skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The rest of the points are silly rehashes of arguments as old as Emacs v vim, but sure, let's go there too. We've done empirical research to see if this matters. Charitably, the results are "inconclusive"[0].

> The first glaring issue is that I have no guarantee that is_valid() returns a bool type.

You can name functions ridiculous, unhelpful and misleading things in any language. The very fact that you know to expect a bool undermines the point: clearly, despite not having static types, a human managed to make a pretty reasonable assumption about what a piece of code was about to do. Just because the compiler can check that is_valid returns a string doesn't mean that hat's magically a useful thing to do.

> The fact that I cannot, in the absence of perfect test coverage, verify the syntactical correctness of someone’s code is a big red flag.

Syntax errors are caught by the compiler. Semantic errors aren't caught by the best type systems. At best, type systems are a way to encode a bit of the semantics so that the compiler can prove things about it.

> To improve static type checking in Python, developers made libraries like jedi, pytype, mypy, and toasted-marshmallow, but they are often not used in most projects because they do not belong to the standard toolchain

I can not imagine the author actually used jedi and believes this. That's... not how jedi works. I also don't know what to do with the argument of "oh, you have an optional static type system but people don't use it because it's annoying, this is why we should use a mandatory static type system" other than shrug.

I like types! I think there are great arguments for types. I like the idea of being able to have a type system prove that certain bugs can't happen. This adds nothing but FUD and no new insights.

[0]: https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/
That's kind of his point though: that we have managed to get this far, but we shouldn't take it for granted and expect that we can just "turn up the equality dial" and get more equality. These are complex systems and barbarism is always at the gate, because that's the default state. It's not that equality isn't a laudable goal or worth pursuing, it's that it's an extremely hard goal that must be approached thoughtfully and often indirectly.
Welfare cliffs are caused by flaws in how they are calculated with respect to income, not their magnitude. Now, what does your comment have to do with that? Care to elaborate?
> large programs that won't change heavily benefit from the literate style.

This has been my experience. Returning to code I wrote as a literate document is a joy.
Right. Intuitively, it is obvious that political choices impact inequality, as does perusing world data sorted by GINI coefficient, or even just a review of the US over time.

I do find it darkly funny that so many folks seem to throw up their hands - it is obvious that inequality will always exist, so just live with however much we currently happen to have and shut up about it. (Inflation, however - we can totally micromanage that!) Humans have an innate sense of fairness that becomes offended at some point, and they start punishing even when doing so harms themselves. The peasants get restless at some point, the tumbrels come out, and there's your natural law in action.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Tablet Review: It's Way Better Than a Surface Pro
Because of Brooks's law. When you're already working overtime, you don't have a day to fix those holes.
Would you suggest it for hauling inanimate objects? Does it handle well?
Why?

If she wasn't conscious and didn't feel any pain I don't see how it's "worse" than any other method of death. The whole purpose is to make the patient not suffer.
The problem is treating “breast feeding benefits” and “breast milk benefits” as if they are interchangeable. They are not. There are lots of things that happen with breast feeding that don’t happen with breast milk from a bottle, especially when the milk is from a bank. This is akin to the flawed logic that lets people tell themselves that juice counts as fruit or that simply owning books will make their children smarter.

Breast milk banks seem to exist primarily to allow wealthy parents to buy off their anxiety about not being able (or choosing not) to breast feed.
One commenter on Reddit notes the "programs provide a necessary relief, but they definitely aren't built to help people truly improve their circumstances in sustainable and lasting ways." They're probably not designed at all.

There is no grand plan anywhere. Regulations are a hodgepodge of legislation and executive decisions made by people with conflicting incentives, little to no feedback and expertise, limited resources, and very real abuse/exploitation.
This is a point I tried to make in conversations I was having back in 1994 or so about the welfare reform that was then being debated. It's a rather technical point, though, so it was hard to get it heard in all the shouting about welfare moms.

Step-function subsidies are evil. (A "step function", in math, is a function whose value changes sharply at a single point, like a stairstep.) They're evil for just the reason being discussed here, that they create a point where a small increase in earnings causes a large decrease in total income.

When it comes to income taxes, our legislators are smart enough to use piecewise linear functions, but somehow this very small amount of mathematical sophistication goes out the window when it comes to subsidies for the poor.

And people's lives are ruined.
The Vesta Approach to Software Configuration Management [pdf]
These comments crack me up. Hacker News readers seem to have a lot of opinions about plumbing, the plumbing trade, the difficulty of plumbing tasks both intellectually and physically, pay scales of plumbers, personal experiences with plumbers, etc.

Did you get that "plumbing" was just, like, an analogy? The article wasn't really about plumbing.
The Future of Policing Is Here
I'm implying that:

- 50 year old overworks at 52 hours a week

- 20 year old underworks at 52 hours a week

This leads me to think that this 52 hours is arbitrary and likely inadequate.
Location: Kazakhstan, Almaty

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: iOS, Swift, ObjC, RxSwift

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alemutemissov/

Email: utemisovalem@gmail.com
> “In Python a good amount of errors are discovered at runtime"

In my experience this is roughly equally true with statically typed languages as it is with Python. The types of errors the compiler helps find before running tests are just not important. They are not types of errors that matter much. And if compiler errors are cryptic enough, it can be a huge huge pain that you can’t just run the code on a toy input to see what’s going on. The whole pitch about how static typing and compilation will save you time by forcing more correctness prior to testing is just a hogwash myth in practice. It happens occasionally, but not nearly enough to justify all the stuff advocating it, and the benefits of being able to debug according to desired behavior and just not care about strict safety in edge cases you can guarantee you won’t hit are really tangible. You cannot easily dismiss these benefits.
(Neo)mutt fuckery with multipart messages
I had one parent die from brain cancer in 2011, and another was just diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, so this is on my mind.

Honestly, I don't think this is a problem specifically for the person with the terminal illness. So much of the difficulty comes from everybody else. American culture does not prepare people to face death, either their own or of loved ones. So a lot of my energy goes in to helping other people manage their feelings at a time when I don't have energy to spare. I want other people to take LSD or do Zen retreats or serve at a hospice or whatever they need to do so they can manage their own death anxiety.

Speaking of which, I strongly recommend the "ring theory of grief" article. The gist is that if bad shit is happening to somebody, you help them rather than imposing on them. It sounds obvious, but I promise that it's unfortunately rare. Here's the article: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/07/opinion/la-oe-0407-s...
Even under general anesthesia some patients feel the pain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anesthesia_awareness#Backgroun...
A Simple Class Chat App
Sure, people do that, but you're reading things into my post if you're implying that that attitude exists anywhere in it. I didn't say anything about throwing up our hands, and as far as I can tell neither does Sowell.
CompuServe.
Applaud the Girl Scouts for helping girls build skills for the 21st century!
Branches are virtual copies/views in p4.
something too imazing and wonderful http://www.tchiase.info/tai-vinacf-hack-cf-hack-dot-kich-hac...
Then why have a constitution at all? Your argument is basically "words don't matter because reasons".
I'm a long term cyclist, run a cycling business, ride tons of bikes. I can definitely say the bike with a trailer is easier to ride, and is safer by far. Full harness, roll cage, head whiplash protection etc. Just putting this comment out there so other people reading see another perspective and don't dismiss trailers as unsafe. They are great!
> It is literally explaining the program. In full.

Precisely. Here are real world examples of this:

A program that implements on-the-fly encoding of images into SSTV audio files (3620 words): https://github.com/jpf/dial-a-cat#1-855-meow-jam-sending-cat...

An example SCIM server (7966 words): https://github.com/joelfranusic-okta/okta-scim-beta#welcome-...

An example OIDC "RP" implementation (7731 words): https://github.com/joelfranusic-okta/okta-scim-beta#welcome-...
Those sites look more like examples of Swiss design than brutalism. Though the schools are certainly related.
It's far beter to consider current, effective treatments for this instead of considering euthanasia for it.
Tl;dr USA refuses to be a nanny state and impugn on the liberty of private citizens.
I have gone through exactly this with my dad, where he was in an unbelivable amounts of pain and eventually was being given so much morphine he wasn't conscious at all in his final 4 days. So we just kept vigil next to his bed at the hospital 24/7, and there was absolutely nothing dignified about it, we were literally sitting next to my dad who was slowly starving do death. It was so disturbing I still have issues because of it. My dad might have chosen euthanasia, or he might not have done - but not giving him that choice in the first place(euthanasia is illegal here) and instead going towards sedating someone to a point where there is no dignity to speak about is horrendous to me.
Most useful for the message, though I find it generally readable.

My variant:

https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB
> state-sanctioned euthanasia opens the door for family members to start pressuring people to die when they don't really want to

Everything I've ever read - or heard - from doctors, is the exact opposite - that family members more often than not want herculean and unintentionally inhumane efforts made to keep a suffering family member alive for just a little bit longer.
Groupon is looking for a buyer
> In fact, C and C++ are both strongly typed, but they are both memory unsafe.

You are refuting my point but provide no evidence and implicitly redefine several terms in a way contrary to common usage.

Is there a definition you can pen down? Because C sure isn't strongly typed in the Liskov, Jackson or modern usage senses of the term.

> Also, tools like valgrind get you 99% of the benefit of memory safety, which is good enough for debugging. C++ lets you override the allocator, and build in inexpensive (fast enough for production) checks for most use after frees, memory consumption profilers / leak detection/ etc.

Would you say that de facto C/C++ has a memory safety problem? If it does, why?

(Also, not germane to my point.)

> I’d argue that python is memory unsafe in practice, since we get segfaults from third party dependencies in python about as often as we see them in c/c++.

Do you have extraordinary evidence to go with this extraordinary claim, or are you just talking about your own anecdata?

(Also, not germane to my point.)

> If you use std::string, adding a in integer does something well-defined (rtfm).

My argument was not that it is poorly defined. Weak typing doesn't mean UB.
Depends on your definition of "regular bike". I have a road bike and a MTB, both of which cost a fair bit more than this one.
If you're never going to haul kids, just get a utility trailer. They're much cheaper, probably because they don't have to be designed to protect humans.
The bulk of IT is certainly data plumbing. The question is what the engineering part is of the total. Compare with physcial logistics, you have the lorry drivers, the mechanics, and the engineers that develop the next lorry model.
There will always be a need for tools and algorithms to work on the data in innovative ways. That is probably where the engineering skills are the most essential. But these jobs are likely fewer than there are people wanting to think of themselves as software engineers.
How to Install Ntopng on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Every such site is a potential component in a combination attack against my system. They aren't publicly audited, I don't have a privacy agreement in them. I have no way of knowing if their ownership changes hands, and the authors are doing noting to assert it doesn't become malware.

It's irresponsible.
The only level of private API use that Apple will accept is 'none', so this question is at best immaterial. All of the private API use needs to be removed.
It will bite you when you don't expect it. When i work, we had a dev write a IO trace playback engine in Python to do some IO performance testing. We then deployed it on various platforms and got very strange results - eventually I noticed when TOPing the node, the CPU was pegged at 100%, so this wasted about 2 months time of about ~4 developers
Thanks! I had a lot of fun building it too :O

Pro "tip" for longer term usage: set the intensity crazy low, like 0.5%, so it doesn't get annoying.
> Perhaps when your code is too big to fit in a file, it is too big to describe serially at all. And it’s time to split it in two separate pieces, two modules with a formal interface between.

I'm not sure these two issues are related. The "tangled" PDF output of haskell-dbus 0.9 was split into chapters, each chapter being roughly a single Haskell module (with a specified API). And books are by nature serial, yet they can express enormously complex ideas -- think of a compilers textbook.

This was all six years ago so my memory's a bit fuzzy, but I remember feeling lost in my own code when it was all in one file. I couldn't do things like "split window and go to top" to find the imports/exports of the current module, and searches for a symbol name return far noisier results when they're all implicitly project-global.

It might be possible to fix these with better tooling, like an editor that could parse literate source and show the rendered output. But then you'd be treating the "source" as a sort of opaque input and editing at the level of "compiled" output, which is behavior I associate more with reverse-engineering than typical software development.
That would be a wonderful world to live in. I can seek out the services/products I want and not have them thrust on me. Sounds like a win.
Demo 2 seems to be a problem with jsfiddle:

https://jsfiddle.net/hegLkz4s/22/

It's also already been reported:

https://github.com/jsfiddle/jsfiddle-issues/issues/963

You're right about there being an XSS vulnerability here though. But you can fix it pretty easily by escaping the HTML:

https://jsfiddle.net/hegLkz4s/17/
Easy and secure way to copy data between Docker volumes, even across VPCs
This is far too celebratory of markets. Markets pay for things that people of means want. If I make a useless toy that delights a rich person I am paid lavishly. If I make a useless toy that delights a poor person I get next to nothing.
How to Get Husband Interested in Me Sexually Again? – Every Time
If you put a gun to my head and force me to choose between "individuals can freely sell themselves into slavery" and "individuals do not have freedom to work as hard as they want", I'll choose the former.
I'd love to hear your thoughts after trying both!

When I got started with Literate Programming, what I thought I wanted was the built-in literate programming support that Haskell has (.lhs files) – what I've come to realize is that the ability to re-organize (and re-use!) blocks of code in an org-babel style literate document is extremely powerful and something I would miss using the "we inverted code and comments" approach that Haskell uses.
The Dark Side of the Silicon Valley Gold Rush
I am a person in poverty.
Plot twist: The onion becomes the CIA project that fools people on using Facebook, another CIA project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqggW08BWO0
Pretty interesting. That looks like a good study. Thanks
I thought the hand drawn windows were well done for what they were, but for a beginner audience I wonder if real screenshots do more or less to help with the "aha" moments of connecting the tutorial instructions with output the user anticipates.

At the same time, the hand drawn windows probably make the tutorial less intimidating to the target audience-of which I'm not a member. But got me pondering how I can improve my own documentation in a few areas.

Curious what others might think.
Our merge strategy with SourceSafe was to always do a 3 way merge (using Araxis) between:

- your latest changes

- version of the code before you made changes

- latest version of the code on the server

So yes, would have 3 full checkouts of the project locally to accomplish this. I guess it boils down to "patch" workflow, except you get to both create and apply the patch yourself. We used a real-world commit token (rubber duck IIRC) to make sure only one person was doing merges at a time...

(Tortoise)SVN was an easy sell when we discovered it.
Check out this invention my buddy made - it turns ANY bike into a cargo bike!

https://argobikes.com/
TensorFlow.js Color Classifier: Training Data Tensors [video]
The only thing holding me back from experimenting with org-mode is its tight coupling with emacs.

It's a non-starter on a team where people aren't willing to switch over to it (at least to view and interact with org files).

It's difficult for anyone who has a heavy reliance on IDE features; I've spent literally probably close to a hundred hours trying to get emacs + IDE-like integrations working for a variety of languages, with only mixed success.

Yes, I understand that going with emacs is a 'different way' of doing things, and perhaps you won't need your IDE if you just do things the emacs way, but the barrier to entry is very high, between building in new muscle memory for shortcuts, the highly non-standard UX compared to every other editor today, and the hours and hours required to configure everything by hand, even with a starter config like spacemacs.
It's worse than THAT. If you're not creating poverty and strife, you're doing venture capitalism wrong.
Podcast: Making AI practical, productive, and accessible to everyone
What I mean by choice is that as long as people can make decisions that affect their outcomes, people will experience different outcomes.
Gotta respect their decision. I mean, I see my father falling apart and if he made the decision idk if I'd contest it. He's not able to really go out, has trouble breathing, etc. Staring at the same 4 walls all day until you die naturally isn't the best way to go out. A little bit of you dies mentally every day going through that until you're just old, depressed, and unable to function. Why put them through that misery if they don't want to essentially rot in a bed or chair.
Could you please try to keep things civil and thoughtful? A pause before replying often helps.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I feel bad for thinking that it's a terrible name, since it's probably a fine name in some other language, and I don't want to be an entitled American English speaker expecting literally everything software related to be in English.

And yet, it's a great tool that I suspect that it will never get traction for precisely that reason. The abundance of options enables people to be shallow enough that a silly-sounding name knocks it out of consideration.
Cheaper to own once bought too, yes? No gas or insurance, parking tickets, etc.

Get rid of your gym membership, too!

Food bill may be slightly higher, but you can haul bags of rice by the 10kg bag!
.. sorry to hear about the frustration, but almost all of these are ordinary problems with application development. Maybe the original developer made a mess, but that is ordinary too.. if you have a short-list of hmm .. ways to solve typical problems, in a workflow you like, in a language and functions you like.. then you can bring those to the new efforts.. production technical engineering groups will sometimes just bid to remake the whole thing, using their own ways, for exactly these reasons.. but individual developers rarely have that option.. chin up!
Halfway through the paper, it describes a new approach to creating trustless, decentralized cloud computing markets via. cryptographic resource attestation.

To simplify it out, the resource attestation model allows one to bind a virtual currency to some amount of computational time and resources.

It allows users to securely rent away their smart devices when they're idle to developers, researchers, startups, and enterprises who really need large amounts of compute power for cheap prices.
Well...this is how:

It was 1997, I just landed in San Francisco as a fresh new commercial Architect/Designer... and I was just starting coding in my spare time.

I got lots of contracts designing new .com Startup and was invited to there "opening" parties. At one of the party, someone asked me a question that will change the course of my life.

<<are you going to invest in our coming IPO?>>
IPO... what the hell is this ??? I said...

A few days later, I came across an article about how Miami was fighting crime using a Pattern Recognition Software.
And I thought I could apply the same kind of software onto the Stock Market... and this is how I found my passion.
I've been using revealjs too! I've been using this: https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal
I think this is kind of missing the point. The movement toward brutalism tries to bring back the uniqueness of sites on the early web in all their bizarre diversity. It's also about just using HTML and CSS, which used to be written by hand and which give sites an off-the-beaten-track personality.
I hope pijul will gain traction soon: https://pijul.org
I had a family and developed hobbies with some depth to them.

Work is fine, I'm grateful for what I do as it puts me in a better position than the vast majority of people on this planet. I enjoy solving engineering problems, so I truly enjoy a portion of what I do Mon-Fri.

It's not my passion, and I'm fine with that. There was a time in my twenties when it was, but now I invest myself in other things.
The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code(2000)
Michigan has a keep right except when necessary law. So you can take the lane to turn left or if you believe keeping right is dangerous, etc.
I hadn't thought of it that way. Thanks for the explanation.
Turn Any Bike You Already Own Into a Cargo Bike
I feel you. Food production is a big one with me right now and I've been drastically reducing the animal products in my diet and switching to less processed foods (black beans have become my staple).

I find writing can help manage it a bit, in fact I just finished a piece on food production and indoor farming https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2018/7/8/tackling-t...
Tackling the problem of food production, and can indoor farming help us