skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The truth seems to be that we don't know what makes a good language.

On the other hand, we do know what makes a bad language. We can spot flaws in a language, and fixing them automatically makes them better —at least in the aspects one is interested in. C for instance has a number of flaws and questionable tradeoffs that are widely known by now:

Contextual grammar. While not too bad (the context is easy to maintain in the parser), unknown identifiers can lead to syntax errors, and slightly worse error messages.

Complicated syntax for types. Matching declaration and use may have sounded neat at the time, but doing so kills the separation between an entity's name and its type. The result is not very readable. An ML-like syntax would be much better.

Switch that falls through by default. The switch statement were clearly designed from an implementer's point of view —it maps nicely to a jump table. In practice however over 95% of switch statements do not fall through. Switch should break by default (Having multiple cases branch to the same code is more common, but is not incompatible with breaking by default, see how ML style pattern matching does it).

No direct support for sum types (tagged unions). We have structs , unions, and with them we can emulate algebraic data types. It's a pain in the butt however. Automating this somewhat would be nice, since sum types are so widely useful. Even if they were used just for error handling that would be a nice bonus.

No generics. Makes it much harder to abstract away common code. Want to write a generic hash table? Good luck with pre-processor magic.

Textual macros. We can do, and have done, better than that.

Too many undefined behaviours. In the name of portability, many things that would have worked fine on many architectures are now undefined because some architectures couldn't handle them. And now we have silly stuff such as undefined signed integer overflow. But we can't remove them because compiler writers justify this madness with optimizations! (For the record, I have seen Chandler Carruth's talk on the subject, and I disagree: when compilers remove security checks because of undefined behaviour, it is just as bad as nasal demons.)

Silly `for` loop. That damn thing is fully general, we don't need that. We have the `while` loop. A simpler, less general syntax would have allowed optimisations that currently exploit undefined signed integer overflow, and then some.

---

Of course, it's easy to criticise a language over 40 years after the fact. But that's kind of the point: we have learned a good deal since the 70's. A language written now could not justify most of the flaws above. This is why so many people (me included) dismissed Go out of hand: not providing generics in a new statically typed language is just silly.

Sure, designing a good language is still very hard. But we can avoid more mistakes now than we could some decades ago.
So my website is on a server outside the USA, what exemption are they relying on?
Reduce the number of HTTP requests and speed up your WordPress site
Become a iPhone app Developer
The whole solar panel industry would not have existed without endless subsidies.

That is not literally true. Commercial solar panels for both remote-area power and spacecraft existed before subsidies aimed at large-scale generation.

On the other hand, the nuclear power industry certainly wouldn't have existed without entirely state-funded, military nuclear programs.
> Hype is worse that what people think: it create bubbles where constructive disagreement and criticism are quickly shunned.

And sometimes constructive criticism is mistaken for hype and shunned by the management, you would hear: we always done it this way, why choose this new technology that might break things; so you have companies that are still using COBOL on the mainframes and don't see anything wrong with it, as well as store user passwords unencrypted.
The tragedy of Google Books
Bypassing the review process and saying you did it is fraud.
The argument is that the lack of constraint means that social forces are allowed to dominate, such as hype, fashion etc. Its not causal, its vulnerability. Any human endeavour similarly unconstrained will see similar dynamics when popularity, status, boredom and novelty run free.
> instead of complaining about it, just don't do it. Run circles around those who do.

...until employers start asking you to work on every buzzword of the month.

> A strong technical background and experience comes with age

No. You can be aware or unaware of hype at any age and experience.
There's a lesson in this piece in community, and how the rich and fortunate should treat those they deal with, just perhaps as in the movie It's a Wonderful Life:

'My dad gave himself over to that place. He kept a shoe-repair place in business for nearly thirty years by breaking policy, by being patient with the billing, by cajoling, by any means necessary, because he respected the man who ran it, a guy I knew only as Clarence. He fought to keep the supermarket open for the urban customer base who had nowhere else to go for groceries without getting on a bus. I believe he provided small loans to start-up businesses. I know he waited out their rent checks. He kept things running as landlord, even at some cost. He did it for the betterment of the city.

In his residential spaces, he was loathe to raise the rent even after many years. Especially after many years. He dropped off cases of beer and huge boxes of Italian cookies to make his tenants feel appreciated. He gave rent abatements when people got cancer. He gave graduation presents, anniversary presents, sent handwritten notes and newspaper clippings to his tenants and their families. While I'm sure some people hated the landlord in him, I believe my dad treated his tenants with honor as long as they did the same for the space he provided (and didn't run up the house account at Wilson Hardware). I know this because people stopped me—on the floor of the mall, in the street, at the reception after my father's death—to testify to it. I came to see that my father was known by many, if not all, as a kind steward of place. This is as much as any landlord can hope to be.'
In a somewhat different way, this is the same reason I prefer to work at night. I can get an 8-10 hour stretch with no distractions!
They are allegedly better at exploiting young people.

They've got a better image, they get graduates for cheaper, oversell the future IPO and make them work longer hours.

It's no secret that Palantir is a sweat shop filled with "Forward Deployed Engineer", a bullshit title to make people feel important and impress graduates (it does work!).

The sad reality of consulting shop: You are sent from client to client anywhere anytime (the "forward deployed"). Your company takes a big cut on your salary, and they benefit by paying you less while charging more for you.
Weekend fun: JavaScript abstract art
> Hardware accelerated graphics (their blitter was cool) is also the norm (and many orders of magnitude faster now).

Not really. Current GPUs don't have 2D hardware, everything is just done in "software".

> I'd imagine, for starters, a uniform CPU/GPU architecture. Lots of cores accessing a single memory pool (let them have some scratch memory for themselves to save bandwidth) running the same software doing the job of both CPU and GPU. Make this CPU/GPU hybrid monster capable of combining multiple 4K inputs piped into textures and composite them in real time on any display surface available.

Sounds rather like Larrabee [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)
I think there's a lot of cultural bias favouring older white males in situations where authority and trustworthiness is important.
That was a delight to watch. Genuine enthusiasm always is. Thanks for making me aware of Mr. Gross.
Dumb question: Why don't people just slap a little PHP + MySQL comment section (or similar) onto their site? It takes little skill to do that and has the benefit that you control everything because all requests go to you and you can manage the tables yourself.
I used to work at a very successful tech company that became the Goliath in its market and saw first hand how the media vilified us and interpreted every little thing we did through evil-colored glasses. I few issues were legitimate criticisms but they were textbook cases of situations where Hanlon's Razor should have been applied. Everyone assumed malice where there there was at worst poor judgement. Eventually the media cycle reached a fever pitch to drive clicks and everything was interpreted in the worst way possible to drive whatever narrative people (just like you) wanted to believe.

Cite me a single shred of evidence to support your claim that they have blackmailed a single journalist.

Uber and its closest competitor Lyft engaged in pretty much all the same competitive actions but only Uber is criticized for them. Everyone criticizes Uber for subsidization tactics to win market share and conveniently ignores that Lyft does the exact same. My observations with my former employee roughly aligns with what I've seen with Uber. 20% or so is legitimate criticism (due to poor judgement) and 80% is hyperbolic and applied to us and our competitors and applies to Uber and its competitors.

Near as I can tell this is a phenomena that applies to every single unicorn that has viable competitors. It happened to Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. near as I can tell, the only difference that I can tell between how Uber is being treated and they were treated come down to the zeitgeist when they came of age. The past 2-3 years has seen a sharp increase in polarization of the political atmosphere with a lot more social justice folks in journalistic positions than in years past and Uber is the favorite whipping boy. For example, Apple has been subject to this as well. Apple was widely criticized over labor practices of its suppliers in China despite the fact that it had and continues to have some of the best practices and policing of suppliers in the industry.

Take the Susan Fowler situation. It's a shame and it never should have happened, but in the very same week when her blog post of allegations was published, there was an actual sexual harassment case filed in an actual court against Tesla, but almost no one heard about that because the media loves Tesla.

Everyone I've spoken to that has ever worked at a successful unicorn has related similar stories of unfair criticism, especially when there were viable competitors whose investors are powerful and can drive a story through the journalists they've invested in or have strong relationships with. There's a reason why investors like Marc Andreessen have invested heavily in the career of well known Silicon Valley journalists and it's not because those journalists have an exit strategy that will net him a 10x or 100x return.
Spring Framework is one of the biggest hype nonsenses for me. There are many other examples (SOAP web services, etc)
Those constraints are incomparably looser than those encountered in a "stable" engineering discipline e.g. you can't build a driveshaft out of wood but you could write paxos in brainfuck.
The use of physical material with hard constraints means there are "few good solutions" hence the disciplines converge and stabilise. Our thought-stuff just doesn't have that property. Even a hard real-time constraint does not strongly dictate many of our design and implementation choices of the written code, only the final behaviour.
No problem! Here's a few more. You might like the first two especially since you like Lotide:

Perfume Advert's +200 Gamma, dreamy with lots of atmosphere:

http://opaltapes.com/album/perfume-advert-200-gamma

Frank Riggio's Psychexcess II - Futurism, intense music that reminds me of highway driving on a rainy night:

https://hymen-records.bandcamp.com/album/psychexcess-ii-futu...

Kristen Zwicker's Hydrazine Dream, impeccable sound design:

https://kristenzwicker.bandcamp.com/album/hydrazine-dream-ep

Telephobia's You Must Feel Strange, uplifting futurebeat:

https://oligopolistrecords.bandcamp.com/album/you-must-feel-...

Teeb's Collections 01, a quite popular artist from LA, but awesome nonetheless:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5op3PCB8i0&index=1&list=PL0...
I use UV for my lighting because red/orange tends to be too bright for me. I do wonder if this has negative effects on my quality of sleep though.
...skill with an axe should be a sport.

It is! http://www.nswaxemen.asn.au/Introduction/Introduction.html
your receipt will show you who you paid VAT to

my local is a franchise and it shows the name of the local franchise owner
It's kind of funny really. Glad I'm not an investor.
Just an observation .... locating the 20th century car industry in Detroit gave them an unfair advantage over California. Cars have to function correctly in bad weather -- rain, ice, snow, etc.

Taxicabs especially. Imagine a transport system in a city like New York or DC where taxis don't function in a rainstorm. It's in bad weather that drivers earn their pay.

I know from experience that the Tesla driver assistance stuff doesn't work in the rain. It won't engage. "Can't see well enough" is what it says.

Maybe these Sili Valley types should stop fighting over fair-weather car control stuff, and spend the same money setting up development shops somewhere besides endless-summer California.

Patents only last 20 years. It's going to take 30 to convert the transport network.
> Clarity, I found, is a better motivator than the threat of small claims court.

Clarity prevents problems before they start
Open source Leaderboard (for table tennis, foosball etc)
That is some awesome news for Sub-Saharan Africans and Brazillians (if I remember correctly rest of south America ins't connected to Brazil, online games between Brazilians and Chileans for example have terrible lag, as route includes US)
This was a great read. Thanks for sharing.
shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit

and ufck: https://github.com/MannySchneck/parcheesi/commit/cb355025d6f...
Like Pittsburgh?
This is nothing but strawman arguments with zero factual basis.

Who are these mythical developers that are selecting technologies purely for hype ? Are these developers so significant in numbers than it is undermining our industry and causing projects to fail ?

And if choosing a technology because it is talked about and blogged about is bad a thing. Then is choosing an obscure and abandoned technology good ?

So many questions.
Accenture is much more accurate than Google.

Palantir and Accenture are consulting company. They make money by reselling meat by the hours, as we say in business. They don't profit from what is created at the client. They profit more by buying cheaper meat (graduates) and reselling with higher margin to clients.

Google is a software company. It makes money on the software service they provide. They get the returns for everything you do. They get more money by you making "better" software infrastructure and services.
Natural gas doesn't pollute. Burning coal creates particulates while natural gas does not.
Trilogy Software in the late 90's had the exact same model with cultish hype aimed at graduating students at top universities who mostly didn't know any better and bought into the hype.
An experienced Javascript developer’s account of learning React
Eggs: how the EU is keeping them safe and healthy
It's true that a lot of people will waste their time on UBI.

So what? A lot of people are wasting their time now.

The difference is that UBI vastly lowers the risks and costs of starting new businesses, pursuing original research, and doing creative work of all kinds.

Even if only a small percentage of the population is interested in those things, you're still going to get an economic explosion. At the very least there will be plenty of new jobs, and it's not impossible there will be whole new classes of jobs that aren't available now.

Combine UBI with some gentle nudges towards self-education through free or low cost online resources and you have the potential for a new post-industrial revolution.
Thanks man. That was good
Lol, I think an important part of the coal issue is that those who were employed as miners were comparatively very well paid, like around twice a teacher's salary (anecdotally: dad was teacher, football coach was miner). Those that could get jobs were often taking a hefty pay cut too, and a cut in social status.

Mining had a romantic "powerful men working against nature, and amidst untold dangers, to 'keep the lights on' for every home and industry" ethos that cleaning dishes in a pub kitchen doesn't.

Having UBI should mean people have some money to live on but we can't then be complacent with our resources and waste them mining for a hobby. We need to redirect people to find esteem in useful work (building community, reducing waste, generating value).
Does this court judgment make any sense?
The problem is not the tool itself
They demonstrate nothing, very misleading title
In my subdivision in a metro Atlanta county I the local power cooperative is replacing failed halogen/sodium/etc street lamps with LED.

The orange lights provided good light but the same pole with a LED now lights up the area as if it were full moon or close to it. You cannot look directly at these lights where you could at the older lights. I have an orange lamp in the corner of my lot but the nearest LED is about three hundred feet away and it still puts out more.

One oddity which I cannot completely attribute to the lights. Birds in our holly bushes were singing at very odd hours for the first weeks or two but have apparently moved to bushes and trees in the back yard.
Depends on the audience but the senior management at a lot of places is often disproportionately older white men of a certain background (MBA from one of a few schools, former frat / current country club member, etc.). This is relevant to consulting and sales because a lot of clients like to think someone like them is in charge.

I've known a few salesmen who were quite open about their role as the senior guy on the contract was literally to take the client it for a round of golf and reassure them that the 25 year-olds weren't going to suggest too much change too quickly. Sharing the same cultural background, wearing a good suit, etc. gave them instant credibility on that front so they could spend lunch talking about which colleges their kids/grandkids were looking at, which pro golf/baseball/football team was going to do well, etc. and get the deal because the client now felt confident that they'd get what they asked for.
Do they have to rescue it? The media has gone so overboard that I jumped off the Uber hating bandwagon about a month ago when I realized that it wasn't a pattern of wrongdoing by the company but a pattern of journalistic malpractice. It's interesting to see that many others are now realizing the same.
Definitly not. Sodium lights obly emit a very narrow spectrum of light (esp. the kind used around observatories) which can be easily filtered without losing a lot of the availible light. LED + Phosphor emits a much wider spectrum.
You can substitute react with php, Ruby on Rails, angular, meteor.
They are just hype cycle that periodically bubble up.
This doesn't mean that in a lot of use cases they are the right choice, but denying the hype is like saying that the sky is not blue.
Going meta here, speaking from the perspective of a software engineer with a great interest for physics.

There are a lot of terms I do not fully understand in this article.

Can you recommend an application that would allow me to select for example the words "distant particles can be correlated in ways that are impossible for classical objects" and find out what lead to that discovery? Or what does "Bell inequality" really mean?

If not, are there recommended methods of understanding articles better?

I am thinking of this process:

- copy the article to a document

- find any words or sentences that you would like to understand better, highlight them in some colour e.g. red

- do some googling / wiki surfing or ask in HN or some kind of forums about them

- add sections after the paragraphs with highlights to explain the words or sentences

- recursion

- once satisfied, highlight the words in a different colour?
That would be UBI plus increased healthcare costs for lung diseases.
Home users too, these days - unless you're on an unlimited connection, BT will put you behind CGNAT unless you explicitly opt out.
Me too. I think we both would just work. You still make money. We can buy teslas or something fancy.
This argument is nonsense because the costs of not having UBI are much higher.

They include lost economic opportunity, crime, lost productivity, extra healthcare spending, and others.

Unfortunately they're second order costs, so they're invisible to people who take a simple moral view of unemployment and can't think beyond that to a place where they can make realistic predictions of economic cause and effect.
Is Uber the only one burning through VC money? Near as I can tell, all the companies are subsidizing to win market share while they figure out how to control costs and get the most bang for their subsidization buck. Can anyone point me at a single ridesharing company that isn't heavily subsidizing the fares?

Assuming they are all subsidizing fares (which I'm almost certain is the case), the question we should be asking ourselves is which ridesharing company is earning the most incremental revenue per subsidy dollar spent?
मई में मिलेगा इन 5 राशि को खूब धन और खूब खुशी May Rashifal Astrology in Hindi
Why BBW Dating Sites Are the Best Choice for BBW People and Their Admirers
If a waterway is used to make it i.e. a dam.
Because they have a product base that lets them leverage a smaller amount of people into a better end result for a deployment. Less labour required = lower labour cost.

At least in the UK, FDE's are definitely not underpaid; I don't know how the pay compares in the SV.

Disclamer: I work for Palantir
To someone who doesn't actually know many of the terms here, it sounds like they didn't accomplish much. They defined a stronger form of locality called "bi-locality" and found a way to violate it.

The structure of the argument is, "We stood up a strawman and knocked it down," which sounds pretty weak. Is bi-locality an inherently interesting property? Does all classical computation follow it? I don't know enough to know if I care, but press releases tend to oversell so my default stance has to be "No, I don't really care."
Virtual dom has nothing to do with hot reload.
Ages ago (more than 20 years ago) you could do the same while writing HTML and refreshing the browser.
And if you used WYSIWYG editors it was even mostly unnecessary.