skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> which are becoming extinct at a rate between 100 and 1,000 times the rate before humans

I have always wondered how people come up with that conclusion. How do people guess at those numbers? We honestly don't know how fast species went extinct at various points in the past and we don't really know how fast they are going extinct right now. We are still discovering new species, by the way, and there may be some that go extinct that we never discover.
The article doesn't say as much as I wish it did about actual impact on the day to day lives of homeless people.

For me, internet access while homeless was a means to keep myself occupied so I wouldn't go crazy, a means to have social contact and meaningful discussion even though I wasn't very presentable, a means to do research to problem solve, access to online banking and other financial stuff, access to reward programs that helped keep me fed and so much more. Having a virtual life made a huge difference in my quality of life while homeless and eventually helped me get back into housing, in part by leading to earned income, in part by allowing me to find a place I could afford.

This was vastly different from the homeless people I saw sitting at the park all day doing nothing while their social skills, self esteem and self image deteriorated and their only means to make money seemed to be recycling and pan handling.

With internet access, a cell phone and mailing address, being homeless is much less of a hardship than if you have none of those. You aren't simply cut off from society, news, information and the power to make plans and build a future.

I don't know how to express how incredibly empowering the internet can be for a homeless person. I always thought of it as if it were a kind of magic. It helped me feel like a whole person. It kept hope alive by keeping options open in a way that simply wasn't previously possible.

Today, a homeless person can go online and look for information and communities for van dwellers, digital nomads, remote work and other things of that ilk that open up the opportunity to see yourself as simply living an alternative lifestyle rather than being straight up a social outcast. That makes taking adequate care of yourself so much more feasible and makes a path back to a more conventional life vastly more navigable, even if you don't qualify for any programs, many of which are aimed at specific populations, like addicts or single parents.
Nice notation! Do these relate in any way to the interaction combinators?
I remember 15 years ago making a neural net captcha OCR cracker (for DNS registrations). And after about 3 hours I have my accuracy, recall and confusion numbers and I'm not really getting them any better. This was a captcha like from those old PHP libraries. Many colors (sometimes bright yellow on white GRMBL), varying background color, a few things on the background that were clearly not letters (like large circles).

Now in order to train this network I had to download 1000 or so captchas and solve them manually, so I had written a quick program that allows a person to solve captchas. So I figured "let's see how good it is", and used the program to test myself (I figured, worst case I have some more raw data).

Turns out the neural net was 2% better than I was. It actually scored 2% better on captcha solving than I did, and this was when I was trying really hard, pausing when there's doubt and giving it 5 seconds thought. I was a bit surprised that trying really hard or just going with my first guess didn't make more than a percent difference.

Then I got someone who had nothing to do with IT to solve 50 captchas and calculated ... precision was 8% below the neural net (also known as she'd do about 1 in 6 wrong, whereas I only had one in 10-12 or so. The neural only had one in 14-15 wrong. It was a pretty sizable difference).

And lastly I figured, this is not possible. I'm somehow messing this up. After all, I should have made that same 8%+ errors on the original set of 1000 captchas I downloaded, did the network really learn to read better than I can, while being fed close to 10% falsehoods* ? So I generated the set where it consistently errors. And ... Yep. It did. About 40% of those was just me doing the ground truth wrong. I fixed them, but it only improved the CNNs performance slightly.

* of course of those 10% wrong would still almost always have 4 out of 5 letters correct
Not every optionally typed system is gradually typed. The purpose of gradual typing is to allow typed and untyped code to interact

(0) without destroying the safety guarantees of typed code,

(1) correctly assigning blame, if a runtime type error happens, to the specific untyped part of the program that causes the error.

Common Lisp's optional types don't quite fit the bill.
> That so many people continue to go into the system despite this shows a clear lack of judgement.

"Let me use this moment to feel better than those other people."

What is "lack of judgment", exactly?
Given the fear about automation's effect on job availability, why is no one talking about basic needs automation? If we can develop machines to serve french fries at McDonalds, certainly there can be some initiatives to automate the production of food/water/shelter/clothing/etc.

If through automation we drive down the cost of staying alive to virtually nil, then we would alleviate much of the consternation about UBI feasibility. But maybe I'm missing something.
In general, you are correct, with other components being the proper handling and usage of keys and disposal of pads,

Although if a friend and I met up in a desolate place where he whispers me the secret, I'd argue the exchange was secure without encryption. So if you can exchange a message without anyone else knowing, encryption isn't necessary
If you think that immutability and laziness are inherently part of functional, then you're part of the new-school-is-the-only-school problem.

I mean, I'm not saying that immutability and laziness aren't interesting. But FP has a long long history, most of it's not lazy, and immutability is nowhere near universal.
Except machine learning algorithms are already better at every last captcha task it comes up with.

I doubt they get much value out of it.
Right, I wonder how much people trust American companies. Imagine a Chinese firm doing the same and how many will trust them again..
This is why:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/12/ftc-a...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/snapchats-privac...
I wish there was a twilo service that would text me when it starts its last 2 or 3 orbits.
I forgot how half the fun was laughing at the hysterical mini-scenes!
Enpass looks wonderful. Lastpass used to export .csv, but now is only exporting in .html. Enpass imports only the older Lastpass .csv format. I may have to manually enter 280 websites, and 100 lines of secure notes. :( .... I will if I have to.
Be kind (2015)
Do you consider Robin Williams "old"?
My most depressed time wasn't when I was on my PhD program. It was when I was on h1b and my job was insecure. I was very worried about losing my job because of project cut and having to leave. In 2015, I was in a state of depression which was triggered by job insecurity at first, but that was only the first week. Then following that, I couldn't sleep for about 2 months. I was trapped in a 3 day loop, the first 2 days, I simply couldn't sleep for a minute. And the 3rd day I would become too tired and I could sleep for only few hours.

At the time, I didn't know it was depression. I thought it was just Insomnia.
According to the Wayback machine, that page is at least from the year 2000 or older, and the two example mails he gives are both from 1996. I would assume that any bug in sendmail which would have existed back then will be fixed by now.
> Several of the axes mentioned (memory management, language specialization) lack any documented attempts to systematize their treatment at the language level.

This is not entirely true. The author of the Gradual Memory Management paper you cite is currently building [1] a systems programming language called Cone [2] that incorporates these mechanisms. Although much work remains to be done, the online reference documentation does go into some detail about the syntax and semantics for references, allocators and permissions.

[1] http://github.com/jondgoodwin/cone
[2] http://cone.jondgoodwin.com
A browser addin to help with this helping might help make the world a better place.
I'm not the original poster but the touch screen controller on a number of ST micro based kits I've played with 'debounces' the press to 10mS selectable down to 5mS. So figure slightly less than 100 to slightly less than 200 taps per second. That can also be affected by multitouch settings as well.
Yes, there is smaller hardware - however this is indeed small hardware. Especially in the context of running go.

This mcu has 4kb, which is not a lot of ram.

8bit controllers are sometimes 16kb - 32kb
Your point is what exactly? Its another option... more options are good. I like it, and none of those things you listed are important to me and many other people.
this article is a thin veneer of (fully justified) criticism of the get-rich-quick economy over tired old communist rhetoric. Please pick one or the other in future. I'd welcome more articles attacking this particular type of industry, but it's a big leap from "exploitation is bad" to "seize the means of production".
YouTube footage?
Are 10GbE switches still really expensive? Think a 10GbE LAN would be cool if you have a NAS or need to backup loads of videos/images.
Looks like a fun project, of course I wonder how much it would cost for 10 to 15 robots so that you could build your own little mobile ad click fraud farm.
Macintosh Common Lisp
The SAT Is a Good Intelligence Test (2011)
Ah a French company with one of their DC in Quebec.
What could go wrong ?
I did Stitcher for a bit. It was kind of ok. But the walled garden felt wrong and at some point I couldn't find a podcast on stitcher I wanted. So I found Downcast (iOS app). While it's not perfect, it does let me access my spaghetti-and-duct-tape BBC radio downloader easily.
Just like a more powerful car is more likely to catch fire.
>Text based advertising sure could be a part of RSS.

Nobody cares about text based adverts
Huh. Now I can't tell if this one is satire as well.

You are on the mark for Java like OOP becoming popular in PHP. I think there are more people trying to do enterprise level work with PHP and they are taking lessons from existing software engineering practicies.
High intelligence is also associated with the following:

1) not fitting in socially;

2) higher awareness of things.

Neither of these are good for anyone's mental health, but they're not problems directly caused by intelligence itself. Their combination is especially bad, as one could be aware of potential problems while others aren't, generating all sorts of friction.

I believe higher intelligence simply requires better personal mental health management, but there isn't really anywhere for people to learn that and I would say our current philosophical assumptions do not facilitate it.
Maybe they should get someone from the internal department that monitors Facebook employees to come over and show them how to run a tight ship:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...
> We honestly don't know how fast species went extinct at various points in the past and we don't really know how fast they are going extinct right now.

Citation needed please. Yes, they're estimates, but there are scientists who have devoted their entire careers to exactly that question. A quick Google turns up entire books devoted to this topic (http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/344/13...) Your phrasing here makes it sound like this number is entirely random and not based on any evidence or science.
I always wanted to build a Lego robot to do UI automation on our Windows apps and embedded devices. Point a camera at the screen, recognize screen elements and then let the robot do the clicking.
Apologies, I forgot to follow up on the promised inference discussion in the original version of the post. I just added a paragraph at the end on my thoughts.

> Another big question in gradual programming is inference vs. annotation. As our compilers get smarter, it becomes easier for information like types, lifetimes, and so on to be inferred by the compiler, even if not explicitly annotated by the programmer. However, inference engines are rarely perfect, and when they don't work, every inference-based language feature (to my knowledge) will require an explicit annotation from the user, as opposed to simple inserting the appropriate dynamic checks. In the limit, I envision gradual systems have three modes of operation: for any particular kind of program information, e.g. a type, it is either explicitly annotated, inferred, or deferred to runtime. This is in itself an interesting HCI question--how can people most effectively program in a system where an omitted annotation may or may not be inferred? How does that impact usability, performance, and correctness? This will likely be another important avenue of research for gradual programming.

This is to say, I don't think inference and gradual systems are necessarily at odds, but could potentially work together, although that doesn't happen today.

Additionally, I didn't want to dive into dynamic vs. static typing at risk of inflaming the Great War, but the point I was trying to make was moreso empirical. A huge number of programmers have used dynamic languages to build large systems in the last two decades, which suggests that there is _some_ benefit, although further research is needed to precisely quantify the benefit of dynamic languages.
Hmm... I wonder if this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
What do you mean by "scales to a reasonable degree"? How does others take over?
Maybe you're looking for the word "trolling"? I mean, that's kind of the essence of April Fool's jokes.
I would love to see some sort of city-wide wifi, that would allow people to buy small amounts of data with bitcoin. You would connect to the access point, send bitcoin/altcoin to the address generated, and get access to the internet until you had transferred the amount of data you had purchased.

Non-homeless people would use such a service as well, but it would be especially valuable to homeless, who could be given bitcoin/altcoin or perhaps obtain it from crypto ATMs.

Not having a physical address is a huge impediment to functioning in our society. Without a physical address, you can't have a credit card or a bank account. Without a credit card, you can't have a cell phone for internet access, or a gym membership to take a shower.

But shower facilities or gyms that allowed you to buy one month at a time with crypto, coupled with internet access that could be purchased with crypto, would allow people to function pretty normally in this society without a physical address. Neither of these would need to be specifically for homeless, nor would they need to be tax payer funded.
How's this work on an international coordination level? Does the Chinese space agency contact its counterparts and give a heads up?
Then I guess those 5-star ratings must have been some Trump supporter conspiracy brought to you by Breitbart and Steve Bannon then... not the fact she went off a cliff talent-wise when she moved to LA. Which was more than apparent to even non-fans of hers. And I say that as a big fan of her earlier work and as someone totally indifferent to US politics.
they're trying to sell you their cars

... and SDVs open a whole new market to them: non-drivers.
Sorry Jon, I didn't mean to imply you haven't been making progress on your language. I was thinking moreso in terms of published research.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-timeline-of-the-mass...

They use fossil dating methods, core samples, and way more things than I’d know.
French Universities Cancel Subscriptions to Springer Journals
To be clear, I mean that in an empirical sense more than a prescriptive sense. More people use imperative code than functional code, and one hypothesis is that it's simpler for people to think in terms of instructions. But as I mentioned earlier in the post, that's purely a hypothesis which should be the subject of further research!
It seems like blanket denials of research to impeach an article would be against the rules here.
TopN extension for Postgres
Gah... You're probably right. It was early enough on March 31 that I didn't think about it.
Yeah, that's an actually reasonable argument (I don't buy it either, but it's coherent enough). But I honestly think most of the time people aren't making that argument, they're just complaining about the typed languages they know -- more often than not Java.
The "#deleteFacebook" tag is so quaint. It's quaint that anyone believes they can "delete" their Facebook account, or that doing so would ever be up to the user to decide.

Need evidence? The centralized nature of websites is structural evidence -- any service can offer you a "delete" button and let you think you're causing that item to be deleted. In reality, service admins control what happens to the data. Hacker News post revisions, for instance, could be kept at HN admin's discretion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16724962 is a discussion about "Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted".

Any time you rely on someone else's computer ("the cloud") to store your data, you rely on them to act in accordance with your choices. This is basic 'how information flows' stuff and it's still valid and still true.

Centralization is popular with admins because of the power it grants them. The issues are much the same for "deleting" an account on some service as they are for censorship power on web-based discussion sites because the same underlying centralized structure is at work.

Website discussion forums are single points of censorship (including this one); the same site deployment choices are made in order to allow the elite few (site admins and those they choose to grant some morsel of censorious power -- moderation point holders) to decide which posts are hidden (moderated down so they're silently obscured) or promoted (moderated up so the thread shows in default settings). And all of this is designed to be done in a mostly unaccountable way by people whom you'll never identify. The differences from one discussion site to another tend to be relatively minor, the running theme of "don't you dare deviate from the narrative!" persists across implementations.

So be careful; your past edits and ability to be heard are more in the hands of people you don't know (and therefore can't trust) when you use sites like these.
The Panopticon Singularity (2002)
sounds like you like making assumptions.

> Take an actual graduate course in pure mathematics, very little hand holding.

i have taken many. and you missed my point. i didn’t mean having one’s hand held through the actual material. that isn’t true at all of course, in part due to poor teaching and in part due to the difficulty of the material. i meant that one is forced to take x amount of courses. i believe, past a certain level, that this becomes extremely limiting. you spend all this time and time effort doing coursework and going to class rather than researching. learning within a context is much better than learning without context, aka most courses. and many schools hardly take any coursework transfers. there aren’t many good reason for this.

and of course i have a bias because that’s what personal experience yields. but there’s no reason for you to insult me. i would wager my bias is shared by many who have been through ph.d. programs. and of course it’s not necessarily true. there are excellent advisors. but they are rare.
Re: Random French switching

Maybe you are using their Quebec DC. (Bill 101)
In my opinion, there's a much worse issue than universities being an ivory tower bubble. They are extremely corrupt. I don't say this lightly. I've spent more than a decade as a grad student in several top institutions. It's hard not to become insane. I've seen many of my fellow students and postdocs going mad, literally.

I've seen people holding papers they had been sent for review, copying and testing their ideas, and then rejecting them to send the same stuff for review themselves. Once you become reasonably well cited within a subfield, all stuff is sent to you for review. You become the gatekeeper. It's a winner-takes-it-all game.

I've sent a paper to Nature, which got held up because our reviewer was about to send the same stuff to Cell. After a year of intentionally slow reviews, our paper lost novelty and went into a different, but still good, journal within the Nature Group. This kind of stuff can wreck your career.

My previous principal investigator got expelled from the University for serious misuse of funds. I reported him because he used all my funds for travelling to all sorts of exotic locations instead of the experiments we had to do. It took years of reports from other people and extremely serious incidents to get him kicked out. Most of the times, political leverage and interconnections give principal investigators more or less carte blanche.

I could be writing all night, but I would rather not because I will go to bed upset. All biomedical departments, where tons of money is handled, are full of charlatans and scammers. It's sad. My prior probability of decency is only high for pure math and less flashy fields. CS is much better too.
I am well aware of that 8 MiB rlimit. It's just a default that root can change. It's both too much and not enough.

It's too much because even 8 MiB is excessive without overcommit.

It's not enough because nothing about the ELF binary even bothers to claim that any particular amount of stack is enough.

I really wouldn't call "8 MiB" an answer to how much stack space should be allocated or committed.
I role my own aggregator, its 1000 years ahead of the rest. Im only half kidding.

Ill share my most recent idea: sort news items by the amount of time between its pubdate and the previous pubdate in that feed. (Discard items older than x where x is since last time you read the results, a fixed amount of time or more if the number of "winning" results is insufficient.)

The idea is simple. That guy who never says anything. When he opens his mouth it should be interesting to hear what comes out.

He will be delighted to have 1 reader. A much more enjoyable position than listening to some screaming news anchor or other attention whore.
enough people have given me this feedback that I will change the repo name/branding. thanks for your feedback.
It's a sort of reverse natural selection. The people writing PHP these days for whom the last, oh, 15 years or so weren't enough to stop writing PHP.
On a recent trip back home, I had some downtime and my device was broken, so I threw a bunch of podcasts on the Apple TV.

A few weeks later my dad calls to tell me he doesn't know how any of this works, but now he gets amazing content while driving, instead of just listening to the mostly ads that came through his antenna.

So.. just lack of awareness? Just fiddly enough to keep people away?

I have a sneaking suspicion that if tomorrow Apple or Google just subscribed everyone to 99% Invisible and waited, FM radio would be dead in a year.