skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not a pedantic argument. A leaky abstraction is a thing when you have some kind of abstraction where the user is supposed to not have to know anything about the implementation details, but where implementation details accidentally "leak" through the abstraction (meaning that the user does, in fact, have to know about the implementation details).

That's not the case here. JavaScript provides an implementation of 64-bit IEEE-754 floating point numbers. You do not need to know anything about the implementation (is it implemented in hardware? in software? what are the algorithmic details? who cares, they just work!) to use them, they function perfectly like IEEE-754 floating point numbers should.

You're saying "well, some programmers think floating point numbers can represent finite decimal numbers exactly", and that may be true. But it's not JavaScript's fault that some programmers are bad at their jobs and don't understand how floating point numbers work (note that this really has nothing to do with JavaScript: this is true in essentially every programming language). A misunderstanding is not the same as a leaky abstraction.

Think of it like this: no sane person would think the fact that an integral type (i.e. an "int" or a "long" in C/C++/C#/Java/whatever) can't represent the number 3.75 exactly means that "int"'s are a "leaky abstraction". Of course they can't represent 3.75, it's an integral type! Likewise, of course a floating point number can't represent 0.3 exactly: it's a floating point type! They never pretended otherwise! If you want to represent 0.3 exactly, go with a rational or decimal type, that's what they're there for.

> Let me know if you ever come across a real-world case where that's exactly what you want.

All the time! Like, 99% of the calculations you make on a computer, IEEE-754 floats are by far the best choice to represent a number! They're a stupendous numeric type! There's a reason why every CPU and GPU in the world is optimized for floating point operations (that's even how you measure their performance, with mega/tera/peta-FLOPS!), and there's a reason why every language under the sun has built-in support for them! Some languages (like Lua or JavaScript) make them essentially the ONLY built-in numeric type: it's that good!
It's incredibly brave of her to take on the darling of venture capital, because what she highlighted wasn't the extremes of silicon valley culture, but the ordinariness of its status quo. And how it's deeply anti-human (and anti-woman) in so many ways. Truly, kudos to her.
I thought that idiomatic react involved using JS render functions to turn JSX + Data into HTML; and using css-in-js to handle styles?

I'm somewhat wary of React because I feel like it pushes developers to work with non-standard tools rather than the HTML + CSS + JS that browsers handle just fine.

I agree wholeheartedly on the ecosystem. I think global state stores will have a reckoning in the next 10 years where we collectively realize that maintaining a large amount of client-side state is not required for 90% of sites.
Fully agreed; transparency is absolutely essential.
Well, for one, Virginia had an interest in Rhode Island being part of the US. Does California benefit from being in the same country as North Dakota? Apart from having their democratic ability in choosing their own executive diluted, not really.

So "great" is really a question of great for who.
Mastercard Introduces European Cybersecurity Center
A good user interface is only good for people that like it, you cannot please all "populations", just try to make an interface that will be both liked by techs and HR / managers. Good luck with that.
The story goes that urban Toronto didn't vote for Ford, but the suburbs and the rest of the province is who he was targeting and they really responded to his populist platform. And there are enough people not living in Toronto DT to win him the election.
I think the only thing in the parent's list that didn't catch on was WinFS, which I believe is because it never even shipped if I'm not mistaken.

Registry and Powershell are integral parts of being a Windows administrator.

I might be leading a little, but just because nix didn't choose to use these things doesn't imply they are bad. Just nix is "different".
awesome, but startups are not measured by requests per month but number of users.
I've been working my way through the Modern Javascript course at Execute Program, so far so good:

https://www.executeprogram.com/courses/modern-javascript
The solution in the blog post is an extension module. Written for you, by the compiler. Instead of a learning curve and "it's really not hard", it's "no learning curve" and "I struggle to find how this could be easier".
I think systems like WASP will proliferate. React, Vue, Svelte and similar frameworks have gotten people used to code generation, transpiling, etc. Technically, people are ready for something that blurs the front-end/back-end distinction.
There's a list of comments all saying the same thing, and I don't accept that these are not bugs.

From the user/UX POV, they absolutely are. They may not trash your file system or set your Mac on fire. But the UX is the public face of the product. If it has issues and causes unnecessary friction, that reflects badly elsewhere.
I've interviewed several hundred people and gave them a take home test of a simple problem that we had encountered in our work.

We asked them to write a simple API that would return the closest pharmacy, given a latitude and longitude supplied to the API, and gave them a CSV with 10 pharmacies. Language didn't matter, and we never even ran it to see if it actually worked.

During the interview we would have them walk us through the code and explain what each part does and why they did whatever (this makes sure they actually wrote it and understand it).

Then, we would throw curveballs like "what would you need to change in your code if there were 100,000 pharmacies", and "how would you need to change it to return the closest 10 pharmacies instead of the closest 1?"

It's normally really difficult to get into someone's head about HOW they solve problems. I really felt like our method shined a light on their programming abilities. Also, how well they might anticipate future usage by building something smart to begin with and not code themselves into a corner.
theres some ironic use of the word in the post above. they are mocking that the new and improved "responsive web" site isnt responsive in a speed context.
"You can implement record-based files (RAX, ISAM, etc) on top of stream-based files"

Sure. And we have, many times over. A base implementation that supported fixed and variable records, shared process mmap() access, etc...would have value. And perhaps the kernel being aware of it would have some benefit.
Very interesting initiative and approach, I am tuned to see the adoption of the community!
Advanced CI/CD for Android Projects Using Bitrise
Since D has a fairly small community, I imagine its a handful of resourceful users in the financial sector fixing problems they're forced to deal with
The 777 is the safest of them all, isn’t it?
The disk is a block device, i.e. it reads and writes data in blocks, the system just abstracts that into a stream interface.
Frustratingly, removing your catalytic converter has a very tiny effect on performance, and an enormous effect on emissions. Kids into car culture tend to hold very superstitious ideas about cars and performance. (eg, the manufacturer intentionally hobbled your car with a restrictive cat-back exhaust, and replacing it with something loud and terrible will "unlock" a significant amount of hidden horsepower.)
Clarke's third law is largely about fiction. It's a rule of thumb for writers, not a rule for reality.

In reality there are limits; there's no reason to think technology can improve indefinitely. We may still be far from those limits, as e.g. Drexler's books show, but fundamental rules such as "Effort requires energy input" are unlikely to ever change, and it's equally unlikely that most modern scientists would regard limit-tech as being magic.

As for the average guy on the street, he probably considers computers to be magic...
Maybe. I’ve implemented a ring buffer that is used between two virtual machine domains. There were a few places where barriers were needed. If they were removed the ring buffer would start corrupting data. These barriers are in addition to the many obviously needed compiler barriers.
I don't think Forbes does alarmist articles for the sake of alarmism. Here's how I am reading this.

It's an article geared towards the audience of Forbes, who are affluent highly educated, business-minded consumers of and investors in digital products. Which is a different audience from those frequenting Hackernews.

At it's core, the article paints an easy to grok good-vs-evil narrative by corralling billion-dollar corporations one side, and small grass-roots projects on the other side, the underdog. Then it ends with a cliffhanger "will the underdog win from the alpha dog?" leaving how the story might end open to the reader.

That unwritten conclusion should be clear to the reader: The decentralized web might create an investment opportunity. Incumbents are struggling with a perception problem, and under that vague umbrella of "dencentralized web" you'll find these new technologies that people might trust.

The article doesn't address the real issue: the lack of proper regulation. It just mentions that in the last paragraph, almost as a side note. Which basically acknowledges that the author(s) do have an understanding, but are simply choosing not to focus on that because it doesn't fit the narrative.

Lambasting TBL's initial vision of the Web as "pollyannic" and then not even mentioning him as an important instigator of the decentralized Web - linked data, Semantic Web, Inrupt/Solid,... - is just another clue that the authors are just interested in their colored narrative of the history.
Things I can’t understand:

- Why North America doesn’t adopt European-style plates instead of the tiny, squished ones they have

- Why license plates are allowed to act as regional advertisements for local states and provinces rather than identifiers

- Why Canadians keep the Ford family in power
Plenty of routers today that can't fragment packets. And they have rate limiters where they can only generate a small amount of ICMP 3/4s (maybe 50 a second).
Positive Yelp reviews don’t boost profits for businesses in black neighborhoods
What's the difference between the dongles on the Wiedehopf buyig guide and a "generic" RTL-SDR dongle?
> We have a small task with two levels, one to complete quite fast and the second level is if you really want to show off and spend more time on it. We use it as the main technical skills evaluation for the in person interview, because it opens up an actual discussion and we can talk about reasoning, see how candidates take feedback and how they can explain what they did

This sounds so refreshing and atypical of the standard take home test that I would love to give this a go.

My email is my handle at gmail.com

No obligation. You don't even have to have a current opening. I want to honestly give this a go only to experience what this feels like. That would be value enough for me.
> could you explain the weird fascination of the D community with Excel

No, because I'm not aware of one existing. The only reason I wrote excel-d is because of business reasons.

> actual Excel in the wild and not libreoffice or openoffice

Where I work, and in many many other places, it's all Excel. It's actually the most used programming language in the world. Maybe it shouldn't be, but it is.
Notion has what I consider to be the best landing page demo [1]. It's the full application. No need to log in or follow specific steps. Scroll down to the "Choose a workflow" section to try it out.

[1] https://www.notion.so/
While the law is interesting, it mostly applies to science fiction. We can't presume that said sufficiently advanced technology is physically possible -- in fact, the opposite seems decently likely.
> I don't like the accusative tone when talking engineering.

That's fair.

I wrote this in 2017 to give a single page arguments against the JOSE standards. The accusative tone is required by the fact that the entire page exists to attack the standard, based on technical arguments.

The target audience of the Paragon Initiative blog has always been "PHP developers", and PHP gives you a built-in session mechanism. Which, if you're writing PHP, you should just use. Session security in modern PHP boils down to "use HTTPS".

If you're doing some massively distributed system (the likes of a FAANG company project), you can disregard the advice aimed at LAMP stacks.
To be clear, my comments were pointing out that what's described was not criminal. I didn't take a position on what's ethical or not.

That said, I think helping VPNs is a good thing ethically. If he'd been arrested for running a Tor node that was used to download child pornography (which has happened), I suspect most people here would defend him.

Helping spammers is bad, but, at least as described by OP, not illegal.
Teardown of a $1.25 LED Lightbulb
I once took a certification exam sort of like that. The goal was to make the tests pass, except for one random stage where the test itself was bugged. It was noted in the notes for that section, but not in an obvious way.

I was not impressed.
I think I read somewhere that one option is to simply use a different dns provider, but I have not validated this. I, too, need to put aside a day to play with this.
>Identifying license plates on the vehicle should be more permanent. Similar to the VIN. Otherwise if they can be changed so easily they're kind of pointless. They operate on good faith.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

What part of the car identifies the car in the days of diy repair and replacement of almost any part on the car?
A Decade of Data Science Hypes: The Good Parts
A scenario more interesting than boundless self-replication is Ackermann goo [0], [1]. Grey goo starts with a molecular machine able to replicate itself. You get exponentially more copies, hence goo. Imagine that we could build molecules like programs which execute themselves via chemical interactions with the environment. Then, for example, a Y combinator machine would appear as a linearly growing string [2]. No danger here. Take Ackermann(4,4) now. This is vastly more complex than a goo made of lots of small dumb copies.

[0] https://chemlambda.github.io/collection.html#58

[1] https://chemlambda.github.io/collection.html#59

[2] https://chemlambda.github.io/collection.html#259
Rust Wishlist: functions with keyword args, default args, varargs
Nim Community Survey 2019 Results
Are you really looking for “engineers” who can half-ass a project from start to finish in 4 hours? That’s the quality bar?

If I were in OP’s shoes and feeling frisky I would point out to the hiring manager that for a real world project like that it would take at least 4 hours to just gather the requirements, write a design doc, and provide an estimate. 4 hours to do design, implement, and test something properly is ridiculous. And if you aren’t focused on doing it properly, then——wait, what company are you hiring manager at?

OP’s hiring company was an insurance company, not an Uber-For-Cats startup. The software he or she is eventually expected to write on the job is supposed to work.
> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Any sufficiently advanced technology does not break the laws of physics anyway.
"A Place to Grow" - It's a pretty transparent move to encourage cannabis growers to set up shop in Ontario.
Study & Experience, that's it.

Also understand the difference between these

programmer
application developer
software engineer
computer scientists

there are very different roles, it's okay to be one and really good at one.

BTW, you mentioned "design" so I'm going to hinge on that, design not the actual implementation. In that case study existing systems. 90% reading can teach you design, on actual implementation, more like 90% doing.
Ava: The Art and Science of Image Discovery at Netflix
There probably is, but the police has better things to do than enforce traffic laws in Toronto (Ontario?) apparently.

Really, the joke goes that if you want to kill someone in Ontario then do it while driving your car. It's even better if your victim is on a bike. Then you get a 500$ fine and back at the wheel. "Woops, didn't see them" is a valid defense, no matter the circumstances.
This has really annoyed me recently, I've had interviews with companies that expected me to do a test before even seeing them in person (following a phone interview) and their tasks mentioned I should spend around 8 hours on the test. I think this is definitely unreasonable.

I prefer longer interviews where you're working alongside your potential future colleagues. This way you can also find out if you actually want to work with them or not. Interviews should be a two way affair.
Why to Use Founder Preferred Stock
If I want to make an application composed of C, C#, and Visual Basic, there nothing stopping me in Windows. You try to pull that shit in Unix though, and you get a whole mess of problems. This is why Unix is clearly just so inferior. /s
JavaScript is still alive not because it's worthy of being alive (compared to the four other languages you mentioned), but because it was first and became well entrenched. COBOL is still alive too...

ClojureScript and Reason are superior languages, period. They will live long happy lives, too.
There's one in your house probably. It won't frag packets between your wired PC and your wired printer.

There are also certainly a shit load of them in closets and top-of-rack all over where I work.
I don't think that the competition are that effective or good. I remember that I have seen documentaries about how the factory workers at Boing anonymously complaining about the build quality and especially that management was not taking their concerns seriously. And this was before Max incidents. I will bet on issues because of profit/cost focus and poor management over conspiracy theories any day of the week.
Except that didn’t happen with the Max. The engineers thought MCAS was safe. Nobody in management told the engineers to design MCAS do be dependent on a single sensor with no sanity check and nearly physically impossible to override.
Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer)
That's fine. But that content should be counted as theirs. You cannot have it both ways - pretend that you are quality publisher and then publish crappy content.
I don't agree with your opinion, but I vouched for you (after you were flagged) because you didn't violate any of the rules and I believe that your opinion is worth discussing.

Feminism can go extreme at times and your opinion has a level of validity. Additionally I would like to probe how a person like you would arrive at that conclusion.

Another thing that gets me is that you didn't do anything wrong. You aren't slandering women, you're just saying that there's sexism towards white men. I am not white and I say this is not worth flagging.
What codec would you use for a camera that captures not RGB, but poetry of the soul?

CONTEXTLESS, HEADERLESS, ENDLESS BYTE STREAMS OF COURSE, where the literal, idealized (remember udp) position of each byte is part of a vector in a non euclidean coordinate system.
The phone's off button is the ultimate anti-loneliness app.
A mediocre game, most notable for casting humanity as the 'super-advanced ancestral race'.

It unfortunately lacked any interesting grey goo-related mechanics, even when playing as the goo.
Only that they've practiced dodging bullets in order to get a job designing kitchen appliances?
I found recently that dragging the middle half of the screen on mobile street view now scrolls up and down the street instead of rotating the view. I don't know why companies obsessively break things that worked fine for years.
I understand. I have architected networks for over a decade now. The real issue is serialization delay. If I have a tiny voice packet that has to wait to be physically transmitted behind a huge dump truck packet (big), it can still be a problem even with high speed links with regards to microbursts.
SynLimb translates neural signals into instructions for electronic instruments
Machine learning is now archiving Mark Zuckerberg's haircuts
this https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Watt-Pro... ?
Previous discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417
> Saw a few of these this weekend, I'm curious to see if the 407 (Ontario's toll road)cameras can read them at night. I imagine this gets changed quite quickly if they can only read the old plates.

It would be nice if some of the US states without tolls could do this on purpose, because many of the ones with them use them primarily to extract revenue from out of state drivers disproportionate to the cost of their use of the roads.

This would also improve the privacy of their citizens, since it would presumably also interfere with ALPR in general and keep their vehicles' location history from ending up in adversarial third party databases.

Anti-ALPR license plates are a feature, not a bug.
The trouble is that the determination of "fast enough" is provided by a senior developer who has 2 years of experience with that toolchain, and that's a ridiculous expectation.

Given a weekend, I can come up to speed well enough on an unfamiliar toolchain to start being productive. Given a month, my productivity is going to be high enough to be good enough for any shop that isn't looking for rock stars.

I interview candidates on their fundamental skills and ability to solve problems. If you're reasonably intelligent, can communicate well, and have logical and higher-order thinking skills, I don't care what tools you've used in the past. Many times I've recommended someone who has absolutely zero experience with the tools my team uses.
I think the main determining factor here is vocabulary. Modern programming langs have fairly small #s of reserved words, and when you add the standard library on top of that, you essentially have all the 'vocab' you need to use the language well. This is because (a) a large part of programming is the act of creating new vocab via writing new APIs/libraries/functions, and (b) the time pressure is significantly lessened; there's no issue with consulting docs for the interfaces you forget.

Meanwhile, human languages are essentially unusable without a fairly extensive vocabulary, and importantly a vocabulary that has to be memorized and available at a moment's notice.
> almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 .... amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly. .... now: type in two words, wait for an AJAX popup. get a throbber for five seconds. oops you pressed a key, your results are erased

So we start with something 15 years AFTER the title as evidence of the "good" times, then make a vague anecdotal reference to something modern. I've seen POOR performances in places, but the majority of experiences I see now are faster than in 1998 and definitely than 1983. Faster AND more convenient.

> And it's worth noting that HYPERTEXT, specifically, is best with a mouse in a lot of cases. Wikipedia would suck on keyboard.

Um....no. It's less convenient than a mouse, but way better than the function key-based commands than the author lists.

I think there is a lot of room available to complain about terrible interfaces today, and in particular how choked everything is by the need to track and add advertising, but there's no actual evidence in this article, and it comes across as a rant and selective nostalgia.
He looks alright to me
So a purge isn't sufficient. Any lasting change would require a complete restructuring of the organizations in question.
Can feminist philosophies of anger be justified?