skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Can you name one source of pollution suspected of causing health issues, that meets the criterion of falsifiability from evidence?

Certainly -- I can name a dozen, each of them demonstrated using scientific methods. Asbestos. Ionizing radiation. Sunlight. Tobacco. And so forth. Each of these can be shown to cause health issues in vitro as well as in vivo -- using properly designed, scientific animal studies.

> So we're always at the mercy of spurious correlations.

Not for a scientifically educated population, which -- if it existed -- would reject this sort of pseudoscience.

A recent example of a shaky correlation that will doubtless shape public policy is this one:

Link: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/01/shootings-us-s...

Title: "Shootings in U.S. schools are linked to increased unemployment"

Quote: "A rigorous Northwestern University study of a quarter-century of data has found that economic insecurity is related to the rate of gun violence at K-12 and postsecondary schools in the United States. When it becomes more difficult for people coming out of school to find jobs, the rate of gun violence at schools increases." (Emphasis added.)

Note the terms/phrases "linked", "is related to" and the tendentious final sentence that tries to nail a nonexistent cause-effect relationship.

Obviously the original study cannot support this conclusion -- it reports a correlation, not a link, not a cause followed by an effect.

This is a practice called "data mining" -- underemployed researchers look for correlations between things, then publish papers describing the correlations, usually but not always with appropriate disclaimers ("Correlation is not causation, much more research is needed"), but irresponsible journalists then turn correlations into cause-effect relationships, as in this case.

In popular articles like this one, the word "linked" is often used to magically turn a correlation into a cause-effect relationship, because it means two things are bound together and move as one. Coincidences become pseudoscience.

> Consider cigarettes ...

Not a good example for your viewpoint. Rigorous, double-blind falsifiable animal studies demonstrate the carcinogenic properties of cigarettes.

> Yet, at some point, the observational evidence starts to pile up and one has to make decisions based on that.

Are you arguing that we should do without science? Without the benefit of science, the U.S. concluded that Eastern Europeans were less intelligent than others, and a resulting changed immigration policy condemned a huge number of Jews and others to death during the Nazi era. Later, more objective intelligence tests came to the opposite conclusion, and Mr. Yerkes, the responsible psychologist, wrote a confessional mea culpa that nearly no one read. This is just one example, there are many.

When we do without science, we should at least acknowledge that we're doing without science, and show an appropriate amount of skepticism about the conclusions we draw.
This is such a terrible idea. By far the main reason I go to IMDb is to see and participate in the discussions on the movie I just watched.
Hey Jason, I hadn't considered that . I looked at this as quick little project to get my creative juices flowing. I'm happy to put the code up on GitHub. Offhand, what would you add to this?
Also Akka for Java/Scala.
You are conflating genius with productivity. In so doing you are missing the point of both your parent and grandparent poster.
Don' t waste your time. It's french politics. And from now on I'll downvote anything promoting a specific candidate on HN as this is not the place to discuss about it.
the watched list is the list with your ratings.
When I was just getting started, in the late eighties, I was chastised for doing something that today I would call unit testing. The thought was that I should be knowledgeable and confident enough not to have to test these low level things, we already do integration and acceptance testing. I was wasting time.

<grinds dentures>
This is really cool! I love how it lights up with the color of the candy it's sorting each time.

I'm curious, have you tried putting both Skittles and M&M's in the same batch? I'd be interested to see if it determines that the purple Skittles and the brown M&M's are the same color, for example
The only problem i have across is speed of my brain, i want to understand faster, for example i want to complete a whole material of abstract algebra (for 2,3 year ungradate math students) in one week or less. But my brains says nah.

I keep pushing it, but after 7,8 hour a day, its performance hits a block and i have to play game or talk to a friend to start again.
They actually can say it. It's all just propaganda to trick people into aspiring to power instead of aspiring to be good citizens. Wealth is more important than social responsibility.
True about the tunnels but in fact they generally make things better not worse. The problem with roads in Norway is that there is almost always a hill of granite rock or a lake or fjord in the way. My 22km commute to Drammen hugs the edge of the fjord and the longest straight is probably not more than about 300m.
Since mathematical skills (broadly defined) are a component of IQ, this is dangerously close to "Basketball is a getting the ball in the hoop game. Anyone who tells you otherwise is kidding themselves." True, but less informative than you might think...

(This is not to comment on the underlying question of whether everyone has the potential to be a great mathematician, just a particular type of reasoning).
Your mom's story and the one on the article really want me to track as many bio stats on a regular basis as possible. Ideally there would be done kind of centralized system that monitors them and also identified patterns across the population. To me that's obviously the future of medicine. Only the privacy issues are a real concern. The technical challenges (measuring the values cheaply and AI) will be overcome.
It's not any lack on your part. F# doesn't really support the really helpful abstraction techniques like parameterised modules or typeclasses. You can roll your own typeclasses using just simple records containing functions. It's easy, idiomatic, and it works statically. E.g., imagine you have a users 'service', with operations 'get by ID', 'add', and 'rename':

(** Type-safe IDs using a phantom type. *)
module Id =
type 'a t = private T of uint64

let of_uint64 u = T u
let to_uint64 (T u) = u

(** A domain type. *)
module User =
type t = private { id : t Id.t; name : string; age : int }

let make uid name age : t = ...
...

(** Users service typeclass. *)
module User_service =
type t =
{ get_by_id : User.t Id.t -> User.t Async
add : User.t -> unit Async
rename : string -> User.t Id.t -> unit Async }

let db : t =
{ get_by_id = fun uid -> ...
add = fun u -> ...
rename = fun name uid -> ... }

let test : t =

Now, injecting a user service dependency into any function is equivalent to passing in a parameter of type `User_service.t`.

As for free monads, I don't think F# will make them easy. If you notice, one commenter in that GitHub discussion mentioned they were doing a lot of copy-pasting to implement FMs. Imho that's a bad sign.
Might it not be that men are referred to as 'boys' regularly in certain contexts but it is simply not remarked upon because there is no historical discrimination against men?
At the (not-BE) college college where I teach, the math majors who are female significantly outnumber those who are male. We don't have any program or special selection. We just find that the students who succeed at math are female, in the great majority.
> No, you are the ones asserting "don't use such languages".

Oops, did you read that as imperative? It was just meant to be present tense. I didn't mean that you were recommending people not use these languages, just saying jobs aren't presently available in most companies. I missed the ambiguity when I wrote it; my bad.

My point was that the fact that you are not currently being allowed to use these languages doesn't imply that new languages won't be added to the list of "Java, C#, JavaScript, C++, SQL" - there was a time when none of those were on the list. It may be that there is something in particular that will prevent the addition of "these languages" but it hasn't been spoken to.
The legibility and simplicity are my favorite things about Go. I know that I can fearlessly dive into other people's source to figure out what's going on without running into 15 levels of indirection hell and a bunch of language features/idioms that I'm not familiar with for one reason or another.
I'm feeling that React Native is just another artificial constraint we developers have to deal with. I would have preferred it if Facebook (and/or Apple, Google) would have pushed WebApps more instead. A web browser, with the right amount of love, would be more than capable of doing the stuff that React Native can do.
I've used wal-e in production continuously since around march of 2011, so almost 6 years, and it's been great.
The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)
Thanks for taking the time to write the suggestions and detail the pain points that exist at the moment.

I had heard about Dafny but hadn't seen the tutorial!

> Additionally, making usable developer tools is an orthogonal skill from doing original research, and as a researcher, I both am not rewarded for making usable developer tools, and think that making usable developer tools is much, much harder than doing original research.

When you're saying they're orthogonal, are you effectively saying that researchers generally don't have 'strong programming skills' (as far as actually whacking out code). If so, how feasible would it be for someone who is not a researcher, but a good general software engineer, to work on the developer tools side of things?
Oh, I don't know. I was a daily user of Usenet for years, but the vast majority of the time I don't miss it. (Yes, I know Google still has some unevenly preserved and mostly difficult to access portion of the content.)

Here's the point: if you put some of the great content that was created there 25 or 30 years ago in front of the current generation, what is the general reaction? A yawn, that's what.

It might be fascinating in a few thousand years, but I won't be around then, and the planet might not be either, so why should I care?
I am not surprised that a telco centric forcasts would be locked into a switched circuit mind-set.

eve in 96/97 interviewing at a british telecom board the 3 (all mainframe guys) just did not get the internet at all - ironically the board was at 207 old street
Minimal state = kleptocracy, rule by thugs and will to power.
I am one of those statistical points that mess with completion percentages just because I use lessons as podcasts while I am driving.
To avoid google snooping. I find that the combination of Firefox and DuckDuckGo serves 99% of my needs and protects my privacy
Whats the best equipment for making your own debitcards
Climate Scientists versus Climate Data
I've often idly thought about such a machine but this is much more beautiful than anything I would come up with, well done! I expect you'll be working on some statistical analysis on M&M color distribution now that you've got this part finished?

Also, what's the difference between processing M&Ms and Skittles? Is it just the expected colors?
Thanks. I just installed morse toad. I like it already.
That's why I try to buy things that are locally made, or that I can discern the quality myself and judge whether it's worth the extra money. As you mentioned, the artisan tries to maximize the taste (or quality in general), and the artisan also tends to be a local shop. With that being said, I have yet to find artisan broccoli.
Or maybe they mean that you HAVE to use interface{} for any reasonable kind of generics, such as developing generic data structures, or generic handlers for RPC interfaces allowing arbitrary nesting?

Even the stdlib uses interface{} everywhere now: https://tip.golang.org/pkg/sort/#Slice
I would mention that statistics like "$10/day" don't necessary capture the average living conditions of people.

$10/day may yield a room over your head, a dull but acceptable meal and a somewhat austere routine in one place (whatever third world nation) but may yield a chaotic struggle for survival in another area (the USA).

Which is not to say that poverty isn't eating a lot of people but rather that guarantees of food, cloth and shelter can be more useful metrics than median income in various places (world median income is rising but does that mean an increase people's ability to realize their geniuses, visions, passions etc?).
Normally it's the other way around, Go gets compared to other "Systems Programming" languages because somehow services got lumped in with that name over the last few years.

To me they're very discrete things, if you can't manually manage memory(raw pointers and the like) then it's not a System Programming language.
> I'm happy to avoid the cognitive load from deciding how to most politely generate/propagate an exception

This is like saying "I'm happy to avoid the cognitive load of having to specify how my code should behave in case of an error".

Sure, your code is simpler as a result. It's also more buggy.
> That's fine, I agree with your assessment, even though you are implying that by raising a question, I have somehow lost an argument :)

I am not implying it, I am stating it outright. Your "argument" here is so tissue-paper thin as to boggle the mind and it is not even worth wasting time doing a point-by-point refutation.

It is the burden of "other people" to deal with the negative externalities of driving, specifically those "other people" who decide to get in a car and drive. Don't like it? Drive somewhere else.
It makes cyclomatic complexity explicit that is otherwise hidden by exceptions.
This one is so fast! Nice Job!
> I have 31 tabs open now (sometimes 200+)
each this level
How do you achieve this? Firefox for me tends to crash long before I reach this level
Well this "pile of shit" is the only reliable way I have to auickly open and export csv files from various sources, so I'd like to thank all contributors for this, especially considering that their multi-millions dollars concurrents are unable to read/produce a text file with delimiters.
So I tried Alacritty the last time it was posted, and found that it was notably laggy compared even to vte-based terminal emulators, let alone urxvt. Maybe my use case is atypical (nouveau drivers, 4k monitor), but I was underwhelmed given that Alacritty claims to be "the fastest terminal emulator in existence." It's definitely not there yet, or at least it wasn't a couple of weeks back.
> and having it readily available with a Ctrl+click in VS Code

I haven't used VS Code since the beta, but it can do that now? Wow. I should give it a try.
Now I'm waiting for the story about how they are vacuuming up the output of all those license plate readers.

Meaning, there is no current such story I'm aware of. But I'm certain it's being worked on. And if not by them, directly, that they are ensuring they have a feed from/to the resulting system.

We encounter little in the way of stories about all this data collection, that demonstrates these agencies' claimed restraint. At this point, you pretty much have to figure, if and when they can, they will.

P.S. Think that "domestic" jurisdiction will stop them? I'll just remind you, among other things, of the stories about just how much of the U.S. can be interpreted as being withing 100 miles of an international border. The CPB's jurisdiction within that territory, per reported documents. And the CPB's "need" for data analysis of people transiting its... "system".

I'm just speculating... But so far, it seems almost no speculation has been too outlandish to be eventually realized.
If chrome ran within tmux, that would totally be my approach. Sadly, there remain GUI's that are better than TUI's (or rather: sadly tmux can only multiplex TUIs).
Not sure why this is being downvoted without comment, considering that it is what accounts for the example that the parent comment chose.
cat could tell but it probably wouldn't be a good design. Calling isatty is easy, and I think GNU cat already does so and buffers differently. But how can it tell what raw binary data did to your terminal? First you'd need to program all the different terminal types into cat (probably by using termcap) which isn't great simple "Unix" design to begin with. Then you can't just reset the terminal after running cat. You need to see if the binary data screwed up the terminal. That isn't in termcap and is probably intractable in the general case.

While catting actual random data is contrived, using ssh is not. What if the connection is broken while you're in vi. Vi switches to the alternate screen and then scrolling stops working. If you don't know what happened it's not clear why. How can ssh fix this other than acting like tmux and parsing every terminal command sequence? I'm not convinced there is a simple fix.

This doesn't even get into encoding issues. Some UTF-8 sequences are terminal commands. The UTF-8 encoding for U+00DF (the German eszett) contains a sequence which will cause some terminals to wait for a termination byte you wont ever send.

Plan 9 had the right idea: do away with terminal command sequences altogether. But that only works there because you can take your "terminal" and turn it into a GUI window.
>Go is a useful language, but it's a language that has purposefully stripped out all the magic. People like magic, they miss it.

Agreed, and I'd further argue:

1) most people driving Ferraris aren't skilled enough to drive them properly

2) most people driving Ferraris have no need to corner at 120 MPH

3) most people driving Ferraris are just trying to show off

4) most people driving Ferraris are more likely to hurt themselves and others than to save the day through the car's performance and handling

(To be clear: I think we're in agreement, but the metaphor is worth explaining in depth)
That of course is your perogative. While HN is not primarily for politics, sometimes the discussion is warranted, and certainly there's been a lot on Trump and Clinton over the past months. Personally I wouldn't want to dismiss it out of hand. Though, if the discussion persists in French I'd likely flag such comments.
Presbyopia is certainly a major drag, and it would be great to have a fix for it.

The ultimate fix would be to replace the lens in the eye with one that can focus. There are people working on that (e.g. [0]).

[0] http://ocumetics.com/
> The U.S. would need 63 percent more asphalt than its consumes now just to pave roads at the rate it reached a decade ago

Interesting how the article fails to mention that asphalt isn't the only way to build roads. Unless you live in an area with a lot of snow and rain, concrete roads are a better economical and ecological choice [1]. I'd prefer a limestone based road vs a petroleum based road if I wasn't living in area with frequent rain. Concrete is also lighter in color which makes it retain less of the sun heat, it's more pleasant to walk near it.

> with demand for construction materials in Texas rising 30 to 40 percent

Interesting fact to mention, except "construction materials" != asphalt. In fact, many road in Texas are already concrete based (which should make northern states sympathize more with Texas when they freak out over 0.5 inch of snow) and recent city road projects favor replacing asphalt with concrete [2]

Finally, people have seen what recent innovation in concrete pavements can bring, with this permeable concrete that instantly absorbs thousands of gallon of water [3].

[1] http://www.brighthubengineering.com/concrete-technology/4585...

[2] https://blog.cstx.gov/2017/02/01/concrete-streets-will-save-...

[3] http://www.tarmac.com/solutions/readymix/topmix-permeable/
Really?

By far the main reason I go to IMDb is to look up actors and movies. And when I did accidentally see a comment, it was usually pretty low-quality.
Looks great! Thanks for sharing it!

Now, if only it would also support websockets. :p
Random Agent Spoofer reminds me of:
https://xkcd.com/1105/
Same here (both Firefox and Chrome download a 0 byte pdf; on Firefox the video errors, on Chrome it plays).
Comments like these really make me believe that it is people like you who are killing the Linux desktop.

Of all the window managers and desktop environments I have tried the last years on Linux, Unity, Gnome3, and Cinnamon are the only ones that don't look and behave as if they are from fucking 2003. Those others might be enough for those people who have stopped adapting and like to be left alone under their rock, but for me it's just frustrating having to use Desktops that are basically some half baked variation of Windows XP.

Let me put it this way: if the desktop environments you so eloquently despise wouldn't exist, I would be writing this comment on a Mac and not on Linux.
I like the disciple.

But the change is real. Google has been gradually become more and more conventional. That probably was what Larry wanted in the move of creating Alphabet, after all.
Most annoying is the need to write in ES6/Babel today, and all these js hipsters that really believe this is the future of web development. I totally hate Babel with it's dozens of Webpack patches/plugins to make it work. Oh, and don't forget your (Airbnb style) linter if you want to be politically correct.

No one needs Babel to write stellar code IMHO. Unfortunately it is not about the quality of the code you write, it is about being politically correct. This whole ES6/ES7 thing is much based on what Coffeescript, Livescript, etc.. already did much better more than 5 years ago. And I dare to guess that most of the Babel proponents don't even realise it's just a transpiler that they will need till the end of the projects live.

note: I expect serious down votes as opposing Babel is almost a serious crime nowadays and proves my unlimited stupidity.

No, web development is not really exiting nowadays, it is more terrifying, where the hype goes tomorrow? Maybe soon I will be forced to write in MS Typescript if I want to be taken seriously. Same counts for Redux because Flux is so 2014.. you must be very brave not using Redux! I can go on and on, way too many examples..

Finding a web developer job now is particularly about complying to made up standards that become more complex every day. And I've seen quit some horrible code bases that perfectly comply! It's a very sad reality.
That last one part i don't believe in.
Ask HN: How do I assess the best tech skill I have to find the right job title?
What I am doing for myself is full stack development. On top of that I will need to be the business man. Or in other words, doing a little bit of everything is like being a generalist, many criticising articles have been written about that. I'm not sure I will succeed on my own. I don't need to earn much, but I need a confirmation that my skills are valued by someone out there in case I will fail on my own.

So I'm looking to assess what is the best skills I have for which employers would employ me. I need to find one or more job titles. I can't call myself a programmer, nor a front end developer, nor a database administrator or system architect or graphic designer. But I can't apply for those jobs that require only social skills and no tech skills. Maybe you have a lot of experience and need an idea for a new project, and that could be to suggest job titles to people.
May I point you to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I think you'd enjoy it! http://www.hpmor.com/
Because the stdlib is using them more and more? As someone mentioned, even closing an already closed channel can panic. Calling the random number generator with a negative limit panics.

And there’s nothing like checked Panics so you’d know if one will happen or not.
The most simple way to monitor changes on directory using a bash script