skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you’re conflating language design with language implementation.

If I’m being paid to write a Ruby compiler then ‘keep the language simple’ isn’t an option available to me, is it.

And the techniques from the 80s would be absolutely hopeless at compiling and optimising Ruby. A lot of the implementation approaches you’re talking about work brilliantly for a single-pass compiler for a trivial language like Pascal generating basic machine code but they aren’t expansive or powerful enough for bigger problems.

So the techniques haven’t been lost - they are in most cases either not enough or not applicable to our languages and the output we need.
A book on sleep (and more) that deserves to be much more widely known is The Head Trip by Jeff Warren:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2168851.Head_Trip
You're mixing up two different evacuations. The whistleblower complaint about HHS employees with inadequate training processing evacuees was about the Wuhan evacuation, not the Diamond Princess one. Only about three of the Wuhan evacuees ever ended up testing positive for the virus, there's no reason to believe they were even infectious when flown back and none of the staff involved have shown signs of COVID-19. It's certainly possible that one of the people involved in the quarantine didn't follow precautions and was infected, even with full training, but I don't think there's any evidence tying the California case to it.
Lackracks have been around since the early 2000s at least, probably earlier than that, even. There's a whole range of Ikea hacks that exist (and dedicated websites for them). Highly recommend perusing the wide range of options if you like the Lackrack!
I wonder if there will be a more general cultural change. For instance, will it become commonplace to have disinfectant dispensers in public places, like you might have drinking fountains and public bathrooms? Will workplaces and stadiums install these? I can't judge the advice on this, but it seems to be that disinfectants work.

Also, will people be told to stay home when they're even slightly ill? Currently people know that sick people spread disease, but we leave it to their own judgement as to whether to show up. What about a law that says you can't be paid as a contractor if you show up and you're ill? Could/should that happen?
It's a valley thing, and then maybe smaller services run by digital nomads. Most of the startups around the world are trying to solve real local problems by emulating successful ones in the USA or China.
I think you could make an argument that a pandemic (maybe not this one yet) might be the closest thing we ever get to world war again.
Touch Typing
Ithkuil
I used to think this every time I downloaded a free mobile game. Probably 90%+ of ads in mobile games were for other free mobile games that presumably also have the same ad-supported model and the same sort of advertisers. It feels like there's a few games making heaps from IAPs and everyone else is just advertising in a pyramid toward them while also using IAPs in a way that makes their own game basically unplayable.
A Treasury Official in 1866 Put His Own Face on U.S. Currency
Course Notes on Optimization Models and Methods (Robert Fourer)
Thank you for the kind words and suggestions!

It's free ("buy" button there is just to motivate people to leave feedback, i. e. on click there is a message "it's free! to download please submit the form"). I'll remove it as it doesn't work (7 submissions per 1.5k visits).

Even a cent will be an overprice for a blank sheet with pomodoro images, I guess. But if I'll be able to ship a really good quality (including downloading multi-page PDF, per-week planners for the whole year, etc.), then charging a buck or two will have some sense.

Thanks!
Might be either the best or worst time in history to enter the WSOP.
Interesting! Where I'm from, these were posted in the newspaper. But I do remember having to call to reserve seats.
I've added it to a todo-list! Thank you!
You can use use it forever without a license, but you shouldn't.

There are lots of honour based / social contracts that essentially function because enough of us abide by them. If enough people do not, they go away.

Or as the saying goes, "this is why we can't have nice things."
PG talks about noticing the same phenomenon - when at Yahoo during the dotcom bubble - in the beginning of this article:

http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html
Look at the big brain on this guy.
I hope they’re capturing this at full resolution and preserving the full 60i signal. Too many times, people think VHS is 320x240 and capture accordingly, dropping half the temporal resolution from the get go. Even though there’s not a ton of horizontal evolution, a full D1 resolution capture will represent the tape much better than a half-resolution capture (but half-D1 would still be better than 320 or 352 by 240).
This is analogous to saying “big O notation doesn’t matter because the code is going to get run either way”.

There’s a massive difference between each hospital dealing with 3 dozen severe respiratory cases at a time and 3 thousand. Part of the game is to run out the clock before cold season ends so hopefully the rate of infection drops.
Of course a small percentage of a huge number is a big number...

The point is to reassure people and to prevent panic. For the vast majority of cases this virus is not a big deal so people should be vigilant but not be overly scared for themselves.
That's likely how SystemVerilog came into being.
> The legal criticism would be that there just aren't that many unique melodies—as demonstrated by the fact that they were able to enumerate them all

How does that follow? You can enumerate any finite number. And the article doesn't say how big. Is it a thousand or a trillion? "Riehl says the algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second.". The article doesn't say how many seconds it took to generate all melodies though.
> Most cases with mild symptoms are not even reported

This is outdated. Dr. Bruce Aylward said in a WHO conference this week that the Chinese tested 320,000 samples in Guangdong and they are not seeing huge transmission beyond cases found clinically. It's at 47 mins in this video: https://youtu.be/-o0q1XMRKYM?t=2810

> so the real number is lower than 1 percent in all likelihood.

I disagree. When we calculate the SARS-CoV-2 CFR properly using

CFR = deaths / (deaths + recovered)

using the latest data we get

2,924 / (2,924 + 39,605) = 7% CFR

That's much more in line with the original SARS CFR of around 9%.
Off topic, I completely agree with most of these except "search engines typically turn up the desired result in the first page, even if it’s a book or scientific paper; one doesn’t need to resort to ‘meta-search engines’ or enormous 20-clause Boolean queries"

I find that search engines used to be much better in giving me relevant useful results 8-9 years ago. There used to be a lot more content on small personal websites or blogs that was really well done and useful.

Now search engines tend to only return results from massive well known websites and the actual relevant and interesting results is buried far far down in the results under all of the seo optimized content farms.
Internal (bug, e.g. divide by zero or missing function definition in a dynamic language) vs external (out-of-your-control corner case, like file not found) is an important axis.

But another axis is "finality":

1. do you just want to never crash (return code)

2. sometimes crash but have the ability to deal with the problem up the callchain (exceptions in most languages)

3. sometimes crash but be able to fix the problem and continue, at the point the error occured -- not up the call stack (restart-case etc. in common lisp)

4. sometimes crash, but have a supervisor hierarchy make an informed decision if and how to restart you and things in your dependency tree (erlang)

5. crash (panic, assert, exit) and maybe have some less sophisticated but probably very complicated mechanism take care of restarting/replacing you (systemd, kubernetes etc.)

This axis may not be completely orthogonal, but probably mostly is. For example resumable conditions are nice in common lisp both to deal with external stuff (no space left on device? ask user to abort or free some up, and just resume download instead of erroring out as webbrowsers do) but also to just fix problems as you run into them and continue your computation during development, including calling a function you did not define – you can just define it and resume the call to it.

Sadly, the choices in most languages for this second axis are much more constrained. Erlang's supervision trees and common lisp's resumable exceptions in particular seem very useful in many scenarios but nothing else has them (well, elixir has everything erlang has, but it's still the same VM/ecosystem).
I see this argument get trotted out a lot. Compared to <dev salary cost>, adding service x,y and z percentage wise is just a small increment.

The problem that gets easily overlooked is that compared to the costs being made, the profit in many cases is also just a small percentage of the revenue, and the small % increment in costs can mean a large % decrement of profits. You should always compare incremental cost of revenue to the margin, not to the base cost.

Now if you are running a profitable SaaS business with 80% margins, a 4% increase in spend might not mean the end of the world even if it was wasted on spurious licenses or other frills, but if you are a healthy service business operating on 12% margins then that 4% increase will reduce your profits by a massive 33%.

This doesn't mean that you have to make do with the bare minimum and skimp on decent hardware or development environments, but it also means the marginal productivity/retention/quality increases must in the end be worth it in terms of increased aggregate profits, and not be justified as 'you already pay me 5K a month, so whats another 250 for ...
That works for individuals and non-monetary infractions. You can't do a precise "punishment > expected profit" calculation on speeding tickets in dollars, because people don't speed for an explicit, rationally priced-in benefit. They speed for emotional reasons - overconfidence, hurry, stress, anger. Since the benefit is denominated in emotional terms, the punishment must be too - hence the idea to punish for equivalent hurt, which scales more-less linearly with income.

On the other hand, a corporation rarely if ever does anything for reasons other than "revenue > costs"; in fact, it usually employs people making sure that ideas violating that rule don't get executed. So calculating a punishment in a way that erases all profits from the infraction and then some is a very good strategy when dealing with big companies.
Two epigenetic regulators interfere with healthy aging
They didn't think they knew enough about CJKV to make that call, and so instead asked pre-eminent scholars from major Chinese, Japanese and Korean universities, and they replied that 21k was going to be enough.

The reason they thought that they could fit Chinese into so few letters was that at the time, the CPC supported academics who wanted to reform Chinese towards fewer letters. Not long after, views about traditional scholarship changed, and now they want to promote maintaining more of their traditional characters.

The reason they thought Han unification would work was that the time they asked was in a short period of rapprochement in Sino-Japanese relations. At the time, it was good politics for Chinese scholars to co-operate with Japanese ones. Very soon after this changed.
> When company really starts using Slack it replaces the whole communication system of company, think at the level of replacing the complete Exchange/Outlook system, the whole intra-company email.

That's exactly why I dislike Slack. You lose the whole history of your communication because Slack history is not very navigable.
Inside the wild world of government auctions
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Not any that I have to pay for yet! :)
He’s in the Dyson sphere now.
"The claim was quickly challenged by an infectious diseases expert who serves on a committee that advises the WHO’s health emergencies program.

Gary Kobinger, director of the Infectious Disease Research Center at Laval University in Quebec, said it would be highly unusual for there not to be mild or symptom-free cases that are being missed. He pointed to the fact that outbreaks have popped up in countries far from China — including Iran and Italy — because people with mild infections were not detected and traveled to other places.

'There are mild cases that are undetected. This is why it’s spreading. Otherwise it would not be spreading because we would know where those cases are and they would be contained and that would be the end of it,' said Kobinger, who insisted that mild, undetected infections cannot be ruled out until people who haven’t been diagnosed with the illness can be tested for antibodies to the virus.

'As long as we do not have good serology data, I think that it is completely speculative to say that there are no undetected cases,' Kobinger said."

What Dr. Aylward says makes no sense and reads more like a PR fluff piece designed to praise China to keep them happy, and as Kobinger points out he's probably wrong. From the same press conference he says this "If I had COVID-19, I’d want to be treated in China."

Which is obviously bullshit.

As the specifics of the 320,000 cases. It wasn't a serum antibody test, so it wouldn't show people with low viral loads or people who recovered.

Also this is in Guangdong where the infection was potentially quickly contained, and if you'll notice the death rate is much lower in Guangdong.
What's the advantage of this over just using pip (other than this is has a GUI which I don't see as an advantage, but understand others might)? How do you handle updates to packages? I'm just really struggling to see why this would be useful.
> Not everyone gets the flu every year because we have natural immunity to it;

... and we have massive immunisation campaigns targetting the people at risk of most harm.
MS Teams is very buggy/has less features, we're researching other tools atm.
This is great write up. I wish every language had this on their official page. I'd personally love one for C++.
Free online chat for people from different countries who want to make new acquaintances and friendship, practice speaking a foreign language with a native speaker of that language.
> I also see no reason to believe that the total number of cases isn’t a couple of orders of magnitude higher than reported, making the overall fatality rate quite low.

4 people died (so far) from the cruise ship, out of <700 infected (including asymptomatic), so statistically the case fatality rate can only be so low.
I wonder how much of this is a lack of communication from your CEO.

I've worked for companies that operated on very lean budgets. Everybody in the organisation knew what it was, it wasn't much fun but it was a clear policy.

There is no reason you can't do the same here, the objectives might be different but unless people up and down the organisation know what they are you can't expect anything other than anarchy.
Shark Tank host loses $400k in a scam
To make math work, you need to arrange multiple viable meetings ahead of time. They don’t just happen because you show up to Moscone with a GDC badge. And such meetings don’t even require a GDC badge...

There’s every chance you could do these meetings at other times of the year, but publishers might be in other cities.

As for learning, there’s great content, but GDC Vault is a far better value than an all-access ticket, and the sessions are happening when you should be having meetings. (That means the randos you’ll bump into aren’t the people who you’d want to meet with...)
Write APIs using direct SQL queries with validation, auth and crons in seconds
Readability is entirely and extremely subjective. I don't find Japanese readable, but that's because I never bothered to put the time in to learn it. I find TeX and LaTeX readable, though. Readability becomes slightly more objective, but not much more so, when you have a well defined and sufficiently homogenous target audience.

If you make a new language today, you should figure out who it's for (probably yourself and a couple of other people), and design it accordingly. As was always the case.
Underscore is not exactly "throw away" but rather it is exactly "don't bind to variable". The difference becomes evident with the statement:

let _ = x;

This is a no-op and the value remains owned by the variable x, and is not thrown away.
Formic acid might be a possible solution for the volumetric capacity problem, although it is still very much in its infancy. See [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22449894
I do not really agree with that, how would you explain that founders that have succeed in the past are most likely to succeed again ?

And how do you explain that some people are just able to create several successful companies ?

Luck is not the best thing to create a company and actually it is almost never the case, luck doesn't last.

I'm not saying that we know exactly what works or we know how to transfer this knowledge to other people, but I'm convinced that luck is not the reason. Actually luck is often an explanation of someone's skills when we don't find rational explanations
> FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. Free since we built it ourselves :)

If the service you're providing is valuable, you should pay for it too. You don't need to actually funnel the money through your payment processors giving them a cut, just do it as an accounting exercise, showing the revenue on the books.

It also helps you quantify your pricing yourself. If you're not willing to pay $x/month for your service, why would your customers? What do you need to change to make it worth $x/month to you? Do you need to change $x to be $x-y (or $x+y? Are you under charging?)

Anyway, great list, great post, thanks for sharing, and best of luck with your product!
I wonder, what is it they missing on $6 GSuite plan, so they need $12 one?
Reason{ML,} is just a new syntax for OCaml, still perfectly round trip translatable I believe (though that's something I expect to diverge over the years). You can use js_of_ocaml or BuckleScript to translate either OCaml or ReasonML written code to JavaScript.
The forest spirits of today are the forests. We haven’t destroyed them completely. So far.
All these intros to asynchronous programming fail to address the most interesting (and arguably most important yet also most difficult) case, which is asynchronicity on a modern multi-core server. Instead, threads and event loops are presented as mutually exclusive strategies.. naively using one thread for every connection doesn't scale, and naively using event loops means you're stuck running it all on one core, which doesn't scale.
Where this totally falls down is where that committee becomes a full-time position, and the members stop doing actual dev work, becoming more and more out of touch with reality as time passes.

This was the case at an engineering company I worked with for several years.

The committee, or "enterprise architects" as they called themselves, became too far removed from the trenches, and the devs viewed them as sitting in an ivory tower and passing down ridiculous decrees.

They brought this view upon themselves, as they made it more or less impossible to even speak to them - almost all communication was through requests and forms uploaded to a sharepoint site!

They kept taking it further and further, until you even needed their permission to take a dependency on a 3rd party library for a LoB app. Such requests would sometimes take weeks to get a response.

We could never hold on to devs for long, in large part because they hated working under this bureaucratic nightmare.

The committee made all sorts of terrible decisions, always without consulting the devs and always with little justification, and these had a lasting impact for years to come.

Gods, it was horrible!
From a business perspective, be prepared for an extended period working from home, and be prepared for productivity to drop. Prioritize and set expectations accordingly.

I have colleagues in China who are facing down their fifth week working from home. At the beginning, they tried to maintain their normal (and excellent) level of output. But the stress of quarantine is starting to show.

Disruptions to normal routines, such as kids stuck at home and reduced/no access to childcare, are the non-newsworthy but most challenging issues for a large number of folks.
I dream, that, maybe, sites which have something like "news feed" could export content not only in human-readable HTML/CSS/JS but, maybe, some machine-readable format too?

And such plugins, software products and extensions, as Devo will consume this unambiguous and common format, and will not need custom APIs, APIs keys, backends, HTML scraping & parsing and all custom work for each site they support, but one common way for all sites?

Is it possible on our technological level, or it is wild dream?

OH, WAIT! RSS!
Is that a country with good internet connections for consumers and small companies? Here in Germany I wouldn't dare to run a lackrack server in the office, because the internet connection is crap almost everywhere.
Another way to see it is that "panic" could save a million lives (eg through the use of quarentines). Is it worth it then? I'm not saying that it's an obvious answer (panic causes its own problems), but it is a trade-off worth considering.
> Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes.

That's just a little bit of redistribution from the top 1% to the top 10%, at best. Tech startups and their new fancy apps aren't putting food on the table or paying the health care bill for the bottom 90%.
I read that somewhere (couple weeks before the first reports from Wuhan actually, a toilet in our office building in Germany had it on a poster) but I don't know why this works. Why isn't it sufficient to rub over every part (between fingers, back of your hand, etc.)? Soap isn't anti-viral, what does longer exposure do? Am I supposed to just rub over every part of my hand N times until 20-30s have passed or does it just need to sit there for the time?
The actual election is some years in the future though.
Made me laugh ...
Covid-19 Geographic Aggregation Tool with Regression Support
The Steely Dan song "Kid Charlemagne", from the album The Royal Scam (1976), is loosely based on Stanley.

"I think the people down the hall know who you are."