skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was asking specifically about comments that directly contradict the code in a way that confuses the reader. If obsolete comments like "never delete" stand before commented code, what makes you think the commented code is actually used or useful?

> “(non-obvious) assumptions” - this is probably the only legitimate reason to write a comment.

If that's what you think, I rest my case...
Germany's third gender law is celebrated as a revolution
Because all of those who started on something like C, C++, or Java have way better programming practices? My experience tells me that starting language is literally not a vector in determining how good of a programmer someone is.
You can build homes near where oeople want to be, or farther. Or hope people emigrate or die. Which is better for transport?
Seriously that's your solution? There are load of people that get by month to month and aren't doing exactly a lavish existence already to be able to cut back spending.

What you going to tell them, "though shit now go be homeless somewhere out of sight?"
If hit at 25 mph people survive 90% of the time. At 50 mph they die 90% of the time. Yet many cities in the US plop 45 mph roads where people live.
Creating Kotlin DSLs
I'd like to see some pictures of the inside of a subway train in the center of Melbourne on 6am on a Saturday... ;-)

It's a mentality issue - Singapore and Japan are also famous for clean public transport, but in most countries it's simply not possible.
The life of an MPEG standard
> How do you feel about just starting with tests that are actually more of a specification?

Tempted and conflicted. Yes, it's tempting, because "yay, more general and comprehensive", the mathematician inside me says.

On the other hand, the beauty of these sorts of tests is often precisely their concreteness/specificity. Tests should be so simple that their correctness is obvious by inspection. (One of my problems with specifications was always that to me it was no clearer that the specification captured what I wanted than that the code did).

The other side of the equation is that although theoretically such concrete tests are seriously flawed, because they only test one set of values, in practice that is actually usually quite sufficient.

> we should be generating

Again, sounds very reasonable, but now you have to trust (a) your generator and (b) your specification of those tests. I'd rather have a concrete test.

Now I do think there is some use for this sort of thing, for example in ferreting out edge cases that you might otherwise miss. I wouldn't want to rely on it.
We can discuss the practicalites of commuting on the sun, too, if you like.
No its not a joke there's multiple processes one of which is the algae fertilizer. It's a very efficient carbon sink.
"But the vast majority are burning money like its water and there is plenty more where it came from."

...like kindling? I chuckled at this.
Fluid Simulation (2007) [pdf]
I noticed the same. Other factors played in too.

Around the time the malls came to Sofia, the municipality also started renovating the main streets in the city center turning Vitoshka into a real pedestrian street and building proper sidewalks on others (like Shisman). The renovations are still going on (Solunska, Graf Ignatiev) and this will only accelerate the process of turning the city center into a recreational area. It's really nice to see how new restaurants, bars, juice bars, soup places, sandwich places, and cafes pop up on streets just months after they have been renovated.

Other factors accelerating the process has been the large expansion of the metro, which happened at the same time as the malls were being being built, the renovation of tram tracks, purchase of decent trams, and the almost complete replacement of the old city buses with modern ones, all of which has given people from the neighborhoods easier access to the city center (which has never been very accessible by car).

Sofia is slowly becoming a modern metropolis.
I'd love to see somebody sell an old-fashioned motor-generator set for generating absolutely pure sine-wave current from a noisy input. Give it a really heavy flywheel and maybe some complicated flexible interconnect between motor and generator, to remove any effects of the input power. Or, even better, have the motor crank up some sort of mechanical/hydraulic/pneumatic power storage, then switch off to let the generator run for an hour or so.
It's on the linked page now.
That's the first time I hear that parents take their children to school because they're afraid of wolves
Miners are not responsible for validating the Bitcoin blockchain. Users are responsible for validation, miners are responsible for ordering blocks. If a miner produces an invalid block, their block is not accepted by the network of users.
If you haven't seen then yet, Joscha also did talks in a similar vein in the previous years:

https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5526_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201312291...

https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6573_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201412281...

https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7483-computational_meta-psycholo...

https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8369-machine_dreams

And if you understand German, he was also in the last Alternativlos Podcast where he talked about some ideas from this talk, but also some more

https://alternativlos.org/42/
You missed the point then. Alpha beta pruning requires knowledge of the game rules. Neural network pruning doesn't. The advantage is that it's a general purpose technique.
This is absolutely nonsense. Modern JavaScript is powerful and actually quite elegant. Perhaps stop thinking about the crappy JavaScript people wrote >10 years ago.
you are misunderstanding. you're given a state of accounts and it has "correct" signature (according to a third party) - without verifying every transaction that contributed to building that state you cannot be certain it doesn't contain invalid records. merkle has nothing to do with it, you either verify or you trust a third party.

checkpointing ethereum state or checkpointing bitcoin utxo set is a way to trade away security, decentralization and trustlessness for faster bootstrap. and ethereum folk have become way to relaxed about that fact.
I'm happy to reconsider my views, but from this comment alone I can't really tell how or why you disagree with me. I'll read a more detailed reply if you feel like leaving one.

edit: I see you wrote elsewhere in this thread that

> I see gender balance of a mechanism for approximating selecting the best talents.

My argument is that gender balance (and other kinds of demographic balance) can be valuable independently of its use as a proxy for unbiased hiring. I'm suggesting that, even if an unbiased hiring process would produce a skewed gender balance,[1] this might not be a good outcome, because a heavily male/heavily female group might suffer from shared biases or blind spots that would be smoothed out in a more balanced group.

[1] I hope treating this as a possibility isn't too controversial; I think there are plenty of ways it could happen, regardless of the existence of any innate differences. For example, even when sexism is the problem, it might be acting mostly at an earlier stage inaccessible to the company doing the hiring (e.g. social pressures on kids to do 'masculine'/'feminine' subjects).
God what a well written article! I don't have much to say on the subject, but this was pure joy to read, it's crazy good. Clear, engaging, to the point, making a difficult subject accessible without dumbing it down, no fluff or unnecessary side stories, just awesomeness.
> The article makes no mention of the other garbage the accumulates as a bypoduct of this event

In fact, it makes a point of it.

> More than 100 sanitation workers begin their eight-hour shifts. Using street sweepers, backpack blowers, and push brooms, they will remove the 57 tons of material that’s left behind, none of which is recycled.
Off topic: Can't we all, just get along and adopt the metric system? It's so weird, a bushel, used for grains etc., doesn't weigh the same https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel#Weight . Use the metric system and be done with it. Or even the pound /lbs but get rid of cups, pints, teaspoons etc
How to make a library in the new Dotnet SDK world
How Netflix Gives All Its Engineers SSH Access to Instances in Production (2016)
Joscha Bach is great. He has many other talks available on his website. [0]

His Twitter [1] is also a fun and interesting place, check it out.

0. http://bach.ai/videos/
1. https://twitter.com/Plinz
>adding that it might be time to remove gender from official documents altogether.

I feel for these people but I really think there is significant utility in recording gender. For example in China we know there is a problem with the ratio of boys to girls because this has been recorded. That is important information when looking at the macro level.
The usual reply is "Ethereum Classic".

If Ethereum were as centralized as claimed ("cult of Vitalik", etc.), the survival of ETC wouldn't have been possible.
>had 1 close call due to Frozen

Let it go.
Ask HN: Which Serverless Framework to Use, SAM vs. Serverless vs Apex vs Newbie
Which one do you use and why?
I hate this attitude among Americans. Like there is some strategy you can play that will make sure you won't get screwed over in life, and that if you do get screwed over in life it's because your strategy was wrong.

It has so much more to do with luck than I think people like you are willing to admit. Where is the compassion in your writing? This story is about people losing their jobs simply because they're old and used up by a society that doesn't give a shit. And here you are talking about strategies for success. It's gross.
>> In fact, less than two months later, DeepMind published a preprint of a third paper, showing that the algorithm behind AlphaGo Zero could be generalized to any two-person, zero-sum game of perfect information (that is, a game in which there are no hidden elements, such as face-down cards in poker).

I can't find this claim in the linked paper. What I can find is a statement that AlphaZero has demonstrated that 'a general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithm can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance across many challenging domains'.

Personally, and I'm sorry to be so very negative about this, but I don't even see the "many" domains. AlphaZero plays three games that are very similar to each other. Indeed, shoggi is a variant of chess. There are certainly two-person, zero-sum, perfect-information games with radically different boards and pieces to either Go, or chess and shoggi - say, the Royal Game of Ur [1], or Mancala [2], etc, not to mention stochastic games of perfect information, like backgrammon, or assymetric games like the hnefatafl games [3], and so on.

Most likely, AlphaZero can be trained to play many such games very powerfully, or at a superhuman level. The point however is that, currently, it hasn't. So no "demonstration" of general game-playing has taken place, and of course there is no such thing as some sort of theoretical analysis that would serve as proof, or indication, of such ability in any of the DeepMind papers.

I was hoping for less ra-ra cheerleading from the New Yorker, to be honest.

________________

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games
I'm afraid I genuinely don't see the difference between the two sentences Dan, it's not an attempt to be awkward. I'm sure if you fed them into a mechanical parser/semantic analyzer they'd reduce to the same predicate logic.

Let's start by agreeing that "Americans" and "American people" are equivalent, at least when discussing statistical facts about populations. Then the two sentences can be rewritten as:

"the homicide rate amongst the American people is much higher than amongst the Swiss"

and

"American people are more homicidal than the swiss"

or taking out the nouns:

"the X rate amongst Y is much higher than amongst the Z"

vs

"Y is more X than Z"

which I am 100% sure, if put to people in a neutral poll, would be considered the same.

But I'm also mystified as to the wider goal. TheDong admits the two constructions are similar, yet his reaction is extreme - one is fine and the other triggers calls for banning people completely, labels of "hateful and divisive" and so on. That kind of unpredictable and over the top behaviour triggered by almost non-existent differences in phrasing is negative to Hacker News, and clearly violates the various guidelines about reading what people say in good faith, let alone the one about reacting to the strongest possible interpretation!

Given that TheDong knows how similar they are, one must wonder what the purpose of treating them so differently is.
There is another aspect of this that is critically important. For a business to operate unprofitably, it needs a line of credit. There are scarily complicated second order effects of what that credit does, where it comes from and whether the net effect is good or bad open.

When credit is involved and businesses are not profitable there is a spectrum of results. On one end the credit is being provided by sensible people and eventually some of the businesses return a large profit. On the other the credit is being provided by idiots (government, banks with bad policy, etc) and at some point there will be massive losses when it can't be paid back.

If someone is observing 'gee, nobody is making a profit here', then I'm going to interpret what they are saying as 'we're moving to the wrong end of the spectrum here, there is going to be a clean-out where people lose their jobs or their investments'. But to have the conversation, really we need to know who, why, how much, when and what terms the credit is being provided under.
I imagine it's not available. Namecheap does that sometimes. It says something is available when it's not.

Incidentally, I own a drive.* domain. Have no idea if it's worth anything. I've been meaning to point it at my personal nextcloud instance but been too lazy.
5 tips to become an AWS expert
Teaching has always had quite a high outflow. More than half of people with qualified teacher status in England and Wales don’t teach. Most people can’t do it. Of those who can plenty decide they can’t do it any more. Long holidays and a fantastic pension aren’t worth a job you hate.

I doubt South Africa is worse than the U.K. The Guardian’s Secret Teacher is awful.
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/the-secret-teacher
they simply had to make compromises to get what they got passed

For much of that Congress, the Democrat caucus had complete control (with filibuster-proof control of the Senate); they didn't have to "compromise" with a single Republican, hence zero Republican votes.
I have a decent hi-fi audio system at home, and there is a clearly audible difference between playing from my high-end CD player, and playing FLAC from the audio out of my Macbook.

The difference is not one of loudness but of 'energy'. A snare hit played from the high-end cd player sounds like someone actually hitting a snare; you can feel there's actual energy in the hit, while the macbook out sounds flat, even at higher loudness.

I'm not sure what is the exact cause but I've always guessed that it comes from the qualities of the built-in amps in the DACs.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocea...

https://phys.org/news/2016-03-seeding-iron-pacific-carbon-ai...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
Share and edit a Document with others without giving all of the data to Google
Deploying React with Docker
In Moria/Morgul you spent forever to build your character, learning spells and getting nice equipment. Then you die of a poisionous rat and was presented with a gravestone and had to start over with a new character. It was painful to die to say the least.
As if the banks were forced to always say yes to whomever came knocking on their door.
I have the feeling many game devs do their own engine, but yes, the new people start with a existing engine.
On GUI-shaming and a mountain of hot takes
Just to put things in perspective. Solar can do roughly 50W per m2 at best and I am being generous. Nuclear does 1000W per m2.

Apples and oranges. We have plenty of desert land and /or roof space for solar. Granted solar is not with its enviro issues but nuclear stands apart. Also costs. A Nuclear power plants costs $20+billion to be built. But then solar by definition is only during the day
Or use "Request desktop site" in your browser, it gives you the same thing.
A Gift of Sound and Vision – Affecting Images Using the Web Audio API
That is spectacular - thanks for the link!
from the internet. are you now going to argue that there is no difference between knowing a couple pages of text that describe how a system should work from downloading and running opaque binary from untrusted source?
The aviation industry would always be one step behind the drone threat
I don't know what a strike price or a Hinkley point is, but if you're saying that it's more expensive than some other renewables, then the issue is still: we can't build enough renewables (in some countries it's physically impossible, in others you'd have to appropriate a lot of land for power production, and in a small number of exceptions the only issue is expenses) so price will have to go up in order to save mankind. I mean, we can haggle over prices, but that's what we're talking about. I'm not advocating nuclear because I see other options, I'm advocating it because I see no other options.

Fukushima was before I was into the topic. I really can't say anything either way, except to parrot what others say: it was tech from the 60s and they built it on a major fault line.

I haven't read up on insurance for nuclear reactors, so I can't say much about that either. Again, though, even if it's dangerous, I don't see a way out that does not include dependency by all countries on solar power from the Saharah and similar places, or nuclear power. Assuming it's somewhere in the middle between the current safety levels and the claimed ones for newer designs, we should not exclude nuclear. It's also not as if we would build 1000 reactors worldwide simultaneously. Some will be built earlier than others and we'll learn more about their safety, allowing us to steer whether we want to appropriate more land for renewables or continue building more reactors.
this certainly feel like paid article to bring some good image to Facebook
Today I learned that lenders cannot deny loans, poor souls forced to give money away to everyone that asks for it, without any kind of background checks.
> Compared to C, Python is the better choice. However, it seems like you haven't learned a Lisp dialect. I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme.

the school I went used to teach C, Python and Scheme in the first year (nowadays it's C, Python and Racket). I don't think I remember more than one or two people actually liking the LISP experience, how bad it was when comparing to other languages is actually a common joke subject amongst alumni.
That's a great book. We were using this book as a tutotial/reference during our http server assignment in college.
Not all commercial transactions involve debt.
A few things that have made creating new React projects easier for me:

- create-react—app or Parcel bundler, both of which require zero config. CRA is easiest but I’m not a fan of their defaults for Typescript (which is to prevent the app loading in dev if you have any tslint or compiler errors, even if they are just warnings) so once I’ve messed around fixing that, it’s almost just as easy to use Parcel.

- For website projects, I use react-static as a static site generator as it can handle all your data loading, bundle splitting, server side rendering, etc. for you automatically. It’s best to start your project with react-static rather than retrofitting it, they have a command line tool to set up a new project so this is usually instead of CRA/Parcel. Gatsby is probably an equally valid choice, react-static seemed a little simpler to me and I’ve been happy so far but Gatsby community seems larger.

- I’ve not used Redux for a couple of years now, instead using MobX for application state. Personally I find it so much quicker and easier to use, although it is undeniably more “magic”. Honestly think this is one of the biggest productivity enabling changes I’ve made since switching to React.

- Personally I’m a fan of Typescript, while it can be a bit of a pain initially, I think you reap the rewards as a project progresses in terms of ability to refactor easily and avoid wasting time on syntax errors.
/gif but why?

I understand how this entertains people momentarily but I still don't understand why people are choosing to waste this much in general...
Lenders are free to deny loans.
I've had fake headphones (more than once) and fake software. I contacted customer services and they didn't even seem to understand why I was trying to point out all the fake products listed on the site. Needless to say, they are all still there and no action was taken.

Take a quick search for headphones by "Apple", I doubt any of these are genuinely Apple: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/s/s/ref=sr_nr_p_89_0?fst=as%3Aoff...

The problem is it's more profitable not to care about these problems.
I know. I used that as an example because I didn't want to share the domain name that I wanted. There are a bunch of single-word domains which are not available, but have no WHOIS record.
I love these DooM posts on my holiday break. There is some kind of mindfulness - zen like - ie. anti-stressing - reading about something so directly fun, trivial and specific.
> I pity the MIT students that will waste so much of their intro course learning what is a vastly more complex language. There will be so many students that will struggle to learn python-specific topics that are irrelevant to learning the act of coding and may decide that CS and programming just aren't for them.

As someone who has been part of running intro courses using a variety of languages: While I like the Scheme path for various reasons, I do not recognize the effect you imagine at all from the students I've seen. That there are complex areas of Python is basically irrelevant for intro courses, the few pain points are really easy to explain and remember, and Python is great for the experimentation phase (the core is easy enough, the (standard) library ecosystem helps satisfying random interests and can generally also be used without being exposed to problematic parts of the language, REPL)
I might just do that :)
If the leader is willing to give money to someone that they know isn't able to pay back, then they surely are to blame.
I'd use these but none of them has Killbill or ServiceBot plug-in.
I am somewhat sympathetic to your points, but was responding to a comment that seemed to claim it was a non-issue.

I’m only “somewhat” in agreement because humans are terrible at reading warning signs, especially from long-dead people. “Oh,” they say, “that was ages ago. It’s just a primitive superstition. Anyway, we’re special.”
Easily building cross-platform GUIs could be that niche.
Which would be an argument for keeping gender on the census. Not on nearly every official document in existance
I'm not in Melbourne so can't say, who knows what they get up to down there but whenever I've been there I've had no complaints. The fact that Singapore and Japan can do it, means its possible though if there's a political will.