skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The programming meme books that you must have on your shelf (reading optional) are:

- The C Programming Language (original C book)

- The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP)

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)

- Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (Dragon book)

- Don't Make Me Think (design)

- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This "paper" is just a glorified advert for CodeScene.
> A fair number of people still use Word 97. It does what they need and still works on modern systems. Why switch?

Perhaps so you can open all of those .docx files that people send to you?
They (he, she, undetermined) might not even be aware of the other office suites. The sibling commenter lists OnlyOffice, first time I hear about that.
> Which makes it insanely hard to change things for the better, normal cancersticks (now without menthol!) will continue to be made

Maybe not current “normal cancersticks”; FDA is targeting those, too: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-anno...
> I know the received wisdom is that "writing the code isn't the hard part", but I think reality is more like "writing the code is only one of the hard parts".

Writing the code isn't the bottleneck. And there is no point in optimizing some part of a process that isn't a bottleneck.

Anyway, have you noticed that "understandably and correctly" isn't included on the OP's definition of "writing code"? That's for a reason, and it's the most adequate definition to use on this context.
TIL about that fallacy.

That's a fair point. I guess it comes in a bit differently in C++ land, because the "you shouldn't" comes into what you decide to allow to be injectable (e.g. if your constructor only accepts the third party object type, you're not gonna be able to mock it). As such, you gotta keep the principle in mind when designing your objects. That said, you're definitely right, it smells like that fallacy
I'm sure it happens. But I'm not sure it's statistically relevant and deserves tailoring public discourse around. It just sounds like « think of the children » nonsense to me. I've certainly never seen it happen. In fact I've never seen anybody vape who wasn't previously a smoker, that just doesn't exist in my area. That's anecdotal, but I doubt you're basing your opinion off broad empirical data either.
Vaping has wiped out 20 years of reductions in teen smoking so that plan isn't working. Juul's marketing was never about a healthier cigarette replacement.

https://tobacco21.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/teen-vaping...
(couldn't find a graph newer than 2018)
Why assume bad faith?
500k per month ... USD ?

Insane, or BS.
Introducing Laravel Pint
Harvard tried to take over MIT six separate times
Fiber optics cables are made of glass whose primary constituent is silicon dioxide and/or quartz which are the primary constituents of sand.
It was pretty inspiring seeing combustible cigarette smokers switch to Juul and having a much much healthier (and less smelly!) lifestyle.

Great to hear that you're off combustible cigarettes :) You can easily ween down the nicotine from 5% to 3% to 1.5% over a time period too.
Note that "for a while" is in Emacs-time, so we're talking ~2013 to ~2019, i.e. longer than some entire popular editors, that flycheck was the normal way for someone using non-prerelease-Emacs.

(And even now I think I'd stick with flycheck if it weren't also for eglot using flymake by default.)
Have you lived with chronic pain, or expected to live the rest of your life disabled?

Because privacy doesn't seem all that important once you actually are going through it.

If you had to pick between being a cripple (say, with your arms or your legs useless) and forgoing your privacy are you really sure you'd give more value to privacy?

Do actually consider what life is like under these circumstances before answering. I don't think there are many quadriplegic people out there who'd pick privacy over being healed.

"X is more important than Y" isn't honest if you never lacked Y and can't even consider a future where you lack Y
I can’t wait until the node marketing reaches length-scales smaller than the diameter of hydrogen.
My personal worst experience with captchas is Vultr: every time I go to their page from my Linux desktop, I need to solve a recaptcha. And if I don't do it within ~3 seconds, the page reloads and I need to start over again. I bet there are more robots than humans who can solve it in such a short time. You need to read the instructions, pattern match 9 photos... twice... in 3 seconds. It doesn't happen when I visit the Vultr's page from my iPhone though. When I get a spare moment, I will move my VPS to another, less obnoxious provider (maybe even Amazon).
This person knows what he/she/they is talking about!
+ Violence in video-games cause kids to become violent / school shootings.
Which is entirely orthogonal from how they might (ab)use that data. They are a commercial company. It will be commercialised. No. Not ok by me.
Sure, they all have interesting challenges, but the day to day work is pretty different. I think in part it comes down to personality and preferences. Which do you prefer:

* Working with users & designers, rapidly iterating UIs on some bleeding-edge messy ecosystem (React, etc.), dealing with whitespace and color palettes, state management and associated race conditions, and having clearly visible creative output at the end to show for it?

or...

* Working behind the scenes with other techies, vendors, specs and docs, architecting against best (or at least "known good") practices & patterns, enforcing rigidity and consistency and good versioning throughout your APIs, optimizing the hell out of every query, containerizing everything and jumping in and out of DevOps every hour, getting to learn various platforms and stacks in depth in order to produce a stable HTTP endpoint, working with many clouds... all to produce a remarkably well-engineered response that fellow engineers could appreciate but no user will ever see?

You can get a pretty deep, but different, sense of satisfaction from either calling. And these days there is really no end to the depth of specialization you can achieve, only the breadth. Even within "frontend" and "backend" there is already several lifetimes of learning, and the pace of development is only getting faster.

The frontend tends to iterate quicker, fast and furious, while the backend focuses on stability and resilience. The engineering cultures can be different (though not incompatible). In general I think the backend stuff is "harder" in that it's more actual engineering, and tends to get paid better. The frontend stuff is difficult in a different way -- creative and visual, often -- which for some reason companies don't tend to reward as highly. In our culture, engineering is thought of as more difficult than design, unless you're Steve Jobs or similar.

But at the end of the day, either path (or remaining full stack) would easily get you a much-more-than-livable wage at any decent company, so it comes down to things like work-life balance (do you want to be on pagerduty?) and just how much you enjoy each bucket of work, and the kind of people you end up working with.

If you're not sure, don't decide after 3.5 years. Maybe try a FE specialization for a year or two, a BE one for another year or two, etc. until you find a niche you really enjoy.

For me it took like 15+ years to realize that what I loved was being able to quickly develop UX with an abstracted/serverless backend, using Next.js. But others hate that loss of control and want to work on the parts of the stack that I'm grateful to never have to touch again. YMMV... take time to explore!
no, I use Word/Excel 2007. and Photoshop CS2. in a Windows 7 VM without networking

they're the ones I've learned to work with, and since I don't use them professionally, they're still sufficient for my needs.

I don't have to re-learn the UI with every other release, and they all run fine with 1 core and 2 GB of RAM allocated, on any machine
You can tell that the author really knows art, because his apartment looks just like an art gallery.
OnlyOffice is far from being as comprehensive as LibreOffice. At least when I tried the spreadsheets, I ran into limitations even though I use spreadsheets very rarely.
TCP Congestion Control: A Systems Approach
So happy to finally see it released! I hope people will like it :)
Ask HN: Can anyone recommend a web-based tool that unlocks simultaneous answers?
Scenario: Let's say your either starting a club, company, or just meeting someone new and you want to mutually land on a vision statement or aligned set of principles about whatever the goal of that club might be.

One interesting way to go about this would be to maybe have everyone fill out a survey, or write their own little manifesto, and keep the results secret, and then simultaneously reveal everyone's results to everyone else at a pre-determined future date.

The easiest way I can think of to do this would be to just have everyone write a Word/GoogleDoc/Text doc of some kind, and have them literally drag it into a Dropbox/Drive/iCloud folder at the same date and time.

However, I'm wondering if there is a tool out there that would make this more fun, and done in such a way that any individual who just wants to get it done ahead of time can do so, and let the software do the reveal?

Is there any kind of cool, "Simuldrop," tool or method that anyone out there has built or uses? A web-based tool would be cool and have the widest reach, but any suggestions for command-line tools, technical solutions could be interesting as well of course because after all...this is hackernews.
Added to the latest list of rich-text/HTML editors: https://gist.github.com/manigandham/65543a0bc2bf7006a487
Best Modern Post-apocalyptic Books (2020)
Not OP, but I know sometimes I forget I want LibreOffice. Many years ago I worked for a computer store where I used to refurbish computers everyday with OpenOffice so open OpenOffice is still the brand that first comes to mind for me. I never get very far though because as soon as I see "Apache OpenOffice" I realise my mistake and search for LibreOffice.

But I'd assume lot of OpenOffice users today are just legacy users who use it just because they're familiar with the brand and that's what they've always used.
The "from 2014" is the important bit they're emphasizing, not the version number. LibreOffice 7.3 was released this year.
OMG those places looks uncomfortable to stay in for more than an hour.
There's a pretty significant problem here: with this approach, you lose test coverage of the code within your client wrapper. Namely, there's code like this which is not being tested: `.json()["repositories"]`

Now, one might argue, those calls are so trivial that it doesn't need coverage, right? But what if you were trying to get the results from a nested key as a list and also check for an error status etc. etc.? Or what if this is XML deserialization with certain assumptions baked into the deserialization code? You could easily add complexity that you think your tests are covering, but they aren't.

I prefer instead to use https://vcrpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ which helps you to create a fixture of what you don't own, and hooks every possible requests/http/urllib system to ensure you're not leaking a hit to a production service on any but your first test run. Tests even need to worry about mocks in most cases, they just need to be wrapped in a simple annotation.

In a way, it's precisely the opposite of the OP's conclusion: mock what you don't own, at the lowest possible level to ensure all the code you wrote is covered. But use the right tool for the job!
Ha! Messrs. Fadell and Fridman might take issue with how you've phrased the title.
I often feel like projects that are handed over to Apache are basically put in the equivalent of an aircraft boneyard; stashed for archival purposes, but it will no longer receive much development effort.
> any form of nicotine consumption is very bad,

“Very bad” is too strong. Nicotine is a drug that does not have therapeutic value. It does not cause cancer. It is addictive. It has mild nootropic effects, as well as other effects like appetite suppression. Here’s a good, easy to read rundown:

https://elemental.medium.com/your-brain-on-nicotine-668c0b6a...

We should be careful to differentiate smoking/vaping from nicotine use.
> meaning things break easily, testing is low, or where maintenance or new dev is difficult - is a genuine business problem. The solution to that is engineering managers that can make a persuasive case to non-technical people for why something needs to be done a different way

At an engineering company management up to the board should all be engineers.

Then, these conversations become much easier, since things that break (and a pattern of repeated failures for the same thing) should be obvious to any real engineer.

> But as a founder and an active software engineer, far too often "technical debt" is used by programmers to advanced their personal preferences, which may not be aligned with the businesses in any way.

That's often a comp problem. Are your engineer's incentives aligned with the company (via stock options for instance)? If not, it's probably better for them to refactor your product to use whatever tech is pushed by the place they want to jump ship to (for a better comp package of course).

> using a mono repo (again, zero business problems caused)

Mono repos have a lot of advantages (most notably that it makes cross-component changes atomic). There's a reason Google adopted that model.

> using any number of 3rd party libraries (vs the developers desire to build from scratch)

Keep in mind there's a hidden cost to any third party dependency, especially if you have to modify it but your patches won't make it upstream.
Have you actually read the article? The last few paragraphs address this:

> N.B: A brief note on the claim carbon nanotubes exist in crucible steel:

> The only articles that "found" carbon nanotubes was published as a brief communication to Nature, i.e not a peer reviewed article, not a full article. This was in 2006, and was only a few pages in length.

> It later found its away into a conference paper by the same authors, still not a peer reviewed article. This was 2 pages in length. These findings should be considered preliminary.

> The method used (dissolving crucible steel in acid and seeing what remains) revealed stands of carbon, but carbon dissolves VERY readily into steel. Crucible steel is typified by cementite spheroids, which often stretch into rods during forging as they are deformed. If you dissolve cementite in acid, removing the iron component, you are left with carbon.

> This does not mean there was an intact carbon nanotube in the core of the cementite rod - and even if it DID mean that, it would have negligible impact on performance because it is *encased* in cementite, which itself is in a soft matrix of pearlite or sorbite.

> But don't take my word for it. Other academics, including those who have been instrumental in understanding crucible steel (namely John Verhoeven) doubt the findings.

> " John Verhoeven, of Iowa State University in Ames, suggests Paufler is seeing something else. Cementite can itself exist as rods, he notes, so there might not be any carbon nanotubes in the rod-like structure."

> "Another potential problem is that TEM equipment sometimes contains nanotubes, says physicist Alex Zettl of the University of California"

> https://www.nature.com/news/2006/061113/full/news061113-11.h...
The main social issue is that green energy is better used as marketing than to really do something about the ever rising levels of emissions.

After all, most people don't care to read the actual facts on supposedly new, superior technology, they just endorse it because it's supposed to be green.
> if a man travelled to USA with a 10 year old wife he could end up in prison for decades, while in many cultures such an arrangement is normal and accepted.

This isn't about whether or not to wear shoes indoors or not. It's not about regional cultural quirks, but about fundamental human rights. What actually constitutes fundamental human rights depends on the framework, but the correct one (and importantly the one FIFA follows obviously) is the "liberal/progressive/secular" one. Which is why an organization that supposedly values those rights shouldn't let a country that doesn't value them host a world cup.

> tolerance is the mutual respect of eachother's boundaries, namely that the people who visit Qatar respect the culture and laws of the country, and the people of Qatar in return respect the rights and freedom of those visitors

That loses the context of the World Cup. Basically saying "we want to host the world cup" is synonymous to saying "we don't mind gay people holding hands". If not, then FIFA isn't actually championing the values they say they are (which is probably the case)
But Chicago has not taken the lead on the issue, with other major cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon, already having implemented foot pursuit policies

> The city (Baltimore) recorded 348 homicides in 2019, a number second only to the number recorded in 1993 when the population was nearly 125,000 higher.

In 2021, Baltimore police said there were 337 homicides. There were more than 726 shootings in total.Dec 31, 2021

>Philadelphia
The city had a total of 562 homicides in 2021, breaking the previous record of 500 killings reported in 1990. For comparison, New York City, with five times as many people, had 488 homicides for all of last year. As of last weekend, the city reported 67 killings so far in 2022. Mar 11, 2022

> In 2021, Portland recorded 90 homicides amid a surge in gun violence, shattering the city’s previous high of 66 set more than three decades ago.

>Chicago

According to CPD, a total of 797 people were killed in the city, a figure not seen since 798 were slain in 1996.

But that total count does not include people shot and killed in shootings on Chicago expressways, as they are the jurisdiction of the Illinois State Police. When that number is included the city reached at least 800 homicides, according to Tribune reporting in 2021.

The CPD figure also does not include self-defense shootings or fatal shootings by police officers.

Good luck in the race to the bottom. I’m not sure which city would want to be the “leader” of any anti-policing strategies. This just sets up a new politician in 4 years that will be “tough on crime”. And the wheel turns again.
> What's the next big new thing? No idea, if I knew I'd make it

If only it were that simple...
The issue here is not "engineering talent" The current hodge podge of Health care apps, web sites and and insurance systems all work correctly.

The business logic is broken.
> People eventually have to take responsibility for their decisions

I also want to point out that this is a huge cop-out, pun absolutely intended. If you put in people in prison, you are effectively putting them in rehab unless you're planning on giving prisoners fentanyl.

Rehab is very often the way that people address really serious drug problems, even when they're taking responsibility themselves for the treatment. Saying that rehab is too expensive for the state to bear is effectively saying that these people shouldn't go on rehab at all, because if the state can't afford it, then the broader community of drug-addicted unhoused people definitely can't.

Is the alternative that they just get left on the street? That's not what anybody wants, including the tough-on-crime people. I'm trying to figure out how someone can have a concern about the scalability of rehab and not have a concern about the scalability of prison/arrests, which are effectively trial costs + admin costs + housing costs + rehab costs + probation/enforcement costs.

The way I see it, if you've got someone on the street and they're drug addicted, you have basically two options: you can leave them on the street, or you can pay to get them off of the street. Telling them to have responsibility doesn't really solve the problem, if they're addicted to fentanyl that's probably not something they can fix on their own. In my mind, I see "tell them to take responsibility, it's not our problem to solve" as equivalent to "leave them on the street" -- and I don't think that's what most Californians want.

----

Like, some people support criminalization because they think that prison is a more effective rehabilitation. I think the evidence is kind of against them on that, but I at least understand the reasoning. And even those people would agree that as far as rehabilitation goes, prison is more expensive in the short term. They just argue that the long-term effectiveness for individuals/communities makes the long-term cost of prison/criminalization less in the long run. Which is again something people can debate, but it's a very different argument than telling people to "take responsibility" for themselves -- being imprisoned/arrested is pretty much by definition the state taking responsibility for you.
the approach i took was to read it for understanding, and then go back and see if i could implement what i had just learned, in a different language, without reference to book. (so implementation would use same strategy, but not be exactly the same.)

it worked well for me.

i think this book along w/ spivak's calculus is probably tied for position #1 in technical book that i found most enjoyable and had the biggest influence on me. cannot recommend it enough.

edit: i should mention if i got stuck i went back to reading the book! the point was, "read to understand, try to implement, if understanding not there, repeat". rather than just typing directly out.
Same author wrote Game Programming Patterns: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
I use F-Droid for pretty much everything now. They've had zero malware, and are very good about privacy. While the app selection is much smaller, I've been pretty happy with what I find there, at least for apps that were released within the past few years. Examples: Florisboard, Aegis Authenticator, Material Files, Finamp, Newpipe, Shelter, Connectbot, and anything by Simple Mobile Tools
I also want to speak to vaping overall.

"should not be" covers a ton of activities medical people would prefer we don't do.

What you are doing here is attempting to put additional weight behind your moral assessment of vaping by implying it's more dangerous than it actually is.

I suggest your opinion would carry far more weight when bolstered with the many potent, rational arguments against vaping, all of which I personally agree with. Those are all true, do not require manipulation in the form of misrepresentation; namely, overstating risk either.

Misrepresenting things is how we get bad law and bad norms. People do not respect bad law and tend to reject bad norms. Look at the whole theft argument used for media works. What actually happens is people infringe, and had we actually discussed all that word means, we would likely have better law today and people with a far better understanding of the issue. But theft sells, and is a sexy, if untrue argument very similar to the one you are making about vaping right now.

This means you may actually do more harm than good, despite obviously well meaning and in your view, considerate intent!

And no judgement here. I am not going to tell you what to do or say. Nor should I.

That is all, just wanted to put a different take here and ask you to think about all that some.
That might have once been true, but my own recent experience makes me think that the tide has turned. I no longer expect the card companies to advocate for the consumer in these kinds of "ambiguous" situations, particularly when the business is willing to misrepresent the truth.
I am not sure that online collaboration is such a killer feature.

Most of the time I would take a good offline office app over the application that requires an internet connection, stores my data in the cloud and forces its design choices, from the UI to the security, down my throat "because of the way cloud apps work". My 2c.