skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I manage a team of power plant design engineers writing complex scientific HPC software, mostly in Python (which drives Fortran 77 codes behind the scenes, among other things). It's been a long haul but through the years we've learned a lot of good lessons and are pretty productive at what I consider at least moderately good code. Everyone starts off by reading Clean Code and taking basic proficiency training. We know to try to make code speak for itself because, as we've all seen many times, comments lie. We've slowly learned from the software engineering community how to set up things like Jenkins for CI, black for Python code auto-formatting, Phabricator for revision control policy and code review. We're writing docs in rst with sphinx, watching coverage, and getting pylint 10/10. We're waking up to the wonders of static types.

Mandatory code review has turned out to be a great way to train newbies, write better code, and make sure code is understandable to at least one other person. It's been an investment (it's slowww) but I still think it pays dividends. That's what I'd add to this advice. And I'd tone down the comments focus. Comment only when you fail to express yourself clearly in the code.
there are tons of alternatives. the probme is, no traffic, no viralness, and terrible user experience relative to YouTube
lolll I never thought about that but damn. Yeah, makes sense.

Life is almost comical.
Looking at the revenue, growth rates, etc, it looks like Youtube sadly does not need to do better.

It seems protecting the rights of massive media companies at the expense of tiny players has resulted them in attracting the massive crowds, at the expense of tiny crowds.

Keeping Marvel trailers and Madonna music videos up brings in much more money than serving the indie sector. They care very little for the false positives, because only false negatives actually cost them money.
With Quora I learned how real filter bubbles are. During the 2016 elections I used to click on a lot of anti-trump questions. The site painted me a picture that trump was a "joke" and that he no one seriously believe he had a "chance". I was genuinely chock he started winning the primaries.. and then the elections. Looking back I still can't believe that I was so out of touch with reality. I haven't use Quora since them.
Nowadays I actively try to ignore Quora when it shows up in search result. But when don't the answers are often short and wrong, or blatant self promotion.
You are making some good points here. It is expensive and exacting work to, for instance, set up validation experiments, or to quantify errors exactly enough so that whatever errors that do appear are explained by known effects. Agencies don’t like to pay for this.

One forcing function can be if high-stakes decisions rest on the conclusions from the code. In the geosciences, you start to see some of this care for air quality measurements and for climate science. (One relevant journal here is SIAM J. UQ., https://www.siam.org/Publications/Journals/SIAM-ASA-Journal-...)

The lab where I work has spent a lot of resources on validating thermal and fluid dynamical codes for atmospheric entry of Mars landers — an engineering example rather than science. They obviously are very motivated to avoid an unpleasant surprise from a model failure.
It's great to see the team move quickly to resolve the UI / UX issues that Tom Scott was rightly upset about.

I've switched from Firefox to Brave due to their stronger stance against Surveillance Capitalism, and as someone who's been in the deep, dark depths of ad-tech appreciate the attempt to discover a new funding model for the web.

Much of the discussion recently on HN and Twitter was incorrect, but at the discussion's heart was a truth the previous UI incorporated what could be considered dark patterns.

It is interesting though to see the rise of bad-faith criticisms, as having read Eich's detailed responses online, and looking at the team, including Yan Zhu (bcrypt) and advisers like Zooko it is clear to me there is a highly technical, principled team motivated to make a positive, significant impact on how we fund content on the web.

When you consider a leading voice on GDPR - Dr Johnny Ryan - decided to join Brave and they are now engaged in significant actions in support of GDPR and against entities like Google I suppose it should be no surprise that ferocious and uninformed criticism of them will arise from many quarters.

This feels like a move into the 'and then they fight you' phase of the new browser wars.
The corollary is that spending money on information is the control for this.
For a take on Epic-the-software (as opposed to Epic-the-company), Atul Gawande had a great piece in the New Yorker recently: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...

It gets into some (though hardly all) of the issues of why EHR software is the way it is, and why (some) doctors hate it. (Among my friends who are doctors, some hate Epic, and some absolutely love it - depends on specialty, age, institution, how it's configured, etc.)

Among some interesting issues:

- As others in this thread have noted, the buyer (administrator concerned with maximizing billing) is not the user. That's the easy one that's common to a lot of enterprises.

- Epic makes it easier for medical directors to track population health and impose standard protocols of care. Individual practitioners don't always like that! I am not expert enough in those fields to say who's right, and I suspect there's not always an obviously correct answer.

- A lot of doctors dislike the underlying mechanic - being forced to actually write down everything they're doing and why - on top of sub-par UIs. The goals of the system conflict with the goals of the practitioner.

- Interoperability sucks, but it's true that standards aren't really there, and it's hard to get consensus... plus everything you put in prod needs to be back-compatible approximately forever. A lot of institutions got burned by maintaining internal software built over decades that you can't turn off because lives depend on it, and Epic/etc. are part of trying to avoid repeating that mistake.

There's more. I only have a toehold in that world now, but love to chat about it. Email in profile.
> At major tech and media companies, promotion of progressive principles has become a matter of humourless, ironclad dogma.

It's the "humourless, ironclad dogma" aspect that provokes the response of people like Pewdiepie, and it's that aspect of the reaction to Pewdiepie's satire that makes it a self-completing feedback loop wherever it's discussed.

A generation ago, this description belonged to right-wing moralists like Focus on the Family and Tipper Gore. Now it belongs to the left-wing moralists who have largely taken over corporate messaging and university curricula.

To me, the political aspect is less interesting than the underlying desire to control thoughts and behavior. The most alarming aspect is that it has gone beyond redefining what constitutes crime to using social media to attempt to destroy the lives of those who run afoul of the agenda. And it only takes a handful of people to start up the outrage machine and direct all of its fury at a particular person. It's the source of the sense of dystopia that I feel many days.

It will be interesting to see what the generation coming up now ("Zoomers" I guess they're called) does in reaction to the full-throated adoption of the humourless, ironclad dogma of the Millennials. I see it played out almost daily between my millennial daughter and her Zoomer son. I think it's going to be uglier than the Boomers fighting with the Silent Generation in the 60s.
I wonder if it would be easier and/or possible (should be) to just write a filter in jq that strips output, prompt_number and execution_count in each cell
Fair point in general. However, in most cases where the debate hits the public because there are experts on both sides, I'd say it still holds.
Not sure if it's required, but it's common to have a 13th month of pay on top of the paid time off. I don't believe it's considered a bonus (ie it's not performance based) - it's vacation pay. It's talked about as spending money for while you're on vacation, although there's no actual restrictions on it that I'm aware of.
XRP is created from thin air, same as the fiat a cryptocurrency is supposed to replace. That's how it provides "Instant Liquidity".
>you're advocating for fixed fortifications in an age of Blitzkrieg.^3 Or to paraphrase Toffler, instead of automobiles, we need to just make stronger and faster horses.

I'm sorry, there is nothing to respond to here if you're going to make that kind of equivocation. Reread my post and respond in a non-disingenuous manner.

I know it's hard for tech people -- who generally have no kind of appreciable liberal education -- to appreciate social systems (even though people on "hacker" news should definitely be intimately knowledgeable and interested in how these systems act). Asimov was right, technology is moving faster than our social practices and wisdom know how to handle.

> that you read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death.

I have, and your post makes no use of your superficial use of this source. Your entire post is basically responding to a straw man. Try something substantive.
Right. You do not always get outcompeted. But you run the risk. And yes, having good architecture in parts you need to change often is someting that pays of. As does having tests in section of the code that is brittle, hard to reason about or historically buggy. As does writing documentation on things that you had to spend an annoying amount of time on to understand. And I think that most researchers understand that and invest that time.

The thing is: This does not mean that either of us puts a lot of effort into having nice, good, modular architecture in parts we know that we will never change. Or write a lot of code coverage in module we understand very well and can reason about using analytic calculations. Or write a lot of documentation for things that are obvious to us (be it through familiarity or whatever reason).
The next researcher however might want to change exactly that part we never want to change. Or might the analytic check we always used to make sure to code was not going of the deep end is not valid for his work. And he is near certainly going to need documentation on other spots of the code (and find the documentation we wrote and needed useless, because that topic is something glaringly obvious to him).

There is usually no advantage for us to make the code nice for that researcher. And THAT is very scientific software gets the bad name from. Because we have to make the trade-off, what is useful to us (and possibly our time). If we try to make the code nice and friendly for every potential user under the sun we usually DO get outcompeted.
Competition, like Vimeo et at?
Part of me thinks the word "fantasize" in the title is referring to the efforts by Elon Musk with the Boring company, Hyperloop, SpaceX intra-earth travel thus I'd like to see arguments for why that is when in fact Boring company is making non-stop progress given how busy Musk is and SpaceX constantly advancing the edge of what is possible with space tech, fantasy? Not one bit.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Du-Bo-rUYAAeU6b.png:large

Might I also recommend you update the language on the "tips" overlay itself to remove any implication the money is actually going to the creator when the truth is really that its being held by you, essentially in escrow, until they claim it... which they may never actually do. And even using "tips" to describe the process also seems rather misleading in this case too.

Also, automatically scraping a creator's profile picture and adding it to your own overlay to give yourself the appearance of legitimately representing them is incredibly misleading as well. So might I suggest you stop doing that too.
That's only for determining who gets certain tax deductions. Minors still have to pay their own taxes and file their own tax return (if they make more than the threshold for filing) even if they are claimed on their parents taxes. The only way you can have multiple people paying or filing taxes together is if they are married.
I refer you to David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water”
Bitcoin provides stronger settlement guarantees than Ripple (as well as a host of other superior properties). Banks are fighting these technologies, adopting competitors which mirror existing business practices (as opposed to making them obsolete).
> thanks eventually to Rome and the British Empire

The British Empire? How so?

Rome obviously was instrumental for the success of Christianity, spreading along the roads of the Roman Empire, having a large population with the same language so you could reach lots of people with one translation Although Christianity wasn't alone in using these advantages. It eventually won out but Mithraism was a similar positioned religion.

After the rise of the Islam reduced the area of Christianity, European colonialism spread it over the whole world. If I had to single out one European nation with the most influence, I would have said it was the Spanish Empire and not the British.
Your initial point is true about just about anyone who wrote more than a certain amount of time ago. It's true of Jonson and Spenser and Marlowe, too. The latter point is just false -- textual analysis is entirely consistent with the historical evidence (such as the writings of his contemporaries) that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works of Shakespeare.
The >40% is of households. Children typically don't have their own households. And retirees can still pay income tax, both because social security is taxable and because they're making withdrawals from tax-deferred retirement accounts. It's not at all uncommon for higher income retirees to pay more income tax than lower income working people (as it should be, but the point stands that the retirees don't explain the total).
I really, really don't want cross-platform SIMD in C++. The reason I write asm is I know how the machine works and exactly what I want the machine to do. It's already hard enough to get what you want from the compiler and trying to make it cross-platform is guaranteed to make it even harder. If you don't believe me try opening an audio device or a serial port from Java, which purports to contain cross-platform libraries for these devices but in fact makes it totally impossible to use them.

As for std::string I never find myself using boost for any reason so I'm curious what the indispensable boost feature is for strings. The only thing I want from std::string is the ability to resize it without initializing allocated space, the ability to construct a string from an existing data pointer, and the ability to release the data pointer from an existing string (basically the union of a string a unique_ptr).
My impression was that the folks at Quora never got community and content the way that those two did. Stack Overflow's founders effectively provided an audio playbook in their podcast (before Jeff left) and anyone could have followed it to create a great Q&A site. This is just one demonstration of their attention to detail. They experimented with business models, and got growth on a technical platform that turns out to have been very efficient.

Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience. Looking at Crunchbase they had $226M funding compared to Stack Overflow's $68M. I know it's more complicated than those numbers, but I feel like that funding is squandered on Quora.
Your first comment was about a person's negative statement outweighing their positive ones, but this attempt to clarify doesn't address that at all, and instead focuses solely on others' perceptions of that person. Which are you talking about? Or if you're claiming they're linked, what is the link?
Yeah, I was looking for this comment before I created another. Surprised by how little Tyranny has been mentioned.
Is this a lack of understanding, or a narrative written with a supposed lack of understanding to effectively communicate to a general audience? The type of person reading this is probably not trying to relive a high school science class.
Is it really a "middle-class tax cut" when, "one in 20 families face a higher tax burden this year... [but] 7.3 percent of middle-income groups."

That means that the middle class have a 146% chance of having a tax increase relative to the median. Of course you could claim that the upper middle class got more $ cut than the lower middle class or some such thing.
That's like saying to me that Opera is competition to Chrome. Come on. What's it have, 0.1% of the videos and 99% of them are from professional photography studios? I can't even remember the last time I visited Vimeo.

edit: I just signed up to give it another chance, looked up something I constantly watch on youtube; "Medieval Documentary" and the few selections I have (3-4) are 5-10 years old.

On the flip side there are so many choices from that search on youtube I'm not even sure what to watch.

Youtube is my cable TV replacement and has been for maybe 10 years, and I'm in my mid 30s.

edit-2: I finally stopped scrolling and getting medieval documentaries. It's endless scroll so it's hard to gauge but I'm guessing I'd be on page 30-40 by now. The only way that I can tell that my search ended was now I'm getting thrown random Youtube rental videos. The first one at the end of my search is An Inconvenient Truth. But they still speckle interesting historical stuff in there for me. Lots of native american, 18th, 19th century stuff, etc. Then a lot of completely unrelated movies, like Holy Hell and Once in a Lifetime, Bill & Ted, what we do in the Shadows. I guess you could use a very vague "historical" against those so maybe that's legit, but not really my aim with that search.
We should support and switch to Bitchute.com if we want to have more than one internet cable channel.
Whoa, this completely altered my point view regarding animal complexity. Natures scary.
Bitterness is always less bitter in someone else's mouth, pain seems to be less painful too.
Pine.blog Feed Reader: Feature Roadmap
I'm not wanting to defend Youtube entirely but perspective is important with issues like this. Never before in human history have we have had the ability to have a free, unlimited access repository of our endeavors, and allow anyone to share their stories or creations.

Youtube is still at the wright brothers level of their systems; they're fragile, prone to mistakes and are pretty terrible to use. We didn't get to airplanes in a decade or two, it took thousands of years and we're still making improvements.

I see a lot of frustration but not many answers. How do you develop a system that has to be flawless for everyone and deal with 350 hours of video uploaded every minute.

That's like designing a perfect 4 lane highway with 350 cars every second of every day, week, month and year, and having a perfect system in case of an accident.

It's not possible, there will be mistakes and we should accept that but always push for improvement, but we're still in the early stages. Just like aircraft, it'll get better but it will take some time.

This isn't exclusive to Youtube, why do you think no one else is insane enough to challenge them? Any provider would have these issues (there are many Twitch dramas for example).

If I were Youtube I'd throw in the towel and just say "well, we can't deal with this, goodbye".

That, I think, is far worse than a few videos being demonetized or channels deleted.

Perspective is important.
Good article but falls completely flat at the very end:

> For TheFatRat the recent trouble was the final straw. Yesterday he launched a petition urging YouTube to fix the copyright protection system which 22,000 people have signed already,

Since when do online petitions matter? Like... never?
I’d like to re-center this on the author’s central diagnosis. Advertising is the problem. Bad protocol design is the cause. Now advertising giants control the protocols.

What are we going to do about it?
This seems backwards to me. Wouldn't a better option be to deduct interest on any house worth less than 750k or some lower number as that would help the middle class much more while also encouraging smaller home purchases and affordability?
Isn't that just a way of saying Judeo-Christian values are anything good Judeo-Christians have done, but none of the bad stuff?
In my comment I am referring to what George Washington talked about in his farewell address when he discussed a similar topic. He didn't name judeo Christian values but it's implicit when he says "religion".

If you are not familiar with it see the section on religion morality and education

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_Farewe...
This one is one of my favorites of the year too. ECS seems like a pattern which can also be used in other contexts then games. I‘m currently writing a simulation tool and I am considering switching to ECS.
After a sympathetic reading of your comment, I cannot grasp this apparently contradictory sentence:
"Democracy can only function with some kind of consensual consensus."

After reading that sentence unsympathetically, I think that you mean that democracy cannot survive without an official priestly class mediating truth for the masses. Is that too cynical?
Social Security is something you pay into.

The fact politicans raid the social security fund and bleed it dry shifting the burden to the young isnt the design

Social Security is not wealth transferred young to old. Its wealth stored in govt care and because the govt is irresponsible the youth has to be taxed to make up the difference
Ask HN: The most disliked HN posts/comments
Youtube released 2018 Rewind and it ended up being the most disliked video in Youtube's history. I often think it's a shame there is no most downvoted section like there are various top lists, best of, etc. on HN. Part of it may be that the most downvoted comment/post eventually gets flagged and dropped, but still seems like it's viable that there should be posts that got so many downvotes before they were taken down thus outranking the rest in number of downvotes. The benefit of such list is to realize what HN community is most against and what topics cannot be discussed. Should there be such a list?
thank you kindly. i'm not a fan of HN down voting either. i try not to do it at all. (i think my total number of down votes can be counted on one hand.)
Isn't that what "values" means? Things that "good" people do and "bad" people don't.

I'm just offering the Reformation as evidence that even people in the 1500s didn't consider the behavior of the Catholic Church at that time "good".

Edit: As the responses point out, people don't all agree about values. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
Fossil fuel powered driving will also not be sustainable long-term.
This kind of retrospective rationalization of mythology is typically referred to as euhemerism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerism
The link is a perception one. To people who view those original statements as negative ones they're not going to care about anything positive and the positive ones won't minimize the negatives ones for them usually. Therefore, if there are negative statements generally some people will find that they outweigh any positives said.

I assumed the link was pretty obvious... to paint a vivid picture if you have a person or group that says nice things most of the time about puppy dogs but just once says some hateful nazi rhetoric, someone out there will find that the negative outweighs the positive and won't care that there are positive statements.

Edit - I probably should've qualified my statement in my original post to better state that position. I can see now that it seems my statement is an absolute for all people. Not my intent.
I worked at a job where I loaded up people's cars and trucks and around 25% of people tipped. I always found it funny how the more expensive the car, the less likely they were to tip.