skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> FileNotFoundException is something my code can probably recover from - you asked for a file

Actually, no. Sometimes it is fatal, and sometimes it's not.

If the file being open is expected to be part of the distribution and your app can't start without it, it's fatal.

If it's a file picked by the user, it's most likely recoverable.

The main problem is that every single one of these exceptions should be able to be either runtime or checked, and that choice should be made by the application.

Open question: should this decision be made at the call site or the use site?
IMO it's awful shite. Other people seem to think nesting lambdas n deep is not shite. I've worked with code like this - I've been lectured that "it's the functional way", but it isn't, it's just a mess. And often inefficient to boot.

You can write fine code functionally but for some reason this kind of horror is considered "the right way". Why? since when did people forget about writing for the human not the computer?
As a layman I have to ask: Isn't this what happens with "the flu" (our annual flu waves) every year? It infects us, we fight it back, it mutates, infects us again, we fight it off again, and the cycle repeats.

Same thing happening here?
> Just looking at the density is not enough.

On the contrary, it should be the driving force about making long-term decisions to benefit society. Hell, I'd be all for mini-nuclear in vehicles but the ability to make it safe is such a high threshold that it's not even remotely feasible.

No one thought electric cars would be where they are today. Elon made this electric car market happen by making it sexy (and selling only premium cars) which helped him double down on the real vision. There is a ceiling for the battery and it's not as high as many think.

We'll see what Tesla battery day shows but my main point is this: That to improve society with long-term thinking, we need to be more innovative and it's my opinion that attacking Milton's weaknesses is a waste of the public's time/energy. Especially when short sellers get a lot more freedom in how they deal with the market. No one is being a fair arbiter of the facts. Hydrogen is better for hauling big loads, it just is. To bring that to market is Nikola's real challenge. The upside to hydrogen is greater than the upside of li-ion, full stop. Shouldn't we want the better solution for society?
dictators don't do what they want efficiently. nor do they do anything else efficiently.

if you were to read the links I posted in the comment you're replying to, you would discover that an expert who was there at the time reported that all of the trains were typically late during Mussolini's regime. this includes both the trains which were favored by elites, and the trains favored by the working class.
Games offered in a streaming game service subscription must be downloaded directly from the App Store, must be designed to avoid duplicate payment by a subscriber, and should not disadvantage non-subscriber customers

Imagine having to download every netflix movie separately from itunes. Well some progress is better than none.
Indeed, you need to look at total impact, not just the impact of switching a raw material.

A college prof did an analysis of plastic versus biodegradable “plastic”.

The biodegradable plastic took far more energy and released much more CO2 than just regular plastic.
They are also non-trivial amounts of work, both to build and to maintain..

Someday, someone will have problems connecting and waste half a day debugging it before they realize what is up.
Gitpod
What kind of millions are we talking?

It's probably 3,000,000, which is 6 or 7 figures.
Some of you maybe remember old DOS game audio setup, the MIDI section usually also had the Roland MT-32 as option. Most of the MIDI of older games was actually recorded on MT-32 and you could hear the music in the original glory by using this device. It was expensive back then and still is - because of collectors and retro gamers. You can even connect it with DOSBox. Later DOS games used General MIDI (MT-32 was before MIDI was standardized) and there were more synthetizers to choose from, but a good pick is Roland SC-55 or SC-88VL. The music sounds phenomenal through the Roland, for example Monkey Island: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20
> Disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself, e.g. unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results.

What if the process is in fact broken and corrupt, and the corrupt authorities dispute the claims of corruption? Hard not to read this as either
a) Twitter will censor elections related claims that contradict the official line or the more likely
b) Twitter will themselves decide what is and is not disputed, and censor accordingly.

This doesn’t seem like a good thing.
Humans yes, and some of the other primates. Obviously. But before those species, was there a kind of "great filter" of numeracy and memory?

If you have cats, and one of them dies, the other may spend months looking for their companion in the usual places, howling away, but for progeny, litters of kittens average about four or so (by nipple math!). If a kitten dies or is somehow lost, the mother will likely miss them on an individual basis, but will the change in the number of kittens in a kitten pile also cause a feeling of loss?

What about with the aforementioned ducks? You might have twelve ducklings and a reduced capacity in the mother to recognize them individually; she might instead look at the ducks collectively. I saw a bit of a nesting duck leading her babies out for their first foray into the water. She would quack and every so often another duckling would pitch themselves out of the nest-hole and onto the water. Eventually the quacking didn't get her any more ducklings and she proceeded onward. She had an astounding nineteen ducklings.

However, that number is going to decrease over time. Will she have a creeping experience of fewer and fewer ducklings? Or is it something like "many, three, two, one"? And what kind of internal state comes about? Certainly we see that loss in the larger primates, and even in our own pets, but when it gets down to birds, many of them do not have a lot of brain matter to work with -- what's their state? Is there enough memory and experience to overcome instinct? "All of my babies died last year and the year before ..."

Overall, and this is just the vaguest of grim suspicions, what if, at each increase in memory and care for offspring, evolution must select against those organisms experiencing a kind of despair, a learned helplessness, at the futility of the ever-larger spheres of their existence? It's not an issue if you're just a handful of neurons wiggling your way toward the next source of food, but it could become large enough to struggle against the survival instinct, and I wonder if numeracy is one of those critical struggles.
If my memory is correct, I discovered PG's essays from Slashdot, and through them reddit, and through reddit hn.

And this reminds me of how some people theorize that life on Earth came from another planet.

In one way it answers the question, but also does not answer it at all.

My guess for origination online communities from scratch would be advertising and already having a small community. Well obviously content too. But I think the reddit founders early on pretended to be many more people on reddit, because no one wants to join an empty community.

The founders provided the startup community. PG's essay were the advertising. And both slashdot and the people who posted PG's essay there, where the advertising of PG's essays.
> And retail doesn't charge "0%" on boxed products

Yes, they do, unless it's consignment model, which wasn't usually the case for boxed software. The retail sale happens after retail has made the purchase. It’s obviously usually at a higher price than the retailer paid, but they don't take a cut of what the vendor is asking for the software. They pay whatever the vendor (or, often in real retail, a distributor that sits in between) is offering to sell the product for, in advance, and takes a risk that they will be able to sell the units they have purchased at a higher price.

It's structurally not at all the same as what an app store does, where it pays no one, anything (indeed, often charges an access fee up front to the seller) before a sale is made, and then pockets a share of the sale at no risk.
How many remote code execution exploits have we seen on webs applications? Many thousands.

But you don't need to make this trade off. SSH does not need to be open to the internet to begin with - make it only accessible via VPN. Now you don't have log spam from botnets in your logs, and it won't show up on a port scan that has fingerprinting enabled and scans the whole range, and you won't be as vulnerable if some sort of sshd exploit comes out that allows you to bypass auth.
Hopefully not at Baynard House [0]

I was responible for, ah, certain outages at the time. Not in any malicious sense, but because my game (running on a 4Mhz Z80) managed to overload the whole network.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baynard_House,_London
> a whole economy hostage.

iOS is not even near to the "whole economy" of mobile software.

Companies should just stop being based in the US.

With what’s happening to TikTok and this ridiculous push for a Communist-style reappropriation of Apple’s platform, it seems that the US may no longer be a safe place for businesses to become too big in (except of course, the ancient titans of oil, guns, pharmaceuticals etc. that have been happily screwing the planet since forever..)

None of this indignation is really about protecting the people, is it, but rather about taking a slice of the billion user pie, which Apple has historically denied other companies ever since they refused to put AT&T bloatware on the first iPhone.
> My take:

You're so wrong about saying this is not a national security issue. China has been in an undeclared war with the US for 40 years. You can learn more on the Youtube "China in Focus - NTD" channel.

> feel compelled to make their products resistant to government influence.

All Chinese companies are controlled by the CCP. What DJI wants is irrelevant. Each company in China over 50 employees has a CCP cell to monitor their obedience.

Obligatory Link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
risk = probability * severity

Security by obscurity is bad regardless of other controls because it does little to reduce probability of attack and nothing for severity. It is only barely helpful at reducing the probability of attack because it is ineffective against various forms of automated footprinting. That is just the attacker.

Security controls impact everybody though. Not only does it make the problem obscure to an attacker it also makes the problem obscure to non-attackers. This dramatically increases risks because it impacts the application and distribution of other security controls.

Since it’s barely helpful where intended and harmful where it’s unintended security by obscurity only increases risks.

The analogy to software is the belief that hiding source code makes it safer. Hidden source code is not any safer but the vulnerabilities are a bit harder to find. The benefit of open source is that the vulnerabilities are exposed to anybody who reads the code which allows more vulnerabilities to be exposed and patched.
It does, generally on islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_gigantism

Humans tend to exterminate them.
A Blockchain based file crumbing CLI written in Go
> In the USA, we live in a system where power is held accountable.

You must live in a different USA than I do. The multiverse in real life.

> Your argument is pure whataboutism

No it isn't. If you only wrote "china does some bad things" and I responded with "X does bad things too". That is whataboutism. When you say "china bad" and "democracy good" and I show you that democracy does bad too, it isn't whataboutism. It's debunking your claim.

> a term coined to describe Soviet propaganda in the 60's.

Right. It's also a well worn propaganda term used by think tanks/propagandists/"journalists"/coworkers/etc to stifle discussion for a few years now. I'd avoid using that term if you want to be taken seriously. It gets tiresome and obvious.

> The reason it's still legitimate to bring up Tiananmen Square is because it is still denied, censored and unaddressed.

Even if it wasn't "denied, censored or unaddressed", I think it would be legitimate to bring it up. Not sure what your point is.

> The Nazis killed the gays right along with the Jews and I would face the death penalty in many countries today.

The nazis killed a lot of people. So did the british, soviets, chinese, japanese and the US. But they singularly targeted jews, like you and the author target china. Also, I don't think china executes people for being gay. Though I may be wrong. So one for the bad guys?

> By your argument, we can never call out evil when we see it.

Where did you get that from my comment? The difference between you and I is that I called out all evil. You call out evil to suit your political agenda. But what upsets you is I called out your propaganda.

> My gauge for evil is what the powerful are willing to do to the weak to increase their own power.

The most powerful nation is the one we are living in. The most powerful bloc in the world is the western bloc. Once again, not sure what your point is and how it applies to china?

> Instead of silence in the face of the evil we personally recognize, let us all speak!

There is a neverending cesspool of anti-china propaganda everywhere. Who is preventing you from speaking?

From whataboutism all the way to victimhood in one paragraph.
Doesn't matter how much you vote me down. You know it's an entirely possible scenario, and having your sshd "off-port" as part of the security strategy can make the difference.
If you're doing a lot of that, sure. But not all of us are, or are constrained by compatibility requirements.
Even though LaTeX is still not very close to producing perfectly accessible PDF documents, there is some recent work towards this goal.

- https://ctan.org/pkg/tagpdf

- https://ctan.org/pkg/accessibility

I am using the former for some personal documents and found that it improves text selection and copying on Apple devices. (This could be related to how PDFKit handles text.)

Edit: formatting.
There's no such procedures for anonymous and coin operated storage lockers or hotel rooms. Why would this be a big concern here?
Yeah, not only that but Linux users are known to be hostile to commercial software companies.

Given that, the microscopic market, and the additional programming complexity I don't see a reason why any game company should go out of their way to support Linux ever.

(As a Linux desktop user, I'm thankful when they do though. I'm so glad that Beyond Compare from Scooter Software works on my main workstation, for instance. Also Zoom, Slack and VS Code among others... Looking forward to trying MS Edge some day soon.)
To make things worse: sub one-point-zero versions don't actually need to mean anything, i.e. 0.0.1 -> 0.0.2 could be a breaking change as far as the semver spec is concerned. Library authors often stay in 0.x ranges "just in case the API needs to change".

And before anyone claims one shouldn't use stuff on versions below 1.0, consider that very popular projects like React were widely deployed in production before they decided to bump themselves out of 0.x...
Stores buy products wholesale and sell them on, and accept the risk of the products not selling.

Apple act as a middleman and and add on their fees, with absolutely no risk to themselves.

They're very different business models.
I think there are two jumps in logic I made, one more defensible than the other. The first:

> Loads of systems exhibit Turing universality, so a small change in alpha shouldn't break that property of our universe.

(I consider this relatively indefensible, and the weakest part of my argument.) The other is

> Turing universality => intelligent life is inevitable, or at least likely.

I think that this second piece, although not discussed explicitly in the post, can be defended. It's not a highbrow argument, just that often-made observation that, if a "computer" requires finite size and finite energy to create, then somewhere in the universe, a computer will come into being by random chance.
I'm sure her decision to use a derogatory insult on you was based on thorough research into sexual preference of cat owners.
>Platforms need to be regulated

No. God no.

Regulation has its place. But regulation is also a slooow bureaucratic process. Regulators have no incentive to change with market conditions and in a fast moving industry will be a hindrance in no time. They also increase the cost of development benefiting the big guys that can afford an army of HR, Regulatory and Legal people to handle compliance.
They should have more responsibility and be held accountable. When managers have narrow authority and are not honestly measured its a bad scene man.
That's not the only problem with obscurity. It not only obscures flaws from attackers, it also obscures them from you and makes a system hard to maintain. In any complex system, ultimately there will develop chinks in your armor that owe their existence to obscurity hacks that were thought clever at the time.
Miscellanea: My Thoughts on Crusader Kings III
Unchecked exceptions are the worst of both worlds: you can call a function that will throw an exception that you could recover from but you have no idea, so you don't even know you should catch it.

At least, Either/Option force your code to take errors into account.

You still have to bubble them up and compose them manually, though, which is why checked exceptions shine.
I think it was both - not unusual to post an announcement for a new forum in multiple places, and PG's blog and Reddit very much had overlapping readerships (and authors) at the time. I found it through Reddit.

BTW, there are some YC founders that have join dates several months before us - HN was open to internal YC batches about a half-year before it went public.
If a company gets too big, they have to start worrying more about internal adversaries. That's why you see those kind of things.
Google has a whole thing on this (https://sustainability.google/projects/circular-economy/) that I find super fascinating.
Don't know about Apple but apparently OnePlus closes the next design 9 months before launch (https://youtu.be/W-VInHvlrZo at 16:40)
The notion that you can reflect on yourself and see where you need to improve shows that you are indeed learning and growing as a programmer. Be patient.

Stay humble! Stay curious! Keep going.
It seems to me like Apple has created the appearance of a new exemption without actually changing anything.

All of the example transactions in the guidelines (“tutoring students, medical consultations, real estate tours, or fitness training”), are for real-world services performed by people. In-App Purchases have always been specifically and exclusively intended for digital content. The introduction for the IAP section explains: “If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app […] you must use in-app purchase.”

Apple Pay is the Apple-provided payment mechanism that has always been used for real world goods and services on the App Store, for which all of the above examples would qualify.
Right, I meant mainly in aggregate. If this patient is the norm, then we are fine
They are also stuck for better or worse as "technological vassals" as not driving research and development. This isn't a slight on their intellectual capabilities at all but an acknowledgement of realities and scales - they are just as human as us. Third world nations don't develop their own novel weapons systems beyond guerilla repurposing like technical trucks - they don't have the budget for it. Clever individuals can still come up with something new but they lack the institutional support for it to be "big".

One silver lining they get is R&D of others can help them skip the step some steps compared to the past west's development paths. Cell phones connected the third world in absense of wires and individual autorouting compared to party lines and operator based dispatches. Something similar is happening to a degree with renewables.

Renewables are a nice fit to them in several ways, the storage and grid free unreliability is unfortunately nothing new to them. It is a bit of a situational dubious blessing like "We don't need to worry about chemo being carcogenic - you already have stage 3 cancer". Not ideal but few things are for the third world even if they are improving.
Interesting. I'd love to see more of these kinds of alternatives.

I don't have experience with monads, union types, and the like for network programming.

I dimly recall some nodejs stuff which moved the err and result values from the callback to the method's return, which I also found appealing. (Or maybe that was golang. Sorry, am replying on phone.)
> And then the rest of the civil service and the government saw its brand reputation as a resource to be used much the same way that slash and burn farmers view the Amazon.

Can you give some examples so I can understand?
Ben Thompson has argued for this, but more in the abstract: government is focusing too much on using preexisting legal frameworks to handle these issues. In reality, the right framework doesn't exist yet!

In the States, this is on Congress: we need new laws and a new process to sort out this flavor of antitrust issue. The current stuff on the books doesn't cut it.

Also of note: I'm also not saying we need more laws. It's not a question of to what degree we do regulate this sort of thing: my point is that we don't even have a process to think about the issues! It's totally archaic.
What incentive does Google or Apple have to associate their name with someone else’s security judgment calls?
> We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.

This line makes my blood boil. Futhermore, later they define disallowed sexual content as:

> 1.1.4 Overtly sexual or pornographic material, defined by Webster’s Dictionary as "explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings."

Do they not know from which ruling that quote comes from?
While I agree with you, I think there's something that should be pointed out: China stance on foreign companies doing business in China.

Currently China wants all the perks of the open global market, while closing it's own. I don't understand how this is allowed.
I would love it. But content should be very special, like unique DIY projects, innovative papers or something like phrack.org. I really miss good tech magazines.

But am not from Canada, fyi.
I have three of those apps installed, none of them did anything that day. They've mostly worked in the past, except when larger areas were notified and you clicked on the notification to get more details the app would show nothing because whatever its service is running on was overwhelmed by the amount of people checking..

Meantime vacationing in Japan I can get a Japanese wall of text on my phone informing me and everyone around me who pulled out their phone of an imminent earthquake, all without data active.
Yes! Will Netflix's Bandersnatch require a separate application?
The "accessibility" LaTeX package maintainer is looking for help in this area: https://github.com/AndyClifton/accessibility/issues/42
At risk of gatekeeping, it doesn’t sound like typesetters merit the title of engineer.
A throat microphone[1] might work.

Another interesting option would be some kind of subvocal recognition device.[2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throat_microphone

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition