jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I’ll preface my response by saying I’ve leaned libertarian/Laissez-faire for much of my (now lengthy) adult life, and I’ve liked plenty of what I’ve seen you write on HN before (I recognize your handle as we met personally at YC many years ago). I say that to point out that I don’t think we’re coming at this with strongly opposing ideological priors.

To your response:

- I myself was concerned by some of the measures and the risk of overreach and permanence of the measures - I said so in my original comment.

- Yes people protested, which was understandable and healthy, and allowed by governments/police.

- Yes sometimes police were heavy handed in enforcing the laws - where it went too far it was widely shared on social and mainstream media and condemned by pretty much everyone. But these cases were isolated.

- The measures taken in the NT to quarantine cases were done because that territory is home to some of the most vulnerable people on earth in terms of pre-existing health conditions, education/language and access to medical care and information; in short, it was done to protect the most vulnerable members of the indigenous population from severe illness and premature death. You couldn’t possibly think of anything more opposite to Nazism if you tried.

The thing about being an adult is that you learn that government policies/measures shouldn’t be measured against some idealistic, imagined alternate reality, but against the realistic next-worst scenario. That’s the whole reason I outgrew my belief in simplistic socialist policies in my late 20s, which most people do, of course.

To me one of the greatest revelations of the pandemic is that libertarians are just as liable to succumb to idealistic fantasies as socialists have historically been.

The standard refrain has been that governments should “protect the vulnerable” while letting everyone else live totally freely - but without suggesting a workable plan for how this actually could be achieved, particularly when it’s not obvious in advance, who is/isn’t vulnerable.

Let’s be clear: your phrase “societal-level adoption of coercive actions and narratives in the name of serving the greater good” is a high-minded way of saying that the virus should have just been allowed to spread, regardless of the cost in human lives, and that to do otherwise is essentially the same as Nazism.

If I’ve misrepresented you, please explain how.

If not, please be less euphemistic in how you’re conveying the kind of outcome you’d prefer to see of the pandemic in Australia, given that the ultimate actual outcome has been a remarkably low fatality rate by world standards (1/7 per-capita even of the much vaunted Sweden), and a social/political order now largely back to what it was beforehand.
> There is some debate as to whether these findings constitute the malware label, as opposed to PUPs (potentially unwanted programs). According to Sprint, its own testing has not uncovered any malware on the U686CL.
That sounds a lot like the way HAL-9000 regresses to its earliest programming (reciting its "birth" date; singing an old song) when Dave is shutting it down at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But the point is that Facebook is showing you ads based on your surfing behaviour outside Facebook - not the content you view on Facebook.

If you use facebook purely for posting and viewing family baby photos, but view websites about tractors, you'll probably see ads on facebook from tractor related companies.

Starspace is used by FB to tag the sites that report that you've visited them to facebook. So they can target ads
I have no regional community. I live in a certain place, but my servers are not here, my collaborators are not here, my customers are not here. What is "here?"
Cisco, much like Oracle, probably doesn't make that much money off of the average startup. It might behoove them to wisen up somewhat and start introducing some lighter-weight / lower-cost entries to the market.

That said, regarding the 20Mbit/s, never forget that Cisco sells networking equipment. Cisco's point (and it's not a hard sell) is that teleconferencing and network are so interrelated that you may as well buy it all from Cisco.

I will say that their 3-screen 1080p telepresence solution is fricking awesome though. Lifelike. BELIEVABLE. And for Fortune 500 companies that are weighing this sort of thing against the cost of flying three people from New York to Tokyo for a meeting, it's not a bad value prop.
I relocated to US in 2007 after working in India for about 8 years. My best friend also moved to US and we were both working in the same company in the US. Once, while negotiating a raise, my friend brought up my salary since he knew what I was making. The HR manager sent me a polite, but firm email asking me never to discuss my salary with colleagues in the future. She painted it as a cultural thing -- that in the US people don't discuss what they make. Since then I have never disclosed my salary details to my colleague - the subject never came up actually.

It is funny how it is totally uncool to discuss your salary with your colleague, but you are expected to disclose it when asked by a stranger working for a competitor.
> There is no way Trump would ever be convicted in a court of law for what he did.

It doesn’t matter. The standards of the courtroom are not being applied here. The facts are plain: there were a hundred off ramps for Trump over the 2 months since the election and he chose to take none of them. He failed in his duty to the Presidency as an institution and the idea of separation of powers and coequal branches of government. He tried to intimidate the Congress into doing his bidding.

You get that it’s a much more essential question than whether he is technically allowed to do what he did, right? Impeachment and the 25th amendment are political remedies that must be used both to punish what this president has done and to warn other presidents that they cannot cross the bright lines that define democracy.

He is the nations principal law enforcement officer and he aided and abetted lawlessness of the most dire kind.
Not really. It's so obvious that the only person that would likely disagree with me is person that will likely disagree with reality, but here I go anyways.

Trump called for insurrection. He didn't call for a protest. So did Trump Jr. So Did Giuliani. It's a matter of public record.

Also the people, and please respect that I single out this comment as completely tangential to the original point, that try to make the "Sure Trump supporters rioted, but BLM!" argument never seem to take the following into account:

BLM is fighting against a system that arbitrarily tortures and executes them, often with impunity. While The Trump supporters are literally fighting to end American democracy.
They're seriously claiming that not a single man lost a job in the US in December?

> Women accounted for all the job losses, losing 156,000 jobs

Huh apparently they are. Seems like the writer misunderstood the numbers, because there's no way that's true,.. right?!
It used to be fairly uncontroversial that internet forums could be heavily moderated. Many of the more valuable forums I frequented in my youth were often moderated to stay on topic and cut down on spam. I cannot imagine paying much attention 20 years ago if a random forum decided even to go further than Twitter has and simply ban all Republicans or all Democrats. Indeed there are many subreddits that go this far with little fanfare. What is the dividing line here between these sites and Twitter?

Another question - what burden does a Twitter ban impose on free speech on the Internet? If Twitter bans me, I am free to move to another social media site like Parler or even make my own blog. If my views are despicable enough then some services may refuse to host me but I am unaware of anyone who has been totally bereft of a solution to put up a website.

These alternatives fail to impress for one obvious reason. It's harder to get eyeballs on Joe's random Q blog than on Twitter or Facebook. Similarly I could self-publish a book - and people do - but I lack the expertise necessary to actually get anyone to read it. I personally see social media as a set of publishers rather than as a printing press, hence why I'm not too chagrined by this decision.
And all the members of the Trump administration bravely resigning in protest when they were going to be out of jobs in less than two weeks. Patriots, truly!
Once we live in the world where the iPhone is the only option then yes, you can make the case that it’s anti-consumer.
Rust works, yes.
Have you been on the Donald. Win lately? At what point are we allowed to stop people from planning treason?
Most commenters are focusing on relatively high level features of decoding speech. It is important to also be aware that there is still great debate about what are the acoustic correlates of linguistic events in speech. It seems that our words are composed of subunits (usually taken to be phones out of the IPA--but there's work on alternatives) but what exact acoustics correspond to the phones are is still unsettled: lots of debate and mediocre recognition performance

Undoubtedly there is much room for improvement on these higher-level features but computers are still well behind humans in large vocabulary isolated keyword spotting: this is a task where one word from a very large corpus of words is spoken and the human or computer has to guess what that word was. Computers do poorly relative to humans (particularly in noise), which suggests that many of the mistakes that computers make is in not being able to interpret the acoustics correctly.
It'd be interesting to see node.js thrown in there. IMO, it and Scala are likely to be the biggest competitors for some of what Erlang's good at.
We're already using the tongue to replace optical input for people who have been blinded.

There's also the possibility of tapping in at the ears, the spinal cord, hell, it's entirely conceivable you could cut off a hand and attach an implant there. When you think about the amount of bandwidth that your mind has between your hand and your brain (seriously, move your hand a bit and think about how much data that is in absolute terms) there's a whole lot of bandwidth in established connections, especially for someone who has been maimed and has brain pathways lying dormant for controlling a limb.
Wow I totally did not put 2 and 2 together until now. Now we just need someone to release "gothic nightmarez" for IRC and revive KnK and it'll be like it's 1995 again.
Huge thank you for the tremendous feedback and encouragement we've received in response to resurrecting the HN London meetup.The flipside to the newfound success is that we will have to switch venues to be able to accommodate everyone.

The new venue is just across the road from the Lightbar:

The Water Poet
9-11 Folgate Street
Spitalfields, London E1 6BX
http://www.waterpoet.co.uk/

We look forward to meeting you all there on Thursday, 24 June at 18:00.

Ben and Dmitri
HN London Meetup
> dictation capability built in to Vista / Windows 7

I'll be ... yep, tucked well away under Accessories/Ease of Access. Who knew? (Six month old laptop w/ Win7, successor to an XP machine.)

Needs setup and the, so-far unused, built-in mic is not cooperating. It does say it allows text dictation, besides OS voice control.
RTTI is runtime type introspection. You may be confusing it with RAII, resource acquisition is initialization.

Yes, technically reference counting is not garbage collection, but in these sorts of comparisons the term is typically intended to distinguish automatic from manual memory management. The overhead of reference counting is non-trivial, that's why it's lumped with the garbage collected languages.
> while selling it as the user's benefit

I disagree.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft have a walled garden, in-fact every company on earth thinks on how to keep customers from leaving.

The difference between Apple and others is that Apple products are far superior, i can't imagine myself using any Microsoft product if Apple provides it.
Why isn't there a way to track without toxic chemicals?
If anything, the inability to purchase (easily) from the Kindle app really pushed me to stop using my iPad and start using my Android products.

Haven't looked back.
Installing to a VM as we speak. I plan to compare it to a copy of Yggdrasil Linux I'm installing simultaneously
The performance figures displayed on those pages look exceptional. Has anyone experimented with it already ?
This should be subtitled, "A biologist opines on cosmology and fails to understand physics."

They have an alternate theory of relativity that they point out agrees with the usual one for many types of data. However their theory does not include a theory of gravity, and an extension of their theory to a theory of gravity seems unlikely to give us some of the odder confirmed effects of general relativity, like frame dragging.

Until you have an actual theory of gravity that matches those experiments (and not just special relativity), you can wave your hands all you want, but you have no real business discussing things like why cosmologists believe that a contribution from dark energy to the stress energy tensor creates the acceleration of the universe that is the simplest explanation of current observation.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model for a random starting place that can actually inform you.
Yes, I think you're right. In Rotterdam everyone ride bikes, regardless of their income. Whereas in SF, it seems more a young, relatively affluent thing.
I've also come to that conclusion after a number of years of freelancing, but I understand the other point of view as well.

While freelancing, especially for people in another country, it isn't uncommon for customers to just disappear without any trace (or pay) half-way through a project. As such, when confronted with some problem mid-project, finishing the job in a half-assed manner can be a way of ensuring you get paid. Of course, a better method is making sure you have a solid plan before agreeing to the job, and trying to avoid unreliable customers - but accomplishing this can be difficult in any setting, even non-freelancing.

On the customer side, making sure you have a number of reasonably sized milestones and pay for them immediately on delivery can help keep freelancers confident, and thus encourage better quality work.
> Unfortunately the Rails tutorial is pretty bland so about half way through I decided to snoop around to see what my options where. Somehow, almost by chance I ended up a subscriber on Lynda. Lynda only has one Rails tutorial, but its pretty in depth and is backed by a five hour Ruby tutorial.

I had the situation in reverse. I found the Lynda.com rails tutorials first (in 2011) and I found it lacking compared to Rails Tutorial. I'm not sure what's the situation now, from Lynda.com website it seems the author (Kevin Skoglund) has updated the tutorials for Rails 4.
I once thought that Facebook would 'go the way of Myspace' too. But then I attended a USENIX LISA conference and I sat in on some of the Facebook presentations. Initially, I was dismissive of them (I'm too old to be in the social movement), but after seeing the advancements that Facebook are making with Open Compute and looking over some of their source code, I was very impressed. They had the best presentations out of everyone. It was all very surprising to me. And last but not least, the caliber and reputation of their technical staff is as good or better than the other big players. I came away with a much deeper respect for them.
So, is this crossfeed, or something more magical? Forgive my ignorance.

PS. This thread led me down a rabbit hole for simulated surround sound and other tech (I'm on linux, so I wanted to see what my options were), ending with this cool demo of Cetera: http://juneja.info/binaural/v-i-r-t-u-a-l-_-b-a.mp3
It's pretty neat (try it with ordinary stereo headphones).
Cool.

Should I change my answer from "in the headline" to "in the 3rd sentence" then?
My impression is that most or all of the countries with the highest homicide rates (Brazil, Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, South Africa, and so on) have very strict gun laws, making civilian gun ownership very difficult or impossible. I've always thought this was an obvious counterpoint to 'if the US had Britain's gun laws it would have Britain's homicide rate' style argument that's very popular. Globally, I just don't see a huge correlation between how liberal the gun laws are, and the actual gun homicide rate. Happy to be proven wrong, but this was my impression from a) listing countries by homicide rate globally, and then b) researching each of their gun laws. But it's also possible that these laws are weak/unenforced in a lot of these countries, so always open to getting contrary info
>By far the part we're worst at is #1, isolation. If we could truly and efficiently isolate one bit of code from another, the other goals would mostly fall into place. But we simply do not know how.

This might sound a bit mean but the author hear lacks clarity in thinking and therefore really doesn't know what he's talking about.

We 100% know how to isolate code. In fact the primitive that guarantees this isolation is part of the name of this site: combinator. Isolated logic is literally the definition of a combinator.

If every line of your code was written as a combinator then all your code would be reconfigurable and modular to the maximum amount theoretically possible.

The hard lines drawn with physical hardware are largely irrelevant and only obscure the main point. It's not relevant whether your code is isolated by a combinator or hardware acting like a combinator. There is no theoretical difference between using a virtual folder to group things or using a computer to group things.

The main issue with 'isolation' then comes down to IO, because all IO related primitives cannot be part of a combinator by definition and IO is a required part of computation. (by IO I mean input/output and shared mutable memory access)

The article doesn't even mention this. The main problem with modularity is how to deal with it in the face of IO. Hence he's not clear about what he's talking about.

IO breaks modularity & isolation and so does the use of anything that is not a combinator.
And the issue of whether people generally care misses the point. A man wants her to find him attractive.
> "White" isn't a racial group.

Yes it is.

> "White" as an idea to describe a group of (roughly) light skinned European people, came about in order to justify enslaving and subjugating other groups.

That's where the entire idea of distinct human “races" came about, and “white” was a pretty constant part of such taxonomies.

> Before, say, about 400 years ago, whiteness was not an idea used to identify a "race" of people.

Human “race" as a coherent, formalized idea is less than 400 years old.

Note that I'm not disagreeing at all with your idea of the role of whiteness, only with the idea that this somehow divorces it from, rather than grounds it firmly in, the idea of human “races”.

All modern concepts of race are artifacts of attempts to justify racial, and specifically almost entirely white, supremacy. The difference between them is that that basis has led to them becoming also groups of shared experience: largely, except for the white group, this is about the shared experience of being subjected to white supremacy, but for the white group it is the shared experience of benefitting from it.
Why wouldn't the edit just get appended to the end on the chain in the PR?
This argument is akin to saying a law against murder is unnecessary because you haven't killed anyone. It is unpersuasive in the utmost.
And the submitter has a weird profile.
I used to be a huge fan of GCP and bet on it to power my startup, and have come to greatly regret it.

Recently, I needed to increase a CPU-limit quota from a small number (like 16 vCPUs to 64 vCPUs) - nothing crazy. In the past, the quota increase system was more or less automated and would only take a few minutes to process.

This time, however, GCP denied my quota increase and forced me to schedule a call with a sales rep in order to process the quota increase. It was the biggest waste of time and kind of goes against the entire point of instant cloud resizing.

It also feels like the velocity of new features, instance types, etc has slowed down dramatically in the past year. Also, while I'm ranting, Google Cloud SQL is probably the worst cloud service I've ever used (and it costs an arm and a leg for the pleasure!)
I use Python. If I use one of the third-party packages for units then I can do what you say I can, but at extreme cost. Every single operation checks for unit conversion, on the off-chance that the values aren't compatible. The system, in trying to be nice to me, ends up making things invisibly slow.

(In practice, the performance code runs in C, so the Python/C boundary would have to negotiate the array types for full unit safety.)

In my work the base unit of length is angstroms. I've used nanometers a few times, and never used any other length unit, though I know that GROMAC's xtc format uses picometers. Saying something has a volume of 600 cubic angstroms is much more useful than 6E-28 cubic meters. While I can appreciate that other fields closer to human scale use may like to standardize through SI, I don't want your preferences enforced on my field. All I see is the chance to make things worse, and slower, and don't see any advantages.

One of my data formats has coordinates in angstroms, like "8.420 50.899 85.486". How would you suggest that I write that in an exchange format? As "8.420E-10 50.899E-10 85.486E-10"? (Or the last two normalized to E-11.) At the very least that's a lot of data for very little gain. It gets worse for trajectories, which might save 1 million time steps x 10,000 atoms/time step x 3 coordinates/atom = 3 billion coordinates to an exchange file. I see no advantage to doing that in SI units.

In practice those distance coordinates will likely internally represented in angstroms. Consider that the Lennard-Jones potential is sometimes written as A/r^12 - B/r^6 , with expected values of r around 1E-10m. The denominator of the first will go to 1E-120 in intermediate form, and not be representable in 32-bit float. While not relevant for Python, which uses 64 bit floats, some molecular dynamics programs will use 32 bit float. (Eg, for older GPU machines, or to save space.)

My other example was the atomic mass unit, another non-SI unit. I have only used amu (for chemistry) or dalton (for biology) in my work, not kilograms. It seems pointless to require that I store the mass of a carbon as 1.9926467051999998e-26 kg instead of 12 amu.

I therefore disagree, and believe there are good reasons to argue against SI units for some data interchange formats. I agree that I want to store a single distance unit on disk, only that unit is the non-SI unit angstrom and amu, and not the tremendously huge meter or kg.
I’m curious - does React Native/Expo do any better job at this, with tree-shaking and package building?
Changing formats is just asking for a large event on 9 November.
If you're getting `check failed: 0xffffffffffffffff != 0xffffffffffffffff (98)` make sure you're able to bind the default port (8080). You can run the symbolized version to see where the check occurs.
Commentary by CEO Nate Pearson about Trainerroad’s use of machine learning begins at 54 minutes into the launch video.

https://youtu.be/nAYVLch8tEA