skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>does anyone know if there is any theory to support the idea that sufficiently advanced civilizations rely on something other than radio waves or light to perform communications?

At a scienctific level no, but in science fiction you have devices like the 'subspace ansible' and similar things that allow FTL communications by using some sort of currently-undiscovered 'subspace'.

I actually remember in the mid 90's seeing, in the Weekly World News (a sensational tabloid for those unfamiliar) or its primary competitor at the time, mention of a intelligence agency that had laptop like devices that allowed for real-time encrypted communication anywhere on the world which was likely a spin on this idea (IIRC it was suggesting some sort of quantum entanglement where doing something to one would instantly cause the same to happen on the 'paired' device so you'd just type on one and it would instantly appear on the display of the other).

There's no valid reason to think something like this isn't possible, or even plausible. We didn't discover infrared until 1800, x-rays and radio until 1895.

There could very well NOT be anything that would allow for FTL/real-time communication over any distance but then again there could be. There could very well be some sort of radiation or similar particle that we've yet to discover too which might be the preferred means of communication for an advanced enough civilization.

Look how far computers have come since I was born in 1985. Look at other technologies like genome sequencing, the human genome project took 13 years and cost many millions but now you can do whole genome sequencing commercially with an 18 hour turnaround and hire your own whole genome sequencing out for 500$ with a 10-12 week turnaround. I know these examples don't compare but what I'm getting at is we are barely a technological species and who knows what possibilities exist for us.
After my first research article on personal sleep data and happiness (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17558542), I wanted to do a follow-up.

Sleep is a factor that has a lot of influence on my life and mental well-being, yet there's a lot that I still need to learn about it.

This new article is my attempt at getting there. I want to use the lessons and observations from these analysis essays to steer my life in the best direction possible.
This is religion.

Either the universe doesn't give a damn about your esthetics, or it does. I'd be curious as why you think it does?

(Full disclosure - I believe it does, but I'm also a believer in an organized religion.)
I would love to say "Let's actually change things" but can you provide a plan for that? what can we _really_ do about it?
So we went from small copyright violators being able to steal without repercussion to large copyright violators being able to steal without repercussions.

Social media went from one extreme to another. Now the big corporations can exploit social media to rob and steal.

This is exactly what it is. Theft by sony and other large companies. Since social media doesn't punish sony and large corporations for abusing the copyright claim system, they will abuse it.

Small copyright violators get suspended if they continue to abuse the system. Each social media platform has a threshold after which your account is banned. Why are corporations not held to the same standard?

If sony knowingly and willingly makes false claims X number of times, then their account should be banned and they should be prevented from making claims. Otherwise, they will claim everything since there are no consequences.

It's sad how social media went from user/people centric to corporate centric in such a short time. Youtube is no longer "you"tube, it's "CNN/HBO/SNL/Late Night Show"tube now.
Qards: A blogging platform focused on performance
Actually outside of manufacturering purposes it is less valuable than that piece of paper. It's shiny, big deal.
The Fermi Paradox, like any good paradox, isn’t a “premise;” it’s a tool to reveal premises. Your thoughtful comment on many possible explanations for why we might not see aliens is exactly what I like about the Fermi Paradox - it makes you think.
Cttrie – Compile-time trie-based string matching for C++
https://www.marcobehler.com/guides/a-guide-to-logging-in-jav...
Burning Man's Mathematical Underbelly
All this stuff sums up to the already existing superciliousness nonsense a living form needs to goes through during life, as perpetual assault to any knowledgeable human being living on this planet!
Human Being going down further and further without any brake!

Edit: Nice insta downvote!
Much like the biggest farm is not necessarily the most profitable, the Netherlands government reporting office claims peak production was a decade ago, and its all downhill until the mid 2020s (lets say, five years away?) when the Netherlands switches over permanently from being a net producer of natgas to being a net importer.

Kind of like how the UK peaked around the turn of the century and has been a net importer for more than a decade, but delayed by maybe 15 years.

In this line of business (IT) its all about scaling. The economic models around natgas are hilarious in that nobody scales beyond one, at least in public. So every country on the planet has a natgas economic model where on a scale factor of one, the permanent transition from exporter to importer is "no biggie" because there's an infinite supply of infinite cheap commodity natgas from world trade, so we'll just have some ... permanent inflation from printing money to import all that natgas. That economic model sounds really good scaled to one country, but doesn't work well when scaled to "pretty much every country on the planet at the same time and the global cheap commodity natgas market disappears".

There's probably a lot of startup opportunity in "residential natgas disappears".
I tried getting through Meditations, but I couldn't. Maybe I'm more used to long-form writings, rather than the short paragraphs? I could read them, but I felt like they didn't "sink in", even if I felt they were profound at the time.
I mentioned to the IT guy that I was going out to buy my own damn RAM. He nearly had a heart attack - "Don't open the case!" I think the remote India IT lords would know if I opened the case and he'd hear about it.
It seems strange to me too. It's not just that, but I have seen more than once someone well-meaning person changing history and pushing it, causing problems for other maintainers. Git is a complex tool and as a result more complex actions tend to fall out of memory and tend towards copy-pasting from a Stack Overflow answer.

> A hierarchy of maintainers that reviews the work sent by others and a single person with commit access to the main repository.

This is surely the whole point of having a DCVS. You can just produce a request to pull and the person with push access can review it before it's committed.
Are badges and notifications killing your productivity? (Spoiler alert: yes)
Number 14 is funny: it's like "do classes, but don't do what classes actually do". The first paragraph then goes about setters and getters that are specifics of some particular styles in some particular languages (and why you even need setters if you want to be clear about "not manipulating the data"?).
Neat! (and scary) thanks for sharing.
The Russians did it and the Russians didn't do it?

The British narrative is the Russians did it.

The Russian narrative is they had no part in it.

If you disbelieve the Russian narrative, you believe they did have a part in it.

It's possible to not believe the British narrative and not care about the Russian narrative because you don't believe they have anything to answer for, but that is altogether different from disbelieving both.

For what it's worth I don't believe the British narrative on this because of it is inconsistent with previous versions of itself and the evidence I have personally seen is circumstantial.
That is the choice you often make later on. But might not always be obvious at that time, otherwise leading to overoptimizing everything in functions.
There is a nice tool called "The Gold Parser Builder" which is free and can help you design a programming language.

http://www.goldparser.org/
Although I'm not as religious as I used to be, I still highly regard 'The Screwtape Letters'. CS Lewis is an excellent writer.
I'd add, beside obvious docstrings, comment to explain why the code does something when it's not obvious (say a corner case).
How can there be any "free will" if we are brought into existence without consent? The only true freedom is to cease to exist. Perhaps quasi-true freedom will be achieved somewhat if there is ever free energy and FTL travel that allows an individual to find a habitable planet. There is no true freedom in a world with resource scarcity. There is no place to run away to, or no place to be exiled, only behind caged bars.
Sorry it's not to your taste, but i don't see how pointing out a couple of facts about how humans substantially differ to other species from an ecological perspective is religious.
US approves the sale of 64 Patriot missiles to South Korea improving its defense
> the following lines could assume any combinations of those conditions.

Do you mind expanding a bit more on this? From what I understand, if you have early returns the only way you can get into the rest of the function is if all of the conditions pass, not any arbitrary combination of them.

Also, do you have an example of a more complex function with early functions that you find difficult to read?
A better point of view might be this: Microsoft is a huge company, not all the people that work there are (what we might consider) ethical engineers, and some of the adherents to the sleazy business practices of their past are still around.

It’s not a good reason, but it’s possibly the reason. Ultimately it’s not really useful to attempt to paint an entity as large as Microsoft as all good or all bad.
I have my 'home directory' on a separate drive to the system drive which I simlink to from the home directory in the system drive. It means I can install OS's anytime without touching my files. I symlink to some dot files too. Once I learn bash better I will automate it like I have with reinstalling all my favourite programs.
you dont reduce nesting by moving all checks to the beginning, you reduce nesting by moving the contents into methods.

if (product.hasPrice){
if (someOtherCondition){
Cart cart = cartService.getCartForCurrentUser();
cartService.addToCart(product,1);
}
}

to

if(canSellProduct(product)){
addToCurrentCart(product)
}
Adding decentralized identity to a centralized app
All the time.

The compiler does tell you if it’s thread safe. That’s the point.
Super informative article explaining how you can use Ruby in a serverless lambda/openwhisk environment! PLAYTIIIME!
You can't have it both ways -- if we're a virus, then the universe is meaningless and frankly who cares about harmony, balance and esthetics.

But if you want to make value judgements -- which you seem to want to -- I'm curious from whence your values come? Is your love of harmony, beauty and balance objectively different than a fly's love of a turd?
I don't see any change in the consensus view on education and health care in this country, as a result of immigration or even at all. The political divisions on how these services should be operated and funded have always been there, but there is no appetite to de-socialise either.
I did the same at my last company and used some old RAM from a laptop that broke. Just switched jobs recently and now I’m realizing I forgot to take it out before I turned in my laptop.

Luckily my new company provides spec-ed out laptops with more RAM for software engineers. It’s also easier to get more RAM at my new company as long as your job code is engineering.
How much more obvious could it be? It’s in the Cloudwatch cron rules that the last parameter specifies the year.
Disagree strongly with the comment about naming : "Names of variables and functions should be distinct and provide a general idea of what they do".

The clearest code that I have read used consistently single-letter variable names. If a variable name holds a meaning, you are then repeating this information each time you use the variable. It is better to name the variable "a", and put a comment upon its declaration. This is the convention used in mathematics and physics, and it works really well.
Xiaomi USB-C powered razor
IceCat 60.2.0 Pre-release
"you can schedule an item to appear in the queue at any future time" Nice! Anything similar in aws ?
This ^ gets you hired.
I'm sure my graduate adviser appears to be a high-frequency publisher (before he became Dean). His name was on every paper that his 9-10 PhD students got published and rightly so--he got us the funding, helped us formulate ideas and perform the research, smoothed over our screwups, and even helped write the papers themselves.
So many complaints about the system! Call your alderman, get it raised at city council. Local government can be responsive. Band with some others, hire a lawyer. Organize.

Is a functioning democracy a right or a duty?

Or I guess you can just complain and post comments.
Natural gas infrastructure in New England and MA in particular is horrible. A big part of the reason why prices remain high (3-4x vs New York) in the region despite the recent fracking boom. Incidents such as this do not help.
Rust does not require a mutex on all stateful objects.
In my day job, I work as an advisor to UHNW families and individuals. They have their investments spread across multiple institutions, each providing their own monthly statement, holdings, etc. Our clients pay 4-figures fees monthly to have a consolidated statement (how much money I earned on August, what has been my return YTD, etc.) and portfolio holdings (How much fixed income do I have? How much I am exposed to the Turkish lira? to Argentinian stocks?). Most of the information is in the individual statements (in pdf) and the rest from providers such as Bloomberg and Morningstar. The solutions out there are custom-made and have a lot of manual input. I think a bit of AI and good visualizations can go great lengths to solve this problem.
Just for fun, I tried to do something similar with a shell script:

set -eu
AGE_LIMIT=$(( `date +%s` - (14 * 86400) ))
for FILE in ~/Downloads/*
do
if [ -e "$FILE" ]
then
export `stat -s "$FILE"`
if [ $st_birthtime -lt $AGE_LIMIT ]
then
mv "$FILE" "~/Needing review/"
fi
fi
done

Run it from cron. Typical caveats of shell scripts apply!
> That being said, the IBM/Microsoft example didn’t really work for me. Because it completely ignores Apple. Apple operates very much like the IBM thst MS vanquished but for the past decade or so it has been crushing Microsoft by any measure of efficiency or productivity.

The talk was delivered on June 6, 1999.
The problem with function names is that there are other factors that decide them. Conciseness of code being one. And as I commented below. At the time you write code it might not be obvious it will turn into a function. With a proper comment that decision can more easy be made later on.
You can definitely go silly by splitting your functions too much. However, most times I hear this complaint, the real reason is:

> 5. Naming is hard, but it's important.

In other words, you should be able to understand what a function does just by the naming of the function itself. When you have a function that "calls 5 other functions" you should be able to understand what it does by just looking at the 5 function calls, without needing to go inside those child functions to check it out.

The only case where this doesn't apply is when you are tracking a bug and the input/output of the function doesn't make sense. That's the only case I can think of to actually dig deeper...
After 20 years as a software engineer, I've started commenting heavily. I used to comment sparingly. What made me change was a combination of reading the SQLite and Redis codebases and inheriting two biggish projects (one Rails, and one JS) which had no comments.

Reading through code that looks like this[0] is so much nicer than reading through code that looks like this[1].

[0] https://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact/9711a7575036f0d3

[1] https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/b93c1661d689c8b7d...
I do not understand how anyone thinks it would be the only thing the car would use
It has worked in the past. Minneapolis has changed a lot of ordinances to restrict towing.
My thought in submitting this was that behaviour (or skills) change is hard. For everyone.

The case of doctors is interesting as they are a well defined, skilled, educated, and reasonably well-measured population engaged in activities for which outcomes can be quantitatively assessed; outcomes, health & wellness measures, or that ultimate outcome metric: deaths.

Which means that in studying doctors there are valuable lessons which might be transferred to other fields. Such as software developers, venture finance, executive management, and end-user practices. Or in addressing social ills, economic inequality, education, opportunity, respecting others, expanding worldviews.

The habit of looking past the immediate to see potential analogues and metaphors is a powerful one, though many seem resistant to acquiring it.
This would be considered chemical terrorism nowadays and the perp would get 3 life sentences.
Maybe some of them, like in tight loops. But the most difficult code to understand for me is Matlab scripts written by physicists, naming variables a,b,c or i,ii,iii etc. Variables with longer lifespan should have more explicit names in my opinion.
It all depends on execution. I'm sure they said the same thing about good old games trying to carve a niche in a steam world.
If I interviewed someone who explained that as a solution, it would definitely not help their case. The worse hire is someone who overcomplicates projects. It leads to “negative work”.
Decisions are first class citizens (an intro to decision engineering)
Yes, that jumped out at me too.

For whatever reason, $69K may not be a livable wage for her and her family. But most people in Raleigh would think, on the face of it, that she's making good money.

But this is an article in Time, not a PR piece. Maybe the author has an agenda, or maybe they're playing it straight. Whatever, maybe Ms. Cooke should have declined the interview.
Of course! I am talking about the names of local variables, not the names of externally visible functions or global variables.
All I am going to say is: When those two idiots set off those pressure cooker bombs at the marathon, there was no lack of cops to form an army to shut down the entire city for nearly three days! Screw off, Boston!
Law of Information Non-Growth (Section 1.2) [pdf]
What tools/machines would most interest you? More along the electronics/robotics side or fabrication like 3d printing, or more traditional tools like lathes/mills/presses/English wheels?
Would it work if all debts on Earth were simultaneously erased by creating the relevant amounts of money?
Let me introduce you to The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two [0]. This is the amount of state your monkey brain can hold in working memory.

This number is why nesting code is almost always heinous. Once the number of nested conditionals exceeds working memory, your monkey brain cannot hold the state and drops all the variables.

Deeply nested statements is my number one code smell, and can almost always be easily refactored.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...
I actually just saw a local news report on someone breaking towing rules in Minneapolis a few nights ago. They got some city council people on TV even.
This cycle of "harmony" is futile and not a constant state that would exist without humans, unless any organism within that cycle recognises that it's simply an evolutionary race to the top as we have, with the reward being dominion over their respective territory. Only until some cosmic entity comes and ends it, or an extinction event occurs, putting the slate clean again for any traces of life left to begin the evolutionary race, repeating until that harmonious life as we see it can no longer exist.

The answer is obvious conservation until we as a species are immune to single planitary extinctions, but the romanticised view of our worlds ecology as some living entity, rather than a number of organisms interacting independently and adapting doesn't give a clear objective of what we should be doing and more importantly why.
I'd make the following addition, which I was surprised not to see:

24: Avoid the 'inner-platform effect' [0]

Make proper use of the machinery of the standard library.

This makes your code more readable, more portable, shorter, faster, and less error-prone, and it doesn't even take any real effort - indeed, it makes writing things easier!

The standard-library was probably written by someone smarter than you, almost certainly someone more familiar with the language than you, and it's definitely better tested, better documented, and, importantly, better known, than whatever you were about to write. This is a pretty basic point, perhaps, but most of them are.

Special case: use standard-library data-structures. If you're implementing your own hashset over a raw array, rather than using the standard HashSet class/template, you'd better have a very good reason.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect
It's interesting that they're comparing Go the language and Rails the framework. Obviously, it's apples-to-oranges, but it makes sense that people would think about it that way.
Ye I don't use it for scale. It's great just to have a declarative file which is easy to read and understand. I guess I use it like people use Puppet and Ansible, I just find it better for my use case. And I don't always have to rely on what's in the package manager for my OS. So I get a nice stable core OS, and up to date apps.
I wonder how much of it is from the training methods - forgetting things is malpractice and thus things get hard emphasized to practically muscle memory "make sure to x-ray the ankle to confirm if it is a break or sprain" even if it would become very apparent without otherwise via deformation or not getting better and the treatment is immobilize both and ice helps with pain anyway.

I think the military has a similar problem with transition to civilian life in terms of "overdrilling". Medicine being a conservative field given the stakes furthers it.
If I had thought of it first, as you say, I would have immediately realized a couple things wrong with it. Like taking space for my personal projects where a desk for another engineer is supposed to go. And having grow lights on a timer that run after everyone goes home is a pretty obvious unnecessary fire hazard.

I was the manager, not someone a level above. I was responsible for space planning for my department. The offices weren't luxurious but they were decent hard wall offices where 4 of the 6 offices in each office bay had windows. Insisting that one should be allowed to take a seat in a window office for a cactus farm seemed very immature. I was also resonsible for assuring a reasonable attempt to adhere to health and safety rules. The unthinking objections to removing a fire hazard showed no appreciation for who would have hell to pay if something happened, even if only a mildly smokey electrical short.
Announcing TypeScript 3.1 RC
A Comparison of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems
The no communication theorem is not the no communication hypothesis, it's actually a math proof. You start from the principles of quantum mechanics (unitarity, etc), define what you mean by entanglement (non-factoring states), and prove it's not possible to use those states to win the communication game. This is an aspect of quantum mechanics that we understand extremely well.