skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Explicit types are important wherever you have an interface contract, because otherwise you may be basing your assumptions on a wrong understanding of what the actual contract is. Furthermore, explicit types serve to decouple interface from implementation. With (only) inferred types, you only have implementation, and client code is thus much more prone to relying on implementation details.

Arguably, every function or method can be regarded as having an interface contract, which is why it is useful to have explicit types there.

Personally, I also find it useful for local variables, because in a significant portion of code, the type of a variable is at least as important as its name, and guessing their type based on their name is worse than having the types be explicitly stated and visible at first sight. In particular in higher-level/domain logic code, variables are often the only ones with their specific type in the local scope. In many cases you therefore could in principle do without the name, the type would be enough.

I sometimes wonder if it could be practical to have a language allowing “anonymous” local variables, only identified by their type, as long as they’re (necessarily) the only one in their local scope with that specific type. That is, instead of writing `Foo foo = …` or `var foo = …`, have the ability to just write `Foo = …` in contexts where you only have one Foo. It would have the advantage that you know it’s a Foo (instead of guessing from the name as in `var foo`), and that the name can’t get out of sync with the type.
> This is absolutely insane to hear.

Its also not true. Local politians are pushing hard to get high speed rail stops, and there is political horse trading going on when building lines to get more local stops, but it doesn't necessarily translate into "one stop in each state" rule.

The problem with hsr is geographical (non centralized coubtry means u need a big network), bureaucratic (it takes decades to build big infra projects), pilticical (germany underinvests in hsr, conservatives want cars, many local greens despise big infra that destroys local meadows), inertia (germans lack vision and follow through, they mostly fiddle and optimize).
"Transistor million times smaller than vacuum tube!"

At least they were somewhat right initially, and eventually they were even too modest.
> the real TCO of passengers hi-speed rails is FAR above air traveling, not much in money but in environmental terms

How? Rail is consistently ranked among the lowest CO2-per-passenger-km of any travel mode. High speed rail is all electrified, flights all put out CO2 exhaust and particulate matter into the upper atmosphere.
Worse that that it’s a tax on earned income i.e. people working, so landlords etc don’t pay it on their unearned income i.e. rents
Different programmers calculate Fibonacci numbers
How do you see that being done in the real world?
To some extent this simply reflects the real differences in population distribution between Germany and France.

The urban agglomeration of Paris houses roughly one sixth (!) of the total population of France, and is roughly 6½ times as big as the next biggest agglomeration (Lyon).

The biggest agglomeration area in Germany in Germany (the Ruhr area, which in turn is itself somewhat spread out and rather polycentric even on the local level) on the other hand only accounts for slightly more than 1/15th of Germany's population, and going further down the list you won't find any such large size discrepancies as between Paris and the rest of France. (In France, Paris is the only agglomeration area with more than 2,000,000 inhabitants, whereas Germany has seven agglomeration areas of that size category, all spread out throughout the country.)

So in France it totally makes sense to just build a series of radial high speed lines all linking Paris with the provincial agglomerations, and even where one line might serve several cities along the way (like how going to Marseille you also pass through/next to Lyon), traffic to/from Paris will dominate, so you'll still get lots of non-stop Paris ↔ Province trains and only comparatively few trains making intermediate stops.

Germany on the other hand doesn't have such a dominant traffic generator and the existing agglomerations are dotted all around the country, so traffic is more spread out and it's more difficult to capture/speed up an appreciable fraction of that with just a few lines.
I am not sure what type of making stuff up are you referring to? How does that flow from my claim that cheating won't affect learning for those who don't cheat?
Plenty of academic research/literature on this, as well as book:

> Chuck is not the first to point out the financial inefficiencies associated with sprawl. Robert Burchell of Rutgers[1] has led several important studies showing the substantially increased municipal costs associated with sprawl development; my then-colleague Matt Raimi devoted a well-researched chapter to it in our 1999 book Once There Were Greenfields.[2] At NRDC, we undertook a small empirical study[3] in Cleveland and Chicago that confirmed the additional operating and maintenance costs associated with suburban wastewater infrastructure when compared with that in the cities.

* https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...

Strong Towns is only reporting what the literature is saying. You're free to be skeptical, but that's what they've concluded from the empirical evidence. The claim is falsifiable if you want to get into testing it.
I don't! Those look amazing, though.
Personally I find cheating repellent. But if a bunch of cheaters can curve you into a lower grade, you don’t know the material.
Fantastic read thanks!
I'm a homeopathic programmer. I fix huge terrible consequential bugs by adding lots of similar small diluted bugs.
> First, theorem proving is NOT the same as an advanced form of static typing.

This Hacker News post is about a theorem prover based on dependent types. That's the context for our discussion.

> You will still have buggy programs in which you use those components

No one is disagreeing with this claim. But eliminating some bugs is better than nothing, even if you don't eliminate all bugs. You and the other commenters repeating this strawman are doing a lot of harm to people trying to socialize their research.

> Chances are you will be doing some new (=cutting-edge) math if you try to verify new things.

Citation needed. Most software is not doing anything interesting at all from a mathematical perspective, just shuffling data around. But either way the point is moot—Martin-Löf type theory (which is what this "magmide" thing seems to be based on) can do arbitrarily fancy math if needed (which is rarely).

I've been verifying bits of software for about 10 years, and I've never needed to invent new math to do it (though I would be happy if I ever did!).
http://detect-respond.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-pyramid-of-pa...
>And for a good reason — maintaining the tracks costs a lot of money, while maintaining the air is free.

Maintanence of planes is way more expensive than trains, and maintanence of airports is way more expensive than train stations.

Also, the biggest reason is tax free plane fuel.
1970 is three generations ago...
Compare to people who bought in the 2000s.
The gilded age was a period of very strong economic growth in the US, averaging 5.7% per year for 30 years.

That’s presumably what they where referring to. It’s remembered as creating vast fortunes, but huge swaths of the population benefited.
> A big impediment is the federal structure of Germany, as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross for political reasons, which of course makes them slow.

That's not generally true. For example, the ICE train from Hamburg to Berlin goes through 3 other states (Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg) without stops.

There may be local politicians in some states making such demands ("If you want to build your tracks through _my_ state, ..."), but I would assume they are trying to make an impression in an election campaign or something.
And “no situation can be improved by involving police.”

And the fact that Justice never correctly delivers justice in any country of the world, but adds 2 to 10 years and large expenses in the process.
To be honest, extracting Rust programs from Iris would be the easy part here. The hard part is, well... using Iris. If you've used it much you know what I mean.
"CEO Eric Eric Schmidt stood out because he 'was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#cite_note-31

Funny how the "objective tests" that leaders apply to grunts never get applied to the leaders themselves.
I once saw a presentation on marseille frankfurt TGV. there are few ppl doing the trip end to end, it becomes economical due to all the other trips (n stops means n² possible trips).
> Back the day we did it with a ten foot sea container, never thought it would fit

How’d you end up doing it? Roll it on its side? Usually the height of a sea going container is ~2.6m and per the specs I’m seeing online the allowed height through the nose is only ~2.49m. Because they are just taller than they are wide, spec wise it would fit laying on its side, but still curious when doing it for real if that was necessary.
"A partial indication of the probable issues involved in the saga". Not quite as snappy a headline, I agree.
(Edit: this comment was based on apparently incorrect information from GP that there is some rule that high-speed trains need to stop in any state they cross. A counter-example is given below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31548720)

> there are a lot of people who actually use the stations between, say, Berlin and Cologne

Sure, and a stop in the middle would make sense on that length of route, or alternating at which intermediate place(s) it stops. But with a stupid rule like having to stop in whatever state you pass means that you have to build rails around to avoid hitting a corner where nobody lives anyway because you'd have to stop for absolutely no reason.

Let the trains make stops and rails be laid based on, like you say, demand. Not on arbitrary border lines.
To be honest, Sierra games always looked like a child's MSPaint drawings to me. Even Maniac Mansion, which had to work with comparable technical limitations, looked more sophisticated.
Thanks! I chose the same set of gears that shipped with the original Spirograph. Also note that you can achieve a similar effect by pressing "," or ".", which offsets the gear by one tooth, and then re-drawing the complete design.
I haven't done the math, so it's conceivable to me that self organizing cables have a longer duration, hence, maybe off-setting the "waste" of neodymium by reducing waste of copper/plastic.

I'm biased towards thinking it does not offset, but I'm not sure, I haven't done the math nor read of someone else's

I'm just mad because that phrase you put in quotes sums up how people jump to conclusions before even caring on doing the math, as if decisions shouldn't depend on the outcome of those calculations

Most of visceral complains about plastics comes to mind, if you read from someone that has done some barely competent calculations and investigations, you realize that most of what should be done is to avoid the use of plastics near bodies of water, and only in the cases where the math says it's a good trade-off
Elon Musk welcomes global recession: ‘it’s been raining money on fools’
Weird, what browser/OS are you using?
Forum posts are the classic pagination example (in my mind), but I feel like the type of cursor pagination you’re talking about might work better.

Skipping forward by date, by username, or even by concept might make long threads much quicker to scan through and understand.
Not C, but I did build a mobile app version that works offline: https://inspiral.nathanfriend.io/
Germany is more densely populated (232 people / km², 357000km²)and not centralized, compared to France (106 people / km², 547000km²).

The ICE trains connect larger cities & regions, not just the big ones. There are ICE Sprinter trains with fewer stops, though. The ICE trains often don't have their own tracks, which is what makes them slow.

Think of German train infrastructure as a mesh, compared to a more star like system in France with Paris (14 Million people for the metropolitan area) as its center. Berlin is not the center of Germany and has only around 6 Million people in its metropolitan area.
Engine is roughly 2.25m in diameter and 5.5m in length. So it would fit through the nose cone door, even with a modest fixture/container, with room to spare.
But that right doesn't count if I type something and a machine auto-deletes it?

What are rights again? Lol.
I was recently surprised to find this map: https://www.interrail.eu/en/plan-your-trip/tips-and-tricks/t...

There totally are night trains, I just never knew of them. Only heard this talk on HN that they are a thing of the past in Europe, and I never looked further than that. Turns out there are night trains all over Europe, from the mediterranean sea to the arctic circle!

Taking a train through Russia is also a thing I've been thinking of doing, but then there's this wannabe-warlord situation messing up a lot of lives right now :/
I guess they'd be fairly popular if they made a comeback, but I assume costs nowadays would mean it couldn't be financially viable.
Depends on what those stops are, for bigger cities it makes sense if route isn't hugely longer. As you can serve also those not just the end points.
People don't realise that government is slavery. Very simple really.
Dup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31540045
Not completely convincing IMHO... Good advice about size, line length, line height, paragraph spacing. But the recommendations for font choice feel completely arbitrary.

> The angular, geometric Abolition works great

Not for me. It's hard to read, and unusual. I think articles that have just one font for everything, text, title, subtitles, etc. are much easier to parse.
> The most important constituency of the UK government is old people, that want their pension to increase and the price of their house to go up and foreigners to go away (or at least to be pestered beyond reason), at all cost and with a 5 weeks planning horizon. This is all the government has been doing since 2008. Now they are somehow upset about the internet and here you have this bill.

What a very slanted view of old people to presume they dislike foriegners! As somebody who is close to 60 and with many old friends, I feel qualified to object to that blanket untruth. Honestly you will find most old people dislike the under 30's more than foriegners based upon my observations and experiences being part of this older demographic.

That all said, my faith in any goverment to address issues in technology is very much lost when they still can't manage to deal with and handle spam calls and texts, let alone emails. It's a crime of block and deny at best with no bite or drive to chase/track them down to the stage that society is normalised that it's a thing and you just deal with the effects instead of addressing the issues which is the root cause of most online fraud. Most know to spot and ignore such frauds early on, but enough do not and why it prevails.

But this isn't about one generation and whilst I find the whole flipped on the head "think of the children" angle amusing, it is not the case here and to distill it down to that ignored the real issues underlying here. Which is once again another poor solution to a poorly defined problem.
I took the train from Berlin to Paris in 2018. Was visiting Europe from the US with my son and we did it on a Sunday when nothing was open anyway. No problem with 7 hours on a train. Would have taken at least 5 hours to fly, getting to/from the airports, security, arriving early, etc. Cheaper and more enjoyable to take the train,
>I wonder: Is automatic DI even helpful? You save some lines of boilerplate but sacrifice control over the initialization-order and get a flat, messy, implicit dependency graph

Initialization order doesn't matter if your services are stateless. At least in our codebase, all of them are stateless, as it greatly simplifies reasoning about concurrent code (both in-process and between servers). Yes, it's easy to end up with a very convoluted dependency graph under the hood, but I don't think it's a problem you really should care about. I mean, your code most likely already compiles to a very convoluted mess of machine code under the hood (with all the optimizations, ABI quirks etc.) and I doubt it matters to you much, as long as it does its job well and doesn't hinder your productivity.

If you are talking about messy dependency graphs from the architectural standpoint (someone can easily add a dependency in the constructor without thinking about the consequences), we use deptrac for our PHP monolith which can validate your architecture is clean at build time [0]

However, for our microservices written in Go, we decided to use manual DI to stimulate developers to prefer simpler design, otherwise our microservices could quickly turn into monoliths again.

[0] https://github.com/qossmic/deptrac
"with a stupid rule like having to stop in whatever state"

There is no such rule in Germany.
> Which of these body fonts feels most appropriate for a sci-fi book set in 2975?

EB Garamond

> EB Garamond has a very classic, formal appearance. We want something that has a modern edge.

No.
What's interesting is those people are not necessarily maladapted to their future adult work lives.

In some lines of work finding the correct stuff to use for a task is way more important than ability to create it yourself from scratch.

Finding the plug that fits the given socket vs building the plug from scratch.
I was an A+ student up to Sophomore year in HS. I downgraded to A or B+ student after I knew how much fun actual learning is.

Before that, all I was doing was memorizing and practising heuristics to get A+.

I actually started learning Science since 11th grade. I grew and grew. And my scores tanked.

Got only 6.xx/10 in college as well.

But no regrets. Learning Math properly gave me a super solid foundation to learn Deep Learning very quickly. Now I do my semi-dream job as a Deep Learning Research Engineer building actual products with Deep Learning.

I have a truly realistic chance of getting my dream job within the end of this calendar year.

No regrets. Screw scores and learning systems designed for the mediocres. The education system has no care for the poor learners with no parental care. Neither it is good for future scientists and geniuses.
I know there's a whole genre (steampunk) dedicated to "what if the Difference Engine had actually been built in Babbage's lifetime and started a steam based computer revolution a century earlier than the electrical computer revolution", but I do think it is a fascinating idea. One sometimes overlooked aspect of this is the global network of telegraph cables. Within Charles Babbage's lifetime there were working undersea cables from the UK to the US (completed 1866) and from the UK to India (completed in 1870), with the UK to Australia cable completed in 1872 just a year after Babbage's death, so it is conceivable we'd have had a telegraph powered form of the internet a century earlier too.
I agree with this articles ending, what you offer though is a hybrid of pair programming, what we ought to say is that effectively we need to have a conversation, trust me i wont do a coding game with you, ill just ignore you, but a conversation like a human being, that i can do and i'm more than willing, and yes ask me anything because i will ask you too, the interview is a two way process, many of us learned that the hard way, therefore we wont repeat the same mistakes.
> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?

I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions, only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge.

The problems were long, had few questions besides describing the problem and maybe a few questions to guide the student along the path to solving it. We had either 3 or 4 hours to solve those problems.

Those tests worked very well. I'd come out from one of those tests having often learned something new.

I was an exchange student in the US, tests involved multiple choice questions, they were closed books with questions around rote memory. While I did feel that some of the education in the US was valuable and interesting, I hated those tests, they didn't correlate as much with comprehension of the subject matter and more with learning facts that are more or less tangentially related to the subject matter. I still remember in a computer graphics tests being shocked by being asked when Opengl was first released, which companies were involved and other completely useless knowledge.

What's interesting to me is that there's much less opportunities to cheat with the former tests while the later tests are pretty much made for cheating. So, imho cheating is a symptom of bad tests.
Basic research is conducted without consideration to commercial exploitation. Think research in time reversal symmetry physics... try to making a buck off that. This article is the direct opposite of basic research, at least according to the authors of the abstract page: They cite a bunch of prior research on the mechanics underlying the paper and then say "However, a link between the generation of the carrier types and their importance for observables of technological relevance is missing." Translation: "We think we found an industrial application".

Actual progress is very slow, even when the technology is already out of the lab - it can easily be decades of waiting before making it into the hands of everyone who'd benefit. Like dialup modems... the tech behind that had not only been available, but already applied to the task, years before the number of people aware of it grew beyond military and telecom people. There were no hyperbolic articles preceding the release of the Hayes modem. Actually, I'm drawing a blank on any example of popsci carny barkers doing anything but misleading and misinforming.
If there’s anything close to a law in sociology, it’s that young people don’t vote. So what you’re saying doesn’t feel particularly specific to the U.K. One thing one might argue for would be a political system where old people’s votes are discounted (because they will die soon or because they are ‘over represented’ due to their bothering to vote).

I guess one could also make arguments about the structure of the system which feels a bit more specific to the U.K. eg rural–urban constituency differences or FPTP.
We do, it doesn't change anything in OPs statement tho. What's the point?
Wow, congrats author if you are reading this
The epic case of a teacher who hunts down the cheaters and doesn't take revenge, instead does the right thing
Heh, I wonder if the quizzes just shuffled the questions between students, how many would get it wrong because their option A) was other people's option B)