skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issue at hand is not about cleverness.

Code was devised to address a specific problem (DRY), which it did quite elegantly. Then, the situation evolved, rendering the solution inappropriate. When a controller starts to deviate from the standard approach, it's best to refrain from inheriting from the base controller and instead create custom ones. Once all controllers operate independently, the base class can be safely removed.

The key lesson here is not to avoid cleverness but to be aware of when the initial problem becomes obsolete.
Yes true, it was very much a warranted reputation, no doubt about that. I still use Firefox and am put off about its UX much in the same way as when chrome was released.
I wish there was a higher IO count one...
Haha, I don't think I ever used that trick but on a number of projects I know I dropped in a `generateGradient.php`-type file that had it's output cached so that in CSS we could just do `background: url(/generateGradient.php?start=XXXXXX&end=XXXXXX)` (and maybe some other params as time went on) to make changes easier.
What did google "once stood for"?

My understanding is that google tries to make money, everything else is brand marketing.
Also https://foxdot.org/
I mean, a lot of people work on things that, despite being billed as a Great New Thing, are throwaway projects that will disappear without a trace in a few years (once management changes, the market turns, or the founders/VCs cash out, or the SEC comes knocking, etc.)

At least a 35yo codebase probably actually does something more useful than sell a narrative whose purpose is to enrich a few random jackasses.
The Gulf Stream isn’t going to collapse
None, but the reasons are more legal than technical.

None of those projects have come close to Microsoft in terms of creating a product, for pay, that average people reasonably rely on.

Again, using a legal definition of reasonably; a widely used and paid for product can be held to something like a "merchantability" standard - especially if Microsoft has ever claimed their product to be safe and secure, which I'm fairly certain they have.
This describes our legacy codebase, which is quite cleverly optimized for the original business case our company had ~15 years ago, and which is now a massive millstone dragging everything down into a black abyss. Just try to add a feature, I dare you.

I would say: design for flexibility rather than cleverness in most cases.
Ask HN: Where do virtual phone number services get the numbers from?
There are hundreds of free and paid services or just plain websites which have virtual phone numbers available for receiving SMS messages.

For example:

https://online-sms.org

https://quackr.io/temporary-numbers

(there are hundreds of those and they work, I've just tested it)

Then there are professional services such as Twilio.

Due to the abundance of those websites I assume it must be fairly straightforward to get such a virtual number yourself, but my best Google Fu didn't yield any good results.

Does anyone know how this works and would be able to shed some light on it?
If the function grows like you describe it's because the developers are doing bad work. Instead of extending the function into a monster it should be split appropriately according to the new requirements. In some cases it may end up being multiple classes and that's fine. What isn't fine is cramming multiple classes worth of complexity into one function just because it almost did what you needed.
Which is why I always use the term „clever by half”. Simply clever is actually good and a term of praise. Clever until an unforeseen (but foreseeable!) consequence bites back, is, well, not clever enough.
Google should go back to slapping a huge "Beta" label on every single product.
The beauty of nuclear weapons being possessed by both sides in a conflict is that it's in neither sides best interest to fire the first nuke.

The West being aligned with Ukraine would prevent Ukraine from getting nuked in an extended conflict.

That being said, there would have been no extended conflict for Ukraine without the West's assistance, they simply wouldn't exist without the international assistance, reducing the chance of Russia using a first strike against Ukraine to 0.
None of what you suggest has any impact, and your model of how many people it takes to influence a Senator is frankly delusional. A max donation to a campaign will get you a signed thank-you card if you're lucky.

Policy on stuff like tech is set by staffers, most of whom work from material helpfully pre-drafted for them by lobbyists. There are some legislators (like Wyden of Oregon) who have very good in-house people on tech policy, while others have no expertise and have to rely on outside parties. But the idea that anyone can be bought for a donation is heartbreakingly naive (and fortunately false). Large donations at best get your calls answered by the junior staffer whose job it is to protect the Senator/Congressman from ever having to talk to people like you directly.

Major legislation on tech is rare, and it's generally much easier to kill something you don't like than to get a provision put into it. The latter course requires being deeply plugged in to the people drafting policy (again, mid-level staff on the Hill, who have zero awareness or interest in which private individuals are making campaign contributions) and enough clout and political ability to shepherd your desired policy through the full sausage-making apparatus of Congress.

Look at the current dueling bills on crypto for an example of how the process actually works. None of it is driven by strongly-worded letters from constituents.
Hate speech to me doesn't exist. A controversial view, I know, but the alternative is a dystopic censor hellhole.

Here is ADL's link on Antifa who are overwhelmingly the cause of political street violence in recent years
https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/who-are-antifa

Antifa killing MAGA supporter in Portland
https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_race-america_antifa-protester-...
> in those days you could sink Ethernet with a faulty PC

That is still possible in the modern era.
That is exactly my worry. It's hard enough as it is with VPN / IP detection, headless detection, Captchas, etc. WEI would probably mean game over for all but a handful of Google-sanctioned bots.
Ask HN: Alternatives to GNU Make?
If so, which one?
Not a physical one but I do a lot of basic calculations through Spotlight.
> Doesn't your car give you a warning on the screen every time you use the handle?

Warning: Door's Handle is only there for emergencies. Use the door's window to get out of the car. UX design 1.0 /s
Will be hilarious when oil is continually $100+ a barrel and their roads become dirt roads, their commutes costing significant portion of their income.
Because schools need cheap laptops that are easy to centrally manage by a single platform. Google also has a Workspace for Education suite that includes all the Google Docs stuff and teacher tools (Google Classroom). They also have a no ads or data collected policy.

It's very enticing. There's no real competition. The closest is Microsoft but Windows machines are much more expensive to manage and have worse performance on low-end hardware.

Let's imagine what HN wants - a Linux laptop running Firefox and LibreOffice. You're not going to get fleet management features, collaborative document editing, or built-in classroom management tools. Kids are still going to Google to search for things (and use ChatGPT).
"can be as easy as restarting the browser"

That is nothing like "convenient profile switching".
It's a lot less spooky when you consider that your desk can hold your coffee mug forever. It's exerting force on the mug, but not doing any work.
that’s the angle.

if you think musk (or zuck) is dumb, well, this one weird fact they discovered about worker productivity will shock you.

it’s clickbait. it held your attention enough to comment on it. but that’s only a partial success.

did you click?
I had almost purged the

<!--[if IE]>
Styles/elements here
<![endif]-->

hacks from my brain but this brought it all back.
so a very compact ansible/salt stack? also it's "high performance" but what did you performance test this against?

also what's protecting the exposed endpoint on the server side? Seems like you can spin up the server, and it will accept remote commands from anybody that knows the exposed port on the server (looks like 9000 by default)
> Nobody here takes it seriously.

A downfalling desperate Putin is likely to cause serious damage with nuclear weapons. I think should be very cautios, but am not suggesting we should giving in to his his nuclear erection. The doomsday clock is 90 seconds to midnight for a reason.
I'm not disagreeing with you but just pointing out that it's kind of wild that "100M parameters" isn't considered SotA anymore. Amazing how far we've come in such a short time.
I hope it worked for you, but I don't see any big difference. Web technology will become dated faster than the old C++ codebase. If you learn some web tech stack today I expect that it will be obsolete in 5 to 10 years. What are you gonna do next? Move to another small company for half the salary to learn everything again and compete with 20 year olds?
Sure.

Bittorrent-like tech has answers for you here.
You should maximize the geometric EV, not the (usual) arithmetic EV. In your average calculation you took the arithmetic mean, but the geometric mean is relevant.

(2.25 * 0.9 * 0.9 * 0.36)^(1/4)

=0.9

Which is below 1!

To test the geometric mean with the earlier example ("+100% is equivalent to -50%"):

(2.0 * 0.5)^(1/2)

=1, as expected.
What is a YC company?
From outside the US this reads like "Pay protection money to the Mob without surprise bills"
My take is, IF I'm going to live in a city anyway (as I currently do) then I'd like to have as many things as possible within walking distance. And in point of fact, I can walk to the grocery store, many restaurants, another grocery store, a hardware store, my insurance agent, my dentist, etc. And I can easily bicycle to my doctor's office. So yeah, that's nice. And living in an apartment is part of that current setup, which is acceptable, but a bit stifling. In particular, I'm running out of room for all of my books.

BUT... all things being equal, I'd rather NOT live in a city environment to begin with. I would actually prefer to live on a large enough plot of land, with enough trees surrounding me, to where I can't see another house without making some effort (eg, walking out to the edge of the road). Ideally I should be able to walk around naked outside my house with zero risk of anybody calling the cops. Because I like to walk around naked? NO. It's just the principle of the thing. And more to the point, I should be able to start a big bonfire in my yard, play loud heavy metal, and have a dozen or more people over, drinking and partying, and not have to worry about bothering my neighbors and having the cops called.

The size of the house doesn't actually matter a whole lot, but I would like a fair amount more space than I currently have in my apartment.

Anyway... I moved from the latter environment to the former for career reasons, but I strongly desire to eventually move back to latter - at least part time.
Tidal Cycles communicating with Ableton through MIDI makes for an extremely fun composition experience. The power of simple, declarative sequencing combined with predictive randomness has transformed how I write basslines and riffs
> Do you have any concerns about Google's CEO's salary ($226 million) or failed products (https://killedbygoogle.com/)?

The question here isn't "is Google's CEO bad?" it's "Should I be using Firefox on the assumption that it will help create a 'free' web?". I don't care about anyone else's salary.

And no I don't care about their other failed products, it's totally irrelevant.
> And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost.

I compared the versions of Safari I had to support in 2017/2018 to the versions of IE I had to support in 2017/2018 (11) for that specific contract. There is definitely no contest when it comes to the older versions.

I find it interesting that folks assume I was comparing to Chrome - I have used Firefox as a daily driver for nearly two decades now. That's what everything got tested in first, and yes - even Chrome had a number of stupid flex bugs at that point in time.

> Have we all forgotten using images to display a rounded corner?

I hope you didn't forget that HTC file to make transparency work...or you'll have nice grey backgrounds on your rounded corners!
We are a software company that specializes in cross-platform mobile development and caters to both American and European markets. Our tech stack is robust, allowing us to deliver top-notch solutions to startups and software factories that require additional resources to scale their team.

Location: Montevideo, Uruguay

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: React Native, Ionic, NextJs, Ruby on Rails, Nodejs, AWS

Email: hello@metalabs.software & marco@metalabs.software

Web page: https://www.metalabs.software/
> - Google - search, ads on search pages and nothing more.

> - DoubleClick - third party ads on other sites.

No, hard disagree. One of the things that gives google its position of power is that its both an ad exchange and a publisher (as participant in said exchange).

The correct way of breaking is NOT search+ads vs third party ads. It's search vs ads.

Make google a publisher that DOESN'T own an ad exchange and make it compete for search ad revenue on equal footing with everyone else. Lets see how well it does (I'm guessing not well).

Same goes for facebook.
My Favorite Vim One Liners
CleanShot X for Mac is a great example of this. It's basically a screenshotting and screen recording tool that you install. But you can also tell it to upload your images and videos to their cloud and get a link to share them with your friends or coworkers (especially helpful for screencasts for example).
The present threat is no nuclear in nature.

Planes from Belarus flew into Polish airspace, and Lukashenko has threatened that Wagner troops are eager to enter Poland.
https://archive.is/ejvtE

I guess this is the future -- more evidence for any sort of "loyalty" being entirely dead. A company not even at risk of shutting down, not at risk of tanking entirely just decides it's going to lay off employees after some rough quarters because it looks bad for shareholders. Wikipedia [0] lists their net income in 2022 as nearly $13B ( ! ). Yes, loyalty is dead, and companies continue to show that they're the ones burying it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm
Just like how Firefox earns money, sell default search engine rights to highest bidder (google, bing) etc , Chrome itself can become billions of dollar business.
Very much so. The concern is that such devices can be hacked and used to exfil information from inside the classified space. While that might sound far fetched, we're talking nation-state actors who are trying to penetrate the most critical of spaces. They're willing to go to great lengths for this because the potential payoff is vast.

If he took a video call in the space using their VC equipment, that's bad enough. (the understanding being that, you use equipment for work purposes, announce that there's an uncleared call taking place, and sanitize the area).

Accidents happen. I've seen people forget they were carrying a phone, it beeps, and they go running out of the room to deposit it, and later self-report the breach. No biggie. But if he brought in an actual phone, and retained it, and then took an incoming call on it, from within a secured area, well, then I'd expect the consequences to be exactly what happened.

To be clear, The article doesn't make clear that it's what happened, but if I watched someone do that, I think my jaw would fall off.

Edit: This applies to U.S. Government spaces which the article seems to imply. Private company security policies probably mirror this in many ways, but I can't speak for them.
No the parent was right, I commented.
Wow, that's really terrible list when on top you've got "Marvel's newest Captain America is an LGBTQ+ activist" as a fulfillment for "Captain America Rebooted As Feminist, Atheist, Transgender Hydra Agent"
Location: Uruguay (UTC-3)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Ruby On Rails, .NET Core, Python

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10ResX5R2RkPHODOBrfSNqJ_OTqH...

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/merodriguezblanco/

Email: merodriguezblanco@gmail.com

I am a detail-oriented Software Engineer with more than 10 years of
experience working remotely both in small and large teams for small startups and
large corporations, most of them located in the United States.

My background skills include a great experience building REST micro-
services with Ruby on Rails and NET Core. I also have experience working with JavaScript.

I have worked with different Agile Methodologies and can adapt easily to your workflow. I had the chance to mentor new hires for the companies that I’ve worked for, which allowed me to develop my teaching skills.

Some of my clients also gave me the change to give lightning talks, TOIs and organizing book review sessions for several teams. I strongly believe that this way of sharing my knowledge with other developers was crucial to strengthen
many of my technical skills.
Do you have any opinions on Tidal vs supercollider on its own, or other systems like PD, max/msp?
I have spent enough time fixing nonsense bugs in Safari to say that. Sure the devlog might look full but there's a very wide gap between Chrome or Firefox. Maybe it's not a priority compared to their revenue stream, I don't know.
Yes, this is what the author meant, no doubt.

To be clear I'm not being sarcastic. Many frameworks have code generators that writes boilerplate for you.
> A judge can then rule on it

And the result of a ruling is a court order to do something. Sure, "ordering an antitrust" is a bit less precise than "ordering a series of actions that result from a successful antitrust prosecution", but I was hoping it to be clear enough.

My point was that judge do issue orders, and they really don't like people finessing around the wording.
> It looks like it was actually forked by someone on GitHub with the username cyphar

Interestingly, cyphar appears to be a SUSE employee.
The real hidden message in the article is: no matter how great you think your code is, when you revisit it a few years later, it will (nearly) always be crappy.

The lesson is to keep it simple so everyone can recognize that it's crappy and help fix it/make it worse.
It's interesting how scarcity of work experience in a technology can drive up advertised job opportunities which in turn drives technology adoption as everyone seeks to boost their resume with the in demand skills.
Wow, those 10TB drives are dropping like flies!
Well, that's one of the reasons demonstrating the Meissner effect is considered a better evidence of superconductivity. Of course any physical experiment always has a noise floor and a finite error. You can't exactly ever measure zero resistance because your probes and the probe-sample interface have nonzero resistance…

But looking at that graph, it would be an incredible coincidence if the resistance dropped like it does and then suddenly stabilized to some very small but nonzero value… That would probably require entirely new physics to explain and would be a much bigger news than "merely" a 110K Tc superconductor!
Can't you have Firefox unload old tabs?
Writing new code with no existing constraints or requirements isn’t some masterful feat of engineering, usually.

Working in an existing code base, on a team with multiple features going in, gathering requirements from stakeholders and negotiating deliverables on a timeline while refactoring is happening, libraries being upgraded and CVEs being fixed - navigating all of that while being a useful, compassionate team member - that’s priceless on a team.
I find it quite faster to type than chat.openai.com
Yeah if you have numerical methods intuition, 99% of the time you can get away with a guesstimation for practically anything. Most people are doing it wrong when they are trying to use calculators for complex computations directly. With a slide rule it's pretty obvious, as the precision is expensive on it. My grandfather, a mechanical engineer, taught me how to use slide rules and nomograms when I was a kid, but I still use calculators since they need fewer workaround tricks.
I did. My statement was hyperbolic. More directly: P-values are more resilient to misuse at their extremes.
I'd been under the impression that most of the useful stuff from servo had already been integrated back into gecko, but I just checked their git and was glad to see that development continues, despite mozilla's layoffs
A lot of the things people bitch about in Safari end up being security things, like the viewport. Arguably, the page shouldn't be able to mimic the browser chrome without some user interaction first, and being able to hide the chrome and convince the user that they've just typed their bank url into the browser is an anti-pattern. So, yeah, good job Safari.

Most bugs I've found aren't bugs but valid "defense in depth" agains the bastards who want to steal my grandma's money.
Robots cause company profits to fall at first, then rise
Yes, stiction is a real issue in old hard drives. In fact something that used to work well if you were cold booting an old server even in the mid 90s, with the expectations of an immediate migration, was giving the drives a good sharp slap to help break stiction so they could spin up. The only issue is it could cause a head crash. Another fun trick from back in the day was sticking hard drives in the freezer to cause the platters to shrink enough to dislodge the head and restore the air gap if you had a head crash so you could try to recover the data.

As much as I love hardware, I much prefer our current solid state wonderland.
Great question. Those AppleTV devices could be repurposed. Has anyone just targeted them for use?
They finally start using the tech buried millions of years ago by Who-Who-Must-Not-Be-Mentioned.
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE (Part Time/Contract)
FULL STACK DEVELOPER

Time Zone: US time zones

Technologies: React, Vue, Express/Node, Mongo, AWS, Laravel/PHP

Email: me+hn @ segoviacristian dot com

Rate: 40 usd hour

Based in: Latam

Have about 5 years of experience working at US based startups and small companies. Mainly looking for frontend work, but can do full stack as well.

Would be happy to do some free consulting calls with any startup founders just getting started wanted to talk about what to look for when hiring or what their infra might look like when getting started, or if looking to hire in latam(have experience building remote teams, looking for devs, interviewing, and hiring etc) I can provide assistance with that.
The funny thing is the last thing I did code generation for just generated classes which inherited abstract base classes. Then we had to inherit the generated code to extend it. It massively increased the complexity.

Then someone came along and invented partial classes in C# which made this problem go away. Well it would if anyone wanted to do all the maintenance legwork which they didn't so half of it's a 5 class inheritance tree, some of it's partial classes and someone got really fed up with this shit and just arbitrarily stuffed Dapper in there one afternoon.
What are developers building with Azure Cosmos DB?
to any Google engineers who read this message. if you have any love for open and free web, you can either get out of Google or change it from within. but let's face it, you are impotent if you want to do the latter.