skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are only a few bugs physically haunting me.

But mentally... I'm haunted by almost every mistake I've ever made. Sometimes to the point of spending hours looking into ways to make sure it never happens again.

Especially now then I'm out of the big city and my life is 10x less exiting(More like 30x, actually). I wish I had done just a bit more, back when I was still doing stuff, not let myself get distracted by anything personal, and just generally appreciated things a bit more.

I was mostly generally fairly respected wherever I went, but every dev has times when they weren't at 100%, and really early on, when I was first starting, there were definitely a few days when I made pointless mistakes because my mind wasn't completely on my work.

But there really weren't that many of bugs per se.

The other big thing that haunts me are some of the personal projects I did, and the bad but workable decisions I made on early jobs due to NIH.

I still have a bunch of stuff in my parts bin that is almost trash. Several hundred dollars worth. I didn't really enjoy messing around with PICs all that much. I'm not convinced it was the most effective use of time career wise.

I don't know if I really benefitted that much from making a point and click game engine in VB.net.

I might have been happier if I had listened to people who said "Just use an Arduino" or "Don't waste your time even thinking of making GUI apps in C".
Much worse. The accuracy is also worse.
While that may be the sentiment, very few countries have the scale required to afford the luxury of acting on such a perspective.
No doubt that excessive bean counters and spreadsheet jockeys have taken over.

Boring needs their Satya Nadella (which was Alan Mullaly) to return to their engineering roots.
I have a significant personal library (a semi-complete list at https://www.librarything.com/catalog/D.A.Hosek which doesn’t include the rare volumes or the unread ones). It largely reflects my personal interests which shift over time, but there are notable subcollections, like books on the Jesuits, English recusancy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, J. D. Salinger, typography/lettering/book arts and Jewish DPs. I have made sure that my wife knows (and my kids will know when they're older) that there is a section of books which are likely to have significant value and maybe shouldn’t just get dropped off at the friends of the library sale after I die.
I too see many usecases for the capabilities you describe. I don't see how Blockchain solves it better than "regular" solutions though. Can you give me a concrete example where such data control is best implemented with a Blockchain?

Every single concrete example I can think of personally would work better with a normal database and some kind of Auth scheme which does not involve Blockchain, but maybe I'm just thinking of the wrong usecases?
Ditto prevents traffic-analysis attacks in WANs
Maybe I've been doing this longer than some of you.

The way I saw it was that there was always pressure to harass users (privacy is not just an lack of dossier building, it's also a "right to be let alone") and I was successful at pushing back against this at least somewhat in many places I worked.

When GDPR came out it was like the dam broke or like when Phillip Zimbardo smashed the window on the car... All of a sudden nobody wanted to listen when you said they should slow down on the harassment. The EU set this example that harassment was "good" or "required", so it made other forms of web harassment more acceptable.

In the US we also had the HIPPA law which showed the moral bankrupcy of "privacy policies". That is, if you get the simplest health care services in the US you have to sign a 50 page document that enumerates such a long list of people who are entitled to your health care data any reasonable person would ask "Why don't they just leave all my health records on the curb and save so much money on paperwork they could cut my health insurance premiums in half."

The harassment, paperwork, costs, and lost innovation is all real. Dossier builders are going to go ahead and build dossiers anyway. The EU gets to prove it is a player by doing a stupendous act of vandalism against a public resource.

(e.g. if you want to improve privacy don't ask for "consent"... that's as problematic as consent for sex... just don't let the data get collected to begin with)
Can emscripten compile to JS? I thought it could only compile to WASM.
5 might be a bit too young but ...

My 8-yo son HATES math. I know a lot of kids don't like it, but this kid has a visceral disdain for it. But I know the things (video games, media, etc) he does like and I've wanted to get better at game programming for awhile, so we set aside time to design a game he can play that - don't tell him - incorporates some of the topics on his teacher's lessons for the next month (which area available via a web portal).

His job is primarily to design characters and levels (on paper) and then I implement them. Then his job is to "test" the game. He knows there's math being injected into the game and it's very simple but this is all about the process. Suddenly he can show and tell his friends he's making a game with his friends and along the way he's getting more interested in programming.

This is just one idea. It's sneaky but seems to be working for us.
Why our continued use of fossil fuels is creating a financial time bomb
> It sounds like your complaint isn't with the advice from the book, but rather that Apple didn't follow it. They did hide away the error messages, but they didn't provide help and insight.

> If they had done so, you'd have (presumably) been told in the software that there was a problem with certain albums, and been walked through a flow that would fix said problem. Or maybe a link to a support page that'd do the same. This, if it was done, would have been much better than showing "error 0xFHJAD1234".

The parent post addresses this: there are so many ways for for the system to fail that it’s not feasible to “inventory every possible problem in a computerized system and then provide a graceful exit”. So where an error is not gracefully handled, the system should allow for a human to see the error and solve the problem, rather than throw away the error.

>> Without any false modesty, I think I have a fairly good idea of how modern computer architecture works. Yet, I will be the first to tell you that I have no idea how any of these systems work in full. In fact, no one does. Not the best of kernel developers nor the best of chip designers. To claim that you can somehow inventory every possible problem in a computerized system and then provide a graceful exit from that or useful info is either ignorant or arrogant or both. But since you've eliminated engineers from the design loop (see #1 above), no one will tell you you're full of it.
True, I missed that "custom domain" isn't part of the lowest tier.

The point still stands though, if you have a mail provider that supports custom domains there usually isn't a limit on the catch all aliases you can add (or a very high one). In any case it's far from being "prohibitively" expensive.

> I'm also fairly sure that they don't let you reply as the address the catch-all was placed on

That is definitely possible with Fastmail as that's how I use it. In their case I believe that feature is called "Alias". If you reply to an email you just select with alias you want to reply from.
Glad to hear that this is all in the name of the war on drugs. /s
Emscripten started as an asm.js compiler iirc ? Or even "plain" js
That's a good example of the kind of practical thing that people in poverty are more likely to know. Of course it's an example of a strategy for coping with poverty, rather than a step out of poverty.

(A common misconception is that by avoiding spending, one can escape poverty, but this is not the case, because poverty is a lack of income.)
The Khan Academy Kids app is really well balanced - a logic exercise followed by a book about dump trucks, a counting game followed by a singalong. It worked for my 4 year old.

If you see some particular math/ science engagement I’ve found Magic School Bus (books / 90s show/ recent reboot )provides an excellent framing.

The Singapore Math Series helped my daughter rocket a few years ahead of her classmates (your mileage may vary here).
After a run on Mars, NASA’s helicopter faces a long, dark winter
This might not be the case where you are, but a common structure for Kindergarten is play-based learning. Reading up on what that entails might be interesting, and give you some inspiration for the summer - http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/kindergarten/parents-guide-play-bas...

If you're okay with incorporating screens into the learning, Khan Academy is well structured and broken down into small manageable chunks. With a 5-year-old you would likely want to do it together. Another is https://www.tvokids.com which has all sorts of video and games content for pre-school age children.
IIRC emscripten was around before Browser support for WASM was really a thing.
Save your marriage–and business–with Friday morning breakfast meetings
We lost so many innovative apps that can't survive without those 10 cents or whatever they get by stealing your data.

Sorry but if you app is so good quality then I would pay for it, support you on Ptreon or similar or if I am poor I would make an account and fill a form with some personal data or if your app is so high quality and you beg I will enable the fucking cookies just for you.

What I think is happen is someone is lying with statistics, they tortured some numbers until they got the result they wanted.
+1 on Khan Academy Kids
I've noticed something similar with remote controls. Receivers, CD players, DVD players, Blu-ray players, TVs, cable boxes...almost every one I've ever bought came with batteries that lasted for many years. Sometimes longer than the device the remote controlled.

Then, when the remote needs new batteries and I put in the batteries sold in US stores they would last a year or two.

The batteries that came with these devices were brands I'd never heard of and never seen at any store in the US. Usually they had lots of Japanese-looking writing on them and little English except for the brand name.
If they are not interested in tech they might not need to learn it. Basic literacy might be helpful in some situations, especially since users aren't really masters of their own devices anymore and the technicalities are well hidden from them.

To see if the tech is interesting it might not hurt to have an introductory course though.
Joel and and one of a collection of German generals has summarized this:

Joel: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

Generals: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/

Smart enough to know WTF they’re trying to do and to handle issues that might arise. Productive enough to deliver a solution. Self-confident enough to ask for help. While this can be (probably is) helped by talent, it’s really practice. Demonstrable results > book learning.
aren't there also multiple mafias? I thought a mafia was a type, and essentially the western yakuza
It was also a great disaster for the thriving and competitive asbestos industry. The number of new applications for it have dwindled ever since.
I've advocated similar as a possible way of countering other consumer-hostile practices in the past but for something like batteries I think we're already past that point.

E-waste is a huge but so far mostly overlooked problem. Built-in obsolescence is great for exploitative businesses and bad for basically everyone and everything else. Unnecessarily restricting hardware repair or replacement might be the largest contributory factor in this problem.

Time to regulate.
The author is pointing out that there is two “types” of people who claim to do SEO. And most shirk away from the doing the hard part of SEO:

More importantly, they typically do not consider their responsibilities to include:

Implementing technical updates to improve search engine rankings
Doing product/market research to find keywords that are likely to convert users
Writing blog content that will rank for target keywords
Guest posting and adding value to various online communities to gain backlinks organically
This is a really odd (bad?) framing. I've never heard of someone who is impressed by Ancient Greek science/knowledge/ability talk down about Babylonian/Egyption. Most histories I read talk about how many of these are connected and were successive.

Can you cite some "pro western supremaciests" you refer to? It honestly sounds like you are just making stuff up to try to demonize other people.
What details are you looking for? Maybe we can fill you in :)

We still have some work to do to get the runtime ready to open source and make it broadly available, but happy to answer any questions we can.
I'm always mindful about where I put my files, whatever the operating system.
Yes, that sentence stood out, from an emotional and automation point of view.

I'm grateful to the producers of this film for conserving the historic knowledge. Makes me wonder how many areas have gone that were similarly fascinating where no such video was made.
During the first covid lockdown, I was by "chance" stuck in the home I grew up in. And I did found my old C128 in attic (which I was only ever using in C64 mode, except to copy disks).

It's a time capsule C128 that hasn't been "polluted" by anything made in the last 33 years so (I switched to the Amiga in 1989 or so).

So one day I plan to manually input the 256 bytes making this insane C64 demo (posted here on HN already), keeping my time capsule C128 intact:

https://youtu.be/sWblpsLZ-O8
Playing with Weggli
Maybe I'm just being kept alive by Twitter's algorithm after all.
I'm a little sad that it's not even a "waste" anymore, because I haven't found anything more interesting than that.
(Deepl)
CPAP: Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. A device to push air into your lungs usually during sleep to treat or give support with different conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_positive_airway_pre...
I just thought "hmm wouldn't it be cool to host an alternative module registry", and then I thought "hmm but what if it got popular, could be expensive". And then I thought, "What if we made open source hosted services that are literally powered by donations?"

You could write a web service that uses metrics to calculate its bills and check a donation account balance, and when the service gets low on funds it would throttle connections, and when funding runs out, service cuts off completely. If a person or company wants it back on, they just donate. A fuel gauge would show when the tank's getting empty, and the "average range" based on current funds.

You could actually make this a web proxy, too, and put it in front of any web service. I'd call it DSaaS
>It wouldn't be impossible to quantify it for all but edge cases.

It would be impossible to quantify it because there's no objective measure of value. The current system allows value to be quantified by people's revealed preferences: the jobs people are willing to pay more for get paid higher. If there's no market for labor then there's no revealed preferences and it's impossible to know which jobs are creating more value for people (only what jobs are creating more value by some bureaucrats personal subjective measure of value).
The average centralized financial processor can process that many transactions in about 10 seconds, with the option of reversal,

You are not making a great case here.
The author points to Microsoft as a typical example of corporate programming in the 1990s.

Yet Microsoft wasn't using a (pseudo)waterfall development model. Quoting Steve McConnell in "Rapid Development (1996) Page 271:

] In addition to providing explicit support for morale, Microsoft gladly trades other factors to keep morale high, sometimes trading theme in ways that would make other companies shudder (Zachary 1994). I've seen then trade methodological purity, programming discipline, control over the product specification, control over the schedule, management visibility -- almost anything to benefit morale.

As I've pointed out before, I've read about software development projects at Apple, Be, Commodore, Data General, id, Infocom, Microsoft, VisiCorp and others. None were using (pseudo)waterfall.

I therefore agree with bdefore that it seems to have been "far from ubiquitous and mostly limited to government or very large corporations", and that the era of waterfall was a mythical beast.
Stressing! Feels like release day.
> We are on the brink of world war three and the UN's only reason for existing is to prevent that from happening again, but instead of doing its job

What do you think the UN is supposed to do when one of the permanent members of the Security Council with veto power decides to go to war?

The foundation of the UN depended crucially on the temporary alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union during World War II. This alliance quickly fell apart though, leading to the long "Cold War", which arguably still exists, apart from a short lull in the 1990s. When the US and Russia are at odds, it's almost impossible for the UN to perform its function. The veto power of the permanent Security Council members ensures that the UN has no enforcement mechanism over those individual nations. This was by design of the founding nations: the United States and Soviet Union never gave the United Nations the power to constrain the United States and Soviet Union.

Having said that, World War III not inevitable. There were only 20 years between WW1 and WW2, while we've gone more than 75 years since WW2, so maybe the UN has done its job?
Unleash the Full Power of Apple Sillicon (M1 Chip)
This article is from 2013, and notes a huge increase in tor clients. While the article notes we weren't able to determine the cause of the sudden increase, the primary hypothesis put forward was that it was a true growth in usage due to new anti-piracy laws in Russia. It doesn't note any particular attacks this may signify, and I'm not aware of deanonymization attacks that involve adding a lot of clients to the network.

The larger concern for deanonymization is typically flooding the network with relays, since it increases the ability to do e.g. timing-based de-anonymization attacks. This is a bit of an arms race. As @ajvs points out though, the known cases of tor users being de-anonymized were not due to attacking Tor itself, but via other channels. I'm not aware of any known real-world cases of users being deanonymized by attacking or analyzing Tor itself, let alone users being "arrested regularly"
A hellscape of hamburger menus, heiroglyphs, and hidden errors.

I'd like to add "everything is controlled through a single button" to the gripe list, but I haven't figured out how to make it snappy and alliterative.

I understand why this happened -- mobile first design and then dogmatic application of space-crunch compromises to interfaces without a space crunch -- but yeah, I really hope we can roll back the worst of it without waiting for AR to reverse the screen real estate dynamics. How many generations of proprietary morse code combinations for single-button interfaces can fit between today and AR landing? Too many. Far too many.
I started my oldest with doing puzzles (jigsaw) and logic-based games. He's now 8 and is very good in the math subjects. Language is less good.

For language I have him reading English-language books, that might have been a bad idea because it's his second language. He is "okay" at his native language.

His sister we did nothing with; her language skills are excellent in her native language, but she's not as good at Math as the oldest. We're not starting her reading English for at least another year.

The youngest, well, he is only starting to talk now. They take a little longer to start because they're dual language (Dutch/English).
Sushil Kumar
It's not something I particularly want because I don't live in a country with currency controls, and I have no opinion on whether it's justified or not. But evading currency controls is a distinct and separate use case from tax evasion. Wealthy Chinese are unable to transfer large amounts of that wealth out of the country without government permission, even if they have paid all their taxes.
He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils." Said Diogenes, "Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king."

There are tradeoffs for everything.
This might have been true 10 years ago, but now (just from the wiki examples):

1. More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election – poll - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-bide...

2. US tax system is not voluntary, but extremely coercive - the IRS is legendary in its blood-houndness and the US is probably the only country in the world that taxes non-resident citizens.

3. Abortion-Rights Protest Targets Homes of Kavanaugh, Roberts
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-08/abortion-...

I am not sure if the US could already be classified as a low-trust society (probably not yet), but a strong negative trend is definitely present.
Yeah it's a dumb idea. Making people spend down their savings when they have no income to pay for food.
That post makes a ton of sense honestly. It is a shame but why wouldn’t Salesforce want their branding on it?

Check out Vercel, Fly.io, or DigitalOcean depending on the complexity of the project you’re hoping to deploy.
MVC frameworks aren't dinosaurs but sharks
> And since anticipating all outcomes is by definition impossible, Norman's advice is awful.

Yes, that's why I said that I read the advice as saying it should only be followed when you can provide help and insight. You don't have to do it in an all-or-nothing way.

You can have common problems with a helpful flow that tells the user how to fix them. You can have less-common problems which just show an error code. Removing the error without providing help is the problem here, and is the thing that I feel goes against the book's advice.
The HiPPO Effect on Customers and Product Teams
Dokku [1] is a self-hosted alternative that can be hosted on any IaaS

1: https://github.com/dokku/dokku/
GitHub Error Pages
This article points out some interesting things, but doesn't seem to get the cause of them right. Employees don't deserve employment, just as companies don't deserve loyalty. If a machine comes along and makes your per-task work much easier, you will be expected to accomplish more tasks. If you don't, then your company's competitors will win.

Companies don't exist for their owners, or their employees. They exist for their customers, and if you can finish more tasks for the same effort your customers will have better lives. And that's what propels us forwards: each company (or winning company in each segment) makes our lives better, or simpler, or easier.
Except those edge cases would likely destroy the whole system. The value of an hour of labor isn’t based on the time it took to acquire the skill, it’s based on the value of the good or service produced to society. Whether it takes a normal person 4 years to acquire that skill, or a genius 4 days, the value is what it’s worth to other people.

That value not only has a very wide range, but also it’s constantly fluctuating. If you try to centrally dictate it, you’ll be constantly getting it wrong, distorting the labor market just as badly as artificially low interest rates distort other aspects of the economy.
As shitty as it is, making the job harder drives the wages up because people would rather quit than do it.
> Growth can't continue indefinitely.

no it can't continue indefinitely, but there's still a tonne of room left for humans to grow. I dont believe we are near the limit yet. And that's only this planet. There's at least a few more in the solar system, and hopefully, propulsion tech will improve at some point to allow other star systems to be taken over by humans.