jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I don't understand why this exact pattern of argument happens so much in online debate, but I really despise it.

Acrobatic_Road makes a reasonable point that they don't feel they were given the proper means to express their policy preferences, and reasonably calls it 'undemocratic'.

After all the reason we want democracy in the first place is so that ordinary citizens can influence the policy.

Chillwaves reasonably points out that America is a representative democracy and so you vote for candidates whom you trust to vote in accordance to your policy preferences.

That's two great points! We should be able to have an interesting discussion right? For example we could discuss ways in which the US system of representative democracy is failing Acrobatic_Road. We could also discuss why we might like it despite its failings.

But for some reason, online debate seemingly always end up in an inane discussion debating definitions with one side claiming X is not truly Y while the other side claims X lives up to standard definition of Y.

Nobody is any smarter. We entirely failed to learn anything from each others perspective.

We can be better than this :(
Pretty much. My own personal interactions aside, I wouldn't want to work for him, given what I've heard from people who have.
We already have scarier robots, they are called self guided missiles. You don't have to imagine this new world.
There's more to it than just that. There's no way that just moving to predefined limb positions would be stable.

You can't script an unstable system without feedback. Any tiny perturbation would cause the robot to fall over. You need to actively control the system to counteract the instability.

So there will be some (scripted) goals, and a very complicated control algorithm that tries to reach the goals without falling over.
The fact that this is a $10 one-off fee is very attractive to me. There are so many subscriptions in the language learning world, it’s incredibly refreshing to see a product using a different model.

Also, you can use them with Anki. Perfect. I’m probably going to purchase. Hopefully they live up to expectations.
TCO is an optimization.

When it’s a semantic language feature like in Scheme, it should be called “Tail Call Elimination” because lack of it changes program semantics (thus not merely optimization)
Do you have any more info to back this? I am honestly curious- I bought a Dyson Animal about 12 years ago now, and its still going strong, and is the best vacuum I have ever used. Not having to keep bags around is nice too. Our usecase is relatively light- we have area rugs mostly, but its still head and shoulders above the previous vacuum we had, and any of the ones my parents had growing up.
It makes the code impure (that is with side-effects). One can also argue that if you can encode the potential errors in the type they are not exceptional.

It's not that bad though, because you get much less of these kind of errors than in a typical Java program (for example).
Is that the case in the whole EU? Because my AmEx gives me 1% cashback here in the UK, and that's been true since long before Brexit.
> Heaven forbid someone make a joke on the internet

Jokes are funny.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289

> I agree with what people have already said, but I think there's one more point to add: people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are. We have a tendency to think, "This idea of mine is hilarious! And different! Surely this witticism is the exception." And we are usually wrong. When you have N people all doing that, there's a lot of noise.

> I try to gently point this out to people who complain when their attempt at humor has been downvoted by the community. It's not that we don't like humor. We just don't like banal attempts at humor, which becomes noise. Or, put in a less charitable fashion, "You're not as funny as you think you are."
Protip: If you're in a public rest room and there are two hand dryers next to each other, use them both at the same time. One for each hand. Much faster.
Ok, I'll bite. Bitcoin has a large, distributed network of miners and exchanges who support it, has extremely low inflation approaching zero, has a supply cap of 21 million, is infinitely divisible, has been in the wild for 10 years with zero hacks, can transfer unlimited value (billions/trillions) anywhere in the world for relatively low costs in relatively low time compared to traditional system, and does not require any third-party middle man to approve the transaction, is accessible to anyone in the world regardless of regional laws, and cannot be printed or inflated artificially. I'm sure there's more.

In regards to value relative to other crypto, this is a valid point but ultimately doesn't matter at all. Why does Craigslist still make 100s of millions of dollars every year when it is clearly an inferior product?
You know I have so much mixed feelings about Electron apps.

One one had, the performance really sucks.

On the other, there's no way we would've had Spotify, Slack, Teams, and all these big apps supported on Linux.
So no actual arguments then (just more pumper nonsense around prices). If you have no interest in economics, why attempt to pretend you do (see your Pablo reference as an example of why you might've not paid attention in Econ 101). Why not just say: "buy bitcoin because moon money" and move on.
There's also cases where if you start working, you actually make less than you would by not working, due to eligibility requirements for certain programs.

Long term, not engaging in meaningful work has many downsides (substance abuse, relationship, career growth, etc) and its not just about money. But going to a grueling 9-5 to make less money for long term benefits is still a tough sell
Any further reading recommendations for concept of "correlation does not imply causation"? I always look for a concise way to describe this (there are just too many reports concluded in this way, I hope I could let others understand this point sooner to avoid being trapped in the details for too long if not forever) but have not been successful. Your words seems the best I can find.
You don't need to protect from everything. Several of these issues are so rare that you're better off treating them than preventing them and your dog suffering side effects.

You should really just talk to your vet. There's way more to it than a simple chart. They know the pharmacology, effectiveness, and necessity of all these drugs.

My girlfriend is a vet, and our dogs only take Trifexis. It works for our animals, their lifestyles, and our part of the country. Her prescription might change for an animal with short fur that goes hunting a lot. It all just depends.
So HN is bascicially a startup simulator for side projects?
I can't imagine anyone'll be able to keep encryption software out of people's hands, even if it gets as dire as requiring fallback to sneakernet.
Of course, but you can't just mix and match these medications. Some have serious side effects and can't be used repeatedly, and some have interactions with other meds.

You should just ask your vet. Vets will take into account the insects in your area, as well as your dog's coat and lifestyle.
Trifexis is awesome and what I use for my active dog (and we have never had flea problems). The problem is that the pill smells very, very strongly of mold. I have to smash up the pill and mix it into peanut butter for my dog to even look at it. I also administer it outside and use gloves, because it will have your house smelling of mold for days. With a smaller dog (thus smaller dose/pill), you could force it down, but a 30+ lb dog will have too big of a pill and won't eat it normally for any reason.
"Punt and let customer support handle it" is a pretty lazy solution, in my view. Additionally, what a developer might think of as a "99.9%" solution is more often than not a 99% solution, or a 90% solution. With enough customers, dealing with everyone who can't use your slapped-together form will be more expensive than doing it right.

Software doesn't become great by assuming someone else will handle the edge cases and details, although you may get away with selling it for a while until your user base grows.
Not sure but some medication will interact negatively with others. Vets will usually tell you to give the heartworms medicine one day, and the flea one the next day, but not both at the same time.
i really enjoy articles that demystify the tools and programs that we all take for granted. i don't think i'm going to be writing my own shell any time soon though..!
-- KitchenTrack -- London, UK

Seeking lead developer and co-founder for sustainability startup

We are funded for the next 18 months to launch a product that is unique to the UK, but has been proven in other markets. The founders have experience in successfully building and exiting startups. We have a mix of technical and business experience. However, we need one more technical co-founder to help us as we iterate on a prototype product to develop something that is ready for commercial trade.

Compensation will be in a mix of salary and equity with options to define the mix based on your financial needs. Given the scope of work, you will need to be comfortable with full-stack web development, have some java/android experience, and be able to work closely with our pilot customer.

Requirements:

- Excellent communication and gravitas to come across as a leader of the
technical business
- Ability to think creatively and problem solve solutions on site with clients
- Java and Android development experience
- Full Stack Web development experience (front and back-end)
- Solid understanding of SQL database design and implementation
- Based in London

If interested email hnproject2013 AT gmail DOT com and I'll put you in touch with the CEO
I can't speak for all religions, but the Judeo-Christian tradition has always believed God is beyond measure.

Some examples are from the Jewish/Christian Bible[0]:

"Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord? Who has been his counselor, instructing him? Whom did he consult, to gain understanding?"

And again[1]:

"O the depth of the riches, and the wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments! How unsearchable are his ways! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counselor?"

Jews and Christians have always believed that God is beyond measure. As we see it, God is outside of the natural world, beyond human comprehension or measure by science.

[0]: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+40&versi...

[1]: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+11&versi...
Quoting: any parent who opposes adoption of the CCSS is, in effect, saying, “I do not want my child prepared for life in the Twenty-First Century.”

That's a bunch of baloney. The premise of the essay is that Fortune 500 companies are the best at deciding how our children should be educated, and therefore whatever scheme is aligned with the needs of the largest businesses - what's good for General Motors is good for America - is the one we should pursue.

Just yesterday here on HN, account 'edward' posted a link to a 2012 Forbes article titled "The Rise of the 1099 Economy: More Americans Are Becoming Their Own Bosses". You'll notice that the 'Fortune 500 most valued skills' doesn't include "independent thinking" in the list of top topics.

You'll also notice it doesn't include fine arts appreciation, history, ethics, and the other ideals of a classically educated citizen, as compared to modern educated worker.
Read somewhere else that they learned from the "jack of all trades master of none" mess and copied a bit more selectively. Still think theirs will be worse though...
Simplicity is about having orthogonal features that compose and work well together.

Not about having "fewer" features.

Especially when Java is infantile in the small number of features it has...
> I just spent some time reading through /Math/Content/K/ on corestandards.org. Most of it is, IMO, complete trash and not at all aligned with how kids in kindergarten actually learn this shit. As a "spec" it's writing is sloppy, poorly defined, and highly ambiguous.

I respect that you took the time to read the document, but your criticism isn't very specific. Are you bothered by the fact that it uses words that aren't appropriate for Kindergartners to describe what they should know? Or that it says what they should know, but not always how to teach it?

I think the "spec" analogy is a good one. The goal of a spec is to lay out requirements, not implementation. Same idea here, which strikes me as the right choice.

The actual expectations are to know a few things about counting, numbers, and shapes. That seems developmentally appropriate to me (admitting that I don't have much recent experience with kids this age).

What do you think Kindergartners should know?

Re: the practices part, these same practices are mentioned at every grade level through high school. I agree that the practices sound way too advanced for Kindergarteners, but the goal is to get students to do them well by the end of high school, not by the end of Kindergarten.
Makes you wonder about http://isocpp.org/blog/2014/12/five-popular-myths-about-c-bj...:

"C++ has been used for demanding embedded systems and critical systems for years, examples are The Mars Rovers (scene analysis and autonomous operations), The F-35s and F-16s (flight controls), and many, many more"

Also: what does that software do? I can think of several:

- Interface with friend-or-foe detectors
- Check that the plane is in the air

But I cannot see why either would take four (more, but let's ignore that) years to develop.
> If there is a corrupt Security Assessor, the problem is bigger than one processor

Huh? As a service provider who has to deal with these third parties (for our hosted/colo type of clients) I would say I have yet to find one that isn't corrupt.

They basically are completely worthless, at least at the lower-tiers. They more or less run nmap and a nessus scan, and then tell the client how to game those scans without improving security whatsoever (e.g. hiding an exploitable version of PHP's version banner, firewalling the test probe IPs from certain ports the world can see, etc.).

In fact, from a service provider perspective PCI has made things less secure since we no longer have as much traction with clients when we tell them they need to do X to store financial data securely. Now they can point to their "audit" and say it's fine.

> Visa is quite serious about enforcing those standards.

Not in my experience. They only seem to care after a breach happens and only for PR purposes. Report anything before that, and from what I can tell it's completely ignored.

That said, we generally don't deal with the higher compliance levels - those that do, seem to get it more or less right (or at least put resources and thought into it if nothing else).
"Science as an institution does not care where the incremental steps towards the truth comes from, as long as those steps are reproducible."

I am very skeptical of that. The scientific community is susceptible to politics and social competition, at least as any other community. Reproducing results (real science) is hard work and the reality of it is that scientists are entitled to unsupported beliefs, but may find it difficult/tempting to misuse their achievements or stature to champion those beliefs.

"ultimately religion is very un-scientific"

This is a provocative statement that would be interesting to hear more on.
I, mostly, figure out the best use-case for the project and then translate it into some other language to get a cool name.
For example, I am currently working on a 2 way synchronization system which will mostly be used as a queuing system, so, I translated 'Queue' to 'Qatar', which is Hindi for queue :)

Sometimes, I like to get the closest match in any other industry (Communications in this case). We recently named a notification system 'satellite', and similar names for publishers and subscribers.
I can't help but see Survivorship Bias in any profile of a successful investor. You rarely see the profiles of the more numerous people whose investments lost them all their money. It's always "How XYZ became that 1 out of ~1 million who flipped heads 20 times in a row. The secret to coin flipping revealed!"
Gotcha, I was coming at this from a different angle. Mostly a local-government perspective for things like city services. That's the kind of government I want streamlined and efficiently run.
Do you know what makes something not political? It not being in dispute - it says nothing about its value just like "X benefits from" and "status quo" means nothing without a context point of reference about what the changes are to say if it is good or bad, let alone slightly more nuanced situations like "too much of a good thing" or "a neccessary evil" or even different relative values.

I find speaking only in vagueness like "status quo" and "good for <the elite>" major red flags - the first especially as implying the changes you want with no knowledge and impossible to reconcile across even two people. Essentially the same sort of lie of populists. The second is a warning sign for fallacious zero sum thinking - best succicently and snarkily refuted as "It is also good for rich people for the atmosphere to be breathable at all."

The assertion that AI and networking are by default pro status quo and that is a bad thing looks like gibberish without any reasoning backing it. Not even "was funded by X" has been a guarantee that it would sustain a stasis.

The arguments leave me with an uneasy feeling of superfically trying to sound good while lacking any substance.
While informal, I do not think his tone lacked civility.

I strongly prefer papers written in this style. Not only are they more enjoyable to read, but they are often easier to understand and more geniune as well. Papers written in a formal style often obscure the real motivation and instead provide a fancy-sounding retroactive justification. It makes the authors feel smarter, and I guess some readers feel smarter as well, but it belies the reality of research.
The professional class has contributed the most to the wealth gap. We blame the wealthy, but it's not they who are performing the task of wealth extraction. The banks owners don't sign mortgages or repossess homes. The shareholders aren't doing the actual labor that increases page views or patents doodads worth negative value to the poor who buy them and funnel the money up. Owners don't do the taxes that rob society of its own worth.

No. It's the professionals who do that immoral work. They are to blame. Not the wealthy. They just pay for it.

The professionals, most all of us here are the cause of the wealth gap. It is we who exacerbate the divide and decline of civilization by sacrificing our moral duty to those less fortunate to get a little more cash for ourselves.

Listen to us all here now. We know this, yet we continue.
Then you entirely missed the point of the comment you replied to: that if you willingly impose google surveillance on yourself you really don't have any space to complain about being reminded of it.
Even this is a little unsophisticated for the same reason as the Golden Rule. The problem is that other people aren't just mirror versions of you.

In small children "theory of mind" develops, the child supposes that perhaps this experience they're having, whatever that is, is also an experience the other people who look like them are having. And this theory works well, you can make useful predictions with it. Because Daddy is like you, and you like apple drink better than pond water, you can surmise correctly that Daddy will prefer the apple drink over the pond water too. Being smacked in the face (e.g. by your own unco-ordinated limbs) hurts, and so it's not a surprise that Daddy doesn't like a smack in the face either.

But the explanatory power of theory of mind is limited if you stop there. I don't like Peanut Butter. But it turns out that other people _do_ like Peanut Butter, their minds are similar but not identical. If I see some bread with Peanut Butter spread on it, to me that bread is ruined, but to someone else that's a delicious snack.

I don't want to marry. So for me a Categorical Imperative forbidding marriage is no problem. But it's clear to me that other people value marriage and so, against my better judgement, it should continue to be permitted. Some people feel marriage should be restricted, that couples ought to be of opposite biological sex, or the same skin colour, or of child-bearing age, or whatever other constraint. I have no dog in that fight but it's simplest if we're to allow something I have no need for, to assume that everybody will avail themselves of this custom only if they value it, and so it may as well be open to everyone until we see some clear evidence of ill-effects.
I think a better comparision would be a manuscript about calculus.
If it was produced before Newton/Leibniz it's remarkable, otherwise well... who cares?
I can't speak to venture funding or terrorism, but something seems really misleading to me about the NIH grant applications model.

My sense is that a grant, like an academic paper, is often basically well-received or not. So prior to going into it, if you're familiar with the details of the particular grant, you can get some sense of interest or not. The grant may have even been solicited in a certain sense by a program officer or something, so it's quasi-invited.

Those grants that are quasi-invited, or well-received, will basically involve polishing on subsequent revisions. Those that are totally unsolicited and not well-received it doesn't matter how much polishing you do often, it will not go anywhere.

I think where this becomes relevant to the paper is that this often has very little to do with the process of the grant revisions. It says little about "how someone responds to failure", and everything about connections with the grant agency, program officers, and luck. All that stuff that happens before the grant is even submitted plays into it, and this paper kind of ignores that.

You could say that it does speak to learning, in that you could ask "why doesn't the other scientist adjust their strategy?" To which I'd say, there are enormous pressures to submit anyway, and for someone who doesn't get good mentoring about what to target, or what agency to target, or whose research doesn't jive with the priorities of the division head at that time, or whatever, they might just not get it, and it might easily be over the 5 year period of the study.

Basically, at least with NIH grants I think this study is really misleading and potentially harmful, because it kind of suggests failed applicants just aren't learning, when I think what's really happening is that you have a mixture of two groups, one of which can learn something, and the other of whom it just doesn't matter if they learn or not, because the outcome has kind of been preordained.

That is, the process they predict from is an indicator of which mixture class the applicant belongs in, not the cause of the outcome.
There's probably some bias here where no parent is going to want to admit that they've treated their kids differently (likely unintentionally). Not to say that there isn't useful insight here anyway.
Our society has decided that taller is better, so naturally the best (tallest) students should get the best (tallest) teachers!
They , KMT, lost to the CCP in the civil war and fled to Taiwan.
Why, because of all of those buzz words? Name any company that doesn't have vision and innovation going on. Also, name any browser that doesn't repeatedly beat the others in benchmarks.

The facts are Firefox has not only lost momentum (as in stopped gaining market share) it's been losing market share.
Jerry Seinfeld says[1]: “Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with.” Jerry describes writing comedy as “The torture I love.”

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2GW2JS_A4g&t=32m20s