skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was in the beta of SO. I almost never interact with it anymore.

Asking a question on SO is a last resort to me, and I get a horrid sinking feeling in my gut when I feel forced to do so. The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out.

You begin to realise no one is actually reading your question in good faith, so you start getting defensive: filling your questions with disclaimers about how your example code is just an example[2], how you know there are other ways you could do it but you're constrained toward this direction for various reasons[3], and so on and so forth, until you feel like you spend more time defensively shoring up your question from attacks than actually constructing the question in the first place[4]

I still read SO, but as someone who was around before it existed I don't really feel like the quality of answers is any higher than the random forum posts of yore, it's just that they're all under the same URL now, and the same user interface.

Which I suppose is something.

[1] Not all people™, but definitely the general feeling tends this direction

[2] classic situation: you simplify your code to Foo and Bar levels to show the problem cleanly, so people chastise you for having a complex data structure / worrying about performance / whatever for such simple code

[3] e.g., "How do I achieve X" gets turned into people saying "Why would you want to achieve X, that's stupid"

[4] This is not the same as researching the issue and trying as many things as you can think of, which is definitely helpful in any context of question asking
Testing code equivalence with Python's AST
It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if they banned sightseeing helicopter flights entirely. They were already banned from overflying Manhattan decades ago after a particularly fatal crash, and serious crashes continue at an average rate of one per year, including one in 2009 that killed nine.

The most unappreciated aspect of the helicopters' impact, though, is the noise. They ruin the possibility for enjoyment of the waterfront for a several block radius around every pier that they use. When you run or bike past the piers along the waterfront you have to stop your conversation, they're that loud. And the combustion vapors they're giving off aren't pleasant either.

It really would contribute to the greater safety and enjoyment of all if they fully got rid of these flights. At least get their launch sites away from Manhattan, where they spoil the peaceful enjoyment of huge swaths of public waterfront.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Abstract_Algebra/Quaternions
or
https://books.google.ie/books?id=ouvZKQiykf4C&pg=PA98&lpg=PA...

I am from Dublin, where quaternions were invented, so they get mentioned a lot by mathematicians and physicists here, maybe getting a higher billing than they do elsewhere. Computer graphics is obviously a place to go for introductions also, but it is typically going to be a more applied and less rigorous treatment.
I do, by using Firefox. Mozilla fought against it but eventually had their hands forced. I use it with EME disabled. Unfortunately, my voice alone wont change anything.
Agreed, though I feel that phrasing it as 'adding a law' to include it under the umbrella of 'extension' tends to diminish, or distract from, the problem with inheritance as implemented in current mainstream languages. What you are describing seems to be a fundamentally different way of looking at the issue.
Dolphin Getting More Improvements for KDE Apps 18.04 and Other KDE Happenings
One of the articles that helped influence Stack Overflow's design is A Group is its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirkey ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem... ). If you poke at the early Stack Overflow podcasts you'll find Jeff mention Clay as a person who mentored or inspired him... And he's on the board of Stack Overflow ( https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp... )

With that introduction, I strongly recommend reading A Group... in particular the fourth item of the Fourth Things to Design For.

> 4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.

The design of Stack Overflow is one that tries to hinder the ability to discuss. This is intentional. Consider how hard it is to search discussions. Try finding a comment here or a particular post on Reddit, or something someone said on Usenet or a mailing list archive. They work ok in small sizes, but they fail miserably when the scale goes up.

If polling / opinion gathering / discussions were allowed, Stack Overflow would be no more useful than forums of old. It would be impossible to find anything of value later because there would be too much noise. All of the chatter makes finding the questions and answers that people are searching for harder. Having questions that don't follow the "One question, one complete answer" make it more acceptable to ask more of those questions making it even harder to find the question with the answer.

There are other sites that are better designed for polling and discussions. Stack Overflow because of that. Hacker News, Reddit, Quora, Slant.co. Stack Overflow doesn't need to be all things to all people.

Stack overflow doesn't need to be all things for all people. Its trying to do one thing and do it right. Fighting against that design brings friction in usability. Fighting against the intent behind that design brings friction in the community.

Stack overflow is susceptible to someone providing a better Q&A site. But building a better Q&A site that provides for discussions? I haven't seen that design scale much beyond the department Confluence install.

Continuing to the next paragraph from A Group...

> This is an inverse value to scale question. Think about your Rolodex. A thousand contacts, maybe 150 people you can call friends, 30 people you can call close friends, two or three people you'd donate a kidney to. The value is inverse to the size of the group. And you have to find some way to protect the group within the context of those effects.
I don't understand people who aren't fascinated by engineering generally and infrastructure specifically. I love knowing how stuff works, even if I don't understand it at the technical level an engineer does.

So much of what we use we take for granted, but it really is worth seeing what goes into making potable water come out of your tap. In middle school, I toured the Baldwin water plant in Cleveland, OH. There is a huge hall full of sand filters that filter out the schmutz after the water is chemically treated. It's one thing to know abstractly that drinking water is filtered through sand to make it drinkable. It's another to see the process in action on a grand scale.

In Boston, I highly recommend seeing the Chestnut Hill pumping station, which pumped water from the Chestnut Hill reservoir. It long predates the availability of sufficiently powerful electric motors, and the three steam engines are a testament to how much work went into pumping water around prior to the development of electric pumps.

I believe the last of the steam engines was decommissioned in the early '70s. I'm told the pumping capacity has been replaced by electric pumps in a single 3m square building, which somehow doesn't convey the same sense of awe and indebtedness to the engineers who make running water possible.

Gotta share a longtime favorite joke:

What's the difference between civil (structural) engineers and mechanical engineers?

Mechanical engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
Flutter is a lot like Electron, but faster. Also, arguably easier to use. They don't have to support all of the backward compability garbage that HTML/js has.
This answer does not jive with my experience working remotely nor my experience working in an office while working with a majority remote co-workers. The problems a remote team faces when it comes to producing good technology are not solved that simply IMO.
Indeed, but unfortunately these complications almost never comes up when programming in current mainstream object-oriented languages is taught. Usually, the take-home lesson is, "if you have a type hierarchy, use inheritance - it's simple."
For many use cases, ES has great memory characteristics because the doc values, which is now default.

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

As an example, I have the HN data set on my laptop - about 15 GB of data and I have the max mem set to 3GB (heap is usually ~1) and I can search, aggregate, etc. very quickly without memory problems.
I disagree. It should at least cover what aspects should be considered when designing an algorithm for use in the real world. You dismiss the entire field of experimental algorithmics as if it were nothing more than a bunch of algorithmicists who know some computer architecture things, but there’s a lot more to it.

I’m not arguing against teaching classical algorithm design and analysis, they’re both incredibly important imho. But we should stop ignoring the shortcomings of the models used, hand-waving them away with “the rest is just a bit of engineering”. It’s not.
Python 3.7’s new builtin breakpoint – a quick tour
Well, it is not free money if I have to spend money to protect me against potential future negative outcomes of that free money. And where would the money come from to mothball a plant? Naturally that would be from anti-dumping taxes on the subsidized goods causing the issue, wouldn't it?

And I would almost never suggest to tell any other country what to do - even though I would consider that legitimate within the right framework because sovereignty is not an absolute right - but I certainly have no objections against and am actually for putting taxes on foreign goods if those were produced according to standards I do not agree with.
We can use cryptography instead of 3rd parties to solve most of the trust problem. The companies publish encrypted documentation of a vulnerability so that when they claim a researcher has found something already known, they share the key to prove they already know it. A 3rd party might be useful in a complaint process where the researcher claims the two vulnerabilities are not the same. Given that is hopefully now a minority case, the researcher can resort to the court of public opinion.

It doesn't need to be a block-chain but I guess it would help create a tamper proof time ordered record.
Men and women aren't supposed to have sex anymore without legally binding contracts witnessed by 3rd parties. Otherwise, men have nothing but undefinable downside.
Any vulnerabilities you might think of??
Ask HN: Why use FreePBX?
I am currently planning to create telephony system. I see some examples like elastix and AsteriskNOW. What makes me curious is why they use FreePBX?. Is FreePBX really important to make dialplan and phone configuration?
Binary Heap was always my favorite data structure because of how it would improve my A* pathfinding performance. Guess I should have used B-Heap.
I think that now this isn't an internet only phenomena.

Of course it isn't. It happens to pretty much everything. Pareto's Principle in action. It's so frustrating that this happens but I see no way of fixing it.
It would seem as though electric power could create a much safer helicopter. An electric motor powering the rotor with the engine acting as a generator much like a diesel locomotive. A smallish battery would give enough power to descend safely in case of engine failure.
> The goal of Stack Overflow is to create a repository of high-quality questions, and high-quality answers to those questions.

That's confirmed by Jon Skeet's responses to Rob Conery's tweet. Skeet keeps focusing on downsides of what he calls "'bad' questions."

To be precise I'd say SO is about generating high-quality answers that people can actually find. One way that SO does this is by trying to incentivize high-quality questions.

Another way SO achieves this is by having questions that use the same or similar words to the ones most people use to construct a search engine query.

Yet another way is by having any question at all that induces or references a high-quality answer that shares keywords with common search queries.

Of those two additional categories, a large number of SO questions can be and are low-quality questions.

A significant number of my routes into SO high-quality answers come from what I'd consider low-quality questions. Sometimes the high-quality answers are inline. Sometimes I arrive at them through a mod message about duplicates or another hyperlink.

Especially when someone is first learning a topic, they need those low quality routes more than ever. After all, they don't yet know how to ask high-quality questions!

At least in my experience, those routes from low quality questions to high-quality answers are the one thing that makes SO unique. Those routes are essentially the skeleton bones of the scary, sometimes humiliating process of asking a noob question. (And now I learn it's also the exhausting and soul crushing experience of experts submitting their high-quality answers.)

So on the one hand, it'd be great if SO had figured out that when herding problem solvers it's a good idea to minimize their propensity for being obtuse and condescending.

On the other, it's a testament to the hacker spirit that SO instead caches the results of all that humiliation and sniping so that others don't have to go through it to find their answers. That's actually a big step for the subculture that came up with the error message, "You don't exist. Go away."
Just adding to your comment. Govt regulation for lead workers where I worked was about 1.4 micro mols of lead.
> It seems the ico is at odds with the EU here:

No, just keep reading on:

On appeal, the Regional Court of Berlin (the "Kammergericht") ruled that IP addresses in the hands of website operators could qualify as personal data if the relevant individual provides additional details to the website operator (e.g., name, email address, etc.) in the course of using the website

That's basically the same thing as the John Smith example: There's a threshold when you have personally identifying information, and whilst it can certainly include an IP address in some circumstances, there are enough other valid uses for the IP (fraud, VAT, etc) and enough uncertainty (NAT, multiuser computers, etc) that it by itself isn't PII.

> There's a provision on right to be forgotten, and it'll be interesting to see that vis-a-vis a public interest in keeping an open archive of public discourse.

Yes. I don't think it's clear what Internet forums are required to do.

The ICO has some pretty good guidance here:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

and the ICO has previously weighted in on how they interpret erasure:

https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1475/de...

so a flag to hide all the comments of a user who has chosen to be forgotten should be sufficient.

However, if a site wants to refuse the order, they may be successful if they can argue the comments are in the public interest, but if I were a company wanted to refuse a persons rights in this way, I would call the ICO to get clarity.

> I don't think that'll be enough to comply with the GDPR.

If someone contacts the data controller (e.g. pg) and asks to have their data removed (or flagged hidden or whatever), and Pg does it, why don't you think that would be compliant?
Study is not scientific if it can't be peer reviewed without knowing funding sources.
How would you actually strip unneeded javascript anyways? Let's imagine I have a setup like the OP and want to optimize it. Is there something, that would be able to strip down all JS functions, that are not needed by the site?
At least some of them are: https://security-center.intel.com/advisory.aspx?intelid=INTE...
This was so horrifying to read. If only those three passengers hadn’t upgraded their flights... they’d still be alive.
> There are actual reasons to be worried about this kind of thing:

I suppose. Why weren't people worried about this during obama's campaign?

> - The advertisements were not overt ("fake news") - It raises the barrier of entry to the political process - Filter bubble effects

If filter bubble effects are a problem, then we should be looking into traditional media, not social media. I'd say there is more of a filter bubble issues in CNN, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, Foxnews, etc than in social media. When nearly 100% of the largest media organizations are endorsing one candidate and/or espousing one type of ideology, maybe we should be looking at that.

> Or you can believe a story about "elites" and "biased media".

It's not a matter of believing. It's a matter of fact. Foxnews and the right wing were also whining about social media when obama won. Now it's the media and the left wing whining about social media because trump won. The only difference is that the leftwing has a much greater media presence.

It's so funny how both sides are the same. When it looked like trump was losing, he was blaming foreign interference and biased media and fake news. And the media/leftwing was mocking him for being paranoid and a sore loser. Now that trump won, it's the media/leftwing whining about foreign interference and biased social media and fake news. The hypocrisy displayed by every side is rather disheartening.
I think it's still early days. plus jb hifi and bunnings are massive national chains, with very recognisable brands.

However, many smaller B2C businesses (that aren't chains), still, fail to modernise. This has been the case for 2 decades.

It will be interesting to look back at this article in another 5 years.
I remember using that exact trick to open up a GameCube! Though I read about it online, wasn't clever enough to think of it myself :)
I don't know if that's right.

I don't think there's a requirement that HN has to keep delete personal data that they don't need, and FYI the Hacker News privacy policy they publish[1] argue they don't have to do it if they don't want to:

You agree that any termination of your access to the Site under any provision of this Terms of Use may be effected without prior notice, and acknowledge and agree that Y Combinator may (but has obligation to) immediately deactivate or delete your account and all related information and files in your account and/or bar any further access to such files or the Site.

so we're really out on a limb here anyway. But let's assume that HN is GDPR compliant, and say that they delete all personal data after 10 years and on request, etc... Are they then required to keep that data for ten years?

My guess is not. The ICO suggests[2] repeatedly that you not keep data any longer than is necessary, and that you repeatedly review whether it is necessary.

The ICO also says[3]:

However, in many cases, routine use of the data may result in it being amended or even deleted while you are dealing with the request. So it would be reasonable for you to supply information you hold when you send out a response, even if this is different to that held when you received the request

which makes it sound like it's acceptable, except:

it is not acceptable to amend or delete the data if you would not otherwise have done so.

which then suggests that HN only needs to have policy that they delete personal data whenever if it is identified for export. If I were HN, and I actually wanted to do this (however), I would probably call the ICO to confirm.

[1]: http://www.ycombinator.com/legal/

[2]: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

[3]: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
So for the sake of pretending that the remote team members are able to contribute as much as the local ones you hobble those who are local? I guess if your intention is to prove a point, but the cost in overhead and diminished output from those who are local seems a bit excessive for my taste.
I generally agree with all your points, but I also remember the forum posts and I find that SO has at least one big advantage over those: it's really quick to pick out a good answer compared to a long thread. Just the fact that a) answers are clearly demarcated vs comments and b) the author can select a "correct" answer makes them way more skimmable than, say, a phpBB thread where every post looks the same.
You mean decided.
Exactly. So long as Google is onboard they'll be some kind of DRM on the web. Mozilla isn't dominant enough to stop an alliance between the media, Google and MS. So the question becomes what sort of DRM is the least worse option?
I agree. So why keep up this naive and demonstrably false act that 2016 was the year persuasion and behavioral psychology was put to practical use in politics to manipulate voters.

Every presidential election cycle I can remember was full of rhetoric and outright lies persuade voters. Does no one remember all of the hilariously terrible chain letters from past elections that claimed all sorts of nonsense? I just don't understand why people are running away with this idea that somehow facebook/twitter have changed the game when it comes to brainwashing people to vote conservative.

Politics is and always has been a no holds barred competition where anything goes that isn't straight up illegal. History books praise JFK for utilizing the television in 1960 to win his presidential election. I'm starting to think that if they had today's political climate he would be remembered as a manipulator rather than being savvy.
You can descend safely with engine failure; it’s called autorotation. Sounds like they probably did so, but the floats were not properly inflated. Also a harness catching a fuel shutoff switch; bad. So many small things that can go wrong, compounding to fatalities.
Thank for the recommendation! If you're into that sort of thing, you might also enjoy Why Buildings Stand Up and Why Buildings Fall Down.

Why Buildings Fall Down includes a case study on a seemingly minor change during construction that caused a walkway to collapse once it was put in use.

At the risk of stating the obvious, these are focused on buildings rather than roads :-)
Is there a comparison online that shows the platform availability of each approach?
I’m pretty sure 40% of the population’s mild behavioral problems would be solved with daily exercise of some kind, rather than medication.