skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Vinegar is a decent cleaner. I use it quite a bit myself, but it's not the best choice to clean up after raw meats and some other more aggressive bacteria. You may have a good immune system, and not run into any problems - good for you, I'm glad - but that is not going to be the case for any large group of people.

Well, anything raw meats touch goes into the dishwasher. I didn't mean to construe the idea that I am re-using surfaces for raw meats.

>Preservation is not sanitation. Yeast will feed off of many things and grow, but it won't typically attack germs or viruses. Those germs will however gladly feed off of the same food you're giving the yeast. This is why aggressively sanitizing any fermenting vessel is so important - you're creating the ideal environments for bacteria to grow and you want to make sure it's only your selected bacteria that are growing.

Yeast don't preserve by attacking germs or viruses, they preserve by creating alcohol - just as LAB preserve by killing germs and viruses via ph. But yes, sanitation and preservation are different - I didn't mean to conflate them.

You don't necessarily need to bleach things to sanitize them. When we wash our hands with warm, soapy water, we aren't killing bacteria, we are reducing the viscosity of our hand oils and wiping them off. The same can be said for most cooking materials/areas.

>
vorpalhex 2 hours ago | parent | on: The Economics of a Commune in the Ozarks

Eggs, chicken, pork, even flour can be contaminated - Chipotle (a popular US fast-ish food chain) had woes upon woes until they finally gave it and started pasteurizing their flour. Dairy and meat are more susceptible of course, but even dry ingredients can come with contamination problems.
Vinegar is a decent cleaner. I use it quite a bit myself, but it's not the best choice to clean up after raw meats and some other more aggressive bacteria. You may have a good immune system, and not run into any problems - good for you, I'm glad - but that is not going to be the case for any large group of people.

> Lactic acid bacteria and yeasts do an excellent job of preservation

Preservation is not sanitation. Yeast will feed off of many things and grow, but it won't typically attack germs or viruses. Those germs will however gladly feed off of the same food you're giving the yeast. This is why aggressively sanitizing any fermenting vessel is so important - you're creating the ideal environments for bacteria to grow and you want to make sure it's only your selected bacteria that are growing.

> Keep in mind this is how society was for a long time.

That is a myth and falsehood. The work week for the average person going back thousands of years was 60+ hours. There was no vacation or sick leave. Sure, if you had a small cottage industry you might be able to ask a family member to do extra work for a day so you can rest, but for most of history children were pressed into labor at ages 8 - 10.

That's fair, I shouldn't have claimed such a broad statement. It depends which society/time-period we're looking at.
The history of China, France, Soviet and others tells us that it is impossible to deal with people even after trying honestly to remove God from the equation.
Of course, being able to easily sue big companies doesn't really help when you've probably already signed away your rights because of a mandatory arbitration clause.
Yes, those are the sacred texts. I do believe the O'reilly book is worth paying money for. It's extremely well written, and I think it's painstakingly crafted pictures of memory layouts and thorough coverage of lifetimes and traits are tremendously helpful.
That is not like the Devuan folks, who do not hide their identities.

* https://devuan.org/os/team/
>1: How much conflict has been spawned due to the UN Partition plan which created Israel? I haven't dug deep into the factors that led to this decision (I'm sure the aftermath of the Holocaust was understandably huge) but the idea that a new sovereign nation would be created catering to individuals who don't currently live in the land which consists of that new nations borders just seems absurd to me.

Okay, so why not do some reading on it before deciding its absurd? Tens of thousands of Jews were displaced during and after WWII and no country would take most of them, period. Go back, get educated, and then post the less "absurd" alternative.

>2: Maybe this is ageist on my part but after watching hours of Senate committee hearings this year (Zuckerburgs testimony and the Kavanaugh hearings) I would not be against a mandatory mental health check up for our highest officials which includes some sort of mechanism to remove them from office if they are determined mentally unfit to serve.

The 25th Amendment and Congressional Impeachment power provide such mechanisms for removal. As for diagnosis, and similar to your prior comment, you really need to understand how politics works before you propose candidates submit to psychological evaluation prior to assuming elected office. In other words... who then is going to evaluate the (unelected) evaluators?
Yes.

Given how difficult this is, it's no surprise to me that potential contributors might not want to stick their neck out, as expressed in TFA.
> What distributions have you been using? I rarely have a problem with Debian or Fedora in this manner.

Fedora and especially Arch are big offenders. Debian is so "stable" that I can't install newer software through the provided packages anyway, so that's trading off one failure over another.

> Get your package into Debian and Fedora...

If you stay inside the FOSS bubble, of course maybe some maintainer will eventually spend their precious time packaging some version of your application in some (sometimes broken) fashion. I don't think that's a good solution even for FOSS, but for non-FOSS it's not even on the table.
Wow, quite eye opening.
Asia’s car battery sector leaves Europe in the slow lane
The issue is that Google is now associating itself with the role of a "publisher" rather than a "platform" (in particular on slide 68). Publishers are not protected under Section 230.
further on, can be the z3 theorem prover built only with free software?
>North Korea, the poorest country on earth, has demonstrated how it can be done by anyone.

North Korea is not even close to being as poor as the reputation bestowed upon it by the US establishment.

If it were, space rockets and nukes would simply have been out of the question (as they were in the 90s). You don't tend to find the best rocket scientists living in mud huts.

It's still hardly a rich country but industrially they're surprisingly profligate and while their famous famine weighs heavily upon them (esp. in the form of stunted heights) it was 25 years ago. About the only thing there is still a massive, visceral shortage of is oil (because embargoes).
Exactly.

I think people are too eager to claim Microsoft as one of the "good" guys. Microsoft has been around since the 70's and has not been "good" through almost that entire period. So, Microsoft releases a (nice) text editor, releases a Linux subsystem, partially open sources .NET, releases an open source JavaScript framework, has an active GitHub account (filled mostly with nonsense by the way), and we're supposed to forget the 40 years prior? ExxonMobil has been investing heavily in renewable energy lately; would you tell an environmentalist that they're wrong to dislike Exxon now?

Microsoft changed because they had to. That must be the context in which they are evaluated in.
Joining a couple organizations, and open sourcing a couple projects doesn't negate the fact that they were forced into this position because they were losing mindshare, developer prestige, and can no longer force everyone into their playground.
That's cool. Thanks for sharing. Would be great to see some more code snippets to get excited (or not) about the project.
Ethics committees in universities should require all studies on sex differences to also go through a Gender Studies committee peer review, to make sure such papers (where the authors are predominately males like here) don't perpetuate the myth that there are brain differences between males and females.

https://qz.com/1057494/the-biggest-myth-about-our-brains-is-...
The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief (2009)
> North Korea, the poorest country on earth,...

North Korea is not even close to being the poorest country on Earth. That’s your bias showing.
It's hard to have "a reasonable discussion" with someone whose political position is that I am a subhuman who does not deserve to live.
That is my understanding. Blue LEDs were last to be developed so they carried their R&D costs until more recently, but between efficiency breakthroughs and mass production improvements have passed through to being the cheapest to buy, especially in terms of lumens per dollar in places where you really need brightness such as traffic lights or overhead LED lighting in homes.
Not that long ago, the consensus was that it was the opposite that was causing piracy: bundling.

They are the two sides of the same coin, which is that people don't want to pay what the content providers want to charge. Fragmentation wouldn't be a problem if each service was 99 cents a month, and bundling wouldn't be a problem if one big service that had everything charged $10 a month. Netflix showed that the latter is true - people generally don't complain about having to pay for all the content they don't care about on Netflix because they feel that what they do watch is worth at least $10/month.
"“If we don’t take back innovation, it will be like the solar industry all over again,” said Anil Srivastava, chief executive of Swiss producer Leclanché, referring to the fact that the top three global solar companies by production are Chinese.
Thanks to generous subsidies and bank loans, Chinese companies ended up producing two-thirds of the world’s solar panels between 2010 and 2015, an expansion that pushed many European competitors into bankruptcy."
> Figuring out how to improve transit isn’t like curing cancer or inventing a quantum computer, either. There are good, viable models of transit systems that already exist in cities that look a lot like U.S ones. They are successful both at attracting riders and at being financially viable, from places that have more in common with American cities than one might expect

If that's the case then you'd think some company would step in to grab that "financially viable" market

Tokyo's transit system is run by multiple companies. There are at least 10 different train companies many of which also run bus services. AFAIK they are hugely profitable. Many of them also open retail spaces and office spaces in and around the stations they run.
Ask HN: Should I focus on building apps or practicing coding tasks to get a job?
Which is more valuable for interviewers: having couple of working and deployed projects or be good at doing coding tasks?

I have 3 year programming experience but feel lack of confidence when I think about interview. And I wonder if having couple of projects on Github can replace whiteboard coding.
The case for and against disposable emails
Welp, somebody is tired of their career...
lazy_static is a wrapper around std::sync::Once, mentioned in the post. I'm not sure if it would be a better fit for the OP, as I haven't read their code.
Bionic Limbs 'Learn' to Open a Beer
Best investment I've ever made is a small-group training membership. The workout is good, but learning the exercises I can do in my bedroom when I'm feeling restless is priceless. Very enabling.
Nitpick here.... There seems to me be to be significant difference between "loss" in terms of something already tangibly owned and "loss" in terms of missing out on an opportunity.

Of course marketing schemes for "act now or lose out" won't work. I don't currently experience the opportunity and therefore losing out exerts no power over me. However, losing a mug when I already own the mug would demand a higher price from me. I would agree with Dr. Thaler that the inertia thing is a minor point about terminology.

Call it loss aversion or call it inertia. Marketing schemes that include the word "loss" in their pitch are not using the same strategy that behavioral economists are talking about here.
Is Alexa Dangerous?
> "It lowers the price everyone is willing to pay for the item". Not really.

To some extent it does, simply because of "why should I pay ${exorbitant amount of money} if I can torrent it for free?" consideration. Which is, IMO, a fair consideration, as we're talking about goods that are infinitely reproducible for $0.00 marginal cost. The availability of piracy does cause problems for "legitimate" distributors, but this doesn't automatically imply torrents are bad and labels have the moral high ground.

The core of the problem stems from the goods being infinitely reproducible for $0.00 marginal cost. Such goods inherently don't work with the scarcity-based business models invented for physical items. Media companies are doing the world great harm by trying to brute-force this impedance mismatch by legislation and technology.
South Africa had a successful nuclear weapons program that they chose to dismantle, so it's not an inevitability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...
BBC News disrupted by software glitch
Welp, we posted an almost identical comment at the same time.
I would not say there is any such thing as "the usual statistical" number for degrees of freedom. There are just different formulas for different estimators that have different properties (like bias) that sometimes matter in practical results and sometimes don't matter.

For example, in Bayesian statistics, summary statistics coming from a posterior distribution are _always_ biased, exactly according to the degree of bias encoded into the prior distribution, You _want_ results that are biased, so long as you believe your prior model of the bias accurately reflects the information you have available at the time.

If you chose to use a summary statistics like MAP in that setting, you would not care one bit whether it was biased or consistent or whatever. You'd just care that the posterior distribution is useful for a practical purpose.

In this sense, I think frequentist stats education falls short a lot of time time. There is nothing special about NHST as a framework for measuring significance of an effect. It's just one way to do things that sometimes is useful and other times isn't.

Similarly there is no special reason to ever care about BLUE estimators, unbiased estimators, efficient estimators, consistent estimators, etc. etc., or differences between different hypothesis tests like Wald test or Welch's t-test or Mann Whitney non-parametric test, yadda yadda yadda.

They are just different things with different properties and different formulas. None of them are "the usual statistical one." And any time you reference a software package using any of them, you should not expect the software package to have the same assumption about what default choices to make that you might believe from a textbook or something. There's no reason to expect them to be connected really at all.
I for one, love to get drunk on rum and pillage coastvillages
Arrrr gimme them shiny discs ye landscruffy or we will keelhaul ye arrrr

In all seriousness, i like to own my music and i love bandcamp. I'm pretty poor so yeah a large part of my collection is stolen from the shores of india. But just like books, when i have some extra money i will buy from artists who i love listening too. If i was rich i would buy everything, but i am not and i still want to listen too music.
Does public transportation always work better outside the US? Metra in Chicago is a heck of a lot more reliable than the likes of South West Trains and Govia in the UK.

Metra even works in the snow! And in the 15 years I've been using it has not had one strike. Whereas London suffers rail and tube strikes every few weeks.

Add to that commuting from the Chicago Burbs costs about 1/3rd of what commuting from the London suburbs does.
You mean illegal immigrants, of course.

> that is trying it's hardest to strip citizens/permanent residents of their status.

Those that obtained the status by fraud, right? Do you think if somebody acquired the status by fraud, this should be excused because when it concerns immigration, laws are mere guidelines and should not really be enforced? Or what would be the reason to excuse fraud in case of citizenship/permanent resident status?
Introducing Clearing by Robinhood
And yet, Harvard and all the Ivys do it all the time.
It doesn't help, but it probably doesn't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. Why is the D.C. Metro or Atlanta's MARTA so bad? I don't think car companies had anything to do with it. Americans are just bad at transit. The people don't care, and the people running it have bad taste, are bad at management, etc.
For the last half-dozen years (give or take), I've been flabbergasted that MS has taken some of the steps it has toward being a better technology neighbor. Even so, it still engages in some very sketchy (even "evil") behavior, as all publicly traded corporations do, and some of that behavior is very reminiscent of the bad old days of Microsoft (though living up to the evils of the Ballmer age is probably not even visible from where MS is now).

Over the last couple years, I see people having completely ignored the fact that Microsoft still pulls a lot of bad shit. Because the change has been so drastic, people seem entirely willing to overlook the horrors still in play. Sure, Oracle seems more evil than Microsoft these days, but that's a pretty damned low bar for someone to suddenly forgive Microsoft and start singing its praises. I'm a bit more cynical than that. Show me an open source MS-DOS 5.0 at least; MS-DOS 2.0 is nothing but a mostly-pointless curiosity and PR stunt. Show me a covenant to never sue anyone for patent infringement, regardless of OIN membership, unless that other party sued MS for patent infringement first. Show me opt-in telemetry instead of opt-out; never opt-out instead of opt-in, for any software at all. We need more.

I've been disappointed that people were so ready to forgive MS not only for the perfidies of the past, but the ongoing bad behavior of the present, too. I'm happy to see there are still people skeptical of Microsoft's current state of reform here on HN. Yes, I am willing to believe MS is better than it was, and is better in some respects than Google and Apple now (which are just atrocious), but that doesn't mean I'm willing to give MS any support for anything that isn't completely free and clear in its licensing.

DOS 2.0? .NET Core? PowerShell? Sure, I am happy with the direction Microsoft has taken with those, but I'm not 100% sure I can legally trust them outside of a Linux context, given how the OIN somehow abandoned the pretense of just being about openness and doubled down on being about Linux specifically. What kind of insanity might creep into GitHub now? How dangerous would it still be to use Windows? No thanks, I'll put my time and trust elsewhere, same as with how I treat Apple, Facebook, Google, and Oracle. I can't trust any of them, and you shouldn't either.
That last caveat is basically the whole thing. Reading Exhibit B (from the Damore suit), it's apparent that a number of Googlers feel it's their brief to ruin your life if they discover that you don't think the way they do.

It's like selling an uncovered call. It'll probably be okay, but you can see upfront that the possible downside is almost unlimited.

I've never even heard of a professional environment that bad.
"automate cherry-picking" is where I feel the migraine starts in git. I've seen three-way merge hell and it starts with something like that.
I have many friends who work for Sears corporate. Listening to them, it seemed like Lampert bet his company on his libertarian ideology. Turned out Ayn Randian ideology doesn't work in real life.
Playing Doom with PyTorch
you're not telling me anything i dont know. you're just using wrong words to describe things.

PoW's work is hashes and they are discarded. PoW's product is valid block signatures and transitively - blockchain security. something is wasteful if the product is worthless. discarded hashes are worthless but valid signatures aren't worthless.

if somebody was running bitcoin miner and discarding all hashes - their work would have been a waste. people running bitcoin miners with purpose of finding valid blocks aren't wasting anything by definition:

wasteful
ˈweɪstfʊl,ˈweɪstf(ə)l
adjective
(of a person, action, or process) using or expending something of value carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose.

there is purpose and value in bitcoin mining.
Ideally you try different tricks in different areas as an experiment, and merge and adjust the best performers. "It's not random marketing BS, it's a genetic algorithm."
How about the cages we put people in for having a certain plant in their glove compartments? No comparisons to Nazi-ism needed for that level of barbarism
I'm not quite sure I see how buying large spaces in dying shopping malls is a huge value proposition for buyers

Especially when you, umm, shut down the anchor store in said mall. I'm thinking of the Overlake Mall in Bellevue, WA that I pass every day, with its now-closed Sears store: "well, who the hell would want to rent retail space in there now?" Even when the Sears was open, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you the last time I was in that mall.

I'm sure there's some weaselly real estate one weird trick that us commoners are missing, but it sure doesn't make a lot of sense from where I'm sitting.
Go up and down the stairs
In the article I noticed: "Problems with the data that underpinned the models’ judgments meant that unqualified candidates were often recommended for all manner of jobs"

That language is a bit ambiguous, it could just mean that the algorithm failed on a wide variety of jobs beyond engineering. But another reading suggests that the algorithm was not asked "is this person a good fit for this role" but instead "what, if anything, is this person qualified for?"

If that's the case, then the problem starts to make more sense: the algorithm learned a correlation between male-sounding resumes and being hired for engineering roles. That could produce a biased approach even if the decisions in the training data were gender neutral but position-specific. Of course, it would also mean that an Amazon ML team trained an algorithm with inputs that didn't match to its eventual task, and makes me wonder what they used as a test set...

(Anecdotally, Amazon spent quite a while recruiting me for SysEng work I'm wildly unqualified for and uninterested in, even suggesting a switch to applying for that team when I was already in the funnel for something I'm more qualified at. When my resume eventually made it to a syseng engineer, they were rightly baffled that I had landed on in their stack, giving me the sense that something was screwy with how Amazon decides who heads towards which role.)
From my dabbling experiences with Rust, I would say that it should mostly be considered for scenarios where a GC is absolutely no go.

If the application deployment scenario can handle typical GC workloads, then using a programming language with such support is more productive.

One example would be modern GUI toolkits.