skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most firearm violence is committed using handguns and most illegal guns are obtained through straw purchases. The best thing we could do would be to implement universal background checks (i.e. require background checks for private sales) but in a privacy-conscious and convenient way that will maintain support from the pro-gun side. Some kind of app or mobile website that allows the background check to be conducted for free on a smartphone, perhaps using token-based authentication to avoid the need to share personal information.

People who sell guns want a way to perform background checks on the people they sell to, but there's no way to do it because only licensed dealers can access NICS. As long as the private background check system has the same privacy invariants as the existing paper system for dealers (primarily that it is not possible to look up which guns someone owns, only to take a serial number and see who owns it) there won't be significant opposition.
North American birds are absolutely in decline. From this article [1], the overall population has decreased by about 1.5 billion birds since 1970. For some groups of species, for instance, aerial insectivores [2], things are much worse. For instance, the population of bank and barn swallows, chimney swifts and common nighthawks has decreased by 70% over the past twenty years alone.

The Christmas Bird Survey is done after most birds have migrated and so captures data on the relative abundance of resident birds, which as a group, are doing better than birds in North America overall.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/report-fi...
[2] http://www.bsc-eoc.org/download/BWCwi08.pdf
> When I have a gun your power advantage is greatly diminished and your size becomes a detriment.

The old Wild West adage, "God Created Men and Sam Colt Made Them Equal!"

> rather than trotting out some "lone man with AR-15 destroys US Navy thereby defending freedom of everyone from Trump's goon army" fantasy to poke fun at.

Of course that's impossible, but look at what small groups of insurgents have done to the US military in various parts of the world. But yea, even if every person in a city owned an AR-15, they would only be an annoyance if the government really became a tyranny.
Michigan is funny, in that a crosswalk is defined loosely as any portion of a road with a sidewalk on either side. Pair that with the precedent that pedestrians always have the right of way and you'll have to come to the conclusion that, annoying as it might be, the pedestrians crossing roads in Ann Arbor actually are in the right.
I agree but this is how a quoted block is rendered on this site. Its fine for desktop but almost completely unusable on a mobile phone since you have to scroll horizontally to read each line.
Paperless Post is an event planning alternative that doesn't require people to sign up or to make an account, just to have an email address.
Cloudflare Mobile SDK: Helps Mobile Developers Monitor Network Performance
Managing technical debt is one of them most important parts of engineering. When you're resource constrained, which is almost a given in the real world, you need to think carefully about what kinds of debts are worth accruing, and what kinds are absolutely not.

I think this is both an art and a science, and the right balance comes with not just engineering experience, but also domain experience, team maturity/talent, market/competitive pressures, leadership, and culture.

There are so many factors involved that it's not surprising so many projects accrue horrible debt.
The Harvard extension says their online bachelor's degree costs about $50k total, so it's not like you're saving that much money.

https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/undergraduate-de...

You'd save more money doing community college for 1-2 years, then transferring to your flagship state university.

Plus Harvard Extension no longer available to those under 21 years old unless for special circumstances such as disability. Many people finish a traditional bachelor's at age 21.
If you're let go for being too old, and no other company will hire you because of your age, would you feel the same way? If so is it just age you're comfortable with as a vertical for discrimination?
Table 2 has latencys (measured in microseconds) and a frames-per-second measure too (which places it a ~250k-400k fps). According to them, ESE has a 17k fps "theoretical max", but in reality has a lower performance.

I don't really get the fps measure -- without context, I can't say above which threshold they'd be able to perform real-time operation (this is surely due to my lack of knowledge in this domain).
I would love for HN to support some type of mark up that could actually render a quote block properly. ( @dan )

> But it doesn't have one AFAIK.

It's not markdown, and the only thing we have is a code block.

I've re-formatted for an even slimmer screen :D
> Yep that exposure control / sensor quality of the dash cam in the video was rubbish.

Is that the same cam used by the AI to detect obstacles?

I would expect a safe self driving car to include IR cameras that can be more cautious about moving warm blooded creatures.

Surely some more detailed telemetry data would reveal whether the main issue is with the sensors or with the algorithm.
I'd say krita and gimp fill different needs. Krita is for artists and Gimp is like Linux's MS paint on steroids. I frequently use Gimp to crop images, make memes, etc. When I used to draw with my wacom tablet, krita was the tool of choice.
While you make a valid point, my pet peeve of late has been people using "your" in place of "you're" since it makes me reread the sentence.
I'm just here for an argument.
First of all, ED seems overly focused on USA/West/China, it doesn't list several arson (I assume that's what Fire Emblem means) and stabbing events (Hack'n'Slash) I personally know of.

Next, I'm assuming that by "mass shootings" you mean the FPS, Single Player category on there (since the only other FPS aka shootings category is Co-op Mode which seems to be almost exclusively terrorism and gangs, not "common people").

Here is the raw data: https://pastebin.com/rfHy5KUu

Here is the aggregate by country: https://pastebin.com/NPi3kELY

USA has 'only' 4.3% of global population but 17 out of 50 top ED loner shootings and one third of deaths and almost half of injuries.

If that's not a phenomenon then I guess nothing is.
Information presentation nit: did anyone else find those "mental model" diagrams really hard to parse? (Especially the first one.)
Witnesses saw the vehicle. I’m not sure about the plate.
His purchase of foreign batteries online was the piece of info that gave him away. Combined with cell phone records.
I'm guessing here... I think ad companies would be happy but it's their clients which are reacting to consumer lobbying. I also think YT and Reddit are also reacting based on this pressure. For a similar effect see StopFundingHate in the UK.
Don't agree here:
- Growth has been relatively high
- Infrastructure improved
- Quality of life improved
- The state was not left in a state of destruction.
> The crux of what I'm getting at is, do you think that you should have the right to moderate the content on your own platform that you built?

As I've said elsewhere on this thread, corporations don't have rights, people do. A more clear way to say this might be: corporations only have rights inasmuch as the people who make up the corporation have rights.

Even though you're not asking this rhetorically, the way you're asking this question is an appeal to me as a person, and obviously I don't want to be forced to host the content of people I disagree with.

But giant corporations are different from individuals. Either we should prevent corporations from being too big to fail, or we should ensure that their failures don't damage society. If a corporation owns a communication platform the size of YouTube, they lose the right to choose what content they host, because doing so infringes their users' rights to free speech, and their users can't just go elsewhere because there are no other equivalent platforms.

Just because a corporation doesn't have a right to an ideology doesn't mean we should not let any corporations have ideologies: we can let corporations have ideologies as long as we make sure it isn't harmful to the rights of individuals. The purpose of laws, as I see it, is to protect the weak from the powerful. If I started Dave's Liberal Hosting Service with just a server and a dream, and only hosted Democratic websites, that's fine, because such a service doesn't become the platform of the internet that everyone is forced to use--it's likely a conservative equivalent would arise even before I built a significant business. Part of the problem is that services like Reddit and YouTube have performed a bait-and-switch--they built themselves into major platforms on a free-speech ideology, and then when they were too big to fail, they turned into ideological platforms. Similarly in the realm of CDNs, groups like Amazon, CloudFlare, Akamai, or Google absolutely don't get to have ideologies. Anyone who wants to work on the internet has to work with these CDNs, so if they don't allow free speech, there isn't free speech on the internet.

> Note Cloudflare had this exact issue: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

Likewise, I'm also not saying free speech is the only right that needs protection. With the CloudFlare case, the "Freedom of Speech < Due Process" is a rational argument, at least. I don't have enough context to 100% decide for myself if I agree with their decision, but I do tend to think that if the Daily Stormer was inciting violence, that's a higher priority than free speech. But note how this isn't about CloudFlare's rights at all--it's about protecting the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the people the Daily Stormer was attacking.

Random aside: I do wish that they hadn't been so nationalistic about it though. (He said: "I, personally, believe in strong Freedom of Speech protections, but I also acknowledge that it is a very American idea that is not shared globally").
Uh, i thought it was easier? All the options for search engines are in the results in quantum
Don't know why this is being downvoted, it's an interesting point.

There's a significant difference in lighting between a night with a clear sky and full moon versus an overcast night and new moon. Not saying that's the case here, but it's not a valueless comment.
I disagree with you on this particular point, but in a wider scope I think you're spot on - it seems so little thought is given to the very basics of UI design.

iTunes is the classic example!
> "Freedom of Speech" is not actually a very coherent ideal.

Sure it is. The ideal is that better ideas, not power, are the best response to ideas someone doesn't like. But there are certainly exceptions where power is needed to counter acutely harmful speech like "don't yell fire in a crowded theater" and "don't post stolen passwords".

Governments and corporations just have different interests and different amounts and kinds of power. So we have different norms and rules for what governments and corporations ought to do. But the general principle is the same.
If housing prices don't go up, landlords make profits from rents rather than appreciation. Currently in SF, if housing wasn't appreciating, landlords would demand a greater percentage of the purchase price from renters, or house values would stabilize at a lower point where rent receipts are enough to make a reasonable return.
So... Red Wedding problems are left behind by Bolt-on solutions that address only only read-heavy spikes?
usual procedure in NLP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words
I mean do we really think Facebook is the only company with data problems? Is switching to something different really going to make a difference? Deleting your Facebook won't get rid of your data. Google, Microsoft, Twitter, your ISP, your cell carrier all have so much data on you. At this point you are out there in someone's database somewhere. Unless you haven't been on the grid at all which clearly anyone on HN is on the grid. So not sure what we think #DeleteFacebook will really do?
We can't even reintegrate the ones supposedly doing it to protect us. If we, the general population, stopped participating in this delusion that they're protecting us, we'd likely send them out to do less killing in the first place.

Killing for money doesn't require you to be a psychopath, as is evidenced by the countless paid killers in the military and swat teams today.
I don't know enough about how different profiles operate to say with any certainty, unfortunately. So it's possible there is no benefit. However, for mobile there does appear to be at least one benefit. When I recently checked to see what data Google had on me using their free tool, I saw that the only web history they had associated with my device was all from URLs visiting while not in privacy mode. These were all links that I clicked from text messages which will always default to open in the regular, non-private tabs, even if you only have incognito tabs open. That right there is enough for me to always and forever use nothing but privacy mode. For the PC, this is a non-issue as I never log into my browser. Although I do use privacy mode there near 100% of the time as well.
They had a package explode while in the packing center, even if they couldn’t get the tracking number from the package itself, surely it would have gotten scanned at least once going through routing.

Easy enough to stop the whole warehouse, scan all packages that didn’t explode, get the missing tracking number, time stamp that back to where it came in, look at the video at that time.
Gimp and Inkscape are both extremely sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in usability, Photoshop in both features and stability. Last time I tried to use Gimp for anything mildly complex (heavy usage of cage distort on a high res pic with quite a few layers) it crashed every 10min (though I was told it was the fault of the Ubuntu packaged, it's not acceptable to make a clusterfuck of the versions targetting the most widely used Linux distro!). Inkscape is horribly unstable once you try to draw anything slightly complex that involves heavy usage of masks and your number of paths/shapes get close/over 100. Its popular though since Cored Draw is no longer a thing, and Adobe Illustrator has horrible UX for anyone not using it full-time/professionally.

Linux desktop desperately needs:

1. a good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities

2. a good vector graphics app - Inkscape could be it, but it would need heavy work on stabilizing it, and UI improvements around anything involving mask (though to honest the bar is low here, Illustrator has horrible UI around masking to)

If anyone can do these things well, I'd suggest a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter or something. Lots of people will throw money at anyone who can produce something intuitive and stable! Not need for tons of features, just make it fast and stable, and someone will add on. And using a "hipster" new language like Rust would also help the project's popularity with new developers... few people are willing to hack on an open source project for the "fun" of improving their C/C++ skills nowadays...
Are people really still so closely wedded to Python 2 that they find it easier to reimplement all the features they need from Python 3 in the former, instead of switching to the latter?
That's worrying. If that's really the case, autonomous cars shouldn't be on the road.
Slack picked a weird time to make it easier for bosses to download private chats
Hi nik,

We would like to migrate becasue alicloud offer data center in the country that AWS / GCP doesn't offer.
How to Build a Search Service with Go and Elasticsearch
Why would I want an extra gigabyte of memory usage for no benefit?
You're probably better off with v52ESR, it's at least getting maintained with security patches for another few months. FF61 should enable the Tab Groups addon to return in June (release of the tab hiding API), v52 is maintained until August.
That's a decent argument for bottom-up programming. Though I'd also say what's really at issue here is short term vs. long term technical debt. Writing software bottom-up front-loads some short term technical debt but leaves you much better able to avoid long-term technical debt because you have a much more flexible product.
Agreed, skipped over these. The rest of the content was golden.
Did you just assume someone hadn't read the posting guidelines?

...

Turtles all the way down.
if you are going to live in a bubble anyway, you might as well have one that doesnt upset you all the time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck ?
Do you want to get regulated? Because that's how you get regulated.
As a professional, hopefully he's been planning for retirement for some number of years. And not all employers discriminate. So just find one who doesn't, finish off your retirement checklist, and leave the world of work to the kids.

There are worse worlds to live in than one in which everyone can do what they want.
Ask HN: Use Gitlab vs. GitHub in production?
Hi all,

I just saw Git web based UI management today. I wonder if someone can share their experience using either on of them so I can compare the benefit and drawback of those 2 options. Anyone can share?

Thanks
I just go with the * around the text since it seems to work fine for mobile.
It depends on what the circumstances are. If communications are disrupted, nuclear forces on alert could mistake it for an attack and launch in retaliation. Daniel Ellsburg's new book details how launch authority, as a practical matter, was delegated to commanders in the field. If they thought that a war had started and they had no communications with their superiors, they would have had authority to launch on their own.
Yup - it turns out pulling out the core of your graphics in a graphics programme can take a lot of time to get right (certainly took years in my own small project).

Who knows, maybe GIMP will jump straight to Gtk4.

There's a good roundup of happenings in 2017 in GIMP here:

https://www.gimp.org/news/2017/12/31/gimp-and-gegl-in-2017/

[EDIT] There are links in the above doc to sponsor GEGL developers [/EDIT]

It's encouraging that GEGL is seeing use in other projects and receiving patches, maybe the GEGLisation isn't too far from completion.
It's not "fifteen twos" but "two fifteens".

They're just counting how many fifteens they've got: "two complete fifteens, and 3 from the third fifteen"
I'm amazed at this coincidence, too.
The interesting part is the explanation on how it works and on the accuracy you can expect:

https://books.google.it/books?id=sFzCAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA121#v=one...
Even going back to my teen years I've always tried to avoid ending up in a bubble of agreement. It's become even more important of a skill in the age of the internet.

Whenever I'm told that I'm not allowed to disagree for some reason or another, I immediately stop and reevaluate my views. Usually they don't change, but it's worth it for the times that they do.

And often times when I've changed my views like that, there's a cultural shift a little while later. A lot of what is held as sacred truth is due to fear of the "opposing idea" being right.

Think about programming in the late 90s and early 2000s, but not believing OO to be a panacea. I use OO when it's appropriate, but it's often not. And speaking up about that in those times meant you were viewed as ignorant.

If you program in Java in the year 2000, you have a vested interest in OO adoption. You've invested your time in a language that was explicitly designed to not allow for anything but OO. And if OO is not the end-all be-all of programming, then maybe you've wasted your time. So anyone claiming otherwise is indirectly threatening your livelihood. You're terrified that they might be right, so you insist that they never could be.
Fractions in the Farey Sequences and the Stern-Brocot Tree
I see accusations of this a lot, and honestly I just really wonder what the team structures are like at a lot of companies- or what the experience level is of the average HN reader. Because you're right, PMs don't have the insight to understand the nuances of technical debt and the benefits and costs associated with varied approaches, and really it's not their job to. As technical folks, it's our job to learn how to say "no", and not just in an abrasive way that shuts down the conversation, but to work with project managers and decision makers, understand the reasons for their decisions, and push back firmly but using language that they can relate to and speaking to their problems.

Regardless of how much PMs might want things or fiddle with the schedule, as professionals it's our job- not theirs- to say when things can't be done, shouldn't be attempted, or might cost more than they're worth.
You’re better off wrapping it in asterisks and prefixing it with a >:

> No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.
puts tinfoil hat on
There's an avalanche of articles from the news corp lately regarding Facebook. Is this a battle of the titans?
puts tinfoil hat down
I've recently taken up drawing and animation as a hobby. I found Gimp to be perfect for what I need. It has good support for my drawing tablet. I didn't find it hard to use at all and I see the fact that the interface isn't completely revamped every 6 months as a benefit. Once I figured it out, the plug-in infrastructure is wonderful and allows me to script a lot of stuff in Python.
There's a fine line between iterative development ("first do it, then do it right, then do it fast") and actual technical dept caused by bad practices (e.g. copy-and-edit instead of re-use). The former method is well-aware of shortcomings and heading towards eliminating them eventually, so I'm not sure if it should even be called technical debt. Actual technical debt (like real life debt) has the problem of "interest" attached to it, so it grows exponentially. So if you're not constantly working to reduce it, it may grow out of hand quickly.
Making an interactive web toy in WebGL and WebAudio
Ya, I just switched back to Chrome, because it was unbearable to use Firefox over Chrome without my laptop plugged in (we're talking ~8hrs life down to ~1.5hrs). I really wanted to like Firefox (given its strong privacy)...such a shame.
Name one product in GCP (that had reached general release) that they have "extinguished".
It is clickbait. Just enough for you to click, read and comment. If the article actually relayed the content - How to manage technical debt better you might not even open the link.
Fantastic article. As an engineering manager working for a lot of young startups, I’ve found technical debt to be inevitable. The author seems to have come to the same conclusion I have: embrace technical debt by leveraging it conciously and tracking it carefully.
This article has a clickbait title with a more reasonable premise in the body. No, technical debt isn't good, just like getting jabbed with a sharp object in the throat isn't good for you. The reasonable point the article is making is that there are some things worse than accruing technical debt, like spending too much time making an ivory tower system that doesn't actually have product fit. Similarly, getting jabbed with a sharp object in the throat in the case of a tracheotomy can be necessary, but that doesn't mean that you should run around jabbing yourself in the throat just for the sake of it. Technical debt is similar; sometimes necessary, but never choose it for its own sake.
plenty of people are already doing this.

tensorflow can be used to run simulations and other scientific data processing. that's because tensorflow is just a retained computation graph that can be flexibly configured.

we have been doing this since before deep learning was the tech du jour and will be doing it long after.