skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sure. So if amazon did not continue to use it. Does TLA+ suddenly become not useful?

Yes. (Or more precisely, it never was useful.)

Zero part of my business requirements involve anything about discrete digital state machines. If I could deliver business value more efficiently with pen and paper, I would. If I could deliver business value more efficiently with Excel or a shell one-liner, I would (and do). If I could deliver business value more efficiently by singing my harmony into the Music of the Ainur, I would. I write software because it's the tool we've found that is most efficient at delivering business value, not because the software itself has value.

So I use high-level languages because they are demonstrably more efficient. (And I frequently write sloppy code in Python or awk because it helps me answer business-relevant questions like "why is the site slow" quickly, without demanding I be rigorous about my software engineering in the process of answering the question.) don't use UML because I have yet to see evidence that it will help me deliver business value more effectively.

(I do also enjoy writing software as a practice, and I do that on weekends. That's the time to make code for code's sake.)
yeah don't do this

nobody at the T-Mobile store knows anything

Its a fun thought exercise, but just smile and nod.

The whole point of going into a brick and mortar store is just to see how the improv troupe will lie to you this time.
You may also like The Goon Show. [1] It's a BBC radio comedy show that ran in the 1950s, and was way ahead of time. Some episodes make references to then-current events that are little known nowadays such as guerilla war in Malaysia, but many are timeless. Episodes "The Canal" [2], "The Jet-Propelled Guided NAAFI" [3] and "The Whistling Spy Enigma" [4] are among my favourites. They have a very playful style and a refreshing lack of cynicism and profanities.

John Cleese has said that the Goon Show "influenced us enormously", and many well-known Monty Python's sketches like "The Funniest Joke in the World" [5] can be traced to the Goon's jokes like dropping 1918 calendars on Berlin to force Germans surrender (in episode "World War One").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goon_Show

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-69K1MQ4YJE

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwSQ0CBQuA0

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nMjk--OVR4

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9FzUI8998U
MSVC was a pain until the 2015 version. Now writing C99 is safe if you target it. Microsoft did immense harm to the industry though, by not supporting C99 until recently. Many Windows-only programmers I saw not even aware of C99 and C11 features, sigh... Anyway, there is no reason to use MSVC at all. Both Google and Mozilla switched[1][2] to use clang-cl[3], which is a drop-in replacement for MSVC cl. Moreover, it supports various sanitizers - ASAN, UBSAN, etc for Windows platform. MSVC didn't even have support for inline assembly! A piece of crap, not a compiler. Just use clang-cl instead.

[1] http://blog.llvm.org/2018/03/clang-is-now-used-to-build-chro...

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/nfroyd/2019/04/25/an-unexpected-ben...

[3] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/MSVCCompatibility.html
Thanks for this. The initial wave of hate on this post had me worrying that we are collectively forgetting the lessons of the past. This industry continually re-invents the same concepts over and over again and just re-brands them. Once you recognize that, the writings of Fowler & Co become highly applicable to many scenarios.
> ...Uber’s GPS navigation is unspeakably bad in most metros, offering idiotic routes...

On this tangent: I took a few Lyfts around LA recently, with the driver following Lyft navigation. For the longer airport rides, that navigation was indeed "unspeakably bad", diverting onto surface roads that ended up adding 15 minutes to a 45-minute trip.

Not being in a hurry, I let it play out on two trips. I looked at traffic conditions on my own phone and there was no construction or accident that would cause the diversion.

Are Uber and Lyft using their own nav solution, or are they contracting it out?
Seinfeld is another show that aged well like Monty Python. Some situations in Seinfeld wouldn’t happen anymore due to cellphones and new technology. Monty Python is nice because a lot of it is fantasy or general humor not situational like Seinfeld.
Developers don't have any interest in the occupants beyond their money. After the first wave of sales or rents, they pass the torch. The problem is with the people involved. It's hard to get the ones affected to be involved.

Can low income people ...take off work to plan their community? ...possess the capacity to help? ...have the stability to persist through it? ...be happy in high density? etc.
The voyager program was made possible by a very specific alignment of the planets which only occurs every 175 years
> Is there something special/different about Apple Pay for online shopping versus physical stores?

Most notably, I could use Apple Pay for online shopping with Safari. I would not be able to use Apple Pay at physical stores as I don't have an iPhone.

Capital One Canada doesn't support Apple Pay of any variety.
We also need to find a way to crack the nut in the city. Soma is the only place with any movement.
Yes!

How can I reach out to you?
That's incomplete, though- NASA has terrestrial computers.
> I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis.

Read Popper for a hint at how misguided this is outside hard science.
Study reveals what consumers would pay for their favorite free apps
I'll admit I've quite understood this ambivalence about WAN links, and particularly not on tech sites. Consider: would you find no different on your LAN going back to 10Base-T, or being restricted exclusively to 802.11a-1999 for all networking (no wired at all) in a spectrum crowded environment, and thus with double-digit latency at all times? Or is gigabit or even higher actually useful in a variety of ways? How about for your persistent local memory speed, is SSD or even modern HDD of no benefit vs something on PATA or IDE or whatever from the 90s? I don't think I'm going out on a limb in saying that yes, having more bandwidth available has and continues to be quite valuable.

So then take that and remember that there is zero fundamental difference between LAN and WAN except latency based on distance and even that isn't that restrictive on Earth, particularly within a country. It's about 93 miles per millisecond RTT under ideal vacuum/air/photonic-bandgap fiber, or 70% of that in standard optical fiber, so 1/90 of a second say could easily be enough for a round trip to anything within a good 300-500 miles. And at a minimum, any application done on a LAN right now could apply directly. For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections. A lot of things that many people currently centralize could be decentralized again if it was ubiquitous that the population just WireGuard into their LAN from anywhere within a hundreds of miles or more and have an experience essentially the same as being on the LAN itself.

I mean yeah, we can imagine all sorts of future AR/VR applications or enhanced privacy via onion routing and the like (essentially being able to burn some spare bandwidth on it for the same experience as present) and the like too. But is it even necessary to imagine that far? We use LANs right now, and that for most people there is a dramatic split in their LAN/WAN experience isn't down to physics (most people aren't going more then 500-1000 miles away with great regularity).
Nothing is...
The time to listen for "what's wrong" would be before they are leaving.

But I generally find that people who are leaving are quite open about the reasons, when asked. Especially if they are more about the job rather than themselves.
Exactly ! I am also starting to question this time dichotomy : work time, play time. As long as you are doing something it’s okay. Of course I don’t consider swiping through an infinite scroll as doing something. There I wrote a comment.
I’m not sure why this is getting downvoted. As a Freemason myself I find the ban on discussion of politics and religion while in lodge refreshing. It’s an important facet of the craft that helps us view each other as equals.
I wish it was as easy to get people enthusiastic about other networking upgrades like IPv6.
Fake news and unfounded beliefs are as old as humanity. Blood-letting, female hysteria, witch hunting, even the Y2K problem. People still read and believe the Bible, thousands of years later.

There's nothing new on this front.
> Wasn't there a scene later in the movie where the actual Jesus was shown (without any mockery) in contrast to Brian?

Yes. And at the beginning as well.
Online certifications are no joke.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1197256/downl...

> On or about September 25, 2018, in the District of Kansas, the defendant, for the purpose of executing the scheme described above, caused to be transmitted by means of wire communication in interstate commerce an online certification that he (1) read and understood the Kansas Board of Regents policy concerning conflicts of interest, (2) understood that any external personal professional activities in which he engaged that take time away from the University must not interfere with him meeting his faculty teaching and research responsibilities at the University, and (3) agreed to secure approval prior to engaging in any such external activities; all of which was in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1343.

The indictment doesn't say whether the fraud was that (1) he didn't read or understand the conflict of interest policy (presumably not, since that would indicate this wasn't intentional); (2) he didn't understand that external activities must not interfere with his University work (same); so it must be (3) that he agreed to secure approval prior to engaging in any such activities.

So the fraud is that he agreed to secure approval, but didn't follow through.

The indictment also claims:

> Tao certified to KU that he did not labor under any conflict of interest.

But the only certification mentioned in the indictment was that he agreed to secure approval, not that he lacked any conflict of interest.

Regardless, the result of this failure to secure approval for a conflict of interest was a four count indictment for wire fraud and theft by receiving salary, plus a forfeiture request. He allegedly "embezzled, stole, and obtained by fraud" grant money that funded his University salary, by virtue of continuing to receive that salary.
Reality is, it's also far more expensive to install 5g. It requires more fiber lines to run to more poles. Also, the telecom companies lobbied on state levels the max cities can charge for renting out putting stuff on poles. Plus trying to get cities to foot the bill. We are at the speed point of diminishing returns, 5g being said point. It's more money for not a real quality of life increase. I dont want my city to spend tax money on that.
It's what we used to refer to as "the talent".
I think the failure of Perl 6 was caused by a lack of community building and implementation leadership, not by trying to be too many things at once.
The biggest problem the parent comment have with JS is not types, as you say, but __a lack of a static type system__.

They are things as different as that you can actually have type problems only in a really typed system (as a static type system). Javascript has a very weak type system, and that's the problem. I think you do not understand that static typing serves to solve other problems in the code, not to solve type problems ... it would be like saying that an hypothetical language needs functions to solve function problems ... and then you say that you never had problems with functions in that hypothetical language (ex: assembler, with very primitives "functions", where you have to save data in register before jumping to code in another memory address).
If (and it’s still a substantial “if”) SpaceX’s BFR flies and comes close to living up to its promises, I’m hoping we’ll see a renaissance in space probes. With this combination of heavy lift and low cost, probes could be built much larger and substantially cheaper, and be launched on faster trajectories.
What do you think would happen to all that “luxury housing” if there wasn’t all the red tape and we allowed as much as the market could bear?

In earlier eras the answer was it didn’t stay luxury housing, but moved down market as shinier and newer buildings kept coming online, and as overeager developers built more fancy housing than there turned out to be a market for.

Then when you have all those landlords and more housing units than are needed, there’s price pressure all the way down, and a lot of upward mobility as people slide up into slightly nicer homes, leaving a bunch of reasonable quality homes open all the way to the bottom of the market.

We haven’t had anything like free market supply of housing since the FDR era, so this example is so far removed from living memory that most people can’t even imagine it.
It is overwhelmingly likely that she was the only person with access to both a NASA computer and the account credentials.
Unexpected benefits of switching to clang-cl from MSVC
By "industry person", I don't think Nilay Patel was referring to standard retail workers. I read that sentence as targeted towards other journalists and professionals.
But realistically, I'm one person, and too small, and I don't _really_ know what's going on.

I'm just one person. I've researched this problem space for many years. I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy well before I ended up homeless.

I think I have some good ideas, but I can't get traction because people with money and power don't actually take me seriously, either online or in meat space.

I wrote this recently and submitted it to HN.

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-small-tow...

I think it got one upvote. So I'm pretty fed up and feeling like it won't get fixed precisely because people actively want it to not be fixed, not because it can't be fixed.

I'm a subject matter expert. It doesn't matter. People just want to keep justifying the status quo and calling homeless people junkies and crazies.

Having been homeless, obviously, I'm crazy. No need to listen to fuck all I say, clearly.
Like massively multithreaded concurrency? Natural language parsing? AI? Deterministic security? Natural language parsing???

I suppose you're right in a sense, these problems are cleaner if you think of them in functional terms. ;)
I recently wrote a personal productivity app using Laz & FP, and came away really impressed. I immediately installed the tools on three different work systems and joined the community because I can see this being valuable in the future.

As another result of that experiment, I thought about giving Turbo Pascal a try next time I'm in DOSBox, just for nostalgia reasons. Hopefully the issue highlighted here wouldn't be too awful to deal with.
Wikipedia ok, but Youtube and Reddit? Are you kidding? Thought you were going to say something useful like wolfram alpha.

Youtube is full of conspiracy theories and reddit seems to be catering itself to white supremacy. Definitely not paragons of good or ethical internet companies.
Eat your bugs you vermin.
With the current equipment and spectrum assigned it does have that problem.

MKBHD goes over this is a video. It is awesome if you stand right underneath a 5g site, 1-2 gbps. If you head down the road a hundred feet/30 meters the signal drops to much closer to 4g speeds.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTUs_2hq6Y
Call it 6G IP.
If it was illegal for her to log in then why does she have credentials. This story is so hopelessly stupid, I'm surprised it's gotten picked up
Look at where money is parked around the world, and you have your answer.
Possibly I'm about to reveal a horrible misunderstanding of monads :p.

So I might naturally write code:

f = open("some/file.path")

if f == ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND:
print("ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND")
return -1

f.write("yes")

vs with a threading macro

(-> "some/file.path"
(open)
(write "yes"))

Obviously I've lost the test in the middle and the thread macro code will crash hard if something goes wrong. I need to fix it. Now I could re-write (open) so that it handles errors internally. We don't really want that because probably how we handle errors is context dependent. However, we have a function that is basically the context: (->)! So instead of embedding the error handling by re-writing (open) we embed it into (->) by rewriting it as (-$>).

So now we have (-$>) that checks every step of the thread and handles ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND appropriately. And returns the -1 we were looking for. Neat.

However, now we are in territory where we would like to start using an object that is either in a "successful" state or a "failed" state, and that is quite primitive so that (-$>) knows about it. Ie, we want (-$>) to appear in a library that doesn't know anything about our specific use case, and generalises beyond ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND. We are about to stumble into something very similar to Haskell's Maybe monad.

So we created a new problem - can't check state in the middle of a nested function call - and the solution is to use a threading macro that by-the-way does error checking and thinks in monads.
At the risk of being that guy who mistakes his anecdote for a datum, I've found the bigger ad-blocking extensions to have a larger performance impact - simply because they're evaluating large regex based block lists on each request.

That said - that's my choice, I don't have to use those extensions, but the gain is, to my mind, worth the pain. I really don't like the patronising "we know what's best for you" attitude of the Chrome developers - especially because what they came up with as being "best for us" is also best for Google.
Which also makes total sense to me: I use radio maybe once a year, mobile data once an hour.
Talking about the quality of a "fit" can be misleading. It presupposes that the factors which make people leave are actually beneficial to other people or the company.

That's certainly not the case with toxic coworkers. Probably there are more examples...
I'm with you. Reading a text file (line by line) is the thing I do most and what I look for first. If you can't do that in a simple way, I move on. I also look at returning datasets from SQL databases, how you can make a GUI, and a host of other practical things. I think fibonnaci is a sort of one step up from "Hello World", so in a sense it gives a little taste of the language and syntax.
I stayed up, well, all night watching it with my father. Amazing experience.

Sometime around then, we also got a computer modem, and one of the first things we did with it was find some NASA BBS where you could download images from Voyager 2. At a blazing 300bps. The long-distance charges were probably more than what I pay for a week of gigabit internet service at home now.
Blackboard Pattern
American expectations of censorship are so interesting, as the whole society was formed by film and radio's attempts to market to the whole country at once, specifically restrictive middle America.

Its clearer now that broadcasting hot spots of New York City and Los Angeles were not prudish about content in the early 20th century, while the Oklahoma's of the nation only wanted fully clothed people, speaking very cordial language, as long as all the actors were white or portrayed segregated culture. Strange to think how that influenced a dynasty of casting decisions still seen today.
it's about ego. if you insult my god, you are insulting me. what you are telling me implicitly is that you don't respect me, you don't care about me and my feelings. religion is an identity. it works for any identity not just religions : country, ethnicity, language and even football team.
> Yes, it has taken 20 years, but JavaScript is now just as viable a choice for your backend and CLI tooling projects as Python was in the past.

Considering how often Node projects break our build, I respectfully beg to differ.
Oh, they’re still around. There was a local group protesting the installation of a cell tower too close to a school recently.
If you google "exit interview" you will find tons of opinions and ideas (example [1]).

Timing is important -- if you want to get useful information, you need to time the exit interview 1-3 months after departure so there's (typically) no fear of repercussion so folks' views tend to be more candid.

[1] https://hbr.org/2016/04/making-exit-interviews-count
Im confused... Why doesn't Push-Location (aliased to pushd by default), Pop-Location (aliased to popd by default), and Get-Location -Stack (trivially aliasable to dirs) not work? You can even have multiple location stacks and, if you care about the registry, you can also use the same commands to handle registry navigation as well.
> what could I have done personally / in official capacity that might have stopped this

Were you their supervisor/manager/lead? If so, the standard answer is to have regular 1:1s with your staff, so things like this do not come as a surprise.

And you cannot always keep everyone. Sometimes things really are not a fit. The last job I left was for reasons that had nothing to do with the team or product, or anything easily changeable. I simply wasn't OK with the commute to a new office. There are a myriad of personal reasons that someone might not want to work somewhere. That doesn't mean the company is flawed - it just means people are different, and have different preferences and needs.

I'd recommend spending less focus on why one person left, and more on ongoing discussions with the people who remain, as well as being sure new staff has every opportunity to learn about the company, so they can self-select out before they are hired if they see anything that would not work well for them.
Because the critical component in organized religions is social control, and one of the most critical factors in social control is maintaining the 'social proof field'. If everyone believes something it enhances the belief, but if there are non believers they diminish the social proof field in the vicinity of their social graph.

Alone these 'heretics' are not a threat, but as soon as two get together it's no longer about one lunatic deviant who you can ignore, but a social phenomenon.

The more you have heretics the stronger their social proof field becomes, enticing people away.

Religions are much more understandable as social movement and political constructs that lean heavily on propaganda rather than as methods of investigation into the nature of reality.
If I remember right, they looked at what political issues were the same at the time as some X years before, and those are often then things which still apply, which gives it a beautiful timeless quality.
My favorite line from the article:

> As space tourism becomes a reality, so might the need to prosecute space crime
Trump's tariffs on monkeys could 'severely damage' US medical research
> people would ooh and aah that I worked at Aflac, having no idea what I did. I had an entry level job I couldn't get promoted out of, but locals acted like I was clearly part or the privileged few to work there at all.

this is my experience telling people you are merely interviewing at Google
I think imminent airlifting merits a phone call, even these days.
I think people get fixated on high-density urban construction and miss the impact that is available by simply allowing the next increment of infill in the 80-90% of US urban land that is currently restricted to single family houses on large lots.

If 80% of the housing units in Atlanta suddenly had the option to add a garage apartment, I would expect to see an enormous improvement in the housing market.

Cases like Minneapolis, which basically just made this change, will be important to watch going forward.