mkramlich

I visited KA for the first time in a while. It used to drop me into a table of links to videos on various academic topics. Very simple, useful, fast, and the Obviously Right Way (TM) to do it. At least in the default case, and for the casual or first-time visitor.

However just now it required me to signup/login. Signing up asked for PII, which is intrusive and strictly unnecessary for letting me see educational videos. I gave a fake email, along with the other fields. It then complained it couldn't send an email to it. When I pressed their button to fix the email address, it then popped up a window for me to enter it, however it was auto-forcing it down into an obviously stupid position such that it was impossible to hit its Submit button. You can enter a new address but not hit Submit because too close to the screen bottom's edge.

I love the orig vision, and the core content (Sal's lectures and his style) but looks like they're now falling down at the simple stuff along the edges of the problem space. Failing over inside the unnecessarily added complexity (GUI/JS shenanigans, control fetish, privacy intrusion, etc), rather than in the essential inescapable parts (text, images, embedded canned video, links, curricula design, effective communication, etc.)

I think that guess is accurate and was a big consideration. If it were for an interplanetary vehicle, multi-months, etc, then yes clearly you'd want a design that assumed stronger/longer radiation exposure. Plus redundancy becomes even more desirable if you have humans inside the tin can.

I totally hear you and understand. However, two points to consider.

One, nobody's forced to share their project/efforts on the Internet, which is essentially the entire planet, all of humanity, 24x7 for all the rest of time (info wants to live forever, etc.) We are all free to keep our things private, off-line, just among friends, etc. You're free to approach people in real life you know for feedback, tips, encouragement. They're more likely to be polite, and also you're not asking something of a total stranger.

Second, there's been a cultural change that a lot of younger people or newbs may not be aware of. For folks of the pre-Internet, "first with computers" generation, that's precisely the standard operating environment when we we learning, just starting out, taking those early baby steps. When we were first scribbling out our first programs, however naive or full of bugs or flaws, we didn't immediately go push it in the faces of millions of strangers across the world (ala Show HN, GitHub, blogs, etc), a good portion of whom would be professionals alot further along, and say "omg look at this isn't it amazing I'm a hacker now please hire me k thx" -- we couldn't because the Interent didn't really exist and most of these modern ways of publishing and sharing didn't exist. So most of that early crude, naive, sometimes embarassing stage was done in private, off-line, or only among friends or teachers known personally. Today we have the equivalent of proud (and healthily, voluntarily deluded) parents posting their kindegartener's first crayon house-and-trees-and-sun drawings out onto blogs, GitHub, HN, Reddit, YouTube, etc and then being shocked or having their feelings hurt when others aren't as eaually blown away as them, and in some cases critical or dismissive. Its just the nature of the beast. Nobody forced them to share those things, and in that public global anonymous mixed (newbs/kids and experts/pro's) of a forum. They chose that. And it makes sense you'll also get back a mix of reactions, some of which you won't like.

What the modern Internet enables today has lots of great qualities (eg. I can download all this cool software for free, Wikipedia, Kickstarter, etc etc) but it also enables lots of sucky stuff (eg. eternal September, eternal kindegarten mode, arrogant assholes, FAQs, RTFMs, trolls, flamewars, phishing, astroturfing, doxing, etc.) Its hard to enable one without the other.

as I've gotten older I've increasingly wondered if I should make the jump (back, technically) to low-level programming. working on those highly constrained devices, every cycle matters, every bit, every watt, etc. because that's where I started as a kid and think it would give me a market advantage over the younger generation who've grown up with supercomputers in their pockets, a dozen high-level languages to choose from, frameworks for everything, tutorials and videos for everything, and not really having to worry about performance or resource usage like "we" used to have to do just to make anything work at all.

for bonus points support all the same PEEKs and POKEs and CALLs that Applesoft BASIC did on the II series. even if it's not strictly part of the BASIC itself, but the integration between it and the hardware/BIOS, it would be nice. technically might be required to correctly run lots of the BASIC programs from that era. I know most of my own relied on them for certain effects.

I've been playing and designing games of several kinds since childhood, including dabbling in tabletop RPG writing/design. So I hear you. I'd love to know if your experience was with your own original RPG or did you just work on adventures/expansions for other systems (D&D, etc)?

I once took a shot at writing and publishing a GURPS compatible adventure, independently, and gave up because SJG either forebade it or simply made it too annoying. And that was the "final straw" beyond already knowing that my total hourly ROI for the project almost certainly would have been bad. Far too bad for a craft that takes such a rare and above-average set of intellectual skills.

However I was "lucky" also to have been programming since childhood, and that is one field that historically does pay well for one's time.

lots of oil and (I think) the world's largest sovereign wealth fund (ie. if they decide to invest in X they can do so big enough to move the needle)

note for the future: Amazon is a tab away and will give you summaries and more of millions of books. mostly a solved problem. would not be surprised if Wikipedia had a summary of it too.

good observation. agree I've seen that correlation. as a prefix for snark.

I wish you kids would use "summary:" instead of "tl;dr" though kudos for putting it at the beginning rather than the end.

I mean this in a friendly constructive way, and realize you may not be a kid. But while there's lots of positive innovation happening in culture and esp related to the Internet, I feel strongly that "tl;dr" is not one of them, its a step backward. It's typically placed in the worst possible location (the very end rather than the very top/beginning) and it's far less likely to be understandable than "summary". It's also reinventing the wheel. Again, not a criticism of your comment, meant more for other readers, esp younger or less educated ones, who don't know about the word summary and how it is traditionally used to solve the need well already. :-)

indeed, its the kind of thing where you hope to see such epic code comments like this:

// and the following section is where we attempt to land on the Moon

I thought that was too meta and strained of a piece. I suspect his goal was just to say something that could make HN front page and then get some portion of that eyeball stream siphoned through to look at his commercial software Wizard. (and here I've helped with that further perhaps, haha.) But it was a very strained, strawman-heavy piece. Though I liked the writing in terms of craft.

you can't know if I'm overconfident or not, you have far too little information, including a lack of details about what I'm envisioning. also I am an experienced programer. More importantly I'm a systems thinker. Also I'm well aware of the need to do thorough analysis, testing and then a gradual roll-out. I also have no illusions about whether such a thing would ever be applied by the US government. I do think it could be used by a small experimental organization, micro-state or virtual nation. It can be overlaid on top an existing government's domain, but just tailored and camouflaged to be compatible legally with any "host" country. Obviously test and tune and critique before making drastic changes to an existing system, or start having large amounts of money pass through it. That should be obvious to any careful, experienced, intelligent person. But you made the rude mistake to assume I didn't. You could have framed your concern as a question instead, and that would have been more constructive, less acidic. Acidic comments are too common on HN. Let's all try to elevate the game.

that's rude. shame on you. that type of comment is too common on HN. poisons the community

if you like this topic you might also be interested in a recent HN post of mine, that did not get much attention, on the topic of all the various possible techniques or patterns we can draw from in order to improve performance (eg. lower latency, increased throughput) or scalability:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8665707

I like the inverse challenge: let's try to replace as much of government as we can with software/hardware. And the simpler, cheaper and more open, the better.

Not even kidding.

I'm already confident I can replace most/all of the IRS, Treasury, and all the welfare/safety-net type programs with fairly simple, hard-to-abuse software/hardware system. Given that the laws were significantly different and simplified. (And snowball's chance in Hell they'd allow that. Although there are alternate law/tax/welfare configurations which are both physically possible and theoretically sustainable.)

from the global data trends it seems clear that an increasing proportion is being captured and kept in th capitalist/owner class, at the expense of labor. there's been a noticeable shift worldwide overall

because not on topic for HN

rapes occur all the time, not relevant if someone just happens to be employed by Uber

if a Microsoft employee beat his wife should that be on HN? no. nor would it if he instead worked at a Texaco gas station

use of force (cops, military)

Chris: You do not want to go to lunch.

Rich points gun at Chris.

Chris: Let me rephrase that. I misspoke. I'm sorry.

I'd argue that both the pro and con positions on this issue are correct. Because there are, roughly speaking, two sub-markets within the larger unified whole. Let's call them the upper market and the lower market.

The upper market is about the supply-vs-demand of the best engineers/programmers/techies. The lower market is composed and driven by the supply-vs-demand for the cheapest people who can ostensibly fill those roles, however poorly, as long as they are (or appear to be, in near term) adequate for the need at hand.

Therefore speaking in broad strokes: yes, if you're a US citizen/resident whose skills/talents/accomplishment are effectively in that lower market, then globalization is likely to hurt you in terms of employment prospects in a tech field. However, if you're in the upper market supply-side, globalization is more likely to help, esp if you market yourself very publically and globally, and independently from any specific employer -- for example, get yourself some kind of top ranking on some forum or in search results on a given topic, or write a book on it, create/lead or contribute to a popular FOSS project, etc. You may not have full control of your destiny, we each have different mixes of strengths or handicaps, but to some extent you do have a choice as to whether to put yourself into that upper market's supply pool, or the lower. And there are lots of people world-wide desperate for money or to get their foot in the door, thus they flood that lower market, even if later some percentage of those same folks may transition into the upper one. And a new "sucker" is born every second, world-wide.

The OP's author is clearly writing from the POV of that upper market's demand side. He's correct for his segment. A different conclusion about the impact of H1B visas (and off-shoring) can also be correct, if about that lower market's supply-side.

All good. No conflict.

disclaimer/caveat: obviously speaking in broad strokes, and thinking at strategic level. (And I wish I never had to point that out on HN.)

> I paid for the research with my tax payer money. Give me full access to it.

though I have a similar desire I don't think that's a good argument for justifying it. why? evaluate the following symmetrical situations:

> I paid for the [tank, aircraft carrier, nukes, Fort Knox, etc] with my tax payer money. Therefore...

that said, I do think there's a greater net benefit to humanity, and scientific progress will accelerate, the easier, cheaper and less restrictive access we have to papers and research results.

poor name choice given the well-known Tarantino movie. its a bit like naming your new, say, stellar formation simulation SaaS (to give a contrived example)... StarWars.

for the younger folks here on HN I wanted to point out that Mr. Bright was the creator of the Zortech C and C++ compilers of old, as well as the co-creator of one of the most famous early computer strategy games of all time, Empire and Empire Deluxe. He would know whereof he speaks.

I personally used the Zortech tools in my C/C++ days, played Empire a ton, even written a few hobby clones of Empire.

$240M cost over 4 years

thats $60M/year

assume that all went to cover cost of programmers or equiv profs

lets say fully loaded annual cost of said staff indiv is $150K each

$60M gets you 400 of those $150K programmers FT for a year

now do that for 4 years

for something that is essentially just a database-backed CRUD webapp with simple workflow and the hardest bits actually done by a pre-existing separate service anyway (messaging to banks to issue the DD; printing checks and envelopes then handing off to PO for delivery); and could have been orders-of-magnitude simpler (and cheaper overhead) if all replaced with a totally automated Basic Universal Income payout to every citizen

gov software: massively lucrative if weren't so massively inane

wait til you learn how many GWh we've put into USD, euros, coins, paper currency, banks, accountants, taxes, paperwork, ATM's, etc etc etc :-)

"Do you have at least 20 years of C experience?"

"Uh... actually, yes!"

Coinbase

I'm not. I'm being observation-of-reality-and-making-humorous-reflections-thereof-ist. :-) Nowhere did I say all teen/20-somethings were hotshit brogrammers. There is however a subtype out there in the real world and both I and others have encountered them repeatedly. They are unpleasant and blindered, to everyone's detriment.

"ken doesn't have any popular repositories"

you just know that somewhere there will be teen/20-something hotshit brogrammer startup CEO/CTO types who will refuse to look at his resume, go first to his GitHub, be totally unimpressed ("lame! just a talker, not a real hacker, etc") then skip over him.

I loved Borland's tools. But they got Microsofted just like dozens of other apps, one by one over the years (word proc, spreadsheet, browser, etc.)