skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bayesian inference for the distribution of grams of marijuana in a joint
> It makes no sense that we should be subject to a volume of law that we could never even read, let alone understand

Why does that not make sense? The law must cover everything from "dont kill certain species" to "don't commit this very specific type of fraud". Society is so advanced we need more laws. Of course Hamurabi's code was short because it didn't need to stop investment bankers committing fraud or voting laws to prevent racial bias or workers rights etc etc. Certainly there are improvements but you will never fit it all into one short book that a layperson could read.
B2C contracts are not contracts between equals, and it is as foolish to apply the same standards to businesses and consumers as it is to treat pedestrians like automobiles for purposes of traffic law. The reality is that businesses can afford lawyers to spend time on a contract they will use with a million consumers, but the consumers cannot afford lawyers for the hundreds of B2C contracts they are presented with in the ordinary course of life.
I am not sure this works. I just tested it on a dummy phishing site I made and it came as clean.
You're likely just putting a lot of effort into helping them test an edge case where tagged photos really don't match. You're probably doing them more of a service than all the normal account users.
Most of the New Yorker articles I read are the size of novellas, so it feels a little strange that they have a very short article for someone who's had so much impact on anything related to computers over the years. Almost everyone in the world probably uses derivatives of her icons, with some direct and others inspired.

I probably need to update her profile on my site as well: https://www.theymadethat.com/people/m1xhv6/susan-kare
Startup Cities: Why Only a Few Cities Dominate the Global Startup Scene
Coinbase provided 1099-Ks to the IRS. If filers didn't also provide an 8949 (cost-basis statement) to demonstrate their net gain/loss, they're likely going to be on the hook for taxes on the entire amount reported in the 1099-K.
You don't need to be in a flood zone to be impacted by a storm surge. You just have to live within ~30ft of sea level. The majority of the gulf coast is pretty flat. Flood-zone maps do get redrawn after every major hurricane, but that's not so much a matter of climate change so much as exactly where the storm hits. Places that have never flooded in a hundred years will flood if a hurricane makes land in the right place, simply because it pushes a couple dozen feet of water ahead of it.

Debris doesn't cause a lot of damage, particularly if you've prepped for the hurricane (by boarding up windows, garaging cars, etc.) The biggest factors are definitely trees and storm surge.
Yeah you got it! Water moves in ways that are not captured by the resolution of the elevation dataset. Also, water moves into/through the ground.
An anecdote and a poll. I grew up in India in middle class family where education was considered important. A recurring nightmare (autual dream I see during sleep) I see even in my adulthood is about me about to take an exam and not being prepared for it. I do not see this nightmare often but I still remember it since the amount of panic I feel when I see it. I discussed with my wife and she also have these nightmare of similar nature. I wanted to check whether anyone out here see this and whether it is more prevalent in culture like Indian culture or is it a universal phenomenon?
U.S. public transit ridership fell nearly 3 percent in 2017
Which is still incredibly rare, considering the size of the country. I think the point being made is if you care about human safety, things such as alcohol, automobiles, cancer, dementia, etc cause vastly more deaths and injuries, but don't get the same mind-share.
yes but we're not built on silicon nor were we guided by curated data sets nor did we have a deadline nor does another parallel universe rely on our decisions for potentially life and death outcomes.
I do not like the idea of this simple equality and I think it misses the point. We might not get to us with this tech, the model might not be near enough.
Some California cities want Amsterdam-style pot lounges
> Am I the only paranoiac that saves work every few seconds? Are all developers like that?

Only the ones that worked with buggy text editors prone to crashing.
> So anyone who was in college in the past 10 years will have had drummed into their heads that there is no consent possible by an intoxicated person.

Which creates all kinds of weird outcomes when both parties were equally drunk.
Robots can assemble IKEA furniture
Hah. And that's probably only 10% of what really needs to be done.
>despite being able to successfully complete contracts and make money from what I was doing.

I think making money is like cashing out the investments (knowledge/experiences). Nothing wrong with cashing our the investments when we enjoy the cash and continuously reinvest using some of the money we cashed out. I think it is dangerous when we have a little investment and no plan what to do when that investment runs out - when our knowledge becomes completely obsolete.

Which is basically "stop learning and just work now to make money" does.

>Those experiences helped me re-evaluate my approach and get out of the "I'm already awesome, why would I need to do more" mindset. Had I not realized that, I might have stubbornly stalled out thinking I didn't need anyone else while the world passed me by.

Happened to me as well. At one point recently, I figured out that being able to make money is not always the result of being able to enrich life. I could gather a lot of money while stalling. And a person who is growing immensely might be very poor. I feel as we get older, we tend to cling to a few metrics that we do good on to judge others, and money is a popular metric.
In the US, the voting majority seems to want such a society, otherwise we wouldn't have so many politicians cutting education and other taxpayer funded support to families in need.
Fair enough. I guess this is why I should get a lawyer involved! I was assuming there was some distinction between accidental negligence and fraud as far as what could be protected against.
Humans make mistakes, processes or the lack thereof allow them to happen.

When mistakes of a certain threshold happen, the organization should have a post-mortem to ensure such a scenario does not recur.

In addition, the person who failed should hold their own post-mortem in private, with the possible addition of a supervisor to determine how they failed, if at all, and how they can use the incident as a learning experience.

"Blame process, not people" is great in that it encourages folks not to pillory someone for a mistake that they themselves could have possibly made, but it is not a "Get out of jail free" card.
> That way they could opt out of selected provisions—limiting, for instance, third parties that can gain access to the data or restricting the kinds of information companies may stockpile.

Am I understanding this incorrectly or are you suggesting that we allow people to selectively opt-out of portions of a T&C document? Because good luck getting any legal department to buy into that whatsoever.
I’ve programmed in Scala most days for the past 3 years, we use plenty of Java libraries, and it works well. Generally it’s as simple as a thin wrapper around the library, that converts mutable data classes to immutable versions (or vice versa), and wraps blocking methods in futures. Sometimes it’s more complex than that, but when I’m reaching for a Java lib, normally it’s just for a few methods that are easily wrapped.
That's not what I got from it. Xz has other problems such as:

> According to [Koopman] (p. 50), one of the "Seven Deadly Sins" (i.e., bad ideas) of CRC and checksum use is failing to protect a message length field. This causes vulnerabilities due to framing errors. Note that the effects of a framing error in a data stream are more serious than what Figure 1 suggests. Not only data at a random position are interpreted as the CRC. Whatever data that follow the bogus CRC will be interpreted as the beginning of the following field, preventing the successful decoding of any remaining data in the stream.

> Except the 'Backward Size' field in the stream footer, none of the many length fields in the xz format is protected by a check sequence of any kind. Not even a parity bit. All of them suffer from the framing vulnerability illustrated in the picture above.
This has to be peak blockchain hype right?

Make it easy to use and let people discover that it’s just not really needed for the cat majority of applications.
> No, because it was (and probably still is) the only messaging app that works with feature phones.

Sadly, Facebook has since dropped feature phone support to support their flanking maneuver on Snapchat (Instagram on the other flank). Instead of keeping WhatsApp simple and admitting it was feature-complete, the grand plan seems to be "copy features from Snap, and drop feature phones that can't keep up".
Don't they have to have several years of experience as well?
Sure bad code that works is defensible in a cost analysis.

But buggy code in an elaborate, overheated pile is not the same as 'shitty code'. Its doing all the wrong things and going nowhere.

Another cost analysis includes 'opportunity cost', the good that you could be doing instead of massaging the dinosaur this product has become. By that measure, work done on this 'product' is money down the drain.

I've fixed megabytes of bad code in my day. If it was just a matter of code preferences, then sure I'd agree. But this thing is irresponsibly put together. So much drama to do so little, that 'fixing bugs' in it is really just moving them around.
A Silicon Valley Pot Deal
No it doesn't. It's a variable that doesn't enter the equation at all.

Maybe the technical debt should be reduced, saving the company money down the road by reduced maintenance costs and reduced issues as development continues.

Maybe the code is feature complete and there's no reason to change what works. It has technical debt, but perhaps the business calculation is that there's not enough benefit to cleaning it up (and in fact messing with working code may introduce issues.)

Either way you look at it, how much revenue it produces doesn't enter into the calculation.

Now you might say the revenue is so low that the code brings little value to the company and so the technical debt doesn't matter. But again that's looking at the wrong thing. Even if it brings in zero revenue, as long as development is ongoing because it brings some other form of value to the company, then the technical debt matters. The right things to look at are the costs involved in cleaning up the technical debt, vs the costs of continuing on while ignoring it. It's all about weighing costs and not about revenue.
You've really never heard of Credit Karma before?
And most importantly, they don't sell user data, so you can sleep tight.
I had similar issues running /r/ronpaul where there was a sustained, concerted effort by opponents to disrupt the conversation. One of said opponents went on to found /r/the_donald.

It's fairly hard to ban people on a site where account creation is as easy as it is on reddit. Moderator tools have improved a little since, but remain inadequate for dealing with sustained brigading.
Of course there are million variables here, but for compressible data arguably compression+ecc is more robust against damage than uncompressed data. The rationale being that with compression you can afford to use more/bigger ecc
I don't typically have my lawyer review the TOS of each website I sign up for, but I did have him review my mortgage. Everyone picks a different place to draw the line between careful understanding (or hiring out a review from someone with careful understanding), and just blindly signing on the dotted line.

For me that is somewhere between purchasing a tractor and purchasing a house. The point is the no sane person includes Netflix in the "needs careful review" category, but I sincerely recommend that everyone take their home purchases seriously.
Have we reached peak facebook yet? Is there a name for these serial outrages that pop up every 2 months? I get it, it's good clickbait but does it need to follow us here in HN?
The likelihood that someone compromised your system just to rename your bookmarks is approximately epsilon.

The most likely explanation is that you did it and have no memory of it; this can be caused by taking certain sleep medications, having a sleep disorder, or by other environmental conditions (like a CO leak, already mentioned).

The next most likely is that a friend or family member with a bizarre sense of humor is playing a prank on you.

It is more likely that you own a cat, who is literate and can operate a computer, than that your system was remotely compromised for the purposes of renaming your bookmarks.
Does Every Senior Leader on Your Team Have a Backup?
From 18 years in tech, through both my own experiences and observation the key is not likeability, it's relationships and empathy.

You can build relationships and trust people who don't like. It's more a matter of both parties understanding and empathizing where the other is coming from.
> "I have nothing to hide" is something I hear far too common, after all.

That phrase always bugs me. Especially with its origin and connection to oppressive government regimes. How did a phrase used to illustrate tyranny and used by Nazis become a catchphrase for the public?

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/217196/origin-of...
IMO, this is a question of consumer protection. It's ok to provide complicated contracts to corporations who can afford to hire lawyers, but it's not ok to do so with consumers. If we make a requirement that for consumer products, contract should be now longer than 1 page written in a language understandable by 10 year old, it will solve problem.
Sometimes, it can be actually worse if the worst parts were implemented by people who still works there. Because you might need to battle the technical issue AND people being defensive about it.
> Shouldn't our laws, in general, be written to be as precise and narrowly defined as possible?

But in practice, it's the opposite. Law is full of ambiguities and loopholes. That's why we hire lawyers-- to find ones that work in our favor.
No “Material Difference Between 5G and LTE”
The Revolutionary Giant Ocean Cleanup Machine Is About to Set Sail
The flip side, is that this is how deviance is normalized.

https://danluu.com/wat/
I wasn't really politically aware in this time, but does anyone have an idea of how economic liberalism was able to take such a strong hold on the US in such a short period of time?

The most glaring example to me is that in about 20 years the core parts of what would become the ACA went from the Heritage Foundation plan[1] to prevent the democrats from instituting a single-payer system to reform that the democrats were barely able to pass.

http://healthcarereform.procon.org/sourcefiles/1989_assuring...
> I mean, what else can you boast with if you have none?

Your actual contributions to the field.

of which, comp sci is one of the few fields where you don’t need an academic degree to have significant contributions to the field

But I read the other day about a biologist who just recently made a major contribution to graph theory, as an amateur mathematician?

He can come speak at all of my cookouts.
Nope. Should I?
Funnily enough even the tightest drafted legalese is actually often subject to a range of ambiguity and loopholes. I feel it can be a quality inherent in certain language regardless of whether it's plain English or legalese, particularly if there is money at stake in injecting a degree of ambiguity into the language (which is what I'm paid to do!).

Overall, if done correctly there should be no issue with expressing the parties' intentions in plain English rather than using dense legalese. It's something I strive to do every day in my job for sure.

Of course I agree with your general point about laws being drafted to be precise and narrow, it's just that using legalese doesn't always secure this objective. Sometimes it's just clear that the draftsperson was having a bad day.
I can attest that, as an American, my parents (college educated) would always bring up that recurring nightmare whenever the topic of dreams came up. They casually noted that it happened frequently in their adult lives, and that it would inevitably happen to me once I graduated college. Notably they didn't see it as a negative, but a sign of a "conscientious personality."
I had Google Talk on my phone for ages, I'm not getting what you mean by this. I had no issues. It was fast, to the point, and worked.
SMS is a best-effort protocol; that is inherently unreliable.
But it seems like getting a lawyer involved is exactly what leads to these complicated Terms of Service. I would have to find a lawyer who agreed to significantly dumb down the Terms of Service, which I would suspect they would be opposed to -- I mean they are writing these things like this for a reason, right?
That's a pretty fair clarification. So long as you have a good enough lawyer, and a jury trial you could possibly get off on anything.
Startup Idea - An AI language translator for legal language to English. It could convert a 20+ page contract to a 1 page bullet list. Maybe this has already been done or does the language of law require quantum computing?
Propositional logic / zeroth-order logic is like arithmetic. You didn't consider numbers (by which I gathered you meant arithmetic) as math, and I'm the same in saying this type of logic is not math.

Logic is a VAST field, and most programmers don't get to use most of it, that was my point.

I already played with Coq (that feels weird to say :)) ). It is a very specialized tool useful in very specific cases. I don't think it will ever be adopted as the standard way of programming since it's really unproductive.

Just because you use math that is really heavy does not mean you understand the math behind completely. We can view a ball throw as a complex quantum-mechanical physical process but we don't call ourselves theoretical physicists for being able to throw a ball.
Startups are borrowing ideas from China: but regulators don't welcome e-scooters
Do you think allowing programs to be specified in plain English is a good idea?

We have "legalese" for the same reason we have programming languages. Terms have specific, sometimes slightly different or more narrow meanings to promote better understanding of intent in languages meant to specify a set of rules.

Specifying laws in "plain English" makes about as much sense to me as programming in English. You'll quickly find that for all but the most trivial of things the ambiguity of the language works against you.
> a more radical departure from historic Scala probably would have helped Scala.

Maybe. But high-risk. See Perl 6.
Surely what your saying is directly contrary to Rovelli's hypothesis? The pin pricking the ballon is causal, and therefore fundamental in Rovelli's view. What's arbitrary about our perception of the events would be assigning specific measurable times to those events, such as the pin contacting the rubber at T1 microseconds, the rubber being pierced at T2 microseconds, the sound of the pop being detected at a microphone at T3 microseconds. Those measurements of time are arbitrary in Rovelli's view, all he cares about is the chain of causation from T1 to T2 and T3 as described by the physics, irrespective of time.
For every story like this, though, there are probably 10 where the new hire didn’t know better than everyone else. I know I’ve dealt with plenty of people like that.
In the US, I know there is a sort of convertible building loan - you need to present the bank with a plan for something that will in short order be a house that can secure a mortgage. Once the house is complete with a CoO, it turns into a mortgage.

I'm guessing the loan underwriters will be uncomfortable with the risk profile of a decade long project of self improvement, but what do I know?
You're once again absolutely right! You can use tools without service providers.

You can use Morse code without any service providers whatsoever! Though using it to send messages solely to yourself might not be the best of all possible uses, it's absolutely a viable use.

Similarly, you could implement SMTP for yourself on paper. It might not be quite what was intended or maximally useful, but it's certainly a use. Some people might opine that it's far more useful with services implementing it widely and making its benefits available to many. I can't say they're being wildly unreasonable.
yeah...you should probably just delete your account
787-8 and 787-9 ETOPS Lowered (RR Engine Flaws)
I've approached the topic of changes, and been shut down each time. They've got so much on their plate, talking about design is the last thing they want to do apparently.

And yeah 'rate' at a large corporation is an intractable thing. My contracting company (I'm a partner) is billing through another contracting company, which is billing thru a billing company, which is contracting the client. The deal was, take this rate or take another job.

Which means, I've been looking constantly for another gig of this length or better. Meanwhile feeling guilty about taking their money for turning their crank, instead of actually applying my skills.
It appears that many people on Hacker News don't like the idea of politicians knowledgeable enough to counter bad behavior by tech companies. It's pretty entertaining when Senators ask stupid questions during the Facebook hearings ... and it also decreases the chances of Congress doing anything useful.
To be fair it wasn't default. It was just blue while the other was grey. I found the process to be quite easy however at the end the had "see my other options" in grey writing and I accidentally clicked away before I saw it so they certainly abuse dark patterns.
That is also a quote from Douglas Adams. It's literally the following line from the original quote.
> Musk is correct in insisting that laws should expire

This is a terrible idea. Stability and gradual, generally understandable, evolution in response to real world conditions are positive attributes of the current precedent-based system that has grown out of the common law.
The society became much more complex since the Hammurabi's code. You argument is similar to people's who say that programs are over-engineered, and should be much simpler. There's some over-engineering but the main cause is that the world becomes more and more complex.
Scripting with Java 10 and JShell – Adam B. Goode – Medium
Why? Does the GDPR mandate that Facebook treat the deletion request differently?
https://www.acronymfinder.com/Sucks-Big-Time-(SBT).html
I'm not so sure. If that was really a case they cared about, it would be easy for them to generate their test cases themselves.
Same here. I also use tags a lot in my bookmarks.

I have tried Pocket and Google Keep before, but Firefox Sync is an order of magnitude more fluid to me.
I'm sorry, I don't follow why the plain English version is severely misleading, or couldn't be supplemented to capture the full extent of Imgur legalese. Why do you think this is the case?
I don't bookmark much. Just things I know I will want to refer to again but that wasn't particularly easy to Google, like certain so answers or blogs. I just use Firefox and tag them with the subject.
Happy to offer up mine, valME.io, which permits custom domains. [1]

[1] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/69qqs/valme-io-now-with-cu...
"Scala has pioneered the fusion of object-oriented and functional programming in a typed setting."

What about Ocaml (1996, well before scala) and F# (2005, not too long after scala)?
Great point about electing politicians who understand technology. Shahid Buttar (who's running for Congress in SF) talked about this in a short video last week - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94IC5JVA_MU