skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for the detailed comment and for the ruby-toolbox link.

All good ideas. Though keeping the reviews up-to-date might become a full time job in itself, as software changes often. I use a service called clickup, they add features constantly and quickly.

How does ruby toolbox do the categories? All other data they show can be automated, but I wonder how they do categorization. They probably use the topics feature from github, I still think it is hard to automate it fully.

Edit: Ah, never mind. Found this https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog
> In the world of programming, where “it depends” is often the best answer and everything is based on trade-offs, writing becomes that much harder. It needs to set the context, justify the decisions, and then power the low-level thinking leading into the code.

Might be that the author is talking about a different kind of documentation, but I believe describing the behaviour of a program in sufficiently detailed fashion and justifying why the program behaves like it does are two very different things.

The former is the task of the programmer and the audience is likely other programmers while the latter is the task of a product manager and the audience is likely higher-ups.

As a programmer who needs to interface with a particular API, I will be very thankful for a documentation that tells me exactly how the data to pass to the endpoint has to look and what kind of responses I have to handle. If there are any particular quirks, constraints or special cases I have to be aware of when using the API, the documentation must explain those as well.

But to be able to use an API, it's not necessary to know the exact decisions and tradeoffs that explain why the quirks and special cases are as they are.
>How long would you be excited?

Probably for at least a century. (If I lived that long.) I imagine when, for example, people living on small islands or other isolated places first encountered people from other places, they remained excited (and/or anxious) about that fact for the rest of their lives. And this would be greatly multiplied because the differences and advances would be much more stark.

>But how would it change your life?

Depends. Do they leave us any of their technology? Then probably all of our lives would drastically change forever. Do they consider us a threat and imprison us or blow up the planet? That'd probably also be a bit of a shake-up.

Otherwise, I'd probably consider switching careers to "non-human intelligent life communication studies" or other ET research or something like that. And I'd probably spend all day every day talking about it with friends and strangers, and maybe some of the ETs as well if they want to and can talk to people like me. I'd probably also start thinking about programming projects, or anything else I could offer, that could somehow help bridge the gap between our civilizations and increase the chance of a mutually beneficial and peaceful relationship.

I mean, I could ramble on about this for hours. But it's basically like asking me "why would you care if you found out some omnipotent deity exists? how would your life change? how long would you be excited for?" Same for "why would you care if you found out you live in a simulation?"

For one, there are way too many unknown unknowns there, so it's hard to imagine exactly how I might react. There are a lot of different ways those scenarios could play out.

Secondly, it's likely impossible or nearly impossible to ever know the truth about any of these things. And thirdly, it's just such a crazy hypothetical because I personally think the odds are extremely low that there are deities or that we live in a simulation or that ETs have visited or will ever visit us. So it's a bit moot to think too much about.

I think a better question to ask of the UFO researchers/ET visitation believers is why they seem to care so much when it seems very likely it's all so futile and just simply a big nothingburger. (I suppose most of them would just respond by saying they don't think it's futile or even that they're completely certain it's real.)

I get not caring given the status quo. But not caring if you and every other human on Earth hypothetically is shown undeniable proof and now knows with 100% confidence that there are ETs/deities/a simulation? That sounds pretty crazy to me. How could you not care? It'd be by far the most important and interesting thing in all of human history. And then if you consider what new things might be enabled for us with that contact or knowledge, it'd quite possibly be the most important thing to ever happen for all of future human history; even millions of years into the future.
I don't believe luck is a significant factor. The number of entrepreneurs who have second and third companies with successful exits effectively demonstrates that someone can consistently do the right things to win, react to challenges in the right ways, and repeat their success. If luck was a significant factor that would not happen.
Creators are making bank selling .Google spreadsheets
What the hell?!

Give. Developers. Offices. With. Doors.

It's conceptually simple, and will probably cost less than this novelty shit in the long run.
Im on a macbook air, but I use a desktop as a service solution. (shells.com)
LOL. I removed the emojis - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27008515 - and then expanded all the available items to expand, hid some of the clutter and exported the list to PDF to read through it. Little did I expect that one of these would actually be a joke.

It says a lot about the page design that items that look really similar, with emojis next to them, are indistinguishable from one another and thus information -- or jokes -- can hide in plain sight thanks to design decisions that downplay and don't highlight what might actually be relevant content. The fact that the lists are so long and this is buried down near the bottom of the last list says something about this.

Only one comment of 128 comments mentions the Batman Curse according to a quick CTRL+F. ;-) And if you read that comment, it mentions a missing Law. ;-)

> The Batman Curse

> Animal attacks at a young age can sometimes turn people into vigilantes

> THE BATMAN CURSE DEFINITION

> Studies have shown that a child’s brain can produce unique hormones in reaction to dangerous animal encounters. During puberty, 1 out of 10 children will start seeing the effect of ADN alterations. Their brain becomes wired to look for justice.

> THE BATMAN CURSE EXAMPLES

> A recent surge of vigilantes cases in Watopia alerted authorities to investigate the Batman curse. One individual was arrested and revealed that he was attacked by bats when he was 6 years old.

> Who needs a reference? Everybody knows it’s true, Fail·Design (2020)
Can you provide it in downloadable/CSV format for each keyword search/filter?

It'd be very helpful!

Good job by the way!
Some years back, I used to be the proud owner of "libgoliath.so", but then they suddenly decided to hike the price to IIRC Euro 80,- per year (either that, or prove that I have a Somalian citicenship). So I dropped that.

So now I'm the proud owner of "goliath32.com", which I currently keep parked until I finally, hopefully get around to overhauling my 10 year old personal site.
The problem with documentation is that the infrastructure/tooling for it is terrible compared to the infrastructure for code. Documentation is often in external systems (Confluence, etc) which lack version control and are hard to keep in sync with the code, and those systems are often extremely slow (especially considering all it does is handle text) and the user experience is terrible (no Markdown support, mandatory "wysiwyg" input, etc).
From what I understand, some devs do use git for their local work, and then prepare a patch to update the official source code in CVS.
Wow. I was just replying to the thread. You don’t need to be an a$$hole.
This is so hard to read. The font size is so small that the serifs make it cluttered, monospaced fonts are terrible for readability, and it's hard to read successive lines since they span the whole width of the page.

I think it's ironic that other commenters praise this as "HN-friendly", when HN itself uses a sans-serif proportional font at a reasonable size, limited width and margins for legibility, and background color to reduce contrast.
If I could suggest a feature, I would put number of downloads to see what is the market for that problem.

Cool job though!
Relevant paper from Misha Belkin's group
https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.12362
Around 1991 or so, I built an extraordinarily slow and deeply terrible scanner out of a plotter which had a simple fiber optical sensor instead of a pen. It was one of those "see what you can do with this stuff" projects that got thrown at me and I just coded this up with a data acquisition board and some flavor of BASIC. Supposedly about 1000 dpi.

I eventually came up with routines to speed up the scanning (left to right, move up, right to left, move up ...) and even hit upon using the "judder" from the repositioning of the pen to, properly timed, grab a point. This saved me from having to fully stop, I could just vibrate the pen forward. This ... probably did not do much for the lifetime of the plotter.

Man, that was a hot mess.
I still remember Sunil hitting the news when he got caught, so I was a little surprised when I first heard he was doing this and trying to bring Snowden into it. If anything, I quite expected it to blow up spectacularly, and wasn't left disappointed.

At least here in Canada, pretty much everybody who's ever heard of Sunil know he's a scammer. Even on sight. I guess he's preying on those who don't remember or are too young to remember.
> Kids today have wanton access to internet and technology but aren't any smarter or better at making decisions.

Citation needed, I guess? Teen pregnancies are way down, for example.
I think i'm ok with it on the Air but went with 16GB for my desktop.

On the Air right now I have 20+ apps open (Firefox, Brave, Chrome, Safari, Slack, Signal, WhatsApp, Microsoft Todo, Excel (4 sheets open), Mail, Calendar, VS Code (2 projects open), iTerm (8 tabs), Postico, Datagrip, Contacts, Messenger, Spotify, Calibre, Docker for Mac (4 containers running)

Memory used is 6.47GB of 8GB physical, cached filed 1.2GB, swap used 8.15GB

It's running more than fine.

It's why I don't think you can compare with other systems in terms of RAM capacity - there is no way I would get away with what I have open now on an 8GB machine running Ubuntu desktop
> You always can tell you're about to land in Delhi because you can smell the air before you touch down.

What a great description. It sounds like Terry Pratchett describing Ankh-Morpork.
>> "Is there any place where you can exist, in 2021, without having political viewpoints crammed down your throat?"

Depends on who you are. Some people have never had a refuge from others politicizing their existence.
When I was a grad student, some code for drawing axes would draw a tick on one side, go all the way to the other side and then swing all the way back. The motor was strong enough to make the table sway back and forth, and of course this method was slow. I remember writing code to draw a tick, come back on the tick, and then draw along the axis to the next tick. Presto, much faster!

We also had an HP plotter connected to one of those large (typewriter-sized) HP calculators, and I also wrote code to graph on that, too.

All of this was pretty low-level stuff, but not difficult, and the rewards were high for a grad student trying to get science done.

Fun times. And a step up from summer work preceding it, when I had to boot my machine by toggling binary switches for certain binary sequence that had to be loaded before it would start to read paper tape.

I think I'm old.
I had an app that was free, but was solely a client for a paid service. Despite putting this in capital latters at the top of the description, it still got loads of negative reviews saying that it was misleading and wasn't really free. It was exasperating as I was never pretending it was anything but that, but I consoled myself with the fact that the people who actually needed it would be coming from the site and were already paying users.
Adar Poonawalla of SII has fled to London with his family because he is being intimidated by prominent people (including many Chief Ministers)

Again, a side-effect of the flawed vaccine policy of the government.

So far, the central government was directly procuring the vaccine, and distributing it to everyone. Last month, it suddenly changed the policy and told all the states to procure it themselves. This has resulted in differential pricing, and the all the states are now forced to negotiate and procure the vaccines from the manufacturers directly. So all the politicians are now harassing the CEO of the vaccine manufacturers for better deals .. https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/serum-chief-flies-to-uk... ...

Luckily the Supreme Court has stepped in and is now questioning the government on its revised vaccine policy, especially on the pricing mechanism.
I'm doing a rewrite[0] of OctoSQL[1], partly to make it push-based instead of pull-based, and for now it's been much simpler to work with, won't get into the detailed reasoning in this comment.

However, if somebody is interested, this is a great paper on how to architect a query compiler: https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/rompf/papers/tahboub-sigmod1...

I found it very enlightening and simple to implement. The paper also delves into details why the push-based architecture has more room for optimizations.

[0]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql/tree/redesign

[1]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql/
Behringer 4 channels for audio, are even cheaper. He could get one for a cup of iced coffee.
Same here for the same product, but in Germany.
Centering Social Media
Programmers don't need documentation to describe what the program does, the code is already a perfect description of what it does.

You need documentation to describe the intent that is not present in the code, i.e., why something is the way it is.
I just put a /docs directory in the root of the project and everything inside that is vanilla markdown.

It brings it under source control and if the person reading it doesn't know markdown they likely shouldn't be reading it anyway.
Most Aggravating Edge Cases
Just some days ago researchers from Peking U and Microsoft published a paper[0] saying they can access "knowledge neurons" in pretrained embeddings that will enable "fact editing"[1].

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.08696.pdf

[1]: https://medium.com/syncedreview/microsoft-peking-u-researche...
It's bloody hard, you say? Hm, maybe in part of the cases, but you know what else is even harder?

Getting onboarded in a new project and having zero clue why X is written like that, why is Y is where it is and why Z is using a 10-year old thread-pool scheduler that is grossly inefficient. And you have to deliver feature A and bugfix B and you might collapse the house of cards and of course, critically important pieces of institutional knowledge are missing.

Eventually you do find out everything you need since you're not dumb and are a bright programmer, but you've lost weeks or maybe even months. The business have lost money because they basically had to give you anywhere from 1 to 3 full salaries just so you can catch up. And it's not even your fault, it's the last person's.

So I can't sympathize with "it's hard" at all. So what, dude? It's part of your job. Do it well. Nobody hired you to only do the easy stuff.

But this does outline the somewhat introverted, almost autistic nature of many programmers. When it comes to writing good docs most of them give up because that requires good and clear articulation which they don't possess. Or they find it "boring".

But they'd still curse if they found an obscure GitHub repo that could help with their their niche problem and find out that it has zero explanations or code comments.
> By now, many of us have gotten a good setup at home and are pretty productive.

It might be okay for people who've been at Google for a while, but it's really not a very good experience for a Noogler.

Google's infrastructure, while amazing, is also one-of-a-kind, which means that you need a lot of internal resources to get up to speed on things, which would go much faster from a face to face interaction. It's nightmare dealing with all this when the only folk with the required know how are some rather unfriendly folk in MTV (who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs in "shit-hole" India).
hmm good idea, i do see some problems and improvements that i need to do before i can implement this kind of feature but yes, sure.

and thx, peoples interest and praise is quite motivating
> Open source software has become very successful, but much of this success is in projects with non-copyleft licenses (e.g. Apache, MIT, or BSD licenses), and even in the GPL-licensed projects (e.g. Linux) I am skeptical that the copyleft aspect was really an important factor in the project’s success.

GCC. Yes, a while ago now. But I think it is the canonical example of a success with the GPL. GCC was the standard for decades. Still is. It was adopted nearly everywhere. It was, and still is, one of the technologically most sophisticated, portable and feature-complete compilers.

Clang/LLVM coming along under a BSD-style license is not a defeat here, but only underscoring the point.

The GPL is annoying if you're something like Apple. Yet the only way that GCC could be successfully competed with was to make an even better program. And it was necessary that it be libre licensed to effectively compete, too. Either GPL or more permissive. Clang and LLVM would certainly have died young if they were proprietary. A win for libre software tools, and the GPL is the prime mover behind it. GCC's success under the GPL has effectively guaranteed all major compilers will be libre licensed in some way.

He has some good points about application services, and I see no obvious solution there.
It's not really a secret. If you get a consumer KitchenAid mixer and use it for baking in an industrial kitchen, KitchenAid is probably going to reject your warranty when you send it in for a burned out motor after 6 months.

Warranties cover defects, not wear and tear far beyond the advertised workload.
First, they not only contributed upstream, upstream developers contributed to this patch. I.e. they got help outside GitHub to make this patch possible.

Second, if they had decided to fork Git, then they'd have to maintain this fork forever.

Third, this fork could overtime become visibly or even worse subtly incompatible with stock Git which is still the Git running on GitHub users' machines, and both should interact with each other in 100% compatible manner.

So, in this case, not contributing upstream was literally no-go. The only rational choice would be to not fork Git.
> The problem is: who is accountable for these mistakes? Who shall I reach out to if Google's foggy algorithms make a mistake? And, in the case of educators and creators who actually do that for a job, who will compensate them for the revenue they have lost because of algorithmic errors?

Given that we've had to endure this nonsense for more years than I can count now, and Google and other companies refuse to budge, it sounds like a great opportunity for legislation to enumerate users' rights in situations like this, and to enumerate penalties should companies like Google violate them.
So do I. I even write documentation for personal projects, as a manual to my future self. However, absolutely every team I've ever worked with held a majority view of documentation being unnecessary.

Some even mentioned "code as documentation". In the end, they just kept finding justifications for not writing documentation or even proper code comments.

Three months after some solution was written, they couldn't explain the thinking behind it or even all the deep dependencies and magic return values because the person who had written the solution had left the team. Even then they were unwilling to see how documentation would have helped.

This repeated with every freaking team I have ever worked with. The only documentation any of those projects had was the one I created while figuring out the code base.

I observed a fundamental laziness in written communication in many developers and to this day I find it puzzling. I sometimes write down a draft of some solution just by myself, like I would explain it to another developer. More often than not, this helps me in highlighting inconsistencies or errors in my thinking.
Naturalist Notes: Wolves and Ravens
It mostly comes out sordid: blighted careers, denied tenure; and tragic, fundamental advances in understanding pinched off. It would need very talented direction.

Over the decades we have heard of a variety of dental discoveries never followed up -- vaccine against tooth decay, stimulated regeneration of whole teeth. It all may need to wait for a generation not gated by the ADA.
The scary thing is, I don't know if I can trust him less than any 'reputable newspaper'. At least if this he says dumb things, someone on HN will call him out. The reputable source has only one voice, it will say anything that brings in extra money, and lots of invisible third parties will try to influence it.
I guess my grandfather would have met Oliphant when they were working on radar. There is a family story of my grandfather sleeping with a prototype cavity magnetron under his pillow to keep it safe from air raids.
On mobile you can watch the videos without logging in.
Mammals that lay eggs, it’s just fascinating to me.

Are these the links between mammals and birds? Or, on a more naive level, between humans and dinosaurs? Why are they some of the only venom-producing mammals? Could we engineer humans to lay eggs one day? And a million other questions that monotremes stir within me.
My parents and grandparents comment that all the younger people today have to spend a lot more time with their kids than they ever did. They said they had 3 and 4 and 5 kids and once they were walking, they were outside in the village with other kids and older siblings/cousins and they didn’t see them again until they got hungry. Or maybe they ate at a neighbor’s house. Either way, parenting of little kids definitely takes more time and effort than previous generations.