skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That’s a lot of repetitive [error handling] work. But we can make it easier on ourselves by introducing a small wrapper type, errWriter.

> errWriter fulfils the io.Writer contract so it can be used to wrap an existing io.Writer. errWriter passes writes through to its underlying writer until an error is detected. From that point on, it discards any writes and returns the previous error.

this is a cute trick.

In some cases it might produce a great result. For example, floating point nan values work roughly like this: a special error values included in the type that can be computed upon without needing to write special control flow until you explicitly need to check the final computed result to see if you got an actual value or the nan value.

but I fear the applicability of this trick in go is limited as it relies on a heap of idiosyncracies belonging to this example:

The chain of potentially error-ing operations that are being performed all involve a value of the same type that can be wrapped. In a less contrived example there would be a variety of different types involved in the sequence of possibly error-ing operations.

The code that is processing the wrapped error-hiding type roughly must not perform side effects when processing an apparently non-erroring computation, since now the error wrapper type is stopping the code from aborting early. It's completely non obvious that this transformation will be correct (ie result in a program with equivalent behaviour to the original program) without reading exactly through the implementation of everything that touches the error wrapper. This isn't helped by go not having a way to tag functions as pure.

The new code now superficially looks like it is wrong as it isn't bothering to check error values of the functions it is calling in the usual way. This will probably cause a spray of linter warnings about failing to handle possible errors in your CI build.

In other languages a much more general way to address this kind of problem could be:

error monads ; or
exception handling

Which can be used to short circuit the entire normal control flow.
Access Control List

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_control_list
Should You Listen to Music While Doing Intellectual Work? It Depends
Yes but the line between good and bad food is not as clear as the difference between vax and no-vax. Moreover some countries (eg France) already have restrictions on junk food advertising.
Recommend you to read this about "Whataboutism"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

or this about "appeal to hypocrisy" logical fallacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

And I don't think there is anything in the world that can compare to what China has been doing to XinJiang today:
The amount of police stands, the amount of surveillance cameras, forced surveillance app install, etc.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne94dg/jingwang-a...
Would you react in the same way if they were demonetising videos about something you consider fair and legitimate? For example gay rights? The problem here is not whether we consider anti-vax as a legitimate battle, but if we're comfortable in giving a private company the power to decide which opinions should be promoted and which should be silenced.
كلمات اغنية اخوي يوسف الراشد
Just because you have freedom of expression doesn't mean everyone is obligated to listen to it and pay you money for it.

"Freedom of expression" is just that, the freedom to voice your opinion. It's not the "Right of attention".

Furthermore, like any freedom there are limitations when your freedom starts endangering the freedom of others. We don't allow hate speech and death threats, so where does anti-vax fit in?
I don't see anything happening. Just a black screen for every game that I select. I'm confused...
I'd say their other key ingredient is the fact that this is a perfect product. It does what it should do perfectly and it will still do it in 50 years and more.
>the thousands of HN karma points I lost over the years to mindless downvoting of the simple truth nuggets

Everyone else feels that way too, you know! :-)
Isn't this the first day?

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09
There's a rather big logging industry in Indonesia (exporting to Aus, NZ, US), and much of it illegal. So, if this bee is in the trees then it's quite possibly in trouble due to that, and putting it back may not actually be always practical.

FYI: Illegal logging is such a problem that there are systems in place to attempt to at least monitor the "approved stuff": https://www.certisource.org/
... said some person about every single strike action, protest, etc. Yet it only depends on whether you can get a critical mass behind your idea.
Go has quite its own reality.

Structural typing, no generics, interface oriented.

Sure, Java has interfaces, C doesn't have generics and TypeScript is also structurally typed, but I guess nominal typing, generics, and OOP is what most people who like static typing in the first place prefer.
Does it matter when? If the employees decide they don't want to develop for the military, that's their prerogative. They can try to change their current employer's practices, or they can leave.
Faceless Publishers (2017)
>Sorry, but part of my techno-libertarian-utopian ideal was open discussion period. Not some version of "civilized" discussion that should follow some specific form and decorum.

Come to think of it, what's described did exist, in communities like The Well. But I didn't then, and don't now, consider them as the model of discussion.

You can find diamonds in the most open (and rougher) discussion. In fact, TFA mentions that much, that in their expected to be a hellish everything-goes Reddit thread, they found pockets of great discussion.
Ironically said Catastrophic Failure was caused by refusal to make regular steady improvements to ancient infrastructure.
Largely, yes.

The Supreme Court case (and subsequent rulings) eliminated what amounted to "someone might have conducted business in this jurisdiction" and narrowed it to, "place of incorporation" and "a place where the company has a permanent office and regularly does business"
is there not some formal "rule of thumb" describing that attempts to improve a system through "point based" incentives ultimately lead to undesirable outcomes as the incentives naively skew focus away from the starting goal of improving the system to simply gaming the point structure?

what I wrote feels hard to put cleanly into words, but does that makes any sense to anyone else?
When a company finishes developing a weapon for one purpose, it thinks of all the other possible ways to profit from it, then you have several million reasons not to turn down foreign countries because of those "pesky ethical questions".

This isn't a theoretical discussion, because people are already selling combat technology based on HoloLens outside of the US.
OK so CR recommends that you continue to kill the planet with a C02 spouting dinosaur technology automobile rather than to put up with a few of Tesla's eminently fixable teething problems to get a wildly more performant car that uses no fossil fuels. Seems to me that CR has lost sight of the bigger picture here.
> Are they going to change platform? To what?

The most likely immediate switch is not to a new platform but to a whitelist of the top 100 or 1k channels. Because of the Pareto principle, these channels get the majority of views anyway, and it's easier to manage a 100-1k whitelist than to blacklist every long-tail channel with content you don't like.

You could argue that this is no different to YouTube in the short run because they still get the ad dollars, but it's in their best interest in the long-run to make the long tail inventory viable.
It was just a kind comment to applaud his ingenuity at such a young age. It wasn't meant to be interpreted as a factual statement.
Exactly. So is Linux, C++, and Java. I remember being at a conference where this was discussed ages ago. The speaker was describing a colleague chastising her for working on code for a guidance system. He had helped develop a mouse, which she pointed out was also used throughout the military. It’s good that there are people who do not want to find more and more better ways to blow each other up, but disingenuous to try to ban a particular technology. If MS doesn’t get the contracts, someone else will. Some exceptions-nuclear and maybe autonomous AI. But even the later seems inevitable. AR will either be a flop or ubiquitous, and so you can’t prevent that any more than Englebert could prevent the mouse being used for military purposes.
As someone who has never run into performance problems with R, and also knows how to use Python - is there a good reason to learn Julia?
Disproportional comparison that misses the point entirely.
So you're gonna trust your company will not lay you off in a year? What will you do after two years even if it didn't,? I doubt you'll continue to keep finding similar paying jobs in Dallas.
Good question! Goodhart’s Law fits this quite well. :)

From Wikipedia: “Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
Thank you for being one of the few commenters on this thread who point out the HBD streak on that thread. The insistence that that is not reactionary has been a strong undercurrent in that forum, and so when people from there talk about the weirdness of that thread, I hope more people notice that it's not about uh, weird music or humor. It's about an obsession with race and genes that easily goes into very dark territory.
The dull man cannot know, the stupid cannot understand this:
that, though the wicked sprout like grass and all evildoers flourish,
they are doomed to destruction for ever ...
The righteous flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
They are planted in the house of the Lord, they flourish in the courts of our God. (Psalm 92:6-7, 12-13)

This world is full of injustice, but the message of Christianity is that injustice is temporary and justice is eternal. Every man has a choice between eternal life and eternal death. God wants life for everyone - that is why he gave each of us life. He gave us the ability to love, but we also have the freedom to hate. Heaven is eternal love; hell is eternal hate. You get to choose the path you want to take.
GTA San Andreas – AB Software Development
Jesus says that if you seek, you will find.
Goodhart‘s Law - „When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure“

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
We got one for our wedding 6 years ago and hardly ever use the thing. Growing up, my mom had a Sunbeam mixer where the bowl spins and the beaters stay in place. Maybe just bias because that's what I grew up with, but I liked the way that mixer incorporated ingredients a lot better. Unfortunately, Sunbeam only makes super cheap products now, so I don't know that you can even buy such a thing anymore.
Youtube does not publishes everything that is uploaded what are you talking about?

Youtube doesn't accept porn for example, which is why people that want to share entirely legal videos of consenting adults having sex created their own platforms to do it. You never hear complaints from them about being censored. Because they were not.

When did it became acceptable to go into someone's house, start shouting about some crazy religion, then act surprised crying censorship and oppression when they finally ask you to leave?
> In other languages a much more general way to address this kind of problem could be: error monads ; or exception handling

errWriter is quite literally "let's do monadic error handling, except not just without monads but without generics or reified errors". And thus it can only handle a single source or error type.

Also FWIW monadic error handling != error monads. For instance Rust does the former, but its type system can't express the latter (so there is no monad or functor abstraction on top of Result).
The real problem here is having a single company that's so big and powerful that they have the power to impose censorship.

We either need government regulations for these companies or they should be split up. This problem goes further than freedom of expression.
Maybe he/she’s Chinese or of Chinese descent? I have friends of Taiwanese descent that very much follow China closely and critically.
This is way more complex than what we have now and adds no practical benefits.
While I mostly agree with you, there is one caveat to that position. Increased warfare precision also affects the rules of engagement directly - strikes that may have been considered impermissible due to high collateral damage may become feasible as the expected damage goes down to more palatable levels. It's probably impossible to quantify that effect with any meaningful accuracy and I'm strongly inclined to think precision warfare is still a net win, but it's not quite an unmitigated benefit with no side effects.
This comes at a very important time, with measles outbreaks occuring around the world from Brooklyn to Japan. It is horrible because it puts at risk the lives of those who are too young to receive the vaccine. I completely agree with Google but I think that the government and/or healthcare workers need to make a bigger effort to teach the public about how vaccines work and how safe they are for the person receiving them.
I like the way Eric Weinstein put it.

“I don’t believe that we can afford to take a neutral stance anymore. I don’t believe that we should optimize for neutrality..” -@jack

Glad to hear it. And, because you just changed your view on neutrality, I just changed mine on anti-trust, eminent domain and tech platforms.

https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/109545757231478784...

It's true. These platforms don't owe users a freedom to voice their opinions.

But since they're making editorial decisions, we, as a society, don't owe them protection from libel laws for example. And we should definitely look into monopolistic practices of VISA and Mastercard because it's much more serious than some microblogging site.
I'm not assuming per-se, im guestimating, basing it on my understand of x86 and ARM. I graduated in Electronic Engineering from a university department who's alumni include Sir Robin Saxby, they pushed ARM hard, and I have a fairly good understanding of where it's at architecturally compared to x86.

Apple have 100% control over every part of their hardware and software from the get go, so it's inevitable they perform excellently on that hardware; they can optimise their code to death, and increment the hardware where it can be improved upon.

Web developers make up a fairly small proportion of the developers I've ever worked with, I have worked for software houses where web just isn't a thing for us other than for our own marketing. None of these people run Mac's, they all run PCs, and these PCs don't have the same control in their hardware/software process that will bring about the kind of "excellent" result you see from an iPad. They'll be relying on Microsoft to get Windows optimised, but Microsoft will be working with dozens, even hundreds of partners, Apple works with one, itself.

I suspect, also that they'll be more expensive because of all the new development the manufacturers have to put into releasing these new ARM laptops. Microsoft will have to put extra work into Windows, which will cost money, and finally those of us that run Linux will end up with something that hasn't had the benefit of the decades of x86 development on the desktop has had, thus, worse performance, at least in the beginning.

I could imagine a laptop equivalent of big.LITTLE, where you have x86 cores for the real grunt work, and ARM cores for power saving, bit I don't see pure ARM in the workstation space.

It'll be an interesting time, but based on my own experience, I'm betting on Linus with this one and I don't see myself or my colleagues or my workplace moving to ARM anywhere outside of non-laptop-portables any time soon.
Some friends created a startup a few years ago. It is now profitable and never took VC.

The two founders pull down $1,000,000 a year and they give staff $50,000+ annual bonuses from profit sharing.

They also work four day weeks and spent every night and weekend with their kids.

What's the upside of trying to make it into a unicorn?
But the author chose a click-baity controversial-sounding title to actually make the argument for a much less controversial point: don't do all the work yourself thinking you are "leading by example".
Was expecting that. Never have to improve if someone else is worse, am I right? Because two wrongs make a right, no? Seriously though, I fucking hate the whatabouttery accusation being misused, I really do. In Ireland, I see it all the time being used to excuse everything England ever did, because whatabout the IRA.

Also, you've made 7 (visible) comments on this site since 2013, the 5 most recent of which concern China, each of which are negative. So, you're kind of a weird little account aren't ya ;)
Something like 2 years ago, a friend of my flat mate came to visit from her home country. She is a very energic person and transmits happiness, we would be just having a drink and talking and suddenly she would get up and start dancing, no reasons needed, "I just feel like it".

We were talking avout drawing and I suggested her to draw something nice for us, told her that if she did I would proudly stick it on the outside part of our flat door so other neighbors could see it.

And boy did they love it. Not because the drawing was beautiful per se, but because of the good idea of bringing some colorful touches to a boring and standard common corridor. Also, most of my neighbors have kids, so they started making their own drawings and sticking them on their doors.

Fast forward to present day. Drawings change every so often, the children draw new pieces wishing Merry Christmas, or the arrival of the Spring. We at home also encourage our visitors to draw something, most are shy about it because "they don't know how to draw" without realizing the expectations are those of a 3-years old kid :-)

Such an inocuous idea has had a very positive impact on a very little aspect of our lives in this particular building. Also the first impressions from new people coming to the place are always fun to see.

We need less robotic-like number optimizations in our lifes, and more of the good-old "do as you feel like" (even if it's not optimum or maximizes some metric)
Permanent b&w+dark mode:

iOS > settings > general > Display Accommodations

Turn on smart invert and color filter: grayscale
As a person living in a place with little to no internet, I can assess that I don't see any reason to depend on central societies and fast internet speed to use my computer as normal.

Here, we usually try to own as much as we can, and only rely on services when there's no other accessible alternative.
There is a crackdown on falsely promoting junk food as healthy or promoting it to people who don't know better (namely children). Maybe not on YouTube, but in various countries' legislation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6154600.stm

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB106919100053167300

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmbills/110/0... (Section 3)

It's not really a fair comparison, though. The main issue with anti-vaccination content is dangerous misinformation, not simply promoting something harmful. The other issue is that the people who fall for this content aren't usually the ones who get hurt, their innocent children are. It would only be a fair comparison if there were a large movement of very influential, powerful, and famous people posting "vegetables cause autism, and Burger King cures it" videos out there to hundreds of millions of viewers and a boom in child obesity tied directly to parents viewing them.
I would very much appreciate a dark mode for the page.
Interview with One of Africa's Forbes 30 Under 30. Coupon Code UW4 on Checkout
> help their soldiers defend their own country

When is the last time the US military actually "defended" its own territory/country, heck even just its own continent? How does droning people in Pakistan, and having troops stationed in Syria "help" with "defending" the US?

Even worse: This kind of logic is then used by NATO allies to justify their own partaking in US foreign military adventures. That's how the Germans "protective military" ended up "Protecting freedom at the Hindukush" [0].

[0] https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/protecting-freedom-at-t...
But at the same time the area of the paper will get almost infinitesimally small so you'll end up with an undetectable paper filament that stretches across the universe.
>Yet in many contexts, both past and present, buttons are anything but easy. Have you ever stood in an elevator pushing the close-door button over and over, hoping and wondering if the door will ever shut? The same quandary presents itself at every crosswalk button.

Both of these problems are irrelevant to whether we use buttons or not, and don't prove buttons are "hard to use".

Just that we sometimes connect buttons that either don't do anything (elevator open/close door buttons wired to nothing, meant to give users a fake sense of control), or do it after a delay.

If the delay for crosswalk buttons was presented on a small timer above the button, there would be nothing "mysterious" about the whole operation but the control would still be a button.

If those, i.e nothing concrete and all badly formulated, are the "Five Lessons From Seven Years of Research Into Buttons" the authors got, then I pity those who funded the research.
Grammatical Inference Using the Z3 SMT Solver
Think about it a moment, which answer would you prefer?
Mine is white :-D !

Safari on iPhone if it helps anyone
Lest we forget the Queen of the Hammond Organ, Ethel Smith, playing Tico Tico [1] in the film Bathing Beauty (1944).

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXrnuwZreHg
Because defending themselves would necessarily require acquiring their own nuclear deterrent, and the US correctly realized that a world where every country had nukes was a world where they'd eventually be used. Alliances like NATO reduced the risk of human extinction while pulling countries closer into the US orbit. It's ridiculous to look at that from an ROI perspective; the ROI is not dying in a nuclear war.
Alexis King covers some of the benefits in one of her blog posts about Hackett[0] and in her talk Languages in an Afternoon[1].

[0]: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2017/01/05/rascal-is-now-...

[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TfehOLha-18
MageHash
They're also completely free to protest, luckily.
Halley: Lightweight Game Engine Written in C++14
For me the only meaningful line is where Software is clearly and mainly intended for use in a weapon system. For example a guidance system for a particular rocket, autopilot software for a military drone etc.

And I don't necessarily have a problem with that in a relatively sane jurisdiction, either. The only good reason to have a powerful military force run by a democratic government is to guard against powerful military forces run by someone else.
Enjoy your perfect vision while you can. For some of us with broken eyes it isn't so easy. Most dark modes cause far less bloom for me. I use 3rd party extensions to adjust colours and contrast, but they often don't produce good results for complex pages.
That's not how real estate development actually works in most of the world. Buyers almost never commit any cash 5 years in advance of property completion. If you want to convince anyone you're going to need a more realistic example.