skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’ve been using graphql for years. In my experience, it dramatically simplifies microservice API architecture vs “normal” API servers.

Graphql is super easy to understand, easy to deploy, easy to scale and easy to grow.

It’s not perfect - the lack of namespaces can be a pain, a few more standard types would be good, and mutations feel a bit under baked - but there’s much to love, and very little to dislike.
> Nim compilation process took an additional 702 ms

That's horrifyingly slow for a compiler. The author mentioned "modern languages look like Python but run as fast as C", which is a common promise those languages make that never really materialize except for a few very happy path cases they heavily optmised the language for. Julia, for example, makes this promise too, but compiles even slower than that and takes ridiculous amounts of RAM even for hello world.

Did the author post the data set they used for the examples? Would be nice to try it out on a few languages to see how fast that can compile and run on a mature language like Common Lisp (which is just as easy to write) or even node.js.
As other commenters point out, how can a language be fast in a way besides something CPU bound? You are saying it is fast when it's not doing anything. Not sure I understand.
Very popular in the 3D printing community.
I use it on my gaming desktop. No major issues with the OSTree/Flatpak design, unless you count the fact that I wanted to try KDE but KDE-flavored Silverblue ("Kinoite") is still in prerelease and didn't work with Nvidia binary drivers for me. Similar story for Wayland with Nvidia drivers.

Fingers crossed, when 35 is released I should be able to have both KDE and Wayland (the latter is moderately important to me as I have a 1080p screen and a 4k projector, and currently I need to change DPI whenever I turn the latter on).

I should qualify that I work with Docker a lot, so rules like "to open a local HTML file in Firefox, you first need to explicitly mount the folder into the container" seem natural and expected to me in terms of security. To others they probably feel baffling or obtuse.

Oh, and my JBL Bluetooth headphones don't work (possibly other Bluetooth devices as well, I haven't tried yet). Nothing to do with Silverblue specifically, just a piece of Linux driver support still being what it is.
He is more of a fig leaf to deflect from FB misconduct.
How it makes sense is simple - people who lease cars don't pay the final payment. They give the car back and lease a new one. That way they pay a bit more for a few years, but they avoid most of the cost of deprecation that they'd lose if they owned the car at that point.

If you plan to buy a car and own it for a long time then leasing is silly. If you plan to keep a car for no more than a few years then leasing is a pretty good option.
Yes. This sounds awful.
My thinking: to a layman's eye this looks like I could have taken these photos with an iphone 6. would be nice to see a comparison of iphone 6 photos with iphone 13 photos of the same subject
I have tinkered with both. Basically if you need to write a FORTRAN application but don't want to use FORTRAN, Julia is the correct choice. If ease of use is more important than having a diverse collection of pre-existing numerical libraries to play with, I'd go with Nim.

If Nim had cloud SDKs I would use it as my default language for pretty much everything.
Towards the end of the article, Weinberg makes the point that a great deal of the money that Congress allocates for science is, in effect, wasted on manned spaceflight. I think there is a similar sort of poor allocation of resources when it comes to space telescopes, particularly optical telescopes.

The original argument for optical telescopes was that they could image sources at far higher resolution than is possible on the ground because they didn't have to contend with the atmosphere. At a good site on a very clear night, you might be able to get down to ~0.8 arcseconds or so. But in space, the atmosphere isn't there, so you can get 0.05 arcseconds of resolution on the HST. Over the decades, though, astronomers substantially improved adaptive optics which counteracts the effect of the atmosphere. The bigger telescopes can now actually exceed HST's resolution under good conditions and were far cheaper to build.

It's certainly the case that there are just some measurements you can't make unless the instrument is in space. But even then, there are lots of cheaper space projects that tend to be given short shrift over the much larger projects like HST and JWST. I remember in college one of my astronomy professors bitterly complaining about how JWST had effectively sucked up nearly all the project funding for a full decade.
I actually use TypeScript/JavaScript a lot for this reason, especially for biological algorithms that I want to run in the browser. The developer tooling is also as good as you can hope for, especially when using VS Code. I actually wrote a circular RNA sequence deduplication algorithm in it just recently [1].

With respect to the identifier resolution in Nim, it strikes me as more of a matter of preference. Especially given the universal function call syntax in Nim, at least it's consistent. For example, Nim treats "ATGCA".lowerCase() the same as lowercase("ATGCA"). I do appreciate the fact that you can use a chaining syntax instead of a nesting one when doing multiple function calls but this is also a matter of style more than substance.

[1] https://github.com/Benjamin-Lee/viroiddb/blob/main/scripts/c...
Microsoft Gamepass is a subscription for gaming that is very popular. Netflix are building something similar right now. No doubt Sony have their own version in the works too.
A Taste of Roc – Richard Feldman
Huh, no idea what it said since it's flagged now, but it was 4 AM when I originally read it so I must've misinterpreted it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why be so needlessly positive and generate unworthy hype?

We need criticisms that call bullshit on undeserving praise.
There is also Ortnamnsregistret, where there are 5 hits for Biby, 3 hits for Bertby, etc.
A new book explores the curious origins of “12 Angry Men”
Indeed. “Thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory” was how the lab leak was described earlier this year by the media.
Covid in the News
> Thing is, NFTs don't represent ownership, absent some external legal documents which tie ownership to the NFT.

NFTs are the ownership-tying documents - specifically, asserting ownership over some property, just like any other deed/title to some property (be it tangible or abstract/intellectual). NFTs, like any other sort of deed/title, require recognition, validation, and enforcement by society at large to have any real value.

That is:

> I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.

I can sell deeds/titles to bridges all day long (complete with thick paper and fancy seals); doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
Not either way. Investigations to find out whether this virus was in fact made in lab has tremendous utility. First it would seek reparation from all parties involved in creating this chaos. Second it will dissuade other lunatic research group or companies getting funny ideas in the future.
Penny wise and pound foolish in my experience for early stage startups.

Don't rush into it obviously, take a few weeks/months inside to get a feel for financials, the business/team etc, but early exercise if you can afford it.

Early exercising may risk tens to low hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the upside is hundreds of thousands to millions through long term cap gains and/or QSBS tax savings.

It also protects you from losing your options if you leave the company, two years into your tenure you might want to leave, but the strike to fair market value spread might have grown so much that you can't afford it in your post termination exercise window.

As always, super dependent upon your particular deal, your financial position going into it etc, do your own math and risk tolerance, but I wish someone had shown me the numbers before I joined my first startup.
Some in the gaming industry tried/are trying hard to make Netflix of gaming subscription work.

Micro transactions work right now but maybe tomorrow it is subscription based gaming again.
Various programming languages (and file systems!) have had some form of case insensitivity and it always turns out to be an absolutely terrible idea:

* It makes searching for identifiers harder. For Nim you can't even use case insensitive search because of the underscore thing! Better practice your regexes.

* The case insensitivity rules are usually super complicated and don't apply to everything, so now it's an extra thing you have to mentally compute when coding. This is probably the biggest problem and I'm sure it has led to bugs, e.g. in SQL.

* Do you enjoy the tabs vs spaces debate? How about single quote Vs double quotes? Ugly inconsistently styled code? Well you'll love this!

* Unicode case insensitivity is actually really really complicated (this mostly applies to filesystems).

You're basically opening yourself up to an array of annoyances and gotchas for essentially no benefits.

I've literally never seen anyone use two identifiers that only differ by case, but if that were actually a big problem it could be solved just by making that illegal. You don't have to resort to the insanity of case insensitivity.
Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea. Your situation sounds identical to mine. My skill set is that I’ll be parachuting in and setting up GPT-J on their specialized low level hardware API. I feel like a lot of people could do this if they put their minds to it.

Two factors helped. One, the CEO wanted me so badly that they put me through an “accelerated interview” process that consisted of no technical questions. (I was asked to design a security system for a hypothetical billionaire, and then to think of as many creative uses of a soda can as possible with a 3 minute timer counting down.)

The other factor is that a $50M contract is at stake. I do think they can land it, and I have a pretty clear idea of how to get them there. It also helped that I happened to be chatting with their client about an unrelated thing right when the CEO happened to first talk to me. He said “small world” and was like tell him so-and-so says hello.

Honesty I’ve started to conclude that perhaps it wasn’t useful to use me as a model for others. Everyone’s path is different. I think I’ll write this up into a Book Of Crazy Stories instead of saying it’s advice.

As Picard once said, “It’s possible to do nothing wrong and still lose. That’s not a failing; that’s life.”

Some better advice for you is probably “have a job you’re totally happy with, and then look.” They could tell that I would walk away, which was a source of strength during negotiations. (I needed it, too.) Maybe it’s a bit like getting an investor; the best way to get it is not to need it.

Also, look around a lot! I can’t underscore it enough that most people simply don’t put in the time to go look. They often feel guilty (employer loyalty) or that the interview process is too much of a pain (totally understandable).

Perhaps the closest thing to a recipe is, look into this stuff as a side hobby; fly through the interview as a challenge to yourself; after impressing everybody, walk away and see what they’ll do to get you back. Now that I’ve written that out, it suddenly feels a lot more tractable. A dedicated person could do this a few times, repeatably.
Python sometimes runs slowly, because it's not designed to run fast. It's designed to be readable and easy to write, which in turn makes developing python faster.

It's a compromise, but I always prioritise _my_ time over my computers time, so if I can write something quickly and just go and get a coffee while it runs - I will do that. I won't spend twice as long writing a single-run script just because it'll finish before the kettle has boiled.
It basically seems to advocate using functional programming, or at least writing pure functions for the code that you want to be testable.

Got a little bit disappointed in the content of the article. In fact, the whole article amounts to the three sentences of information "Write functional code. If it doesn't work, reorganize. Try it and let me know". I wish the author at least pointed how to convert the code to the testable state. Not to mention the "reorganization part" totally blows all the meaning out of all previous sentences -- if writing pure functions may not work, does what you say even matter?
Quite the hyperbole. The author even points out how this was done without realizing it — purposefully misspelling certain words to get the right character counts.
> Yeah should really be "Why I don't use Python for Data Processing".

Not entirely. Nim‘s benefit here is that it’s superficially similar enough to Python that’s it’s easy for people from that world to pickup and start using Nim.

> Also I don't know how anyone could design a language in the 21st century and make basic mistakes like this:
> If that's any indication of the sanity of the rest of Nim then I'd say steer well clear!

It may seem like a design mistake at first glance but it’s surprisingly useful. It’s intent is to allow a given codebase to maintain a consistent style (eg camel vs snake) even when making use of upstream libraries that use different styles. Not including the first letter avoids most of the annoyance of wantonly mixing all cap constants or lower case and linters avoid teams mismatching internal styles. Though mostly I forgot it’s there as most idiomatic Nim code sticks with camel case. I’d say not to knock it until you’ve tried it.

The rest of Nim’s design avoids many issues I consider actual blunders in a modern language such as Python’s treatment of if/else as statements rather than as expressions, and then adding things like the walrus operator etc to compensate.
My parents worked service jobs their entire lives. One of my main memories of my time as a child is my dad napping on weekends while my mom was at work, with me sitting watching TV. As I grew up and learned about "self-actualization" and heard exhortations imploring me to follow my passions, those values quickly crashed against my lived reality. I had a span of time as a teenager, before I ever worked, where I applied those values to my expectations of my parents and felt disappointed.

It took me a while to understand why my parents didn't have hobbies, abandoned self-study courses, did little outside of maintenance tasks, etc. The first chunk of my working life put me in positions where physical exhaustion became real.

Some people really don't have the space in their lives to engage in non-critical life activities. Off the top of my head, I don't know of any philosophers that have explored those types of lives. Are those types of people destined to grind until their last days? This seems especially important to understand as safety nets like Social Security become less reliable.
Yeah, I meant that currently, there is no way to do non-trivial mathematical calculations with either of default builds of busybox* [1] or toybox [2]

[1] https://busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html
[2] http://landley.net/toybox/status.html#done

*In busybox, there is `dc` but that is really hard to code in due to RPN.

Thanks for that note about bc being a build dependency of Linux kernel!
For other people, more info here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/439483/306382
>> While I am very much interested in this sort of history, I doubt I would enjoy this book.

I tend to agree. I felt like I was being asked a lot of questions with few answers or explanation. The pictures were not elaborated on either, so I’m still not sure what the threat lurking outside the window at the coach house breakfast was.
The great venture capital resignation
I agree with the overall message. I would like to note that the author doesn’t stop himself from dehumanising people though. To him, there are ‘red state’ people, ‘blue state’ people, ‘conservatives’ or ‘losers’. These people also share ‘evil’ knowledge and support ‘evil’ politicians. That is one issue with people/Americans: everything is good or evil. This is the polarisation you supposedly speak against! Why are you committing it? My disclaimer: I don’t support any political idea/party, and I don’t like any politics.
Here in Denmark at least, there are quite a few car-on-demand services and apps by now. Cars are very (very!) heavily taxed in this country so that makes it hard to say that it indicates a global trend but there is definitely a trend.
Here our tests are written in BDD (behavior-driven development) style, mimicking user actions and data expectations. During development, these are run against mocks (either in-memory DB or a mock repository). Individual small scenarios are also combined into realistic long-running processes, for example cases from opened to closed taking various paths.

The suite runs in parallel fast and frequently alongside unit tests. Then occasionally like before PR merges, the same scenarios are run against a clone of the production environment to catch any mismatch with the run-time environment, also in parallel (connections) to simulate multi-user usage. Any technical issue prompts an improvement of the mocks and rarely resurfaces.

Running these as scripts also doubles as a fake data generator to play with for manual testing, reporting, etc. Last we proceed with some manual testing to validate new changes and pick-up UI-related issues - we don't do UI automation.
Tesla also is kind of subscription based
I guess all the stuff the NSA kept perfectly secret before the Snowden leaks were the hallmark of a conspiracy theory, too.
I don't think the market demands it, just the media. Ive noticed the feminist media only focus on pretty white women CEOs, even when they are often disastrous for the company (Yahoo). I've been surprised by the lack of reporting about Lisa's success.
>It seems that you have completely missed the past four decades of renewable energy decreasing in price by a factor of 100x.

And it seems you have completely missed the fact that investment from crypto miners helped to bring this efficiency saving about, if there wasn't so much demand, there would be nothing to invest in R&D and infrastructure that inevitably lower prices.

Crypto, or specifically PoW acts like a guarantee of sale under a certain price per KwH. It used to be necessary for governments to guarantee power prices, and offer subsidies to encourage investment in their countries infrastructure. PoW in part replaces this necessity and encourages companies to invest in renewable, efficient, power production.
Could also be in Halland!

https://ortnamnsregistret.isof.se/place-names/1304478?place-...
> But they make no sense at all for durable goods that can last for years without significant upgrades, like cars.

Which is why there is a war on durable goods, such as trying to develop viable cloud gaming to replace people's gaming computers with subscription services.
The author makes a fair point, however, that is a rather non optimal implementation in Python. You likely could use chunked Pandas to speed up or the code, or at least replace some of the for loops with a list comprehension syntax.

However, in any case I would never replace Python with Nim as it is too niche of a language and you would struggle with recruiting. I could consider Julia if it's popularity keeps growing.

That is the ultimate challenge of a language. It either needs a large backer (Go and Google) or be so good, it gets a natural market adaptation(Julia). As a manager I am reluctant to adapt yet another language unless there is a healthy job market for it.
>"We provision approximately 7,500 instances for 1 million requests per second."

Looking at this numbers makes me think that a single instance of properly written server running on a single dedicated piece of hardware can handle this without breaking a sweat. My servers for example handle thousands of requests per second. It looks to me like one giant waste of human and hardware resources. Not very "green" approach I would say.
"""
Github, for instance, is built on a tree-like structure. When Github arrived to the version-control arena, it quickly blew away the other systems (which were rife with horrid version conflicts and syncing issues; think technologies like SVN).[7]
"""

Ummm what? SVN is also built on a tree like structure. SVN is terrible but not because (git) is based on a tree and SVN is not. I honestly don't get his point. Is this just word salad?
Exactly. It might be impressive if it's consistent, or if the number of misspellings is rare. But starting off with a correctly spelt document and then achieving justification by conditionally removing a letter is... not that hard.

Ought to be possible to test this hypothesis (is the justification done by conditional misspellings?) with some simple scripting.

edit: however, it appears that's not what the author did.
Michael Hart, of Project Gutenberg fame, was known for this style, only, without typos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_S._Hart#Writing_style
In the lab we can vastly exceed natural mutation rates, rendering this appeal to nature baseless.

The rate of evolution is a function of the mutation rate and the effective population size. There is no reason to believe that a lab setting, with highly parallel evolution on a very large, diverse population, will be as slow as passage through hosts in nature. The application of mutagens, and also the lack of selection by a host immune system can support much higher rates of change. And in coronaviruses, recombination is also very frequent, and this could easily give rise to multiple % levels of divergence in a single step. Finally, it's trivial to synthesize a genome of this size, and also to synthesize pools of related viruses based on common backgrounds.
I don't think it'll solve the problem. The fun is sitting around and gossipping. Memes are a form of gossip. Debating about The Godfather 3 is gossip. Or coronavirus daily cases.

HN is great at this. A topic crops up, reading the topic is optional, all the gossip are in the comments.

Emails seem like a really poor platform for gossip.
One pitfall that I ran into when trying out Nim for scientific computing is that Nim follows more a computer science convention than mathematics convention for exponentiation and negation operators. That is in Nim -2^3=(-2)^3 unlike more scientific computing oriented languages where -2^3=-(2^3). To someone like myself who mainly does scientific work this was quite unexpected and it causes a surprising amount of mental overhead to avoid mistakes. I did like Nim quite a bit otherwise, but essentially found that I was missing some important numerical libraries so did not continue using it.
> When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-- C.S. Lewis
Help OpenEMR Get to APHA
Consistency Models Explained
As a user, I'll always prefer a permissively licensed piece of software over a GPL one, ceteris paribus.

I hate the whole idea of intellectual property, so the less time I (and everyone, really) have to spend caring about it, the better.

MIT and BSD licenses allow everyone to care as little as legally possible about copyright, so in that regard any other choice is inferior.

And the "companies will be forced to give back to the project" argument never made sense to me.
From the guide's FAQ:

03. What program did you use to justify the text?

None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the
right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor.
Any scheme that pays early “investors” with money from new investors will eventually collapse leaving masses who feel they were cheated. When no lies are told yet relevant education or information is held back or obfuscated or buried in pages of legalese or complex computer code - some consider that fraud others not. How will the poor masses that feel about this question? How will they vote?