skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked on a Scala system with two rookie Scala programmers who had been taught that `for` expressions were a simple and easy way of composing futures, because it was the monadic way. The code looked very neat, but we had an epidemic of swallowed Failures, and the ones that weren't swallowed were often interpreted incorrectly. (For example, a 500 from service A would be logged as a 500 from service B, because someone miscalculated how the Futures and Trys were being composed.) This was due to people not understanding the for expressions they were writing. Rather, I seemed to be the only one trying to understand the `for` expressions: I often had to mentally (or even manually) translate them into flatmaps and maps according to the language spec to discover that they were not doing what the person who wrote them intended. The other programmers, who had been promised that `for` expressions were obvious and self-explanatory, felt that this should be unnecessary, and that if they were making mistakes, then Scala was failing to live up to its billing, and we should stop using it. It was extremely frustrating. I love Scala, and I feel that promoting `for` expressions to beginners like that was ideologically motivated and bad for the language.

It's much easier to just use map and flatMap. But that won't do, because the virtue of monads is supposedly the abstractions built on top of them.
Fantas, Eel, and Specification
Actually, it's debatable on whether VB6 is "dead". Certainly not sold any longer, but Microsoft keeps including the runtime DLLs in Windows; they still exist in Windows 10.

The main reason is the sheer amount of software out there that businesses rely on to run their business, which they might not even have the source code to. Those that do have the code do hire people to maintain and extend the applications (shades of COBOL there).

It wouldn't surprise me to find out that new VB6 applications are being created - lots of people love it and loved using it (though I personally preferred VB5, because the compiler was separate from the rest of the system and could be used at the command line). VB.NET was widely viewed as a travesty to the language; some moved to C#.

What is strange is how few of these programmers seem to be aware of Gambas (and similar "VB-like" languages). I moved away from Windows at home in 1995 and move on to Linux; over time I became aware of other BASIC programming languages, but I moved away from BASIC as well, though it will always hold a place in my heart, since that's what I started out with.
My thoughts exactly.

After living in cities all my life, I moved to a small farm about a dozen years ago. I still keep track of what's going on nationally and internationally, but I've found that it simply doesn't affect me as much as it did when I lived in a city. I stress out a lot less.

Rural people think Trump's as much of an idiot as urban folk do: it's just that the media think we all love him.
Keep at it and evaluate every few weeks if you feel ready to throw yourself into the arena and take some interviews. You may never feel ready due to the sheer amount of languages and knowledge you think you'll be checked on, that means you need to narrow your focus and specialize in a popular stack that you personally enjoy working with to get your foot in the door.

It is absolutely reachable. A personal path for reference:

2012: Graduated college with a non-comp sci degree (although had tinkered with tech, software, linux, etc since a teen)

2012-2013: Took comp sci MOOCs.. Obsessively learned python and built throwaway projects. Took code challenges weekly.

2013-2015: Got a job as a manual test analyst. Used python to automate testing, got promoted to test lead.

2015-2017: Took a job as Lead QA Engineer. Learned C# for the job. On the side picked up React and Django/DRF for building out SPA/microservices. Began getting serious about clean projects on github and kind of branding myself as a developer (personal landing page, etc). I couldn't keep recruiters off me from my linkedin, stackoverflow and github profiles. Was like ok.. I'm ready... it's time.

2017 (mid): Studied the hell out of algorithms and data structures. Did tons of whiteboarding practice and began taking interviews. Signed up for some tech recruiting apps like hired and opened the recruiter floodgate. I had 2-3 phone interviews a day for 3 weeks. Then a few in persons per week. Not one whiteboard session. Some would send code challenges. The rest asked if I could send them a github project that we'd review during the interview.

2017 (mid)-Present: Now a Software Engineer at an established startup working with brilliant peers and some of my favorite stack.. A massive kubernetes cluster built on Python, Go, React, and ElasticSearch services.

So from 2012-2017 there were many points where I doubted I'd land that dream... and then boom! As soon as I got the balls to throw myself into some interviews for the position I wanted I found it and now I no longer feel like I have to grind away every evening to stay sharp since my job is doing that for me now.
apples quality and design have gone considerably downhill since the decision to get rid of the mac pro and their boner to try to be more like microsoft and stick with flat design. snow leopard was the perfect os RIP
Ask HN: Which are some OS projects known for the quality of their code?
If I were to look at some Open Source projects because I wanted to know how quality JavaScript or Ruby looks like, where would I look? Which ones do you know?
In physics, local violation of conservation of energy due to quantum effects is pretty established by now. Unfortunately, these effects don't scale, that is, in larger scale conservation of energy does hold. So alas, you can't use these effects to make a power generator.
Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
Practicality generally refers to usefulness in fulfilling a larger goal. A moon space station should either be cool in itself, or it should be a practical stepping stone on the way to something cooler. To many people it just seems like a cop out mission, that will use up the budget, short of efficiently working toward something really cool, like human space exploration beyond Earth.
In this case, the subscription service doesn't allow for local vaults. You need to be using the 1Password hosted cloud service to store your passwords. For most of us that is a nonstarter.
Schneier agrees, almost word for word.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/11/the_problem_w...
Visual Studio has VB.NET - which is barely recognizable as VB for those of us who used VB6 or earlier back in the day (I started with VB3 on Windows 3.1).
Well, I use houdini, that's my solution =)

In hou it's really fun and flexible, and most of the repetitive stuff can be automated away. There's almost always a new cool challenge to solve, a creative improvement to be made.

Having said that, there's hardly a part of CG art that doesn't get tedious at times. Modeling, UVs, texturing, animation, rendering... It all has it's repetitive boring moments.

Look at it like at knitting, or putting together a giant puzzle, or playing minecraft. There are moments where you gotta think and be creative, and then there are moments where you can just enjoy the meditative, comforting, familiar process. It can be fun in it's own way.

Also, if things get really boring, you can always listen to music, audiobooks, or your favorite sitcom in the background =)
How to Export Raw Mixpanel Data to Your Database
This is glorious. Thank you.
I cut my programming teeth in BBC Basic, which was a much better language than that found on many other 8-bit micros of the time. No silly 2-character variable names limit (IIRC it respected up to 40 characters), proper named procedures and functions so you could program with some structure (some 9-bits BASICs' had little more than GOTO <line> and GOSUB <line>, with BBC Basic and very little jiggery-pokery you could program without line numbers at all), and a built-in multi-pass assembler (which I played with for various tricks like sprites and a bit of playing with integer fractal calculations for trippy graphics).

I used QuickBasic later (QBasic was essentially QuickBasic without the compiler and a few other features cut out) and many other things since.
I‘m torn about this. I really wish there was a renaissance of the blog or even better, the niche website [1].

I don‘t believe this will happen. The effort to write a high quality article is the same whether you post it on your own small b blog or on Medium. So why not opt for the larger audience if it has so few disadvantages.

There was a little window in time when there were no gatekeepers and the technical savy could reach a large and quickly growing audience. But this is over and the gatekeepers will never go away again.

[1] Like the Juggling Information Service. How many hours did I spend on this site? I don’t know, but fun times...
Right is the right result and Left is the wrong result. That's about as easy it gets when it comes to remembering things. There is already a strong convention for using Either for this purpose and it's built into the standard library, since the Monad instance is designed to allow you to do this.

If you create your own data type for this, you are designing yourself into the Monad transformer hell you mention in another comment.
And there are lots of other key factors within our eating habits.

Why this isn't the focus, and instead people receive insulin, escapes my grasp.
Does anyone have information about this? What is happening at this event?
This is also very interesting and related: https://psyarxiv.com/387h9
also, https://youtu.be/3spnGnavWFg
In the grand scheme of things, 100,000 deaths is a non-event for a government representing over 300,000,000 constituents. Almost 6 times that many people die from both cancer and heart disease each year. Where it becomes a problem for governments is when there's bad PR. They focus their attention on terrorism because it commands the national attention, not because it's a significant threat. While the abuse of opioids is no doubt a problem, it's getting government attention now because of media scrutiny, not because it absolutely needs to be solved by government.

Humans are terrible at estimating risk. We seem to do it by attributing it to the ease which we can recall an incidence of something similar happening. This may have worked well when we were part of small tribes, but it's terribly adapted to a world where every unusual, capricious event is is broadcast nationally and the mundane, common dangers receive very little media attention.

You can see this with the current debate over guns. Now I favor the liberal position of drastically increasing gun control, but only around 11,000 people are murdered with guns each year and another 22,000 or so kill themselves. That's around a 1/30,000 chance of being the victim of gun violence. Those deaths may be largely unnecessary, but we should still have the perspective to realize that they're not a significant threat to our health.
They are not always equivalent. But in the case of China, changing from the current state to some new form of government carries a high risk of a prolonged chaos, which would destroy safety and prosperity for most families.

Russia risked that chaos, but it had little choice: the USSR was a complete economic disaster. If China today was as bad economically as the USSR in 1985, a big part of my argument would disappear.

In some limited sense, I might even say that the Chinese economy today with the old regime is more promising than the Russian economy today after all the changes. And even if I'm wrong on that, still the Chinese economy is at least decent. So the people in China have a lot more to lose from chaos than the people in the USSR did.

Another thing. You're saying Russia is in a better state today than 30 years ago. Yes, but Russia is governed by a strongman, who doesn't allow much political dissent. Are you sure that without him Russia wouldn't be in chaos?

And if you think that what is going on in Russia is an acceptable compromise, then why would you be uncomfortable with the Chinese government? The difference is not that great.

By the way, authoritarian governments had been around for millennia before fascism was even a thing. I don't see why you would equate the two.
Definitely not a good source of net worth data, but I think it might actually be skewed for the opposite reason.

Most of the student loan refinancing options are targeted at low risk borrowers who can qualify for a lower interest rate. Generally the people who are in financial trouble won't be refinancing because the rates set by the government (which don't take individual credit risk into account) are already lower than they could qualify for.

The refinanced loans also don't qualify for income based repayment like federal student loans do, which is the last thing that people in financial trouble would want to give up.
It looks neat and all, but I'm not sure why I should use this over Kubernetes internal Dashboard?
BTW - Microsoft will likely never open source VB, because it used and incorporated a ton of 3rd party stuff (pretty much all the VB versions did) - it's a licensing nightmare. The best they have done has been to keep the VB6 runtime DLLs available and installed (they're there on Windows 10).
I am not saying that college is magical place where everyone has guaranteed success.

The parent argues that college grads made "poor investment" because "only 27% of college grads in America work in a job closely related to their degree, and 'The chances of finding a job related to your degree or major go up a few points if you move to a big city'."

That is ridiculous argument. That group of people is doing better then anyone else, whether they work in field they studied or not. There are many jobs that require you to have some college degree or related college degree and people without degrees wont get them.

If parent wants to prove that some people would be even better off without going to school, he should give us more (e.g. prove that these would be even better off if they did not went) or pick different group of people.

Otherwise it is just the usual misleading talking point based on wishful thinking and bias.
> Macro expansion can place a literal or generated lambda expression there instead of using FUNCALL at all.

Not quite. This, for example, does not work:

(defmacro foo () '(lambda (x) x))

((foo) 1)

A macro can expand into a form whose CAR is a literal lambda expression, but because there is always an equivalent LET form I can't think of a circumstance where this can do anything but obfuscate the code.

Personally, I think this is a flaw in the design of CL. Long ago I proposed an extension that would allow the CAR of a form to be a macro:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/lisp/combination-hook.lisp

I think it's cool for pedagogy because it lets you do things like directly define the Y combinator in CL without a ton of FUNCALLs. But it never caught on.
Sometimes the phone call is a hassle, but not evil. People don’t always understand the impact on their data and talking can help.

Other companies make that a black hole as well. Back in the day Vonage would put you on hold for >30 minutes. I ended up cancelling via AMEX disputed.
QB64 basically is.

From the article you can do everything Qbasic could, but also load PNGs (_LOADIMAGE), fonts (_LOADFONT) and MP3s (_SNDOPEN).
my friends and I send BTC, LTC, ETH to each other instead of paypal, bank transfer, or cash

typically one of us pays the bill with a credit card and the others send him crypto to settle. same with selling electronics to each other and paying rent.
PetSmart sort of does this
The contractors who build our rockets our the same ones who build [our] war machine. These projects have been, all the way back to Kennedy, about keeping the military industrial complex in business.

Another route to go is not incompatible with SpaceX’s mission (I’m not suggesting Musk will save us, just that he’s not as wrong as the feds).

Use space flight to prop up the industrial complex instead. We have converted that to military in times of war before. We can do it again if we need to. Stop indulging in war fantasies and get to the belts. Learn if it’s possible to refine materials in low g. Start building things. Destinations.
{18} – Apple Thinks Gaming, Vision Esports $38M,& Discord versus Twitch
Forth SoC written in VHDL
Indeed. Antipiratbyrån (The Anti-Piracy Bureau) was a lobby organization representing copyright holders in films and computer games until 2011. They surveilled people, breaching privacy laws but got exempted in court because it was done for a good cause. Infiltrated a Swedish ISP, tracked down filesharers online and took them to court and influenced the political debate a lot.

I don't have any illusion of lobbying and diplomatic pressure having lessened since.
while that quote is interesting, it also posits progressivism as the culprit, and by allusion, points to conservatism as the solution, but that’s plainly wrong.

it must be taken as a given that change (i.e., progress) will happen. you can thank the 2nd law of thermodynamics for that. so then the perspective must shift from “can we keep the world the same as we imagine it to have been in the past (while ignoring all the bad parts and negative consequences)?” to “how do we deal with a changing world, adapt to it, and focus our efforts toward positive change?” we just don’t get to sit still. life only happens in the gap between order and chaos.

the quote i prefer is

“The oxytocin we experience from love or friendship or orgasm is chemically replicated by the molecules derived from the poppy plant. It’s a shortcut — and an instant intensification — of the happiness we might ordinarily experience in a good and fruitful communal life. It ends not just physical pain but psychological, emotional, even existential pain.”

this articulates a mechanism by which opioid addiction lodges itself in the failed corners of society. so how do we fix that? it’s not by considering addicts criminals. the “war on drugs” experiment has proven that doesn’t work. instead, we need to accept the social responsibility of creating “losers” in the first place. we need to progress to the next level of societal structure that redirects folks back into meaningful and purposeful lives.

i think the stage might be set to move to a kind of globally-aware localism. that is, having people focus on their microcommunities (the 5-10 block radius around where we live in cities, a bit bigger in less dense areas). how do we organize homes, schools, businesses, offices, services, etc. in ways that reinforce our ties to each other rather than two-dimensional celebrities and fantasies of far-off wealth and fame that make you feel like you’re losing? but also use technology to learn from those far-flung places to improve your own lives locally. you only need a few people around you appreciating your efforts to get plenty of oxytocin to forget about the hard opioids.
Digital resistance is deletion
In theory, perhaps- in practice it's not feasible. I was having a similar conversation today with my thesis supervisor and he quoted something Turing had said in his original machine intelligence paper, that "There's not enough information in data to learn from nothing". This was in the context of machine learning, because Turing was wondering about the best way to create a learning machine. I think the bottom line is that he didn't think you could do it without some background knowledge, of some sort.

Edit: I haven't read Turing's paper recently and I might be misquoting him, but I do think that was his general intuition, that you can't just learn the world by observing the world.
The Worlds of Ultima
seems to be about some new dating site for Spanish geologists
Ah, didn't catch that. Thanks!
It won't. If any of the functions on the right-hand side of the '<-' return Nothing, then the later lines do nothing. Think of the '<-' operator as a 'flatMap' call for Optionals in Java, if you are more familiar with that.

This particular syntax for chaining together monads is called 'do notation', and is just syntax sugar for calling the bind function (flatMap in Java) manually.
What if you rent a 2000 sqft apartment and don’t renew your lease because of price. You decide to move to a smaller apartment with cheaper rent or move back in with your parents where rents free. Can you keep your stuff in the original apartment?

I don’t disagree with you but your analogy is flawed. At least Dropbox keeps your stuff to reclaim whereas a landlord would kindly shuffle it to the garbage while cleaning your old apartment.

That nag screen is a nice way of sayig we’re still paying for your hard drive space.
Using GitHub issues to power notifications in this way is absolutely inspired!

You get single-sign-in for anyone with a GitHub account.

You get both email AND push-based notifications without needing to run ANY of the infrastructure yourself.

Your scrapers get to run in their own time and publish via a very well-documented and easy to use API.

I'm totally sticking this idea in my back-pocket. It's brilliant.
Juggling Information Service (1997)
In that example I put the form on the '/' route. Here is a GitHub repo with the code:

https://github.com/thinkxl/hn-bottle-example

And here is a gif showing how it works:

https://dsh.re/364b2

Edit: Words.
If you want a closer analogy, we don’t require grocery stores to tolerate shoplifters; we have food stamps and soup kitchens.
I've been using the Amazon "subscribe and save" to get Blue Buffalo dog and cat food for a while. A subscription model seems solid, especially as I can't get Blue Buffalo in the grocery store so I have to make a special trip for it. But, maybe with this deal it'll get into more grocery stores?
Heck... you could probably even feed a person in a lot of parts of the world. Feed your dog well and end hunger!
The elegance of this solution IMO comes to this:

- you mastered the art of reading math papers, love seeing f: XxYxZ -> D notations and enjoy (partially) composing functions in papers you write. You are on academic track for PhD or higher. It's your natural habitat; ideas are always more important than current mediocre reality; real-world is just a side effect. You are going to love monads. You'd treat monad transformer hell or other warts as necessary and unproblematic.

- you went into programming by observing real-world, how each action modifies environment and how interactions affect each other. You saw a great analogy to those when you started with your first language such as Python/Basic/Java/Pascal/etc. Then you started to optimize runtime more and more and now can't write a line of code without addressing all kinds of performance and consistency issues. You are likely going to hate monads if you ever manage to understand them.
because most of these systems also support non-Unixy target systems
sqlite> select substr(hash,1, 5) as hashbeg, count(*) as count from pwned group by hashbeg;
# put result into hashcount table
sqlite> select avg(count) from hashcount;
478.397716142925
sqlite> select min(count) from hashcount;
381

So, I'm not sure I agree with you, if on avg almost 500 records are returned given the first 5 chars of the SHA1 hash across the 1/2 billion records.

But I do agree it helps with cracking the passwords, but seeing as how all of these passwords are BAD and are known to have leaked... cracking them again isn't the use-case, the bad people likely already have all these passwords in plain text.
Society splitting into haves and have nots due to technology, globalization, and a myriad of other things most definitely changes social cohesion. That's just one example, when (if?)people finally start paying attention there will be many more obvious effects.