skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A context-free grammar, besides making things a lot simpler, means that IDEs can do syntax highlighting without integrating most of a compiler front end. As a result, third-party tools become much more likely to exist.

This statement feels imprecise in a couple ways. It seems to imply that some IDEs actually use context-free grammars for syntax highlighting? Which ones?

As far as I can tell, Vim and Textmate bundles (i.e. what Github uses for syntax highlighting) don't use anything close to a context-free grammar for their syntax highlighting models. They are more like ad hoc lexers -- a collection of rules and regular expressions.

Certainly an editor doesn't want to parse the entire file to highlight text, because it has to potentially re-highlight at every keystroke. Also, you want to be able to highlight malformed programs (i.e. code with syntax errors). As far as I understand, that's generally why they don't use grammars.

I think you might mean that a language should be designed with a concise grammar so that somebody else can reimplement it by hand more easily? That is, you want multiple independent implementations.

If that's true, "context-free grammars" is the wrong term to express that notion. Context-free grammars don't handle many real languages, not just C and C++, but also Python/Perl/Ruby, and even JavaScript and Go (semi-colon insertion.)

Also, a lot of tools are enabled not by grammars but by producing specific data structures for your front end. (e.g. here is the way I think about it:
http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/02/11.html )

The different between Clang and GCC is that Clang is a library that enables a whole ecosystem of fantastic tools, including IDE support. But Clang doesn't do much at all with CFGs. The real difference is that the front end is a library that produces a very rich representation of the code.

The C# front end does similar things. More links here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Lossless-Syntax-Tree-Pa...

In other words, I would say that integrating the compiler front end into the IDE became the more popular and successful approach. And of course the compiler very much has to be designed with this use case in mind.
I think that's probably why you're not getting much traction (and getting downvotes): the sum total of your point is "I personally don't like this stuff", and the way you conveyed that was through hyperbolic put-downs against the guys who did a lot of pioneering work to build it.
Generally, your language has to expose a meta-object protocol like this itself. Perl5's Moose[0] did it without this, thanks to Perl5's extreme flexibility & easy ability to run code at the compile stage.

Your example is really describing a class; you could drop all the typing and it would still be a great question.

[0]: https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Moose/lib/Moose/Manual...
I am aware they did some really crappy things. Unsurprisingly, the company has shrunk in recent years. I left in part because I was having nightmares that I was on a sinking ship.

None of that precludes the possibility that WFH arrangements may be inherently poorly suited to an employee contract and may be better suited to a freelance type situation.

I thought it was worth tossing the idea out there.
The Dymaxion House
Wow, I thought he had some cool typefaces, but I really hated this one. It is so uneven, so many different angles on serifs and things. The o sticks out so much -- it doesn't even look italic.
I remember hearing I think it was a Radiolab episode which talked of an instance where a lot pollination was done by humans, by hand, with paint brushes and pollen. It turned out that the humans were actually better at it than the insects, because they were more consistent. So the result was a crop that was larger than it would have been had insects done the pollinating.

It's kind of a "waste" of human effort to do manual pollination like that rather than having insects do it "for free", but in an emergency, if that's all you've got, then it can be done.

It also seems to me like this kind of work would be ripe for automation with robots or drones somewhere down the line if, say, most bees wound up dying out and humans were forced to pollinate by hand at a large scale.
Why would it be easier to make a biological mechanism that produces whole and usable chicken eggs rather than a commercial-scale process for ground beef? It's not like they're trying to create a whole cow, and the ground aspect is easier than the texture requirements of something like a steak.
Get to work, open folder:

Feedly (more of a web app than website), Reddit, Hacker News and Slickdeals

Now that I think of it, most of the sites I visit are content aggregators and not individual sites.
I'd argue that they bought Otto mainly for the narrative. But they got Levandowski for the better part of a year -- how long exactly does it take to knowledge-transfer information about stolen LIDAR? They also get all the other Otto engineers.

I think that the worst scenario for Uber is actually if they really do think that Levandowski himself (not his stolen files) are uniquely amazingly valuable. Which may be true.
Because I'm aware of having done both.

Plus, I don't remember being anyone else and I don't think anyone else remembers being me.

Edit: Btw, despite the fact I'm indulging you, I don't find that sort of discussion particularly productive. You might as well argue that parallel lines could eventually intersect. Sure. They could. But we assume they won't. Now what?
VCs will always do much much better, they have the connections to do the exits...
HN/Twitter/Stackoverflow
If I remember correctly, it's actually a consequence of how the parser handles certain circumstances. It's not just arbitrary and enforced.
And Windows XP was not targeted at all by WannaCry.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. ANSI Lisp has a great object system based on a small, coherent set of principles that allow OOP code to flow ...
I assume you're in tech? Consider finding another job. There is too much demand for smart people in this field than to suffer this kind of treatment. Or maybe your salary makes up for it?

My salary is probably low compared to what a lot of tech workers make, but among other intangible benefits, I don't work nights or weekends and vacations are really vacations.
Integer Factorization: Part I
It's made for sysadmins like me who think C# is too hard.
Not really any new information here. It's fun to speculate about what Fuchsia might become, but it's pretty clear Google's not ready to announce anything yet. The only reason we even know it exists is because they made the source code public.
Oh I agree that equity crowdfunding is generally a bad idea for all involved.
> What actually happens is you provide a research question and the way you intend to approach it.

Which is what I described. Except that I'm comparing two identical candidates except that the one has better science than the other, which is the genesis of my thesis: Bad science should not get funded.

All of the things you mention come into play at one degree or another depending on field. I think with some experience can agree to this, but even with this, I don't see how an alternative approach would make it better than what we currently have.

Evolution is really what's happening, and from my perspective for the better.

> Age

Advancing one funeral at a time...

> Gender.

The effect of this is field specific. Biology for instance skews female and I've met some fiercely competitive female biologists who are very successful, but besides my anecdote, females are preferred in biology overall.

> Race.

My sample size is a little small but does not skew Caucasian.

> History.

Which I don't see as a bad thing. Except if a PI makes the mistake of hiring an incompetent (but very aggressive) postdoc that can't tell a nude mouse from a barbering one... I've seen this happen and yes, the person carries clout from the lab with them.

> Funded before.

I don't see this as a bad thing either. As there as numerous (though not nearly as large) sources of funding only for young scientists to help alleviate this issue.

But this + history = track record. So bad for some, but good if controlled for bad science. But this too can be overcome through aggression and politicking.

> Reviewer preference.

From my experience a lot of established scientists outsource this to younger scientists so that they can get experience judging good science.

But yes, this is all over the place. But for all the shortcomings like the randomness you mention, this is a good tool especially if the reviewer pool is somewhat diverse, but also experts, a hard combination for sure.

> Worth doing

Or competes with things they're working on in secret...

> it's hardly a meritocracy

You meant to say Utopia right?

If you don't expect it to be a meritocracy then you'll be happier in the long run. As long as the system is evolving in a good direction, which from my perspective it is, we can ignore that it is not a perfect meritocracy. But creating perfect markets is pretty hard to do in general.
Thanks for the tips! I'm definitely going to use these as well.
Most apps aren't doing that, which is exactly why I said that the generational hypothesis will hold in general. I don't need convincing that optimizing for that case is generally a good idea. It just has very little to do with the point I was trying to make (apparently in a less than clear way)
The follow on investors probably want to know why A16Z and other VCs competing with them for deal flow thought they were less valuable than people who hadn't met the founders...

(I mean, "frankly, we wanted the most money for the least equity and if that was dependent on the public having more inflated expectations than VCs so be it" is a perfectly valid answer from the point of view of running a startup, but it's still an adverse signal if the investors most informed about your company at the last investment round were those willing to offer the lowest price for your shares)
I hope you get good compensation for this. I'd feel a constant low-key stress and couldn't switch off if I was in your shoes. For such requirements from my employer, I'd demand 50-100% more money than I make now.
> what imagery you most responded to

Apr 1, 2020 - Scary Zombie Game introduced "scared as you want to be"(tm), using real-time emotive feedback to adjust game art and story to achieve the desired levels, types, and temporal profiles of scare. The "won't startle a baby bunny" profile developed a camp cult following. Valve reports no player has ever completed the "continuously mounting dread with Poisson spikes of terror" profile.

With eye tracking perhaps widespread in the 2018 generation of HMDs, it seems an area likely to get increasing attention.
Sorry if this is a little blunt, but why do you stay?

That sounds horrible. Unless there's other major benefits to the job, I'd be looking around for new work as soon as I heard that I'd be required to check mail on vacation.
New ‘Social Justice’ Math Class Teaches Kids That Math Is Evil, Dehumanizing
Sometime allowing companies to maximally extract value from their employees actually hurts the economy in the long run. If there's less incentive to improve operations, it's just makes it easier for companies to crack the whip rather than make capital investments in technologies that will benefit us all in the long run.

One could argue these sorts of laws can act as accelerators toward automation. One case study could be the French jet manufacturer Dassault. Part of the reason for investing heavily into robotics was labor law constraints. It wasn't the entire reason, but it did add a financial incentive.

In the long term, would you prefer we live in a world where people feel compelled to answer emails at all hours, or would you prefer to live in a world where companies have an incentive to invest in technologies and processes that allow people to have a better quality of life?

Like anything, there needs to be a balance.
Scala has no operator overloading. You cannot blame language on somebody picking bad method names. There are plenty of bad names in Java and Kotlin libraries as well.

> an overly complex type system

It is only as complex as it has to be to solve problems it was designed to solve. I take a more complex type system that make complex problems hard to solve rather than a simplistic type system that make complex problems impossible to solve.

> it feels a little too much like a language that was designed by throwing nifty ideas at a wall without cutting out the stuff that didn't stick

Name a few that could be removed without making the language significantly less powerful. Most people saying "Scala is complex" really want to say "Scala has many concepts I'm unfamiliar with". Java or C are also "too complex" for most VB programmers.

> Add in the slow compiler

It is not as bad as you may think, and IDE support is stellar, so I don't need to compile really that often. Many successful languages have much slower compile times: C++, Rust. Incremental compilation is fast enough. I get typically 1-5 seconds compile times.

> sbt (I don't need another build system, thanks)

SBT is not mandatory. Just a tool. Pick whatever you wish. Scala works perfectly fine with Gradle or Maven.
> the only merit of whatsapp is that it's popular in some countries

whatsapp has a fairly impressive set of merits that check lots of points for people who actually do security work:

- uses a known and vetted protocol

- protocol was implemented with help from known and competent security professionals

- is supported by one of the most resourced and competent private security teams on the planet

- is easy to drive uptake and has impressive network effects

Its major drawback is that it shares metadata with facebook. This may or may not be a big deal to individual users, but on the balance its fairly easy to see why people recommend it.

The closed source thing is largely not a consideration that comes up when you talk with professional security folks, and is a pretty obvious red herring when you think about it.

[note: i'm not a security folk, but i have drinks with them occasionally. I don't use whatsapp or telegram and only very occasionally use signal]
That's exactly the trick: the attacker doesn't send you their private key, they decrypt (using their private key) the other private key that the ransomware generated on your machine, which is what was used to encrypt the per-file AES keys.
Good for you that you have that leverage.
It would be interesting to learn what mistakes were made on a process level here.

Were warnings from people who predicted flooding ignored for some reason, like warning of concerned NASA engineers about the safety of the Space Shuttle? Or did no one honestly predict flooding in a region covered by snow despite global warming?

There could be some valuable lessons here for participants in Long Now and similar projects.
news.google.com, HN, reddit, arxiv (just pick a random category and see if there is something I can read), springer (to see if there are fun books coming out that I can google hard and lift papers from .edu websites/elsewhere), digikey/mouser.
All property law, basically.
In the wannacry event the policy of not applying updates was contributory to its spread. So 'not forcing them' being the less good choice.
> All I could wish for is C with native features of python (dict, list comprehensions, libs like sqlite and xml...)

Many had these fantasies before realizing the intrinsic conflict. First, it is merely a library away to have high-level data types in C, but that is not enough. So the wish is not merely to have, it needs to be native. What does that mean? First, it needs syntax support. That can be managed by macros and, in c++, templates. But that is still not enough. So the wish really goes into the semantic level, that is, high-level data types that do not need worry or understanding of its low-level subtleties. But, you now should realize, that without understanding and worrying about these low-level subtleties, there is simply no reason at all to use C versus, e.g. python. We use C because we want to program in low-level that is impossible or difficult to do in the other languages, e.g. efficiencies. Wanting to do low-level programming and refusing to distinguish and understand low-level subtleties are intrinsically conflicting.

So any such effort of adding high-level data types natively to C will end up with syntax full of details of low-level subtleties: types, memory management, runtime, etc. The language will no longer be simple and they still doesn't feel like native (as python).

So honestly don't make another C++. Embrace C. Use Python.
Absolutely this.

I don't respond to email after work unless the building is literally on fire unless I'm on rotation in which case that's either in my contract and I'm compensated for it or it isn't and I don't respond.

Salary buys 40hrs of my time (on average, some weeks might be 45, some 35) and that is it.

My time outside of that is my own and jealously guarded.
Look at the word "energy" there are a few mentions. I mentioned renewable energy pretty early on.
Slate Star Codex

Hacker News

4chan (/v/, /tv/, /pol/)

Youtube (Mainly for music)
Honestly the idea that capitalism itself systematically causes inequality is not a crazy thing to believe. You obviously don't agree and that's fine, but it's not the case that every smart person believes the "negative outcomes found in capitalist societies" can be resolved without a fundamental change in the underlying system.
Anywhere from 3-8+ coffees a day depending on how I'm feeling that day and what my workload looks like.

I always have a coffee first thing in the morning, another in my travel mug on my drive to work, and usually make another when I get to the office.

Some mornings/extremely busy days I'll sub in a caffeine pill for that extra boost.

I usually cycle down my caffeine use a few times a year, going from my usual 3-8 down to about 2 coffees a day. I find this helps me from building too much of a tolerance and needing to constantly increase the dosage.

I really only drink alcohol on the weekends and even then not very much.
If you end up staying a few more years at the company, the code you write today, you will have to work on again at some point.

Since we read code more often than we write it, put a little extra effort into making your code easier to understand.
The letter says so.
In that case, Microsoft wouldn't have released an emergency patch for XP, three years after end of support. But they did [0].

[0]: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msrc/2017/05/12/customer...
The attacker probably just decrypts your locally generated key. I doubt they send along the master key.
Rust is a big tent
I'm pretty sure it violates multiple laws in various jurisdictions to be on 'vacation' while not being on vacation.
IBM tells thousands of remote employees to come back to office or find new jobs
Well let's assume he was scared of a random arrest before the allegations. He'd be extra scared when they emerged.

Not sure what's to doubt.
I didn't once when I was young, now knowing when to say 'no' and when to really make it stick is a highly valuable lesson taught over years.

In fact if I could go back 15 years and give 22yo old me one lesson it would be learning to say no.
Preact CLI: Your next Preact PWA starts in 30 seconds
So we're gonna cull the "manager" fakers who probably contribute $10,000 to their company's bottom line over a career of 30 years? Sounds like a double win for WFH to me.
Personally I don't check my emails after work/on weekends/on vacation, and I wouldn't want a job where I would have to do it. It's actually one of my own criteria when looking at a job offer. Of course I have no problem when it's an emergency, but anything not urgent can wait for me to come back.

I have no problem with companies requiring or allowing this, so long as the pay reflects this. From my limited experience though, most of friends who are more of the 24/7 type self-impose that discipline and don't get paid nearly enough for the amount of effort poured in. It's like a race to the bottom where the only winner is the company.
What's the point of putting it somewhere maximally inaccessible with lots of ice? I was never that sold on the idea of putting it on a coastal island to begin with. I realize they want somewhere cold but a large mountain cave seems a better bet. That's where we put things that are meant to withstand nuclear war or similarly drastic upheavals.

I don't blame the organizers for that, it's a lot harder to raise money for protecting biodiversity than for making weapon systems, but this outcome suggests to me that our institutional cooperation models of governance are not working well.
It's mostly YouTube. I've been listening to Joe Rogan's podcasts while working for some time now. I also subscribe to Joe Robinet for some bushcraft and camping stuff that I typically watch in the after-hours. DI.FM for music. Google News/Finance for news and stock updates. And HN, of course.
"Uber is a company filled with over-optimizers, who will continue to futz with prices and hope to find equilibrium."

Ha ha! Yeah. Drivers tell me they have little consistency in their take; there was even a short time period where Uber stopped paying bonuses. (that didn't last long)
I think there's quite a lot of paid promoters/promotional comments on this website, to be honest.

I'd be interested in seeing a stylometric analysis of the comments. I bet we'd see quite a lot of crossover with political, and corporate PR.
Sorry to hear about your experience, but you make a very salient point and I also agree that you made an enlightened (if hard earned) decision regarding the best thing you could do for your children.

In my experience there are thousands of people doing the hard work day in and day out, quietly holding the line. It's a constant effort and constant tension, but for those who won't settle for anything less than revolution - that sort of work, no matter how vital, just isn't compelling enough. I personally find the prevalence of this kind of attitude very disturbing, although I suppose it is just human nature in the end - perhaps with a bit of celebrity/hero worship thrown in.
Yes it can run anything sbt can.

https://scastie.scala-lang.org/MasseGuillaume/62vmEr9XR0qDWw...
A brief visual history of MARC cataloging at the Library of Congress
Sure, I agree: they're theoretically limiting themselves to mediocre engineers, I guess. But the companies with the greatest potential to effect cultural change in the industry don't really care, because their returns look like this:

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/AMZN#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI...

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/AAPL#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI...

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/GOOG#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI...

Which brings us back to my fundamental premise - companies emulate the business practices of the companies they desire to become (or in the special case of tech, desire to be acquired by). For every company that wants to virtue-signal their remote culture, or be avante garde out of sincere appreciation for the concept, there are many more that don't want to make changes like that without seeing it work at widely recognizable examples. When the companies with the collective lions' share of business signaling power in the industry have returns that look like those, they're not concerned about having mediocre engineers. Privately, they'd probably disagree with you that their engineers are even the competitive advantage.

To reiterate: this is all coming from someone who presently works remotely and enjoys it thoroughly. I just really don't think there are substantive arguments that it should be adopted by companies that don't already have the culture in place.