skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The predeclared identifier nil is a constant, like 0 or "".

Like 0 or "", nil is untyped. Go has both typed and untyped constants. 0 also is untyped, which is why you can write x==0 regardless of whether x is an int32 or an int64.

Unlike 0 or "", nil does not have a default type. The default type of a constant is the type that it is implicitly converted to when a type is required. For example, "x := 0" declares a new value x with the value 0, but 0 is untyped. Untyped integer constants have a default type of int, so x is given the type int.

Since nil does not have a default type, it's an error to write "x := nil".

You can declare a typed constant with the value 0 or nil. int32(0) is a constant with type int32 and the value 0. (* int32)(nil) is a constant with the type pointer-to-int32 and the value nil.

Variables of an interface type can hold any value that satisfies the interface. For example, a value of type io.Reader can hold any value that has a Read method with the appropriate signature.

The common confusion about nil occurs because you can compare an interface value to a non-interface value.

var b *bytes.Buffer // b is a variable with type *bytes.Buffer
var r io.Reader // r is a variable with type io.Reader
r = b // r now holds a value with type *bytes.Buffer and value nil
b == nil // true: b is nil
r == b // true: r and b are equal
r == (io.Reader)(nil) // false: r is not a nil io.Reader
r == (*bytes.Buffer)(nil) // true: r contains a nil *bytes.Buffer
r == nil // false: r is not a nil io.Reader

The confusing part is that last line. How can r not be nil, when it contains a nil value? And the reason is hopefully apparent from the previous two lines: It depends on the type of "nil".

Whether you find this a wart in the language or not, this is not a case of nil being either typed in theory or untyped in practice. The predeclared identifier "nil" is an untyped constant.
This is becoming more and more futile as time goes on. 10+ years ago blogs were fun because of the comment section. Each website had its own particular audience who created their own culture in the comments.

Now that's pretty much all gone. Most 'blogs' have no personality and are producing the same kind of keyword-researched content every other site is. The writing is dry and lifeless, as if its only purpose is to be picked up by a search engine. Scroll to the bottom, no comments, just a grotesque "share" widget.

These sites look and feel like ghost towns now. It's a completely different atmosphere than what internet communities were envisioned to be.
George Carlin - Euphemisms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
Imagine Facebook or Instagram adding an NFT display section to your profile, where you can show off the NFTs that you own.
It's because Samsung can get away with selling total garbage. I work on an audio-related app, and a huge majority of the hacks in the app to work around bugs in phones are for different Samsung models. Still more than half of our users keep buying them.
From what i've heard(I am not russian but merely from EE), it doesn't really matter, because as soon as you start to use that hardware/device, "Putin knows" where&what.
So the argument doesn't stand.The spyware being removable is "good enough" only if you don't care that the government already knows your IMEI, location,and every other data by the time you get to delete the crapware.

This anti-trust cat & mouse game is really getting old.The device should not have any pre-installed apps choosing one side or the other(the opposite would be to provide all alternatives, which is virtually impossible).
In the case 'critical' apps are necessary for the user to do basic operations, the software preinstalled should be entirely FOSS.I fail to see a better alternative than this.
If the government is able to ban crypto currency because it's unnecessary and uses too much energy, couldn't they apply that logic to nearly any other modern luxury?
or teenagers/young adults in a rebellious state of mind. If you like to provoke and your circle of friends feels the same then you're not shamed.
I think he was hoping for a Beeple-like windfall such as from Elon Musk or an early crypto adopter...a huge right-tail in terms of potential profit. No dice though.
We’ve won our lawsuit over Matt Hancock’s £23m NHS data deal with Palantir
As a rule of thumb Asian giants tend to deal in everything. Especially true for Japanese giants (which is weird, since for Japanese companies it's also common to find small giants that deal in one thing only and never integrate). Especially especially true for Korean giants.
California has the ccpa. Often changing the law is possible, its just a full time job.
A lot of init script writing was made easy for years with tools like the lsb* functions and start-stop-daemon.

It would’ve been cool to have functions that supported dependency in the scripts themselves. A web server would have a call to...

init_wait_for networking

...which blocks until some higher level networking script calls:

init_ready networking

...but the standardised LSB header magic-comment stuff was also fine when it came to handling dependencies.

Doing all this with INI files is very clever but it’s always felt very NIH. Good solutions solve existing problems without rewriting and embracing everything from the ground up.
> Oh wait, will we need to pay to upgrade to ST4?

Maybe not. Depends how/when you bought it, I think. From https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text:

> Personal licenses are a once off purchase, and come with 3 years of updates. After 3 years, an upgrade will be required to receive further updates. One license key is all you need for all your computers and operating systems.

Edit: the site seems to be a bit inconsistent about pricing info. https://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq says:

> Licenses purchased for Sublime Text 3 do not expire, however an upgrade fee will be required for Sublime Text 4.

Can anyone please clarify what the correct answer is?
The loophole is someone hosting a modified instance without publishing their source code changes. I don't think it affects data or APIs at all.
IBM bought RedHat to control the second most important piece of software that makes part of major Linux distributions.
I think there are clear cases where someone did or didn’t write a song, but there are also very blurry areas in the middle (and these areas are where the debate actually matters). My impression is that it’s not uncommon for people at many stages in the audio engineering and music production to change things that may or may not be considered part of “writing the song.”
As a former DS hiring manager who phone screened over 200 candidates, Insight is the only DS bootcamp that I've found to be positively correlated with capability.The other programs had candidates that were weaker than the generic new grad pipeline. Eventually we just made a PhD a hard requirement to filter down the ridiculous application volume.
> It's possible to be vaccinated earlier if they are at risk for a severe case of Covid. They might want to consult with their doctor and would need some medical documents to backup the claim. Knowing that it is actually possible might help, so maybe tell them?

Thanks, but they (and supportive relatives) are 100% on it. It’s the speed of the roll-out in Germany that’s the issue.
I'm always curious why bluetooth is such a terrible piece of technology. Did anyone write blogposts analyzing what went wrong?
It is very confusing that equality in JavaScript is not transitive: https://imgur.com/5pFXFbR.

Apparently equality in Go is no longer transitive either...
Nice! Make sure to do a saved search so you'll get notified when one by you is added. My goal for April is to get over 100 campaigns in the system :)
Logic chip teardown from a vintage IBM mainframe
Indeed, the world of cyptocurrency/blockchain research has many ground breaking papers and news are often real time, even crypto news aggregator can't keep up with it. HN crowd refuses to care about it because of bad taste of crypto in general.
Here we go again, the "right-wing populism" narrative to ban crypto.
All about Astrobotic's Peregrine Mission One
And what makes you think there were no intermediate consequences about that? And what kind of consequences are you expecting? Cancel him out completely? Isn't it too radical? It seems like a standard predator behaviour to me, similar to one attributed to Stallman.
The main premise of the article is that cryptocurrencies are "speculation for speculation’s sake," i.e. gambling, and that's bad. Also, the article claims that they contribute to inequality. The green stuff is basically a side note.

I don't think it's a terribly strong case but I suppose it depends on whether you agree that crypto is gambling and if you think gambling should banned. Anyway, I think lots of people stupidly speculate on things. I cast my vote by not speculating on those things. Should I be able to stop others from speculating?
Well, a lot of heartache and nonsense could be avoided ny paying songwriters fairly but could a song written for Arethra Franklin havethe same effect when sung by say Solange Knowles?
They didn't make the argument that the internet was a ponzi scheme or that it used energy equivalent to a medium-sized country. Did you have some other arguments in mind?
It's against the HN guidelines to post insinuations of third-party manipulation, astroturfing, etc., without evidence, because internet users are overwhelmingly (I mean pick as many orders of magnitude as you want, it's still probably true) too likely to just imagine this stuff out of whole cloth. If we're going to look at such abuses in a sane frame of mind, there needs to be something objective to go on. People holding differing, strongly-felt views about China (or any hot $topic) is no evidence at all. It's evidence of something else altogether: that many people have different views than we do.

The core problem is that because we're tribal creatures it's difficult for us to acknowledge that other human beings have different backgrounds and different views than we do. It gets even harder when they're right beside us (albeit virtually) arguing fiercely for views which seem monstrous to us [1]. That's why we're prone to invent explanations of bad faith. The majority invents one sort of explanation (spies and agents are among us) while the minority invents a different sort (you just hate people like me), but both are textbook examples of cognitive dissonance.

[1] I wrote a longer explanation of this here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098,
and there are plenty more explanations at links like these:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Yeah, GPS signals make it inside houses just fine. It might've been a problem 20 years ago, but newer receivers are mindbogglingly sensitive.

Some time back, I was helping prep a uBlox MAX-5Q receiver for a high-altitude balloon flight. At altitude and with no other noise around, we figured we could get away without an amplified antenna, so we had a little passive helix design. But before attaching that, for giggles, I just soldered a piece of plain wire to the module's antenna pad, trimmed to what I eyeballed as probably roughly something approximating a quarter-wavelength at 1.5GHz-ish maybe.

It got a 3D fix within moments. Indoors. On a workbench under a mountain of test equipment. With a ton of RFI around. In an industrial building with 2 layers of roof. With a paperclip for an antenna.

And that was a 5th-generation receiver. We're up to the 9th generation now and they've only continued to improve.

Yes, most cellphone locations are wifi geolocation, because it takes less power. But even if you can render that moot, the GPS signal itself is plenty strong to receive indoors. And modern chipsets are tracking at least 3 and maybe 4 constellations, giving them a lot more satellite options, so there's almost always a good set overhead at favorable angles.
Possibly but Python is a completely different level of programming too.

I do wonder if Rust is easier or harder than other comparable languages like C / C++ when the person has no prior knowledge of programming.

I would say just the ease of having a hello world and the ease of the Rust book would make it easier to get to grips with. No dealing with complex build systems and compiler flags at the start
Not OP. I suppose though, that the point is that a system in which things happen serially you don't really have race conditions. Things either work, or they don't. If they don't, it's because they happen in the wrong order.

One of the (very many) things that gave me and my colleagues a headache when switching to Systemd was two init scripts that could run one after the other (and the order didn't matter) but they could not run simultaneously. This had worked fine with System V style init scripts that ran serially, but started breaking in Systemd.

Of course you can now argue that this is a configuration error - however, it does not change the fact there there didn't use to be a race condition. Now there was one. One is a larger number than zero.
Ok. Let's ban capitalism.
>whatever harm the Muslim countries think women showing a little skin will cause

Is there really a case for that? I thought that was just something the authorities made up. In contrast, COVID is actually real. I would find it pretty surprising if they were offering justification for their cultural norms on a factual or material basis.
>>> In social media era, everyday our adversaries are running very effective military-inspired psyops campaigns to sow division and polarization within the body politic.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a 2 way street and our governments are actively doing the same to our adversaries?
Dont forget you are not bad until other people realize you are bad.

Keep working. Most of the failures you have identifies seem to be resolvable by learninh good practices in 1 week.
Regeneration need not be expensive. The cells can do the work, as evidenced by the embryo. We just have to figure out how to tell the cells to do it again. And, critically, tell them to stop when they're done...
> † Of course its log file is not ACID, so when it poops its pants and corrupts the file there's no way to recover it besides moving it out of the way. Though the log entries on why this happened are also corrupted so there's no root cause analysis.‡ They could have just used SQLite as the logging format and it would have probably been awesome with regards to tooling and doing queries (instead of grep-foo). But no.

When current journals are detected as dirty by journald @ startup, they are renamed and no longer written to. This is a very robust and conservative approach. It burns some space in the interest of simplicity and preserving the log data without risk of messing things up.

These renamed journals are still accessed when reading, so it's not like those dirty files no longer participate in journalctl operations; their contents are not lost.

Any logs lost in a crash are just what was in-flight IPC, or sitting dirty in the kernel's buffer cache and hadn't been sync'd to backing store yet. Journald also performs an explicit sync whenever an urgent message arrives, to try ensure it's made durable ASAP. Of course there's still a filesystem and potentially myriad layers below that which could lose data in a crash.

ACID would be overkill for this fairly simple single-writer multiple-reader mostly-appended situation.

Edit:

Your statement "when it poops its pants and corrupts the file" implies journald has a tendency to actively corrupt its own files.

The principal mechanism journald uses to detect potentially corrupt files is simply identifying a file as being ONLINE when opening for writing, typically at startup. This is almost always caused by an unclean shutdown of the host, though it could be due to a crash of journald itself.

The file isn't even necessarily corrupt. It's simply assumed inconsistent and treated as such WRT writability. I'm not aware of any journald bugs in recent history where journald actively corrupted the contents of journal files. Even crashy bugs where journald was littering dirty journals to be treated as corrupt I'm not aware of being actually corrupted internally by journald bugs.

Source: I've worked quite a bit on journald over the years
Seems to me that Stephen is not well informed on crypto in general. This article is really only relevant to Bitcoin.

Take a project like Brave for instance which is disrupting the online advertising model:
https://brave.com/
(I am completely unaffiliated, just a fan of the project)

Can you look at this project and tell me with a straight face it is bad for the environment and should be banned by government? Because that's basically what Stephen has done when he lumped every crypto together.
Ban? That silly. How you kill something you don't like is tax it heavily. Add on the carbon tax equivalent to each bitcoin transaction as well as tax the capital gains/losses. Interest will deflate on it's own.
On hindsight. However did you think of that before hearing of the problem. Even if you did, can you think of - without much time to think - how every possible metric I can propose on every possible topic.

Tony Blair was trying to solve a real problem that needed solving. That he opened a different problem is something that we should think of as normal, and not blame him for trying to solve the original problem. The question should be how to we change the metric until the unintended consequences are ones we can live with. That will probably take more than a lifetime to work out.

Note that there will be a lot of debate. There are predicted consequences that don't happen in the real world for whatever reason. There are consequences that some feel we can live with that others will not accept. Politics is messy.
Where do we go to find out which NFT is valid according to Beeple? How is this information stored, authenticated, distributed?
It's a systems course, so we use a language targeted at writing systems. It used to be C/C++, now it's Rust.
The political case against it is that banning cryptocurrency will cause a non-negligible fraction of the population to lose a large amount of money solely through government action.
This is like saying Taylor Swift's grocery store deserves a cut of her royalties because she wouldn't be able to sing if she starved to death.

Song-writers get paid poorly because there is more supply of pop songs than demand for them. Taylor Swift's grocery store doesn't get a cut of her revenue because Taylor Swift could easily just switch to another grocery store. The same as she could easily switch to another song-writer (or write her own songs).
What about the BSL makes it a deal breaker? You can host it yourself you just can’t compete with their hosted offering to other customers. I think that’s fair: they get to monetize what they make. And then after 3 years iirc all the code that was BSL or that version anyway goes even more permissive.
Just dropping by to say I actually did develop a NFT version of the Moon (back in 2017!). It was obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but still very much alive and real:

https://lunartoken.co

I think your critique of NFTs is mostly valid. Until there is some legal validity to them recognized by governments, they are basically just, well, tokens of ownership. The same could be said about most property or IP at some point in time :)
You own the thing.

Even though it's not physical, it's exactly like owning a baseball card or a work of art. On their own, those things have no intrinsic value. Just like an NFT, they have value because the creator endorsed them, and other people put value in that endorsement.

And just like an NFT again, you do not have the right to reproduce a baseball card or work of art just because you purchased it.
List of Proposed Etymologies of OK
> What Marvin Minsky did in that situation

* - what he allegedly did in that situation. This claim is disputed and was never proven.
The government has regulatory authority over monetary policy and currency, so why wouldn't this be the government's job? You might take issue with their decision, but the authority is there.

https://www.occ.treas.gov/

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5103

https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/fract.htm
Or like Gene Roddenberry writing some cheap lyrics to the Star Trek theme so he'd get a 50% split of the publishing with composer Alexander Courage.

The lyrics were never used. Because the lyrics were never supposed to be used.
My only disagreement with your chosen course was the lack of update on the ST3 dev builds page. As-is, it gives the impression to users like the ones I replied to that there's no progress being made.

Sticking a note at the top of the ST3 dev build page akin to the one on the ST2 dev builds page, even without a link to the discord or new builds, would have changed their perception of things.

Or even just a post on your news blog that you're moving active development to an upcoming version? A pinned post on your forum? There really was no communication to users who're not actively involved in the community, that I could find.
> Quite difficult to do with imaginary internet points tho ;)

There's a market for established Reddit accounts:

* https://blog.usejournal.com/what-i-learned-selling-my-reddit...
Sorry I wasn't clear. The vast majority of businesses operating anywhere (not just USA) aren't organized as limited liability entities.

In the case of this particular tweetstorm, the business was likely not incorporated as the author kept feeding it from his own bank account.

Also note a parallel comment referring to the consequences of corporate bankruptcy in the UK. I used Switzerland as an example. The US is an extreme outlier; this has long been cited by many people as a factor in its success (though the belief is hardly universal or there would by now be many others who copied the example).
I had a coworker do this all over a Cold Fusion codebase.

He also claimed he used to be a dentist in Mexico, so anywhere he had his name, email sigs, code comments, etc., he would sign add "DDS" after his name.

Dude was a trip.
Is "Electricity Neutrality" a concept? Does the government have any control over how I use the electricity that I pay for? This is a genuine question and I'm not trying to be snarky.
Bootstrapping means starting the company from a small sum and having it sustain itself from its own profits without further infusions.

This company was never profitable, and the author invested $10M in it over time. That is definitely not bootstrapping.
You mean like the Steam Trading Cards?
No one blames fiat for the destruction of entire countries and assassinations of leaders who tried to get away from being beholden to X financial system.

Money drives people to do insane things. Governments only care about the environment insofar as to stay in power and to keep their citizens from interrupting their gravy train.

Look at the numerous examples politicians using “green” initiatives to line their own pockets.

Attacking cryptocurrency is in their best interest because they can’t control it. Full stop.
Agreed. VSCode became my daily driver for 99% of things, and ST only comes out for very specifics scenarios it does better - which for me means multi-cursor and rectangle select scenarios, since even though some of them are possible in VSCode, they're keyboard-only and nowhere near as simple or intuitive as they are in Sublime.

.....although apparently at some point VSCode finally added Shift+Alt+drag, so now I have no idea what reasons I'd have for opening Sublime.
I think that wholly depends on the context. Python is a great teaching language IMHO if the goal is to teach how to get things done. It's not a good language if you're teaching how things do work under the hood.

To me it's the difference between programming and computer science.