skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In many cases it's probably not necessary. There's a lot of low hanging simplification fruit available in at least two areas:

• Internal/enterprise apps. Instead of writing a full web app write a desktop app using one of the many new frameworks for it and connect directly to your database. Use views, row level security and other RDBMS features to implement declarative ACL logic, and stored procedures as a thin RPC layer when necessary. Benefits: eliminate the whole web tier, no SQL injection (users log into the db as themselves), no load balancers (client side can fail over between replicas), use non-JS languages over the whole stack without transpilation, give users ultra-low latency UI without lots of work, feed output of your SQL library direct to the UI toolkit, no browser compatibility bugs.

• Eliminate mobile/web duplication. Use Jetpack Compose/Kotlin Multiplatform/Flutter/etc to bring your mobile app to desktop and keep all the frontend codebases synced.

If we assume by frontend you mean exclusively web apps, complexity seems to have come from several places:

1. A desire to use something better than JS (typescript, coffeescript, kotlin, whatever).

2. HTML5/JS's failure to provide a components model leading to it being layered on top with npm, webpack, react, etc.

3. A desire to eliminate state-management related bugs via FP techniques.

4. A much wider recognition that latency is important, causing practices that were once routine to be now officially frowned upon and creating piles of complexity through optimizations.

5. Assumption/desire that websites will work on mobile/tablets, even if a native app exists, causing a lot of work for responsive design.

6. Lack of anyone other than Google incentivized to really improve the platform, causing an explosion of tiny GitHub projects that each seek to solve a micro-problem which then get cobbled together into ad-hoc per app "frameworks". Compare to the Apple stack, the Microsoft stack, the Android stack, the Java standard library etc where a lot more stuff comes out of the box and they try to solve app development end to end.

The question of whether this complexity is necessary is always relative. Many apps have a captive user base who are much more sensitive to feature throughput than looks or how quickly the app loads. Things like server side rendering+rehydration are just a distraction there but they often come along for the ride due to the industries preference for using FAANG freeware over buying platforms that could then be more tuned for the customer need.
Diesel will slowly go away because of the ever tightening emissions noose. It's just getting harder and harder to have something that's both compliant and has a lifetime TCO that's lower than equivalent gasoline engines that can more easily meet their (more stringent) emissions requirements.

The bar for what kind of usage makes diesel cheaper than gas over all is constantly creeping higher. Notice how a huge fraction of smaller medium duty trucks have gasoline engines these days.
I would say I have good mental health. That was not always the case. A number of things have turned the tide for me.

1. I found some "active" shit I legitimately enjoyed doing: playing music, writing, walking, iyengar yoga

2. I walk a lot

3. I do yoga intensely once a week

4. I keep a journal

5. I learned how to manage my emotions from a powerful book called "The Anger Management Workbook for Men" by Aaron Karmin, and embracing it changed my life and enriched it in ways I absolutely never could have predicted

6. I have found a couple of communities that I am a part of

None of this stuff happened overnight, but the shift into the right direction started occurring a lot more quickly than I expected, and the not feeling like complete shit all the time, the extremely poor and sometimes very destructive coping mechanisms, they are a work in progress, but I am so much closer to my ideals than I could have expected in such a short time.

If I had to pick one to recommend, it would easily be the Karmin book. Best investment I've ever made.
The EV transition is really slow and easy for the grid to adapt to.

Assuming 100% of new cars where EV’s you’re talking 25 years before adoption approaches 98%. Plus on average each EV is only using ~50,000kWh / year or 400 watts average load.
DistroWatch Weekly – 1000th Issue
It must be frustrating for you to be so sure of what your opponents think and feel, yet never able to understand what made them vote for the Orange Man.

You are the reason the Orange Man was foisted upon the US. We are going to get more of this, and not less, if you do not learn to communicate with your ideological opponents.
It’s nowhere near 1 million per year. The record from 2021 was 405,000 and the plan for the next 3 years is < 1.5 million in total.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...
https://archive.ph/9EvOE
I'm building a virtual pet that couples a daily check-in routine with gamification techniques. It's goal is to help me be excited to journal, self-reflect, and track where I'm at with my mental/emotional regulation.

I tend to go through periods where I do a little too well with everything, take on too much, get overwhelmed, then fall down for a bit before I decide I have the ability to care again. The best thing I can do for my mental health is be more consistent and mindful such that I grow continuously rather than follow boom/bust cycles.

So, I'm building that to help! :)

Other than that, everything else everyone is saying is good. Exercise, diet, companionship, self-awareness. I've just never found lack of familiarity of the good things to be the limiting factor. For me, it's always just about convincing myself I can do it, and it's worth doing continually, whenever I fall off the wagon. My own brain is its own worst enemy that loves to overthink things rather than stick to what's clearly working. Then, I do the things, and all the fears melt away, confidence appears in bounds, motivation grows with the confidence, and we're back in the race called life.
Funny insult for copy pasting code that made me chuckle
"This phrase comes from a student of mine named Boon. She always said that if you copy code from one place and paste it into another, you are obviously creating redundant code. She calls it "inheriting from the Clipboard," which I think it pretty clever and memorable.

When you copy code, ask yourself why you are doing it—and if the same operation is needed in two places, doesn’t this indicate that you need a service in your system?

My boss and mentor Alan Shalloway puts it this way: There are three numbers in software: 0, 1, and infinity. 0 represents the things we do not do in a system (we do those for free). 1 represents the things we do once and only once. But at the moment we do something twice, we should treat it as infinitely many and create cohesive services that allow it to be reused."

It actually came from a 2009 book called "Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development". Somewhat goes against the grain of the more common wisdom of taking the bullet once or twice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_programming)
OP overstated the case as being free of centralized parties, but checks do give individuals more rights - checks have been around long enough that even the US has had to develop sane regulations around them. Whereas digital payment services can just send you a text message saying "your whole account is frozen. see you in binding arbitration!". Maybe that will change in five decades, but it doesn't help us now.
"China will carry out a military attack on Taiwan in the next few years — we must therefore significantly reduce our dependence on and influence of China as quickly as possible."

PRC attack is contingent upon declaration of independence by DPP - any observer of IR across the strait would recognise this.
2 logical options:

1) They aren’t as fiscally sound as you think.

2) They’ve sub optimized and someone is looking very good for stretching payment terms at the expense of the rest of the company. Once they do this it can be hard to walk back as someone centrally has to justify more working capital.
Hmm…

He claims:

>> it is legitimate to punish by death, someone who openly declares the popes to not be infallible on matters of faith and morals

But also claims that, in simple terms, “executed code is not code or lawful” if it’s executed code dealing with his magic internet tokens…

What a conundrum…

What a specimen of a human being I’ve come upon tonight. I’ve known of the man’s existence, not this beautiful list of past quotes you’ve given us tho.

Did not know there was a raging christo-fascist amongst the core dev team.

Unfortunat.
I'm currently struggling with parenting an 18 month old child as an introvert. As a 50 year old first-time parent who had the benefit of lots of quiet alone time for literally decades, and possibly got a bit too used to it. :/

My sanity is eroding and I hit a wall every day. I also found that I don't have time anymore to keep up with technological developments like I used to, which is unfortunately eroding my value as a developer, so now I'm looking into hybrid PM/management/developer roles.
By buying Flipper Zero you are sending money to russia, indirectly funding terrorist invasion of Ukraine. :/
> I dunno. Lots of users seem to wake up and say “Gimme a UI with rich interactions, super low latency, offline support, and real-time sync

I'm inclined to disagree.

One of the most successful web apps I know is a CGI (not FastCGI) app written in Pascal and containing some 30-yo code.

100% of users I met are happy but they don't even know why. "It's good", they say.

I believe their underlying reasons are:

- the app is extremely fast. Full screen reloads are not a matter anymore with broadband internet.

- client side code is light enough to run well in crappy, old windows-based PCs running internet explorer

- lots of reports and features. The vendor's team has time to develop them since they are not busy trying to centralize stuff, fighting w/ CSS properties and other stupidities.
Not to mention the most important reason for colonizing a planet: Because it's there.
My golden rules of programming:

• All booleans really want to be enums

• All enums really want to be rich data objects

• All rich data objects really want to be discriminated unions

That is, whenever you write some code which accepts a Boolean parameter that drives its behavior, at some point you will regret making it a bool and inevitably need to refactor it to be an enumeration type with more than two values. But then eventually you will realize that you have one behavior in your code that applies to more than one of those enum values (all the ‘type a’ cases but not the ‘type b’ cases), and you will want those enum values to themselves have a Boolean property telling you whether they are of type a or type b (and note that that Boolean will also be subject to this same golden rule in time)

Eventually you’ll find that those different enum values (the type a and type b ones) need different sets of dependent data (type a values all have a ‘target’ as well, but type b ones don’t, say) - so you end up needing a discriminated union to capture the various data objects involved.

All of which leads us to: every if statement and switch statement (over a parameter or input value) is a disguised match on a discriminated union type. Over time, this fate is inevitable.

And if your language doesn’t have discriminated unions, learn a pattern to fake them (usually it’s the abstract factory pattern).
Lol. Anyone else notice that in the first screenshot the CPU is at 18% and is using 10.4gb of memory? Ah windows. You will never change.
I don't really like Ruby, but sounds cool.
You can imagine that proving the efficacy of the drug over dozens of years is going to be especially challenging. No clinical trial ever does that.
Arguably, a Martian colony might be actually more resistant to some forms of attack due to the normally hostile environment & presumably lower population density.

Not to mention any attack coming from Earth and not from some nearby (in ship travel time terms) will be known for months if not years in advance.
Aligning your views with someone else's may require changes to both sets of views (yours and theirs), which could involve negotiation. Consider two people planning a trip, each compromising slightly to achieve a plan they are both happy with.
> However they do not explain whether higher or lower levels mean more or less hydration, or vice versa.

You wouldn’t expect this to be laid out in a medical journal article. Much like you wouldn’t expect the definition of taking a derivative to be explained in a machine learning paper.
I try to learn new stuff every week, and i try practicing a new sport every year (i go to an adult sport camp for a week every year basically).
Sorry but this is a garbage take. Typing negates the need for writing useless tests that just verify the correct value types are passed - it does not negate the need for writing functional tests.

Where did you come up with this?
> Is that better than logging into your online banking, making an instant transfer? No need to go anywhere or pay anyone.

If I have their bank routing number and account number, sure I can do that (then it's effectively the same thing as a check but without the slip of paper). But I don't always have that info particularly for informal one-off payments (e.g. yard cleaner that came to haul debris away) so it's easiest to hand them a check.
I think about this every time I fly coach, which is 99.9% of the time. It's also great if you are in a submarine or do electrical work in enclosed spaces.
Every time I fly, I am grateful to be on the shorter side
Ctrl-F "networking", close tab...
It's very easy to see why this happens. Because nobody actually knows what they're doing.

There is no logical/mathematical theory around program design. We have no idea if we're improving in optimization, staying the same or even going backwards.

For the shortest distance between two points, we have a theory that defines the best distance: A line. That's an easy target to hit. For the best way to design and organize our programs... there is no theory. It's all made up and opinionated. Without a theory we can never truly know.

Thus we are doomed to forever move in a flat circle creating framework after framework and endlessly having progress move horizontally while wasting effort creating isomorphic patterns without ever knowing if the new pattern is better or worse.

Until the day we have a mathematical theory around program organization that can say Design A is 2.3 times more optimal then Design B. Then on that day... this madness will stop.

But until that day we're all stuck in an endless limbo mouse wheel mind fuck. I look at front end and I suspect that out of all software technologies, front end is one of the few fields that is actually moving backwards. I'd estimate 0.01x less optimal every year then I predict at a delta of 0.5x less optimal from an inflection point it starts to oscillate back towards the natural equilibrium again. Then when it hits equilibrium it will oscillate in the opposite direction again. Endless.

Python is likely one of the most stable technologies imo. It's definitely not remotely close to the MOST optimal state but it's nested too comfortably in a local optima and it will likely be stuck there forever.
Frontend is inherently complex and becoming more complex because we build more dynamic web apps. PM and designers don't know what works and keep changing the product until they get something acceptable, which will also mean much more moving parts for developers until the product matures.

The complexity will stay and get bigger, we need to a way to control it and be able handle it.

The first step is to abstract frontend development (be it web, mobile, desktop or even VR) into concepts then introduce a system to build apps with these concepts.
The main thing your comment highlights for me is how much of a push we need for more sustainable methods of transportation in general.

There's always going to be people who will need to drive, but there's a hell of a lot of people who could be perfectly adequately served by strong public transportation.
>He appears to be astoundingly, cripplingly stupid. Core dev, huh? Yeah. Cool.

Is that an issue? His contributions are peer reviewed, just like with everyone else's contributions (anyone can submit PRs). Or do you work at place that would fire well performing team members if it was found out they believed in something that was "astoundingly, cripplingly stupid"?
Against Automated Plagiarism
To be fair, the article claims that the guy first started working in this area in 2004, which is before the wikipedia article was created. bu.edu isn't trying to say that this is a new discovery this year/decade, it's discussing a particular academic's career.

That said, I'm 100% sure that the article is distorting (perhaps radically so) the background here -- these sorts of publications always seem to.
Tokyo (and Japanese culture in general) may be so different from Western (specifically U.S.) cities that I suspect you are right. But I don't think the decline in Japanese real-estate value is the problem.

I've got a sort of mixed-message about Tokyo real-estate prices anyway. Sometimes the impression I have is that it still is expensive but only if you are comparing the cost per square feet with Western cities and not the cost of dwellings — I guess the salient point being that the Tokyo-ite will live in a smaller "flat" than their Western counterpart and so may in fact have a smaller rent.
"I stopped caring 20 years ago" achievement unlocked.
To carry a single raisin to the top, then he climbed it a million more times to bring more raisins, then he made a jet engine from the raisins. Then he started bringing more raisins so that he could make a raisin plane for the amazing raisin engine.

In the intervening thousand years, other climbers learned to cybernetically modify their bodies to be able to climb every rock face on the planet. The resulting boom in cybernetic technology granted immortality and immunity to all diseases to humanity. Humans never did master the raisin jet though (because they learned to transfer their conciseness over the internet so honestly jet engines seem kinda silly).

/S
This also seems like a great way for Harvard to colonize as many institutions with graduates easily. If employers don't know about the compression at the top and they do value GPA and the reputation of the school, it likely creates a situation where a Harvard graduate gets employed at a company even when doing poorly on the interview because "Hey, we'd be stupid to not employ a Harvard graduate with a 3.8 GPA. They're top of their class from a very reputable institution."

Over time this puts enough Harvard people in institutions and Harvard people have a reputation for alma mater nepotism (that I've personally observed multiple times).

Almost all major US institution from media companies to banks to government have their upper ranks colonized by Harvard grads.
Meditation when I feel like it, in the Soto Zen style.

There seems to be a popular perception of the mind as a thing with many knobs and dials that has a tendency to get out of whack and require servicing by a qualified professional. It's really not.

There are a probably infinite number of things that can outright go wrong with a brain, resulting in an equal infinity of fascinating symptoms that are rightly in the domain of the medical profession. However, like other parts of the body of which the same can be said, those things are unlikely to be wrong you. Most "mental health" issues are not of that nature, but fall into one of two categories:

1. Suffering because something external is actually affecting you. Eg. If you're suffering mentally because you are in an abusive relationship or because you hate your job it's not fundamentally a mental health issue but something you need to straighten out in your life. If you can't you will continue to suffer in some way however much therapy you get. This can of course lead to problems of type 2.

2. Self-created (or self-exacerbated) problems. Pathological mental systems, misunderstandings of the world and your part in it, unhealthy cycles of self doubt and self torment, etc.

Problems of type 2 are very real, but they don't mean there is something wrong with you. Everybody experiences these things to some extent and learning to escape from them is part of learning to be a functioning adult. By far the most important technique to learn is letting go of things. You cannot prevent ideas from entering your mind, but whether you let them remain is ultimately up to you.

When something in your mind causes you suffering - a bad idea, an intrusive thought, a self-defeating behaviour, a necrotic value system, an unrequited love, etc - you can let go of it. Doing so is a physical act, not a mental one. It's not always easy. It can be extremely difficult, but it is always possible.

Meditation, as I see it, is physical practice at doing this. You simply sit and let go of whatever thoughts enter your mind, always returning to simple awareness of the present, your body (especially breathing and posture) and your surroundings. You cannot stop the thoughts entering your mind. They will continue. That is right. You are practising letting go of them when they do.

What you learn from this is that retaining thoughts is optional. You only need to pay any attention to the ones that do you some good. The physical ability to let go of the others is one of the most important skills you can acquire. It's worth practising.
macOS

I posted this yesterday, macOS is also at fault.

Here’s an interest blog post from a former Apple UI employee talking about the growing inconsistency in macOS UI.

https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/macos-12-monte...
Unpopular biased opinion.

Frontend development is mostly done by people who are into visual things and less into logic.

Unlike backend engineering, where people working are primarily choosing technology based on logic/merit and less by visual appearance.

This leads to the adaptation of large number of garbage frameworks in frontend primarily because their landing pages look visually appealing.

After some time frontend developers will find some new framework with a better landing page and move on to that.

And the cycle repeats.
In Germany I haven't seen one since the 1990s. I was horrified to learn that they're still in use but apparently there have been only 8.3 million transactions with checks in Germany in 2019 compared to some 11000 million direct debit, 6600 million bank transfers and 6300 debit card transactions.

Apparently there was a Eurocheque system that enabled guarantees for international cheque payments in the EU but ended in 2001. This is generally cited as one of the main reasons cheques rapidly became irrelevant given that EC debit cards were still available and online banking became a thing.
When I want someone (who needs to pay me) to give me the check, my bank account details are not supplied to them. I just deposit their check. The check has their bank details printed on it, not mine.

When I want someone (who needs to pay me) to transfer money into my account, I need to provide them with my account number.

In the first case, my bank details are kept private, but in the second case, not so much.