skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wondering whether “best practices” has wrecked SW engineering
This was part of a code review in a small project in Go:
'You did not apply SOLID principles and no extensibility'.

At this point I've seen this kind of feedback one too many so, given that I'm just a click away from giving the whole current SW dev party the middle finger and do something more productive with my life, I'd just want to see if I'm alone in feeling that:

1. cargo-culting (uncle Bob et all) has poisoned the field to the point of destroying even unrelated paradigms (at this point I won't be impressed if someone tries to apply SOLID to Elixir)

2. SW eng roles are gatekeeped (this was a take home test) by evangelists of a certain type that make sure that things will keep being done in that way.

3. That way being the way Java ecosystem made sure that nobody with a creative vein and a slight aversion to authorities and bureaucracy would ever set foot in it again. Consistently delivering overengineered BS that build nice CVs and careers and leave companies with unmaintainable overengineered messes.

4. There is yet a shred of actual damned scientific evidence that all this 90s and 00s "best practices" actually lead to better SW. There has been no double blind experiment to measure whether the SOLID principles actually work or their best use is to insure a fat paycheck for evangelists and build CVs. For the record I conside most of SOLID and a lot of DPs just self-indulging rules conjured out of thin air. A case of an academic trying (and succeeding) to impose his hugely impractical views on the real world. Shit that looks good on paper but is actually offering little value and a lot of times is akin to splitting hair.

Anyway. Bye and thanks for the fish.

I think I deserve much more than munching on canned BS by this world's uncles and their minions.
> Yes, you can screenshot the Mona Lisa or print out a signed Mickey Mantle rookie card, but it's not the same thing is it?

Obviously not, because those are tangible things. That’s not a valid comparison.
It wasn't so much circles as everything else.

Actually circles in themselves felt botched and I stopped using them.

The good things about Google + was:

- high signal to noise ratio

- you could follow what people wrote about programming or photography without following what they wrote in their local language about local politics (i.e. think if you could follow just @eitland#programming on twitter instead of getting everything I wrote)

- beautiful reading experience
Taking you up on your AMA, is there a best practice for discovering datasets belonging to articles and vice-versa? I see that Web of Science has a lot of this but they don't make that linkage explicitly available as an export. I have tried querying isSupplementTo and chasing cited works, and I don't expect a smoking gun.

Just now I tried searching Scholix via the web interface for IDs that are linked in Dryad, which is supposed to use the same linking system, and in either direction came up empty.

TIA for any clues!
> How is "NFT" not a gigantic scam?

Some types of NFTs are not scams, but the NFTs that are images, videos, audio are complete and utter scams.

Simply slapping blockchain on them creates the false illusion that you somehow 'own' it when given that are not even stored on the blockchain in the first place, it tells you that you actually own an expensive certificate that could point to anything since they are really living on centralised servers.

If that is not a scam, I don't know what is.
Nor can we tell why proton is a spin 1/2 particle because the gluon soup and particle-antiparticle pairs make this complicated.
I think I can explain. I understand why others value them, although I don't agree with the valuation (as a litmus test, I also think shelling out $30k for a genuine Rolex is very stupid). My lack of agreement also does not prevent me from participating and profiting off the people who think they do have value, although I have not done so.

There are basically two theories of their value: the collectible theory and the ownership theory. These overlap but are best explained separately.

In the collectible theory, NFTs are like an autograph you get on merch from a famous person. Think an autographed photo of Will Shatner you might get at a con. Usually the (cryptographic) autographer is the original artist of the work being autographed. Of course the autographer can release multiple autographed versions of the same work, but this decreases their value (and the value of any further work they might autograph).

Collectibles have long had value to humans, but they also suffer from three annoying problems: storage, fakes, and transaction costs. NFTs solve all three - they never degrade on the blockchain, their authenticity is cryptographically verifiable (assuming one can associate the signing address with the famous person, which is comparatively simple), and they are easily transferred online.

The second theory is the ownership theory. Here NFTs are used to track ownership of the underlying digital asset. In our current internet this is absurd, as the torrent is designed to demonstrate - everything is a copy, and even the NFT holder can never get access to the "original" bits. The ownership theory requires adoption of NFTs as an ownership mechanism in the metaverse, along with associated digital rights management technology. It's an early land-grab for the VR overworld.

Now, personally I don't find either of these theories very compelling. But I also didn't find cryptocurrencies generally very compelling, so I don't have a great track record. Cryptocurrency really tends to turn us all into Frank Grimes -like characters who miss out. I believe the more widely-used term is "midwit".
> Extending fundamental software development practices like version control, automated testing, and continuous deployment to other low-code and no-code tools sounds like a job for programmers, and one that’s still on the to-do list.

This, so much this!

The amount of wilfull low-code ignorance of standard, 20-year+ old best practices for producing reliable software is mind-boggling.

Integrate with standard version control. Have a textual representation of your source. Integrate with standard CI/CD.

No, you are not a special snowflake. And no, no one wants to have to use your cloud SaaS build tools vs something they can own, integrate, and run themselves.
The "Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site." page is considered one of the internal protected pages, so in theory toggling the appropriate setting to allow extensions on those pages should fix that issue.

Just for clarity, those "special" internal pages in the browser have privileged access to some specific user data, so the intent of having extensions off-by-default on them is to ensure extensions don't all have full access to all that data by default. However, this seems similar to extensions being disabled by default in Private Windows, which is easy to toggle, so I really wish they'd make special browser pages as easy to toggle.
So like others I've been using gmail for mails with a high spam risk such as registrations, etc. for a long time now, but gmail now modifies URLs in email to redirect to Google Search, the result being that those won't open anymore (maybe due to Search requiring agreement to new privacy disclaimers?). Is that a new thing, or in EU only? Doesn't disqualify this the usage of gmail for anything business?
Missed opportunity to call it a "macroprocessor".
I really don't understand all the PHP dismissal on HN. As a language it has continued to evolve in meaningful ways, especially with the latest releases. Companies like Facebook are built on PHP (yes, they extended with Hack, but most of the benefits are available in PHP 8 now without the downsides).

Coming from a C background, I found PHP easy to step into as many of of the underlying libraries and common functions are wrapped and available in PHP (with similar names).
I spent a lot of time reading political philosophy books from smart people with big reputations and the definition and dynamics of liberty was definitely an overriding theme. My takeaway many years later is that it's a very complex topic and many people, all with contradictory positions, have a lot of confidence in their take on it. I trump them all by having no confidence in my take!
Some points:

1) It's about 1600 years since Britain was a Roman colony. A lot has happened since then, such as the Dark Ages. When Rome was in charge the local population was in effect the Welsh (and Cornish and Bretons). How's Wales doing now relative to England?

2) Yes, the US was a British colony, but the dominant group in the US is still the descendants of the colonizers.

I don't the history of Singapore, but I would be curious to know who was in charge when England took over versus who is in charge now.

In all these cases there is a complex history which can't be glossed over by saying "they were all colonies". Important issues are the support they were given to create or rebuild institutions, population replacement, the extent to which they achieved control of their own resources, the institutions they were left with, or whether they were saddled with debt. Haiti was a colony that achieved its freedom, but was left with a crippling debt to its occupiers which it only finished paying off in the 20th century.
If only certain identifiable individuals are at risk of severe covid, I expect there would be no lockdowns, and that those individuals would be given the warning to lock themselves down as they see fit, for their own protection.
If you are actually curious, see here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29265373
> Vulkan is defined in terms of the SPIR-V intermediate representation, so presumably can run anything that compiles to that

“Presumably” doesn’t hold here, unfortunately. We are seeing issues in spirv processing by drivers if it doesn’t look like the output of glslc.
DeepMReye: Magnetic resonance-based eye tracking using deep neural networks
Does PHP still look like that in 'real life'? I was reintroduced to PHP last year via a Laravel based project and it looked nothing like that. It was all Objects and Models and Controllers spread out across a half dozen folders and scaffolding code generated via CLI commands. All actual HTML was generated with Blade templates.
People need to know what could happen when they call that hotline. I'm guessing people think it goes something like this:

"I'm feeling suicidal, let me call the hotline."

"I called the hotline and now I feel better, everything's great."

In reality, at least in the US, it could be like this and this is codified in law (Duty to Warn):

"I'm feeling suicidal, let me call the hotline."

"We've notified law enforcement. The police are on their way."

I'm guessing the reason it isn't always done the 2nd way is because actual therapists know how bad this can be to the patient. Realize therapists are taking a legal risk in not reporting. In the US, the only tool government has for most problems is, "call law enforcement." The only tool law enforcement has it, "take them to jail." If you do some research, you come to realize what a bad tool that can be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_legislation#United_Sta...

If it were me, I would call a professional therapist before calling a government hotline in the US. This is not medical or legal advice.
Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29250582
Brought to you by Hardee’s
Per the paper (https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/emmm.202013714) the importance of this finding appears to be the discovery that hFwe-Lose concentration has greater predictive power for patient risk stratification than other methods (which notably include analysis of other biomarkers in addition to things like patient age), at least for patients who will become seriously ill.

In other words, working out who is likely to become seriously ill early on is important for physicians to provide the correct level of care; they have a number of tools to perform this asssessment already; the news is that hFwe-Lose concentration seems to be better than the rest at predicting severe outcomes.

Personally I don't think it's blindingly obvious that biomarker levels early in the course of a disease should be so very highly predictive of patient outcomes late in the course of a disease, but I am also a layperson.
I wonder how the economics work for this - it's great to have cheap FPGAs like this, but I suspect Renesas will need to produce a lot of IPs for people to use on these devices. With a cheap FPGA device like this you need quite big scale before this starts to beat a more expensive chip since you're going to have to going to have to get an FPGA developer to write your IP and that's going to be atleast in the region of tens of thousands in dev cost. It was always the problem that the big fpga companies ran into - at small scale the development costs are prohibitive, at large scale the unit costs lend themselves to custom asic production. The result is you're constantly chasing this mid-scale niche, pushing at the boundaries by pushing your process advantage vs custom ASIC and by pushing the tooling to lower the cost of development - neither of which proved to be very successful.
There’s a Norwegian show on Netflix called “Norsemen” that you might enjoy. Much of the dark humor revolves around looking at the most barbaric Viking practices with our modern sensibilities. It’s hysterical. Apparently they filmed every scene twice - once in Norwegian and once in English.

The trailer for season 1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HpMvIZRUPf4
PHP pays my bills. I don't use it for web backends, it runs automations for a number of operations that glue APIs together, as well as exporting some custom document types and sorting out workflows/data.

Simplistically speaking, all I have to do is stick the path hashbang at the top of a php file, follow with the business logic and run it as a shell script. Clears any urgent ad-hoc request within a day.
>Do any other languages have the same kinds of optimisations that PHP has with FPM where it keeps the process alive but pretends it's a complete fresh execution at the language level?

I know that's how the TCL and Perl FastCGI implementations work. I suspect that's how most of them work, and there's lots of languages supported by FastCGI.
> Do any other languages have the same kinds of optimisations that PHP has with FPM where it keeps the process alive but pretends it's a complete fresh execution at the language level?

I'm not aware of other languages where it is baked into a language itself, but FastCGI libraries tend to be basically drop-in replacements for CGI ones (at least it's the case with common C, Perl, and Haskell libraries; sometimes CGI and FastCGI libraries are combined, so that they are usable in either setting): you get the optimization, while still can pretend that it's a regular CGI. I guess the primary difference from PHP is just that global/static variables would survive.
I doubt it. There seem to be several SBCs in the picture with the Windows terminal.

The Windows terminal is probably used to communicate with the megaprocessor.
I don't believe in NFTs but I can imagine that they represent a generational wealth in the same way that Elvis memorabilia has probably somewhat peaked in value as it closes its generational capture.

My argument would be that when Pokemon cards came out I'd imagine most adults at the time would think them worthless, its just a card with a picture of a dinosaur on it. It was the children and young adults that attributed the value upon them and thus as those people are now 30/40/50 with large amounts of disposable income they can be worth a lot.

The same could happen with NFTs. People buying into their value today might come good on their value in later decades. Maybe it doesn't have to make sense if enough people believe it.
Speaking from behind the former Iron Curtain, corruption is a lot more widespread than people think. Not too long ago bribing a doctor for a better hospital bed was normal here.

Corruption itself isn't a prohibitive barrier to development. Countries as different as Italy, Poland, India and China managed to develop pretty fast even with endemic corruption. Heck, the U.S. themselves is pretty corrupt, at least on the political level. Didn't stop you from becoming a world power.

The interesting question is why some countries sink into such a deep corruption that they lose even the basic ability to function. Lebanon comes to mind.
Very similar, but free: https://spaceli.io/
What, exactly, is the enforcement mechanism of NFT? Do they come with a military or police force to do violence against those who disagree with your Internet Claim Check?
Cloudflare Workers Now Even More Unbound: 15 Minutes, 100 Scripts, and No Egress
Paper: "Magnetic resonance-based eye tracking using deep neural networks" by Markus Frey, Matthias Nau and Christian Doeller.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-021-00947-w (pay-walled)

Accessible summary:

https://www.mpg.de/17840610/1112-nepf-artificial-intelligenc...
ConstitutionDAO Hits $30M in Ethereum Raised, One Day Before Sotheby’s Auction
The mystery part is: what is the correct way to include the mass term.
In the last case it doesn't really say anything.

Though I suppose you could visualize it in the nickname somehow. But I hate the current retrieve trend of "and 3 others". It didn't really tell you anything if one of the other participants is someone you want to know about. Because you still don't know if any of them is typing or not.

If it's important, show it for everyone. Otherwise don't bother showing it at all. But showing it for some randomly picked users makes no sense.
> The verifiable timestamp and record of account associated with a wallet address (public key) that is known to be associated with the artist that produced the work is the same as establishing physical provenance for a unique item.

Not really. In your Mona Lisa example, an NFT would be more like a blockchain based ticket to the Louvre that has a link to a Mona Lisa JPEG.

That’s the mismatch in NFT discussions: The believers have been convinced that the NFT is the artwork, but everyone else looks at the NFT and sees a link to a JPEG with no actual rights, possession, or ownership of the artwork.

NFTs aren’t the artwork. They’re a fancy crypto receipt that says “I paid X amount to someone and we agreed that transaction had a link to this specific JPEG”. You can technically go into the blockchain and confirm that your receipt was the first, but there’s nothing stopping anyone else from making another NFT of the Mona Lisa and selling it.

The blockchain itself can’t even verify that the Louvre sold you the original Mona Lisa NFT, you have to rely on 3rd-party news articles and such to confirm the address was truly associated with the Louvre. We’re already seeing scams where fraudulent NFTs are being produced that claim to be authorized by legal owners of the artwork but are actually just scammers selling NFTs of someone else’s artwork. But the funny part is that discovering these frauds has zero impact on the blockchain because the NFT was already minted and owned and you can’t undo that. We just have to look off-chain to websites to tell us what these tokens are supposed to be thought of, ignoring the actual blockchain NFT contents and trusting the non-blockchain NFT sources.

They might be valuable to other members of the NFT believers group in the same way that rare baseball cards are valuable to other baseball card collectors, but the rest of us just aren’t interested in trading digital baseball cards of JPEGs.

There’s also a huge problem with wash trading: Someone can make their NFT or NFT collection look arbitrarily valuable by trading it between multiple wallets they own. From the outside it looks like the NFT is “sold” for huge amounts of money, but really it’s just someone moving their own money and NFTs around on the blockchain. In the real art world this is much less practical because someone would be paying huge tax bills and auction fees on each sale. With blockchain, someone can simply wash trade with themselves across wallets and nobody would ever know. NFT values are definitely being pumped up by this scam because it’s too obvious and easy to ignore.
Screenshotting the Mona Lisa or printing out a signed Mickey Mantle card is not a good analogy to copying an NFT. In the case of the NFT, the exact same bytes can be on my system as the 'owner' has.

How can I get a Mona Lisa copy that has the exact same physical makeup? Or a duplicate signed Mickey Mantle with the same ink strokes?

Digital assets can be easily duplicated identically. The only thing you're missing is some stamp on a chain that says you're the owner.
Oh huh, I completely missed the second hamburger button and was perplexed as to why their documentation only had three links to other sites.
Lab-stage mRNA vaccine targeting ticks may offer protection against Lyme
I feel like HN has more of the feel to it of a typical forum but it's missing a bit in the relationship building department.

I was quite active in a few forums many years ago where I knew all the regular folks and made a few lifelong friends.

But despite being quite active on HN for 6 years (and lurking much longer) I only recognize a handful of names, rarely see them comment, and don't think anyone is aware that I exist. I believe it's because, like Reddit, it's a bit too big for that type of interactions.
Thanks for the link. Getting hit by a bus is a bad example for sure. I just wanted to paint a picture about there being risks in life.

According to "usafacts.org" [1] there's a (very) roughly 1.6% rate of death, not controlling for age. The informationisbeautiful data shows that I'm >90% protected from extreme cases with 2 doses. That feels pretty safe to me given how low the rate of an extreme case is to begin with. (I'll admit I only measured death though)

You're right, though, it's not invincibility. That's a pretty high bar for anything.

[1] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...
I thought we weren’t allowed to talk about this. If China wanted an investigation, they’d have allowed WHO to do it.
Scaleway announced it was leaving Gaia-X