jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I have a ton of goodwill and appreciation for the VLC team.

That said, my experience with the VLC app has never been very positive. It seems to be universally loved by everybody, yet every time I've used it in the past 10 years I've some issues with it, including but not limited to:

- Stuttering 720p video on Windows 10, 10 core CPU, GTX 1080

- Opening network streams is a bit of a hit and miss

- I could never make sense of the default "playlist" view when you start the app

- Settings menu is a nightmare of options and UI layout

I've always used SMPlayer on Windows and Linux and IINA/mpv on macOS instead and always had a better experience.

Am I the only one that really doesn't grok VLC at all?
I'm not predicting doom, i'm predicting that given their revenue is dropping for the past 11 quarters, and they can't they will cut the number of people to match the size of the market in most places, since they don't believe they can grow those markets.

They don't need 400k people if their future is providing cloud and cloud services, and not tons and tons of services contracts in every walk of life
etc

Given they've taken restructuring charges between 600 million and 1.5 billion the past few years (which is about 7000-20000 people a year), why do you think they are going to magically reverse course?
The legal requirements are hardly "farcical", considering the "take the money and run" business practices of the more than half of Bitcoin exchanges that have gone bust. California does have requirements for money transmitters, and Coinbase is not on the list. The list: (http://www.dbo.ca.gov/Licensees/money_transmitters/money_tra...).

The list on line is current. I just called the California Department of Business Oversight to check. Coinbase is not a licensed money transmitter in California. (When I mentioned Coinbase, the Business Oversight asked "did you just call about that"? I hadn't; others are asking them about Coinbase.)

Trying to run an exchange with just a money transmitter license is sleazy. Especially for a business hiding behind a mail drop in SF's homeless district. They need to be a registered broker/dealer to be taken seriously.
There are two sides to it: yes, new frameworks and new stuff to learn, and that can be overwhelming.

On the other hand, rapid evolution leads to better ideas, keeps your mind fresh as your learning never ceases, and an opportunity to improve yourself, keep your career in demand, and generate more income for yourself.

Example: when I started web dev, client-side code was basically a giant function containing browser-specific DOM manipulation.

Today, client-side code is arranged in modules with single responsibility, well-defined application architecture, easy to test, easy to modify or extend, the app logic cleanly separated from the UI.

Rapid evolution also keeps the mind fresh. You're continually learning new concepts, absorbing new ideas. This helps me enjoy my job; I'm always learning.

Rapid evolution keeps my skills in demand, too. My last 2 gigs have been because I learned Angular. I'd be hard-pressed to find work if I was still building web apps like it was 1998.
Seattle is on the list! I'm pleasantly surprised.
I'm sure most coders could get out of the building and do some research on users and usability but I've never seen any do that well either.
I've heard a rumor that telegram was developed by the creator of vkontakre, the russian facebook clone.
The backend is a mix of things.
That readme has to have more explanation. Upload some screenshots of it in action or a video link to youtube showing a screencast of how you use it. It might be the best thing since sliced bread but we don't know what it is from the description.
> I think a better comparison would have been some of the smaller discrete GPU wielding laptop.

I agree, but from what I have seen they also perform poorly against collab. A 1660 Ti 4gb RAM laptop gpu, runs about as fast as Collab CPU does. [1]

I have not been able to find how the RTX 2080 Super (Laptop) and upcoming RTX 3080 (Laptop) compares to Collab. The 3080 has over 3x as many cores as the 1660 Ti.

[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/google-colab-how-does-it-comp...
The main argument I hear against extensive documentation is that the codebase changes too quickly to make it worth the effort. I cannot see video as being any better in this regard - it takes more effort to create and more time to consume. Seems like it would be a large effort just to get around the concern of asking quick questions remotely.
> It is rumoured that Apple put the charging port in such an awkward place to force people to unplug the cable as soon as the mouse is charged.

You say this as if it's absolutely typical of Steve Jobs. I read it and think exactly the opposite. Jobs was certainly a stickler for aesthetics, but also for usability. I've read numerous accounts of him lashing out when he found a workflow noticeably frustrating.

What decisions made during Jobs's tenure would you consider comparable to the Magic Mouse's charging port?
Why should people living at some place even be concerned about diversity? I find your comment almost surreal - after relentless media campaigns, people really believe "diversity" should be their top priority in life?
Consumer Reports rated Comma #1 for driver assistance tech, implying fitness for the mainstream market.
This is the same way persistent data structures are used in FP to provide immutable semantics with ~mutable performance. In Clojure the concept is extended to transients, which allow for scope-local mutation reasoning that if the statefulness is invisible at the call site it wasn’t stateful.

All of this is just making the physics of electronics and stateful low level APIs provide reasonable performance for the reasoning benefits of immutable data.

Of course if you break that fourth wall you’ll find it’s more complicated than that. And that’s interesting for understanding how it works, but it’s important not to frame that as some kind of exception or trap door. Anyone busting through that abstraction either knows they are or has more problems coming.
You are maybe being a bit drastic and that's probably alright given the experience that speaks from behind what you're writing there.

I can see some of what you are saying happening at my org too. I'm fighting it with I think enough success to be comfortable. What I mean is that my boss has recently tried to get me to commit to more coding and I refused. It makes zero sense to me to have a team lead commit to coding a specified "amount" (good luck measuring that properly anyway). It will only lead to "sorry nope can't help you, gotta make my own quota" type behaviour, which is definitely not what you want to encourage.

Fixing bugs to help the team out and having them concentrate on delivering the user stories in sprint while actually having some fun debugging sessions for a change? Awesome! :)
Hey Tim, from Realm here. The big thing is really ease of use. Our blog post has a few more details on that point [0] but basically what we heard over and over and saw ourselves, is that Core Data quickly gets in your way if your app grows [1][2][3]. In essence, we tried with this initial release to offer a rich feature set with a simple API, less side-effects (especially for multi-threaded apps), and a performance that’s even better than using raw SQLite.

In early testing we got a lot of higher-level questions about what Realm was exactly, so we decided to go for a descriptive tagline instead, but you’re right that we should add more details about how we compare to Core Data!

[0]http://realm.io/news/introducing-realm/
[1]http://wbyoung.tumblr.com/post/27851725562/core-data-growing-pains
[2]http://alastairs-place.net/blog/2013/04/17/why-core-data-is-a-bad-idea/
[3]http://inessential.com/2014/06/11/core_data_thoughts_june_2014

(EDITS: formatting)
Here's how I like to explain Monads to people. I've been told it's a decent explanation. (It ignores the monad laws and such, but it's a decent conceptual overview.)

OK, so you know Java interfaces? Haskell has something just like that. They're called "type classes", though. But it works pretty much the same way. When you write out a class definition, you write A) the name of the class B) all the functions the class has to support and C) the types of those functions. (Like a Java interface definition.)

Haskell has a type class called "Monad". To "implement the monad interface", in Java parlance, you have to implement two functions. The first is called "bind", but it's written ">>=". Here's its definition:

>>= :: m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b

Let's say our Monad was called `Foo`. In Java-land, this means the function takes a `Foo<a>`, a function that takes an `a` and returns a `Foo<b>`, and it uses those two things to return a `Foo<b>`.

The other function is "return", which is defined as

return :: a -> m a

Which, in Java terminology, means it takes an `a` and returns a `Foo<a>`.

If you implement those two functions, you now have a Monad.

If you've been told that Monads do anything in particular, you've been told wrong. Monads don't necessarily have anything to do with IO, or sequencing, or state, or anything like that.

It just so happens that those two functions (">>=" and "return") are super useful for representing a whole lot of common things, which happen to include things like IO and stateful algorithms. Monads don't have to do either of those things, but they certainly can.
Heh. I didn't realize that. When I'm evil I don't do it by half measures.
Wasn't CampBX the first US Bitcoin exchange? And then TradeHill and then Coinsetter and then Digital Currency Group? And then there's LedgerX...
WHAT is the airspeed velocity of an coconut-laden RC jet?
Yes and I've lost the window to edit my comment. Thanks for the correction :)
Exactly. They were dead to me around 2016.

It's really self-defeating. They think that talking politics makes a difference (even though how many people listen to Mozilla on politics? Anyone?), while neglecting the core product which allows them to have a platform in the first place.
Agree, no one is surprised.

But the authors successfully show how to train CNNs, RNNs, and LSTM RNNs without backpropagation, i.e., every layer learning only via local rules, without having to wait for gradients to be backpropagated to all layers before the entire model can move on to the next sample.

As I understand it, this work has paved a path for training very large networks in massively parallel, fully distributed hardware -- in the not too distant future.
Music gives me momentum and puts me in the moment. In my most productive streaks I listen to music. Then silence is good when evaluating what I’ve done, cleaning up here and there and some refactoring. It’s come kind of call to arms if I needed to make an analogy even though Im not a fan of warfare
>you should have a think about it.

Yeah in a couple other articles it seems some banks refused to lend to / cut off Archegos at some point(s). These guys who are all leverage all the time ... seems inevitable they get it wrong.
I think it's popular in the high performance computing crowd.
"Anyway it's probably good practice to recycle your number every few years, and not use it for 2FA to make switching numbers a lot easier."

Ironically Twilio of all places forced SMS 2FA on all accounts earlier this year.

As in, one day you could no longer log into your twilio account without giving them a phone number. You are locked out until you do.

Ironic in a few ways ...

First, twilio numbers are not mobile numbers - they are voip numbers - and cannot be used for most 2FA authentication services because they cannot receive messages from short codes. So it's ironic that twilio forces you to use a non-twilio number for their 2FA.

Second, many twilio use-cases (like mine) involve building a twilio infrastructure to replace my existing phones/numbers ... and now that is broken from the bottom up because I have to use a mobile phone with a fixed provider just to use twilio.

The bottom line is: none of this is for me or my safety and security. Twilio has a spam problem and that spam problem is very hard to solve. Forced pairings of physical phones and SIM cards is just a desperate way to throw sand in those gears to slow it down a little bit.
This is a take I very much agree with. It's also borne out in modern innovations: the smartphone is the success it is not because it's ambient - but because it's personal. Small enough to always be on you, and powerful enough to do all the basic functions we need of a computer. It more or less is the basic defining digital boundary of our identities - and the reason why user controllable and ownable phones is so appealing to us tech-types.

I think the industry will push for smart everything, and I think it'll all be met with the increasing distrust and derision which has come from the realization that everything that has a computer is basically spying on you for someone else. If there's hope in this dystopic vision, it surely lies with the open source smartphone platform movements and reasonably egalitarian bodies like the EU pushing for consumer rights and standards.
Product and distribution are usually two distinct things in business. We've all learned this the hard way.
Seconded, but I believe there's more to it than just linux being "bad". I believe the greater problems are:

1. Poor discoverability and ease of use - if you have an issue or a need, it's often really hard to find out how to solve it. Even if you do manage to find a solution, often it's not quite plug-and-play and you have to mess around in configs or compile something yourself in order to get it to work. Fun for college students, but a massive pain for everyone else.

2. Hardware drivers: 50% of my issues with linux come from nvidia being an ass. Fuck you, nvidia. Likewise with other devices that often only get third-party drivers which aren't good enough or require more wrangling, see problem 1.
A single formula is entirely possible. Simple rules in principle can generate the complexity of the universe we see. Look into the Wolfram Science Project to see how.
It's pretty silly to ask a command written in the seventies(?) to follow a convention (for another operating system) presented in the nineties.
Wow what a bold take, brave
> Is it even possible to do anything else? I can’t imagine keyboards report their physical layout..

You can easily ask the OS what layout is being used or even ask the user.
> People take things too seriously

Depends on your viewpoint. If you have a small plugin or personal project like CoC, without any ambitions to reach many people, such a joke is fine in my book. But in this case, it seems to hinder the adoption and growth of the language, so it makes a lot of sense to switch to a less offensive name. Especially since the language seems to aim to get more widespread usage.
Wow this is very slow
How did w3c get such power to “slap down” google.

If users can’t access gmail / YouTube etc, they will be ignoring the w3c.

Another workaround if google can’t try this in chrome (it can) do cookies on a google sub domain (yt.google.com etc)
My opinion is that people do what they do because they don't have the choice. As in because my tool is not on their radar. Obviously optimistic from me, but I am launching a product, I have to be!
These comments have all been really useful – it was a while ago that I used Rails – seems that things have come a long way since I played. I'll have another look + at Sinatra. Thanks!
You're how I found this blog. I went back and read a lot of the archives, it's really, really good.
Smells like a PR plant by the headhunting firm.
Security is relative and depends on your particular goals. I may have zero confidence that the government has not subverted Firefox, but that would not stop me from using it. If there are government back doors in Firefox, they aren't being exploited on a large scale for robbery or identity theft, and that makes it good enough for online banking. It wouldn't make Firefox good enough for evading government surveillance, but depending on your purposes, using a web browser you don't trust might be better than not using a web browser at all.

If someone of sufficient expertise decides to hack you and take your banking info, they will, just like if someone decides to rob you on the street, they will. We assume there are vulnerabilities in any piece of software as big as Firefox. Your security depends on not being a particularly tempting individual target for highly skilled attackers and staying up-to-date enough to avoid mass automated attacks, and those factors depend on relative risks that can't even be objectively measured.

Edit/PS: I am also confident that the government would not insert back doors that are likely to be found by criminals, because those vulnerabilities would be exploited by foreign governments and would hurt U.S. commercial interests, which I imagine is the only kind of mistake that would result in Congress taking drastic punitive action (slashing budgets, reducing autonomy, increasing oversight) towards an intelligence agency.
Vogels joined Amazon in 2004.
My understanding of the problem with US schools is that they are funded by the taxes of the surrounding neighbourhood. Thus, a low income neighbourhood will have low quality schools. Even if a student does well in one of these schools, their chances for getting into a good university are still low due to the poor reputation of the school.

I'm Canadian and this information came from talking to someone working in the Detroit area school system. So I'd appreciate any corrections or extra details. But, if this is correct, it seems to me that taking only those of european decent into account would completely hide the problem, as most europeans do not move into extremely poor areas.
Maybe I'm missing something but why exactly does this app need your browsing history?
But people don't want to know you're A/B testing on them with prices. Didn't Amazon get in trouble over that and have to back peddle?

Seems like you have to A/B test over time and not offer different prices simultaneously or else you risk pissing people off.
This is correct. Once a company has to go to the trouble of producing quarterly and annual financial reports and filing them with the SEC and making them available to the world, most companies conclude they might as well do a real IPO and get some pop from building a market in their stock.
C++ is simpler and richer than CL? I've worked in both languages and would say exactly the reverse. In fact, I'm stunned by this statement; I would have thought it impossible from anyone with sufficient experience in both. Our minds must work very differently!

My feeling when I started working in Lisp (CL) was that of a fish who had spent years swimming in oil, glue, and other fluids, finally experiencing what it was like to swim in water. C++, by contrast, was my wet cement (and cement doesn't stay wet for very long). So while it makes sense to me that a Lisp connoisseur would find CL overly complex compared to other Lisps, I am flummoxed by the idea that anyone would think this in comparison to C++.

Programming language preference is far from rational. Not only is there a strong intellectual bias toward what one already knows (viz. Blub), there is a strong emotional bias toward what one /likes/, and that is conditioned by personal experiences. For example, if a language is imposed on you (by a professor or manager), you'll probably dislike it and look for things to hate about it. Conversely, if you discover something for yourself and associate it with the freedom to do and create what you want, you'll probably feel strongly about defending it against criticism. Of course, we spend a lot of time arguing that our emotionally driven choices are strictly rational. Such is human nature.

I don't think anyone is immune to this, and that's why working in a language that one loves will always be more important than working in an objectively better language (by some criteria).
On a month to month outgoing basis I can imagine you might be correct that renting works out cheaper in some cases.

However, it's missing something I think is important. In my case we have a £335k home at 1.6% interest which means every year we pay £5000 in interest, but we paying off around £15000 of the principal on the loan. After 10 years we could sell the house, spend the £150k+ (assuming the home value stays the same) we've paid off on a sailing boat and head off around the world or whatever takes our fancy.

If we'd have rented we might have been able to save maybe £200 a month in outgoings. Even invested in index funds it's unlikely to come close.
It retreads the same old, tired argument that Rust developers have been disproving it for so long, i.e. "Just write good C code" or in this case "Just battle test it"
What Ansible resources do you use for Nomad, Consul and Vault though? I've found a few but they all seem to lag behind release. Noone is up to date at Nomad 1.0.3. Would be nice with some half-way standard way of setting it up, like k8s has quite a few projects that do.
An ice age in Europe, and maybe colder weather on the US east coast. It will probably also have other effects, but it's really hard to predict.
It might take a bit of effort, but should be possible.

One problem for libraries like SDL is they disable all their per platform code with #ifdefs.
To build a static, cross platform version you would have to convert them all those #ifdefs to runtime branching, dynamically load libraries and provide headers files for all platforms.
I have to disagree. The different tiers clearly incentivize giving back something. Sometimes this may only be a featured mention on their website or README, but depending on the exact modalities of that placement and your jurisdiction even that may be subject to VAT.
Decadence. People don't care about civil rights, because those rights don't seem to have anything to do with the lifestyle cults that people are involved in. In Australia, particularly, where the idea of having 'a great lifestyle' trumps all other civic involvement, it should be no surprise that nobody cares - as long as you can drive to the new mall on the weekends for a bit of air-conditioned consumer protection, can watch all the latest crap from the UK/USA on television every day, and can generally just kick back and relax and enjoy 'the good life', who cares what rights are taken from you? As long as "I've got mine", where "mine" is variously defined by corporate masters whose marketing-mind-control rules every aspect of that lifestyle, in an ultimately feudal system, nobody really gives a shit ..
If it could be done cost effectively relative to mining, it would be a winner.
Unfortunately Google hasn't hired a million programmers yet so perhaps their ML algorithms aren't good yet at knowing what actually makes people good. In fact, I think it is actually rather fool-hardy when I hear people talking about analyzing resumes to predict candidates, or other such nonsense.

Just interview some people. Don't ask crazy algorithm questions either, watch the person do what they are suppose to do. It worked great while I was at Pivotal Labs. We would sit down with engineers and pair program with them for a while. It became rapidly clear whether or not they were good, mostly because we were evaluating them on the exact criteria for which we were searching.
This is an interesting take on using syntax trees to rearrange an in-memory representation of Python code, using parse methods and Visitor methods.

I'm going to follow his other blog posts to see where he is going.
Censor but supply notice that they were censoring. And when China hacked into gmail, they left the country rather than continue to comply with their laws.
I also write and make music, but not the generative kind. I'm interested in the generative fiction, what do you use and how does that work? What kind of stories come out of it?