skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Java's strictness used to be tedious and redundant. Don't assume all strict languages work like Java. Type inference in Kotlin, for example, is fantastic.

Strictness with good error messages is much better for beginners. That's why I use the strictest possible language in professional work: if the compiler can do a bunch of work for you, why not let it?

Strictness is like bumper lanes or training wheels.
I’ve always wished that Mezzano made the desktop look more like the lisp machines. I’ve always liked how Genera looked.
> Unit tests are good, integration tests are gooder

I would personally rephrase this as unit tests are necessary, as are integration tests, as are end-to-end tests.

The testing pyramid: write most of your tests as unit tests, then write a bunch of integration tests, and finally throw in a few end-to-end tests.

> Tests make better APIs

Yes! This is such an important point. A perfect example I love is that globals and even thread-local values make testing hard, and that’s reason enough to avoid using them.

> Make tests that you know how to run on the command line

Again great advice. I would also add, get your tests running as early as feasible. This saves you rewriting APIs and other decisions that might make testing, even deployment (which you need for end-to-end tests), significantly harder.

Anyway, this entire set is a great read, and I agree with much, but not all.
The larger defense contractors have issues paying software engineers remotely close to private industry nowadays. In certain regions of the US the software market is dominated by defense though.

Back in the early 2000s I know of some J2EE architects that pulled $200k as defense contractors once they got a Sun certification. The certification and diploma mill market in the US is driven squarely by big federally funded institutions that value paper over experience because they don’t know how to measure ability any better than SV Leetcode questions would assess.

Of defense contractors I’ve seen pay tables for in the DC area, LM and Raytheon paid worse for senior engineers than slightly smaller, more specialized companies but they certainly had a lot more overhead and administrative positions available that were possible to reach just by having a PhD even if it’s not related to engineering or STEM in general at all (political science obviously makes sense here as valuable, for example).

But under DHS you can hit $200k+ as a contractor for anything that has “cyber” attached to its name these days. But for the most part, the high payout days for software engineers in defense are over which is what led me to leaving the DC area years ago to stick with better pay and work environment with private sector. A TS is a pain and the pay bump is a joke compared to RSUs. I’ll take leetcode grinding for months to get a stack of RSUs and marketable engineering skills over the demonstrably useless charade of the DoD security theater practices with none of the employment benefits besides some smug, self-assured sense of patriotism.

Most of the higher paid contractors in DoD aren’t engineers - they’ve usually been intelligence officer trainers and skilled and experienced warfighters (well past $400k, much of it untaxed).
PLC stands for Public Limited Company. A company is not a corporation.
Certain activist groups put constant pressure on Facebook to “deplatform” and remove pages for both legitimate in it legitimate reasons.

Now we’re talking about giving Facebook control over the very means to do financial transactions. How long Before this also becomes weapononized, by Facebook, or by activists?

there is a reason why popular currency systems has been the purview of governments. We’re creating an awful lot of social repercussions by allowing corporations to own the basic financial fabric.
This behavior isn't surprising, Toyota has been coasting on consumer perception they built up in the '90s and early '00s for a long time now. Since consumer perception tends to lag reality by a decade or so and the car industry is more of a boogeyman than a subject of interest to most of HN it's not surprising that this behavior is unexpected to a good chunk of HN.
I focus on what I am building with JVM and .NET stacks, while enjoying quite expressive languages.
And yet, people are solving problems in it, often quite well.

I say this as one who has basically mastered Haskell, so it's not like I'm not aware of all these things: Fans of all these complicated abstractions really need to take some time and grapple with that fact. It will improve your programming in the more complicated languages as well.

No, seriously. Stop for a moment and think about that. Consider the advanced features as a scientific prediction: "If you do not use these features, you can't have a good program come out the other end." This prediction is falsified by the concrete existence of a lot of good Go programs. This matters. It is something that should be grappled with intellectually, if you are a language fan.

It will bring you to a deeper understanding of all the fancy features. By a deeper understanding, I mean that quite directly, with no attempt to be subtly saying something like "Oh, you'll find they're all useless in the end." That would not be true. They are not even remotely useless. They are incredibly useful. I would even go so far as to say that the development of these complicated sorts of features is legitimately among some of the most simultaneously interesting and useful intellectual work being done in our time, and greatly contributing to our ability to hold our software world together. It's just that the shape of that usefulness is more complicated than a lot of people realize, and a deeper understanding of that complication is very useful for developers.

One of the things that I think really comes out of it is a yet deeper understanding of matching tools to problems. I use a lot of Go, because I write a lot of things that are at a size and complexity where those other language features just aren't that helpful. Yet, there are tasks I could be assigned where I wouldn't dream of using Go, because I know I would need all that fancy stuff to hold the program together. I can easily imagine ways in which my career trajectory would change in the next couple of years and I'd go primarily Rust; I can equally easily imagine ways in which I will stay primarily Go. I can imagine ways in which I'd need to go with some other language. I think a lot of programmers who find these fancy features and fall in love with them end up overestimating the scope of the set of programs where they can be helpful. To give a degenerate example, my six line shell script does not need to be written in the Rust type system. It is not only not helpful, it would be actively harmful. The scope of programs that don't really need those features and where they quite easily become actively harmful is larger than a lot of people think. Especially if you consider them in the context of a heterogeneous team of developers who may not all be in the 5+ years of experience range, or when you may not be able to guarantee that the project is going to stay in those hands.
That's a fair point, yeah.
Facebook seems awfully quiet about WHY they're developing this thing. There's a lot of fancy and positive spin on "helping people in countries without access to banking" and that fine, but they do need to explain how they plan to turn a profit on the project. Until they do, we should assume that it WILL involve selling/exploiting the financial data of the users.
My oldest "big" Go project started in 2010. Last commit date was 2013 - https://asciinema.org/a/cJosP51z0oScKPLmVUhyNKUOj

It still runs today. I have Haskell and Python programs that are somewhat smaller from around the same time that no longer run.

More importantly, I can go into my source code and I can still understand it. I can't say the same for the Haskell and Python programs.

I wonder which is more maintainable in the long term.
Signal isn't particularly inconvenient, but it is ugly compared to every other mainstream app -- and looks matter.

The reason I stopped recommending Signal to anyone is that its message delivery is abysmal compared to everything else. When I was using it regularly, maybe 5% of messages wouldn't be delivered right away; they'd get there a few days later, or up to a week later. I don't understand that failure mode, but after having a panic over a pet sitter not getting some instructions (the pets were fine) I tried out Telegram; never had one delivery failure in about 8 months of heavy use.

It's a shame, because I liked Signal.

The other showstopper Signal has is also a UI thing; you cannot set a contact to "never use Signal". Which means, if you get one of your family to start using it, and they don't like it and uninstall it, you're forever forcing Signal to "send via SMS" to that contact. They can "unregister" but you can't do that for them.

I had two or three people who I'd send a message to, not hear a response, 30 minutes later realize that it went to their nonexistent signal account, reset as SMS and got an instant reply. Very irritating for a messaging app and so easily solved.
"She says that humans would have an "unconscious preference" to protect and breed from dogs with such an appealing trait, giving them an evolutionary advantage and reinforcing this change in subsequent generations."

What is the difference between evolution and selective breeding? Just seems to be used interchangeably here.
I/O, both disk and network, can happen almost anywhere because data doesn't always fit in memory, may be streamed from a remote source, and I/O handling cannot always be deferred indefinitely. A significant part of systems software design is accounting for this reality.
Having a non-typical tech stack helped us get better candidates
So you have bitcoin, visit bitcoin only cafes, and yet you or the business cant figure out how to pay for a cup of coffee with bitcoin...

It’s hard to tell if this is a joke, trolling, manifestation of dystopia/idiocracy.

All that’s really needed now is an underlying story of how the cafe couldn’t figure out how to accept payment, but due to being “bitcoin only” they received wild media attention and became an influencer, got SV capital investment, pivoted to a freemium model just giving away their bitcoin only coffee for free, gained market share over Starbucks thanks to SV Venture capital subsidizing our coffees and then they go public and the VCs/bitcoin coffee founders make billions unloading onto the public.

I’m so sold I was going to register both bitcoincoffee.com and bitcoincafe.com, looks like some savvy founders already beat me to the punch.
Terrifying, really. The world is hurdling back towards a feudalist society, with corporations instead of kings.
They use "cryptocurrency" here at least: https://calibra.com/about
Interesting, there is a community for sea glass..

https://seaglassassociation.org/
I was also solving problems in Z80 Assembly, once upon a time.
Context's WithValue will be an interface even if go supported generics. It stores anything, not values of a specified type. Same with fmt
Yes, it is a similar approach in terms of trying to be comprehensive.
Hey team! Where are the images stored once edited?
"If we have a mass of students learning no useful skills and divert them into useful fields..."

What do we do if a significant portion of the students who already aren't learning useful skills lack the neural plasticity to become productive in other endeavors? Or in other words, how do we incorporate humans into the economy when those individuals are objectively inferior at EVERY task compared to an automated (robot, AI, etc...) alternative? Especially as we consider things like climate change and austerity, and how humans are supposedly the greatest threat to overall environmental longevity?
if governments weren't already on Facebook's back this will certainly get them there. Governments, read : politicians, already are incensed at Facebook and similar because they cannot control the message. Now Facebook wants to give people security in their funds?
This looks very cool. Do you see it as tightly coupled to ML or would you think this is adaptable to more general tracking of dataset processing? It looks pretty flexible to me after a quick glance but I haven't had time to dig deeper and understand the details of how it works.
There is a sample on the Amazon page.
I can't imagine a factor of an economy, including property prices, that wouldn't be strongly effected by population stability.

What happens to wages? Inflation? Energy? Companies? The share market? ...aged care?

Absolutely fascinating stuff.
Libra is a stablecoin, holding it isn't going to make you rich.
Korolev. Slimming Pill for Web
You might be interested in https://github.com/zedshaw/lamson
It's super old (died when python 2 was still the king) but probably more suited for making programmatic mail applications
The bigger failure here is the law that requires this
And existing non-corporate democracies are... democracies.
In Ontario, you pay a small deposit ($0.10) for each glass bottle of beer. You can bring the bottles back to the store and get refunded the deposit.
The article seems to indicate a shift in trying to produce high end fakes to more middle range priced fakes due to perceived lack of scrutiny at lower prices.

I wonder is that accurate? It seems logical that anyone trying to produce a fake would have seen the benefit of avoiding too much scrutiny at the high end, and a fake around say 6 to 10k would be easier to pull off.
Given the absolutely horrible record of many of the companies involved in this in regards to not abusing our private information, Facebook using phone numbers given for 2FA is but one example, why should we trust this?

I am sure that if they leak or misuse our private information that the TOS will protect them from having to make us whole again...
How to teach programming to your loved ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BleOgPhsdfc
> "On the first point, Marcus said that Facebook is enforcing a strict separation between users’ social data—their Facebook likes, photos, etc—and the financial data that will be available on Libra’s network. There will not, he insisted, be a readily available data trove connecting users’ transactional data to their Facebook profiles, and users’ funds themselves will be cryptographically secured. “We don’t want financial data and social data to be commingled,” he explained."

WhatsApp showed that eventually, the data is likely to be merged.
An acquaintance who worked in QA for a foundry producing alloy castings for the aerospace industry swore they shipped a greater weight of paper than metal.
One thing I have learned in almost 30 years of SW development: work somewhere where the CEO has at least a basic idea of your work and sees value in your work, not just cost. Work somewhere where people care for the craft and it’s not only about “business” goals.
Privacy-friendly alternatives to Google
Only using UTC makes sense if you are recording exact moments in time - when a log line was generated for example - but it falls over when you start interacting with actual human times.

If I say an event is happening at 7pm, I mean 7pm in my local timezone. If I record that upcoming datetime in UTC but I forgot about a daylight savings time change between now and then that doesn't mean the event will happen at 6pm - it's still happening at 7.

I've done some projects where I've stored dates as a localtime, a timezone AND a denormalized, calculated UTC datetime (for lookup/sorting).
> being Eich’s new business venture doesn’t inspire any trust none what so ever.

Why?
I got a somewhat useful answer to this question over on economics stack exchange which could help people find related research.

https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/29461/what-is-...
How to Use Grep
And, fortunately, it looks like it is getting some traction: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/sadhguru-bri...
It's always fun to answer multiple choice quizzes like this. Work out what point they're trying to make and go from 0/2 to 10/13.

I'm not informed, as the quiz result suggests, I just spotted the pattern.
So it sounds like Libra coins will be minted at a previously agreed-upon exchange rate by one of the consortium companies proving that they have bought one of these low-volatility financial assets. It does not sound like there will be any "mining" and the decentralization will be, for the time, in just a handful of large companies.

Can someone validate that I'm understanding that correctly?

If so, I'd agree with previous commenters that we're not looking at anything which can shift the power structure of monetary policy but improvements in transaction speed and cost could have some real social benefits - especially in the developing world.
There would be savings for cross border transactions. If governments aren’t going to support banking the poor, then why does it matter who does it?
A consumer can still decide for himself if he has enough and the right education and set of mind.

An electronic device connected to a brain could inject thoughts without the carrier even noticing it's not the thoughts who are supposed to be saved/generated in this chip.

Now they have relative control over the majority but it's still not absolute - in my opinion that is a huge difference.
> Teegarden’s star is a stellar runt that’s barely 9 percent of the sun’s mass. It’s known as an ultra-cool M dwarf

Is it too late to change the name to Tyrion Lannister?
It's easier to use Kotlin to make fun animations than JavaScript, because Kotlin has better autocomplete. The DOM is neither the only (nor the easiest) presentation layer when you want quick results.

> Immediately throwing them at typescript without understanding JS could lead to frustration/confusion.

I don't understand why you think this would be the case. They could write plain JavaScript in a .ts file and get better error messages. There's no downside.

It's also frustrating to constantly have to check docs for JS libs instead of using autocomplete. A good static type system makes coding much faster and require less memorization of things like parameter order or return types in libraries.
Willpower Hax #487: Execute by Default (2009)
> If Libra is an oligarchy, closed financial systems are dictatorships

Given the global financial system is not controlled by one individual, it isn't a Dictatorship (power of one) but is more like a form of Oligarchy (power of the few). As for which form of Oligarchy each are, I'd argue that the existing financial system is more of a Technocracy (i.e. you need to know what you are doing to be one of the few) whereas Libra is a Plutocracy (you need to be wealthy to be one of the few) or even possibly a Kleptocracy depending on how they actually run it and what their true motives are.
It's a way to make some money for poorer people too - collecting the bottles from the bins and public areas of the city can be quite lucrative. One plastic bottle gives you 25 cents, one beer bottle 8-15 cents.
Step 1 - say that your "coin" is not centralized
Step 2 - proceed to contradict yourself in the next sentence

How the hell is a an obviously centralized system with 3 dozens of privileged entities is not centralized... Also it is not only oligarchy, but completely unaccountable shady oligarchy. Why people continue to "want" it is beyond understanding.
It's based on what people are willing to buy or sell it at. Like anything else...
You need to sign up and verify your account before you can do anything. Think of this like paypal with blockchain behind the scenes instead of Oracle/Sql or whatever they use as db
> The main point was the standardization.

That sounds reasonable. America can queue that up after they standardize on the metric system.
Took me a little research to get this one, which is rather subtle.

The author of the above hit piece on higher education, according to his own web site spent time in Australia "studying full-time for his Bachelor's degree in English and philosophy at the University of Sydney. (He did rather well.)" Seems like the possibility of Rank Hypocrisy exists in the "Don't Go to College" essay, then.
when I was learning programming as a kid it was all about video games. Quake was a new game and it had an embedded language called QuakeC that controlled the game logic. That was hugely fun for making Quake mods. That set me up to do programming in Perl and C.

I would probably play to their interests with projects that are more concrete than abstract. If they are into video games, lots of games have mod languages and they can start by giving themselves more health, more power, different weapons etc. If they are into social media maybe javascriptlets to edit the DOM on a website to change peoples tweets and take a screenshot, twitter or insta bot that automatically responds to certain types of posts, etc.

Teenagers should be able to grasp non-toy languages and the concept of searching StackOverflow for how to do stuff :)
> These regions are marked by ideologies or interpretations of it that are hostile to women, and poor infrastructure.

> We need to shift 100% of our foreign aid to education, contraception and abortion for women.

You're essentially advocating for colonialism. Not every culture is the same and some do not want abortion, for example. It's not the west's role to forcibly import our culture into other countries just to lower their birth rate to that of our's (which is too low, not even replacement level).
I don't know that exact ratio, but the number of stars that you can see that probably have planets in their "habitable zone" is pretty high... One in 5.

https://www.popsci.com/article/science/one-five-sun-stars-ha...

In our solar system, 2-3 of the 8-9 planets are in the "habitable zone". So let's just say it's maybe one in 20 or so.
Yes, Bitcoin is a poor fit for face-to-face transactions, but that doesn't mean it failed.
Not if we use nukes or solar to power it.
I refer to them because their arguments make sense to me - they seem measured and nuanced. I've encountered a lot of pseudo-science, and this has none of the hallmarks that I associate with it. The argument is not that renewables are bad, but they alone are not enough. Can you point to something that provides a counter-argument?
New React Testing Tool – Spearmint.js
If they could provide any history of being principled in their application of policy, it might be worth it; but as it stands, Facebook just sorta arbitrarily unpersons people on their platform, which gives me the impression that they'd be perfectly willing to debank them as well.
The business logic many (perhaps most) programmers work on is primarily occupied with gluing together multiple state stores (databases, caches, message queues), running some very simple computations, and writing the output to some IO sink (often a web response).

Sure, you could extract the computations part out. But that barely moves the needle on testability/cleanliness, because most of the business (or business-value-driving) logic is the data flow management--highly stateful IO coordination.
In the U.S. for example climate change is leading to decreased rainfall meaning less runoff and less groundwater recharge.

Where are you getting this? It certainly doesn't agree with figures published by the government. [0] The aquifers that are dropping are dropping because of massive well pumping. The wildfires are because we've stockpiled understory fuel while building homes in fire-prone forests. Overstating the case for global warming will convince some people, but others will only grow more skeptical.

[0] https://www.drought.gov/drought/data-maps-tools/current-cond...
>> Skepticism is valid, at the same time consider carefully if this is worse than The Fed.

Are you serious? Are you comparing facebook credits 2.0 with The Fed?
I wish this article included photos comparing the look of a dog face when using vs not using the cited muscles.