skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was talking politics with my friend from Iran. Having grown up in the US, I’m bitter that the American dream has been broken, and that our desire for “freedom” only includes freedom to commit war crimes and support horrific wars.

But my friend from Iran said he likes America and we have it pretty good here. I saw it as a valid difference of perspectives. Later I learned of a massacre in Iran where the government of Iran killed thousands of political prisoners in secret. [1] It helped me appreciate that for all our problems, at least we don’t do that.

That said, we’re currently providing direct support for a war in Yemen where an estimated 85k children have died of in the last three years [2], and countless civilians have been killed by our bombs. We even bombed a school bus full of children [3].

The death toll for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over 200k [4].

So it’s hard for me. Does the US respect human rights? Clearly China is not respecting human rights, but what kind of example are we setting? How can we condemn others for their atrocities when we ourselves commit so many? Could we ever change our ways and set a true good example?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_executions_of_Iranian_p...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/21/yemen-young-ch...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/19/us-supplied-bo...
[4] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians
Correct. The XBMC/Kodi UI was developed with game engine tools for the xbox, and the way the UI worked the screen redrew at 60fps, or whatever, whether the content on the screen changed or not.
Excellent! Always believed being able to "play" with the Hamiltonian particle would be a great motivator in understanding physics ;)

This is why I get so excited about about probabilistic programming in general. 1M dimension data sets likelihood estimation in reasonable time right on your laptop. Real world samples are usually sparse, heterogeneous. By abstracting out your analysis it not only reduces the chance for human error. But allows for ingestion of even more disparate sets of archival and de novo data sources. I have little doubt this will lead to more nuanced theories. And higher reproducibility of results.

A recent example of the state-of-the-art: predicting rare events in pediatric transplant surgeries.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04407
New York's Strand bookshop begs to avoid official landmarking
They seem pretty mundane consequences of SR and not even paradoxical.

General relativity, on the other hand.....ok I passed some classes back in the day but looking back I’m not sure I ever understood it, except at a very shallow level.
UI is a function of data
> you close the dialog with that person that allows you to change opinions and outcomes.

So if we're nicer to facebook, maybe it'll decide to not spy on people quite so much, undo the engineered-for-addiction notifications and feed, and curb it's anti-competitive practices (but not give back any market advantage it has already gained through them, of course)? The executives will voluntarily decide to make the company earn less money, so they can be more ethical?

Is there any precedent for a large corporation acting in this way?
You should probably start cranking out code, either via personal projects, or work-related projects.

> How can I start transitioning away from school so that I can start working full time as a developer as soon as possible?

These people either 1) get internships with a decent salary while in school, and just dropout or 2) build their own side project into something with cashflow, then dropout

> I'm okay with not being a ninja rockstar 10x programmer, I just want to be "average"

Frankly, you'll have to change this mindset if you want either #1 or #2 (which I mentioned above). The folks who either dropout due to amazing internships, or because their side gig has taken off are usually pretty good programmers. Not "balls-to-the-all amazing", but definitely better than average

My suggestion: Stay in school. Learn the fundamentals (e.g., C), but learn how to sling code around at the same time (e.g., React, Python, etc). You'll get your shot in due time.
My girlfriend works in retail, and every month there's someone who gives her a bad survey because she was following company policy or because the customer didn't listen to her when she was advising them. For example, she worked with a couple to port their phones over from AT&T despite advising them that their phones may not work on her cell network. After all was said and done she got a bad survey because their phones ended up not working well on her network. And her manager even caught them outright lying in the survey about how the interaction went down. She was still punished for that survey.

Customer satisfaction surveys can be a useful tool, but they're often applied as a blunt instrument on employees who have no control over the situation the customer is dissatisfied with. It's basically a lazy copout as opposed to actually fixing company policy. I tend to ignore them unless it's to give good feedback.

A more humane system would take the feedback and then interview the employee in question and their management to understand what the root problem is. But the management organizations that use these surveys are almost never humane. Plainly, they don't give a shit about any of their employees.
No, the only way to know how well it's doing is for it to get enough "interesting" miles, and then compare the success rate of those miles to similar human-driven miles. Right now Waymo is past 8 million miles driven. Miles driven is a better and normalized metric, with comparable real world statistics, unlike time.
There's nothing that Facebook did here than any other company, in tech or otherwise, wouldn't have done.

And for the record, Facebook did not "share data with Cambridge Analytica for shady research purposes". A rogue third party developer created one of those shitty quiz apps for Facebook, and then proceed to get users to signup for it; several million did, which allowed said developer to harvest data thanks to the very permissive APIs that Facebook provided at the time. He then proceeded to sell this data to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has a responsibility in what happened there, but "Facebook sold data to Cambridge Analytica" is a widly misconstrued story.
Good job on the website. Clear and simple. I might give it a go, I wanted lean and keyboard oriented (never got to setup firefox extensions properly for that).

Bravo
What's the relationship between negative mass and negative gravity and anti-gravity? Dark fluid is repulsive, so is it theoretically possible to collect a ball of it, put it between you and another positive mass, and fly apart?
P is for pterodactyl, T is for tsunami: 'worst alphabet book' becomes bestseller
First, congrats. I think your humility comes through in your comment, which is refreshing.

The nice thing about money is that you can simply put it into an investment or savings and defer the decision about what to do with it. I recommend against pressuring yourself to make a quick decision.

I recommend just finding a new job or taking some time off and thinking about life for a while. Based on the time it has taken people I know to adjust after retirement, I'd give it 6-8 months before you can trust yourself to really know what it's like not to be obligated to work and to have your self worth defined that way.

So you may not want to retire, but I think an 8 month break would be a nice period of time during which to evaluate all of the options.

One thing that I think about is that in many ways my life is about as comfortable and pleasant as it could possibly be, even though I have not had a major exit. In one sense this is a good thing, but many philosophers tell us that struggle is what makes life meaningful.

So you might frame the question thus: Now that you no longer have to worry about basic financial security, what struggles might you choose to undertake that you could not undertake before because of your duties?

It might be a personal struggle (learning, accomplishment) or an inter-personal one... maybe political, maybe athletic or philanthropic.

The biggest thing to watch out for which you may or may not have encountered, is that people will flatter you extensively. While $8M isn't major wealth, it's enough that you will attract flatterers and your ideas will be given much more serious pondering. People will act toward you as though you are more attractive, smarter, and more insightful than you actually are. Beware of this because it is a reality distortion field.

Getting rid of the money quickly to avoid this sort of thing is a mistake, because dealing with it is just an important life skill just like learning to avoid people who are overly negative or mean-spirited.

Good luck to you!
SpiderMonkey is from Mozilla.
Maybe next can be a good pivot to do just that. It seems the author is willing to try other ways to use the web.
When they say "bubble", I think of groups of users with fewer differences within the group than outside the group, sort of like the Wall Street Journal study showed. If they're finding variation among users, but not predictably more or less variation between any two of them, then that isn't a "bubble" to me, it's just customization.

Customization is troubling, but less so than bubbling. (Hey now...)
Why I’m into meditation
Uptake signs Rolls-Royce, sheds 150 jobs
Take a little time out to reflect on life before you do anything with it. The money will still be there in a few weeks/months when you’re ready.
No, they can't since DDG is a wrapper for Bing.
> well actually when you host an SPA and you DO use lazy loading

This is not always true. Many times frameworks are so heavily leveraged and the site-specific code so minimal on small SPAs that it is reasonable to have a single packed-and-minimized JS file. And it still may change frequently.
I don't think that Agile is always about being more risky. Sure, Waterfall is a safe way to go in most projects, but what about the possible losses in costs and effort that may come from it? However, I do get your point regarding safety for the client itself, that don't want to risk shipping an "unfinished" product.
aio(4), or asynchronous I/O on files in general?
Found John McAfee
> When will y'all grow up and grow balls to make spreadsheets FASTER than it is today

Probably when the IT peeps in finance believe that the problem with spreadsheets is their speed. As the fundamental problem of spreadsheets in finance has absolutely nothing to do with their speed, this may take a while.
Can't edit the above post, but when trying to write this up more carefully I realized it's not correct:

(1) For one thing, the difference in epsilon is very small: the ratio (1 + ε√3)/(1 - ε√3) is 1+2√3ε+O(ε²), that is, we're comparing something like 4ε+4√3ε² versus 4ε-4√3ε², which is probably too small to matter.

(2) The argument looks like it applies to all angles, but in fact experimentation shows the same phenomenon does not appear, and finally,

(3) Here are the next two terms after:

(211,14), (94,191): 60.000000269
(253,140), (1,55): 59.999999869
(265,71), (41,153: 60.000000035

where we see that one term is less than 60 degrees.
By default, unless you NEED web fonts, why not just be respectful and use system fonts. Using web fonts us unnecessary for the bulk of websites. Every system has a helvetica/arial and georgia/baskerville family. Build a strong font family, and use webfonts sparingly when spacing and consistency are actually important. Why bloat bandwidth and page speeds for little gain.
Yeah. This looks like a "modern textbook" presentation.
Software that actively nags you at every opportunity to opt in isn’t really “opt-in” per se.

There’s a third kind of system for polling preferences, which I’ll call “opt-forced” for lack of a better make: it’s where you are required at some point to decide whether to opt in or opt out, and neither option is the default. (Picture two radio buttons, neither selected, and you can’t proceed until you click one.)

Nagging opt-in is a lot closer to opt-forced—you’re required to either press “OK” or “Cancel” to the opt-in dialog box. Except, since it just keeps asking whenever you “opt out”, you haven’t really opted out at all. Thus, this dark pattern is actually closer to the “opt-out” side of the fence, in terms of the number of people who end up in the program even though they’d actively prefer not to be (but this preference is weaker than their preference to stop being nagged.)
Let them howl. When they've been involved in shady stuff that's against the public interest, I will have no sympathy for them, just as I don't when FB is the "victim". I am glad they didn't decide to sit on it because of any fears about "I don't want this happening to me, so I won't snitch".

By the way, these emails were not obtained via hacking/phishing, so the Wikileaks comparison doesn't make any sense.
Less culpable.
> The fact that Board is immutable means we don't have to perform any cleanup when backtracking. What does it mean? When one of the branches is stuck in a dead end, we must slowly go back, trying to take all other possible moves. Mutating Board would require cleaning it up. Immutable Board can be simply thrown away once it's no longer needed. Also immutability enables concurrent exploration (soon to come).

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe backtracking actually requires a mutable array and would be faster (since you wouldn't have to build 100x100 arrays all the time: you could just build the 100x100 array one time and mutate it.)
There are certain forums in which the groupthink makes discussion of certain topics in good faith impossible.. sadly, HN is one of those when it comes to Facebook being anything other than cartoonishly evil.
It's not that you're wrong. You're not. People are complicated, and everyone's the hero of their own story. There are plenty of people out there who give millions to charity but steal from the poor. As a general rule, though, when someone accuses you of being bad and your best argument against it comes down to "what is bad anyway?," you're probably on the wrong side.

Is Facebook universally bad? No. It's done lots of good things. And lots of good people work there. But Facebook is also doing lots of bad things. Your policy chief hired a PR firm to push antisemitic conspiracy theories about George Soros. "People are complicated" isn't an excuse.
Ask HN: How have you transitioned to tech you have little experience with?
I've been a front end developer for the last 4 years ever since leaving university, working for companies using C#, WPF and Silverlight. The desktop seems to be in decline and the major industries still reliant upon these technologies seems to be finance, which isn't exactly appealing to me. I'd like to transition to a different tech stack (JS/React most likely, but that isn't exactly important) but with little experience of any other languages/frameworks it's quite a daunting prospect.

How have others made a transition to new tech, and what advice would you give to those of us looking to do so?
Ask HN: Best way to list skills on my resumé?
I have technical skills (e.g., programming languages, frameworks, platforms, etc), and I have non-technical skills (e.g., product management, leadership, communication, etc).

How do I list these skills on my resumé in a poignant, informative, yet to-the-point way?

Previously I had just gone with some sort of comma-delimited list, but there has to be a better/more creative way than that right?
I think it's safe to say that was the case before .NET 4 introduced the dynamic language runtime. Afterwards, I'm not so sure - it seems like the story there was that the .NET team put a whole lot of work into building support for IronRuby and IronPython, but the languages themselves failed to take off for other reasons. Lack of community need/interest, for one.

To me, the more interesting test is, could you do a useful port of a language like C or Pascal or ML to the JVM or the CLR, while having it remain the same language. My instinct is that it's equally unworkable for both platforms. Requiring erasure vs reification is a small difference compared to the major demand that both platforms make, which is that any languages targeting them need to be at least partially object-oriented.
Right, the real milestone was when they set Waymo cars with no safety drivers on the streets a few months ago. This milestone realistically is just that the riders don't have an NDA anymore, unlike the previous ones. It's still a cool step forward, but it's still a "private beta". At least now we can start getting photos and videos from the users though which is cool.
“What’s most impressive is that the predictions of dark matter were first made in the 1970s and 1980s, and were observationally confirmed later. This is not a case of tweaking the model to fit the data; this is a case of the best kind of science you hope for: where you make predictions, make the observations, and what you see validates and confirms the predictions you had made.
And yet, even 35 years later, there are no modifications of gravity that achieve the galaxy-scale successes of MOND that also explain these other observations. The best tests of dark matter vs. MOND, which are on large, cosmic scales, have a clear winner and a clear loser.”

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/theres-a-debate-raging...

In short: looking at everything we can observe and can model, we do know that the “dark matter” is matter. Because we first made predictions (“it should behave as matter”), then confirmed them, many times. And MOND can’t even explain that what’s already observed.
Tao was a UK OS company that produced operating systems call Taos and intent (emphasis theirs); their killer feature was binary portability and assymetric multiprocessing, so you could have multiprocessor machines built of several different random architectures and treat them all as a single message-passing system. Code was converted from bytecode to native machine code at load time. It was small, elegant and very cool.

Turns out people didn't want to buy that.
Think about it like this: Why is there paid parking? It's because demand exceeds supply, so they require a fee in order to encourage people not to come.

But that means you could have more visitors.

Now, if you are maxed out, then good, paid parking makes sense - send those tourists elsewhere.

But if more visitors = more money, and that is something the town wants, then adding more parking, and reducing fees is what the town should do.

Which is what I said: "It also encourages people to go elsewhere."

It boils down to this: When choosing paid parking make sure this is what you want, that you want people not to come.

(And I acknowledge that in certain situations it makes sense to want that.)

And I know what you are thinking: You'd rather they take the bus or whatever. But think about this: Why do they chose to drive anyway, forcing you have to encourage them not to?

Clearly there is something lacking with the bus, to the point that you have to deliberately make driving worse just to induce them to use it.
No, checking/savings account is not fine. They are covered for $100,000 (IIRC) by FDIC if the bank fails. [Edit: $250K.] That is, if the bank goes under when you have $10 million in it, you get back... $259,000.

I mean, it can be OK if you have 40 different accounts in different banks. But that's tedious.

Dump $100K into a bank account (one that does not have a debit card attached to it). As others have said, set aside one year's expenses; I'm going to assume that $100K is in the neighborhood of that. Put the rest into, say, a Vanguard S&P 500 index fund, a Fidelity high-quality corporate bond fund, and somebody else's Treasury fund.
What about data that Facebook generates about you, but you did not provide? Is that information required by the GDPR to be provided to you, or does the GDPR only state that any information you provided to them must be returned? There's no way I'm reading the GDPR nor would I even understand all of it if I did.

We know that FB makes connections between you and other users even if you've never made those connections yourself. We've heard about the shadow profiles, etc. These are all data points that FB generated on their own. It seems like this is the information that is valuable. Information gleaned from ML analysis of images posted would also be their own. That has way more value than the image itself would. FB is doing way more under the hood than just slurping in the data users posted, and then displaying it back to them.
Leaving is by definition going to hurt them - if it wouldn’t, they would have already replaced you. It’ll either cost them (interviews, higher pay for someone else), leave them with a marginally worse developer, or both.
How  Local Businesses Can Dominate Social Media Marketing
Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
Vancouver Named NeurIPS 2019 and 2020 Host
How battery intensive are accelerometers? The last fob I had required a battery change once every year or so already, increasing that frequency could be quite annoying. And I'd rather not have yet another device I need to regularly charge.
> This needs to be a conclusion, not a premise.

What makes you think it's a premise and not a conclusion?

> Ideally, we would list the good/bad it does and assign weights to these points to determine if it is net harmful.

I have 11 years of data points and experiences about FB, I'm not going to enumerate all of them whenever there is another. I'll just say "typically fucking Facebook".

At this point, I don't even feel obligated to remember it all -- I can trust myself enough. We do that with "evil" people in our lives, too. We don't remember every dirty detail. We remember that there were a bunch of things, and that overall, we had it at some point. I save the conclusion and the checksums and that's enough.

If you think I'm operating on a premise, instead of having come to a conclusion, how is that not you operating on a premise?

> I want to be convinced

Maybe, maybe not. What you are doing is delegitimizing even the conclusions others arrived at, by simply calling all of that mere premises. You saw a bunch of posts that struck you as knee-jerk, so all of it is knee-jerk.

You have to form your own opinion either way, that burden is not on others. Do you also expect anyone who says anything positive to give some kind of thorough, 1000-page assessment of all the benefits and cons? No, of course not. Same goes for criticism.

I for one don't care about the "evilness" of people I never met. For me the harm done through ignorance or fear or "evil" (which is just another form of weakness really) or not caring enough is the same harm.
What laws did Facebook break that warranted seizing and publishing internal documents?
My free will told me not to read this thread, and yet here I am...
Seizing documents for a valid inquiry is one thing.

But does that follow that publishing them is OK too?

From the outside, it looks like these politicians are frustrated that a foreign CEO ignored their demand to appear before them (because he has no legal obligation to do so), and have decided to retaliate by releasing embarrassing private internal documents obtained during an investigation in the hopes that Facebook will be politically and financially damaged.

I get that people hate Facebook, but does that justify any level of bad behavior as long as it harms them?
A good solution to that problem are UWB radios with timestamping (like the Decawave DW1000), which let you measure the time it takes for the signal to travel. You can then place physical limits on the proximity, rather than assuming that a strong radio signal means proximity.

Coupled with a cryptographic authentication protocol these solve the issue quite nicely.