skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry,

I am deeply /deeply/ romantic about programming, but industry is dreck. Unimaginative, low potential, sapping, low-ambition, filled with endless middle- & low-roads & compromises. Countless stakeholders, endless non-technical-personals to "reason" with. Plans & designs & endless corporate aligning & planning. All for middling corporate plans, faint progress, carried forward under the weight of countless legacy systems & terrible decisions.

Programming & open source is this limitless potential, this endless imagineering & exploration. We are unencumbered by anything beyond what we might imagine, what we might want to do, free to think of how we want to represent, structure, develop things.

Not everyone is into programming for the same reasons. But I find increasing distance, increasing inability to articulate to others how amazing being a programmer is, what expressiveness & power we have, how unencumbered & free we are. Even if others don't share the ambition & sense of grandiosity, don't feel the immense pull of the vast humanistic work that we distinctly are the crafters & doers of, there's still such power to create & share & inform that is so rewarding, so immense, so imminent in the craft, & I deeply deeply crave seeing some recognition, somewhere, of some of it- of themselves!- at some level, in my fellow peers. It's ok if we have different reasons, different motivations, different engagements, but there is a might of human potential here that programmers are so uniquely connected to, so immersed in, and I want these fish to realize the water about them, even if they only aspire to be small fish.

I affirm strongly the question: how indeed can you not be romantic about programming?
But this is what Taleb and Zizek have been drawing attention to for years, its just that this predicament is the case at every level of society
Was also disappointed to find that browser picture in picture support was limited to a video element. Wish I could just use it on any element, like with fullscreen.

I can imagine some complexity as explained. But for example it seems reasonable to me to limit browser panel/PiP support to a single element at a time like it is now for video to avoid some of that.

This looks interesting!
I don't really think this is true for two reasons. First, the app doesn't add anything that someone training a classifier couldn't just do themselves. If I want to train my network against adversarial inputs, I can just generate them myself at training time on my own training data - it's not particularly helpful for me to have a bunch adversarially-perturbed but unlabeled images. Second, and more importantly, it's not sufficient to just train on adversarial examples taken from another network. You might learn to be robust against the specific weaknesses of that other network, but your new network will have its own idiosyncratic weaknesses. To be effective, adversarial training (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.06083.pdf) needs an adversary that adapts to the network as it trains. In other words, you need your adversary to approximate your current weaknesses at each step of training.
I've been programming since my early teens > 25 years ago. The article asks "How can you not be romantic about programming"? And I have to say, that after all these years, I am romantic about programming...only sometimes, now.

For one, programming a lot made me very near-sighted, and my eyes are dry to the point that I can no longer wear contacts. (I had a bad episode and nearly went blind a couple years back.) That really blows, because I used to like surfing and other outdoor activities that are seriously curtailed by thick glasses. Take care of your eyes!

Second, I am mostly not romantic about programming because I feel like I am swimming against the tide most of the time. Stuff changes so fast and so much; there is so much fad and passing fashions, and what's the rage these days is tomorrow's cargo cult. What's today's cargo cult started as an offhand comment with a kernel of truth that far too many people took far too seriously. It's never the right things that change, either. We keep changing syntax and IDEs and environments and frameworks, and yet we're still fighting memory management bugs in 2021. A very stubborn cult of performance worshippers have successfully defended the bottom layers of software from being rewritten in safe languages (putting safety at priority #1 for 4+ decades). I'm willing to pay 15% performance for this layer to just be forever ridden of this, but people treat me like an alien.

Third, people have complained about programmers being lazy and wasteful since the beginning of time, but we've truly jumped the shark. Build times for C++ (and Rust) are just insane. To think, dozens of cores, cranking away for minutes at a time, trillions upon trillions upon trillions of calculations just to output a little binary. Being a compiler person, and knowing some details about what is going on inside those compilers makes me want to cry. It's insanely wasteful.

Fourth, the arguing. There have been tribes and flamewars and a toxic culture since forever, but really, it feels so hard to express how disappointed I am in the whole shit, without adding to the whole shit and making the whole atmosphere even worse. I vacillate between wanting to yell at clouds and being sick of hearing people yelling at clouds! I'm simultaneously sick of being shouted at and on the edge of being shouting mad!

But, there are bright spots. CPUs are insanely fast, and there is memory enough for everything. Stuff crashes less. But yeah, everything is a tangle and huger heap of shit than ever.
I believe plastic recycling is not motivated by oil use primarily. I believe it is motivated by trash accumulation in oceans and the food chain (microplastics). There are a ton of areas of the world where plastic just piles up.
>What are you talking about?

Is this just me or does this phrase come across as needlessly hostile?
Cash rules everything around me.

After a few decades of relying on coding to feed my family, I miss the way it felt magical, writing in Basic on a ti 99/4a.

I thought I was going to tell computers to do wonderous things. In reality most of us are telling them to serve ads or sell crap to people. Most of the rest of us are telling them to serve data to companies doing the above.

It’s just business now, nothing more.
This looks good and I'll bookmark and return to it as well. Well done. The Economist might also be worth adding as a source on your next iteration (assuming that's possible).
For me programming is all of those but also boring and frustrating and gets on my way to get things done.

Creating things nobody ever have done before is one of the deepest feelings you can feel in this life when you have done that, but also is terrifying emotion while you are doing it.

Like a chemical reaction, for something to be deeply satisfying from an emotional point of view you first need to give the system enough energy for the reaction to happen.

It requires intense focus, that is deciding not to do other things, which is painful. It is slow, which is frustrating. The work that could not be automated is boring. It is very expensive if you hire others to help you, and involve a tremendous risk if after all the work, it doesn't work out.
Facecrook: Dealing with a Global Menace
> I agree with this. I believe pure mathematics is suffering greatly because many mathematicians refuse to fully embrace the computational power of modern technology.

They can't even give meaningful names to their variables. When showing code to mathematicians we should always rename all variables with only one character. Then look down at them because they can't understand it ;)
That plugin is for desktop browser. My biggest distraction is the phone actually. And firefox for phone doesn't support it yet. Somebody should really port it. Grease monkey also doesn't work on mobile browsers.

What a great idea. I have myself disabled colors on the screen to avoid those addictive contrasts.

I also try to do a phone fast every Sunday, where I give my phone to my wife and just live without it for a day. It's amazingly rewarding. You should give it a try :)
>A capacity market in Texas would have made wind significantly more expensive, and was thus politically untenable.

A rather surprising claim, given the apparent tenability of wind in the rest of the world.
Tech trustbusting's moment has arrived
Something I sometimes think about in this vein: how many lines of code, written by how many people, in how many different times and places, are traversed on your computer every second?

It's kind of mind-blowing to me, and I can't think of anything else that works like that. It would be like if, when building a new house, you built it around an existing house, and continued to add layer after layer, and generations later the original house was still in constant use and supporting all the rest.
Please say more. My efforts to buy least processed cotton and wood pulp products have been largely unsuccessful. I don't need my toilet paper or t-shirts to be white.
Depression is a bit more complex than that though. You can be emotionally neutral if you're just not strongly affected by what you're doing, it's probably the default state if you've done something for a while. I'm emotionally neutral when I brush my teeth.
As per usual, the major issue with fiat currency is how poorly the government is managing the country.
It works from 13.0. We are at 14.4.
"Plastics production accounts for about 4 percent of global oil production. That’s according to figures for 2012, so now it may well be higher."

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/How-Much-Crude-Oi...
Coping with Redesign: Catan Universe
But nothing says the function is ran only only once...
There could be someone in the next room also emulating an universe, and not intervening. Or they could emulate the universe 5 minutes later and say "this time we dont intervene"
http://archive.is/efL0G
It's based on patches. I'm perhaps not going to win any friends, but I think that is ill-advised. Patches are great for emailing around, they are a horrible idea for an SCM.

Perhaps I need to write up how weaves work in more detail. Once you get that, you won't want an SCM based on anything else.
Nope. IO would be orders of magnitude less than computation
I never know how to answer coworkers when they ask what motivates me because, frankly, I think all the romanticism is just a childish fad that you have to play along with if you want people to assume the best of you. My usual answer is always something vague like "there's just something magical about them. I feel like an artificer." It wouldn't be so annoying but I constantly meet people who insist they just can't work that day because they don't have whatever synonym they've chosen for inspiration and meanwhile all I can think is "Or you could get over it and finish like a god damn professional". As a very mercenary person who's happy to hone a skill simply for the money I can't wait until there's enough people in software that we can start firing the profitable children finally.

I think this is just an American thing though because on the occasions I've met with partners from other countries, especially basically anywhere in SEA, I've noticed people act a lot more like adults. Personally I blame San Fransisco.
Oil on its own is still not great, because of the extraction methods that cause environmental harm, but it’s definitely better than the CO2-related issues from burning it.
Space isn't just about the basic science. We could advance engineering with projects like HAVOC [1] That could be indispensable if we ever need to use it on a more "interesting" planet.

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa...
so, what you're saying is that from your experience lucid dreaming does not impact sleep quality negatively - correct? if I'm understanding you correctly you'd even say it impacts sleep quality positively (?)
so they're saying the form of bullying in this article needs to be addressed with prevention measures. they aren't saying your form of bullying doesn't exist.

whether one happens more or less isn't really the point. Its about identifying an underserved need and addressing it.
This isn’t true. It works with the iOS version that came out 1.5 years ago - 13.0. Apple is prepping 14.5 for release.
The first mention of this I saw was in a New Zealand press conference, where the reporter asked about Pfizer maybe being stored at new lower temperatures, and for me it underscored that we should teach people absolute temperature (ie Kelvin, there is an absolute version of the Fahrenheit scale but you've got no reason to adopt that). If you see the storage temperature rules change from 210K to 255K it's immediately obvious this is a higher temperature, whereas some people will think -20°C is lower than -65°C

The professional they were asking questions of was careful to correct them by saying it's "warmer" rather than just snapping that it's actually "higher" temperature - because this way sidesteps the confusion, but it'd be easier to just not have that problem at all.
Thanks, although I think you're demonstrating here and in the other comments why you should write a real history.

Was the conference recorded? I've tried searching, but I'm not turning anything up.

As an outsider you get my worthless full agreement on strictness of history, and on solving the monorepo or vendoring dilemmas. My employer at the time of the upheaval was a bitmover customer, and as we slowly switched away one repo at a time it definitely felt like a sideways step. I'd hesitate to say backwards because it did come with some big process improvements for us, but definitely not forwards.

I'd surely have been proud of solving problems with the quality that BK did too. I remember playing with a lot of the open source systems of the time¹, and none of them were in the same league. I'll make no apologies for this sounding like truly weird fan mail.

¹ I'm remembering hg, darcs, monotone, $some_implementation_of_arch, prcs, codeville but there was a lot of people in the space to some degree.
I think it's called Cognitive Dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
let var i be none

while var i is less than j

i is i plus one
Glad to see Perl :)
Minor nit, possibly predictive text: full-fledged* btw
It does seems inconvenient but also intended to help keep the platform- and therefore users- secure. I’m not sure the word ‘draconian’ fits here, especially considering its original meaning and historical uses.
Every time I hear about USA I can only think about how they everything do there is "wrong". It's probably selection bias but I can't help but think that I am correctly recognizing a broken system 50% of the time.
This is the "brain in a vat" thought experiment in philosophy. Also the simulation hypothesis.

In short, I don't believe it's falsifiable or testable. We can just reason about likelihoods.

Relevant to this is solipsism. We also don't have and can't have specific evidence that another being is conscious. At best we can just say that it's likely that they are.
It doesn't really matter to antispam folk if you can make dozens of aliases on a single account for free easily.

So I guess this is more of a feature request, make it easy to bring your own domain and make aliases off it with a single MX record change
It's in "papillon". Used in prisons worldwide
I agree with you overall. There are some really interesting things you can do on the moon. Check out this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-RTBGnzNks
Hyperinflation might be a (not so) sneaky way to pay public debts without defaulting.
> How did things progress so far backwards in stability?

Because they progressed so far forward in security. Design is an exercise in priorities and trade-offs. The ability to wipe your Mac is now second fiddle to the ability to secure your Mac.
https://www.bpf.co.uk/press/Oil_Consumption

"In Europe, it is estimated that between 4–6% of oil and gas is used for producing plastics."

- British Plastics Federation

It varies from country to country, and in the USA natural gas is the primary input instead of oil. Some gas or oil could be consumed by the plant, not actually ending up in the final product.
Hello HN!

Daekun here, co-founder of Scena 360 (https://scena360.com) and Software Engineering student at the University of Waterloo. Scena 360 lets attendees hold separate conversations in parallel just as they would in real life, and allows meetup hosts to stop having to worry about turned-off cameras. In Scena 360, you can turn towards the person that you're talking to and have separate conversations around campfires without having to break into awkwardly-moderated breakout rooms.

Having completed several remote internships and study terms online, we realized how much 2D calls suck, as do most users that we have spoken to. We personally felt anxious keeping our webcams turned on and staring at blank screens, joining "virtual work parties" and "virtual conferences" without being able to casually talk to people. On top of that, we got fed up with malicious video conferencing software.

Imagine that you're in a workshop: Seeing the speaker give a presentation at the front of the room, while you're having a side-discussion with the person next to you about an issue. Turning to the mentor walking by to ask a question. Walking over to another group to strike a chat with them. Talking to a person with their video turned on or a customizable avatar (similar to Bitmoji, Memojis) instead of a blank, muted rectangle. Knowing that your talks are protected with end-to-end encryption. These experiences are made possible with Scena 360.

We've just launched a pre-order for our Pro plan, which allows you to hold meetups with up to 100 attendees, which we plan on increasing to hundreds or thousands of attendees per room.

Scena 360 is built using A-Frame, ReactJS & WebRTC. We'd be happy to answer any questions about our tech or product (example: how we keep conversations private). Any other questions are welcome as well!

Feel free to hop on here to talk to us directly too: https://app.scena360.com/?roomId=daekun-meetup-hn

We would love to hear your feedback. What do you dislike about 2D video conferencing?
My valuable valuable data being stolen by the app. What have I been thinking.
I had a chance to meet some of the devs on the project at a hackathon after pycon a few years ago.

That statement perfectly describes my experience. Really friendly and welcoming group.
Maybe the thing you were working on wasn’t interesting enough to you? If I’m working on something really hard that I think is cool, the intermediate steps are a joyful rush when they work out. If I’m working on something like pulling data from yet another endpoint, not so much. Might be worth looking around for problems that actually excite you.
Admins are employees of the Reddit company. Moderators typically are not.
This reminded me of something that happened last week. I had written some code I found absolutely beautiful, then had to delete an hour later since the customer's requirements had changed. Personally, I find these situations disheartening but it's never frustrated me.
Back in the 60s and early 70s, ham radio people used quartz crystals that were simply a sliver of crystal mounted in a little box with no additional circuitry:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/VmAAAOSwdjZfEVOx/s-l640.jpg

A common circuit called a "Pierce Oscillator" (as Ken described in this article) was used to enable their oscillating ability:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce_oscillator

Now all of this comes in a can which is more of a "clock module" than a quartz crystal, as Ken Sherriff explained.
Honestly, who's the bone head who set up this department in first place? It's like letting the cock sleep in the henhouse. Either this department is one big charade, or it tries to do a good job and is in constant and acrimonious conflict with rest of the org.

It's like a bank or HF having a compliance department who is not only responsible for ensuring rules (it doesn't entirely understand) are followed, and making up new rules at the same time. In effect, a dual legislative and judicial branch.
Reasoning over Virtual Knowledge Bases with Open Predicate Relations
The surreal part is surely the book-sized holes the censors cut out.
I think it's unlikely that the noise will generally have any relation to the target class. I can't find anywhere they say exactly which attack method they use, so it's hard to say for certain, but all of the attacks I'm aware of don't generate noise that has any human-interpretable structure. See for example Figure 1 in the seminal paper on adversarial attacks: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.6572.pdf
I think know what happens here. We become disconnected from the real-life output of what we do. It becomes abstract. If you're like me, you started off making stuff for yourself and it was a thrill to put it live and know that people could see it. Now I think we all build stuff for others, because that's where the real money is.

In short, a hobby turns into a job and stops being fun. But I've found ways to bring programming into my hobbies and that's been life-changing!
In part I'm glad I didn't go into programming for this reason. It's a pure hobby pursuit free of the pressures & stress of work. I code what I want when I want.
Bittorrent ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That would be a fun idea, some sort of intervention that stops the universe it manifests in from doing the intervention to the universe below. That would split the universes into odd-numbered and even-numbered universes.
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I've heard basically two arguments for wind/solar: it's cheaper, and it's greener.

In a place like Texas, you get support on the "it's cheaper" argument. Wind and sunlight are free after all.

In many other places, you get support on the "it's greener" argument. Doesn't matter if it's more expensive, less reliable, etc. because it's saving the environment.
I like this, but there’s an important component missing:

(Assuming you had the resources in-hand) how much time would each one take?

Like, the micro singularity: are we talking minutes, hours, millennia? Longer?
Added! PureScript is a purely functional substitute for JavaScript.
The more GPUs you buy, the more money you save
It’s a good point. I think most people think “warmer” if they hear “higher temperatures”
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Thanks for the detailed response. I too generally feel bad using most social media (doomscrolling, etc..), but there's probably a lot of other things I do on the computer that make me feel bad, I just have not noticed.

I've written a simple script to record most of what I do on my computer (ie what I type, what windows/tabs have focus, etc...). Correlating that info with Emotions monitor seems like it could find patterns I'm not aware of. Not sure if I'll get around to do that but you never now.

You've given me lots to look into, thanks again.
I think, like with many things, basic steps are not taken, through laziness, carelessness or ignorance.
> It just seems to be a waste of brain-space to bother with making everything romantic.

Is dancing is a waste of energy?