skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A harder problem is errors that cannot be handled by a simpler type system. For example, consider Haskell's head function

Haskell's head function is often pointed to as a wart even given Haskell's type system; the signature really ought to be:

head :: [a] -> Maybe a

With a definition (equivalent to):

head [] = None
head x:xs = Some x

It's absolutely not a good example of a source of errors that can't be dealt with in a type system like Haskell's.

> In order to express constraints such as "list must not be empty" or "number must be higher than 1" or "file must be open, the type system needs to understand the semantics of the values expressed by a type system.

Sure, but you don't have to express those as type constraints to avoid runtime errors when they occur; if you can express the distinction in normal code you can use distinctions of return type.
> While I think the ACA made things better than before (it got a lot more people insured and thus no longer easily susceptible to medical bankruptcy), it was a very imperfect and inefficient solution

Could they have done better?

Normally a big bill like this would pass the House. Then the Senate would make several changes in order to get enough votes to pass there. Then it would go back to the House, where the House would make another round of changes...then back to the Senate, and so on.

But in this case, that stopped early. It came from the House. Changes were made in the Senate that were able to get it through, 60-39 (60 were needed because Republicans were filibustering). One of those 60 was from the person temporarily filling the seat of the recently deceased Senator Kennedy.

It went back to the House, and while it was there the special election to fill Kennedy's seat was held, and a Republican won, and the Democrats lost the ability to break a filibuster.

So the Democrats in the House went with the bill as it came from the Senate, because that was the only thing they could pass that would not have to get past a Senate filibuster. (They were able to make some changes separately, because some of the changes they wanted, such as some relating to subsidies, because those counted as budgetary changes, and there is a separate procedure for reconciling budget changes between the House and Senate that is not subject to filibuster).

Wikipedia has a good, detailed, account: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Afforda...
I'll always remember our international parties here (in Germany). Party starts, some of us show 5 minutes early, some up to 10 minutes late. Then there is about a 50-60 minute break and the Italians and Spanish would start arriving.
I actually had to rip out the burner from my last computer and install it in my new computer the other day to help a friend try to diagnose an issue he was having with burned DVDs of his own work.

Sadly, I wasn't any help other than confirming his issue.
Actually, businesses love healthcare coverage. The most costly thing in a business (esp. tech) is recruitment. If you give awesome benefits, a lot of people might decide it's 'safer' to stick with your company even though they're burned out and would rather work for an exciting startup, or something.

Benefits are a tool to turn workers into slaves, and stop job mobility. Sure there are other benefits, but healthcare is the biggest and most costly. The better health a company gives the more likely employees are to stick with it.
California and Illinois have two of the worst fiscal conditions in the country, ranked #43 and #49 (by GMU) among states respectively, based on cash on hand vs. immediate obligations, debt to income, and liabilities to assets. California's unfunded guaranteed pension obligations alone add up to almost half its personal income. Don't even ask about Illinois.

New York isn't much better. It's #39. New Jersey, home to a huge percentage of the NYC workforce, is #50!
Relevant enough for you to type 10 words....
Show HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) on iOS and Android
Ask HN: What do you ask your interns as they finish up for the summer?
Show HN: Bootstrap Logos – Ready-to-use logos for people building websites
For computer scientists, the SICP is comparable to the Bible.
The second. In the given example, if skilled programmers cannot find the bug in a couple dozen lines of code within an hour, it is not an Agile vs Better Agile vs non-Agile question. It is a question of whether there is a member on your team who has the "toolkit" to test concurrency scenarios sufficiently well to find this kind of bug.

Of course, the hard part is recognizing when to use formal methods and when not to. I do wonder if someone who had used TLA+ (frex) in the past could look at this code and know that now is the time. Or not.
Shuffle a deck of cards with animation in Vue.js
Hi — we’re Chandan and Jon, co-founders of CoinTracker (https://cointracker.io). CoinTracker is a cryptocurrency portfolio manager that automatically pulls balances and transactions from top exchanges and wallets, and delivers tax information to users.

About five months ago we launched CoinTracker web on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386419). We really appreciated all the kind words and have been hard at work trying to improve with the features you requested. The top request was to bring CoinTracker to iOS & Android, so we’re excited to announce our mobile apps are now live:

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.cointracker...

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cointracker-crypto-portfolio...

We would love to get your feedback on the apps and on how we could further improve CoinTracker for you.
Being kidnapped for ransom?
The concept of bail has been around since 399 BC with Plato tried to get a bond for his friend Socrates. It's been a problem a long time. If you read the whitepaper, part of the platform is to do exactly what the big insurance companies backing bail bonding agencies, lobbyists and PACs are doing by making investing in similar efforts to derail the system. Calling out the big insurers profiting off bail.

What this platform does is match bail requests with people willing to make small contributions to helping to pay someone's bail. Knowing that if the bail is paid in full it's returned by the courts when the accused attends trial.

It would be the same as someone putting up a gofund me page. Except it happens much faster and it's already funded.
VerbiAge: Using NLP to Improve K-12 Content Marketing
I was surprised to find that in Sweden, it's very similar to Brazil: people never come to parties on time. A delay of 30 minutes to 1.5 hours is about right. So, it's not just a "poor" country thing, I think.
Obviously Facebook wasn't making enough revenue from these accounts / page(s) to turn a blind eye.

Give Facebook $100k and they'll allow you to upend a democracy.
Coding Interview Meditation
If you ask an economist, he will define economics as the study of human action, making him an expert on nearly (or entirely, depending on the economist) all disciplines, questions, and problems.
So the thing is, it is partisan, towards the republican party. When they showed liberal issues during the election, it wasn't ones that would drive the average liberal vote. It was issues that would drive conservative outrage, like Antifa ads saying to burn down society, etc. And IIRC correctly, the ad spend they did was showing these liberal ads to conservative audiences, which would make no sense if it was non partisan.
It is not anti-science to allow people the freedom to determine their own gender. There is a difference between being a man or a woman and being biologically male or female. All it requires is a degree of enlightenment and perhaps empathy.
Communication is me taking an idea in my head, considering you the listener and our shared context, and deciding which outward signals will invoke that same idea in your head. The full meaning of a statement is NEVER completely contained in the words themselves; they are selected in empathetic prediction merely as triggers of hidden assumed shared state unique to various speaker/listener pairings.

As children, we blindly associate phrases to situations in which those phrases were heard, and attempt to map them in our outward communication, often to comical effect. It's a cargo cult model of communication, since at that stage we don't understand how those phrases were originally constructed under specific intention & purpose.

The meaning of words and phrases will change over time and location, as we have new experiences which text associates. Certainly as humans we can understand and continually update multiple simultaneous contexts in which things are said, and from which version an utterance is invoking its meaning.

These issues are why I don't see the direct text-to-text model of machine translation getting beyond a certain ceiling of usefulness. Text fundamentally refers to out-of-band human experiences, in very inconsistent associations.
Once again, we are seeing very skilled PR from Facebook.

Problem: Media have painted Facebook as an enabler of propaganda

Reality: There is so much activity on Facebook it is impossible to manage, even with the best AI tools available. There is likely next to nothing they can actually do to stop coordinated exploitation by highly skilled and intelligent state actors.

Solution: Make a hollow yet visible action to take steps in the right direction and use it as cover to make a public statement of values knowing that this action is fundamentally inconsequential and that the media and public will be temporarily fooled since most people don’t understand the real situation.
https://www.nfpa.org/public-education/by-topic/property-type...

>U.S. fire departments responded to an estimated average of 4,980 structure fires in educational properties in
2011–2015, annually. These fires caused annual averages of one civilian death, 70 civilian injuries, and $70 million
in direct property damage.
Nearly seven in ten of the fires in educational properties (69%) occurred in nursery, elementary, middle, or high

So roughly 25 deaths and 1750 injuries in the last 25 years in the US. I think this is amazingly low considering the 4,980 structure fires in schools per year.
"On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.

Trump supporters experienced no trigger event for cognitive dissonance when Trump won. Their worldview was confirmed by observed events."

Facebook is a convenient collateral damage victim the Traditional Media is willing to make to further their narrative. It continues to fuel the cognitive dissonance for 50% of the country.
I think the trillion dollar mark is actually a very important psychological barrier. I've long felt as long as this debate about which one will be the first to cross that the market is sort of waiting for permission to value a company at over a trillion. I think it will be Apple and pretty soon, but no matter which company does it, I think it's important because I think others will be quick to cross over as well and this will blow the ceiling off the equities market. A trillion is a lot of money, but it's only about 10% higher than where Apple trades now, so there's no reason why they can't carry that valuation and quite a bit higher, especially as inflation continues to rise.
This. It's documented that the Russian state security apparatus was not seeking (and did not believe it possible) to prevent Clinton from winning.

What they wanted, and got, is mania.
The justice system is really slow and expensive. It can take years to end a lawsuit. Judges have 2 months and a half of vacation and most of them work less than 8 daily hours.
> Jack told me: “I started looking at the market and realized that, pretty soon, eBay was going to try to get aggressive with its business in China. They’d start with consumers, but over time they will start coming after Alibaba’s wholesalers. Competition was inevitable. So I decided the only way we can slow them down is to launch a site to compete directly with their Chinese language site."

That, plus the fact that China will just pull the plug on any American business gaining too much traction.
If they’re simply trying to create unrest of any kind, you play each side off of each other.

They don’t need to support one side to weaken us. Making our political systems grind to a halt through a lack of agreement is something we’re already good at. Perhaps they’re just trying to push our buttons to get us into that gridlock again.
"Person discovers result in complexity theory" doesn't really beckon your mouse.
He didn't get a match against the AccurateRip database:

> That single AccurateRip entry for this album matched my CRCs for all tracks except track #3 – they had 0x84B9DD1A, vs my result of 0xA595BC09. I suspect that original ripper didn’t realize their disk was bad.
hmmm...I guess so, 13 words?
And they are able to push all of their mobile games through Wechat, with over a billion active users.

Gaming was 48% of their revenue for Q2, with US$3.2 billion in phone sales and US$2.1 for desktop.

The other 52% comes from social networks, Wepay, cloud infrastructure, and online advertising.
> you, as a human, can read the review

Yes, you can, if you ever get to the review page. The ratings on reviews average out into the product rating. If there is a zillion one star "shipping is slow and Amazon customer service sucks" reviews, the product (which might be of very high quality otherwise) will have a one start rating. So you are not likely to see the product, since it will not make it into any sort of rating based list and even if you do see it you are likely to ignore it based on its one star rating.
The Russians also ran the #NotMyPresident campaign after Trump was elected. The Russians trolls do not care who is in office they just want to cause mayham.
There is no obligation for a private company to provide a platform for another's speech. None. It is, in fact, antithetical to the concept of a "Marketplace of Ideas." In a marketplace, shitty/dangerous/offensive products are not offered for sale on the shelves of department stores.

This happens so often on HN. People understand the superficial concept they gleaned from a class years ago, but since most people went into STEM, they weren't exposed to a liberal arts education that gives the full picture.

So, we're left with people pretending to understand a concept, while simultaneously destroying the principle with their opinion.
Or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess
Buybacks and mergers.

The latter, of course, is rather unlikely.
I wonder what FB would do if they had bought more than $11000 measly dollars in ads?

All of these examples are identical in form to content that is otherwise plastered all over Facebook and Instagram. Especially Instagram; that's basically all shitposting and memes still over there, like Facebook was in its youth.
Same thing. I flew around the world dozens of times and my fear developed gradually over time. In the same way yours did, by experiencing some scary incidents.

I don't have a cure for myself so I obviously don't have one for you, but here are some ideas:

1. Look at how many flights work out well https://flightaware.com/live/ there's something like a million people in the air at any given time. It's extremely unlikely that your plane will be the unlucky one. Take a screenshot and keep it on your phone.

2. Think through how horrible a crash would be and then just accept that you might die like this. You're going to die eventually and this is far from the worst way you could go. Your family will probably get well compensated which is a plus.

3. Sit in the stable parts of the plane, which I believe is towards the front and over the wing. The tail flexes which makes for much worse turbulence.

4. Consider drugging yourself. I can't do it but lots of people pop an anti-anxiety pill. Your doctor will probably give you some if you tell them you can't fly. It may completely solve the problem by altering your brain chemistry. Not a good idea if you're at risk of developing an addiction.

5. Fly on the high quality airlines with big planes. They don't want to lose those $500 million planes so they generally staff them with good pilots and do proper maintenance.

6. Don't fly when the weather is bad, just because it might feel scarier.

7. Try to avoid flying at night, just because it might feel scarier.

8. Watch pilot videos on youtube to see how incredibly stable modern airplanes are. These machines are incredibly fault tolerant and capable of recovering from severe problems in many cases. They're not flimsy or weak. They're really badass.
Coordinated attempts to influence elections? Are you sure you didn't mean to write "political campaigns"? Are you also implying that politicians aren't always authentic and honest when they go on campaign? Heavens to Betsy.
This article shows the state actors actively organizing left-wing counter-protests. Your narrative is part of the problem.
Trump 'not normal' FCC commish reveals amid Sinclair-Tribune mega-media-merger
Oh then, is the subsidy for fossil fuels and roads driving increased intensity of hurricane storms? If you think so then what should we do with the increased destruction of property who at perhaps only peripherally participated in that subsidy?
> pay the premium to buy Toys R Us

Toys R Us is NOT "premium". Even back when it existed a few years ago.

Melissa and Doug is "premium" for toddler toys. Spend a little bit more, and you get quality toys that is even a bit fun to use as an adult.

Plenty of those stores around, and their webstore (https://www.melissaanddoug.com) is well featured.

Based on my experience with buying kid's toys... Toys R Us failed to stock good enough quality for me. If I wanted crap toys, Walmart and CVS had plenty. Target's selection of toys is mediocre, but I find a few dolls here and there worthwhile.

A "major" gift is almost-always a Melissa and Doug splurge moment.

I've never trusted Amazon for kids toys either. But Toys R Us was also in a similar boat for me of low-trust low-quality products.
The App Store does a good job with this, showing reviews for a new version while maintaining old reviews. Of course products aren’t often “versioned” so this might requiring revisiting how products are posted/managed.
"inauthentic behavior" is an strange way to put it. propaganda, information warfare, disinformation, incitement, false flags, fake news ;)
PSP was the only program I knew about that showed images inside a folder in the folder's thumbnail. This was a very time-saving feature!
"But security is not something that’s ever done."
I initially read this as "Security is something that nobody ever does."

Not to be pedantic, but "finished" would have been less ambiguous.
Convolutional neural network, classify cats and dogs
Designing a Car Trash Can and Making $15k/month
The thing is, the ad spend of the bad actors during the election was basically inconsequential. But the organic reach was huge since inflammatory fake stuff spreads easily, especially if you pay 100s of people controlling individual accounts to boost it.
I confronted someone who left this sort of my review on my mobile app to ask why they gave me one star if they were so pleased. It was the only review under five stars.

They said that they wanted their review to appear in the "top negative review" column since it didn't have a shot at the "top positive review" column.

I was dumbfounded.
It is fairly common practice for someone accused of a crime for the first time to be Released on their Own Recognizance (ROR) without bail. I could easily see a system where you are outfitted with an ankle monitor with GPS and a radio beacon similar to house arrest but only activated after either 1) Failure to appear or 2) Detection of tampering with the ankle monitor.
Harvard Study: Your Open-Plan Office Is Making Your Team Less Collaborative
All this sounds great until legitimate political orgs get blacklisted because someone at FB thinks they're astroturfing

Regardless of who actually created the event, I can imagine that posting a removal notice of a political event is going to trigger the conspiracy nuts and aggravate distrust against FB
Not entirely -- license revocation can happen for a number of reasons involving content. It just doesn't happen anymore.
If it isn't worth properly funding the /defense/ for then maybe the matter should just be dropped entirely. Should save quit a bit on paperwork, jail stays, and the prosecution as well.
pubg was bound to be a flash in the pan. i don't know how they would be able to fix it short of completely reworking it. 10 minutes of looting, then rip after getting shot from across the map
'Prodigy' chip moonshot gets hand from Arm CPU guru Prof Steve Furber
Ask HN: What strategies or tools that helped you to write regularly?
Hi!

I recognize that communicating via writing in the online world is an essential skill, just like coding.

I'm trying to learn to write and to do it regularly, but I always have a problem with a writers block and/or impostor syndrome and end up never writing. I can stare at a screen for minutes or hours, put things off, procrastinate on important things, because I know I have to write.

I've even hired a writing coach, who is also versed in therapy and can help from that angle, but even with that I am truly struggling.

If you were in a similar situation and were able to overcome, what has helped you to become a better and more regular writer?

Thanks!
If the sources I read were itself not fake, the idea is that they simply try to increase the gap between left and right. Decrease mutual understanding, prevent dialog between sides, increase mistrust.

I'm not entirely sure how that can benefit the Russian government though. But hey, I have no idea what their end game is. I'm sure someone here has ideas.
I take all Intel benchmarks with a grain of salt, it seems more often than not, the initial benchmark was misleading.
Only verified purchases should count as well. A lot of people review stuff just out of spite or PR reasons.
Give a politician $100K and they'll allow you to upend a democracy
I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but Tinder used to ask for a review right after a successful match
Those same people have zero issue with gerrymandering.
The bug I had was declaring variables in the body of a class without `self.`. Turns out that makes them static. Ironically similar to JS making non prefixed declarations global, except I received no in editor warnings about that, and it wasn’t something beaten into my head from the day I started.

Edit: or was it that I initialized them at time of declaration rather than in the constructor? Not sure. Something along those lines.
> There is a difference between being a man or a woman and being biologically male or female.

It's true that there is a difference between gender (and gender identity) and biological sex, but biological sex is more complicated than simple binary distinction, too, and done biological sex features correlate with gender identity better than those we have historically mostly relief on to set socially ascribed gender.

Perhaps in the future, we can do a better job at first-impression gender assignment as well as avoiding blaming the victim when we get it wrong.
Do you not see all the source code in https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret/blob/master/ferret.org?