skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just a couple of comments as I read through this:

> Non-free, proprietary software is also much more likely to be malware—to contain malicious functionalities, of which there are many kinds. Non-free programs can spy on the users, report on them. Many are designed specifically to restrict what users can do—that’s their purpose.

I think this is a mischaracterization, since these things apply to free software as well. The difference is that it is usually much easier to detect when such things are happening, and modify the program so that it no longer does these things.

> Another form of malicious functionality is tying the program to a specific remote server

Again, this doesn’t seem to me to be a “free software” argument. The reason this doesn’t usually happen with free software is that there is no central entity that controls the software, whereas with non-free software one company/server/person can control their products and “backdoor” them.

> If a program is written in Swift, you can now install it yourself from source code.

This is not quite true. I can do the same for a program written in Objective-C as well, and I can still write an app in Swift and send you a compiled binary for you to install. Perhaps Stallman was talking about Swift Playgrounds, but even here there are issues: you cannot necessarily change the code on your device itself, and the environment that your code runs in is much more restrictive.

> free software is something businesses can use and develop and sell.

I have seen many companies use free software, but very few actually making money off of free software. When I ask, I’m usually pointed to RedHat, which makes money off of providing support. However, the money they’re getting is usually coming from companies that sell non-free software. So I’m really curious how the economy would work if everyone sold free software, since this doesn’t seem like something that would work.

Also, just a a final comment, I find it amusing that Stallman has these little nicknames for all the non-free things he doesn’t like. It seems to me a bit childish; I wonder if this actually helps him or it just makes other people feel like I do.
That's quite true, but armies need bases.
For fairness I just did that myself. 4 seconds.
I'm worried about seeing a script that says

df = read_csv(file)
df <- df %>% mutate(log_income = log(income))
# do manipulations in shiny
Shiny(df)
# click "transform" in the top right hand corner...
Yoga and judo are also about your mind and mindfulness meditation is also about your body.
This is why I love async code, at every step I get either an error or a value. Which lets me deal with the error gracefully. I don't think error handling is "clutter". Not trusting code is an under-statement. You should be paranoid!
Do you worry or deny that carbon fiber airplanes are safe to fly, do you not use cell phones or gps because you don't believe that physics works? No, you don't. You only want to seek proof for things that are uncomfortable for you.
And? It shouldn't be there either.
A lot of tech company woes come down to an insistence on automating things that really need human attention.

Your recommended children’s videos are actually disturbing parodies? Easily solved with human curation. Some Alex Jones story makes its way into your news aggregator? Having people check the story would fix this. Scammy or malware-ridden ads on your site? See above.

Obviously this isn’t practical for everything, but tech companies take it way beyond what’s necessary, then act like the problems are impossible to avoid.
Static types can and usually are checked at compile time.

Whether the language runtime also uses type checks while running depends entirely on the language and the runtime.

IIRC, the JVM (to take an example) more or less throws away a lot of the static type information -- which is often too generic to be useful in guiding optimization -- in favor of runtime profiling, and several of its key optimizations involve inserting runtime type checks.
Back in the 90s, I (and many people) believed that when the Internet gave everyone instant access to all the world's information, urban legends would die out because it would be so easy to fact check things and surely nobody would spare a few minutes of research to avoid propagating a half-truth. Alas, this theory didn't fully account for human nature.

A grounded version of this story (if you're curious) is given at https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_history4.shtml
> All Ms has to do is flag ads whose displayed URL do not match the final URL for manual review. Or simply ban it.

The ad did match the final URL, it just selectively redirected to the legitimate or malicious page based on user agent. See https://twitter.com/sephr/status/1055751684146655232?s=19
> Humans who thrive in spatial and kinesthetic channels are debilitated on a modern computer.

Interesting; this isn't something I know anything about. Is it not feasible to develop alternative hardware and software that adapt our symbolic notations for these people, while still enabling those of us who practically require symbolic notations to collaborate?
My quick take is that the authors of the linked essay have a circumscribed and very industry-focused view of what an introductory CS course should teach and what kind of things a student should be expected to learn. Their primary goal seems to be preparing students for a follow-up Java course (of the early 2000s style of Java), but without dropping all of the incidental complexity of Java/C++ on the students right away. To that effect they have pared down most of the “computer science” content of a SICP type course, and focused heavily on the computer programming process, analogous to the way middle school English classes teach about writing.

(Disclaimer: I have not directly evaluated their curriculum/textbook.)

This differs markedly from my own opinion about the proper goals of a ‘computer science’ course at the undergraduate level, which is to teach timeless principles and flexible thinking without bending to fashion (especially fashion which is now a decade out of date), and to prepare students for follow-up computer science courses such as data structures / algorithms, theory of computation, programming languages, or in a more applied direction databases, networking, graphics, operating systems, numerical analysis, machine learning, and so on. A lot of these follow-up courses will be substantially mathematical and will rely heavily on analytical skills developed in in introductory CS course and in mathematics courses (not just on programming skills per se).

But if updated for 2018 the authors’ curriculum would be appropriate as a course titled “introduction to programming” or the like. I agree it sounds like an improvement vs. first courses that start students out on C++ or Java (their main comparison in the linked paper).

YMMV.
It’s easy for Bing to manually review every ad. What’s hard is manually reviewing every ad while maintaining their current prices and profit margins.
This isn’t the same thing. Some people are happy with viewing ads in general, but are not happy with aggressive pop-ups that tell them to upgrad. In essence these alerts are saying their choice is the wrong one, even though it’s a choice that YouTube itself gave them.
It's possible to install Google Chrome on a Windows box with chocolatey, the Windows answer to apt and brew.

But, still, Microsoft's browsers still aren't good. In my workplace (where we do some complex cross-browser work) they're an enormous nuisance to development and QA. I wish Edge were far better than IE, but they're both quirky. Firefox and Google Chrome ordinarily work predictably. Safari has a few quirks, Edge is really quirky, and IE is a narrow gauge steam train, all different.

Why doesn't Redmond stop throwing good money after bad and just license Firefox? Are they stuck in the sunk-cost fallacy?
I think the author was assuming that the reader was already familiar with FPGA design, in such designs it is straight forward to synthesize adders and shifters but you cannot synthesize a multiplier (for example).
300ms for a simple RoR site? Sounds suspicious.

That said. Even Gmail is on the order of seconds for being useful nowadays...
I see. Dare to disagree with Thomas Ptacek and you get shadow banned?
Chiptunes in an Altoids tin
ProtonMail, NTFLX, VSCO, Photoshop
I would recommend "Discrete mathematics demystified" by Steven G. Krantz. It is an introduction to topics that you may have never encountered before
Yes.
When the rich fail they probably still have enough to live on. When the poor fail, they go on welfare and require money from others.

Either we get rid of welfare, or ban people from partaking in risky investments. Which do you think is better?
Let's do the math. Rainiest spot on Earth sea level, say 1 inch freshwater per day, every day, and somehow consistent all year.

One square meter, 100% efficient, looks like it would produce less than 1 kW with a river feeding it. With just rain, figure on well under 100 watts. Probably under 10 watts.

Compare with a floating PV array, also 1 square meter, but real-world 20% efficient cells. In the same rainy rainy spot. Probably much higher than 10 watts, even factoring in nights and overcast skies.

Maybe you could combine them, but I bet you'd get better bang for your buck by just doubling the floating PV array size. PV doesn't need a freshwater (or saline) source either.

If you care about consistent power then you'll need a battery (or grid connection) either way.
???

This makes less than no sense and my head hurts just trying to figure out how this could possibly work.
Only if we switch to Base-16 at the same time.
How about the metric time system?

1 day = 10 hours

1 hour = 10 minutes

1 minute = 10 second minutes

1 second minute = 10 third minutes

Or should it scale at 1:100? Why or why not?
It seems the data stays in sync with other places you're signed in, so supposedly you could get redundancy by signing in on more devices/browsers. In that sense, it's better than a crappy text editor on your computer.
Yep, you're right.

Which just goes to show that these are not the types you want to be using for any kind of portable binary I/O.
email is fine if you don't enjoy the public performance of social media. they're all messaging systems when it comes down to it. stallman also famously reads webpages by curling and emailing them to himself.
Yeah, picking on the upgrade wording is tricky, and cuts both ways. It has a common, semi-specific meaning with computers, but has also been used for far longer in the more general way it's used here.

If you say "I upgraded my stereo system", I would consider the chance you meant that to imply you got better versions of the same devices from the same manufacturer to be essentially nil.

I'm that respect, it may seem misleading if you do a lot of work with computer or have for many years, buts maybe it isn't much to a layperson?
If b is uint8_t you get zero if you <<8, but the expected value if you * by (int)256; or is it late and I should keep quiet?
Tax changes and budgets are passed separately
Apple and Samsung fined millions for intentionally slowing down old smartphones
Or the UK, where they drive in miles and weigh themselves in Stones.

In the USA, you can buy soda in liters and most cars use metric wrenches.
> "RAPE_IS_OK" "HEILHITLER"

What the fuck am I looking at?
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/25/6475315...
Documentation and/or a type checker. Jsdocs are both documentation for programmers and can be enforced using tooling like the closure compiler or typescript

JavaScript is no different from most other dynamic languages this way
Deciding not to provide a platform for any particular view is not censorship. Also, hate speech specifically calling for violence is not protected speech.
At first I suspected this as well, but apparently it was a link to itracking[.]services and Bing pre-resolved the redirect chain.

You can spoof any domain you want in Bing Ads without needing an open redirect.
IIRC, the only reason mathcomp isn't in the Coq standard library is because the license isn't free.
Not really, I use them mostly to support my head in side sleeping. Occasionally I'll use a folded arm instead, but that's uncommon.

Congrats on getting past the acclimation period, it seems obviously better for your back.

How has it affected your personal life? The last woman I dated was deeply offended by my disinterest in sharing her bed and insistence on sleeping on the floor after our first few overnights. This aspect of the practice seems the most problematic, it's had me consider moving to Japan.
those videos are what led me to this question :)
I strongly believe that it's not.
I don’t use Edge, but it’s unfair to characterize Edge as a “downgrade” for all people. The average user cares much more about being able to annotate webpages (for example) than having access to the latest web standard. So the “upgrade” you’re talking about is only from the point of view of the web developer, which is usually the wrong way to think about this kind of stuff. If you go far enough along the path of prioritizing the developer over the user, you end up with stuff like Electron, which penalizes users for not “upgrading” to Chrome and deciding they wanted a native app instead.
Maybe Blasteroids, the 1987 sequel?
I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think you understand the temperatures involved here. Stella was burned by 80 deg C coffee. Guess who else serves coffee this hot? Everybody. ALL good coffee shops and restaurants serve coffee in the range of 160 degrees F (71.1 degrees C) and 185 degrees F (85 degrees C). The National Coffee Association informally recommends the higher end of this range, around 80-85 deg C, and McDonalds still serves at this temperature or higher.

Anyone who drinks coffee at shops or restaurants, or makes coffee in a decent coffee maker, has experience with 80+ deg C coffee, and any reasonable person should know not to squeeze a cup of it between their legs while they take the top off, which is what Stella did.
Interestingly the Indian Space Research Organisation seems not to have followed this path.
Unfortunately the problem is not with Bing alone. There are multiple ad networks including admob owned by google, who will serve a url, or sometimes a script for an ad. That is unfortunately just how advertising works.

The industry never matured (to handle spam, malicious content or fraud) thanks to the Duopoly of Fb and Google, and even the biggest players are not immune to these issues as the onus is on the user to not to click on ads that offer to upgrade browsers, or any system software through ads.

It is the same systems that served malicious election results, the same systems that contributed to the echo chambers that impacted recent elections.
Why would Microsoft do this?
Interesting thoughts. It could be that PayPal has over extended certain models for far longer than they should have. Some forms of tech debt should be resolved sooner, rather than later. It would be fascinating to know the real reasons behind the fall from grace.

Is it really the employees, or the managers? There could be dilapidated business processes still in place that even prevent the company from healing itself. An interesting take on this is the book How The Mighty Fall.

Some relevant things to know might be if they have restructured a lot, and what their churn has looked like both in the executive suite and in engineering.
Small investors should absolutely be investing in index funds and not individual small-cap stocks. However, the returns of those index funds are driven by the returns of the index's constituent companies. When the most lucrative companies remain private, index funds can't invest in them, and that hurts all index investors.

Not to mention that even if the companies aren't any more lucrative, they can still help the average investor reduce their portfolio risk via diversification. If the universe of public stocks shrinks, your portfolio is going to face greater volatility, even if your absolute returns remain constant. Diversification is the only free lunch out there.
He clearly values privacy very highly, and using a social media network, even a free one means giving up some of your privacy. I doubt Stallman cares much about this, but there also is a very real effect of people competing with each other on social media to show more and more artificial happiness and consumerism in their lives. Thirdly, most of GNU development is still done via mailing list, if your using email for all your work, why not use it socially as well?
How would I download this, without using Bing in Edge to download the installer for this?
Hetzner has had peering and jitter issues for years, in the past they would nullroute your server's IP for minor DOSes: https://www.reddit.com/r/seedboxes/comments/6fwphr/hetzner_i...

Hetzner does pay lip service to improving their network, but its akin to ColoCrossing, the internal network infrastructure is not amazing due to budget constraints, and the peering situation isn't apt to improve as its essentially money and politics that created it.

> What kind of stable do you mean (referring to OVH)? Bandwidth, latency, average I/O ops, CPU load?

I am referring to bandwidth, latency & jitter when comparing OVH to others. One thing OVH has nailed is keeping jitter minimal, and there has been significant optimizations for routes in their newer datacenters as time has gone on.

Mature OVH locations already have fairly good peering, to the point that many time sensitive workloads that can't be fronted/cached choose OVH in certain regions.

Its really sad to see Google Cloud and AWS flunking on this front, the lack of internal IPv6 support to the VM kills mobile performance, adding tens of milliseconds of latency and incurring a stateful connection in cellular carriers CGNAT (which gets killed after ~100 seconds), reducing performance and breaking long term open connections. Sending a packet over IPv6 to a cellphone is often faster than using push messaging on iOS or Android.

OVH Latency Optimizations: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2873074#Commen...
I thought this was an autostereogram adventure game and spent the first 10 seconds cross-eyed.
If PayPal bans Gab because they dislike the speech available on Gab, it is literally an attack on Free Speech. I understand you feel differently.
IDK about back pain, but eye exercises are a must for me much as I stare at screens.

I saw a series of videos years ago (which I can't find online and don't recall the name of) where author claimed focusing on fixed distance close objects so much is messing up our vision.

The exercises included a few things, "palming" and some other stuff (which I tried once or twice and never stuck with) but one in exercise in particular I do it frequently, at least several times a week, especially after a hard session in front of the screen.

The gist of the exercise is (and again, can't find video) is to go somewhere where you can see very far with an open horizon (the ocean, on building roof, something like this, the best thing you can find but less than ideal works as well). You then relax your eyes and sort of gaze off into the distance with hands lifted up next to ears, maybe 6 or 8 inches off each ear. Then you kind of flick your fingers around where you can barely catch a glimpse of the movement out of the corner of each eye while continuing a relaxed gaze out in the distance. Do that for a couple of minutes, rest and repeat several times. It really works for me and immediately when done the ability to perceive depth seems much enhanced and I can "see" better, or that's how it feels. I didn't do any quantitative trials, nor do I know of any, there might be some. But FWIW.
I think you're confusing the fact that people have repeatedly argued that Gab isn't white supremacist twitter with the notion that it has somehow been established that it isn't. But, of course, it is. Even Voat has better bona fides than Gab.

Later

It's probably not just a coincidence that every time this comes up on HN, there's a Popehat thread about Gab at the same time. Here's Ken today with a telling citation to Gab's own Twitter account from earlier this year:

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1027671587825172480
In what position do you sleep? On your back or on your side?

I have extreme problems with sleeping on my side without a matress, even on just a camping foam mat for a few days. I regularly have the problem with camping trips which last longer then 4 nights, when both sides are just no longer an option
Not a mathematicians, but I always got the impression that at the beginning it's all about doing it yourself...and later it's all about reading what the top minds are doing
So, 'hope'.

This is exactly why I can't take javascript seriously for anything besides basic UI enhancements to a web page.
By the first chat-room, did you mean the rabbit hole that opens if you always open the first letter? Because this thing is still going and have gotten surprisingly interesting.
> If we’ve somehow got an entire society that can play gymnastics with time in this way, and claim to wrap their head around it, I don’t think changing the calendar is really a huge ask.

It wouldn't even be the first time. September, October, November and December are _clearly_ meant to be 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th month. I always thought that July & August were the interlopers, being named after Emperors, but I read somewhere that I was wrong.

I share your frustration that there is a faction who seems to have dedicated their existence to making time as irregular as possible.
Yes, you're right. When I said "cast a pointer to an array", I meant it more colloquially - as in declaring a variable of type char[...], taking a pointer to the first element, and casting that. And yes, it's about access rather than the actual cast, but in practice a cast to anything but void* is virtually always the first step to accessing it as the cast-to type (excepting some legacy POSIX APIs that use char* for this, because they predate the existence of void* ).

And yes, there's the exception to the usual rules that lets you access T via char* , and then there's the "common initial sequence" rule with structs. Suffice it to say that it's complicated, but that things that people usually think "just work", actually don't.

FWIW, I'm of the general opinion that the C (and C++) memory model is formulated in such vague terms that no-one really knows what it is. We have some sort of conceptual consensus, that kinda sorta works because everybody makes the same assumptions (that aren't really warranted by the standard, but are "common sense"). But once you start digging into things like lifetime and object type - in C++ especially - and coming up with weird corner cases, things break down pretty quickly.
lol.. until you actually try.
Just like the foam rollers.
Everything seems so relaxing... :X
If nothing else if does force one to consider which term is closer to the truth, the one commonly used or the one Stallman invented. Used and users seems very clever, while global heating vs global warming seems arbitrary, while some people may think of heating as more threatening than warming, I'm not sure that's universal.
User-contributed content, and a site operator who either endorsed these beliefs and/or believes in unmoderated free speech and/or is altogether unaware. Seems likely they’re aware, since they’re the submitter of the post, but @aehtyb, FYI if not!
Good point, and you're right: the buck has to stop somewhere.

However, Edsu is a federated protocol with an open source implementation. So it only disappears when the last person to care about it stops keeping it up to date with the compiler. That's about as good a guarantee as you can get, I think (e.g. telnet is still around after 49 years).
Heatmap of Population Distribution in Your Neighborhood
So you want to regulate parking lots but not commercial and residential zoning? Makes sense.
So when was "Time Traveler" used for the first time?