skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with this in principle but in practice code I write that’s quick & easy and not very readable is usually not understandable by me in a few months either. So if it’s a personal project I hope to last I still want to keep it simple with my code.
Logging is like a lamp in the dark, you need it.
Turing machines are arbitrary in that they don't derive from some mathematical basis. You could easily reformulate the abstraction in many different ways, replacing "tape" or a "read/write head" with some other quasi-physical concept that don't normally appear in mathematics. Those concepts are spurious, just provided for their analogy to real-world machines.

You can provide formal descriptions for many things - the Perl programming language, for example. I would also call that language unmathematical. You can study such objects mathematically, but they are essentially external objects of study which one is using mathematics to make more tractable.

In contrast, Curry and Howard discovered direct correspondences between logic and lambda calculus. For example, intuitionistic natural deduction is isomorphic to typed lambda calculus. The internal languages of Cartesian closed categories are lambda calculi.

If Church hadn't discovered lambda calculi, they would have eventually been discovered via one of these correspondences.

Wikipedia provides a partial list of these correspondences at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspon... :

* Girard-Reynolds System F as a common language for both second-order propositional logic and polymorphic lambda calculus

* higher-order logic and Girard's System Fω

* inductive types as algebraic data type

* necessity in modal logic and staged computation

* possibility in modal logic and monadic types for effects

* The λI calculus corresponds to relevant logic.

* The local truth (∇) modality in Grothendieck topology or the equivalent "lax" modality (◯) of Benton, Bierman, and de Paiva (1998) correspond to CL-logic describing "computation types".

As such, lambda calculi are inextricably embedded in mathematics and logic, and their core features (ignoring superficial choices such as syntax) are a discovery, rather than an invention. We can't change the equivalences described above, they are facts that arise from the formalisms developed to address subjects like logic and categorical analysis. The same is not true of Turing machines.
In this context, people are basically saying it’s okay steal $7000 from a customer they don’t like, and upvoting each other for the sentiment. The only reason it’s not criminal is because it’s a powerful party doing it to a weak party. Imagine if a homeless man took $7k of amazons money - the police would be involved instantly and there would be jail time
I don't think people understand how hard this would be, or how much it would impede science. To give an analogy to coding: imagine a company with thousands of programmers, all using different languages and writing different types of code (mobile apps, back-end server apps, mainframe code, device firmware). Now assign one or two poorly-paid employees whose job is to review all of their code and find issues with it.

Can you imagine how annoying this would be? How much time you would spend simply explaining to these people what your code does, so they could understand the basics of what your program is even doing? How ineffective they would be at detecting actual fraud, and how quickly their processes would turn into yet another annoying layer of bureaucracy and checklist compliance?

There are a lot of things Universities could do to assist scientists in producing better output. This is not one of them.
I would do this auditing job, no joke. A kind of "code-smell" service, that can yield problematic areas, along with a report of engineers that could use additional guidance/training/reigning-in would be super valuable from a manager's perspective. And because it's a neutral party, they can feel good that there's no politics.

One challenging bit about this service would definitely be quantifying improvements. Since the problem is somewhat hidden by nature, you would almost need testimonials from other engineers on the team.
How is this going to work with carrier grade NAT?

Edit: commercial to carrier, thanks justusthane
If you keep buying mouldy food maybe there is need to change your habits... Or stop buying from that store in first place.

On other side, let's say customer violently attacks other customers or staff. Or causes substantial property damage intentionally, maybe attempts arson. Would you still disagree with them banning such customer?
The point is that it shouldn’t be the aggrieved consumer filing the lawsuit, it should be the powerful regulator with potential fines tied to a percentage of company revenue.
It could even revitalize these places - make them destinations in their own right - if the charging is paired with good food and a nice setting.

For example, a lot of California highway waypoints function that way now, like the saloons and restaurants near the entry points to Yosemite.

It would be a temporary boost that would have to sustain itself on its non-charging-related merits when charging itself becomes ubiquitous though, as even the original restaurants/gas-stations in the article were based on the then new novelty of countryside driving.

> resurgence of shopping centers, maybe even malls, in those areas

I doubt it - you're mostly describing outlet shops which are also affected by the decline of brick and mortar retail. Thanks to the internet and e-commerce, people don't often go on long drives with the objective of shopping, but instead are seeking out distinct experiences (think cute tourist towns with "local" feeling shops) which may involve shopping, not the same mall experience they can already get nearby their homes.
If you can manually enumerate it, and typescript reasons about it correctly, then it seems to me it would be trivial for the compiler to generate the enumeration? It sounds like the job is already done, at least for slow but correct, they just didn’t finish up

Except of course infinite ranges
If his primary aim was to improve his reputation, wouldn't he have created the Nobel Prize before his death?
What should it be called then? I saw suggestions for computing science, but applications often don’t ‘compute’ anything rather make API calls. Data science doesn’t seem to fit.

The best I can come up with is ‘instruction science’ the study of how to structure, execute and store sequences of instructions. The computer is a tool to do it faster, but you can also use pen and paper, it would just take longer.
I don't think companies that are too big to fail are particularly conscious of laws, especially in some European country...
> I saw it working on the OLPC, and it was great.

Which one? I saw XO and it was terrible. I am genuinely curious, did you actually use it actively? Because a lot of people take a quick look and then use their first impression. My meaning of terrible is that it was unusable compared to an equivalent LCD of the same price (I have to guess based on what I was told was the actual selling price of the overall product, about USD$250 in 2008 since OLPC was never transparent about their costs and Quanta holds such data tight). It had lower resolution. Lower brightness and color gamut in normal mode. Lower contrast in reflective mode.

> Mary Lou Jensen’s reality distortion field had lasted a bit longer we would all have been better off

I doubt it. btw, it is Jepsen, not Jensen. I work in the display industry. Most of the experts I talked to were surprised that anyone thought it would be successful. Which explains why the only investors were unsophisticated decision makers from UN. The millions wasted on it were taken from developing countries. That's a shame. Jepsen left the industry and now works on "practical telepathy". I think it is easier to shift the reality distortion field to a new set of victims than it is to actually make genuine improvements to a technology.
Would it be very wrong to consider QUIC a new type of layer 4 protocol encapsulated in another one (UDP) for compatibility with NATs and other middle boxes?

SCTP is also usually encapsulated in UDP when used in WebRTC data channels, yet I've never heard it being described as anything other than a transport layer protocol.
I've had this happen too, but I wonder how much of it is confirmation bias. I see ads for random stuff all the time and don't even think twice about it, but when we're talking about buying a laptop for my sister and I get laptop ads that sticks in my memory.
> You are clearly anti-cryptocurrency and there are lots of reasons to have a strong opinion about it.

I'm glad you know my opinions better than I do. :)

> The fundamental technology is like giving away the key.

Which fundamental technology? EMV is not, nor are the delegated payment models of PayPal/Apple Pay/Google Pay, nor the similar models supported by some European banks. Static credit card numbers are indeed, but this isn't fundamental to centralized payments; if your primary goal is to eliminate shared-secret payment schemes, Bitcoin is overkill, obviously.

Conversely, if what you think is great about cryptocurrency is that it avoids shared secrets, you're really missing the key innovations and advantages. :)

> This was not about BTC specifically so that fee discussion is a straw man.

Sure, but POW has an inherent economic requirement that workers get paid, either via fees or via currency devaluation. Can you name a POW scheme where what I said is not true?

> You just sort of throw out Apple Pay like it's automatically going to be as good as or better than some cryptocurrency without argument.

No, I threw it out as a specific payment technology that supports online payments without giving payees an ability to impersonate payers. Am I wrong?

> Which is just your bias against cryptocurrency.

I think you may have misunderstood me.

That being said, "cryptocurrency" isn't a protected class. You can't be "cryptocurrencyist". However, I do tend to think that, like Jesus, a lot of cryptocurrency's biggest fans don't actually know how it works or what it's all about, and they tend to be among the loudest on online forums, sadly. ;)
When I published those papers, I was new to the field. I was guided by the standards set by the community, by my mentors, by my peers. I was proud of each of those papers. At publication time, I believed I was doing good science, and the belief was re-affirmed by acceptance at top conferences.

My thinking has evolved since then. The community norms have not.
Answering the Techno-Pessimists
Theoretically they might have intended to release it somewhere else but accidentally it escaped in Wuhan.

But no, I think no nation state would try to weaponize a virus of that sort for precisely those reasons: China has as much or more to lose than everybody else, both in the event of an accidental as well as an intentional release.
I'm not saying to hack away and make a mess necessarily.

Sometimes the simplest solution also requires learning and building upon other concepts. Or sometimes, a simple interface is written around a complicated core.

For example: The OP's quote is used time and time again to argue against FP concepts in industry - a newcomer doesn't know the first principles, so by the OP's folksy razor[1], that code isn't as good as less abstract code that doesn't require learning a new concept or two once and for all.

[1] Folksy razors are the essence of every principle-ish-level engineer's methodology I've run into. Corporations value the ability to remove all human agency & decision-making from software development where possible.
Also have to factor that Amazon's customer service is fantastic.
That's the hidden cost in using something else: How is their customer service? How much hassle are they going to give me to return an item? How much does it cost me to return an item?
> built a framework for spinning up new fully-deployable services from scratch that gets engineers 90% of the way there (minus the business logic)

I'm guessing that this was based on first-hand experience building such services and witnessing engineers struggle getting new services up. And not so much that you've had specific training or past experience in developing bootstrapping frameworks. This would be my definition of making it up as you go and is great way to do it. Another way is learning how to make bootstrapping frameworks and applying it wherever you can which doesn't go as well.
I came here to say this. +100 to this.
>Amazon founder Jeff Bezos knew that the number one pain point for online buyers is shipping

I disagree. I can't speak for everyone, but for me I want to know the full price of something as soon as possible. Most online/mail order retailers used "shipping" as an opportunity to milk customers for a few more dollars as the amount charged really didn't reflect how much it cost to ship an item.

Customers are well aware today that "free shipping" just means "shipping included". I think this is one thing Amazon has pioneered that is actually GREAT for customers. I would rather see a law passed that makes it illegal to add more fees than the first price you see (after choosing a non-specific shipping location). It'd still be legal to subtract from that to combine on shipping of multiple items, but never add.
You can't meaningfully delete messages in non-forward-secret systems, because part of the premise of all these systems is that your adversary is recording everything.
An honest, rational, and intelligent way to approach our working lives and it runs counter to much of the advice you'd get elsewhere.

I think it's possible to be disillusioned with work and yet still do a good job and find satisfaction in it. Maybe it's just a matter of finding the proper distance between you and your work.
The fundamental problem is that there isn't enough money in the system and there aren't enough professorships for the legions of PhD students that exist. We either need to cap the number of PhD students much more aggressively or we need to spool up many more institutes and increase funding dramatically. If you set the bar for tenure at people who are publishing in Nature or Science or prestigious journal X then people will just come up with ways to game that too.

The other thing that goes unsaid is that huge swaths of researchers in the US are immigrants on visas. If they cannot find that next postdoc they will be kicked out of the country. This creates a massive incentive to do whatever you need to do to get your next opportunity.
>It's difficult to distinguish genuine romantic feelings from exploitative lust everywhere.

Huh?
Never Split the Difference is a great book.
They were supposed to keep grinding away on the dirty manufacturing while we pocket all the profits via financial services and IP rents.
Clojure goes against so many of lisp's timeless philosophies and principles that it can hardly be described as a lisp.

When someone says "lisp is the greatest programming language" it's these principles that they refer to, most of which Clojure discards so it can play nice with Java and promote very specialized ways of solving problems in order to best fit a particular niche.

The best way to discover the essence of lisp is to read SICP and learn Scheme.
> Especially since one huge strength of Rust is its C interoperability, one would imagine that incrementally replacing or extending parts of the legacy tools would be a much more sound approach.

When it is unlikely that the maintainers of existing tool written in C would accept pull requests that add Rust as a dependency (and I imagine this would usually be the case), why wouldn't you start anew? It also allows easier experimentation on the architecture of the original tool, and breaking compatibility. For example, ripgrep isn't a drop-in replacement for grep and the author never intends it to be, so forking grep probably wouldn't have made it easier to develop.

I think the difference between a learning project and a "real" project is mostly how many people end up using it.
Greater Manrs Alignment Will Benefit the US Research and Education Community
> But I don't think there's any unemployment danger among CS PhD's to worry about

This is why my comment specifically addressed top positions and tenured positions i.e., a position with a specific world-renown research group. Competition for the positions that putting all that time and effort into a PhD would be for.

> employed in a research or at least R&D capacity.

Sure, jobs exist. I am not seeing where I denied this fact anywhere.

> tenured positions do not pay eye-watering salaries

Tenure is what I am specifically referring too. It's a form of intellectual and economic freedom.
> I believe I’ve read that even Church himself said that Turing machines are a more elegant basis for computations, since they are much easier to mathematically reason about.

I'd be interested in a source for this.

Lambda calculi are used as the basis for several functional programming languages, which seems to argue against the idea that they're less easy to reason about.

They're also used as the basis for proof assistants such as Coq. Coq is based on the calculus of constructions, which is a typed lambda calculus. Again, this would be a mystifying choice if lambda calculi are difficult to reason about.

> I disagree with your statement that it is more mathematically grounded.

I've provided more support for my position here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334163
I don't think there's necessarily a disagreement here. You're talking about "how" to approach problems and he's talking about "what" the problem space is.
Good find. My post is voted down, but this authoritative source is literally saying the same exact thing.
Amazon is great for stuff that is neither valuable, critical, subject to counterfeit, or perishable. But if health or a large amount of money is at stake, avoid it like the plague. It's not worth the risk.
Those papers you mentioned are closer to the field of Software Engineering.
> The fact that I can buy a $7.95 item on Amazon and have it profitably delivered in a day or two is absolutely incredible.

Is it profitable though, or is this a loss leader to get more people shopping at Amazon?
Freezing is a local anaesthetic. It is a needle injection. Think lidocaine, that kind of thing. Better to go to an oral surgeon for more complicated work.

Filling in grooves needs to go away. It will change the bite/shift the jaw which theoretically can lead to other problems. Not to mention, the grooves are there to help provide a grinding surface for vegetable matter, etc. If you make your teeth perfectly flat, they won't be as effective. Making your teeth flatter is actually reducing/damaging the effectiveness of your teeth. If it was a good idea herbivores would have teeth as flat as a tabletop.

Where I live, as a kid my dentist filed the tips of my canines down a little. Why? Who knows, they weren't bothering me before. It was something that was decided upon without consulting me.
It goes too far though. The virtue of simplicity needs to be balanced against the virtue of making proper use of advanced language features.

A first-year student is unlikely to understand C++ template metaprogramming, or just about any Haskell code, but that's not to say they should always be avoided in production code.

> The best code is no code at all

This can be interpreted as advice to avoid the 'inner-platform effect' anti-pattern. Good advice, but personally I'd rather express it in terms of the inner-platform effect.
Happen to have an Apple Watch? Pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if accelerometer data could be used to classify common activities.
Never use the OpenSSL CLI to encrypt things. It creates unauthenticated ciphertext. It is anything but "perfectly secure".

I don't think it's even the case that the OpenSSL project wants you to be using their code this way. It's just that Unix nerds (hey: it me) find things like this and adopt them, then write things about how they're "perfectly secure" in message board slapfights. It's a microcosm of the whole problem.
I know, It's hard not to be flippant with the crowd over here.

(sometimes I wonder what their background is, It looks like it's a bunch where their parents were from a poor socio-economic backgrounds, so that in their view when both couples are working for 40 hrs a week and paying off a mortgage is seen as 'progress' )
This is exactly what happened with booking.com and hotels.

Price parity meant hotels simply charged more on their website as well.

That said Booking and Amazon are providing value to customers so be it.
We pay for our collective laziness and high demands.

With hotels you can at least call and get a discount or book with the right cancellation policy to get a cheaper price than booking.
> programming is webapps

Uhm, sweety, just no.
Antescriptum is probably the closest to the root of the word “pro-gram”.
> Something bizarre I have noticed though in junior-almost-senior engineers is that they pride themselves in obfuscating and writing "highly complex" logic

I think it happens because most measures of code quality are quite fuzzy, but brevity (which is valuable, other things being equal) is relatively objective. "Have I made the code shorter?" is a much easier question to answer than "Have I made the code easier to understand, modify and maintain?"
This is effectively required when open sourcing something that was previously internal. I've done it at a company. There could be company internal things that leak in old revisions of code and commit messages. Even if the latest commit on master is clean, it is really hard to know that every revisions, throughout the whole history is clean.
The issue isn’t exactly inflating prices, it’s aggressively punishing sellers for lowering their prices elsewhere where shipping is not included

> Those sellers are effectively saying that Amazon dictates what happens on shopping sites all over the internet, and in doing so makes products more expensive for all of us.
The original idea with prime (for the consumer) was that they would get free two day shipping. Amazon already had free shipping for Amazon sold items starting at like $25 total (is it 35 now?) but back then it could take 3-7 days to arrive.

I can't claim to know the average amount of orders but it is not that hard to meet the hurdle for free 'standard' shipping and (pre-covid) most deliveries now are already in a two to three day window.

Think it will be difficult to prove that the existence of Prime actually inflates the price of goods, net net, absent Prime.
I use "Hacker News Readable Dark" along with Stylish.

It works great.

https://i.imgur.com/OUmTmP8.jpg
There’s only the minimal amount of knowledge needed. I think a manager is no different than a soccer manager. Their role is to train the player for the role they’re best fit for. A manager has to build a team with the right skill sets. And I don’t mean just technical skill sets. You coach the player during one on ones and give feedback, and then during game time, you maybe yell strategic advice but the ball is at their feet, they’re now autonomous unit that needs to work cohesively. A good manager gets out of the way and steps in only when necessary. The more coaching and autonomy is given the more your players develop. The more they develop the more they’re capable of doing, and the more time the manager can spend thinking about higher level ideas and goals. It’s a nice feedback cycle.

I do think when the team is more technical than the manager, he has to coach the team to communicate the useful information to him. It’s his job to be able to synthesize information and to ask questions that make the team think outside the scope of their work, try to find or tease out any gotchas. Lastly a manager should be aware of the impacts their teams work will have on others and intervene when he thinks something might go wrong.

It’s always positive when the manager has a very technical background or deep knowledge of the tech stack, but they should be aware of micro managing.