skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for a thoughtful reply adventured. As I said, it gives me an
uneasy/weird feeling, which is to say I haven't quite unpacked it
myself yet. Your response is helping me.

> It also doesn't speak ill of those values

Well actually it does, at least in that it highlights them as
inconsistent. Clearly my issue is that values prone to change
according to circumstance are weaker, as generally one holds
consistent values higher than fickle ones. However, your further
points are interesting and deserve thought.

> You're conflating two separate matters, the values, and the effort
required to hold/protect them.

Perhaps in a short, pithy comment I'm not taking time to distinguish
the values (which I love and live by, and believe most of my
countrymen uphold) and the laziness by which some fail to consistently
and robustly stand up for them.

> Liberty requires a persistent effort to maintain against politicians,
malevolent actors generally

Absolutely, and would you agree that we've slipped dreadfully in that
duty in recent years?

> Just because something of value requires effort to keep or maintain,
that doesn't debase its value or otherwise speak or how great or how
little the value is.

I am glad you think that, and we agree. I am not sure if you thought I
said otherwise?

> Very valuable things often require an enormous investment to acquire
and keep over time.

Like previous wars in which my family have fought at great cost.

> At all times entropy is trying to destroy well ordered systems

No. Sorry. That's too simplistic a take. I'm not talking about the
constant gardening required to maintain structures of value, I am
alluding to the malevolent domestic forces who would sell our hard won
freedom, democracy and liberal values down the swanny for their own
aggrandisement and profit when it suits them, and sing a different
song when virtue signalling calls.

Let me try to be clearer what I am attacking here. It is sloppy and
selective values. It is a laziness that lies somewhere between "sworn
enemies unite against a common foe", and a prejudiced framing effect.

We're all very happy to cheer on Tor, VPNs or other instruments that
circumvent tyranny, so long as it's not _our_ tyranny. All of us have
benefited hugely from the freedoms immanent therein. We built these
tools (US Navy), and the internet itself (DARPA), in pursuit of
spreading the same values that we no longer have the stomach to
robustly defend here.

Yet when a tyrant goes crazy in Overthereistan we're all sweetness
and light and our digital "doors are always open for freedom". Those
double standards are not a good look.

I need more time to think about it, but maybe what irks me here is
simple hypocrisy.
Measurements of pretty much any time in the universe can test predictions made by models of the early universe. One of the main reasons we think there was inflation is from late time (near today) observations of matter density (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatness_problem).
Good Lord, he’s done it again!
I wouldn't call Java especially beautiful. When I learned about Java, I thought: "Hey, everything has its place! It is clear what kind of concepts to use. Interfaces, abstract classes, classes, enums ..." and I thought it was beautiful. This was however my own limited view on programming languages at the time. In hindsight, this system was quite stunted and held me back, by forcing everything into that shape. Later I learned other languages, which include language concepts for things, which I needed to write extra files and classes for in Java. One such example: Decorators.

Java has moved on nowadays, to include concepts, which other languages have had for decades, finally coming around to it. It did "modernize" a bit, one could say. Lambda expressions, namespaces, not having to put everything in a class (how silly that would be, to still have to do that). However, that doesn't make it beautiful, because those concepts are bolted on, for backwards compatibility reasons. It is not like there has been a redesign of the language or anything. It is going a similar way C++ is or has been going. Adding new syntax. It has to go that way, because there is no good extensible concept of Java syntax. Its syntax is always only a snapshot of the current state, that says "this is what is valid syntax right now", instead of offering a flexible way to extend the language.

I want to use languages, which have incorporated concepts, which traditionally Java did not even have or use alternative concepts, which make things possible and in this way shorten my code significantly. Then I don't have to write 10000 lines for simple things.

No language, however beautiful it may be, will solve a problem of overlooked use-cases, which cannot be solved using the concepts implemented in a library or program. For me beautiful code is code, which implements the simplest concept one can think of, in the simplest way, to make all intended use-cases possible. This is what I call flexibility. It is about implementing the least amount of limitations, not hard-coding assumptions, which are not justified, but all invariants, which are necessary. Not programming oneself into a corner.
I'm sure my parents would disagree that Pokémon trading cards weren't a giant money sink designed to take their money.

I can see a lot of problems with giving children access to credit cards, but I honestly fail to see how loot boxes are different from trading cards marketed to children. My high school enacted and enforced a ban on all card and board games because some parents were worried about child gambling; I'm still mad that they took the fun away from school recess because of a dumb moral panic.
He was trained by the USA. The objective of the training program is not disclosed.

A reasonable guess would be that the objective of the training program was combating Islamic extremism / terrorism, as this aligns with US interests in the region.

Either way the conclusion that this he was directed by the US is not supported by the facts in the article.
“Just as much of a COVID problem” is a joke, right?

They never had a major outbreak with an unvaccinated population.

They never had a major outbreak of Delta or Alpha or any more-deadly strain.

Their first experience with Covid is an outbreak of Omicron, the mildest variant yet, with a highly vaccinated population.

Plus now there are viable treatments.

That was the point.
Barack Obama's Statement on Ukraine
I think the claim "Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F)" is dubious.

When I lived in Taipei, it would common to have 100F @ 100% RH in July/August and life/activity didn't suddenly stop because of it including people working outdoors. Now they may have modulated or changed how they worked outdoors but it's not absolutely so dire as this line claims. The reality of seeing that is self-evident proof is wrong. I'm wondering where this actually cites from...
> “Amazon lied through a senior executive’s sworn testimony that Amazon did not use any of the troves of data it had collected on its third-party sellers to compete with them,”

It's time to set an example. This sworn testimony was knowingly false. So charge this Senior executive with lying to Congress and lay down the likelihood of prison time. Watch them flip on their other execs.
100% agree. I've been using Blender for over 20 years as a hobbyist and it has consistently been one of my favorite pieces of software. It's written by creators, for creators, and you can feel the love and care that they put into it.

One area I wish they would start to give more attention is their scripting. I consider myself a Python expert, and the Python API leaves a lot to be desired at an architectural level. For example, many operations (bpy.ops) require an accurate "context" to succeed. This context is essentially putting the UI in a particular state, as if the user had clicked specific items and activated certain windows. This makes the api feel like an afterthought to the traditional UI interaction, and introduces a number of issues that I won't bore you with. Suffice to say, you end up writing a lot of boilerplate to ensure predictable state changes in between operations.

If they levelled up the Python API to be more friendly to the code-oriented generative art crowd, they would be even more unstoppable!
I've battled this problem many times over my career in many different ways - this approach looks very solid to me. I particularly like the way the schema design incorporates a record ID, old record ID, updated record and old record.

You do end up storing a lot of extra data, but it's very thorough - it's not going to miss anything, and figuring out what happened later on should be very easy.
I reported the "loadstring accepts arbitrary bytecode" issue back to Debian and Ubuntu.

But, just to clarify, mikemike's advice is that everyone (i.e. including people running upstream redis) should disable scripting.
My recent favorite small program I wrote:

Was watching a movie with a group of friends which someone had ... acquired from the internet, but it didn't have any subtitles. Someone found an SRT file, but the subtitles were offset by quite a bit - enough that you would be seeing dialogue in the subtitles for what had been onscreen 10+ seconds ago, which kind of defeated the point of getting the subtitles. So I wrote a program in a few minutes to specify an offset and rewrite all of the timestamps in the file. We timed the offset, ran the script and got to watch the movie with working subtitles less than 20 minutes later.
Time, weather and astronomical information without the BS
It's "nearly" instead of "completely" because of cases like yours where there are verifiable facts that signal the candidate's capabilities.

A typical resume has none of that and is more like:

. BS from some un-ranked university

. 2 years at some company you've never heard of

.. Did things you have no way of verifying

. 2 years at another company you've never heard of

.. Did more things you have no way of verifying
They're talking about the new Benchmark tool specifically. I'm not sure if it's included within Blender itself, but it's not available (at least separately if included with Blender) on Steam.
And belief that access to information freely somehow makes one better informed is how propaganda is most _potently_ spread. At least people who grow up in repressive medium regimes know they're fed propaganda. There are comparable amount of low-info useful idiots everywhere, but very few countries are so unfree that access to global opinions isn't a VPN away. Though the ignorant from "free" societies are most insistent they're free from indoctorination, for merely having access to perspectives that they don't actually read nor have capability to interpret i.e. the amount of diaspora in western countries and western NGOs abroad means flow of propaganda is strong unidirectional while west is largely dismissive of what everyone else thinks.
> partner with a recruiter they like

Years ago, recruiters seems to have a line on positions I had never heard of. Nowadays when recruiters contact me, they are already about positions I know of on Linkedin etc. Maybe with more people working from home (including me) this might change.

One thing recruiters can still good for is post-interview feedback. Some companies feel more comfortable giving it to recruiters than directly to you.
A quick bit of browsing the Amazon Basics line of products would certainly lead one to assume they had totally knocked off the 3rd party products they thought they could without getting major brand pushback.
I think the effect is similar to what Peter Norvig described in his "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" lecture (which if you haven't seen, you should really check it out -- its awesome).

In essence, yeah, the core mechanic is the same, but the digitization of it fundamentally transforms its ubiquity, how often it can be iterated, optimized for more and more segmented group of kids, etc. I think there is an argument to be made that enough of that can effectively change the character of the activity itself, even if it is at first glance "sorta the same thing."
> It would be really cool if the ACM, BCS, IEEE, or any one of those professional associations,

Not software engineering, but AWS/GCP/Azure* certifications are basically this. They are rigorous enough that you can't just luck into passing the tests, you actually have to study (for the higher level ones at least). And some are tiered, so you have to get a requisite cert, wait, then take the test for the next level.

ABET has a professional engineering exam for software engineering, but nobody ever takes it. This is the same organization responsible for licensing other engineering disciplines. I find it interesting that so many software engineers denigrate the field for not being "real" engineering, but none of those people are taking the FE/PE exams to create that critical mass necessary to begin making it a requirement for employment.

Part of this might be ignorance, maybe people don't know that software engineering has a licensing body already. Or maybe most of us don't want to be forced to get a license for a job.

* I don't have Azure certs, so I'm assuming here.
That's all fine and I am broadly in support of the statement "people without major COVID risk factors should not take any special precautions or avoid travel to areas experiencing high case rates." My comment was simply addressed to the claim that the U.S. is currently doing much worse than New Zealand in some way that is relevant to travel advisories.
> It's a damn beautiful language.

> I stopped using it because I stopped wanting to write 10000 lines for doing simple things.

My definition of beauty includes expressing simple things concisely.
> Don’t slow the reader down. Avoid footnotes because they break the flow of thoughts and send your eyes darting back and forth while your hands are turning pages or clicking on links.

This sounds reasonable for technical writing, though it's interesting to read McCarthy's recommendation after considering David Foster Wallace's work, where there is a very frequent usage of footnotes.

In his non-fictional essays essays—often in the role of a reporter like in his well-known "Consider the Lobster" for Gourmet magazine [0]—Wallace uses extensive footnotes. This isn't technical writing, though the quality of Wallace's convinced me that footnotes can have a useful place in fictional writing.

> And don’t worry too much about readers who want to find a way to argue about every tangential point and list all possible qualifications for every statement. Just enjoy writing.

From Hacker News discussions (and also speaking to a colleague who competed at a high level on a debate team in high school), I learned the opposite lesson. If there is a weakness in an argument, it's likely it will be pointed out. I've found it important to consider weaknesses in logic and try to anticipate counter-arguments whenever possible, when writing for readers from more technical problems.

[0] [PDF] http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf
Children buried in rubble after Russian airstrike on Mariupol hospital
Especially if you format them well. Just use a newline before each `:` and maybe after each `?` (if the value expressions are large), and it'll look great.

return isA ? A
: isB ? B
: isC ? C
: D
I think the issue is the lower barrier of access. Every small step added to the process discourages the use: get driven to the store, walking to the counter, talking to the employee, physically pulling money out of your pocket, physically seeing how much money you have left.

All of those contribute to making it more difficult to buy cards.

Loot boxes, on the other hand, is much easier. Once you store your credit card info, all you have to do is press a button or two.

This is the general idea Nudge Theory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#:~:text=Nudge%2....) when shaping behavior.
> Yet as today’s letter points out, subsequent investigations by The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and The Markup revealed that not only did Amazon employees working on private-label items have access to third-party data, but they routinely used it, even discussing it openly in meetings. “Amazon employees regularly violated the policy—and senior officials knew it.”

That's pretty incredible. I'm curious what kind of data this is; knowing the nature of the data would help us understand how platform operators can abuse their position.
ruststep takes a similar approach to STEPcode but is written in Rust and produces Rust code. I wonder why nobody has a repo of the various STEP specs run through stepcode to produce usable C++ read/writer.

I think working on Open CASCADE may be worth peoples efforts, but I've opted to work on Solvespace instead. The core NURBS code is only about 8000 lines, while OCCT is absolutely huge.
Solid actually uses them for static analysis which ~isn’t otherwise possible in JSX, which has to be an expression. It would be great if for/if were expressions in JS, but they’re not.
Could be a sign of good parenting if they are aware of their future costs and that they should start investing their allowance in index funds to afford a house, as opposed to wasting it by gambling on lootboxes or yu gi oh cards.
Depends on where I'm at. Some places where I'm leaving on good terms, like the people, etc I'll work until the very end. The current place I'm leaving is f'ing toxic, and I'm doing as very little as possible. Basically just documenting what I've been up to.
author here
(of the blog post and https://github.com/supabase/supa_audit)

happy to answer any questions
"Using the same word repeatedly is boring, technical writing or not." -- A technical or scientific paper does not need to be entertaining. I mean, it can be, but it adds zero to the value of the discovery made or methods developed.
I know it is intriguing to think in terms of "fun", "creativity", "entertainment", but the scientific or technical paper needs to be as clear as possible, which is more often than not in contrast with a desire to make a paper "engaging". Nobody cares if a surgical operation is "entertaining".

I don't remember having thought, when reading a paper, that it was boring, or "not fun", but I remember many times to have thought, "man, I have no clue what's going on here", "so many unnecessary details".
How do you copy a variable? You can only copy values. A free variable has no value. You're confusing capture with closedness.

Here's a trivial example:

\f -> \y -> (runRemotely (\x -> f y x))

The expression passed to runRemotely has a free variable "y". How are you going to serialize (\x -> f y x) in order to send it across the network? When you hit the "y", what are you going to do?

For this trivial minimalist example you might cook up a one-off hack like lambda-abstracting the free variables in the runRemotely expression and then reapplying to the returned value, but there are much more complicated and insidious examples where these workarounds don't work.
Great point, we'll work on getting that into a more prominent spot and explaining it better. thanks!
> What's wrong with paid hosting?

Oh nothing wrong. I'm just on a fact-finding mission on seeing whether any other companies have successfully followed the consulting/support contract model vs paid hosting or open core (because this has rather significant repercussions on what kind of products lend themselves well to a given business model, e.g. a desktop app is not going to work well for paid hosting).
That is like saying UNIX would migrate away from C.

Kotlin got lucky with Android, Google should have all the fun with their own version of .NET.
The real bug here is not having a test for this, or not running the tests as part of the packaging process. We should not have situations where packages are so sensitive that a small change to them should be considered unsafe. Open Source is pointless if your source is regarded as immutable. If there is a subtle detail like this (and sometimes it's unavoidable), it should be covered by a test so that ensuring the end result is "ok" is nothing more than seeing the tests pass.

I'm not going to weigh in on which party should be responsible for that test.
I like processes that systematize getting decisions in front of people with expertise and good judgement (peer and committee review, etc).

I despise processes that enforce rules perhaps once born of good judgement, but now divorced from the judgement-having person's assumptions about context or her ability to change her mind when presented with new information.
Many of these games have different types of in game currency which can be used to purchase lootboxes. With FIFA, one of those currencies can be bought with money. The other one can't be purchased directly and is earned through playing the game or selling what is received in the lootboxes. This means that a person doesn't need to use real money to participate in the gambling aspect. They can instead gamble their time which might not be as damaging as gambling money, but is still just as addicting.

Also even the real money gambling in a game like FIFA is more dangerous than physical trading cards. With physical cards, you had to go to a store and pay at point of sale. You couldn't easily do that with your parent's credit card and there was always a person on the other end of the transaction to stop you or even just exist as a social obstacle to discourage obscene spending. Those obstacles don't exist with lootboxes. A parent's credit card can easily be added to an account and you don't have to look another human in the eyes to make a purchase.
SFW in case anyone was wondering
They've moved on to chiplet design. Don't disregard their clear direction to SoC's with non-upgradeable RAM, GPU, CPU.
Well, we should not have knives nor anything that poses any contextual danger in any situation either. Oh, nor should we use fire.
Linus on Multi-gen-LRU:“I think this just needs to start getting merged.”
I've been keeping an eye on this space as well, and while I agree with your first point, I have to say that I'm really more interested in the groundwork that these kind of efforts may lay for the future. For example, I know that there's currently a company called Foresight Mining Software[1] that is aiming to build a CAD product, in Rust, using the Bevy game engine (also written in Rust) on the backend. Even if it's not entirely FOSS, they are open-sourcing aspects[2] of their work that could help to accelerate the development of FOSS platform, or at the least, could eventually lead to true cross-platform general-purpose mechanical CAD support for platforms like Linux so that users aren't tied to Windows and the Dassault/Autodesk ecosystem.

[1] https://www.foresightmining.com/

[2] https://github.com/ForesightMiningSoftwareCorporation
"not subject to market pricing" is quite a spectrum of practices, and depending on how you define it, it could be almost nothing, or almost everything in the US.

Taxes, tariffs, subsidies, affect market pricing quite a bit and are extremely common. Some consumer protection laws place very loose pricing rules on businesses that are literally price controls, but in practice allow pricing to fluctuate with market rates. Some other industries have segments which are price controlled, and other segments that are not, i.e. healthcare, insurance.