skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love his criticism of IBM (and the literary adjective that perfectly describes IBM that I learned today):

Q: Tell me about IBM?

A: What would you like to know? OMINOUS LAUGH

Q: Well, I'd like to know what's wrong with them, to start with, since that's what you want to talk about.

A: Ok. IBM is first and foremost a very slick sales organization, which was created in the image of Thomas J. Watson, a supreme despot, and very imaginative salesman who managed to create an organization with less fat in -- pardon me -- less local fat than any other corporation that ever happened.

And one that has over the years learned to devote teams to getting things done. That's the positive side. Get these things done with dispatch and with earnestness.

Now whether they're done the way one would like to see them done if one contemplated what the real nature of a problem, this is and entirely different manner. And critics of such things as IBM's 360 and 370 computers would say that they are were Brobdingnagian, clumsy and surrounded by unnecessary difficulties.

And this of course is why many people like the kids who showed me around the University of Waterloo this morning far prefer to use systems like Digital Equipment machines which are much more accessible to the sophisticated user.

Anyway, the question is why has IBM prevailed in its way, and the answer is that they have a sort of monopoly. And one which obviously has a political side and a technical side. And the problem is now that as they are swinging their new communication system into place, it seems increasingly likely that this communication system is more built to maintain the monopoly than it is built to satisfy the needs of what people ought to have.

Q: What communication system?

A: Oh there's something called Satellite Business Systems, which IBM and Aetna Life Insurance and I think a few other partners have created in a joint venture.
Completely agree. Though I'm curious on how you made vanilla JS universal -- how much duplicate/messy code was necessary for cross-browser and platform (mobile) ?
This is a great listen. The interviewer doesn't seem to understand that there are hard limits to humans ability to search, compute, organize, notice patterns etc
The mystery of fishing boat “Fausto”
Stop using Google products then. Get a new career.
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. I'll admit I've never heard this opinion before but I'm interested in learning more. Do you have any links or books that go into more detail?
Not sure why this was downvoted, but I support your question.

As modernists, we believe that it's important to punish the person who is responsible for a crime. It is not clear that is

1/ "Justice",

2/ shared by our ancestors,

3/ any more clear or moral than other belief systems.

It boils down to the purpose of the modern justice system. I've heard all the following reasons, each with deficiencies:

1) because doing wrong must be met with punishment (tautology)

2) because it keeps dangerous people off the street (not structurally optimized for)

3) because it makes our society safer (abstract/generic)

4) because it makes it clear that each individual is responsible for their actions (most believable to me)

I guess my question is this: why do we put people in jail (or kill them)? Personally, I don't think our justice system exists to make "good society" safer[0]; I think it's to control people so they behave in the same way those in charge want people to behave. (I.e., the initial motivation is amoral.)

[0] if so, victimless crimes wouldn't be so heavily regulated
Looks like 36 300w panels. 10,000 volts DC. If you were doing this type of setup on a roof in Massachusetts there is a law requireing safe voltage, and quick system shutdown. The panels would limit the voltage to 48v or there would be microinverters on every two panels to keep the voltage at 110v AC.

The phrase 'As primitive as a farm in Vermont' jumps out at me. These people have no idea what there talking about, any farmer would know how to test pH and NPK values of the soil and take tissue samples for analysis, there's a lot of data involved in farming, not to mention it being one of the few industries to utilize gentic modification.
Wow! This is a a really cool observation!
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita are all renowned in the US. They pop up in this thread and in pop culture references like in Tron and Seinfeld.
Perhaps in a modern context. I know that the ancient Chinese were big into sacrificing prisoners and captives of war. And the end result is eerily similar even when couched in terms of law and order. Sacrifice has both been used to appease or ask favor of the gods, and to assert ones rightness and an other’s wrongness. Capital punishment fits the second criterion to a tee.
As an electronics engineer with a decent grasp on software as well... that hurts ;(
That observation is only valid if you ignore all other factors that could differentiate those areas, which is obviously ridiculous.

It also presumes that unionization is the only way to rid yourself of the fear of getting fired. Unionization will alleviate the fear of getting fired based upon factors relating to competence, but another way to do it is simply to increase your competence. I don’t fear getting fired at all, partly because I know I’m competent enough that it’s incredibly unlikely, and partly because I’m competent enough that I know I could simply get another job if I wanted to.
If you miss your launch window for going to Mars, the delay is two years; since you can't be 1 month late and have things still be okay, the initial schedule is more realistic and delays are much less tolerated.
I hear where you’re coming from, and we seem agreed that there’s nothing internet sleuths are entitled to. I do think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this:

The implication is that the family either wanted to know or ought to have wanted to know. We have no information to evaluate those judgments, and there's enough gray there that it's irritating as an assumption.

I think if someone has died — even if it was a fairly long time ago — it’s safe to presume that there are people somewhere who still care about them, still think about them, would like to know what happened. From a state of ignorance about who those people are, I think it’s compassionate to try to let them know, especially when no one else is trying.

And naturally, the same compassion instructs one to respect their wishes after that point. Again, all working as intended.
I agree that most of those are not in the wiki nor in GitLab pages.

For non developers you can make it easier to edit by linking the bottom of each page to the reposity. See our website or docs pages for an example of that.
> replaced all the teachers in a school with teachers recruited from the top 5 or 10 percent of all teachers in the country.

My Sister and SO are both teachers and we've had this discussion. They believe that if you took a low performing school, and replaced all the teachers with the best teachers in the country, you would find zero difference.

My sister has been beaten up by students, breaks up fights nearly every day, deals with child protection services, assault from parents, weapons in the classroom, drugs, gang activity, students who haven't eaten or bathed all weekend, etc. She teaches Grade 6. It doesn't matter in the slightest how good of a math teacher she is.

She's has it bad, but I think many people here may be surprised just how common her situation is.
I was actually surprised how detailed the WHATWG specification is for something that's been "not recommended" for ages, but I guess they document everything that's still implemented: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/rendering.html#the-ma...

(I believe <blink> support has actually been dropped by at least some browsers)
Jack Horner was a big driving force behind the modernization afaik. He was involved with the original movie. Living near Bozeman I've been able to hear him speak several times and also run into him at Costco.
It seems like this is a bit different, though.

The equipment can be used to spy on people and harass them when the abuser isn't even there.
I'm left with two thoughts after reading this, either teacher quality doesn't matter or our ability to measure teacher quality is garbage.

The latter is no more satisfying because when you can't tell the difference between good and bad you get a market for lemons, so you end up with a pile of bad teachers despite the fact that good ones would help.
That Genesis 22 bit (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+22%3A1-...) provides a more nuanced view on the god of the old testament than you make it out to be.
I wonder if MS would have been on board with that around the time they were launching the Zune.
>If the worry is that immigrants will outvote the locals and impose an uncongenial government on them, one solution would be not to let immigrants vote—for five years, ten years or even a lifetime.

This is actually an interesting idea worth thinking about more. If the concern for those on the right is that more immigrants to the US would cause a permanent electoral Blue Wall by flipping Texas in a couple election cycles, and those on the left see economic migration through a humanitarian lens, then re-thinking what Citizenship means and the rules for participating in a democracy could be on the table as part of a compromise. I imagine a sizable percentage predicate their reason on wanting to come to the United States on earning money, not voting in elections (though I could be wrong, but I don't think I am and I doubt this question gets asked to newcomers). The natural reaction to such a proposal would be that we'd be creating tiers of citizens (Native Born vs Full Citizens vs residents or something along those lines). I don't have a problem with that, per se, but I can see how a lot of people would.
Richer? But will it be happier?
Don’t do it. Not worth it. Once you get into transforms it’s a waste of time. Anything more complex than a couple `animate` elements and you’re better off with a mini JavaScript lib.

I used to spend time on this but when a little animation takes two hours then you stop.
Surely the hoops you have to go through to live in Taiwan despite not being a native prevent the country from being overrun by people who are culturally incompatible with the local populace? It sucks you have to go through hoops and can't just fly there and move in tomorrow I guess, but in a world where you could do that, so could I, and I can't speak any Chinese or Taiwanese, I don't know anything about their culture, and my only connection to the country is an aunt who married into the family. What if a bunch of people like myself moved there suddenly for some random reason, and the local culture was essentially eradicated as we altered it to suit our desires? with global open borders, this sort of thing would happen constantly, all over the place, and with the advent of the Internet, most of culture would merge into even more of a ubiquitous monoculture than the world already is.
I've replaced many Mac keycaps. All the "chicklet" style, starting with the white plastic MacBooks, can be replaced. (I don't know about the silver MBPs keys before that.) I honestly don't remember when key cap sets became available. Possibly after the retina MBPs came out, which use the same keycaps as the Airs. With the white MacBooks, with their infamous palmrest cracking issue, there were always extra top cases around to take a key from. This is still what is usually offered, at no cost, to someone who needs a key or a few, if they're off warranty.

The big thing is the keycaps and scissor aren't designed to be removed, unlike other parts of the machine, so you will break a large fraction of the ones you try to remove, and those will need to be replaced with a new key and/or scissor. And they're small and fiddly to replace. So there's a difference between replacing 1, 2 or 3 missing or wonky keys and half the keyboard. Many shops would probably only want to replace the whole top case after a certain threshold due to the time and work involved. If the keys are sticky it's different too, since the keycap, scissor plus the part of the top case below and around the key would need to be cleaned to get it moving well. With more than a few keys this starts to be a lot of work.

The butterfly keyboards don't have replaceable mechanisms, and the keycap's tabs are so small that they are not meant to be put back on, but instead always replaced.
Is Speex also in that category?
I believe they are concerned about the Loudness War, where songs released over the past 10+ years have been mastered to be as close to 0db as possible.

This was done for decades by radio stations applying strong compression, because they knew that someone going from frequency to frequency was more likely to stop on a station that sounded loud, implying that they were getting a stronger signal and could listen to it longer before they drove out of range. The longer the listener stayed on their station, the more ad impressions. But then the record labels started doing it and so even buying a CD meant you were getting a lower-quality album.

A few years ago Apple mandated the use of their Sound Check tool that penalizes iTunes Radio songs that are all-loud, all-the-time. And it sounds (no pun intended) that Spotify and other services followed their lead.

Google cache of article because the site is unresponsive:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:P4y5VeS...
I was told just last week a production mold for an automotive bumper costs about a million $. Mind you, that is a big mold with hot runners, multiple gates, and I think some moving parts. I can't confirm that figure but I do know a small mold for a 4x12 inch rectangular plaque, 3 mm thick, costs $10k. Uh, but that is not from China.
Hilarious. The poor interviewer just can't comprehend at all what a computer could be used for. Also, Ted Nelson was pretty good at predicting that a computer would be used as a writing medium, a filling cabinet, a musical instrument, a few more things I don't remember specifically. As I was listening I was just silently agreeing that yep, we have that, and that, and that already.
"things often work better when you pay people upfront rather than get something for free and let them fend for themselves"...

Whoah, for a second I thought this was 1999.
Brobdignagian is the opposite of Lilliputian—from Gulliver’s travels. It means stupendously gargantuan.
"Remarkable that humanity survived without [a computer] all this time." -sarcastic

"Yes it is!" -serious
Fun to remember but obviously useless at this point thanks to CSS animations — which are eased, interactive and more complex than x/y movements.
Ok, so i didn't know Ted Nelson, from his wikipedia page:
"Theodor Holm "Ted" Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965."

I'm impressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brobdingnag
> Since I doubt that Facebook is actually stealing data from the web pages its libraries reside on, it certainly isn't a HIPAA issue

"Stealing" is a loaded term here. I've observed myself that at least some pages with the FB SDK installed send a tracking HTTP request with every page click - FB appears to be hooking into some very high level page event. Depending on what content is on the page, I could see that being a HIPAA violation: even if they aren't deliberately doing it they could well be logging confidential data.
It sounds like you have a lot more experience with windows than other platforms.

Many who have mainly used windows haven't experienced what typical software installation is like on systems like Linux. One hardly ever needs to run on trusted executables, for any reason. If you do, they come from one or two trusted sources, not one of hundreds of private websites. That is just not how Linux software is distributed. It doesn't abridge freedom, either - if you want to run I trusted executables, nothing is trying to stop you, either.

Then, if you do have an executable to install from, the installation process is more likely to be one command run in a terminal then a GUI 'wizard' that takes 10 minutes, frequent attention and 20 clicks, and tries to convince/trick you to install a bunch of other software.
Brobdingnag is the "Gulliver's Travels"[1] country where everyone is a giant. Famous for having a breastfeeding woman horrifying the narrator, and him sword fighting a rat.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver%27s_Travels#Part_II:_...
The funny thing is that early on in this interview the host tells Nelson that he's the only one saying anything about using computers to store and retrieve text. But that's simply not true, certainly not in 1979. For example, John McCarthy had been describing what largely came to be our digital literary future as early as 1970:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10370990

Even within the contemporary environment a significant fraction of computer use was not 'number crunching', but the sorting, retrieval, and printing of essentially textual information. (i.e, records) Records are tiny documents, which to me makes this early portion where Ted accepts the point without argument a large missed opportunity to get the point across.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMYiktO0D64
The biggest problem, and biggest fail of IRC. It is too low level and requires people to write scripts when they need anything else beyond simple text message.

I am torn apart here, because I really do like hacking things. The issue is - most people don't. They just want to use it, and they want to use it consistently - no matter the platform, the client, the server they are connecting to. And I totally understand that. More of it, I also understand that if you fail to provide this consistency your service have failed in the design phase and will never get widespread usage.

The sooner we, tech savvy people, understand that, the sooner we'll be able to deliver a successful open services that actually stand a chance with their closed counterpart.

So obviously, give people way to hack, but you must to:

* Design a rich protocol covering needs of the biggest target possible while allowing optionally disable features. Channels history, disappearing messages, embedded media, text formatting, emoji, stickers, web hooks, API for bots, you name it. The protocol must cover most of them, so there is no need to write scripts anymore, unless you need something niche.

* Design a strict spec for the clients, so all of them must keep to the spec, or they fail to be part of the service. And this is critical - do no allow client to behave differently and have a missing features.

* Design clients so they are trivial to use. They must be usable out of box and all (most) of the features must be enabled after installation. Necessary steps to start using it (connection, channels, etc.) should be reduced to minimum and intuitive.

* Keep a community of server and client developers so they can share info and be able to build uniform solution for the users.

* And probably most important - promote the service. And do promote it heavily, unless you want to design something niche, which, I guess, is not what we are talking here.

I've used IRC for years in the past. It was great, I do admit - not anymore. Today I require at least few formatting options (bold, inline code, block code) and no 3rd party tools needed to get anything else work properly. I have no time to hack things I need to use. I would rather spend my time to hack things I like. IRC is just a tool to communicate, I want to use it, not hack it. I loathe to jump here and there to accomplish tasks that should be done within a second with one click.

The biggest problem I observe with many things in the industry is - made by devs for devs. Never for average Joe. Average Joe have no idea about keeping your session attached so you don't loose nick, logs, etc. Neither he cares about that stuff. And honestly - the older I get, the less time I have for this kind of stuff as well. Just make it work or face the failure.
This reminds me of a home I saw once with large rusty chains used as down spot channels from the rain gutters, it was pretty neat looking.
The US is a funny place: metamizole and weed were banned because of some bogus claims about their risks while dismissing their benefits, and replaced with opioids which pose a well documented risk of addiction.

It almost looks like someone was trying to push as many opioids as possible.
What are good resources to learn more about what works/ what doesn't in improving education?

At the end of the article, they add that the study deserves a lot of credit even though it didn't work. Kudos! I was pretty happy to read that =).
> All this means is that better methods will need to be invented to score teachers, not that it's impossible.

No, it is impossible. That's the whole point. If it wasn't impossible it'd be a great idea.
French jogger detained after crossing US-Canada border
I think it was just overly aggressive settings of compression parameters. I don't see any evidence that the jbig2 compressor was implemented incorrectly. Source: [1]

[1]: https://www.xerox.com/assets/pdf/ScanningQAincludingAppendix...
Curious - are you in an industry where you expected bad actors?

I'm not blaming you -- far from it! Just wondering how applicable your experience is to the world I normally work in.
Or 50,000mg per dollar as a bulk powder, if you're into DIY.
If you had a missing loved one would you invite them to solve it?
Tracking progress in NLP tasks and datasets
When we had a 486 running Windows 95, I used to convert CDs to WAV for fun. The GSM 6.10 codec in Sound Recorder (22050 Hz, Mono, 4 KB/s) could fit about 1 song onto a floppy.
Depending on what content is on the page, I could see that being a HIPAA violation: even if they aren't deliberately doing it they could well be logging confidential data.

There are probably some instances where this is true - for example on a poorly designed site that includes confidential health data in URL query string parameters (e.g. "hasHIV=true" or similar). But if the site is designed in that way, they have much bigger problems than the security risks imposed by Facebook SDKs. Facebook JavaScript SDKs do not scrape and store page content as far as I've ever been able to tell, so it would take egregiously bad design to turn their use into a HIPAA violation.
>Go drive around "working poor" neighborhoods right after Christmas and see how many huge flat-screen TV boxes are curbside waiting for "big trash day" (small hint: a lot) or see how many people don't have smartphones.

Perhaps the hedonistic acquisition of inessential physical goods is not necessarily commensurate with a higher standard of living?

While there has been progress in the past 50 years, there has certainly also been much regress. When measuring the advancement of a civilization, it seems something other than the pervasiveness of bigger, cheaper screens for reruns of Baywatch (et al.) should be the yardstick.
Try making friends irl, you'll notice the difference
> we'd be creating tiers of citizens

Other than violating many Constitutions you mean? It's bad enough to have invisible castes as is, now enshrining it into law would be a regression.
It’s already like that. An Indian H1B will never get a green card but their US born kids will be citizens.
>I own dozens of rental properties, some of them low income where we accept tenants

You are saying you happily take money from the government. I see you as the biggest welfare recipient. You PROFIT from it which I don't have a problem with. I do too. If you don't think that is healthy don't have section 8 rentals. It's funny that my policy is GOOD for your bottom line.
PeerTube Reaches 100% Funding Goal
Supply-demand model of labor markets is broken, preventing pay raises