skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got my first job out of college 29 years ago. For the first 10 years or so, the process was I guess you could say agile-like in that we certainly didn't do waterfall, we just talked about stuff, built stuff and banged it straight into production. Testing was not an official thing at all, somebody had a quick look-see if they felt like it.

My first 10 years on the job was Turbo Pascal and Delphi for various shops. Working in that old DOS-based Turbo IDE felt like magic, I remember plumping for a shocking blue, yellow and pink colour scheme - I miss Pascal. The move to Delphi was a huge change, OOP, native strings over 255 long and some truly unbelievable drag-and-drop GUI building functionality.

We had no source control until we started using Delphi, I think it was Subversion but there might have been something before that. Prior to SVN it was a case of baggsying report.pas for the day.

Thinking back, and maybe I've forgotten, but I don't think we shipped anything that was particularly worse than stuff I see getting shipped today. Yeah, stuff went wrong, but it still does. Without reviews, Git, CI, etc we still shipped something that largely worked and kept customers happy.

Code quality was bad. No standards were followed across the team, so files all had different styles. It wasn't uncommon to see procedures that were 100s, maybe 1000s, of lines long. Turbo Pascal's integrated debugging was a life-saver.

Unit testing was not a thing.

I think we wrote far more stuff ourselves, whereas today there's a lot more libraries and systems to use instead of building.

Obviously there was no Stack Overflow, I signed up to that when it first came online, it has been a game-changer. I read a lot more programming books back then, you had to. I think there was a lot more try-it-and-see work going on, I used to write many small apps just to work out how some thing needed to work before touching the main codebase, that's something I still do a lot today, I'm not sure the new-bloods do?

Work-life balance was absolutely fine, there was no pressure to work extra hours but I don't find that there has ever been. I've always prioritised family-time over work, I put in full effort for my contracted hours, the second they are up, I am gone.

I certainly enjoyed programming a lot more back then, it felt closer to the metal, it felt like a voyage of discovery, I couldn't just Google to find out how to pack a file down to 50k whilst keeping read-time quick, I mostly had to work it out myself, read a book or ask colleagues. You had to work harder to learn stuff, and I don't know, it felt like that hard-won knowledge stayed with me more than something I googled last week.

Moden languages have abstracted away a lot of the complexities and that is of course a good thing but I kind of miss the pain!
A Celebrated Japanese Artist Died Trying to Save Others from Drowning
> I can't imagine a single self-taught programmer of my talent-level making something that could be mistaken for a 2018 AAA game today.

They might not look like 2018 AAA games, but there are so many indie games that vastly eclipse AAA titles in every other way... even "double A" or smaller big studio titles can be better than AAA titles if you judge by things other than flashy graphics.

And it's gotten much easier to make a game if you're willing to use something other than ultra-real graphics - Unity, for instance, has massively improved the ability for relative amateurs to make great engaging games.

Thinking of the games I play most days now, only one of them (Hunt: Showdown, by Crytek) is anything approaching triple A. I haven't touched a big budget big studio game in years.

So I think at least in gaming, things have gotten better, not worse. Yeah, the ceiling has been raised, but the floor has also dropped such that the level of effort required to make a decent game is lower than ever.
Leica sells cameras for people with more money than sense. I mean come on, $5K for a film camera?

Their stuff is made more as a status symbol than an actually useful device. From a technical standpoint it makes no sense. You can buy a high end camera and a full compliment of lenses and other accessories and still spend less than they charge for the base model.

Or if you're into analog, you can do that for a small fraction of the price.
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This all comes down to the "Gish Gallop" problem. It is easy to vomit out disinformation and lies. Anyone attempting to poison the well can do so much faster than you can refute their lies with facts and well-reasoned argument.

When the other party is acting in bad faith all it takes is some money and time to subvert platforms with paid shills that all network with each other and mix disinfo into seemingly normal content streams. This allows the shills to build credibility.

Good luck dealing with that. You can reply with all the well-reasoned arguments you want but when 500 of the shill's friends bury your reply (and mass-report you) no one will see your message so correctness becomes a moot point... not that people have enough free time to read and consider every well-reasoned argument when they come across an issue to begin with. If you tried that you'd need more than 24 hours in a day.
https://archive.ph/PCdT6
I applaud the whistleblowers, keep fighting, you are not alone
Even without considering toxicity, national security would prefer a widely dispersed generating capacity.

It's relatively easy to have 10,000 PV and wind farms each contributing to their local electricity network. That's a lot more work for an invader to knock out than say 20 or 30 nuclear plants.
That there are downsides is not in dispute, but you’ve not shown that it’s a net negative. Perhaps it is, perhaps the shortages we experienced because of a very unusual event like COVID outweigh all the day to day advantages of having little slack in the system. But you haven’t shown that.
That is exactly what you do in Kerbal Space Program ;)
Honest question: Can you grow anything out there? I guess you could do indoor farming, but maybe it's more than enough "compost" they're producing there?

It would be interesting to know if an analysis of it (when in the US) could tell some things about how the station is doing.

https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/mcmwebcam.cfm
Though it doesn't explicitly say so in the guidelines, HN is an English-language site. Even if English is not your best language, most of us read bad English better than we read good Portuguese.
So executives can play politics but everyone else should just know their place? This is a bootlicker attitude.

More power to this guy if he thinks he can make a move and make it work out.
It doesn't matter if it's perfect. It's still a Bad thing. The proliferation of AL/ML needs to stop.
I agree with your synopsis. Idiocracy is allegorical of now.

And you're right that one would meet stiff resistance broaching the
matter head-on. Misunderstanding, offence, divisions and accusations
of indoctrination would surely fly.

So I tried a different approach, some of which is mentioned but not
documented in detail here [1]. The discussion of art and literature as
a method can be extended from digital self defence to a more general
"intellectual self defence".

The long and short of it is that this has all happened before. Great
civilisations have fallen into the intellectual doldrums. That's why
we have literature, poems, plays and songs. The Arts are there to
rescue us from this sort of nonsense when we reason ourselves into the
corner of stupidity.

[1] http://www.icicte.org/assets/icicte2019_5.4_farnell.pdf
>What is it that makes jpegxl valuable given that there’s already widespread adoption and support for av1, webp, etc?

IMO the killer feature of JPEG XL is its ability to losslessly transcode already existing JPEG images.

See also these articles for a more detailed comparison:

https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...

https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_deth...

(disclaimer: they were written by one of the authors of JPEG XL)
Are you claiming there are no other sources of price changes between now and 200 years ago than the social changes for women and minorities? And that the changes from the last 50 years or so caused the 6x price increase in housing?
Renting property dates back to ancient times. It certainly long predates the modern restaurant. We have records of rent contracts 300 years older than the first known instance of a place where people could buy freshly prepared meals.
Nope. My biases are clear and well known, I dislike everything about Silicon valley and the culture of Silicon Valley.

If I could make one plea to Elon, it would be to move Twitter out of Silicon Valley as fast as possible
There was a funny story I don't remember where... A manager was doing LOC as a metric, and they were required to count it. But an engineer refactored and put -1000. That was the last time they asked for it.
> If you're arguing that consensus are not important or a basic requirement of a democracy, and long term plans can only be implemented if they are dictated by an autocratic government then the problem is another one.

I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that a legislature randomly selected from the population is actually more likely to seek consensus and do long term planning than a legislature of power-hungry politicians.
Do the website operators think they're being funny by loading in all the photographs upside-down?
Man, that's probably the smart way to go.. I just told my wife to take my half-assedly secured computer to one of my tech friends to break into it
Is that right!? Wow, I'm honestly surprised it's that low. As an American, I totally would have expected it to be at least double that, but most likely more. I haven't had a kid yet, but my wife had outpatient surgery a couple of years ago to remove a cyst. I hung out in the waiting room and we were out of there before lunchtime. Our insurance was billed nearly $100,000. We (thankfully) have good insurance (tied to my employer, of course), and we hit our annual out-of-pocket max with that one operation.
Generally the end of the month that you were terminated in, unless you pay the same company to keep the same plan via COBRA. It's the same plan, you're just paying what you paid for it before plus whatever the company was paying for your share, which is generally much higher.
Landlords aren't in the property business. They're in the liquidity business.

I know it sounds weird but that's their function in society, they are one of the many "business lubricant" sellers that allow modern society to work.

A liquidity provider is someone who makes transactions easier. The insurance company will insure you against risk does this. The lender who provides loans does this. The landlord who rents property does this.

You can run an economy without them, but things will cost more and take longer to happen.
I don't think anyone has a perfect answer to this question, but I'd prefer we invest in education. My english class, many years ago, tried to teach us how to identify whether a website contained useful information. I thought it was helpful.
If Elon or anyone else actually has strong reason to believe that certain employees are dead weight I'm fine with them being laid off. Given the speed and general dysfunction of this particular case there's basically no chance that's what is going on here.
I always loved how despite the massive domain differences, the ISBN situation is extremely similar to the IPv4/IPv6 situation (except more aggressively rent-seeking), with prefixes leased out to the old dogs, concerns about eventual address/isbn exhaustion, a scheme for mapping old ISB10 to new ISBN13 codes, etc etc.
I recently made cxt[1] to try to solve many of the issues you mention.

[1]: https://github.com/civboot/cxt
We used to call it "wall speed". "Wall speed ahead!"
Don't need DBAs if you're hiring 10x full stack developers.
I'm positive that emailing that list to someone does not make it a violation of the first amendment. There's nothing secret or illegal about it either, so I don't think collusion is the word you are looking for. Now an agreement between Twitter and the executive branch, that Twitter would do everything asked of them would maybe make your point. Of course, that's exactly what's missing.
"... and replace it with a metric which explicitly optimizes for all the policies I personally like."
Unions have bloc power to influence laws.
If increased employee protection causes you to layoff almost everyone in a country -- you probably had little good business reason to be in that country.

Employee protection exists because there's a huge power imbalance. A company who can constantly just say, "we'll fire you if this doesn't get done" and colludes with other companies on such matters makes it very difficult for workers. This is why employee protection, unions, etc... exist.
In conservative states, people who're dying can afford to live better.
In Massachusetts one can purchase Boston-wastewater derived fertilizer pellets in bulk from the commonwealth water authority:

https://www.mwra.com/03sewer/html/baystate.htm
I'm a libertarian socialist, so while I agree landlords are often evil, I'm also a pragmatist, and don't see the entire system just changing overnight.

A better more practical approach would be guaranteed basic income, and a land value tax that's somehow tied to average rent prices, so if rents go up, the land value tax goes up so much that it probably would've been better to keep rents lower than pay the higher tax.

Since the money from the LVT goes towards GBI, and people's rents are being offset, the one incruing a lot of the costs is the landlord, and they don't just have a free for all.

They need to double the tax though on airbnb and 'hospitality' designated residences that do short-term leases instead of long-term leases.

I'd even say give some lenience for people w/ less than 3 homes (i.e. you get your home/land free/clear and 1 rental you get 10% of normal LTV, instead of the full tax), then maybe graduate it up... 4-10th house you pay 50% on, 10th+ you pay 100% on.

Foreign investors should pay double the tax, if you want investment property in America, then pay other Americans who can't use those homes.
What cause is outlined in their employment contracts?

Do they even have employment contracts?
I have a very simple way of evaluating any sort of markup language. How easy is it to edit tables?

https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jgm/djot/b...

In that example, xidoc requires a human to manually align ascii chars to make it look pretty... That's a job that computers are good at!

I would rather be able to define some sort of data block:

[let "myvar;" [csv;
col1,col2,col3
1,2,3
4,5,6
]]
[output-table "myvar"];

... or something.

I'm not sure right now how useful is markdown really... It was a nice experiment but I mostly use it for bullet points (*) and headings (#). I would say that's successful enough as a contribution to internet culture! :-)

EDIT: seems like I commented on xidoc+djot at the same time, but the criticism is the same for both languages :-)

https://djot.net/
No, just Apple.
Nobody makes any policy decisions based on GDP.

It's just a proxy of economic activity.

Nobody ever said, We (won't) need policy X because we are at Y GDP.

Companies make decision based on supply/demand.

So, this whole research is kinda pointless.
In fact the worst thing anyone could do is have a metric and make the entire nation focus on that.
You can think of the "topological" knot as an abstraction of the physical knot in the sense that you can take away all the physical properties of the knot and still be left with certain structure that captures the "essence" of the knot. This is what mathematics pretty much is. If you want to keep other properties of the rope, that's all cool, but then you start doing physics more than mathematics.
I like that they have this, it means if I ever go missing unexpectedly that there'll be someone who can access my last known location, and access to social media comms to understand why.
As others have said, lock code is safer. iPhones sometimes will demand the code instead of biometrics from time to time. Also, any app protected with biometrics can be unlocked with the code, so the code is the safer bet.
> concierge direct primary care model

How does this reduce/eliminate the “better document this thoroughly in case I get sued” work?

Or are the legal worries overblown/over-relied upon for over-documentation?
brk/sbrk are obsolete legacy functions.

Memory allocated with mmap is released with munmap.

brk/sbrk can increase the size of the data segment, thus allocating memory, but they can also decrease the size of the data segment, freeing the memory.

Whether calling the function free of the standard C library results sometimes in also invoking munmap or brk/sbrk to release memory to the operating system is obviously implementation dependent.

When malloc/free are bypassed and you get memory from the OS directly with mmap, to be used by a custom memory allocator, e.g. an arena allocator, then it is up to you to call munmap when the memory is no longer needed.
What if you have children? In Turkey the bank account can be taken over only by legal inheritors, and all of them should be present together physically at the same time in the bank with a document, most of the time obtained from notary, called inheritance document (plus a document that shows that there is no debt). Inheritors in a normal family are spouse and children. Ratio for inheritance for a children and spouse are different. Spouse gets most of the inheritance.
Arthur Whitney's compiler for a language "isomorphic to c": https://kparc.com/b/.

Amazing that someone can write correct, fast code like that.
And this is why the most polished part of most enterprise software packages is the dashboard/reporting function, the only part the C-levels might actually touch themselves.
Lot's of people know why. Academia hasn't been able to find a way to frame it that is palatable.

We live in a society where every single thing is a rent seeking and nobody believes in anything besides winning because everything of substance has been hollowed out.
A flight simulator called fly8 had an interesting C structure made of pointers to functions.
It was a way to declare a device driver in C.

Years later I could tell my colleagues how a device driver/plugin actually worked (before COM/etc) just with this.
I was mind blown in college when learning recursive programming and being introduced to the recursive solution to the Tower of Hanoi problem:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi#Recursive_imple...

I remeber thinking "where's the rest of the code? It surely can't be just those lines!"
> But what happens if shadows are disabled?

> Something cheeky happens! I actually draw the shadows with 0% alpha channel!

Does that still pay the performance cost to "draw" them, or does it get optimized away?
It was either end World Hunger for $6B or buy Twitter for $44B. He could not do both.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/elon-musk-un-world-hu...
Dammit, I see what you did there.
>a landmark forum

Oh Lordy…I had a boss send me to a “management seminar that he found exceptional” that turned out to be that train wreck around 20 years ago. I think I lasted maybe an hour before I got up and left in the middle of the session with the speaker yelling at me to sit down (and some rude asshole trying to block me from leaving…unsuccessfully).

I called my boss and told him I left, that I didn’t care if he got a refund, and to fire me if he wanted (he didn’t).
It’s not an excuse to treat people poorly, but I certainly have less empathy for someone who has $5M in vested stock who gets fired vs someone who makes $15/hour and lives paycheck to paycheck.

Both are injustices. The former isn’t much of a risk to life. The latter could literally result in life or death situations.
Exactly. If there was a way to determine the least performing 50% of employees in a matter of two days, they wouldn't be there in the first place anymore. Even if you fire them, that's a surefire way of making sure that the best 5% of people leave the company anyways do to the depressing atmosphere this creates.
"Long COVID" and medical journals.... Even the highest estimates only have it as a very small percentage of symptomatic patients which is already a subset of the general population.
Bitwarden has an emergency contact feature if you have a premium membership. My wife and our lawyer have emergency access. They can request it anytime. If I approve they have access right away or if I reject it is denied. If I cannot or do not take action access is granted after five days.
It's well thought out and a nice feature for $10/year
https://bitwarden.com/help/emergency-access/
The End of Excel?
And presumably their stock also vests?
Agreed. I'm with you. If one is going to point the "communism" finger at universal healthcare, then you ought to point the same finger at firefighters, first-responders, police, and roads, amongst other things.
What is an engineering manager as it relates to actually writing code?

One of the things Elon said was that there appears to be 3 managers for every engineer. I understand the need for a few PMs but if there really was a 3:1 ratio that’s just absurd.
I use Dark Crystal (https://darkcrystal.pw/) to distribute my secrets within my social network (scuttlebutt and email mostly). It utilizes Shamir's Secret sharing.
Those examples indicate that even pollution isn't so well-defined.

What about nutrient pollution? It requires a bit of philosophical nuance to conclude that nitrogen runoff, say, is a pollutant.
Which is obviously terrible, but that's not fundamental to the system. It would make more sense to have a state law mandating, say, a minimum yellow time for such cameras.

But when most people drive, it's easier to do something that seems very pro-driver, even if it's anti-safety.
With apologies to Dr. Knuth…

The most important thing in a markup language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name, and now I am looking for a suitable language.
A mistake that I've made before, that I think is quite common, is to assume government will enforce laws the way I would. Regarding speech, because I am a person of good will, tolerance, and open-mindedness, I assume government will enforce the law this way. This is a grave mistake. The people who would seek out jobs in which they can control other people's speech are exactly the sort of people who should not be given that power.

Even if the actual enforcers of speech law were honest, they would never be allowed to enforce the law where it is most needed, namely government itself. Wars are usually supported with lies. [1] [2] Will speech laws be used to punish government officials who lie the country into war? I think not. Instead, such laws will be used to protect powerful people, especially people in government. For example, in Citizen's United, a case that Democrats still criticize, the government was prosecuting the members of a small non-profit with felonies for publishing a 90-minute documentary critical of then Senator Hillary Clinton. [3]

[1] https://militaryhistorynow.com/2015/07/15/damned-lies-nine-w...
[2] https://www.europereloaded.com/false-flags-and-the-american-...
[3] https://www.oyez.org/cases/2008/08-205