eggs in cold water, bring to boil, boil for 3 mins, remove from heat. never cracks, eggs never overcook no matter how long until you remove them from the water.
Amazon in 1995 was a C++ executable invoked via CGI () That couldn't scale once load-balancing was required, but it worked pretty well up until that point.
() technically, two of them: one handled the front (customer visible) end, one handled the back-office side.
I am frankly amazed that US trucks, which already have an elongated "nose first" tractor shape, have not evolved to look more like high-speed train engines.
Some have become more aerodynamic with the mirrors, over cab cowling, and wheel cowling. I wonder if some of the flat front had to do with airflow over the radiator.
Good radiator space was definitely some of it, part of the requirement for the engines and transmissions to last the like million+ miles truckers want out of them is to have more than merely sufficient cooling in order to keep both the engine and transmission to stay the same temperature no matter how hot it is outside or how hard they need to run the engines to get up a hill. Of course that is along side other semi-truck specific equipment like bypass oil filters that have a MUCH finer filter to remove smaller metal particles that would otherwise just pass right through the main oil filter. More variable operating temperatures and worse oil filtration might be fine for consumer vehicles that are mostly rusted out trash out by time they hit 300,000 miles, but you wouldn't want to have to buy a brand new semi-truck engine every 3 years.
No but it is incredibly simple and reliable to just have a large opening for a large set of radiators rather than worrying about ducting and air velocity and pressures as they go through them.
Carlin was an insufferable cynic who helped contribute to the nihilistic, cynical, defeatist attitude to politics that affects way too many people. The fact that he probably didn't intend to do this doesn't make it any better.
I don't dispute that Carlin was a cynic, but saying he contributed to political attitudes is an overstatement. There are hordes of people who were and still are making a reality all the things he so cynically highlighted.
He helped make it legitimate to doubt that there can ever be a politician who is not motivated by self-interest.
The fact that self-interest may play a role in the careers of many politicians doesn't undo the damage that this attitude has caused to our polity.
"They're all fuckers, they're the same" is the attitude that leads to people being unable to differentiate between one party that is subject to excessive corporate lobbying and donations, still starts too many wars, and frequently makes mistakes but nevertheless is fundamentally trying to improve most people's lives, and another that wants to destroy Medicaid.
Too much cynicism is destructive, but so is not being able to resist the temptation to see one's political opponents as aliens with inscrutable motives or truly failed or defective human beings with despicable motives.
I am not that interested in motives, since they are rarely truly knowable.
I prefer to judge my political opponents by what they actually do, and by that metric, it is self-evident from both their public and private speech, and from the legislation that they seek to (and sometimes do) pass, that Republicans would like to destroy (or at least massively downsize) redistributive programs that provide assistance to the poor.
Now, as to why they might want to do this, I remain mute and disinterested, since in 61 years of life, I've never heard any explanation that doesn't deconstruct under cross-examination.
> This a late 20th century myopic view of the economy. In the ages and the places long before, most of human toil was enjoyed by a tiny elite.
And overall wealth levels were much lower. It was the expansion of consumption to the masses that drove the enormous increase in wealth that those of us in "developed" countries now live with and enjoy.
> Doesn't mean we should continue with the old ways.
The GP was claiming that it is "20th century myopic" to not notice that in the past the products of most human toil went mostly to a small elite. My very point was that that old way of doing things didn't generate much wealth, not that the way things have changed is all good. I'm not advocating for any of the old ways, I'm saying that having an economic system that brings benefits to all is an important component of growing the overall wealth of a society (and of humanity overall).
I mean this is what feudalism was and this not the only system with this property. Early forms of industrial capitalism had the same form as well. We tend to think of capitalism bringing economic prosperity to the common people but nothing of the sort happened. Worker organization brought prosperity to the workers. Our entire worldview of capital is formed by the period from 1940-1990. This is a historical aberration as it actually is the period of forced confiscation of capital from the capitalist. This is why the common people think of this period as the Golden Age.
In what sense were "early forms of industrial capitalism" characterized by "elites producing for elites". Perhaps you mean "elites directed production towards the desires and needs of elites", but that's a very different claim than "elites producing for elites" ...
The entire point of capitalism (at least until the very recent past) was to harness the production capacity of labor to create profit. Since elites generally do not engage in labor, there is no sense in which capitalism has ever involved "elites producing for elites".
Of course, expanded automation may tweak this a bit, since elites may no longer rely on human labor to facilitate production. That would change things ... substantially, which was really the original point.
If we arrived at a scenario in which elites used highly automated production to simply produce for themselves, what does that economy look like compared to today? Is it wealthier or poorer overall? Is it self-sustaining?
Im saying that that scenario is virtual the same as before the workers revolutions only now the workers are no longer required. Before the workers got a tiny slice of production to sustain themselves. Now they will get nothing for they will not be part of production.
> Amazon needs to be stopped, and legislation will not do so. Only its loyal consumers – who keep the beast alive – can do that by taking their money elsewhere.
We've (my wife and I) tried to stop using Amazon. But recently, I've run into issues where I need particular specialized bits and pieces (e.g. just today, a low profile 4" HVAC 90 degree elbow) that are only available via Amazon. A variation is where the item is available from one or two other places, but at a 10x markup.
We need to convince vendors to also avoid Amazon, and that may be even more of a difficult sell (no pun intended).
ps. Amazon employee #2, and I approve this message.
The other problem are people doing price arbitrage. You find the item on eBay and think to yourself, "cool, I'd rather patronize a small business" - but as it turns out, the item is drop-shipped from Amazon, Walmart, or the like.
This got me the other day, and it had me cracking up, they just put my shipping address and and checked out from Walmart. $5 lesson that Walmart actually sold what i wanted and i should have checked there first.
I recently had something very similar happened to me, and then the seller accidentally sent me another weirdly expensive item by mistake. Unfortunately it's a large heavy part from a ride lawn mower
I just read your Vox article and the comment "We exist with multiple hats" really resonated with me. I find it difficult to interact with a lot of people in tech because they too often seem to be overly dogmatic and unable to consider that other valid perspectives can and do exist... and that they might not know everything.
Sometimes I just want to say to those people, "I want to live in your world, where everything is black and white and you have all the answers in your pocket. It sounds comfortable and easy."
Cancelling Prime seems to have a big natural impact. I heard stories about how much order volume goes up after someone joins Prime, and it seems the opposite is true as well. I cancelled my membership when they started charging extra for ad-free video. It just felt so cheap and petty, since I was already paying for Prime. This was just the straw the broke the camel's back. I was already pretty fed up with Amazon due to being sent counterfeit products, used or open box items being sold as new, the push to leave retail packaging on my porch, all the fake reviews, the inability to find quality items via their search, the site being overrun with low quality garbage being resold from AliExpress for 10x the price, the concern for the future of my local stores, wishlists no longer supporting external links or simply ideas, etc, etc, etc.
I still do make the occasional order out of laziness or a lack of other options. However, I looked up all my orders from the lifetime of my account and charted them a couple weeks ago. After 6 years of year-over-year order increase, and a 17+ year overall uptrend in orders... they fell off a cliff once I cancelled. My orders fell by 60% the year after I cancelled Prime, and it's on pace to drop even further this year. I even did all my Christmas shopping last year without any Amazon orders, while previous years were 100% Amazon.
Going down to 0 can be hard, but even big drops in orders will have an impact. And if that money goes to other retailers, and demand grows, they can invest in more inventory and a wider array of goods that people need. Any percentage shift away from Amazon is progress, especially in done my the masses.
I'd encourage everyone to dump their Prime membership. If you order more than $35 you can still get free shipping (you just have to be explicit in selecting it and be vigilant during checkout to avoid the multiple traps to try and get you to sign back up... lots of dark patterns). Shipping times are a little more unpredictable. Sometimes it still only takes 1-2 days, while other times it seems to take a week or two. Most things aren't urgent. If they are, I try to find them locally.
I've also tried to stop obsessing about finding the "best" whatever it is I'm looking for. When online, there are a lot of traps, but one of the things I expect retail stores to do is make sure they are carrying quality products they'd stand behind. They don't want returns or to get a reputation for selling junk. I was getting a toaster a while back and instead of spending hours researching online, I just went to a store I frequent, looked at the 5 options they had, and picked the one I liked the best. Hours of time saved, and the toaster works fine. I expect I'll have it for many years to come.
I've discussed it to death here on HN. Sort of over doing that anymore. I was only there for 14 months before getting out to become a stay at home parent.
This is second openculture list I've seen on HN recently, and when I visit the link, I may be dumb but I cannot see a list, playlist or anything corresponding the actual title of the post.
In all likelihood you lived through 2008, and yet you continue to believe that market "efficiency" is somehow a builtin immutable property of particular trading rules?
That doesn't matter much when it's specifically the C/C++ compiler vendors who don't care about fixing the cross-compilation problem. It would be trivial for C/C++ compiler vendors to make cross-compilation as simple as with the Zig toolchain, but they don't care about the topic and that's why it doesn't happen.
Fast forward a few decades to today and the best solution to cross-compile C/C++ projects is the Zig toolchain (and isn't that kinda weird? A "foreign" toolchain coming along fixing one of the biggest problems in the C/C++ ecosystem just like that as a "side quest"?)
The problem with cross-compiling for Windows or macOS as targets are the runtimes (sometimes required during compilation or building), not the cross-compiling. This also has nothing to do with C/C++ as a language.
We build for Linux and Windows on Linux using gcc/mingw and don't have any fundamental issues doing so. On macOS we need the headers & libraries for macOS, we have to do those inside a VM.
I'd be extremely surprised if you can cross-compile Zig for macOS on a non-macOS platform, unless it doesn't use any macOS native frameworks at any level.
From all that I've experienced in the past few weeks dealing with C projects and various build systems and operating systems, I suspect that using Zig would work perfectly as an easy cross-platform alternative to CMake. Until I open up my code in VS Code and the C/C++ plugin just doesn't work, no auto-completion, no go-to-definition, syntax highlighting is broken, etc., and all because it can't find the files in places it ordinarily expects them to be. And maybe there will be some hacky way to fix it with a setting for the VS Code plugin, but likely not.
I'm not saying this is the case, but literally none of the setups I tried feels non-hacky so far, and every one of them has at least one noticable problem during development. I truly miss the days of writing apps for a single platform using its own native build tools. Maybe that's what I'll do: write this as a native Windows app using Visual Studio (ugh, such an awful editor though) and then if I get sales, port it to Mac OS X 10 using Xcode.app, and compile it for Linux inside WSL with GCC 15.
Maybe I worded it wrong. I want to develop my app in VS Code. I have gotten so very used to everything about how VS Code works over the past 10 years, that Visual Studio feels so unintuitive and backwards and weird. But VS is the king of C development on Windows apparently. That said, I've made some progress getting VS Code to work with the official Microsoft plugins for both C/C++ and CMake, both inside WSL and outside of it, though nothing that doesn't feel somewhat hacky.
Sadly, the C++ language does not exist in a vacuum.
In fact, it exists in a world which contains "an ecosystem", tooling, opinionated build systems, various incompatible compilers, and mountains of legacy baggage, and all of these influence the daily experience of programmers using the language.
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