skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the post conflates several quite unrelated concepts under the label text. Also what does he mean by text and information? For example he mentioned the "optical telegraph", which is a semaphore system which used a system of messages which AFAIK were not alphabetic text.

Another example if we compare logographic language systems (e.g. Chinese characters, hieroglyphs ...) to alphabetic systems. I guess we can say both are text, but logographic systems are close to pictures as well (pictographic systems even more so) and they can convey information in much less characters, at the cost that one needs to know a much larger "alphabet".

Similarly if the information we are trying to transmit is actually an image, transmitting the actual image is certainly much less information than transmitting a description of the image. That is also why the comparison with the bird and twitter image falls flat. The image conveys a specific image, not the generic image of a bird. To describe that specific would need many more characters than 4. Similarly if I have a large set of numbers, it's much more efficient to store and transmit in binary format not as text.
Honestly, most SDFs you use in practice will be badly formed. Creating a well-formed SDF is very, very hard, and only possible in a few special cases.

So in practice what you try to do is find an SDF that is not TOO far off from what it should be. Ideally, it should always have an absolute value that is equal to or less than (but not by too much) the real, ideal SDF.
there are many examples but i’ll provide just a couple of scenarios:

automatic fines when anti-social behaviour occurs via face recognition.

here’s another one: identifying individuals with potential diseases via cctv and providing pre-emptive care.

and the last one: identifying at risk youths via cctv and providing support. in real time.

the tech is not the problem. it’s how we use it.

right now we use it for ads and the occasional terrorist. but the potential for good is huge.
Also anecdotal: needed some small items from there (because it matches what I've already got) and their click and collect in Berlin was super well done. You could order to pick up the next day.

They had converted their entrance and exit "lobbies" in to a zone where carts of items were prepped and after they confirm your order they'd just roll the cart with your order out of the door and leave you to take it from there.

Obviously you have to be prepared for heavier items, etc, but it was fast.

That said, I had some less urgent stuff to get, and ordered online, took 3 weeks to even process/ship (though i knew that in advance)
As amusing at it is to imagine, their team page only lists 3 developers[0], so I bet that turnover does not happen particularly frequently!

[0]: https://sqlite.org/crew.html
Would you recommend Common Lisp as the lisp dialect for a new beginner and for an eventual hobby project? Do you recommend SBCL over other Common Lisp implementations?
Old houses in New England were built with internal chimneys for the same reason (less heat loss).

Houses in southern states were built with external chimneys which made sense for a couple reasons. Back in the day people would keep a fire 24/7 for cooking and that fire + southern heat is uncomfortable. Because of the shorter cold season the chimney was on the outside of the house. Also, in the case of chimney fires you could tie a chain around an external chimney and rip it down with a horse, hopefully saving your home.
I'd love to know which PR agency Basecamp uses. They have really had some fantastically timed mainstream press over a number of issues (most notably, the Apple 30% cut one) and I can't help but think there is a very smart agency pulling it off.
You can do OOP in Haskell, if you really want to..

If you are interested in F#, but not especially wedded to .not, you might want to look at OCaml.

F# is to OCaml as Clojure is to Scheme/Lisp.

Ie F# mostly tries to be OCaml, but has some annoying limitations because of .net compatibility.
> I wonder what will change the opinion of the skeptics?

Nothing. It's an ugly system, for soulless players: it's eating up hardware production capacities, energy supply, and the money of the ordinary folks.
I dont think you would. If english is still understood, decoding ascii/utf-8 is trivial. Just think of it as a ceaser shift cipher with an offset of 64. Very trivial to decode with frequency analysis if you know its english. Either you understand that 65 represents the abstract concept A, or you have no idea what the letter A is. Either way, a picture of the letter A is not going to be helpful.

Having english still understood after 5000 years seems much harder. But hey, latin is pretty old and we still understand that.
Wow... I think I should've better written https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164826 comment here.

Just a perfect illustration of how "синдром вахтёра" works in mods/admins.
Forth in Space Applications
"The following table presents space-related applications of Forth microprocessors and the Forth programming language, including:

spacecraft flight system controllers

on-board payload experiment controllers

ground support systems (e.g., communications controllers and data processing systems)

hardware or software used to build or test either flight or ground systems."
In some sense, yes.

But it's a test suite that can be much cheaper to write and maintain.
This is fascinating, it's interesting how the author balances respect for the students, while challenging them.

I would recommend anyone who enjoyed the article read the prior two posts linked at the top, they provide some nice additional context.[0][1]

That being said, while I do believe this kind of teaching could be useful, it seems that the teacher who attempts this is going to have to be very skilled, there appears to be a fair bit of lesson planning involved and knowing how to maintain the balance so that students get the sense of their teacher's respect for their capability against the disappointment that they didn't perform better.

> It’s crucial, therefore, to hold the students themselves as inviolate — dignified by default, and capable by assumption.

> The antagonistic teacher, on the other hand, takes it as a given that most students will put forth the bare minimum of effort, and structures his class accordingly. He makes clear exactly what is necessary to achieve a B or a C (rather than presenting these as inferior shadow derivations of A-level work), and then ends his spiel, ideally leaving the students with the vague sense that they’ve just been insulted.

It would be very easy for a student to get the impression that the teacher "has it out for them".

The other thing I'm wondering about is how much is this a useful teaching approach vs the existing let's call it "kindly mentor" approach. There are some proportion of students that will react well to this model vs the existing one and I'd be really interested to know what the broad proportions of that would be. At the very least this approach seems to penalise students with issues such as learning disabilities, though perhaps with some adjustments made towards students specific needs a more antagonistic style might be a refreshing change to their instruction instead of feeling like they're being introduced to a teacher who just has it in for them.

- [0]: https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/educ-101-axioms-f1cba0c85794

- [1]: https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/educ-102-economics-dcbe70ca5a...
Thanks, I actually just noticed the GitHub page says "The Firefox version supports automatic updates" so I guess it's safe to say that the Chrome extension won't automatically update?
No, it just means people act human.
Yeah... ADHD alarms are blaring right now. Worth getting yourself checked.
Alphabetic glyphs and pictures are not the same thing. Glyphs are abstractions. Pictures are literal (ironic).
For those who use HeidiSQL: it has now (experimental) support for SQLite.
This Flower Is Really a Fungus in Disguise
That really depends on your language system. What you say is true for alphabetic systems, but quite different for logographic (e.g. Chinese) or pictographic systems.
OK edited :)
To summarize my mind, I think the only american animated movie that's worth saving in the last 10 years is Disney's Frozen. It has some harshness, complex character relationships and appeals both to adults and children.
For the amount of bona-fide progress they pushed, the European Parliament has some un-democratic elements. Many of the votes are just decided with a show of hands, even though there's electronic system in place[1]. Sure it wouldn't change the outcome, but always voting electronically would ensure accountability of MEPs to people they represent.

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP/...
How to Measure Performance in FinTech Apps
black mirror almost real
Storage hasnt really been the bottleneck for a long time. A terabyte stores a lot of pictures.
With your experience, what do you recommend?
Yeah, usually you want to sync everything with the same clock.

Verilog and VHDL allow specifying delays, which is basically troughoutput. Basically:

when input changes:
computed_output = f(input)
after 10ps:
actual_output = computed_output

That's not actual syntax, mind you, I am a bit rusty for this. But the idea is that you either make sure every delay fits in your clock period, you use different clocks, or wait a few clock cycles to sync everything (which is the same as having different clocks).

Of course, you can oversize a capacitor to drive a high-capacitance line faster, and that would require more current. I don't think logic synthesis tools can handle that sort of compromise yet.

This is also why non-sequential (no clock) logic is hard: you would likely need synchronization signals so that the rest of the circuit knows when it can change the inputs (maintaining those during setup and hold times is necessary to guarantee valid output... try changing the input numbers while you perform a multiplication by hand).

And that class of issues is likely not a problem at all in factorio: I have only played mindustry and infinifactory, but I guess that factories do not run until they have the right input materials? Control signals are already there, in the form of {material present, material absent} on the belt, and factories are already fully-fledged state machines.
These kind of mass data collections should be banned anywhere. Otherwise it enables any future Hitler or Stalin to select and locate any undesirable population and head them to camps.
> in 5000 years time we'll need both the Unicode specification and those 2-4000 bytes to decipher the author's post.

Nitpick: In all likelihood, an English dictionary would be enough. Even if the Unicode spec is lost, the text can probably be deciphered by using frequency analysis plus the dictionary to associate codepoints with characters.
I was talking about the American market. Unless you're a professional investor you can't touch ETFs if you're an euro.
Yeah, I like the idea that bacterial life spread between the planets.

We have found Mars fragments on Earth. Some almost almost certainly went the other direction.
> That's true, but if you find one such island, you can take it in isolation and see what it actually proves without considering the overall theory.

Except that isn't what happens in practice, rather the island is taken as confirmation of the rest of the theory.
Video: API Is a Hall of Shame
For me it depends a lot on what I want to learn. For some things (e.g. programming) text is much better.

For other things (e.g. repair a part on a bike) text requires images, to really be able to quickly grasp what one has to do.

Finally, for learning e.g. dance moves I really want a movie (or a live instructor).

So like usual "it depends".
Then why is the rest of the C# world using traditional CLR?
Who actually uses bitcoin for transactions today?

I used it to buy the phone I'm typing this on:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25598831

Despite the run-up since, I'm still happy with that transaction!
> You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam

Can you give a source/reference for this? I'd like to understand it more.

I don't allow any remote content when I read emails, and I get quite a lot of regular newsletters. Why am I not being unsubscribed?
If you think graphical programming languages are nowhere, that just means you do not have a very broad exposure to programming.

As was already pointed out, graphical languages are massive in game design. They are also used in audio processing, in scientific and engineering software through labView, and in various other places.

They are very popular in fields where we want to open up programming to more people than those who call themselves "programmers".
Whats the difference between a government so weak it cant do anything, and no government at all?

Without a limit, this appears to be an argument for anarchy
Fastest WordPress servers are based in Finland
By AI you mean matrix multiplication on single/half-precision floats? You could be a bit more specific.
Something doesn't feel right here. Why would you send anything to someone with a potential to be marked as spam? That sounds like obtaining a user consent with unclear scope and then spamming them?
Well, we're likely one strong magnetic pulse away from having only paper books as a source of information, so there is that.
Honesty is always the best solution in my opinion. Send a verification email when someone subscribes. In the verification email, put a "yeah, I want this" link, and explicit "unsubscribe" link. If you also want to consider loading remote images to be valid verification, then say so explicitly in the verification email, and explain they may get unsubscribed if they don't either click the link or load the images. Explicitly unsubscribing will always override the other options.

Unspoken assumptions are always going to be wrong for some people.
It seems the requirement differs based on your nationality. For me they asked for either passport number or ID card number.
I've noticed in more and more projects a trend for the front-end team to build a legit backend server as a facade interface for multiple other backends. So I guess this is the front-end-of-the-back-end-of-the-front-end?

The rationale is that it is often easier for the JavaScript to talk to one backend facade layer, and have that backend facade handle talking to the "real" backend servers. So think sequencing and/or parallelism of API calls, serialisation, transformation etc all happening on the backend server before sending only the final result as simplified JSON to the browser.

So now your front-end dev also needs to know java/go/c++ as well as html/CSS/JavaScript/typescript :)... We just call them frontend engineers and be done with it. The best engineers tend to have broadly applicable skills and can rapidly learn something all with a smile and good attitude. A sneering/condescending/moaning/complaining/whinging aversion or outright refusal for writing CSS/c++ (it cuts both ways) is usually a red flag IME.
You can disable the displaying in GMail.

Settings > Images > Ask before displaying external images
good points.
Nearly every language will be processed as an AST, not as text.

Text is just a serialisation format for the AST. For some reason we still insist on editing the serialisation format instead of the actual data representation.
>The way we pay taxes does not matter nearly as much as the Fed.

It matters, in the sense that the government could just adopt a foreign countries' currency and thus the value of that foreign currency would benefit from the power of the USA. The USD would lose its value as a result. I can run my own central bank and mint the hacker news dollar and the currency would still be worthless because of a lack of government adoption.

The US government has decided for itself to be dependent on the USD via taxation and thus it will do everything in its power to protect it. It's that simple. So, yes taxation has a huge second order effect that completely dwarfs the first order effect.

Compare that to oil dependent countries that get paid in dollars for their wealth. They tend to protect their USD based economy at the expense of everything else. Their local currency tax base tends to be pathetic in comparison to the oil money and thus they neglect it.
> I can guarantee the opposite for any front end code, even Angular projects

I'd say ESPECIALLY on Angular projects (or React or Vue). Look at the package.json of any JS "web app" in any of the popular frameworks. Now imagine how many of those packages will have breaking changes in 1 year. By 2 year mark, many of them will be abandoned completely forcing the app maintainer to replace, or continue using an old version if that is even possible.
So, you are saying that a blind person has to enable images that he can not see, but that can mess with his screen reader, in order to continue receiving your newsletter. There ought to be a law against such discrimination!
Yes. See also Florence Nightingale using rose diagrams to illustrate preventable excess deaths to infection during war.

https://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/coxcomb-diagram-1858/
Sorry for your loss, I wish you all the best
Yes! The color palette is great.
Elephant in the room: models are desyncing because we broke the planet.
The macOS mail client shows an unsubscribe button.
You can still watch the original swf through Ruffle.

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/11940/format/flash
Each restriction at the language level adds a cost. The cost of having simple nullable types like you do in Java or C# is worth it. The cost of trying to formalize away null errors isn't. That is what I think. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should, so just because you can ensure no errors of class X happens at a language level doesn't mean that enforcing that at a language level is the best solution.

> It's not possible to solve problems at the code level. That would require every single developer writing in that language to account for all the holes in the type systems.

I'm not sure what you mean with this. Of course you can fix this at a code level. Not for the entire world of course, but you can do it in the code you write.
this is true, but
>you'll spend easily as much time learning their idioms, mutations of the platforms, unique glue code and business logic as you will learning the platform.

unless that is a trivial amount of time, which it generally isn't (and obviously can't be if you are expected to learn a new platform in the same amount of time to a level of reasonable proficiency), then the amount of time that you would devote to the learning it is probably not that worthwhile for the company to let you lose on the platform you don't know.

Of course my perspective is as a consultant, so if I'm brought in for 6 months and I do not know part of their stack it is just not worthwhile for me to learn that part of their stack, they generally want me to be productive on the parts of the stack I do know. If I was going to be at a place for some years maybe the motivations would change, but bigger places tend to optimize and specialize their developers and not want people to be "full-stack".
Funny to see the replies to this comment I posted just 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26096563
C++ is not complex? The C++ complexity is not accidental? C++ is like Haskell or OCaml?

Dude, C++ can still compile C code, right? And how are C++ templates anything like Haskell or OCaml? Aren't they just some fancy text-based code generator thing, at the end of the day?

I'm really curious about this as everything I've seen so far contradicts your perspective.

Or are you talking just about modern C++ (post C++ 11)? That doesn't work as C++ of all kinds is out there in the wild and you'll run into it, at least from external dependencies.
This type of bifurcation limits the growth of developers, and makes evolving inorganic. So how does one get better at either side of that coin? Talk to your boss and say ‘I need to do more front of the front work’, or ‘I need to do more of the back of the front work’?

It’s no good, and oddly it has been the go-to divide and conquer tactic I have seen in at least two of my previous companies. In fact, a very long time ago I had a company straight up tell me and other frontend developers that all JavaScript work was too advanced and will be handled by their ‘real’ developers (the backend people). It was just Jquery work at best, zero app architecture.

This happened again at another place where there would be people that would do the CSS and pass it off to people that hooked up the JavaScript.

I’ve been on both sides of the coin, and in both cases I either felt like it was complete bullshit for myself to be limited, and if I was on the more ‘favored’ side, I would feel absolutely sorry for the front-of-front people being limited.

Companies that have strict lenses to view developers in this way will always have a limited view on an employees potential. They also generally consider certain types of work lower class. So for example, they may think someone from QA can move up to front of the frontend, but the frontend person could never seriously move over to the backend. Both the QA and Frontend person are basically maligned to their caste with their potential capped. I am speaking very specifically of companies that have clear castes (there are many still), and not speaking of the new fullstack trend. You’ve been warned, you’re up against an insidious bias.

With all that said. One of the things that makes me semi decent at frontend work is that I know css and js well enough where I can find a solution that can use css in a way that minimizes JS. I couldn’t get there if stingy idiots force fed me one class of work all day, every day. This is a massive opportunity cost issue if you are facing this.

The prime directive for determining who is dope at one particular thing has only one use case - time sensitive delivery. If there’s a short timeline to get to prod, or a time sensitive bug, or critical deliverable, or critical architecture (you need the really good css people setting up your layouts for example, not the sql guy that knows some css), yeah, go ahead and discriminately delegate.

Otherwise, let the fucking developers grow.
It's ironic that you make that comparison to silicon valley because silicon valley was the progenitor of these supply chains.

If the supply chains can move across the ocean once then surely they can move back again.
Yes the game. I understand what you mean.

But my intention was question validity of series of claims the author making using full loaded abstract words - " Text is everything" " text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication" . Of course the author should expect to be challenged on meaning of words.

Let's say you looking at some painting painted by a person who wanted "paint" the emotion inside his brain. Not sure you can completely paint the emotions as picture. But author claims is text can completely express the painting or the emotion - that is not true. Can someone write words to describe me - how lemon taste? And I get same feeling on my tongue after reading "text" ?
> I am a programmer and like many of my peers I cannot stand those systems

I am also a programmer but I love my graphical shader editor in Octane [0]! It's the perfect interface for defining a graphical data flow. For example, I can implement really complex spatial conditionals by creating a merge node controlled by a greyscale bitmap. E.g. to create a gold thread on a silk material, I can merge existing gold and silk shaders through a bitmap of a lace pattern, itself edited in Photoshop. Just by connecting some nodes.

[0] https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/
Solar panels don't generate that much power during the day, and even less when they are covered in snow.