skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Choosing a language to learn for the heck of it
I'm a technical manager, which means I do a lot of administrative stuff and a little coding. The coding has become a nice distraction when I need to take a break.

For "real work" I write mostly Python, a lot of SQL, a little bit of Go, and some shell scripting to glue it together. I'd like to learn something I have no need of for work. If it becomes useful later, that is OK, but not a goal. The goal is in creating something just for fun. That something is undefined, so general purpose languages are the population.

I have become curious lately in Nim, Crystal, and Zig. Small, modern, high performance languages. Curiousity comes from the cases when they are mentioned here, sometime for similar reasons I list above.

Nim is on top of the list: Sort of Python like, supported on Windows (I use Win/Mac/Linux), appears to have libraries for the things I do: Process text for insights, play projects would use interesting data instead of business data.

Crystal does not support Windows (yet), but appears to closer to Ruby. Its performance may be a bit better.

Zig came on my radar recently, I know less about it, compared to the little I know of the others.

Suggestions on choosing one as a hobby language?
Obsessed may have been overkill :)
This is because self-referential jokes are the funniest ­— like this one.
This reminded me too much of the time Comcast tried to turn customer routers into public wifi APs. Amazon creeps me out enough, Sidewalk is something I quickly disabled.
Yes, sure, but have you actually used Ada in practice? It's not exactly ergonomic or straightforward either, it's not magic.

You don't hear about the struggles of using it in practice because the projects you've pointed out are usually confidential.

In my experience MISRA is a much more popular standard for secure programming in the defence industry versus Ada. MISRA is a C standard, and yes, it runs missile systems, Boeing braking systems, you name it.
GitHub stars matter Here is why
The fact that you can say this without being hauled off to Room 101 and tortured until you recant proves that this is in fact not exactly like 1984.
Think if all of the young people in Western countries didn't get vaccinated and we distributed those vaccines to the grandmother's in India who need them.
I'm not sure it's the same thing. It's an arbitrary and somewhat dubious limitation, but it's less like "IE gets to hook into the OS at a lower level than Netscape Navigator can" than if the problem has been "Netscape Navigator can run on Windows but has to use IE's rendering engine."

I think a lot of iOS's limitations come from a philosophical stance Apple took at the start of the (iOS) App Store -- iPhones and iPads should be treated like consoles, not general purpose computing platforms. Despite them marketing the iPad Pro as if it's a full-bore computer replacement -- and to be fair, there are a lot of use cases where it really can be (e.g., office worker, photographer, writer[1], even video/audio editor -- on an OS level, they've stubbornly stuck with the "Mac = computer, iPad = console" approach[2] and I don't think they're going to change it unless forced.

[1] With certain limitations. I can use an iPad well enough for my fiction and non-fiction, but not for my technical writing.

[2] The "Mac = computer" part of that is why I disagree with the prevailing opinion on HN about how Apple will "inevitably" lock down the Mac to the same degree they have the iPad; I think they continue to see them as fundamentally different classes of products, even as that distinction grows ever more arbitrary.
Reminds me of the Chandrian. Haliax is afterall a shadowy figure that is obsessed with keeping themselves secret without any clear goals.
Imagine if games were made of discussions on how the game should be.

it’s important stuff but should not be replacing the stuff that it’s supposed to regulate.

Intense rule making periods are tragedies. Everything of substance is easily lost on the promise that we will have more of it in the future.

At the end, often the rules remain about the same but the rulers change. Politics is not about philosophical argument but power distribution. It's not the case that the more you argue the better rules you produce. In the Middle East the everyday life is deep into politics and they failed to produce the outstanding rules.
Good data scientist described here seems to have unrealistic expectations at super human level of know-it-all/do-it-all.

I think there are more well-established job architectures like business intelligence analyst, data engineering, user experience designers, product manager, software engineer etc - these roles in combination serve to do a lot of what is described here as data scientist. These roles are easier to hire, have well defined career paths and good ways to get job satisfaction and can scale well as the business-problem-space/orgs grows.

I think the scientist label should be reserved for those who actually do the scientific mathematical research – specialists who have done deep research in specific areas.

For applying pre-existing sciences to solve practical business domain problems, we need lots of engineers, analysts and managers etc who are all trained with AI-first software development practices and just a few specialist data scientists.
When you compare with inflation, the cost of building this rocket and launching it 10x is less than the cost of any single launch of the Space Shuttle.

Also this rocket they intend to test to destruction. Nobody knows if it has 1, 10 or 100 more launches in it.
>This "foo" still suffers from the same problem as "Option::map" does: it is hard-coded for functions of fixed arity (2 in this case, 1 in Option::map's case).

Hence the last paragraph in my comment.
Navigate between tmux sessions with ease
He is welcome to open a channel with Babel privately and, if unaddressed, make a proper statement about it. Blasting someone by using GitHub contributions as KPI on Twitter is highly unprofessional and awful behaviour
I don't think so. There are a ton of companies that are desperate to fill positions right now, and Gen Z teenagers probably don't qualify for unemployment benefits, so they'd be willing to take a shitty job for some cash.

Plus, maybe the idea that someone needs to present themselves a certain way to the public to be hirable is a millennial thing. This could be a glimpse into the future of a world filled with Gen Z adults, who have internet culture and mannerisms in their DNA.
I'm not a Rust programmer, but AFAIK Rust has inline functions, so if your code has lots of indexing calls, could most of the pain go away with a few short helper functions?

#[inline(always)]
fn idx(i : u32) { usize::try_from(i).unwrap() }

or

#[inline(always)]
fn get(arr: [T], i : u32) { arr.[usize::try_from(i).unwrap()] }

Have to repeat the definition for each numeric type you use, I guess, but hopefully you aren't using _that_ many of them.
But it might. A colony on mars doesn't have to end up being a capitalistic flavour of the day.
> "execution people" can be very creative, you know

Echoing me here :) -- main problem with the article is that it represents, no, encourages, black-and-white thinking at a management level. Most of us are quite flexible, and tick both boxes, but we'll identify stronger with the label that feels more rewarding.
Property taxes are a small fraction of a mortgage payment though. When property values go up, rents usually go up a similar amount, and renters eat all that cost. However homeowners housing costs go up a tiny fraction compared to renters.
Well there is New Horizons[0], which launched in 2006 and is now beyond Pluto. But in terms of coolness, I really like The Parker Solar Probe[1] which is going closer and closer to the sun with a massive heat shield and at eye watering speeds. By 2025 it will be going 690,000 km/h (430,000 mph), or 0.064% of the speed of light.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe
Correct https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units#Planck_time_and_l...
We'd love to figure out ways to reward volunteers for their service via badges/certificates, letters of recommendation, or potentially even college credits (e.g., if we could convince teaching colleges to give their students credit for tutoring students on UPchieve)!

Recruiting retired teachers could be a good option for us too since they have the expertise of a highly trained teacher without the cost. At a minimum, I agree we need to invest even more into the training of the volunteers!
These are not well chosen examples of feigned openness by Google or maybe I don't understand this comment.

I used and loved Google Reader but you can't accuse Google of destroying an "ecosystem" by closing down a product. If it was really that healthy, other sites would have outrageously flourished by a market leader packing up like that.

The Geolocation API that powers so many mapping/fitness sites, local store locators, and God knows what else? How is that not open?
"A Planck time unit is the time required for light to travel a distance of 1 Planck length in a vacuum"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units#Planck_time_and_l...
My argument is that TikTok is making it worse, not better, not the same.

The status quo is that a paper/PDF resume is the initial screening method. An employer committed to removing hiring bias could have the recruitment department strip personal identifiers like the name before handing the resume to the hiring manager.

Now, instead of that, you have a video of the person. Now you’re subconsciously judging everything: how the person looks, speaks, dresses, and even the decorations in their house.

Obviously, there’s potential for bias as soon as you see a person in real life or hear them speak. That’s going to happen at most jobs at some point.

However, this TikTok service introduces new methods of bias to the initial screening process that didn’t exist previously.
I would totally buy a mint condition 1992 Sunburst Yellow Miata for $9k.

I would have an issue playing Red Barchetta in it, because of the poor color matching, but I'd still do it.
It doesn't even have to be at that extreme.

A walk in a park vs a picnic of 20 people in a park from different households.

The former's risk is probably nil; the latter's not. However, I've seen this last fall...
>Good DS thinks from first principles. Bad DS accepts everything they have heard or seen as the ground truth, or the best way to do something.

Domain knowledge - and the humble attitude that can get stakeholders to give it to you is fundamental to understanding data and how models will be interpreted and used. There is not enough "listen to others" in this list (although I read the "listen to customers" at the end). Listening... listening listen!
>You can't not have an iPhone for so many reasons.

This is the most entitled, "first world" problem, I've ever heard of.

Sure you can (not have one). The majority (60%+) of the population in the USA manages just fine without one. 90% in some Western European countries...

Pro tip: you don't need an Apple Watch either.

Pro tip 2: you might want to look up the definition of "need" and "lying".
> pounds are a more common unit if weight than tons?

Are they though?
Bezos should just dump all his money into nuclear fusion.
The analagous situation with convenience storea is: If any convenience store chain was able to prevent other convenience store chains from operating in a geographic area, they would have a monopoly in that area. Consumers in that market segment would have no other choice unless they were willing to sell their house and move.

In your example, a consumer can easily leave 7-11 and go to a near by store at a much, much, lower cost than selling a house.

On Android, to have choices beyond the Play Store, all I need to do is change some setting and instal a 3rd party store.

On iPhone, to have choices beyond the AppStore I might be able to run some much more complicated and dangerous software, but only when Apple is behind in the cat and mouse game with jailbreakers.

The root of the question here is one we have to answer as a society. How much should consumer choice cost (relative to the price of the good/service they are choosing). Maybe 5x is reasonable, but 500x is not.

When a company deliberately does everything they can to raise those costs and thoae costs are very high (such as with Apple), I think we should absolutely call those companies to account for anti-competive and monopolostic trade practices.
juxtaposition (i.e. syntax that has meaning when two identifiers stand together separated only by whitespace) is generally a problem for parsing. Basically, it introduces all kinds of parsing ambiguities. Compare the following:

a *b
a * b
a[n] x
b [n]
a<x> y
a < x > y
e(1) f
e (1)f

Even for C/C++ this is complicated (you need the symbol table when parsing, to know if an identifier is a type or not), but for more advanced languages, it's even worse (e.g. if you support pattern matching / destructuring assignment).

Declaring variables with var let's you also write let or const instead, giving the programmer more options (and making those options obvious as well).

You might not "like" type inference, but it really is superior to no-type-inference - you can always also write the expected type, if you want.
My benq monitor came with a remote. They exist.
On most things, clone() will make a full copy. If your type is wrapped in Rc<T>, then calling clone() on it will increase a reference count. So it ends up being cheaper. If you were mutating things, though, you'll need extra stuff in the Rc<T> case, though. If you're mutating in the regular case, you'd be changing the copies, of course, so the originals wouldn't change.
VW Will Sell You Self-Driving for $8.50/Hour Someday. Too High or Too Low?
RFID is no solution at all, how do you ensure a toddler running into the road is properly RFID chipped?

If you need every possible obstacle to be tagged with a locator beacon, you’ve essentially just reinvented 1970s autonomous subway or PRT technologies that require the track to be completely fenced off from surprise animal or humans or debris ended up on the track.
One of my favourites:

> John Titor is a name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be an American military time traveler from 2036. Titor made numerous vague and specific predictions regarding calamitous events in 2004 and beyond, including a nuclear war. Inconsistencies in his explanations, the uniform inaccuracy of his predictions, and a private investigator's findings all led to the general impression that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor
Trump's blog isn't lighting up internet, showing effectiveness of deplatforming
Good points.

I think there might be space for open source solutions here as well as standardization. Would be silly if after all that fight over "bad proprietary Flash" we turned around and made every website depend on some proprietary streaming technology. I bet over time it will evolve into some open web standard type thing.

And if it's an open standard then you can have multiple vendors. And for some of them support for plugins might become a distinguishing feature. Some might even have that built-in.

But you might be right too, in which case we're pretty doomed.
You mean when they terminated service to the daily stormer or 8chan?

I don't like censorship, but I have a hard time criticizing those actions.
It's baffling just how much situation has degraded here (in Brazil) in several aspects, and I worry about how bad things can still get.
I seriously thought we would have a bright future and be living in an awesome country by the time I was earning any money. Fast forward and now, all we have is massive environment disasters, a fundamentally broken economy, worse than wild west violence levels and just straight out, in your face, government neglect and corruption.

And it STILL ends in feijoada! How! Wtf happened?
Higher property taxes mean that less property will be hoarded, and that it's likely that real estate will be put to more productive use.

It's the rare market where rents are set according to how much it costs to provide the rental, as that would be a market that is oversupplied, and most governments work hard to prevent that from happening. In supply-constrained markets, rents are set by what the market can pay, not based on how much property taxes are or interest rates for mortgages or maintenance costs.
> did some research

How did said research not uncover the problem with NYT itself? I think that's the upsetting part.

As part of a journalistic organization, journalists and editors have some ethical responsibility to be especially rigorous about the organization they represent, similar to full disclosure. At the very least, they should acknowledge what research they performed on their own employer. This is similar to Reply All reporting on racism at BA but forgetting to reflect on their own internal structure first.
Cannot answer for the parent commenter, but I know I wouldn't be able to make decisions like he did.

Just for one specific example: even if I was in his exact situation back then, I wouldn't mortgage out my house, ask friends and family for loans, cash out all of my savings, and then dump it all into my failing green energy startup during its "make it or break it moment". But he did, and none of what Tesla/SpaceX are presently would have been possible if he didn't make that decision.

And that's just one extreme thing that he did that I know for a fact I wouldn't have been able to do, even with the resources and everything else he had.
You can't undercut LG, they control the oled tv market.
Open source tool can help identify gerrymandering in voting maps
... No. At least not where I work.
Work is work, not personal entertainment. Once one learns to accepts that, they will be in a much, much better path to life satisfaction.

Definitely look for a job with high pay, good benefits, lots of time off, etc., etc., But it's extremely unlikely you're going to find one that actually brings you joy - so learn to live with that.
Skimmed it, seems like its a lot of bullshit wrapped up in plausible sounding science.

The H1N1 pandemic is an interesting historical model, and the more deadly later waves indicate that more virulent variants were produced in that pandemic as well. He seems to be arguing that vaccines are causing the variants and that natural herd immunity is better, which is bullshit.

First of all the vaccines are 80-90% effective, even against variants, which greatly reduces the number of people that the vaccine can use to mutate new variants. When there are vaccination failures the vaccines prevent symptoms, prevent viral load and shedding and transmissibility. That cuts down on the production of variants as well.

There's also considerable cross protection in the human immune system since immunity isn't binary like an on/off switch. As a historical example the people born before 1957 were exposed to H1N1 and had cross reactive T-cells to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. So after mutating in pigs for 50 years the human immune system still recognized the H1 envelope protein sufficiently to take the edge off of that pandemic to make it essentially nothing. And we vaccinated younger people (with I.M. flu vaccines) and didn't see the emergence of hugely virulent H1N1 variants.

The variants are arising now because there's a decreasing fraction of the population which is 100% susceptible to infection and the virus is chasing after that decreasing fraction by increasing transmissibility, viral load and virulence. The vaccines will be effective at taking people out of that 100% susceptible pool even though they're not absolutely perfect. The virus will eventually run out of that 100% susceptible pool and will have to start optimizing for costly immune escape variants which will lower its virulence in order to try to get around vaccinated and recovered individuals immune systems.

This right now, with the evolution of more virulent variants is the WORST time to be playing the natural herd immunity card. Everyone needs to get vaccinated to protect themselves and to put the virus under more pressure to make costlier mutations than it has been able to make so far. Spreading this idea that the vaccines are producing the more lethal variants is literally going to get people killed by having them skip vaccinations and wind up contracting one of the most lethal variants the pandemic is likely to produce. That is optimizing for the worst possible roll of the dice for yourself.

So yeah, he should be banned off of social media and you're killing people by spreading this misinformation.

Cheers.
The moon is rotten with metal oxides. Powdered metal oxides. If you can work out how to do smelting and metallurgy in low G, then the moon as a manufacturing base for a stellar civilization has its attractions. We can't manage a Mars Colony (like capital C colony, not camping trip) from Earth. But from the moon? The physics is certainly better, but I'm not so sure about the logistics.

Does anyone know if convection is a net positive or negative when smelting metal? I know that one way to remove impurities is to cast a billet and then saw off the bottom and top edge, where the heavy and the light contaminants tend to come out of suspension. But is that a boon or just making the most of a bad situation?
Sorry. I didn't see it before. You're right.
And of course, the anime based off of John Titor's legend: Steins;Gate (and other urban legends: such as miniature black holes are being created by "SERN" in the LHC: the obvious play on CERN in the real world).

A pretty funny (and horrific!!) "what if" scenario if a lot of those legends happened to be true. I have my doubts if it has aged very well: a lot of the pull of that anime was that it felt very "in the now"... where "now" was ~2010 when it was released. Those urban legends / online conspiracy theories have a short lifespan, and I doubt that many people today would pick up on all of the stuff integrated into that story.
I mailed an AirTag and tracked its progress
The process of activating and then deactivating the software is too much, in the heat of the moment.

Art is weird. I have a perpetual license for Lightroom. It's great because I can click the LR icon and boom, there it is, ready to download my photos and serve me. I don't have to measure my photography out by it, don't have to consider whether or not my LR subscription is current before I pick up the camera, I don't have to hassle with it when I need something... it's simply there.

Same with music: if an idea pops up in my head, I can click the FL-Studio icon and... there it is! Ready to go. I have a couple of plugins that need to periodically reactivate interactively, and in all honesty they simply don't get used. In the moment even load times matter, I'm not going to sit around and finagle with logins or activations or anything... I'll just move on.

I purchased a data recovery program that used to be called R-Studio a little while ago. It's great software, I used to pirate it back in the day, and its demonstrably better than most of the free data recovery apps out there. I've used it once, but again I am confident that it is there and it will run, and that I can confidently offer a data recovery service/favor to friends or customers without awkwardly futzing about or checking before-hand as to whether the software will work or not.

These are all cases where having software ready-to-go is better, and a subscription just gets in the way. I could even argue that having this stuff on-hand helped me get through some really lean times where even $10/month was a difficult price to pay.