skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a look at hyperinflation in 1920s Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Obelisk is highly recommended.
Or 1 with spooky action at a distance
Are hard contact lenses better than soft for astigmatism? Have you tried soft ones? I've only tried the latter and could never get used to them seeming to go out of focus or drift around whenever I blinked.
Are we allowed an array of references to functions with meaningful names?
Not that I am taking a stance here, but you didn't really engage with the GP saying that having functions instead of lambdas allows one to name, test and document them: in fact, they might not be called f1 to f20, in fact they might have docstrings (I guess one could comment lambdas, but see it rarely) and you couldn't test lambdas unless you assign them, i.e. give them a name i.e. turn them into functions in all but name.
It doesn't harm Google's Play store profits so why would it harm Apple? Plus any sales on any store owes California taxes when someone in California actually made the purchase. So again this all falls flat on it's face.

It's baffling that on HN of all places I see people actively making this argument that you should NOT be able to install whatever the hell you want on your personal pocket computer that just happens to have an Apple logo on it. It doesn't make you more secure. It just doesn't. A locked down operating system quite literally makes you LESS secure because there's fewer people poking holes.

They JUST a few days ago patched a critical zero day. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/apple/apple-silently-f...

The ubiquity of Apple devices makes them a gigantic target for hackers.

As a developer I own both devices but the iPhone I have is quite literally a really really nice toy. All the apps I use are free. It's literally a social networking box with an excellent camera.

Meanwhile my Android does the exact same thing but I install and use open source apps on it to read manga that are simply not available on iOS.
Reminds me of Big Cabbage on the Sto Plains between Uberwald and Ankh-Morpork:

"Billing itself as the green heart of the plains, Big Cabbage boasts The Biggest Cabbage in the World, which turns out to be a building erected in stressed concrete to look like a hundred-foot high cabbage, in which a multitude of cabbage-related ideas may be wondered at, bought, and taken home as souvenirs of an exciting holiday. Cabbage Beer may be bought, as can cabbage cigars, rolled on the inner thighs of alluring young local maidens."
>hang her nude bits out.

Well no, nothing of the kind was occurring in the demonetized videos referenced in my post. I did not have more skin on display than any typical YouTuber might under the circumstances. It was a tank top and a halter top summer dress on a hot summer day in a tropical city. The issue was my shape inside those clothes- not the clothes themselves. That's what was interesting, YouTube's response to demonetizing the cardboard dress form made it clear my physical shape was the problem- not the degree of coverage or activity.
Optimizing Page Load Time (2006)
It was never intended as a definitive _thing_. I don't think anyone believes it has an exact definition. Just like good writing. There is no canonical good. Shakespeare and Hemingway are both "good" but absurdly different. But still, "clean" is a useful abstract concept for us to aim for in each context we encounter. At the end of the day, we need some kind of way of talking about "desirable" or "good" code. And I feel like 'clean' is as good as any other word.

The author lists a litany of traits that could be considered "good" things to aim for, but most of them are pretty granular, fuzzy, or superseded by others. The author says:

Words like ‘encapsulated’, ‘testable’, ‘mockable’, ‘reusable’ have meanings that we can all agree on. When we use more specific words that describe the various code traits that affect our project then we can be sure that we’re all on the same page.

Unfortunately, however, we're never really on the same page. Even these more precise terms are very context specific and amorphous. "Testable" may mean granularly accessible, modular, mockable, idempotent, or quick to spin-up for CI, or only a subset of these. Highly dependent on testing approach too (unit, TDD, BDD, E2E...)

This is why I like thinking in terms of tenets: broad concepts that are applicable to everything but enable context-specific meaning. E.g.

- Reliable
- Efficient
- Maintainable
- Usable

With these tenets, for example, we can then *contextualize* and find the "cleanest" code for whatever particular application we're working on. If we want to break these broad tenets down further then we can, and I hold the position that this _is_ very useful:

- Reliability: Correctness, Stability, Resilience
- Efficiency: Time, Space, Second-order effects (ecology etc.)
- Maintainability: Adaptability, Familiarity
- Usability: Storytelling, Intuitive, Accessible

Most of these are independently VERY context-specific. Being time-efficient is about the available hardware, interfaces, UX, etc. Being accessible or usable is about WHO is going to use or access your abstractions and underlying implementation.

To achieve these tenets, there are many principles and approaches to draw on to help us find the 'clean' solution each time: E.g. The Law of Demeter (LoD), SOLID, The abstraction principle, Functional programming, etc. These exist as tools to help us get closer and closer to the unreachable (yet desirable) goal of "clean".

So, I suppose I agree with the author but only semantically. Cleanliness does not have a fixed definition, but it is still useful to talk about as a goal or absolute to aim for. A bit like all manner of other superlatives.
Smartphones are usually rather cheap. I think it would be more like setting your car on fire.
There's a sizable community of eye fitness empiricists at https://endmyopia.org with years of discussions, measurements on improvements, videos, etc. Most of the content is free/open.
I've always been so frustrated that the route to building stuff is so starkly different to the employment route.
Water gives slightly more radiative forcing than CO2 from airplanes, and the effects of NOx are negligible. But of course the water disappears from that altitude in hours, while CO2 has a long atmospheric residence time.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04068-0
> Readable, Understandable, Simple, Performant, Safe; But these traits are in some ways at odds with each other.

No, they are rarely at odds with each other. Readable code leads towards performance and safety naturally. Writing readable and simple code means that you understand the problem domain well, and the amount of abstraction needed for tackling the particular problem at hand. Readable code is also much easier to analyse for performance and safety.
If you think putting an app in the store is all you need to do to market your software then you are in for a shock. You would be better off taking your investment to the local casino.
The author isn't arguing against the existence of "good" code or "clean" code but rather advocating for us to try to articulate what is good (or bad) about code because "clean" is vague and encompasses too many things.

In response to:
> You definitely know it when you see it.
the author suggests:
> It’s good to build that intuition, but we can’t just stop there. We need to dig deeper beyond those feelings to understand and articulate why we think the code is good.
Admittedly, it's been a while since I last had to bring this up, so I found https://www.businessinsider.com/retail-apocalypse-is-still-i..., which upon further inspection lacks those countries.

That being said, the US is by far the country with the most retail per capita.
The free software community is not ‘work free’.

Many free software developers work for organisations who have chosen to share their work freely because their revenue stream comes from support or hosting.

There are free software projects where hobbyists build things to scratch a personal itch, but most of these people are contributing their free time and have another job.

You keep repeating the point that ‘a massive number of jobs are not necessary’. Can you define what is ‘necessary work’ and how society can determine a priori what that work might be?
Okay. Bottom of page 4, "50 gallon sprayer, $5000" Here's a 50 gallon sprayer from Northern Tool, cost $489. Where'd the other $4500 go?

https://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200722048_20...

Edit: let's give them the benefit of the doubt, here's the most expensive one, still coming in $2000 under budget

https://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200675174_20...
That is rather fascinating, where can I read about this?
I was at Lloyd Center on a Friday night recently. At 7:00 the place was dead, other than the skating rink. The food court was shutting down. If that’s what it’s like during what should be prime time for a mall, no wonder it’s shutting down.
in the late 70s/early 80s fueled by the oil crisis initially, the American car industry went into pretty steep decline and together with political fears of a rapidly growing Japan the US started to cap the imports of Japanese cars (also motorcycles and punitive measures on other industries) given that they were fuel efficient and appealed to consumers. The American auto industry became more profitable short term but generally up until the late 90s continued to stagnate or decline in particular in quality and efficiency.

American cars had a bad rep internationally (and domestically) probably until the mid 2000s when the industry started to become more competitive again.

Today Tesla is probably one example of an American carmaker that is innovative and I doubt you'll see them demand protectionist measures. International competition remains one of the best drivers for better products.
I primarily use Visual Studio and VSCode for development professionally. I have been playing around with Xcode a lot for some personal projects on my Mac.

In many ways it’s pretty good, but there’s some omissions and other behaviors that I find simply astonishing.

Why can’t I view two code windows side-by-side? Why can’t I dock the controls library so it’s always visible? Why does the documentation view always have to be on top of everything else? Why can I zoom the Interface Builder when building iOS applications but not Mac applications? Why do things just kind of stop working and require restarting every couple of hours?

In many ways Xcode just seems to lack a lot of the polish and capability Visual Studio has.

I tried playing with Visual Studio and Xamarin on my Mac to see if it could accelerate development by allowing me to leverage my familiarity with C# and found it to be so cumbersome (change to Xcode and mess around with IB, switch to VS, switch back to Xcode…ugh) that I just ditched that flow completely and went all in with Swift/SwiftUI/Obj-C instead.
Pen.el can do many things. It's a docker container running a prompting server and LSP server based on language models such as Codex.

It's point and click and runs in your web browser, or in your terminal, or in an emacs GUI.

You may use it to come up with names for dwarves, using bash.

echo "Cast: Dwarf\nOccupation: Lumberjack" | penf pf-christen-something-with-a-name/1

https://semiosis.github.io/posts/pen-el-to-name-dwarf-fortre...

You may use it to quick-fix syntax for your code:

https://semiosis.github.io/posts/quick-fix-code-with-codex/

You may use it as an overlay for your terminal, to give you very intelligent autocompletion, for example to your terminal.

As easy as `cterm bash`.

https://semiosis.github.io/cterm/

You may use it for mind-mapping using GPT-3.

https://semiosis.github.io/paracosm/

Or to browse the imaginary web (that is, the infinite internet, hallucinated with an AI).

penf -u --stop "\n\n" -p --tokens 10 pf-imagine-a-website-from-a-url/1 "http://blog-about-cars/mazda323"

https://semiosis.github.io/looking-glass/

Or talk to any personality you want.

https://semiosis.github.io/apostrophe/

Chain together prompts as easy as bash.

penf pf-imagine-a-website-from-a-url/1 "http://blog-about-cars/mazda323" | penf -p pf-generic-completion-300-tokens/1

It contains a fileystem that generates the contents of files and directories as you name them.

You can use it to easily navigate your way around AWS insfrastructure, with Natural Language Shell.

https://semiosis.github.io/posts/demo-of-pen-el-s-nlsh-for-w...

And so much more!
After suffering in the coding world for a bit now, the only clean code I need is the code I can easily change or use. Code formatting, style, naming, but even architecture and all forms of best practice cargo culting I do not care at all, if it does not make things easier.

The company I worked for had a separate team, kind of a startup, and these guys were all in on discussions how to do things cleanly -- is it a code smell? -- but everything they did was overengineered and borderline useless.

If the things you do to make code cleaner make it more difficult to change things, or even to use it, you are doing it wrong. And I've done things wrong plenty and mostly still do, but I want to improve and what developers usually emphasize does not make things easier.
$1.66mm seems like a lot for a traffic signal at an intersection. I’m sure an auditor could find a at least a few interesting items to dig in to and validate.
For programming language/interpreter that's not true.

Lately I've been doing a lot of "self-hacking" on iOS and I'm quite satisfied with it. There are Python environments, some JS ones. Of course, they're not 100% desktop-like, but limitations aren't that different from various embedded systems. Those can be integrated into widgets/watch faces, on-demand and remote triggered scripts. There's also possibility to write webapps that run in full-screen form (good for calculators, small snippets, there's some iOS API to be used but I didn't bother that deeply to check). Some stuff can be ran completely, there's rich automation library and plenty more.
What? Of course it's inherently bad! Why does the size of the community matter? Is corruption quaint if the place it's happening is small enough?!
The question isn't which is better or more original, the question is which predicted the future better. If you say neither because they copied We, it stands to reason that We didn't get it right either, nothing about good or bad. There's plenty of great SF with terrible "predictions" and vice versa.
On the contrary, these kind of extremely obvious knowledge bits destroy your credibility.
I disagree that corruption is rare in USA. You could say USA "solved" corruption problem by legalizing it. If you agree that legal action cannot be corrupt then you probably could say that corruption is rare in the USA, but I doubt many people would agree with that rule.

There are many ways you can legally bribe a politician in USA. Those bribes are passed in the open, there are even online trackers of those bribes. There are loopholes allowing corruption in other countries too, but nowhere else I encountered such acceptance to bribing politicians with corporate money.
Without getting too much into politics, I am pretty sure most libertarians would be pretty decent in an auditor position. (assuming the person has a least basic understanding of accounting). An auditor is not a policy based position.

While most people think of Libertarian right on the basic political compass when thinking about libertarians. Lib-right and lib-left do have a fair amount of overlap on certain things. Although, considering your politics I can understand your dislike since most lib-right are quite pro business, but their politics are more than that.
I’m not saying that Apple always acts altruistically, it is a business after all. I am pointing out that if you are relying on the original comment in this thread to understand the situation, you are going to be misled.
Any API can have issues, but an imperative api has some advantages in my opinion.

The boundaries of an imperative api are atomic and easily well-defined. When something goes wrong, it is possible to look at the methods individually and figure out exactly where expectations and reality diverged.

With a declarative system you just put out everything there as one big chunk of state and hope the right thing happens. When the wrong thing happens, it's usually not clear if the problem is a bug with the engine or your understanding of it, and also not clear how to go about determining where the problem is.

To be clear, I am not totally against declarative systems, but I would be hesitant to use any declarative system if it isn't mature and well-tested, documented with priority, and in a space where the use cases are predictable.
> I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people on this website are vaccinated.

I am not so sure. HN is the most "covid is just a flu, masks and respirators dont matter, teachers should teach when sick with covid those lazy bastards" place I regularly visit. I would be surprised if vaccination rates did not followed the same general political alignement.
not counting upkeep and training (or an emergency chute)

AND an emergency chute.

All training/certification providers state a reserve chute as a requirement (more than one when engaged in acrobatic activity/drills).
> So when you're looking at close screens or books for most of your day, the eye makes that be the "at rest" state, but now distant objects are blurry. Now if you insist on having distant objects not blurry (by wearing glasses _all the time_), it's the same situation again and the eye will "adapt" even more, and you'ell get more power glasses, and so on...

My optometrist specifically prescribes me lenses/contacts that are slightly worse than optimal (i.e. -2.25 instead of -2.5) based on the fact that I stare at a computer screen the entire day. IIRC her explanation was along these lines, and I've had no degradation in eyesight in nearly a decade since. (I am not an optometrist, for god's sake find your own)
"What Is Clean Code?
There are probably as many definitions as there are programmers."
Robert C. Martin - Clean Code A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship - p. 7
What Exactly Is a Bcc Anyway?
Writing is a great metaphor: there aren't any hard-and-fast rules and there's certainly a subjective quality to it... but also, some writing is clearly better and some writing is clearly worse. Maybe there is no such thing as "good" writing because writing can be "good" in different ways or because we can never fully define what "good" means, but that doesn't mean that all writing is equal or that "everything is a tradeoff"—and, like you said, it doesn't mean we need to deeply analyze every piece of writing to draw useful conclusions about it.

My view is that while there is definitely a subjective aspect to quality—whether in code or in writing—a larger portion is objective, just hard to formalize or quantify. Just because we can't measure something directly or because we can't all agree about it in every instance doesn't mean it's subjective. There are a lot of things we can't know exactly but that are still objective, so why not writing or code quality as well?
>All the rumors about them investing toward a full self-driving car product is really odd ...

I can see technology companies looking at the automotive industry and thinking those traditional manufacturers are struggling with the technology side and that maybe they can do a better job.

I'll be surprised if it ever sees the light of day though, the car side is hard as well.
Depending on where you are, land is not actually that cheap where these suburban stores exist. The suburbs of New York and the suburbs of Cleveland look very different in terms of land price.

One contributing factor might be local tax policies. American politicians are all about bringing jobs to their local area, and so have been willing to cut very generous tax breaks in return for, say, opening a store that provides jobs. However, American metropolitan areas have very fragmented local areas, so suburb A and suburb B and suburb Z across town are all doing this. This basically encouraged a lot of these commercial developments to throw up cheap buildings that wouldn't last long; once it was showing its age they'd just take the next suburb's tax break and start over. You can only repeat this trick so much, though.
In fiction :)
The mirror argument is that from a climate perspective, as long as we are still burning low energy-per-co2 fossils like lignite for energy (spot the embarrassed German) it might be a net reduction if we burn those high energy future landfills instead. Plastics are very useful, perhaps we should consider it wasteful to leave any well-to-atmosphere paths where the carbon did not go through a stage of making itself useful as plastics? Hard to find any numbers, because the CO2/MWh stats of incineration plants always contain a considerable fraction of renewable on the input and that would have to be removed from the equation an all sides (input, CO2 output, energy output) for a useful answer.

I'm not enough of a chemist, but I suspect that the process the article is about could also habe potential for the creation of raw materials from bio stocks for plucking into the conventional plastics pipeline? This, combined with landfills (instead of incineration/highly processed incineration) could end up being the most viable carbon capture approach: instead of jumping through hoops trying to capture for the sake of it, it would harness our insatiable demand for plastics consumption. Are there any plant-based plastics already that don't don't with the friendly "degradable" label?
Checkout endmyopia for similar alternative therapy to glasses.
> You can potentially request all your data (and data about the hack)

It is impossible to backup the existing page using Facebook Download Page tool for a page with large number of users, I've been trying that for months[1] to delete my Facebook account. Perhaps if initiated by their end it might be possible but then again does requesting user data using personal account include page data as well?

There's now a 'How can I reach a human at Facebook' post making to the top of HN every month in vain. I think that Facebook employees in HN don't want to reveal themselves for obvious reasons, But what I would really like to understand is what reasoning a company has to remove all support systems?

Closest I can come up with is "We can control all user actions on our platform to X% accuracy that we don't need any support system for the eyes and just maintain it for the wallets".

[1] https://abishekmuthian.com/meta-is-holding-my-facebook-page-...
Yes. It's not about money, it's about trust.
"What Is Clean Code?
There are probably as many definitions as there are programmers." - p.7 - Clean Code - Robert C. Martin
There can't be a "you" with true free will even if there's a supernatural other dimension containing you, because there's still only those two options wherever you are.

The best you can do is be evolved to use true randomness (if it exists) to choose between good-enough actions, so at least nobody else can predict what you're going to do.
There was recently an interesting movie called "The Sound of Metal" [1] about a drummer who lost his hearing. He tried to live with it and eventually decided to get a cochlear implant. I don't think it was based on a true story, but I had the impression that the filmmakers tried to accurately show what life with a cochlear implant is like.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5363618/