skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It should be readable, as a complete document, in its existing text form without any transformation.

Is this _needed_, or is this nice to have?

A markup language annotates text and describes _how it should be rendered_. It feels redundant to describe how a document should be rendered (presumable for final consumption) _and_ have the document be readable as-is.

Case in point: I'd argue that HTML is a great markup language. I wouldn't call it the most readable in its current form.

I agree with the spirit here, but it ultimately feels more "nice to have" than truly required.
TuSimple Fires CEO Xiaodi Hou Amid Federal Probes
Out of morbid curiosity, I actually did read the rest of your comments. I still don't see anything besides "light could be refracted in ways that confound your model" and "infinity is non-physical". And also getting more explicit with the conspiracy rhetoric. I'm prepared to believe you didn't realize it, but that's pretty much exactly the epistemological nihilism I expected.
I very much doubt whatever wacky theory you think replaces standard cosmology can survive the tests you're trying to apply here, where it has to be absolutely immune to arbitrarily complex confounding factors in observation. Which means by your standards, it's impossible to know anything.

Instead, in the real world, we go with Occam's razor until we get evidence strong enough to shake us out. It's not perfect, but it beats the crap out anything else we've tried.

FWIW, you're probably not completely wrong about infinity. I rather suspect singularities are not physical, and quantum gravity will erase them. I know there are some mainstream physicists agree. Cosmological distance and event horizons are here to stay, though.

Also, still not a Marxist. That only gets funnier every time you repeat it.
Thing with this is that causality is so much harder to prove so any type of evidence-based policy is reduced to stabbing around in the dark hoping that the odds of the next happiness poll are not diluted by some random corruption scandal.

The whole point of having measurable metrics and models is that they allow the use of the scientific method in policy making, whilst asking random people in the street might just get different answers whether you are asking them during or after their lunch break.
Well, .NET's garbage collector certainly springs to mind. Not exactly in a good way. You know you have something special on your hands when GitHub refuses to show you a highlighted version of a hand written C++ file (https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/98984ccad55362a66b7fd...).

Other than that, I remember my mind was blown a few times while watching Jim Weirich's presentation on functional programming all those years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs).
It was different. The amount of resources were zero. We had books. Like real thick books with lengthy explanations of each command. Sometimes it was the complete opposite and there was a command without any explanation at all. Good look with that, without decent debuggers or clear error messages.

Since my 14th I joined a computer club. Basically a bunch of nerds from the age 14-60 working with computers 24/7. Some ran Unix like systems, most had a Windows system or RedHat.
You had to take your desktop computer and (huge) monitor with you to every meeting. It was a whole operation just to get there.

Some guys worked at Philips (now ASML) and had very early version of COAX nic's. We built our own LAN networks and shared files over the network. We played with network settings, which was basically what we did all day. Lots of terminals and Dos screens. Later Netscape was the browser of choice. When the Windows era really took off some of us started to hack Windows 95 machines.
Often with the use of telnet and a bunch of commands you were able to find a lot of information about a computer.
Sometimes it was just as easy as sending a picture with a hidden backdoor with tools like Cult Dead Cow.
We did it for fun. There was no scamming involved.

We used ICQ and IRC to communicate online. Later there was MSN Messenger which was great to communicate with classmates. There was no cable internet. You had to pay per minute for internet over the telephone line.

Free software was available on Warez sites or FTP sites. Also newsgroups but this was mostly for reading news. I had FTP servers running everywhere. People connected to them through the whole world. Some left a thank you note after downloading music or the newest Winamp version. There was no Napster.

We went to LAN parties. Basically a university opening their auditorium for 150 nerds with huge desktop machines drinking Jolt coke all night. Some companies sponsored the events and tried to recruit java developers. There were games to hack a computer. Big part always was the opening where the (hack) groups presented themselves with 3d movies. The quality was insane for the time.

Also during Windows 95 lots of software ran in a DOS prompt. BASIC and Pascal were languages often used for this. The applications were not structured in a great way. You had open each file and analyze it. I can't remember developers used many comments in the code.
Files were fairly easy to read and understand. There weren't that many references to other files.

If you wanted to have a DOS prompt with your application you had to write everything, even the mouse cursor moving over the screen. There were no packages or other predefined codelines. There was no autocomplete, code checks, stack overflow, or decent debugger. There was even a time without line numbers.
The correct analogy would be bombing their military bases launching attacks on you, vs doing nothing because you "wouldn't want to escalate" or violate peacetime statues for military use.
It’s not too late. The money they spent is a sunk cost. If all they did was say, “We are going to milk advertising and give our cash to shareholders” they would do just fine.

Or they could focus on creating the next social network.

But… Maybe just maybe they pull this off. I just have a great idea on Mark’s product intuition, since so much of Meta’s growth has been data analysis driven.
ICantBelieveItCanSort: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.01111.pdf
The Mirage of Mandiant: Post-Acquisition Follow-Up
I'm in the same boat, I've used Zig to go through AoC 2021, liked it. I know some C, as in worked through K&R years ago, but I possess little practical experience.

Any recommendations for resources/books to learn knowledge and programming patterns applicable to Zig?(memory management best practices, low level programming, et cetera)
Sure. That’s super valuable.

But I hope they have something productive to show for the other 20 odd days that month they collected their paycheque for…
Not that, no.

($fc) = /^(.)/

We're doing a regexp match, capturing the first character of a string. This is an usage of the implicit $_ magic variable. The () in the regexp means we want to capture this part, and the "." matches any character. ^ is the start of the string.

We're doing ($fc) rather than $fc because regular expression matches work differently depending on context. In array context they return a list of matches. In scalar context they return a match count. So the ($fc) forces an array context to return the actual match.

So, TL;DR in a more traditional language this would be:

firstChar = left(someString, 1)

And actually in Perl you could do:

$fc = substr($var, 0, 1);

as well, which would be far more understandable to a less Perl-inclined person, but with regexes being such a core part of the language they tend to show up for purposes users of other languages may not expect.

This is indeed a pretty good demonstration of some of Perl's quirkiness. If you like it, it's nice and flexible, if you don't, then it's annoying as hell.
All of these seem to say the risks of complications are extremely rare? I mean it's endemic at this point so it's really really shitty if you are one of the unlucky few but what can we even do?

> We can clean this crap out of the air. Nobody has to breathe in SARS-CoV-2.

?? What do you even mean. Maybe if the vaccine prevented spreading the virus we could but until we develop that I don't see how that is possible.
As stated by one of the core KDE contributors, they (KDE team) want to make KDE appealing for regular users more, thus KDE6 work is focused on bugfixing and polishing the UX. https://pointieststick.com/2022/10/28/this-week-in-kde-next-...
Same... doesn't really help if you can't scroll down and read tweets without being prompted to sign in.
> Unions in europe also seem far less militant

That's because unions are an integral part of the way many of the countries socio-political systems work. In Norway, for instance, the trades unions and the employers get together once a year to hammer out what is called tarriflønn, essentially the going rate for each broad type of job. The state provides a referee for the meetings whose job is to keep them on track and to encourage both sides to compromise. Unions and companies work together rather than fight each other, most of the time.

But this can only work if there is a broad consensus that we are all in the same boat and that we will all be better off if we work together.

The attitude, that appears to be common, in the US that employers are always exploitative, employees are always lazy and thieving, that the government is just a parasite, and that the aphorism "Good enough for government work" is a synonym for delivering shoddy work means that no one trusts anyone so you end up fighting all the time.
In case this wasn't clear, when I say "no code" I mean no commits, nothing they can point to as evidence of doing any work. Afaic, commits removing code count for at least as much as those adding code. And if they've spent the past month adding documentation to the intranet wiki or something like that, there should be logs they can show to prove it.
> I've read that doctors now spend as much as 50% of their time documenting their work. Companies such as Epic, which provide the software that hospitals use to build databases of patient data, have been big winners in the new world of hospitals-depending-on-software.

My daughter works at Epic, and she explained that one (though not the only one) of the big reasons health care is so expensive is because Drs have so many record-keeping requirements, and one reason they have these is because of liability. It would greatly help if Americans weren't so lawsuit trigger-happy. The real winners are the lawyers (and insurance companies).
I remember something about that too. Was this the blog you read? https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html
Using software rendering instead of OpenGL disables most if not all effects from what I remember.
> Honestly, gzipped json is likely much smaller than uncompressed protobuf.

Likely not. See here for a comparison: https://nilsmagnus.github.io/post/proto-json-sizes/

Btw, binary formats can also be compressed though it typically won't yield the same compression ratio as similar json would since there will be less repeation in the binary format.
I built a status page service (https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/) on Remix, I find the data fetching patterns (and SEO) make a hell of a lot more sense than Next.js
> More or less, what I want from markup is to convert a text string into a document tree:

enum Element {
Text(String),
Node {
tag: String,
attributes: Map<String, String>
children: Vec<Element>,
}
}

fn parse_markup(input: &str) -> Element { ... }

> Markup language which nails this perfectly is HTML.

The reason HTML nails it perfectly is because this is modeled after HTML.

If I were to make up a markup language, I wouldn't follow that model.

In particular I would get rid of attributes which to me are a restricted kind of children with a specialized syntax.

This is both unnecessary and undesirable in many cases.

The major problem with attributes is the <String, String> mapping. Once something is defined to be an attribute, it cannot be sensibly extended without creating an unnecessary problem.

For example the `class` attribute in HTML looks like it was originally designed to hold a single class name. Then people realized that it would be desirable to have multiple classes per element.

So, to keep things backwards-compatible, the value of the attribute was extended to hold a space-separated list of classes instead. Essentially creating a little DSL inside of the attribute's value.

If `class` was instead a kind of child, initially limited to a single instance per element, extending to multiple instances in a backward-compatible manner would not require introducing the DSL. It would be natural. Just allow many `class` children.

A valid argument in HTML in favor of attributes is conciseness. But that's an artifact of the syntax.

We could make up a language with syntax for nodes as concise as HTML attributes, eliminating that argument.

> It feels like there’s a smaller, simpler language somewhere

Certainly.

I have experimented with many different designs for such a markup language on top of Jevko[0]. One interesting design that trivially maps to HTML looks like this:

h1 [Title]

p [
paragraph
]

p [
[paragraph with a ]
a [
href=[...]
[link]
]
]

Another one looks like this:

[h1][Title]

[p][paragraph]

[p][
paragraph with a
[href[...] a][link]
]

Both are extremely simple and minimal, but also extensible and lend themselves to writing by hand.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33287620
Oh, it might be worth adding duplicates for people who visit via hackernews.com

hackernews.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/\bTwitter\b/):upward(tr):remove()
hackernews.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/\bMusk\b/):upward(tr):remove()
hackernews.com##tr.spacer + tr:not(.athing):remove()
China has literal GDP targets. Yes it's very dumb
The tricky thing is that if no one from family knows you have $$$ in Bank Foo, this money can just lie there unclaimed forever (until taken by the government after N years).

Even if theoretically those institutions should proactively search for deceased owners' heirs in some jurisdictions, I wouldn't trust this to happen.

At least listing all banks, stocks accounts & insurances you have might be really useful. Just set a yearly reminder to self in calendar to send such an email to your closest family member.
Hashlife.

I'm pretty sure that if something of the sort had occurred to me before I came across it, I would have thought "that'll never work" and moved on without taking it seriously.
> I never thought this would happen, does this mean I should quit programming?

Yes.

> I feel like you can't get much done in a computer without branching in a CPU, but maybe I misunderstand modern CPU architecture.

Most CPUs have jump instructions, that doesn't mean it's a good idea to have gotos in your programming language.
> because of — you name it — political propaganda I would pause for a moment and revaluate whether I am still who I think I was.

We don't know why Pelosi's husband was attacked. The guy who attacked him appears to be left wing (nudist activist, pro lgbt, he made hemp jewelry, and was a member of the green party). Pelosi appears to have said the attacker was his friend on the police call.

We just don't know enough to say it is political.
Or how good your wine is by the alcohol percentage.
I'd like to think that cost isn't the issue, that they aren't sacrificing their cause because of that.

I believe the charity has an income near £100m a year, so it could justify some cost (how much I don't know)

I would love to think that a respectable CDN would jump at the opportunity to support a cause like this at cost and could perhaps reach out and offer services.
> broadly the analysis results in better outcomes or else there would be no economic incentive to facilitate medical research

This is true to a degree, but outcomes for real healthcare rely on much more than research, as you’ve indicated.

Documentation is part of that research, of course, and whether they have short-term or long-term effects for researchers’ ability to work out better treatment is relatively lossy.

Actual treatment also includes the rest of healthcare (training, hell, even their housing costs), and rules-based or centralised administrative systems backed by insurance don’t necessarily create the right environment for that information to be propagated more widely.

People training to be health workers don’t use the frequency or quality of medical research papers to decide whether to become a doctor.

I think there’s a view you can take on the information topology here that’s a little odd in how it’s currently set up — documentation for front-line workers and information wealth for researchers feels like it’s relatively polarised.
I haven't touched KDE in maybe 15 years. I just always defaulted to Gnome when I'm on Linux desktop. But this looks more macOS like. Just curious, is there any reason I should try KDE today?
Not programming per se, but: mathematical induction. It feels like cheating to get an infinite number of true statements by cleverly setting up a deductive argument.
No. Nothing that I have protected by a password is of any use or interest to anyone but me. When I die, the things that have actual value will migrate wherever they're going to via the normal legal processes. Anything else will die with me.
Well. There is a reason why married and families with kids get tax breaks. It is government gently prodding the common folk towards having progeny.
The actual y combinator (for recursive anonymous functions) took me a while to understand, and I'm pretty sure that by now I've forgot how it works and would need to take a second look at it.

On the less functional side, Linux linked lists are super smart.
Will give a try. I like Replit's ready to use key-value db and also, a click deployment (running is deployment).

Overall, I like my Jetbrains IDE but Replit is coming with appealing features for the side projects specially. Easy to use auth, db, analytics, deployment...

I wish either Replit levels up its IDE game or Jetbrains(or community) build plugins to match the state of art/joyful experience of programming.
His libelous pedo accusations should have sealed the deal years ago.
Not blaming BRIC countries here, but the really intense spamming started post-early internet. You can see the spike up in the early around 2003-4:

https://www.emailtray.com/blog/email-spam-trends-2001-2012/
The Underachievers and the Limits of the Meritocracy
And this is why companies/open source maintainers hide their discussion from public. There does not seem to be any malicious intent behind this move, yet they are getting bashed because they removed it even though they are the only one with the implantation for it in the first place. Also every commentator with '@gmail.com' is certain that entire industry is supporting JPEG XL and they are sure it doesn't require any maintenance if it left in the codebase[0].

[0]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...
I'll take a function that looks and acts like you'd expect over a magical keyword any day. Code that behaves consistently is worth a bit of overhead; it costs some readability in the small, but it more than makes up for it in the large.
Yes, this is "proof" that remote work is less productive.
Also, to some degree, in events like these what inventory is needed is not predictable, because humans are unpredictable and irrational at times.

Panic buying of paper towels early on in the pandemic, as an example, was not predictable.
Nah, PayPal or Wise has the money. It didn't disappear from circulation.
It’s bizarre to me that Apple has had no antitrust allegations yet. The way they manage iOS and the App Store is like a much worse version of Microsoft in the 90s.
At this time, such naïveté is understandable only in the very young.
The Elixir |> (pipeline / nose) operator. Makes functional programming much cleaner without brackets or intermediate variables. I wish more programming language has this. JavaScript comes close with chained calls of map.
I have been interviewing ML Engineers for a while now and I've seen companies fall into the same pitfall over and over. I informally call this the "low hanging fruit" or the "illusion of competence" pitfall.

It goes something like this: someone (a PM, manager, or sometimes an engineer) has a brilliant idea to use ML to enhance some part of the business, say automate a manual process. A random folk is asked to do a PoC, and they slap together a model in a couple of days.

This model often shows impressive performance, say 80% accuracy in a problem where 90% is considered acceptable. Leadership gets all excited and they sign off the project. And they get themselves into a world of pain.

The pain takes many forms, but the most common ones are:

a) That extra 10% accuracy is extremely hard to achieve.

b) Running ML in production is really difficult and the company doesn't have the skills/maturity/expertise to run this new, possibly mission critical components.

The pitfall that lead to this situation are:

1) Assuming ML is easy from a PoC.

If we built a PoC that achieves 80% accuracy in 2 days, how hard can it be to achieve 90%? it turns out it can be really difficult. Performance improvement of ML models is not linear and it can be really difficult to get even a few % points better.

The second part is running ML in production. It might be obvious to an engineer that there is a big difference between slapping together a prototype in a hurry and running a mission critical service in production, but people unfamiliar with ML tend to assume that the process of building the model is all there is to it.

2) Assuming ML is not all or nothing (for your particular problem).

One might tend to think that a model with 80% accuracy is just a little bit worse than one with 90% accuracy. However, depending on the domain, this isn't true. For some problems models need to perform better than a certain threshold to be of any use. In that case, a model with 80% accuracy is as good as one with 0%.

This is an oversimplified explanation but I've seen it happen often enough that I consider it an (anti) pattern.
Whether it does or does not protect them, employees will pay for these protections in the form of lowered salary and fewer jobs available.

Nothing comes for free.
If articles on HN are any guide, CEOs say this up until the moment that layoffs occur. It goes something like "while we had hoped and worked to avoid impacting personnel, changes in the macroeconomic conditions have made it impossible for us to..."
Yeah but you're on HN. Everyone here has healthcare payed for by their corporate sponsor and nice stock options.
Life has become worse for the poor but it is easy to ignore that.
A small anecdote:

During industrialization "extended" rests where added before they where required by labor protection because they increased productivity.

Multiple experiments have shown that in some situations software companies can be nearly as productive with a 32h week then a 40h week.

As far as I can tell the US has been moving in the opposite direction, dismantling or avoiding labor protection and sometimes outright forcing people to work multiple jobs.

Similar having long term health issues you can't treat because you can't afford it isn't grate for productivity. One of the more successful (non-private) health insurances in Germany is also one which also covers comparatively many precautionary health checks/things. As it turns out making it easier for people to less likely get serious sick is cheaper in the long run.

Add to this that a lot of IT systems where added but in my experience many of this IT systems are designed for middle/high level management to look nice, instead of being designed with and for the people which use them.

Lastly add to it that the future prospects look not so grate for a lot of citizens (not just limited to the US) which kills motivation (positive motivations works in general better long term then threads).

So I'm not surprised.
>washington post
>bezos newspaper

of course they would be concerned about productivity of all folks