skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find the converse of the observation is true as well. I often post things about potentially controversial topics (Rust advocacy, undefined behavior, the suitability of Electron for UI), but I am always very careful to avoid provocative statements. In fact, I usually send around a draft and reword anything that is at risk for being misunderstood. As a result, I often see lower engagement in comments than I would expect for comparable material. Like probably about 0.01% of content creators, I take that as a positive metric.

I also have a very good experience on Twitter, being careful only to tweet constructive things, and curating my feed. (I'm interested in political news, and find that following only Kyle Griffin gives me all the signal and none of the noise).

That said, though I can tune my personal experiences in these ways, I feel like I'm pissing into the wind. All of the digital content business is relentlessly optimizing for clicks and engagement at the expense of everything else, so I think it's increasingly difficult to filter for quality. I try to spend more time with print, but I find it hard to resist the immediacy of digital.
A tyrant is just a ruler.

> The discussion is what category AInfalls under.

A tool or utility. A hammer drives nails into wood enabling construction far superior to hands alone. A hammer can also crush skulls. A hammer is a utility. The determinate use is left to the user. The same objective reasoning applies to successful gun laws, which is often fatally missed by the gun lobby and advocates of gun restrictions.
Don't ostracize unions and 40-hour week will be back.
I agree, but the most wasteful packaging is for food. I throw out small amounts of electronics packaging a few times in a few years. I throw out heaps of food packaging every week.
Before they where slaving in rice fields and starving. Factory labor actually gave them a lot of freedom and self determination - even with all that suicide going on, but the point is that its far more nuanced then you make it out to be.

Edit: this article gives a fairly nuanced perspective on this topic, and its even more against my comment and for your comment.

http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1219/empowering-wom...
Yeah, this is the point - a lot of it is about trying to see someone's trajectory. Regardless of what you used to do, people should be able to talk about how great your work is and how far they think you can go.

We've got a post on references coming up actually, and this is a great question to note - thanks!
I was halfway through before I thought, "this reads like it was written by an ESL author." I scrolled up to look at the author's name, and only then noticed that it was machine-translated. Amazing job on the translation. Also a good story.
What we learnt from implementing Ray Dalio's error log process at our startup
This kind of tech was actually investigated several years prior, at PNNL, where they experimented with using electric water heaters to provide grid frequency regulation:

https://availabletechnologies.pnnl.gov/technology.asp?id=287

Soon after, I worked on an team that, inspired by PNNLs work, created a research demand-response system using a variety of real and simulated loads, including electric water heaters. IIRC we used the current Texas wind output as our input power signal.

At least at the time, our finding was that a collection of smart loads could replace natural gas peakers for frequency regulation on the demand side, so much that the service (therefore economic opportunity of) frequency regulation would be met with a small percentage of actual loads.

The real long term and large scale value of dispatchable loads was thought to be the ability to adapt to the intermittency of renewables. I think that is still the case.
Indico Capital Invests 400K into Sound Particles; Software Used in Hollywood
Researching the Traders Behind the Cryptocurrency Mania
Thanks so much for the compliment. This is probably a bi-product of the maze generation algorithm I used. Essentially, at every step, the algorithm bisects the maze horizontally or vertically - then, it chooses a random cell along this bisection to leave open (that way the 2 resulting regions are still connected). Then, the same algorithm is performed on the 2 new regions. Recursion continues until it no longer makes sense to continue bisecting.

Wikipedia has an article on maze generation that explains the algorithm - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_generation_algorithm
Lactofermented hot sauce is just Chili's and salt and water left to ferment. Comes out something somewhere between Tabasco and Sriracha.
This is different from my experience. I've find that I run into 10 npm issues for every nuget issue.
Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't one way to solve the "store electricity for later" problem we have with renewable energy be to use the unused power generated at peak times to produce a stable, long term material that can be used to generate energy on demand? Example: using excess energy collected at peak times to convert large amounts of water into oxygen and hydrogen by way of electrolysis, store the hydrogen for later, and then depend on hydrogen fuel cells during periods of little to no energy collection?
I love when developers make food analogies, they almost always show their ignorance of cooking, and sometimes of software development. After 30+ years of software development, I always read the actual code to find out how software works. "CombineIngredients" is useless and honestly quite horrific. Instead of "simplifying" it is obfuscating. The details of cooking are in the function. I don't need to see "PreheatOven" at the same level as "CombineIngredients". One of my favorite posts on this subject is: http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...

Tucking away code in a function serves a purpose, and that purpose is not to make the highest level function hold no detail. Like cooking, software is about the details, so don't hide them from me. I can't stand the "Russian Doll" approach of a function that just calls another function that just calls another function that just ... Nothing improves the understandability of 10 lines of code than spreading it across a 10 functions often in different files /s

Great abstractions exist, but very few abstractions are great.
Solar thermal is still several times more expensive that PVs, and I'd kind of have trouble seeing how that could come down massively in the same way that PV price has.
yep my game is on itch. It's a great community. The tools and the developer side of the website are very good.
I would have thought that Coffeescript's optional chaining, present at least as early as v1.0 in 2010[0], would have counted as prior art.

[0]: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/blob/1.0.0/lib/par...
I'm interested in better understanding your concerns.

If the DOM and JavaScript are the main sticking points, how would you feel about web apps being implemented with WASM and targeting WebGL/WebGPU as the rendering target?

Are you feeling more favorably towards technologies like Flutter? https://flutter.io/
I’m just taking the article at face value, they use the word container and say they’re not compatible. So maybe the article could be better, not sure.
It's interesting to consider how much money is required to validate this idea -- there are multiple companies, many investors, and focused engineers trying to solve this problem. Are those resources emotionally driven to a short-term outcome that is proving to be far away (how far, and can this push result in a non-linear jump somewhere?). What is the real hypothesis here that bridges the idea and valuation creation?
Yeah, my statement was hyperbolic on purpose. The difference with sales is you can put in 300+ hours and still get no pay. Which is partly why prices need to be higher than an engineer would otherwise think reasonable.

On the other hand, consultants live and die by repeat business and reputation so it's not as far removed from software sales as I'm saying above.

A major ongoing debate in industry is whether self-supported OSS with consulting and full time employees is a better model (time/cost) than enterprise software. I think at worst you have pathological tendencies in either case: the software company wants you to use the unique features that keep you renewing and make it hard to switch, whereas the consultants want to build a factory that keeps billing/renewing and makes it hard to maintain.
1.1 Comparing objects by value
I _think_ I'd prefer a standard `equals` method, or more likely a `[Symbol.equals]` method. With `[Symbol.equals]` and `[Symbol.hash]` we could also build collections for objects.
I feel like there's something I'm missing with do expressions. Are they purely syntactic sugar? What can I do with a do expression that I can't do with an immediately invoked anonymous function?

The examples the article gives don't really look all that syntactically different to me.

const func = (() => {
let result; // cache
return () => {
if (result === undefined) {
result = someComputation();
}
return result;
}
})();

const func = do {
let result;
() => {
if (result === undefined) {
result = someComputation();
}
return result;
};
};

And I guess I wouldn't be able to recurse in a do expression like I can with a named function? So it's not like I can actually universally stop using immediately invoked expressions everywhere.
Non-nuclear, non-strategic weaponry been important in every war fought since 1945.

While not between major powers, these wars have changed world affairs.

PS: You might not intend the way your comments come off. Speaking about another's logic for three paragraphs -- seems more negatively patronizing than anything else.
Recursive division may be elegant, but it seems that may also have its disadvantages.
Desalination is useful in certain areas, not so in others.

Eg in the UK we have absolutely no need for desalination, but wind speeds tend to be higher in winter, when most energy is used, so this tech could be combined with electric heaters also, as well as water heaters.
Draft Debian Position Statement About the GNU Free Documentation License
This is well researched, but unless I missed something it doesn't answer the basic question: just how many people work over 40 hours? It just kind of assumes that "this is what happens". But how often?

I worked for 3 years at a FAANG and only worked more than those 40 hours a week occasionally, perhaps something in the order of 10% of worked weeks. Even then it'd be 50 hours a week, tops.
The author doesn't go into enough detail about the nature of the blocks of code (how big, what they do) as that will most certainly have an effect on the decision to break it up into functions.

I think if A, B, C, D, and E are mutating functions then yes, it may be sillier to break them up if they are all contribute to a core, almost atomic mutation. However, if they were functional, breaking them up may actually make sense and be more readable.

let a = A(x)
let b = B(a, y)
let c = C(b)
let d = D(c)
let e = E(d, z)

Then you can unit test each function and read each one in isolation to understand what transformation is being done on the data.
You are describing charging a battery: https://www.tesla.com/powerwall

Also, see Gravity battery: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789456
Got it now, thanks. Coincidentally, had just been making some green chilli pickle - just with salt and water and onion, although other methods and ingredients exist, because sometimes I like to keep it simple. Will try out another batch with fermentation.
Groovy had the same feature well over a decade ago[1] (at least in 2005) and other languages possibly even before that. Swift was first announced in 2014.

Swift's is also tied to their `Optional<T>` wrapper type, any potential JS implementation would be more like Groovy's.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050815012153/http://groovy.cod... , bottom of the page
Samsung and open hardware? OS choice? Sure. Besides, the already do a lot of laptops. They even had a promising business line - https://notebooks.com/2011/03/18/samsung-introduces-series-2... - , which vanished.

Unfortunetely they never were, and probably never will be dev friendly.
From what I've seen the software industry is pretty good at this. At companies I've been at, people sometimes choose to work over 40 but it's rare. Friends in finance regularly work 60 though.
Relevant recent discussion:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18959636 (John Carmack on Inlined Code (2014))

• This comment, which contains a useful example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18832382

Please let me know of any further discussion on the topic. (I'm also reminded of Ousterhout's advice in A Philosophy of Software Design that “classes should be ‘thick’” — see talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY or (unrelated) slides: https://platformlab.stanford.edu/Seminar%20Talks/retreat-201... )

One thing I see people miss in this discussion is that there's a tradeoff between having an individual function be understandable (shorter functions are easier to understand) having the entire codebase or interrelationships between functions be easier to understand (fewer functions are easier to understand). When there's an example presented like in the post, it's often presented as an example with a single function, and of course four short functions may each be easier to understand than a single function, but you've also added three nodes to the “graph” (of functions and calls between them) and now you need to study whether these functions are called from anywhere. To make up for this one may start introducing classes/objects to indicate “private”/“public” functions, and so on. (Some languages allow nested functions, which can help.)

Most of all I'd say reading very different styles of code, and seeing how people achieve great things in unusual ways (e.g. with lots of abstraction, or with very little abstraction), can be an illuminating experience (see my comment in this thread about reading Knuth's programs).
Yeah I work roughly 45-50 hours in my financial job in London. And I'm still asked to be 'on call' at weekends. In fact some people I work with are proud to tell me they worked the whole weekend for some reason. The whole thing is crazy to be honest.
There are some nice ideas here, but how many different ways do you need to do something? Since JavaScript has an especially high burden for backward compatibility you can’t really remove old cruft, and adding yet another way to (whatever) just makes the language harder to learn and harder to read.

Warts and all, one of the best things about ES5 and earlier is that the language was so simple that you could pick it up in a day.

The later additions have added developer convenience for sure, but at the expense of taking something simple, consistent, and very easy to read, and turning it into a complex and subtle language with a lot of redundant syntax. For example all the different syntaxes for defining a function with the subtle differences between them. And in this articles proposal - since switch doesn’t do what I want, we’ll have both switch AND case with different semantics and syntax. Ugh.

At this point I’d rather see an effort to deprecate cruft or standardize features over throwing in new things.
> Never click on a “recommended” video.

Hiding the recommended videos bar on YouTube would be a great use for an adblock rule.
I'm curious how they distinguish it from synchrotron radiation
WebGL as a target would work, except that it has no accessibility affordances. That needs to be solved first.
Yea, "self" can be a liability.
> So that users do not have to replace a perfectly working phone because they fear for their security.

Nobody does this, ever. Those who do fear for their security, runs LineageOS or similar, the rest care about the shiny features.
I think about that every time I am visiting an archaeological site with stone inscriptions.

Looking 5000 years in the future, no one will be able to read our documents, like we do with those written 5000 years ago.
It seems like a much simpler solution would be to have dynamic rates based on demand needs. There would be a near overnight rollout of dirt cheap gadgets designed to help you regulate your energy use based on the pricing. You could have a simple web interface that lets you set the rates you are willing to let your appliances run at. The end result would be exactly like this without having anything centralized and letting people determine their own demand. The average smart home can probably do this already with a little extra software.
You’re not missing anything, as shown in the article it’s just sugar.
Geographical Data Plotting in Python
VC Purchasing Power Calculator for Metro Areas
In the book Psycho-cybernetics, auther talks about delegating the details to subconscious mind before sleep and downloading the processed material tomorrow morning. I read the book and dismissed the idea but maybe it some value. I shall try it again.
You are right. It’s about two different subjects.

Here it is an extension of a side discussion.

My original question was a thought experiment that..if I had a choice, I would have likely reworded (Altho I don’t know how..)

Let me try again. If we look at what is ‘food’..1. for plants, they are able to synthesize their own food from sunlight. 2. Insects like bees and ants etc use this plant synthesized food like honey or the fruit etc. 3. some plants are also carnivorous. 4. Some insects cannibalise like praying mantis. 5. Re birds, they rely on plants 6. Some birds like vultures scavenge. 7. Some birds like raptors are predators. 8. Mammals are carnivores. Some look for fresh kill. 9. I think some do eat dead animals after their natural death or even rotting flesh. 10. Fish eat krill and all that goodness. 11. Big fish eat small fish. 13. Dead fish get eaten too.

I think all of them do and can cannibalise when they need food.

But as the highest order organism, we rely on raising and slaughtering animals and birds for food. Nothing else in nature does that..it’s just bizarre. But again, I digress.

The point is we now know exactly what nutrients we need to live. Not what foods we need to live because they are multi variate. We add back vitamins and proteins and trace minerals etc to highly processed foods.

1. Why not make a broth or a gel to which we add all that we require anyways? It’s the closest we can come to synthesizing our own food.

2. Why not reuse flesh of our own? Not killing..no black market meat etc. Just freeze freshly deceased people..test them and recycle the meat just as we use the organs. We certainly do reuse organs.

3. Speaking of organs, some of them are regenerative. Blood regenerates. Plasma regenerates. Healthy organs regenerate. We can grow organs in a Petri dish to transplants with cells..we can grow ‘muscles’ in vats. We can clone mammals.

These are all possible technologies now. Ok. Expensive likely, but forget about costs for a moment. I want to think of possibilities.

So why isn’t it possible to synthesize food from our own bodies? I feel like I should stay away from the word ‘cannibalism’ because it does have a history and the thought experiment strays into the morality of what is verboten and immoral.

Synethesizing our own food...even possibly from our own or genetic kin’s deceased bodies. Yay or Nay?
Flask for Machine Learning Applications
There is also the Efail pattern of attacks, where malleable ciphertext is used to inject active controlled plaintext (HTML tags, different URLs, etc) that exfiltrate the rest of plaintext. Can you rule that out as well?

There's a reason some people call this "the cryptographic doom principle".
Because writing applications for 3 or 4 distinct targets is a waste of time and money.

If wasm/web were good enough, one app would run on Android, iOS, desktop, etc.
> You can't think of anything worse than not having a delete account button on a pseudonymous list of article comments?

Why is HN somehow outside of critique of Dark Patterns?

> HN already employs someone to manage this little discussion site, and he seems to have the bandwidth to handle an occasional delete request by hand. Why assume there's a more nefarious reason for not investing resources into automating that process?

The "little discussion site" is a feeder venue for the venture capitalist side. The words, "Strategic Operations" come to mind.

And I don't have to come up with "assumptions" of nefarious reasons. The fact is, that deletion is not available to us without significant dark patterns. Every other site has this to maintain data and/or users. Why would I expect HN not to be in this category when every other one is?
It's far less useful than a battery, though, because heat is only good for heating things, which means you also need to provide fuel to convert it into electrical or motive applications. like computers and cars.
One is better and more free though. Atleast in the US you have the possibility of getting closer to the truth if you're committed enough to wade through all the info. In China, that's simply not that case.
There's some interesting stuff in here, but I'm noticing a large chunk of it is syntactic sugar.

Keeping the extensible web manifesto in mind, I wonder if maybe what we really want is to have some kind of standardization around transpiling code.

With new features like promises, we had extensive testing via user libraries before they made their way into the language. But with these kinds of syntactic features, that doesn't seem to be happening.

If a feature is almost purely syntactic sugar, maybe it would make more sense for it to be supplied via a transpiler rather than being baked into the core language? Are there pain points or disadvantages to libraries like Babel that we could address via the core language instead?
This was a problem in finance until a few years ago.

When I started on the trading floor one of the traders went up to the desk where the devs were sitting. He asked for help getting his pound coin back from the vending machine. He thought that was really funny.

These days you can go on efinancialcareers and see that dev jobs can pay £150K, probably more than most financial professionals. Maybe not as much upside potential as trading, depends on what you're coding.
Is it telling that your utility company is one letter away from comedy?
I have a good experience in general with Lua and Tarantool. Last year, my company decided to give Lapis/openresty a shot, and It is very challenging. for example:

1- debugging moonscript error messages always references the compiled lua (nothing like sourcemaps)

2- creating layouts is just pure pain (you will need to create moonscript widgets instead of writing HTML so your frontend people need to learn Lua too.
>how would you feel about web apps being implemented with WASM and targeting WebGL/WebGPU as the rendering target?

In that case, what would make them "web" apps anymore, as opposed to apps running on a low-level VM and a GPU library? They'd be more like e.g. Java+OpenGL apps. Just that they launch from a web browser? All kinds of non-web technologies do that as well.

>Are you feeling more favorably towards technologies like Flutter?

Yes, though I'd prefer they targeted the native SDK's UI widgets.
Modern Java has a lot of features borrowed from functional programming, but using them is still pretty awkward and verbose.

Kotlin is vastly better in this regard IMHO.
I dunno, I prefer taking showers with hot rather than cold. Hot water helps with the dishes, too...
Well, it's not enough if the company decides to support the one that you don't use! Also, many apps that provide access to a service don't make commercial sense unless they are accessible from both platforms.