skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The goal of `Optional[T]` is not to "make the problem magically go away", in fact that is almost the opposite of the goal.

Optional[T] exists to make it very obvious when a value is nullable. Having non-nullable types as default, with Optional[T], allows a developer to model a system more accurately. This is helpful both to the compiler as well as anyone else who reads/maintains that code.

> Imagine, for example, in an Optional based language, that you just map the optional to a lambda to execute on the optional, and the behaviour of the optional is to then simply silently do nothing if it's optional.none. That'd be a much harder to find bug than a nullpointer error. (errors with stack traces pointing at the problem are obviously vastly superior to mysterious do-nothing behaviour with no logs or traces of any sort!).

This is just one of the things a developer could decide to do when faced with an optional which is none. It is up the language design to make it easy to express this behavior (or any other behavior they might choose) without hiding it.
If driving people from or to poor neighborhoods increase risks for the driver then it's fair risk compensation.
That's not the same thing as a null pointer because Nothing isn't allowed in place of e.g. integers, strings, etc. like in Java. What you're doing is defining a non-total function. Haskell, per default, doesn't perform exhaustivity checks when pattern matching, but you can enable that via a compiler flag - then it won't let you compile your example. Ocaml, for example, does that by default.
> There are great many ways to solve them. The most common ones are 'null' and 'Optional[T]'. Neither just makes the problem magically go away. If a process is designed (or a programmer writes it) thinking that 'ah, well, here, not-a-value cannot happen', but it can, then.. you have a bug.

> Some language features might make it possible to help reduce how often it occurs, but eliminate it? I don't think so.

On the contrary, you can 100% eliminate it by forcing null handling at compile time with your `Optional` type. Haskell and some other strongly-typed languages do this (but they call it Maybe).

The way to do this in a C-syntax-ish language would look something like this:

Optional<int> increment(Optional<int> i) {
// return i + 1; would throw an error at compile time,
// because Optional doesn't implement the + operator

// i.applyToValue would throw an error at compile time
// if you didn't handle both possible cases
return i.applyToValue(
ifNull: (void) => { return new Optional<int>(null); },
ifValue: (int i) => { return i + 1; }
);
}

This is syntactically a bit heavy, partly because I was a bit more verbose than a real implementation would need to be, for clarity, and partly because C-style syntax doesn't do this well. Languages that support this generally have some syntactic sugar to make it a bit more terse.

I've argued before on HN that the benefits of strong static typing are overstated, but this is a case where strong static types really do completely eliminate an entire category of errors. Given how common these errors are, not using stronger types in this situation for popular languages has absolutely been a billion dollar mistake.
Plato's allegory of the Cave is about the liberation provided by education, and self-awareness.

How gaining understanding of your environment freed you from the limited reality it presented you.

The initial usage of the story was to illustrate how political indoctrination could present a false reality to ardent followers "the shadows of cave fire for those raised in the cave", and how education could "open the eyes and show them the true light" (the fire in the sky/sun vs the fire in the cave). "...even if one was dragged out of the cave".

This was later extended to demonstrate that if humans learned about their own emotions, they could learn to reason decisions, rather than allow emotions to guide them exclusively.

Tangentially, this rough concept in early western philosophy evolved into the religion of the Sun, and had significant influence on early Christianity.
They also don't have nukes, making the lack of missiles somewhat secondary.
Yes, but the parent is just saying that x86 based hardware that sells itself as being a “pfSense box” also runs OpenWRT.
Plus also doesn’t the stack need to be small to fit into the CPU cache?
I really wish we had more popular representations of the later empire. So many people believe that today’s world where people visit and settle from all around is something completely new and perhaps bad. Perhaps if they knew what the Roman empire stretching from London to Palmyra looked like, it might amend their perspective.

(And for anyone who’d jump on this: No, it wasn’t this mixing of peoples that brought Roman down. The story is much more complicated than that.)
How does that work?

If a driver is always paid x/minute/mile (total X), customer always pays Y dollars as made up by Uber. Uber takes U, 25% of Y, pays the driver X, where does the rest go if Y-U-X > 0?

How can this ever work without Uber sometimes taking a loss?
> By analogy, when you are being attacked by a hater, like many famous people, I don't think social planning is your first order response. Much like if someone were to hold you up with a gun, your immediate response wouldn't be a reflection of the societal conditions of the assailant.

Your analogy seems inapplicable here. This was an essay, not an immediate response. Whatever we may think of the response, it seems fair to put it down as the well-considered position of the author, unless they retract it later.
The Power of the Marginal (2006)
Code of Ethics – National Society of Professional Engineers
I’m not sure medical research treats one gender better than the other - not something I have a strong opinion about.

But if the person you’re responding to is truthful, it’s odd that if the rates were similar why we only hear about one of the two groups being affected, isn’t it? I think if you search you can find a lot of these across both sexes, actually. I’m not sure what the cause of throat HPV is, but if it’s oral sex on women maybe that reveals a societies taboo. It’s so taboo that we are willing to let people die rather than admit it.

Anyway just a few thoughts as I was skimming the posts here.
That might make you feel better but it's not going to get you to your destination faster.
AFAIK Standard ML predates Haskell and it has an option type.
What Do I Need Other Than a Pitch Deck?
Uber has no contact phone number or email for costumers or drivers to reach anyone in the company in the event an issue arises. Delete Uber, it's a shit company.

I once had someone try to brute force my uber password, I was getting constant login failed notifications. Could not contact Uber, so I tried deleting the CC they had on file. They don't allow that. So I tried deleting the account. They don't allow that. So I changed my password to a ridiculously long set of random characters and deactivated the account, which they indicated would take 60 days.

They make it so easy to give them your money, but if you have a problem, it's 100% "We don't give a fuck about you."
A precedent, then.
I've taken Levodopa, not prescribed, I do not have Parkinson's. Just had access to it and decided to try it as mood enhancement/anti depressant.

It did nothing noticeable. At higher dosages for 1 day I felt somewhat dizzy/nauseous, so I never tried that again (there is some research mentioning it can damage receptors irreparably). At the prescribed dosage, after a month I dropped it, as there was no improvement, no change.

Really, the only things I tried that had an actual effect were alcohol, cannabis, phenylethylamine (with nicotine! Does not work without it. And can probably kill you with alcohol, beware!), cocaine, aniracetam and sulbutiamine.

No wonder they're mostly banned, because they exhibit actual effects, but are not for any specific sickness. Sad, I'd say lack of alertness and a bad mood should be treated as sickness.
I would argue that a language targeting bare metal type applications should at least be minimally aware of that underlying hardware. A single stack "virtual machine" type language is generally a terrible fit for the 2 and 3 operand register-based processors which dominate the landscape.

Every interview of Chuck Moore that I've read has contained zero push-back for his rather wild claims. It's entirely possible for an industry to do go down the wrong path for a while, but at some point, if Forth and stack processing were the giant killers they were cracked up to be, you would see them enter and dominate at least some portion of the mainstream. You can't say they haven't been given enough time.

It seems there are many "Forth curious" programmers out there, but they aren't being given the full picture with the various puff pieces and vanity projects floating around that never really go anywhere. It's almost a culture of victimhood.
The paper seems to me to suggests that the Romans got sicker due to increased exposure to virus and disease as they got more integrated, wealthy and populous. Perhaps this was a hidden trend behind the fall of pre-industrial age civilizations. "Romans paid a price for their wealth with a deterioration of their health"
That code is generated by the level editor, IIRC.
Deep Learning State of the Art (2020) – Lex Fridman
Because the DSL is complicated and you encounter weird edge cases even for not so complicated things.

Common, almost ubiquitous in my circles, and often reliable are things I would say about it, painless is not. I was a bigger fan until using it daily focused on a project for a month on it more than anything else.

I feel this strongly enough I'm looking at AWS CDK and troposphere, likely to learn I suck at writing my own imperative style terraform and to be more thankful. Lol
We don’t have any third party packages for that authentication style yet, but we do have an API for supporting custom auth flows... https://www.python-httpx.org/advanced/#customizing-authentic...

If you’re interested in trying httpx you’d be very welcome to raise an issue an issue related to NTLM/Negotiate authentication - it’d be really helpful for us to work through that and figure out if our auth API is sufficient for implementing that, or if there’s anything we’re missing.
Should every domain have a Nil element instead ?
I had never heard of this link between statins and aggression and Tylenol and lack of empathy before. Interesting. Maybe this is why Boomers act so strange now. “Former flower children lost their empathy and caring for the world and the next generation when their doctors put them all on statins and they started gobbling Tylenol” would be quite an interesting story. Both my parents are on statins, it seems every person past a certain age is, the doctors think statins are something everyone should be on. I have my doubts.

>“Should people at low risk of cardiovascular disease take a statin?”

https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6123
>Can you find another example where companies are paying for "things happened"?

Airlines.
ML is even older than SML and has algebraic data types.
> I’d be curious to hear the experiences of people who take/have taken some of these drugs such as L-dopa.

L-DOPA's significant side effects and risks are very well known to doctors. No one should be prescribed L-DOPA unless they have severe Parkinson's disease, and even then the L-DOPA dose should be actively minimized.

The impulsive behavior side effect of L-DOPA is so well known that it has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_dysregulation_syndrom...

We should all be aware of potential side effects, but it's also important avoid the false dilemma fallacy. These patients aren't choosing between being healthy or taking L-DOPA. They're forced to choose between suffering from severe Parkinson's disease symptoms or risking the side effects of the medication. When the side effects outweigh the benefits, the medication should be discontinued. When the side effects are less than the underlying disease, the medication should be continued.
Yes, 0BSD is the generally recommended no obligations version https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html
On the user side, we have to jump through hoops and sign so many onerous paper HIPAA compliance forms at dr’s offices, to just get doctors to share records about us. On the backend it’s free for anyone to access. It’s all backwards!
An Idea from Physics Helps AI See in Higher Dimensions
Did you ever present that license to anyone though? It could have been them that sold your info. e.g. concert venues who scan licenses, etc. Not that I doubt the DMV did it!
Assuming it's like any other product or service, the people that implement longevity (if they do) will be a tiny fraction of the general population, and certainly not a random sampling thereof. Most people who end up being able to make use of longevity treatments will have had nothing to do with those who implemented them (except by working for company A which made product X which was used by company B to make ... which was one of the components the longevity researchers used); I think it'll happen regardless of their opinion about it (well, I guess if they violently opposed it, maybe they could stop it).

So, it's less a question of what drives the search for longevity than what we'll do with it once it arrives.
The marketing provides value by convincing you that you found a quality product in an opaque industry.
Not contradicting, just that there a slight benefit in reifying an issue as it opens for notation and operators to simplify it. Maybe monad or option chaining are more than making the thing obvious, it make them half disappear.
> It's not some special thing that sits apart from it. It is an integral part of the whole, no different than your kidneys or liver.

Except it is. The brain is a part of your body and the two are tightly integrated. Yet the brain is also not simply another organ. If you lose half of your liver, your personality might change due to the trauma, but you will still be you. If you lose a kidney, you’ll live on as if little happened (assuming modern medicine stops you from dying of infection). If you lose half your brain, you’re probably dead, and if not, you’ll be drastically impaired the rest of your life. You’ll also likely experience drastic personality changes.

The brain is part of the body but it is also special. To my knowledge it’s the only organ with a dedicated blood barrier. It’s also the only organ that modern medicine can’t keep “you” alive without. If your body is on life support but you are “brain dead”, then “you” are gone. Your heart can be replaced with a pump. Your kidneys can be replaced with dialysis. Your stomach can be replaced by a feeding tube. Yes, all of these are pretty poor alternatives but they affect quality of life. They don’t end life. If modern medicine could replace your brain with a computer, no one would consider this a lifesaving intervention.

No one says they’ve lost a parent to kidney failure while the parent is still alive. Many people have said they’ve lost a parent to dementia while the parent is still alive.
For second hand books you should be using thrift and abe. Better selection and better prices. For music use discogs.
Dark matter is the ghostly realm. And boom, suddenly it hasn’t all been disproven :)
On subjects that they don't understand but which affect them, I think it's better if non-experts follow their own gut instinct rather than to defer thinking to someone that they don't know who supposedly understands the subject. Human elites are liars and cheaters, the so-called expert is more likely to be a skilled con artist than a skilled expert. I trust that even so-called morons have decent common sense. Probably better than a lot of elites even.
> Rust seems to be the only one that mostly circumvents this problem. Are there other good examples?

Swift, Kotlin, and of course older languages of a functional bend like MLs, Haskell, Idris, Scala, …

Some are also attempting to move away from nullable references (e.g. C#), though that is obviously a difficult task to perform without extremely severe disruptions.
They should just all adopt OpenWRT (with their custom UI) and invest in it. Like Android for smartphones.

All router firmware is terrible in some ways, and has been for decades -_-
I'm on Firefox Preview for Android and am having no problems with the article. No ads, popups etc. Just pure content.
I used to think the brain was the most important part of the body. Then my arsehole clenched shut for a week...
Here’s where things get tricky. The ultra wealthy have most of their wealth tied up in stocks/bonds.

Bill Gates and Bezos are the worlds richest because they have >1% ownership in their founding companies.

The rich get richer because the stock market and their companies are doing well. They own means of production.

Capital gains tax rate means if you hold stock for more than an year and sell it, you get taxed a bit less. There’s an incentive for longer term ownership.

Like property taxes, what if you taxed holding stock? Then that’s unfair as AMT crap. Holding stock is fake money. It could disappear in thin air when market crashes. Gains are only realized when you sell.

But when you sell, you still pay income tax.

So if a billionaire has ownership in his founding company but draws <100k of real income from stock, should they be taxed higher than a person who just makes 100k of salary?

I’m all for higher tax percentages at higher incomes but all of it gets very murky.

America was built on the foundations of if you work hard and build something great and have a pie of ownership, you get to reap the rewards.

Removing this ^ incentive causes all sorts of issues in other parts.

I would love estate tax to have a higher tax rate. Transferring property to kids shouldn’t be cheap since they didn’t do the hard work.

I would also love taxes to be 0 below a certain income bracket.

I would also love some form of aid when unemployed/ on the streets. Some sort of buffer. Better affordable healthcare. Less middleman. More transparency.

A lot of this problems aren’t money related but more about refactoring the current way of things and making more efficient use of what’s currently already there.

My 2 cents. Would love to debate.
Dynalist hits the right spot for me to manage my current work (tasks, quick notes…). Simple but flexible, extra features not overwhelming you if you don't need them.
But their mobile app isn't great.
Venture Capital: The Rules of the Game
> The CA store should be a configurable option, and one of the supported options should be the system CA store.

It's more complicated than that, especially if you aren't on Linux.

On both the other two big general purpose platforms (Mac OS, Windows) the vendor provides a library which implements their preferred trust rules as well as using their trust store.

On Linux what you usually get is the list of Mozilla trusted root CAs and you're left to your own devices. Mozilla's trusted list is IMNSHO a shorter more trustworthy list than supplied by Apple or Microsoft, but it misses nuance.

When Mozilla makes a nuanced trust decision for the Firefox browser that decision doesn't magically reflect in an OpenSSL setup on a Linux server. Say they decide that Safety Corp. CA #4 can be relied upon to put the right dates on things, but its DNS name checks are inadequate and no longer to be trusted after June 2019. Firefox can implement that rule, and distrust sites with an August 2019 cert from Safety Corp. CA #4, while still trusting say, the Safety Corp. CA #4 certificate on Italian eBay from March 2018. But there's no way for your Python code to achieve the same outcome relying on OpenSSL.

Python's key people seem to think that it's better for Python to try to mimic what a "native" web browser would do because that's least surprising. So on Windows a future Python will trust Microsoft's decisions, on macOS they'd be Apple's decisions and only on Linux will it be Mozilla decisions. Today it's Mozilla's trust store everywhere.

Hypothetically in the ideal case you'd have your own PKI and you'd have all the necessary diligence in place, hire your own auditors, maybe even have contractors red-teaming the CA you trust for you - but we don't live in a world anything like that, most people are implicitly reliant on the Web PKI and probably tools like these needs to accept that.
I don't get what you are comparing? Trump's actions were deliberate, and almost universally acknowledged as misguided, dangerous, and foolish (with the reneging of a working deal the first and largest blunder).

Iran, under pressure, made a mistake. An accident happens. I don't see how one assigns some score to these events, yet your comments reads like "they deserve a few more assassinations and maybe a bit of bombardment for being so stupid as to show nerves when attacked by the fragile masculinity of a superpower in decline".
Growth Hacking Techniques and Tools for Startups
Functional programming languages have been doing it for ages. Most "newer" statically typed languages also have it (Swift, Kotlin, Rust) by default. And old languages had it bolted on (C# 8, Java 8, C++ 17).

I think at this point basically everyone has realized null by default is a terrible idea.
Diagnosing and Relieving Pain in Software Development
> Imagine, for example, in an Optional based language, that you just map the optional to a lambda to execute on the optional, and the behaviour of the optional is to then simply silently do nothing if it's optional.none. That'd be a much harder to find bug than a nullpointer error.

It's worth noting that this is only possible if the operation you're mapping over the optional can have side-effects. Without side-effects, mapping over an optional always does nothing, in a way - all the difference is in the value returned.

Adding that constraint does make programming pretty painful, though.
Usually doctors still operate by the book. All symptoms and deductions have to make sense in the "context" of the "book," if the book doesn't mention it, the doctor doesn't proceed any further.

For example, I slept on my bed with a heater blasting onto my face. Next day I developed sudden onset dry eye. Literally from eyes that had zero issues to dry eye. I think the heater was the causative agent, but the medical literature is blank on this, so the doctor is clueless as well. In fact the doctor literally ignores the fact that I had a heater blasting my eyes all night. I came in to the eye doctor and he assumed that my dry eye developed over a long time when in actually I "caught" it three days ago.

One perspective of this is that the patient is biased and assigning causative attributes to something that only happens to correlate with an outcome. Therefore all patient descriptions must be cut through and ignored if it's not relevant to the problem. It's largely true but I think doctors bias themselves towards this predisposition a little too much and dismiss many things that are actually important.

Either way though, if it's not in "the book" then treatment for it doesn't exist in any scientific form yet, so the doctor can't help you anyway.
That's being ungenerous, most people that don't exercise don't perceive it as something enjoyable. Imagining people that behave differently than you as idiotic is both unkind, and strategically foolish, as it will lead you to underestimate your enemies.
MikroTik, too, but last time I checked the UI was pretty bad. Good hardware, reliability and features, though.
> Haskell and some other strongly-typed languages do this (but they call it Maybe).

Most call it either Option or Optional FWIW. `Maybe` is the term used by Haskell and its derivatives (like Idris or Elm).