skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, exactly, it's no more inappropriate than calling it the spanish flu, which health authorities consider innapropriate. It didn't originate in Spain but a hundred years later we still link it with Spain. The whole point is that future pandemics should not be given names that are tied to a name or a person so that we can explicitly avoid another case like the Spanish flu where we name it after a place hundreds of years later. The better name for the Spanish flu is the 1918 flu pandemic.
> I've heard that retailers are hesitant to even use AWS (I don't have a source for that and would love to hear otherwise if that's the case?) -

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wal-mart-to-vendors-get-off-ama...
Another thread here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22524315
>One of the outcomes of this is that parts of the country have been 'left behind' economically.

That's the whole point of the comment you're replying to. This isn't new or unique to recent technological advancements. This is always the case when new technology displaces existing structures.
I guess I'm just wondering if there's data on how often you these self-checkout bottlenecks. The way other commenters describe it makes it seem like it's fairly often. Hence the surprise.

Although I agree just-walk-out scales well with demand.
I too would be interested in answers to this, and I found the question itself thought-provoking. This is the first time I've seen this.
I think in the short term, the information revolution appears similar to the industrial revolution: a category of jobs become obsolete, but long term, the economy grows, and adds many more categories of jobs.
>I was not commenting on the thing that the quote was intending to talk about.

Exactly, and that's the definition of a strawman.

Again, I do agree with your larger points about privacy, but the presentation of your argument rubbed me the wrong way.
This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/

I've spent a lot of time in recent years warning about disinformation and the value of flagging or deplatforming bad actors who exploit the valuable principle of free speech to deliberately make others worse off. Free speech is good, but the economics of information distribution often end up giving free reach to purveyors of information with negative truth value.
A lot of this and a few other links in this thread end up looking like creating an AST limited to the operations you want to expose to the user, in a serializable way. I think that's even called out explicitly in the articles. But I'm left thinking "what is the serialized structure of an AST?" It's source code. So we've implemented a language that then we have to use from within our code that is not as ergonomic as the host language.

In a way, it's kind of like type-safe eval(), with the limited nature of the purpose-specific implementation creating a sandbox of types around the eval, i.e. the impl isn't complete enough to give us turing completeness, File IO, or other things that would let the data turn into executable code that could escape the sandbox. So I'm curious to see if some wrappers around Roslyn[0] could get us less verbosity than Roslyn itself, a more complete impl that doesn't have to be written for every application, and the sandboxing necessary to prevent it from being handing the user a fully-automatic submachine gun pointed at our database.

Maybe it's something like a white-list for Roslyn structures. You could take a C# file, parse it with Roslyn, filter through the white-list, and either error-out if the user is doing something nefarious, or compile the structure and continue as normal. And then the code that we pass around as data could just be C# code, rather than having to have our own AST structures that we serialize on our own.

Maybe you could even allow limited forms of looping by injecting infinite-loop-breaking code that does some simple pre-/post-condition checking. Like "while(true) loops are only allowed to execute 10K times", or "for loops need to be bounded correctly for the update expression, and the index must not be modified in the body".

[0] Side note: my office is in a neighborhood called "Rosslyn", so I'm constantly misspelling one or the other.
Yeah the walmart near me in the Woodlands TX was the same way and I don't see the pricing gun any longer
As a "junior programmer", we aren't the only ones who need this. There are a lot of us in this new wave of programmers who have been learning about and working to explore the material in the hard CS(i.e FP and type system) fields.

There are a lot of "senior programmers/developers/engineers/whatever other term you want to use" that don't know about these techniques. More broadly they don't know about a lot of the features and functionalities of functional programming and more generally higher order (as in function) programming paradigms.

If we don't write introductory articles in a way that those outside the subfield can grasp them, we are alienating large groups of new-guard and old-guard programmers who could benefit greatly from understanding the techniques that not only help them improve their code and productivity, but also the techniques that allow them to use high level features without paying for the cost of them.

Anecdote: I've worked with a senior engineer on a C++ project. We used C++11 but effectively we wrote C++98 style code because they had largely unfounded fears of not only the performance impacts of utilising new features and FP paradigms in their codebase, but also the debugging and readability impacts of using them. I found that many of the articles and videos I would send them to try to ease those fears ended up falling flat due to them not targetting his audience. It took me slowly writing up internal memos and presentations on these various features, and showing how they came at little to no cost while providing their benefits for our team to actually start using them. Now they like to joke about how "In 2019 I did the impossible and helped drag them kicking and screaming into 2011".

On your last comment: You claim that we shouldn't need to "Cobalize everything to make it superficially acceptable to people who refused to learn basic language" but the issue is a matter of priorities. For a new engineer learning the language is important however for senior engineers and leadership, these are not the most important concerns. The important stuff is the following in order:

- Actually delivering a product.

- Making the product stable, easy to maintain, easy to debug/validate/test, and easy to modify/improve without introducing issues.

- Making sure that the product ages well, handles staff churn without losing design intent, and doesn't unnecessarily accrue technical debt.

- Ensuring that new staff can be easily on-boarded and become productive.

It should come to no surprise that senior staff are hesitant to waste time on what could potentially be fads or misinformed design choices. They won't waste time on learning something they don't think will be useful or pay off and as a result, unless introductory content includes them in the intended audience, they never will get a chance to find value in these concepts.

One last note: Sorry if I rambled a bit, I'm typing this up real quick while I take a break and I've been a bit all over the place recently. If I don't seem clear about anything, ask me to clarify and I will.
I was actually just thinking about coupons and how this would change that landscape. Physical coupons would be pretty useless I could imagine, everything would have to shift to digital, unless you could scan them on your way out, which would then just defeat the purpose of "just walking out". I think my mailman would appreciate it regardless, due to the large amount of unwanted coupons that get put in my mail almost daily.
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SF BART was just as full today as it usually is. Headlines might be that big tech companies are telling staff to WFH and paying their hourly employees during this, but most people at most jobs are going about their lives per the usual, because everyone's locked into it.

So far.
> I think this is going to be more like the loyalty cards

That would be OK, actually -- there are still plenty of stores that don't use loyalty cards.

The difference between the two things, though, are that you can shop at a store that has loyalty cards without having to use them yourself. You couldn't shop at a store that uses this program without using the program yourself.
> Maybe because Android and iOS came out at the same time as people were learning that Blackberry's "security" was a pastiche.

> In order to operate in some countries, all Blackberry traffic had to be routed through that country's government servers.

> It's been a long while, but I'm pretty sure that India was one such country. And at least one Middle Eastern country.

This was only related to the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), and even then only on the standard consumer phones. The corporate servers had their own keys, IIRC. Plus, it was only for messages traversing Indian or Pakistani networks, and my memory was that BlackBerry did not hand the keys over, just answered all of their requests.

Even at that, this level of encrypted communications was not otherwise widely available for consumers. The actual migration from BBM to whatever iPhone and Android were offering were downgrades.

I'm not aware that BlackBerry devices were ever rooted, and they were default encrypted with 128-bit AES. The OS required users to grant permission for apps to access resources, such as GPS. This took something close to a decade to be installed and enabled by default in iOS and Android.

There was a big story where 3rd-party apps installed by providers contained malware. It was a huge story run everywhere and headlines made it sound as if every single phone had this vulnerability. However, they didn't mention the vulnerability could not affect BlackBerry devices because BlackBerry had a contract with all providers that the provider could not install any software to the device.

Not security-related, but a big complaint from devs at the time was that BlackBerry had so many different devices that it was very expensive to develop for. Apple, for sure, and maybe Android promised this would never happen on their platforms. Only the truly naive could believe this.

My takeaway was that BlackBerry somehow pissed-off all of the tech journos and suffered appropriately. That's why they got nothing but bad press.

The other thing they suffered from was this "co-CEO" nonsense. For whatever reason, it seems nearly universal that if more than one person is in charge, nobody is accountable.

Edit:

And something even I forget about is that prior to the Snowden releases, concerns over government snooping were only for the tin-foil hat donned black-helicopter dodging conspiracy theorists. It just wasn't on the public's radar.
If you want an expert opinion, it's better not to watch WHO or the television.

University lectures seem less opinionated, especially EPFL in Switzerland. The main message he has, that the oppportunity window for containing the virus closed in the last few weeks, and now it's all about mitigation, so that it doesn't overwhelm the health system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RQBtA4dK9s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0cjSnAynGs

Sadly I saw some bias even in the Harvard talk when speaking about masks: saying that medical workers need them and that they don't work well against the virus anyways, so people shouldn't buy them is a contradictory statement.

The truth is that it's a locally wise decision to buy N95 / N100 masks for partial protection, at the same time it's globally a bad decision for mitigating the virus, as health workers need them more.
Also a lot of people saying "It's just a flu" have clearly never actually had flu, they've had bad colds which they assume are the flu.

The flu deadly, and this is worse.
I don't completely understand this technique, so maybe I'm off in my interpretation of it. But it seems like something, flexibility-wise, between hard coding things and embedding a scripting language.

Back in high school I liked to work on MUDs (multiplayer text roleplaying games). It feels like this is sort of thing we resorted to a lot. Content creators that couldn't code could use a text UI to build up spells, skills, etc that the code would use to apply the specified effects. We had basic things (such as "fire damage") and more generic modifiers (such as "make the next thing apply to everyone close to you rather than just 1 person").

And every step of the way other subsystems could intervene and modify the outcome, so someone could e.g. create a monster that nullified all fire damage someone tried to deal to anyone nearby.

For people that did know how to code, we had a basic scripting language for more flexibility. But these scripts still plugged into the above system.
When I've used to Amazon Go store, it has usually taken a while for the app to update with a receipt. Last time I went to the new, bigger store it was about an hour before they had the receipt available.
70 years ago, cars weren't as complicated as tanks were. Do you think that automotive tech has stood still relative to military technology?
Actually 2006: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA
I did not find those effects to be specific to keto for me, but I'm glad it's going well for you.
There is also the issue that some people don't read things. Plus, when people don't read something there isn't very good feedback that they aren't paying attention. If you have a meeting, you know that the information you wanted to get across is being transmitted and you have a way to quickly detect if people aren't paying attention or they don't understand.

People do like talking and lots of meetings are unnecessary. But I think you can deal with the issue better if you get into the heads of the people calling the meetings and figure out alternatives that meet their needs as well.
The idea of producing a description of some effectful computation that is later interpreted instead of generating the effects directly is certainly applicable more widely than just functional programming. For example, the Command pattern described in the book Design Patterns is broadly analogous in object-oriented programming and provides similar advantages. (Edit: On reflection, the Interpreter pattern might be a better example, but the main point stands.)
The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place. Lots of people got very wealthy though, that's for sure.

This view of history as immutable, with the ends always meeting the means is the sort of thinking that I believe is holding us back as a society. Researchers are still studying the impact that the industrial revolution had on not just the environment, but also the mental health of the descendants of the working class in Europe: https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-the-industrial-revolution-l....

We can and should do better.
My recollection is that the original prototype was written in Perl, but the oldest commit on github[1] is in C, which is still the language it uses today. The original C version had big contributions from someone other than Brad starting from the third commit (search the git commit log for 'avva'). Definitely still Brad's baby though.

(Disclaimer: I was an early, minor, contributor. It looks like the second commit mentioning me was to fix a bug introduced by my first one, whoops.)

[1] https://github.com/memcached/memcached/tree/32f382b605b4565b...
Grabbing a receipt at a kiosk is a lot quicker than manually scanning your items.

My main problem with this is how invasively creepy it all is.
No, it's because of the asymptomatic nature of it and carelessness by the officials.

Without supply and strong backend infrastructure, panic will only cause situation to worsen as people crowd up to get supplies, find them out of stock and blow themselves up over it.

Panic will also cause a shortage of human resources which are required to handle the situation. People will line up over small issues and displace those who truly need the help like what happened with masks and hand sanitizers. Hospitals won't be able to keep up. The staff will have other problems to deal with as their toddlers or family members are in panic at home due to schools, offices etc everything shutting down.

Mortality rate for people under 40s is not high. When you consider the risk factor, you would be more likely to die from using escalators and stairs over a period of 1-2 year.

Stop overblowing/underblowing the thing.
Nice! Thanks for trying!

> it is still 1 byte larger then without

That's actually pretty cool, because together with your earlier remark of ~40x occurrences of Math.<whatever> that means we have a ballpark figure for where the tipping point is!
...and a century or so of civil unrest, bomb-throwing anarchists, communism, and other entertaining side-effects.
I'm not quite certain what this means.

So, if my JVM forks another JVM that will debug just fine?

Or even that won't work as in I won't be able to add a breakpoint inside some standard Java class?
I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc).

I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fragmented. For me, a week with 30 hours of meetings can be more productive than a week with 15 hours if I manage to defragment the time around them.

I have recently worked with my team and other peers to put an effort to defragment my calendar by batching predictable meetings together (this is a process I repeat every 6-12 months) and I feel an immediate boost in focus.

My rule of thumb is trying to make sure I get daily focus slots as close as possible to length X where X is:

X = ( (40 hours) - (prebooked hours in meetings) / (5 weekdays) )

In my case (40-18)/5 = 4.4 hours. I currently have two 4-hour slots monday and tuesday, a 5 hour slot on wednesday and a 3 hour slot on thursdays. Not bad. But that degrades quickly!
> Is it really spying if you are entering the store with full knowledge that your every move is being watched by a system in order to automatically track your selections?

True, I was being a touch aggressive in calling it "spying". However, if this sort of thing becomes so ubiquitous that its impossible to avoid, then it is 100% spying even if fully disclosed.

The difference between data collection being "spying" or not is one of voluntary, informed consent. If every store uses something like this, voluntary consent is no longer possible, and this would absolutely qualify as spying.
Even for costco, most employees aren't cashiers--which is only job really affected by this tech.
You could equally argue that Gail's law is applicable. Without someone creating something simple but working it may never have existed.
>These kinds of stunts are happening everywhere, with governments left and right oriented.

It reveals how leaders think of their constituents - they are not approaching this from the perspective of informing the public on how to best deal with this real but not world-ending danger, instead they are thinking of it in terms of "stopping the cattle from stampeding."
"Infects literally everyone" is 7 billion people. If it infects 0.1% of that, it's already going to be extreme.

Obvious limiting factor would be local saturation. Problem is, we're shuffling population faster than ever before.

No, I see no reason to not expect the virus to ride the exponent into millions of cases. I guess we'll see if I was right in less than two weeks.

EDIT: On top of that - arguably, it's not the virus that's most dangerous right now; it's the healthcare system overload and the disruption to the supply chains (and the economy in general) it caused. Not going to take bets on that, but I feel somewhat positive that these secondary effects will lead to more deaths than the COVID-19 itself.
A laptop with heat sinks will have a larger area to dissipate heat. Where the perfect balance is remains to be seen as always.
Well there are obvious reasons price for one, a A13 Chip might cost apple $25 to produce which is far cheaper than Intel Core i9-9900K which would cost us $479 even for OEM's at bulk prices it would cost them south if $420, even if Apple produces 4 times as dense as chip as A13 which is already quite dense at 8.5 billion transistors it would not cost them what Intel is charging. And Intel has been overcharging for a decade as is evident from AMD's processor pricing. Also A13 is an energy efficient product at 7nm compared to any desktop processor at this time.
Article about vitamin D deficiency in winter:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/well/live/do-i-get-enough...
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People are not going to forget this came from Wuhan whether you call it the Wuhan Flu or not.

I understand that the intentions are benevolent, but policing language does not change reality. No more than stigmatizing the word "retard" (originally a scientific term like moron, imbecile, idiot, and all the rest) will change people's responses to those with mental disabilities.

The downside to this kind of stigmatization is that people start to abuse it as soft cultural power, which breeds resentment and discord among the population. I'd be willing to guess it's literally one of the peculiar Western cultural features those "evil Russian hackers" (and other nation states) are targeting to wedge society apart.
Of course and I could say "that labeling law" or something. Point is: The short length is nice for consuming tweets, but you can't use it for discussion. Quoting that term was ment for emphasizing.
Unless you operate your own farm, sooner or later you need to eat, and that implies you're buying food from somewhere.
> "Real-life shopping" is just as optional as online shopping is.

Really? And how do you get your food if you don't go shopping? Most people can't run a self-sufficient farm.
I'm sure the items have posted prices, so it would really be simple math that could be done in one's head.
What they're trying to figure out is how it spreads so quickly when other viruses of the same family do not. Also this is an RNA virus (like most viruses), and RNA is not a stable molecule, especially compared to DNA. The ability of the virus to attach to and invade cells is also not an absolute. Our adaptive immune system can and does recognize the virus as a threat. What you flippantly described as "not hard to understand" is actually very hard to understand for the domain experts actually working in this field..
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This is an extremely accurate statement that can be complemented by the telco side - telcos that sold BlackBerry devices saw it as a great way to "lock in" customers in the business/corporate sector, add an extra data service to the customers' bill, and reduce the number of bandwidth-guzzling PDAs (and PCs) on the fledgeling GPRS networks (which were a far cry from the [3-5]G networks we have today).

It was initially played as an exclusive (not many telcos wanted to devote APNs to manufacturers or set up the tunnelling to the BES), which helped cement that worldview.

From an IT perspective again, you also had pretty decent device management (activation/restriction/lockout/wipe) features.

Customers, on the other hand, loved having usable e-mail and calendaring on their pockets (and later IM, but that's part to RIM's failed attempt at going mainstream, and I do thing I will write that post soon...).

Oh, and they also loved week long battery life. Sad that is now a thing of the distant past.