skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I am not going to waste your time or mine cataloging and complaining about the many, many bad practices, user-hostile design decisions, mind-boggling complex workflows, and poor development process that afflict Japanese software.

>If you want details and debate about exactly how Japanese software falls short, or if you just in the mood for some good old-fashioned venting about being forced to use it, check out Reddit or maybe Hacker News. This topic comes up pretty often there.

>No, for the sake of this podcast I’m going to assume that we are all in agreement that on average, Japanese software. is just … awful.

What are some examples of Japanese software? I'm not aware of any Japanese software I use besides a few random apps from the App Store, all of which seem fine to me. "Japanese Software is awful" is a common topic on Hacker News?
The temp change part makes sense and I can see how figuring out how to account for that across multiple pans could be challenging for folks that haven’t worked with it before.

Cleaning I’ve had no scratches using bar keepers friends to make a paste and scrape off, ymmv.

Came across this mother Jones article [1] on the success of the gas branding to promote gas stoves which was fascinating.

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/06/how-the-foss...
If "wasting kids' time so they can't do worse things" is meant to be the point of the education system, it's a stupid idea, as it just means when they're adults with more free time they'll catch up on what they missed, and as a bonus they'll carry a lifelong hatred of learning from being trained to associate it with mind-numbing, pointless busywork at school.
Works for me in firefox on X11
I heard that Ifthingsaredoneright is a really nice planet to visit one day.
You're optimizing for the wrong things and working with an artificially limited set of constraints.

The rule of thumb is that we spend 10x the amount of time reading code that we do writing it. When you use cute names to avoid the pain of name changes when the service changes, you're optimizing for writing over reading. It's a mistake. You pay the cost of a name change once, but you pay the cost of an unclear name many, many times per day.

Further, you're introducing unnecessary, artificial constraints. If you need to add new responsibilities to a service that don't fit with in it's existing scope - the correct answer is to make a new service.

Granted, some times we don't have time for either a rename or a new service and we have to duct tape the functionality wherever we can. This is called techdebt. It should be documented, tracked, and paid down at a later date... By renaming the service or refactoring out a new one.

Attaching arbitrary functionality on to cutely named services that don't have logical coherence is not future proofing. It's really bad software design.
Would you throw out sqlite, written in C for a Rust clone?

It is possible to reimplement a relatively easy tool like make, and having learnt from its historical shortcomings it can be better irrespective of the implementation language. But that’s a different point.
Forgive my ignorance as I've never set up anything like this, but how do you then deal with the potential for extremely long passwords? Can that be detrimental on the back end?
In pure dollars per minute, yes, but the primary benefit being alluded to here is a political one. A small team can use tiny discretionary funds and build a working prototype quickly. The same project is dead in the water if you have to go get buy in to allocate company compute, get multiple VP signoff on a project proposal, etc etc.

Cloud computing turned asking permission into asking forgiveness, and that's a real benefit politically.
This is a question mark for me. In nintendo in particular, many of the software engineers ended up being quite important in the company, although there were also game designers so may be the logic is different here?
The sources are “afp and rt” - that’s “Russia Today.”

The website includes articles with titles: “Russia: Ukrainian Special Services Prepare Major Anti-Moscow False Flag in Kharkov” and “Ukraine Truce Ordered by Putin Takes Effect as West Vows to Send Heavy Weaponry.”

This is a Russian propaganda site. They’re trying to demoralize Ukraine by claiming
the US can’t be relied upon.

Edit: I’m trying to find a reputable source for this. Some mainstream news sources talk about it “raising questions”, but nothing definitive. Some mainstream articles have scary headlines about this, but the articles don’t say anything specific.

Zelenskyy has congratulate McCarthy on Twitter in what seems to be an effort to dispel this narrative.

The only news outlet supporting this story is Russia Today.
such a powerful language and such an amazing small comunity. learning lisp is not only fun but it can broaden and deepen your understanding of computing far more than what you get from syntax-soup languages. plus with common lisp you can build industrial strength applications with unrivaled interactive development
It feels like the author is talking more about self-hired indie hackers so the payroll doesn't count. But I don't know if that was really a fashion.
Building code nowadays only allow building A+ energy efficiency homes here (Lithuania) which forbids using vented extractors - only filtered ones.
It's funny because it's an absurd comparison.

It's not at the top of HN because of that specific joke.
/s missing, right?
> ideally, in a segregated account, so that they're not considered the company's asset in the case of a default

Correct, they should be parked in an escrow account on which the exchange has limited control. Also, such accounts are monitored by third party auditors, banks as well as government regulators. At least that’s how it’s in India.
Why is Spotify full of faster versions of pop hits? Let’s bring you up to speed
I'm not so sure. Have you watched them type on computers and phones? It's a bit more complicated because you need an IME, sure, but it doesn't seem to make that much of a difference. I guess it's tempting to draw that conclusion, but I think it's much more related to culture. Even among European countries, and within countries but between age groups, the usage of voice vs text is pretty different.
But with added session id energy too!
The part you've quoted is pretty clear that the cost it's referring to is maintenance cost for on-prem servers:

> ... and paying system administrators to keep them running.

That agrees with your main point, which is that employee time is the main relevant cost. (Nowadays, cloud services seen to have gotten so complex that you still need an eternity of employee time to set them up, but that's another matter.)
Well, it just make files. But it is quite clearly a revamped make.
Fusions of Consciousness
It's not just movies; TV shows in the 60s were shot on 35mm film too, so now when they make Blu-Ray remasters, they look absolutely fantastic in HD.
> The only reason it performed better is because Google would preload over 1MB of Javascript needed to run AMP on its search page.

I wonder what he actual metrics are for how often that was used, what % of people chose one of the AMP results, because those were at the top of the list. That preloaded data might be common for most of AMP pages, which is much better than the mess of each site having different React/Angular/Vue bundle versions or even jQuery versions back in the day.

As a thought experiment, I wonder how much we could save on bandwidth, if all of the "popular" frameworks/libraries split their base code from each individual application's code (we already have code bundling, after all) and browsers included all of those packages of base code, preloaded.

Maybe even follow SEMVER as close as possible, so the browser can always ship the latest minor/patch release for a given major release, to cut down on space needed in the browser.

Something along the lines of:

<script src="/browser/react@18"></script>
<script src="/js/my-app-react-bundle.js"></script>

Whereas another app that needs an older version could use:

<script src="/browser/react@17"></script>
<script src="/js/my-older-react-bundle.js"></script>

And if you don't want to participate in such an initiative (or really want a custom version), you could always make sure that your web server serves the "/browser" directory itself.

After all, browser install sizes are already horribly bloated, a few dozen MB will hardly matter at this point, whereas each site needing 1-5 MB of JS is absurd, especially because those are re-downloaded for each of them, despite the fact that most sites out there use one of like 3-5 popular solutions.
Amber was good but I preferred the flicker-free long-persistence green phosphor (P39) like on the IBM monitor. It had a lot of ghosting but was easy on the eyes. The article is wrong, though. The green in a color monitor is generally a different phosphor from mono monitors which were based on oscilloscopes originally.

Studies supposedly showed that amber was easier on the eyes but I often found it a little dim. Computer users of the time, like 911 operators, often worked in darkened rooms to see the screens better.
not that long ago AI lost a debating match with a human, let's see how it will manage in court
Are you writing everything in sh?
I've migrated from a ./scripts directory to a justfile and greatly appreciate the concision and modularity. I understand and have tried source'ing common bash files, but have never managed to make it feel quite right. ```just``` has bought my current project a lot of time until we replace it with some behemoth like bazel.
I think the population factor plays here.
> would you rather be stupid? think of all the things you would have wished to know before you die.

If someone takes the approach that school is required for learning, then they'll stop learning after finishing university (as most people do) and within a decade they'll be stupid compared to someone who believed learning is a personal thing and kept learning after their formal schooling had ended.
The key part to me:

> But the rest of the word was moving in a different direction. The rest of the world was moving away from dedicated hardware and towards innovative software running on standard hardware platforms.

This piece is about Japan vs the world, but looking at countries other than the US I'm not sure this narrative works.

For instance did the UK become a Software behemoth ? France ? Germany ? Brazil ? India ? Perhaps each country has their own failure story, but if we see the same result accross the board, are the individual specificities significant ?

Most advanced country have seen a few successes and has a decently sized software development power, but not that much bigger than Japan, and certainly not to the scale of the US. The real story would be to me "the US ate everyone's lunch"
The problem with wooden cutlery though is that it tastes like wood. And don't get me started on paper straws. Would much rather be given reusable cutlery to use and return later.
@dang I’d look into this.

Edit: There are two accounts that are happy to publicly disagree with me within seconds of eachother, and three-six that are are happy to downvote privately within those same seconds.

Maybe I’m magically guilty of having The Wrong Take or there are some people that will kneejerk use their network of accounts to downvote things that aren’t useful to their buddies.
So does $10 camping gas stove
“I won Russian roulette, you should play too!”
"To prevent users from changing it, set telemetry.allowChangingOptInStatus to false."
Tempest at Home – Finding Radio Frequency Side Channels (2020)
I too obsess over shorter URLs but I do love the idea that the whole state is just a URL. From the comments, use good enough defaults and URL shorteners where necessary, and it's a brilliant design for a free-tier application.
The comment did not address any points in the article. It only mentions their view that a certain group uses this type of name. That's the "vague" part.
I worked for a startup that was based on the fact ( amongst other ) that Sony was making a good hardware product, but terrible software for it.

Mostly the UI, but also weird restrictions on the input / output while it was a 20k professional pieces of hardware in a highly normalized market. ( easy to see that Dolby was NOT restricting it for instance )

We had a good run. Thanks Sony.

Detail : the setup of that industry made it that Sony and other HAD to let some api open for us insects. That was our opening.
The only difference I see is the Chinese market is large enough that you don't need to appeal globally.
Direnv is the real QOL improvement. You just add a .envrc file, write a flake.nix file listing your dependencies and anytime you enter a project directory you have every project dependency/tooling instantly available, but they otherwise don’t bother you at all.
How can you secure state stored in the URL?
A few more points.

* The :test argument of various sequence processing and other functions would default to equal, not eql. The eql choice is incredibly poor. It doesn't benefit programs that use numbers, symbols or characters as keys, just breaks programs that use lists or strings.

* I would fix the equal function's inconsistencies, like how it recurses across conses, but not vectors.

* I would clean up the following issue in the CL condition system: certain behaviors of condition raising are implemented in specific functions. In CL, if you want an unhandled error condition to drop into the debugger, you have to signal it using the error function. It's that function which performs the callback. If you signal the condition with signal, and it is not handled, then signal just returns. WTF? I would fix that, so that all manner of signaling an error condition will go into the debugger or terminate or whatever.
Don't do this. I see these names as just obvious ways to describe what things do like variables. I wouldn't want to be reading code like
```
beeblebrox = zaphod + trillian
```
similarly names of services in architecture diagram shouldn't be undecipherable (outside of perhaps ultra secret projects -- then maybe those agencies should have a name generator :) ). The cute names even if based on some theme get very old and the cultural context almost always gets lost once the company/team outgrows. Also it's a much easier to refactor away a new service if lets say you find yourself adding a completely unrelated feature to a service named "accounting" or something boring,whereas if you named it "hades" or something cutesy, you don't have any indicator whether the feature has outgrown. I've found it much easier to deprecate/sunset services and systems when they're obviously named too.
One exception I'd say is when nicknames just arise and it becomes obvious to call it that. It's very rare and it happens. Borg at google is perhaps a good example here. It's so all encompassing that it's obvious what it means and calling it another name like "container orchestrator" or something similar perhaps doesn't have same gravitas. I think Microsoft had something called Autopilot which is even clearer but not it can be applied to many things.
I'd rather patch a bunch of openssh servers than a bunch of proprietary software agents that essentially keep reverse ssh tunnels open for me. Or did I miss something?
Was visualizing the cabin during that last 360 circle, followed by the "slew" maneuver, must have been surreal.
Great Job Everybody, We Saved the Ozone Layer
Great. But also keep in mind that breakfast is your most important meal for the day. You could probably skip lunch instead.
True for wealthy countries, but in really poor countries access to things like medical care or legal services isn't a policy issue, there is a legitimate scarcity. Barring foreign aid, the only two alternatives are no access to these services, versus access to an automated version that's worse than a human but better than nothing. So we're not dealing in a world of perfect solutions, just less bad solutions, which is fine. Note that I'm speaking generally, not about the particular service this article is about.
You can successfuly export Japanese games, they're valued because they are different. You can't successfully export Japanese enterprise or user software because it really predominantly is designed for the Japanese market which is very unique. It's not even awful as the author claims, just different.

People always create these complicated narratives for why non Anglosphere countries don't create many consumer or business facing software products and the answer is simply because they're at a comparitive disadvantage both in terms of culture and scale.
While a pure ChatGPT-style bot would be prone to hallucinations and overconfidence, isn't law actually a fertile field for working out grounded chat LLMS?
Pyodide [1] (Python in the browser) is available for writing interactive books like never before. You can let the user not just play with pre-built visualizations but actually modify the code as they see fit - the important thing being that python is easier to parse than javascript.

I am writing an interactive book in this fashion these days, and I am hoping it will help my readers build understanding that is much deeper than the existing static books and resources.

[1] https://pyodide.org/en/stable/
My approach is cute or funny names based on abbreviations, e.g.:

- trump - totally reversible universal manipulation protocol

- Biden - booked Internet device expense network

That way a cute name has a meaning. Additionally one can change the abbreviation if the purpose changes!
AI will give crappy representation to those that can't afford it who will then lose from those that can. This isn't the fastest way to address this particular grievance, it is the fastest way to ensure it won't get addressed at all.

The fact that you can't get a half decent lawyer to represent you unless you are willing to go bankrupt isn't a feature, it's a bug and this just further increases that divide.
In the US at least, you don't need a license to protect your work, you get it by default. You retain full ownership and copyright of any creative works that you author. Nobody can use your work in any way without permission, with exceptions for fair use.

Whether you can afford to defend those rights is another question entirely.
if it has a price, it has value.
Maybe, but around me, house demand hugely outstrips supply, so everyone buys at the limit of what they can afford. For sure, proper dumps that need significant renovation go for less, but they are super rare. Everything else goes for a price set by the size of the home and increasingly, the size of garden. New builds command a slight premium, but that's mostly a marketing premium, which doesn't hold for resale. It's hugely complicated by the location aspect of course - older houses tend to be in better locations. Basically, my point is that trying to attribute regulatory costs to house prices is essentially impossible, and is very much in the noise.
I would say the CS that I remember wasn't a gimme major; not sure about nowadays.
Weird, doesn't lag at all here on Firefox/X11 on my amd igpu notebook
He failed super fast with it, that's a good thing.
Seems a bit weird to say "never watch youtube". It's like never reading a book anymore because someone gave you a bad one. It's up to you to filter out content you dislike, just like with everything else.
What? Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 Movie wasn't enough for you?

I kid. Every 40K fan wants this, but it almost feels like hubris to hope it actually happens. I have to wonder if the Amazon deal[1] is Games Workshop's attempt to get out of the streaming business. Nothing coming out of Warhammer+ is breaking out of the core fanbase; I couldn't fathom suggesting to anyone not familiar with the universe, "Yo, you got to checkout this show The Exodite."

My guess is GW is falling back to its comfort zone of licensing IP: "Amazon Studios today announced that it has secured global rights to Warhammer 40,000...The agreement encompasses rights to the universe across series, film, and more..."[2] When you have two producers from Vertigo Entertainment, one of which happens to be dating Henry Cavill, brokering an escape hatch I'm sure they were, "Yes, please."

My guess is we're going to see Eisenhorn first[3] which feels like a far more approachable introduction to the setting anyways.

[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/henry-cavill-wa...
[2] https://www.warhammer-community.com/press_releases/amazon-st...
[3] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/warhammer-tv-se...
Disclaimer: I am the author of this article.

All applications I’ve looked into so far were communicating via a local web server. It wasn’t always WebSockets, one would also see JSONP or even submitting data to a frame.

They typically run the server on a fixed port. Port conflicts are rare in practice, so these applications don’t really care. In one case I’ve seen port probing however: if one port fails, websites will try to connect with subsequent ports.

As to best practices: I wouldn’t consider websites communicating with local applications best practice at all, by whatever means. It’s generally something to avoid.
Milage vary, my own anecdote: until we got Macs (OSX) as dev machines, every companies I worked for in Japan allowed us to buy two individual machines: the standard Windows one (just like every other employee) and a linux "server" for our dev needs we'd ssh into.
I think you got it wrong: Buying hardware and setting it up and keeping it running, just as described, is / was a high barrier of entry cost-wise (Not to mention the fact that people used to actually running hardware in a data center are scarce). Many (sometimes poor) people could not / would not take that bet.

With "cloud computing" (to me even before there was the word cloud around, but thats nitpicking) suddenly your only real investment needed was your own time, which to you is "free" if you can somehow make a living on the side (some people simply accept to live poor for some time, some had their family, etc.). The few Euros for a vserver (or "webspace" at the time) were doable for most if not all. Not to mention student programs, free credits to lock you down to hyperscaler X, etc. we all have nowadays.

Or comparing it to myself: I learnt programming at the age of 12 because we got a free environment alongside our ISP contract for executing PHP with a mysql database behind it. I would never have spent any money. Now I have been a professional software developer for almost 16 years which I say is thanks to that way lower barrier of entry that was created along the lines of ~ 1995 - 2005.
He does show signs of remorse: “To Melanie, I never meant to hurt you.”

With regards to the guilt question: I did make the honest mistake of misquoting the history of another inmate before, what stands out to me and what I wanted to point out: I don’t think it is a coincidence that both of those inmates grew up in an environment of poverty. We do have the specifics of what happened in childhood in the first case, the second one I can only infer from the fact of teenage drug use and of growing up in a certain environment, which are both things I would expect to have a high correlation with childhood trauma.

This is not to say that Milton is not guilty of a crime, in the legal sense. But to expect someone who has been beaten, abused and has gotten the short end of the stick all their life to take full individual responsibility for something he didn’t have a choice in does seem inhumane to me. In a way like Melanie, he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

And what purpose would such an admission of guilt serve? Would it take make it easier to believe that tragedies like this are fully the individuals responsibility and that the environment the individual grows up in has no influence on the outcomes?