skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was in Japan it was strange to see how slow some trains are. You will see that sometimes they stay more time in a station and will accelerate way faster than usual.

But when one train arrives it is common that there is another one arriving at the same time. People exchange lines from one train into another in a few seconds and then both of them depart.

My feeling is that the optimization is not for the speed of the trains. Japanese trains do not go as fast as they can. But all the train system is optimized to reduce waiting time. Each individual train is slightly slower. But the mean time that Japanese travellers spend is reduced.

I would love to see some study about this, as it was just my travel experience. It would be cool to compare that on how ants behave. It will not be the first time that ants have resolved an optimization problem way before even humans existed.
Well explained. Nicely written. Thanks for such a great article.
Exactly correct. The federated model is what makes this possible. A centralized service like Twitter has huge operational costs to serve their audience. But by distributing the load on thousands of independent operators like Mastodon does, each instance keeps their costs low and can easily be funded by their users. It has a local community feel, not a corporate mass-appeal feel.
Paid in Blood – Horror Movie
> One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group.

> How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retweets; it has "boosts". Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there's no option to add your own commentary.

I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit. Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters. In fact, putting forward bad ideas takes less time and energy than refuting them. This is why, usually, burden of proof is placed on the one making a claim. Otherwise people who value truth will be exhausted from the approximately 10 times the effort it takes to refute false claims and truth will never win out.

Showing bad ideas to be bad is very important in civil discourse, not being able to point out bad ideas by "retweeting" them with commentary will likely make this social network an echo chamber devoid of intellectual curiosity
You can export most of your data and move to another instance. It's not the most elegant process, but it seems to work out fine in the long run. You just tell people where you went.
That's pretty cool!

If you want something now, I've also written and abandoned this: https://github.com/aykevl/tinygo-gccgo

It actually worked fairly well, but the code was way too bloated to be useful.
I'm pretty sure 90% of the pens i've ever used or owned were bic. I'm not sure if i've ever really used berol pens. My writing's pretty messy so I've looked for a couple decent pens for my notebooks and such but that's about it. I like anything where the ink doesn't run and that helps me write more clearly. Some pens are definitely better than others.

That Wikipedia article about crayon colours though....the author wasn't lying...that is an amazingly detailed list with hex and rgb values for just about every crayon ever made. The standard colours also have hsv values and there's detailed history for everything. It makes me want to setup a bunch of colour palettes based on all the different crayon sets.
> "indefinite leave to remain"

My brain breaks whenever I read this. Like who the fuck came up with this name?
> and I really just want a place to talk tech, philosophy, and video games

mastodon.technology? Been on it for past couple of weeks; feels quite ok so far.
Okay, but what does that have to do with this story?

The guy was gainfully employed until the Home Office did their thing.
And admission to the country on a temporary basis is done by granting leave to remain (v. indefinite leave to remain).
He has a book “Adventures in Stationery”. Sitting around my home office, started but not finished (too much travel on my side)
She does refer to this here:

> Each individual author must actively put up a fight to restore the findability of their free speech.

That's still an unacceptable system. Apart from shifting the burden of proof, you're not even notified when your pages are de-listed, so how are you supposed to know when to send such a notice?

Also, from your link:

> sending a counter-notice makes non-U.S. residents give up a powerful argument they would otherwise have -- namely, that a U.S. court does not have the authority to render a judgment against them. For these reasons, non-U.S. residents may not want to send a counter-notice
It's much easier to hate on an individual in front of you than a president, policy, regime or country (and takes less effort). The bigger grind for me is that the same countries (UK in particular) hammering citizens from those countries welcome leaders with open arms and provide them with refuge, the ability to buy sheltered properties etc. The UKG loves nothing or nobody but money, I just wish they would be upfront about it so their policies were consistent with their actions.
Kerala floods: death toll rises to at least 324 and 200,000 left homeless
This is a useful set of instructions (thanks!) but it points to the biggest challenge Mastodon/ActivityPub will have in gaining a network. It's taken decades for people to "get" email, en masse (and many still don't understand CC/Bcc).

Twitter and FB have been mainstreamed faster in part because the onboarding/acquisition UX is so easy. It's necessary to think this through (if widespread adoption _is_ the goal).
It would follow then that an engineer having to look at a React project in the future might have an initial reaction not foreign to an engineer having to deal with a legacy Angular 1.x codebase today: recoil.
Here's an invite to my closed instance that any HN user is welcome to take advantage of: https://cmpwn.com/invite/7CA9J3mq This is good for 25 uses, if it runs out and anyone missed it just let me know.

For the most part it's tech folks talking about tech, though the federated timeline is naturally more diverse. If a bunch of HNers join up, even more so. It is what you make of it, you shape the local culture as much as anyone else.
Asciidoctor is worth a look, in line with plain text / markdown but offers a bit more in terms of textbook specifics.

https://asciidoctor.org/
CafeCoin’s Advantages Over Other Mediums for Digital Payment – iCoin Blog
Since the Home Office is a government agency which operates on a fixed budget it is unlikely they can just hire more employees as the number of applications rises. They can request a budget increase for the following year so they can hire more employees then, but the decision to approve the request is a political one outside of their hands.
Aside from "toot my own horn" the only other uses of the term I can think of are:

Kids impersonating the noise a train horn makes.

A word for farting.

The only context in which you'd normally say that someone "tooted" is the latter.
I have seen some people getting hit hard because of Places API price increase. Did it hurt any of you?
[video] MKBHD: Talking Tech with Elon Musk
Let's not pretend that this is from the bottom of their hearts. This is a business strategy to increase penetration.

Nothing wrong with it except the duplicitousness.
In Linux, video drivers are moving to the kernel and there's been a push for this in the BSDs as well. Wayland was part of the impetus for this but it benefits X as well: with the modesetting driver and GLAMOR accelerator, Xorg will Just Work and be accelerated with whatever graphics hardware, old or new, the kernel supports.
Show HN: How to hack smart contracts (Ethernaut walkthrough series)
Maybe the machine is not designed for your expectation of a bad ass checkout experience. Maybe the main considerations are getting acceptable performance when used by people with an extremely wide range of technical literacy and cognitive skills.
BioBits Explorer: Low-Cost, User-Friendly, Classroom Kit for Synthetic Biology
Maybe in silicon valley startups, but not in most places. Honestly.

>I used to work at Ball and was pushed out for complaining about every single face in every single meeting being white

I doubt that's why you were "pushed out..." Or maybe "complaining" was not done in a constructive manner.

(My uncle thinks he gets "pushed out" of all the jobs he's ever had because of some silly reason like this[1] but it's actually because he has poor work ethic and doesn't get along with others. I used to listen to him talk to dispatch when he was a truck driver living with us...uhhh it was embarrassing to listen to...)

Also, I'm a woman myself, FWIW.

[1] stuff like "my boss promoted my coworker over me because she's pretty." That was the last "reason" he had.
Personally I find SDL far too limiting. As soon as you want to write even one shader you have to write all of the graphics code yourself, and at that point it's hardly better than GLFW.
Wow, my mind is warped... I read it as...
The country itself has no stock exchange.
Reuters has a toggle button to switch of photos: https://www.reuters.com/commentary

And nowadays I find Reuters having very interesting informative writeups which rivals NYT, Guardian, etc.
I think that Mastodon has a lot going for it, and indeed It think an open source federated system is a great idea I hope to see succeed, but I don't think that RT is the main problem with Twitter.

Maybe I'm lucky that few pay attention to me, but I haven't had a lot of trouble making Twitter incredibly, if not the most, useful social network. Its easy to find your interests and fairly simple to ignore/block things you don't care about.

I also don't think that "there are people I disagree with also using this space" === "this place is toxic" which seems to be the lazy default these days. I prefer Twitter, being a US company, tread as close as it can to the 1st Amendment. I think that people need to engage with views they are unfamiliar with or misunderstand -- though there's certainly the echo chamber problem, to never face ideas that challenge you is to never grow yourself and understand what you believe as most often reflected in classrooms that now boycott professors or require everything come with some trigger warning.

Twitter has a ways to go to provide tools for dealing with trolls but it's making its way there in a way that seems more methodical and less reactionary than something like FB, and while I find characters like Alex Jones offensive, I find the rush for people (particularly some journalists and 20's something safe-space-mobists that are every bit as vocal as the mobs on the right) to default to the ban hammer more offensive.

These companies have immense power over speech in a way that should frighten us, not encourage us to have the centralization as an excuse to circumvent the 1st amendment. True, no platform is obligated to host someone, but given they are effectively monopolies (extremely responsive to legislator outrage that would otherwise have to fight the 1st) this should give everyone more pause than it appears to.

Jones fell like a domino once Apple removed him first. When Spotify removed the reprehensible music it did, the other companies fell in line and the immediate reaction was for activist groups to demand more and more be removed to varying degrees of things being actually offensive (do we now remove old NWA tracks?)

This is all an incredibly slippery slope, and to me the sign of the times is that the trolls have made it so that any difference of opinion is now something everyone flees from and that the default is to assume the worst of someone who might have a different point of view than you do.
Thanks, I'll check this one out next time I get the itch to find an instance. It seems straightforward enough but the website gives me a 502 atm
Are you honestly suggesting making a Year class to represent years in a C++-like language? And you want to forbid Years from being -5 or 1800, because they "do not make sense"?
What if I want to interpret the integer in a way you didn't think of when you wrote your Year class? Maybe I want to know whether my friend John was older when his sister Sally was born than Jesus was when St. Paul was born?

That’s why languages don’t represent dates as just as struct with ints - there is a Date class that knows how to semantically add days to dates taking leap years into account, time zones, etc. That supports our point....

Then will your class take into account that the calendar changed in the mid 1600s(?). If you need to calculate dates and compare dates.

If you have a special SensorReadingId type and you change what it is, all your code breaks at once and you get a hell of a mess to untangle.

How so? All of your other code should be treating it like an opaque type. If I was comparing two sensor ids for equality outside of the class and I changed the underlying type, I should modify the equality comparison operator to work with the new semantics.

It may not be practical to enforce "ints that represent sensor reading ids are SensorReadingId type" across all of your code. You'll need to unpack your type to a primitive type whenever you talk to an external library or serialise SensorReadingId's to storage or the network. Even if you did enforce SensorReadingId everywhere:

You shouldn’t have to do it in but one place. The serializer
would call your .ToString() method anyway. You just override it.

If you serialise SensorReadingId's anywhere, changing the type broke binary compatibility with your old code. Or the network protocol you're supposed to be speaking. Or the library you're using.

Versioning and deprecating APIs and interfaces is a solved problem. But you shouldn’t be using the same model for internal use as your external model anyway.

Arrays of SensorReadingId now double in size. Perhaps your code crashes at startup because some stack frame grew too large.

I thought we were specifically not talking about low level languages and you mentioned Java. When would that be an issue in Java?

Why is an Account making its own decisions? This sounds like the "circle that knows how to draw itself" antipattern. My friend and I want to talk about a certain Account; how do I arrange things so that the Account makes the decision to put an identifier for itself into a certain field in a certain protobuf message before I send the message to my friend?

I wouldn’t be sending my Account class that probably has business logic in it across the wire. I would be mapping it to a dumb AccountModel POCO/POJO with something like Automapper.
Dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality
Twitter didn't used to have retweets with comments but people did basically the same thing using manual retweets or . replies. I imagine if Mastodon develops a big partisan political community the same thing will happen there.
Every time I see a new text editor announced for programming, I find that is just a rehash pf unstructured text editing functionality. Programming languages are heavily structured, and code transformations between text and syntax tree forms have been implememted numerous times. So why the focus on editing plain text instead of trying to create an editor that actually transforms the syntax tree directly? I don't know what the UI would look like, but an editor that is based on refactoring operations instead of direct text manipulation might end up being a very powerful tool.
While the Home Office in UK was vigorously trying its best to throw Lucas out, the same Home Office in UK is trying its best to keep economic offenders like Vijay Mallya and Lalit Modi from being deported: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/28/india-asks-brita...

"The Home Office said the suspension of Mr Mallya's passport was a matter for Indian authorities and declined to comment on the individual case, citing its policy of neither confirming nor denying if any extradition request has been received until an arrest is made."

It's been 2 years since India sent a formal extradition request. It has been rejected twice.

Just to explain the absolute ridiculousness of this entire exercise to those who aren't aware: The case is still pending in UK court and the defence is actually arguing about the cleanliness of Indian jails and if adequate toilet facilities are provided for a fugitive:

https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/gi...

With this action of the Home Office, it has been made abundantly clear that the "human rights" of an economic fugitive far outweighs the human rights of Lucas.
> I think it's maybe unfair to view Context as a replacement for Redux.

That pretty much sums up why I wrote this article :) After the new Context API came out, a lot of people started saying that it would replace Redux, and like you said, they only really overlap in that they can help avoid prop drilling. Redux is more powerful, out of the box anyway.
9 Worst Python Practices
oh man how the hell did i mess that up
> And where are the people proposing rocket designs, in modern AI research?

We like people like Geoffrey Hinton as their work produces results - he is the first to admit you can't get there from here.

I think it's the people who are concerned with fundamentals, like the people at the Sante Fe Institute - complex adaptive systems.

In the beginning we believed in programming AI from the axioms of mathematics - not many people believe that now. A bit like configuring an animal from atoms. Difficult, pointless.

The first story is that 'fundamentals' might mean some evolutionary framework being required to plug in results from other areas like computer vision and machine learning, my guess would be something from genetic algorithms.

The other story is there exists a 'God Algorithm' that all sapient beings possess - but I find that difficult to believe.

Another story is that we simply have to start from the start - literally everything we know is nearly worthless because consciousness is too unlikely with computer hardware - that the entire history of computing is a dead end. Great for human technology but just not the route to a synthetic version of biological beings. I suspect we're more biased against this possibility than we should be.

I hope that it is the first story - my rationale is that biological intelligence and consciousness is not as far away as we think it is. If we look to evolution we see these vast periods of time in which nature works on different paths and it's only in the last few moments that an animal begins building cities and civilizations. There are also lots of the neurological version of transition fossils if you look around - lots of animals exist that exhibit human level cognitive abilities and some of them outright outrank us. I'm sure you've seen those birds assessing situations and solving puzzles, heard of monkeys coming up with original innovations like salted potatoes - a lot of animals outperform human children.

My thought is that when/if we break Moravec's Paradox and develop a robot that can walk, really walk, then we're some way towards developing machines that perform comparably to biological brains.

The catch is that people who think a walking robot is trivial are so wrong - it is spectacularly difficult. Boston Dynamics is impressive until you understand that a three or four year old is the Albert Einstein of getting about on arms and legs. Show me a robot that can mimic a human walking down the street and I'll stand up at the other side of this internet connection and start clapping. Most people start to change the definition of walking because that is easier than admitting we can't do something that looks easy. I didn't say give a machine locomotive power by changing the shape of the machine or its environment. I said walk - I meant walk.

1950 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0Mr3mLujE

A toy, but not bad for £16.00

66 years, a team of experts and millions of dollars.

2016 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY

We could be waiting until 2082 or longer.
Leave means permission, going on leave means you go with permission and why AWOL stands for absence without leave.

“Old English lēaf ‘permission’, of West Germanic origin; related to lief and love.”
Creating the Innocent Killer (2009)
No doubt there are terrible leaders, but experience in the middle east has shown it's no just terrible leaders standing in the way of prosperity.
I'd like things to go in this direction as well, but with slightly different tech than rss. What you really want is the notification layer of social networks as a standard, so that ppl who follow you are merely alerted that they should visit your site. RSS can be used for this of course, but it's really meant for content syndication rather than as a notification transport layer
It's an onomatopoeic term for briefly sounding a horn, but I almost never hear it used for that. In my experience, there are two primary uses of the word in American English:

1) In the expression toot [one's] own horn, which means to praise oneself. Often in the form "I don't want to toot my own horn, but [...]".

2) A cutesy word for a fart, used primarily when talking to young children.

Notably, an elephant using its trunk to make noise is said to be trumpeting, not tooting.
> no longer acting in good faith

This seems to be the greatest legal casualty of anti-immigrant rhetoric -- cover for bureaucratic apathy.

Maybe the author of the initial decision acted with malicious intent.

But I'd bet they just didn't care and certified it that way so as to not have the case boomerang back to them. And the political climate gave them flexibility to do so.

The only defense against this seems like a more robust, independent version of a Dean of Students, albeit for everyone interfacing with the legal system. Empowered to bring action against egregious ethical or moral breaches.

The legal profession seems to have no inclination to weed out those lacking ethical standards, so tragedies like Aaron Schwartz go unpunished. Carmen Ortiz, who oversaw the prosecution as US A, now practices law in the private sector. [1]

I get that handling lots of cases with limited resources is difficult. But when you fuck up, and then insist you were right rather than act with some compassion? There should be consequences.

[1] http://www.andersonkreiger.com/attorney/carmen-m-ortiz/
Living Record
Ah, yeah, this is an American resume though (it's illegal in Canada too fwiw).
If I'm going to preprocess before invoking awk I think I'd rather switch the separators to use ascii record/unit separator values than to replace the content of the actual fields.
Not everything that is legal is right, and illegal is wrong.

In many countries, being gay is illegal. In some countries, being a woman and walking alone in the street is illegal. “Oh, but they have to respect the law” is a poor defense.
Hmm, Oracle JDK yes, but seems there will be no free version https://medium.com/codefx-weekly/no-free-java-lts-version-b8...

Personally, I've been transitioning my stuff to OpenJDK (probably should have a long time ago).
Find Scholarships, Fellowships  and Competitions in India
Eton and the Making of a Modern Elite (2016)
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100% with you. At some point, someone has to ask who/what is causing the immigrants. I know the answer isn't simple. Some will even say the West is caused all the issues in the first place. At some point though we have to start discussing concrete ways of changing the status quos and moving forward. Changing UK immigration laws might help a few of us get into the UK but not much will change in the home country. The same African dictators rigging elections are allowed to vote on UN resolutions and make grandstanding speeches at global conventions.