skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that day-to-day danger is without personal cost, even for people who are "resilient". My experiences with living in various levels of dangerous situations[1] is that people become "politely selfish" in direct proportion to the level of risk. If you're doing okay it's not a problem, but the people at the bottom of society are the first to lose support when this happens.

In the case of the US, I think a lot of the insane response we've gotten is because of a combination of two things. First, we've not had real personal danger within our borders in most of our lifetimes. Second, media has learned that it's profitable to sell fear. The result is a bunch of manufactured fears, that aren't rationally actionable because they don't exist to begin with, and we become accustomed to reacting irrationally to fear and not looking too closely at our responses because ultimately there's no consequence to doing something ineffective in response to a danger that doesn't exist. But when a real danger like Covid 19 comes along, people don't have a rational set of coping mechanisms honed against previous real dangers, so they react to a real danger the same way they've reacted to a bunch of nonexistent, media-manufactured dangers in the past. If people post about how WiFi causes cancer[2] on Facebook and then do nothing to avoid WiFi, that's not great, but it isn't critical. But if people post about Covid19 danger on Facebook and then do nothing to avoid Covid19, at a societal level that causes the disease to spread and kill more people.

[1] I did live in Israel, although that's not what I'm talking about. I was 5-6 so I'm not sure how relevant that experience is.

[2] I'm not saying WiFi causes cancer.
> like parents scolding children, is unbearable. The population is made up of citizens, not loyal subjects.

Populations are made of children citizens. Italy voted Berlusconi into power multiple times.

I'm strong supporter democracy but the idea that voters are "adults" does not hold water. You need the mechanisms of liberal democracy and institutional processes for any resemblance of rationality to emerge from democratic process. Democracy is inherently dangerous.
You missed the part where he wrote the bit about the Clinton timeline being written prior to her election. He then had an alternate timeline by accident, and tried to come up with a reason for why his 2017 is different.

And if you’d, oh, I dunno, read the book instead of judging it by its cover you’d understand that the Clinton world is still barreling toward apocalypse because Gibson isn’t a hack and the point is not “if only democrats would save us” but rather “our whole system is built on corruption and will destroy us.”

So your comments make zero sense. Your critique is aimed at an abstract idea of what you think a book should be and has no relation to the text itself.
Healthcare and Technology sectors are probably on the way to all time high in output shortly. The US is a large player if not the largest in both of those sectors. We'll see a big hit but I think these sectors will be able to prevent a recession
Show HN: Language detection using Spacy and Fasttext
There was a proposal for a checked integer type that you might want to look at:

N2466 2020/02/09 Svoboda, Towards Integer Safety

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2466.pdf

The committee asked the proposers for further work on this effort.

Integer types that saturate are an interesting idea. Because signed integer overflow is undefined behavior, implementations are not prohibited from implementing saturation or trapping on overflow.
How did they get people to agree to it? Mathematical terminology is a crime, but the problem is that it's very hard to get people to coordinate on different terminology.
Syntax of pointers. Easy to use high level languages make extensive use of pointers (i.e. all their variables are actually pointers) but beginners cope with them because no stars or ampersands are required, with the help of GC. Of course they'll get bitten soon and often because it is too easy to create copies of pointers rather than copies of full data structures, and without understanding pointers it's hard to grasp why that happens.
So in a corner case where you have a loop that iterates over all integer values (when does this ever happen?) you can optimize your loop. As a consequence, signed integer arithmetic is very difficult to write while avoiding UB, even for skilled practitioners. Do you think that's a useful trade-off, and do you think anything can be done for those of us who think it's not?
Another approach would be a standard library of arithmetic routines that signal overflow.

If people used them while parsing binary inputs that would prevent a lot of security bugs.

The fact that this question exists and is full of wrong answers suggests a language solution is needed: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1815367/catch-and-comput...
Never heard of betteridge before, and was thinking the answer to headlines is normally yes...

The Wikipedia article you link to states a study of ~3000 articles where the most common answer is infact yes.
It's interesting to hear the standardization perspective, because it's pretty much the opposite of my perspective as a user.

I see the classic path of any programming language -- regardless of standardization -- is to continuously add features until it's too big and complex that nobody wants to deal with it any more. Then it's replaced by a newer, simpler language that takes the important bits and drops the unnecessary complexities. At that point, everybody sees that the older language was barking up the wrong tree, and they stop wasting time on it.

It's not the cessation of language change that causes language death -- that's merely a symptom. You can't keep a language alive simply by changing it every year. Some people sure have tried.

Alternatively, until it's evolved so much that there is so much diversity of implementation that simply knowing a library is written in "language X" doesn't tell me much about how it's written, or whether I can use it in my program which is also written in "language X".

Then again, C is the exception to every rule, so maybe we can keep piling on features indefinitely, and people will have to use it (even if they don't like it), for the same reason they started using it decades ago (even if we didn't like it).
Didn’t know Gary Bernhardt was working on something outside of DAS. Quality content as always.
I've been developing software for over 40 years now (35 years professionally) and I still love the idea that I can create something from nothing. I always have a couple hobby projects that I can spend a few minutes on ... things that stretch my skills or that involve a subject of interest outside my day job. I also make the software I write for work more fun by treating it link a craft ... if you see art in what you're doing, even mundane programming can be fun. Curiously, altering software to make it testable and writing the tests is one of my soft spots.
Show HN: DesignerJobs 2.0
No, what I'm implying is that If I jump off a 17 story building and it later turns out that I test positive for covid, the cause of my death sure isn't covid.
> If the compiler aborted compilation when it detected undefined behavior, you’d be getting a lot of false positives for unreachable code

Could you please provide an example of this?
Our system rewards people who relentlessly pursue their own advantage at the expense of others. The official talk is about shared sacrifice but the real winners are the ones who make others sacrifice. My company has a lot of problems but I really appreciate that they set out a goal to not lay off anybody. They could easily have laid off a lot of people but they didn’t. This will probably not get rewarded in the stock market but it shows that the company is not run by complete sociopaths like many others.
Gary has already checked out Rust and didn't particularly like it, so I doubt that will be happening.

Regardless, it was not about being some sort of hipster. It solved real problems: https://www.executeprogram.com/blog/porting-to-typescript-so... (this is linked from the part you quoted, of course.)
I don’t really see a simple way out of the present situation. Maybe there was once a time when people tolerated the “wrong” views of others, but that’s long past.

Now the hegemony is enforced in many ways. Social firing campaigns being one of the popular ones.
No one should make this claim because it is a scientific and medical claim, not a business claim.

All precautions can be taken, and then a shipment could still have active virus on it. The deliverer (e.g. UPS) could infect it, too.

Customers have to wipe down their packages or let them sit to disinfect. No precautions a shipper takes are enough to prevent that necessity.
The C charter and the C committee's job is to standardize existing practice. That means codifying features that emerge as successful in multiple implementations (compilers or libraries), and that are in the overall spirit of the language.
That's correct. DP3T documents and code here: https://github.com/DP-3T/
> You miss an important feature of the solution shown in (I presume) your rush to demonstrate your bash knowledge: the ability to edit a filename shown, in place.

OK, then just use !#$ (the last word of the current command) and press CTRL + ALT + e to expand it into the actual value.
Hello,

First off thank you so much for taking the time to answer questions.

As a new programmer starting with C I am trying to learn how to go from a beginner to an intermediate any recommendations of projects to help learn C?

It is difficult for me to find projects that I see are "valuable" for a lack of a better term.

Thank you!
Singapore: Compulsory to wear mask when leaving the house
Aren't most "apps" redundant considering you can install a program the way you would for a Linux distro? There are resources going back ages. I suppose they aren't designed for mobile, but could be tweaked.
Less people driving?
I don't think you're quite grasping what "distributing the wealth" would look like. I have in mind something like a Universal Basic Income. Reducing the involvement of large organisations (including governments, non-profits and corporations), as well at high-net worth individuals is entirely the point.

It's basically democracy for economic power. And you're right, it's not a silver bullet. But I believe it could be a significant improvement on the status quo.
Covid-19 response: Corporate Exploitation
And yet the english characters are rotated clockwise?
COVID is not a black swan (unknown unknown), but a white swan (known unknown). A looming Coronavirus pandemic was a well known global catastrophic risk.
What? They bought up another company in 2015. Not the other way around. Why would that even be a bad thing?
yes, that is correct.
Hello, just a quick note; I wanted to buy the book so I went to the website and when I picked my country as Canada it started giving me a strange list of provinces (definitely not Canadian) so I abandoned the process for now.
Many uses of strchr do write via a pointer derived from a non-const declaration. When we introduced const qualifier it was noted that they were actually declaring read-only access, not unchangeability. The alternative was tried experimentally and the consequent "const poisoning" got in the way.
for the love of [deity] some startup please sell the networks a high quality webcam solution on a private network with low latency/lag and multi-path routing to keep it online because I cannot stand to watch broadcasts anymore, it's total amateur hour

all these reporters are using potato cams with some highly filtered high latency public streaming service and it might as well be some kid in his basement - speaking of which why do you not even have a backdrop, we don't want to see your ugly bookcase or oddly posh kitchen
It's really too early to say one way or the other because spread of the virus started a different times in different countries. Plus we have to factor in the long term excess deaths that will be caused by lockdown measures. Poverty kills (even in Scandinavia).
Describe software engineering in three words or less
So no wiretaps, ever? I'm not so sure...
It's right there in what you have written yourself. 31% is a finite number, that means scarcity. 16 million homes is a finite number, that means scarcity.

In a world without scarcity you'd have infinite food and infinite houses. We do not live in such a world.

You don't give people without the ability to pay for things stuff for free because you don't want to absolutely wreck your economy. If I'd get food and housing for free, I'd be the first one to quit my job and just live the good life of not working ever again. I'm incentivized to work because that isn't the case. And also because it's such a stupid idea, that I can see that it would collapse fast.
I think I enjoyed tinkering with EMM386 and QEMM parameters or fiddling with device driver load order more than I did actually playing the games!
Yeah, instead of spending the time learning English or Chinese or useful skills, kids can now waste decades on their leaders' ~~nationalistic~~ ethnocentric fools errand...
Monetizing your hobby is a scam sold to us as children. Take a sabbatical and do open-source if you have the financial freedom to do so.
And small investments tend to have better returns.
ymmv but I went to Recurse Center and it sparked the joy again for me...twice!
This looks really interesting! I've been building an RSS reader for myself in my free time, and this will be really useful. I was wondering if you know anything about the legal implications around scraping full-content like this and packaging it up? I was planning to do it with some fun added-on features, but was worried it would be considered copy-right infringement (since I would basically be re-hosting other site's content without permission). And some websites outright ban this kind of usage in the TOS for their RSS feeds. For example, from the Washington Post[1]

> a. For any article, you may not display more text than we provide in the RSS feed.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/rss-terms-of-service/2012/01/...
I'm going on a tangent here, buy I'm curious as to what would happen if they did kick them out. Could those nations just print euro-denominated debt in anticipation and then switch currencies once out? I
My USD$7.99/mo grandfathered Google Play Music subscription is scheduled to renew in 2 days. There's no indication on my account that it will be cancelled.

If I recall correctly, I did run into an issue in the past where it was incorrectly cancelled, and I had no trouble getting it restored at the same price by contacting support, but that was a long time ago, so it's hard to remember. And I'm pretty sure it was partially an issue on my end--my bank was declining the charge or something. When the charge finally went through, it was $9.99 instead of $7.99. I think. My memory is terrible.
I believe the last proposal was in 2008 (ignore the try..finally stuff here): http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1298.pdf

So I guess it needs someone to take that and update it, also to pull up a full list of current Linux software which is using this feature (which as I say these days is a surprising amount).
Take a look at N2466 2020/02/09 Svoboda, Towards Integer Safety which has some support in the committee:

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2466.pdf

(signal is a strong word... maybe indicate?)
>immunity passports

Yip, that may well become a thing and as we know, that could play out in many ways. How do you make sure people carry them. We happily allow our beloved pets to be chipped with tracking RFID chips. We freely already carry around our own personal RFID bank cards and mobile phones that with each advancement in radio tech alone allows better tracking from the radio aspect alone, let alone all the other smart features built into the radio/chipset.

Thing is we take those around with us with a choice, any immunity passports, would the same level of choice play out.

You can get 100 people, give them the choice to carry tracking and 99 of them will be happy to do that, yet if you told those 100 people they had to, well - there would be way less than 99 who would happily comply and that is when things get messy.

Hence many and much enforcement of lockdowns have been overall, softy softly. In the UK we had a soft lockdown for about a week and the results was not as good, so a more formalised lockdown transpired. Still, mostly softly softly of move along, move along now. But still, it only takes a few to ignore things for the line to be moved further for all.

So whatever is needed or done, will be a fine balance in PR with the people and would need clear, precise reasons and durations and full intent outlined. Hence most will be pushed as a choice and if you are offing people some extra level of freedom back during lockdowns, then those that take up even voluntarily will PR wise, work well. Also won't be the ones that you would want to track anyhow in most cases. Though if enough go for it, you start to get a sense of mandate to make it more formalised knowing that the majority have already signed up freely. That is when things may well get interesting concerns.
Dude pls with the spamming
You’re commenting on the plot of a book you haven’t read.
Ooh, that's a good point. I think of it as related to free-market fundamentalism, but it deserves a word on its own.
Ask HN: How will Covid and recession affect open source funding?
Could model OSS funding as a form of charitable giving that dries up in hard times, or as a way to collaboratively fund high quality basic software tools on the cheap in a time of belt-tightening.
One possibility is to modify some existing program to include an additional new feature. You should soon develop a sense for what works well versus what causes problems.
Speaking as someone who is not in the committee but has observed trends since 2003 or so, I would say that solving this problem is way beyond the scope of evolutions that will make it in C2a or even the next one.

There are plenty of programing languages that distinguish strongly between mutable and immutable references, and that have the parametric polymorphism to let functions that can use both kinds return the same thing you passed to them, though. C will simply just never be one of them.
That hits so close to home it’s comical.

At 15 I said ”Welp, not gonna be a music prodigy, that’s okay”

At 25 I was like ”Damn, not a comp sci prodigy either that sucks”

Then at 30 it was ”Well crap, anything I achieve now will just be considered normal”

Pressure is still there but it feels lessened. I’m not gonna be famous for achieving great things before the curve. But I can still gain notoriety for doing cool things at a normal pace.

The key is to let the ego motivate but not crush you, I guess.
Isn't that just a fancy way to say "you need experts to make the decisions and the populace to believe they are in charge"?
"Hey Y'All, I'm back with another video! Be sure to hit that Like button and be sure to subscribe, just click the little subscribe button there below this video. I always love your comments and feedback so keep it coming. Be sure to tell me if you have ideas for videos you'd like me to make! I have lots more videos..."

You mean that crap at the beginning, middle, and end of every video isn't working? Cry me a river. Its about content not your unoriginal gibberish.
Coronavirus Clarity
Can you please repeat this AMA at a later date and at a time of day when people on the west coast of the USA are awake? Alternatively, please keep it going for a few hours if you would be able to be so generous with your time! Thank you for doing this!

Do you also answer questions about the standard libraries? This is not so much a C question as a library question:

I'm wondering if Apple's Grand Central Dispatch ever made it into a more integrated role in C's libraries, or if it will forever remain an outside add-on. And whether there is anything else at that level (level in the sense of high versus low level) in the standard libraries that plays such a role, that I should read up on instead of GCD.
or... you can do this

mmv '<asterisk>foo<asterisk>' '#1bar#2'

where <asterisk> is the common symbol (Will not appear in HN)
anki appears to have a Linux version on the website. Wouldn't that work? Even if it's not built for mobile.
It was a close election, there's probably a lot of single things that could have changed it. One side or the other winning a close election shouldn't fundamentally change your worldview.
What's an example of a codebase where _Generic has had a notable positive impact?
How does mode of travel affect risks posed to other road users
That sounds like a very ad hoc explanation, what about Japan then?
But they aren't getting their hands on dollars, they're getting their hands on crypto claiming to be tied to the dollar. Tether did the same - until they didn't. You can't be tied to the dollar without backing your coin with dollars. You can't possibly back your coin with sufficient dollars without US government approval. You aren't getting approval without following the same regulations as any other bank, which is what made getting dollars difficult in the first place.

Which means the only alternative is attempting to supersede the dollar by pegging to it but not actually being backed by it. Which, again, will never happen.
I think anyone interested in the subject ought to play the Deus Ex game series (especially the last two entries in the franchise)
read antrhopology and philosophy journals. everything else will be a validation of myths, like Sapiens suggested already.

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/youre-a-slave-to-m... (ignore the inflamatory simplistic title)
Without systematic random testing these numbers are describing testing activity, not effective reproductive rate.

Infection rate is not the same as number of cases.
Death penalty states urged to turn over drugs to help coronavirus patients
"is that countries that more believe the Austrian school, like Germany"

As a german, this is news to me. Austrian school stands mostly for a free market without or as little as possible state interventions and regulations: a idea very frowned upon here generally and usually rather associated with the US
The L.A. Times has a really polished version of this, which I sometimes prefer over the regular articles. It has the effect of a full color scan of the entire newspaper. If you click in an article, you are taken to a standalone page for reading. You might have to be a subscriber to access it.
How can you suggest to be in cash when they are literally printing trillions with no sign it will slow down?

I know that a lot of it is supposedly not going to make it into the real economy. But if there is one thing for sure, it's that the government is going to behave recklessly and fuck it up.
Great question!

Joining the committee requires you to be a member of your country's national body group (in the US, that's INCITS) and attend at least some percentage of the official committee meetings, and that's about it. So membership is not difficult, but it can be expensive. Many committee members are sponsored by their employers for this reason, but there's no requirement that you represent a company.

I joined the committees because I have a personal desire to reduce the amount of time it takes developers to find the bugs in their code, and one great way to reduce that is to design features to make harder to write the bugs in the first place, or to turn unbounded undefined behavior into something more manageable. Others join because they have specific features they want to see adopted or want to lend their domain expertise in some area to the committee.