skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Political activism platform
After recently coming across news that representatives in my state have introduced problematic and comparatively faulty legislation in the upcoming session, I've been moved to start a bit of a grassroots effort locally to combat the passage of those bills.

I've seen quite a few sites that allow people to enter their zip code and find their representative, does anyone know how I can find, or has anyone written and open-sourced this kind of lookup implementation?

Failing that, are there any platforms that this community would recommend that would allow a simple landing page with copy text, facts and info with linked sources, and then a web form to find their representative? Perhaps even a WordPress plugin that I should look at and build on top of?

Ultimately I'm trying to avoid people leaving the page to perform the lookup since I can't guarantee that the receiving site will either handle incoming load, remain online, or even have the most up to date rep info. If someone's leaving the page, I'm hoping it's primarily to read linked sources from the "facts and info" section.

Thanks!
Potatoes, rice, pasta, many root vegetables etc, can be bought in bulk when on sale. Buy the meat that's on sale that week. Buy the fresh veggies that are on sale that week. Pick a meat (or other protein), 2-3 veggies, and a carb, and that forms the bulk of your meals.
I am not sure what can be gained by comparing human languages or speech to computer language paradigms. I mean I could easily encode
"go get a cup, and I'll get you water." as (ocamlish/F#ish)

get_a_cup |> Option.map(fill_with_water)
Oh, and there are plenty of those! I've been trying to incorporate experiences as I go, and there's a good amount of nasty experiences I make mention of in this post: https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-u...

But I will definitely look to put something together that incorporates more of what you're talking about - thanks for the input!
Which leads to loss of trust in Court System. Uncertainity in judgement is something to minimize.
Show HN: Instagram year in review
Most Americans simply need to eat less. America is not facing an epidemic of rickets, scurvy or beriberi, but it is facing an epidemic of obesity-related diseases. The average American is eating ~50% more calories than they need. That caloric surplus is the dominant issue.

Skipping dessert is free. Not snacking between meals is free. Serving smaller portions is free. Apples are cheaper than candy bars, carrots are cheaper than meat. Whole grains and pulses are the basic sustenance for most of the poorest people on earth.

The problem is simply too much food, available too cheaply. There is an abundance of tempting, calorie-dense foods. Given the choice between spending $0.25 on a banana and $1 on a candy bar, most people choose the candy bar. This is why we're seeing increasing mortality in middle-income countries - when you overcome the diseases of poverty, you quickly start developing the diseases of wealth.
Stop posting physics articles on hacker news. Just because everyone here has watched too much Star Trek and Star Wars doesn't mean we actually understand a single solitary shred of this stuff...although it sounds cool.
Customer will see token anyway
It's typically written up in meeting notes and someone publishes them if it happens during a meeting. If it happens outside of a meeting it likely happened in GitHub or the ECMAScript mailing list.

The person(s) opposing have likely already shared their view point with the community at different stages. Proposals are not simply created and championed with zero feedback from the ECMAScript folks util they're proposed at a meeting.
California AG Threatens Legal Action Against Uber Over Self-Driving Cars
Check out https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.00061 - "Towards A Virtual Assistant That Can Be Taught New Tasks In Any Domain By Its End-Users."
To completely solve the hygiene problem on an academic level, you have to use gensyms for all references generated by the macro, including all function symbols.

Lisp macros don't bother doing this because the Lisp-2 separation provides adequate hygiene. Programs which choose to lexically shadow standard functions like cons or list in the function namespace are considered to be sticking a fork in the proverbial toaster, and so that is not handled.

That would't work as well in Scheme because the mere presence of a variable called list in the user's code would interefere with a (list ...) function call generated by a macro.

Also providing hygiene are packages. If macro-generated code references private symbols in the macro's own package, everything is cool. Packages take care of the problem for nonstandard functions. You just don't use another package's symbols for local functions and variables, and that's that.
>> "Alexa, weather" is less convenient because she doesn't know that I prefer Celsius over Fahrenheit. This is unfortunate, but at least she can do a conversion.

There's a device-level setting in the mobile app to set Alexa's preferred system to Metric...
Airbnb Is Building a Flight-Booking Tool
Wow! This looks great.

I really like the power of emacs. It seems like Atom might be more powerful, thanks to its browser capabilities.

I've read that Atom is not great when it comes to how many resources is requires. Has it gotten better? Is there a timeline for Atom performance improvements?
TBF, that large comment precedes 150 lines of arbitrary hex strings without even a variable name to tell them apart. I'm normally someone who prefers the code to speak to itself, rather than have a large prose comment - but if I came across that in a code review without an accompanying fifteen line comment I'd probably flag it as needing some explanation.
You're nitpicking. GP said:

> If objects are mutable then the order of execution matters, and you have to trust the programmer to get the data flow and control flow to agree

My point is that, even in FP, as soon as you hit sequential operations (in your example, side effects), you're still bound by the execution order and the programmer getting it right (and how that is completely orthogonal to OOP or FP).

Order-dependent sequential operations are the programmer's responsibility regardless of paradigm.

I don't think OOP is inherently sequential. Your post made me realize GP is conflating OOP and imperative programming and his post makes sense if :%s/oop/imperative programming/.
BTW, adding another idea I just got:

Big data is about to take over the world. We'll have deep knowledge of even the most minute differences in outcome differences. Equality-of-outcome doctrine + big data is a recipe for disaster. You think politics are polarized right now? You ain't seen nothing yet.

It's important to measure what's important. If you're trying to lose weight, and measure your weight every morning (outcome), and you see it's stagnating, you'll be discouraged. If you knew that you had lost some fat and gained tons of muscle, you'd be much more encouraged. What you measure ends up controlling you.
Well, part of that deal is delayed pay, because the public sector pays a great deal less. Without this, you're going to get menial and do-littles in public service. ... Which the more I think about it, perhaps is the reason why they want to, so the Republicans can look at their bad performance and cut funds further. (Don't get me wrong, Democrats seems to like throwing money down holes for populous programs, which have their own set of regressive issues. I'm much for UBI, and scientific testing of laws and programs to determine if the benefit is actually helping. If not, eliminate and move it to help more, better.)

If you cut funds by what you can, and then blame them for bad performance, you can "punish them" with less money, getting even worse. Wash, rinse, repeat, until that program is effectively dead. We're seeing it in the schools right now, with "No Child Left Behind" and the similar takes across the country with it. Inner city schools have bad performance, primarily because of bad home life, poverty, lack of food and resources... But because they do bad for tests, they get less funds.

I always think, what would our system look like if we adequately funded our programs? Would the BMV be such a cesspool? Not hardly. Would dealing with government office be peachy? Well, no. But they would have quick serving times and adequate material and time response in larger issues. Instead, what I hear is "They're bad, so lets cut funding." which exasperates the problem by now cutting personnel, time, and physical resources.
That being said, I don't think the ability to learn and adapt. This is entirely a statement on semantics, but if I made a tic-tac-toe playing program that had every possible game state pre-programmed in, I would not hesitate to call it a game playing AI even though it lacks the ability to learn.
I didn't create any false dichotomy, I simply noted your original middlebrow dismissal of the article was based on the absurd premise that its criticism of a mining company for causing a problem and lowballing with compensation was analogous to the criticism meted out to those whose philanthropic proposals "observe or interact" with problems they couldn't fully solve. The mining company doesn't stand accused of observing problems whilst not doing enough to help, it stands accused of creating problems whilst paying off just enough to get a contract.

Nobody is suggesting the mining company is the "bad guys" for having an interest in making a profit. They are suggesting they might be the "bad guys" for allegedly exploiting the naivete of local residence to pay a pittance to wreck their environment.
If one forgets the (parentheses) you may or may not immediate or later can an error _somewhere_.

It isn't about the workaround -- it's about all the subtle bugs it will introduce in the edge-cases, for example:

f => () => {}
f(); // undefined instead of empty object
If you're missing an ingredient, just skip it or substitute it. Recipes are suggestions, not rules.
The alternative interpretation is that politicians and the people who elect them (meaning all of us) tend to be short sighted and underfund pensions for public workers. Many of those public workers are willing to work for less pay because of the pension, so in effect we are defrauding them. Detroit is an odd example to use as there we are dealing with a severe population crash, that's not the situation in California.
I believe that was the fundemental issue in the famous 'Oracle vs Google' trial
Fake news will be defined by the establishment or those with power.

I too find it strange the left is pushing this fake news narrative, so hard right as Trump is taking power.
And with practical applications as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission_tomography
LOL - yeah the other day when i was using Alexa, while I have to admit i enjoyed it, I decided that I just do not believe Amazon as a company has the data needed to create a truly immersive and useful solution.

I have hopes for Google Home (which i'm yet to try), but i actually think this will end up a two horse race between Apple and Google. I would completely leave Apple out of this, but Homekit is a pretty powerful concept (if done properly) given the number of iDevices out there.
But it's easy to forget, just once. For example:

x => () => {}
x(); // undefined instead of empty object

This can lead to immediate syntax bugs, eventual errors throws and silent semantic errors.

Which reinforces the whole argument that they should think a bit harder about all the new features.
I wonder if, in the future, it will be just as hard to find a "dumb" toaster/lightswitch/thermometer as it is to find incandescent bulbs.
Thank you for that. I was thinking; wait people actually care about the weather but this makes sense. As someone without kids, we have not checked the weather for over 10 years and so using that as an example 'what people talk about' sounded weird to me.
Not the ones in Scarborough.
There's indication that 00/FF contrast can be problematic, especially for dyslexics [1].

The ridiculous part is the amount the contrast is often toned down as a result. No one benefits from a sea of grey on grey bordering on unusable.

[1] http://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/dyslexic/eyes-and-dyslexia
Surely it was someone's job to project these future costs when putting such promises into employment contracts. And I would also presume that these future cost calculations should result in some amount of planning to understand what the minimal amount of tax revenue or investment would have to be to support the future obligation.

However, even if that happens, how do employees prevent politicians from mucking about with those plans so that they can receive the retirement benefits that helped convince them to take jobs? These fears are why someone must have encouraged Congress to muck about in the USPS budgets wrt retirement accounts.

The only solution I see is mandating that (gov't) employers pay, during an employee's employment, into a retirement account such that politicians and bosses can't touch the money, and only the employee can do anything with it during retirement.
All pension funds are pyramid schemes. We need to move to fixed contribution plans for giving people money for retirement. The existing schemes can only be propped up by more taxes or by slashing benefits.
I am not sure public sector work pays less than equivalent private sector work on the whole.

I don't know for certain either way. My unsubstantiated belief was that it was higher and sometimes significantly so especially taking into account benefits, vacation time, and overtime policies.

So citation needed.
Actually, our "dexterous" robots are below human beings among many axes.

Weight being high is one of them, but also sensors for present pose, present load, anything touching the armature, flexing, .... Humans are much better at that, and it's important stuff!
Why wouldn't they be allowed to unionize? In America you have a right to a union.
...no, it's literally saying "here are the settings you need to make sure you only use efficiently implemented algorithms"
> Eating healthy food _is_ costlier than not caring about what you eat

Can you point to some examples of unhealthy food that's actually cheap, in terms of price per weight unit?

I simply cannot think of anything from that category that rivals basic rice, veggies, sale-price meat, etc. If you're going solely on cheap, you will generally end up in these "healthier" categories. If you're going on "don't care", you'll not stick in the cheap and be more pricey, plus more likely in convenience items of questionable to poor healthiness.

It's funny how often I see some tempting convenience food or treat or whatever, and notice that its price per weight is more expensive than a quality steak.
> So are you suggesting [...]

If you want to check if this is what happened - yes. I'm giving you a workaround to check, not advertising a workflow.

> Maybe add a warning to that submission that it was classified as spam

I don't expect they'd go for that... Marking things as spam is useful for the readers. For the writer it just mean, "keep rewriting the data to find out how our filters work and how to bypass them".
Well, that would be caring, at least a little.
Comparison of Mortality Rates for Patients Treated by Male vs. Female Physicians
You chose whether or not you are insulted by something. I have no control over whether or not you are insulted. I can try to insult you, i can try to say the worst things possible to insult you - thats "being insulting"...

If you were standing next to say, a very enlightened, mindful buddhist monk - you can be insulting to him, but he will likely never be insulted. Because he choses to not be insulted.

Being insulted, having hurt feelings, taking offense - these are all acts that the "victim" themselves control 100%. Nobody can make you feel insulted, nobody can make your feelings hurt, nobody can make you feel offended. These are all choices you make yourself. You're the only person in this entire world that can make yourself feel hurt, offended, or insulted.
Who gets to decide what news is actually fake? This is a rabbit hole that leads to nowhere good - with legislation like this, the authorities become the sole arbiters of truth.

So long democracy, was nice knowing you...

Edit - lol at all the comments suggesting that the government may abuse this law getting down-voted.
FWIW, if anyone wants to discuss, join us on our Slack channel via http://perfect.ly

My handle on that channel is, surprisingly, the same as here, @iamjono.
> An observable is definitely not a stream of promises, because an observable is push-based, while a stream of promises would be pull-based.

Why would a stream of promises be pull-based? That seems like a pretty odd assumption to me.
Depends what you are wanting to achieve, to be honest. Writing the same code can help make you faster at writing that code. This can be annoying to people who are higher level coders, but the reality is that intrinsic quality of code is easy to complain about, but hard to model the importance of. In large because its importance is quite low.

That is, if what they are writing works, despite having what could be seen as mistakes to a more disciplined practitioner, then what is the problem?

Consider, someone that has put together Ikea cabinets every week for the past year is probably hella fast at it by now. Can they replace a carpenter? Doubt it. Are they bad at what they do? Doubt it.
Thank you for what you did, even if you failed. I've been looking at an app for that for a long time, and even collect data if I had to, to participate.
Expecto – a new smooth testing framework for .Net
Different areas of technology have profoundly different dynamics and interactions.

Much of the 19th century boom drove directly off of coal and what it made possible (steel, electricity, lights, electric motors, locomotives, mang), and toward the end, petroleum and automobiles. Henry Ford's Model T began production in 1901, just after the end of the era, and the Wright Brother's flight was in 1903, enabled by low-weight, high-oputput gasoline engines (we've improved considerably since then).

Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History provides a really good illustration of various technolgies and capabilities, many with semi-log plots (log power vs. time). They show the overlapping-band dynamics you mention, but that applies pretty much exclusively to energy technologies.

The thing about information technology is that it only buys you so much. The Boeing 747, and for that matter, the Dreamliner, both still continue the design originally pioneered with the 707 (and its bomber/transport predecessors). We've added avionics and controls and engine tuning and a slew of other elements which are far more advanced than was was available in the 1950s and 1960s when the airframes were first produced. There's been a slight improvement in fuel efficiency, enough that today's turbofans are roughly comparable with prop-driven planes of the 1950s (props are more efficient, but slower, than jets). There's been a big increase in safety, witness the HN article a few days back noting that it's been 15 years since a major widebody jet fatality by a US carrier (smaller planes and non-US carriers, yes). Actual travel times have increased since the 1970s, due mostly to security checks, also some congestion and routing changes. Prices are down from the late 1970s, but not from the pre-oil-embargo days, at least not by nearly as much. (The airline deregulation story gets hugely oversold on that point.)

Genomics is another form of information processing, ultimately. It's not clear to e that it will have the same impacts as, say, clean fresh water supplies, sewerage, municipal waste removal, and public health and nutrition programs. Certainly not at the same costs.
Depends on the evidence, people are not always rational. I remember being called crazy before the Snowden leaks, then afterwards everyone just knew it was happening all along.

People have different standards for evidence and coping mechanisms for uncomfortable truths.
This, written with PHP and Objective C, is far more inspirational than the career-infused blog postings typical here.
I agree completely with the sentiments of this article, but it didn't touch enough on what's preventing the mainstreaming of cryptography and security.

The two big reasons I see every day are:

1. Cryptography is difficult to use effectively, and it's not getting easier fast enough.

2. Cryptography and security are seen by users as the developer's problem, and seen by developers as the user's problem.
instead, programmers are given a fips-compliant "black box" drop-in openssl replacement which they're not expected to question, right? :)
I especially appreciated this:

"Think of building your SaaS app like a game of chess. You want to win the game with the least number of moves possible, but you have to think about how each of your moves potentially affects the overall game (and your chances of winning)."

The analogy is even better with a one-person SaaS startup because you really can only make one move at a time (you can only do one thing at a time). The value in this series of articles is to get you to think strategically about those early moves and not to waste too much time thinking about the moves in the future that you currently have no visibility into.
Well, I went to school in Germany - stuff's different here, ofc.
New Clues as to Why Boyajian’s Star Is Dimming
> I haven't had a Big Mac in about 25 years... maybe they're better now.

10/10 optimism
Public workers don't settle for less pay than private sector workers, that is an often repeated talking point that simply isn't true.[0] A garbage man, janitor, administrator, etc. working for the government isn't going to magically make more salary by quitting and going to the private sector. Top level employees can make more in the private sector, but the average worker cannot. Public employees make more money, are very difficult to fire, and have far more benefits than most workers.

[0] https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/federal-worker-pay
10 MUST-USE Words in Marketing Any Product or Business Online
Do you have an iPhone (not being snarky, but with voice-activated "Hey Siri...", it's effectively the same thing.)

Google's Pixel phone does the same thing.
Yes, sure

(defvar *chip*)

(defun memory (&optional (chip *chip*))
(chip-memory chip))

Just binding the variable is enough. If you want to hide this variable as an implementation detail, you can use a macro:

(defmacro with-chip (chip &body body)
`(let ((*chip* ,chip))
,@body))

You could also have a symbol-macrolet so that "memory" expands as a call, i.e. "(memory)", but then you would have the same syntax as the above poster wanted to avoid ;-) (except that accesseors already provide setf functions)
The basic problem is cultural fragmentation of the middle class who are the main market for any product (the middle classes are the only class with the money and size to be worth mass selling).

There is so much more diversity now in what middle class people want that it is impossible for one idea to appeal to a large section of the population. When everyone middle class listened to same music, watched the same TV shows, saw the same movies, ate the same food, drove the same cars, lived in the same houses, etc it was possible to create a product that appealed to most. Today that is no longer possible so all ideas are small and niche.

Regulation and risk avoidance has also played a strong role in killing ideas. For example, most of pharmaceuticals developed in the 1950 to 1970s could not be brought to market today.