skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've come to the realization that planetary colonization is sort of a dangerous and anesthetizing science fiction fantasy. It allows us to mentally defer our reckoning of the finite nature of our planet and its resources.
With all due respect, the fact that you have doesn't remotly imply that any remote developer is doomed to fail.
>Either way, if the number of idiosyncracies in your language is confusing to junior developers it's absolutely something worth considering.

Why? Aiming for the lowest common denominators and the simplest systems tends to not create scalable long term solutions.

You also seem to really undercount what a properly trained junior developer is capable of understanding.
The key is regulation, we have privatised utilities in the UK and although they aren’t perfect they appear to be much better than what Californians are putting up with. Before they were privatised they suffered from terrible under investment as every right wing government would squeeze their finances.
> I guess I just didn't realize how bad a programmer knowing (only/mainly) JavaScript causes you to be.

Hey now - not all of us ECMA devs are total crap, but, I guess I know a fair bit of other languages. This guy is just totally ... I have words for it but I'd rather not get the mods on me.

I struggled with an appropriate way to say this but I think he's super pretentious and just sounds frustrated with learning a new language. I mean, we've all been there but typically we don't post ignorant BS to HN/GitHub about it... Every time I jump into a new language I'm always stubbing my toes on things I find "awkward", only to learn later that there's usually a reason people design languages certain ways.

If he wants to shoot his social media reputation in the foot as a developer then so be it I guess =/
Yeah, being able to run uBlock Origin is one of the main reasons I don't want apps opening links in anything but my main Firefox install.
>Is someone really advocating for destroying Earth and moving lightyears away? I've honestly never heard this idea spoken or written down seriously - surely this is the realm of fantasy and science fiction?

It's part of the "californian ideology" thing (developing from "technological utopianism").

Not suggesting we destroy Earth, but, "well, destroying it isn't that bad, surely technology will (handwaving) get us to another planets, it's (handwaving) inevitable that man will colonize the universe".
If I were 15 nowadays, I'd be getting so many people banned, lol.

I can't comprehend how SE can be so ignorant.
Yes. Because python is a programming language.
it's important to be precise: he is not the world champion. "world record holder" means something different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_World_Athletics_Champions...
I hate python, but it is still invaluable to me for its ability to let me get shit done. Getting meaningful data from a 100mb CSV? No problems. Everything I need can be found in the STDlib.

From my main perspective (scheme programmer): I am constantly amazed by the bad code python programmers write in scheme. Take a nice recursive function, sprinkle it with set! (which leads to boxing and general slowness in many implementations) and if that wasn't slow enough for you, wrap it in a call/cc to be able to return from arbitrary places in the function. As a bonus, forget to discard the captured continuation to make your program use insane amounts of memory.

Then proceed to complain on Reddit.
Not really, there are some pretty hard limits on interstellar travel and humans don't seem particularly suited to the task either in lifespan, general durability and ability to deal with boredom.

I like SF quite a bit but I'm well aware of what the 'F' stands for.
Or it would be like the Puritan settlements in the New World - a totalitarian state, sure, but one that shares that fetish/deviant lifestyle/whatever of yours.
I keep saying this - a colony on the bottom of the ocean would be absolutely invulnerable to almost any catastrophe, maybe except a direct asteroid impact. The surface could be engulfed in nuclear fire or wiped by a comet, and nothing will happen to a colony few kilometers below the ocean surface. But of course like you said - it's not as sexy as talking about space exploration.
Yeah, but I can't slip the computer a bribe to make the problem go away.
Ok, we'll s/other /exo/ the above. Note that space.
dic = {k: v for k, v in dic.items() if k in other_dic and v == "bar"}

How could that be improved? That's 3-4 LOC minimum in any other language

My main grip is python's ternary operators, since the True value is evaluated before the condition, if you are doing ternaries on things that might throw exceptions the False value has to come first

value = 0 if key not in dic else dic[key] * 5

rather than (throws indexerror if key isn't in dic)

value = dic[key] * 5 if key in dic else 0
Private companies electrified the US. This model was pioneered by Samuel Insull.

https://www.masterresource.org/insull-samuel/insull-rural-el...

FDR didn't like competition for attention, and hounded Insull in court for years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Function_Call_Syntax

Called uniform function call syntax, an I idea I first saw in Nim and found really cool, but then found really dumb. Can't remember the reasoning for both opinions, which is a strong indicator of "probably doesn't matter".

For a while I was entertaining a thought regarding mutability and returning copy's. Like foo.bar() would mutate, bar(foo) return a modified copy. Don't know if that concept has a name or if it actually makes sense at all.
Check out the 2nd to last line of that post. They make the same statement in doc. Lots of services are getting VPC endpoints so traffic never has to hit the public web, but firehouse isn’t one of them(yet).
We've changed the headline to clarify that.
The biggest beefs I have with Python are inconsistent syntax and dynamic typing. But I've basically decided that dynamic types are a waste of time for me personally, so I'm not really the target audience anyways.
There’s gonna be a whole lot of unhappy Quickbooks users out there. There’s something special about accounting software that makes people reluctant to upgrade, and Intuit certainly hasn’t helped by making the process difficult, confusing and expensive.
There’s plenty to criticize Python about relating to performance and developer operations (pypi, virtualenvs, cumbersome version juggling), but most of these language features mentioned have a valid need to exist, or are purely stylistic, and therefore not admissible to the “not a great programming language” debate imo.
That explains why humans want to live on Mars, certainly. But "we really want to" is not, on its own, a compelling reason to spend billions of dollars.
I haven't noticed that with computer vision papers, maybe it depends on the field? There is sometimes difficult to understand jargon but it's generally not gratuitous.
Not trusting them is reasonable, but then where does that leave you? You don't know then whether they're underestimating or overestimating things. I'm strongly in favor of building a prior from the geological record and leaning on that as much or more than the models, but that doesn't lead to a very different conclusion.
Really? I thought they were 21 days for literally everybody. What did you get?
> "These planets are much, much too far away. Even in the very optimistic case of a livable planet that is not too far, say a few dozen light years...We are talking about hundreds of millions of days using the means we have available today. We must take care of our planet, it is very beautiful and still absolutely liveable."

That's actually a good point and one I hadn't really thought about.

The only way I can think of for humanity to get to these other planets would be to build a network of self sustaining space station colonies. And if we can do that we don't really need planets any more.
> ... When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Plenty of distinguished but elderly scientists have said that the existence of ghosts is impossible. Therefore, in the view of people who quote Clarke's First Law, ghosts probably exist.

tl;dr As Voltaire said "A witty saying proves nothing."

(Aside from that, didn't we already discuss this not long ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207011 ?)
List comprehensions are one of those abuse subject features (like most things) where light simple use is fantastic but some people just take it too far into unreadable nastiness.
There is plenty of money for marketing. Research is a distant second as you probably well know given your nickname and if someone put their study on hold for a half decade or so just to make sure that the software they use is properly put together the funding would evaporate rapidly for that particular team or individual.
I know a company, they have a floor filled with developers who think that Python is the best thing since sliced bread and any other language is abomination
By "Failed to account for that" I mean that they failed to consider how much software has been produced outside their control, so they should have been more considerate with the timeline for dropping compatibility. And there's plenty, plenty more stuff outside these 235 apps - sometimes new versions are expensive and do nothing new or useful for most users.

Here we are talking about dropping application that the CPU is still fully capable of running. There's no silicon advantage like on the latest iPhones. There's no big performance penalty running an emulated app, which would quickly drive people to use something native. There's no Moore's law obsoleting your current platform nearly as quickly as it once happened.

Apple has, in the past, treated people better when changing architecture that it just did with this thing, where the architecture stayed the same.

Edit: To the long list of past architectures Apple has dropped, maybe the root of the problem would be that I (mistakenly, maybe) do not consider 32-bit as past. I consider it still somewhat current, so seeing it dropped like this is less acceptable.
Also, if some distant planet is capable of supporting life, it almost certainly is supporting life, and that life may not be compatible with ours, requiring the extermination of either us or them.

Models that claim life is so rare as to be impossible are obviously speculative, and more reasonably deemed wrong.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

For example, instead of putting someone's article down as sophomoric, you could explain what's different and possibly better about Haskell list comprehensions.
FYI, you can report non-working sites to https://webcompat.com
They're regulated in such a way that they basically print money, in certain circumstances. I do agree though, power companies should not be publicly operated at this point in time. It might have made sense when electricity being delivered to homes and businesses was a new and somewhat optional concept, but we've reached a point where it's exceedingly rare to _not_ have electricity available at all times. I believe PG&E is essentially telling the state of California, "So, you're going to sue us for billions of dollars because of wildfires you think our transformers caused? I guess we'll have to retalia...er, shut off the power sometimes in order to prevent fires."
Gates probably needed something else from Epstein, likely having to do with his ties to intelligence agencies.
Most popular programming languages got popular by aiming for the LCD in some capacity, e.g. Java. It's the reason why we're not all writing LISP or Haskell.
Not workable. But the source should be placed in escrow that releases it once the program is no longer supported.
Putting power lines underground is very expensive - meaning, very nearly prohibitively so. Or actually prohibitively so when you consider that PG&E has to serve vast areas of wilderness in California.

Paradise (Camp fire) was sufficiently west that I think its own power lines did not travel through Natl Forest however if I'm not mistaken it was hit by fire from the east (pushed by a wind out of the east), further up into the Sierra, and almost certainly there power lines were in the wilderness.
> It's going to happen simply because people want it to happen.

This sounds a lot like the religious arguments for supernatural healing, just have to believe and try.

Human willpower is limited by the laws of physics. Barring some fundamental breakthroughs in resource utilization, like cold fusion, I don't see it happening--no matter the desire to do so. And if the cost is making Earth uninhabitable then it'd a be foolish to pursue blindly.
Honestly curious, why clickbait?
> It's super hard compared to fixing Planet Earth.

I don't think that's true. Most of Earth's problems are political, with humans in charge exercising their power on purpose to make pollution on Earth worse. On Earth you are fighting against rich and powerful people who want the pollution to get worse (because it temporarily 'enriches' them, ugh). This is happening at an accelerating rate.

There is no such challenge on Mars to overcome. Nobody is arguing (with any power) that we should not terraform Mars, but even the US President thinks that Earthly climate change is a 'hoax' invented by the Chinese to specifically harm America. THAT is what prevents progress here, not technological development.

We have technology to 'fix' Earth today and to 'terraform' Mars soon. The main issue on Earth is that the people with the power to do something good are choosing to bad instead.
Too bad you can not use it to write those libraries ;)
there is an organization called Software Carpentry that is basically like this.

however, the real problem has more to do with incentives and funding than it does knowledge of software best practices. right now, if you take the time to write thoroughly-tested clean good code, all you're doing is handicapping your research career against people who can churn out papers faster than you. you can see this because code from computer science departments is nearly as bad as in other fields, even from students who have had real industry jobs and learned how to do the right thing.

it does seem like in this case, though, because the scripts were actually intended as a tool to be used by others, the investment in more careful testing might have been warranted.
> This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which can run decades old games fine.

But this has happened before. Pretty much every pre-2007 Mac game stopped working in 2012 after they removed Rosetta, their PPC emulator.

And 64-bit Intel has been available since Leopard, released in 2007. So that leaves a tiny window of 32-bit only releases.

On the other hand, the removal of OpenGL, if/when that ever happens, might have worse consequences.
I'm spending the weekend making a set of custom sleeved PSU cables - I'm in the middle of a crunch at work and writing code is the last thing I want to do ... so instead I'm doing something that's monotonous, but relaxing because of it. Don't need to engage higher brain functions, just cut, crimp, cut, melt, crimp, into the connector, next.

Whilst I do extoll the virtues of working on "passion projects" with programming, sometimes you need to do something else so that you can go back recharged, and that's OK too.
Yes, exactly. It points out phrases like "frequent and productive collaboration with," which would be better as "worked with," or "highly efficient execution," which could be simplified to "fast."
True this. Autofilling just doesn't not work at all in Firefox for me. Chrome's was great.
In the era that python was created in, autoformatters were not a thing and I appreciated the forced indentation. Nowadays with autoformatters being standard, the downsides of semantic white space is not worth it.
The MS Edge one is offered by "Nik Rolls" and not "Raymond Hill (gorhill)" like the one on the Chrome Web Store and Mozilla AMO. I'm guessing they're not the same person so why should I trust this extension instead?
It would be easier to change humans to be something that could live comfortably on Mars than it would be to make Mars that is comfortable for humans. If Mars is ever really permanently colonized it won't be by "us" as we are now, but maybe something like us.

In a similar way I could see something we make traveling out of the solar system, maybe we could even seed life. But it would be something different than us.
This is the same company that operates the android 'Play Store', host to half a million spyware "flashlight" apps.

I find it hard to take their expressed concern for my security seriously.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

Mayor’s claim doesn’t seem any more credible than Watson’s. Mayor might wind up being right, but not due to any deeper insight. It will happen, or it won’t. My opinion is we will do it as long as we don’t destroy ourselves first.

He’s also conflating the migration with protecting the earth. I don’t think there are very many credible people saying we should protect the planet as we can migrate to an exoplanet.

Protecting the planet is worthwhile, regardless of whether we can flee it.
In sci-fi, the next step is usually to move to living on a dyson swarm harvesting the sun's energy first. Not another planet or different solar system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A
> This is all true BUT I think the monorepo as described here is the act of treating all your projects as directly referencing each other.

From what I read that is a correct assessment. What the OP is proposing is something of a strawman argument. No advocate of monorepos I've ever met believe that a monorepo should imply a monolith.

Generally they're advocating monorepos in order to develop microservices faster, and with less effort. Using a monorepo and the associated tooling side steps the pain that comes from complicated CI, the difficulty of sharing code, the difficulties of non-atomic cross-repo reviews, and the difficulties of making multi-app refactorings.
The conviction was for solicitation of an underaged prostitute.
There are plenty of things about Python that are not good, and only two are touched on in this list (the cumbersome double-underscore syntax and "magic methods" in general, although the author clearly has experienced python mainly through Django, which has other problems). The rest read like someone who doesn't really know the language that well and hasn't a lot of experience in general.
Not everything needs to be political. Nitpicking people's speech is not a viable way to push your agenda; it will only turn people off of it.
> a colony on the bottom of the ocean would be absolutely invulnerable to almost any catastrophe, maybe except a direct asteroid impact.

Any NATURAL catastrophe. As soon as someone knows you're there (and they will, because building things like that is both literally and metaphorically noisy), and that you have food and shelter while they don't... Well, your invulnerability is going to be put to the test.
This really rings true for me. I've also found that looking for several "known" properties within a complex model's behavior to be an effective way of rooting out subtle bugs. If the model isn't keying in on the obvious, it hardly has a chance of keying in on subtle unknown relationships. I've even gone so far as to optimize hyperparameters based off context specific properties, e.g., hunting for the model that has the most coherent output behavior with regard to a range of inputs (assuming that outputs are expected to have continuous behavior).

https://sproutling.ai/blog/harvest-simulations?jm

https://sproutling.ai/blog/growth-simulations?jm
It is not so much about being "public utility", it is about competition, if you can't have competition there is no point giving the rights to some private company which acts like a monopoly. Transportation is also public utility and yet it makes sense to have different taxi companies or airlines.

The interesting question is when you got something that you can't compete with directly like a train line but can compete using other methods like buses or airlines. In that case there might be more incentive to a train line operator to give a good service because of the competition.
If you could get a build deployed to AltStore (https://altstore.io) that would be amazing.
I agree. Dallas has this problem. It basically took a girl dying in a gas explosion for the lines to be repaired: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/courts/2019/05/30/atmos-sett...

Just a line item...
> Terraforming Mars is quick and easy ...

Ahhhhhh.....

> ... compared to flying to a more habitable planet.

Ah, OK, right, agreed completely. Very good point.

And both are wildly misrepresented as to their difficulty.

Terraforming Mars is how many times more difficult than not destroying Terra? Billion? Trillion? Exillion?

"It's OK for us to destroy Terra, we can "simply" find another planet to live on and if not we'll simply Terraform a planet that is uninhabitable."

That's the philosophy this Laureate is speaking against, and it's clearly a delusional philosophy held by millions including the shyster sociopath Elon Musk and every last one of the fanatical devotees of his deranged and unscientific cult.

How can anyone believe they are going to travel vast distances to some hostile alien planet carrying a minimalist cargo to not just reboot civilization but terraform the planet to begin with, and succeed, when they have no ability to survive on a planet that in every way is completely dedicated and attuned to the optimal survival of their kind? What hubris and madness in such a belief. Comparably one might find they are incapable of living on a tropical island with fertile fruit trees and abundant fish and announce that they intend to move to Antarctica and transform it into a tropical paradise using vines and coconuts lashed together on a raft. It's utterly delusional. Believers in the madness should be committed to asylums for the insane, if they can take a moment away from their busy schedule of gulping down drugs and accusing cave rescuers in Thailand of being pedophiles.
> A quick glance at the documentation didn't mention it

What do you mean? It is the very first sentence of the documentation: "results are returned in arbitrary order"

https://docs.python.org/2/library/glob.html
PS: Another very important thing is that when you talk with an artisan to make your pieces it is craftsmanship.

You need to explain to the artisan what you need done. This person has to understand you. This take time and money.

The effort I make explaining what I need to an artisan is completely lost if I change the artisan.

With a 3D printer, you create a design that is a product in itself. It can be repeated ad infinitum. The work I do today improving the design is work I will not have to do tomorrow.

I routinely send designs to people living 2000 miles away. They print it and can play with it the same day.
Samsung and every other vendor outside of China have announced lower sales as people keep their phones longer.

While everyone admits that Mac keyboards are horrible, Mac sales are so small compared to everything else Apple sells, it doesn’t really hurt their bottom line

both of my roommates who have iPhone Xs are thinking about switching to Android after being plagued with constant hardware and software issues.

Anecdote is not data.

It does not sound like you have any legitimate information about how Windows compatability increases vulnerabilites beyond vague statements.

Let me tell you a little story about how the half dozen different ways to represent and encode a string in Windows led to a security issue in IIS where you could just encode a DOS command in a browser window and have it execute remotely....

https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/threats/paper/...

Or a DCOM vulnerability in 2019. No one uses DCOM anymore.

https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2003-0352/