skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The author (and pretty much everyone else who never used Visual Basic) misunderstands how it's used. The next line is expected to check the Err object to see if there was an error. It was never expected to be used for just ignoring errors; it's a way to switch from "exception style" to "error code style" error handling.

I think this comes down to how you think about languages and features. Is a feature good if its intended use is that it be used carefully in limited circumstances and with careful error checking?

Or is it a terrible feature if in practice, the largely low-skill userbase slapped it everywhere and anywhere they could with absolute abandon, because it made the confusing error messages go away?

I think the author (and I) just fall in the latter camp. It doesn’t really matter that you weren’t “supposed” to use on error resume next except in limited scopes, and you were “supposed” to rigorously check the Err global afterwards.

In practice, it was abused non-stop as a crutch by people who largely didn’t know what they were doing, and it made touching a VB6 codebase hell on earth.

I’m not looking at the language in the abstract, but from the experience of having been handed maintainership of a few LOB VB6 apps early in my career. On error resume next’s consequences, how people actually used and abused it, are what matter, not whatever hypothetical nice way to use it existed in the docs and the maybe 1 in 50 VB programmers who approached the language with any knowledge or care.

It was a godawful feature that vanishingly few VB programmers ever used correctly, and it made working with VB projects an absolute nightmare.
An excellent piece. I’m especially interested to hear stories from the fellow HNers about the last point Jocelyn mentions: how to build 2 shipping cultures inside one company, when your business requires it (for example: two-sided marketplaces with different apps for consumer and businesses).

In our case, we have this situation with SW vs HW shipping culture. On the SW side, we focus on continuously developing features and have deliberately emphasized productivity over schedule-predictability, while on the HW side they naturally are focused more on schedule-predictability due to complex dependencies.

Now, this dichotomy has created an interesting discussions inside the company on the right way to ship products and projects, and to me, arguments mainly come from the fact that people come from the different shipping culture and have hard time to see the benefits and requirements of the other culture.
Ah, well. You think so. But would that hold up if traveling by air so much more, for so many shorter trips? What could go wrong?
I know usa politics are nuts, but drug reactions is not a partisan left vs right issue.
Thank you for the insightful answer.

I see the problem with mutations in foreign systems if those foreign systems do not support idempotency themselves. IMHO, though, stripe should abstract away faults in banks, and figure out how to work around faults in bank's systems using e.g. automated refunds when a duplicate charge is detected, and not just bubble up a 500 to stripe's customers and leave it to them to figure out. If stripe cannot figure it out in an automated way toward the bank whether the request suceeded, stripe's api customers certainly can't either, and stripe should risk double-charging the end customer knowing the the end customer will complain and request a chargeback.

> The most honest answer is that Stripe wasn't built on a data store where transactions are supported

Transactions are not necessary if one can do an insert conditional on the key not yet existing, but then it is required to have the idempotency key from the client enter into the primary key.
> that's the overhead that a copying garbage collector will incur all the time.

Semi-space, or any copying?
I'm not sure I understand. How is the rampant crime wave in SF a matter that divides people? I don't think there's a significant amount of Americans who believe that shoplifting is acceptable, is there?
I'm happy to see goto did not make this list.

Goto has some very valid use cases, and sometimes I want to throw a goto into my code to say, "Yes. I did that on purpose."
The new DA absolutely does not care about home invasions.

There was a fairly spectacular case last year when a home invader was shot by police (because he attacked the police with a deadly weapon) and the DA let him skate.

Burglaries are also on the rise. The problem with your "voting correctly" assertion is that the people who're tired of things and have means just leave SF. This means the remainder of people are fine with it, or the newbies think the problem is something else.
The sandbox is extremely limited protection. There's no recourse against misuse of data you grant permission to use, but in the main App Store Apple can kill a deceptive app
> The basic premise of the state is that it exists to protect life & property.

Citation Needed
> Just give feedback or stay quite.

Your comment is self-contradictory - this is Show HN and they just gave their feedback.
It's unbelievable the amount of depravity a single DA can inflict. An unprecedented number of companies and workers are fleeing the city. San Francisco is set to become the next Detroit. What's your exit plan?
There’s a really weird political element in San Francisco which claims this reporting is all a conspiracy. While it’s true the violent crime coverage has been misleading, there has been an unprecedented normalisation of all manner of property crimes in a way that, to this New Yorker, is shocking in its banality. That dismissal of criticism as a conspiracy is thwarting civic discussion on this trend.

The unfortunate effect of this is it’s setting back reasonable police reform movements in other major cities by a decade or more.
The concern is likely over whether supply creates its own demand. In other words will the commodification of state surveillance technology encourage suppliers to manipulate the environment to create more purchasers in a manner that transcends the original limited desire of host republics to defend residents from domination. In other words will the actions taken in pursuit of a mission lead to outcomes in conflict with the original mission.
To be successful at bullshitting, you need remember the maxim , "Know thy audience". The biggest thing the bullshitter fears is being found out by others who are equally or more intelligent than they are.
This is very similar to my biggest frustration with PubSub, or heavy event driven systems in general.

The concept is so appealing, “Hey I’ll just fire this message off and whoever needs to know about it will do what they need”.

It’s great to have that ability to focus on just the component or module you’re working on, but the lack of visibility on exactly what is about to happen, and what has happened, has caused many late nights of debugging and frustration.

It’s just how you described “there’s absolutely no way to tell the code that was going to get injected”

I’m guilty of contributing to this problem as well. Once you become familiar with the event system you’re working in, windows, DOM, whatever, you can make some pretty good assumptions about how other components are implemented. When you’re faced with a bug in code you don’t have access to, or a behaviour you don’t want, often the solution you’re left with is asking “okay, so what combination of events and timing do I need to force this component into the state I need?”

For example I remember doing this with some third party grid controls. We really really wanted the TAB key to insert a new row at the end. We had to orchestrate exactly the right mix of events and method calls in the right order, with a few BeginInvokes to get the job done.

I wish I had a solution to all of this and other frustrations. It’s all trade offs and a balancing act.
A less cynical approach is that you are paid based on the value you create (or the perception thereof).

Besides, I think people just want to put in their hours and get paid. As long as you don't make their 40 hours a week more unpleasant, you'll do just fine.

Otherwise, I completely agree with your comment.
neat webext but I'm curious why no firefox release? after a brief perusal of the code it doesn't look like the code has any glaring incompatibilities.
Leaving this here:

Human Waste Shuts Down BART Escalators

"When work crews pulled open a broken BART escalator at San Francisco's Civic Center Station last month, they found so much human excrement in its works they had to call a hazardous-materials team."

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-dow...
Yes, you just don't unit test it, because if you mock out the only dependency it has you are left with nothing. So you are not unit testing anything anyway. You know what I mean?
That code can (and should) be tested, through an integration test.
That's really interesting. I'm in the UK and the consensus is generally that the US doesn't give much holiday to staff and that Europe is more generous. I'd never heard of unlimited vacation before. Here the standard is 28 days plus the 8 or 9 public holidays, so about 36 days off per year. In Europe it's more, and often you must take them.
> San Francisco is set to become the next Detroit

This is hyperbole. The Bay Area remains an economic dynamo. San Francisco’s culinary and cultural credentials remain largely untouched. It’s a safe city to be rich around, and that will continue to be the case for the near future.

The distinction important. Threatening the city’s economic elite with ruin is a red herring. Contrast that with Detroit, where the city’s economic elite were directly threatened. That threat forced change, by changing opinions and replacing decision makers. That pressure has been inhibited in San Francisco by its continuing ability to generate wealth independent of its problems.
Why?

Steve Jobs was deeply anticompetitive
and anti user control since 1980 or older. Wozniak fought him to get the tiniest bits of user freedom into the Apple computer.
But...FREEDOM!
You'd be surprised if you've ever talked to any left-wing (and I mean actually left-wing, not what Fox News calls left-wing) people. To shoplift from big stores is to "fight the corporate power". This demographic is particularly pronounced in the Bay Area. My personal experience has been that most of them also came from fairly wealthy families and have never experienced actual crime.
How does this compare to Dask?
To be honest, I don’t know what an app literally can’t do on an iOS device (or Android device), regardless of how it gets there. I expect there are private APIs that could be exploited to do things an app otherwise couldn’t do that could be against the user’s interests.
Tell me what city you're from and I find a scary headline. Be honest.
ah that makes sense.
It's intentional: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Billionaire-Sor...
What is “generic” information? You used this term twice but I am not sure what that means in this context.
How so? Might not want to mention it in the same footnote as the grant number.
A trap the company I work for got caught in for a long time was not realizing we had transitioned from "start up" to "small business."

We aren't growing like a hockey stick. We never will.

We are moderately profitable, fill a small market niche, and are providing predictable income for ten people and their families.

That's something to be proud of. But if you are stuck comparing yourself to the VC backed people down the street, it can feel a lot like failure.
We have the same DA-refuses-to-prosecute issue here in Madison, WI - except the issue is car theft by teens. The DA is an elected position. Our chief of police resigned last year because the police would arrest them and they'd be let out hours later on a signature bond. There are kids who have gotten arrested more than 10 times for the same thing - stealing cars and shoplifting - but either the DA is afraid of appearing racist or his office is so overworked it's impossible to be effective.

Society is running on auto-pilot with no enforcement of everyday laws, and sooner or later things are going to break down in a big way.
Neat! I have tomorrow off so I'll give it a shot.
I feel like I'm missing something with Pinterest. My experience of it is that it turns up annoyingly often in search engines, and has hits on pinterest.co.uk, pinterest.ie, pinterest.fr, pinterest.com etc. It's one of the sites that prompted me to install a browser addon that filters out Google hits I've blacklisted every one of their domains.
Great work and kudos to the Ray team!
It's definitely a fresh look with a lot of lessons learned from previous generations (e.g. spark).

There are a few nice features I wish Ray would eventually get to.

On the user experience side, it would be nice to have task level logs: often time it's easier for users to reason at task level, especially the task is a facade that triggers other complicated library/subprocess calls.

For the scheduler, if there's more native support for sharded/bundled/partitioned tasks and
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/no-shard-left-beh...
Right* (depending on jurisdiction, ymmv). Getting from it articles that you cannot have otherwise is (except for the vanishingly few articles in the public domain, which are not really likely to be found on Sci-Hub anyway. I tried).

Saying that the work could not have been done without it is basically admitting that you got papers outside the subscriptions of your institution. It is also against the policy of all the institutions I know, so could be grounds for termination. And again, this could apply to your co-authors as well.

I am really not endorsing the subscription model, but putting something like that in your articles' acknowledgments really is not smart.
> I find it hard to believe that an organisation with GitHub's expertise and resources haven't analysed (and got comfortable with) the legal issues associated with the use of GPL / AGPL software to train CoPilot

Almost certainly. But what people tend to forget is that "working out the correct legal interpretation" isn't actually the job of a lawyer; it's the job of a judge. The job of a lawyer is to devise a legal strategy that works for the client.

In practice that will quite often mean "yes, this is illegal, but we will publicly claim that it's legal and ride the wave, and the consequences will cost us less than we can profit off it".

Even if it's not explicitly stated like that and couched in vague "legal risk" handwaving, the lawyer ultimately works for their client and that's who their allegiance is to, not to the law.
You speak with what seems to be the perspective of someone who has lived under authoritarian rule and doesn’t grasp that although “consent” may not always be explicit, it is in fact required for any state to maintain legitimacy.
I’m often tempted to think that I would have accomplished more if my parents had like, taught me to read or whatever.

But the most remarkable person I’ve ever worked with was born female in the PRC at a time when, well that was even more of a handicap than contemporary US-style sexism and misogyny, to put it mildly.

This person had to be at the top of every list by sheer character and determination from birth on to even get to where my fucked up childhood started me. And has far exceeded my accomplishment so far.

It kind of keeps it in perspective for me that as hard as I’ve worked, it’s possible to work harder and smarter and achieve more.
not sure why this is downvoted - it's precisely our story and the stories of many friends.
After a few years in startups, I’ve found the only death knell to shipping software – when product runs out of ideas.

You can work around everything else. Prioritize speed or stability, use different standards for different areas, even any number of project management methodologies. A group of talented folks with a goal can make anything work.

But when you’re out of ideas, that’s when shipping dies. Your engineering department devolves into a pile of factorings and refactorings and turd polishing projects and academic exercises and none of it drives the business forward. It’s just busywork because engineers are expensive.

And trust me, they’re gonna get tired of the busywork and they will leave. You’ll get tired of paying them for busywork too.
> refuses-to-prosecute

Almost like selective enforcement of the law is a step towards tyranny and we’ve know that for hundreds of years.
The End of Books
For a free and open source alternative I recommend checking out TIC-80: https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80
Why are you so sure it will set back police reform? The idea that "the police should be held accountable" and the idea that "the police are necessary and should be funded" are not mutually exclusive.
A dry California creek looked like a wildfire risk, then beavers went to work
free is a flawed concept - energy and time went into publishing each paper meaning someone paid. If the authors want to give permission, then she ought to seek it for each paper she's put on her website or seek permission from whomever owns the copyright. Otherwise it's theft. And no amount of civil disobedience can justify theft.
We need to start organizing and go on the offensive: abolish copyright and patents through a constitutional amendment— http://www.breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendmen...

If you’re wondering how to get the public to support it, we need to start spreading the truth. The opioid crisis kicked off by Purdue? Wouldn’t have happened without USPTO. Big tech monopolists? They get their monopoly power from IS laws. The list goes and on. IS laws choke the flow of information through the nervous system of the world and we feel it’s consequences all over the place.
/me hypes the loop...
> pure sloppiness on the part of github

Considering that their entire business model from the start has been "capturing the open-source ecosystem onto a closed and proprietary platform that doesn't interoperate", I'm more inclined to assume malice here than 'sloppiness'.

Edit: By which I mean that their approach most likely just couldn't work well enough for end users, in terms of hassle, if they actually did it above board and included licensing information. So not caring about that was the profitable option.
Guessing that it being normal to wear a mask helps a bit as well. Less worry about being on camera.

I would think SF could charge people with more than shoplifting if it's an organized event. California has "Section 490.4 - Organized retail theft" that covers this sort of thing.
I don't know about those culinary credentials... other large cities have similar amounts of variety and quality, and a lot better parking and less homeless addicts near the restaurants.

Can you give me some examples of cultural credentials?
That reminds me of a phrase I've heard in relation to file sharing and such: "if everyone runs the red light together, there is nothing to be afraid of".
During the recent protests this past year it seems that there were quite a number of people (including members of the press and politicians) who had no problems with theft and vandalism if done for the right reason(s).
With all due respect, this is not about your open source decentralized peer-to-peer crypto utopia. This is about third-party app stores. This is about Google- and Facebook-type companies gaining unfettered access to the most lucrative user segment (rich iPhone users) and data-mining the crap out of them. This is about billions of dollars of juicy advertising revenue.
Apart from the Blender manual itself, I don't think there are.
In general, I also find the repetition of basic things in every Blender video to be exhausting, even if by sticking to it I do learn a lot more stuff. Ian Hubert and his 1 minute tutorial are fun exceptions to this.

Perhaps you could study Blenders' nodes systems? I've found that channels dedicated to shader and geometry nodes are a lot more precise in their terminology and succinct in their explanations. Probably that is because their target audiences are slightly more advanced and, also, the positive influence of math on their method.

Here are a few Youtube channels I recommend:
- Erindale. He's probably the most known Blender node wizard. His videos are pleasant, thorough and accurate.
- Just 3d things. Another channel about nodes, also very thorough and precise.
- Sam Bowman. A channel that methodically goes through the creation of different materials. A very useful resource.
- Entagma. They're mainly Houdini people, but in the last months they've also started doing geometry nodes videos. Great and informative stuff.

There are many others, but I can't remember them right now.
SF used to ge a great city.
> Why are you so sure it will set back police reform?

The effect is palpable in New York. The current lead candidate is campaigning on a promise of increasing police powers. There was direct campaigning on not letting New York become San Francisco, and keeping the Chesas out of the DA seats.
Your last para is the key - unfortunately, the legislative process is so slow in most democracies that it might take a decade or more for most countries to setup such regulators.
>install this app or you’re fired

What sort of backward country do you live in where that's even remotely legal?
I did this! I encourage everyone to do it! Include the Sci hub link with the DOI.
You could also start from first principles and essential abstractions. If you build a solid key-value store, it is possible to construct higher-order stores on top.

Once you can quickly find a thing with some key, any degree of structure and complexity is possible from that point. Column-based, row-based, document-based, etc. All are possible to build on top of K-V. Might not be the most optimal solution, but it is a very accessible path in my experience. You can start defining types like Table, Column, Row, Document, etc. which all leverage this idea that you can trivially refer to another thing by some identifier. For instance, Table.FirstRowId and Table.LastRowId could be used to refer to the logical extents of a collection of rows that might be linked together both ways (e.g. Row.PreviousRowId, Row.NextRowId).
You mean the place where you get thrown in prison then caned for tagging? Wow, I'd never want to visit that police state. Sounds like a lovely place.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/singapore-sentences-swiss-man-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_P._Fay

EDIT: time spent in prison was off by 7 months
> Can you give me some examples of cultural credentials?

San Francisco has a large number of Michelin-rated restaurants. Their clientele are largely insulated from these issues. It also has a large number of independent theatres and performance and exhibition spaces.

One of the city’s problems is its elites can live quite well independent of reality on the ground. That’s essential to the political problem, and why claims that San Francisco is going the way of Detroit can be distracting or even harmfully mollifying. This is not a system that will self stabilise.
> I would think SF could charge people with more than shoplifting if it's an organized event. California has Section 490.4 - Organized retail theft that cover this sort of thing.

Could? Certainly. The problem is that Chesa Boudin won't.
No it's not.

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...

Pretty random fluctuations across crime categories year over year (5% up for robbery, vehicle theft, 11% down for larceny/theft, which is what this articles about...). For reference, it looks like a few years ago SF was 9th in the us for robbery, at 34 per 10k residents. The current sf stats come to about 40 per 10k residents.

https://www.safety.com/home-security/cities-with-high-rates-...