skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that (at least part of) my preference comes from familiarity but I am not convinced that it is caused 100% by familiarity.

I happened to see this brief interaction in a video [0] the other day that pretty accurately illustrates my point of view. In summary: 2 makers (one german, one american) working on a device are looking at parts in hand to design as they build and one says "...if you put this 15 millimeters in from the edge. about half an inch". They first physically see/feel the distance they believe to be correct is 1.5 or 15 metric units (cm or mm) or 1 imperial unit (half inch). This is the case I find comes up frequently for me. Measures where moving a cut to line up to whole cm is too far and I end up working with half and quarter centimeters or awkward counts of millimeters.

Though, it is definitely possible that 15mm only felt right in that case due to familiarity with imperial measures and that 1cm or 2cm would have been fine.

I guess the "trick" is that even though 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 inch are all technically divisions of an inch, they all function in practice as distinct whole units that are (typically) easily converted. So when you are doing work in that scale range you have many options to match what you are working with.

Paper sizes are also another good example of what I am talking about. An imperial "letter" size page is 8 and 1/2 by 11 inches. To cut one in half in either direction, the calculation is easy: horizontal 8 divided by 2 is 4 plus 1/2 divided by 2 is 1/4 or vertical 11 divided by 2 is 5 and 1/2.
The similar ISO size (A4) is 210mm x 297mm would be cut at 10.5cm or 14.85cm. Sure you could just pull two A6 out of the drawer instead of cutting one A4 but then you are using ISO216 as your units of measure instead of cm/mm. In terms of practicality, cutting material stock in half is a pretty basic operation.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxLOoriXkMc&feature=youtu.be...
But their purchasing power parity is way higher so presumably they get more for less, other than stuff they have to import to support research.
In Python:

["a", "b"].join(" ")

This would mean the type list has a method join, how would it work with the following ?

[1.5, "hello", None].join(" ")
I feel like this is more an issue with cheap construction (and what people will pay for) than anything else. I've stayed in people's apartments in the UK where the light fittings rattle if upstairs is running a wash. These flats aren't cheap either, in the South East they're eye-wateringly expensive for the build quality (eg 250k for an "entry" two bed flat in a commuter town). Having lived up north for a few years in a detached house with a garden, it would be extremely difficult to go back to a flat (especially one in London that costs double the price for half the space). There is a massive supermarket five minutes down the road from our house and town is 15 mins drive. These places absolutely exist for reasonable prices.

When/if we finally buy, we're looking at a rural, passive self-build where we can work remotely. The cost is about the same as a town house these days.

There isn't any technical reason why you couldn't put in proper isolation between floors or walls, aside from the fact it would slow down construction and be expensive. Proper insulation (both acoustic and thermal) also makes rooms smaller in a given footprint which is an issue for marketing.
Gene pools are at least three-dimensional. Just because humans are diverse, does not imply that the gene pool is not well-mixed. And there's a rather famous anthropological observation that skin colors correlate with latitude, as well as well-understood mechanisms which control that correlation; there's a gentle tug-of-war between lowering the chance of rickets and lowering the chance of skin cancer.

Put another way, we already have had centuries of high-speed travel connecting the world and globalizing the population, and we do have region that produce "uniform" skin tones which look like the average of all of the local skin tones, but those regions also have lots of non-"uniform" skin tones. The people that you imagine are but one thin slice of a much thicker and richer gene pool.

Finally, please don't confuse the deliberate fancy breeding of dogs, pigeons, etc. with humans' natural free choice of how to use their sexuality. We frown on eugenics for humans for precisely the same reasons that dog breeders bemoan hip dysplasia.
I worked for a firm that tried to use Smalltalk to deliver commercial software running on Windows in the early 90's. From a learning standpoint, I learned a lot. From a business standpoint this is what we ran into compared to this article:

Lack of a Standard. Didn't really bother us. FYI we were using Digitalk Smalltalk. People in those days didn't have the expectation of changing their toolset without incurring problems.

Business Model. At that time people paid for software. The free (as in beer) software distribution model didn't yet exist. The tools were expensive but they were justified by programmer productivity. To that end, the tools made programmers very productive. It's one of the best environments I've ever worked in - and that was over 25 years ago!

Performance. Ah - this is where we started having problems. At that time Smalltalk hadn't yet optimized integer arithmetic and as a result simple numerical operations were slow. The garbage collector was also difficult - when it ran it would essentially hang your machine for several minutes. That would improve over the years but it was bad early on. Performance was the deciding factor in our not using Smalltalk.

Interaction with the outside world. Digitalk took care of this. It was workable, i.e. this isn't where we had problems or concerns.

Deployment. Digitalk was capable of producing a Windows executable file. There were two problems though: 1) it made a guess as to which classes should be included in the executable artifact (you could manually adjust), this made automated testing extremely important because you would need to test a release candidate and 2) it employed it's own windowing system which it would embed in the executable. It never looked like a native Windows application. The marketing folks and product line managers didn't like that aspect of Smalltalk.

Bottom line - poor performance and a poor end-user experience killed Smalltalk for us as it did for many others at the time. You know the saying you only get one chance to make a first impression? That goes for programming languages as well. A LOT of developers gave Smalltalk a go in the early 90's and ran into these issues. Though these issues would later be resolved by then the perception damage had been done and everyone had moved on.

It's interesting that Smalltalk is one of the most influential languages that never caught on.
There's the core team, which is extremely unfriendly to any kind of user-driven development of the language.

The whole reason Elm has been stuck in a niche when it had _huge_ hype around 2015 and everyone was sure it would be the "next big thing" on the front-end is that the developers have tried to keep full control of the language and keep shooting down proposals by users. It's either their way or the highway.
Honestly given how weird the imperial system is I’m genuinely surprised that miles can be expressed as an integer of feet. Was half expecting a 7/16th at the end.
Read how this Software Engineer is making over $1k/mo from his Alexa Skills
The only issue with F# is that it is a bit the black swan of Microsoft languages on .NET, so it doesn't get all the toys that C#, VB.NET and even C++/CLI get to play with.
Quick hacks to make video calls less fatiguing
Off serious topic: Naming it after you girlfriend is a risky move, like getting a tattoo of her. Better get married and stay that way or the next partner is gonna be like: "wtf", you still working on your tribute to your ex programming language!?
App Review process updates
No discussion of sprawl is complete without talking about Robert Moses. American highways, and highways around the world sprawl as they do because of Robert Moses.

Throughout Robert Cairo's 1344 page biography of Moses, the reader sees how Moses' racism and clasism impacted the massive influence he had on transportation and sprawl in America.

+1 for Stamped.

In addition, Redlining is a well researched and documented practice in America [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining#History
Kurt Vonnegut’s Shape of All Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago
> Greg Egan worked out the shape of physics in a universe with two spatial dimensions and two temporal dimensions:

I am looking forward to this next Christopher Nolan movie.
The author seems to know (well, was involved in) the history of Self and Strongtalk but seems disappointed that the people involved went on to work on and perfect what they see as inferior technology (Java, JavaScript).

In reality I think if we do an honest accounting of the situation we can see that these have been the more pragmatic engineering solutions for their times, and so that's where the $$ was. I worked in Java for years, but didn't particularly like it, but it is, I think, what the marketplace needed and could handle at the time.

And I think JS/ECMAScript etc. is a reasonable practical solution for the imperfect world that evolved out of Internet/browser tech.

Unlike the author I don't think Sun's fortunes would have been any different if Self/Strongtalk or some other Smalltalk-world inspired/derived tech had been pushed hard. The market didn't need or want it.

IBM did a similar pivot with their VisualAge line, and they did it for pragmatic reasons.

Finally, let's look at the bigger picture: in the end, what we have with the browser + modern JS on V8/SpiderMonkey etc. is a dynamic object oriented programming language that allows for dynamic manipulation of its environment, is accessible to any user, can be edited and inspected live, can present interactive media to users, and has a large community of authors.

Is this really that far off from what Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls originally wanted? Purists will gag, but I think as much as I hate front end dev in JS that there's actually a lot here that is Smalltalk inspired.

EDIT: I spent much of the 90s and early 2000s cringing at what was evolving. I was really into PL research and really liked the Self-inspired world of prototype OO languages. I really dug LambdaMOO and spent time writing my own shared-world multi-author persistent-world object oriented virtual machine type systems. But there's no way any of that would pay the bills. I still avoid JS work really, but I can see the niche that this filled. It's imperfect ... but that's the world. I'm grateful to V8 & friends for making it suck a lot less. And that work in V8 is a direct descendant of some of the really neat pioneering stuff in the 80s&90s.

There's a good response the original article here: http://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/914
There are lots of options for Houston to evolve. The city is mostly how the electorate wants it.
How should we build the APIs of tomorrow?
Who would you be selling this to exactly?
I assume the poster meant “evidence that genocide is happening” and not “evidence that genocide is a good thing”
PreciseCoupons offers a collection of the latest coupon codes, promo codes, and deals helping make great savings online.
It's the result of a lot of growth and development by a common culture with high degrees of communication and trade in a very short amount of time.
What a year!

Python 2.x dying; Python 3 becoming the norm; "Perl6" renamed to raku & Perl5 thinking of bumping to v7... and now Ruby going all the way to v3.0!
As long as you pay lip service to the right politics you can innovate as much as you want in science and technologies. You are free to use tabs for indentation or write your webservice in brainfuck if you want.

What can be a drag on innovation is if there is nepotism. If the leader appoints his good-for-nothing nephew to science minister. Or if there is corruption, and well connected incumbents throw up endless barriers for innovative upcomers. Or if organized crime steal too much value from the productive people.
I wonder how it would look if there was some magical way to view it on an ROI basis.

Rather than focusing on R&D (science & technology presumably), I'd like to see Western countries start approaching ~"the humanities" (culture, society, happiness, etc) the same way we treat technology and industry. To me it seems fairly clear that there are distinct differences at the human satisfaction level between different countries/cultures. I have the sense that Western countries are starting to fall behind in some categories, the consequences of which first began showing up in our political discourse/mood, which has now progressed to literally spilling out onto the streets. Rather than our current laissez faire approach to this aspect of life, could treating it as a serious first class intellectual problem yield positive results?
Ahmedabad, India appears to have about 6M people and 1 highway interchange. The interchange isn't even a full cloverleaf, but instead only allows 4 of the standard 8 cloverleaf options. In 2012 it was listed as India's best city to live in.
Same applies to F#, a ML based language.
It is because in Javascript everything can be translated to a string:

1 + "hello" == "1hello"

Therefore, the type Array can have a join method that have predictable results (unlike Python).
> I feel like you may be arguing semantics

Yeah, I am; it really depends on how you define "true". I prefer this to be interpreted as "true in all models" so sentences are "true" when they are tautological consequences of a theory.

Using this definition, all "true" sentences are provable in first-order logic.

The (usual) Gödel sentence is true in the intended model of arithmetic, but I don't really like this property being referred to as "truth" without qualification.

> "true but unprovable" within a given system

Not sure about this: I don't think you can really say something is "true in a system" if it isn't provable. You can only assert its truth by saying it's "true in the intended model" without qualification, or by doing some meta-reasoning in a more powerful system outside the original one.
CS631: Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment – NetBSD
Thanks for taking the obnoxious "Yes, this" off the title.

Yes, it's one of the weirdest pet-peeve trends over the past 5-10 years. No, I do not like it, thanks for asking.

Wait, you didn't ask me? You mean nobody was asking me, it's just something I decided to couch in a response to a conversation that wasn't going on?

But seriously, I wonder what's going on when we do this. My theory is that it originally caught on to lend credence to what we're saying when we pretend our statement is actually a response to an open question, though now it's just subconscious rhetorical device to emphasize a point, I would imagine.

As for the article, growing up 45min outside of Houston, that interchange is all I think about when I entertain the idea of moving to Houston or DFW. There's something grotesque about it and the feeling it gives me. Cars, traffic, and this need to slave away in a commute.

Austin keeps voting down highway extension proposals. I'm sure anyone who has to sit in Austin traffic daily hates that, but we can't have every damn city in Texas becoming a concrete metropolis.
Isn't arch on arm a different group? I know their website doesn't work without talking to google.
This article just shows American exceptionalism in it's true form:

Whenever Americans are confronted by foreigners with the fact that they under perform or do less well in some area, they find some good excuse why they are actually not under performing. The sprawl is not just a side effect of car culture, or zoning laws, or whites not wanting to live next to colored people, or the land being cheaper far from city centers.

No, it was actually a feature designed to prevent a nuclear attack.
Padding Oracles: An Animated Primer
I think many companies have real problems, but find that DL ends up being a poor solution in practice for various reasons.

You need not only real use cases, but use cases that happens to well with DL’s trade offs and limitations. I think many companies hired with very unrealistic expectations here.
Videos link : https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC7-CyoYfsrVI-dsuHRQx0IQ
Why does language design continue to be a subjective topic? its not like computers need cultures !

Computers don't use programming languages. Thats why we need interpreters and compilers.

I think programming languages will always be subjective, but I could imagine a time where programming languages are obsolete for almost all use cases.

Imagine an AI with advanced NLP, that allows you to describe to a computer what you want done in your native language. Then the "programmer" never has to worry about the implementation details, just what they want done. Basically like the audio computer interface in Star Trek TNG.
I’m Asking My Friends on the Left to Vote for Joe Biden (Anil Dash)
How an intimate wedding in rural Maine led to the state’s largest COVID outbreak
Breaking changes after every breakup
> The number 20, of course, was the common “decimal” system prior to the invention of shoes (at which point you can’t see your toes).

Is this true? It reads like a dad joke.
I'm fairly certain the word "quietly" is automatically removed from submission titles.

i.e. "Apple quietly drops case against X" => "Apple drops case against X"

However, I do think "quietly" provides extra context - it indicates Apple (in this fictitious scenario) did not issue an official statement on what they did or why; a 3rd party just happened to notice by reviewing public legal documents.
I'm confused as to whether you're describing urban living or suburban living. Both have everything mentioned, the latter without being stacked on top of your neighbors.
There are pauses indeed, hence why most RC in high performance contexts rely on background cleaning threads to avoid stop the world with deletion cascades.
Are they going to make non-backward-compatible changes, or is this just a marketing move?
Atomic clocks are so sensitive now that it's possible to desync them while they're in the same room [0]

[0]: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2010/09/nist-pair-alum...
Blessed Are the JavaScript Developers
I eventually bought a bunch of them, but the thing is, the car was gone before I pulled any of that apart again. So now I have a bag of fasteners that match no car I own. :)
This looks helpful! I'll try it today! Its not exactly the plugin I recall, that one did all of the lines right away and used different colors per-line.

Thank you none the less for taking your time to find this! :D
Neither. They used a plugin to anonymously track people who opted-in to the experiment.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pioneer
This is the intersection of East Freeway and East Loop. It occupies about 1.58 km^2. It is an older interchange reflective of relatively modest traffic volume that set a wide space to ensure room for future growth (which didn't happen on the eastern side of the city). Many newer interchanges operate at higher volume and density.

https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7748476,-95.2664193,17.32z
> In the past when I see people using Ubuntu, I always wondered why?

Debian is great. I particularly respect Debian as an organization. On my home laptop, I've used Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc etc.

But on my work computer, I've always used Ubuntu (or sometimes MacOS), because:

- I prefer Ubuntu LTS to Debian's testing/stable approach.

- Lots of other devs use Ubuntu, so instructions are often focused on the distro

- It's always had all the drivers I need packaged with the distro

- Smaller projects are more likely to set up a PPA than host their own package repository.
I agree it's probably a joke, but I'm not so sure that the core idea is actually impossible... I could reasonably see a SaaS that simply provides a quick and dirty key-val store. The code is just a translation from REST to REDIS which could easily be done in 2 lines, the value-add is the hosting.

That'd actually be pretty helpful for initial prototyping, where you want to have state shared across devices but don't want to bother with hosting a backend at first, and localhost wont work because the client wants to play with it too.
Vanguard Outage – 25M users and $6T in assets locked out
debian says hello
Morocco Travel Agency
writing service students seeking English Literature Writing Services and english literature e
Which? Returning to, or retaining?

I wonder if he'd lived, he'd have changed his opinion from 4 years ago, given the dogs breakfast that is the current transition process, run by a non-representative collection of opportunists.
First, having spent the past two years in IntelliJ with Java, no. I still would have much preferred named parameters to having to worry about the order (and still occasionally mixing them up when they're not unique types, and only finding out when things fail).

Second, if a language is heavily reliant on features from an IDE, yeah, I'll echo that's a badly designed language.
> Perhaps something like a day or two in the office for meetings, the rest of the time work from home but be in contact.

On the last days before covid WFH I was still going into the office (against better judgement) because we had meetings

When I got to the meeting room I found I was the only one there. The other attendees were either in a remote location or WFH

Would you want everyone from the same team going i to the office on the same day during a pandemic? Probably increases contagion risk.

Would a company want everyone from the same team in the same location?
Implement read-your-writes Consistency and Availability in Distributed systems
I’m a huge fan of UMAP, but this [0] paper suggests that t-SNE can be tuned to produce UMAP-like results (the algorithms are extremely similar—you can recover t-SNE with certain UMAP parameter choices). One of the insights is to use PCA first to better preserve the global structure.

For example, see figure 9 in the paper: the plot on the left is the typical result of default t-SNE (distance between global structures not well-represented, since everything is jammed together), and the plot on the right is very UMAPish.

Basically, there are a lot of preprocessing and parameter choices involved in producing these embedding plots, so it’s advisable to try to understand the effects of these choices regardless of which algorithm you choose.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13056-x
cloud without failover infra.

Failure++
Maintaining a lead could be a good idea all the same though...
Seems like a great scam. Create a bank, go through the many many steps to obtain FDIC backing, pay out enormous loans to insiders, have a run on the bank, then everyone is made whole again while the fraudster skips town.

I understand that this is basically insurance fraud, but the money is gone long before the fraud occurs and the government must pay out, unlike a single insurer.
I don't think the problem is that theres a monkey shortage per se, but that 1% of people own nearly 100% of the monkeys.
According to the tagged union Wikipedia you referenced, a disjoint union is also considered a tagged union. Whether or not that's actually a correct description within the vernacular of computer science, I don't know.

"In computer science, a tagged union, also called a variant, variant record, choice type, discriminated union, disjoint union, sum type or coproduct, ..."
The manufacturing and industrial sectors existed before automobiles, as did cities.
Any tips for running a self-hosted mail server in 2020?
I know many web devs and they all use mice at their desks in the office.
And on Tesla/Apple split day... Where there is a lot of speculative trading that would be happening right now.
This is why every restaurant has chicken fingers
Might be wrong on this one but I thought that I had heard that this was not the case in earlier versions and if you opened a German excel file on a computer set to English it would fail.