skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> at the same time I'm not a fan of the news media's quest to find some of the biggest outliers possible

I don't consider being in the hospital wanting to watch Netflix to actually be that much of an outlier. It's pretty common and I know for certain that I'd want to do it (along with many many others) if I were in that situation.
But isn't a valid argument against Netflix's policy that there are a huge number of edge cases, which their previously policy automatically handled. Now they are trying to enumerate the good edge cases, which is bound to go poorly at first, and is thus a bad policy.
Yeah, I was recently diagnosed. Its awful, but I do like that I no longer feel I should also feel bad that I struggle.
HN works like this: If you approve of something, but have nothing substantive to add, upvote and move on.
My experience is that I run into a lot of relatively junior programmers who are concerned about clean code. Is my code clean? How do I organize my code? How do I make it clean? Should we clean up this code?

I almost never want to use the word “clean” when I’m talking about code.

These days, when someone asks me to review code, and they start talking about “clean” code, I shift the discussion to two points—code should be correct and easy to understand. I think “correct and easy to understand” is a much more useful rubric than “clean”. Obviously it’s still subjective. Code that is easy to understand for you may be hard for me to understand. Likewise, code that is correct for your use cases may be incorrect for my use cases. But it’s much easier to come to an agreement about “correct and easy to understand”, or at least communicate issues with the code using that basis.

Like, “you shouldn’t use boolean flags as parameters, you should use enums” becomes “I can‘t understand the meaning of true/false at the call site, so let’s use an enum instead”. This gives us a very clear, articulable basis for how we talk about code quality.

Of course, “correct and easy to understand” is not the be-all and end-all for describing good code. It’s just a nice substitute for the horribly vague, terribly subjective “clean”.
This is why I never think of BTC as decentralized. In the end, the maintainers have a ton of unchecked power. Neither is Ethereum.
Well, I can't really edit that anymore as it's been too long. And I simply used a bit of colourful language to describe relevant points to a discussion of Mr Hersh's trustworthiness: he is senile and old.

Now, if you think 'The man is 85, he gets basic facts wrong in his articles, he takes a single anonymous source's word as gospel, and either won't do fact checking or fails to do so competently. He is senile and old.' is acceptable, I will stick to such less colourful language in the future.
We are truly living in a very interesting time. AI is already "smarter" than a big chunk of the population, Musk's company is expected to land human onto the mars soon, gene therapy is able to cure rare diseases that was unthinkable just a few decades ago, a certain type of colon cancer was 100% cured in a trial.

Just shockingly amazing!
I don’t think that you clicked the link.
Slightly out of topic, does anyone know any good mods for Beyond Earth to completely recreate Alpha Centauri?
I tried Beyond Earth, really didn't like it but I absolutely loved Alpha Centauri
I've got a solution... don't force people to work in an office. I just started a new job and am lucky enough to get an office with a window and a door I can shut. Not working from home sucks but I could never deal with cubes again. I just simply wouldn't take the job.
I once coined an aphorism: “Deepmind can train a new model faster than you can go back to grad school.”
> to live and what kind of house to live in based on the assumption that WFH (specifically at Amazon) would persist.

That’s a silly assumption considering what has been communicated thus far.
They discover a NN optimization algorithm via search in a symbolic space. Most of the article is about using it for NNs and not discovery itself though :(
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.
No not everyone likes that.
I gather this happens a lot, relatively speaking.

In early 2001, a junior in a webmastering class I took (I was a sophomore) introduced me to an LPMud, and it's ~recursively changed my life again and again. It was what finally taught me to touch-type in high school. It wasn't where I learned to program, but it was where I really cut my teeth (even though it took 9 years for me to decide to try). It isn't open source, but a related yak-shave did lead me to my first major OSS contribution merged into another project.

I've talked to at least a handful of other people who've worked on our game with similar stories, and at least one who used something he built for the MUD to get his first programming job.
Normal people prefer syntax-less, unambiguous lisp-languages over the mess we have now. Just look at Javascript, rust or C++ and tell me normal people prefer that.

Only worse languages win, because people are masochochists, but throwing away this possible user base is always a win.
>Gandhi is actually one of the most peaceful leaders in Civilization V, but his artificial intelligence parameters that control building and using of nuclear weapons have the value of 12, which is the highest of any leader.

[clap emoji]x3
I don’t think this is right. Managers can be hands-on or hands-off, task-oriented, or people-oriented.

Very task-oriented + very hands-on = micromanager.

Very hands-off = a disengaged manager.

In my experience, the best managers can find a beneficial spot on those axes for each employee.

Give the technically competent people lacking confidence reassurance (be hands-on and people-oriented), micromanage a bit with people who aren’t doing their work effectively and not as a result of something that can be fixed with empathy or encouragement, and be disengaged when you’re working with competent self-motivated misanthropes.

IMO, saying one extreme is better than another tells you a bit about the author, nothing helpful about management in general.

Regarding the complaint of not moving decisions forward with a disengaged manager, if you plan to be absentee you must delegate, i.e. be laissez-faire. If you’re forcing people to get your approval and you’re not around to give it, you’ve combined the most incompatible bits of micromanager and the disengaged manager.
John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
An opinion can't be "correct". Some of us prefer working at home and aren't that outgoing "need people" type. I need a desk, some quiet, a coding task, and a paycheck for hopefully great work. My actual family and friends provide all the good work environment that I need.
That's neat! Recently I've been looking for resources on getting a py2app MacOS app notarized by Apple but haven't been able to find any precedent. Would love to see a tutorial for that too since you guys seems to be domain experts in this
The parentheses would appear to antagonize the humours.
I think the art style of Civ6 fits your point.
What do you want then?
Just appreciate everything for what it is.
var distance = sqrt(x * x + y * y)

That is something very similar they may had in high school.
Not everything requires posterity. Things can go unindexed and the company and your teams software will be fine.
> ”Stadia Maps”

Interesting name, considering Stadia was the brand of a recently-discontinued cloud gaming platform made by… Google.
It's the sort of thing we should get the International Standards Organization to look into.
It’s a Richcession, Not a Recession
Is this true? Yes or no
Yes as much as I have found memories of the first Civilization, I'd still say Civ 2 is my favorite followed by Civ IV.
Alpha Centauri is still my favourite of them all though.
Had no idea it was a meme, but it sold me on the fact that it really means simple (many “simple” apps are not at all simple). I like it!
> None of them capture the original

Same for me, though I couldn't exactly pinpoint why - maybe its the simplicity?
Or you could use a software defined radio and as many boomboxes as you want.
I had to turn off slack and just open it up and check it every couple hours. If people really need me they can knock on my door in an emergency, the building isn't that big.
Perhaps you're joking, but I'm not. The personal computer revolution began in earnest with the Apple II in 1977, joined by the Commodore 64 in 1982. Gen-X boys shoved Gen-X girls aside, shoved the computers into their bedrooms, and 15 years later were at the right place and the right time to shove an Algol-based tech stack onto the center stage of the dot com boom. SQL was a necessary evil held at arms length behind ORMs as fear, uncertainty, and doubt rapidly took root. It's taken decades, but finally, mercifully, the Gen-X priests of procedural programming are losing their grip and we're just starting to emerge from the Dark Ages of all this superstitious nonsense about not putting business logic in the database. It's been a long strange trip, but it's never too late to study the classics. After all, they never really go out of style.
I find district mechanics as implemented to be too much of a micro-optimizing puzzle game, especially once you get to late game tech. Make a single mistaken placement early on in city development, and you can block yourself off from important wonders or buildings in that city.
I believe the question could be more thoroughly phrased as “How does DNA sequencing work with such precision at such scales that we can edit DNA?”

This formulation has the added benefit of not being easily answered with a flippant remark.
Again, the point is to not ban any kind of car as a redundancy. You've created an elaborate narrative of what you suppose your opponent is claiming. It is time to stop.
Ruby is growing (you can say "growing back") starting at least from 2020/2021 with a lot of things happening in 2022 and looking at a very exciting 2023.

Hotwire is an exciting technology coming out of Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Rails 7 was an important release bringing a lot of great features and Rails 7.1 looks even better.

Ruby has a lot of nice advances as language starting with 2.7 and continuing to the recent release of 3.2. Check the recent changes at https://rubyreferences.github.io

IMHO Ruby and its eco-system is the perfect mix of tech that works while trying to get right some of the most important modern approaches.

Specifically regarding the

> But realistically unless if you plan to do a rewrite, which is never a good idea, it may not be the best option out there

This is not directed to you but more a general rant :)

I hate with passion (and yes I am biased) this line of thinking because it is not true in maybe 90% of the cases. And it is not true when one says that about almost any established language that should be used where it fits (or where it is used the most).

What I write below applies to an average company mostly doing Saas/CRUD/web apps. If you are working at FAANG or FAANG-like companies maybe this does not apply to you.

Be sincere:

- Say that you want to pick something that will increase your hiring skills if you are a developer, or that you want to brag to your friends that you are using what Amazon/Google is using or that you want to speak to conferences about the latest big tech

- Or say that you don't like Ruby and just want to choose something else. That is fine.

- Or if you are a director of engineering/leader/manager say that you can hire JS developers cheaper or that offering a cool/hype technology is the only way to attract new people or that you want to feel safe in front of board members/GM/CEO by saying we failed to solve this even if we use everything that FAANG uses.

But please don't say that you don't choose Rails because you might grow so much that you will need to rewrite.

I don't know one single example where a company died because they choose Rails. Just the decision to rewrite a product on its own is a high risk of failing. It does not matter the from:, to: parameters.

And again I need to say to anyone thinking to start a project in Ruby/Rails but thinking they need to choose otherwise: You are not Google, nor Netflix, Amazon, .... You (probably) don't need anything from their tools or architecture that makes them offer concurrent services to hundred of millions of users.

Try to have 10k users first and then I think you will probably have the mindset + management experience to hire Ruby devs or to help a new hire to learn Ruby.
Ye flat functions are way underrated. It is so hard to keep track of the call stack when reading code for me.

Deeply nested code is read only, unless the problem is nicely modelled as recursive in some way.
Surely the developers have implemented rules or an overlay of some type to prevent undesirable behavior, separately from the underlying engine that produces text?

I would think it's unjustified anthropomorphizing to treat it as an integrated whole.

Although it does resemble some people I've talked to. Those people give me cult programming vibes though.
Sure, you could rephrase it to something inaccurate if it was your prerogative to "both sides" something that failed almost entirely along party lines after attracting the support of several very conservative senators. I'm not sure what value that adds though :)
Not in the millions no - 100k would be a reasonable order of magnitude.

I'll take a look to see if MBTiles will get me there and if not I'll come back to these.

Thanks heaps
Introducing Bing Troll, trained exclusively on Reddit
> However, as a team, I also know our productivity is subtly down in the last 3 years, because it falls on me to measure these things.

How are you doing so?
The Digital Antiquarian, a brilliant blog that’s been chronicling gaming history in exquisite detail, just wrote about Civilization II as part of a series on strategy gaming sequels:

https://www.filfre.net/2023/01/sequels-in-strategy-gaming-pa...
Those on the receiving end of SBF's generosity wouldn't want to send a message to future benefactors that their money won't actually get them what they want when the chips are down.
After some years I recently had to work on a very old PHP project with linear and untested code. Full of bugs, unmanaged corner cases, unnecessary code duplication, magic numbers...we didn't even try to understand the business logic or reverse it.

I still think it's just low skilled devs vs professional ones. You can make similar mistakes with many, many languages, it seems to me that Java went out of fashion, considered old.
Yes, they do prefer JS over Lisp.

> throwing away this possible user base is always a win.

Ok, then.
In this case I honestly trust someone with 4chan picture more.
Nendran can be eaten either raw (i.e. ripe, but uncooked) or boiled,
often with a little jaggery and spices like cardamom. People who don't like raw ripe Nendran may find the cooked variant tastes good, although it is not like the experience of eating a fresh banana. More like eating a cooked dessert, vaguely like a Western pudding. IMO the mealiness becomes a plus when it is eaten way.
When I talked to Amazon they told me that my role would be remote and I could choose whether to come in or not. I didn’t join but if I did this seems like a pretty reasonable assumption to me?
Pro-tip: move every open-paren to the right of its first enclosed token.
I know, it’s pretty ridiculous compared to other streaming services! It’s $23/mo for two people. Which is more expensive than practically everything else out there. That’s the same cost as the Apple One family plan, which includes cloud storage and games! (And if you get YouTube premium with the Apple tax, it’s $30/mo…)

And here are some other plans which support multiple people:

- HBO Max is $16

- Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+ together is $20

- Netflix is $16

- Amazon Prime (huge list of benefits) is $15

This is the main reason I don’t have it. As streaming / bundle services go, its value add is pretty small. If it included cloud storage, maybe. I don’t get how google one doesn’t include it.
It's a shame that you don't have the perfect working environment at home but the answer isn't "make everyone else leave their house cause mine sucks". Go into the office, rent your own, find a coffee shop, etc because now you have the freedom to choose your work place and let everyone else do the same. If your company has more than one office or your customers aren't coming in for service then at some point you'll be working with someone not-in-person.
Also, Nendran has an indescribable but distinct flavor which is different from a regular dessert banana.
Fruit and antioxidants are healthy in moderation.
Same with me, just couldn't get into the habit of reading a little bit of it each day.

I never got done reading 'Getting Things Done' either.
Zero. Whatever dust/pollen you observed on the ground after rainfall, that was not from Japan. That was not the nature of the released radiation.

The radiation released by Fukushima was minute, vastly overestimated at the time, and quickly diluted.

You need to stop stressing out over an event that is now over a decade old.
We are all AI, receptive to specific prompts.
I just can't let go of infix notation.
The claim is not that the book is dogmatic, but that its worshippers (for lack of a better word) are. The infamous Design Patterns book, despite having a similar "disclaimer", has had a similar effect.
Don’t Bet Against India: New Delhi’s Brewing Economic Comeback
The takeaway is not clear to me.

This implies it doesn't really matter that much:

` “I doubt that he’s fraudulent,” Bishop says of Matson. “I think it’s just this factory for churning out fairly trivial papers.” '

It raises the question in my mind whether this guy (who I never heard of before) has had any significant influence on the proliferation of autism or autism spectrum diagnoses in recent years?
MUDs (specifically Achaea) got me from hunt-and-peck to competent typist. Not even Mario Teaches Typing could manage that.
Why do people keep using Wikipedia? From an actual historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary:

Earliest use as an English word: 1830:

J. P. Cobbett Jrnl. Tour Italy 214 Maccaroni, like vermicelli, is only one of the forms into which the Italians make what they call ‘pasta’ or paste. It requires a particular sort of wheat, a brittle, flinty grain, to make this pasta.

Earliest mention in English (i.e., as an Italian word): 1820:

W. A. Cadell Journey Carniola, Italy & France II. 152 The Italians prefer that [sc. Macaroni] which is fresh made, and made at home, and called pasta di casa, household paste.*
It's legal where I live and doctors still give people the drug-seeking-behavior runaround if they so much as mention casual use. God forbid you want to manage pain with it.
Yep. The day before my interview, HR called me to link me to the "Amazon Leadership Principles" and told me to memorize one or two examples for each of them. Then during each of the five interview sections the interviewer would name one principle and I'd have to recite a story about how I accomplished it.

Yeah bro, I totally demonstrated "Insist on the Highest Standards" by being really rigid on a code review that one time. Trust me, for real for real.

I don't know what working there is actually like but the interview made it sound like a goddamn cult.
A compiler should do this for you.

Unless it outputs source code, it can't.
I experimented with something similar at the conceptual stage. I used XML and a basic GPT2 model. The focus was on NPCs and quest items. Throw away invalid XML and prompt for NPCs to produce or consume quest items. Looking at reworking it, but ultimately it is something which has to be semi-supervised.
I've never tried that. Thanks for the tip
In chess, it is possible that humans and bots can both someday play perfectly, and every game will be a draw. (Young people might play chess until learning how to draw, and then move on.)

For Go there is no such possible outcome, and deep reading (calculation) will always be in the machine's favor. The architecture of AlphaGo (policy and evaluation networks plus MCTS) is sufficient to recreate and surpass any kind of human-practical strategy. The era of human dominance in Go is simply over.

Of course, current AI programs will never be perfect either, so there may continue to be such adversarial attacks, but they will necessarily become harder to use (and quickly impossible for humans). AI go programs probably have nearly infinite possibility to continue marginally improving against each other, though.
No, it makes a Dan Brown novel.
Have full confidence on our abilities; we will make sure your baby is treated in best possible manner. Our surgeons are experienced and they have been handling similar cases for a long time.
Civ V improved a lot on warfare. There's not a lot of depth to stacks upon stacks of the same units.
You've haven't thought long enough or read much alignment literature if you don't think LLMs already have considerable potential for harm. In 3 years they will be devastating.

Political interests? Wanting an aligned AI isn't a political interest, it's a basic precaution to not fuck up civilization.
I've always avoided the "post what you had for dinner" content on forums. That casual stuff didn't work well for most forums. It's good that low quality content moved to social media.

> "decision by Google to devalue forum posts"

Google used to have a checkbox to restrict results to forums only. They removed that years ago, which annoyed many. But you can still add "forum results only" to your search, and Google will more or less try to return forum results as first results.

For example search for: bluebox headphone volume - forum results only

Google's first result is a helpful forum post on that subject. There's nothing stopping you asking search engines to give you exactly what you want. Since search engines are now boasting "AI", they will need to listen harder to people's requests.
Yeah I've taken to calling purveyors of certain anti ML arguments 'parrot parrots.'
Film ‘BlackBerry’ – Exploring the Cautionary Tale of World’s First Smartphone
What an obtuse comment.

For a single person, yes, moving based on employer might make sense. I have a wife, who owns a business tied to the community. I have kids in school. I have family and social commitments in my neighbourhood. Why would I cause my whole family stress and frustration by uprooting them to reduce my commute?

It's entirely possible that I will be directed to return to the office. At that point, I will politely but firmly decline, because I was hired as a full remote employee. And then I will find a new remote job, probably in less then a month, and probably making more money, even in this market.
Man I miss MUDs. Anyone here ever play RockyMUD? I had literally over a year of actual pay time in that one. My accrued hours of play surpassed a year. That is with like a decade of playing though. But still lol
When we start, I think the name "meditation" is misleading.
It's what we have left when we feel overwhelmed. Sit and breathe. It's interesting to try to do something so simple, so complicated.
I have played all of them since the first and this is my most disliked. There's something just not quite right with it for me though I can't put my finger on it.
Just tried it again. Slow initial load on pages and worse, even after that almost every action has a few ms delay, not a lot, but enough to feel them. It’s like with Gmail, Facebook or new reddit, everyone else seems to have a far higher pain threshold for slowness.
https://archive.is/XSqXy
I keep buying them but I only ever liked civ IV. Stealing cities with culture was so much fun. They also had Spock do the voice acting. What a phenomenal game.

Literally the only turn based strategy I like
Careful, it’s possible you just described human intelligence ;)