skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are awfully quick to cuss at someone for merely having a difference of opinion about something that could be viewed as trivial in the grand scheme of things.

Ironic given that you are decrying the evils of a forum supposedly becoming an echo chamber.

I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the HN leader board.

I spent nearly six years homeless and was an active participant here during that time. I was quite open about being homeless.

I'm firmly against UBI when UBI is a fairly popular idea around here.

I'm critical of what I frame the "pro vax" crowd, which is a highly controversial position.

I've been thrown off of multiple forums or simply left because it wasn't productive.

Although I have a lobsters account, I barely spend any time there in part because of the gestapo like inquiry from the moderating staff concerning why the hell I had joined given that I don't yet know how to code. The moderating staff made it quite clear my nefarious interest in a coding forum as a non programmer combined with "unusual behavior" -- probably largely rooted in being a demographic outlier -- meant they absolutely had their eye on me.

This made me feel distinctly uncomfortable in a way I have never felt on HN. It also suggests a dramatically lower tolerance for social differences than HN has.

Your view of HN vs Lobsters and mine aren't remotely on the same page. And cussing at me about how you have logic on your side utterly fails to overturn the weight of my first-hand experience with both forums.
They do already offer this, but it's not free, and you have to re-label each item with your barcode, and cover up any UPC codes, if possible.

The base problem is that UPC. Amazon wants to use it to identify everything, as it's already there, and easy to use. However, it's also easy to counterfeit along with the item.

It would also be a significant technical challenge, as it would increase the size of Amazon's item database by at least an order of magnitude, and would increase the amount of unique bins they need to maintain in the warehouse by a lot too.

They clearly need to do something, but understand why they don't want to go down the road of tagging per-vendor if they can avoid it. On more expensive items, they seem to be trying the alternative of allowing vendors that control their supply chains to also exercise control of the amazon supply chain. It's starting to hit for more prominent vendors. I can no longer sell used Canon lenses on Amazon anymore. To do so, I need approval, which consists of "At least 1 purchase invoice for products from a manufacturer or distributor, 1 letter from Canon authorizing you to sell their products". (Note, this is for selling used gear, not new, or like-new. Just normal, used camera lenses that I bought and no longer need.)
True, there will always be people who need to know the details. That applies all the way down to CPU opcodes.

I’m making more of a semantic point than anything else. If you define indirection as anything which causes you to jump from the code directly in front of you at any point, then yes, you can call even good abstractions indirection.

I’d argue that such a definition makes the word “indirection” must less useful, as it becomes pretty much synonymous with “abstraction”. I think it’s better to reserve the word “indirection” to describe abstractions that require you to look elsewhere to understand what the abstraction actually is.
I've written a blog post with my own feelings about it (hopes and fears included ;) ) - feel free to check it out: https://lukaszkups.net/notes/do-we-have-to-be-afraid-because...
They should open-source Q(uick)Basic and with it GORILLAS.BAS, MONEY.BAS, NIBBLES.BAS, and DONKEY.BAS. State-of-the-art programming power for your XT, 286, or higher PC compatible, free and open source.
The story format that Holmes sprang from wasn't all that much older. I'm inclined to think there are other examples but I can't really think of any. With respect to detectives specifically, Wilkie Collins wrote what is generally considered the first detective story a few years earlier. But Sergeant Cuff isn't central to the story the way Holmes was in Doyle's stories.
I know many people want something like this, but few seem to want to pay for it, which seems to leave the problem languishing. Would you be willing to pay for such software? If so how much?
I'm sorry that this will come across as rude, but I feel like you're repeating something you've heard but didn't quite understand.

Yes, at pretty much ANY level, you should write your function names to hide the implementation details and to describe the intention of the function. In my previous post I hinted that the name of the function should "describe what the function does", which is the same as "describe the intention of the function", because if the function doesn't do what it's intended to do, that's a bug.

The reason I say I don't think you understand what you're saying is that none of what you're actually saying applies to the examples you're giving.

`is_foolike` doesn't describe the intention of the method. It gives an entirely vague and inaccurate view of what the method does. So even though we both agree that functions should describe the intention of the method, you're saying `is_foolike` is an okay name even though it doesn't do what you say it should?

`starts_with_foo` describes the intention of the method. It doesn't describe the implementation: `starts_with_foo(x)` might expand to `x.startswith('foo')` or `x[:3] == 'foo'`, but I don't care which, because the name accurately describes what it does either way.

Your example doesn't elucidate. If we're representing beverages as strings which are somehow guaranteed to begin with "co2" if the beverage is carbonated, and we've decided that the deserialization should be mixed into our "high-level, in your business domain", the program is so badly tangled that we're not going to get any truths about good programming from it.
This is why I always say that microservices are a technical fix for a political problem.

Technically they're harder to manage and often come at a high technical cost that you should never attempt to pay if you don't have to, but it's an effective way of managing the often extreme coordination costs that exist in large, dysfunctional companies that simply don't exist elsewhere.

I used to rail against microservices for years (working in startups) until I finally worked at a large dysfunctional corporation trying to run a lot of complex processes that spanned a lot of tightly coupled departments and then I started to see how they made sense.

It also gave me an appreciation of the problems Bezos recognized when he tried to decouple the organizational fiefdoms under his control.
> I have more trust in Amazon’s ability to safeguard PII and payment information than I do for other companies.

Even though I'd preferentially avoid Amazon much of the time, this is true. I wish Apple Pay for web purchase would become ubiquitous (and my credit card issuer would add support) to sidestep this issue.
The cost of suing Amazon (which is how a customer would hold them liable) greatly outweighs the cost of almost any counterfeit good they might happen to ship.

The government is not likely to step with criminal enforcement unless they are presented with proof that Amazon purposefully ordered the fakes, or knowingly sold fakes.

Generally speaking, retailers are considered victims, not perpetrators, of counterfeiting. That's because when a retailer sells a counterfeit, the retailer has to process the returns and deal with angry customers, and then they're left with worthless inventory.

Again, the exception is if the retailer knowingly traffics in fakes and tries to defraud their customers. Proving that takes some pretty specific evidence though.
The thinness is a red herring but people who don't know better believe that.

Apple is clearly doing these things in order to make their products unserviceable so they can upsell.
No, the first 1M users that sign up pre-launch will have first option to pick their username when we launch. It's something to create some sort of buzz ahead of time. We dont want to release concept and purpose ahead of time. We've created something that will change the social media landscape overall and bring the meaning of social back while empowering our users.
People aren't really keen on taking few hours of their day to repackage and ship back something that is 20-50$.

I often buy things from amazon-like storefronts here in asia and sometimes they refund no questions asked but sometimes they require you to ship it back and 90% of the time it's not worth it. All of these "free returns" policies sound much better than they actually are.

One of more recent anecdotes:
I bought a new keyboard for my Thinkpad which said "genuine" and serial numbers in decription match ones with Lenovo's. The keyboard turned out to be fine but had no backlight. My point is that packing it up and sending it back to neihbouring country is just not worth it. I clicked refund and left a negative review and that's pretty much as far as I'm willing to go for 60$ that I've spent.
Question... does Zhaoxin allow the public to audit their x86 microcode updates; that is, is/are their microcode/microcode update format(s):

a) Documented

b) Publicly Available/Transparent -- no NDA or paywall

c) Auditable

?
There is one thing that I’m missing, yes when the only thing you do is wrapping the standard library with a function it’s overkill. But when there is a business decision logic behind it I would still advice to extract it. Creating a function with a name tells you something about the why!

I think peek definition could help you out when you are really dealing with it in the code base. I just wish it would be smarter. Peeking a function with 5 lines, peek it. If it’s larger, jump to it.
In South Africa almost all of our electronics are imported. Given the high amounts of unemployment, the technical recession, lack of secondary industries and manifacturing, the brain drain and scarcity of technical skills, etc., I would really like to see something like this develop into a viable business.

Of course after that it would not be DIY anymore, but I like the spirit of learning and productivity which at the same time would be refreshing to see it developed into a viable product.

If you buy a high end powered speaker or amp here, expect to pay 50% more that the price you see on Amazon. So, you basically have a 50% profit margin even if your cost is equal to the sales (!) price in the US.
As we learned in the Hidden Figures (I did anyway) the math is Euler’s method of iteration. So a desired variable (location of touchdown!) is fixed and then the inputs iterated until a successful set of inputs are found.
It's not indirection, it's bad abstraction that's the real issue here. Consider the example used in the article:

if x.startswith("foo"):
do_something_with(x)

if is_foolike(x):
do_something_with(x)

The problem with both of these variations is that the "if-statement" doesn't have any meaning behind it. There's no gain in the indirection presented here. Whereas the following code has meaning:

if checkHasPermissions(x):
do_something_with(x)

The reader of the function is now able to understand the purpose of the indirection and the function has clear responsibilities.

Remember although code is interpreted by machines it's read by humans...
Right. It's easy to handle the simple case, but honestly "let the GC close it" works fine in the simplest cases.
Google's flight and hotel search doesn't come from scraping the web, it comes from ITA, the Google subsidiary that operates a Global Distributuon System.

Building flight and hotel search by scraping is possible, but will make whoever you scrape very angry very quickly, because they're paying their technology vendors per search, so they watch their look to book ratios very closely.
Of course some people fail to consider the privilege of family wealth, but wouldn’t student debt forgiveness also hugely benefit (perhaps unfairly) people with that privilege? I suspect that students with family wealth have considerably more student loan debt on average, because (among other reasons) they correctly judged that their family wealth would be a safety net for their future student loan debt.

I suspect that many students with less family wealth tend to take on less student loan debt, even if they would be accepted to the same college education opportunities. I would call this “financial responsibility,” and I would consider a blanket student debt forgiveness to be quite unfair to them.
In your example `is_carbonated` is a private method. In an public interface you would want to hide the implementation details but surely not in a private method.
>How do you establish that a given act of hacking is or is not a public service?

If you hack and then publish embarrassing material to the whole world it's a public service.

If you hack non-embarrassing operationally sensitive material and then leak it selectively to foreign governments then it's espionage.

There's some fuzziness but it's not a bright line to cross and Julian Assange is very, very far away from it.

The fact that the murders that were uncovered are still going unprosecuted adds considerable weight to the idea that it was a public service. If Assange had done the exact same thing to Russia the idea that it was espionage would be justifiably mocked. It's not mocked because nationalism is a potent drug, essentially (here, it's not like Russians aren't looking at this and shaking their heads).
It's actually a reference to a cat-burglarising penguin.
Suning.com Corporation Acquires Carrefour
If only MS never charged more for the 64bit versions :-/
Recently the US Supreme Court ruled in Apple v. Pepper that app buyers of the iOS App Store do have standing to sue Apple in the antitrust suit, because they're buying the apps from Apple directly, and not from the apps' developers.

Regardless of the eventual outcome of the suit, this ruling may have implications for other online storefronts. Here, the Court saw online storefronts as the sellers of goods sold, regardless of whatever business arrangements may be in place between the suppliers and the storefront. Under this interpretation, it's likely that fewer antitrust suits could get thrown out on questions of standing against storefronts. With these prospects, it's likely that more suits will be brought.

My prediction is that to mitigate this, storefronts will try to introduce more visual separation between first-party store and the third-party sellers' stores, even if the items are still found from a unified search and catalogue. The purchasing of the third-party item will take place at the third-party storefront, but the payment will be processed by the captive aggregator and fulfilled and supported by them as well.
Pretty much everything written in Ruby before "Practical Object-Oriented Design In Ruby" by Sandi.. Haha, #KiddingNotKidding.

Looking for a non-contrived and/or non-scarecrow example? Anything in the Chef code-base circa 2014 or prior.. No clue if it has changed.

Ruby code bases were the poster children of DRY-gone-wild.
Karma: Is it possible to go in to the negative?
What are the consequences?
The made up story sound similar to Hertz losing 32 million while hiring Accenture to do internal API rewrite in 2 years.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_law...
Not implying that at all.
I think it is mainly sociological. Are basque, irish or croatian less useful to convey ideas than chinese or english? Not at all. Perhaps they might even be better.

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is who talks the language, what is written in the language, where can you be understood in the language.

In programming language terms, the important questions are: do I have a library for X? Is bug Y solved quickly? How many answers do I have in stack overflow? Do I get job interviews due to that word in linkedin? Can I pair with a random valley programmer to work a quick pilot over a weekend?
It is very hard to eliminate false-positives without introducing a raft of false-negatives as well. If you held Amazon liable for anything bad a 3rd party merchant ever does, they will react by clamping down on all unverified merchants, and a lot of small/medium businesses will find themselves caught in the crossfire. Especially those who don't fall under the umbrella of Amazon's good graces. Is that really what you want?

More generally speaking, do we believe there's any value in having open platforms with platform-owners who aren't trying to police every single actor using the platform? There have certainly been many politicians who wanted to regulate the internet as a whole, similar to how you've asked for Amazon to be regulated. Would society be better off if ISPs were held liable for any fraud/unlawful behavior that happens on their networks, and were expected to police all internet traffic they were routing?
VB was a money maker, flat out. You could deliver great solutions to problems while standing on your head. And the fact that it extended into Office S VBA made it even better.

We wrote plenty of code in VC++, but I have to admit that VB had massively better ROI.
Mercury.co uses Haskell. It’s been great so far.

Mercury.co/jobs if you are interested.
and, these:

4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLYz2vWv1wg

5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsbrEOxVPcg
I was able to manually upgrade a Win 10 machine with a USB drive to 1903.
> You are awfully quick to cuss at someone for merely having a difference of opinion about something that could be viewed as trivial in the grand scheme of things.

I didn't swear because you have a different opinion. I swore because "well I don't think it is" is not a valid response to the logic posted.

> Ironic given that you are decrying the evils of a forum supposedly becoming an echo chamber.

I didn't silence you, or hide your comment from others. Please learn what irony is.

> I, I, I, <snip>

How is any of that relevant. Please discuss the facts. How you or I or the neighbours dog live is irrelevant.

> Although I have a lobsters account, I barely spend any time there in part because of the gestapo like inquiry from the moderating staff concerning why the hell I had joined given that I don't yet know how to code. The moderating staff made it quite clear my nefarious interest in a coding forum as a non programmer combined with "unusual behavior" -- probably largely rooted in being a demographic outlier -- meant they absolutely had their eye on me.

Given that Lobste.rs makes moderation actions public, please provide some references.

> how you have logic on your side utterly fails to overturn the weight of my first-hand experience with both forums.

Lets cut straight to the facts:

HN approves and agrees with "downvote to show disagreement". Fact.

HN by-default completely hides, and even with that option off, uses styling to reduce readability of any comment that is down voted. Fact.

Lobste.rs requires an actual reason to downvote, specifically to counter the type of things that occur on HN and other sites with similar features. Fact.

Lobste.rs does not "hide" down voted comments.

So please, tell me again how your anecdotal evidence is more relevant than the simple logic of how each site is designed to function?
The site was explicitly created by a dude banned from HN (an action since regretted by pg) so don’t hold your breath.
They are definitely tracking suppliers, but it is not as easy as you make it seem.

Suppliers may not be using 100% fakes, making them much harder to catch. Customers may also be a significant part of the problem, due to Amazon's return policy. Customers can easily claim a fake, then ship a fake item back, blaming the supplier.

There's no way to know for sure without Amazon themselves testing the products, which would be costly. Most items do not have unique serial numbers, and even if they did, opening boxes to confirm matching serial numbers would likely be cost prohibitive.
>The question about helping someone hack the laptop in question (even if not successful) was a clear crossing of a boundary that I would expect most journalists would not cross.

It seems fairly analogous to the famous 1973 burglary of FBI offices that uncovered J Edgar Hoover's blanked surveillance of civil rights movements and his attempt to coerce Luther King into committing suicide:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/fbi-office-bre...

Retrospectively, it's easy now to call these people heroes who uncovered a rather evil conspiracy.
Yes, they can try many ways to get it done. However, the effort and time that they would pay is indeed diminishing the will to contact the owner. It's not a fair comparison. Even if you give it an email index from world bank, that still doesn't tell how normal citizens' acquaintance in using email.
Hm. Are you aware of [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/emips/ & [2] https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/support_for_microsoft_emip... ?

Especially the two papers which come up when you search like this? [3] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=microsoft+extensible+mips

MIPS-to-Verilog, Hardware Compilation for the eMIPS
Processor
Karl Meier, Alessandro Forin
Microsoft Research
September 2007
Technical Report
MSR-TR-2007-128
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

[4] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

and

EXTENSIBLE MICROPROCESSOR WITHOUT INTERLOCKED
PIPELINE STAGES (eMIPS), THE RECONFIGURABLE MICROPROCESSOR

A Thesis by RICHARD NEIL PITTMAN

Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of
Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE

May 2007

Major Subject: Computer Engineering

[5] https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/59...
For macOS you need to use an app like TripMode [1] or Little Snitch [2].

[1] https://www.tripmode.ch

[2] https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/
This is getting tiring, the same comment over and over again.
I feel as though this is a huge part of working with Rails as there is an incredible amount of magic that happens under the hood.

From my limited experience, I think abstractions like these are helpful as long as there is consistency.

This is easy to do by yourself but not always on a team; however, I think Rails has a good balance of conventions that allow indirection to be successful as long as the people writing the code use the same patterns and communicate effectively.
Hofstadter, Friday and Perl 6 – Arne Sommer
I don't see why police can't simply use civil asset forfeiture seize an entire warehouse, just like they seize homes from owners who might not know that another resident was selling drugs out of it. Proving that the owner knew of the crime isn't necessary to seize an instrument of crime.