skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The death of a man does not make him a saint. Having good words for his family and friends is alright, but I see praises everywhere for Kofi Annan, and my perception is quite different.

He was a charismatic diplomat, but an extremely ineffective and spineless leader, whose errors damaged the credibility of the UN and had a responsibility in millions of civilian deaths.

The UN peacekeepers did nothing to stop or even slow the genocide in Rwanda (about 800,000 killed in a few months), and that was mainly Annan's responsibility. The same passivity was seen in Bosnia and Somalia under his control. When he was UN's First Secretary, he did say the US invasion of Irak was illegal, but spoke very softly against it, embraced a few lies of the Bush administration, then quickly sided with the occupying forces. Kofi Annan was also involved a scandal about the Swiss firm that employed his son and won contracts with the UN: the UN internal investigation judged there was no proof he intervened, but that his personal actions were inadequate when the accusations emerged. It was recently discovered that his son used offshore companies in Panama to hide his money.

I believe that, among the Peace Nobel-prize winners, he will be remembered to the sides of Kissinger, Obama or Suu Kyii, though it was more for his passivity that he failed to contribute to peace and human rights.
> The same causality can be observed in the ML world. Mickens

> asks why people are hooking ML systems whose operation

> isn't fully understood to important things like financial

> decisionmaking and criminal justice systems. The answer is

> that the customers demand it. ML is trendy and buzzworthy

But that's the same as with the testicle exploding argument: ML is nowadays called AI, can self-drive cars and beat humans at any task (like Jeopardy or Go). So people assume from their experience that it just works, even better than any human. Of course also a big mystery bubble is created around that both by Marketing people and ML practitioners (oh and IBM).

Being myself an engineer working on "normal" systems, I somehow feel pressed as well to do something fancier like ML - according to some survey already 40% of Engineers do that. But on the other hand I realize most of this stuff is, as already pointed out in the talk, just there to target ads or work on meaningless financial systems. I was recently listening to a talk of an AI expert person, using the AI for fraud detection in an online payment system. At the end of the talk somehow asked a really interesting question which was: so how do you connect that to your online system? He answered: we don't, it's just for compliance reporting. That's just stupid, I feel misguided. It's cool to do statistics on your data, simulations but calling that AI is incredibly misleading.
Annan facilitated the formation of the grand coalition government. A lot of the election reforms came out of that. May he rest in peace.
Creating the innocent killer
www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
Ah! I follow his book recommendations and I'll be adding them this month.
The state of AI is such that it can be used to detect faces from a crowd to falsely arrest you, deny you a home loan based on nothing, cut you off from social media based on a misunderstanding, and still can't transfer knowledge between domains.
Can someone explain why you'd want uninhabited types?

> if you have to define an error type for some computation, but this particular computation can never fail, you might use an uninhabited type.

I don't see the reason behind returning a Result<String, Err> if there is no error to return. Why not just return a String?
> Here they go alternating from AI is a "super genius threat" to "it isn't that smart".

It’s possible to be both you know. I can think of at least one example of a moron who is also a veritable genius at being threatening.
Bill Nelson wasn't making things up: Russians hacked Florida election systems
Making the first game that legally shows Nazi symbols in Germany
Speech itself is nothing without actions, power and trust - talk is cheap.

The same insults and threats hurled at you by a person in a position of power have a very different meaning when coming from someone powerless.

Likewise promises from somebody trustworthy are much more powerful than from a stranger.

My point being: it's not the speech that's powerful, it's the person behind it.
I agree that liability is probably the best approach and is long overdue for software. The problem is the standard for proving security nonfeasance? My thought is that if your product was found to have a security problem and you did not have a security audit performed by licensed security auditor then you are liable. But I'm not sure there are licensed security auditors in the way, for instance, a CPA is licensed. Over time, if a security issue is publicly reported (e.g. a CVE) and you haven't fixed it within a certain amount of time then you are also liable. The length of time a vendor must provide security updates to a product for free should probably be defined in law, e.g. 2 years.
All the biggest gains I've seen in editors are, in order of importance, inline doc lookups, easy local file search with file-customisable ignores, quick file opening with fuzzy search and Emmet abbreviations.

Does anyone know how Kakoune does in terms of these features? They're all much more important to me than say, syntax highlighting, which I find neither here nor there.
Yeah, I think one of the risks here is spending so much time picking the right tool that you lose interest in writing the book. Latex is great for writing papers, formatting, references, but arguably not great for churning out thoughts. Sometimes a pencil and paper will do.
I’ve been at the station in the article during rush hour. It was quite packed with people but still extremely clean and thoroughly pleasant.

In my admittedly limited experience the Swedes are really good at shared public spaces.
> Why do people give advice when they haven’t been there and don’t know anyone that has?!?

Well, TBF you probably wouldn't give advice to visit, say, Aleppo right now, or jump off a cliff, even though I doubt you've done either.

And so I think people generalize with the same heuristic: Someone from Minnesota or someone from Brownsville sees the same Fox News and gets the same fear; they know it's OK where they are so the danger must be someplace they haven't been.

It's the same reason a person might be racist or have strong prejudicial opinions even though they know and are friends of the prejudiced group: "well my friend is the exception". I have actually been on the receiving end of that!

I agree it's dumb, but the above seems like a reasonable explanation.
“It's not Netflix. It's HBO” What HBO's new slogan should be
Global focus

https://fallingfruit.org/
Perhaps you’re making use of a parametric type provided by a library, and you don’t have control over the structure except by filling in type parameters.
"Despite being targeted by a string of communist terrorist attacks in the 1970s and 80s..."

Using loaded terms in your writing is a good way to lose readers.
It's funny how there are tons of negative musk articles lately along with tons of negative comments. If I was a cynical person, I'd say there is a targeted campaign against the guy. And it's not just with Musk. When the news supported censorship. And of suddenly the amount of comments supporting censorship skyrocketed all over social media. Maybe it's the russians ( though I doubt it ). But there definitely is manipulation.
Do you accept PRs for website and documentation? Thanks!
Someone had been spying on Google? How does it feel to be tracked in real time?
I learnt it the hard way: https://learnpythonthehardway.org/
Government authorities bombing US citizens from the air was not well received the last time they tried it: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/18/407665820...
The online magazine you cannot read online
Unarmoured, with live steel?

I took a few short-sword lessons a while ago. The First thing we were taught was a simple block, the second thing was how to defeat a simple block by twisting your blade into the other guy's neck. The third thing was how not to get stabbed in the neck that way. It went back and forth from there.

I suspect a good cut to the neck would be the most common wound, and it would have a good chance of being a mortal one.
When you implement a generic trait that is designed to handle errors but your specific case is infallible then it is helpful to indicate that the error case can never occur. Marking that as uninhabited makes it easier for downstream consumers to just eliminate all code related to error handling for that concrete type.
Show HN: Interactive Wallpaper animated art tool (symmetry groups)
Should Rivers Have Rights? A Growing Movement Says It’s Time
Yeah, but the question is: having the source code in the form of a bunch of files (each containing some routines) OR having it in the form of a bag of routines, is that a significant difference?

(To see the analogy, substitute file = chromosome, and routine = gene)
Thany you for the link.
The stats I provided were just an estimate. Apparently the real numbers are 93% of men in occupational deaths.
I wasnt far off.
I imagine Im not too far off with the homelessness stat either.
I think it's common in smaller cities, there just aren't many jobs to jump to. My city is population 360,000. I had my first job in 2001 and I know several devs that are still there. My wife, electrical engineer, not dev, has also only had one job.
Big Oil Is Racing to Pump All the Oil Out of Texas
My Life in Pens (2009)
src is in native https://github.com/Microsoft/FASTER/tree/master/cs/src/nativ...

Looks like some file IO functions and __rdtsc
True, i think the real feasible way to grow a AI is- to actually repeat the process that grows us. As in- grow a single neuron creature in a challenging environment, and by acceleration, environment acceleration and evolutionary algorithm, herd the smarts toward sentience.
If China is using for example Apple's data to help incarcerate their citizens, does anyone else think Apple shares responsibilty? Would a Uigur that was detained and tortured have possible legal standing in the US to sue the American corp. that helped enable the surveilance?
Muslim congressional candidate Rashida Tlaib endorses one-state solution
I would credit the Prius with this shift in attitude. The Prius wasn't cool, but it was cool enough, and more affordable with a reputation for reasonable resale value.
>never

first of all you're equivocating about the difference between violence and harm but that aside you seem very certain soft (volume) speech can't harm. okay then you should be fine with this experiment (and confident about its result): let me put you into a room and have people come in for 8 hours a day and call you stupid, ugly, worthless, a disappointment, etc. in perfectly mild tones for exactly one month. we'll perform a mood/outlook/mental health assessment before and after. do you think there will be a difference in the two assessments?
Wow, thank god. Just what we need. Another JavaScript framework.

Hey, yeah, we looked at your resume, but
we noticed that you don’t have any hobbit.js
experience. We’re a pretty serious project
and hobbit does a lot of heavy lifting for
us, so we’re going to pass for now, but we’ll
keep you in or file in case anything comes up.
Thanks so much! Best of luck!
> I'm not trying to imply that all homeless people are addicts (quite the contrary) but if I'm a crack addict and you give me money I'm not sure I'd be using it to save it up for buying a car one day.

Drug addicts make up a negligible percentage of people getting a helping hand. The statistics show this and it has been born out by the states that introduced drug testing for assistance recipients: they cost more to administer than the money saved by kicking people out of the assistance programs because the numbers are so tiny. Even in SF where it seems like all the crazy homeless people are strung out or tweaked, well, that's a sample problem: indeed many of the crazy ones are, but they are a minuscule, though highly visible, percentage of the people in need.

If you're struggling to make ends meet you don't have time to take drugs.

Whereas if you start out OK, become drug addled and fall out of the system, you probably by that time are too out of it to ask for help.
Sounds like a usecase for
https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo
> But if you give people food stamps, they'll buy food with it. Even if they already have suitable food, because it's free money that can only be used for one thing.

Well, no. A lot of them will sell the food stamps at a discount to people who do want food, but would like to pay a little less for it. The poor person gets money and so does the grocery shopper.
I don't think we are that close to creating artificial intelligence for a very simple reason.

To solve a problem you must first be able to define the problem to be solved. So, define intelligence. Take your time, this comment will wait for you. Done? Good. Now define it in a way that everyone else agrees with and that doesn't fall to pieces under scrutiny.

Philosophers have been trying this for thousands of years and are still no closer to an answer. As far as I can tell we don't have any test for intelligence that is good enough to establish, for absolute certainty, that another human being is 'intelligent' let alone anything else.

Define the problem and the requirements to consider the problem solved and only then do we have any hope of coming up with a solution.
The effect of Com.java.some.class.name ?
meta: interesting to see here on HN after the announcement of Aretha Franklin's death was removed from the FP this week.
The effects of com.java.some.class.there.and.here maybe :)
He does but remains very engaged and passionate. That tells me he is fine. The narrative was that he was near the point of breakdown which is over exaggerated.

As an example:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-17/odey-says...

To me Musk always comes across as genuine, even to a fault with his often optimistic predictions. HN crown seems to always hate corporate speech and fake smoothness, I'd think his style would be appreciated here.
But that's kind of the point - no matter what "should" be, it's an unavoidable fact that desirable real estate / desirable location of living is an inherently scarce, limited, exclusive resource; whatever you do, not everyone can have it. Living in the best locations is a luxury - the average person can't live in Hollywood Hills or NY SoHo, and yes, they have to to live in a lower quality living space that they can afford.

A homeless person wanting to live only in SF is just like a starving person wanting only caviar; it's a luxury good that they're not going to realistically get because so many others want it as well.

If you want better availability of infrastructure, better opportunities to make connections, and a better quality of life, then the question is how to improve the quality of life at locations which currently have low cost real estate - and decoupling income from jobs is one way that can happen; for many of these places the living environment actually is quite good (mainly because you can afford much more space), but the main (only?) problem is the lack of local jobs; if the local people wouldn't be forced to move to where the jobs are, there's nothing wrong with the infrastructure.
Musk didn't want to buy the whole company, just move it to private investors. Converting debt to stock is part of the funding for completing the goal.
...and still can't avoid running over pedestrians because they were pushing bikes which confused it.
You don't know how U.N millitary forces work. They get "final" orders from their origin country not from the UN president. The country leaders didn't want to risk the lifes of their mil people so they backed off. UN is more a "voluntary" club with very little power(see the Iraq war)

As far as the saints are concerned I don't think people want or vote for saints...just look at our leaders! Ha ha! Saint Trump, Saint Putin, Saint Orban, Saint Duterte...
I didnt get those are custom emojis. Iv been browsing with >50-100 tabs open for at least 10 years and websites with broken/no favicon are very rare. Its usually servers you expect to be permanently broken, like https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/favicon.ico
I think it’s to do with him being a political figure vs a pop culture figure, but I could be mistaken.

I sometimes see political news on HN, I don’t think I’ve ever seen pop culture news.
Firing off a tweet takes like 20 seconds. If your argument is that he needs to delegate this responsibility to become more efficient, it's not a good argument.
Sorry those stats were just to make point. You guys cant google?

93% of occupational deaths are men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_fatality

60% of homeless are male.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S...
The first thing I thought of when I heard about this was how surprised I was that he was still alive, given his very unhealthy daily breakfast of a coffee and a naan.

What would you like for breakfast Kofi Annan?

Yes please!
The article's term "gentrification" has a more specific focus than overall social welfare, and I think it's spot-on. Entrepreneurs notice an "underutilized" resource (housing / food waste) and create a new distribution network, disrupting the old one. This is good ol' competition (which I am a fan of), but it's important to acknowledge that it impacts people who aren't "competing", like food bank visitors. Even if the new network captures more value than the old one, it may also redistribute that value -- as the article contends, from food banks that would get more donations to "conscious consumers" who prefer this to traditional groceries, and of course to Imperfect Produce via profits.

Regardless of how you feel about the ethics of the above, it's at least part of Imperfect Produce's identity. If they are marketing to conscious consumers, this article helps those consumers consider more broadly their social impact.

For my own value judgement, I feel like I'm missing some important data:
- If IP is taking waste produce from larger farms, are they actually competing with BeetBox for the supply of produce?
- Downstream of above, has IP's activity actually reduced the amount of food donations being made available to food banks?

If IP is mainly competing with BeetBox for the "conscious consumers" that subsidize their charitable work, maybe BB can focus efforts to marketing their distinction from IP. Maybe this article is the first step.

Alternatively, if the BB folks are prioritizing social impact, have they tried to convince/train IP to work with the same social gaps they fill? If IP is more efficient in extracting conscious-consumer dollars, they have more surplus that could be poured back into the community.
A LaTeX template for an invoice with automatic calculations
> It shouldn't be too hard to find or introduce the proper tags

There's lot of people mapping such details in OSM already:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural%3Dtree
That's some nonsensical justification. We had been really really poor when I was young. But at no point me or my parents or their friends would shit on the street.
He specified "non-smtp" in the title
Looks like he had ‘sd’ sit down at the typewriter
I'd like to hear about a food that isn't in some way problematic, can you list any?
Interesting, I don't have much experience with either, but I thought Mithril was kinda succeeded by Aurelia, which makes it a less attractive choice for a new project. Good to see there's still stuff going on.
Here's an orthogonal thought. Kubernetes is really popular, but it really should've been Erlang or some other kind of distributed Smalltalk that vaguely smells like serverless. Distributed objects failed originally because RPC was a leaky abstraction.

The idea of a "server" at this point, then, is basically an extremely coarse-grained unit of work and locality. You deploy some binary onto a box on a rack, you ensure that the stuff on the binary stays together in one place.

But what we really care about is objects and functions/methods, and having related objects be closer together. In the ideal world, we should just be able to throw more and more machines at a cluster, and have it transparently rebalance objects underneath, taking into account load and affinity.
Samba DNS problems with DNAME records and large replies
You're speaking from the perspective of someone who always has enough to eat, so you have the privilege of optimizing for nutrient ratios. Billions of other people aren't so lucky, and they just need more calories period. Wheat is great that, along with rice, soybeans, and other staple crops that are better in the growing/volume sense than in the nutritional sense. Not all of humanity can afford boutique heirloom artisanal hand-grown crops that are $10 per pound.

If we're going to optimize for anything, it's for feeding as many people as possible -- there are far fewer celiac sufferers than there are people who go without enough food. Optimizing the food chain to protect you would result in many more people dying from starvation, because you'd be eliminating an efficient, widely grown crop that feeds many. Wheat is the second most important crop in the world, behind only rice.
Hallelujah. It's a little disheartening to me to see so many responses, especially on HN of all places, sort of arguing that Musk should be acting like a typical Fortune 500 CEO.

Musk's deep flaws are also the strengths that have allowed him to accomplish the near impossible in the first place.
Oh, I see now. Yeah, trying to make assert output a dynamically constructed message does seem like a PITA.
This is/was distinct to military contractors & personnel.

Not typical of the 80s

AFAIR at least
The NIH estimates that the average person uses $316k ($419k in 2018 dollars) in health care spending over an 80 year life.[1][2]. That puts the value of health insurance at $5,237 per person per year.

The average health insurance deductible is $4,358 and the average premium is $321 per month.[3] That means that on average US citizens pay $321 per month for (5237-4358) / 12 = $73.25 of expected value. That's a 4X markup over the expected value of insurance.

Health insurance companies might be reporting single digit overheads but they are providing $1 of value for $4 and are inefficient.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361028/

[2] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/11/05/when-your-shitty-...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/06/23/heres-how-much-the-avera...
It is great to see Mithril again on front page of HN, it is one of the most simplest and easiest modern JS frameworks. I only know flarum [0] as a project which has used Mithril mixed with jQuery [1] and personally, I am quite amazed how snappy it is.

[0]: https://discuss.flarum.org/

[1]: https://github.com/flarum/core/blob/master/js/package.json
Because it's more informative. "a person" doesn't tell anything descriptive at all; "friendly" or "a good father" would be relevant if we were talking about their personalities, but if we're talking about their economic needs, then "homeless" is the single property that's most relevant to the discussion.

With your examples about mental handicap, the same principle applies - it matters what's the topic of the discussion, what's the next sentence, and thus where the emphasis should be. If the fact that that person is mentally handicapped is irrelevant to the rest of the story, then "person" is the part that should be emphasised; but if the mental handicap is the key factor for what happens next, then that is the most salient information of the sentence and it should be emphasised.
Surely you just means "ops"? I thought the point of someone being "DevOps" is that the developer also does operations, so it would be their own problem. I wonder if that word has become so diluted that its lost the reason that it came into existence in the first place.
How to start crypto exchange trading platform