skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I prefer some targeted ads. I'd like to be able to opt in or out. Why do you think that what I want from Google should not be allowed if it's a win for me, Google, and advertisers?
You have to separate the word from the underlying concept(s). They're not the same thing. If they were the same thing, I could conjure of invisible pink unicorns with an utterance and make all the world utopia by having everyone recite "I am a good person and I won't do anything bad". Words can fail and everyone acknowledges that at least tacitly. Hypocrisy is the purest form of words failing. Let's put it that way: Even if you call yourself a meritocracy you can still be a hypocrite. On the other hand being a meritocracy without calling yourself one is no problem. If you call your organization of 300 people a meritocracy, there will be 300 notions of merit. What benefit is there to calling yourself one if the word itself has no concrete, actionable content and doesn't unify people's vision?

This sort of trickery is easier to see when you are part of the management of an organization. The bulk of my relevant personal experience is as a software consultant where I have been embedded in many organizations, all of which considered themselves "good thing"ocracies, but usually fell far short of the mark. We are all hypocrites like that. Words are tricky devils. If you don't treat them with a healthy suspicion you can get in trouble. You have to make them servants of your goal, not arbiters of what your goal is.
Parallel scans while great for performance, I found them hard to tune considering how they work with `work_mem`, `max_connections`.

The issue is that when a parallel scan starts, it's not limited to the `work_mem` which you would expect per connection. Instead, every parallel worker gets it's own `work_mem` limit. On a very busy db you can quickly end up with lots of OOM errors. What you end up doing is either disable all parallel scans or reduce `work_mem` which sometimes results in slower query performance for non-parallel queries. Suffice it to say, I wasn't smart enough to tune them and just disabled the parallel scans. Another way to do it is set a higher `work_mem` for expensive queries while having a generally low `work_mem`, but that's just hard to get right and you end up with even more bookkeeping.

This behavior might have changed. If anyone knows more about this would be glad to hear what you've done.
I think it has been proven that oppressed people cannot judge their oppression
I get the idea, but Mozilla is building things.

If I want the best engineer to build my bridge, I don't want to give bonus points for skin color or private parts. It's not like the trucks going over it will be any lighter or have smoother tires because the person building it grew up in a single parent household or something. When the rubber meets the road, some engineers are better than others and it affects the end product.

My fundamental concern is that the moment that the deciding factor isn't how good someone is at what you need them to do, you're driving a wedge through "the world as it is (cold hard reality)" and "the world as you want it to be (equal outcomes, diverse, empathetic)". The deeper that wedge gets, the tougher of a time you'll have meeting goals in the real world, where whether or not that bridge holds during a tornado is completely independent of the background of those who built it.

I think employees should be judged on how well they can deliver toward the company's goals, and for the most part, I think that happens. Actions like these are more about virtue signaling than anything else.
Who gets to define merit? Say a certain style was more likely to pass code review. And that style was more often associated with people with CS degrees, vs self-taught programmers. Even though it's a stylistic choice, functionally equivalent, one is "better" than the other and is introducing bias.

It's very easy to do, especially because consistency is important for legibility, but a stylistic choice nonetheless. I think a decent, practical solution to some degree are prettifiers/code-formatters and linters. Because the style is codified, and trivial for anybody to apply.
It seems that some people view the term "meritocracy" negatively because they believe it implies that everyone has the same opportunities. I don't see that implication, but if enough other people do, maybe it's worth re-wording their governance docs.

At the same time, the proposed replacement seems off the target:

> "Mozilla is an open source project. Our community is structured as a
virtual organization. Authority is primarily distributed to both
volunteer and employed community members as they show their ability
through contributions to the project. The project also seeks to debias
this system of distributing authority through active interventions that
engage and encourage participation from diverse communities."

What's wrong with something innocuous, like: "We strive to encourage contributions/engagement/participation from diverse communities"?
For the same reason we disallow indentured servitude, even if the poor guy would „really“ love to „work“ for the other guy.

For the same reason we disallow duels, even if both parties feel it would be a great way to settle a dispute.
It is especially relevant that it is not influenced by your ancestry.
Even before the GDPR, text-only news sites seemed to be making a comeback. On bad cellular connections, these two are great:

https://lite.cnn.io/en

https://text.npr.org
I don't understand: what do you mean with binding methods to interfaces?

Interfaces just represent a bunch of functions that an object must provide (and you can call when you "mask" the object behind the interface).
You can! It's totally fine for Google to ask for your consent to track you! They just can't make your use of the site dependent on your consent.
I'd be willing to bet your "small number" of white listed websites is actually a lot more than you think. Turning off Javascript breaks a ton of sites, IME.

Same thing with cookies.

On a side note, web developers have gotten really lazy at feature checking. In the IE days they'd at least have a banner saying their page wasn't going to work because it required IE or Netscape. Browsing with cookies turned off nowadays, I hit one or two sites a day that won't even display and then often get stuck in infinite redirect loop.

Even white listing sites to use cookies is a PITA. Outlook for Office65, for example, requires white listing cookies from 3 or 4 domains, and due to the way it redirects, I had to dig around in Chrome's page inspector to even find out what those domains are. And of course the page itself gives no indication of why it's not loading, it just flashes between empty pages forever.
I propose that hardware manufacturers be forced to divulge admin methods and encryption keys to their products 6 months after their software updates end.

At least users can apply workarounds in that condition. As it stands, there are no options for the owner of the device.
I think you're missing your /s tag. If that's not sarcasm, I kindly ask you not to call me oppressed.

This pretty much makes my point for me as well that an attempt to "help" me is nothing more than pure condescension and racism.
This one is actually much nicer.
Great! The GDPR allows that.

It simply doesn‘t allow you to decide for me that I would really love targetted ads.

Hence, „consent“.
You should follow the project's style when you start contributing. If style is pointed out in code review, fix it.
I was able to find an Alex Jones / Infowars video about it, but I'm unable to watch to see if it's just infotainment bluster, or based off of something more concrete that the parent poster could be referring to.
A few extra billions in fines
Indeed, it’s a win for the American economy too, when the IP is owned by American companies and the majority of profits go there.
So, 100% of the US population, based on:

- the continued militarization of police

- classifying 66% of houses as constitution-free border crossings

- holding citizens for years without charges or trial

- a for-profit prison system that engages in de facto forced labor

- criminalizing mental health issues and withholding psychiatric care from insured people.

For the record, these things have all been going on for multiple presidential administrations, and have enjoyed bipartisan support.
The radical group pushing these language changes are explicitly opposed to meritocracy.

They don't think they should have to justify their positions or their influence, they get it by having the 'right' politics.

They are committed to advancing their own personal and political power and influence by language enforcement, then use of secret code of conduct proceedings, all of which are subject to abuse.

Even where open source has failed to be inclusive and diverse empowering a fringe minority and instituting authoritarian language policing and secret proceedings will not advance inclusion or diversity.

They make no substantive contribution to diversity or the project.
I hope that your „obviously“ isn‘t quite so obvious and it does stop.

I concede that chances are low, but I contend they are non-zero.
> An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new.

Taking existing components and building something new by combining them? What on earth is wrong with that? That's great software engineering if it's possible to do for what you need.
Review says that grass feeding makes the antibiotic growth effect different, but it's not a monotonic difference: makes some antibiotics better, some worse.

https://www.livestockscience.com/article/S1871-1413(07)00572...
Sounds like the Tesla and Mobileye partnership.
This just shifts the burden to the users, I don't see this as a meaningful solution.

I think that there would probably need to be classifications of software.

Things like:

1) Is this infrastructure (routers, scada)

2) What level of user data is exposed to this software ? (unencrypted user data, credit card info, etc - we already do this to some extent)

3) What level of exposure exists? (NAT'd, routable, etc)

And then start imposing restrictions on software in those cases.

But this is very off-the-cuff, obviously it's far more complex than this. But someone needs to be responsible.
>We hardly put that level of scrutiny on any day to day use products.

We really should.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/seriously-scary-radioactive-consumer...
I‘ve done Slow-Carb and Leangains for muscle gains, eating LOTS of meat in the process, but I‘ve never felt as good as now, eating little meat and lots of raw vegetables (salads, whole carrots, you get the idea). Of course, I‘ve lost a lot of muscle, but I currently don’t really care.
In today's software profession we're all duct tapers to varying degrees. Everyone is using someone else's abstractions.
It is very good that I can delete my e-mail from a website.
The national agencies evaluates the complain and take a decision, which I hope will happen before the end of the year. Exactly how it happens depends on the country, as the GDPR leaves room for national legislation also on the section on the Supervisory authority.
Hmm.. wouldn't all those plants be fed to animals? GMO in EU is only allowed as animal feed. Those plants get treated with the same pesticides (if not stronger), but now a cow eats through tons of grains while you would never eat that much food in a lifetime. Then, the cow's body bioaccumulates the pesticides and then you keep dosing yourself with larger amounts than if you just ate the plants directly?
Incorrect: Even a single person company described above will still need to handle GPDR requests. The operational requirements is not 0 even for a company retaining no unnecessary records.
Product Chart replaces product lists with scatterplots
> The group has a mission. You help with mission, you go up. You work against the mission, you go down. Thats meritocracy.

Honest question. Do you think you've cleared anything up with this definition? I don't think you've gotten anywhere closer to the truth. If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission. In life, in software, there are enough derelict projects, aspirations, visions, dreams to fill a graveyard. That should serve as a warning that it's not so clear.

And anyway, does the mission really have to say "We are a 'help the mission'ocracy"?
But I guess that’s the point in rewording the mission. The proposal is to align the mission statement with something closer to reality, and give more leaway to adapt.
I claimed that his rant explains why they failed, not that the rant itself is why they failed.

I think his rant says a lot about how he views his role, company, and product. He seems conflicted about starting the company at all, dismissive of his coworkers, delusional about his role in history, and confused about what makes people want products. And yes, the fact that the product's homepage features him above the product itself is also a very bad sign.
First up-close look at Tesla solar roof tiles – Electrek
Whereas the US with its ISP, fossile fuel, pharmaceutical monopolies, it’s GM and Apple, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, Lockheed, and Boeing is obviously a Randian utopia. Yes indeed, no entrenched institutions in the US!

/s In cased you missed it.
How the ‘World’s Most Comfortable Shoe’ Is Challenging Nike and Adidas
What @leftworks1 did is not a "conflict with Wikipedia". It is disruption, a deliberate attempt to insert poorly sourced material into contentious articles. It is _exactly_ what you are calling Philip Cross out for. You are applying a double standard here - if you think Philip Cross is a bad editor, @leftworks1 is bad too (and worse - they rather openly broke the rules again and again).
There are probably many factors you have to adjust along the way to achieve it -- possible, but not without effort.

If you live in a place with $700/mo rent, I imagine you probably also live in an area that doesn't pay the kind of salaries San Francisco tech pays.

So you might want to work in SF. But let's say you work in SF and get bay area SWE salaries; if you were to want to "retire" in SF and continue to live with $3-4k rent, that might be a hard point to reach after 10 years.

If you work in SF/Bay and get bay area SWE salaries (or better yet, FAANG salaries) for 10 years, live modestly for most of it and not overspend, you can then probably afford to retire with $700/mo rent (or even buy a house with cash in an area that costs $200k~ a house) after 10 years by moving away from the bay to other states.

The difference in salary and cost of living between different areas is often larger than you can imagine; and it's up to you to figure out how to adjust the knobs to make it work best to your advantage.
I too remember QBASIC with a lot of nostalgia, but surely Python is a better choice for introducing kids to programming today.

name = input("what's your name?")
if name == "Noah":
print "you're the best!"
else:
print "you're the worst"
> The project also seeks to debias this system of distributing authority

Because this is not about the governance documents of an open source software project, it is about affirming the radical worldview of a small but loud fringe group in the name of diversity.

Except the only diversity is creates is diversity for people with the correct political opinions. It has nothing to do with the actual diversity that benefits an open source project.

It is time we stop listening to this fringe group about how to achieve diversity, they clearly only want power and control for themselves.

We should not let them bully pragmatic moderates who generally support diversity and inclusion into ceding them more authority and dictatorial control.
Like using software libraries together?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
Yesterday Ghostery sent out a "Happy GDPR Day" email, which also leaked their users' email addresses in the CC field. I'd say they're off to a rocky start.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gdpr/comments/8m3t1s/ghostery_celeb...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghostery/comments/8m3nqq/did_ghoste...
Since things have to be opt-in, in theory you could ignore or block all such popups and benefit from the default of not having given consent.

In practice, companies will continue to assume the opposite, and we'll see how things shake out with the regulators and courts.

It's the cornerstone behind any teeth in the GDPR.

Exciting times.
Blockchain platform to help farmers
Ads are perfectly capable of being served without javascript and without cookies and without tracking users across the internet.

Serving ads requires exactly:

1) The HTML <img> tag.

2) Server side rendering (at least enough to insert a URL into the src="" attribute of the <img> tags.

3) A webserver that responds to the URL's inserted in #2 above by supplying an image.

That's it. And, in fact, in the beginning of ads on the internet, the above was how all ads were served. But sites didn't care for it much, because they had to do extra work to serve ads. And advertisers very much did not like it because they had to trust that their partner sites were truthful in their reporting of add impressions (for the pay by impression model).

And having the advertiser be the one running "the server" of #3 above (which would allow them to monitor impression counts) means that their partner sites need to be kept up to date with the latest set of active URL's, lest some <img> tags show the broken link icon. Also a huge hassle.

The JS ad frameworks came about because the ad networks realized if they could lower the bar to gaining "ads" on a site, they could get more sites running ads (the push went something like "now use 'ad world 2.0', now just a single <script> tag in your website, no other work on your part").

And along the way the ad networks realized that the companies purchasing the impressions were willing to pay more for impressions that might be more "significant", and "relevant ads" were invented. Of course, the unstated, behind the scenes, part of "relevant" was that in order to determine "relevance" we now have to track and monitor the end users activities all across the internet so that if we see J. Smith searching for cat food on Amazon, we can now start serving him ads on facebook for catfood, and they will be "relevant" because we know he is interested in cat food for some reason.

So sites don't have to go "ad free" to also be "track your users activities everywhere" free. They just have to return to the original model where the ad was the internet equivalent of a highway bill-board or a poster on the side of a bus-stop shelter. Untargeted, just there, maybe it is seen, maybe it is not.
>The issue is the opacity of the concept of merit. How do you distinguish being a meritocracy in some good sense from insisting you are a meritocracy and thus poisoning any discussion that you are not one?

Context. Is it helpful for x business goal?
Do the individual liberties in US exist as approximately "freedom from government" or also "freedom from fellow citizens"? Same for EU - does EU "collectivism" work to ensure citizens are well in all aspects, freedom included?
Start watching nutrition facts on yt. It will be encouraging and Dr Gregor supplies all his sources.
He's talking a nice talk, but history has shown us that when EU makes regulations/laws then they just don't care about the consequences or the collateral. As evidence I would bring the completely useless cookie law and the completely botched "digital VAT" change.

In the latter it just confounds me that the legislators set up a situation, where a small business in the UK is better off not selling a digital good (that you can make infinite copies of) to a buyer in Malta, because the bureaucracy would cost more than the sale would pay. You can't have a "single market" like that.
Why not? As a consumer if I don't consent I simply don't use the service. Is it my right to use Google?
I think The Atlantic’s version is a great example, with a bunch of opt-in options clearly laid out. In the end the rest will probably end up looking more or less like that, or go down in much-deserved flames.
If you're a newspaper for example, personalized ads isn't part of your service which is to present news. So you can't make presenting the news conditional on accepting ad tracking.

You're free to have ad tracking as long as it is optional and by explicit consent only.
I welcome the old days. Everything has been heading in the direction of data grabbing and market share focused turf wars between big tech companies all trying to establish the most profitable monopoly.
> an acknowledgement that “this person is valuable insofar as they are like me.”

Yeah, when evaluating PRs I rarely even look at the person making the contribution, I look at the code.
This is really cool, and I did something very similar (more hackish) ten years ago. This is a very powerful technique, and I wish the mint team the best. The downside is really a combination of building a community and educating people about it; this is where I failed along with SEO.
I have this issue on all the epubs I have downloaded on archive.org, the converter they use (pandoc?) seems to give bad results on pdf-epub.
This is only an improvement in a superficial, linguistic sense though. If the single coefficient is just a bit-packing representation of many more degrees of freedom (because of its huge precision), then from a model information complexity point of view, the polynomial model could actually have fewer parameters, in the sense that the overall size of the combined parameter space is smaller, e.g. it’s a smaller program size.

It reminds me of the Grue vs. Bleen question in philosophy.
I answered in another post of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17163342
The people pushing this radical view on diversity and equality tend to paint all people they see as marginalized as unable to compete on a level playing field.
IMO both are obsolete especially if your connection is >50Mbps. If you must DIY use pfsense on a x86 machine with Intel NIC and low idle power draw. Otherwise use Ubiquti Edgerouter or Microtik.
I politely disagree. The law is clear that it can go on with user consent as long as there is provision for deletion and download. Which means it is going to be business as usual (with a lot of inconvenience to comply).
If they are using C# (I'm making that assumption - I could be mistaken), the type system in F# isn't a huge leap in terms of learnability. It wasn't that way in my experience, anyways.

The learning curve seems to be with other aspects - like where the hell do I put my I/O? Error handling? How do I trace (or write) all these functions that are piped or composed together? Questions like those are what I tend to see. Both personally and when pointing other people to F#.
Dental health is not just cosmetic; it affects multiple areas of physical health. If there were a safe way to add something that would prevent heart disease, it would absolutely be in the public interest. Your other examples are strawmen.

You can certainly argue (as this paper’s conclusion does) that more research is needed on other potential effects of fluoridation, but it isn’t arbitrary.