skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel the same way, but we both have to accept that we're tilting at windmills. Complexity can't be measured, so there's no way to demonstrate, much less prove, that the time you spent reducing complexity was time well spent. You can demonstrate a run time or memory performance improvement. You can demonstrate a new feature. Unless you can reduce complexity in zero time and do so without introducing any unintentional side effects/bugs, you're just hurting yourself when you try.
Prior art is a sugarcoat invented to give the illusion checks and balances.

Patent Office operates as if it doesn't exist, and then even if a prior art is established after a long and expensive judicial process, only partial claims of a patent is invalidated, and it's trivial for the patent owner to change it slightly and get it reapproved
> Well, what is the recourse for legitimate businesses then? When pirates can set up shop and distribute content that is expensive to produce, how do these businesses evolve to a more flexible model when an unknown large chunk of their rightful proceeds are directed elsewhere?

I think this falls under argument from lack of imagination. Overreach shouldn't be justified because we haven't yet figured out how to solve the problem. I still lock my car and house. I invest in that security because it is important to me. I think they could invest in their own solutions to solve some of those problems without gov't interference.
Solar and Wind have really been exploding in the past few years. I fully expect this hand wringing over nuclear will end up being overtaken by events in the next 30 years or so. The real limitation at the moment is battery technology, there is a lot riding on finding cheap and efficient energy storage.
To not run code that somebody else may have changed is the whole point. And it does not fail if you test it first. We are talking about billions of requests every day that is served by external CDN providers.
So here you get the worst of both on a slow connection.

- The page takes an extra 100ms to load

- ~ a minute later (when you're halfway through reading it) the content will jump by some large amount.

There isn't a nice way to do custom fonts on the web and you should just avoid them.
Unless they're fighting a war.
After having looked up "phlebotomist" on Wikipedia I can assure you that I did not have the intention to accuse you of being one.
I think this is the line that triggered the parent:

"Cloudfront can distribute static content and backends running on Lambda@Edge."

The really scary thing is that the aws products being lampooned are the mainstream ones. Amazon has, what, another couple hundred "offerings"?

Here on HN, there are people that say if you're using AWS only for the basic EC2 you're doing it wrong. They can be correct in the tactical sense, but in the strategic sense, AWS is cackling with glee.

If I were building an IT org, I'd have an Infra as code foundation that from the foundation supported both AWS and other options that are far cheaper. AWS for prototyping and DR/redundancy but it "seamlessly" (I can hear the eyeballs roll and you're all not wrong) will deploy to non-AWS.

It's crazy that the basic tooling for EC2 / google computer / azure / etc to do this is only at the quarter-state. Hey HN, isn't there a massive opportunity for a company to meta-manage this?
I've been trying to get kde connect working for about a month and I've yet to get to the point where my laptop and phone can actually 'see' each other even after whilelisting the ports in the firewall (or turning it completely off for that matter). FWIW I'm on Endevor OS (arch) with an xps 13 and a pixel 5a.
It's a hell of a bargain, though -- we'll destroy your economy, attack you population, but give you money so you're not as dirt poor as we would have otherwise made you.
A "unified and neutral streaming service where they can share the revenue" already exists. That's called cable - and 2012 Netflix was just a better, more convenient, and cheaper version of that.

Part of the whole premise of how the Internet was supposed to disrupt the publishing business was disintermediation - i.e. cutting out the middleman. Instead of everyone selling their works through a distributor, they'd sell them direct to the public. And that's basically what every streaming service turned into - including modern Netflix.

Cable companies used to be good, too. The shenanigans they resorted to with "packages" and price discrimination were the result of the same pricing pressure from the TV networks that killed 2012 Netflix. When Netflix refused to play that game, the TV networks decided to disrupt Netflix, because they own the content and Netflix owns nothing.

Sometimes innovation sucks.
This is a genuine question. Is there a defense of cryptocurrencies that doesn't follow the pattern of, "yes, that is indeed true, however here is an edge case or counterexample which either doesn't exist yet, or is not in wide use so it's not actually a problem"?

Every article or comment defending cryptocurrencies has followed this pattern and it isn't convincing to me. I'd love to have my mind changed, but when every rebuttal follows the same script, I remain am unmoved.
Very much agree with this.

That said given the quality of what they have put out, I'd surmise the issue here is morelikely they don't feel the same pain on load times?

Bandwidth too good, rigs too powerful, dev envs overpowered, etc. to enable developer velocity can often also mask real world problems.

Hell, even hot reload can mean you don't see load as often and are able to easily rationalize as "not that big a deal" - I wouldn't necessarily take it as a sign they are not deeply invested in their craft.
Again, you are ignoring that healthcare outcomes in Canada are generally the same or better and that wait times exist in both systems. [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2801918/
Why are they working so hard on an 8 year old game? Aren't they just basically producing content packs now? Doesn't even seem like the playerbase cares when there are gamebreaking bugs ongoing for months.
I've watched that video at least three times, but I still can't articulate the exact distinction he is making between simple and easy :/
The problem statement doesn't permit him to choose the prize. He is explicitly stated as having revealed the goat. Given that, do you switch? Even if he could have revealed the prize (due to lack of knowledge or care), he does not reveal the prize so why are we considering that circumstance?
I'm not disputing the claims the article makes, I'm just saying: it's not an especially persuasive reason to support cryptocurrency; if the problem is simply "bring transaction costs down for the working poor", there are much simpler ways to do that. Meanwhile: the cryptocurrencies we have today are causing ongoing harm.
Linux on the desktop. Where old Mac HW goes to retire when it is unloved by Apple. The rate at which macOS Ventura ruthlessly cut off 2016 and 2017 Macs shows the need more than ever for Aishi Linux.
so _this_ is the year of the linux desktop?
Haaaa great write-up! I was in that situation and ended up repurposing a Raspberry Pi to make sure it would fully work. Didn't wanna take the risk of bricking it so soon after getting it haha
The stream quality is my experience as well... I was shocked the first time I watched a 60fps hockey game (and it wasn't on sportsnet or NHL channel).

There are ways to not have any issues catching any game you want to watch, but older people are simply not going to be stream hunting... but that's what all the young people are doing.
Probably nothing. Loading times in rockstar games on consoles have always been this bad. GTA4 was just as bad too.
To add to this, I think Linus himself mentioned this issue at a talk at a Debian conference.

I think he even mentioned maybe gaming would save Linux from this, since games will not constantly update to fix compatibility issues so distros would be forced to behave.
Next killer feature: preferred pronouns on profile. /s
Because it's easy to learn and "good enough". Rust is not easy to learn.
A while back I googled the number of transactions per second for the various types of payments in the US, and it came to less than 100K tx/sec, including credit, debit, cash, checks, wires, and ACH.

Rollups on Ethereum today can handle a couple thousand tx/sec, and the sharding system they have planned will boost that by about a factor of 200. These systems are somewhat centralized for block production but fully decentralized for verification.

Having had to spend time more than once physically visiting bank branches to send wires, or wait for days to get checks to clear from one bank to another, I'm not convinced that today's solutions are all that impressive. They don't exactly seem simple, either.
I have had a great experience in a recent interview that used Byteboard. The format was two parts: First there was a design document in a Google Doc for a hypothetical system with three implementation options. All options were defendable, you just had to defend one in an essay-style answer. There were also various comments to respond to throughout the document.

The code part was a small existing codebase simulating the system in said design document. You you are given three tasks, and explicitly told you are not expected to complete all of them. I ended up using virtually all of the time (70 minutes) completing the first two tasks, and using my remaining minutes writing comments about how I'd complete the third task. When that was complete, I was given 15 minutes or so to describe what I would do if I was given another 15 minutes of time to work on the project.

My only real complains were that the time limit added some pressure (that I was able to manage reasonably) and that the grading process is opaque. I know a human grades it according to a rubric, but I don't see any of my results. The company I was interviewing for just said "Everything looks great, we're moving you forward to the next stage of the interview process".

The code didn't involve writing any fancy algorithms, but instead getting to know a (very small) existing codebase and understanding how to use it to add functionality. This is much more realistic a gauge of how good of an employee you are than how well you can implement a search algorithm from memory.
You don't pay for the fees...the vendor does. Not to mention all of the other fees they rake in.

You can have other ways of making sure payments are safeguarded...actually one of the smartest ways to do this was setup on the dark web illegal markets where there was a middle man that didn't have custody of the money (at least in the best multisig ones) but was able to complete or reverse transactions if needed. Basically an escrow account...

https://darknetone.com/understanding-multisig-vs-escrow-vs-f...
This is actually a symptom of ADHD, something to do with working memory I believe.
I did a search, and apparently they also hold a trademark on "cron" within the domain of scientific and technical services [0]. That it was granted at all is absolutely ridiculous, given the history and omnipresence of "cron" as referring to Unix cron. Similar to the debacle about "Python" a decade ago [1], this raises a lot of red flags. When somebody picks a name that is already widely known in their field, I assume that they are either inexperienced enough not to know the term, or deceitful enough to try to profit from it.

[0] https://trademarks.justia.com/900/03/cron-90003841.html

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/pytho...
Alternate Histories and GPT-3
> We've had a number of corporate firewalls wholesale block the .so TLD

Your firewall is incorrect.
Can anybody recommend an anthology available on Kindle that contains this story? Ideally Asimov only, but fine if it also contains stories by others. I couldn't easily find one. Thanks!
A lot of stuff is obvious after someone has said it or done it. A lot of stuff is so obvious that no one would ever say it.

It can still be helpful to say some of these things explicitly because people may not realize they have made an assumption.
The states would have to pass laws prohibiting the businesses and individuals within their borders from paying the federal taxes -- and that probably would get some sort of reaction.
That's like saying everyone should dress in plain clothes and not waste money on fancy shit. I mean sure...but also not really a viable solution.
I have been developing software for over 20 years and leading teams of developers for the last 10. Please allow me to give you some insight from experience.

To your first point, in my experience, the best software, including complex platforms that handle massive amounts of traffic and data, can be built and maintained by small teams. I mean less than 20 developers. The larger the number of developers working on an application or platform has an almost inverse correlation to the speed in which new features are built or bugs fixed.

Software architecture has been done visually since perhaps its inception (tools like UML). At most places I've worked, every new project or large feature is diagrammed visually to use as a guide in breaking down the project into component parts.

In my experience complexity arises, not from lack of tools or industry knowledge, but from 3 main causes:

1. Inexperienced developer asked to create project, who just starts building without planning beforehand.

2. The main one - business demands features built that were never expected or planned for, and built as fast as possible. This causes developers to take shortcuts, make inelegant and difficult to maintain design choices. And leads to often inscrutable code that becomes technical debt especially after the original developer leaves the company. This will always happen as long as software is used to make a business money.

3. High team turnover - I've seen places where developers came and went so often that there was a myriad of things half started and never finished.

How I've solved or helped alleviate these issues: Make the business case to company owners or management that technical debt will be an ever increasing impediment to development velocity and the dev team will need a percentage of work in any given sprint to tackle tech debt issues (as opposed to having everybody work 100% on new features and bug fixes all the time).

I have successfully taken a platform that was bug-ridden, difficult to maintain, and where new feature development had slowed to a crawl due to the over-complexity of the software, to a place of stability and ease of development, simply by allowing our team to chip away at tech debt over the course of several years. Tech debt issues were rated by level of complexity, risk to the business in change (regression bugs), and impact on team velocity. We worked on the highest impact, lowest risk items first and kept going until there wasn't much left on that list.
“ Though relatively average by global standards, the 16% of Americans overall who said in 2017 and again in 2018 that they would like to permanently move to another country -- if they could -- is higher than the average levels during either the George W. Bush (11%) or Barack Obama administration (10%).”

So usually America has lower than average citizens wanting to emigrate. Trump made Trump haters want to leave, bringing it up to global averages.

That’s a significant jump, but being globally average does not fit the narrative you’re trying to portray.
Call me a snob, but I bet no small number of Android users would have picked an iPhone if it were cheaper.
These are all nice features, but hardly deserve the qualification "next generation".
Japan's GDP-per-capita has been roughly stable since the 90's:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Seattle is geographically constrained. Most/all of the old cities (and metros) have sprawled to ungodly degrees like atlanta or la. How do you undo 70 years of development (ie, tens or hundreds of billions of dollars) spent on sprawling?
Even if you were nitpicking then that's OK. On Hacker News we critique the words and not the person, right?
The same thing happened to me. GTAO earns billions/year, crazy that "fix the insane loading times" didn't bubble up to their top-priority.
Accepted as a speculation asset, yes
Can you elaborate on why you feel this proves that the host's knowledge is important in deciding on whether to switch after a goat is revealed from one of the two doors you haven't chosen? As far as I'm aware (but it's been a while), the host's knowledge is only important up to the point where the first door to be revealed contains a goat. All scenarios where the host reveals a prize on the first door to be opened are discarded for the sake of the problem statement (when dealing with the host being ignorant).
> "The top credit-card merchant fee actually rose in the United States between 1991 and 2009, and this is a goddamn tragedy, since these fees are baked into the cost of most retail goods and thus born by the working poor (who pay them even if they use cash.) . . . Why are these IT-focused industries so consistently immune to the same technological improvements and cost reductions we see everywhere else?"

The simplest apparent answer is that this (the provision of payment services) is not a competitive market and as small retailers have nowhere else to turn, they're forced to pay high rents to what would have been called a trust in late 19th century Gilded Age terminology.

The solution is also fairly clear: if you have what's called a 'natural monopoly' then it should be state-owned and state-managed (see the network of roads, water pipes, etc.), and if it's not actually a natural monopoly - meaning a system where competition doesn't make sense, i.e. having multiple networks of privately owned roads is silly - then you need anti-trust actions by the government to foster competition in the industry, which would reduce fees and costs for merchants.

Arguably, if consumers had to pay the cost of transactions, rather than merchants, you might seem a lot more political pressure to make credit/debit card transactions the same cost as cash transaction, i.e. no added cost.

Cash is a government-supplied taxpayer-supported service supplied free of charge for merchants and customers, so perhaps that's the best option for the credit/debit interface as well. Of course, this would allow government to track everyone's individual non-cash purchases, but then they already have access to the credit/debit ledgers, don't they?
Braveheart
I’ve seen a few AWS instance hardware failures, they happen with some regularity.
You can handle single instance failure without being multi AZ.
Testing an actual AZ failure, as in the whole AZ going offline or getting partitioned from the other AZs, is pretty much impossible.
> One thing working in complexity’s favor, though, is that engineers like complexity.

Honestly, I hate complex solutions. Even my own. What I like, and what impresses me, is the simple solution that takes a lot of work or math to prove it works. Like, emergent behavior type shit.

Control theory, for example, runs systems with very simple runtime behavior. A few open loops with some parameters. The analysis to chose those parameters is where the engineering happens.

Microservice practices are not yet that simple, but some day I hope they can be.
We are in the era where its impossible to be bored. In the elevator? Phone out on instagram. Loading screen? Same thing. Instant dopamine the minute you need a drip. The playerbase clearly doesn't care. To be honest, these loading screen times are as bad as they've always been for console games (especially considering it was only a generation ago that they ran off a disc).
Notion went from one of my critical apps to an app I try to avoid using because of this. Also their apps are genuinely terrible, which hurts.
Tried months, maybe a year ago. Could not handle my 15 year old corporate email accont with 300k emails.
Everyone here talking about super fast, but that's one thing I haven't complained about my stock calendar app. Wish there were more screenshots.
There are two frameworks. I'd suggest you combine both. The first one is STAR: situation, tasks, action, and results. The second one is used by product managers a lot: MECE, or mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. Use the first framework for your narrative with a focus on why, or so-called working backwards. Use the second framework to narrow down what you need to dive deep.

I can't stress enough how important it is to work backwards and explain the why of your work. Too many geeks mistake claims for reasons, and got dragged into irrelevant details to the point that their work appears irrelevant too. On the other hand, the bigger a problem, a more impressive a solution. If you can articulate why you're solving a problem and why you solved it in the way you described, people can probably figure out the how part easily.
"survived to update the file" implies that the one to add it to the list must be the one to have landed there
You will absolutely get "more" performance out of async. I'm not sure I could call it much more. It's hard to get an exact number because there isn't exactly a whole lot of pairs of "async" vs "greenthreaded" options out there, but I'd guess you're looking at 20%-30% tops. For most people, and even most people writing async code, this is irrelevant. They are never going to write code that absolutely needs that last 20-30% and that alone is the difference between the problem being solved and not solved.

It certainly isn't like you use a green thread model and you unconditionally throw away a 5x performance factor or something.

There are absolutely cases where that does matter. To name just one, a game engine would not want to throw away that level of performance out of the box. (That's the game engine user's job, to "spend" the quality of the game engine on their task.) But I think there's a lot more programmers who have, without analysis, assumed they're in that class and made a lot of decisions based on that, when in fact they are plural orders of magnitude away from it. To pick a number out thin air, 4 full CPU cores running Rust code that someone has at least glanced at and spent a bit of time optimizing is a loooooot of power.

(The closest current comparison is Rust vs. Go, but Rust works much harder at compile-time optimization and doesn't have GC, and I expect those two things account for the majority of the delta between them, with Go being greenthreaded being non-trivial, but in the clear minority. Stay tuned for Java with Project Loom versus Rust, which has its own rather major differences but will at least be another relevant data point.)
Is that really an issue?

You want to use Gnome? Use Gnome. You want to use KDE? Use KDE. I3? ditto. Etc.

Oh, some random GTK app will look weird on KDE? Tough. Every Windows app looks different, and even MS's apps always felt out of place on their own OS. And with the proliferation of Electron apps, nothing ever looks "native" anymore.

> while I don't know if anything that has been built 2 Ubuntu LTS releases ago still works

Maybe, maybe not. But that's also an issue on MacOS. And while Windows prides itself on backwards compatibility (and mostly delivers), that doesn't come free.

There's also hardware backwards compatibility. Many devices that used to work with older versions of Windows or MacOS just don't work anymore. Even those that never required custom drivers from their manufacturer. On Linux, if it works once, it'll usually keep on working. I have such an issue: a PCIe USB 3 card, so it isn't even something that old. Used to work with MS Win 10 provided drivers, now (win 11) it's unusable.