skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realise you've been _building_ it hurts.

I still feel complicit.

I worked for a hardware startup in 2013/2014. Part of my role was to populate and run the private pacman server that the devices got their OS and software updates from (we ran ARCH, but didn't connect to the public ARCH pacman repos, because we had some hardware specific code and kernel mods we needed to work, so we tested everything that updated on there public pacman repos before letting the devices load them). The startup failed after the first batch of products were shipped - as they are wont to do. Much acrimony about who owned what. I kept the Linode instance running the pacman server on my own credit card for years, but eventually the domain name (or perhaps the dns hosting, I don't recall) expired and the only devices that still knew how to get to the repo were my own. If I'd have a heads-up that dns was going to die, I could have pushed a config change to use a domain name under my control, but it just unexpectedly switched off.

There were only a few hundred devices I was keeping software updates flowing to. But the feeling of despair when I was no longer able to do that and finally decommissioned that Linode server was heartbreaking.
I think that’s unlikely, and what that confluence of factors produced was speed rather than any otherwise undiscoverable knowledge.

“A Manhattan Project for X” (cancer, renewable energy, quantum computing, …) is a common political refrain, but misses what made the original successful: The scientists had a pretty good idea what was possible and how one might do it. The devil was in the details but the picture was, in outline, quite clear, if enough money were spent and the right brains harnessed.

Now, one might argue that speed still made a world-historical difference: Because the weapon was made in time to be used in the current conflict, we did not have to wait until the next conflict to fully understand its significance, at which point it might have been too late.
I have a feeling it's not the determined smart kids that this app targets as a primary product...
I haven't been this entertained for the mere price of $12 in a very long time. I think it's worth the price of admission even if I never even try to upload an image.
It really will have lasting repercussions and I'm afraid of what some of the administration is doing to band-aid it. I spoke to an IB coordinator last week and I was told that the finals grades had dropped so significantly that the curve system had to be reworked. Not just made stronger, but completely changed.

In fact, the in-class tests were curved according to this formula: 10sqrt(x). A 10% is curved to a 31%, a 25% to a 50%, a 40% to a 63%, a 50% to a 70%, etc.

I spoke to an AP World teacher and he said less than a quarter of students got a 5/5 and less than half a 4/5 compared to pre-pandemic.
It would appear that the old methods of political polling in places like the US and Australia don't work with the accuracy they used to:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/11/opini...

A similar thing happened with Clinton in 2016 and with Brexit. Political polling has stopped working. It's not clear whether the polling organisations are simply asking the wrong people, or the wrong questions, or that people are no longer as fixed to their opinions as they used to be, or would prefer to hide their preferences.

It would seem to me that a lot of the stranger activity on social media is an attempt to fix that problem.
This affirms my intuition that the power of test suites arises from their coverage of the data-cases, and call-sequence, and not simply from "visiting" more lines of code. This also is likely the underlying reason for the extreme effectiveness of fuzz-testing and property-based testing.
https://github.com/FastForwardTeam/FastForward/
Nah, she made a lot of proud people look stupid. I predict she'll get the Shkreli treatment.
Test of effect of lipid lowering by diet on cardiovascular risk
Members of the UK delegation were spies for the Soviets, and other members looked as hard as they could to find advantage for their own country. I certainly do not look askance upon the latter, and would have done the same.

I don't think anyone doubts the contributions our British friends made to the success of the project.
1 on 1's did not use to be 'a thing', and we still got plenty done in those days, which were not that long ago.

Generally ideas like this seem to spread because it was part of some successful company and so it got written up and now a lot of people copy it because it's easy to copy and they think it will help make their own company successful.

As a result, the thing that actually occurs in a lot of places is a manager reading from a script that they've been trained on a little bit from someone else.

It does not feel useful to me.
Speaking of Google web products not working with Firefox: Google Meet backgrounds. What's most frustrating there is that it used to work until they disabled it to just throw up an ad for Chrome (i.e. use a "supported" browser).
If the reason is to reduce competitive demand for cheap fuel by preventing poorer countries to have access to the most cost effective coal technology, so that China can have cheaper energy [which is just my conjecture], I don't think it is a great outcome at all.

China has a horrible environmental track record, they cause more carbon pollution than the developing world combined, and despite being a rich country they are still massively increasing their carbon outputs.

The fact they are a communist dictatorship doesn't inspire any confidence that they might one day suddenly start to value the environment any more than they do now. They will move away from coal as soon as it become economically advantageous to do so and no sooner, which is not all that different to how poorer countries will deal with their coal generation.
> For context, compare the layout and content on an authentic blog like Scary Mommy with the spam, ads, and brain-numbing botspeak you’ll encounter on a MediaVine blog like the A Typical Mom. The difference is easy to spot.

The ads seem much worse on Scary Mom. What am I missing?
> I like tongue in cheek stuff, jokes and all, but that tone sounds more like “fuck you” than a solid, reliable business relationship with adequate respect where the customer is not the product.

I kind of talk about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28677501

Basically, it's a bit funny that people complain that it sounds more like a "fuck you" when that's the entire point, and the site is completely explicit about it. We don't trust services to not want our money, even when they're telling us they don't. We just think it's a ploy.

> Besides that: Props for so quickly capitalizing on the (probably still brewing) imgur controversy!

Thanks! I made the site and bam!, two years later, Imgur imploded and I made $12!
QR error correction helps and hinders scanning
And while you're getting organized with the other seniors, maybe discuss if you want to start a new company together.
I usually just use Unit Test coverage as extra insurance that I didn't accidentally forget a path when writing up tests for new classes, or when trying to assess others tests to see if/what they miss. Outside of that, I basically ignore it.

That (per)mutation testing, sounds like pitest, which I've had fun with using to gauge the effectiveness of tests I've written in the past.
The US got off with 100 years of IP theft in the 19th century. Now the door should be closed to keep anyone else from doing the same?
Agree with 1/, disagree with 2 and i have a different point of view on th 3rd point.

A lawyer can review a contract, miss a loophole/backdoor, and then argue to the court that the backdoor was placed there in bad faith, recoup his client losses. You can't do that with code. If you load a backdored code, you can't argue "this is unfair" to a court of justice.

On the 3rd point, i think "good" crypto (and by that i mean non-obvious shitcoins) tend to centralize a lot.
If tv works with embedded EOLs, you can do this:

cat data/a.csv | tv | head -n5

It is more resource intensive, but it pushes the problem you mentioned onto tv. If tv doesn't work with embedded EOLs, then you need to fix your data or fix your tool.
everyone keeps saying loyalty like people sign blood pacts with the CCP or something. it's no different from companies abiding by US laws (and provide backdoors etc) in order to stay operating.

it's not loyalty or some secret pact. it's just them acting in their best interest to follow regulations (however dubious) in order to keep making money.
It's past time to take a step back and consider as a society that the predominant mechanism for communication, hence the distribution of ideas and hence the formation of socially-dependent constructions of self, and belief systems,

are now in the hands of companies like Facebook which by their own admission are driven all but exclusively by the necessary (sic) pursuit of growth via "engagement" at any cost.

This system is not just capable of, but biased towards the amplification of exactly that content which maximizes limbic system engagement, i.e., triggers the sub-cognitive emotional brain.

I.e. that content which enrages, titillates, and otherwise triggers reward centers.

Let's look at that again, stripped to the core.

Our society's primary mechanism for interpersonal communication,

is social networks which by their own description, depend on the purist possible amplification of that content which triggers us the most,

regardless of all other factors, including truthfulness, social benefit, coherency, utility to the commons, you name it, call it anything you like. The good.

Naturally one can individually work hard to use these systems for the good.

But the systems themselves have zero incentive to amplify you when you do; and every incentive to amplify the shit-posting trolls being paid by our enemies foreign and domestic.

That's not hyperbole; that's a simple statement of fact.

The end of this road is like e.g. the climate change that goes unaddressed in part because of these very mechanisms,

approaching more rapidly than we think.

A cognitive error to remember: we extrapolate linearly, and have no native ability to extrapolate exponential outcomes.

The clearly visible end game in the US for unchecked perpetuation of bad-faith high-performing "engagement" on Facebook and its properties, in particular,

is clearly civil war.

Maybe it's cool for a while; maybe it's hot only in moments; but the edge of the cliff is visible and the intense push by bad actors of all kinds to push us off it is palpable.

And the mechanism remains Facebook, steered as it is by an amoral culture which sprang from and is perpetuated by a literally emotionally truncated high-functioning sociopath.

If you think that's wrong, the onus is on you to document how the company's behavior internal and external is distinguishable from one in which that is a precise definition.

I've said it here many times, I'll say it again:

If you work for them, it's time to quit.
If you do business with them, it's time to quit.
If you think think you can't because <reason>, you're wrong.

The damage to yourself, and to our society, is profound and un-ending.

We remain at memetic war and it is reifying into a culture war on the edge of becoming simply a war.

Don't be part of the problem.

Get off now, and work to get others off, and work to unmake this.
It sounds inspirational and revolutionary but the longer I think about it, the less utopian it feels. The idea of forgetting about pieces of code or how things are linked.

Files also provide an opportunity to purposefully communicate organizational intent.
This has always seemed sort of passive-aggressive on the part of the spec. "No, memorizing our various custom env var names is not sufficient. Developers must also implement our custom logic, and immediately update whenever the logic changes!" That seems a bit much to ask. Why not just trust the user, who will set the env vars if she really wants to use this scheme and who will do something else if she wants something else?
It depends. When you tell developers "you must have 100% code coverage" they usually write tests that don't actually validate any functionality and instead get into every if block. Tests are useful when they test edge cases and assert behavior.

I've told this story many times before but at a previous job a senior engineer told me "100% code coverage is useless and you shouldn't go for it" but since he was being dogmatic and not actually thinking about what he was saying he was arguing against something very sensible. I was testing an expert system where everything was large if/else trees encoded in types + configuration. I wanted to make sure I tested all edge cases and activated all of the blocks when they made sense.

I had to fight for that extra coverage and it was, in the end, a massive help.
If it takes you 3 days to write a test that covers a once-in-a-million condition and your service gets 2 requests per day, it will take you about 500,000 days to hit that condition once.

You've increased test coverage, but was it effective? Eh probably could do something more useful with your time.

(yes this is a contrived example, adjust numbers for your situation)
Wow, I had no idea their whole belief system was based on conspiracy theories.
The US fed doesn't own all companies in its borders.

The US fed doesn't own the manufacturers that sell overseas.

The US fed isn't actively and openly involved in domestic and international censorship campaigns.

The US fed isn't currently committing genocide.
Are the journalists for freethink.com (hah) incapable of distinguishing between internet speed (if you had 319Tbit/s internet, you'd go bankrupt, genuinely), and signalling bandwidth?
Hardly "old-man-yells-at-cloud territory". It's been only four years in our district since we were told to leave our phones in the lockers or at home, preferably. In those four years they implemented "Bring your own technology" policies to cut down on tech spending, and now everyone has their own laptop in our district. No one blinks an eye at using devices, except during assignments. "I'm taking notes" is the typical excuse.
Google wants more water and a tax deal for data center expansion in The Dalles
Pocketbook Inkpad Color

https://goodereader.com/blog/product/pocketbook-inkpad-color...

I've got one of these and it's quite nice. Of course the colors are not as intense as other screen types. But still actually pretty good.
I don't know that "hard-working" has generally been used to mean "working at hard physical labor". I have not been hard-working in that sense since the age of about twenty, the occasional home or volunteer project excepted.

Having said that, would you settle for "diligent"?
Previous cases of naturalized Chinese-Americans being indicted for espionage/IP theft/national security-related crimes:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/mit-professor-arrested-an...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-navy-officer-his-wife-and-...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-cia-case-officer-charg...

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3104566/ch...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-citizen-...
Why not youtube? I thought Google and YouTube were separate, at least they claim to be.
Ah I see what you mean now. What you mean is this event doesn't technically mean the entire company is a scam that has no clicks. It's possible all their traffic is organic and uses iOS and loves clicking ads, just that the CEO and co-founders conspired to impersonate this YouTube exec. Yes, it could technically still be a valuable company.
This makes perfect sense: a simple function with two code paths that splits on the comparison of two signed integers immediately requires a minimum of three test cases for correctness, yet it only takes two to achieve 100% code coverage.

Checking for correctness for corner case values - maxint, minint, zero - adds a minimum of another 9 cases.

And it will take many, many more test cases if you're working with a weakly typed language and you're potentially comparing an integer with a floating point value. Or strings. And so forth.
I would have giggled slightly more if you had "MOST POPULAR" instead of "OUR CHOICE" on the "BUY THE SITE" option.
- Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

- Dulce María Loynaz, Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems

- Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries

- Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972
> If you are referring to a Reciva based internet radio the web site which powers them was shut down by the owner of that site, not by Grace Digital

I am referring to that. I'm reduced to 3 presets. The disaster is that:

1. the device was critically connected to a resource that GD does not control

2. GD offers no way to change this dependency, no way to redirect it elsewhere, no way to change the presets, no way to access radio stations, etc

3. I don't see any reason why they had to use Reciva to access Pandora

None of this was disclosed when I bought them. GD should offer a web interface to it, like my router has.

The media server does still work, but it can't read USB sticks with more than 32G of capacity.

But my Roku device can. Roku works fine when I hook up a 16T drive to its USB port. Pretty much all the streaming devices I looked at as replacement for GD have strange limitations on what can be connected (some USB sticks work, others do not), Roku does not.

I'm kinda shocked that 20 years after the Turtle Beach Audiotron, streaming devices are still mired in the stone age with bad user interfaces, poor device support, unusable displays, bricking, and very buggy (my GDs regularly locked up).

My GD display, for example, shows:

1. the title of the song
2. the bit rate
3. the elapsed time

When it should show:

1. title/album/band

2. time remaining

3. album cover art

The GD is like 90% towards being a good product. Why not go the last 10%?
Even when the possible goals are identified, someone has to prioritize them at some point, since there are always more goals you could achieve than goals you will achieve. To prioritize, you need to know both the benefit of a goal (which is really a probability distribution, not a number) and its cost (which is notoriously a wide probability distribution before you have done it). Sometimes this involves trading off the needs of different "goal donors"; in XP these all filter through a single "goal donor", confusingly called the "customer", who decides how to order the cards in the box once they're estimated. The goal donor (who may or may not be the gold owner, another confusing name) can reorder the cards at the beginning of each iteration, either because new information has appeared about the benefits, about the costs, or about the possible goals.

It sounds like what you're describing is the lack of such prioritization. It isn't necessary to keep the developers ignorant of new user "demands" in order to prioritize them; they just need to be empowered to follow the priorities the team has chosen instead of accommodating every demand.

Sometimes it's easier to accommodate a demand than to write up a card and estimate it, though. Sometimes a bug fix or layout tweak is obvious enough that doing it takes only a minute or two; then, it's just a question of process overhead whether the actual cost of doing it is five minutes or five hours: potentially multiple forwarded email round trips, a fresh checkout, pair programming or other code review, compilation time, test suites, commit comments, merge requests.

Usually, in my experience, if you have extreme overhead, most of those changes never get requested, because they don't get prioritized the way they would with the order-of-magnitude lower cost a lightweight process can provide. The result is that they never get done, so the product is full of easily observable minor problems, which is experienced as shoddiness.
Better?

Kidding aside, I read an account by a B-52 bombardier whose plane on SIOP alert carried two B53 high yield bombs (one usually got a four-pack of B28 bombs and one B53).

His target brief went something like "when you get there (Moscow-locale leadership bunkers) you'll see a crater; put your bombs in it."
So does linux and such:

cat data.csv | sed 's/,/ ,/g' | column -t -s, | less -S
I've always thought a nifty way to deal with this would be to use a FUSE filesystem. So you'd have a directory structure like:

/workspace
/ast
/module-1.ast
/fuse-src
/module-1.txt

where opening and modifying "module-1.txt" would cause "module-1.ast" to be updated, and vice-versa. I actually think I've seen this approach used in some experimental language or another. I'm sure there would be a LOT of tricky edge cases and/or synchronization bugs to address, but it seems like it's not very far outside the realm of feasibility.
Oh no no no, that won't do. Please send your SLA and NDA for me to sign, we can't be spending $12 willy-nilly! We could have almost bought one movie ticket to Cats for that money!
How ‘wonder material’ graphene became a national security concern
>Science can strictly speaking not prove any truth

Could you elaborate on this?
test("when a metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric", () => {
runApp(); // look ma, lots of "coverage"!
assert(true, 'No errors!');
}); // unfortunately paraphrased from real code
Sources needed.
I'm sure he sounded equally peaceful back in 1939 when dividing up Poland with Hitler while building tanks for streamrolling Europe.
Ive doesn’t make me think of Ferrari. Ferrari is about emotional design which I haven’t seen in Apple products.
How do you figure? He didn't write anything, but his contemporary Heraclitus did. And Heraclitus insulted him for being a syncretic thinker. Why would he if he didn't exist?
Depends on what the consequence of that failure might be. It could be anything from completely unnoticed to ending somebody’s life, rarity is only one dimension of risk.
> we're just not going to prove it to you

How do you know there is no proof? Unlike some dimwitted administrators, the US doesn't have a policy of disclosing actively classified information.
> I got so much joy out of the FAQ I nearly paid just as a thank you for putting a smile on my face.

> I got so much joy out of the FAQ I nearly paid

> I nearly paid

> nearly paid

> nearly
In other words, more tests do find more bugs, but it's the number of tests and not their code coverage that has most of the predictive value. It's a surprising result, so if you'll excuse me, I have a couple of lecture slides on software testing I need to revise

Is it just me or was this _not_ surprising at all?

I mean I suppose I should have expected what he said, given it sometimes seems hard to convince other people about this but to me it's a well known fact. There are so many ways this can go wrong.

I mean it's so easy to give the one counter example needed to break the myth of 100% test coverage being good for much: Well you executed the branch/line at least once with one potential input. Was it an edge case input or a happy path input?

More tests than is needed for "100% coverage" means that you actually executed some lines multiple times, hopefully with not just 10 happy path scenarios but with 1 happy path and 9 edge cases. Now remove the happy path scenarios for trivial code and also the edge case scenarios for trivial code and your coverage might only be 80% but you have the same actual test suite effectiveness. When you keep adding tests, add more to the 9 edge cases, staying with the same coverage but make the suite more robust.

Of course 20% is better than 0% and 50% is better than 20%. Somewhere between 50 and 100 is an optimal point. For lack of a good estimate, let's go with the old 80/20 rule. Something around 80% test coverage is what you can use to make a tool fail the build. If you pass the 80% mark you _might_ have a good test suite but it doesn't mean you stop there. It's just a reminder that you might have missed adding tests when that thing triggers a red build but don't use it to mean that you actually have a good test suite.