skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If there is a useful metric, then I haven't found it yet. The data on cyclomatic complexity[1] does not convince me, and in practice, the linters I've seen have complained about boring code like this:

switch (foo) {
case KIND_1: return parseObjectOfKind1();
case KIND_2: return parseObjectOfKind2();
case KIND_3: return parseObjectOfKind3();
...
case KIND_15: return parseObjectOfKind5();
case KIND_16: return parseObjectOfKind16();
}

There are 16 paths and yet this code is easy to follow. There is no substitute for human judgement (code reviews).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity#Correlat...
Bay Area techies are still celebrating getting rich in a pandemic
> A more sexless society is also a society with a lower overall birthrate.

Since the 1950s, basic living has steadily become increasingly complex and decreasingly affordable. Sex is harder for six exhausted roommates under one roof.
I've been running that for years.
Well they're pretty identical in effort, so the same - you apparently consider them to be entirely the same class of work with no moral/ethical difference.
I think that's where your bias lies. If you think a book is a masterpiece no amount of evidence can flip that bias.

You post basically declares every scientific or academic or professional field as "pattern languages."

Then you conclude to say.that there are books much more well put together then the gof book. I agree, like pretty much every axiomatic math book that proves each theorem starting from base axioms is more elegantly put together than GoF.

And none of these books have the pretentiousness to call what they're doing a "pattern language." The concept is unecessary and is only used by books that are actually very informal. The Gof book is essentially just "oop programming tricks" retitled to "design patterns" to sound more academic when in fact its so far from academia, most schools don't teach it as part of foundational computer science.

Also all the books you defined are informal and opinionated. Especially capital by marx. None of those books come close to the rigor of "pattern languages" established by even a basic math book on number theory.
Nice title but if you are promoting a SAAS where you send notifications about relevant job requests, it has nothing to do with your ability to make $200/Hour.
You have a fair point but this tool is actually meant to be a software translation of contactless cards and it's 1-1 that. Neither Apple nor Google Pay thought to reimplement given the new tools they have available.

If I had to guess, I would say it is because they wanted to support some use-case that contactless cards currently do: presumably like I can pay at Safeway before knowing the amount - a feature I use very often to speed up the process.
In could, but that's generally not what it means when applied in this way. You don't thin out a a herd (which is where I think that phrase is most often used in English) by spreading it over a larger area, but by removing a percentage of the individuals that make up the herd.
Stripe’s not a publicly traded company yet — it will be at some point — and I get the sense that Patrick and John are enjoying the relative obscurity while they still can.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is selling his first tweet – bidding is at $2.5M
Consider the cost of lines of code in a solution. Double the lines means double the time spent to simply type them in. Double the time later to read them. Probably many more times than double to re-understand them. Double the time to explain them. Double the compile time. Execution time is probably around double.

It's not just twice as good to write shorter code. Its something like 64X as good. By some ways of thinking.
Ask HN: Where to look for jobs at small companies?
I'm a UX designer who's interested in joining a small business that makes a useful software tool, as opposed to a rocket ship startup that is redefining market X. Is there a job board or a place to look for this kind of opening, or do you just have to know the right person at the right time?
How to send gifts without addresses?
I see the same thing in Applied Machine Learning, where psychologist X writes paper on "My mathematical model for predicting Intimate Partner Violence scores." Where the deep learning model is a basic multilayered perceptron implemented with sklearn. Something any CS Freshman could cook up in 10 minutes.
It's funny that the author makes several mistakes in this piece criticizing writing.

The first jumped off the page at me:

"She is involved in The Drunken Canal, a regional print publication based New York City"

This is also bad writing:

“Honor Levy was conflicted about pulling her piece from The Drunken Canal, a regional New York print paper she began last year. She had several short stories published in the New Yorker, but this felt different.”

Regional is a redundant descriptor if New York is included. Just saying "regional" would make the sentence flow better. "Print paper" also doesn't have meaning, it's something the author made up.
I see your point: what you are asking for is labelling the articles rather than grouping them in collections, right?

I think labelling is useful when you can download individual articles (by label) efficiently. I don’t think it’s practical to create torrents for each nor efficient to ask users to scrape. IPFS could have helped if it wasn’t so slow in practise.

Also see https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages
Crypto is 'backed' by the sunk cost of the energy used to mine it.
Wait till you see what happens when you swipe, insert or tap a credit/debit card.
Improving Public Health Screening with Technology
>He's right

Perhaps, but the right way to approach this is to point out the factual errors, rather than making thinly veiled insinuations that his opponent is a shill for the BLS or whatever.

>defending the CPI calculation is almost criminal

Ah yes, because the only possible explanation for why people don't hold the same beliefs as you is because they're acting with malice.

For this and the previous point I refer you to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, namely:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

Assume good faith.

>Many people on fixed incomes that are adjusted based on the CPI are negatively affected. This bogus formula will be conveniently altered to stay under 2% if inflation creeps into the basket of goods being calculated.

All this does is provide a motive for why CPI might be wrong, but stops short of providing evidence or counter-arguments.
Why Google's social network was a spectacular failure
Right. The number 3 is inarguable. That 4+2=6 is inarguable. The applicability of a give statistic to a given situation or argument is a much more difficult proposition, but people too frequently treat a statistic as relevant just because it's easy to compute.

After all mercury is in retrograde, and that's a scientific fact.
> Honestly don’t know if you’re trolling or just old.

No need to be ageist. It's a fair perspective. There is a quality of independence and agency that comes from being able to purchase things with cash.

Ironically, your weed transaction is a perfect example of that. I am a little confused by your argument though. Are you saying that you used cash because you couldn't pay legally with a debit/credit card or something? How come you didn't you use crypto? That aside, even with cash you were able to come to an independent accord (without the gov) and trade value for value. You could almost call it a barter, if you really consider cash to be a relic.

Despite having laws against this, society is mostly okay with some gray area around "off the books" transactions - which is why you can brag about it online and no one really cares, much like jaywalking.

More options for independent transactions don't necessarily hurt, but they do muddy the waters. The thing about cash is, since it is so commonly used, people generally understand what it is worth.

If I sell a TV for $100 on Craigslist, I take my $100 and I have a good idea of what I can buy at the grocery store with that. Offer to trade me 0.0020 BTC (~$100 right now) and I'm less likely to engage in the transaction because I don't understand its inherent value. You could even offer me 0.0022 BTC ($110) and I'd pass. How much gas can I buy with 0.0022 BTC? Do any gas stations around me take BTC? Do I need to convert it? I don't know. Add even more cryptos and it becomes even less clear...

I'm not against more options. More crypto options = more ability to barter. You and your dealer can decide to transact in Pokémon cards and no one's going care. But I do not see it being some sort of fix-all for the downsides to cash.
That's all social skills, it really takes a concerted effort to break the cycle.
I heard similar opinion recently about Square hitting $1T market cap too. Let's hope that market is big enough for both companies.
It is not bitcoin, it is the human race which is cancer to this planet. This race will consume everything, destroy every other race, gobble up all resources, drink up all the water and burn down every forest. And then it will destroy itself just like cancer cells.

I know I am being hyper-cynical but this is how I feel very often. When I read about human endeavor of settling at Mars, I do commend the engineering skill but I also see the irony that the same human race couldn't protect the most suitable and hospitable planet.
Cost of living.
Causality, i.e. Causal inference & Graphical Models, see the work by Judea Pearl, he pretty much singlehandedly pioneered the field.

https://www.amazon.com/Causality-Reasoning-Inference-Judea-P...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality#Theories

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_model
The GP's point is that even if we switch to Bitcoin completely, there will still be a hierarchy of financial players, with regular people at the bottom, just like in the current system.

There are ~150MM people working in US, so let's say that only these 150MM need to perform financial transactions (get paid, pay others, etc.). How many of these 150MM will be direct participants in Bitcoin? If not all of them are miners, there will be some necessary centralization.

Why should anyone trust the 10,000+ Bitcoin miners? Do I as a regular user have more freedom when dealing with these 10,000 miners vs the 4,000+ US banks?
How do you pay for things when not using the phone system (which you explicitly refuse to use)? I'm curious what system of electronic payment you believe is trustworthy if the payment terminal is not.
> I've long held the conviction that tourism is a toxic sector.

It's sort of a Dutch disease [1]. I've seen it happening from afar to Barcelona, which was on route to become what Berlin now is in terms of IT/programming back in ~2005-2006 but the ever increasing rent prices caused by tourism put an end to that (plus the 2008-2010 crisis, of course, which hit Spain especially hard). I had expected the same thing to happen to Amsterdam, but it looks like it managed to hold up better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
That's what I was thinking about when I used "ideas". To me there's one main idea in all that code: "we are returning a parsed object of a kind"

Not that I'm trying to sell "ideas". I don't even know. But it's this very loose concept that floats around my mind when writing code. How many ideas are there in a stanza? Ahh too many. I should break out one of the larger ideas to happen before.
I used to think the same about gun play, and still do. But I realized what the driver is, having kids.

No one wants to watch people getting it on with their eleven-year-old. An adult rating makes an easy warning.
> It’s obvious MS and any other company that compensates similarly is included when stating “FAANG”

Then why is faang.io using a strict definition of FAANG? I think a loose definition is preferable, but clearly that's not a universally-held opinion.
I mean if you read any of the launch articles or people's experiences including my own you'd know it's incredibly hit or miss.

If anything you're wrong here. Neat tech, swing and miss product and quality wise imo.
This is great. Another thing is that sometimes leaving things as-is can be better than making changes.

The problem you might be avoiding is change.

Things that are bad should probably be fixed, though.
I think Apple is included because the pay/benefits are similar.
Slugs Cut Off Their Own Heads When They Want a New Body
My approach is to take their weekly magazines (paper or digital) instead of browsing through the home page. Weekly editions still include an article or two on US politics, but in general are significantly more diverse.
What leverage do email companies have? They do it by having enough scale to maintain a more personal relationship with the email providers (goog, ms, apple, aol, vz, etc). And it's not like Insta banned this guy because of some nefarious plot. They want people like him on his platform and want to be able to remedy accidental bans. They just suck at moderating. An intermediary can help them and they'd be glad to deal with them. They don't need leverage, just credibility.
I see. I am sorry that you are not willing to try new tool while you hate the old thing.
We created this Gibtr to solve our own problem; a founder couldn't find a way to send a birthday treat to a coworker because he didn't have the coworker's address.

Would love to hear from everyone either about

- how to solve this problem,

- make this better or

- learn more about other products or

- connect/collaborate to those who are trying to solve the same problem.

Thanh
This is the only comment that matters. This article is merely an opinion piece with a factually fake click bate-y headline, aimed to rile people up instead of inspiring thoughtful conversation.

It's one of those article we point to when we complain about the media's lack of credibility.
I'm less familiar with the R ecosystem, but there are tools in the Python world to go that direction -- https://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.io/
(I'm not super informed in this space)

AWS WorkSpaces purports to have machines with meaty GPU's, are they not powerful enough?
You clearly know very little about Basecamp and their values. They're very articulate that they're not competing with Google in any shape or form :)
The first COVID vaccine, Pfizer-BioNTech ... was developed within Pfizer in the EU (Germany to be exact).

The part that made it work, a lipid envelope that keeps the thing running at non cryogenic temperatures, doesn't sound very impressive (though it is), is a Belgian company (Dutch, although I believe located in the French part of the country).

This vaccine, aside from (part of) it's financing is very much European ...
Depending on the problem that you are trying to solve with TLA+, you may prefer one encoding or another. For instance, here is one encoding for the proof system: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01768750/. And here is another encoding for model checking: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360549
At an internship we heavily used Windows RDP over our local network - worked phenomenally well, basically 1:1 when connecting to our "home desk" desktop. I think RDP + very high bandwidth network is the best way to do it still.
What is nature different from the environment? Is nature not the environment? Is it truly aggressive and competitive or does it seek balance and evolution, or maybe it is and does not seek? Does applying those adjectives personify and build emotion into nature where none exists?
i disagree with the validity of cultural fit. if there is a problem with someone fitting into the culture, then it is the culture that needs to change. letting someone go because they don't participate in after-work activities or because they don't drink alcohol is unacceptable. as is letting someone go because of gender differences.

yes, some people have a problem working together. carl in the story is a good example. carl is someone i would let go because he is uncooperative. this again has nothing to do with cultural fit.

and especially if the difference in cultures falls along diversity lines, i would very carefully examine what the actual culture is and make a strong effort to push for a culture change.
link to his Amazon reviews page?
You have two major political parties that have vied for power since the war, and only one of those of is of the right (HDZ).

And it has little to do with "progressive" minds, and everything to do with opportunity. I personally have known Croatians of all politics who have left the country due to lack of opportunity, not because they were progressive.

Also, leaving the country because of lack of opportunity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When word processors were invented. After that, it was hard to get a job as Editor. Because everybody could write now!

But without an Editor, writing went downhill and is now circling the drain.
"I think that increasing education and birth control will decrease birth rates."

"But haven't you considered that forcing people not to reproduce is horrible?"

"Who said anything about forcing? I'm not advocating for forcing anyone?"

"Hah! But in fact people are being forced!"

"Well yeah, lots of bad things are happening. That doesn't have a whole lot to do with available birth control and high income."

"No TRUE Scotsman!"
> That delayed transition comes in part from an increased focus on the self.

Mostly no. It comes because modern hiring practices are trending toward making first time job applicants unemployable - and because under-25 incomes are less likely to come anywhere near covering minimal living expenses.
Make that five times...
Very fair and thoughtful counterpoint. I think I may have been imagining that 'smart aleck private trying to get one over on the brute drill sergeant' trope.

Totally agree that tactical communication requires brevity and clarity.
i'm not really in the workstation provisioning industry so i can't comment on the article, but i've used salt, puppet, etc in provisioning servers and have found that declarative configuration management is surprisingly complex and has a lot of pitfalls and is deceptively hidden behind the "look how simple it is to install a package". declarative languages for config management imo was a mistake, because in order for it to be truly declarative, every part of the system (including preinstalled software) needs to be managed by the config management tool. otherwise stuff like "i pushed a diff to remove the block where i asserted this package to be installed but the package is still installed on the hosts" will continue to surprise newish users. stuff like cdk works because, as stated earlier, it asserts the desired state of every piece of infrastructure it manages

a better alternative would instead be something akin to Dockerfiles where you assert what packages you want to be installed on top of a base system, and if you want anything changed you update the dockerfile and rebuild the whole shebang.

i'm imagining a system where the local filesystem is more or less immutable and work is saved to separate filesystem. but having worked from computer labs in schools, i know how less than ideal that is when i need to use a program that isn't preinstalled to do my work, so maybe this all doesn't work and saltstack is a necessary evil
Very, very cool! I love the code-generation bit, and I've been wanting to add something like it to https://github.com/plotly/jupyterlab-chart-editor for a long time! Is this functionality based on something open-source? I've seen https://github.com/mkery/JupyterLab-CodeAnalysisDemo ... is this related?
It's not just the .zip file. You can transfer all your photos, in original quality, to Google and that includes all metadata. The only notable thing that has changed is that Apple will do it for you, not because of GPDR, but because they're part of the Data Transfer Project.
3D Printing 90° Overhangs with Non-Planar Slicing
I think picking on the FAA is a little unfair. For the past ~20 years, they've been enormously successful in overseeing commercial airliner operations - I think the last commercial crash in the US that killed all onboard was in 2009
A medical provider I know had a medical assistant that would write charts that were next to illegible. Little to no punctuation or capitalization. Slang. etc... The provider invariably had to go back and rewrite the charts because they didn't want that associated with their name.

It's no wonder more and more people don't care about virtually unedited published content. In addition to not caring, often times they don't even know the difference.

Which begs the question for me: what is it they say we're getting with all these standardized tests and the singular focus on teaching kids to pass those tests again? Because it seems to me we're about to have a populace doesn't read and can't write.
I was thinking the same thing as I was reading. Seems like feedback lag while drawing brush strokes would be frustrating for an artist. But then again, we have examples of surprisingly good response time in the game streaming world.
And, the very fact that you consider it OK to *unilaterally* decide what level of conscripted service is acceptable for other Israeli citizens is all the proof you need.

Just keep them away from the guns.

Like South Africa.
The management psychology side of this wants a sequel from some veteran who was in the meetings and is now ready to confess:

> ... wrote in the number: -2000.

> I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

Bill — but what about the rest of the team? The devil’s answer: They were expected to keep supplying the number, because line management was forwarding the stats up, having previously “sold” upper management on their value. And to admit error on such a fundamental is career-threatening.
It kind of encourages you to use a lookup table or polymorphism, which isn't far off from what the compiler is likely to do with that switch statement.

As for correlation to number of defects, another important factor is maintainability (velocity of new features in growing programs, keeping up with infrastructure churn in mature programs). If reducing perceived complexity improves maintainability, and if measuring cyclomatic complexity despite its flaws helps reduce perceived complexity, then it's still a useful metric.
If you want to make valid comparisons, compare the energy usage of Bitcoin (and other blockchain-based solutions) to the energy usage of the current fiat system (with all its banks and other financial services companies). Plus, it is a fact that the majority of energy used to mine Bitcoin is renewable.

Let's be honest. It is obvious that the majority of HN users are anti-Bitcoin for a few reasons:

1) They see early adopters profiting mightily and have a zero-sum, envious mindset.

2) Silicon Valley promotes centralization. People have invested their careers in organizations that promote the centralization of the internet and technology, and Bitcoin is a threat to that.

3) Silicon Valley, once teeming with innovation because of diversity of though, is now completely monolithic in thought. The powers-that-be (i.e. Bill Gates, among others) are anti-Bitcoin, as it threatens their centralized power, and so Bitcoin has become out of fashion in Silicon Valley.

4) Politics. Bitcoin is decentralized and empowers those that privately and independently own it and transact with it. This is generally a libertarian concept. Silicon Valley, being very politically on the left, realizes that the independence that Bitcoin brings goes against their ethos of governmental and bureaucratic control. You cannot "cancel" or prevent someone you don't like from using the Bitcoin network - even if you disagree with them.

HN used to be great, in my opinion, and I hope things improve. My comments are sincere.

Now, prepare for my comment to get censored by a flood of downvotes in 1, 2, 3...