skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seconded. Both concepts apply, as is very common.

Attempting to generalize:
A tragedy of the commons is when everyone would be better off if everyone avoided an action which produces more negative externalities than captured value, but each one is individually better off if they take that action, so most do take it.
I try to follow a few rules when writing OO code.

1. Make classes do one thing that is basically summarized in the class name. (This also takes care of 'separation of concerns')

2. Be careful to not over-abstract. That results in many tiny classes, aka ravioli code. Nobody, not even you, will remember what all those little bastards do.
3. If a class is bigger than a page (or two) of code, it's probably too long.

4. Design patterns are for inspiration, not the law. Solve problems, don't prove how smart you are.

5. Make your classes as simple as possible. You will thank yourself later.

6. If you have to write a comment that explains how some confusing thing works; that code block is a good refactoring candidate.

7. Refactor, refactor, refactor. Refactoring is rewriting code for clarity. The more you do this, the more your code will become clear to the reader. I find refactoring often reduces my LOC drastically.

8. If you just learned a technique/pattern and that technique/pattern is suddenly popping up everywhere in your code; make sure you aren't just using it because it's fun. Say you just learned what a singleton pattern is, now your code is littered with singletons. That's a good sign that you are forcing yourself to use your new found toy and reconsider.

9. Long method names. Don't be afraid to have long method names. Yes, it looks ugly, yes it takes time but you will thank yourself later and often a long method name will compensate for the lack of documentation on that method.

10. Your program should basically be a bag of loosely related, self-contained components. Think of them like parts of an engine, they each do one thing very well and they each have an interface to the rest of the engine. Also, they can individually be swapped out for another component (as long as they bolt up to the engine appropriately).

Understanding OOP is definitely a paradigm shift in thinking and it is also loaded with many a foot gun (especially when you are new).
Multibillion-dollar opportunity: Virus-proofing the new office
Nearby habitable stars could host Earth 2.0
Activists Drop 270GB 'BlueLeaks' File of Internal Police Documents Online
And in a few years it might be a forth grader. Then maybe a few years after that, a fifth grader. Slow progress is still progress.
Yea anti-racism is a modern religion. It's counterproductive, and I expect a net-negative backlash than useful reform and change. No longer is it ok to affirm the human dignity and the equality of minorities. Racism is assumed globally so the question now becomes how is a person instantiating racism, not if a person is instantiating racism. It's screwed up and bizarre.
I think this is just problem in general with touch devices.
Also the way modern apps are designed, where almost everything is button, does not help.
See mobile twitter, for example, close to 100% of the screen is link of button that does something.
Twitter Suspends Account of Organization Behind Police Leaks
In my experience, it does apply to paypal, except they wait until you put a minimum amount into your account and then lock it pending KYC. This basically forces you to provide KYC documents (or say good bye to your money). This is likely so they can avoid the 99% churn rate they'd get if they KYC'ed people on registration, IMO there should be a law against this practice or just fix draconian KYC laws. Skrill did the same with ID required, except i still cannot access my $900 2 years later because the KYC is fully automated.
This. I did not decide to do this, but over time I refactor things. As I gain experience doing that, I realize I have started to write "refactorable code" (you heard it hear first. In JavaScript land (I'm a fan by the way) this is inevitable. JQuery, React, hooks, context, promises, async, ES6, on and on.

The churn in JavaScript is painful, as many people note, the code I started with is now both smaller, clearer and easier to refactor. So yes to refactoring.
It would be AI by the standards of A*, maze solvers, and similar. It isn't ML and doesn't isn't related to that branch of AI.

Should graph search be considered AI? This gets us to the root of the issue, which is how do we consider something AI or not and to what extent has that definition changed as some problems have become trivial or commonplace. Machine learning is a bit easier since you can create much strong classifications around the need to teach, to feed it data with expected results, before it is useful to get a response (or otherwise give it a way to evaluate data it generates and then feeds itself). However there are a number of techniques that predate ML, or at least having fast enough computers to have worthwhile success at ML, and thus we are left with determining some way to objectively classify those as either AI or not.
Git Is About Communication
Hi, is this similar to the Argo project? Is a scheduler included?
The US-China Battle over the Internet Goes Under the Sea
As a seasoned C++ programmer, that occasionally plays with Haskell, here is a question?

Has finally Haskell the problem of how to do destructive updates or not?

If it cannot do destructive updates, I am not interested. The kind of software I am called to build always requires destructive updates for performance reasons and secondly I am so used to assignment and all the design patterns around it that I don't think I should bother with something that does not provide that.
I understand that the search function will now be updated.

Can't express how happy I am.

Bye bye Slack, Teams & Telegram
D2 could have come with a source directory and a make file then been sold just the same way it was. If they were woried about how it would effect priacy they could have added the source directory in a patch a year later.
>My spouse and I both work in a hospital. She got covid and so did one of our two siblings. Neither of them had any symptoms (spouse is in her 50's, our sibling is twenty plus.) I never got it nor did our other sibling.

Apologies, but the text makes it seem like your spouse is also your sibling.
If you have no privacy, what is there to give away? You can't have both!
> and so imagine if you could emulate some platform at high performance with low overhead, in a sandbox. You would then be able to script in whatever language you so desire, provided it has that target.

My understanding is that this is what Google's PNaCl was about (https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/nacl-and-pnacl) : leveraging LLVM bitcode for both portability (source and target) and native performance, being able to sandbox properly the resulting executable.
If M&A became harder, more companies would go public; or stay private and distribute profits as dividends.

But the problem is not M&A on its own; the problem is that through M&A, big players are able to stifle competition. I'm sure it's possible to define a reasonable law (about company size, market size and kind) that would make it much harder for today's Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon from acquiring potential would-be competitors, without making it harder for two $100M companies to merge, or one $100M company to buy a $20M one.
It’s not a Marxist or Neo-liberal critique, just an observation. People are (rightly) viscerally afraid of dying in a fireball, but are far less animated about the horrors of living as a non-person, without the right to privacy, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, the presumption of innocence, due process in law, and just all round basic human dignity. The right to life is an important one, but it can and should be upheld without setting fire to all the others.

Worth just reminding everyone that those rights exist whether the powerful of the day want to undermine or uphold them; they exist everywhere in the universe including airports. They exist for all people regardless of their religion or ethnicity.

We’re not fooled into forgetting about these immutable rights just because someone acts as if that they have the authority to negate them. They most certainly do not.
Same. I miss how awesome COM was too.

DCOM was a couple of orders of magnitude more fiddly to get working. But amazing once it worked. Create an object on another server, call its methods, side effects happen on that server, results are returned to your process.

When I was learning Go the similarity between COM interfaces and Go interfaces really helped me grok them quicker.
I love the mature version too -- 1950s Gould sounds like he's in a terrible hurry, 1980s Gould feels entirely in control of his performance.
A question for anyone with more knowledge: does this circumvent the need for a TTL on DNS records?
COM is quite alive, after Longhorn's project failure, all those .NET ideas got re-implemented as COM and all major Windows APIs since Vista have been introduced as COM based APIs.

WinRT/UWP is just COM improved to support generics and .NET types.

It is pretty much alive despite not being popular in SV, and it is also how iDevices drivers work actually.
You don't need fancy GPUs with lots of RAM?
And I like how you only have to know the library/class/interface guid. No header files, nothing to link, the compiler figures out and infers everything. Type libraries make it possible to use the same component in a language-independent manner; bindings are generated automatically from TLB data.

> Anyway its mostly dead now I guess, except for these random archaeological digs.

Far from dead. All new windows stuff is built on top of extended COM.
> it's not clear that asymptomatic infections are as infectious as symptomatic infections

Yes it is clear (they're not)! Superspreading events are caused by people who are clearly symptomatic but don't act responsibly. Most spreading in total happens via nonsymptomatic or presymptomatic people, because covid19 is a coronavirus and that's how coronaviruses work. No point in pretending this is some kind of big unknown.

If you don't believe me, let's look at this story of army recruits. Those who tested positive were isolated, those who remained tested negative and trained together with masks and social distancing. Result, 8 days later 142 out of 640 tested positive. https://outline.com/dK2TWd
It still is, powering all major Windows APIs since Vista.
> Humans achieve their performance levels while only ever observing a tiny fraction of that training data

This is really the key detail and the hole in Gwern's argument that AGI is around the corner. You can't just compare the result. You also have to look at what it took to train the model and at what the model is actually doing.

If you look at GPT-3's output, it only superficially makes sense. Is there evidence of true understanding or is it just a really really good text generator?

Regardless of AGI though, I do think that models like this will eventually mean the end of social media and perhaps all wide open discourse on the Internet. When this stuff gets easy and cheap enough that spammers and propagandists can use it, it's over. How much money in compute/storage would it take to train GPT-3 to advocate for Donald Trump or Joe Biden all day long, or to shill products, or to just generate superficially comprehensible text to execute a kind of denial of service attack on a community?
> https://www.devever.net/~hl/windowsdefeat

I was thinking along the same lines. WSL looks like a half-hearted and late attempt to put some POSIX lipstick on the Windows pig, but for me at least it doesn't really stick. The implementation is as messy and intransparent as usual in Windows. When I have to use Windows, Cygwin is still my tool of choice to make the system usable at all.
> Why can't ideas be allowed to exist on their own, detached from any known person?

Perhaps because their formation was coloured by someone else's experiences and prejudices. Why is it wrong to want those who propose these ideas to take credit and responsibility so that we can examine the idea and the nature of the person who conceived the idea. These ideas exist to persuade; they should be examined as the rhetorical sophistry that they truly are and not in some pretend world of spherical cows and platonic ideals.

If you temper the ideas you propose to the public it could be because you are afraid of offending someone, or it could be that you are simply someone who is capable of feeling empathy. Given the similar result does it matter which reason is the source of such self-regulation, and are we worse off for it?
I do love NYC, Chicago, and Philly, but I've always wanted to avoid winter entirely as I get pretty severe SAD. San Francisco seems like the only walkable city where that's possible.
Show HN: Thinktype – Write and Search for Notes at the same Time
Gnulib is distributed in source code format and comprises several bundled functions aka "modules" including dependencies.

You either download individual files online or clone the whole repository for local usage. There is the gnulib-tool utility which you use to copy the required source modules into your project. They come along with Autoconf macros and build scripts.

After properly setting up your configure.ac and Makefile.am, all imported modules will be build, the resulting object is a static libary libgnu.a, ready for linking.

On the source code side, the only thing you will do is #include "<module>.h" and use the available functions.

Autoconf & Automake take care of the rest for building.

For me, this feels very much like a module system (designed for maximum portability), but of course there might be other definitions of a module system.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/MODULES.html
This is cool. Working on a small project with lots of sensors and associated amps/adcs/etc the wiring quickly gets out of control if you're just using breadboards. This will help keep things documented and surface the actual layout to help build dedicated connectors/cables.
Hahaha you must be american, right? USA is not the whole world hihihi
And that could describe, alcohol, weed, sweets, gambling....
Styling Browser Console
Tech Offices Will Change as We Reopen
Visual Studio was/is super expensive and also necessary for MS development.

With .Net core you can get by with never touching VS. But that wasn’t always the case.

I also don’t believe MS had a free livense of Visual Studio like they do now.
You've hit the nail on the head - breastfeeding is entangled with our relationship with nudity.

I don't personally condone eating nude in public in a restaurant, but there is a broad spectrum of ambivalence towards nudity. For instance, plenty of europe is fine with mixed sex nude saunas and beaches. And the whole thing is pretty asexual.

If you feel ashamed or self conscious or indecent topless on the beach, or even in a same sex changing room, it's probably not a stretch to think you may feel shame breastfeeding on the side of the road in a car.

Now you will have prudes and exhibitionists in any society but the window of normality is going to be a function of what the environment dictates. And iirc being topless on a beach in the US is illegal, whereas no one will blink in Spain or France at a topless woman (except the American/Brit on holiday)

But this is learned behaviour - most children don't care about being dressed or not
They really remind me more of Android widgets, which the article also mentions. Those were a killer feature for me for Android.
Synthesis of the Elements in Stars [pdf]
Lost?

Most countries have Microsoft sponsored education programs and all big software shops have MSDN subscriptions anyway.
FB's users are not it's customers. It is free for users, in the same way that food is free for cows in a diary. Indeed, the cows did not choose to live that life, but increasingly [not] having a facebook account is not an option.

FB's customers are the advertisers. And they pay very good money, or FB wouldn't have had the money pay for WhatsApp, Instagram and its tens of thousands of employees.
The Genius of Harry Beck’s 1933 London Tube Map (2018)
I believe the main use of molten salt batteries is for high heat applications e.g. in solar collectors

The heat is essentially "free" which makes the molten salt heat retention properties perfect for storing energy overnight.
> The unique pattern of machine-code that must occur in any implementation of JIT, is a jump to a memory address that was computed entirely at runtime, i.e. with a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use-define_chain for that address value that leads back to a call to mmap(2) or malloc(2).

This is probably mostly true. But actually reliably finding such cases, in the most hostile environment imaginable (namely, on x86-64 binary code), would require heroic program analysis that I as a compiler engineer would judge unrealistic.

I would find it much more plausible for the system to watch for something like "jump to a target in a memory page that at some point had the W flag set, has since had W removed and X set, and has not been jumped to since that", and then trigger a compilation of that page starting at the given jump address, and a rewrite of the jump instruction. As proposed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23614894 this could be done by watching for page faults, though presumably it would mean intercepting places where the application tries to set the X bit on a page and setting NX instead so that the page fault can be caught.
What's your reason for scraping so many people's personal data?
What sort of definition of reasoning implies or requires consciousness? I haven’t seen one.
Yeah, my comment was that many, many (not all) images for most development use cases will be fine. With the popularity of the Raspberry Pi and other ARM SBCs there are tons of ARM images. If you don't believe me, look on hub.docker.com. Many, many base images are already supported.
Ask HN: Is psychological therapy working for you?
I've went to countless sessions and therapists (for my own issues, for issues with the kids, marriage counseling etc etc), spent many years and a small fortune - but nothing did any real significant change (despite significant hardships as a kid, all-in-all my life turned out ok, but some things can be better...).
I feel like its a fraud, that everybody knows it doesn't work, all this endless talking and digging and analyzing, but are just afraid to admit it. Nothing in the way therapy is done today can be really measured, with metrics that can actually point to any significant progress. Many times I finished a session/therapy and wondered - did I even achieve anything? was there any progress? regress? forget about the money - was that a good investment of my time?
New Jobs Available
Get now over 1000 jobs in your location
The thing about contests/awards is they're judged by people at the peaks of their careers who have seen and/or done basically everything. It's hard to impress them. So the easy stuff is cool and fun to both see and make, but also doesn't surprise the judges.

Example: photography contests.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcxcGBbLIwk

The cool, pretty, easy to access photos aren't surprising to someone who's seen it all. Anyone with enough money and time can take those photos, just as anyone with enough time and little concern for popularity can sit there and write something that surprises the people who give out writing awards.
So... the current out of control outbreaks are less painful? You genuinely believe that? And CA, while it does have a growing outbreak, is in some sense the exception that proves the rule. Here are the 10 worst states right now per capita. California is at the bottom of the list, and is the only one you'll see there with a democratic governor.

https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states...
Can someone explain to me the history behind Python's aversion to switch statements? I get Python is opinionated and I'm not trying to start a language war, it was just never clear to me why the `if ... elif` pattern was the preferred idiom.
That free license was called Express, was available per language variant, so you needed on VS Express install per workload and exists since around 2005, until Community made its appearance.

Also the Windows SDK was always available for free, just you needed to get a C compiler yourself.
Definitely does not work for me (firefox 77.0.1 on linux).
Also, system-wide in basically any text field, cmd+left/right does the same, and alt+left/right moves the cursor to the previous/next word.
So who would buy these companies if not some other company where the a acquisition would have “synergies”? Why would VCs invest in companies if they didn’t expect an acquisition? The chance of a company actually making it to a successful IPO is slim.
I've have been working on software engineering, web development primarily over the last few years. It's always felt that use of AI in industry was hyped up and soon the hype wind down. Finally there would be done very specific domains were AI can do exceptionally well.

But recently I've been looking into the works of OpenAI and I can say that all my assumptions were out right wrong. The rate of growth in AI is increasing definitely. Just consider the voice tech landscape, with the new generative models around speech I can totally foresee the numbers of industries that are going to be disrupted from the ground up.
Ask HN: Simple Deploys Scaled to Large Businesses?
Hello -

I am looking for war stories from simple deployments that scaled to large businesses. Does anyone on HN have any stories of running a large business solo, or with just a few engineers?

I just love those stories of "We scaled to $500k+ in Revenue all running on one phsyical linux box with mySQL and Apache."

Perhaps the 2020 version would read something like: "We scaled to massive amounts of users running everything as a static website with FaaS lambda calls wired up to PostgREST".

Thanks in advance. First HN Question so sorry if I am breaking some unwritten rules.

EDIT: Typo
> But beyond that, there’s very little publicly accessible information demonstrating that these tools are actually effective at stopping or decreasing terrorism.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly in this context where the actors involved are highly incentivized to keep success stories well-hidden and well-guarded.

You'll never know about all of the terrorist attacks that didn't happen.
Well, of course. It’s not human. Even a superintelligent AGI would likely do zero ”human reasoning” unless it wanted to do authentic emulation of a meatbrain for whatever reason. Like keeping uploaded humans running.
If using bare bones C, yes definitely.

Developers that know what they are doing would use a C++ library with support for COM smart pointers, .NET or Delphi.
The thing that improved my coding was actually maintaining my own codebase for a few years (4.5 years in the same job working on a system that I wrote from scratch). That way you see which of your decisions worked and which ones were crap. When you need to revisit your own code 6 months later and can't understand it, that's no one else's fault but your own.

Even then I think you have to be able to look at your own code critically and want to make it better. The current tech lead in my company churns out a lot of code quickly, but doesn't take constructive criticism of it at all well. It's not easy code for other people to jump into and there are no docs or tests. He thinks it's close to perfect. I don't
Meta: I've vouched for this comment. You appear to be shadowbanned.
Gitty – GitHub Client in Bash
Apple's New Reality
Show HN: Bootstrap Themes, Templates and UI Kits
To be specific and as you say, not to denounce this (or any other) very welcome recent offering on the Goldberg Variations ...

https://imslp.org/wiki/Goldberg-Variationen%2C_BWV_988_(Bach...

offers 38 scores and 50 arrangements of out-of-copyright (free scores) Goldberg Variations.