skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have always used a step-debugger for debugging and personally find the process somewhat thrilling, especially when debugging other peoples code and learning all the tricks and techniques that they are using to get the jobs done.

I don't know how much time and effort I have saved over the years using tricks I gleaned stepping through code written by people much smarter than I.

There is simply nothing that comes close to learning and debugging code line-by-line, examining variables and taking branches in real time. In fact, how people can debug large existing codebases without a debugger is beyond me.

Of course, nowadays in modern webdev it seems that most developers no longer use step-debuggers and, in general, want to rewrite the app in whatever stack will look best on their resume and/or sound impressive in the pub or gym afterhours.

I long ago gave up poo-pooing the importance of social signalling within the young-ish developer community, something that really did not exist when I was 20-something as programmers had few choices about the stack.

I really love the jist of the OP, and agree that the misapplication of the programs mental model is the underlying cause of almost all bugs. This mental model is what I'm always trying to load fully into my brain as, IMO, true productivity occurs when I have it fully loaded and I am confident that I am covering all the edge conditions.

Debugging must not be an afterthought in educating; industry must stop insisting that bugs be interpreted as failures of individual programmers ...

Funny...I've really never separated debugging from developing as they always go hand in hand, and certainly have never thought that bugs signify "failure". In fact, to me it represents progress...
Why not both? And some Vue.js too maybe.
Fortunate that a good programmer will get more clever over time.

Also will know when to write boring and or testable code. Testable code is also debuggable more easily.
One thing the aggregators do well is offer a consistent and more flexible search than the airlines' own sites which are often pretty terrible. For example, I live within 2 hours of about 5 airports, and when flying within Europe there are often two airports near the destination. Being able to search with multiple departure and arrival locations, with flexibility across several days, in order to find the cheapest combination of airports and dates is still a useful service.

I'm interested to know where Google Flights fits in to this picture. It is not well publicised but suddenly seems to have become quite good. A key feature for me is inclusion of the two big UK low-cost carriers, Ryanair and Easyjet. I'd assume Google are not working on commission but are just trying capture another area of search with their algorithms and data. Does anyone know more about it?
But Python also warns about it in the documentation, and provide the factions (https://docs.python.org/3.1/library/fractions.html) module and the decimal module thttps://docs.python.org/3.1/library/decimal.html) in the stdlib to avoid the problem.
British / Irish pasteurised milk tastes so much fresher than pasteurised milk in other countries, must be our abundant green grass, British Beef is also the best in the world.
UHT milk is horrible. Filtered fresh milk is the answer, needs refrigeration but lasts for 5 times longer than non-filtered.
Have your tried Strauss Farms milk?
Pijul 0.4, Improvements and breaking changes
Well, Facebook definitely knows what I was searching recently on Amazon, as it shows me ads with the same (rare!) products that I browsed (didn't buy) on Amazon.

Clearly, they sell my data to Facebook. Can they sell some aggregates over your Amazon Drive?
Be careful with this source; as articulate and urbane as much of the writing is, it's the UK's Breitbart.
It's a limited market. Once all the rich people have their tesla, they won't buy many more because:

- they already have one and want another toy

- it's not trendy anymore since everybody has it

The ideal move would be to create separate models. Affordable ones to keep Tesla afloat. Luxury ones (with a very distinct design) to keep the brand PR on top.
This is literally the MIT vs New Yersey style debate - https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
> a tendency of omitting/censoring[1] the fact that it was primarily directed at Jews and Romani

Same in the GDR by the way. Memorials in concentration camps often highlight anti-fascist fighters who died there - no mention of Jews, Roma or Homosexuals.
This is just 'wisdom' in a different wrapper.

Some folks have a knack for acquiring wisdom with age - some don't. It's not a matter of articles - I'd say it's mostly a matter of personality.

Some are curious and want to see how things work - others only want to know how to get that specific thing they want, come upon a stumbling block, rationalize it as 'outside of my control' and spend the rest of their days in complain-mode :)

I'd say the ratio of philosopher vs complainer is maybe 50-1? If not 100-1. Either way, they're rare birds, them folks who seek wisdom it seems.
State pension is not the same as the Civil Service pension, which would be equivalent to what you're talking about, and can be very good indeed.
Influenza regularly knocks you out for 5-7 days [1]; that's one way to distinguish it from the common cold, which usually has no non-respiratory symptoms (fatigue, fever, muscle aches) and when it does lasts only a couple days.

In my family, we usually would go in to see the doctor if the progression of the illness was getting worse. Influenza usually comes on very strongly and knocks you out for a week, but the worst days are the first and second, and then you're just on bedrest for a while. Same with most illnesses. It's when you feel sick and keep getting sicker that it's time to see a doctor.

It sounds like that's what the family in the article did: when her illness got worse, she went to the doctor. But the doctor just diagnosed her with the flu and sent her home, so it's not like it helped.

[1] http://www.merckmanuals.com/home/infections/viral-infections...
And verify it with good tests. It sometimes happens that a certain piece of code is inherently complex, due to a complex underlying algorithm. But often, test cases are still easy to define, so it makes sense to heavily make use of them.

For example, sorting algorithms may be somewhat complicated in implementation, but it's trivial to come up with some sample before/after lists.
> Imagine a contract which says the contract partner receives e.g. 0.001% of the total revenue for the fiscal year (which could be 10bn Euros)

I'm imagining it, and I don't see why storage or computation time would be major obstacles to a calculation you run once a year. Use whatever big integers you want?

Suppose we dedicated one $100 hard drive (per year!) to storing all the relevant data. I feel like there would be plenty of space left over, and the budget would cover it.
If you push enough, they will. Once I had an 18 hour layover in Honolulu and I decided to go to the Pearl Harbor memorial (sentimental, I know) and Uber was a mess. I got cancelled on, and I cancelled one...both times I was charged the fee. After a few emails of back and forth they actually refunded my credit card instead of just giving me "Uber credits."
A chatbot, voice or text, is a response generator, where responses are prompts, requested information, or state change (e.g., place order, cancel service). It's no more interactive than other tools, and the more divorced the interface from text, the more levels of complexity are thrown at it.

Talking at a CLI interface is no more a "conversation" than typing at one. Despite the fact that interactive computer systems were called "conversational". (Don't believe me? There are books on the subject, from 1968: https://www.worldcat.org/title/conversational-computers/oclc... https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Aconversational+comput...)

I've been thinking about world models and communication a great deal. In this context, talking (or typing) with a chatbot is a great deal like arguing with an idiot. If the chatbot's world model doesn't include the actions or questions you're trying to address, there's simply no way to get it to understand. Quite literally, its world doesn't include such things. Though unlike the proverbial wrestling with a pig, in this case, you're the one far more likely to be annoyed.

Which gets to another major problem: such systems are constructed, and serve, the interests of their creators and clients: the companies which create them, frequently not the same as those who deploy them, the clients.

Users' interests are at the bottom of the priority stack.

Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of calling the local (and pathetic) newspaper company after our Sunday paper failed to arrive. I was greated, on three successive phone calls, to a several-minutes-long pitch for services I had absolutely no interest in, when trying to address a problem created by the company in the first place. To put it mildly, I was not pleased.

And my standing recommendation to cancel the subscription (substituting it with a much superior national paper) seems to be bearing out.

Chatbots which treat interactions as captive sales opportunities will, I suspect, not greatly enhance customer affinity to brands deploying such strategies.
Pasteurised, UHT but no mention of powdered or condensed milk.
Bullshit. I'm often in disagreement with The Spectator but that is a ridiculous slur.
It's not as easy as regulate as stealing or murder. It's more like with freedom of speech. If you start drawing a line, you end up harming the very thing you tried to defend.
So, should children be given to the care of the state at the earliest possible age? Or you'd rather have mass prosecution and re-education to stamp out beliefs that you dislike?

In the long run, maladaptive beliefs will die out and useful ones will survive, head start or no.
They seem to operate only in the USA, but form an "alliance" with other services in other countries (Didi Chuxing, Grab Taxi, etc.), for which you need the respective app though.
Apple now forbids apps to mention price in their name
Apple can and does update APIs in ways that preserve old behavior for apps linked against older SDKs, specifically so old apps continue to work. They could do the same here with versioned symbols, if they wanted to switch mutexes to unfair-by-default. I believe they intentionally go with fair-by-default because it's the safe choice, the choice that guarantees program correctness, since most people don't think about this sort of thing and probably won't be able to figure out themselves when their locks should be fair or unfair. It's the same reason C11 and C++11 atomics default to sequential consistency when not otherwise specified; that's the slowest memory ordering, but it's the one that's guaranteed to be correct for all cases. If you know what you're doing you can override the default and pick something else.
I tried to use the API but was unable to get an API key without installing PrexView Studio. I'm not installing an application to try out an API.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAuEoo3lgKM
I can't agree with you more. When the state steps in to control what people are allowed to teach their children we have entered into a very very scary time. Freedom of personal belief is fundamental to all freedom. If we allow the state to dictate the beliefs taught to children we take away that freedom.
I've done some bouldering and although I don't know what the actual best is, you don't want to land directly on your back or front (flat) and you never want to land on your head of course. I learned to try falling with legs slightly bent in a mostly upright position. Someone with more experience can give you better info though.
There's quite a big different between 72°c and 140°c. Would 105° produce a semi-long lasting milk that doesn't taste quite as different (bad) as UHT?

Also, are there any other downsides to UHT besides taste? Are more nutrients lost?
The Super Bowl is available through antenna.
News to me too, but apparently they bought a bunch of tech and 100 Bing Maps employees in 2015:

http://mashable.com/2015/06/29/uber-bing-maps/#yo4ZMCPC1aqj
You're right (and we probably agree). I did focus on the number 1 problem in social science / pop psychology today -- sloppy statistics.

But you do make a convincing point. The 'stink' that is uncovered nowadays is mostly in those sciences where the layman / statistically schooled can make a difference. We hear a lot less about the replication crisis in those sciences where one indeed needs to have a lot of background knowledge before being able to do peer review. That's a problem.

There is no reason to assume that the same problems are not paramount in cell biology and other fields. We actually have enough reason to believe that many trials in medicine are flawed. Given that researchers in all fields face the same incentives (publish or perish) we are probably looking at at least 20 years of false, peer-reviewed and published results in all fields. That's a huge problem for mankind.
Event-driven programming in C 89
But the Nazis were in fact applying overtly racist policies. Admitting this fact doesn't make you a racist. Denying it instead makes you a liar or even a negationist.
Oddly enough, I just tried to book an ihg hotel through priceline, and priceline said it was sold out. ihg was happy to give me the reservation directly though.
So we have beliefs in the dead rising, a bunch of decapitated and burned bodies, and then they all leave anyway.

Guess it's time to re-read the Zombie Survival Guide.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
Life Hacks to create a successful B2B advertising campaign
I was a print subscriber for two years, read every article in every issue, and that was my conclusion.
>Not if it is their fault/equipment.

That depends entirely on the technician you get. At least for Cox, it's up to the technician to determine if the customer foots the bill or not and while you might get a competent technician who will happily redo all of the outside wiring while he's there for free you might also get a technician from some third party contractor who doesn't even have the equipment to test anything and is just relying on the customer's modem for troubleshooting.

Just because it's their fault doesn't mean that they'll admit it or even fix it.
"While surges do mitigate shortages, they do so in part by repelling passengers..."

Supply and demand -- what will those crafty manipulators at Uber dream up next? The author makes it sound like some kind of voodoo magic.
Google Flight also has this nice bar chart of what departure date is the cheapest for, say, a two-week trip to XYZ (and of course the usual departure date/return date matrix).
It is possible to recognise without conferring a sense of preeminent victimhood, and doing so may even have benefits for internationalism; but I do not wish to argue this point. The response above is just an elaboration on the parent's simplistic claim.

From the same Wikipedia page: "An official memorial to Soviet citizens shot at Babi Yar was erected in 1976." Yevtushenko starts with an incredulous observation that there is no memorial at all, as of 1961. Your comment hints at a possible reason: it may be difficult to commemorate this specific site if one is unwilling to mention the Jews. It is imaginable that had a memorial existed--in any form--the poem may not have been written, but its lack had caused the poet to search for reasons.
Open Sourcing our SyntaxNet python wrapper
I agree - debugging is an integral part of programming. I don't mind debugging, and often bugs are good for you:

- solving a bug teaches you something. You either learn something new about how to write good code, about the product or about the domain.

- debugging problems teaches you how to write code that is easy/easier to debug. You see what information you wish you have had, how to be able to track what is happening in the program etc.

- solving problems and mysteries (how can this even happen) is often fun in itself (like solving sudoku or crosswords or reading murder mysteries).

- when you resolve a bug, both you and your customer are happy. It's a bit of a paradox. If there wasn’t a bug in the first place, there wouldn’t be a need to fix it, so why should they be happy? However, my experience is that they are happy to receive a bug-fix, especially if it is solved quickly

More detailed argument here: https://henrikwarne.com/2012/10/21/4-reasons-why-bugs-are-go...
Hi, blog author here.

> I'd love to see numbers

This was an experiment, and I didn't do a performance test. The Orleans people will tell you that the current production version will process something on the order of a couple hundred thousand of messages per server per second. If your actors are modelled well, this scales to hundreds of servers, so it would be possible to have on the order of tens of millions of messages per second between actors, including persistence. I expect the upcoming Dotnet Core version to do even better.

> How's the testing/debugging experience

I normally test with xunit, standard dotnet stuff that works very well. Orleans provides a TestingHost that lets you spin up silos for testing grain code in a 'real' environment. This costs some time for startup.

The time travel idea needs some devtools ui, which I didn't build. I'm sure this would be possible though, with the limitation that the "edit and continue" feature of dotnet is not as capable as in javascript: often visual studio will tell you that your change requires a full application restart. You can change code and data while paused in the debugger.

> What happens when the machine goes down?

Orleans would respawn the Grain on another server (using the last-known state) and retry the operation up to two times by default. If you follow a safe implementation pattern (call WriteStateAsync after a state change), your state will be correct. In my blog code, I await successful completion of the message on the client. If something went wrong in Orleans and the state isn't persisted, that promise would be rejected, and it could be shown to the user.
Most definitely. If you have a family it is a lot harder. You need to talk to someone if it gets progressively worse and if you don't have a significant other that will support you quitting you need to get additional help.
> To most people, knowing "how it works" is no more than being familiar enough with the magic spells that you can use them with confidence.

I like the (literal) treatment of this topic in Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality.
I've had some trouble with moto G4 - just google for phantom touch.

If you use the device for email, etc.. probably you won't notice. For development/testing is a mess.
When you have a very active Facebook page with thousands of fans, you'll get dozen of questions every day via Messenger. A bot can help with that.

And I agree with you. If you weren't using Facebook to reach customers in the past, there's no point building a Messenger bot.
NB: You're arguing your point against a native of Poland.
The excuse is that there are literally billions of things that one could thrive to understand at least superficially, but the typical human life has only 4500 weeks.
They're both good. Learn whichever is more appropriate for your projects.
Uber for trucks or how to establish your own successful trucking business
Don't link to jwz from HN unless you want other people to see a NSFW picture of a hairy nutsack.
I'm embarrassed that I never looked into the difference between the two.

I've always bought fresh milk on the assumption that it was healthier and purer than the long life stuff, especially because the long life milk tastes a tad sweeter and creamier to me (so it must be bad for me, right?)
Disagree. Tesla will make far more money reshaping an industry than selling luxury vehicles.
How could they have cancellation fees at all if you could just turn off your phone and claim it died to evade them?
And yet, passports said "Ethnicity: Jew". "Ukrainian". "Georgian". For a country inhabited by Soviet people, it had a surprising lack of people identified as simply Soviet in their documents; hard to have it both ways.
Often times, it really means you hire less since there's less support load. E.g. we have a customer which support requests are more than 90% frequently asked questions. Adding a bot to their Facebook page decreased their support load from full time to at most 1h a day. :)

But as you mentioned, when using a bot, the goal should be customer happiness, not cutting costs.
I think aviation is a good analogy.

Most of the automation in a modern airliner, for example, isn't there to make the plane "fly itself" from point A to point B -- it's there to do things machines are good at in order to reduce the workload of the human crew, so they have more time/energy to focus on the things humans are good at.

Flight plans, for example, are still decided on by humans, even if a programmed computer carries out many aspects of the plan once decided upon. Same for en-route deviation from the prior plan in order to either avoid bad weather or reach good weather (where "weather" is kind of a broad term, and includes things like winds which would help/hinder an airliner). Although "autoland" is a feature, it's not something that's used every time and can be moderately complex to set up, since a bunch of factors have to be decided/input by a human. And of course the final decision to land or go around is made by a human.

Which drives home the fact that automation, in aviation, is a partnership between humans and machines, with humans benefiting and being more productive from offloading some work.

A lot of fields should be looking at that as a model.
Thanks very much for the answers. I really appreciate it!
You can tell Common Lisp to read double-floats by default.

CL-USER 113 > (+ 0.1 0.2)
0.3

CL-USER 114 > *read-default-float-format*
SINGLE-FLOAT

CL-USER 115 > (setf *read-default-float-format* 'double-float)
DOUBLE-FLOAT

CL-USER 116 > (+ 0.1 0.2)
0.30000000000000005

Thus if one wants to make sure which float format Lisp should be reading,

a) specify the default format, as above

b) or use s, f, d, and l to specify the format (short float, single float, double-float, long-float). Example 1.0s0, 1.0f0, 1.0d0, 1.0l0
What are some good online tech communities for non-hackers?
For a non-hacker (no computer science degree) who is interested in tech, and learning simple coding (starting off with html, css), what community or forum would you recommend I join? I'm looking to find a place where I can learn, ask questions and contribute.

So far, I'm looking at hackernews, indie hackers forum, subreddit

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I’d like to focus my time on one community if possible.
Thank you, @oferzelig, for pointing out the inaccuracy about the Angular update, we fixed it in the text. However, AngularJS is still a supported framework that is widely used. And Angular 4, despite being an improved version of AngularJS, has yet to acquire the same level of adoption.
Well, this is what "Sex in the City" is about in real life :)
> But productivity (amount of $ per hour of work) has been dropping for 30 years,

What, what? Except for some years during the 2008~ financial crisis, productivity has been rising steadily all over the developed world.

https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDYGTH

In fact it would be very odd if it wasn't rising; it would mean all of the aggregate investment in machinery and office automation during the last 30 years was useless.

Of course, productivity's rate of growth itself isn't always rising, but that's a different story.