skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees this.

Are the people building React completely oblivious to the nigh-unbearable code smell that this is? Why is it so difficult to reason about whether or not code will have side effects?

I'm no frontend developer, and certainly don't have experience with React, but after stopping in at their homepage to see what it does for me and finding out about "JSX syntax"... jesus. I don't know how you parse something like JSX, but I would be willing to bet the implementation is a dumpster fire of completely unnecessary complexity.

I would really like to believe that the people building this stuff aren't amateurs, but the more I learn, the more convinced I am that this is the case. The modern web is bloated, slow, and riddled an assortment of issues that is different depending on which site you're on. Will my back button work this time? It's anybody's guess!

It only seems appropriate to lay the blame at the feet of those who thought the best course of action was to make web development ten times more complicated than it needs to be.
Same for me. All these things like Project Euler leave me cold: I'd rather learn something new on the way to a tangible endpoint, even if it's a janky PoS that I never look at again and lose when I don't bother to copy it to a new hard drive.
Maybe some lines, but here they travel at the same speeds.
Why spend extra money for an event that doesn't happen very often? Elevators have storage (it's part of their function) so plants don't have to deal with that. Changing our manufacturing/ agriculture sector to cater to people wanting to ride the train seems a poor decision based on the needs of everyone else.
The medium is part of it. A huge number of programming language features stem around the fact that we make text files the human interface. "Clicking things" is not the next step because clearly keyboards are faster. Imagine something more like a "notion for code" where things are 1) clearly keyboard focused 2) clearly being stored as structured data not plain utf8 text.

Comments, build configuration, platform specific implementations, alternate implementations (e.g. (re)implementations of an interface used by an application), tests, and etc. could all be part of the "program". In many ways we try to do this already by hacking together git repos with everything stored in there as text and then require very particular versions of programs to run everything in there anyways.

I think it's all sufficiently powerful already to build awesome things, but I do not doubt that in the next 10 years something will be built that realizes the ideas which have been kicked around since Smalltalk/Self and raises the bar of productivity.
I like the ethos behind this post; I've been struggling to finish projects for years, I get desmotivated, jump into another thing, don't finish it, come back after months now lost again, advance a little bit, drop it after a weekend, repeat, etc.

I will try to use the framework presented here but I'm not sure exactly how to apply it, for example the project I've been meaning to finish is what I call a very dumb compiler (parse a very simple language and emit x86_64 assembly code but without any optimizations, the most naive thing that will work).

It's hard to think how to reduce this problem to something I could do over a weekend; I have to do a lot of research, thinking and trial and error because I'm not an expert in writing parsers or anything like that.

I feel like this might only work in certain occasions.
So far my experience with leetcode is that it is asking me over and over again to implement binary search of arrays (which is the wrong solution 95% of the time) and it wants, to charge me money for a debugger, and I have to write my own unit test framework from scratch if I want to avoid a debugger.

Everything that’s wrong with interviews, with rent seeking as the cherry on top.

I haven’t tried hard yet but I’m bracing for a shitshow.
Surely some attorneys would be interested in a class-action.
The video seems to be no longer available online. The discussion about the way the Adirondack park system was created is well worth watching if the above program airs on your local PBS station..

Below is an older 2 hour PBS documentary on the Adirondacks:

https://www.pbs.org/video/wned-tv-documentaries-adirondacks/
> But personal car travel is currently heavily subsidized (no, the fuel tax does not cover road costs)

If only there were some other way to collect funds for roads. One idea could be that governments require some kind of annual "license" that they charge you for. Alternatively, since private automobiles involve a large capital purchase, maybe we could levy some kind of fee or tax on the purchase to cover annual road maintenance.
Look at it this way: the man has shown he doesn't have respect for borders of other countries, he doesn't care about not having friends in the west for the foreseeable future, he doesn't mind expending men and material. He sees something he wants and thinks he can get. Why would he not try, former Soviet country or not?

> But you do know that there is a list?

Well obviously I can't know, and it's not the point. The point is, with how things have developed, you have to assume that there is a list. It's hard to know who exactly would be on it, but you can make some good guesses who probably aren't.
Pray that Apple makes one.

I'm only half joking. I was just fantasizing about this the other day. I'd love this to become reality but I'm worried reality diverges from this idea further with each passing day. People produce more and more data that's useless outside of a closed platform. Nobody owns media to host.
Indian food traditionally was not red hot spicy the way it is now but instead relied on the unique flavor of Asafoetida (Hing) which is still a key ingredient in legit Indian cooking
I think you mean it logged log messages twice?

I don’t believe having devtools opens changes the runtime semantics of the app.that would defeat the point of the devtools.

I do know it annoyingly logs things twice
> It’s almost as trivial with this format too

I mean you can pick any format you want before the "@", but yeah my format is trivial. Nobody has tried to do it automatically yet though, as far as I can tell.
In my experience bad code isn’t written for the sake of being bad. A lot of companies don’t value IT and software they work with almost daily as much as they should. The idea is that if they click a button and it works, it works. Next project. Not enough time, pressure from everywhere to develop new features and behaviours and there you go, badly written code.
They are often subcontracted to the private companies.
Because the track is already in use. Also private companies ARE now starting to run trains on the tracks and building their own. See the brightline service in Florida. Privately owned and run with a great service.
Now you are onto it!
> If not then I'm afraid I must oppose some ideas in ways other than ignoring them.

True. But trying to prevent further expression of those ideas, or retaliating against those who express them ("cancel culture" IIUC), isn't necessarily the best type of opposition. For example, disability rights isn't an academic issue for me and some of my friends. But when someone expresses opposition to the idea that websites should be required to be accessible, I don't try to silence them; I try to engage with them for the purpose of changing either their mind or mine.
There's always going to be a need to adapt generic managed services to fit into a particular business domain or organization. I think asserting these jobs will disappear is susceptible to the lump of labor fallacy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy)

If this trend continues the more likely outcome is these roles will evolve. Deep technical understanding will still be required along with a need to spend more time in dialogue with these systems users. If anything it'll cause wages to dramatically skyrocket because relatively fewer have the capacity to perform both of those effectively.
What is the mechanism that causes nationalized rail to inherently be more expensive?

I can see the argument for nationalized being cheaper due to not being for-profit, due to having larger negotiation power (via the government), etc.

What's the argument for nationalizing it increasing cost? Is it just "look at all these anecdotes?" or is there some fundamental economic reason.
Get different light bulbs; My light bulbs require a password and route-filter. If yours don't, your firewall isn't protecting you if your computer can reach them because someone can just send you and iframe that pokes your light bulbs.
SwiftKey keeps telling me how many presses I'm saving by using SwiftKey. Does that count all the delete, retry, delete, retry, delete, give up, type manually-cycles I'm doing? It's slightly better than having to type by hand but it still feels like having both hands tied behind my back and typing with my nose. I can't even get through one short sentence without deleting and retrying several times on some words...
The database in org-roam is a cache for performance. It can be removed at any time and it will be rebuilt from the metadata contained in the files.
never mutate anything and just compose functions and your C is functional
A bigger problem is that all of this is extremely local, typically affecting a small fraction of the world population, when for the majority the truth is very much different.
If you did get good at this, all you’ve done is trained yourself to trust your own code over libraries. My suspicion is that experiences like this are the supervillain origin story for people with NIH syndrome.
> you will observe that your internal model is correct

What I was saying is that there is nothing extrinsic to compare an internal model to, so you should know that any meaning created is your own. Creating meaning that requires you achieve something and possibly fail seems unnecessary.

I view willful ignorance as a method of resisting potential pain - and resisting anything usually introduces its own pain at some level. I find that being aware of, and accepting of pain works well for me, although I'm not always good at it.
Heh, my dog has never gotten that wrapped up in laser pointer chasing. She knows it's me, she stops when I say 'Done'. Now, when it comes to chuckit balls on the other hand, she's dangerously close to real OCD.
> tap next to trust big tech with all your private data and sync it all in the cloud

Consumer NAS management should be way easier. Why can't I tap my phone to my NAS to pair and then go anywhere in the world with a network connection?
> Are the people building React completely oblivious

Perhaps the people criticizing it so flagrantly are oblivious to the goals motivating their design choices.

No one is forcing you to use it.
Because more individuals depend on our nation's logistic system than would benefit from riding the train. Passengers have an array of solutions to solve their problems. Individuals are served by choice and dependable delivery of goods. Why should 250 passengers be valued over thousands of people?
Well, now I had to upvote your post, because I know, that you will feel good about it.
Hmm, I get what you're saying, but it sounds like an "attention tax" at that point, which seems like an unsustainable approach -- assuming voters even realized that these additional fines existed and were coming out of their taxes, the gist of this seems to be, if you want to stop people who aren't doing their job correctly, fine another group (citizens), who will then contact a third group (legislators) to do something about the first group. This same could be expanded to seemingly any part of the government moving to slowly, but at what point do citizens say "hey we're tired of paying for you all not doing your job, and why are we only finding out about it by being fined?"
Why a high school teacher needs a position on gay rights in the classroom, in 1985 or 2022, is beyond me.
> game of whack-a-mole with syntax errors

first time I ever "wrote" a program was hand copying one from PC Magazine. Knowing nothing about pascal syntax nor semantics, what you said describes that whole week of mine.
I have had this feeling a lot with my project. One thing that might work is break down the compiler itself into smaller projects. If you cant solve it all in a weekend try solving just a part of it and then calling that the project. Then move on to the next part. In the end up are building up to it without overwhelming yourself.
Wouldn't the break up be more influenced by the gravitational acceleration imparted by earth? Most asteroids are rather loosely bound.
Would it be fair to say that it's not a problem that has really been solved because it's a relatively small and non urgent problem? The spent fuel isn't dangerous while it just sits there, and there isn't that much of it. My understanding is that most spent fuel just gets stored on site, because it's the easiest way. I guess my point is that having to deal with storing solid, static nuclear fuel seems like a pretty good problem to have, compared to having to somehow capture the billions of tons of CO2 that we've put into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels for power.

And I'm not sure about the relative environmental impact, but it's important to note that this thorium and uranium mining would be competing with coal mining.
I'd grant that (a) platforms have a fundamental right to try to realize their vision, which may include promoting and demoting various types of content & (b) spam and astroturfing is a constant reality in any social platform (and users are better served by less of both).

I don't think that platforms should have any such fundamental right wrt user produced content. I think that platforms should work as either publishers (where they produce and are responsible for all the content), or as common carriers (where they are forbidden by law from interfering with legal content). I think that platforms should have to explicitly choose one model once they reach a certain number of participants or when they incorporate.

I am all for shielding platforms from liability for user content if they act like a common carrier and limit themselves to removing illegal content. However I don't see why we as a society should shield companies from liability when they selectively pick and choose which user content to promote and which to suppress, according to their own preferences.
I think the key phrase is "roughly equal quality". Back in the day, it was not equal. There was nowhere near the same level of cleanliness and amenities on many AirBnBs. Over time, people started to make a living at it, the quality level went way up, and prices followed.
Would the same standard apply if this happened to you or your neighbors in your country or would you just wait for better days?
Not at all. You have to be on business side
On a semi related note, there is some speculation out there that iOS 13 changed how the native iOS keyboard predicts words and has gotten much worse.
What Amtrak should actually be doing is closing down all it's long distance routes followed by privatizing it so it can profitably run it's short haul lines.
I think what Paul is describing is blasphemy more than heresy. Blasphemy is a single public statement contrary to official doctrine while heresy is the public endorsement of a school of thought that contradicts official doctrine in some nontrivial way.

Paul's connotation for heresy is: A dismissing B due to a specific statement from B (blasphemy) that contradict A's canon of orthodox beliefs (religion).

But I think that incorrectly conflates individual opinion into an unforgivable sin, punishable only with excommunication or death. Historically, cases of heresy arose when someone like Gallileo proposed a viable model of the universe that contradicted dogma, not when they made a single isolated statement of dissonance. The latter were commonplace in secular writing even early in the Enlightenment. (Blasphemy did alienate freethinkers like Voltaire to the Church and Royalty; but it didn't get him imprisoned or killed. It was direct opposition to Royal dogma that did that, like Sir Thomas More's excommunication by Henry VIII).

BTW, 1918's Sedition Act was passed after the US entered WWI, as an emergency expedient intended to squelch open opposition to the war. It isn't really comparable to the concepts of heresy or blasphemy against a canon of beliefs, since Wilson's decision to go to war wasn't a persistent dogma that needed protection. The Act was a temporary martial law (like Lincoln's suppression of the Maryland government for the duration of the Civil War) to be lifted after the immediate threat to fighting a war had passed.
What I remember reading in the papers long ago is that drinking wine occasionally was good for you. Can anybody tell me if this study invalidates that too?
It'd like to broaden this question: Why is there almost nowhere a straight-forward option to limit network access?

Even backend app containers like Docker, which are all about restricting permissions and maintaining a sandbox, allow arbitrary outgoing connections by default.
There were 3 plans offered, community, pro and enterprise. We only needed one feature that was sadly in the "enterprise" bucket.

Sadly that plan was very expensive, so ended up not paying anything and just getting the feature from OSS.

No the pricing, but rather the feature coupling to plans and no willingness to do any dynamic pricing.
It’s tempting to point out a few heresies. My hunch is that you’d err on the side of feeling uncomfortable. “Ignorant” and “insensitive” are telltale signs of orthodoxy, the way that clouds are telltale signs of a thunderstorm.

I had a relationship with a much older woman when I was younger. It was long distance, and after a few years we met up for a wonderful trip down a river. It was one of the best memories of my life. Swimming with her, making a fire and cooking our own food, laughing the days away. When she had to leave, we sobbed our eyes out at the airport in front of everyone. I was 16.

This experience enriched my life. Ditto for the years leading up to it.

Today, the universal conclusion would be that I was groomed, taken advantage of, manipulated, and so on. In a word, she’d committed heresy.

I don’t think most people would want to have an open discussion on the merits of teenagers dating older women. The teen’s feelings don’t matter; whether the teen initiated it and pursued them doesn’t matter; the question of whether it’s a net benefit for their life certainly doesn’t matter. What matters is the power imbalance.

Do you see what happened? This is equivalent to saying that certain truths aren’t allowed to matter. The question of truth becomes irrelevant. You can’t have public conversations about it without summoning a thunderstorm.

Swap the genders in the above story, and it’d be a firestorm. Everyone would gleefully watch you burn.

The reason pg didn’t dare mention any specific heresies is because you can’t mention examples without immediately making the conversation about that, and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.

I can think of at least five other heresies. But I wouldn’t dare point them out publicly.

It’s worth trying to force yourself to think of some. I say “force” because the ideas are uncomfortable by definition. And if the ideas you think of are also very popular, that should worry you — what are the odds that we happen to live in the precise decade when we got our morals exactly right? Or even a little bit right?

There’s a reason pg started with fire as a metaphor. We’re fortunate to live in a time where it’s merely a metaphor. And I think we should worry whether we’re burning people for the right reasons, the same way you’d worry if your neighbors set fire to a house while arguing that it’s okay —- the people inside really deserved it, right?

Sometimes they do. But if your moral compass just so happens to point in the same direction as all of your peers, it’s important to occasionally ask ourselves whether we might be mistaken.
It doesn't even matter. The facts of a news story aren't very relevant to the opinions people form. Instead, news largely leads people to get emotional hostile feelings about outgroups. It doesn't matter if mother Theresa saved a dying beggar or a terrorist bombed a hospital. Whatever the story, and whatever the facts, people will go away hating whoever the news hijacked their minds into hating.

If you're concerned about facts being true, you're missing the real problem of divisive hate-inducing news.
It's awesome. Lots of cool things going on [0], great work life balance, competitive pay, great people. If you want to know more just email me (in bio).

[0] https://medium.com/@cfatechblog
> What is the mechanism that causes nationalized rail to inherently be more expensive?

A management that is not incentivized to reduce costs, or a the very least, following the operating policies set by politicians coming first before reducing costs. (It's hard to reduce costs when how you operate is decided by politicians.) The same problem that plagues government run systems all over the world.

A great post on just a few of the silly policies is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263
I think it's likely that we will see a rise in customs expectations from countries about data that is imported.

The great firewall is the prototype, but as the world becomes multipolar again, regional powers will want to control what kinds of data is imported/exported
We just have to accept that their covid zero policy actually worked for two years and their numbers were mostly accurate.

Now they arent working and the population has no exposure.
There’s still no good way for me to write an open source web application and have its users bear the cost of running it.

This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and IMO is the reason open source web applications haven’t taken off more.
True. I have a copy of "A Gift From Earth" here, in the same volume as the "Tales of Known Space" short stories which includes the one mentioned above, and "World of Ptavvs".
> Low carbon footprint datacenters

My gut tells me it's fairly low per person served, and it'll only improve over time as more renewable electric sources come online.
Web browsers have had callbacks for DOM elements since... forever. Why did we need to add an entire component framework like React on top of it?

Everything on a web page does not need to be interactive. It's a document first.

Web applications are cool. Maybe React makes sense there. _But every site does not need to be a web application!_ And yet somehow, React and company became the industry default.
The biggest problem I have with Paul’s writing on these topics is the misanthropic undertones. The classification of folks as “conventional minded” mirrors other socially reductive language like referring to people as “simps,” “NPCs,” and more. Paul believes he is partly responsible for engaging a social immune response to the intolerance he perceives — forgetting that immune responses are inflammatory by nature and often destroy large amounts of healthy tissue and in some cases, entire organisms.

I don’t think his assertions are wrong but I don’t think castigating people as “aggressively conventional minded” is the right approach. In creating an us-vs-them mentality I think Paul may inadvertently be adding to the actual biggest problem in civilized discourse these days — weaponized victimization and othering. It’s not enough to have an opinion, there has to be a bad guy or an evil group of people intent on destroying society.

I’m not sure how to solve this problem — open to suggestions and brainstorming, it’s just something that’s been on my mind a lot recently.
I love this kind of stuff. Back in the day Big Nerd Ranch made a Mac app to create printed versions of these. I used to use it all the time.

Here is the source code: https://github.com/robrohan/PagePacker

Looks like this project just needs to add add a print feature and it’d be on target.