skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's about Unix read() and write(), not human linguistics as I thought when I clicked.

Very interesting nonetheless.
Yup. That exactly matches my past experience from when we tried levelDB as a possible replacement for our key-value store in a past project.

On paper level DB looks great but the extra write load from the write amplification thanks to the multi-level data structure meant the real world performance was much worse than a plain BTree / B+Tree for continuous random write load.

If you have a different workload, then levelDB might work for you: continuous appends of mostly new data perhaps?
Although, the OP says "edit- top level responses edited for grammar and punctuation" so it was probably a more marked difference before.
EverythingMe Shuts Down
I was indeed more thinking of the fine-grained dataflow or event-driven tasks, in the style of VAL/SISAL or very recently OCR (https://xstack.exascale-tech.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page).

I heard there were some fundamental problems with TRIPS, but never got any detailed explanation. Any idea what it was? Is fine-grained dataflow still too much overhead to do in hardware or was there something else.

There were some dataflow-critique papers back in the 80-90s, but most of their points seem moot these days: low transistor occupancy (compared to the 90%+ of the simple RISC microprocessors) and high cost of associative memory needed for the token matchers. These days, we are working with billions instead of 10k transistors and commonly ship processors with megabytes of associative memory in the form of SRAM cache.
The problem is that you don't get guarantees that something is not null; you can still do Optional<T> myOptional = null. Second, you're not required to handle the not-present case. Third, if you attempt to get the value of an optional (using .get()) when it is not present, you get an (unchecked, so no requirement to catch) exception - basically replacing NullPointerException with NoSuchElementException.

The only value Optional has over regular values is that the developer has to assume the value can be missing - but the same was true for nullable properties.
IMO, it also tastes bloody horrible!
I'm pretty sure that would confuse people even more; i have no idea how much electricity a soccer field uses on a monthly basis.

Can't we just get over it and accept that the only thing people generally have a good idea about is the power consumption of their own household, and as such using home energy consumption is what journalists have settled on? It's really the most pragmatic, and is only problematic when they're not providing the GW value.
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Expensive, single-purpose hardwired tracks that make it much more efficient for the whole vehicle to travel. 500 autonomous vehicles all carry engines, batteries, lights and a lot of stuff that is not needed when those car are all traveling together, but wastes energy anyway. Also, the price tag of those single-purpose tracks is amortized by all the millions of "cars" that travel on them.
With a minimum distance of 4 lightminutes you can wait 8 minutes (at a minimum) for a live answer... unless you time delay your mind with psychotropic substances, we engineer microscopic wormhole tunneling or we discover telepathy (IF telepathy goes faster then lightspeed) there will never be a live chat between mars and earth.
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Changing how the environment works isn't a trivial change, it would have far-reaching consequences, and every program that reads the environment would need to be patched, not only the shells and display managers.
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Yes, and furthermore Neil Oliver actually does speak like this[0], as many Scottish people will be able to instantly make fun of. [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUutdlJ7V3M

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afRE3RwLwaE
I like tarballs. Speaking as a non-programmer who compiles things like Vim and Scrypt, it is nice to be able to download a release without having to install a VCS first.
The lack of pattern matching doesn't make it useless. The existence of Optional reminds the programmer to check whether the value is present, and the type system does enforce this; you can't accidentally treat an Optional as a reference of the same type. The type system does help us remember to handle things; it is a reminder enforced by the type system that's easy to examine during code review.

Yes, you can write get() and risk an exception. So don't do that. I'm still glad get() is present because there are times when the human knows the value will always be present, but sometimes in a way that can't be encoded in the type system. Alternatively, sometimes an absent value is an error and get() is an acceptable way to check-and-throw.

I agree with the suggestion that static analysis can be useful, though many users had that already with FindBugs or Fortify. If we're talking about annotations based analysis, then it only goes so far. Optional and streams provide useful new tools for documenting intentions from my perspective. Another reason I enjoy the type is because it makes it a little more reasonable to say that, at least in new code, all references are nonnull references by default, since they'd be Optional otherwise.
It's true "power 1 million homes" fuzzy unit, but it's actually what lay people and policy makers want to know in the end. Also true what it takes to power homes varies a lot.

I remember kayaking down the Colorado river. First day was hot and the Hoover dam upstream was running it's generators full tilt to power all the air conditioners in Vegas. River was kinda scary. Next day weather moved in and the temperature dropped 20 degrees. Air conditioners off, generators off. Now flow and the river was still with wind blowing upstream and we had to paddle all the way out for 8 miles.
Yes, I'm sure. Why are you so hellbent on doubting me?
Fwiw, French don't obsess as much as the Americans about the legality of their actions, so I don't think the participants were influenced by the (virtual) likelihood of going to court for their decision.
It is clear that there is a selection bias. Suppose there are 3 heads in a row, HHH, and we are going to estimate the probability of the next coin to be H. But we do it this way: if the outcome is H you don't count that as a H, a success, instead we proceed to make another estimation replacing HHHH as the initial condition. Since you don't count correctly the number of successes, this way of estimating probabilities constitutes a biased estimator of the real probability.
btw this is the account of Bjarne - https://www.reddit.com/u/bstroustrup
Perhaps we can use quantum entanglement.
I think that the average person cannot really picture 500,000 houses; big numbers are hard.

Percentages are easier. This plant delivers 500 megawatt of power, which is 15% of the biggest nuclear powerplant of the US (or 7% of the biggest hydroelectric power plant of the US, or 2% of the world's biggest power plant, the Three Gorges Dam in China).

This helps putting in perspective the size of the plant in terms of what other endeavours of that kind offer and helps cope with the fact that the average person has no idea how many plants there are in the world and so how to relate the 500,000 houses number to the importance a given project might have.
I would think any question starting with "Would you..." gets more chances of getting a "Yes" as an answer when the person you are asking is drunk, whatever is the question.
At least one of the values of Optional is to communicate in the API that a value can be missing. The article mentions that:

A programmer looking at the code for the first time will know, just by looking at the return type, "Hey, this method may not return a record! I'll have to handle that scenario."

Making this clear to users of an API is something that nullable properties can not do. The user has to deliberately ignore the fact that the value might be missing by calling `.get()`.

This looks like a advantage to me, so to say that Option does not solve ANYTHING seems incorrect. It certainly does not solve EVERYTHING.
Interesting but... I enrolled and completed a couple of the courses listed there.
I'd be interested in seeing for each what percentage of enrolled students actually completed the whole course. Anecdotally the numbers are really really low (as in "around 5%").
I don't have that on my keyboard, only ¿.
Does Arabic have a similar enough set of phonemes to English to be able to write English using the Arabic script? Not that it's a particularly useful thing to do in of itself, but the script itself is beautiful, and I'd be interested to play with it.
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Perhaps "write like you want them to hear" is a better way to think about it as it acknowledges the inner voice the reader will use when they read.
> Optional<T> myOptional = null

That hasn't been a problem for me in practice. It's pretty clear that a reference to Optional should never be null. It can be statically or dynamically checked with @Nonnull or a precondition.

> but the same was true for nullable properties.

It's inconvenient to have to treat everything as possibly null. It's a lot nicer to create the convention, within one's codebase, that references are always nonnull and only Optional are nullable.
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Definitely. For me, the main use case of Optional is to provide a way for programmers to express the semantic fact that "there is no such object" without resorting to null.

Doing this leads to checking if (obj == null) for dealing with the semantic case that the object is not present, but other kinds of failure may cause obj to be null, but should be treated differently (for being a lower-level issue, for example).

So, Optional<T> is basically a way to differentiate between different types of nullity.
NT kernel and NTFS supports that, it can be activated.
India also has some desert area. e.g. thar desert on the border with Pakistan. This could be used to power e.g. New Delhi
I have a question to all the naysayers and praisers of the future autonomous car: have any of you ever been on a high speed rail link in europe? Assuming everything else equal, they're just a far superior way to travel, where you can walk around, drink coffee, work in a relatively quiet and steady environment and all of that going 300 km/h.

That said, there are obvious questions why the project is far more expensive than a comparable one in Europe, but that is a completely separate question.
The asp.net team have taken something super simple, but opaque, and made it super complicated for no good reason.

What people want:

A static class that sets itself up on its own

What they've given everyone:

A class you've got to inject and instantiate on your own using IOptions<TOption> with each call to Configure<TOption> adding an IConfigureOptions<TOption> service to the service container that is used by the IOptions<TOption>

Mind boggles at the over-engineering.
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Right, but the difference in reality is that developers don't check every reference to see if it's null. The difference between a raw reference and optional is that with optional the author of the interface has explicitly signalled 'you really ought to check this'. Optional provides the ability to work with better conventions.

Sure, this doesn't live up to the actual guarantees provided by other languages, but that's not the same as being useless.
In today's lesson, wodenokoto learned that real life is infinitely more complicated than San Francisco startups would have you believe.
I know what a Watt is and I understand the Giga-prefix. I still like an analogy with my GW numbers, because in my daily life I don't encounter these things very often and have a hard time imagining how much that exactly is. I would have to Google some other representative values, like the output of a typical coal plant to get an idea what the number means.

This is not the case with calories (I know that what I eat daily has about 2500 of those) or horsepower (I know that my car used to have 60).
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"...a little less than half a Delorean"
Yes but without a change to the license itll never go into the kernel. While that might make not change things operationally for some people, not having it ship with the source means itll always be a second-class citizen.
> Why are there so many Medium stories on HN?

I once tried writing a story on Medium, and their editor is pretty amazing. In addition, stories on Medium do look nice and better than a significant share of Wordpress and friends themes. I'd assume that some people also publish on Medium hoping for some extra traffic driven by Medium.

So Medium could be just summed up as 'it just works'.
There are few commonly believed economics concepts which demonstrate a remarkable resemblance to this.
I think this is targeted at the scenario where the developer works in Lua but is deploying to platform without any Lua dependencies. Not sure if it will pull in any used packages though.
I think the main use of Optional is in a codebase which doesn't _ever_ allow "null".

If every method call either returns an actual object then you can get rid of null checks, and not bother doing any checks on method returns that don't return an Optional.
Out of curiosity, what is the power consumption of your household?
The sixty-billion-dollar bullet train they’re proposing in California would be the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile,” Musk said. “They’re going for records in all the wrong ways.” California’s high-speed rail is meant to allow people to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about two and a half hours upon its completion in—wait for it—2029. It takes about an hour to fly between the cities today and five hours to drive, placing the train right in the zone of mediocrity, which particularly gnawed at Musk. He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city.

From Ashlee Vance Book on Elon Musk
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I can strongly recommend Stephen Granades' talk on phlogiston, where he performs a small experiment to demonstrate its existence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTD-vYhwj4

See also the sequel (on the luminiferous aether):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpNVG33awq4
some have already commented here that author maybe complains too much (e.g., calling .get() on an Option<T> is a deliberate move, meaning that the developer explicitly took on the risk of that exception. that's very different than implicitly assuming that a regular ref is not null, using it and getting bitten in the ass.). but this one really hurts:

"The last flaw with Java's implementation is a bit ironic — It's possible for the optional reference itself to be null."

ouch.
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You can do it today, but that won't work in Java 10 with value types.

Optional is planned to become a value type.
I don't see any support either :)
5% sounds pretty high to me, considering how low (nonexistent, really) the entry barrier is. Where does that figure come from, if I may ask?
Optional is planned to become a value type in Java 10, so while the current situation is less than perfect I don't consider it a big problem.
Using get() is just bad style and so is returning null where you could return Collections.emptyList().

Previous discussion on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3pl7o0/java_8s...

tl;dr: use map, orElseGet, orElse
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> the death of the SDET role

Can you give some more details? This bit sounds strange.
Shameless self plug

"Comparing Optionals and Null in Swift, Scala, Ceylon and Kotlin"

http://codemonkeyism.com/comparing-optionals-and-null-in-swi...
Did you try different level multipliers? i.e. Using 4x instead of 10x, to trade write amplification for read amplification (which can be amortised by bloom filters)?
I don't understand what's wrong with get() method. Swift has built-in null-safety and it has "!" operator. Kotlin has it. Even Haskell has fromJust function which does exactly the same.

May be name "get()" is too short and innocent-looking.
> this would never pass a code review, the expectation of "foo?" is that it returns true/false.

95% of the time, yes. However, the "official" rule is simply that such methods must return a value that can be EVALUATED as true/false. There are plenty of methods in the ruby core/standard library which end in a "?" but do not return true/false, such as:

* File#size (http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.2.3/File.html#method-c-size-3F) returns Integer or nil.

* Integer#nonzero? (http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.2.0/Numeric.html#method-i-nonzero...) returns self or nil.

This misunderstanding of what "?" methods are allowed to return is an ongoing problem in the community, e.g. https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/20110
If they are relying reliance then forget, they are dead carrier. The internet.org will neve take off. But I see new player advertising in India like aircel...like basic internet is free... I don't know what it means.
Why it's bad? If I'm sure that this optional contains value, I don't see why it's bad. May be I checked this value presence few lines above.
> git can be considered a pretty basic tool

so what about CVS, svn, Mercurial and fossil? Git is hip right now, but including it in an initrd seems excessive. Furthermore git downloads the entire repo, all the history/commits, this isn't always what you want or can handle or want to pay for.
Similar project for Python: http://www.pyinstaller.org/
Works with multiple source files and supports widely used Python modules out of the box.
The train question has always annoyed me. It's a fantasy world where you kill and save people by pulling a lever. And after the you answer, people add more rules, like "you may have to face jail time if you deliberately kill anyone". What about negligence?

Call me obtuse, but no one could convince me yet that not pulling the lever is the right option. Does it detach you from the problem? No, you still took an option and acted according to it.

Maybe even better, we should look for the sociopath who's trapping people in these train racks for the fun of creating moral dilemmas.
For whatever reason, Ruby allows method names ending with ? or !. AFAIK the general practice is to use ! for methods that perform a mutation in-place (e.g. list.sort! would sort a list in place, list.sort would be expected to return a new list) and to use ? for methods that return a boolean (e.g. list.empty? would indicate whether the list is empty).
It could also be that children that spend time with their parents are more well adjusted.
The author is missing the point. The fact that Optional can result in a nullpointer doesn't mean you should use in the same manner as null-checks.

You shouldn't replace:

if(x == null)
{
y = x.doSomething();
}

with

if(optionalX.isPresent())
{
y = x.doSomething();
}

You should replace it with:

y = Optional.ofNullable(x)
.map(ClassX::doSomething)
.orElse(null);
> make clippy an optional feature

Yeah, that's what I'm doing but that is also the reason why nightly is an allowed failure on Travis…

I have high hopes for compiler plugins after the current internal refactorings (HIR, MIR), though :)
Also check:

Bundle [1], using LuaJIT

Luvi [2], which is also able to generate a single file executable and you can include static resources.

[1] https://luapower.com/bundle

[2] https://github.com/luvit/luvi
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Hmmm, allow immigrants to do phd with spouse to work visa so that they can pay for the education and do this course
Exactly, it forces the programmer to think about whether something can be null or not and actually had a behavioural change in my java coding.
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Have you considered expanding the penalization software for content aggregators (such as Medium), so that it would treat a combination of the user and the domain as the key, rather than the domain name alone?
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The same on both system. You have to stop and start cmd.exe/etc again. In older Windows versions you had to reboot/re-login.
> [...] would your land usage tax/income vary depending on how many tenants were currently renting in that block of flats?

It's a land value tax, not land usage tax. So it would be independent on what you do with the land. (Basically it would be driven by the opportunity costs of what someone else could be doing with the land instead.)

> Tax exemption for primary residences (under a certain size) + basic income is a far more flexible arrangement, and you lose none of the benefits of determining basic income on land use.

Why? That's much more complicated, and full of loopholes.

I do agree that tying land value tax to financing basic income is only potentially a good idea, not necessarily.
I don't understand why this needs a special syntax -- to me ruby already has a little too much syntactic variation.

Why not just extend fetch or try e.g. -- .try(:profile, :thumbnails, :large)
Why go by size and not by value? Someone having a huge estate in the middle of nowhere is not a problem, vs occupying the same amount of space (or even a much smaller, but still large one) in the city centre is.
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Garrison says that it is unclear whether the trends are bad news for young researchers. “Since most will end up outside the laboratory sooner or later, one interpretation is that they are just taking a more direct route to the next stage of their career,” he says. “But for consumers of research, this probably means that there is less science being done.”

I think what it really means is that the industry is now getting to the point where its profit can be realized, which means there's more money going into it from companies (research or otherwise) and of course, at the end of the day, people will go where the money is.
Perhaps you'd like to get some actual numbers behind your claims?

And not stuff like "trains are very rarely entire full". Of course they're not. But cars are almost always entirely empty.
It's rarely used, and only by experienced users.

Also, 3rd party software can provide that functionality
I am not familiar with Ruby except for the casual exposure to it through Sass but couldn't he just go for only

if u.profiles.thumbnails.large

instead of these successive checks?
What is the `nice` language you refer to?
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I remember how Apple mocked them when demoing Safari the previous WWDC, heh.
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No, because you cannot access thumbnails on profiles = nil.
Yes you can you'll have to use an extended version of the alphabet (the characters that have 3 dots on them) and you'll also be kinda forced to use diacritics
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How many homes are there in Morocco's capital city? I'm curious whether (with current technology) we need more or less space than one home in solar panels to power one home.