I actually agree with you, for the most part. The code I work with actually does contain some valuable algorithms, but Im pretty sure the effort of integrating them into a larger system is pointless without the data. It’s almost like stealing half-life 2 source code without any assets.
Still, “Getting the source code of facebook or instagram doesn't mean you could compete with them.” I think to giants like that, having access to their source code could open up some very interesting loop holes for manipulating the ranking algorithms, or even security vulnerabilities.
True, haven't thought of that. However very few actual projects / companies are in a situation where the chinese GOVT would be interested to spend resources to hack your platform. For the ones that are afraid of that there's always self hosting of course
I used to work with HVAC companies, and I noticed that many of their customers mistakenly believed they were purchasing air conditioners. They didn’t consider these devices, which they connected to the internet, as computers. Despite being systems that required user names, passwords, updates, monitoring, and other maintenance, the prevailing attitude among these customers was, “This is an appliance, and why would anyone care about my air conditioner?”
All this to say, not even subject matter experts necessarily appreciate the risk involved in their work
I love DL. I think tables, at least in the past, were misused as DLs even more in the past and the inconvenience of the table markup is even worse than a bunch of divs.
As someone who had written lots of XHTML in the past, not having closing tags makes my eyes twitch like Scrat in Ice Age. I even occasionally write `<br>` like `<br/>` out of habit.
Yes yes, someone is about to tell me that Opera running on a PS Vita with the language set to Basque will display those incorrectly. That ISO 714-4BΔ-鸡冠 defines them as undefined, and prohibits them within eight clock ticks of C sequence points. That Apple charges an extra 1% app store commission for them (except where prohibited by court injunction).
Call it a concession to my sanity. A song of saner days.
Someone here. OP most certainly knows that precisely, but for the rest: It was Netscape® Communicator, which interpreted everything after `<` up to either white-space or `>` as a tag name. Technically that wasn't even that much incorrect, but amusingly, since the HTML "specs" then still stemmed from SGML, the really correct outcome of `<br/>` (and even `<br />` with a space before the "closing" solidus) back then should have been to both emit the (empty, by definition) BR element (⁕) and a dangling `>` text node after that. No consumer-facing HTML client really implemented that. Netscape simply took it as unknown "BR/" tag and didn't render anything in its place.
In the late '90s Netscape was a niche browser with negligible 80% market share. The real and eternal XHTML enlightenment had begun a few years later, in the early 2000s and reached near eternal duration of seven years.
Practically, using `<br />` in HTML with space was safe, like, forever, except for original W3C validator and Amaya. Using `<br/>` is safe since around 2002-2008 when Netscape was dying. In 2026, you can throw basically anything at current browsers and it will repair it to something meaningful, as per the living HTML spec. You can go `</br/r/r>`, if you are really into solidi, and it will work the same as `<br>`.
Disclosure: I also clearly see how having stupid simple "XML-like" syntactic rules would be beneficial in the grand scheme of things compared to what HTML became: memorising the "VOID" HTML elements by heart, and having to implement this in every HTML processing product clearly creates significant mental and processing overhead. But FMPoV, it's just one inconvenience we should begrudgingly accept at this point, rather than fight it.
(⁕) In reality, the way browsers treat `<br>` in the document flow is more like a text node than element node, but it's just an implementation detail orthogonal to this topic.
Haha, blushing in awkward uncertainty that I've failed to detect irony …? (Is this HN, right?) But even if, thanks anyway! I'm glad I could vent the lore I've spent gathering in unhealthy amount of unproductive research; I cannot imagine better place to finally bury that than deep in super-tangential HN discussion…
No no, dead earnest. I'm a big believer in honest compliments, where merited.
Please start writing a blog, if you don't already. If I could compose a blog roll of people writing fun CS histories, I would replace my HN bookmark with it.
You cannot close HTML tags that way anyways, <br> and <br/> are the same, as are <div> and <div/>. The spec defines whether an element self-closes, the slash is just ignored.
Fair point, though /DT and /DD are also optional just like /TH, /TD and /TR are. So in effect, def…scription list could structurally save you one TR for each entry and two "BLE"s:
I actually prefer VLC to foobar2000. However, I still prefer classic Winamp to to all other music players, and I wish I could get Apple Music work in the same interface. I like 100% of the classic Winamp player UI/UX.
- I like the separate player, playlist, EQ windows.
- I like that I can re-arrange the windows, and resize the playlist separately.
- I like that the main player has a little EQ built in.
- I like the layout of the main window. It's perfect.
- I like the layout of the playlist window, it's also perfect. I can add "directories", "albums", etc. and again, I can resize the window.
- I like the skins. I like the classic skin, but I also love the Sonicated skin. I still have it on my Windows laptop.
- Conversely, I really dislike the "native" UI elements.
- I like that lack of rounded corners on the classic Winamp windows, such that when windows stick together, they appear as whole, and I can drag them around as one.
Mostly, it's a bunch of seemingly small and aesthetic things, but if a player doesn't have those things, I might as well just use iTunes.
Named arguments are a great feature in Python. I often forget TypeScript doesn't have this, but I use the object form all the times. As a bonus, you can also declare these arguments in an object an interface type, aptly named.
I do not downvote comments when I disagree, and I think it’s better to explain why I would strongly disagree. Downvoting in this case almost reinforces the notion that the downvoted comment makes such a good point that it causes people to give up on the discourse and just smash the panic downvote button. It’s obvious to me why this is not the case for this comment.
The suggestion to setup some kind of IAM policy to shut things down and stop resource usage is insanely complicated for users who need this kind of feature the most. If I’m learning AWS and just added my CC to it, I am the last person to be qualified to setup this kind of an alert and policy from scratch. This needs to be a single text input in the billing page, like it is for countless spend-as-you-go services. When the limit is hit, the service needs to stop the usage at the customers peril, because that’s what they customer requests.
> The suggestion to setup some kind of IAM policy to shut things down and stop resource usage is insanely complicated for users who need this kind of feature the most.
We set this up at my last job like in 10 minutes. Complexity is a matter of perspective, and if your job to do this, you have done this many-many times, and you have ready to use infrastructure as code templates.
Yes, AWS is massive, the documentation is huge and makes things inherently complex, but flexible too. You can define what behavior do you want when you exceed your limits. We can argue whether this is obfuscation or complexity or what, but based on my experience AWS optimizes it's product for enterprise-ish companies, that can afford to have SREs who knows exactly what to do in such cases. That is where they have their own training/certification program.
For simple use cases there is AWS Lightsail where pricing is simple and easy to understand.
But even if it would be insanely complicated, that is a reason to downvote? HN used to be better than this kind of "I don't like your comment, let's downvote it".
Is this actually GeoJSON falling down, or decades of convention extended to JSON? Topology is great, but it is sidestepped by Shapefile/WKT/WKB/etc, in favor of independent primitives like POINT, LINE, POLYGON. If GeoJSON did not exist as a new JSON GIS data format encoding these primitives, TopoJSON would not have "replaced" it, due to the added mis-match with other non-topological formats.
From what I can tell, the top criticism of GeoJSON is the under-enforced winding order specification, and crossing the antemeridian.
Similarly, typical map APIs like the Google Maps API accept GeoJSON and not TopoJSON. I was not suggesting TopoJSON as a replacement for GeoJSON, but as a complement to it. With the tools on the TopoJSON GitHub, you can have GeoJSON input and output, but convert to TopoJSON for the simplification step to avoid the "slivers" problem.
That’s not an accurate take. Microsoft has had a monopoly on the PC desktop OS. Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft. To call most of these developers “not serious” is quite and overstatement. This includes all PC game developers, DAW, CAD, Adobe…?
Azure expanded the Microsoft franchise, and provides another prong to their whole integration story just like cloud AD services and online Office 365 provide another way to stay integrated into their ecosystem.
Yeah, they needed to work on their image somewhat, but their image never negatively impacted them
> Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft.
Developers as users, sure. MSFT was common. Developers as responsible for infrastructure, MSFT anything was considered a huge risk and unreliable in the 90s.
Granted, my memory retains only a general narrative...I remember a shift by 2002ish when I started to see windows servers as perfectly fine machines for closet/under-the-table infra you didn't care too much about anyway. By 2004 they were moving out of the closet, so to speak. Then those machines became more important because more was being done with them and were considered "just as good" as any other OS. Developers that had experience, with their MSFT certs in hand, were cheaper too. It was a slow progression to eat into the corporate marketshare. By 2006 virtual machines were ubiquitous and you could run MSFT virtualized. Many companies do that by default today for workspace controls. I have never and would never choose to use MSFT products (including Azure) for business critical infra. MSFT acquiring Github was great for them, and the death of it for me. I'm probably an old outlier, but I 'member.
I think the first shift was the reckoning with Windows NT actually being decent software. Windows 2000 (AKA NT 5.0) included Active Directory, WebDAV support, and a host of other features that were genuinely useful in a sysadmin setting [0]. Also, it shipped with IE5 which introduced XMLHttpRequest and was the best web browser by a mile. Between their pushy sales reps and so much stuff being included by default, I think it got kind of hard to push for anything else for a while.
Right, those are all desktop applications. Microsoft has long owned that market.
I said “internet developers” meaning web sites, servers, apps, etc. Microsoft’s early offerings in that space, plus all the pain they inflicted with Internet Explorer, is what took years to overcome.
As an MS dev at the time: MS missed The Web and Mobile, thinking Office would be enough. Everything since is catchup.
On the one hand MS was a web pioneer — asynchronous web calls and ActiveX technologies that were surprisingly capable — but these were peripheral to their main goals.
Instead of MS extending their unified development platform outwards, something .Net promised to enable, effectively the opposite happened. .Net chased Java, but Java was being pushed out by Ruby on Rails. .Net web starts chasing RoR, but then Node is getting cool. .Net Web starts chasing Node and that effort splits .Net into uhhhhh ‘Framework’ uhhh ‘standard’ (ie Old-and-working), and .Net Core (what a container based web stack VM needs to look like).
The problem at that point, IMO/IME, is that Node is JavaScript, and those awesome server-side geniuses dump too-easy tooling while recreating every problem of every stack ever (ie LeftPad, loosely goosey versioning, and NPM being a crypto hackers wet dream). The .Net that started as Enterprise Server Stuff is now kinda sorta ‘Whatever’ about versioning, stability, roadmaps, and platform planning. Everything from DataAccess to GUI was churned needlessly for almost a decade, and everyone using that platform looks and feels like an a-hole because huge swaths of MS tech is abandonware resulting in perpetual rewrites of recent-term work and silos of competence.
No one can explain what framework to use to write a basic windows application anymore… Office uses React, and Windows does too… the fat cats who made MS into M$ knew better than that, the M$ who chased cloud growth and cut staff for stock price has never cared.
I love Zed. I was a fan of Sublime Text, and could never get used to VSCode. I thought I'd try Zed a try when it was still extremely raw, before the AI integration, and I loved the simplicity and speed almost immediately. When they added better python linting features, I switched, and haven't used anything else. I know that there are many anti-AI folks here, but I feel lucky that we they added the Zed Agent, and all the integration. It's been great not having to switch back to VSCode for copilot.
Still, “Getting the source code of facebook or instagram doesn't mean you could compete with them.” I think to giants like that, having access to their source code could open up some very interesting loop holes for manipulating the ranking algorithms, or even security vulnerabilities.
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