skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> reading like a sentence.

But therein lies the problem. Let's forget about programming for a moment and talk human languages instead.

In english, you say "Cheese omelet". In dutch, you say "Kaas omelet". In french you say "Omelette du fromage".

Neither is better than the other; it's just how it is. A native english speaker who is learning both dutch and french may posit the feeling that dutch feels 'more natural' and has 'more obvious word order'. But I'm sure you'd agree that this is just based on happenstance; simply because english and dutch so happen to match. There's nothing intrinsically better about putting the cheese in front of the omelet instead of after it. Nevertheless, for a native english speaker, dutch will seem simpler... __right up until the moment you turn "native", and you no longer translate each word on its own back to english first__. Once you've hit that level, there's no difference. At all. You hear the words and your brain visualizes a cheese omelet instantaneously.

The same logic applies to programming langauges. "It reads like a sentence"? What are you on about? If I see this code:

account.deposit(Dollar.of(100));

I know what that means, __instantly__, in the exact same fashion someone who is entirely fluent in both french and english makes absolutely no difference whatsoever between Omelette du Fromage and Cheese Omelet. Simply because I program enough javascript, java, C#, (C-esque syntax) that __THIS__ is natural to me.

Rails in particular is egregiously in violation of this ridiculous aim to make it look like english (but, fortunately, nothing so crazy as AppleScript). Rails prides itself on being able to write `5.minutes` - they monkey patch numbers to add a minutes function.

But in programmese, of any flavour, that makes very little sense. You want to create a value of type Minutes, or in some languages, you want to create a value by using a function from the namespace Minutes, and this operation that requires a parameter (the amount of minutes). Putting the param _before_ the namespace / class / type / function name / whatever your programming language uses here - is _highly exotic_ - something very very very few programming languages do. Except Rails (I'm going by memory here - I believe the minutes function on numeric types is a monkeypatch Rails adds, it's not stock Ruby). They do it, apparently (in that they call it out in their tutorials) because "5 minutes" reads like english and leave it at that - clearly insinuating that 'reads like english' is upside.

No it isn't.

And that's why "account deposit: 100 dollars." is by no means "easier to read" simply because it reads like an english sentence.
Ask HN: Is it me or are we entering an ARM era?
With the Macbook M1, billions of smartphones running ARM and less and less sales of Intel chips, will we see the sudden rise of Linux and Windows desktops / laptops also switching to ARM?

Is x86 dead?
Why do you say "probably"? Do we have any evidence on which to base our presumptions of the inner experiences of monkeys?
> What makes you think revenge isn’t an instinct in humans?

An instinct is something you have no choice over, it's automatic.

Humans very clearly have a choice as to whether they pursue revenge or not. If someone wrongs me in a given way, I can choose how to respond, or to not respond at all; and I can spend as much time as I like (decades if I choose to) pondering on that. It's doubtful these monkeys function quite at that level.

It's unknown whether, for example, these monkeys have any choice in the matter. Their programming may be purely instinctual when it comes to a revenge response.
Generally true, but the average chimp is only 50% stronger in relative terms and the average chimp is only 4ft tall.

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/28/7343

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2138714-chimps-are-not-...
Oh for sure but although I got a fair amount my domain owner email address was just swimming in it. As others have said thousands of emails a day.
Since it's pub/sub, you just need one misbehaving client that LISTENs in a transaction to have problems, the other clients can still receive and process the NOTIFY event
Don't know why people are so reluctant to admit animals are highly developed intellectualy. The cocncept of revenge is usually just denied, despite common observations. Wild animals, mostly, of course. Ask farmers - they'll have one or two stories of crows taking revenge. Even on humans.
I would expect most animals that still exist to at the very least not be a major threat to humans - because if they are, they tend to cease to exist.
The Church Committee hearings (particularly some of the "family jewels" stuff) and Iran-Contra hearings pertaining to Nicaragua and Contras establishes to some extent which sabotage manuals are real and who wrote them.
It comes out of extending that to an accelerating reference frame, which gives you a curved spacetime. That doesn't stay stable by itself. It has to either expand or contract, depending on how much energy is in it. (Mass is a form of energy, and so you get gravity.)

It's a bit like noticing that objects can't float. They can either fly away or fall but they can't just sit there. It's not exactly the same thing, since we're talking about the spacetime itself rather than gravity as separate from the objects, but the analogy mostly works.
I’m not surprised that this isn’t supported in mobile Safari.
Was my thought as well. Python is eating Mathematica and Matlab for lunch.
I guess the reason is also, that FANG investend heavly in python. Even just by opensourcing tensorflow, pytorch, jax and so on.
Ask HN: A decentralised way to fight DDoS attacks?
Hi HN,

A simple Wordpress website and server I manage has been suffering a DDOS recently, and my attempts to combat it via fail2ban failed, so I've ended up using Cloudflare. Putting a huge centralised service in between the website and its readers feels like a privacy failure to me.

It's a simple website hosted on a physical server. The DDOS attack is trying to brute force /xmlrpc.php and /wp-login.php, so I'd blocked all access to xmlrpc.php in nginx, jailed any ips who requested it in fail2ban, and rate limited access to /wp-login.php. But still endless requests to both are being made at numerous times a second from an endless series of ips, crashing the server on a daily basis. Now I've got Cloudflare in the way I'm hoping to turn away to buggers before they reach the server. But is there no decentralised alternative?
Your phone, smart watch, smart glasses, extra battery pack, wireless earbuds, laptop, and essentially all other modern wireless consumer products can and do burst into flames on occasion. As a result, they are required to be shipped with hazardous material declarations like the UN3481 stickers you'll find on everything.

Consumers in general are unaware of the hazards and unwilling to learn, mostly because it's very rare for anything particularly bad to happen. You can find thousands of examples of dangerous situations here: https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/

edit: as a tangential story, I once ended up at a battle robot live stream. Turns out lithium battery fires are a normalized part of that, with arenas filling with toxic smoke and volunteers with no PPE collecting actively combusting robots while breathing billowing clouds of thick smoke. It happened to have some affiliated moderators; after pointing out this was stupid and very, very unhealthy, they basically told me to shut up and donate PPE if I didn't like it. I thought it was a fascinating example of the disconnect between OSHA-regulated industry and end consumers.
Wolfram had been trying to push its language as something that can replace python
They didn't say their work is worth nothing, but that the label doesn't mean much. And even if they did, that's still a level better than your comment. And even if it wasn't, "they said something bad so now I'm going to insult them too" is not how discussions are supposed to work here.
Can you recommend a translation?
10ms or so
The trick is they are stuffed with ads. I swear the reruns have extra ads than when they originally aired. It will show 3 minutes of programming than 1.5 minutes of ads.
> Well the better way would have been to honour the browsers 'Do Not Track' headers,

If the GDPR would make ignoring DNT illegal, that would be great.
Is there anyone who honours the DNT header?
> But is is changing

No, not really. At least in practical terms.

C11 saw some changes, and arguably only minor ones.

C17 is a bugfix update to C11.

And C20 is still in the works, and none of the proposed changes are relevant.

Consequently, C as been dormant since the release of C99, which already was criticized for not bringing anything new to the table other than C++98 tuneups, and support for inline comments (?!)
Alternatively you could block the Google Analytics domain altogether.
If any network gets significant market share (like Google or Cloudflare), they can probably still follow you around by correlation of IP, user agent, routing location etc.
So it's not technological or economical progress, nor economies of scale, that are to be credited with cheap appliances today? It's cost-cutting that we should thank?

What if, instead of comparing it to prices from 70 years ago when Death of a Salesman was written (4 years after WWII ended), you compare it to the cost of a refrigerator today, that is designed to last 2-10x as long?
It seems like Facebook doesn't have problem with releasing open source project [0] while keeping centralised control over it.

Why not just say they want to monetize it?

Arguably even pure, single monetizing argument can be challanged as their adoption would increase tenfold, if not more and there are tons of ways to monetize popular technology.

[0] https://github.com/facebook/flow
The default postgres one, serializable (if I remember correctly?)
You could argue that an error correction code just expands the set of correct inputs.
OSS is not the CIA. Pleas correct the headline.
Aspiration. But UW is not allowed to create quotas out of thin air to implement equity (like say the Eastern WA quota).
> Assuming a global mutable variable will never change is generally not a safe assumption.

Put your logging level behind a switch point and C2 will treat it as a constant but still let it be changed - that works today.
I thought for a bit that the tactics were increasingly applied by many workers. sadly enough they aren't applying planned coordinated actions, they just are so fed up with this so well rigged system they've decided that, perhaps unconsciously, sabotaging all they can is the best pleasure they can hope for.
There are dozens of edge cases that you can argue; is redistribution allowed, is attribution required, etc. - open source is a blanket statement and is perfectly suitable as a term IMO.
If you're spraying a rapidly solidifying goo, you'd need to be darn sure you don't cover the target's face or you're back where you started.
I think it’s much simpler than that. Ruby didn’t have good documentation in English until the mid-2000’s. Python was in use by the English-speaking world before the turn of the century. Documentation + you can generally understand it at a glance == total Python dominance.

Looking at recent Python code, it also seems like the simplicity is being lost in the rush to add features.
Numerical simulations and jit-compiled autodiffed float32 operations are not Mathematica's main purpose.
> So, paradoxically, the risks are both negligible and inevitable, something that every consumer should be prepared for because "everyone knows" batteries explode, but no manufacturer should warn about, mitigate, or account for in the design because who'd buy their product then?

I think this can all be true. ER doctors say avocados are one of the most dangerous fruits because of knife accidents.

Yet avocados don’t come with any warnings or mitigations. And for the general public, you probably don’t know any one who was severely injured slicing an avocado.

Surely avocado farmers should be working on cultivars that have a small or no pit so people don’t get injured preparing these fruits? (I mean that only half sarcastically, I would enjoy a seedless avocado if it tasted the same.)
Whether it matters or not is besides the point. The attached article claims that these supermarket chains will no longer source from farmers that engage in 'illegal' deforestation in Brazil. It is therefore reasonable to ask illegal under whose law? Brazil? UN? UK?. I thought I asked a reasonable question. I'm not sure what the downVs are about.
Maybe not, but "It's very similar to this other thing, but under a different name" isn't exactly an uncommon theme for Google. That's how we ended up with Inbox vs Gmail, Google Play Music vs Youtube Premium, Google Chat vs Allo, Hangouts vs Google Voice, and the others I'm sure I'm forgetting.
Appropriate for the time period
You’re right. I rarely see 3rd party sellers on Target. As for Walmart, currently there is no commingled inventory, though things could change.
This isn’t remotely comparable. Whatchamacallit is generic and these are separate market categories.
> - She gets ₹100 for every book she finishes regardless of genres but ₹500 for any non-fiction documentary-ish like a biography of a great person.

Are you sure that's a good idea? At least at one point, pecuniary incentives for children for "good" behavior were considered harmful to their education, but maybe that has changed.
The world is infinate, so the knowledge we have of it will always be a subset.
You are right, nobody honoured the DNT headers - it needs legislative action (preferably GPC as it's the better standard).

Apple even pulled support in Safari as pretty much no advertisers were using it to stop tracking, but some advertisers were (ironically) using the header setting for additional fingerprinting.
Outwitting the Devil -
by Napoleon Hill

Outwitting the Devil is a work of fiction that was written in 1938 by Napoleon Hill, which was considered too controversial to be published in its era. The book is written as an interview between Hill (Mr. Earthbound) and the devil (our inner dark self), wherein Hill attempts to uncover the secrets to freedom and success by evaluating the greatest obstacles that humans face in order to attain their personal goals in life.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage... authenticates part of this. I'd be surprised if you couldn't find the full version hosted on their official page somewhere.
> "The popularity of this library is working against it, preventing it from reversing bad decisions, and multiplying the harm. Sometimes it’s worthwhile in the long run to throw away the “battle tested” thing in favor of a newer, simpler alternative."

You can say that about anything, I don't get your point. Talk about not adding substance to the conversation...

Some bugs are difficult to fix, and sometimes how we fix something has to be weighed against things like backwards-compatability. That a certain fix makes sense to you, doesn't mean it's a done story.

It's not dead weight being dragged around - it's the consequence of having millions of enterprises all over the world directly depend on your software - so you actually have to spend the time finding a proper solution first, not just improvising. Your customers are banks, healthcare, goverments, schools, and so on. "Move fast and break things" doesn't work here.

20 years in this industry, so you should know better.
because it's a vehicle to deliver other, profit-making products. I.e. Just come up with a different business that makes hundreds of millions of dollars and use that to pay for Wolfram !
I don’t think you understand what the word “arm chair general” actually means. It’s just a term that means “someone who has no experience with the field thinking the answers are easy and that the experts doing the work are just idiots for not seeing how easy the answers are.”
Diloger
This got me thinking. People like Joscha Bach and Douglas Hofstadter have posed ideas that we are programs running on a computer, which implies when we ourselves halt, there is nothing, but if we in fact were, there would be someone running that program and deciding whether to boot it up for something else, a set of basic reference rules to keep the program going, and a benevolent intention and desire of the operator to keep it running.

To keep the environment going and developing, you need incentives, so a notion of suffering is necessary, but not the purpose. The purpose would be to use a dynamic between the suffering and the rules to evolve something greater that sustains and improves the overall environment of the program and evolves through other instances of whatever individuals are.

An immortal soul concept works into this where it's like a trained module an operator could rely on to perform in a particular way, and it would get used or reused as was useful to the overall environment. It runs somewhere, or it doesn't, and the suffering piece is just the incentives of the environment it was placed into to develop.

These GPT models aren't sophisticated enough to fully emmulate us, but as a logical mirror and test harness that can reflect pretty much every metaphysical concept we can think up, they may be sufficient.

Sometimes I think of forum updoots as weighting for a language model, and some of these more metacognitive musings need suppression because they would be disruptive to the sustainability of the model. If there were javascript behind this comment form that also used timing from our keystroke patterns to weight paths between these words, it would imbue the model with a kind of "personality," that emmulated what was going on in our minds as a kind of black box.

How would one find out if HN data is being used in GPT or LAMDA models?
Before we ditched the gods, Occam's razor would bring you to a conclusion that Earth is the center of the universe as 'world created by god' was the explanation with fewer details than 'world with many planets created by god.'

You can apply the same logic here; who said we see the objective truth now? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance covers the issue well - church of reason AKA science is the current faith that makes us blind.
The best of innovators have the same thing to offer regardless of formal credentials.

A big difference is whether or not this is well recognized, and by whom and/or at their own peril.
The United Nations is probably right. He's sort of a political prisoner. The reason he's in jail is not for his crimes, it's an extraordinary contempt-of-court charge, which is procedurally bonkers. I didn't say the guys on the other side of the table were the good guys.
>Most of these are about wanting control over the design of the software - but releasing their code doesn't have any impact on that - I don't get it? [...] how releasing your source lead to bad design?

The way to interpret his argument is to imagine an alternate past history where Mathematica was open source from the beginning and how that would have lead to an inferior product. He wrote:

>[...] I think that it would not have been possible to create the Wolfram technology stack using a free and open-source model.

So instead of thinking they can just go ahead and open source what they have today and everything would be just fine, we need to consider how game theory would have played out in an alternate universe where they tried FOSS model from the beginning.

Maybe his argument is still flawed but to at least entertain his scenario, let's study other projects and compare:

- open source GIMP is considered very good -- but also is several years behind closed-source Adobe Photoshop in features

- OpenCAD, OpenSCAD not as full-featured as proprietary Autodesk, SolidWorks, etc

- LibreOffice has less features the MS Office

- Code::Blocks and Eclipse as IDE for C++ coding not as good as MS Visual Studio

- OpenStack less features than AWS

- SageMath has less symbolic computing features than Wolfram Mathematica

To counterbalance the above, we can try to identify open source projects that are equal or superior to proprietary solutions:

- LibOpus is superior algorithm to Fraunhofer FDK AAC

- Linux (server) is comparable or superior to MS Windows (Server).

- GCC, Clang comparable to Microsoft "cl.exe" compiler.

Is there a pattern to the above? It seems like a combination of :

- big complex software with lots of features

- GUI

... often means that open-source collaboration model falls behind the proprietary commercial offerings. Why?

So if Wolfram tried to open-source Mathematica from the beginning of its history, a different proprietary XYZ software may have outcompeted them. E.g. the salaried programmers working on today's Mathematica wouldn't have worked on the open-source Mathematica for free because they would have been at XYZ Corporation. In that alternate timeline, we'd complain today that "Mathematica isn't as good as XYZ"
The fines are what will make the software improve. Someone was slacking on that for years but now they have to pay enough that they could have lavishly staffed an entire company if they could use something like Teams.
The Three Laws of Personal Devices
Don't forget Ambrai Smalltalk which had a really cool beta version but then disappeared.

F-Script was really awesome, even more with F-Script Anywhere
The way I always understood it is that "open source" and "free software" are orthogonal concepts:

Open source = bazaar-style (highly-decentralized development)

Not open source = cathedral-style (highly-centralized development)

Free software = source code released under a license that grants rights such as freedom to modify, redistribute, own a copy of, etc. (see [1] for the proper definition)

Nonfree software = source code not released under such a license

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
that's just the generic warning that they have for most extensions, because the webextension security model doesn't allow for granular permissions.
NextJS also does the same thing, it's just server side rendering
Java wasn't a business failure. SPARC was a business failure, and Sun had an incompetent CEO.

Java ultimately kept their declining hardware and operating systems afloat for longer than they would have been otherwise.
In that point I agree, I can simultaneously acknowledge that having any somewhat coherent process of law is a relatively new phenomenon in China. It's like they're playing a game of paperwork and Rule of Law to appease trading partners and investors.

Single party control is effectively party-less control, and the due process is not necessary, but there is a future convenience to making decisions seem less arbitrary while getting the behaviors they want from all persons.
Hey hey! Had the same experience with Screwtape Letters + Meditations
It is funny, one of the things that has bothered me for quite a while is that diffs don’t understand code.

For example if I add an additional usage to a global variable to a file, while someone else renames it in other files, git happily merges with no conflict.

Tighter language integration can help with that.