skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a software engineer, I recognize that my own code is incomplete. Will it ever be complete? Will it have all the needed features to meet ever changing demands? As the system it’s built to support grows in use, will those demands change?

Languages are the same. Decisions in the past may be discovered to be incorrect in the future. Some features make the language far easier to work with and built better more stable software.

In Rust there are some big ones. ?, For easier returns from functions when errors are encountered, this simplified my code, made it easier to read. async/await, vastly simplifies Future based code, based on my own experience I believe there was a 30% reduction in code when I converted old hand written Futures to the new model. These are big awesome features in Rust, that most people who use them find to be great improvements for productivity.

Your attempt at an analogy is off, because neither wood nor vinyl are living things. I think if we turn to other engineering fields it’s more obvious. For example, batteries. We’ve had batteries since nearly the time that electricity was discovered. If they did not improve over the years, would we be able to build high-performance log-range cars with them? E-bikes with them?

Or something else, hammers are fine for nailing things, but nail-guns are amazing. Have you ever seen someone lay top nail floors with a nail-gun? I have, and my jaw hit the floor as I watched how fast they were.

I want my languages to be the same. Improve things that make the language better at working in difficult engineering spaces (for us that might be embedded), and improve it to make it more productive so I can build better software faster.
Arrogant is the most accurate word to describe Elm and its leadership. I tried to use Elm in production between 0.14 and 0.18 versions and it was fun and mind expanding experience. I'm truly grateful that I've used it because it introduced a lot of functional stuff to me. But I no longer use it myself or recommend it for any serious work.

Breaking changes were negligible in the beginning. But I got fed up with rewriting the app after the 3rd Elm upgrade. I think it's irresponsible to advertise the language to be used in production and break it every fucking year. Speeches about finding the perfect solution are great for academical discussions and toy languages, but you can't just remove the stuff that your community uses without offering any alternative. It all stems from the arrogance and cult-like behavior of the core team. I'm sure that they're wonderful and very smart people who do their best to create the best version of the language that they can. But their management style is too dictatorial and they don't respect their community.

For me, the split started with elm formatter discussion on github. I disagreed with some of decisions that the core devs made and I wanted to see what other developers have been saying about it. On of the issues was the preference for 4-space indentations instead of 2-space. I understand that it's important to have a single source of formatting for the language. But at that time there was no consensus on what amount of spaces to use. Basically, the community divided almost 50/50 between the two. Moreover, a lot of core libraries and example code still used 2-space indentation. (that's why I preferred it). Due to lack of consensus, there was a suggestion to add a flag to formatter to set the indentation. It required to change some parts of code to pass the flag to the formatting module. At that moment, one of the core devs stepped up and closed the discussion because he didn't approve of this decision and he just said that 2-space people should adapt to the new 4-space default (that wasn't supported by any majority). It was the first time when I felt that the Elm management is too strict and I don't want to have anything to do with people with such attitude.
But aren't sales and account management precisely the people who are client-facing or related to e-commerce?
I still have a Z88 somewhere in here (my office) ...

It's the granddaddy of the modern PDA and smartphone; anecdotally, some time in 1989-ish John Sculley was chairing a meeting of Apple execs and realized half of them were typing on these weird black plastic things the size of a pad of paper. Sculley wanted a pen rather than a keyboard, but got the idea that maybe Apple should develop something along these lines: a mobile computer companion device for note-taking, calendar, and productivity (back in the days when a Macintosh Portable cost $5000 and weighed 10kg because of the lead-acid batteries).

That thought eventually turned into the Newton, and the Newton in turn gave Palm their start (initially as a platform for Graffiti).
Yep; I was imprecise!
The “right thing” here, if:

• you’ve got a RasPi running Linux (Raspbian)

• you want to drive a novel display with it

• you want the contents of the display to be regular Linux text-mode console output, with regular Linux text-mode console input

...would be to just write a Linux kernel framebuffer driver for your novel display device, and then drop it into the Raspbian kernel tree, recompile, and deploy to your device, no?

Then there’d be no other custom software needed. You’d just have a regular Linux system, with a regular Linux console TTY, mapped to a grid of pixels by the Linux framebuffer code (bonus: in whatever bitmap font you wish), in turn bit-banged to the display device’s IO port using your driver’s custom refresh sequences.

Sure, this approach requires learning some new codebases (Linux kernel driver development!) but so does the “user-mode driver” approach in the article.
Assets aren't worth more, money is now dramatically worth less.

You measure one with the other.

Here's a long term graph of the Feds balance sheet: https://www.ft.com/content/ec10b41a-84af-4e44-ad3f-5bb86b6e1...

Here's the Australian Central Bank's current balance sheet: https://i.redd.it/h7bdffj8gqr41.png

This is playing out across the planet and will likely have the same market distorting effects as a decade ago.
Saludos de Mérida, Yucatán!
This is what happens when a bunch of web developers are in the core team of a supposedly "systems programming" language. Web developers are used to moving to a new framework every week.
Probably because this crisis will consolidate corporate power in the hands of big business.

The divide between big and small business in this scenario is stark. For companies that have access to bond markets and the stock market massive amounts of cash are being deployed to prop things up.

Small businesses are in complete free fall, with a non-functional short term confusing payroll assistance loan plan that has yet to lend to anyone in effect.

The writing is very clearly on the wall. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses will fail, and that will further tip market share towards larger companies, conglomerates, chains, and similar.

When you invest in the stock market you are investing in those larger businesses.
Execs are even easier to fire as they are the furthest away from the front lines, but they're the ones doing the firing so too bad for everyone else.
Reports just came out that OPEC+ is more likely to reach a deal than was expected just a few hours ago.

Virtual meeting started around 10am EST.

But yeah tbh no one really knows
This is the part that completely evades me. The economy ground to a halt worldwide, 6 million new unemployment claims are processed every week in the US, established startups are on life support, more and more small businesses are collapsing...

...and the stocks are green.
I'm a bit lost at the name and the target audience of this book. OP is asking for help with implementation of layouts, book seems to be geared towards learning design, not implementation of design (but there is no 100% free samples available so not fully sure on this)

And why is the book named Refactoring UI? It doesn't seem to be talking about refactoring at all, so where does that come from? Is it a design/UI/UX term I'm not used to?
My guess: because speculators are speculating that the recent severe dips in the stock market are undervaluing the economy and therefore are buying when it goes low, propping up the price. Speculators speculate that the pandemic has not actually destroyed any significant real value in the economy and will bounce back, therefore the stock dips are overreactions and are good buying opportunities.
> Why isn't it expected of Mac software to keep an installation manifest and provide a way for removing the software?

It is dead simple to remove a .app from the Applications folder. Sadly the pkg installers also throw files everywhere. Some software does include an uninstaller pkg, like Windows apps will include an uninstall.exe. But like windows, not everyone is meticulous about making sure you can uninstall cleanly.
The learning curve to PureScript is way higher than Elm. Is that not that obvious?
The only way to actually survive is to hunt big game. Fish is too lean. Vegetables have no calories. Small rodents have very few calories. Fatty meat is a necessity.

In alone, they are forced to transport heavy camera equipment. They start out right before winter. The local laws prevent them from actually hunting. The show is a joke. There is no surviving actually done. Just enduring starvation. The optimal way to win is to select fatty food as many of your 10 items as possible, make a shelter, and expend as few calories as possible. But that isn't entertaining to watch, so they won't select you to be on the show.
The negativity is because they were never serious about it.

While C++ might not be the ideal language, choosing one that only works properly in Apple platforms, dismissing the complaints of lack of any solid roadmap in platforms that researchers actually use and hand waving any usability problems to just use notebooks in Google Compute cloud is not how a language gains adoption beyond its initial niche.
All those people with AirPods do, otherwise I would imagine they're like me and disable bluetooth the moment you buy the device and never activate it again.
> I know the dev team had major changes between every title

Which is kind of funny, because the dev team between Myst to Riven was one of the transitions where they kept the team+tools the most similar between releases. (Myst 3 and Myst 4 had entirely different studios, with entirely different teams, tooling, and engines)

The next closest similar transition would probably be the Uru series to Myst 5 (but for wildly different reasons)
Why we do machine learning engineering with YAML, not notebooks
my guess is that people that are well off (rich) still have their income stream. A lot of tech workers, CEOs, etc are working from home. It's poor (or middle class) people (working in retail, tourism, food) that are disproportionately affected by this. In 2008, it hit rich people first, then "trickled down". So, the rich are seeing this as an opportunity to offload some extra cash onto the discounted markets.
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> That seems pretty ridiculous coming from Linux, where the vast majority of software will be installed via a package manager, making clean removal trivial.

Except that packaging (in the package manager sense) and distributing proprietary software for Linux, with its too-many distros and even-more-too-many library versions, is such a pain in the ass that almost no one does it in the first place.

Now AppImage, that's trivial.
Can you give me an example how you got to 400 actions? Just enumerate like 5 or so, I’m assuming you are building features where groups of actions are just necessary based on the patterns you are using.

I’m genuinely curious because I feel like this kind of inflation of actions/reducers in Redux is what makes it nightmarish.
Show HN: Python package to create HQ images programmatically with templates
In that case, the analogy is to open-heart surgery, which typically results in significantly reduced capacity for a long time at best, and often permanently. It's certainly not something you bounce back from quickly or easily, and even if you're young and in perfect physical health, you have to be pretty lucky to come back all the way.

Staying within the increasingly strained analogy, I don't think it is reasonable to describe the US economy as "young" or "in perfect physical health", or indeed even as anywhere close to either of those. This is more like doing an emergency sextuple bypass on an obese 70-year-old with a lifelong pack-a-day habit - even if the patient comes off the table alive, it's going to take a long and careful period of physical therapy and recovery to keep him that way, and he's almost certainly never going to recover all of even the limited capacity he had before the crisis.
Do you have any counterexamples where novel germs or viruses were better understood in a shorter amount or time? From my POV, it just looks like a genuinely hard problem right now.
> a good idea which is supposed to manage both demand and supply issue was what helped Oyo grow

What was the good idea? As far as I can see, it was a ploy to try and get into the hotel business without the hard stuff, like capital expenditures, training employees, checking quality of hotels, etc.
The market is reactive to relatively short-term inputs. I'm looking at a few things that are causing the jump:

- Some of it is inflationary as others have pointed out. There's a lot of money entering the system right now, and markets tend to go up on that

- Some of it is short sellers realizing gains from the last month and exiting their trades (the effect of closing a short causes markets to rise)

- Some of it is psychological reactions to dropping death estimates, and concurrent optimism that things will go back to "normal" soon (or at least sooner than previously thought)

What the market did 12/21/18 is sort of irrelevant
Google loves entering legal battles over programming languages huh....

Just use something actually free, or create your own.
I remember playing with a Vydec word-processor as a kid and thinking it was the coolest thing ever.
Realistically I would say a lot of engineers are easy to fire. You only need a certain amount of engineers to do maintenance.
Bye Bye Bernie
Show HN: Subreddit Finder - Trained on 4M Reddit Posts from 4K Subreddits
TLDR: Maropost exposes 95m database and lies to researchers
Look for trends in the articles posted by the person who posted it. My guess is some people just post anything Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Facebook related.
He does mention the Fertile Crescent and the modern-day countries but seems to suggest that agriculture then moved to Mesopotamia. Not true.
It'll probably be fine in another couple of months. It's just difficult to know for sure and payroll obligations are tough to roll back.
What kinda dev work? Would definitely be interested.
That website is pretty brutal for reading, with the ads rotating and their different heights shifting the content up and down constantly.
Maybe you missed the ~40% drop it sustained in about a month's time? That happened when it looked like the world was ending and 2 million people were supposed to die in the US. Now that things are looking better, the stock market is improving.
Thanks for sharing this, is interesting to hear what other folks are doing in practice!

We were actually thinking of migrating to something similar in terms of data fetching to Apollo/graphql and leaving redux for more app wide state problems.

Could you share any further insights on how you started organising this project? I.e. some pieces in Apollo/graphQL while maintaining a redux core, (presumably that's the core you started with?). Would be really interested.

Also I share your sentiment exactly, redux isn't dead. It's still a really solid approach to state management, and in complex applications I still think it's one of the best options. Thanks and kudos to the maintainers!
I don't think Microsoft needs promotion currently, atleast during these times. Their main revenue is from Enterprise market and during such slow growth, no Enterprise shifts to newer platform over the night. I am just saying, we shouldn't be negative about everything, just because it's Microsoft.
U and non-U English
Google creating a new language? To shut it down in 3 years? Swift will be around in 15 years. It would be Microsofts F#, or Googles Dart all over again. It's a monumental task to create a language that people want to use, and an even bigger task to create tools around it (IDEs, language-specifications, cross platform frameworks, package management).

I know this is a hot take but... I doubt Google has the capability to be frank. They created Dart and Go (a.k.a generics ain't necessary). They created Tensorflow 1 which is totally different from Tensorflow 2.

Swift may not be the best but Swift is starting to become such a large part of Apple so it will have backing no matter the internal politics.

The language is not where the battle will be, it will be the tooling.
Are you asking if VentureBeat is genuine news or a PR firm?
Ask HN: What Happened to ICOs?
DNC's Blueprint data tool will help down-ballot campaigns
It's not just Microsoft, I've seen similar articles from other telework apps (Zoom, Slack, etc) and from internet providers talking about the increased activity they are seeing. I think it just comes with out current situation.
Any state that wants a loan can get one. This isn't really a "stimulus" per se; the Fed is just ensuring that states facing short term liquidity issues can continue operating. To solve the broader structural problems at play, the government needs to step in with some fiscal stimulus.
Along with the cynical, pessimistic, and snarky answers, bear in mind the market does not reflect what is happening now. It reflects an averaged, time-value-of-money-weighted assessment of what the market participants think it's going to happen in the future.

So, despite what you may naturally think, the market crash wasn't reflecting the fact many people aren't working right now, it was reflecting the fear that we could be knocked out for months. Now fears about the worst-case scenario are receding, so the time-averaged result rises as the result of the worst bottom elements lifting, even if the overall assessment is still problematic.
> The difference between you stuffing money under a mattress and the government doing so is that the government controls the money printers and you do not. There is no point to the government stuffing money under a mattress because it can conjure up as much money as it desires when it so desires. On the other hand, you have no much magical ability, so the situation is quite different.

> And yes we are talking about fiat currencies because most currencies in use today are fiat currencies.

> Government debt is not like household debt, and government saving is not like household saving.

Yes, the money printers are the exclusive exception and the only factor in inflation or deflation. Taxes are not a factor any more than mattresses. I don't know if you recognize it, but you are supporting my position.
Thoughts on Team Productivity in Quarantine
It is a totally unrelated virus, but if you get chickenpox you may get many years later shingles, the virus may remain inactive in nerve cells fo a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingles
It is called bear rally.

It happens all the time during sell out (1929, 2008). At some point shorts close their positions en masse. It doesn't stop the market from falling further later...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-how-big-of-a-bear-ma...
Because Fauci said earlier today expected US fatalities has been down revised to 60k

Meaning it's not as bad as we all thought in previous weeks when millions were predicted to die
The website crashed.

Interesting!
I also get a kick out of their technique for constantly loading pages of memory from the disk, resulting in a few thousand seeks per level then come to find out Sony only rated the disk drive for <100k seeks.

I wonder how influential the decision was to not tell Sony brass about it.
We could give money to people/government directly. Why create money as private debt?
Yes - holy crap is it annoying. I found the best way was to only launch meetings from their desktop client :S
We've always been a bit shy, you know... :)
I've got a serial-to-USB adapter, and NCX [0] by Simon Bell is a fully-featured device manager for importing and exporting documents, installing packages etc. It's basically a modern replacement for Apple's old Newton Connection Utilities.

[0] https://newtonresearch.org/connection/index.html
Yes. But now they have no one to call.
A company like yelp making 1 billion revenue per year, I'd except they could have their employees back, for at least a couple months, maybe furlough them with 80% of their salaries...
Maybe, but that's also an advantage. Often it is useful to have two versions of the same application available, for example if you are testing one of them, or if a feature or compatibility was broken somewhere along the way. Typical package manager software installation does not accommodate such use cases.
Maybe this?

In addition to the expansion slot, the eMate also featured a single non-CardBus PCMCIA slot. It could be used for a number of different cards, including modems, ethernet cards, wireless cards, bluetooth cards, and flash memory (linear and ATA/Compact Flash).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300

edit: OP answered!
Bill G. Interviewed by Becky Quick on Squawk Box
Because the market is not pricing this as a signal that the "sum of all future free cash flow" is in jeopardy.

Governments all over the world have implemented financial relief to these companies by promising to shoulder the cost of wages through the normal unemployment benefit system. Companies taking advantage of that during this extraordinary period doesn't say much about what their profitability will look like after the lockdowns are over.

In fact, in some cases this could be evidence of a flexible company that is able to scale down quickly and is more likely to survive this and future demand shocks.
exp(x) ?
I doubt anyone's being paid by MS here, but MS puts out blog posts and will release numbers that news publications can write easy, free articles based on.
Do you think it is harder to learn than Ocaml/ReasonML though?

I think there is a good free introductory book [1], a welcoming community [2], the language and ecosystem are quite stable nowadays and there's good tooling (now that there's the Spago package manager).

[1] https://leanpub.com/purescript/read
[2] https://discourse.purescript.org/
Yelp's engineering isn't likely much more than ~150 people (I worked there ~2 years ago, maybe has grown since then but honestly, given their revenue situation even then, likely not by much). The mix there is just like most companies; you've got dedicated teams for each of their apps (which includes Android, iOS, web, business-facing, etc), you've got API teams, back office teams working on moving data around and business analytics, a very secretive abuse management team, IT, etc. Yelp also, given their age, wasn't (at some point) running their primary workloads in the cloud; they had (have?) a colo DC in San Francisco that hosted a ton of stuff, so there were people dedicated to that hardware. There was some movement to get rid of this as I remember.

Surprisingly, or hopefully not, the vast majority of the company is more directly revenue generating; sales and customer acquisition. Its spread very globally; at least as of a few years ago, the SF HQ didn't house any sales people, though I think they had an office in Oakland which did.

Point being, I always got the impression that their engineering team was very "right sized" given their revenue and product scope.
Icelandic police traces people who may be infected and send them to quarantine
I am now growing into thinking Swift may be a very good language, but may also happens to be not the best language for anything. And I am not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
Farmers Deal with Glut of Food as Coronavirus Closes Restaurants