skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't felt the need for static typing in Clojure at all. I don't understand, why people are so dogmatic about static typing. In my experience and other on the team share it too, static types really haven't (or wouldn't have) prevented any bugs. What is more important are good names for variables/ references/ functions, code that just speaks to you or is at least sufficiently clear, up-to-date and clear documentation with examples and links if needed and efficient testing/ sensible test coverage. If I really need to know the type of something, I can always use (type <something>) or more concrete e.g (string? <something>) if I want to use that information for something. If I don't know, how to use the function, I have to improve the name, the documentation and my understanding of the code perhaps. If I pass garbage to a clearly named function, I get garbage out as with the static type system. In both cases, I have to investigate and ask myself tough questions about how I understand code or whether our code-base is well maintained.

I can see static typing helping e.g. with compilers, low level software where every clock cycle and byte matter and some specialized stuff. I don't see much point in static typing in a language like Clojure.
> Here's one take: You don't go around calling yourself a crypto trader if you do not have a significant stake.

I think the flaw with that is that I could totally see some unemployed dude who took his meager savings and went all /r/wallstreetbets into dogecoin describing themselves the same way on a dating app. I guess the question is, which one is closer to the more typical case?
Exactly. He was taking advantage of everyone around him to enrich himself. The companies were fine (most caught on quickly and fired him) but he left a mark on the teams he left behind.

There’s nothing heroic about joining a team and then sabotaging their work.
The PassivHaus concept utilises a massive (5,000 gallon / 20k litre) insulated thermally stratified water tank as thermal storage mass, among other elements.

It's used to create zero-net-energy homes in Fairbanks, Alaska.

https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/a-passivhaus-de...

http://www.esterlibrary.org/programs/lectures/chluppp4-20-20...

(The videos are the best resource. They're very long, up to 2+ hours, but also incredibly detailed.)
What about the right to repair software? Or the software that runs somewhere on the hardware to make it work? There is so much firmware running on our hardware in some closed off environment and it plays an integral role in making the hardware work. Sometimes it even emulates other hardware components to save costs. To the OS it appears like the real thing, but it's just implemented in firmware code.

Today, if there is a bug in your firmware you are pretty much hosed even if there is nothing wrong with it, physically. Some manufacturers are better than others, but some are so bad that flashing anything but some signed firmware image will just produce a brick. Most things that require this firmware to be uploaded at runtime reject unsigned firmware. So again, if there is a bug in there and whoever made it doesn't exist or doesn't care, there is basically nothing you can do.

For that reason I think that anything that requires firmware, or has a mechanism to update firmware should be required to allow loading custom firmware somehow. Maybe make it a switch, or require blowing a fuse and voiding the warranty, but it should absolutely be possible to do.

Problem is that this is fundamentally incompatible for a lot of hardware with the way DRM is implemented. For example, on Intel systems the motherboard firmware is involved in handling HDCP and there is something similar going on with HD Audio. Same with the GuC/HuC firmware for the iGPU. It't involved with handling hardware decoding and handling HDCP. No way that could be opened up without making the DRM scheme useless.

So how do you repair that vulnerability in your CPU when it's already out of support? If you could at least load unsigned microcode you could at least patch it yourself, but you can't, so your CPU remainins unfixable broken even though it's physically fine.

Similar things could be argued for regular software, but in the case of hardware repair it goes, or should go hand in hand with repairability. Otherwise you are quite limited in what kinda thing you can repair.
While a focus on financials can certainly undermine a technology company, the reality is that Intel's R&D has not been held back by a lack of cash. Intel has, and has always had, plenty of cash, even after stock buybacks. Intel's problem is not a financial one, it is a technological one. They have failed to make production-worthy processes at the smallest nodes, 10nm or below. This does not appear to be for a lack of cash to be able to do so.

Now, it is certainly the case that a company _can_ lose its technology edge due to allocating its money incorrectly. But whatever the source of Intel's problems in R&D, it is not a lack of money to spend on it, whether due to stock buybacks or anything else.
Complaisance to the smart phone users is the goal here, damn be mp3 player users and RSS users, it's not convenience- it's a huge "f*ck you" to the minority of their users.
programming language*
Hey Carlo, nice to see see you guys on here and great to see a Swiss company in YC! Congrats. Cheers, Can (from Chimpy).
Which is hilarious when you consider that those "old-style" applications had a lot finer-grained control over their theming in Windows95-XP.

Just another example of software developers doing what they do best these days: reinventing the wheel, but worse.
I believe some states used to have a professional license software engineering component for a few years but have since stopped.
I find the cure to this frustration is to accept that everything I love is obsolete and that it's OK. As you say there are historical periods we now look back upon and say objectively they took a step backwards in terms of skill and artistry in many areas. But we don't know if this is that period, because maybe the creativity is shifting into something we can't yet observe clearly.
No justification for why F# is so good, just an assertion that it is. How about showing us some of the parts of the language which are interesting, giving examples of how it compares to other languages etc.
Here's the Key and Peele sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceijkZQI1HM
For each webapp you can use a local lightweight alternative.
“Paranoia strikes deep:

Into your life it will creep.

It starts when you’re always afraid.

You step out of line, the man come and take you away. ”

For What It's Worth, Buffalo Springfield, 1967
For one specific use case. Given that we're talking unpsecified Apache Spark workloads, it's a little hard to know exactly what's going on. I think that the author is correct, though, to point out that there's reason to believe that Spark workloads might see a larger benefit than other kinds of Java applications.
I thought that the selling point was avoiding centralization. I suppose some measures could be implemented to avoid robbery.
Banks basically act as escrow service, and it's not difficult to build this feature with smart contracts (as long as vendor is comfortable with the money being held by Escrow for a period of time, say a month).
I’d guess it depends on the topic and scenario.

> Would this not require quantifying real, objective truth?

Could you give an example?
"Fundamental" in the sense of "foundational to civil society".

Not "fundamental" in the sense of "impossible to deny".

Where fundamental rights are routinely denied, civil society is impossible.
The race to fish the 'twilight zone' (2017)
Nope, never used a real one. Yeah, from what I was reading it didn't have a single-chip CPU - but that's to be expected as the VT05 was introduced in 1970 and Intel didn't release first single-chip CPU 4004 until 1971.
As a disclaimer: I haven't bought a camera (or looked at new models) since 2018

> Mirrorless cameras with phase detection have actually existed for a long time - actually since 2010

I guess that depends on your timescale. The first SLR camera was 62 years ago, with the Nikon F (1959-1973, 14 years span). The first [SLR] camera with phase detection autofocus, the Canon EOS 650 (incidentally my first SLR [1]) was released in 34 years ago, in 1987. It wasn't until 2002 (Canon EOS-1Ds, 19 years ago) that there was a DSLR that could capture images on par with film.

Even if Canon deliberately suppressed mirrorless PDAF (which I don't dispute), phase detection autofocus has been around much longer than digital cameras, and at least until recently DSLRs have had better autofocus performance than mirrorless.

To be clear, I'm not cargo culting DSLRs here. My point is that beyond the change from film to CMOS sensor, DSLRs are not significantly different from the film cameras they replaced.

[1] I mentioned to a coworker that I was thinking picking up photography; the next day she gave me a bunch of film photography gear that had been sitting in her attic for the past 20+ years. Unfortunately, the EOS 650 ended up getting stolen.
This is a bit like saying that Esperanto is the best teaching language. That may be true (I've no idea), but why invest in a language that is only spoken by 2 million people?

I've been wanting to play around with F# for years. Perhaps some day.
It's pretty basic troubleshooting if you can't reach a network resource like a website or a file share. What do you do in those scenarios?
The strategy you need to manage that micromanager
This is possibly the most interesting thing I have read this week. It is possible this happening now. The pinnacle of a social engineering attack.

So how would this be detected and countered? It seems undetectable if the mole has perfect opsec. I guess an organizational structure with a lot of checks and balances might be resilient to their manipulation…
Alexandra Elbakyan deserves a Nobel Prize.
Postgres turns 25 years old today (or is it 35?)
Is the public nature of transaction worrisome to you? Seems like that might also be a political issue.
It's not snark at all. It is setting expectations. At this point in my career nobody should hire me because of what I might grow into. They should hire me because they need what I already do. Concocting some flim-flam about my growth goals would be misleading.

Anyway, this approach has always succeeded for me, including when I told the fintech company that I wanted to work there because it was the job in my industry nearest to my house. Both sides seemed happy with the outcome.
This is really the heart of the matter. On hand , yay, great we can subvert nasty states using cryptocoin, but also could undermine legitimate democracies. Swords cuts both ways. No one can deny the wave of ransomware and cryptocoin are not related.

How do we balance it so it can provide a net positive for humanity?
The Clairvoyant
> (I wish I could get rid of Firefox from the three, but I need to look up documentation for whatever language I use, usually Haskell,

Lynx, Links, Elinks, W3M, Netsurf, Dillo HG from mercurial (openssl-dev, fltk-dev and mbedtls-devel as dependencies, I can help with a custom build in a breeze).
I fail to see what problem F# solves that is not already done as well or better in Go, Rust, or Python, coupled with the wide acceptance and/or hype among other developers for those languages.
Spot on! Thank you for that. Some work I do would be sunk without her and we know there are countless independent researchers who could say the same thing.
I think F# in the context of C# replacement (as a superior language) is not worth it.

If you have a team looking for a functional language on .NET it's amazing - so I don't dismiss it - it's just a very niche thing on .NET platform.
I tried playing EVE once but realized quickly that I like reading about EVE much more than playing it.
Going out on a mission in a fleet of 1500+ in a Mumble server against a similar sized enemy was indeed grand. Shame you end up sitting in TiDi where it takes 30minutes for your modules to activate.
Was excited to read this as I have always been somewhat intrigued by F#, but this article is missing the remaining 80% and all of its actual meat! The author talks about “oh, what really separates languages in the real world isn’t syntax but rather the development experience and job market” and then immediately shows only syntax and signs off (literally).
> I am yet to work with a payment method that does not support reversal

Strange, because from your comments you are based in India and there's simply no way to reverse a bank transfer there or in my own country, can you confirm this? What I've read over the years suggests the complete opposite of what you've said.

A brief internet search brings up:

> Adhil Shetty, CEO & co-founder, Bankbazaar.com, says, "The most important thing to understand is that if a transaction has been made, the bank cannot reverse it from its end without approval from the beneficiary. Bank can only act as a facilitator."

https://www.businesstoday.in/personal-finance/banking/story/...

> According to the Reserve bank of India, it is the senders responsibility to link and transfer money correctly by cross checking the account number and name of the beneficiary. Banks will not be held responsible.

https://www.allonmoney.com/banking/money-transferred-to-wron...
This looks perfect for retro indie games. Anyone here have experience with it? Are the results usually as expected or are there often edge cases where you have to edit the exported model?
> People who build 3d printers don't design the microcontroller used to actually drive the thing.

On the upside, hopefully soon-ish they well. Open chip design has become a very quick moving area lately. We're starting to see more fabs open up to having chips made.

But the makers probably won't be building the chip fabs to make those chips.

> It's magic with a DIY layer on top.

It'd be lovely to see some folks try to DIY a fab. How hard do you think it would be to go build a 1µm chip fab yourself (what the 486 launched on)?

The fab is hard (probably! not sure!), but we're getting pretty good at spreading the knowledge of how to design chips.

Your point is well taken that we can't know everything. I like the above quote, "magic with a DIY layer on top". In the 3d printing scenario, I think we're closer to full-knowledge than we might originally credit. With something more complex like an OS, I'd rate it down to more a question of knowability: no one may know Linux entirely or even let's say (a much vaster) Freedesktop stack, but there's a couple thousand people on the planet (maybe decreasing, ffffff) that, if they had some reason to figure something out, could go & dive in & understand all the relevant subsystems to the challenge at hand reasonably well within a day. Computing drags in so so so many things, there is so much going on, just mountains of code... but our tools to navigate & observe & experiment & view are highly highly refined, are very very good. Computing is imminently knowable, everywhere (except when institutionally designed not to be).

Personally I really think the web as a medium is probably one of the best ways to introduce people to information technology, to bestow agency & learn about systems. There is a consistent, malleable, programmatic (inter-)system, focused on media delivery (immediate results) with well defined rules. But I wrestle with this difficulty you present: even with the best DevTools (quite likely one of the greatest understanding/learning-machines on the planet), under the surface lies of it all is an incredibly complex browser, constituting a vast magical system. One can be a complete expert at web development, but few of those experts are browser experts. Usually there's no call to go below the abstraction boundary, to understand the magic. But it is a barrier. The web is by far my most preferred rich environment, the most hands-on, practical, tactile thing I could imagine putting before a new IT recruit, but it's with faith not reason that I would justify putting them to such a highly abstract machine first. And, alas, there aren't even that many browsers left to compare across- not that most were open source or viewable anyhow, not until very recently.
Hey Can! Thank you so much, man! Really appreciate it! My phone is docked to a Chimpy right now (no joke).
Thanks! You may want to add that to your website somewhere, especially since the requirements are a tad stringent (lots of stuff still supports Mojave, for instance).
Technical Sales
I always thought it was a shame that the Director's Cut, which is what Paramount+ is remastering, wasn't originally done in 4K. The Director's Cut was released in 2001, and BluRays came along only five years later.
It's definitely a policy, in that it's a design-decision that could be changed to make it operate differently. For example, if a good majority of a crypto-currency's miners elected to fork to a new policy, then it'd just happen.

And cryptocurrency isn't really about lacking a trusted-party so much as decentralizing the trusted-party. Which might sound pedantic, but it's an important distinction: there can be an authority that makes decisions, just it'd be decentralized.

Future crypto-systems, e.g. probably a next generation that'll replace early systems like Bitcoin, would probably take a smart-contract approach. For example, a payment could be reversed under conditions encoded in a smart-contract.

A well-developed system would likely end up including a system of checks-and-balances, appeals, manners of collecting evidence, etc., where trust is decentralized.

For example, most folks would generally agree that a mature, well-developed system should allow someone to recover funds extracted from them under threat-of-violence if everyone agrees that that's what happened. That current systems are too limited to make such an obviously-desirable thing happen is an obvious non-ideality. Once someone makes a good system that fixes such problems, in a generally agreeable way that people can trust, it'll likely become a preferred system; it and its clones, etc., would displace older systems, and this whole no-reversible-transactions thing would become a minor footnote in early history.
And who checks that the code snippets didn't come or were derived from code licensed under a different license?
> Most coders are interested in learning how to code in a purely functional manner, but don't know how to do so.

Lost me. This is not true, by far.
It's more like, the spotlight has shifted away from the medium and creative people have left. Old movies, like old books, are by definition more important. Looking at the highest grossing movies of the past 2 decades almost all are based on older stories/franchises, from star wars to marvel , to LOTR, to harry potter (newest one).
IMO, the Psych rock scene starts a little earlier than the Byrds.

I used to play with the rhythm section of the 13th floor elevators, and a couple of folks claim that they were one of the first bands that was doing a lot of psychedelic drugs as part of the shows.

That may be an exaggeration, but it was certainly interesting to hear their stories from when they were kiddos.

However, it's hard to find video representations of that scene... like, you've got a bunch of teenagers tripping at concerts, but that's not even something that registers enough for the larger culture so instead you get normal teeny-bopper representations of them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c6gDKsPQDM

If you go back to, say, Dali or Luis Buñuel then you'll find plenty of psychadelia in early film, though inflected a bit differently.
> I was smart enough not to touch that bad juju PDF, but I wonder if it was an attempt to hack me. Anyone know?

There's no way anyone can answer that unless you share the PDF for analysis (and I couldn't even answer then).
So true but this youngster doesn't sound like someone who needs to win, he is already made. All he (or his parents) want is to look like they are successful by saying, "Little Johnny got 15 GCSEs".
Obviously this is subjective, but for my money I use Go for everything where development velocity matters and Rust for everything where performance and/or safety are paramount. I steer clear of VM and interpreted languages because true first-class support for statically linked native code is really hard to beat (and all of the "but you can AOT/statically-link Java/C#/etc!" promises seem to come with significant hidden caveats that you only run into after considerable investment).

Yeah, I know everyone hates on Go for its type system and because Rob Pike called it a systems language once (although the idea that OCaml is a systems language while Go isn't boggles the mind), but it's honestly so much more productive than any other language I've used. I also tried hard to like OCaml but the tooling was crumby and integrating libraries which used different standard libraries or async libraries or etc was painful. The ecosystem was also quite a lot smaller and important libraries were missing or low quality. While the Go community has its own problems, the OCaml community was positively toxic (if you have a problem for which there isn't a pat solution, then what you're trying to do is stupid and if it wasn't stupid then Jane Street would have solved it already).

While an ML type system is certainly nice to have, it turns out there are a lot of factors that matter more for practical software development, and if you're missing out on these fundamentals, the best type system in the world won't save you (and I posit that Go excels in these fundamentals even if it lacks an ML type system). I understand that this will not be a popular sentiment in a thread about F#.
> (Not from memory, had to look everything up...)

right, great list but I'll forget it all by tomorrow.
Yeah and there's a reason people stopped keeping money in cash
Right, not having worked with it my knowledge of SWIFT is at a superficial level. So I actually followed Bangladesh heist because it's a fascinating at multiple levels.

The net loss was in fact minuscule (in % terms) compared to the attempted amount. Summarising from the article you linked.

> ....illegally transfer close to US$1 billion

> ..The Federal Reserve Bank of New York blocked..US$850 million

> ..with US$20 million traced to Sri Lanka...recovered

> ..traced..US$81 million to the Philippines...out of which US$18 million has been recovered.

So the actual loss is ~US$60 million. I would say the system has worked as intended, for sure there's a scope for improvement which I'm sure are being worked upon. Also I imagine the 4 individuals, the final recipients of the money are being pursued.

If I do a thought exercise with bitcoin; what are the potential options to prevent such a heist? I would imagine within an hour or so $1B would get distributed to to thousands of wallets. Sure, you could trace all of that, but then what? Would you instruct the Blockchain network to not authorise any spends originating from those addresses? Kind of maintain a black list?
From the tagesspiegel article:
“ Why is Tesla risking all of this?”

A possible answer:
https://vtdigger.org/2021/06/13/michael-shank-with-time-runn...
We are running out what time for fighting anthropogenic climate change.

As long as there are still new ICEs being built and sold that electric carmakers could displace, it’s understandable why you’d want to go extremely fast in building more electric cars.

(Appropriate regulations should be followed, but still, it’s not as if there’s all the time in the world…)