skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to get depressed thinking that I wouldn't live long enough to see the sci-fi future where we're all immortal cyborgs with minds in the cloud.

So in a purely selfish sense, I guess "right now is the peak of human civilisation, the future is all melting ice caps and resource wars until we die off completely in 2500" is reassuring?
Help
I'm dumb
List of OkayAfrica’s 100 Women 2019 Which Celebrates African Women
> Take two weeks off, avoid alcohol and other stimulant, avoid artificial light after 8 and wake up without an alarm. You'll see how you feel after that regimen

I do this once a year for one month for general health purposes.

I am no less groggy in the morning. (No alarm means I wake up at 4AM or after 11 hours.) I am no more energetic. I sleep about the same number of hours as I did otherwise. Generally speaking, I noticed no physiological changes other than (a) craving sugar and (b) losing weight (due to cutting out alcohol and related foods).

(Granted, I haven't been chronically sleep deprived for years.)
It does produce a new list/dict, etc. That's what you want to avoid side effects in many cases. Modifying is actually an exception. Handy to have, but not common. Even numpy arrays recreate everything every time.
> The actual impacts of climate tend to be contributing aggravations to what are honestly concerns more driven by overpopulation.

Yeah, but we don't need one more way to screw ourselves over.
> What is absent (surprisingly, if you're naive),

As someone that is a lot more familiar with the situation, Russian elite didn't need help to be corrupted. They were already corrupted to the core.
> Any examples of this?

Yes, Java and .NET.

Some JVM implementations, e.g. IBM J9, can save profile information between runs and use it for speeding up code generation, based on the complete history of the executable.

Google also started doing this when they rebooted ART into a mix of interpreter written in Assembly/JIT/AOT runtime. Starting with Android P they are even uploading profile information back to the store, so that similar devices can reach optimized AOT compiled code faster.

.NET Framework allows some control to save PGO data, and variants like that WinRT/UWP cloud compiler take it further.

> What prevents one from JITting AoT compiled binaries?

It relatively complex, versus just starting from bytecodes.

Hence why mainframes always took the approach of either JITing at installation time, or using microcoded CPUs.

Like on Burroughs, Xerox PARC and IBM cases.
Not comparable because by pirating the software you're not physically taking it off the owner's hands.
Here's some Google technology: https://goo.gl/images/jUnTNJ

Traffic Accidents are the leading cause of death from injury among young people. (Click on the other charts to find the one showing injury being #1 among all deaths in those age groups).

> and prove repeatably, which is the foremost requirement of the scientific method

No, nothing needs to be proven repeatedly. Once something is proven, you're done. Wikipedia: "A proof is sufficient evidence or a sufficient argument for the truth of a proposition."

Plebeian indeed...
FemtoJS – Small JavaScript (ES6) Library for DOM Manipulation
Teacher here.

All my students eventually try {} + {}.

I'll bet on it to be the most intuitive.
Running your game servers at scale for up to 90% lower compute cost
Gwyneth Paltrow Is All Business
I’m not quite sure that random tourists and Airbnb guests bring more value to a city than the actual people that have been living there for generations.
In Java a new doesn't always map to heap objects.

Depends on which JVM one is talking about and what JIT is being used.
It's not like that money is enriching ordinary people (except incidentally by unavoidable tax), Russian oligarchs owning half of London isn't really helping us in general terms -- if you owned buildings in London already you're probably pretty happy though.
We have these other seasons in northern Europe, called autumn and spring.
The remarkable persistence of ideas that are no longer appropriate
Swift does layout optimization as well, since it similarly has not pinned down module stability.
All my students disagree with you. They all try addition, and all expect a resulting dict with keys from both dicts. The fact the keys from the one side are prioritized is something they will learn once, just like with dict.update().
self-horsing vehicles are now replaced by autoautomobiles
If zoning codes did not required the building to have large amounts of parking, there would be more people who would choose to drive cars - as parking would be expensive. There would also be more apartments on one place so public transport would be more likely to appear.

Had there be more crossing and people allowed to cross out of crossing where crossing is not available, more people would walk.

People choose to have or not have a car based on many factors.
It's like watching a documentary about the last summer before World War 2. People enjoying themselfes, everything looks peaceful and fine on the surface. Some people suspect what is about to come, but don't dare to really watch into the abyss.
Only a few really know. Those people of back then, we are today. If you ever wanted to experience, how people in the past were so clueless and stupid to change the course of the future for the better, now you've got an VIP-ticket for the live show.
And a = 1 is not equality.

Welcome to the world of programming, where we don't all try to match mathematical conventions because many of us suck at maths and are practical.
Don't let tales of a collapse of civilization lead to an immediate collapse of your judgement and focus.

This article is full of doom and gloom. Many predictions are made, and they are conveniently quoted as someone else's:

"Some of the people who believe that we face inevitable
extinction believe that no one will read this article because we will see a collapse of civilisation in the next twelve months when the harvests fail across the northern hemisphere" (written around 12 months ago)

I for one won't hold my breath.
I wouldn't call it a risk but rather a benefit, in which it makes impossible to not see the absurdity of prohibition laws.
Kepler's First Planet Candidate Confirmed, 10 Years Later
You can't express every comment as an assert statement. And when you can, then what's the point of the comment?

I don't think

// x should never be 0
assert x != 0

is all that different from

// set x to 1
x = 1
Thanks, I lack the experience of living in the north for more than a few weeks in summer and a couple of days in winter.
No need to disparage tree huggers, but this is a great story.
It sounds like you're saying make Russia/ex-Soviet countries so poor that the people have to fight for enough food to live? And do this in a way that enriches the already wealthy oligarchs?

Kinda like "don't help poor people, you're just ruining their motivation"??
Do you own your ancestors?
> My office is in the same building as BitDefender. (...) They mostly hire their researchers straight out of college if they have high C proficiency

Also partially OT, just wanted to say that I was a sort of college-roommate with one of their present-day senior security researchers in the early 2000s and to this day I remember that person as one of the most code-obsessed persons I have ever met, and I say that in a good way.

He was looking at almost every program running on our room's computer (yes, we only had one computer in our room of 4 or 5, no laptops) as a thing to be "broken apart"/analyzed/made sense of, he had a state of mind and a way of looking at things when it came to computers that I've never met since then at any other computer programmers (I've mostly met desktop, backend and front-end programmers, I'm a data-obsessed person myself). I realized in the meantime that in order to enter this "computer security" field and especially in order to be good at it you need to have a different set of skills and especially a different way of looking at things compared to other computer programmers.
As you say, if we want green power it's going to have to be mandate or subsidy to someone, and it's not a bad idea to bribe the middle class to support green energy. Otherwise you end up with the argument that "building a wind farm is simply a wealth transfer to the capitalist bankers who funded it from the poor people who have to pay for energy", which is true but ignores the wind farm.

"Energy poverty" is a real problem but that needs to be addressed separately. I'd rather raise energy prices and increase transfer payments than try to keep energy cheap, so long as any of it is generated by fossil fuels.
Symphony of stars: The science of stellar sound waves
Popular programming languages you can learn with Raspberry Pi
Yes, it’s horrifying, isn’t it? I’m in Italy but I follow American and British (I’m half Italian, half British) and there’s a never ending display of constant hysteria.

I used to be very harsh with Germans collectively for having ‘allowed’ Hitler to come to power and for having been complicit in the crimes he perpetrated. But now I’m not so sure. I’m not sure if the grim spectacle going on in the US is proof or refutation of my distaste. Does it show how easily dysfunctional evil can mesmerise the population into allowing it to govern, or is it proof that many people are putting up a damn tough fight to make sure that evil does not flourish and take root? I’m not sure.
That would be awesome, but it’s just a dark foreshadowing of the junk to come.
>4. Looking at the list of supporting organizations on the OCCRP's web site, it would be rather extraordinary if this publication does not have a political bias, since many of these supporters have rather blatantly open political agendas (with some of them at least being suspect of being criminal organizations in their own right).

What are the blatantly open political agendas of those supporters? I'm asking seriously. All seem to be about human rights and civic societies and so forth.
I can't help but wonder whether quadcopters will be where governments finally legislate control over general computation. Having access to bare metal means nobody can stop inexpensive and socially-disruptive quadcopter applications. How many years before quadcopters join rats and pigeons as the scourge of urban life, always on the prowl for unguarded power outlets or perches on power lines?

Governments and/or corporations have control of the bottom layer of cell phones and TCP/IP networking. Not so for firmware and cryptography, though not for lack of trying.
Japan has never widely adopted SMS[0]. They have always used proper internet E-mail instead, and more lately, LINE messenger.

[0]Once they added global 3G/UMTS support their networks got SMS support, but it's only used by phone number verification services and 2FA, nobody actually sends them. Their homegrown 2G networks before that launched messaging using E-mail.
Between horse and automobile, the safety bicycle was the dominant mode of urban transport, by a huge margin.
Every top comment is about Emoji… Law of triviality in action ;)

Also in Version 12.0, the following Unicode Standard Annexes have notable modifications ⟨…⟩
UAX #14, Unicode Linebreaking Algorithm
UAX #29, Unicode Text Segmentation
UAX #31, Unicode Identifier and Pattern Syntax
UAX #38, Unicode Han Database (Unihan)
UAX #45, U-Source Ideographs
I wonder if some variation of this experiment would be useful for retina detachment, personal interest (my retina was completely detached and I was left with 0.60 vision in the left eye).

What's the effect of giving more information to the cells, would the brain use the extra information to self improve vision? In my case the right eye would be used for training the left one.

Another experiment I am thinking of, If a 3 month old child suffer a retina detachment, would his brain be able to recover the full vision by the brain making appropriate changes?
> when using a system "with consensus" there is often no need to actually invoke consensus on the read side of the system, in which case you don't have to pay the throughput and latency penalties.

Doesn't matter if the system is designed for faster reads. There is still coordination, you still pay coordination overhead, including throughput and latency penalties. Without coordination, for example, you can have some part of the database relevant to the client stored directly on the client, not doing remote reads at all.
I highly recommend Bill Browder book on this topic - "Red Notice: How I Became Putin's No. 1 Enemy".

It's an awesome read - and very interesting. It's written by the guy who used to run the biggest investment fund in Russia and was quite an activist. Later, he and his lawyers uncovered a massive tax fraud scheme, involving a lot of important people - he became number 1 enemy there. One of the lawyers - Magnitsky, got imprisoned for several month, then beaten to death there. He (Browder) now spend his time trying to uncover more of the abuses in Russia (the recent wave of investigation into European banks is one of the fruits of his work).

The book is mind boggling.
Just my two cents: Climate change threats are being over-hyped by those people/companies who stand to benefit from "green" energy/society.

These orgs are spreading propaganda to high-school teens by telling them lies sprinkled with a bit of truth and causing them to protest because the teens on average cannot make a better judgment then people with decades of experience.

Nothing is going to happen. I for one wont hold my breath.
I once got so claustrophobic just by reading a book about caving that I had to put it away: Blind Descent by James Talbot. It describes the quest of a couple of maniacs to explore the deepest caves on earth under hellish circumstances. No light for weeks, no communication with the surface, camping against vertical walls in the dark, hurricane level winds, tight sumps full of dark water, disease, panic attacks... Man, who in his sane mind does things like that?
Please support your argument with numbers. 36 participants can be plenty or can be absolutely insignificant. My partner is just in the process of getting subjects for an experiment and she's trying to estimate the required number of participants. In their case 30 participants would make the experiment useless, 40-42 would make it very powerful (significant).

You can't judge the weakness of an experiment just based on the number of participants. Your comment might mislead others with not enough knowledge of stats I think.
Practically, what your wish would accomplish ? Will it make most people more productive ? Produce less bug ? Learn faster ?

Most Python coders don't even use sets more than once a year. Hell, I use collections.deque more than sets.

But dicts ? We use it all the time. In fact, failing a {} + {} is a recurring disapointment in all my classrooms.

Plus, in PHP and JS, arrays/objects are the "do-it-all" data structure. And it's horrible. You see the same data structure everywhere. You have to read in details what something is, and what it's for.

It very nice that dict and set are very distincts, and that they have a distint set of operators. This way it's super easy to scan the code and know what the data structure is, and what it's used for. That's why I always teach set([1, 2]) and not {1, 2} first. It helps people to make a clear distinction in their mind.
> NO MODES

That's a lie though. All GUIs have modes all over the place. For example:

- When I click into a text field, I go into Insert mode.

- When I tab away from the text field, I'm in some sort of Select mode.

These are clearly different modes because keys will do different things depending on the situation (e.g. [Space] in Select mode will click the focused button, but in Insert mode will insert text into the focused text field).
I think the core issue is that people think humanity is static in the face of an imminent danger, while in effect it’s certainly not. Everyone wants to live and prosper and I’m sure that as the problem becomes more tangible, we will find the ways to mitigate this issue - just like, as a species, we did many times before.
Y Combinator Weighs Possible HQ Move to San Francisco
This is my dream watch. Absolutely. Too expensive though :(
Our default reaction should be to watch out for shoddy science and shoddy scientific journalism.
Sometimes it's an hour or more in time savings.. Not MA, probably just as bad in DC.
Tech billionaire Jack Dorsey just bought $10k worth of Bitcoin
Besides, anytime somebody compare Python to Haskell, the battle is over. They have completly different use cases and philosophy. If you want something in Haskell, you probably want the opposite in Python.
> well trained and well behaving dogs

Ever dog owner has the most well trained and best behaving dog.
"probably owing to stress in my life"
Sounds more like depression, hope you're in a better place now.

To more directly answer your point. Things always seem to be bad until they're not. And we are on virtually any measure you'd care to look at, better off than we were a century ago.
The temperature may rise x celcius, empires may fall, there may be wars, but this has been an unusually peaceful period of history, wars happen anyway, and people probably wont mourn the non existent ice caps that they heard used to exist, just like we don't mourn the dodo.

If we say went back to something equivalent to 1918 Europe. Yes we would have lost a lot, both life and infrastructure, with Spanish flu still on the horizon, but we will rebuild and get on with life, would you expect climate change to be worse than that? And look where we are, a century later.
The nature vs nurture debate is not new. Do you have any evidence for your "ridiculously outweighed" claim?

From Wikipedia: "Early studies of intelligence, which mostly examined young children, found that heritability measured 40–50%. Subsequent developmental genetic analyses found that variance attributable to additive environmental effects is less apparent in older individuals,[45][46][47] with estimated heritability of IQ increasing in adulthood."
No, "the market" means financial considerations created an opportunity that was fulfilled to generate profit. It could be that the economy gained via this FOSS release, and that was part of the consideration, but that would be structural interference by the government (which can be a good thing IMO) working in opposition to the market.

Market forces are often reined in, eg by human rights, those things aren't part of the market operating they're mitigations of the damaging effects. In this case it's an external force (gov action), not the market, that has created the availability of the product.
Apex Legends and other games are all continuations of COD, so interpret that sentence as 10,000 hours of addictive online multiplayer gaming.
The Bottleneck of the Web
> How near? About a decade.

Okay Al. Still waiting on that dramatic increase in frequency and ferocity of hurricanes, but I guess I'll add this one to my calendar.

> ou only needed to step outside during the record-breaking heatwave last year to acknowledge that 17 of the 18 hottest years on the planet have occurred since 2000.

Wildly untrue. Perhaps if you add "since records began in 1850" it could maybe be valid.
> The value of home solar fed to the grid is almost everywhere negative to the utility

[citation needed]

Also, being of negative value to the utility is not the same as negative value to society! Is it displacing carbon-based generation? Is it reducing the need to buildout power lines?

> costs money to bleed off excess power when there is not enough demand for it

This doesn't happen during the day. Very occasionally some wind farms get curtailment payments at 3am or similar. There are no giant resistor banks to dump energy.

> force them to pay you for your useless solar excess, they just have to raise the prices on everyone

Economics 101: producing more of a product makes it more expensive! No, wait, the other thing.

> constant power sources are cheaper than adjustable ones

Be specific: nuclear (no longer really being built, surprisingly expensive) or coal (phasing out)?

In the UK it mostly displaces dispatchable CCGT: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

(Some of these problems might appear at 10x the current solar market penetration, but most of them are just anticompetitive complaints by utilities because solar shows up as negative demand)
VC Doesn’t Make Recruiting (Much) Easier
I use sets a lot, sample size of one. I do data science/engineering stuff, sets of columns/sets of keys. I'm very sceptical of your claim that most developers don't use sets.
I just hoped for a citation on your surprising tanker claim.
Hey! Why so angry! :-)
Coinbase upsets XRP users by refusing to retrieve funds
Is Universal Basic Income a Free Lunch?
Why is it that only now you are depressed? Did you not know you were going to die anyway and human beings as a whole were going to evolve into some species completely different from us, even if there was no climate change? I believe we have conjured up a depression about this topic because we believe that our ability to stop climate change will be amplified by the pressure of sadness, all the while not logically understanding that we are destined to be replaced either way.

You should therefore have been depressed from the very beginning, but you probably weren't. That proves that this idea of humanity being erased is not inherently depressing, nor is moving on with our lives. It's simply the news you are reading that is depressing, not the philosophy behind it.
Stop reading doomsday cult prophecies on the internet and go outside and get some sun.

Seriously.
As a reminder, Paul Graham's On Lisp is freely downloadable, in PDF or PostScript via links on this page at PaulGraham.com:

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html
Snax. Social transactions and why sharing is caring
I feel this way about technical debt sometimes :)

There has to be some point where you start on something otherwise in 50 years they would be wondering about the tech available 50 years from that.
Education is the only cure.
Speaking as an outsider, I grew up near Hispanic cultures in the Southwest. I think there’s a need for better information about the Maya. For one, there’s a basic lack of understanding of time “before America” across the US. Most I've met seem to operate as though human history in the Americas only started with independence. The colonists wiped out a huge amount of history and culture. We might not have the best technology that could ever exist, but we do have a great need to appreciate a shared past. Fifty years from now people will be further from the past and more likely to take it even less seriously.
> I used to be very harsh with Germans collectively for having ‘allowed’ Hitler to come to power and for having been complicit in the crimes he perpetrated. But now I’m not so sure.

As a German, so did I. But my illusion of control dissolved in the face of doom. There is nothing you can do but hope for the best.
Is this Europe’s ugliest capital?
I'd strongly recommend checking out Rich's youtube channel (0). It's a great mix of humor, geeky details and good tesla-rant every now and then.

Rich is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to start his own shop, which I am not to sure about. So far they have invested in wheel balancers and alignment equipment, which has nothing to do with EV's, that's just car maintenance.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfV0_wbjG8KJADuZT2ct4SA