skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm currently refactoring a fairly large piece of research code myself. It was written with lean startup thinking in that a little code ought to produce some value in its results. If i was able to eeek some usefulness out of this code, then Id put more energy into it. Otherwise I was perfectly happy to Fail Fast and Fail Cheap.

How did it become such a mess in the first place? Simple - I didn't know my requirements when I started writing it. I built it to do one thing. In running it I learned more things (this is good - why you build stuff like this in the first place). The code changed rapidly to accommodate these lessons.

It wasn't long before I was running into limitations in the design of the underlying libs I was using etc. Of course I could find a way to make it work but it wasn't going to win any Software Design Awards.

Im happy to report that despite ending up a tangled mess, it actually helped me to come to understand and conquer a very specific kind of problem. In doing so I learned the limitations of commercially available tooling, the limitations of commercially available data, not to mention a great deal about the problem domain itself.

This research software has earned its keep and is now being cleaned up into a more organized, near commercial quality kind of project. Im glad I threw out "architecture" when I first started with this. It could have gone the other way where I had a very well built piece of code that didn't in fact perform any useful function.
That wasn't the official home page of the project, it was his personal fundraising page, with more words dedicated to fundraising than anything else. The official home page of the project is on gitlab, where the most recent sources, issue tracking, and history are.

Asking you to prove what you claimed is not canceling you.

>I never accused you of lying.

>"I’m sure all your claims can be either explained as inconsequential or disproven as false" -teddyh

Then either explain away all of the quotes of him saying racist and sexist shit as inconsequential, or prove he didn't say what I quoted. Has he ever claimed someone broke into his web site and planted all those racist misogynistic words attributed to his name, that he's never gotten around to removing?

For example: Does this make your skin crawl, or do you agree with his defense of Harvey Weinstein? "Is the casting couch fair trade?"
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7701

Do you have any idea how many racist and sexist remarks he's made that you're going to have to explain away as inconsequential? Have you ever even looked at the comments section of his blog on his web site, or did you ever read his Google+ account, or see any of the many screen snapshots posted to twitter? You've sure got a lot of work cut out for you.

The fact that you are so sure you can explain all that filth away as inconsequential, but refuse to actually do so, sure says a lot about you.

Start explaining away and rationalizing here:

https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833
First of all there is nothing called Hindu nationalist. India is the most diverse & secular country with all religions. In fact it is the country with the 3rd largest population of muslims in the world (after indonesia, pakisthan).India's identity does not rest on being hindu but being secular and diverse. Combining hindus and nationalism together seems like an effort to malign hindus. Seriously, why cant muslims be nationalist ?? Does that mean to say Muslims in India don't care about India or anti national?? The above piece is definitely a hit piece to malign either Hindus or India or both by implying india is a religious country (nobody gives a rats ass about religion in india, unless its western media) - so please take this with a huge grain of salt.

Secondly, alternatives are good. Isn't that a free market thing? why should twitter be the only place - social network? As a food for thought - How do you feel if we start calling GOP as Christian Nationalists ?
It's on Steam now
It may not be too late for that.

https://www.gog.com/game/starship_titanic

https://store.steampowered.com/app/467290/Starship_Titanic/

Looks like it's being maintained.
> Comments should explain the why, not the what or the how. Obviusly that are exceptions, almost all of them around the really algorithmic parts of the code, something I have to write less than once per year (backend software is not that clever.)

Although I agree that choosing clear variable and function names is usually enough to explain what code does, I'm just not entirely convinced that concise code becomes harder to read with multiple people or after coming back after some time. I feel that communication and documentation is generally the best way to get someone up to speed.

By concision, I mean something closer to terseness or brevity: exactly enough to understand what's going on, without anything superflous. Here's a classical concise python one liner:

def flatten_list(t):
return [item for sublist in t for item in sublist]

This flattens a list of lists into a list. But if you're actually coming back to the code either having never seen this comprehension or forgetting how it works, a little comment never hurts:

# iterates through each sublist to flatten a list of lists into a single list

Some may say this is redundant, but it's useful in more complex circumstances too. If you're working on a machine learning pipeline, say, it can be a quick way to block out some code.

# normalize all the input data
# generate embeddings
# train until error doesn't improve for 100 epochs
# run the net on our test set

(This is my third most favorite programming trick: pretending that something exists, then building it out*)

These examples are besides the point though. Terse code doesn't have to be illegible or hard to comprehend; it's all about finding that balance: no less, no more.

* My second most favorite programming trick is building a small set of tools and using those to redefine the problem.

> If it's not enough probably those functions are doing the wrong thing, maybe more than one at once, and must be redesigned.

Often I'll come across old code, think, "this can be written much more efficiently if I do it like this" and then half way through refactoring remember that I did it the first way because I already thought through the problem and realized that the first way was better and but wait maybe if I do this then that and so on...

It's easier to leave a quick comment just explaining why code is the way it is, which is all I was suggesting.
> You know, China

Another thing I find very interesting is Go is very popular in China

https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2021/02/03/the-state-of-go/

the US ranked #7, it barely had more devs than say, Belarus.
Yes it is one of those thing Tomshardware and Anandtech had problems with in their early days. They dont report rumours, only Facts and in-depth reviews. But rumours gets the click and ads revenue.
Plus it becomes impossible to get multiple developers to work on the code if they can’t understand it because of its messiness, so there’s a bit of survivor’s bias and stronger motivation to clean the code up to be comprehensible to others when you have multiple people working on it.

Also, I feel personally attacked by the headline. :)

It is for this reason I try to keep my code and models pretty simple, only two or three pages of code (or ideally a single page), and I don’t try to do too many things with one program, and I choose implementations and algorithms that are simpler to implement to make concise code feasible (sometimes at the expense of speed or generality).
Yep, Firefox is telling me that some parts of this page are not secure, such as images. I guess you may have more strict security settings.
I’ve not used Twitter in years and don’t know what the appeal was when I did.

“Audience” is specious to me considering the number of bots. Still, it’s an echo chamber regardless of which side you’re on.

So, yeah; I think we would all do well to recognize the immense bias of Twitter and ignore them. Soon enough their investors would punish them for these kinds of actions if we did. As it is, their investors love this nonsense because it results in “eyeballs”. Mine are rolling at Twitters antics.
There is a way to make that judgement; areas with a different regulatory structure didn’t have blackouts as long or as severe.
Python programming language hurries out update to tackle RCE
There are several lightning network (payment channel layer on top of bitcoin) paywalls where you can pay 1/10 of a cent to read an article. The tech exists, its now an adoption problem
They gave them this contract even after the whole phoenix pay system debacle?
It has absolutely NOTHING to do with 'extremism' that's just a cheap CCP talking point. It's about the geopolitical importance of xinjiang: https://youtu.be/ZxvYcByv2M8
Pork and pineapple is arguably good; the problem here is the pizza around it, which clashes horribly with pineapple.

This is especially true for tomato, which unless very sweet and acidic like in sticky sauce, it doesn't go well at all with pineapple.
For someone who "just went through this" your memory is off. As a Canadian the process is far easier than for a refuge or landed immigrant.

* You don't need to go to the post office and get multiple copies of the form, it's available online.

* You don't need to know the doctor who delivered you. That would be pretty tough based on many people not being delivered by a doctor, or born in a hospital.

* Driver's licenses are issued by either provincial agencies or registries; passport photos and application are reviewed & issued by federal agencies.

* You do not need a public servant (they qualified but you never needed them) as your reference, or even a registered professional - these rules changed several years ago. They need to be available to be contacted but not "interviewed" beyond a phone call.

* You need 2 references and a guarantor; the qualification are very modest.

* If it took 2 weeks for you to prepare you were not in much of a hurry, and 6 weeks for processing and approval seems reasonable (even fast) based on historical wait times. Regardless I can't see the approval time being improved as it will still be done by hand.

* If you need your passport quickly you can pay extra for priority rush and get the entire process done within a week.

Getting a Canadian passport quickly and easily should not be
a measure of success of this system as far as I'm concerned. Keeping the process analog with intentional slower, manual steps is a security feature.
Except that most governments have migrated to digitalization of many services. Do you do your tax return in your browser or would you prefer to file endless paper forms and go in person and wait in lines?
My money is on Twitter’s $0.50/hr offshore first tier support staff not being universally good at parsing the meaning of complex paragraphs of text.

I bet you could find plenty of educated native English speakers who would accidentally flip the meaning of that tweet around if forced to skim it and 200 other “probably bad” ones every hour, every day, all week.

So there’s probably no real news here except that big tech companies don’t do support tasks well.
If upstream is not keeping their software up to date, why are you using that software? Imagine if Google stopped updating Chrome. Would you keep using Chrome?
>The real reason is the incentives. Not just are there no incentives to produce good quality code, there are incentives which make people focus on other outputs. Publish or perish means that people put up with technical debt just to get to the next result for the next paper, then do it again and again.

I believe this is true and is fueled by a misconception of what software is in research. Software in research is often akin to experimentalist work in the past. It's tacked onto theoretical work projects as an afterthought and not treated as what it really is: forcing the theory to be tested in a computational environment.

If we start treating research software like experimentalism in the past, we might get a bit more rigor out of the development process as well as the respect it really deserves.
as people are saying, the typical software engineering advice simply wouldn't work in a research context.

one exception is the most basic stuff - people should use version control, do light unit testing, and explicitly track dependencies. These weren't really done in the past but are becoming more and more common, fortunately.

I think if software engineering experts actually sat down, looked at how researchers work with computers, and figured out a set of practices to follow that would work well in the research context, they could do a lot of good. This is really needed. But the standard software engineering advice won't work as it is, it has to be adapted somehow.
I've been coding for 10+ years in primarily ruby and python. I switched to golang recently for work. While its an interesting language, it takes forever to express what I want the code to do, unlike the previous languages.

Go's simplicity forces developers to introduce insane amounts of complexity.
Be honest, that's in a culture that holds the Nobility as a different kind of human being above everyone else. This worshipful attitude is a huge factor, not just economics.

And not all the rich, stay rich. That's a mainstay for every British comedy ever. But the ones who do stay rich, are very often those that are held in higher regard than the 'common folk'.
Entire school board resigns after accidental public livestream
What is TCO?
what are languages that implement TCO?
Gopls works great with Emacs.
The US as an aggregate of it's citizens' views must be viewed through the lens of it's leadership. From their actions, we can see it doesn't have an ethical compass at all. Unless of course you mean this in the most absolute sense, where there is an ethical judgement being made about drone strikes on children and it is thought to be acceptable.
It would be for me if I recently spent $40,000 for the privilege of doing so.
I just wish they would not inherit the horrible security practices from the incumbents.

Opening a new account, the happy path steers the user to 2FA via SMS (which can't be disabled once enabled). The only other option is via their proprietary iOS or Android app.

Please, please give us at least TOTP, if not FIDO U2F or Webauthn.

SMS is inherently insecure (arguably worse than e-mail) and I'm not going to download your app.
> Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for.

Yeah, you can.
> enabling competitors in science ... really, really should be.

Said someone whose livelihood doesn't depend on said competition.
An interesting hypothesis from Sir John Bell is that, some of the asian countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, China and Thailand have a lot of bats and may have got immunity from past exposure to bat coronaviruses.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusUK/comments/lmiyfv/profe...
There are dramatic photos: http://avherald.com/h?article=4e35302b&opt=0
What policies were you referring to when you said "All of today's grids started with smaller, less-connected entities."?

A lot of people have focused on Texas's separate grid policy.
Keep up the good work Jack. This is a good direction, keep pissing everyone off until the EU finally steps in and starts regulating Twitter. Would love to see them have a taste of their own medicine.

Although I would prefer even more if Twitter went offline just like Parler did. I consider Twitter a net negative on the world honestly.
>Reports up to 3 displays, so it's safe to assume 2+1 external/internal.

M1 Macs have been shown to drive 6 displays, so this "3 displays" means "3 4K/5K displays" I supposed.
I don't think you can write that much of a rant using the term "ease of use" without explaining your view on what "ease of use" is; does "use" really only mean a beginner using it for the first time? You mention languages with punctuation, what alternatives do you see instead? You claim "ease of use is THE most important part of a language", but why is it the most important?
Simplicity pretty much excludes generality in a lot of cases, you're only able to port code to the GPU if it wasn't a million LOC to begin with, so you're pretty much making the case for it.

Note that Simple != Easy or Naive

Hardcoded structures is potentially exactly the kind of simplicity needed.

What's not simple is a general "this solves everything and beyond" code-base with every imaginable feature and legacy capability.
I don't see why inflation is necessary. UBI doesn't have to change the amount of money flowing through the economy; one option is heavy taxes. Wealth redistribution, effectively. That does beg the question of whether incentives will remain high enough to maintain the technological forward momentum we have been making, and whether that slowing down is even necessarily a bad thing.

> [1] my local grocer employees a few folks with Down syndrome at the cash register. They’re super slow, but otherwise good at their job. I love them. They value their job so much, and they have by far the best attitude. Their job gives them the dignity of knowing that they aren’t mere consumers, but also (in their limited way) contributors. That’s very powerful for the soul.

That's very different from smashing the machines to me. They really and truly are contributing something to the world; we need people to check people out and bag their groceries. If we built a machine that could check people out and bag their groceries, smashing that machine so people can get the "sense of pride and accomplishment" of having needlessly manually bagged the groceries seems a little... patronizing? I mean, at that point why don't we just keep using the machines and send everyone to school for the rest of their lives to keep them busy like we do with children?

I think people will gravitate towards work on their own, it just won't look like what you're accustomed to. With that amount of automation, we can support a lot more work that isn't strictly industrial. Arts and culture, artisanal goods, baskets woven underwater, etc. Is it going to propel us forward? Probably not, but I think it will make people a lot happier than pointlessly bagging groceries. If we accept that the value of the work is intrinsic (i.e. the value is in doing the work, not in the product of the work), we might as well let people work on what makes them happy.
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Intermediate size venues got wiped out because smokers are extremely profitable--smoking and drinking go together.

Same in pubs. The smoking-and-drinking crowd got edged out by parents who for some reason want to bring their kids to the pub. They will have brought their own drinks and snacks for the kids too. The mother will have a small glass of wine and the father will drink half a pint of "craft beer", stretched out over a couple of hours while their kids run around screaming and annoying the few remaining paying drinkers.

I loved pubs in the old days but even before COVID they were dying out because they just don't want their loyal paying customers any more.
You can't even get above 16GB with the M1. You can with the i9. It took me MONTHS to receive my 16GB M1.
That sort of nuance is diametrically opposed to the tribalism pushed by race essentialists currently en vogue in the United States.
Another issue is that the standard software engineering advice doesn't guarantee clean code either.
People unfamiliar with the HN convention of tagging an article with the publication year might be somewhat confused by the title.
>hard to forge paper

Except that history has proven the plenty of crime organizations can fake those really well and pass undetected and maybe you missed it, but the authenticity of your passport or any ID document is proven and validated by the secure cryptographic element in the chip within it, not the fancy features in the plastic/paper of the document, that's why chipped passports are now the norm. Fancy physical documents without security chips are inherently less secure, not more.

If that same security chip, that passes government security certifications, think Common Criteria level EAL 6, is in a piece of paper and plastic called "passport" or a piece of metal and glass called "smart-phone", what's the difference?
Sovereign Immunity means you can't sue the government unless given permission by a statute anyway.
> If you're worried about them _becoming_ officials, then act now.

If you mean this figuratively, we already have many situations - going back at least to the Arab Spring - of government officials directing policy on social media sites. Secretary Clinton of the Obama Administration spoke about this many times.

If you mean this literally, check out how may high level policy types from social media companies came from and have returned to high ranking spokesman+policy roles in Biden Administration.

But fundamentally, it doesn't require being an official. Even filtering and shaping search results has an impact.. and this has been measured repeatedly. Here's a study from five years ago (aka pre-Trump) which demonstrated it:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
Exactly. "Priest teaches Church teaching", woooah, what a radical.

I think secular society (i.e. Big Tech, mainstream media, governments) is treading a very interesting line at the moment, because it simultaneously is ( or at least appears to be) embracing all faiths and cultures, while denouncing them as being inherently hateful (Christianity, Islam).

The idea that they will ever reform and completely 180 on teachings they've stood by for thousands of years is naïve.
And if we stand by the idea that we simply cannot tolerate hateful speech, with the definition of hateful becoming broader every day, where will we end up?

The next 10 years will be very interesting
Their responsibilities under FINCEN/FATCA are not prove anything, but just have suspicion or some reason to think you might be a "US Person" (not just US citizen, but US resident, or various other special situations).

Of course, the US claims to extra-territorial jurisdiction, and bullying of global financial institutions to enforce their crazy inter-planetary tax system, are totally preposterous.

Elon - renounce before blast-off!
>Inflation is already happening, that is why housing and equities are so high.

The USA hasnt even touched 2% inflation since 2019. Let alone any hyprinflation concerns yet. In the context of: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/central-bank-bala... and https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m0

Inflation should be sky high. You cant inject that much money into the economy and not expect inflation. Inflation must come eventually.

The reality is that people in lockdown arent spending. Adjusting inflation numbers for this, the economy is tremendously deflationary. Not to mention officially in recession. Worse yet, the 'v shaped recovery' also only exists because of the debt taken on by the governments. Adjusting for debt there has not been a recovery.

Why are assets like housing, equities, bitcoin, gold, etc so high? I think it isn't inflation/deflation. It has more to do with expected collapse of the economy. Possibly great-depression levels of bad, but that won't happen for North america. The USA will declare a new war this year to counteract that concern.
Be worried, but don't assume this is an earth-ending event. How magnetic fields impact UV penetration is a complex process involving both physics and chemistry. One thing humans have proven very good at is modifying our atmosphere. Before we all retreat into caves we will try to boost our ozone layer. Artificial injection of ozone into the upper atmosphere is well within current technology. It isn't currently economical but would be cheaper than living like mole people.

And don't worry about nuclear power. Getting sufficient solar power won't be a problem with all those higher-energy particles getting through.
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