skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The authors, who are decidedly non bot-like, are exploring how HCI methods can improve the process of programming language design. They offer a method "PLIERS: Programming Language Iterative Evaluation and Refinement System.", and they "evaluated PLIERS by using it to create two different languages". Funders for the work include IBM and Ripple, a blockchain company. Table 1 in the paper is the clearest summary of the work in terms of challenges and approaches. The underlying problem is that it is expensive to get to the point where you can iterate well with users in this design space.

It's interesting to think of a programming language as a user interface. My takeaways here were that academic programming language design has a data problem, which is finding the right population of test users, and the idea of "Wizard of Oz" to simulate tool interaction. Wizard of Oz is a dev "behind the console" who is simulating appropriate responses to user actions. That's much more like the person switching the pages around as you walk through a paper prototype than an endpoint returning mocks. If I were an academic in this space I would want to see how lab approaches to design and eval compare against the sort of proposal and review cycles that I see python and golang use for language changes - the latter seems like the status quo, for better or worse.
Even layout aside (I'm hoping Houdini will eventually bring some form of constraint-based layout to browsers), HTML is the lamest UI toolkit going.

We've got a handful of basic form inputs, incredibly inflexible tables, and some semantic rectangles. That's basically it.

Even the form inputs can be a pain. It's insane to me that the only way to change the background colour of a checkbox is to hide it and build your own with CSS hacks (pseudo-elements etc.).

I guess the fact that any element needs to function purely from markup without any code severely hampers them, but I can't believe how much time we're all wasting having to build things as basic as pop-out menus by hand.
Great, I'll be in touch.
What the Gig Economy Pays H-1B Technologists: Uber, Airbnb, and More
Hey HN! This is what I've been working on for the last 6 months. I'd love your feedback!

The current goal is to build data pipelines really fast and operate them really well, but I'm also interested to see how far the VM abstraction can be pushed. What would "soft infrastructure" look like?
The lesson of Matrix is that you have to give everybody all of the features. All at once. In advance. Even the ones nerds don't need. Then they'll be there for everyone else.
Yes you're right, the engagement is the most important part.

It's not the ease of creating the site, it's the ease of directing people to view / subscribe / communicate through & return to it & that is a very difficult problem to solve if you do not simply approach as a standard social network.

I guess to me there's a niche for smaller scale networks, which would suit those with lesser engagement needs. Most people want to comment & subscribe, I'd say that you could cut almost all other social network features and it would work to a degree.
Readers think of Reddit title as discussion prompts. The combination of subreddit theme and post title can easily start a discussion on “close enough” topic. One of the suggestion for increasing engagement is to disable link posts and only allow text posts.
Safety-critical systems have specific processes that need to be followed and it's definitely not as easy as using a simple OS, but it does help of course to keep things simple.

And that's the problem with Linux: it's huge and it's always changing so that one cannot make any guarantees about anything except that it's broken in known and unknown ways. Saying that it's battle tested is not as useful as one would think, since any small kernel config change would result in a different configuration with different behavior. Abstract Linux is battle tested, but the config you want to use is probably not that well tested and even if it is, the whole development process is so chaotic that there's no guarantee that somebody of sufficient skill will report even the majority of encountered bugs and that those will be fixed.
thanks, first time seeing that
Are you accounting for all the kids born in Easter Europe in the early 90s that either have developed cancer in the last 10 years or are dealing with it now? Or at least all the 90's kid from Belarus that are still dying to this day because of cancer?
>Once compiled, the ZFS module is a derived work from both the Linux kernel and ZFS.

Really? So if i compile something with gcc it is a derived work from gcc and gcc is derived work from my bin? Or when i make a firefox extension it's a derived work of firefox? Compile the nvidia module...a derived work from linux?

>I trust the Red Hat lawyers on this matter more than someone who is not a lawyer

But he can read :) but hey whatever, really not interested if linux has something good like DTrace ZFS or Crossbow, they like the NIH-Syndrome and i am ok with that too.
IIT Bombay 58th Convocation; Awards Degrees to Students' Virtual Avatars
It was pretty bad, high values of mostly cesium-137 in local food. Now some 35:ish years afterwards, its mostly reindeer that goes over the recommended thresholds.
Well, I am playing in a different league. I have single digit budgets per volume per month. Of course they are smaller and have more modest performance requirements. But still, exceeding my budget by 30% is not acceptable over longer time. And EBS (as well as all other Amazon stuff) makes it really easy to exceed it by 300%.

For standard volumes you pay by IO operations (absolute calls). For the newer types you pay by provisioned IOPS (a max rate). That's a particular difficult decision to make if you move in that area. The less advanced competition has simpler pricing, but then you might be more unsure about what you get. Again for high requirements you know that if someone offers you 25 or even 50 GB for 1€ per month you know it's too good to be true. For modest requirements that's something you need to consider.
Please, using for loops is okay, especially if you're not actually writing functional code.

[...document.xpath("//text()[contains(., 'Hello')]")]
.forEach(node => node.textContent = node.textContent.replace("Hello", "Greetings"));

versus

for (const node of document.xpath("//text()[contains(., 'Hello')]"){
node.textContent = node.textContent.replace("Hello", "Greetings");
}

No allocation of a pointless array, no redundant iteration, fewer "[]", "()" and no "=>" or "...". No downside whatsoever!
I assume people had to quarantine for two weeks after the concert?
I specifically didn't mention Linux because Linux isn't a realistic choice for the average consumer, though. Realistic choices come commonly pre-installed and works with a range of things without much work for the end consumer. Most folks don't have the choice to install it due to lack of technical competence anyway. Even folks with the technical know-how often enough don't due to, well, ease of use issues.

(Yes, I know you can buy computers without an OS and you can buy computes with Linux as well - but not enough to be realistic for most folks. I'm pretty sure you can buy phones with a different OS as well but again, not realistic choices).
Legally Epic would lose access to all Apple developer IP including iOS SDKs and Xcode. You have to click through an EULA to access this stuff. And you can bet that Apple would have sought a court order to enforce it, had they prevailed.
Do you mean the number of death because of Tchernobyl is negative (less death than if Tchernobyl did not occur) ?
What do you think your chances of catching and spreading the virus are?
I’ve noticed this in the comments under music more than elsewhere. Anything politics is still awful.

Music is nice and largely even positive—if repetitive (“anyone here listening to [90s band] in 2020??”)
Depends on what advantages it gave me. If it was impossible for the car to get into a accident where I hurt myself or others I would certainly consider it.
Very cool! I really dig your "everybody is a helpdesk" approach.
Isn't AWS supposed to handle most of that?

Kik messenger had 300M users and a tiny team. Same with WhatsApp - and it's reliable.

Asana scales more or less horizontally, meaning that they don't do anything much at the scale of all of Asanas customers. No individual customer repo should be massive (unlike say Facebook, where a user search searches the entire world.)
I think it's strange that you don't want me to have the product I want to have. Nobody is forcing you to buy an Apple product, and there are plenty of stellar alternative products from numerous other brands.
Thank you for the link, this is a great resource you've put together! I'll be sure to share with some of my colleagues.
Ultimately you are right, but this is basically Popper vs Kuhn. I can confidently say that the sun will indeed rise tomorrow from the East and set on the West, to pretend otherwise is sheer folly.
It's vapor_wave_, a musical and visual style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave
Hm, I expected this to be a real concert, with crowd standing and most people not wearing masks. To me it seems they tested how the virus spreads on healthy individuals (i.e. nobody had a virus prior to going there) who hold their distance while sitting still and wearing masks. Under those constraints, I'd expect around 0 new cases.

Edit: much clearer now, thanks to everybody who replied!
Yes, it's a difficult problem to solve.

The fact twitter has so much political sway in the real world is appalling considering how small the user-bases are relative to populations.

We find ourselves in a position where the media can use twitter to amplify opinion and provide a false sense of majority to implement political pressure.(See cancel culture)
Difficult to know. Diversifying won’t get max returns but also won’t get max losses. A range of ETF’s (Global markets and bonds), real estate, bitcoin, and cash might be a starting point.
Really great tool !
And the gmail attachment outage.
Even in this contrived example, you're still allowed to exclusively use your specific gas and roads if the car manufacturer is forbidden from demanding you do so.
Insurance isn't actually gambling and the legal frameworks they operate under are very different. They have common features mathematically, but they serve very different economic and commercial purposes.
> Werner Von Braun was an actual nazi. He was also a great scientist.

Some recent research suggests he might not have been that great a scientist after all. The story goes that he was an impostor who got to his position mostly due to his influential father and whose main skill was managing others who did the actual work.

Here's a bachelor's thesis from 2018 and an interview with the author - both in German, unfortunately:

https://www.christopherlauer.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/C...

https://wrint.de/2019/01/15/wr903-wernher-von-braun/
Is that Apple's fault?
There has been about a 1000 deaths attributed to it in Sweden.

And you could argue that its "low", but its in the very sense "Russian roulette", you never know if it is you, maybe you where unlucky and ate a side of that wild boar that contained 39706 becquerel per kilo...
Heh, I'm at this point waiting patiently for Apple to wage war on PWAs as they start to gain in popularity.
FLETA’s Online AMA Highlights
> Isn't this the same as saying "Germany killed Jews" when it's Nazis who were doing that?

The setup is a false premise. It wasn't just the Nazis doing that. There was no clean line separation where only the Nazis were involved in the Jewish Holocaust. Historically such isolation of actors never really exists. Germany didn't kill six million Jews without the help of a large number of of non-Nazi Germans (their role in enabling the Nazis to power and conquest, supplying the Nazis, and in some cases direct assistance in the genocide; it was not uncommon for Germans to intentionally look the other way at what was going on, it was an open secret).

Presently China is the CCP, the CCP is China. They're inseparable as China is a one party dictatorship, and not subtly so. The CCP rules China top to bottom, in all aspects of culture and economy, without exception and without challenge. Their power is absolute over the nation. That said, I'm not implying it's reasonable to compare the current CCP China to Nazi Germany either.
Well the point is more that a lot of stuff doesn't even need to be in a queue. It's just cookie cutter engineering. "I did this before and it worked so I'll do it again" without any consideration on what it does and why it does it.
Then make it hard, with a scary pop up, so technical people can make an informed choice and tech illiterates cannot.
> Microsoft is building the most modern Terminal emulator

If it is anything like Powershell, which is more "modern" than bash, then I don't think it will make much of an impact. Powershell seems like it was designed by a comittee which did not quite understand the point of what they were doing.

It seems that if at least someone on that committee used a Unix terminal maybe once in their lives they would realize that what they were building would deliver a really bad user experience.
ADAS can break, accelerate and steer the car.
Snapshots are something you control - they don't happen by themselves.

Furthermore, you only "pay" their storage cost for data which actually changes. On a 2TB volume, last snapshotted 1 week ago, if only 5GB have changed since then, that's the only storage overhead (ignoring for simplicity the folder structure itself).

Also, if a single data block changes 20 times since its last snapshot, you still only "pay" storage costs for its current version + the one sitting in the last snapshot.
That SSD seemed healthy in every other respect and it's still chugging along today just fine. On ZFS no less.
The kicker in the catastrophic failure was that none of the recovery tools worked and I'd need to write my own recovery tools to fill in the gaps where the metadata got corrupted. I also did not have much time to faff about - I imaged the disk and reinstalled the machine.
As for the metadata, I was under the impression that there were no checksums for metadata in BTRFS?
Generators/Iterators are not just for asynchronous code. Generators may be a bit slower than iterating over an array, but arrays use more memory and put more pressure on the garbage collector.

Your mileage will vary.
https://flock.com
Good on them, but can Silicon Valley people stop conflating their corporate operating bloatware with Eastern Spiritual Terms?

Completing that outstanding customer ticket is not like the process of achieving englihtenment.
I feel like in today's climate browsers themselves might eventually be held responsible for what people do with them. For instance should chrome detect and block illegal porn from someone trying to access it, etc
The point is to study how people move and how they touch things. The study is intended to cause no new cases.
Instead of deaths, we should use number of years of life lost.

When primarily 80+ year olds are dying from COVID, it looks worse than a nuclear accident that killed everyone.
The great dumbbell shortage of 2020
Not just a trigger. The heat itself is what opens the cone.
It seems just coincidence.

The reason for coincidence might be cash-out for investors due to fear of covid-19? I do not know that.
A Chrome feature is creating load on global root DNS servers
curl | jq
Greenland was warmer in the 30s than it is today
I believe the reason for that rule is to avoid polluting the thread with "did you even read" type remarks. Starting an argument won't help the thread recover from an uninformed comment.

Nothing in the rules discourages downvoting people who didn't read.
https://zulipchat.com/

Probably the best I have used, easily prefer it to Slack but it's hard to convince people to use stuff other than Slack.
Why? Because they kept their distance and wore masks while around people tested not to be infected?
I think what you’d see is not much in the way of price decreases or increased availability of apps, but more dark patterns, malware, and anti-privacy measures.

Apple basically collectively bargains for iPhone users via the App Store. Privacy features, sign-in with Apple, limiting tracking abuse, privacy “Nutrition Facts” and other items will go out the window. Apple will have those in their App Store, but users will make the trade off with privacy to play Fortnite or download a new social media app. Apple makes it so that trade off doesn’t have to happen.

It’s all around awful. I really hope Apple wins this court case.
Doesn't appear to be open source
Love the story about his first unpleasant experience with a certain tech personality, "one of many".
They were tested before the concert.
There is no way you could take “risks” like these a couple of months ago. We simply did not know enough about the virus at the time.

Now we have improved treatment methods significantly, we know ways to drastically reduce the spread of the virus using simple mechanical strategies, and we are confident about the kind of people that are at the least risk.

In Germany the virus is also subdued enough that even if something goes wrong, it won’t become a drastic situation immediately. The US isn’t there yet, but thanks to mask wearing and social distancing might be there in a few weeks.

So once the conditions were feasible to do such studies, peop,e are doing such studies.
(ISC is a troublesome license, but that's beyond the point)

Licenses are not adopted in a vacuum. The license is what made GCC what it was when Linus had to pick a license, and arguably what made Linux what it is today. A "BSD Linux" would have likely ended up the same way BSD systems have: a largely academic project routinely cannibalized by behemoth closed-source companies.

The question, yesterday and today, is really "why not care about the GPL?". The rights it grants are what made the F/OSS ecosystem what it is today. If you want to grant more rights to your users and developers, by all means use a less restrictive but compatible license like modified BSD, or MPL 2. It's easier to do that without fear of withering, now that opensource is the de-facto default choice in a lot of fields. It definitely was not as easy back in the '90s or early '00s, which is when the GPL effectively fought the war for the whole field.

If you choose to stick with pre-MPL2 derivatives, though, you are clearly not interested in granting users and developers the same basic rights as the GPL.
I think this is a very useful research. Considering the catastrophic effect of the pandemic on performing arts, knowing that concerts organized with due precautions are reasonably safe, it could directly lead to a very significant restart.

This is indeed (based on the article), the target of the research:

to investigate the conditions under which such events can be
carried out despite the pandemic
They did eventually, the ingress point was originally eu-west-2 but got changed to eu-west-1
ZFS has feature flags [1]. If you're carefull not to do 'zpool upgrade' (as this commit message warns) unless you understand the consequences, you can switch between ZFS implementations.

[1] http://build.zfsonlinux.org/zfs-features.html

You can explicity create a pool with certain features disabled.

I'm going to try FreeNAS Core tonight.
We developed ethics around clinical research.

One of those principles is that if you’re going to actively expose people to something - to create a possible harm where there previously wasn’t one - you have to be honestly uncertain of the potential harm (eg, it’s ethical to give you a placebo vs experimental drug because I honestly don’t know if the drug will work).

It’s unethical to -certainly- cause harm.

In part that’s because, social dynamics and power structures being what they are, those “consenting” will skew towards the uneducated and powerless.

In part, consent isn’t even relevant - in this example, if they ended up stoking the flames of contagion, they wouldn’t just affect the concert goers but, by definition, all those exposed to the concert goers.

Amusingly, the above refers more to interventional studies - those with more than one arm. This doesn’t really have a control arm, or randomized assignment of people to exposure. It’s effectively an observational study - the sort of thing you don’t need to intentionally construct, but for the fact that people seem to not be going to concerts.

So... did they have to construct concerts artificially because not enough were occurring naturally? Did they have to create a harm that didn’t exist to begin with? Will it even be insightful? They filtered for the young, which specifically ensures there’s less of a chain of transmission available.

Considering Germany inspired so much of modern medical ethics work, it’s ironic to see them conduct such a study. I honestly wouldn’t have expected it.

I’m sure the relevant experts and authorities beat these questions to death, but even so, I’d be awfully curious to see those deliberations and what justifications were ultimately considered adequate.
I, too was annoyed by this... It's not worth staying to read a possibly good article with horrible and pointless autoplaying music.
I, too, am wondering how people are affording these houses. I'm not "filthy rich", but my income hasn't changed significantly in the last 15 years. I don't know others who feel they have had significant income increases either.

OTOH, in my area (semi-rural Ohio) these new houses are costing at least 1.75X (and some _much_ more) what similar houses cost 15 years ago. Stuff that went for $120 - $150K 15 years ago is running north of $250K now.
Yeah you can always dumb it down to prove whatever point you want to prove but decisions like "do we spend a billion bucks building the levy one foot higher to prevent the flood or do we assume the flood will happen and spend a billion bucks on flood mitigation in our building code and emergency preparedness plans" are full of ambiguity and nobody knows the right answer ahead of time.
Try to work on that false comparison of yours and come up with a better counter argument, you know you don't have any examples with your previous one.
We can, but someone will still have to build the less smart AIs
I may forget my age, but I can't forget I'm now over 30.
Well, here's the court's reasoning:

By contrast, with respect to the Unreal Engine and the developer tools, the Court finds the opposite result. In this regard, the contracts related to those applications were not breached.

And then:

The court also finds that "Apple has chosen to act severely, and by doing so, has impacted non-parties, and a third-party developer ecosystem. In this regard, the equities do weigh against Apple."

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.364265...
I was hinting at the possibility of having a platform where there is no central app store to even allow such "dynamics" to unfold.

> I'm not sure what you want to say here

That the Apple platform with the store model has significant disadvantages.
PCR has a 30% false negative rate. You make it sound like they entered a clean room. They did not.
Looks neat and tidy. Is it open source?
> Common sense ties them together.

The problem is that the US judicial system, thanks to its focus on precedent cases no matter how old they are, and "modern common sense" don't always fit together.
>and other variants of passing the hot potato.

That's pretty much every aspect of society anymore. Few people will take responsibility if the option to pass it exists, in general.
> you have got all the results in memory anyways inside the xpath function

Not necessarily, that's an implementation detail. The result of an XPath query is not an array, it's some object that accepts integer indices for lookup.

If you were to return an array, there would be no way to break out of iteration early without paying for every lookup. For something like XPath, breaking out early is a likely scenario.
How to Fix Gimbal Lock in N-Dimensions
Launch HN: Kanaree.io – Liberate your clickstream data