skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For kernel work I am inclined to agree with Linus.

Every kernel problem I have ever faced down was an intermittent problem involving some sort of race condition. A debugger doesn't help you there because:

1. Timings might be changed so you can't (possibly) reproduce the bug in the debugger, or
2. The race condition involves some rare events that might turn up every week on a server but that could take years to find in the debugger so you can't (practically) reproduce the bug.

In applications work (with say Python or Java), however, I am strongly against debug
printf's and any temporary changes to the source code which are motivated by the needs of debugging.

Typically you wind up with the code (somewhere) in a state having some temporary debug-related changes and an in-progress fix. It might be checked in and pushed because
that is how you get it up on the test server.

These temporary changes have a way of becoming permanent, thus somebody tells your company that there is something at the bottom of the home page that shouldn't be there and you realize that it had been there for two years without anyone noticing.

Yes you can push back against that with code reviews and process, but wouldn't you rather use that spray can of management on real problems instead of avoidable problems?

Thus the debugger is great if it means you can eliminate the use of temporary debug code changes (e.g. not the in-progress-fix)

I also like developing unit tests in the debugger in Java and C#. You edit this, you edit that, you can look at data structures at any point in time... It's a lot like using the REPL in Python.
When you are homeless, you tend to wear the same clothes for days or weeks at a time. You may be unable to shower for long stretches.

Construction workers are going to go home, shower, change clothes, wash the clothes they wore all day and worked hard in.

You seem to be taking it for granted that one can get cleaned up again after being exposed to a port-a-potty. This is not a given for homeless individuals.

If you are in good health -- which many homeless people are not -- and have regular access to showers, laundry service, etc, using a port-a-potty may be no big deal. But this is generally not the case for people on the street.
The U.S. Navy seems to operate a bunch of floating (and some submersible) nuclear power plants in the ocean without too much trouble.
Google reports straight to NSA cia anyways all messages.
Do people listening at all what Snowden revealed ?
High Water Marks
Are We Database Yet? [Rust]
> ... But Python 2x / 3x as well.

That was one of the lowest effort upgrades I ever did for my company (backend services, no front end websites).

One of the other reasons Java is popular in big companies is the low effort it requires to find people who can work with it.
> people hate writing Go

Bit of a blanket statement. I enjoy it much more than the little Node I investigated for work.

The lack of functional programming though, yeah. I feel like it might be due to GC optimisations as well, however. From what I understand, the reason the GC is so fast is because such a style of programming is heavily discouraged.
I loved what Rob Pike had to say about what he learnt from Ken Thompson:

```A year or two after I'd joined the Labs, I was pair programming with Ken Thompson on an on-the-fly compiler for a little interactive graphics language designed by Gerard Holzmann. I was the faster typist, so I was at the keyboard and Ken was standing behind me as we programmed. We were working fast, and things broke, often visibly—it was a graphics language, after all. When something went wrong, I'd reflexively start to dig in to the problem, examining stack traces, sticking in print statements, invoking a debugger, and so on. But Ken would just stand and think, ignoring me and the code we'd just written. After a while I noticed a pattern: Ken would often understand the problem before I would, and would suddenly announce, "I know what's wrong." He was usually correct. I realized that Ken was building a mental model of the code and when something broke it was an error in the model. By thinking about how that problem could happen, he'd intuit where the model was wrong or where our code must not be satisfying the model.

Ken taught me that thinking before debugging is extremely important. If you dive into the bug, you tend to fix the local issue in the code, but if you think about the bug first, how the bug came to be, you often find and correct a higher-level problem in the code that will improve the design and prevent further bugs.

I recognize this is largely a matter of style. Some people insist on line-by-line tool-driven debugging for everything. But I now believe that thinking—without looking at the code—is the best debugging tool of all, because it leads to better software.'''

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1941206
The argument I heard it's that it's the USA that's disproportionately funding R&D in the medical field, so naturally the costs are higher than for someone just replicating the formula and selling it. Is there any truth to this?
Yes because it's the regions fault people don't want to freeze to death on a sidewalk in Minnesota.

The first thing I would do if it looked like sleeping on the street was my only option is start walking south.

The problem is wealth disparity; not drugs, not geography, not 'life-style', not 'poor choices'. These "certain cities" on the West coast are prime examples of the wealth gap, people are homeless because they can't afford to live there. Nothing more. The wealth-gap is CAUSING the problem.

The wealth gap was less at the start of the French Revolution then it is now.
>> When I pay $$ to get shoes, I dont expect that to run forever.

The better analogy is: when you buy a book, do you expect you can read it again in ten years? People who bought 1st pressings of Beatles albums 60 years ago can still play them with their grandkids. I can still play old SNES with my siblings at Christmas. But imagine a 2019 being unplayable in 2029. It's reasonable to be concerned.
No he didn't, because "productive" != "(not?) difficult", they're mostly orthogonal. LISP is productive according to PG because it has a kind of unlimited amount of abstraction, I don't think he would say that LISP is difficult.
LISP/smalltalk: PG-productive, not difficult
Java: PG-unproductive, not difficult
C++: PG-unproductive, difficult
(Forth? Haskell?): PG-prodictive, difficult

So there are points in all 4 quadrants I think.
It isn’t just toys - opening trading card booster boxes and packs is also very popular, especially when something rare is pulled :)
> Higher than that, by current rules, you really need an elevator[...]

You're really making my case for me :)

Of course there's trade-offs involved. The point of deregulation is that instead of us or some council meeting having to decide say if 4 floors, 5 or 6 is OK for a walk-up, people can just vote with their money.

And yeah, I'd argue that there's plenty of people who given the choice between paying an extra couple of hundred a month and a shorter commute would be fine with walking up 1-2 extra floors.

But the point is I don't need to be right. If it's deregulated and nobody builds 5-6 floor houses without elevators we've lost nothing, but if they do we've produced a lot of value for them just by getting out of their way.

> I don't see the need to pack as many people as possible in the city. The city has to remain livable[...]

There's plenty of European cities that are nice to live in that are ahead of Amsterdam when it comes to population density: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_...

> It's not really a bubble when it's based on real supply and demand.

It's based on an artificially restricted supply, which is politically motivated. The city's only needing to micro-manage the market it's already ruined because it started out with intervening in it. There's plenty of cities that historically have grown in size, density and population while real estate prices have stayed level or even gone down.

> Of course the Amsterdam will keep looking for places to create new houses, but opportunities for that will remain limited.

I 100% agree that it very likely will stay that way. I'm only making the point that it's almost entirely an artificially created problem.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/red-a...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Water_Army

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103136
> you are free from PHP itself and can build your platform on anything else

Sure, but why? Why one should discard proven,highly performant and well working solution with tons of already written and ready to use high quality frameworks and libraries? Why one should try to replace internet's "workhorse" with FOTM language/solution? Just because of hype on reddit and HN?

I know that PHP (and Java) is out of fashion right now but it's worth to be calm, ignore buzzword hype and use best solutions for problems.
>you're dealing with a largely voluntary unpaid workforce that requires a lot of effort to become proficient

Are you, though?

"While many people tend to think of open source projects as being developed by passionate volunteers, the Linux kernel is mostly developed by people who are paid by their employers to contribute."
- https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/

And even if this were true, Linux is no ordinary FOSS project at the risk of losing "viability", with what I imagine is an absolute minimal amount of casual contributors which would be turned off by this sort of supposed "barrier to entry".
SaaS Landing Page Strategies to 3x-10x Your Demos
Old news. Re-opened.
The problem with print statements is that you're now adding unnecessary code to the application that you then have to take out.
How many of us have been lazy and just left them in? I know I have.
Thus you violate KISS and add unnecessary complexity to code when you could've just used a debugger.

As for logs, those are a necessity and should be in every complex program not just because of exceptions, but because of program logic that you implement and want to know where you are, and were, while the program is in use.
Do you think Linus Torvalds has an exaggerated sense of importance?

These threads are always a bit disconcerting as people get so sensitive and personally offended by them. And invariably despite the astonishing success of Linus' leadership, we'll just throw that all aside and posit that if it were a committee of equals who treated each other with love and admiration it would be as successful.

Or maybe it would be an abject failure, which odds tell us it would have been?
So, large swaths of the United States in the year 2019.
Campus – A Collaborative Innovation Platform
Political correctness and being "open minded" only on the latest trends and hot topics is what means being "woke" these days

They take a lot of shortcuts, they aim for equality of outcome and nitpick on useless details

I'm really not surprised about the reaction you got from your coworkers / employees of your company
Punishment (discipline) works as long as their is a chance to reform. A child or anyone for that matter, will think twice before putting his hand to the flame, but only if they have the option not to. Society in the U.S. does not offer many options for the ex-criminal to live an honest life, which I suppose, is where your idea of rehabilitation fits. Let's not pretend that nature, the ultimate punisher, fails to teach. Sticks and carrots are both effective ways of driving a horse.
I wonder whether tooling that is commonly used to query a database should detect these common mistakes and warn you. `psql` could easily pop up a warning "Are you sure you wanna drop this entire table?".

An alternative would be for databases to add an option to prevent accidental deletion. When enabled, would make it impossible to truncate or delete entire tables. I would enable such a setting on my production databases.
Russia wants to cut itself off from the global internet–what that means
Michael Karl Auf Foursquare
Any purely functional language will :

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

If a language is pure then there is no point running an instruction other than to return a result since the only point in ignoring a result would be if the instruction had a side efffect, which a purely functional language disallows.

Haskell does simulate this chaining instruction via the do notation..

do
a <- getLine
b <- getLine
putStrLn ( a ++ b )

It looks like it is chaining instructions, but really this gets rewritten by the compiler to something like this (in pseudo js) :

bind(getLine, function(a) {
bind(getLine, function (b) {
putStrLn a + b;
})
})
I think it depends a lot on context. On a project with good automated tests, I find that I don't need to use the debugger very often.

But, those times when I had to use it, it saved me probably thousands of hours of work - especially when debugging complex software which I didn't write myself.
It’s really interesting how many HN users continuously engage in whataboutism and praise China every time any criticism of China comes up.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/red-a...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Water_Army

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103136
> [edit: OK I probably couldn't do this, but I could probably pass any/all exams related to the quant side]

After "staying up late for weeks" at some indeterminate point in the past? I'd be amazed. The pass rate for the quantitative finance exams is ~35%, and that's among people who stay up late for months, not weeks, specifically to study for those exams, after having spent years of their careers working on quantitative financial models at insurance companies and pension consultancies.

I'm calling this out not to nitpick about the difficulty of actuarial exams, but to make a broader point: You are a generalist. This is what being a good generalist looks like. Developing knowledge that's on parity with specialist practitioners in a field is an upper bound, and it's not really practical to attain for highly specialized fields. But the amount of domain-specific knowledge that's needed varies widely from project to project, and needing to read up on the subject after work for a few weeks is well within that range.
Every single one of what you listed is either FUD or not an accomplishment of socialism.

Specifically:

- Cuba's hospitals are not top notch, to say the least.

- Russia did the rapid industrializing but it already was on this way before the revolution and would be much better off should the socialist revolution never occurred.

- The equality laws for men and women are not due to socialism.

- China enjoyed the economic rise because they freed the marked not because they tied it, it's the opposite of socialism.
Facebook’s AI couldn’t spot mass murder
She's+The+Ice+In+My+Blood+by+Xaphan
Freeagent is good.
I clicked on London, and got Stone Henge listed ?!

There needs to be some geographical search options, you don't seem to be able to search by area either.
Show HN: Messengerturn.com, a new support platform for small businesses
Video games felt this first: games are made now to stream well; it is almost as important as gameplay for many studios.
Lol he left a cliffhanger and then asked to sign up for his email weekly updates, what an ass.
Hello HN,

this is the early stage version of a support platform I am building. I would consider it beta software. It's the common denominator of things I want to see in a platform thats simple to integrate but has enough features to work with: help center, chat, shared team inbox, etc.
In the future I’m going to add features in the direction of analytics to let users improve their content quality, and thus reducing their support load ($).
So building stuff is the easy part (since I’m a SE), but marketing - oh boy have I no idea what I am doing.

I would love to see you try it out / email is in profile
That's called slavery.
At the Hubert Humphrey Building dedication in Washington, D.C. on November 1, 1977, Humphrey spoke about the treatment of the weakest members of society as a reflection of its government: “the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”
I think to remember that wet faults (as in "there is water mixed with the rocks") slide more frequently that dry faults and yield energy in less powerful bursts. If so, lubrificating faults could be a solution. Unfortunately I found a paper from 2017 [1] that suggests that it's not so simple. There are many more micro conditions that can trigger an earthquake.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5580450/
Ask HN: What would you measure or capture from space?
If you had the chance to send a payload into low earth orbit, what would you be interested in observing?
Systematized unethical behavior is much more generally assumed fair and reasonable than outlier behavior like bludgeoning raccoons with garden tools.

The guy also probably has substantially less money to lobby congress and the FDA for special privilege than the slaughterhouse industry.
VP of InfoSec at InVision on secure code development [audio]
> Since nobody buys big carrots any more

What?! Citation sorely needed. I do, and in my experience 'big' (I would've said 'normal') carrots are stocked more abundantly than any other.
U.S. Treasury Yield Curve Inverts for First Time Since 2007
Defining a Distinguished Engineer
I went bald very young (started shaving my head around age 20/21 because there just wasn't enough left).

It was a big hit to my confidence, especially as a teen. I also felt it prematurely "aged" me - I used to joke that I turned 28 on my 18th birthday.

It is nice that there are successful/attractive men who are bald to point to, but I was more often compared to Moby or Billy Corgan, not exactly sex symbols.

It all seems silly in retrospect but it felt very serious at that age. I'm so used to it now that I don't even think about it. It helps that I'm old enough that being bald is "age appropriate" and I stick out less than I did in college.
You've hit upon the concept of wage slavery.
Alternately, people who care about empathy, particularly for marginalized groups. Nobody is perfect, of course, but kneejerk lumping people who care about social justice this way is unhelpful.
> Similarly, a low-energy scream in the montain can trigger a high-energy avalanche.

While this is a popular myth, it's actually entirely false. You can shout and scream all you want - there's not enough energy transmitted to the snowpack to actually trigger an avalanche (by at least two orders of magnitude). This has been debunked by multiple studies, one example here: http://www.gblanc.fr/IMG/pdf/reuter2009.pdf
Hm, this doesn’t even remotely match my personal experiences. In my experiences, they’ll refer you to each other as warranted but ask you for your preferences first. I’m sorry that you’ve had such a bad time. What happened for you?
Hmmm...

Rates of homelessness:
Germany - 0.50%
USA - 0.17%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
And yet I see pretty much the opposite here in Sweden.

The more we’ve privatized and NPM’ed all the things, the more it costs, and quality on the whole have suffered.

It’s great for politicians that can push blame I guess...

Also, a well thought out democracy is what gives options through voting.
If all options are sub-par or too expensive, what’s the point?
Basically, a marijuana dry flower overdose would come after A) your lungs were ruined by the enormous quantities of smoke inhaled after a short period or B) you were crushed or smothered under the plant material.
Functional programming as defined in its purest form would be ( as some others defined here ), akin to "mathematical functions as the form of abstraction". In the context of computer programming, Haskell would be the epitome of this. That being said, elements of functional programming are already available and making more head-way into imperative languages creating a hybrid imperative/functional style which I think is great. Some elements of functional programming that provide huge benefits are hard to argue against:

1. high-order functions ( as inputs or outputs ) e.g. map, reduce, filter, etc. Direct benefit is a significant reduction of code and the ability to chain operations together and compose them.

2. immutability. Direct benefit here would obviously be minimizing shared state thus reducing bugs

3. side effects: minimizing and pushing side-effects to "edges" of an application. and/or designing programs such that side effects can be mocked out. e.g. building up a Http request that can later on be executed, thus facilitating unit-testing.

4. type checking: Converting runtime errors into compile time errors ( to some degree ). again, by offloading work to the compiler, you can catch errors much earlier on.

The biggest problem w/ FP ( as I have evidenced ) is that while these things are great, when taken too far for the sake of pure FP itself, can create complex code. so there has to be a balancing act involved.
This is actually a phenomenal resource. Brennan Dunn provides a lot of insight into understanding what value you create and how to pitch it properly. 10/10
Without too much trouble that we know of. And a small number of small reactors.

I think it is extremely irresonsible to build military equipment with nuclear reactors. They are destroyed in conflict, polluting everything.
> How is Microsoft a physical business?

A lot of its income comes from licensing Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, which are physical products.

And where Microsoft competes with Google directly, it often shows ads just like Google does[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_Ads
Yet in practice, has it hurt Linux? Linus' entire point is that he doesn't think more is better. He'd rather have a smaller group of more talented individuals working the kernel. Even if you disagree, the premise of your argument, that Linux devs are largely an unpaid, voluntary workforce, is incorrect.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the scale is much different.
I've also heard of Facebook Live being used to document police violence.

Same problem with content-moderation, but on the other hand it means the video is out there before the police force has time to confiscate the device or even lock-down their account.
When building certain applications, it turns out those concerns aren't really separate! It helps a lot to colocate the markup and the code that generates/modifies it.
Sound alone, even a sonic boom, cannot trigger an avalanche. You need explosives in contact with the snow.

Sources: personal experience in AIARE training [0] and Utah Avalanche Center via Myth Busters [1]

[0] https://avtraining.org/
[1] http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-da...
My main problem with functional programming (mostly based on some experience with Haskell) is that I find it really hard to estimate the performance (in terms of runtime and memory consumption) of programs.

It's really nice to structure your program around types and build your program via function composition - but getting it performant (let's say similar to C, Rust or Java) is far from simple. In particular performant Haskell does not look like idiomatic Haskell, whereas performant C, Rust or Java does.

Now don't get me wrong - I absolutely love the idea of functional programming and λ-calculus is a beautiful system to express computation, but in practice it's still hard to make performant while keeping a readable style. Maybe Idris 2 can close the gap?