skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Off-topic (or maybe not), the title reminds me of a coding API/interface design issue I often encounter, and I'm never able to resolve without finding whatever I end up with as ad hoc at best.

To give a contrived example (note: the example is about a pre-condition-like check, but that's not always the "intermediate action").

Let's say I design a sort function. It takes a linear collection (like an array or list) and returns the same (sorted). Let's say I need to carry out an intermediate action (intermediate as in, between the calling code before sorting and the sorting algorithms itself) that I need to check if the collection is already sorted, and return the collection as it is without invoking the sorting code.

The design issue I have is: should the check be inside the sort function or in the calling block just before the sort call?

It might feel like the validation squarely belongs inside the sort function but, besides this example being a bit contrived, there is a solid counter argument to be made that 'the job of the sort function is to sort'. If I am a sort function, I sort. You give me a collection, I return a sorted collection. Don't encumber me with extra checks of validating if the collection is worth sorting, or some other stuff.

This is a general problem not specific to coding. In an interface between a manager or a team-lead and the engineer, there are often situations when the engineer says "It's my job to do this, you give me the task in this, such-and-such prepackaged, form and I will return you the results." Later, the lead wants the engineer to improvise a bit and do this extra thing, an intermediate action, before actually doing the task. This "intermediate action" fits squarely in neither the lead's or the engineer's roles. Ignoring the tilted-balance-of-power in which usually the engineer ends up doing what's slightly vague, which I consider an ad-hoc solution, the engineer could just as well say "Why don't you do it?".

I guess there's a 3rd possibility in which a 3rd party does it. So in the case of sort, we have a pure-sort function, which is called by "an outer-sort" function which has all the checks, and if they all pass, only then the pure-sort is called. And that outer-sort is called in the calling code instead of calling pure-sort directly.

Which one of these is the best? most optimal? correct? What should even be a criteria for judging the implementation of such a scenario? I don't know.

edit: another example, you have an in-place sort impl. and a non-in-place sort impl. In the calling code you wish to switch between the two making sure it's always non-in-place. Should you wrap the in-place sort in a make-a-copy-before-sorting wrapper? or should the in-place impl do it itself just before returning? or should the calling code handle the two types of sort with some if check?
bitcoin was created to be a deflationary currency that couldn't be regulated, the market deciding the price is a feature not a bug, not everyone agrees with their local monetary inflationary policy and bitcoin provides an alternative store of value, cypherpunks think cryptography and math should run things and the the us stock market is the real bubble
This is a problem for a lot of languages, unfortunately, and it breaks the clean separation between syntax and semantics that we're hoping for when we write a formal grammar.

I've had some success in the past with using GLR or another algorithm that can handle ambiguity, and then choosing among the possible parse trees in another pass that takes semantic information into account. How applicable that is really depends on the language, though; if things are so ambiguous that you're getting an exponential growth in possible parse trees, you may not want to use this approach.
> they just transform it from food via a roundabout process that produces lots of waste.

You mean like any other machine that generates power? A human on a bicycle, assuming a ~20% efficiency of converting food calories to muscle output, gets a gasoline equivalent 600-1000mpge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance). And unlike a car, using a bicycle has health benefits.
It's not pedantic because of the inefficiency.

You'll have to use energy to produce and distribute the food that powers the people that power the things...

Perhaps you would be better off if you simply used the energy to power the things.
You had me until:

>While the mathematics shall remain a mystery (have a look at our data science job openings if you’d like to learn more)...

thptt.
How much would it cost to hedge the EUR equivalent of USD 16bn of these bonds?
Don't they know the only valid test string for this kind of thing is #asdfasdfasdf
My rule of thumb for adoption UX is: every step roughly halves the number of people who will complete the process.

So a 10-step install means that if a million people discover the app only about 900 will get it running.

As complexity and general noise increases this effect will become more pronounced. People just do not have time for time-consuming installs. The information age is the age of distraction and so if something takes a lot of time "plonk" into the trash it goes.

There are ways to secure things with decent UX. At the very least the defaults could allow direct access only from private IP ranges and require explicit configuration to set otherwise. This would prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot this way.
They "may," Bitcoin doesn't. From the source of that quote:

>They promise consumers or investors large profits based primarily on recruiting others to join their program, not based on profits from any real investment or real sale of goods to the public

By contrast Bitcoin profits are based on the real investment in Bitcoins, which are really sold to the public. They go on:

>little or no product moves to market

Obviously very different than Bitcoin

https://www.ftc.gov/public-statements/1998/05/pyramid-scheme...
I rather like the way elasticsearch handles this. If the server is only bound to 127.0.0.1 then anything goes. If the server is bound to a network interface then various setting must be configured to ensure it works well in a non-testing environment.
> I refuse to be squelched because some
> Neo Nazi could use my words against me.

You misunderstand again. I said that violent or smearing actions done for sound moral reasons can and are used to publicise and win support for the alt-right cause.

While you might not care about your own personal risk, as a citizen of the world you should care about having your actions used to create political material that radicalises people towards the alt-right cause as this threatens people other than you.

It doesn't matter whether they are idiots or not, it matters whether bad players have an easy or hard time making their case and recruiting supporters. Make it difficult, not easy!

> The instances you quote have nothing
> whatsoever to do with debating this
> in a facts and reason based way on an internet forum.

I fundamentally disagree. They demonstrate the mechanism by which the alt-right grew their support so quickly. This is important to the argument at hand and since you can't seem to see this and I don't have any more source material to counter your very strong opinions with, I don't think there's any point in arguing around it any further.
OTOH the drug Shkreli hiked the price at was already out of patent. So you can see the "free market" issues. Nobody cared about bringing competition as the price was too low.
Someone else was complaining about the excessive pedantry imperative languages and I pointed out not all languages are so pedantic.

And you're calling this judgement? I mean, in the objective sense: declarative languages abstract over control flow and make programs less repetitive. If you (like me) think that's bad, then I think my conclusion is obvious. If you don't, why would my opinion concern you at all?

It's almost like your comment is, "Hey don't have opinions about tooling."

If that's your message: I apologize but I both cannot and will not oblige you.
"never say never"
Amazon's War on Fake Eclipse Glasses Trips Up Newbie Merchant
Thanks for the suggestion. I unfortunately don't, but this tool can certainly be integrated with ORMs and in other BI stacks.
I was alluding to the legend that John Cage once sued for copyright infringement another artist who released a silent track. Nobody told you to buy it.
I'm not OP but maybe I can chime in. My employer runs a fairly large application platform on Azure and I've used Azure for personal projects a few times.

Let me start off that you can host (ASP).NET Core projects just about anywhere, so using AWS is definitely a possibility. I myself use basic Azure functionality though. Here's what I do when costs are the limiting factor:

For storage, Azure used to provide a small (20MB) db instance for free in their 'free tier', but that doesn't seem to be available anymore.

As an alternative you should consider using Azure Table Storage instead of Azure DB.

While Azure DB offers a fully-functional SQL server instance, it will cost at least $5 per month to use on a basic plan. Using Table Storage (Azure's 'NoSQL' solution), on the other hand, is way cheaper. For a fairly small application with less than a hundred users my average monthly bill is $0.00. Even if it scales to a hundred thousands users (while it isn't really built for that) the costs for using Table Storage would probably still be less than a dollar per month.

Alternatively, you could use SQL Server Compact. This should be possible on Azure but I would not recommend going this route though.

As for hosting, my personal apps almost exclusively make use of the Free tier for App Services. For what my apps are doing this turns out to be efficient enough. If that's not enough, a simple Shared hosting environment is also pretty cheap at less than $10 per month.

It only gets expensive if you really need dedicated VMs running for you but even then $50 per month for a dedicated machine shouldn't break the bank if your SaaS business is actually going somewhere, plus scaling it up or out is dead simple. On average I spend more time per month babysitting the single VM I have with RackSpace where I run old (non-azure) webapps than our entire team spends managing our azure environments (DTAP) with hundreds of apps and databases.
This is a mistake all marketing people will make (hopefully just once but we all know that won't be the case).

The worrying thing is that the last similar social media fail was less than 3 months ago with Walkers Crisps showing various photos of mass murderers..
The exchanges cannot decide who receives dividends and who does not, very much unlike a Ponzi.
I don't know if that was an intentional flattery tactic to get me to read your most more closely, but it worked, thanks, regardless.

I'm surprised if the post read as "more children dying is the obvious optimal path," that wasn't my intent.

I'm meaning to draw attention to the fact that if we are going to have outside interventions into societies that have drastic effects on those societies, then the outside interventions should include plans for all foreseeable(and vigilance in watching for unforeseeable) drastic effects they incur, be they in population structure, political structure, etc.

In this case birth control education seems a prudent corollary plan to disease eradication. But it's more of a thorny problem than just saying here read this book, take this class, take this pill, if these reproduction strategies are expressions of deeply ingrained genetic tendencies.

Certainly birth rate in the western world has declined, but there are lots of differences in the western world and Africa. Not least of which westerners never had outside interventions into their culture and environment of this nature.
How 1 language united 83 islands
Some years ago, an engineer gave a talk at the French National Assembly to a workgroup debating on sustainable energy. His point was that, by comparing the average yearly energy consumption of an occidental 1st-world person to the mechanical energy production of an average human being, each occidental would need about 200 slaves to maintain the same lifestyle. This is obviously not an qualitative equivalence but it helps put our way of life in perspective.
Is there a verifier/validator that will flag misuses/non compliance? Even if it's an incomplete set of misuses, it would still be useful.
See : zafka.com
while a small amount has been added, it was designed around 1994.
Isn't that illegal, since you don't own the copyright? Or are you not distributing it and keeping it for archive purposes?
Yet many want to 'solve' the problem of the 0.1% being so wealthy and as a result let the government do most of the charity work instead. I think this would be a huge mistake. The mega wealthy donate a larger percent of their income than any other income group (which makes complete sense). We would be losing a ton of donation money.

Yes this is a tangent. But I think its an important point to make. On top of that, even if it were true that most of the 0.1% are very wasteful spenders, there are some who's donations are irreplaceable with government charity. Irradiating the worlds malaria is an example of this. Getting rid of the wealth in the 0.1% would be a huge loss for important donations.
more about the how is what interests me. I just find it fascinating. I've tried nearest neighbour, ant colony and simmulated annealing thus far (Or read about them and tweaked some code)
With wider monitors, my browser is actually narrowed. I split the screen in half and devote one half to the browser and the other half to a text editor and terminal. I used to have two monitors to do that, but now just one is fine, but the side effect is that I browse in a pretty narrow window. A narrow window also makes reading somewhat nicer on some sites, since it's harder to read very long lines of text.
I'm not sure you'll find a 3/2 even at that sqft in a decent school district. Redwood City has not great schools and the decent parts of it are around $1.6+ for a starter home from the 50's. Areas with good schools are probably closer to $1.6 or $1.7+. But I'd love to see some recently sold listing links proving me wrong

Source: recent comps from redfin.
I genuinely like the graphic + nav
>Sexism doesn't magically increase during recessions.

I am not so sure about that. I would not be at all surprised if racial resentment increases during times of economic turmoil. My understanding is that during tough economic times industries like alcohol/gambling preform far better then the market as a whole. I would not be surprised at all if scapegoating of "outgroups" (both black and white) incresses during economic tough times. See Nazi Germany circa 1930s.
They're either looking for a purple squirrel (like trying to hire the original developer of the technology), trying to move someone internally into a position that requires them to also seek outside candidates (by making the requirements impossible to fulfill), or dev told HR they needed someone with "X" experience for a senior role, and HR translated that to "10 years experience with X" (X having been out for 2 years).

There are three of the standard answers that come up any time this topic does.
You should get the heavy metal cover.

I'm not even kidding, it exists.
I collected a list of ~15+ archival tools on a discussion of Wallabag last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14686882

Happy to discover yours!
Perhaps the most sustainable way.

It would reduce my stress to imagine a world where my grandchildren didn't die from atrophy during the great power outage of 2079, where only the 10% of humanity that weren't reliant on exercise machines exercising their muscles for them, survived.
How original.
Well, the stated goal was to use rust for small hotspots. These hotspots could take very little time but are called a lot, so the overhead of creating a process / communicating with another process can be quite a lot (think of a function called in a tight inner loop)
Why couldn't hospitals.. create a union... where they negotiate together for better drug prices, AND they ALSO become the insurer-- your primary hospital is your insurer--you pay them monthly to keep you healthy. They get recurring income from sick/healthy people alike, they get to control the costs...and they could set prices to be related to income...say 4% of income goes to healthcare... When someone travels to another hospital, their primary hospital picks up the bill...etc... I think costs could be a LOT lower because w/out insurance agencies there's more money for the hospital directly and being MRR the hospital can have a better idea of how much revenue they bring in on average per month.
Weird - why do people not just have play set to random?

I've been using Aux, Bluetooth - never had this issue.
Movie bot that creates custom lists
the best way to save the rainforest is to make more efficient drug crops.
Certainly, it is important to make efforts to be cognizant of negative ripple effects arising from even the most altruistic of endeavors, but it is also necessary to actually make decisions. The Horizon Effect[1] is unavoidable in situations like you are describing, but the most we can do is act conscientiously and avoid paralysis due to the inherent uncertainty that arises from our actions. I know this isn't the exact point you were raising, but reading in between your comment lies what I suspect is a hyper awareness of consequence, and I wanted to share my thoughts on that.

In response to the specific fear you mention, while this may be possible, I would consider it more important to successfully eliminate Malaria than to not do so for fear of the negative repercussions you raise. I think it is both more uncertain and more unlikely for those negative consequences to materialize in such a way that leaves humanity and leaders unable to respond adequately.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_effect

(edited for typos)
In LA only the central library is open Sunday, for 4 or 5 hours.
And a couple-dozen home-phoners, but try to keep the number of per-click and scroll trackers down to under 10.
I just realized that Hosted VS2017 is still using Visual Studio 2017 (15.1 Update). That's two versions behind now. When is it going to get the 15.3 update?
>Mazda Protege

I think you misspelled Ford Escort.

Speaking of which, trying to buy a Ford Escort on CList can result in some very ambiguous text messages.

Edit: Thanks for the down-votes. Please read the Wikipedia page on the Escort and Protege. They use the same platform from the 90s onward which was the time when Ford and Mazda collaborated on a lot of stuff. Both flavors of the platform have their pros and cons.
I don't want to 'take it back.' But, I feel donations should not be tax deductible. Why should I subsidize anything someone feels is worth donating for?
yes. was just thinking about that, but archive.org was not around in 9d4

https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.archive.org
Example lists:

- show me english scifi movies on netflix

- english movies about aliens released after 2000

- english movies about lawyers on netflix or hulu

- best hindi movies on netflix

- hindi drama movies on netflix released after 2000

- clint eastwood movies on amazon prime or hbo released between 1960 and 1980

- movies based on true stories on netflix

- johnny depp fantasy movies on netflix

- the pursuit of happyness

- movies similar to the pursuit of happyness

- movies on jfk released after 2000

- english movies currently playing in theatres
The problem libraries solved, mostly access to information, has largely been monopolize by the internet. Most, including the third world impoverished, have access to the internet. Therefore the necessity of a library has been largely diminished and inevitably libraries will disappear. Complaining about libraries when people have no sanitation and access to clean tap water sounds largely like a first world problem, as much as I dislike the term.

Libraries should evolve with the change of technology and move their function from curation and access to information to something that is able to benefit more people. Books occupy volume and removing them would make more room for desks and rooms where people with no access to quiet areas could use to be more productive.
> How is planting one billion trees not a good thing?

Yes, exactly.
First time: 3 months

Second time: 5 months

I am coming up to the end of my personal runway on this current venture but I raised some money from friends and family and I'm able to pay myself a little bit now! Meanwhile I know people who are sitting on 4,5,6 years of runway and are still just talking about doing it. Whatever it is, if it excites you and you can convince others of that, go do it today!

I'd suggest about 6 months of runway to be safe, but we aren't doing this to be safe are we?
IPFS seems to work effectively for storing versions of files. The downside is, as I mentioned in another post, that it's not permanent. Someone has to pin it or it'll disappear. But it doesn't require anything as complicated to use today as trying to modify git to do something it wasn't meant for.
Shameless plug continues: https://engineered.at

Startup/Tech/Engineering blog aggregator with an HN-style interface. I'm working on a few features this week:

1) Feeds index so you can browse them

2) User Profiles

3) Automated post tagging with tag browsing (going to be a bigger initiative but excited for this one)
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437923
Yeah, this is the best way to consume the shroom. Mix with a little loose leaf green tea and it actually tastes pretty good, with a tingly after-feeling on your tongue.

For anyone that's interested, basically just roughly dice 1/8 oz. of dried mushrooms and add a scoop of your favorite tea. Put the mix in a large teaball (or multiple small ones). Boil 2-3 cups of water. Let the water cool for 20-30 seconds on a cold burner before pouring into your teapot. Steep and drink!
I also have an infant daughter, and don't even imagine moving to SV. Other comments have talked enough about the finances, but the main factor for me would be the work-life balance.

From what I hear in online communities, SV sounds extremely anti-family. Companies that can hire new grads that will conveniently work overtime for pizza and beer will not really value a 9-5 family man like yourself. Add to that the stress and time-sink of long commutes, and that's all time that you could be spending with your young family.
I'm working on a recipe app. Maybe I will be able to integrate that into the application.
Thank you. I wasn't aware of the history of the 51st. That's some story.
Pretty much censoring themselves due to the higher technical barriers for accessing.

I suspect they'll get some new (normal) domains and be operating like normal within a week as the media fervor dies down.
Melissa O'Neill gave a talk describing the PCG random number generator at Stanford in EE380. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45Oet5qjlms
you present a good argument for ticking all the safety boxes, but the original comment you're citing doesn't specify safety; you're refuting an argument they didn't make. To count Go as an example, one could count "zero-cost abstractions" or "no runtime" as a box that Go doesn't check.
I owned (and still do own) this book! I would spend many hours as a teenager going through the links and accessing all the cool stuff in the book. This really brings back memories!

And yes, the way I got on the internet in those days was to dial into a public Sprintlink number, then telnet to a card catalog terminal in the Stanford library, and then send the telnet "Break" command at exactly the right time to break out of the card catalog program and have unfettered internet access. Good times.
Fascinating study & highly relevant to most people here (since many of us "hackers" are in highly cognitive job roles)

Conclusion:

> Thus, the labor
market appears to increasingly value individuals possessing high non-cognitive relative to
cognitive skills over time.