skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The FDA mandated that this study be conducted. There was no chance of Pfizer sweeping the results under the rug, as the FDA was watching the whole process.
The problem with abandoning the electoral college is that it would violate the original principle[0], namely that the President should be elected by both a population-based and state-based mechanism. So unless we want to repudiate that founding principle, the electoral college is still the way to achieve that balance (then and now).

The electoral college is not racist, either. The 3/5 compromise of course came into any situation where population was considered (including the electoral college), as the country still had slavery at the time. We no longer have that compromise: blacks, women, men without land, etc. can all vote in 2016.

Abandoning the electoral college would just weaken the States, and if that's the plan, we might as well abolish the Senate too—it exists because of the exact same principle.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...

> In Federalist No. 39, Madison argued the Constitution was designed to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. Congress would have two houses: the state-based Senate and the population-based House of Representatives. Meanwhile, the president would be elected by a mixture of the two modes.
That's why we should avoid labels such as "extremist", "radical", "fringe" - they are deeply subjective.

Fun fact: Austria' Freedom Party's (invariably labeled as "fringe") presidential candidate came close to winning the election a few months ago. If you get close to 50% of all votes, you are not exactly fringe, are you?
It's a cold day in hell.
I played this for about 2 hours recently, and it’s so much fun!

Flying around like that really gives you a perspective of your home town that you don’t usually get. For instance, I have discovered that there’s actually train tracks underneath a bridge over which I drive fairly frequently — from inside the tram, I never saw them.

Notably, this is significantly better than the “liquid galaxy” installations one can find at Google offices. It’s smoother, more immersive, the controls are more appealing, and it looks better.

This app definitely goes into the list of things I show people who are new to VR :).
I like the idea of that kind of approach (maybe not for Twitter), but I don't have any experience with it.

How is it working out for Metafilter?
So have you ever contributed to OSS projects by these companies? I ask because what you've described is definitely not the case from what I can see.
Myself I prefer optimistic SF such as classic Asimov and Clarke. I don't mind things going wrong because mistakes are normal. But there ought to be resolution and problems solved by hard-won knowledge and the efforts of good people. If you think that is immoral or unrealistic consider whether you would read your children bedtime stories with no good guys and/or no happy endings. Consider how such children might grow up. Then consider the effect on society of unrelenting pessimism in SF.
Correct, which is why they aren't trying to establish that metaphor:

> The material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by the study of paper and ink, yet technologically advanced and open to imagination and magic.
Yes because my body has such a hard time making sugar water

\s
But don't you need Xcode to build stuff for iOS, macoOS, etc.?
How do you integrate the two and is it worth it?
UWP and Xamarin apps can use XAML, so it's not like the underlying ideas of WPF/Silverlight are dead.
This is the ultimate embrace, extend move. Hopefully it means MS has reconciled itself to the fact that it cannot easily extinguish Linux. I would expect MS to use this position to divert headlines away from the concept of free software, and toward the MS brand; and to introduce dependencies to third-party software that makes it difficult to extract MS proprietary code entirely from the Linux ecosystem.
LINQ and ability to interact with any IL compiled language (F#, VB). Also async.
but they still getting money for the patents over linux ...
How can anyone in this day and age assume when someone speaks poorly of a massive, corrupt oganisation that they think highly of another massive, corrupt organisation?

Shouldn't we assume that everyone outside of those massive, corrupt organisations are tired of the status quo?
I've worked at 3 gaming manufacturers including implementing the payout table. Near misses were never coded into the design. If they did occur, they were consequences of the way the reels were physically laid out. That choice was made from an excel sheet that outlines how many types of each award were expected. The primary statistics the mathematicians cared about were volatility (std deviation) and hold percentage. I can almost guarantee that no modern manufacturers have coded logic that says "If a loss was chosen, re-arrange the loss to appear close to a winning combination". There is no need to do that.

Also, virtual reel maps allow you to have wins over 10,000 units. That enables choice, some people might want to play a large-award machine. There is no deceit there. If the award says "8 million dollars", you know that winning symbol does not have a 1/22 chance of coming up. I have played megabucks, a progressive slot with a $10mm award, for a couple hours. I believe I got one winning megabucks symbol on the first reel, perhaps 4-6 times. That seems in line with its rough expected probability. No deceit. If the first symbol, and (!!) the second symbol came up with their true 1/22 probability, but conveniently the third symbol always missed, it might fool some people initially. But the people who play these machines often would figure it out and their gambler's superstition would kick in. They'd say "those machines are rigged, I've gotten 2/3 winning symbols hundreds of times but I never get the third. I wont play them anymore."

For anyone who is outright against all gambling, its important to remember that you will never shut it down. If you make it illegal, people will go online, or the mafia will have their "numbers" game, people will bet on sports through bookies, etc. The shadier the source, the dirtier it gets. I've heard of casinos in south america that had "inaugural wins", where they'd rig the machine to pay them the first time they sit down in order to hook them. That is sick.

The first reform I'd like to see is the $1200 tax limit increased. Thats an unfair tax on everyone, addict or not. It should be raised to account for the cost of living and inflation. I don't think it's been changed in at least the last 15 years.

Second, I think the optimal solution here is to legislate some sort of "gambler's bankruptcy", where someone surrenders their assets to a court, which then puts them on a forced budget and severely impedes their ability to gamble. That way it could perhaps prevent them from being homeless, sued, etc.

Third, I think that if you embezzle or otherwise use stolen funds to gamble that should absolutely be recoverable by the victim. If I buy stolen property, the court has no problem seizing that from me and returning it to its rightful owner. If the casinos sell entertainment and receive stolen funds, they absolutely should suffer the consequences just like an ordinary citizen. If they see a "whale" coming in and extend all these benefits to them, it should be their onus to verify that person's income.
Clarkson – Notify your users of new features
I think it works pretty well. Granted, Metafilter is also heavily moderated to prevent conversation derails and general abuse, but that's also what the money pays for (not like money is a problem for TWTR, or is it?)

I don't believe the payment is used towards enforcing identity (MeFi values privacy and anonymity when needed) and locating abusers, but if things got really bad I don't see why that would be a huge problem.
It's Category (2) here: http://www.visapro.com/h1b-visa/h1b-cap-exempt-candidates.as...

"Even after the H-1B cap is reached, employers may continue to file H-1B petition on behalf of foreign nationals who are currently outside the U.S., as long as they held H-1B status during the past six years, and have not exhausted the full six years."

Basically you have 6 years after you quit/are fired and return home to transfer that H1B to a new employer, for the balance of time remaining on that visa, without being subject to the cap.

Ask your attorney ^_^
I didn't realize PoisonTap's creator, Samy, is also the creator of the Evercookie[0], a persistent identifying cookie that remains sharded(then recombines) in your system even after clearing your cookies. While a very cool project, it has some scary implications on users not trained in their removal.

[0] https://github.com/samyk/evercookie
IP law including copyrights and patents, as currently implemented, undoubtedly stifle innovation.
Please enlighten us with your definition of "regular people" here and ask yourself if the line worker at a Ford factory is necessarily instantly qualified to the CEO.
There will undoubtably be a number of good responses here to your question, but I'd like to share my opinion. For me, the answer comes down to tooling. I make frequent use of Integration Services, Reporting Services, the Server Agent, Profiler, and other services I'm not remembering at the moment.
In my mind, SQL Server represents an ecosystem of tools and services that are simply part of the package (no additional cost) and are fully supported and integrated as part of a comprehensive suite.
I got fired for supporting Trump in Silicon Valley Where do I go from here?
Ask HN: How do you know if someone asked/replied to your question on HN?
There's a thread I like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12957371 and I asked some questions to some people.

Problem 1: I think they don't know about it, since there's no notification function. So it's kinda sucks.

Problem 2: when they replied, I got no notification. That sucks #2.

How do people deal with it?
Well it's looking like they assumed more people were going to show up, based on their polling, and a good chunk didn't show up. That is, Trump voters showed up approximately as the poll models predicted, while Hillary voters apparently weren't as committed to actually showing up as they were when polled. So the polling fouled up only in terms of capturing a meaningful nuance whether the voter was likely to show up, which is a really hard thing to do.

And the polls didn't ask, and may have a lot of error capturing for, the Q&A along the lines of "if there's another controversy regarding candidate X are you a lot/a little more or less likely to vote?" It's plausible the polls don't capture last minute antipathy.
Want to make a fast application on a pebble and with actual type checking? C and Ada won't complain or blur your lines...
http://blog.adacore.com/make-with-ada-formal-proof-on-my-wri...
Is there a ELIF type link for licensing that explains what we are allowed to do with this on Linux? Can I use it for development work on a company owned workstation?
If they ported query parallelism across CPU cores as base MSSQL on Windows has, that would be a significant differentiator for those in the DWH / analytics space.

Its also likely this is a attempt to keep customers on the MSSQL platform who otherwise don't have a need for a commercial OS, and may be willing to keep paying for MSSQL while cutting their OS expenses.
Nothing prevents you from doing both approaches. I mean, while Mozilla is increasing Rust usage, they're also rolling out more extensive sandboxing.

Either of those by themselves are not a good enough solution though. Just trusting on Rust means you are vulnerable to Rust bugs or logic errors. Just trusting on sandboxing means you're hoping that your trusted code (written in C/C++) doesn't have any security bugs.
Why on earth would Google care enough right now about MS' phone efforts for that to be something they're actively seeking?

I think it's far more likely that any movement towards C# on Android would be motivated by: 1) perhaps enough devs are asking for it, and 2) it would give them extra leverage in negotiations with Oracle about Java.
Amazing how much backlash there was at the idea of legally requiring software to explain its decisions, but this is one example out of many that makes it clear that we either require it or people will die from software with bad intentions. To me, the idea of trusting software authors or companies without the accompanying legal framework to ensure that it isn't blind trust is absolutely insane. I should hope VW (amongst many other companies) has proven that beyond any doubts.
Censorship in Social Media Leaves Users in Frustration
Quit Slacking Off: How Teams Are Using Slack as a Project Management Sidekick
Well, the SEC [kind of] already does this with accredited investors :)
You can't have generic functions that can wrap data so you end up passing concrete models or interfaces to views - no generic view-models for you. The inflexibility of the type system isn't a big deal when you are working on network applications or tools, but causes serious duplication when you do anything that passes around concepts internally.
Worth noting this is from Plumbr's (monitoring) data, so profile of company using their solution may be different than Internet at large. Additionally, any comparison I see of database/language/etc would be more useful if it filtered out what I'd call passive installations (for instance MySQL and PHP when running Wordpress) vs active development.
Is there an API to convert primitive doodles into guesses?

I'm trying to develop an app which would do this with things people "draw into the air" with their finger.
TPP: A Post-Mortem
Rust is great. I've been following it since pre-1.0 and writing code with it for about as long also. It's really come a long way, my favorite language for pretty much anything except web development.
#2 is up to the engineers making the product. #1 is why Rust exists: it eliminates whole classes of errors. No, it won't stop you from screwing up badly, but it just might stop the buffer overflow or race condition that would have helped a hacker steal your users' identities.
"Consistently applied metaphors" except for where they don't want to be consistent.

Copy/pasting from another comment of mine, quotes from the manifesto:

> The material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by the study of paper and ink, yet technologically advanced and open to imagination and magic.

"It's grounded in reality... but not!"

> Surfaces and edges of the material provide visual cues that are grounded in reality... Yet the flexibility of the material creates new affordances that supercede those in the physical world, without breaking the rules of physics.

"Except for rules of physics like things moving against the force applied to them, or shadows changing without the light source, object, or perspective changing."

> The fundamentals of light, surface, and movement are key to conveying how objects move, interact, and exist in space and in relation to each other. Realistic lighting shows seams, divides space, and indicates moving parts.

"Except where we decide we don't want to be realistic."
Could someone explain why "ASP.NET Core 1.1" Kestrel webserver decided to use LibUV DllImpor [1] instead of .NET Asynchronous Server Socket (System.Net.Sockets) [2].
Does that mean that the managed implementation of Async socket is broken and was too slow?
[1] "https://github.com/aspnet/KestrelHttpServer/blob/dev/src/Mic.... [2] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bew39x2a(v=vs.110).....
I love pgsql and it has some features that SQL Server does not, but SQL Server also has a range of features that pgsql does not including index-organized tables, automatically-updated materialized views, much more mature support for query parallelization, etc. Lots of the discussion in this older thread is still relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9464505

Edit: fixed link.
You can do it in Rust too; though most of the demos I see on GitHub are just demos.
Fun Fact: VS Code started life in Azure as Project Monaco. It was later pulled into an Electron app and released as VS Code :)
I love how the guy they've talked to compares his banning to Hitlers purge of SA leaders.

The purge of SA happened after Hindenburg threatened Hitler with martial law if Hitler didn't reign in SA (though Hitler had his own motives for going along with it - they were a threat to him as well), which were seen as particularly nasty and brutal.

Comparing yourself with the people that other parts of German society at the time literally saw as worse than Hitler is perhaps not quite what to go for when trying to elicit sympathy.

He should at the very least then not complain if people call him a nazi.
> Wasn't there a golden rule to not store persistent data in a container?

You shouldn't store persistent data in the container. However, you can mount external storage and read/write to it from inside the container. The most simple example of this is mapping a path from the host.

EDIT:

In fact, the MS documentation gives an example of exactly this.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-...

> sudo docker run –e 'ACCEPT_EULA=Y' –e 'SA_PASSWORD=<YourStrong!Passw0rd>' -p 1433:1433 -v <host directory>:/var/opt/mssql -d microsoft/mssql-server-linux
So what technical test did you take to sign up for the website to prove that you were technical? I know I never took one.
I was also reminded of the Romans as related on the History Channel show "Engineering an Empire". They talked a lot about how the Romans used concrete for various purposes including aqueducts, etc. Iirc, they mentioned that they'd built a building with a vaulted concrete dome that we weren't able to reproduce, even after the re-discovery of cement, until we had computers.
Very early on the Republican (and later, Trump) strategy was to discredit and bring suspicion to Clinton - enough so that people who would normally vote for her wouldn't show up. Remember that when Clinton was Secretary of State her approval ratings were above 60% and peaked at 66%. When it was rumored that she was going to be the only candidate fielded by the Democrats, the long discredit campaign began. You can see it in the gradual decrease of her likability from 2013 onward.

Also: remember that Bill Clinton, when he left office, was one of the most liked presidents in history [1]. And, that was even after the impeachment hearings. The mid-late 90s were a very positive period. So, considering those two things together, the Republicans were extremely successful.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Bill_Clinton
Linux is a class of operating systems which use the Linux kernel. Referring to Linux as an OS, is a perfectly fine thing to generically mean 'an OS which uses Linux as a kernel' and has an agreed common meaning.

Almost no Operating System is precisely GNU/Linux - most have vim, an X server, GNOME or KDE, 7zip etc. And the argument that GNU is a more principal argument is incorrect.
Does Emscripten support Rust already?
The plastic white MacBooks had a fake screw for symmetry years ago.
Jon Skeet (C# guru who works at Google, for those unfamiliar with C# rock stars) was interviewed on Software Engineering Daily, and his response to this question was basically, "uh, no." Google isn't shifting their focus away from Java/C++ any time in the foreseeable future. (You might see improved support for .NET Core in Google Compute Engine, though.)

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/09/20/cloud-client...
Is it in github?
Yes. While programmers being asked to do unethical things is a salient topic, the posted article feels pretty weak on all fronts. He admits that the site as designed was compliant with medical advertising law. Its goal was to get people thinking about a medication that still required a doctor's approval to obtain. His "infraction" was writing code that would indicate this prescription is a good solution to the various problems that, presumably, the medication addressed. I personally don't see any ethical problem with that.

The author should probably speak to a professional therapist who can help him process this event and understand that he shares no responsibility for the complication that caused a user of the drug, who may have benefited substantially before the complication occurred, to commit suicide.
Canadian engineering unions are basically a mafia. Their sole purpose is basically ensuring that their members pay dividends and preventing them to do any job if they dont.
Just wanted to chime in and say that I am in a position similar to yours, and agree with everything you have said, but would add that I believe the iron ring is a very good 'nudge' towards ethical decision-making.
I believe it'll largely depend on who we have our next war with. If it's with a first world nation then more sophisticated air support should be expected.
Sure, but isn't one of the goals of modern design to emulate the physical world for a more tactile feel? Googles material design has a whole section on how cards should behave so as not to break the rules of the physical world.
It seems odd to strive for realism, but then break it somewhere because "it isn't a real button, so it doesnt have to feel like one"
My guess is they are not trying to do quad tree tiling. The demos are very nice, but it might have trouble scaling to larger maps.
I'm confused about this as well - this could be a great application for "casual" vr like daydream.
> A. That Trump winning was worse than Clinton

If this is the case, why not pull a Comey and release this information before the election?

> B. That what Russian state-actors do is somehow more "bad" than what American state-actors do

Since the NSA is an American agency, it follows that they think themselves less "bad" than the equivalent Russian agency. If they thought themselves worse, why not help Russia?

> C. That the people of America should be prevented from knowing certain things that "us smarter people in power" can handle, so that they vote for the person "We know is best."

Again, if they thought Clinton was the better option (your stated assumption from point A), why wouldn't they release information that appears to show that Russia is sympathetic to Trump before the election?
> I'm really not sure what the argument against impossibility is...

It's humility. It's admitting that there are things we don't know, and that some of them could give exceptions to the things that we do know.

I think that "willing to be proven wrong, but requiring proof" is the correct stance.
Many of those threats are technologically solved and the improvements will be iterative. Our R&D needs to focus on projected future threats.

Also, our last two "wars" were no real threat to our country. We don't need directed energy weapons and stealth submarines against jihadists, but we might against Russia and China.
NES Classic:  Official scanned manuals
> the U.S. Army’s ‘Phaser’ can ... take down ... anything with circuits in a single shot ... iPads, computers, targeting systems or even cars speeding toward checkpoints.
I like liberals. I am a liberal. Even still, I voted Trump, because of how corrupt the Clintons are.
> it's utterly despicable in both cases.

I absolutely agree. It should be anathema; people of all parties should unite to vote out anyone who tries.

However, the article talks about Democrats scheduling local elections (e.g., school board) at times when fewer people vote (e.g., odd years). If true (FiveThirtyEight is credible and the article seems well-reseached), I oppose the practice but I don't think it is at all equivalent to widespread programs intended to actually stop people from registering or voting.

Is there evidence of Democrats doing something more substantial?
Every systematic approach I've seen to enforcing privacy, nondisclosure, etc. and has to deal with dynamic security rules ends up having to include knowledge of information flow (via things like program counters, aka lifetimes, and in some cases explicit ownership tracking) into the language. Rust isn't enough but I think something like it will be necessary to take that next step.