skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Strong opinions, weakly held" makes sense in exactly one situation:
When you are definitely an expert in a topic you should have your strong opinions about it.

But since everybody is sometimes wrong about something, and that should be very seldom in the expert case, you should be able to let go of one of your opinions, in case you get counter-arguments.
Not sure where I heard it but: "No decision is a decision."
IE Decide to put off your decision until later.

People agitating for everyone to "voice their opinion now" are often looking to form a mandate from those opinions.
Xinjiang’s situation didn’t start in a day, and neither did Hong Kong’s. We’ve been watching HK boiling for the past year and things have finally overflowed. It’ll only get worse from here. America is following a similar course. Massive detention camps for citizens aren’t a problem yet because they haven’t been built. But people are being picked up and who knows what’s happening, journalists are being arrested just for reporting the facts, people are being shot and permanently injured or killed just for standing by the protests. And while not intended for citizens, America already has detention camps in use, but we’re exempt from them for the moment (although some citizens are being rounded up [1]). It’s not impossible or even difficult for the feds to decide to take problem A and solution B and say, hey, we can apply this method here.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/07/23/us/u...
Nostalgia Reimagined
It's my understanding that the actual propulsion of a nail is no more powerful than a powder actuated tool, which use cartridges similar in power to the very small .22LR
There seems to by multiple different types of material incorporated, and I'm not sure that would work in a blade, where it's really the tip/edge that comes into contact.
World’s first independently developed supersonic jet
> Water is ... a mild solvent

I remember, when I was a child I asked my parents (both are chemists), about what the most powerful solvent is. To my suprise they answered: water.

Wow, that can be true, it is everywhere, I tought...

It is somewhat a point of view question, considering that there are different categories of solvents - it is like asking a biologist about the most dangerous animal: human - of course! But that can't be true, humans are everywhere and I'm still alive.

These kind of suprises happens if you do not specify the questions exactly (Dangerous to what and how? Solving exactly what kind of things?)

edit: it is natural to think, that something is mild and friedly (in general) - if you are made of that...
This might give you language around the value of the position you're staking (esp "high-confident grays"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrRRvqgYgT0

Tools that cultivate more position-taking of this sort, that's what I firmly believe is part of healing the world we've thoughtlessly created through digital mediation of everything.
It's nonsense, written because Joel had never used a language with a decent type system. Any Haskell programmer uses half a dozen non-leaking abstractions before breakfast. Even the examples in the post itself don't hold up - using UDP instead of TCP doesn't actually mean your program will work any better when someone unplugs the network cable.
It's one of those weird swirly gradient things, not really my cup of tea, but it looks _a lot_ better animated, on the page than the still.

https://stripe.com/, though I don't suppose anyone is going to have difficulty finding the stripe homepage.
Being decisive has nothing to do with a strong opinion.

It does bring up one of my issues with these pop philosophies. So many people interpret them differently while claiming to have the exact same interpretation.
I love the article!

My only advice is to end with a list of maximum entropy distributions to showcase the many applications of this theory. I often refer to such tables when I have varying constraints and want the best choice for representing the spread of the data.

See the table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_entropy_probability_di...
Ipe is an amazing material. Found a lot of prefinished ipe flooring at a habitat for humanity store a few years back and did the top floor of the townhome I had at the time in it. Really beautiful and very resilient. It's become hard to find in tongue and groove flooring lately. Abundant for decking though.
A state where the government always servers corporate interests becomes indistinguishable—in all functional matter—from a state where all corporations are state controlled.
Seconded. This could have been written by Churchill.
Thank you very much! Great idea!!
I think the author means recovering the hash by using dictionary attacks
It doesn't belong in the same way that Debian doesn't.

The good ones in the list are good because they are not obviously a name of a person, the name of the thing makes sense independently to it being named after a person.

"Lake Mountain" could easily be named that because it is a mountain with a lake, so it is interesting that Lake Mountain is named after someone named Lake; Adidas and Debian are unexpected simply because they don't look like the name of a person, or anything else!
Last night rioters broke into and set fire to the Portland Police Association offices.

Going all the way back to May 29th, protesting has morphed into rioting on a nightly basis. Rioters have fired guns and hit bystanders. "The rioters and looters shattered store windows and tagged buildings with graffiti that police say stretched for 20 blocks." "Demonstrators broke into and started a fire inside the Multnomah County Justice Center, home to hundreds of inmates." "Other protesters set fires throughout downtown, torching dumpsters, trash cans, cars and pallets." -- That was all May 29th.

Here is timeline of the first 12 days. It's much the same every night. [1]

I believe it's Day 50+ now.

[1] - https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/protests/protests-in-...
There was a long time when Stripe was taking a significantly higher transaction fee than most other merchants for cc transactions yet there still was fervent developer push to use it anyways (Note, this hasn't been true for a few years and was only true during the first year or two of Stripe's life).

People made all kinds of rationalizations to themselves for using stripe at a much higher cost simply because they didn't want to spend a couple more hours using crappier API's or digging through crappier API documentation.

It made no sense to me at the time because while Stripe was nice, it was usually only a matter of a couple hours/days to implement any of the other big payment processors of the time. I guess that shows what the power of cultish developer zeitgeist can do.
Nacchio was convicted by a jury of insider trading. I dont see how the NSA could have arranged that. And he did not deny making the trades.

I'm not saying yout wrong, just that Nacchio is not a good example.
Title corrected - Web application system design for advanced beginners
Open Source DIY face mask with voice visuals
People with hidden immunity against Covid-19
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23766503
Reminds me of Stephen King novels.
Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" - I missed this being a thing. Seems like terrible wording for something that already had english words.

Science.
Devils Advocate.(although this is not obviously a better phrase...)
Yes, in fact we have ourselves published a few open source packages out of the need we had to build them.

The latest incarnation of this problem, was when we had to validate RUT codes (a tax code with a checksum we use here in Chile). Options for Python [1], options for Node [2], options for elixir [3] (don't mind to click, it's a list with nothing to do with RUTs or modulo11 validations). So we had to implement it ourselves. Looking for information we found example implementations [4], where as you can see you have example implementations even for Asterisk Dialplans (!!) but no mention of Elixir.

[1] https://pypi.org/search/?q=rut
[2] https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=rut
[3] https://hex.pm/packages?search=rut&sort=recent_downloads
[4] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Implementaciones_para_al...

There are many more examples. Of course you get libraries for the "standard" stuff, it is when you get into the detailes, and that happens when you are already too deep into your project, that you realise all the missing pieces.

Also, what code editor do you use? we've tried everything, and seems the best option is you grow a beard and go emacs/vim. The VSCode plugins hog your laptop and are really inconsistent, incomplete and sluggish [1] [2].

[1] https://github.com/JakeBecker/elixir-ls/issues/54
[2] https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/issues/96

Of course there is no IDE similar to intellij, rubymine or pycharm.
Better Type Casting for PHP
AKA Militant Agnosticism
"The server is temporarily unavailable".

Wonder if it's written in Pharo.
> Nacchio was convicted by a jury of insider trading. I dont see how the NSA could have arranged that.

I'm not sure what part of identifying the jurors, finding pressure points, and covertly applying pressure you think would be beyond the capabilities of the NSA if they wanted to do it. Or doing the same to Nacchio and/or is counsel, to affect the case that got to the jury.

Not (even a little bit) suggesting that is what happened, just that suggesting it is plausible for the NSA to be able to influence that kind of outcome is not even a tiny stretch.
I tend to suffer from this, only in the _other_ dirrection, in that I forget when I give something or I add something or I help with something or I forget conflicts with people and slights reeal easy. My mistakes and failures, I remember vividly. Does that set me up for anti-success I wonder?
Breaking up monopolies like Twitter may not work. They must be subjected to heavy regulation. They must not censor/block/shadowban any account or tweet. They must open their entire operation to APIs at reasonable costs. They must allow interoperability with any other Twitter clone, tweets from everywhere should be visible across all Twitters.

Follow all this, or pay $1M/day compounding fine.
I agree. Dijkstra et al. always pushed (as early as in the 1960s) that resources used at abstraction level n should be effectively invisible at level n + 1. Anything else is an improperly designed abstraction.

Of course there's always the thermodynamic argument that "any subprogram has the permanent and externally-detectable side effect of increasing entropy in the universe by converting electricity to heat" but that is to me a bit of a Turing tar-pit of an argument.
The whole point of forgetfulness is to have less “memory” to trawl when making decisions.

Notes are the worst kind of memory with the highest seek latency.

I am in the business of making good choices - not remembering when, where, how and why I learned the lesson.
I believe they also built a in-house main website, so that the entire company was on the same page on things. It seems like what they are very goo dat, and I think this resonates well with developers, is providing a delightful experience. This goes a long way with enjoying using the product, and you can tell they really care about what they present out to the world.
Execution is key.
> constant camera exposure

Sure, just take an image and color the night part completely black. Street lighting is around 10 lux -- sunlight is 100,000 lux.
Don't miss proPagate the plant!
I separate academia from science. They are orthogonal constructs.
I've always been this kind of person, opinionated but backed by reasons, and most people find it abrasive. There's nothing I like more than having someone change my opinion, because that means they taught me something. The catch is, most people are either unwilling to teach such an opinionated person, or have nothing of value to teach.
Pharo has been distancing itself from the word "Smalltalk" pretty much since day one. This is not surprising at all.
My company used to be like that, but was acquired last year and the company that acquired us has such a refreshing travel process:

- Booking fees are itemized and stated up front. $3 for bookings handled 100% via the online reservation system, $25 if you ever have to talk to an actual agent.

- The online reservation system shows publicly listed rates as well as negotiated rates, and you're free to choose what you want within policy. The negotiated rates were virtually never the cheapest, but they also tended to come with a lot more flexibility (i.e. no change fees, refundable up to time of departure, 24 hour cancellation of hotel reservations, etc).

Those two aspects, combined with the fact that the travel would ultimately be booked to your card on file anyway (generally a corp card for anyone traveling frequently), pretty much negates any incentive to go outside of the official travel system. Depending on the trip and your travel budget, you can either go with the riskier but cheaper options or go with the more flexible but also more expensive options. The default booking fee is tiny enough to be understandable, and the incremental $22 fee ends up well worth it in the situations you need to call the travel team's 1-800 number to get you out of a bind.

The old system didn't bother me much as I was used to it being The Way Companies Are. But after being spoiled here, I dread the day I end up in another travel-heavy job and have to go back to the more typical Big Corp travel process.
It is not impossible, you are right. But he admitted to placing the trades.

How do you explain?
Too much color ends up overwhelming. I can find the red circle super quick because it's the only red thing in a sea of black and white.

But I like the idea of going beyond syntax. Maybe a way to get the best of both worlds would be to have keyboard shortcuts that toggle cycle through different views. Press this shortcut to color-code types, press this other one to color-code error handling, etc.

Also, maybe other visual depictions might be useful. Maybe parentheses could start off very tall and get slightly shorter as you go a layer inward. Or add a 3D/depth shading effect so that code each level of parens literally looks like a level. Or whatever else you can think of, the point being that it doesn't have to be color.
Show HN: Currency, a Go package to do currency computations
This kind of nibbles at the edges of the longstanding question: Whether source code is best represented as a linear document.

Because historically, that was true for the obvious reasons of pragmatism; you could put it on a punchcard, print it to paper, save it to a file all using the same character encoding and rendering methods, and when we went to interactive editing that didn't change: half of the joy of plaintext is that you can select, copy, paste, search and modify in mostly standard ways across many tools.

Syntax highlighting is incrementally in line with this paradigm since there's only one syntax for the language(syntax extension and mixed-language documents aside) and it too follows a linear order, although it also recognizes that an AST exists. But as you get into stuff like code folding, Intellisense and other IDE-like features, deviations emerge. More of the selections deal with symbolic meanings(declarations, types) and not really the tokens or the characters they consist of, and only incidentally the delimiters of the AST.

But - when we try to fully re-envision it and express these other concepts directly we tend to end up with something that is unfamiliar, a bit clunky and alienating(most graphical languages). So the accepted developments always seem to come in these little ideas that are mostly-optional add-ons.

Chuck Moore did use semantic color as a language feature in ColorForth, but his specific goals lean towards a holistic bootstrapping minimalism, so I haven't seen it taken up elsewhere.
Currency package helps you do exactly what it says, currency computations. It lets you do sub-unit(e.g. cents is a sub-unit of dollar) manipulations as well. It takes care of carry over values in division, i.e. consider 1 dollar divided by 3, it'll return 3 currency instances with 34, 33, 33 as the values instead of 33.3333.
DNSSEC enumeration also exposes all the hosts in your zone, and CT exposes only the hosts with publicly verifiable certificates.
This isn't constant exposure throughout but at some points you can see the transition pretty clearly such as 21:32, some great shots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM2wtte1JRE
If you work in an organization where this isn't the norm-- do you try and change it, or is it best to move on? Sometimes, it feels difficult knowing I made one corner of the product great when there's glaring issues elsewhere, and my team doesn't have the bandwidth (or jurisdiction) to fix all of it.
There are another version of "weak opinions, strongly held", and unfortunately the version I encountered more: "I don't know why and I don't care, but I will do it my way and you can't change it".

Your interpretation sounds very much more similar to "weak opinions, weakly held" to my ear.
Wormhole – Cast and control iOS or Android devices on your PC or Mac
Go back another 30 years and everything you mention was happening as well.

JFK - lying about the missile gap with Russia to get elected

Johnson - lying about his intentions in Vietnam

Nixon - too many to list

If anything, I'd say there is more transparency around unethical behavior by elected officials.
Flow State Training Review, Legit or a Scam?
Andy Ngô documents violence engulfing Portland and Seattle
I don't think you have a clue about intelligence based off that retard comment.
Is anyone else reminded of the kaleidoscope machines of Orwell’s imagination? “It was just a passing fancy”
> there is zero difference between what China does and what the FVEYs do, except that our Overlords tell us they are not spying on us, while every peasant in China knows they are being spied on by their govt because the Chinese govt openly admits to it.

Zero difference ? Except that you don't have a totalitarian power on top for which laws are meaningless pieces of paper. Look at HK and ask them under which regime they would prefer to live in.
Debunking the Serverless Myth – Talking Serverless
Yeah, it's not true "Systems design" since it's specific to programming
Alternative take on this: they may be evacuating agents who were posing as protesters.
The general theme of my feedback will be the following: (1) don't automate something that people aren't already doing manually, and (2) the cloud has the wrong mix of pros/cons for this type of project.

> Secondly, the second you put your legacy on paper, that's it. You can no longer update it with more memories. It's frozen in that state.

But it isn't frozen. You can change it or add onto it.

You can think of "preserving your legacy" as a low-read, low-write data type. Once someone does this, they aren't likely to go back and edit it. They may add onto it with photos and whatnot, but they probably won't make changes to old content on a regular basis.

> With this website, they'd be able to continuously update it with stories, photos, etc.

To the extent people already do this (I have personally never seen it), they can just as easily use Facebook as a "digital scrapbook" so to speak. They can post all these types of content now, and their family already have access to it.

> Additionally, children, parents, and relatives will all be able to link up their own personal accounts to build an accumulated family legacy.

It seems like people largely preserve their memories as photos with captions. Again, it's something they do on Facebook, and they don't have to convince relatives to use it. All their relatives (especially older ones) already have accounts and previously-made connections.

> The older generation do like tangible items

I actually disagree. I don't think they care that much about tangible items. I do think they have a sense of how "long-lived" a medium is. They likely don't think of Facebook photo albums as something that will last for 20 years.

But that's not something any digital property can solve. People know that the web is ephemeral, and the content disappears as soon as the backing entity runs out of money. You'd have to establish some kind of trust to guarantee you'd be around for decades, similar to what graveyards do.
I think this thread has lost the point being discussed (much like GPT's limited window!)--

I was replying to this:

> If I have a chat with the model and I ask it "what did we talk about thirty minutes ago" it's as clueless as anything.

This criticism is true, but would almost certainly be eliminated if the transformer window was increased go back far enough.

That wouldn't give it an arbitrary memory, sure. But the specific complaint that it forgets the current conversation doesn't require an arbitrary memory.
You can sell a proprietary product, right? With a restrictive software license?

That means customers are willing to pay $base + $yearly renewal for the product.

Why aren't they willing to pay the same price for the same product but with an open source license?

I really don't understand why they don't.

I'll go one further - how much will people pay for an open source license over a source available license with a right to modify, no time limits/renewal requirement, but no distribution right?

Answer: all but one of my customers jumped at the chance to reduce the cost by switching from the MIT license to a not-quite-open-source license.

Which means they don't really value the redistribution right.

And I saw this at one small conference about industry use of open source. The organizers - who use chemfp! - stated at the start that the biggest reason they love open source is because it's "free" (meaning no cost), not the principles of software freedom nor the improved development methodology of open source.

I tried selling feature requests, services and support to the users. That was my original plan, and it worked so long as those feature requests were easy and there were enough of them.

But consider that the upgrade to Python 3 took two months. Who pays for that? The first customer who wants Python 3 support 5 years ago, who pays $20K for a feature request which everyone else gets for free? Then there's inventive to wait for a feature request in hopes that someone else will pay it. While the sales model - even as free software - lets me split the cost among multiple customers who need that feature, and across a few years.

I also pointed out that selling services is a disincentive to developing good document and good APIs. I feel like there's a sweet spot where if I were to skimp on the documentation some then there's an increased chance of getting consulting work.
It's unbelievable how disconnected that article is to reality.

1. Cops pull over people and arrest them all the time using unmarked cars - why is it an issue now?

2. The cops are identified as such (that's the badge on the shoulder). Undercover cops can arrest people too - why is it any issue?

3. These people are being arrested and released - doesn't sound like kidnapping to me. Sounds like law enforcement doing their job.

But hey, the never let the truth get in the way of your political goals, right?
Most of the time, the HGTV spends are horrible investments even if the touted "new value" is correct. The margin after increase in closing costs--agent fees, title transfer tax, to say nothing of opportunity cost of the cash outlay--is often zero or negative.
6G
> those folks are messaging each other with their Bloomberg IDs, so they know with each message who's in and who's out.

This kind of reminds me of network engineers repping their ISP's AS numbers on conference badges and jackets and swag. If you're not one of the persons with full admin access on the core routers of your AS, you're not part of the inner circle.