skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programming is almost always conducted in English, even if the application itself as well internationalized and can be used from different languages. Even API documentation is almost always written in English regardless of the country of origin of the author. The only exception I can see to this rule is programs and docs written in China.

Everywhere else, it's reasonable to assume that if you're a programmer, you speak English and likely have an English keyboard. This may not be fair, but it is the state of affairs.

You likely own a US keyboard not only for the parentheses problem, but because of all sorts of English isms throughout all code -- alphanumerics, urls, etc are all in Latin script. It's like German in the field of mathematics in the 19th century.
that's not the same thing at all
Why not be the agent of karma? Someone’s gotta do it, most likely.
I spent a month figuring out a single line of configuration. That really hurt.
>Are studies of this sort still being done, perhaps privately at Fb or other social networks?

According to my facebook feed they said no, they don't do anything unethical. To be serious though this is pretty scary. The power these companies have to manipulate society is not understood by much of society.
Check out Public Rec’s Men’s All Day Every Day pants. Similar style, $30/pair cheaper.

https://publicrec.com/products/all-day-every-day-pant-inseam...
You summarised almost perfectly my gripes with Go. Thank you. Just to add one: any type has a "zero values" as a default value, and the compiler doesn't force you to initialize stuff. That single misfeature caused basically all of my grey hair, and I'm still young.
Yes, I understand. The parent is still correct. You can buy splitters that strip HDCP.
The popularity compared to what? How do the numbers stack up?
You can always stop upgrading and join the python2.7 crowd (apparently not as big as it appeared it would be a few years ago).
> Show of hands, who looks around today at the biggest challenges and problems we face, the ones that affect the greatest numbers of people the most perniciously, and that need swift & decisive solutions at almost any cost, and concludes that they're the ones having to do with foreign students being in the country taking online classes?

I'll bite despite your total lack of empathy.

The rule change was brought in by ICE, an administrative arm of DHS, on its own accord with a desire to use humans as bargaining chip to help Trump's inhuman agenda. Not by congress, not by Trump.

Since the problem was created by ICE in the first place, the onus is on them to fix it.

Now if you would've said the same thing last week when ICE actually brought this rule change abruptly, I would've agreed with you. Why bring unnecessary nonsense rules in the middle of a pandemic?
Well, dev-oriented projects by Google and Facebook fair well...
Could you elaborate on this point for someone who isn't familiar with typescript (or javascript, for that matter). I'm no stranger to strongly typed languages but that function signature seems pretty complex to me. By elaborate I mean explain what's going on in that signature, and what the critical information it supplies is?
This. I know C, C++ implementations are efficient but to see python implementation of this makes it lot easier to understand.

> You don’t implement any code to do the actual decompression and decoding

This is also true in case of face recognition. Nobody tells you internals and just tells you to use tools like OpenCV. Maybe it's too complicated but a post like OP's for face recognition would be a treat!
I would think that would be a knock against it with the reputation of Google abandoning projects.
Yes! I stopped building working prototypes because of this misconception.
type of cool stuff
I'm commenting primarily because I agree with fao_ that it's sad nobody's commenting on this post. Bottom line: the Lambda Papers (of which this is one) are a true achievement in programming languages. Before these papers, there was a belief that lambda calculus was of theoretical interest only. Various interpreting automata (of which the SECD machine is probably the best known) were seen as too inefficient to be of practical use. Steele and Sussman demonstrated in the papers that procedure application subsumes many features of sequential programming languages, including assignment, GOTO, and object-oriented programming (the original plan was to build an actor language, until they realized that procedure application gives objects), and that you can build an efficient interpreter or compiler for the full lambda calculus. Anybody interested in programming languages can benefit from reading them.
As it stand today, there is some elegance in its simplicity, but the lack of generics makes it unergonomic to write libraries. It's a good language to build applications, though.

This is less to do with the language and more about the standard library, but it has tons of cross-platform quirks that I feel aren't handled well. For example, Rust's standard library makes cross-platform work less footgun-filled, IMO.
Has there been discussion on just creating a golang managed collections library that's generic and not adding general generics into the language?
Reducing flakiness of your automation test cases
I would hesitate to use this robot for dishes. Maybe sorting laundry but not folding them. And I don't know if it can actually set the table fast enough.

You'd be surprised at how much dexterity and precision all these things need. I doubt this robot can handle that.
>On the keyboard layouts of many countries these keys aren't accessible at all, either missing entirely or only being accessible via unergonomic key combinations

Not really relevant, as we're talking about keyboards and setups used by programmers.

If they don't know how to change the layout in English to program, then perhaps they're not fit for the job.

(Non ASCII/US programmer here).
Google rolling their own replacement for TCP and HTTP is a disappointment. Their own benchmarks indicate they get maybe 10% more performance on a good day. All this comes with a huge increase in complexity. Which means more bugs.

The "solution" to bugs today is forced updates. Vendors love being able to forcibly impose whatever they want to do on the user. Turn off features, put in more ads, whatever. If software was reliable enough, nobody would upgrade, which damages the business model. It's so convenient that software seems to need constant "security updates".
But you weren’t criticizing actions in your posts...
FOSS and Crafts Podcast
Interesting footnote from the Wikipedia article on Malaysia My Second Home:

"On July 2, Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture Nancy Shukri announced that the MM2H programme has been temporarily frozen until December 2020 for review and further improvement."
Malware stashed in China-mandated software is more extensive than thought
Ars Technica: Malware stashed in China-mandated software is more extensive than thought.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/malware-stashed-in-china-mandated-software-is-more-extensive-than-thought/
I explicitly supported protecting the high risk populations when I said it's up to us to shape our behaviors.
I like this one. I would add "We most likely overpaid by a lot."
Amazon’s new smart shopping cart lets you skip the checkout lines
I never once thought of rebooting my computer. I always buy a new computer. Thanks.
Move the video preview top of the screen, center screen. As close to the cam as possible.
That sounds more like fuzzy inference rather than prediction.
Funny how we add 100 new emoji per year, and yet we can't seem to be able to add a new matching pair of characters in our keyboards for 5+ decades...
It's reasonable to assume that you speak English, but not so reasonable to assume that you have an English (US or UK, for example) keyboard. Basically all of us have keyboard with Latin letters, that are perfectly up to the task of writing "normal" English, but the seldom used braces and brackets are behind some alt-gr shenanigans.

Yes, they are symbols that are used in many programming languages. No, it's not reasonable to assume that they are easy to type for all of us.
Java has genetics and it is many times more popular than Go. I'm not sure absolute adoption of Go is a good way of divining programmers opinions on genetics.
That's even worse in terms of creating more questions. Did every employee pay for their part? Did the company pay for it? How does this even work?
Lies, damn lies, and front-end tracking
> Such bullshit. Since when we use UDP for a CRUD service ? Since when SCTP is even considered outside of the telecom world?

You're making a strawmam out of this. I'm responding to the following:

"while I have developers that have written full Node.js sites and dont know that IP or a Port, or TCP, UDP, is..."

But thank you for the insult.

> HTTP and Rest-like API have been able to handle properly simple CRUD API since 20 years without problems, way before gRPC was even a thing.

Hm, what are you talking about? Are you talking about the client? Are you talking about a load balancer? I don't think anyone is proposing that a simple static blog use gRPC to serve content to its users.

> But in 99% of the case, yes it's an overkill.

Compared to what? I'd argue that CRUD over HTTP is wrong. In fact, folks have been writing CRUD over TCP for ages. Why do we need to massage CRUD syntax over HTTP when we can just stream requests and responses over TCP? In fact, TCP predates HTTP by 20 years, so if you're using the historical argument, raw TCP is even older. How much bullshit is there around AJAX and Websockets and HTTP multipart and HTTP keep-alive when we're just trying to recreate TCP semantics?

So why are you drawing the line at HTTP? Seems arbitrary to me.
> tool like grpcurl

Not available in any repositories and largely unknown to general masses (much like gRPC itself).

Personally I like gRPC and sometimes use it in projects. But the author is right — attempting to gradually replace an existing HTTP API via gRPC API is like replacing horses with genetically modified cows. You need a very... corrupt mindset to ever attempt anything like that.
> I think the day we can import braces from __future__ might not be far away.

Behold, bython: https://github.com/mathialo/bython
That looks cool. Too bad there's not a Linux version. I suspect you could code a screenshot every 10 seconds in bash pretty easily anyway.
This struck me too. Writing code on an Icelandic keyboard is an awful experience.
IMO the ideal setup would be for an article to contain pseudocode and to have supplementary executable code. This would allow the article to explain concepts without boilerplate and unnecessary details, but also ensure that those details are available for readers who wish to investigate further.

I still think it's an advantage to write the executable code as close to pseudocode as possible.

There is further discussion of pseudocode vs executable code at https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/140986.
Explains why they ignore the obvious violations and still publish the app in their store. Seems like a major conflict of interest.
> BBB

The Better Business Bureau is non-governmental and has no authority to do anything.
Is tracking prevention just builtin adblock?
This may be unpopular, but I already feel the earth is well beyond it’s ideal human population capacity. We are straining resources because of our bad policies and practices and politics.
Shamelessly pitching our own small satellite project that can run mission of your choice:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exodusorbitals/nova-a-c...
Note that these are wireless ISP’s. They put a directional antenna on your roof, and aim it at an omnidirectional antenna on a hill. This is similar to starlink, but with lower latency (to the tower/satellite).

I agree that the speeds are awful on an absolute scale, but they’re competing with entrenched monopolies that own legal right of ways that will never be developed. This lets them prevent competitors from running fiber.

Starlink is attacking the same ridiculous regulatory problem. Why build an entire reusable launch infrastructure and custom satellites when laying fiber is dirt cheap? Heck, Facebook says they have a robot that will piggy-back 2km of fiber over existing power lines in a day!

In California, deploying the robots would mean getting PG&E to cooperate, but I could see it helping out in other states.
I haven't used Go but I'm curious, how do core data structures like hash maps work without generics? Does everyone just roll their own for their particular use-case?
I wonder whether mobile-friendly plain HTML would be better received than scanned pages. I have to admit skipping a lot of PDFs, and now wanting to search and skim just to see if a reader in 2020 is still likely to learn anything new from this seminal work.
I made that comment once about "Soylent". (Remember Soylent? The nutritional drink?) That company made a big deal about their "tech stack". Not for manufacturing or quality control, but for ordinary web processing. Their order volume was so low that a CGI program on a low-end shared hosting system could do the job. But they were going to "scale", right?

Amusingly, they eventually did "scale". They started selling through WalMart in bulk, and accepted their fate as yet another nutritional drink, on the shelves alongside Ensure Plus and Muscle Milk. Their "tech stack" was irrelevant to that.
> Every visitor is encouraged to take a COVID-19 test 72 hours prior to their departure and bring the results with them to present upon arrival.

Ha! Where in America can you get the results of a COVID test in 72 hours?
Potentially. I think we'll see another explosion in population IF a cause it's addressed. What those causes may be is not yet fully identified.
Elder care is a pressing issue, but in general isn't this good news?
Grant Imahara Dies at 49
Summary/details are very difficult to style. You can approximate it using some hackery with a checkbox and sibling selectors. Here's an example that I was working on recently: https://smichel17.gitlab.io/donate

Source is here: https://gitlab.com/smichel17/smichel17.gitlab.io/-/blob/mast...

Note: accessibility is still WIP, because the toggle is not selectable with the keyboard. Should be solve-able though by hiding the checkbox via different means than `display: hidden` (ie, so the checkbox is visually hidden but still keyboard-selectable).
Sorry for the slow response. A few days have gone by, but your reply still demands a response I feel.

I was vague about helping others on purpose because experience has made me wary of claiming that I know what's good or moral. Fundamentally I would only claim to know better than evolution in two cases: 1) Jeopardizing the ecosystem/biosphere (because it would be suicide). 2) The need to get off this planet before it gets eaten by the sun (because I don't think evolution properly accounts for this). That's not to say that I claim to be amoral. Rather, in the name of humility, I'd stop at the definition: Being productive in a responsible way - guided by the two points above.
My reason for this is that, in my experience, the worst consequences of human behaviour stem mostly from indifference, whatever the intention may be. And the promise of having a positive impact often makes people as blind to terrible consequences as the opportunism often associated with selfish behaviour.
So I tend to limit how I express myself in this regard, because I think it's more honest.
Being a statement is less of an issue than the special behavior of the trailing comma, '>>' token, and the inability to augment behavior with named arguments. The lexer shouldn't have to deal with that sort of stuff.
Sqlite's definitely high in the running (https://sqlite.org/). Feels like as much thought and care went into the documentation as the software itself.
The Darkest Material in the World
One of the benefits of Go is super fast compilation time. Unlimited look ahead is likely to make the compiler slower. Ergo, it’s not a great idea.
How many of those emoji are on your keyboard?
> The researchers warn against undoing the progress on women's education and access to contraception.

Interesting...
I think the article is "CAN THINGS BE BOTH POPULAR AND SILENCED?", archive link https://perma.cc/9XBH-VQT9
You're saying that as if it's not true

How many languages are there released by advertising companies?

Just to show the influence, python was an obscure programming language until Google started using it.
More succinctly: https://xkcd.com/810/
Yes and no. if you look at the date though the places with the most "abundance" or wealth is where the fertility rate is collapsing. It is largely down to that wealth that people are having less children.
As I understand it, the language spec is designed so that compile-time specialization is possible but not required. It could be some mixture of both.
You have emoji on your keyboard?
This is exactly what I was thinking.

It's not editorializing. It's framing a discussion of a certain part of a web page that is not an article by using a title that is a factual statement about said web page. The obvious "workaround" is to publish some low-effort tweet or blog post or whatever, which further muddies the waters re: the other "guideline" which says you should submit primary sources if possible.

I get wanting to take a hard line on titles, but I think the "guideline" as written is confusing. The bit about editorializing should be taken out, to make it clear that actual editorializing isn't precisely what's prohibited.
Not for the economy
It may be unpopular, but I agree 100%.

I don't want people to suffer unnecessarily. But the more people we add to the planet, the more we exacerbate problems with food, water, Co2 emissions, etc.

In the end, something will curtail human population growth. I really hope it's voluntary and painless.
Regardless of whether accusations of spying are true, I think these moves (including pulling out of Hong Kong) will do nothing. The politicians and a large part of the public have already decided Tiktok is guilty, with no way to prove innocence. A ban is just a matter of time.
There's a short-term problem of society becoming "top-heavy", where there might not be enough young to pay for the continued care of the old. But in the long run this seems like a win. I wonder what impact it might have on climate projections.
I really like the syntax used to declare generic type parameters to functions in ML-type languages like F#.

Writing the below in other languages (pseudocode) feels repetitive in the same way that `Thing thing = new Thing()` did back before `var` or `auto` types became popular:

list<Y> Map<X, Y>(list<X> inputs, X->Y mapping)

Why do I need to put <X, Y> in brackets after Map? To tell the compiler that these are generics, not attempts to reference actual specific types that just happen to have crappy, nondescript names like X and Y.

In F# and friends, there is no need to put a bracketed block declaring which types are generic parameters. I would simply write:

let map (inputs: list<'x>) (mapping: 'x -> 'y) : list<'y> = ...

The little apostrophe or tick mark before the type name tells the compiler it's a generic type parameter. It's not legal to name a concrete type with a leading tick mark, so there can be no mix-up. At first it looks ugly, but once you are used to it, it is natural and less cluttered than having to have these separate bracketed declarations for "uh-oh, here comes a generic".

But I suspect Go will always want more explicit syntax for generics. In part out of backwards compatibility, but largely because Go's designers see generics as an advanced, occasionally useful feature. Correspondingly they'll want the presence of a generic function to have ugly syntactical warning signs: here be dragons.

Functional languages usually take the opposite approach and see a fully generic function as less complex than one for a specific type, because just by looking at its signature, you know it doesn't require anything special about the input objects it's going to work on. It is not going to be calling methods on them or messing with their guts. It's just treating them as black-box, could-be-anything cards to be shuffled around from point A to point B.
That reminds me of the original Unix philosophy: programs should succeed silently, issuing (error) messages only on failure. You had to add a --verbose flag to get it to tell you what it had done.

I'm not sure how it arose, but one observation is even in the beginning the Unix world was full of shell scripts. If every command that shell script ran was chatty, the average shell script would overwhelm you very quickly with noise.
For the planet? Yes. For people who have priorities other than child rearing? Yes. For economies based on endlessly borrowing from the future, overleveraging, and fractional reserve lending, most definitely not. The economy will have to adapt, as the decline curve is locked in the longer the fertility rate is below replacement rate.

This is, overall, splendid news. Commendable this was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I agree with the format change, but I don't think people in 2020 are inherently more informed than people in the past. It depends on the individual to put their mind to work and allocating time, and the culture that they surround or grow around themselves that dictates what they're exposed to.

For example, you can say that most people these days are exposed to stuff about quantum physics, and indeed they probably 'know more' than people did in the past. But in reality the majority of what people are exposed to (if they are at all) and the majority of what is accessible to a layman, are parodies and crude misunderstandings of the science itself.

We're mostly the same old people we've always been. Much of the social problems we struggle with and arguments we have are hundreds of years old, and we're still struggling with things, like treatment of racism, perception of gay and trans people, that were thought to be eradicated in the 1970s. Because at the end of the day, schools won't teach people how to notice and pick apart their cultural upbringing and blind spots, it's something that you have to teach yourself, if people bother to do that anyway.

And nobody, not even on this site, seems to be willing to pick up the academic literature on the subjects that they expound on. A lot of the "SJW" material posted to this site gets harsh criticism and debate, and a lot of it is only basic 101 material, stuff you teach to undergraduates.

Arguably, around worker's rights people are less educated than they were in the past, with regards to social organization. In the UK most working class people have forgotten that strikes are the only way we obtained the right to vote for working class people (in the 1800s, all working class people were unable to vote) or any rights at all. In the US, people have forgotten that workers used to protest by dismantling the houses of the people in charge. So it's funny to see people have opinions on these sorts of things on this website, not even aware that their ancestors took more drastic and more effective measures.
I feel like this is becoming a very crowded market. What sort of differentiation separates this service from the pack?

For my purchasing decision, I’d lean heavily on the probability the service will be there in 5 years (it’s obvious I’m getting older I guess), as the market seems pretty mature.
another chicken little article. worthless speculation about the future. who knows what will happen if the population declines. one thing is for certain though. it will be a positive for the environment. at some point the ponzi scheme, infinite growth society must have it’s day of reckoning
Thanks again for the detailed response.
Why does it seem like a win?
Yes for the planet and yes for the human race too, overpopulation leads to all sort of problems

The economy should adapt not the other way around
What is your estimate on the Earth's ideal human population and what is it based on?
How to write technical posts so people will read them (2019)