skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm turning 50 in a few months. I still enjoy coding; and I expect to be coding for another few decades.

One thing I figured out early on is that your choices in languages and tech really matter. There are only so many things you can learn and you have to make some educated bets on things getting traction or not. And if you make the right bets, it's easier to keep your skills fresh and relevant.

Some things look fancy and nice and then five years later it's all outdated and obsolete. And some other things go big. Java was one of those things and in 1995, when I was in university, they decided to use it for teaching programming to first year students. So I ended up being a teaching assistant and now have nearly thirty years of experience with the JVM ecosystem.

I recognized the signs of the platform and language (especially) going a bit stale about fifteen years ago. It's becoming the Cobol of my generation (plenty of work but not the kind that gets me excited). I realized I needed to move on if I wanted to stay relevant. Since then I've touched a lot of languages. Right now, I do a lot of Kotlin but I keep an eye out for new things. Kotlin was a bit of a bet ten years ago. I fully committed to mastering it six years ago. And at this point it's starting to feel like a good bet. The language is modern, has a lot of momentum and there's lots of interesting stuff happening with the language, compiler, tools, etc. Particularly multi-platform is opening up a lot of possibilities.

I've dabbled with other things along the way but never really got the feeling that mastering that stuff was worth my time. E.g. Ruby was interesting but it's now mainly used by people in their forties (i.e. my age). Younger generations seem to not be interested in it. Same with things like Scala. Lots of stuff still happening with both of course but it seems that they are both a bit past their peak.

Python on the other hand keeps surprising me by not getting replaced with something else. I kind of like the language and have done some things with it over the years. And I like that they are clearing out technical debt (like the GIL) and keeping the language fresh. I work with some twenty year old interns that know and love it. People will be doing Python long after I die. That's a bet I didn't make but it would have been a good one. And not too late obviously. I know enough python to be able to jump in a project and use it. I've done so on a few projects in recent years. It's a very approachable language; kind of by design.
My two cents from 2012: https://blog.databigbang.com/esoteric-queue-scheduling-disci...
Are you sure? People of the old time spent most of their time worrying about having food on the table. I doubt they could have time for FB if it was to exist at the time
This is true, many people got hung out to dry who happened to hold office properties when COVID hit.

But the housing could have just housed the family members if times were tight. For at least the first generation, it did. That's intrinsic value, not valuation according to a market.
People don't need to be deluded, just ignorant. And you don't even need that, just having a different set of priorities would suffice.
For me, for Marx to be right, I just have to observe that my employer and I have different incentives that often means our priorities conflict and for the most part their priorities take precedence.

Perhaps this feeling is less common than I thought?
That is an interesting framing. I think the "maker vs taker" label is great. Creative Inc[0] uses "suitcase handles" to describe something similar but more generic.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Expanded-Overcoming-In...
> Fastmail can investigate the abuse you are involved in and can suspend your account.

What if the Fastmail account is simply just using their free 30 day trial, how will they track the user then?

My point is that the malicious user will still have a way, while the legitimate user is punished by having to pay a fee to the email provider.

> Every time someone like you thinks this is okay, you make more service providers lock down what email domains they accept, punishing folks like me who just want their own domain on their email.

How about no one gets punished and service providers verify phone numbers instead of emails and we get to keep our inboxes clean?
My bitwarden plugin locks out after a few minutes of inactivity. New installations are protected by totp. So one has to physically be at one of my devices few minutes after I leave even if they have a password. This reduces the attack source to a few people that I have to trust anyway. Also I can lock / logout manually if situation suggests. Or not log in at all and instead type the password from my phone screen.

I understand the conceptual risk of storing everything behind a single “door”. That’s not ideal. But in practice, circumstances force you to create passwords, expose passwords, reset passwords, so you cannot remember them all. You either write them down (where? how secure?) or resort to having only a few “that you usually use”.

Password managers solve the “where? how secure?” part. They don’t solve security, they help you to not do stupid things under pressure.
If we add an arbitrary amount of dark matter everywhere, to match the observed motions of the celestial bodies, that adds an infinity of parameters, and not even a enumerable one.

This obviously can match almost anything and it has extremely low predictive power (many future observations may differ from predictions, which can be accounted by some dark matter whose distribution was previously unknown), so it is a much worse explanation than a modified theory of gravity that would have only a finite number of additional parameters.
I really liked SourceTrail when it was a thing, as mentioned in the article. It's surprising that we don't have something like that for every language as a mainstream tool, to explore how bits of code relate to one another in a visual way. There are dependency graphs, e.g. in JetBrains IDEs, but none are as easy to use as SourceTrail.

You know where visual programming really excels, though? In game development and when working on other types of visualizations.

In shader graphs in particular, like in Unity, where you can very quickly iterate on how things work and look. Writing shaders manually is quite the mess, honestly, so I am really glad that alternatives like that exist, with near-immediate preview to boot: https://unity.com/features/shader-graph and https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/introduction-to-shader-grap...

In addition, visualizing state machines is also really nice: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/StateMachineBasics.html and https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/finite-state-machines-1

Also, tools like Blender have node based logic, which is lovely too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ0qtcSymDI

Some might also mention Blueprints in Unreal, but personally I think that most of the time traditional programming languages would be a better fit there, but something more approachable than C++, for example, how some engines use C# instead, or maybe GDScript in Godot - many just use Blueprints so they don't have to write C++: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...
The article says that an incoming update is addressing this by giving people the option to delete local data, so it looks like this soon won’t be an issue.

But stepping back, it is not at all surprising to hear about this type of flaw. MOST startups have these kinds of flaws. They spend as little as possible on things like security or privacy. Enough to meet some checklist minimally but not enough to actually respect customers and their data. In some ways it is understandable since they have to do whatever they can to survive, and the chances of that are low to begin with - so saving their energy and time for other things is what happens.

I bet most customers would be frightened if they knew exactly how cavalier most startups truly are.
Try opening Edge and you will realize that is has imported all the Chrome session/cookies etc and now you are logged in those sites in Edge. This setting is on by default.
The linked story where the company claims an employee leaked keys to a “hacktivist” group and then something about sending defamatory emails to employees is very strange: https://www.rabbit.tech/security-investigation-062524

Nothing about this feels like a well-run engineering team. I understand it’s a startup, but all of this is just weird.
I have little understanding of code and my abilities are not yet sufficient to write more complex filters.
They can remember O(1) passwords, but they need O(n) passwords
Amazing, thank you for taking the time
Yes institutions and democracy can resist and win against a small group of armed people taking over the physical seats of the government.

But in order to win people have to agree that the act is profoundly antidemocratic and a punishable offence.

It becomes more problematic when a sizable part of the population dismisses it as a non-issue. That very fact raises the level of concern several orders of magnitude. The more people dismiss the level of severity of an act of subversion the less faith you can have that the problem will just fix itself.

So yeah, it's not a big deal, provided that we all agree it is a big deal. Otherwise it becomes a big deal.
He enjoys success by literally enjoying it successeeding. He sees his projects pay out, and move on to next asap.
> This is not at all obvious for the reasons listed above, after a certain point material abundance does not cause psychological well-being.

I have been trying to find a news interview for years. It was on Fox news just before Christmas about 15 years back, they had someone from an anti-consumption group. Needless to say, the interviewer did not take kindly to the position they had "It's un american to not buy Christmas presents!". But the last point the interviewee made as they played the music over them was something along the lines of "Consumption is three times high per capita than the 1950's and we are no happier because of it!".

Fair point to be made.

> I’d argue that point was well within the reach of most of our ancestors, since we have had happy ancestors of modest socioeconomic status.

While they aren't the only ones, folks like the Jainists, Taoists, all manner of Buddhists, Hindu's have lead very happy lives living on a tiny fraction of the material needs that we have. Not saying they didn't appreciate some of the new things but it isn't a case of living in squalor for millennia.
I figured they were going for a distinction between words and phrases, where it's true that "yesterday" is an opaque lexical item while "next week" is a compositional phrase.

But they seem to just be buffoons:

> Mayan languages express future and past days with great ease and expanse, both into the past and towards the future. To name past and future days in my Kaqchik’el Mayan language, for example, we construct the word starting with the number of days we want to express plus a suffix implying past or future.

This sounds about as exotic as an English construction of the form "three days ago".
> And it is so damn easy to use it's amazing to me the whole world doesn't use it.

Perhaps many of them are locked into “the cloud” and “serverless”, by default choosing the proprietary solutions offered by these providers on their platforms?
Alternatively, FT has always allowed 95%+ of paywalls to be bypassed by being referred from Bing. Copy subject, Bing.com, paste, click FT, no paywall
I remember watching Coffezilla's vid on Rabbit R1, and it looks both shady, and 10 years away from what it is promised to be.
Some more discussion from 2020 with author input:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24578749
See this video by Coffeezilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPOHf20slZg
It's a bit clickbaity, but turns out Rabbit was a crypto-nft-ai buzzword company with a very shady history.
Amazon is very much a camera-on kind of company. What I noticed is that everyone turns on their camera, then most people stare dead-eyed at the camera, not doing anything useful, but also making sure they don’t move or let their eyes drift from looking at the camera. And as soon as they join, they mute themselves or are automatically muted.

Only when they are called on do they then respond, and it’s usually a pretty perfunctory response. I mean, they have been listening and not doing anything else while listening, because they’ve been so focused on the fact that they are on-camera 100% of the time and they don’t ever want to be seen to be doing anything “wrong” during that time.

I do remember some folks had their camera aimed at them from the side (presumably from the laptop camera, while they’re using one of the external monitors as their main monitor), and they would sometimes be doing things while not looking at the camera. But they would quickly come back and respond, if someone called out their name.

In contrast, other employers have had a no camera policy, and that can get a bit weird to explain to external parties who are used to being on-camera 100% of the time. So, I’ve always tried to help explain that to the external folks.

For no-camera companies, it seems to me that those people are usually more engaged with actually listening to the conversation and responding in real time during the meeting, as opposed to waiting until their name is called. They’re also less likely to automatically mute themselves when they join the meeting, but also less likely to need to mute themselves when they join.

And the no-camera companies seem to be well aware of how much the meeting is costing in terms of how people are there and how long they’re all on the call, and then ending it early if they can.

It’s a big culture shift to go from one type of company to the other type.
Adding any finite number of parameters is strictly better than adding an infinity of parameters (i.e. an arbitrary distribution of dark matter chosen to match the observations).
He does work like a dog, but hes not even 18 yet and has already made more money than most people I know make in their lifetimes.
Ok, I get what you mean now. You can build a model by plugging in any activation function into the two slots in the equation at the bottom.

There's a typo in the activation function next to "otherwise" in the "Ant Pheromone Signaling" row.
Feels like a case study in _why not_ to trust internet randos without hardware experience with a device that's meant to handle a bunch of private data.
Just out of interest, what exactly do you want to see in the code? It's just a wrapper over OpenAI API, see https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-to-speech + Google OAuth2 authorization + lemonsqueezy as payment platform.
Hello from Alameda, CA. 15.5c per kwh here except for M-F 5pm-9pm, where it is 50c.
How about a fortnight ago?
No source, it’s just my impression that most Norwegians feel they get a fair deal.
Your fingerprint does.

It's not "you" unless you are highly deterministic and bear in mind identical twin fresian calves have different black and white patches because of how their gene expression is affected by gravity, alignment and temperature in the womb.

They will not have recorded large chunks of unknown, or the much misnamed "junk" DNA regions, the bits they don't understand.

But that aside, Don't commit any crimes, and watch out for people emulating PKD who hypothesised a machine to drop your DNA at a crime scene and implicate you as it commits murder.
The problem with the above statement is that merely “offering” a better option doesn’t solve the issue. The mere presence of SMS as one option gives the same risk as if it were SMS- only. An attacker can choose the sms option (after slipping $100 or even just a fake ID to the teen at the phone store to sim-swap you) even if you never would use it. It needs to be at minimum able to be permanently disabled on demand.
In some sense, all programming is visual. Our methods of programming are not designed to be listened to, or felt. They are designed to be looked at.

This has the interesting effect that we care more about how code "looks" more than necessary. We place an emphasis on code formatting, even though how the code is laid out doesn't affect how it gets executed. We often talk about "lines" of code or "blocks" of code, even in languages where lines or blocks don't carry any semantic meaning.

This is just my opinion man, but I suspect this is why Python is popular, while Lisp never caught on. Despite being grammatically simple, normal Lisp code looks like a bracketed mess. A lot of people can't get over that first impression.
I also looked into this topic for several years due to my insomnia issues. Ultimately it took forming a new relationship with sleep for me. To let go. Easier said than done. An online CBT-I class helped me make this shift. I later read the book Hello Sleep [1]. It shared information similar to what I learned on my journey. I recommend the book.

1: https://drjadewu.com/
For some reason, it's cooler of it's agglutinative.
That’s funny, because I didn’t even notice it.

In my own writing, I usually try to be very consistent, unless I am intentionally trying to make a joke or keep things light. And in those cases, I am very deliberate in my use of mixing the styles.

But in reading someone else do this, I didn’t even notice.
Dawn of War is a good example of an RTS that deviates from the genetic ore mining paradigm.
More broadly it feels like there's a lot of potential alpha in the tooling space that just gets left on the table by the industry

I don't know what the reason is. Making tools is hard? Thankless? Tough to generalize? Devs are reluctant to adopt new tools?

Whatever the reason, I feel like workflows could be an order of magnitude more effective with better tooling. And I don't even mean the table stakes of "can install dependencies and reliably build and run on different laptops" (which some ecosystems still fail). There's huge untapped potential for "tools that tell you interesting things about your code and/or program"

My personal theory is that the design of most programming languages today makes static analysis much harder than it needs to be. And then I guess, runtime analysis is just fundamentally hard to tack onto an existing language no matter how it's designed
This was a fascinating read!

My biggest question is what happened around 1970? Did their analysts predict saturation or the rise of other networks? It's not exactly clear from the article.

They basically were spending money like it was free in the name of growth for a century, and stopped about that time, which led to all sorts of problems. Was it a prediction, or the onset of 'beancounter accounting'?
I see 4 accounts making direct death threats, all 4 are green. You're choosing to intentionally assume the worst case about them being people's alts. The most dangerous thing here is your desire to prop up the narrative that a meaningful portion of this community were proposing to respond to this attack with political violence.
>major dental or surgical needs that are today fixable with little fuss

I guess perhaps that's true in some countries, but not for the US. People put off major medical needs for years and even decades to wait until they can get on medicare.

Dental issues are even worse. Yes, the availability of the treatments is nice, but the majority of people are deeply stuck in modern society to have access to those treatments.
Clojure macros continue to surprise me
The social problem with visual programming is indeed the same as with "Mythical Non-Roboticist". But there is quite some issues on it on the technical side too:

- Any sufficiently advanced program has non-planar dataflow graph. Yes "pipelines" are fine, but anything beyond that - you are going to need labels. And with labels it becomes just like plain old non-visual program, just less structured.

- Code formatting becomes much more important and much harder to do. With textual program representation it is more or less trivial to do auto-formatting (and the code is somewhat readable ever with no formatting at all). Yet we still don't have a reliable way to layout a non-trivial graph so that it doesn't look like a spagetti bowl. I find UML state machines very useful and also painful because after every small edit I have to spend ten minutes fixing layout.

- Good data/program entry interfaces are hard to design and novel tools rarely do a good job of it the first time. Most "visual" tools have a total disaster for a UI. Vs. text editors that were incrementally refined for some 70 years.
"Ago" is kind of agglutinative. In english it isn't used by itself. It's pretty much a suffix even though by convention it is it's own word.
This is a fantastic post that explains a lot of the end product, but I'd love to hear more about the journey specifically on denormalizing permissions at Notion. Scaling out authorization logic like this is actually very under-documented in industry. Mind if I email you to chat?

Full disclosure: I'm a founder of authzed (W21), the company building SpiceDB, an open source project inspired by Google's internal scalable authorization system. We offer a product that streams changes to fully denormalized permissions for search engines to consume, but I'm not trying to pitch; you just don't often hear about other solutions built in this space!
I think you're jumping to a lot of conclusions about what I believe about Biden based on very little evidence. I'm a moderate who feels stuck and lost between two vindictive, hateful and poisonous parties and I just try my best to help people talk to each other and get past hate where I can.
I was intentional when I said "the developed world", so including Western-Europe, South Korea and so on, not just the US. The fact you're on HN speaking perfect English already means you're likely to be very much above the median, salary-wise.
One have to recognize that manufacturing consent, including consent to give away to their threateners, is not necessarily always the most trivial job.
So this is what happens when facts win out...
This is one of the few things I actually liked about the way Amazon did meetings. The standard was to distribute the document first, or in the event that couldn’t be done, to provide a link to the document at the very beginning of the meeting.

You’d spend the first part of the meeting with everyone reading the document (and maybe commenting on it, if you gave them the link), and then once everyone had read the document, you could start discussing it. They made heavy use of “Quip” as a shared document writing/commenting system for anything that was still being worked on, although official documents would need to be in Microsoft Word format.
Just to add a few things.

Hygiene theory has gone a long way to alleviate some of the more problematic disease issues. I have said that if we went full Mad Max (I don't think we are), hygiene theory would survive because of how useful it is.

Starvation is one of those issues of the odd cycles of nature. Many I have spoken with that do back to the land farming have said, on a 5 year average calories aren't an issue. The problem is it usually means 3 bumper years followed by two starvation years. Thru modern agriculture we have both made systems of storage and fertilizers that flatten over these issues.

As for the governance of strongman. There was the flip side of, they couldn't strong arm people TOO much because if enough people figured it was worth over throwing them, the boss would be overthrown with violence or death. It was risky being at the top, there was a reason why the kings thrown was backed up to a wall. Stops the assassin coming from behind.