skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Has anyone suggested some sort of postfix macro syntax?

Yes, numerous people. A few different discussions have gone by; it has many potential applications, but it introduces several aspects of syntactic weirdness and parsing weirdness, so it'd require a lot of care to introduce if at all.
I could be reading the tone of the interview wrong, but it seems like there's a weird sort of anti-intellectualism bent to the Ruby community.

In the middle, there's this exchange:

Jonan: So you would just use pointers to point to those immutable objects?
Koichi: Yes. Also, I want to note that immutable doesn't mean frozen object.
Frozen objects can contain mutable objects. So I mean those immutable objects which only contain children
that point to immutable objects.
Jonan: So if we had a nested hash, some large data structure, we would need to
freeze every object in that in order to reference it this way. Is there a facility in Ruby right now to do that?
I think I would have to iterate over that structure freezing objects manually today.
Matz: Not yet.
Jonan: So there might be?
Matz: We need to provide something to freeze these objects.
Aaron: A deep freeze.
Matz: Yes, deep freeze.
Jonan: Deep Freeze is the name of this feature maybe? I think that would be an excellent name for it.

So yes, they all agree that Ruby's current 'frozen' feature doesn't grant real immutability guarantees.

But then at the end...

Jonan: OK. So then, a friend asked me when I described guilds, he writes a lot of Haskell,
he asked me when we are we going to have "real immutable objects", and I don't quite know what he means.
Is there some distinction between an immutable object in Ruby and an
immutable object in a different language that’s important?
Matz: For example in Haskell, everything is immutable, it’s that kind of language, everything is immutable from day one.
Jonan: Yes.
Matz: But in Ruby we have mutable objects, so under that kind of situation we need a whole new construct.
Aaron: Frozen objects should really be immutable. It's really immutable.
Jonan: OK.
Aaron: I don't...
Jonan: You don't know what this person who air-quoted me "real immutable" was saying?
Aaron: Yeah I don't know why they would say "real immutable".
Jonan: Should I unfriend him on Facebook? I think I'm going to after this.
Matz: At least tell him if you want "real immutable" go ahead and use Haskell.
Jonan: I think that's an excellent option, yeah.
Aaron: You just to need to say to them quit "Haskelling" me.
Jonan: I should, I’ll just tell them to quit "Haskelling" me about immutable objects.

I get that they are joking a bit, but do they really not understand that the Haskeller is referring to the lack of deeply immutable objects? The hostility seems a bit weird to me, given that languages like Haskell push forward our understanding of the usefulness of things like immutability, which then get absorbed into other languages (like Ruby, clearly).
I believe that you are taking too much stock in believing that you and your needs are Apple's primary market now. Software developers are but a small niche compared to Apple's worldwide consumer base, and they are developing for their market at large, that buys these products for the social signaling and never use 30% of their capabilities. They want good looking and expensive things, and the capabilities of the devices Apple is producing is an improvement over the last iteration as well as still above the common consumer's resource consumption to start.
Idea: Location based DropBox
At Discourse our biggest constraint we are fighting now is memory, not performance (don't get me wrong, I wish MRI was faster). JRuby is usually more memory hungry than MRI and getting reasonable boot time is not easy on JRuby.

Additionally we don't even boot on JRuby today, I wish we did but it is hard to justify effort here.
I study this kind of stuff pretty heavily, because I have a teenage son who could (should!) be alive in the last quarter of the 21st century.

The chance that humans will go extinct is close to zero over the next 100 years. Even in the worst case scenarios, thousands of people with access to huge resources will do what it takes to survive in the long-term.

The biggest natural threat I see to society and civilization isn't sea level rise, even though that's going to become a huge problem.

I think there is a good chance that within the next 50 years, it will be very difficult to grow sufficient food for billions of humans. If my concern comes to pass, then billions of humans will die of starvation, and our society and civilization will be utterly changed, though I would not hazard to guess how.

The scenario is straightforward: in the past decade especially, global weather has gotten a lot more wild. We know that it is getting wilder, and many climatologists believe that the rate at which it is getting wild is increasing.

How does wild weather starve billions? Too much rain, too little rain, too much heat, too little heat and too much wind. Everywhere.

I think there's a chance that in the next 50 years, it will be difficult to find plots of earth that aren't exposed to crop killing weather over the course of a growing season.

We're already seeing the beginnings of this, all over the world, though the total human impact hasn't yet been extreme. Indeed, we live in extraordinarily stable times. I believe it's safe to say that the average level of food safety today is higher than it has ever been.

Hopefully I'm wrong, and as the overall global temperature warms, the weather's intensity won't increase, increasingly quickly.

PS: Most of the people reading this will be alive past 2050. Think carefully about how many '100 year' and '500 year' weather events have come about in the past few years. Also note that, 30 years ago when I was a teenager, a '100 year' or '500 year' weather event anywhere in the world would have been big news, because of how uncommon those events were. Last I checked, we've had something like six or seven '100 year' or '500 year' weather events just in the United States, just in the year 2016. My point is that unless you're digging, it's quite likely that you aren't aware of even a majority of such weather events worldwide. They just don't get consistent mainstream coverage anymore.

PPS: I didn't vet this too closely, but it's interesting: https://www.google.com/#q=frequency+of+100+year+storms&tbs=q...
I must be one of the very few people who can write working and mostly bugless code and without writing any kind of test. Writing tests feels like the most wasteful and possibly harmful thing to me (like by people forcing dependency injection etc. where otherwise unneeded).

I don't really know what to think of the situation? Is this how it has always been? Do most software engineers really have no idea what they're doing?
I did not realize there were RAID implementations that did block level checksums.

ZFS is both a file system and a block layer. You would use RAID + ext4 or ZFS. The block layer parts of ZFS are comparable to RAID and are superior in many ways, including the most important: checksums.
What about the money lost because people don't wanna use your app because it's bloated and slow?
Careful -- in these studies the subjects are writing tests before writing code.

In practice there are 'test-heavy' devs who use factory data and the test suite to run skeleton code with crashpoints, and switch actively between test and imp files.

This has tests & implementation being written in parallel vs strict TDD which has us finishing tests before writing program logic.

Most test suites depend not just on functional requirements but also on implementation details, so it seems obvious that tests-before-logic development is inefficient.
> There's a difference between respecting someone's ideological preference, and discouraging hate speech

No there is not. "Hate speech" is what liberals call inconvenient conservative speech. Approving all speech except "hate speech" is just declaring that you will censor speech you find disagreeable.

The only legitimate speech restrictions are viewpoint-neutral no matter what the viewpoint.
I've used lots of Windows laptops at home and work over the years. From $800 to custom-built $3k business-class workhorses. I maintain my claim that the build quality and integration on a MacBook is still among the best.
>Congratulations. We've reached a point, for this individual, where "facts" as decided in the common forum are suspect and the only thing they trust is themselves (and whatever non-Mainstream Media they listen to). We have reached a point where the only truth is what they decide is the truth. //

This is similar to the UK going in to the Brexit vote. Politicians that were promoting the break away from Europe were pushing hard the idea that "we don't need experts" and that listening to expert opinions was wrong (listening to experts like pro-Brexit economists who stated, in common with the anti-s, that Britain would be financially worse off leaving Europe).

It's like the media managed to spin the idea that all people who have rigorously studied something are not to be trusted. The biggest wtf is that it worked, writing a big fat lie in big fat letters on a bus trumps (heh!) countless professors of economics telling the people it's a lie.

The trap is to conclude that people are idiots, postmodernism is not really the reason either I feel. The reason IMO is that the media have become very very good at manipulating people's thought processes and feeding them a position with out resorting to having the person think through that position. Yay, we've won, the media can now make us all believe whatever they want.

But don't panic all those rich politicians and business people are sure to use their powers for good ... /s
TDD requires you to write FUNCTIONAL test first, not unit tests you are talking about.
>But they don't agree on which ones should be removed.

So they might want to start a program for that. Or they could start with one type of laws.

>It's why "everybody knows" Congress is terrible but they

>keep getting re-elected.

What would be the alternative? No Congress? ;) I mean it's there and it should certainly be improved.

> It's because everyone likes their representatives but hate all the others.

It seems so in the US, but in Europe there is also a trend towards this highly polarized direction. I hope people would take things easier and maybe try to understand the other politicians as well. For instance one could watch both CNN and Fownews. ;)
Pay the tax. Owning a home in a crowded city, not living in it the vast majority of the time, and refusing to rent it out to people who desperately want to live there imposes a negative externality on the city, which you need to pay for.
Yes - a fact that most people seem to be forgetting.

People will be less apt to complain when they realize they don't have to replace their entire adapter when they wear down the cable as is the case now.
I personally am worried not about single family homes, but about maybe one day getting to own a condo. That'd be cool. But new tiny units start at $600,000.

But what happens if you just chop down SFH and rebuild with higher density, and you don't also put restrictions on investing in the new units? You just end up with the problem we have now. We're building tons. Our local GDP is largely based around real estate. Not that we don't have a NIMBY problem — but there's only so much building you can do before you look around and feel like you just built more empty houses for people who don't live here.
> This is great (although it's not enough) and more cities should do it.

Something similar is common in the US, and is typically framed as a homestead exemption. Basically, set a high property tax rate and if people prove their house is owner occupied give them a rather large discount. My property taxes are ~$1500/year because I live in my house. People who rent out or do not live there pay $6000-$8000/year in my neighborhood.
Shirtless Violinist – Making Classical Music Sexy
Also note that because American elections tend to hinge on a handful of swing states (and then, often only on particular counties in those states) you do not need to commit fraud on a wide scale to commandeer the election. It should be possible to measurably influence the election by hacking a handful of influential counties, actually.
I had one user message me complaining his all of clients websites would lag when he used the extension (It checks for changes to files by crudely polling them every 200ms or so). Turned out the guy was building sites via an FTP editor in a production with all his clients on one server, with a lot of CSS/JS files being included in each page.

After a few emails back and forth, I switched him to WAMP for local development.
How do you KNOW your code is working and bugless?
Mysterious noises in the Arctic recently may have a very simple explanatio
Checked exceptions probably act more like ad-hoc enums since you've got to handle each kind of exception that can be thrown, but I'm sure that could be encoded in nested results too.
>...it is notoriously difficult to pin down what Trump stands for...

He was pretty clear about it. He's for wind energy, just not on his golf course.
Yeah, it's hard to get this across to people who live in a city where it feels like supply is increasing fast (because it's in huge, highly visible towers), but as a percentage of the total stock, is growing quite slowly.

I lived in Vancouver for a while, and though people were totally on board with the idea that increases in demand for housing would push up prices, they were highly skeptical of the idea that increased supply could decrease prices.
If the HOA is a corporation with the residents as shareholders, then Walmart or whoever can go to the council and offer to buy out the area or make an exception. The local neighborhood can vote on whether to allow it to go through, or ask Walmart for money to compensate them for the disruption. There's very little friction if Walmart is willing to come to an agreement with the neighborhood. The worst case is that Walmart buys the HOA corporation, and there's always some amount of money that will buy people off.

If the local city manages it, then it's a long drawn-out process of lobbying for zoning controls that apply city-wide. And offering the citizens money to vote for it might be illegal in some jurisdictions. Even if Walmart and the local citizens are okay with it, a couple hold-outs or people from other neighborhoods can delay the entire process by complaining to the zoning board.
Up the Organization, by Robert Townsend, for example.
I don't think that's the critical subsidy. My understanding is that with a solar roof, your whole solar freaking roofway is subject to the solar installation subsidies.
Trump also said Wind farms are bad because it kills birds.
Yep, we already covered that. Feel free to call it xenophobia and religious bigotry instead.
> There aren't that many rich Chinese people.

China has 1M+ millionaires. Assume 10% have enough disposable cash and motivation to go shopping for foreign real estate. It doesn't take much effort to look across the Pacific and home in on the politically easiest place to escape to. If 10% of those people choose Vancouver that's 10K units locked away from local residents.
Bash completion is still pretty fast for most commands. If you need --help or man, it will slow you down considerably
I'd say a more specific definition in this case is "people that are using real estate as a place to park money rather than as housing". In many cities like Vancouver, New York, and Miami, the money often is coming from foreign countries. With housing so limited, that has a real impact on people that live in these cities, and the benefit is provided to people that don't even live here.
We know that David Duke supported Trump. We don't know of anyone associated with the KKK supporting Hillary. That the voters don't care is to their discredit.
His positions were pretty clear. He's for all forms of energy, including coal. Wind too, but just not around his golf courses.
Not at all. Adding more supply is definitely part of the solution.

The problem is that adding supply takes time, there are physical limits to the rate at which supply can be added, and the level of demand is unknown.

This means it's hard to know when a supply only solution will result in decreased prices and it can take a long time. (Vancouver is not SF, it adds plenty of supply and yet there is still housing shortages and high prices)

If you want to fix the problem quickly, policies that increase supply and limit speculative demand will achieve results faster.
Hot damn, that's taking "move fast and break things" to a whole new level. Still, good on you for taking the time to suggest a better way to do things.
Right! Except the IIe was "IIe", at least in later versions, wasn't it?
Yes, AppleScript did this way back in the pre-OS X days -- but only if you added Apple Events support to your app, which was extremely fiddly and tedious.

Their current tool Automator is supposed to do this, but I don't know how widely it's supported. I suspect just like everything else, it has niche of users who love it and depend on it. It's not something your typical Mac user would think to reach for.
Tempesta FW reaches 1.8M HTTP RPS on 4 cores CPU
Homestead exemptions punish renters, which there isn't a compelling policy reason for.
Disagree. One of the most generally applicable practices to learn as a developer is the ability to use CLIs effectively, for tasks to which they area best suited. Which is the great bulk of them (version control, database admin, most filesys manipulation, etc).

Or to address your point more directly: for many tasks the GUI may seem easier at first, but a modest investment in CLI techniques can yield far greater dividends, over time.

And then there's all the conceptual and dependency bloat that GUIs impose on a project, over time.
I guess you are not in California.
If you're working long hours doing repetitive work and you aren't hourly, you should probably get a new job. Most people working long hours in, say, software aren't doing the same thing over and over. They're building more things, more quickly. They're managing projects more successfully. This can absolutely lead to measurable success without starting or running a business, creating a new product or service, or inventing anything meaningful.

If you can get significantly more done than your peers, competent management will notice and reward you meaningfully. The fact that you sacrifice your private life to accomplish this won't be very relevant to whether or not you deserve a huge bonus.
I love that top one since they're from the same party. Wonder what would have happened if Democrats could have chosen between Bernie and Hillary to vote for.
Five Email Newsletters to Follow for People Who Work in Tech
Like the Democratic majority he had while first elected?
Ask HN: How does one start a big project against climate change?
So here are two ideas I've been playing with (disclaimer: my current position is that climate change is already beyond repair, these are just my best two guesses at solving part of the problem)

Option 1:

- Use heliostat solar ("molten salt" solar) to generate heat in desert coastal areas

- Use the majority of the power to desalinate ocean water (this is a relatively cheap thing to do with the massive amounts of heat heliostat installations capture)

- Provide irrigation to the desert from the desalinated water

- Use a bootstrapping mechanism to generate fertile soil

- Plant a lot of trees

- Rise repeat (keep the trees there of course, expand coverage rather than replace)

This is technologically doable, safe, and provides a massive carbon sink, among other potential benefits (housing, agriculture opportunities) in areas that are otherwise lifeless (from a human perspective) wastelands.

Option 2

- Genetically engineer (synthetic biology) a rapid growing photosynthesizing algae that accumulates some heavier than water materials. Once a threshold is reached (quorum sensing) initiate a self destruct sequence for the colony

- Build a massive basin in the ocean for these things

- Just let the dead algae go to the bottom of the ocean

Slightly less safe and more experimental, still very doable (even grad students can potentially engineer this, just look at iGem)

/But/ and this is the big but: while I strongly believe these are viable options (the numbers even look on the /profitable/ side of things) initial investment will take billions! How does a senior software developer in Artificial Intelligence without the right connections even begin to approach building or promoting these things?
You're making a huge assumption that capital controls are the cause. It's more likely that people believe real estate is a better investment than currency, stocks, precious assets. Or perhaps they just want to diversify their holdings. I'm considering buying some investment real estate, and it has nothing to do with capital controls.
That's a good question. There are different ways:
- Play around with the program intelignetly and observe no bugs (you wouldn't believe how many bugs I've found by that method, that have been missed by very formal verification processes).
- Don't call it done until you haven't proven to yourself that the code has no bugs. This is an informal process of self-code-review but which involves quite rigorous thinking about the behavior of the code. Often assertions are involved (which all have to be proved).
That is not even a little bit true.
I'm not speaking as a software developer now. I think it's an established fact that "normal" people love (loved) Apple products because they "just work" (worked). The prettiness is a nice bonus, but they key thing was always the concept of "things just working".

I now see Apple moving their focus from "just working" to "pretty", while raising prices.
Is macro recording (and editing) still a thing? I haven't used MS Office in a while...
That's the biggest drawback of any kind of tests - there is always the risk of testing the wrong thing, or not testing enough of the possible right things. and you're absolutely right - because the test is also code, it also can and often will have bugs.

When you write tests for what you're about to code, or what you just finished coding, it's a challenge to write a test that is not flawed in the same way the code is - because you don't know the flaw is there in order to test for it.

By thinking things out first you can decrease the number of these (and enforcing that discipline is a major plus for TDD ) but for typical non-trivial application without a lot of control over its inputs, it's close to impossible to do.

Tests are often reactive as well - because the changes that require them are reactive (bugs, new reqs, arch changes, etc). That doesn't detract from the value of them, but it's a limitation that explains well why even 100% coverage never stops the bugs from showing up.

I think I'd be happier with TDD if fewer people presented it as if it solved all the problems. TDD is a powerful tool, but tools are only as omniscient as the people who use them.
The part about higher taxes for people renting property out seems to amount to yet another subsidy for home ownership over renting—which is not obviously a good thing. A tax just on properties that are unused (ie not owner-occupied or rented) makes more sense to me.
[Oldschool Dark Ambient Music] Sephiroth – R'lyeh (1998)
Trump received a 40-year, $120 million full tax abatement from NYC for the Grand Hyatt (Newsweek 6/17/90) . He sought a residential tax abatement for Trump Tower, an abatement designed for low- and middle-income housing (NYT, 8/6/1983), and an abatement for another luxury tower, Trump Palace, and for Trump International Hotel (NYT 7/17/94). He sought a $356 million low-interest loan from the federal government for the West Side Yards, received a $34 million tax abatement in Florida, and had the assessed value of a Las Vegas property lowered from $180 million to $8.6 million (LA Times, 5/11/2011).