skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have to realise the scope and context: the Go compiler rewrite was done by people who were:

* working on the codebase full time

* intimately familiar with the quirks

* relying on the transpiling to be mostly automated

IMO as far as rewrites go, that's a pretty tall order.

I'm personally contemplating a rewrite of an old project (mostly due to GTK having gone downhill in past years), and harbour no misconceptions about the scale of the effort. It's only about 10k lines of python, across two different projects, but if it takes me less than 2 months (of active spare time work), I will be very much surprised.
I'm slowly developing a systematic framework for programming the human brain with foundations in category theory. I've gotten a lot of useful mileage out of what little I've learned about category theory. It contributes to my intuition about how to reprogram my brain. I'm convinced we'll be teaching it to children in the future, once the programming framework is better developed and understood.

What could be more practical than self-improvement?

I'll answer my own question: learning how to apply the same kinds of reasoning to improve how people interact.
If you like forest scenes, there's Speedtree.[1] Speedtree is a commercial terrain and vegetation generator for games. It can procedurally generate huge landscapes in real time, and has level of detail handling so the world will fit in memory. There are some Speedtree demos where you can walk around in a forest. It's like a game with good visuals, except nothing happens. Very peaceful.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Z142aOsm4
The bull is in public space, not a museum. Public space interacts back with your art piece. I consider that a given. And in this case the reaction on the piece was a great one.
I'm curious; I get why it's "even German", given that they're an economically prosperous neighbor with jobs etc. But why "even Russian", today?
It's a valid point, but I'm not sure how many of the old texts are digitized, or will be.
Well, 8 centuries ago even the word "Въкраина" was used. It doesn't fit into the narrative.
Extract from wikipedia about protected health information below: note that names and email addresses are PHI and must be treated with special care....

Under the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), PHI that is linked based on the following list of 18 identifiers must be treated with special care:[1]

Names
All geographical identifiers smaller than a state, except for the initial three digits of a zip code if, according to the current publicly available data from the Bureau of the Census: the geographic unit formed by combining all zip codes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20,000 people; and the initial three digits of a zip code for all such geographic units containing 20,000 or fewer people is changed to 000
Dates (other than year) directly related to an individual

Phone numbers

Fax numbers

Email addresses
Going to a doctor implies consent to have your contact data shared with Facebook?
Engineering Degrees Wasted-12 Years of Life Gone
I went to Wright State University (WSU) in Dayton, Ohio. Earned a BS in Biomedical Engineering (BME) and an MS in Human Factors Engineering (HFE). For over ten years they used me as cheap slave labor teaching/lecturing fundamentals of engineering and senior design along with a myriad of lab sections. All the while they dangled the fish of potential employment. Once I turned 60 years of age they decided that the easiest way to get rid of me was to hire me. One year later I'm fired on trumped-up BS charges like not making enough progress on my PhD (they didn't even ask to see my work and poor student evals when over 90% of students gave me favorable evals. All my teaching experience was there and now I can't get a favorable reference. Nothing left but the streets.
I know several people who have had their bank accounts stolen at one point or another, and it's never required a lawsuit to be made whole. This is because almost all the transactions by which you can lose money through your bank are reversible, except for cash withdrawals.
Worth noting that Reddit might become a competition to Facebook in a year or so.

They recently introduced a trial of followable users, that you can subscribe to, just like you subscribe to subreddits.

It's de facto the same mechanism that Facebook has with user walls.

Once they roll it out to everyone, Reddit will be quite similar, sans the real name policy.
470 Twitter Pictures by Melania Trump Analyzed
Paging George Burdell
For those want a great intro and overview of category theory aimed at programmers, Bartosz Milewski's lecture series on YouTube [0] is worth the time investment. It covers the topics this post discusses and more, but crucially with plenty of context to help understand why any of it matters.

0: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbgaMIhjbmEnaH_LTkxLI7...
That is interesting. I can see the logic there, mostly I'm just impressed that both sites maintain a critical mass of activity, since (at least in recent years) SX seems to require a pretty high level of engagement to get out of perpetual beta.

Does anyone know of any other cases with two similar but distinct SX communities?
yellow ribbons
That looks really cool (although the free fall scenes are faked, sadly) --- do you know if it's getting an international release with English subtitles?
I've been studying Leibniz recently and I'm excited to get to his treatment of Monads. The following is a little irrelevant to this post, but the title of this post stirred a relationship.

So to Leibniz, in the conception of an entity's identity, he posits that one must include all propositions related to that entity. So when we try to consider a property of an object of our mind, we are basically saying "it is what it is." Saying that Einstein is German is like saying "Einstein is Einstein." Where this conception of including propositions in identities gets weird is that his formulation also includes future propositions. In this respect, only God can truly understand anything fully, because only he can tell the future and can get the full identity of things.

So "x is x" shows up a lot.

Edit: As mentioned, Leibniz Monad != the Monad of category theory. I suppose I'm just looking for any excuse to talk about Leibniz. Also, I did say I didn't even get to that topic yet. Consider this a peep about the duality of that term.
Code with Root
That reminds me of the situation of Korea, where the two Koreas cannot agree on how to say "Korea" in Korean. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The number of gas stations declined 25% from 1994 to 2013. I'd hardly call that doing fine.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2016/06/why...
Increment: On-Call
> it also spies on US citizen to be sure to control dissent and shut people down.

Yups. Shut dissents down, in an undemocratic way, to keep an undemocratic gov't from receiving public scrutiny. In the mean time keep up the appearance you're fighting (inter)national terrorism. Yeah for "National Security".
It's actually pretty accurate description of the reality. Mindless administration in the path of progress.
Reminds me of what https://indieweb.org/ is pushing as well
Mobile VR works by rendering both eyes to the screen. The result is then seen through lenses. As a result pixel density is highest in the center of each eye. So in this case center means the portion of the screen under the midpoint of each lens.
I use dialyxir, too. Mostly I was referring to wanting dialyzer to output Elixir syntax, not Erlang.
We do. But that costs money, and the only things that seem to be working are clickbait, fake news, and government sponsored outlets. A future of RT, Press TV, infowars, taboos, and if we're lucky al-jazzera
Correct, also for the other runnable software (e.g. Apple II collection) and livingroom consoles :)
Imagine you don't want to have 5 important, large-scale customers, since your company only has 5 people?

Imagine there are no companies with the need for dedicated representatives, since they are 5-people companies also.
Well, this takes "not knowing the price of a gallon of milk" to a whole new level.
Are you fluent in Haskell?
There's lots of evidence that the concentration of wealth is bad for the economy, but I suspect from your posting history that you'd ignore it all in defense of the ultra-wealthy (which you're not one of and will never be, of course).

https://www.google.com/#q=concentration+of+wealth+effect+on+...

It's your right to believe whatever you want, but that's what this world-view is, belief, and nothing based on evidence or reality.
Letter from a Drowned Canyon
How many companies are building rockets?
Do we have any confirmation that Google has mandatory TLS?

IIRC, STARTTLS may not be mandatory and be just purely opportunistic. So relying on STARTTLS only is not a good idea.

https://serverfault.com/questions/523804/is-starttls-more-sa...
Selling a side for 3 _month_ earnings? Too cut losses and cash in? And I always thought 3 years earning would be a steal.

The one who later bought shipmentoffail.com for 5000$ seems to have failed even more. shipmentoffail.com is a parked domain now.
> Investors are seeking high ROI and low risk too, though. This creates challenges for "putting money to work".

Hoarding cash has a negative ROI (inflation). They are still going to put it to work. Apple is not sitting on $246B in idle cash.

> Each trade raises the pressure to speculate, allowing the market to trend upwards without actually doing much of anything for consumers, gradually increasing the likelihood of a crash.

There's no evidence of that.
Different "monad", unfortunately.
Lumens are very misleading as they're entirely based on human vision sensitivity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminosity_function

Naturally, the closer to the 555nm green peak, and the more monochromatic your light source, the brighter it appears to be. This is a part of why night vision systems are green.

You measure a lumen by taking the area of your light source spectrogram in respect to the luminosity function.

I did this years ago with some manufacturers LED light output curves to reverse engineer electrical->photon efficiency vs cost from their data sheets. The main purpose was to figure out how close we were to LED lighting taking over.

I did that research back in 2012 and predicted 2015 as the point where LED was more efficient and cheaper than CFL but I was off by a year or so. Hilariously that paper got me a C- because it was only tangentially related to the teacher's pet subject and never saw the light of day.
New Kibana Visualizations: Heatmap and Point Series
I don't think the issue with reading materials is that big of a deal as long as the language itself stays the same. Alphabets are easy to learn. From personal experience, one big hurdle is going to be learning how to type in a different character set, for people who already have the muscle memory for a Cyrillic keyboard. Also, hopefully they take a sane approach to orthography, but characters like ы and ж and щ don't have a 1:1 counterpart in Latin.
If I were you, I'd -

1. Check if people are doing it already, if yes then how well and how you can differentiate/ carve out a niche.
2. Cold email startups, small organisations.
3. Meet college authorities
4. Call anyone and everyone you think can be a prospective beneficiary.
I know, that is the "reserve requirement". It's a government requirement, and not particularly relevant to this discussion.
I have not put significant thought into if making patents more specific would help the current situation. It could help or it could make relatively trivial derivative works a larger problem. That is actually some of what this article is about, wherein one group describes a tool in one system and another group describes it in a separate, more lucrative system. I'll leave the argument of if translating expression from prokaryotes to eukaryotes is trivial, but I am convinced the translation was significantly easier than the discovery and description of the system in the first place.
I had always crazy problem in setting up Kafka until I discovered https://github.com/Landoop/fast-data-dev
Well-written primer, so cool to see something complex reduced to its simplest form that captures the essence.

Funny to read how PC memory can be "millions of bytes on modern machines". To be fair, I was using a computer with only 128MB as recently as 7 years ago :-)
It's also fun to play for downvote, which Facebook discourages. But HN is one fun place to troll. Bitch.
How costly were contracts 2000 years ago? Read again, I suggested that companies start getting better interactions with others, that means innovation on contracts to make them more viable than hiring a new employee.

I wasn't trying to say that it is viable to do EVERYTHING with a 5-people company. I was trying to say it is viable to do a lot, and that it is maybe possible to make it more viable to do more.
> I'm on like 27 mailing lists from places where I bought something or had to set up an account for some reason, and the first thing I do is set up a filter that shovels their traffic into thr trash.

You're not the average user. Many (not that many but enough) will see "hot new deal! don't miss out!" and click it.
So, the fix is for the government to start banning likes?

It's really hard to take these comments seriously. Most of yall seem condescending and firmly out of touch with why people use Facebook.

Everyone on the platform doesn't need to be saved by HN just because you know a few narcissists.
That's interesting, since Hulu runs Nielsen tracking software. I'm not sure if it's included in DVR+3/+7 ratings, though.
Super! Thanks! I wondered how they would get an analog to digital converter to work a sub-millimeter frequencies. So, right, they don't!
> there's a number of differences that feel like warts and needless complications for no discernable gain

Such as?
I took a class a long time ago that was about contenders for computing on different logical substrates, which might be enabled by active areas of research in the somewhat-distant future: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course_deta...
It is Perl code to parse X using regular expressions.

This is always the worst kind of Perl code imaginable to try to tinker with.

It will be fiddly. It will have exceptional cases piled upon exceptional cases. It will have hideous numbers of undocumented corners.

All because it isn't a real, actual, fscking parser.

Because we don't really need a parser for this, right now, do we, really?

Yeah, this is one of those cases where "Do the simplest thing" breaks down horribly and very rarely does someone have the wherewithal to apply 2x4 cluebats to the people who persist in writing parsers with regular expressions.

Yes, I have done so (in Python actually). However, my code has a little "counter" in the comments along the lines of "You have debugged a regular expression in this code: <n> times. Use a real parser you idiot."

It is depressing how large I have let that number get before I actually pull my head out of my ass.
Well, the point of their engine is to make it harder to game the system... everytime someone figures out a trick, someone takes advantage of it... that alone would discourage leaks.

We laypeople can only find out things via word of mouth or observational tests on assumptions.
> There is no such thing as "just rewrite it in X".

People do it all the time, every day. Code has side affects and features you don't necessarily need. NIH is usually, "don't need most of that here" or "language X would do it cleaner/with-less-bugs(tm)", which is different wording for the exact same reasoning. So I'm not sure why the focus on this line-by-line conversion that nobody would choose to do.

On the other hand, rewriting my java chat server in erlang
(in 2008) went from 5000 lines to about 500. That was a point by point functionality conversion of my own project, for existing java clients.
Collectively, we have a lot of experience with the foibles of our visual system (to the extent that we don't notice what it does poorly, which is a problem, too). Further, we've arranged civilization to play to its strengths, which is one of the reasons we're so interested in facial recognition.

The recognition systems look like they are doing the same thing we are, but they're not. Adding an adversary taking advantage of the difference is just sauce on top of the problem.
>The way argumentless functions must be declared with "function".

Could you show an example, I don't get it?

>The expression termination issue (";;")

Strange, I've never used ";;" in my code, only in repl.

>Operators not being overloaded is annoying, although there's a valid argument for explicitness.

Overloading is harmful. It's definitely the wrong way to do
ad-hoc polymorphism, and OCaml have a polymorphic comparison operators, which brought so much headache. Type classes or modular implicits are the right way to do ad-hoc. Looking forward to see modular implicits in OCaml [1].

>For example, having a REPL without built-in readline support (rlwrap to the rescue)

What do you mean by "readline" support?

[1] http://ocamllabs.io/doc/implicits.html
Applications can accumulate 'business cruft' as much as they do code cruft. Things were built for one reason, then were hacked to do something different. I.e:

"Note that GTK-Doc wasn't originally intended to be a general-purpose
documentation tool, so it can be a bit awkward to setup and use."

So pure 'rewriting' is not usually what you want. You want the same functionality but in an easier to use and maintain package. The approach I usually take is finding a well supported project that is already solving the same problem and extending it to solve mine.

In this case, a documentation generator seems a suspect thing to rewrite as there are already many of those out there. I'd look at extending Doxygen to support GTK-Doc's syntax (or automating a GTK-Doc to Doxygen translator).

Anyway this is an approach i've used with some success before. It can't always work, sometimes the problem you're solving is fairly unique or sometimes the available open source projects don't have much better code bases than the one you're trying to replace.

As far as "Chesterton's Fences" I say tear 'em down (but instrument and be prepared to rollback). Sometimes the only way to tell why something exists is to remove it. This is effectively just paying the price of technical debt - a cost of doing business. The higher cost is to live in a world littered with rusting fences.
But how do you go from 60% certainty that it is an A to 90% certainty that it is a B?
I guess I'll raise my hand by commenting.

This stuff is a certain brand of abstract algebra. Abstract algebra is generally of a certain degree of usefulness to a programmer in that there's a similarity in discipline. Moreover, linear algebra can be very useful to many programers who do things related to applied mathematics---nearly all of it touches linear algebra. Linear algebra is a specific form of abstract algebra and this blog takes a particularly "abstract" approach to linear algebra.

The particular tools being used here are of a category theoretic flavor. Category theory is a sibling to abstract algebra especially popular in certain fields (topology, algebraic geometry, foundations and logic). It's furthermore pretty popular in the Haskell-like FP crowd since Haskell is a rich place for exploring very high-order abstraction and category theory helps provide some language for talking at very high abstraction. For that reason, a lot of Haskell hackers have some amount of experience with category theory.

Finally, hackers with any kind of pure math background have a decent chance at having been exposed to this stuff. Even if they weren't, there's a good chance they could read it with some fluency. Math is a lot like programming where once you get your water legs you have a significantly improved time digesting related subjects even without direct prior experience.

For myself I have a bit of a math background, was drawn to Haskell for that reason, discovered category theory via Haskell, then swung full circle and read about it as a branch of pure math to learn more about foundations and logic.
Would you consider streaming/broadcasting yourself doing a project like this? I think it would be interesting to pop in and watch you work, especially if once every couple hours you provided some commentary about your thought process and what the latest hurdle to overcome is.
Who, if not our "captured legislatures" is to act?

"We don't need an alternative very much" today, perhaps, but I fear this may be like saying the Titanic had little need for life rafts _when in dry dock_.
I and I guess many others don't see it and don't care.
> US was well past subsistence farming in 1776.

Not really. Nearly everything a farm family needed was produced on that farm at the time. Note that Jefferson made his own nails on his plantation. People were short, malnourished, and bone evidence of having worked incredibly hard. There was no farm mechanization.

A consistent food surplus was not produced until around 1800.
VSCode's plugin model is pretty impressive and tends to isolate the side effects of poorly performing plugins (including language/autocomplete, etc)... so that the main editor tends to be responsive. There should be room to tweak, but I'm pretty happy overall. Way better experience than any full IDE I've tried... I only hope they keep it that way as features come in.

Also, as an Electron app, there is a node element, so compiled components are already an option.
I think everyone who learned English has memories of pronouncing a word for the first time while reading it repeatedly. The fact that this is a usable way of learning words shows the it's fairly phonetic.

Contrast this to Chinese for example, where the symbol has almost no relation to pronounciation and some dialects are unintelligible even though the written form is exactly the same.
No offence but pretending that google translate is a proper way to evaluate translations of almost 1000 year old text is beyond funny. It's obviously before Russian lang. existed since Moscow was founded 400 years after this text was written. At this time Kiev was not under any external power so you theory of the origin of the name is also very questionable.
At least on the math side, MathOverflow is generally for research level questions, and math.stackexchange is for any level math, often easier, questions.
FWIW - I'm on your list and find your content's signal to noise ratio pretty high. I like how you continually push yourself to learn new things, and bring the reader along on your journey.
I can also work from anywhere I have access to a computer to remote in from. No need to carry a work and personal device with me everywhere.
555 (telephone number)
Having used TAP I'm glad it existed for the things it arguably precipitated but I will never do it voluntarily again.
Maybe the right solution is to remove both. But it does make for an interesting dealing art piece despite the fact (I didn't realize) that the girl is just a ad for some company. Though I wonder what would happen if someone put a third piece right in the middle that made fun of both.
For half a century, neuroscientists thought they knew how memory worked
Could a blog like this succeed today? Seems like this function has been taken over by Reddit Tumblr and Facebook. None of which pay the content creators and steal most their content from other sites.
> None of that would be a problem if performance discussions were happening throughout the entire year.

Agree on that. Likely a signal of bigger systematic problems too.
Because it's true in 90% of the cases?
Math Overflow was created as a Stack Exchange 1.0 site, which means essentially that SE hosted the software, but everything else was done by the users that initiated the site.

A few years ago, SE stopped supporting the 1.0 sites, and Math Overflow decided to join the Stack Exchange network. They're still somewhat special, e.g. they have the right to leave the SE network again, if they would want to.
Sell this to me as a user.