skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey HN! We're building Docstring, a tool that can automatically generate documentation for Python, Ruby, and Javascript (with more languages soon to come), and then makes sure the docs stay up to date whenever the code changes so you don't have to. We integrate into your IDE (currently VSCode and Vim, IntelliJ products soon) and generate docs inline with your code just as normal. When you save, the code and docs are uploaded to us so you can browse and read online, and see stats like what the most under-documented portions of your codebase are.

Background: My co-founder and I have been programming for 10+ years each, and like many of you I'm sure, have run into old, incomplete, or entirely incorrect documentation more times than we can count. We believe that this happens for a few main reasons:

First, existing tools don't really support you in writing docs. They may autogenerate a few lines of boilerplate, but nothing links the docs to the code itself. This is true both for top of (function|class) docstrings, but is even more true for documentation which is in completely separate files like READMEs, architecture diagrams, a wiki, etc. We believe that by being more intelligent about understanding what is documenting what, we can make the experience better for everyone, both on the writing side, and also on the reading side.

Second, doc writing is time consuming for something that feels like gives little immediate gain, and is also not ingrained in many companies engineering culture. In reality, it helps your teammates _now_ since they can more easily comprehend what you wrote, and in the long term, it of course becomes necessary as people come and go (or even just to remind yourself of what you wrote a few months ago). It's just hard to be driven to do something when the payoff may be a few months down the line, especially when you have a deadline to ship something next week.

We're curious to hear what you all think both about the product and about the issue in general.

Thanks.
I switch between the american style for persuasion, and the british style for precision. Am also Canadian, so a metanational approach is normal here. I also keep copies of the Chicago Manual and Strunk & White, which are useful for knowing which rules to break. Ain't never had much of a problem, consequently.
Something I had completely forgotten. I was writing a modem pool software server for a custom payment gateway back around 2004. Point of sale terminals would normally be configured for around 9600 baud for this reason. Payloads were typically small and link establishment was the priority.
Notably, one of the big benefits from the recent move away from coal is the cleaner air and the healthier lungs that it creates (this is also true of gas, though not as much as coal). So even the energy bits are about health too.

> Economists believe that in 2030, the Clean Power Plan could save the country $20 billion in climate-related costs and deliver $14 billion to $34 billion in health benefits. The shift to energy efficiency and cleaner power will also save the average American family $85 on its electricity bills in 2030.

Similar effects are found for various similar things, like the Clean Air Act, and California's auto emission legistlation.
https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/progress-cleaning...
OK, but neither Nike nor Disney is what the term "company store" usually implies (especially in a coal mining context). It's a place that you have to use, and that overcharges you.
An ideal social platform should aim for its users to spend the least amount of time behind screen (and the most with each other). Facebook has the opposite aim. This simply cannot align.
There is definitely a terminology problem. "Automatic memory management" is a more precise term than "garbage collection". It refers to the more user visible trait, and pairs better with the antonym of "manual memory management" which is much more commonly seen. I would encourage people to use "AMM" as a term even if in their coding they do not use it. :-) "AMM" also begs the right questions such as "automatic -- in what sense, exactly?" It also tracks with the primordial C "auto" for stack variables (the automatically managed part of C - yes I am aware modern C++ repurposed it). It might even make some discussions have less talking past each other. This kind of oceanliner ship is hard to turn, though.

There are a few high profile prog.langs and environments like Java/Go/old Lisp stop-the-world/etc. style where (some) people struggle with "GC". These struggles often give AMM itself a bad reputation - while C stack variables (often coupled with what people call "value types" today) are often the way to be very, very fast (yes, because of mostly CPU-private stacks..even so).

Nim is very fast and has many choices in AMM from none to Boehm-Wiser to its own tracing variant to a new extremely low overhead ARC and ORC that have more Rust-ike aspects (but copying in some cases to be safe which is just about 10x easier to use in deviousmeters). With a TinyC/tcc backend Nim yields near Interpreter/REPL-like edit/compile/test cycles. It's really a joy to write code in most of the time. People should look into Nim more.
Why Authorization Is Hard
> Look at the chess moves. They're a monster.

Brilliantly said. In the early days of MP3s I ripped all my CDs and refused to get that content locked into Microsoft's platform as I wanted control. Today I find myself so deeply tied to Apple's platform that I don't think I can get out.

I think we need the government to step in and require open APIs when a company is vertically integrated to allow competition in. E.g. you built the phone and the cloud service. Fine every cloud service app on the phone has to support an API that allows me to use the phone with a different vendor's cloud service. And we have precedent for this too, e.g. at one point I could only buy a landline phone from Bell, the gov. came along and told ATT they had to allow other companies to provide landline phones that would run on Bell's network.

My photos library is larger than disk space, so if I wanted to export photos out of the cloud I'd probably have to do it manually in stages. And I've lost my original MP3s somewhere along the line. Yikes.
It is classic HN that this is one of the most active posts of the week!
Facebook seems to have an even better performance implementation using sqrt. Might make sense to port that over to Rust. https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/stats/TD...
Let me remind you that being a hypocrite does not make one wrong.

If I smoke and I tell you smoking causes cancer, will you disbelieve me?

It's actually a strange form of argument from authority: you don't follow your own rule, and I believe your honest self that I think you're showing by not following it.

If anything it should tell you something that a guy who is milking the system says the system is broken. That at least is a first hand witness.
Apple made an exception for Amazon (to not have to use IAP for books purchased in the Kindle app).

Amazon released an ad showing how easy it was to move books between iOS and Android.

Apple didn't like this ad, so revoked the original exception.

Amazon removed the ability to purchase books from the Kindle app.

End result – experience is shittier for all users, but Apple gets a fraction of a percent more platform lock-in.
Some parts of mathematics deal with infinite sequences, that is, actually infinite lists of numbers. It's usually assumed, and important for analysis, that these numbers are considered to be "all there" right from the beginning. You can do operations like: Compute the limit. Add up all of its elements. Determine whether two sequences are identical for all entries after the trillionth.

I think this is often part of the misunderstanding when you stumble into a post by someone who's confused about 0.999... = 1. People sometimes write things like: "0.999... only moves closer and closer to 1, it never reaches 1." I think that highlights a deeper point than people usually give these comments credit for. The thing is, 0.999... doesn't "move" anywhere, it's considered a completed object right from the beginning.

Anyway, the point is that Turing machines are not like this at all. They only look at a fixed-size part of the tape during each step, from this follows that they have only used a finite amount of tape at each point of their execution.

So for any given (halting) computation, you don't actually need an infinite tape, you just need "enough", without changing the result. This is important because it makes Turing machines a model for practical computers. For example, the device you're reading this on has gigabytes of tape, and that's big enough for many, many, many kinds of computation.
Show HN: NFT Drop Cal
The biggest NFT calendar (rarity.tools) keeps ignoring my NFT project and many others with no explanation, so over the weekend I made cleaner NFT calendar which list projects transparently for free.

The stack is React / Next.js on Vercel.com with styled-components and plain CSS for the frontend and Django Rest Framework on Heroku for the backend.

Feedback and suggestions welcome!
Just tried it - there is no significant difference between Java 8 and 11! They both start around 6.5s (JVM running for 7.4s). Java 17 starts the app in approximately 5.9s (JVM running for 6.7s).
It's been amazing how fast they can burn so much goodwill.

Up until recently I was on the verge of switching from Pixel to iPhone. There's no way in hell I'm switching now.
You could bake 45 pies in 1 hour, and they could all be terrible pies that can't be sold, and you could burn down half the bakery in the process.

In the same way, a developer could ship a bunch of features, but they could all be "half-baked" and a nightmare to maintain.

You can inspect the pies made by your staff. Terrible pies that can’t be sold either look bad (misshapen, burnt, leaking) or taste bad (too sweet, not sweet enough, salty, over/undercooked). It’s not difficult to figure out.

On the other hand, evaluating a developer’s productivity and quality of work would require a lot of code review which takes time and skill and also may require the developer to be present, wasting their time and lowering productivity. Push the review and eval process far enough and you really risk bringing down that developer to an unacceptably low level of productivity.
github was a mistake
Since we are talking fantasy land, why not?

The base compensation could be the skill / productivity part of the reward.

But who is to say the 8 hours of life risked by the kid in the mail room is worth less that then 8 of life risked by the CEO. We all only live about 80years. We only work for about 40 of them. If you show up and do your best every day to make the company successful, then that's good enough for me.
That's not so simple. A lot of the jobs around the beltway are high paying because they depend on taxes in some way, eg defense.
There's nothing to represent a dish that went into the oven, there's no leek, no aspergus, no cooked meat outside of a poultry leg, some cartoonish meat on bone and bacon, only one type of cheese that's again a cartoonish cheese wedge, no cereal except for rice and an ear of corn, no zucchini, no nuts except the peanut, no round bread (not round flatbread, more like sourdough), no pasta except for spaghetti, no fish outside of very specific dishes, no soup. That's without thinking too much about it.

It's a very "I live in the city and mostly eat outside, often at ethnic food places" centric vision of food.

Edit: there's nothing wrong with living in the city and mostly eating outside, often at ethnic food places. But it's erasing a lot of people.
Always wondered why people don't just create their own using something like Outline on a DO droplet (bithost) ? How is Mullvad better?

I don't understand how we should trust a company we know nothing about other than the text they put on their website which basically means nothing.
Came to mention this. It really was a fantastic joke. May it rest in peace. pours one out
Outside the USA , apple is not that much of a big deal. But it s interesting how disproportionately influential They became, because of their appeal to developers and technologists and their bubble
Note that both American and British usage put a question mark outside the quotation marks. Only periods and commas are placed within the quotation marks in American style.
OP: When in Rome, do as the Greeks do because their way is better.
> but the HN search links demonstrate that the threads here on HN from back then where Epik gets mentioned are almost all specifically about that stuff! Not all of that discussion was opposed to Epik, but that wasn't the claim you took issue with.

Yes it was? That's why I said threads - not posts. Threads include the discussion, not just the articles. And like you showed, even the big discussions did not have people mention how bad of a person Rob Monster is or that Epik is that right-leaning instead of just really free-speech.

In every second about a (big) company on HN, folk here mention how bad that company or some execs are - because it is common knowledge / opinion. And it's always one of the top comment threads in the thread.

Rob Monster and Epik being that right-leaning and not just "really free-speech", and also (Christian) nut jobs - was not common knowledge at that point. Which was my initial point "upthread upthread", that Epik had 100% a boat load of users that were just there for cheap domain prices and that did not know about it and were not there to support any of this. And thus are not guilty by association (and even deserve to be in that leak), like some in this thread claim.
It's better to think of these kind of systems as Disposable infrastructure instead of Immutable infrastructure. The difference being is that you occasionally, temporary can accrue some state on a machine (eg: debugging, hotfix), but you are accustomed to the idea that you can indiscriminately dispose of any system without worrying about state present on the system. So after you're done debugging, you just throw away the system and have a new replacement build automatically (by autoscaling or similar systems).
That's only one of the protocols they're funding though. The others being IPFS and WebRTC.
Yet what if the best developer on the team was paid 3x more than everyone else, would you not also feel like shit? Unless everyone is paid exactly the same, then everyone feels like shit, which will motivate everyone to no longer care, and then your job will go away as your employer winds up as shit.
Can't name numbers but compared to video-ident it's drastically cheaper.
I was so excited by the headline... and then I was so bummed by the domain name that I now doubt myself for being excited by the headline. I clicked.. there's still no danger of confusing this guy with a scientist or an academic. If somebody is real smart, but also real self serving, it kinda cancels out their smartness. He's not the worst, but still.. it's like if a paperclip maximizing super AI was trying to convince you to let it out of its box. He's not gonna teach you anything.
I hope there is a bigger push for apartment complexes to have charging stations. It’s the only thing stopping me from going electric.
If you want them changed, then you should make good use of your time and spend it lobbying the Unicode committee to get these in. Society will much appreciate you for spending time on worthy endeavors like this.
Thanks to marriage, names were non-canonical before the computer was even invented.
Under-eye creams for dark circles, according to experts
Maybe. Sounds to me like you'd be happier without that and all its baggage.
Recent Ebola outbreak emerged from someone infected 5 years earlier
The astronomy world is quarreling over whether 'Oumuamua was an alien craft
I don’t know anyone personally but in Ireland there’s an ad on national radio for a desk booking Teams App.
I follow Apple news a lot and still get confused with the differences between each iPads nowadays.
iPad Pro.. iPad Air.. iPad "normal". iPad mini is the only one easy to understand.
Some models support Apple Pencil 1st gen... some models support Apple Pencil 2nd gen. WHYYYYYY? It should all be the same.

Which iPad support the smart keyboard? What about the "magic" keyboard?
By all accounts MailChimp employees have been well compensated for the last 2 decades. They are all getting bonuses after this acquisition. Why should the suddenly get equity now? I doubt many employees were willing to trade salary for equity before this exit.

Anyways, looking forward to more of Ellen Pao's stupid hot takes.
What are your gripes with SOAP? Genuinely interested. I've used it once professionally, and while there was an initial learning curve, it seemed to have some nice properties once you got past that.
For the landlord example - sure, if for some bizarre reason a tenant would agree to that. Presumably no one would, and so the landlord would lose out and stop.
Thank you for the note! I'm not a regular user here and don't know how the moderation/administration of posts works here, so the email is greatly appreciated.
Congrats to the author for realizing that confidence doesn't equate skill. This isn't being a pink unicorn, it's simply humility.

The real danger of confusing the two is that real skill dulls if you let overconfidence take over, since the very thought of being "better than others" prevents you from accepting that maybe there are things that you don't know or haven't considered.

For example, is "destroying" a coworker's commit in a code review really really helping? Did the person perhaps forget to consider that hiring to refill the position of a fired developer actually costs physical money (as opposed to time spent on coaching?) or that perhaps a lot of time is being spent on nitpicks without bottom-line value or that tip-toeing around egomaniacs can stunt autonomy and therefore creativity? This is not merely a matter of whether you're lulling yourself into some false sense of superiority/duty/whatever; thinking in terms of bigger and bigger pictures is an actual skill that one needs to develop when going up the career ladder.
N26 is under investigation of the German banking authority due to shoddy KYC and AML compliance (https://www.heise.de/news/Erneut-Vorwuerfe-gegen-N26-Betrueg...). Last thing they'd go for is yet another brand new ID system.
Oh, so many things were terrible, but it was definitely different. And quaint.

I remember seeing my first digital photograph (a blurry, dark scan of a wine bottle label) on the web and being mesmerized. Because before that, web images were exclusively computer art.
I don't think there's anything that stops you from doing that? You can edit the running system the usual way AFAIK. Even better, afterwards you can just reset the box and all your changes are automatically cleaned up.
did Larry Ellison leave oracle?
CO2 isn't the only pollutant.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/coal-and-the-enviro...

https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/coal-ash-haza...
Oracle moved away from their "free" license to requiring a $100 or $200 per seat license for home users (and I think even more for business users), so the clock stopped ticking at Java 8u202 for a lot of people who refused to (or couldn't) move to OpenJDK.

edit: although this appears to have recently changed! https://blogs.oracle.com/java/post/free-java-license

It was really a terrible idea from a security perspective - and unfortunately there are organizations that won't consider software without a support contract.
"It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with. This it is calculated to effect primarily and chiefly of course, through its executive faculties; but it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself in another manner. For, in so distributing and combining the truths and the formulæ of analysis, that they may become most easily and rapidly amenable to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated. This is a decidedly indirect, and a somewhat speculative, consequence of such an invention. It is however pretty evident, on general principles, that in devising for mathematical truths a new form in which to record and throw themselves out for actual use, views are likely to be induced, which should again react on the more theoretical phase of the subject. There are in all extensions of human power, or additions to human knowledge, various collateral influences, besides the main and primary object attained."
-- Ada Lovelace, 1842
http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html
That's a simplistic way of defining security needs. for example, you can be a dissident originated from a country that threaten your life and need an extra layer of security to avoid being blackmailed or killed.
Nothing for you, but something for us.
In the days where you can buy a ram chip, a register machine is a really easy abstraction.

If you're trying to imagine something you can mechanically assemble out of discrete compoonents, it's not so great. You need an unlimited number of components hooked up in complicated ways.

A turing machine is a fixed-size and relatively simple box, plus a long tape that feeds through.
Does it record network calls? We often build fronts for API'S so bugs are most of the time mismatch between frontend va backend expectations
> Perhaps, but then I would expect people in a post-scarcity society to be fine with the idea that life is not fair - that it's not possible for everyone to have equal access to everything at the same time.

Are you kidding??? Life today is better than it has been at any time in history with more opportunities and luxuries more accessible than ever and people still complain.
Linux kernel minimum compiler raised to GCC 5.1, allowing potential C11 use
> I felt weird about doing this given that rep points are involved, but between having someone lose rep points vs a larger group of people potentially going down a sub-optimal path, I chose the former. Anyone else feel weird about this?

Should rep points decay over time? Or accrue for the duration an answer is still relevant (for low level questions especially, the best answer might stay so forever if dealing with a specific CPU architecture for instance).
It's an improvement, but insufficient to meet emissions objectives. Of course, if we taxed carbon we could actually rely on the market sorting itself out without gaping loopholes (e.g., virtually the entire transportation sector).
Funny quote from Lori Stroud:

> The bureau’s dedication to justice is commendable... the most significant catalyst to bringing this issue to light was investigative journalism - the timely, technical information reported created the awareness and momentum to ensure justice

A lot of moral superiority there when based on how Stroud has talked about her own work with Project Raven [1], she was perfectly happy to help the UAE kidnap, torture, and disappear dissidents (including children), human rights activists, and journalists.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spyi...