skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every C# release, F# starts looking less and less compelling. There's already a level of friction, since so much of the underlying framework is C#-centric and littered with exceptions and nulls, and if you want to expose F# code to be consumed by C#, you have to dumb things down. And the tooling for F# is considerably less advanced than you get with ReSharper or even out-of-the-box in Visual Studio.

It's a bit of a shame; I suppose that is one of the reasons that some people in the F# community are really pivoting over to WASM and Fable for using F# in the browser.
IRS sues Facebook for $9B, says company offshored profits to Ireland
I'd love to use a self-hosted VCS (git or svn) that supports directory-level ACLs && painless code review workflow. Can this be achieved with Phabricator?
They're certainly more privileged than disabled black babies.

Take any example you like. Poor. Genetic disease. Whatever. Stick black on that baby and you've just made their lives another degree harder.
The Problem with Palm Oil
Transit providers should push packets and generally do. With PMTU failures it's usually clueless network admins on firewalls nearer endpoints. And no, you don't and I wish the admin responsible could feel your pain.
My Memories of Larry Tesler, Parent of GUIs and Slayer of Modes
The ability to change value by ref is crucial to most real-world apps. This is not surprising, as those apps are modeled to represent a real, dynamic world.

Functional languages tend to disregard this, and demand composition over mutation. While this works for some domains, it's a burdensome complication for others.

Imperative languages are here to stay.
DON't disconsider this nightmare scenario too much - While engineering (as in classically designing, prototyping etc.) such a grey goo might be almost impossibly-hard because of chemical energetic constraint and the obvious fact that 3bn years of evolution were not enough to bring about such effective "grey goo" that could "consume the planet", there are some chilling new developments:

We're starting to be good at (1) using machine learning to "learn" designs for components much faster than naive-genetical-algorithms (aka "evolution"), and this will only get better as ML improves, and (2) we're getting better and better at simulating-in-software biological-like processes (and quantum computing will help with this). So we are pretty much in shape to vaaaaaastly outpower 3bn years of evolution.

A virtual + physical nanobots-evolution-gym where AI agents evolve and compete at creating better and better self-replicating nano-machines will give you the nightmare scenario easily...

Basically anything related to the combo of "ML + nanotech" should be carefully watched and monitored!

(And if you're willing to not start from scratch but instead use existing bio-building-blocks like viruses and bacteria, and don't have as high goals as "consuming all matter on earth" and instead you settle for "most multi-cellular living matter" then technically we already have the capabilities. You probably know what I mean.)
So 1 comment with 17 negative responses in a full thread of 36 comments is "the majority of the community?

That's kind of the part that really surprised me. That it exists, OK, but "the majority" in this thread? I feel like on the contrary, in the scope of this thread, it is a tiny minority.

Edit: Since I can't reply to the comment below. By "17 negative responses" I meant negative to the one "bad" comment.
> Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement?

It's at the end of their comment.
The "benefits" were forced upon you without your consent, though. And some of those are blatantly misleading. For instance, most of the defense budget isn't spent on protecting the US from invasion. Most companies protect their property by hiring security guards, not calling the police.
I never wrapped my mind around the Promises API, but I have always async/await is much easier to grasp in any language
"Why must it be this way[?]"

Follow the money.

I don't mean that as snark; I'm serious. I think people in general don't follow the money enough. Even some people who occasionally advocate for it are very selective about it and frequently just treat it as a slur to deploy sometimes. But it's more important than that. It should always be part of the analysis of a business. If you aren't paying for it, you aren't the beneficiary of it.

In the case of HR, if you are a productive, profit-center worker for the company, you may in fact at least be partially paying for it, and may get treated accordingly, though I wouldn't count on that for much. But if you are not clearly in that category....
There are indeed a lot of curious examples of computers seeming to go slower today than 20,30,40 years ago. But on the whole, I completely disagree with the summary. My laptop today is faster than anything I’ve ever used before today. It boots faster, it loads files faster, it responds faster, it does more simultaneous things, it crashes far less often.

My first computer was an IBM PC jr, and using it was an exercise in patience at all times. Maybe the author never played Ultimate III on an IBM PC. It was sooooo slow. The exact same was true of the computers my friends had, C-64, Atari 800, IBM PC. It probably took a full minute to boot. Maybe the author never saw the memory test PCs used to do before even starting to boot, or how slow floppy drives were. My first modem was 110 baud... that’s a whopping 15 7-bit bytes per second. Downloading a 40x40 character image (picture made out of keyboard characters) took a minute and a half. Downloading games routinely took hours. The PCjr hard crashed and needed reboots all the time. Even my later 486 would do the same thing. Rebooting was something you just did constantly, multiple times per hour. Today, almost never.

One thing this article completely avoids acknowledging is the general difference in functionality we have today than with computers in 1983. The database lookups and maps that were faster were faster precisely because they are 7 orders of magnitude smaller data. The article is comparing DBs and maps that fit in the main memory of a computer at the time to databases and maps that are out on the internet and don’t fit on any single computer. It’s amazing that we get the results as fast as we do.
Multiple people in my last organization fit this bill. Worse, these bad actors are somehow able to leverage their incompetency to be branded as 'thought leaders' themselves. Its comically impressive...
Machine Learning Is Fun
:) arc is mostly pain but the rest is nice. And the project review stuff is genius.
I've been using gogs from extremely early on and switched to Gitea after the fork. The quality of the software is extremely high and it's quite a breeze to self-host. Highly recommend.
I haven't been able to create a new repository all morning
>There is precisely no point in selling IP from a US subsidiary to one in Ireland at a fair price. That would just trigger an immediate taxable event in the US for no benefit whatsoever.

Apparently there is if you want to book your international operations in Ireland without the IRS dragging you to court saying you lowballed them a decade ago.

Facebook had a funding round in mid 2009, and mid 2010. The 2009 valuation was $9.8B, and $13.8B in 2010. And this case is solely about their ex-US operations, which they're saying basically didn't exist at the time.

I mean it's like if you join a startup, how much are your equity options worth? Does the IRS go back and say your options were worth way more because it turns out you were working at the next Netflix or something?
Sentry got degraded performance too
https://status.sentry.io/
On prem software has its place. Whether GitLab or some other alternative.
Which? I can't remember the last time any of these happened to me. What "hardware compatibility issues" have you experienced lately?
Read the ECMA scripts. ESPECIALLY sections 13 and 15. Seriously, even the best textbooks will only give you a superficial understanding relative to the actual standards. Sure there are different JS engines, but they all do roughly the same thing. Master the algorithms in the ECMA standard and you won't even need to read textbooks. You will be able to deduce and derive those concepts yourself.

Understand exactly how JavaScript gets converted under the hood. Remember, ECMA could be implemented in any language not just C/C++. What you're looking for is algorithmic understanding.

For example, here's the snippet that explains how "new" works in JavaScript https://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/5.1/#sec-15.2.2..... Going through the algorithm, your first thought may be "wtf is [[Prototype]]"? Dig into it. Understand when, where, and how [[proto]] and __proto__ get assigned. Learn about the cyclic references that allow everything to be an object including functions.

Of course, feel free to use external resources to assist you while reading ECMA since it is quite dry. For the example above, this amazing Stack Overflow post can help you visualize the algorithm: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/650764/how-does-proto-di...
I feel bad for the metaphorical user. They were robbed of their tools.

We get to keep our shell utilities and CLIs, but they were robbed of tiny single-purpose GUI tools.

We get to keep our shell pipelines and perl scripts, but they're getting locked out of their Excel spreadsheets and VBA scripts.

Hell, with how things are going even automation tools like AutoHotKey are going to perish.

"People don't know how to code" or "users aren't tech-savvy enough for data processing and programming" are bullshit statements. They just happen to not code the way Silicon Valley does. And now these users are getting corralled into caged web apps and experiences that give them no flexibility at all and just treat them like children, all the way from the feature set to the presentation.
Bootstrap your way into 500 customers in more than 50 countries
European Commission Presents Strategies for Data and Artificial Intelligence
> Most computers weren't that bad, but there was a time when Windows 95/98 and the mainstream hardware it ran on weren't a good match. That's what you remember.

That's been the issue with every Windows OS. The cheap consumer hardware available at the time of the release was not enough to provide a snappy OS experience.

Unfortunately, hardware frequencies have sort of stalled, so now we're back to square 1 again, where W10 doesn't run snappy on median consumer hardware, but the hardware isn't getting faster at the same rate it was during the first decade of 2000's.

I have a Windows 7 machine for some legacy games and software, and it feels much faster on a 6-year old CPU (Haswell) than W10 does on a 1 year old CPU.
Wikipedia seems to be an okay reference on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis

Google mostly returned SEO garbage on this for me.
At a different level that's part of the reason receipts exist, and why you occasionally see things like "if we don't give you a receipt your order is free."

In those cases it's typically about preventing the employees from not ringing up the sale and just pocketing the cash. The receipt proves that the order was entered into the system. Same idea, just a difference of who's stealing from whom.

Hm, I suppose that scam is less of a problem in the era of credit cards.
Really, because two co-workers have told me they spent weekends trying to configure a printer and downgrading a graphics driver to get their graphics working again. Yes, they are engineers (mechanical, not software), but I have had my share of issues like this, and I started programming in 1978 on a Commodore PET. I do prefer lightweight interfaces, and my wife can't get my Maps app working while I am driving because she has a Samsung and I have a Blackberrry (KeyOne). Things look prettier, and there are a lot of advertisements, but I relate to a lot of these "cherry picked" rants.
> But countless doctors and the UN specialist have witnessed, reported, and endorsed that he has been tortured and I don't know what else you want.

I don't think that's true. They don't say he was tortured, they say he displays the symptoms of psychological torture. From the OP:

On May 31, 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, reported on his May 9, 2019, visit to Assange in Belmarsh, accompanied by two medical experts: “Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma.”

While I don't doubt those are symptoms of torture, they also seem nonspecific. I'm sure spending 7 years on the lam as a fugitive could also lead to "extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma," for instance. I think that's even more likely since the visit by the Special Rapporteur occurred about 1.5 months after Assange's arrest, and there were already reports that he was depressed and in poor health before his arrest.

To be tortured requires a torturer, and to say that Assange was tortured by the UK for his time at the embassy requires bizarre conclusions such as:

1. law enforcement is to support fugitives and assist with their escape rather than trying to arrest them, or that

2. torture is a normal and necessary activity of law enforcement (since chasing a fugitive is torture and law enforcement is supposed to chase fugitives).

Again, both of the above numbered statements are bizzare nonsense, but I think they're implicit in the belief that Assange was tortured by the UK for his stay in the embassy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_and_arrest_of_Julia...: "After Assange's asylum was revoked, the Ambassador of Ecuador to the UK invited the Metropolitan Police into the embassy on 11 April 2019. Following this invitation, Assange was arrested and taken to a central London police station."
exactly this is the problem.I think small language with limited features is better of one language which can do everything and it need a lot of expertise. Simple is beautiful. If the developers need FP than why not F# integrated in C#?
>But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either.

You still have to waste a lot of time doing this crap. Last time I set up a printer for my mom, it was a PITA: I had to download drivers, install some giant pile of crap software, go through a bunch of screens of garbage, etc. Needless to say, her computer runs Windows 10.

By contrast, when I wanted to print to that same printer with my own laptop (running Linux Mint), it was simple: there was absolutely no extra software to install, and all I had to do was go to my Settings->Printers, search for printers on the network (took a few seconds), notice that it found the (WiFi) printer, verify it was an HP and whatever model, and then it was done.

Things could be much faster and simpler than they are now. They aren't, because it's not profitable for various actors for it to be, and because most users accept this. Most users are happy to have gigabytes of malware and spyware on their systems, wasting CPU cycles reporting their behavior back to Microsoft or their printer vendor or whoever, and that's a big reason things are so much slower than in 1983.

So if I'm being "elitist" to point out that spyware is a bad thing, then I'll happily accept that moniker.
Oh sure, but I know I'd get around to thinking of it after I'd moved a couple tons of dirt with a spade.
If you had used a Mac or an Amiga, you wouldn't have those bad memories. Instead, you would fondly remember an era when software was pristine.

There also was a time when people just started to use C++ and software was much buggier.

I wouldn't even say software today feels much slower across the board, but it definitely far more wasteful, given the resources.

You can see a lot of software that essentially does the same things as it did 20 years ago, but (relatively) much slower. Try using some older versions of e.g. Adobe software, you'll see how snappy it feels.
What It Takes to Kill a Coronavirus
I actually do think he’s in the wrong as well, in this particular case, I agree.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this person has already been affected by racism. The only hope there is to allow the passage of generations to ease that pain.

In other words, by engaging and escalating the argument, even though the white guy was likely correct, he is reinforcing these tensions rather than reducing them.

If people stop treating others badly, you’re left with the next generation scratching their heads saying “my grandma is so racist, it’s so weird, I don’t see the difference” which is what we want.
Some of these cheap LED bulbs have horrible flicker. For a fun time, record a slow motion video of a cheap bulb on your phone and play it back. Like half the damn video is black (pretty sure it is because they literally chop out half the AC sine wave with a diode). LED Christmas lights are also really bad.

Then compare it to something like a Phillips hue bulb. The difference between the two is pretty big.

On a side note I sometimes wonder if other animals have a quicker “refresh rate” on their eyes and see nothing but very visible flicker on these bad LED bulbs. I also wonder if some animals could see the raster scan in action on old CRTs...
How do I start learning something?
It seems to be up again!

Back to find my answers on GitHub :-)
This is rather heavily debunked already. You might want to investigate that.
Yes, I remember all these things, because they're almost all still a thing. But now with a shitty React front-end.
You can't really do that without including the entire Python runtime in your application, and cpython is (so I've heard) absolutely horrid at being embedded in things.
You don't need to "metabolize useful energy out of concrete, sand, glass, and dirt" to have a nightmare scenario...

Anything that can metabolize lots of kinds of multicellular living matter could can do insane amounts of damage even if it's not a pathogen... for example agriculture is quite frail and we depend on it!
Continuous Integration for Swift Packages
If, for some reason, lighting teardowns are a fascination of yours, I thought I should mention "bigclive", a YouTube channel devoted to this very topic :-D https://www.youtube.com/user/bigclivedotcom/videos (the author of this blog post also has a channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/electronupdate/videos )
Well guys, what say we all go get some breakfast? No work is getting done right now.
What's the point of a number plate if it's not to allow a stranger at a distance to identify the car? It seems that Anti-ALPR plates are indeed a bug, although plates may be a misfeature.
...I'm a little confused. My computer still flashes the motherboard manufacturer until the fans are all assessed and then the windows logo.

And while my connection is fast, it's a lot less reliable than the one I had 20 years ago, with about three 15-minute disconnects per day on average (although that has more to do with the general shit-quality of the Comcast monopoly than anything else).
The “just find another job” trope is tiresome and overused. This seems to be commonly thrown around in a hand-wavy way, and it ignores a large part of reality.

The idea that one can just move to another job is a luxury in many places. Many areas have only one or two employers, so there’s simply no place to go.

There’s also the fact that no matter where you go, you will likely always find someone you don’t get along with. Learning to deal with those people is a life skill.
Thanks @nl, quite right -- and I do recall, having been there -- but my point was not that Ballmer had all the right ideas(!), rather that his emphasis on developers led eventually to the org (under Satya) embracing OSS which IMHO represents a logical (tho far from inevitable) progression or evolution.
Top Free Bootstrap UI Kits for 2020
The Forgotten Algorithm
Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter.

It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map. It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for people who know where they are and where they are going; it gives almost no affordances for exploration and cross-referencing.

> Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours.

As someone who builds their own PC every couple years: it still does. It's actually worse now, due to the amount of products on the market and price segregation involved. Two PCs ago, I didn't have to use two parts compatibility tools, several benchmarking sites and a couple of friends, and didn't have to write CSS hacks for electronics stores, just to be able to assemble a cost-effective PC.

> But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either.

You don't? Printer drivers are only slightly less garbage than they were, but now there's also less knobs to turn if things go wrong. When my Windows 10 doesn't want to talk to a printer or a Bluetooth headset, all I get to see is a stuck progress bar.

Bottom line: I agree 100% with the author that one of the primary functions of a computer is enabling easy cross-referencing of information. This ability has been degrading over the past decades (arguably for business reasons: the easier it is for people to make sense of information, the harder it is for your sales tactics to work).

> These posts always have a slight stench of elitism disguised as disappointment.

That I don't get. Is it "elitist" now to point out that the (tech) "elite" can actually handle all this bullshit, but it's the regular Joes and Janes that get the short end of the stick?
Don't integrators like IFTTT already support GitHub integration? How is API Tracker different from IFTTT?
there should be no "WHY" someone had to sacrifice their career/life to expose systemic industry wide treatment of people that is unjust. There is only that this treatment exists and that the industry is not going to progress without everybody's collective effort to change it
The ideal is for the company and the candidate to have an equal investment in the process.

If I spend two hours coding some toy project, I expect the company to spend two hours talking to me. Either interviewing or constructive feedback relating to their rejection.

A company that wastes 1000 people's hours and then ghosts 990 of them should be embargoed by some kind of a computing and technology service workers' union. (You know... the folks who can herd CaTS.)

If the company feels justified in wasting a lot of your time in order to save a little of theirs, before the interviews even start, imagine what they will do after hiring.
The value is in knowing when to use which.
There are examples, but it's no longer the de facto experience. I have put PCs together from parts since about the 386 era, and there's absolutely no question that it's far smoother now than it ever was before.
Found this job with interview process in detail and also closure SLA
I remember my BBS days, waiting minutes for stuff that happens instantly now.

That being said, it is a bit of a shame that the faster computers get the more time the computer spends on fancy UI elements, etc.
the tesla hype machine must continue...... Bill's been a Porsche guy, does he still have the 959?
Aside from HN I have no social media accounts, so a picture or two to illustrate what an "Instagram Face" is wouldn't hurt. I also don't care enough to actually look it up, so I suppose there's that too.