skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good post-mortem summary does a few things: (1) describes the actual event timeline clearly and precisely; (2) describes the negative consequences of the event (if they are not implicitly clear) from the end-user's point of view; (3) lays out exactly what mistakes were made that led to and continued the event--whether in assumptions made, process failures, inadequate process, unanticipated consequences, side effects to remediation attempts, etc; (4) describes planned and potential changes that will avoid the problem in the future along with a communication plan for keeping stakeholders informed of any future changes. A good post-mortem does all of this while taking a broad, organization-level view of the event and a user-focused view of its consequences.

Maybe the internal document covers all of this, but this blog-post summary does not. And what is included here does not bring me great confidence.

Firstly, this summary indicates they were far too narrowly focused in their assessment, talking only about the Mr Robot promotion's compatibility with the purpose and restrictions of the SHIELD tool. And I suspect that maybe internally the story now is that some marketing staff misused the SHIELD approval process to get this plugin around other more robust processes.

But the intricacies of which particular avenue within Firefox or Mozilla this occurred through is a backwards view of the problem. Users aren't upset that the SHIELD tool was misused to push an ad on unsuspecting and confused users. They're upset that _Firefox_ was misused to push an ad on unsuspecting and confused users. The problem here is the entire idea of a "TV show tie-in" to Firefox.

And lastly, the action items here are pretty pathetic, and fail to address users' concerns (not a surprise since users' concerns are never explicitly recognized in the post, either). Yes, SHIELD studies should be actual studies; and yes, SHIELD studies should be clearly named; and yes, it's bad that the SHIELD program was used to ship a commercial. But never once does this post promise that Mozilla will take a broader view of the actual needs and desires of their users, or that they will correct their internal mindset that led to anyone thinking this tie-in was ever remotely a good idea.
Yeah also I recently tried Xi-mac and the first thing I did to see how fast it was was to drag the scroll bar quickly. Based on my experience of other editors that is where they usually get slow (no editor seriously has problems inserting one character at a time).

Unfortunately Xi was quite laggy in the scrolling department. Slower than VSCode for example.
Yes, but once created, UBI is more stable than expecting every public servant to keep a single goalset focused on poor people.
There’s something circular about this argument, which reduces to “We can’t make perfect copies. But if we could, they’d be perfect.”

Without evidence - unlikely anytime soon - there’s no way to know if a copy really would feel identical, or whether - more likely IMO - it might start “close enough” but errors would accumulate over time and lead to noticeable differences, which might be experienced in both subjective and objective ways.

If there are quantum-level effects, consciousness will not be copyable.

Even if there aren’t, we’re talking about exactly duplicating a specific arrangement of atoms in space to reproduce all the neuronal configurations and chemical gradients.

And we’re talking about doing that with no significant errors. And implanting that configuration inside an extended nerve and tissue network it has to be matched to.

At the very least, the functional information structures created by the chemistry and biology have to be duplicated exactly - probably instantaneously, to avoid mistakes - with no significant inaccuracies.

All of that seems quite challenging to me.
> Darwinism isn't an optimisation algorithm. A set of circumstances that were favourable for survival with a particular trait may not necessarily be favourable in the future.

While agreeing with the thrust of your post, personally I think that Darwinism is a form of optimization, but the mild confusion around Darwinism that you're describing is a confusion about what that system optimizes for.

Darwinism optimizes for survival in the specific environment and circumstance, and plays out over time. Darwinism does not optimize for "best" or "strongest" or the "mightiest".
That covers the most common format accepted by the BSD and POSIX inet_* functions, but misses the less common ones.

If anyone wants to have a go at a more complete one, here are some test cases for you that it misses, using Google's well known public name server 8.8.4.4. These all work in the classic command line tools like ping on MacOS, Linux, and Windows:

134743044
8.525316
8.8.1028

POSIX and BSD also allow the numbers to be written in hex:

0x8080404
0x8.0x8.0x404
0x8.0x80404
0x8.0x8.0x4.0x4

or octal:

01002002004
010.2002004
010.010.02004

or mixed:

010.8.0x404
The implied suggestion in your post is that we should accept people going through the situation that the man in the article went through in order to make it harder for criminals to commit benefits fraud. That is, quite frankly, an utterly inhumane reaction to the problem. Innocent people in dire situations are far more important than protecting a (relatively small) amount of money being paid out to criminals.

We do need to try and catch criminals where possible, but if the cost of catching them is innocent people suffering then we should do less to catch them and just accept the cost instead.
Or you know, you could just get mugged by someone homeless with nothing to lose who is also getting recruited by gangs who use these people as fodder.

In all seriousness, if you have not the slightest ounce of human sympathy to those who don't skim and are decent folk, rational self management has a strong enough argument and evidence to support such behavior.

The reason advanced societies pay this price is because the alternative is right there in front of you in the developing world.

The disenfranchised don't go away. They are human beings, who happen to be pretty efficient at coming up with average solutions to the problems they face.

Even if that solution is directly through you and to your wallet.
It's not open source though.
Rise in Cryptocurrency Mining Affecting the PC Gaming Industry
Mary Beard is "Britain’s most beloved intellectual"?

Not Brian Cox? Not David Attenborough?

Please let's keep HackerNews free of the media's usual hyperbolic nonsense.
Laser routine
Show HN: A HN/Reddit-style site for scientific pre-prints and publications
The notion that cryptocurrencies would displace fiat in our lifetimes was always a red herring.

This is the real impact they will have in the long run: the technology will greatly expand the set of people and organizations who can issue a currency. Fiat will have a lot of competition that it didn't have before. Competition is bad for incumbents, but good for the rest of us.

So the libertarian dream will probably still be realized, just in a more measured manner than some frenzied speculators and early adopters would have you believe (which shouldn't come as a surprise at all).
I think people are social animals who often find it easier to understand a concrete thing like a "no-goodnik thief" as opposed to a MNC with complex possibly legal? or not? tax loophole abusing ability
C.S.Lewis probably has the best claim, and I thought they were referring to him at the first.
A bigger rocket or a smaller payload, yes. Higher-energy collisions should produce more and higher-energy shrapnel, through, leading to even less predictable mess. Also, Inescapable Hypervelocity Shredder™ has a nice ring to it, and it would be giant "fuck you" to the rest of the world; precisely something you'd want to do if you were crazy and hated the West.
I wouldn't be so sure. A single draw call is surprisingly slow. If you drew each glyph with one draw call that could be hundreds which will definitely cause slowness.
The Committee recently got rid of trigraphs (required for EBCDIC compatibility). IBM was strongly against the proposal but was finally outvoted. They do keep the functionality as a conforming extension in their compiler, but now that they have been removed from the standard, the language might evolve in ways that might make the extension non-conforming.
I saw Stroustrup give a talk and he said exactly this - C++ is a toolbox of different paradigms that aren't meant to be combined. If you avoid frameworks that impose a particular paradigm and/or shield the parts of the codebase with different paradigms (for example when using Qt you really should have your "engine" running aside the Qt rather than embedding the code in the UI, extreme example I know but the same idea) you'll have a grab bag of different approaches for the specific problem you're having for zero cost. When people talk of "sticking to a subset" they are unknowingly doing exactly that (especially since everyones subset is slightly different).

There might be a "culture of complexity" in the community, but to remove the conflicting paradigms from C++ is to destroy what makes C++ useful. I don't believe C++ is complex in it's DNA, but highly experimental, overwhelming to newcomers and experienced developers alike (since you have to truly understand any feature before using it), and easily misunderstood. It requires more strictness in design and implementation than other languages, and isn't my first choice for anything that doesn't require high performance. But since I'm in game development and audio synthesis, it's often my only choice since nothing else hits that sweet spot of abstraction and performance.
The official method for estimating fraud rates is take a very small sample of claims, review the paper work and conduct an interview. of course this is never going to catch the majority of fraud!

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
I’ve been running my own homeserver for over a year now. As long as I’m not joined to the “giant” rooms like #matrix:matrix.org and #riot:matrix.org, my user’s messages send instantly. Definitely recommend running your own server if you can manage it
It's not just Permanent Residence applications. Something similar happened to my wife with a Tourist Visa application.

I'm a UK citizen, my wife is not, nor is she an EU citizen. At the time, she was studying for a Masters level degree in an EU country, with a Student Visa for that country. Not ideal for married life, but she wanted the degree and we made it work (spent loads on airfares).

During the summer holiday, we decided she should visit me in the UK. We applied for a Tourist Visa, which seemed to make sense as she was only coming for a few weeks. There was no need to apply for a Spousal Visa.

Despite the fact she had multiple UK Tourist Visas and a UK Student Visa approved in the past, this one was rejected. No specific reason.

There was a written appeals process. We appealed. The Home Office had months to submit their case. Nothing happened.

Next, there is a court appeals process. We applied for a date, one was set several months in the future. Obviously only I could attend. Eleven months after the original Tourist Visa application we had our day in court. The Home Office didn't even bother to show up. The judge heard my side of the story, reviewed the supporting documentation and the Visa was granted.

We were never given any official reason for the rejected initial application or the Home Office's refusal to engage in the appeals process. As you said, I think they were just going for sheer annoyance, hoping we'd give up.

Lost a lot of faith in the UK after that. We now live together in Europe and of course Brexit is doing its best to screw that up too.
Facebook billionaire funds his own company and gets his friend’s companies to use it at work.
I've never used nor paid for Asana, however...

It looks like your numbers are way off https://asana.com/pricing

30,000 customers with an average of 100 users (on the non-enterprise tier) puts that revenue over $400m/year.
Most people know Lewis as an author of children's books and probably wouldn't really of him as an "intellectual".
Here's a quick sample of some of China's computer donations to parliaments, defense and foreign affairs departments and police and immigration departments in recent years:

PNG:
http://pg.china-embassy.org/eng/zbgx/t849942.htm

Fiji:
http://www.fiji.gov.fj/Media-Center/Press-Releases/CHINESE-G...

Botswana:
http://bw.china-embassy.org/eng/sbgx/t541543.htm

Maldives:
http://www.foreign.gov.mv/index.php/en/mediacentre/news/2786...

Samoa:
http://www.samoagovt.ws/2017/01/china-donates-new-computers-...

Cambodia:
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-11/03/c_134779443.htm

Mozambique:
http://clubofmozambique.com/news/china-donates-100-computers...

Sri Lanka:
http://www.colombopage.com/archive_17B/Aug05_1501907095CH.ph...

Ghana:
https://www.ghanabusinessnews.com/2017/06/07/chinese-embassy...

Pakistan:
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-09/22/c_136627663.htm

Liberia:
http://mofa.gov.lr/public2/2press.php?news_id=880&related=7&...

Zimbabwe:
https://bulawayo24.com/index-id-news-sc-national-byo-16364-a...

Laos:
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-04/12/c_136202934.htm

Macedonia:
http://arhiva.vlada.mk/?q=node/5196

Serbia:
http://eng.mod.gov.cn/news/2017-06/21/content_4783395.htm

Afghanistan:
http://www.gov.cn/misc/2007-01/11/content_493797.htm

Kyrgyzstan:
http://en.people.cn/90001/90776/90883/6776679.html

Dominica:
http://news.gov.dm/index.php/news/536-china-donates-equipmen...

Barbados:
http://www.caribbean360.com/news/china-gives-barbados-over-u...

Guinea Bissau:
http://en.africatime.com/guinee_bissau/articles/china-donate...

Moldova:
http://www.army.md/index.php/duhovniceti/img/userfiles/info/...

Guyana:
https://www.stabroeknews.com/2017/news/stories/11/07/457430/

Nigeria:
http://www.spa.gov.sa/299126

Malawi:
http://en.africatime.com/malawi/articles/malawi-china-donate...

Yemen:
http://ye.mofcom.gov.cn/article/jmxw/201309/20130900303426.s...

Syria:
http://sy.china-embassy.org/chn/xwfb/t790038.htm

http://china.aiddata.org/geospatial_dashboard and https://www.lowyinstitute.org/chinese-aid-map/ are interactive maps (albeit using older data) showing where donations and aid have ended up.

These are just the overt instances where press releases are issued with prime ministers, senior officials and ambassadors shaking hands in front of donated computers and laptops. There has also been research such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostNet which is relevant to this discussion.

Also very telling is how Western countries are responding. Some recent articles:

Verizon no longer selling Huawei phones:
http://www.afr.com/news/world/verizon-is-said-to-drop-plans-...

AT&T no longer selling Huawei phones:
http://www.afr.com/news/world/north-america/att-told-to-stee...

Australia funding a PNG-Solomon Islands-Australia undersea fiber optic cable project to prevent Huawei from getting the contract:
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/austra...
As the title suggests, the site is centered around discussions regarding scientific pre-prints and publications. Current sites supported are:

* arXiv
* bioRxiv
* Pubmed
* Pubmed Central
* DOI

Threads are submitted using the publication ID, DOI, or URL of a pre-print or publication. PDFs are fetched when available and used to generate a thumbnail.

Currently, the site only supports academic email addresses. I am trying to figure out the best way to open the site to all without having to manage spam. Let me know if you have any thoughts/ideas. If you are interested in accessing the site and do not have an academic email address please PM me with an email address to whitelist.
The Need for Speed (Starting up, that is)
Which paper are we talking about? (Would like to read it).
In our pm product (Targetprocess) average customer lifetime is about 4 years.
Luckily that was challenged, and overturned, and they've said they're not appealing it.

Here's the judgement. It's worth reading, because it seems the lack of consultation for a major change was one of the reasons to overturn it.

http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/...
It’s time to use ISO 8601 across government
I can't make this out; his style contains an awful lot of "this guy is a racist" markers for someone who's Lebanese.
Because hate crime isn't easily defined. Some things are obvious but a lot aren't.
I am far from a geneticist (or in fact any form of scientist), but why do normal experimental controls not work in the case of this experiment?

You perform the odor exposure to half of your group and not the other half (the control group). Then you compare the results (measurement of the offspring) between control group and non-control group.

Assuming that your group size is large enough that the measured difference can be considered statistically significant, then it doesn't matter what other variances there are - you have controlled for them.
New employee welcome swag
Trying to nail this down can be a hair-pulling experience. I know estimations are a ridiculously hard thing to do, but that's kinda the reason I'm engaging them as an expert.

I also know they want all the work you can throw at them, but just getting a sense of whether this is a 1 hour or 5 hour gig so I can evaluate the ROI before briefing it in is impossible.

This is one of the things I want to address (my side-gig doing marketing consultancy) - one rate, whether that's strategy or design work, up to the client how to use it (and telling them to use someone else if not good value).
Thanks for this response. It seems like writing the policy might capture most of the value of an audit since it'll make all staff members aware of the risks we face.
Nice article. I still prefer arrow functions over positional arguments though, because this approach trades some clarity for syntactic sugar. Until partial application becomes part of JavaScript, the import statement will probably outweigh the informative "boilerplate" it helps obscure anyway (there's rarely more than one use case for partial application inside a well-factored component).
I think that implying bribery here is dishonest. 6/7th of the authors of the paper are IBM employees and they are just voting according to their employer wills.
Why would the developers of Uber pay employer’s NI for people using their smartphone app? Uber drivers are self-employed and pay tax accordingly.
Wish they would use this in schools instead of getting kids accustomed to MS office.
Very interesting take on modern 802.1x authentication !
So like Wall Street.
How long would it take for orbit decay to bring these objects back into the atmosphere?
There are plenty of directly compiled languages with good performance, linking to C APIs, and higher level abstractions.

Rust, Haskell, Go, and Erlang come to mind.
Consider the following quedtions: Can they overload arbitrary key presses? Can they modify what is on the screen? Can they change the screen's content without changing the file's content? Can they call the editor's own editing functions? Can they be called by the editor's own editing functions?

Textmate can bind shell scripts to shortcuts, but letter keys always insert letters, and the editor always shows the file's content.

Emacs can execute arbitrary code on arbitrary keys, which enables you to implement vim-style key bindings. Also, Emacs can display stuff that is not a file, which enables mail clients, git clients, and terminal emulators.
I hope we will have healthcare services that don’t require advanced knowledge or infrastructure to operate, but we’ll still need advanced tech to produce them.

I don’t see a way around this, since you always have to start from the same raw materials.
Wakefield AJ, Murch SH, Anthony A, Linnell J, Casson DM, Malik M, et al. Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Lancet. 1998;351:637–41.

Recap:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues[1] published a case series in the Lancet, which suggested that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine may predispose to behavioral regression and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Despite the small sample size (n=12), the uncontrolled design, and the speculative nature of the conclusions, the paper received wide publicity, and MMR vaccination rates began to drop because parents were concerned about the risk of autism after vaccination.[2]

Link to actual paper: https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0140673697110960/1-s2.0-S01406736971...
Attenborough is deeply beloved but (and possibly because) few people would describe him as an "intellectual"; his career has been one of "professional" broadcaster but "enthusiastic amateur" naturalist.

(There's an interesting sub-discussion to be had here on what "intellectual" means in English public life and why it's not a popular category)
Graphics chip demand surges. AMD sees double-digit percent sales growth in 2018
A happy useful system that gives money out is an easy target for politicians who want to show they are vanguards of small government or better saving/spending.

Good welfare programs are targets.

Therefore they will only be mediocre programs, even if you could have a good program.

Any good program will survive only as long as its not a target.
>>Really, I don't think that Java brings that much complexity now. It use to.

That's because these days you don't learn Java, you learn things that manage Java madness. Like Eclipse, IntelliJ or Maven etc.

You don't really do much using Java these days. You do things using tools, which write bulk of the Java code. In essence learning Java today is learning Java ecosystem tools.

>>But you can get a new developer up and running in Java within 2 months.

That's because it doesn't much time to learn the IntelliJ UI :)

>>Java is like a 10-speed Schwinn. Fast, moderately complex, but easily understood when kept within the wheelhouse of Spring + Core Language.

This is true for most languages today. Java owes much of its success and power to two things. Libraries and Marketing. Marketing money is gone as Oracle doesn't spend a dime on anything that doesn't bring in two in return. And other language ecosystems have caught up with libraries.

So you could use anything instead of Java and it would all still work, in fact in most shops it already does. Haven't heard any major project being started in Java in most places in a long time.

Legacy projects will carry the Java carcass for a lot of time. But If you want to work on projects worth working, Java isn't the language you should be with right now.
Well, of course banks can become insolvent (i.e if enough people default on their loans), which is why many governments now insure people’s deposits (up to a certain limit).

But Lehman Brothers wasn’t a commercial (retail) bank, which is what I was describing. They were an investment bank, which generally don’t take deposits or directly offer loans.
Fuji are killing off their film lines though: http://ffis.fujifilm.co.jp/information/articlein_0072.html

These are the 5 packs of Velvia, Provia, and Superia. It's not a good sign, although maybe economically it makes sense? They've also completely killed off Acros in 4x5 and 120, I'm stocking up on the 4x5 boxes.