skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Languages often have a bunch of implicit assumptions which are not stated outright in the material.

As a example, the Foo-lang [1] books starts (obviously) with how to write and compile a hello world program. Bar-lang books typically postpone this to the end of the book since IO and deployable programs are advanced concepts. I once talked to some Bar-fans about this and they simply did not understand why this could be an issue. Surely you could just echo "Hello world" in the repl as the first exercise?

The underlying unstated assumption is that Bar-lang programs are primarily something you write for yourself and interact with in a repl, while Foo-programmers assume programs are written to be deployed and executed.

Such unstated assumptions are not written on first page in the manual because they are invisible when you are immersed in the culture.

Another example is a discussion I saw where a Baz-user claimed that everything was simpler in Baz than in Bong. The Bong-fan then asked how you loaded data from a relational database. The Baz-fan replied that only an incompetent moron would use a relational database, real men use text files which have less overhead. Now this could be dismissed as cognitive dissonance because Baz didn't have a nice RDBMS interface, but I think it is indicative of a deeper cultural assumption that the application can decide which format to persist data in, where Bong comes from an assumption that the data is already there in a given system and a workable program will need to be able to interact with it whether the developer like it or nor.

Again, such underlying assumptions are typically not written in the tutorial, but have deep implications for the language design and ecosystem.

[1] I changed the language names so as to not start a discussion about the particular languages. Although I'm sure there are actual languages called Foo, Bar etc.
Hi! Thanks for your thoughts, they are really interesting. Do you have any examples of your Houdini to game content or could you recommend any good learning resources for using Houdini in this way?

I've been sharpening my blender skills for content creation and while I enjoy it, it's quite slow.
Possibly but it’s a complicated trade off: first, there’s the question of how much advantage it could confer – if young people get through a disease and the deaths are mostly old people who are past reproductive age, there might not be enough advantage (especially since humans are social - a 10 year old losing a parent is a tragedy but probably not fatal if you live with older siblings, relatives, or a tribe). Depending on what people are dying of and when, this might not be enough to select for.

The second big factor is what it would need to develop. This isn’t a directed process - something needs to confer a benefit of some sort early to be selected for, not just after hundreds of generations. If you’re talking about a major change like completely changing mammalian skin, that sounds very complicated compared to other things (such as improved immune function for the specific disease killing people), and there’s an arms race if all you’re doing is selecting for mosquitoes with better bites which might not be winnable.

Finally, there’s the question of downsides: do the mutations producing this leave you more vulnerable to other conditions, less likely to attract mates, etc. If that tough skin costs more to grow, you’re paying the cost upfront even if you’re living somewhere without a huge mosquito population, so it might be maladaptive for too much of the total population to maintain.

The downsides discussion is particularly relevant in the case of sickle cell anemia, which is believed to be a side effect of an evolved malaria resistance – beneficial if you live in an area where it’s common but a net loss if you do not:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20450-how-sickle-cell...
I think it's a play on recent "this X does not exist" trend.

https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/

https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/

Maybe "never existed" alludes to the time dimension used to generate these fictitious rivers; they don't exist now and they didn't exist in the past.
The following fails with expired certificate on all our OSX machines:

curl -s -o /dev/null -vvv https://kernel.org
Interesting, from China.
It’s not the criminal conduct of an officer. Police brutality is a recurring pattern in these communities. It’s large injustices like murder and small ones like unjustified traffic stops and fines. It’s continual and oppressive. People are mad about it and rightfully so. There are plenty of examples peaceful protest against police brutality but nothing has changed. What can we expect? Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
Saw a beautiful example of this in action the other day in the Observable "cherry logo" notebook: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/cheery-logo
I think you'll find that a substantial portion of those of us who are opposed to police surveillance are also opposed to the mandatory use of contact tracing apps, especially ones designed by some of the least trustworthy surveillance companies in existence (Google, palantir, etc).
Looks are not everything. Wood ash isn't (nearly as?) carcinogenic.
Hi! Welcome to the website you are currently on.

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How to Deal with Overwhelm When Learning New Skills
FREE While In BETA

Turn the beta into 1.0 and start charging. It will validate that a market exists. Or that one doesn't exist. Get that answer now and find people who are willing to pay. Don't build a product for people who will never pay.
I have to admit that I felt that way about it too. In fact, I think everybody felt that way about it at first. It was a work-around. The reason it was never changed, though, was that people didn't find anything significantly better. Rust is already a big language. It doesn't necessarily need new constructs.

However, as the OP of this thread, I have to admit that I often feel conflicted about it. Using the Deref trait certainly feels like another hack (and some people really dislike it). Basically Deref is what's used to dereference a reference. It's invoked automatically when you are calling a trait function on a variable. So if you have a variable that's a struct that implements a trait, it will bind to the function on that trait. If your variable contains a reference to the struct, then the compiler is smart enough to see if the struct implements the trait and then automatically uses the Deref train to derefernce the reference and bind to the function.

So if you want to delegate from one type to exactly one other type, you can do it simply by implementing the Deref trait on the first type and having it convert to the second type. It's kind of elegant, but also kind of hacky :-) There are people who feel that Deref should only be used for objects that are actually memory references. Other people feel that it's OK to use it when one type is masquerading as another type (as we are doing when we put a data structure inside a tuple to make it a "new type").

On the plus side, it gives you really fine grained control without adding new constructs to the language. You can make a "new type" that incurs no runtime overhead (in speed or space) and you can choose whether to delegate all of the function calls to the contained type, or to control them explicitly. The former is really, really easy (essentially 5 lines of boilerplate) and the latter is extremely easy to read and reason about. I have to admit that it's hard to justify adding a new construct for something that is not actually broken (except when you first look at it ;-) ).

And, really, to me this is Rust in a nutshell. It's got a lot of really elegant and intelligent decisions going into its implementation, but all of them look incredibly unlikely when you first look at them. The result is that the learning curve is quite high and the road to fluency long. Often newbies (which I probably still qualify for) ask, "Why the heck is it done this way". When you get the answer, it make sense, but it's often not as satisfying as you had initially hoped :-) Still, like others who push past that point, I've got to say that I really enjoy writing Rust code. It's strange.
>> Sort of makes me wonder why a VERY C-like, small, dynamically typed, scripting language never emerged.

Csh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_shell) was the de facto standard shell on many Unix systems and still is widely used.

However, it has some issues:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/

https://www.grymoire.com/Unix/CshTop10.txt
I honestly thought this article might be a joke – burn wood to generate a trickle of electricity.

Maybe it's merely teasing the Ig Noble Prize committee though. :-)
== Price gouging does cause users to associate the site with high prices. Particularly when third party sellers aren’t transparent about MSRP. Amazon risks losing customers to physical shops if they become known for being 3x+ as expensive.==

If I go to a marketplace in the real world, I don’t associate the vendor’s individual prices with the entity that runs the market.

In a real marketplace wouldn’t we expect a vendor to notice the price gouging and take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity? Maybe Amazon isn’t really a marketplace?
> All that is needed is communication.

When applied to behavior I would say that all that is needed is a shared goal, a shared understanding. The individual units don't necessarily have to communicate. They only need to share some common direction or goal. For example, the infamous starlings don't formally conspire. Yet the result functions as a conspiracy, so to speak.
You don't necessarily HAVE to use K8s to get advantage of it. Use something like Knative and you're good to go. Google has Cloud run and Azure would soon come up with some similar abstraction on top of kubernetes.
To add a datapoint that might be underrepresented for reasons of self-selections: I've updated to Catalina and haven't had any issues.
The Servicification of the U.S. Economy
Oh don't be naive. There were and still are plenty of protests in Europe. Maybe watch a programme or ten where the banlieues of Paris burned for days because a teenager was accidentally killed by the police. And the protests in the UK, where the reasons were many (racism, austerity, corruption).

Europeans saying, "this could never happen here," is as daft as an American saying it.
Came here to mention this also. This was such a great article - a perceptive and engaging portrait of Victor Vescovo and his motley crew. It’s quite long but worth every minute.
That’s a specious argument. Most parents (mine included) put massive pressure on working age kids to get summer jobs to fill those hours. The incentive for the kid is of course spending money too.

I would imagine with massive closures and unemployment that supply of summer jobs is close to zero now.

I suppose in our kids generation there is a mitigating circumstance- the wide availability of legal teenage heroin aka video games. Today’s “bread and circus” of inexpensive, endless content and games will keep us placated indefinitely as far as I can tell.
When I read the perldocs much of it looks write-only. But in keeping with Perl's spirit of "there's more than one way to do it", one can actually write straightforward Perl code that is as understandable as Python.
> But subscribers to a scientific worldview often make a more ambitious claim: that the best theories are isomorphic with the fundamental nature of the universe.

This is not an "extra" claim on top of conservation laws/fundamental symmetries.

> Reductionism can be understood as a combination of (1) the claim that the intelligibility of the universe depends on the unity of scientific theories

It's strange and frankly likely just projection to say that it's the reductionists that claim the universe must be a certain way in order for it to be intelligible.

> Despite its limited usefulness as a guide to scientific practice, reductionism is a powerful cultural idea. We might call it the Lego-block conception of reality: only the Lego blocks are real, so ‘fundamental’ science involves identifying what the blocks are and how they interact, while ‘applied’ science involves discovering the right combination or permutation of blocks that accounts for the phenomenon in question.

The question of realism is separate than reductionism of fundamental law, and it's not a good sign to (deliberately?) confuse them. EDIT: Just to be clear to people skimming this stuff, I can hold two theories: a) your dog is real, b) your dog is not real, only quarks are real. We can debate this for as long as we'd like, but what I am not necessarily saying is that your dog's dogness corresponds to some suspension or modification of fundamental physics.

> that parts and wholes have ‘equal’ ontological priority, with the wholes constraining the parts just as much as the parts constrain the wholes.

Again, if ontology means "realism" this is a confusion, if it means the way things work, it's simply wrong or completely unsupported.
Intel Kills Off Core I9-9900K Speciality Dodecahedron Packaging
GNU Parallel is also a very useful tool, and it's written in Perl 5.
I wasn't paying much attention when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. Probably I was reading Tom Clancy novels about Jack Ryan. White privilege, etc.
If we can’t even make a regular shower sustainable, then our civilisation is fucked.

Next month: how to enjoy your weekly sponge bath!
You understand heterosexual people have anal sex too, right? It's become quite trendy.
Files Discredit Accusation That Democrats Tried to Hack the Georgia Election
This should be the top comment. Maybe we could collaborate on it via a github repo?
You do not push the whole app to the front by mistake, especially at some glitch of connection as it is happening here!
It is not a typo or whatever kind of mistake just happens on its own but had to be a conscious action!!
I write code, I make mistake, but this is beyond that!
It is also neglected for years now while being very widespread, no way of being unnoticed and left there if it wasn't a conscious choice to do so!
It seems that EDA tooling is one of the the major holdups [1].

[1] https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/huawei-banned-so-lets-invad...
I don't know about that, but it'd be a surprise to see an airframe of that age in commercial service that hadn't had its avionics upgraded, since that's a relatively simple way to gain new flight management capabilities. It'd also be a surprise to see so severe a bug go undetected for so long, if it was part of the original equipment.
Rust (Rustup) + IntelliJ (Jetbrains Toolbox) is the single best way to get the same thing for native code. Version manager for environments, cross toolchains, package management and building (Cargo).
If you missed it, that was my best 7-year old hack at Greek philosophy :)
I'm a bit out of my element so I apologize if I'm missing something.

Microsoft implemented cgroups and namespace analogues in Windows Server 2016 to allow it to run "real" Docker containers without the need for virtual machines. The limitation is that the real Windows containers can only run Windows based applications because the underlying architecture is still Windows. Something similar would happen with macOS. The underlying architecture of macOS would remain macOS regardless of whether it could run real containers or not.
All languages have an ideological component to them. Here is a list of languages with "everything is a $THING" in it. https://argumate.tumblr.com/post/118013166244/python-what-if... As a pythonista language-naut like the author I think the fun part is trying on the language du jour's ideology and figuring out if you can get productive with it.
Trump doesn't win the election and his hysterical tweets only further prove that he knows how much shit he's in come November.
If you give a Perl interpreter a Rorschach test, you might be surprised: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/05/pollack-perl.html
Who profits from our medical records
I prefer to replace Schrodinger's cat with Schrodinger's brother. Now you claim to have a human observer in a superposition of dead and alive states. He will not suddenly experience collapse when let out of the box to greet Schrodinger. The entire notion of "wave function collapse" is a fictional construct that can not be observed because it doesnt happen.
>and don't allow you to do things like delete them.

How does that work with GDPR?
Yes, I was wondering. I know of one prominent open source programmer who was a murderer, but he invented no programming languages and committed only a single murder.
What I can say from a personal standpoint is that learning Elixir has been a really pleasant experience.

Many of the points mentioned in there are well managed by the friendly community, and the superb inline help system.
Because nonlocality?
I meant specifically about security. Because everything is a string?
The context is important because most people have heard the word "epicenter" from earthquake stories, where the epicenter is usually singular and never migrates, thus strongly correlated in people's heads as the "start" of a major event.
Uh, raku looks interesting, the web site is also quite accessible. Sad that it took so long, maybe Perl6 would have regained some territory otherwise.
Jeevee: Online Medicine Delivery Platform Marches Forward with a Leap of Faith
I’ve been waiting patiently for the other shoe to drop on college tuition for more than a decade now. I still have another ten years until I’m in the thick of it again myself.

Unfortunately history so far has shown that tuition is surprisingly immune to what I would consider severe shocks to the rest of the economy. So I watch in shock as the price continues to skyrocket...
Could it be that Water vaporization from sludge and possible sewer runoffs have ammonia-water vapor whose pH level is conducive to carrying certain SARS virus, also like meat packing house? Just putting it out there.
In the field of security, much more than in the rest of technology, age is an important factor of being a problem. SHA1 is merely starting to see attacks that can finally be demonstrated rather than theorized, that still take hundreds of CPU-year, 20 years after its inception. But we haven't waited all that time to retire SHA-1, because we know that eventually all schemes fail.

Same holds for RSA.
One could argue if you have a tiny set of services you are better off using a managed offering like AWS Lambda or Cloud Run
AcceleratingHT
I would strongly recommend you do learn Perl 5 (and Raku, and Haskell, and lua, and functional languages, and ...), even if only to be able to know enough about them to be enlightened about what each of them gets right and wrong.

For Perl 5, you could do worse than going through the _free_ "Modern Perl" book, at http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/
FS2020 Discovery #8: IFR
1,700 National Guardsmen expected in Minneapolis tonight
Have you had an experience with Cargo, the Rust package manager? It is an absolute joy to work with, clean repeatable builds, and fast for what you are getting (speed of C++ with the correctness of Haskell).
To that point, the bun fight moved from the back end to the UI when git came along.

Personally, if you're not using magit[1], you should have a look.

Ridiculously powerful; check.
Open source; check.
Works like a champ in a terminal over SSH; check, check, check.

[1] https://magit.vc/
You can only get around callbacks for async IO with async/await or language-integrated N:M threading, which is a challenging problem (I still trigger ICEs in Rust's implementation on occasion). Java is another language which suffers from this, and C++ only got coroutines in C++20.
This may not be nice or demonstrating customer obsession but it is probably a good way for them to make money with business customers.

For better or worse Zoom has obtained “iPhone status” in corporate IT.

What killed the Blackberry was when decision makers had a personal iPhone and a work Blackberry and they finally turn up in the head of IT’s office and say “hey these things you’re making us use really suck, please just make it so we can use these iPhones which are soooo much better.”

I see exactly the same thing happening now with Zoom. I see IT types saying “but encryption” yadda yadda yadda and decision makers tuning up saying:

“This conferencing software you’re forcing us to use really stinks. I had a meeting with our soccer parents group on Zoom and it was so much better. Please switch us to this.”

A product that reaches that status stands to really disrupt the enterprise if they’re smart and take advantage of it.
How to Grow Your Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqQTEdHVaCw
That goes a long way, thank you :-) One of the other comments was saying OpenSSL probably has the best support for secure elements (hardware accelerated crypto?).
Love the section in this about using "boring technology" - and then writing about how you used it, to help counter the much more common narrative of using something exciting and new.
Why can’t Michael Moore just put the film on his website? He needs Youtube too?
It seems to me to be more of a spectrum, where a 'well-understood' system is one we can simulate accurately with extremely pared-down models. (I.e., we can simulate it much more cheaply than running the whole atomic simulation) because we found symmetries/simplifications/shortcuts. Approximating ballistics arcs with parabolae, for example, is sort of a compression algorithm on the full simulation.
I had not considered that it may have support for hardware accelerated crypto.
The keyword is "accidentally killed". But whatever suits your agenda for downplaying what's happening in the US.

"And the protests in the UK, where the reasons were many (racism, austerity, corruption)." - Absolutely not comparable to what is happening in the US. The UK had riots few years back and absolutely no leader issued statements that they will get shot, and hounds released on them. It was a big deal even whey they wanted to use water cannons. But hey, what do we European communists know.
People write unreadable code. Its not a function of language.

The kind of people who write unreadable code have long since moved on to write unreadable code in trendier languages and legacy critical code has long since been cleaned up if its of value.

Unreadable Perl is no longer an issue in 2020.
Glad to know you think of my intelligence so uncharitably that you have to explain a tautological definition.

I know that insurance only covers the insured. I charitably assumed the reading audience of HN knows that, too. Is there something more insightful you wanted to share? For example: have a conversation on the general risks of taking insurance versus not, or whether in these particular anecdotes the owners in fact did/didn't have insurance and their reasons for it? Or was it really just to try to make me look like a dumbass to the crowd?