skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programming education is broken because it focuses almost exclusively on how to tell the computer to do something (henceforth "the first skill"), rather than what we should be telling the computer to do.

Sure, plenty of people struggle a lot with the first skill. But it's almost entirely pointless to teach the first skill to someone who lacks the second.

It's as if you taught a pet how to indicate letters in sequence from among a pile of cards, found that they could spell no meaningful sentences, yet declared "ah, I have been successful, and to compound on my success I will teach them to do this with the Greek alphabet too!"

Thus we get legion programmers who can tell a computer to model a chessboard with `class WhiteRook extends Piece`, but fail to understand that this is a bad solution and bitboards are better. Or put in your favorite example.

This point comes up when we discuss the low relevance of specific language skills to hiring "senior developers" (this being how we refer to people who have gained the second skill). The usual story told to explain this phenomenon is that senior developers have mastered the first skill to such an extent that they can pick up any language quickly. There's an element of truth to that, but I think it is more accurate to say that the first skill is simply not very useful in the day to day job of a senior developer. Someone who has the second skill but lacks the first is simply better at the job than vice versa.

On the other end of the spectrum, I encounter this phenomenon in a forum for helping beginner programmers: time and again a beginner will ask "how do I frobulate the encabulator? I tried encabulator.frobulate()" - but when queried, they cannot explain in any terms why they are attempting to do such a thing. Upon further inspection it turns out that encabulators should not in fact be frobulated under any circumstances. But because the beginner only had the skill of figuring out how to do such a thing, it simply never occurred to them to figure out whether it should be done! Again, it's not merely that they were wrong about it, but rather, lacking the skill to make such judgment, the question itself is missing entirely from the repertoire of tools they have at hand for doing their work. Their problem-solving process is "1. Read the problem 3. Tell a computer to output the answer" but this is missing the most critical, maybe the only critical step: "2. Find a solution". This is instead treated as a minor interior part of step 3, which is a woefully ineffective process.

I'll throw out one more concrete example, although I know I'll lose some readers who will insist this is actually a reasonable thing to do: it is a perennial question, "how do I get $0.20 + $0.10 not to output $0.300000004" (or whatever it is). The correct answer is "don't use floating point math for currency", but the beginner gets so focused on that '.' in the input and the question "how do I make that '.' happen in my programming language?" that they fail to ask better questions like "what does that '.' mean?", "what is a floating point number?", "are they the same thing?", "What am I actually trying to accomplish?"
That's a big part of real historical Fascism too, and even in contemporary satires of it, like It Can't Happen Here:

> Windrip's administration, known as the Corpo government, curtails women's and minority rights, and eliminates individual states by subdividing the country into administrative sectors. The government of these sectors is managed by Corpo authorities, usually prominent businessmen
Spending time on the Internet doesn't make you understand computers. (It does make you understand that you get a hit of happy-brain-juice when you press the Play button.) My wife teaches college courses and laments that her students, fully in the always-online generation, are helpless in Excel, let alone something like a command line.
Yikes. What if they ban your Google account? They have no customer support to speak of.
When I am on task I find others to be distracting, and that is my concentration problem, but it isn't an anti-social problem. I am not anti-social, I enjoy a certain amount of social interaction. I often prefer my lone time, more so.

Nit Alert: I wish people used 'unsocial' more often. Anti-social means one is hostile or disruptive to social engagement(s). It is thrown around way too often and has an entirely different context to just being 'less inclined to interact with others'.
Depends on the area. The bay area home prices started to exceed the 2007 bubble prices around 2015 and are well above the old peak still.
https://www.bayareamarketreports.com/trend/3-recessions-2-bu...
As a crypto skeptic, CBDC-as-a-service are the only thing that make sense. Say you're a country like Zimbabwe and you want to quickly create a currency that everyone trusts? You buy a third-party CBDC service. Obviously a lot of things also have to happen before this becomes a reality.
It’s just the clarity of thought that our lives will be in a cycle of pestilence and sickness until we die. Every 2020 fear of end of society will manifest in the next 6 months.

There really is not a lot to look forward to.
Yea, their stuff is so dang expensive. I really don’t know how they are able to charge so much.
I'm aware throughout, but usually my thinking leads me nowhere! I often find the solution I'm thinking of the next morning or a few days later, and wonder why it wasn't so obvious the first time I pondered it.
I think you are the exception, not the rule. I teach Scratch, MakeCode, and Microbit to kids at my daughters school. Only a small fraction take it serious and get into tinkering and making stuff.
Sure, I could coordinate or license a frequency and build or acquire radios to use APRS but why? It requires greater effort, risk, and expense for the same result as the off-the-shelf solution.
There has been an uprise of agencies/studios/dev shops trying to make their offering "limited" and thus promoting some fear of missing out by feigning scarcity.

I think these ideas can be creative, but I feel bad for those who can't do the math for themselves and also build the team/contractors that would likely make them successful in the long run.

More and more "startups" are just disguised digital agencies.
Too much money printed at the top.

What should wage workers do except demand more at the bottom?

If we don't demand higher wages the the printed dollars just end up among the really rich.
Good point. In the United States there are two pozzolanic materials frequently used as "admixtures" in concrete: fly ash and silica fume. Fly ash is far more common. It is a beneficial byproduct of coal combustion. Being a byproduct of another industry, it is less expensive than Portland cement.

There are several reasons for adding it to mix designs. It can replace a portion of the Portland cement without sacrificing long-term strength, so it is added to reduce cost. It adds to the strength by reacting with some hydration products that do not contribute to the strength of the hardened concrete, converting those hydration products to those that do increase strength (calcium-silica hydrate for example). It reduces the permeability of the hardened concrete which improves resistance to corrosion in marine environments. It reduces the heat of hydration (which can be damaging), because it reacts less vigorously than Portland cement. There are probably other benefits, but those are the ones that come to mind.
Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
People that own a M1 Pro 14' and have been using it for a while do you think it is still worth it for development mainly React and Flutter?
Imagine living in a developing country and earning your first $100 USD because you had a pirated copy of Adobe CS6 and learned Premier from YouTube.
Not Covid, but there were a few times I got sick and was depressed during and a while after the sickness.

There’s studies which suggest depression is tied to the immune system, so when your immune system is active it makes you more depressed. Pointing to links like how depressed people get sick less often (? idk if this is true), and how being sick makes people feel down.
Calling football or hockey "violence" dilutes the meaning of the word. May as well call a high five violence.
Because Java is taught to kids as their first language in high school and college. It’s associated with homework, exams, and boring corporate jobs.
If you searched for me you wouldn’t find me either but I’m a real person.
The basic premise seems to be utter government dysfunction, which allows the corporations to take over a lot of power and provide public services directly. That might include the military, and in fact OCP pitched the ED-209 as a police and military product.
For the record I grew up administering Linux servers and am way more at home there, and strongly preferred Linux to windows servers. But hasn’t stopped me from appreciating the elegance of those nicely integrated one clock deploys from this .Net days.
Not as much as many pay for their cell phone, tbh.
I am currently writing a typescript project with deno. I need to resize lots of very large images (20mb+) in a reasonable timeframe so I was considering using web assembly for it. Does that seem like a good fit? I have never used WASM before so I am wondering if its worth it.
At Google there is a process where if you want to submit e.g. a patch to a FOSS project on github, you need to send it to some team that reviews it for conflicts of interest first. There is another process for releasing your own software publicly where you need to ask permission to retain ownership of the IP because the default is for it to go to Google. When you join, you need to list IP that you owned before joining in order for it to be exempt from the process.

I have heard that these clauses are unenforceable, yeah, but that doesn't mean that these employees (who seem to mostly be fairly junior) aren't going to be in hot water if this page gets back to whatever part of the company is responsible for attempting to enforce them.
Multiple profiles in parallel? Sure, you can start multiple instances of Firefox in parallel from the command line and use them with different profiles. I do that (on a Mac) regularly. Works under Windows too, IIRC.
I think something like gasbuddy would work, but it would have to be for the right products.

It would have to be for products people buy often that have little or no substitutes.
I'm surprised there isn't a straightforward financial app that could tell you all this information with an intuitive graph.

I'd pay $9.99 a month for that.
1) they’re already taxed

2) companies building on top pay tax

3) if you’re an end customer youre paying a tax

4) a billionaire is floating this idea. Sounds like redirection to me
> It's a myth that every side project you work on and every thought you have in the shower is automatically owned by your company.

It's a myth... until the lawyers come round and start serving papers on your ass.
> didn't think my list was particularly egregious. There's Apple One, a markdown app, a weather app, a few streaming services, a VPN, a password manager, and a few more

At this point I thought I was reading satire, but reading to the end it is clearly earnest. How is an annual subscription to a weather app not egregious?

Commercial VPNs are mostly scams preying on people's irrational privacy fears. I personally wouldn't pay an ongoing fee for a password manager. And paying $400 / year for cloud storage seems pretty steep, but we can't know whether the author really needs 2TB.
Yeah, while he did categorize the subscriptions, I do think it would be useful to break things down as content, applications, and infrastructure. There's some overlap as with Apple One (which includes both storage and News+ for example), but it probably makes sense to separate out a Disney+ from a Grammarly.
How much value does this provide vs. just checking over your account history every month? It feels like a pretty high price to pay in terms of access to your data just to have them check for things that you could probably do by exporting a CSV and searching for things.
I mean that's kind of the case, but zoomed out to a systems-level view we see that intellectual property rights definitely contribute to the domination and monopoly-like behavior of corporations in the global market.
There are other countries than US :)
topaz gigapixel
Been long enough that I don't really remember the details, but I found it a lot harder to find what I was looking for.
Only people left using it are now tech people and they've started dropping decisions that lead mainly to bad profits... Albeit slowly...
That’s why I have a personal finance spreadsheet.

Also I despise subscriptions
Every programmer should care about UI design
My bad, I didn't see that disclaimer anywhere while browsing the website on mobile. Thank you!

Edit: The disclaimer is in the legalese on this page: https://onionbrowser.com/legal
I find hard to interpret "A 40 yo learned something from a 13 yo" in a non ageist way. Seems that people disagree, but nobody has provided a counterpoint.

Actually, the comment in question would have been perfect encouragement in my view just by removing that phrase.
If you use 'serious software' (Adobe, Autodesk, Unity, etc) the bill can add up fairly quickly. But that's for professionals and serious hobbyists, and that's powerful software that offers a lot of value to serious users.

And any tech hobbyist can quickly end up with a number of smaller subscriptions (e.g. hosting, backups, AV, password management)

But I've not yet found any mobile-only 'apps' that can justify the usually-overpriced subscriptions.

The upside is that I don't spend too many hours on mobile devices, as so many games/apps have such obnoxious monetisation (see Diablo Immortal, or any 'hypercasual' game with more real-money-gambling ads than actual gameplay), and the 'mobile web' isn't as good as it should be (endless app nags, poor ad-blocking compared to a real computer)
the insipid conversation of others lays so heavy on me.

i can't seem to ignore it and it bogs me down, i have to do so much too suppress my hatred of their banality

folks say im so wonderful in conversation but its more that if i let them talk, i suffer

thank you for sharing the sartre it's refreshing to see how true it is

others judge you, so you judge yourself, even if you don't care about them

covid was such a great relief to not have to interact with people
Russian leadership has no such reservations.
I haven't even heard of 90% of these things. It seems hard to believe that people could have so many things in their life that need paid software solutions. I get the feeling that most of these are solutions trying to invent problems instead.
It takes a few years before even something as simple as a walk to the park isn't exciting anymore. And I think the thing that's implied in most of the pessimistic responses here is "you have to start early or you lose control".
> The plot itself is just a goofy sci-fi military movie but the human culture in it is absolutely terrifying.

The contrast between the two was kind of the point of the movie though.
I took a look at Truebill, and expected to find a list of supported banks somewhere, probably prominent on the landing page, as how are they supposed to be able to analyze my bank account otherwise?

But, there is no such information. Applications that reads data from banks keeps doing this, missing to display the single most important piece of data before I signed up.
For sure on finding the solution at a later time. I have a bedtime ritual where an alarm goes off in the evening to remind me to identify the most important problem I have been unable to solve today. I then tell myself that I would really like to have the solution to that problem when I wake up in the morning. Now maybe it would happen anyway, but a good deal of the time when I do that I will wake up with something valuable.
Aside from these issues in the reporting, I think we would need to control for active reading, and for active remote interactions with other people, whether via pen, telephone, or video call. Also whether the social isolation is being caused by the dementia.

Not that this is an easy topic to study, but although the scientists are experts, at least the article seems to show some large holes in the reasoning.
I would be embarrassed to post a list like that. This "consooming" just for the sake of it. Like part of their identity is paying for subscription services. I wish I had the writing skills to fully elaborate on why this irks me so much.
I've checked this out with genuine interest because I've been looking for pure text file, Markdown-based blogging platform for a while.

I built Madblog some months ago (https://git.platypush.tech/blacklight/madblog) to fill that gap. Madblog has a lot of the features I wanted (including RSS feeds, git versioning for the static files, a good looking index and LaTeX support), all while being purely staticly served with zero JavaScript. But now I feel the need for some more meaningful user interactions - adding comments on articles, preferably through Fediverse/OpenID login instead of using Disqus or other bloated stuff. But I don't feel like going down that rabbit hole implementation.

Is there any source code for prose.sh by the way? Can it be self-hosted?
Most of my subscriptions are for video services like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and HBO Max.. But some of the software subscriptions present there and my current monthly bill comes to little bit over $150/month. Well, at least it is what Bobby (iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bobby-track-subscriptions/id10...) says. The only problem I need not to forget to add/update subscriptions. There are apps which will track these things for me, but will require to share access to credit card/bank accounts, which I don't feel like providing.
>I'm not the one misinterpreting.

Yes you are. Forget the technical debate for a minute, the failure is in that you've misinterpreted the semantics of:

X is Y for Z

Y in this instance doesn't mean a tool/service historically used by Group Z, it's to illustrate that tool Y helped another unlisted group immensely.

Hence, the typical "this tool is Uber for..." way of trying to help people understand a startup.
DOjS – A DOS JavaScript Canvas with Sound
> I don’t think there will ever be a dependency manager

I know a C++ guy who insists that C++ already has a dependency manager — he says it’s called Docker. Not sure I agree, but that’s the kind of attitude that seems to grow when a void exists; people get by with “good enough hack for my use case in a pinch”, and then over time that turns into “this is the way it’s done”.
I use both browsers (mostly FF on powerful machines and Chrome if I need to use Core2Duo or older) and I have an impression that Firefox has some memory leaks. Chrome browser loaded with as much tabs as allowed by my RAM can store its tabs forever. But Firefox can not do the same, despite it has been written on Rust.
A CEO I worked with a while back just cancelled her CC every few months. Then she'd resubscribe to things she was still using. She said she didn't have time to cancel all those subscriptions individually. I thought it was poor form since a lot of services bill at the end of the month and would never get that last months due.
The compilers aren’t done yet. They’re using cross compilers running on Itanium.
You have been watching too much Suits.
I have to chuckle a bit about this

> That's the thing, they were very far from sane

Considering China's situation since 1840:

* Colonizing by almost of the world's super power. It's like being abused by US China (todayas China) Russia France UK Germany etc. Think a moment how can a nation today fend off these powers and remain an integral nation. Yet, China managed to do that.

* During WW2, China faces Japan, China essentially is an agrarian society facing an advanced industrial nation Japan, with considerable resources and man power. China almost lost 1/3 of its territory. Yet the nation standed up, and emerged more coherent and unified than before WW2.

* The so-called insane CCP managed to install strong control over Tibet and Xinjiang, right after WW2, right under the threat of USSR. The ability to manipulate Stalin, is indeed insanely smart.

* CCP fought a series wars after WW2 never lost, and have all succeeded to achieve it's political objective. Indian border war made sure India as a nation lost its aggression towards China for half a century, Korea war installed a fear and awe by us military men towards Chinese army; the Vietnam war effectively ensure no single nation able to challenge China's long term superemcy in South East Asia.

* They are the only equal partner in the cold war containment over USSR, basically practiced the strategy by their own strategic initiative and offered proactive support across the globe for that strategy to work.

* They initiated opening up and internal reform, transformed 1B people from a USSR style economy into the second largest in USD number, and the largest in purchasing power. Where as the same reform effectively triggered the collapse of USSR, which had 1/4 of the population of China.

* They effectively are challenging US supremacy in all aspects and are winning in many. Basically unimaginable since 1920s.

Call me stupid, but I think they are not only sane, they are probably so sane that random people like you are not able to grasp their genius...
I'm trying to think of examples of trying this for C or C++.

* Batteries-Included Standard Library - can't actually be a standard library, but could be the next best thing, a widely-used library; things like NSPR and APR for C, or Boost for C++

* Third-Party Package Repositories - Conan, which seems to be healthy, but hasn't taken over the world

* Documentation - Doxygen, which has been very successful

* Write Once, Run Most Places - little progress towards this for C, but the people in the C++ standards process do at least think about portability; i think there is an inherent tension between portability and being close to the metal which means it is always going to be a lower priority for C or C++

* Package Managers - see under 'Third-Party Package Repositories'; not clear to me to what extent this is a different thing

* Code Formatters - these have long existed, i suspect clang-format is most popular, but it is far from universal; what's missing is a universally-accepted strict formatting standard, as found in Go and Rust, and arguably now Python

So, it seems that these things do get retrofitted, and do get adopted, but not to the same extent as if they were there from the beginning of the language.
That's like saying that the Watt steam engine [1] was basically Newcomen's atmospheric engine [2], not to mention the Aeolipile [3] from ancient Greece.

Yeah, if you squint hard enough, everything new is just the reinvention of the wheel [4]. And yet – sometimes small, incremental improvements are what it takes to push a concept (steam powered machines, or bytecode for execution in the browser) from niche applications to being a breakthrough technology. I don't know if WebAssembly will be that incremental improvement, but claiming that it won't because Java tried and failed is a lazy, fallacious argument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

[4] Speaking of reinventing the wheel: Those radial tires, eh, who needs them? They're basically just like cross ply tires. Not to mention the spoked wooden wheels that have been around since forever.
Yes, so long as

1) the pay for the technical tesm is in a country where you can pay sub $25k/yr (which is most countries on the planet but rules out North America or most of Europe). Because there won’t be enough money to pay much more.

2) So long as all these projects are technically simple. Don’t be an incubator for new ideas. Make CRUD apps for orgs that want to replace a spreadsheet instead.

But as some kind of incubator or operating in EU/US? No.