skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dominic is wrong. If there's no authority, then there's nobody taking responsibility. This is a perfect example of how lack of organizational structure simply does not work in the real world. Dominic's other projects like scuttlebutt are likely doomed to fail as well because of his wrongheaded views about organization.

For a successful counter-example, one can look at the well-structured, hierarchical organization behind Linux. Lieutenants gain authority based on the merit of their contributions, and are responsible for reviewing the work of other developers. Authority works, has worked for thousands of years, and will continue to work for thousands more.
"The convincing argument in my mind is that unlike Rust, Go has no trait system to facilitate this sugar, so the alternative is to special-case the compiler to support the error type."

What do you need out of "traits" that "interfaces" don't provide, for error handling?
"I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. ... You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business."

Prove it. Get out ahead of these issues. Add value. Progress marches on. Lead the way.

Let's assume (for scope of this comment) the replication crisis is the biggest threat to everyone's reputation.

What would a solution look like?

More access & transparency & accountability.

Imagine a scholarly clearing house that facilitated the existing processes and workflows.

Something like github.com for warehousing all the data. Something like a collaborative editor. Something like scholar.google.com to better find & forage for stuff. Something like linkedin.com for researchers to connect and share their thoughts.

Maybe even a brokerage for grants, connecting funders with applicants, help administrate the administrivia.

Publishers would still publish journals. The cream rises to the top. aka curation. As Scott Galloway likes to say "Information wants to be expensive."

TL;DR: Innovate to add value in a changing world, instead using the status quo to continue rent seeking.

--

"It's like discussing politics online."

For policy work (vs electoral politics), I very much agree. Policy work has it's own replication crisis.
This is ignoring an important benefit of the libc implementations of malloc/free on OpenBSD, free pages are being opportunistically munmap'd at random. This catches actual bugs.

Otto Moerbeek has a great recent Twitter thread on the topic:
https://twitter.com/ottom6k/status/1065594523559096321

https://twitter.com/ottom6k/status/1063118597160091648

> The JIT has no insight into the app's malloc/free usage, so no, it can't. There is no system allocator in WASM, just a big chunk of linear memory that the app does whatever it wants with.

This point by kllrnohj illustrates a pretty significant weakness.
You can, but it's opt-in. At least once with every new project I go "gah, dammit!" because I forget to check in a lockfile, but I sleep better at night.

I do not know if NPM lockfiles are transitive, though. Guess I'd better go looking...
It's worth pointing out that the U.S. Congress can also directly subpoena documents and testimony without going through a judge.
I think the issue here is not learning new things, but having the time to sit down and focus on them. As a child and young adult, you usually have fewer distractions -- whether a significant other, a mentally or physically exhausting job, bills to pay, etc. -- and spending hours on a single task is not so difficult.

I have found a lot of success in waking up earlier to do the "learn a new thing" part of my routine, before the hectic work day begins.
If all you need are Lightroom and Photoshop, yes. The full Creative Cloud is $50/month for professionals. This is a pretty good deal if you would otherwise have purchased a bunch of apps but Adobe doesn't really provide a subscription option between single app and everything.
Essential TypeScript Types - Get Started with TypeScript
>He forgot to mention preferred shares given to VC’s with liquidation preferences that likely never disclosed to new engineers.

>Usually, the founders and VC have the preferred shares, while someone writing unit tests at 3am does not.

This. I moved into a VP Eng role at a startup and had options for common stock worth about 0.7% of the company. When we were acquired, those were worth zero, though I was decently compensated by the acquiring company with cash and stock. The money I made was due to my role/position rather than my equity.
Response to first genetically edited babies from CRISPR co-inventor
We can agree to disagree on that. The certs are useful if your business requires them for whatever reason but my standard take is any cert that doesn’t require hands on learning, such as RHCSA/RHCE/CKA/CCIE, tend to be a pointless exercise in reading comprehension. I say this as someone with several AWS certs.
Please have a look how frigging huge ITER is. There is no other way to put it. This thing has its own campus. It is also delayed because it is the first of its kind and also underfunded with some mismanagement on top. But
Just be glad they didn't pair them with advertisements for face masks, and blood remover.
> Being good at marketing is essential

This claim is dubious. That you can sell people space exploration by hyping it up.

It does not show in money, or people going to STEM field. It probably increases interest for scifi books or videos.

> I'm sometime very tired of the pessimist sentiment here.

You want to be inspired/entertained as a consumer. People who must be constantly emotionally propped and mentally supported are not the ones who are willing to go and work toward Mars.
Well, he didn't really hand it over to a hacker, did he?
That is nominally a series A startup, but actually a bootstrapped since series A startup. Big difference.
First, that's inherently non-portable. That aside...

On most systems, the null pointer happens to be a pointer to address zero. For other systems, e.g. 8086 16-bit mode, you can create a intptr_t (which is the same size as a pointer) and set it to zero. Then cast it to a pointer. Such casting is always done bitwise, so it will work.

The compiler knows to turn the following into the null pointer

void *p = (void *) 0;

but the compiler will NOT turn the following into a null pointer

void *p = (void *) (uintptr_t) 0;

because the literal 0 is now in an integer context, not a pointer context.
I think the Assange/wikileaks indictment is a misstep by the justice department/current administration.

My understanding is that it's far from clear how a case again Assange/wikileaks would play out in court. Like the article mentions, the New York Times and others have published classified information repeatedly -- how can Assange be indicted but not the NYT? Assange also isn't an American citizen and he hasn't leaked information himself, just published it. I think there's a good chance Assange would be acquitted.

I also think it's a bizarre exagerration to argue that an attempted prosecution of Assage would result in "broad new powers to put Trump’s media 'enemies' in jail".

Don't get me wrong -- I don't much care for Assange. It seems to me that there's a lot of hot air coming from him and he appears to have quite an ego. Also, though I understand there is disagreement about this, I think countries keep secrets for a reason and I consider it naive utopianism to expect everything to be brought into the open. In an ideal world, sure, but the world is not ideal.

While I don't think Assange/wikileaks are necessarily "siding with Russia," I do think that Russia has made use of wikileaks. Wikileaks is heavily promoted in Russian propaganda, and it seems at least plausible that Russia could obtain information and leak it through wikileaks. This is a problem for wikileaks: if you're all about freedom of information and you make public everything passed onto you, it's totally possible for state actors -- the same state actors whose behavior you find reprehensible -- to use you as a tool to further their own interests.
The people with legal liability to the end-users, I expect, are the developers that made use of this library without properly vetting all changes to it.
Sure, but then they have to actively invest time into the project... not everyone can afford that.
Yes, and also making that house, or land, or taxes produce 4x as much energy is categorically different form reducing the cost of existing 22%-efficiency panels by 75%.

That's because higher-energy-per-unit-area panels increases the efficiency of land use, which drives all the other costs you list: land acquisition, taxes, customer acquisition, etc.
Scientist claims he created world's first gene-edited (CRISPR) babies
Ask HN: Do you start an LLC when launching a side-project?
If you do, do you use a LLC creation website, or do you do the paperwork yourself and list yourself as the registered agent. If not, what do you do instead to shield yourself from liability?
I was immediately reminded of "color.com", the social network that bought the domain for $350,000. I remember that people thought that was preposterous at the time[1]. I'm not sure that $825,000 for cover.com a few years later makes a lot more sense. At least I hope for them that they'll be more successful than Color.

By the way I just checked and color.com seems to now belong to a genetic testing company, I wonder how much they paid for the domain, maybe the color.com app made a good investment in the end.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/24/color-com-was-acquired-for...
Free GitHub unlimited private repos
Awesome, was looking for something like this. Will definitely try it out. What rate (fps) were you able to process the stream at?
Ah that fresh whataboutism I’m always sure to see on any HN thread discussing Chinese human rights violations.
I really like this idea, thanks for sharing.
Uhh... are you aware that the 7-X design was computed in the late 80s?

It was just an enormous challenge to build this thing. Things like building and validating the field coils required a lot of effort and some novel approaches that they had to come up with along the way.
coverage.com would also be perfect.

"If you need coverage, just go to coverage.com!"
Oh come now. Subscription software is simply a system by which software developers can ensure a continuous revenue stream, independent of the value of any ongoing development they do.
Original title: "Paradoxes of Material Implication"
Yes, Go requires explicit error propagation, but this is desirable because 1) errors are no different than other values so they don’t get special flow control and 2) people are much more likely to properly handle errors if they have to think about handling in every call frame (I.e., error handling bugs are much rarer in Go than Python or JS or etc).
> presumably the domain name is a capital asset that preserves its basis

the domain name doesn't have an inherent value or basis, it's (presumably) unlikely that the next Cover Inc would be willing the same amount within a short timeframe of them wanting to disinvest from the name. Illiquid assets have to pay for liquidity in such cases.
And, while the usual modern method is resort to executive enforcement and criminal charges, Congress has and has used (though not used since 1935) inherent arrest and detention powers which have been confirmed as intrinsic to their Constitutional authority by the Supreme Court.

So while it would be newsworthy for Congress to do this, what the Parliament did here is not something Congress could not legally do to a visiting exec in possession of information sealed by a foreign court.
> I liked Elon about 3 years ago before we found out he was a master Marketer. I feel played.

What’s wrong with him being a master marketer?
2018 on Track to Be One of the Worst Ever for Data
His responsibility as a maintainer is to signal when there's a change in power, since the package is trusted via his credentials.
Errors cause side effects, which is how you get to improper state. How does forcing the caller to handle errors helps with removing side effects?
I think they carry a ceremonial mace, heavily ornamented with gold reliefs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serjeant-at-arms#/media/File:M...

I'd definitely not want to be bonked on the head with that. Fortunately, as the article you link to says, they can call the police to do the dirty job. "Fortunately", as in, the combined threat from the mace and the cops should suffice to convince most people.
https://jalopnik.com/general-motors-may-kill-the-chevrolet-v...

> Update (Nov. 26, 2018 10:50 A.M. ET): It is official. A GM spokesperson told Jalopnik over the phone: “We are ending production of the Volt March 1, 2019.”
Well then living in a conversion van wouldn't be for you. For many young professionals who can work remotely in the west coast, it's a very compelling option. Especially with the fact you throw away a significant portion on your income on rent. With a van it's significantly cheaper(less than half) and at the end of the day, you own it.

There are other issues but many people have figured it out and there's a vibrant van(life) community that's thriving due to the sky high property prices.
So you reckon that people who publish open source software should be liable for flaws/vulnerabilities in their code?

It's a bold assertion, I'd be interested to see if you can provide any case law where it's been tested.
Free lunch tasted bad? And let's not blame the free lunch people who are always on the hunt for people and ingredients needed to put together free lunches.

Paying for a better, more consistent lunch makes sense at some point, yes?

People are motivated to work, ingredients are vetted, better prepared, etc...

Not blaming anyone, just pointing out an obvious problem by analogy.
Bitcoin Winter Is Hurting Altcoins
If you run a business where you have convinced people to give you access to their house to do some chore and you sell your business and your copy of their keys to a criminal it could be morally problematic.

A car is merely a fungible vehicle the customer would have been no better or worse off had the robber been driving a different car.

This would be an apt analogy for just giving / selling a code base.

Had it been distributed under a new account/name users could have decided to trust or not trust a new maintainer.

The dev allowed new people to trade under his name and rep worse allowed new people to delegate further to unknown others.

He is morally liable and ought to have known better.
It's definitely too early for them to declare victory on justifying the $825M domain purchase.

I wonder if this is a pattern for them to celebrate the vanity milestones - I also noticed another medium post about the $27M they raised that "puts us in a strong position to fundamentally change the insurance industry".

https://medium.com/@coverinsurance/i-raised-27m-in-two-years...

Changing the insurance industry is a huge task and $27M is a drop in the bucket - if I were there investor I'd hope to see their medium articles focus more on real progress they are making to change the industry.
Err... I believe Ford didn't want the bailout money. Not sure why you tossed them in here.

I am totally in favor of letting bankruptcy courts do the job they are best at. All those assets don't just go away, they are put to better use.
The biggest problem is that the Web doesn't fit GUI's well. MVC and its variants are an ugly fudge, largely to make the stateless Web protocols "seem" stateful. One has to split the work up into bigger teams to do something that was easy, trivial, one-man-band work in things like Powerbulder, Delphi, Oracle Forms, etc. We devolved from the 1990's, turning bicycle science into rocket science. Our Oracle Forms team is 4x more productive than our MVC team. It's embarrassing. Sure, the web apps are arguably "prettier", but at a cost. (If not for Java security going bad, our org would keep using Forms. Oracle should have kept the "EXE" based client.)
> Though the cost to benefit of $800k makes me seriously question if that money could have been spent somewhere else with better returns.

Do insurance agents still get residual payments on policies? I know after the first dot com crash, I was interviewing at insurance companies and that was a huge selling point to become an agent. If so, the ROI might not be so bad, but 800K is a huge nut to cover and I would agree is going to take a while to make back regardless.

Not such a big benefit when you have to wait 20 years to break even.
You can (and at least one nuclear plant does!) run greenhouses off 40-celsius air. Maybe some tropical fish aquaculture.

But no, nothing at infrastructure scale.
I have no qualms with the merit of an automatic chicken coop door. Obviously the benefits can be considerable, and the project certainly fits the bill.

The point is, almost all maker projects jump straight to let's throw an Arduino at it, with no consideration to the tradeoffs at all. This can be quite a disservice.

There are tradeoffs, eg. power management? (those batteries aren't going to last at all), fault tolerance? (arduino crashes due to condensation shorting out the timing crystal), maintenance? can you instruct an untrained individual to perform any meaningful repair work (eg. bend the arm on a damaged limit switch).

One benefit IOT can bring, is the detection of fault conditions etc (door took too long to open fully something stuck in the tracks), but implementing that kind of handling in a meaningful way is a complex problem.

These things rarely matter for a diy project, but you see this stuff everywhere. Consider whether a problem can be solved in an analog or mechanical manner, it's likely to lead to a simpler and more robust solution.

As for ensuring chickens are inside of a coop, that's a tough problem and I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that?

Eg. for the above chicken in coup problem, something as simple as a weight triggered switch on the ramp (or a push bar near the coop opening) is likely to out perform anything more complex.
> Isn't adding another potentially unknown maintainer generally better for the community than a project dying?

No, not if the project becomes malicious. I'd rather it died and I switched to an alternative I can trust.
> Isn't adding another potentially unknown maintainer generally better for the community than a project dying?

I don't disagree with your overall premise: if you aren't actively maintaining a project for what-ever reason (you don't currently have the interest in it compared to other project or can't justify the time that you could spend elsewhere instead) and someone else does have the time and the interest, the project should be allowed to live on through new maintainers.

But: just handing over admin access of a project that many rely on to an unknown entity is not a safe move as this case proves. I understand the point of not wanting a permissions based community and so forth, but (and call be cynical if you will) that is rather naive. The world is just too full or arseholes for that sort of idealism to be at all safe in practise.

Instead let the new person/people create a fork and update your documentation to state that you are not currently actively maintaining your fork and people should consider moving to the new one instead. This way no one else unknowingly uses the new fork. Of course people might blindly switch over without verifying the new maintainers which puts those people at the same risk, but at least they take action to blindly move over rather than not knowing at all that it has happened, and people who are more sensibly cautious will hopefully monitor the changes more carefully than they would under the previous stewardship so this sort of backdoor is less likely to go unnoticed.
> Dominic is wrong. If there's no authority, then there's nobody taking responsibility. This is a perfect example of how lack of organizational structure simply does not work in the real world.

Maybe, but the sort of people who are not jerks (i.e. who don't get too much pleasure out of having power) who are willing to lead for free are... very rare.

Fundamentally, non-commercial open-source needs to evolve organizational methods that require less leadership, just because there aren't a lot of good leaders willing to work for free.
If this is possible (a repo being maintained by not the original owner), then you have to assume it's happening.

So how can you be mad?
I am still waiting a friendly backend language similar to Elm. OCaml is hard and lost timing.
I completely agree. I think people are shocked, at first, at how everything can go wrong in ways they've never considered. Exceptions hide the complexity by pretending that errors are exceptional things that will never happen to YOU. The opposite is what's true, though, random errors will happen all the time; networks drop packets, remote machines are slow, database transactions fail because of other writers, etc. If you are aware of all the things that can go wrong, you can handle them. If you treat them as "exceptions" rather than the rule, then you will just write flaky software that needs constant manual attention. Some people like this, I guess, but I'm personally not a fan.

The syntax could be better (I do have err, !=, and nil keys on my keyboard, I really do) and it would be nice to annotate errors and not lose the semantic information (fmt.Errorf("trying foo: %v", err) throws away the specifics of err beyond the result of err.Error()), but really... explicitly handling errors after every function, even if it's just "return err" and punt to the code one level up... is something you have to do in every language. Go just front-loads it.

As for timeouts, I am not sure why you wouldn't just pass in a context, which already has provisions for a deadline, explicit cancellation, and cancelling further library calls. If you can cancel your operation when <-ctx.Done() returns, then you can ensure that all the related work is cancelled. You don't need a clever panic/recover for that. Just select { case <-workDone: ...; case <-ctx.Done(): cancelWork(); return ctx.Err() }. I am not sure why people rely on hacks when there's already a standard method built into the language.
Damn, of course I'm a consumer of space. I would not even be half that interested on how to actually go on Mars if it was not for Space X.

You know, research money is not coming from nowhere, you have to actually advertise what you're doing in order to get money. I even bet the the bigger the crowd is, the more money you can raise.

You know, if the public opinion is favorable to what you're doing, it get a lot easier to actually do it.
Step 1: Be an asshole.
Step 2: Profit?
If the car is sold, but still uses the same number plate, and is still attached to the name of the original owner, there is a problem.

Selling a car = shutting down the maintenance of current project, pointing to a fork done by someone.

What happened is just handing the car's keys to someone, without much notice.
Depending on size of model between 30 and 5 fps
> "If you hate Assange because of his role in the 2016 race, please take a deep breath and consider what a criminal charge that does not involve the 2016 election might mean."

---
Why? There is mounting evidence that Assange - whatever his idealistic intentions might have been with Wikileaks - has become an active conspirator in working with the Russians (and unsavory Americans) in undermining US democracy.