skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The entire article could be summarised to 'Autocratic executives of VW got away with wilful cheating, by throwing middle management under the bus'
To freedom in the UK in general.
> A random old-time Lisp hacker's collection of macros will add up to an undocumented, unportable, bug-ridden implementation of 80% of Haskell because Lisp is more powerful than Haskell.

How so? Can we program Haskell's Hindley-Milner based type checking into Lisp with macros and homoiconicity, and have it run during compile-time?

I've been dabbling in OCaml and ReasonML recently, and am enjoying pure functional programming a lot. But I never could get into untyped FP like the very practical Clojure before because they didn't seem to offer me too much compared to Ruby and Javascript.

Functions in ES6 are more first-class than Ruby's lambdas. The single-line function definition is very concise and you can also do your programming with immutable values if you are careful about references and use something like the immutable-helper. Granted you don't get persistent data structures, but then you have ImmutableJS now. ES6 implementations also have TCO, so a recursion-based programming model should be fine as well.

In that context, the differentiating power of Lisp seems to be around macros - a very powerful way to write programs that write programs. I have done my fair share of meta-programming with Ruby and I realized I really didn't want the power to change my program model at runtime. While they made certain things easier - like Rails's ActiveRecord (which is superb btw) - the "inception"-like indirection made things very hard to reason about.

For me the secret-weapon language is less about power, and more about structure. We can build equivalent things with any turing-complete programming language, but the test is when the system has to grow, and that is precisely when most codebases fail. So far, statically typed FP with Sum Types and Pattern Matching and Immutability seems to be the cure, and macros and dynamic typing its very antithesis.
What is needed isn't a "true" meritocracy -- evaluating merit of output independent of all other factors--, but affirmative action, to uplift and improve the overall quality.

This action by ElectronConf is an attempt at affirmative action, but winds up being the opposite. Affirmative action is where you reach out, support and encourage those that represent the diversity you want. Meanwhile this (as communicated here) is just throwing up their hands and waiting for the diversity issue to resolve itself, at the cost of coming off really unfair to the people currently represented. Really weird.
If we could terraform, we should do it right away, humanity is one meteorite strike away from extinction... the universe is a harsh place and we have to hedge our bets to survive and thrive...
I don't actually know anyone who concerns themselves with identity politics to the extent they would mothball their tech conference. Who are these people who make these kinds of decisions?
I suppose machine learning could study communication patterns to see what patterns are there before an attack.. e.g. if suddenly they started talking about birds when they never did before, did they just establish some code words? The dark part is the computers will need training data...
My impression is that there's less actual discrimination, and more cases of people using accusations of discrimination as a weapon to compensate for lack of merit.
> A true meritocracy would mean anyone with intelligence, talent and creativity would rise to the top.

And that would be good why? See, every time there is a top there will be losers. Personally I think that's unavoidable but we could work a little harder to flatten out the landscape so that the various lotteries matter less.
I don't buy the meritocracy BS that's so popular around here, but I do agree this seems insane, at least based on the small amount of information we have.

The organizers have the right to do whatever they please, but I don't understand what they hope to accomplish by calling off the entire conference. It seems like that just hurts everyone.

(I'm a white dude, just for full disclosure.)

P.S.: Does anyone else wonder if this is a cover for something else? Maybe there were speakers they did not want to allow but also didn't want the backlash of denying?
If you're pushing to have unqualified people on your board simply because they're women, your company will die. Aside from that, why strive if I know I have a good chance of getting a position even without any kind of merit?

Fucking hell, I want to be seen as more than just a disabled trans woman, I want people to look at the shit I've done and say "Wow, she's really awesome, let's hire her/accept her into our college", not "Wow, she's super oppressed! We can get grants if we do nice things for her!". Hiring me/accepting me based on "diversity" is the most patronizing thing you can fucking do. I don't need your help because I'm a minority, and viewing me as just a trans person instead of viewing me as a normal candidate is breaking me down to nothing but my identity, and that's transphobic as fuck.
Not sure if it still works, but in Israel it is as simple as prepending the voice mail prefix to the phone number. Some voice mail boxes can receive faxes, so there is some legitimate use for it.
While i agree, not sure about 1) Germans use debit cards everywhere, it's just that credit cards are used very rarely but also accepted very rarely which is probably due to some fees that make it not worthwhile, while in the US you cna pay für $3 coffee with a credit card.
Electron, proton, and neutron enter the bar. I forgot basic physics and chemistry, so I don't know how it goes from that, but at the end, electron says: there's not enough diversity here!
Oh yes. Siddhartha was really a good read!
Was it ever alive in the first place?
The message is very cryptic, one possible interpretation would be that TOPICS presented by those speakers wouldn't be diverse enough to make the conference interesting. Why interpret this in gender/racial terms?
If it was possible to regulate the internet for the average person, would it be right to regulate it?

From what I read, the police arrived within 2-5 minutes after the attack started. The only way to pre-empt it would be to have information about the terrorist's plans beforehand. Encryption on phones is widely available to the average person, and this makes it very difficult to stop terrorists from planning attacks.

In the grand scheme of things, terrorist attacks do not kill very many people. However, they brutalise public discourse. Every time this happens it draws us closer to authoritarianism: loss of privacy, mass internment, ethnic cleansing. The conversation after attacks seems to be becoming more and more sarcastic and bitter on one hand, and counter-establishment/authoritarian on the other. For example, photos of Sadiq Khan telling the population that these attacks are 'part and parcel' of living in a major city; and the mockery of people saying "we don't yet know if this is a muslim".

I'm pro-free-speech and pro-encryption, but I am not sure whether grinning and bearing it is really an effective weapon against terrorist activity, considering its ratcheting effects on public opinion. So, if we don't ban encryption, what are we going to do?
I still can't fathom how it is that Twitter has so much influence on the tech sphere.
As a European, I keep getting baffled about how out of hand these things seem to be in the USA.

I live in the Netherlands, a very open-minded country with same-sex marriage, equal rights and were women seem to me to be even slightly more dominant over men (but this is just my perception).

All this without safe spaces, forced quotas at conferences, codes of conduct and people that police every word you say. There are laws against harassment of course, and that's enough.

Of course, it's not perfect, but there are rarely if ever any big incidents due to discrimination (to my knowledge).

Looking at the USA instead I see people getting offended pretty much for anything. As a consequence discussion gets neutered to the point where everybody is afraid to express even small controversial ideas or make the next "dongle" joke for the fear of repercussions.

I have also seen a lot of videos of people getting beaten in the streets for holding up signs with which "offended" people did not agree. Is that freedom of speech? We had such things in our history in the "old continent" and they were definitely not called this way.

This is one of the big reasons that always kept me away from the USA, even for short trips at conferences. Here in Europe to me it feels much safer and open minded, with all the flaws and imperfections that there might be.
At this point, I am pretty certain that deciding to have children is unethical, due to the various types of suffering they are nearly certain to endure.
Unfortunately no one knows. Not even the Internet Archive has a record of it.
For those who want to read her exact words, full transcript:

http://time.com/4804640/london-attack-theresa-may-speech-tra...

Quote:

> We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements that regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning. And we need to do everything we can at home to reduce the risks of extremism online.

Other interesting quotes:

> "While we have made significant progress in recent years, there is - to be frank - far too much tolerance of extremism in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations."

> "And if we need to increase the length of custodial sentences for terrorist-related offences - even apparently less serious offences - that is what we will do."
You would have to dumb down the AI to solve a dumb problem.
> what's left when everything is already illegal?

Looks like it's enforcement.

What, from the looks of it, would be nightmarish enough. No need for any new law.
I've never liked May's authoritarian tendencies - no way does that stuff remain restricted to targeting Islamism - but your last paragraph is in fact exactly what they are doing.

Having asked the question of "why do they want to kill random strangers", the answer they arrived at is "because they were brainwashed by religious fundamentalism they found on the internet".

Obviously nobody knows yet the specifics of this case, but I'm not sure why they think that given that the Ariane Grande event seemed to be radicalisation through family. It wasn't clear the internet played much role.

However, the UK Government has made repeated references to plots that were foiled (no details provided). If those plots were investigated and the root cause was frequently identified as "spent too much time surfing jihadi ideology" then I can see why they'd conclude the answer is internet regulation.
a) I never said anything about advocating for unqualified people.

b) Almost all Fortune 1000+ companies are doing this today. And it's been conclusively shown to be improving the quality and strength of the board and encouraging more diverse people to join the SLTs.

c) Not sure what that rant at the end has to do with anything.
Is this financial mismanagement being covered up?
Show HN: Minimal string-formatting in C++1z
>However, if you just run the programs with your own compiler,

By that logic GCC is also an interpreter.
https://github.com/abijith-kp/gcc-interpreter
The in-process Scala collections library overhaul, what impact will that have on Scala.js when Scala 2.13 lands?

From what I've seen so far there hasn't been much in the way of removals. Ideally the compiler and standard library would be as small as possible in order to help Scala.js streamline generated application binaries.
You mean like GitHub? </joking_but_not_really>
Well that's a load of nonsense. How about backing some of it up? We do have a right to a jury trial. Self-defense is an important defence in several laws. There are assemblies/protests in central London every weekend pretty much. Regarding the 'right to remain silent' when arrested in the UK you do not have to say anything. As for the right to keep arms - we don't want it. If our police force believes they can do their job without all carrying firearms (and last night where they tracked down and killed the attackers within 8 mins of the first call to them proves they are right) the general public doesn't need them either.
> In most ways, the UK seems more sane than the US

Don't make the mistake of comparing another country's highlight reel with the day-to-day living you're familiar with here. I promise you that if you lived there (or just about any other country) for a while, you would start to see the warts along with the successes.

This is in no way a knock on the UK.
You're comparing the UK to the USA there and assuming the USA is saner.

The origin of the USA's prohibition against self-incrimination was people who were tortured into confessions and other forms of undermining their own freedom. The original logic for this right does not apply to divulging encryption keys. It's not clear what higher purpose is being served by allowing people under investigation to halt those investigations by using encryption: it's not like they can be tortured into revealing incorrect information inside the encrypted files.
Show HN: Ask anyone for book recommendations or give one
I'm a regular visitor of books-related subs on Reddit and my fomo regarding an excellent book goes out of control whenever I see related threads on HN.

I've noticed that a lot of people want book recommendations but they don't want the "best" books in a field. They are looking for something that falls in their area of reading interest and something similar to what they've read earlier and liked.

--> In the absence of any context of what a person has been reading, it becomes difficult to recommend a book to him.

--> On the other hand, if I know someone likes reading biographies, my first reaction on discovering a great biography is to either message them about the book or try to "sell them the idea" of reading this book. Both the approaches are easily forgotten.

So to make asking for book suggestions easy, I've added this feature on ShelfJoy, called Recommend a book.

Now, you can simply share your ShelfJoy profile with your friends/with people whose recommendations you trust and ask them to recommend a book to you.

Example: I am on a reading challenge in 2017 where I am reading a business biography every month.

By sharing my profile here:
http://shelfjoy.com/sia_steel/recommendations

I can simply ask for recommendations and friends can browse through my reading list, books that I've liked before and recommend me books they think I'll like.

My entire recommendations stay at the same place and I can simply shift that book to the books that I've read once I finish it.

+ I'm looking forward for some feedback on this feature and whether you find it useful.
For self defense, see the case of Tony Martin, who was convicted of murder for shooting intruders in his home. Castle doctrine would have protected his actions in all US states except Vermont.

The right to remain silent in the US (and previously in the UK) means that your silence cannot be presented as evidence of guilt in court. In the UK, such evidence may be presented and the the jury is instructed that they may make negative inferences from your refusal to speak with the police.

The right to a jury trial has been limited by changes that allow juries to reach majority (10-2) verdicts and by removing the right to a jury trial in cases where the government suspects jury tampering.

I'm not trying to get into a debate about guns. But any list of rights no longer enjoyed by Englishmen wouldn't be complete without mentioning it. Whether it's for the better or worse is another issue.
What do you exactly expect from targetting WASM instead of JS? Higher performance? Smaller bundles and faster load times? Better interoperability?
You provided zero evidence for your claim. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but so far you have only made an assertion.

If you think some language is misrepresented in that benchmark, you can submit your own solution.
JavaScript itself is one of the biggest arguments against existence of meritorcracy in tech :).
I think assertions of this kind either need to come with proof, of which I doubt you have any, or some form of credit to the writers of the latest season of House of Cards as you seem to be lifting your half baked conspiracy theories right from Netflix.
Everywhere outside of McDonald's, the only obvious icon for "fat" would be a burger.
Can we please stop this trope that "machine learning" is the solution to everything?
Diversity is defined negatively: it means anyone who isn't white, straight, and male.
Thought crime already exists for a long time already. Planning to commit murder (thinking about it) is punished nearly as harshly as succeeding. Is it really so controversial?
>Maybe not, but I have a hard time to believe that it can be considered even a slight annoyance to anyone but people just learning how to program.

Slight annoyances pile up. Ergonomics matter even for seasoned pros. Just because they have learned to ignore the garbage, doesn't mean their room is clean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran_and_violence
Because everyone is crediting the cancellation with this tweet https://twitter.com/fox/status/870761439094489088
There is also the opposite problem. The public aren't asking for it not to be done either. Internet surveillance isn't a hot button political topic either way. However, terrorism is. Hence the problem.
>> I'm free speech and pro-encryption, but I am not sure whether grinning and bearing it is really an effective weapon against terrorist activity, considering its ratcheting effects on public opinion. So, if we don't ban encryption, what are we going to do?

I'm in the same position. It's getting harder to stick to my principals. The way I'm trying to think about it though is this: banning encryption and destroying privacy will not fix terrorism. Governments should be focusing on actual solutions to the root cause. Maybe we should stop blowing up the middle-east. We need to work for stability in those regions. Ban encryption and the terrorists will find another avenue to communicate and we'll lose freedoms for nothing.
A true meritocracy might be even harsher, because those at the bottom would still be downtrodden, but this time they would deserve it.
> > written in Macintosh Common Lisp needed 20 MB RAM

> At the time when computers had 32/64 MB of RAM.

That's non sequitur. Lets quote the entire context:

> the Dylan IDE written in Macintosh Common Lisp needed 20 MB RAM

How much RAM other IDEs used at the time?
The message makes it pretty clear the speakers aren't diverse.

Referring to the speakers themselves: "We published a list of speakers that does not reflect the standards to which we hold ourselves."

Again referring specifically to speakers: "more diverse slate of speakers."
on face value you can't argue with your logic but if you want to play the long game and help create and contribute to an industry that includes people from all demographics than this is a very smart move.

and more people included in your sample, more chance of finding amazing A++ engineers that can help the industry, your dev platform, etc...
It's always a failure when you can't find better solution than killing your citizen.

Hence, let's stop discussing it as a success.
We've tried this in the past :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Pedway_Scheme
You are far from the only one.

It must be for political use, as there's nothing more those people care about.
Not necessarily, but it's really hard to say without them being more open about what their goals were in the first place!

Like maybe they were trying to get some legit outreach going but it fell through, who knows?
To me, the work of Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates is that the dialog around racism has to be open, transparent, honest. Especially becomes important if you're developing tech that will impact everyday people.

Another thought. To me, racial oppression is like a virus that is replicated particularly when the oppressed are shamed into silence, complicity, or the sense the they have to adopt the memes, mental constructs of systematic oppression. So like, what do we mean when we say meritocracy?
MB is a victim primarily of its own success - with a lot of Kodi clients requesting data as well as MB's own tagger, Picard - but also of spammers leeching bandwidth.

This is not the first occasion when demand has exceeded capacity, but any capacity added soon gets swallowed up.

Suffice it to say that the MB team is urgently looking into how to stop this happening.
I regularly allocate buffers in excess of 40GiB on my workstation. Linux on x86-64 currently uses 47 out of 64 physical address bits to support up to 128TiB of physical addresses. This leaves 17 bits in a pointer for your size field. (2 ^ 47) / (2 ^ 17) is 1GiB, so the granularity of your bounds checking system would be 1GiB unless you made the userspace ABI dependent on the number of physical address bits.

If you store the bounds separately (full runtime bounds checking) you lose efficiency on code which inherently can not overflow the bounds, and code where you have a large number of small objects (let's say you have 400GiB of 64-byte objects) with a known size. If you switch to a new language, great! But you obviously lose access to your existing code, which is a non-starter.
Yeah, it's a big flaw in the setup. The instructions I linked have users add it temporarily, to unlock the rest of the options, and remove it afterwards.
You're not supposed to do pointer arithmetic with these pointers. It's generally meant for storing pointers "at rest".
Does anyone know how Agner actually produces all this information? It can't be easy to determine all these parameters.
Everything You Need to Know About Buying Bitcoin
Also, aren't they already monitoring all international communication lines? I don't remember the last time any of these attacks were actually coordinated by international agents (all are homegrown, most are lone wolf)

Short of policing thoughts, at some point, they'll have to admit 'MONITOR EVERYTHING, POLICE EVERYTHING' won't actually solve the problem.
Bunnie on point as always.
This is crazy. Big minus for Electron and GitHub. Diversity++; Actual knowledge and skills of speakers--; Reputation of event--; GitHub--; Electron--;
No I got you, you're saying majority is an automatic disqualification which is ridiculous but happens today nevertheless.
"faux-immutability" is a good way to describe it. My problem is the "faux"; proper immutability is virtually impossible in python and I'm not convinced about providing partial immutability and thereby giving people a false sense of security. That said there's an issue about it: https://github.com/samuelcolvin/pydantic/issues/38. I'll consider it if we can find a performant and elegant way of using it.

__eq__ makes sense, I'll do it when I get round to it

__hash__ would be nice but far from simple to do in a performant way.

__lt__ I'm not sure what this would mean?

__cmp__ no longer exists in python 3.
Very true, but I don't think it's possible to have an authenticator-only 2FA setup on Gmail. They make you keep the phone number on it.
Annecdotaly, most non-tech people I speak to just don't understand the Internet (or how far it extends into their lives). They seem to see the internet as the web browser they use for Facebook, and not how far it extends into what they do every day. As such many seem to think it can be regulated like television, and few seem to understand the implications of backdooring encryption and whatever else.
Ultimately it's a 'we trust the government' and 'I have nothing to hide'. It seems difficult for most people to see outside their own bubble, especially when they're frightened of an invisible enemy.