skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't be too discouraged. You may note that SkyMarshal's comment is back in the black, no doubt partly due to your and my upvotes. (Or at least it was, now it's gray again! <sigh>)

It often happens that a comment gets some initial downvotes and then bounces back. In some cases, this can even be from fat-fingering on a mobile device. I've accidentally downvoted comments more than a few times, so I always try to remember to check whether the header line changes to "unvote" or "undown".
Manufacturer can bypass any user firewall.
His book Clean Code is pretty good. Not in the sense that everything is agreeable in it (though some not so great programmers would benefit themselves and those around them from following it religiously) and a decent chunk of it is covered much more briefly with one chapter of The Practice of Programming but you can actually see the book as the artifact of a reasoning mind taking certain principles and articulating them. It lacks the usual polite qualifiers like "I think..." or "In my opinion..." or "Obviously not in all but in many cases generally speaking..." before every assertion which annoys some people. A fair number of his blog posts are like that too. Where Uncle Bob gets an unfair reputation is when people take things out of context from the larger works and (sometimes willfully) misinterpret them -- he doesn't say you should never ever have comments, for instance. Of course some of it is his own doing from occasional tweets that are by necessity of the medium less well thought out or conveyed.
I think you missed the point of That Hideous Strength, which is not an allegory by the way. In an allegory, you must be able to say some person or thing in the story is equal to some thing in the real world. For example, Animal Farm by George Orwell is an allegory. In it, the farm is the Soviet Union and the pigs are the Communist Party. That Hideous Strength does have a scientific institution, NICE, but it does not stand for any particular institution, or scientific institutions in general. NICE is a hypothetical example of what a scientific institution might become if it took ideas that were in operation in the 1940s to an extreme, as happened in Nazi Germany. (NICE has some similarities to Nazi Germany, but I don't think it is a symbol for it, just like Tolkien's Morder has some similarities to but is not a symbol of Nazi Germany.)

For Lewis, science is not evil, but it can be used to dehumanize, especially when people focus solely on the scientific and throw out or de-emphasize all other aspects of human existence. Anyone who cannot see some measure of dehumanization in the modern world is blind. I see huge changes just during my life. When I was a child, we knew the names of at least 20 families within a block of our house, and had been in the home or had had in our home at least half of them. Now, most people have much less knowledge or contact with their neighbors, and that isolation is greater for those who benefit the most from the fruits of modern technology.

If Lewis had lived to see the moon landing, I think he would have admitted it was an awesome achievement. I certainly think it was. It was a defining moment in my childhood (I was 6 years old). However, if you compare the pre-modern conception of the moon with how we see it today, it has been reduced from a heavenly body to a large rock in space. This reduction is symptomatic of the reduction of our conception of our own humanity from spiritual beings loved by the creator of the universe to accidental products of random, blind, impersonal, physical interactions. The modern conception of man is a product of evolution that was probably a bad turn since we seem to be damaging the planet on which we arose.

If you think Lewis was dogmatic, I'm sure you must really think Tolkien was, since he was Roman Catholic, which is by definition dogmatic. (To be a faithful Catholic, you must believe the dogmas of the Church. Anglicans, which Lewis was, have no such requirements. In fact, I don't think the Church of England has anything they call a dogma, but I could be wrong.) I don't know if Tolkien said anything against space exploration, but he did have strong views against the headlong rush of scientific progress that had no regard on its effects on humanity or the environment. I think most people today can see that his environmental concerns were well founded, even if they don't see the deeper human impacts.
I have what I feel like are cultural disagreements with Fowler (e.g. "Enterprise Architecture" is oxymoronic to me) so adjust for my bias accordingly. But perhaps his most famous book is "Refactoring", where he gives (fancy, new) names to things he found in the wild. It's basically what he does and arguably his most influential contribution to the industry.
Catabolism is another aspect of thinking about code as an organic entity that I find useful. Anabolic (growth) processes and catabolic (teardown) processes always accompany each other in biological systems. Too often we neglect to continually tear down and remove unused aspects of our systems.

Both anabolism and catabolism are always operating, though at different rates depending on the environment and needs of the organism. The funny thing is that catabolic processes will happily tear down important parts of the system, forcing them to be anabolicly rebuilt. Things like bone and muscle mass. This seems wasted, but it has an extremely important purpose: uncontrolled anabolism is cancer.

I think the analogy to code is obvious. We've all seen codebases that have gotten out of hand (gotten cancer), and part of the reason they got that way is because the growth pressures had no countervailing teardown pressure. The market provides selective pressure in nasty ways: codebases and systems with cancer slow and die, and are replaced by younger codebases without uncontrolled growth.

How do we break that cycle? By encouraging catabolic activity culturally within our companies and codebases. Cleanup is incredibly valuable. Functionality that isn't being heavily used and is complicating implementation of new work should absolutely be on the chopping block. We don't have to be quite as aggressive as biological systems, but we shouldn't take their example lightly either.

This also provides insight into when cleanup doesn't matter: when the survival horizon of the organism is sufficiently short that cancer frankly doesn't matter. Startups shouldn't worry too much until they have product market fit. Once it's clear they'll be around for years more though, catabolic work will help ensure future health.
The town without wi-fi
Understanding Kubernetes (K8s) – Part 1
Itemsy (email links to read later = personalised newsletter)
I don't personally care about the cost because I think it's a moral imperative, but yes it'd actually save money if a single payer were negotiating with all the providers and drug companies.
A look at SpinLaunch, a startup seeking to catapult objects into space
Preserving profitability with unchanging charter, business model, and ownership structure (including approportion of shares) is harder than maximising profit.
How long until these recordings start leaking to the public because of a contractor not being up to security requirements or some employees taping recordings?
You’d hope.
Is anyone aware of a proof system that can do independence proofs over a set of axioms?
Hyperledger's Brian Behlendorf on Starting Apache, Foundations, and Blockchain
I’m in Seattle. I’ve talked to some Uber and Lyft drivers who seem very upbeat and like what they do and others who hate it. I don’t go into this mental calculus every time I interact with an Uber driver, the person cutting my hair, or bagging my groceries. There are different jobs - you voluntarily took the job. No one is forcing you to be an Uber driver. Why the outrage? Is it that much better to work at WalMart, QFC, or fast food? Why not do those jobs? Do you also avoid buying groceries or purchasing anything at all made in China because of labor conditions?

I get it you want to take a stand somewhere - sure.

On a meta point, the NYT and other media outlets run a story on one of the big tech companies literally every single daily. If it’s not about Google being nefarious because they’re working with the US government then it’s about FB, or about Amazon selling items that can be a choking hazard for toddlers. The outrage culture is annoying and it keeps these companies making money.
Capital punishment is/was considered a deterrent because we are programmed to attempt to avoid premature death by natural selection.

That's not to say people always understood this or even that today it is the way most people think about it, but at least according to a mechanistic/biological view of behavior, that is the basis.

Note that natural selection did NOT necessarily put a desire to pass on our genes into us, since that wasn't necessary. It simply put such things as a desire to continue living, a drive to care for children (which can easily be transferred to non-biological children, and we can easily ignore that drive for biological children that we don't bond to), and a drive to have sex.
To be fair though... are you willing to pay to run miles upon miles upon miles of copper or fiber? For free? Someone has to do it. And they really dont feel like doing and flip burgers too.
It’s very weird to see so many tech people siding with NIMBYs and hypochondriacs against technological advance.

This is just a microcosm if a larger problem: municipal governments hold back progress. Right now, my Maryland county is lobbying to get veto power over a much-needed expansion of bridge capacity between the western and eastern shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Folks are also lobbying hard to shut down already-built light rail stations in the county. Municipalities make it impossible to densify urban areas, demolish obsolete buildings, build transit, build fiber, etc. Remember when San Francisco used to stop fiber deployment because some people thought the fiber cabinets were ugly? 5G is just the latest in a long list of things where a minority of loud voices holds up progress for everyone.

Technologists are jealous of why places like Japan have such great infrastructure. They do because they don’t give local interests veto power over infrastructure. They don’t let environmental and historical preservation laws turn every attempt at infrastructure development into years to decades of litigation. Tokyo is criss-crossed with spiderwebs of fiber on utility poles. They don’t hold that up because some NIMBYs complained about the view. That’s how you make progress.
GoPuff, a low-key delivery unicorn
Is that teaching a computer to distinguish between males and females based on height and weight?
The claim was that being the owner of high-priced land is easy, not that becoming the owner of high-priced land is easy. Your question is essentially asking why people don't decide to just time the market successfully or inherit valuable estates.
That doesn't explain why companies DO hire in Houston but refuse to pay close to what they'd pay the same person if the person moved to Mountain View or SF. It's simple status garbage to sustain the illusion that people in SV are "better"
You can't afford something you need? How are you still in business?
Much programming is more art or craft than engineering.

For example, what separates a mechanic from an engineer? They are often working on the same project, and appear to be doing the same thing. In my view, a mechanic follows rules of thumb, eyeballs a design, etc. An engineer applies math and derives design, or checks the design using math. A mechanic will say "this beam looks thick enough to hold the load", and engineer can do a calculation to select the correct thickness for the load.

For software, a programmer can tell you that quicksort is faster. An engineer can tell you why it is faster, and be able to calculate how much faster it is.
For paid content, it's either cash or attention-via-ads.

Yes there's a tiny bit that's provided for free by creators who pay for it themselves, but it's so miniscule that it doesn't matter.
Is their contribution to an F/OSS project a "job" or guarantee of income? If you do not want to "donate" your time anymore...stop; this isn't a difficult concept. I contribute $500/year to 4 projects that are integral to implementations I support. And I am not attempting to sound like a hero or what I contribute is important...but I can assure you its MUCH more than most.
I have to try this with the kids. I wonder, if you aerated the water slightly and protected it a bit from things like heatwaves, would you see more life? Would the little crab have lived longer? Or would the higher life capacity due to increased oxygen also lead to more ammonia spikes that aeration alone wouldn't help the ecosystem process. I guess it's something to experiment with.
I was just thinking this. In treating their workforce as disposable they themselves became disposable.
Heh, SF has its own little version of American Exceptionalism.
Thanks, they're so useful.
It would be fantastic if one could draw some graphs indicating the amount of fires in the same area for the same time frame (say mid summer) but in different years. Does anyone know if there is such a feature? It would help to investigate politically motivated arsons by finding correlation with various events. The amount of fires we had in Rome/Italy in 2017 raised too many flags in my head; I recall days during that summer where one couldn't turn in a direction where there weren't one or more fires in sight, and I for myself got intoxicated while helping friends to fight one that was getting very close to their home.
Some of those arsons were started in mid morning, before 11 am, when the already dim chances to have a spontaneous fire drop below zero, and I perfectly recalled the smell of smoke bombs (very often used at the stadium) while passing by near one just put out by the firefighters.
My theory is that some "entity" wanted either to send a message to the new mayor or make her waste as much as of the city funds to fight fires (firefighters, trucks, helicopters, planes etc cost a fortune) so that she and the council would be much easier to fight at the following elections. Putting time and events on paper could help to connect the dots.
Because it's a mostly unexplored corner of our solar system. The Voyagers were survey probes: they saw glimpses of a lot of interesting things, but couldn't stick around and solve any of the hard mysteries. (For example, just what is going on with the weather on both Uranus and Neptune? It's weird!) Orbiters such as Galileo, Juno, and Cassini are able to stick around long enough to do deep science.

Orbiters for one or both of our ice giants ought to be much higher on our space exploration priority lists than they seem to be.
She should call Theresa May for tips how to cope.
How to Find Old Instruction Manuals for Free Online
Hard left? Seriously. They were center left if anything.
The mystery behind Minoan bull-leaping
>Absolutely incorrect.

I said OO didn't have basis in theory or science. By basis I mean it wasn't derived from theory. Rather it was created as more of an "artistic" endeavor and later it was fit into a framework of an existing theory. You should know almost ANY system can be broken down to fit into an existing theory from a projectile object, to a flying plane, to the weather, to an object oriented programming language. Thus following that line of thought ANYTHING can be a part of a theory but I use the term "basis" to emphasize that something can be derived out of theory.

>The data part of OO is based on set theory as formalised in the database design research and type systems.

I highly disagree. Type systems are not exclusive to OO, additionally the OO type system allows for mutation which is basically not at all part of set theory at all. Also type systems and database systems didn't formalize set theory. Set theory comes from mathematics.

>The dynamic part of OO is based on finite state machines.

This I can agree. A state machine modifies a change of state which is closer to the definition of an object in OOP.

>The data abstraction and information hiding part is based on the work of barbara liskov (for which she won the Turing award) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Liskov

This has more to do with the type system then it does with OOP. Also note if you read the paper. Her paper has no data, statistics, formal theory, rigor, theorems, proofs or axioms. So although she won the turing award, although this is a research paper... it is largely "artistic" in the sense I defined it. See the paper here:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.136...

Note that her paper is important, I am not discounting it. But it is largely more in the realm of design then it is in the realm of theory and science.
Yes, single inventor (programmer of 25+ years now). Started a Kickstarter campaign, but ended up changing to a 3D printed modular system, rather than going injection mold route. Gave us the flexibility to improve our design without high costs, but also allowed us to create a modular system, so anyone can use our parts to build their own devices.
Sometimes you also needed to switch L1 and/or L2 cache off to get correct speed in addition to pressing turbo button.

If you were unlucky, underclocking was the only option to get the speed just right. Not fun in the era when clock speed was set with mainboard jumpers...

Of course there were also TSR [0] utilities to slow down old games.

I remember twiddling with all that to get some early XT era games working properly. Computers were getting faster so quickly that you'd literally see a new faster model for sale in as little as 1-2 months later. Slowing down things just right amount was an art form in the mid to late nineties.

[0]: TSR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_stay_resident_pr...
What? There must be some context I'm missing. What this on HN before, and you're responding to people in the last thread?
Yes I wasn't suggesting that Apple or Google were having humans actually process the requests real time. My wish that they were listening would be satisfied if, months later, someone heard my frustrated response and there was a way they could register that in the ML training set or otherwise register that so that product designers could see it. (in the example above, it is more of a product design issue than a ML issue)

That's actually what I am hoping for -- I'm not trying to make a minimum wage employee miserable, I would like the actual software to get smarter. (and maybe make the AI Google Lady a bit unhappy, if that is possible)
That is really great, thanks for posting it!

(Edited to remove my suggestion after you took care of it, glad that was helpful.)
You could always start a bookmarks folder for 'HNers I find Interesting' and save their profile to that. I bet there's a way to write a script that goes through them, checks for posts since the last update and display them.
> Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.

Hopefully we don't get there before proper regulation of tech companies is put in place.
Good for you! I've lost most of my "childhood coding" stuff to an accidental `rm -rf /home /something` (note the extra space. Backups? what backups?) some ~18 years ago. That included a couple of DOS viruses, one of which was polymorphic (I wrote them just for fun and never spread them; did upload one to an antivirus vendor BBS back then through their "Submit a new virus" function and it's still in many databases because of that); a C++ rewrite of mars.exe voxel landscape generator, but with added rotation, music and lakes; a PWM-based WAV player for PC speaker; etc. I'm still quite sad about that accident ...
Death is inevitable, but its environmental toll may not have to be
All that darned privacy! If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
We're going forward to the Moon to stay
Convincing frame-by-frame comparisons of The Lion King to older Japanese film
My previous startup (CircleCI) was written in Clojure, my current one (Darklang) is written in OCaml. I decided not to use Clojure again because it's not statically typed, and my number one frustration when I coded in the CircleCI codebase was that it was very very hard to know what shape a value had, and whether it could be null.

OCaml certainly has a lot of flaws, and is not nearly as "nice" a language as clojure, but the productivity of static typing (in the statically typed functional language sense, not the C++/Java sense) is huge. Knowing you can do a big refactor and the type system has your back is massive.

We sponsored core.typed to add types to Clojure, but there were flaws at the time (they have have been fixed since), and we didn't end up sticking with it.

So Clojure I wouldn't use again. OCaml I would, despite having significant flaws (every language has significant flaws).
Do they not? I thought there was pretty good cooperation all-around when the Spectre/Meltdown bugs started coming to light.

I know Theo de Raadt has something of a reputation for getting prickly with Linux devs, but he's on NetBSD now.
Post-Compiler Software Optimization for Reducing Energy (2014) [pdf]
Among other things, 5G holds the promise of making traditional wired telecom regulation obsolete, by getting rid of the last mile problem, reducing the tendency toward natural monopoly, and enabling competition.
That’s the status quo when it comes to journalism today.

Do an in depth analysis of the data and talk to experts with varied opinions? Nah....

Find an anecdote that pulls at the heart strings and use vague language to insinuate it’s a “crisis”? We have a story!!
Note: The statement in question was made by the Executive Director of the FreeBSD Foundation. That position relates to a distinct management structure from that of the FreeBSD Project (although several people do hold positions in both).
I see nothing wrong with smart voice assistants etc.

I only see a problem with it all controlled by few corporations and all the proprietary algorithms underneath closed up..

They know all about us and we almost nothing about them. .. or in a dystopian future, even "they" then do not know how all the proprietary libaries, training data and algorithms etc. of all the smart homes and self driving cars and autonomous killer robots anymore, and then some conflicting virus gets out of controll and ... Booom.
> Seems very... vindictive and an overreaction by the spouses part to be contacting the agencies:

Without knowing any details of the incident, sometimes people keep crossing whatever lines are set until you get the law involved.
Man your view couldn't be more myopic and shortsighted if it tried.
“a normal eye with regular vision and unaided by any other tools can see objects as small as about 0.1 millimeters.”
I agree. In 2014.

It's 2019. Nobody gives a shit.
The Simpsons’ Planet of the Apes Musical: An Oral History (2017)
you can accomplish a lot in a few lines of clojure
Here is an example to massage/manipulate CSV data.

Stolen from the README page for a clojure CSV parsing library (https://github.com/clojure/data.csv)

(defn read-column [reader column-index]
(let [data (read-csv reader)]
(map #(nth % column-index) data)))

(defn sum-second-column [filename]
(with-open [reader (io/reader filename)] ; Read in the CSV file (streaming / lazily)
(->> (read-column reader 1) ; Convert to just the first column of data.
(drop 1) ; Drop the first row (the CSV header)
(map #(Double/parseDouble %)) ; convert each string in this column into double
(reduce + 0)))) ; sum the result

Because it's lazy, this code should work regardless of how large the CSV file.