skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Popular as it is, C++ is still a pretty special case. Not many languages have references like it. (I personally don’t use any.)

int a = 5;
int& b = a;
b = 6;
// a is now 6

Allowing an lvalue argument to be changed by a function call is something more languages support, though, like C# and VB.NET. That’s what it means to “pass by reference”. Passing a reference/pointer is an accurate description of how most languages work, which might sound similar, but is really different enough to warrant not being called that. Especially because the behaviour has nothing to do with passing: variables just work that way in general in Python, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, C#, VB.NET, Lua, ….

Anyway, back to:

> I may be missing something, but I can't find any example in my mind which indicates difference between passing in Java and Python.

You’re right that C extensions can break the rules, but in the real world they don’t (because that breaks everything); immutable int objects are effectively primitives. (Modern JavaScript – in strict mode – is an example of a language that hides the implementation details of primitives better than Java.)
The reason I asked about a literate programming version of the shell script is that it speaks directly to Knuth's original stated goal: "I’ll try to prove the merits of literate programming by finding the best possible solution to whatever problem you pose"

In the context of that requirement, the it's the use of literate programming that's more of a concern than the specific implementation. (Which is why I asked about a literate version of the shell pipeline.)

Earlier in the thread, you also mention this concern around data volumes:

> If you have hundreds of gigabytes of input, you'd have to have at least that much more just to sort it. McIlroy's approach is a good one for one-off program or not too big input processing,

There, your concern is not justified by the stated requirements of the problem: "I did impose an efficiency constraint: a user should be able to find the 100 most frequent words in a twenty-page technical paper"

I do think McIlroy failed to solve the problem of demonstrating the value of literate programming, but I'm not sympathetic to arguments that he should've used more complex algorithms or relied on less library code. This is particularly the case when the additional complexity is only relevant in cases that don't fall into the given requirements.

(A literate program that uses SQL server or Excel might be an interesting read....)
They're rational. If they look into it, they have to actually work. If they don't, there is zero disadvantage for them. Why WOULD they look into it?
The article suggests they do arbitrage.

They blamed their failure on "increased competition for arbitrage opportunities." Properly, arbitrage is low risk exploitation of differences between two markets in the same thing. Cryptocurrencies used to look like they had arbitrage opportunities, with differing prices between exchanges. Mostly, that was because it was so hard to pry cash out of the underfinanced cryptocurrency exchanges. They always had some excuse for delaying paying out. Arbitrage requires the ability to move cash quickly from one exchange to another.

As that situation improved, the spreads between exchanges narrowed. Opportunities for low-risk arbitrage disappeared. These traders reacted to this by going into higher-risk forms of trading. Which is about typical for traders. It didn't end well.
(Parent may be referring to Shuttle solid-rocket boosters. From what I've heard they were as expensive to reuse as to manufacture from scratch. In other words, they found the break-even point, which is something good at least.)
Python: something you can't see causes significant change in program behavior.

Go: Something you see ends up as a compiler error.

Oft heard is the bellyaching cries of the proponents that try to conflate these two things, but they are not the same thing. One results in bugs, the other can be bypassed. Most languages opt for the second. (With Java for instance, most shops have a checkstyle gate in their build process).
Not in the same quantities you can't. If something calls for, say, eggs, you aren't going to buy a single egg, you're buying six at a minimum. If something calls for fresh cilantro, you're buying a whole bunch.

If you're cooking for a family, fine, but cooking for one or two? The food waste problem sucks, and you can't really get around it unless you like eating the same thing for days in a row.
I basically use the same kind of hesitance around automation when making programming decisions:

1. Automate for spec and quality first(make it work, get it right, make it fast)

2. Add opt-outs(write to the limits of your debug system, apply the Principle of Least Power, use common formats and protocols)

3. Automate the easy parts first and limit scope(short build scripts, mockup UI, placeholder systems, set scalability targets, etc.)

Software projects are ultimately about the full automation of a complex data processing task. The difficulty is in learning enough about the problem and knowing where to set boundaries. Writing software that "does anything" is one of those philosophical black holes that is easy to fall into in small increments, because the system can surely always do more, and you might have a library that solves 90% of the problem...
I rarely just straight out drop money for some large group or cause but rather prefer to do something closer to me. Usually if there is an opportunity to directly support the cause I do it.
It manifests mainly in 2 ways.
1) I participate in the event and pay a fee
2) I know the local population and people in need and donate both cash and in items/food directly

Neither is for any gain but seeing it first hand is such a great experience that you're inclined to do more. I usually advise people to take care of issues locally first. I also support the cause of supporting remote regions and less covered issues when I travel to such places. Don't want to just give money and "be done" with it - there's more to the cause and a nice conversation can also go a long way.
> Also, lots of people still use Perl. Lots of people still love Perl. I don't know why.

Perl still holds a special place in my heart. It's so forgiving that it's perfect for banging out something that gets the job done in a couple minutes but while I most often use it for something quick and dirty you can still put in some time and planning to write something complex and maintainable too.

I'm not sure there are major projects being written in perl today, but it's the language I still use for automation of day to day admin stuff and for pretty much all of my log/mail parsing needs.
Interesting. So would there really only be a fixed set of existing objects, and the interaction layer of the program would be simply a function that is applied to messages passed between the objects?

The message that is actually left gets sent to the object, which generally do impure things?

Would there be any way to define such objects? (Any such definition would of course basically just be a message translator like the program function, but if users cannot define such an object I'd imagine some real pushback, or at least some complaints.

Without a built in object to handle say MyFavoriteDatabase, doing the equivalent via a message to Network, and its reply message back to Program would feel a lot like completely useless boilerplate. (especially since i would need to transform the high level query to something low level like raw packet contents before i could send it to Network, and do the reverse on the reply, while a MyFavoriteDatabase object could do that all for me.
What my visa rejection taught me about the west’s biases on tech in Africa
That's what I do. If a call comes into my phone from a number that isn't in my address book, it just gets sent straight to voicemail. My phone won't even ring.

The only reason I don't just drop the call completely is to cover situations where a someone not in my address book might be calling me for something important.

That has never actually happened yet, though.
Play and search chiptunes online
Miners use energy for their ASICs and whatever else the algorithms of the coins need. We are seeing innovations in chips. I can imagine there is or will be innovation in decreasing energy usage of said chips. For example, a chip that can't melt doesn't have a cooling cost. But a global solution to cheaper and cleaner energy is probably the #1 way to rule the world if you can figure out how.
It's an astonishing sign of the times that people aren't more up in arms about this. A propaganda arm of a rival foreign country deliberately misled millions of US citizens with the direct aim to affect the election, undermine the fundamental mechanics of democracy, and sow discord.

They literally sold merchandise containing propaganda to unwitting American citizens.

If our current President wasn't in bed with Russia, we would have likely retaliated so firmly that Putin would be quaking in his boots. And yet this isn't even the top news story of the month.

Putin really went all in on his Trump bet. He's gotta be thrilled now since he won, but he must have been biting his nails during the election. Hillary would have been furious and taken action on this had she been elected.

Also, I can't help but laugh at the double entendre in this meme: "Struggling with addiction to masturbation? Reach out to me and we will beat it together." – Jesus
Yeah, I should have marked my comment as a nitpick.

I suspect if you picked Germany or Australia or any of the other "normal" countries where cops do have guns, the stats would look more like the UK than the US. Partly because they too have better procedures.
That first one sounds promising. I'll have to see if I can adapt it.

My devices are basically just gateways to audible, radio, and general timers. I have begun using the announcement features, but it is amusing to see the kids basically having announcement wars.
I think you're completely right that his fund isn't just performing straight up arb. In fact, I don't think it can generating most of its P&L from arb since (from what I remember at least), Galaxy Digital simply has too much capital to put it to use with an arb strategy alone.

My guess is that his fund got locked into a levered position on one of the exchanges like BitMex for trying to trade too much then couldn't get out for 24 hours. This kind of thing is more common than you might expect. There are also very few exchanges that allow margin trading, leverage or shorting, and all the ones that do have, uh, questionable compliance practices.
Why your iPhone selfies don't look like your face
> It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this.
However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility ...

Optimizing for legibility as opposed to screen space is a distinction that isn't very meaningful in practice. Because if words aren't legible enough, people increase the font size until they are. If something is extremely legible (like latin letters at a 40pt font size) people will naturally tend to decrease the size. So screen space and legibility are largely different labels for the same concept. With some wiggle room but not that much.
I wouldn't accept a distant interview I had to pay for at all, much less one I wouldn't be reimbursed for. That's the interviewing company's responsibility, open and shut.
No, it is not. It is in fact explicitly illegal to do a great many of things, even in defense of your own property.
Improving Amazon Redshift Performance: Udemy's Data Warehouse Story
Also, it seems unlike Jobs to be reading algorithm books or to claim so - he was not interested in writing software. Jobs would involve himself in the user-facing functions of software.

Whereas I recall Gates claimed to have read them, or at least some of the volumes, and found them mind-expanding. Gates wrote a fair amount of software himself early on and later would still challenge people on very technical points.
News aggregator by Duke Entrepreneurs will revolutionize how you consume news
They might still get quite PO'd. Also, if it's someone who's stooping to stealing packages, they might not be of the most stable mindset.
Sugar Free Chocolate Treats Benefit Good Health
Knuth talks about this video in his "Web of Stories" interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnMkW8M1ZGk&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...

> I was manager of the basketball team, at Case.

> And I’ll say a few words about that, because after I got into computers later on, I combined that with my managing the Basketball team. So I devised a strange formula that I don’t believe in much any more, but anyway, I had it at the time, where you could compute each basketball player’s real contribution to the game.

> [...] So I calculated a huge number of statistics for every player, and I had a spotter, who would call to me, and I could write it down, every little thing, and after the game I would go and punch cards that recorded all these statistics, and fed them into a little computer program [...]

> So Case’s Coach, Nip Heim, loved this system, and you know, he posted these numbers, and the Case News Service was always good at trying to plant interesting stories in the local paper, so they sent reporters out [...] and IBM heard about it. So IBM sent out [a camera crew] to make a film of me spotting a game, [...] our Case team playing basketball [...] how I would punch the cards, you know, and put it into the IBM computer. Before they took the shot of the IBM computer, they planted a great, big IBM sign on the machine, so that nobody could fail to miss it [...] and it’s getting printed out on the IBM printer, and then the Coach is looking at it and posting this up.

> So this was a little movie that I was in, about two or three minutes long. IBM supplies this movie to CBS, and they put it on the Sunday Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and all my relatives in Florida can see me on TV. This was very exciting. Also US News and World Report ran a story about it, and so this was my connection between computing and sports, when I was at Case. This was also a clever way for IBM to get their advertisements in there, rather subtly, but it was fun.

> That was when I first realized how hard it must be to be a movie star, because I had to walk through these scenes six times everything, you know, punch those cards over and over again. How could Audrey Hepburn possibly look so beautiful after the sixth take, you know?

(Thanks to https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006 for transcribing the videos.)
Think of the number of people living in a large city, and compare that to the number of police officers in that city. It is a tiny percentage of "trained" people asked to protect the citizens. There is only so much you can do, only so many places you can be at one time. An investigation looking into stolen property requires so much effort for so little return. I would be very interested in knowing the number of open cases at any one time a single cop is expected to have to handle. I'd be willing to bet we'd all be surprised by the number. Just like any other profession, as you become senior, the tendency to become jaded is probably even more likely as a cop. We all want them to solve our specific need just like an episode of CSI or whatever, but that's not real. Being too busy to read email sounds just like a guy that is just waiting out his time for his pension. Oh, and there is a significantly larger than 0 percent chance that as they go about doing their job that they could be harmed if not killed. Would you be willing to take on that risk for something like stolen personal items that is covered by insurance?
Pro-tip for Bananas: When they start to have black spots on the skin, throw them in the freezer. Use them in a smoothie, it will give your smoothie a really nice creamy texture, almost like an ice-cream and it's all natural!
And Warren Buffet was wrong. The hedge fund manager made more money than what the customer would have done in an index fund.
> the way most stuff sold in supermarkets is designed for family meals

Dude. Leftovers. I used to make a couple of family-sized meals on the weekend to have for lunch and dinner throughout the week. I’d also dine out 2-3 times a week to mix it up a bit.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS now available on Dell Precision mobile workstations
Introducing Verizon Media Group
One substantial difference worth noting between the Russian astroturfing and astroturfing from other countries is that Russian crime have been refining their ability to automate human-like behavior for ad-fraud purposes. For those not familiar with ad fraud, there's been an arms race between criminal organizations to emulate human behavior clicking on ads and the advertising companies trying to detect it. The resulting algorithms have dual use properties that can be applied to astroturfing (e.g. https://www.trustwave.com/Resources/SpiderLabs-Blog/Bedep-tr...).
It looked great on the iPad, really readable.

Optimized for mobile maybe?
Oh, but it did — from John Sculley. Such a saga it was.

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-dream...
Care to elaborate problems of IPFS? I just recently set up a node (which I run while I heat my apartment with GPU mining) and am wondering if there's some other project I should give my spare cycles to.
While true, enough people misuse the term "REST" that you can't trust, upon seeing the term "REST", that someone is actually talking about Fielding's ideas. Unambiguous terms become ambiguous if enough people are sloppy with their usage. I wish it wasn't so, and perhaps you can have a personal crusade of correcting everybody who says "REST" when they really mean "HTTP API that doesn't use SOAP and seems to respect verbs and response codes", but much like the terms "ironic" and "to beg the question", "REST" has been poisoned by sloppy usage.
Just in time for me to sell my GlitterBombDetector TM.
Nice, I think this is what the web needs, a Unix approach so tools can be built on top and hosts are interchangeable. Coming from wix I assume you know Carrd.co? It would be nice to start checking your editor without login as well (they do that) saving later to an id, a draft mode.
I don’t know what to do about such things.

One of my exes is certain what to do, which is why she’s campaigning for the fourth largest political party in America.

Me, I could work on AI to fully enforce all laws, but I suspect that would have unfortunate side effects like accidentally returning to feudalism after all but a few thousand Americans end up with multiple millennia of prison time because the laws themselves are overbroad… and if I limit it to just laws I agree with, well that’s exactly the sort of thing I would be appalled by if done by someone with whom I disagreed about which laws were just.

What should we do, do you recon?
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703172
I'll also usually cook two or three dishes that share all those ingredients. So for example, if i buy pre-made pesto sauce, i'll make pasta with pesto sauce, and chicken breast with Pesto sauce. If i buy a lot of Mexican ingredients (beans, cilantro, ground meat et all) i'll make a Chilli and taco bowls.
“The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.”
> For example, no server is involved so there's nothing to attack or track down, making anonymity guarantees seem to be much better.

Not really "no server". I mean, Freenet users collectively are the servers. As in BitTorrent, I2P and IPFS.

What Freenet does better than Tor is keep content available, even if the provider goes away. As long as it's popular content, that is. Although Tor .onion services are perhaps harder to find, once they're gone, they're usually just gone. There are exceptions, of course, such as the The Hidden Wiki. But any mirroring that happens is entirely ad hoc. In Freenet, it's automatic.
What the hell is a "broker fee"?
Abstract: We can represent an array of n values from {0, 1, 2} using
n log_2 3 bits (arithmetic coding), but then we cannot
retrieve a single element efficiently. Instead, we can encode
every block of t elements using t log_2 3 bits, and bound
the retrieval time by t. This gives a linear trade-off between
the redundancy of the representation and the query time.

In fact, this type of linear trade-off is ubiquitous in
known succinct data structures, and in data compression.
The folk wisdom is that if we want to waste one bit per block,
the encoding is so constrained that it cannot help the query
in any way. Thus, the only thing a query can do is to read
the entire block and unpack it.

We break this limitation and show how to use recursion
to improve redundancy. It turns out that if a block is encoded
with two (!) bits of redundancy, we can decode a
single element, and answer many other interesting queries,
in time logarithmic in the block size.

Our technique allows us to revisit classic problems in
succinct data structures, and give surprising new upper
bounds. We also construct a locally-decodable version of
arithmetic coding.
I have the same rule.

It sounds so whiny when they start their message decrying that they'll get downvotes for something.

Its even worse when its not something they will get downvotes for.

That's when you realize that they probably get downvoted a lot because of how whiny they are, only they always blame it on some other aspect because they have no self awareness.
> I have never had a problem breaking up a bunch of bananas in the store.

Ah, so you're one of those people. Don't you realize you're condemning those poor banana bunches to an ignominous death in the dumpster? Nobody's going to buy a bunch with an uneven number on bananas. :(

Being serious though, I don't think you're violating any major taboo. I see people do the same thing all the time. You're actually performing a public service for all those people who want fewer bananas but are afraid to split the bunches themselves.
People coming to JS from other languages often ask how to create private variables, the answer is to use a local variable and closure.
And with ES5 you can also use defineProperty
Food waste has to be factored in. I can't help but wonder what the math for net energy consumption breaks down as when you're forced to buy x+y quantity of food when you only want or need x, vs packing material.
OP here. This is a very nice actionable feedback. Thank you for taking the time to write it!

My pinning to Bandcamp's business model was purely from royalty sharing/transparency standpoint. Clearly it isn't quite spot-on and causing some confusion in the community.

The broad footer on profile pages will progress downwards as the user builds more work on the top, but I will definitely rethink its colors to make it less conspicuous initially.

At this point we're almost like a manual sweatshop publisher and we get involved with the writers directly to adapt their book(s) on web. I don't think we'll be in a position where we'll do what thousands of other websites are already doing i.e. force people to download files (or skip) and hope that those files will be opened and read somewhere someday.

It doesn't help the cause of an ordinary user (following simple Priority of Constituents here) and the general idea is that if the book is not on web, it's not accessible by default.
Does anyone, even HR, have a belief contrary to this?

I think probably most people believe that if they have a dispute with another employee that HR will resolve it in a “fair” way. But of course HR is only really thinking of which outcome is less likely to involve lawyers or a tribunal. Head on over to workplace.SE to see loads of this... if you can’t bring a credible threat of a lawsuit HR will always side with your boss, no matter what he or she has done.
- Wikipedia
- Khan Academy
- Black Girls Code
- Ng Girls
- Dot Net Rocks (.net podcast) (not exactly a donation but I get nothing in return)