skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple of books that changed my life:

Sarah Bakewell's 'How To Live: A Life of Montaigne': https://sarahbakewell.com/books-3/how-to-live-a-life-of-mont... - the book started my journey into philosophy. Montaigne's life is extraordinary, mainly in how he was the first person (that we know of) who wrote essays about everything. Everyone can relate to what he writes of. And Bakewell does this by boiling down his many essays and biography into one single book. Absolutely engaging.

* William Burroughs - "Naked Lunch". This book tore me up when I first read it when I was 12 years old. Not your atypical yoot book.
I think this title needs an exemption from HN's no-emoji rule
I was wondering what the title meant. Turns out HN’s emoji stripper screwed with the title.

It’s asking why a skin toned (not yellow) facepalm emoji’s length is 7 when the user perceives it as a single character.

Tangent: Emojis are an interesting topic in regards to programming. They challenged the “rule” held by programmers that every character is a single codepoint (of 8 or 16 bits). So, str[1234] would get me the 1235th character, but it’s actually the 1235th byte. UTF-8 threw a wrench in that, but many programmers went along ignoring reality.

Sadly, preexisting languages such as Arabic weren’t warning enough in regards to line breaking. As in: an Arabic “character”[a] can change its width depending on if there’s a “character” before or after it (which gives it its cursive-like look). So, a naive line breaking routine could cause bugs if it tried to break in the middle of a word. Tom Scott has a nice video on it that was filmed when the “effective power” crash was going around.[0]

[0]: https://youtu.be/hJLMSllzoLA

[a]: Arabic script isn’t technically an alphabet like Latin characters are. It’s either an abugida or abjad (depending on who you ask). See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script
I would argue that it's Uber's marketing costs that make their business much less profitable than it could be.
I'm a recent FP convert after 15ish years of OO. I don't hate OO now or anything, but maybe a little? It adds so much more to think about for what I now consider to be no benefit, at least for the types of systems I've worked on in my career. A big thing I've realized is that everything I've worked on has modelled things that are already abstract. For example, I'm working on a scheduling app right now. In real life, a schedule is an abstract concept realized on paper. Our app certainly doesn't have a Paper class. That may seem knit-picky to some people but it's true: the whole "model the real world" breaks down there. My apps also always have way more behaviour than they do things. FP is much easier to model a lot of behaviour around a generally fixed set of things than OO is.

This is not to say there aren't good use-cases for OO (video games come to mind) but for my day-to-tasks, I've found FP much simpler (and immutability is a god-send... it's like, "Hey, you know that foot gun you've been carrying around? You don't need that anymore!"). I would encourage any OO zealots to give FP a honest try.
First world countries simply outsource labor to those third world countries with more "libertarian" ideals.
I agree with this. I am wondering if boat is an abstract class and ship is an implementation.
There are locks on either end of the canal. I wonder if the water level can be raised a little to help?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSp8IyaKCs0 you're welcome.
And there should be some degree of flexibility. If a new unplanned but important project comes up, you don't want to say "Nope, can't help it's not on the list" even if everyone else agree this should be your priority. (Or you're told to do it and then are dinged because you didn't meet your goals.)

In general, having a set of agreed-upon goals/priorities works for me so long as they're not being rigidly followed past the point where they make sense.
Money no object as governments race to build chip arsenals
Yes, it's possible that I may have misunderstood the quoted fees, or that what I read was exaggerating intentionally.
I always thought of OOO as a dsl. An object with methods and properties has an easier mental model than state transitions. You can still implement such objects with immutable state under the hood
I feel like it’s generally more helpful to stick with SI units if you’re already there :)
The Uber business model is:

Undercut competition.
Use borrowed money to sell rides under cost.
Wait for all competitors to die.
Jack up prices.

AFAIK they’re still living on borrowed money.

It reminds me of the airline deregulation of the 90s. New airlines would use borrowed money to sell seats at below cost to attract customers, driving established carriers out of business.

The funny thing is that this smells a lot like “the tragedy of the commons”. Everyone wants to use this amazing infrastructure for flying, but no one wants to pay for it. New firms undermine the stability of the system by charging less than cost in order to starve established competitors whose business model is focused on being profitable.
Doesn't ext[2,3,4] reserve 5% of the space on the disc for this very reason?

This can be adjusted with tune2fs -m <percentage> /dev/sda1

You can check the reserved blocks with sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 | grep 'Reserved block count'
Ships lean outwards in a tight turn. Boats lean inwards. That’s one unusual definition I’ve heard. So, that’s definitely a ship. :-/
it's a heuristic, or rule of thumb; which is to say, a very loose model useful for estimating but not calculating with precision.
Did you try paged.js?
>to make the connection to Brexit as a cause is quite the stretch

I did say either cause/consequence to express exactly that it's clearly not the lack of UK erasmuses alone that caused the Brexit.
I believe though the lack of UK erasmus for the past decades is something that might be correlated with what caused the Brexit.

> Overall, 85 per cent of students who voted in the referendum chose Remain, meaning almost one million out of the UK’s 1.4 million full-time undergraduates voted to stay in the union.

I'm happy you shared that article with us and I'm happy to know once again many UK students wished to not leave the EU.

>Maybe it's because Erasmus will largely favour white people and put them into largely similar majority white cultures.

I think we can agree that people come in all colors and shapes, not just white and black. I can guarantee you there is already many permutations of colors and shapes of people in the Erasmus program. I wish more countries from Asia and Africa to join in more exchange programs in order to avoid for people of the similar color and shapes to cluster with each other.
I wish the UK would have stayed and help.
I don't have a problem with the UK having their own exchange programs. I have a problem with the UK leaving the Erasmus.
I wish they would have stayed in the Eramsus program.
The fact that the Alan Turing program is less tolerant to me is because is borned out of leaving the Erasmus program.
Great photo where nobody wears their mask properly
Nope. This isn't agreed on at all. Just google 'qanon canal'. It's a conspiracy. They think the boat isn't stuck, and it's not a boat.

edit: I'm curious if downvoters are qanon-subscribers or just people who don't think this contributes to the discussion.
Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi to make EVs using Great Wall's plant
Imagine if one of those also gets stuck while turning around.
Owner of stranded Suez Canal ship aims to free vessel on Saturday
No, ntfsfix

I do not think linux fsck works on ntfs
The Anarchist Prisoners' Legal Aid Network
> It's not stuck for mysterious reasons related to a long history of humans cruelly exploiting other humans.

That's not really true though, is it? Sure, the stuckness itself isn't mysterious. But the canal was built with deadly slave labor. The global shipping industry exists to facilitate exploitation of the developing areas of the world with manufacturing capacity. These monster cargo ships are an icon of the age of consumerism, which is largely responsible for the global pollution epidemic that will leave millions of unprivileged people underwater.

Sure, big stuck boat is as funny as it is true. But to be honest, I don't like that the boat even exists.

On the other hand, I do kind of like how wholesome of a disaster it is.
Blind exceptionalism is required to get by in the West. I can't see good reasons for it, Hollywood plays the fiddle.
There is an asymmetry here, these locations are quite attractive as its easy to make friends, the language is the same but the culture is slightly different, etc.

While Erasmus+ extends outside the EU the scope is really weak and lots of people want to go to the same places with limited slots, that is what the problem is imo. I can understand the attraction of visiting an English speaking country from another EU country but for an English speaking country it is still culturally enriching to visit another country where you are past the language barrier to go a bit deeper.
Glad to hear you like the site design!

Half Lemons doesn't do accounts. No sign-ups anywhere. It's an app, and it's freely available to download on the App Store. Our website is just a landing page. Hope this helps!
This is similar to how some university departments retain their budgets.
We have had that in Mexico for about 10 years. It's called SPEI here. Pretty convenient !
Thanks for your feedback! For broad testing we definitely understand there has to be some time spent setting up good testing environments. Running a staging environment suited to being tested to catch regressions is usually not quick.

But it can be effective to run the same tests across one type of environment, such as staging tests against a staging environment. This will catch many regressions, and with more work setting up good scenarios cover large parts of an application. Do you find any value in making it easier to do testing?
> I’ve been considering starting a software coop to build open source versions of these middleman gig work services for a while. Would anyone on here be interested in joining one?

i’ve been idly considering the same thing for a while now. i’d be down to chat about it, [my username]@gmail.com
Brass Playstation 5
Yeah, for 99% of software produced, smaller binary sizes do not offer increased user value.

Software designed to spec and user requirements does (where those requirements could be fast development time, high performance for whatever the performance criteria are, longevity, easy and cheap extensibility, etc.).

Binary size, as I was saying before, is like 100 on the list of priorities for most categories of software. Mobile apps sometimes have it as a priority and embedded apps frequently have it, too. But for mobile apps those limits are loosening, so soon they'll stop caring, too, and embedded apps are a minuscule percentage of all apps developed out there (most of them are web apps, especially Line of Business - LOB - apps).
In my experience (manager of teams 5-10 people) the purpose of the goals is to ensure that you're setting expectations between you and the company and holding you to what you agreed on in the first place. The key is that if you haven't agreed something up front, then when you come to review your performance there's a really high chance that you've focused on doing things that the company didn't want you to do or doesn't value.

Now, the most problematic issue with settings goals is timing. By tying your goals setting process to the financial year or to bonuses the result is that you have to set goals so far in advance you can't reasonably set them, and you're almost certainly going to review them at a point where it's unclear what the outcomes are. Which is why this is better done as a continuous process. Every month or so you should be looking at your goals saying "Is this still relevant", "what progress have I made towards this", and "What am I doing that is not captured by this goals". And by doign that and actually recording that throughout the year when it comes to annual review time you have relevant goals, you have clear record of progress towards them, and you aren't worried about things that are still in progress. Most importantly though - you play the recency bias lottery. In every company I've worked in a project delivered in the 3 months before review is worth 10x what a project delivered in the 3 months after review is worth, if you have written documentation throughout the year you can fight against this.
"Counterterrorism" implies to me that the targets were not under the jurisdiction of the United States, and therefore could not have been jailed for ordering a drink with too much sugar (not that anyone in the US could, either, but let's pretend they could).
Could you order conference tickets or something similar that allows free cancelations in the future? In my previous job, we did this to carry over training budgets.
From my viewpoint the oversight given to the intelligence agencies is handled by intelligence friendly members of Congress. They don’t seem to let critical people into the committees and if they do they are minor players.

Even still, Clapper felt compelled to lie to their faces. How many others have done the same?
Yeah, that is really bad... but on the other hand, is it reasonable to allow 4 thousand pound cars to accelerate and steer however their software makes them? Seems reasonable that when there's a human inside that the car obey that human and nobody else, but if it's on the move without a person then surely somebody has to be able to stop it if something goes wrong.

It brings an interesting question... can an individual really own or be responsible for an automated vehicle? If you summon it to pick you up and it runs someone over along the way, should you be liable for that?
No this is due to degradation from nucleases. In fact the number you linked is specific to bacteria. Lifetime of mRNA in eukaryotes is on the order of hours, and this is due to active degradation as well.
> economically it’s better off to give the inspectors raises above the amount from bribes

I can't speak to whether this is verified or not, but at least it makes sense. The same logic is often used to motivate why politicians have relatively high wages, as decreasing them would incentivize bribes. It's of course not black and white and well-off politicians may still accept bribes, but at least I have a hard time seeing how the wage wouldn't be a factor.

I heard a similar anecdote about badly paid police officers, how many countries have this issue where police are paid so little they pretty much have to take bribes, in a perverted sense like waiting jobs in the US "include" tips, so the notion of an uncorrupted police officer is completely foreign as you simply wouldn't be able to make ends meet.
Why is there such a rule?
Sure, and it could be argued that "literally" means "figuratively", but should it?
Simplified (not an essay) set of reasons:

1. Herding cats is hard, i.e. how to point them in the same direction (as the company strategy - a.k.a how do you communicate "this is what the company thinks is important")

2. How do you spot bad performers (those who are busy but never seem to ship / deliver)

3. How do you provide timely opportunities to learn / grow / improve

Is it the best system? Not by a significant margin, but all better systems have trade-offs or work great in theory but not in practise.

Is it misused / abused by some companies? Absolutely, this is true of all such systems and it's up to each company to seriously ask itself why it wants to do this and whether it does apply to everyone they want to apply it to.

In many ways it is a "least worst" option, whereby you have a degree of alignment around contributing towards the company strategy, are able to have a regular cadence to ask "did you complete that work when you said?", and a regular cadence for "how can the company help you?" (by lining up work that helps with growth, etc).

Is it scientific? Not really... there would have to be a universal scientific application of such processes for them to be comparable and companies will always apply things in a way that fits them.

Edit: I've seen this at my last few employers and I believe it is valuable, but really you get out what you put in. For those looking to advance their position, compensation, etc... this is a great opportunity (4 times per year!) to identify what the company thinks is important and to contribute to that work, and fit the narrative of your progression into the company one. No-one forces you to do this work, you can treat it as a paper-pushing exercise if you want but then it's a wasted opportunity for you to use it for your benefit (profit! including work/life balance, etc)
There's another interesting takeaway from that.

It should be alright for us to accept that different brains prefer different ways of working.

To me, functional paradigm is closer to how I see and understand things. "It gives us less work to design & program solutions." :D
I heard it was deliberately scuttled by the right-wing owner of a competing canal... just sayin!
Saw this comment and expected the article to be an incoherent mess. I wasn't pleasantly surprised to find it was actually a just a playful, and very enjoyable, rant on the weariness of politics. Perfect coffee read for my Friday morning.
Formal problems often have theoretical limits, and solutions approaching them. But for "real-world problems", you can often change the problem, and even change the context of where that problem originates - perhaps eliminating that specific problem entirely [1].

So we'll change problems/contexts to ones that are easily parallelizable.

In that dispelling-myths paper, Patrick Madden notes that a less efficient but faster-because-parallel method still uses more energy. A good point, but I'll note that because energy consumption is superlinear with frequency (e.g. a 2 core method at half the clock speed of a 1 core method will use less energy, assuming perfect parallelization), a parallel solution can be both faster and more energy efficient. GPU compute shows this e.g. bitcoin mining.

His last paragraph begins:

Despite these challenges, there is no choice but to forge ahead with parallelism

...which doesn't sound like disagreement. He's mainly criticising breathy papers.

Finally... why is he known by the half-life protagonist? Does he look like him, or is there some thematic connection?

1. Maybe the entire context can be formalized and solved, so you can't "change the problem", but even then, real-world problems tend to keep changing, because of changing customer demands, competition, technology, legislation etc.
Static site full text search with Hugo, S3, Python and JavaScript
To be clear, by "X" you mean "amoral" and "y" you mean "moral"?

I think it not only acceptable but incumbent to hold yourself to a higher standard of behavior than the lowest common denominator. "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind."

(There's also a practical reason: China is much more effective at their approach than the US is, being much more experienced at it and also having stifled internal debate about it. If the US gives up its claim of being a morally superior employer than China, why would anyone skilled want to keep working for what will inevitably be the losing team?)
Writing Extensions for Nyxt
I’m curious: is the no-emoji rule a rule that happens to block emoji or a hardcoded rule? What I mean is: emojis (in UTF-16) have to use surrogate pairs because all their code points are in the U+1xxxx plane. Is the software just disallowing any characters needing two code points to encode (which would include emoji)? Or is it specifically singling out the emoji blocks?
The credit card cartel (with their asinine PCI controls) has to be burned in a fire. It's expensive, inconvenient and inefficient for all the parties except the members of the cartel.
I would but that breaks many sites I frequent, but even if I can use (yet another) browser for this, it's just an annoying hassle.
To me, this is not a difficult decision or a debate.

Allowing vulnerabilities to remain open/undisclosed because your government approves of them... for one thing, they aren't only useable by your government/allies, you don't know who else knows about them.

Our government's approach of finding security vulnerabilities and keeping them for their own use (instead of responsibly reporting them to get fixed) puts all our security in danger. There isn't much we can do about that (except, well, try to use our "democracy" to get the government to behave differently).

But in USA at least, private citizens can't generally be compelled to cooperate.

If engineers at a private company find a vulnerability, it should be responsibly dealt with to fix it. No matter who else knows about it or may be taking advantage of it.

I think it is unethical for a software engineer to do or go along with anything else.
This may be the best tech writeup I've ever seen. Super in-depth, easily readable. Really well done.
POSIX actually specifies a hash table interface in the standard library as well: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/hsearch.3.html

In typical Unix fashion, however, it is designed to use internal, global state, so you can only have one table at a time.

There is a GNU extension that provides the same functions with an `_r` suffix that allow you to work with more than one table.
Where does this idea that all law is enforced by police come from? Why is it so prevalent on HN?
The preservative TBHQ in popular foods may harm the immune system
In my experience people vastly prefer their fantasies to reality.
Don’t closures effectively break down this FP facade of local scope only mutability?
I know that tax to the government and cigarettes to the officer are different but I think in 2021 no one should deal with that, we no longer do a lot of things that were normal in the olden days.

And those who feel to operate like that should maybe should be more open about the payments so we can skip the negotiation part. A carton of cigarettes is not a big deal but trying deal with the official that tries to coerce you into that payment is. It makes things slow and unpredictable.

Oh and I strongly disagree with the "entrepreneur" analogy, the people who get into these lucrative positions are people close to the politically dominant class. They often "donate" some of that money to their church/mosque/party and take it easy on the people of their clan when making life hard to the outsiders.

A recent case is the case of Reza Zarrab, the guy who laundered Iranian money through Turkey and get caught. He has become a billionaire and was very well connected to the Turkish political class. Erdogan himself pulled a lot of strings with Trump. Very high profile case with a lot of US and Turkish public figures being involved, you should Google it.(Spoiler: Rudolph Giuliani was on his defence team)

Apparently he had an issue with a customs officer called Teoman who refused bribes so he got Teoman fired. Those informal organisations are more like cabals than corporations. It's not about entrepreneurship but loyalty to the higher ups. It does create a business but that business is reserved to the people in power and the bribe takers are simply employees.

Zarrab also gave a master class in bribery. His motto was "You pay prostitutes afterwards but public officials beforehand", apparently. Good to know.
Emojis aren’t professional (depending on who you ask) and can be overused (look at a few popular GitHub projects’ READMEs - emojis on every bullet point of the feature list, for example)
I bet that gets fun in a hurry in the event of a collision.