skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone else feel like BBC writing has gone into the loo lately? Popular science reporting doesn't need to sound like sixth grade book report filler.

> Who knows? It might even get us closer to understanding those cosmic head-scratchers "dark energy" and "dark matter" which appear to be controlling the evolution of so much of what we see when we look up.

Gah, really?
On always looking for opportunities
I didn't say it was random. On the contrary, I'd expect it not to be.
Awk rightward assignment:

$ awk 'BEGIN { "echo foo" | getline var; print var }'
foo
Like everyone else on this site, I don't pride myself on my fashion.

It's uncomfortable. It gets hot, sweaty, and stuffy under there.

It's inconvenient. The other day, I parked my car and got halfway to the supermarket entrance before realizing I left the damn thing in the car. I was the guy mumbling expletives in the carpark as I backtracked.

And, most importantly, it doesn't make sense to me. Nobody in my small city cares. It warms my heart when I see a family or a group of kids playing in public without their bloody masks. If I lived in a more 'multicultural' area where people are flying in from all corners every day, then maybe we'd be more anxious about it, but in our case the general mood is one of bitterness and resentment that we're paying the toll for the city-dwellers crammed into high rise apartments surrounded by sniffling strangers.

Forcing the entire population to wear masks to save a few 87 year olds from catching the flu every year is absurd.
Yes, i have people sending me emails at first.last.com@gmail.com, instead of first@last.com. How I know? They type both addresses just to be sure.
Seriously. And you're lucky if you get an actual journalist too.
2% better perf isn't anything to sneeze at but also not super drastic. Will be curious to see if this unlocks more optimizations over time.

I'm also curious if there's been any work to organize code layout to make it more efficient to page stuff out efficiently to reduce memory pressure (so that you're using all code in the pages you are bringing in) & reduce paging thrash (you're not evicting a code page only to bring it back for a few hundred bytes).
I would think she suffers from psychopathy. Would it matter in court?
Is there really nothing else to improve?

More unnecessary "features"...
It took me years and years to get a story that made sense about Corbin Motors and why they flamed out making the Sparrow and trying to bring out the Merlin.

It will probably surprise nobody here that the Pareto Principle applies to large scale manufacturing. Hand building a vehicle is 10% of the work, and the other 90% is a very different kind of work and skillset that is easy to drown in. A bunch of things you just figured out how to do well, you need to stop doing entirely because a machine or a vendor should be doing them for you. Along with all the people and equipment you acquired to do it.

You have to stomach writing off a bunch of equipment, swallowing your pride and taking advice from people who have no sweat equity in your company. And as a cherry on top, you probably get to be the asshole that has to fire John Henry, who has been here since before the machines.
The premise of common law is the Magna Carta. it was between the king and his nobles. Everyone wasn't a noble.
T-Mobile used a 5G-connected robot to give someone a tattoo
https://noyaml.com/
everyone is fighting their own battle
Well I suppose it's possible that your "about" line is completely fake, but in that case it sounds like you want people to go around thinking you're not him.
Google Maps is back on the Apple Watch
> But I really do not think Musketmen are as powerful as you say.

Its not Musketmen that makes the strategy annoying. Its the death-stack mechanic in general. The tactical possibilities of a Death-stack are boring: its just bigger is better.

Engaging in a death-stack is similarly boring: if your stack is smaller, you retreat. If their stack is smaller, you advance.

Musketmen are just the example I'm using because they're the "all-around" unit from the mid-game. I don't really need to know the composition of your military if I'm using Musketmen around the time they come out. It has nothing to do with Musketmen in general, the boring part is just throwing 20 of anything down onto a single tile stack.

-----------

It doesn't matter if the stack is composed of Axemen, Samurai, Infantry, Gunships, Tanks, or whatever. Its all the same to me: you make a big ball then wreak things without thinking too much about the individual strategy.

In contrast: Civ2 was extremely punishing against stacks in general, only a well-defended location (ie: City or Fort) could support stacks. In the open field, it required careful consideration of the board whenever you were moving. Maybe a stack was worthwhile (ex: moving onto a Fortified Musketeer in Civ2, since you're confident in its defense). Or maybe not (well maybe you'll lose 3 units to their Artillery).

Civ5 and Civ6 get the right idea by preventing death stacks: it means that choke-points truly exist in those games. However, the lack of stacking messes with the movement of both games, and moving units (especially in the endgame) becomes EXTREMELY tedious.

Civ2's "kill the whole stack" allowed you to have simplified endgame movement and tactical gameplay. It was the best of both worlds, albeit with just the occasional newbie complaining about killstacks.

> Then, once cannons/artillery and air units come into play, death stacks are very vulnerable to them.

Cannons and Artillery only have one movement, and have the same problem as the Trebuchet. Mobile artillery has 2-movement, but everything in the game has 2 or more movement by that point (Tanks / Mechanized infantry)

Bombers, sure. Bombers finally give an answer to the deathstack right before the game ends. But Gunships (Helicopters) and Fighters don't do anything vs stacks. And it only takes a single Fighter running interception missions (100% interception rate) to deter any Bombers from your stack.

Stealth Bombers with 50% evasion, finally give a way to reliably attack stacks in the absolute endgame.
But surely strings are valid? Unless you want some kind of static type checking/linting for eg an ipv4 vs ipv6 key? Strings are very portable as well (POD).

Plenty of real world applications use static hostnames and rely on DCHP to assign IPs. When you have systems that can fail hard and you need to replace a NIC, it saves having to update either a ton of config files, router configs, or your hosts file(s). Most networking library api calls also take strings as arguments for this reason. Not saying its a better solution, but there times when either an IP or a string hostname should be acceptable.

I've never had to use it, but Qt does have a hostname class, for an example of what such a dtype looks like. The class explicitly handles conversion for you:

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qhostaddress.html
Cargo error when downloading crates from our CDN
I've been using TOML recently and what displeases me most is that almost all string values need to be quoted.
I think terseness and readability are often at odds past a certain point, and TOML seems to optimize for readability at the expense of terseness.

E.g., having to specify column names again and again is tedious to write, but makes the file easier to read and modify safely.
Performance Metrics for Front-End Applications
How to win Kaggle competitions with Anthony Goldbloom
Sweden has always been near the top 10 (currently 13th; to give some context, Italy is 12th) and somehow the myth of "Sweden is magically successful at fighting COVID-19" refuses to die.

If having 1 in 1730 people die is such a huge success, I suppose having 1 in 1690 die is okay, too.

(To avoid misunderstanding, no, I don't think any of these numbers is okay. Many developed countries have an order of magnitude better results.)
Remote work in the 90s and 00s was a lot of FTP, CVS, email and IM. Long distance phone calls still cost money for much of that time too, so there wasn't much synchronous phone calls, once a week or so. Also, generally the business needs were either high enough that the staff were all expert-ish and could get done what they needed, or low enough that random Bob's cousin's nephew could build it in HoTMetaL. There wasn't a lot of in between.

When I worked for other people, management spent a lot of time with requirements and specs before implementing, which often resulted in mismatched software expectations. Agile gets poo-poo'd now, but it was a revolution at the time

When I was doing my own consulting, I always did my best to find local clients for remote work (often building e-commerce web sites when the competition was still using FrontPage) because it was preferable to be able to call the client or meet in person to discuss the inevitable requirements snafus.

Honestly, it doesn't seem that much different now. Humans are generally not all that great at communication. The tools we have today make a dent in that problem but there's still significant unresolved challenges.

When I'm leading teams, I tend to spend a lot of time on teaching people to communicate more effectively and creating processes to enable it. It makes things go more smoothly than trying to be the central hub for all communication.
I run https://kopi.cloud - let's you give out burner addresses you can just make up on the fly. SSO through Google, Facebook, Twitter. One touch blocking of burner addresses. Supports replying and attachments. Mail 2 RSS - read Facebook / StackOverflow, newsletters, etc. as RSS feeds. And you can use your own domain if you want, so no lock-in.
Production Testing with Dark Canaries
Though I'll agree that I don't love the name "table". I think it's referring to the kind of table you might see in an instruction booklet or something, with keys on the left and their values on the right, but the possible confusion with database tables seems not great.
Performance in the opposite direction is also useful;
the Ryū algorithm[0] is a fast float-to-string conversion that I've used recently to great effect[1]. Namely, to convert path information from glyphs into vector graphics for a minimal math-oriented Java-based TeX implementation[2]. The result is code that converts 1,000 simple formulas as strings into individual SVG documents in under 600 milliseconds on newish hardware.

[0]: https://github.com/ulfjack/ryu/blob/master/README.md

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17633182

[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/JMathTeX/blob/master/README.md
I had a bit of a brain burst the other day when I recalled from undergrad (GIS) that this was a real problem, but that area was a value that converged on a number the more precisely you measured, so presumably you don’t have to worry about massively different area values the more precisely you measure. But then realized that the coastline paradox must also exist for 3D surfaces (TINs or DEMs or whatnot) so asking “what is the area of a surface on earth” can be a very complex question if dealing with elevation.

That got me wondering if it’s generally true for any number of dimensions.
This link has a decent overview: https://www.arp242.net/yaml-config.html

There's also the NO/Norway problem (although it seems this instance of the problem may be fixed if you're always using newer versions): https://allan.reyes.sh/programming/2018/06/20/The-YAML-NOrwa...
I don't think the top level honchos at GM are smart enough to have thought even this far through as you have.
This is definitely a problem. I'm also beginning to believe I should pad the estimate and also tell them "I padded it in case something goes wrong".

Another hard thing to say is 20% of my time is meetings, and those aren't all in 1 block, so I have less time and I'm less efficient.

Finally, I'm beginning to believe you should do your own sprint planning as a dev quick before sprint planning with the group. Otherwise you get talked into half-baked stories with no acceptance criteria and a terribly short estimate.

They want you to keep them honest when it's all theoretical... but not when you're actually doing the work.
Perhaps, I'm dumb as rock, but what does your comment have to do with what I originally wrote above?
If this is your argument supporting this trend, then I'm speechless ...
Can you expand on the negatives? I don't think I understand what you mean.
> Does that make NASA liars?

No. It makes them not-successful. Which also applies to SpaceX in that regard.

> Their actual goal (self-sustaining Mars civilization of at least a million people) is 5-6 orders of magnitude grander than that, and almost certainly won't occur in Musk's lifetime. Musk acknowledges that.

His stated goal is to do this by 2050. That’s within his lifetime (I hope).
I wouldn't have expected any functions to be 5KiB or larger. That seems like a lot of assembly to me, and so it makes sense to me that these functions would be "accidentally" generated by inlining.

I'm curious what percent of functions are this large?
TOML sucks in so many ways. It is about 8x better than YAML, INI, or JSON though. It is good enough that I can ignore its flaws.
> I think it's pretty accurate description of what PRISM and other NSA programs allow NSA to do — that the signals intel agency can spy on content coming through American Internet servers.

The part you quoted is correct, but he didn't claim otherwise. He said that they could not get Americans' data in that manner, which is true. Reread his exchange with Johnson in the article. ("Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?") In other words, he did not lie.
I'm confused, why is this the case?
Rodents in space: Keeping bone and muscle strong on the ISS
Boom Enters Supersonic Air Force One Race
Are you an expert? If so I defer

Don't. An expert is the person most likely to be able to provide good support for their claims.
bEcAuSe pRoPer cApItAlIzAtIoN iS iMpOrTaNt fOr rEaDaBiLiTy ;-)
Do you have some examples of those silly things?
Thank you for this service. It is actually the only Twitter account I have push notifications enabled for (though I need to figure out a better solution when there is a lot of churn).

FWIW, I know at least one non-tech company that was already using .brand as an internal TLD and spent the money to avoid a name collision.
Yeah I think poor use of logic is most of the problem. No one's 100% logical... but you get pulled into these discussions asking just how quickly you can get this out... and it just repeats. At the start of the project they'll talk tech debt/spikes/whatever... but as you keep going it's just churn and burn and you really have to do extra/free work if you want to inject more quality.

There's definitely a spectrum from trash to gold plating... but most web shops are in 0 danger of wasting time or gold plating.

I understand the need to go faster from a business perspective... what I don't understand is the lying. Why not just tell us what the plan is so we can plan accordingly?
> reduced how?

I told you in the GP post. The email metadata program was shut down, and the phone metadata collection was reduced.

> PRISM still exists,

PRISM does not collect Americans' data.

> The question is what he had done about it when he was Senator and VP - specific actions attributable to him?

Again, I told that to you.
Gah i got bit by this with 'jq'!

> $ echo "{}" | jq
> {}
> $ echo "{}" | jq > out.json
> jq - commandline JSON processor [version 1.5-1-a5b5cbe]
... etc ...

Turns out when stdout isn't a tty you _must_ specify a filter (in this case '.')
Om Malik: In Convenience We Trust
Oh man, they left out the part I was hoping to find out more about!

> it's good form to have a function called resize() or similar that you run on program start and later when the terminal window is resized. while there is a horrible way to do this with ANSI escapes, it's better to just bite the bullet and learn how to use ioctls and termios.

I wanted to know about the horrible ANSI escape sequences to send that can query the window size. Afaict one has to read from the terminal to get the answer--but these are control sequences that could be inserted into the normal stream--when, where, how?
Endorsing censorship seems right in line with all of the other terrible decisions made by mozilla as of late.

Leadership team needs to go, start with the CEO.
Amazon, Apple, and Google’s open-source smart home standard on track for 2021
>> But then we use that drinking-level standard water to (1) water our landscape and (2) flush the toilet.

> Doing otherwise would require a massive duplicate water distribution network for non-drinkable water.

No, we don't. Water can be cycled onsite for other uses. It does not require anything massive or a duplicate water distribution network. For example, a Y-switch can be used on the outflow from a washingmachine, with one fork distributing it to the landscaping.

> That sounds labour intensive and non-scalable. How big would this green house/ water recycling solution need to be to power a single apartment building? How many people would be required to keep it up and running? What’s keeping this green house warm?

It's mostly automated, using low-tech, passive methods. The water cycles through the plants on its own. It has the added benefits that you can get fresh food. You would plant perennials, not annuals, that are selected to form cooperative interactions (plant guilds). That significantly reduces the amount of labor to maintain it, though labor is involved for harvesting.

I think you are misunderstanding what the greenhouses in those earthships do. You have to first understand it in context: New Mexico high desert, with extremes in heat and cold. The greenhouses acts as a passive buffer to regulate temperature of the main living areas, and does not require active cooling or heating. Between the sun, the trapped moisture, and the plants own heat regulation biomechanism, it reduces the volatility in temperature extremes.

This type of system does not work without the construction method to build these houses. For other sites, you'd have to come up with different solutions. I don't know, for example, if earthships work in temperate (Mid-West), or extreme colds (Alaska). But I know they will work for most of the Southwest US.

As far as scaling up to something the size of an apartment building, I have no idea. The earthship designs share similar ideas with Arcosanti (in Arizona), which is probably one of the largest scale implementation for passive heating and cooling.

Generally, within a larger pool of people, there are going to some people who are interested in tending the plants. As far harvesting, I think you'd be surprised by how many people would be willing to participate in being able to harvest free, fresh food close to where they live.

> You are going to have to be more concrete than that. Every living creature consumes resources from their environment and every creature will destroy their native environment unless held in check by predators or some other external limiting factor. Humans are the only animals to understand this, so we have the ability to moderate consumption.

That's a false assumption. Although there are plenty of examples of species that will run without check, there are also examples of species that cooperate with each other.

As far as being concrete, what I was talking about is the lens, or the paradigm in which we interpret facts and understand the world. That isn't something concrete.
Nice clean code! Thanks for open sourcing. I was a bit hoping to see how you were calculating amortization/interest charges in Clojure, but it appears to be only a pure ledger. Out of curiosity, were you using hashing to verify transaction chains? I saw code for MD5 hashes, but not where it was used.
> Most countries have twice as many cases now than at their peak in Spring and the trend is accelerating.

To put it in context, "twice as many cases than in spring" can still be per capita 10 times smaller number than in USA.

> US is actually doing well overall.

Yeah, if the number of deaths doubles, USA can be number one! Wait, that is actually not a good thing...
This seems like such a useful feature though. I wish there was a way to know for certain exactly what the device was doing so I could have this functionality but also have certainty that Google can’t arbitrarily add other wake words without my knowledge or consent.
> quasi-Marxist organization

A+ lede necromancy.
Both suck when you actually want any structure or have to go back later to figure out what happened. You need to structure your communication more than free form text. For example, is that email a question? A suggestion? Maybe it's a reason this is all pointless. Search doesn't really fit the bill because it only really works if you know the proper words.
>I don't take wikipedia to be authoritative about anything but I'll bite.

No but it's more authoritative than a random person on the internet (you). For things like this it's good enough. I'm not writing a paper here.

>Well, obviously in this context the author of the submission wasn't using that definition.

>Context matters.

>In most mathematical settings it would be a perfectly fine definition, but not here.

In this context it's also perfectly fine. OP did not make a distinction between subroutine or function. He also uses the term higher order function wrong. It shows two things. He does not know what a higher order function is and he does not know what a function is.

>Here are the problems with it: It assumes an interpretation in sets when there are a plurality of interpretations of functions qua functional programming which are not compatible with set theoretic models. For example, functions in homotopy type theory have higher dimensional structure than just being elements of a set. Functions in domains have more structure than just the extensional mapping from inputs to outputs. Your chosen definition also includes non-computable functions which are simply not admissible in this context.

This is the garbage pedantry that I warned you about earlier. I'm choosing the generally accepted academic definition. Hopefully you're not one of those people who can't comprehend "generally accepted" without an expose into axioms and different obscure branches of math.

>You seem to be confused by the existence of multiple definitions and how they are appropriate in context.

Find the generally accepted definition in wikipedia that this person is using (Hint: no actual technical definition exists). Obviously he's using "function" in place of procedure or subroutine. But then he uses the term "Higher Order" to imply an actual functions instead of procedures.

Not only does he use "Higher Order" incorrectly but his usage of the term indicates he doesn't know what a function is and the difference between a function and a procedure.

Yeah I'm not going to reply to your shit any more. HN really needs to change the policy of not letting parent posters vote others down.
Under the GDPR, any non-essential data processing (analytics, ads, marketing, etc falls into that) should be opt-in

This isn't strictly true. Consent is only one lawful basis for processing under GDPR, and it comes with a lot of strings attached that other bases don't necessarily have, which is why so many lawyers and consultants were recommending against relying it unless it was the only way during the mad rush to GDPR compliance a few years back.

In particular, even some of the regulators have themselves indicated that marketing might be a legitimate interest of a business. Obviously the details matter here, and handing personal data over to third parties like Facebook without their knowledge or consent seems materially different to, for example, the original business sending a relevant email about a new product that is related to something that the recipient already bought from them. Time will tell how the regulators decide to handle this.