skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true that you can't extract a value obtained from the outside world from the IO type by design, but, I don't think I'd characterize that as a problem. For any piece of code someone thinks they want to write that involves turning an `IO something` to a `something`, I can show how to solve the problem without doing that with a minimum of fuss. It's actually quite difficult for me to remember why someone would want to do that, having been immersed in this paradigm for so long.

For example, if you have, say,

`getIntFromSomewhere :: IO Int`

and you want to apply a pure function of type `Int -> Int` to it. Supppose the pure function adds one. You might initially think that that's all there is to it, you don't want IO involved in what happens next. But of course, the only reason you would ever do some pure computation is to use the result to have some effect on the world, eg printing it to a console. So actually in a sense, you do want to stay in IO.

myIOAction :: IO ()
myIOAction = do
myInt <- getIntFromSomewhere
print (addOne myInt)

As you say, you can't pull the int out of getIntFromSomewhere without operating in an IO action. But why would we want to, since we obviously want to make use of that value to affect the outside world? And of course, that doesn't mean we have any issues getting that int into a pure function `addOne :: Int -> Int` first, before eventually (immediately, in this case) making use of the result to perform some IO.
McDonald's is designed to run with the simplest possible steps. I suspect that "clean nightly" is a different process for MCD vs Wendy's, and that the MCDs is designed to "automate" more of whatever it does - and if it fails it locks you out.

In other words Wendy's and In-N-Out have more details procedures that the employees have to do (and "wash the machine" may include dumping all extra product, cleaning the insides and the dispensers) whereas the McDonald's "wash the machine" may be just clean the dispensers and load with product and let the machine do it's thing (and only every 14 days do a full clean).

But since the simpler machines trust the humans they can be made to run even if steps were missed.
Ask HN: Simplest way to create a simple digital currency (no blockchain)
Hello,

the (elementary) school my daughter goes to wants to create a simple digital currency for the pupils. The current use cases are pretty simple:

- kids get some amount of 'money' when they enter the school, also sometimes extra money for contributing to the 'common good'

- occasionally they create 'stuff' (handicraft, etc.) during classes and they can sell it to each other on school fairs

- there should be some way of managing the 'wallet' without having access to a smartphone -- the younger ones might get a QR code or a PIN and that could serve as the 'wallet' during fairs

- censorship resistance is not needed, nation states don't want to break into the network (likely)

Is there anything that already supports this extremely simple use case? I think something could be done with e.g. Google Sheets + AppMaker or something similar. Any other ideas, thoughts?
“Let’s sprinkle a few billion dollars into each important senator’s state so they can’t shutter our operation.”
You don't need GC or copying. Rust supports reference-counted handles that will never dangle, and will only leak in very rare cases involving self-referential data structures.
I don't care why they are doing this, but it should have happened a long time ago. The cynism here is disappointing.

If companies start investing their money domestically then excess savings will fall, deflationary pressures will be gone and the economy will start growing quickly again and that means wages will grow too.
NC just announced they will give Apple close to a $1B tax break... (granted, over up to 30 years)
I understand the "!", I use it when it fails the first time and I'm trying to hint that I really really want it to work.
Rich rich, look I am a small shareholder like millions of other and I just like put 5% of my salary into my company because I like what I see in the inside, every month.

It kept dropping since I started and maybe one day it'll rise but I just enjoy taking some sort of ownership of my own work.

You always want to tax shareholders when a company gets popular in the media but it's hard to reimburse shareholders when the company goes down...
Has that happened flies or animals that are immune to high radiation?

I could see the next generation having horrible mutations, I could see the genes correcting some of this in the 3rd generation. I could see some of mutations living on but resistance to radiation would be so extremely useful we would build materials out of them which we are not doing today.
What was the Zope 3 debacle exactly? I have vague memories of something like that from back in the day, but having trouble finding anything concrete.
This is true. We are being psychologically manipulated by extraordinarily skilled operators to redirect our attention from our family, friends, and local community toward these non-local (more lucrative) concerns. This makes the manipulators a vast amount of money.

Maybe we should think about the associated negative externalities and act accordingly.
> That's insanely accurate.

This is misleading, and it's a misconception arising from the way that even physicists sometimes misspeak when talking about statistics. The "sigma" is a reference to a standard deviation, and we use it to measure evidence against a null hypothesis (which is generally defined relative to a model of some type). An 11 sigma result means that there's strong evidence against (hypothesis + model), not anything in absolute terms about "accuracy".

The meaning of such a result depends on the model being used; sometimes it's as simple and easy to defend as there being some sort of distribution with a mean which exists, and other times there's a complicated model which may itself be incorrect (producing significant results).
Are there scenarios where this would be more efficient than using regenerative agriculture techniques like cover cropping to naturally out-compete weeds?
Also, 2.5 from fans.
Statecharts often provide a mote complete picture of behaviour than sequence diagrams.
You can’t expect a company (or individual) to not act in their best interests - it’s up to the Goverment to make the law and tax code fair or redistribute wealth
I consider reference counting a form of GC - a rather slow one with lots of potential pitfalls.
There is still a set of people that like their local news a lot. Or don't want to figure out the piecemeal way to get access to their cooking show, some current ABC/NBC/CBS show, BBC America, old episodes of Forensic Files, etc, from X different places. Though I agree, I do see it dying out.
I said it. The second set of quote marks here do not mark a quotation from someone else, they mark my paraphrase of the first quote.
Researchers say enterprise password manager hit in supply chain attack
Soviet Screw-Propelled Vehicle
It doesn’t need to recognize every possible weed species, just “crop of interest / not crop of interest”. A much simpler but still valuable task.
I assume you are talking about AZD1222, the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.

1. The supply to UK comes from the UK manufacturing sites - no one has confiscated vaccines meant for the UK. In fact the UK has been confiscating supplies meant for the EU.

Link: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-sues-astrazeneca-ove...

"The spat with AstraZeneca has also stoked a dispute over supplies with former EU member Britain. AstraZeneca said it was prevented from exporting doses from UK factories to make up for some of the shortfalls in the EU, EU officials have said. Now the EU is opposing the export of AstraZeneca shots to Britain from a factory in the Netherlands."

2. No - the UK did not pay fully for the research.

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastraz...

Overseas governments paid substantial amounts in addition to significant grants from the Bill Gates foundation.

3. Given your history of being a racist prick - I understand it is hard for you to do some basic research before making comments that add absolutely zero value. The comment you made was completely irrelevant to the original submission. You had an option to ignore the misery that is going on over in India and move on - you chose not to. I would strongly suggest that you go back and stay under the bridge where you came from. There is absolutely no value people like you add to society as a whole.

Links:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24386903
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25429577
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12529710
No wonder they call it CARBON robotics, using CO2 lasers and yet still pumping significant amount of combustion CO2 into the atmosphere . . .
Warp drives: Physicists give chances of faster-than-light space travel a boost
It's really interesting that Zig seems to have managed to avoid the "color" distinction for async. I'm curious to see how it works out in the end (and am a happy sponsor, to help that out!).

However, and maybe this is what you're alluding to with your mention of allocators, it seems that Zig has "colored" functions in its own way, with regard to allocation! If a certain function allocates, then to use it the caller will need to pass in an allocator, and that caller will need to have been given an allocator, etc. In other words, explicit allocation "infects" the codebase, too, right?

I can't help but see the parallels there. I think Zig's stance on explicit allocation is one of its strengths, but it does make me wonder if some compiler trickery can make it colorblind as well.
Show HN: Paragon: A command line benchmarking utility for Python code
Hey everyone! I wrote a lightweight, easy to use command line benchmarking utility (and library) in Python over the weekend, not having been overwhelmingly satisfied with what was already out there for performing quick and easy benchmarks.
It's $0 if you were already going to spend it anyway
What I learned from this article was:

Go is all asynchronous. Problem solved.
To all the humans mulling to play with this library, note that the signal-service-java[0] dependency signald relies upon isn't an officially shipped one. It's a fork with backported features. To me, it makes the library 2-times unofficial as it relies upon an unofficial library itself.

The official implementation[1] hasn't been updated for around 1,5 years.

[0]: https://git.callpipe.com/finn/signald/-/blob/master/build.gr...

[1]: https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal-service-java
It reads like they're trying to avoid creating jobs in manufacturing directly, but will instead pick US suppliers and potentially let them hire lower skilled workers.

I wouldn't expect this to create that many jobs in manufacturing, it seems more like engineering and creative work, with a promise to prefer US suppliers, assuming they exists.
What exactly comprises a great NFT? I mean that seriously: what makes a great NFT different from a scam NFT?

Is it the same as "this is great art and that's just a single pixel"? Or is there something more directly NFT-ish involved?

As far as I can tell, most of "crappy and scammy" NFT is just pointing out that the entire notion of an NFT is somewhat absurd, and an absurdity that happens to have caught the attention of people who made a ton of money in cryptocurrency and are looking for something to do with it.

Can you explain what I'm missing?
What happens if you add/subtract those negative "deferred" lines?
4. Apple was planning to do these things anyway as part of normal operations, and is just spinning them as "investment in the country"
Experimental drug shows potential against Alzheimer's disease
Government is increasingly transparent compared to past history. You can see that in things like right to know, freedom of information, etc. There are still information issues in both discovery and presentation. The public trust is still very low.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/09/14/americans-vi...
Almost everyone owns stock in all the major companies - indirectly via their 401k or index fund.

To a first approximation, there are no non-stockholders.

One real question is why, when stockholders vote on CEO compensation, fund managers are allowed to cast the votes of fund investors. If you invest money on behalf of other people, there are all sorts of fiduciary duties to keep the money separate, but that money gets you votes, and you get to vote them according to your personal preferences, not according to the preferences of your investors.
Ah that's unfortunate, I didn't know they were gating content like that. It's still a pretty good deal though, certainly better than bundled cable, and most of the content on these stations is pretty evergreen.
Help India Fight Covid: A list of Covid donation info – Crypto and Cash
Pow! Take that, Monsanto!

This diminishes farmers' dependence on patented "Roundup-ready" seeds, and on the Roundup herbicide itself. That can only be good for everybody except Monsanto.
The key to doing migrations on the request is having the migrations live in single classes/files. It makes it very clean to have the app migrate from version 3 to version 12 with the 9 or so classes handing the response from one to the other.

I made a package a few years ago in PHP/Laravel that focuses on this: https://github.com/tomschlick/request-migrations
A Recent Megaflare Shows That Proxima Centauri Is Not a Nice Place to Live
Graph Components: Strongly and Weakly Connected Components
I would love to see local news (minus commercials). I'd definitely pay $5 a month for that.
Usenix – Burnout and Ops (2014)
>when you can create virtual sign map that every city/road maintenance HAS to update?

Who can do that?
Didn't know that. Thanks for clarifying.
For a really simple emulator project (not quite the level of VirtualBox), check the "IntCode" challenges from AdventOfCode 2019.
So I don’t think that this criticism is quite fair, and I’ll explain why. When you choose to make something implicit/easy in a language, it often comes with the cost of making other things explicit/hard. The best example of this, in my mind, is the choice to use Hindley-Milner style type inference (ML, Haskell) versus forward-only type inference (C, Java). HM style type inference comes with its advantages, but introduces limitations that affect polymorphism.

In Haskell, you can’t automatically lift something into a Monad because this would require a type of ad-hoc polymorphism that is impossible with a coherent Hindley-Milner type of type inference system.

However, that exact type inference system is what lets you just write “liftM”, and it automatically does the Right Thing based on the type of monad expected at the call site.

I think ultimately—Haskell is in a sense an experiment to see if these alternative tradeoffs are viable, and it’s a massive success in that regard.

(Also: you wouldn’t need to liftM every function in a chain. Just liftM the chain at the end.)
Flying Ants Swarm Hotel Room
I don't get this:

Big money machine: Myers expects the farming robot to pay for itself in two to three years, but it does come with a hefty price tag: Carbon Robotics' CEO Paul Mikesell told the Seattle Times it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars (he declined to provide an exact price).

If it pays for itself in, let's say, three years, then you'd think the manufacturer would be eager to finance it over a similar period of time.
Why APK-tools is different than other package managers
I'm the main author of libfive, happy to answer any questions.

The site isn't totally up to date – the Python bindings + API are brand new, and need some examples, but they work great if you know how to use them!
Surely agency/intention cannot only exist within the physical bounds of our planet.

Why not? There is a non-zero possibility that we are the only intelligent life in the universe.

We assume that we're not the only intelligent life based on probability - intelligent life can definitely exist (we are the evidence), so if you try enough times it'll probably emerge in other places too. We have no evidence that this is the case. We even assume that if it starts earlier it'll be more advanced, although there's no reason why that should be the case either unless there's something about evolution or tech that means it progresses at the same rate everywhere. That's silly.

The problem with these assumptions are that they mean we don't consider ourselves special enough.

We aren't willing to protect ourselves and the only planet we can currently survive on. We wage wars, we develop weapons of mass destruction, we ruin the climate, and we let millions starve in the name of capitalism. We're always on the brink of wiping ourselves out. We could, potentially, end the only intelligent life ever to exist anywhere in the entire universe with the next big event whether it's a war, or a technological 'advancement' like cryptocurrency, or just bad luck like a global pandemic brought about by people living in extreme poverty needing to eat bats to survive. For intelligent life humans are impossibly stupid.
Cancelling your bluehost subscription requires your password over the phone
Grab XCOM 2. Its a solid step forward from enemy unknown and you might not feel the same disappointment.
I remember hearing a hypothesis that "junk DNA" acts as a kind of shielding against mutations. From a probability standpoint, the more non-coding DNA you have, the less likely an error is to hurt the lifeform. Taken to an extreme, if every DNA sequence did something a singe error would cripple the organism.
> pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal

If it pays as much as other jobs with shorter, less sporadic hours, it's underpaid.
Researchers Secure Bug Bounty Payout to Help Raise Funds for Infant’s Surgery
>An iteration of this with higher resolution cameras and small flying drones seems like an intuitive next step.

The gimbal alone on your flying drone will cost more than the entire river.
No-SQL databases are glorified caches
This is exactly my grudge with boilerplate. Code is being read much more often than written.

I don't care if you hand-coded all those buckets of accessors, or your IDE has generated them -- that's irrelevant to that they're still overwhelmingly useless noise. Which I need to read through, which I need to review in PR diffs, skim in "find symbol usage" output, class interface outlines, javadocs, etc etc -- all that 10 as often as during writing. Somehow I'm expected to learn to ignore meaningless code, while producing it is fine?..

Remember the point made in "green languages, brown languages" recent post here on HN? The insight for me there was the source of "rewrite it from scratch" urge which should be very familiar to engineers working in the field. It comes from incomprehensible code or weak code reading skills. Either way, boilerplate does nothing but harm.

So no, while I agree on your point that code exists principally to be read by humans (and as a nice secondary bonus, executed by machines) -- I disagree that boilerplate is "fine" whatever its incarnation. It's not, because it directly damages the primary purpose of code: its readability.
It is still contaminated because the half live is 30 years. After 35 years it is half as strong. In 350 years it will still be contaminated but it would have halved 10 times.
As convoluted as this comment is, props for pointing out that evolution (and the formation of the solar system) took billions of years to produce intelligence. Can humanity do it in less time?

Because biological evolution’s is oriented toward propagation of DNA rather than intelligence, we can ask what kind of evolutionary pressures lead to intelligence. Under what scenarios does higher intelligence lead to higher survival, and lower intelligence to lower survival? If the answer was “all the time”, then everything on earth would show signs of intelligence. An intelligent spider would have no significantly greater chance of survival. It merely needs to spin webs, eat, and reproduce in a tight loop, with deterministic responses to various scenarios — it needs instinct more than intelligence.

By understanding what kind of evolutionary pressures lead to the necessity of intelligence, we can evolve (train) ML directly for intelligence, skipping straight to the answer rather than showing our work.

The answer is found in the peculiar evolution of mammals, the only organisms that display consistent intelligence across all its species. Mammals are highly social, beginning from live birth to mammalian glands that feed its comparatively feeble spawn. Sociality is built into the bodies of mammals. And the most social animal on earth is Homo Sapiens.

From here I’ll just recommend “Consciousness and the Social Brain.” I’ve been beating this dead horse on HN for some time.
> but what you do pay can be written off against your revenue

How is that different from any other business expense in any other industry.
I’ll wait to see the halo effect of high paying tech jobs in a community.

Any community with half a functioning government should give tax breaks to get these kinds of jobs from such a reputable company.
In the Wired article, the Kytch founder alleges that Taylor takes a cut of the distributor's profit from the repairs:

The secret menu reveals a business model that goes beyond a right-to-repair issue, O’Sullivan argues. It represents, as he describes it, nothing short of a milkshake shakedown: Sell franchisees a complicated and fragile machine. Prevent them from figuring out why it constantly breaks. Take a cut of the distributors’ profit from the repairs. [1]

1: https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
booster shots for variants are almost guaranteed to be needed.
https://www.nomnoml.com/

http://chartmage.com/index.html

https://swimlanes.io/

https://dbdiagram.io/home
SEO content is a positive feedback loop.
That doesn’t really explain anything, given there are millions of deaths under capitalism too.
Basedrop: A garbage collector for real-time audio in Rust
effing loving that tool.
Love seeing advances in this space. I have an 80 acre farm and I’m waiting for an autonomous slope mower.

Question about this tech is, does it really kill weeds, or just defoliate them? Like, is this laser strong enough to get down to the roots, which are often very deep with weeds?

If not, I’m wondering why lasers instead of something mechanical that can corkscrew down and tear up the entire root?
No; that’s a potential use of upgraded, more capable rotorcraft in future missions.
I completely agree with you but good luck convincing anyone to do that. Memorization and regurgitation questions are easier to create, evaluate and grade. Asking meaningful questions, evaluating each student's answer and taking an individualized approach to each student requires a lot of time and effort which are the most scarce resources in today's mass education centers.

So they'll keep asking stupid questions as if the student was a database being queried. It's no wonder that people can solve them by querying actual knowledge bases! Schools won't accept that: they are selling degrees and they don't want to make it too easy for students to pass their courses. So they come up with the absolutely ridiculous notion of cheating.

The whole thing's so phony and artificial it's mindboggling. I don't think it's even possible to get a high quality education anymore. Maybe if a student is lucky enough to have a one-on-one mentorship.
The Future of Data Ownership (?)
I don't get it why would they need to reverse engineer their own software? Was it some sort of RPC without an explicit protocol?
Good point, but you havent thought of the *millions of tiny mirrors* they'd obviously be using :)