skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Question: If you take an organization with the goal to make money, and you execute well on social media with the help of capable engineers, will the end result have been drastically different than what Zuckerberg came up with?

If the aims and initial circumstances are similar, and the methods of engineering people & data with code are known, and few errors are made to get there, how much is really left to the individual as opposed to the system itself?

Would there have been any way that Facebook did not become its evil current self, without accepting that it would eventually be replaced by an equivalent organization that did decide to "listen to the data" and let algorithms decide what's most effective in getting us to be a potent tool for shareholder enrichment?

It might have been Facebook's set of algorithms and engineering prowess that got us to the point we're at now, but I wouldn't refute the statement that the use of those methods would cause better long-term results in someone else's hands.
I think the "you're committing three felonies a day because laws are overbroad" argument is incorrect and overblown. However, there are overbroad laws in specific areas that impose arbitrary injustices upon people who happen to come within their scope.
Section 1001 (the "lying to the government" statute) is an example. It reaches a tremendous amount of conduct. It's cold comfort to someone in the crosshairs of a federal prosecutor that they may be able to prove that the misstatement on some random piece of paper that happens to be within federal jurisdiction is, in fact, a mistake and not an attempt to deceive the government. Until the Supreme Court reigned it in, the honest services fraud statute was also in that category.

Intent doesn't help. If you're at the point where there is a debate about your intent, you're already in a pretty deep hole. Intent is an expensive basis to defend yourself on (you pretty much have to go to trial because it's so fact-based) and there is no telling what a jury will think of your story.

Blanket immunity, on the other hand, is good. You can tell a prosecutor to sod off if you've got blanket immunity, because proving that you're in an immune category is something you can do easily and inexpensively, unlike proving that you didn't have the mental state needed for a crime.

This particular law has the potential to be the section 1001 or honest services statute for pretty much everyone operating a website that hosts user-generated content. It's terribly drafted, overbroad, and the mens rea requirement is too low. You should be very worried.
Previously we had outsourced thinking to:

- village elders and tribal leaders

- educators at all levels with various agendas

- workplace superiors with party lines and biases

- etc etc

People were never individual free-thinking agents like they think they were. Ever. In fact, I'd much rather have machines recommending me what to read next, even as a side effect of a company making money by showing me ads in the process.
Ask HN: How many code projects of your own do you use in a given day
Thinking most broadly, how many of your own code projects (scripts, compiled, browser plug-ins, android apps, web sites, etc. etc.) do you use on a daily basis?

For example, if you coded your own task reminder system, and built a scheduled batch job that searches for picture duplicates, and wrote a browser plug-in that blocks ads, that would count as 3.

In addition to a number, please feel free to share any cool projects that you are proud of!
You're arguing a straw man by putting the word only in there.
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." OCB
Not really, even in my worse app I never wrote anything in the face of a user...
And you can't treat a user as a global mutable state if your code doesn't directly mutate it.
I obviously agree with the concept that he is a very good example for an external system on which you have no control.
There are more byas. The test difficulty is different per language, the years of experience, etc. You cannot extract any conclusions from this article.
There's a big difference between Osama and your average everyday ISIS wannabe, who absolutely do use internet. Eg https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7n4a/isis-messa...
> Isn't a database global mutable state? Or a filesystem?

Yes.

> If global, mutable state is considered problematic when programming in the small (i.e. single program), why is it unquestioned when building much larger, more complicated systems that we also need to reason about?

It is, and should be, considered problematic. The filesystem can mostly be avoided. The database should probably be rebuilt into something that's easier to reason about. See e.g. https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou...
How are they related sorry?

I know in ES6 closures inherit the scope they are declared in, but I don't think that's a required part of the concept is it?
They can be, but so can a lot of drugs sold at the grocery store. E.g. paracetamol/acetaminophen is one of the largest causes of liver damage in the UK. One of the big shifts there has been to restrict size of packaging and require pharmacists to exercise care (some will explicitly verbally warn you about the risk).

Ultimately I think that we'd in many respects do a lot better if it was possible for someone who wants to use things like Adderall for recreational use to go to their doctor and ask for advice and appropriate monitoring and know they won't be refused, than having people randomly taking it without getting proper advice.

But I also think another large potential benefit would be for doctors to be able to steer those who insist on using drugs to safer analogs were possible.
So you feel your program is better off for having only one connection pool and being unable to use another?

Regarding caching your processor tends to feel otherwise and has multiple levels of cache because globally mutating state in a coherent way is slow as molasses.

I can't wait to hear what awesome program needs a connection pool and access to the JIT at the same time. Are you writing a SQL compiler that sends mail?

Is your awesome program by any chance written in JavaScript or PHP?

PS. Databases aren't really global mutable state as in when you ask your database for a count of rows in a table the answer you get back won't ever change because magic.

Also, because of the ways database ARE global mutable state you run into all the issues you typically do with global mutable state. And then the places you do have global mutable state turn into performance nightmares. (Read: Hot spots)
Unfortunately, many companies still insist upon remitting in paper checks, especially for cross-border transactions. If I could route a paper check remittance to a BTC/ETH exchange like Kraken, buy into BTC/ETH in that paper check's denomination, then immediately sell and withdraw as USD, then I and many other vendors could solve that use case. If anyone knows of a BTC/ETH exchange with turnarounds even faster than forex brokers, and can process paper checks, then please post who you use. For a world economy that is supposed to be a global integrated entity, the amount of rentier hurdles sitting on the borders never ceases to amaze me.

For the few customers that agree to a wire transfer, I'm trying out a cryptocurrency exchange in 2018 to convert them to USD.
First ask yourself why it's important to bring up slavery at all? Do that, and you'll have your answer.
The 32-bit deprecation issue points to a larger issue of cultural decay. We can still obtain old Commodore 64s, Nintendos, Gameboys, and other old HW and run old SW on it.

However, the way these walled garden DRM'ed online app stores work, once something is taken out of circulation, it's just GONE. You won't be able to buy an old iPhone 5 10 years from now and go download an old game.

My son really liked this old Simpsons game on the iPhone, but now there's no way to run it, or even find it in the store anymore.

This isn't an Apple specific problem, but I wonder, if future archaeologists will even be able to find anything left of our culture, as it digitally disappears behind upgrades and silos.

One thing I love about the Web, is we can have sites like Archive.org. And I can still view the very first Web page ever in my browser. Spacejam still works!

But what if the first iOS games I loved on my original 2007 era iPhone? Will there be an Archive.org emulator? Unlikely.
Though naturally, you should have some experience with alcohol or pills before doing this, or you'll get a combination of stage fright with having a slightly fuzzy brain.

You might feel good about your speech, but your audience might decide that maybe you shouldn't do that again.
It's designed for making moms feel like they make substandard cupcakes that are not craftsy enough.
JavaScript is actually a better case than most languages as it doesn't support threads.
And yet it apparently amazingly is still surprising to a lot of people.
What you describe above is similar to what Carmack discussed at his QuakeCon keynote several years back when toying with a game engine on Haskell. Very interesting talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A
Seems more like FB is reeling in official policy but ok...
Great job on the music! What did you use? Is that vocal in the first 40 seconds programmable?
I would say on average less than 1 since I rarely finish/get them to a working state...

I really should see if I can get such a thing done...
Based on this note[1], you can also disable with:
Preferences > Pointer > CMD+Click Opens Filename/URL

[1]https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/3688#note_1665347
It is a terrible analogy all around.

What is happening is that Facebook is shifting from being AOL 2.0 to being a government contractor. They'll eventually be more entrenched and integrated (in the US) with the IRS, police, intelligence, etc.

The first step is to get them over a barrel, with public opinion against them. The rest is easy, and FB will embrace it.
I would argue that it’s not an industry standard unless it’s back by some sort of ISO like RFC. I’d also argue that it’s not an accepted term as _many_ people don’t agree with its misleading name, for example I personally see it as marketing spin.
We are investigating using Scala and Akka (using actors) for concurrent processing. No locks are needed...
tiny?
I know it's subjective, but lot of people look less attractive after getting plastic surgery. Maybe what I've seen are some of the tail end (e.g., not one procedure, but people getting literally dozens of procedures).
The absolute worst type of global mutable state I've had to deal with personally follows this antipattern:

oldEnvironment = getGlobalEnvironment()
SwitchToGlobalEnvironment("Foo")
- Do things that rely on the "foo" globals
SwitchToGlobalEnvironment(oldEnvironment)

Or, worse, functions like this:

// NOTE: DO_STUFF assumes "FOO environment". Set FOO ENVIRONMENT before you call it.
def doStuff() {
- Do stuff that relies on foo environment
}

or:

// NOTE: depends on the value of global FooBar. Adjust FooBar to make DoStuff2 behave how you want
def doStuff2() { ... }
This book is definitely created with an agenda and trying to force a point of view to lead readers to be left wing economists. It seems more like an indoctrination attempt especially when you read the leading questions asked in the text.
On that note, does anybody know if iOS also sends out your history of wireless network SSIDs to connect to networks, like Android (or some versions of it) does?
Washington Post is some of the best investigative journalism going on right now at a mainstream media level.

NYT is just a rag in comparison.
More memory, and a video controller. (I can imagine a PS/2 port implemented through GPIO, but a video controller can only be done using a separate chip.)
But google told me that my language choice won't impact their hiring decision :(
Wikileaks – the #surveillance apparatus implemented by firm Peter-Service
The particular example of game engines is where many laws of clean code break down. The tradeoff to performance is usually not worth it to get immutable data structures, AoS and all those niceties. Instead you make singletons, SoA, collections of mutable entities and so on. And that's fine, as long as you have good performance reason to make that tradeoff.
ProxySQL integrates ClickHouse with MySQL protocol
Is Harvard really considered more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge? That doesn't follow my perception.
Powerful Earthquake Strikes Mexico
There are no keys to launch infrastructure in Russian military. The few things amounting to that are the key codes stored in sealed containers that open code locks on control panels with physical launch buttons. The steel plate that cover the launch panel at Topol TEL can be easily cut open with a power tool.

Topol missiles have literally only 5 control inputs available to the launch crew:

1. raise the launch tower, 2. lower the launch tower, 3. arm the missile, 4. disarm the missile, 5. launch the missile

All missiles are programmed at the factory. Precise start coordinates are held by a separate navigation receiver at the missile TEL, and if the receiver fails, there are multiple redundant fallbacks.

The only way a crew can mess up the launch is to override the start coordinates with manual input.
Apparently, it's more profitable to pay developers nearly twice as much, than it is for a VC or CEO to take a airplane flight a few times a year.
There is now a history of American tech companies operating in China. The lesson is pretty clear: play politics if you want, but know that if you do (i.e. Google), you are going to lose access to the market. Thus, it comes down to a business decision and it becomes increasingly hard to argue on principles if things look so binary.
The database (at least the relational ones (I don't know the nosql thing)) is actually a very well behaved global state. It gives you guarantees about its mutability which you often don't have in your own code (well, in mine at least :-)). Moreover, the transactional nature of those DB actually percolates in many places in the code and makes it more reliable. So I'd say the database is a very special mutable thing, it's not as general as the usual proposal of GMS and therefore, it's much less dangerous.
Exactly, if everyone's plastic surgeried, then it's a complete lottery who in the next generation gets attractive genes.

Without plastic surgery, there's more assortive mating which preserves attractiveness from parents to children.
> Evolution is neither demonstrable nor falsifiable, so it's not scientific.

"Evolution occurs" is science - it is reproducible and falsifiable.

"We are the result of evolution and descended from single cell organisms" is not reproducible nor falsifiable. I would agree with your claim that this is not science.
I don't think it's true that everyone seems happy with this. In the past 10 years culture has shifted dramatically towards encapsulating and minimizing JS state (modules, moving away from imperative jQuery code and toward MVC, React) and, to your other point, moderately towards more strict CSS organizational techniques (OOCSS, SMACSS, BEM).

I agree that the culture by default was to program everything against a giant mutable state bucket and I'm not sure why that happened.
A hypothesis is an educated guess. A scientific theory is a substantiated, unified explanation of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence.

You're splitting hairs on semantics to hold onto your untenable position that evolution is not scientific.
Link fixed, thanks.
What is a Kicker score
Then you start jamming affiliate links in places so you get a percentage. Then you target more and more keywords that are convertable. Then you have a newsletter that pushes those products. Then you take money to write articles/reviews/videos about some product.

It's not just jamming banner ads everywhere, there's a lot you can do to increase revenue with advertising and referrals.
> If your ISP gave you the option to deliberately rate-limit access to some sites and you used it, that would not be a net neutrality issue. Correct.

Yes it would. Net neutrality basically says "regardless of what users ask for or what providers provide them, they can't give preferential treatment to some companies over others".

I do agree that, since this is on-device and not targeted definitely is the right way to go and alleviates many net neutrality concerns. But the closed classifier, the choice of 30 days, etc and that this is a single browser doing it on a device where they allow no other browser just gives me a slippery slope feeling that Apple can unilaterally choose which default parameters users browse under outside of web standardization.

I think the 3rd party cookie thing is a bit of a red herring anyways. If ad networks weren't so stupid, they'd use first party cookies and correlate unique identifiers on the backend. Even when done w/ minimal fingerprinting (which iOS is exempt from most forms of due to its user base consistency) and IP tracking (which iOS also more exempt on cell networks than home ISPs), it can be quite effective.
> (As noted, she doesn’t get everything; once she and the male mate and part, she raises the offspring by herself.)

You can argue of course its genes of good scavenger that get selected for.
Blanket immunity "is good" if you're the tech company that may or may not be knowingly harboring sexual predators and human traffickers. Being able to "tell the prosecutor to sod off" is not, for everyone else, a good thing.

I get that blanket immunity is cheap, but when we're talking about companies which make hundreds of billions of dollars operating their platforms, with profits soaring so high they literally don't know what to spend it on, that we ask them to occasionally spend a little of it convincing the law they're doing enough to manage their platform?
Yes it's really quite amazing that browser development has gained the traction it has, considering what a terrible environment it is to work in. I think its a combination of a lot of devs never having done anything else, so they don't know better, and also that removing the friction of deploying and configuring native apps was worth all of that.
I think one of the short-term goals is to succeed as an IP core rather than standalone chip. For example I recall that recent nVidia GPUs already have RISC-V cores integrated in management role.
Ther interwebz says I score 127. Where's my McMansion?
I was a TA at Yale when I did my PhD there and I contrast that experience to when I was a TA at University of Calgary. Whether it’s a higher sense of entitlement or just grinding it out to maximize your official grade the contrast between these two schools was striking. At Yale you’d better think twice about honest grading because if you did there would be an army at your door with pitchforks ready. You then have to spend hours explaining why they didn’t deserve a higher grade. At the end of the day you’re worn down and there’s very little incentive to grade honestly as you get pain nearly nothing and you’re really there to finish your PhD.
Personally, I've had the opposite experience.

You can set billing alerts that will e-mail you when you cross whatever thresholds you set. On the billing page, it has a line item for each thing that costs money. It's not particularly difficult to stop anything, especially when you're just doing hobby projects anyway.

If you're OK with insignificant (less than $10) charges on your credit card, it's really not that hard to get pretty far with serverless. Almost everything serverless has perpetual free tiers and the ones that don't (API Gateway, CloudFront, Route 53) have very low usage-based costs (less than $1/mo idle). If you put any value at all on your time, you'd cross these amounts almost immediately trying to setup / learn anything else.
I love William Carlos Williams. I'm not an avid poetry reader, but I always loved going through his work. Another favorite is Alfred Tennyson.
@HN: Just trying to understand why this post didn't make it to the global feed? It has accumulated decent upvotes. It's not present on the 2nd page and 3rd page as well.
what is their definition of large?
But without the context and background people aren't equipped to make up their own minds in a well reasoned way. The text seems to try to take advantage of that by feeding the reader how they should believe instead of letting them make up their own minds.
Right, but that's "the adaptationist view that beauty is an “honest signaling” of evolutionary fitness," and which he explicitly rejects.
And remember the wifi hack?

https://www.wired.com/story/broadpwn-wi-fi-vulnerability-ios...

For that reason, I keep my wifi off as much as possible.
As always: there are no silver bullets. Static typing, nor Rust, can save you from all bugs.

If you follow the link to the security announcement list, you can see the one other advisory we've had since 1.0 as well.
It really is the best way. Half of my grad classes were exactly this format
So, investors simply don't believe in the existence of income?
Pirate Bay Founder’s ‘Njalla’ Offers Anonymous Domain Registration for Bitcoin
Anyways, it's a good example of how to do inbound marketing. It certainly worked on me!
You really never use singletons or other static global objects? I use them fairly often, mostly in game dev.
Startups: Real-life games?
The key is in the first few days to teach mother and child how to latch to the breast.

If your wife and daughters breastfed in the hospital or immediately thereafter and then supplemented, that is different (and lower ROI) scenario.

There’s a ton of published material on the topic.
The taxes that, according to you, should only be paid by individuals and not by corporations - thus allowing rich individuals to postpone paying taxes as long as they want, and forcing not-so-rich individuals to cover what's missing.
One thing that you need to get past really is that pot being illegal doesn't really seem to effect usage that much. It's not like 30% of the population was waiting for it to be legal to smoke it. If it worked any other way nobody would have had alcohol during Prohibition.
Cut Cord: How Viacom's Master Controls Were Left Exposed
Aw, Fritzing is cute. It's for the Arduino crowd.
Fritzing is for projects that can be built on standard solderless breadboards. It's fine for that. The ceiling is low, but high enough for many projects.

Real EDA programs are terrifying to beginners. You start them up, and there you are, with a blank schematic and no idea how to get started. Fritzling is limited enough to be approachable.

It's like the experience hobbyists have when they encounter Digi-Key. You want a 1K resistor?
Go to "digikey.com", and type in "Resistor". You get back "Chip Resistor - Surface Mount (508794 items), Through Hole Resistors (285766 items)". OK, try "through hole". A huge chart of options comes up. Select "1K". The options narrow: "2,261 Remaining". Yes, DigiKey offers 2,261 different 1K resistors. Select "Active" and "In Stock", and you're down to 299 remaining. If you know to select "Cut Tape" and "Bulk", meaning you don't want reels of components for an automated production line, you're down to 199. Select wattage ratings under 1 watt, and you're down to 124 options. You probably don't want the $50 ultra-precision 0.01% resistors, so set the precision to 1% or worse. 96 remaining, any of which would probably work on your solderless breadboard. Sort by increasing price. The cheapest resistor is $0.10 each, $1.62 for 100. "Stackpole CF14JT1K00, 1 kOhms ±5% 0.25W, 1/4W Through Hole Resistor Axial Flame Retardant Coating, Safety Carbon Film."

Compare Jameco. Go to Jameco.com, and type in "Resistor". The first search result is "CF1/4W102JRC
Resistor Carbon Film 1k Ohm 1/4 Watt 5%". Jameco offers 5 options in 1K ohm through hole resistors, and they're different wattages. Less consumer confusion.

People have to start somewhere.