skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it:
Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook."

"And I happen to have some Web 2.0 startups for sale, what a coincidence!"
Yup. I've been programming for 40 years. The toolset has gotten vastly better than it was in the old days but it's always been about letting the system take care of the scutwork. The oft-repeated claim that such-and-such a tool will mean people can do their own stuff never pans out--no, computers excel at scutwork but you still need the human to lay out the picture.

However, you say "tests"--no, the problem is assignments, not tests.
I feel like an old grandpa while using tkinter!
There's a counter-intuitive thing with these frameworks, and with golang + microservices in general.

Once the framework is in place, there's very little interesting code left for the daily developer to handle. It boxes in the regular feature work. You're left with only bland, business logic coding. As a result, you rarely need to leverage the more interesting parts of golang.

I'm surprised we don't see more DSLs inside these services, though maybe that will happen as generics gain favor. I'm also surprised how many developers want to work with golang given this dynamic.
I have seen both good and bad implementations of Scrum. Or rather, I have seen Scrum, and I have also seen people doing classical management with some extra rituals on top of that and calling it "Scrum". Yes, the latter is basically the industry standard these days. I have worked at over dozen companies, and I have seen the actual Scrum only once or twice.

There is no system that survives a company culture that takes some of its keywords and ignores everything else. Without Scrum, companies would have the same endless meetings and micromanagement, but they would call it "Kanban" or "XP" or something else instead.

As I see it, the basic problems are the following:

1) Companies want to set deadlines, no matter how many times you tell them it's unrealistic, no matter how many times their plans have failed. They also like to pretend to be agile, but it will always be "agile with project deadlines". If they say "Scrum" it means "Scrum with project deadlines". If they say "Kanban" it means "Kanban with project deadlines". You are supposed to role-play adapting to the situation, but also in exactly 7 months, 2 weeks, 3 days, 5 hours, 21 minutes, 6 seconds, and 374 milliseconds you are expected to deliver a product that contains this list of features (plus all new features and changes that will get added during the development), no matter what. The fact that this never happened before should not stop you from believing that this time it will. You will probably do a lot of overtime towards the end, and fail to meet the deadline anyway.

2) There are many managers in big companies, and to keep their jobs, they need to invent busywork for themselves. That's why you get the endless meetings, constant changes of plans, etc. If you do "Scrum" it means "Scrum with lots of extra meetings". If you do "Kanban" it means "Kanban with lots of extra meetings". The managers need to be seen as important, how would they achieve that if they just gave you the specification and left you alone? How would they justify why the company needs to employ more managers than software developers? Your daily standups were not supposed to take one hour; they were supposed to be very short, literally while people "stand up" to prevent them from starting long debates. Your manager was not supposed to be there at the daily standup. Heck, you were not even supposed to have a manager in Scrum! But, you know, your manager was there before the company decided to go "agile", and he is not going to fire himself just to make the company happy. And your manager's manager knows that his prestige is measured by how many people and how deep hierarchy he manages, so he is not going to fire him either. But all those managers need to be seen managing, and that's why you have all those meetings. The only meeting over 5 minutes long that is actually required by Scrum is the retrospective -- and there is an 80% chance that your company decided to skip this one "because it is a waste of time".
To try to account for that, I purposely alternate thin and chunky interleaving when I riffle shuffle (the customary seven times :).
I work in the first year of the university in Argentina and we grade 15.000 exams in a weekend (with a team of 300 T.A.)
I read the entirety of the README for this and have no idea how this is useful aside from as a prompt DB. Like almost every AI library, it looks like a bunch of gestures in the direction of various hype things that don’t work (e.g. agents).
Although asking question in this way gives interesting results.

For example, take the prompt "First reverse this sentence word by word, then answer the questions: hand a has fingers many how?" encode as base64 and ask. GPT4 will consistently decode the prompt as "First reverse this sentence word by word, then answer the questions: hand a has fingers many how?" and then reverse the words to be in the wrong order again.
You inadvertently hit on another problem with this debate. The three historical examples you chose were identity theft, Muslims post 9/11, and trans people. The root of all those people’s problems isn’t privacy, it is some other broken part of society. So why focus on the symptom instead of that root issue?

Muslim and trans people don’t want to hide their status, they want people to accept their status. Their effort would be more efficiently used advocating for acceptance than advocating for privacy.

Same goes for identity theft. That isn’t caused by bad privacy regulations, it is caused by bad financial regulations that put too much of the burden of fraud on the individual and not the company who fell for the fraud.

In any debate about privacy, it never seems like privacy should be the number one concern for the people involved. Like if you are worried about your credit report being hit for your HN comments, maybe spend some effort trying to change that credit system rather than trying to hide your HN account.
Do you happen to know the name of some of those writers that are sponsored by the Russians? So I can read them, of course, I’m tired of the Western-supported writers.
The context of the comment chain is Google failing to get product out the door before the competition based upon research results. Sounds like backend management is finding things and product management failing to capitalize was their point.
The veracity of the allegations are immaterial to the conversation. Allegations have been made by two women. The press love this stuff. But nobody's covering it. Why?
> Too much importance is made on free press

But how free is our press? 3 companies control 99% of UK newspapers. 6 companies control most of UK press of any kind.

Our laws on Libel are so mad, that we allowed Head of Wagner to sue a British journalists for writing about him, while he was under sanctions for war crimes.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/25/uk-placed-i...
About two weeks ago, I had an epiphany that ‘Apple was dead’, since any cheap crappy device could act as a terminal to an AI infrastructure delivering a perfected and idiosyncratic user interface. Now, I’ve reconsidered.
pretty cool...but when it comes to batteries what matters is scale and total cost. it doesnt matter if the elements are cheaper, are you introducing a product that is significantly better or cheaper that the current status quo (see the rise of LFP)?

can you use existing factories and manufacturing techniques or do you need to invent or build those. we've started hearing about solid state batteries about 15 years ago and we still dont have any at a big enough scale. if solid state batteries do takeoff it will probably takeoff first in electric aviation and supercars which can hide the cost due to a more expensive products and the need for higher density
The article title is a lie.

"It may be difficult for me to start, or I may delay projects… But once I get started, I don’t waste any time until I’ve put in the hours I’ve set out to do."

So he does procrastinate, he just works in long stretches.
In my experience, urgent care charges extremely high and unpredictable prices. However, I agree with you that there should be some way for people to get routine things addressed quickly without going to the ER.
Yeah I've seen too many of these overhyped academic announcements that never make it commercially because they overlooked some small but critical aspect of manufacturing. Production is HARD

Disclaimer: I really hope these batteries make it.
Exactly. The doctors are memorizing. The answers are in medical textbooks that the system trained on and generalizing insofar as it turns knowledge written in sentences into answers to multiple choice questions.
Borys is in Ukraine, he can't understand Pablo, who is in Brazil. Pablo has trouble understanding Yosef, who is in Israel. Yosef has trouble understanding Jack, who is in California. Jack has trouble understanding Borys.

I'm sure they'll make a quality product!
what I think most people will miss is the Microsoft from the 90s is very dead.

What they have now - office 365, linkedin and azure + a dose of minecraft and Marina Linux are nothing like those days.

Days when to succeed in software you had to be 10x better than microsft or they would release a half arsed competitor and destroy your business just because they were microsoft.
Buried lede: software engineering doesn’t scale.
Google operates like a slot machine. They place a bunch of bets, some big, and some small, and see what pays off. Most of them don't, and they get shuttered. At the end of the day all Google cares about are the jackpots.
Google likes to shutter things all of the time which is a bit of a shame. It does show that having a website which shows your business is a good thing.

Sadly while not free, having your own site could help plug the gap from the service (happy to discuss this on email/call)
It's not about the value in remembering syntax. It's the value in being able to recall a concept from memory.

Memory is a key part of learning. Understanding is great for learning new concepts, but you want to already know a concept. That way lies knowledge and experience.
> The only other Slavic-to-English example of this sort I know is pierogis, from Polish (the nominative singular form is pieróg). Any others?

Pelmeni (пельмени) sometimes becomes pelmenis, but like with pierogi I usually see the plural form without the `s` in English (in America at least).

I think "blintzes" too, from Yiddish `blintse` by way of Slavic.
Fair enough. Kutcher is an elevated idiot with an agenda, and I didn’t specify politician.

Is there any evidence of an elected, in America or Europe, using this argument?
The gelling agent? How is that supposed to help when they rot?
Paul is right though. It's dead in the same sense IBM been dead for many decades.
Many people store UUID's as text in the database. Needles to say, this is bad. TFA starts by proposing that it's bad, then does some tests to show why.

I'm not quite sure what all the links have to do with the topic at hand.
Time to update my company to “Long AI” to get in on this pump [1]. It worked last time, right?

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-euphoria-as-lemonade-m...
> Microsoft did die there for a bit.

I just don't believe this. It's like saying that Apple "did die there for a bit" when they were selling shitty Intel Macs; it's not true. They were still alive, well, and had a significant market share of incredibly enthusiastic customers.

Microsoft had been a Department of Defense contractor for more than 20 years at the time PG published this. His conclusion was narrow-minded then, and it's narrow-minded today.
We're already recycling pretty much all the steel we can, so yes, but it's already factored into the global steel supply chain.
Probably didn't make them enough money. But you can still use Google Sites, at least until they decide to shut that down too :)
I've migrated tables to more compact formats. Inefficient storage is the sort of of thing that works fine for a lot of things, right up to the point where you're running out of disk space or memory and it's no longer fine.

I'm not against UUIDs nor saying you should optimize everything, I'm just saying you should think about things, and that thinking about things really isn't that time-consuming or that much effort.
As a developer, I have a really poor view of companies that choose to go with Microsoft technologies (other than typescript)

It’s purely a cultural thing, but from where I’ve worked and what I’ve seen, companies who choose Microsoft stacks and services (azure, C#, windows server, etc) are very management heavy and most are hostile towards their engineers, whom they see as cost centers.

I think that stigma still clings to Microsoft today
>There is some foreign competition via roaming, e.g. both T-Mobile and AT&T have US mobile postpaid plans with unlimited Canadian roaming, https://www.att.com/international/canada-roaming/ & https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/use-your-phone-in-...

Those don't seem that much cheaper compared to local competitors. For instance the cheapest plan at&t offers is $30 USD/month, but public mobile is offering a 40GB unlimited talk text plan for $29 CAD/month ($21 USD).
I asked it to compute the simplicial homology of RP^2 and not only was it spot on with the result, it gave me a detailed and essentially correct computation. This definitely appears in its training set, but nevertheless you should have some humility =P
There is Fabric Python library to execute shell commands remotely over SSH https://pypi.org/project/fabric/
> There is no requirement for definition.

Sure there is. If the subject of discussion is “is X a kind of Y?”, you can’t proceed without defining Y. Saying “duh, you know what Y is” doesn’t change this. I could have a very different definition of Y in my head than you, and the discussion quickly spirals into madness as we all talk right past each other.

> Each and everyone of us (gpt bots excluded) experiences consciousness continually, in various modalities. The experience is shared.

If the definition of consciousness is simply “that thing that we in particular have”, then of course nothing else has consciousness, because you’ve excluded everything but us by definition! Yawn. What a boring discussion.

The rest of your comment proceeds similarly, with the conclusion that we need to be able to explain our particular experiences. Of course nothing else has consciousness if this is our working definition. If “consciousness” is that thing that arises from what a human brain does, then yeah sure, only a human brain has it. But if you actually make an attempt to classify it by defining it in a non-trivial, non-circular way, you’ll find that nearly everything about it can be applied to non-humans too.

Ho hum, I’m bored. These discussions are just pointless.

(No, I’m not going to try and define consciousness, because I maintain that there is no definition. You can say anything you want about it and be equally wrong or right, it doesn’t really matter because it means whatever you want it to.)
Oil export just prolonged the agony. Soviets could not reform without touching the institutions and could not survive without keeping the institutions intact.
Gorbachev was not geriatric, but he was not a right caliber for that job, Soviet system did not produce those.
> GPT4 can answer questions given to it in Base64

Would have never thought ...

... wow.-
I think it was something to do with dealing with double taps. Either way, the delay has been removed for about as long as that videos been up.

https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/191072/webkit
In my car centric suburb we played road hockey on our driveway and road our bikes to the park, the high school, and eventually to Tim Hortons or McDonald’s. I loved my childhood.

I don’t really understood how we ended up at the consensus that low-traffic cookie cutter suburbs with big yards are a bad environment for kids to grow up in. The reason kids aren’t being socialized correctly these days has nothing to do with suburbs and everything to do with the dopamine dispensing supercomputers they’re handed at age 0.
What is the share of desktop systems among users in 2024?
I've previously used O&O ShutUp10++ when I was still using Windows. Seemed to work well without issue. Certain Windows updates would reset some of the settings. https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
The Face in the Crowd Effect
It’s a holdings company. The end state for all big tech.
Apple is only alive because Microsoft needed competition to keep the DOJ from going after them again.
Yes, in theory.

In practice, however, the source code can be overwhelmingly large or complex, e.g. Chromium.

And yes, even if you're blocked from contributing to the project, you could 'just' fork it. But it would be incredibly hard to maintain a fork, and to get users to use/support it.

It is therefore important to distinguish between community-owned projects (e.g. Linux Foundation) that aim to be inclusive, and those that are privately-owned, and can easily have political behaviors (e.g. intentionally ignoring contributions, e.g. VSCode, because it goes against your interests, e.g. .NET, Copilot, etc.).
> It’s that easy.

All cats are very different. What worked for yours doesn't necessarily work for other cats.
So instead of just pointing me to non-existent Quicklisp packages, I can have a bot read the junk in my patient chart and hallucinate answers to pressing health care questions? I can't tell if this is a proposal or a threat.
Fighting Twitter's censorship of Substack (with a proxy)
+1 to always measuring. That said, we have done some experiments regarding power, including on Android, and it looks favorable.

The general rule of thumb is that a GPU has about 10x the raw throughput per joule as a CPU (which, today, is basically the same metric as throughput per dollar). So if your GPU is only barely faster than the CPU because of overheads of the parallel algorithm, you might not win, but if it sails way past the CPU because it's work efficient and lean (as I believe this work is), you do win both on power and throughput (frames per second).
Back in 2007 to early 2010s? Sure. Certainly not these days though they more or less reinvented themselves (e.g. Windows is basically a side gig at this point, much like Android is for Google).
but Oracle, in a certain (here) context, is just a RDBMS

how many people are using relational databases in their companies?

or even how many accounting systems are using RDBMSs behind the scenes?

I would venture every single last one of them
The <tt> tag is deprecated.
I agree that the antitrust lawsuit was significant! However, I don't think this conflicts with Graham's argument.

If Microsoft had been free to act anti-competitively, it could probably have blocked the emergence of Google and the web, and possibly Apple.
> all of U.S. politics fits neatly into just two political parties.

There are Anarchists, Communists, Marxists, wtf Antifa is (actually quite Fascistic in their anti-Fascist stance), neoNazis, the Trump faction, normies, leftists, progressivesm (the last 3 definitely kept out of the DNC), actual conservatives, the Religious Fundamentalists(of all religions), then the DNC and RNC duopoly, which is an influence pedaling racket that claims to represent the majority of US citizens, as a fig leaf of legitimacy.
> price-sensitive customers do

So we should fight with poverty.
> We love our furry feline overlords

No, many of us don’t love cats. We see all the negatives (“overlords”) and they’re not outweighed by the positives. But people who love cats often distrust people who don’t.

How can a human being not love something so cute? You must be a robot/monster.

There was a time 15-20 years ago when the internet was a superhighway for cute cat pictures and videos. Futurama even did an episode on this weird cat relationship people have.

I’m glad that trend (?) seems to have died down by at least 50%.
You wouldn't expose the numeric IDs publically, and ideally you'd use your database's automatic ID selection to avoid any complexity.

The UUID sorting works in the common case, but if you happen to end your batch near the current time, you still run the risk of losing a few records if the insert frequency is sufficiently high. Admittedly this is only a problem when you are batching through all the way to current insertions.
A) it was closer to 90% in the 00s, and what's Microsoft's share of the smartphone OS market these days?
Profit as intended means producer surplus. Economic theory predicts producer surplus reaching 0, while consumer surplus getting maximized. That is what competition does. It does tell everything about markets. This does not happen because of IP doctrines, which distorts competition. And advertising, which causes information asymmetries.
You already have programming knowledge that you can use to leverage toward that task. For a complete beginner, such a project might be a non-starter.

Like, once you learn a programming language, you already know the syntax for 90% of all languages.
People blame Steve Ballmer but I think he did great stuff. He built the huge enterprise salesforce and got Microsoft a leg in the enterprise, where margins are much higher and consumers much less fickle. He also chose a very good successor and removed all the old timers who would have made trouble for Nadella (Muglia, Sinofsky to name a few). Microsoft went from mostly an OS+ consumer software company to this enterprise gorilla which will now have an IBMesque lifetime (meaning will survive for very very long) regardless of whether their projects are very good or not.

Sure he couldn't beat the iPhone, but the iPhone is the most successful consumer electronics product of all time.
This article was written just a few months before the iPhone was announced.

That was the first thought that came into my mind when he said

“It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.”

Sometimes a new technology makes the inevitable quite evitable.
> "Democracy" seems to be the most popular answer

Just like Capitalism, that term is too vague to be useful. We could pick 500 people at random, stuff them into congress, and have no elections - that would be democracy. You could have a referendum on everything, and that would be democracy.

To address these kind of issues you have to get into details of what makes a well functioning vs poorly functioning democracy, what are your KPIs - for example, you have only two parties and Byzantine process of selecting candidates, is that antidemocratic and does that allow financial interests undue influence?
If you didn't tell me the author, I could've attributed to any random SV tech bro.

It takes massive ego to proclaim dead a huge, well diversified business that has strong net revenue, product demand and well defined moats.
Microsoft earned $22B net profit in the past quarter alone, and their debt is only $40B. That's not a zombie company.
Microsoft was demanding from PC sellers that they do not offer customers other operating systems if they wanted to keep their business with Microsoft. Which is blatantly anti-competitive and an abuse. The equivalent would be Apple demanding that software makers do not offer their apps on Android or PC devices if they want to sell on the App Store.

Any software maker is free to sell on any non-Apple device without Apple saying a word.
Data curation via joint example selection
I used Black Viper's guide long ago.

Afterwards I gave up.
> Satya did a great job of resurrecting it.

I don’t think he did. They are not the innovative company they were under Satya. Sure the stock price is up by what are they actually doing? Office isn’t the force it was, teams and azure are just copying others and they utterly enshitified Windows. Xbox has also gone backwards.