skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've found that thinking and rationalizing about units and following TDD is much more important than a debugger.

The debugger generally sucks because by the time you have to use it the whole system isn't functioning properly.

If you can just find out WHICH component broke you can rip out that component and build a test for it or expand upon an existing test.

It usually turns out some input for a function broke the range and domain of the function and just adding another test for it and then fixing the tests fixes the problem.

The additional benefit here is that not only do you not need to use the debugger but since its now a unit test and in your code you can't ever break that way again.

A lot of people joke about how they don't write unit tests because they're trying to save time.

In my experience, in any significantly complicated code base something massive will break and knowing exactly WHEN it broke and in what commit can dramatically lower the time needed to fix the problem.
Ask HN: YouTube channels removed or disabled for no reason
YouTube is continuing its spree of disabling and removing channels for no reason. One of them was by Jeff Quitney, a person restoring public domain videos, mostly science, technology and military from what I watched.

From his Patreon page

>My previous YouTube channel was shut down on March 20, 2019 for no reason, with no warning, and no explanation. YouTube will not answer my inquiries. There were no copyright strikes against my account. I had posted over 5050 videos at YouTube...

How did I stumble upon this? I tried watching videos from my "watch later" playlist but alas they don't even show the name of the channel nor the name of the video removed, hidden or disabled, forcing me to go on a treasure hunt trying to find what the link was about (remember to periodically use the takeout download of your data...).

If there are YouTube people among us, do you have insight into this? Seems like a problem that should be solvable...

For the rest, what violations have you witnessed and would like to share about?
Some of the comments in this thread is a master class of how discrimination and gatekeeping work not just in our industry but in society as a whole.

How can we simultaneously be an industry built on free an open source software and yet try to put up walls around our industry when efforts are made to make it more accessible to others?

The barriers to programming are being lowered and this is an excellent thing. More diverse companies, different types of people to bounce ideas on, new perspectives. This is what our industry needs more than ever, and yet so many feel a threat veiled by concerns of affirmative action and 'reverse discrimination'.

We need to acknowledge the barriers that have existed in our industry but may be blind to you personally because you never had to deal with it. For one, access to a PC for a long time was restricted to those with low incomes. My mother saved her income tax refund for two years to buy our first PC, the one I learned to program on. The schools I attended didn't have a computer lab until my junior year of high school. It's a great thing that programming is being spread to those who did not have access before. If software is eating the world everyone had better become familiar.
I feel like you just answered your own question. If it was sincere, it wouldn't be so easy to have the system reset you back to step 1 in the 'rehabilitation'.
Yes, that jumped off the page at me too, and distracted me from the rest of the article.
Linking to C-16 is not explaining how “his arguments against C-16” are “transphobia”.

Of course it isn't, but it allows me to know what you are and aren't already familiar with, so I can know whether I need to first explain that part of it or not. I have accused Peterson of 'fearmongering' regarding this bill, and a substantial part of that is a deeply misleading characterization of the bill.

I am trying to understand "are you familiar with C-16 through Peterson's portrayals of it and secondary commentary, or are you familiar with the primary text of the bill itself". I am also curiou whether you've seen the primary text around the time of the controversy and, or whether you've seen the text of the bill only after seeing it linked here.
Clearly not. What a weird question.
Yes, I suppose I could. I guess that I don't want another human coming into my house in my absence to do that, nor do I want to have to schedule it to happen when I'm home. Nor do I want to take my laundry someplace else and have to return later to pick it up.

I could probably live with leaving the laundry on the porch and having it returned there. I'll have to look into whether such a service is available in my area.
It's terribly phrased, but shanty towns present a host of problems no matter where they are.
VRoamer [video]
Yes the massive volume of fake transactions is actually good for Bitcoin.
The single most important characteristic of functional programming is that all control flow routing is done by function calls.

Functional programming can include side effects.

This is still basically functional:

1> (let ((cntr 0))
(list (mapcar (lambda (x) (inc cntr) (* x x)) '(1 2 3)) cntr))
((1 4 9) 3)

Just not "purely functional". Functional means we work mostly by applying arguments to functions, and avoiding loops, ifs and gotos in favor of canned mapping operations that work with sequences and such. If an assignment sneaks in here and there, it's still functional.

(if antecedent consequent alternative)

is not functional because control flow is being diverted by a special operator without the use of functions. But if we have a function iff:

(iff f-antecedent f-consequent f-alternative)

such that iff will call the f-antecedent function and then either call f-consequent or f-alternative based on what f-antecedent returns, then that is functional.

Functional just means "obsessed with functions"; without further qualification, it has nothing to do with purity.
That's just certain politico-religious camps trying to hijack the word for their own agenda.
wasn't owning a horse made quaint by the fact that owning a car was far more advantageous? so what is replacing the car? even the authors own anecdote/ethos plug isn't that they cut the landline cord because they could just share a landline phone with their friends, it was because a personal cell phone was a more advanced replacement. maybe i am looking too deeply into an opinion piece from an author who thinks that their ability to predict the rise of cell phones in 1998 makes them an authority prognosticator. well him, zac morris, my fellow arrl, and anyone whose had the pleasure of cruising the citizen's band.
Tesla eliminates service schedules, moves to an 'as-needed' model
Just leave the women alone, they are not interested and rightfully so. In the western world there are many other jobs which are much more fun for women and they are happy to do them, including high paying professional jobs like lawyers or doctors with much higher bars for entry, and yet, women manage to study and do those jobs just fine.

In countries where programming pays well and there are no other better options you can see much more women in the field, like India or Israel, somehow those women who in many times comes from much more traditional and conservative societies, manage to learn to code like any other men. I wonder how they do it without all the affirmative action while popping out 5 kids per family or even more like the orthodox women in Israel.

It seems like modern feminism destroys the capability of women to learn anything that is not liberal arts, someone needs to research how that happened and how it is all men's fault.
Saying thimerosal is dangerous because of mercury is like saying salt is dangerous because of chlorine or water is dangerous because of liquid hydrogen. Moreover, it is mostly phased out of use.
The lifetime profile is basically nothing more than a few lints. There are systematic reasons why C++ can never get the memory safety features of Rust without breaking compatibility so much that it won't be C++ anymore.
What biases against them? Women do better in education. Women spend more money. Women are less likely to get sick at all stages of life and live longer. I respectfully suggest that you look into this more.

If what you're saying is true that means that, on average, women you work with are always more capable than all of the men. Do you really believe that? Think.
Microsoft details how xCloud will let you play Xbox games on an Android phone
> It seems like we'd need something like off-world colonies, a fertility crisis or environmental collapse to really create a need.

Two out of three ain't bad, so I think we'll have that need soon enough.
It is very difficult to have a company culture that optimized both for software and hardware.

"Move fast and break things" doesn't work when you have to retool your production line or throw away inventory, or call a supplier to request changes.

Conversely, hardware development processes tend to be too rigid and slow when applied to software.

It is very, very hard to get these working together even (and particularly) when they are two distinct groups in a company.

I have had to deal with 'firmware' updates on a VM. You know, the full "build and download a binary" thing from some website, upload to FTP, then login to a website and point to that FTP server, so the binary would be applied and the instance restarted.

No big deal, right? We do that sort of thing for OS upgrades, right? Except it wasn't an OS upgrade or actual firmware, it was updating the application running on that machine. The sort of thing that could be accomplished by an automated CD job, and a docker pull (or heck, apt-get update). All because the thing was an appliance. So it was lifted and shifted as-is and now "it's a cloud app, because it's on AWS!".

I have had to argue against authentication for a HTTP health check. "But if there is no authentication, people can spam the endpoint, and it's slow and returns a lot of data". Ok, first thing: it's not a public accessible endpoint. Second, I'm not interested in testing auth or taking the machine down when credentials expired. And third, if it is slow, then just return a HTTP 200 for me if it is ok, I don't care about anything else. "But if I just return 200, it doesn't mean the app is actually working". Ok, so go do the checks at whatever interval you want, and return the last run. "But this needs authentication, otherwise there could be a DOS, as the checks are slow." No you don't understand, they are supposed to be async... This went on and on for months. I finally got the health check.

... but then, now they want to log all packets to our centralized logging, so that they can count them. Dude, expose a metrics endpoint, Prometheus will call it periodically. "But there are too many messages, we can't hold all of these!" No, you give me a counter. Return the counter. "But counting messages is even slower". No... you increment the counter _as you receive them, not when I request_.

sigh

So anyway. Even when hardware is amazing, software development can lag behind. Or vice-versa.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge... and read the first couple of comments as well which is further back and forth between the two authors.
Unconscious bias is a real thing. You can easily have a situation in which no one is intentionally discriminating and yet end up with decidedly non-equal outcomes.
Thanks, haven't heard that before
I understand your point (and please don't take this the wrong way) but of course there is no thoughtful discussion for this nonsense.

Debating against people with absurd, unproven, and dangerous claims does nothing to help the legitimate sciences, but works depressingly well at lending credibility to the erroneous claims.

If I were to make the claim that "all kale is radioactive" and that "there's a strong link between eating kale and growing tentacles out of your brain" without providing any evidence of this in the academic literature, you almost certainly wouldn't "debate" me on this, and you'd probably make similar points to the ones I'm making. I'd then fire back with "if you even _question_ the radio-kale theory you are a complete nutter". I might even exclaim "see, they won't even debate me on the kale question! They're trying to censor me! ORWELL!!!"
Our public policy often chooses to subsidize free parking by making large chunks of land available for free use by automobiles.

Modern technology allows permanent structures to be much more space-efficient for housing by building many stories high. However, the use of such technology is often banned and structures are limited to one or two stories. Also, even for one-story structures, rules often require eg. 6000 sqft of land to be used for a 1500 sqft house. These rules all result in significant surplus land wealth being required (or expensively rented) for people to obtain permanent housing.

Is it any wonder that, faced with these constraints, people are choosing to live in one-story homes on free land? Government policy is practically begging for it.
Floating nuclear power plants are already quite common and have a spotless track record in the past century. That's wht most of America's aircraft carriers and modern submarines are.
Have you provided evidence that IQ has an influence on one's ability to be rehabilitated in prison?

Said a different way, is IQ relevant to the discussion? Why do you keep bringing it up?
> It seems like we'd need something like off-world colonies, a fertility crisis or environmental collapse to really create a need.

Simpler than that: increase the price of labour such that robots doing menial tasks become profitable. A UBI would achieve this goal without catastrophic change.
> Why do you think the intention to rehabilitate in the US isn’t sincere?

High recidivism (shows it's at least a failure), focus on punishment (mandatory minimums, etc...) for things like drug possession, cruel bail system, "tough on crime" judges, legalized prison slavery, heavy use of solitary confinement, outright criminal levels of cruelty, normalized prison rape, stigmatization of felons, etc...

They had prisoners fight california wildfires for slave wages. They justified it as it was voluntary and they were learning a skill.

Felons can't become firefighters in california.
Syncthing? It added Variable Size Blocks to speed up transfer of large files last year.

Works will for one-way or multi-ways syncing
https://docs.syncthing.net/users/foldertypes.html
does that invalidate the argument?
> Print statements are very helpful for uncovering that.

Yes, I used to do that all the time. It was excruciating, only I didn't realize it.

Then I started actually learning how to use a debugger. Efficiency in uncovering bugs went through the roof.
If we have pure funtions, that is not "strictly segregated side effects"; pure functions do not have side effects, period.

We can segregate side effects very well in imperative code.

The segregation of side effects is clearer in a strictly evaluated imperative language than in a lazily evaluated functional language.
Tried to visit the site from Europe:

451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact webmaster@bakersfield.com or call (661) 395-7500.
For similar reasons, I use Paddle to process subscription payments for a paid Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/).

Fastspring and Gumroad deal with VAT as well. Fastspring is more expensive than Paddle but has more features. Gumroad is cheaper than Paddle but doesn't integrate well with SaaS products last time I checked.

Doing VAT processing yourself sounds like a nightmare.
I appreciate the snark, but my point is that the massive volume data on coinmarketcap is so unbelievable that I prefer knowing that it's actually lower.

Do you have anything else to contribute? Would it make you happy if actually bitcoin exchange volume were $17 TRILLION dollars, or if it were reported as such?
You say:

"Looking at bitcoin volume on coinmarketcap right now, it's about $9B 24h volume on a $71B market cap. In just 8 days the entire market cap of bitcoin will have 'exchanged hands' (again, I know this is not exactly what volume means)."

And, from the deck in the article:

"Despite its widespread use, the CoinMarketCap.com data is wrong. It includes a large amount of fake and/or non-economic trading volume, thereby giving a fundamentally mistaken impression of the true size and nature of the bitcoin market."

(Emphasis mine)
Traditionally, you would physically separate your living quarters from the areas where servants would work. In this scenario you could have a laundry room in the basement and a dumbwaiter connecting your basement to your closet, and have a separate door that only goes into the basement.
Ah, I see. Well I'm definitely trying to whip up excitement to the public here. If I tell you that the LERF goes from 1e-3/year to 1e-8/year, a lot of people wouldn't understand the implication, which is, effectively, "no problem". Nuclear engineers tend to speak in acronyms and numbers, I try to distill it down. There is weight behind these kinds of estimates though.
> then maybe you should grafitti the Sistine Chapel. You claim you're making it prettier but why is that up to you?

Of course it's not up to me? You asked how it could be "ok with so much of Western culture". If we collectively think it's prettier, like those Banksy pieces that were going to be removed but were instead made permanent due to public outcry, then we're okay with it. If we collectively think it's dumb/ugly/meaningless, like tagging (which is what it's called when people just write their name or initials or gang sign or sports team is apparently really common, too), then no one minds if we remove it, and there's certainly not much respect for it. If someone destroyed priceless cultural heritage like the Sistine Chapel by spray-painting over it, do you really believe that would be "ok with much of Western culture"?
Livestream from the RadicalxChange Conference in Detroit
I don't know where you'd get the idea that everyone who knows modern C++ prefers Rust. I'm not the only one who knows how to use modern C++ and usually goes with Rust instead. In my opinion, modern C++ is less safe than classic C++, because it adds more ways to get use after free (e.g. lambdas).

Modern C++ is not memory safe, and there is no way for it to achieve memory safety without either significant runtime overhead or breaking compatibility so much it won't be C++ anymore. The features in modern C++ are nice, but they don't solve my problems.
I could be wrong, but my understanding of most laws regarding advertising to kids is: It's OK to run ads on media consumed by kids (so long as those ads aren't for inappropriate things like alcohol or cigarettes or adult chat, etc). It's NOT OK to try and pressure/trick/cajole/persuade/influence or otherwise actually target those kids in the ads. It's a weird distinction, but it's what allows ads to still run on daytime television and during children's programming.

For example, you can have an ad that happens to show a toy being played with (I think). You can't have an ad that tells kids to ask their mom and dad to buy it right away.

There's a lot of nuance in between, but I've never bothered to master it because as a matter of principle I refused to be involved in any marketing aimed at kids. Life's too short to feel that kind of guilt.
It doesn't show that they're harmful; it shows that they have a cost. The question is whether the benefit exceeds the cost, which depends on making some sort of quantifiable conversion rate between "acrimony and uncertainty" versus "more women getting coding jobs".
We won't need to limit speeds to 20mph, it'll happen naturally. Ride sharing substantially increases traffic--180% is the latest research.

Uber and Lyft are the worse things to happen to traffic since... cars, I guess.
This is purely a marketing post? How did it front page with 3 votes 9 hours ago? Is it a YC company?
For the record, I'm not asserting anything. I'm merely proposing a theory that I haven't heard many people bring up. Not everything is an argument :)
What the actual fuck? 1) Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information, try again. 2) This comment thread is bringing out all the racists on HN.
Its going to take at least 8 months, up to 20 months, to stop sending bank records to contractors? Can't they just... Not send the specific info they aren't supposed to? What's going to take until 2020 to implement?

What is this world coming to lmao
I don't have much interest in Japan or Japanese culture, so I don't really have much in the way of bias or preconceived notions on the subject.

In the last few years my Japanophile flatmate has brought multiple Japanese people into our home for short term (couple of months) cohabitation. I've also noticed what to me felt like a lack of interest in interpersonal depth or closeness, with myself and others. Conversations stayed rote, surface level, and formal - though flatly cheerful. I often felt like I was "stressing an introvert," was suddenly oddly conscious of the other's sense of privacy, and only got polite awkwardness in response to attempts to be open and build rapport. I just chalked it up to cultural differences.
Wouldn't your question be more appropriate for the Joint Chiefs Chairman who actually said the quote? The article writer is reporting what was said at an event. It wasn't an interview or Q&A where questions like that could have been asked.
I think the one-cent spread on Coinbase Pro mentioned in that article is partly just an artifact of their fee structure. Maker orders which are placed and sit on the order book have no fee, whereas orders which match against the order book are charged a fee. So unless people are desperate to trade, they often save on fees by place a post-only order at 1 cent away from the other side of the orderbook. You can often see this as a pair of walls 1 cent apart on either side of the orderbook.
Now show how to add back a cartoon character drawing of the boss (bald man,) like in the show.
I thought Visa sponsorship was the issue for third-world countries,I and many of my friends (local code meetup) share the same story ; apply to 150+ companies and not a single response.
We are white from North-Africa.
I stopped applying abroad because these kind of "diversity" policies scare me because they're mostly ethnic based I believe it should be idea based otherwise you end up with a group that all think alike.
My phone number is still all over the internet - thankfully from the previous owner and their personal information. I have had this number for 12 years now
If someone trades a product with a neighbor, are they liable since they sold it for a different form of currency? Or would this only be aimed at those who reach a certain level of trading/selling per year?
You can actually run X11 apps in WSL, you just need a Windows X11 server running and the right environment variables for WSL apps to find it. You can waste time running glxgears, xeyes and xclock "natively" on Windows!

I use VcXsrv and gnome-terminal since I do all my development in tmux/vim/zsh and the default WSL terminal is really bad. I made a shortcut that calls 'bash.exe -c "DISPLAY=:0 gnome-terminal"'.

I assume this would also work for konsole/terminator/etc. if you prefer those.
Is Google's AI work in China public though? If that's not the case, I see Dunford's point.

The DoD does not have a unit in Deepmind ensuring all of their findings are evaluated for potential military usage as far as I know. Whereas that's certainly going to happening in any Google AI lab on China.
Especially given the topic, I kept jumping around to see if it was intentional. Like maybe they would use these RE tools to exploit it.