skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issue is that there are legitimate uses for this type of code, though. For example, I have my home set up with tons of automations that change, for example, the color of the lights when I'm in the kitchen vs. when my wife is in the kitchen. She prefers warm lighting and I prefer the daytime lighting. It's the same technology, it's just being misused in these commercial instances, in my opinion. People don't actually know that they're agreeing to this type of usage.
No, some folk do side projects all the time. Mostly very young folks without families or substantial hobbies.
Agreed. I feel like if I had to classify the issue “technical literacy” would be the root problem and solution.
Gene Editing Is Back in the Spotlight
I much prefer this, though I accept its not without problems in some cases. I find that say Javascript in comparison has a lot of syntactic noise; it's all annoyingly boiler-plate.

Maybe JS's implicit-return-in-arrow-functions is a better compromise.
I guess most people really can't distinguish between "C" and C.
This is the role of code comments for me:

- Point It: Comment itself

- Call It: Comment explicates why potentially surprising or ambiguous thing that follows is the way it is.

- Get It Right: Eliminates potential error in future. (Or maybe helps spot one if explanation doesn't mesh with observed behavior.)

I was just reviewing a PR requesting clarification of some config settings and this article (which I looked at earlier) came to mind.
I don't know about the 1950s, but Earth experiencing a cooling trend would have been an extremely minority view in the 1980s.
One thing about biology I don't understand at all (not that I've ever really tried to learn about it) is how cells "know" what structure to build where. Can anyone ELI5?
> while net consumers of code (those who don’t want to give back to the community) tend to favour the latter. In other words, freeloaders.

I think this is a really unfair statement - "net consumers of code ... freeloaders".

While there are surely plenty of users of code who are not contributing at all, and they would be freeloaders, the phrasing "net consumers" means that some of the consumers are contributing back code, just not as much as they consume.

I would wager that most end users are freeloaders (they never commit code back).

I would further wager that most developers are closer to end-users.

Finally, I would wager that the vast majority of developers who contribute code are net consumers, not producers.

To me, it's not so surprising that a few people who put in the most public effort sometimes feel bitter that others don't carry their weight.
What structure do you believe Haskell forces on your code?

My experience with Haskell is that it's the most expressive and flexible environment for exploring different ways of structuring code that I've ever used. I've seen everything from extremely-imperative code carefully managing memory allocations and munging bits, to very abstract high-level libraries that declare abstract computations that can be interpreted or executed in a variety of ways.

I'm very confused and surprised to see someone assert that Haskell forces a particular structure on your code.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience. I hope that you are someday able to get your account back. If that is truly the reason your account was suspended, that just isn't right.

If I make any headway with my case and I am able to forward you contact info I will happily do so.
> Any good HN user nose this

> and it snot funny

These horrible puns made me -- not quite laugh or smirk -- but rather exhale heavily through my nose (is there a specific word for this?).
I don't know about others, but I expect people to have some fluff on their resumes. I don't blame them because recruiters and HR types love fluff, so fluff gets your foot in the door. Recruiters might skip over a person who has MongoDB on their resume instead of Elasticsearch because they don't know they are similar technologies. So it's reasonable that a candidate hold the recruiters hands.

If candidates come out and say such when I ask them questions about it, I'll just move on. I won't hold it against them unless it happens excessively.
> Will try to make a request for the same type of data from Oslo municipality (Norway). We have a law where they have to hand over the data.

Is asking them to spend time getting this data for you honestly a good use of precious public money?
> The political goal was to give users absolute control over their computational environments

No, that was Free Software. Open Source was created as a reaction to that, with the goal of removing the ethical implications and making it "business friendly". And it succeeded, unfortunately.

See: "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software"

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
Considering that rumors are that YouTube is still barely above break even, that is a lot.
That still won't change much, though, because, inevitably, there will be some app that requires Bluetooth for some fundamental aspect of its use that will also use one of these SDK's. Granting that app access to this will give it all the info it needs. What really needs to happen is that Apple needs to make some of these beacon-able permissions more granular. How to do that in a way that a tech-naive population understands what's happening is a very difficult problem to solve, though.
8chan served with search warrant [pdf]
Whenever I code something moderately challenging, I come back and do it again, and maybe again until it’s good and proper. I love history rewrite in mercurial.

The code gets better, but the business outcome remains unchanged so it may look like waste. But it’s not waste - the micro skills acquired in the exercise accumulate.
There's no guideline against it as far as I know.

Anyone talking about what they do is an 'advertisement.' I don't know what good marking them would do - you should be as skeptical about anything anyone tells you whether it's an advert or not.
We definitely don't want to get into another situation like after 9/11 when some people did everything they could to connect Iraq to 9/11 so they could invade. Not sure if there are people right now who are hellbent to go to war Iran. I hope not.
No, it's exactly as you expect in GIMP: Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. Then either Ctrl+H to merge into the layer below (clicking the anchor on canvas does the same) or Ctrl+Shift+N to create new layer from floating selection. Or use Paste as New Layer, of course.

How hard it is... You tell me :)
On Building Wechat Miniprograms
> JavaScript is precise for 2^53 range

What does this mean to you? It's very easy to get horrible rounding error with real-life sized things. For instance

document.writeln(1.0 % 0.2);

The right answer is 0.0, and the most it can be wrong is 0.2. It's nearly as wrong as possible. These are real-life sized numbers.

btw: I think IEEE-754 is really great, but it's also important to understand your tools.
For a great book on the military decision making at the time, I’d recommend Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg
It is virtue signalling.

As someone who has spent thousands of dollars on Lego, if I see "Biodegradable!" splash on the box I'm going to think twice. I painted my Lego, played with it in water, and I could still give it to my kids in the original condition. We can't know that any new Lego will perform the same way.
Admittedly, I didn't read every link in the article, but this quote is almost unbelievable to me:
----
From 2006 through December 2016, the total movement of funds (credits) into the [ultimate beneficiary owners’] laundering at PrivatBank Cyprus was $470 billion, which amounts to approximately double the Gross Domestic Product of Cyprus during the same period.
----
Nearly half a trillion dollars??? That would make them the richest men in the world, many times over. How can that be possible?
I get what you're saying about academic jargon, but it's honestly on the level of a term like 'imperative programming', 'darwinism', or 'boolean logic'. Except, it's like 500 years old, so perhaps even more extreme.

I just don't feel like it would be a good start for a bunch of people who wanted to discuss maths to redefine the term 'boolean' to mean being smarter than other people. I equally don't think it's a good start to call yourself a rationalist when you're actually an empiricist. It's not an obscure term. It's the kind of thing you learn in school, if you take a philosophy class at A-level.

When you talk about 'frequent and deep referencing', I would very much hope that they would be aware of philosophical rationalism. It's literally the most influential tradition of thought in the last five centuries. I also can imagine that if you spent enough time reading, you might transition from the sort of person who would identify as a 'rationalist', to somebody who might have interesting comments on philosophical rationalism. I also feel like work is done by building on other people's work. That's as true in philosophy as it is in any field. You won't make interesting work impossible by starting from scratch, but you do make it really unlikely - sort of like trying to build a steam engine using an anvil and tongs.

Nobody who had a basic grounding in philosophy would use a word like rationalist to mean 'very rational' in the same way that nobody who had a basic understanding of physics would use the word gravity to mean 'heavy stuff'. It's literally that bad.

Realistically, if you define a group by a word that sounds good, but displays ignorance, you're going to get a lot of good sounding ignorance. And that's kinda my take on the whole rationalist thing.
Not sure, honestly. I've never used Kube, just taken a preliminary look at the docs and been scared away by how much abtraction there is. While providers may manage it for us, I'm not sure to what extent they manage it. We're on AWS and I haven't been super happy with the responses/response times of their support, so when dealing with unknowns I'd rather not rely on someone else.

That said, Nomad hasn't been without problems. It's just that the problems seem to be easier for one person to solve. I set all this up almost a year and a half ago and haven't touched it much since, so it's possible both Nomad, Kube, and and managed services have come a long way and now is a good time to re-evaluate.
I wish more developers wrote code with a mute keyboard.
I'm sorry to hear of your experience with Twitter. I really wish they would give you a precise explanation. Many large companies have humans replying to support requests on a regular basis. It would be nice if Twitter would do the same to provide some context. I don't blame you for quitting Twitter after that.
> You've convinced my to consider Wyoming.

Great, definitely compare and contrast.

> It still doesn't seem worth it to examine the laws of all 56 jurisdictions in the US ...

Not sure and you're right that it isn't worth it to do that, but the simple reality is that legislatures didn't just ignore their incorporation statutes for 30 straight years while Delaware was winning the marketing game. Their fairly unique Court of Chancery isn't really useful in today's world for most organizations. There is a simple benefit in reading comprehension.

There are common attributes that jurisdictions offer for legal persons. Namely related to the privacy and protection of the natural persons that created the legal person. You make a list of the things that are important for you, and then there may be charts that show how well a jurisdiction offers a certain perk.

The next aspect comes down to competency, and this isn't easy to gauge from a chart. Most jurisdictions aren't attracting lots of foreign business and simply don't have a group of public servants that know how to do what the state legislature said was legal. So popular streamlined states like Wyoming and Delaware cut through that process of deduction really quickly. But if you do have patience then you can really leverage obscure jurisdictions.

The third aspect comes down to state priorities and psychology. Again, incorporation laws are usually made to be competitive, but states and outside jurisdictions usually aren't focused on the "incorporation industry" like Delaware and some United and micro states are. Most jurisdictions exist because someone was EXTREMELY PASSIONATE about succession/partitioning for an ideology and then maintaining stability. And then some foreigners see the power vacuum and are like "hey nice new state you have, while you're at it how about passing this LLC statute, yes its the same as Colorado's but all the directors and beneficial owners are unknown and the state doesn't levy any taxes or really ask any information at all, you'll make money from the annual incorporation fees alone." and the governor and legislature is like "uhm what yeah okay back to our extremist ideology and sugar plantation regulations", but you'll potentially be able to leverage a sovereign brand and sovereign protection for centuries before anyone really revisits the incorporation laws.

When you're ready to really get to the next level, there is a lot you can do with creating legal persons in one jurisdiction under one set of laws that own legal persons in other jurisdictions under different sets of laws. Mix and match. Lots of structures, infinite permutations possible. Many perks.
And it has some truth to it, or it wouldn't come up every time.

I think it would be great to lower public school tuition going forward. State colleges are majorly underfunded.

I don't think someone that got the benefits of private school education should get their payment for it paid by taxpayers, while someone who chose public school get little to nothing.
Absolutely. There are gems on YouTube that are not only hard but almost impossible to find due to the flood of crap they repeatedly recommend me. As far as I am concerned the algorithm is broken and almost killed my YouTube experience(I have to admit that I'm still on YouTube but a lot less these days).

I figure that they probably don't give a damn about users like me, the algorithm is designed to steer traffic to a pyramid of monetized content and I don't seem to have any options to fight the trend but to disengage.

There are some channels/users that I started following a long time ago but after I watch one of their videos I land back on the crapflood.
Some of this advice echoes that in Fundamentals of Piano Practice by Chaun C. Chang.

https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/en/lat...

Chang precisely recommends the same thing: don't just practice by going through pieces from beginning to end repeatedly. Being a scientist, he quantifies that with efficiency arguments, which are along these lines: if a five minute piece contains two-bar difficult passage, then you can only practice that passage twelve times in the span of one hour. If the passage is only ten seconds long, you can practice it twelve times in just two minutes, which is 30 times more efficient.

One tools is to use a metronome to find the stress passages in a piece. Without a metronome, we hide the stressful passages by slowing down subconsciously.

Set the metronome at a baseline rate at which you can play everything. Then gradually crank up the speed. Then the stress points show up: passages where you fumble.

Chang makes astonishingly clever observations about speed. Basically, speed has two extremes that are easy: very slow, or super fast. It's just as hard to slow down from high speed playing as it is to speed up slow playing. The initial argument he makes is that there is no faster way to play three notes than to just hit a three note chord with three fingers, which is easy, and "infinitely fast". Moreover, it is basically easy to slow down from that "infinite speed" a little bit; if we hit the chord so that the fingers are staggered slightly, we will play a fast arpeggio. A really fast run of notes is like that: hitting groups of notes in this manner, and changing the hand position in between those groups.
> I still will never understand the level of fame given to Virginia Woolf.

Woolf’s writings, unlike the work many of her contemporaries, deal with issues that are of keen interest to the public today: feminism, homosexual desire, gender queering. Maybe the prominence of these themes in contemporary discourse represents a fad, and in a few decades’ time some other modernist author from the first half of the 20th century will seem more relevant. But for the time being, it is easy to understand why Woolf is hot.
I can't see myself needing most of the commands on this list because I simply don't use those services: https://almond.stanford.edu/thingpedia/cheatsheet

I can see that some of these are "wanted to scratch an itch" but then there's things like "when matrix67 publishes something new." Since the service relies on Thingpedia, can I choose which Things to include? Does this namespace run the risk of becoming cluttered (if I search for "matrix" is that going to give me Matrix films, or posts from Matrix67)?

I see that a one of the trigger keywords for ArXiv is "paper". This causes Almond to fail for fairly trivial searches like "how is paper made?" When I try things I'm fairly certain won't be recognized because it's not a Thing, I get completely random results:

"wikipedia article about paper" -> YouTube Category ____ if the title contains "paper"
"wikipedia" -> Dropbox (demo only message)
"play a random video" -> Spotify gets "YouTube videos matching ____ and then play the artist the result" (saying Yes transfers control to YouTube Thing)
"random facts" / "random fox" -> No problem, surely.
"news about Kanye West" -> random fact about Kanye West (because that's all that Thing does)

And a few other searches which will need some love before they're ready for broad release:

(any search for "price of ____ on Steam" must be an exact title match)
"what is the price of "the witcher 3" on steam" -> not found
"what is the price of "the witcher 3: wild hunt" on steam" -> The current price of the witcher 3: wild hunt is $11.99. (correct, but GotY edition is $14.99 right now)
"how much is "THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT - GAME OF THE YEAR EDITION" on steam" -> Cannot use 'in' operator to search for 'price_overview' in undefined.

I'm not sure what my overall point is with this post; I'm very likely going to contribute, but I can see there's still a ways to go before it compares with the commercial products.
dark background is bad for eyes
You did a switch-a-roo between the perspective of individual programmers to the perspective of organizations that produce software, and I think that doing so muddies the situation a bit.

Whether programmers sell their code or their time doesn't seem that important to me. (I've seen it work out both ways.) What is more important to me is what they're paid in. Personally, I like to get paid in money, because I can easily turn money into things like food and shelter. Because I like that, it's hard for me to hate on my employers - or anyone else's employers - for wanting money in exchange for software or SAAS or whatever.

From that perspective, a really devoted adherence to copyleft has always seemed kind of petulant to me. I don't want to begrudge anyone for the simple fact of trying to make a living any more than I want others begrudging me for the simple fact of trying to make a living.

I also don't begrudge people preferring to share their code under Free software licenses, mind. It's more that I take umbrage with thinking that choosing a license like MIT or BSD makes you some sort of capitalist patsy.

Also, point of pedantry: Simply owning exclusive rights to a particular piece of software does not give you a monopoly, and framing things in such hyperbolic terms does not do anything to advance the conversation.
You might be shooting yourself in the foot by having not picking an ecosystem that better supports your business case. No one I know who's good at React+Redux would pick a CRUD app as the domain they'd like to exercise those skills in.
I would add that not only the license is quite expensive, but it has a confusing "syntax" that most often than not results in unmaintanable software.
IANAL, but have done a few of these type projects. With some caveats of course, as long as you are using FCC licensed tablets (e.g. must have an FCC ID already) and are not modifying the radio or antenna then you just have to list the FCC ID of the original tablet on the outside of your packaging and follow the rules for manuals etc. This is similar to why a lot of people start with FCC licensed modules for hardware projects instead of building up their own. Also, if you co-locate any other transceiver then you will have to do FCC testing and get a new ID, although it is not that difficult or expensive to do it generally.

I had built a few kiosk marketing solutions that basically did just this and we did go through legal just to make sure we were on the up and up and it was really simple. Honestly just following some instructions from the FCC would have been good enough, but we didn't want to chance a screw up.
The FT is written by European style Liberal Democrats who are basically 'free market' types but who accept some degree of socialism, but on social issues they are definitely left of centre. Or rather, they are not 'woke', and wouldn't be voicing issues such as non-binary gender normalization etc. - but they would support gay marriage, would be against discrimination etc..

So their 'interest' is 'big business' ... but that's the whole point of the publication (!).

Consider that I have never read an article in the FT for example lamenting socialized medicine in Europe (maybe 15% of the entire European economy is socialized just in that area alone).

The readership is probably a little more business and less academic.

Basically: 'polite businessmen'.

The writers definitely have an academic/intellectual streak.

The FT is more European version 'Mitt Romney', not 'Donald Trump' and not 'Wolf of Wall Street', and not even 'Rothschild'. It doesn't have an aggressive tone.

Because the FT has a stable readership, they are one of the most intellectually oriented publications going. Their podcasts are a nerdshow - they'll take an hour to interview the authors of arcane books on economics. Or members of the Fed in the US.

You can have a look at the columnist background here [1].

It's not exactly Wall Street. On the 2cnd most recent Alphachat podcast, they were discussing Picketty's inequality data, not in a cynical way.

They occasionally have a look at some social issues, but in a more classically North American Liberal kind of way, but not from a 'woke' perspective.

Of super relevance to this post is the most recent Alphaville podcast, I highly recommend it [2], "Will Davies on populism, data and experts" an interview about an author about a book on populism.

[1] https://www.ft.com/columnists

[2] https://ftalphaville.ft.com/series/Alphachat
I must have written a couple dozen sorts, but only in high-school or when preparing for interviews. It's the one thing that is very well supported in most programming languages. C++ has stable/unstable sorts, partial sorts, whatever you want.

Accepting things like bubble sort also makes the exercise doubly pointless.
darkroom is called darktable :)
I understand your frustration. I offered to provide my ID to Twitter for verification if it would help. I never heard anything from them in regards to that.

For me, somebody actually tried to extort me with my firstnamelastname account on Twitter. To this day they have it registered still with no tweets.
I don't understand how this is supposed to work. For one thing iterative code wouldn't even do the same number of iterations when you change the desired precision, so merely plugging in higher precision numbers wouldn't give the higher precision approximation you'd be looking for. You'd have to actually re-execute the entire code with higher precision numbers so that intermediate control flow decisions use those numbers instead too, right?