skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's more of just a joke--sometimes a simpler solution can do much more than a complex one. Complex solutions aren't necessitated, in fact, I actively avoid them in my product.

It's also not for lack of use, I've developed software for more than fifteen years, and I've always had access to some sort of debugger, and I've always used them, just very rarely.

>You add log statements, rebuild, relink, reproduce; or, you could just set a hardware watchpoint to print the backtrace whenever it changes. In my experience people don't reach for the debugger way of doing it simply because it might not be needed all the time and the syntax is forgotten. Diving into `man` or docs is harder than printf(). Use those skills more regularly and/or make a cheatsheet, macros, etc. and it is less of a problem.

Hardware watch points work horribly for objects, I have to create and maintain views for all the practical objects I use, unless they're very popular libraries like OpenCV. Ultimately, these views could simply be printf or cout statements, maintained with a common function or method defined on all objects.

These log statements typically happen right near assert statements, so they can be maintained along with the code. I'll usually use something more sophisticated than simple printf, and I'll have many different types of logs for common debugging cases. They can be enabled or disabled at runtime, so no recompilation needed. They give me access to all the state I could possibly require, and they get committed to the code base.

I've had coworkers spend entire days in debuggers (often in groups), where a simple step back and a simple log easily solves the problem.

I would use hardware watchpoints if they were standardized across debuggers, but they don't have all the features I need even in the best debuggers, and then I'm still useless on other platforms. Also, I usually need the program to run at near real-time otherwise the bug may not reproduce itself.

edit: I should add I do use some of the more advanced debugger features in those rare cases. So debuggers are still necessary, just not in the day-to-day.

I should also say I've also worked in environments where the software has to be pretty much bug-free, where small bugs may not be immediately noticeable. So there's a lot of planning, design, even non-formal proofs of correctness happening. If it's allowable for your software to have some bugs, maybe you can take a shortcut with a debugger.

Finally, I'm not against all tooling, just debuggers. I use visual profilers all the time.
> We still don't understand gravity, as it relates to entropy. Usually entropy makes things spread out, but gravity makes things come together. Weird.

If 'gravity' weirds you out, put the mixture in a centrifugal chamber and let it spin. You get the same gradiated separation.

> Usually entropy makes things spread out, but gravity makes things come together. Weird.

It's no weirder than saying that hydrogen atoms exist because the proton attracts the electron.
> The same publications that push 'have fewer children' for developed countries (which mostly already have below replacement rate fertility), sharply criticize people who apply this to developing countries

Indeed.

Population control is crucial and should apply to developing countries with high priority because they are the ones experiencing high population growth.

It is high controversial to suggest this, though.
>once in 1500 year floods happening every year.

Source?
> I've never understood this angle either. Buying stuff doesn't make stuff appear out of thin air. Buying stuff means buying stuff from the people who already have it, which for valuable things like housing is already the rich. The difference between buying an apartment and renting it is whether I give the rich person 30 years' worth of rent right now in a lump some or slowly over time. I don't see how I "win" against the rich person by giving them my money earlier.

There are 2 ways to make a profit on a property investment:

1. Sell at a higher price in the future which offsets all of the costs of holding the property (rented out or not).

2. Rent out at a higher monthly price than whatever the monthly cost is (cost spread out over whatever your investment horizon is), right now.

Number 2 means (assuming the house was purchased on credit, which at negative interest rates it should always be as much as possible) that you as the renter(s) are paying back the owners credit he took out for the house, the house's maintenance, the owner's house insurance and taxes and all other costs + THE APPRECIATION IN VALUE OF THE HOUSE FOR THE TIME YOU RENT (higher housing prices = higher monthly rent) + a profit.

When you buy a house, you're not giving the owner 30 years worth of rent. You're giving the owner the value of the house, which is way less than the accumulated rent would be over 30 years.

Buying a house (on credit) is only ever a net loss if the house's value goes down significantly for whatever reason. Reasons can be: uninsured destruction (war, fire, bad renters) or deflation (due to oversupply of houses such as is the case in Japan right now or due to the overall economy going bad).

In other words: assuming a healthy economy, buying a property as an investment (with a 15 - 30 year investment horizon to be able to spread all initial costs over a longer period of time) is ALWAYS a win assuming you can find renters. In the current market (at least in most cities of Western Europe) you will always find renters, because a significant part of the population who would like to buy a house simply can't get the credit they need to buy a house close to where their employment is. Due to the housing prices being too inflated relative to average income from employment.

Summary: housing prices higher than the credit people can afford = people can't get credit to buy a house = lots of renters on the market (people rent instead) = makes it interesting to own houses to rent out for profit = housing prices higher = poor people can't get credit to buy a house = lots of renters on the market and so on.

See what's happening? Those who can afford real estate investments start receiving an ever larger portion of the income of people who can't afford real estate investments. AKA: the poor and middle class get poorer and the rich get richer.
Yup, the same exact document, page 78.

10.3bn number is for TFL combined, which includes buses, DLR, overground, tram and other.
People, en masse, rarely react to a problem till it hits them in the face. Florida does get flooded already - Sunny Day Floods, what a beautiful name. Meanwhile real estate prices keep ignoring the issue:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIXRNSA
> Ours will just be bits on a flash drive.

Computer archæologists disagree.
My claim isnt that wittengstein's ideas can be explained to a 6 year old or are simple or that he is overrated. My claim is that blog author's perception of wittengstein is shaped by how wittengstein wrote. Which is a style that was common for philosophers of the time. The style of expression has little to do with the difficulty of the idea. I regularly read/write scientific papers that would be very hard to meaningfully express to a 6 year old. However, good modern papers do use a direct style with few independent clauses and indexical references. This was not the prevalent style for wittgenstein or even modern continental philosophy.

Tldr, writing style matters and can confuse people independent of idea complexity.

Edit: more thought, in physics (and other math heavy field) we often rename sub-expressions with variable names to make formulas written subsequently shorter and more comprehensible. This means that we often write extra lines of text simply to segment out different concepts so no one line is too hard to understand/too long. This makes it easier to understand the "important" parts.
Of course I am not assuming every single homeless person needs the same amount of assistance. I'm saying, as someone who is privileged to know what severe and persistent mental illness is like, that the average would be around I stated.
I think it’s because

”Similarly I want to avoid tying myself to a particular OS, and ideally I'd like to have the option of developing for consoles. So it's important that my programming language is portable, and that it has good portable library support”

Availability of Rust across platforms is nowhere near C or C++. It may, and I hope it will, change in the future but right now it is not so.
Rationality, the Bayesian mind and their limits
This is a bit like the 80s in communist countries: you'd wait for years on a waiting list to be able to buy a car.
More context needed. Why are you in fear of losing your job?
How ? $10K doesn't go very far in most areas of deep tech, where most significant inventions are usually created.
Safari supports the same sort of ad blocking as a pi hole -- specifying a list of domains to block. This is available in so-called content blocking extensions.
Yeah, that surprised me too. I thought they would at least throw in a reference to CP/M at that point, but that was missing.

The other interesting story that I thought went missing was when they talked about Bill and Paul working on the class scheduling software for the school after the all-boys school merged with another school to allow girls in. I think they missed the story about how Bill set up his schedule so that he could be in an all-girls class.

Overall, it was a pretty good documentary. I do want to note that it focuses more on Bill's philantrophic efforts, especially in Episode 1, but then Episodes 2 and 3 do a good job of covering his history and Microsoft (though still more focused on his recent philantrophic work.) So this is just a PSA for anyone more interested in his Microsoft story: you may find that more in Episodes 2 and 3.
Your just repeating some of the anti union messages the union busters hired to oppose organising campaigns.
“Bad for the company” doesn’t mean “good for employees”. If the employees were planning on burning the office down, management would pretty obviously voice dissent but that doesn’t mean the employees are “onto something”.
>Studies have shown innocent people regularly react to assertions of criminality.

Yeah, if I were accused of a big crime I would look at it like this: if my faith in the justice system is 99%, and if I'm facing 50 years in jail, then given my innocence I'm facing an expected value of 6 months in jail. You can bet I'd be sweating!
> It is also true to say "When you were told in primary school that the primary colours for your paints were red, green, and blue, this was untrue"

The reason that red, green and blue are sometimes stated as primary colors in the context of mixing ink layers is that red and green and blue are rather vague terms. What is meant by red in this context would more exactly be called magenta and green is used to designate cyan. Wikipedia puts it this way[1]:

> Before the color names cyan and magenta were in common use, these primaries were often known as blue and red, respectively, and their exact color has changed over time with access to new pigments and technologies.

Also I think education about primary colors is just a mess and the same Wikipedia article[1] talks about this too:

> Elementary art education materials, dictionaries, and electronic search engines often define primary colors effectively as conceptual colors (generally magenta, yellow, and cyan; or red, green, and blue) that can be used to mix "all" other colors and often go further and suggest that these conceptual colors correspond to specific hues and precise wavelengths. Such sources do not present a coherent, consistent definition of primary colors since real primaries cannot be complete.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color
Blue Oak for Permissive
Yes, but that doesn't mean the regulations are still relevant, or that they were ever been a good regulation to start with. The PATRIOT act came from a horrible tragedy, and many people would tell you how terrrible it is.
I really wish you could build a robot that could "bring out the trash" with just $1 MM, but robotics is not so forgiving. Anki, which raised around $200 MM, started with advanced toy robots and were shifting towards a home chore robot and ran out of money before they had a prototype. The only company I know with a viable solution in this space, and honestly I am stretching 'viable' in terms of what it can do for what it costs, is Boston Dynamics. It'll be interesting when someone finally leaks a price for SpotMini - I'd guess something like $60k.
What kind of evidence do you expect? Without time travel.
The medium post linked to in Galloway's article is also a good read -

https://medium.com/@henry.hawksberry/is-we-work-a-fraud-5b78...
Due the low throughput of Go's GC (which trades a lot of it in favor of short pause duration), you risk running out if memory if you have a lot of allocations and you don't run your GC enough times.
Yes, but if you aren't a millionaire now, you are unlikely to become one.

Less unlikely than 3 decades ago, but the chance of a (lower) middle class person becoming a millionaire, and especially a liquid (non-retirement+primary home) millionaire, which is the kind of thing we think of when we say millionaire, is exceedingly low.
One of the largest insurers in Florida is Citizens Property Insurance. It's run by the state.

On top of that, Florida has a state-run fund (Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund) for times when the private/commercial reinsurance market is insufficient.
Visualizing all approved, illicit, and experimental drugs
For some reason I just assumed that Miami Beach real estate was all luxury condos, so I was shocked to see how affordable some condos could actually be in 200-300k range. Not a luxury high rise, but a condo in the heart of Miami Beach nonetheless.
I also liked the article. I lack theoretical knowledge to determine if the system that is affected by gravity can still be considered "isolated" as per 2nd law of thermodynamics. I think this is not really relevant here, as the article focuses more on the common mental model, that disorder always increases with time. This model is not only incorrectly labelled (as entropy), but also misleading when used to describe some processes in the world.

This oil/vinegar example is immediately useful for other areas too. We have oil and vinegar in the dressing. They eventually become separated and we need to put effort to mix them together. Now replace oil and vinegar with leave/remain, blue/red or whatever else...
Just because I'm tech savvy doesn't mean I want to waste my time.
Almost a decade ago I was writing a desktop toolkit in Lua 5.1 and gdk/cairo bindings. Let’s say for fun, because it never seen the light in planned business. But it had animations and geometry dynamics (all soft, no hw accel). While GC seems to be fast and data/widget count was small, it suddenly froze every dozen of seconds for a substantial amount of time. First thing I tried was to trigger a [partial] collection after every event, but what happened was (I believe) incremental^ steps still accumulated into one big stop. Also I followed all critical paths and made allocations static-y. It got better, but never resolved completely. I didn’t investigate it further, and my hw was far from bleeding edge, thus no big conclusion. But since then I’ll think twice before doing something frametime-critical with GC. Each specific implementation requires a handful of wild tests at least before considering as an option in my book.

As others probably already mentioned, worst side of gc is that it is unpredictable and hard to be forced in a way that matches your specific pattern. With manual/raii mm you can make pauses predictable and non-accumulating collection debt and fit before “retrace” perfectly. Also simply relying on automatic storage in time critical paths is usually “can not” in gc envs.

^ if any, I can’t recall if 5.1 actually implemented true incremental gc back then
I think it's obvious that FP is great at linear / dataflow which can be represented visually trivially.

I think the missing part is distributed / protocol like interaction between pure agents. Maybe we should ask the erlang crowd. Or the smalltalk crowd.

Also, who uses petri nets ?
It would be cool to make a topic-specific Hackernews shin ranked by hotness for that topic. It’d be cool to focus in on topics I care about, not everything in Hackernews universe.

My theory is “What’s hot in Elasticsearch” would seem to be better answered with hacker news than a subreddit...

(Hackernews Search is only sortable by date or votes, neither of which gets at hotness)
Thanks for your reply, but I meant struggle in a positive sense :) Life is certainly not easy, and I think contending with its difficulty is what gives its meaning.
Major built up areas in Florida were swamps before they were raised by landfill from dredging.

Add more landfill.
I would call that using a subset of OOP features[1], not avoiding it entirely.

But I guess there's no point in arguing over semantics.

[1] As Wikipedia defines OOP: "a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data, in the form of fields (often known as attributes or properties), and code, in the form of procedures (often known as methods)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming
> C++ is as complex as you want to make it

I second that. I always find the attitude of “C++ is bad so I’m going to stick to C” really bizarre. You can use C++ as a better C.

- use type inference and references instead of pointers. Writing C style code with these features makes it more readable.

- Don’t like OO programming. Stick to struct with all members public. It’s going to be a lot better than doing the same thing in C and you shall not have void* casts.

- use exceptions instead of return code for errors, so that your code is not peppered with if statements at every line you call. With an exception you’ll get additional info about crashes in dumps.

I wrote for an embedded system where the C++ standard library was not available, in a previous life. I ended up writing my code in C++ and “re-inventing” a couple of useful classes like std::string and std::vector. For the most part my code was very C like...
My MacBook is plugged in 90% of the time. While travelling for example on a plane and I forget to charge it, then yeah, Safari is helpful to have.
Or, and you may be shocked by this, another alternative would be to make them take an IELTS exam, set the minimum score high and deny them entry if they don’t pass.
Some people actually choose to use Safari from the plethora of available browsers. Low battery use, smooth scrolling, and utmost respect of system settings (e.g., Firefox will still use a blue accent color even if you set your system accent color to something else) are all reasons to consciously choose Safari over another browser.
Not a game developer, but I used to write UI addons for World of Warcraft. WoW allows you to customize your UI heavily with these Lua plugins ("addons") and Lua is garbage collected. It's a reasonable incremental GC so it shouldn't be too bad in theory.

But in practice it can be horrible. You end up writing all kinds of weird code just to avoid allocations in certain situations. And yeah, GC pauses due to having lots of addons is definitely very noticable for players.

Also leads to fun witch hunts on addons using "too much" memory, people consider a few megabytes a lot because they confuse high memory usage with high allocation rate... Our stuff started out as "lightweight" but it grew over the years. We are probably at over 5 MB of memory with Deadly Boss Mods (many WoW players can attest that it's certainly not considered lightweight nowadays, but I did try to keep it low back then).
But I think we still do a reasonable job at avoiding allocations and recycling objects...

The point is: I had to spent a lot of time thinking about memory allocations and avoiding them in a system that promised me to handle all that stuff for me. Frame drops are very noticable.
But there are languages with better GCs than Lua out there...

Somewhat related: I recently wrote about garbage collectors and latency in network drivers in high-level languages: https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20945819

That's a scenario were short GC pauses matter even more as the hardware usually only buffers a few milliseconds worth of data at high speeds.
You’re writing in a much improved C. Strong type system (including closures/interfaces/arrays/slices/maps), sane build tooling (including dead simple cross compilation), no null-terminated strings, solid standard library, portability, top notch parallelism/concurrency implementation, memory safety (with far fewer caveats, anyway), etc. Go has it’s own issues and C is still better for many things, but “Go with manually-triggered GC” is still far better than C for 99.9% of use cases.
it was too tempting honestly and a natural tension of having computers manipulating graphs .. at one point you want to link the graph with the concrete artefact automatically

but classical OO is not appropriate methinks
That's exactly the type of hogwash executives promote in order to avoid rewarding engineers so they can keep more profits for themselves.
Just remember that if this happens and spreads out the insane software engineer salaries will be gone. Whoever makes a Silicon Valley salary is a benefactor of the current setup (which, I agree, is a little outrageous).
I almost burst out laughing reading this. I’ve also worked across start-ups and larger established companies, across industries and with different ranges of success outcomes.

Never saw one iota of difference in how management is handled. If anything, the reduced bureaucracy of the start-ups was a problem because it left executive behavior wildly unconstrained, where rampant religious bigotry, sexual harassment, micromanagement and overwork were elevated into practically glorified business ideals and self-serving cultish culture mandates

Executives at bigger companies were just as reprehensible most of the time, but at least had many more layers of other corporate oversight constraining them to at least give appearances of professionalism and sincerely consider employee’s needs when designing policy.
It’s a quasar on a significantly smaller scale.
[citation needed]

Eliminating any motivation to perform well is of course going to discourage people who try harder for rewards. That’s basic economics.

Claiming that the top performers will continue to innovate and lead when they are compensated the same as the bare minimum clock punchers is extraordinary and requires evidence.

About the only place where unions are better (at least the salary negotiating US style ones) are jobs where innovation and efficiency are irrelevant.
> they’re all just temporarily embarrassed corporate execs

I've always found this condemnation odd given how often it's actually true.

If you break down salaries by demographics, one of the biggest correlations with salary is age. Senior positions pay more than junior ones. It's an extremely common career path to start off in an entry level job and ultimately end up in management by the end of your career.

So the reason people think they'll be making more money in ten years is that most of them will be. You may not be Warren Buffet but you could easily be the manager of your branch office and making two or three times your current entry-level compensation.
I have 28 days of holidays + national holidays in Italy, plus paid sick leave, plus 8 hour of permits a month, plus of course pension, which is a legal obligation.

And I'm thinking of leaving because as a new company in a larger group they still don't give us meal vouchers like the rest of the companies in the group.
The Use Method for analyzing the performance of any system
I can't help noticing that you addressed my first sentence but then ignored the very next one where I laid out a different point of view, opting instead to refute an argument that I never made.