skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Who do you think has more political power in the United States today, the Congressional Black Caucus, or Richard Spenser and the Alt-Right?"

Considering the White House is full of people who support Spencer and the alt-right, and this country still gets super riled up when black men peacefully and quietly ask the police to stop murdering them, I'm probably not going to go with the Congressional Black Caucus.
PS: This becomes REALLY fun if you use cnames to load balance proxies. Which use Kerberos. <sigh>
> in order to write effective tests, a programmer had to know all of the ways that a piece of software could fail in order to write tests for those cases

No.

In order to write effective tests, a programmer has to think of the piece of software's entire input domain, carve it up into a set of equivalence classes, and then determine what the expected behavior should be for a piece of input from each of those classes. With more careful testing at their boundaries, so that you can root out edge and corner cases.

The results of those tests will then find the ways your software can fail for you.

Thinking about it this way, it starts to become clear that a huge part of your job is finding ways to simplify that input space as much as possible. Simplifying at this stage makes getting it right so much easier. The fewer special, edge, and corner cases you allow in the first place, the fewer you have to code for, the fewer you have to test for, the fewer you might accidentally miss, and the fewer others might accidentally run afoul of.

This, incidentally, is the key reason why it's good to take some time to define all your tests before you start writing your implementation. I'm not necessarily a huge advocate for "red green refactor", but I do think that at least identifying all your test cases before you ever start implementing can potentially save you boatloads of time, by helping you recognize opportunities to simplify your design before you get locked into an unnecessarily complicated one by a couple hours or days (or months) of sunk cost.

It's also the real reason (IMO) why functional programming - as a style, not a kind of language - is such a valuable discipline. The challenge with programming in an imperative style is that it turns your module's entire past history into one of the inputs you need to consider, and that turns your test and specification surface into something that is just so much bigger. Considering that it opens up the possibility of injecting bugs into a routine without ever actually editing the routine itself, or even any of the functions it calls, it's possibly even fair to say that it's unbounded.
Travis CI MITM RCE
That's one reason I really like functional programming: it's easier to test pure functions, vs code with side effects that requires you to look at the internal state afterwards.
Many companies have their marketing site at www. and they're app at at, say, app.
e.g. https://www.netlify.com/ vs https://app.netlify.com/
Are "Meetings" and "Hackfests" productive enough to justify spending all received money on them?

I have never been to such occasions, that's why I ask.
I take it that you don't believe in Keynesian theory, which is fine for me, but if you want to persuade people that you can disprove one of the most influential economic theories, then you might need a better argument than the tired old "What if somebody put a gun to your head?" story.
Without automated deploys, how do you know that what you deploy is actually what you tested?
People use DIMM as a general purpose interface?
Pretty sure this isn't 4chan.

Don't conflate manifest destiny/religious destiny and culture. The caliphate(s) eventually gave up on sieging Constantinople after the utter failure of 717. But before that, they were essentially a collection of tribes which rapidly expanded, and whose opponents fell so quickly they felt they were destined to bring Islam to the entire world, with Constantinople as a prophecied conquest.

This is less than 100 years after the Rashidun caliphate sprang into existence, and the Islamic Golden Age lasted for centuries after that.

Beyond which, you should not assume that they were not peaceful just because they conquered their neighbors. The laws of the caliphate(s) were extraordinarily generous to believers of other religions, and the caliphate was internally peaceful, enforced charity, successful as a gateway for trade between the East and West, and, yes, actively preserved/translated the writings of previous civilizations until ~1100
Buying votes in Congress seems to be quite cheap. I think the average is less than $10,000 per vote. So that would buy them quite a few votes.

There have been multiple stories in the past few years about this company or that company making something like 1,500% "ROI" on their lobbying (bribing) money.
I’d be really interested to see the correlation of project management practices to tech debt.
> a structural engineering professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Carmelo Gentile, found troubling signals of corrosion or other possible damage...he has performed his tests on some 300 bridges around the world

It would be very interesting to know what he had to say about the other 299 bridges. After all, you can find someone who will tell you you have a structural problem with the safest bridge. It's hard to tell if they are a crank, someone with a vested interest, someone seeking publicity for their new diagnostic method, or genuinely an expert who is giving you good advice. But if Professor Gentile mostly says the bridges are fine, but singled out this one as a danger - then it's really worth listening to his other recommendations.
app. subdomains are not hidden
It is, it's a design choice. You can do exactly the same with gimp. You can even do non destructive saves using the classic save shortcut and export it using the export shortcut (which must be cmd+e on mac i guess) when you want without messing with your current work.
I personally find this more convenient than having to do a first non destructive save, save as a destructive format and reopen the first save again if you want to continue working, but it's a bit different than other tools yes
Aside from the lack of innovation, it's got lots of bugs. Sometimes it will continue to call you over and over when things have been acknowledged, or it wont acknowledge things, or you will try to acknowledge something that has already been acknowledged and it will error out.
Is this true? Moonlighting is legal in CA [1].

[1]: https://danashultz.com/2016/05/31/moonlighting-employees-pro...
That's www vs app, not www vs lack-of.
>"Access to developers is a bigger constraint than access to capital"

As software continues to eat the world, I am reminded of Uncle Bob's blog on a Hippocratic Oath for software developers and the gravity behind the consequences of what we produce.

http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2015/11/27/OathDiscussi...

It's only a matter of time before the discussion changes from "Developer Coefficient" to much more dire tone. To quote Bob Martin,

"With that great power ought to come great responsibility. And, indeed, society will hold us responsible when our actions result in disaster. And yet nothing binds us together as a profession. We share no ethics. We share no discipline. We share no standards. We are viewed, by our employers, as laborers. We are tools for others to command and use. We have no profession."
I track the EV of 5 different lotteries available in Minnesota. At this moment only one of them is over 0.5, at 0.55. I don't even think about buying a ticket until it gets over 0.8.
>"The greater nighttime warming takes place because wind turbines can enhance the vertical mixing and bring down warmer air from above," the authors wrote.

That's actually a very interesting effect. I guess the votices generated by wind farms quite beneficial in a desert region.

It would be interesting to see what effect wind farms have on desertification. Given that two large factors are fertile ground blowing away and desert sand being blown onto fertile land, I imagine wind farms might be beneficial for slowing down desert growth.
So true. AoE II was a great learning experience too on top of being an excellent game. The campaigns (although not exactly historically accurate) made me learn a lot about European and Asian histories, rivalries, amd personalities.
Maybe the address bar UI will next hide query string parameters because they are an implementation detail? So Google News would be displayed as "news.google.com" instead of "news.google.com/?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWGGNJaD46c

At 2:30

>> This activity didn't come from Russia. It came from Iran.

Shocking!
You are right, the result may be the same. But it is important to properly label and address the issues.

This is part of the entire issue as a whole. And partly why I think the there are better solutions to the problem. Intent matters. If you apply a race based solution to a problem that was incorrectly identified as a race based issue it is sure to fail. You could call it discriminatory but the entire selection process is just that. What I think we all care about is why a given individual was chosen or not.

In a attempt to maybe find some common ground. How would you feel about this solution be applied at the end of the pipeline; What if when there are two or more candidates with the same qualifications, the candidate is randomly selected? This will remove any bias by the selector, and over time would ensure diversity would result in matching the local population.

I also figured out why I have such a hard time with blindly selecting a given race in terms of programming. No pun intended, it creates a race condition. In your scenario if a white person and a black person always submitted their resume, and the black person is always selected then then white person might apply to 100 jobs and get selected, if it so happens that 100 black people also applied with the same qualifications. Because there is no global accounting system per individual this very well can happen, and has happened, and is the exact thing we are trying to solve. Nobody can guarantee there will be a scenario when this white person will submit a resume indefinitely and indefinitely not get selected because of the rule of always selecting a minority over a white person. This is why I suggest adding a bit of randomness to it.

So today we have have broken code, we can fix it, but we should fix it with more correct code, not more broken code.
Your definition of "save" is not the common, user-centric one.

As a user, I think about "saving" as a process to persist my work. If there might be technical fine-grained issues, show me a warning sign in the save dialog, but don't come up with a process that "makes me think".
The logic/brains around the actual nucleus of the business (calling people when shit hits the fan) is bug ridden. At this valuation and after this amount of time I would expect that to be the most bulletproof and pleasant part of their entire program. It is not.
Also, if that much excess would otherwise be wasted, we could always use it to smelt aluminum, form it into big tanks, attach standard docking rings, fill them up with water, and launch them into a designated band of refueling orbits. Those would almost certainly be useful later in space technology development.
Living on the Wireless Edge with AI and 5G
It seems that United States has the exact same problem as Facebook. I don't think this is all that surprising since they are both very large organizations.

As someone mentioned above, committees allow for the dilution of responsibility. While a couple of people might have a serious problem with the committee's actions, what are the odds that they have problems with the same action? And so the committee lets the bill or whatever is slide across the desk with an approval and actions we find morally questionable become official policy.

The answer to this hypothetical, where Sandberg turns the question back on Rubio, would probably be more about positioning and evasion then anything of substance.
Technical debt doesn't accrue in a linear fashion. Instead, it's synergistic. Up to a certain point, it's a noticeable drag. Past that point, there is a change in the difficulty incurred.

In the article, the combination of some "you're-supposed-to-just-not-do-that" with:

>If (the database throws an error) { do nothing }

resulted in a major mishap.
Not in favor of Google deciding yet again how I want to browse/view the web. I've been extricating myself from Google services slowly, and I think it's time for Firefox again. Kind of arrogant to decide something like this for more than a billion users, and a step backward for those of us in IT who have a hard time getting the user to understand a visual difference in the address bar.
Rbspy, the inspiration for this tool, has a similar default output, which you can see in the documentation, https://rbspy.github.io/.
> [...] I hope Gimp puts it to good use.

From the announcment:

> [...] and will use the money to do much overdue hardware

> upgrade for the core team members and organize the next

> hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the

> next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting.
There are a couple of places where RL/Evolutionary Methods/Something Else are jockeying for the top of the leaderboards, but usually if one technique succeeds over the others it just means that someone's put a lot of work into that one particular approach.

Anecdotally, I've heard about some optimization problems that should be a good fit for dynamic programming or reinforcement learning where it turns out they actually don't seem to work as desired.

For example, optimizing elevator policy: an agent controlling an elevator wants to achieve high throughput of passengers while also minimizing the wait-time of each individual.
We want people to get to their floor quickly but also want to avoid having any individual wait for an excessively long period of time.
The agent can only observe information about the buttons pressed on each floor, although it gets a reward like that reflects our desiderata[1].
As it turns out, most elevators are not running some sort of cool machine optimized policy, but rather something hand-coded.

This is not for lack of opportunity, either-- apparently, some researchers pitched Otis on this in the 90s, and it didn't work as well as what they already had, despite this looking like a case where theory should match reality.
Why this is, I don't know, but it might come down to the fact that there's really a lot more to a "pleasant elevator experience" than might be assumed (or modeled by the reward function), or perhaps the hand coded policy incorporates background knowledge about human vertical locomotion unavailable to a machine.

-----

1. Maybe something `R_{t} = Transporting(t) - ∑ Waiting(i, t)`, meaning something like "number of people currently being transported minus the people who are waiting times how long they've been waiting for".
From the business point of view that would make perfect sense. The user wont be able to remember the url and even second guess it so that would need the "help" of google, cause everyone knows that "google is your friend".
> believes that it was because she was from a minority group herself that she had the fresh ideas required to make her discovery as a young student at Cambridge University more than 50 years ago.

I'm curious what she means by that. Did she have a particular world view not shared by the other students that helped with this discovery? The article mentions her experiencing the 'imposter syndrome' which caused her to work harder to standout than she would have usually, otherwise she might be exposed as a fraud who doesn't belong (even though she was clearly capable enough to have been at Harvard). But wouldn't a modern inclusive environment have eliminated that feeling?... So I'm curious if there was something else about her own personal experience helped her with that discovery, beyond working harder.
His videos on linear algebra are excellent, but they are not a complete resource. If you want a comprehensive resource, search for the LA course by "maththebeautiful" on YouTube. Also check out Gilbert Strang's MIT lectures.
Yes, and it should also pretend that you searched on DDG by imitating all interfaces and developer console records.
Do you have more information about this?
Also true. Basic things like being able to cascade a delete or manage dependencies during a delete is a nightmare.

It truly feels like 6 months were invested into a fairly basic CRUD rails application with a Twilio gem installed and then forgotten.

Good for them to have generated so much revenue with such a weak product. We paid them for years even after we removed everyone from rotation. I am sure lots of companies do this because it is the only thing out there.
I really enjoyed the wonderful In our Time podcast about the Mamluks https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03bfmlh
No, but it can be done. I worked on an FPGA board interfacing through the DRAM interface once: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4139277_Pilchard_-_...
I was also a customer for quite a while, and also didn't notice any new features or anything. But I also didn't need or desire any new features, and I can honestly say that of all third-party services I've used as a part of infrastructure across every company I've worked at, PagerDuty is the only one for which I've never experienced downtime.

To me, keeping the product stable and making sure that I never miss a page when I'm having downtime is by far the most important thing. I commend them for having designed and developed a system that appears to be one of the most robust services you could use. It means I'll continue to use them in the future without hesitation or lengthy debates on cost.
It's also where you receive a lightweight, fast, to the point version.

Admittedly, it's not just "m", but If I _must_ use Facebook the only bearable version is mbasic.facebook.com
It matters because deep-linking is possible on the web.

Hiding it just seems like a trivial UI matter that makes things slightly more obnoxious when you do care.

I'd be surprised if only showing the domain vs domain+path made any difference on phishing results.

I don't think these little tricks do much for the user. For example, browsers now highlight https websites with green in the url bar and show a little lock icon. But how is that actionable information for the user? To what extent does that mean you can trust that website, and how does the average person interpret it? Phishing websites use https, too.

I would avoid stealing any pages from Safari's UI. That browser doesn't even show favicons on browser tabs to let you quickly distinguish them.
20' is wider than any shed I've built. Two of the observatories were wider and we used trusses on those. I am far from a structural engineer and mostly based my plans off of others'.
m. is where you find a lightweight, no-bullshit version of a site that doesn't load excessive images or Flash or JS before required.

I want to know I'm on a faster version of a website.

(Seriously, mbasic.facebook.com allows chat, whereas m.facebook.com reminds you to install the Facebook app.)

You're the second person recently to lament mobile sites on HN. I think they're great. Responsive isn't there yet.
Company offers mail and package forwarding Poland – Google Search
Safari shows only the domain name (minus "www."), so Google News is shown as "news.google.com" until you click to see the full URL "https://news.google.com/?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en".
It's due to different groups controlling different parts of the infrastructure, allowing for separation of privilege -- and is the whole reason www even existed to begin with.

Often these separate groups aren't part of the same organization. They're a different organization or contractor paid to maintain a web presence.
> Beyond which, you should not assume that they were not peaceful just because they conquered their neighbors.

That's the definition of not being peaceful.

>The laws of the caliphate(s) were extraordinarily generous to believers of other religions

As in, they were second-class citizens who were tolerated because they paid extra taxes?

>Pretty sure this isn't 4chan.

Yea, but I haven't been there or responded to anything with "implying implications" for years, so forgive me this indulgence.
Just speaking for myself, but often people will link to mobile Wikipedia pages, or mobile versions of other sites, and I'll look at the URL first to see if I can change it to a desktop version.
http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup

A big salary can evaporate quickly. Between March 2001 and April 2004 roughly 400,000 American jobs in information technology were eliminated. Many of those who had coded Java in obscurity ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart. A personal professional reputation, by contrast, is a bit harder to build than the big salary but also harder to lose. If you don't invest some time in writing (prose, not code), however, you'll never have any reputation outside your immediate circle of colleagues, who themselves may end up working at McDonald's and be unable to help you get an engineering job during a recession.
I think it could make sense if they start with a hard requirement that it must be able to do a good job of cleaning a not-yet-mapped house. (They might feel that is important for making a good first impression or avoiding user confusion.)

If they manage to solve that case, then the benefit of retaining the map is less compelling. By definition, you can do an adequate job without it. So then it's a question of what you gain in cleaning performance/efficiency vs. the extra complexity and any potential problems it might bring.
Past edit window, but update on the DNS issue: it seems to have been a coincidence after all.

Apparently, ISP's NS stopped resolving a lot of .com domains, and it must have poisoned my router's cache. After disabling DNS peering (to avoid ISP's NS injecting itself) and flushing cache, the problem seems to be resolved.
Are they planning to create cryptocurrency miners?
Don't drink a lot when running a marathon or doing other heavy activities - that's how most people die of water poisoning.
> “Users don’t care.”

This is the counter to every technical bikeshedding post. Either it creates revenue by being what users want, or it's a waste of time. And people seem to love wasting time instead of delivering.
The Top Martin Gardner Scientific American Articles (2014)
I think that could be enough. Actuaries have a good idea about when you are likely to die in the next two years. Basically, when you are old and your medical costs suddenly double. Doctors use the same sort of inductive reasoning for their prognosis. The industry probably collectively has all the information to put together useful actuarial tables on technical debt, but it's all silo'd in individual companies.
>> Really good outcome.

The best outcome would have been the confirmation of real lgm. That news will blow away everything else every done in astronomy and physics combined. Every time a new instrument comes online (LIGO) I cross my fingers, and then am disappointed as the known universe becomes a little more empty.
I have an older random walk Roomba and a newer Neato BotVac. The Botvac is nearly usable, but is also battling and eventually getting stuck on a dustpan in a corner more often than not.

The Botvac get caught on a lot of random junk and is beeping miserable most days, and would be much better if it backed down and marked the area to be avoided.
Gluten free also refers to processing. If something is made in the same facility / alongside a product with gluten it’s a serious problem with people with Celiac.