skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the human history was illiterate, hungry, supersticious, and suffering from tapeworms.

You can't project ancient barbarians onto modern people as any kind of proof.

There is a great book, called "better angels of our nature".
I think you could go to gearslutz.com and see a forum full of folks that would confirm my point :)

I would also argue that while maybe the general sound quality has improved with technology(a 4 track cassette recorder can only sound so good) the music is not similarly improved. There are great songs written today, as there was 40-50 years ago, but the technology isnt the reason.

Anyway, I will concede that in the right hands a great studio full of awesome gear will make a better product than a cigar box guitar, pots and pans and a mini cassette recorder. The point I was really making is dont expect technology to make you write good music. It can inspire creativity, but you need to have the spark and put in the work...
> As far as I understand it, this limitation is also the only thing preventing tail-call elimination in C/C++.

That is not the case. Guaranteed TCE requires deallocating the stack frame before jumping to the target, but that is not possible when an object is allocated in that frame and its address passed to the target function.

In C++ there is also the issue of destructors needing to run after the tail-call returns (in which case it is not really a tail-call).

C/C++ compilers can and do eliminate tail calls where possible, but there's no guarantee like you get from a compiler for a functional language.
If that were the real reason, why is rocket league still available on both the ps4 and Nintendo switch?
Aha! I was trying to position my finger over the dial and turn it. Thanks for clarifying.
Ami, a tiny cube on wheels that French 14-year-olds can drive
"We" didn't stop, it was cheaper for Coca-Cola to use plastic. Coca-Cola did it.

Stop blaming consumers for corporate choices to slightly increase profits.

Like in the UK, Tesco have just inexplicably switched from using cardboard egg containers to plastic ones. Is that my fault?
at a high level, doesn't this make sense though? the library author knows whether their code can recover from a certain exception, but they don't know how important their library is to the client application. in your SQL example, if the application's whole purpose is to track inventory using that database, then yeah, SQLException is probably unrecoverable. but if the database is only needed for some ancillary functionality, the application writer probably just wants to tell the user "hey, this feature isn't available right now" and let them keep on using the rest of the program. maybe I'm missing some context here? I'm primarily a c++ dev, and I don't know much about SQL either. in my project, a crash is only acceptable if we are out of memory or if data corruption is imminent.
Very interesting projects and can be scalable
Keep up the good work
>The utility of a vaccine might be lower than you think.

Especially given that most Americans won't take it [0].

[0] https://www.axios.com/covid-vaccine-election-f267a641-a19f-4...
For short times it's not that problematic IMO, but for long term storage? Rather avoid it: https://www.rd.com/article/cooking-with-aluminum-foil/

Additionally, salty foods seem to be problematic too: https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/22133/why-did-...
Hmm, that's going to be a maybe.

If the AI needs to interpret the rules of a card based on it's text and figure out how to use them, it would indeed be a very difficult challenge.

If the AI can simply learn how to play the game with a predefined deck, it'll probably do just fine, outperforming humans but not all the time due to random chance.
SRE Leaders Panel: Testing in Production
To each their own, I guess. I’m guessing many people who work with the kind of environments you’re describing are like me in that I prefer everything as pure text and pipes (*sh/vim/sed/grep/awk/jq/tr/cut/xargs/curl/etc). It definitely is a longer learning curve but at some point everything becomes the same whereas with GUIs there’s a new flow for every system and there’s a bottleneck in how much you can manage manually and visually.

There’s no going back to GUIs when the shell and keyboard become and extension of your mind.

But I think you have a point in that there’s an big user base of somewhat-power-users that prefer visual interfaces and that there’s a better middle ground to be found. The biggest hurdle I see is that tools like that easily become outdated, have selective platform support, aren’t as extendable and customizable, etc. it’s a vastly bigger undertaking to make something that can work everywhere with everything in the way text UIs can.
Speaking for myself, my friends and I would do this as teens in '99 with a open protocol chat program called MIRC. This was chatting with strangers, and back then everyone opened conversations by asking "ASL?" which meant "Age, Sex, Location".

We figured out pretty early on that by saying "Female", you opened yourself up to a torrent of creepy come-ons, which to us was absolutely hilarious. Here was this complete stranger who did not have so much as a profile picture to go off of, either professing his undying love to you after a few messsages, or straight up using abusive and degrading language.

As an old millenial now, it's been pretty shocking to me how open Gen Z is about revealing numerous identifying details about themselves on social networks. I'm under 40 and we were raised to protect our privacy online, and this was when surveillance tech was in the stone ages.
SRE Leaders Panel: Embracing Resilience During Crises
Part of the reason for highly visible security vulnerabilities in Wordpress is just a result of the massive user base. Heavily used platforms are naturally more heavily targeted by malicious users since they are easier to find, and exploits are more readily available.

In truth, most software at any given time probably has serious security vulnerabilities that just aren't as obviously exploitable, and I wouldn't say that the volume of published exploits related to Wordpress is indicative of a poorly managed or written piece of software.
You can't provide a single link. Provide one and we'll stop asking.

Saying the modern GOP believes in a white ethno state is ridiculous. The closest a mainstream political part has gotten to that is electing a leader that supported racial segregation. You seem interested in this topic, but only in one direction. Surprising.
I don't quite follow what you mean by "Brideshead Revisited hangover" - from Wikipedia, it seems like it roughly means "nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy"?
> Analog is continuous and digital is discrete and that implies a loss information.

No. Digital audio with 44.1 kHz sampling rate is capable of perfectly reproducing all sound waves in the human hearing range. If any information is lost during the conversion from analog to digital, it is due to the quality of the recording hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
> the second you think "I could make X if I had access to Y" you are already thinking about it wrong

I've noticed myself thinking this way a ton and you're absolutely right. It's just so easy to get bogged down with the possibilities that it's easy to think this way. How do you stay focused with what you have?
A lot of those biodegradable containers you see are coated in short chain PFAS/PFOA which build up over time in the ground and end up in the water (and maybe plants) and then give you cancer.
> It's such an obviously terrible program that surely it only exists to funnel money to someone's cousin, or something.

Primarily, it makes people feel good about their excessive consumption and it helps people win elections by letting them claim they did something.

But really, the only solution to prevent or reverse environmental damage is drastically reducing consumption. Reusing isn’t going to work, recycling definitely doesn’t work, but no one will win political points for that viewpoint and who really wants to reduce their consumption.

But if people around the world became united against this issue, the solution would be dead simple. Hit fossil fuels with a huge tax. A tax big enough to make prices for everything rise and we will immediately see a reduction in consumption.
Can you add your own music to Spotify in a way that it gets distributed to your other players?
I'm a 1%er on the electronics stackexchange, and unfortunately it is pretty elitist and tends to close questions that don't fit into a narrow mould.
Kinda sad that emminent mathematicians can only rent...
In the case of StackOverflow, Spolsky and Atwood made podcasts from the beginning. There is a record of the whole process. It's worth noting that StackOverflow built a very narrow channel for community activity relative to typical online communities.

StackOverflow Podcast #1 https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange/stack-overflow-podcast...
> ...and building new functionality primarily in Rust.
I don't know how things are now, but in Sweden there used to be standard 33cl glass and 1.5l PET bottle sizes, and when they were returned for their deposit, instead of crushing or melting them down, they'd just have their label stripped and they'd be washed and reused. You could tell old a glass or plastic bottle was by how scratched the sides were.

I don't think these were government mandates but just industry agreements. I remember Coca Cola being the first company to break the mold with custom 1.5l bottle designs
Very impressive, Great job.
So I am reading this as more like Apple is funding ( so to speak ) some work on Linux Networking using Rust? Which seems reasonable given Linux Kernel recently shared their intention to accept Rust code.

And I was thinking why did they make Swift for low level usage if they were going to use Rust.
Sounds like an attitude which would be popular with youth.
For the past years it seems Heroku has kinda stagnated. When was the last time they announced a new feature?

It seems all the talent is focused on Salesforce.
Ghost 4 SUAS
In no way does that imply that the whole company is doing so, just that one team.
>while recycling is worthwhile,

I'm not sure it's that worthwhile for most things. Glass is made of sand, which we have plenty of. Cardboard is trees which are renewable. Plastic is petroleum and it's probably better that we use it and bury it then burn it. Metal is rarer and some of that is worthwhile to recycle but again not like we're running out of iron ore. We also have plenty of land to bury stuff in.

The thing we should focus on is carbon footprint. Reducing that is an immediate need and has long term benefits. We should not be burning more carbon to conserve the things we have plenty of.
Even better for GM, they just acquire the whole thing and now they have a new brand to make their EV's under. GM could make a Chevy Volt 2x better than any Tesla, but Tesla will still sell better because of the brand identity. If you look at it like a branding/marketing deal then it makes a lot more sense from GM's perspective.
I just spent 5 minutes with the app, and had a revelation about my fear of failure and how it relates to my parents that I've never had before. Thanks for sharing this.
He already mentioned Window Maker.

In any case X11 isn't going anywhere even if Xorg developers decide to abandon ship, others will pick it up and continue. It isn't like Xorg was the first and only server, it already the third or fourth fork from the original server.
App is down now but the archived version works perfectly :
https://web.archive.org/web/20200911062544if_/https://beta.w...
Also see this blog post by Palmer Luckey:

http://palmerluckey.com/america-is-back-on-top-baby/
Especially as they used to say once to start you can't stop. So you eat the whole tube anyway...
Probably because some dumb middlebox somewhere isn't 8-bit clean
I don't really dislike the concept of checked exceptions, but the awful way they prevent the usage of functional interfaces and modern Java in general is pretty infuriating. Functional interfaces and code that uses them should have a generic way of being transparent to exceptions, but I'm not sure it can be done without breaking the language.

Nevertheless, I still believe that Java's biggest mistake is not checked exceptions, but the stupid distinction between primitive types and Objects (caused because all the cruft present in the latter would have make basic operations prohibitive in terms of performance, at least for early Java versions) and all the associated boxing. I have seen some extreme cases of performance degradation because of that (fortunately a refactor to use arrays solved the problem, but this is not always possible).
I am working on www.pagews.com, it's a self service alternative, the static sites are based on the content of a spreadsheet/api and deployed to a CDN.

The site pagews.com is generated using the service for example (including capture forms back to the sheets).
A few years ago I was working with JetBrain's MPS [1] and got excited about it's projectional editor, which allows for different "projections" of your code, not just linear text. One of the things this enables is using descision tables directly within your code [2], as well as a bunch of other things like math notation or graphs for statemachines [3]. Being able to use another notation than just plaintext can make some code a lot clearer.

I know this isn't going to replace code as text anytime soon, but it looked really interesting. Does anyone know of other projects experimenting with representing code in other ways?

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/

[2] https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/img/screenshots/2017.2/domain-...

[3] http://www.mbeddr.com/platform
What Is Virtual Career Fair
Privacy right now is still a super luxury product that hasn't trickled down generally to the aspirational goods market. I'm all for engineering privacy solutions, but reality is, these are designed to facilitate information sharing that was previous considered taboo or beyond the acceptable. You probably wouldn't trust a bunch of anonymous random grad students using university tech to keep your family's medical records safe, but with a privacy technology, suddenly giving them the data is viable - and this is what we call "privacy" now.

Privacy engineering is interesting, but not nearly as much as privacy products, as really without viable privacy products, privacy engineering is just another self-selected problem.
StackOverflow Podcast #1 (2008)
On a somewhat related note, here is an excellent short documentary on the making of the score for John Carpenter’s Escape From New York: https://youtu.be/NBw4OXM6ad4

It is particularly interesting to see how MIDI completely changed the game. Getting everything synced in the pre-MIDI age sounds like it was more involved.
Logo is looking good , gj
Ableton is great, especially if you are tech-oriented. I suggest you follow along with a couple video tutorials introducing the basics of Ableton to get started. You can make something decent-sounding with just a few tracks and loops. The basic concepts should apply across DAWs. Have fun, and good luck!
I am, they seem like a great idea and I wish they were common in my part of the world.

But they only motivate manufacturers' packaging choices in the rare case where it's more cost effective to recycle the material than to purchase it new. If it's cheaper to use something that ends up in a landfill, most companies just will.

I think we need something that motivates them to want it back no matter what it's made out of.

---

I make beer and I've been reusing the same bottles for years. The trick is to rinse them right away, otherwise it's a pain to get the dried beer gunk off the bottom. Bottle return programs don't motivate users to clean the bottles, so they need to be recycled rather than merely sanitized and reused (I think).
Nothing is stopping you.
Technology Is Compounding Inequality and It's Okay
You can store tennis balls. You can make a WiFi cantenna! Many ways to re-use these cans.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand" -Richard Feynman

“Chi cerca dove non deve, trovarà qualcosa che non gli
piace.” [“He who looks where he shouldn’t, will find something he will not like”.] [Sicilian proverb]

"Sew in wind, reap the whirlwind" Hosea 6
> > I agree that word is bad

> If we put aside the Word file format, and maybe the ribbon, is Word bad though?

Is the ribbon bad, though, or are we just living through 2003 era UI shock for 13 years now?

I lambasted the ribbon as was fashionable back then, but actually using it in 2020?

It's good. Like, legit amazing UI design. Makes it easy to peck through menus and find what you want. Structures chords for power users, and importantly makes those chords visually discoverable. I've found a pile of good keyboard shortcuts just by starting to slowly press a chord on the ribbon.

It's great for mouse users.
It's great for noobs just learning the ropes.
It's great for keyboard users who already know their stuff.
It's amazing at facilitating the learning process into knowing your stuff

It's been great for 17 years. Do we still have to pretend it sucks because we were used to a different way of doing things?
As far as I'm concerned, the very definition of success in music has changed as a result of modern technology. There are far more genres with their own communities, events, magazines (paper and digital), crucial albums, and both minor and major celebrities. The relevance of labels has changed so much that many artists don't bother seeking contracts because they can achieve their definition of success, which in some genres can look just like the traditional "making it" picture of a successful musician, without ever signing a contract. Thank god for that.

The modern world of music is such that an artist playing a very niche kind of music can record at home or in a friend's studio cheaply, release their work online, build a dedicated audience, and make a respectable amount of money without ever dealing with a label. They can be working in a kind of music that never would have had any success in a pre-digital world. That's powerful, wonderful.
You can do incredible amounts of harm to your PC without installing a virus. Ironically installing every virus scanning software at the same time results in massive issues.
I'm surprised that monero hasn't gotten more attention in the crypto space. It's got a solid, albeit small development team and a strong vision.

It's probably the closest thing out there to digital cash at the moment.
Project Cybersyn: the afterlife of Chile’s socialist internet
interesting. good pattern. I frequently do something similar:

opt="
# this is the foo option
a=1

# define the bar
#BAR=ON
#BAR=OFF
BAR=MAYBE

" | egrep -v '^#|^$' | sed 's/^/-D/'

or

progs="
one two three
#four five siz
seven ate tree
" | egrep -v '^#|^$' | while read o1 o2 o3
do
program $o1 $o2 $o3
done

sort of like on-the-fly readable configurability
The corporations only make those choices because they are allowed to(or rather, because they are not forced by the regulations to actually pay for the environmental cost of what they make). Yes, I recently noticed that with Tesco eggs, I have complained to them about it. And it's not our fault but we can definitely try to avoid these products as consumers. Telling companies why you avoid them is also a good thing to do.
That's how it works in general unless there is a prescribed compulsory penalty.

Usually (or often) the job of the court/jury is not only to decide on guilty/innocent but, in case of a guilty verdict, to decide on the level of culpability and appropriate penalty (within what's prescribed in law).
The rare occasions that I played against my wife and tried to castle, she rejected it outright with, "No fancy moves!"
Eh - myself and lot of my friends grew up army brats, and we're fine. Really into vidya.
I get that this is true of real cars, but is it really true of simulated cars? Can you share an example?
Well, I guess that's a difference in philosophy then. I find myself agreeing with him that sometimes, people can be quite wrong and bad, and that's in fact a greater danger than the benefit of people being right and good.

And protecting society from going down the wrong path -- which often leads it towards permanent irrecoverable damage -- is as important, if not more important, than enabling people be able to so quickly fix something that temporarily solves it, but sets up the society for greater disorder in the long run.

Perhaps judges could have fixed injustices faster. Or different styles of democracy could have. But they could also cause injustices faster too.

Take a different example. People are in some no small measure in approval today that abortion should be legal, when it involves (in some other people's opinion) the killing of human beings. (Just to avoid any controversy /s)

How would you handle that one? Is that to be given the same process as what you just proposed to cure that injustice?

You see the point about having a system that does well across many issues, not just one, right?
One answer to "Why is this question..." is because we have defined it so. And why did we define it so? One could make an argument that notions of sets, counting, length, and so on are anthropomorphisms -- we project our bodies onto the universe around us so we can reason about the environment using our specialized brains. (Human brains are specialized to operate in the context of our bodies.) In fact, the Whorf hypothesis [0][1][2] addressed this subject in the context of linguistics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/#SoCalSapWhoH...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B008043076... , https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/03042-4
> But if we assume our current knowledge of physics and biology are good enough

That's a bloody big if, but let us let it ride for now

> we should be able to find the best(whatever definitions is used)

Agreed it hinges on that, assuming the preceding if is accepted. What 'best' do you nominate? I have no idea what it might be.
A lot of countries seem to have had a system for reusing old glassware. And stuff they were used for like milk, beer, carbonated water weren't 10x more expensive. Nowadays it's recycled if you're lucky, or it ends up in a landfill.
It's interesting because I spent time learning C++/Rust a year or so back and I stupidly didn't look into the job market before devoting time to it only to get the sober realization in my city of 6 million that very few companies were looking for it. I ended up learning Javascript not because I truly loved it but because there are/were significantly more positions available.
I don't know. I read the pointers chapter at least 3 times, and I still get confused when I see pointer stuff in real code. The other day, I read the famous regex post by Russ Cox[1], and it took me a couple of hours to understand the pointer parts of the code even though the algorithm behind it was relatively simple. I guess pointers are just one of those things that for some people make a lot of sense, whereas others struggle with.

[1] https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html