skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have so much to agree. There is a reason, why still a lot of software is implemented in C. There are historic reasons of course, but also, because C is just powerful enough to do so, and that gives you a small language, which removes a lot of complexity. Of course, in the case of C, this comes along with the warts of lacking memory safety and limited type safety, which are responsible for a lot of bugs. Other languages like Pascal and Modula-2 did improve a lot in these respects. Yet, all of those languages remain simple.

That is the reason, I like Go so much. It is still a very simple language, but improves in the key parts of memory safety, having a GC, better type checking, and a few high level constructs, most of all having first class functions and closures. These enable many of the features of "higher" programming languages. You can do mapping functions over lists in Go quite fine.
Well, in western world, you’ve got CSI and all cop’s show that sell you the same.

« Bad guys always caught, police can know whatever you’ve done »

I’ve always (and that’s not ranting. I really have) wondered if it was on purpose.
Sorry, who's 'we'?
I was already achieving that around 2008 by having each team responsible for their modules, delivered over Maven, or on the late 90's by having each team responsible for their COM modules.

No need to over-engineering modularity with distributed systems algorithms into the mix.
I think its important to undrstand that we are the resources. Oil was useless before we found ways to get it up from the underground and refine it to energy and the thousands of products we use in modern society, coal was useless before we found ways to turn it into energy, concrete etc, uranium was useless before we found ways to use it, stainless steel and i could go on.
I like the elegance of this idea.
I'm impressed by how well this complicated page renders without javascript.
I very vaguely remember a story, (though I can't remember which company, but since it's probably corporate propaganda that's fine anyway).

The story goes that you have a company with lots of industrial manufacturing facilities distributed across the country. In one of them there is an accident which leads to the death of workers.

As soon as possible, the big boss at the main office orders the plant manager to fly over and when the manager enters the office, the boss asks "Why did you kill these men?" The manager is flusters and protests they did everything they could, was not to blame, etc. etc.

I don't know if the manager was fired or demoted, but if he wasn't that sends a message through the organization that you can fk up or be negligent and still keep your job.

Anyway, the point is that all of this is a top down corporate culture problem. If the highest level doesn't understand that they are responsible for this, and if they don't enforce a culture of responsibility all the way down the line, then you will get outcomes like at France Télécom or much worse a culture like at Union Carbide that lead to the Bhopal disaster.

Looking at the Bhopal disaster I guess you could say it's also an external accountability problem. If there's not some external entity like a government to hold the company and executives liable, or an insurance company that makes them pay through the nose if they are negligent, then the quarterly earnings cycle will lead to increased risk for employees.

Insurance premiums are perhaps a more practical way to set the right incentives, as they give much more immediate feedback than intermittent disasters. If executives can point to safety measures they have taken and the reduction in premiums that were enabled by that, then perhaps even the most narrow-mindedly short term profit seeking execs/board members/shareholders will do what is right for the safety of employees.
Not working for me either right now. There was a game like this before, something like minefield.net, but it eventually disappeared. Played it every now and then with a couple colleagues during lunch break.
another cyclical influence is scheme trying to reimplement the actor model in a lisp/lambda clothing.
If you're logged into reddit you can just set old reddit in your account's preferences.

If you're not logged in you're only seeing the cesspool of default reddits... I would recommend avoiding that
Sure, but what's next. Are you gonna do something about the other factors? Are you saying that because of the other factors we shouldn't do anything?

This is the same trick that non-feminist MRAs try to pull when they talk about men being raped as well whenever women being raped comes up. Most don't care about the men being raped and won't really care about asking the question "and how do we stop that from happening", they just want to stop the conversation. Fuck no, if you want to comment on serious issues, comment constructively (on the bushfires example "it's also caused by XXX so we should do less of that/fix that" would be reasonable to ask for, then we can talk about prioritising this over fighting climate change)
I dont think there is a single scientifically demonstrated consequence of the climate changing we dont know how to deal with today.
Don't get me wrong I think this is an impressive feat and I am always impressed to see universities pull off these kinds of complex system and control projects. Yet, there are a few things that I would like to mention.

The article says that the car does "doughnuts with inhuman precision" and they want to develop vehicles that can handle "emergency maneuvers or slippery surfaces like ice or snow". In this context, I feel this demo falls a bit short. The car can drive with superhuman precision, but it also gets superhuman capabilities like inch-precision localization (and an IMU is my guess) or superhuman steering wheel turning speeds. And the vehicle is heavily modified for this specific use-case. Drifting looks stable in the video but I really cannot judge how much easier it is with this car than a normal car. In addition, the asphalt also looks fresh and clean. I would like to see what happens if it suddenly encounters wet surfaces (or ice).

edit: typos
The website only works in Chrome or Opera at the moment - this may be what is causing you problems. Potentially yes - we are starting with Mandarin because it's such a popular language to learn. What other languages would you like to see?
Modular programming as well.
> I think china views the concept of separation of companies, the government, and the military as a western notion.

"China" views it that way. All 1.4 billion chinese do?

> The ecosystem is fundamentally different from in the US

This is simply not true. The history of US began as a government created to protect US business interests. The first major act of congress was a tariff to protect american companies. Every war we fought against the native americans, chinese, middle easterners, south americans, mexicans, etc were to further the interests of US companies. Whether you are talking about railroad companies in the 1800s or US oil companies in the 20th century. Maybe you might want to read up on where the term banana republics came from?

> and western observers dont seem to be aware of this.

Actually western observers are aware of it because it was the "west" which helped china industrialize. Do you want to know what country china modeled itself after to modernize its economy? The 1800s US. Which is the modeled followed by south korea, japan and taiwan as well.

Pretty much every major world economy works the same exact way - collusion between state + companies + military.

The only difference between US and china is that the US is the inheritor of the european colonial word order and hence is leading the "western/white" bloc. China has no bloc ( at least yet ) so is going alone at it.

The separation of companies, government and military is a western notion - one that no western power practices. Which wasn't lost on the chinese, south koreans, japanese, taiwanese, etc.
> So I may have such a strong opinion on the GDPR because I live in Germany.

Those C&Ds are pretty insane: I heard about them before, what are they for? In NL we had, for a little bit, lawyers who searched out illegal photograph usage and tried those letters. But according to Dutch law, I can remove the picture (we had a large image site) and that's it. So they made $0 of us, not did the lawyers. Is it something similar?
There is no reason to suppose that the mass migrations will not lead to global thermonuclear war. We are already witnessing a rise of fascism in response to the barest beginning of that migration. Fascism always ends in genocide and war.
Ask HN: Product Manager Training
I’m a developer looking to make the move into a product role.

I would like to take a break from work and do some training to prove my interest and gain some credibility with employers.

Are there “bootcamp” style courses for product roles? If you’re a hiring manager, do you pay attention to things like this?

I’m UK based but could potentially travel anywhere for training.

Any personal experiences or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
The Technological Society (La Technique) by Jacques Ellul
There still is no crisis and nothing scientifically demonstrated with regards to the climate we cant handle.
Good question, and this rule is meant to be bent in those scenarios. I try to avoid these dependencies if at all possible, but if not possible, the "writes" for those modules all belong to a single service, and any other service, depending on how "pure" I need to be in the project, will make network calls to the other service, or just grab that data directly from the database.

For a more concrete example, I recently built a service ("scraper") that scraped data and upserted a large tree of structured data to postgres in a transaction. Writes were only allowed from scraper, but "api" could SELECT data for reporting to the frontend "web" as much as it wanted. In the future, "api" might make be refactored to make internal HTTP request to "scraper," so they could have totally separate databases.
That's not true. NIC queues and CPUs are still very important to get good performance on servers by pinning different queues to different cores.
Much more than money? 80% of your reasons are about money. :) /All but the last one./
Desktop cores are tiny today in comparison to all other useless stuff put on die like "AI" accelerators and such.

That is even worse in mobile chips. All people call Intel cores to be oversized, but they need to look at up to date die shots. All cores combined can be less than a half of the die area.
Humanity will not, like so many species, go extinct, but the radical population decline will not be comfortable, particularly for those who starve.
"Alternate routes" are still normal roads people travel on. Since the travel time of a path is just the sum of the travel time of all path segments you only need people traveling every road to estimate the total time of any path. Path finding is well understood with many algorithmic solutions, so there is no reason to use machine learning.

Google's implementation is impressive, but I see no reason why it would benefit from people traveling suboptimal paths.
>I’ve always (and that’s not ranting. I really have) wondered if it was on purpose.

Of course it's on purpose. No one would watch a police procedural drama where the police always lost, were inept, or only won their cases due to corruption or malfeasance, or where the criminals were never caught and cases never resolved. Showing the heroes defeating the villains isn't propaganda, it's just good storytelling.
I didn't expect $11 to be sustainable for pinboard either but as I hoped idlewords used the initial revenue and/or attention to bootstrap other recurring incomes.

I get to keep my old account the way it was but if I decide to upgrade I have to pay which is reasonable since the service has been upgraded significantly.
I would say it is a clear case of false advertising.

If it's bad business to honor their own promises that's the company's own problem.
I inherited a few python/django servers. One of these has workers that grow to about 1Gb over time, even though they retain absolutely no data in core (or shouldn't). The same server is used to collect data, convert things and analyze the data. Especially the latter can take a bit of time, which means that there is a problem when more than two people try it at the same time, since it severely hinders the other tasks.

I'm now converting one server to Go (although not the heavy one), and it really runs fast and uses much, much less memory. It also starts in in less than 1s, whereas the django application takes 5 minutes, because of some stupid problem in static file collection.

Python is fine as a teaching tool, to prototype in, and to use in notebooks as a wrapper around numpy, scipy, etc., but not to run in production.
The page isn’t loading at all for me
In what situation do you need to saturate your network pipes with cryptographically secure random data?
Get a blog, mate.
"Placardisation" is totally a thing. Contrary to anglo-saxon culture, to this day, failure is not an option for French management. And having to fire someone is failure. So the alternative is often harrasment.
Something this article completely misses: double-clicking. I don't know how many bugs I've fixed over the years that were simply caused by double-clicking even though every single developer around me didn't believe that could be the cause.

Older people double click on things, even though my sample size is small, it's 100% of them. My Grandma, the owner of a startup I used to work at, my Grandma's friends, etc...
Anyone complains they can just say "Ok Boomer".
No. No more than electricity is turing complete.
This used to exist, and was even fairly common, in many countries. Moreover it was brought to your door by the milkman. And that milkman sometimes also had eggs and even vegetables from local farmers. This disappeared, driven by economics/capitalism/'supermarket=freedom'/..., not because it's bad per se. In fact there's quite some benefits to that whole system from an ecological point of view.

Which leads to sort of funny situations: locally it's been about 20 years since the milkman made his last round. Now there's again a company starting to do a similar thing (bring bottled milk/juice, local farmer's products to your door weekly) and some people who don't know better consider it revolutionary, and the poor company can't keep up with demand :)
> Partially Encrypted Deep Learning using Functional Encryption

I don't agree about this one. It does seem fundamental science to me.
"Twelve years" is like every idiot cliffhanger movie, where the bomb is defused with two seconds to spare, and everything is suddenly fine again. Things will get continuously worse, and continue worsening long after the twelve years, even if we manage to do enough by then for civilization not to collapse.

There is little point in setting up to grow vegetables when civilization collapses and roving bands of armed thugs raid anyone who seems to have anything they want.

We will either avert disaster together, as a global society, or not at all. Growing vegetables is not a response. Do it anyway, if you like, just don't fool yourself that it improves your or anybody's chances.
No. None of these have to do with money.

A license expires and I am at the sellers mercy whether I am allowed to get it extended. If it were libre I could instead find someone else to give my money to and keep using it.

I want to use my software for something else. Again, I can try offering the company money to allow me to, but if they say no I am out of luck. Instead I can pay whoever I like to implement the necessary changes for me.

Crippled functionality. Again, I can pay someone else to uncripple it and the original manufacturer has to compete with the uncrippled version.

Moving software. That is admittedly only about licensing and kinda unrelated, but similar to the first one.

It is nice that libre software often also is gratis but that is just a nice bonus.
In Germany, this used to be quite a lucrative business model for lawyers, and it was insane indeed! It got a little less profitable when the government put a cap on the fees, but I am afraid it it still a thing. Dutch law sounds much more reasonable!
What did she complain about ?
Democracy isn't dead because it got defunded.

> Usually you take the good with the bad and vote for the candidate that agrees with you on the issues that you care about the most, or the one that seems more reasonable overall.

How is that working out in the US?

I don't want to make an analysis of what's wrong or right in american politics. If someone got elected with the message they will burn down the house and everything and he doesn't care... I hope you read this message that after this presidency, you cannot go back to business as usual.

Even if "you" win in the next election, it's going to be more brutal in the election after that one. The EU countries know this and are already planning for an exit of the US on the global stage.
What about writing modular libraries then?
Lack of a built-in integer type makes it clear that measurements are inaccurate, so there's a good reason for using JS in that domain :)
Can I ask briefly what kept you spending such a significant portion of your day working for such an employer? Is this is in the US or somewhere else where maybe there is a forced work period? In the US at least your employer generally cannot force you to keep working for them but I know other places in the mideast etc they can.
I completely agree. I have been on ICCV this year (only 7500 participants) and found it really difficult to find people who I would like to talk to (e.g. because they had a nice presentation). The number of submissions has doubled since the last time (two years ago) [0]. It is just a constant overflow of information and the conference (including workshops, which were pretty good) lasted seven days.
I think these ML/DL conferences need to be split up and specialize more to manage the interest.

[0] https://github.com/hoya012/ICCV-2019-Paper-Statistics
>Also, this has nothing to do with decompression sickness (aka 'the bends'). That is to do with dissolved gases in the blood which turn into bubbles when the pressure is lowered.

Dissolved gases dropping out of solution and forming bubbles is literally decompression sickness.
Can we use a Mastodon instance as a containment unit? /s

It really looks like the attempts at censorship have failed, and it doesn't look like it's working against disinformation. In fact, these people might (and probably do) feel that because they are being censored, they are actually right but the real conspirers are trying to suppress the truth.
Delphi, Ada, .NET Native, OCaml.
FBI program helps companies fool hackers with decoy data
I've been thinking about this for some time. What if:

- we vote on topics instead of for parties
- party affiliation ceases to exist at the national level (might still be useful for city counsils)
- we vote for representatives standing for specific topics & solutions. After elections those representatives form working groups

What this would avoid:
- huge senates voting on topics they're unequipped to understand
- voting the party line

Obviously establishing such a system would require a massive overhaul of our governments, but I'd like to think there's something better than the currently existing democratic systems.
It's there any way to read it from a phone? It's 5:04am and I don't want to open a laptop just for reading it...
Lifetime licenses are the pyramid scheme of software sales; it’s not a sustainable model and generally they’re offered for the lifetime of the product, not the purchaser.
You're right - I updated the title. Thanks
Sure they could've communicated better/found better ways to raise money. Someone needs to host the servers and if they aren't making enough to support it then you (the consumer) lose the app's services. What is lifetime license worth then?

They've probably spend enough of their own money supporting it already that it came to this (Wish businesses were more transparent about it). Startups and small companies are hard things to support with hard (sometimes unsavory) decisions to make.
That situation is the consequence of too protective laws for working in France. In France, it is very difficult to fire someone, so it leads to problems when you want to decrease the number of staff.
A rebuttal by Dijkstra to Backus' paper is here (actually, a deconstruction): http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd06xx/EWD692.PDF
The Mandalorian has done something that none of the star wars media has achieved since I first saw star wars as a kid in the 80s

It's reminded me how much charm the universe has, it's a loving homage to the original while not feeling like a deliberate homage.

The universe feels realer somehow and the score is appropriately epic.

If you haven't seen it, totally worth a watch.
I usually save articles to Pocket and read it there. If it can't render the article then I don't bother.
Why did Instagram ban hashtags like #vaccinescauseautism in the first place? I mean is there any other reason than to look good in the eyes of others?
just one reply to question one of your statements:

The last time the earth was hotter is somewhat between 180k to 240k years ago. So "not-so-distant-history" is at least somewhat misleading, if not outright lying.
Not successfully, but it has motivated e.g. Japan to combat earthquakes (with building design). On top of that, Bangladesh is a poor country.
Migration from python 2 to 3 is easy and fast. I've migrated multiple large apps and it took about a day each. Most libraries that matter have been migrated. Some don't even support python 2 anymore. It's practically 2020. This should not even be a consideration. After 2 to 3 is done they should consider again If they want to redo the stack but first I'd focus on this small maintenance task.
Great idea! I like the concept.

One of the things I miss most about the old web was how trivial it was to local mirror any website. It was great!
This is actually very standard syntax for array languages. Precedence rules may be uncommon, but extremely simple: right to left, that's all; and finding the meaning of each symbol just requires checking in a table. In your c-style example, you are actually using different precedence for each operation (is it (x -> ...) == 1 or x -> (... == 1)?), you have symbols like the dot which mean different things depending on context, a function of two arguments like % works totally different to another one (map), and so on.

The only reason you find the c-style version simpler is because that's what you are used to. But while you have been able to interpret the Klong expression with no experience at all, ask yourself if someone familiar with array languages (and only array languages) would be able to understand the c-style version in a few minutes without having to read an extensive tutorial.

I do not agree simplicity is in the eyes of the beholder. If a language can be totally specified by a few paragraphs and a table, it is simpler than a language that needs a long specification. However, this does not mean the simpler language is simpler to use. That, indeed, is a subjective matter.
I upvoted you because I agree that thought and speech are clearly different things.

However, regulating people's speech leads to contradictions that can only be solved by picking a side- the side that the government decides is the right one, ie the more powerful side. If you're on this side, it's clear that you think it's the true one.

How do you balance the "harm" (hurt feelings, something that all but the most isolated delicacies learn to deal with by the age of 15) against the harm of restricting someone's speech? Certainly there's a similar psychological harm in not being allowed to express one's thoughts? (Not to mention the lost opportunity to engage in productive development of one's understanding..)
Yeah, lots of science videos do this, particularly when the authors are non-English-native and (presumably) nervous about their voice/accent.