skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> HN's been around for nearly 20 years. You can check its growth.

It was not a comment about "growth". It was a comment about function. Besides, Facebook has been around since 2005.

> You do not have to do this when you code

You do not have to, you are right. But people who are bad a coding do not do it.

https://dev.to/philip-ainberger/the-art-of-code-commenting-3...

> Social spaces, whether online or off don't work like code.

This very site uses code to control the conversation between two people. Where does this happen in the real world? Where is the algorithm that can make what comes out of my mouth not reach your ears? Where is the upvote floating over my head in real life? CAn someone new I meet look back at everything I said in my life?

Below is the third party on HN, like a policeman looking over our shoulder 24/7.

http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

> If you want to design a messageboard by voting, you should try that.

Why? So we become more splintered and alienated? This is what destroyed Linux.

> supported by concrete facts or experiences

If someone else can control you with a rule or law, without giving you a way to change that rule or law, what would you call that?

Defiend as Authoritarian : favouring or enforcing strict obedience to authority (dang/algorithm) at the expense of personal freedom (the HN user)"

While a "flamewar" might be distracting, banning someone for it is precisely authoritarian as well as subjective.
Law does have subroutines like this... but they're implicit via "as used in this section, X is defined as" clauses that may be pages away or defined decades prior, as well as de facto definitions scattered through centuries of case law. New legislation can't simplify things unless the entire graph of implicit definitions is considered.

All this was inscrutable before LLMs, but LLMs bring their own challenges: to summarize something in plain text, is it using a deep graph of definitions that are sourced and verifiable, or hallucinating their existence? IMO architectures as in https://arxiv.org/html/2410.04949v1 and https://arxiv.org/html/2409.13252v1 are useful; one uses LLMs to create local knowledge graphs and integrate them, then translates natural language queries into (successive) graph queries or graph-based RAG approaches. Things are still evolving in real time here, and IMO we've only scratched the surface of what's possible.
It would certainly could serve as a fun challenge for experienced chess players.

But I'm let down because my chess partner is a 9 year old who is still learning basic strategies.
Touche!

If there's a case where one computation needs to occur before others, then that's where I always use parens.

I'm also never doing a^b^c, either as a^(b^c) or (a^b)^c, but if I did, there would be parens.

Readibility in one's code is necessary for those of us who must re-read our code when we need to refamiliarize ourselves with it before making changes. It is said that programmers spend far more time reading code than writing it, and I have found that to be true. As someone who has developed large pieces of software, my strategies include clarity for the reader, who is, first of all, myself.

As to what it's called, yeah, 'associativity' is the math term, but if you think I don't understand the concept, then you don't understand the depth that precedence goes to the heart of parsing source code to produce executable code. And I do understand that, friend, for four decades now.
So don’t work at a company that sells a software product to other businesses. Work at a company that has a business of its own, which runs more efficiently when the software is better.
So much humanity in this. Thank you for sharing and for advocating.
There is some linting available:

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/lint.html

Personally I'd move as much logic out of the YAML as possible into either pure shell scripts or scripts in other languages. Then use shellcheck other appropriate linters for those scripts.

Maybe one day someone will write a proper linter for the shell-wrapped-in-yaml insanity that are these CI systems, but it seems unlikely.
Related: in tptacek’s Cryptopals/Matasano security challenge, there are two kinds of problems:

A) Implement this off-the-shelf cryptosystem based on the public documentation about it.

B) Given this cryptosystem and these hints, find and exploit a vulnerability.

Surprisingly, I found the type A problems harder — because the documentation was always missing some critical knowledge you were just supposed to know.
i was gifted a glass set once where black's pieces were matte glass and white's pieces were clear glass, so quite a striking texture difference

it was still unplayable and more of a decoration
Modula-2 is interesting. It is basically the C many wished had been around in the 80s and 90s. Modula-2 has about the same expressiveness of C with pointers, structs, unions, and all that, but it has a stronger type system (tagged unions, mandatory casting, etc.), concurrency as part of the base language, an actual module system (like C++ just finally got in 2020...), and the typical clean lines of Wirth's designs - if you can get over the Wirth-style CAPITAL RESERVED WORDS and BEGIN and END, anyway.

A Modula-2 front end was added to GCC recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34050597
I think they do around $500k+ a year based on the numbers they have shared in a few spots. The new giveaway platform for authors should help jump that revenue up too.
Not just as a programming language. One that is being executed by adversarial agents. They won't just dumbly interpret the rules. They will do so with specific intent for gain. (I don't say this as a judgement.)
A Warning to the Laggards
Mortadelo y Filemón were a parody on Sherlock Holmes and Watson first, but being a polar opposite duo a la Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Later, at the mid-late 70's they shifted to a James Bond like parody, being secret agents instead of private detectives.

And, OFC, as Don Quixote, they made fun of the Spanish society itself leaving no one without a critique. Politicians, bosses, the average Spaniard mentality of being half a cheapskate lifehacker and half a rascal, the Church, the shitty state infrastructures for its time, and so on.

The Brits have a similar setting with the Rowan Atkinson movies depicting incompetent spies with a Mr Bean like character.
https://openlibrary.org/ has a pretty good set of data and a decent API. You can mix and match too, since openlibraries covers kinda suck half the time.
The article backs up the common sense that laws are written in order to accumulate as much power for the State as possible.

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."
Dogecoin, XRP Trading Volumes Flip Bitcoin's in South Korea
After 11 years, internet begins to dominate Japan's elections
The Over-Engineering Pendulum
It is so bad!!!

I use Nielsen's API, but the data is pretty rough, and you have to spend a lot of time cleaning it. Plus, the archaic industry standards around genre are hard to translate to what readers use - https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-list.

Ingrams and Bowker are the other big metadata providers. Ingram's is good but expensive, but the data faces the same issues.
try to reset the phone. that sounded like it might do it. i didn't try it for fear it actually would.
I switched to electronics engineering
Mostly, I think, legalese is a collection of superstitous incantations built up over millenia, which lawyers use because "you need to say it exactly like this or vague, bad stuff will happen." Except sometimes the superstitions are right.

I also think lawyers don't find it worth optimising the language much, because the target audience is other lawyers who know all the incantations anyway. The target audience is lawyers instead of laypeople, because the language isn't what matters in the first place. What matters is all the relevant case law, which can vary so much from the "obvious" or even "right" interpretaion of the written language, that a layperson not using a lawyer for all but the most trivial legal needs is a recipe for disaster.
but not everyone is relying solely on an LLM for documentation.

humans are still the primary audience for documentation.

if it ever gets to a point where no human is reading the docs, worry about it then (or close to no humans).

just because a new frontend framework gets released doesn’t mean we should all start switching to it today. it’s the same principle.
Kind of horrific.
> That analysis revealed that legal documents frequently have long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences — a feature known as “center-embedding.” Linguists have previously found that this kind of structure can make text much more difficult to understand.

Can anyone provide an example sentence from a legal source with center embedding? Multiple examples, ideally?

It is maddening that so much of the article is about this, but they refuse to actually show it to us.
How do you handle admins approving what gets posted? I know at a lot of events, the event organizers are worried about content being auto posted. Also, Do you have a video to a demo anywhere?
Yeah it's not that clear to me. My interpretation would be that if I'm reporting (whatever that means) April, then May would be the first month following, and hence June would be the second month following. Hence the last day I could submit would be June 15th (paper) or June 25th (electronic).
Almost all of these "cars bad" arguments fall for the trap of focusing solely on the disadvantages of cars while completely ignoring the huge upsides that make them by far most popular form of transport in rich countries in the first place: Long distance transport directly from your home to the front door of your destination in a private, climate-controlled cabin with zero transfers or unnecessary stops.

Self-driving will make our lives better because it takes that already very successful form of transportation and makes it significantly safer and more efficient without compromising any of its advantages.
Yes, beep is probably the most well known of them, having two test locations in Contra Costa county you can ride if you're in the bay area. They're much less sophisticated than Waymo vehicles though, and the unit economics are much less favorable.
> I think the last time bespoke restaurant menu websites

> There seems to be some kind of app template many restaurants use which you can order from too.

I think you agree with the comment you are replying to, but glossed over the word bespoke. IME as a customer in a HCOL area a lot of restaurants use a white-label platform for their digital menu. They don't have the need or expertise to maintain a functional bespoke solution, and the white-label platform lends familiarity and trust to both payment and navigation.
> 300 forums is a lot of power.

Yes, that's possibly 100 middle-aged men you could urge into battle!
This. Dependence on technology and outsourcing of basic survival needs (like food, medicine etc), has fragilized our civilization to the point that collapse would have an exponential rate.
To be fair that was quite a late addition to the language all things considered. It could be he learned Java before it existed, or had most of his experience in 1.4 (which survived quite long in some environments because 1.5 was such a huge overhaul). But still, a good dev will keep up to date with language features.
Ah, the always-entertaining moment when a person who is technically-correct (the best kind?) realizes that the socially-correct interpretation carries greater weight in the minds of everyone except themselves.

Been there. Learned eventually. Sometimes still forget. :)
What if I'm part-carbon, part-silicon?

Like, a blind person with vision restored by silicon eyes?

Do I not have rights to run whatever firmware I want on those eyes, because it's part of my body?

Okay, so what if that firmware could hypothetically save and train AI models?
Nothing. A tool that is only right ~60% of the time is still useless.

I've yet to have an LLM ever produce correct code the first time, or understand a problem at the level of anything above a developer that went through a "crash course".

If we get LLMs trained on senior level codebases and senior level communications, they may stand a chance someday. Given that they are trained using the massively available "knowledge" sites like Reddit, it's going to be awhile.
Access on an empty slice would also panic because of out of bounds. So there’s no useful distinction there.

However, nil slices work just fine when calling append on them, while writing to a nil map in any way will panic.
The artist definitely captured the atmosphere of the recent movies. Bravo!

One thing that immediately jumps out at me about this chessboard is the use of varied ground plane -- how the back rows are high up, whereas the middle of the board is down below. The high ground really evokes a sense of power of the "senior" pieces, and casts the middle rows below as the inevitable battleground. One can imagine pieces mounting an uphill attack in the later stages of the game. Such a simple thing, and so effective!
> By contrast some of the most fundamental laws in the nation, the Constitution's Bill of Rights, are generally just a sentence or two - and that works just fine.

No, that hasn't worked fine at all.

Do you realize the amount of judicial interpretation and flip-flopping that has gone on over just the first two amendments?

They're like the poster children for being under-specified.
Are you insinuating it's the West's fault?
I just published an update to the post which corrected the title, URL, and content, and also published an additional post calling attention to the error and explaining it (https://v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/corrections-using-drop-safe...). Thanks again for flagging it up, @dathinab!
Love it. I used to use excel back in the day to create pixel art.
That’s hilarious. I bet if you reach out to Microsoft, they will give you that domain. There’s no way they’re using the trademark anymore.
Eight Day Road Trip of Western Ghats in Karnataka from Bangalore
Only because I'm significantly more intelligent than ChatGPT, so I can achieve its level of competency on a lot of things with a thousand videos instead of a million videos.

If it just reduces to an issue of data efficiency, AI research will eventually get there though.
And to that extent, the Bill of Rights only works because the government finds it generally does not apply. For example, practically none of it applies to students at this point.
> Neither Argentina nor Brazil has ever had nuclear weapons

Brazil holds the key technologies to develop it and the sixth bigger deposit of uranium (with only 30% of the territory mapped). The navy is even currently developing a nuclear submarine that will be totally based on local technology.
really even regionally. In Canada i've seen geo popularity across Kijiji, Craigs List, FB Marketplace, domain-specific communities with markets
It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.
It’s true that trying to state complicated necessary and sufficient conditions will inevitably involve a ton of essential complexity due to the nature of the subject matter, but there may still be room for improvement by eliminating additional accidental complexity introduced by e.g. cumbersome syntax. I think by "legalese" the authors probably have in mind only the accidental complexity introduced by the distinctive, convoluted syntax of legal language.

For instance, here [1] is a random paragraph I found in a contract that I think is pretty good example of "legalese", and here [2] is my attempt to rewrite it for readability. All the essential complexity remains, but I think (hope!) much of the accidental complexity has been removed. :)

[1] 3.3.4 Date of Issuance. Each person in whose name any book entry position or certificate for shares of Common Stock is issued shall for all purposes be deemed to have become the holder of record of such shares on the date on which the Warrant, or book entry position representing such Warrant, was surrendered and payment of the Warrant Price was made, irrespective of the date of delivery of such certificate, except that, if the date of such surrender and payment is a date when the stock transfer books of the Company or book entry system of the Warrant Agent are closed, such person shall be deemed to have become the holder of such shares at the close of business on the next succeeding date on which the stock transfer books or book entry system are open.

[2] 3.3.4 Date of Issuance. To determine the record date for ownership of Common Stock shares (whether issued as a book entry or certificate), ask: Were the Company's stock transfer books and the Warrant Agent's book entry system open when the Warrant was surrendered and the Warrant Price was paid? If yes, the record date is that same date of surrender and payment. If no, the record date is the close of business on the next day when the books and systems are open.
> “In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company (all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter referred to as the ‘Total Payments’), would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced.”

> The paper offers this as a more understandable alternative, with the definition separated out:

> “In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced. All payments and benefits by the Company shall hereinafter be referred to as the ‘Total Payments.’ This includes the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof.”

https://bcs.mit.edu/news/objection-no-one-can-understand-wha...
This is ridiculous.

Corporations should be the ones that take measures to protect their CEOs. They have the money to afford private security.
House of Representatives Unveils Bipartisan AI Report
You know political assassination was a thing even before Twitter right?
I'm from the US and I grew up with tintin and asterix.
yes this is exactly the idea all page remains fast even if we need to list 5k speakers on that page
how do you work? or do you get financial support? i could not hold a job if i had to take care of kids without a partner.
The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their service becomes. And thus they can command a higher salary.
Link to the report: https://www.speaker.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/AI-Task-F...
From the linked article, this particularly stands out:

Among the features identified as more common in legal documents, one stood out as making the texts harder to read: long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences.

[..]

“For some reason, legal texts are filled with these center-embedded structures,” Gibson says. “In normal language production, it’s not natural to either write like that or to speak like that.”

- notice how there's a definition right in the middle of the article, and not at the beginning.

Anyhow, there is a specific reason for having a definition not in chapter 1, article 1 (definitions) but somewhere down in article 15; lexical scope. That definition is not meant to be used in article 8 or 64, where the same word or phrase may be interpreted "as normal" (that is, still as a legal term, but not the one from article 5).

This research seems to ignore that there are different styles of legal texts; you'll find that the civil code of any country is usually written in a different (more modern) style than the ancient "thou shalt not kill" bits of the penal code. Even if new crimes are added, those will be written in the same ye olde style, rather than an updated one (with definitions in chapter 1). Also, legal texts dealing with finance tend to be written in a different style from legal texts pertaining to consumer protection.
I also had experience with brilliant kids during my teaching side-career, but my statement is still true: kids TYPICALLY do not master touch typing by that age. In fact, it's extremely rare based on the kids I know and knew in the past.
Also, it's become pretty clear that anorexia embodies a particular kind of dysfunctional dynamic between body perception and diet (one that is gaining recognition in other forms of dietary restriction, as sometimes seen in e.g. athletes and people obsessed with various categorizations of "natural" or "pure" foods). The vast majority of obese people aren't building an elaborate system of memes and rituals to force themselves to overeat because they look in the mirror and see themselves as thinner than they really are.
Back in the day any European would laugh on itself as a tradition. Spaniards did the same with the Bruguera School (Mortadelo y Filemón, Zipi y Zape...) making fun on both the state/power/society and the outdated traditional family values. The Zapatilla brothers (Zipi and Zape) were subversive long ago before Bart Simpson and made a good laugh on the 60's Spain. MyF were basically "Get Smart" and the Superagent 86 10 years ago in the 70's, showing up a backwards Spain compared to France and Germany and making fun on the shitty infra we had on everything while we tried to fight crime. Luckly, times changed a lot in late 70's/80's.
OK, so go to the wake or the shiva or whatever. You don't have to buy into the funeral industrial complex to believe it's important to honor the dead.

In fact, I think you have it exactly backwards. The industry popped up in order to exploit a deep human need. It did not create that need.
I do, before there was a sea of games on facebook, before facebook apps, people were clamoring for the API access. It was supposed to be the next big thing and everyone made integrations with it, you'd log your spotify listening queue to it, etc. Developers were very happy when the API came to be. Then later people became aware of how much access you could actually get and especially if you saved the data locally. Then the FTC fined them for it and everyone tightened things down, not just Facebook. I at least remember it like this, with that first part.
63 Chinese Cuisines: The Complete Guide
May require a new cable not a new port. HDMI has required updated cables to take advantage of new features multiple times in its lifetime. USB and Ethernet are examples of 2 other standards which sometimes require updated cabling to take full advantage of their updated standards.
Which non-Go people brought generics into Go?
Reading the whole thing, I think the author would agree.

"Go to the funeral" isn't just about the funeral. It's a specific example of "if you have a chance to show up for someone, show up for them: even if (maybe _especially_ if) it's awkward or inconvenient".
If I understand correctly I think they and ended up in the line of folks being given condolences as if they were close family.

Sounds extremely awkward and like a plot Michael Scott would get himself wrapped into.
Lots of ambiguity with “next”. It’s always so hard to describe “next Wednesday” if it’s Monday or “next week” if it’s Saturday.

My friends from non English countries get very confused that somehow “next Wednesday” when it’s Monday might not mean two days from now but 8 days from now. And how two days in that instance would be referred as “this Wednesday” or “this coming Wednesday”

Which is different way of talking. If you were sitting by the road counting cars and you are at car “n”, Saying “the next car” would refer to car n+1. If your counting wednesdays you experienced “next Wednesday” technically refers to n+2

I stopped saying “this <day>” or “next <day>” and now just say “Wednesday the 25th” for instance.
I go further and simplify: "delete code" whenever and where possible. The term "Tech Debt" is really overloaded; I think the idea that "all code is liability" is better for framing the issue and strategies.