skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Pedantry out of the way, You could make a case that the Wikipedia is the same language and you can change the character set pretty much interchangeably by machine

This is absolutely not true. Even ignoring idiomatic differences (which are comparable to UK vs US English), the conversion from Traditional -> Simplified is a one-way function. The mapping between characters is not one-to-one: there are a bunch of traditional characters that map to the same simplified character, and some words that are dropped entirely. You can't up-convert from Simplified -> Traditional without guessing.

It's like saying we should just use simple.wikipedia.org for the English language and then use a thesaurus on the client side to auto-convert text to use big words for en.wikipedia.org. It ain't going to be readable.
Happy someone else echoes my sentiment too, especially when Ruby seems to be beloved by everyone around. So many ways of doing the same thing; unnecessary cognitive burden for both reading and writing.
Stats and correlations can still be useful. Quantum mechanics is a great example: we can use it to make the most accurate predictions in the history of the world yet most physicists would agree we have no clue as to the mechanism.

As I see it, the ecosystem around research journals is mostly to blame. Throughout history scientists recorded both surprising and unsurprising experimental results. Both were treated as important.

Now we basically discard and forget experiments / work that is not 'novel'. The bias introduced by doing this is what makes those p-values questionable. Furthermore, for some it seems that the goal has become publication rather than the search for truth.
Same here. 20 years, Europe, corporate and open source projects, zero emacs users. Seen vim, notepad++, sublime, uedit, atom and vscode. And all types of fat ides
The "line noise" aspect of Perl never bothered me, because I'm already a heavy user of regexes. The cause of my misery was Perl's "There Is More Than One Way To Do It."
Some would say it shouldn’t be possible at all
Java IdentityHashMap Class
> Can someone remind me how it comes to pass that there are people in the scientific community who believe we are the only "intelligent" life form?

Sure. I’m a strong-form rare Earther.

Interstellar pan-spermia is possible but unlikely across large distances. Independent seeding is the only way a 14bn-year-old expanding universe 93 Gly in diameter proliferates with life.

We don’t understand abiogenesis. All indications suggest it’s a difficult problem. The abundance of elements is set by the nuclear physics of stellar fusion and neutron star collision. Solvency further restricts biological chemistry. Given this, it seems likely that life in any form is quite rare.

Then we have multicellular life. On Earth, this is a product of the fusion of mitochondria and bilipid-barrier cells. Consider the number of cells in Earth’s history. The eucharyotic union occurred once. That is improbable.

I believe we will find scattered archae beyond our Solar System. (We may find single-celled life within it.) But complex multicellular life—let alone intelligence—takes so many variables perfectly aligning that it strikes me as vanishingly improbable.

We must as a species confront the moral implications of possibly being the sole light of life in this universe. That’s an uncomfortable burden. I understand why we shy from it.
> dark patterns

I was pleasantly surprised by Netflix recently. After avoiding using the service until recently, I was motivated enough to subscribe by one particular film I wanted to watch.

Initially, they automatically upgraded me to the Premium subscription level on a trial basis. When that trial time period ended I received an email saying, "do nothing and we'll downgrade you to the Standard subscription level."

That was truly a pleasant surprise.

I did nothing.
Thanks, that's even better. I need to work on my Git skills, I'll try this out.
What is so complex about being lucky and receiving an airdrop on multiple addresses ? Some guys are just born lucky...
I assume MSFT has a benefit for doing so. What’s Apples benefit for porting Swift to Windows?
You can call it bad code, but someone wrote that bad code. A few people worked on the same team when the bad code got through the cracks. Someone supervised that team, etc. And some of those people, or people they know, are still working around you. Technical debt may not be the appropriate term, but there are good reasons to be a little more tactful than saying "I have to fix someone's bad code that broke" so that you can continue to have good working relationships with the people around you.
Remember going here often with my dad in the sixties. Riding in from Lansing on the train while I was at college at Michigan State in the seventies.

This building is in every photo of Detroit's decline or 'ruin porn' as city residents call it. Ford is really doing a great job of restoring it to serve as headquarters for their self driving car efforts.

The depot is located in a part of Detroit West of downtown called Corktown. The idea is that engineers could chose to live in Corktown and be able to walk or bike to work.

Michigan avenue will be a special autonomous car highway and Ford people will take self driving shuttles back and forth to Ford headquarters in Dearborn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corktown,_Detroit
The problem was that they weren't storing events in UTC but were using local server time instead. They had no explanation for what would happen during the switch from daylight time to standard time but couldn't rule out the possibility of out of order events happening due to it.
> E.g. ever wonder why things that have to do with body parts and organs have a moon radical associated with them? That's because of a conflation of two separate radicals (moon radical and meat radical) that were distinct in Qin Dynasty seal script.

They're distinct in modern Chinese too, if you look closely.

(And if you use a Taiwanese font.)
Our Endless Appetite for Chocolate Has Bitter Environmental Consequences
In wiring a house, there is a built in assumption that something could go wrong and disrupt the wiring. That's why we had fuses, and now circuit breakers, grounding, ground fault interrupters, metal conduit, etc.
All of these serve to limit the side effects of faults.

When you turn on a switch... it's part of a circuit which is current limited, and in fact there are several limits on that current, all the way back to the source... each designed to protect a link in the chain. Each of those breakers limits the capability to source current further downstream.

When you run a task in any modern OS, it runs with the full privileges of the user id with which it was launched. This is like hooking a generating station directly up to your floor lamp in the living room with no breakers. If the process has a fault, there is nothing the Operating System will do to prevent it from being used to subvert other parts of the system, there is no limit to what it can do.

There are systems that require you to specify how many resources a given task is to be allowed to access. It turns out that such systems can be just as user friendly as the ones we're used to, but they do require things be re-written because the ground assumptions in the security model are different.

Capability Based Security (also known as "Multi-Level Security) was born out of a need to have both Sensitive and Secret information shared on a computer that scheduled Air Traffic during the Vietnam Conflict. (If I remember the situation correctly) The flights themselves were sensitive, and the locations of the enemy radar were top secret (because people risked their lives spying to find them).

It was extremely important that information could not leak, and solutions were found, and work!

About 10 years ago, when I learned about this, and considered the scope of work required to make it available in general purpose Operating Systems, I estimated it would take 15 years until the need for Capability Based Security would be realized, and another 5 more or so until it was ready. I think we're on track.... 2025 people will start adopting it, and 2030 it will be the defacto way things are done.

Genode is a long standing project to bring this new type of security to the masses... I'm still waiting until the point I get to play with it... and have been for a while.

Things will get better... these types of tools, along with "information hiding", getting rid of raw pointers and other clever but dangerous tricks will help as well.

[Edit: Re-arranged to clarify, and improve flow]
Why don't you link to the original preprint [0]? phys.org and its paywalled brethren are all too often touted on HN to waste time on sci-pop.

The paper has lots of pictures.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.08987.pdf
It's hard for me to imagine a world in which the Emacs core team has much to do with the look-and-feel of the Emacs that gets new users to adopt it. Haven't Spacemacs and Doom have done more to recruit Emacs users than anything the core team has done in a decade? Maybe "dark theme" and "lots of menus" aren't the problems the core team should be worrying about; leave that to other projects?

The idea that what Emacs needs is more or differently organized menus is pretty funny though. Maybe if we could just get all the customize groups into a single tree view it would all make sense to people!
That is very fair question. In my experience of html, css, js/ts, C#, VB, java, php, c/c++ and python I have never seen any emacs users in 20 years. I think it is really a language and region cut going maybe back to the universities supporting lisp or something else
I think last time if you were still on default you moved to the new default.

But it's hard to find a definitive record.
Since backspace worked in every IE version up until Edge/Chromium, I never knew the ALT+arrows combinations worked. It wasn't until backspace stopped working that I did a search to find what was going on and saw the ALT key combos. So they may have been there all along but I never had reason to find out about them until recently.
List of cool Tailwind CSS templates
HowApp in Google Play – any parents here?
A ton of SaaS is business facing. Not much more beyond what you listed is aimed at consumers. Businesses already think of expenses in terms of time period and even prior to SaaS being normal they'd be paying for customer support, maintenance, custom development, etc as a service on top of their software purchase anyway.
Just trying to make analogies people can understand over the years.

The current state of computer security.... is like building a fort, out of cases of C-4 explosive.

How so? Almost every program has bugs, many of which can be exploited remotely. It is effectively impossible NOT to have a zero-day exploitable hole in any given computer. Thus, every single computer can be exploited... and then used to attack more computers.... in a chain reaction.... like a fort built out of C-4.
The executive pay shows that their conclusions about where money should be allocated have severe issues, so it's hard to trust that choice without more justification.
Because doing this is illegal.

Also, would you actually want to work at a company where people are bleeding the company for their own benefit? I cannot even imagine the toxicity. Even hearing the offer I would be so gone.
His defense team is pulling out all the stops to prevent his extradition.

Wikileaks has done nothing but tarnish and smear the diplomacy of the United States by creating an unfair manner for which to defend themselves by releasing cables not meant for public consumption.

If Wikileaks was as altruistic about shedding light on the evils of the world, why haven’t they published anything about China, or about Russia? The most darkest of crony governments whose mobster antics and anti free policies keep an iron grip on their power and through silence, let their influence spread.

If what he is doing is free and innocent, then defend your actions in court. I have no sympathy of someone who uses freedom as a shield to defend being a possible agent for other countries hostile to freedom.
Can you point to any large Go project that isn’t a mess?

I agree that from a single sample you can’t reach conclusions, but “it was their fault” isn’t a great defense.
On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project
look at it this way, if major companies who spend billions to hire the best industry security experts to secure their devices and their networks still find themselves regularly compromised, then consider how many of the iot companies are tiny or/and clearly place a significantly higher value on marketing/sales/shareholder return then they do on security, then ask yourself if you want the security and very specific details of your life to reside in the data these companies devices collect.

i don’t want to say they’re malicious but it should be clear by now that a very tiny fraction of companies are taking the security of this data and it’s collectors at even a fraction of how serious they should. even behemoths like amazon have had massive problems with their devices and have been very loose with the data collected.
Totally agree. Pants should be optional also
I think of technical debt as either 1) deferred maintenance or 2) systems, even when properly maintained, slowly aging into "legacy".

I wasn't really aware there was a much broader use of the term than that. Although I guess you you can overload the "deferred maintenance" category quite a bit if you get creative.
> big national public service broadcasting stations (BBC, DR, NRK, SVT, etc)

Found the Scandinavian, I think! Because it's Google, NPR/PBS or even just Netflix would probably work even more efficiently.
If scientist makes claim that X sometimes happens... and then researcher Y repeats the experiment, and it happens a few times, but not always.... or not at the same frequency... far to many people say the replication has failed... instead of digging further.

There were many such incidents where the stated effect happened only a few % of the time.... but not zero. But, it wasn't 100%...so it got ignored, or rejected.
Modeling and Simulation in Chemical Engineering
The reserve ratio is mostly a historical relic and is zero in many places, yet those places don't see an infinite amount of money.

This indicates that the traditional story of how fractional reserve banking causes money growth is wrong.

In reality, even a non-zero reserve ratio doesn't limit money creation if you look at the financial system as a whole, because the created money will simply become deposits elsewhere.

The true limiter of money creation is capital constraints: somebody must give money to the bank and be willing to lose it - only then is the bank allowed to make loans.
Perhaps the Smurfs are an example of what's possible when Dunbar's Number isn't exceeded and multiculturalism is absent.
I suspect a major part of the difference between CO2 and methane is the economic angles.

We always knew what to do, but free-market/democratic systems could never get the political momentum for it. The scientists had to make their case against a large pro-CO2 lobby (the coal and existing electric industries) wielding a major economic bludgeon.

I don't think methane has those same champions. The regulations and tech will face much less blowback.
> I see newer engineers struggling to memorize "what Git command corresponds to my current situation" all the time, and they're missing the intuition that it's all a very simple graph under the hood.

The reason I have run into this has almost always been because what I want is “take this commit and move it here” and the command for it is some sort of git frobnicate --cached --preserve-stashed that you look up online. “It’s a graph” is great and takes like thirty seconds to explain but once you get that done with it provides almost no insight in how you’re actually supposed to interact with the porcelain to get that graph in the state you want it to be.
also we need to account for the labour and cost that's gone into the production automation equipment .
Even with thousands of contestants, someone ends up being the Rock, Paper, Scissors champion.
Are you aware that a sect of Theravada Buddhism has been perpetuating genocide against the Rohingya population of Myanmar for almost 5 years now?

How about the dozens of self-immolations performed by Tibetan Buddhists to protest China's annexation of their homeland?

Honestly, it's hard not to think of Buddhism as a religion which is traditionally politically activist. Wasn't Siddhartha himself a wealthy prince who only left his life of comfort and privilege after being shocked by the injustice and pain that he saw when he stepped out of his ivory tower?
To complete the picture, it's helpful to point out that what banks need to create loans is capital, not deposits.

If a bank is constrained by the Basel capital requirements, it can e.g. attempt to issue bonds. If it does so successfully, it can then create new loans corresponding to a multiple of the value of those bonds.
well, I showed "pseudo code" (no, really python...) at middle management and they not only understood it, but also tuned it.

was fun to show them that that "pseudo code" actually worked
Think of how easily it will be though to reverse engineer the patches in the SP and apply them to the actual source.
Samisdat?
You might enjoy the superb lyre bird imitating sounds as mind boggling as a chainsaw--and when I say imitate, I mean I couldn't have distinguished the lyre bird sound from a real chainsaw. It's really mind-boggling to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq-yQ
/remindme after this guy finds out how it is
Indeed it is! Although that's actually a later re-invention of modern fonts rather than a preservation of a continuous tradition and is not consistent because it cannot be since there are multiple potential ancestors of 月 (e.g. 朋, which does not preserve its seal script roots in any modern font I know of).
You may not need orbiting black holes.

We can now generate radio waves in a pocket-sized device, without involving celestial objects.

We only just recently managed to detect gravity waves at all, and it took several kilometers of vacuum tubes to do it.

There’s a lot of room for discovery and miniaturization left.
There was a thread a couple of days where this user commented the same thing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24571360

As of this writing, the post from two days ago, as well as the post to which I am replying, are rather down-voted and nearing transparency. I can't imagine why some folks would be against this information getting out there. If this story proves untrue, it's a pretty big deal and the publisher should be held to account. We should all demand better from our news sources. Regardless of outcome, what's the benefit drawn from down-voting a (potentially smug) reference to the impassioned discussion this story produced here on Hacker News?
Ractor is "actor-like" and looks a bit like a mix of both Elixir/Erlang and Go.
Rust lacks the formal specifications from SPARK.

And SPARK 2014 will support ownership specifications.

Rust is the less advanced one.
It is an echo of the ‘centrist’ mindset. It was as difficult to understand that earth was not the center of the universe. Then our sun was not the center of the universe. Now that the human soul is not the center of all living things on earth.
If life is a possibility then intelligence isn’t simply a matter of time.
However, the bigger question is whether intelligence is the curse of life. Is intelligence self destructive by its very arrogance and nature.
Just published an article ‘Beyond Drake- Earth 2.0’ as the foundation for this very question. You can google and find it. It’s the start of a journey and a path to this question.
They were not asking for a completely random fork, thanks.
The same can be written in Swift as

(1...10).filter { $0.isMultiple(of: 2) }.forEach { print($0) }
That was insightful, thank you!

The part that stood out to me was getting stuck on what to do next!

When I worked for other people as a programmer I loved it when the product manager would queue up tickets for me and I could just knock them out within two weeks. I dont have that now.

In the game Dead Rising, it is open world-ish, in a mall, but all the tasks and side quests have time limits on them, really helping prioritize

> we might have different needs and ways we like to get organized (judging by the number of app for productivity in the App Store ...)

or it is an unsolved problem

or it is too easy of a problem to develop for. Isn't this every mobile app tutorial ever, swear I’ve seen them creep into system design prep too

or all of the above
> Since they haven't controlled it for so long

Worth noting that the PRC has never controlled Taiwan.
I don't know that it's possible to prevent it, but include the coder's perspective in a team conversations about the project, standards and such

If it's innocuous and they have a bee in their bonnet, consider letting them refactor on their own branch, and subject it to normal code review

Recount the Parable of Chesterton's Fence

Ask them if they are just bikeshedding

Let them make low cost mistakes to learn cheap lessons, saving expensive lessons later
I am enlightened, and all of that doesn't apply. I see myself as a marketer of some ideas, nothing more. When the conversation happens to run into them, I offer my ideas, and handle any questions about them that might arise. I hope the ideas will spread, and eventually be reified into code, and make things better in the long run.

No delusions of glory, profit, etc.... just a slow but determined push to make things better, eventually.
Isolated example: I have an IoT device, and based on my interactions with support and engineering, the company providing this product is extremely clueless as to my device’s state. Let alone building and monetizing sophisticated profiles of my personality.
That would be most excellent. Please go ahead Facebook. Make my day.
WinUI is quite alright.
GitHub Actions: first impressions
My problem with Python is that once you start working with a strongly-typed language, a duck-typed interpreted language starts to feel like it's missing a major tool in terms of writing correct code.

I also think S4TF's approach has been really neat here: there's a really nice python interop so you still have access to the entire body of work and tools in python available, and it basically feels like writing native swift code.
If you go outside and look up and tell me that the sky is blue, is that a fact or opinion?
Huh? My point is that it wasn't. They got military support, that's all.

The region is still a mess, a new warlord is gaining power.
Do you think that focusing on more unsexy things would have helped? It seems to me that it's fundamentally a marketing problem. Many people are not even aware that Firefox exists, despite it being basically as good as Chrome, and in some ways considerably better.
> However, ideally you want well paid employees who are not exploiting volunteers?

Notice how you said "employees" here. Yes, employees should be well paid. Then, ideally, the high level administration should be kept small and paid similar amounts or only a little bit more than the employees.
More to the point, planets are next to stars. So it's more like detecting a single grain of sand on Mars that happens to be sitting next to a high-beam headlight - even if you had a telescope powerful enough to resolve it, it's tough to separate it from its host star.
It’s in a public git repository
Complete tangent, but it turns out I was wrong about horses: apparently they become more agreeable with age, not less.
Just like many Rust code bases that are full of Rc<RefCell<>>, which don't get optimised away by the compiler.
Map doesn't mutate, it returns the result of applying a function to the (possibly immutable) value. I believe you can also, say, `select icolumn * 2 from table`, where `icolumn * 2` provides precisely the same functionality as the function passed to a map.