skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Declarative programming is very interesting. Some people are mentioning Prolog being slow. Well, I took an undergrad class on Prolog, and my perception is that Prolog can be very performant doing complete searches, but:

1) You need to know how to encode the constraints so they can be evaluated efficiently, not just write them.

2) A common way to achieve 1) is to encode a problem as a SAT problem and use a modern SAT solver. They are pretty sick. You can write great SAT solvers in Prolog, but there are already many good ones in many languages, so it's quite poinless unless you do it for fun or learning.

3) Compared to most statistical methods / heuristics, searches in Prolog will be slow. And in most cases statistical methods will do fine anyway, because there will be at least decent solutions to be easily found.

My conclusion is that we often confuse the problems of "proving that a plan is optimal" with "finding a good plan", which are indeed related, but use very different techniques to reach solutions.
There is this form, FWIW: https://info.10xmanagement.com/contact-us-become-10xer
This means that whoever is upvoting the item, isn't doing so because they disagree/agree with it. but instead for item visibility, because of which it will attract more discussion.
this is what i always use the upvote button for.
60 years of COBOL – past, present, and future
> Languages are not created in a planned, thought-through manner. Instead they are designed by human beings.

What the heck does that mean?

Programming languages, like languages (English, French, Chinese), evolve organically to solve new problems, no?

Anyways maybe I misread it, and underlying it is your desire for the next version or iteration, because you’ve bounced up against some limits or boundaries with the current iterations?
Right, but I am talking about the people who call it a hoax and not real. Hence the term denier.
You can do exactly this with Blades. The binary has no dependencies.
> I would expect China or India to have a higher number of deaths overall if the data were available.

You would be incorrect. Perhaps the reason this death rate was mentioned is because the US is an outlier in both absolute numbers as well as per capita deaths.
> the numbers are pretty much business as usual . . . going purely by deaths the situation is mostly normal

The article notes that, through July 25, there were 235,610 excess U.S. deaths. The link you gave shows that excess deaths started March 28th, for a period of ~119 days.

Wikipedia says that the U.S. had 291,557 combat deaths during WWII, which was over a ~1366 day period of U.S. combat involvement if we count the period from Pearl Harbor until the end of the war. The U.S. is about 2.46 more populous now, so adjusting for that, the ratio of the rate of excess death over the period studied vs. U.S. combat deaths in WWII is (235610 / (119 * 2.46)) / (291557 / 1366) = 3.77.

Since you're calling 3.77x the population-adjusted rate of WWII combat deaths "mostly normal", I would be curious to know what rate of death you would consider abnormal.

On a non-population-adjusted basis, which is arguably the correct measure if we want to think about waging a war that's the equivalent of WWII, the death rate over the period studied would've been equivalent to the U.S. combat deaths from waging 9.28 simultaneous WWIIs. Personally, I wouldn't consider simultaneously engaging in nine wars the size of WWII to be business as usual.
I think Facebook has banned totally Swedish Government information about COVID. And maybe Finnish Government information too. Because I have only seen American Bulletins on Facebook unlike on Twitter. Swedish did not believe in masks and lockdowns at all. And Finnish government told us masks are only safe with professional training as per doctors and nurses.
OP did literally say that they didn't handle the pandemic well. I don't think they're trying to avoid that. If anything, per capita figures would make this even more clear when comparing with the current situation in India and China.
> driver license

That's the problem for me. I don't have a driver's license because public transit is good enough for 99.9% of trips. There are situations where it would be nice to be able to drive a car (esp. to get a rental car for countryside vacations, or for large Ikea purchases). But getting a driver's license doesn't make sense when you never really use it and fall out of practice, so my money is better invested in the national public transit flatrate card.
> Actually, that is a very good question and probably caused by the general immaturity of software engineering. Languages are not created in a planned, thought-through manner. Instead they are designed by human beings.

> But what if they were, in fact, planned?

[snip good post]

There's also the Le Corbusier Problem: A language has to be livable in order to be used, and everyone's conception of livability is different, but few people desire to live in what could be defined as the logical minimum required.

Even mathematical notation is inconsistent and luxuriant sometimes; for example, we have sine, cosine, tangent, and so on, when we all know that complex exponentiation would suffice. That's a multitude of functions which are all non-orthogonal variations on a theme! What wastage! What profligacy! A truly austere system would have very few, if any, named functions.

But, of course, humans can't live like that, and few desire to try.
The canonical reference is by ICNIRP which references many studies at the end of the document. This is also actively reviewed based on new evidence all the time, which is the entire point of ICNIRP!

https://www.icnirp.org/cms/upload/publications/ICNIRPrfgdl20...

I make no comment on Scientific American. I don't read it and have no experience with it.

Just a point here to note ...

There are health effects from RF as it stands but it's usually localised heating, hence why some handheld radios are known as "Chinese eyeball cookers" but they tend to run +40dBm into an antenna with some gain thus ending up with 25W ERP close range strapped to your face - that's another 4dB or so. Your average phone kicks out a max of 23dBm if it's really kicking it out hard. That's 125x less power. Your wifi router is half that again. That's 250x less power than the eyeball cooker. And none of those emit ionising radiation. And your wifi router isn't strapped to your head.

As mentioned earlier my Ryzen's motherboard shows up bang on 800MHz with more ERP than my router...

Far far far more worrying for me is all the pollution and crap in the air I'm huffing up every day living near an airport.
Everybody has their blind spots.
Now how do we address that?
I'm using https://www.notion.so .
I have try several other before: pocket, google keep ...
I don't know yet if I will stay with notion.
Don't use spray foam, if not properly mixed and applied there is a risk of the foam off-gassing, continuously producing toxic fumes over a period of months to years, and consisting of chemicals such as isocyanates. The cost of removing the foam once installed is tremendous.
In theory, yes, but PostgreSQL's current storage is not optimized for flash.
Parent means that there isn't a long term strategy for which languages needs to be developed.
Probably very little. Users are conditioned to assume internet infrastructure (chat rooms, reddit, twitter, gmail, etc) will be free.

That said, Mastodon is doing reasonably well, depending on how you measure success.
Given the maximal confusion from wordwide health authorities aswell as local authorities concerning covid19 I would argue that the split in what people believe is not very suprising.
> but no one wants to go out on a limb and make suggestions about how to improve it.

That's not really true, plenty of suggestions on how to improve it. Many of those based on experience doing it for the long haul.

Personally I always advocate for a technical discussion of their experience. Read the resume in detail. Talk about it. Pick some past project to go deep. Also let them pick a favorite past project to go deep in detail. It means the interviewer needs enough technical depth to follow along. This works. I've never said "yes" to a hire and later thought that was a mistake, in ~25 years of doing interviews.

Just the other day here someone was saying they received over 50 resumes for a role so they had to interview over 50 people. No. Don't do that. You can't go deep, so it just leads to meaningless puzzles. Read the resumes, pick the top 5 or so, interview them personally. Hire the best of those. Done, move on with getting work done.
Open Letter to Apache OpenOffice
Indeed... prior to the algorithmic timeline and the push for "engagement" what you saw on your timeline was posts from your friends and family.

If some cousin posted a nonsense conspiracy theory you could comment on the post and there was at least the possibility of some kind of debate among your own social circle.

The drive for engagement killed all of that.
That and does GP have a WiFi router a few meters from the bedroom, which they always unplug at night (disclaimer: I used to do that). And the clock next to the bed? Battery or socket?

You also cannot unplug all of your neighbours routers, TVs and other devices.

It is very easy to get paranoid about specific wireless technologies, it is almost impossible nowadays to avoid "electrosmog" or particularly wireless emitters entirely though.
Industrial software, at the SCADA level. Basically "industrial IOT" (aka indistry 4.0). Moving data from one place to another. Historial data, events, alarms, reports, human-machine interfaces (aka GUIs). Mostly C and C++. C++ really puts all together, just use C because most industrial network protocol libraries are implemeted in C.
I think it was the other way around, you could just start wamp/mamp/xampp copy the file to public folder and everything just worked
It’s a platform for kids seven and up to learn about computing and electronics. You can buy a classroom set for about £140, less than almost any single smartphone and far better suited to building things in both software and hardware.
If the other changed, you could ue those changes to send information by varying time between changes (pulse width modulation). Instead when you measure one you go from "not knowing which one is red or blue" to "knowing color of both".
This is fairly far from my field, but as I understand it, that would be a hidden variable interpretation of QM [1], and specifically in that analogy a local hidden variable theory. That's what Einstein himself wanted.

There is a famous test, Bell's inequality [2], that specifically rules out local hidden variable interpretations of QM.

Nonlocal hidden variable interpretations, such as De Broglie - Bohm theory [3], are potentially still on the table, however.

It is somewhat ironic that Bell's theorem is sometimes presented in popular media as a general disproof of all hidden variable theories, in a context where locality is taken for granted -- because Bell himself seems to have been partial to nonlocal hidden variable theories. An article by the same Mermin mentioned in the OP is worth a read, on this subject [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory

[4] https://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/Mermin1993.pdf
Here’s the tune (one of the): https://youtu.be/BtpWn6PuDX0
It only supports CommonMark markdown now.
Maybe I should state it more explicitly somewhere.
All the new shiny. From experience I can tell you

a) most companies deal with small amounts of data. Small can mean dozens of megabytes to dozens or hundreds of gigabytes. A single well provisioned server will typically be able to handle that very well. Also an SQL database can do a great deal if you know what you're doing.

b) inappropriately used big data frameworks are expensive performance killers. https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-... for example.

c) Good quality programming, as in understanding the machine, memory layout and why it matters, and a good understanding of algorithms (and a hefty dose of common sense), will often yield you more speedup than buying almost any number of new machines.

c) Hiring is often driven by fads and companies often don't like being told 'you don't need this roomful of servers', they like to waste money, so maybe do learn them (the profligacy with money is likely to be coming to an end with the economic damage of covid).

Takeaway: brainpower will get you much further than horsepower
That's more spray and pray damage then a specific hack on hospitals.
> Anyway, my question was meant to challenge the assumption that "it's far more important that forward progress be made".

So just to be clear, what I certainly don't mean is that action should always be taken quickly without a proper consideration. Having a discussion is obviously important for understanding all the potential pros and cons of the various decisions. Additionally, it's really important that everyone feel like their voice is heard and their needs and preferences considered.

I'm talking about once all that's done. Sometimes you have a discussion, everyone basically understands what the other people want and where they're coming from, you're pretty sure all the relevant factors have been considered, and half of the people still prefer A, and the other half prefer B. At that point, further discussion is often counterproductive.
> Maintaining your own server is completely nuts

I've in this area professionally for some time now, and I've never "maintained" servers in any reasonable sense. There are kernel people who maintain the kernel and there are Debian devs who maintain the operating system. The server may be mine (but more often that not, it isn't) but only in very specific circumstances do I ever concern myself with maintaining any part of this stack.

A vanilla Linux VM is a platform to build on. Just like AWS or anything else. It is the environment in which my software runs.

Thus far, something like Debian has been more stable and much less of a moving target than any proprietary platform has been, cloud or non-cloud. Should a client wish to minimize maintenance costs of the software over the coming decade, it is most cost effective to not depend on specialized, proprietary, platform components.

That may change in the future, but right now there is no indication that is the case.
Wyssen Avalanche Control | Backend/Full-Stack Engineer | Switzerland | Onsite | Full Time | https://www.wyssenavalanche.com/

Visa possible for the right applicant (EU preferred)

---

Wyssen sets the standard for innovative and high quality solutions for risk management in avalanche-exposed areas. We deliver cost-effective and ecological solutions for avalanche control equipment and software tools.

We have over 350 avalanche towers protecting roads, railroads and infrastructure in Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Chile and Canada.

We are constantly focusing on innovative solutions, and this has enabled us to set the standard in the field of avalanche control with our state-of-the-art technology and professional risk solution services.

---

We are located in Reichenbach im Kandertal, a small ski town in the Bernese Oberland (ten minutes to Adelboden ski area, 30 minutes to Interlaken, 30 minutes to Bern).

Our current team is small: one frontend engineer, one devops/backend engineer (me), and the electrical engineer who built the initial application. The practical challenge right now is to transform the current, non-OOP, primarily PHP application into a modern, extensible, and manageable tool for our users and for future developers. We are looking for someone with a strong architectural background and experience with PHP web applications. You and I will have an opportunity to define much of the direction and technologies we will adopt or modify.

Most of the team speaks Swiss German, but I am a native English speaker and we use English for technical discussions.

Job description (in German): http://minify.link/6hf

Please email me with questions: gerrit[at]wyssen[dot]com
>Languages are not created in a planned, thought-through manner

Well, some are. Namely, Algol, Scheme, Smalltalk, Java, C#, and famously Ada (And I've missed some, like Oberon, etc).

Those were planned, and thought-through quite well. And their later updates were also planned and thought out quite thorougly.

Other languages were more idiosyncratically designed by some (often single) person, and accrued features haphazardly over time.
When I look at the website I currently only see "No items", but if you are using Python 3.6+ the pathlib[0] library has a very nice way of reading/writing files:

from pathlib import Path
p = Path("my_file.txt")
p.write_text("thing that needs to go into a file")

[0]https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html#pathlib.Path....
I'm a minority but I'd be happy to pay ~30 bucks a month for a tool like Facebook as long as it doesn't behave in a user-hostile manner (so basically the Facebook from 10 years ago).
I found this sobering statement at the end of a BBC article on the difficulties of comparing countries:

"But until this outbreak is over it won't be possible to know for sure which countries have dealt with the virus better.

'That's when we can really learn the lessons for next time,' says Prof Oke."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/52311014
Interpreted vs. compiled vs. JIT-compiled is usually not part of a language definition, and can easily change without it being considered a new language.

Many Lisp dialects include both compilers and interpreters. There was gcj and now Oracle's AoT for Java, etc. In the late 1990s, MIT's 6.270 robotics competition used an interpreted implementation of C. I haven't heard anyone claim that these implementation details should cause the implementation to be "not really Lisp", "not really Java", or "not really C".

Also, if you link in Boehm's libgc and start allocating via libgc, you've got (conservatively) garbage-collected C without violating any of the C standards.
And you'll get downvoted pretty hard on HN and Reddit for being opposed to GMOs based on the extortion potential... well, it's "refreshing" to see that the fears are not baseless but reality.
Honestly, if you have a FAANG on your CV you're pretty much set, especially outside of SF (e.g. every other tech hub in Europe). Senior developer / CTO will be the kind of job offers you'll get, and recruiters will be all over you.

Disclaimer: I don't have a FAANG on my CV.
Many cities with good public transit are still bogged down by politicians giving preference to car traffic over PT and bicycles, making journeys by PT slower and journeys by bike more dangerous than they need to be.
Very interesting project, thanks for sharing!

CommonMark supports HTML tags, so one can currently also write pages in plain HTML if they want to.
Sure; but if facebook shows me 1% of all the content from people I follow, it exerts a huge amount of editorial power. And it doesn't use that editorial power to serve users. It uses that power to keep people addicted to the site so they can sell more advertisements. The fact that my friendships are weaponized doesn't make facebook any less culpable.

I'm a pretty nice guy. But if you made a supercut of 1% of what I say in a day, you could tell any story you like. It would be my words, but its your narrative.
It's a painful thing to say but I don't think the indogenous peoples will be given much of a choice in brazil. they can either integrate with wider soceity or they can die. Brazil is still a developing economy with widespread poverty that needs to grow to get out of it. in that situation their only worth is how much they contribute to the wider economy. They would be best served by accepting this reality and adapting to it. Maybe they can have their own bio-industry. Their own mines.
Censorship is not a problem on Facebook, it is disinformation. There are no problems limiting information on Facebook, the problem is the opposite in that you are constantly bombarded by an endless stream of highly-targeted bullshit that is designed to engage your lizard hindbrain and bypass reasoning as much as possible.
> IE shipped tab process isospin first

IE shipped activex and jscript (MS scripting host) exploits first, too. Which made the whole tab isolation stuff useless.
I wonder if this is a similar attempt that the calendar event spam we had a few years ago where you'd get calendar invites to random events, with the spam being in the event notes.
What did this have to do with plan 9? This post is mostly about building a cute case and keyboard for 4 raspis. No clustering and almost no plan 9 involved at all.
Weight and something that absorbs and dissipates vibration. Drape rubber mats over it, or weave strips of soft material into the fence slats.
>I find the question really odd. It is like asking why people create new recipes or new music or whatever else - because they can.

We "can" do all kinds of things we aren't nonetheless doing. So the question is still valid.

Heck, even for recipes it would be a good question.
Ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting effects in Alzheimer's rat model
>Maybe even behind Ruby and C#.

Way ahead Ruby.

>Unless you count all the Wordpress installs (where most webmasters don't write a line of PHP) it's not that popular nowadays. We're in 2020.

You'd be surprised. Outside of startup-land there are tons of PHP shops... And not just for Wordpress either...

Ruby, on the other hand, rose and fell along with Rails popularity...
It's not useful in every scenario but it's useful more often than you might think and it's very effective when it is useful. The book has two great examples.
When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook
This is spam, they are just spraying the equivalent of calendar invites
It is serene compared to the US where it's common to receive 30 robocalls a day.
> You get "sharing" with a whole lot of bad.

I really doubt the anemic social sharing they offer is all that compelling to that many people. Sure, it has its uses, but if did nothing else, I doubt it would see much use. What's extremely, extremely compelling to me personally, though, is that for the price of half a CD a month, I get access to almost everything I'd ever want to listen to, on all my devices, everywhere, without any friction whatsoever. Even if I really wanted, I could never replicate that with Winamp on my own.

As to the rest for your argument, I'm basically with you and I think you have an important point, I guess you've just made it in a needlessly incendiary way. There are many things to be said in favor of capitalism, but I'm severely disillusioned with the way the currently-favored brand of capitalism is shaping out on the internet and in computing in general.
Australia has similar obesity rates to USA, and dramatically lower COVID mortality.
>pretty much business as usual.

Not only is it not actually business as usual, as other commenters remark, but this rate of death is despite the severe measures taken.

Without such measures, deaths would have been 10-20 times higher.
Yeah. Maybe it’s another way of saying that language is one example of an emergent phenomena or system.[1] In other words, it’s something that evolves, with new things arising, that emerges organically from experimentation and practice, due to certain environmental factors/conditions. Where practice and experimentation come before theory.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=eh7qvXfGQho
Potato Doom
In Vietnam they have these motorbike peddles that drive around selling food, picking up scrap metal, sharpening knives. There’s one probably every 20 minutes driving by. Was absolutely mind bending at first, but eventually I got used to and don’t even notice anymore.

https://youtu.be/PJ1ySFEQOtg

They also have a type of peddler that drives around with what is essentially a coal furnace strapped to a motorbike. He sells hot buns. There’s literally fire and smoke coming out from his tail end.

https://youtu.be/oH3SeODFXZ4

(You can see fire at the end when he drives off. But it’s a small one. I seen much larger fires.)