skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you want to do something, it's much better to do something positive, e.g. passing subsidies for renewable energy tech.

Okay, that makes sense and, even better, also works sometimes. In fact, renwable energy is a good example where incentives can trigger changes (see the solar market in Europe). However, there are also many examples where incentives have not worked, although running for decades, because people are too lazy or because the financial incentives are not big enough. People and (by design) the industry are waiting that the goverment pays and says "please, please, take that money and prevent that we destroy human life for next 100000 years".

At some point you have to say "fck you, stop that behavior, otherwise you will kill us all". In my opinion, we are very close to that point with the CO2 level. In contrast, OP seems to suggest that we should continue and hope that some miracle in technology will help us, because saying "Stop that, you idiot" doesn't work, right? The market will fix it and regulations and deep states are bad, right? But the fact is that regulations have worked many times. See leaded petrol, asbestos, catalyzators, pesticides, and basically all laws that we have had in Europe for the protection of the environment in the past 50 years. I am not a child waiting for christmas, but an adult who knows that the parents bought the presents.
Bhutan achieves this by importing most of what they use from countries that produce the carbon. Obviously this doesn't scale.
The principle species that can't react quickly enough is Homo Sapiens, sadly. At least lower mammals don't have to deal with denial and demagogues.
Are you production ready? Going live
What didn't you like about the support you got from compose? I'm working on standing up a competing service and would like to learn from your experiences with them.
Apple could offer insurance, knowing full well how often accidents happen and how fragile mostly their phones are.

Insurance is for accidents; warranty is for their failures. And they have had a number of problems with pretty much every generation of product that would fall under warranty - delaminating screens (got it), broken speakers (got it), antennagate, etc.
My experience: Most brand tech companies (and Amazon EU) replace or fix the devices (hard drive, phone, etc) in cases like this within two years, no "proof" required.
As far as I can see, nuclear is the only existing technology that can now be used to rapidly transition to low carbon energy. We then solve the problem of nuclear waste (if indeed it is a big problem - I suspect not) afterwards.

It's either that or not solving the problem.
Chiming in anecdotally here: 50k ``real'' lines of Python and climbing. No problems maintaining it but I wrote it all for my dissertation. It's scientific/CAGD programming, -Not sure but it feels like that makes it easier. Pretty sure I need to re-write it to entice others in on the fun. Anecdotes aren't valid far from the experience, I am afraid.

I, along with one other guy, maintain a >500k fortran 77 code base (bit of C/C++ sprinkled in) at work. It's way cleaner than my home-brew python. Maintainable is about wise practices, not language choice.
I agree. As distribution speed increases, it should have gone down instead of up. 20 years is an upper bound.
The Thing about Mutable Default Arguments in Python
>> American children consume about 200 times the resources of children in developing countries

So one less immigrant is 99.5% as effective at reducing co2 as one less child?
I hear this quite often but the case is that if you are looking for financing the main technical concern of the investors is how (and if) your application does scale - talking about SaaS. If a SaaS gets popular the new user load can be quite heavy and in the past there were a lot of story's about companies that needed to rebuild there system because of this (I think pipedrive was the last example I heard of).
Although it makes sense to ignore scaling at the beginning you need to design your application in a way that you can easily transition to something that can scale.
qui vivra verra - time will tell

Maybe it's time to lauch a competitor, by starting new leveraging kubernetes or whatever new tools exists now and by benefiting the time they will spend merging products and teams.
If global warming is a political problem not a technological one we’re screwed. China and India aren’t rich yet, never mind Africa and all those people want a nice middle class house or apartment and a two week international holiday per year.

Here’s hoping for a technological solution or failing that gradual and non-catastrophic climate change.

Change in CO2 Emissions per capita 1990-2016
https://twitter.com/naytadata/status/1049675803007602688?s=2...
Share Your DNA, Get Shares: StartupFiles an Unusual Offering
Well said. There is no game, it's simply doing. How is any journey started? By taking a step.

I think sometimes peoples intelligence works against them. A deep analysis of procrastination is itself procrastination. The fact that someone recognizes they are procrastinating is 90% of the way there to stopping. Next, they just need to step. Eventually, taking a step becomes habit.
That's basically my story as well. Lacking a control group me I have no idea what it did to my cognitive skills, but I do know that I'm a pretty good cyclist now.

(Edit: I definitely feel more awake after a morning sprint, but I'd rather watch this story of science about "energy levels" unfold in full glory than point out the banality of activity being the opposite of being asleep)
Would you be open to sharing some details about your experience there? I'm building a competing service and want to learn how I can make it great. If you're not comfortable sharing publically, my email is in my profile.
I love this post, even though it gives even more evidence that the original TCR proposal is unworkable in practice. Namely, because all the bullet points at the bottom define different conditions that all have to be satisfied for TCR to be workable (and many more are omitted), you end up needing your unit test situation to be the intersection of a huge number of special cases that are almost never true in practice.

You need (TCR doesn’t fragment commit history && tests are fast && confidence of test accuracy is high && ....). As you AND more things in there (and there are many more things to AND into the list of conditions necessary for TCR), the probability that it all applies to your working situation is going to drop rapidly except for some extremely isolated cases, and then one might question if it’s a good idea to adopt an extreme practice like TCR even when the heroic assumptions are satisfied, because it will mean mixed development practices in cases when the assumptions are / are not satisfied, and that inconsistency itself costs you, especially in a team setting.

But the idea of reversing objections into statements of conditions is brilliant and I plan to practice thinking this way for sure!
Indeed, there's no gun to our heads preventing us voting for taking serious action on climate change. There doesn't need to be.

Imagine I'm a voter in, say, the US or the UK. There is no major party I can vote for that will, if elected, take serious action on climate change. In both nations there is a Green Party which probably would, but it has a firmly established track record of getting approximately zero votes; the only way in which voting Green has ever had any visible impact on US or UK policy is that a bunch of people voting for Ralph Nader in the 2000 US presidential election is part of why we had President Bush instead of President Gore, which is probably not an encouraging precedent to most potential Green voters.

And, of course, voting Green also means voting for all their other policies. Which doesn't matter if you regard climate change as the only important issue, but since you probably don't, you might find them unacceptable on other grounds; and since lots of other voters definitely don't, lots of them are going to be voting not-Green even if they care a lot about climate change ... which means that, once again, the Greens are not actually going to win, and the only real effect of voting for them is to give you less influence on which actually-electable candidate wins instead.

So no, in practice we don't have the option of voting for taking serious action on climate change. We have the option of voting for a big package of things, one of which happens to be serious action on climate change, in the knowledge that (even if a sizeable majority of voters wants serious action on climate change) voting for that package won't actually result in a government that will try to implement it.

It may be that those of us who care about climate change should be voting Green even though it predictably won't help in the near future, in order to "send a message" that might change the political landscape in future elections. Or that we should be putting pressure on the actually-electable parties to change their policies, or starting new parties, or something. But none of that means that we have a realistic way of getting action on climate change just by voting for it.
RESEARCHERS IDENTIFY THE MISSING LINK IN THE CHEMISTRY OF SATURN’S LARGEST MOON
Maybe for a SaaS product I could see some cleanup. But this doesn't sound like a responsible strategy in the fintech space. In any event, if you had 20 engineers already, surely they could simply fix their stuff or you could replace them with better staff who could. How much code does it take to implement a matching algorithm with some asset silos, an app, and a web interface or two? Not 20 engineers worth. This smells like VC tap-money gone riot.
Apple waived the cost of replacing the hard drive in my 4 year old iMac, just 2 weeks ago.
If it's within 2-3 years you can take it for warranty, because the EU laws indicate that electronics have a minimum reasonable life time - 3 years for most products.

Hard drives is a bad example though, given how many hard drive manufacturers offer a 5 year factory warranty themselves (or this used to be the case anyway).

And if it's by design, that's a class action lawsuit.
Coral reefs and their ecosystem lie at a precise depth - where water clarity, temperature and sea floor cooperate to provide enough sunlight and energy to allow corals to grow. A change in sea temperature of a degree or two, or a rise or fall of a few inches, and existing coral reefs collapse. And it takes centuries for them to regrow.

Many things are like that. And we don't have decades to wait for the Earth to become congenial again, we need to eat every day.
I frequently use code generation in python. why write thousands of lines of boilerplate code in any language when you can just generate it? Maybe I'm just lazy but the results are better and more consistent to get something done.
Everything has some valid criticism, but if one side pushes their particular criticism a lot people might think it is worse than the alternatives.

For example if this site is by the Snap developers...
Just invent a way to get lots of cheap energy without burning stuff and we're fine. Not nuclear plants, nuclear energy is evil, we all know that.
Huh? How is that a problem with the product? If you want protection against your own usage risks (accident, theft, etc) that's what insurance is for. But if the law required (this is completely as a quick example, there would need to be some real debate over exactly what lines up with reasonable expectations, and maybe it should be non-linear at the high end) 1 month per $35 with a minimum of 6 months and maximum of 5 years, and your $1600 Macbook had a display failure under normal usage 3 years and 2 months after buying it, then yes Apple would be required to deal with it for free.

And again "deal with it", it's up to them how. A replacement would obviously do it, but so would a repair, the whole point is each manufacturer could optimize for what they think is the best approach. Some will in fact go for easy repairability part swapping, so basically making each individual repair as cheap as possible. Others will work to increase their QA to reduce overall incident rate, so despite each individually costing more the overall rate would still be acceptable. There will be efforts to leverage the value offered by more compact systems into higher profit margins which then can help offset repair/replace costs too. Etc, everyone will do their own thing, and consumers will see in the sticker price all of that internalized for each company and know that no matter what they buy they can expect it to be taken care of for a reasonable period of time without any "extended warranty" shenanigans (extended warranties should only be necessary for professional/enterprise customers who really need a support cycle completely divorced from standard consumer usage and they can negotiate that and any SLAs themselves).
The main problem isn't the solutions and efforts don't exist, but that core python doesn't care about it.

The core devs don't acknowledge distribution as a real issue -- which makes for a mediocre distribution experience.

Pyinstaller looks great like that, but gets extremely complex for anything serious.
I assuming the data was collected through the Ghostery browser extensions, which requires explicit opt-in to share that data.
From the pdf at the end of the article, this estimate is based on a study of 19000 consumers from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, UK, US. The population of all these countries is 1.5 billion, but there are more than 3 billion internet users. Also, a study based on 0.000001 of the 1.5 billion population?
The Pixel 3's Verizon Exclusivity Is Just Dumb
Same as 'Stay Back 500ft, Not responsible for damage' signs on the back of gravel trucks. Youd better bet they are 100% liable for anything that flies out. But it discourages the unmotivated and the uneducated from seeking their entitled legal relief.
If altruism is heritible (like almost every other personality trait) won't this just select for a world of selfish people?
You certainly don't need to use a VPN - much less one that routes all your traffic - to access a site from another place.

I suggest: https://outline.com/
> Predicting all possible edge cases of a piece of software has been proven to be very hard in the past (there have been software bugs that literally killed people).

This is what formal verification is for. But seemingly the current Smart Contract ecosystem doesn't care...
Cryptocurrencies Aren't Unregulated, They're Unlegislated
Fox News is the a major barrier to that happening. There are those on the right that believe in climate change and think that we need to take action but they are vastly underrepresented on Fox. With that being the case most Republican voters will believe that its a worldwide leftist conspiracy and few Republican politicians will dare defy this orthodoxy.

That's why we have Republican congressional leaders saying things like people can't change the climate only God can (Inhofe), that sea level rise is caused by rocks falling into the ocean, and that increasing atmospheric CO2 levels are the result of more people exhaling.

Short of one of Murdoch's children changing the Fox line, only losing elections will change this behavior.
When it comes to refactoring, there are so many automated, guaranteed safe refactors you can
do with statically typed language that you can’t do with dynamic language.

I can’t understand why developers would want to take a tool out of their tool belt like static checking.

I’m a fan of Python as a low overhead scripting language but for large systems with multiple developers, static type checking is a godsend.
It solves the case of non-trained people from "accidentally" using a usb device that could open up data infiltration/exfiltration attempts
Thanks, I registered and will follow it for a bit, but I doubt I can convince many to follow me there :(
There are two things in this world that I have no problem with anyone in need stealing - food and music. I will politely look away. When I was a kid I pirated music, as well as music production software. I grew up pretty poor and I wouldn't have had those things otherwise (the only reason we had a computer was because of oil dividends given to all Alaskan residents once per year). I don't feel like anyone really lost out because of me downloading those things when I was young. But I know that the music industry eventually gained a lifetime subscriber (currently Apple Music, for many years now - family plan), and don't even get me started on the money I drop on software synthesizers. The good fortune that drizzled on me as a kid came back to those people as a raging storm. Advertisers know exactly what they need to show me when they want more of my money (those sweet, shiny synths), and I'm not even mad at them. They're almost like books now, where I don't even need to use them, I just like having them and knowing they're mine. That being said, as a long time amateur electronic musician, I'd love for people to pirate my music. As it stands I can't seem to even pay them to take it (with music that is).
And ensuring mass depression, deaths and misery.
That's a pretty huge selling point - I think it was the main reason for creating them.

The flaw this post seems to highlight is that they shouldn't claim that they are sandboxed when they aren't. But even without sandboxing they're still a good thing.
One effect I haven't seen mentioned yet is that EU data subjects can permanently delete their Facebook accounts, along with all associated data. (Previously you could only indefinitely 'deactivate'.)
Not a lawyer, but I believe this generally falls under "obstruction of justice" in the US. It appears to be a felony in most jurisdictions.

Probably tricky to prosecute though, since you would have to prove intent versus, say, incompetence.

The penalties seem pretty low too, and not correlated with the potential damage.
Cobol had 10x fewer developers at its peakc and probably 100-1000x fewer lines out of code out there, in the wild. Plus it didn't have a huge Open Source community.
It's also affecting nutrient absorption. I don't see any quantitative number about this in the paper but it's been mentioned several time as having an impact.
> This isn't limited to "open source". It is probably just a people problem.

My understanding is that those kinds of "people problems" are exactly what CoCs are attempting to tackle. (Or at least that's one motivation)
Yes, but with Java, a good IDE can answer questions like:

- Where is this method being used?
- If I delete or change this method will anything break?
....
Yup. We are switching to openjdk 11 from Oracle 8. We used none of the commercial features and really only used the Oracle jdk because it was easy to install.

If you want support, there area ton of other jdks for cheaper (like azul).
Biscuit: Monolithic, POSIX-Subset OS Kernel in Go for X86-64 CPUs
Not really a song might take a week or 5 mins to write but its the result of years of experience and hard work - your not going to write "September Song" at 18 are you

You would be ok with your employer using the same argument when they paid you ?
Right to repair is not the right to repair the thing myself, is the right to have someone fix it, why should I send my 6 years old Macbook sent in US to be fixed by Apple (with a cost 2 times more then the money I paid for it) instead of having a third party person in my area use a component from a different Macbook to fix it.
https://www.etherchain.org/charts/topMiners
It's easy when you throw out a lot of "predictions". This is how the Simpsons do it as well.
Put into perspective — £120k isn't enough to hire two full-time people to work on this sort of problem, so why would they?
USB drive is not the most alarming detail. The fact that sensitive data was in a TRAINING VIDEO.
Even with the 'facebook redirect' trick.. the paywall prevents me from viewing this article. -_-
Honestly you are missing out, I've been developing in Django for years and can't imagine not generating code anymore. Generate and a bit of tweaking, the results are the same with a lot less time.
Of course it’s possible if you write every line of code and you know it inside an out, but that’s very much not the norm.
What's your source for this 12 year figure? What exactly happening in 12 years? What scientists are saying it's our "final chance"?

I don't think being hyperbolic is constructive or helpful in the slightest when you're looking to have a serious discussion. To be clear, I'm not saying there isn't a problem. I agree that there are a multitude of problems and that we must take action to address them. But over the last few decades a few people have made a name for themselves by making crazy allegations, and I believe this has done nothing but make people take the issue less seriously than they should.

I'm happy to be corrected on this, since I'm not an expert and I haven't done that much research. When I last looked into this topic it didn't seem like there was consensus among the scientific community about the predicted timelines for future climate events or even a clear understanding of what those events would be. Again, I'm very happy to be corrected on any of this, as I take the topic of climate change incredibly seriously. It is my belief that allowing climate change issues to run loose is one of the biggest risks to our civilization.
You can only make that choice if you're informed about the tradeoff. Getting sites to inform users is the main purpose of the GDPR. It's not the EU's fault that the LA Times would rather block people than do that.
And if the 2 years of warranty is over and my product breaks should I throw the device?
A few jobs ago was in Python. Joy to write, absolute terror to deploy.

Seared into my mind was a failure caused by delivering .pyc files (oops) to a server whose shared libs were compiled with different flags than our CI box.

To be fair, this was before docked (or at least before I’d heard of it). Maybe that’s improved things a bit.
Data Science Interview Questions and Answers
This is a problem with usernames being the display names on the platform. For example, my friend's Xbox Live name is in the format XX## from before Microsoft upped the minimum character count. He was grandfathered in. He's fairly attached to his name and forcing him to go to one of the remaining unique usernames doesn't seem fair when he's been paying for the service for over a decade. In that time, thousands of "good" usernames have been taken and all that seems to be left is John33191299991102. Asking them to switch names they've already locked in is a very difficult balancing act between this problem and pissing off their longest standing customers.

Steam's approach of unique username and your choice of display name makes the most sense to me. If I want to be Bob, I can be. If I want to choose something rather unique, I can. However, this opens up a whole new set of problems with impersonation. I don't think this is a problem on XBox with the buddy system and no trade economy though.
So did you believe Julie Swetnick before or after she walked back her allegations?
RAPIDS: Open GPU Data Science
The conclusions they draw about the Russian spies are so fundamentally basic that to question them would be a shocking assault on truth.

These spies used GRU HQ address on their undercover passports. They registered over 300 sequential vehicles all to spies. They used their real names! This wasn't a "Bellingcat isn't credible" situation but a "GRU failed at basic spycraft" situation.
Agreed... this seemed like it might run afoul of CADT [1], and I'm glad it hasn't.

1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Project page - http://rapids.ai
And as usual, it's a question of degree. If the bulk of development is done on the official repo and people just do occasional private forks for special use cases, I don't think there is a problem.

What's problematic is when the balance shifts and the bulk of interesting developments is done in private forks.