skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About a Dominos mascot... I dont think they are even going to bring back a mascot after what happened with their last one.

Many here might be too young to remember but they used to have a creepy man in a bunny suit called The Noid as their "mascot." It was more of an anti-mascot though because the Noid ruined all other pizzas except Dominos, hence the slogan "avoid the Noid."

Bizarrely a man named Kenneth Lamar Noid was so distressed by this mascot he entered a Dominos and held the employees hostage demanding a getaway car and a copy of a novel about Freemasons!

https://priceonomics.com/how-dominos-pizza-lost-its-mascot/

>On January 30, 1989, a man wielding a .357 magnum revolver stormed into a Domino’s in Atlanta, Georgia and took two employees hostage. For five hours, he engaged in a standoff with police, all the while ordering his hostages to make him pizzas. Before the police could negotiate with his demands ($100,000, a getaway car, and a copy of The Widow’s Son -- a novel about Freemasons), the two employees escaped. In the ensuing chaos, the captor fired two gunshots into the establishment’s ceiling, was forcefully apprehended, and received charges of kidnapping, aggravated assault, and theft by extortion.

>The assailant, a 22-year-old named Kenneth Lamar Noid, was apparently upset about the chain’s new mascot. A police officer on the scene later revealed that Noid had “an ongoing feud in his mind with the owner of Domino’s Pizza about the Noid commercials,” and thought the advertisements had specifically made fun of him. A headline the following morning in the Boca Raton News sparked a talk show frenzy: “Domino’s Hostages Couldn’t Avoid the Noid This Time.”
This happens in DC too, although perhaps to a lesser extent due to your mild climate. Some construction continues through the winter, and most carpenters and laborers are happy to work instead of draw, but nobody is framing in the snow. It's true that excavation is easier when the ground isn't muddy, so "breaking ground" in the winter could make sense. You can't pour concrete when it's freezing, though, so if the timing is wrong the rain could mess up the excavation before you get a chance to place your forms.
Is saturated fat bad for you?
Another reason is the rumor that Google is going to make their own chips for their Cloud, possibly ARM based. This could have big cost savings with some applications. Video streaming and encoding are one of them.
GNU Emacs for more than 15 years now!
And here’s the press release

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman-launches-inq...
P2P chat is not something new and not something hard to do and based on old concepts of decentrialization it can be done with dispersed "central" servers. Telegram decided that they will route their traffic over central servers due to the potential profit of spying on their users. It is hard to imagine that FSB doesnt have a team of reverses that dissected Telegram protocol and found backdoors, which are cryptographical but usable by founder. Now they are paying for that. We need p2p chat/voice software, that cant be censored by design, but that invalidates an option to monetize it. But at the end, it is always the choice how cool the smileys look, isnt it?
The interesting difference being that TPUs are available for rent to pretty much anyone, whereas crypto currency ASICs appear to be horded until they're not as valuable.
This is consistent with my college experience but maximally inconsistent with post-college: because of online dating, many people can and do go on more coffee-only first-dates than previous generations ever did. Maybe that means they are being psychologically warped by perceived disposability, but they certainly aren't lacking in practice talking with strangers.
If it is one thing that I have learned at a large software company it is the fact that Conway's Law is fundamentally true. Any software system is a mirror of the team setup and the interactions between the involved people. And many bugs are found in the interfaces/interactions between components of isolated teams.

However, this also means that as a software developer you are unable, or at least very constrained, in the ability to improve or refactor any complex legacy system. You are basically fighting uphill battles in such situations, because you are not in the authority to change/improve the organizational structure.

This also means that as programmers we may need to take more time and care to invest in human relationships and in our communication skills, as this could have an significant effect on code and product quality.
CGP Grey explains how dictators work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

When the collaboration of the citizens is not required to generate wealth, dictators emerge. For Venezuela, it's oil.

We are also seeing how technology is generating enough wealth and power to allow tech companies to compete against society. Today, it's tracking people for advertising purposes, tomorrow it could be a mass surveillance at the scale of what is emerging in China.
Russia Blocks Millions of Amazon and Google IPs in Bungled Try to Ban Telegram
Iverson explained the reasoning behind this in an appendix to a book he wrote in the 60's: http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/EvalOrder.htm

It's the approach used in APL and J, and I've certainly found it far preferable to the current math notation standard.
Except governments should watch the interests of their citizens, not only those of their shareholders.
I work for a large CDN. Lots of big customers do this, they shift their traffic around between different CDNs based on a lot of metrics, including price and performance.
Margins are pretty high, in part due to scale. If AWS were to hypothetically sell 80% of capacity at cost, that makes the last 20% more profitable than it would be to just sell the 20% alone.
GDPR Annotated
Connected factory being built in San Francisco for manufacturing electronics
Curious about the choice to use cloud storage vs. IPFS or something similar. What was behind that?
I think this may be one of the reasons for IETF's success. Compare with, for example, 3GPP standards. The fact that each WG does a single task and is disabanded early means, according to Conway's law, that individual RFCs will be relatively independent.
You're right - a URL is an address, and a link is a sign saying 'go here'. The address still exists with or without the sign.
What's wrong with immigrant labor (apart from them taking "our" jobs)?
I believe I remember seeing some CSV to Ledger-cli tools if you can get the data into that format.
Mint doesn't do nearly any of the things he claims (and definitely not well), I use it daily and have been looking for a good replacement for over a year now.

Do TurboTax and Quickbooks sync so that I can quickly add taxable transactions?
...why would a defence mechanism for worker health be something people deride?
> Is this what the Internet is like for "regular" people? If so, holy shit. I'm glad I use uBlock Origin on my computers and an iPhone.

Somewhere, in a dark corner in a AWS datacenter in Oregon, some third-party tracking software records "Hey, the only user within five-mile radius that blocks our ad links just finished watching a kung fu movie."
Actually, in the 1990s was the peak of major commercial broadcast networks with 6, not 4 (the old big 3, plus Fox, plus UPN And The WB.)
What do you think of the apple pencil?
I often see this in the company webpages. Does a college organize for new students? By division? Department? You can tell a lot about the college culture based on how the website is organized!
I fear that it will only come when at least half of the military is ready to side with the people against the regime. I don't think the people there can take on the military if the military is willing to fight back.
I cannot speak for the person you are responding to, but in my [agreement] of his critique of statistics, I am implicitly speaking of social statistics. I think there is a vast difference in e.g. a statistical modeling of the behavior of electrons and e.g. the statistical modeling of some sort of human behavior.
Yeah, but you ought to be able to use the assets from the demo.
While I am a single freelance developer, things wouldn't change much with a family.

Also GnuCash has heaps of documentation on dealing with employees / payroll. I think it would be pretty easy to pull off with a couple of employees. Not sure about beyond that, but honestly, it's a non-issue.

Worrying about that would be like worrying about how to operate at Google scale when you haven't even developed your product yet.

For the record I still goto an accountant every year. I just bring him the reports that GnuCash created. Unless you hire a personal bookkeeper you're always going to be responsible for totaling up your own income for taxes no matter what you use.
Simpler but still more expensive by far, and I suppose the ROI would be far smaller.
Google Cloud Tool to Build Chat Apps
^ Probably correct, +1.

I'd like to add that Android by default tracks your location constantly [1]. I recently got a Pixel and was staying in a hotel. Every night I came back to the hotel room it would ask me to rate it or upload pictures of it to Google Maps. It can be disabled in Settings, iirc.

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb
How China’s winemakers succeeded (without stealing)
Yes it makes propaganda easier, but so did the printing press and I still believe that it had a positive net effect on the world.

By coincidence I am a Texan and I've had some really interesting conversations on the internet and have been exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints and information sources that vastly outweigh that of Putin's little troll farms.
Yes, the blockstack node package running on your machine generates the key pairs for you and thus the keys are stored on your local machine, not a centralized authority.

The reason you need an .id is because we have to register your identity on the blockchain and propagate your zonefiles.

We can help you register a .stealthy.id that gives you access to the tool if you create an account today :)
Kubernetes is a huge deal here. The big move to containerization makes GCP very attractive to new infrastructure.
New York State Online Tax Payment Is Down
The normal operations kill more than the abnormal situations. That doesn't make it better.
The solution is to have the repository refuse checkins with bad indentation. Anyone who can program can follow indentation rules, many people just can’t be bothered. But they can if there is no alternative.
If by science you mean policy of NHS?

Current scientific consensus is that it is caloric surplus - confounded by a bunch of poorly researched factors. For weight gain source does not seem to matter too much. This does not say anything about dietary specifics or how they affect intake and metabolism.

Technically nutrition science does not provide strong support for such statements as this carb vs fat one based on interventional studies.

Epidemiology alone does not tell you "therefore this change will be beneficial"...
Ask HN: How do you remember things without tests?
I find it hard to remember things that I'm not tested on later. For example, I'm currently reading a fascinating textbook about compilers. I would like to remember the information later on, but without a formal test and the deadline it poses I don't remember anything. How do you deal with this problem?
Taking an average over the world, most governments are badly functioning and they've been that way for years if not centuries.

Business on the other side, tend to be punished by the markets when misbehaving and then course-correct.
Yet, we have governments watching the interest of the corporations.
Part of the mistake here is in interpreting the p value as being a measure of anything really meaningful. P<0.05 doesn't mean 1 in 20 are wrong. It does mean that in the narrow confines of the definition of the statistical model used, it is possible that 1 in 20 would be explainable by the null hypothesis.

It is not, in any way a measure of reality. It is a guess at how accurately you've modeled the system, how accurate your priors are, and so forth.
If you're going to get fingerprinted anyway, might as well save the bandwidth.
I think GNUCash is in the Unix mode of "do one thing and do it very well". For me, that "thing" is enforcing double-entry accounting, although there are a couple other things that distinguish it from a spreadsheet for me.

I can see how you might want or expect a piece of software that handles everything, but in the GNU ecosystem, the traditional user-land pattern of use is to have many pieces of software, each of which does one thing, and to use them in turn as needed. This might place more cognitive burden on the user (vs. Windows), and also requires pieces of software you can start, use, and close quickly (again, vs. Windows, and GNUCash is a bit wanting in that regard...) but it also allows you more freedom and flexibility in doing your work.

So, instead of embiggening GNUCash, I would say that your desired actions would better be served by separate pieces of software:

- Bank hook-up: Something from your bank? This one is tough, as there is no widely-used open standard for manipulating your bank account over the internet, AFAIK, so you'd need bespoke software for your bank.

- OCR data ingest: Something like Ocrad with post-processing into a format GNUCash can use. Some lex/yacc wizard could probably do the latter part easily.

- Automatic tax calculation and burden reduction: A FOSS version of TurboTax? This is a good example of why the Unix philosophy is applicable, because my taxes in Canada are simple enough that I can handle them myself. I don't want a big tax-optimisation program tacked onto my bookkeeping software which I won't use.

- Expense comparison: I don't think closed-source accounting software does this, but GNUCash does allow you to make budgets. Collecting the budget for a "typical person" (of your country and lifestyle) is a little out of scope, and might be better served by a market research agency or something. Sadly, there will probably never be a GNU World Census.

- Mobile app and cloud storage: This one is a little tough. You want it to sync up between your mobile device and (presumably) desktop. You could host a Seafile or OwnCloud instance on your desktop, but I'm not sure if that would let you sync them up anywhere. iCloud-style storage would require server infrastructure, and that usually requires an organization running off profit or donations to host and maintain the infrastructure. IMHO, we don't really have a good answer for the issue of "who pays for the servers?" in FOSS. Anyway, we are getting beyond a software/GNUCash issue and into a hardware/infrastructure issue.
KDE Plasma on the $89 Pinebook
>Most countries around the world are led by the upper class who has large access to capital.

Yes and that's bad so we certainly shouldn't expand the power that people with lots of capital have.

>Even in democracies power goes to the wealthy, and you dont get to vote for lower class representatives.

That's not an intrinsic feature of democracies but it is of markets.
Power to the party: Why political reforms can be bad for democracy
> and not the simpler solution of an actual universal basic income

Eliminating fossil fuel use is also simple. But there's another dimension to this problem, called "political viability", which I feel you're overlooking.
Yeah, and the basics aren't even hard to learn/use, after the person understands the concept of double-entry. I know someone who has no particular expertise of accounting nor computing and who uses GnuCash to manage the money of an art group (receiving money from multiple entities, keeping track of expenses and paying out interpreters), and almost never needs help.
> I actually think the scientific model is falling apart.

You must have a totally different definition of "the scientific model" than I do. I suspect (although I could be wrong) is that you have an oversimplified view of just what the scientific process is.

The scientific model/process is not a linear list of discrete steps moving from "Ask a question" to "Communicate results"; it is not a discrete and static set of criteria we apply to individual experiments or instrument output.

Berkeley University does a good job of providing visualizations on this topic:

http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/howscienceworks_02
PEG uses ordered choice instead of alternation; all PEGs are thus deterministic. The article's description of PEG is so off-base that it makes me question the entire article.
Giving retroactive telecom immunity is moral and/or ethical?
and properly aged cedar won't rot for a hundred years.
But I was under the impression that Linux isn't suitable as a real-time operating system (RTOS)[1] (which Microsoft may very well not require for their IoT systems). So the Linux Foundation providing an alternative free kernel meeting RTOS requirements makes perfect sense.

I'm not as clear on the history, but was Linux ever pitched as capable of being real-time OS? I don't think so. The hard requirements for real-time generally lead to very different systems than general-purpose operating systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system
What's CAF? Googling wasn't very helpful :)
ZTE is barely an also run alongside Huawei. If China does anything to ensure it's survival it would be to deny Huawei a monopoly vs the carriers.
Even blowing out only one side of a tall tower, would not cause it to fall like timber. Instead, one of two things will happen. If there is low lateral strength (unlikely), the east side of the floors above will shear and collapse off, straight down into a pile on the east side. If there's good lateral strength, The forces formerly supported by the now blown east structures will largely fall on the adjacent structures around the building, overloading them, causing failure, and rapidly continuing around the supports in a zipper-failure, whereupon the above structures now unsupported again fall straight down with gravity's vector.

Either way there's probably a bigger pile on the east side, but it's not like the top floor of a 1000' building will land 1000' laterally from the base. 100' would be a long way (tho there's be lots of flying debris for a good distance).
There is the problem of conflating science with mathematics.
TIL Conway's Law isn't "Life Finds a Way"
> 3. The end-product of science is not truth, it is explanations of observations. Those observations can (indeed must) include non-reproducible ones. Sometimes the explanation of non-reproducible results is "experimental error" or "delusion" or "we just don't know." But non-reproducible events are nonetheless within the purview of science.

Yes and no. I think you have to have predictions in there somewhere. That's why your celestial mechanics is science: whatever the movement is, you were able to say what it was going to be beforehand, even if it only happened once.

As for explanation, that is not necessarily so simple, either. Sure, a lot of things seem to make more sense with a theory, but not every theory makes sense. A lot of stuff in fundamental physics is predicted by the equations, but in what sense are the equations explanations? "Shut up and calculate" comes to mind.
While we're talking political economy, I was thinking that academia tends towards a degenerate form resembling subsistence agriculture: defending a small patch of turf and making just enough meaning to support a career. Even if the raw economic incentive is removed (e.g "publish or perish") there is sufficient ego investment to preserve this pattern.
>bicycle with a helmet in an American urban environment is a fundamentally better decision

I agree. I don't bike on streets but I do wear a helmet when I do bike.

>we should not allow business to operate if they encourage biking without a helmet

The problem is that this is effectively equivalent to saying bike-sharing should be banned, especially dockless bike sharing (because they're probably not interesting to many given, say, strict enforcement of helmet laws). I'm not sure that's a nudge that "makes society better."
This will end WHOIS I think. It should provide interesting to see the side effects of abuse/spam where they can't be identified as easily anymore. On the flip side, mass IP demand letters will become much harder when you can't target someone as easily.
>The end-product of science is not truth, it is explanations of observations.

That sounds a whole lot like truth to me, or at least, like any sane construal of truth.
Honestly, all personal budget systems I've tried are crap.

I use two systems:

1. Annual budget spreadsheet. A simple high level of what my planned income is and what my planned expenditures / investments are. If there's anything fundamentally wrong about my plans, it's caught here.

2. GNUCash for transaction history plus 90 days of forward looking planned transactions. If there's a projected account shortfall, I can rebalance accounts, and determine whether this is a temporary cash flow problem or if I need to adjust my annual budget.

This setup works fairly well for me, though a tax accountant will still be useful in navigating things like what is and isn't a deductible expense, what documentation is required, and how to adjust your future plans to become more tax efficient.
Sadly, that's why I said "should". Imagine those same governments being actual corporations... maybe your standing as a citizen would be measured by how many shares you own.
The thing is, in Venezuela a lot of people still have a lot to loose. Their economy tanked, the question at this point is how the available resources are going to be distributed. The existing corrupt structures are still a safer bet for large groups of the population and they cant have to high hopes for the viable alternatives.

If the old regime is overthrown, it will likely not be more equal. I would be highly surprised if it wouldnt come to a famine then without major NGOs stepping in.

I hope I have the wrong impression though. The situation is simply terrible.
Before then – in the 90s both Intel and Microsoft used a lot of backroom deals to keep big vendors exclusive. If memory serves it took the Opteron’s crushing performance advantage before we started seeing that break for Intel servers; Linux users for years were stuck paying for OEM Windows installs which were never used.
> If we don't use science to make decisions, what are we supposed to use? Gut instinct?

I thought the parent comment made it clear: the alternative we are supposed to use is "democracy". That is, the people who are ruled should determine the rules that are imposed on them.

Now, democracy does not preclude the use of science to make decisions. The voters may rely on science to inform their decisions (when the science is available). It does however preclude a rule by scientific experts/bureaucrats.

But I also think it's foolish to frame the decision as solely one of "science" vs. "gut instinct". The are many phenomena, especially when it comes to human society, that are too causally dense for us to sufficiently tease out the causal factors to make accurate predictions.

In those conditions, the goal should be to minimize the consequences of being wrong. We do that by decentralizing decisions to the greater extent possible.
With Stealthy, everything is encrypted client side. Therefore, cloud storage acts as a 'dumb' storage for all your encrypted files.

You can store your files redundantly on S3, Azure, Google Cloud, Dropbox, and even IPFS. We just have to enable all those drivers :)
Shameless plug: I've compiled hledger to JavaScript and you can run it in your browser on https://hledger.alhur.es/
Formatters / indent do exist.

But they're not widely accepted by most languages devs (like gofmt is by Go programmers), nor is their use enforced by the compiler (even in Go).
This is another example of gun control working as intended by an oppressive regime.