skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some examples from a Software Foundations (a series of books about Coq, available online):

I just wrote something I called insertion sort. I want to know that this is a valid implementation of sorting. What does it mean to be a sorting algorithm? It means that the output is sorted, and it's a permutation (shuffling) of the input. This is an exercise here: https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/vfa-current/Sort.h...

Say I've written a Red-Black tree. I want to know that it behaves like a map, or that it keeps the tree appropriately balanced (which is related to performance): https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/vfa-current/Redbla...

One more: say you have specified a programming language, which includes describing the structure of programs (the grammar essentially) and "small step" semantics (e.g `if true then x else y` can take a step to `x`). It would be interesting to show that any well-typed halting program can be evaluated in multiple steps to exactly one value (i.e. the language is deterministic and "doesn't get stuck" (or, in a sense, have undefined behaviour)). That's the subject of volume 2 https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/plf-current/toc.ht... Beyond this, you may have done a similar thing for a lower level language (machine assembly, wasm, ...) and have a compiler from your language to the low level language. You may want to prove that the compiler "preserves" something, e.g. the compiled output evaluates to the same result ultimately.

RE: termination, in something like Coq that is a bit special because every function terminates by construction. That might sound limiting but it's not really/there are ways around it. It would, however, be impossible to write something like the Collatz function in Coq and extract it in the obvious sense.

EDIT: and there are other ways these tools can (theoretically) be used to work with programs, but that's a long story. There have been real-world programs built like this, but it is very uncommon at this time. It is an area of active research.
Noticeably long lifespans. I realize it's hard to quantify this but just eyeballing it, for a group of 10 people who got famous before age 50, born that far back, to have four members break 90 seems unusual - including wartime or other disease-related deaths.

The fact that IQ tests can predict longevity is interesting.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC30556/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothian_birth-cohort_studies

John von Neumann=54,
Paul Erdős=83,
Eugene Wigner=93,
Leó Szilárd=66,
Edward Teller=95,
Theodore von Kármán=82,
John Hersányi=80,
John G. Kemeny=66,
Paul Halmos=90,
George Pólya=98
The construction industry in Quebec has been synonymous with organized crime for many decades. Olympic stadiums falling down. Bridges over freeways collapsing and crushing commuters. Cutting one limb off a rotten tree does not stop the rot if it goes all the way to the roots.
Who said it was easy? FFS read what is being written instead of going for the epic cheap shot
If author is here, I would showcase this behaviour with a mixed material circuit gif, because it is not obvious at all to the spectator that the impression of stillness is due to the belt being still and not to the refresh frequency moving items exactly to the former item position.
Except everyone calls themselves "engineer" after a 6 weeks bootcamp, is is rediculous.
Here and there, but still rarely. I tend to donate after interacting with maintainers of a project I can't live without.

I do contribute detailed bug reports, feedback and code fixes when I can, but truth be told, I'm not giving back nearly as much as I get from open source software.
I ask this sincerely: what makes you an expert on the motives and culture of Facebook, where you feel you can authoritatively state that their problems are “not specific” to them? Because, as someone who has spent time with the founders and early executives, I think you’re flat-out wrong.

These are people who were way more obsessed with manipulating people and society than any other group of people I’ve encountered — including “professional” trolls on the dark web — and they remain exactly like this to this day. Manipulating young women and putting them in unhealthy/uncomfortable positions is part of the founding DNA of the company. Can you really say that about any other large corporation in Silicon Valley?

If you want to defend Facebook, please provide context — and any conflicts of interest.
Free Startup Ideas Shared Online
Here's a FREE list of ideas you can adapt or inspire you to create your own idea.
If the goal is ending disease, all that matters is sterilizing immunity, currently available to those who have recovered from Covid, and currently unavailable from any Covid-19 vaccine. As described on the CDC website, vaccines offer protection from serious disease/death, not prevention of infection or transmission.

Fortunately, the human immune system doesn't have an opinion ("low grade malingerers") on the social class of the human. But then again, the human immune system isn't attempting to restructure society. Good luck to the social engineers!

[note to self: ask WPP how to auto-downvote a comment within two minutes of posting, when the story is nowhere near the first few pages of HN]
> because it doesn't make any additions to the algorithm Bitcoin uses

I haven't paid attention to BCH in a while but when it was released they had changes to the difficulty calculation that allowed difficulty to drop before the normal 2016 block interval.

In principle this could give miners greater control over inflation.

I'm not saying it's good or bad but it is a change to the bitcoin algorithm.
I like doing research, it's fun and always changing and it's cool developing new techniques. Publishing and prestige are sort of like the "have-tos" of research, to me. Kind of like doing coding sprints and JIRA tickets are have-tos for developers.
Politicians need to be more active when it comes to greenflation
It's not exactly the same though. Stolen cars does not have the potential to affect your daily day life as broken software can.

I agree that the blame does not lie on the engineers that created the cars or software though. In the end it's a problem of cost, you could write better software, but it would cost you time, money and shifted focus in the education of software developers and so on. Users are not willing to pay for that cost, they are very upset when reality bites them in the rear though...
It strikes me as inconsequential since it presupposes that which is trying to characterize: feeling.
I don't get why everyone talks about carbon instead of fossil fuels. The carbon that's already in the atmosphere cycles through it but doesn't change it. The carbon that gets dug up from the ground gets added to the atmosphere. It seems to me that what we really need to do is stop mining fossil fuels, and e.g. incentivize biofuels. If we tax carbon we also make biofuels more expensive, while in the grand scheme of things they seem to be basically climate neutral?
The shift in company culture that I am thinking about is about how strongly people react to react to social justice issues, not really the issues themselves.

I think, deep down, Coinbase wants a tough, driven, mercenary workforce. If that's the workforce they get, POC or not, it has downsides.

If a company has a certain number of employees who are sort of flakey, idealistic types, it probably guards against employee turnover, departmental silos, fraud. You want some employees who sometimes do what they think is the right thing, for its own sake, and aren't so career-driven that they undercut others.
What is the equivalent of open source software in the physical engineering world that this author respects so much? How is it regulated?

If there isn’t such an example, then perhaps software is a category of its own and thus its problems can’t be solved by legacy regulatory tooling.
Wow, Scripting Intelligence?!
> generally far more certified

Hardly. Any software developer working on systems that risk people’s safety - eg avionics, automotive systems, medical devices, traffic control systems - would be required to have advanced university qualifications. Google at least used to require all its software engineers to have masters degrees. Do they still? People I’ve know to work in software dev jobs at Microsoft and even mid-level companies like TripAdvisor and SurveyMonkey have PhDs. Other tech companies like IBM and Accenture sure would require at least bachelor degrees.

But sure, plenty of software developers have no formal qualifications or liability. And they’re not working on stuff that directly risks people’s physical safety.
Fact: bears eat beets. Bears, beets, "Battlestar Galactica."
There is a straight forward (but not easy) solution to the China problem. It's called the carbon club, and William Nordhaus won the Nobel Memorial prize for his paper on it. Germany is currently leading the charge to get one set up.
It's also a playstyle, though. People make these 'sushi belts' for fun with different items on them.

A somewhat valid use-case is for inserting science packs into labs.
Because it's fairly plain genetic determinism, the same kind of theory that postulated the superiority of, say, 'Aryans'.
>I'm really not sure why you seem to be pinning this on the population.

I think both major parties are dragging their feet on climate because any sacrifices they ask people to make will lose them the election. Covid is different because it has not been an election issue.

I'm pinning it on us, because who else is there.
I really wish people would stop thinking that there's this one thing that will fix climate.

There isn't. It'll take lots of things. Carbon pricing is a good one if done right, but it's not a silver bullet. There are no silver bullets.
That is not completely correct. We have inherent biological drives from lower level temperature regulation and such to nutrition intake and on an even higher level a proclivity for social interaction including reproduction. The ways these frames can be aligned and satisfied are not infinite. So some level of constraints and requirements are pre-specified. A person’s chosen behaviour must fit within this structure and that of others for it to be sustainable.
can you name the sustainable sources of hydrogen, and their efficiency?
Ask HN: Do you remember Ultima Online?
It's just a nostalgic wave. The game is one of the most powerful childhood memories that I have.

Actually, that's all I needed to be happy that time.

And then you grew up and voila, you have 9999 responsibilities, and no passion like you had when playing a computer game.

sigh
How is any system that risks spontaneously losing funds any better than just using the existing banking infrastructure that has this down to an absolute minimum?

Of course market speculation has made any cryptocurrency system completely unusable for long term value storage so I wouldn't put my savings in there anyway, but even for a checking account the existence of risk of spontaneously losing money that you can never get back while using the system normally seems like a massive design flaw.
Carbon taxes basically do that though. They "fine" you if you use more carbon than your competitors, disadvantaging you in the market.

Tax evasion is already a crime, and would be difficult for most people since it would be embedded into the things they buy in a million little ways. But each supplier has their own direct incentive to change that to stay conpetitive.

There's room for other policies too, the whole "if you dont do carbon taxes youre not serious about climate change" thing seems like a bait and switch by politicians who have already poisoned the well on taxes generally. (And people generally seem ignorant that carbon pricing is an integral part of action on climate change around the world).
First drive: 2025 Volkswagen ID Life concept review
Turing sentence: This program does not halt
The 5th is the least tempered interval in 12 equal temperament (excluding the untempered octave and unison), with less than 2 cents difference from the just interval, and the violin only has 4 strings, so in practice it's probably close enough.
Vaccine push corruption leads to resignation premier New South Wales (AU)
shii...strap a tube to my arm and hit me with that mamba juice. be flying for hours...

or more likely arrested for animal abuse, but hey, imagine being the cool druggie who can get high and defend his territory with a snake. this under-bridge be mine.
I think rather than broadly comparing software engineering to other engineering professions in general, it would be more apt to compare it to plumbing specifically. Building bridges, planning houses and roads, etc often comes with strings attached because lives are at stake. Focusing on this distinction and then dismissing the argument as it's not applicable to software short of a few specific areas is easy, but missing the forest for the trees. Plumbing is a better comparison. Most of the time, there's no life-threatening danger involved (although there are exceptions). In general though, failures are simply both very unpleasant and get expensive fast. If you need to replace an old tap you may be able to do get it done on the cheap or even do it yourself, but if you want to run water for a whole building, you will most certainly want someone who comes with certifications, liability insurance, etc. In the long run, as a society we would benefit greatly from introducing varying kinds and levels of certification in the software industry, and for similar reasons. Like plumbing, there's no problem if you do smaller things around your own house. But if you want to build software that sits at the heart of say nationally important systems you should be tested before you're let at the wheel.
It's like a religion. You have a simple gospel, but religious nuts turn it into a faith-based dogma. If you don't get results, it's because you're not following the rituals well enough. You get the idea.

In practice, I think it's one of those things where you should follow the rules for a while, until you can tell where it makes sense to break them. If you half-ass the implementation, you end up doing the same things as before. If you overdo it, the process stops serving you, and you start serving the process.

I do appreciate daily standups and retrospectives, but only if they're well-run. Otherwise people attend it like the Simpsons attend mass.

Personally, I prefer Kanban for its lack of arbitrary divisions and estimations. It doesn't encourage basing solid deadlines on guesstimations, and allows for on-the-fly priority changes. It requires a lot less discipline, as your only job is to keep the backlog sorted.
Oh I like that - safety while compounding must have been a huge issue.
This article, and the comments, made me realize why some friends that I tried to teach coding just couldn't grasp it yet for me it seems kinda obvious.

I don't understand music one bit, none, zero. I can read descriptions and even understand what different notes are, and the symbols for them but it's a very dry knowledge. Nothing I do make it 'click' for me and it feels so disjointed and foreign that I just got overwhelmed and I know it will never make any sense to me

I can read a math paper, and even though I might not understand it at first, at least I know that if I just take a book that explains the terminology then I'll be able to grasp it. With music it's a complete opposite - nothing no matter what I do will make it understandable for me

Edit: To give you and example, I have been studying the famous clip [0] about the rhythmic displacement. I have watched it thousands times, read tons of analysis etc. and I know exactly what was done and when. I just don't hear it being done - I know people aren't lying to me but I just cannot hear whatever happened at that famous point and what changed after

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UinRq_29jPk
Sorry, this analogy does not hold up.

First of all, you're comparing unintended software vulnerabilities to physical locks; being able to open a lock with a lockpick is an element of the design! Everyone knows this going in!

That aside, ask yourself what car manufacturers have to do to prove the safety/security of everything in their supply chain down to nuts and bolts, and what the consequences are when they make a mistake.

Now compare that to how modern consumer software projects do dependency management and verification, and what happens when they have a whoopsie because some open source library they pulled from GitHub with a "no warranty" license exposed them to a critical data breach. In my experience they throw their hands up and say "meh sorry, software is hard."
Yes, I’m definitely not supporting colonisation. I’m from a country who’s prospects were stunted by merciless resource extraction. I wish it didn’t happen. I’m simply saying that, it’s the “lowest common denominator” means of achieving progress and geo-local maxima by causing ethical global minima. Hence, space exploration is a noble alternative in comparison - extract your resources from dead zones in space and have a human utopia for all here on earth.
I hope it's okay to post to my own article.
> As far as I understand from Tesla's progress, they need to merely cover ever more corner cases to go up the levels.

I think this is the crux of the disagreements here. You say they need to merely cover more corner cases, while I think many (including myself) think that this endless list of corner cases is the primary almost-insurmountable problem.

From what I've seen of Tesla FSD (and competitors), these systems do pretty well in highly structured and orderly environments during clear desert weather. In order to deal with chaos in a blizzard etc, we're going to need far more than just a few tweaks. At this point, none of these companies are even doing any testing in extreme environments. They're still trying to stop their cars from hitting pedestrians in well lit areas on known crossing points. [1]

--

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28566376
I don't want to live in a region where my neighbors just watch me get robbed...
This seems old news? This is why there is all the rage in the Netherlands to use glass milk bottles for babies instead of plastic.
> Just observe a teenager of your family to see the values that are being taught through it. Is this how you want the next generation to be?

To be fair, isn't this how every generation looks down on the next generation?

> We don't even need clinical reporting to tell that instagram has a bad effect on teens.

Sorry, we can't leave this to armchair psychologists.
Hey Jim! I answered you on Twitter https://twitter.com/dbuidl/status/1444281093000159233?s=21

There might be a bug in the form, but you can see the current one being displayed has also 3 lines and a pretty long ones.
Its just a shorthand. Most actual policies include gasses other than carbon dioxide (which is different from carbon anyway) and account for things that absorb or emit carbon in other ways (e.g change in land use).

The low hanging fruit is to stop digging up fossil fuels and burning them though and as such theyll be impacted most by "carbon" fees.
as a Zimbabwean too, I wish the best of luck to Venezuelans. the hyper-inflation era, was rough. prices changing every 30 mins. people stopped counting money, it was about how thick it looked while boarding public transit. But yeah Venezuela need to get off the 2 currency system as it's prone to manipulation. I wonder, how it will work for them though, since they're under massive sanctions from the US
Space policy is finally moving into the 21st century
There’s more diversity in roles and risks in IT than there is in medicine. But even still there are still jobs related to health that don’t require qualifications and certification - e.g. massage and fitness training.

Plumbing certainly involves physical safety and health; poor plumbing work can damage the building leading to collapse, or cause a fire/explosion, water contamination or electrical faults leading to injuries or fatalities.
It all depends on the complexity of the method of the contract being called. I can surely imagine an $800 fee in peak times for a complex multihop swap on Sushiswap or something ;)
That's my personal opinion, but I think that programming language pages should have more information density. I also think that using your average "startup template" for Common Lisp is a bit weird. A good example of what I like might be the OCaml homepage https://lisp-lang.org/, the Go homepage https://golang.org/. The Haskell homepage has a REPL with a tutorial, which encourages you to play around with the language, I think that's a good idea https://www.haskell.org/. TypeScript's page is also nice https://www.typescriptlang.org/. For something a little bit different, Dhall is also good at quickly demonstrating how it works https://dhall-lang.org/.

That might just be a consequence of my time on Hacker News, but I think the insistance on Paul Graham is a bit much.

The chart about server performance felt a bit weird to me, as I think the difference between Ruby and JS would be bigger at least. So I checked on techempower benchmarks (https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/) and sadly there is no common lisp. It's also not on the last runs (https://tfb-status.techempower.com/). I think putting the origin of the results and a way to reproduce them would be a good thing. I don't doubt that common lisp is fast, but that diagram looks a bit too much like hollow marketing, especially with the image behind.

The page about OO (https://lisp-lang.org/learn/clos) has a good explanation of multiple dispatch, but I think it should come with an example. The first steps pages (https://lisp-lang.org/learn/first-steps) also explains atoms well, but it doesn't explain lists after mentionning them.

In general this feels a bit unpolished, though some part are good. There's no mention of the Common Lisp cookbook (https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/), which sadly confirms a bit the "Lisp users all have NIH syndrome" meme.
Yes, it's not an industry problem, it's just that most software isn't critical. When software is critical, it's also handled differently. I worked on critical car software, where a bug is expected to cause a safety hazard, and can lead to a car crash. The development process is completely different from some non-critical web service. FMEA analysis, breaking down the software into ASIL levels per component so some components get the very thorough ISO 26262 procedures, every code change has to be traced to a requirement and reviewed by two people. Tooling requires 100% branch coverage in tests, anything that's manually excluded from tests has to have a written justification and manual analysis. Code to be written strictly in MISRA C, any non-compliance detected by static analysis blocks the merge until resolved or manually verified and documented.

Developing that kind of software is so different from most non-critical software that it might as well be different industries altogether.
I'm interested in the Coinbase Commerce as an option for my SaaS, sadly they don't seem to support recurring payments out of the box. Does anyone know if they might be offering this functionality in the future?
Yes, it's fuzzy just because there doesn't seem to be a general widespread agreement on terminology, even among "experts", so that someone uses the word consciousness meaning something completely different than someone else. It seems that each time one wants to embark in a consciousness discussion, there should be a glossary preamble to specify definitions.

Regardless of the breadth of the spectrum of definitions, at the very bottom you find phenomenal consciousness. The given, undeniable fact that "it feels like something". We don't have a plausible avenue, not even in principle, to even start addressing this fact of existence, to the point that the most rational stance is to assume that it is fundamental in nature.