skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Fossil fuels are not on the table, IMHO, so there's no point in comparing to them at all.

There is the point: fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear.

Renewable energy has their problem, and the problem is that not all country are like the US, i.e. a lot of space that is unused and can be used to put solar panels, wind turbines, or make dams, without anyone complaining. If you look at the European territory, it's mostly used, there is not a square centimeter of land unused. This is a problem.

Another problem of renewable energy is storage. How do you store all that amount of power to use it when the renewable energy production (that is depended on the weather that you can't control) is not available? It's a big deal. And you will likely always need fossil fuel power station ready to operate in case of necessity.

> We have ~100 nuclear reactors in the US, and they are reaching their end of life. If we could start building 10 replacement reactors tomorrow, and we can't, because we don't have a design or the labor force or the supply chains or the EPC capability, we could maybe hold on to about 2% of future electricity in the US as nuclear. And those 10 reactors would take 10-15 years to complete, even if we had the proper economic requisites.

I don't know if you are up to date, but we have also a semiconductor shortage. Guess what solar panel are made of? Semiconductors. How do you even imagine getting the material to produce all that panels in a short time? Not only that, but solar panel alone don't do anything, since they produce DC power: you also need inverters, that are other piece of electronics. Again an enormous quantity of electronic that this day is not available. And do you talk about storage, do you think that getting lithium is much simpler? And in the context of a probable (if not already in progress) commercial war with China, where do you produce them? How many years do you take to open up a plant to make semiconductors in the US or Europe? And where do you even get the raw material?

Yes, a nuclear reactor take a lot of materials to build, but with a few reactors you can make all the energy that you need. That is overall the materials that you need to produce the same amount of power are order of magnitude lower. Also, a nuclear reactor has a greater life expectancy than other renewable sources (except hydroelectric).
Batteries and storage haven’t proven to be economical at scale. And also aren’t infinitely sustainable either (renewables and their storage don’t grow on trees, they use more resources and valuable minerals than nuclear). So by your measure we shouldn’t do that either.
It was my fortune to interact and discuss dsp with him many times around 7 years ago. He is missed. I'm glad his forum posts and podcasts are probably still helping, or entertaining, people everyday
Or the converse: People who care about C don't want to go chit chat about it every year.
I’d take a root canal over AMP any day of the week - this is still way better than the crap google been pushing
I'm sure the F1 engineer is capable enough to adapt to different requirements.
Compiler says, "Approved!"
Ketamine has a nice rate limiter of $500 per session and at most once a month. I just had a booster, but I can't imagine myself doing it again for a while.

I do believe a neutral state is ideal, but that requires highs and lows to define. For a variety of reasons, it's very easy to get stuck in a down position for a variety of reasons.
Well, I wouldn't go that far. Blow is a smart guy, and games are hard to make. Two mainstream successes are more than I have. :P

> If we only teach folks how to script Unity and Unreal how are we supposed to get the next generation of engine developers to build the foundations of the technology?

Why can't we have both? Lowering the bar to allow less-experienced engineers to create things doesn't mean that we've prevented engineers with more experience from continuing to exist and thrive. We've just created a richer stratification of skill levels than previously existed.
I'm oversimplifying a bit here, but I think the strategy that most major software firms are following right now would match the "adaptive radiation" phase of ecosystem evolution. There are so many empty niches as a result of the high dimensional space of user requirements (where say, 2 additional features are sufficient to differentiate a product, see e.g. discussions about slack vs discord vs teams from today) that companies hardly need directly compete with each other. This would be a virtuous explanation for lack of competition.

Another candidate explanation for what is going on in your "race to the bottom" likely has to do more with signal to noise issues and other types of adverse selection where e.g. a company needs to spend only just enough money for a product to make it past the average review date, at which point the device/whatever will fail. These literally marginal devices/software/whatever are then sold by literally copying and pasting the specs from some other product that is selling well and now consumers are toast. In the software world this looks like a billion clones of the same game, etc. This however is not what I would call good faith competition, and in biological systems species that do this eventually get wiped away completely when they finish degrading the ecosystem they are in. This will look like a mobile gaming crash (about which there seem to be some google hits for back at the start of August).

The kinds of things I'm thinking about are e.g. the fact that text selection in HTML documents is SO BAD that people have started to add copy buttons. Want to copy a url out of some calendaring software? OOPS NO you actually wanted to select literally all the other text on the page right? There are what 2.5ish major browser vendors (supposedly) now? That is by design and a sign of anticompetitive behavior.

Another example would be the GTK+ file picker. Though in this case it is far more likely that the desktop linux environment is extremely marginal in terms of capital than anticompetitive behavior on the part of redhat.
Interesting. Ok

> (3) just as with (2), the new thing transpiling to SQL wouldn't have to allow NULLs, and could generate SQL that uses `IS [NOT] NULL` / `IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM NULL` to obtain the desired semantics if the new thing kept any notion of NULL.

You may disallow nulls stored, but anything like a non-inner join will produce nulls and then you're almost back to where you started.

> (4) is not a semantics issue, and anyways, [where 4 is "Finally, the execution model of SQL is always against a DBMS table or view. So in-memory relations, etc. look difficult to implement"].

Spot on and great catch. I missed that.

> I'm unconvinced that there are such problems that are very serious

Let me help you - simple sqlNG commands could transpile into more much complex normal sql target statements, breaking the optimiser. That's a very real risk.

Good post though
I work mostly on frontend and even I agree that you often "need" a good backend more than you need a good frontend. That doesn't mean it isn't valuable, see GP.

I'm actually impressed and surprised by how many frontend jobs DevQuarterly sees (https://devquarterly.com/insights/trends/). Big tech companies typically have many more backend developers than frontend developers. It depends on how many of those fullstack jobs are frontend heavy, but from what I've seen these job postings from smaller companies are often looking for frontend developers with some basic backend and cloud skills to build a product 0 to 1. Backend at that scale can be quite simple and is not out of the wheelhouse of a frontend developer that can actually code.

Doesn't look like many people have bought into Hotwire with Rails ;) The "component and compilation circus" is pretty easy these days and improves the potential for your site. People see the billion dollar SaaS companies with fancy websites built on React and follow them.
> Please stop using Slack/Discord for forum replacements

I always thought it was replacing irc and other previous chat platforms (google chat, hipchat, skype, icq, etc)?
> Does it mean "fold elements starting FROM left", or "fold elements TO left" ?

Neither; it means "left-associative fold", like left-associative operator: ((a + b) + c).
Tactical Combat Umbrella
Can't you use some channel bot to archive everything?
> If you plan an event for September 15th, it would be insane for people to have to ask the question "which September 15th"?

That's how Russia lived for the two centuries:

https://www.rbth.com/history/331074-russia-late-for-olympics...
> has a peak capacity of about 100 million documents

This is much larger than expected.
The apparent claim that he is the only one who's put any effort into measuring world GDP also stretched believably.
The average age of a farmer in Canada is 56

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220511/dq220...
If English weren't so arbitrary and complex, it would be exponentially harder to detect scammers.
To me it is a feature not a limitation
Its possible to do, and once set up its a reasonably smooth process.

- Init Your TPM

- Create a key+cert on your TPM using certutil.exe

- Grab your public key

- Use WinCryptSSH (https://github.com/buptczq/WinCryptSSHAgent) as your SSH agent and away you go

These are very simplified steps, but there are howtos floating around (eg https://blog.habets.se/2016/10/Windows-SSH-client-with-TPM.h...)
Apple can talk about what they like, between Starlink and Kupter there is little available heavy lift for a long time to come.
Do you run with an ad blocker by chance?
I want to pay for it to increase the probability people can work on it in a sustainable way focussing on my interests at least to some extent. I also want a fully managed product working on the devices I use.

I am not sure since I didn't look for another product for a long time now. Is there something that provides the above while still being open source?
I really can't believe how much of an arrogant blowhard (pun intended) he is sometimes. 95% of the things coming out of his mouth are negative, cynical, and self aggrandizing. He has some good points, sure, but I really just can't get past his personality.
There are a few games, mostly high-profile ones, with exceptional wikis or fan sites, but they are exceptions.
> I imagine there's tons of stuff you're not allowed to talk about

Yep.

> but have you ever written down any stories in a book or blog or anything like that?

Nope.

But thanks for asking — I appreciate the interest!
It seems you're badmouthing psychadelics, while advocating for achieving the same effects without the use of drugs. Why does it matter if someone has a similar experience with a different method?

Also, not everyone can just hop into the woods, alone, for days on end without food. Although that sounds like fun to me, I get horrible migraines if I don't eat regularly. What then? Is vomiting up my last bit of bile huddled in excruciating pain in the middle of the woods going to be some profound experience? Possibly, but psychadelics are an easier method for someone like me (and can be just as natural, in the case of mushrooms/ayahuasca/mescaline/etc).
That's the porn. There's a separate option to show/hide 18+ shows.
That’s fine. My blog and Twitter account are easily discoverable. Anyone who takes 30 seconds to look would see that that isn’t the case. Anyone who doesn’t take the 30 seconds… probably isn’t someone who wants to chat with me anyhow.
Microsoft "adopted" XML purely to assuage various regulators that their new format was totally gonna be open, interoperable and standardized. It is a pure fig leaf but judging by all the comments in here mentioning "XML", it seems to have worked.
i only said lisp repl is superior. far more superior actually. whether its popular is a different matter. there are people perfectly content with subpar technology and thats ok. however it doesnt hurt to know that there are alternatives
> And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build.

Also other form of renewable are expensive. Unfortunately we are not so good at doing calculation on large scale. Just because installing a few solar panels is cheap, it doesn't mean that if we start installing a lot of them will maintain the same price.

Especially these days there is a shortage (they said due to COVID, but it's obvious that we are in a commercial war with China) of electronic components and semiconductors, guess what solar panels are made of? Where do you produce them, of course you can't rely on importing them from China, because China in a couple of years will not sell you anything, but if you start producing them in the US good luck making them cheap. And where do you even get the raw materials to start with?

Sure, a nuclear reactor does use a lot of materials, but are mostly steel and concrete, something that is produced in every industrialized country.

Do we even talk about energy storage? How do we realize that? Batteries? Lithium ones, good luck finding them at a cheap price.

Overall nuclear power is cheap, is just that we focus on the initial price that is obviously high and don't think that all the cost of transitioning to renewable energy added up are even higher. I don't say that a private investor will ever construct a nuclear power plant, the upfront cost is too high, but it's something that a government should build.
Cool. Now couple that with ability to store on the user’s file system.

Can we all now say in unison: FILELESS MALWARE?

Oh, wait.
The current once are not, they are a technology level behind what even Starlink v1 is. Maybe some future OneWeb will be able to do it, but not for a long time.
Am I not also a taxpayer?
Mark Zuckerberg admits censorship at behest of FBI
> To me, this says that I can't trust that slack cares about supporting what people are currently using their product for.

Did you expect Salesforce to?
I host a bunch of Discourse sites. You can do it yourself on a 1GB server.

The docker install is super easy.
Not sure why this is posted, but as an amateur aircraft builder, I have a love hate relationship with these things. On one hand, they're clearly very versatile and cheap. On the other, if there's a significant curve in where they're installed, it can be incredibly frustrating to get the pins in/out.

In some cases, we'll take the kit-provided hinge and put them aside. Instead, we'll use SkyBolt camloc-style fastners.
Software is a big field. I don't know much about linked lists or TCP/IP either, and that's okay. I've created solutions that solve problems, and it sounds like you have too.

The programmer Steve Yegge wrote a "drunken rant" blogpost where he uses the term "racecar drivers" to describe programmers like us, programmers who create at a higher level of abstraction. The idea is that programmers strong in algorithms and theory of computation are the racecar engineers, while the rest of us just drive what they build.

It's not the most accurate analogy, and the tone in the rant alternates between tongue-in-cheek ribbing and concerningly genuine-sounding disdain, but the main point still stands in my opinion: There are different types of programmers. I would fall into the racecar driver category in Steve's view, and I'm fine with that. I like sitting close to the business and being able to add value quickly. I wouldn't be able to do that as a racecar engineer, at least not where I've worked and with what I'm interested in working on.

With that in mind, I'd say not to worry about becoming the kind of engineer you think you should unless you actually need to. E.g., does the company you're at expect a certain set of engineering skills from directors that you don't have yet? In that case I would find out what that entails and sign up for courses that teach it (Udemy is my go-to right now, but take your pick).

If not, I think you should just accept that you're different - not an impostor, just a different breed of software engineer, not a racecar engineer but no less valuable, and in certain domains more valuable for the unique mix of skills you bring to the table.
Slack isn't dominant. They sold to Salesforce because they couldn't beat Microsoft on distribution in the enterprise, and saw the writing on the wall.

I am skeptical this is driven by "resource cost". What resources will be saved by this change?
It's Big Brain 200 IQ Hacker News, what did you expect
I'm doing this for a customer right now!

Using Textract from Amazon to do the OCR. I dump the raw json in a SQLite database.

Information extraction is trickier. I extract useful things like lines and pages, locations of lines, set up various columns and now can search the SQLite db either with python code or SQL queries.

There's of course cost for running textract OCR on AWS. There are open source solutions like Tesseract
This hits close to home.

On one hand, I completely agree with Jonathan.

I started my career 20 years ago in games dev and digital advertisement which were strangely close to each other at that time. When I work with developers today who need an external library to check if a number is odd it's terribly frustrating. There are certain techniques like working with binary formats, that were taken for granted even at junior level when I started that seems like a rocket science these days.

When I share my gripes with fellow managers they often joke if I would be a developer on their team and came up with one of my "optimal" ideas they would fire me on the spot, because such solution would be too convoluted and obscure for todays standards and not maintainable.

On the other hand I completely understand that the software industry shifted a lot since I started and now every bussiness is an IT company.
This creates a lot of demand on the market and someone has to push these deliverables somehow. And despite what business stake holders will tell you, world won't collapse if these applications cracks in few spots if you'll be able to ship them before competition. People will still continue to use LinkedIn even if it takes 7 seconds to gain interactive on my phone.

Jonathan comes from a different background and his views may seem radical for someone working in an ordinary IT company, but even the game dev industry shifted in that direction.
Back when games were released on CDs and you couldn't assume that every user will have a constant access to the internet it was absolutely crucial to make sure that the game will work on day one. But that's no longer the case. Companies like CD Project proved that you can ship a broken build on day one and keep releasing patches months and months after premiere.

I mean, it's embarrassing that GTA V required 5 minutes to parse a simple JSON file for 7 years, but the game sold in 170 million copies regardless.
The viability of renewables depends more on population density than location. There are always some natural processes you can take advantage of to generate power. And if the density is low enough, like in Finland but probably not in the US, existing hydro should be enough to cover most energy storage needs.
Corporate marketing says lots of things which they don’t mean. Google actually required you to use AMP to get the best results placement and they took many years to implement solution-neutral alternatives which would have been easier to do in the first place. It’s really hard to believe they seriously intended to spend all of that extra developer time and strong-arm publishers on a temporary measure.
>The goal is always to produce things that users can actually use.

consumer software exists downstream from advancements created by people who care about performance and correctness. You can only do extremely stupid things because someone else did non-stupid things to enable that kind of waste.

That sort of works as long as the wasteful people don't outnumber and outrun the few people who keep everything glued together, but if they don't then at some point this arrangement breaks down.

Maybe let's try to convince developers and consumers to be smarter rather than try to make software dumber. We should take a page out of the semiconductor industry's book which is run by engineers and builds towards engineering and scientific targets, not consumer demands. Those are a byproduct afforded by increases in performance. That's why chips, unlike software, get faster.
And for $20 a month?? This is kind of horrifying. Does any other product out there have the database that MFP has?
Or better yet, pay people for what you want to keep long term.
Totally agree, learning geometry or linear algebra through AR/VR would be so easy and intuitive
Unlike the author, I _have_ had one of these vibrate its way out in flight. It was a small door that had a fastener on the other end, so it didn't completely detach from the airplane, but it was noisy and somewhat frightening at first.

Please secure your piano hinge wires. :)
I can’t use Debian for my Windows use case.
It's called a "ground source heat pump".

Unfortunately, they require either a very large area to dig very shallow, or they require drilling down very deep, or they require a pond.

I got quotes for the drilling once, and it was prohibitively expensive.
I hope this is a wake up call for OSS projects that communicate from Slack to migrate to discord. And for discord based projects to have a plan to commit valuable conversations to a more open and permanent record.
I think there is an additional possibility, which is that the software quality is bad enough, but there is no where else for users to go.

Since proving that directly would require a viable competitor to already exist we are in a bind.

However, we might be able to find some examples where there are viable competitors, or we might be able to find a population of users who have enough experience with similar pieces of software to be able to state which one has fewer bugs (at least for their usual workflows).

One category of software that comes to mind for me would be 3d modelling and rendering software. Perhaps examining the impact that Blender has had on quality would be a place to start?

edit:

I do think that the activation energy (capital) required to get competitors off the ground at this stage is enormous, but that is in part because many of the alternatives have been allowed to die out or be acquired by their direct competitors. Had they been kept alive an independent there would not be a need for so much capital to get back in the game. Sadly, now, many years on, the remaining systems have acquired enough complexity that they can fend of most competition without much effort.
They are in a tough space by their own making because they keep refusing what the market has been telling them for decades. They need to SEPARATE their consumer making business from their Corporate business.

For example

Lync was separate from Skype... Business and Consumer

Then they got rid of Lync in favor of Skype for business... Bad

Then comes Teams, designed from the Ground up for Corporate. Dropping Skype for Business like many many wanted, a separate corporate app

Now with Win11 they are making the same mistake again with "Teams" the default app in windows 11, which is different client than the "business teams app" and at launch could not even connect to organizational teams tenants only "Microsoft" teams accounts which should be called Skype....

Skype should remain the consumer / family platform, if they want to bring "teams like" features to that great. Teams should remain a business app
The reason is that GitHub, being GitHub, has a lot of search indices and existing analytics on the code that is hosted on GitHub.

It was easier, at least - but probably gives some nice guarantees about the statistics of "public" code, with the norms and conventions you're "used to", because you're used to the internet's coding norms.

Company code can be pretty bad, even at Microsoft, often riddled with hyper-verbose variable names and strange design patterns.
Discord is actually fairly annoying because so many things are on Discord and split between servers.
Meta is building an AI to fact-check Wikipedia