skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You’re quoting a random blog post from Scott Hanselman and not Docker release notes.

I don’t know what happened with that but I was not wrong and Docker for Windows does still run in a VM: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/install/

I assume you don’t use Docker on Windows and just pasted the first google result?
> No one advertises Python as suitable for life-critical applications.

I think you just relegated python to the status of 'toy language'.

But that's the wrong attitude. Just like everything will sooner or later connected to the internet, which is why it matters that it is secure, with 'software is eating the world' as pretty much the mantra of HN you should realize that any piece of software, no matter how trivial has the potential to affect lives and sometimes in the most direct way with the ultimate price - of someone else's life - as the consequence of our collective failure.

And that's because of the very nature of software: it gets re-used all the time. One persons application is another persons library, one persons application is another persons service and so on.

Leaky abstractions are bad enough, leaky broken abstractions can sooner or later turn out to be dangerous.

Of course whoever deploys the software has the responsibility to check it for suitability. But in principle any language, OS or library has the potential to be applied in ways the original author did not foresee and if that potential can extend to life critical or life affecting purposes then that should come with a similar standard of care.

How many machine learning systems are written in Python? How many of those make decisions every day regarding people's lives, some of those life critical? Are you seriously suggesting that all those people made the wrong decision in picking the language the application is written in?

If so then you are most likely at odds about this with just about every developer out there who - rather than arguing with their manager about whether language 'x', 'y' or 'z' is suitable for the job will simply be told what language is on the menu and to do the job in that one based on availability of programmers and whatever is 'hip' at the moment. These decisions are not necessarily made in the most rational manner and whether you agree or disagree with that in principle it is the reality that we live in.

And so 'toy' languages such as Python, PHP, Perl, Visual Basic, FileMaker and so on are all going to be used for mission critical stuff, whether you add a disclaimer or not.

Better be aware of that before you throw your brainchild out into the world: you own it.
There are plenty of Brexit voters in their 20's and 30's. You'll be waiting a long time.
No, executive orders can only function in areas where Congress has delegated control to the Executive branch but not to a specific body. ie, setting details of employment policy for the federal government, or setting priorities for prosecution of crimes, or making decisions about how administrative policies happen. But the President can’t provision new funds, raise taxes, make decisions that have specific bodies set up for a regulatory purpose (FCC, SEC, Federal Reserve). A lot of what recent Presidents have done with executive orders could be rolled back by Congress if they chose.
>Would you have two string types - py2string that accepts anything and py3string that only works with utf8?
Yes. A single naive one for py2 and two separate ones for py3 bytes and unicode. All casting between the two would have to be made explicit.

> How would this all work with C modules?
In non-strict mode, you'd be able to use either py2 strings or py3 bytes with these, and gradually move all modules to strict mode which requires bytes.

And then, gradually after a decade or so attempt to get rid of all py2 types.
six 1.0 was in 2011.[1] 50% of the top 200 packages were compatible by the end of 2012.[2] And there were features you could use in 2008 to make the eventual conversion easier.

[1] https://github.com/benjaminp/six/commits/1.0.0

[2] https://python3wos.appspot.com/
> For those who believe the market will fix it: Well paid drivers no longer exist. The last time he has seen a local work as truck driver was in mid-2000 and meanwhile salaries have dropped to ~€700 and less therefore only some Eastern Europeans can justify that working as a driver still makes sense for them. There is not much wiggle room left in terms of just paying better salaries - even smaller freight-forwarders are asking themselves whether it continues to go there (at least for now).

Which is probably, in part, why Brexit happened. Think about it - this is a career that used to provide fairly well-paid jobs to British people, but EU rules around access to our trucking market meant that wages were driven down so much that the only people who can do that work are Eastern Europeans based in countries with much lower cost of living. And the response of the British elite, including our press, was to insist that this didn't happen, that working class people were just brainwashed into blaming the EU because they were too stupid to realise it was their own damn fault they didn't have jobs. There's comments along those lines in almost every HN discussion of Brexit, including the other one that's on the front page right now.
'a communist who wanted to shut down most of the banks and all go back working in factories'

That sounds like its straight from the Daily Mail, quite unfair summary.

In terms of economic damage, BoJo is certainly giving him a run for his money

Back to the topic at hand: British state appear very reluctant to interfere with 'free market', significantly more so that the US government. I don't feel donation would be neccessary
That’s not a violation of thermodynamics at all, since the earth is not a closed system, and it’s also about averages. You can have local fluctuations.
Yeah, it was definitely not just as easy as a machine translation, especially when dealing with which library functions took one vs the other.

And this attitude and lack of empathy ("just use the automated tool, lol") is a big part of why the blasted thing took so long.
You're mistaking watching somebody on your computer as actually looking at that person. It's not and your brain knows this. It's very obvious that talking with somebody in person makes a huge, huge difference with the circuitry in our monkey brains. Listening to people on zoom calls is fatiguing and makes me feel like I have permanent brain fog.
The problem comes when words describe an idea or concept. Usually, words lose specificity and become more generic.

Consider the word racist, "the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another." Many people who say "I'm not a racist" are correct. They can be xenophobes and/or bigots.

There is no specific English word to describe bona fide racists from David Duke to Charles Murray, without including xenophobes, bigots, and people with strong unconscious prejudge.
As a former agnostic now churchgoer (who converted when I got married) one of the things I observed is that, perhaps by happenstance of history, organized religion is a key part of how Americans transmit their cultural values.

I was raised without religion but as Bangladeshis we have a pretty rigid culture apart from religion. This is the “what do you teach your kids about stuff.” Here in the United States it seems like most of that is just whatever is transmitted through the Disney Channel and movies. And frankly a lot of that is pretty garbage culture. It teaches people to be self-centered assholes.

Obviously there are many moral people who aren’t religious (and many religious people who aren’t moral). But you can take away religion but you still need some moral framework in its place. And in the US that seems really hard. We don’t have ready-made frameworks for “here’s what you should teach your kids.” Many parents do a fine job improvising, but it’s a lot of work to do it on your own from scratch.
No they can only issue things related to a law passed by Congress or a power granted to the executive branch by the Constitution. The Judicial branch can invalidate them.
Totally agreed, but check upthread for a comment that literally says this tool is unsuitable for work where lives depend on it. And for telcos that's pretty much a given.
> full of leaks that can’t be fixed

Not claiming it's perfect, saying it exists on nearly every cpu running Windows today. There's serious value for plenty of people out there to have access to these interfaces that are only internally documented and available to a small group of people from one company alone.

Only have to look at the history of adding randomness to CryptographyAPI-NextGen to understand where I'm coming from.

No one has been able to add an additional RNG source to the Windows entropy pool for ~15 years now, highly venerable Microsoft developers say this is a good thing in public for all their enterprise clients when basic maths proves it wrong in about 2 minutes.

They do not have your best interests at heart, no matter how big you are, in fact it's less likely the bigger you are.
I fear the British public are learning too late that the finger needs the hand rather more than the hand needs the finger.
Right but it poisoned the well; people had already had four years to kick the tires and conclude "yeah nothing works, my dependencies aren't ready; this seems completely not worth it."
That is a huge power, but a president’s pardons are limited to federal crimes. State level charges still apply, and that doesn’t seem very king like. I also forgot to mention the previous president is about to go on trial in Congress starting Monday. Also far from what I would expect of a king.

A couple of US websites even banned the previous president while he was president, and he couldn’t do anything about it.
I believe Youtube was asked by a few US Senators to take down(censor) election fraud related videos. They did not act from policy.
Yes, but clojure toolchain system seems a bit brittle to me, especially the rather onerous use of leiningen etc.
I have seen people arguing to change zoning so that walkable city kind of building is legal. Because in many places, zoning excludes mix of houses and businesses. You have to have houses only place and then businesses place. That is pretty much opposite of what you claim. Maybe in some later step they someone would try to make suburbs illegal, but right not, the issue is "make walkable pleasant city legal".

Second, your claims about price are purely theoretical. As of now, suburbs require more money and dont have all that many solar panels.
Ask HN: Development preparation steps before new SaaS
Hello Hackers!

Before I start the development of a micro saas, I would like to ask you how do you prepare and setup all the workflow when there's the possibility of selling the saas later on. The saas will be subscription based.

- Do you create a dedicated Gitlab/Github account?
- Do you create a decicated AWS/Firebase account?
- Do you create a dedicated email account?
- Do I have to create a company in order to run the saas?
- Do I have to register the product?

When I mean dedicated, I'm refering at no using personal accounts whatsoever.

Do you now any articles/books on this kind of subject? How to prepare the more technical aspects considering the product can be sold.

Deeply appreciated.
Why can't you ship your own interpreter to the machine? It's a mistake to ship python source code out to some distro maintained interpreter. Think of your interpreter, dependencies and source code as one atomic unit.
That would be an epic own goal. The west is desperate to reduce chip manufacturing reliance on China.
I think our industry has too much sympathy for companies running obsolete software for decades because they can't be bothered to spend on keeping their software current and up to date. If it's mission critical and obsolete, you messed up as a company. If you allowed that to fester for a decade plus, you've been negligent.

Now a lot of python stuff isn't really that mission or safety critical. So, a hopelessly outdated red hat server that hasn't been updated in years running some software developed over a decade ago may be convenient to keep up and running but if it's mission critical you could have acted by now. The good news is, you haven't updated in years in any case so why start caring about that now? Either way, it's your problem; own it and deal with it or not.

The source and binaries are still there and will still work a decade down the road. A lot of banks do just fine running software written in languages that stopped being fashionable half a century ago, where the developers have long retired/died, suppliers have long disappeared. Running their stuff on (typically emulated by now) hardware and OS that has gone out of production decades before the end of last century. Same thing. If push comes to shove, you can pay people to fix things for you. Banks do this all the time. But expect to pay for the privilege. Or just fix it properly, finally.
Are people actually OK with their image hosts looking like this?
hi! i hope you dont mind the random solicitation but intense searching for answers led to a comment of yours in a very old thread that struck a chord with me, i hoped to find an email or way to contact you but only found that you are using a throwaway to remain anonymous and that your tone/language/interests/concerns (from the little ive seen) are more relatable than i expected is there a way we can chat today without me imposing on your privacy/anonimity? a secure way to chat for you? if you didnt mind me picking your brain of course. thank you!
High-impact tips from legendary advertiser
> What are the issues with using docker to solve this problem ?

Docker alone doesn't solve the problem and neither does pip unless you take extra steps.

Here's a common use case to demonstrate the issue:

I open source a web app written in Flask and push it to GitHub today with a requirements.txt file that only has top level dependencies (such as Flask, SQLAlchemy, etc.) included, all pinned down to their exact patch version.

You come in 3 months from now and clone the project and run docker-compose build.

At this point in time you're going to get different versions than I had 3 months ago for many sub-dependencies. This could result in broken builds. This happened multiple times with Celery and its sub-dependency of Vine and Flask with its sub-dependency of Werkzeug.

So the answer is simple right, just pip freeze your requirements.txt file. That works but now you have 100 dependencies in this file when really only about 8 of them are top level dependencies. It becomes a nightmare to maintain that as a human. You basically need to become a human dependency resolution machine that traces every dependency to each dependency.

Fortunately pip has an answer to this with the -c flag but for such a big problem it's not very well documented or talked about.

It is a solvable problem tho, to have a separate lock file with pip without using any external tools and the solution works with and without Docker. I have an example of it in this Docker Flask example repo https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example#updating-depe..., but it'll work without Docker too.
This is akin to the "Forever Project" concept described by Scott Turner of Here Dragons Abound: https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-p...
Wouldn't have had to be the whole interpreter, really just a flag with single file scope which makes bare strings be interpreted as bytes instead of str, and maybe some other similar translations in stdlib functions.
How is this article only four sentences long?

USA Today gave it better treatment with added context for those curious as to some of the bets Godiva took in the year before the pandemic that increased their economic exposure to the pandemic. That being said, it's also clear that Godiva itself isn't closing. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/shopping/2021/01/22/sto...
> Clever code isn't usually good code. Clarity trumps all other concerns.

Generally this is true, but with the caveat that what actually matters is 90th percentile (or maybe even 99th percentile) complexity. If you have a choice between spreading low-grade complexity across the codebase or having one module that is nearly incomprehensible but that provides an abstraction that makes the rest of the code very simple, the latter is almost always to be preferred. Once you've distilled out the evil into one place and gotten it working reliably, chances are you're never going to need to touch it again, and if you do need to, at least you only need to deal with it in one place.
That’s just it, look at the statistics for wealthy blacks vs whites (and I don’t mean cash/liquidity)
> UTF-8 as a fixed encoding only works if you manage to write mappers from and to alternative character set for practically any language outside US English.

From a European perspective, this sounds very unlikely. Sure, you may have to deal with deprecated _encodings_, but I’d like to hear about mainstream languages with writing derived from the Latin alphabet, that aren’t supported by UTF-8
Many years ago I wrote https://github.com/adh/random-tools/blob/master/byc.c which tends to be the tool that I use for copying images from/to block device (it was originally meant for something else which is why you need -p for it to do the right thing).
Ion Trap Quantum Computer
That’s very true but making “static distributions” of Python apps is a fairly hacky/annoying problem with lots of room for subtle breakage. In practice one static pkg per major district version seems advisable.

Curiously Linux, despite having an extremely stable user space interface, suffers from a high degree of user space incompatibility. This starts with glibc and its components and ends with graphical toolkits. Go seems to be very successful because it ditches all of that crud and goes for the stable interface instead.
> Remote college isn't a thing and never will be

Is so wrong as "Remote working isn't a thing and never will be"

There are a lot of people that are interested in Remote studing. Sure it's not for everyone, sure not always 100% of the time, but I guess it would work pretty well and I personally would love to see "Remote college" becoming a thing.
Not specifically due to extension, but there are plenty of cases where people hosting tor exit nodes get raided.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/07/05/tor-linked-nonpr...

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160406/08211234116/law-e...

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/tor-exit-node-operator-raided...

https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/6283/raided-for-runnin...

https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/e...

Nothing really prevents same thing happening when it's VPN service's exit node (except maybe the fact that people doing illegal things would usually choose tor over VPN provider (though more technical ones are likely using both)).
Show HN: Teach and learn programming with interactive Blockly coding
Hi HN!

I'm Nelson from Malaysia and I built this app to help students to learn programming with Blockly and we also make it simple for teachers to teach.

I run a small coding academy for kids in Malaysia and we use platform such as MIT App Inventor in our teaching however we find it difficult for us to focus on teaching the programming principles. We tried to look for platform similar to codecademy or freecodecamp but with visual programming language so students do not need to worry on the programming syntax. Eventually I built this for our own use and now turning it into a SaaS product to see if other cs teachers would find it useful.

There're still a lot of work in progress and I plan to add more interactive activities related to different computer science topics. Love to hear any feedback from the HN community!
HTML and CSS byte on Crio winternship
It would also be a good idea to check every capacitor for leakage or bulged top and replace them. It's usually the capacitors that go bad after many years (read also: Capacitor Plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague), they contain electrolyte that deteriorates over time.
It sounds like you're talking about toy databases which don't run at a lot of TPS. Let me point out some features missing from your simple load a map in memory architecture.

You also have to do backup and recovery. And for that, you need to write to disk, which becomes a big bottleneck since besides backup and checkpointing there is no other reason to ever write to disk.

Then, you have to know that even in mem database, data needs to be queried, and for that you need special data structures like a cache aware B+tree. Implementing one is non trivial.

Thirdly, doing atomic, consistent and isolated transaction is certainly trivial in a toy example but in an actual database where you have a high number of transactions, it's a lot harder. For example, when you have multiple cores, you certainly will have resource contention, and then you do need locks.

And last thing about gc, again, gc is great, but there has to be a custom gc for a database. You need to make sure the transaction log in memory is flushed before committing. And malloc is also very slow.

I'd suggest reading more into in mem research to understand this better. But in mem db is certainly not the same as a disk db with cache or a simple Hashmat/B+tree structure.
It can even happen at the level of subculture-specific words (possibly NSFW depending on your W): https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiff
Oh yeah. I’ve worked remotely for over a decade. I didn’t even have a webcam on my primary computer until the pandemic started.

Now everyone wants to have a video call for things that used to be emails or slack conservations.
> I dont buy this argument at all. Any sufficiently complex Python 2 project does not work with Python 3 without modification, there is _no_ cross-version compatibility.

I was personally and solely responsible for migrating a >250kLOC project from Python 2 to Python 3, doing so without cross-version compatibility would not have been feasible. We literally picked the earliest P3 version we decided to support based on cross-compatibility features.
Transparency and Ethics in Cryptocurrency Investing
Probably because Python 3.5 was EOL’d last year and 3.4 two years ago.

https://endoflife.date/python
> Despite being called "engineers," most decision are pure cargo-cult with no backing analysis, data, or numbers

This is the most important part. Most companies don't have a mindset of doing research and analysis before taking a decision. No training is provided around this.
Most "engineers" want to play with shiny toys without being held accountable for any decision.
Ethical source movement attempts new kind of software license
They're really aren't.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36616028

A nice fat majoring of people under 45 voted Remain.

Edit: and that was when the bore happened, so that's not basically everyone under 50...
I don’t really have the time of inclination to continue arguing, but I will point out that you say all this as though the approach the team took failed. It worked. The ecosystem is on py3.

You can imagine some world with a crazy context-dependent string/bytes type. Cool. In reality this would have caused endless confusion, especially with beginners and the scientific community, and likely killed the language or at the very least made the language a shadow of what it is now.

They made the right choice given the outcome. Anything else is armchair postulation that was discussed previously and outright rejected for obvious reasons.
His wife didn’t cut any ice with them or he didn’t speak Welsh?
Many peasants wanted to defent their tyranical king, that sort of thing.
Woeusb is pretty decent on linux, and does the same uefi-ntfs magic that Rufus does, and that you'll need if you're burning a large ISO like recent Windows ones.

Though if it's just for ISOs, ventoy is fantastic, just drag and drop the file and no burning at all :)
Do you think brexit will solve this?