skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Julia is intended to be (and already is) a general purpose programming language. What it does not try to be is a language that tries to be good for every purpose. Python for example is a general purpose programming language but you wouldn't use it to write kernel modules, and likewise you wouldn't use C to write your simple website (even though you obviously can). A language that tries to be everything to everyone will either be too bloated and complex, or lack the included batteries for pretty much anything.

Even if we don't use technicalities, Julia is a very powerful language that allows people to extend it for purposes it was not built for. If it didn't support JSON, you could write a JSON type as integrated and fast as what the stdlib offers, it's metaprogramming/multiple dispatch paradigm allows for easily creating frameworks for many purposes and while numerical processing gets special attention the language will still outperform in terms of speed most dynamic languages in any domain.

And I do think short scripts are within Julia's main targets and are merely victims of the fact that the language is still too young and the battles the devs chose to fight within that limited time (and either AoT options or an interpreter that runs code while it's compiling could solve it really well for example, but both would require a lot of time and work which could be used for other features).
> which seems probable, as we are progressing fast in the number of qubits we can keep together
Probable? Ridiculous:

×there are still no hardware implementation of a single logic gate despite what? 40 years of research?
×stability of qubits are pathetic.
×no software stack (almost)
×Number of qubits are ridiculous and 40 years of research can't even make a consensus on how much qubits are needed for beating a CPU on at least one task.
Even if quantum could(I strongly doubt that and quantum speedup has never been shown empirically) reduce complexity on some algorithms, the constant factor has no way to be handled with 50qbits, more like 1000000 qbits at minimum.
×no sign of needed breakthrough in error correcting codes.

I consider quantum speedup to be theoretically flawed, based on an interpretation of quantum mechanics needing "parallel worlds" which necessitate a misunderstanding of causality to make sense.

I consider quantum speedup to be flawed in practice too as order of magnitude of order of magnitude progress is needed and the trend is: no progress or very slow progress.

Thus quantum computing is like a vaporware, which take funds that would be far better allocated at e.g medicine, AGI, or ASICS.
Swiss scientists develop vaccine for cat allergies
This totally awesome! Installing dosbox to play them!
> For some reason, the authors of both seem to hate each other.

Not surprising if they visit each others web pages too often.
Similar to what Unison is doing. Functions are identified by a hash and the names are ephemeral.
People being larcenous, it needs both a carrot AND a stick to make it work. Simple cheap methods will allow shirkers to avoid the intent of full compliance driven by a high return fee with the bar code hoopla to defeat people who return fake old packages with only the bar code to identify it. With a 120 cent bottle worth 50 cent refund and inductry making fake bottle would soon emerge.
NO? Yes. When they had a wolf bounty with a fee paid for each wolf killed, they said just bring us the ears = less weight. Immediately a fake wolf ear industry appeaed as civil serpents did not look closely at rotting stinking wolf ears returned. After a few months, the fraud was discovered.
So the 100% link of customer ID, coupled with serial nunbered bottle ID as well allow an electronic system to verify the buyer, the product and the return. Of course the cutomer migth want to avoid this by having a friend buy it and toss the bottle, but then a street person would m find and return and would get the rebate, but that would also show who tossed it away and a $50 fine would go to the buyer. If they did not care about that $50, being rich dogs, then that fine would help the compliance business.

We must face the physical reality of our trash risks overwhelming our society - look at Italy, where local trash mafia build monster trash piles in the face of weak and crooked politicians.
https://www.google.com/search?q=italian+garbage+crisis&oq=it...
Maybe they can, but why would they? Algorithms interviews are the only thing with an actual bearing on their future earnings.
Natural selection. The ecosystem is evolving; if you can't stop yourself from eating plastic you'll be wiped.
I don’t think anybody is disputing that Google’s influence over Chromium gives them leverage over the browser space. This is evident in things like their changes to how TLS certificate metadata is displayed, support for TLS 1.3, and changes to how content is rendered.

But this comment thread includes the claim that their influence over Chromium is being used to push AMP, and I don’t see how they are using their position with Chromium to push AMP, a technology that uses a specific subset of existing web technology and operates cross-browser already.
Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team
One thing to keep in mind is at the right point in history, Zork and Star Trek might have been among the only games available on the computer one had access to. Both were available on the DEC mainframe we had free access to at my local community college in the early 80's while in school. I can't remember if we had Space War on those, but the limited selection and novelty made everything about the games fascinating. Even later on C64/Atari 1040 when I tried some of the later Infocom games the convoluted logic needed for some of the puzzles turned me off for more accessible games, though Kings Quest and related series seems to be the graphical version of the puzzle logic of some of the Infocom games.
Has anyone studied the wildlife effects (or lack thereof) of natural olivine beaches? They seem healthy in travel magazine photos, but of course that’s no substitute for science.

https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/beach-vacations/...
> The community will just do ...

This is the funny thing about decentralized services. They require centralized action. Not saying it is good or bad, but it is... different.
Going top down seems to be the secret. I do mainly C# now but even there a lot of people get confused by looking at the last error on the screen. I always only look at the first error and deal with that before looking at anything else.
SQLite really is the best of both worlds when it comes to files and databases: it is a file, one that can usually live entirely in memory; and it’s got all the awesome utility of SQL (even window functions too) that can be used very simply to do powerful things.
Exactly, why is this person putting so much stock into what is said by a floor salesperson and a spokesperson?
A chat app that can have no more than 5 contacts.

Still more than I need.
On the Hunt for National Treasures with America’s Archive Detective
The security problem is common to many serialisation formats and similarly terrible bugs have happened in a large number of formats.

For instance, the recent iMessage bugs that project zero announced were because NSCodable serialization tells the deserializer what class should instantiated. Followed by remote code execution (woo!)

Similar problems have occurred with java serialization over the years, the python serialisation thing (that silly name I can’t recall).

I was recently learning swift and was getting frustrated by the verbosity/work for deserialisaing abstract classes when I realized the clunkiness was due to a design that made the deserialise attacker specified objects basically impossible. Obviously you could engineer a solution that would be exploitable but there’s only so much a platform can do to stop developer mistakes.
A cs professor at Stanford that hired at google said they _absolutely_ care if your code compiles and works correctly. This is the “coding fluency”[1] metric. The author of cracking the coding interview also touches on this.

1. https://www.programmercoach.com/2017/04/interview-insider-co...
Err, yes? Is quoting your keys, delimitation members with a comma instead of whitespace, and putting brackets/braces around collections really that confusing that people struggle to edit it by hand or read it in a diff?

I think the syntax is actually what makes it more human readable, it's still 95% text/numbers just annotated with information that makes it clear what things actually are instead of hiding them behind confusing computer parsing rules nobody is going to think about while reading human-friendly text.
>The ECB does not have to balance interests. It‘s independent and it‘s job is monetary stability, not economic interests.

That's the version one would teach to high schoolers, not the real political/historical truth by any margin. In fact it's so naive I don't even know where to start addressing it.

You can follow the power plays in the ECB in all kinds of outlets, if leftist ones are not your thing, even Le Monde, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Corriere della sera, The Economist and co will do.

>It‘s also not widely accepted that it‘s in Germanys interest. In fact it is against it. Germans hold most of their wealth in cash. They received interest for it. That‘s hundereds of billions now gone.

When Germany has control over EU/ECB policies, it could not give less ducks about the German people. It's about German banks and elites doing good.
Thank you for the correction; it’s too late to edit but I would if I could :(
PS. It's how the pope sends his message in all languages :)
It can be denied with a policy profile.
Totally, but I found it's always fun to explore interlinguality :)
My mistake. Hopefully my submission can be flagged for removal. I recall HN recognizing dupes and using a new submission of an already posted URL effectively as an upvote (rather than allow the dupe through). I guess they don't do that any longer.
Code reviews are good at catching oversights and at giving design & implementation pointers to people acting in good faith. Senior talent doesn't have the time or energy to push back on all of a systematically incompetent person's code until it's good. See the bullshit asymmetry principle. And once you hire two of these people, they'll just review each other.
My favorite library for this is docopt[0], which parses the docstring at the top of your script. It’s a lot easier for people reading your code to see the usage up front rather than scrolling to the bottom and finding your main() and reading the argparse calls:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
“””
Usage: ./myscript.py <arg> [<optionalarg>]
“””
from docopt import docopt

if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
args = docopt(__doc__)
print(args[‘<arg>’], args[‘<optionalarg>’] or ‘foo’)

[0]: https://github.com/docopt/docopt
I learned some of the intricacies of yaml the other day when refactoring a docker-compose project. At first glance, it's brilliant... Until I started running into limitations, edge cases, and issues.

I like the _idea_ of yaml, but:
- it's overly complicated in the wrong ways
- common/simple use cases aren't supported and require post processing (i.e. Merging block maps/arrays, string interpolation, etc)
I'm interested, can you explain more about the merging idea?

To clarify the requirement, history could be a JSON array of objects:

[
{"cmd": "git checkout", "when": 1234 },
{"cmd": "vagrant up", "when": 4567 }
]

To append an entry to this file and keep it valid, one must locate the closing square bracket and overwrite it. That work is what I hope to avoid.
I wish python had something similar to OCaml's Cmdliner[0]

[0] https://erratique.ch/software/cmdliner/doc/Cmdliner
EBITDA Is BS Earnings [2014]
Iirc that already exists....hangouts.
German here who tries to learn Czech for some time now. Even as a novice I had no problems to identify many words that I know in czech. Awesome.
To be fair, Twitter's constraint is 140 code points, and SMS was 160 7 bit ASCII characters.
The solution will be a confluence of technologies.

* Wind and solar, over-provisioned, will supply the generation.

* Batteries will provide peak-shifting and frequency maintenance.

* Grid upgrades / HVDC will even out regional variation in generation due to weather while flattening the duck curve.

* Variable pricing will lead to more even demand curves, both from residential BEV usage and industrial strategies for cost optimization.

The pessimist's case for a non-renewable economy are just hopeless at this point. All of this stuff exists now, is competitive now, and will only be getting better. It will take time to build out, but the economics are impossible to ignore.
How Fentanyl Ingredients From China End Up in the U.S.
Only if you are putting stuff into the atmosphere. If you are for instance removing CO2 to sequester it, no one should bat an eye. Same if you put a bunch of green sand somewhere. Really no price should be too high to pay to prevent global warming. It will be a problem which will cost literally trillions of dollars if we don't fix it.
do you deliver a YAML editor with your software?
Because people will use notepad or nano to edit that stuff.
What effect would this have on the ecosystems of the beach?

I suppose in some sense you could consider it a trolley problem - do we kill one to save millions - but it seems very intensive?
I've never stayed in a shelter but I know people that have. A lot of homeless will sleep in a makeshift shelter in the winter rather than a shelter because shelters are ass in every way.
If builders of a huge castle place some stones incorrectly, does it collapse completely?

No. Such errors may be discovered soon and taken down, or stand for decades, sometimes with lots of stuff built on top of it, and sometime parts will collapse, but the overall structure of the castle is sound, and, sooner or later, errors will be corrected.

And of course, sometimes, somebody decides to start building an entire new wing to the castle using new rules, as, for example, happened when non-Euclidean geometry was discovered/invented.
They do still do that, but I think it has a time limit of a few hours. Also, I'm guessing the URL probably needs to be identical to trigger it.
This looks pretty reasonable https://www.blog.google/technology/area-120/byteboard-interv...
> If you want, you can also provide a friendly cli tool to interact with the debug api. This tool could output help messages, show current config values - differentiate between default vs overwritten etc.

And we load the config by curling a JSON payload :) ?
While I agree that QC is far from cracking any encryption today or in the near future; this

> theoretically flawed, based on an interpretation of quantum mechanics needing "parallel worlds"

is patently false. There is nothing in QC that would stop working under the good ole' Copenhagen interpretation.

In fact, if there was even a theoretical possibility that a QC experiment would work only in some QM interpretations, they would no longer be interpretations, but falsifiable hypotheses.
Simplify Redux Reducers with Lenses
How about ‘bored’ which is a chat app that only works when detected in a moving vehicle so your passengers have some like minded entertainment.
Nitpick, but file permissions in Linux take normally 12 bits. You probably did not count SUID, SGID and sticky bit.
Install them uBlock Origin and 99% of the problems are gone.
I used Python as an example, but handling namespaces in most languages besides Java (and even arguably in Java depending on your point of view) is rather painful.
I never understood how YAML is more human-readable than JSON. I find JSON much easier to read.
What annoys me the most about YAML is that it's easy to misinterpret the indentation.
You need a special IDE to know whether a property belongs to a specific object or to its parent.
Tesla drops lawsuit against critic after judge asks for evidence
Congrats. Unfortunately my favourite PR [1] Model error as object didn't make it into Rails 6, but it will be in Rails 6.1

Active Storage still needs work [2], ( I really wish paperclip had stayed a little longer ), but the update should really be good enough for general purpose usage.

And hopefully someday Action Cable would really work without switching over to Any Cable, the latency are way too high.

And I heard Stimulus 2.0 [3] is coming too.

And with Github and Shopify taking more hands on approach in development, Rail's future is brighter than ever.

[1] https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/32313

[2] https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/31419

[3] https://github.com/stimulusjs/stimulus/pull/202
Playing with My Son
> The first moon landing was at once a historical inevitability and an improbable fluke. Inevitable because we had already done it so many times in our storytelling and our dreams.

Now, who's dreams? It boggles my mind. When the opportunity comes to talk about the moon, this magical license to speak for the entire human race appears in the pockets all of the young professionals everywhere. Someone's dream can't be to lift up the poor and sick and hated, to make sure no one is left behind. Surely only the opposite could be true: we must leave those people behind, and go to the moon. Otherwise "you are a weird radical who doesn’t know the first thing about Economics. You are a sentimental bleeding-heart who will never understand how things work. Pick yourself up, bucko, and if you say you can’t you’re just making excuses, you’re just the kind of sorry unproductive parasite that the Job Creators and Entrepreneurs have to generously subsidize through their brilliance and benevolence."
Ask HN: Did anyone download their Facebook data before 2016?
I'm looking into the history of the Facebook data dump tool - I'd be interested in knowing if anyone here successfully got their data from Facebook before the data download tool was active using a Subject Access Request, and how they did it.
I learned to type by playing Zork on an Apple IIGS. When you couldn’t look up the answers to puzzles on internet it really made for a different gaming experience.
Ask HN: Is there a HN for Ruby news?
I enjoy a number of the posts submitted here, but wish I saw more Ruby news on the front page. Rust, Python and Julia seem to have more of a sway with this community.

Does anyone have a suggestion for active sites with a more Ruby-centric community?
I don't think they have it mastered as well as Apple does, you're locked out of OS updates, iOS updates, all entertainment, iMessage, etc.

You essentially turn everything into a paperweight.
.ini, followed by TOML, followed by an identical implementation of some other app's config format.

The biggest problem with config formats is they mislead users into thinking they understand the format. The user tries to edit it by hand, and chaos ensues. So only formats that are stupidly simple, or whose warts are already familiar and well documented, are good choices.

Apache had a great configuration format. Nothing else used it (that I knew of) but you could in theory implement "Apache configs" and then people'd just have to look up how to write those, which there's lots of examples of.

JSON and YAML and XML are data formats; they should only be written by machines, and read by humans. Same with protocols like HTTP, Telnet, FTP... You're not supposed to write it yourself, but it's readable to make troubleshooting easier.

Data formats are nice for expressing nested data structures, but then they don't (usually) support logical expressions; at that point you need a template/macro/programming language, and at that point you're writing code, which will need to be tested, and at that point you should just write modules and use a config format to give them arguments. Every complex tool goes through the same evolution.

If you care about your users, write a tool to generate configs based on a wizard. Good CLI tools do this, and it really makes life better. (It's also a great way to document all your config features in code, and test them)
You need types. It's the secret sauce behind multiple dispatch.
Military Siege Theory and the Cloud
Well, it's a twist on the trolley problem because there is a background state of coral reefs and beaches dying already. So we're killing the beaches and saving none, presently.

I think this is a case where the trolley problem is easily morally solved; it's morally urgent to slow pace of coral reef death and other marine life death, and since it is already our actions causing this I think it is quite morally right to take any action that reduces the
suffering of life overall.
That can't be right, otherwise a CEO could "sell" their revenue figures to a golf buddy who then trades on them. Possibly allowing a reasonably broad set of people to buy the data is enough, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.
If you want to know more, there are more details and background here, https://www.filfre.net/2019/07/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst...
I remember a job interview where the take home project was to parse a log file and search/sort by various top attributes as fast as possible.

I thought about writing something from scratch, but I knew that whatever I could optimize in an hour or two would be nothing compared to more robust tools that already existed. So I used sqlite to ingest the log once, and query it in various ways to produce the requested reports. The script was just a dozen lines long or so, with one dependency (sqlite pkg).

The interviewer didn’t like this answer. didn’t say why. But I’m glad to see that I wasn’t way off base about how performant sqlite can be.

My answer was of course not a prod solution, just an answer to a question with a narrow scope.
I think "architect" is code for manager who is slightly technical enough to make high level decisions about a system.

You get layers that are 1 to 1 mappings from engineers? Gee only software architects have the innate ability to notice an issue like that. An isomorphic layer more than likely exists as a translation layer to make composition with another layer easier even though entities are bijective.

So you think an engineer is unable to comprehend anything about a layer that is basically an identity morphism in disguise? Wow. Please tell me about some other architect things that an engineer is unable to comprehend. I would like to learn more from great architects who have super powers like "big picture thinking"
I wish tools defaulted to only showing the first error.
Sorry, but the US is a constitutional democratic republic with generally functioning rule of law, while the other is an a mercantilist-authoritarian-dictatorship with absolutely ZERO legal accountability to its citizens.

By conflating patterns of US government’s very real human rights abuses (domestic and abroad) with with the CCP’s abuses, you demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of how each political system works and its relationship with its citizens.

Also you’re using a red herring logical fallacy when you say “let’s focus on fixing shit here”. How about trying to do dispute the original premise instead of distracting?
Iframes are just terrible. Here’s how they could be better
The plastic layer will sequester the carbon previously sequestered as oil and coal.
Maybe they padded it for unicode?
I work at Zalando where we run hundreds of PostgreSQL database clusters on Kubernetes (on AWS) using our Postgres Operator (https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator). This gives us some added flexibility, quick startup (e.g. for e2e), and the latest PG features. That being said, I would be careful to recommend any specific stateful workload approach without good understanding of the whole setup (true for whatever cloud/k8s/onprem environment).
That's probably the biggest thing YAML has going for it and probably the only feature I take advantage of when something takes YAML instead of JSON.
Mathematics is convex to errors