skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm always afraid that if I knew what my cat was thinking I'd be disappointed. Like "I wonder if I can kill and eat him?"
The author is really overthinking this. Small functions, big functions, long variables, short variables... none of this matters. The goal of programming is to express a solution to a domain-specific problem, using a general programming language. The job of a programmer is to arrange a set of logical building blocks (the general programming language) into the domain-specific solution. Good code will be naturally express its domain specific logic in a way that is both readable and maintainable.

Readability is most strongly related to the ease of following all possigle code paths from a given entry point. That is, can I start reading in main() and iteratively follow the possible code paths given a specific input?

The answer to this question is more related to separation of scopes than it is to function size. If a single scope contains many possible branches and code paths, then it will be difficult for a reader to follow a specific code path amongst the noise of irrelevant functions (short or long).

All else equal, the length of a function is primarily a matter of style and preference. The priority of code should be expressiveness and clarity. If small functions enhance expressiveness, then they are the tool for the job. If big functions add clarity or aide in separating scopes, then they are also a tool for the job. Sometimes you need both.

Worrying about anything other than readability, maintainability and correctness is needless dogma.
It may raise prices at the outer suburbs as a commute will be easier.
Pascal as a language was designed, among other things, to be very easy to compile. I believe that most of the time you don't even need to build an AST, for instance. Unless you try to optimize the result seriously, it must be reasonably easy to write a very compact and resource-economical Pascal compiler.
Yes, and the lack of an acrid urine smell in the air would be a fantastic quality of life increase.

I'd be happy to pay triple my current commute expense in return for two things:

1) A vehicle that picks me up on-demand from my home and which goes exactly where I'm headed, so I don't have to commute to and from BART.

2) A vehicle populated only by other paying customers, with a mechanism to eject bad actors from the system.
A lot of people who stick with expressive static type systems find the process of fixing type errors quite enjoyable. I really like the experience -- I can go really fast confidently.

GHC does let you defer type errors until runtime but I never want to...
Cats and Dogs are very aware of human beings, and no, they are not interested in killing or eating you.
Well, there are small functions (that encapsulate a particular bit of behavior), and small functions (that encapsulate a repeated bit of code). The OP wants to get rid of the second, not the first. The problem is, they're both "small functions".
Well the Toronto Star actually let her write her own op-ed!
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/04/10/i-was-...

https://i.imgur.com/Gf86VlO.jpg
there is a lot of that stuff in the readme on Github (icon top right corner). Ask me if something isn't clear :)
Last week WSJ reported Jeffrey Immelt is the frontrunner for Uber's next CEO. Out of the blue this article pops up. With sections about "Transformation", his connections to Silicon Valley, how he's hip and watches Netflix;

with quotes like

>"We were a classic conglomerate. Now people are calling us a 125-year-old start-up."

>"The two things that influenced me the most were Marc Andreessen’s 2011 Wall Street Journal article, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” and The Lean Startup—Eric Ries’s book, which I literally read in a day."

The PR spin machines are already churning.
> The author is really overthinking this.

Isn't the author trying to correct a dogma, just as you are?
That disparaging attitude got to me as well. Honestly I made the switch to WoD back when it had the 6 point system, and never looked back ever since. Although I haven't played it in many years, I loved how it didn't have levels, had a more identifiable setting, a more standard background for the whole universe, and how even a couple low ranking characters had a shot at taking down strong characters.

Quite possibly the most creative setting WoD had was Wraith: the oblivion, yet it was the most unsuccessful financially, due to its complexity and heavy burden on the Story Teller compared to the other installments. We used to play it with two Story Tellers, one whispering into ears and one speaking out loud for a better experience.
Ask HN: What are your favourite self-hosted tools?
There is another objection. People who use a car to go to work need that car at the same time. Playing lottery on whether I will be allocated a car or not to get to work this morning isn't an option. That's why farmers usually own their hardware. They could rent except that they all need it the same days.

It will free up the streets nevertheless. The reason you park your car nearby is so that you can walk to it. But if the car can go park itself and come back 10-15min from where you live in some big car park, you would probably as happy as if you had to walk 5-10min yourself.

Plus ownership isn't fully rational. Otherwise people wouldn't bury themselves into debt to own their house, pushing property prices up. Instead you would have cheap property you can rent.
Facebook and Instagram down in parts of the world
Why not self driving RV? a veritable castle on wheels.
Yeah, I tried a PSVR, which is said to be worse than the Vive or Rift, and it still shocked me how immersive it was.

I have a long running bet against the future popularity of VR, and that experience certainly shook my confidence in my position.
God, I despise this culture.
You are not going to blow your stack without recursion, even with a fairly small stack size. Iirc swift has huge stacks for objective-c interop by default so even that shouldn't be a problem.

Overhead is a fair point for jit/interpreted languages if you want to write performance critical code in a jit/interpreted language for some reason. Tiny functions are almost certainly going to be inlined if the compiler does its job, though, so it isn't a huge deal for compiled languages.

And the point is that the function can be so tiny that you would just replace it with a new function. Then you can reason locally about behavior. This is a very functional approach, though, and can break horribly in imperative languages so there definitely is a balance.
If a German HN reader would be so kind as to make that request and report back on what they get, I can absolutely positively guarantee that they will be the happy recipient of One Internet Point from me when they submit the story to HN.
As someone who gets chased by a dog at least once a month on my daily commute I'm pretty sure they do want to eat me. Maybe a couple are just trying to herd me but I think you underestimate their prey drive.
Here's the problem - dogma already exists, and it exists in the name of readability, maintainability, and correctness. DRY is the particular bit of dogma which has been taken to the extreme.

And this is the thing about extremes - to get back to the center, you have to push towards the opposite extreme (and hope your push has the right magnitude to not overshoot the proper location). It's why the title is extreme, and the article is not. "Small Functions Considered Harmful" is easy to remember, and a soundbyte which can compete at the same level of "Don't Repeat Yourself".
> These lawsuits highlight the real reason for the lack of women in science

In an article about science, a claim like that without strong support is in very bad taste. If you want to prove causation, you should at least first prove correlation. If we measure how much an industry believes that a specific gender is suitable for the job, do we get a correlated number for gender segregation? For an assertive statement that we have now found a scientific proof for the real underlying reason for gender segregation, such question should be easily answered.
You're making my point, you can't control yourself!

Race and climate aren't naturally connected concepts. It's fair to conclude you use race and class in this way as a wedge to divide people and pit them against one another in order to batter your political enemies and increase your power.

If you want to be a Marxist, just be a Marxist and don't hide your beliefs.
I've been using OCaml for a couple of side projects, and I have been absolutely blown away by the amount of power this language provides. It strikes a nice balance between high-level expressiveness, while not sacrificing on performance.

I feel like OCaml is one of the programming world's best kept secret - if it had better tooling and better marketing, it could have taken over the world. I'm cautiously optimistic about ReasonML for this reason.
You are being downvoted because you are making strong claims without having anything to back it up. You are free to have your own definitions of things but people like to have the same. This helps in carrying on a useful conversation.
Thanks for the recommendations, these look great. Definitely adding them to my reading list!
Do you know anyone who has requested all this information, seen how it was provided and was able to make sense of it, especially from a platform like Facebook? What format is the information provided as? HTML files with graphs? XML files (gasp)?
Good, let the reasonable folk settle in DE / the US instead. Not folk who read too much sensationalized news. There may be problems but being unstable isn’t one of em.
> How do you enable it in-game?

Double press the system button of any controller or the left of the HMD. There's also a button in the Steam overlay. Make sure the camera is enabled in the settings, and you may lower the refresh rate if there are USB issues. It's a very shitty camera but it's good enough for finding the controllers, obstacles, etc.

> without the helmet grabbing and smudging them

It must be put on front first, and it must be removed back first. That way you never move the glasses from your face. Worst case they get stuck to the HMD, but doing it correctly they don't smudge anything.
I haven't found a good citation yet, but my understanding was that it was carefully planned and she was chosen.

This gets into it a little ...

http://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719889/before-rosa-parks-th...

When asked why she is little known and why everyone thinks only of Rosa Parks, Colvin says the NAACP and all the other black organizations felt Parks would be a good icon because "she was an adult. They didn't think teenagers would be reliable."

She also says Parks had the right hair and the right look.

"Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class," says Colvin. "She fit that profile."

David Garrow, a historian and the author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, says people may think that Parks' action was spontaneous, but black civic leaders had been thinking about what to do about the Montgomery buses for years.
This is well known, and it's called 'shadow profiles'.
Yes, newspapers often publish the writings of public figures, it doesn't imply an endorsement.

Do you think they made a mistake by publishing her op-ed?
You usually pay a premium (in real estate/rent) to live near fast/accessible public transport.

As self-driving cars are introduced, places that previously had terrible public transport access, yet are still within a 45 min drive of CBDs via driving will have mini-booms.
Thanks for that explanation! I didn't think about prepayment when I wrote my comment.
Car sharing will be the catalyst that reshapes cities. Reducing car ownership 90% (let's say) will reduce the space allocated to parking and traffic proportionally. When that happens, land use (zoning) will become much more dense.

Maybe self-driving cars will hasten car-sharing. That seems to be Uber's long-term bet. We'll see.
Google, Mozilla, and the Race to Make Voice Data for Everyone
A lot of cities have a feral cat problem. Very few have a feral dog problem, because a feral dog problem rapidly becomes a feral dog pack problem, and it turns out a pack of feral dogs is pretty good at hunting people.
IMHO self driving cars will predominately be a fleet/subscription-service model eventually, and in that case it will actually further incentivize shorter commutes (denser living). Right now, when you buy, finance or lease a car you pay a fixed rate and the variable component is almost negligible. That means a 10 or a 50 mile commute are really just a question of your personal time, they don't have much price-cost.

Conversely for a shared-fleet-subscription model you will pay a much more utility-like rate (or they will price the subscription based on utility like analysis). Now there will be a much more direct correlation to the distances you travel and the price you pay.

Especially since commuting will have the peak-utilization effect on pricing that all shared services from frame-relay networks to ec2 autoscaling exhibit. People will be able to directly price the cost of living in location X vs. location Y and make a much more informed decision (I can pay $250/month on my mortgage for a 3rd bedroom in a home closer to work, or I can pay $300/month for my 45-minute rush-hour service charge). Overall more accurate pricing will dramatically skew toward density.
I am most interested in what self driving RVs will do.
Why don't you just call what you are talking about "language", instead of contradicting what literally everyone else means by "thinking"?
I'm pretty sure they are not (unless it is a pitbull or something). Most breeds of dogs will not attack humans. They are aware of the difference in physical strength.

Also, if they are real aggressive, I assume a catastrophe has already happened or is in the making (especially with a child?). The authorities have not intervened yet?
https://github.com/nodejs/CTC/issues/165

I assume that they forked because they don't believe Rod should be on the node leadership teams.
I wouldn't overdo the remote working. My experience is that it is terribly inefficient in my business. It's fine at small dose to help people cope with other obligation but I don't see that being the future of office work.
I don't use backend js, but things like webpack-dev-server which on file save do an incremental recompile and then hot reload have made this a non issue on the frontend for me. Not sure if this applies to your use case, but figured it couldn't hurt to offer a partial solution.
USB isn't optoisolated. This is its killer flaw as a replacement MIDI transport.
You can't just imagine that that change will occur to the job market and nothing else will react to it. All commuters already get a sort of averaged-out pay for their commute since they all have to make it. Rather than the market being permanently unfair, you will see over time some sort of wage adjustment occur to compensate for the work-on-commute advantage... and if I had to guess, it would be via a reduction in the wages of those who can work by the competition between the jobs that offer it as a perk with less salary vs. those that don't but have to pay more, whereas those who already must attend work will continue to be paid mostly the same.

I think this is fairly unlikely to stay a permanent source of inequality between classes of people. I also think it is very likely that people who don't notice the wage reactions will continue to complain about it indefinitely, though.
...and where would the electricity come from?
Electricity isn't an energy source. Right now the US generates ~65% of electricity from burning coal and natural gas[1]. This is a common misconception with hydrogen fuel cells as well, which are chemical batteries, not energy sources.

While I agree with your general sentiment in this thread, simple electrification isn't enough; we also have to roll out major renewable energy generation and storage (which is still far wiser than building a gun to shoot a sun shield into space).

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
Mid-market has vastly improved since Twitter, Uber, Square, Zendesk, Microsoft, etc. moved in. It's no longer a crime-ridden sad part; it's now vibrant with grocery stores, restaurants, cafés, bars, housing, etc. It's a great success story for redevelopment.

Some people call it gentrification.
I'd be curious to know which conclusions you think the author has reached.

And you're probably being downvoted because your criticism is neither specific nor substantiated, and fairly snide besides.
> Metros are built out of the way. They shouldn't kill people because there are a few stations of track that they can kill people.

This is demonstrably false. There are many metro systems with tracks on viaducts and at-grade (e.g. "open air"), with GoA 4 control systems.

These systems can and do detect objects on the track. They also deal with severe weather (heavy thunderstorms, snow, etc).

I think you're discounting the experience of delivering railway systems without considering lessons that could be learned in deploying them, and applying that to self-driving cars.
The making of a new car is an extremelly CO2-intensive process. Ecologically damaging, too.

The most green car is the one you already have, as long as you do, even if it's a SUV.
feels a lot like "unlimited vacations" -- sure you can take a week off, but are you ready to be judged?
"Almost certainly" means that there will be a number of times where they "almost certainly" will not.

Inlining is hard (especially with languages which allow for overriding functions), and is not done perfectly (or at all). The LLVM compiler toolchain in particular has a lot of properties which can inhibit inlining code; and in some cases you even have to explicitly tell the LLVM compiler when it can inline a function.
How the Music of Rogue One Links to a New Hope
This isn't unnecessary drama on Rod's part.
He is standing in the line of fire to shield the rest of his community from a McCarthyesque witchhunt conducted by SJWs, who are the real source of the drama.
I honestly thing they should be “giving away their position”. Pretending they shouldn’t is simply ego, and demonstrably dangerous.

It’s perfectly normal to see this in our own waters. AIS will identify the vessel as being named simply “Warship” or “Surfaced Submarine” (where “Warship” means “none of your business”, and “Surfaced Submarine” should be treated as a hazard to be actively avoided, as they're damned difficult to spot). They usually won’t give any useful to/from port (part of the AIS messages), and I’m not convinced their MMSI (identifying number) is actually fixed, but more likely disposable (or in practice, simply ‘0’).

And that’s okay. We can work with that. I don’t actually need to know who they are, I just need a location, course and speed so my radio can calculate whether our closest point (CPA) is uncomfortable, and the designation of “Warship” is perfectly sufficient to ensure my eyeballs and the computer are talking about the same vessel. MMSI should be useful, but rarely is - Warships are surprisingly difficult to raise on civilian radio. It's not unusual for them to have no idea how the civil band is channelized. In & around ports if you need to communicate with them, it's best to look for their police escort & raise them, and anywhere else .. "If it's grey, stay away".

There’s entire oceans for them to go play hide’n’seek in. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that when they’re in a shipping lane, they obey the rules of the road - in peacetime at least. If they want to be invisible, perhaps the worlds busiest shipping lanes aren't the best hiding places.

Or, look at it this way. If a small sailboat was arsing around in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, at night, with no navigation lights, no AIS, no radar reflector, and what appears to be insufficient watch-keeping/lookout - and got mown down by a frieghter - you’d have very little sympathy. “That’s a terrible shame, but realistically inevitable”.

This is exactly what the USN look like to everyone else on the shipping lane. Playing hide’n’seek on a busy road, and wondering how these accidents keep happening. And yes, they should be blamed for any incident where the bare minimum of good behaviour would have averted entirely. (I should say seamanship, but this concept is long since lost on the USN)
> I'm pretty sure they do want to eat me.

I don't know if you're being flippant or not, but the desire to eat humans has long been bred out of the domestic animal gene pool (and, frankly, out of most of the wild animal gene pool as well). The dogs who are chasing you almost certainly just want to establish their dominance over you and defend their territories. It's also possible that they want to play.

But any dog that is chasing you, or any other human, needs to be put on a leash. You should have a chat with the dog's owner and point out to them, politely but firmly, that an off-leash dog chasing people s serious liability risk for them. And if the dog doesn't have an owner you should call you local animal control.
All the dependencies that make urban density relevant are being eroded by technology. Self driving cars will be one part of a trend that makes remote living a lot more pleasant and popular. Amazon will deliver most of what you need to live (and soon eat). SpaceX is working on low orbit and therefore low latency high speed global internet so you can work and/or get entertainment anywhere. Tesla can sell you solar panels and a battery to power your home. You can do a septic system instead of a sewer hookup. If you insist on gas you could get propane delivered inexpensively. If you want to mingle/meet people you can do that online. Then with a level 5 self driving car you can send your kids to far away schools everyday easily, or work at your "desk" during a long commute in the car. Or say if you want to drive 90 minutes into town for a basketball game that's no big deal if a computer does the thinking while you watch movies in the back. I live in Oregon where I expect a profound impact. There are so many amazing places here that are incredibly beautiful/cheap and within 90 minutes of a major metro area/airport. I think the real driver of this change will be cost, younger people (myself included) are getting priced out of owning a nice home in a major metro area. I'm seriously considering moving to Sweet Home Oregon and building a mansion on acres for half the cost of a modest townhouse in portland. High speed Internet is the missing piece for me.
Wait a a minute, why are those the only two options?

I'm a long time AR developer and have seen nearly every generation of VR since the early 2000s (NASA, Sensics, Oculus) and have never had my "mind blown" or "jaw hit the floor."

I think people just have a super low bar for being impressed.
I think the more rational position would be that animals do think, as we are animals, and we think. To claim that animals do not think has no basis outside of our own condescending perspective. If we cannot prove one way or another then I feel my position is the more rational and should be the default position.
> I remember being in a guitar store and hearing a pedal that converted a guitar, chords and all, into MIDI piano samples

I remember the same experience (in like 1989).
Meh. I drive little enough that even factoring in non-commute driving, I still wouldn't get much extra flexibility from an autonomous vehicle.
I've been wondering if electrical cars (self-driving or not) will affect prices of properties which are - currently - next to noisy and polluted streets. Does anybody have insight into that? Or maybe smog-ridden cities?
I think gentrification is awesome. I fully support improving the area with new restaurant, bars, stores, housing. Local housing values will improve as the area becomes more desirable. Also key is cleaning up the crime.
Data is the new oil: Your information is now the world's most valuable commodity
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14988206