skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the only two countries still using a logographic writing system are China and Japan. I wonder why this writing system still has a stronghold there.

I would expect that that has a lot to do with how long-lived China's culture is. The "choice" of writing system was made long ago and has stuck. There hasn't been a significant enough upheaval that would have allowed another choice to take hold.

And Japan just happens to go along with that because they borrowed parts of their writing system from China.
An infinitely deflationary currency will be hard to popularize as anything other than a fiat. With the regulation around custodial Ethereum, I doubt the whole "dApp" ecosystem is going to go anywhere beyond where it stalled-out circa-2017.
I think some of Google's strategy is identifying new markets and potential rivals, and then throwing their resources at them until they dominate the market or buy/crush the competition. Building a sustainably profitable product is ancillary to that and not much of a factor initially.
‘Inventor of the Future’ Review: Buckminster Fuller’s Big Designs
if you're making design decisions based on HN comment threads instead of proper focus groups, you're going to end up with a very weird product.
The badness tends to not start in your example - which is the most trivial example of an RPC - but when you don't know / care if a function is really a stub for some kind of remote invocation. Before you know it you're knee deep in a sea of distributed systems problems where instead of a clean separation between client and server, half your client is on the local machine, the other half is on a remote machine, and the state is also weirdly split. Of course, you can replicate the same mistakes with a REST API, but at least that's by definition more explicit about state transfer etc.
The article quite clearly debunks 3, and all of the others are sort of redundant. Someone who is principled, motivated, and wrong to proselytize might better be described as "obstinate", and we don't generally like those people.

(To be clear, re #3, there exist people who have done as much or more for free software as RMS, but people don't idolize most, except perhaps Linus, to the same degree)
Unless the entire production pipeline, from mining to machining parts and tools involved in making a plane, no.

Planes literally in the air are not the only source of green house gas connected to flying planes.
Or UV-Lights!

https://xkcd.com/2507/
To augment the article's perspective:

To add: Trust (lack of it) played a big role also, in the sense that to capitalize with Stadia, one needed to produce a quite different port of their game.
I can imagine that making the decision to invest your developers' time on a new port and that being a product that its known track record is "https://killedbygoogle.com/."

But also google, as other sibling comments have pointed out also, did not integrate at all with their other products, did not offer more than some free games, had no offline offering -- I would pay 110% the price for physical + online access to the game for life.

They could have actually been a serious Steam competitor, they have the money to do so. Instead of supporting linux gaming, they went with their own approach. They did not offer a console, or hardware, besides the initial giveaway. Minute point, but doesn't help, when competition in the space gives weekly games, deep discounts and has a great API and track record.

Everyone knew they would fail, and they did, despite their resources, which tells us a lot. I think it is high time and paramount to retrospect and learn.
Have been using it years for astrophotography planning.

I've never realized it was 0.x, as I haven't encountered a single bug with Stellarium in my lifetime either on desktop or on iOS.

Great to see it promoted to 1.0 (though I think its more of a symbolic thing)!

Lovely software, free and open source. Recommend to anyone who might want to explore astronomy.
I will dispute this notion that volume of technical work is related to how famous someone is. Today, there are lots of people in opensource doing backbreaking work that we rely on, but whose name we don't even know.

Indeed, fame is often the result of them being outspoken.
OP said "as a side hustle", not for. Perhaps OP resells Google services or Cloud offerings?
> I was stunned by the arrogance, rudeness, and completely ignorance of RMS

Why were you stunned? The guy signs his emails "Dr. Richard Stallman" whilst only having an honorary doctorate. Clearly there are issues. It's as insane as signing emails "Dr. Bill Gates", "Dr. Clint Eastwood" and "Dr. Billy Joel" (all having honorary degrees).
Right, all the prosperity, security, education, health care we have today came out of nowhere and from the private sector.

Oh, you live in the US, ahh, I can see how 'in your experience' may give you a totally bonkers view of the world, nevermind
Games require a lot of upfront investment. Games are not like music where top hits are routinely created in a day or two. Nobody is making a game on the off-chance that they will collect enough pennies from plays on a streaming service. Anybody making a game, be it indie or AAA, is investing years and $$$, and they need that big payday on release.

Even Netflix mostly funds their own content. A “Netflix for games” would involve Google funding exclusive games to be made for their platform.
Salmon jerky is pretty good in its own right!
Fully possible to set login shell to powershell on Linux. Wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s an option.
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated…
Been using the newer rewrite (6.x I think) for the past couple of years and it's been great. It's lightweight, snappy, and doesn't bog down over time like many RSS reader apps tend to. Its UI is all standard AppKit/UIKit and is designed more to be useful than to look pretty or act as branding. All around great.
As the report says:

> a seemingly recent campaign to counter transnational telecom and online fraud (according to the official provincial statements)

The increase in telecom scamming activity is a real thing in China, with scammers operating from southeastern Asia countries. And operators are often Chinese citizens hired for what they originally thought would be "oversea job with good pay". The "persuaded to return" strategy might be targeted primarily at them.

Those scams are particularly bad -- maybe even worse than the telecom scams happening in the US and other wealthy English-speaking countries -- because taking personal loans is way too easy in China. A few clicks on a lender's app and you get cash transferred to your account instantly. And there are hundreds of such apps. Scammers can talk victims into maxing out their credit lines and wire the loaned cash away.

And the fact that there isn't "personal bankruptcy" laws in China also makes it worse. Such loans are rarely forgiven and victims often had to pay them off with their future income for years out of the fear that loan defaults can affect their credit score for life.

So I guess this is Chinese police's way of "do something about it". Of course they don't have jurisdiction overseas and should have gone with Interpol and/or local police first, except that hasn't been very effective. My 2 cents on the reasons behind this is:

1. Local police might be paid off;

2. No incentive for local police to prioritize their resource for cases like this -- there were no victims in their own countries;

3. There are just too many scammers;

Surely once this set up is in place it's possible to extend its coverage to harass/"persuade" political dissidents but CCP has already be doing it for years without it. If this oversea police "persuasion" program is getting local law enforcement's attention to the point that they can arrest both them and the scammers, I would see it as an absolute win.
Tell me you've never developed native applications outside an iOS simulator, or OS development without telling me...
trpc relies still on strings: No proper refactoring (ie F2 in VS Code) which makes refactoring as slow and error-prone as with REST and GraphQL. Should change with v10 but its API hasn't been finalized yet and ETA is far in 2023 if at all. Also overall API design has missed opportunities.

Telefunc should support zod, why shouldn't it? Just pass them as native zod types and all good. You could also convert them before with z.infer but you don't need to.

> It seems like this library has its own bespoke syntax for types

Only for stacks which don't transpile server-side code. You can use normal TS types with something like Next, Nuxt, Svelte, Vite, etc. So, these bespoke types aren't relevant for the majority.
Availability and reliability can be handled similarly by thinking about classes of failure modes. Most RPC frameworks have error codes that are too fine grained (see HTTP and it’s cousin REST).

Latency is actually mostly solvable with something like cap’n’proto that pipelines the promises so that you can have a normal looking composable functions without the latency cost.

Joel Spolsky advice is usually fine but it’s important to understand his commentary tends to be about what ideas are in vogue / dominant at the time of the post and tend to have a more limited perspective (vs listening to researchers in the field actively investigating the problems and investing in ways to find solutions).

For example, we have an explicit class that manages RPC calls so that at the call site it looks like a regular function. But since it’s I/O it returns an async so it makes it clear that it’s I/O (which you have to do with non NodeJS JavaScript). Additionally, it returns a promise of a Result object type just like any other failable call which you have to handle properly. Works pretty well (although in retrospect I’m now wishing we had used structured clone instead of JSON to send messages around).
I am looking forward to seeing if Etherium has less correlation with Bitcoin after changing to proof-of-stake. The price of Etherium and Bitcoin were highly correlated, and was that partially due to production costs (power) or just market sector investments (large inflows or outflows to/from the crypto market in general).
I suspect ozone layer filters it out.
Okay, something I can speak too! (Though I left in 2009 but it's close enough)

I was a SRE on Gmail, and I can assure you that the experience for devs was not great intentionally. We had a pool of dedicated machines that ran various versions specifically used for development. I made sure those where always on our worst clusters (slowest CPUs and disks) so the dev experience was always the worst case scenario for performance. :-)
That's one nice thing about hardcopy. It can't be changed remotely.
From the first link in your post:

"In fact, Stack Overflow’s 2020 survey found that “developers who are men are more likely to want specific new features, while developers who are women are more likely to want to change norms for communication on our site,” a request that’s frequently paired with the terms “toxic” and “rude.”"

It is difficult for me to seriously treat an article that considers "rude comments" more important issue than "features". What a regular person wants is something that works. Whether it was done in a way that kept Susan happy is tertiary at best.

Is this all that RMS is accused of? If so, I am only glad I am nowhere near that scene.

edit: Come to think of it.. is the reason new software sucks so bad lately ( the focus on stupid stuff )?
This is how it should go. Not setting the high perf machine as a benchmark.
Little misunderstanding here. I'm not saying that the USA doesn't have a national identity, because it clearly does. What I'm saying is that because it is an entirely manufactured one, it is therefore predestined for conflict.

One of the bigger conflicts that societies have is that as they move from whatever traditional identity have they have find a set of common values that still makes for a common goal.
When I have something in my steam library I seem to be able to use it on any platform it runs on.

My knowledge about this is limited to a couple board game programs I used to use on a Mac and now run on Linux.

It’s not gog type freedom from drm but it seems to be cross platform. Well of course not on iOS….
> We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.

Sometimes people's flaws prevent them and the people they work with from doing good work.

A lot of people I'd describe as "principled" don't want to be anywhere near Stallman for various reasons, often related to their principles. Maybe he's just cleared his orbit of anyone else who actually fits your 4 criteria, so only appears to be unique. This seems like a rather common failure mode of personality cults, tbh.
Thanks, Canada, for giving us The Weeknd!
Korea is a solid counter example. Around the 1400's their King devised han'gul, which as of today is the dominant writing system of that country which replaced Chinese. They still study and use Chinese characters in school, but only for two specific cases: Names, and official government documents.
oh right! that plane is electrostatic rather than magneto fluid dynamic. good point I totally spaced on that one. MHD stuff is super cool tho!
And 100% of The Weeknd.
Homophones don’t seems like they would be a problem intuitively. If a homophone can exist in the spoken language and retain meaning, then it would be able to exist in the written language too without a loss of meaning.
Very interesting! I never thought DataDog would be close to AWS spend

Were these also on AWS Lambda or something else (EKS?)
> There is no reason that we must retaliate against Russia for a tactical nuke used in Ukraine.

There is—security of the Eastern flank of NATO—though it doesn’t require a nuclear response.

> What this idea does, that Russia cannot use a tactical nuke in Ukraine because of the principle of a necessary retaliation by the U.S.

That’s not the principle. The principle is that Russia cannot prosecute an unprovoked war of aggression, in which it commits an appalling array of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Direct NATO response has not been withheld short of further escalation by Russia as a matter of right or because Russia has committed insufficient provocation (on either aggression, humanitarian risk, or regional security risk calculus, Russia has far exceeded that which led to NATO intervention against Serbia or Libya) but out of desire to reserve responsive options in the event of further escalation.

> is negate the strategic advantage of having nukes in the first place thus rendering Russia at the mercy of U.S. interests around the world.

The idea that other nuclear powers cannot respond militarily to aggressive use of nukes by Russia negates the strategic advantage of having nukes in the first place thus rendering those powers at the mercy of Russian aggressiom around the world.

> You may like this principle, but Russia may not.

Global concern for what the current Russian regime likes is not particularly high right now, nor should it be.

> They may be motivated to assert their interests in Ukraine using the only remaining tools they have.

That is, indeed, a danger of a regime ewuipped with WMD of any kind facing conventional defeat and without the perception of its own domestic political strength to just take the L. But unless the world is prepared to allow itself to be forced into abject surrender to any aggressor willing to wave around nonconventional weapons, there needs to be a clear expectation—and demonstrated follow through should someone decide ro challenge it—that using sich weapons to rescue failing aggression will only magnify the scope of failure.
If there's no absorbing states and it's the cumulative sum of infinite coin flip (-1, 1), it'll visit every integer an infinite number of times with probability 1 a.s..
Do you actually have something to add to the discussion? Or you just want to take potshots at me?

You’re all over the place. Please explain why you think using underpowered hardware is the only legitimate way to write software that works on that hardware.
While I agree in part, I think you can’t have a “flawed” but effective advocate for free software.

We kind of already have that in “open source”. What Stallman was advocating for was the far-left pulling everyone further with him.

That said, I think what actually failed him was his poor management and discipline. He couldn’t build an organization. He could inspire and advocate.

What’s troubling to me, is that no other organization or project really pushed free software in the same way. Out of the tens of thousands of people working in tech. How many were principled enough to do what Stallman advocates. Very very few, if any. And none are as effective.
Maybe something like "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde? Something that rattles the foundations of life in a playful, unexpected way.
> [...] this will probably not change, since, (reportedly) both Google and Apple have moved away from LLVM involvement.

Correction: according to what you've linked, it is not LLVM but clang. This correction would be extremely important for my reply.

I can't see how is that a good news for GCC. This (and other incidents) suggests that both companies have lost interest in investing the future of C++, and they were already building their own languages for a long time. You can argue that they wanted to bend the standard and implementations as they see fit---and it's partly true, otherwise why would you want to join at all---but it's probably more likely that C++ is becoming irrelevant at least in some applications. And if the language is made irrelevant, a better standard compliance means nothing.
>Retaliation with the intent to silence critics

which critics?

When I search for this, I get this article:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/elon-musk-and-free-speech-tr...

Which is full of honestly ridiculous examples like "he told an analyst to shut up and stop asking boneheaded questions." Or "he told his followers to edit his wikipedia page" ...?

The "best" examples are of workers are are currently in litigation.

Everything else, I see no reason why one couldn't support free speech on a social platform while also requiring beta testers to sign NDAs.

>welcome the criticism and respond with facts
Do you have examples of where/when this could have been done?

At the end of the day, I feel like a lot of this just comes from the fact that when one supports free speech, it comes with a *. It's easier to say "I support free speech" vs "I support the idea people should be able to post their opinions online without being banned (this doesn't mean anyone can post live execution videos or organize crime, etc)."
Even if we ignore the horrible pile of allegations against him (and we shouldn’t), I always come back to the same fundamental question.

He did some very important work at launching the idea of free software and starting important projects/groups. That’s very commendable.

What has he done in the last 20 years to seriously benefit things? He had refused to budge on software being free, and that’s laudable. But what has he done tangibly? Because all I ever see reported is software-wise is him standing in the way of things or rejecting the idea of improvements. What has he done to improve things?

I’m not aware of anything even semi-recent.
I would hate it if I worked on something for n years and then it just gets binned.

I imagine that if you work on such stuff at Google, you probably need the attitude that you're only there to earn money. If you get too involved, it would suck big time if it got thrown out.

So I would think that devs not getting too involved with what they work on, will probably reflect in product quality.
Treaties and international law in general are only relevant for weak states. Powerful states ignore any negative decision against them - especially the most powerful.

This is even official in some cases. For example, the USA does not recognize any authority of the the International Criminal Court (neither do China, Russia and a number of other big states), but that doesn't stop them from occasionally using it against smaller nations.

You can look for a long time, but you'll never find an example of a superpower/empire, or a close ally of one, submitting to any kind of international judgment against it, criminal or in a trade dispute. At most, they may accept a negative ruling to a case they brought against someone else.
If anything, I think Stallman represents an increasingly-obsolete view of computer freedom. It is perhaps worth meditating on what happens to the protagonist of A Man For All Seasons.

This article gives good reasons why modern financial incentives make it increasingly irrelevant if software is copylefted (the Corps interpret copyleft as damage and route around it; the free software community has not demonstrated enough organizational energy or proactive vision to outpace moneyed development with their copyleft solutions). Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer? The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," which is head-in-sand ignorant of how modern developers value things.

New approaches are needed, and the approach represented by GNU has run its course. The Overton Window moves regardless of RMS's opinion these days
It also sounds like a joke and gossip.

I’m sure RMS could be like that, however having spent some time with him —- I didn’t see anything like that. He was frankly more interested in his laptop and food than people.
> What did Linux not do right?

Linux did everything right, if you want a kernel that looks and behaves like Linux. If you want a kernel that does something differently, see the other replies in this thread. All of these things (such as a stable driver ABI) would radically change Linux, and are probably very bad ideas.

> Or, if you have enough funding to write a new kernel, what would you do differently?

I'd make an open-source kernel inspired by the best parts of Windows NT. Not a direct clone of 30+ years of legacy APIs (ReactOS), nor an emulator trying to fit the square peg of Linux into the round hole of Windows (WINE).
Or the scarier alternative,

"What things do we claim to believe today despite knowing they are factually incorrect, due to pressure from the government?"
Perhaps not, but even if true, this was not, then, any fault of GCC, which was the topic at hand.
Haven't finished reading, but they say using emacs since 2010 makes you an emacs old timer? Hardly...
Just have to say thank you so much for CoffeeScript! It was pivotal in my career and has brought me a lot of joy :)
>Every ORM that I've worked with is a separate DSL that I need to learn

That is the point of Flyweight. The API is very small, and for everything else you use SQL. The ORM parses the SQL to figure out the types, and when you want it to, it maps the SQL into more complex data structures.
No, it was not in fact OK to coerce someone into a date with a threat of suicide in 1985. I was there. It's telling, about this whole Stallman debate, that anyone would even try to make this claim.

Anyways, I didn't know anything about the suicide threat before seeing this link, and didn't know my contempt for Stallman could get any deeper. So thanks for that!
I agree with tolerating “some flaws”. People can be eccentric.

RMS’s behavior is way past “some flaws”.

No company on earth would have let him stay this long.
You’d have less fallout if you just delay giving them upgrades long past the point they are due.
It seems to me that he created a toxic work environment - especially for women, and got away with it because of seniority and it seems having narcissistic personality traits.