skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I know this is often said, but why? English did not originate in America, but in England and even there it originated as a mix of various other European languages (Latin, French, Nordic languages and a few more). If anything, it represents the colonial past of the United States.

That's irrelevant and I doubt many people in America considers English the language of the colonial past. The reason English has become the lingua franca for businesses around the world is evidently because the USA became a superpower and managed to gain a huge worldwide influence in both economy, military and cultural sectors. Like most Europeans my age I've grown up eating a huge dose of American cultural goods.

Captain America is in theaters around the world. Katty Perry and Kanye West play on the radios in the middle east. You can watch American politics play out on your TV in Madrid while you sip on your Coca Cola. Or maybe you prefer to watch Game of Thrones while eating your Big Mac? Don't forget to post about it on Facebook, Twitter or Reddit using your iOS or Android phone. Many artists produce music in English instead of their native language in order to sound more modern and reach a wider audience. Yesterday I noticed that they didn't even bother translating the title of Stephen King's latest novel for the French version, French readers are expected to understand it. Can you imagine that happening with a German or Russian novel? American culture spreads over the world like no other, I don't think its hegemony is debatable at this point.

>Simply said: If England leaves the EU, then nobody can say that one of the countries has a language advantage, as everyone has to learn English as a second language.

So in order not to advantage any country in the EU we'd advantage the USA, UK and Australia by doing their job for them? That's cutting off the nose to spite the face, although unfortunately I can see that happening. I'm also not convinced that you can pretend that Ireland doesn't speak English solely because it also recognizes Irish as an official language. Wikipedia tells us that `Less than 10% of the population of the Republic of Ireland today speak Irish regularly outside of the education system and 38% of those over 15 years are classified as "Irish speakers"'. There might be more Spanish speakers in France than Irish speakers in Ireland.

>Furthermore, adding to my first point, since many places around the word start to speak English for professional communication, it represents the US less as time goes by.

I'm not convinced, the more the world speaks English the easier it is for the USA to spread their media and, indirectly, their message and propaganda. And the USA is incredibly good at that already. We call it "English" but let's be real, it's really USA'an that's taking over the world.
They check for entangled photons, as that lets them easily filter out noise inherent in all the other particles.

It's really an idea not a complete system, needing a way to quickly entangle photons on-demand. Cool idea, definitely!, but not yet completed.
>You have to view source to find the URLs.

IME you just open the page in the podcast program - it extracts the rss feeds from the appropriate tags automatically, promoting for ambiguity (this is with antennapod (Android)).
ESA Teams Ready for Space / Operations / Our Activities / ESA
The best of Python: a collection of my favorite articles from 2017 and 2018
Dunno if it's underappreciated. I appreciate it for this reason, and similar ones. I assume this is why the idea resonated/s with the likes of friedman and also left-libertarian leaning thinkers.

I don't think all problems can be solved quite this way, and I don't fundamentally have a problem with secondary currencies as an instrument, as long as they work good.

In this case, taking the premise as is (food stamps should exist and apps should exist to make them work better), what you inevitably have is an artificial market. It's not impossible to have a core system onto which independent developers can build apps.
Show HN: Vanity Fair, the Future, and You
There's no chance that Mandarin will ever take the position of English and that statement is solely based on the peculiarities of the written language, not even the seeming lack of interesting content produced in Mandarin (comparatively tiny Korea and Japan are much bigger cultural exporters than China and Taiwan).

Chinese is only really spoken in any capacity as a second language in countries that used to use Chinese or Chinese characters for the written language (Korea, Japan, Vietnam) and countries where ethnic Chinese people currently live. If you did not grow up looking at Chinese characters and speaking a language that has a big lexical overlap with Chinese (Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese) then Chinese is extremely difficult to learn. The writing system is incredibly impractical since it requires learning thousands of symbols to read any normal piece of text and the lack of spaces makes parsing many basic sentencse very challenging until the learner is at a very high level (must know all characters in sentence, must know most words in sentence, must know general grammatical flow in sentence).

The coming of electronic dictionaries and Pinyin IMEs has made it much easier to learn Chinese than it used to be, but it is still ridiculously challenging. Many learners living in China simply skip learning how to read, which I don't think happens with many other languages. Chinese people are often functionally illiterate and even educated Chinese have trouble reading certain things (names, especially). There's a very well-known essay in the Sinologist community about all of these challenges: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
This article from 3 years ago predicted this situation:

Sabadell warned about ‘high risks’ in IT integration of TSB
https://www.ft.com/content/c5157c1e-20ab-11e5-aa5a-398b2169c...
The amusing thing is, they forgot to cancel the automated press release that's boasting about a successful go-live:

http://prensa.bancsabadell.com/en/News/2018/04/banco-sabadel...
The changing face of home entertainment
Surgeons performed world’s first total  and scrotum transplant
The OU was actually one of the great British success stories, a "MOOC" before the Internet. It's a tragedy if that's coming to an end.
Monzo now has a full FSCS licence.
I spoke to several of my friends about this. People of both genders I discussed the surgery with have said they'd seriously consider suicide if their genitals were destroyed.

I'm not saying this to make light of the situation; my point is that I would expect the risk of suicide caused by this kind of injury to make such a surgery of medical importance. Compare, for example, that several governing bodies consider gender reassignment surgery to be of medical necessity for transgender individuals who want to transition because of the dramatic reduction in suicide.
I loved the 'RSS feed' ecosystem but it did have its problems.

Plain old 'everything you can eat' RSS suffered from lack of a decent curation system. You got to a site/article you liked, and subscribed to the feed. When the number of feeds you accumulated got to the point where it became too much, you then faced the 'chore' of deleting stuff you once actually liked, and still might do. Most never got round to this and so stuff piled on.

A good personalized priority/curated feed out of your subscriptions would have been nice, but at the time nobody succeeded.
So, honest question for you and others who have know more about this stuff: is it possible that perhaps you're erring on the side of caution a little too much?

It's a lawyer's job to worry about everything that could go wrong, and assume a worst-case scenario, but surely in many cases GDPR will be about the spirit of the law rather than the letter?

For example, while I personally think the backing-up-now-deleted-user-data issue is not insurmountable, assuming it's not, I cannot imagine that these 'small companies' will be fined left and right for failing to remove a user's data from every backup. And that's even assuming that there's a high likelihood that said backups will be investigated.

To make an analogy: there are quite a number of regulations in effect concerning invoicing that are flagrantly violated by almost every single small-business owner that I know. Some of them have won the 'audit-lottery' and did not suffer any significant consequences, because their transgression was relatively minor (stuff like correcting an invoice and sending it without properly sending a credit-invoice first to nullify the initial invoice).

Again, I'm way out of my depth here so by all means yell at me for being irresponsible about this :).
Yep. My employer pays directly in to them and has for 6 months now. Zero complaints and top notch customer service.
One of the problems stems for this dichotomy:

I did not see anything in GDPR which does not make sense to me, it looks like common sense applied to data management

versus

I get a feeling you haven't tried to actually properly implement the GDPR regs, talking to lawyers and everything

Which can be further shortened to:

common sense versus talking to lawyers

While interpretation of laws by necessity is at best difficult and at worst fraught with peril - reality in all its complexities is hard to catch in a few written pages - the legal profession has turned themselves into virtual toll collectors for anything related to law. Ask a lawyer about the legal implications of preparing a peanut butter sandwich and you'll be first presented with a legal disclaimer - pay me if you want advice - and then treated to a tale worthy of Lewis Carroll. GDPR is a $deity-send in this respect, good for many a year of steady income, especially given the stiff fines which threaten.

...which does not mean the person who used common sense to interpret the law is wrong. He is very much likely to be right and, having spent two weeks of technical work to prepare their infrastructure they're probably set to fulfil the obligations the law puts on them. It might need some fine-tuning here and there but that can mostly likely be handled as well without incurring the wrath of the courts.

In short, talking to a lawyer about being able to do something like this by yourself is more or less guaranteed to give the same reply as e.g. talking to someone who does data rescue whether you could replace the head stack on a hard drive by yourself. In both cases it is possible as long as you're careful and use the right tools, in both cases the answer will be 'you could do this at your own peril, disaster is waiting to strike, you take up enormous risks, let the professionals handle it'. Which is true to a certain level, there are risks just like there are risks in any venture.
It's not a question of being "put off" if you're denied entry or deported (wrongly or otherwise) by the Home Office.
>People literally copying from Wikipedia or copy and pasting from papers to make their own work. //

My lad is just in UK high-school but I'm surprised at how homework is set with no provision of resources and no mention of plagiarism or need to cite sources. The kids are basically expected to find their own sources, which is ridiculous - making them trust whatever Google gives them.

Once they've been inculcated into the notion that education resides in googling and cutting and pasting, without even reading the content, then it's hard to establish a good research ethic.

On top of this the teachers aren't even teaching good use of online search, or providing access to primary source material that gets referenced.

It's really dire.

Textbooks have their problems but ...
New Europe law makes it easy to find out what your boss has said about you
Cross-post from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16911321 :

This appears to be an IT failure comparable to the 2012 and 2015 IT failures at the Royal Bank of Scotland. These involved multi-day / multi-week full/partial outages, and multi-million pound fines.

FT: https://www.ft.com/content/9178ef60-46d9-11e8-8ee8-cae73aab7....

Background: TSB is a UK bank. They had a planned 50-hour maintenance window over the weekend (Fri 16:00 - Sun 18:00), to move away from Lloyds's systems (following the "un-merger" in 2013-2014). This went wrong, in what is likely to become a textbook example of an IT failure.

From a letter from Nicky Morgan, chair of the UK Parliament's Treasury committee, to TSB CEO Paul Pester:

> The reports of unauthorised transactions, access to other customers’ accounts, and failures of in-branch services have all the hallmarks of an IT meltdown. This is yet another addition to the litany of failures of banking IT systems. Potentially millions of customers could be affected by uncertainty and disruption.

Some interesting screenshots of people seeing debugging information in the front-end: https://twitter.com/bcleeve/status/988333991676796928 https://twitter.com/apphancer/status/988698182170357760 https://twitter.com/thejackthomson_/status/98856435451268710...

Ironically, TSB's parent company issued a press release (in error?) claiming that the migration has been a "success"! http://press.bancsabadell.com/en/News/2018/04/banco-sabadell...
> and even though EU has free movement of labour, the
language and culture barrier is strong, and
internationals have a harder time to get hired,
unless they speak the local language.

Certainly not in all fields. In all the math labs that I know (from France, UK, Italy) more than half of the researchers are from other countries.

Of course, if you want to teach, it is much easier to get hired if you already speak the language.

(edit: format of the quote)
Cambridge University researcher testifies on Facebook data scandal
Algodão Lavado Bonés De Beisebol Dos Homens Cap
The 'New Europe law' being GDPR, of course.
I also switched to inoreader recently (after going >GoogleReader>DiggReader) and I'm happy with it. I used to be a firm believer in a simple list of text headers, but with inoreader I found myself opting more and more for the thumbnail grid list.
In what sense do they have to accept anyone that applies?
I've seen well reasoned pro gun arguments eat an army of down votes, while ignorant fudd level "who needs an ar15 all you need is ___" posts get all the upvotes.

Then there are the people who are lying about not wanting to take all guns they just want common sense gun control (that will ban ar15s, the most popular and available gun platform in America.)
That makes no sense. It seems to me it is an elitist view that when you provide a service to the unwashed masses, it must be of lower quality. I believe it is false. Curricula don't have to be easier if you have a large student body, and graduation requirements don't have to be lower. Taking in more students does not inhibit service quality, up to the capacity of the school, which can be easily scaled by hiring more teachers and more teaching space.

Anyhow, the volume of students as a change driver for university quality explanation does not fit with the observations that:

a) Universities employ disproportionately more non-teaching staff than they used to; and

b) Academic staff has a harder time reaching tenure.

The explanation lies elsewhere.
There is one separate JS context for every tab you have opened right now and every feature has its cost in terms of memory & cpu. That's a major reason why javascript has very thin "stdlib".

Also, big stdlibs are compatibility problem so it's definitely better to have as much as possible in user-space.

BUT, we really should use few big utility libraries like lodash instead of dozens of helper-function modules.
YouTube under fire for censoring video exposing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones
While I agree that some disciplines trying to looks like science got too much funding and that these funds are used for propagating ideology instead of doing proper research[1], saying that administration is run by activists is a pure conspiracy theory. Moreover, freedom of speech became an issue in most universities because of the more global politically correct context, so it is not something the can be addressed only at the academic level.

[1] I'm reading an interesting book written by two French sociologists which advocate for a clean-up of their field precisely because this issue is costing them of a lot of the credibility. "Le danger sociologique" (2017), Bronner G., Géhin É. Presse Universitaire de France.
Good to know, thank you.

What I do love about Monzo is their approach to development - they blog everything, even the outages. Good to see the process involved in making a new bank from scratch. I'm keeping the account as a scratch account but have already moved the direct debits from my old Halifax account to Starling.
I hope it works out well for the patient, enabling the hoped-for quality of life.
>You may also check out the economic history of Japan and South Korea, but also how European countries like the UK rose to power. LOTS of government planning.

Yes, although in the case of Japan (MITI and the like), there are counterexamples like the Fifth Generation project. In addition, there were economists like Lester Thurow in the US arguing strongly at the time that the US had to follow Japan's lead in industrial planning to create cosortia like SEMATECH, which largely didn't pan out.
PhD selection committees don't give much weight to grades (did they ever?) and instead rely on letters of recommendation. The corporate world doesn't care what one has gained from their degree apart from the social skills which universities don't grade for anyway. So who needs the grades to be rigorous?
Nuzzle does a pretty good job of this using your Twitter social graph.
Top Ways to Promote Your Music Online in 2018 – The Blogging Musician
Which then will be penalised by mainstream employers, because there's no certification - automated CV scanners will dump your application as it's "not a proper degree".
Because with the vastly greater luminance dynamic range, the display reproduces orders if magnitude more distinguishable colours.
You are right, in this case it does not make sense since you can already distribute the Qt compiled version.
Yes, at least that is what I meant by monopsony.

There are multiple competing firms, but they all sell primarily to the state. The legal cases syshum mentions resolved in changing the rules of this artificial, state-run market. ..making them better.

I don't know where "no-bid" plays into the story, but elon musk testified for fixed-bid as an alternative to cost-plus pricing/bidding.
In most cases, I would agree that Conduent is within their rights to build their own data stream for their product, and cut off a competitor. But, when your product is the redistribution of taxpayer dollars, doing so turns into a government sponsored monopoly.
2 of my friends work in HR. They tell me, that they see a university degree not as a valuable certification criterion on its own. I mean, the tech industry has always been a bit special in this regard. There are lots of excellent autodidact programmers, that never saw a university and there are a number of people that have specialized in getting good grades, but could not implement 10 lines on their own. Most recruiters are aware of that fact, thats why we have to do stupid whiteboard interviews for senior developer jobs. I suspect, that with the further erosion of principles and standards of universities, this mindset will creep into other domains as well.
There is a page on the pumps on the author's website (in french):
http://paillard.claude.free.fr/triodes/pompes/pompes.html

It seems he made all the specialized equipment he needed to make the tubes.
This is because of cheap German supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl) with ruthless efficiency dictating prices for the German market.
No, it is only the English that have to pay the full fees, students from Wales and NI pay a lower rate.
A great many systems and designs reach stability relatively early on. Particularly for mechanical systems.

Computers are something of an exceeption so far as scale goes, what with Moore's law, though other principles are vastly more durable.

(x86 architecture, Unix, core memory, von Neumann / Turing machines, Boolean logic.)

In mechanical systems, it's often some particular breakthrough somewhere which makes for changes. In the case of printing, the period from about 1780 -1920 was profound: from wooden "wine press" designs of perhaps 60-120 impressions/hr to electrically-powered, steel-framed, web-fed, linotype-set, offset-press based systems running 1,000,000 impressions/hr.
> Don't know how it is now (I haven't purchased a used phone for a while), but the carriers I dealt with often asked for the account numbers and waiting and shit to """verify""" the original owner and make it as hard, slow, and painful as possible to unlock a secondhand phone.

Carriers in my country don't sell locked phones anymore for the reasons mentioned earlier. The last time I bought a locked phone on contract was the iPhone 3G. Even back then selling a locked phone on contract was extremely rare and IIRC only the iPhone was sold like that back then.

After a year, it just unlocked without me asking for it, I didn't need to do anything except plug it into iTunes, which I used to do anyway. That probably isn't even needed anymore as you don't have to sync with iTunes for carrier updates since forever.

> The person they paid to answer the support line gets the payment regardless whether they sit there playing solitaire or helping you.

If fewer people actually use that carrier, they need fewer support people.
The Federal Reserve system is quite complex, but the 12 banks are not owned by the banks. They are chartered and organized by the US government, so they can't change their mission without convincing the government to change the laws around them.

Nationally chartered banks are required to be members of one of the Federal Reserve Banks, and have to own "stock" equal to 3% of their capital and surplus. State chartered banks are not required to be members, but may do so under different rules. The banks receive a 6% divided of their stake, with the remaining profits going back to the government. The numbers aren't clear, but it looks like the system made over $92 billion for their 2016 year, and over $91 billion of that went to the government.
Where are all the Kaby Lake-G laptops?
I don't see that in computer science, or in my subarea of research. Major industry labs are highly respected contributors to science, and this has a long tradition with Xerox PARC and Bell labs, and now with Microsoft Research, Google Research and DeepMind (to name few among many).
Last weekend I was reading about RCS, Google's effort to update SMS. They have signed on a lot of partners and I wonder why any of them trust Google to follow through? Telecom companies like technology that ages over decades whereas Google seems to evaluate things fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter.
"If I’m not paying for Facebook, am I the product?

No. Our product is social media"

Hahahahaha

I'd give this propaganda a 1 out of 10 on the honesty scale, and 10 out of 10 on the sociopath scale.

If facebook were a person, would you want that person to have access to your life and your interpersonal connections, and to be a party to your communications? Or would you think to yourself, geeze, this guy is a psycho, I don't want anything to do with him.

... but hey, Farmville.
I have no inside information for TSB, but I have worked on other large migrations before at $DAYJOB.

Based on the original planned 50-hour outage, I suspect that TSB chose a "big bang" migration: all-or-nothing, no rollback possible. These are technically easier (so cheaper) to develop, but far far riskier than taking a phased approach.

I have successfully argued against such approaches in the past, due to the high risk of catastrophic failure if it goes wrong (i.e., exactly what has happened to TSB).

I regard TSB's failure as an in-the-making textbook example of "how not to do it".
I guess one of the bigger challenges when it comes to unstructured data is identifying URLs. Is there a canonical way of identifying a URL embedded in text? Is it an impossible problem?