skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You couldn’t pay me to touch a crypto currency built by Facebook. They’re the king of shifty behaviour, dark patterns and unscrupulously harvesting all the data they can get their hands on.

There’ll be no privacy from overlord FB and everything will be more or less at their behest.
That's unfair, there was a lot of pressure on companies to protect users from scammy crypto ads during the big bubble of Bitcoin. I think many companies banned ads for shady sites and to imply they did it only to promote their own coin isn't fair.
The description of the STEM/MINT situation in German universities is far too generalized. You have quite a few STEM/MINT universities and programs which require a numerus clausus, its just up to the university to set the NC. Many classical STEM/MINT programs dont have a problem with having a few hundred students each year instead of a few dozen since alot of those will fail in the first years where students just have to learn the basics of the field. Those courses are generally easy to teach and require little interaction with individual students. In the most prestigious technical universities having 70 to 90% of the students fail specific exams is nothing special. And studends are barred from the program after failing the 3rd try. You are also not completely barred with to low of an average entry grade from school, you will just have to wait longer to start your degree. That part is the case for every university and every program, STEM/MINT isnt a special case here.

edited for more information
Standard library APIs like context.Context's WithValue/Value, sync's Map/Value/Pool, stuff like the sort or container/heap packages. Some of them are obvious "really wanted generics, but wasn't important enough to get the special built-in treatment" cases, some aren't.

Most logging libraries I've seen follow the pattern from fmt.Println etc to accept arbitrary `interface{}` values to be logged instead of actually using some Stringer or Formatter interface in their actual method signatures.
Ordered the book (Yiikes, I had to use Amazon because of you as it seems the only online store to deliver the hard copy in Europe. Usually, I refuse to use this service as I'm totally against the business model of this company).

The great thing about HN is that it let me thanks you for DDG!
Facebook is involved, so I don’t think anything positive (for users) is being liberated here.
Writing code is also UX. some future user will have to understand it. More often than not, that future user is you.
Language-specific conferences are not just a C++ thing, though. There are Java conferences, Ruby conferences, Python conferences, Rust conferences, etc.

The only thing that doesn't exist is a C conference, but that's because C is the least common denominator.

Pretty sure that there are Go conferences.
> SEPA transfers are quick and cheap, if not free

FedWire transfers are instantaneous and cheap if not free at many institutions. The “bank transfers are slow and expensive” argument is financially illiterate.
I wish I understood what problems people solve day in and day out such that they need to call IO in the middle of Dijkstra’s algorithm. Most "business logic" ought be pure functions over persistent data structures with no IO other than the occasional logging. At the last possible moment, 5% of the code wires in IO in some boilerplaty way. Is that sufficiently pervasive to worry about it?
Bitcoin is a nightmare for both buyer and seller due its volatility, not to mention the difference between exchange rates. You may buy your bitcoin with a specific price but the merchant/payment processor values it differently(lower). Just check bitpay to see for yourself
I hope it’s true. I’d love to support financially an added value service by Mozilla.
A quick estimation about the environmental impacts (with data for Germany only) shows peat is at least 5-20 times worse in terms of surface destruction - I have no idea how to compare the ecological impact of removing a biotope vs. moving a town.

Lignite:

- thickness of a lignite bed 11-35m [0]

- surface destruction per metric ton: 220-700 cm² [0]

Peat:

- thickness of a peat layer 1,5-2m [0])

- surface destruction per metric ton [1]:

-- at least 3,850-5,130 cm² (using the same density for coal and peat)

-- 6,000-8,000 cm² (moist peat, 0.8g/cm³ [2])

-- 10,000-13,300 cm² (dried peat, 0.4 g/cm³ [2], considering the higher calorific value for peat [4])

-- at worst 12,000-16,000 cm² (dried peat, 0.4 g/cm³ [2])

[0] (Data from 2015 for German mining areas; page in German) https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/flaeche-boden-land-oeko...

[1] There was no data for the surface destruction for peat in [0] so I estimated it using densities from [2]:

thickness lignite bed x surface destruction lignite x density lignite / density lignite / thickness lignite

e.g. 700 cm² x 11 m x 1.25 g/cm³ / 0.801 g/cm³ / 1.5 m = 8011 cm²

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=peat+lignite

[3] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/fuels-higher-calorific-va...

[4] The gross calorific value for peat is 5-20 % higher than for lignite [2]-[3]; though I guess that does not exclude the energy needed for drying the peat.
The Complete Guide to React Refs
> Turn off comments
For as much grief as Medium gets, it sure would help blogs like this. The font color is a poor choice considering the background, the font itself isn't that common for reading long text forms.

Not saying Medium is perfect, but it does help standardize the display of all these random, one-off blogs.
I swear to god I read FBI? Did you edit it? IF not apology from my side.
Thoughts on Libra “Blockchain”
So the only thing this has going for it over cash is that it may ease exchange online (to be seen). And this depends on how easy it will be to join this as a merchant or user, how nice APIs will be, and how well fraud will be handled, etc., etc.

And the value will fluctuate based on the trust in the ability to convert it reliably to cash/other currencies. So there's no real peg to anything, as described previously.
It even attracts VAT, yes
Very possibly, it is not mine in any case.
This is seriously scary. The buy-in it's already received from some of the big financial players worries me that this might actually catch-on.
Facebook is the last person I'd trust with any of my data, let alone a complete history of all my transactions.

I hope privacy is more important to the average Western Joe than it was to the Chinese. WeChat sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
In general this is an insightful article (once you apply the Wadsworth constant), but I am bothered by the sentiment of section on Citra and 3rd party builds. The narrative seems to be that "good guy developers who care deeply about you" are telling you not to use builds that solve your problems and do what you want, and instead you should just suck it up and wait until they get around to fixing it properly, presumably with love instead of hacks. That's just a silly thing to expect.
A major point the article is missing is that after population peak comes population decline. The pattern of "demographic transition" is that as lifespans extend, infant mortality declines, and lifestyles change the birthrate drops. But it doesn't drop just to replacement rate, it drops much below replacement rate.

Great. Better to have it happen through declining birth rates than through natural disaster, pandemic, starvation, etc.
I suppose what I'm saying is that you need to weigh up all the factors.

Generally we're all happy enough for our phone operators to know where we are with not-terrible accuracy since so many of us choose to walk around with a phone in our pockets. In the event that you get into a potentially fatal collision, is your privacy more important than a first responder being able to actually find you?
I guess you were not on vacation in Hangzhou and in scenic areas. The last thing I'd want to do on holiday is opening a bank account.
"Stay young longer" is healthy lifestyle and a bit of personal responsibility.
All payment solutions have drawbacks, we are talking about legality at the moment.
By "wealth and resources" do you mean a full scale invasion of Brazil? That's the level of effort it would to possibly accomplish what you suggest.

I think a lot of you are very taken in by "climate science." I remain skeptical. Were it not so tied to political ideology it might be more palatable. But I'm unwilling to give up any more ground to the far left at this point. I don't care how good their argument for this or that is, I'm simply not listening anymore. They will have to come and kill me as I am no longer interested in complying with their administrative state and it's unelected idiots.
Please give me this nonsense. I'm sick of programming languages.
You'll take a pass but the majority of the people won't so most likely you'll end up using it.
I don’t recommend that people use Go to write complex multithreaded code that accesses shared state. My point is that I doubt many people are doing this while erroneously thinking that their code is guaranteed to be memory safe. In other words, whatever the problems with Go may be in this regard, it’s not primarily the absence of an ‘unsafe’ keyword that’s the issue.
I guess we have usable alternatives to lead pipes. For electric cars let's see where is the externalization of emissions.
Agile Misconception #2: We Don't Need Documentation
> Tests? No, definitely not on the first run. Maybe only for documentation purposes in legacy systems. But don't take away all the fun by starting with tests. You'll paint yourself into a corner.

Trying to squeeze in the tests into existing system is painful. So better do the tests before it had become a "legacy system to document".

Tests should be written before and during writing the new system.

That's because they are the executable language for the results you want to get from the system. The two other options are: use plain text to document your manual actions and expected results, don't document your manual actions and expected results.
> So it unites the drawbacks of both fiat and gold without any of the advantages.

Well, if you conveniently ignore the advantages...

> Yeah they can, it's called a hard fork in cryptocurrency.

That's similar to me printing "Doge dollars" and claiming it increases the supply of US dollar.

> Actually you can, though in this case you exchange ownership contracts of the gold, which you can swap for the gold you own at your bank.

Yes... If we ignore the fact that you're not actually sending gold.

> Until the tax office knocks at your door and wants to know where all that money went. Then the ease of transport is suddenly a problem.

That's not an argument. Taxes are applied in the same way as cash is taxed, with benefit of you having a ledger you can reference.

> It's not a medium of exchange at the moment any more than beer tops and a ballpoint pen are.

Except them being instantly verifiable, have a constrained supply, are easier to transfer, are divisible, are fungible & uniform... Just the properties that money actually needs and make for a good medium of exchange.

> The average customer can't even get refunds if they get scammed, how am I supposed to take it seriously as a digital currency?

I guess the same way you take physical cash seriously?
> "it’s a pretty long read... clearly the author did not learn brevity in his coding"

Brevity shouldn't be a virtue of coding. The best code is self-documenting code and self-documenting code is rarely brief.

To quote Wordpress PHP Coding Standards: In general, readability is more important than cleverness or brevity.

https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/best-practices/codi...
Wow, I just took the quiz and it was rather enlightening. I ended up scoring reasonably well (9/13), but only because getting the first few wrong taught me to stop taking such a dismal view of the world. If I hadn't been shown the correct answers until the end, I probably would have done even worse.
I might have to look into that book!
> A second one is keeping data read-only so that it can be freely accessed by multiple threads

That's not really a "pattern for achieving safe concurrency". At one point, your concurrent processes need to communicate somehow or they're parallel more than concurrent.
>Initially, the association (and validators) will consist of a geographically distributed and diverse set of Founding Members. These members are organizations chosen according to objective participation criteria, including that they have a stake in bootstrapping the Libra ecosystem and investing resources toward its success. Over time, membership eligibility will shift to become completely open and based only on the member’s holdings of Libra.

So it's not going to be Facebook's centralized servers, but Facebook + their friend's centralized servers. There are some vague promises, but this will start out just as centralized as Facebook Credits.
The only added value that’s important is respecting users rights online and privacy. Brave is as bad as any of them, and being Eich’s new business venture doesn’t inspire any trust none what so ever.
> If you don't believe that making clear promises and delivering on them is, then what would you suggest is a better reason?

How is "being opinionated" and "making clear promises and delivering on them" equivalent?
Show HN: Converting scanning output to tabular formats
> A long time ago, a small language made the rounds by not evaluating expressions when they appeared, but when they were needed.

> Lisp did this a long time ago, and now most languages are getting it too.

I'm not sure if this is correct. You can probably write a macro for lazy eval, but by default lisp is a CBV almost-lambda calculus.

Or you could pass around quoted things, I guess
Also Dublin needs to get serious about public transport. This will be difficult and expensive, but the city is already gridlocked at rush hour.
Sillicon Valley ... ?
At my current job, most of the backend code is divided in two separate groups. One uses Java while another is built with Go. Both have teams have very good reasons to choose what they did and both languages are serving their purpose pretty well but one of the major issues with the Java team I've seen is how discussion there is around styling the code. Most PRs have some comments about some styling and it gets a bit worse every time a new engineer joins the team. I think what you pointed about Go is one of it's best features if not the best.
Type 2 is reversible, at least up to a point (maybe, a few decades).

What exactly does this mean?
Responding to your EDIT2:

I don't understand how you can both be concerned with the 'current state of roaming charges', yet think that getting a local SIM for a 2 week trip is 'overkill'.

I agree that it's probably harder to find the right place to buy a SIM in a non-tier-1 city, but you can probably Google it before you get there.

However, to get Alipay working you probably need a Chinese bank account. You can get one of those with your passport (even with a tourist visa) but I can understand if that seems like overkill for a 2 week trip :)

Nevertheless, if we contrast the situations in the US and China, they each have pros and cons for tourists:

USA pros:
- cash gladly accepted almost everywhere
- visa/MC accepted almost everywhere

USA cons:
- can't get a local bank account as a tourist (at least not easily)
- can't set up a local mobile wallet (PayPal or Venmo)

China pros:
- tourist can get a bank account
- tourist can get a mobile wallet (after getting a bank account)

China cons:
- some places don't accept cash
- many places don't accept visa/MC

So the US is a little more convenient for a tourist. You can get by fine without a local bank account or payment app.
Oh, I didn't realize it shows answers right away. Previous version didn't do that. 9/13 would have been a great score.

edit: I've changed the link to a test that doesn't mark correct answers right away, previous link: http://factfulnessquiz.com/
Political party live-streamed a press conference with cat filter switched on
>I would venture to say that whoever starts with "I have x years of experience" or "I'm an Y language developer" is mostly bulshitting you or doesn't really know what he's talking about, so he'll need to have a badge to shove it up your face to demonstrate his qualities.

A better approach is to demonstrate your skills and why it's important, then let people ask and wonder about your background...

Basically, shoving experience or qualifications in my face doesn't make me respect your point of view more, it just makes me think you can't be humble and want to make yourself look good.

This is actually great advice for both people with experience and people listening to them.
Anecdotally, the average person would do it once per year at most. More perhaps, if you have relatives in the UK and like to drive there with small children in tow.
Actually, it does behave differently. Never underestimate the weirdness of IPv6 ;-)

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_segment_size :

"To avoid fragmentation in the IP layer, a host must specify the maximum segment size as equal to the largest IP datagram that the host can handle minus the IP and TCP header sizes.[2] Therefore, IPv4 hosts are required to be able to handle an MSS of 536 octets (= 576[3] - 20 - 20) and IPv6 hosts are required to be able to handle an MSS of 1220 octets (= 1280[4] - 40 - 20)."

So it seems like one needs to clamp tcpv4 to at least 536, and tcpv6 to at least 1220. (tcpv6 is common shorthand for TCP over IPv6, similar to udpv6 and icmpv6)
I've played both (even contributed to the CDDA project).

Both games:

- Are what I'd consider traditional roguelikes

- are hella fun and 150% worth playing. 10/10, would suggest to a friend.

CDDA:

- has significantly more to do, more items, and more overall depth

- Has better "role playability"

- Is incredibly open ended.

- is under heavy development (just had a HUGE update drop. Be sure to check it out!)

- is fully open source

- can be somewhat confusing for a newcomer (though less than something like Nethack)

- Performance can sometimes be rather meh due to the complexity of the models, particularly in locations with many mobs.

- many systems are not yet fully fleshed out (looking at you NPCs) though many issues have been resolved in the latest release and the experimentals.

Cogmind:

- Has arguably some of the best UI/UX you'll find in a rogue like. Take a look at Caves of Qud and TOME as other great examples of proper UI/UX in rogue likes.

- provides a much better tutorial

- has a more fully fleshed out story

- offers a more guided and less open ended experience

- is more "complete".

- excellent performance

- is not open source (to my knowledge)

- is definitely worth the purchase price if you're a rogue like fan.
You are right ... I factored in getting from original origin and to the final destination in the train journey, and not in the plane ride. That makes plane 5 hours, and train 12 hours. I guess last time I checked I also choose an overnight connection.

Worse yet: There is no feasible way to actually buy that itinerary without driving to the next larger train station some 40 hours away, during hours I usually work. The plane ticket I can buy on my smartphone while taking a dump.
Something tells me the calibra wallet will be the only wallet authz and it will be no different than your paypal app both as functionality and flexibility.
As far as bitcoin is concerned it has no place in the payments world.
It's a flawed coin for payments due its volatility.
According to this news report, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/05/facebook-cryptocurrency-comi... yes some employees will be paid in company scrip.
I think that was a "myth" indeed. But the OPs point is still valid. :)
It's so strange, I'm pretty sure they admit the whole thing is not decentralized.
The Boutique Fitness Boom
I was going to suggest to anyone interested in VMS to head over to the deathrow cluster but unfortunately it's now dead. https://deathrow.vistech.net/410.html
Use Coq in Your Browser: The Js Coq Theorem Prover Online
I mean open source ftw but it being closed source doesn't mean you should avoid it. What hacks I've heard nothing of the sort
Awesome, thanks for the reply! Guess I'll make a point to read your book then :-)
The makers of many point and click puzzle games disguised as development tools.
> don't take away all the fun by starting with tests

Depends what you're doing. For interactive programs, automated testing is more painful than just firing it up and testing manually, at least at the beginning. For noninteractive systems it may be much easier to start with a test as a spec: "parse this file and produce this output".
Here is an example: https://github.com/google/gvisor - https://github.com/google/gvisor/tree/master/tools/go_generi...

It was useful enough that someone made a standalone package: https://github.com/mmatczuk/go_generics
Protip: You can write FORTRAN in any language!
But then, with the current usage of the term, a Markov chain is AI.
I didn't say they were. They weren't even in the same sentence in my original comment.
I can't find on white paper, transaction are immutable or are reversible?
The average civilian associates cryptocurrencies with high profile thefts and dark web drug dealers because that's what makes it into the mainstream media. At best this will panic the big payment processors into making traditional payment options cheaper and easier, further undermining what little reason this has for existing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I searched but couldn't find where it says no jokes.
I believe only facebook and few others will have access to the blockchain(i.e transaction history etc) so it really brings nothing to the user/clients or developers outside of libra association
Alternatively, I use reader/distill mode, the color scheme on this blog made me squint and almost damage my eyes that I nearly stopped reading immediately until I switched on reader/distill mode.

I agree, for a much wider (programming) audience, Medium would suit better for this blog.
My biggest issue with navigating Go codebases is that sometimes it's cumbersome to find where a specific type/function is defined, when there are multiple files under the same directory.
Global population growth is really just African and West Asian population growth. These regions are marked by ideologies or interpretations of it that are hostile to women, and poor infrastructure. They will also be the worst affected by climate change due to their geographic position and reliance on agriculture.

Unfortunately fertility rates in these countries are falling too slowly. In Egypt, approaching 100m people and affected by water shortages and overpopulation, the fertility rate is increasing.

We need to shift 100% of our foreign aid to education, contraception and abortion for women. Whilst some women and men choose to have an excess of children, many women simply lack access to contraception.

If global conditions and the climate worsen, we may need to consider more assertive measures: $1000 cash for every male under 25 and with fewer than 1 child willing to accept a vasectomy, for example.