Shog9

As Evan points out in TFA, this has happened before.

I'll add that it has happened more than a few times.

Past response was to shut down inappropriate behavior in the now (folks rambling on about the person in comments under some programming question, etc.) and let the temporary interest die out on its own.

This time... The response seems to be inviting the Streisand Effect.

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Sadly, ridiculously expensive for fairly limited cargo utility, no doubt due to their ATV heritage ($30k will get you what is essentially a posh ATV that is simultaneously an extremely janky vehicle by kei truck standards.)

BMWs aren't that common anywhere in the US - if they were, they'd stop being a status symbol.

That said, they're also not uncommon - a quick look at registration data suggests ~8% of cars "on the road" are BMWs, though of course just because a car legally could be on the road doesn't mean it's being driven with any regularity (I had a co-worker years back whose pastime was buying old BMWs and fixing them up; apparently they could be had relatively inexpensively at the time, as servicing was pricey).

Which is why all this pedantry misses the point: there's nothing terribly special about BMW; total cost of ownership is probably higher than domestic brands, but you could just as well pad out your ordinary expenses with a Ford or GM payment; a new Suburban or nicer pickup can soak up just as much excess cash as that X3.

Then again, Real Americans drive increasingly old used cars.

Second this recommendation. They also publish a bunch of their software on GitHub: https://github.com/victronenergy - makes it much, much easier to figure out what the hardware is capable of even if you never venture beyond cabling various boxes together.

I helped a neighbor replace his Magnum system with Victron a couple years back; sadly, the former company has abandoned its roots and produces hardware that is neither well-designed nor robust. The documentation still smells like it was written based on some EE's napkin notes though.

If you get a chance, try WineCrisp. Loads of flavor and stubbornly crisp. The things keep for months, even in less than ideal storage (such as a fridge), and even after losing a great deal of moisture retain a snappy bite.

Only real downside is that the appearance isn't very flashy; they're the russet potato of modern apples.

I don't know which "early days" you're referring to, but I remember these complaints already in the very early '00s.

...and then I tried Photoshop for the first time. It was every bit as clunky, but made up for that by also being sloooooow (at least on whatever OS X PowerPC machines the lab had back then). Couldn't figure out why anyone used it.

...then I watched someone who actually knew how to use it use it. It was still slow, still clunky, but they made that weird UI dance.

There are still plenty of apps like that. Particularly when you get into stuff like A/V where no amount of UI glitz will paper over the reality that a few poorly-chosen commands can bring the beefiest machine to its knees. You either spend the time learning how to use the software on its own terms, or suffer.

The extra irony here is that both apps built their own, entirely custom UIs rather than settle for dependencies on existing kits... The big difference with GIMP was that its toolkit was built to be separable from the rest of the app and eventually became its own project, while Blender's is just ... Blender.

I suspect if you described the architecture of the two apps without naming them, most devs would predict disaster for the latter. But as you say, it has not worked out this way; indeed, GTK has repeatedly dropped or... gimped... functionality that originally existed to facilitate productive interaction with the GIMP UI (such as fast custom shortcut keys), while Blender's UI remains bespoke and quirky, but also insanely powerful.

You're being pretty generous toward the "phone companies" here - their reputations have decades of bad press and shady behavior to shoulder as well. The big difference being, in addition to their roles as data brokers and fig-leaves for the spooks, they also provide phone service.

So... Y'know. You could just let people assume that you're a lineman or something.

Then you also remember all the other companies that threw money down the well in '99 and didn't pull a rabbit out of their hats in time.

Throwing money away isn't the clever bit in the Google story.

Interesting. My first thought was of Google Notebook, a service that died well over a decade ago and I still remember only because I used it to bookmark recipes.

Online recipe sites tend to either be horrible ad-clogged messes, have unreliable URLs (or hosts), or both. Notebook let me select the text of a recipe (ingredients and instructions) and save that along with the URL, something I made frequent use of during its life.

Since Notebook died, I... Print recipes. On paper. Which also hosts the content, annotates with the URL, and allows me to easily take notes. And also doesn't cost me much if I spill things on it. But there are certain downsides as well.

Please stop pretending that "data hording" didn't / doesn't happen on IRC. There's nothing inherently friendly to security or privacy in the protocol; if anything, it's quite the opposite.

That you can, with augmentation and diligent op-sec, get something a bit better than Discord isn't a great selling point unless you have the time and resources and buy-in already, not just for yourself but from everyone in your group. At which point, there are still better options than IRC.

For decades now, the main draw of IRC has remained a fetish for conspicuous configuration, as it embodies a sort of brutalist architecture of communication software. The excuses change every few years, but the love for cobbling together a barely workable system from parts remains core.

The jobs, and in many cases the expertise held by the people working those jobs.

I think this was the angle epistasis was coming from: not just that chips are physically being formed within the boundaries of the US, but that citizens are involved, being trained and garnering the practical experience that comes with being intimately involved.

So, so much of this sort of experience has been lost over the past few decades, and the fallout is palpable: how many discussions have played out right here surrounding the challenges of manufacturing anything, even trivial bits of plastic, at scale without spending years traveling across the world, dealing with language and cultural mismatches, ensuing mistakes and quality issues?

We're in a weird place now, wrt manufacturing skill - there are still plenty of individual crafters, folks who can make one-off or small runs of high-quality goods... For a pretty high cost per/ea. But scaling is troublesome; to hit that economy of scale requires a lot more people with maybe journeyman-level skill, folks who cut their teeth in a large operation and are looking to specialize - and those large operations aren't here.

So many of the responses here are effectively identical to complaints folks had about Stack Overflow 3 months, 6 months, a year after it was launched.

They were valid complaints then, and they've valid now.

But... They don't answer this question, which is predicated on SO losing prominence - if poor moderation, rude answers or "duplicates" were enough to torpedo the site, why did it ever gain any prominence at all?

To understand this, we need to look at the state of the 'Net back in 2008, when the idea behind Stack Overflow was conceived and when the first version of the site launched[1].

16 years ago...

- ...USENET was still (barely) around and in use. A non-trivial number of folks hanging around on SO in the early days were old newsgroup regulars for various platforms / tech. SO offered them a welcome reprieve from the by-then-crushing tedium of spam and endless repetition that had pretty much killed USENET by then, as well as a larger audience.

- ...General-purpose "programming sites" (forums, blogs, article repositories, snippet sites) were still very much a thing. CodeProject, CodeGuru, w3schools, etc. For the most part, they had inherited all the problems of USENET and introduced new problems of their own. Again, SO offered a reprieve.

- ...Then as now, special-purpose forums / mailing lists / IRC rooms were collecting an awful lot of "original expertise" for various projects. Then as now, these were mostly useless for disseminating this information; that job fell on folks willing to spend crazy amounts of time soaking it up and then summarizing it in documentation, tutorials, FAQs, or actual books. Most of which didn't get read by the folks who most needed it[2]. So the actual dissemination was handled by the handful of people who did read these resources, via answers to questions on USENET or other major programming sites. The same questions, over and over and over again, until finally years into it some bit of critical information finally entered the public consciousness and questions tailed off.

- ...Google was really, really good at finding information. But information was often not structured in a way that was friendly to Google. Yes, as crazy as it sounds, 2008 was still on the other side of "Peak SEO". This was particularly true for programming information, which tended to live in dense, hard-to-crawl and thus poorly-indexed databases or in some cases (Experts Exchange[3]) actively obfuscated. Google was still leaning heavily on the old DejaNews archive (and Google Groups that had swallowed it) for a lot of more obscure questions, but... had kinda broken all of those in various ways. Stack Overflow's format was very friendly to Google, and Q&A quickly acquired very good ranking, with Google introducing a microformat[4] based on SO's layout for sites willing to present information in this manner.

- ...Reddit was popular, but also kind of a trash fire. Ok, maybe there are a few constants in life. There were good programming communities there, but, uh, not where the unwary would think to look.

- ...There were good, helpful programming communities on IRC too. So I'm told by people I trust. Maybe there was a secret knock or something. Anyway, there were also plenty of the other sort of channel, where asking a question would get you mocked at best or given a script to wipe your harddrive. As crazy as it sounds, a site where you might be brusquely asked to clarify your question and then given a working answer or nothing at all was much nicer than the status quo for an awful lot of folks stumbling around looking for help.

- ...GitHub barely existed. git support on Windows was iffy. Google Code was still a thing, Subversion was king, Mercurial looked like it might be the next king. Normal programmers used pastebin waaaaay too much. Stack Overflow was arguably the most "put together" site at the time.

I wanted to end with that last one, because I think it points out the real answer to your question: Stack Overflow of 2024 is still... Pretty close in terms of what it offers to Stack Overflow in 2008. Meanwhile, GitHub, GitLab, Discord, Slack, Google, even Reddit not to mention thousands of other services (most recently a lot of GenAI-based stuff) have spent the last 16 years trying to outdo each other in various ways with the intent of grabbing the attention and loyalty of programmers / tech-workers.

If I'm running a little project now, I can set up a GitHub repo w/ wiki, forum, online collaboration (including hosted build system) and if I need more a little Discord or Slack server will probably do the job. I can moderate all of that myself, or lock it down, or appoint other folks in roles to moderate. I can pick a license that suits the project, a Code of Conduct that suits its growing community, use Markdown or something similar pretty much everywhere... That's all so far beyond what was available anywhere in 2008, and so much easier and less restrictive than what SO provides...

SO got big because the 'Net was a shit place for programmers. It's shrinking now because the 'Net has gotten so much better that SO looks like shit in comparison[5].

[1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/09/15/then-a-miracle-occurs-...

[2]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/04/16/stackoverflowcom/

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182198

[4]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41371512

Pretty much the only benefit I've seen of running prettier on Markdown is to highlight mistakes in formatting that otherwise wouldn't be apparent without viewing rendered output (which it highlights mostly by trashing the file in some fairly obvious way).

The stated philosophy behind Prettier is to end arguments within a team about how to format code, which... Given Markdown is already heavily constrained, barely applies; unlike other languages supported by Prettier, there are precious few adjustments made to Markdown that are clearly intentionally made in pursuit of consistent readability - indeed, if I recall correctly the Prettier Markdown engine is mostly just a round-trip through the remark.js parser and stringifier, and the results reflect this - the results look mechanical, and it is just as likely to eliminate whitespace that lends clarity as it is to add it (if not, as the GP suggests, more likely).

Sadly, there are remark.js plugins that could have been used to e.g. enforce consistent use of whitespace without stripping everything down to the bare minimum, but last I looked the Prettier folk were pretty hostile toward any suggestions that their (default, bare-minimum-effort) "style" was at all problematic.

As the essay and this discussion repeatedly try to emphasize, thinking of Markdown as a "superset of HTML" is missing the point - it is meant to be read. It has both meaningful and collapsible whitespace, and both allows and encourages uses of whitespace that only have a significant effect on source readability.

...Arguably, the reason HTML has collapsible whitespace is to allow writing readable source, and once upon a time it was more common to see HTML produced in a way that didn't get in the way of this (e.g. paragraphs and indentation indicated primarily via whitespace with only opening `<p>` and `<li>` tags). But that ship sailed; tooling long ago coalesced around more rigid conventions, and thus the need for Markdown emerged. Throwing those advantages away raises the question of why bother using Markdown at all.

> Has the Congress ever responded by actually passing a law?

Yes. Despite appearances to the contrary (and the exceptionally lethargic behavior of the current (118th) congress), Congress does actually pass laws (and revisions to existing laws), often in response to deficiencies identified by courts and law enforcement in what is currently on the books. If you're interested in following this, the library of congress website [1] has half-way decent filtering.

> I know that it's not the court's responsibility to fix the rest of the system. But it feels disingenuous to say that the legislature could fix it when they know perfectly well that they won't.

Forget responsibility, it's not even within the court's purview - in order for a ruling to stand (much less set precedent), it must be based on the law as it exists (including past precedent); ignoring that might feel good to watch, and would certainly make life interesting for participants in one specific case... But in no way compensates for an inability to legislate on the part of actual, elected, legislators.

If you're frustrated, vote for congressfolk who get things done vs. blather on, don't wish for a magic judge.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/search?q=%7B%22source%22%3A%22legis...

I vaguely remember DLNA... Which is to say, I remember it barely working at best and mostly just wasting a lot of time debugging configuration and network nonsense.

Arguably the biggest advantage of Chromecast was just not having to deal with all that.

My team ran into this early on when attempting to adopt a rebase-preferred workflow for feature branches...

...then we got used to it. A few workflow changes were necessary:

- configure pull.rebase=true. This is kinda just nice in general, but critical if someone might have rebased the branch you're working on overnight. - get used to pushing up your changes regularly - at very least before you quit for the day. - get used to pulling remote changes regularly - at very least before you start work on a branch each day. Rebase after pulling - especially important if you've branched off another feature branch (which may have been rebased). This way you avoid doing a bunch of work on an out of date base. - *Talk to each other.* If it isn't already obvious what a collaborator is doing... Ask them! And err on the side of over communicating what you're doing.

It turns out, all of these behaviors are kinda just generally useful, and after a bit you forget about rebase being the motivation and just enjoy having a bit less friction when working together.

Probably not water. Purpose is to dampen vibration, making the needle easier to read and possibly protecting the mechanism a bit. https://tameson.com/pages/liquid-filled-pressure-gauge

Generally grid backfeed capability for these systems is predicated on the presence of a stable voltage and frequency already on the grid - this is both a safety measure and a practical necessity, as the inverter needs to synchronize with the grid frequency.

I'm writing from a US perspective; we generally don't buy ranges per-hob (or call them hobs). Stand-alone range + oven is the rule, and that combo runs from a few hundred (basic gas or electric) to a few thousand dollars. You can get a single counter-top "hot plate", but good luck finding a decent 1500W induction hot plate.

Price is coming down, but still much higher than standard electric. Standard electric being somewhere between annoying (open coil) and infuriating (glass top) to cook on when compared to even very inexpensive gas ranges.

So most folks moving into a place with "contractor-grade" appliances already installed are going to experience a very functional gas range or a barely usable electric.

Most folks don't replace appliances just for the hell of it.

This is an insightful observation, and a problem we struggled with for years on Stack Overflow: if you keep moderation quiet and anonymous, there's a lot less criticism, seemingly less hurt feelings... But also very little correction. The Star Chamber works great until corruption sets in; finding a good balance between secrecy and transparency is a challenge.

For years, moderators signed their names to messages like the one cited in the article. After one too many cases of a volunteer being called at work or having their family harassed or sent a suspicious package in the mail... That particular bit of transparency was eliminated - the cost was too high for the limited benefit. OTOH, it used to be very difficult to find your own deleted posts but that has slowly gotten better (including visibility into who deleted them) - turns out the benefit there was substantial (identifying wrongly-deleted posts & curbing over-enthusiastic curators), while harassment has been mostly limited to occasional grousing.

These exist as camping fridges (ex: https://www.amazon.com/DOMETIC-75-Liter-Portable-Refrigerato... there are also a few different full-size deals floating around. From what I've seen, these are a terrible idea for normal home use: they're eye-wateringly expensive, and for the sake of efficiency you give up a lot of nice features like air circulation and humidity control that are commonplace in far cheaper ordinary 120v AC fridges. Great for short-term use, but if you plan on keeping food fresh for weeks instead of a few days, you're gonna be annoyed.

This is also true for a lot of the "kits": they're not particularly inexpensive for the floorspace (especially considering the labor needed), and often require a lot of finish work to be livable. If you have the land, manufactured / modular can end up being more cost effective and considerably quicker.

These strike me as schemes to mark up materials moreso than honest efforts to provide affordable housing.

Here you go: https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/108509/2020/5/26

For some reason, you'll need to be logged into Stack Exchange to view that.

Screen-grab: https://i.stack.imgur.com/6aalu.jpg

Then you don't remember those days at all, because there were plenty of areas the monopoly refused to serve where residents had to cobble together their own service and fight to be connected.

They're really great for drinking while driving without spilling your drink on bumpy roads.

The gp here was referencing a weird little bit of accountant jargon that uses a corruption of roman numerals to indicate million as a product of thousands. It's a terrible idea, but crops up in software circles occasionally due to the number of folks stuck writing financial software.

AFAIK, even accountants are slowly moving away from it for ... Obvious reasons.

The original title sez "millions" and is clearly distinct from both "Minnesota mining and manufacturing" and "millimeters".