skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if with "dangerous languages" like C you could turn off pointers, or make only functional subroutines?

For instance, perl has this construct, to make your programs better:

a program foo.pl:

$c = 1;

runs fine. Now turn on strict:

use strict;
$c = 1;

and

$ perl ./foo.pl
Global symbol "$c" requires explicit package name at ./foo.pl line 2.
Execution of ./foo.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

you must declare $c:

my $c = 1;

the idea would be... write your program and you can opt-in to various constructs.

NOTE: my first example didnt' work.

use strict;
$a = 1;

won't throw an error. Turns out the variables "$a" and "$b" are exempt from "use strict;" ha. wow.
This brings to mind this related article by Jared Diamond from 1998:

In Search of Japanese Roots
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/in-search-of-j...
> Could peer review learn anything from the open source community?

I think that's a great question. Imagine papers with pull requests, issues, and additional experiments contributed from anyone with relevant experience. And imagine those experiments being open data and up for third-party verification before publication. That could be powerful.
Yep, the first book "From jQuery To VueJS" is still in the works. I'll be updating the pages to reflect the coming soon status of the book tomorrow!

But if interested you can leave your email address on the form at the bottom of the post.
I don't. As a member of a small ethnic group myself, I really don't understand why. Whatever it was that we had to give to the world has been given. None of us have been treated cruelly for being of a certain race (for the most part). We just chose to move away, marry others (because we're not race purists, like many 'indigineous' activists, I suppose?), raise our children, and be happy.

Not every society has produced things of equal value, and it's not particularly offensive to notice that.
Yes that was my thinking when Italy locked down the first little towns and I'm still with that opinion. Not many viruses target specific groups of the population, but this one does and it was clear by end of February.

For politicians it was just easier to lock us all in because such measures are more accepted by the public if everyone has to give up and not just a few.
On the other hand, the lockdown for all created so much noise that we didn't focus enough on those at risk and easing their lockdown in some way.
Even Sweden got it wrong by banning visits to elderly homes only by late March.

Besides the lockdown for elderly (and a growing list of others at risk) I wish they'd broken up elderly and care homes where-ever possible. If just half the residents moved to a younger relative for a year (and pay the relative for their work, obviously) the homes might not be those death traps they are.

Here in Austria the government worked a lot with Angst. It went so far that the younger were more afraid of the virus than the elderly. I had to spend days to persuade a 35-yr-old that she doesn't have to be afraid and from her initial "I don't want this virus" position she moved to "I already had it" six weeks after...
The ostensible purpose of peer review is filtering: making sure that the signal to noise ratio in published journals remains high enough for the journals to be useful to other scientists.

That logic probably made sense back when journals were the primary means of communicating scientific results. But the Internet has changed the situation drastically. Scientists don't need to wait for a journal to publish things; they just go to arxiv.org. Nor do they need to wait for a journal to filter things through peer review; they have plenty of other ways of judging papers for themselves.

So at this point I don't think we need a "system" at all for what peer review used to accomplish.
I really like the Facebook redesign. Looks great and is just as usable as the previous version (which isn't really a high bar, but can't say there was regression).
Reddit isn't that bad too, though it definitely deserves better.
Quora though… Quora and Pinterest, if they disappeared overnight, I would not miss them. Annoying UX, scummy practices, garbage content.
`use stricter;` is the obvious solution.
Would Einstein and Darwin have made it through peer review? I doubt it.

Einstein worked in a patent office for years, unable to get a job in academia like he wanted. There were two attempts to prove his Theory of Relativity. They occurred years apart because it involved photographing a total eclipse of the sun and while eclipses typically happen every six months in pairs (one solar and one lunar, though sometimes there are three in a row), most of them are partial eclipses, not total eclipses. It had to be a total eclipse to prove his theory.

The first attempt to make the photograph failed. There were only two teams and it was during World War I. One was stopped or arrested or something because they were assumed to be spies. The other failed due to rain.

After this failure, Einstein realized there was an error in his math and redid his formula. Had the first attempt at taking photographs succeeded, we might have never heard of the man because the world might have decided he was a quack since his math didn't hold up, so, "obviously," his theory was bunk.

He probably had one and only one shot at this unusual peer review process.

By the time they made the second attempt, it was something like six or eight teams of photographers trying to get a photograph of the total eclipse of the sun. Only one succeeded. I think the rest were again rained out.

Nicely, it was a team that had also tried several years earlier that actually succeeded.

Once there was photographic evidence supporting his theory, he became world famous overnight and then was finally able to get a job in academia, IIRC.

What current day people like that are held up by their "peers"? I fear we'll never know.

Me. But just saying that is likely to get me mocked. No one is trying to prove I know anything. No one wants to peer review (or otherwise check) my ideas. People mostly just want me to shut up and go away.
Those aren't killing people in rich countries with good healthcare and sanitation though
In my city in the US:

+ Node.js is plentiful

+ Golang is up and coming

+ Some elixir

+ Haskell is pretty rare but it shows up as a secondary language

+ Java and php are plentiful but these tend to be large, older corporate gigs

+ Rust is rare

+ No crystal/nim/f#/zig/D that I've seen

Obviously anecdotal and your case my differ.
I have long imagined a much weaker form your desire: a C++ runtime that detects all undefined behavior in the code that executes. Note that it is nowhere near the goal we want, which is that the program has no memory safety issues at all. Even though there are many static and dynamic analysis tools that exist today, with runtime penalties ranging from almost zero to extremely high overhead, I have yet to see a system that can do this. So I would guess that no, this is not possible. There might be a magic set of idioms, but my guess is that finding that set is going to be so impractical that we will never do it, or someone is going to write a proof that that set is empty and we will just go on living our lives slightly more depressed at the state of computing.
Ubiquity used MongoDB for their CloudKey Gen1 series. When there was an unexpected shutdown, there’s a random chance it would lose its configuration [1]. If your SD backup didn’t work, you’d lose configuration for all WiFi hotspots. If you did client installs like I did, this was a total nightmare.
How did they solve it? Release new, more expensive hardware with a battery backup acting like a UPS. Never solved Gen1 issues. Imagine your phone corrupting after a hard reset. Thanks Ubiquity & MongoDB

[1] https://community.ui.com/questions/MongoDB-corrupt-after-eve...
Java is mature and regarded as high performance, even if it is a memory glutton.
[FWIW, for me at least, your first link redirects eventually to same as latter, though I can then click "return to code search v1" to see what you mean ]
SQLite was started by Dwayne Richard Hipp from North Carolina. 20 years ago.
Why haven't they just started to rewrite it in rust yet?
Very cool. You can also hang around with a charred cotton strip and throw sparks at it.
Preface: I'm glad you're in a pub. I wish I could be! Sounds nice, masks and all.

> Almost no matter how bad it gets, I think people care about social interaction above almost all else even their own safety.

Ultimately, my struggle is that I don't understand this. I don't value social interaction this way, and most of my close family and friends don't either (though it's far closer to 50/50 than I am comfortable with).

Ultimately people are irrational. People want to be masters of their own destiny. Is it illegal to go outside? Am I going to get in trouble? So long as people can act without consequence, they will.

With a deadly virus that spreads so silently, I really fear for humanity here. The fools will be the end of us all.

The only hope of real consequence is contract tracing and frankly, I don't think the majority of people want contract tracing to even work, especially Americans, who value their liberties to such extremes. People would rather kill anonymously without consequence.

This all makes me so sad.
I think your broad point is accurate. It's going to be a spectrum. Many people will want that social interaction in some form that is not just virtual, but the form it takes will vary a lot.

Sure, some people will go right back to indoor dining, bars, nightclubs, whatever is allowed to open back up. But, a lot of people aren't going to go back to pre-Covid behaviors just because things are open. Many will seek to resume social interaction, but in safer ways, and your example of the pub is a good one. Time for more beer gardens!

Just thinking about myself, I probably won't dine inside a restaurant for a long while. But outdoor dining set up in a reasonably safe way? That's possible.

For better or worse, we're moving into reopening, so there should be a big focus on harm reduction: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/quarantine...

> What does harm reduction look like for the coronavirus? First, policy makers and health experts can help the public differentiate between lower-risk and higher-risk activities; these authorities can also offer support for the lower-risk ones when sustained abstinence isn’t an option. Scientists still have a lot to learn about this new virus, but early epidemiological studies suggest that not all activities or settings confer an equal risk for coronavirus transmission. Enclosed and crowded settings, especially with prolonged and close contact, have the highest risk of transmission, while casual interaction in outdoor settings seems to be much lower risk. A sustainable anti-coronavirus strategy would still advise against house parties. But it could also involve redesigning outdoor and indoor spaces to reduce crowding, increase ventilation, and promote physical distancing, thereby allowing people to live their lives while mitigating—but not eliminating—risk.
70% of all failed jokes on HN are due to memory safety problems.
You don't understand convexity. You don't walk across a river that is 4ft deep on average.
My first question is who's behind it?
> Would Einstein and Darwin have made it through peer review? I doubt it.

Einstein did make it through peer review; his classic 1905 papers were published in Annalen der Physik, the most prestigious physics journal in the world at that time, after being refereed and accepted.

Darwin didn't technically go through "peer review" since he published his results in a book, not a scientific journal. But when he did so, what we now call scientific journals were extremely rare.
Both the statistical reasoning and the math are wrong here.

First, this isn't really "95% confidence" of anything. You are computing the probability of seeing your outcome in the case that A and B have the same distribution. This is very counterintuitive and I highly recommend people read up on a p-values to get an exact sense of what's going on. A low p-value simply tells you that it's unlikely that A and B have the exact same performance, it doesn't really tell you that A is faster than B in any specific manner (mean, median, mode, etc).

Second, the math here is wrong. The p value is actually 0.10, not 0.05 as presented here as you should also take into account the possibility of your test returning 3 Bs. You then get p = 2 * 1 / 20 = 2 / 20 = 0.1. (The exact terminology here is whether the test is a two-tailed or one-tailed test an usually you want to use the two-tailed test unless you have some special prior knowledge).
I was fired from my first job by the CTO of my company after telling him I was job hunting.

Context: My first two managers were friendly and we openly talked about what we wanted to do next. My 3rd manager was the CTO, who talked a lot about preparing people for their next jobs/career. I assumed I could be open with him.

After a month or two where several people left, he asked me in our 1:1 if I knew of anyone who was thinking about leaving. Assuming that he wanted to know so they could make counter offers or back fill headcount, I told him I was considering it. I was trying to be helpful, and I guess I was, just not in the way I expected.

Two weeks later he either quit or was fired. I was fired three days after him. Apparently he had already advocated for my firing before leaving himself.
Original source: https://github.com/LisaDziuba/Marketing-for-Engineers

---

For what it's worth, one of the best articles in the list, for me, was patio11's:

Business of SaaS - https://stripe.com/au/atlas/guides/business-of-saas
Customers do buy what they want relative to other products in the market, but absolute satisfaction could still be broadly low across the board. The incentive to fix commonly complained about problems is tied entirely to the speed to which their competitors respond—shared incentives prevent the market from improving as a whole through competition.

This is especially true in markets where the capital investment required for entry is in the billions of dollars, like smartphones, operating systems, vehicles and other patented infrastructure (looking at you, john deere).

Overall the claim should be that “customers buy what they want from available products”, so that the one can not claim the converse, that a customer is necessarily satisfied with the products they purchase.
We develop flu vaccines every year, and we do have knowledge of other coronavirus.

I tend to agree that there is some potential for fuckups, but 12-18 months seem reasonable to have most (if not all) of the vaccines as reliable.
Yeah your comments were not clear. But the reply comment to you made a great point (that you actually acknowledged, but don't seem to understand underlies why your point is problematic): NNW is free (in both senses of the word) and open source software. Brent and the team are not being paid to work on it. They are using a third party service (Feedly) as a backing store. You have the option of paying for it, or you have the option of not paying for it. Either way, if your argument is that NNW lacks a syncing feature you are wrong. And if your argument is that the syncing feature (Feedly) should be free, then your argument effectively boils down to "hey people who did this awesome free software, please make more free software for me." Which is not a strong argument.
Celebration with 10000 Kubernetes Pods
I saw this interesting youtube video of a guy celebrating his milestone. Decided to share some of my learnings from my daily interaction with kubernetes as well. What are some of your learnings or pain points of using this tool?

https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-24-kubernetes-cele...
If you wish to lower lung damage, you eat it.
This can be avoided to some degree by the practice of giving all primitive members a dummy in-class initialiser. E.g. int64_t mSomeIndex=-1;

Sadly I don't think the tooling exists to enforce something like that automatically, because C++ is so hard to parse (a separate issue to memory safety). But when/if metaclasses finally land, it should be possible to write a "fixed" class/struct keyword that default initialises all fields.
No, even world-class C++ experts can and will make subtle memory safety bugs across abstraction boundaries. Think about millions of lines of C++ codes which have their own assumptions on invariant and contract. Their time is a limited resource and for many cases memory safety is not the most valuable thing to put their efforts.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Affirmi...

You've also treated two unrelated statements as dependent clauses.
Nope. I took 30mg per day for a month for each of four brands, and it didn't change things one way or another. I'm in my mid 50s and the arthritis is mild still, and it affects me most when playing bass (my main hobby right now). I didn't try going to higher amounts because it gets expensive quickly.

Via a friend of a friend, I was able to get a bottle of "Jayden's Juice", a brand from California which is 20:1 CBD:THC or something like that. My daily dose of THC was 1mg or 1.5mg, and even for a THC virgin like me, it had no mental or sensory effect, but sure enough, my stiffness was reduced and the flare ups were less intense. It wasn't dramatic, it took two or three days to notice the effect, but it seemed to be real. I stopped for a few weeks just to test if the correlation held up, then started again. The stiffness/pain tracked. This is a data point of one, and non-blinded study at that, so it is easy to dismiss this as placebo effect. On the other hand, the CBD-only oils didn't help even though many people say it helps them and I went in hoping I would get the same benefit.

Unfortunately, I'm in Texas and driving round trip to a THC legal state is at least 25 hours, so instead I have continued to sample Texas-legal CBD tinctures, hoping one helps in the same way.
This is a dupe, original linked there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22168960
> the fact is that any app built properly with native MacOS/iOS APIs will be extremely fast

Nope, you’re reaching too far. Applications built using native frameworks will have a strong push to generally do it right, but nobody can save you from an O(n^2) loop. And even with native frameworks and engineers with access to the best resources, you can totally mess up: take macOS Catalina’s Activity Monitor app, which takes up approximately half a core updating a table view every second, which it managed to do previously with a mere fraction of the resource usage. You can’t fix everything.

> The best example I can think of off the top of my head is the Apollo app for Reddit on iOS; it is coded with 100% native platform APIs, with no slow cross-platform garbage.

Apollo is not cross-platform, but it doesn’t always use native platform widgets as I have pointed out to Christian in the past. I don’t think this has had a major performance impact, especially since they aren’t in the most computationally expensive path, but those parts probably do not interact with the platform at the layer you think they do.
Humans don't do "ruthless" enforcement, machines are good at it which is what Rust is about. Humans will say stuff like "well, I'm pretty sure this is safe and I need every CPU cycle I can get". This is a security consideration so the bad guys only have to be lucky once, it's like the IRA told Thatcher (British Prime Minister, after a failed assassination attempt):

"Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always."
Interesting post! I too posted a similar post about the different design patterns of javascript as well! (:

here's my post to share with you as well!

https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-04-11-second-four-des...
Not to say they don’t exist or haven’t been reported, but many of the unsound issues on github for Rust don’t seem to hold water.

They all seem to misbehave on a single nightly build, affect only a very narrow and unsupported target group, be related to a bug in a unsupported release of LLVM, or simply aren’t reproducible. I think the percentage of security bugs in Rust related to memory safety, based off that list, is _effectively_ 0%. I can’t find an issue in the list that seems like it would impact Rust programs that people write today or on targets that people deploy Rust code where memory safety matters.
Vape is, isn't it?
What other ways are you referring to?
Not being allowed to use pointers means not having control of memory layout.
Well, now with MS Edge, wouldn't it be an option to move to its store and flip Google off? Just a thought.
Rust has significantly less overhead than Java
- Anything in the NVRAM space

- Modern database companies such as Cockroach Labs, Couchbase, MemSQL

- Hashicorp
Believe it or not some people enjoy the act of smoking even though it's not the most efficient method to get high. In general, something does not need to be safest or most rational in order to be satisfying.
This was an enum (class) member, so I didn’t really have one to spare that wouldn’t just hide the issue under the rug.
You do realise that there can be multiple purposes for an action? The most pressing at the time the lock down was implemented was preventing the hospital system being overwhelmed, but there are others like allowing time for better treatments to be developed.

Looking at the infection rates even in Europe the idea of herd immunity was always doomed. Not even Sweden is anywhere near herd immunity and their economy is as trashed as their neighbours.
Fascinating. Not sure why then. But then again doc wide changes are rare for me and my team so maybe that’s the difference.
Keep blogging! 2020 has been the start of my blogging about my learnings as a software engineer too! Just posted one about Kubernetes too! Hope you enjoy! Bring the blogging culture back! Sharing is caring

https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/
https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-24-kubernetes-cele...
Peer review, in the modern sense, only became common about 40 years ago. In Einstein's time, the journal publisher decided on their own what to publish.

Or so I'm told. I know that when I went through a pretty serious physics education in the early 80s, I never heard about peer review.
Top questions you get as a hiring manager
Oh, right, I see now. Thanks for explaining that and providing the references.
Now with MS Edge, wouldn't it be an option just to move to its store and flip Google off? Just a thought.
In case of tobacco smoke, Wikipedia says yes:

"The particles in tobacco smoke are liquid aerosol droplets (~ 20% water), ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_smoke