skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This dovetails to some degree with thoughts that I've been having about language and expression design.

Associativity and operator precedence are ideas that made sense as a shorthand in written mathematics (and have deep roots in the structure of arithmetic) but don't actually add a lot of value in programming languages, except to put a huge mental burden on developers to unpack the precedence.

My thought is just to remove precedence and associativity entirely -- instead of "a + b + c/2" you have to make it explicit -- "a + (b + (c/2))". The only problem that I see is that there are two ways of writing this, you could also write "(a + b) + (c/2)". In my experience, though, especially in programming (though not always in financial programming), there are almost always semantics associated with those intermediate values which makes one of the two groupings preferable.

Taking numeric constants and adding internal separators makes a lot of sense as well (both before and after the decimal point). Ideally this would be enforced at some arbitrary cultural level, (e.g. using the US-standard groupings of three with comma), and would be required -- "2000" is invalid and "20,00" is invalid (so python3's approach of allowing arbitrary _'s in numbers is not really great, because it doesn't protect against typos). The right-of-the-decimal-point separators are not really common, but it would be nice to take advantage of this to make a sensible arbitrary enforced designation, like using "," to the left and "_" to the right, once again mandatory and required to support groupings of three.

Would probably also be desirable to have a convention for hexadecimal numbers and other supported bases -- in particular binary is not supported by many languages, but is very natural for most programming languages, if we had a way of using delimiters -- 0b0100_0000 is more readable and meaningful than 0x40, but 0b0010_0100_0011_0010_0000_0010_0010 is not so good (quick, how many bytes did I just type?).
Thanks for the great feedback

- The humor does seem out of place for a professional chatbot experience, will get that sorted out
- Return was interfering with the private messages, will enable that as soon as I figure that out
- Also, the part about acting as an agent and not split personality (1st person vs 3rd) is what had me confused as well. I'll update the response in the 3rd person format.
There's a number of Cloudflare folks who are HN regulars, so hopefully you'll get some answers. Hopefully it's something they can reverse.

But as a general reminder to everyone (I think this is an unfortunately common problem from a number of companies): If this is how your company handles account issues, you're probably wrong. Whether it's automated or manual, a user should be able to access all of their own information even when you decide to no longer provide them service. And you should test and retest the ability for people who you now deny service to transfer out.
Does the U.S. Need a National Digital Currency?
RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps
Isn't that the point though? That sweeping things under the rug in order to save face is what allows these issues to spiral out of control.
Funny that this is coming up. I just transferred over from Namecheap to Cloudflare a few days ago and had a similar issue. One of my A records (out of about 20) were missing after the transfer.
Plant Moves-lapse videos of plants
Seems great from an all in one perspective. Just wish you could automate some of the reporting. It looks like they constantly scan the network and run ISP upstream speedtests. They should put them together to report on over time changes in speed or outages. Something simple like a heartbeat every minute, if it is non-communicative for X heartbeats send an email notifying of an outage. Same with speedtest results or new devices on the network.

It looks like a great option but very young compared to solutions like Netcut. More like Nmap on steroids.
My thought as well - it's jarring at first to get used to, but Desmos' way of typing in equations, where keypresses really act more like operations on the equation than raw text input, gives a natural easy way to write good equations.

At the very least, typing / automatically makes a fraction with separate top and bottom input areas - which means that brackets for numerator and denominator aren't necessary.
This depends on the skill set available and the goal of the company. My previous employer tried the open source route, but then the normal things happened - people left, documentation was lacking, new people preferred other tools, then those new people left eventually. After a few years, it was a tangle of half-done implementations and no one there fully understood how these worked. Committing to rolling your own really does mean committing. Maintenance is not cheap, so paying for part of it with “vendor lock-in” could be practical for some.

My comment was intended for those just starting out. If you don’t really know what you are doing yet with data, it best to focus on your core company objectives and not burn valuable engineering time on infra you can buy for now. Unless that data stack is your core business.
But couldn't you now just buy an ad, send them to ihavecancer.example.com and find that in the DNS logs later? You don't even have to own the domain. You could use that exact one and then just find the failed resolution in the logs.
as much as i like cloudflare (and i like them a lot), it's kind of absurd that this kind of thing can happen. a lot of red flags that, if true, would mean that their infrastructure require a lot more care (127.0.0.1 as the source of an audit event? no email when DNS records are deleted? no 1-to-1 message due to this happening?).
At google some candidates who failed all their interviews were hired because they had connections to upper management.

Here at Amazon, if the candidate knows the hiring manager and interviewers they can be fed all the answers. Not being able to code fizzbuzz doesn't block people from getting 350K+ offers. It's insane. Amazon tried to fix this problem with "bar raisers" but it doesn't work since humans naturally follow the crowd, even if the crowd is corrupt.
Is there ever a time when an outbreak would seem less suspicious? I'm also not sure the vape "panic" was a moral one. Was there not a clear link to certain vaping products and death?
No it's not legal, but who's going to do anything about it? Good luck suing a Chinese company in China. You might have better luck sending them a letter asking them nicely to stop counterfeiting your product.
Also Java has Optional<T> and C# has Nullable<T>.
> Sometimes safety equipment lets you go faster.

Even simpler: brakes let you go faster.

When I was cycling a while ago, my brakes broke in the middle of a cross-country ride. I didn't want to push the bike back all the way, but you can bet your hat that I rode extremely slowly and cautious.
Hence the cognitive dissonance I was mentioning in my initial reply.
God no! That was bad. Animations, colors, SOUND! I hope this is a joke, and not something serious.
xenix
Mexico did well in containing the H1N1 flu in 2009. Granted, COVID19 seems much more infectious, and our current government has repeatedly cut funding to public health, so you're maybe right.
I'm "curious" how things will work out in the US when people

1) show up to work at, say, McDonalds even if they're not feeling great.

2) wait until the last minute to seek health care because it's expensive

And by "curious" I mean "extremely worried".

Edit: I'm certainly no expert though; it'd be nice to consider some actual data about how these things spread (is the flu a similar enough model?). Maybe the above points don't really matter that much. I'm still worried in any event. Several relatives-in-law live in one of the affected areas of Italy.
Smart, nerdy people tend to spend a lot of time alone with books/computers/hobbies, so they simply do not spend enough time with other people to properly develop their social skills.
We had snow here in the UK for the first time this winter today. It's all gone now, and unless we have more in the next week or two we'll likely not see anymore this year.

Contrast a 1-day of snow winter with those of past harsh winters and you can easily deduce that 'wind and rain' isn't really a winter anymore.
The private sector is very much the same, just look at SAP. You only hear less about it because their budgets aren't as detailed and few people care about waste that isn't paid for by their taxes.

While I also feel the temptation to yell "I could do it for 1/100th of that" at a screen when I read/hear about these projects, just basic probability suggests that I'm probably wrong. It's me (with as little enterprise" experience as I could manage) vs a whole lot of people that don't strike me as particularly stupid and who have lots of incentives to keep costs down.
> Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this

Amazon cares, but Chinese sellers are paying Amazon customers to write fake reviews for them. There's an article about it here:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/her-amazon...

This practice basically makes it impossible to tell fake reviews from real ones.
WeWork paid $2M in cash to woman who threatened to expose discrimination
The selling point of types (and type inference) is that they save you from having to write half your tests.

And of course, lines of code that you didn't have to write are less likely to have bugs in them.
This happened to me with AWS somewhat recently[0], and I never found out exactly what happened. I just chalk it up to some dev made a mistake and didn't tell anyone. It's pretty alarming when things like this happen though.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21326014
Private equity returns fell behind stocks over the past decade
While I can see where the author is coming from, I have a couple of points where I disagree.

1. I've yet to see any automatically formatting system that's not extremely painful to work with.

2. Mathematical notation hasn't just been developed over 100s of years it is continuing to do so.

3. Units aren't labels.
When I worked on the infrastructure parts of Google I worked on systems with millions of QPS, does PostgreSQL really handle that kind of load gracefully?
Signature Validation Bypass Leading to RCE in Electron-Updater
Did you... read the thread? Or the post?

This isn't about going in for a one day interview. It's about the huge amount of time required for the interview preparation that comes long before an actual interview. As the post I replied to said:

> even if you were to ignore the upfront preparation costs just the timeline (months with not much indication)

And the fact that it isn't just one day of interviews, as the post details it's multiple interviews, some remote, some in person.

All of these things are an absolutely enormous time suck.
So, you have to keep a computer on to sync files.
And then, what about automatically tagging people, suggesting fixes (rotation, lights), searching by location name, sharing albums, etc?
That is... quite scary. Why would you EVER have a way for auto deletion of domains?
Indeed. See When Fury Overcomes Fear: www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/viral-alarm-when-fury-overcomes-fear
I noticed that if you don't unfocus the input field by focusing somewhere else on the page it may not save. That may be what happened to you.
Just want to point out a very accurate, yet completely inelegant solution to voice text input: Saying each letter and symbol individually.

If you haven't tried it, you'll think I'm crazy, but it's amazing how fast computers can recognize individual letter names. You can just blurt them all out. I discovered this while entering a domain name by voice - just spell it out and poof, no problem, no corrections.

Not sure I'd want to spend all day doing it that way, but rather than fighting with voice recognition for misunderstood homonyms, just fall back on individual keys.
Maybe the nightmare wouldn’t end with your proposed solutions... in fact, maybe your personal problems aren’t related to society’s organization scheme but rather something in your decision making system.

I hope you find peace.
> Google doesn't respect your time.

Not only that, but they can't even tell the time in my experience. When I interviewed with them, they did not call at the agreed upon time and were many hours late. This happened the first time and with the rescheduled appointment. Yeah, they pay a lot of money, but if they're too stupid to tell the time, it seems to me they are not hiring smart people, let alone the best and brightest. The only other conclusion is that they are assholes looking to hire assholes. Because only an asshole or an idiot would mess up the time of the interview twice and be off by hours. So when they wanted me to make their stupid algorithm faster, I told them I wouldn't since I didn't want to work with such people.
Probably not. Most likely it's just become widespread there and they haven't been containing or testing. The deaths and serious cases are the tip of the iceberg.
You can post on Twitter about how unfair it is, but I would rather take control of my own destiny and do something else. Living in my car outside the football stadium in the hope that someday I'll be hired would be naive. The same for the adjuncts.
The question was "Challenge me, give one example that can't be done as easily with Clojure." The answer is "static typing". I never claimed it's revolutionary.
Any language with a type system at all can create a Maybe type. The difference is that failing to handle the None case is a runtime exception in most languages where in Haskel/Rust it won’t compile.

I don’t know of any mainstream language that has bolted on that level of verification.
At the very least, this sort of lack of good process is definitely what happens when Google decides to cut you off (and another person just commented a similar experience with Amazon), but I suspect it's likely the case for a much larger number of companies and services than people realize. It's fundamental internet architecture, and often little more thought goes into account termination than what you'd do to ban someone from your mid-2000s phpBB forum.

So much business focus goes into the onboarding experience, and since you assume all of the people your service terminates are "probably bad people anyways", not a lot of thought goes into offboarding, or ideally, appeals.
The New Meteor.com
Yeah I'm not sure what's "moral" about people vape users randomly falling ill. Maybe doctors quickly blaming weed could've come off as a moral judgement, but I think it was backed up with enough anecdotal evidence to make that correlation.

Also, I don't think a dozen people falling ill over a year is comparable to the thousands impacted by this and hundreds dead within 2-3 months. It's definitely on a completely different scale here.
Hi HN,

We built documentation in the form of a code walkthrough for the popular open source software Moment.js (Parse, validate, manipulate, and display dates and times in JavaScript.)

Use the links to step through the guide!

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Wonder what will happen with the Olympic games. Even a simple delay would be huge.
Show HN: React Hooks TODO List version 3.0
I can kinda do this with my bank (a small credit union) with a feature called Recipes. Basically a Recipe is a IFTTT-like interface where I can say "if my balance in CHQ drops below $1k, transfer $3k from LOC to CHQ". Likewise when the balance goes over a certain threshold, I can pay off the LOC, or if that's all paid, transfer to mutual funds or what have you.
> where everyone can be a leader - and everyone would act as an owner

I suspect these are different things.

Everybody can have a sense of ownership? Sure (e.g. common goals, employee owned companies, options, etc).

If everybody is leading (at the same time), nobody is. It's good if anyone can assume leadership at any given moment, though.

Tacit leaders are more important (and respected) than explicit ones. Appointing a leader rarely works.
But I am already thinking about what the code should do. The problem is that if I read functional code I get bogged down in the details of what limits are set by the operations, because they're usually not as explicit. It's like reading a chain of functions on some element (actually, it quite literally is that).
Bias alert: I work for Google.

I enjoyed the write-up but I have a small correction to make about "Frustrating moment #2. You can pass every interview with A grades and still not get a job, because a senior Googler decides that you're the wrong person to be hired."

The author is referring to hiring committees, whose job it is to take the feedback from every interview and make a hire/no-hire decision based on the blended results. I've done hundreds of interviews at Google and I've never seen universally positive interview feedback result in a no-hire decision.

The problem is that most feedback is not universally positive (or negative). So the hiring committee has to dissect the feedback and try to figure out if the identified negatives are (1) credible and (2) sufficient to be disqualifying. That can be pretty difficult (especially if the feedback is contradictory) and why a committee does it rather than the recruiter or hiring manager.
> I can’t for the world understand what it means...

It means Go performs well on real world projects. People feel productive, the language, tooling, and ecosystem get out of the way. You (and most PLT advocates I've encountered) seem to be evaluating languages on their inputs/features (presumably because you believe axiomatically that certain features--e.g., type systems--have a huge effect on the success or failure of a given software project) while the "useful for real world problems" view is about evaluating languages on their outputs. The latter view is harder to measure objectively, but it accounts for everything (e.g., syntax, type system, tooling, performance, ecosystem, etc) in correct proportion (no axiomatic beliefs).

Many PLT proponents generally seem to struggle with the notion that languages are successful when their model predicts that they shouldn't be. For example, many PLT proponents believe type systems strongly predict the success of a language, yet languages with very sophisticated type systems which are much admired by PLT proponents do poorly in the real world and languages with very flat-footed type systems (e.g., Go) do relatively well.

Either the qualitative data about these languages are wrong (e.g., contrary to the qualitative data, Haskell actually makes for more productive software development on balance than Go), or these PLT proponents' whitebox model is wrong. My money is on the qualitative data.
There are far more advanced hacking groups than there are nation states. There are likely more criminal hacking groups in each individual country than there are nation states.
The coronavirus has killed people. How is this a "moral panic"?
There's nothing surprising or underhanded here, and never was. It was just too complimentary perspectives.

McIrloy's paper shows the value of good hackery over engineering.

Knuth was set back by the blogger's dilemma of trying to show a technique that maybe useful in general but isn't very useful in a very short program.
Show HN: Unwyre.io
The landing page url is http://unwyre.io

Please checkout the video demo first, to get the idea.

To test out the product, use the url http://unwyre.io/home

Registration is two steps -> email+verification, and subscription. I don't have any customers right now, so if you just want to signup with your email, I'll contact you and give you a live demo.
Ethics Whiplash as Sonos Tries Every Possible Wrong Way to Handle IoT Right
Show me an engineer that has never made a mistake.

He designed and built two separate steam-powered rockets and at least one mobile launch platform that was able to carry a human hundreds of feet into the air. He obviously fucked something up but on average I'd say he did OK.
Launch HN: UXtweak – Platform to Improve Websites
Hi HN,
Together with our team, we developed UXtweak (www.uxtweak.com) unique platform for remote user research and usability testing. Our platform offers a unique combination of research & testing tools. We are not the first in the industry, but one of a kind.

UX tweak was born thanks to UX lab, created at a faculty of informatics and information technologies after numerous terrible user experiences on websites. While running UX lab one of the founders realised that such testing is very expensive and time-consuming. So, we started developing a sulution a budget friendly, effective all in one solution for UX research - UXtweak.

At this moment it is a little over 2 year in development and we recently launched. We developed a unique solution to use your real users as participants in your testing to provide the most accurate insights with which you can optimise your websites accordingly. UXtweak helps you to avoid confusing navigation, bad content labelling, unusable information architecture, increase conversions & optimize just about everything with our research toolkit. Our toolkit consists of: session recording, tree testing, card sorting, activity tracking and we are working on prototyping as I write this.

With years of expertise in user experience at the University UX lab and a team of great developers and UX researcher, we believe we created a product capable helping Web/UX designers, Marketers & Product managers around the world. We are looking for any feedback and suggestions on how to make our platform more appealing and get it out to the world.

Thank you
I have plenty of experience in Clojure (even some of it still in production!), as well as "C family" languages, both statically and dynamically typed. I didn't answer the question out of ignorance. The thing that immediately jumped out at me that "can't be done as easily with Clojure" is static typing.
I'm genuinely curious. What opportunities do you think an economic collapse would create for you?
DNS has become frighteningly unreliable. Here are previous stories that show how it is possible to lose access to your domain for no fault of yours:

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700139 - Sinkholed

(2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322966 - I lost my domain and everything that goes with it

No different than this story where the author's DNS records were deleted because of so called "anomaly".

Here are so many more stories: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21710939

DNS was a good idea but now there are organizations that have the power to arbitrarily take control and even remove your domain names and records. We really need to come up with a peer-to-peer solution and take back control of the naming system from these authorities.
Visualizing Function Composition
Why are you giving social media companies free marketing?
> had I known better I'd have gone into computer science because that's where I see the most progress being made.

Interestingly this is similar to what my two advisors (one from the math department and one from CS) suggested to me. It would be easier to do the math I like in a CS department than it would be to do the CS I like in a math department. Do you feel like math departments are more conservative when it comes to working outside the discipline?
I had an issue with them recently where a SRV record pointing to “.” (meaning “service unavailable”) was being rewritten to the string “false”. It didn’t take them too long to fix it, but it made me wonder how they managed to push a bug like that to production without some sort of automated test catching it.
Here is a very early(2007) and unintentionally humorous attempt to script in Perl with voice recognition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJ0CytAsec
Great experiments/demonstrations.

What are your thoughts on Mathematica/Wolfram Language? Some of these ideas are present in it (like mathematical typesetting, interactive documentation and live code/data updates).