skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Elixir is a bad example here because it's one of the eco systems that, while they preach "Use a function if you can!" very loudly, use macros much more heavily than other eco systems, often in places where they don't have to. Phoenix, the (unfortunate) flagship library, abuses macros all over the place where even relative beginners can see that they didn't need to (see [0] for example). It's incredibly badly designed overall and these things have set the tone (especially since a lot of Elixir programmers are in reality just Phoenix programmers).

So, while macros are "discouraged" in Elixir, in practice they are very much encouraged by several prominent libraries. Picking on Phoenix is very easy because it's so blatantly bad in this regard (and others) but it's almost impossible to do useful things with Ecto if you go outside the macro bubble, etc., as well.

Example that shows how an eco system that definitely could have done stuff with macros (Clojure) has correctly decided that writing functions that take data is better than using macros:

Elixir and `Plug.Router`:

defmodule MyRouter do
use Plug.Router

plug :match
plug :dispatch

get "/hello" do
send_resp(conn, 200, "world")
end

forward "/users", to: UsersRouter

match _ do
send_resp(conn, 404, "oops")
end
end

Clojure and `reitit` (https://github.com/metosin/reitit):

(def router
(r/routes
[["/hello" {:get (fn [r] {:status 200 :body "world"})}]
["/users" {:name :users
:router users-router}]
["*" {:get (fn [r] {:status 404 :body "oops"})}]]))

P.S. I've used Elixir since 2015, this is not an opinion I've developed at a glance.
I wrote a music AI which is accidentally funny
My AI writes lyrics and draws an album cover. Music generation is on its way too, but it currently lacks in meaningfulness.

If you ask for something funny it can actually come up with something hilarious. I promise.

What are your thoughts on the project and music generation in general?
Ah, yes, the mighty Apple chips suck so much what an inferior chips from the other manufacturers never could!

Or you drunk your Koolaid and ignored "GPU, WiFi, GPS" parts.
There's bias in pretty much every poll result, but I doubt the reason you provided has much of an effect.

People who truly "love" flashing elements (I don't believe they exist) will just choose "I barely notice these", and it wouldn't affect the conclusion.
I agree with this. Even their GPU drivers for gaming are bad, they get stuck at “basic” things like MPEG encoding.

But I don’t understand why software is a problem for them with their deep pockets. It can’t possibly be dearth of talent, or that it is expensive. Here in Europe a good software engineer earns half of what a mediocre software engineer earns in USA, to say nothing of India or China. They could just hire a bunch of teams and up their software game.
If you are fine with search and replace to refactor your code then ok.
I think the word you might be looking for is "Monopsony"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
Played with my girlfriend and we got to rule 35, include the current time
> Null terminated C strings are a prime example. There is absolutely no good reason, other than the fact that the authors may have wanted to save 3 bytes

Or, you know, they wanted to make the language track assembly as closely as possibly (which was possibly back at that time when processors were much simpler and instructions weren't constantly reordered), and if you've ever written assembly, you know you're not really working at a string level, you're working at a byte and character level. Sized strings are more complex than null terminated ones in that you either need to set a max size or you need to waste multiple bytes per string (which actually mattered on many systems C was used on when it was developed) or you have to use masks on those early bytes to or determine if the next byte is part of the string or a continuation of the size.

And honestly, when you're working on systems where ram (and maybe storage) is in kilobytes or less and speed is in kilohertz, the extra code to do that and the extra time to process them and the extra space to store sized strings is a lot less of an obvious choice to make.

Was C a good choice for the time and where it was used? Possibly. Is it a good choice these days? Probably not without a bunch of extra utils and compiler guards to beat back the worst problems. I do t blame C as much for that as I do the people that continue to use it without extra safeguards.

What was that you said about Chesterton's fence? That's one of those terms you should be careful about throwing around when supporting an absolutist position...
The notion of "Pythonic" is to me an expression of a cargo cult.

Python is not special, and despite its slogan of the 90's, has as much bloat as any other language.

It's API design when it comes to class methods (e.g. convention with _ for private) is not pretty, and understanding its eco system is horrible.

It gives no pleasure compared to Ruby et al.

But it works, and it's fine.
>Even just finding a realistic replacement for plastic in shoes is not being productized seriously.

We can just go back to the material we used to use for shoes: leather. If there isn't enough cow skin for shoes for 8 billion people, we can just vastly increase the amount of cow farming we do. Oh wait...
There are ORMs (like Doctrine) that don't break SRP.
I think ORMs have a bad reputation because of the ActiveRecord pattern. Not every ORM has to implement that pattern.
> future generations will look back on plastics the same way we do at lead paint or asbestos

Only if there is an alternative, which doesn't exist at the moment. And no, plastics are way less dangerous than lead point or asbestos, its main problem is its sheer quantity.
The suffering patient is not the customer.

The customer is the health insurance. This is why most of the health systems have issues now, because the patient is not the customer, the patient is only a vehicle to extract money out of the health insurance.
and still no product
It's very responsible of the New Yorker to bring this up. For individual studies it definitely depends on how "environmental impact" is defined.

For example, looking at only GHG emissions, you'd have to use a ceramic mug 500 times (without breaking it!) before the GHG emissions of creating the mug was less than the GHG emissions of creating 500 styrofoam cups. That's because a styrofoam cup is 99% air and merely contains 4.4 grams of plastic (about 4mL of volume before it's foamed up and pumped full of gas). Whereas a ceramic mug weighs 200-400 grams. Just kilning the 400g of the mug to dry the clay uses a lot of energy / creates a lot of GHG emissions, compared to processing 4 grams of plastic.

However, GHG emission is just one part of styrofoams environmental impact. The ceramic mug can be crushed up and essentially become part of clay again. The styrofoam just ... never decomposes. The styrofoam contains (and literally is itself) an endocrine disruptor -- so even as it does "decompose" it pollutes the environment with itself and other chemical additives in the polymer. The styrofoam is likely to contaminate your food as well, especially when restaurants put hot food in it and it melts small holes in the styrofoam box, or when kids chew on the styrofoam cups. But then, ceramic mugs may have various harmful metals in them or toxic chemicals/metals in its paint and glaze.

Basically, it's very, very important for us to start doing full hazard and lifecycle analyses of the materials we use at large scales. Overall, I think we're currently greatly underestimating the hazards of most of the newer modern materials. I also think the energy requirements to switch back to traditional materials would be untenable -- and still require ubiquitous quality control to minimize harmful heavy metals / etc in the raw materials.

But I think anyone who says "well it's just too hard then, forge ahead!" is terribly misguided or callous. And most people who say "we need to go back to metal/paper/wood/glass for everything!" needs to be fully prepared to describe to listeners/readers how that would affect daily habits -- you'd have to bring your own $5 drinking vessel to Starbucks because there probably wouldn't be a "to-go" cup available without petrochemical-based cups. I don't think everyone who pontificates on this is a hypocrite -- many of them do advocate for reducing consumption above all else. It's just a very hard sell.

But we don't have any roadmap at all for taking these contaminants out of the environment once they disperse throughout it.
This is fiberglass.
Fairness in Machine Learning
What also important in what you do to minimize personal footprint, is that you influence others by sharing it
Has anyone used this product? Cloudflare said that this thing can replace MPLS, so cloudflare rents a dedicated link and distributes it to customers? If so, is the performance of this dedicated link the same as mpls? Also, if you have Magic WAN, do you still need sd-wan soluation?
They should buy RIPE Atlas!
I don’t understand how you can ignite market forces in health care. How else can you balance priorities for all the different uses that people’s financial resources can be used for? What does it even mean to let science decide? No cap on spending?
It doesn't make much sense to say the company is making a profit, but it's only losing money because of maintenance and it will not be able to replace its current plants because it's undercapitalized. All those things are a part of running a business. The cost of electricity is not fuel plus operations, it's the funding for a plant, the maintenance, and once that's paid off the depreciation of the asset which will eventually need to be replaced. I don't understand why this is so difficult.

Also for the EDF being forced to buy Areva, I mean, you need to pick a side. Either you are a real business and you don't need to do that, or you are a state owned political tool. If it's a real business, will it go to a bank or issue bonds for hundreds of billions it will take to eventually replace the current plants? If not, then that investment in Areva will be very cheap when the time comes for the state to fund the new plants. Macron is talking about new ones for at least four years.
So much modern AI is just reinventing the wheel
Funny anecdote, but I have literally have started programming by doing “smart” assistants like the former, and I don’t think they were much worse. What I did was to lemmatize the words (my native tongue is agglutinative so it was somewhat harder than with English), and simply look at a fixed set of “commands” like “play it”, and pass the rest of the words as parameters when needed (I searched youtube for a video in this case).

Unfortunately I have seem to lost these “beautiful php” codes, even though I would be very curious how bad that code was :D
Using the column they are on, or the row if they are both on the same column. For example Rac8 moves a rook from a8 to c8, R1d2 moves it from d1 to d2.
That's not too surprising, b/c you need massive amounts of cheese to make a pizza. This means a lot of milk and a lot of rennet. It just seems it'd be really extravagant in premodern times.

And I think that goes for a lot of cuisine. While in China I learned that actually a lot of Chinese cuisine is quite recent - and yet it's really central to regional identity and has a interesting timeless quality to it. For instance people will rarely get experimental or make significant modification to the original recipe (the idea of "fusion food" is mostly absent outside of bougie areas)

I've heard similar things about Korean food - a lot is very recent and meat heavy. Go not too far back in time and people rarely ate meat at all.

In Taiwan a lot of the "traditional food" is based around beef - but traditional/elderly Chinese would normally refuse to eat beef entirely - so it must be a product of the past few decades.

I'm skeptical anything deep-fried goes back too far as well since it's a colossal waste of oil
A noticeable trend in ecommerce over the past year or two is sites adding a "Why not use our app?" popup modal or banner when you hit the site or you add something to a cart. This is directly related to search ad costs. Companies are trying to reduce their reliance on search engines to drive traffic because customer acquisition costs are crazy high while the average customer spend is falling. At some point it stops being worth capturing the customer with a search ad.

This is especially true for brand adverts where the customer would have reached the site organically but you have to outbid a rival because they're trying to bid on your brand keywords. It's a "Google tax" for having a popular brand name. It really sucks.
-- Written by an author of a book selling remote/hybrid work. I'm sure his take is absolutely objective.
This is a low quality comment not fitting with the discussions we try to have on HN. Please stop trying to call people fanboys for no reason.

> yet millions of iPhones were slowed

Citation needed. Only handsets with degraded batteries were slowed, and only after the first brownout. Replacing the battery brought it back to full speed. This is the main point people don’t understand. Every phone got the software update. The feature still exists today. But not all phones were slowed. My iPhone 11 will slow if the battery degrades.

If they wanted to sell you a new phone, was that the best way to do it? Couldn’t they… have just done nothing instead? Like the other manufacturers? Instead of prolonging the life of resetting handsets?
I stick my head in pretty much any charity shop I pass to get a feel for the place, and there’s a huge variability in what you’ll find.

Winchester’s second oxfam was a goldmine, as was their municipal dump - got a lovely set of late 18th c. Anglo-Indian rosewood dining chairs for a nominal sum at the latter, which took me all of an afternoon to bring back to life. Broadstairs in Kent I also had some great finds.

It’s to do with the local populace - elderly, wealthy, and often lacking inheritors - and then they staff in the shops being just parochial enough to have no idea what they have.

Big cities, forget about it, you’re more likely to win the lottery.
You shouldn't be washing your car in the driveway. Even if you use environmentally friendly soap, or no soap, the water coming of the car isn't exactly clean.

Professional car wash places are required (depending on location) to collect and dispose of their waste water in a safe way. When you wash the car in the driveway, the waste water will either go into the ground or the storm drains, neither of which will ensure that the waster is cleaned before reentering the environment.
> employers still think that butt not in seat = not working

This is a huge red flag for companies. Currently I can just go for a 15-30 minute walk with my dog if I get stuck and still count it as work time.

If I'm at the office I can go grab some snacks and go sit on the break area sofas and watch some crap on my phone - still working.

It's actually been scientifically proven that a change of environment brings more creativity and makes problem-solving easier.

---

At a company I worked years ago we had "work reatreats" where we booked a conference room from a random hotel or office for a day. Breakfast and afternoon tea was catered.

Everyone had to pick a few tasks they thought they could finish during the day, we turned off all communication devices and started working roughly on a Pomodoro system monitored by one person. No talking allowed unless we were on a break, where we all got up and left the room for a while.

Pretty much everyone was finished with all their tasks before our lunch break. We did this multiple times.

It's amazing how much work you can get done when you're in a novel environment with the knowledge that you will have zero distractions for the next 8 hours. Nobody can just pop in for a "quick question" or ping you on any communication tool.
Ruby on rails with active record is absoutly amazing. and anyone who hasn't tried it, haven't used a great ORM
There's a nice tool called dplyr-cli which lets you use R's dplyr data manipulation language on the command line.

cat mtcars.csv | group_by cyl | summarise "mpg = mean(mpg)" | kable
#> | cyl| mpg|
#> |---:|--------:|
#> | 4| 26.66364|
#> | 6| 19.74286|
#> | 8| 15.10000|

https://github.com/coolbutuseless/dplyr-cli
Nothing happened to stainless steel bottles, they're available. About twice as heavy as a plastic bottle, when empty that is. Full it's more like 900g vs 750g.
>There are lots of "grey water" uses that don't require drinkable water, like watering plants, flushing toilets.

Yes. I've heard/read grey mentioned many times in permaculture articles.

I like the fact that permaculture takes a systems or holistic approach.

Another nice, small but useful example of permaculture design is the concept of guilds, when it comes to planting crops around a house.

They plant by category, in concentric bands called guilds, with the guild nearest to the house having most commonly used plants such as herbs, then vegetables, then grains, then fruit trees, etc.

So you have to walk less to tend to or harvest them.

Edit: I may have used the term "guild" incorrectly.

The Wikipedia article on permaculture uses it differently, under the section "Guilds".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild_(ecology)
http://janaushadhi.gov.in/ProductList.aspx

at least in india we have this generic medicine system that is run by the government. Not a fan of a lot of things but generic medicine at very very low prices.

check this link out and search for medicine.

remember the prices are in indian rupees where $ 1 USD = 90 INR ~.

they have cancer medicine, surgical supplies, basically almost all generic medicine under the sun.

I wonder why cant this model be replicated in other countries.
This argument has been presented forever to excuse bad tools, and it is a strawman. Of course good tools don't fix bad behavior. The argument in favor of good tools is that competent people with good tools are insanely more productive than competent people with bad tools.
> Natural language is the ultimate programming language. We use it to program us humans all the time

Unreliably, with mixed results.

Just yesterday, I said something loudly from my basement so that my family upstairs could hear, and the response was for them to ask why I was angrily yelling nonsense at them from the dungeon. YMMV.
The correct business term for a "50% monopoly" is "not a monopoly".
The Gene That Explains Statins’ Most Puzzling Side Effect
This is a really cute first video. :)
Yeah much of the problem is that people aren't currently willing to change their lifestyle to embrace the "reduce" and "reuse" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" triad. They only know two options: "Paper or plastic?" because the vast majority of people don't want to bring their own bags from home to the store. Or their own cup to Starbucks. Or their own to-go food box to the pizza place.

I'm trying to imagine how DoorDash would even work without single-use plastics? Maybe we'd have standardized reusable containers with deposits on them that could be returned to a central location for $1-2 refunds per container, where they'd get sanitized and re-distributed via restaurant supply companies.
Love how the tech community keeps veering from “ORMs are awesome!” (rails era) and “blockchains are the future” (2016) to “they suck!”

No, ORMs don’t suck. We used them for over a decade in our projects. There is no downside because you need middleware that writes your SQL queries for you anyway, so the app layer can reason about sharding and other data, and to avoid SQL injection. So you may as well make it object-oriented. Just make sure your ORM can handle primary keys with more than one column.

What sucks is using relational databases when you could be using graph databases. Because graph databases don’t waste memory duplicating primary and foreign keys across tables, and don’t waste time doing O(log n) lookups in an index for each row, 99% of the time you can directly get the ENTIRE array of Foos that are related to a given Moo in essentially O(1). https://neo4j.com/blog/data-modeling-basics/

I would have used them but MySQL was ubiquitous so we went with RDBMS. Many people chose RDBMS because they were mature and very widespread. But graph databases have been catching up.
That's optional, you can skip the cloud and download the data directly from the device over bluetooth and dump it into graphana or whatever floats your boat.
The BME 680 does temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and VOC gas sensing. Maybe there's something reasonably-priced that does particulates, but this doesn't seem to be it. What's a good alternative?
South Koreans become 1 or 2y younger as country changes system for counting ages
also in my experience tesla has terrible inside edge tire wear.
Why do DEs have to look modern and slick? In the end you can work the most efficient if your work environment is fast and configurable. All the rest should be up to you. I am running the same DE configuration with Xfce for many years and I never changed it. Its pretty much Windows95 workflow. No need to adapt to some shiny new features, ads or stuff that gets in your way but still up to date. If you were a carpenter, you would arrange/configure your workshop the way you can use it most efficient, easy to clean, tools at the right place,... and you wouldn't probably every 2 years just to get a more modern feeling.
I can’t imagine this sort of trickery is going to help them in the long run - they are training their users to mistrust and eventually ignore them.

It’s like a furniture shop advertising a “going out of business” sale or a shepherd boy crying wolf twice.

People wise up to this and become more open to alternatives.

Surely, even VCs and investors know not to take DAUs and MAUs and click rates at face value. Who are these companies trying to con?
"In the end, it's up to consumers."

No it's not. Please don't spread sinister pro industry falsities like this. Nothing has ever changed because of some symbolic drops in the ocean.

Regulation and collective action is the only thing that has ever worked, all personal lifestyle choices are romanticizations about personal effects that the industry loves because it has pushed responsibility to consumers, like much of the astroturfed recycling movement that is theatre hiding actual policy making.

If people want to do anything that makes any kind of actual difference they should get into anything that's anti the big industry lobbies or collective action and see through the jungle of astroturfing and "lifestyle signaling" greenwashing noise.