Hacker News Reader

taraharrison Twitter Is Shrinking: Web Visits Down 7.3%, App Usage Dropping

These days, I use Twitter more than ever. I pay for Blue, and the only thing I'd like to see is editable replies and a way to make sure I don't see political ads.

taraharrison Ask HN: How can we improve remote work?

The current focus you have sounds an awful lot like what the founders of Pragli (later renamed to Pesto) were trying to address. It just shut down recently. https://twitter.com/PestoHQ

When they began in 2019, they reached out to interview me because I had been working remotely for five years. I tried to tell them that the lack of a "sense of feeling together" wasn't the problem they thought it was, and I tried to steer them into taking a look at ways of doing better telepresence with VR/AR, with a focus on pair programming and the like. They didn't listen, and I'm sad to say I was right.

If you want to solve real problems with remote work, you need to focus on how to get work done inside a VR or AR environment, and offer things like easy two-way screen sharing, as CoScreen (recently acquired by DataDog) and ScreenHero (swallowed up and destroyed by Slack).

A workplace is fundamentally about getting things done. Trying to build a virtual office in 2D is just window dressing that will get in my way and has no hope of getting used. You have competition in the most obvious space, which is already handled well through IRC, Slack and Teams.

If you want to facilitate spontaneous conversations and team culture, your client cannot be the company the employees work for. Those things happen on back channels like text messages, Signal, Discord servers, etc.

I'd be interested in glancing at what you've come up with, especially if it's not just yet another web or Electron app.

taraharrison I Don't Think Elon Likes Me: Elon Musk Is Suing Me

Years ago, Greenspan sued one of my friends (@WholeMarsBlog on Twitter) out of sheer spite. Greenspan is a well-known Tesla shortseller with a chip on his shoulder. When I saw this headline I just rolled my eyes; this will get thrown out.

taraharrison Is the US education system in a state of collapse, and what caused it?

Please have compassion for those harmed by what is by nearly all accounts a heartless, unaccountable institution. My comment is not substantially about taxes at all, and I mention that as a remedy knowing full well that the chances of it coming true are close to zero. What's the harm in letting a girl express her utopian dream? The worst that could happen is that I drag us forward a little bit

taraharrison Alien Artefacts

SolveSpace is an alien artifact. I can safely say that because I've spent months working on it, porting it to Haiku OS. It is validating to know that this phenomenon is real enough to justify a name for it! https://github.com/realtaraharris/solvespace/tree/realtaraha...

taraharrison Is the US education system in a state of collapse, and what caused it?

I had an incredibly bad experience going through public schools in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin in the 1980s and 90s. I did my best to hide it, but I began suffering from gender dysphoria starting at age 7. I was known by my classmates as the weird Jewish kid, and I stuck out badly in every possible way. I was a year younger than most of my classmates because I skipped third grade.

I was bullied for years and treated as a behavioral problem by my teachers. I hated every minute of school. It has always been a prison for children who are different.

My mother became a substitute teacher for the Madison Metro School District in the late 1990s, after I had graduated. As she learned about the way these institutions are actually run, she saw the need to apologize for sending me to school instead of just letting me stay at home to learn what I wanted to, at my own pace.

At a minimum, the truancy laws need to be abolished and you should be automatically exempted from property taxes if you homeschool your children. We have the remote work and the Internet now, so there is absolutely no humane justification for forcing all children into the same cruel torture chamber just for making the mistake of being born in the United States.

I am 42 years old now, so I've had decades to reflect on all this and consider my position very carefully. Edugenic harm is very, very real.

taraharrison A radiation hard RISC-V microprocessor for high-energy physics applications

Wow, cool. The article says they're clocked between 10 and 100 MHz. Neat!

taraharrison Is it that bad to ask workers to come back 5 days a week in the office?

I worked full-time remote from 2014-2019 before leaving the workforce. I made good investments and I have spent my days doing as I please, working on open-source projects.

While I do have an interest in working (know of any place that does stuff with Haiku OS, C++ and 3D graphics APIs?), I simply won't consider software engineering jobs that require me to be on-site.

I strongly suspect that engineering-driven companies that fully embrace remote work will out-compete the laggards. The people that write the code that AIs can't are not going to roll over and put up with the way things used to be. There is no going back.

If you are fence-sitting on this issue because you're worried about having enough money, consider that the entire workforce benefits when you stick up for yourself. Labor is a market like any other, and every shitty job you refuse to do only puts more pressure on the corrupt management class. <3

taraharrison COBOL: Thinking about it wrong

But I don't think about COBOL at all, and neither should you. The problems that legacy banks, airlines and government institutions have are not my problems.

The management class doesn't want to hear this. Their only goal is to lower maintenance costs on their legacy systems by bringing in new people to ensure lower wages, so they fund all this nonsense about this very dead language.

"What is it with these nerds that don't want to write COBOL code? It's all just coding, isn't it?"

You know they're desperate when they resort to astroturfing.

taraharrison Will Carbon Replace C++?

Have you actually watched the talk, or are you just giving us yet another ad for Rust? cfront helps C++ developers switch from less-strict C++ to a much safer, much improved syntax known as cpp2, which may in the future become part of the C++ standard.

I like Rust well enough, but I'm simply not interested in abandoning C++ and all of the incredible stuff written in it just for the sake of theoretical purity and safety.

taraharrison Will Carbon Replace C++?

Whoa cool! Medo is awesome!

Thanks! I'm working on a port of Solvespace to Haiku. My goal is ultimately to give it a native UI and some new features, but I'm still early in the process. The latest thing I got working was some pixels in the screen from a replacement 2D renderer that uses AGG instead of Cairo. I post screenshots to Twitter as I go (@realtaraharris).

taraharrison Will Carbon Replace C++?

The thing I like about it is that it is the easiest thing to switch to. It provides the path of least resistance for my existing workflows, and that alone is reason enough for cpp2 to win.

taraharrison Will Carbon Replace C++?

Just watch what happens to Google and their ad revenues in this downturn, by the way. I knew people that were hyping Fuschia, and then Google cut deepest from that on their first round of layoffs. It wouldn't be a shock to me if they yank out the carpet from this Carbon thing one day, or have it limp along like Dart.

In summary, Google can do what it wants, but I'll just keep using C++ no matter what it does. I spend all my time in and on HaikuOS now, so for me C++ here here to stay :)

taraharrison Will Carbon Replace C++?

Has anyone else looked at Herb Sutter's cpp2?

For those that don't use C++, Herb is chair of the ISO C++ standards committee, and holds the position of "native languages architect" at Microsoft.

https://twitter.com/herbsutter/status/1609307537261617154

This is a good introductory talk on cpp2 by Sutter at CppCon three months ago, where he demonstrates cppfront, the cpp2 -> C++ transpiler. One of the things I like about it is that the code it generates is human-readable and fully backwards-compatible with C++. If you use cpp2 in your project and end up not liking it, you still have the same (very reasonable) C++ code that you'd write by hand today if you followed the guidelines you're supposed to already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELeZAKCN4tY

I think this is very promising, and I'm interested in using it my next project. We don't need a total replacement for C++, we just need to let out the awesome language that's always been hiding inside it.

taraharrison Ask HN: Would banning travel between Ukraine and Russia end the war?

Russia is a mostly flat country with very few natural barriers to invasion, such as mountains or large bodies of water. It has nine gaps through which other countries can invade. For Russia, this entire conflict is about halting NATO expansion and closing those gaps. For the United States, this conflict is about sticking to a long-held neoliberal/neoconservative plan to replace all governments with Western-style democracies. Other goals include sending a message to China that any invasion of Taiwan would be repelled militarily. If this war goes well for Nuland, Sullivan, Biden, Tapper and company, the hope is to carve Russia up and make efficient use of its natural resources in the world's first truly global empire.

The primary concern that I and many others have is that things will not go to plan. If the American public does not start paying attention to what's going on, it is possible that the conflict there will escalate to a hot war that will engulf all of eastern Europe. If the West manages to win to the point of overpowering the Russians, they are likely to use nuclear weapons to rescue the situation. The likely response from the United States at that point will be to pull the plug on the entire war effort because the alternative then will be global thermonuclear ominicide. The result of this path is a total restructuring of Europe on an economic, political and military level. (Needless to say, this is not a desired outcome for comfortable elites who stand to lose a great deal from changes they have not anticipated.)

Please don't downvote me; I am not a propagandist for any side. I am merely concerned about very real and immediate risks that the media is failing to report. I might be wrong, but the least you can do is to hear out an alternative view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBiV1h7Dm5E

taraharrison Putin suspends nuclear arms treaty

First, take some basic, low-cost precautions to protect your body. I bought a radiation dosimeter (GQ GMC-500Plus) as well as some iodine tablets. I also have several jugs of water, large bags of rice and beans, a few paper books and basic first aid supplies. I also happen to have some Tyvek coveralls, nitrile gloves and a 3M™ Versaflo™ Heavy Industry PAPR Kit (TR-300N+ HIK), but I use these items daily to protect myself from rock dust in craft projects. Everything but the PAPR is inexpensive and I highly recommend their purchase.

Second, read bravely to protect your mind. Since the second Iraq war, American media has become overtly pro-war, so if you're not really paying attention, you only get one side of the story. If you want to balance that out, I recommend the following sources:

Jeffrey Sachs, Professor at Columbia University. Sachs has extensive experience as an advisor to American and European leaders during the 1990s. He was sidelined by neoconservatives rooting for war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs

John Mearsheimer, Professor at the University of Chicago. Mearsheimer famously predicted the present Ukraine war and authored "The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent" in a piece published in Foreign Affairs in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. He won the Pulitzer Prize for this book when it was published in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb

Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945 by Richard Overy. His work is summarized well in this review recently published in The Atlantic: https://archive.is/BZ2OO

taraharrison Ask HN: Are you preparing for WW3? If so, how? If not, why not?

Solution: a trilateral agreement between the US, China and Russia that the intelligence establishments of each major power be progressively destroyed, leaving a world without large-scale state-sponsored secrecy.

Official secrecy is the ultimate weapon in any authoritarian regime. No illegitimate government can survive without it.

To be sure, private actors can attempt to retain secrets, but they simply do not have the resources to destroy the world in the way that even a small nation (let alone a nuclear superpower) does.

If this sounds impractical, take the New START treaty as a model. Let's have fully open teams of international inspectors that monitor the number of spies employed at the CIA HQ in Langley, VA, at the Ministry of State Security in Beijing, and at FSB HQ in Moscow. These agencies, and all others like them, should be progressively dismantled in lockstep, on a timetable set by treaty. The files they all keep should be made open to the public and used to teach future generations that secrecy itself is a weapon that repeatedly brought humanity to the point of self-annihilation.

And yes, this same process needs to happen with the world's war departments as well. Call me a dreamer if you want, but at least I'm not on the side of more killing.

taraharrison Ask HN: Are you preparing for WW3? If so, how? If not, why not?

I bought a radiation dosimeter (GQ GMC-500Plus) as well as some iodine tablets. I also have several jugs of water, large bags of rice and beans, a few paper books and basic first aid supplies.

Last April I made a sign that says "WE ARE SLEEPWALKING INTO NUCLEAR WAR" and I spent some time holding it up on a busy intersection near my home in Chattanooga, TN. I decided to do this after seeing the way I was shadowbanned on social media for occasional posts in protest of clearly harmful media narratives. I don't think that I am likely to change the course of events at all, but it beats just sitting on your hands and sulking about it:

https://twitter.com/realTaraHarris/status/152157741487430451...

https://twitter.com/realTaraHarris/status/161793964289205862...

I am saddened that a larger anti-war movement has not materialized by this point. Something foul happened to American media after the second Iraq war.

Edit: go head and downvote me. I'm just honestly answering the OP's question. I'll protest the American empire, in real life on the street, for an additional hour for each downvote I get.

taraharrison Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

The coffee damage was the last straw. I was fighting the language (Swift), the lack of documentation (WWDC videos are not a substitute for documentation), and the general lack of any attention paid toward the needs of small app developers.

I spent a lot of time building my own stuff to render pen strokes because Apple refused to supply an API that gives access to the underlying stroke data. SwiftUI was similarly crippled: developers have no access to internals, which made it impossible to write tests that would inspect the view hierarchy. I understand that Apple wants to retain flexibility with their APIs, but they took away far too much. I have no interest in an expensive platform that treats me like a child by locking me out of everything I actually need from it.

taraharrison Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

I put up all my code. I wonder why I'm getting downvoted?

And how is Apple ever going to change if no one makes a credible competing open solution? I believe Haiku is going to get a lot more popular with creators. Unlike Linux, no corporations control it, and it's also more Mac-like than the thing the Mac has become.

One of the biggest improvements coming to Haiku is hardware-accelerated Vulkan graphics. I am so excited for this! https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/vulkan-lavapipe-software-rend...

taraharrison Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

I poured a year of my life into an app written in Swift for iOS before I ran into a brick wall trying to figure out how to use Apple's stuff to encode frames into an mp4 video. It's a pretty slick thing that uses low-level APIs like Metal, Core Audio, CFRunLoop, etc. https://github.com/realtaraharris/arezzo

I accidentally spilled a latte into my M1 MacBook Pro, which cost me $2000 to buy. At that point I decided to just forget about Apple and their entire ecosystem because it is designed to abuse everyone. $99/year, no source code for any of the stuff I'm struggling with, no access to any of the people that can answer questions about the black boxes? No thanks.

What am I doing now? I am rocking a ThinkPad T440p from 2012, which only cost me $285. I spend all my time writing apps in C++ for Haiku OS and I have never been happier. Instead of pouring more of your life and energy into a corporation that has labored tirelessly to destroy your freedom, please consider contributing to the commons instead.

taraharrison SS United States, the fastest passenger liner ever built

Entering service in 1940, the America made regular passenger runs across the Atlantic

The Pentagon also quickly took interest in the project. ... Of the estimated $78 million budget, the Pentagon provided almost two-thirds, plus a portion of the yearly operating expenses.

Funny they called the US Department of War the "Pentagon," because it wasn't yet built! Construction of the Pentagon started on September 11th, 1941, and was completed on January 15th, 1943. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon/wiki/The_Pentagon

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

taraharrison U.S. jet missed with first missile while downing object over Lake Huron

Where is the evidence that these objects existed at all? The US Government has refused to share the footage captured by its airplanes so far.

The US Government is likely responsible for the trickery behind "The Battle of Los Angeles" and similar tricks in 1941 over NYC, both of which were likely staged in order to frighten the American public into supporting the war. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-time-a-ufo-invaded-lo_b_6...

taraharrison Tell HN: Windows 11 update erases Linux boot entries

Please consider replacing your Windows install with Haiku OS and just give up on running the programs you keep Windows around for. Your freedom over the long haul is far more important than whatever it is that Microsoft is doing for you. I spend my time these days writing native apps for Haiku in C++, which is a lot more fun than playing in a sandbox stacked against us all.

taraharrison China Spots Unidentified Object Flying Near Port City: Paper

The United States could clarify the waters by releasing more information, including the high-resolution photographs is has of the objects it shot down. They may either be doing psyops on us, or withholding crucial information about something that all of humanity has a right to know about. I don't know what to believe about any of this, except that our government so far has treated us plebs with contempt.

I reject the notion that keeping us in a state of ignorance will ultimately make us safer.

taraharrison Putin grants Russian citizenship to Edward Snowden

They each had a duty to pardon Snowden, as he showed the American public incontrovertible evidence that the US Government is violating the Constitution by spying on Americans.

taraharrison UFO Sightings Went from Conspiracy Theory to a Serious Government Inquiry

Senator Harry Reid wrote this letter, affirming that Elizondo did in fact have a leadership role in AATIP: https://twitter.com/GadiNBC/status/1386872125835812864

taraharrison rms-open-letter.github.io

When they tried to cancel RMS for the first time in 2019, I am ashamed to say that I used it as an opportunity to pile on him on Twitter. I was sore about petty differences such as the architectural crippling of GCC and the viral nature of the GPL.

Since then, I have seen user freedoms continue to erode. Statists continue to push for more controls and backdoors on encryption. Repressive governments have the cooperation of the companies that run the mobile device app stores. Desktop operating systems continue to degrade with the addition of advertisements and increasing amounts of DRM, spying and "trusted computing" features that limit what you can do with your own machine. In short, we are one or two steps away from Stallman's nightmare scenario, where the illegal use of debuggers and compilers is considered a crime.

I used Stallman's first cancellation to advance my own permissive-licensing agenda (albeit by a very small amount, as I'm an unknown). Introspecting upon the way I reacted initially, I now suspect that this is simply another attempt by powerful interests in government and business (notably, a great deal of enmity against RMS comes from Microsoft and Salesforce) to destroy a man that has dedicated his life to keeping computing free.

taraharrison Ask HN: Why does Costco not have an express lane at any of their stores?

Costco is optimized to sell you stuff in large quantities each time you visit the store. They explicitly trade convenience (i.e., you can't buy a single roll of paper towels there) for extremely low prices.

If you want a store that offers a nicer, more convenient shopping experience (along with significantly higher prices), there are plenty of alternatives available to you.

taraharrison Moral Effects of Socialism

East Germany had zero private property, and was governed by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany from 1946 until 1989 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Unity_Party_of_German...).