skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The straightforward way to understand code is to work with it. That is to say, look at open tickets and try to implement the suggested functionality or fixes (or some of your own ideas).

The analytic approach is a bit more awkward, since you have no specific goals and need to make them up yourself. So you could pose questions like how a specific behaviour of the application comes about ("why does it do that when this happens?", "how does it do X?") and then try to answer those comprehensively, systematically (a format that works well for me is short snippets of code interleaved with explanations and arguments).

A bottom-up approach is generally easier, because your questions will give you information at the bottom (like specific application messages), which are generally easy to find (ag, grep). A good IDE can be helpful for navigating the code and finding call sites, especially in projects written in dynamic languages where such analyses can become kinda annoying. (However, in more awkward code bases analysers like PyCharm are quickly overwhelmed and are unable to resolve indirections)

Top-down is in my experience less useful, because there are far too many choices on each level for most applications, and the first few layers are generally the least interesting and most arcane/fragile and difficult to follow along (things like initialization sequences).

The most difficult projects are typically those relying on multiple languages, code generation and runtime mutation (reflection, on-the-fly UI generation, overly dynamic Python code are typical examples). Another frequent obstacle is excessive abstraction and indirection (implementing something that could be done in a few lines of easy to understand and reason about C using multiple C++ templates spread out over a bunch of files and a healthy dozen of advanced language features is an almost archetypal example).
If you want to shut down, you have to start somewhere :)
I'm pretty ad-friendly compared to most on HN (people have shown countless times that they don't want to pay if they don't have to, and microtransaction/favor/tipping systems are a giant mess and likely always will be), but the "people have to track to keep stuff running!" view strikes me as naive.

a) Right now we have "content" created and tailored more to pull in ad revenue than to do anything user-beneficial. That's not ideal, most pure clickbait going away would not be a net negative. Consider news: was the internet of 15 years ago meaningfully devoid of news content compared to today, or was it better off cause it wasn't flooded with as much polarized crap?

b) There's an assumption here that ad spending will decrease. One alternative possibility is that ad companies have been stuck in arms races for years now, without actually increasing yield. Look at the reasons why companies are "pivoting to video" - even with all this tracking and "AI" garbage, online display ad effectiveness still sucks. As long as every network and publisher has to follow the same rules, I don't believe any advertiser is truly worse off. And from a principle-based view, I think any sort of smart-enough tracking to produce truly well-targeted ads (vs today's "here's that thing you already bought, let me show you it on every website now" crap) is too far on the creepy side to be something we want anyway.

c) The other side of the "sites won't make money anymore" side is that with a more even playing field there's a chance for some of the money to shift away from the people playing tech games and to the people producing the content. There's not a ton of effective competition in ad networks right now, look where all the revenue goes. A Facebook and Google duopoly also only makes the implications of the tracking worse.

d) Finally, from the advertiser's perspective: where else are they going to send that budget? TV? Newspapers? Please. And even the worst case here - a net decrease in ad spending - is hard to paint as such a huge loss since there's a lot of more productive things out there than showing ads.

There are a few other trends that will need to be ultimately addressed separately, though. One is the shift to video even for stuff that's rather stupid to force into the video format, just because the audience is more captive to ads, and this is a big problem IMO. Not really relevant to what we're discussing here, though. A more interesting debate may be around fraud prevention, I could see a plausible claim that if you have less history on the user you have fewer heuristics you can apply for fraud-fighting. I'm mostly meh on that, though, and willing to let fraud be the cost of business with internet display ads and hope it just washes out in the long run. (I'd prefer if it caused people to shift to paid models, but I'm not optimistic.)
Bill Beaty's site was and still is amazing. It sparked my interest (and lifelong hobby) in high voltage back in the late 90s. Some of his essays (and ascii) art explaining concepts like coherence (http://amasci.com/miscon/coherenc.html) still stick with me today.

As for the electrostatic wall story... it's fun but I don't believe it.
Some stuff does not work easily with non fossil fuel based engines. What better way than to refine current tech instead of inventing a whole new one?
I highly recommend Eric Hoffer's The True Believer if you're interested this topic at all. It's a short book full of major ideas.

Hoffer's treatment of the phenomenon is just as fresh and relevant today as it was when he wrote the book in the 1950s.

I got downvoted for suggesting that Maoism was a religion, but it quite clearly had more commonalities than differences with the more extremist religious cults (as did Stalinism, Nazism, etc.)
It's an interesting case. I looked at their architecture diagram and at first thought "WTF is the blockchain doing there", since their process is essentially the same as Mozilla Persona, except in the latter the attestations were delivered to the user, who then delivered them to the requester (therefore keeping the provider ignorant about who was the requester, from privacy reasons).

But then they talked about revocability and yeah, that's true; if an attacker tricks the provider into giving them an attestation, then the provider has no way to alert the requester if they discover the attack, since the user is mediating the conversation. The blockchain serves as a kind of neutral proxy that allows the provider and the requester to talk without meeting each other.

On the other hand, the requester still has to check the blockchain periodically to see if any revocation was issued, so it's not immediate. Rather than doing that, why doesn't the requester periodically require the user to provide a fresh attestation?

So yeah, I'm still not seeing why the blockchain is actually needed.
"Science" doesn't say either of those things are safe. Studies (often paid for by the companies trying to sell the technique) say that the core concepts and techniques are safe. The problem is that side-effects are left out of scope of the study. Hence, the environmental impacts of both are swept under the rug.
The metadata of experience, the experience of metadata
Published a small extension,redirects Twitter.com requests to mobile.Twitter.com
Here in Germany we literally have a nuclear scientist running the government and frankly politics have become a bit boring. Now that may be a good in a way but vision is not really her thing.
Tesla has been selling Model S since 2012, Model X since 2015 and Model 3 since late 2017.

Mazda could have been selling a kick-ass electric model of Mazda in 2019.

And if they did it right, maybe they too would have 500k of pre-orders and the "problem" of not being able to build the cars fast enough.

The question is: why are they investing in technology that is in inevitable decline vs. investing in the technology that will inevitably win?

Now, I know why.

A guy in charge of diesel engine development is at least a VP at Mazda. He doesn't want to fire his engineers. He doesn't want to fire himself.

He has power and he will use every bit of it to downplay and delay inevitable.

That's understandable from human psychology point of view but it's bad business.

Innovator's dilemma is real and many companies failed to make the obvious investments in the future technology on time. See Kodak or BlackBerry.

And when they finally did, it was too late.

5 years ago we could have an argument about diesel vs. electric. Today the future winner is clear.
Click on 'Signal generator'?
In this case the domain is politics not science. If anything your argument is in agreement with the parent.
How would you engineer a material that would only pass through certain shapes of nozzle or tube, but not other shapes? For example, a fluid that would only flow through square tubes, and would not flow through traditional tubes.

If this were pulled off, the possible uses extend far beyond 3d printer consumable copyright(?) enforcement. It could act as a simple filter, when given a mixed material, it would allow one type of material through while not accepting the other.

Wouldn't the molecules of the material have to be nearly the size of the nozzle/tube, so it would be more like pushing a square peg through a square hole, instead of numerous tiny round spheres through a square hole?
Up until this weird new thing where people want to dream up models and not worry about empiricism, "science" has always been characterized by the fact that you can strip out all the dependence on philosophy and reduce it to statements about procedures and algorithms. Every metaphysics has to reckon with our ability to act in the world, but they don't all have to include particular statements about the ontology of (say) numbers. As a result, statements about similarities between processes (for example the way counting in your head, a neurochemical process, is similar to putting stones in a bucket, a mechanical process) can be "independent" of the underlying ontological model. After all, whatever "similarity," means on the inside, those processes are "similar."

In a sense, it's similar to how mathematicians write proofs in natural-ish language and call them true under the idea that they could convert them to purely formal symbolic manipulations if they wanted to put in the effort. Scientists talk about things as if they had all kinds of ontological statuses that they can't be shown to have - (ever heard a chemist describe electrons as "wanting" to occupy the lowest energy state?) - but that's nothing but language. The only reason any of it works is because you could cut out all of the weird stuff if you really wanted to.
OpenGrok, it's very simple to setup and makes navigating in large codebase easy.
> Reason, logic and strategic thinking is what we need

Reason, logic and strategic thinking (hereafter, "they") don't get you palatable slogans like "Yes we can" and "The Buck Stops Here".

They don't empower you with the ability to shake a man's hand on the campaign trail and remember their name, their wife's name, and the details of their situation a year later (or the con-man ability to pretend they can through cold-reading).

They don't teach you when to talk, when to shut up and listen, and how to effectively communicate your ideas to an audience.

They don't teach you how and when to compromise your ideals to get somebody else's bill passed so that you can effectively curry political favor and capital on the issue that matters to you enough to uphold your campaign policies.

Past that, the constitution (and thus, law) cannot be parsed in any programmatic or logical way. Without that understanding, you can't know what is or isn't constitutional, or even if something is or isn't constitutional, whether or not it's likely to be upheld by a system of courts, or what words to use during its planning phase such that the legislative record reflects the best chances of ensuring it be read by the courts in the manner you desire.

All that said, I freely acknowledge that the abilities to schmooze, read and write law, and effectively sway others to your belief do not necessarily empower you to understand climate data, or the ecological impact of a tariff on solar panels, or the technological impact of a blockchain.

Either way, we need a diverse group of people in power - true diversity, in the usual ways as well as in the experiential, cultural and viewpoint diversity metrics to truly represent the many valid ideas to be had within the electorate. Of course, the more diversity you have within a legislature, the more they tend to disagree on things ,and the less likely you are to get compromise. Personally, I maintain that's a feature of the legislature, but considering every time Congress is seen as 'do-nothing', their approval ratings drop, which is why political parties tend to coalesce behind a few divisive issues and then just kind of fall in line or not give much credence to the remainder, using rhetoric to blame the other party for its woes.
Gigabit ethernet though, so network storage is presumably an option. The Pi suffers from relatively poor network throughput (although much improved since the first release way back when)but I'm assuming this won't suffer the same problems.
"Science" doesn't say either of those things are safe.

Yes, it does. Sorry.

Nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than any other energy source (including solar). We've got 60 years of real-world data on it.
PROOF THE NAME “JESUS” IS GRAMMATICALLY and HISTORICALLY INACCURATE
All I'm saying is, academia and government are 2 different ballgames -- I'm sure there are lots of similarities, but the stakes are on 2 vastly different levels. I'm not saying having scientists in the government would be bad, to the contrary -- right now that's what we need.

But replace all the lawyers and businessmen in government right now with professors and administrators from academia and we would still have lots of issues.
Lambda is an exciting platform, but it does require some bending to get it to work for certain use cases.
This reminds me of some problems we solved last year [0], which should not have been problems for a fairly straightforward application.

[0]: https://iplayer.engineering/evaluating-tensorflow-models-in-...
That's really clever - I just blogged about it https://simonwillison.net/2018/Feb/3/conditional-aggregation...
Tesla has been selling expensive luxury cars to a niche market.
Carnot efficiency = 1-Tcold/Thot. Tcold = room temperature ~ 300Kelvin. Thot ~ 1500 Celsius ~ 1800 Kelvin. So the theoretical Carnot efficiency is about 83%.
Use `tree | less` just to get an idea of where everything is and how it is structured and `tokei` to check out what the code actually is written in.

Then I try to go down the main code path of some examples or the primary binary if available and just check out out how things are called/done around there.

Then run an example through callgrind and visualize the call graph in kcachegrind to get an idea of how often things are called and where and where the heavy lifting happens. That last step is optional and really depends on the type of project.

Then I use my code editor and lots of searching and call site lookups to get a better idea of how things are used.
Why ipify though? I connected to you. You already have my IP.
I didn't, as I really wanted to see how that would be possible using only clang/llvm. The way I see it is that it seems a shame to rewrite every possible ABI (and the more it goes the more we have (https://xkcd.com/927/)), where compilers like clang and gcc already does all the work.

One point of my llvm talk of tomorrow is to be able to discuss how we could "extract" these parts from clang to be able to do this the lightest way possible! (but that would still require the embedding of a full LLVM backend which is still huge for the only FFI case).

One good point we have embedding a full compiler is that we can really JIT C code from let's say a python interpreter. The usefulness of this is another debate :)

Said otherwise, I thought the experiment was worth the try, and it seems fun to see how far we can go from here :)
Edit: My bad. More coffee, less impulse. Apology.

This (the OP) may be insightful, but my first reaction is within the context of my ceasing to purchase Levi-Strauss products, because: First and primarily, they started wearing out very quickly -- I'm hardly the only one to have noticed this; and secondly, their unit size variations went way out of control -- e.g. taking 10 or more identical units into a dressing room, to find 3 or 4 that actually fit well, or at all.

Their office processes may have developed to some super-natural level. But I'm still not buying their actual products.

I mention this, because I run across it repeatedly, these days. All sort of internal "efficiencies and improvements", but no corresponding improvement in the actual product.

Towards the more dark pattern end, materials scientists and engineers closing in a particular lifespan to maximize revenue. It may be a very sophisticated process, but as the consumer, it's not doing me any good -- as I see it.
No, when you take away your citizens freedoms and liberties you become their weapon.
There are plenty of dictionary lookup apps, if that’s what you want. It’s just not what GT is.
> Forced charity is an oxymoron

Yes, I know. I thought my meaning was obvious, but I'll be clearer: "Forcing" people to provide an alternative to charity is simply called "taxation" (to the extent that taxes are spent on things whose benefits are not distributed in proportion to taxation).

My point was that I don't understand your claim that you don't follow the GP comment's point, since you're surely aware that taxation and gov't spending are well within the Overton Window.
If you want to obliterate any last remnant of nationalist thinking from your mind, read Ayn Rand. Or read The Ominious Parallels by Leonard Peikoff, one of her students.
Article doesnt use correct words. Author isnt a space geek. Vasimir engines can indeed "escape earth orbit" ... they cannot get TO orbit, ie escape gravity. Lots of other odd phrases and mistakes (galactic rays?). I stopped after skimming a few paragraphs.
Lots of discussion about compute-intensive alternative solutions there, but what about a human layer where something triggers a "wow, this word is rare, let's call up Prof Whoever and ask them for a suggestion" notification? There's a lot of words in the world, sure, but you only need to solve each one so many times. Dictionaries seemed to manage this trick even before computers!

Similarly, I would pay a lot of money for a Spotify or Netflix alternative where a knowledgeable human looked at my activity every month or so and created a hand-tailored recommendation list, since those products seem pretty bad at nuance in ways that even just simple "do you like this for reason A or reason B" questions would answer.

I know how the sausage is made at some non-Google places, and there's a common institutional blind-spot where the algorithms people don't want any human-driven chocolate getting in their peanut butter, and lazy product people are perfectly content to let any junk the algorithm throws up be the math guys' fault. Sadly, the world is full of edge cases, and sometimes you need one-off rules. (There's a parallel thread going below where people are aggressively defending the fact that the translate product as implemented is bad at certain use cases. Baffling. At the end of the day, are you happier telling users they're doing it wrong than given them what they want?)
What do you find naive?
"The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook."

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien
When were these old days?
Document automation:
https://www.hotdocs.com/products
https://www.activedocs.com/

https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/writer/
https://extensions.libreoffice.org/templates/
Welcome, it is fascinating!

And, for example, since you mention Croatia, in the middle of beautiful Split on the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic sea, there's the palace of Roman emperor Diocletian, then Fort Gripe built during the Venetian era to defend against Ottoman attacks, the National Theatre built during the Habsburg era, etc.

Beautiful Dubrovnic three hours down the coast has Byzantine origins (literally), suffered artillery attacks as recently as 1991, and now is a location for the filming of Game of Thrones (King's Land or so).

Of course people have some awareness of the history, they're living in it!
i find it amusing when a lower level lang compiles to a higher level. but i still think its the right word. another word is assembled when assembly goes into machine code.
Not a user but I think Zookeeper is worth a mention.
> The true winners in this are obviously the platforms with the largest database of users and user interest: Google and Facebook. The two companies are are dominating already, and in essence killing smaller local (EU) publishers.

Neither is really a "publisher", and (as people are arguing elsewhere in this thread) it's the US multinationals which will be in a worse position, since they rely so heavily on doing things with people's personal data without clear consent.

> band together, creating cookie pools and sharing user information

My impression was the directive makes this harder since everyone involved would have to get informed consent.

> promote the "right way". Example: People get hit by cars crossing the roads anywhere. They invent a crosswalk and make it illegal to cross the road anywhere other than the crosswalk.

Ah, the American solution. The UK never made it illegal to cross the road and instead invented a type of crossing where the pedestrian always has priority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisha_beacon

Just as an American must check the legality before crossing the road, it seems the intent of the GDPR is to make every developer think twice before storing any data about the user in order to consider whether it is personal data, or the even more restricted category of sensitive personal data. Hopefully this will prevent users getting hit by privacy breaches, intentional or accidental.

The law doesn't regulate specific technological details because that would be far too dirigiste, and break down as soon as there's a new technological innovation. People would either be complaining that they couldn't use a new solution because it wasn't mentioned in the law, or that their privacy was being violated in a new context.
Is your main argument there Bill Nye. If it isn't, it should be.
The advantage of Scratch is that the kids don't need to type the commands. Seems like a trivial thing, but it makes a ton of difference.

Imagine teaching a child who needs on average 10 seconds to find a key on the keyboard. That makes 6 keys per minute, 270 keys per 45-minute lesson. But that's an upper bound, because the kids can't spend the whole lesson typing (they also need to be told what to do), and of course they are not going to get everything right on the first try. Also, small kids are going to make a lot of typos everywhere. What kind of a program can you type using less than hundred characters?

This problem magically disappears when you use Scratch. For little kids, it makes a big difference.
Cool, care to share some citations on it?
Assuming that both groups spent the same amount of time learning programming. For most kinds of large software projects, I think that the psychologists will produce better, more readable and maintainable code.

If the project is like a game or something heavy on physics then mathematicians will have the upper hand.

I actually did a project for a professor of psychology at a university in the US. They didn't know much programming but I was impressed by the specifications document which they sent me because it didn't have any gaps or inconsistencies like most engineering specifications that I've seen before. The requirements were very clearly expressed.

Being able to share very complex ideas with a high degree of accuracy is is an extremely valuable skill.