skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's called "The Art..." for a reason, it should maybe called "The Black Art..." - robustness of the kind required for real world use by arbitrary punters is surprisingly hard to achieve, there are lots of tricks and traps that you need to become aware of.
Why Poetry Matters
I don't think anybody's arguing that we can just redistribute wealth to the degree that there's enough for everyone to do absolutely nothing and still enjoy high living standards (though folks like Buckminster Fuller make a case that this will grow increasingly possible, and the proverbial 15-hour, or less, workweek should be feasible while maintaining the same, even higher, output). But Andrew MCafee's (research scientist at MIT) recent book "More From Less" is a contemporary take on this idea.

The traditional GDP would shrink in the long-term, but the idea (drawing from Charles Eisenstein, Paul Mason, etc) is that gift economies and communities would grow to replace the goods & services we currently rely upon traditionally economic transactions for.

And you're right that policies trying to democratize abundance (unconditional affordances like UBI, healthcare, etc) would restructure the labor force. But David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs' is a strong case that the labor force needs restructuring anyway.

And it grows increasingly difficult to earnestly frame these abundance arguments as fanciful, wishful thinking, when some of the most reputable economists who've ever lived argued the same. Thinking of John Maynard Keynes, JK Galbraith, and so on. There's a serious economic discourse, and potentiality, around the idea of lessening the amount of necessary labor to negligible amounts in order to secure access to all one needs, leaving production and 'participation in the workforce' to be an increasingly voluntary decision, taken on because one wants to make something, rather than one needing the paycheck to continue living their lives.

What do you think? The idea of abundance doesn't seem like a hippie discourse anymore, especially in light of folks like Mcafee's work. Why do these ideas continue striking folks as wishful thinking?
Kotlin can generate both JVM bytecode and iOS binaries. I've successfully shared code between iOS and Android projects using Kotlin before. The overhead is quite low, and, all in all, I was quite satisfied with the results.

However, a lot of the tooling around this is experimental, so you might want to tread carefully here.
> Last year’s wildfires in California released as much carbon dioxide as is emitted in a year generating electricity in the state, according to the US Geological Survey.
Of course everyone wants the government involved until it affects their company.

More government involvement is seldom the right answer. It amazes me that even after we all witnessed the clusterf%%% of California trying to force Uber to treat drivers as employees — making it harder for people who wanted to be freelancers — that people still trust the competency of government.
> and thus not inherited trans-generationally

I'm not sure what you're referring to here? There appears to be quite a significant body of literature on epigenetic inheritance -- just to pick a few: [1,2,3,4]. The term "Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance" even has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_i...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1199_314

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg1834

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05917

[4] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2014.02.045
Firebird on the Road from v4 to v5
Ah, so he had it backwards :)
ok. But You haven't answered my questions.

Re that example, I was just using this famous tweet.

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

You don't get a job solving simple recursion problems. You have to solve hard leetcodes.
Show HN: Bricks – A New Visual Site Builder for WordPress Professionals
The Banality of Systemic Evil
Oh yeah, in industrial circles it's very well known. Just not in the public at large or pop culture.
> Why are we significantly less likely to have mutations on our mitochondria than in our fingers?

I’m afraid this is simply not a biologically meaningful statement to begin with. Mitochondria are subcellular organelles. Fingers are complex organs that are formed from spatial arrangements of multiple cell types. Furthermore, mutations happen on the level of DNA, not on the level of either organelles or organs.

Apart from that, mutation rate is (not quite, but more or less) uniform across the whole genome (the exceptions, due to e.g. GC bias, are not relevant here). Viable mutations are not uniformly distributed because of selection; that’s precisely the striking insight that Darwin had (though he was unaware of DNA and genes). Importantly, this does not require a guided error correction mechanism. Simply put, even slight variations in the oxidative phosphorylation pathway of the mitochondrion are likely to kill you during gestation; whereas similarly extreme variations in finger morphogenesis, at worst, make you unable to hold a tool.

> some subsystems are more stringently error corrected than others

This is virtually certainly not the case, because of what I’ve just described. Selection is sufficient to describe the outcome, and there is no evidence whatsoever to point to the mechanism you postulate.

> I would be incredibly surprised if a crocodile, who has been in a state of relative homeostasis for millions of years, has the same rate of mutation as a human.

Evolutionary mutation rate is governed by effective population size and generation time. That’s why fruit flies evolve fast and crocodiles evolve slowly. This, too, doesn’t require variable mutability of different traits, and no biologist has yet seriously suggested such a mechanism.
Actually I am always amused by their take on matters especially their headlines.
Show HN: The Weekly Digs – A Real Estate Newsletter Made by Scraping Websites
I think the buried and more convincing point in there is that Bezos and Amazon's continued expansion into new markets mean there's more and more industries that feel threatened by Amazon, and thus more worried about funneling them money through AWS.

If you're building out a new company right now and get to pick your cloud provider, how confident are you that in 5 years, Amazon won't be selling a competing product to yours? And if you're starting from nothing, why not just use GCP or Azure and avoid that risk?
>Steve saw the internet coming in 1985. Wow.

This will probably blow your mind:

https://youtu.be/Ao9X1GsUPys?t=125

1988 presentation where Alan Kay confidently predicts media-driven websites that became the norm only around 2010. He also talks about virtual reality and real-time 3d graphics.

We still haven't caught up with his vision for exploratory interactive computing and user-driven simulations.

The fact that computers can/will/should be networked and also used for interactive collaboration rather than just raw number crunching was evident to some people as far as 1962. Maybe even earlier.

http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/

Augmenting Human Intellect is not an easy read, but it is well worth it, and not just as a matter of historic curiosity.
Try this weekend: The Game of Carrom
hire entire teams whose only jobs were to write documentation

In contrast, I've always found Microsoft's documentation to be incredible.

I don't know how Apple and Google work, but as a long-time-ago MSFT employee, I can tell you it is because they have entire teams. Chain-of-command, senior-level, leads, managers (don't know if there's such a thing as User Ed VP/Director, though) the whole works, like Microsoft kinda took it seriously or something. Hence my ranking of docs:

1. Microsoft: could be better, but you're going to have an easy time finding worse. No, they're actually pretty damned good. When I worked there, for instance, there was a big push that example code will be secure. The mantra was "sample code becomes production code". APIs have close-to-real-world examples of usage. "Could be better"? Eh, I don't know what I'd improve, frankly.

2. Back before they got really big, I'd say about Apple's docs, "does the job; it's not Microsoft-quality, but they don't have Microsoft resources, now do they?" Umm, that's not true anymore, and I think the quality has gone down since.

3. Google: just use Stack Overflow. The docs are just going to frustrate you with their incompleteness and outdateness.
Absolutely they can be buried. They must be insulated, but that's not particularly expensive. There are thermal limits, as you mentioned, but that simply requires appropriate engineering.

It costs $1 million per mile (roughly) to bury transmission lines. PG&E has about 18,000 miles of transmission lines. That's about $18 billion to bury the lines. Sounds like a lot, but...

...the estimate price of these multi-day blackouts is on the order of $1 billion per blackout. Given multiple blackouts per year, and we're talking just a few years to pay back the price of burying the transmission lines. https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/A-cool-billion-...
Yes! sorry for the memory lapse.
And yet Netflix is AWS’s largest customer even though Amazon has Prime Video.

On another note, look how Apple both competes with Samsung and use Samsung parts for iPhones.

The industry is all about co- optition
"Think the ternary operator, but worse"

Giving the developer succinct ways to prevent program failure from unexpectedly undefined values is a feature.
Data Point of the Week: XR Execs Speak
Not sure how much the idea makes sense, but these days I feel that rather than education, looks, status, etc. being the rare and difficult-to-attain markers or benefits of being of a higher class, being a generally sane person with a coherent worldview and some degree of emotional control is.
I have an interesting side project where I scrape websites / APIs on a weekly basis. I then take this scraped information and form an aggregate-style newsletter about a subject I really enjoy (Real Estate and Property Management). Thought HN might find this interesting, thanks!
That's cute, but how long does it take to push that updated system out to your customers?
Yup.

Personally, I like the ternary operator, and I also like the nil-coalescing operator, but I'm quite aware that they can produce difficult-to-maintain code, so I'm careful with them. I have gone and done some silly stuff with both, but then, I realized that I was leaving unmaintainable code.

If you use godbolt.org, you can actually see what code is produced by the source.
It's certainly an interesting critique, but it also massively oversells itself and is totally lacking in self-awareness if you take it seriously.

Computing is absolutely full of widely deployed working technologies that enable people to get work done all day but that have rough edges. For every one of these, there is somebody saying that you should use <pet technology> instead. Usually with missionary levels of zeal. And yet at no point do they seriously address why people might have good reasons for adopting the allegedly inferior solution.
I've been using Svelte in production for over two and a half years. It's tough to go back to a fully-run-time framework after using Svelte.

So obviously the tiny amount of run-time code leads to better performance, but what surprised me was how much better the run-time debugging story is. If my code causes an error to be thrown inside the "framework" code, the stack is always very shallow, and it's easy to follow to figure out what's going on.

Compared to my experience with e.g. trying to trace through AngularJS's digest cycle, following what's going on "under the hood" at run-time is pretty delightful.
I'm not defending those types of interviews, because I'm not great at them, but it seems that they're looking for human algorithm machines. People who can go in and write very specific performant code. Maybe that's the requirement for the job as opposed to someone who can interface with businesses and do general enterprise software.
Websites can change content inside a selection
Weird how you can consider this a "clusterf%%%" as opposed to the existance of Uber itself: an unprofitable company that only barters for monopoly power while treating everyone down the chain like shit.

Not that I'm behind splitting up companies. Everything that turns into a monopoly should be nationalized instead.
Then what is the new Rails?
This is a good plan, probably a notch better than using UIDs. You can use UIDs as a cursor to the server as a hint to speed up the operation if that’s what you meant in the other thread, and that’s a great thing to do.
Here you can find published interactive map of Unicorn startup companies by country https://datamaps.world/projects/unicorn-startups.

Let me know if you would like to get trial access. I would be also glad to send a discount code for anyone interested.
That's probably part of it. Radiation is certainly a bit harder to detect with our human senses. Maybe if we put radiation detectors in every home and printed out XKCD dose effect charts people could make more risk-informed (as opposed to fear/uncertainty-informed) decisions.

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Keep in mind that normal fossil fueled power plants are killing about 4.2 million people per year via air pollution, which is also largely invisible. I don't quite understand why radiation killing up to 4000 freaks people out so much more vs. air pollution killing 4.2 million/year.

https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/
As CTO I looked at it as well. The product isn’t the issue. Well, let me fix that by saying if you don’t mind your all data being entirely entirely open to your cloud protection system and their partners and contractors in a way that is completely black box, there is nothing wrong with the product.

It’s the practices and their work with the FBI that came up from the 2016 election and their protection of the DNC when they were allegedly hacked by Russia, statements they made then retracted, and everything that has come since are the issues. Like I said, maybe nothing, but a lot of smoke. At the very least, I don’t want my infosec suite to have such a high profile for failure to protect incidents.

Too much for me and my company. We went a larger name alternative and deployed some more open and transparent solutions where we could. I’m expecting a rebrand of the CrowdStrike name sooner than later.
Apparently it functions a bit similar to the javascript || assignment.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2100758/javascript-or-va...
> Similarly, I can tell you that dealing with ill formatted feed data, parsing any given value can be trivial, until you find some random example of data that abuses some seperator. Then suddenly you need to do thing like try seperating on X and see if you get data that looks right, else seperate on Y.

Yes, if you accept complexity, this is where you end up. The other alternative is to reject complexity. Stop accepting and trying to make sense of broken data.

At this point, we get back to my point because you'll say that someone (a stakeholder) demands that the program works with existing legacy/broken/misguided systems/users. Sometimes that is genuinely the only reasonable option, but all too often I see people introducing more and more features and complexity instead of figuring out whether it's really necessary or whether the intended end result can be achieved with less.
I felt compelled to post this essay after reading the HN comments under ‘Silicon Valley,’ Darker Than Ever, Captures the Bleak Mood of Tech and after again receiving the customary negative votes for even suggesting SV culture is at least banally complicit in system evil.

Note the people whose photos illustrate the essay.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21374198#21374691
... and this is so wonderful! It's in no way worse than the ternary operator. You punt to a default value really easily, without having 20 lines of `if (a.this == null) a.this == 0; if(a.that == null)a.that == ""` or similar.

When constructing objects "in-line" in c# I actually used to see the ternary operator quite a lot, as in

new SomeClass() {
Val = valSource == null? SomeClass.DefaultVal : valSource
}

The coalesce operator is way better. Except it can't be used in LINQ projections.
I have personally found that sometimes writing out comments that explain how a confusing function is going to work will help me to understand the ins and outs and flow of the function before writing it, which will in turn help me to actually write the function, especially with algorithmic functions. Those comments might as well be written as long-standing documentation that doesn't change as long as the implementation/algorithm doesn't change. I know "comments lie" but if it's a long-lived implementation, it's more beneficial than not.
One of my proudest foreign-language speaking moments was playing, and winning, a game of Codenames in France, against native french speakers.

It was an amazing way to learn new vocabulary. If you haven't played, it's a 4x4 grid of words with 2 teams guessing which words belong to which team, giving additional words as clues.

After the board setup, the French players would explain the single, double, sometimes triple meanings of the words and I'd write them down into a notebook. Then, using a English-French dictionary I'd come up with clues that could fit. It worked surprisingly well, I think perhaps given the similarities between many English and French words. I wonder how it would work with a much more different language.
State of South Africa’s Software Developer Nation 2019
Why would a saas partner care so much if you're on aws?
Its really just two components

- Kaspersky Safe Kids - Does the actual locking/restrictions

- Custom Python Script - Communicates with Fitbit/leetcode/projecteuler/wechall and can update a the restrictions on the Kaspersky website.
Nowhere in the comments thus far has anyone pointed out that SwiftUI — the framework in TFA's crosshairs — is in beta. I've written a relatively large amount of SwiftUI code and I get the impression that the design is still in flux. There are corner cases (as well as much more mainstream one) that haven't been fully thought through. Beta 5 of Xcode 11 brought non-trivial changes to the API and I expect those to continue.

"It's not finished until it's documented" is a fine sentiment, but I don't think Apple has remotely claimed that SwiftUI is finished.
I wonder if you could then approach it from the other side. Product market fit is hard, sales is hard. If you can find sales in a niche, develop your product to fit that niche. Could there be a market for communication tools for the elderly? It's a high bar to make things easy to use, and a very high one to make it easy for the elderly.
The amount of pollution per person varies wildly. Some societies were perfectly sustainable.

Among the most capitalistic and consumerist societies (e.g. US) the pollution is staggering.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption
I recommend "Tartine Bread" as a supplement to that, specifically for making breads with wild yeast. The method in Flour Water Salt Yeast for starting and maintaining the culture seemed really finicky and intimidating when I first skimmed it. Reading the Tartine Bread book both gave me a better understanding of how it works, and is also a lot more relaxed about the process. Flour Water Salt Yeast is better for general breadmaking technique though.
It sounds like you are asking "is there an economy of scale?" to burying power lines. Or "is there a learning curve that will drive the costs down?", like for solar.

The answer seems to be 'no'. Digging and burying pipes is something we've been doing on a massive scale for hundreds of years and there's no reason to believe more volume will improve the economics. It's probably getting worse since new development means more roads to dig up and more structures to plan around.
But is Netflix an example of a company that's happy to be paying Amazon whatever they're paying them? I don't know the exact chronology, but I think Netflix pre-dates Amazon being in the Media business much, if at all?

Netflix also don't really have an option, outside of building their own cloud, since Microsoft and Google also have video streaming. It's a little different if you're a Sears or Walmart, and you're not directly competing with the other providers.

Same with Apple and Samsung. Sometimes you're stuck buying from competition because they're the only people making the thing you need. It doesn't mean you're happy about it or wouldn't jump ship if possible.
> I get the enthusiasm for functional programming and persistant structures, etc., but at the end of the day it's just an engineering approach. One of many, and there's room to do the work to choose between them.

I don't disagree with this but that's not what you said initially. You said "this is why FP sucks".

I definitely think that if your work is doing tight-loops where every micro-second matters, an imperative language will usually be the correct approach. I don't think anyone is (or would) argue against that point, including most Haskellers.

However, functional languages do simplify things with network/concurrent applications. There's a reason that something like MapReduce is popular. Something like Spark or Onyx is just simpler to do correctly and work with than trying to achieve something equivalent using C or C++; maybe this is just me.

EDIT: My bad, I was responding to the wrong person, this person never said FP sucks. I apologize!
Show HN: Size of Space – An interactive universe scale comparison
I hosted Home Assistant on a Pi2+ at first, and then Pi3 for a long time. Eventually I wanted to use the Pi3 for something slightly different and had a low-powered home server at that point so I migrated to that. It's basically just running on a Ubuntu box that I use for NAS and workstation stuff now.

As for Doorbell, it's pretty much like this: https://partofthething.com/thoughts/making-my-analog-doorbel...
I wonder if there is a wargaming app where I could find out whether the Royal Navy of 1918 would win against the Royal Navy of a century later? ;-)

Edit: Of course it would lose, I had forgotten about submarines!
Woz documented every line of his Apple ][ system monitor code and it was a joy to read.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information. Naval warfare has had more changes in the past 100 years then nearly any other point history. Like 100 years ago they didn't have aircraft carriers, the keel of the first one was laid 1924, and it wouldn't be until near the end of the Pacific theater that the supremacy of the carrier group was proven.

Like, your whole argument is equally applicable to torpedoes, except those are even harder to hit.
It is far from safe. People have accidentally gotten water on the glass window of the oven door and had it shatter on them.

Many people, myself included, use a Dutch oven like the Lodge combo cooker. The bread bakes in a small enclosed space and the water given off during the bake is sufficient to steam the space within. That and you get a very even heat from all directions.
I suspect, from what I've read of his early life, that he is a flow addict and runs his companies to force employees into flow as well. 'Impossible' deadlines are an easy way to hack a team's flow, see e.g. the games industry.
I disagree. It's one way for the interviewee to reiterate back to the interviewer that they understand the problem and constraints.
I don't think there's anything in the nature of C per se that's required for Windows. Any reasonably low-level compiled language would have done the same job; Pascal is potentially the nearest substitute. Windows had to construct its own executable and library formats anyway.
On a related note: I've noticed that ffmpeg supports the BCSTM format, which has built-in loop points (unsurprisingly, since it's used for video game music). ffmpeg decodes and stores that information. mpv however doesn't take advantage of that. That's mildly unfortunate.
Sun Belt Cities Are Dangerous Places to Walk