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hackingthenews

212 karma · joined January 4, 2019

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hackingthenews··on Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy
What is the chance that someone saves them from bankruptcy?
hackingthenews··on Reassessing relative temporal lobe size in anthropoids and modern humans
Not really.

Watch: "Are We Really 99% Chimp?" https://youtu.be/IbY122CSC5w

hackingthenews··on Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
Hanlon's razor never applies when politics or money is involved. Best to just suspend your judgement instead of giving politicians the benefit of the doubt.
hackingthenews··on Cppfront, Herb Sutter's proposal for a new C++ syntax
This is explained in the talk he gave. One of the benefits is that with new syntax the semantics can change without breaking backward compatibility, e.g. [[nodiscard]] can become default for all functions written in the new style.
hackingthenews··on Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?
I am curious about companies who survived/flourished despite seemingly key employees quitting or employees quitting en masse.
hackingthenews··on Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes
My impression from reading about chess engines online is that drawing is far simpler if that is your explicit goal. Several comments online on different websites claims that they are able to end games in draws against stockfish.
hackingthenews··on US has lost at least three nuclear bombs that have never been located
I agree. My guess is that institutional malice is fully explained by economic incentives 99% of the time. Which the version from the other comment cover: "Never attribute to stupidity, that which can be adequately explained by economic incentives"
hackingthenews··on US has lost at least three nuclear bombs that have never been located
Yes, thank you, I was in fact primarily (but not exclusively) thinking of economic incentives! I will use your phrasing from now on.
hackingthenews··on US has lost at least three nuclear bombs that have never been located
I personally find this saying extremely overrated and damaging in many cases. Especially considering the pacifying effect it can have on attempting to undo certain injustices.

Best use of it is in your personal life with family, friends, retail worker in your local grocery shop etc.

hackingthenews··on Joke written by an AI: “A basic program walked into a bar ”
Successfully? The last line from the AI indicates otherwise.
hackingthenews··on China allows couples to have three children
Yup agreed, commented the exact same below.
hackingthenews··on China allows couples to have three children
Agreed. But if you could maintain a system that avoids a very unlikely scenario with possibly huge disastrous consequences, then why not?
hackingthenews··on China allows couples to have three children
You are correct of course.

The 3 children per woman limit is still the smallest number that accommodates for the 2.1 average required for replacement level. To achieve equilibrium and avoid rapid growth the limit must be set to 3 and then hope that the average will be drawn down enough by the women who can't/won't have children for various reasons.

Not advocating for this policy, and I am not considering how well it works in practice and the morality. This is just a reductionist model.

hackingthenews··on China allows couples to have three children
It could also be that they see no scenario ahead where they want the average number of children per woman to be above 3. I don't think China wants back to exponential growth ever. They probably want to find their equilibrium.

Consider if something unlikely happens that completely changes the dynamic of families, e.g. a cultural shift where women stay more at home and have more babies. If the average family started having more than 3 children, they would consider bringing back this system, which could cause big social problems, as it costs more social capital to bring back an unpopular system than to simply maintain it.

hackingthenews··on Show HN: Parallelise pipelines of Python async iterables
Concurrency/Parallelism is the number one reason I move a project from Python to any other language. It's one the few areas where Python can't provide a gracious frontend or an acceptable runtime, but it is very impressive how much the community is willing to do to mitigate the challenges.
hackingthenews··on C++20 has been approved
New version bumps after 8 are not necessarily major.
hackingthenews··on C++20 has been approved
Agreed.

Just gonna drop this here: Nicolai Josuttis “The Nightmare of Initialization in C++” [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/7DTlWPgX6zs

hackingthenews··on C++20 has been approved
The problem is not just complexity, but complexity with tons of pitfalls.
hackingthenews··on C++20 has been approved
Kind of ironic that I would agree with you. The reason I still wrote it is that my opinion just recently changed from liking C++ but understanding the pitfalls to a more pragmatic this is not worth the time or effort.
hackingthenews··on C++20 has been approved
But that is not inherently a bad thing.

If we look at programming languages as tools, it makes sense for them to get out of date and new ones taking their place, with all the lessons learned.

So its possible that programming languages like C++ that keeps extending their own life through adding features (while keeping weaknesses), will ultimately cost the community/industry more in the long run.

hackingthenews··on C++20 has been approved
Even as a C++ programmer with too much spare time, it has become obvious that learning and using all of C++ is beyond impractical. To the point where I find that my C++ code more than ever before looks like C.

Nowadays I am using C++ mainly for the high-performance libraries, and only if I can't archive the same in jit-ed python, cython or rust.

The Java strategy of being very conservative about what you add to the frontend would have done C++ a lot of good after C++11 (or even before that).

hackingthenews··on Traffic Prediction with Advanced Graph Neural Networks
I can see how solving for perfect cooperation can leave people irritated. That's why most algorithms used in OSs takes latency, fairness etc. into account.

Algorithms in between might work better in real life, e.g. people routes can be adjusted slightly to make paths better overall, but no adjustment (away from greedy) is made that the average pilot would find overly unfair or unpractical.

hackingthenews··on Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases
Completely agree. Unapparent effective price fixing is standard. The modern governments has dropped the ball on trying to understand the modern markets.
hackingthenews··on Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases
Honestly heard it more than once from smaller players. I can see how the bigger players gets away with this based on all the other things they get away with that we know about.
hackingthenews··on Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases
What Apple and Google is doing is in many ways effectively price control and inhibits free market dynamics.

For example Apple demand that app developers price their apps in the app store similar to the same service in other stores (website, Google play store, etc), even though they are taking a huge 30% cut. So Spotify can't price their product 30% more expensive in the app store, which makes the app store appear competitive and effectively kills incentives for the app store to reduce their fees, while devaluing products sold through the app store.

I do agree with you though about the political side of the matter.

hackingthenews··on Haskell Mini-Patterns Handbook
I tried with Chrome and it worked.
hackingthenews··on Haskell Mini-Patterns Handbook
Anyone else have trouble with the page on firefox? I get a giant "kowainik" written on the forefront of the page, and I don't know how to close it.
hackingthenews··on LFE: Lisp Flavored Erlang
Thanks!

I haven't really experienced the image feature, as I used Scheme. It doesn't sound like it would be consequential to how I program, but that might just be my ignorance of it.

My experience with the macro stuff is that they enable in-house implementation of language features like lazy evaluation (not possible in other languages without a lot of extra code), which we implemented during the course. But implementing features like that is not really something I need to do for my everyday programming.

hackingthenews··on LFE: Lisp Flavored Erlang
Can someone direct me to some code where I can see the full potential of Lisp?

I have programmed in Scheme before while taking a course using SICP. Final project was a Scheme interpreter. But I didn't have any epiphany/awakening like many others seems to have.

hackingthenews··on Compiler Explorer
That's fair. Here is another example where it eliminates since 5.1.

https://godbolt.org/z/3oGc3P

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