skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As soon as Blow and others start pontificating about how modern software is terrible, I get frustrated; my viewpoint differs with theirs so drastically that I don't even know where to begin.

I might start somewhere around here: I think the fact that modern software is "terrible" is actually a sign of the dramatic success, not failure, of programming.

The reasons that Blow et all normally cite as why software is terrible are usually that, 20 and 30 years ago, engineers were able to pull off superhuman feats compared to the engineers of today. I accept this unquestionably. They wrote software that ran quicker and was more space-efficient than modern software. But running software that fit in kilobytes of RAM was never the goal of software engineering. The goal was providing value to your users.

Blow et. al. seem to think that efficient software is the goal. I couldn't disagree more. The goal is always to produce things that users can actually use. And if that means doing hideously inefficient things, like running your app inside a chrome shell, so be it, if that means you delivered value faster.

And the amount of engineering effort per unit of value created has gone down so much today compared to 30 years ago.

In the past, engineers could squander days or weeks trying to make code more memory efficient, or finding the exact right sequence of ASM instructions to waste less CPU cycles. These are issues I don't even have to think about. Heck, I can do extremely stupid and inefficient things, like use a garbage collector, or electron, and for the most part, users don't even care[1]. What an incredible success!

Essentially, I think what Blow is seeing when he cites the demise of modern software engineering is in fact that the bar to writing usable software has dropped immensely. I can understand why this is a frustrating thing for him, because it effectively means that his skillset is not as valuable as it used to be. But I just can't agree at all. How amazing that we can be so wasteful and yet still produce such great software, and furthermore what an incredible success that engineers like me don't need to even think about ASM and RAM efficiency.

[1] Yes, some users do care, and I think that a disproportionate majority of them hang out on Hacker News. :P
If money is your sole motivation and stack overflow is to believed you would be better off learning Clojure.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-top-p...

Rust pips Go very slightly and C++ is near the bottom (I imagine because of underpaid and overworked game devs dragging the average down?).

I'd take the entire survey with a pinch of salt.

BFung's advice is decent. I would also add:

- What is a problem that lots of people have that you have the skills, willpower, time and creativity to solve?

If you want maximum financial payoff you're better off thinking about what is the maximum value you can offer to the world through problem solving and then select the appropriate language for solving that problem. And again, if maximum financial payoff is your sole goal, you're ultimately going to want to either own your own business or join the management/executive track otherwise you're probably going to hit a pay ceiling. So you might need to simultaneously study up on business skills depending on your existing background.

Another thing to consider:

If Capital by Thomas Piketty is to be believed, capital is growing quicker than wages. So would you be better served by taking time to invest your existing wage in a smarter manner than focusing on increasing your wage? I remember working in a coffee shop in 2014 whilst in debt wishing that I had the money to invest in shares in Tesla because I'd been reading about it and it seemed like a good bet. If I had maxed out all my credit cards and invested in Tesla stock I would actually be a millionaire right now because the stock has risen by over 3000% since then.

Obviously that would have been an insanely risky financial strategy but I think it illustrates the point nicely that maximum financial output is a pretty hard target to optimise for. Instead, optimise to add value. Most people find this a more rewarding path emotionally, spiritually and, as a happy byproduct, often financially as well. After all, a company's share price is, theoretically, a reflection of the value it offers the world at any moment in time.
We need a IRC client that will convert images to ASCII art.

no one needs anything more than ASCII art ;)
I am sorry to report from the front lines that such users and use cases do, in fact, exist.
You can't leave your house. Imagine your current life / lifestyle...but limited to a landline.

Funny. Not funny.
> I know younger programmers who don't even bother to check for errors

The older programmers of today were once young, and many of them didn't bother to check for errors back then.
Such a tangible experience of shame/regret/guilt
Too real
Finlandssvenska is a strong identity that stands on its own. Kind of like Quebec. Definitely they don’t hold any fealty to Sweden
When I worked for Tribune (before the LA Times got sold off) it was a hot mess of adtech garbage like Taboola that nobody had the guts to get rid of.
Kris De Decker: “Low Tech: What, Why and How” [audio]
> Former Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified as [chief] engineer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

I imagine there's tons of stuff you're not allowed to talk about, but have you ever written down any stories in a book or blog or anything like that? I would love to learn more about your career, what you learned, saw, etc. etc. Thanks!
rather ironic given that, in at least some instances i use, the primary mode of using slack (to the point that some members will complain if you violate it) is as a shitty forum. most discussions are segregated into threads; there isn't really much in channels other than the collection of initial messages that started a thread.

i despise this given that there's nothing like the bump mechanic in channels (threads with newer posts don't move to the top of a list, they just stay in their original chronological order), and in the thread view where there is, you can't keep threads uncompressed, there's no pagination for threads with 100s of messages, and finding individual threads is a chore because they're still not completely compressed.
The US nuclear naval fleet isn’t a set of islands. The fuel must be mined and delivered.

The nuclear reactor have to be maintained and kept in dry dock, sometimes for years on end.

Nobody is afraid of aircraft carriers, even though they are powered by nuclear reactors.
Breeder reactors and seawater mining are current tech.

Also, this seems like an extreme luddite attitude. Imagine refusing to use a steam engine because nobody has demonstrated infinite coal reserves exist.
5G did not roll out where? Plenty of locations have good 5G coverage on this planet, at a scale many would deem as a roll out.

If you refer to the USA it has not been a model for rolling out new telecom infrastructure for a long time as far as I know.
Also available on YouTube for free :>

https://youtube.com/watch?v=y79Jf1nXW_4 (7+ hours!)
Not just permafrost. Due to increased temperatures wetlands are emitting more methane (https://cires.colorado.edu/news/new-analysis-wetlands-other-...). That is another positive feedback loop, besides the permafrost one, that is increasing the amount of methane in the atmosphere.
First of all, Maybe you should recognise yourself for your hard work so far. Also, it is admirable that you’d like to become even better after reaching staff level.

My 2 cent: you say you don’t like tech, then switch away from it! Most companies have manager track as well which are much less technical and it sounds like you are already a great manager. Could you ask your manager (or find a new job) to switch to more managerial track instead?
For the same reason there aren't any oxygen conferences.
I got to thinking about silent movies, like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. I don't think I ever saw another treatment of home ownership quite so apropos as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Week_(1920_film)

It expertly treated its subject matter with great humor--sans verbal language (interstitials aside).
Check out the video at https://comsec.ethz.ch/research/microarch/retbleed/ , they capture the root password hash with their little utility.
If they do, it just means that they're making more $$$ from you for providing that feature. Otherwise they're under-monetizing and all it tells you is that they don't have their pricing and growth strategy put together.
It sounds like you've been basically working as an engineering manager, rather than as a technical leader. Is there a reason you can't just make that a formal change and then you won't be in a position where you feel like you have to hide your relative lack of knowledge?
I do miss the old forums, but Discourse is pretty nice with Markdown formatting and its tagging system. Much better full-text search than the old-style forums too.
The Dota 2 wiki is pretty much the canonical "technical reference" for the game.
I agree. We had open notes / open internet (no communication) exams at engineering school and they wouldn't help you pass the test if you didn't know the material. Maybe you could spend all exam period solving one of the questions if you weren't prepared but you'd be lucky to get a D.
Yep. I checked his bio only after commenting.
Greed & platform lock-in with no good alternatives.
Curious About 3D Printing? Here Are Some Tips Before You Dive In
They did if they were C/C++ programmers because everyone would know if they didn't when the screen went sad. Maybe Java programmers. I don't know, I never touched the stuff.
I agree, it seems like a change in title to not sound/feel like you’re supposed to be an IC would go a long way.
Also the electricity sector is organized around provinces in Canada. So it makes a sensible comparison.
See also: mailing lists.
Not really a deadhead -- I used to go to the Greek for Dead concerts (hey, it's Berkeley), but I didn't follow them around the country or analyze X-Factors.

Anyways, when the Greek Theater is a 10 minute downhill walk from your lab, how could you not go? (those days seem so long-ago...)
This. Do the most valuable thing you can. If repairing provides significantly less value than your other work, do not repair. It is great that we can afford so much stuff now. Thanks to it we can spend more time on helping the environment.
I beg to differ. Was Galileo a Jerk? He was excommunicated simply because he simply disagreed with the majority and stated the earth circled around the sun and many many people thought he was a jerk because of that.

If HN excommunicates people simply because a majority disagrees with them, then this place is not a good forum for science and intelligent discussion.

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths... We've been wrong before, and we're likely going to be wrong again. That the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade and ideas. In light of that knowledge that we may be wrong, the best course of action, the safest course of action, is to go ahead and listen to the ideas on the other side. The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. Those are the ideas that we can safely act upon. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based on imperfect knowledge. That, at any rate, is the idea behind free speech. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

So unless I explicitly threaten or insult someone. Let it be. Cast your vote. But to censor and threaten a ban? That's wrong. That's exactly what's going on here. Read carefully what I wrote, there are no threats, there are no insults, there are no explicit attacks; just my opinion. The only line crossed here is the threat of a ban; we all know Dang operates first on a warning then he bans people.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why not simply `setcap cap_wake_alarm+p gnome-clocks` and any other app that may legitimately use this?
This is a Saleforce thing.

They own both Heroku & Slack and both have completely revamped/ended their free tier this week.
My dumb as a brick solution to this is just to clear all outputs every time I commit. Having a smart diff\merge sounds like it would make things a lot easier.
Those aren’t the only two options. Being politically uncommitted is more the norm.
Looks like Ghana aviation authorities are doing a great job!
I extracted all the text from the Apple ][ Mind Mirror floppy disk image:

https://donhopkins.com/home/mind-mirror.txt
Would a public, searchable, aggregator w/chat instead of comments work? I've been building https://sqwok.im and I'm interested in learning how I could help solve these issues...
Discord’s UX is a disaster for most of the things I’ve seen Discord used for. Lately, I don’t even bother trying.
Ghana Threatens Effective Ban British Airways Since They Dislike Gatwick (2021)
> Re. French nuclear saving the day:

When supply cannot meet demand, prices do not represent production costs.

Building a nuclear plant takes about 5 years. In situations with sufficient sense of urgency, construction speeds can be ramped up surprisingly quickly.

From 1940 to 1944 US federal spending went up about ninefold (while GDP almost doubled as a result)

The liberty ships were the most obvious example. Initially it took 230 days to build them (in 1941), in 1943 it took 39 days.

A more modern example is the number of cars built by Tesla each year. From 2013 to 2023, the number of cars built per year will have increased by a factor of about 100x.

Similar economies of scale are available for energy plants, if we choose to. For solar panels and batteries, we're already seeing this.

If the political will was there today to vastly expand the amount of nuclear power, we would be able to produce A LOT within 10-15 years.

The same goes for renewables, of course, as long as raw materials and technologies are available.
And then there's the folks that use Slack/Rocketchat for support - zero ability to curate any useful info.
It's kind of like asking why there isn't more than one fire in a pan of gasoline, even though you struck so many sparks over it.
That's a detail I didn't know about. I guess it will remain to be seen. I still assert it won't stimulate the economy unless debts are completely repaid, but I am open to being wrong.
I use archive dot org and archive dot is for bypassing paywall. The dot org one works best usually in sites with JavaScript.
The Cold war never involved a large scale Russian invasion. Do you really think Russia will stop at the Polish border if they make it that far?
I think one reason not to use the timerfd method is that you (waked) could drop the fd if it terminates unexpectedly. There is probably a way to persist the db separately... But the device node is right there.
As far as I can tell, 'software quality' these days is pretty good, all things considered, as compared to twenty or thirty years ago.
Keeping track of addresses is still worth it, regardless of how they're implemented.
I'm curious why you would be concerned. I've seen a good number of teenagers hanging around and playing with computers.
Paying for something does not necessarily mean you won't be tracked, or even not be shown ads ( Windows, anybody?).

The better solution for that is to use open-source software.
> When really English is far closer to a language with morphological future tense than it is to Japanese.

I really don’t agree, as a speaker of both languages.

There’s a lot of western-exceptionalism invested in the notion that Japanese somehow has an exceptional paucity of ability to express future events that’s categorically different than English, when in reality the situations are quite quite close to one another.

It’s not that English doesn’t have a future tense in a casual/non-strictly-morphological sense of “tense” — it’s that by that casual definition really Japanese is in almost the same boat, and we should stop playing this “invent arbitrary ways to claim the inscrutable Japanese mind speaks without the ability to use a future tense but English is different because I Say So” game.
zulip really is an amazing piece of software. Don't let the looks deceive you. They are "brutalist" because they are spending all the effort on UX and UI. If you download their terminal client, there is nothing to learn if you already know vim, and more importantly everything is very intuitive. Their messaging model is a bit different and needs an initial familiarization until it dawns on you that this is how messaging should be done anyway.
What's the answer? The post tapered off with a long quote, unless I'm missing something by having js turned off..
IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've logged...

The biggest problem with IRC has always been its lack of server-side history.
I’m glad you can make the statement “if you are happy you’re probably unhappy” because it really solidifies the fact that you think and speak in absurdisms.

If you think orcas are doing nothing at sea, how is that morally different from them doing nothing in a tank?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...

Or Sabine Hossenfelder's explanation https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=365

Current reactors use U235 which is less than 1% of all Uranium on the planet. Don't know about reactors that use other uranium isotopes, but if after 70 years they are still at the design stage, it kind of makes my point. It's just too late to turn that around. The article just overlooks this fundamental problem.
This or quantum computing, probably both. I'd imagine a quantum computer running RL could fit solutions for fusion without much fuss.
I liked it because it dangled the possibility of author signatures on content, via RealURL.
Also, a lot of AMP isn't even bad. You can self-host the js for it, follow the spec and restrictions, etc, and still get all the speed upsides except for the js being cached from Google.

I've done this on many personal websites and it is a easy brainless way to get a fast simple site.
Did you mind checking the availability of people with lisp skills vs most other languages used in research and DS? Or the availability of libraries and pace of evolution? If your solution is to teach lisp massively and have everyone just build their tooling, can you explain why it hasn't happened yet, despite lisp being around much longer than most languages in use in this field - and many attempts at what you're suggesting?
I'd like to think it's about cultural priorities. While in the perspective of the Western frame it would seem "irrational" to eschew modern advancements - it's just that, a perspective of the Western Frame and not objective. Even elements within the WF such as Marx and cohort identified generally negative elements like alienation. As an aside, there are people like the Sentinelese - a people contemporaneous with us still living in the stone age evidence that we don't need modernity, industry, and so on in order to continue as a species.

Toynbee on the Genesis of Civilization via Wikipedia [0]:

He argues that for civilizations to be born, the challenge must be a golden mean; that excessive challenge will crush the civilization, and too little challenge will cause it to stagnate.

One of the big history book authors has an oft-repeated joke, one permutation of it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bsnud/is_this_a_joke...

Why do all that work when you could just sit your ass on a beach or in a nice Mediterranean-esque corner of the world?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History#Genesis_and...
The unlimited budget and the fuel comes from political will so I don’t understand your point.
The C++ Foundation and ISO can kick you from the Committee for retweeting this
Advocating for a lower population is not "eugenics." People who beat this drum are lazy and stupid. There are only so many resources to go around, and our productive externalities can cross limited thresholds before becoming lethal. The common factor is the scale of our consumption and production which is, by some incredibly odd coincidence, linked to our population. Who knew...

I'm pro-nuclear, but trying to paint the anti-nuclear environmental movement as eugenicists is grasping.
Masahiro Sakurai explains frame rates
The context is people learning the language though... this sort of efficiency will always come with familiarity, like how you can read 21:00 as 9 without thinking about it
In my experience, this feature is common on Chinese android phones, but not on Pixel, Samsung, Sony...
The fact they track the amount of messages is analytics to begin with even if it has a valid reason.
> pay or lose months or years of history.

You have to be very inactive slack to have years of history fit in 10,000-message. Our family slack hit 10k long time ago: 7 members total, 4 inactive and most active channels is @me using it as clipboard across devices.

Teams that were on an old 10k plan either:

- potentially going to become paid customer eventually (evaluating slack or early-stage company trying to save money)
- never going to pay (families, online communities)

Changing this to 90-days plan:

- potential paid customers now have a clear cut-off date and either stay on free plan longer or convert to paid customers before 90 days mark OR move somewhere else; Either way, it's a win for slack.
- Online communities most likely benefit from that because I've been to slacks that churn thousands of messages a day
- Family slacks probably don't care, they always knew old messages will go away

The only reason I use Slack for family and my side-gig company is because I use Slack at the day job.
How Did Technology Help Create China’s Historically Large Population?
Embrace your truth. You're a people person not a tech genius. That actually has huge value in the tech world because you know enough about tech to get some credibility. I don't know why your goal would be to become a better engineer at this point, your goal should be to become a better manager. There's probably politics involved, you need to read the tea leaves and figure out how to get promoted. But it's not by suddenly getting hacker fever in your 40s. If you never had it before, you're not going to get it now.

The main thing holding you back is your imposter syndrome. That's all I can say of your earlier work where engineering was more critical. Just drop it, admit you're a mediocre engineer but have confidence that you're a people person and be proud of that.

Someone I know quite well did just this at 50, got a Fang job with a Fang salary and is having a great time. He never really liked coding, he just fell into it because he's smart. You're not the only one. You just need to learn to lead with your strengths and stop perseverating about what you're not great at.
If you were using a free product with limited history and expected not to lose history then I have exactly zero sympathy for you. Even if the free product you were using changed their terms.
Defense lawyers get to ask questions too, you know. They also get to object.
So what? That doesn't show they actually affected anything.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and you should not rely on this as legal advice. Even if I'm right, it would be a stupid and expensive lawsuit.

I think that under US law you can legally clone it from github [1] and build/run it [2] without a license.

[1] GitHub has a valid license to create copies by virtue of their TOS. You aren't creating a copy, github is, and they are then lawfully transferring it to you.

[2] This is explicitly called out as something you can legally do without a license in copyright law. "All rights reserved" is just the lack of a license and doesn't prevent you from doing things that weren't illegal in the first place.: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
I've seen a matrix client that does this, 'Gomuks' if I recall correctly.