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A related question if anyone knows good answers here.

What programming languages' de-facto thread implementations are not wrappers around pthreads? I think Go has its own thread implementation? Or am I mistaken?

How can we build a society that supports volunteer work in open source? Should governments step in and provide open source grants for important projects just like it does for research work? So much of the world now depends on open source software. This problem needs to be solved soon.

I really thought that pipenv was an anti-pattern. How hard it is to run "python3 -m venv venv; source venv/bin/activate; pip3 install -r requirements.txt" that one needs to create a whole new tool just to combine these three simple commands together? If it is so hard to just use three commands, just put those three commands in a script or Makefile and move on.

I know pip has its own flaws with not-so-great package and dependency management. But does that warrant a whole new tool? Or does that warrant fixing the existing tool?

> From the outside, it seems like Javascript developers are all in high school

I wonder what the reason is for this kind of behavior to exist only in the Javascript community? Could it be that a vast majority of Javascript developers are really in high school? Are there any good stats sources for it?

You are quoting from Wikipedia and that quote is an oversimplification.

If you redefine the law like that, then sure, I agree that there are many uniform distributions too where the 1st digit is likely to be small. Here is another simple example: Consider the distribution of positive integers from 1 to 2. If we pick a number at random from {1, 2} then the 1st digit is likely to be small. This kind of analysis is boring.

But (fortunately!) that's not what Benford's law says. Benford's law provides a specific formula. Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Definition to see the specific formula that must hold good for a set of numbers to be said to obey Benford's law. That's what makes Benford's law so interesting whereas your example ranges are degenerative cases where nothing new, surprising, or interesting is going on.

Can you provide an example range of uniformly distributed integers that obeys Benford's law?

Ramanujan also claimed 1 + 2 + 3 + ... = -1/12.

How does that work? Who can explain this to me?

> creating a new green account and downvoting me isn’t going to change that.

It is impossible on Hacker News for a new green account with less than 500 points to downvote someone else.

You just keep going round and round with handwaving that makes no sense. I read your link. I did not see Benford's law emerging anywhere in your link.

What does "max is uniformly distributed" even mean? If you think that the Benford's law holds good for a set of uniformly distributed numbers, why not simply provide that set? It would be so easy to prove your claim if you just provide an example set of numbers that obeys Benford's law.

All sets of numbers you have presented so far (0-300, 0-30000, 0-300000000000000000000000) do not follow Benford's law. It is very simple to show. In all these sets, the probability of first digit as 1 is equal to the probability of first digit as 2 which contradicts Benford's law.

If you present a weird distribution to begin with, it should not be surprising that every digit does not have the same chance of appearing. That's not the point. We are not talking about weird distributions here.

If we are going to argue like this, I might as well present a set of two numbers S = {1, 2} and claim that when we choose numbers from uniform distribution, the probability of 3 occurring as the first digit is 0. Other commenters are not assuming weird distributions like this because this kind of discussion does not provide any new insights and is just a waste of time.

Can you provide a concrete example of a range of numbers that you think obeys Benford's law?

It does not matter what N you choose. The experimental results are always an approximation of Benford's law. The approximation gets better and better as N becomes larger and larger. The fact that you do not see Benford's law working with N = 19 is not in anyway a flaw in the way the experimental results are set up. It just means N is too small to approximate Benford's law closely.

That's a fair point. Yes, I thought the same thing too when I read this. It is only introducing restrictions on sequential prime numbers. I doubt it has any bearing on the factoring problem yet, at least not without more work that can connect this to the factoring problem.

The image was put in public domain. No further exclusive rights are required to sublicense it. You are allowed to pick work from public domain and sublicense it if you want to.

> This is not what happened. They never were granted the rights to sublicense it.

This is not what happened. They were granted the rights to sublicense it. Placing a piece of work in public domain automatically grants others to do whatever they want with it including sublicensing it.

Is Reddit forgetting history? Users migrated from Digg to Reddit in large numbers due to UI changes that users did not appreciate.

Why would this have any implications on cryptography? This does not make factoring an RSA modules any easier.

Squatting can be easily prevented by reclaiming domain names without refund when the domain names have not been used or used illegitimately for more than a fixed threshold period of time.

Parking pages or any other use that intends to work around the restriction can be deemed illegitimate use.

I do a very similar thing except that I have a folder with multiple .txt files named by dates.

An unrelated question. For those using Vim, what plugins do you use to get a SLIME-like development environment?

I have read great things about SLIME and how it helps in hot-reloading code into a Lisp REPL using Emacs. But is it necessary to learn Emacs to do Lisp? Are the plugins for Vim good enough?

Which plugins did you experiment with?

Can you share your two keybindings with us?

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Some people prefer full-blown feature-rich static site generators like Jekyll or Pelican or Hugo. Some people like to write their own minimal static site generator. To each their own.

> Makesite.py is "sold" as an alternative to Jekyll for people who prefer Python.

That's a really strange argument to make. If you see the README, it mentions, "But then did you yearn to use something even simpler to generate your blog? Do you like Python? Perhaps the thought of writing your own static site generator crossed your mind but you thought it would be too much work? If you answered "yes" to these questions, then this project is for you."

Makesite.py is being presented as a do-it-yourself blogging solution with makesite.py serving as a good starting point to start hacking. It is very different from Jekyll. How does it make sense to mention Pelican which is, if anything, similar to Jekyll and not similar to Makesite.py?

Is it just me or the site isn't loading anymore? HN's hug in action?

> but in some environments these might be best practice

What are those environments? Can you be more specific?

What has referring to a variable twice got to do with whether it should be a macro or function?

From the header of the website:

> arXiv Vanity renders academic papers from arXiv as responsive web pages so you don’t have to squint at a PDF.

Why aren't more PDFs displayed like this on the web? I thought the math stuff would be a problem but this site shows the math stuff alright.

Anyone knows how to reliably convert complex PDFs to beautiful web pages like this?

Not a Singaporean. But I have traveled extensively in Malaysia and Singapore and I can attest to the better experience of Grab. The Grab experience (availability, pickup time, price, etc.) was so much better that I never even thought of installing the Uber app in my subsequent visit to these two countries.

But it can still take a long time for a problem like this to solve itself, especially, in an area dominated by a monopoly. So the need for laws for this is not completely unnecessary.

But no language, no matter however opinionated, does get most things right, does it? People complain about C, C++, Java, Go, you name it.

I know many people are averse to the idea of macros that makes Lisp so malleable (you can add syntactic abstractions like in-fix expressions etc.) but the same people are not averse to adding new types with classes or new "operators" with functions. I find it curious that many are comfortable at stopping the level of abstraction at just that (types and operations). For some reason, the idea of abstracting away syntax itself or dynamic function definitions (macros) is unpalatable. Why should the comfort for abstraction stop just there? Just like one can make a mess with types and functions, one can make a mess with macros. Just like one can write beautiful and elegant types and functions, one can write beautiful and elegant macros. Does the aversion to macros come due to the traumatic experience people relate to when they think of C/C++ macros?