skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> - find someone to donate a generic orthogonal routing algorithm based on a modern algorithm since people want this

> - it would be a big effort, but move the core algorithms to a framework that supports interaction with layout generation

Yup, I think these are the ones that mean I never actually end up using Graphviz for anything :)

If I'm generating graphs, I want them laid out in a hierarchical style.

To do that, I need a library which can do that layout.

Those libraries are often written in a higher level language like C#, Java, etc, which come with their own simple drawing layer.

And then I don't need Graphviz anymore! (not that I'm suggesting graphviz should change)
And it's all your fault, middle class America!
With modern monitors being as large as they are already, I'd say the need for a vertical monitor is likely an indication you're working with spaghetti code.
Sometimes I go deep wiki some nights in mathematics. Representation theory and Set Theory are the only sane ways I know of on how to approach higher mathematics. But it’s their practical applications in software that amazes me.

Take Young Tabs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_tableau) and Hook Lengths for example. I’ve been playing with the concept that you could use Young Tabs and Hook Lengths to represent groups of FSMs in metric space if you wanted to know mathematically if one FSM could be topologically sorted into a congruent FSM.
Curious what you think about something, since it seems like you've been iterating on the challenge of a big interactive graph lately.

I've been pondering building a big interactive chart, like a decision tree or differential diagnosis chart, that maps goals/needs/problems to docs/examples/tools (for the Nix/NixOS/Nixpkgs ecosystem, but the basic concept applies to any sprawling ecosystem where discovery is hard).

I recently stumbled on https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid, which seems like it has an interaction model that could support what I have in mind (minus the question of whether there are performance cliffs that'd make it unsuitable).

If you considered mermaid while working on bear-note-graph, could you share the conclusions you came to?
Honestly, front-end development is probably the most forgiving area of all for tech workers returning from an extended hiatus.

Front-end churn is like the apocryphal factoid about the human skin replacing itself completely every few years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that you're never more than 4 years behind the state of the art in front-end development.
No, just the secure boot flag. Linux can EFI boot, and most UEFI bioses are perfectly happy to boot 'legacy' BIOS OS images as well. You just have to figure out how to disable windows-only mode.
Uber likely to pull out out of merger talks with Grubhub over antitrust concerns
Startups Can Mitigate Risks of Hiring a Web Development Company
While I agree that PHP does have pros as well as cons, I find it disconcerting that I've read MANY assertions here on HN, that PHP detractors just haven't used it very much or are mostly complaining about things like bad standard library function names.

I've used PHP in earnest. It and JavaScript are tied for worst programming languages I've used. JavaScript gets more of a "pass" from me because I'm just not a dynamic-typing fan and I'll admit that it might be less awful for someone who enjoys/prefers Python or Ruby or whatever.

PHP, on the other hand, is basically just worse-Java. And Java isn't a great language, either. The built-in PHP array is a constant source of frustration. Keys are sometimes strings, sometimes ints. And you don't always know which it is! This makes working with the array_* functions cumbersome at best. The fact that you can't typehint everywhere also sucks. No generics sucks. No threads sucks. No (real) async sucks. Globals suck (including different language behavior based on a config file on your machine...........).

It's just not a strong language. And I'm super-tired of hearing "it's not the tool, it's the user." There is such a thing as a shitty tool. And just because some human somewhere CAN write working code in Brainfuck, does NOT mean that anybody SHOULD. I'm similarly tired of "all languages have warts". Do I even need to actually explain the fallacy there?

On the other hand, I agree 100% that PHP's deployment story is awesome! But is that because PHP did anything useful, or because Apache and Nginx support PHP out of the box?
6 hours of actual heads-in-the-code software dev work. It does vary, sometimes I get nearly 8 hrs, but meetings/etc drop it to the average of 6.
It may also translate into: representatives grouping into parties. Which parties get the more votes globally, get to have proportionally as many seats, which they distribute to the elected members of the group.
Yes, this is extremely useful, thank you for sharing.

I also often use the REPL as a "tool" rather than just a editor feature.

For example this week I'm working on a data integration. This is a very specific one-time task, so there is currently no need to write accessible production code. I can just use the REPL to do the "ETL" and leave the code as-is.

There is merit in keeping it and find functionality to extract, abstractions/compositions in the future, but the point is that the integrated (Clojure) REPL itself is already sufficient, powerful and very ergonomic tool.
Ignore about how to bet/spend about that money. Hold it till to 6? month or more.
Yes, a weaker executive branch at the federal level.
Yeah, I recall an article about London taxi drivers having to memorize the labyrinth of streets in and around central London to get a taxi license. They were paid very well and the jobs were stable as a result — until Uber / Waze came along. Then the market was flooded by recent immigrants working for much less who were able to navigate unfamiliar streets with GPS and the job became way less stable.
Redlining was a conspiracy, but it's pretty well documented. Here's a good book on it.

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...
A desire for punishments generally isn't for 'enjoyment', but motivated by someone's sense of justice. "Being punished for bad deeds" is a very common notion of 'fairness'.

If your notion of justice doesn't include retribution, that's completely legitimate, but to insinuate that your sense of justice is somehow less of a emotional response than someone else's is ridiculous.
I get the world is more interconnected than ever before. Still, in my 45 years this is the first pandemic. I think people expecting one every year or two will find they are waiting a very long time.
Thanks to open source projects students are able to learn, experiment and grow. I was lucky enough to have one of our professors introduced me to Asterisk for VoIP calls. Being able to learn and modify the code base and contribute back to the community are skills which helped me grow as a professional
I consider this a fundamental insight of Rust programming language: that it is a programming language optimized for long term usability.

No wonder it is struggling for adoption.
Rasmus Lerdorf look at the last 25 years of PHP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCZ5TJCBWM

Really interesting for anyone wondering what the thinking was behind function naming and other inconsistencies jump to: https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg?t=987 and https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg?t=1466
Investing in Alpha Health
Enjoy handling HTTP headers again in Python programs
Most people don't know this and the timeline also doesn't make it very clear: PHP never started as a language but as a templating system for C.

Feature requests were quickly added and that's why PHP became a language with a lot of quirk's.

Today that is totally different. As a scripting language it is blazing fast. It still has some strange corners, but it's amazing that a templating system because such a wide used language.
There's possibly an argument that reusing C names when you're wrapping or emulating C functions is actually a good usability design choice which has, over time, become a negative.

Like a floppy-disk save icon, what helped one generation becomes obscure to the next and they obly see the flaws.
> It has a very rich standard library

Yet I still have to define startsWith() and endsWith() any time I touch PHP code...

(More importantly, PHP is the one language I can never write from memory without referencing the manual for each and every function call because of how inconsistent it is. Eg Sometimes $haystack is the first parameter and sometimes it is $needle.)
For me it has changed a lot and very quickly. I empathise with a lot of what he's saying, even without being incarcerated ;)
How can you not have noticed any changes in 40 years time? I take you don't live in an area with extreme summers/winters? Or don't you go skiing and notice the rapidly melting permafrost?

Also, regardless of your opinion and what you "see", what happened to trusting the scientific method & looking at the actual numbers?

As Gates said "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."
Game Theory and Ethics [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
I agree. I'm not suggesting tech isn't important at all. I'm just trying to provide a counter point to the OP, whose argument sounds very one-sided.

You can't build the next FB and Amazon without great tech. But they are not in the tech industry. Tech is the key ingredient (out of many)
Nope. Neoliberalism is what we should be talking about. Anything else is just avoiding the elephant in the room.
That distinction isn't relevant here. She had mens rea -- she knew she was voting. She didn't know she was breaking the law.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027 (586 points, 352 comments)
> I was arrested in 2009 for installing botnets and commercial remote access programs on a handful of sensitive clinic systems, which included a critical SCADA system

Hacking an online store and a sensitive clinical system should be punished with very different levels of punishment.
>This blog post screams of vulture capitalism.

This is Hacker News?
Neotron – Family of 80s-style ARM-based Rusty-ROM home computers
Great language to prototype webpage and backend
> The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will.

I didn’t know about Frankfurt or PAP. Thanks for telling me!

As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.

I guess I don’t agree that because something is proven false, people will stop caring about it and wanting it to be true.

I think one way out of the blame problem is to recognize that blame being an abstraction (I’m becoming a broken record) doesn’t make it less useful or meaningful. Assigning someone the blame as a killer still gives us the knowledge to act (e.g. separating them from society). But recognizing that ultimately everyone is a victim of fate in one way or another allows us to simultaneously have compassion for the people we’re locking up.
Recently did some nodejs work. It was surprisingly fun. There are A LOT of sharp edges, but working "closer to the metal" is great. Fast deploy and startup is GREAT.

Am an early, vocal Java partisan. Java world HTTP servers fell into a ditch and kept digging. Servlets and JSP weren't too bad. Wasn't crazy about Tomcat or NetSuite, but ok. Then it just got more and more nutty. J2EE, Spring, XML, schemas, annotations, etc.

There's nothing about Java that rules out simple and quick. For medical records stuff, I replaced a huge J2EE/BizTalk style backend with stupid simple process runner for stupid simple tasks. Think Windows OS Task Manager running AWS Lambdas.

In conclusion, I remain sad about the enterprisey detour Java took.
The Coronavirus and the Coming Exodus from Cities
While I don't use PHP today, it always makes me wonder at deceptively easy it is to deploy a PHP app.

There's no having to worry about restarting processes since the next request picks up the code changes and deploying at scale has so many problems auto-solved by that such as rolling restarts.

You can then handle things like percent based feature roll outs at the application level which is likely where it belongs anyways.

On the flip side, for single server deploys, you can also get by with zero down deploys without needing to set anything up. Most other languages and frameworks can't do this, or the way they do it involves doing very complicated things or using even more complicated tools to solve the problem for you.

It's funny to think back in the early 2000s I was using PHP and deploying was brain dead simple then, but fast forward almost 20 years and it's still pretty much the case today -- at least it seems that way based on the talks I've seen around using PHP in production over the years.
What changes do you want to see to believe it?
> If PHP is a bad language, your complaints are just just irrelevant

I don't really understand what you mean here.

> I could probably find some bad code base made in Go and prove that Go is bad.

"It is possible to write bad programs in PHP and also in Go, and therefore the languages are the same"

YOu can write bad code in all languages, but PHP makes it harder to write good code.

> The things is that from your comment it shows you have no idea what you are talking about

Yes, my 21+ years of experience writing code in over 10 different languages, including a decent amount of time writing PHP, pretty much means I don't know what I am talking about.

> I suggest you let people with experience in PHP to explain hat are the issues and how to work around them.

<raises hand>

> What I could complain about PHP are small things I do not feel that I need some feature from Java or C#

I am not talking about features. In fact, Go has a surprising lack of features, it's one of the things that makes it pleasant to write, and easy to write well.
>Think of them as the fundamental rights that society declared everyone has as a result of being a human

Like Freedom?

And what society your talking about? In Europe its clear that everyone has at least the right to life, not so in the US (death-sentence), free-speech? No not in many-many country's.

In prison do you have free-speech, freedom or the right to life (if you have the death-sentence)?

No you don't...so talking about human-right's in prison is completely wrong.

EDIT: Having prisons is just a trade-off of human rights for protecting the life of 'free' citizen's
"I don't know if this plausible catastrophe will happen, but I'd best wait and see". Not angry, just tired of people like you.
You're right about convincing society, but American society has conflated vengeance with justice to the point that they may be inseparable concepts.
In Frederik Pohl’s The years of the city, gendered pronouns are completely gone. Instead of he or she, there is “e”. His/her is “er”, and him/her is “um”. Too bad it didn’t catch on.
For dead languages the answer is easy: a lot of the most interesting texts are in verse. Including Middle English. I have never had a conversation in any dead language. Prose literature is actually a more recent development, so if you want to read ancient stories in the original, which are awesome, you will be reading poetry.

As to poetry in general: Poetic language is challenging, diverse in vocabulary, and because of meter it is memorizable, which I find puts more of the language "in my head". Poetry is also an essential part of most national literatures, and so a big component of really learning a language beyond being conversational.

Nothing in my answer disparaged prose, or that poetry is more important than prose; any language learning consists of repeated, effortful exposure to many language sources, as well as speaking and writing the language. I'm just emphasizing that studying poems in other languages can really help learning those languages, so a savvy student should include it. The tone of your response is puzzling to me.
Ask HN: Why is it so difficult to find pre-installed Linux on “top-end hardware”
If Linux is gaining mindshare and marketshare, why are manufacturers not providing Linux "out-of-the-box"? Some like Dell do but it is difficult, if not impossible to see it across geopgraphies. They all seem to "recommend" Microsoft Windows.

When will this hegemony end?
May work?!

It definitely does, no questions about that, but only as long has you have a high enough perceived value from the other party. A hobo playing hard to get won't win anything from it. You have to display some sort of value, be it real or faked.

To put it simple, if you chase something (job, love interest, etc.) it means you really need that something, if you need it, it means you have no other options, if you have no other options it makes you desperate and being desperate signals low value. If nobody else wants you, why should I?

Think of it like ivy league or a night club. Everyone wants to get into the ones that are the most difficult to get into whereas almost nobody wants to go to the ones anyone can just walk into. That's why girls will flake on you if you're always too available for dates while they're trying to go out with that guy who keeps ignoring their texts.

It's basic human evolution from our tribal days to desire what's scarce and discard what's not.
Social media didn't create the culture. It just gave more people a chance to be part of it. Before, marginalized voices were almost universally bullied and abused into conformity. Some of those marginalized people handle having a voice now poorly, but it doesn't mean the culture they participate in is new.
Yes I think so! The pattern is this: big organisations produce generic solutions to cater 80% of the needs of the 100M people. Your task is to create very specific, expensive solutions for ~500 people.

Not a compilers expert, but I will try to invent a fantasy example:

GCC/clang are ok for compiling generic programs, everyone is more or less happy with them.

One day you read on a HN that SpaceX satellites have to ship with 4 redundant CPUs. Every CPU costs $100K and consume a lot of power, but they are needed to correct errors introduced by cosmic rays.

You decide to create a compiler that creates programs with error correction automatically embedded. Using your compiler, SpaceX saves $100K and can have 20% smaller solar panels because they can ship it with 3 CPUs instead of 4.

1. How much $ do you think you can sell a single license?
2. How many customers will you actually need to be profitable?
3. How much of your time do you need to create a minimal prototype that you can DM to that SpaceX employee and get him/her in a valuable mutual-help feedback loop?
4. How much better can this compiler become in 1 year of refinement?

Chances are you can make as much you currently make in a year with your first 2 customers.
I found their PCB on Kitspace and thought it was intriguing: https://kitspace.org/boards/github.com/neotron-compute/neotr...

Z80-based retro computers are cool and all, but it's exciting to see one based on a modern microcontroller.
Texts like The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley are eye openers in this genre.
"Unlike other well-known paging programs most supports multiple windows and can scroll left and right. Why settle for less?" http://www.jedsoft.org/most/

It also has built in syntax highlighting. But it's not usable for me, as it doesn't have vi-like keybindings. My ideal pager would be less with syntax highlighting, which should be possible because git shows logs, etc in color in less when they're larger than a screen full… checks less manpage It is! You just need to use -r or -R and make sure commands you pipe into it don't disable color when they detect a pipe (eg. use ls --color, not ls --color=auto). Thanks for sending me down that rabbit hole!
Joseph Lizyness talks about angel investing and the music industry
> Assigning blame requires only the impulse to assign blame

Causally, sure. Morally, I disagree. You've just justified mob rule and the tyranny of the majority.

> there are societies that have no perception of it, they believe that their actions are guided by spirits.

Sure, and what do those societies do when someone kills their neighbour and claims the spirits said their neighbour had to die?

> Western concepts of justice are founded on the idea of free will, so of course you need it for western rationalizations of how to apply justice, but arguing that we need free will for justice to work is putting the cart before the horse.

Western justice is founded on free will because it's a logical necessity for coherently assigning blame.

> It is in my interest to argue that life has intrinsic value because if I don't I risk being considered a threat by people who happen to value their own lives quite a bit.

No, it's actually in your interest to argue that your life has intrinsic value, and that anyone else's life is of lesser value.

So here we arrive at the morally repugnant conclusions I mentioned: if you can effectively argue this point, as they did with the divine right of kings, there is no logical basis upon which you can dispute this conclusion.

Moral progress has been marked by eliminating such artificial distinctions, not justifying them.

> By our own rationalizations, life doesn't have any intrinsic value unless it is a life that serves us, or has power over us, and the value of a chicken's life extends only as far as it is tasty to us.

Please explain how this follows from anything I've said in this thread.
I like the two graphs to organize the conversation. IMHO the key to success (max bang for the buck) is better composability and as little boilerplate code as possible. Haskell and Julia (for example) do this fantastically well.

The essential theme of long term usability is very close to what Guy Steele talks about in his fantastic talk/article Growing a language — you want as little as possible embedded into the language, and you want as much as possible farmed off to the libraries so that users can compose the pieces they like without drowning in too much code.
See also "Where to Find Roger Ebert’s Great Movies Streaming" [0] which has US listings for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney Plus, Criterion Channel, Kanopy, HBO, Starz, and Showtime as of March 2020.

[0] https://www.rogerebert.com/features/where-to-find-roger-eber...
> I think the point is the poetry

Bingo. This isn't about science. This is about inspiring young women.
That's my father since he retired. He does wood working as a hobby, but he will use any excuse to go to the hardware store. I don't know his actual frequency, but I wouldn't be surprised if he is there 4-5 times a week, with or without a project lined up.
That's not being fair. There are many comments on HN of people saying exactly that PHP just isn't bad. The grandparent reply even says:

>My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax.
...?

Either I am failing to parse your sentence or you missed some words.
IIT Madras Is Offering Stipend Up to ₹60k for Internship in AI Research
Five Strategies to Boost Sofware Deliveries in Any Company
It's not a theoretical consideration. It's quite common for BIOS and firmware code to clobber registers that it isn't supposed to; see the code I mentioned in the Linux kernel, which arose through real-world bugs that were incredibly hard to debug.