skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In the physical world, maintenance and repair hardly ever consist of coaxing the same matter into working state. It's extracting old parts, throwing them away, and putting in new ones.

The difference is what you consider "the same matter". Since software exists in the realm of the mind, you have to come to an explicit consensus; there is no natural or physical barrier.

A mechanic will allow dirty oil to drain, but they won't rip out your oil reservoir and redo all your hoses every time you want to get your oil replaced. That'd be very expensive and wasteful. It is not good to use parts that are so cheap that they tear whenever someone pokes or nudges them. That'd make it so no one could move around without getting lots of oil all over the place.

Basic maintenance should be possible. In almost all cases, you should not export every function as its own independent microservice. You should not have to track a request across 60 internal services when you're trying to debug. Yet, this is what we've gotten from naive microservice implementers all too often.

In a microservice architecture, many of the tools that would otherwise validate and verify a successful refactoring are unavailable, because dependent code is exported and accessed over HTTP instead of language-level constructs that the compiler or other static analysis tools could check.

In any architecture, it is rare for a programmer to be able to gut a dependency without causing collateral damage somewhere down the chain.

Somehow, this policy of "throw out everything related to SERVICE_X and start over whenever we need to make change" doesn't seem very practical...
Lack of architecture is to blame, and poor design. I'm sorry to say after having worked in software professionally for over 10 years, that most people just suck at any kind of reasonable design or architecture. You can attribute it to lack of experience, incompetence, or lack of care, whatever, but most people are just bad.

The only metric an engineer should be judged by is: do they make everyone around them better? How quickly can a new developer come up to speed in their codebase and make meaningful contributions? It's okay to start out slow, but in my experience the #1 sign of a bad engineer is someone who gets slower over time. If the costs to implement a feature are increasing, not decreasing, you need to take a hard look at your team and what kind of hot mess people you are really working with. If you're in a position of power, that might involve letting people go, and worse, if you're just an engineer, that might mean finding a new job yourself.
No it's not. Business is a non-moralistic action. People can be immoral doing business, but business itself cannot.

Also, I happen to know a few very moral and ethical business owners who would rather lose money than screw someone over or do a shady business deal. (and have done this)
There's also this[1] series of blog posts by Brett Beauregard that speaks of a few improvements for real-world implementations.

[1]: http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2011/04/improving-the-beginn...
Now, the question is, which industry sector cuts the largest percentage of trees. Now, answering that question, is there a way to do the same thing without cutting trees?

Answering that question and then executing a business plan is probably worth billions.

Planting trees to combat 6 billion trees lost every year is a pure expense, no profit to be made at all. At least not if you won't cut them down a few decades later.
>It's a statement that someone's private data and intellectual property is theirs

Private data is data you don't share. Under some very limited circumstances, you might entrust private data to a third party for safekeeping, i.e. Dropbox, Google Photos, iCloud Drive, and it's important that they not leak or abuse it.

But that's only a tiny portion of what the GDPR is about. It concerns records of your interactions with others. It's a statement that one side of an interaction is entitled to force the other side to delete their memory of that interaction, or to dictate the situations under which they are permitted to remember it.
While I agree with most of what you said, where my perspective differs is this - The WWW is called the World Wide Web for a reason. A platform to showcase your service globally, without borders.

Suddenly, the EU thinks "Oh, if you have a website that is accessible from the EU, then you need to display X". Sorry, then what was the point of WWW? And more important, why should I update my code? It costs me money and you're not paying me, obviously (you = GOV). Why don't you ask your citizens to stop visiting websites that track them? I showcase my service on a global platform. Don't like it? Don't visit it.
I agree. If not “killing” at least “severely” slowing us down. This Rich Hickey talk deserves a link here and it’s right on point:
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
> Non elastic, or high egress cost apps are still too expensive to run on public clouds.

Unfortunately for the sector I'm in, this is becoming less and less true every few months. Besides, a lot of managers simply don't care, they'll just compensate higher opex with a few redundancies, it doesn't matter - their capex budget goes down, they cash the big bucks, and if apps don't work it's the nerds' fault.
Happens at a perfect time for me. I was wondering about a project I want running on smartphones and web and was pondering restarting a unity project (which meant begrudgingly reboot to windows, the linux IDE is not there yet). Now I'll give godot a try.

Is the iOS support good?
To which the entirely reasonable response from anyone without a legal nexus in the EU (or physical products to ship) is "we don't care and you have no legal right or ability to enforce that". And the entirely reasonable response from anyone thinking of creating a legal nexus in the EU without an extremely business-critical reason is "let's stay in our own country where it's safer and we only have one jurisdiction to care about".

For the record, when I build services, I personally don't intend to ever keep any records that aren't absolutely necessary to provide the service. That's a personal decision, a voluntary one, and also one that can be marketed to certain customers, though that isn't the reason. I also believe that if you send data to a website then it becomes subject to whatever terms they want to apply to it, and if you don't like how they use your data then don't send it to them, and block them.
That's true, however, there's no fixed limit to the possible distance between draft and final guidance.

Say you have a large marketing database and you're trying to figure out the nuances of consent. Or you are a large bank and run on a fidgety mix of consent and legitimate interests. Three months is nowhere near enough time to get everything finished.
All the technology required already exists. You'd just need a compelling enough application.
Thanks - I was obviously too lazy to check our the FAQ.
The system design clusterfuck is what you always get, when you cram as much software as possible on as few ecus as possible.

You wouldnt buy a car that is safe- because bad security does not smell.
> There's also community support for python and some other languages

There appears to be semi-official support for D[1] and Rust[2]. I also found some bindings for Nim[3]. However, since c# is supported, you can probably (?) also just use any language that runs on .net[4].

1: https://github.com/GodotNativeTools/godot-d

2: https://github.com/GodotNativeTools/godot-rust

3: https://pragmagic.github.io/godot-nim/v0.5.2/

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CLI_languages
> complicated sublanguage

I kind of fail to see how it is especially complicated. The macro uses a general mechanism to create lists. This mechanism isn't tied to macros and does not do anything special in macros.

It's also not really a sublanguage.

> then you think hard about where the leaks are

There are no leaks in the example.
Unless that comment is a mea culpa then one must conclude you must have had no life experience as anything other than an employee?
A $100 wildlife camera may solve that problem for you.
>a natural point in life where depression sets in, a subconcious rebellion/angst against a life we are living that is fradulent not in tune with our true selves.

This is interesting because I feel like after the war I came back a middle aged man at 24 due to this feeling. I went through the motions in my professional career, but it all seemed so empty compared to what I used to do... so I spent the last ten years or so of my free time my career supported trying to study geopolitical and geostrategic issues because I found meaning in trying to understand why things are/were so damn fucked up, so perhaps as a problem solver I could fix some of them. (I have what are probably ridiculous aspirations of a presidential run someday.)

So I was living a half fraudulent life in order to live a half self-true life, and the tension between the two was palpable.

Near death (and near life) experiences really have a way of breaking that societal programming fast though. It's like when I went through what I call my Descartes reset. I took the red pill with the concious decision that I wanted to know the truth no matter how ugly it is... but that doesn't negate much of just how much impact the ugliness of truth can have on a person. Many people seem to have a subconcious awareness that they would prefer the beautiful lie due to that, but for some reason middle age tends to be the point in which those two forces butt heads, and sometimes people change course at that point.

That's why I used to joke I was getting my midlife crisis out of the way early. The joke was on me though, ten years later I still struggle with that dichotomy. I'll finally be 35 in 2020, so do I pursue the grand purpose path and just try my hand at a run for POTUS despite my trepidations or do I focus on establishing a more down to earth life and focus on just living it while I can!? I don't know yet, but I do know that at some point soon I will have to make that decision and follow through with it.

The real point is that I think we should self-analyze enough to make these decisions conciously before the uglier side-effects of dealing with them subconciously rear their heads in often desctructive ways, such as a midlife crisis.
I agree that it’s encouraging to see engineers and scientists focus their efforts on important societal issues. However, we need to find more thoughtful ways to use this technology. A good place to start is trying to deeply understand a context and need, before coming up with a solution. We just ran a workshop in Jordan with engineers who want to develop education technology for refugee learners. On the first day we took our teams to NGOs who are working with refugees and interviewed the learners. As a result most team scrapped their initial ideas. I wish learning to analyse a challenge through the lense of the user was a more integral part of engineering education.
a leading academic has cast doubt on how much of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo he actually penned. A new film will also suggest they were largely written by an unsung assistant [1]

Who wrote the novels of Alexandre Dumas? [2]

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7198...

[2] https://flcenterlitarts.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/who-wrote-t...
> you have to contend with a grid full of other riders taking offensive lines and passing only inches away

It'll be interesting to see what happens if we have robots and humans racing together. On one hand they will be programmed to win, but on the other hand, harming humans is a big no no.

It's likely that this will happen before we have true AI, so it'll be the human overlords (i.e. team mangers) who make that moral decision. Given some of the things racing teams have done before to win, it could be quite concerning...
#Intel reportedly alerted Chinese companies before US Government
You are anthropomorphizing companies here, and I think it's a pretty poor analogy. Corporations do not have a memory, they have records, and those records comprise the personal data of everyone who encounters them; data those companies don't own. You seem to be characterizing GDPR as unfair towards the corporate end of the interaction, but that ignores the massive power differential that currently exists.

Corporations have incredible power compared to the individual, and before GDPR, it was commonplace for services to require unreasonable privacy violations: And consumers had to either accept it, or be cut off. (In many cases, the companies doing this have monopolies, making this even more problematic.)

Realistically, this is not going to impact small companies a lot. This is about big ad and tech companies, and giving citizens some minor semblance of tools to resist them.
I don't want 15 different subscriptions. I'll pay a premium for 1. I think a lot of people would do the same. Why haven't they figured this out yet and formed some kind of group/alliance?
The minion is a device you own. You don't need to ship the samples (which can be a problem, imagine ebola samples). You wait a maximum of 2 days for most of the results.
This is neither advanced nor denanonymization (sic).

They basically pluck an interesting route from the hotmap (as per other people's recent discovery), pretend that they have also run/biked this route and Strava will show them names of others who run/biked the same way. That's clever, but that's not "advanced" by any means.

It's also not a deanonymization as there's really no option in Strava for public _anonymous_ sharing to begin with.
Title is a bit misleading...

'The Guardian has halved its operating losses compared to two years ago, now looking at breaking even by 2019.'
> I‘m sorry, but 99% of the population will prefer a random shiny device

That part gives me the impression of a fatalist stance, and I see that waaay too often. When everybody does x, but doing y gives some profit, people are all interested. But if it's doing y for some other reason, then it's always the "that battle is lost", or "the majority will never change". Argh! It is quite irrelevant if the majority buys random shiny devices or not. What matters only is if there are enough customers of good devices.
In particular you see that there is NO country today which is as badly off as EVERY country was 200 years ago.

I tend to believe that this argument is generally true, but some researchers have argued that it is very sensitive to the specific endpoints chosen. In his preface to A Farewell to Arms, economist Greg Clark argues (about the world circa 2007):

> "Prosperity, however, has not come to all societies. Material consumption in some countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, is now well below the preindustrial norm. Countries such as Malawi or Tanzania would be better off in material terms had they never had contact with the industrialized world and instead continued in their preindustrial state. Modern medicine, airplanes, gasoline, computers—the whole technological cornucopia of the past two hundred years—have succeeded there in producing among the lowest material living standards ever experienced. These African societies have remained trapped in the Malthusian era, where technological advances merely produce more people and living standards are driven down to subsistence. But modern medicine has reduced the material minimum required for subsistence to a level far below that of the Stone Age."

Clark also argues that:

>"Indeed in 1800 the bulk of the world’s population was poorer than their remote ancestors. The lucky denizens of wealthy societies such as eighteenth-century England or the Netherlands managed a material lifestyle equivalent to that of the Stone Age. But the vast swath of humanity in East and South Asia, particularly in China and Japan, eked out a living under conditions probably significantly poorer than those of cavemen.
The quality of life also failed to improve on any other observable dimension. Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: thirty to thirty-five years. Stature, a measure both of the quality of diet and of children’s exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800. And while foragers satisfy their material wants with small amounts of work, the modest comforts of the English in 1800 were purchased only through a life of unrelenting drudgery. Nor did the variety of material consumption improve. The average forager had a diet, and a work life, much more varied than the typical English worker of 1800, even though the English table by then included such exotics as tea, pepper, and sugar"

A lot of present arguments seem to center on the shape and AUC of the progress curve, and whether that has any implications for predictions based on historical data.
Against small companies with almost no footprint in EU maybe. But against huge multinational corporations that want access to the 500m+ people market they sure can.
Very interested in it for GDScript's alleged Python-ness.

Can anyone comment on how seamless the transition from Python to GDScript will be? And how performant is GDScript?

It's a shame Unity dropped Boo but I think it was due to lack of interest as much as lack of support. There is no much code in a game (or "game-like thing" - I'm more interested in VR experiences etc) that doesn't need to be performant that two levels of code access is desirable. A fast language and a nice language...

I'm warming to C# but that's probably more down to Stockholm Syndrome than any innate pleasure in using the language. When I switch back to Python I feel all warm and fuzzy again.
If I'm a US company, with a non-GDPR compliant website, and a visitor from the EU visits my site, under what jurisdiction does the EU have to reprimand me? Or will my site just be blocked in the EU?
No, you're confused. Google has a physical presence and business partners in Europe; I do not. (Profiting from EU citizens is beside the point.)
The Sapiens author would have been around 34 years old at the time his book was published.
Good point about regulation. I am from Norway but have lived in the US. My impression is that regulation and bureachracy tends to be overly complicated in the US, while usually much simpler in Norway.

This happens despite Norwegians generally being positive to government and regulations while Americans seem knee-jerk anti anything government.

To get simple and good regulation I think you need an effective government and a belief in government. In Norway you can enact large and broad reforms and regulations, while in the US everything seems peacemeal.

Take welfare or healthcare. The US has a huge patchwork of small programs and minor regulations. This is due in part because of a reluctance towards broad but simple government programs like single payer.

A government can set standards for data exchange and bills e.g. which is why prescription can be sent from my doctor electronically to all pharmacies in Norway.
A cyclone destroyed quite lot of banana plantations in Queensland, which caused banana prices to shoot up to $12/kg
No I would not.
I have to say that this blog has become one of my favorite. It's a great way to stay up-to-date with advancements in the field or to know about interesting things from the past.

If you ever read this Adrian, please don't stop!
StyleCI launches automatic code standards for JS, Typescript, CSS and Vue.js
Sorry, wrong example.

When I take a plane to some country I will follow their rules, protocols, yes.

But imagine, I had a museum that can be accessed world wide, instantly and some guy from a specific country/region had a problem with one of my showcases in the museum, do you expect me to alter my museum for this guy and his groupies so they'll be happy?
Chemotherapy, a Trusty Weapon Against Cancer, Falls Out of Favor
I'm doing some regeneration work on a property in an occasionally semi-arid, very harsh region, with a combination of dry sclerophyll & cypress forest that are generally allelopathic.

This is in Eastern Australia, where we have native wombats, macropods, possums, as well as wild/feral pigs, goats, rabbits, and the occasional deer, along with parrots and fruit fly that tend to destroy fruit with potentially viable seed. But at least we don't have moose, I guess.

Fencing off an area to stop the ground-based pests has impressive observable results even after a couple of years - but it's very expensive, and fences decay within the lifetime of many of the pioneer trees.

So de jure reforestation, while a nice principle, isn't feasible in all environments.

Further complication in many areas desperately in need of reforestation is periodic drought -- Australia and the Americas have the famous El Niño / La Niña cycles to contend with, where we regularly have several consecutive years with minimal (or at best unreliable) rainfall. Again, this is an excellent candidate for a very cheap mass seed distribution system that can simply be re-run each spring until a favourable rainfall pattern produces a good result.
It’s also comparatively expensive compared to other platforms (you can get a full human genome sequenced at high coverage for between 1000 and 3000 USD).

The error rate is stupidly high (somewhere between 10 and 20%) compared to Illumina or Ion Torrent who give error rates far less than 1%.

It can give very long reads, which are useful in some niche applications. But it’s been massively over-hyped (and over capitalized).

The neat thing is that it’s very small. But that isn’t really compelling given the very low accuracy.
Exactly, that's the distinction.
Microservices are never deleted. They are only abandoned and left to rot after the initial developers move on to their second system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect). Then you have apps that are stuck in migration purgatory, where they haven't fully switched over to the new microservice because the business doesn't want to spend that effort, but they do want developers to focus on using the new microservice and new API for new app work. The hope is that app will eventually be 100% on the new microservice, but after 3 years you start to realize that is never happening and by that time the company has an entirely new staff working on a much newer microservice that promises to fix all the problems with the prior microservice.

That microservice kool-aid is strong and deadly.

> replace it with something that conforms to the same interface

ha. hahaha. Oh my. I'm in the process of switching over a REST service to a GraphQL service. Because apparently people wanted all the pain of SOAP, but "could I get that in a JSON flavor, please?" Five years from now, REST will be making a comeback under a different name. You heard it here first.
Mobile App Success Story: Pandora Music
Isalnum() is not my friend
The article doesn’t mention the trust that owns The Guardian, now a limited company, which is quite interesting because it was set up to own The Guardian for purely philanthropic reasons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust_Limited
from what i catched talking to our lawyer, there are other levels of consent than explicit by the user explicit consent that might be revoked, in this case.

1. concerns of security and quality of service (gathering logs with full ip addresses is allowed for a reasonable time, a few days for example).

2. you don't need to delete the logs if you use them for this specific purpose only.

3. for analytical purpose it is enough to use pseudonomic identifiers, in case of ip address zero out the last part and you are fine.

4. using Piwik or your own cookies? Suddenly its not a third party cookie anymore and you are more free to do things.

The problems for operators begin when they are handing this over to a third party.
How to create a VR shopping experience for your e-commerce site
John Cena in multiple languages
Because they are competitors?

But hey there is https://blendle.com I think it works pretty well