skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That right there is why i stopped using Google.

Anyway, things get a bit kafka-esque when you realise that there is another company doing this WiFi thing and to opt out from that one you need a different SSID suffix. Since you can't have both, you end up with at least one company data mining you.

Why GDPR has not put a stop to this is baffling
I've been laid off ~1 month before a vesting cliff before. Along with a few other early employees.

Looking back (this was 10ish years ago when I was still a n00b), they had definitely given me too much equity based on my experience. If you don't grow as fast as the business grows, you will get booted. Even if you're a cofounder (one of the cofounders "left" about a year later too). Business is business, especially in America.
> ! NEVER USE CUTE NAMES IN ANYTHING !

So I guess you first-born is called pants-pooper?
This takes me to a dropbox page where I have to sign in.
Interesting that they call Lajes a “military airfield”. On the Azorean island of Terceira, Lajes (TER) is a mixed use airfield that is the commercial landing strip of the island since the 1930s, as well as having a multi-national military base on the other side since the 1940s. There is a picture in the story.

The NTSB report called it a military airbase, and other reports say “Military air traffic controllers guided the aircraft”. Civilian aircraft can use the military side with a permit.

Plenty more info on the air field at https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Lajes_Field

Lajes’s other claim to fame is that Bush and Blair met there just days before the Iraq invasion to hammer out whatever deal they thought had to be dealt.

The tale of the stricken aircraft was fascinating. I’ve always wondered, over the decades as I’ve flown slight doglegs over Earth’s oceans, if the strategy to route over remote airfields in case of emergency has ever had a “cost” estimated. How many hours and gallons of fuel has been spent for this safety blanket? The infrastructural insurance spent to prevent lives lost in air travel appears to be much higher than lives on road travel. Could it be that the insurance is for the aircraft, not the lives? Hmm.

The island, and the others of the Azores, are a wonderful place to visit by the way.
Not sure if i'm missing something, however both Grafana and InfluxDB also default to sending data back:

https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/setup-grafana/config...
https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.8/administration/con...

So... by default, i assume whatever i'm using is spying on me, until proven otherwise - and yes, that's kinda depressing...

(and one more reason to use something like Pi-Hole to have at least some attempt to throw a wrench into that practice)
This is good advice in the small, but I think the author is correct for larger services. I can't tell you how many times someone insisted on a name that was "universal such and such" which, uh, turned out not to be universal.

More concretely, this is good advice for services that you expect many teams to hook into, and not great advice for services that you think should not expand 1-3 teams ever.
Yes.

You could build compatibility layers for porting the most complex stuff, but the idea is that an advanced, better OS would make it trivial to build the most commonly used applications for everyday use, and provide benefits on top of them that would make the switch to the new system worthwhile.
Or how about "Sorry, your password may be at most 12 characters long".

Grinds my bloody gears.

What irritates me more is knowing that the people who implement those solutions are probably here. Shame on you, go back and fix it right now!
Ah LAN parties, AoE, BfME 2, C&C ... good days.
The LAN setup times, not so much but we had it down to a spritely 1.5 hours ;)
I think "either this or that" type of thinking is unfit for the topic. A better strategy is to setup a priority: making the name descriptive should be very close to the top, and making it also cute should be somewhere down the line.

Also, cute is really subjective. Personally I think "Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery" is cute and "cli-anal-stats" is very cute, even through you might not think of it the same. The advantage of descriptive names is that it's more recognizable, you read the name, you knew what they do, and that's cute for me.
On your first point, there's some really good results from this paper:

Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.02111

Website with examples: https://valle-demo.github.io/

For your second question, Apple is already rolling out AI-narrated audiobooks. See: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/apple-rolls-out-ai-n...
Input Direction confusion in snake game JavaScript?
Here's the full code:

https://codepen.io/pelko/pen/jOpBmPN

This is the code that I'm interested in:

window.addEventListener("keydown", e => {
inputDir = { x: 0, y: 1 };
moveSound.play();
switch (e.key) {
case "ArrowUp":
inputDir.x = 0;
inputDir.y = -1;
break;
case "ArrowDown":
inputDir.x = 0;
inputDir.y = 1;
break;
case "ArrowLeft":
inputDir.x = -1;
inputDir.y = 0;
break;
case "ArrowRight":
inputDir.x = 1;
inputDir.y = 0;
break;

}
})

What is inputDir variable? (I didn't write this code, I'm learning it from a tutorial, you know tutorials don't cover stuffs well).
What I'm not understanding is why are we setting inputDir at 0th row, 1st column? What does that mean? Can you provide some explanations with figures(if possible) about this issue?
Not a word on economic Armageddon that hit Japan's overly financialised economy at the end of the 80s.

This economic malefactor is now hanging over many of the western countries, the UK potentially the next to collapse.
I write performance-critical code where it is normal to count bits, not just bytes, and keep track of number of instructions generated by your code. The whole web thing where people shove everything into a browser is just weird to me.
It's not an incorrect word, but it can be possibly misconstrued as being infantilizing, because "child" somewhat implies a young person. But I can't think of a better word!

Perhaps it could have been more a bit more tactful to reword to avoid saying "child", like saying "your son is doing well" in this case.
Disclaimer: I am the author of this article.

Yes, default Content Security Policy of add-ons doesn’t allow eval(), and they likely couldn’t figure out how to change it. So it might be that they never even realized the security impact of these changes, which makes it even worse.
OP is sharing a screenshot of a login form.
Almost to 100%, so that's nice.

We've had several years where we had a very wet month then literally nothing after.

And hopefully we don't get any abnormally warm storms that melts some of that.
The lawsuits I've been involved in typically hinged on pretty arcane stuff which I highly doubt is going to work well without an entity that can quite literally think on its feet. Just showing up is 90%, but what you do when you show up is the other 10 and if you botch that you may still lose a case.

'Sorry, that wasn't in my training set' won't cut it if the penalty is >> the price of your legal fees, an extended stay in jail or in some countries the death penalty. Obviously for criminal cases you'd be fairly mad to try this kind of construct but that's exactly the ones where the legal fees are absolutely crippling.

I've yet to have a case that I brought that went to trial end up under 50K in costs and that was with what I thought was fairly simple stuff with relatively unsympathetic defendants.
What was the question I asked
To be honest though, the Civilization games in particular are badly implemented. I had no end of similar issues with Civ V and Beyond Earth (didn’t play the earlier ones). I do agree with the general sentiment, but I find Civilization to be a kind of worst case scenario.
this was windows 3.0, so linux might have been contemporaneous, but just barely (WP tells me 1991 ~= Linux 0.01).

https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_3.0A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Chronology
Brad has a large collection of excellent articles written to educate on topics [1]. Don't miss the others, there are some real gems.

[1] https://garden.bradwoods.io/
All the countries that see/saw software development as a trade instead of a highly paid white-collar position fell behind.

It seems sort of consistent?
So far, it looks like the things we never thought could be automated - and maybe didn’t want to automate - are ”easy” for AI and the stuff we thought could and should be automated is hard.

So instead of AI helping us with the hard work of keeping people alive and well - farming, infrastructure, manufacturing - we’re using it to do the fun stuff for us. Go figure.
Enabling by default this setting is quite annoying from the point of view of the user... But, from the point of view of the software developer, the choice is not so easy:
You decide to either be totally blind on the usage of your software or you jump into the exact situation they are in in this comment thread: piss of people.

At least they choose to let us opt out easily, no?
> All of them require you to grind your own coffee.

I'm not sure if this is one of those weird only-in-America things, but in every European country I've ever visited, you can buy pre-ground coffee in supermarkets, and specialty coffee suppliers will grind the beans for you at the point of purchase. Sure, it might not taste quite as good as if you grind the beans yourself every time, but I wouldn't say all the methods above require you to grind your own coffee.
Johnny, your Algorithms 360 professor is telling me you're falling behind, but I see you're studying nothing but Databases 413, in which you had 97% in the midterm.

Maybe we have to reprioritize your focus.

Sigh, you know, it's the same old story like back in kindergarten.
I used cold air and air conditioning as an example, but my problem is actually the opposite. I live in Minnesota. It gets cold here. I need a constant supply of hot air blowing at the windshield and side windows in order to keep them defrosted. Subaru, in its infinite wisdom, decided to make the "Full Auto" default to having the hot air come out of the foot vents. It also throttles the way back when it detects that the cabin is up to temperature (68°F in my case), which is ostensibly fine, but causes problems with frost. So, every time, I end up having to do a bunch of configuration to override the "smart" HVAC system in order to actually get it to appropriately balance safety and driver comfort.
I’m at a mid size company that is currently moving away from cute names onto meaningful names.

I’m glad we’re going in this direction as the onboarding process was painful, trying to piece together so many arbitrary facts, and I’m reminded of this pain every time someone joins and I have to talk them through architecture diagrams.

Using meaningful names will force us to maintain microservices that honour the single responsibility principle.

Scope creep is a form of tech debt, which must be repaid as opposed to being tacitly endorsed by naming services with mutability in mind.
I use CL for hobby projects and do love it. The main difficulty with “industrial strength lisp” is finding places in the industry that want to do so. :/
Speaking as a Japanese-American, I personally think the biggest problem with Japanese programmers comes down to the Japanese being too crafty and elitist.

What do I mean by this? Basically: If you're a wizard at peeling the skin off an apple with your knife you never need an apple peeler; consequently, you never get a good peeler industry going. Meanwhile, Americans manufacture the best apple peelers because they can't skin an apple with a knife to save their own lives.

Likewise, Japan doesn't /need/ or /want/ the conveniences and luxuries afforded by genuinely good programming. Japanese can and will get by with the hard(er) way and won't care.

Tools exist to address an inconvenience. Good tools exist to make a convenient inconvenience even more convenient. And good toolmakers exist to enable such better conveniences. None of this can exist if there aren't inconveniences in the first place.

This also extends to the hardware side of things, too. Take flash memory, for example. Flash memory was invented in Japan by Toshiba, but nobody cared because Japan was too good. Meanwhile, Intel and the west seized upon the invention and made bank.[1] We all know where Toshiba is now.

This I feel is why Japanese programmers continue to be utterly inept (most still can't produce unicode programs), and why the wider industry in Japan continues to be irrelevant on the world stage from a programming perspective. There is no Japanese equivalent to Microsoft or Google or Amazon because Japan's too good for that.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujio_Masuoka
I approach writing like I approach coding. First, I do a "breadth first" plan of what I'm going to write (i.e., I define the ToC for the doc, first).

Then I go through the headers and just bang in a few quick-and-dirty bulletpoints under each heading -- and I do that all the way through the document.

If it needs diagrams, I hand-draw them roughly, take a photo with my phone and copy-paste them in.

Then I do a third pass where I come back, flesh out the bullet points into paragraphs, and spend some time in Excalidraw knocking out the diagrams.

Finally, I do a fourth pass, to tidy up stuff.

The benefit of this approach is that it allows you to compartmentalise the different cognitive requirements into phases. Phase 1: planning, Phase 2: idea capture, Phase 3: wordsmithing and diagramming, Phase 4: proofreading

This approach works really well for me.
I guess Canadian unis need that sweet sweet foreign money to keep the lights on.
Mini hrv is like $200
I know the argument. It's propaganda, a theory by Milton Friedman taken to an extreme, starting (IIRC) in the 1980s. Just look into it a little, think about it a little. It's paper thin.
I'm not sure I would class de Maistre as a "Christian nationalist", certainly not if we are opening that term up to Protestants. The authority of the Church is essential to the whole of his theopolitical conception.

I was introduced to de Maistre years ago in my reading of Berlin. While I appreciate Berlin for having shared his name and thought to a generation of people who otherwise never would have heard of him, nowadays his reading of de Maistre appears to me to obscure his meaning.

Interesting about Pound; I was entirely unaware that he had read de Maistre, but I definitely see the connection.

I would certainly hesitate to class de Maistre as "proto-fascistic". Fascism was always opposed to the Church and held to an all-encompassing view of the state, and the Church hierarchy is not simply an alternative form that "the state" takes in de Maistre.

However, I can see how it would make sense to class de Maistre in such a way if one represents political thought strictly within the dimensions of "libertarian/authoritarian" etc. [For myself, the key dimension in politics is "modern" (in the sense of an obedience to what is immediate in the senses)/"traditional" (in the sense of an obedience to what is received mediately). There are, of course, many subsidiary dimensions that are important to consider, but from an aerial view it seems to boil down to this primary axis.]
yup. data > gzip > UU/B64/URL-encode > text.
France had more than ok software company.

Bull for instance. Ubisoft and a bazillion other video game company. Alcatel / Lucent / Thales for industrial stuff.

For the deepness of my ass I would say failure was tree fold :

- France like a good old top down approach. That … mostly don’t work for software.

- France decided to listen to our American friends and sell the familly heirloom to the market. ( I’m bitter on this one )

- France like to do it the “right” way, and that is, of course, the French way. That lead us to build our own internet in the 80’s ( see : minitel ) ( see : point 1 )
Happened to me half a dozen times or so over the years.

It's also happened where sites have updated their password policy, e.g. to set an upper length limit after I signed up and now I can't login because it won't let me enter my longer password.
> Maybe it'll spur you on to do something about the other low quality comments that are flooding HN.

He's doing just that. You could have engaged the counterparty, you could have ignored it or you could have just downvoted it and moved on, instead you chose to lower the level purposefully, that is the problem that you perceive as 'the quality of HN comments has gone down dramatically'. If you let yourself be provoked into reducing it even further then you are part of the problem.
Ask HN: 40% of companies YC funds are just an idea
I was reading the YC FAQs and I found this:

> On average, 40% of the companies we fund in each batch are just an idea. Most don’t have any revenue.

Can I see a few such YC application videos or business plans?
You might want to give Zeal:

https://github.com/Zeal-Operating-System/ZealOS

a try. It's 64-bit fork of TempleOS...
Hi. I'm Tim, the author. I'm delighted to see the interest in this subject on Hacker News and happy to answer any questions.

To group and respond to a few common comments:

> 1) Is this unique to Japan? Most other countries have not developed world-dominating software industries.
That is true, but most other countries did not enter the PC era after spending several disrupting and dominating multiple global industries. So, expectations of Japan were much higher.

> 2. Was cloud computing really that pivotal?
Hell, yes! Being able to prototype and get a handful of paying beta customers for a few thousand dollars changed everything. It totally short-circuited the VC "experts" who would say "no one will ever pay for that".
Lawyers specialize, just like software developers do, and they also look stuff up, just like software developers do.
What we need is liability, and returns like in other goods.

If everyone behaved with software like when they are pissed off at shop owners for selling them faulty products, this would have been sorted out long time ago.
I had a college student complain to me recently that many of his fellow students bragged about cheating. I suggested that was a good thing - those were the students you wouldn't want to set up shop with after graduation. 'Cause sooner or later they'll cheat you. It was nice of them to warn you that they're cheaters.
The ADM-3A you mentioned predated the rest and was available in amber, green or white. I remember a few of the amber ones in my middle-school library, as well as white. I also miss the pastel case colors.

The monitor on the TRS-80 was a cannibalized black and white television. Cost was probably a big factor in using white for many of those systems.
this. (but of course I almost never powered it up without thinking of Gibson's "black ice"; cf Burning Chrome)

incidentally, Burning Chrome's description of how Automatic Jack lost his arm, over Kyiv, was coincidentally prescient...
I am confused. Why do the packages smell bad?
I enjoyed reading this. Thank you. Specifically how you beautifully put “Japan is too good for that”, in a way that both compliments and criticizes at the same time.
You can clone HN, or any number of things but they'll have little or no value just because of user adoption
Sorry but this is BS. What's your background here? The author of the article has quite some credibility here having lived in Japan for decades, and worked in said industry.

> And I think the answer is the language barrier.

You need to learn about a dozen English keywords to use something like C++. The rest is abstract thinking. Windows, Visual Studio etc have been available in Japanese for a long time. By that logic, every country that doesn't speak English should suck at software development.

As I read the article, post 2000, the simply wasn't any path forward for a startup. Nobody would give you money. Nobody would take you seriously. There was no easy way to distribute your software. It didn't cross anybody's mind to do so.
Part of the reason this was all acceptable in the LAN party era was that you were having fun together with friends while dealing with the annoyances. You could curse, you could laugh, and you could eat pizza together while you were wrestling with the faulty ethernet hub (remember those?) or whatnot. I remember I once accidentally blew a transformer at my friend's home while getting set up, and we all had a good laugh.

Nowadays, you play a game over the internet and you would be lucky to have even a friend next to you watching enthusiastically and intently.
What is the point of the encoding ? Is it obfuscation for the common user ? What's wrong with http:// url.com/api/?interval=week&periodicity=1... since the encoded version is not shorter.
There’s an X in the top right.

(If you hadn’t posted I would’ve backed out of it too.)
That is a really interesting perspective, thank you for sharing!

The idea of Japanese people honing a skill/job to perfection is definitely a stereotype where I am from. Perhaps it might be a justified stereotype which ties into this. Definitely the apple peeler example rings true.
4. Some countries allow the misuse of "engineering" titles even when people lack the background for having them
Animal meat is an excellent source of protein that belongs in most people's diets.
Any references that prove this? I have been skipping breakfast for years, and feel fine. Eating breakfast makes me feel sluggish
Weird. I’ve always used make on Windows by dropping in a single binary.
Thank you so much! I've struggled to not show stuff on HN for the past decade or so, because I also like to feel free to get into persnickety debates here.

The click-in-one-place cycle sprang from what I'd call a happy accident, after playing with several ways of handling where to put the section you just clicked away from. I realized it was a neat feature not to just send it back to where you had clicked, since that would lead to just A/B clicking, but to shuffle it to the bottom or right side of the deck. It works if you just repeatedly click on the second item. I don't think I could find a way to let a single click on the third item cycle through everything and act in a logically consistent way. A carousel, I guess, but that didn't seem to feel right, because then the next click might skip a bunch. I remember just thinking it might be fun for people to figure it out. I could've just left them alone and not had them reshuffle at all, but what fun would that be?! ;)

Also, twiddling with it sometimes, when I get a new device, I often find myself "missing one". To answer your question about design vs. practicality, this design probably just triggers my own OCD about getting everything arranged just right. I'd say that a lot of software I design is, accidentally, a way to usher users into my own OCD way of thinking about edge cases and make them dot their own i's (rather than repeatedly hammer them with error messages or something). And plus, I like easter egg designs that reveal themselves slowly, when people are actually noticing things. I assume most people don't try to click every entry on a website, so it's nice to leave a little extra to discover for those who do.

Thanks again, your comment made my night.
Japanese mobile phones kicked the ever lovin' crap out of western phones for a very long time. The Japanese got into social media way before the West did. And Yahoo Japan actually still exists and seems to be doing okay.

And that's not to mention the success of Japanese video games.

The big problem that Japanese software has is simply that its market is too much smaller than anything which caters to English. This is why video games can do so well--language is of secondary importance.