skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, they like to give special privileges to favored entities. Some of these special privileges would likely be counter to any published rules.
(BBC) Shipping Forecast
Regardless of the reason, the fact that you can have your livelihood taken away without an explanation or human contact is pretty worrying.
Methods change but does strategy?
In certain cities.

Rivers and groundwater were totally undefended.
How does that compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization ?
> As a coder, you have the ability to create almost anything. How can that knowledge not tempt you to create something yourself?

Oh, it definitely does, but...

The stuff I wrote during school, in Turbo Pascal, is just too old and completely unrelated to what I do for living now.

I also have hobbies other than programming. Since I started spending 8 hours a day coding at work, I usually spend my afternoons doing the other things that interest me. When else should I be doing them?

And now I have small kids, so there is almost no free time anyway.

The projects I did in previous jobs, I don't own the code. I was never paid to work on an open-source project.

...and this is why I don't have anything to show you on Github. Not because I don't care about programming, but because I also have a life. (Perhaps that is a competitive disadvantage. Well, I can still find a job regardless.)

Yeah, I could choose to just ignore everything for a few weeks or months, and build something on Github instead, just to get that extra point at an interview, but it would feel like building a Potemkin village. Unless really necessary, I would prefer not to do that. I hope this makes sense.
I have to second this suggestion. School is great and if you want to go back to school then I don't want to stop you. However, if it's a means to an end, then when you are in your thirties with a kid I'm not sure it's going to pay back. "I'm a programmer that wants to be a PM/PGM" is a great way to get into business without having to pay upfront. Certain kinds of dev management will get you there too. If you don't mind doing dev for a couple more years, you can try moving to a big company and climb the "greasy ladder" for a while -- Get a lead dev position, move into a dev manager position and then start working your way up to executive level. To be honest, experience is going to pay much better than education in these kinds of scenarios anyway.
The problem here is you're completely ignoring morbidity. Skin cancers are a whole lot easier and safer to cut out when they're small.

Of course, I do work in Australia, so pretty much everyone gets skin cancer.

Source: I cut out skin cancers.
I have done a little with http://us.metamath.org/ and I am sure within 10 years every professional mathematician will use formal proofs.

The two prerequisites are 1) making a fluid and intuitive interface for inputting proofs which can also display human readable proofs for any theorem known and 2) creating a database of all known mathematical proofs into which new results can be inserted.

Both tasks are ~50% complete. Metamath, for example, has all of mathematics formalised up to a basic undergraduate level. It has some reasonable editing software, but not close to good enough for mass adoption. There are also plenty of other systems being developed.

The time will come though relatively soon.
I used to work in chemistry a while back and the trend at the time was outsourcing chemical precursors from China. In the late 1990’s it was rare to buy from them, but by mid-2000’s most of our chemicals came from China. They literally sprouted a whole chemical industry pretty quickly.

Send drug precursors just came along with that capability. Want to order a starting material for Lipitor? Sure! What about fentanyl itself? Sure! Just another chemical.
There's a company, I think it's Mythic Beasts in the UK, that has or had a job application that had something along the lines of (before you got to the form) 'first prove you're not a robot do this simple maths blah...' but every time you submitted your answer, by typing in and clicking on the page, you got an error page saying 'too slow'. I wasn't looking for a job at the time but that has to easily be my favourite application process ever!
Melanin converts 99.9% of UV radiation into heat.

Even the synthetic form as noted here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15068035
The risk is poor nutrition, copper is needed for this skin pigment, which means competing with the demands placed by other parts of the body like collagen, (bones, skin, etc etc), blood cell production and more.
Another problem is the skin is washed often, daily in most cases and exposed to chemicals which can become carcinogenic under the sun. Carcinogenic suncreams exist. So its a complicated picture, poorly understood. The photo's are useful for seeing the distribution of cells.
Yeah. I never got the hate for XML. I feel like it was always mismatched expectations: some people wanted something the Markdown of configuration files, and other people wanted something extensible enough to encode any possible data structures.
You got me thinking about that word, CLI. I know that usually means a Unix shell, but when I just run my bespoke file conversion tool from CIDER REPL, that interface is also a command line one, what else is it?
I do Amazon Prime Video +1

Just canceled Netflix going to spin-up HBO for a few months.
Or it just gets pushed underground. Just because there was a lot of heat from publicly selling it, it still may be manufactured. Along with a price increase to make up for the lost volume.

The whole point of precursors is to buy something that is multi-use or that one could do the paperwork for to import legitimately before diverting.

We might be dealing with this for a while. The whole enforcement regime continues to be diverted around, so now we just have ultra-potent stuff that is basically unsafe to handle but the only choice.
These games do not resonate with everybody.

Back in the day, they seemed powerful. The lack of graphics was a clear trade for what seemed a lot of text and fairly sophisticated input.

I loved them. Have only finished a couple though.

I still really like IF. One gem today is lost pig. Hilarious!

Later, as my understanding had improved, I appreciate the art. Harsh limits back then. Despite that, for those people for whom words light up fun parts of the brain, the result is compelling.

I have wanted to do one with all sound. Maybe text to read, maybe those words just spoken. Dunno.

For what it is worth, Dungeons and Dragons invokes a similar mindset, given a good DM and group of players.

Maybe give that a go should you encounter an opportunity.

For me, we had lots of different games. Various systems to game on too. The text adventure stood out, but not for everyone.

No worries. I also think when it stands out, is compelling, it is super compelling! You maybe need the right triggers, or maybe just are not the type.

Triggers for me were actually teachers endorsements. They wanted us to play those text games. I know that had an influence on me.
It seems less implausible when you consider that essentially none of it is actually being spent on defense, as such.
> JSON was a reaction to the verbosity of XML,

JSON was a reaction to the simplicity of having a data format that JS, ubiquitous on the web, could load via eval (which, once JSON was established, was largely abandoned because it is ludicrously unsafe, but the momentum was already there.)
You can't avoid it forever, but it's more critical in the early stages where small signals have a big impact. If you've invested enough time in a candidate to do an interview, you're more (subconsciously) motivated to plow through (subconscious) biases.
The unusual thing is that it used to be India that was the source for generic drug company's APIs, with the basic bulk materials coming from China.

Either China ramped up its domestic game and/or India itself outsourced to China.
If you notice a something weird on your skin, you should definitely see a doctor. Otherwise, there's absolutely no benefit to routine dermatology check-ups; this sort of futile over-investigation and over-treatment is one of the major reasons why healthcare in the US is so cripplingly expensive.
(Flagged; Mercola is a pseudoscience website.)
This thread has been a great discussion. We are a startup and did hiring ourselves. We gave 1) algorithms, system designs type on questions 2) a mini project like build a profile in React Native. With 10 sample size, we found people who finished the project quickly and reasonably performed well at work while candidates who passed algorithms didn’t grow as fast.

The main thing is the problem solving oriented skills in a project that really makes a difference.

Thus, we pivoted to do a mini project screening automation for companies to do hirings. This site has backend to frontend tasks that come with a CLI to code the project locally. The website is called https://real.dev. We want to solve this interview problems for companies.
FWIW, I'm with you on pie charts. :)
It's spiteful and childish because it's not a monopoly, and the only reason anyone wants to break up Google is to lash out.

Build an iPhone app if you're so upset.
Degree Forum Wiki
SQLite in the browser...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database

It was killed though. Derp.
> The powerful dermatology lobby has consistently misled the public about the so-called dangers of sun exposure

Amusingly, most of the people I know who are into things like high fat, red meat heavy, paleo/keto diets are also into things like intentionally getting way too much sun - and like with the diets, there's always some lobbying industry keeping the "real" medical information from us.

I suspect most of them will have heart disease and skin cancer when we're in our 60s.
YAML (/ˈjæməl/, rhymes with camel[2]) was first proposed by Clark Evans in 2001,[10] who designed it together with Ingy döt Net[11] and Oren Ben-Kiki.[11] Originally YAML was said to mean Yet Another Markup Language,[12] referencing its purpose as a markup language with the yet another construct, but it was then repurposed as YAML Ain't Markup Language, a recursive acronym, to distinguish its purpose as data-oriented, rather than document markup.
If JSON did support this (and multiline strings), I think it’s unlikely anyone would reach for anything else.
Java Volatile vs. Synchronized
Can't recommend TOML enough. I use it for everything. Super simple and easy to edit.

It fulfills all of the requirements.
There are several available C++ TOML parsers, including one from Boost.
I would like to understand what you mean but I can't, could you rephrase / exemplify?

"Basically that quantum interactions are more fundamental to the universe than more terse ones, stochastic randomness or presence/absence."
What does more fundamental means? Presence, absence and randomness are included in the set of quantum interactions they are not of a different nature.

" If a computing device (in a universe) is built to compute using more fundamental substance (to that universe) it should stand to reason it is more efficient."
What does fundamental substance mean?
I don't understand this paragraph.

"If you model a photon, does your model ever move as fast as the photon?"
My model does not move.
If you meant that my mental visual simulation of a photon moving is slower than a photon moving, yes obviously, it's slowness and lack of accuracy is just a limitation of my brain.
How is that related to quantum speedup?

Help me understanding you, I would really like to believe in quantum speedup but the explanation needs to be sound.
They can have a catch-all at the end to cover those situations.

They make the rules, so the rules can include, "you can be removed at the discretion of google" at the end.
Not to mention; while pretty wordy, XSLT was incredibly powerful.
Yeah, if you have a family, you are probably not sufficiently dedicated to your job anyway. And if you only have a girlfriend, if she truly loves you, she will certainly understand that you don't want to waste your precious free time with her. It's all about priorities.
> ... nobody needs to know:
> Anything less recent than 3-4 years

Really? I did the most interesting and challenging projects earliest in my career (late 80's to early 2000's) -- just due to the nature of the industry, I'd think that more recent project descriptions have undergone a certain homogenization that would make them less and less an indicator of talent and varied experience.

I can chat excitedly about early projects, but now people must all be saying "cloud blah JS blah containers blah blah bit-pipes and storage blah - oh yeah, and modands!"
nice post

making a page that offers tools to find random content on specific sites seems like a fun idea, maybe as a starting point for an even larger project
True, I think this is likely the real reason.
XML is great for documents too:

<t>Some <b>text</b> is here </t>

And I found some things weird, like entities and (external?) DTD references.

But it's great for building your own formats. For data interchange it has it's problems, like no types. Everything is kind of a string. With encoding problems and XML in XML everything ends up in CDATA...

I think that's why XML makes for heavy parsers. I remember it was better in Java, because of the strong libraries.
20 chars for handle
Aaaand it's still "one of the best technical books ever written."

Anyone marginally interested in the periodic table of the elements or rockets needs to read this.

"if you, gentle reader, have never seen a nervous rocket mechanic, complete with monkey suit, being buzzed by nine thousand demented bats and trying to beat them off with a shovel, there is something missing from your experience. "
Hebrew had over a million speakers even when it wasn't anyone's native language. It was known to Jewish men who studied in a cheder as boys (those who did not continue to higher studies/seminary in a yeshiva), the way I think Arabic is known to Muslims who are not native speakers. Hebrew was used for literature and poetry and for communication between Jewish communities that didn't share a native language. It wasn't reconstructed from literary sources, it was only modernized for everyday use.
Given that it's incredibly easy to corrupt the batch by contamination, the washing is nearer an abrasive stage followed by very hot washing. Not only do they need to remove food remnants, but ink, labels, glue and any remains of the one time seals as found on milk cartons.

Local facilities probably wouldn't pay as margins are so thin - it depends on sending to parts of the world that are cheap. The parts of the world that have few environmental laws or enforcement and where cutting corners is too easy.

Totally agree on the real solution. Recycling came about in part thanks to companies working hard to promote it as a means of externalising another cost in place of reuse.
I'm not sure there's a lot of multiplier on top of software engineering which isn't a more specialized version of it like network or ML.

The only one I can think of is an entrepreneurial business degree and then you starting your own software business.
Just a reminder though, economic predictions are known to sometimes be wrong.

And calm your tits everyone, this is such a contentious matter. Both sides don't know what the future will bring, it's probably neither a disaster nor a panacea. At least it hasn't been so far, despite being known as a definite inevitability for 3 years.
They need to avoid product being a fist up their arse turning their head in different directions like a puppet, if that is counter to getting meaningful work done. In some organisations that probably means having an insulator between product and dev.
Config files are typically written updated by non-developers and often go through a less rigorous release process, so having a less-complex and dangerous, even if less-capable, language can be desirable.
Show HN: Add web analytics to a Google Doc in 20 seconds
Yes, there's strong anti-Russian feeling in several countries, but Russian is still, by far, the Slavic language with the most second-language speakers.

According to Ethnologue, there are more than 100 million Russian speakers outside of Russia. It is the primary language in Belarus and half of the Ukraine (and is known by most people in the country). Almost 7 million people in Poland know how to speak it.[1]

English is probably becoming more of the lingua franca of Eastern Europe, but still, if any Slavic language were to serve as the lingua franca, it would be Russian. It's the Slavic language with the largest international presence, and in contrast to constructed languages, it actually has a large speaker base and significant cultural heritage.

1. http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/rus/
> the true horror starts when people start using text template engines to generate YAML

I just had a shiver recalling a Kubernetes wrapper wrapper wapper wrapper at a former job. I think there were at least two layers of mystical YAML generation hell. I couldn't stop it, and it tanked much joy in my work. It was a factor in me moving on.
The Israeli case is illustrative for two reasons:

* Most of the people involved had some familiarity with written and liturgical Hebrew already.

* The revival was kicked off with a seed population of self-selected, ideologically-motivated Zionists in-country.

* When that seed of fluent speakers spread it to larger waves of immigration, there was no alternative lingua franca.

Italy was also a case where there was no alternative lingua franca, and it was in fact a dialect which was both mutually-intelligible with extant dialects, and was in fact made official in many Italian states well before unification.

More generally, these both are exactly in line with GP's point: "people are motivated to learn a language when it has prestige". Both languages were absolutely high prestige at the time.
Something I never understand when defence spending is compared: how do they account for differences in PPP and different levels of grease/corruption?

E.g if the US spends twice as much as X on fighter planes, but they are built in an uneconomic place because of politics and wages there are double than the average of X. I would say it might mean it actually spends only half, no?
Not to belittle the article, because it's definitely interesting. But as an ex-BBC 6502 programmer, my nitpick here would be that the title should really be named "Dirty tricks C64 6502 programmers use".

On the beeb we had our own set of tricks specific to the memory layout and ROM of our beloved beige and black machines.
Hives and What They Mean
At first I found it really annoying but then the more I thought about it the more I came to value the "," semantics as proper validation for a "forgot to put the last element in the list" error which would otherwise be silently hidden via the parser.
It’s the problem under discussion in the post you are replying to.
An amazing read which makes Kerbal Space Program look like a documentary based on real life events. See also: Things I Won’t Work With [0] series by Derek Lowe, another long time HN favorite on dangerous chemistry.

[0] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thin...
Plastics that sit undisturbed in the earth are a form of carbon sequestration. That is not a bad thing, as long as they are concentrated in a known place.

Landfills are lot more complex than just dumping trash in a pit. https://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/swfacilities/landfills/needfor... may be of interest. The tl;dr is that properly-managed ones genuinely are a safe form of waste disposal.
Rich's idea is not to forever support old implementation's, but to never mutate an existing one in a breaking way. In the Clojure community, that's actually been working pretty well, and you seldom have to deal with the kind of rewrites other languages forces upon you.
I don't know why this is such an unpopular comment. 5000 users today is the same number of people as 5000 users in 1970, even if there are way more potential users now. We can be pretty pleased that there are a bunch of people who are getting the productivity, fun, and education Lisp can provide, even if we might wish it had a higher percentage of users.
I think they meant "Scala", the programming language.
My favorite quote from Ignition is this description of Chlorine Trifluoride (CTF):

It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
Also mentioned in the episode—a US landfill is very unlikely to illegally dump your plastic trash into the ocean. If you ship your plastic to China or Malaysia, the possibility of that happening becomes substantial.
I'm not hiring purely on technical skill. Everyone I hire has to work with everyone else I've hired. There's more to that relationship than technical ability.
> and it was in fact a dialect

Based on Tuscan dialect, but my understanding (correct me if I am wrong) is it was not 100% the same as that dialect and drew from historical written forms.

The fact that mutual intelligibility exists with other dialects certainly helps. But the same is attempted here to bridge Slavic languages.

But yes. My two examples are high prestige, emerging at the right time alongside a new national identity. It has better chances than some Slavic language bufs on the internet. Just trying to say that the line between "constructed" language and a real native tongue is sometimes blurry. Failure of these attempts is not inevitable, given the right circumstances.
Build a Shopify App with Node.js and React
It's also the sort of problem that just doesn't exist at all if you use a real data serialization format from the get-go.

I'm so frustrated with our collective attitude of building abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions, without ever stepping back and realizing that we're using the wrong tool to begin with.
My friend was wondering why we don’t use ATP as rocket fuel? You can’t get any better than the energy currency of the cell.
It didn't do well, they just marketed the failure as a success, and they were at scamming a different municipality for a follow up 'experiment'.

Why can't they just work on something that makes sense?
Show HN: Kangaroo is the most efficient bookmark tool for business
Always throws me off when I see his name because I first think of the actor rather than the author!

The part about being prophetic about the Cuban Missile Crisis was interesting, and I think I'll add The Quiet American to my reading list:

[Greene's] previous full-length novel, The Quiet American (1955), anticipated tragic US military entanglement in Vietnam a decade later. Meanwhile, his Havana-based story would prove remarkably prophetic about another key Cold War episode. Using an Atomic Pile vacuum cleaner as a model, the charlatan Secret Service agent fools his bungling bosses in London with sketches of ‘big military installations under construction’ in the mountains of eastern Cuba, including a ‘large concrete platform’ and ‘strange machinery in transport’.
It is not about making it doable, the questions are: is it needed? is it worth it? what will be the quality of life in a world with 20 billion? Every big city has a housing crisis already, how is this solved for 20 billions? What about energy and waste?