skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't buy the authors testing argument for a couple of reasons:

1. Verification is automated - From my perspective, tests predominantly serve to document AND verify the behavior of code. You don't have to follow TDD to buy into the idea that tests serve to verify behavior of the code that was written. Some applies to formal verification of software.

2. Documentation stays in sync with tests - I'd imagine that any snippet of code is read 2-10x more than it ever changes and tests help with that reading process. Writing tests means you're optimizing for the thing that happens most often AND you are somewhat guaranteed that your testing "documentation" stays up-to-date because as software evolves the tests will need to evolve as well there is an immediate penalty for not updating the tests; there is no corresponding immediate penalty for forgetting to update a specification document. The older a piece of software is the harder it will become to understand: the original developers stop working on it, the documentation becomes stale, context and initial reasoning for certain decisions is lost. In such an environment it's, in my experience, generally easier to make changes to old code bases with lots of testing because generally tests will tell you if there is something you don't understand with nearly instantaneous feedback: write some code, run the tests and it either works or it doesn't.

Similarly, I don't get the authors argument that code is more illegible than it has been in the past. More modern languages make this as easy as possible to get correct. Take something like Flask [1] written in Python and generally considered to be well-written and compare that to the C code in SQLite [2] which is generally considered to be well-written C and tell me which is easier to understand without any prior knowledge.

[1] https://github.com/pallets/flask
[2] https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite
Your concerns are basically straight up range anxiety. Anecdotally speaking, my previous vehicle was the only one out of 4 vehicles on camping trips for several years that had mechanical issues.

The simple reality is that in most of North America you are less than 2 hours away from help in case of mechanical defect. Inside the United States, with few exceptions, it's must closer. You are just as vulnerable to mechanical failure with a gas vehicle as you are with an electric vehicle.

That said, it's currently a consumer choice, but as a tax payer and a consumer I desperately want my (Canadian) government to end all subsidies for fossil fuel industries, and introduce additional taxes with a direct path to those taxes being used to subsidize and invest in electric alternatives.
I think it means SolarCity was run by Elon Musk’s cousin and his cousin’s brother, who ran it into the ground, and then Elon Musk acquired it.
You aren't going to find what you are looking for.

There is Zero benefit to vaxxing children or those that have already been sick with Coronavirus. Yet that's exactly what is being done.

The vaccine is Generally safe, and generally effective at preventing sickness and death, even still above 90% with the Delta variants.

What it has totally failed to do (courtesy of the Delta Variant) is stop the spread of the virus.

Data out of Israel says only 40% effective at preventing symptomatic infection. That also doesn't address asymptomatic spread after vaccination.

Conclusion: Vaccine is safe, and will help save healthcare system. Also, vaccines can't stop Covid, only natural immunity can stop Covid.

So to answer your question, the information you seek is hidden, for the public good. And maybe even for good reason. Admitting to anti-vaxxers that whether they take the vaccine or not will only serve to unburden the healthcare system but not end the pandemic isnt going to convince them to take the vaccine. It will probably only embolden them to start using the words "experimental gene therapy" instead of "vaccine".
I don't think those controls will ever go away, because Windows is mostly just gamers and corporate IT installations, and IT people will need full control over that kind of stuff until the end of time, due to law.
In a debate, both sides of the argument are up for questioning. You can enter a debate certain that you are right, but if you're not prepared to entertain the idea that the other side might be right, then it's not a debate, it is hectoring.

If your aim is to convince others of your views, expect to be disappointed -- ask yourself, how would you respond to hectoring by someone who is absolutely certain that you don't know what you're talking about, you just need to have the facts explained to you? With hostility I'll wager.

I speak here as someone who is pro-vaccine, and who's had the vaccine. I have (much younger) friends who choose not to take the vaccine, I don't try to convince them to, "that's your lookout antivax boy, no skin off my (well vaccinated) nose <laughs>". I take the piss out of them, we remain friends, but in the end it is their choice, and people respect the choices of their friends.
Fair enough; if the aim is to increase the level of discourse on HN, that's a noble cause I'd have to support.

(Note, and entirely FWIW, I still think message could've been presented clearer / in a more friendly & productive fashion - it's usually better to coach and show than to yell & chastise).
For a guy who can cite names and dates you show very weak understanding of history.

Technically both Belarus and Russia area also democratic countries. Both countries have this written in their constitutions.
Common law countries? Yes.
Well article does speak of continual disturbance of 36000km2 to 100000+. I see their damage here NZ, at scales where it makes growing pasture and animals difficult.
I went to an all-black public school after my family moved to the US in a Chicago "suburb" overrun by gang activity and crack houses (yep, my sister and I were the only white kids in the whole school). Most of the teachers were black, and upper-middle class, none that I knew of living anywhere near the neighborhood where the school was (down the block from me). I once asked a younger teacher who would frequently mention her kids during classroom "lectures" why they never visit her during the school day. She sheepishly replied that they go to private school. This was around '92-'93. A few years later the school district put out a poll of the teachers where a couple of the questions were focused on if the teachers' kids (if any) went to school in the same building where the teachers taught, and if not, did they go to public or private school. Something like 58% of the teachers sent their kids to private schools outside of their own area. :-/
It appears the Koreans were the smart bunch among east Asians. They ditched the tiresome Chinese writing system and moved on to something much more elegant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul.
oh, that makes sense. Its been a long time i saw diesel engines and probably thought its a past thing. Apparently not :)
We're not even recycling "recyclables" at very impressive rates. Our local waste management program here in Maryland has a Facebook page that talks about how there are a very very limited number and types of plastics that are even accepted at recycling facilities - and the market for recyclables is starting to dry up. Largely because a lot of the foreign countries that were taking it in by the container ship load have stopped doing so.
Also macOS Big Sur 11.5.1 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212622
I had numerous spars with Namecheap CEO over the years and I continue to stand behind my words: 1) the site is extremely buggy and I been charged multiple times and had to dispute through payment processor since they didn't even believe me that I was charged twice. 2) they claim to be great for hackers, but there are stories over the years how easily bullied, they gave out all your info to even unlawful request from LE; surprisingly GoDaddy stands much tougher, but funny thing GoDaddy didn't advertise themselves as being hacker-friendly registrar. 3) their customer support is in south Europe. Since you can turn on auto-renew I am sure they store your credit card info on file. I read stories from someone using unique card number only with Namecheap and getting it used somewhere else, which they found impossible. It also hurts their "Made in the USA" image, since the owner bluntly said using European based customer support save him tons of money.
Sure there is, the fact of its apparent permanence provides and ordering criteria for a value system. Are you saying that there's nothing - nothing at all - for which you'd be willing to sacrifice your life?
> Here is a fun challenge for anyone who thinks "it can't be that bad": Try to implement a TwoWayDict, an AbstractDict where if d[a] = b, then d[b] = a

I've done the exercise, let me walk you through it.

First, there is no inheritance of concrete types, only composition, so I wrote a wrapper:

struct TwoWayDict{K, V, D <: AbstractDict{K,V}} <: AbstractDict{K,V}
d::D
end

How do I know this signature? By looking at

julia> supertypes(typeof(Dict("a"=>1)))
(Dict{String, Int64}, AbstractDict{String, Int64}, Any)

and the {K, V, D <: AbstractDict{K,V}} pattern is a well-known trick in julia.

Then I tried to instantiate a TwoWayDict in the REPL, and it complains about iteration support, so I implement that:

julia> d = TwoWayDict(Dict{String,String}())
ERROR: MethodError: no method matching iterate(::TwoWayDict{String, String, Dict{String, String}})

julia> import Base: iterate

julia> iterate(x::TwoWayDict) = iterate(x.d)

julia> iterate(x::TwoWayDict, s) = iterate(x.d, s)

julia> d = TwoWayDict(Dict{String,String}())
TwoWayDict{String, String, Dict{String, String}}()

How about setting a value?

julia> d["a"] = "b"
ERROR: MethodError: no method matching setindex!(::TwoWayDict{String, String, Dict{String, String}}, ::String, ::String)

Okay, so let's implement that

import Base: setindex!

function setindex!(d, key, value)
d.d[value] = key
d.d[key] = value
end

julia> d["a"] = "b"
"b"

julia> d
Error showing value of type TwoWayDict{String, String, Dict{String, String}}:
ERROR: MethodError: no method matching length(::TwoWayDict{String, String, Dict{String, String}})

Hm, so length is missing, let's add that

julia> import Base: length

julia> length(x::TwoWayDict) = length(x.d)

julia> d
TwoWayDict{String, String, Dict{String, String}} with 2 entries:
"b" => "a"
"a" => "b"

Ok great. How about retrieving a value:

julia> d["a"]
ERROR: MethodError: no method matching get(::TwoWayDict{String, String, Dict{String, String}}, ::String, ::Symbol)

Hm, okay, 3 arguments?! Let's see how it works for Dict:

julia> get(d::Dict, [tab][tab]

get(h::Dict{K, V}, key, default) where {K, V} in Base at dict.jl:504

Ok so

julia> import Base: get

julia> get(d::TwoWayDict, x, default) = get(d.d, x, default)

julia> d["a"]
"b"

---

It should be documented better, but without leaving the repl it's not that difficult to implement the basics, just some function forwarding really.

Now if you ask: did you implement the full interface? I don't know [1], but I do like that julia doesn't force me to implement things I don't need in my code. By not being strict about interfaces, julia solves the expression problem [2], and in some cases this is very useful. E.g. if I want to create a number type and I only want to implement +, -, *, /, and potentially conversion and promotion, then I can do that, but I don't have to worry about exponentiation, trig functions, or whatever people think is encapsulated by the notion of number.

[1] Well, I forgot to write a constructor to enforce the d[a] = b and d[b] = a invariant on instantiation, and there's no support for deletion by key.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expression_problem
> Current QCs are only good for one thing and one thing only: "Simulating" quantum systems.

That's only true of gate-model machines; for example, Google's recent claims of supremacy seem to boil down to something like that. Premature, to say the least, though the work by their team is nonetheless impressive. The pressure to publish is very real! Investors (even when it's a company-internal effort like Google's) still expect some kind of progress even if ROI is not yet being delivered.

Quantum annealers are already solving optimization problems well. One of the goals here is to democratize access to high-quality, high-performance optimization capabilities.

> Nobody is solving any actual optimization problems with a QC in any meaningful sense

Not quite true. Check out what we did in Lisbon:

https://www.dwavesys.com/media-coverage/volkswagen-optimizes...

Clearly this is early days; but the way that detractors talk about this effort is perhaps best server through a metaphor. Imagine you were interested in Babbage or Turing's work early on, but your question for them was, "but how will I use this device to get dinner delivered?"

It's easy for us with a hundred years of progress to see how a connected world enables those kinds of questions to have very robust answers, but it would have been very difficult to see that when you're standing in front of an Analytical Engine full of inscrutable steampunk complexity. If the applications we enjoy so much on the modern Internet were the actual end goal of the technology, it would have been considered unfit for purpose for a very long time indeed! Intermediate, small-scale applications are what paved the way forward, and so too they will be what enables quantum computing research to continue for the likely decades that it will take before it is integrated into apps that consumers use on a day to day basis.

That said, the sort of applications that we talk about around here are often in the realms of science-fiction - imagine the kinds of scheduling and coordination problems that people and machines find difficult today being solved cheaply using open-source software and widely available cloud QPU capabilities. Imagine traffic routing where every single person's destination is calculated together as a tremendous optimization problem in near-realtime to maximize the throughput of a city's streets, or where large-scale resource distribution problems can be solved in maximally equitable ways to help deal with the kinds of challenges we all know are looming on the horizon.

> the company you work for has a long history of making grandiose claims

The company I work for has a long history of delivering tremendous technological advancements, from fabrication to algorithms to production-grade online systems that anyone can access for free. We haven't let Aaronson's opinion stop us from working on that.
As an urban car owner with a car that has a 300 mile range, when I am running low on “energy”, I will drive the car to a dedicate place where more “energy” is put into the car. ICE or EV, it makes no difference to me, energy goes in at an external place.

What EV has over ICE is that these energy-giving places can be located anywhere - my work, the supermarket, a town car park, a mate’s house, an extension cable pit my window in absolute emergencies, etc. I really don’t see why this is a good argument against EV. Yes I can’t fill up outside my house, but I can’t do that with a petrol car either.
If this is really critical, it would not be unprecedented if we were to see another iOS 12.x.x release.
How many petrol stations do you need to equal the bandwidth of almost all charging happening at home/work?
They treat K9s almost like officers (eg if you injure or kill one it will be a felony, likely similar to assaulting an officer, but varies by state). They should also then treat them like officers and keep Giglio records (not that they are good at that for human officers...).
Animals other than Humans and their livestock are practically a rounding error when it comes to mammalian mass on land. I'm not too concerned about the climate impact of wild pigs.

https://xkcd.com/1338/
That coal-mine flood was in Xinjiang, and Xinjiang has now kicked out all its Bitcoin miners, because the only way it's profitable to mine Bitcoin with fossil-fuel power is when it's subsidized, and it was being subsidized. But subsidizing Bitcoin mining is unprofitable for any government, so these subsidy-exploitation setups tend to be short-lived.

90% of Bitcoin mining in the PRC got shut down permanently last month with little warning, dropping the hashrate by half: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1226598.shtml. Presumably it will nose back up over the next few months once deals have been signed and the mining hardware has been installed in new places with cheap unsubsidized electricity—necessarily from renewable sources.

I agree with your skepticism about non-currency uses of blockchains. Some people do seem to be using ENS now, and I think smart contracts might become usable eventually, but I'm not confident blockchains will be part of smart contracts as they actually get deployed.

As for the 12-years-into-the-internet thing, well.

The ARPANET started running in 01969. The first version of the FTP protocol we use today (USER, PASS, SOCK, TYPE, BYE) was standardized in RFC 354 in 01972. The "Internet Transmission Control Program" (TCP), featuring SYN/ACK/FIN bits, but 20-bit host numbers (divided into a 4-bit network ID and a 16-bit "TCP address") and 24-bit port numbers, is specified in RFC675 in 01974, and experimental deployments started in 01975. Version 2 of TCP is IEN 2 from 01977. Version 3 of TCP, with a separate IP layer so you could use it for voice over IP, is from 01978. 12 years after the ARPANET's launch was 01981, which is when the Internet Protocol was finally standardized (in RFC 791, IEN 128, replacing the 01980 RFC 760) as a future replacement for NCP. The switchover from NCP to TCP/IP was January 1, 01983.

So 12 years after the internet's launch was, depending on where you count from, either 01981, 01987, or January 1, 01995. Even on January 1, 01995, most of the US still had no for-profit ISPs; the closest thing most people could get was AOL over dialup (probably 14400 bps), which had three million users (1.5% of the US population) and wouldn't let you browse the WWW. AOL added an email gateway to the internet in 01992, Usenet access in September 01994, and web browsing later in 01995, all paid by the hour. At some later point AOL started providing actual internet access (so you could, for example, use telnet and ssh and upload files via FTP).

It was clear to me what the internet's utility was as soon as I got on it in 01992, 23 years after it started. But in 01995 Bill Gates's The Road Ahead dismissed the internet as a primitive precursor to the "information highway" he imagined, so it wasn't obvious to everyone, even 12 years after the switchover of the ARPANET to TCP/IP.

Similarly, the utility of Bitcoin is obvious to me, too, and to millions of other people. I've written about it here before, for example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744.
Tesla has, to put it lightly, a horribly crappy manufacturing process. Toyota's by comparison is the pinnacle of iterative industrial manufacturing.
Observe and report, and verbally harass if necessary, in an "acceptable" manner. Using robots apparently is not yet in vogue, so citizen branded patrol might be the current local-minima for this type of function:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/13/16771148/robot-security-...

I knew someone that worked at the SFSPCA and they said the robot absolutely put a dent in car-break-ins, needling, and encampments in the animal-shelter parking lot, but advocates won in the end.

What worked in Knightscopes case is the feeling of "presence" that security cams, even the panning ones with a built-in speaker, are unable to give off. So Citizen branded patrols fill that "presence" role.
Over my career I've had private offices, cubicles and open offices. Of the three, I actually liked cubicles the best. They are far from perfect, but they offer the best balance between privacy and communication.
> you can take the output of SHA2 and hash more data into it

Isn't this problem fixed by simply dropping some bits from the end? See SHA-224 for instance.
I just started using Julia last week.

The REPL-based workflow and the compile time latency just need to go.

Stop defending it. Its a problem. It harms adoption. Fix it and move on and you'll stop hearing endless complaints about it. Sometimes the endless complaints have a point and you need to listen to it.

Coming from a decade-long history with ruby I do think that dynamic, duck-typed languages are inherently flawed, but c'est la vie and Julia is miles better than Matlab. I'm not looking at Julia to be exactly like go or rust, I want automatic differentiation. Don't particularly care about the memory bloat either.

Newbie documentation does need to be a whole lot better. I suspect that would probably get fixed if the compilation and REPL-centric issues got fixed and it wasn't so immediately hostile to your time on day 1.

Package management also needs to get better. Rubygems gets the shape mostly right if you don't look too close at the details, cargo seems to be excellent. Languages created in the past 10 years really should have strong package management from the start and not treat it as an afterthought and not try to reinvent the wheel without understand the successful systems that have come before them.

But really its about the compilation and REPL-centric issues. That should have been a requirement for 1.0, and I can't believe that a language that is nearly 10 years old could have that bad of an initial workflow for users.
Right now, the government taxes USD cash savings at 5.4% (current inflation rate).

There are good reasons for fiat currencies to continue existing, but it is also easy to understand why savers find a currency that cannot be devalued by federal reserve policy appealing.

Personally, I also think the transparency of Bitcoin is a positive quality. Even the federal reserve does not have the capability to trace exactly where a given dollar has been - they are just integers in black box databases owned by banks. They settle net amounts, but enumerating the history of any particular dollar is impossible - even an accurate approximation would be prohibitively expensive. History is integral to the architecture of Bitcoin, so being able to trace where exactly money came from is much easier to do than for the dollar. If governments were forced to use crypto for expenses, it would provide much more transparency into government spending. I think this is especially beneficial to NGOs - they can publish their addresses and the public can audit their income and expenses directly.
Hydrogen is already terrible enough as it is to contain. So now you want to add a bunch of connect/disconnect cycles to a high pressure tank?!
What about dynamically replacing said inner or outer struct? You get absolutely no insight on the intent of the developer. That’s why actually joining a C project is really hard. C simply sucks at abstraction, and can only manage it through convention, without enforcement.

Please show me any IDE that can reliably refactor huge C projects. Compare it to eg. Java. The difference is night and day — what even is the point of text based macros? You have to parse the AST either way, why not manipulate that? And you can say that at the time memory constraint or whatever, but it is simply a terrible idea all around. You are basically running sed through your code.
To be fair, the answering machine was suppressed by Bell Labs, even though magnetic tape recording was invented in the 1930s.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106703
Is the official binary unsigned by any chance?
That is a "one solid example", it is so. It was a bad practice of them. Does there have ANY others? This one example gets pulled out every time the NYT is mention and never have I seen other, not any.
That was a settlement for fraud under the Martin act. Fraud was the charge settled.
Even the name just sounds like something that would get exploited