skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You completely missed my point. Both my examples were when a function returned an object, and the caller has no idea whether that object ever null. It has nothing to do with parameters.

Type hints then? I don't write much Python so your point might have be clearer had you provided an example. But even in the case of type hints, it requires the developer to be diligent about setting those hints -- Python will happily plod along without them.

That's actually one of the reasons Python isn't my preferred language. I generally prefer something where typing a lot stricter. But this is personal preference and not a judgement on Python.

> For what it's worth, I completely disagree with your point. Optional arguments are there to set default values.

Default values can be set via constructors. Which then allows you to define far more explicit APIs. For example a method that explicitly sets the optional properties when needed might be called `CreateFooWithOnions()` and that method is aware that `.bar` is required to be set for "Onions". Other methods that know the defaults don't need to be set can leave those optional properties with the default. Thus the developer doesn't have to consider if an optional parameter is required in specific use cases, they instead call the method for their use case that is aware of what optionals are required for that use case.

I went through a phase of using optional parameters in the 90s and as I worked with more contributors, and other projects interfaced with my own APIs, I began to realise that optional parameters aren't self documenting. They're not descriptive. Instead it requires the user to understand what's happening under the hood of the API. So I learned from that and moved away from optional parameters.

> Default values are so useful that even Rob Pike went through some efforts to use them in Go[0] after refusing to have them in the language.

That link was from early 2014. Back then methods were only 6 months old (in Go). In fact Rob Pike (and others) tried a lot of things in the early days of Go. Some of those ideas sucked and were never heard from again. And some of the ideas worked and are now part of the core library.

Also the ironic thing here is while the API is called "Option" what Pike is doing is not creating optional parameters but actually creating objects with optional properties. Exactly like I've been describing as the better solution. Albeit Pike's work created a bunch of additional boilerplate and ultimately ends up with something that isn't any more readable. Which is likely why that idiom never made it to Go 1.3 (and beyond).
I'm sorry this isn't clearer. The core part of the coaching program is focused on psychology: we even call it "psychological coaching" internally! That's the stress eating side, then also diving deeper into why we make the food choices & portion size choices we do.

My take: a approach focused only on changing behavior has good parts, but traditionally been way too much reliance on this and not enough on the psychological/cognitive side.
Think about the replication crisis as actually a generalization crisis. The study said what it said for the exact parameters given. The question is what were all the parameters and which ones are the final result actually sensitive to?

It’s actionable by trying it in a new circumstance (set of parameters) and observing whether it fails - over and over. Failure doesn’t mean the claim is wrong/untrue, it means you’ve changed a parameter that happens to be important: now find it!
A military trick that can help you fall asleep in 2 minutes
I've taken that bus. I think the change is in Lille, in France near the border with Belgium.
I have noticed that this nagging happens on iOS/safari but not on Windows/Firefox (unless my adblockers took care of it).
Sounds like something a 4g modem could handle trivially.
True, so then me arguing here is pointless, thanks :)
Same here. Honest, guv.
But cross species transmission is known for quite a lot of pathogens. Ebola is a recent example. Asserting it is so unlikely as to be dismissed out of hand doesn’t match knowledge in the field.
Combining some form of automated testing (doesn’t have to be anything fancy) with a debugger provides a very fast feedback loop you can iterate quickly on.
Because payment companies or banks with a history of shady shit are dictating morals.
It started about 2-3 weeks ago. It seems it's being rolled-out progressively, because some people don't see the nag screen. It's very annoying.
Siri Speech Synthesis in iOS 15
I was a participant in an Erasmus programme with a German university. In my case the German University created and translated a course to English and the classes and exams were conducted in English.

There were some rough edges, such as untranslated terms but it isn’t as hopeless as you claimed.
All of the above, depending on the situation. Haven't found one set of tools that combines the best of each.
Check this out: "The rate of strength increase differs considerably between untrained and trained individuals (148), as trained individuals have shown much slower rates of improvement (83,107,111,221). A review of the literature reveals that muscular strength increases approximately 40% in “untrained,” 20% in “moderately trained,” 16% in “trained,” 10% in “advanced,” and 2% in “elite” over periods ranging from 4 wk to 2 yr. [...] The difficulty in continuing gains in strength appears to occur even after several months of training. It is well documented that changes in muscular strength are most prevalent early in training (92,185). (Progression models in resistance training for healthy adults. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2002;34(2):364-380.)
Improving the Trust-On-First-Use authentication scheme with transparency
> But that is not what was announced

yes, so what? We expect that.

Previous comment here touches upon the connection and inevitable gap between the inspirational BS "what was announced" and final outcomes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28255768
I think it's better to look at certain items to understand the value. For instance, a brand new Ford Mustang back then was $2300 when it launched. So in that context, getting a $1000 bonus is very nice indeed.
Rather than pivot, wouldn’t a better bet be on crypto payments? They might be able to pull it off with the right UX or partnerships.
Interesting point. So the original paper (2012) didn't give a table or anything, but said: "Customers who signed at the beginning on average
revealed higher use (M = 26,098.4, SD = 12,253.4) than those who
signed at the end [M = 23,670.6, SD = 12,621.4; F(1, 13,485) =
128.63, P < 0.001]."

Was M = 26,098.4, SD = 12,253.4 enough to infer a uniform distribution?
> What I do despise is that my Amazon.com credentials are the same as my Amazon AWS root account credentials.

This bite me hard last year... I lost my phone and with it my MFA for the root account, and of course forgot to properly backup the MFA seed.

Now when calling AWS support to get back my accesses, they ask me to prove ownership of my Amazon.com account with the same email... Which is like 15 years old. I changed phone number, address, country dozens of times since then.

Apparently I would have to get back to my home country and ask a notary to sign a paper asserting I am really me to get back my accesses. Nightmare.
Yes, the cartel is very concerned about following laws and wouldn’t want to risk anything like upsetting the police to test a thing that might be specifically designed to avoid them.
Sounds like an opportunity for a clone using Bitcoin or some other cryrpto to launch.
Not quite 50 years, but in 1982 under the Iron Curtain two Polish students developed Intel 8080 clone as a PHD thesis. Manufactured between 1982-1993. http://retrokolekcja.pl/MCY7880.php

For comparison original 8080A: http://retrokolekcja.pl/zdjecia/8080A%20struktura_d.jpg

Polish MCY7880: http://retrokolekcja.pl/zdjecia/MCY7880%20struktura%20ITE.jp...

Russian KR580BM80: http://retrokolekcja.pl/zdjecia/MCY7880_zsrr.jpg

And the absolutely amazing gem. In 1983 legendary Polish science education TV program SONDA documented design and manufacturing of first batches in a humorous lets bake a cake fashion. Paper plotters, light pens, developing/rinsing dies by hand, electron microscope debugging, the whole nine yards!

part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJGp7keIA_o

part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHl6m93Hay0

part 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcOTwkT-PDU

Amazing anything worked considering really Spartan conditions. Yields were low and political pressure from Moscow meant later batches were mostly KR580BM80 dies packaged in Poland.
NetBox: Infrastructure resource modeling application for network automation
They must be high on fumes of glue!
For those of us with coupled accounts, is there any way to separate them?
The NCAA instituted a rule[0] on the confederate flag that led to Mississippi changing their state flag[1].

Some changes, like them or not, come from very unexpected places.

[0] https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/29334498/ncaa...

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/mississippi-lawmakers-vote-remove-...
> Rich parents can prepare their children very well, but it’s only changing the minimums.

If you need an example of this, take a look at the admissions scandal with Lori Laughlin, et al. No denying they were rich, but despite how rich they were, they could not tutor their kids way to a good SAT score and had to resort to outright cheating that was so blatant that they had to go to prison.
That is a failing on your part given that the tools are available.
I've begun to enjoy Twitter since I've started to unfollow everyone, put interesting people in topical lists, use Tweetdeck, very rarely engage with anyone, almost only read, and remove people as soon as they annoy me.

Even with all this culling I still add more people to my lists than remove people from them.

Also, go to Twitter a few times a day, not every few minutes.
The thing is, if you speak to obesity specialist MDs, they really do come at this in a different way. They have a much more nuanced view of how underlying metabolism / biology interact with CICO.

I know personally because I used to believe a puritan CICO, but had a "viewquake" moment speaking with them and had to change a lot about what I believe!

Importantly they try to focus exclusively on practical solutions for the population: what will actually work in the world. They detach themselves from a lot of the moralizing we see.
Didn't think anyone knew about that place, that's where I built my experience!
Why do people bring that up? Phone market is orders of magnitude bigger, bigger more important markets face more scrutiny.
To clarify I mean this comment ‘It still seems like California's process is the least democratic.’

Which is a bizarre way of looking at referendums, as it would imply that referendums over the entire voting population are less legitimate than bills enacted by a representative body.
> That story doesn't seem very believable. Why are other people's personal accounts getting banned too?

Fully believable.

In some cases people don't even have the slightest clue.

In this case there is at least an explanation even if it is bad.

PS: I don't hate everything Google do or any employees specifically, I just try to shine a light on the places where they fail like lack of transparency or even basic communication or their abuse of market power to try to kill competing browsers.

They have done good work in other areas it seems like standing up against dragnet surveillance etc.
Best answer and a good metaphor. Paying more only goes so far in attracting talent. You need the job to be manageable, the environment needs to be at the least not actively hostile, and the system the job exists within to not be completely broken.
How does Apple restrict you to a single Apple ID?

I use my personal Apple ID for personal things, my work one for work things, and as an admin of our Apple Business Manager account I can create new Apple IDs for anyone in the company as necessary.

To my knowledge Apple doesn't even have a policy of requiring one account, I've certainly been told to set up separate accounts by Apple support teams.

Facebook does have this problem, they have a policy that you must not have separate IDs, they police this heavily with a lot of automated bans, and they also require a Facebook account to do development with Facebook.
The photographer in a playground example is understandable, no parent wants a stranger having pictures of their children. That is a violation of the family's privacy.

I'm guilty of the home smart speaker as I have a few google/nest minis around my apartment. I don't plan on getting anymore because they're just basically used as glorified alarm clocks and speakers. In theory I would ideally replace them but the effort seems like a large inconvenience since the impact would be minimal considering I still use an Android phone.
Now Robots Can Change Colours Like Chameleons
Up until 3-4 years ago, if you created an AWS account with the same email address as your amazon.com shopping account, Amazon would automatically link the two together, without warning and without a setting to undo this. Changing the password on one changed the other too. This connection persisted for accounts made after AWS stopped doing this, probably for backwards compatibility reasons.

At least when I dealt with this mess a couple years ago, AWS support did not have reassuring answers. They claimed they could separate it, but if something went wrong we were on our own without spending large amounts of money on premium support.

Lucky for me most of our resources were already in child AWS accounts and the rest could be migrated, so I was able to create a _new_ top-level AWS account, re-parent the child accounts, and delete the old parent account instead. At least with that process we could create a throwaway child account and test every step before doing it for real with production.
Like somebody mentioned, companies trying to impose on people what their morals should be. The first time I heard about it was when a nurse/doctor got fired. Although some restrictions can be consider, what people do in their private life should not be anybody’s business unless it affects others.
FFmpeg Lossless Video Trimming
It is wrong to believe just because a result cannot be replicated the original result is wrong or fraudulent. It can be totally normal and is to be expected that a replication study fails to yield the same result just out of chance etc.

Sometimes things are even more complicated than you already believe them to be. And it may take more than just a replication study to say a study is wrong or fraudulent.
Clearing your cookies and cache for Twitter seems to stop this.
Yes. Find it. And when you do, you'll have something reproducible. The purpose of science is to advance the species. Given this, when that happens, this other thing(s) occur (or occur with a certain frequency)

I agree that this is a generalization problem. I just don't believe that this particular way of describing it is helpful. If you'll allow me an apocryphal example, when Newton saw the apple fall, if he had generalized to "all things from apple trees fall at the same rate", he would have been correct for a while, then ludicrously incorrect once the leaves started blowing off in Autumn. If at that point he had tried to figure out exactly what kind of tree produces this gravity thing, or which parts of trees, we wouldn't be any further along than we were before.

Generalizations work along multiple axes. With some degree of imprecision, every experiment can be a success (or failure). This is why we have the scientific method in the first place.

Now, perhaps you're making the argument that this is somehow, for lack of a better term, half-science. It's not right, but it's not wrong either. It's truthy. The logical follow-up would be: ok, where is the second half? In this and many other cases there is no second half. Papers were published, people received awards, wrote books, became famous, and lots of other folks used their work. So even if somehow this is better than nothing, in practice I'm not seeing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctwUkz_0gbg
Better than not, but how much can you trust the word of a third party auditor in a world where government intelligence agencies conspire to spy on each other's citizens because their laws expressly prohibit on spying on their own... where the (one time) worlds largest supplier of cryptographic hardware was covertly owned by the CIA and shipped backdoored units for decades, where our national standards bodies make standard backdoored random number generators, and where the US government used a sham vaccination campaign to collect genetic samples from a whole community in order to locate and assassinate a single terrorist.

When it comes to keeping data private we face adversaries whos only rules seem to be what they can get away with. Against that, full transparency when it comes to the construction of our security infrastructure really needs to be the starting position.
of course. but they could use crypto or whatever to salvage part of their income. And they 'll benefit from the brand recognition that they created.
I have gone back and forth.

I'd say this. I've become convinced that the bottleneck in machine learning is the willingness of organizations to make training sets that are representative of their business problems.

If you are downloading data sets from Kaggle you are going to be "always a bridesmaid and never a bride."

So I am convinced that the royal road to automation is "break the task down into little bits, build something that people can control like a puppet to do the job, use the inputs to the puppet to train models that partially automate the task -- someday you need only 5-10% of the inputs that you started with"

Thinking about it that way I am very happy to be mastering (and I do mean mastering) user interfaces with React and similar tools.

I had a great opportunity in the past where I could have gotten management to take the initiative, formulate the problem correctly and build the right kind of training set but I didn't have the courage and I made the same mistake that almost everybody else makes to depend on generic algorithms and training sets -- something that we all knew would fail and it did.

I won't be fooled again.
Give groups larger grants for publishing negative results too? More money seems to be workable enough in the rest of the economy. Obviously it would be best if those at the top make the change and let it cascade down. But any private source of funds could also experiment with changing the grant model.
‘No one wants to go back’: Covid scuttles IPO and debt roadshows
You can have a look here: "4. Identification of known Solar System objects", https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.05749.pdf#section.4

By the way: you can easily create links like this by opening the document structure view of a PDF in Firefox and by then copying a link to a section via the context menu. If this is not possible for some reason, one could still have used #page=3 to direct the user to a particular page in the PDF at least.
That's nice to read. I'd like to see more dog control everywhere. You shouldn't be allowed to bring your pet hiking or to the beach. It's not fair to actual nature. Even if your animal is well-behaved, its scent alone can prevent native species from getting around as they should.

I'm not a hater--I've owned dogs all my life, but the current culture of bringing them everywhere (off leash!) is ridiculous.
I am addicted to information, but mostly junk. I often check the news, HN, less frequently reddit. I'm pretty sure it's a major contributor to my brain fog. I don't know how to deal with it other than get a dumb phone.
Let me continue the example...

We found that students participating in the "2hr active recess program" have meaningfully better health outcomes, psychological health outcomes, and better grades. It was tested faithfully in 25 schools over 10 years.

It expands to other places. Different countries. Different decades. Different people run it in different ways. The kids are different. In some cases, the kids are already so active that the extra activity is detrimental. In some places, it's really hot. Kids tend to read, or do more organized indoor activities.

Basically, the world is not a laboratory. You're not predicting the trajectory of a projectile, where unknowables can be quantified as a function. It's all 3 body problems all the time.

Yet, we as humans do manage to make sense of the world. We run schools, companies. We learn more about how to do those things. Formal studies are an important part of learning about how to do those things. Scientific mindset and methodologies are useful to this. It's a lot better than just philosophizing the whole thing. The type of knowledge we gain, OTOH, isn't like F=MA. It never will be.

The value of the above study does relate/imply to it containing knowledge. It's a partial knowledge of a general problem. It is not complete knowledge of a particular problem, like you would get in a lab. Neither lab experiments or wild studies tend to replicate in one another's world.

No matter how good the study, how many times it replicated, or how well it worked throughout the 80s and 90s... there's no guarantee that your program is working well or a guaranteed explanation for why it isn't.
Yeah make it so confusing nobody buys anything!
Honestly this is a pretty good description of the Fella program: "A holistic approach which addresses trauma, reasons for emotional eating, lifestyle replacements, recalibration of palate, satiation even at a deficit, and all the rest."

We designed Fella because "throwing drugs at it" is not the best solution for patients.

The crucial difference to your approach is the addition of the medication. Which if you speak to any obesity specialist MD, is exactly what they'd recommend: pharmacotherapy + psychological & behavioral intervention.

Please do not let moral posturing cause you to underrate the importance of a holistic approach which includes medication-assistance.
If you check out the end of the thread you can see that they stayed overnight in a hotel in Morecambe and took the train back the next morning. There wouldn't be a train to catch at gone midnight when they arrived in Morecambe (the last sensible train option to London leaves at about 20:00 and takes three hours).

I wonder if they had a plan B for accommodation if they'd missed that last bus to Morecambe, though...
One of my most exciting bus journey was on a very straight and smooth road which the driver did probably above 80/100 Km/h regardless of the speed bumps we encountered along the way. My ass got some air that day (in the skateboard sense).

- Bangladesh
Recursive parsing is a completely valid concept, but it's unnatural at first to hand-write parsers with it. I have tried it - even wrote a prototype DSL in Haskell (the CPS monad is very useful for that), but what I end up doing is using the DSL to write down the LR state machine, bottom up. This is eerily familiar to embedded and GUI programming where internal state matters and the program reacts to input. It might even be a better way to incorporate ad-hoc code that has side effects. However, most people think about programming languages top-down and use grammars to describe them.
Though there's something to be said about die size. If you can't reach 250mm2 on a single die, that's much more mockable than wanting multiple dies to build your 900mm2 server CPU.