skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Biologists and doctors talk about "war against disease" and the "war on cancer".

There was an article posted to HN some time ago (last year?) that argued we should stop saying people must "fight cancer" and similar terminal diseases, because it puts the patient in an unfair position: it's all about their "will to live" and their "struggle", and if they die, it can be seen as a failure on their part. While (I think) there is a mental factor to fighting terminal diseases, the article argues cancer will often kill you regardless of how much you "fight", so it's unfair to put it in those terms.
Argh... wouldn't that make it brute force attacks more efficient? E.g. the suspect/victim is born on May 31st, his iPhone allows 10 PIN attempts. Your attack algorithm becomes:

1. Input "0531" on another iPhone's setup screen.

2. Try "0531" and the other suggested PINs, based on distance from thumb to the option.
Several media reports said that the woman did not get herself tested for the coronavirus because she had not travelled overseas and simply thought that she had caught the common cold.

That isn't the same as actively tried to spread the infection.
As far as I can tell,there is indeed a long-term goal behind this. The idea to shift the economy towards sustainable consumption and a proper circular economy that ideally reduces waste close to zero.

Here's the official website of the initiative: https://ec.europa.eu/environment/circular-economy/index_en.h...
"Reliability" - in a language with manual resource management and unsafe parallelism model? Really?
BTW never heard of modern games written in C. Mainstream game engines (UE, Godot, Unity...) are written in C++ and C# and cover all major platforms and consoles.
"Performance" - Rust is probably more performant when it comes to code, and definitely more performant when it comes to development time.
"Simplicity" - primitivism is a closer definition.
Why Melinda Gates is investing $50M to make the next Silicon Valley
It's more than that. Both Angband and NetHack are forks of their ancestors.

There is an unbroken line of continous development of the same code base coming from the 80s. Hack and Moria OTOH were clones of Rogue and didn't share any source code with it.

There is still non trivial code from 1984 in NetHack: https://i.imgur.com/H4HpjYf.png

With Angband, the case is a bit more complicated as the original Moria was written in Pascal but it was already converted to C in 1987 and Angband decends from that code.
With context, I can understand "We co___ed together some crazy hack" and "We c___le our infants to show love and affection."

These sentences almost give definitions to the partially obliterated words, which is why we can guess what those words are. We can form plausible definitions, and then work backwards through our vocabulary by pattern matching.

(I would probably guess "cuddle" for the second one; I have negative associations with "coddle", since it's mainly used in describing situations when ineffective adults are supported economically, and protected from the consequences of their bad decisions.)

The strings in your APL/J/K are not existing vocabulary words that you're re-iterating with a context that gives their definitions. (Some of them may be idioms that appear in other programs, including other people's programs, but others are local inventions in the program.)

If you obliterate parts of them with underscores and then hand that to the next programmer, they are screwed.

Cobble and coddle are confusable. If we use cobble as a parameter name in some C function, and later refer to it as coddle elsewhere, only the compiler will notice. (Provided it's not the case that they are both defined, and have compatible type.)

extern int coddle;

// ...

void frob(int cobble)
{
// [ snip 300 lines ]
if (some_condition || (another_thing(foo) &&
some_condition(foo, coddle++))
do_that();
// [ snip 400 lines ]
}

My eyes will likely will not spot that the "coddle++" isn't "cobble++", and the compiler has nothing to say. Doubly so if I'm not aware of the existence of the coddle global.

I remember copious instances in the past when my brain decided to hide a difference like that, and then "cached" the decision so that it remained hidden even after staring at the code. Once you believe that coddle++ is incrementing the cobble parameter, your brain may not let your eyes take a fresh look at it.

Very recently, I was tripped up for a while by a sentence in some documentation that talked about PTP (precision time protocol) and P2P (peer-to-peer) in the same sentence. It didn't make sense until a fifth re-reading with a coffee break in the middle.
> Plenty of companies have mentoring programmes.

Not sure which decade your time machine brought you from, but no, I would not say that "plenty" of companies do this.

Far more common is a sink-or-swim scenario where new hires are expected to learn from overworked and not particularly interactive senior-level folks, while everyone gets their noses pushed into a grindstone by project managers.
But the cases you mention are about the Government helping a private entity make a profit. In the weather app's case it's the Government (broadly speaking) giving tax payers something "for free". This last case is far more nuanced than your comparison makes it out to be.

And I'm pretty sure most tax payers will pretty much always choose a free app that gives them basic weather data a few days in advance than a paid app that gives them bells and whistles. So the Government is catering for the vast majority in this case.
Yeah. :/ I can't wait for banning ICE vehicles from cities.
TLDW: A 1970s over-the-horizon radar for ICBMs that apparently didn’t work very well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar
Doctors can potentially reduce the number of deaths from Covid-19
People need to stop acting like Rust is flawless. There are real issues that make it not an ideal choice in some situations (notably embedded). Issues include:

1. Rust is very slow to compile. This is bad when rapid iteration is important.

2. Rust is a complex language. It wants to replace C++, not C, and gladly adopts features™ and the complexity that comes with that.
If you cannot by arsed to learn a few new development tools or workflows, I am sorry but this field is likely to burn you out very soon, be it Linux kernel development, the next shiny GitHub replacement or the new edition of HTML/CSS/whatever.

And let's not start about learning the myriad of tools you gotta learn to do in professional Linux kernel development (or any kind of specialized development for that matter).

If you want to educate your students on being one more cog in the machine and make them complacent on learning the bare minimum, that's on you. I for sure wasn't taught like that.
Assuming that we are as stupid at using strategic resources as our ancestors back in 1918, we do have a lot more of them. With much easier coordination and communication. and mch higher degree of automation, requiring an order of magnitude smaller work force to keep things running.
This is fascinating, I didn't know that data about antibiotic resistance was available like this, and definitely had no idea there was such huge variation between countries.

Surely this should be considered a major public health emergency in itself?

Are the countries with high percentages taking steps to limit antibiotic use? Coming from the UK the idea of letting people buy antibiotics as easily as painkillers seems crazy.

And what the hell is going on in Greece!?
> apprenticeship should be also a full-time paid job

What makes it different from a job then?
Well if they do it for cheaper, won't it as well open them up to the same 'unfair advantage' accusations?
Free Trading Couldn’t Have Come at a Worse Time
You seem uninformed about multiple EU initiatives, we've been deploying reneables, cleaning up the grid, etc. Our car emissions standards are much stricter than US/China/Russia.
Unlike in the US, exporting plastic to the third world is actually illegal. And plastic is a distinct and separate problem to CO2.

Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gacGuWjqKco&t=579s

You could still argue they are not doing enough, but at least some credit is due.
Brutal Performance Impact from Mitigating LVI Vulnerability
You would have been better off writting that in rust
Debugging MySQL replication lag by diving into the internals
>This model is the existing model for every new graduate who starts a job today. Any new hire in a decent company is going to be getting taught the industry skills from more senior members of the team. Plenty of companies have mentoring programmes.

If that's the case, I'd say there's a massive shortage of 'decent' companies. Modern business strategy shuns apprenticeship because that's viewed as additional cost no one wants to pay that ultimately becomes a sunk cost. I'm not saying they're right/wrong, just that's the perspective I see.

Every business I interact with wants quick turn around/ROI and any respectable semblance of apprenticeship doesn't fit well in that framing. Even in research where it's assumed you're taking on new problems you've not seen before, the pressure is constant and budgeted/planned on the assumption everyone "hits the ground running."

I don't know how any of these environments promote apprenticeship which is slow, costly, and supports practices like long term investments in relationships between employer/employee. On top of that, if you do go into training new hires and your competitors don't but instead hire experienced workers, that puts you at a competitive disadvantage in the near term which may strangle you long before your new hires can help level the playing field.

I'm not sure how you reincorporate the concept of apprenticeship back into the current labor market. The big tech companies strategy is to simply start kids earlier by integrating some training materials into k-12 and colleges so tax payers and future employees will eat the training costs. They also get their pick of experienced folks when they want/need them because they can front the costs/expenses. I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Traditionally there's been a balance of sharing the cost between apprentice and mentor. More and more that cost is pushed on the apprentence and who wants to pursue that pathway if so?

This seems to especially be a problem in tech over more traditional roles where apprenticeship is expected: medicine, engineering, trades like plumbing/electrician, etc.
Thanks for this, I was going to say that we have had to infer most of the details about it or earlier pandemics.
I am curious how this would work in the UK. The UK national met service, Met Office, has a free app, but has to show ads (not sure if there is a legal requirement similar to this case). Its biggest competitor is the BBC weather app which is also tax funded and is not allowed to show any ads. Up until a couple of years ago BBC got its data from the Met Office anyway so the two apps were basically showing the same data. However, now the BBC get its weather information from a private weather company. Anti-competition laws and tax-funded organisations is a complicated business!
It's not just that you get repeated results, but that the repeated results will be correlated to non-local results. In ordinary determinism every interaction can be explained purely by local stuff; the further something is, the less it matters. In this case a very far object has an unlikely effect, which can be achieved only by constructing a Rube Goldberg path for it to get to a particular state.
Courts are decidedly not a political instrument, their judgements should be by law, not by utilitarian considerations.
It was at least the case for the Vietnam War, where -- besides preventing the spread of communism, the "domino theory" -- there was no clear overall strategy or goals, so the objective and only metric of success was body count. In that war, the US goal was to kill the enemy.

Of course, the US has been widely criticized for using that strategy and it likely was a major factor in their failure to win that war.
Counter-example: mathematics. I can't count how many times I've encountered people who "just aren't good at math". Besides those few with a condition to justify it, those people aren't good at math because they've been told all their life that math is hard and they can never be good at it. There's nothing inherently blocking them from excelling at it.

I also suspect that a lot of people claiming that they just aren't interested or motivated to learn X are often covering for their own insecurities. I know I'm personally guilt of it.
Bow Greetings to Stop Spreading Covid19 and Other Diseases Too
‘Data is not the new oil – it’s the new plutonium’
Whenever I read, see or, especially, visit such enormous abandoned man-made objects I have very specific feeling which is hard to put in words. Some wild yet soothing blend of awe and fear.

Does anyone else experience it? Is there a name for such feeling?
Your PIN can't be used because it is the smallest number not on our list of PINs that are too easy to guess for other reasons.
Totally agree. Most organizations have a ton of problems they know about but instead of addressing them directly they decide to paper over them by creating processes and tools.
Another thing about that code that I think irks some folks but is also reminds me of reading math is that it's much easier if you are aware of some common conventions and notation. For instance, the lines:

#define V1(f) A f(w)A w;
#define V2(f) A f(a,w)A a,w;

Are much more quickly recognizable if you know that in APL the left and right arguments to a function are alpha (α) and omega (ω), so you'd immediately recognize these macros as for defining 1-argument and 2-argument functions.

For folks in the know, conventions like this allow quicker communication and expression, but they also raise the barrier somewhat to the uninitiated.

Side note for folks used to "modern" (post 1989) C code - this is old K&R style function definition. This SO post (https://stackoverflow.com/a/3092074) shows a comparison.
It isn't explained, which is my main fault with Primer. Primer leads you in with a crystal clear beginning that makes sense, but goes off the rails by the 2nd half.

A lot of people are tricked by the crystal clear beginning and assume that the end makes sense, but the movie goes into ambiguous mode about half-way through. Its audience interpretation, as opposed to a singular answer. (Contrast with something like Inception, which doesn't really have more than one interpretation).

Some people like ambiguous movies. I don't, which is why I kind of prefer Stein's Gate, where all actions are clear.

---------

Either way, its clear that the powerful organization is Aaron's goons. Aaron was the guy who played the stock market with the time machine, so its obvious that Aaron used the time-machine for ill-gotten gains at that point... and is using the money to fund a bigger time machine.
You're kind of preaching to the choir, I have two kids and need a lot of time for myself. But, there's no need to yell at your kid when he made a mistake that was quite foreseeable.

> You should also stop using this as an excuse.

I don't feel victimised by my father, but there's no denying his actions influenced me in a big way. And it's important to recognize that because I want to at least do better in this area with my own kids.
That may be, but when I click on the NYT link for the article, I get the following: https://imgur.com/aionwnv

Not technically a paywall, but certainly a wall.
> I'm not sure what's so bad east of Poland but I'm not there

It's known for being a bit less strict and a bit more corrupt than the west. At least from what I gathered from my bulgarian, polish and greek friends and from my own experience over there.

Idk where you live but in France we have mandatory vehicle inspections every 2 years and you definitely can't bribe these guys. You'll get fined if you get caught, like everything else. How else would it work, we can't have daily inspections on every single thing that could potentially be made illegal.

I agree with your last point though, but that's the german auto mafia, these guys get away with a lot.
I think it would be very helpful to demand that all leases are labeled properly. Where we are it says "Buy" on the ad, "Buy" on the button, and "Lease" deep inside the 30-page Terms Of Service.

It's very reasonable to say that the vendors created an expectation of ownership to push their sale.

If you didn't notice that I called them "vendors" instead of "leasers", it adds to my point.
It was apparently informally known as “the woodpecker” because of the sound of the interference it would make. It’s interesting to read the amateur radio community’s response to it at the time: https://www.qsl.net/n1irz/woodpeck.html

> “If you want to screw up a radar signal, all you have to do is send a return signal on its frequency which blocks out the echos. Hams, from the earliest woodpecker days, have been driving the monster off their bands by getting on the frequency and sending properly spaced dots back. The screen somewhere in Russia blanks out and the operators utter some Russian oaths and change the frequency to get rid of the interference."
Same here, I also have the same feeling in very large rooms when I’m not on the floor — say an engine room in a ship.
Ask HN: What to do when company takes Covid-19 as a joke?
Basically my company is only starting to consider the possibility of eventually having the thoughts of working from home... Based in London and things could easily escalate here to the same situation as Italy. Should I simply not come from next week and WFH regardless of what they say or be a patient lamb?
Twilio releases open source video conferencing apps for iOS, Android and web
Also did something similar[1]. My motivations were a better API (mine is modeled off of Elm's), and better error messages: I have a use case where user's need to be shown raw, dev-tools-style interactive data dumps, with error information overlaid on top. The next version will also enable data generation from schemas.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, this library has no respect for undefined, because particularly in the context of data modeling, undefined is complete nonsense.

[1] https://github.com/ai-labs-team/ts-utils#decoder
The Chinese government is essentially building a private Internet that they can fully control and censor when needed.
the CDC site states that they only include tests performed by the CDC. There are hospitals performing tests that don't have to report to the CDC.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. What interests me most is does the US have the infrastructure in place to ramp up production as needed? While Italy might have to "place an order" for more ventilators, there is at least one if not more companies in the United States that can manufacture them. Staffing nurses and doctors might be the bottleneck in the US, not the specialty equipment. ICU travel nursing in NYC is already up to 20k+/mo in pay and that number is steadily going up.
I don't really like AWS ElasticSearch offering (it's subpar at the very least and I'm being kind) but what you are saying is completely unfair. If I'm using IaC then I'm a power-user and I want to be able to open an ES cluster to the Internet if that makes sense to me. What should be protected by default is the point-and-click wizard configuration (which it is, indeed).
Yes. And what's worse, they misinterpret movies like the Wolf of Wall Street as something to admire (even if being aware of the excesses), when they are really descriptions of broken, corrupt, hateful individuals and criminals. Quoting the Wolf of Wall Street shouldn't serve as an endorsement of anything.
The issue I have observed is that management at many companies, most especially in tech, is so terrible that they don't know how to train people (e.g., it used to be assumed that when a company hired a new employee, the employee would need to be trained on the company's computer systems, but now it is required that the employee be hired already proficient in the company's computer systems).

Coupled with being located in very expensive regions, tech companies have to hire at high wages, making training very expensive already.

Something will really have to give somewhere for this to change.
My first experience with NetHack was in college, when my roommate convinced me to give it a try. I took about 10 steps in and saw "a rock falls on your head. you die." After several more failures (who knew eating kobolds was bad for you?), starvation, and death, I found the most fun in gaming the character creation system until I got a ring of teleport, going to the nearest shop, taking everything I could, and escaping without paying :D
Also, Taiwan
I don’t think banning the concept of licensing would be helpful.

Other things being equal, I would agree. However, if market forces push us into a choice between ordinary people being able to own things and use them freely against ordinary people being forced to pay rent on everything forever and use things only as some higher power dictates, it's not going to take long to make that choice. This is the choice that we are heading towards with the increasing use of software and, in particular, the repurposing of laws originally intended to prevent exploiting the work of others to create software so that they constrain the ordinary use of a product by the person who bought it.
Maybe it's a joke to you. For me it's fine. People pay real money in order to have Apple quality. If all you need is "a computer", go ahead, there's plenty around any corner.

Any merchant of quality products would suffer greatly if everyone is allowed to sell stuff in its name.
Well, if you know so much about preventing the spread of infectious disease, quit whining on HN and do something productive for a change.

DARPA has advanced needs, which is why they develop advanced technology. Most people do not think of needing the things that the military needs, because most people's lives are not as challenging as a soldier's.
I use C(as a backend) because I understand it.

In reality I use anything that gets the job done faster. That usually means prototyping in C++,lisp, python, swift, java, perl, lua.

After I have the prototype I code it automatically with C, or minimal C++ and my own DSLs, done in Lisp controlling C, C++ code generation.

I have reinvented the wheel a lot. Someone told me you are not going to be smarter than a compiler, but having read several of them, they are so dumb, and they have to be because they are generic.

E.G In a project I was using std::vector and predicted the expected performance of the whole program by O notation and "on the park" calculation needs as X.

When I completed the program, it was X/1000. Fair enough I made some stupid mistake...in the end I got X/100 performance and could not optimize farther.

I got so frustrated so I started replacing components to see if numbers improved. Replacing std::vector by a c vector made the program X/1.4!!

So I started studying std::vector implementation and it was a template of a template of a template... I could not wrap my head around such a mess.

My implementation was done in lisp with proper macros and was way simpler and efficient and generated c code, that was so easy (although tedious) to understand.
I couldn't quite figure out from the video if it was an early launch detection system and/or a signal jammer. Cause the video mentions both.

A cursory glance at the Wikipedia article also didn't clear it up. Does anyone know?