skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have any numbers, but I'm inclined to claim that in any reasonably large economy there's tons of software engineering (or maybe programmer) jobs where you will never touch anything "latest" :)

In Germany there are quite some developers whose English is very basic (very often older than 40 or 50) and especially those who grew up in the East (some or most had Russian in school and not English). I mean, usually it's not -zero- but really basic on a reading level, even less writing. I'm not in any way saying they're bad at what they do - if you work in some fields you can absolutely get by just sticking to German variable names (or guesswork English) and those 50 keywords of your language aren't usually a problem. For looking stuff up online there's google translate.

On the other hand I would not -advise- against trying to be the best at English that you can, because if you happen to need to read some complicated stuff like advanced books or papers.. Let's just say I wouldn't look forward to reading even anything medium-level in another language where I only have basic proficiency...

Fun fact: I've actually seen one codebase where all the domain knowledge was German and everything "normal" was English - and it was the right thing to do. Was an application for a bank and they had a technical Glossary with obscure financial technical terms where a) the meaning might get lost in the translation and b) not even the domain experts would know them off the back of the hand. Also the chance you'll have international people working on this intra-country level stuff was deemed very slim. Not sure if the bank got bought by an int'l one later though :P
Google “Thomson Reuters Blockchain” to find out why
No, knowing English is not required to be a software engineer. There are millions of software engineers around the world, a large percentage of which do not know english. Virtually all modern languages and tools support UTF-8 which can encode almost all symbols of all languages.
I always really admired Orwell's style as a political journalist and writer. He writes clearly and gets to the point. He doesn't hide in flowery ambiguity, like most journalists do when writing about "isms."

Here specifically, I don't think he's clear and timeless.

This is an essay about British politics of the time, for the British. Nationalism meant the bad guys from the war, which was just ending. Orwell is warning against fanatical politics likes those of the 1930s. Besides the war, the British Empire was ending. Orwell is warning the British about paranoid, nationalist politics the loss of empire was stirring up.

He is being delicate with his labels to avoid just calling his readers fanatics^. I think this leaves us with something less timeless.

Anyway.... First, he splits hairs to define nationalism separately from patriotism, the safer & less violent flavour of nation-centric "ism". Then he extends his definition of "nationalism" to include also... "such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism."

So, wtf does Orwell mean when he says "nationalism". It's not like patriotism, but is like Trotskyism? I think he just means fanatics. Ideologists that care more about winning arguments and wars then morals & greater goods supposedly furthered by ideologies.

That is relevant today. I think this essay would have been gone on to the top shelf of timeless political writing if Orwell had pretended to write for the French about the British, instead of "anticipating the troll" and mincing his words in response. Name the thing.

^Orwell's essay on Gandhi is written for Brits too. He doesn't hold back pointing out the fanaticism of Gandhi. This makes his positive points about Gandhi's nonviolent political methods clearer and more honest, having already named the superstitious elements what they were.
Making European Venture Capital a Little More Human
Or maybe these were the best songs
> the penalties associated with RAII and

.... there are 0 penalties associated with RAII.

struct my_interrupt {
my_interrupt() { vendor_specific_horrible_stuff(0x237ABC); }
~my_interrupt() { if(whatever) vendor_specific_horrible_stuff(0x237BAC); }
};

void f() {
my_interrupt is_enabled;
// do stuff
}

will translate to exactly the same assembly than

void f() {
vendor_specific_horrible_stuff(0x237ABC);
// do stuff
if(whatever) vendor_specific_horrible_stuff(0x237BAC);
}
Capability and performance are distinct, IMO. Capability is what one can do, performance is what one does do. We train to achieve as much as we are capable of but are bound by our natural limits.
I don’t know if this is classic Gruber. I’ve read a lot of his stuff and it’s always been interesting. Now I haven’t followed him closely either, so maybe I’ve only seen the good stuff, but this is the first time I’ve come away from it thinking he was an idiot.
Large as in lines of code and number of authors. Not how many people it serves - why would that matter?

Something like 10k lines of code or three authors seems to be about the limit where dynamic typing becomes really painful.
Haha OK then use a UNION... oh wait we're gonna have NULLs with that too. One suspects you'll also have some vague objection to this point, but if the only way to address that is to wait on somebody to invent an "improved" SQL, one won't worry about it too much.
Well, when you type "If, for, foreach, switch, GoTo, Resume, Continue, Break..." you are already using English so I would say that if you are able to code, then you are capable of at least, understand a basic level of English (which translates into English being a requirement to even start to code).
Ethernet cables come to mind. The bit that makes it clip in, is definitely on the cable.
They don't have to be effective on you, if they are effective on even a small percent, it might be worth it.

We hear this every time there's a new public safety campaign: Drunk driving, seat belts, texting and driving, safe sex, stop smoking, gun safety, etc

Every single time, the cry is "but but, this won't solve all the problems, it won't work on everyone." But we have reduced drunk driving deaths, we have reduced highway deaths with mandatory seat belts and airbags, we have lowered the spread of STDs.

Sure, you can give people a label listing calories and tell them to eat healthy and many won't. But an increasing percentage of people are becoming more aware, and awareness is really the first step.

There's way too much cynicism, and way too much, I dunno, either alpha-male macho behavior that chafes at being told to eat your Brussels Sprouts, but being nudged by your phone to stop using it once in a while isn't a bad idea.

Something has to break people out of their skinner box once in a while, besides hunger or bankruptcy.
And what's worse, for every dollar you spend on electricity for CPU-mining, you (or, in this case, someone else) receive 5 cents worth of cryptocurrency.
Assholes, SRE, Container and Kubernetes Security, Ansible for Windows, and More
Pretty much the same.

I'm a programmer at a manufacturing company and our offices all have (well we actually have two) canteens attached, Microwave, 4 rack toasters and a paninni maker.

Coffee/Tea/Water are available from a machine (you just put your token in and select what you want).

We don't have Sofa's but everything else we do have, I have a whiteboard behind my desk (though that is because what was a meeting room is now just my office).

Boss understands that staff comfort is important.
I mean, Gruber is literally accusing Sundar Pichai of lying on stage: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/995538518016487425

I usually like what Gruber has to say about Apple, but this fanboyism is off the charts even for him.
boost::optional has been available since 2003. There's no excuse.
It's the transfer time and fees between non SEPA countries that's cheaper and much faster. And that includes fiat->BTC->fiat commissions and tx fees.
How about an option where a parent controls during what times the phone has a data connection?
There were really was a belief among orthodox Western Communists that the Soviet Union was the future and that Stalin was a great man. They often became Rusophiles who learned Russian and went on trips to the Soviet Union where they were given carefully controlled tours which made the place seem like Utopia. That was different from just a belief in Communism -- as Orwell notes, there certainly were the Trotskyists, who believed that Lenin's revolution in the USSR had been betrayed by Stalin, but they had their own parties and organizations (and weren't that numerous).
Copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston's newly published first book
Ugh, I worked in a code base that had a lot of Cyrillic characters and the code base got moved to our (English language) team. It was difficult to work out what was going on and with a lot of Google translate we ended up with an English code base. Another interesting thing that happened once was that a German team had a comment with an umlaut in it that would crash certain code/text editors. It took them a long time to figure out what was happening.
Any explanations of why doing this to scotch tape releases such energetic particles? (ok, THz not so much, but x-rays are energetic)
(1) The usual argument against below-market housing here isn't "screw the poor". It's "this is an ineffective show at a fix for a problem that the market would resolve if we could build to the higher density that current zoning prohibits".

(2) Even if you have only market-rate housing, that doesn't mean the people who can't afford it end up homeless. You can just give them or their landlords money. In the USA, that's Section 8.

Economists generally like Section 8. It gets a bad reputation, because the apartments tend to be shabby; but that's a question of the amount of the subsidy, not the delivery mechanism. For a given total to spend, I'd rather put two people in a run-down $1.5k apartment each than flip a coin, put one of them in a $3k apartment, and leave the other on the street.
Corporation's are made of people and people don't only have the direct interests of the company in mind.

I don't understand the commenters responding negativepy to these proposals; by all means be circumspect, but don't criticize a company for making a positive change just because you think it doesn't go far enough.
I am curious... has anyone ever tried to convince git to fix the defaults?

Of course there's a little more than just this wrong with submodules but it seems like given how much hate they get, that someone would be interested in actually fixing them
If you want to be this pedantic over it, it's that they oppose every piece of government regulation, regardless of merits, so basically everything the government does that isn't unchecked capitalism.
Hyperloop as presented is a good idea, but perhaps not great idea.

High vacuums are expencive to maintain and take longer to achieve after a leak, but would allow for faster speeds. They also force maglev or something like it to achieve those speeds which is expensive. It also forces you to carry an indecent air supply, and cooling becomes a significant issue.

At STP you just have a normal train which is limited to a few hundred miles an hour.

Between those extremes you need to deal with some air but you can compress it for passengers. Further, you can quickly pump down the air pressure using fewer pumps. You can fly / use ground effect avoiding the mag lev issues.

Heat is really the largest issue, compressing air heats it as does friction, and your passengers / equipment also generate heat. So, you would want the air kept at very low temperates.

Why not just use nag lev? You get faster speeds and as strange as it sounds lower cost per mile of track.

TLDR; Lots of useful trade offs.
Anyone interested in using a big integer library, but unwilling to subject themselves to GMP's viral licence, check out LibTomMath (no affiliation): https://www.libtom.net/
Yep beyond steam as most people know it there is dry steam/superheated steam (in the hundreds if not thousands of Celsius).

A principle that's been used in steam engines for at least a century.

It's horribly dangerous stuff to work with as well, it'll flay flesh straight off the bone.
Not only in a startup. I don't remember where I read it but it was "Every time you add a single person to the team, it's not the same team anymore" and I think it sums it up perfectly.
Probably also true for people leaving, but maybe a bit less
You're not alone in doing that, though it'll be interesting to see how these boys perform when given these sort of succinct prompts and instructions, given the Google example was trained on real conversations - you may find they perform worse compared to 'natural' speech
> silly to argue they don’t have a meaningful geographic origin

I'm not arguing that, nor am I arguing that one shouldn't take pride in one's culture.

> Cultures are a real thing, usually tied to real places and real people. Pretending otherwise is approbation

That is a new definition of appropriation. For example, the "walk like an Egyptian" dance is now considered cultural appropriation, yet it explicitly says it is Egyptian.

It's just absurd.
> Why not demo it live? Why only play recordings?

Because consent.
I suspect that there is quite a large variation between people, but it has not really been studied because it is almost impossible to get funding to study differences that don't cause a problem to an individual. It is a shame because I find this topic fascinating.

I have a pet theory that more visual thinking is something that has come in from our Neanderthal ancestors. We know they had a brain more specialised around visual processing, but very little beyond this. It is almost certain that some people today think in a similar way to Neanderthals given how much of the Neanderthal genome is still present in the human population, but who they are and what they think like is unknown.
How can someone take something they've never heard of seriously? Have you heard and evaluated all musical styles from all cultures? I'm sure nobody has - do you regard that as a real problem?
Orwell is being obtuse when he says "nationalism."

What he meant is some flavour of what we'd call "ideologist" today, whether or not the ideology has much to do with nations or nation states. Communism was a major political movement all over europe (and the world) at the time. Most labour movements considered themselves communists.

Anglo-American liberalism was the biggest ideological faction, but Orwell doesn't seem to count that as "Nationalism." After that, communism probably was the biggest faction in universities in 1945.
So, people don't always pay attention to what they're reading?... strftime(3) says[0]:

"This has the same format and value as %Y, except that if the ISO week number belongs to the previous or next year, that year is used instead. (TZ (Calculated from tm_year, tm_yday, and tm_wday.)"

[0]: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/strftime.3.html
"The Smalltalk font in the screenshots is Cream by Bob Flegal, based on a design by Alan Kay"

Alan Kay: "Actually, Bob Flegal's challenge was to somehow make a script font that kind of looked slanted but was actually straight up. I though he succeeded really well with this design." (http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2004-...)

It was also the first system font used on the original Mac! (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...)
Right. I've played in bands and produced a couple of records, and while I used to write score for programming music into a sequencer app, I've never used it to communicate with any musician I've worked with. At most you write down the the chords to a song. Outside of Jazz and Classical it appears that everyone is playing by ear.
I had a kid a year ago, and another one three years ago. Both had this test.

Their mom probably wouldn't remember if you asked her. She's not really a good person to ask. You should be asking the partner who was there for the birth, since we're the one that actually sees it happen (they were still stitching up my wife when the test was done).

For the second kid (because I was just in a daze for the first kid), being the paranoid security person that I am, I asked what happens to the sample and what kind of controls are placed on the sample. I also asked if I could opt out. I was told that I could not opt out and that the sample becomes the property of the State and there is nothing I could do about it.

This article was the first I learned that I could request it be destroyed. It is also the first time I'm learning it could be used for research (but I kind of assumed that was why they kept it in the first place, other than to add to a database for matching with potential criminal activity).

So thanks for posting this, now I have to figure out how to request the samples. I'm going to see if I can actually the spots back.
I repeat:

How about your own claim?

You can start with yourself, which should be much easier since if you want to ask the person something you just have to do it in your head.

If you were even an iota as critical about your own content-free mutterings you could make the world a better place. Seriously.
I am not saying there is a better alternative out there, yet. but once it appears, it might be too late for apple.
The reason why it is so little studied is it is very hard (near impossible) to get funding to study the difference between people unless these differences cause a problem to the person. No professional scientist can afford to work on questions that can't get funding so whole areas of really interesting research are neglected.
As a non-native speaker I would say it is absolutely necessary. You can get through university without it and you can probably get a job in your country without it but you really shouldn't. Never ever write code in non-English. I hate it when programming is tough with localized variable names etc.
Just imagine a coworker from another country being stuck with your codebase with all non-English words in it...it's a nightmare.

Also the best tutorials, books etc. are in English and the most new content is released in English as well. Going a step further if you are interested in NLP it's very likely that more interesting datasets will be available in English. State of the art academic research (new algorithms etc.) will also very likely be published in English.
I can't wait for automated phone spam to be weaponized so that we can receive verbal Turing tests when we call the customer service hotline.
I don't see what your reply has to do with anything I wrote.
Another example would be Led Zeppelin being inspired by blues artists on another continent. That fits the definition of "cultural appropriation", but do you seriously want to denounce Zep for that? Music is so rich and diverse and beautiful and ever-changing because of copying/blending styles from other cultures and genres.

(Those blues artists would be long forgotten if not for Zep, the Stones, Eric Clapton, and others copying/blending it.)
> C++ in embedded. Lord god no, if you want to do that use rust instead. Or embedded python or lua, anything but C++.

First Rust needs to reach C++'s tooling maturity on embedded space.

When there is High Integrity Rust certification, compiler backends for all major CPUs, SDK support on OSes like INTEGRITY or Mbed, UI embedded tooling for IoT displays, maybe we can start seeing production code there.
It was within the past 6 months and I was up-to-date on IDEA and Scala. I was running it on OSX though, so that may have had something to do with it.. It's hard to recall, but I may have run this by another team member and he didn't think it was unusual. Perhaps Microsoft has just spoiled me with C#, F#, and TypeScript tooling :|
I don't think it's a strange question at all.

I have good friends who I love to spend time with, but I never want to work with them.

I had colleagues in other teams I loved to work with, who I never wanted to have in my team (e.g. development vs operations. Really cool for problem solving and interacting on a project basis, but too different in daily habits).

I had colleagues in my team I loved to work with daily, who I never want to start a company with.

Even when you already know a lot about people that doesn't mean they'd be a good fit for a cofounder. But then I've never started a startup, I'm happily employed and don't plan on going back to be my own boss.
> I don't agree on principle with the implication that users don't/can't have free will to enter into (however unfair) contracts these companies wish to use.

These companies have lawyers who spend 40+ hours a week crafting contracts from which it's impossible to determine what are your rights for the average person. Good for you for not having a bad experience yet, but once you do you'll want a recourse that's more than just 'tough luck'.

I know where this thinking comes from - is this absolutist "I should be free to do whatever" mentality, which ignores the fact that you rely on the fact of people not being able to do that daily.

Are you of the opinion, for example, that simply leaving your house gives anyone who dares a free pass to enter it? I mean, you're technically free to take it back from them once you get back and if they're stronger, better equipped so you don't manage to? Well, tough luck, I guess.
So what exactly is the solution you want? Do you want google to block the service after a threshold period of time.
I’m sorry to say this all felt a bit clickbaity/scammy to me.
This raises another point. To what extent is Google recording the calls made by Duplex? In France you have to pre-announce any recording before the call and I suppose in many other countries it is the same.
It's only a contradiction if you think short term. Long term, it's clearly in Google's interest to engender sustainable consumption. People who are comfortable with the role their smartphones play in their lives are much more valuable consumers than addicts who are apprehensive over it. They are also much less likely to seek radical action which may damage Google in hard to predict ways.
I responded with apprehension and gave an example of a similar initiative that Nintendo has already shipped [0], which has been widely mocked, and I explained why these sorts of nagging notifications are a tricky balancing act (the product doesn't know the context of your use, but can only guess, and it is grating when it gets it wrong).

[0] https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/997614-nintendo-3ds/747...

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/does-nintendos-oh-youve-been-...
Indeed. Thanks for the info.

As far as I know, Reuters isn't big on aiding pump-and-dump schemes but this sure looks like it.
I thought they killed by clamping the neck and suffocating their prey.
Gruber's stock in trade is ambiguous 1 line response to an extract from an article he's linked to which he can then criticise people for mis interpreting.

Once you've noticed this pattern it's much harder to take his (often very good) long form pieces seriously.
Having better default notifications on Android would be a start. Everything off(bar calls & messages) unless turned on by user.

every app now wants to notify you about everything.. so every phone i get, i need to go in and turn off notifications for everything bar calls & text messages.

Pity they don't sync your preferences when you get a new phone.
Currency exchangers work by having pools of money in many currencies and countries, so if you want to exchange USD to GBP, they add your money to their USD pool, and take out the same amount out of their GBP pool. How fast can you do it? Probably as fast as sending an data packet to the UK. I don't see why bitcoin has to be used, well maybe if the exchange doesn't have a lot of capital and is buying BTC with the USD and selling it for GBP.
I think a big difference between Github and package managers is that on Github everything is prefixed with a user name. It takes two clicks to find out who made jakob/TableTool. It’s obvious that the author is a random dude on the internet.

But the brew cask package “table-tool”? That sure sounds official!