skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Larry Hastings pointed out that PHP strings are format strings by default and "the script kids love it."

This seems like an odd argument. PHP makes a clear distinction between string literals with single quotes and those with double quotes, where only double quotes do variable substitution and escape sequences. It's very common for PHP projects to default to single quotes and only use double quotes when their special handling is actually used.
> Margins are super low on pretty much everything that's not a B2B behemoth

There's tons of in-house custom enterprise software development where, depending on the skills of the manager leading the project, the idea for the developed solution can be sold to upper management as the second coming of Christ (e.g. we'll spend $10m over two years on developers and potentially earn/save hundreds of millions) and this unlocks a pot of gold for the development budget. The manager will then want to hire good/expensive devs as this increases the chance that the team will deliver what he promised to the upper management. I've seen this multiple times in large organizations I've worked for.
many legacy businesses have institutional technical debt and higher priorities that makes it easier to not deal with faxes.
I think the current explicit f-string syntax actually aids readability. When I see an f-string, I’m immediately aware that some interpolation is taking place, and my eyes can quickly scan for the braces. Additionally, it helps me to differentiate between “static content” and “dynamic content”, for want of a better phrase.
If I were creating a new language today there is absolutely no question in my mind: I would have the default string type support interpolation. It means that there is a particular character or character combination ("{" for python, "${" for JavaScript, etc) which is not allowed in strings without escaping -- that isn't much of a usability problem: we live with the need to escape new lines in strings and no one even thinks twice.

But changing it in an existing language causes massive backward compatibility issues. Unlike the move from Python 2 to Python 3, it is trivial to build a perfect migration script (2to3 was useful but not perfect) -- it just needs to prefix "p" in front of all normal strings, or at least in front of all normal strings that contain the interpolation character(s).

But even so, the need to run that script is a VERY BIG DEAL. A perfect migration script doesn't help with sample code that is printed in a book, or thousands of other situations that are awkward to fix. It would, without a doubt, require very careful introduction by use of "from __future__ import". (The fact that Python has that facility is extremely helpful for this kind of migration.)

I am utterly bewildered by this article's claim that the proponent of this change thinks it should be dropped if it is to be introduced carefully using "from __future__ import". That is just stupid.

I would rather end up in a place where interpolation strings are the default, but it is not clear to me whether the path to get there is worth the pain.
I also recommend:

https://wizardzines.com/

by the same author. It looks "popular" but it's written much more thoughtfully and competently than most of the content found on the web. Like this article, it's the result of real personal research, it is never just rewording of some manual or already existing material. In short, really worth reading, and also worth using inside of the companies.
Yeah, his blog has previously indicated he’s been considering retiring.
Words run short some times. I know the history though, didn't mean to pin it as a conspiracy, but in desparate times, which I do not keep track of, things can happen, since I follow histories. Don't take this as a rebuke, is that the word, yeah, don't whatever man. <3 Who cares
Did you say that you took an online class once? And based on that one experience you have seen both sides?

Just askin'
My basic issue with the lab escape theory: if SARS-CoV2 is a natural strain (and there is at this point no evidence that it isn't), then why assume some researcher was patient zero, when millions of other people catch bat coronaviruses each year? The following interview (from [1]) puts it succinctly:

>“If you do the math on this, it’s very straightforward. ... We have hundreds of millions of bats in Southeast Asia and about 10 percent of bats in some colonies have viruses at any one time. So that’s hundreds of thousands of bats every night with viruses,” Daszak says. “We also find tens of thousands of people in the wildlife trade, hunting and killing wildlife in China and Southeast Asia, and millions of people living in rural populations in Southeast Asia near bat caves.”

>Next, he says, consider the data he’s collected on people near bat caves getting exposed to viruses: “We went out and surveyed a population in Yunnan, China — we’d been to bat caves and found viruses that we thought could be high risk. So we sample people nearby, and 3 percent had antibodies to those viruses,” he says. “So between the last two and three years, those people were exposed to bat coronaviruses. If you extrapolate that population across the whole of Southeast Asia, it’s 1 million to 7 million people a year getting infected by bat viruses.”

>Compare that, he says, to what we know about the labs: “If you look at the labs in Southeast Asia that have any coronaviruses in culture, there are probably two or three and they’re in high security. The Wuhan Institute of Virology does have a small number of bat coronaviruses in culture. But they’re not [the new coronavirus], SARS-CoV-2. There are probably half a dozen people that do work in those labs. So let’s compare 1 million to 7 million people a year to half a dozen people; it’s just not logical.”

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus...
> Getting China offside means 1 in 5 people on Earth would no longer get WHO advice and state media would undermine them at every turn.

Basically you're saying the same thing I'm saying. Authoritarian nations are allowed to dictate WHO policy in order to keep them "onside".

You're just arguing that it's necessary, and I'm inclined to agree, but it's also the reason the WHO is not an impartial or trustworthy source of information. And it's probably impossible for any such organization to be so at this time.
I'm not really an artist but ok sure. I can certainly fax some doodles. I'll think about how to pitch and present it. I'll register artsyfax.com this week and throw something together. I even have a pnp modem and a pots line.

There's probably Linux fax software nobody has used in 15 years that can import vcards and be scripted with lua or something.
You need to set up an app specific password [1] and use that for IMAP.

[1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/185833?hl=en
Kudos to Tim for not being blinded by the money. A whole lot of people are going to wish they’d had his courage when the history of this era is being written and our descendants are wondering why more people didn’t act.
Eclipse Dirigible 4.5.0 Released
It's well established timesheets are an utter failure when concerning knowledge work and derived output. There have been times where every hour had to be accounted for, allotted to projects, cost centers/departments and various general types of allowed "hours". This is more unusual today because it provably reduced productivity and sometimes even led to pointless discussions where to "punch in your hours", employees stopped caring as the time was not theirs anymore anyways. In the end, data quality would be destroyed, and the entire system a time-consuming pointless exercise in C&C futility.

The system of building on trust is a more basic form of reporting, actually more in line with business thinking. Trust is currency and life blood throughout organizations and across them. There's surely some people still doing the agonizing detailed reporting of timesheets, but even consultants are given same benefits of doubt nowadays, as companies tend to use the same system for everyone.

I'm sure the cycle will restart at some point. That situation will be one where employees have much less say in the day to day work and operations again.
Our society is based on science.

I would prefer to add an amendment to allow to censor extreme views contradicting modern science knowledge.

It is, indirect, what happens and to be honest, i do believe that people doing the youtube videos about aliens and flatearth have often enough some agenda.

It hurts our society and we need to find a proper solution.
Off course, you don't have to provide any standard to criticize whatever you deem fit. The point of my comment is not to ask you to provide a benchmark, but more to point out the flaw in your arguments to future readers. I admit I could have done this in a better way. But my point is without a relative benchmark, one can criticize anything and everything, even though the criticism encodes very less information. To brand something evil, it has to be compared to it's peers in it's time frame. Or else I can brand every single company and human being on the planet evil for n number of reasons, e.g, for not paying their lowest paid workers enough, or for not doing enough to combat climate change. These will apply to every single company for some definition of "enough", and if I don't have to provide a benchmark, I can set enough at any point.
I'm guessing he has other things in resume that got him hired at Sun, Google, and Amazon (as VP of Engineering and Distinguished Engineer)...
But that's the thing - a restaurant depot is not suffering from the lack of customers because it is not designed to sell commodity products at a premium.
The difference is that with unskilled jobs, you can immediately find a replacement for the position.

It's not as easy with skilled labor, so there is more leniency.

I think the leniency is inversely proportional to the replaceability.
Thousands in the Middle East died from Obama's presidency. At a certain point you start to think that the "lesser of two evils" strategy just shifts the playing field to be ever-increasing in its evil across the board.
Ask HN: Why there's no voting on ArXiv?
Why there's no voting on Arxiv? Or even the number of the page open or PDF downloads? It may help filter out really good papers. Citations count is a rather slow indicator, because well, not many people cite you after a month or two.
I'm asking because I want to be up to date with all the significant research from my field (I'm an engineer, not a researcher), but there are 50+ papers published every day in my area, which is incredible. But not all of them are worth reading.

HN like voting would do.
It isn't:

https://theconversation.com/does-playing-chess-make-you-smar...
> Lennart and the systemd team did exactly that 10 years ago. Why can't you?

It would be impressive if Lennart managed that by himself. Red Hat wanted it done, Ret Hat also has its hands in various open source projects that suddenly started to sprout hard dependencies to systemd. Projects like Gnome were Red Hat is by far the biggest contributor.

Not much an individual programmer can do compared to a corporation throwing its weight around to break things.
> which afaik you only really have if you're coughing

Which is something people do. The general advice is changing last weeks, it is more and more recommended to wear them even in countries that were super opposed a month ago.

You dont need mask to be 100% effective to be useful.
Lots of people are reporting this outage on this Google Support Thread:

* https://support.google.com/mail/thread/44318228?hl=en
Being ordered to quarantine does not put you at risk. Jumping off a bridge puts your life in danger. Have no idea how those are at all comparable.
That's most interesting, given that both systemd and Fedora are Red Hat products. If there's one distro that would use the systemd defaults, I would expect it to be Fedora. Who exactly are these defaults for, then?
Animal Consciousness
Tom Waits the musician?
> It would be great if YouTube adopted easy to follow policies and would terminate accounts based on clear breaches of policy, rather than just playing whack-a-mole with whatever topic is hot at the moment.

The thing is it's impossible to devise effective policies that are "clear cut" to the point where an entity like youtube can apply them effectively over a media platform with the scope and throughput of Youtube.

It's always going to be a game of wack-a-mole. It's wack-a-mole even on HN. These platforms should be free to yank stuff and be responsible to some extent if harmful content is spread through them. As it is now, the threshold for being deplatformed is too high.

Conspiracy peddlers are totally free to choose another platform for their garbage or create one for themselves. Info Wars is still up and running through their own website. They would be far smaller, however, if Youtube had done the right thing and pulled the plug early-- like when Info Wars started spreading Sandy Hook conspiracies.

We're talking like facebook and google ARE the internet. They are not. They're merely platforms analogous to a "hyper newspaper". Like any news paper, they should have the right to put content of their choosing on it and be held accountable for harm spread through it. No one is going to stop maniacs or anyone else with strange viewpoints from printing up xeroxes and handing them out on a public corner -or- putting together a weird website, that's their first amendment right.
This is why I use Git for this (running MGit on my Android phone). It's really not a huge hassle to do this manually once a day or so (maybe more if I'm doing some out of band stuff).
Unless it's for work, why not use a different service or host your own mail server? I'd say setting up a mail server with projects like Mail In A Box is easier than living without GApps.
They are comparable to Whole Foods or special store prices which are significantly higher than prices in grocery stores regular people ( read : people who don't spend $100/dinner for two and don't bat an eye ) shop.
I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. I know I have an easier time understanding History on Fire[1]'s thick Italian accent than Americans do. When learning English, you learn the correct pronunciation and also the "incorrect" pronunciation used by your classmates.

[1]http://historyonfirepodcast.com/
> I don't see why that makes Rust "bad".

And this is why people suggesting what you are suggesting never manage to achieve the change.

> 99% of the software does not use the entirety of the std

Most Rust software uses most of it.

> You are suggesting moving something into standard that would make unicode software harder to update

How do you update the unicode tables for those stuck with Rust 1.0 ? If you are going to make this claims, back them up.

> It is not a "problem". In most commercial software, libraries and versions are vetted. Same applies for all languages. If something is in the std, then it is already in, that is why it is useful.

So your organization does support third-party packages, you are just to lazy to ask for vetting ? That's not what you claimed above (you claimed that your organization does not support third-party packages at all).

The answer to this is simple, ask your organization to vet this library. If that's too complicated and takes too much effort, improve your organization's process.

Suggesting that only because you are too lazy to vet a library that library should be in standard is a laughable proposal. Think about the trade-offs, evaluate them, weight them, and if you still think doing so is worth it, write an RFC. The process for putting things into standard is open.

But if your only argument is "me,me,me,me" that's not going to go anywhere.
To be fair, this is a bit of a strawman.

The marginal utility of almost anything (cross fit, big muscles, abstract maths, jazz trumpet ability...) tapers off at the highest levels. OP is saying that there are gains in going from Elo 800 ("total novice, inconsistent playing tending to lose") to 1200 ("plays at baseline level consistently"), not that you should dedicate your life to chess to the exclusion of everything else.

I'd be willing to bet that Putin has a recorded Elo somewhere at least in the 1400s. For comparison, pros have 2000+ scores, the greatest champions (and computers) 2600+. A 400 point difference roughly means you're 10 times better.
How are these questions in bad faith?
Well I was never going into a "technically" argument, I thought that was pretty clear from the start. I had already knewn that those containers are used there in some places (although I didn't find any when I quickly skimmed the codebase 2 days ago). So let's just say "yes technically I agree" and maybe I won't seem as a totally boneheaded evangelist.

My actual intention and the reason for my comments was to put things into relation. Compared to what you want to argue about here, pjmlp has a totally different idea of how things are or should be, and which I think is rose tinted and skewed.

Using a templated container once maybe every few dozen or hundred lines is not a justification for unfounded and unbalanced hating, and it is no indication for taking this codebase as an argument that C is so bad that they couldn't deal with it anymore, so they had to switch to C++ which solved all their alleged problems. That's just not the way it is.

Not taking from that technical point of agreement, and as an aside because I can't resist, I personally prefer to just use stay with C completely/"technically", and I believe I get better results by improving the architecture of my projects to work around C's "shortcoming" of not having templated containers. One can even make a point that just templated dynamic vectors are easily available in C since C does have polymorphism for arrays, supported by its pointer syntax, and using valgrind and the occasional assert() you can get lots of the same benefits in terms of security. The way I go about this achieves the same level of convenience, minus RAII (which I found to be problematic on larger scale. Templated containers and maps are nice though for short throw away code and temporary variables that never leave the function scope.)

I also actually make heavy use of a C99 feature that is still not in C++, which is designated initializers to make static arrays (often readonly data) to map from enums to additional data. I also found that I've wasted a lot of my time trying to build arbitrary "nice" things in C++ and always finding myself in a place some time later where I've totally locked myself in, so that's why I prefer just not to use a C++ compiler at all, even if there are some little nice-to-haves that you can get with it.

So there you go, my rant that is totally out of place here, why I don't think C++ is a better choice even if used very lightly.
I have no problem with it so far. Thunderbird on Debian through VPN in Amsterdam. (edit: wording)
No, all strings shouldn't be f-strings, because if they were you'd either need to resort to weird, awkward escaping or invent a new prefix to have template strings that you interpolate repeatedly later, and in either case break backward compatibility. Both template strings and immediately interpolated strings are needed, and the current “normal string” vs. f-string divide allows expressing both easily and clearly, and there is no improvement to that status quo in this area that is worth the cost in backward compatibility.
Au contraire; fax spam was a reasonably big problem:
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/2-2-trillion-lawsuits...
You're right - though it's more about the precise timing of the tones than the frequencies themselves.

The T.38 protocol exists to allow faxes to send over a packetized network. Already if you're sending a fax there's a high chance it's been converted to T.38 at some point, as SPs gradually move toward a fully packetized core.
How Dyslexia Has Helped Me Build My Career
cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wi2hPn...
Is drone technology really being called a ufo? In 2020 who doesnt know know we have craft that can maneuver like a robot.
I don't get it.

What does he win doing that? One publicity stunt. Thats it

He could have done much more inside Amazon and get fired later.
Yes, exactly. The point I make in my article is that stupidity isn't at all as common a reason (for why something's been done a certain way) as we'd like to think it is. I think the true split is about 80/20.

This is from someone who's had the [dis]pleasure of working on all manner of steaming piles of rubbish.

If there are any Junior devs reading this, Chesterton's Fence is a great concept to understand and abide by!
Joué Play – Everyone can play music
And those in 'science' captured by a groupthink? How do we deal with them?

Don't forget that the 'lipid hypothesis' was everywhere just a few years ago and everybody believed it. Now you have more chance of finding somebody who will admit to be being a member of the Stasi.

Science is, at its base, the rejection of hypotheses by experimental validation. Quite a lot of what is touted as science either hasn't or can't be experimentally validated. The non-falsifiable stuff dressed up as science, when it is really philosophy (or perhaps religion) is just flat earth thinking with better PR and credentials.

This is the reason free speech has to be defended. Remember Cromwell's Plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."

Not every nutter turns out to be nuts.
Data visualization explains Jeff Bezos’ staggering wealth
His page seems to be melting under HN effect (was: Slashdot effect), luckily IA seems to have a copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20200504111506/https://www.tbray...
> Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle.

On the contrary, bucketloads of people do this all the time. The world would be a better place if more people did.
As far as I've picked up, yes, but, not that matters in the direct software industries. Tim's got tons of connections though so I doubt he will starve. Tom Waits while Tim Brays.

Check out your email signature Tim Bray. Good luck onwards

EDIT: I might be totally wrong but I read somewhere he's friends with yes that guy.
Will send a newsletter this week and your opportunity is included in there
Not really. That Rust forced total order and partial order into a sub-typing relation is a completely unnecessary, self-inflicted wound.
Oh fab, just when I thought I had a fairly solid understanding of how to handle Unicode strings I learn something else that increases the complexity.

I have nothing but respect and gratitude for people that write good unicode handling libraries, but even then the end developer has to learn a lot just to be aware of what to look out for when handling strings.

Somewhere on github I think, somebody has posted a file with evil Unicode strings.
I asked that specific question from a friend of mine.

His answer was:

* we charge $20 for a plate that costs is $4 in ingredients because we are lazy to squeeze it down to $3.50.

* Single sourcing means I don't have to trust ten of my employees with credit cards to run around the city to get stuff.

* Single delivery means I can schedule it better.
I'm not sure what else you can expect in a world where jobs that require effectively 0 skill exist.

I'd prefer the "full automation" route, as I think it would be better for humans to not need to perform these jobs. But until then, isn't it a good thing that jobs which require no skills exist? Since there seem to be many people with little-to-no skills?
Ugh, no. I have been using RF CAD since HP MDS. You’ll end up with a convoluted mess like ADS, where the EM package is now a separate application from the main package. I ditched it 20 years ago; good riddance.

The Microwave Office guys knew this 25 years ago, which is why it’s so much better than ADS. It is all tightly integrated and object oriented.
Systemd – Job propagation through dependencies