devnonymous

> It's a wretched, insidious text sneaked in by very bad actors into mainstream open source repositories.

Replace text with code and think about how the supposed 'meritocracy' of open source deals with the problem? Isn't 'nobody is stopping you from forking it', 'submit a pull request', 'the community/bdfl has final say', not apply here as well? Or do the benefits of open collaboration stop at code?

> As an aside I really feel like LibreOffice had a lot of momentum back in the day, but when the whole OpenOffice/LibreOffice debacle occurred due to the Oracle purchase, the confusion of the branch (into LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice) just pulled the rug out.

IMO, the concerted attack against the ODF format[1] was also a large contributing factor towards OpenOffice/LibreOffice loss in the format wars[2]

I posted about this in another thread and was down-voted for some reason[3], but I think it is important enough to not forget.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

[2] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2639468/odf-vs--openxml.ht...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596347

AI is such a nonsensical word these days. Will automation eat jobs? Most certainly. Will automation based on machine learning become good enough to entirely replace humans? That's hard to predict. Depends on the data. I'd lean towards no it won't. The thing about AI is, it's not the algorithms that make it intelligent, it is the data. Data that might help machines replace human effort is also data that can be abused. Unfortunately abuse of data is currently more profitable than use. So it all depends on how certain humans (politicians and corporations) evolve.

My thoughts : Social networks as we understand it today will no longer exist. There would be cyclical phases of fragmentation into specialised services and localised networks with attempts to bridge them via a common ^standard^ but of course that won't work, because history.

The role of the web itself as the platform where social networks live would diminish further than it already has. Of course everything would still be connected and online on the Internet, but the web won't be the primary home for these networks. I am doubtful about AR and VR playing a big role. These technologies still are waiting for thier iPhone moment to occur. When it does, I doubt it would be related to social networks.

Of course I did but like any other process if there has to be complete adoption the benefits need to be clearly visible and significant. The problem with pure TDD (and remember that's what I am talking about - writing / updating tests before writing any code), is that there are diminishing returns as soon as the code base becomes a certain size. In fact, at some point the costs flip around to be higher than the benefits (ie: updating code before tests becomes significantly more efficient than the other way around).

In my experience, it has always been easier for multiple developers working on a code base to write the tests once the implementation has been fleshed out and a significant portion of it is 'ready'.

> As an added bonus, they are really not in the mentality of profit sharing/equity compensation seen in the US, so you can typically get them with a very cheap salary (think ~$50k/y), where a local senior developer would cost you ~$250k + equity.

ugh !!! yeah, you better be scared for your own job and good luck hiring those devs in the future...its more likely they'd be hiring you.

As a veteran (20+ years) programmer I've yet to witness a project where tests are written before the code for the entire duration of the implementation. I personally feel TDD is the snake oil you need to sell to get your team to do write unit tests for max coverage.

No.

Your responsibility as a seasoned programmer is not to code !

I'm a 20+ yr experience programmer and still hold the title Sr. Software Programmer and no. I say no.

Yes the stack is deep but it is unnecessarily so. Yes, there's layers and layers ...but it is your job to educate the less experienced why less is more and why there's is always a tradeoff to be made.

Computer science hasn't moved a whole lot[1] in terms of problem solving since the 80s. Computers have just become faster. The best ideas we have today are still rooted in the principles of the 80s. They are just a abstraction level higher.

So no. I refuse to accept the premise that Nothing is easy anymore.

[1] when considering fundamental theories.

> I am ABSOLUTELY claiming that

Oh well, I disagree with you on that then. However, irrespective of how we feel it could have turned out, the fact remains that Microsoft deliberately pushed for standardization of a document format which at the time of standardization did not have a complete reference implementation even by Microsoft itself !!

They could have simply adopted the ODF format (still can if then want to) but chose not to.

The funny thing about this discussion is, seeing things a different way, it is me who is saying MS had the foresight/business acumen to see how a standard they control can lead to lock in/dependence of their platform and you're dismissing that with claiming their reasoning was a simplistic 'ah, nobody will pay us for that, why bother'.

In any case, my initial (and I suspect the OPs) assertion is valid --

MS has had a long dirty history. I am not opposed to giving them the benefit of doubt but it is way too little, and way too early to do this right now.

I'm curious as to why I'm being downvoted. Do people disagree with the reasoning or do they disagree about the actual facts of what happened ? I'm OK if you are down voting because you think this has nothing to do with the point being commented on (although I disagree) however if it isn't I'm curious about the reasons.

> Everytime I hear someone say "just look, they don't support office on Linux!" I ask: and what exactly do you think the market share is of guys who love Linux so much they use it on the desktop, but also would PAY Microsoft for Office vs. just using LibreOffice or Google's office suite? If you think MS hasn't done the math and figured out that solution would never break even much less turn a profit, I guess I'd ask anyone making that claim to show their work.

Microsoft crunched the numbers for the platform rather than the software and decided to steamroll over the ODF format[1]. The largest revenue for MS Office comes from enterprises who do care about paying less for the OS if all they are going to use is a wordprocessor or spreadsheet. Are you claiming that desktop linux would not have been adopted by enterprises if they could get the same document render and be editable exactly the same manner irrespective of the vendor software being used ?

MS has had a long dirty history. I am not opposed to giving them the benefit of doubt but it is way too little, and way too early to do this right now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

I disagree on this. More programmers should understand the performance characteristics of the abstraction layers that they rely on. Else we have the case of jerk programmers who insist on redesigning / rewriting / refactoring to optimise for CPU caches while still running the apps via a bunch of docker containers each based of the centos image to run one simple binary that probably needs only glibc.

Never forget you're dealing with humans at the other end. You can always tell the person at the other end that you need time to consider and are not ready to sign the contract. You needn't offer reasons.

If they are serious about hiring you, they'll wait. Almost every time a company makes an offer they have a contingency plan for delays, rejections etc.

In any case, do not sign the contract until you are ready to sign to contract (heh, that should be obvious). Regardless of whether they can or will do anything if you bail later, it just comes off as being unprofessional. It is a waste of time and effort for both, you and them. You can be honest without being all out open about your reasons.

This migth've been tongue-in-cheek but seriously, this is what I do a lot of the time. I have a usb drive specifically to quickly move files around with a dual USB type A and micro-usb interface, specifically to move files from my phone. Less thinking / worrying/ debugging "why-didn't-that-work".

I wouldn't know since I've not used one. I didn't even know that they had a new model of the DPT. Judging by a quick google though, I think the biggest difference is the display and touchscreen. The Sony appears to have a "Electrophoretic display" and a "Projected capacitive touchscreen" whereas the remarkable has a proprietary 'Canvas display' based on E-ink Carta -- all that to say, I can place my hand on the remarkable display and write / sketch / highlight ..etc. I'm not sure whether that is true of the DPT. The biggest problems with the writing on regular touchscreens is accidental unwanted 'writing' by your palm instead of the pen.

edit: I should add that the remarkable runs linux and as such is pretty hackable. You can ssh into it and hack it in a number of interesting ways[1] if you're into that sort of thing. Although for my purposes just adding custom writing templates itself is worth the hack-ability.

[1] https://github.com/reHackable/

You've already discovered the remarkable tablet so I'm just going to say that I'm a huge fan. I use it quite heavily for note taking. I can't recommend it enough. You may find second hand units for cheaper, since they've been around for a couple of years now and there exists a large majority of people who weren't really heavy paper users but bought it for the sake of novelty.

That said, if your primary problem is going through a lot of books quickly and you cannot afford the remarkable, even a used one, you may want to consider something like:

https://getrocketbook.com

One of my colleagues uses it and seems to be pretty happy with it.

A lot of devtools and configuration oddities can be learnt in an hour or less. One can become a fairly proficient/well informed user of any of these. The $VALUE for any/all of these are huge !

  * keyboard shortcuts for your preferred UIs
  * vim (/ your preferred $EDITOR)
  * tmux
  * make
  * readline
  * strace
  * gdb
  * valrind
  * tcpdump
  * wireshark
  * basic bash
  * all sort of server configs:
     - nginx
     - apache
     - postfix
     - ldap
     -...
  * compiling the linux kernel
  * understanding the sysctl tunables
  * pick a binary file format and understand it
  * pick a protocol and understand it
  * man proc 
  * iptables
  ...
  ...

You get the general idea. Personally, I sometimes feel the only reason I am respected by my colleagues is simply because I know a little about a lot.

If you have an hour to spend, don't look for the biggest bang of the buck / the most valuable. Explore something small that you use all the time / wish to understand better but didn't take the time.

If you'd like a gentle introduction to something like gcc itself before diving in to writing your own, then you may want to read through:

https://siddhesh.in/posts/gcc-under-the-hood.html

which gives some introduction into how a modern compiler like gcc is designed/structured. For context, the author, siddhesh is a current glibc maintainer.

Dup : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480623

I am not talking about hash tags. Just the replies on that specific thread. Am I now to believe that twitter itself is working with the LW handles to show the replies of LW criticism of twitter while suppressing RW voices?!!

Come on, use Occam's razor.

If Twitter has banned as many right wing accounts as left leaning ones, why is it that the majority of disgruntled responses to Twitter India's clarification thread are blaming Twitter India's right wing bias ?

https://twitter.com/TwitterIndia/status/1192384055884447744

...or is there a claim somewhere in here that the unhappy right wing accounts just leave twitter for Mastodon without complaining and hence all that anyone, including the BBC, seems to highlight is the left leaning accounts making a noise ? Where are the unhappy right wingers in that thread ?

> It's a bit more complicated than that.

I really don't think it is. The replies on that twitter thread I posted there, from a couple of days ago clearly indicates (or at least implies) that the people leaving the platform are most likely the people unhappy with Twitter India's right wing bias.

For context, some high profile activist / journalist accounts have been suspended of late. There's been a noticeable right-wing leaning enforcement of twitter policies in India.

I think the trigger point was when Jay Shah's account[1] got a blue tick despite being a dormant account with a just 19 followers (at the time of being verified).

Twitter India then issued a statement, which further had the Streisand effect:

https://twitter.com/TwitterIndia/status/1192384055884447744 (heh, just noticed the ratio on that ! :))

[1] https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/with-zero-tweet19-...

Gates on Making the world’s invisible people, visible:

  https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Heroes-in-the-Field-Nandan-Nilekani

Reality:

  https://jsis.washington.edu/news/the-aadhaar-card-cybersecurity-issues-with-indias-biometric-experiment/
  https://www.epw.in/engage/article/aadhaar-failures-food-services-welfare
  And in general - https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Aadhaar+problems

The basic underlying idea being pushing surveillance tech under the guise of public welfare.

Gates on Climate change:

   https://www.gatesnotes.com/Search?search=climate

Reality:

   https://grist.org/climate-energy/the-gates-foundations-hypocritical-investments/

Gates on medical assistance:

    https://www.gatesnotes.com/Search?search=medication

Reality:

    https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/another-missionary-africa-bill-gates-myth
    https://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8760199/
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/gates-foundation-accused-of-dangerously-skewing-aid-priorities-by-promoting-big-business-a6822036.html
    https://www.nonprofitpro.com/article/report-slams-gates-foundation-for-self-serving-agenda-corporate-ties/

...and this is just with simple random google searches like 'gates foundation criticism' . There is a rabbit hole you can fall through if you're so inclined but the core idea of a megalomaniac comes through fairly quickly.

Even his philanthropy (or at least that of the Gates foundation) is ethically questionable [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat... ... And that's just barely scratching the surface. Honest curiosity will lead you to understanding how the megalomaniac in Bill is still alive and well.

Fitbit really only took off after the Pebble acquisition IMHO.

Each time I see an implementation of binary search like this I can't help but recall:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about...

Which reminds me just how young the field of computer science is and how even the ^well known^, fundamental algorithms might have buggy implementations.

Here's AOC's questioning :

https://twitter.com/i/status/1187098428737753091

It's a pity that the major regions that link the greek/roman thought of the 'west' to the Indian/Asian cultures of the 'east' are today places of conflict resulting in destruction, both intentional and collateral. How much of archaeological knowledge has been lost to post ww2 wars in Afghanistan, Iran, Syria?

Not that I'm against python 3 but please, this dismissive arrogant attitude says more about your experience with python than of people who took their time. Python until at least 3.4 was changing way too fast to be considered as a stable platform to port to. The actual window for migration has been more like 3-5 years. Yes this has been sufficient but not so long that people need to question their life choices for being cautions.