skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Every time I opened up a meal delivery service meal I just felt like I was killing the environment.

As you well should.

How the fuck have we gotten to the point where chopping up vegetables is a task too onerous for the "I'm too busy in my hustle to bother with this shit" types? These ass backwards Silicon Valley 'products' should be taken behind an alley and burned to the ground.

Coral reefs are dying, mass exctinction is underway, our oceans are deadened and acidic, the little life that remains is full of microplastics and metals, glaciers are receding, entire fucking nations are sinking, fires are blazing larger than ever, antibiotics are no longer effective, heck, even drinkable water is getting scarcer, but fuck it, what we need is yet more asinine packaging to let the fat, overfed, heavily consuming American have yet another morsel of convenience because god forbid he have to get off his electric wheelchair to exercise his muscles and bike to a grocery store to buy some fucking Brocolli.

Fuck it all.
Features

Compatible with redis protocol

Full distributed transaction support

Strong consistency

High availability
I concur that this is an interpretation I encountered, that is bad copy/paste of possibly good code (often from stackoverflow) that results in spaghetti/pasta code, due to pasted code not being reformatted/refactored to fit surrounding code.
There is one fundamental difference between software engineering and any other type of engineering. It's that the feedback of the rules that govern the outcome is instant and received by multiple human senses.

If you hit something with a hammer the result and response is instant. You can feel the nail went deeper before you look, you can hear you hit the head correctly before you think about it. You can feel the vibration and hear and feel and see the wood crack before you could read a sentence about it.

You don't have to compile the hammer and run the hit and read the result from the screen and if you logged the right things you will see something about the result based on what you logged but not quite everything because that would be an unintelligible mess. If you compiled the right version of hammer that is.

You don't even know for sure if you are holding a hammer. Of course that's not called a hammer but a unique tool you downloaded because they said it is the new best tool of the year - and there are several famous new tools every year. Though you cannot be sure if that tool helps in your job until you try to use it as you don't know if you are using a hammer or an excavation machine and both can be suitable for the task one being slightly bigger though.
In my past life I was an oceanographer at a consulting company. Essentially we wrote Matlab code that processed data we get from ocean and meteorological models. Many of these models, used by NOAA, are all written in Fortran. While most were well documented, one thing you could not get around is the use of parameters for these models ( think of global variables used everywhere) and a never ending game of go-to statements. I had to figure out how this one flood model worked... literally had to read 5,000 lines of Fortran. This is what we use to determine potential flood impact from hurricanes, today. Software written for oceanography is a whole other beast.
I think a bigger problem which these services don't get is that if you live in a reasonably sized city then you will have a huge range of takeaway/delivery food options.

The amount of people who want to cook and prepare a nice meal is probably a lot less than the amount of people who just want to buy, eat and enjoy a nice meal.

I live in Dublin, not exactly the biggest of cities, but I can't think of a single type of food that I can't order through one of the various home delivery apps available to me. No need to cook food or be constrained by a predetermined set of menus.

It's hard to make the case for a meal in a box service when you can order just about any food imaginable from your phone and it will be delivered within 30 minutes.
Yeah, the only way I can imagine it working is forcing everyone to open source their code. It doesn't sound very realistic.
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Specifically Go has very particular ideas about memory and stack layout, which do not go well with C libraries. In order to call a C library, Go has to go through thunking shims.

When using syscalls directly, it does not matter. Kernel doesn't care how your laid out your userspace stack.
I run an algorithm in my brain that tells me this is a bad idea
Skip the "or more" part, then, but that doesn't make it less true: it wasn't possible to make a 6-argument system call with syscall on alpha 8 years ago. I don't know whether that's been fixed or not.
This is good initiative taken by Waymo CEO in terms of Pollution. Good Luck for this!
Actually maybe it's a good idea, my algorithm is probably pretty broken. It should probably not be allowed on the market. Employers beware!
But today they have the biggest network of drivers, and until they do disappear (or get disrupted by something like self-driving cars), network effect ensures that they'll remain the default option.
The same for wine. However, research has shown that adding red food coloring to white wine, causes people to smell the notes that are usually smelled in red wine. [0]

[0] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...
At one stage a company I worked for was considering licensing the code for a school time-tabling application, rather than paying the company to do the (fairly minor) changes we required to meet (non-USA) state requirements. The company was started by a couple of teachers, the same people who wrote their product. It was 10s of ks of Pascal code, but with not a single variable name or function name that made any sense; everything was A, AA, AA1, X, XX, XX2 etc. I spent a few days looking at it, then recommended we keep paying the somewhat steep cost for the modifications. Then at least if anything broke it was on them to fix it.

Incidentally we had a small falling out with this company, and they were refusing to update their executable until this issue was resolved. This looked like affecting some hundreds of schools and their timetables. I did some checking, and it turned out their 'non-updated' executable was doing a simple date check on the local PC; if it was past a certain date, the executable refused to run. So I did a quick hack in our application that involved:
- setting the local PC date to prior to the 'cutoff date'
- running their executable with the required parameters, and grabbing the results
- setting the local PC date back correctly

This led to interesting negotiations as they were puzzled why their 'gun to our heads' no longer appeared to be working, and things were resolved to the benefits of both parties soon after.
To add: C-14, Al-26, Cl-36, Ca-41, Ca-48, V-50 and more in trace quantities can be present.

Try pointing a Geiger counter at a brick or ever better plaster wall and be surprised about the amount of radiation you get during the day.
Is it not time that specifications for additional features for C++ came with a test-suite? Preferably something shared via git somewhere that people can contribute to.

Would make bootstrapping some of these new features to a usable level much quicker.

Speaking as a dev that needs features to span 3 major compilers (clang/gcc/vs) before I can use them.
> Linux desperately needs to get past the notion that libc is the only gateway to the kernel,

Are you sure about that? Linux doesn't have that notion, it keeps the syscal ABI stable, and anyone can use it directly, like Go does. There's no need to go through blessed syscall library, which on their respective systems are the only gateway to the kernel.
Ignorance is bliss, till it kicks you in the ass :(
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Exactly. And self driving cars cannot even come anywhere near close to the capacity of the trains, which need desperate renovation. NYC needs to dump money into new rail stock, new rail, tunnel renovation and a massive Penn Station overhaul. Those will be more valuable two decades from now over self driver cars. Personally I think self driving cars will be a no-start in NYC. I doubt one will make it more than three months in the city before killing someone.
UNILOC thinks you are infringing on several of their patents.
Maybe a good idea, maybe not, but targetting "algorithms" is certainly too broad. Everything that does anything is an algorithm. Will we have to get government authorisation before we can quicksort?

This should be restricted to anything making decisions based on personal information, if it is to be implemented at all.

Also:

> What digital ecosystem do you personally live in? Apple, Google, Microsoft?

> [...] There’s a big difference between the way that Google deals with their photos and the way that Apple deals with their photos. Apple photos are your photos. You keep them. When they do facial and image recognition on them, they use meta-level features of your data. The way that they’re communicating is in the most private way that they possibly can while still collecting the data they need.

You don't need to live in some company's digital ecosystem. I don't. I own my own photos, and Apple are not getting any facial recognition features out of them.

For someone who is clearly a strong proponent of privacy, it's disappointing that she doesn't even bring up the prospect of opting out of these companies.
NYC needs train restoration. Self driving cars wouldn't even hit 1/50th the capacity of the subway system.
The linked MSDS says "dioxane-dione-dimethyl-polymer", which is better known as PLA. It contains dioxane in the same way table salt contains sodium.
Pretty much.

Route leaks are a daily occurrence on the Internet. You only hear about when it impacts some big network.
I beg to differ. Having to run the full test suite to catch significant errors is an indication that the software design isn't (very) modular, but it has nothing to do with unit tests. Unit tests do not replace service/integration/end to end tests, they only complement them - see the "test pyramid".

I think it's important to point this out, because one of the biggest mistakes I'm seeing developers do these days is relying too much on unit tests (especially on "behavior" tests using mocks) and not trying to catch problems at a higher level using higher level tests. Then the code gets deployed and - surprise surprise - all kinds of unforeseen errors come out.

Unit tests are useful, but they are, by definition, very limited in scope.
Well you could technically demand the companies show the source to this hypothetical organization. AFAIK the FAA will take a look at the software that runs on planes, and how well you can trace requirements, whether the requirements are tested. Still Boeing and Airbus don't have their code on GitHub.
C can't be that different from redstone right?
That's a really good idea. I was planning to buy one for a few hundred dollars, but I should just do this instead. The burning season is really bad in Chiang Mai (lots of smoke in the air for about 2-3 months), so it's good to stay indoors and have an air filter.
Article seems fascinating. Format seems (is) unbearable.
Keep in mind Weave was designed as the alternative to using LDAP for storing such information. The first browser supporting Firefox Sync (Weave) was Fennec on Nokia N8x0/N900. We're talking about 2008 or so here. LDAP is no longer used for this purpose, and the other alternative is proprietary and stores your data at a third party for data mining (Google Chrome).
You may not want to reinvent the wheel, but you have to change the tires.
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> I imagine many companies would suddenly become very eager to insist that their algorithms are in fact not algorithms at all but "simply computer code" or such

All you need to do is make human(s) accountable for decisions taken. It doesn't matter what is fed as input into the decision making process.
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> TDD doesn't think for you

I totally agree, but I met several programmers who think the opposite.
As a budding programmer (hobbyist), what can I do not to fall into the mistakes others talk about in the comments?
Is there any particular set of mental habits that could lessen the chance of spaghetti occurring, or is it just a matter of when rather than if?
Carey Wedler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4zu_QS6hK4
> to what used to be a very predictable and simple to understand language.

Are we talking about the same C++ language?

I mean, I get what you're saying, they're introducing new concepts fast, but C++ was never "very predictable and simple to understand". There is a staggering amount of corner cases and ancient obscure features.
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How does one control the chain reaction of the fusion process? I understand fission reactors using control rods to absorb some of the neutrons to prevent those neutrons from hitting other fissile particles, but this seems like a harder problem. Those particles fusing at a "low" temperature in the distribution of equilibrium cause additional fusion reactions at higher temperature thresholds in other particles because of the energy released, if my mental model is correct? And assuming the fuel is gaseous, the idea of a control/absorptive retarder seems like a much harder problem. Edit: Oh! Maybe they reduce the strength of the magnetic containment field? Which reduces pressure inside the reaction chamber and thus reducing temperature?
> WebAssembly has been widely supported for a while now. So the fact that it isn't catching on should tell you something about how great binary formats are.

I could argue that this also has a lot to do with inertia: the relative effort of implementing a web application in WASM is not comparable to using Javascript. It's not clear to me that things would be in the same state if there were also decades of work on tooling and libraries for WASM.

> They are easier to introspect. View Source is important on the web.

In theory yes, but is this really the case in practice? How often can you view source on a modern website and meaningfully understand the javascript? More likely it has been minified and uglified. Besides, it's possible to provide a source-map with binary formats to make source available if the author chooses to do so.

As to your other points, it is true that high-level languages are nicer to work with from a developer perspective, but the question is whether the fundamental web interfaces should be optimized for developer experience. I would argue that since web is the most prevalent way that people use software on the planet, web technologies should be optimized for performance and flexibility over developer experience.

The advantage of a low-level interface is that it's not opinionated. It's just a thin abstraction layer on top of what the hardware can do, it's not making assumptions about what use-cases should be optimized over what others. The situation with Javascript in that regard is insane: each browser vendor is constantly optimizing their JIT compilers in response to how people use Javascript most often. So the ones writing the code, and the ones optimizing the code are two disconnected groups, each with moving targets. A low level interface lets the end software developer have a consistent baseline to optimize against.

Also you don't lose any of the advantages you mentioned with a low-level binary interface. Inevitably there would quickly be tools released to compile HLSL or GLSL down to WSPIRV or whatever the low-level format would be. So if you want to work with a high-level language instead of WSPIRV, you could easily choose another high-level shader language as your target. However you do lose the advantages of a low-level language if you start with a high-level one.

It's easy to build nice tooling on top of a low-level interface. But if you require every application to have a nice-tooling-layer as part of its stack, you're essentially incurring a performance penalty on all software whether the application requires it or not.
Let me ask a different question to the knowledgeable folk here. It has been noted that producing the temperature is not the hardest part but confining the plasma for long periods of time is.

On this note, do we have any reason to be particularly confident that magnetic confinement will ever break even and produce surplus energy? In nature fusion seems to occur through gravitational compression, so what makes us sure that we can simulate this by other means that will ever amount to more than just demonstrations?
Totally unsurprising if you've ever worked with Oracle. The layers upon layers of legacy cruft are plainly visible even in simple things like the GUI installers.
With attack vectors it's also about ease of exploitation. In this case, the ease is high. If the person you are responding to compiles their own browser, the bar to put an exploit in there is already much higher. Yes, there are still attack vectors. And there always will be. The point is they're harder to access.
I'm not so sure it'll be fun for everyone... that is only a couple of steps away from a Black Mirror episode (specifically S03E01, Nosedive). The risk of 'poor driver' ostracism/stigma is significant.
> They all look like crack addicts scratching for rocks in an alleyway.

Here's a relevant comic:

https://zenpencils.com/comic/129-marc-maron-the-social-media...
> It’s never been quite clear, she says, whether the phrase—which is frequently the entire output of a student’s first computer program—is supposed to be attributed to the program, awakening for the first time, or to the programmer, announcing their triumphant first creation.

It seemed perfectly clear to me. "hello world" is the purposed program talking to the user of the computer on behalf of the service provider who wrote the application. The second lesson was then to usually request user input from that user.

> We need to make algorithms transparent, regulated, and forgiving of the flawed creatures that converse with them.

Do we? Do we really? Pray tell why...

> you could just put any old colored liquid in a glass bottle and sell it as medicine and make an absolute fortune. And then not worry about whether or not it’s poisonous. We stopped that from happening because, well, for starters it’s kind of morally repugnant. But also, it harms people. We’re in that position right now with data and algorithms.

No, we aren't. "Algorithms" is being abstracted here to mean, presumably, large scale high cost data collection infrastructure and logistics and business. That's not algorithms, it's something else.

> You can harvest any data that you want, on anybody.

No, you cannot.

> You can infer any data that you like, and you can use it to manipulate them in any way that you choose.

No, you cannot.

> you can roll out an algorithm that genuinely makes massive differences to people’s lives, both good and bad, without any checks and balances.

Presumably you mean sell optional, usually free services that people might want to leverage in return for access to their data. In reality there are only a dozen or less companies with reach on the scale that you might even start considering this a problem. Of course not using their services or applying various legislatively controlled options on those platforms protects you fairly well. Also not "algorithms"

Perhaps there is some idle minded conflation with the risk associated with data breaches?

> A regulatory body that can protect the intellectual property of algorithms, but at the same time ensure that the benefits to society outweigh the harms.

Insidious at best. The "algorithm" behind academic consideration of how to employ themselves by intervening in something that doesn't need intervention is certainly something I wish we could "regulate".
This is one of the goals of Judo. It combines rational thinking, "How does this throw work? Why did not my attempt work?" with the end goal of not needing the thinking in practice. No Mind. It's what allows any musician or performance artist, race car driver, to be effective; Because they need to operate creatively at speeds that are faster then rational thinking. And this in our field is of course known as "being in the flow".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin_(mental_state)
"Once mushin is attained through the practice or study of martial arts (although it can be accomplished through other arts or practices that refine the mind and body), the objective is to then attain this same level of complete awareness in other aspects of the practitioner's life. "

http://budobum.blogspot.com/2015/02/states-of-mind-mushin.ht...
And to "save" even more clicks, it gets flagged off the front page like that.

So much for shallow dismissals... "sitting by the campfire, telling the epic saga", while knowing full well a snarky reply to you isn't allowed.
I don't really know - in my case, it was all handled by my employer and their lawyers; all I did was gather the documents they told me they'd need (basically whatever is necessary to prove said work experience).
That’s a good point. Now, how do you find interesting job which involves computer science skills?
This is the elephant in the room, and the key component of cryptocurrencies which is yet to be solved. Cryptocurrencies can trustlessly manage intangible tokens which were themselves issued on the blockchain. But when you want to interact with real world, tangible assets, blockchains can only manage proxies of the real asset. There has not yet been a trustless way to ensure the link between the tangible asset and the blockchain proxy.
With 'we' I meant every country that's involved, not just my own country.

$60bn is actually surprisingly little for research that could change the future of energy production and possibly society as we know it. To put it into context, the Apollo program cost $200bn in today's money and a high speed train between LA and SF is projected to cost $100bn.
Sorry I don't know anyone who sells in Jakarta. I purchased it on Amazon.com and used the myus.com service to forward it to me. It's expensive but worth it for my health.
> it's disappointing that she doesn't even bring up the prospect of opting out of these companies.

Hear hear. The lack of this in such articles makes me feel this is less of a grassroots boycott and more of a political hatred for consumer information tech companies.
How about an SEC instead.
You can buy a ISO C or ISO C++ certification suite.

http://www.plumhall.com/suites.html

https://www.opengroup.org/testing/testsuites/perenial.htm

http://modena.us/

https://peren.com/pages/cppvs_set.htm

Ah just needing the support across 3 major compilers!

I guess you haven't enjoyed the glory days of writing portable C, C++ or Pascal code during the 1990's.
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Sad, but it also means more organ donors.
As has been said here many times, these puzzles test for corporate compliance, not for problem-solving ability. You're being assessed on your willingness to spend x months studying to a certain industry-wide norm, and to then pliantly follow interview instructions to reproduce one of the stock answers on demand in the format requested.

If you deviate from the rather arbitrary requirements you will be considered a no-hire.

Other industries have a formal study, exam, and professional certification process. Developers don't. [1]

In the absence of that, these interview play-throughs are treated as an ad hoc substitute. They're a passable fit for generic ass-in-chair juniors, but a very poor fit for anyone looking for good seniors or a CTO.

[1] In the UK you can become a Chartered Engineer via the British Computer Society. I don't think there's anything equivalent in the US, and I'm not sure how many shops in SV even recognise Chartered Engineer as a professional qualification.