skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think claiming that the LDS church hasn't been hostile toward LGBT people is pretty disingenuous, much like claiming they haven't been historically explicitly racist towards black people.

One doesn't have to much more than a google search for "Lds gay quotes" to find a long history of negative teachings from church leaders about gay people. The church recently expended a ton of time and effort to attempt to block gay people from being able to be married. The church had policies about gay behavior (even non-sexual in nature) at its universities until recently. It has had a role in forced gay conversion therapy, which is a horrendous practice.

Even setting aside official teachings, church members in Utah have been incredibly hostile towards gays in the past. I grew up Mormon, and I heard all the things people said about gay people. I worked at the LDS church, where I overheard 2 other employees bemoaning the fact that it was 'probably illegal' to bring a machine gun to a planned gay rally in SLC and mow down all the gays there. Others who were there just chuckled and mumbled about political correctness. I wish I could say that attitudes like that were the exception, rather than the rule.

I appreciate that the church leaders are trying to take a much more moderate approach, and I know there are a lot of church members who work hard to treat LGBT people appropriately and work to make it more accepted by others, and it is really encouraging to see some of the changes over the past 5 years. I do think, however, it is wrong to pretend that the LDS church hasn't contributed to the problem, and I think even the current teaching of "hey, so god decided to tell us that you actually can't change your sexuality, so it is cool if you are gay, but we still think it is kind of icky, so don't do gay stuff" is really hard for someone in that situation. Can you put yourself in their shoes for a minute, and think about how you'd feel in that situation?
It will be interesting to see what happens when machines and algorithms really start coming for jobs on that level. I wonder if far down the line, will there be one sole human at the top of all of this automation, protected from its outcomes?
Being able to read someone else's code is an essential skill. If enough time has elapsed it can even be a useful skill for code you wrote some time ago. It can make you a more effective developer because, for example, you will be able to read through open source code to understand what it does (since some have poor docs) as well as allow you to contribute fixes and enhancements. You can also find new techniques in code that you can add to your own 'arsenal'. Another reason is it is a great way to learn a new language: you can start reading examples and mapping patterns from languages you know into the new one. So yeah, this is an essential skill.
WWII was more like a second act of the same war really. Wounds were not closed.
There's a very noticeable difference in taste between pasteurised and UHT milk, and anecdotally, based on discussing with multiple friends over the years, people who are used to pasteurised think UHT tastes worse, people who are used to UHT don't notice the difference, or notice but don't mind either way.

Personally, as a Brit (pasteurised is the norm) who has lived in France and Belgium, I'd always choose pasteurised. To drink on its own, UHT is significantly not nice to my tastebuds. With breakfast cereal its OK but still worse. A small amount in coffee and I don't notice the difference.

In Paris, finding pasteurised was pretty easy to do - although shops gave much more shelf space to UHT, I rarely struggled to find fresh milk. In Belgium on the other hand... near where I was living in a city, only one of 4 chain supermarkets and none of the cornershops sold non-UHT milk.

It's quite possible that if I spent <x amount of time> drinking lots and lots of UHT milk eventually my preference might change. I'm not planning on trying, though.
>Turns out knowing more than one language isn't a rare or sought after skill. In Europe maybe 40% of the population knows multiple languages fluently. Perhaps a third of these write well enough to translate.

Depending on the combination of languages - it is an extremely rare skill! Just being multilingual is not enough, you need to be multilingual in the correct combination of two languages! Although a majority of translations are English->Target language, that is not always the case.

How many people know both Japanese and Arabic well enough to translate? How about Mandarin Chinese and German? Portuguese and Danish? French and Tagalog? Hokkien and Russian?

Your second point "sought after" is the important part. How much demand for Russian books are there for Hokkien speakers? No demand - no money.
Just because a language is compiled doesn't mean it will approach C++ speeds. The GC itself is a hard limit on perf. What I've seen in practice:

1x time: C

1.5x time: C++ (with smart pointers)

~2x time: Objective-C (almost everything is a heap smart pointer)

3x time: Java, Golang (optimized GC languages)
If you came up with a definitive way to value stocks it would mean a) you are probably the richest man in the world b) You at the very least deserve a Nobel prize in economics.
I've thought about this same thing before, also in the context of not contractual work, but longterm.

At least 1 thing is that if something goes wrong later on, you can point to the tests to show that _your work_ is no the culprit. I'm curious to hear what the more experienced people have to say on your question.
this really sounds like a 'common mistakes programmers believe about phone numbers' is coming to a future near us.
I don't understand the argument that opting out of using animal products is avoiding responsibility. Isn't that equivalent to saying that by boycotting sweatshop products we aren't taking responsibility? Are you arguing that we should work within the system?

> Vegans will be looked down on the same as meat eaters, because they are not taking responsibility for animal welfare either.

Vegans aren't interested in animal welfare in the way we usually think of it, i.e. in terms of bigger cages, access to fresh air, etc. Vegans are interested in animal rights as in not using animals at all. It might not be possible to product food without hurting some animals, but there's a moral difference between accidentally and intentionally hurting someone.
Encrypt the traffic between nodes in your elasticsearch cluster
>The generational declining male labor participation rate. The economy is being geared towards knowledge work and has been going that way for some time, yet men are participating less, and women are participating more.

That doesn't mean that all women are participating in "knowledge work" jobs though. K-12 education and healthcare are also two fast growing sectors that have a high proportion of female workers. I doubt that all jobs in those sectors should be considered "knowledge work".

Participation stats for women could also be due to sectors like HR, or just generic office work. Obviously I don't deny the existence of female programmers and scientists. I just don't think there's evidence to suggest that they can do those jobs strictly better than men can.

>a large portion of our society is incapable of doing the type of work the economy is geared towards and rewards most heavily (outside of finance).

I think this is plausible.
SR2017 is now over with a well deserved 1st place win from CATS College Cambridge!
Followed closely by Systemetric (Hills Road College Cambridge) and Collyer's in 2nd and 3rd place respectively. After a close fought final against 3 very strong teams CATS College emerged victorious.

Congratulations and well done to all of the teams!
Modern CPUs are pipelined, which is a fancy word for "splitting instruction processing into a number of stages to increase parallelism".

The first stage is instruction fetch - "get the instruction at this address from memory". The second stage is instruction decode - "figure out what the instruction is (opcode) and its arguments (operands)". The important thing to understand is that all stages execute simultaneously. For example, when the pipeline is fetching instruction #2, it is also decoding instruction #1.

So why not do branch prediction during decode so the CPU knows it's a branch? Well, it could, but then the prediction would only be available to the fetch stage in the next cycle!

Keep reading if you want an illustrative example.

So where does branch prediction come in? Let's take a simple example where your CPU doesn't have a branch predictor.

The instruction stream is A B C D, where B is a branch that is taken and jumps to instruction X.

I'll use this diagram to represent a 4-stage pipeline: [ | | | ]. The stages are: fetch, decode, execute, and write results. Just focus on the first two stages for this example.

Let's walk through it cycle-by-cycle:

* Cycle 1: [ A | | | ] -> A is fetched

* Cycle 2: [ B | A | | ] -> B is fetched, A is decoded

* Cycle 3: [ C | B | A | ] -> C is fetched, B is decoded, A is executed

* Cycle 4: [ D | C | B | A ] -> D is fetched, C is decoded, B is executed, A write its results

Cycle 4 is the moment when the CPU knows the result of B, i.e., taken or not taken. But there's a problem: we just ended up fetching two useless instructions! So the pipeline is flushed, and fetching starts from X.

* Cycle 5: [ X | | | B ] -> X is fetched, B writes its results

In other words, we effectively wasted two cycles. This is where branch prediction comes in. Branch prediction is added to the fetch stage in order to predict whether or not a branch is taken, and if it is taken, fetch the correct instructions.

Let's add a branch predictor and repeat our example. For simplicity, we will assume a 100% accurate branch predictor.

* Cycle 1: [ A | | | ] -> A is fetched

* Cycle 2: [ B | A | | ] -> B is fetched, A is decoded

Now B is in the fetch stage and is passed to the branch predictor. But we have yet to reach the decode stage, so the CPU has no idea if B is a branch!. First, the CPU decides if B is in fact a branch - BTB and trace cache are two options for implementing this - then it decides whether or not the branch will be taken.

* Cycle 3: [ X | B | A | ] -> X is fetched, B is decoded, A is executed

At this point, we have utilized our pipeline fully and have avoided wasting time on incorrect instructions.
But now who can buy that house for $1.2m, and in 30 years will it have increased in value by 10x again? I feel like this is why an increasing number of people are locked out of the housing market. But as we learned, prices don't increase forever...
I'm surprised your version control solution let this situation arise considering this is exactly the kinds of problem version control aims to resolve. Usually you only hear of these things happening when you have multiple devs FTP / SFTPing files to a shared repository rather than following a managed check out and check in procedure via your preferred VCS frontend.
Fake It to Make It
Show HN: Service/API to Transform Data from XML or JSON to PDF, HTML or Images
Hi, we just released a new service to transform XML or JSON into PDF, HTML or Images.

I would like to know what do you think and if some of you are interested in it let me know if you need any king of help. Thank you!
I have to agree. I'm an immigrant though I grew up here (and my parents had a strong work ethic and taught me that hard technical work is respected). I notice with my American peers that there is some disdain for office work. And also there is some lack of belief in their skillset. (As much as people say Americans are overly confident, I find the opposite in tech for those who simply haven't tried it enough. They don't know easy it can be.)

The key for many is willingness and commitment to it in my opinion. At the end of the day, many folks could retrain themselves with all the tools they have for free online. I find that tech is not a profession you can exactly spoon feed to someone. This is why I think immigrants are an easier solution in some cases.
> nearly everyone is white.

That's a bit of an overstatement, eg There are a lot of Hispanics, especially in West Valley, but not totally wrong either. Rural Utah has a high percentage of white people (except for native American reservations). That fact stems from the same factors inherent in any rural community: Most of Utah was settled by white Europeans. Those people have historically had, add continue to have a culture of large families.
TL;DR. XDR was designed in the 1980s. This is a major factor in Decisions 2 and 3.

RFC1832 has a rationale for decision 2 towards the end of the document. Here is an excerpt.

"(4) Why is the XDR unit four bytes wide?
There is a tradeoff in choosing the XDR unit size. Choosing a small
size such as two makes the encoded data small, but causes alignment
problems for machines that aren't aligned on these boundaries. A
large size such as eight means the data will be aligned on virtually
every machine, but causes the encoded data to grow too big. We chose
four as a compromise. Four is big enough to support most
architectures efficiently, except for rare machines such as the
eight-byte aligned Cray*. Four is also small enough to keep the
encoded data restricted to a reasonable size."

Most RISC architectures of the time did not support unaligned memory accesses.

Decision 3 is a matter of timing. RFC1014 ( https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1014) was released in 1987. Unicode was still a work in progress.

Edited to fix formatting of the excerpt and a typo.
I remember delivering UHT milk 30 years ago as a kid. It was always in the bottle with the thin neck, and tasted disgusting, we used to call it dead-mans milk.

Maybe the process has changed, but...
I stil don't understand how this guy did it. Can someone explain in a few words?
they know, they just dont care. ads on fb are ridiculously cheap. They have soooo many impressions relative to the number of advertisers. So your furniture company says 'target everyone over 21 cause why the hell not, it costs barely more than doing an intelligent campaign'. Also, their click through rates are terrible, so you end up needing to spam as many impressions as possible.
USA already has worldwide tax jurisdiction. The more difficult problem with capital taxation is how to accurately value an asset.
The one and only!
>"How do machine learning and statistical analysis tools distinguish between a causal relationship and mere correlation?"

They have no reason to make such a distinction.

If you're trying to look for subjects of with a particular property X, but X is hidden, but you know property Y correlates with X, the correct action is to choose subjects with property Y. The causative relationship (or lack thereof) between X and Y is irrelevant.

As a simple example, if you're hiring people to carry 80-pound bags of grain between trucks, you want the property of physical strength. But, if you only have resumes to go on, you can't observe physical strength directly. But, gender correlates with physical strength, and names correlate with gender, so you'd be rational to choose the resumes with recognizably male names.

The reason we avoid discriminating between various protected groups isn't because groups don't have characteristics. If that was the case, such discrimination would be pointless and people would not bother doing it because it would have a cost but no benefit. Discrimination based on hair color is like this. Nobody does it and we don't need campaigns to stop it.

In reality, groups of people do have characteristics - physical, psychological, emotional, intellectual, cultural. However, we avoid discriminating between protected groups because we believe it's wrong to subject an individual to that kind of discrimination, even if such discrimination would be rational for the discriminator. Such discrimination violates our western ideals of individual rights and equal individual opportunity.
It took about six months for the online mattress ads to settle down after I quickly (within a day or two) researched and purchased one. I recently purchased an expensive pair of headphones and I suspect to see those for the next several months.
It's a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Not all software deals with real-world engineering problems, and there are plenty of applications where you would prefer accuracy.

I'd rather make that trade-off myself than have the language decide for me. Most of the time I would start with correctness and if speed is needed and the profiler shows that the bottleneck lies in fractional arithmetic, I'll switch to floating point numbers.

A similar trade-off exists with bignums versus 32 or 64 bit integers. There again, I prefer a language that uses bignums by default. I'll convert the bottlenecks to use fixnums after I've verified that it is safe to do so.
It seems ironic that France, being a country that places a huge importance on using raw milk for certain cheeses, drinks UHT milk more than pasteurised milk.
The bot looks good. Have you tried AWS Lex? It has a pretty good English language model (same as Alexa) - you just add a bunch of example sentences per intent, and it does the matching
Design Patterns (in software) are supposed to be derived or inspired (not the actual patterns, but the idea of patterns) by that book, BTW, or by Alexanders other thoughts or writings.
Meet Microsoft’s Bold New Surface Phone Design
if I want to give some away it's best to start early

Right, if it's the same net present value why would anyone ever start later? If you're still working just take the money and save or invest it.
What are you doing with your milk? My milk isn't UHT and usually lasts weeks to a month after opening.
Try using incognito mode to create an account on google, it won't let you even though it says it's optional. However if you try and create an account in a browser which has a super cookie or google account logged in (or out) attached it'll be fine without one because I believe they are tying it to your repuation.
default doesn't mean only, from memory Rakudo smooshes Rats into floating point Nums when the denominator gets above 2 to the 64th or so.

FatRat are an infinite precision rat. FatRats, like RATs are Cool (which is a double entendre, because Cool means it knows how to be a string, which is apparently "Cool") The default recently has not been fatrat but one of the many benefits of a language under development for 20 years is that quite possibly that default was changed last weekend. Or maybe fatrat were default for a painful week back in '02. Probably not, but it could have happened.

Perl does the right thing but if you're really unhappy about not using floats you can force a .num conversion into floating point or you could express a number in scientific notation to force floats. Perl really wants to make a division problem into a Rat unless you work hard to stop it.

In general, for the past 30 years or so, if you're doing something weird, Perl will work and probably give faster and possibly more accurate results than most other tools, but the rest of the world will not be interested in debugging perl6 but will instead be asking "why you use perl6 instead of Gnu-R or mathematica or ?" or whatever is trendy momentarily today. Perl will never be trendy yet the whole world runs on it.
This is the geometric distribution. The probability of surviving a meal with 99% survival rate is .99, two meals like that would be .99*.99, three meals .99^3, etc. So the probability you will have died by the n = 1000th meal would be 1 - .99^n = .99995683

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution
C# is missing an example using decimal type:

Decimal uses 128 bits to hold it's data and seems to handle rounding differently to System.Double, e.g. 0.1 and 0.2 using decimals evaulates to 0.3:

> 0.1M + 0.2M
0.3

You can read more about decimal here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/364x0z75.aspx
whats the price difference between the two products?
>I also like The Soul of a New Machine

Me too. Fascinating read. I still remember the part where one of them compares their work to the pinball game - where the reward for winning is that you get to play again.
I don't think pragmar agrees with the world-view he described! He was just describing the unfortunate existence and prevalence of this world-view.

Tech seems to have a larger percentage of people who approve of (or at least don't condemn) drug use than many other industries, so there's at least some reason for hope. Good luck.
The huge advantage of UHT milk in sealed packages is that it can be distributed effectively in a developing nation environment without a reliable logistics "cold chain" or electrical grid. Example: Boxes of UHT milk sold at nearly every small grocery store in Pakistan where refrigeration is either impossible for the shop owner due to economics, or the electrical grid is not reliable enough to support a refrigerated product section.
I know of Orbit (Java) and Proto.Actor (Go and .NET)

https://github.com/orbit/orbit

http://proto.actor

These are distributed virtual actor systems, which is the pattern of Orleans. Of course there are many "normal" distributed actor systems (the Erlang Actor model).
Nudity Detection API, just devised for content filtering
The myth that an external force can drive otherwise-sane people to suicide merely by disapproving of some of their behaviors needs to go.

It is, ironically, perpetuated to shame and humiliate political opponents, by insidiously attempting to saddle them with responsibility for the deaths of the depressed and mentally ill.

Healthy people do not commit suicide, and they certainly don't over issues as ethereal and inconsequential as some religion's disapproval. Just having any religion automatically makes you the target of more condemnation than not, because most religions reserve eternal bliss for their own members.

Furthermore, almost every religion preaches against theft, dishonesty, duplicity, extramarital sexual conduct of any kind, and a range of other basic moral violations that are consistently verboten throughout the history of the human family. People violate these things routinely and, despite the frequent imperatives issued and social pressures imposed to encourage compliance, somehow refrain from killing themselves.

If the argument is that it's about the typical human response to homosexual conduct being so negative that it drives people over the edge, I don't see how the Mormon church, or most other Christian churches, could have any culpability for that, since a universal Christian theme is redemption, forgiveness, and an ability to leave behind a past life of sin and error whenever one commits themselves to doing so.

Mormonism in particular, as described in the parent comment, makes an effort to be civil and polite, and to encourage families to fellowship and associate with their children and friends regardless of one's level of agreement with their personal choices, including their sexual choices.

That doesn't mean that one must endorse, accept, witness, or accommodate any and all behaviors, but it means that one should remain respectful and polite, treat others with dignity and decorum, and continue to have contact in a positive manner to the fullest extent possible.

The Church is compassionate and welcoming to sinners [read: humans] of all types. No special scrutiny or shame is applied to persons who are inclined to sin by engaging in homosexual behaviors vs. those are inclined to sin differently. Any type of sexual misconduct, heterosexual or homosexual, is forbidden by the Church and regularly preached against, and I guarantee you there are many more adulterous husbands feeling guilt and shame over the much-more-frequently discussed topic of marital fidelity than there are homosexuals feeling shame on the rather rare occasion that homosexuality is broached.
I am trying to get into math. For now, I am considering my cheapest options. (In a community college with Pell Grant keeping me afloat for now). But you are right, my brief exposure to a good university was full of ego and lot of extra stress. Neither of which I preferred.