jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Indeed, I've been on the receiving end of somebody taking this kind advice to heart once, and things not working out too well.

At that job the we had a legal obligation to let anyone in the country to opt their building out from a certain database, by entering the address on a web form. We'd then send a snail mail verification code to that address, and enact the opt out on entry of the code.

This was covered incredibly well in the media, and the number requests was in the millions (don't know how many of those actually turned out to be valid). I suspect the people who'd made the web form had read this exact rant about addresses, since contrary to how things were normally done, they'd just put in a big textarea for the address. Now, this was completely unnecessary even by the standards of the "falsehoods" article, since it was a country with very well established address conventions, and since by definition no addresses from other countries should be entered. And as might be predicted, it caused some problems.

First, just as you note, people didn't really understand what they needed to enter into a textarea like that. They didn't do as bad a job as in your case, but you'd have things like people leaving out zip codes, leaving out the city, putting their name on the first line (even though the name had been asked for separately), entering all address components on the same line, entering addresses in different countries, and so on. And unfortunately the geocoding service used to let them check whether the address had been interpreted correctly (for the purpose of "this is the address that should be expunged from the db") was very good at finding the right location even with badly malformed addresses, and no other input validation was done. BTW, it's quite likely that without this geocoding step the amount of bizarrely formatted or just outright invalid addresses would have been higher.

More importantly, even ignoring the data quality issues, the services used sending out millions of letters in bulk would not accept free form addresses in general. No, they needed the address broken out in separate fields, exactly in the way they would have already been stored if we'd had the kind of structured input form that everyone uses.

My part of the story was then to clean up the mess, a task I got despite being in a totally different group, since I happened to work on the address extraction parts of the geocoder at the time. A disaster always takes precedence over real work :-/

Writing the code to do the right thing 99% of the time took a few days, and I don't want to know how much time was spent by someone manually on the remaining 1% that were flagged by the program. I somehow doubt that anywhere near as much time was saved on punting on the web form.
Rather than respond to a lot of different comments, I'll just note (and these comments are US-centric):

1. Because of the internet, recording technologies, etc., we have a much more accurate view of the relatively recent past than one had in the 1980s.

2. From the 50s to the 80s there was a huge change in societal attitudes vs. authority, order, etc. Nothing as dramatic has happened since. Cynicism has changed in its specifics, been put aside occasionally, etc., but since the stock market crash of 1987 and Iran/Contra took some of the bloom off the Reagan rose, there hasn't been a huge societal consensus, so there in particular hasn't been a huge societal consensus that was later shattered.

3. Sexual mores had a much bigger shift from the 50s to the 80s than from the 80s to the present; the 80s are when the view was adopted that sex was permissible but dangerous, and that's been the general societal attitude ever since.

4. I agree that modern filmmaking techniques emerged in the 1970s. Hollywood then regressed to the more commercial action blockbusters, but eventually technology evolved to the point that the same or even greater quality of storytelling was possible on television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was like a series of 1970s auteur movies of 22 * 47 minute duration. The same is true of Babylon 5, except that the dialogue (usually stolid at best, Londo & G'kar excepted) and special effects were more in the George Lucas vein. TV may have progressed even further since.

5. The internet brought tremendous changes to day-to-day life, especially if you include the rest of computing (PCs, video games, mobile phones) as well. I don't have a good answer for why that alone doesn't make the 1980s feel more distant than they do.

6. People never know many details of era before their own. This was brought home to me when my stepdaugher, who is a Middle East expert (e.g. relevant Master's degree from Harvard), couldn't get a Trivial Pursuit question whose correct answer was Gamal Abdel Nasser.
This is a great idea, buyers really love side by side comparisons... my main concern is how are products being populated? I'd like to know that I'm not potentially missing something by doing my product research on your site.
"The form factor is identical."

That's inadmissible! Humans have evolved in ten years, they've grown two more fingers, a third arm with eyed antenaes which allow for easy lateral vision of objects at arm-length, and we are now 200% bigger!

Apple! Adapt the damn form factor!
Wouldn't there be anything in Flickr's ToS that would prevent third party developers from hosting their app's photos there? I like the suggestion though.
I hadn't thought of it that way (comparing borks, not sql null); it does make some sense in that light (though then you should be able to compare the same NaN in two variables...).

Though that undefined === undefined works, and so does Infinity === Infinity doesn't make as much sense when thought of that way; infinities aren't all equal, and undefined isn't a single kind of value that it makes sense to compare as if it were. And to counteract the sql null viewpoint, (null === null) works.

Also:

var x = parseInt("a");
x === NaN // false
alert(x); // "NaN"

doesn't make a whole lot of sense. isNaN() performs the exact same thing that === NaN implies. Especially as:

{}.x // undefined
{x:undefined}.x // undefined
for(prop in {x:undefined}) alert(prop); // displays "x"
{}.x === {x:undefined}.x // true

Meh. It's a weird language. Not intending to shoot you down; just spilling my brain into a textbox.
Fair point, I didn't realise that was the idea.
"and do something that I'm really passionate about, like starting a rock band?"

What? This makes no sense. You're doing it wrong. If you were really passionate about playing in a rock band, you would already be filling your time playing in a band, jamming on weekends, playing in your free time.

You don't just "go out and start" doing something you are passionate in. If you are passionate about it, you can't stop doing it.

What do you do in your free time? You have no hobbies or things that keep you busy or wish you were doing rather being at work?
There is an icon to the top-left that controls the display.
One problem that I experienced is that when I viewed the sample gallery and then clicked on an image to view it larger, I couldn't figure out how to get back to the gallery again. I tried pressing the back button but it returned me to the landing page, rather than to the gallery as I expected.
Of course. I'd even tolerate the sale and consumption of in-vitro human meat. (Computer generated imagery, if you're following the metaphor.)
Launch Safari to have them complete registration online?
"This means we need: basic programming (using FOSS) for everyone, teach stats before, teach FabLab tech, teach media literacy and research at a young age, show them the vast amount of resources at their disposal."

And then what? Let's say 5% of people now are in tech (just a guess, maybe a bit too much). Let's say we're short on people in tech by 100% (we're not, but let's say so). That would mean the tech sector could employ 10% of the population. What's the rest going to do? What good will it do when the janitors and assembly line workers have memorized a hello world in Python?
"This type of mentality is why the US will lose to China. The government and Wall Street only care about how the numbers look on paper."

I was with you on the first paragraph, but this I have to LOL at. Have a look into China's property market if you have a spare hour somewhere. It's in a lot worse shape than the US one is, except that the bubble hasn't burst yet. House prices have gone up 100's of % (yes, that's two 0's, and it's not a typo) over the last few years basically because Chinese have little to no other options available to them to store value/wealth in. There are whole cities that lay empty and whose owners only bought the real estate for 'investment' purposes, forced government lending is being misappropriated for unproductive real estate development, insolvent loans are kept on their feet by the government by rolling them over. Taxi drivers and maids own two or three apartments - and all over the place, in tier one Beijing and Shanghai but also tier two like Kunming, I mean this is not just some localized big city phenomenon (Kunming is still huge by my standards, but well ;) )

The bursting of the Chinese bubble is going to hit China like a sledge hammer, and I'm curious to see what their response is going to be. One way or the other, it's going to affect the West in a major way, so I'm really hoping for a soft landing, but we'll just have to wait and see.
I don't think its intended to be used for frequently changed models like 'user'. It is much more suited for low change frequency document like models. For example 'content' model in a blog or cms.

having history might not be a big deal, but having branches IS!.

It is great for stuff like testing some new set of pages on a staging server and then 'adding' them to the currently running production server which kept changing while you were working on the stage. Try that with SQL!
This entire article reads like a tutorial about how to make poor decisions.

I mean, if I want to eat a cake, and I know how to make a cake, I'm not going to pull up a recipe for brownies and try to make a cake out of them. This guy made some really bewildering choices; the list of things he clearly wants to do is both silly and frustrating.

"I want to write a site using Django that uses full-text search and multiple-table JOINs so that it takes longer than 30 seconds to load a single page, and Google App Engine won't let me!"

Brilliant.
When I saw the article about changing the favicon for Google Calendar to the actual date, I tried to write a game in the favicon at that point.

Unfortunately, it didn't work for me on Chrome 6 (linux). It would update once, and then refuse to update again. (No error, just didn't change.)

I'm happy to see that's not the case on Chrome 7 now. I'll probably revisit that little project.
interesting argument, and it's definitely worth thinking about these kinds of UI assumptions.

But I'm still in favour of keeping them.

First of all even if they are 'training wheels', the user interface should be understandable by someone who's never used a computer before. Buttons and sliders have real-world analogies and as such if correctly implemented are easy to understand without requiring that the user has prior knowledge of 'the web2.0 way of doing things'.

Secondly, sometimes I just want to zoom right out, or zoom right in, without having to pass through every step in between. This is something that sliders afford which continuous scroll-to-zoom or click-to-zoom doesn't.

Thirdly, right-click to zoom out is not very webby at all, and I doubt many users are comfortable with that UI pattern. I've certainly never used it. Keeping 'webby' is hugely important - and not in conflict with my first point - because there are two relevant points to be aware of when implementing a UI: Firstly you're teaching users how to use the web, and secondly when you implement a UI you can expect (but not require) users to use it in the same way they use other web apps. Right-clicking fails badly on both of these.
In most mathematicians and theoretical physicist I know this tolerance for "esoteric behavior" probably caused exactly opposite effect: they are probably too much sociable and cool.
In particular, a good hash table implementation will have O(1) amortized complexity [1] (i.e. average complexity over a worst-case sequence of operations). Since in the Real World we deal with sequences of operations rather than single ones, saying that hash tables provide O(1) operations is quite correct.

[1] http://videolectures.net/mit6046jf05_leiserson_lec13/
The first principles of computation are not the first principles of software development. A computer is not a Turing Machine: it is an electro-mechanical wrapper around the limited imitation of a Turing-like core, and that wrapper and the physical properties of the system put extreme limitations on what can or cannot be proven.

Software development is a perfectly ordinary engineering activity, or should be (although it is mostly done by non-engineers), and the same standards should apply. No mechanical engineer or electrical engineer has ever shipped a "provably correct" machine. They have shipped machines that conform to best practices, including heuristic analyses of MTBF and so on.
Or if milkweed were replanted in other areas still within the Monarchs' path but not mixed in with the crops. Many towns have butterfly gardens, but something on a larger scale would work too.
I use SSL for my admin control panel. I don't know if it's really useful but I feel better :-)
I ensure that the title is correct and was written by me; actually they're both me, just different emails.

Don't let your employer into your GitHub account, kids; it will never be the same.

The linked project is an example of how to do just what it claims using the project you linked as a foundation.
I wasn’t criticizing the author. The author says that money they have when they die is of zero value to them. It’s the polar opposite of my perspective, as a person with a special needs child who must plan to support that child beyond my death.

So I’m surprised that I am getting chastised for this comment.

A quote from the article that stood out to me: “For me, though, a billion dollars after either I’m too old to enjoy it or after I’m dead is worth nothing. I’d literally rather have one dollar in my hand today.“
I've done this to build for MacOS, and it still becomes like a tax as the hardware ages out and Apple insists you have the latest OS to publish to their stores.
> One issue is that many pages tend to be bucketed in err-on-the-side-of-caution type alarms. Like they might not even be directly indicative of a problem, but often are, but basically just need to have a human take a look.

If you wanted to get all passive aggressive about it - consider calling up your manager and skip manager every single time one of these intrudes on your non-paid time.

(This is a really bad idea BTW... It _might_ help if you're on friendly terms with them both and they're really just oblivious to the problems, but as you've indicated that you're already worried about blowback from even mentioning it... You'll almost certainly be better off walking. The "extra load" on the rest of the team is totally a management problem, not yours.)

The only people getting paged by "err-on-the-side-of-caution type alarms" should be the people who set them up (or the people who asked for them to be set up).
A couple years ago I hacked on a Python type inferencer someone wrote in Prolog. I wasn't enlightened, despite expecting to be, from a bunch of HN posts like this.

https://github.com/andychu/hatlog

For example, can someone add good error messages to this? It didn't really seem practical. I'm sure I am missing something, but there also seemed to be a lot of deficiencies.

In fact I think I learned the opposite lesson. I have to dig up the HN post, but I think the point was "Prolog is NOT logic". It's not programming and it's not math.

(Someone said the same thing about Project Euler and so forth, and I really liked that criticism. https://lobste.rs/s/bqnhbo/book_review_elements_programming )

Related thread but I think there was a pithy blog post too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18373401 (Prolog Under the Hood)

Yeah this is the quote and a bunch of the HN comments backed it up to a degree:

Although Prolog's original intent was to allow programmers to specify programs in a syntax close to logic, that is not how Prolog works. In fact, a conceptual understanding of logic is not that useful for understanding Prolog.

I have programmed in many languages, and I at least have a decent understanding of math. In fact I just wrote about the difference between programming and math with regards to parsing here:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/comments-parsing.html#w...

But I had a bad experience with Prolog. Even if you understand programming and math, you don't understand Prolog.

I'm not a fan of the computational complexity problem either; that makes it unsuitable for production use.
Not one picture of the subway tunnels or platforms... disappointing.
I had read on Wikipedia that Sikkim was annexed due to it being a failed state. This article stating that it was conquered like Tibet is an eye opener. And one I want to doubt.
> The first period includes within it a perfectly flat period longer than shortest of the periods you chose followed by a period of equal length that is more consistently increasing than the (mostly flat) period you've held up as an increasing trend, and then a period nearly as long as your shortest that is as consistently and more sharply decreasing than the one you hold up as showing a decreasing trend.

It sounds like you're referring to the "maximum tax rate on long term gains." As I stated, I used the "effective capital gains tax rate," which is the average rate that is being taxed (long term cap gains tax is different than short term).
Hahahahaha. This is the funniest thing I’ve read on HN.
It was a Stephen Heymann, Scott Garland, and Carmen Ortiz universe.
It's pretty easy to get two full time programming jobs and do both remotely.

Being in the office at least ensures you're not in another office.
Probably not. Most football players aren't that smart to begin with[0] and most important intellectual advances are made by a small minority of people.

What's the most significant intellectual contribution of any athlete? I can't think of one without really stretching. It's not like tennis players are making great intellectual contributions and football players are the only athletes who are absent.

If you're talking about the opportunity cost of watching college football instead of doing something more productive, then maybe, but most (virtually all) of the extremely smart people I know do not spend much time watching sports.

[0]: I'm not saying they're dumb, they're just not geniuses
Since the topic here was D-vitamins I didn’t want yet another detail to digress over. My point was mainly that what might seem like “zero-cost” at first glance can be a bit more complicated.

(But “here” in this case would be Sweden)
Used this a while ago and it's ok-ish, but I've also used Powershell and despite it not being as nice of a language as Python (imo) and also can suck in other ways, what is striking for this particular example is that Powershell doesn't need most of the explanation on this page because the topic is basically 'here is how to do grep/sed on plain text in a list of strings which contains file information and hope you extract the correct field' and Powershell did nail that pretty well by piping objects.
That's true; assuming you run the software on your own premises, GPL won't hurt you at all. If you sell premium software packages to be run over at your clients' hardware this can be a problem, though.

However, after looking into Keycloak more closely, the software seems to be licensed with the Apache 2 license, so none of this is a concern.
The thing that baffled me as I read this point is that the choice set when sick is (a) go to work and work, or (b) stay home and work. What we should be discussing is not working at all when you're sick. Rest and get better.

I can't be the only one that finds this odd?
I forgot about half of these things already. Thanks for the reminder!
But that's already happening on it! It therefore wouldn't be dropping in quality from where it already is!
Absolutely no.

At least those that already have a drive to know use reddit to sharpen their knowledge. As a research tool itself reddit is pretty invaluable.
The surplus of resources on modern PCs makes it possible to make development tools which would have been positively indulgent by the standards of their day- sophisticated debuggers, the ability to pause, freeze and replay execution while inspecting every byte of memory at will, fancy languages that remove tedium, etc.

For my part I made a pretty nice high-level assembler and IDE for the venerable Chip8: http://octo-ide.com
HN doesn't interpret <> correctly. Here https://twitter.com/paulg/status/558494900245643264
http://greplin.com possibly
Women are not a niche.
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Diagnostic page for google.com

What is the current listing status for google.com?

This site is not currently listed as suspicious.

Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 12 time(s) over the past 90 days.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 6815255 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 1686 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2015-01-22, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2015-01-22.

Malicious software includes 139894 exploit(s), 2748 trojan(s), 502 virus. Successful infection resulted in an average of 5 new process(es) on the target machine.

Malicious software is hosted on 275 domain(s), including 24corp-shop.com/, abu-farhan.com/, soaksoak.ru/.

296 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including southeastasianarchaeology.com/, thesmallbusinessplaybook.com/, impots-economie.com/.

This site was hosted on 3 network(s) including AS36040 (YOUTUBE), AS43515 (YOUTUBE), AS15169 (GOOGLE).

Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?

Over the past 90 days, google.com appeared to function as an intermediary for the infection of 528 site(s) including s3.amazonaws.com/lowlordyok/, s3.amazonaws.com/fann21ahsdc/, s3.amazonaws.com/skcfb01kpl/.

Has this site hosted malware?

Yes, this site has hosted malicious software over the past 90 days. It infected 22 domain(s), including burguscircus.free.fr/, plus.google.com/112502198606472559837/, beljews.info/.

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Windows 7 + allows you to select a bluetooth device as the locking device for proximity detection.
To me this seems like a web-based reinterpretation (perhaps/probably accidental) of the quite old German "Sprint Layout" piece of software (https://www.electronic-software-shop.com/lng/en/electronic-s...) - there are probably some more tools doing this.

I like the simplicity of this concept, basically, don't bother to make a circuit diagram, only focus on drawing the PCB itself.

First impressions of using this beta:

I created a project based on the example PCB.

- My first instinct was to drag a component a little bit to see if the routes were updated automatically. It got stuck in "processing" for a long time.

- Ctrl-R is overloaded - instead of refreshing the tab when it's stuck "processing", it rotates the currently selected component.

- How to change routes wasn't immediately obvious.

I do think the creator would do well to have a close look at what made Sprint Layout so easy to learn.