skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most metaprogramming shouldn't exist in production code.

Go ahead and try. Many of the libraries you will use use metaprogramming of one flavour or another for ergonomic reasons.

Python decorators are metaprogramming. For example putting @cached above a function declaration esentially wraps your function into another that caches it's values without you ever having to see all of these details.

I am not sure if your production code would really gain from writing out that caching logic over and over again for each of your functions that need caching. I am sure however that it would become less readable and harder to reason about.

In Rust #[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)] can be used to automagically give your data-types serialization and deserialization. This is also metaprogramming. It also reduces the code you have to read and write and the mistakes you will make if you roll this on your own. It also makes your code easier to read to all people who understand what it does (so nearly everyone who programs Rust).

Metaprogramming is okay, if it is done in the right places for the right reasons and doesn't obscure the logic of the program.

I often use it for custom decorators in flask e.g. @admin_user or @authenticated_user to quickly wrap the functions for some http routes with the ever-same logic for authentification. Sure you could also do this with a function, but the ergonomics could be worse and you could accidentally place the function call in the wrong place and thus exposing some parts of a route to unauthenticated users. I don't think this makes it harder to reason about my code.

Like all "don't do X" idioms in programming the one about metaprogramming should be taken with a grain of salt. There are cases where metaprogramming is the best (most reliable, futureproof, usable, etc) way of solving a given problem. The warning is true in that you should avoid using it everywhere without reason. But there are places where it makes sense and there it would be a waste not to use it
Taking these shortcomings a step further, it may not be long before we can't tell reality from simulation, since we've all so plugged in.

A friend who lived in the amazon with me for sometime did a diet with datura, a potent psychoactive. He described his experience as one moment sitting in a cafe completely lucid and chatting with friends, then a moment later he is somewhere else altogether, this continued for some time and of course none of it was real despite it beinf indiscerbible to him within that experience. People often lose their sanity with this as a result of inability to find a way back to the old known "reality". With AI and neural link like interfaces... we have interesting times ahead.
> we are at the best time in the entire human history

I constantly see this claim and I have really grown to hate it. It is a simple lie, in three ways, and thirds one is the worst.

Firstly, the statement is only true if you compare human history over hundreds of years. So you comparing modern society to people who haven't discovered soap and hygiene. If that is your benchmark, even USSR looks good if you compare it to 1500's - at least you had real medical system and toilets. Clearly medieval social order in not our benchmark of success, no-one is arguing we should bring back the inquisition, burning witches and bloodletting.

It is not actually true if you compare human experience over last few decades - look at suicide rates and debt burden amongst young people, climate change, etc.

Second reason your claim is terrible, is it conflates social order and technological progress. So when I question social policies, like why did I alone pay more tax in UK in 2015 than the entire corporation of Starbucks, people go - 'things have never been so good, so current social policies should not be questioned.' Well, things get better because technology get's better. Even in USSR technology got better. So if all you knew was living in USSR, you'd be making the same argument, and it would be equally valid/invalid.

Third reason this is terrible, is it fails to take into account inertia. So in Britain we question the way our railways are run, and this argument gets throw around. But majority of railways were built in Victorian Era, under completely different social order. American economy was made great decades ago, when corporate tax rates were like 3x higher, education was free, etc. We are just living off success of the past, it does not mean current social order, which is different, will lead to success.
I don’t mind doing my “part” for perpetuating humanity or what have you (though as the sibling comment points out, there are plenty of kids being born without my help), but what I was getting at in my comment is that it seems unwise to jump into that without first learning how to be a fully functional member of society and coming to know oneself, neither of which most people have managed to accomplish until they’re at least in their mid-20s.

If I’d buckled to societal pressure and gotten married as an overgrown kid, the chances that the marriage would ultimately succeed would’ve been a lot lower which means a lot of unnecessary emotional turmoil for everybody involved, including any kids.

I don’t think it’s particularly selfish or unwise to aim for a successful marriage over getting married ASAP. If anything I find it thoughtless and selfish to rope somebody into a relationship you don’t even have the life experience to know if you’re ready for yet.
If you are looking at innovation, it's not the big budget games you should look at.

Spring(-Recoil) engine and games like Zero-K have tried a LOT of things over the years, and I am going to take a guess and assume that so did 0AD ?
Perhaps Japan's area plays some role here.
I meant that aesthetically, I find 0-based indexing more appealing.
My first guess was the because ThePHD did a lot to push C23 forward, this might have been seen as a 'betrayal' to the Rust community - but maybe my imagination is a bit too wild, at least that’s what I hope.
For a potential reader like me, linking to a PDF would be better because a Github repository is not how I typically engage with texts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Spacelines_Pregnant_Guppy
Even harder is using them when the vendor keeps pushing updates that may or may not work.
> You've fallen for propaganda, I'm afraid.

That seems shortsighted at best. Theres certainly a case to be made that increased life expectancy, increased consumption of goods and services, access to education and health services, reduction in poverty etc. outweigh those things you cited.

Also, those things you cited are all highly political issues and arguably not true so be careful about suggesting people have fallen prey to propaganda. Environmental pollution, at least in the West, is down. Are you comparing comparable houses when comparing housing prices? In places with similar demand?
MIT entrepreneurs: The world's 10th-largest economy (2015)
I made my DOS apps using National Instruments DOS GUI.. it was oddly wonderful, and super easy to make full fledged applications with 'c' calls. It's a shame they now just make bloatware for niche testing environments.

Then I got into visual basic in the later 90's and was able to build amazing apps as well. Then it all got overly complicated seemingly.
An article about their role in the original referendum on fluoridation in Wichita:

https://www.kansas.com/news/article1101667.html

And a Fresh Air interview with a historian who recently wrote a book about the John Birch Society:

https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2023/05/17/1176658584...
"start dictating" - this is literally how emissions laws work in the US. If I am allowed to impose unlimited externalities on others for my own personal gain then why would I ever choose not to?
wait for it, don't blink
Japan to try beaming solar power from space in mid-decade
“life is futile and will inevitably lead to suffering, decay and death”. Ok, but she really is of the opinion that life in general is futile, independently of the state of our planet… I mean life has always lead to death and decay, and had always meant suffering (amonst other things), especially thousands of years ago.

Not saying what she says is meaningless, but she’s not really about saving the planet.
At the risk of being downvoted to hell. I'm genuinely trying to understand: what would the issue if civilization collapse and, in the extreme case, human species goes extinct? If you are not alive by then (which is probably the case), would you feel something?
Day2day usage? no not really, everything is smooth including the terminal and the built-in port-forwarding feature

You may notice a tiny delay when refreshing files or when using hot/live reload stuff, but it's sub-second and only becomes an issue of you dig for it
The only use case for this that comes anywhere close to being viable is if the alternative is flying in fossil fuels to run a generator. IOW, polar regions and forward military bases.

The hope is that space based manufacturing will eventually make this technology viable more widely.
Don't know about asbestos, but everyone knew lead was bad. Profits just spoke louder.
My wife is a hospice nurse and she is constantly at odds with her company over admitting non appropriate patients. The industry is rife with fraud with “marketers” selling people who are looking for free home health care on hospice benefits. However, this forces nurses and doctors to lie about patients in order to avoid scrutiny by Medicare.

The evil part is there’s a cap on patients aggregate benefits and those often get used up before they are end of life. Then, when they are end of life and appropriate for benefits they don’t have any left.

I told her she should go work for the Medicare fraud division.
Yea that’s not true. You should take hospice for you and your family rather than spend your last days in the ICU clinging to life.

If you stay full code when you do go you’ve been intubated so long they put in a tracheostomy; you’ve been unable to feed yourself so they put a gastrostomy tube in; you can’t filter your own waste and also can’t maintain blood pressure for normal dialysis so you’re on continuous renal replacement therapy; and because you can’t maintain blood pressure you are on increasingly large vasopressors which cause progressive ischemia of your limbs, bowel, and what’s left of your kidneys.

After all this your heart goes into various tachyarrhythmias requiring multiple episodes of CPR during which your sternum is fractured and multiple bilateral ribs are fractured. You suffer from esophageal rupture and bilateral pneumothoraces requiring bilateral chest tubes. Air constantly leaks into your soft tissues and you literally crackle like wet rice krispy cereal when you are touched.

That’s OK though you’re still not dead. You have time to develop multiple areas of skin ulcerations in your dependent/weight bearing areas even though you’re repositioned constantly by your nursing staff. These wounds progress and quickly extend through your atrophied gluteal and paraspinal musculature and reach your pelvic bones. You become infected by MRSA and have osteomyelitis and sepsis. Your blood pressure is still difficult to maintain and you require constant maintenance fluid and fluid boluses. Your nutrition is poor and albumin very low despite supplementation and trickle feeds so you develop anasarca, pleural effusions, and ascites. So now you appear grotesque - puffy from edema, skin crackling from subcutaneous emphysema, purple and contused from CPR, fingers and toes black and curled from pressor induced ischemia. There are tubes everywhere coming out and going into you. They’re in your throat, belly, and chest walls, central lines are in your neck for pressors and CRRT. Various machines surround you with alerts sounding almost constantly.

After all this your stress dose steroids have suppressed your immune system and you experience a reactivation of varicella and get Herpes Zoster across multiple dermatomes. Your skin is blistered and red in multiple areas and you are put in isolation to prevent spread of varicella pneumonia.

Finally after many weeks of decline and isolation your pupils are non-reactive and you lose brainstem reflexes. A CT shows diffuse hypoxic encephalopathy with herniation and brain stem compression. Because you’re full code and your “loving” family won’t accept death (over the phone now, it’s been a long time and you’re non- responsive and in isolation anyhow) a nuclear medicine cerebral perfusion study is done and it shows no blood flow to the brain. Now you can finally be declared dead.

Your family has already mourned your passing and had been going through the motions. You’ve been sedated and in isolation for weeks now and never got to say goodbye.

Your spouse is left with an enormous medical bill but there’s no money anyways so it goes unpaid.

The end.
If his talk would have been anything like his blog posts, I’d expect it to be brilliant
It depends on a lot of factors. Many older homes today were converted from barns and other structures that were not designed to optimize climate.

But some homes were indeed designed with climate in mind. The broad rear side might face the south to be heated during winter. The whole house may be configured with one long hallway with windows or screen doors at either end to allow cross breeze. Windows on different floors may be designed to open part way to facilitate cross breeze. The fire place may be located deeper in the house near the bedroom, with subsequent rooms getting farther from the fire so in winter you can shut the doors and only heat your own room with the one fireplace.

An attic fan that can switch between blow and suck is essential to keep cool (and prevent mold using air flow). When it's cool in the early mornings, keep windows open to cool the house, then close them when the sun rises and close shutters. As the temps rise throughout the day, you crack a window upstairs and turn on a window fan (blowing inward) and one window downstairs (blowing outward) to create a downward breeze, or the reverse to pump heat up and out.

My ex hasn't owned an AC in 10 years. She just regulates the doors and windows and has window fans. House is 130 years old
You can disagree all you like, but they lay out their policy here: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/5109141421850-S...

My guess would be that they want to dump the messy and easy-to-screw-up CommonCrypto code and switch fully to CryptoKit, which was introduced in ios 13.

If you don't like their way of running their project, you have other options.
I haven’t visited the site, but the outcome you describe (“helping businesses provide food perks to employees”) isn’t limited to office spaces. You could also help get food to employees at their home.
Employees could just get food delivered through participating delivery partners.

Needless to say, it would be trivial for UberEats and others to simply sherlock that as a corporate offering.
Nicely put. People sometime forget that fading away is part of existence.
Also, humans going back to be fish again would be part of evolution too.
Surely everything was 0-based initially, when everything was written in assembly? Are there any 1-based ISAs?
Bria ($1/mo subscription). Works as well as a voip client could work on iOS.
But then you don’t get a space-based energy weapon as an added bonus
“I’m probably going to be doing the movie with Sony because they’re the last game in town that is just absolutely, utterly, committed to the theatrical experience,”

I know going to the movies might have inspired a good bit of the directors I love but I'm getting really really tired of the "theatrical experience" rhetoric.

It ain't an experience, it's sitting in an often uncomfortable sticky chair at an odd angle with weird smells and other people's noises. It ain't romantic and ain't like going to a theater production which is an experience. Plus with the added bonus of the occasional improperly setup AV equipment.

I would rather they focus on good story telling than some ethereal "theatrical experience".
Would it be possible to use bitcoin pow as a replacement for captcha? It both blocks ddos and create an income through mining (client side) for the host.
I think it goes well with the loop syntax. In contrast to C/C++ where you do

for(i=0; i<n; i++)

In Lua you do:

for i=1..n

On the Lua case, both the beginning and end of the loop are inclusive.

If you have to iterate over n elements, the first syntax is optimized for 0 to n-1, while the second is optimized for the other case. See:

for(i=1; i<=n; i++) // <n becomes <=

for i=0..(n-1) -- ugh
Ignoring all the 1 star feedback sounds kind of dangerous. Yeah, often its crazy people or people who have severely misaligned expectations. But sometimes there are useful info among those who hate you. You just need to make sure you dont let it get to you when listening to them (which is quite hard actually)
and crymods ce2
I'm of the opinion that no one is bad at math.

But as the article says, math is challenging and precise, in ways other subjects aren't. There isn't always one and exactly one English answer: they have smoother correct/incorrect gradients.

What I think people actually hate about math is (a) having to practice/memorize to get up to the baseline, (b) being unsupported when they're not getting it ("dumb question" fear), & (c) as a consequence of being unsupported and never learning topics, future topics are impenetrable.

And naturally, instead of saying "I didn't invest enough time in practicing and/or ask my teachers enough questions," people in bad math learning situations default to "I'm bad at math."

No one to blame. Nothing to be done. Everyone forgiven.
Does it? Because they are beaming that energy back to earth, just to a very specific place.
Maybe doing compromise - build space mirror and beam light to earth 24 hours per day, as bonus panels maintenance it on earth and can be easily upgraded.

Something like this was tried by Russia: Znamya ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_(satellite) )
> it's not trying to progress Pokémon, to make something new or better out of it.

But it is addressing one of its "failings": No decent online PvP play. And it's only about that.

While the 2 latest "main" games addressed this, showdown it's still important, because building a team ingame needs some time commitment (catching/breeding the mons and training them) while on a simulator its "instant". Also, there are more formats to play.

Yes, showdown doesn't try to make something new/better out of pokemon, but that misses the point. Their examples were about picking something popular and making something like that, either by the community/opensource or commercially

Showdown is not that, showdown is not alternative,a rehash or competitor to a main pokemon game, showdown is better seen as a tool rather than a game, it's where you go to validate/test your team, it's where you play some alternative format that the game itself doesn't care. So it obviously doesn't try to move game design forward, if it changed things it would no longer be where people would bring their pokemon teams online. "bringing pokemon forward" is gamefreak/nintendo job, showdown is just a tool for competitive players, and it's not a tool job to make something new or better than the original game.

It's just a glorified "online matchmaker" why is it even being lumped together?
"You don't have to do all this. Their benefits are additive, but acting on even one of these suggestions is better than nothing."
I'm guessing it's because Japan doesn't have the Sahara Desert.
A company always has shareholders. A privately-held share simply changed hands in private transactions, rather than in the public stock markets.

So an LBO happens when a PE buyer makes a sufficiently attractive offer (privately) to the shareholders. If they offer you 50% over what you think your own business is worth, you probably would take it, right? That’s the BO in LBO.

This large amount of money is typically acquired through debt - “leverage” - which is the L in LBO.

The classic coup de grace is to then load the giant loan onto the books of the acquiree and let them sink.
I'm going to assume that the person that thinks their least happy is one of the following.

A person that had 'happiness' and now is in a less secure position.

A person surrounded by happy people, but doesn't feel that way themselves.

Relative privation does weird things to people.
I read the whole thing, they have a section called "the punchline" that restates those bullet points. If the point isn't "the punchline", and the text certainly supports that is indeed the point, I'm not sure what is.

What do you think the point is?
Stating that it's easy to develop clients and servers for Gemini is fine. But it's not how curl works. IF a feature is to be accepted, it will have to be maintained for a long time. In fact, it would not surprise me that curl's eventual implementation will be regarded as a sort of reference, simply because curl is such a well-regarded project. So it's really important to get this right.

And the spec is the only realistic thing to build on, because clients diverging from the spec have been threatened by blacklisting by other users (Amfora attempting to use emoji "favicons" for example led Drew Devault to threaten to ban the client from accessing his servers).
I am driving my hardware usually to the ground - I am not gaming but browsing using apps on phone.

My Android is 8 years old and it was flagship at the time and I also don't remember anything being slow on it.

I have also low end Android phone - which is 3-4 years old, it was cheap like $50-$100 range and on that phone nothing really works and even when it was new it was quite slow anyway. But I keep it as a backup in case my main dies and I need some phone to put sim card in to be able to call people.
He gained notoriety in the 90s cyberpunk time but from NYC.

The fact he sounds weird is interesting because it is really the degree that everything has become dominated by the culture of San Francisco.

It is the degree that Silicon Valley beat Silicon Alley. He is expressing the side that lost the culture but it could have gone the opposite way. Wallstreet money didn't have to go very far to get to Silicon Alley.

Pseudo.com was basically doing real audio/video podcasts from Silicon Alley in the late 90s. I don't think that whole scene really recovered from the dot com bust though.
Solar panels are ~40% efficient. So they capture and beam 40% of the energy, and the other 60% gets reflected away and/or radiated as heat. Reflected energy won't hit Earth. Some of the heat will be radiated to Earth and some won't.
The risk of communism and fascism feels really important here. Whether the state capture industry out the other way around, industry leaders end up with all the power of the state with none of the democratic guardrails of elections and accountability.

> Even a C level politician would demolish then in a town hall meeting.

There might be an interesting u-shaped curve here. I totally agree I'd expect a half decent politician to call BS very easily, if that politician is actually interested in representing his constituents. Congress seems to enjoy the horse and pony show, inviting tech leaders for hearing while the goal is just to win political points and pander to voters . Love them or hate them, except for an occasional fluke anyone getting to the highest levels of federal office are A level political that should be able to demolish leaders in these hearings if they actually cared.