skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't think of a case of a system like that being revived after 10 or more years. My best guess is that the mismatch between the environment the language was written in and the modern world simply becomes too great for anyone to care after a while.

For instance, I have to deal with JSON. There's no reason older languages can't deal with JSON, but it'll often be inconvenient as the libraries try to deal with mismatches in the type system or whatever, and it just can't ever be quite as slick as a more modern language written with some partial, vague combination of the fact that JSON exists in mind, together with the sorts of techniques used to implement JSON support in modern languages. Or sometimes it'll just be the dominant library for dealing with it just has an old design that baked bad assumptions in, and since it's the dominant library it's the one everything uses, so I have to deal with that everywhere.

And it's just the death of a thousand of those cuts. "But you can do JSON in my favored language!" Yeah, but it's just not quite as slick. "But we have an HTTP client in this language!" Yeah, but it's just not quite as slick. "But we have GPU support in my favorite language!" Yeah, but it's just not quite as slick. And you've ground all that "not quite as slick" deeply into your language over the decades.

So nobody has any one reason they can point at as to why Ada isn't going come back, or why E isn't going to come back, or why Cyclone isn't going to come back... but the reality is that the sum total of the issues is more than sufficient to prevent it from ever happening, and what's going to happen is a more modern language is going to get the support.

Advocates also try to "defeat in detail", in analogy to the military technique, arguments to the contrary, but the problem is that while that may satisfy the advocate, everyone else is still left looking at a metaphorical battlefield that has an exhausting number of "battles" over basic deficiencies, and being "defeated in detail" by an advocate just transfers to exhaustion with the underlying language anyhow.

It probably isn't a "the issue" with Ada/SPARK. It's a horde of small little things, the sum total of which is too much hassle for anyone to want to deal with.
I propose we extend the definition of algorism:

al•go•rism /ˈælɡəɹɪzəm/
n.
1. Obsolete spelling of algorithm.
2. An irrational belief in the infallibility of algorithms.
Any chance you know of a decent video showing how to teach someone to snowboard? (or ski?) I'd love to understand the best way to do that.
In the United States the poor get Medicaid, so it's really just the Middle Class who need to afford the $8000 to hit the max out of pocket.
Well, someone has to certify the university. They wouldn't stay certified long if they just gave diplomas to anything with a pulse.
By "print" I meant putting the words down in a more tangible and provable medium than simply saying the words aloud, which if only heard by one person, is easily enough deniable. Your word against theirs. Printed threats were took more seriously by law enforcement when I was young because those words didn't vanish into the ether the moment you were done with them. They stayed where they were placed (on paper usually) and were therefore usable as evidence, same as recorded (video or audio) threats.

As to tracking the perpetrator, in some cases it's exceedingly hard to trace them down online, but in many of these types of cases, the person or persons making these types of threats make little to zero efforts to cover their tracks (of which there are many on the modern Internet), and would be child's play for law enforcement to trace down, especially with even the smallest bit of cooperation from ISPs.

That having been said, I'm actually against wholesale spying on the entire userbase by ISPs, even though many of them are guilty of that already, but when someone reports a crime to them that involves actual risk to the safety of others, turning over user records for the violator (easily determined who by simple time/date matching in the logs) isn't going too far really, I would think?

I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps I just need to accept that everything bad in the world is only gonna get worse no matter what anyone does or says about it. It's so hard to tell anymore from day to day…
They both favour in different ways. You’d need to have huge initial capital, time and energy for mining, that’s quite a barrier to entry. Staking you’d need just large capital as the barrier.

I would say it’s harder to compete with miners than stakers.
Yes. Because such a fundamental process was faulty, the entire project and anything built on its underlying code has a high bar for trustworthiness. I don't believe the *Office projects are rigorous enough about solving those issues, in the way Blender and other similar projects are. So I don't use them nor do I recommend them.

Losing data is unacceptable.
Minetest – open-source voxel game engine
I mostly like Bitwarden but I really miss the 1password feature where it shows your password in big text with each character numbered. I have a few accounts that do that dumb "give us the 5th, 12th and 21st characters" thing.
What?

The great American comedies are loved worldwide from the classics like the Three Stooges and Abbot and Costello to the "modern" dumb movies like the Hangover or Superbad. The pull to milquetoast, harmless comedies come from INSIDE the US by the usual suspects.

A comedy like Borat can be made because it makes fun of the "right" people, a FSU country, Islam, Roma people, American conservatives, rednecks, etc, so it is New-York-Times readership approved. Keep the same script but change the demographics and you will get pages upon pages of harsh criticism all over the media.

Young people need to understand that there is always an ideologically war going and the powerful people push their worldview unto us.
I was in the threads and I didn't see a single person posting personal information or encouraging harassment.

Cookieengineer randomly decided to claim that "70 people" had called him to harass him. He's now deleted the tweet and there's absolutely no evidence that anyone called him or that his number was even accessible online.
You can't really compare unstructured feedback in a forum / issue tracker to getting detailed Sentry data tagged with a version number and other metadata. Seeing quick spikes of issues of a new version at a glance is valuable data to have.
So what? BSD licenses are being violated just as blatantly. There's this clause about giving credit where credit is due, and copy-pasters don't really care.
This will be a nice case study in if collecting telemetry actually works - will audacity actually have improved in a year from now?
> wouldn’t algorithmic decisions be preferable to biased human judgement?

At this moment? Big NO. Algorithms

- are programmed by humans

- trained on past data (which by definition includes all the "isms")

- have a gajillion corner cases in which they perform hilariously bad

- don't understand the data they are processing so they can't reason something must be garbage in

How's that Amazon recommendation system working out for you compared to a human recommendation? That's the current state of the art algorithm on a very simple problem.
AlphaGo vs Humans is not a straight forward comparison. AlphaGo trained on a few orders of magnitude more games than any human.
This exists actually for software development. I went through the AWS Software Development Engineer Apprenticeship when I made a career change from Military & Government work into Software.

Similar programs exist at Google, Lyft, and a few other tech companies.

Apprenti, the non-profit that administers the AWS apprenticeship, is doing pretty great work getting people into tech form non-traditional roles.
They almost certainly will not encode any explicit biases of the algorithm authors (e.g. “she’s pregnant, can we get rid of her?”), which is already a great step forward, as explicit bias is still sadly far too common in the workplace.

When implicit biases find their way into algorithms, it is usually a specific edge case that’s a function of the training data (e.g. facial recognition preforming poorly on darker skinned people due to training set imbalance). The biggest case of implicit bias in algorithms I’m aware of is when the training set is the behavior of society as a whole, as with search engines: for example, women search less for C-level jobs and so are less likely to be shown postings for C-level jobs when doing job searches (thereby perpetuating a vicious cycle), or websites depicting Black teens are more likely to show them in a criminal context than White teens, so searches for “black teenager” show pictures of criminals whereas searches for “white teenager” do not.

These implicit biases are not encoded by the algorithm developer but rather by the dataset the algorithm is applied to.

In the case of automated firing, I don’t see how implicit bias can creep in if the metrics are strictly work-related (e.g. fraction of on-time deliveries). For the record, I do not agree with automating performance metrics, since they cannot account for nuance (e.g. delivery drivers assigned to gated communities have issues opening the gate and thus deliver fewer on-time packages, which is not accounted for in the algorithm.) However, this is not a form of demographic bias, explicit or implicit.
Yup. When I was painting, I spent some time thinking about what it "meant" to be an artist. I finally decided that an artist is just executing a vision in some particular medium.
Those are of course serious issues that any society has to work out. However the existence of those issues don't in any way detract from the existence and seriousness of this one, or provide any reason to neglect it.
That's the standard interpretation of the Four Freedoms. Unfortunately, I think it ignores that most users can't code. The Four Freedoms, practically, protect developers and the freedom to hack. These are good things to protect, but it's not the same as protecting the interests of users.

It can be argued that GPL'd code (in contrast to a license such as BSD) is less a net positive for users because the constraints the GPL places on how code may be used (requiring any user to expose modifications made to the GPL'd code along with a subset of the code connected to the modified code) means that some developers may not choose to use that code in their application. This results in fewer applications, which means fewer ways for users to solve their problems.

For Carmack in particular, I think that's the argument he's making. Carmack's goal isn't to guarantee developers maximum freedom to hack; his goal is to get his code in as many places as possible (because he prides himself on being the smartest guy in the room, and the more people use his code the more proof there is of that assertion). Maximal code adoption is not served by a GPL license; the GPL license sacrifices a bit of that opportunity to protect the developers' freedom to hack.
I live in Brazil, I am Brazilian. Why did you feel such strong rejection of a black woman playing a white king? I have no idea which movie are you talking about, but I am pretty sure their intention was not to trick, mislead, or miseducated viewers that the Swedish king was not a white male. You continue to sound silly to me.
Working with Bitbucket feels like every click compiles a linux-kernel in the background.
They're looking for things like "how much usage does X thing get?", and this is hard to get from users for various reasons. You need lots of fine-grained feedback like menu clicks and things like that, you can't discover whether a button is easily discoverable from GitHub issues.
Probably not, but so what? It happens all the time, because the non-racist logic still affects people unequally due to racial reasons. Here's the top result from "racist algorithms" in Google - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03228-6

TL;DR: One of the factors for referring people to treatment was doctor visits over the last year. Makes sense; unwell people go to the doctor, so those going to the doctor more often are more likely to be unwell. But, of course, due to historical segregation, generational wealth, etc, black people on average tended to go to the doctor less. So even if they exhibited the same risks, symptoms, etc, as white people, because they saw a doctor about it less often the algorithm was less likely to refer them for treatment.
>Fighting the govt is rarely productive, but they probably know something to do this crazy in-your-face stuff.

Depends on your definition of productive, I suppose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_grandmother_to_suck_e...
If you're from Monaco or Luxembourg, you absolutely have the right to live there. You can't force people to emigrate because they're poor, that's ridiculous. And moving from a high COL to a low COL area in the EU still amounts to emigration.
The whole concept of at-will employment and employees made to look like contractors is the issue here.

This is a labour rights issue, not an “Amazon is evil” issue.

I don’t see any problem with an algorithm that fires unproductive workers, provided it has real cause to do so.

Instead of bellyaching about how evil Amazon is, perhaps we should be asking why it is so easy to classify someone as a contractor so that you can deny them benefits and terminate them without cause?

Beyond that, why is at-will employment even a thing?

For Canada and most of Europe, the idea that you can be fired for any reason on the spot just because your employer feels like it is ridiculous.

They either have valid cause, or they should have to pay you severance. The courts should not by default side with the mega-corps.
Kids Using Soft Drinks to Fake Positive Results on Covid-19 Tests
I never quite understood why Ada/Spark dont get the same attention or love.
I thought it was more about the fact that it's opt-out (if I understand it correctly!).

Companies have existed for centuries without needing constant telemetry... we have many methods that do not require telemetry: surveys, emails, forums etc.

In fact, there is a subreddit here [0] that the devs/owners could easily ask questions.

[0] - https://old.reddit.com/r/audacity

Edit: Also, I think people are totally jaded with telemetry. There are some companies that take data whether you want them to or not so people are naturally wary... what's to stop them pushing out an update that grabs a massive pile of sensitive data and then when the backlash starts, they throw their hands up and say "sorry"... much like Google do/have done.
1. The fact that 1 and 2 are far apart is irrelevant to nodes that were absent for the two steps. It's true that this requires a long absence, but given many people disconnect cold storage wallets for years, we can't rely on this for security. Indeed, the time when you most need to be able to distinguish between real and fake chains (because your cold storage wallets are likely to be your most valuable) is when your proposed solution doesn't work.

2. That's simply incorrect, and I'm quite unsure why you think that. Proof of Work is the thing that slows down the creation of blockchains: a PoS attacker who creates a blockchain can emit blocks at a very high rate. The fact that they are the only validator doesn't slow them in any way.
Not excusing the issue, but did they not just replace your joycons once they started drifting? Mine were replaced at no cost.
I wonder if they initially thought it was a bug in the software, rather than a misalignment in the point system.
I'm not as disappointed as others seem to be. It never made sense to me that they would upgrade the hardware much. The whole selling point of the console is that it can be handheld, despite having much less graphical power than the competition. If they take steps towards upgrading hardware at the cost of portability or battery life, then it's less appealing.

And on a minor note, the original kickstand is an absolute joke, it would be nice to try one that actually works.
No, by they might filter for traits like less likely to commit a crime. Given that African Americans commit roughly half of all crime in America (last time I read the FBI data), such an algorithm would get really racist, really fast if left to itself.
Metaprogramming in Haskell
> it

pronouns are an alternative
Does anyone else here run a commercial service with do-not-track functionality?

I have observed that users who enable do-not-track raise more support tickets and generate substantially less revenue than those who do not.

To the extent that those users are a net negative to my service. Even counting referrals of users who do enable tracking, even with generous assumptions about the metrics I can't see due to lack of data.

My tracking doesn't involve ads - this is pure analytics for reporting dashboards, crash analysis, etc.

Are my findings unusual?
If that were the case, why do Microsoft apps still crash so frequently
> Every single argument I've seen against C++ in systems code has been specious: people act like typing "g++" instantly implants a copy of the GoF book in your head and turns you into a design patterns robot. "I don't like it" is not a technical argument. Neither is a profanity-laced rant, as satisfying as it might be to pound out such a thing.

Well put. Given the style of C used in the linux kernel, it should have been possible to restrict the use of C++ in the same way. Yes there is lots of bad C++ in there, but it doesn't have to make its way into the kernel. The maintainer s can reject code that is uses inheritance, or templates in the wrong way, etc.

It's like believing you shouldn't use C in the kernel because it's possible to write lines that are over 80 characters long.
Apple has built significant brand trust and brand loyalty on the premise that Apple’s business model is built around devices and services and that your data is not something that Apple is not interested in exploiting/monetizing; Google has a reputation for an antithetical business model in terms of user data.
> After a bit less than two years, this vulnerability has been patched on all versions of KPM. Vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2020-27020.

Pretty terrible bug to be unpatched and presumably uncommunicated for 2 years. Ouch.
BTW: The joysticks in the JoyCons that seem to wear out quickly are at least very easy to fix yourself as the electronic switches are just screwed on and not soldered. I bought replacement sticks (including the electronic switch component) for as much as €2.50 and just followed The guide on ifixit: https://de.ifixit.com/Device/Joy-Con#
C is simple only as a pseudocode language, i.e. to reason about the happy flow. As soon as you start adding corner cases and error handling, all your happy flow code now gets obscured by numerous ifs, switches, and ($deity forbid) goto statements. Then, add pointers masquerading as output parameters, pointers masquerading as arrays, and pointers masquerading as pointers and your language isn't so simple anymore.
There is a meta-issue at play, as there is with many of these recurring stories that generate a lot of boring-to-read conversation. That is, "when is it acceptable to overreact to something?". Activism is based on the premise that it's acceptable when the cause is somehow good enough: one overreacts because most other people seem to be underreacting. This creates boring-to-read comment threads because (in the best case) half of the people are intentionally acting a bit unreasonably, and the other half are saying, "well, aren't you being a bit unreasonable?".
I view that as a positive. Like a lot of other things in the US, the film industry has a long and racist past starting with the infamous "Birth of a Nation," which was highly profitable at the time of its production, but you couldn't make a blatant racist propaganda film like that now, which I'd say is for the better. The article mentions "Borat" which is an interesting example because I'd imagine a lot of people just don't get the joke and would also view it as a racist and anti-semitic film.
Perl debugger superpowers, part 2
A mobile game I built in a few months last year:
(Android) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.reckoning....
(iOS, newly released) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sandbox-city/id1512598054

Brings in around 400 euros a month from ads and in-app purchase revenue.
I think there's plenty of data for that, given that it's how UX designers generally do things nowadays. What I'd like more to see is a telemetry library or service that respects your data, so we can say "oh, they're using OpenTelemetry, so that's fine", where OpenTelemetry guarantees that it will respect user data.
I am from the region where Francis of Paola[1] lived. He's mentioned as the first example of Garden Hermit in the article.

He's regarded as a very important religious figure in my region and home town. I am quite sure a lot of more conservative people would find the idea that he was an attraction for rich people utterly offensive.

I find this very fascinating because as I grew apart from my catholic upbringing and started questioning things, after visiting Francis' alleged hermitage, I could never shake the thought that it didn't seem very remote, secluded or uncomfortable...

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Paola
Github is in no way something that can be (or rather: is) used by anyone outside the tech bubble. Audacity however very much is. It is used by a lot of people that will never write a line of code and don't care (and shouldn't have to) about what github even is.
As much as I agree with a lot in this article, I totally don't understand the "Code Kata" thing promoted by Uncle Bob Martin and others. I understand drilling a specific skill in the arts, but writing the same piece of code over and over just makes no sense at all (and yeah, his example was solving the "Bowling Score" problem every time).

So, anyone do code katas and like/recommend them? If so, what does it teach you? Do you do the same problem over and over, or tackle different problems?
Topsoil accumulates at the rate of about 2.5 cm/century. The rich farming soils of North America and Europe are the end result of 10,000 years of natural formation since the last northern glaciation.

Any exposed Antarctic landmass will be naked sterile rock, at high latitudes, lacking any sunlight for much of the year.
m1 disagrees. still my point is, free software is fine with slow progress as long as it keeps going. we do not want corporate overlords to tell us how our free software should develop in exchange of them reaping the brand benefits or tracking users and other stuff
Free as in freedom software produces even more entitled users, since we are entitled to fork the project and do it differently.
That was my (first) point, too though I am not sure if there were death threats - ctrl-f 'death' returned nothing on the issue, and surely he'd mention them while explaining the harassments.
It takes discipline.

Any piece of code lives in at least two worlds, usually more. It depends on other code, and other code depends on it. It is also relevant to requirements, objects and processes in the "real world".

Get over the fear that you will "lose" the content of open browser and IDE tabs; more likely you will have a hard time navigating and get distracted. Close applications that you are not using. Disable notifications in your operating system. Delete breakpoints regularly. Develop a single "highly effective" strategy to find code that you're looking for and apply it consistently. (e.g. go down through the hierarchy of the "Project" view.)

Eclipse has a "working set" feature that shows only selected code in the "Project" and similar views. It's a lifesaver.

Adding a second or third screen helps (if you use it with discipline), as does pulling individual editors out of your IDE to float in their own windows you can tile. Notes on a piece of paper (I have huge numbers of 'reject' 4x6 and 5x7 cards around thanks to my printing hobby) are great because they live entirely outside the computer and won't add to the problem of finding things on the screen.