skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many elevators in tall buildings have you select the floor when you arrive at the elevator bank, then it assigns you an elevator (usually denoted with letters A, B, C, D etc). When that elevator opens you get in (along with other people who were assigned that elevator), and it will stop at your floor (as well as other floors for other people).
In the long-run, queueing systems tend to follow Little's law given by

L = λW

where L is the long-term average number of customers waiting (in a stationary system), λ is the long-term average arrival rate of customers and W is the average time to serve a customer.

In software development, you can reduce W through best practices, standards, better specs, improved testing, increasing team size etc., You can control λ by triaging tickets.

This works as long as the customers (in the s/w case tickets or PRs) are all independent.

A lot of the complexity in s/w development results from interdependencies between tickets. This causes the service times to vary and pushes the long-term W higher and not to mention affecting the stationary assumption of the system.
The DRY example is better though. The payload is an object. When you have multiple objects of the same shape you have a class of objects. Menu items could be loaded from a JSON source. Separation of concerns and duplication is removed from the code.
Yup.

A pair of clinical psychologists practicing in Manhattan and Brooklyn NY could probably say something useful about this. But they didn't.

Thought for today: Is impostor syndrome driving the use of excessively complex tech stacks on problems that don't really need them? If it's not complicated, do they really need to pay you $250K a year?
I find that music with lyrics is ok as long as it's not in a language that I understand.

So for example, these languages would destroy my cencentration:

- Cantonese

- Mandarin

- English

- French

I'm still ok listening to Japanese music, but I suspect it will soon be a goner because I listen to a lot of Japanese at work nowadays.
The elevators in my building do support this. People get confused all the time by accidentally deselecting the floor because they didn't notice it was already lit up. Also, the "G" light is broken in one of the elevators, which causes even more confusion (until you realise that it's not broken on the second, lower set of buttons for people in wheelchairs).
This sounds like a fascinating social medium/"platform". Could you share more about the community or an article about it?

I tried sending you an email but it bounced!
I disagree with the author's example as given.

The example discusses a code boundary that is internal to a single atomic "module" - the preparation of a data structure that describes a pizza. Then the author says that bad things will happen if said code boundary is used from other modules.

However, why would an extrenal module developer do that? It is common wisdom to recognize and avoid module-internal utility functions.

Conversely, as long as the presented shortcut is internal to a module (=used only for a specific set of use cases well understood by anyone touching the code), and saves toil, it might actually be justified.
Thank you for sharing.

First impression is quite impressive, both music and graphics.

Have a good day and a great week!
Great seeing you (and flavorjones) do big things at Shopify, Jacques! Always great seeing your impact, after our Pivotal/VMware days
You know that they can be shortened right? Get-ChildItem = gci

I for one really like PowerShell, if it could consume bash completions I would switch to using it as my $SHELL. Right now I'm leaning to switch from ZSH to Xonsh (Python).

Reason for liking PowerShell: C# compability, OOP, semi-sane syntax.

You can do type definitions, serde multiple formats into native structures.
Nice optimization!
For folks born after 2020 (I wasn't; my kid was), lots of NaN's.
Quite literally; uncertain times.
John Mueller makes a lot of remarks that are 'off the cuff' and contradicts himself to the point that I don't him seriously.
> But yep great insulation in the network is a requirement.

Indeed, even with "free" heat from CHP you can get an economic net loss.

Every house connected is a lot if piping, most of it unproductive — heating empty space, and losses in piping. So CHP district heating work best with large apartment buildings, and worst with single family housing.

This way Danish 65C° district heating for detached housing may be the worst example of district heating adoption.

And even if you do have only commie block style apartments, you may still end with having to add extra heat from local boilers in very cold climates. There regions in Russia where heating eats 1/3 of regional GDP.

But an overall, does district heating makes sense? Hell yes, and it must be made mandatory in the West one way, or another, along with policies to prevent counterproductive outcomes.
Gas Prices Continue to Drop
I speak French... I know what they mean. I still don't get your joke or reference. Or I don't find it funny? Unsure.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I wish meetings were held in textual form (like a Slack channel). Reading the history and being able to search through it would make it a lot easier to understand context.
But the keychain is, of course.
In those giant meetings if I couldn't get out of them I just pretended.
Water flowing directly through a city might not be pure. That doesn’t mean a centuries-old city unlike any other on earth and full of beautiful architecture has no appeal.
> "Here is the cash price. We won't know your HDHP insurance price until after we bill them, which could be good for you or could be bad."

This is the reason that non-emergency healthcare is so expensive - the purchaser does not know the price of something at the point of purchase.

This results in the price being significantly higher than what the market can bear.

When consumers are informed and can force suppliers to compete with each other, prices go down to exactly what the market can bear.

Emergency healthcare is a different beast, but will probably also decrease if non-emergency healthcare prices was left up to the market to set.
I think Stallman, and having been at his session done at CERN during 2003, I did actually got to talk with him, doesn't agree with the stage thing.
The only people who really know are not saying anything. If your site is doing OK than any change is going to be a risk.
Personal anecdata. I have been increasingly aware of my own mental patterns during development and I've noticed that often I've been sitting and mulling over refactoring to some sort of universal solution instead of getting on with the work and getting things done. There are instances when I could've finished the task twice as fast if I would've just went ahead and done it with repeating code instead of thinking of clever ways to DRY it.

Therefore for my personal projects I'm now firm believer of quick iterative building. Just get the first iteration done, get it working and save improvements for later. It may create a bit more work for the future me but it decreases the mental load quite significantly. I'll take less mental load with clear objective (refactor this because this) over more mental load with unclear objectives (make universal solutions taking into account things that may or may not happen in the future) any day.
>Turns out they just want a better Python.

That's Go. It gives actual types[1] and structs (so you dont have to wonder about dict, class, class with slots, dataclasses, pydantic, attrs, cattrs, marshmallow, etc). It removes exceptions and monkeypatching. It's async-first (a bit like gevent). It's inherently multicore. And you can package and distribute it without marking a pentagram on the ground and sacrificing an intern to Apep.

You just need to stop being friends with C FFI. Which is fine for web and sysadmin tools. For data science and ML/AI/DL, it's less ok.

[1] And the types are actually checked! I think a lot of people aren't really using python type checking given how slow it is and no one seems to complain. Or maybe everyone is using pyright and pyre and are satisfied with how slow these are.
Recovering lost changes with Git reflog
How is that not locking people out also? It’s the same concept applied with a different metric.
Not to mention raising prices broadly hurts locals and not just visitors? Entry fees are a pretty simple solution, I hardly imagine it being bureaucratic.
It's extremely slow to load, even before the spinner starts. This should really be a static site.

A lot of copy issues with typos, grammar, etc. throughout. This is compounded by the fact that there's a lot of copy on the page (probably too much).

You only mention the CIS countries thing in one place, that should be more apparent given it's the name of your company.

The dashes on the "What We Cover" cards look really bad.

I think it's particularly damning to be a "top 1%" freelance platform for web dev services when this site is so poorly developed.
Yes! Even when not on NixOS I like systemd, one reasonable(not perfect) way to do things? Sign me up!
Agreed on the first if the company was hiring armies of juniors, which isn't going to work either way.

As for the second: yes, you can mess it up, a solution like that requires both discipline and someone in charge of architecture with the power to enforce the rules. If everybody runs off to create their own little kingdom and APIs then it's just going to make matters worse. Sometimes much worse.

But here is an idea: if you run a typical web company you already have a couple of ways in which you can slice up your monolith:

The hot path, all that which is visible to the unwashed masses and the internal software that your various employees use to deal with order flow, support requests and so on (assuming that you built those rather than bought them, as you probably should have).

The part that is visible to everybody on the web can in turn be split up into content delivery, pages that are visible to non-logged in users and pages that are visible to users. Possibly you have a mobile phone application. Maybe your back-end has certain features that can be easily parted out and made to operate stand alone. Before long you'll have somewhere between 5 and 10 cleanly separated chunks, each of which can be worked on in isolation because the only thing all these have in common is the persistence layer, which can serve as a single source of truth. Everything else can be made as stateless as possible.

Such a solution would serve the vast bulk of the e-commerce and SPA solutions out there and would scale to very large size without breaking a sweat. Then, if it becomes necessary to break things up further this should be done with the realization that those parts will need to continue to function as a whole and that architecture will have to take a front seat if it is to work at all, which means the company will have to hire a capable systems architect who can balance the extra complexity with the flexibility required. This is not a trivial thing to do and messing it up will come with a hefty price tag.
There are videogame streamers and YouTubers who easily provide over 4 hours of content on a regular basis, mostly for free. It's going to be either making subscriptions as content rich and cheap as possible or hoping to get a renaissance of movie nuts culture.
I don't read coding opinion articles like OP but I like to check out comments.

> DRY does NOT lead to over-complicating things.

That is not true. I dive around foreign code bases a lot and dry-ness is actually a significant complicating factor in understanding code, because you're jumping around a lot (as in physically to different files or just a few screens away in the same file). As in, inherently every time it's used, not just in situations where it's used in a complicated way.

This sounds dumb but it just simply is much harder to keep context about what's going on around if you can't refer back to it because it's on the same screen or one short mouse scroll above or below your current screen.

That obviously doesn't mean you should leave copy pasted versions of the same code over your code base. But it's important to consider that refactorization of that code into something common that gets called from multiple places as something that you don't get for free, but that is an active trade off which you usually have to apply to prevent bugs (changing one code location and not the other) or simple code bloat. In practice this is very relevant when you suspect something might be repeated in the future, but you're not sure. Imo: Just don't factor it out into anything, leave it there, in place, in the code.
> fifty is half three twenties

I'm confused. Wouldn't that be... thirty? :-)
> However, why would an extrenal user do that? Potential external users typically recognize and avoid module-internal utility functions.

External users will go look the implementation of msvc's standard library and reverse engineer windows API to make things faster lol. No internal module function is ever safe.
There's a difference between strong consumer rights for things like products being faulty, or not being as described.

But there is no EU consumer right to simply return an item because you've decided you don't like it, or no longer want it, which are open to abuse.
There's no silver bullet. My opinion is that you should weight alternatives without repetition and with repetition and choose the most appropriate one. Also if in the future you feel that this common code is becoming more complex with options and switches, feel free to remove it by inlining, either completely or in a few places. Often it'll allow for better code or it'll allow to find out another way to extract common code.

Basically I like the refactoring approach. You have a set of refactorings. Like extract method / inline method. The point is that every refactoring is two-way. And both ways are useful in different situations.

To support this approach, sane IDE is a must and strictly typed language is preferable You should refactor your code without fear of breaking unrelated code.

What I definitely think is overrated is "if it works - don't touch it" principle. It's lazy and in the end it creates much more work than if one would gradually improve something that works.
It’s time for a law that gives you the right to keep pirated copies if you own (as in press the buy button, even if it’s an indefinite rental) the original.
I used this 15+ years ago with C++, it was so much easier to do cross platform things that way and it had good performance. Now I think I have not worked on a native desktop app on at least 10 years. And everything I see others make is more hybrid, javascript, electron kind of things. The performance of that even though we have much faster hardware feels worse than what WxWidgets / C++ did 15 years ago...
A relevant primer, a comment by me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31987377
Awesome work guys! A couple of knee jerk reactions while playing around with this:

1. In my work (also at UT actually: Hook 'em), we've found that the hallucination problem is, in part, lessened by over-parametrizing the model. Places that have the budget to do this have noticed that the performance of ml4code transformers increases linearly for every 1e3 increase in the number of parameters (with no drop off in sight). Love to hear your thoughts on this.

2. I'm concerned that finding code snippets from a short form query is underspecifing the problem too much and may not be the best user-interaction model. Let's compare your system to something like Github Copilot. I pass a query:

> how to normalize the rows of a tensor pytorch

With GitHub Copilot, I can demonstrate intent in the development environment itself with an IO example / comment / both and interact more efficiently. If I see errors in the synthesized snippet, I can change the query in >1 second etc. Etc. This is hard with a search engine style interactive environment. For this query, I had to navigate to the website, type in the query, check the results (which were wrong for me btw. Y'all might need to check correctness of the snippets), copy back the result, maybe go to the relevant thread and parse more closely etc. A good question to keep in mind here would be to figure out how to make this process more interactive.

3. Finally, I just want to say that the website is phenomenal, even on mobile. Kudos on the frontend/backend/architecture side of things.

Also, don't let my or anyone else's comments take away from the awesome work y'all have done!!! I pulled out that example from a paper I read recently called TF-coder. They have a dataset of these examples as part of their supplement material. All the best!
Can't listen anything with words to focus, so it has to be instrumental music in background, so while not programming but doing different work with zero error tolerance I listen to soundtracks or electronic music, often to supress noise from kids playing in other room, if they are at home, so it has to have ideally various frequencies like white noise, I find soundtracks like Prisoners or The Prestige probably the best.
Many were fazed. They were told no layoffs and two weeks later big layoffs.
I took a screenshot of the address and pasted it into OneNote. The 'Copy Text from Picture' extracted the text with no issues.
From the context I'm guessing MUMPS, and it kinda seems to resemble it, if it had more line breaks: https://github.com/programarivm/mumps-examples/blob/f160bfb6...
BepiColombo’s Second Date with Mercury
This is like a compiler inlining code for faster performance, with exactly the same reasons
In France, the pharmacist is legally obliged to offer the cheaper generic. If the doctor wants the primary brand specifically, he has to write "non-substitutable" on the prescription and a shorthand mention of the reason.
And here are a few of my sources for music while programming:

- kahvi collective (kahvi.org, kahvicollective.bandcamp.com)

- ocremix.org (they produce some really nice albums, e.g. the gigantic 6-disc Final Fantasy VI remix album, one of my all-time favourites)

- amigaremix.com

- www.dwellingofduels.net

- remix.kwed.org

- lots of other video game original soundtracks that I bought

I have a FiiO X5 DAP, so I download the music and put it on a few microSD cards (the FLACs take up a lot of space).
Adam functions as a low-pass filter (and/or "compressor") on the gradient. It filters out "noise", which is "wild" during start of training.

This is basically what all "optimizers" achieve in various ways, including momentum.

Adam uses several times more memory, and is slower, than momentum or just SGD. That's reason to not use if not needed.
IMO, DRY is the second principle, the first one is KISS. It is preferable to repeat ourself if that contributes to simplicity and ease of maintenance. My third principle is that there is only three principles.
As mentioned below, every standing water has (on average) the same amount of inflow as it has outflow, otherwise it wouldn't be there in the first place ("dry up", evaporate, etc.)

In fact, I know an artificial pond (and I guess there are many) that has no obvious inflow, but if you look closely and feel the waters 1-2 m below the surface, you realize it has massive inflow from ground-water (there is a large river just nearby), and there is a swampy area at the opposite end, where the pond has considerable outflow - just not as obvious.

Now we could modify this to say, there must be obvious inflow from a river, stream or similar... But then again, in areas where there are not many big lakes nearby, e.g. Lower Austria, there are several "lakes" (often artificial) which I always jokingly criticize ("You call that a lake?").

If you grew up near e.g. Lake Constance or let's say Lake Michigan, most "lakes" are ponds for you, even if they have inflow.

So I think most people would agree that surface area is the main differentiator, but I would say it is highly subjective where you draw the line.
It's not the risk analysis that drives these companies to shut down EU traffic, it is cost benefit analysis. Until the USA implements a similar law - hopefully without the warts, which the GDPR definitely has - this situation will persist. Note that parties that make money on their products rather than on their users have no problem with GDPR compliance at all.
Not sure why this is on the frontpage. Not only are there a bunch of typos, a bunch of code doesn't actually work the way they said it does. Also gotta love hating on the 10x developer or whatever for saying you are wrong.

EVERYTHING HAS TRADEOFFS. Every single thing has tradeoffs. Obviously you should not write terrible, brittle code. The reason DRY is important is because when you start duplicating code, having 30 different serialization methods littered throughout your code, 5 different ways of calculating the same value, etc etc you see why it really matters. Its a GUIDELINE used to as a general rule. And as guidelines and general rules go -- its useful for juniors and people who don't have the experience to see the best way to write the code.

Its a good default, and like YAGNI, and 100 other programmer acronyms it has its ups and downs. Your pizza example is not "coincidental repetition" -- it is actual repetition -- you just abstracted it in a really poor way to make a strawman.
Hey.. this is made by datasette who is a great producer in his own right!

https://datassette.bandcamp.com/

"Polyhedron Navigator" has quite the interesting energy and sound design to it.
The world needs a better way to monetize open source.
Dupe?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31999241

I am really intrigued as to how some posts for the same (or similar) story get to the front page and others don't rate a mention.
You are quite right, I should have stated that.
My first steps of getting rid of social media
That is I'm literally in a hell eternal. That will take time to sink in.
Or they could put the license you purchase in a public distributed database.
In practice there are no penalties for pirate content, although sounds like a good change.
They should do this for Amsterdam. And make them 500 euros.
Huh, interesting!
This just in: Message broker creator insists you need message broker. Kidding of course.

I started work and got introduced to BizTalk. My first job revolved around it so I was surprised to move on and find we all just use queues. Reading this was weirdly nostalgic
The Benefits of World Hunger [pdf]
Decriminalize piracy for natural persons (not corporations.)
Previous discussions :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547694 (Feb 3, 2012, 183 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3605957 (Feb 18, 2012, 95 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12844434 (Nov 1, 2016, 434 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771600 (Dec 12, 2019, 263 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27737887 (July 5, 2021, 147 comments)
> what if i honored your copyright as long as it "suited me", then one day it didnt.

That is already how consumers behave. You're living the dream right now!
Covid-19: Booster-Shot Now or Wait Until Fall? – Immunologists Weigh the Options
In UI work I prefer copy-paste when there is no clear abstraction. So far this has paid off.
But that means you'd need to be constantly building new smelting facilities as local wood resources were used up. Making charcoal needs relatively little infrastructure, so it'd be easier to make and transport.

I suspect the optimal answer is a combination of approaches. Build a few foundries distributed optimally near large forests, cut timber and char it and bring the charcoal to the foundries. Maybe cycle them on a 40 year basis so you can re-seed the forests and grow enough timber to make them worth it.
I think we will get there sooner than later. Solid state storage is progressing in capacity pretty swiftly. 100 and 200tb SSDs already exist. They are just super pricey.

Home file servers/media servers would likely become more popular if you could just plug a small low power device into the wall.
Tourism always was for the rich until the 1970's. That's when travel became so cheap that everybody started doing it.