skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> when scaled sufficiently

Whilst technically correct, this obscures the truly collosal scale at which evolution computes.

If we consider each organism as a processor executing a single fitness observation, we can fit hundreds of thousands of such processors (e.g. bacteria) on the few square millimetres of a pin head. These processors are spread (less densely) across the 510 million square kilometre surface of the Earth. They are suspended in oceans, which have an average depth of 3.7 kilometres; and in the atmosphere, at least up to 10 kilometres (based on our observations so far).

Whilst the generation time (AKA execution time) of such organisms varies wildly, it is very commonly less than an hour. Yet even with these truly staggering resources at its disposal, evolution still took 3.3 billion years of wall clock time to come up with multicellular organisms.

Relying on evolution to come up with meta-level optimisation mechanisms like intelligence is also rather flaky; we only have one example of biological evolution to study, acting on one representation (DNA + RNA + proteins). This just-so-happened to stumble upon aerobic respiration, multicellularity, neurons and brains, but it's certainly not a "goal" of the system, and sampling bias prevents us knowing how likely an outcome that is (i.e. whether it's an attractor). Still, organisms with nervous systems are a vanishingly small proportion of all lifeforms; and in fact, every "advance" is dwarfed by the success of single celled microbes.

We could always leave an evolving system running for longer, but setting up conditions which lead to open-ended evolution is still an unknown area; simulations always tend to level off/saturate at some point. As a "last resort" we could provide the system with a mechanism to sample organisms completely at random, and use that as proof that anything is possible given enough time; but in that case why use evolution at all, when we can just perform that sampling directly, or alternatively just enumerate organisms?
> Your code should avoid breaking at all costs.

This type of practice hides bugs. Whatever happened to 'fail fast, fail often'?
I told my friends that they better get to VP or equivalent decision maker quick so I don't have to deal with stupid interview anymore.

Joke asides, unfortunately I don't have a solution here, I gave up on interview in general. Personally, if I was looking for a corporate job, I'd write "interview is stupid" in front of my workspace and play the number games until one day I might pass one. Otherwise I'd look for smaller orgs and tell the decision maker I have interview-phobia, can we do something else?
Ok, I was unaware of these SKUs. I will have to ask if they learned their lesson.
I agree and disagree to some extent. I think there is one piece though that could speed up the process. If Google, and other ad networks, put their foot down and said either ads are served via both HTTP and HTTPS (or just via HTTPS) or we will discontinue serving them, this would put pressure on the agencies to speed up change. In the current state though, like you said there is no incentive to change.
Show HN: Koloboke Compile: all-new way to specialize collections in Java
I sit down with them individually and talk about the handin. For any meaningful feedback to happen, we need to see the code. This is not programming 101, but courses that require you to have passed advanced programming, so I expect them to hand in without comments like this:

i++ //increment variable because used clicked

It's harmful for readability and takes a lot longer to read. If they hand me a second handin with such comments, after our first session, I'm not going to tell them again.
"Fail fast, fail often" does not refer to the build status of your project, it refers to the business.

How does writing code that builds hide bugs?
Always after the first such handin. The second, not so much.
I've done projects with NDA for the Android platform where using Android Studio today is almost mandatory.

After reading this post I remembered that Android Studio already has some kind of spell checking active by default and to be honest I didn't read the complete source code of Android Studio and all packages that are shipped with it by default, who does that?

Maybe you do, but who is going to pay you for completing that task (as a programmer) and reviewing every single update in the future.
The Jan Willem Nijman talk was excellent, thanks for posting it!

To those that haven't seen it yet, he iterates a boring game prototype into something that actually seems worthwhile. And all he does is add tiny things that seem inconsequential at first. Stuff like "make the bullets faster" and "add a muzzle flash".

I was amazed at how big of a difference the small changes made in the end. Adding enough lipstick to a pig actually worked wonderfully.
The term "grounded" is to have meaning which references some external reality. He meant that a NN which can perform symbolic algebra would demonstrate that symbols are grounded in some meaning outside the identification/pattern matched sense. They have meaning outside of "an or symbol, an and symbol, a true symbol" with additional information in their relationships that a NN can understand well enough to use them in context.
Sure but its not different/weird. I've used rpm for a long time, using nix was more, oh ok so rpm type flags no big deal.

It is weird mostly due to exposure to other tools. IIRC nix started out over 10 years ago, well before apt or yum became very widely used.
Perhaps that's an "it depends", and "odd" tech can enable you to do something "odd" that your competitors can't do. When I was skimming the cited article for the quote I plucked out of it, I came across this bit:

What were the results of this experiment [in using Lisp, which we knew, but didn't know anything else, like about business]? Somewhat surprisingly, it worked. We eventually had many competitors, on the order of twenty to thirty of them, but none of their software could compete with ours. We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the server and yet felt like a desktop application. Our competitors had cgi scripts. And we were always far ahead of them in features. Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce features that we didn't have. But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too.

While currently popular scripting languages can also give you fairly rapid new feature development times, their decision to use a language and ecosystem that allowed for lightening fast development (plus, let's admit, very smart programmers) allowed them to do something that every else was doing, web storefronts, but in an "odd" manner, with an OODA loop their competitors couldn't dream of touching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop).
One that gives me the direct image link right away, specially easy to use on mobile.
Anyone else get an error when trying to add this extension?

>Package is invalid. Details: 'Could not load background script 'tracksy/tracksy.js'.'.
Comments should explain the why of code, not the what or how.

From a technical standpoint you should read uncommented code and more often than not be able to tell exactly what it does (barring a lot of poorly named methods or similar architectural issues). Any comments should simply explain the business rules or decisions that led to that code. Maybe you are knowingly violating a best practice for your framework or language because following it would break business logic down the pipeline or something. This is the perfect time for a comment explaining that so a well-meaning junior developer doesn't refactor it six months from now.
Apparently asking people to read the descriptions of plugins they are installing is too much effort
"I also wonder how well does the "map the same object at multiple virtual addresses" trick work in architectures with VIVT caches"

Not well at all, unless the OS goes out of the way to do cache coloring. There is a reason that VIVT are today considered suboptimal.
> ... splicing into indented strings ...

That sounds pretty cool, how does it work? Does it match the indentation of the parent that issued the splice for the entire child? How about nested splices?
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I was initially confused. I spent some time trying to understand how RaftLib makes use of the Raft protocol, and after some time, whether it made use of it at all.
Thanks Alan, that looks like a pretty fantastic list of books to get engaged with.

Definitely agree with this sentiment:

> I should mention that reading lots of "poor books" is also part of literacy: they help the understanding and appreciation of "good books" considerably.

I see parents bemoaning their children reading sort of simple formulaic series like The Hardy Boys but frankly that's how I started out and now those parents complaining consider me some kind of authority due to my collection of books and wide ranging reading habits.

It's ok to read spy/dective fiction or romance novels. As long as you make an attempt to explore outside those genres at some point it'll be fine.

It's like the three stage rocket leaving earth's gravity. The payload is supported by an immense amount of push from something that will be thrown away later (until Elon Musk came along). You don't necessarily get better readers by increasing the quantity of payload.
Yes, lots of people used this on Atari ST and Amiga (Tempus editor on Atari comes to mind, which used the highest byte of address registers as additional faux registers).

Same tricks are used even today. E.g., have a look at Facebook's DiscriminatedPtr from the folly library, which uses the top 16bit of a 64bit pointer (otherwise unused) for type tagging.
You can see my reply to the parent comment. I always sit down and talk with the students, but for us to talk about the code, we need to be able to read the code. Unneeded comments make it significantly harder to read code.

First time we talk about why I don't want "the what" comments, only "the why" comments. If they still do it in the next handin it's a fail unless they've explicitly provided me with a reasonable reason to do it.
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(Also I think it's really good the way you have been engaged and open to new ideas and criticisms here. That isn't always easy, and very refreshing to see)
Considering the awful compressed audio that goes with ads, it's a good thing.

I could stand ads and TV if it weren't for the blasting audio.
That's an official model name.
There is a wide gulf of difference between installing an IDE from a trusted corporate entity who would be sued if they did this kind of thing by default without warning vs. installing a 3rd party open source plugin from a developer you've never heard of without reading the description.
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> Materialists can practice what looks like romance but cannot be romantics in any meaningful sense of the word.

I must say I really enjoy reading about your position in this and, to be honest, would wish nothing more than to be in agreement with it. I was a devout Christian for much of my life and I still feel the loss. But my reason for quitting this search and need for capital-T truth was that the Christian version of it (as well as the few others I explored) just wasn't convincing. It felt like a convenient lie to give meaning to my life rather than some Truth I happened to have figured out.

But all this doesn't mean that I now spend my life an exhausted nihilist. There's plenty of room for values and truth in a world-view that holds that ultimately the Objective nature of these things is probably unknowable. By the standards I used to hold as a devout Christian, I'm quite possible a better Christian now than I was back then. Plus I'm happier.

Anyways. I see your point, and I respect it for the most part, but I think it's a bit overreaching and arrogant to argue that a materialist cannot be a romantic in any meaningful sense. By my definition of meaningful, my romantic relationships are very meaningful. And practically speaking, I'm pretty sure my experience of romance is not so different from that of a Christian anyways.
How to win a coding interview where the company does nothing but write short snippets requiring cleverness. When's the last time you worked for one of those?
For the first programming courses I can understand the commenting, but I've been TA for advanced courses where many of the students have passed the compiler class. They don't need comments anymore, and it really detract from the readability of the code.
If they store something there they have to mask it out before dereferencing the pointer. x86-64 doesn't ignore the topmost bits, if you set them wrong the CPU will throw an exception.
Not a bad price compared to other nRF51 boards, but I wish they'd included a coin cell holder.

Btw the best way to program these (if you want to do it the 'real' way) is using Yotta.

http://yottadocs.mbed.com/tutorial/tutorial.html

You can get started really quickly:

1. Install yotta

2. Start->Run Yotta

3. mkdir mything

4. cd mything

5. yt init

6. Paste some code in source/main.cpp

7. yt target bbc-microbit-gcc

8. yt install ble

9. yt build

Then find a file called mything-combined.hex in the build directory and copy it to the mBed USB drive.

It's all very command-line based and Yotta is Python/CMake-based which is quite slow and very IDE-unfriendly. But it does work well.
Okay but in this case the mugger (spotlight suggestions) can also be told that no, actually, I don't want to be mugged, and it won't mug you.
It might be the name of his model, mine is: MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012). It might tell you more than "2.6 GHz Intel Core i7"
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You may have heard of how new neural network architectures are designed? GDGS? Gradient Descent by Grad Student?

It's a joke, but funny because it is true.

That's one of the artifacts of the number of people in the field.
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Fail fast, fail often isn't just about the business. It's about code too.

If the palindrome function does not support unicode correctly, it can:

1. Try to function anyway, return true/false even without a real match

2. Detect unicode and always return false

3. Throw an exception

It would be best to throw an exception. Why is a function that doesn't support unicode being called with unicode input? That's the real error.
You've never heard common sense called "horse sense"?
It would help inform your discussion of the article if you read the first paragraph. A) This is VS Code, not Visual Studio, B) This is a third party open source plugin
Any hints on where to start?
The rise and fall of the dungeon master on software projects
Could anyone elaborate why tracking protection was removed?

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17167
I don't think it has anything to do with you being a developer...this stereotype has to die.
Intel introduces Broadwell-E CPU with 10 cores
They were certainly influenced to unhealthy degree, but those were still national countries represented by people of their nations. I imagine Soviets just took leading Polish/Hungarian/etc communist parties and made them the government. They still were Poles/Hungarians/etc.

In 1968, Albania withdrew from Warsaw pact. And that was it.
We'll he collected publishing money,and a flat fee. He didn't do it for free. David Byrne had an amazing and wonderful career and he came out of CBGB. Blondie as well. I'm sure Blondie lives off of the publishing from songs on Parallel Lines. A lifetime of passive income? I'm not sure I would call that a ticket to nowhere.
Well, my bank certainly has no involvement in this, and the banks I own shares of neither.

I can thank some US banks that I, as German Android user, get locked down by Google. I get all the issues, none of the benefits.
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I was already coding before C had any meaning outside UNIX.
Ha I remember the same thing used to be possible with MSN if you used a third party client.

You could have it open a window when someone started typing to you, before they sent their message.
I don't think this is true. See https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#AccessHiddenServ... any SOCKS4a capable browser should work.
There is a long tradition of embedding tags in pointers, for all kind of reasons (type tags, pointer/int discriminants, ABA counters, etc.). That's perfectly fine and it is one of the reason intptr_t exists.

The problem is when the architecture lets you get away with explicitly masking out the tag bits (i.e. a tagged pointer is a valid pointer) which makes it hard to evolve the architecture.
Progressive and Our Regressive Approach
Because that's how apple indicates the 'version' or 'revision' of the model, instead of just numbering they give the 'produced from' date. Kinda like car manufacturers distinguish the different versions of a given model (i.e. the 2012 Tesla model S and 2016 Tesla model S).

Also, since you can't tell from looking at the laptop (they are all identical since the first retina macbook from 2012), you must go to the 'about this mac' menu, which gives you the model name and revision date. In my case this is "Macbook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012)".

When I used to build my own PC's, I could tell you the brand, model, revision etc of every component inside, but since just about every internal part of an Apple laptop (motherboard, SSD, memory etc) is custom fabricated, there is no point in trying to remember what's inside. I know my laptop has the 'second fastest' i7 I could choose from in that time, and the 16GB memory option, but don't ask me which specific i7 or which DDR type I have, I don't know and honestly I no longer care.
Psychic mode is/was amazing. I used to love freaking people out when I saw the 'You feel a disturbance in the force...' message and quickly type 'Hi!'.
Start with something that looks a bit like something you might want to make into art. One of the standard fractals, Perlin noise with a fixed seed, anything that's got a bit of randomness to it. Look for a section that's inspiring. Then look to see if you can tweak the logic to make that closer to what you want it to be.
I don't see a problem here. The exact model of CPU, memory and other chipsets are irrelevant to me. As long as I can work comfortably on it. I also don't care what's under the hood of my car. I'm technical enough to find out and study it and discuss it, but I'd like to focus on other things. The Macbook is just a tool to me. And one I'm very satisfied with. So I'm very happy there are only a few models which can accurately be referenced by using the model and year.
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Which people keep forgetting is only available as implementation defined extensions, as such it is no longer ANSI C and any language compiler is free to have extensions.
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When I was a kid, I worked my way through our local library in an orderly fashion. I only had to be able to sign my name to get a card. When mom would drop us off for a few hours, we'd pick out our six books (the limit), she'd come get us, and before we got home, she'd chide us on already reading too many of them. We wouldn't make them last until the next visit.

It seemed an agonizing wait until 14, the required age for checking out books from the adult section. I'd read the entire children's section, so I had to wait until after school (pointless school) to read adult books at the library. By 18, I'd read about 20,000 books. Strangely, on turning 18, my reading rate dropped off a cliff.
Behavior-Driven Development SaaS
Does anyone know of voxel media without distinguishable individual voxels? In 2D there is both pixel art and regular art. I'm curious if 3D works with that, or only with vector graphics.
>“Is this client side or server side JavaScript?”
>“should an empty string be considered valid input?”
>“Do I need to handle unicode characters?”

these questions seem a bit much for a palindrome test.
SQLite: The art of keeping it simple
Here two of the best voxel editors:

https://voxel.codeplex.com/
http://guillaumechereau.github.io/goxel/
> preventing this sort of backward compatiblity issue is the reason why AMD64 will trap if the unused bits of the address space are not all 1 or 0.

This helps debugging, but it doesn't help future extensions of AMD64. Programs exist that store data in bits 48..63 of a pointer on AMD64, and expect to retrieve a pointer by doing "x << 16 >> 16" on the integer data. Increasing the address space is a pain no matter what.
How can anybody track which ads you failed to download? TOR browser has Noscript on by default, as far as I remember.
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Sure I do. So, likely, do you and most other people reading it, or at least have a general idea. So what's the point of typing out my specs? Should I also type out the specs of my Nexus 6P or just tell you I have a Nexus 6P?
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What this guy said. Using RethinkDB for 3 years :)
I think the first point is precisely why OOP is dangerous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

It may be initially easier to model a problem with 'Nouns', but this won't necessarily reflect the structure of the implementation, which is what I think the code should reflect.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/christopher.mallagh/INCKy/OrgPr...

Sometime the abstractions aren't quite as perfect in their implementation as modelled in the mind. Then you realise you need to model implementation differently from domain, and the difference between the two can cause issues (leaky abstractions, shared-encapsulated state, etc).

To put it another way, information should be communicated using concepts from the way people thing about the problem, and the code can communicate this, but the actual structure of the code should reflect the implementation.

the same kind of thing that can happen in ORMs wrt the actual difference between object-hierarchy structures, and relational database structures...
Also, is there a "don't" missing in "you know what the future of that thing will be"?
Yes, there is nothing more fun than moving a large 8051 embedded project from Keil to Tasking.
There is a difference but it doesn't change anything for me as a contractor. I'd imagine suing Google or Apple would be no fun when I'm sued by some bank for a breach of NDA.

As a software dev we ideally should keep in mind for what kind of target audience we are developing our tools, and in this case it is obvious that this tool would be a problem for many if not most companies for security reasons.

Is there even a reason why anyone would want to have all his source code sent to some unknown third party? Or why this would be necessary for something like spell checking?

I doubt that the dev has bad intentions with this plugin, but imho this tool is badly designed and unusable. Doesn't matter how visible this information is, there are no justifications I can think of why I should allow my source code to be sent to a third party.
How to waste CPU and kill your disk by scaling 100M inefficiently
> What option does that? All I've seen is about changing the key used.

It's the first option on the man page[1]: Multiple gpg-ids may be specified, in order to encrypt each password with multiple ids.

[1]: https://git.zx2c4.com/password-store/about/