skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>What alternatives would you suggest?...

How's about the ones we've used for centuries already; "contacted" or "got in touch with".

>"Reached out" at least has a warm diplomatic connotation...

This is exactly the reason I abhor it so much. It's so blatantly trying to be touchy-feely it makes me want to puke! It's like some committee somewhere sat down one day and decided that terms like "contact" or "get in touch with" just weren't putting across how caring their faceless corporation was. So from now on it was going to be "reaching out" all the way.

What I also loathe about it is that, having thus been foisted upon us from nowhere [5 years ago I'd only ever seen the phrase in the Four Tops song], all of a sudden, all over the globe, people who have been quite happily "getting in touch with" others or "contacting" them are suddenly "reaching out" instead.

And, while you're all downvoting away. Just be aware that, in addition to the "reaching out" crime, my benevolent dictatorship is going to take a similarly flagellatory view of:

* Beginning the reply to a question with "So..."

* Using the word "super" instead of "very"

* Describing anything as "awesome" which does not meet an officially defined standard of awe-inducement

* Having entire conversations on social media, which consist entirely of fucking emojis.

* Using the phrase "I could care less about..." when you mean precisely the opposite.

[Phew! --that'll do for now. I think I need to lie down til that vein in my temple stops throbbing]
Right, but the Western sponsors of the work would have been aware of this. This whole thing was a major dispute among virologists, major enough to end up in a NYT editorial. That makes the lab escape scenario an international failure, not a national one.
If only things were as easy as you stated. I don't mind the ideals, but for many, life realities are far from the ideals. And ideals remain just that for many.
> C / C++ has huge pitfalls with its memory management. But it is also a well-designed programming language with a great balance between efficiency and comprehensibility (and all other features of a language).

Citation needed. I don't believe it's anywhere close to the Pareto frontier of language design, nor do I think we should reasonably expect it to be - it's fundamentally a language put together by two kids with no formal training, designed for programming a machine that had 256 kilobytes of RAM. It became popular due to some accidents of history (Unix, availability of free compilers) and the following network effects far more than the technical merits of the design.

> Every design decision in a language is a trade-off. And the trade-offs in C / C++ are so well chosen that there was no easy improvement for decades. No low hanging fruit. A C programmer has to understand much more about memory management because there is no virtual machine / garbage collector / interpreter running which takes care of it. But for that you get efficiency that is not possible by design with the other approaches.

That's nonsense IMO. ML was and remains an overwhelmingly better language, the performance of an incorrect program should be considered meaningless, and for all that C is supposedly more efficient, when I've actually seen a C program rewritten in an ML-family language the result has been substantially better performance.
I have been searching for something like that for ages.
> not just paying with your "attention"

And maybe abolishing democracy

Political manipulation ads, helping an authoritarian rise to power.

But ads for buying what I just searched for: "buy new running shoes", aren't like that -- they can be helpful instead :-). It's mainly social network ads like on Facebook that are dangerous for society?

From the article:

> I think advertising is positive

It's both? Ads are different from ads, just like different things one can eat are different, like potatoes (running shoe ads) versus poisonous mushrooms (nation states abolishing democracy in the US via political manipulation on Facebook)
No need to nest promises:

console.log('start')
doA()
.then(() => doB())
.then(() => doC())
.then(() => console.log('finish'))
.catch((error) => {
console.log(error)
})
> Trees are not evolving as fast as the speed we destroy our environment, we have no choices left and we need to help them by not letting the forest completely wild.

Mostly, the problem isn't actually one of too-slow evolution, but even more basic: Forests often can't migrate fast enough to keep up with current rates of climactic zone movement.

Human intervention is pretty simple and effective, though: keep planting trees on the leading edge of the forest (usually poleward or upslope where the limit is temperature, away from the coast where the limit is precipitation)

Of course, there are ecosystems that don't have anywhere convenient to move to (arctic and alpine, for example), but most forests don't fall into that category.
In April 2021, it was announced that Muse Group, (owners of MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar) would be acquiring Audacity.
It's not unpopular at all. Watch Silicon Valley. The very first skit is Peter Gregory talking about why school is bad...this is the opposite message of Adam Sandler in Mr. Deeds.

I think you are right but I think that also is going to be part and parcel of traditional colleges changing. You absolutely cannot replace the role of college community nor tenured professors working with you in person. It, in my experience, doesn't translate to online. You need these people for mentorship and to offer constructive and informed criticism of your work. We as humans need the socialization so we don't turn into cranks.

HN and SV despise schooling sometimes, but we as a society don't progress without it being dominant in some form or fashion.

Funnily enough, that scene ends with some dude yelling "fascist!" and walking out. I never knew how uncannily accurate of a parody that stuff was until I started posting on HN.
What we do is tied to hardware products so there's no "push to production" but the fairly typical flow in the industry is:

- Implement feature locally and unit test it

- Push to codebase is gated by code review

- Integration tests

- System tests

- Delivered to customer release by release

- Customer's acceptance tests

- Deployed

In principle I would expect a significant level of testing before pushing to production.
> So, the team needs to prioritize and to do things in steps. While they are rewriting some C/C++ code, they'll need to still maintain other code.

Sure. But I don't think kind of portability-for-reliability work described in the article is effective work that should be prioritised. Yes, it will catch some bugs, but there's not actually much value in that.
Here's a lazy third option:

console.log('start')
try {
doA()
doB()
doC()
console.log('finish')
} catch (error) {
console.log(error)
}

It seems to me async/await is a desperate attempt to try to make JavaScript less painful to deal with because of its asynchronous execution nature.

I am not a JS expert and have not had many opportunities to work with it extensively, but I confess I have always struggled with this when dealing with JS; I have often wondered if the (alleged?) performance gains from executing JavaScript like this outweighs [what I have always perceived as] the significant extra verbosity and complexity required to manage simply executing things in order.
I guess this is, at least to some degree, caused by code reusability. We can easily (with the right PL) plug foreign code into our project and use it. We cannot as easily read a paper, or a low-level implementation for a different instruction set and use the method in our project. Hence we prefer the former over the latter. I for instance once implemented Derek Oppen's pretty printer in C++ and was surprised how difficult such a transcription was.

This situation then leads to a certain inefficiency, as portability becomes more important than efficiency.

On top of that, there is the cost of maintaining a piece of software. A threaded forth interpreter is much more expensive to maintain then one based on a switch statement, I'd assume.
That’s not how viruses work.
"often times" ?!

Where did I put that cat'o'nine tails?
Designing Twitter Video
I grew up a middle-class white kid in a good family in California so was pretty much oblivious to victimhood until I went to college in Missouri where the notion of racial inequality was drilled into me to the point I actually learned to fear people of other races held a grudge against me.

Although I've been aware of this learned fear and done what I can to mitigate it, this means I might sometimes fear interracial interactions which means I might not give a black person an equal chance as a white, which then comes across as systemic racism, and so it's a vicious cycle.

On the topic of breaking the cycle, I had an eye-opening encounter with an Iranian Christian who said that he felt the US oppressed Iran (sanctions leading to economic and political instability) but as a Christian, he chose to forgive the US and pray that they'd see the harm they're causing. In this scenario, because he offered forgiveness, I feel more comfortable around him even despite agreeing that "my people" have been making life harder for "his", and not in vague systemic ways or hundreds of years ago, but right now in concrete ways.
I haven't worked at many companies (only 4 during my 20+ years from late 90s until now) and while work at two was stressful (TV journalism and IT) with 'pushy' bosses, I've NEVER encountered any where the environment is truly toxic. And that includes working in different countries, private and public sector (University of California, for instance). I didn't hear too many horror stories either. However people keep talking about toxic workplace like there's an epidemic going on. It feels weird.
The economic pie is shrinking. Elites are spending more and more of their money sending their kids to the best prep schools and resume padding to ensure they don't slip through the growing cracks in the developed world (i.e. inequality that is well accepted at this point).

See the college admissions scandal. That was the canary in the coalmine for intra-elite competition. They spent hundreds of thousands to low digit millions to send their kids through the backdoor because they couldn't afford the backdoor. These were like low-level elites (not hyper wealthy). The point is that if these people are concerned about their status, the middle and lower classes have little hope.

While the average outcomes may have been true in past decades, one must ask if this will be the case going forward. In a low-to-no-growth economy, where most of the gains are financialized in limited sectors (high finance and tech), how else will one penetrate these sectors if not through an elite institution? Answer: they probably will not and will resign themselves to working in a stagnating part of the economy.

Respectfully, I think people who subscribe to your view are whistling in the dark about the future of the country.
I see some points but i'm getting tired of the bashing Basecamp gets. We can clearly see where it went wrong - i mean, at some size of the business it doesnt look good if employees make fun of customer names internally. But come on, i dont think any of the customers were hurt or affected at all, none of them even complained about any such thing happening. So this was some internal whistleblower who raised the alarm and then some internal shitstorm started. And suddenly a stupid joke becomes racism, sexism or other form of criminal offense and nobody has any control over what's going on.

Did the company become toxic? Of course, something broke internally. But was it a toxic place before raising the issue? Not necessarily. It was just some inappropriate fun that should have been quieted and stopped without making a big fuss and throwing accusations around. There are some people who take advantage of such occassions if they can accuse coworkers of 'big offenses' like racism or sexism and hope to cause as much damage as possible (with a good chance of succeeding in such case).

Of course I dont know the real situation at Basecamp, but have seen how easy it's to destroy relationships inside the company and company's reputation by throwing around accusations of pathological behaviors.
eBay would not flip on two factor without you knowing. Likely it is to alert you of a new device accessing your account and possibly part of a password reset flow.

It’s a good point though — how munch more secure is two factor if you have an unguessable password locked away in a password manager. Your single point of failure is security of your computer.
I used this with miband, but then xiaomi went full-google and requires their watches to connect to their network before the first use.

I wonder if I can buy a second hand miband and get around that.
I worked in a small startup company (~20) with a horrible founder. As a lead, she would ask me why some people are taking their lunch time after 2pm. I didn't know how to answer. Our standup would last 45 minutes where she would interrogate each person. As a lead, I didn't have the guts to fix it. I stayed for a year. There are many things I should've done and I could've done. That was a truly toxic place.
The complaint really is that if everything is sequential it is a fault in the language to make you explicitly say it every time, not that await is somehow worse than promises.
Slightly confusing with the other meaning of threading, this is more like what is pejoratively called "spaghetti code" which was mostly superceded by structured programming. Easier to understand, marginally less efficient, especially for the interpreter case.
Raw soybeans are pretty toxic
> No, it's used everywhere in phonology, for every language.

Sure, of course, but I was thinking mostly of those grammars (usually Sino-Tibetan ones, for some reason) which use IPA throughout instead of a romanisation. (I suppose that by now I’m just so used to IPA being used for phonologies that I don’t even think about it.)

> I started a project like that (also to train myself using web components), except it listed the phonemes of a given language, selectable to the user. I should complete it one day...

So like PHOIBLE? (https://phoible.org/)
I admit to being biased against articles about higher education that are dismissive of Science and Engineering majors. They don't understand the contributions of such to modern society. They talk about art, but isn't a cell phone a work of art? Isn't a Saturn V a work of art? Isn't knowledge of how stars work amazing? What could be more beautiful than Yosemite? I recall a quote (can't remember where it came from):

"A scientist would fearlessly peer into the Gates of Hell if he thought it would advance his knowledge."

I felt I was learning the keys to the universe in college.

And besides, I don't see much elitism in S&E professions based on the college. Employers don't care if you hail from MIT or UW if you can get s*t done.
I don't understand why the author casually says Basecamp "burned it all down". Basecamp took action to set a culture they believed would help them succeed long term. Is having a tough conversation with employees that risks offending some of them burning it all down?
You look like Thor!
Yes

If he was slightly smarter he would have put his content on YT, content-id'd it and have it monetized by the ads by either what he or somebody else posts.

Instead he wants to fight it "the old way" which will not make him more money.

Why do you think the artists are "selling their catalogs" now? Most of them are too old-fashioned to know how to make money in the new platforms.
> How to survive a toxic workplace

One piece of advice I was given early on in my career: "If you can't change the people, then change the people".

Working with people you get along with not only helps keep your mental state healthy, but it also makes one more productive.
That's the history of humanity, not only of the west.
Unfortunately the doctor's report amounts to "we asked them if the virus escaped from their lab and they said no".
> obsessed with the same hamster wheel

Perhaps this is by design? Imagine that same level of obsessions, dedication, and intelligence redirected at building competing entities to existing large corporations, investment firms, or establishing new political parties? Instead of competing on an ever-decreasing probability window of being one of those who are "in the top 1%" of everything in life.

Top 1% high school. Top 1% standard test scores. Top 1% University. Top 1% internship. Top1% GPA. Top 1% corporate job. Dont' forget that those probabilities multiply ... Oh woops, can't even get wealthy even if you do win those insane odds? Hmm. Whose game is this again? Who is profiting from this funneling?

The problem is that right here on HN there will be a few who have won those odds and will fail to see past their personal anecdotes (out of a lack of desire and not ability).

Stop playing the crony capitalism lottery. YC is one alternative, but starting any business (technical or not) is another. Business is 100% about how you compete. If you are already willing to do that for numbers that are not your bank account then why not just do that instead for your bank account?
It is often used as a perjorative but the spaghetti is in the eyes of the beholder.
That's the worst way to create passwords.

It's too chaotic, which makes it hard to remember, which forces the user to save it in a password manager (or worse, write it down). And since it's going into the password manager, you can just go full random.
> Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits).

I agree with the general sentiment, but I think it's worth adding in a couple of caveats.

The demand to get into a top university in the US is so high that even if you meet all of the prerequisites, getting accepted into Tier 1 university relies on an uncomfortable and ever growing amount of luck.

What people forget is that this dynamic is driven by growing demand, and that an increasing number of qualified applicants are being pushed into lower tier universities. While this isn't an absolute guarantee that the overall quality, and marketability, of these universities will increase, this is, in fact, what has been happening.

So yes, work hard, but don't set your goal on achieving a target that is driven as much by random chance as it is by your own effort.
For swe, I've rarely seen it happen except with junior engineers and end-of-career engineers.
You would be correct, that is indeed a large part of modern "education". See the signaling theory of education for more.
Also, look at all that legroom. What a fantasy.
I don't have Elixir experience, but the natural way to get started in modeling data and state in Clojure quite obviously involves less ceremony and scaffolding than what you do in Haskell, and is less work to change around.

Also, it's not just the amount of work, it's the complexity of the language. Clojure is really simple, so you don't h ave to spend much of your cognitive capacity juggling things related to the language or operating a mental simulation of the type system.
No, there is not enough snowpack. It's currently well below the seasonal average for the last 15 years [1], the average for that period is lower than the historical average was when California water policy was first established, and 2014 was the driest period California had experienced for the last 1200 years [2]. Only 2017 and 2019 provided some relief since then.

Current models predict a warmer and wetter California punctuated by extremely dry periods [3]. This is really bad news for a couple of reasons: Sierra snowpack accounts for around 70% of the state's overall water storage, which means it would need to double its total liquid water storage (and where is that supposed to go?), and agriculture is an important part of California's economy and contributes significantly to national food production, but also uses 80% of the state's water supply.

And then there are the aquifers. Subterranean water has been pumped out faster than it has refilled for decades [5], and wells have had to be dug deeper and deeper. In 2016, some communities ran entirely out of water because they were built on underground water supplies that had gone dry. Some of this water storage can't be replenished, because the substrate that stores the water gets compressed as water is extracted and then can't store water again.

Considered altogether, it is currently impossible to collect enough warm water to meet the state's needs.

I love California but the long term water outlook for the state might be enough to get me to move elsewhere. It's very grim.

[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/03/02/sierra-snowpack-at-61...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

[3]: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climat...

[4]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2016/3062/fs20163062.pdf [pdf]

[5]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/droughts-exposed-cal...
W3C Issues First Public Draft of Document Object Model (DOM) (1997)
Is everything sequential?
I'm not sure if you know this but as vast as wikipedia is, its content probably accounts for far less than 1% of the historical content that is out there.

A front line historian distills tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages into a lengthy dissertation or book. That document is likely too dense to be of much interest to you or I. But another historian writing popular history books might reference it and also use some of its citations to quickly find interesting primary sources.

In this way, a 500 page popular history book may be distilled from a hundred other 500 page books which themselves are distilled from thousands of pages of primary source material. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, not an archive. So it's not really the appropriate place to house anything but the most distilled of these products. Essentially, all the other material is not relevant. But it's necessary to produce the relevant stuff.

As an example, you can read the wikipedia on Lord Nelson. You'll find most of his major life events listed there. But if you buy even the lightest biography on the man you'll find much more. Why? Are the people curating Lord Nelson's page lazy for not including those details? Of course not. The Lord Nelson page is probably obnoxiously over edited. But there is probably more of a fight about what not to include than what to include. Because the article seeks to be a relevant encyclopedia entry not an exhaustive resource.

My town's coal mine history may warrant a brief mention on wikipedia but not much more than that. However, if someone were to start composing a book on say labor organizing in Western Washington state, they might be interest to consult our archive and the distilled work our historian has done. More importantly, if a historian invented an interesting mode of statistical analysis, having that raw data already partially curated could move them a long way forward. This happens pretty often. A historian comes up with a novel way to count some interesting historical phenomena and they can only do it because some enterprising local historians whiled away hours collecting specific relevant information.

Intesting discoveries about historical economies come from counting of mills and bridges and other mundane activities. The path travelled by important historical figures come from historians stitching together news items and diary entries gathered by a local obsessive historian. And so on.
No, thanks. I don't want to pick up and unlock my phone every time I need to log into my account from a PC.