skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Developers need to use a system font stack which loads fonts from the system itself instead of remote web fonts.

Browsers have always loaded a font from the system over a web font if it has a font of that name.

We could just normalize having a lot more free as in beer fonts installed on the average user's machine.

The unfortunate emphasis there is "average user's machine" as font loading times are already a a deanonymization vector/fingerprinting. Way back in the day IE made a big deal about bundling a group of fonts and calling them "Web Safe" and we need an initiative like that again. Take the Top X fonts from Google Fonts and just bundle them with browsers or operating systems and spread those as widely as possible so that it isn't a useful deanonymization vector.
Ye I'm on a seesaw still :(. I'm happy to help, but only if I want to. On stuff I don't, then I need to flatout learn to make them pay for my time.
> As in, if you write a 5 line perl script that makes you significantly more productive, do not share it as you will be asked time and time again why you wasted your time on something outside of your job description.

This sounds like something I'd see in a Dilbert comic. Do you mind sharing what industry you work in? Perhaps you saw this in old-fashioned industries like banking or insurance? Have you experienced this in tech?
Ridiculously bad take. The military desperately wants good nurses. The military also wants people who will follow orders even when those orders may cause harm to one's self. The military doesn't have a particularly compelling need for all (or even the majority) of its nurses to carry large packs for long distances.
I think that's an honourable but unattainable persuit.

A huge part of the problem is the messiness of the real world and costs.

While there may be a finite set of fundamental problems, the set of possible hardware and software platforms is ever increasing and each has it's own constraints and strengths.

A "universal programming environment" would need something like a "universal hardware interface". That's why things like Java and the Web became so popular despite their poor design.

Also, visual programming is a hard thing to make work and human language skills seem to be far greater than human visual skills.

Perhaps the best that can be done is "starting from zero" and making sure everything, from the ICs in your hardware to the memory models behind your software is thoroughly tested and formally verified.

This is insanely expensive with current technology. Perhaps some fancy math and AI advancements can make formal verification powerful enough for ubiquitous use. Until then, I see little hope for a "universal programming environment".
Novel solutions aren't as helpful as you think. Pragmatic, simple, vanilla solutions are reliable.

You won't create your own linked list library, you'll use one from the standard library.

General runtime analysis can be helpful - but production, real-world benchmarks trump all theoretical performance values.

Code changes - how do I make a change to a production system in a million line code base that has good test coverage and when deployed, won't bring the entire system down. That's an exercise in the coding interviews that is completely ignored but most useful in the day-to-day professional setting.
HR does not do that. They don't prioritize nor coordinate - unless you count getting people to company dinner as coordination. They do communicate, but rarely about product or how things are done or should be done.

And I don't mean that as criticism, I mean ythat as "it is not their job"
No, in my estimate, its more like, you have to be willing to piss some people off to make stuff go. Perhaps better wording would be that you can't accomplish things without sacrifice. We aren't willing to do that. You can't have CA's environmental review process and timely/cost effective construction. You can't have SF's discretionary review process and ... any construction, really. You can't solve the housing crisis without building housing, but to do that, you'd actually have to build housing. The cost of that housing is multiples of the public sectors budget, so you'd need to first of all, admit that, and then allow the private sector to do it. The private sector only does stuff that makes a profit... so we'd just rather not build housing than change regulations. Now, we get to say we like affordable housing and protecting the environment when our policies don't result in affordable housing and we push people out of environmentally efficient cities into the suburbs/exurbs/wilderness. Fundamentally, if you want to be able to build stuff in CA, you have to get rid of all of the universal, asymmetric vetoes that allow any person to spend $200 to cause millions in costs via review processes.
And Linux on Game Boys!
Covid-19 Vaccine Effectiveness against the Omicron (B.1.1.529) Variant
When I work on audio, I only have my DAW open. I'm sure modern hardware can handle it, but force of habit really.
Most interesting part: https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...
agreed, but i've found it easier/safer to just back out of sites when I see taboola stuff on them in the first place. it seems to be an indicator of the (non)quality of many sites.
I want to say "this has really aged badly", but unfortunately this is still how some people see the industry.
Why should developers necessarily be trying to cut loading times? Perhaps GTA is phenomenally successful because they have good BAs and POs who are able to identify and convince engineers to work on what matters to the bottom line.
You know where to find their issue tracker, help them help you?
People still use Usenet, it's still going. Some groups get hundreds of ppd still.
"please rest assured that my home is still standing" at the very end. I missed this myself.
> Names

Don't try to force schemas onto schema-less data. Store the "name" as a JSON string/blob representing the various possible attributes (given, middle, family, title, etc) and provide a variety of functions for representing that data. IF you really need to do this at all (for an internal app, you probably don't).

> Physical links

Include an Hardware Asset FK in your Link M2M table. Model each binary link explicitly, so a Y cable = 2-3 different Links that point to the same cable Asset. Or you can have single Links with M2M inputs/outputs. But definitely don't model Y cables explicitly.

> Password recovery

What is so complicated about this, specifically? Python and Ruby are completely different languages with no guarantees for interop.
Ask HN: Old iPad, Unusable?
I was digging through my closet and found an ipad that was given to me years ago that's great shape, barely used.

iOS is running 9.3.5 but I'm finding it completely unusable. There are no apps on it other than stock.

For example, I want to download an app to use: `This version of iOS is unsupported`...ok, I'll just go to the website.

OAuth won't work with google on safari because `Couldn't sign you in, this browser or app may not be secure`

OK, let's update iOS...nope, can't be done

I've used a mac every day for the past 15 years but have almost never used an iPad, am I a luddite or is Apple really doing their darndest to get me to buy a new iPad?

How is this acceptable?
> … not dependent on each other…

Unless they are — methods that change how methods are compiled.

> … loaded and presented in any order…

And which may give different results depending on order.

Isn't that what "First-Class Undefined Classes for Pharo" was about?

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01585305/document

> … how to define classes which Smalltalk file-out format…

That problem isn't created by the file-out format. That problem is everything is a message send.

"Class definitions are [not] static, declarative syntactic structures."

1988 "An Overview of Modular Smalltalk"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/62084.62095

Seems like there have been plenty of problems caused by "method is the basic unit" ;-)
This was my favorite deep dive post on this exact topic from a few years back in the Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin...
This was in fact one of the earliest use cases of proof-of-work from the 90s [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
Interesting that the author is Orson Scott Card of Ender’s Game fame.
Hm... it feels about on par with Eliza. Or at least I haven't gotten it to provide any constructive insight or meaningful questions. At its best what kind of interactions can it produce?
Dropbox Backup is not Dropbox the file sync app. See here: https://www.dropbox.com/backup#dropbox-backup-plan
Sure. They should have been upfront about it, and they should have offered a switch to disable the behaviour. They were rightly punished for it.

But if we’re going to be correct about things, it was phone speed that took a hit, not battery life.
tangential: Regarding Duolingo, its nice that its a fun gamified thing for you and your wife to do together, consider formal education though. A 3-month class at community college will propel way further than believing Duolingo's method has short circuited a mental process. Duolingo is a decent addition to another learning method. But level 25 isn't going to be fundamentally different than level 7, it will never tell you "why/when/context" and that's very limiting, whereas a teacher can tell you in 20 seconds.
Well I don't consider those people my friends anymore. I don't think they ever feel guilty thats the issue. Even when I'm near them and they probably can see me, they tout it as theirs.

Hmm I doubt I can change them - I'm not gonna be friends with them - they still havent said thank you after ghosting me after 2 years.
Wasn't the local learning disabled because it enabled fingerprinting?[0] Has that been fixed since you're recommending it?

[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/privacy-badger-changin...
More appropriate interview would be "figure out how to get permission to change this setting"
> Having a huge chunk of the supply be stable and controllable

Nuclear might be stable, but "controllable"?

On the days when it's windy and sunny in your part of the planet, try telling your local nuclear plants they're not required.

There's simply no reason to guarantee nuclear generators a fixed electricity price decades in advance, like the UK did with Hinkley Point.[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
Could this be mitigated by disabling/suspending js in background tabs?
definitely a 7 out of 9.
Cities have different problems from the federal government, usually funding being the big one. Even a Democratic city that overall favors good government will have problems being effective without sufficient funds to pull it off.

I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
The best known algorithms, say relabel-to-front, is O(m^1.5) and the paper proposes an algorithm which is O(m^(1+o(1)). Here, 1.5 is fixed but 1+o(1) can be anywhere between 1 and 2 based on your luck, and should be 1.5 on an average over variety of inputs. Still no free lunch.
I'm all for making things better.

But isn't what you describe precisely what Musk did himself? He passed judgement on companies like GM, for instance when they killed the EV1. But he did one step further, and actually started his own company. One that works according to those rules he thinks make more sense.

I mean, even if you disagree with the rules he has come up with... wouldn't you at least have to respect that he did something about it? Isn't that, in a sense, an encouragement for your own values, also? Because it shows you that you, too, can make a difference? And that, even if you don't do it, people with ideas generally do have a chance of rising to the top, where their ideas can have an impact?

If we were talking about some dude who inherited all of his wealth and power from his parents, it would be a different thing.
Because most oppressive regimes have authoritarian systems of government.
somewhat north...
This came up in my subscription feed. I think it's just what you are looking for.
How to say no: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwzPJhutVaY

If you want to do the thing, but for compensation or some other condition, there is also yes, but... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPaClwd0W5w

Or yes, and...these are my rates. For example.
For the last 12 years, I’ve worked with 40+ different software teams (helping with UI/UX design [1]). From small scrappy startups to fortune 500.

The teams that were great to work with and ended up having the biggest wins, were always small teams with a great cultural balance. They always strived for the simplest solutions.

You could trace this balance of engineers in all of the cases back to GREAT hiring by the CEO.

The teams that were the least productive and just burnt through VC money were the ones that had a handful of toxic engineers at their core. Finding complex and seemingly clever (over engineered) ‘solutions’ seemed to be their goal in every meeting.

A way to find out if your team belongs to the second group, measure the amount of jargon that’s being used in meetings.

[1] www.fairpixels.pro
>startups are supposed to be, uh, innovating, developing new technology, and working on hard, meaningful problems?

Maybe 1% of startups do this. The rest are shitting out the software equivalent of Juicero.
Let's hope Rogers, Bell and Telus's IP ranges get flagged "by accident."
> We haven't really found a way to reuse these among different technologies. Like, if you once figured out the perfect password reset workflow with Ruby on Rails, and your next job uses Python + Django, you're back to square one.

C and C++ libraries with light language-specific wrappers largely serve this purpose, in practice. It's plausible that, say, a PHP postgres client lib and a Node postgres client lib will share nearly all their code—probably as C or C++.

This doesn't get leveraged much aside from interfacing with daemons and sometimes for extremely complex e.g. media or crypto libraries, though. No-one's doing this for high-level software workflow building-blocks, like a password reset flow.

[EDIT] as for the "why", I suspect it's because the things it's used for are far simpler than the things it isn't. A password reset flow can potentially need to interface with lots of different things, some of which may be custom to the project, some of which may vary with run-time input, et c. If you cut it down to only the parts that could truly be re-used anywhere, with all kinds of points where you can hook in as needed... you've only made about 5% of the work re-usable, so it's just about pointless.
That was a large part of it, but it also had to do with taxation over building highways for trade in the north while the south had ample waterways to move trade goods... I'm not saying it wasn't about slavery as well, before anyone gets mad.

EDIT: https://medium.com/@jonathanusa/everything-you-know-about-th...
Yes, obviously if there was any direct influence, it was from Asimov to the web comic author, not the other way round.
Nahhh I'm super down to help. General help is fine.
I block out Fridays for general help - copying Adam Grant's friday blocking method for givers.

But I get sad when they expect me to help them more and more and more and more. Projects can take days and weeks and months.
also, quantity is the (primary) independent variable in economies of scale, and at quantities of dozens for nuclear plants, you can't get much economies, as opposed to when quantities are in the many thousands/millions.
> The real test with most of these authoring tools is text support

So how's the text support?
Meta, Google backed Lobbying group spent $36M on opposing self-preferencing ban
I hope some ambitious soul can port the Chrome OS window manager in some way. Chrome OS is the only non Windows or Mac window manager that handles UI scaling correctly in all cases and across all displays with differing scaling settings. There is no Linux WM that I've found anywhere near as good (don't say i3wm).
Yeah but the fragmentation is the problem.

One reason Windows and macOS are popular is that people know what they are going to get. If you've used one Windows 11 box, for example, you can get on another Windows 11 box and figure out how to use it. It will have the same user interface and window management as the other: the Start menu, the control panel, the desktop, etc.

That's just not the case for Linux. There are several popular desktop environments that are very different from each other in look and feel. For an ordinary user, switching from Gnome to KDE would be quite jarring and it would take them a while to get used to it. For power users and tweakers, that diversity of options is an attractive feature of the Linux desktop. For ordinary users, it is a deterrent.
Why We're Sticking with Ruby on Rails at Gitlab
OOO thanks!!!!! I'll defs read both :))) Thanks for the kind words as well :)
As a desktop, Linux is now fully functional for most users. I know administrations running on Linux, law firms, and even my dad. Beginner users don't care about choices, they get Linux Mint or similar with LibreOffice and Firefox and they are good to go for most of their tasks. For advanced users, the abundance is a key benefit of this ecosystem.

No company is fully focused on the desktop OS, and I don't see why they should. This article is contradictory saying "desktop operating system will lie in the hands of Apple with macOS and us with Linux". It is not because Microsoft prioritize cloud services that it abandons desktops, it is not a priority for many Linux developers and sponsors as stated above in the article, and it doesn't seem a high priority for Apple either.
As someone who's built this kind of multi-player undo/redo in the past all I can say is this looks amazing and I can't wait to try it in one of my projects - Thanks for building this!
Haha just busting your chops.

You’ve convinced me to try it out!
Ah yea we had the same thought a while back so, yes, that's in the works :) The biggest drawback here is that there are rate limits to the GitHub API. It should work for just trying out some diffs though. Thanks for the feedback!
Sorry, I've had both my kids go through the WISC-V "IQ" test in the last few years and there's no single "intelligence" number that comes out of that that would be meaningful for employment. It measures all sorts of things and you can be off the charts high in one kind of mental / reasoning skill while being average or below average in others and yet that still might tell you nothing about how well someone writes code at a job.

Most of us aren't doing intense mathematical reasoning stuff at work. Sometimes we have to, but most of the time the actual amount of novel algorithm stuff being done pales in comparison to "synthesize this knowledge from 10 different sources and evaluate the best way to integrate that into a reasonable solution."

I don't think coding tests are a good substitute for that, and an IQ test would not give you a clear answer there either.
I used to be on the "Flash is awesome! Don't kill it team!" But I've changed my mind. Flash needed to die. It existed in a world where everyone was on desktop with a mouse. Fixing it to be responsive so the majority of creations made in flash worked on both desktop and mobile and adjusted from landscape to portrait would have basically broken flash IMO.
That problem was related to the lack of budget though. Congress demanded they perform a complex evaluation of who should be eligible for tax exemption, with little staff. Unsurprisingly they resorted to shortcut methods like searching for groups with political terms in their names.

As that article notes, they did also target liberal groups in the same way. The hearings they held basically found they were doing a poor job generally.

There's this pattern of cutting funding, and then using the disasters caused by the funding cuts as "proof" the government can't do anything right.
> "There are four things I would...", and I'm thinking "Damn! You already thought through the entire response in enough detail to count the bullet points!"

As someone in a similar role – it's all cheating. They've seen a version of your problem so many times it doesn't feel new to them. While you were talking, the architect was walking down a decision tree of possible problem patterns. Every new clue you provided eliminated part of the tree until the only thing that was left were 4 options that you can eliminate or confirm by asking followup questions or doing followup investigation.

Once identified, you use the off-the-shelf solution in your brain. Slightly tweaked for the current problem.

That's what people buy when they hire for experience.
Who is going to the bell the cat? Unless at least 20% of FAANG, unicorns, stop using leetcode, this show will go on.
system design and behavior interviews expect you to put up an oscar worthy performance.

There is no way to "design instagram" in a super fluid straight line thought process. Only way to beat this system is to prepare and have notes handy where you can go from point to point.

Eg: you are expected in system design to have these 4 components

1) functional requirement 2) non functional requirement 3) back of envelope calculations 4) components of design.

Similarly for behavior you need STAR format with actual numbers ( improved latency of 20%)

Freestyling in an interview is a recipe for failure.

Ppl complain about leetcode but i find these interviews really embarrassing for all parties to involved to participate in this charade.
> Diving into the XNU source

Uh oh
A lot of the decline is down to poor incentives. Failure is often seen as a reason to ask for more money rather than stopping a program. In many ways actual success is disincentivised. If a contractor delivers on time and on budget, then they have to bid a new contract rather than extend an existing one. If a program reduces homelessness it no longer needs the same level of funding because there are less homeless. When crime is low it's hard to justify a new SWAT team.
Well I think it happened because a large number of Rust committers, core-devs doubled down on multi-year Rust async effort. What larger ecosystem would take away from this?

IMO the message was Async is the future so everyone better hop on this train.
>Not sure why IQ tests are so fetishized among a certain set.

It is an easy numeric way to satisfy a superiority complex.
Or if you were taking specifically about the nuclear construction incompetence, the loca newspapers in South Carolina and Georgia have been providing the best reporting. Here's South Carolina's archive:

https://www.postandcourier.com/business/vc_summer_nuclear_pr...

Search for "Georgia recorder vogtle" to get some of the reports from the Georgia construction delays.
Super and also super.
I think they do that because nuance gets lost so easily. And some of those laws going through are anti-voter in so many ways that getting lost in the weeds of hypothetical situations weakens the pushback.
If successful software companies are dependent on retaining great programmers, they're probably doomed unless they can keep creating new software. Great programmers want to create. They won't be satisfied with just maintaining a successful product. Few companies have the capacity to keep creating really new products and they certainly aren't going to be willing to abandon the old product.
Yeah, disabling or suspending JS in background tabs would definitely kill this version of the attack. However, our attack also isn't limited to JavaScript -- many of our experiments in the paper are implemented with a Python attacker. It can be implemented in basically any programming language and embedded in any application on your machine.