skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "But it’s worth noting that for the most part, people already had tools for analyzing data. They came in the form of SAS, Stata, SPSS, Minitab, Microsoft Excel, and my personal favorite, XLisp-Stat (thanks Luke Tierney!). But the commonly used data analysis packages had some key downsides:

-The graphics were too “quick and dirty” and did not allow much control over the details; they plotted the data, but that was about it;
-There was relatively little ability to build custom tools on top of what was available (although some capability was added to most packages later)."

Besides the XLISP-Stat, none of those are open source, so you cant fix the bugs yourself and when there is a bug the company tries to hide it. I wouldn't even put any of those tools in the same category as R when it comes to serious data processing/analysis/stats. Its more R vs python.
Not sure, but I would guess they're just extrapolating these trends onto places that still have high agricultural employment.
Why can't straws be made of recyclable or degradable plastic?
I take exception to the part about how the crashes and the fires are trying to stoke up some kind of self-fulfilling short sentiment.

The majority of the article is backed with references and evidence, but there's no escaping of the reality that a lane-keeping cruise control being marketed as autopilot has and will take lives. That's not just some negative sentiments being drummed up, it's reality and human beings that are being harmed or killed.

And all of that is very much on Tesla.
I'm a crap history student, but wasn't this during a time when a central Caliphate ruled over most Muslims? It might be more accurate to say that calling him a "Muslim engineer" is like calling Steve Jobs a "Western engineer". Specifying a particular region he was from might be like calling Jobs a "California engineer".
Yeah, it's not my favorite part either. We've made them mostly unnecessary by adding inline tables, but for heavy nesting of arrays of tables, you still need to use them, which is why I mentioned that there are still some weaknesses for large, complex config files. Hoping to make this better in 2.0.
What does he say about biodegradable plastic straws? The company I work for enjoys signalling its ecological awareness, and so they offer disposable compostable plastic cups. They work for hot coffee just fine, so the material should be as good for straws.
I said "praise", not "successfully implement"
How Minecraft is helping kids fall in love with books
Why was it a shit-town?
The same way we orchestrated before containers: VMs, config management, and APIs at the control plane
A brief history of the s’more
Does anyone know why such a "joke proposal" (as stated by the author itself) was chosen for pretty significant projects like pip and cargo? (edit: I tried to say it began as something small and personal)

(Well, I guess there's not that much to win/lose in the area of config languages, but still)
(Also, I think it works pretty well, so this is not to downplay TOML!)
Physics. From the article:

Compostable straws cost six to seven times more than their plastic alternatives, don't keep for long, and fall apart when exposed to high heat

Consider that the recycleable lid isn't immersed in hot coffee.
I can't tell if it's mass insanity or a deliberate distraction campaign to focus on plastic drinking straws. If you look at what percentage these make up in single stream recycling or general waste it is really tiny. This is different from plastic carrier bags, which despite their tiny proportion of the mass and volume of waste it is still a bigger proportion than drinking straws, but more importantly it can escape waste management systems and pollute widely due to being so light and the impact is higher because of the effects from the material's large surface area. I think drinking straws is just an easy target for environmental PR signalling.
Yes, the census "80% of people live in cities" thing really just means "incorporated areas". In reality ~2/3 of housing stock in the US is detached[1]. Traditional detached houses and mobile homes combined are around 78 million. Now I have not seen detailed statistics about the exact number of people living in each type but it seems pretty safe to say that the average household size for detached housing is at least as high as for apartments, and most likely higher. US average household size is 2.58 people which would imply ~200 million people in detached housing, well over half the population.

[1]https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/unit...
It's clickbait, but it's at least a step cleverer than most.
You can set that up only per application, and you can't do anything fast like dragging all your apps into the window. You have to click the + button once for every app on your machine and manually select it from an Open dialog. And the dialog doesn't remember the last directory used. It's utterly hostile.
Of the major outlets only Fox News has a clearly partisan bent.

There are many ideological rags (Reason is Libertarian, Jacobin is Socialist, etc.)

But the majority of major news sources are non-partisan and non-ideological to the point of giving undue weight to completely foolishness just because the foolishness benefits a certain party. They have systemic biases, owing to being staffed largely by elite educated urbanites with close proximity to power. That's different from being partisan. Where parties are concerned this bias tends to cut against them both in different ways.
Recycling of some plastics may be more of a 'feel good' activity, at this point, then of real utility. There is no guarantee that these will be recycled, either. Consumers are used to dumping disposable, one-use cups in the trash. Even plastics that are recycled often find their way to the landfill. Plastics that are recycled can usually not be reused for the same purpose, and eventually do end up in the landfill.
The new sippy cup lid is made of polypropylene, which is recyclable but expensive to do as it requires separating. Not all cities accept PP plastics for recyling. It typically needs to be combined with mostly virgin plastic to make new products, which are often less recyclable.

Is this better than the straws? Seems like it. But it would be a whole lot better to actually reduce the quantity of plastic.
I certainly don't recycle them at home. The recycling bin at any Starbucks gets dumped straight into the trash.
>Everybody uses an ORM with a SQL database.

That's not true.

>While I was writing these queries, I was just thinking to myself "I can write this in code in a few minutes instead of an hour or more"

Well, no, because SQL is a 4th generation language of higher level than most general-purpose languages. It is a domain-specific language focused on database handling.

A simple SELECT with a few joins and indexes involved encompasses a query execution plan that would be a few hundreds of code in a regular programming language.

>I chose Mongo for a project recently.

Storing relational data on a document store is a bad idea.

And if you need a document store, Mongo is pretty much a bad option.
That's a good point. My usage of R is quite a lot more recent than S, or even the original advent of R. I know that R originally built on an open source Scheme runtime, but in so doing, I don't know how much influence that had on the evolution of R as a language separate from S.
The opt-out that Citi provides is extremely similar if not the same to the one that I receive annually from basically all financial companies I have an account with. They allow you to limit the sharing only as mandated by federal law.

Regarding (e) I can only say that I'm quite happy using Privacy's website to manage my account. Of course I disallow location sharing there, so the best location they have is via IP address which is a granularity I'm comfortable with (and which could be further obscured with VPN if you're really worried about it).

Overall it's a nice service. I completely agree with you on (d) being less than optimal and wish they would issue some stronger language on that point. Nothing is perfect I suppose.
Yeah, but this is more code architecture than system architecture.
Organizing the largest machine learning meetup group in Latin America
Those investments are happening anyway because they make sense on their own terms.

"batteries have a slate of use cases and multiple value propositions; with costs declining, analysts say there is much more capacity on the way."

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/eia-700-mw-of-utility-scale...
> 1) that plastic is often trashed, not recycled, and it assumes that we will never fix that.

I'm sorry to say, but recycling plastic doesn't work all that well. I believe one problem is that straws couldn't be recycled (and I think these lids can?), but then the next problem is, who is going to recycle all this plastic [0] and what is the recycled product going to be? You can't make a new lid out of an old on, unfortunately.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368168
The public kanban board is an excellent idea! I'll probably set up one for myself this weekend.
If only package.json had been package.toml
I saw an ad for a reusable straw that folded up and attached to your keychain on instagram. It was still too large for a keychain in my opinion though.
Ötzi the Iceman’s last meal shows how Copper Age people ate on the run
https://stownpodcast.org/about

> "Brian, a longtime This American Life producer, started reporting this story more than three years ago, when he got an email from John with the subject line “John B McLemore lives in Shittown Alabama.”"

You can listen to the podcast which includes John McLemore himself and why he described it so.
Yea, we have the hubs at our office and use this. It’s great for collaborative diagramming.
You wouldn't want it even if you could do it; it would be permanently overshadowed unless it was actually in Central Park or somewhere.
Eslint was hacked
How else would one write an article which people might try to refute with misconceptions? I'm trying to imagine a version of this story that would satisfy the critics.
Facebook Researchers Win Test of Time Award at ICML 2018
> what if you actually were that rich?

Living in a detached house is annoying. I grew up in detached houses. I now live in a nice Manhattan building. Having to worry about maintenance, heating, lawns and all that junk seems parochial. For a vacation home? Sure, you can get a management company. For a primary residence? How do people have time for that!?
I know, just a good natured poke :) Plus you could probably take that comment at face value - making use of web caching is definitely an important tool when building a large scale system.
Only problems have been after the occasional update, when the patches haven't been updated. A few times it's taken 5-6 reboots to start OSX properly. The best way is to delay updates as long as possible!

Apart from that, no problems at all.

http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/ and the related forum posts were excellent.
The news here is (presumably) the announcement of version 0.5.0 a few days prior [1], which includes several clarifications, rollup changes, and enhancements that accumulated over the last 3 years.

In my opinion, one of the more useful features was the addition of Joda-style datetimes [2][3][4][5], which disambiguates between various kinds of datetime constructs aren't interchangeable yet commonly conflated. It's fair criticism that the addition of rich datetime types exceeds the language's original 'minimal' goal, but too many other languages and formats these days just punt to RFC3339 and leave no guidance or tooling on how to represent dateless times or timeless dates without introducing a ton of side-effects. This is a place where language standard libs, with few exceptions, have repeatedly dropped the ball, and similarly, language or library-agnostic, generic guidance is nowhere to be found.

TOML raises the bar here, by providing a concept and notation to specify these values at rest, and gives parser writers, as opposed to the users, the task of finding a way to represent these values in whatever way is idiomatic for the given language.

[1] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
[2] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/pull/414
[3] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/pull/362
[4] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/issues/412
[5] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/issues/263
Seeing a horror movie is the perfect first date
I also find that reading gives you time to reflect on the author's points and see where you agree or disagree, which helps you clarify your own understanding.
The last point in the article hits the nail on the head; power is being centralized in these large tech giants. It's not so much that they are inherently bad, but it's that there are quickly becoming no alternatives.
Could you please talk about your experiences with TLA+? The "tools of thinking" for designing and verifying systems really interest me.
Kind of like North Seattle.
> Travel can be more difficult if not near a central airline hub.

Oh this is a great addition. Remote jobs often have an element of travel involved. Only having a small regional airline means a least 1 layover minimum and limited time options. Often that means having to travel on Sunday night to make the Monday at noon meeting - where others can just fly out Monday morning.
Why would you ever agree to rent a place where you need to vacate it for 4+ hours every day? The experience with AirBNB sounds all around awful, but I'm honestly baffled why you would go along with such a weird setup.
An array of dictionaries. In JSON, my example becomes:

{
"designers": [
{"name": "Guido", "lang": "Python"},
{"name": "Larry", "lang": "Perl"}
]
}
I like R, and I think it has some great DSLs. Plus a wealth of packages implementing many methods not found elsewhere. I also like its Scheme roots. But I think R's design is starting to show its limitations. Ross Ihaka, one of the main developers published some papers pointing to these issues and suggesting to start over using another Lisp-based language [1].

I don't think he has developed anything yet, but interestingly Julia is quite Lisp-based and addresses many of the problems he mentioned. I've used R heavily for many years, but I'm toying with the idea of transitioning to Julia because the combination of multiple dispatch and a type system designed for efficient code is extremely pleasant to use. It's a simpler and faster language, plus I can keep calling R code when needed. There are also awesome packages that are getting developed in Julia and not found elsewhere [2].

[1] https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/%7Eihaka/downloads/JSM-2010....

[2] https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-package-s-are-state-o...
I also don't think it's a good idea. If you don't use the database specific functions out of fear you aren't able to switch anymore, you are probably wasting a lot of potential performance.
Every book in the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold. It character driven sci-fi. My non-sci-fi friends introduced me to it, and being a sci-fi lover myself, I enjoyed it that much more.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga
> US Freedom is misinterpreted to mean individual freedom at all costs. US Freedom is not just individual freedom, it's local rule and local soverignity.

Not even that local. With the few exceptions from the Constitution, U.S. states wield supreme power and can override any actual local attempt at governing.

Freedom is freedom for the States, not the people.
Oof, too real. I'm still struggling to understand the difference between onedrive and sharepoint, after getting documents shared to me from them for the past year or more.
Compostable is a different thing from recyclable.
When your queue is full, back pressure.
Obligatory Penn & Teller recycling-is-bullshit episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/

As long as plastic disposables actually are disposed of we're in no danger of running out of landfill room. Plastic saved from omitting straws in negligible, this is greenwashing at its silliest. The energy and labor spent separating and recycling most plastics has worse environmental impact than the benefit from plastic saved and re-used.
I mean, burning something can remove the problem locally, but then anyone that relies on air to breathe has to deal with whatever chemicals have been released.

I'm not trying to side on, "let's just bury everything", but as a thought experiment:

Would you rather be in a room where there's a plastic line trash can filled with a variety of trash, or in that same room, where that trash is currently on fire?

Think about it this way: If CO2 had a color and producing it by driving a car would lead to purple billowing smoke, cars wouldn't exist, I don't believe. But because it's invisible, we also think the problem is invisible. Sort of like burning trash.

At least with a landfill, we see, "Guh, that's just a big pile of trash! That's gross!"
Quiet resignation is always an option! (I get so jealous when I go to Tokyo or Munich and see that they have a functioning society. But I'm resigned to the fact that I live in a country where the trains don't run on time, and people are just okay with it. As an immigrant to the U.S. to begin with, I can hardly complain.)
So why can't we have compostable straws that degrade in 5-10years rather than 5-10 months?
Loving [Numi](https://numi.io) as a nice scratch pad for math. Has support for things like variables, constants, functions, and even px/em/pt values conversions. You can hack it with JavaScript to add personal global values, etc as well.
They're recyclable, but consumers don't always recycle. The 3 Rs start with Reduce, but we cannot as long as so much junk plastic continues to be manufactured. Plastics make it possible.
From my understanding Airbnb is much cheaper than alternatives . The sharing economy basically functions on that premise and ignore the local laws.
The diagonals can be a little confusing, especially since they're numbered as if they're North/South, but unlike a true North/South street they have no fixed East/West number (Lincoln is 1600 W at Ashland but 2000 W at Damen).

They always mess my wife up when she's driving as well (think easy right vs. hard right when approaching a three way intersection). What gets me is when driving on a diagonal and the intersecting streets bend right at the intersection so that they meet the diagonal at a 90 degree angle. That messes with my head because it feels like you're driving on one of the normal grid streets.
Cheap price?
At least it's brown lawns people don't want in their neighborhoods these days.
You can ban something without being a government. However Starbucks actually said[1] "Starbucks to Eliminate Plastic Straws Globally by 2020". You could argue that Starbucks have banned the sale of plastic straws in their shops, but they are probably not banning the use of them, should a customer bring one in from outside.

[1] https://news.starbucks.com/press-releases/starbucks-to-elimi...
I think most of us has unused talents in several other fields we could have gone into.

What matters is that we do good work in the field we're in.
They could use paper cups or even Bioplastics, although those have some pretty negative findings in a few reports.
Blue Origin could charge $200k-$300k for a trip to space
1: Diaspora (Greg Egan). Brilliant sci-fi where computer science concepts like cellular automata, computation complexity etc are major plot points. Starts with a highly detailed explanation of AI personality creation. Super geeky and a brilliant plot.

2: High Performance Browser Networking. Really explained a lot of modern networking. I was already familiar with the basics of the OSI stack, but this explained a lot of newer ideas, optimizations, and HTTP2. Really comprehensive guide to how the internet works.

3: The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein): A history of how the CIA has shot down democratic regimes to enforce small-government-free-market policy in developing countries when these policies are rejected in polls. Explains a lot of the crises in Latin America and Russia.
> Consider that the recycleable lid isn't immersed in hot coffee.

Are any kind of straws? I had no idea people are using straws with hot drinks.
Outside of very niche use cases pushing enforcing consistency to the app layer adds enough complexity to dev process that a one/two programmer team will not generally handle it well. That's why even Google ended up building Spanner.
most of them that I tried are not working well enough.
i.e. lots of performance issues, blocker bugs when runnning builds and/or reading reports.
Hi Tom, huge fan of this project.

1. Would a file path type make any sense to add? TOML is ideal for configurations, and so many configuration options use file paths. I know there are questions about platform dependency, and I don't have all the right answers for how that would work, but I could see it being possible somehow?

2. Data versioning is a big deal to me. For now there's always an option of just adding a "version" key and updating it, but can you think of a better way to do that with TOML?

I'm always overly critical of JSON (despite overall being a fan) because it doesn't specify bit sizes of numbers. I notice that TOML has specified 64 bit numbers. It's nice to see that.
Since the Charlottesville incident, when AirBnB permanently banned an unspecified list of people they identified as Nazis, I've always taken a closer look at ToS and AUP for various cloud services, many of which claim they will permanently and immediately ban you for transmitting or storing things that are "offensive", with no further explanation given.

Bans like this are yet another transparent exercise of platforms' power. Where does it stop? Amazon clearly has the technological ability to ban you from Whole Foods if you returned too many items on their website or wrote some bad things about them online; I'm just waiting for the first Medium post about it. Can the phone company ban your number if they don't like who you're talking to? Hell, even my apartment lease lets them terminate it if I "engage in criminal activity", not requiring "criminal charges, arrest, or conviction", but by a "preponderance of the evidence in our judgment".
Ask HN: Do you prefer “engineer” or “developer”?
To the people in software, do you prefer calling yourself (or others) a "software engineer" or "software developer"? Is there even a difference?

Assuming there's no difference in meaning, what are the pros/cons of the abbreviations ("eng" vs "dev")? I'm asking because I'm building a developer tool and want to include one of the abbreviations in the domain name (e.g. "eng-tool.com" or "dev-tool.com").
Obligatory pedantic HN grammar comment: on the outside chance that the gp's gender is not binary, the word 'they' is a good stand-in gender neutral pronoun to 'he/she'. You also have at least 14 alternatives to choose from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Summary) and two more if you're at a Renaissance faire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Historica...). For the grammar snobs, this convention has existed since the 16th century.
Apple Registers Two More Unreleased iPad Models in Eurasia
>> For the land of the free, some US rules are a shock to me.

US-style freedom isn't only the individual freedom of action that people commonly believe. US freedom is also about allowing people to organize communities however they want. The US is the land where people can form neighborhoods of like-minded people and enforce their own local rules. Strata boards, neighborhood zoning, water control boards, "home rule"... it is all about little collectives organizing themselves in different ways. The individual's freedom is the right to move amongst these collectives. Don't like the neighborhood? Move.
While I agree with you, a lack of knowledge about this stuff will unfortunately not help you pass any interviews.
Anatomy of a malicious script: how a website can take over your browser
Engineers and Scientists Behaving Well