skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I strongly disagree with this. If statements have caused me more headaches than any other single programming concept. This is not subjective. When coders use if statements to replace polymorphism, it scatters logic throughout many different files. This has two extremely negative effects: first, to understand the reach of a single component, you need to understand the entire codebase. Second, when multiple developers are working in tandem, you are almost guaranteed to go through an incredibly difficult rebase process since the structure requires everyone to work on the same files.

If statements are useful for validation and bootstrapping decisions*, but if you embed them in your model as part of the operational structure, you’re making a rookie mistake.

*High performance software and scripts are the exception to most rules.
Two? Sure. How about when the whole application is tightly coupled so a change in one class necessitates changes in 4 others? And sure if the logic is straight forward and simple that's fine, but add in that the code is a complete mess with a bunch of weird convoluted solutions to things and whoever wrote it is long gone so nobody knows what it's supposed to do beyond "exactly what it currently does".

I think I'm pretty good at programming but that's generally what I've been doing in my career and to me it's incredibly difficult. Not that much new code, just a lot of wrangling shitty old code and in retrospect regretting that I didn't just delete it and write everything from scratch.
I just don't get how is this not obvious.

There are a lot of seriously SICK or DISREGULATED people who are ILLEGALLY staying in PUBLIC AREAS causing PUBLIC HARM. They are taking part in ILLEGAL activities that are generally degenerate, indecent and uncivilised.

Any normal functioning society handle this with a proportionate response and its really really simple. YOU REMOVE THESE PEOPLE FROM SOCIETY.

They forfeited their right to participate in society through their actions and/or their condition.

This is how we have been handling this issue for ever!
It's not that Americans are unable to distinguish between race and culture, it's that we recognize a long history of culture being used as an argument for segregation.

The race/culture distinction between modern nationalism and racism is just a historically-revisionist excuse. In actuality segregation was heavily reliant on cultural arguments, and the arguments you're raising here now are almost verbatim the arguments raised by segregationists (literally down to "only white people want this"[0]). You might not like to hear that, but it's simply true. Here's George Wallace on the subject[1]:

> White and colored have lived together in the South for generations in peace and equanimity.
They each prefer their own pattern of society, their own churches and their own schools – which
history and experience have proven are best for both races. (As stated before, outside agitators
have created any major friction occurring between the races.) This is true and applies to other
areas as well. People who move to the south from sections where there is not a large negro
population soon realize and are most outspoken in favor of our customs once they learn for
themselves that our design for living is best for all concerned.

Pro-segregation arguments were heavily reliant on culture as a justification for separation. Segregationists argued that separating White and Black culture threatened the "peace" between these supposedly incompatible societies, and they were quick to argue that segregation actually benefited Black citizens and that many of them preferred "separate but equal" access to resources. Black communities had their own churches and schools, they argued, and it was unjust to both White and Black culture to force those rich but very separate traditions to intermingle.

If Wallace was alive today and gave this same speech about immigration, I think you'd be defending it.

[0]: That you link to Charles M. Blow is particularly funny here given that in that very article he argues against strict separation based on culture or race -- effectively arguing not for isolationism for Black communities but for deliberate self-motivated integration back into the communities that they originally fled from in order to recapture political power within a white-dominated culture. Charles Blow is also, incidentally, a strong critic of nationalism/anti-immigration (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/opinion/charles-blow-bigg...), so I strongly doubt he'd agree with your supposed distinction between cultural and racial segregation.

[1]: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdf...
Author here. I've used React Table for this, which has like 20k+ stars on Github.
It's slow.
Imagine you want to edit a cell in a spreadsheet with 40k rows. You MUST create a new array, otherwise React won't update the DOM.
Well, there's not much preventing a C++ programmer from limiting themselves to a feature set similar to Java's (replacing garbage collection with generous shared_ptr usage).
The ads are so inexpensive that just one repeat buyer pays for all the waste.

Think of it — some people have a second home. Or a short term rental. Or a guest bedroom.
> But building complex apps is easier, compared to React.

This is distinctly the opposite of my experience. Being able to reuse common components makes logic encapsulated. The browser sort of has this with custom elements, but that adds its own level of complexity.

React, despite everyone's best efforts with CRA and other tools, is hard to get up and running with. It just takes time, and you inevitably need to eject. But once you codebase gets big, idiomatic React (at least in every case I've worked with) is much easier to scale than rolling your own everything.
Given that we've gone from 0 computers to computers running our world in under 100 years, I don't see how any potential contact with aliens would be anything we could even comprehend at this point.
I was deep into the study of emoticons. When emojis showed up and I didn't have the energy to change my taxonomy.
I was excited to see the author's reasoning and some code to support the claim. Then I reached the end of the page.
Turns out quality content targeting hurts views and engagement.
The Economist generally doesn’t have bylines. Nothing to do with AI.
I would think that in the few remaining CPUs specially designed to run Lisp have a significant historical value. Just having a working original Lisp Machine is extremely rare these days - given that there were probably only 10000 ever being made and the older ones (from the early to mid 80s) are extremely fragile.
> ...building UIs with the document/element api.

When the whole premise is flawed, JSX or not, does it really matter if there is a better or worse way of misusing a technology not meant for UIs?

Leave HTML and JavaScript to Wikipedia and other hypertext document libraries.

Unfortunately, WASM is not there yet, but people are trying: https://platform.uno.
They decriminalized personal use. They didn’t fully legalize use.

Similar to speeding tickets in the US. Speeding is against the law, but minor infractions are not criminal offenses.
I said I can judge your kids better relative to other kids because I have extensive experience doing it. If you think you can do that better without any experience actually evaluating kids, then I think it's you who needs the reality check. It's such hubris to think you can do the job of an experienced professional better without any experience or training whatsoever, and that's the whole problem with busybody parents.

The few sentences you provided are highly correlated with very successful students. Learning Latin in 5th grade is not something 90% of children do. Immediately your kid stands apart for having done that. Same with sports and music. Combine that with good grades, and that's the profile of a top student. What more do you want? Again, what's your conception of a top student, and how do your kids not qualify? Is it because they're not getting straight A's?

Still so wild to me that you, as a father, are arguing post after post to me, a dog on the internet, that your kids are below average. I mean, regardless of what reality I live in, what's up with that? Who are you really trying to convince here?
Why weird? The request was made there. The discussion on the PEP is there. And the person answering is a core Python dev and part of the Python team at meta/insta.

Their team wants it, and is offering hours to help get it done. Is this not what everyone wants from businesses using OSS?
How is this not reasonable? What is your alternative?

Put them in housing? THEY WILL BURN DOWN THE HOUSE!
Allow them to stay? THEY WILL BURN DOWN YOUR STREETS!

Why tf do you think its ok for you to be too scared to let your kids play outside IN THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD!

THIS IS NOT NORMAL. THIS IS NOT OK! YOU GUYS ARE F** CR*ZY!!!!
> I also frequently have fat finger emojis in Slack, Discord or WhatsApp, now it's legally bounded?

No. The judge decided based on the specific facts of this specific case that in this context the emoji meant that the contract was accepted.

You can read the judgement here: https://images.assettype.com/barandbench/2023-07/17ed50ce-4e...

quote: "What sets this case apart is the use of a thumbs up emoji “<thumbs up emoji>” and what that meant in the context of the specific facts of this law suit."

> The most obvious explanation is the confirmation of the recieval.

This was not the understanding of the judge on a balance of probabilities in this specific case.

This is the relevant quote from the judgement: "So in short, what we have is an uncontested pattern of entering into what both parties knew and accepted to be valid and binding deferred delivery purchase contracts on a number of occasions. It is important to note that each time Kent added to the offered contract “Please confirm terms of durum contract” and Chris did so by succinctly texting “looks good”, “ok” or “yup”. The parties clearly understood these curt words were meant to be confirmation of the contract and not a mere acknowledgement of the receipt of the contract by Chris. There can be no other logical or creditable explanation because the proof is in the pudding. Chris delivered the grain as contracted and got paid. There was no evidence he was merely confirming the receipt of a contract and was left just wondering about a contract."

Thus if you want to avoid accidentally accepting a contract by fat-fingering an emoji, then do not accept contracts with short words like "yup". Rather insist on more formality. Simple as that. If Chris would have said in previous occasions "that sounds about right, send it over as PDF, and I will send you back a signed PDF" that would have probably been enough to convince the judge that the simple thumbs up emoji was not meant as confirmation of receipt.
Figuring out where the spam came from doesn't prevent the spam coming. I would prefer a solution that prevents the spam from coming.

I built such a system. I made it available and nobody used it or cared. It works great for me.
One thing I learned for "Design of Everyday things" is that when someone blame themselves for not correctly using a product, it is bad design of the product at fault instead.

In car which offers self driving restrictions people are going to look away. If looking away caused an accident will the be blaming the drivers? Will drivers be blaming themselves? These UXs are life threatening.
Notion plug-in would be fantastic
I'm a VP of Engineering and have been a TL at major React shops.

I don't agree with this statement: "The best benefit to all of this, in my opinion, is that it allows more junior-level people build interfaces that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to build at all. I say, React has commoditized the web app development."

In my experience, React is pretty complicated for junior engineers who don't grok how the actual runtime works. On the other hand, what React has really enabled is for large frontend teams to exist and work together meaningfully. I remember the days of vanilla JS and large codebases. I can imagine that today those codebases would be easier to maintain and work on due to things we've learned and developed (thanks to React, by the way), but I still strongly believe that the productivity gains from React for a team greater than like, 2 front end people on a project that needs to be maintained for longer than 6 months is worth the effort.
You’re missing part of the picture. It also takes a huge time to develop, and requires people with a lot of experience in FE architecture, or you’ll mess up your redux.

I wish I were joking.
Wireguard+SSH+VNC works wonders for me.
You should try building a bridge. Moats are a pitfall, literally.
Calling it a "donation" is even too generous. They use python and would save a lot of money running it (less severs) if it could run multi-threaded. Implementing it themselves and maintaining a fork may be cheaper in the short term but due to ongoing maintenance and third-party extension incompatibility it would likely cost them more in the long run. So they are effectively investing 3 engineer/years of resources to A) ensure the project gets done and B) help it get done faster.

I don't see any charity here, this is just a smart business move by them. When you run as many servers as Meta does being able to run 1/4 as many instances is huge RAM and therefore money saving. It won't take long to add up to 3 engineer/years.
>What's new in this release:

> - Initial support for painting windows in the Wayland driver.

That's encouraging, I've heard that adding a Wayland driver is a challenge because the Windows and Wayland APIs don't match as nicely as the Windows and X11 APIs.
Have you tried creating your own table in React that supports just your use case? That would've been a fairer comparison un my opinion.
What about images with ocr?
Twitter is popular in the zeitgeist, but Reddit is the dark horse.

A Reddit replacement with the reach of meta is a very fertile opportunity.
> It Took 100 VFX Industrial Light and Magic Artists to De-Age Harrison Ford

Only because ChatGPT was down so they had to use RI (real intelligence). /s
> secretly believe

Apparently not so secretly.
The Questionable Engineering of Oceangate [video]
Removing millions of lines of code does speed up your application. Removing react and the 100 NPM modules helps. Removing Java and the 100 Jar files helps. Removing Django/Laravel/Rails/etc... helps reduce calculations and memory.

There are a lot of instruction abstraction layers that just aren't needed. Older games are a great example. I am still amazed at the size of the modern StarCraft, Rollercoaster Tycoon, or CS:GO executables with all the new layers of emulation and compatibility stuff. Sometimes even 10x the original size.

However, there are ways to use libraries like react (preact.js anyone?) without a dozen plugins and a huge runtime layer. Look at HTMLX, the new cool kid that was originally an XHR request that inserts document.querySelector(name).innerHTML = response and is now a large package of 145KB of JavaScript.

Part of the issue is the growth of these frameworks and part is that the developers don't know how to use them in performant ways. They're just trying to ship stuff, performance is optional.
cough cough Snowflake and /r/dataengineering
Honestly does it really matter much if their B2C usage is primarily students?

I’m more curious about their B2B operations which is likely what will trickle into more people’s lives. Their APIs seem to enable quite a few interesting possibilities with a low up front technical investment.

Too me the whole “generate me a bunch of text and display it as text” is a niche use case for a lot of people. Integrations for web search, document search, summarization, data extraction/transformation, and sentiment analysis are more useful and less likely to have hallucinations affect the end product.

Regarding their revenue I’m curious how the Azure hosted OpenAI services work for OpenAI. Billing is all through Microsoft and the documentation tries really hard to make it clear these are Azure services. I wonder if Microsoft just pays a licensing fee or if there is some revenue sharing going on.
React is a legacy, 10-year old technology. People are thirsty for something new, even if it is about going back to basics.
The LLaMA weights still have a restrictive license.
On the Discovery of a Late Acheulean 'Giant' Handaxe
Typescript is pretty much a 1:1 mapping to "modern" Javascript plus type annotations. It will only do non-trivial code transforms when compiling to an old JS version.

Of course one could argue that Javascript itself doesn't allow much control over performance.
I think there's a good case to be made that alcoholics who can't get sober and won't stay off the road, even though they have viable alternatives to driving, are a large enough danger to society that we'd need too keep them away from the rest of us. Ideally that'd be in a treatment center and not a jail cell though. The trick is making sure there are viable alternatives to driving.
Adaptive cruise control with lane keeping (ie. you don't need to keep your hands on the wheel) is already a thing in many cars.
> Sure, same with any big city

Not true. Major asian cities are pretty much safe throughout.

> That said, having lived in Beijing for a bit I would guess it is technically safer there, you just are living in a panopticon.

The guy said asian cities. Not beijing. Also if beijing is a panopticon, what is london? Super panopticon?

Are most asian cities panopticons too? Or are you just picking on beijing because of an agenda?
Can you use WSL2?
>Or my car (unless it’s a really bad car).

Is there a legal standard for this? I like to imagine a legal dispute in front of a judge if the vehicle in question is or is not a total POS that can be sold on the spot.
In my own experience, Chromium browser (which is the base for Google Chrome) works much better (faster) than Firefox on my Pinebook Pro (ARM, Linux).

But I think the author is using Chrome under emulation, so bad performance is expected.
I am willing to bet that statistically (with the number of mattress companies offering X night returns) that a recent mattress purchaser is more likely to purchase a different mattress within X days than the random public.
If there were scandals at fire departments around the country would you eliminate some or all of them?

It's the same with mental institutions. There are people who should be committed for the rest of their lives and nothing, short of curing them, changes that
Exactly! Lifting is very safe and has an incredible cost-benefit ratio.

The conversation around form is especially frustrating since it’s never data driven and really just scares people away from the gym. And by telling people that they must use “perfect” form (whatever that is…) or they’ll get seriously injured, we’re actually priming them to overly fixate on any little tweak they might feel while lifting and actually _increasing_ their risk of feeling pain.

Anecdotally, if form actually mattered so much for injury risk then there’s no way lifting would have such a low injury rate. Go into any gym and you’ll see all kinds of “incorrect” form, yet there aren’t discs shooting out of backs and knees exploding all over the place.

What really matters for injury risk is load and fatigue management, and we have great evidence for that. [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27677917
The selection effect is real, but there is very real value in a university education, too. The author was raised by a single mom and did not have amazing grades in high school. He's watched the door to the middle class that he walked through slowly close over the past 30 years. He's not just talking about Harvard. State schools have become much more selective and expensive, too.

The difference between this and printing money is that money is intrinsically worthless, and a university education is valuable for the knowledge and skills it imparts and the social capital it builds. Controversial perhaps on HN, but true.
This isn’t a rendering engine, it’s a library layer that just provides an interface to OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, etc. The pics in the article look like OpenGL renders, and this library is not really making its own “artistic choices”.

Even if it was a rendering engine, having worked on rendering engines for both games and film, I’m unconvinced by your argument. In fact, the goal is typically to avoid baking artistic choices into the engine. The goal is usually to represent the choices made in the scene and the staging by the actual artists faithfully without bias. Sometimes there are some identifiable styles that emerge out of the technical limitations of an engine, or occasionally from unique technical features. It’d be a stretch to call those artistic choices. There can also be uniquely stylized engines that make unique artistic choices, and they’re pretty niche so I can’t even name one off the top of my head, but this library by Meta definitely isn’t one of those.

And again, if you look at the two specific images in question in the article, there really aren’t any particularly unique artistic choices there, neither in the rendering engine nor in the staging. They look like screenshots of an OpenGL render of the CC licensed Bistro, using a camera view and lighting that is similar to thousands of other shots of this scene.
Communists think that it possible to build communism by killing of «bad» (rich) people, until good people, liberated from burden of capitalism, will build communism. In their imagination, it's OK to kill 30% of population to build heaven for them.
The author has missed a critical insight from their evaluation — the fact that they could develop a tool in vanilla JS more simply than React is only because they first developed it in React. Developing with a framework gives you the advantage over bespoke tooling — you can experiment and iterate faster. It is only having had that experience, and exploring the problem-domain so clearly by building it once, does the second build happen to quickly.

So yes, maybe React was over-engineered for their problem. But I think they only realised they over-engineered their problem after having over-engineered their problem...

A better point would be "I used React to test-build an app then to build it again natively for speed."

--

As an aside, I do agree that React (and I'm extrapolating this to many of the web frameworks) have an incredibly steep learning-curve and onboarding cost. I'm an avid Vue fan and I've found the architecture around Vue 3's "single-page components" to have created so much technical debt and complexity that I spend more time debugging the build pipeline then actually developing. I still like the flexibility and acceleration I get with Vue, but Vite often leaves me feeling like I'm just fighting the framework... I guess I just miss Gulp.
I will never understand why so many use unnecessary complex things, especially if better and simpler things existed befor and after.
I didn't mention anything about restricting it, the law will eventually get around handling this type of thing, probably in a DMCA-ish manner would be my guess.
I look at things like this post and then look at my manager breathing down my neck for an artificial deadline. I have made the wrong choice more than once in life.

I wonder - is my humanity lost? Am I going to end up being that old guy with soulless droopy eyes? With no friends? With no real connections?
>Archaeologists Find Ice Age Axe So Large It's Difficult To Pick Up

https://www.newsweek.com/archaeologists-find-ice-age-axe-lar...
I love rehabbing legacy code. It's like furniture restoration for apps.
And that's how SAFe* was born :]

* https://scaledagileframework.com/
If it's estimated several centuries are necessary for technology to advance enough for reanimate them, this rounding off error adds up to quite significant.
Reviewing MultiPaxos under partial network partition from the OmniPaxos paper