skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The semicolon is a profound public mystery; the only punctuation mark that regularly unites readers and writers in deep-seated repugnance."

That sentence should have used a colon, not a semi-colon, IIANM.

The digital world churns; Twitter is not an arena known for reflection. Semicolons, then, are snottily elitist and shadily indirect.

The elitist snottiness is in assuming people live their lives on Twitter and the like. They don't.

the semicolon has been usurped by ... the Dash

Well, _maybe_ some authors use more dashes than they used to (I actually doubt that, but never mind) - but a dash is not a substitute for semicolon. Their semantics are too different for that to be possible, IMHO. Take the first sentence in this paragraph: You can't replace the dash there with a semicolon, as that would mean splitting the "maybe" and "but" clauses into separate, not-directly-related clauses; you just can't do that.

indicating a pause

Not just a pause; a semicolon is also a semantic distancing. Two phrases separated by a comma are really an inseparable part of the same idea idea; if you separate them by a semicolon, they can each stand in their own right.
Conversely, the "F1" help in so many other Microsoft (especially windows) help page - which often ignores preferred browser - is the absolute worst help system I've ever seen. Literally never once has that page aided me in any way.
Maybe loops are not fun in common lisp the? I had much fun with loops in PicoLisp.

Julia also has similar macro capabilities to common lisp.

> And it's much easier to figure out what the function composition does than to write a loop vectorizer

I probably agree but complicated loop vectorisation would probably expressed in Einstein tensor contraction notation such as Tullio.jl provides. I wonder a Fourier transform would look using function decomposition.

@tullio F[k] := S[x] * exp(-impi/8 (k-1) * x) (k ∈ axes(S,1))
Sounds like a religion to me. We are born in sin and need to be saved.
Aluminum.
They will never experience buying bootleg disk for gif porn.

edit: disk is for diskette
No, because the semicolon is dead; long live the semicolon.
> the short life and quick death of DLNA.

Surprising number of recently updated repos that match the search term "DLNA": https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=dlna&s=updated&type=Repos...
You are unwittingly just promoting yet another form of back pain snake oil and there is already plenty. If I had fallen into the idea that my back pain was “just in my head” I would have gotten no where. I encourage anyone suffering to get an MRI as early as possible so at least you know what is wrong. Doctors and chiropractors will regularly misdiagnose you. There are lots of ways a back can go bad and everyone has their pet advice which probably doesn’t apply to you.
Yes, at least Popper wasn't trying to "excommunicate" the "undesirables". He said it's perfectly sensible to tolerate even their intolerance, as long as you can counter it by reasoned argument and keep it in check by public opinion.
Even better, use an old tire.

I like to set the tire on a large round, place a few smaller pieces inside the tire (so they don’t go flying out) and then chop them all before clearing and refilling. Also works with a single medium piece inside the tire. Large pieces you can quarter first, I don’t have much trouble there with pieces flying around.
Sentence length has gone down a lot, it feels like. So really, the semicolon has not been replaced by the dash, but by the period.
I enjoy using semicolons when writing, a dash is not always appropriate.

Bonus points if it makes me look like a pompous loner going against society.

Reject modernity, embrace semicolons.
It’s Time to Fear the Fungi
I also use a manual hydraulic splitter as I never developed axe skills when young. It works fine for most sections of trunk and gives a nice upper-body workout. If I load it with two sections of trunk the rearmost one significantly reduces the distance I need to move the ram before the section at the front makes contact with the splitter.
It seems partially accurate but also very stereotypical and some points are flat out wrong, I've met enough fellow aspies to have seen a lot of diversity in how we behave. And even in myself many of the problems on this list I became aware of decades ago, have worked on and are no longer a significant problem.
Nah, I want to work with actual people.

I have literally zero interest in a Zoom call to someone who's in the same town as me, I'd rather jump on the bus or train and see them.

I don't see that as being increased friction because to me travel and seeing people is _better_ than sitting in front of a screen for longer - it provides a welcome break and helps me to see more about the world.

I just find the entire thing odd. Like, being in the pub is better than on a phone call. Being at a theme park is better than being in a sim. Being at work is better than being at virtual work.

The whole situation is absurd to me, like a bad movie plot.
Luckily she was the head of state. They firebombed the vaccine evangelist Cotton Mather’s house in 1721:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/03/07/smallpox-c...
He should win.
What Are the Applications of Telemetry?
That's a very shortsighted comment. Just because you've never seen it happen, it doesn't mean that it doesn't. While terraform itself may not crash (maybe not in the manner that I assume you're referring), you are at the mercy of the implementation of the specific providers for which I've (and many others as well, I'm sure) seen plenty of issues. Even in "mature" ones as aws/gcp.

Besides that, the control-loop pattern, which the parent comment describes is a very sound design, which is employed not only in kubernetes and has nothing to do with "Optimizing based on a lottery event".
Operator overloading in a language in which memory management is all manual would be more challenging. That doesn't really tell us about its suitability in a language with automatic memory management. We've had about 20 years of C# with operator overloading, and it's been totally fine.
Not really:

SEPA has several message types:

- SCT Standard is a push
- SCT Inst is a push
- SDD Core is a pull
- SDD B2B is a pull
Clearly Lisp is the actual source of all evil ;)
I’m not even sure what forum to discuss this on anymore given so many variables

Headlines be like “[last year’s] vaccine less effective against [this year’s] variant” but omitting everything in the brackets when this is an obvious standard used for every seasonal pathogen…..

I’m also curious about who is doing what
How many bad outcomes did the pessimism prevent!
Depending on the bank large transfers are delayed to prevent fraud.
"Fun" in the Dwarf Fortress sense. We once spent days trying to track down an obscure malfunction only to discover that someone had passed a 0 literal as an actual parameter to a certain function that assigned 4 to the formal parameter. For those following along at home, that meant the value of any 0 literal in the program suddenly became 4.
Timeline of Vaccinations
Turning yourself into the problem
Not correct:

SEPA SDD Core + SDD B2B are working crossborder; though you're right that these are not deployed regularly/seldom.

DISCLAIMER:
Lead Payment Engineer at an European Challenger Bank, i'm implementing that stuff in the backend, i'm mainly talking to our central bank.
In 90s in my country it was a norm to buy potatoes directly from farmers. Many would find it funny that in richer places people pay more buying it washed, and sorted. However, as economical circumstances enhanced majority of urban dwellers started to pay more for washed, and sorted (and often imported, because you can't guarantee high quality of yield in any given year, at any given place) potatoes. You still can buy directly if you like, but nowadays it's mostly for students, and unsupported seniors. I don't know, maybe there's some sort of cartel conspiracy in US food trade, but consumers paying more for intermediary services is universal phenomenon. Likely after reaching some economical threshold, it becomes easier to spend for a bit of free time, and comfort.
> “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” The symbol is facing the same melancholy fate as the dodo, the dinosaur, and the Soviet Union.

Consensus is a beautiful thing.
Sometimes the semicolon is the best tool for the job.
It looks like a columnist attempting to bootstrap the argument that legacy systems foster lack of oversight, or something like that.

And failing.
Friend, you missed the biggest news of 2017:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38660860

Although it probably takes a few years for all toilets to be replaced...
Pakistan, duh. Pakistan-Taliban links were widely known for decades.
Indeed. If the parents are concerned about the book being part of the curriculum because the author is black, Jewish, homosexual, or any ‘other’ (rather than on the contents of the book), it seems to be a fairly accurate assumption.

“Look, we literally can’t force your child to do anything. If they prefer to sit non-disruptively and receive a zero in that part of the curriculum, that works for us.”
While I do love that video, it has some massive oversights:

- Safety margins requires distance to increase with velocity. i.e. if the light turns green and everyone accelerates together, then you end up with a bunch of cars going at high speeds bumper-to-bumper. This would be clearly undesirable even if everyone could press the gas pedal at the same time. Meaning you'd still want to insert a delay between cars regardless of people's ability to press the gas pedal at the same time. Heck, even with self-driving cars, you'd still want comparable safety margins in case something goes wrong; it's not like self-driving cars result in a perfectly predictable world.

- "Stay the same distance apart from the car behind you and in front of you" ignores the fact that the car behind you might be quite far behind you (if there at all). In reality you probably want to maintain a minimum distance both in front of and behind you, not an identical distance.

- It also fails to show that decongesting a traffic jam by deliberately slowing down (which is what you'd have to do to increase your distance from the car in front of you) will actually result in you getting to your destination more quickly. It's certainly not intuitive for that to be the case.

While I'm not claiming the conclusions would be necessarily wrong if you take these into account, for a viewer that hasn't already done research in this area, it sure doesn't convince them that the conclusions are correct once these are accounted for either.
Clever url domain of covariants.
I just had this thought yesterday: Could the process you described be sped up? If there was a virus variant that spreads faster but is less deadly it would replace the known variants but do less harm. So let's head to the bat cave and build the virus variant we could handle. (what could possibly go wrong?)
At least in theory this should be possible, right?

Edit: Fixed typos
> It's so easy. No setting up shit like iDeal or Stripe..

While true, the friction with iDeal or Stripe is a lot lower than with bank-transfers.

I've helped set up such payment systems (backends): the rate of non-paying (send reminders, etc) is far higher with bank-transfers than with iDeal. So much, that for many freelancers who send just a few dozens of invoices per year, it pays off (pun intended) to include an iDeal QR code and link in that invoice.

People are so much more likely to click and link and pay than when they have to type over payment details. The latter often ends on the "TODO pile" the former is often payed within minutes after emailing.

(Do note that in Western-Europe it is common business(to-business) practice to send an invoice after the goods or services are delivered. This invoice acts as a payment-request.)
The press is "underplaying" it with a 24 hour propaganda loop? Antibody dependant enhancement?
If you’re a good enough writer to know how to property use a semicolon, you’re a good enough writer to not need to use one.
Endianness, API Design, and Polymorphism in Rust
The semicolon is dead; long live the semicolon.
Yeah, this list is quite hit-or-miss, and seems to be more miss than hit the farther down you go. It doesn't help that many of these are phrased in absolutes (e.g. "all aspies hate X", "aspies always prefer Y").
When you need to write text for a wide audience, shorter sentences are usually preferable. Most business schools even teach briefness as an explicit target, as far as I know. That's quite different compared to the origins of writing, where the target were (usually) very literate people.
State of Chip Shortage in 2021: A Quick Revisit
Not correct:

Giropay does in fact include fees, though these are usually covered by the seller.
(check for example: https://www.unternehmerportal.info/giropay/)

DISCLAIMER:
Lead Payment Engineer at an European Challenger Bank, i'm implementing that stuff in the backend, i'm mainly talking to our central bank.
Was going to comment this. Are there any great examples in all of literature where a period would not have been a good replacement fora semicolon?

As a side note, I am only a little offended by the idea that fiction writers should use semicolons to make their writing more literate or fancy. But I think simple writing is always better, even when you are trying to convey beauty. I believe great flowery literature is great in spite of the floweriness, not because of it.
> I just really miss the UK, stupid Brexit. I have to quadruple the amount of paperwork if I want to sell to the UK. It's not worth the hassle. Just not worth it.

Had the same conclusion for a while for my webshop. It bothered me to say no to people from the UK, so ended up setting up a reseller account and chose to use that for the UK.

Which - while not free - has now changed to my main payment system as it reduced my overhead drastically. Plus now all my sales is compliant with all tax laws everywhere. Not just VAT within the EU, but also sales tax in the US etc.. without the additional overhead as the reseller is the one who handles all the taxes.
Decentralized Finance Defined-Stephen Ajulu
Explanandum and Explanans
How to Get Up to Speed with Contemporary Art
Boursorama and Fortuneo aren't neobanks ;)
But aren't most Americans' biggest asset their house, aka real estate? And their savings is their 401(k), aka the stock market?
No, I really don't think it's predictive. It's interesting social commentary on a world that no longer exists.

It's interesting historical commentary on some specific events in England, but not "mankind". Capitalism arose out of feudalism in England yes, but Capitalism also predated Feudalism in Rome and other societies. In fact, Feudalism arose out of capitalism!

If you look at the history of Feudalism, it came to be from the efforts by Rome to fight inflation, which required moving away from taxation via currency and starting to tax goods in kind. They then created lists of people with certain occupatons, and they froze the economy -- you needed to do what your father did. People didn't like that, so they started preventing people from moving. That was the origin of capitalism devolving to feudalism.

In other words, the ideas that there are these "historical laws" is the most discredited part of Marxism (other than the pure economic stuff). That idea is called "historicism", and is no longer advocated even by those who really like marxist economics. The reason is that we know a lot more about economic history than Marx did, and especially about non-european economic history, where some societies never experienced feudalism and jumped straight into capitalism with the domestication of cattle in the neolithic era. Fun Fact: The word "capital" comes from cattle. I recommend reading A History of Interest Rates by Sydney Homer.

So as long as Marx sticks to commentary on 18th Century England then he's golden. Alienation of factory workers, economic surplus, rapacious financiers -- it's all good stuff to describe that society. But the moment he starts declaiming universal laws for all societies and economic history in the middle ages or even tribal societies, that's when he doesn't have a lot of evidence for his thesis and ignores lots of counter-examples and most economic historians no longer take it seriously.
Probably so it doesn't break, sounds like a clever idea?
VMware mouse driver for Windows 3.x
I have no issue with people paying for processing, only the part where you're buying potatoes from a supermarket that came from another country when there's a farmer growing the exact same thing a few miles away. Reducing logistic complexity is both an inherent good for the environment and places distributive power in the hands of farmers to form a market or a distribution union or whatever form is applicable locally.
The Terra Luna Ecosystem and why it may be so important to the future of crypto
Cazy how civilized the Canadian system is. You can whip open your banking app, enter the email of anyone with a Canadian bank account, link is generated, money is instintly deposited. People basically use this for everything except regular debt purchases (and even then, in instances that you forget your wallet, non-chain stores will usually let you etransfer someone). It's how I pay rent etc. No fees. It's been like this for ~15 years
Not exactly:

You could sign a contract with your landlord, then revoke the so called "SEPA mandate" afterwards and you can forcibly switch to "manual payment" each month, since the SEPA mandate is not necessarily required or a "legally-necessary intrinsic component of the contract" (check for example: https://deutschesmietrecht.de/mietvertrag/662-mietzahlung-ei... )

Tough, depends on which type of relation you want to have to your landlord ;-)
Interesting. Thanks for sharing!

I wrote something for Java roughly 20 years ago (before ORM was really a thing). Of course I enhanced as needed over the years, but have used it heavily. It supports any DB with a JDBC driver and has easily saved me more time than anything else. There's not even a close second.

It's a pure code generator with a UI on top. You write an SQL select stub that references columns/tables for one or more tables, then provide the class name you want to generate. You then add any number of where clauses (including join conditions and parameterized placeholders). For each where clause, you use checkboxes to indicate what you want generated: select, update, insert, upsert, delete.

When the code is generated, all column-to-object field mappings, including types, are resolved through inspection of metadata (provided by the JDBC driver). Property names for the resulting domain objects are also generated using snake to camel case translations and, of course, methods resulting from parameterized statements include parameters of the correct types.

So, instead of having, say, a User class with a Profile class, which has an Image class, each with its own properties representing the full set of columns for the underlying table, you frequently need a limited subset of each combined into one object. For instance, a ProfileListView might need username, email, first and last from user; profile_pic_id, slug, and short_bio from profile; and thumb_filename from image.

There's more to it, but I took this join approach vs the "one table to one object" model because I found early that you frequently need different views of the data, based on different use cases. So, it's a way to flatten the underlying relational model when needed.

Not perfect, of course, but the best thing going when I built it. And since, I never found an ORM that was worth the switch.
In certain common lisp deployment you might do that.

There are legends from Common Lisp users where this is very much done.

> When one of the customer support people came to me with a report of a bug in the editor, I would load the code into the Lisp interpreter and log into the user's account. If I was able to reproduce the bug I'd get an actual break loop, telling me exactly what was going wrong. Often I could fix the code and release a fix right away. And when I say right away, I mean while the user was still on the phone.

> Such fast turnaround on bug fixes put us into an impossibly tempting position. If we could catch and fix a bug while the user was still
on the phone, it was very tempting for us to give the user the impression that they were imagining it. And so we sometimes (to their delight) had the customer support people tell the user to
just try logging in again and see if they still had the problem. And of course when the user logged back in they'd get the newly released version of the software with the bug fixed, and everything
would work fine. I realize this was a bit sneaky of us, but it was also a lot of fun.

Taken from https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt?t=163...

I know that this is not possible in Julia like that. But just because it's not possible in Julia doesn't mean what they did was somehow wrong when it worked well for them.
> to not need to use one

Why should one avoid using it.
The website decided to randomly turn into a blank white page after clicking through a number of items on the timeline. Said timeline also obscures the bottom of the tweet embed on a small viewport. Between that and the cutesy center-justified monospace, perhaps the pessimists were at least right about Web Technologies™.
I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in applied math with a Pentel 0.5 mm. Soooo, there's also a Pentel 0.7?? GOOD. Thanks!
That's what the author's Github profile says!
It’s not that the more benign virus beats the other one over the head, just that the more deadly strain dies out eventually while the more benign one doesn’t. Adding benign strains can’t speed up this process
Forks are great! I've literally never had a problem with any of my forks
It’s odd that “all in your head” means “not a serious problem” or “you can fix it by yourself”.

It seems to me that a problem being located in the head/brain/mind is, almost by definition, particularly difficult to fix, let alone to fix without external guidance.
for (let i = 0— i < 3— ++i)
{
console.log("no semicolons!")—
}
So how do other capitalist countries solve the bootstrapping problem? Because in order to have capitalism you need to have a class that owns means of production (coming out of feudalism, that meant private land and farming equipment that were previously worked by serfs) - what was the economic model that led to the centralised ownership of these things in Rome? Perhaps a system of slavery or similar?
I like TrueLayer as well, albeit it's not free for the provider. TrueLayer is the middleman.

They probably don't get as much money as CC payments though. Revolut topups / Nectar / Chip are now all using TrueLayer.

On the cons side, it doesn't work so well on all devices (I had problems going from app -> browser -> app on older devices, probably because of RAM limits).

Ideally, we could just have a free open-source wallet application that connects to all the different banks via Open Bank API (same as TrueLayer) and then just have a special walletOS://revolut/topup/250/gbp link in the app which opens up your wallet and allow you to send an instant bank transfer.

Zero fees, zero middlemen.

I've been toying with the idea of building it but it's not immediate to monetise, so I'll do it once I'm rich and bored and keep selling simpler services to business for now.

You could potentially upsell a saving / personal analytics premium service once you have enough adoption or resell transaction data (even if the latter won't probably be a very popular model, given modern concerns with muh privacy)

The main problem it would solve for me is that I have something like 8 different banking apps on my phone which I hate with a passion and I hate Credit/Debit Cards: sharing your single secret everytime you're paying for something is just plain retarded plus we're just enriching Visa and Mastercards, which produce zero innovation in FinTech.
Does the US Fed have a some kind of official charter saying that they will keep on inflating assets by keeping interest very very low?