skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many US elections, emphatically including those of Presidential electors, are done by plurality rule, so you don't need a majority to start with -- which is floor(votes×50%)+1, not 51%. With the structure of the EC, you can, therefore, win with a minority of votes in states with a minority of the population.
[Infographic] Big data in Banking
According to https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2016-8655

"Non-privileged user namespaces disabled by default, only vulnerable with sysctl kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1"

But: ... on systems where unprivileged namespaces are enabled (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc).

Interesting that Ubuntu and Debian differ here.

As of right now it doesn't appear that any distribution has fixed this yet, which is odd since it was fixed upstream a week ago.
I've been using uBlock on Safari for quite a while now (I've got 0.9.5.2 version installed atm). I cannot find any info what is the difference between uBlock and the uBlock Origin, can anyone elaborate on this? Is the difference like between Adblock and Adblock Plus?
Interesting that Japan has both the highest level 3 percentage and the highest can't use computer percentage.
Thanks, resume can be found on my website:

https://www.amarkota.com/resume
Where I work, we definitely get too many customer recommendations that are treated as show-stopping by someone in our business side. Often the customer will only vaguely remember making the recommendation a few months later, and it turned out to not be that important. Gee, thanks business people, for wasting 3 weeks of software engineer's time and lots of the owner's money!
Perhaps, but as an alternative perspective....

I work for a midlevel publisher. Nearly of our content is syndicated, with very nearly none if it being unique. Our value -add is our selectivity, and great on-site user experience when it comes to filtering and subscriptions.

20% of our readers use adblock. For video content which is a mere fraction of our site, that comes out to $700 a day in bandwidth costs going to adblock users, or $21,000 in the average month. That's a lot.

What publisher wouldn't fall over themselves to get 20% more profits in a given year?

In the last year, we grew approximately 20% but our % of adblock users soared so while costs are up, revenue is flat. This isn't a sustainable situation. I have a lot of sympathy for people who do not want to see intrsuive advertisement, and I myself feel the same way sometimes, but when it comes down to sheer costs---we can't afford to subsidize adblock users.

I'm unconviced that adblock users add more value that they take away. Since we know how many of them they are, and how much they cost, we can ask is $21,000 better spent subsizing adblock user who may tell their friends about our site, or is it better spent on traditional advertising? I think that people do follow word-of-mouth better than traditional ads, but that also means the friends of adblock users are more likely to be adblock users themselves---thus just an additional cost ontop of one we can't handle already.
I think we are getting closer to furthering the concept that dreaming isn't just a side-effect of thinking (or simply a defrag/clean-up routine upon the previous day's thoughts or the mind's expectations for tomorrow). It is itself the key to the thinking process, and sits above and commands the other "agents". It helps us deal with uncertainty and lack of rationality inherent in the universe and our incomplete understanding of it.
How do you discuss in "good faith" ideas like white nationalism?

You discuss it the same way you discuss any other idea in good faith:

by evaluating the content on its message, not on the presuppositions you might have for its messenger;

by evaluating each topic in isolation on its own, and trying to determine whether or not any individual point has merit or not, how much merit it may have, and where it does not have merit, explaining why you consider it meritless;

by being open-minded enough to not dismiss individual points because you disagree with the central thesis;

by putting forth your best arguments, and letting the stronger argument win the day, unblemished by vitriol;

by being civil and courteous to your fellow man because as humans, they're deserving of at least a civil, open minded discussion.
I'd posit that the reason is a nuance of #2, more thought was put into older code on the design of how it should work before making it work. Now we write code so fast that we have to scrap it all and do it again a second time to fix the mistakes of the first time [0]. I'm of the mind that upfront planning would've likely taken less time, but that's simply my opinion and I don't have anything to back it up besides anecdotal experience. The current practice of "move fast and break things" very well could be a better approach.

[0] I'm only mentioning this footnote due to the article picking on Angular (fairly or unfairly), but the point I made that this is footnoting is relevant to them potentially.
To be sure, Bill Gates is a solo authority when it comes to listing his favorite books.
If you stood up in the middle of a geology lecture and tried to start an argument about Roe v. Wade, you'd rightfully be thrown out of the room. We're all affected by politics, but that doesn't mean that political discussion is necessary, useful or welcome in every context.

This is Hacker News. It's not the front page of Reddit, it's a niche site with a clear remit. I'm absolutely fine with any general political discussion being permanently flagged as off topic. If people want to discuss something like internet censorship or science funding, I think this may be an appropriate venue. Discussions about the technology of politics like econometrics, polling error or voting machine design may also be relevant. Beyond that, the internet has no shortage of places to discuss politics; many of them have a vastly higher calibre of political discourse than HN.
What are covariance and contravariance in C#?
What makes you think Google did not already have access to this information? They don't even obfuscate the fact because for the last several years, you could see your location history[1] as reported by your device.

1. https://www.google.com/maps/timeline
Quite a few. 1Blocker is one of them:

https://1blocker.com
That's an excellent insight, actually! A century ago, cars were fairly simple devices which required skill to start and operate. These days they are highly complex and hide their complexity nicely behind a dashboard. Once the abstraction leaks, however slightly, we call the pros. Or at least I do.

Computer technology follows the same trajectory because most people purchase technology for solving tasks, not because they have a craving for complexity. So "computer literacy" is about as important to society as "motor literacy".

Common sense is as important as ever, though. I.e. having a repository of background knowledge to be able to detect bullshit, fake news, and propaganda on the internet. That's the kind of old school literacy that we need.
To be honest, most publishers just follow industry trends. Many didn't join this industry to find new and inovative ways to make money. Rather they joined because they love the content---people who love sports, want to be sports journalists. People who find politics important want to be political bloggers.

So, whatever 90% of publishers do... we follow along and do the same. If most publishers are use advertisements, we do that because it's proven to work at least marginally. If most publishers user subscriptions services as they did in the 90s/2000s, then we follow along and do the same.
or We won't have true AI until AI explains the human brain as a "form of AI"
A nice complement to this article is the MIT 6.828 shell exercise. It provides the command loop and parsing for you, and then has you implement command execution, redirection, and pipes.

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2016/homework/xv6-shell.htm...
> Under what circumstances is working 100+ hours a week optimal? I can think of quite a few actually. Building/updating life critical systems come immediately to mind. Security vulnerability work, in the same vein.

I would say the opposite.

If someone is working on critical systems where literal life and death is at stake, I want them rested and at full mental capacity with the ability and time to think through repercussions to choices they make.
how do they think those tiny fans are going to generate enough thrust to fly that?
Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
Sugon’s cloud server system ups high-tech stakes
Is it every 10 minutes?

I haven't downloaded the app myself. However, I was under the impression the 'virtual walk' was some separate feature that when turned on, allows the person to monitor your whereabouts in near real-time. (like could watch a tiny dot moving on a map as you walk).

One update every 10 minutes is way too infrequent. I feel like the majority of walks people could use this with would take less than 10 minutes ...
context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F
Long story short - uBlock Origin is a fork by the original developer who worked on uBlock.
17 for '17: Microsoft researchers on what to expect in 2017 and 2027
They'd probably be better suited to giving nothing except thanks. Once you put a dollar figure on it, people naturally compare it to how much profit their time would get in other places.
When if ever has it helped you?

Meaning - yes, clearly it helps companies sell their products and services. But, as an individual consumer, how many times over the past year have you purchased something because its advertisement informed you of something that you truly needed but didn't know about?
I would like to add to this that it's incredibly important you use fixed seed, or at least logged seed tests for this.

If you fail to do this you get unreproducable ghost tests that you can never investigate if they happen to fail rarely.
I don't know if there is a service out there yet, but here is a script in python to download all your posted vines and liked vines. You just need to download some dependencies and replace the placeholders with your email and password.

https://gist.github.com/davoclavo/1567b3da0f6aa19019c0deb574...
> But cant police use the tracking info already once you report someone missing?

1. Police can, but won't until they consider it a missing person scenario, which oftdn involves considerable delay, at least for an adult -- and that's even if the police happen to prioritize that case.

2. For many people in various places for a variety of reasons, even aside from delay issues, the police aren't the first people they'd want to rely on. Or even on that list at all.

> This just seems like a way for busybody and manipulative people to stir up drama

There is some risk of that, but there's also empowerment of people to create their own effective support networks of real, personal trust.
> majority of people don't know regex

the majority of people who call themselves programmers and sysadmins don't know regex.
A phone is a media consumption device, not a computing device.
New York City's History of Resistance, in One Riotous Map – Atlas Obscura
It has been fixed in Ubuntu and OpenVZ:

https://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3151-1/

https://virtuozzo.com/linux-kernel-security-exploit-fix/
Honestly, good. I'm all for freedom of speech and not censoring information, but this is crossing the line. All pizzagate has done so far is put real lives at risk and make peoples' lives shitty over what is, at best, circumstantial evidence and happenstance.
WTF - I know Google employees troll this forum to build brand and influence, but squelch criticism? Come on. What ever happened to the 'don't do evil' company?
I can only speak to what we do at Bleacher Report, but we were mostly Ruby - now Ruby is mostly legacy apps.

Elixir for the services and Node for the client/frontend is how we're rolling now. I don't think any of the Ruby guys want to go back.

While we're not against Ruby - and as I said, we still use it - at our scale Elixir is much more performant & scales better.
If our brains would work fully all the time, our head would boil and explode. I don't see how this is so new.

I am glad that functioning of the brain is understood much better. Also, this could be utilized if we could find ways to increase focus, maybe even artificially, well artificially until brain gets trained for full flow state for example.
> If my parents had received a push notification the moment I left school, my teenage years would have been utterly miserable, instead of just mostly miserable.

Incidentally you can just leave your phone at home, or turn it off.
Réplique De Montre Rolex Oyster Perpetual Cosmograph Daytona La Revue
It also leaves most of Europe uncovered. I can only use Lex for demos there, no commercial services. People want to speak their own language and an English only service will always lose against a native language one. Hopefully they'll add other languages.

Did any non US English native speaker experience Amazon's language recognition? I assume it understands your language easily, but does it?
If you need something similar that works on iOS (and Android), take a look at https://pushover.net/

I use it for some personal automation scripts that might need to get my attention if something goes wrong.
If you don't need low latency and are ok with the extra architectural overhead... there's nothing wrong with that.

Different use cases
Good detailed piece, but I think it could have used more details about Enchant's decisions rather than just summarizing what options are out there.

For instance, you mention two async communication strategies (message broker and webhooks), but not which you picked and why.

In the case of complex workflows, you picked decentralized interactions, but you don't walk us through an example of how it works for you, what challenges you face and why it's a better fit than the problems using a centralized orchestrator.
On the one hand, my knee-jerk reaction to this involves a meaningful amount of Windows-hate. In short: there is a tight limit to the amount of trust I can give to any build on a platform that I can't build.

On the other hand, reproducible builds are /important/. The better we can trust our tools and verify that they're exactly what we think they are, the less we need to worry about the security of our tools, and the more we can get on with /using them/.

In the end, despite enabling the continued use of a deeply proprietary and anti-freedom platform, this is a good thing.
> This was during day time in a very large, safe city, (with ample access to public transportation, police officers, etc)

Knowing your kids location isn't something you always need, but when you do, you need it badly. Anything can happen in a 'large, safe city' - such as being run over. Parents knowing where you are when you don't turn up at home at the agreed time is OK with me.

My other question is: are you a parent yet? When you become a parent, your brain gets rewired, you start worrying about things you never worried about before.
I'd be willing to bet that the majority of people browsing don't know that it's even a standard feature to search within the text of a webpage.
If you want to see a pretty complete shell in a higher level language (Python, 11K lines of code), check out:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/

And a blog here: http://www.oilshell.org/ (index: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/20.html)

This article is good in that it shows that starting processes boils down to the system calls fork(), exec(), wait(), etc.

My shell has function calls, loops, conditionals, pipelines, subshells, command substitution, redirects, here docs, etc. (The code has some messiness, but the architecture is clean IMO.)

It turns out that these features require just a few more system calls -- dup2() and fcntl() to manipulate file descriptors, pipe(), and open() / read() / write() / close(). It's a good reminder of how simple Unix is. The complexity of the shell is basically all in string processing, and not in interfacing with the kernel (although the interactive parts of the shell do complicate things).

These system calls are all available in Python, so the code ends up being comparable to what you would write in C (and I'm in the process of porting to C++ now that the architecture has settled.)
Great stuff here.

Definitely some merit to reason #3 - people are more willing to work on something that they can easily build on top of.
It certainly made it easier for me to copy code and dissect it :)
To make matters worse, most programmers don't really know regex well enough to use it without reference, and even if they think they do, they probably don't know the problem domain or the nature of their regex to get it bug-free. See basically all attempts at parsing email addresses in regex for an example of this.

Then you have the gotchas... E.g. most implementations have performance issues in many scenarios, leading to situations like when SO went down a few months ago.
> I'd love to see more powerful, versatile searches generally available--booleans, date ranges, so on and so forth--but regex is ridiculous overkill for most people's use cases.

To do that you're going to reinvent regex, usually with a clunkier interface that has to be re-implemented everywhere. Or you'll come up with a text based system like google, which is again it's own domain specific language.

Edit - in fact, I just remembered we have such a tool where I work. Because the support folks were deemed to be too stupid to learn regex we created a custom "language" that turned out to be a bastardized, dumbed down version of them. Instead of the support staff learning a skill for life, they only learn our abomination.
I put "attack" in quotes because those are his own words. Again, I re-iterate my point, he sees them as an "attack". I do not believe people who dismiss his ideas set out to "attack" him.

> The people who claim to be on the side of science should be above playing these kinds of political games, and need to be very cautious about even the appearance of impropriety.

You are setting a high bar for them, and that's fine. But doesn't that mean the author of this article should also meet that high bar?

He's accusing people who disagree with him as playing politics, but his article does not provide proof. In essence, he is playing politics himself.

I don't think that's fair.

You are right about the "one data point" part. This article is just another baseless data point for climate change deniers. And that's a problem.

Actually, I went back to research the article a bit more clearly. He really should not have used that wikileak email as evidence. It really discredits him more than anything:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/19569
They teach you this stuff in product design classes.

TRIZ is a way of breaking down an engineering design problem into the thing you want to change, and the thing you can't change (a "contradiction"), then resolving it. A "TRIZ Matrix" is a reference tool that suggests ways of resolving conflicts between common design parameters (strength, weight, durability, manufacturing tolerance, etc.) based on a number of principles that have been validated over the years, like "nesting" or "prior action". Over the years, 40 standard principles (and 39 parameters) have emerged. They all have somewhat cryptic, consultant-handbooky names but make sense when you see some examples[1].

E.g., you have a beam and you want to make it stronger, but can't make it any thicker. You consult your matrix for "strength" vs "area" and get some suggestions such as "use composite materials". Or, applying the principle more generally, you try to extract techniques from the patent library or publications that resolve the problem.

[1]: https://www.triz.co.uk/files/triz_40_inventive_principles_wi...
> many [other places on the internet] have a vastly higher calibre of political discourse than HN.

Can you (or anyone) point us to these? Not being sarcastic, but also somewhat skeptical - I've never encountered another public forum of HN's overall quality.

I think the metaphor about the geology lecture is misleading - HN isn't a lecture hall, it's an exhibition hall, and if the only criteria for something being an exhibit is a capacity to intellectually stimulate, then I don't see why political discussion should be precluded.
If you get ACM membership you can get a good subset of Safari books and some other online book selections as part of the deal.
SoftwareSuggest Releases Top ERP Software Ranking List
You need to choose the "Demo Test" link.
That's awesome, thanks for the links!
How to Nice a Bash Function
I'll drop him a mail to suggest the feature. Might need a lot suggesting with the amount downloaded the app!

He's at moondownload.com if you want to start talking - it gets an amazing amount of updates for an app I thought feature complete about 4 years ago!
I see the argument of "not enough hours of practice" in some comments. I disagree. That would be true if there was a direct correlation between moderate proficiency in computers (e.g.: ability to independently reinstall your machine completely and diagnose which hardware component to replace after a failure).

The unmentioned problem here is that people are actively reluctant (this is tested, too) to learn the skills that would let them be more independent. I doubt this is entirely related to the total amount of hours spent at a computer.

In some way, computer literacy seems to be a similar scenario than cars: the homo simplex doesn't want to understand how it works, he/she just wants it to work while enjoying the luxury of not needing to understand it while posting duck faces on Instagram.

Let's face it, computer illiterates understand less, pay more and end up having lower purchasing power. Considering that this is entirely under their control, I find this quite fair (I have different opinions about Seniors, but that's another discussion).

To be honest, I can find only one valid reason for this to be an issue: civil liberties and human rights.

I'm intimately and increasingly concerned by how much civil liberties have been taken from citizens in "developed" countries in the recent years, and I am under the impression that this is the direct effect of computer illiteracy spread across all levels of the population.

Citizens are being asked to vote on laws relying on technological concepts they don't understand, and which end up in striping them from their rights.

That's what computer illiteracy is about and that's what (I think) the article should talk about... :(
> An abuser would know if the device was failing to report a location, or if the victim were to turn off the system, and could take action accordingly.

As much as we would like, technology will not solve trust issues in any relationship.
You don't, but when you want to combine the primitives to get stuff done it's much easier from the command line.
So let me get this straight: this guy turns C into an interpreted language (processed line-by-line)?
Are modern compilers truly that deterministic when processing arbitrarily complex code, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot example aside?

In the reconfigurable world, place and route engines run metaheuristics[1][2] to find good-enough solutions in an intractable search space. I'm imagining if there's a compiler stage which implements even a single optimization heuristic, any prospect of hash-wise reproducibility goes out the window?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm
The problem comes when they want to pay you like you worked 30hr.
"you can move an endpoint along the curve without changing the remainder of the curve" Is trivial true. Think of a curve as t(0..1)->p as a function. Change (0..1) to (0..a) with a<=1. It's the same function, just scale t by 1/a first.