skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If your goal is "I have a blackbox of code, I must make a change, and I will assume existing behaviors are correct", this approach should be reasonable to ensure that the code doesn't break after your change.

You don't have an external spec to test against in this case, the existing implementation details are the spec, and so the goal is to preserve them.

I'd say going from:
* Find one input
* Get coverage
* Mutation test to ensure you have assertion density

is probably a fine way to accomplish the goal.

Eventually you'd want to define an external specification for the code that isn't just "the service works, therefor ensure the service does what it's been doing", at which point some of these tests may be removed, or at least enhanced.
> They were saying everything was okay and people-people transmission is low.

For the first two weeks of January.

When they got to the point of locking down an entire city, it became pretty clear to everyone that it was a serious situation.

We looked at that, and did... Nothing.
It's not meant to give you confidence in the code. It's meant to give you a quick test to make sure you don't break something while you change the code, if you have to make changes to code that lacks any tests at all.

As the author said:

> It’s fine to delete useless tests afterwards. They were useful when you had to change the code. They’re not here to replace proper tests in your codebase!
Startups that rejected an acquisition offer but ended up worse off
This is not zero value. If nothing else, this test will later on, tell you if your behavior changed.
i get your point. maybe clearer to say "inverting a many to one function", i.e. there is not a unique well-defined patch that corresponds to the change, there can be many such patches that produce the same change. c.f. ill-posed inverse problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-posed_problem .

but, even more subtlety: some changes also aren't truly insert delete edits to strings. e.g. suppose old state was: the string "x=1" ; new state is: the string "x=2". If your system tracks string edits, maybe it encodes this change as "delete char at index 2, append char '2' after index 1". But perhaps the user intent behind this change is actually <increment the value stored in x by 1>. So reasoning about the patch at the string level misses the point completely.

This difference doesn't really matter if you are just diffing changes from a single user, but it could matter an awful lot when trying to merge overlapping changes from multiple users! E.g. perhaps user A replaced "x=1" with "x=2" and user B also replaced "x=1" with "x=2". Depending on what the intent of both users is, perhaps the correct merged result is "x=2" or "x=3" or something entirely different!
Some thoughts on team size, burn and runway at the seed stage
Unfortunately, making a lot of money with software and the technical complexity of said software are weakly correlated.

Or maybe it's a good thing because it means a stupid simple idea can make you a millionaire
And your code from 2013 pretty much certainly doesn't work anymore. Whereas C++11 is still perfectly adequate, and it works with the latest compilers.
That quote reminds me of where "fascist" comes from...

The individual is week, but a group of reeds, tied together, can be unbreakable....
So looks like my randomised sleep times, working until bed, too warm a room, light seeping through, and glass of scotch in the evening 'routine' is not the most ideal.

Definitely need to take that advice on board!
I honestly have no idea what is going on. This is like one bad dream I just can’t wake up from.

Not sure how the tens of millions of people losing jobs and businesses going to be affected in coming months.
That's my thought but for Eve Online. I've read and heard about it, and the idea of it fascinates me. However I just dont have the time required to dedicate to it.
> no new cases sure does sound like bullshit

As does 50-60 cases a day per 1.5 billion people when your test accuracy is pretty much a random number generator (as Spain has unfortunately found out when they received Chinese tests). I'd have a much easier time believing 5-7K new cases per day. For China that'd be the same as 1K per day for the US, which for us would be not an issue at all, if it kept steady.
Learning Rust with GitHub Actions
With GitHub actions, we can learn and experiment with Rust code directly in your web browser.
The current trope of "modern C++" programmers seem like the modern equivalent of the "pure OOP" crowd that infected C++ in the late 1990 early 2000's.

Precisely. Whereas the latter debate and complain about whether code is "OOP or not", and think non-OOP is a "bad practice", now we have the same contention around whether code is "pure C++" and dogma that "C with classes" is to be avoided. Hopefully the latter group will also eventually realise the silliness of it all.

I personally use C++ as "C with some extra features" and try to avoid most of the template insanity.
From what I understand, countries like Germany are only reporting deaths with no co-morbidity, whereas Italy anyone that was positive with Covid19 in their system and dies is being reported as a death.

The lack of standardized reporting is odd considering the impacts. It definitely seems to be contributing to the general confusion on decision making.
I’m no expert, but would suggest try to focus on the future. What would you like to be doing 5 years from now. Write down all the steps needed to accomplish it & find a way to remind yourself every day. I recommend the book The Compound Effect.
People just don’t get sigmoids. They don’t understand that herd immunity quickly starts to slow the local spread of a virus in a region, and that you can’t model the entire population of a country like bouncy balls in a box. Every country should be hoping that whomever calls the shots understands math better than the average HN commenter.
The post on the HAM (hold-and-modify) video mode is particularly interesting:
https://www.markwrobel.dk/post/amiga-machine-code-letter12-h...
Fwiw, Emacs is usually single-user, and self-selects users better able to understand and manage their own complexity.
>Certain things that have shown up in third party utilities like Dwarf Therapist are nearly impossible to do without, making the base game more or less unplayable after a release until the third party stuff catches up.

I called this Kerbal or Skyrim Syndrome amongs friends.

Games that are no longer playable vanilla after you've had the luxuries of some of the simple convenience addons.
> I am very curious who are the "higher-ups" in an institution dedicated to the production and enrichment of intelligence within humanity?

I was thinking about both university and department administration, though for the latter I'm thinking only about faculty members with administrative positions. Also included are committee members.

> But, my guess is the vast majority of the time these higher ups are just politically-savvy administrators who are just in it for the prestige and money.

I think most genuinely believe they are doing what is in the best interest of science in general, perhaps limited by their own capabilities as they see it, i.e., they can't do everything and need to follow their bosses and incentives. But these people aren't always helping.

> I am genuinely hoping the younger generation changes this dramatically. But, I am not seeing it. Most millennial academics are either supportive or entirely silent towards the status-quo.

I would tend to agree that the younger generations don't seem any better in these respects than the older. But there is a growing independent science movement, and I'm hoping eventually they'll move the needle. Many of them are here: https://forum.igdore.org/
Consider brevity.

Consider staying with the matter at hand.

You have diverted the question to “maximizing happiness for all humans”. This is substituting the original bounded problem (“which of these finite candidates do I support in 2020 and why”) with something much less bounded.

Signing off.
isn't it concerning that Google decides to follow and implement even though the conversation on github concluded by "it should be rejected by W3C"?
https://lwn.net/Articles/288056/

Excerpt:

"There are advantages and disadvantages to each type of sleep. Interruptible sleeps enable faster response to signals, but they make the programming harder. Kernel code which uses interruptible sleeps must always check to see whether it woke up as a result of a signal, and, if so, clean up whatever it was doing and return -EINTR back to user space.

The user-space side, too, must realize that a system call was interrupted and respond accordingly; not all user-space programmers are known for their diligence in this regard.

Making a sleep uninterruptible eliminates these problems, but at the cost of being, well, uninterruptible. If the expected wakeup event does not materialize, the process will wait forever and there is usually nothing that anybody can do about it short of rebooting the system.

This is the source of the dreaded, unkillable process which is shown to be in the "D" state by ps.

Given the highly obnoxious nature of unkillable processes, one would think that interruptible sleeps should be used whenever possible. The problem with that idea is that, in many cases, the introduction of interruptible sleeps is likely to lead to application bugs.

As recently noted by Alan Cox:

Unix tradition (and thus almost all applications) believe file store writes to be non signal interruptible. It would not be safe or practical to change that guarantee."

That's the whyness to all of this...
That's interesting! I'm seeing responses from both sides now.

Some folks say they actually like reading in twitter rant form. It suits them. You are saying, some folks are saying, they like writing in twitter rant form. It suits them.

As a couple of commenters have pointed out (And I admit, I was unaware of), there are already services to handle the people who struggle with reading long, distracting Twitter threads (https://threadreaderapp.com/).

Maybe there is an opportunity to handle the other side? Maybe we need to create a service that handles the writing side of the problem. The side for folks, who feel like they can't manage the overwhelming feeling of writing a long form blog post.

An app geared towards writing in small chunks. Then in some way, the chunks could be managed, to try to make it easier to edit into a long form article?

Honestly, after spitballing about for a while, I feel like I could benefit from something like this. Personally, I do tend to wish I did more writing, but I tend to lack the discipline, or focus or whatever, to sit down and write something long-form.

P.S. - I like saying the word folks
> the impact to the economy will only get worse

To be fair, most of the economic sectors affected by this are silly frivolities, e.g. travel, tourism, fine dining, vacationing, nightclubbing, cruises, sportsball, etc.

The actual, value-generating, real economy will continue on as before, and may possibly even benefit from it as our attentions are shifted away from garbage pursuits that don't advance society at all.
> less frequent, larger major market shifts make equities-based investments less, not more, suited to individual investors.

My comment may not have been clear. I wasn't claiming that equities (or a certain % of one's portfolio in equities) are or aren't suitable for individual investors. Rather, I was stating that a 30-35% decline during one's ownership is normal: https://www.yardeni.com/pub/sp500corrbeartables.pdf page 4.

Between the end of the Great Depression and now, roughly every 5-10 years you'll see a major decline. Since 1940, I count 13 peak-to-trough drops of -20% or more and 7 of -30% or more (including -36% in 1968 and -48% in 1973 - this isn't a new thing).

If you want to own equities, that's what you're signing up for.
Good explanation. (The article is moronic because it missed both the main reason about ventilators, and central banks are not going to help small business survive.)

I'm glad you mentioned Ebola.

The West's poorly-managed response to corona virus gives us some insight into the African experience of being overwhelmed by Ebola.
The last thing everyone in the office needs is to know everyone else's birthday.
I remember back in the early days of the web, when half the pages had a tilde in the URL, there was a site, worst of the web, which trawled through personal pages to find the comically awful or embarrassing. It was notable enough that it has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirsky%27s_Worst_of_the_Web
It's not 90% of the apps on the store, and if it was then they should definitely ban it because there is no way 90% of the apps even need login accounts. The flashlight app still has no legitimate reason to access your contacts and location, much less Facebook.

Moreover, prohibiting this wouldn't actually remove the apps for more than five minutes because what would immediately follow is a version of the SDK that doesn't send any data to Facebook when you're not actually using a Facebook account.
if your browser isn't supported, it's not the browser's fault, rather the website you go on not to support your browser.
Probably the USB interface keeps some data for its encryption function on a part of the hard drive which it makes inaccessible. You erased the whole hard drive, including that part, and probably caused the USB interface to malfunction.
I'm surprised this isn't getting more notice. Many services have been down for hours, Google Cloud SQL instances have been hosed for a while now
The example is just one example. For some parents, it's this but all the time with different things.

ASD* kids don't learn like neurotypical kids and if you treat them the same you will quickly get exhausted. As someone who has had classes on this, you can't "educate" the kid out of being autistic, and many have tried. This technology is just an adaptive tool, and a great one if it works.
Yeah the product is kinda dumb (or not, what do I know), but his attitude and mindset is spot on. I've met a lot of smart people with great ideas but they don't have the growth mindset and the perfect combination of both irrational optimism combined with realism, if that makes sense.
Step 1: Take time off from yourself and your opinions about yourself (stuff like I am not cut out for this, I am a failure da di da di da). Stop this destructive cycle and stop playing victim. You are not helping yourself or the world with this mode of thinking.

Step 2: Realize that you are alive and breathing is the greatest thing. I mean we are all mortal and could be gone anytime. I cannot understate the importance of reminding ourselves about this.

Step 3: Realize that Success and Failure are 2 sides of the same coin. Success and Failure are also 2 constructs/labels of society. Honest to God, let me tell you nobody knows what they are doing and why. So you are in a somewhat better situation in terms of looking at what you really want right now. Go inside yourself and introspect. Forget about what society considers Success and Failure.

Step 4: Realize that you can only do things to the BEST OF YOUR ability. Which means forget about what others are doing.

Step 5: Balance. I mean inner balance. Don't even try anything without setting course inside first.

So to summarize, go to a quiet place wherever, relax and sit around and introspect for a few days even a month. And do whatever it takes to find "unshakeable" balance inside, meaning no desperation/fear.
>Do whatever you want. And this only you know for yourself. Nobody can tell you.
We don’t want to be at the mercy of Facebook: social app developer on patents
I am curious how this differs from chashmap:

https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/chashmap

They provide benchmarks, but I would be more interested to know how the implementation differs.
> You might hear some discussion of wanting WASM to replace JavaScript, but that is clearly stated by the WASM project as not a design goal.

Unfortunately, that appears to be a huge miss. There are a lot of programmers in other (non-JS) languages that would very much like to create front end pieces for their web applications.

Hopefully when the interface types proposal (or whatever) happens, direct access to the DOM does become a thing and non-JS programmers really can do their front end work without JS.
in practice, suppose you want to do a merge of files that have more structure than plain text. e.g. code belonging to specific a programming language, json, some data format for an application, etc. This all has a lot more structure than just plain text. You can do a better job of diffing and merging if your difftool and mergetool is aware of the structure of your file. text-based tooling that git offers is to some extent a lowest-common denominator. in principle you can build custom tooling for your format / context that does a better job.

one extension point that git offers for this is the "merge driver". you can define an external script/application that will be called by git whenever a merge conflict needs to be resolved for some particular file (based on path or a pattern).

Here's an older blog post describing a custom git merge driver for merging data files in a game engine: http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2010/06/avoiding-content-locks-... In this gamedev context of merging game data files, it was less important to produce the "correct" merge result than it was to produce some result that had a valid file format. Less technical users could then fix up bad mergetool decisions in an editor with a UI instead of trying to resolve the merge conflicts at the level of the raw serialisation format itself (which could corrupt the data file and make it not possible to load into the editor).

In other situations where there is a large cost to automatically producing the wrong merge result, it would be a better tradeoff to "halt the line" if there is ambiguity about how a merge should be resolved, and escalate to a human to decide what to do.

Further reading: How to wire a custom merge driver in to git: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes#_defining_a_custom_me... What values you can pass in to a merge driver on the command line: https://github.com/git/git/blob/f1d4a28250629ae469fc5dd59ab8... Simple example of the plumbing to wire in a merge driver, with a trivial dumb driver script: https://github.com/Praqma/git-merge-driver
Thanks for the optimism, I've been told this more than once :)

However, it's hard for me not to compare myself with peers of my age who already have it figured it out so to speak, who have not failed as much as I've had and etc...

That's why I am asking for resources to help me out, as it seems like my life is a concatenation of failures, so to speak.
Yes. Next question. (Assuming people volunteer and are appropriately quarantined).
The implications of this are vast - what more could we accomplish with this kind of technology? I'm so excited to see what's on the horizon. Bravo.
Now, here's a great read. Loved it. I've used tla+ ... I'll give alloy a try too. I'm interested in anything else along these lines.
Here’s a reality for folks: right now, Zoom is literally saving entire corporations and jobs in the midst of a global pandemic. Outside this little bubble, no one is blinking twice at this, and neither is our government; frankly, and that’s how it should be. The benefits of Zoom actually _even working at all_ during this time is to be applauded and the engineers and customer service reps should be applauded. This... this right here is a privileged group of people with no conception of what real problems actually look like.
That’s not it. Grep shows the word Operations isn’t present in the fuse module.
Covid-Symptom-Checker Web-App
I didn't realize there was such a strong demand for this kind of service. How does one go about knowing there is a market for things like these? I assume you also need to be somewhat involved in podcasting in this case?
Have you tried Duolingo (https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto)? If so, what did you think of it? It's free, with a subscription option for more features.
Why are globals considered bad? I'm seriously asking. I, too, have been told hundreds of times over the course of my career, and I never questioned it. I want to question it now, because I've never understood why people work SO HARD to remove and avoid globals. I seriously doubt that the time and effort I've seen spent on removing and avoiding globals has been time well spent. And I'm quite sure that the effort spent on that is not comparable to the amount of problems prevented by not having globals. There's just no way globals can be dangerous enough to justify the size of globals-cleansing efforts I've seen.

Game development often has a very large global state, and game problems are often inherently global state manipulation problems; you need globals in order to even have the game in many cases.
If you leave the HN/SV bubble, you find huge amounts of Fortran. It's still plays a significant role in scientific computing. If you lost track of it in the '80s, you might be interested that the language had major updates in '90, '95, '03, '08 and 2018. It's just not a part of the world of cat pix sharing websites and innumerable "Foo of Bar" startups.

Same with COBOL.
Why It’s So Hard to Create New Processors
That was made up by the author, who was grasping for examples. An Airbnb owner is a landlord, not a worker.
Stephen Buhner’s Herbal treatment for CoVID19(link 2 in comments) [pdf]
Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll read it and reply back w/ what I learned.

I don't know what I want to be doing in 5 years. I simply don't :/ Moreover, I am afraid of messing things up again when most of my peers my age already have something going in their lives.
It's the same in New Zealand, my particular ISP offers IPoE[0]. I have a repurposed PowerEdge R210II connected as a firewall/router.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPoE
Also known as a Decision Record, as described by Russell Ackoff in many of his books. Another critical component to include in the Decision Record is not just the decision made, but also the other alternatives that were considered. The documentation should also describe why the other alternatives were not chosen.

Since we can only ever learn from our mistakes, a Decision Record helps us be honest with ourselves when we are evaluating things when they don't go as expected.
Yes. I'm aware. BTDT, got the t-shirt
-- as noted in my two other comments in this very discussion.
Real question.

Most of the wasm instructions are very low level (eg, the test and branch are different, similar to assembly).

But then when you get to the control flow constructs they went in the this weird direction. There is no goto, some of the instructions (br) are context dependent, and if the wasm JIT tries to inline anything it has to muck with the br operand (not even the worst of it). The looping constructs are just odd too.

When I last checked you couldn't even do basic blocks with a control flow graph like most other compilers (so that also means no jump threading optimizations, and without goto you would have a hard time optimizing at the wasm generation level).

It just seems like this part of the instruction set was developed by somebody who wanted some weird higher-level asm, but others wanted an asm close to the instruction set. Just seems like a really bad decitions.

Is there a reason for this or has this been cleaned up at all?
GM salaried workforce must defer pay due to coronavirus impact
Haskell, OCaml, probably F# too.

Can also do 'bare metal' as well.

I think the advantage to Lisp is that the programmer can generate and evaluate arbitrary expression trees at run time.

I'm not sure about the others but I recall Haskell has some difficulty with this. It's possible but it's not supported and not trivial to do.
This is not too surprising as ATSC TV is an abortion and simply doesn't work. So if people suddenly have newfound time on their hands from lack of commuting, they will listen to a broadcast system that WORKS.