skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For something that argues against bad abstractions, the article sure is lacking in concrete examples and makes a point in abstract. A lot of people will likely misinterpret or get the idea that abstraction is only done for duplicated code (DRY as some people would call it). I think the wrong/bad "abstractions" here mostly refers to abstraction that was made over common code that is very specific in a context and is very susceptible to domain changes.

But there are a lot of other kinds of abstraction aside from DRY. There are abstractions made to reduce clutter and hide implementation detail and will likely be used only once. There are also abstraction that are more general and aren't coupled to the domain. These abstractions are more reusable and composable, and are immune to domain changes such as the step 6 in the article. Some people would find these kinds of abstractions harder to digest, but I personally consider these kinds of abstractions as extensions to the standard library, or even additions to the vocabulary of the programming language.

Note that I don't claim that general abstractions are necessarily better, since the generality can be made to the extreme and we'd have monads for breakfast.

All in all, I agree with the article, except that it is only referring to one kind of abstraction, although I hesitate to call it as such.
Be very, very sure that you understand how expensive Glue can get, especially with suboptimal code. I have seen bills 10x of same code running on emr spark clusters.
and the online transition was bungled when the state university system overuled GT's president and insisted they stay in person, then changed their minds.

So campus went from 'we are coming back after break' to 'online after spring break' to 'coming back after an extended break' to 'online after spring break' in something like 96 hours.
Sounds like Reddit or HN comment sections. Both form trees of comments, some of which end up becoming long chains.
Sorry, but no.

If you think 'innocence' matters you are part of the problem.

All internet mob's need to be stopped.

I think this author is part of the problem. It's possible they are trying a tactic of gradually disarming the internet mobs, but it doesn't feel that way.
GUIs are much more consistent across platforms than terminal features. Windows look and behave consistently but DOS vs BASH are totally different.

I'm not sure what you mean by efficient keyboard commands. Command line programs are extremely inconsistent with regard to command line parameters, especially across platforms. They're inconsistent between common programs in Linux and between common programs on Windows.

Copying arbitrary text from a terminal is more rigid than a GUI; it's difficult to select with a keyboard, the text is unlikely to be formatted ( sometimes a good thing), and often what you want to copy isn't text but an image, sound, video clip, or some sort of object.

Powerful depends on what you mean by power. There exist somewhat-interoperable terminal programs, but there are lots of GUI programs that are as interoperable or even more interoperable and both can be scripted. Often requisite functionality is only exposed with a terminal program, but that has nothing to do with the lack of power of a GUI.
Does free food mean the company isnt wfh nowadays. Id be willing to take a 100k pay cut compared to a in office job.
I work with sqlalchemy a _lot_. Love it. But it's not intuitive at all especially for the majority of folks with a DS background.
You should read some of Stalin's writing , and also Mao's, not what western writers write about foreign revolutionary leaders.

Why do you think only the most paranoid communist ideology survived ?

What happened to the peaceful Indonesian Communist ?

What about Salvador Allende in Chile ?

What would be your recommendation for the Vietnamese Communists ?
Not sure why you're getting downvoted (/sigh) because you're not wrong: from a strictly cost-of-time POV, an engineer making food is a pretty poor use of time. Now that doesn't mean you need to or even should work an extra hour (or whatever) either. You can use that for free time and it's still a net benefit.

Now, if making your own food makes you happy and you want to do it, do that. Of course. But having the option not to do that. How is that bad?
The only difference between Postmates and Uber Eats is that Postmates customers overwhelmingly tip the delivery driver. The Postmates app and systems is horrifically engineered. Uber Eats is an exceptionally better system.
Same as CSV then?
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Food delivery is a terrible business. M&A won’t make it better.

I worked at LivingSocial in 2012/2013. We used to joke that “we lose money on every transaction but make it up in scale.”

Takeout and Delivery was one of the last bets the company made. Basically food delivery. The customer service load is huge, the services aren’t really differentiated, and you have to both pay the driver enough for it to be worth it and keep prices low for the consumer to think it’s worth it.

Attracting customers on either side of the market means spending money to undercut your competition. As soon as you stop giving free delivery promotions or introductory no-fee periods for restaurants, they can instantly churn with little to no pain. Not to mention reaching small restaurants is incredibly time consuming. They’re not all just hanging out online. They’re running a business. They take a lot of expensive (human) outreach.

Margins are terrible, if they’re ever positive. It’s just a bad business.

And yet people keep trying. None of these companies have made a net dollar. But it’s a simple enough pitch and a common enough use-case that investors think, “yeah, that makes sense!”

But it doesn’t.
It just doesn’t.
In case I am misunderstood, the above represented literary criticism of the broader narrative and story arc of the Old and New Testaments. To anyone who feels personally offended by this criticism, I unreservedly apologise.
That's honestly not enough info to go on.

What do you mean by "occult" - as in, like, literally they seem to tie into subjects you have a religious objection to? Or just that they seem like they're designed by and for spooky people who hide in basements?

Who are you playing with? Kids? Adults? Do you have a regular group? How large is the group? How often are you looking to play, and how long into the night?

What do you like about Catan, TTR, and Carcassonne? What older boardgames did you like before?

Like, I can say if you like the mechanics of TTR and the leveling-up feel of Catan, you should get Splendor... but if you're hungry for just more Catan, with deeper and more elaborate gameplay I'd say jump to Cities and Knights of Catan, the expantion that makes the game level up higher.

Do you love the tile laying of Carcassonne, but want something where you feel like you have more control? Get Kingdomino.

If you love tile laying but want less control and more mayhem, and love the exasperated agony of watching your hard work collapse? Including real-time rushing? Like, ever tried playing Jenga with a chess-clock? If that sounds fun, get Galaxy Truckers.

Want to explore the social side? Have a large group? Resistance Avalon. The game is pure social deduction - figure out who among you are traitors before they take control of the game. If your group is in for black comedy, there's a Weimar Republic themed game that's similar called Secret Hitler.

Ever tried a co-op game? Want something thematic to our modern pain? Pandemic - you and a bunch of specialists run around the world treating cities and hunting for cures.
Private equity usually higher than 1 liquidation preference, and if they have participation rights then it is barely only 1x.
Hmm. Couldn’t they use isotopic analysis to determine where and when someone grew up? Would this also be robust across different planets (if that becomes a thing)?
I didn't dismiss anything, nor did I take the weakest plausible interpretation - I followed up by asking for a clarification.

Anything else you would like my help with?

Edit: Ah! I see now. You're bothered by my response to you the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730545

That's childish. Please, go and play somewhere else.
I can't promise they're underground but...

https://elmc.bandcamp.com/album/melt

https://brainwaltzera.bandcamp.com/album/marzipan-ep

https://analogicalforce.bandcamp.com/album/af005x-voiceless-...

https://rognvald.bandcamp.com/album/lord-rover

https://williamsbraintree.bandcamp.com/album/automaton-2
They can say that, but money is fungible. If operating expenses go up, then raises/bonuses go down.
This is one of those cases where the pandemic saved a company. A few companies like post area and this “uncooked food by mail” companies got saved big time.
Remember JUMP? They were acquired for $200M like, a year and a half ago. As far as I can tell, they don't exist anymore.
Also Flexing Habitual
PROBLEM(S):
I (well, the nonprofit I lead) am trying to solve for the general problem of municipal public policy but, as you might expect, it's a series of discrete, linked problems. Some of these problems have thousands of people focused on a solution; in other areas, it's virtually greenfield.

SOLUTION:
The space doesn't lack for good research and policy recommendations, but it has historically lacked (on the right and left), non-screedy, nonpartisan voices that can be trusted when policymakers look for solutions. We're attempting to fill that space.

WHAT WE WANT:
Ultimately? We want every major American city to work better for the people who live and work there. It'll look different from community to community and our job isn't about applying a cookie-cutter approach. Instead, we want to get a wider range of ready-to-implement tools in front of the decision makers, and educate engaged citizens that solutions exist.
> Her verdict on the long-awaited cereal?

> "The green onion flavour is too mild."

The whole concept of a spicy cereal seems incomprehensible to me, but I _am_ curious now... I've never had anything close. Has anyone here tried this, and would you recommend it?
I was thinking of Job 3:2, which, in some modern English translations is simply rendered “He said:”. But the Hebrew is more complete.
Could just bring along a future copy of the bitcoin blockchain, though as a downside that would potentially give away other information about the future (what people become rich, etc) they may not wish to divulge.
Is that really idiomatic? I don't write much erlang but it seems like that wouldn't work for any code shared between two processes, one transient and one permanent.
There's a lot here beyond just the hacking. Huawei was able to grow so insanely fast because they had access to a blank check and endless credit from the Chinese government. Nortel and others meanwhile had to finance things themselves.

Private companies cannot compete with governments. Governments, especially those with sovereign currencies, can do things that private companies simply cannot do and have pockets far deeper than any private company can ever hope to have. That's why China has won the global game. Everyone else is fielding their star players, sure, but China's star players are all on 'roids in the form of endless government backed credit and many other forms of state backing.

To see an American example, look at American dominance of aerospace. America has stealth fighters, probably a ton of secret stuff responsible for a good number of UFO reports, and rockets that land themselves because the US government backs promising aerospace companies generously. This has been the case since WWII. Lockheed Skunk Works is almost 100% government funded. SpaceX isn't entirely government funded but they've certainly benefited from NASA funding, NASA R&D handholding, and in the beginning got a transfer of IP related to NASA's previous research into low-cost rocket engines. Without all NASA's help I doubt they'd be where they are now.

China is doing this everywhere with everything.
my L5 offer was a half of that (kind of lowball which i naturally didn't take). It looks like i got into what i heard is the "benchwarmers" category as a result of that being the second interview with Google - i.e. they hire those low and put on unimportant, to say the least, projects (and the projects they gave me did look so).

Edit in response to the comment below: it was Bay Area, SWE L5, about 3 years ago, was truly surprised myself. Since that have learnt about couple other people in the acquaintance network who got similar.
We need to go much lower. Down to more manufacturers of POWER9 or RISC-V based systems.
Ask HN: Difference between BPM tools such as camunda and tools such as zapier?
Basically you do that when you play poker. Knowing hand odds, pot sizes, number of players, are all numbers you use to do on the fly calculations and use to aid risk/reward assessment while on the table
Show HN: Build a reading habit with this Telegram bot
Of all the services I've tried in this space, only Postmates lets you request items from businesses they aren't partnered with. This was a huge win once when I needed groceries delivered quickly.
Kent Dodds is so wholesome. Just all around positive and awesome.
I was inclined to disagree with the OP, but if a third of the top board games could reasonably be described as having an occult flavor, they seem connected with reality. That’s high enough that it seems okay to ask for help choosing a game.

Gloomhaven is full of demons and Lovecraftian monsters to fight, by the way, and the player characters use summons and dark magic. Great game; we’re on roughly our 40th play session tomorrow!
I work in healthcare in the US, and using banks to perform auth is a fascinating concept. I also don't see the US ever adopting it due to nuances in American concepts of privacy. We don't mind sharing literally everything with a single entity, but once you get more than 1 entity involved, everyone freaks out. Using banks for auth would also eliminate the wide array of third party auth services, like Auth0. Eliminating the middle-man is very un-American.
And the cost shows how they wasted money. Leather bodysuits are not 1,000,000$ in any currency. And that couldn't possibly have been solid gold. It would be too soft. They paid 1,000,000$ for an off-the-rack fetish outfit and some a gold-plated hand-hammered steel sheet. A live-in designer? Nobody since 18th century royalty has needed a live-in fashion designer.
> “This is plain and simple: Economic espionage did in Nortel,” Shields says. “And all you have to do is look at what entity in the world took over No. 1 and how quickly they did it.”

The definitive book on the collapse of Nortel is 100 Days: The Rush to Judgement that Killed Nortel by James Bagnall, a journalist for the Ottawa Citizen.

Occam’s razor applies here: the well documented fraud and bankruptcy at Worldcom and Global Crossing crushed Nortel. Overzealous regulators delivered the coup de grâce.
Haha, I bought AOL in the late 90's, rode it up 10x, then sold it when it sank back to 1x. A couple stocks I bought augered in so bad they were just removed from my brokerage statements, never to be seen again.
> Participants are still volunteers, not workers, and that's unpleasant work.

For some, learning why world works a certain way is an interesting, even captivating activity. For some others it's an unpleasant work.
Something similar happened to me based on false accusations.
Lately I've started thinking about the current mob justice compared to the protests against police brutality. Logically they are no different.

Both are situations with a skewed power dynamic where innocent people can be harmed.

Often both camps are comprised of the same people who act as judge, jury, and executioner.

That kind of justice goes against what I believe western justice should be about.

For some, the judgement phase lasts much longer than 8 minutes and 46 seconds too...
The most common payroll taxes (social security and Medicare) are paid jointly by the employer and employee. Just saying “it’s a payroll tax” does not imply it went won’t show up on a W2 or be paid by the employee.
I didn't mention parents not being able to teach. I just asked where your assumption for that is coming from.

Just wondering as I haven't heard of this at all in my home country. Homework is usually quite clear, and the basics to get through it are made clear in the classroom. We had separate times for learning maths, and doing exercises.

Have you thought maybe your assumption is based on very very old anecdotal data?
Anyone knowing pascal will have made the jump to C# in 2006, everyone left are quite happy with Pascal, nobodies going to make the jump in 2020 IMHO
I stopped kickstarting games too because I've had like a 10% hit rate.

One clear signal to me now is if they offer additional game mechanics as a stretch goal. It's hard enough balancing the base game and making it compelling. If a designer thinks they can do this not once but twice, and in a modular way no less, I question their design sensibilities in the first place.

It's possible that this is a flaw of kickstarting board games in general. The platform incentivizes stretch goals and they don't map well onto most board games.
Are you talking primarily about the customer-facing apps?

I wouldn't go so far as to call the Uber Eats driver app an "exceptionally better system", it mostly works (modulo some annoying bugs that keep reappearing every few updates) but it's painfully obvious that they don't bother to do any serious QA on it. [They should send Dara out to be a driver for a few days, he'd love it!]
Hmm, not sure how I feel about that YouTube "Skip the sub box!" feature. As subscribing to channels means you are supporting their effort for making contents you like
I love that you're being downvoted for saying something so utterly non-controversial. It's almost as if the fact that there were large matriarchal societies inhabiting America for centuries (arguably millenia) before the first European man set foot on the continent has never been taught to the average HN reader..
Archiving Gallery 2 with HTTrack
Camping de Noetselerberg – Camping Sallandse Heuvelrug
The myth of NoSQL (vs. RDBMS) “joins dont scale”
In the context of language design, the arguments for 0-based indexing rise above bikeshedding.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...

Sure it may not be the most critical point about language design, but it's not just bikeshedding either. For one thing, it is a language semantics issue rather than plainly syntax issue.

I still like Lua, and maybe you don't even agree with Dijkstra's argument, which is also possible to make, but doesn't mean its bikeshedding - which seems to be a totally overused term to basically mean any argument I don't want to have.
The A.I. Of “Creatures”
I think you'd be surprised how profitable late entrants to the space can actually be.

Like you said teaching small businesses is hard, and you need to undercut competition to grow.

Well you don't need to teach someone who has been using grubhub and postmates already.
They're theoretically orthogonal but practically not. You can deduplicate code without abstraction per se, but the result is generally unreadable and unmaintainable. As such, all reasonable code deduplication relies upon abstractions. However, not all abstractions involve code deduplication, and may instead have other goals (such as making it easier to reason about local state, invariants, etc.)

> If you write a new function like `fun addThreeTimes(i) = i + i + i`, I don't see that as a new abstraction at all.

If you only call it once, it's not code deduplication either.

What differentiates addThreeTimes(i) from sqrt(x) or average(x,y) or pow(x,y) or multiply(x,y)? Not how many call sites it has, nor the presence of a dedicated operator to the function in the language. Instead, I'd say: the function's reusability, composability, commonness, ... or to put it another way: addThreeTimes is an "abstraction" - it's just a poor garbage unreusable unremarkable unrememberable abstraction with no expressive power.

However, poor abstractions aren't the only result of overeager code deduplication. Sometimes you end up with "good" abstractions misapplied to the wrong situations - e.g. they solve issues your current problem doesn't actually have. As an example, turning your list of game entities into a list of (id, aabb_f32) tuples might be exactly what you want for a renderer culling or broad phase physics pass - but completely counterproductive for implementing the gameplay logic of a turn based game! If you've already got a list of tuples, you've a few choices:

1. Modify the tuple (add tile position information that's useless to the renderer/physics, muddying the abstraction)

2. De-abstract (e.g. perhaps change several function signatures to pass in the original entity list instead of the AABB list)

3. Re-abstract (perhaps your gameplay logic should take something else that accounts for things like the fog of war instead of a raw list of entities?)

4. ???
I saw someone online saying how they didn't get their ranch with their pizza, so they called up customer service and eventually got a whole new pizza out of the deal.

I understand it sucks to not get your ranch, but come on...
From the link:

Conclusions: Risk stratification-based treatment of COVID-19 outpatients as early as possible after symptom onset with the used triple therapy, including the combination of zinc with low dose hydroxychloroquine, was associated with significantly less hospitalizations and 5 times less all-cause deaths.
Jump bikes still exist. Not sure what you're on about.
Seattle and Washington have historically been all about smaller governments, efficient spending, and no income tax. Even without this new tax, Seattle is overflowing with tax funds from other sources, such as increasing property tax revenues. They’ve been absolutely wasteful with it all, and quality of life in Seattle has deteriorated significantly in the last decade.

Such policies and the politicians who back them are a result of a rush of recent transplants from places like SF, and are not reflective of Seattle’s true culture.
Firefox disabling ALSA after the people that use it most refused to tell Mozilla that they did in fact use it seems like a “leopards ate my face” moment.

Telemetry IS asking their users in a way that scales past putting a random poll in some random forum that only a specific subset of people will ever interact with.

You can have some idealistic view of how feedback should be holistically gathered by “just damn listening to people!”, but this entirely glosses over the specifics of how it will scale and how accurate it will be which is vitally important when you go past 10,000 users.
Have any other sources corroborated this story? Bloomberg News lost a ton of credibility with me after their “The Big Hack” cover story [1], claiming Apple and Amazon had been hacked by chips secretly added to their servers in the factory. The picture of the chip on the cover was purely a work of imagination. To my knowledge, no supporting evidence was ever produced, nor were any of the widespread criticisms of the story ever addressed [2], [3].

To push another “China secretly hacked the west” story while also invoking Betteridge's Law leaves me highly skeptical.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Businessweek#%22The_...
[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/17/bloomberg...