skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am currently developing a language, though more as a research project than anything practical. Apologies for jumping on this post, but it is a good opportunity to organize and set out my thoughts (and possibly someone might find it interesting):

Essentially the language is a pure functional language that takes the untyped lambda calculus and adds decoration terms as first class citizens in the calculus. These terms can be used to wrap selected combinators (eg church numerals). The normal beta reduction rules are extended to handle these decorations in a useful way.

The decorations allow predicates to be formed that are total over the term space (eg isChurchNumeral?), which means that function call identifiers can be dynamically
dispatched based on their arguments (using a certain amount of term assembly from the surface syntax). Adhoc polymorphism can thus be encoded in a transparent fashion.

This has been sufficient to build a numerical tower up to and including the Complex numbers, such that the usual operations add, mul, sub, div are defined within and between Natural, Integer, Rational and Complex numbers. It can also manipulate strings as if they were lists, whilst retaining their 'stringyness'. All without needing number or string specific features internal to the runtime (save parsing and formatting on the way in and out).

REPL examples:

> (sum [1 -3 2.5 3/2 1+2i])
> 3+2i

> (reverse "hello")
> "olleh"

Something resembling Haskell's typeclasses naturally arises, with the usual definitions of Functor, Monad, and Applicative.

It is, needless to say, astonishingly slow.
A bit off-topic, but this is another one of those sites that show nothing without JS, and looking at the source reveals something a little more amusing than usual: content that's full of nullness.
> but still MAC addresses would differ

You mean BSSID. It looks like a MAC address and in some cases it actually is one, but it’s not required to be. Each AP broadcasting for a given network will have a different one and I’m not aware of client side native behavior to alert or enforce a whitelisted set. Even if there was, you could easily spoof the BSSID too, just would need to war drive to get it.
Part of my point is that "mainstream social mores" aren't and shouldn't be dictated by a group of companies mainly located within a single American state.

There are some things that are normal in parts of the world, but unacceptable in America, and vice-versa.

There are also some facts different countries disagree with. Should the mainstream internet adopt the American position by default? Should America's terrorists and freedom fighters be Google and Microsoft's too?

A large company that recommends content for a billion users holds significant influence, and that power should not be taken lightly.
Optimizing code is a book-length topic just for an introduction. It's also true that knowing how optimizers work can feed back into improving the language design.

For example, `const` in C++ doesn't mean the data is immutable - it can change with any assignment through a pointer. No optimizations assuming immutability will work. That's why D has an `immutable` qualifier, giving the optimizer to do optimizations assuming it does not change.

For a famous example, Fortran assumes two arrays never overlap. In C/C++ they can. This is the source of a persistent gap in performance between Fortran and C/C++. C attempted to fix it by adding the `restrict` qualification, but this failed because it is just too arcane and brittle for most users.

In D, I'm working on adding an Ownership/Borrowing system, which will enable the compiler to figure out the pointer aliasing optimization opportunities.
The purpose of context-free, or rather unambiguous grammars in general, isn't for the benefit of compilers, but for the benefit of humans. A computer can parse almost everything, even regexes (with backtracking etc.), it's the humans that trip over fancy grammars.
Not if you draw the picture. A rectangle with height divided into 60 and 2, width 20. Then it's obvious the total area is the sum of the two parts. My kids got very comfortable early on with that notation. Switching to the standard algorithm was tough, even after they understood why it was equivalent, because the diagram just makes so much more sense.
Half of San Francisco restaurants expected to close as industry faces pandemic
I used https://github.com/deoxxa/hl7 at my last job to grab HL7 messages out of central processing system.

Regardless of the parser, I agree. Writing your own is dangerous. HL7 is deceptively complex. It leaves a lot of room for vendors and your hospital to customize. If you write your own, you can very easily end up with a system that is boxed in to your hospital's own, or even your department's own, implementation.
Similarly, "The Creative Process":

http://toothpastefordinner.com/103012
I love these drawing!
The all pairs loop is unnecessarily low level, and it would be hard to spot a mistake there. It would be great if there was a way to say

for i < j <= N

as this is super clear.
Iceland is leading testing rates at almost 146 per 1,000 people[1]. This is extremely low for a hyper-contagious pathogen like COVID-19. No one is "pretty sure they're at least discovering the majority of contagious infections" -- let's call a spade a spade and build models that actually make sense.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing
Running tokei [0] on their repo [1] gives me that it's around 300 lines of C, and around 8000 lines of Coq. A lot of that C is actually test code, so in reality it's about 8000 lines of Coq to prove around 150 lines of C correct.

They also don't prove the correctness of mmap (which is how they actually get memory to alloc out), but entirely depend on it.

It seems incredibly expensive to write 8000 lines of very dense and difficult proof code in order to verify that you remembered to check "if p == NULL". It probably would turn null into a trillion dollar mistake if all devs had to write coq proofs for each nullcheck.

0: https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei

1: https://github.com/PrincetonUniversity/DeepSpecDB/tree/05bd7...
> This is just “security theater”, to put it in blunt terms

The security theater argument would make sense if there is an audience for the theater - but that is not the case. For example, there are no criticism of the government that it is not doing enough that the government needs to resort to a theater.

> The number of smartphone users in India is around 500 million out of a nearly 1.4 billion population

It's about concentration of the phones that matter. If the biggest risk of infection is in the cities, and if the concentration of phones in cities is high enough, then it is effective. Looking at the whole country as a single aggregate number doesn't make sense.

Your points about privacy I agree with.
It's been completely painless for me for years. I've got it set up pretty much exactly as the grandparent described: 50 GB partition mounted at /, 600 GB partition mounted at /home. The graphical installer has made this easy since ~forever.

The only pain I can come up with is that I'm wasting about 20 GB, because the operating system doesn't actually need 50 GB. So maybe not a great solution for people who have to do with Laptop with a non-replaceable 128 GB SSD. But 20 GB is not a big deal to me.

The upside is that I've done clean Ubuntu reinstalls two or maybe three times since then, and my data was a non-issue, just reassign the existing partitions and don't format /home. I'd estimate it takes rather less than the 30 minutes the paines refers to, and I always grin despite myself when Firefox restores the browser window as if nothing had happened.
Zortech C was fabulous, wrote a disk editor in it many moons ago. Kudos!
Really? I'm confused. I would think that they could rescind the offer to draw on it for the same reason they would pull back on making home equity loans. And why wouldn't they?

Not saying you're wrong, it's just I don't see what kind of dynamics would lead to that kind of thing, where the economic situation drastically changes to the point where they won't make new HE loans but will gladly honor anyone's exercise of an existing HELOC on (mostly) the same terms they had before.

I could understand if HELOC approval locked in some duration under which the bank couldn't back out, but I don't see why banks would grant such optionality either.
Is Haskell context-free if you don't use the indentation layout mode? Haskell does support using braces and semicolons too. However, this is not true of Python (as far as I know).
One trick you can use is to figure out a set of product parameters that you can tweak into new combinations to create lots of pricing plans. They may be effectively identical to previous ones as far as your cost and engineering are concerned, but different enough that customers don’t feel someone is getting a different price for the same thing.

E.g. your previous “Medium Starter” plan included 10 foobags and up to 1.5 zoffobytes of data for a price of $19. Your new “Basic Plus” plan includes 15 foobags and 1.2 zoffobytes for $25.
> Any modern enterprise WiFi setup will support containing rogue APs. So this vector won't work if configured correctly

You misunderstood the issue. Modern enterprise wifi won’t detect a “rouge AP” that’s setup near a worker’s home (or coffee shop), only ones in radio range of the corporate APs.
There will be a coronavirus pandemic != There will be a lethal coronavirus pandemic starting in Wuhan.

I'm not aware that Wuhan was regarded as breeding ground for human transmissible lethal coronaviruses prior to 2020. Do you happen to have a source for that?

Edit. Added 'lethal', as common cold is also a coronavirus in 15% of the instances.
I assume most people run the code they compile on the very machine they compile it on, so how does preventing compile-time system calls help stop malware?
Why not instead alert the programmer that compiling this code would call such-and-such system calls?

That's IMO how all software should work. Apple did something similar, AFIAK, in the latest version of MacOS, and failed - it's obviously something that is extremely hard to retrofit onto existing software. But allowing arbitrary execution for new software, and sensibly limiting it (e.g. "this program cannot access the internet") is, I predict, fairly feasible.
> counter cyclical industry

What are some examples of "counter cyclical industry"? I have not heard this term before..
That’s pretty sweet. Makes me think about software upgrade scenarios. A typical upgrade process for long-running services I’ve seen is usually some variant of “flush everything out to disk; shutdown process; run some hand-crafted upgrade code for the on-disk datastructures; start the new process.”

On the other hand, the development for this stuff usually consists of a sequence of small patches. You could generate a lot of that on-disk upgrade code by applying something like this against all those patches. Maybe you could take it a step further and never actually tear down the process (by doing that memory mapping stuff the article touches on).

I wonder how far you can take that concept. People develop software today with an edit -> build -> deploy cycle. With sufficient tools, could one do development solely by describing how to patch the running process? Your repository consists of a sequence of such patches: CI applies the patches against a running process (and then runs all your tests). If that passes, you can deploy the patch everywhere using an identical procedure.

Fixes the issue of customers running outdated software because they can’t handle the one minute of downtime associated with an upgrade to a critical service. You don’t need to keep years-old upgrade code in the codebase (and keeping it well-tested) because one of those customers might want to upgrade someday. On the other hand, pulling bad patches caught late in the cycle becomes more difficult. And also the problem of downtime already has workarounds today, usually by making use of redundancy (which remains valuable even outside of upgrades).

I dunno, it’s fun to think about where and how you could apply this. Hot-reloading structs is a totally novel idea for me :-)
I think we picture "high output team" differently.

The way I see it, a "high output team" usually knows all the tools in their respecive field, and knows 99% of them are trash and this fundamental thing has to change before a better tool becomes possible. Which in turn makes conversations with salesmen mostly pointless.

On the other hand not a "high output team" don't know exactly what they need and just chase hype.
Good idea. Psychopaths are apparently 1% of the population. People with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) apparently have very a different brain anomaly. It might be necessary to have separate tests for each: https://bit.ly/2zMPGqB
> Being taken down from YouTube does not equate to being silenced.

It does not equate to having your free speech violated, but it does equate to being almost silenced. It's akin to a candidate being excluded from the main political debate.

If it's not on the main platforms, it's not on people's feeds. It's not shown by recommendation engines. It's not in Google results. You won't hear about it unless you look for it. We can all agree to censor child pornography, but I feel like we're inching closer and closer to censoring merely controversial opinions.

My point is that a small group of American companies get an immense amount of influence over mainstream culture, since they control most of the internet traffic. It's legal, but that doesn't make it a good thing.
Thanks for sharing your experiences!

I did well in Kaggle's highest-prized competition[1], so I wondered if I should explore this kind of consulting myself.

The competition I was in was effectively limited to US residents though, but as a "remote" freelancer you compete world-wide, potentially with people willing to work for far less. Are there reasons your clients prefer US-based freelancers enough to justify the gap in pay?

[1] Top 1% (5th/518), #1 result in California: https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/news/2018/07/09/n...
‘False Dawn’ Recovery Haunts Virus Survivors Who Fall Sick Again
Why? It’s difficult and knowledge of how to do single and multi-tenant applications for B2B keep a ton of people employed. However it’s not that far off from consumer projects. Most established players moved fast to build custom code to match their use cases. It’s not OSS material.

For B2B, “super-admin” should only be done with logged permission. Usually an email request.

Here’s two projects to help point you in the right direction.

https://github.com/terraform-google-modules/terraform-google...

WorkOS is attempting to simplify this. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IR2QZQrzoiA&t=1433s
Fallout 76 (amongst literally hundreds of recorded bugs) shipped with a bug that was able to brick PCs and consoles alike.
Nvidia's chief scientist designs a cheap ventilator to help fight Covid-19
When I was a kid, I thought one of the coolest things in the world was that when I turned the PC on, it dropped into a programming environment if you didn't put a disk in the A: drive.

I felt like my kids would miss out on this experience of random programming.

repl.it is a nice substitute though. Maybe I'll just pull out an old computer and force it to boot into repl.it...
Larger companies will pay that much salary for ML talent especially with experience and a PhD. I've seen $400+k salaries for people with a few years experience and no PhD. Contractors will generally charge twice the amount per hour as an employee so you're looking at $500-1000/hr.

As for why. If a large company makes money from advertising and you improve their $10billion/year click model by 0.01% CTR then you've just made them a million dollars. Do that few times throughout a year and a million dollar payout seems low.
Sorry about that -- in real life you would just ask the interviewer what MAU meant if they didn't spell it out.

The purpose was to make the questions more realistic, since at least in my experience in data analyst interviews the questions are asked in the context of actual business or product situations ... like company leaders, PMs, or others wanting to understand trends in MAU.
Emacs definitely does parsing of C/C++ (or delegates to an LSP server, depending) in order to do indentation, users' preferences for which tend to depend heavily on syntactic context.
What is your opinion about self-hosting (i.e. writing the parser/compiler in its own language)? Is that really desirable, or even necessary, or just a gimmik (I know what Wirth says, wonder what you think)?
Yes, we're hiring in L.A. too. I'm the Director of the teams. We are hiring in L.A. The JD specific location has not been posted yet, but we are hiring in L.A. in addition to Los Gatos. If you're based out of L.A. and interested go ahead and apply to the existing LG role I linked to. Don't worry about the location marked for LG.
A wonderful application for this would be diabetes accessories. Currently both insulin pumps and CGMs (continuous glucose monitors) are devices the sizes of pagers that patients must attach to their bodies and carry around, including while asleep.
> Can I actually a publish <insert popular package> without any checks and, once I got half a million users by repackaging the deb file in snap, add some subtle malware? There is no review process or anything?

This is already possible with every other distribution method. If you host your own debs, then you can easily get them to do whatever you want. Even relying on the main archive isn't great - apt is typically delivered over HTTP to make mirroring easier, for example.
Does this help?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/saas-dbp...
...or representative of the majority.
> Most peoples immediate thought would be a double for loop

Really? I've a hard time believing this
Many trials do NOT require patients to come in to take the medication, but there are of course some which are harder to take at home (whether intravenous or intrathecal or whatever).

But compliance is certainly hard to assess and so important. Your app thought reminds me of "Video Directly Observed Therapy" which is commonly used for things like tuberculosis medications (due to painful combo of lengthy duration of treatment, disproportionately affecting less well-off / well-educated people who are more challenged in compliance, and public health risk if inadequately treated).

Several companies have also worked on pills with an component that detects when it's been ingested and beams a signal to a (external) device, thus "confirming" ingestion.

Although of course, in a way, compliance is part and parcel of your drug's overall effectiveness. Not to dive into efficacy vs effectiveness and the larger considerations... but what if your drug "works" but nobody can be compliant? Of the top of my head, a few antibiotics are like, dosed 6 times a day, so I'd rather prescribe most patients a different one that's only taken twice a day, even if the 6 times a day antibiotic is technically "better" for their infection.
I would have thought demand would have went out since laptops all sold out at the start of the stay at home orders
> I always maintained that Free Pascal should either ditch the text mode IDE

Why not fix the bugs instead? And it shouldn't look weird to anyone who has used TUI programs. In fact, we really should have support for these TUI features (stackable text windows, mouse-controlled menubar and widgets, context-sensitive status-bar) right inside emacs, or some other generic editor. They have stood the test of time wrt. intuitiveness and ergonomics, and it's weird that we still lack them in terminal-like environments.
I am an early adopter and I've been following the development of MaidSafe since 2014.
I think I do understand your frustration because in the very early years the development had very little documentation.

Also it is doubly frustrating to read about this perception of being "buzzwordy" or "scammy" or to have "people paid" to promote this network... because this team is exactly the opposite to the point of frustration. The actual team is all about doing the grunt work with zero regards towards marketing or promoting it.
They didn't even properly capitalized for PR their participation as consultants of HBO's Silicon Valley, if Pied Piper Network sounded very similar to the goals of the SAFE Network it wasn't just coincidence.
Mike Judge confirmed it in the Decentralized Web Summit that they especially did research on MaidSafe.

In any case, that image should be changing now, the risk profile has changed substantially.
The proof-of-concept was released two years ago, and now there are actual usable alpha you can download right now to test it out.

The main risk in a project as ridiculously ambitious as this one is that they may never release anything. But they had, and they are still developing at neck breaking speed.
So if you really understand the scope of this project and you see actual code to play with, you should be orgasmically elated.

If you are not, you don't really understand the implications of a network like this being released.
If you don't understand how they are designing the network, you should start by reading this: https://primer.safenetwork.org/
And watch this to understand how Xor Distance and Xor routing works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr9FJRDcNzk&list=PLiYqQVdgdw...
And learn about PARSEC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKagaPUrDsY

I hope it helps you understand that this a serious project that isn't using buzzwords just for the sake of marketing, it is truly groundbreaking and in my opinion is the next paradigm shift after the invention of the blockchain.
And this is coming from a bitcoin early adopter (2010).

Regards
I'm not sure I agree with the choice of the emoji used for the testimonials section.
Logo was definitely my introduction to programming. Never thought of it as programming. Lots of fun. We tried to make an animation with it as a kid.
"He is the cons man of the operation."
All the more reason to not give that data to the government, right, if they don't already have it?
I mean, do those people who download and compile code not then generally... run it...?

Perhaps I'm missing something but the issue here seems to be whether you trust the source, not whether syscalls are made at compile time or run time?
Exactly, this would likely work fairly well for a targeted attack. Yes, shared Wi-Fi names might work for some employees, but using the employee’s work’s Wi-Fi SSID/psk is virtually guaranteed to work (if they use WPA PSK anyway).
Pricing is HARD. I launched a SaaS in 2016 with a 100eur per month recurring plan. only 5 signups in two years. Then around 2018 someone wrote me "that's incredibly cheap. why?" So, I doubled it to 200eur per month. Today there are 60 recurring plans at 200 per month, and only 3 @100(grandfathered plans from the early days.)

Clients tend to think that if something seems too cheap, something is wrong with it.
> The approach we took with Dark is that there isn't a syntax, per se, in that there isn't a parser.

Can you explain how that works? Unless Dark is a purely visual programming language (in which case I'd say that there is "syntax", it's just a bit more abstract, and in any case, it seems that visual languages haven't really caught up as an idea), I find that hard to believe.
What's $50/hr then? College student frontend web developer? :)