skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I agree with Steve Kaufmann (a well known polyglot -- you can google him) that techniques aside, you really need 3 basic elements to learn a language

(1) attitude -- being willing to make mistakes (it's actually part of the brain rewiring process -- we remember better when there's an emotional connection). Also being willing to take the language as it is, and not imposing your own values on it from the get-go (e.g. why are there so many unnecessary cases/conjugations? it's stupid! -- people who are super-contrarian and judgy probably struggle more... they try to analyze everything but end up not learning anything. It's a common attitudinal problem among many otherwise smart people.)

(2) constant contact -- you need to spend time with the language in small chunks (e.g. 1/2 hour a day) over a long period of time rather than spend a week studying then stopping for several months.

(3) ability to notice things/distinctions -- this is important because if you cannot differentiate sounds or details, it can be hard to get to a certain level. I believe this ability is at least partly innate; folks who have this ability in spades seem to be able to progress faster. (but I also believe folks who have a growth mindset and put in the work eventually get there)

With these elements, one can assemble a combination of techniques tailored to oneself (everybody learns differently). For me, watching YouTube creators explain local culture is what interests me. Podcasts work for some people, but interesting content doesn't always exist in my target language, so I'm perfectly happy to reject that as technique for acquiring certain languages. Taking classroom lessons actually works really well for me because I like structure, so I do it weekly. Some people like music for learning languages -- it doesn't really work for me because I don't get to learn intonation (music obscures intonation and vowel lengths).

Learning techniques have to necessarily be bespoke because we come at languages with different backgrounds and interests. But I believe the 3 elements above have to exist.

In my opinion -- this is only my opinion -- immersion by living in a country is overrated as a technique. It helps for sure, but it really isn't necessary. The elements above are what are needed -- without these, even immersion is ineffective. I've met Irish guys living in Barcelona who couldn't speak any of the local languages. I've first hand experience living in several places where I never learned the local language because there was always a way around it.
Checked exceptions are optional in Java. If you look at a even an long-standing enterprise platform like Spring, there's almost no checked exceptions. I always make it a policy on Java projects to not allow checked exceptions and it's never a problem. Anything in the standard lib may have to be dealt with, but I don't allow commits with any throws declaration.
I'm seeing this "3 pillars of observability" framing as the main description these days, and I think it is nice breakdown of options. However, there is a common problem I am curious how others are dealing with. All metrics systems I have seen don't handle high cardinality data like Ids well. Most SASS products base their pricing on unique metrics because each unique aggregation has a cost. In the 3 pillars model, companies like Datadog are pushing those high cardinality values into the log pillar, and this article seems to imply the same. However, logs are often unstructured. There are often tools to search through logs, find values within those logs, and I can even do aggregations on them. However, when you know ahead of time what you want to aggregate on, text logs are more brittle than simply defining an event in json or another structured format. This log tier quickly becomes an ad-hoc version of a data warehouse and I feel like there is a missing tier here where you would send structured data to a datastore to do aggregations on for observability purposes only. I know datadog supports parsing structured data in this way, but I'm curious what is a common solution to this.

Is sending structured data through the "log" tier common, or are there structured event and reporting systems that are part of another system that is seldom discussed in this topic.
I like that idea voting for ideas instead of people.
However, unlike those companies I personally don't have a decent PR budget to shift your perspective in your daily life. I only have my words and my own actions.

I get my information from websites and articles and journals and classes and so on. How much of that was subtly[0] (or not-so-subtly[1]) altered by the investments of the gigantic entities behind energy consortia?

People don't care about climate change because their worldview leads to a conclusion that it isn't that big of a deal, that things are overblown, that people are fear-mongering, etc. It certainly isn't helped by the PR against serious thinking regarding climate issues, such that we have this absurd thing where Exxon is more keenly aware of the issues of climate change decades[2] before the average voter is.

So they aren't "nice guys" indeed. But I'm sorry: they're way worse than that - and they actually know it.

Unlike the average person who might not fully grasp where we're at and what one can do or might be disheartened by the fact that they are but one amongst many, we have people who have been keenly aware of what's to come but can't even begin to contemplate slowing down the growth of their bank accounts for the long-term viability of the ecosystem we live in.

The difference between "most people" and those guys is that "most people" would know better than to fuck things up as actively for their kids if they actually were aware of the situation, and if the effect of the "not so nice guys" PR could be to some extent lifted.

And the way things have been going, we'll definitely need to continue making the information available and attractive to most people so that we can reach a turning point and force those "not-so-nice guys" to seriously pivot instead of continue posturing.

[0] https://below2c.org/2019/11/oil-sector-propaganda-invades-th... and https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504622.2019.1...

[1] https://www.zmescience.com/science/richard-berman-green-radi...

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
There is a very good reason to eventually abandon it: leap seconds. Unix time goes back one second whenever there is a leap second on Earth.

It's extremely weird and IMHO completely ruins the purpose of a timestamp, but it's a compromise for backwards compatibility, since Unix time was created before leap seconds. This hack ensures that the number of seconds in a day remains fixed, an assumption of many systems at the time.
Emacs has multi cursors (https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=emacs%20multi%20cursors) though I never saw them as useful, search & replace seemed better. Perhaps I was missing something.
AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study resumed after pause
Moda gives me a headache. Half (or less) of an armodafinil works though. I can't take it for more than a few days in a row without it affecting my sleep.

Adderall makes me feel weird. Ritalin is awesome but I get horribly depressed and weepy when it wears off.
I think govt subsidy on compostable biodegradable plastics would be good too. Especially if the subsidy was not just on the bags themselves, but the research and process engineering to make them more cost-competitive.

In the US at least, cities can also get creative, such as exempting compostable items from sales taxes.
What is your job title, or what is it commonly called elsewhere? I'm desperately trying to get out of coding roles but hate just leaving my senior dev titles to rot and not help me in my next step.
Previous discussion "AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to suspected adverse reaction": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24413629
Waking up around the world in 2020: Time-series plots of Covid's effect on sleep
Show HN: ThinkStation – Interactive Live Education Streams for Ages 5-10
Hi HN,

We're Mayu & Glenn, the founders of ThinkStation (Free BETA: https://beta.thinkstation.io/download/). We provide an education platform for kids aged 5-10 to learn intriguing concepts through interactive Live Instruction!

Now more than ever, we know parents are stressed out. We want to help you buy back 30 minutes of your day to enjoy a sip of coffee, nap or work! Your kids can learn about the dirty jobs of the middle ages, or learning what is money whilst you sip away on a tea with a book -- and its content you can trust!

We’ve come from the realm of extracurricular education -- prior to testing this, we use to run a robotics/programming camp where we taught students to learn languages such as C#, JS etc through projects and have them compete at university hackathons -- and win :) When COVID hit we had to shut down and it was pretty brutal -- especially because we were so used to teaching students in person.

I was then helping my sister out taking care of her 3 year old daughter -- and I realized working from home as a parent is a terrible endeavour. We realized in order to buy time for meetings, coffee or just a short bit of alone time we needed to create something educational, engaging/interactive and well.... not youtube. Also, easy for the parents to use :)

We’ve built and released our BETA via TestFlight/TestFairy (3 Weeks!) in hopes to generate as many testers and we hope to keep you entertained by our weekly patches and new content!

We run at 4pm EST on Mon/Wed/Fri (Let us know if you want us in your time zone!): hello@thinkstation.ca
Our FREE BETA version is available via: beta.thinkstation.io/download

This release includes:

-Live Stream Videos at 4pm EST Mon/Wed/Fri

-Individual Student Accounts

-COPPA compliant chat features!

Also, you are more than welcome to share amongst your family and friends!

This our first time posting in this community and look forward to all of your feedback!

PS. Anywhere else we should post?
brz (a decentralized revision control system)
So, any insight what was happening during those six hours?
“make+copy” calls run faster than a single “make” call in Go
> First because it uses reverse DNS while common use of URL are in the opposite order.

Well, that's more a bad thing about the DNS though.
"toplevel.domainname.subdomain/path" should really be how it should be structured. SUN improved this and made the hierarchy proper.
The callee should not return invalid results. It can return empty data or some kind of results wrapper or just throw a runtime exception of something really catastrophic happened.
Exactly. If I'm going to forgoe the great weather, I need some of that "excess living expenses" to make up for it with tropical vacations and maybe a nicer car or something.
I just chastised my FB friends for not wishing me a "Happy Programmers Day". They're all feigning ignorance.
Pervasive use of pattern matching, including function definitions. It makes if-less programs a reality. IMHO enumeration is much easier to read.
Wow I didn't know you could do this. I thought OS X was tied in some way to Apple hardware (i.e. you can emulate the CPU but they tie it to other hardware).

Is this how Github actions and other CI services work? For some reason I thought they had to buy a bunch of Apple hardware ...
Yes, I do this as well. The improvement is significant, and the relief, noticeable.
University of Oxford resumes vaccine trial
FiftyOne: A Tool for Rapid Data and Model Experimentation
Lex Fridman recently had David Fravor on his podcast and they spoke about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E
> The US really is a third world nation sometimes. Here in the Netherlands

Kinda rich coming from someone in a country with a dying tech industry.
The first example code is rather off-putting, because it has multiple errors. The code would not throw an exception, because it produces compiler errors so you’ll never run it. (OK, so it still generates JavaScript that you could run, but I’m assuming you’re using TypeScript properly and won’t do so.)

• `return number + 1;` should be `return someNumber + 1;`. If you ignore errors and run the JavaScript, this means that it’ll throw a ReferenceError on this line.

• `bar(someNumber) + bar;` is adding a number (well, it should be a number, but you’ve omitted the return types, so the previous error will mean it infers `any` instead of `number`) to a function. This is a type error.

• `baz()` is called with zero arguments instead of the one it requires.

> When baz is called it will throw an uncaught exception. By reading the code you know that foo throws an Error. Debugging this snippet is a piece of cake, right?

As mentioned, this code doesn’t compile, but if you ignore that and run it anyway, then the uncaught exception is a ReferenceError, not the error you see on a throw line. I… don’t think this is what was intended. This also demonstrates what I consider a bit of a weakness of the exception system in such languages: various programming errors that a compiler should catch come through as runtime errors instead.

(I’d generally prefer to use exceptions to indicate exclusively programmer errors, and basically never use a try/catch block, but too much is designed around treating exceptions as normal parts of control flow to be able to do this in most cases. I like the Result/panic split in Rust, where panic always means programmer error, and Result is for probably-exceptional cases, but where they’re still generally expected and part of the design rather than programmer error.)

If you fixed only the first error, you’d get a value like "NaNfunction bar(someNumber) {\n return foo(someNumber) + 1;\n}" out of the baz() call. Fun times.
This feels like when I review incomprehensible code on GitHub:

Mention. it. in. the. code.

Adding a comment here and on Reddit is useless if nobody else sees it.

Explaining why a fork exists should be the first thing people read, especially how “everything is a fork” on GitHub.
Problem is if you have one then at least one person becomes important enough to "make you", the boss / a family member / a friend you feel you're in debt etc. I see that plenty around me. Pretty sure if I'd have one that person would become my wife for me. Don't get me wrong, I love my wife but I also love the freedom of not being at her disposal 24/7.
Watch as this becomes an interview question.
Your correct! It was the MC6847T1 update that allowed for lowercase.
> I thought OS X was tied in some way to Apple hardware (i.e. you can emulate the CPU but they tie it to other hardware).

It is, but very weakly - basically a secret string stored in the SMI.

> Is this how Github actions and other CI services work? For some reason I thought they had to buy a bunch of Apple hardware ...

You can virtualize MacOS, but only on official Apple hardware. There is likely a fleet of Mac Pros or Mac Minis somewhere running real hardware + VMs.

EDIT: Read "You can ..." above as "You are authorized by Apple and can legally virtualize MacOS". You can run OSX on virtually any hardware in a VM, but doing it at scale or in a commercial setting will probably be a bad idea from a legal perspective.
The Either monad is a very nice solution for this in my opinion, in Haskell it's just

do bar
baz
bazz

with it immediately returning after the first error value it encounters or returning the actual result (this is also how Rust solves it, though they introduce specific syntactic sugar for it rather than an universal monadic sugar).
This is the mistake, as a developer I want my app to run on your hardware, and the hardware of millions of others, it hardware that you happen to have bought from apple, but it's no longer theirs, and if you want to run my app, and I want you to, that should be our choice, not Apples.
You mean that from a remote place or fast-moving ship, the time on Earth would appear to go at a different speed? So local time would not just have a constant offset?
It’s super frustrating to hear people defend their meat eating as if it has no impact on the world. Or that it’s a requirement for health or it’s the reason why we evolved (both of which don’t seem to be true). It’s one of the easiest and most straightforward changes a person can make to have a positive impact on the environment and their own health.

In many ways it reminds me of addiction, with people reacting in the same way any addict would in defense of their toxic habit. The path out of the addiction takes some initial thought and sustained effort (and even a bit of mental and physical withdrawal), but the other side isn’t that hard to get to in this case. Isn’t having compassion for the environment, the animals, and each other worth it though? If you look at it deeply you begin to see how much unnecessary suffering it causes in the world due to how interdependent everything is.
Is this why the Pentagon is a pentagon? I always thought it was to contain the lloigor to prevent it from assimilating souls.
Groupon founder Andrew Mason's farewell letter to employees (2013)
Of course, that makes sense, reading the parent comment I thought it implied that they were letting some money in and not letting it back out. In fact I could swear I've read about PayPal doing that - letting money in, not letting it out.
There's a good history stackexchange answer on the topic. https://history.stackexchange.com/a/35726

> Bastion forts are designed to enable enfilade (or flanking) fire: shooting on the line of attackers from the side, significantly increasing firing efficiency of the defender.
Yeah, grew up in France and I was the only one of my friend who had not modified my scooter. It would litteraly stop accelerating past 50 km/h.
I don’t understand why so many people advise against TS enums. The string variant is no different at runtime from a const of the same mapping, but they also achieve nominal typing in an otherwise structural type system, which is super useful for preventing ambiguity errors
Description versus Prescription
I was mostly joking though I’ll consider applying for fun
This doesn’t sound right. Do you have a source for this?
¿Por qué no los dos?

For today, the highest budget[1] celebration I've run across: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrH8xyJG4rc

I'll have to try to find something else for 2020-10-24, but it appears Sun Wukong had a hacker's aversion to authority, so maybe that avenue will be fruitful?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_King#Havoc_in_Heaven

[1] https://101zabava.club/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/pozdravlen...

left panel: programmer working

right panel: programmer celebrating Programmers' Day
If you think about it abstractly, all of these approaches are effectively increasing the surface area of the fortification without substantially increasing its internal area. This increases the number of positions from which defenders can operate, while simultaneously decreasing the effectiveness of any particular attack.
x86_64Ubuntu
https://sonomacounty.ca.gov/PRMD/Fire-Prevention/Vegetation-...
SC run a chipper program for residents to chew up their trimmings, but various state bureaucracies are responsible for what's left of forestry management.

Walking around redwood groves of 1000 year old trees with burn scars, the reality is that California ecology has always had 'cleansing' fires. The humans, the abysmal electric grid that starts a lot of the fires and building in fire plains have predictable results in amplifying that at this time of year.

Paradise (which used to be called 'pair of dice') is one of the most dangerous places to live in California, a combination of winds, canyons and narrow roads. They've had endless fires in that part of the world, but more people moved there (cheap) and when the 1912 pge power pylon fell over on a 45% wooded hill the inevitable happened.
Most of Houston Texas is built on a flood plain, yet people will be astounded and appalled when they have a 100 year flood and the UK Guardian etc will blame it on global warming...
I didn't understand the dark forest about gaining their resources in the context of the novel, (even though that's mentioned, I'll discuss below). I believe the stronger argument is about the inability to trust them at such great distances and time deltas (i.e. you can't trust, but verify).

to recap: even if they meant what they said at t0, by the time you get the message at time t(1billion) (just picked a large number), their thoughts could have easily changed due to their development in the time that has elapsed.

therefore, if you have the ability, the only "logical" thing is to wipe them out. Of course, this presumes the ability to wipe them out with one shot (2d foil), not get into a shooting war even if you are technologically superior (i.e. trisolarans)

with that said, where I felt the logic of the novel fell apart a bit was in the context of the sophons. i.e. the technology for instantaneous communication existed (or at least was built). which negates one of the axioms.

now to get back to the resource scarcity argument, while resource scarcity is mentioned, I also think it as basis is problematic. why? because a common method used to destroy these far off civilizations is effectively resource destruction (ex: collapsing 3d space into 2d space). If your goal is to maximize your resources (as opposed to minimizing your opponents resources), you don't go about "destroying" them.
I want this in a 27"-ish monitor for programing and text work in general!
It's a lot harder to seriously injure someone with an e-bike as apposed to a car or motorcycle. Simply physics since the weight is a lot lower
OK so by "can" you mean "according to Apple's TOS" ?

Because it seems like you "can" in the technical sense (although I didn't try it, I looked at the code and it looks legit)

I imagine that a small CI service could start with the QEMU solution unofficially, but they would likely have to switch to Apple hardware before Apple got wind of it ...
> why did they put 3 white dudes in charge of messing with someone's life

Maybe because they earnt their position through merit? Maybe because white males are still a majority of the work force in Google, Facebook, and may more? The probability of picking 3 random senior people who are white are not that slim.

I as an Asian man take issue that just because you see white people in the show and automatically assume what the show has to say is not representative of whats happening in the Ad-industry. You could literally replace any color of race and claim it is not representative and disregard the bigger message here. This is a classic reverse-racism.
The two are not mutually exclusive, and stating a general practice ("giving ... control over it") without further criticisms or clarifications in a given post is exactly what creates a general implication.

I'm not really here to debate. You can disagree, but considering John's well-discussed pro-Apple bias (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345312), it seems others agree that his writing often goes out of its way to frame Apple in more of a positive light than Apple likely deserves.

It's fine to praise specific actions, but Gruber's known for praising Apple so much that his Apple critiques tend to make news for how rare they are.
And to the farmers, obviously, or they wouldn't pay extra for it.
Not exactly what I meant.

If installation number is open and visible, any person without any knowledge can confirm that during vote, latest installation number was such and such and hash of build was of such and such. Before election day number can be publicly broadcast so everyone knows what needs to be checked.

Opensource and visible means same as for linux, code is visible to those that have knowledge and can quickly identify attempts of backdoor attempts like for instance this one: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-...

Code wise that will allow that people in power will not try to manipulate or rig elections. If you have XX thousands of IT professionals that can check code it is surely better than "trusted" dedicated private contractor.