skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He should take a class out of the B school, in philosophy. This is a well-trodden topic, and as with his studies of cosmology and biology, understanding what others have figured out already will give him something to stand on.

Although at least he's thinking, which is sadly uncommon.
3 Quick Tips to Avoid Google Analytics’ Sampling
I posted this link because I got an OSX notification through their Mac app, oddly enough.
Very interesting article.

> It is likely that many recommendations for the broader economy would have been ignored as well. For example, if a computer recommended that the price of heating oil should be doubled in the winter, how many politicians would let that happen?

The heating oil required to maintain temperatures in so many cubic feet of air space in the country, given some quantity of heaters at various levels of efficiency, themselves producable by the same giant calculation. The problem is the dimensions/variables are endless and subject to change based on the uncalculable whims of people. Stopping at any one point is arbitrary
If you're really centrally planning the economy, then all of the decisions are made by a central authority. There's no room for anyone else to do anything, because it messes with the program. The central plan can only work of it knows everything relevant.

If you're running a mixed economy, where some sectors are planned and some are not, thats fine... but it's also not what the post is taking about.
Why are you reading my code???
"Challenging Mainstream Thought" in the Nytimes. Is this a joke?
So, I am a white dude who was pretty skeptical about the whole microaggression thing. But I changed my mind.

My girlfriend is biracial and just watching how strangers interact with her taught me a lot about the state of race relations in this country.

Microaggressions (I am going to abbreviate this as MA) are more like micro-transgressions. In the vast majority of cases, the people who commit MA are not seeking to hurt the recipient of the MA, they are likely trying to be pleasant and friendly. But there is something about the interaction where the person expresses a subconscious bias that the target is not normal.

A great example, is the question "What are you?" How often are you asked this question? Me, I've never been asked this outside of Halloween. My GF gets this question a lot, at the grocery store, at the dog park, etc. Why? What does it mean? Why is it hurtful?

The questioner never means anything bad by the question. It's honest curiosity.

Based on the conversation that follows (a nice chat about our respective ancestries) and the fact that I never get asked this question, they are really asking, "are you black, Pacific islander, asian, or what?" but have learned that that is a rude question.

Why is this an unpleasant experience? It is "othering". Yeah, what does that mean? Well, it means that it is inherently exclusionary. It means that the asker of the question sees you as fundamentally different. And not in a good "let's celebrate our differences"-way, but in a hidden-deep-in-our-limited-monkey-brain "is this person safe" kind of way. It means "are you going to mug me" and "do I have to worry about saying something racist that my white friends would give me a pass on". It means "Are you one of us?" with the presumed answer of "no". For most of us, all of this is subconscious.

People who get asked "what are you?" regularly know what the implicit questions are, even if the person asking them doesn't. They questions feel aggressive, but they aren't outright, in-your-face, aggression.

Ask yourself, honestly, when you meet a white person who speaks with a local accent, how soon do you ask about their heritage?
This is great for something like a public website. What about a situation where I want some of my users to only be authorized to view some of my data based on a set of rules I set in my backend application. Can Agolia accomplish this?

EDIT: Looks like they do support this..
https://www.algolia.com/doc/api-client/ruby/api-keys/#genera...

However, I think for a small project it will probably be extra work to keep these keys synchronized vs just doing a postgres search for my project
RedBubble is where I buy hi quality artists' prints
Yes but it's corrupted at step one by an artificial selelection process. You want just the real world to be the filter.
One of my favorite quotes:

"There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved."

-- George Sand
Well the version part still doesn’t go away ;)
Yes it hasn't been properly possible to return such an iterator chain that uses closures before, unless the iterator is manually boxed. With impl Trait that is now fixed.

The latest RFC is https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1951 ; it was in several.
I literally just tried this in Safari 10.1.1: https://codepen.io/chuckhendo/pen/NgGZqg

Maybe it affects older versions of Safari, but I don't recall having run into it.

"backdrop-filter" is irrelevant - it's an entirely different feature.
I do not care about the cup-monopoly, when the providers of water are strangling the pipe.
Building a virtual home automation agent for device control
It wasn't inside the shower. How would that even work? Where do you stand when showering?

Do you mean that there's no separation between the toilet and shower? If so, then yes. But we had a corner curtain affixed to the wall to keep from splashing the toilet.
"Mozilla must earn their user base by making a good browser and marketing it well"

They are just as evil as Google at this point. They pretend they are not, but even Apple respects users more.
Using user review are not very helpful as well. Each taster use different vocabulary and there are even different way to analyse wine: some people describe the flavours (this wine is strawberries, apple, lime) some, including me, are more of a structural tester (comparing "length" of a wine, width and character of the taste and after taste).

Second problem is (and there is even statistical proof) that after wine pass some threshold of kinda good wine, the resulting score is random. This is caused by few things: your mood, what you drink before it, anticipation, the meal and even music.

Scoring (and recommending) wine and selecting what you like is very complicated subject and probably best way is still ask some good wine buyer, describe what you like and he might recommend wines he likes that loosely fits your description.
I think part of this lack of accountability is how some of these larger projects are funded. In Connecticut, they had a busway that was created on an interstate highway. The total was 570 million of which the federal government provided 400 million. That 400 million was added to the nation debt. The reasoning why this project continued despite its costs was because the federal government had already approved the funds.
> Amazon's service was truly unlimited

It is not and never was. Check TOS

> 5.2 Suspension and Termination. Your rights under the Agreement will automatically terminate without notice if you fail to comply with its terms. We may terminate the Agreement or restrict, suspend, or terminate your use of the Services at our discretion without notice at any time, including if we determine that your use violates the Agreement, is improper, substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users, or otherwise involves fraud or misuse of the Services or harms our interests or those of another user of the Services. If your Service Plan is restricted, suspended, or terminated, you may be unable to access Your Files and you will not receive any refund of fees or any other compensation.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
> If Google abuses their power it is easier to correct course by forking

Just like when Microsoft abused their position people immediately switched to non-IE browsers and IE was never heard of again, right?
> Even as a manager it's the gaffatape programmers who end up saving the day rather than the best practices.

Yes, the other ones are to busy fixing the gaffatape programmers' code to ensure the last day will stay saved.
> Central Planning, as reasonable as it sounds, can only play a very limited role in a free society.

USA, for example, has a lot of central planning, in the private sector alone, not even considering the public sector. Any large mega-corp is an example. Walmart has a huge centrally planned operations and supply chain.

> capitalist economies, where standard of living, abundance and variety of products all grow naturally higher with time

How would you explain stalled and declining standard of living in the Western capitalist economies over the past 30 years or so?
> And they talk about it. A lot.

That's signaling. It's a mating strategy. Whether that actually changes the behavior of all those who are signaling when they aren't being observed by others in their in-group is another matter entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
I am gonna dispute that. Chrome is bloated and inextensible​.
>> good folks at Firefox deserve your usage just as much

>So contrary to popular opinion on HN, Firefox is not as good as Chrome. However, we must still use it. Consider it an act of charity

>I don't think so. Mozilla must earn their user base by making a good browser and marketing it well

Firefox don’t need anyone to use it as an act of charity.

But you need to stop the underhanded FUD.

Talking like Chrome is somehow better than all other browsers is just as dumb as saying that x model of y car brand is best...

Best for what? A lot of people love Chrome, Mac, Mercedes.

Sure they are good but I dont want any of them.

- I want my tabs to be vertical and automatically nested,

- my browser to support 100s of tabs and real extensions,

- my computer to have different window management and different menus than what is available on Mac OS

- my car to have a handbraķe.

Going on about how chrome is the best browser is only slightly more mature IMO than me as a kid going on about how x was the beat car (just because my dad had one).

In this case it is even worse as people read it everywhere and start thinking it is true.
Yeah the point is, it's not slightly - I even lose my friends' interest, and will fall silent 5 minutes later.
I don't think that's the monoculture of developers.

Chrome was based in Webkit in it's rising years - which put it on par with Safari and Android. This meant that you could develop comfortably and do less cross-browser work up front.

Developers got comfortable. Chrome is open source, extendable, and keeps up with web standards.
The codebase for redux-saga is a dream to read through: https://github.com/redux-saga/redux-saga
With secured API-Keys:

https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/security/api-keys/
This gets to the setup.py/requirements.txt confusion.

setup.py is for specifying dependencies of a piece of code you're distributing, while requirements.txt is for specifying a known-good environment to run a piece of code in.

For example, my own personal site has a requirements.txt specifying Django 1.11.2 because that's the version I'm deploying on and test it on. But it uses several applications I've written and distribute, and those use setup.py to specify a dependency on Django 1.8, 1.10 or 1.11 (and those all use tox/Travis to test on the full matrix of Python and Django versions they support).
As described above and in Cosma Shalizi’s post, the number of steps required to solve a linear programming problem with nn products and mm constraints is proportional to (m+n)3/2n2(m+n)3/2n2. The USSR had about 12 million types of goods. If you cross them over about 1000 possible locations, that gives you 12 billion variables, which according to Cosma would correspond to an optimization problem that would take a thousand years to solve on a modern desktop computer. However, if Moore’s Law holds up, it would be possible in 100 years to solve this problem reasonably quickly.

I found Red Plenty fascinating and I enjoyed the Crooked Timber seminar that Chris Said links to, particularly Shalizi’s post. I'm still wondering: why is the compute-unit "a modern desktop computer?" Is parallel scaling poor for this kind of problem?

If parallel scaling is poor, might better speedups be available with ASICs? Or are there heuristics that run faster and produce usually-close-to-optimal solutions on this type of problem? I'm just running through some common ways to accelerate solutions for compute-intensive tasks that run slowly on a single-socket of general purpose CPUs. For all I know, none of these avenues are promising.
The Rise of the Machines – Why Automation Is Different This Time
After years of using Chrome I tried Firefox just to try something different and to my surprise it's 90% as good as Chrome and even surpasses it in certain areas:

- address bar history is better, Chrome wants you to google everything, not use your history,

- Firefox for Android has addons, I don't even want to remember life without uBlock... I still have nightmares of vibrating website scams on Chrome.

Chrome is generally better in:

- speed and security,

- interesting Web APIs (foreign-fetch in Service Workers, Barcode recognition on Android).
there is, and it is commonly used in places by modern farmers. In North Dakota my uncle leaves his fields fallow every third year. Some of his neighbors leave their land fallow for 2 years then farm for one. (this lets them grow crops that need a lot of water in a desert, the two fallow years recharges the ground water)

However as I've said repeatedly, the best farming practice isn't the same even on the scale of one field. When you go to a larger scale it gets worse. (in a field the right practice is at least similar, as you move to the next field it often is very different)
Thank god.

This has made visiting news websites—say, your local fox channel—nearly unbearable, between the auto-playing ads and content.

I can't imagine how people with small bandwidth go to sites these days without an ad blocker.
Node.js and MySQL Hosting Platform
Snyk's done some analysis on that aspect specifically too: https://snyk.io/blog/77-percent-of-sites-use-vulnerable-js-l...
> google "the Socialist Calculation Debate"

I can't seem to find the document you're referring to and its conclusions, Wikipedia page? Is there a balanced discussion on the subject somewhere that is not from Mises Institute or some other libertarian ideologically-driven piece?
Well if the comment seemed gauche, it was meant to reflect my opinion of the discussion.

Otherwise, I just reviewed comment guidelines. Don't see what might merit the "please don't". Please don't... what?
React by default has pretty good XSS protection. That being said, "don't trust the client" has been something developers have struggled with ever since we started writing client/server software.
I have a different opinion. I think this monoculture is great. There are many browsers all based on Chromium: Chrome, Opera, etc. While they offer different views, their core rendering engine and api's are shared with chromium. It makes life much easier as a developer. While having many implementations is great, it is a pain in the ass. For example, I have an app that uses service worker and indexeddb. It has cases where it fails to work on Safari.

The author compares to Chromium monoculture to IE. That is a very unfair comparison. I would compare it to Linux. Both have open code bases that you can fork at any time and contribute to if you want. It works well on all platforms/hardware respectively. Both have corporate goodwill to pay for it. Its wasteful to re-implement things multiple times over.
IIRC the GitHub Open Source Survey noted that the people surveyed were more likely to trust OSS software in terms of security because of the transparency with vulnerabilities and the community surrounding it.

This article mentions increased use of OSS libs as a rising source of XSS. I'm really not sure what's worse - OSS that can be fixed and audited easily or proprietary software that's closed and lacking visibility.
Definitely agree on 1. Having a clear goal makes it a much better experience by soothing the nerves esp. for someone like me who doesn't speaks often in public. The more clarity I have about my content more confident I feel while speaking.

I would like to try 2) and see how it goes.
My employee drastically changes her appearance in the middle of the workday
>>DOE
>Can be confused with Do Over Engineer.

YSNOE (You Shalt Not Over Engineer) which is more imperative is worse at reading.

Maybe NOE (Never Over Engineer) would be acceptable.
> What happened to cross-browser testing, progressive enhancement and other best practices?

It is the responsibility of browser vendors to follow the spec, not of developers.

Otherwise, developers would have to test in 10+ different browsers every time they make a change in the code, which would mean madness (!)
The answer is to avoid such questions with everyone :)

This is a barrier I also had to cross as someone who is involved in a lot of interviewing (software engineers). I used to always break the ice with things like "Where ya from?" or "How long have you lived NYC?". To me it was natural to ask that when first meeting someone.

But over time I realized it makes some people uncomfortable. For example, someone with a thick accent (English is their second language) might take "Where ya from" to mean, "I noticed your accent, where is it from?".

As innocent as my intentions may be, I now believe it's not appropriate to ask questions like that during an interview process or at any time in the work place. Talk about movies, the weather, programming languages. If someone volunteers that type of information by all means engage with them.

And as an interview icebreaker just say, "It's so nice to meet you, we're glad to have you here. Should we get started?". Another one I now use is, "So what do you think of our office? Did you see all the snacks?".
It seems difficult to reconcile inclusivity with the inability to ask someone something as simple as where they are from. Not in a exoticized "Oh no, where are you REALLY from?", kind of way, but in the simple question about where you grew up, whether it's Chicago or New Delhi, kind of way. In a similar way, it seems difficult to debug a problem or help a coworker in a gender-blind manner, when subjectively speaking the wrong way places you at risk of being called a mansplaining sexist.

Exoticization and mansplaining are real phenomena, but so are misunderstandings and damaging accusations based on a lack of pre-established comfort zones with the employee. Less verbosely, if I just met you why would I know that such a question makes you uncomfortable? Should I just assume all brown people get skeeved out by that question and simply not ask them the same questions I ask my white coworkers? How is that inclusive?
It works now I guess, but Safari has quirks I've seen time and time again where things don't work as they should.

I'm also hesitant to call it "fixed" considering it happened just last month and YMMV with a one-element pen.
Right. The correct answer here is to convert external data into UTF-8 once and keep it that way. You're probably not going to become compute-bound, even if you're just reading in text and writing it out again. The UTF-8 check is linear time.
Interesting and disturbing article.

The author ends with some ideas about how to solve the problem. I would like to make a suggestion.

To start, I think it is a good principle that whenever there is a problem in this country, we should look at other countries to see if they handle it better, and if any do, look in detail at how they do it, and then think about adopting their methods to the US. My suggestion is simply we do this with the infrastructure construction problem.
Different strokes, I guess. Want edit access to my account?
IIRC the mods also soft banned it because of that. So posts with the word "NSA" in the title get penalized and ranked much lower than other posts. Hence the shrinking.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508029
Does this include animated gif?

If yes: then it's annoying.

If no: annoying ads turn into animated gifs.
Decentralization Could Have Saved Users of Amazon Drive
> Real estate agents only have the sellers interests in mind because the higher the selling price, the more they make.

Hmmm...is that always true? What if the seller is asking $1 million for a house, then I approach the agent and say, "My offer is $850,000. If the buyer accepts this offer I will give you, the agent, $50,000". Wouldn't that be a problem?
I had a perfect apartment for me. It was 596 sq ft, but split over 2.5 floors - equally-sized basement (one room/laundry & utility closet) and main floor (kitchen/bathroom/living room), plus a 1/4-sized lofted bedroom above it.

My partner of a few years moved in with me, and we quickly realized we had to find a new place if we were going to live together. If one person coughed in the basement, the other person could hear it in the bedroom. No amount of putting up sound-reducing barriers helped.

It looks romantic from the outside, maybe cute and cozy, but day-to-day it takes a very special kind of patience to deal with.

I do have friends who live in about 300 sq ft in New York City, somewhere in the East 60s. Their apartment has that exact "romantic" feel to it, but they only survive because they live in NYC and can spend the majority of their time doing things (together or separately) anywhere but their apartment.
I had trouble with the Japanese "ts" sound until I was taught that "ts" is the same sound as "pets" without the "pe.

Can you pronounce "squirt"? If yes, try pronouncing the "squir" portion of the word, dropping the "t". You should be pronouncing it like this reference, minus that hard "t" sound at the end [0].

Can you pronounce the rare English word "rill"? It's of Germanic origin so you should be able to. You should be pronouncing it like this reference [1]

If yes to both of the above questions, you can pronounce "squirrel".

Say "squir" from squirt, take a pause for a half second, then say "rill". Repeat the phrase faster and faster trying to shorten the pause between the two.

Alternatively, you can approximate the word "squirrel" from the English word "quarrel" by adding an "s" to the beginning. "s" + "quarrel". There will be a subtle mispronunciation with this method, but you should be able to pass in most conversation.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CPhAx00d2Y

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyFuCgq03mg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y21ZciKJA_I
One of the companies I work with has been using Django for sites since it was in beta. They are always years behind in releases.

Sometimes you can build a small but profitable business and not do everything right from a technical perspective.

Still, you'd never see the code on a public Github repo.
>If Google abuses their power it is easier to correct course by forking. In fact, many browsers like Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Yandex etc are already based on Chromium

Will you be able to use DirectTV with those alternative chromium based browsers? I don't know... but I'd guess no.

I was not impressed with the recent google earth (chrome only)... and now here we are with DirectTV.
Perhaps to most people it would be such, but I personally disagree. I agree with regulation, I agree with socially owned services, I agree with free healthcare for all, I agree that taxes should be spent for the good of the people both in the present and the future. I believe in effective Government. What I don't believe is that to this point the Government has been as effective as the tax payers should be expecting and to which the Government should be held to account.
How will this effect video backgrounds like Airbnb used to have?