skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why do so few of these small programming language projects have a "why x?" section?

They do... you missed the Cray name in the logo, and the 'runs on HPC systems".

> How do they expect to gain marketshare if they aren't frontloading their value?

I'm guessing their marketshare is already well defined, there aren't a ton of supercomputing clusters in the world.

> This is a fairly old project and yet they've never taken the time to put a sales pitch on their website.

See above. They only have to sell to a small fraction of people compared to your startup 'eatt the world' mentality.

> In the past 12 years they've added 15 links to their press page [0].

And?

> This is a fairly mature project and I have no idea why I should investigate it.

Never needed to run code on big iron, gotcha.

> I guess it's fine if they never want users, but as someone who's worked in the startup world this sort of thing really gets under my skin.

As this is not a language for startups, I don't think they care if you're annoyed. They are likely dealing more with multi-million dollar single project runs that could take months to complete.

At least look up the meaning of things like HPC before you just shove the concept through your narrow filter of expectations.

I don't expect to ever run high performance code like this, and I'm curious to see what the design could tell me just in passing.
Show HN: We're giving away our health apps for free for 30 days
ICUs Leverage Remote Doctors and Telemedicine to Manage Coronavirus Deluge
Wow, that's crazy. Are you still unable to get your money back?
Given Google's hostility towards the glacier-slow release schedules of Android updates and the continued embedding of vendor apps that screw up Android by phone vendors such as LG, I'm already quite biased in favor of "companies like LG are incompetent and negligent", based on the evidence available over the past several years.
In my experience, purely from a UX perspective (both visuals and responsiveness), a hand-crafted macOS app tends to be moderately better than an Electron app, but an Electron app is usually vastly better than a shoddy or cross-compiled native app.
I know it's tangential, but get a TLS cert!
Isn't Sigma making the best lens at the moment anyway?
> It’s not sending anything any other analytics package wouldn’t

But the where matters as much at the what; sending it to FB means that they add it to their profile of your users.
A 15 minute test could be more easily done before boarding a flight for example.

I'm not sure if it is really necessary either but mentally I'm at the point where I think we should just fire all available bullets at this thing, as they become available.
This sort of rapid test (say, results in under 4 hours from collection) is useful in a few different acute situations:

- Patients needing emergent surgery while also presenting with symptoms concerning for COVID-19.

- Critical healthcare workers (physicians, nurses needing rule out and rapid return to work)

- Patients presenting who may have contributed to exposure of other high risk individuals (to speed up time of tracing)

Your other points are valid.
Oh well, another crypto scandal in making. I wonder why is this so upvoted, like it impacts more than 0.1% of people. Who cares what happens with Robinhood.

In theory you shouldn't use crypto for trading (and keep money at centralized exchanges) but there's no other use case so people were to listen and not do that, 1 BTC would still be 40 bucks and most of the rest wouldn't exist.
You missed the "HPC" acronym.

If you're not in the market to run supercomuting projects, you'll likely never use this language.

If you are, there's a very high chance you know about it already.

Sharp divide between those sides.
Given how they monetize their users, i wouldnt be suprised if it was to dupe customers.
That isn't startup world wisdom, it's just "how to sell x". You don't get users, or maintainers, without a sales pitch.

But I actually do work with HPC on occasion, and I don't work with cray technologies. I'm very much aware of their existence, but they have never convinced me to go out and use their products. I've heard several pitches by HPE folks, and they often push towards slurm or bright systems over the cray ecosystem. Maybe I'm just not the target audience, but I routinely run 100+ node jobs using a mishmash of slurm, bash, python, etc.
> That would imply they are incompetent and negligent.

Not really.

Product Manager: I want to be able to support Facebook login for our app.

Developer: OK... [googles for how to do that] ... We can use the FB SDK for that.

PM: Cool, let's do that.

Dev: [implements it]

Nobody really does much more due diligence than that most of the time. I suppose you could argue that's negligent, but if that's the case, then pretty much every company that has an app with login functionality is probably in that boat.
The person you're replying said it was illegal there, too.
Between this kind of chicanery and their constant coding goofs, keeping your money at Robinhood just seems like a great way to wind up standing in line at SIPC waiting for your account to be reimbursed someday. Now that they've pushed lots of other brokers into fee-free trading I don't know what the appeal is.

I worked in algorithmic trading for about 4 years. In that time, I witnessed the market find and exploit the tiniest, most inconsequential-seeming bugs in my code in ways I could never have imagined or planned for. Finance and "move fast and break things" just do not mix. Someday, I expect to see a news headline about how some HFT sharks on Wall Street found a way to take Robinhood and its clients for billions, and that will be the end of it.
>I don't get this "nearly impossible to stop" thing

I don't know the situation in the OP's country, but I wouldn't assume that filing a lawsuit is always an accessible option in jurisdictions outside the US.

Many countries make it very difficult for the general public to access the court system.

Where I live for example, it is extremely expensive to even begin a lawsuit (multiples of median monthly income), contingent legal fees (i.e. no win, no fee) arrangements are illegal (up to 7 years in prison), and class actions (i.e. multi-party litigation) are not permitted.
Ehhhhh...

IDK what they're like nowadays, but Sigma has in the past had a reputation for a larger quality variance than others.
Yep, I'm wondering the same thing.

With the sheer number of pharmaceutical companies jumping on this opportunity and desperately trying to be the first to market with a test, treatment or a vaccine, we the public absolutely need to know the efficacy of whatever is proposed. Especially in light of the fact that the FDA is currently under enormous deregulatory pressure.
If you can see it, but can't block it, then you've already lost a part of it before you can make that informed decision.
Kind of. There are a lot of smart people who think that their expertise in one narrow domain transfers universally. There is a lot of bikeshedding and reinventing concepts from first principles, often badly.
For us non-HPC developers, does it make any sense to dig deeper? I get the feeling there could be some interesting thread/core usage maximisation ideas, or some such, but I've not delved before so I have no frame of reference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings
Yup, you can get fee free trading at so many reputable, long-lived brokers, why bother with Robinhood?
That's a ridiculous comparison. My arm and asshole serve completely different functions.

Again I ask, exactly what issues have you had that stemmed from using toilet paper instead of a bidet?
> Do their employees not vet any of the code they use, and just slap things together off the internet

That sounds like a pretty accurate description of how software is built. (No, I'm not being flippant.)

> ... and hope it's not doing anything their users don't like?

I expect most don't think too much about it, not out of malice, but because their product manager told them "I want FB login" and to do that, they either spend an afternoon using the FB SDK, or spend a week figuring out how it works, implementing it from scratch themselves, and debugging the inevitable interop issues with whatever oauth2 (or whatever) library they've picked. It's really a no-brainer... few developers can take the week-long route and then justify that to their manager. They'll get fired.
> - each timestep, self-replicate the most recently made objects twice each, and append true, false to the array

> - after N timesteps, every possible set of values for the boolean variables will be in memory

Creating that takes O(2^N) time, hence this algorithm is not polynomial. It's especially not linear, as claimed.
Yes. AFAIK when a small businesses applies for a loan they will be eligible for up to $10,000 in an emergency grant that would be given in three days or less from the application being received.
With respect to your point about unstructured interviews - keep in mind that any statistical measure of performance isn't based on an objective measure of output - it's almost certainly based on performance ratings, which take into account "impact on the entire team." If anything, my experience is that charming, likable people that do well in unstructured interviews are also better at getting better performance ratings than they deserve.

Also, I think you're implicitly assuming that structured interviews cannot measure soft skills as they relate to workplace behavior. I would argue the opposite - the only way to ensure high standards for these types of skills is to have a structured interview. Otherwise, you're not systematically trying to hire people whose workplace behavior enhances group productivity, you're just hoping that whatever random biases that interviewers bring to the table end up being a net positive. Being a productive team player isn't about being able to impress a random person in an unstructured conversation - it's about knowing how to behave productively (combined with the willingness to do so, which unfortunately is contextual and virtually impossible to directly observe) in a wide variety of challenging situations.
I think it's more likely that the developers responsible for the HTTP server just didn't know much about local security, and Zoom doesn't have a good security review process (where actual infosec professionals are involved). That doesn't absolve them of responsibility, of course, but I really don't think it was malice or an intentional desire to ignore privacy concerns.
Interesting - can you share more about the bugs you found in your code that were being exploited?
I’m not sure why there’s an obsession with testing right now.

Some people, grocery store workers and emergency workers are expected to be working. If you could test such workers as they show up at work, these work places would be much safer.

The "shelter in place" order is pretty as leaky as a sieve to be honest - people are still buying groceries at crowded stores because they don't have a choice. So yeah, if you could really confine everyone for three weeks, the problem would go away quicker but now, when that's not really what's happening, tests as a tool seem useful.

From what I understand it’s the asymptomatic cases that are the problem, and they’re not getting tested anyway.

When you have a ten minute test, why not test asymptomatic people?

Plus also, we need to be working hard now so we have testing, contract tracing and quarantine method available later, when they are need to "mop up" the remaining cases.
Even libertarian views take a stance of "your freedom stops when it infringes on my own"

So your desire for location privacy in the midst of a public health crisis has, at minimum, a lower priority than when conditions are normal.
> While I'm ranting, why do they let basements or single floors of a shared house count as an 'entire place'? It's really weird to turn up and see you're actually in a basement in the owners house with their kids stomping around upstairs.

Would you describe a room in a hotel as an "entire place" or a "shared space"?
This article is utter total bullshit. But thank you for sharing anyhow.
I now understand why China hired a dutch friend of mine to sanitize their nasty BGP issues.
I mean VSCode is the best Electron app ever made and it still kind of sucks. The median is miles underground.

Consistency is a sliding scale but Electron is a whole new (lower) level. Extremely basic interactions like "the menu bar highlights to acknowledge key equivalents" are missing.
This whole process will be more difficult with 6-foot distancing and surgical masks.
Because it's not economical.

Are you surprised that you don't have your own equipment for disinfecting your own snail mail before you send (or receive) it?

(I wonder why people worry about this because state owned postal services are too slow to deliver viable SARS viruses)
It's not accurate at all, though. I use my arm and my asshole for completely different things. There's no danger I'm going to accidentally wipe my asshole across my face. If I shit on my counter I would clean it and disinfect it immediately, but I shit in my toilet every day and only clean it every few days and never disinfect it.

I like to live in reality and not a world of what-ifs. About 50% of my shits are immediately followed by a shower. As far as I (or anybody else so far) can tell, whether or not I followed the toilet paper up with a shower has absolutely zero impact.
Disease research isn’t about avoiding mistakes, it’s about taking chances and exploring avenues that look promising.

Failure is essential to learning.
UK tech industry forms Code4COVID.org
I send jobs to HPC systems on a daily basis at work. This website fails miserably to capture me as a potential customer. The cray name has plenty of baggage, but that doesn't give this language value. I do not currently work in the startup space, but having done it, I get annoyed when people put so little effort into selling their projects. I'm sure that a lot of time was spent building this (it's been around for over a decade), but they've put essentially nothing into marketing it.

I run high performance multi node code at work, typically 1-2k cores continuously. I have several contracts with HPE. Am I not part of the target audience for this language?
If you're going to read the Phoenix Project, skip it and go back to Goldratt's 'The Goal'. And take it with a grain of salt.
The term easier is highly subjective so I did not use that word on purpose for that reason, but otherwise the connection I drew between lowering the entry barrier and a superficial abstraction layer was pretty explicit.

I am not a C++ developer and I have no experience writing in that language. I know that Boost is a template system for C++. I know this because for a long time I maintained a multi-language parsing utility and was considering extending support to C++. I never extended that support to C++ in my utility but C++ developers who introduced me to Boost were absolutely confident that parsing Boost logic from a C++ code sample would be next to impossible. Its trivial. If you have experience with embedded languages that sort of multi-dimensional parsing is not as hard as it sounds. A more elegant example is JSX which is a pseudo-XML construct embedded in JavaScript that can recursively contain JavaScript in various ways which then can contain more pseudo-XML islands and so forth. There was also a jQuery template scheme that introduced psuedo-HTML into script tags of actual HTML.

Typically the goal is to make systems that are more simple opposed to more easy. Easy is a disorganized pile of spaghetti code because it took less effort to write with no prior planning. Cleaner and more organized code takes greater effort with fewer interesting parts. Easier is generally preferrable to entry level employees who don't yet have the experience to differentiate easy from simple.

> This assumption is quite strange, because "don't reinvent the wheel" is usually a tenet of the more seasoned developer

I absolutely disagree. This is what I call an experienced beginner. That is somebody who has been doing the job for a couple of years and has gained confidence with certain techniques and conventions, but has never grown to a level of sophistication or problem solving that most businesses would consider valuable enough for senior level responsibilities. This is the kind of thing that most people would refer to as Dunning-Kruger, because the expertise is limited to something designed for engaging beginners and that expertise is confused with excellence.

> But in general the more senior people I've worked with are the ones who have the philosophies that boring is better, reuse existing solutions if possible, and don't do anything too new or in a novel way, because that is typically the road to knowledge siloing.

There are all kinds of justifications for avoiding writing original logic and most of them are pretty weak. If it cannot be expressed in terms of project risk or financial harm the justification is generally a form of bike shedding. That means the developer is framing the conversation in a way their limits their uncertainty exposure without consideration for the product.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
This makes a lot of sense to me, the camera business is pretty standalone and has been on my wishlist for a while. That said, Sony as an industrial conglomerate appears to be spinning apart. It will be interesting to see where that leads.
Yeah, that's the thing. I do very little web development, but I inevitably find myself in the Network tab of dev tools debugging something. I do around as little mobile (Android) development, and I'm not even really sure how I'd watch network traffic coming from an Android app. (I'm sure it's possible, but I imagine it requires explicit setup, possibly with some third-party software and/or the assistance of a laptop.)
That's for the first UBI payment though, right? I was under the impression there would be more, no?
I second The Cuckoo's Egg. It's a great read and provides a vivid portrait of a particular point in time of Unix culture.
The author also uses a neural network to automatically detect the foreground and apply the filter only to the background so this can be done automatically.
I want to admire him for that, but then I re-read that "$500 billion bailout of corporations" part. This movie was terrible the first time I was forced to watch it...
The tech execs who don't agree with 'soul-stealing' coronavirus safety measures
Pretty much the same as before, just with a bit more regular buys for dollar cost averaging.

In enough time we’ll be at new highs like usual, there’s no need to panic.
One thing I credit COBOL with is the use of descriptive variable naming. In FORTRAN you see variables named i, j, x etc (just look at Numerical Recipes) but in COBOL you see TOTAL_MONTH_SALES and the like. It is considered good style and “self-documenting” to do that today.
Late reply, but yes to the former, with the caveat that it's contingent on sensitivity and specificity. (I.e. false negatives/positives)

Probably yes to the latter, unless it takes away resources we need more urgently elsewhere.

But really, what we need to do is depress the count of infected people to a point where it's even feasible to test everybody with symptoms.

Even if we rolled out testing to a point where we can test 1M/day (I think it's 200K/day right now?), it'd take a year to test all of the US. If we're in flu-prevalence territory, that's only 19M, and so suddenly much more doable.

And at that level, we need the ability to both test anybody with symptoms and to conduct random samplings of asymptomatic people, because without that, we couldn't lift shelter-in-place until we have a vaccine. That's... a tad long.

So, more tests, plus suppression doing its job. And it'd be lovely if our government would push to get anything done, really. They've wasted 8 weeks by now, at least. Coordinated response is allowed to kick in any day, by my book.
But I try it all the time. I shit primarily first thing in the morning. That's generally, but not always, immediately followed by a shower. There's no physical difference in the sense of cleanliness of my asshole. Since I have tried it and can't tell a difference I'm left to assume it's either your wiping technique or diet that's the issue. Either that or it's just a physiological thing for you.
yeah same here, on web and mobile this is super common. i just went through this with a PM.
Yelp is one of those companies that seems to play low-ball and make bad product decisions (consistently over many years).

I guess it's just in their DNA.
> I am not sure why Nikon and Canon didn't invest more into mirrorless technology sooner, and I'm no photography expert, but I think they were just too entrenched in the DSLR technologies they pioneered.

You nailed it on the head for the most part.

Nikon had a mirrorless camera in the J1 series, which had some very nifty features but was just an absurdly expensive system for what you got (especially since it is basically a dead end, proprietary platform.)

Canon did a bit better with their first MILCs, but they weren't amazing. At the time they were introduced Canon suffered from a lack of on-sensor Phase Detection AF, and Contrast detection systems weren't as fast as they are now.

I mean, a big issue is glass; While there are exceptions to this, you can't just re-use an existing lens design on a mirrorless without making the thing longer than it needs to be (Which looks off on a Mirrorless.) Which means that Nikon/Canon can't just release the 18-55 EFAF Mark 10 lens.

Designing proper lenses takes time and money. I mean, the first few years I had an E-mount, the pickings were slim for lenses, while the a6000 was a good start it wasn't till the A7II and A7RII with their ability to do usable PDAF with adapted lenses that the platform felt safe to pick up.
Wow this looks ugly :D. But still nice work. It's just that the girl is totally over-processed and the "bokeh", well I hate to break it to you, but this isn't bokeh, its called "blur".

This is bokeh: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/JgrDuxQPCAvgd5VzqiKN5a-650...

And bokeh is 3 dimensional and surrounds the focus area, increasing with distance: https://www.flickr.com/photos/scottcartwrightphotography/145...

I suggest to brush up a bit on photo skills, although I agree that the instragram and iPhone culture can shift your perception of "bokehlicious" quite a bit.

I don't want to make you feel bad, so I also tell you that Apple's "bokeh" in portrait mode looks disgusting, doesn't make any sense and breaks the image in a lot of trivial cases... and they spent a lot more money & effort on it than you :).
The person I replied to said it would change my world. I just want to know how exactly.
were you on the tech side of HFT? What were you doing, if you don't mind me asking.
Look at the industries where those regulations are most relevant and notice how most of the jobs in them have moved to countries where those regulations don't exist.

That's not to say we should go back to having children sewing our clothes in sweatshops (oh, we don't have to go back to to it, they still are, just in a different country now), but collectively people have decided that they don't want to pay what it costs to provide those benefits for workers.
While yes we can use oil for other purposes, the vast majority of use of oil is for net positive energy use. If oil were net negative the majority of it's demand would disappear.