skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That doesn't count because it was an invasive monkeypatch that took a function that could not possibly cause an error and made it throw.

The original claim was based on that possibility, its pretty goofy to declare it doesn't count.

> I dunno, pretty much any code that uses a catch block to undo things has to be very carefully written. Even if you're wrapping things in higher level objects, you still have ugly scenarios where you're mutating a data structure and have to unwind the changes halfway through. I bet tons of that code is written under the assumption that there will be no exceptions.

Is it any different for return codes than for exceptions? I'd say that any code which attempts to undo change in the case of an error has to be carefully written. Every special case on the ordinary code path, has to have matching special cases on the error paths. In fact, I've never seen code in any language that does such a thing. And I wouldn't trust if it I did, since its extremely difficult to get right for all cases, and the errors paths almost certainly hasn't been well tested.

> I guess if we consider "trying to catch KeyboardInterrupt at any level without immediate exit" as a weird barely-supported case, then things are fine.

Well, trying to continue running after KeyboardInterrupt is dubious, the user just asked the program to terminate.
I would immediately change your workplace if you are able to do so.
> Biology seems much more brute force in comparison.

Biology is more decentralized for sure, but I wouldn't be so fast with calling it "brute force". One interesting feature of biological neural networks is the variety of neurotransmitters. In very simple terms, they are not only capable of exciting or inhibiting neurons from firing, but they are also capable of regulating how neurons adapt to the stimulae they have been exposed to. In other words, the biological network not only learns, but it runs the learning algorithm itself. It appears to do this by creating various layers of communication with different effects on the computing nodes.

In my view, we have not been smart enough yet to figure out nature's algorithm.
> ...but it kind of feels a bit "old man yells at cloud" - and that's not bad, I just thought there was value in debate.

Yes, that is a very accurate description of how I feel when making this argument :)
> they deleted it off your console so that there was no way you could play it.

This infuriates me.
“Unless my coffee-deficient brain is missing something at the moment”

Add enough zeroes, and you’ll run out of exponent range.
The complaint is more about bad interfaces. One of the examples (unix command line tools) has a very clumsy interface if you're trying to use it from within a lower level program: create pipes for input & output, fork, exec, use i/o on the pipes to feed data in and get results out, waitpid, figure out how the tool exited... this is slow, annoying to implement, has many failure modes that would not exist if the interface were a direct function call, and it's inflexible in that you'll be unable to use the core functionality provided by the tool if your data cannot be realized as a simple text stream that still makes sense to the receiving tool. And you can't extend the core functionality e.g. by passing another function to it. That's a huge amount of friction to using code that is already there, because of bad interface. And that's why people reimplement those tools instead of composing programs using those existing tools.

Likewise, FFIs exist, but often it's just easier to reimplement something in your language instead of trying to use the existing implementation from another language.
How does that contradict what I said? Until it's put to trial successfully, with full information and prosecutions of some very, very well known people, they all got away with it.
Cool list!

I'll throw in one I made for myself and never really showed to anyone. It's a clone of Unblock Me/Rush Hour, but with no ads and undo+redo support. It's only a website since I don't want to bother with app stores (I just save the page to my home screen).

https://zwegner.github.io/slidey-blocky-thingy/base.html

The puzzle variety isn't great, my generation method sorta sucks. I had started to build an exhaustive generator after reading Michael Fogleman's article[1] on it, but haven't finished.

https://www.michaelfogleman.com/rush/
Highest durability for in-cylinder position sensing
> Why all this attention? We're moving this nightmare from 32 to 64 bits

It helps that you then almost certainly have buy-in and are allowed to treat this as a priority because it's tied to work that the business is willing to prioritize. You're already over the hurdle of "customers don't pay to fix compiler warnings".
Bacteria and sand engineered into living concrete
It's not exclusive to anti-bias "sensitivity training". It's pretty much all the industry of corporate training seminars. "Team-building", bunk "psychology tests"... You know the type. You probably had to endure them. They cost tens of thousands of dollars each, they're completely useless, but still, the managers with more budget than sense buy them, and it's a billion dollar industry.
> All other destroyed cities (e.g. Arnhem, Nijmegen) were bombed by allied forces in their attempts to drive out the occupying Germans

I initially learned this from Band of Brothers. It doesn't seem to be as common knowledge in the Netherlands compared to the bombing of Rotterdam.
At least the article title is quite a bit misleading in my eyes.
There is no single silver bullet solution to "fixing" climate change. However, reforestation can play a large role in combating climate change. The first and most important step should be to cut down burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. The lowest hanging fruit there is stop using coal. It is the worst offender and the most easy to get rid of. Just burning gas instead cuts CO2 emissions by more than 30%. Not counting in that number is, that a lot of gas is burnt on oil producing sites instead of used and that gas plants can have much higher efficiencies, like using the heat also for heating houses. Gas plants can reach up to 90% efficiency this way, basically halving the CO2 emissions vs. coal. Also, flexible gas plants play nicer with renewables as solar and wind. And of course stop using oil e.g. for cars.

Having done that would cut down the CO2 emissions drastically, and then the reforestation becomes a more realistic target and would indeed a very practical means to get to net zero emissions. And even if it were only a small part, setting up desalination to green large parts of the desert would be a big net win. But before we use solar cells to produce water for growing trees, we should use the electricity produced to not burn fossil fuels in the first place.
Follow up advice:

After sufficient CYA steps are taken, don’t offer any help on this problem unless explicitly asked to do so. And even then wait until there’s actually desperation. Feel free to think about it so you have some ideas when the time comes, but if this service isn’t something you are responsible for then stay away.

Or else it will be a “you touched it last you broke it” regardless of what actually happened. And if you make too much ruckus about it, they’ll say “why didn’t you do anything to fix it??”
> "I just don’t see how you get to dictate to people what products they are allowed to develop, what terms they are allowed to sell them on and how they are or are not allowed to make money."

Exactly my point.

Yet these companies do want to dictate exactly that.
The taxman doesn't follow up?
Not every driver can be Ayrton Senna. It is best to make automobiles work in such a way as to mitigate slopping driving if possible.
It isn’t doing the quote matching to save on your typing, but to keep your scanner from providing the wrong tokens to the parser of your compiler that is running all the time while you are typing.
Ask HN: Would Firebase/Firestore work with a billion users?
So... exactly what I said?
What happens when you shake a bee swarm? [video]
Thanks for the clarification. I actually had the Big Five in mind - somehow I confused that and MB. Even there, I don't really have any idea if Big Five is "true" (stable and/or predictive) or not, I'm really just listening to Jordan Peterson here.

I'll edit the post above.
Thank you for putting this together!
Personally, I think neither bash nor zsh have the optimal behavior.

I agree with your point about the extra tab keystroke being useful before a giant list gets printed. I like that about bash.

But sometimes I hit tab too many times. I don't really count keystrokes, I just kind of mash the tab key until I get a list. And I don't need bash to print the list again if I hit tab an extra time. (This seems like it could be changed without breaking compatibility with anything. If you hit tab 3 times, don't print the list twice. Instead, only re-print the list if the string (that the completion is based off of) has changed.)

I guess I don't care too much either way about having the list in my scrollback buffer. I can see how it's useful to refer to it, at least while in the process of trying to use the completion.
The frst rule of floating point comparison is you do not compare them for equality, but instead calculate the difference and check if the difference is less than epsilon.
That's why I use electric scooter to work. It costs 300$ and I spend 1$ a month on electricity to charge it (I could charge at work). It's an 10X improvement for short distance travel. It's much cheaper and convenient, since I don't wait in traffic and I don't have to worry about parking. The only drawbacks are: less immune to the weather, it could be hard to take it into some places like restaurants and you can't transport heavy or large stuff.
"Lousy programmers" was very uncalled for, and is not productive. We're all learners.
Funny, when I read the headline, my mind instead went to "pollution in Silicon Valley". Because that's the most concrete thing I currently associate with the legacy of these companies, maybe because I'm in the process of trying to find a relatively affordable new house to buy on the little remaining land that isn't already held on to by the millionaires.

You find that the housing that can be built now (usually on north side of El Camino / Caltrain tracks) is on land that people previously didn't want, which frequently (you also find) has had a history of groundwater contamination, industrial waste leftovers, etc. Making your $1M+ house instantly devalued / hard to buy and eventually hard to sell.

Sure, Silicon Valley has all this innovation, growth, rebirth -- but that also comes with failures and the waste (tangible, leftover solid waste) that we have to deal with because companies can't be made to pay for it at the time.

Maybe when I apply for a job at a Fairchild-child company I'll think to the glorious history of their innovation and branching, but right now, I mostly think of why I can't find a decent place to live.
Big5 is the only one of them with any scientific backing, the others are just pseudo science.
I participated on this kind of training in more than one organization, and I see the issue as trying to give an artificial justification to existing leadership and to the general organization style of the company (generally multi-layered pyramid). They will somehow always conclude that managers have the "right" leadership characteristics, and that people being lead should be fine with their position, because after all this is who they are!
> Now had we created no-development zones around forests, to allow them to expand naturally, in a world not deforesting at ever increasing rate...

I am no fan of rainforest destruction and the ensuing loss of biodiversity, but globally the world is not deforesting:

https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offse...
I also did this Insights Discovery with a bunch of colleagues.

Two weeks beforehand we had to do an online multiple choice questionaire with about 20 questions. Based on this everyone received an elaborate report with their personality analyses. Strong points, weak points, etc. Very detailed.

But I've got to say that everyone in our group - mostly rational devs - was positively surprised how accurate these analyses were.
Let me ask you something: Is unconscious bias training the worst example of bullshit you have experienced in your professional life or the thing that has aggravated you the most? Does that tell you anything about your unconscious biases?

The point of the training is for companies to absolve themselves of culpability. If you act like a jerk after unconscious bias training you are on your own and the company hopes that it can't be blamed for it.
I always thought this as well. In Lisp, data is the program similar to how DNA is data as well as the program.
There is a tool used in malware analysis and computer forensics called Volatility[0]. It has some very powerful analysis tools and works on Linux Mac and Windows. In your case its ability to dump the memory of a running process without messing with the process state [1] may be very helpful! It also has the ability to run a Yara scan against the dumped memory which could let you find the region of memory containing the config file (so long as you know some of the strings in it).

Hope this helps!

[0] https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility

[1] https://www.andreafortuna.org/2017/07/10/volatility-my-own-c...
In that case I got more interesting knowledge for you: Rotterdam was also bombed by the allies. It's often refered to as the forgotten bombardment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_bombing_of_Rotterdam
Always thought reversing is fun. Back in high school and college I would spend days or weeks trying to reverse random software packages I had installed on my system. It was pretty surprising how, with a few tools like OllyDBG, 90% of the software I attempted to crack was actually crackable. Most of Autodesk's software was ridiculously easy to crack. (Don't worry, I owned all that software already! I was studying animation at the time.)

I didn't realize this until later, but I got a skill out of reversing that's actually pretty useful as a software engineer. Granted, I work with JavaScript, but reversing actually taught me how to persevere with debugging. I've been able to fix some bugs that other people couldn't in a reasonable timeframe because I treated the problem like I would when reversing a program; it can be more expedient to perform a process of elimination by disabling or inverting parts of the code, observing what happens, keeping detailed notes on observed behavior, and lead yourself down to the key change you need to make. A lot of people debug problems by trying to look at the code and reason about it while setting breakpoints, but there can be a lot of mental overhead in doing this. When the problem is mysterious, I find that a process of elimination through experimentation can be more effective.

This actually happened recently, where we essentially had an infinite feedback look happening that was obfuscated by a lot of framework code. It's possible that the root cause could have been identified by debugging, but a few people tried to do so but couldn't figure it out. This is because setting a breakpoint somewhere in the process chain didn't reveal anything obvious, and you'd be lucky to actually spot the problem in the application code just by looking at it. I treated the problem like reverse engineering, and did exactly what I described above. It took me a few hours, but I did succeed in narrowing down exactly where in the code things were going wrong.

Sure, someone could have stepped through the app and framework code enough times that they might have figured it out. Perhaps there are also more advanced debugging techniques that none of us were aware of that would have helped. But the mindset of a reverser definitely works.
For others who can't quite picture 3 billion acres, that's around 12 million square kilometers (USA - 9.8 million km², Russia - 17.1 million km²)
They could still build an electric super card and pool with fiat.
> converting the long value 0x7fffffffffffffff to the nearest double value: 0x8000000000000000

From what I understand from the spec it should be the nearest in value, no? Not the nearest in memory representation.
How to Add a Timeout to Promises in Node.js
>Research has shown...more qualified candidates...

First, can you link a source? Second, what does "more qualified" mean in the context of politicians? They are selected by popularity in the majority; capabilities are downstream from likeability. This, one could argue that "more qualified" could be construed as "excellent hair" or "large breasts." This is not to say that the job of political official does not have constraints or optimums, but the method of job placement is the issue in terms of my question.
Sweden have had for several decades a law that require reforestation when landowners harvest timber. Every year a lot of trees get planted, and depending on how you count you can either see it as a massive amount of carbon credits from the last 50 years or so, or as being carbon neutral as it is very likely that the wast majority of the timber end up being burned.

If we look at climate research we also see a similar concern. Reforestation only work as a carbon sink if it also accompanies agreements to not harvest the tress and keep the forest as reservations. In simple terms, global reforestation in order to combat climate change has the same challenge as a global initiatives to create more forest reservations.

A global reforestation policy without extending the reservations is carbon neutral. It is much better than deforestation, but it won't fix the problem of fossil fuels putting out massive amount of carbon into the air.
That depends on the dog.

My parents got an Australian shepherd. If you know anything about the breed, you know that they are highly intelligent, but also stubborn and willful animals who need a lot of physical and mental stimulation. You may also know that Aussies tend to bond to one person well and be wary of even that person's family members.

That said, my parents' Aussie absolutely adores me, even though I don't visit that often. When I do visit, he jumps on me and wags his tail-stump so hard his entire rear moves. He even gets excited when he hears my name mentioned. This wasn't automatic; I had to earn his adoration by being his pal. And I appreciate it even more deeply for havung earned it.
Don't apologize, it's perfectly acceptable and even expected that you gaze into people's houses while passing by. It's a Dutch thing; front windows are large and heavy curtains are rare.

I look in everyone's house when I walk by, and wave at everyone I see inside. I always get a wave in return. My kids count cats on sills. I spend considerable time in my in-laws' front room waving at passers-by, and we've even been known to go out and join someone on a walk.

I've heard it said that the open front window thing originated as a backlash against the heavy curtains that became common during German occupation in WWII. I don't know if there's any truth to that.
Are there any non-pseudoscientific psychology theories? That's a good question. Here's an off-the-top-of-my-head list: Rescorla-Wagner, Pavlovian learning, Habituation, failure to thrive, opponent processes, dominance hierarchies, learned helplessness, one-trial learning of disgust, avoidance theory of phobia, short-term vs. long-term memory, chunking, the hypergeometric forgetting curve, public inhibition of non-dominant behaviors.

A challenge for Psychology in the U.S. is that Statistics is usually included in the curriculum in Spring of Senior year -- an after-thought. I've been off-and-on poking at creating a course that would put statistics immediately after Intro Psych.
To be sure I'm not defending the practice, just shedding another light on it.

In answer to your first question. There might not be an insurance against the system failing. The honest answer to what to do then, because someone always needs to ask is: Panic! It might not even be unrecoverable, just really expensive and time-consuming to do so.

The follow-up question would be: Yes it is a risk, yes it is a possible disaster. What do you want to do about it? If your answer is anything more than: We should not have taken on that risk in the first place or lets bet the companies future on the fact that we can fix this. Then it might actually be interesting to listen to. It seems from your comment you resolved it.

As for messaging. I do not agree you should explain the situation on the server. Just let people know they should not touch this ever. As soon as you explain why people will assume their reason to do so will trump whatever reason you gave. If they need to think of all possible disasters that might happen it has more impact than the one you can describe.

Messages like "Before doing anything on this server contact Bob" will eventually lead to Bob receiving a message: "We have done this or that. Just letting you know, but it was after office hours" which he will probably see rushing into the office in the middle of the night because the server is not working anymore.
The other type of message: "Don't reboot this server ever! For more information contact Bob" Bob changed because he spend a considerable time saying no and explaining the situation to the sysops team, their manager, their manager's manager, etc. who all thought their priority must trump Bob's.
Bob might still be working for the company. He might have tried the better part of his career to get this stain resolved. Nothing bad about Bob.
Software Architect Technology Roadmap
The introduction of a new form of renewable energy which taps into the thermal difference between the sky and the ground broke the rancorous fossil-vs-renewables debate by providing an affordable source of power which ran directly off the temperature increase caused by CO2.

Because this energy source only requires access to the sky, poor nations were able to develop their own renewable power grids. Economies based upon the sale of oil are reforming to be based more upon the output of their workers, reducing the power of the elites and making for more equitable societies. The change in the balance of power has created new fault lines in international diplomacy, but because these changes did not require force, the changes have been largely peaceful.
I find that the timing is actually worse, because then I start waiting for the menu to appear as affirmation for some assumption I made about the namespace. It’s also jarring that it appears out of sync with keystrokes. Turning off the delay and working on menu placement instead could provide for better PX, but it is something that can be user tested a lot, at least.
Yes. Even if one leaves aside the difficulty of an individual business eliminating tipping... It's a near-certainty that if, say, a city banned tipping in restaurants somehow, the jobs that rely on tipping to supplement wages would pretty much all get a pay cut even if the base salary were raised somewhat.
A Free Safety Net for the Everyday American
I've actually used an STL port to Arduino and was able to create a standard vector of length three but not four. that crashes the system.

I believe it uses a custom allocator.
Heh - sorry for the hyberbole.

At least in my country, Germany, fraudulent use of telecommunications services, public transport or paid events/facilities ("Erschleichen von Leistungen", § 265a StGB) is not just a civil matter, but also a criminal offence. If you got caught manipulating your modem to avoid paying for faster broadband, you would likely to get into trouble.
I wasn't even considering it. It bugs me too. It's nice to hear what people who are annoyed by these types of games like and dislike though, so thanks for pointing it out.
Mojo Vision Augmented Reality Contact Lenses