skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> stop doing things

This is what we call raising an exception.

> I add that the desired behavior can always be implemented using regular control flow constructions.

I agree. But that's not a very interesting observation. We added language specific constructs for errors not for the computer but for the human. These constructs make reading and writing code easier and safer.

A code with if-else constructs for every possible error condition is really hard to follow and very brittle. If the result of every error condition is the same (stop doing things) we have developed constructs to make that path easy.

The problem with errors is that understanding and resolving them is often non-local. If a network call fails the code where that fail happens doesn't have enough information to resolve it. If the solution is re-try the entire operation 3 times and then give up, the handling of this error must happen back where the operation starts not some random place in the middle where it actually occurred. Maintaining all the if/else necessary to move that information up through potentially dozens if not hundreds of calls is extremely difficult. And, it turns out, completely unnecessary and easily automated.
Tangentially, biological systematists (aka Taxonomists by some) take the cake: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html.
Is WA open source?? Sorry but I've never heard using the word "maintainer" on a proprietary software, only with open source projects. Usually people call themselves "<software> developer" instead.
Windows has also a good part of C++ and we all know Microsoft's stance on keeping C compilers around.
My failed startup: Why it failed and why I’m releasing all the source code
Erlang concepts of processes, list comprehensions, pattern matching and extremely simple file/socket interfaces just make problem solving a breeze.

There is very little boilerplate and very little in the way of irrelevant details.
Running on the Erlang VM and all the benefits of Erlang aren’t the same thing. Erlang itself is based on a very carefully constructed set of trade offs. You don’t add something without giving up something else.
A bit meta perhaps, but dang’s long-form moderation style is always great, and this is a prime example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15374190
I don't think you understand what class is. I'm familiar with the above story and it is beyond nonsense.

A communal facility maintained and paid for by some people doesn't necessarily have to be made available to anyone else.

If your back garden was in sight of someone living in social housing ought they be able to make use of your property?
Kickstarter, 2013: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/backyardbrains/the-robo...
Only common knowledge can be found on the net. You won’t find institutional knowledge or ‘old’ stuff.
Chess came from India where it was used by the ruling class to learn important skill like emotional management.

As the rulers had all power, it was incredibly very easy for them to get mad at someone and engage in destructive activities. Chess helped the new princes learn emotional management and act better when met with situation like, strategy failing, loss of your resources etc...

Later the game was brought to middle East by Arab traders from where it went to Europe and new world.
Moores law is strictly about transistor count and not performance, it is just that we are only now seeing the two come decoupled.
New Arduino Tutorial for Beginners: Measure Distance Using Ultrasonic Sensor
Recently posted new tutorial how measure distance using ultrasonic sensor and Arduino Uno.

https://lindevs.com/measure-distance-using-ultrasonic-sensor-and-arduino-uno

Please write comments, suggestions, and concerns. New Arduino tutorials is coming!!!
I spent two months on my last project. It only cost about $4 a month to run (lambda). Can you believe that? My boss and users are getting ripped off!!
From the article:

The three study types respectively yielded estimated IQ increases of approximately one point, two points, and five points per additional year of schooling.

And what were the three study types?

Cognitive tests were taken before participants differed in their degree of education (e.g., before some dropped out of high school) and again afterward, sometimes decades later.

A policy change, such as an increase in the mandatory education level, resulted in some students staying in school for longer.

Students who made an age cutoff to begin schooling were compared with students who had not.

So the best study, which tested IQ scores before and after, showed the least improvement, at 1 IQ point. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of education for boosting IQ. I would conclude the opposite of this article. When better studies show smaller and smaller effect sizes that’s a good indicator that there’s probably nothing going on.
Nit: The background-color style on `.lyt-txt label` makes this very difficult to read for me: https://i.imgur.com/XYIH36q.png
The second one has "Gold", and "gold standard" but it does not link the two. The first links the two, but there are a number of sources here and at the least they disagree.
I think you've lost sight of the fact that this entire discussion is constrained to the 4x4 matrices used in computer graphics. How to best invert a matrix of a particular small fixed size is a very different question from how to best invert matrices in general.
> Just to be more pedantic: it did use tail calls, but the recursive calls weren't the tail calls.

I was talking about this code:

def fib(n):
if n =< 0:
return (0, 1)
else:
a, b = f(n-1)
return (b, a + b)

Not sure what you mean by tail calls here. I don't see Python-level tail calls. The interpreter will call C code for tuple packing, but those aren't in tail position with respect to the Python code either.
QOwnnotes is a cross-platform markdown gui app that integrates with NextCloud Notes. https://www.qownnotes.org/
Bitwise Config Flags – Get rid of unnecessary if conditions with esoteric way
Sand is cheap too. What's the price of a Xeon E3? Cheap to make each chip. Those fabs tho...
I saw cpio archives in a .pkg file on mac as recently as last week so yeah very much still in use.
Yes. You're right. I was sloppy with language. To be specific, I think that "human level intelligence" is basically synonymous with "able to think about thinking", and I think to do that, you need symbolic manipulation, and language is the only way we can do symbolic manipulation.
I migrated from Chrome Scratchpad to Google Keep when the former got killed as Google is wont to do.

And I've been pretty happy with it, though I am a simple man with simple needs. My biggest angst with using Keep has been uncertainty over Google's interest in it, they did kill the original note taking app I used, but it's been getting pretty good updates for the past few years. And each note has an "Export to Google Docs" option as a last resort, I suppose.

Keep's simplicity and especially reliability have been golden in my use. Even syncing is almost-real-time between devices. It "just works."
"to no end" means: uselessly, futilely.
'no end" means: endlessly.
Start a new list for things unexpectedly NOT named after people. Silly example "Bilirubin"
A lot of what you list are anti-features:

> Electronic communication allows you to communicate with
the specialist in your field

Which makes it less likely you will communicate with someone closer to your level. The specialist will be inundated, whereas perfectly fruitful conversations with merely competent/slightly expert people will not happen. You are a lot more likely to know the famous experts than you are to know very good people in the field who are right in your (or any) backyard. A dense network of communications will likely generate better ideas than those centered around very few specialists.

> It is constantly available thanks to smartphones.

Time sink spent on sites like the Math stackexchange, etc at all possible hours. With a coffee house, you have a dedicated time, and you cannot utilize it outside of those few hours. This frees up your mind to ponder and create. With "constantly available", you can spend all your time on it.

> If you have a great idea, you can share it immediately,

This is a huge problem for two reasons: 1. It leads to way too many false positives. I reckon most such ideas are flawed, and you would have discovered the flaws if you had waited a few hours/days to share it. 2. Spending the time to curate your idea, formulate it well, etc is much more effective than simply messaging out your half baked idea (even if the idea is a good one).

> You can ask question and get answer within seconds when you are working on your subject.

This is the same anti-feature and is why when I worked in teams where we were colocated, I would keep my IM off at work (sometimes for months at a time). If people wanted to talk to me, they could email me if it's not urgent otherwise they would have to walk to my cube and interrupt me (I don't mind these interruptions). This worked well for 2 reasons: 1. They are much more conscious of interrupting me, so they will think more before deciding to interrupt me. 2: Just that extra physical motion of getting up and walking would be enough for their brains to figure out the solution on the way to my cube.

You could very well argue that some people have the discipline and skills to manage all the problems above. In my experience, they are in a minority, and a smaller proportion of the population can/will manage them compared to the old days.

> But they are now able to take advantage of both electronic and face-to-face communication with a level of expertise older generations don't have, and better manage potential distractions.

Very much disagree on "better manage potential distractions." We have an order of magnitude more distractions, and looking around I see that most people are doing a very poor job of managing them.
The title made it sound like a fly or an ant, but in reality it’s a rather large beetle. It’s neat work though.

For a redteam project, I once made a spy camera that fit in a belt buckle. I’m not sure you’ll need to worry about surveillance implications of insect-mounted cameras; surveillance is already pervasive.
I thought you wrote "fruitflies" R&D and was thinking 1) why are they hating and drosophila and 2) I don't think flies are really a comon model for Nucs BICBW. But then I reread the word...
I believe that the C standard now explicitly supports casting a struct to the type of its first member. I learned the pattern in the late 90s from looking at the gtk project's glib library.

Then I realized I sometimes needed to downcast, so the base struct ended up with a type enum. And then I realized sometimes I wanted to call specialized functions, so I reinvented vtables. To this day I consider C++ an unwieldy over-complicated beast with a specification that is literally too complex for a verifiable implementation, but that brief exercise gave me a sufficient appreciation for the designers of C++ to respect their creation.
There is no correlation between ownership rates and homicide rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

Injecting suicide rates into the discussion is a motte-and-bailey tactic. People make their legal case for regulation by invoking the right not to be murdered as outweighing the right go bear arms, but when confronted with the fact that gun control doesn’t appear to reduce homicides within the US, they shift the goalposts by citing numbers that lump in suicides. But the legal and moral justification for regulating guns to reduce suicides is very different than for homicides.
I appreciate this suggestion.

It can act a journal, as you mentioned but...it's a linear overview of the things churning in your mind. And something great can come out of it but regardless, it helps you in more than one way.

I appreciate the insights and methods you use. I sometimes over-complicate solutions when all that's needed is a catch-all drawer.
Agreed. It's really bizarre that they didn't include even one frame of the transmitted video. It's central to the story.
Thanks for your efforts! It's great to see someone keeping the classic Worms going.

Out of general curiosity, is there anything you can tell us about the source code? What languages are used? How many LOC? Did they use any sort of version control? Whats the build process like?

Were you surprised by any of the ways they were doing things when you first got to see the code?
Israeli doctor reinfected with coronavirus 3 months after recovering
Apologies for the condescension, and with all due respect, building a social network is a bit neo Silicon valley frothy.
The biggest waste of time I've ever seen in my career was when a team put all their backend efforts into migrating their app from The Rails Way to Services, then from Services to Trailblazer, then from Trailblazer to ActiveInteraction. All in the span of two years and without delivering a finished product.

In the end the company just bought a competitor and gave up on the app.

100% agree that doing things The Rails Way is where you reap the benefits.
Not an expert but I thought this one was actually hard to make. Or at least, sufficiently different that tooling up a production line would take time & money, so that the big generic guys couldn't just open the taps. (But I could be wrong here.)

I thought the big Indian manufacturers already just-about ignored patents, these only restrict what can be shipped to the west.
no tree view yet but we do have a graph view: https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron-template/blob/master/va...
The Purpose of Technology
Ditto for cockroaches. I'm curious where those little buggers disappear to when they manage to escape from me.
Our situation is a little unusual in that we didn't participate in the game's creation; Instead, years after the fact, we were entrusted with the source code by the developer company (Team17) so that we could continue maintaining it. The updates are still published by Team17, but almost all programming is done by us. So, I can't think of a more appropriate word.
This is classic example of monopoly pricing. Gilead developed a drug the federal government has minted as special. They can charge whatever they want for it because there's a period of effectively unlimited demand (until a vaccine hits the market), and a very narrow band of supply. Products like this have what you might've learned about in econ 101 as inelastic demand -- the demand for the product remains the same regardless of the price.

They know people and/or insurance companies will pay for it, so why not charge whatever they want while they can?

Of course, there is a very simple way to bring down the price and reduce the overall cost burden to the economy: a price ceiling. The government could just say, "sorry, you can't bring that drug to market unless it's below X dollars".

But the Federal government has been entirely unwilling to exercise its power to enact price controls on drug companies. At the same time, other countries do this all the time, driving up the prices we pay even more. It's insane.
Exploiting Mucosal Immunity for Antiviral Vaccines
Definitely. JPEG2000 uses a wavelet transform instead of the DCT to achieve similar goals.

One way to think of it is your transforming to some other basis. You could do something similar with any vector base change where you go from a dense representation to a sparse one. Think of things like an eigen decomposition where most of the eigenvalues are small or zero and can be ignored
Show HN: Moment for macOS – Every Day Counts
My first interpretation was heveh-side or hevi-side.

I have no idea what the correct pronunciation is. But between you and me, I think we have some viable candidates.
One important thing that's missing is an indication of what scale your oven temperature is at. I'm guessing Celsius, given what numbers I'm getting out of it, but it would really be helpful to specify clearly.
This is the primary reason why I love the .NET stack so much. Not only is a security update almost universally a non-event, but so are major framework revisions.

Updating .NET applications for security concerns in many cases boils down to letting windows update do the thing it should already be doing automatically. In a much smaller portion of cases for .NET Core, a security update is a matter of rebuilding a self-contained deployment and pushing it out to production. Neither of these cases requires editing any code or configuration.

Only in the transition from .NET Framework to .NET Core did we find any appreciable difficulty, and even then it was still within the realm of reasonable. Most of the pain here boiled down to usages of System.Drawing and DirectoryServices, both of which have alternatives that are supported on all platforms. We opted to use the compatibility pack instead, but would be OK if that was removed at some point and had to replace with the other implementations.

We have lots of sourcecode that has withstood the test of time because of these technology choices. Many files are completely unchanged since .NET Framework 4.5 was released and now running flawlessly on top of .NET Core 3.1. This is the only reason we are still in business right now.

I ended my journey with NodeJS (and AngularJS on the same day) when I attempted to update all of my packages after just a month of inactivity. Seeing the resulting pile of nonsensical dependency graph trash in my console may have radicalized me into using more "enterprisey" solutions when writing software that I might get put on pager duty for.
Why it’s hard to kill the Bloomberg terminal (2019)
Everyone collectively wants to, we just can’t decide how.

Half the population wants the post-capitalist, ecologically sound, anti-racist path forward.

The other half wants to lean hard into capitalism and traditional civil liberties (“freedom to” not “freedom from”) with an emphasis on innovating our way to the future and out of our current problems.

The post-capitalists look too much like communists to be trusted by the freedom folks, and the freedom folks look too much like history’s economic oppressors and robber barons to be trusted.

Historically these divides take a long time dissolve (unless there is a bloody conflict and clear winner).
USA spends very little money on military as a percentage of GDP while being the most powerful force in history.
I would argue that that money is very well spent.
Robots turn into cheerleaders in Japan baseball games
Sorry I misread your comment!
It’s based on a tweet from tech reviewer MKBHD, the link is in the footer of the site.
Doesn't the video in the article show this? Here's the video: https://youtu.be/115BGUZopHs
I doubted that as well, but I don't think it is--at least it's not a simple copy paste. There's an emphasis on _is_ in the last sentence which I don't think the algorithm could have generated.

However that makes one wonder if it can also learn to generate emphases, and if so, how would it format? With voice generation it can simply change its tonality but with text generation it has to demarcate it in some way--does the human say "format the output for html", for instance?
if we collectively wanted to

I suspect that collectively, we actually DO want to; we've just ended up with social and political systems, both domestic and international, that conspire against actually managing to do anything serious about it, like some prisoners' dilemma played out on a grand stage.
Ideas 0001 – Design service for small digital agencies
In a professional context I couldn't agree more. However for a hobby project I couldn't disagree more. Implementing safe down-casting (up is trivial), dynamic dispatch, encapsulation, and other OO(ish) features is an absolutely wonderful learning experience. Like most first attempts, it will probably be a mess as you say, but there can be a joy in making a mess of things so long as you're not inflicting it on the unsuspecting.
What a ridiculous thing to focus on. They also cite tweets by DHS and White House leadership. Trump has repeatedly commented himself about how he has directed federal law enforcement to operate in Portland.

If that's not enough for you, what exactly is? Is it hard to believe that someone who openly admires every authoritarian in the world and has repeatedly tweeted authoritarian threats would support this?
The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys
Sure that's what they would say. They may even believe it themselves. So in a way it can be said to be true!

But you know, we don't need to base our perception on their perception. We can look at the pattern and say: "they sure like to reward their buddies regardless of company performance."
Needed by whom? Why does someone who can't afford the prices deserve cheap housing downtown?
If only you eliminated tail calls, then you would be in looping bliss.
The military spent $80 million sponsoring sports events in 2012. That's a lot more than a color guard.
Yelp+ for hospitals with procedural cost information, reviews etc.
Healthcare in US is notorious for having opaque medical expenses involving multiple parties and resulting in jaw dropping prices for trivial procedures.

The solution? Arm patients with easy to access historical information of procedures at each hospital with user submitted price information, ratings etc. Integration with insurance provider to personalize patient decision making on which hospitals are within network and which ones aren't, expected out of pocket expenses etc. Include foreign hospitals as well, and this becomes a platform that forces competitive pricing and efficiency in healthcare.

A new law that the US Govt. has passed also mandates hospitals to release information regarding costs for procedures, which is another potential point of integration to improve the pricing dataset.

Long term, this could be the single source of healthcare decision making and planning. Planning to have a kid? This is how much you need to save. Have a family history of heart conditions? Save up to $x in HSA etc. by the age of 40.

What do you guys think?
It's still now clear how small rounding change results with NaN. It would be understandable if some triangle would be off by one pixel on AMD and probably not noticeable.

So far it looks like a CPU bug which produces NaN on some input.
Between Apple Notes, private git repo, and sending myself links via email... this problem is solved forever for me.
My impression is that these models are already doing far more than what the language production machinery in our brain does. We are able to produce language according to grammar and semantics, but we also have independent mental representations to guide the generation of language and to provide context.

I don't really understand why we're trying so hard to build models that can generate coherent texts based on having predigested only other texts, without any other experience of reality. Their capabilities appear already superhuman in their ability to imitate styles and patterns of any kind (including code generation, images, etc.). It feels like we're overshooting our target by trying to solve an unsolvable problem, that of deriving the semantics of reality from pure text, without any other type of input.
Samsung runs their own CA with a long expiration, so at least they aren't affected by trust store issues. Amazon had an issue with this on Kindles though, if you didn't online update your Kindle in time, you have to do an offline update -- i think that one might have been sha-2 signatueres rather than a CA expiration though --- not sure.
Answer: organise a “hide and seek” flash mob, apparently.
Once they get it down to flying insects, would it be possible to deploy a swarm of these (thousands) and use positioning data to generate high resolution 3D imagery?