skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a more real-world example.

I worked on an enterprisey line of business app that assigned sales leads to salespeople.

The algorithm to do this was a multi-step process that was (1) rather complex (2) constantly being tweaked (3) very successful (4) contained a number of weighting factors that were utterly arbitrary even to veterans of this app.

It was full of many `if country_code==KERPLAKISTAN && day_of_week==MONDAY` -style weighting factors. Each represented some hard-won experience And when I say "hard-won" I mean "expensive" -- generating leads is expensive business.

We had a strong culture of informative commit messages, but this file had hundreds if not thousands of commits over the years.

It was the kind of code that resisted serious refactoring or a more streamlined design because it was a recipient of frequent change requests.

A few human-readable comments here and there went a loooong way toward taming the insanity and allowing that module to be worked on by developers besides the original author.

Knowing the why for many of these rules made it much easier to work with, and also allowed developers to be educated about the business itself.
I don’t think anyone on earth thinks they are good for you
I have never met or heard of a teacher who wants students to stop asking questions in general. They do need to get through a plan and some questions are meant to show off or be distracting, but even tired, jaded teachers like questions.
> I've developed programs with tens of thousands of lines of expanded JSON in their config files.

To what end? I don't get what you could possibly be putting in these files that could consume so much space without refactoring.
He should have also sued Pax Labs, the company that spun Juul out (likely for this very reason) when it was still getting off the ground as R&D.

This structure was definitely chosen to protect Pax Labs.
Chandrayaan-2 Enters Lunar Orbit
My Reveal Part I [ Satoshi Nakamoto ]
> Configs / config generation is hard, and generally awful. If you don't see it that way, congratulations; you're either a genius in your field, you've got not enough experience, and/or you're wrong.

The point I'm trying to make is that you're describing broken frameworks, data flows, and work flows, and blaming it on config generation. If you have a counter example, I'd love to see it. Discussing these things in the abstract is pretty pointless and based in emotional language/semantic quibbling rather than meaningful things people can reason about and discuss, like code comparison or time tradeoffs.

Hell, because no specific GOOD examples of configuration-as-code have been brought up, literally everyone in this thread could be considering a different pet example of theirs. It's OBVIOUSLY a waste of everyone's time without examples. Why bother comment at all—to go out of your way to punch down without contributing to the discourse?
tinfoil:

1) false flag lawsuit directly planted by big tobacco

2) who will claim "hey it wasn't a tobacco product so our previous lawsuits didn't apply",

3) thus creating public outrage (think of the children) about this classification

4) leading to broad stroke regulation of vaping e.g. expensive certifications, etc, which will

5) quash the small time vape industry which in turn

6) benefits the tobacco companies.. who will

7) pay a pittance in fines to

8) regain marketshare in the vaping market and

9) profit!
> Overthrowing a democratic government is as easy as checking a box on a form.

Yes and no. You're changing the representatives of the government, but the general circumstances are largely continuing. You don't see a large turn when a new government is elected in a democracy, which you would if it was "overthrown", imho. Similarly, you won't see a large turn in an authoritarian society if the president changes, because in both cases, "the system" remains the same, and changing the face of the system doesn't fundamentally change anything.
Any interesting technical implementation details?
"People are influenced by advertising."

OK, let's ban Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Because people are influenced by advertising, and advertising is all about goading people into buying stuff they otherwise wouldn't.
I've been playing it semi-regularly since 2012. I can't recommend it enough.
I think when you are getting a large amount of commentary from a totalitarian state, your default response should be suspicion not to just allow it. Each of the totalitarian states in our world today have proven they have massive information operations ongoing to deceive people in democracies. They have found this as a weakness in free states. You should be responsible and delete all such accounts by default.
"As a minor who caved into marketing pressure and became addicted to nicotine, I think we should make tobacco products more accessible to people like me"

This is not at all a cogent argument. Don't blame the nanny state for problems you brought upon yourself.
I'm seeing this sort of thing often these days. People absolutely insist on taking a moral stand on the flimsiest of situations. Not everything is a value judgement for Christ's sake, sometimes words just mean what they mean!
This kind of comment is the exact reason why I keep coming back to HN. It's great to read stories of real people who have worked in all kinds of amazing and inspiring projects, thanks for sharing your experience with us, it's always nice to read about technical details of legendary software.
Separate discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20739540
It's fair to say even HN is not blocked by GFW, majority chinese are not comfortable reading/writing english to participate discussion here, or on FB, twitter.
Also economy wise if using VPN or otherwise to get onto the internet having a cost/inconvenience, it's not wise to spend it on political discussion, youtube or netflix might be just better options.
> but why haven't the government collapsed after so many years if there were no people supporting them?

Totalitarianism?
Each generation has its own beliefs. It’s possible manipulate or instill different set of beliefs, especially when it’s about a younger generation. So, claiming that everyone knows something is generally a false statement.
Losing a job unexpectedly isn’t a downside?

> Being paid a wage and also expecting royalties is wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Expecting royalties or bonuses is generally a bad idea in the “don’t count your chickens before they hatch” sort of way. I saw people spend money they didn’t have, and then get smaller bonuses than they counted on. Oops.

Being offered a bonus by your employer after six months of 80 hours/week crunch because the game sold well is not the same thing as either expecting royalties, nor having+eating cake.

> Generally when an artist (or creator of any sort) is paid royalties, it’s in lieu of wages, so you’re also shouldering risk if the project fails.

Why do you think this? Lots of people are paid both wages and royalties and/or bonuses. I have no idea how often it’s royalties-only, I’m curious why you claim it’s “generally”. I have only seen the mix kind in my experience, never royalties-only payment in lieu of wages. FWIW, my experience includes six different companies and maybe roughly about a thousand people being paid sales based bonuses on top of wages.
They talk about what they are interested in on a daily basis. You don't even need to ask them. They will tell you.

There are millions of development tools in this world. No-one has time to learn all the tools. Even if they want to. I don't understand why LISP have to be the only exception when coming to tools a Developer can ignore. I doubt Linus Torvalds has time to learn every obscure technology out there. He focuses on delivering kick-ass solutions using C. Same as other great Programmers. It is the book writers and consultants who are busy learning each and every tool.
Read an article recently here on Hacker News that with capitalism being based off the notion of growth, and many places experiencing a stall in population growth there essentially won’t be new consumers for capitalism to work since there won’t be new growth and might actually be diminishing growth.

Also wonder if that is why all those companies signed that letter today saying that shareholder value isn’t paramount. Maybe it is acknowledged that growth can’t happen forever because it can’t.
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom, we need to keep that in mind at all times" - Bill Hicks
That is completely untrue. Kubernetes has full support for IPv6.

https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/issues/508
Nah, I'd rather use high-power laser to slice off heads of people who are so full of themselves that they think they have a moral right to force others to live their idea of ideal society. This kind of sanctimonious idiocy is quite addictive and way more deadly than all addictive substances together - as evident from 200 or so millions murdered in 20th century by the warriors for the Progress.
Sure it does, we (should) decide policy based on what is possible, not what adheres to some God-given set of moral consistency conditions. A ban on e-cigarettes is probably politically feasible, a ban on cigarettes is not.

Anyway, I still disagree with banning e-cigarettes because it seems they're so much less harmful than regular cigarettes that even if the marketing was so effective that everyone started vaping, I'm not sure the harms would outweigh the gains from smokers quitting.
Paper filter from local algae could save millions of lives in Bangladesh
One possible factor in the French riots is immigrants, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_riots#Context. This is not a problem in HK and very tightly controlled in China.

Also the same factor could be important in other mass crimes, for example, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35231046.
Of course we would ban accounts that are part of "massive information operations to deceive people". The problem is that users routinely accuse other users of such nefariousness without evidence, and that unfortunately is also a form of abuse.
Someone simply disagreeing with me is not evidence that they are an "information operation" or "commentary from a totalitarian state". In most cases it simply indicates that opinion is divided in a large community.

When concerns about abuse come up, we have to look for evidence. Otherwise the policy becomes "ban anybody who disagrees with me", which is mob rule. Nobody would advocate that in principle, but in practice I'm afraid that's the direction that emotions tend to point in, and they're much stronger and swifter than most people seem to realize.
I have a little landing page on itch.io which can be followed if you have an account (but the content is getting embarassingly out of date): https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos

Current release plan is to get some builds out late August/early September, both free and paid(paid simply gets the updates faster). Then later on, I can think about plans to open up development. PICO-8 took about two years from conception to release and I'm getting to around the end of year one of mine, and just about everything has had multiple iterations, but the first release will be a basic "run at the command line, code in your text editor, store assets in the file system" kind of environment. Releasing means I think the basic design is mostly settled, so after that all the UI and IDE functions will become possible.
??? I never felt pollution like you described, having lived 23 years in Paris. You might be extremely sensitive to pollution. And I am especially surprised that you claim LA is less polluted, considering that public transportation is much less developed there.
Yes, with zebra finches, bengalese finches, and starlings, among others.
to do what? do any of the climate models suggest that future human intervention can have an effect? my understanding is that they don't.
It takes around 15-20 transistors to make a simple neuron simulation:

https://www.quora.com/How-many-transistors-can-be-used-to-re...

But:
"Synapses are usually separately modeled in transistors (they are not part of the neuron circuits described above) and dramatically add to the transistor count."

"[A neuron] has on average 7000 synaptic connections to other neurons."

So we're not there yet, but it's definitely an improvement!
They even add on the old "I was like you, then I changed, so obviously you too may one day be so fortunate as to advance into being like me"
> It's a little known fact but the kind of FP programming we do in Scala tends to be more pure than what happens in OCaml, F#, Erlang, Clojure and others.

What do you mean by pure exactly? IO Monad? Simply no side effects?
Hello World on the GPU
Written in C++ and Qt, ....
I have lost 79lbs on that diet.
> Lots of American culture

lots of what porn producers are producing you mean?

'american culture' also stipulates that it is illegal to disseminate pornographic material to minors.. but this is not being enforced at all against the US pornography industry..

-> $$$
Here is what I like:

I am rate limited. And it's just fine. I like to do what I do, and feel very few inhibitions. Real conversation matters to me more than volume of conversation does. And that ranges from the discouraged here to the encouraged. My own skin is very, very thick. No worries on my end no matter what. (I've read it all man. ALL) But, others do vary. Happens with people. It's all good.

For the most part, the loss is the occasional follow up that would have added value, but also no worries. The limit is there, and honestly? Yeah, there are often better things to do. Win-win, if you ask me.

The style of moderation is, for the most part, unobtrusive, very frank and polite (dang asked me multiple times, early on, and very nicely I might add, to either not do, or modify how I do things, and a fair number of those requests were easily done), and effective. Love it.

I moderate elsewhere, and have picked up more than a few good tips here, many unsaid, just observed. In particular, simple tools like the rate limiting, or frank requests, are a lot more powerful than I believe people realize.

Norms matter, and these two moderators are exemplary at establishing and maintaining reasonable community norms. Unlike rules, which people often see as targets or a thing to be gamed, norms tend to be a bit more fuzzy and us users here tend to amplify them when those norms are resonant with us and what we find here of value.

In my own efforts, I have emphasized norms far more than rules, and some of that influence comes from this fine place for discussion.

Kudos you two. Well done!
Yeah that's exactly my feeling on Scala after debugging some "magic" code, it feels like a functional perl where you write whatever you want and good luck if someone else will need to read it later.
make the heat go away!
Ugh, Strobist. This is what I get for typing this on my iPhone :-\
Previous story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20409569
There is a lot of virtue-signaling going on here, but understanding the state of today's USA education systems, I'll try to parse it.

> Is your perspective that as long as you aren’t personally targeted and can make money, it doesn’t really matter what the government does?

[Bob]: No. My perspective is that of a person who spent their first 32-years in America, who one day about a decade ago during the depths of the economic downturn, decided to try to eat the dogfood of living and operating a bootstrapped business in China so that I could better understand it and the world I live in.

> You talk a lot about how nice/safe it is for you personally as you enjoy the benefits of living in China as an expat, but at the same time, you do have to realize that your current situation is one of extraordinary privilege and not necessarily representative of the reality for vast swathes of people in China today right?

[Bob]: I'm not claiming it is particularly safe for me alone. The feeling is one of an environment of general safety. As in, lack of violent crime. A Country where, on innumerable local blocks across its many cities, there are instances of thousands of people in public squares at night, enjoying things like group song and dance. You don't see that everywhere in the USA. I do realize, there may be many non-Han Chinese communities I'm not exposed to where the freedom to express themselves is not so great.

> Your status as an expat puts you in a similar level/position to be able to provide a voice for those that otherwise might never be able to freely express themselves.

[Bob]: No, unfortunately, my status as an expat doesn't give me any particular right to speak for its citizens, nor impune myself in the business of China's governance of its citizens. I'm here as a guest in China. China reminds me of that every year when I go through the month-long process to renew my resident and work permit. Anyway, guests don't go to someone else's house and tell them how to run it. But, I fully support your own free speech rights to say anything you want about China or the governance of its peoples.

That said, there are plenty of things I don't like about being in China. Being here has led me to change my views on many issues, versus my views from a decade ago. Previously, I was far left in viewpoint for the times. Such as, I held the view America should nationalize the banking system. While that still may have been the right call, overall, after a decade of bureaucracy, I'm no fan of big government.

And now, I'm a much more rabid proponent of American's protecting their free speech and privacy, at all costs. Otherwise, it's a slippery slope to end up with what they've got here in China.
That's if the foreign goods are substitutible.
Article Author here, you are totally on point: The wrapper is done by one contributor mainly https://github.com/shimat/opencvsharp/graphs/contributors

It works, but has it's problem, like memory leaks if you forget to dispose the objects and an upgrade to a newer version had a bug in it's ubuntu binaries that any simple test would have caught.

There is a higher quality commercial wrapper that is only free for gpl'ed solutions.

Which is what I see with some projects, even though the software itself is free, the c# wrapper done by a third party costs money which makes me loathe to use it, as it hinders reuse.

Take care,
Martin
> So, its a state where the people living inside have all the benefits of being Chinese, with few of the downsides.

I also don't agree with that point but probably for different reasons. Hong Kong was simply straddled with a half oligarchic system nominally democratic but in actuality structurally setup to be unconcerned with the livelihood of the middle class.

While the CCP is at least nominally held to be the steward of the common people's wellbeing, most of the functional constituencies in the legco have no 'fiduciary' responsibility towards the average Hong Kong person. Seats like Insurance and Financial Services aren't even voted on by the insurance or fintech workers but by the corresponding corporate monopolies in the unregulated market. These oligarchs also have no interest in any of Tung Chee-hwa's economic reforms that might have helped Hong Kong's workers bridge though China's declining need for Hong Kong as a trade funnel and the present social stagnation and 20% poverty rate. That's 20 times the poverty rate of mainland China.
We still want it to be promoted to beta, so it is actually available in GKE and other cloud vendors.

Alpha level cluster in GKE gets wiped every 30 days, nothing you want to run any production workload on.

Of course you have the option of self-hosting..
That’s an interesting theory. But you’re right—it isn’t the US government, so it’s not really germane.
As long as I can self-host and keep it running on the LAN throughout our 6-month playthrough as a family!
Most vapers i’ve talked to believe they’re doing something that’s bad for them... but not VERY bad for them.
Currently you're charged only for unused external IPv4 addresses.

Starting January 1st, 2020, you'll receive a bill showing how much you would pay under the new scheme that charges for all external IPs, but won't actually pay yet.

Actual billing starts April 1st, 2020.
Bounce rates and load times are important if you want people to try the product.
Tell HN: Looking for up to $10/hour dev to help me development of a side project
I have a side project which I'm looking for someone talented to help me with. I'm an individual full time worker, but this could provide with a side gig for you and also its interesting, like up to $10 / hour ping me if you are interested.
I’m chill. I’m also patriotic though, and so I respond when people make snide comments about how horrible and abusive the US is.
They are, but the least they could do at that price is repackaging high quality pencils, instead of low quality.
Is a Government in a Position to Hack into Bitcoin or Ethereum?
I suspect the confusion in this thread really boils down to a lack of agreement about what "conditional" means. I think some commenters above think it means conditionally branched instruction streams. They don't consider arithmetic or logical operators, lookup tables, and demuxers to be conditionals.

The earlier description of a cycle of functional updates to state sounds like the classic basis for latched digital circuit design. But, assuming the commenters were interested in software examples, I brought up analogous programs for cellular automata and grid simulations.

Also, since the state transition is purely functional with a finite input and output, it could theoretically be implemented with any functionally equivalent method, including flat lookup tables. No branching or conditional execution is required, even though it might be convenient.
A complication to the whole story about the risks of vaping is that nicotine alone doesn't appear to be particularly addictive. The evidence suggests that it's specifically the combination of MAOI and nicotine found in tobacco that's actually so addictive:

https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine#addictiveness
Well ya. When your company's product is a net minus for society then you have to wonder about the ethics of everyone involved. Ya, they're doing it for the bux with little care for the consequences.
?? So don't buy an iPhone? It's their ecosystem. You are owed nothing.
This article is from 2015. Is the beginning of the ending of capitalism done beginning?
That sounds unlikely, given that Google's Play Store is blocked in China and everybody uses local stores instead.
I’m totally getting the feeling you have an interesting story to share, perhaps about a startup exploding in the bad way? I’ll stick around if so! I’ve had one myself that was a roller coaster, but at least didn’t end with people owing personal money.
TabNine is awesome, I use this everyday and am always very impressed by the autocomplete suggestions, regardless of Language or context.

Seems I cannot install this Local version though...

> TabNine Local is unavailable because your CPU does not support FMA instructions.
My argument is that the price of the choice is memory corruption and the benefits seldom outweigh this cost.
> The problem comes to distinguishing genuinely held beliefs from subversive comments designed to manipulate the HN audience

How do you propose to do that? Clearly one must look for evidence. When evidence shows such abuse, we ban the account. Far more often, though (and I'm understating things when I put it that way), evidence shows the opposite: the user was expressing their genuinely held beliefs. Should others be allowed to denounce them as astroturfers, shills, or spies, based on nothing but how strongly they disagree? On HN the answer is no. That follows from the values of this site, and we have a rule in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html saying so.
Brilliant is quite commonly used to mean "very good" or "excellent" in the UK, so it is not unreasonable to assume there is some value judgement implied.
Rails6 adds support of symbol keys with HashWithIndifferentAccess#assoc