skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds promising. The trouble is that programming-as-teaching relies on a fairly rich set of runtime language features. The language runtime has to know a bunch of stuff about what's in memory in order to provide the programming-as-teaching features. That makes it hard to add the needed features as bolt-on extensions. You sort of need the whole environment to be designed for that kind of work from the ground up.

So if you're right that programming-as-teaching, and image-based development, is a good solution to the issues you face, then an old-fashioned Smalltalk or Lisp system seems like a good choice. If you want those features, but you don't want Lisp or Smalltalk, then I think your only option is to build a new development environment for your language of choice that has the requisite support.

That's a tall order.

Sometimes I've idly toyed with the idea of writing a Ruby implementation on top of a Common Lisp or Smalltalk runtime, but that would be a huge amount of work with no guarantee that there's any demand for it.
My manager does 1-1s back to back in 30 min blocks and as each engineer comes back they call the next person to go up. I don't get the cattle feeling but is it unusual or bad practice to do them back to back?

Also what would you think if the manager was late for the set block of 1-1s by 40 mins?
SICP Goodness – The Environment Model
everyone except

1. northwestern Europeans, centered around Belgium

2. The Maasai tribe, of Kenya and Tanzania
I don't think that genie is going back in the bottle.
Where’s the insult? I can’t speak for the community or who did what. If anything I’m looking to see what can be done going forward.
Do you think worldwide military uav research will stop if the US chooses to cease its own particular efforts?

This is in no way intended as snark. It's a serious question. Where do we, as a society, put the dividing line between adequate, not enough, and too much military spending?

I certainly agree that many of America's recent military actions have likely not been a net contributor to world stability. But I also think that the commonly presented idea that if we just stopped, somehow there wouldn't be anyone left that wants to cause damage to the states is naive. The United States is one of the most developed countries in the world, and to be near the top is to have a target on your back, one way or another.
Note: this article is written by a doctor, not a random person.

I don't think anyone is under the impression that Apple's screening is statistically without error or as good as dedicated devices. False positives suck but every consumer EKG device has them.

I feel like it's hard to argue having this feature is less good than not having it.

Apple already does large-scale studies with Stanford [1]. It would be interesting to see if they do one around the new EKG features.

[1]: https://med.stanford.edu/appleheartstudy/faq.html
This is not the case for the Google protest. The protest started in the division doing the work and spread to the rest of the company. If I recall correctly the contract was to use machine learning to pre-process video footage for the US drone program in order to identify potential targets, thus freeing up the human labor of the drone pilots to more quickly identify and kill the people they’re hunting. Which I’ll remind everyone they’re doing with a flying killer robot. I don’t think this use-case was on the table when the Machine Learning experts and general software engineers joined.

I think it’s quite reasonable to resist weaponizing machine learning. To say “I’m not comfortable making it cheaper and easier to kill large numbers of people at a distance”

If you were to do as you suggest and found or spin off a company to work on weapon systems, at least the people who joined would know what they were signing up for. I do hope you’d find it difficult to recruit, and I fear you’d not find it impossible.

I would like to think that thoughtful people would be able to see that building terrible weapons moves us closer to a world we shouldn’t be rushing to create.
The use of Agent Orange fits your pasted description quite well, as does the My Lai massacre and similar atrocities now anonymous to history.
Interestingly, just yesterday I saw an Apple Maps Car crossing the Benicia bridge... What I thought of seeing this was "Oh, wow - an apple maps car - don't see to many 'maps cars' around any more... interesting"

So, it shows they have some self-awareness of the problem.
Men. Roots and Consequences of Masculinity Norms
> That's so wester/occidental... Who says that democracy is such a good news ?

"The Dictator's Handbook" [1] does a good job of explaining various political systems lays down and presents an argument for why people in democracies have more freedoms and are generally more prosperous.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
I'm not sure we're using the same emacs lisp.

Your list of things that are painful in Elisp: working with lists and maps? For real? Opening files? `find-file is hard?

As for hard to find out how to accomplish basic things what about the extensive in-editor help system? C-h f for functions, C-h a for apropos and C-h i for info? It would be hard to find a better documented software system anywhere.

Sure you need a few libraries to make things better, but the fact that there is a healthy ecosystem of packages is a good thing.

Maps are fiddly in Common Lisp too, all the data structures feel a bit crufty compared to Clojure.

Elisp is being improved with every release. Lexical scoping was added without much ado; this release got concurrent threads, radix trees. It's not that broken we need to throw it away and start again. IMHO it's not broken at all.

Rewriting to modernize would effectively kill emacs lisp.
Totally agree. US had no need for a big army, but saw the need for a bigger navy to protect sea lane approaches to US Continent, and thus had a fairly sizable Navy.

But in modern day with big jets, fast transports, such stance of not having army big enough seems not wise.
precedent is a court document

you linked to an article pretrial

the person in the article took food from a bin stead ewaste

i tried to find a followup article or court decision but was unable

i did find a similar article from iceland where people were charged under an 1824 vagrancy act which was ruled unworthy of prosecution(o)

your linked case reads like a power tripping manager to me

this practice was part of the squat culture as well: every few days we would do a 'skip hop'.. skip being the term for a large trash bin.. we'd go to grocery stores who were legally bound to throw away food that expired that day at the end of the day as well as forbidden from giving away 'rotten' food, so the employees would stack the food items carefully in separate trash bags from the 'actual' rubbish and put these bags next to the bins

pageantry of plausible deniability is a hilarious thing

(o) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/jan/...
Indeed. Sometimes I think that if I had a text collection of a few sources (like HN), I could do a better job just greping them on my own PC. This is in regard to highly specific queries e.g. when debugging.
A Smalltalk system has data structures that record a comprehensive inventory of every memory object. If anything, Smalltalk makes it even easier than Lisp to keep track of all the objects in memory.
I have lived in Vancouver most of my life and did live in Seattle for three years. I watch and read a lot of the local news. What you are describing sounds like a 30000 ft view of Vancouver as portrayed by many news articles.
Good for you and your city. My hometown apparently made an exclusive deal with a startup, which I hear is why we still can't see bus schedules on Google Maps.
It becomes a problem when rivals are cultures that do not accept the latest western explanations for human conditions, and we take a distinct side in the matter in the name of (national interests / business etc / flawed or failed popular culture social theories) with divisions present within our own society.

Targeting shepards / nomadic cultures who despise the western LGBT* ideology using satellites, cruise missiles and AI is falling out of fashion.

Western policies that target outspoken cultures on the complications of the LGBT* ideology in sparsely populated and non western style areas of justice makes more authoritarian leaders look good in the current power and control matrix across this increasingly small world we all live on.

Instead of speaking 'Truth to Power' and appeal to common sense, western politics charted a course to "fudge because yes we Ca(i)n.". There is a clear and present danger of this generational make up (Old and Young) loosing true unitary cultural principles that forge a nation spiritually (Winning WWII), to instead only be chasing the lean mean money-making-machines servin' fiends (Mercenary Defense Operatives).

Most people are too polite or too busy to get into the gritty, but the conundrums and hypocrisy of modern western culture is in full view.
>>You can currently add a transaction to the Bitcoin blockchain for (converted) approximately one US cent.

That's irrelevant. The only reason you can get away with a low fee on the Bitcoin Core blockchain at the moment is that it's not operating at capacity. As soon as adoption picks up again, fees will start to climb - they have to because capacity is constrained. At any globally significant level of usage, fees will be astronomical.

Remember, as recently as December 2017, BTC's average transaction fee reached $30.

>> but the idea that someone that can afford to run a full node will not be able to afford to insert a transaction does not hold up under basic scrutiny.

That's absurd. 1 MB of space in each block allows for a maximum of 604,800 transactions being written to the blockchain a day. There is no way that fees for writing to the blockchain wouldn't skyrocket, far out of reach of ordinary users, at any significant level of adoption.
Ng-sq-ui latest version has some very exciting stuff to show
In the latest version of ng-sq-ui (1.0.6), the following new additional features have been released:
- A brand-new expandable textarea:
https://sq-ui.github.io/ng-sq-ui/#/form-elements-module?id=sq-textarea

- A customizable progress bar:
https://sq-ui.github.io/ng-sq-ui/#/progressbar-module?id=sq-progress-bar

Today we also released another standalone package - @sq-ui/ng-datetime-picker!
This is SQ-UI's official datetime-picker component with only 3 dependencies.
Starting today, ng-sq-ui will come with @sq-ui/ng-datetime-picker by default.
You can, however, use the package separately.
Make sure to check it out:
https://sq-ui.github.io/ng-sq-ui/#/datetime-picker-module
https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sq-ui/ng-datetime-picker
The tech community as a whole has always been anti-war from time immemorial, but in the past the vast majority of tech funding came from the govt and so tech companies were always involved in one way and another in building war machines so as to make money, but in recent times with the vc in tech funding more tech companies, they no longer really need to build war machines to make money, I mean the top five tech companies in the world presently are majorly consumer tech, so tech companies and the workers who make them up can say fuck you to the government sponsored tech contracts and fuck you to war in general.
"Blanket statements like these however put people like janitors and paper pushers in the same bucket as those who manufacture arms that are shipped to Saudi Arabia."

What's that saying about wars being won more through logistics than through arms?

If you are working for a startup that merely delivers pizza to the troops, sure, you can't seriously be put in the same category as a torturer in Abu Ghraib. But you're still (indirectly) helping the military kill people.

Whether that sort of indirect support weighs heavily on your conscience is something everyone has to decide for themselves. Personally, I don't want anything to do with the military or military contractors, even if in an ostensibly peaceful capacity.
> Milk and cheese would be a good candidate for a basic income sort of scheme

Why milk? Vegetables make more sense.

Milk is not a necessary foodstuff. Creating labelling standards for high-quality milk and letting the market do its job would be the most-reasonable outcome.
Of course! But the question is why there would be a policy of no raises above 2.5%, and I think the reason is the sort of thing I describe.

In response to others who said "this is a good recipe for losing your best people": yeah, it might be. But if you don't believe your best people are dramatically better than the rest, or if you think that actually your best people aren't the same as the people who will go shopping around for higher pay elsewhere, maybe the calculation works out differently.

Also, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying that this is good on balance. Only that it's not so hard to understand how a company might arrive at that sort of policy while trying to maximize its performance.
> Other cool features include support for daisy-chained DisplayPort configurations and improved Redshift support.

Wayland can do redshift now? I thought it wasn't possible yet. Guess it's time to move off of Xorg.
There's enough ability to go around. Let the Raytheon's of the country employ their share of bright folks who willfully signed up for defense work become increasingly beholden to DoD contracts.

Furthermore, it's not really in the best interests of the general public to have already too-powerful tech companies running the largest and most omnipresent domestic surveillance systems becoming increasingly dependent on defense budgets. Those contracts give the government more leverage over the companies they fund and create more conflicts of interests.
> BUT, how we verify people and distribute private keys without again trusting a middleman?

In the case of a national election it's of course okay to trust that the government distributes the keys.

As I said in Sweden we have BankID. With it you log in to all banks, do your taxes, doctors appointments and journals, etc. These are given out at banks and service points which require your ID and send to your address (the exact same security checks as when you're voting). They can be withdrawn and renewed as needed.

We distribute the votes so 1 vote = 1 BankID vote. It's also technically possible to allow users to change their vote if done before the deadline.

All this can happen on any blockchain for example the very secure Bitcoin chain.

> What if I lose my private key?

You renew your BankID and you can change your vote.

> What if somebody starts paying people for their private keys?

What if somebody starts paying people to vote for them? Same problem.

> What happens if a user claims the vote they cast isn’t what the public ledger shows their public key/address as having voted for?

That it's even possible is an improvement over what we have today. Now I just don't know if my vote was counted incorrectly either by a tired worker or a corrupt one(s).

> What does the blockchain really provide in these kinds of imagined uses?

All votes can be counted publicly by anyone. There's no possibility for more votes than registered residents for example. There's no delay.

A lot of money is spent on setting up voting booths, collecting votes and counting them. This is much cheaper. We also don't throw away so much paper.

> assuming a 51% attack isn’t affordable enough for some party wanting to sway the election

Firstly a 51% attack would be easily detectable.

Secondly the only thing you can do is prevent people from voting. You cannot vote for them.

Thirdly all votes cast on the orphaned blocks can still be detected.
There's a difference between accepting money and goods from Chinese or Russian investors and accepting money from specific bad actors. For example, taking investor money (and thus giving voting rights) from groups like SoftBank (which has a ton of Saudi Royal family money), is a totally different ballgame from say, buying MacBooks that are made in China.
The intent is good but I feel this is a pretty futile angle. On an aggregate scale if you don't take authoritarian money, your competitor will and then they will have more money than you.

Luckily these days we have a system of checks and balances on authoritarian entities throwing around huge amounts of money to get what they want; it's called democratic government. These days you can help democracy in your own country by working directly on campaign finance reform and voter's rights in your local communities and greater state and federal campaigns. So the people in your government aren't mostly millionaires. That helps. But I've seen first-hand working on these issues that they come off as unsexy and grindy to many.
We're flying too close to the sun here.
Countries do go to war with countries they trade with. People were saying record high levels of trade would prevent war ... in Europe, right before world war 1
It very much depends upon the generation, the 1000 series cards aren't well supported but they do work.
You can't if at the end your company is public or acquired by a public company.
Sure, and my point is not that these gains are meaningless for the people who have e.g. been lifted out of extreme poverty. My point is that having improved or solved those problems will be for naught if the giganting looming one reverses those gains. Given the enormity of that problem, taking an attitude of “but things are actually getting better!” is either shortsighted or willfully obtuse.
Why is this a federal crime?
In fact for the corrupt, it could even be viewed as a net positive to know you have bad actor money "on your team" - whom may directly or indirectly help your cause to get things in your favour.
A Blue Pill Is Stopping HIV, World-First Study Shows
Drawing is done in several different ways on many different platforms- sometimes a single platform has multiple options.

Some libraries that work on top of Haxe can give you a standard API that’ll let you not have to conditional compile (OpenFL, NME), but in general there’s a lot of trade offs that need to be considered at a platform level for drawing that conditional paths for drawing aren’t too uncommon.
> The question posed by the CEO in question, while valid, is futile --verging on naive.

From the article:

> The CEO asked his VCs because questions were coming up internally and he wanted to answer honestly and accurately.

The question was imposed on the CEO by "naive" employees who will quit if the company took money from the Saudis.
If there were one metric that i wish apple would actually capture and share with everyone in the world is:

How many backspace keystrokes and seconds have been wasted due to autocorrect features on phones

The other one only the universe knows:

how much time has been wasted by humans untangling headphones which get tangled due to the grippy texture-finish of their rubberized coating
> digital voting with cryptography

MmmmM yummy

> decentralized digital voting with cryptography

Grrrrr, bLoCkChaIn bad!!
This is a cultural thing. If you must spend time with British people (or some of the ex-colonies) you need to learn how to recognise (and protect yourself from) sarcasm and "jokes" (what you might see as lies and cruelty).

When I was 21 in the US we played a mean game of seeing what we could make Americans believe - and we came up with some truly bizarre stuff.

I think that English people do this as a proxy test of intelligence - it is a continuous competition. Maybe an English person can correct me?
I saved this comment from jlcfly from an AskHN that was answered a long time ago and have reposted it many times, as I feel it is an excellent philosophy for making your team better.

> "Teach them to be better than you. That may seem counterproductive. I have a type A personality, and I have decent coding skills.

I've been in your situation a number of times. I also know there's these mythical expert developers out there that I can't seem to find (or afford). So, what to do? A few years ago I realized that if I continue down this path, I'll end up with some serious health issues due to the stresses that come along with having a reputation for being a really good developer.

So, I decided that instead of searching for developers better than me, I would teach developers I work with how to BE better. It's taken a lot of patience.

And it's taken me quite a bit to LET GO of my way of doing things. I had to take my ego out of the picture. (VERY hard to do.) Nowadays, I realize that developers don't have to BE better than me. I simply have to ALLOW them to do what they do without being so obsessive about it. Turns out, even junior developers really CAN do good work. They just need a little guidance that only comes with experience, and then they need me to get out of their way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8649415
Sure, there is always some difference in opinions even within the same organization. However, I do not think it is what killed Dart. It would have been a clear winner with clear traction, people will have changed their mind and adopted it (as many did with TypeScript)

I think it was smart of Google of giving it a fair trial and cut its loss when it was time before it got embarrassing or "coffeescript costly" for many developers.

The problem is that all of those new "beautiful" languages is that they trade pragmatism for purity, but at the end, we all have stuff to build, and at the end of the day, a well known, well tested, and good enough language with some modern construct (a la TypeScript and ES2016+) can become a very powerful tool to build small to big code base, whereas a beautiful near perfect languages would have brought us lot of development frictions or little exhilaration.

There is a reason why the Chrome team was not really into it, and they might have been right, but regardless, they should not be blamed for Dart's fall. As developers, I do not think we want another GWT or Google Gear kind of experience.

TypeScript is successful because it solves the right problem the right way, i.e., adding type without changing everything else around it.
A blockchain based universal basic income
> Further, the idea that sleuths (amateur seems pejorative in this case) are working with city governments to battle corruption does not hold up to Matt's (or other journalists) experience.

Yes, exactly this. History has shown that government employees and officials, being human, are reluctant to dig into, nevermind snitch about matters that may impugn their own colleagues. That a random citizen, or even a journalist, could convince law enforcement to go to a judge based on trends found via analysis of anonymized hashes is unrealistic. Nevermind that it effectively denies the benefits of transparency to anyone who isn't trained in data science.
Do farmers ever learn? Bandwagoning onto the latest food fad is the failure story that just repeats itself over and over again. Farms are firms in a perfectly competitive market: why invest oodles of capital to chase what is basically noise in the market? Why is anyone surprised when the market contracts?
Saudi Prince Says He Owns 5% of Apple (1997)
Do you really believe governmental employees and the people who manage them have your best interests at heart? (Of course, they'll endlessly claim they do.)

How about that guy that runs the FCC who ignores net neutrality sentiment? How about that county clerk a while back who refused to grant marriage licenses to gays? (Of course, she thought she was operating in the best interests of gays.) How about the police who confiscate your cash to fund their departments? Does the prosecutor who hides exculpatory evidence have the public's best interests at heart?

There's nothing special about government organizations that make them operate altruistically.