skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really understand this level of risk aversion. I'm probably old for hacker news, early 40s and my infection fatality rate is somewhere around 5 to 12 in 100k. I've got many hobbies and lifestyle choices that expose me to greater risk.

Even at 80 years old the risk of covid at worst is basically no different than wingsuit base jumping hard for a season. Yes of course if you can lower your 5% risk of death by all means the vaccine is worth it. Somewhere between 50 and 80 is a gray area.
mRNA vaccine research has been going on since 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine

with lots of money and research going into the technology, I don't understand where folks are coming from.
> you are doing a bad job of producing an up-front system design

Or, it could be that you're actually innovating and requirements are changing faster than you write code.

A late change in requirements is a competitive advantage.

There definitely are systems where BDUF is a valid approach. But at the same time there are systems where making mistakes is the best way to learn. Emergent design is a thing.
I knew this article was written by Greenspun within 2 paragraphs. It's really sad to see someone otherwise talented and intelligent devolve into the conspiracy-theory laden mindset of a man broken by his own relationship mistakes.
Jobs are also voluntary.
Yeah, but I think what they're getting at is that Rust could provide a standard executor in the library and also be modular enough that you can use whichever one you want. The questions are orthogonal
Last updated 2010. I'm all for software that doesn't need new features but no changed in a decade make me not want to install it on a production server http://feurix.org/projects/hatop/
Effectiveness of HEPA Filters at Removing Infectious SARS-CoV-2 from the Air
Depends on the context, I think.
She took the limo ride because it's was available.
Alcohol is alcohol.
What if it was another person sitting in an ordinary cab drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle saying to his/her friends "Thank God we're getting out of THAT, right?"
There is a saying in Vietnamese roughly translated to “Looking upwards, I’m worse than everyone. Looking downwards, everyone is worse than me.”

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/trông_lên_thì_chẳng_bằng_ai...
What are you trying to insinuate, that the COVID vaccine is causing this?
But it's a valid concern to know if the vaccinated are dying at a higher rate than pre-2020, and if so, is that attributable to the vaccine.

There's no brushing off this concern, it's vitally important to get this information.
It's generally accurate. It suffers from the fundamental problem of truth by consensus rather than truth by competence, though. There is severe cherry-picking about disputed issues.

An experience I had some years back makes it very clear. It was an Israel/Palestine article, I noticed one item that should have a link didn't. Being naive about it's biases at the time I added the missing link--no words changed, just the link added behind a couple of words. It got reverted--that's a link the left would prefer people not make.
This is not an academic survey, but wikipedia is probably a better source than Civilization at least (good games, though). You can look at their sources if you really want to get rigorous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_eco...

> Hunter-gatherers tend to have an egalitarian social ethos,[17] although settled hunter-gatherers (for example, those inhabiting the Northwest Coast of North America) are an exception to this rule.[18][19] For example, the San people or "Bushmen" of southern Africa have social customs that strongly discourage hoarding and displays of authority, and encourage economic equality via sharing of food and material goods.

> Most anthropologists believe that hunter-gatherers do not have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed.

Anyway, IMO the null hypothesis should be that small humans tribes in nature act like large extended families or groups of friends and acquaintances -- generally friendly, collaborative, and driven by a consensus of stakeholders interested in a given problem. With less ability to horde wealth, you'll get shallower power structures -- more need to keep everyone broadly happy (or at least convinced that they are better off working with you).
Americans are constantly learning that unfortunately you have to fight for your rights. The First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth have been eroded to various degrees in direct violation to the Constitution, but that doesn't mean that they aren't still rights.
Nintendo escaped the console war. Now Microsoft and Sony want out, too
> - Raw-pointer equivalent to lifetime parameters (`GenericStruct<*>`, converts `&'a T` into `*const T` and `&'a mut T` into `*mut T`)

How would that work? References and pointers are fundamentally different types, and the primary operation on references (`Deref`) isn't available for pointers. Any methods implemented on the struct wouldn't be able to do anything with the "reference" field, since it might actually be a pointer instead - it would be like having a `struct Foo<T>(Vec<T>);`, and then specifying `Foo<boxed T>` (imaginary syntax) if you actually want a `Box<T>` instead of a `Vec<T>`. You can't just treat a `Box` like a `Vec` (or a pointer like a reference).

> - `impl Trait` for associated types. This lets you workaround async trait functions without boxing the returned futures and also return anonymous closures from traits

You're probably already aware, but for the bystanders, that seems to be close to happening: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/63063

> - Mutability variance: e.g. write `fn index<&a>(&a self, idx: Idx) -> &a T`, instead of needing to write `fn index(&self, idx: Idx) -> &T` and `fn index_mut(&mut self, idx: Idx) -> &mut T`)

I think that's something the Keyword Generics (aka "totally not effects") Initiative[1] is looking into.

> - Built-in unit types (e.g. write `#[unit(ms)] pub struct Milliseconds(usize)`, and then you can write `128ms` => `Milliseconds(128)`)

Making sure that doesn't turn into a name collision nightmare would probably needs some work. It might also make it very hard to figure out what type you're actually dealing with just by looking at such a number. The current solution to this problem, defining an extension trait on integers, produces only moderately more verbose code, with the benefit of not requiring any additional syntax: `128.ms()`.

[1]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/07/27/keyword-ge...
Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?
I know it will depend on the person, I'm just curious as to which work arrangement that you all find to be more rewarding in terms of work-life-balance, pay, job satisfaction, etc. By "Work for yourself" I mean freelancing, independent contracting, building a profitable application, etc.
Work for yourself
Full-time job
A model is a prediction, nothing more. It can be a correct prediction but only after being verified by comparison with reality.
Yes, a lot of places have quality control that removes the tiring "just asking questions" concern trolling and bad faith arguments from people who don't understand the basics of epidemiology. This comment section would be better with the same moderation. Confusing dissent with informed dissent is a big problem on "free speech" platforms.
Highly recommend "l'Amie de mon Ami", my favorite Rohmer. "Maud" is probably second.
I have a thinkpad p71 with an Expresscard x1 slot and can't figure out what to use it for since the laptop has so much existing IO out of the box.

It would have been nice if framework adopted this existing standard and started making their own express card modules instead of making their own USBC thing that doesn't fit in any other laptop.
No, it was unprecedented to tell people to take an emergency authorized drug of a highly experimental nature or lose their jobs.

It was always a gamble. I took it, knowing it was a gamble, since COVID was very dangerous. We forced people to gamble. It was criminal.
Except that's not at all what the article is suggesting. Quite the opposite.
I think crossword editors and cartoonists necessarily have a broader world view, albeit with less experience in long-form writing.
Drains need to be sloped to the riser pipe. And in nearly all offices thats concentrated in the middle, which implies a huge slope for drains coming from several dozen feet away.
Did you also learn SQL? Most COBOL code I've seen contains SQL. I've always felt SQL statements fit well into COBOL code as the syntaxes are similar in their verboseness.
In my experience, HPA are awesome! Once you defined your sweetspot of buffer pods for quick scaling, they are well worth the effort!

It the super simple stuff, scaling down staging on the weekend or even scaling all feature deployments to 0, when you know nobody will be working on it, that will end up saving you big bucks on your cloud budget.

If you pair the HPA with a decent node autoscaler, THAT in my opinion is the game changer of cloud managed kubernetes over the bare metal deployments that I have done.
> there's no real cost to manufacture and distribute software

Do you know where you are writing this? God, even if you managed to find people that are willing to sacrifice their >$100K/year for a good cause, "local storage" has both a start and a maintenance cost, especially "massive" ones.

And copyright is a legal issue, not a technological one
Sadly the adventure books often have much more detail and different outcomes than many supposed “non-linear” games.

They also has the ability to “quick save” and go back to a decision point and try again. Some would even let you loop.
Well...in MS Flight Simulator, I know the voice alerts will yell at you to warn you about terrain, of if your AoA is too great ("Sink rate!").

But they don't care about high climb angles until you eventually stall.
I recommend this book, it was written by top people with decades of experience in creating runtime, OSes, base class libraries, designing APIs, naming and so on

Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series) 3rd Edition
If we're going to ascribe success to a factor like school choice, we should also rule out other factors such as what those schools are being chosen for. [For example, if it turns out that there are no academic differences in chosen vs non-chosen schools, and its simply that the mere ability to choose a school causes benefits, that's really important to know!]
> diluting her awfulness among the maximum number of students

*polluting with her awfulness the maximum number of students
Not how communicable diseases work.

If enough people in the population take certain precautions, and those precautions limit the spread of disease, then there is some sweet spot between the virus’ contagiousness and number of people who take precautions that will cause the virus to not spread.
Turkey apparently didn't get this rubber-stamping message, and used their vote for own gains. To me this still looks pretty much like a state deciding for themselves.
Scala was fun before Typelevel broke the community. I liked Scala when it was a pragmatic, hybrid FP-OOP language, with a powerful actor model implementation.

Now, OOP became a curse word, and if you do not do purely functional code with tagless-final and don’t know the definition of free monad by heart, you have no business writing Scala code (I like pure FP too, but if I want to write Haskell code, I can do it in Haskell), and the community drama with “typelevel/cats vs Scalaz” and “typelevel vs zio” was too much for me to handle. The new community is too toxic for me to continue writing anything in Scala.

The only bright point in Scala is lihaoyi’s ecosystem, which is sane enough to actually use, but it is too much to maintain for a single person, and it is losing momentum.

So I quit, and moved to Common Lisp, which is interesting and pragmatic enough.
What exactly is the issue with comparing oneself to others?

I came from a less fortunate background in some ways, and LinkedIn has been a godsend for me to compare myself to others and get to where I want to be: I just look people up who I’m really impressed by, see their history and combined with other research I find the patterns that got them where they are, and then develop goals for myself to surpass them. It’s almost like they’re my mentor and don’t even know it.

I wouldn’t say I’m wildly successful now, but any time I encounter someone noticeably “more successful” along the axes I care about, there’s a moment of envy that quickly turns into “what can I learn from this person to accomplish that and surpass them”? I’m way more accomplished than I was even just a year ago, and I find myself saying that every year. I’ve sold businesses, lead teams, received awards, and have accomplished things that just a few years ago seemed like a pinnacle of success because of this mindset.

Comparing oneself to others is so powerful, especially now the availability of peoples background info basically makes it a labeled dataset for learning how to become “successful” in whatever way you define it. I think that’s always been the point of it biologically: if you’re worried you’re falling behind - fix it! The issue is the same as calorie counting: there’s a healthy way to do it and an unhealthy way. Most people compare themselves to others in the unhealthy way, so it’s unproductive and just anxiety-inducing. The healthy way uses that low level anxiety as a catalyst for action.
I’m in my early 40s. I know a guy from my college years who is now making a TON of money because he got into COBOL development early in his career and most of his peers are now in their 60s and 70s and retiring. I think he was among the people who helped New Jersey fix some of their COBOL problems a couple years ago [0].

I sometimes wonder what’s going to happen in about 40 years when some then Fortune 50 company who built their entire operation on Node suddenly can’t find Javascript programmers because they’re all retiring. :P

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/06/new-jersey-seeks-cobol-progr...
> Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible...

Ahem, cough, dial-up modem handshake.

That is all I have to say on the subject.
I hate Musk, but who cares what the motivation is?

Shedding light on an (unfortunately very) influential company is good for the public.

Musk shouldn't get out of his deal, but whatever he does to reveal malpractice at Twitter is good for all of us.
That's kind of the whole issue, isn't? Who knows what that kind of code is supposed to mean?
You Might Not Need State Management: The Flutter Edition
The time horizon on that payback is very long and the risk of total project failure is very high.
I Hate Coordinate Systems (2020)
Some people wore masks some of the time, varying by seasonality, weighted regionally by the dominant political ideology of the area. My understanding is that masks were more effective against the flu than covid because Covid can spread in finer particles than the flu, which makes masks more effective in fighting the flu.

> people with the flu were testing positive for COVID and health authorities were counting flu cases as COVID.

We know this happens, the critical missing part of your argument is your estimate of frequency. If your theory were true, the precipitous drop in flu cases indicates that almost everyone with the flu also had Covid. That doesn't pass the smell test to me - I feel confident we would have heard if there were that high a correlation, given all the research going on at the time.
True. I'd put it on the same level as connecting XLR cables. MiniDiscs (and to a lesser extent) UMDs were maybe the last examples of such satisfying mechanics.

We are moving towards a solid state future where no user interaction directly drives mechanics. Physical media has largely disappeared, few cars are sold with a manual transmission and everything is wireless.

Maybe folding phones will fill the gap. For now, at least my toaster remains!
You probably won't write any useful and nontrivial piece of software in C today without using external libraries, so if you really need Unicode, you will probably use one one of Unicode libs - although basic operations like copying will work without these anyway.
It’s not a court, and Twitter doesn’t have a right to be there (nor do any executives want to be in front of Congress under oath). Edit: The ranking member of the committee in the video said that the Twitter CEO was invited but refused to join the hearing. So there you go

but Twitter has already testified more or less through compliance statements and attestations about their security, and now we’re finding out about what they’ve been sweeping under the rug.
Local storage of everything. A language for the markup of hypertext documents (no, HTML doesn't do that). A strategy for recording an annotative trail.
Russian expansion does indeed mean dead people. It means constant suffering, political oppression (including killing opponents or forcibly relocating them), destruction of economy and the death of culture.
The most common/cheap solution is the Gotek floppy drive, easily found on Aliexpress or eBay, and with the FlashFloppy firmware [1] for expanding the capabilities of the hardware.

Since I'm nitpicking, it's not an IDE interface, as there's no IDE floppy drives :)

[1] https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy
> that too many members of society (including the leaders) are dangerously under-informed for living in it, let alone governing

And this might even be tenable, if they were to surround themselves with knowledgable people who could give them advice. But, in a situation not entirely dissimilar to the inner workings of large corporations, our leaders are surrounded by parasites who ride on the their backs, and lead them into making decisions that benefit themselves in the short term, instead of benefitting the country (or the company) in the long run. You can fix this in government by amending the Constitution to get rid of Citizens United ruling, and then tackling the lobbyist problem, as if either one were possible. And I don't know how you'd even begin to fix it in large corporations.
I can't wait to bust out my collection of "PC Genius" floppy disks that I had growing up, and play them with my son in a few years. I haven't inserted a floppy disk in a reader in about 10-15 years, but secretly super excited to do it again!
The github source for it doesn't list a license. How can I be sure it is safe to my easily triggered sensibility concerning unknown ingredients in my PC's food?
> So, if that isn't the competitive advantage, why go for it in the first place? At least blue collar languages have much, much larger pools of competent programmers to select from, which is an objective, convenient upside any manager can understand.

I think its like Haskell, Rust, Go, Erlang, etc. These languages are extremely useful in the microcosm of places where they excel. Rust when you absolutely need to insure memory safety, Go when you need near-C speeds but a simple to use concurrency system, Haskell for rigid typing, Erlang for high availability, etc. The problem is the dead average developer looks at these, and sees these high flying companies doing cool things in it, and then decides "wow I should write everything in this - it's the future!"

Scala is the same way. It's not objectively better than a modern java in any way which might be taken as fighting words. But foregoing a lot of developer history you gain the power to reason about a very, very small subset of programming easier at the cost of speed, time, etc. For a company like a twitter with a very specific use case for this it made sense. Especially since at the time twitter switch from RoR to Scala, Python and it's concurrency platform didn't exist. However, I would speculate if they switched today they would've almost certainly gone to Python which would have been a much less "cool" switch and probably not even made the news cycle.
The idea is interesting, how about have the protohacker listen on a port, and accept connections from our program?

This way anyone without public IP nor credit card can participate.
Rifles, Tasers and Jails: How Cities and States Spent Billions of COVID Relief
I didn't say it was working.

I'm not saying we're going back to russian gas. Again that's the point of the question!
> Having to write out BEGIN and END all the **ing time. Typing in general, and the syntax. Having to write out "POINTER TO INTEGER", for some reason, while "VAR" is abbreviated. No metaprogramming.

Have a look at Oberon+ (http://oberon-lang.ch). It supports small keywords, has a lot of abbreviations (e.g. ^T instead of POINTER TO T), and it has generic modules.
I've had both shot and booster, and have since had COVID twice. Sure, that's anecdotal, but so is "How many people do you know...".
Relevant KRAZAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSqexFg74F8&ab_channel=KRAZA...
First, to make sure we're talking about the same people: Full time at $15 hourly puts one well outside the bottom decile. About 35% of Americans were paid less than that in 2020; even in a relatively wealthy state like Virginia, it's more than 30% below that line. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/waynesboro-va

For the sake of being on the same page, I'm going to frame the expenses by this article talking about spending categories by income quintile: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-the-poor-spend-more-on...
51% nondurables (think grocery store)
16.6% restaurants
14% Other services
10.7% durables
7.2% fuel

My most frequent places eating out are probably Chipotle, McDonalds, ChikFilA, and Costco, all in mid-to-low CoL places, so I feel pretty qualified to say that prices have gone up substantially ([0] says 8% 'from 2020' to June 2022), and service has degraded enormously over the same period.

Groceries are at least 10% higher.[1]

Fuel is a very high outlier, which I'll let you research if you don't have recent experience.

'Durables' and 'other services' are harder to nail down, but the three places I've lived since 2020 have all seen significant price increases (as assessed by talking to people, with me not having the time in place to judge), and service is reliably disappointing enough to take services from convenient to 'I don't have 3 hours to wait on hold for this thing that was screwed up because billing department doesn't have enough people working there' levels of crappy.

Finally, and most importantly, people who switch jobs for higher pay will, indeed, tend to see improvement over time. But the people who didn't switch jobs over the same time period will likely have seen 1-3% raises, if any. And the bottom decile probably isn't very full of people job hopping for upward mobility.

[0] https://www.gobankingrates.com/money/business/as-mcdonalds-p...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/13/business/grocery-inflation/in...
> on a social network where people share 280 character messages is fucking bizarre.
reply

Perhaps a less dismissive characterization of Twitter would help make it less bizarre?

It's a platform used by many leading public figures, including US presidents, to share information and the 280 character limit is a format that often leads to less filtered communication than you'd get in other mediums.
I remember trying to fix Katello once and trying to figure out why "candlepin" was broken because it couldn't talk to "gutterball". Everything about the situation was terrible.
What does that mean though?

Twitter must have test environments for developers and automatic tests.

Do they just not have a full staging environment? That would be understandable. It's impossible to create a production-like test environment for a product like Twitter. You're better off just doing canary releases or feature flags with slow rollouts.