skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most execs at most companies really are driven by very short-term planning and thinking, as it benefits their career to do so. They just need enough good quarters/years to justify their promotion from VP to SVP or SVP to CEO. Nobody gets blamed and punished three years after they move on to a new role for the shortsighted choices they made in their previous role.

Having said that, Cutler is not one of those execs, but was certainly subject to pressure from above to get systems out the door and keep the revenue stream coming in. As he mentions early in the interview, he’s really bothered by shipping bugs, really disappointed with the quality of software engineers in the industry, and really bothered by program/project managers treating every bug like a rare corner case. I concur with him on all three. Most of the bugs I file are “corner cases”, and yet I hit those issues every day and my bugs have multiple dups in the database and/or my bug gets duped back to an early report.

Having spent a few decades in this industry, all of it in Big Tech, I have yet to come across a company that doesn’t fold to the same sort of pressure, even if the engineers and first-level managers are pushing to get bugs fixed before shipping, and pushing for more frequent bug fix updates.
> that description is what happens when programmers do marketing

To me, this statement implies that developers of Lexical would be interested in maximizing their user base, as opposed to, say, attracting the right kind of users.
Running my own authoritative DNS server
I think you picked a bad example, because the "computation" in NP is not really a computation to most of us.

Most programmers think that computation means "something that can be done on a Turing machine or equivalent". It isn't hard to extend this idea to things like a true random number generator, or a quantum computer. This shows your basic point that computation need not be deterministic.

But the "nondeterministic" in NP doesn't speak to an actual computation that programmers think can be done. It speaks to a computation that we'd like to be able to do, but most of us think can't be done. (There is a prize for proving that impossibility.) And while there might be models of computation where said computation can be done, few programmers would think of them as modeling an actual computation.

Here alert readers might jump up and say, "Quantum computers might be able to solve NP complete problems!" True, we don't have a proof that it is impossible. But at the present time, there is no reason to believe that it is possible either. See, for instance, https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf. And so it appears that for actual computers that can be built, there is no computation matching how we'd like to solve NP complete problems.
It encourages the continued and expanding collective investment in it as a platform, as a location for information. We all know how this ends, and we would all rather that information be on a thousand different independently-owned Mattermost instances than on one worse-than-Reddit black hole.
I think one of the reasons behind PornHub's tech stack is that their industry doesn't really lend itself to VC, so building an engineering playground for PH would be a waste of money as no amount of complexity would net them VC money (nor an invite to a cloud provider conference), where as most startups live and die based on the VC funding their complexity and buzzwords allow them to grift.
Nice features. If I like it enough I could get the paid version.
It seems like you're saying that the way salary negotiation works is: the manager benchmarks the candidate's salary request against an alternative investment, like bonds, &c -- not an alternative candidate in the market place -- and then considers whether to spend that money on the candidate or on the investment.
I can last years with only Python, so those little detours won't expend as far as React.

It's more likely that I will do something like "a full web app from installing the OS on a fresh laptop to coding it to hosting it on server".

It would also be more beneficial: plenty of tutorials for individual techs, rarely they teach you how to integrate them together and go beyond the toy example on localhost.

But for that I need a better platform than substack. Therefore that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Glyphy
>it's clearly all cultural. Take the Canadian out of Canada, make them report to American bosses and clearly they can create popular new software, no different to Europeans or Indians or Chinese ... the differences therefore must be related to government policy and culture.

By default, most of the top-of-field Canadians work in the US because it's at least 50% more profitable (among other reasons).

I agree with the premise about culture generally but you can't attribute all of it to culture. A great deal can be attributed to money and "ecosystems" around certain industries.
I’m surprised to hear that. We had an entire job tracking system in a large factory running off of them and they lasted years. This was with daily handling by factory workers.
This is such a cool result. I would love to see the next step of creating a tool like Resilio sync that builds upon this work!
The closer you are to the capital, the easier it is to slice off a piece.
Finally, a Smart Home for Chickens
HGO, Hunch-guided Optimisation
Alternate, works for me.

https://archive.ph/u3HmK
As a contract medical device manufacturer I was incentivized to charge more. A device which costs $1 to make can only reasonably be marked up so much before it's a red flag. A $100 product can more easily be marked up to $300. So all kinds of little extra features are added when the $1 product got you 99% of the functionality. So many people are on the take there is no end in sight. The doctor sees the admins make more, the admins see the insurers make more, the product distributers, the device manufacturers... so everyone keeps asking for more.
It's my browser running on my computer, I get the final say in how content is presented to me.
>Europe

>needlessly dense cities

Guess you've never been in Asia? European cities are far from too dense.
Not a rant, very valid points!
The issue is that now smaller ISPs or honest ISPs have to raise their advertised prices compared to Comcast.
What you think about doesn't apply to healthcare. You cannot pick your emergency room like you might select ddifferent groceries, because if you do, you die.

It is not as if there are other nations with formidable health care systems that are way more efficient that one could look into.
That number for the amount of text they accumulate is underwhelming. It adds up to 15TB which would fit on a $300 HDD. Sure it has to be indexed, searchable, able to be quickly accessed, probably tiered into RAM or SSD, racked into some kind of system, housed in a data center, powered, etc. 40x that would be less than one of those bay area engineers.
Okay, maybe you should do that and come back with a proper analysis. Personally I would trust federal numbers more than “some guy says nuh-uh that can’t be right.”
That still won’t do what sponsorblock does for you with ads the content creator injects vs youtube
My spouse moved the first one to her office after trying it out for a few days. That is the reason we got a second one :D

The price was within range. I did not want to spend ~2k on a Herman Miller. These days there are many options around the 500 EUR range though.
The typical expansion of pre attribute likely/unlikely macros (for example from the linux kernel) is buitin_expected. Hot/cold should also work if a bit extreme.
The AMA has pushed for years to artificially restrict the number of physicians that universities are allowed to push out. If I recall, that number has been held steady for a couple decades or more.
it used to be considered a common and annoying problem to accidentally type a lot using a different language keyboard (e.g. have English keyboard on, but trying to type Russian in), that a lot of people had an automatic keyboard switcher installed for that case (I'm talking like, 20 years ago)

one popular app for that also contained a keylogger with your whole typing history

somehow i don't miss the switcher, but i miss the history sometimes. it surely would be a security nightmare, of course
I've been a dev for a very long time, and I still regularly hear weird software stories from colleagues that are not just "the same old thing" again. They're a pretty small percentage -- maybe 2-5%? -- but despite the low flow rate, the well never seems to actually empty.
Related current thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37972271
An independent YouTube would figure it out.

Netflix works. Facebook works. Ad-supported video streaming works.

A standalone YouTube would remove the insane perverse incentives and double dipping that Google has wrought in their ownership of YouTube.
No, just no

Health care is a situation where competition cannot be a spur to reasonable costs because individual consumers are simply not in the position to make the kind of "free market" choices that economists (or more often free market ideologues) expect they'll make.

Moreover, the malignant and abusive US health care system is in fact a product of layer upon layer of failed "efforts to create competition" intended to reduce cost "through competition" to the point that by now all the abusers really know the dance and will be profiting next year from any further or replacement layer you add this year. (and "no regulation then!" as the US 1900 results in doctors being just heroin dealers - like my great grand father interestingly enough).

Most other industrialized nations have a state run medical system that's far superior and cheaper than the US system. They didn't solve their problem with "competition".
Some problems are people or process problems and can’t always be waved away with tools. Sometimes the answer is to enforce growth of the professional discipline to update documentation alongside code changes.

A way I addressed this was to add a checklist item automatically to PRs, “did you review and update the docs?” And put the docs in the same repo so that a code change will have documentation updates in the same PR. It’s mostly worked but still relies on discipline.

It’s kind of interesting how hard this is for some. The code change is 5 mins. Testing is 20. Documentation is another 10. I’ve seen lots of people not want to do the testing and really not want to do the documentation.
First of all -- I want to thank you all for robust discussion on this subthread. I've learned a lot about the experience of other folks using Prolog and where they've gotten mileage out of its unique strengths. It's been eye opening to see for sure!

Part of the reason I wanted to ask this question because I had a suspicion that there may not necessarily be as large of a gap between SQL and Prolog as there may initially appear. Said another way, I wondered if there was a Prolog (or Datalog) to SQL compiler used in production.

I recently stumbled upon Logica [1], which appears to based on a predecessor (Yeladog) built at Google. I don't have experience using it, so I'm not sure how complete the implementation is nor how efficient it is. I'm curious if anyone has used it before and if so, what their experience was. At first blush, it appears to bring the best of both worlds: the expressive power of Prolog/Datalog, combined with the standard operational tooling of SQL which is a common core dependency in many if not most production software systems. Two questions:

1) How does Datalog compare to Prolog for common problems you might use Prolog for? Any things you can do in Prolog differentially that wouldn't be as easy in Datalog and vice versa?
2) What issues might come up in system that uses a Datalog to SQL transpiler? Given that some of the answers in this thread about the efficiency of using Prolog to do constraint solving, it seems like such an approach might lose some of the efficiency that makes it so powerful in the first place. On the other hand, if it doesn't, it seems like it'd bring a killer app to SQL, which is the ability to do constraint solving in a nearly native fashion inside SQL.

[1] https://github.com/EvgSkv/logica
Ugh, or large scale dairy-farm. Milk production is gross! But, manually getting milk from one happy cow is... much less gross...almost fun even.
I don’t know why you were downvoted, this seems like an obvious connection to call out.

A bit related but separate, one of the most compelling arguments that anti-vax has is that vax mandates translate to a built in mandatory market for manufacturers. You don’t have to agree with these but it’s an obvious factor in a follow the money type of way
The thing is, for a junior engineer, this is not that bad of an idea. I don't think that it should be part of a formal performance process, but if you're green and aren't putting out enough PRs, it suggests you're either struggling to contribute, or putting out PRs that are far too large and need to be broken up to be easier to review & safer to deploy.

Think of it as a threshold. A high number doesn't suggest you're great. But a low number can often be a symptom of a greater problem.
When talking surveys, it's always imperative to bring up this scene from Yes, Prime Minister which describes how these surveys work - https://youtu.be/ahgjEjJkZks?t=26

For reference, National Service was a national conscription service between 1949 and 1963. Since then a lot of conservative-leaning folks have been clammering about saying that bringing it back would fix the badly behaving youth.
The basic principle is that a CPU core is a complex distributed system with varying degrees of parallelism, concurrency, and latency as all of these components communicate with each other. The design of this distributed system varies across microarchitectures as do the available features. Analyzing the optimal codegen is similar to analyzing optimal algorithm design in higher level distributed systems with a fixed hardware specification.

Compilers are good at finding very local optimizations targeting specific microarchitectures. If you use godbolt and switch out the architecture flags you can see how the codegen changes.

However, as with higher level code, the compiler can’t rewrite your data structures or see patterns spread across too much code. As a simple example, modern cores have 4+ concurrent ALUs with different capabilities. Some of those ALUs are usually idle if there are not enough independent instructions or independent instructions are too far away from the current instruction. You can see large performance improvements simply by reorganizing your C code so that the compiler and CPU can see more opportunities to use more ALUs in parallel. Interestingly, a lot of these code changes are trivial no-ops at the code semantics level, but they bring the ALU concurrency opportunity within view of the CPU.

There is an active niche community on the Internet that studies how various instruction sequences interact with various microarchitectures. This is probably the best resource because a lot of detail is not well documented by the CPU companies themselves. It requires a fair amount of experimentation to develop an intuition for how code will run on a given CPU at this level of detail.
Agreed, with only one slight quibble: content can be good even when the purpose is sales.
That sounds like a pretty amazing layout. Maybe in 100 years we will have something like that in the US!

As a single person, I do not think living in a city is that big a challenge. Sure it’s expensive, you still have to hustle, but you can get a studio or roommates or even live with family, that is how people get by.

Once you are partnered and have kids it becomes much more challenging. I know someone who raised a family of five kids in a 2BR in Chicago, it can be done. But it’s a cultural issue: that is what poor people do, and nobody wants to feel poor. So we expect to have a big house that is unaffordable in the city and we move to cheaper climes and commute.

The nuclear family is a big part of the problem. Going back to multi-generational housing with little private space is not a super popular option, but Gen Z seems to be dipping their toes…
Microsoft fixes the Excel feature that was wrecking scientific data
I’ve only tried structirizr briefly, but I found it too inflexible. No way to draw concepts that aren’t strictly part of C4. For example I wanted to encapsulate 2 components in a box to represent that they’re currently deployed as one service (not necessarily a good thing to do in absolute but would have helped my team to grok it better): impossible.

I do like the idea of describing architecture formally, but the lack of customizability of diagram output was too painful
Your anger is blinding you to reason. I’m fine hating on landlords, but a paywall in front of an article is literally exactly the same thing: a way for a corporation to extract rent.
I enjoyed this book about it:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18271029-the-darien-disa....

It was written in the late 60s, but it looks like it's been republished more than a few times since then:

https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?mtype=B&keyword=%93Darien...
I wonder whether the Darien Gap or the US-Mexico border (and surrounding deserts) is more dangerous to cross illegally.
Yeah it's hard.

For http API design I like to start with an openapi spec then generate as much of the server and client library implementation from this as possible.

The spec gives a language/implementation agnostic way to describe what you're intending to build that's nicely diff-able over time, and you can generate a lot of the boilerplate that's easy to screw up in a way that's both compile time (static types) and runtime (parsing/validation of inputs & outputs) safe.

I can imagine a world where a similar approach could work for higher level architecture. It's pretty common to have a shared helm chart that (largely) defines each individual logical service in k8s environments.

Taken to the extreme you could provision your data stores, and network policies etc using this approach such that an individual services chart defines exactly what it depends on. Throw in some metadata fields for descriptions and you're well on the way to having something that could generate some useful diagrams / documentation.

Of course the issue with such helm charts is that if you make them flexible enough to suit everybody eventually you'll just reimplement the underlying APIs they are calling - perhaps some approach using direct introspection of k8s resources and cloud resources with a standardized set of metadata to group and describe relationships might be more feasible.

For the moment I'll probably stick to excalidraw
Interestingly, most users try to provide as much information as possible, to increase the score and grow higher in rankings. Then, other users try to catch up. The system basically regulates itself. When all activities are added by all users, we end up with the objective ranking making all users agree. Especially if they know each other (e.g. classmates or co-workers). But real life doesn't stop, and the rankings are always changing because of new information.
I’ve walked many thousands of miles on land where nobody tried to extract rent.

It is when you try to move into a building that someone wants rent. Just like when you want to benefit from someone’s work to convert mere facts into a story.
I knew someone who worked on the Windows kernel in the "aughts". Apparently, Dave Cutler was still looking at kernel code reviews back then, and could be quite unsparing in his feedback.
Regarding the mention of war crimes, it's important to note that allegations of this nature are very serious and should be based on international law, ideally confirmed through independent investigations.

Crucially, Cosgrove's explicit condemnation of Hamas was made during his apology, 3 days after his controversial statement.

You raise an important point about not ignoring the slaughter of Palestinian innocents and civilians, and how it's vital to carefully consider what you are saying, but your suggestion that my comments are transgressing these seems to ignore that advice. Your statement looks like it misses that my comments have examined Cosgrove's statement from different perspectives on multiple sides.

Your comments show a seeming swiftness to accuse, which might be read as a form of conflict escalation, or even bias, while your accusations themselves could be seen as an example of simplified "binary" thinking, in contrast with your advice to carefully consider what you are saying. This could lead to your comment being viewed as an unhelpful, or contradictory, contribution to a dialogue aimed at fostering impartiality and peace. You support those, but they are not reflected in the above comment.
I’m pretty certain that the battery lawsuit happened before the 3g shutdown.

So while I totally believe this is killing batteries, I also believe that these cars have more electrical problems than just this.
This advice sounds a bit out of date. I spent 3 months cycling solo through Colombia a year or two back and it was fine. Lots of villages to stop at, most of them have places to eat and stay the night. To be fair I neither went deep into the jungle nor spent any time in either Medellin or Bogota, but there's plenty of countryside to visit along the Rio Magdalena that is pretty safe.
Makes it really easy to have something that looks good.
"Survive" is hyperbolic. If someone DDoSes your $5 website and it is down for a day until you sign up for Cloudflare, you do not literally die. You do not need to sell everyone's 24/7 browsing history to Cloudflare to keep your heart beating.
Allow everyone the freedom to own their health, see whichever doctor they want, get prescription from whomever they want and get their medicines shipped from wherever they want from around the world. Let health care compete globally. That will automatically fix this problem.
>Silly anecdote, but one of my close friends somehow learned to rapidly toggle Caps in lieu of Shift, and still does it to this day.

WHY WOULD YOU TURN OFF CAPS LOCK ONCE IT HAS BEEN ENGAGED?

WE CALLED IT "CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL" FOR A REASON DUDE

(ALSO SPEAKING OF CRUISE CONTROL IF ANYONE HAS MY WALLET, I'M TIRED OF WALKING TO THE LIBRARY TO SPIN UP NEW NYMS)
We have a local mind-control cult where I live.

When asked they'll retort "why yes, we are a mind control cult. We teach you how to control your mind."

...but that isn't what I meant.

Controlling the language. It's a big thing.
More accurately, before Microsoft cared about the Internet.
Depends on how much of that trillion goes to actual salaries or how much goes to dividends?

Worst part of the privatization of the Swedish school system is that we know that the tax-money we pay to educate our kids is being diverted to Neo-Nazi funders and Saudi oil funds.
Ive seen testing reluctantly tied to “they’ll make me change everything in code review, so why waste the effort yet”
Yes, you could imagine a bunch of scenarios where this could hurt you. Imagine a compiler that outlines the rare branch in order to shrink the code size of the function so that the hot path has better icache performance. That function call you inserted is expensive.
Just like how mandatory sewers helps big pipe, plumbers, the utility company, and harms septic tank makers. Compulsory schooling puts scribes out of work!
No it won't, unless we build infrastructure for them to work with.

Even worse, given modern security standards, I wouldn't be surprised if programming and scripting were to be prohibited in the next ten years or so.
"Build your own X" projects
You can see a crappy house that’s falling apart pretty easily. Conversely management cannot see a crappy codebase that’s rife with technical debt. Maybe they would make more intelligent decisions if they could visualize the problem.
r/stallmanwasright
Yes it is actually hard to kill a chicken per day, which is why societies that have to grow and kill their own food don’t eat a chicken per day.

Only the hyper-industrialized meat producers get even close to that.