skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's disturbing how many developers simply gloss over the fact that requiring a smartphone with one of two non-free OSes installed (Android and IOS) is severely limiting the user's freedom in their use of digital services.

In the Netherlands the ING bank was testing the waters this year by holding back on announcing a non-smartphone alternative to their ageing authentication methods (either SMS or a list of pre-generated codes received by mail). All of their communication was bent on nudging customers to use their banking smartphone app, and only at the end of this year did they announce a separate hardware solution for customers who don't want to, or cannot, use a smartphone for their banking.

Every other bank in the Netherlands already had such hardware devices (TOTP usually, although newer generations use more complex methods) for a decade.

U2F and its successors are the way forward if we want to maintain some semblance of digital freedom, not tying your whole identity to a smartphone.
A Dollar Store Backlash Has Begun
What an amazing talk. I do stream monitoring and have heard about planaria and have seen specimens. I did not know it is such an amazing creature. What a beautiful talk.
I think this would be a very interesting twist on a dating app.

Now we are spoilt for choice on apps like Tinder. Even when you match with someone you have a very strong interest in it's all too easy to keep swiping and have your eyes wander elsewhere.

I do wonder if 'old-fashioned' dating's best feature was that a 'match' only came along rather infrequently.
I don’t know if we’re doing something wrong but initial startup time on sentry’s webpack setup is something like 30 seconds and iterative changes around 5 seconds. Still beats our rust or python iteration times though :)
> In response to your other comments, I feel good assuming we're somewhere in the general brand feel of the EFF and Firefox.

That's laughable. Trust me, among the people who know about Brave at all, you're associated more with Dentacoin and Bitconnect than EFF and Mozilla. I expect you'll have a rude awakening when you're searching for your next job and people decide they don't want to hire a scam artist.
My favorite for the year too!
Thanks for your response--it's helpful to hear! I've mostly been using flask for simple APIs / dashboards, but have wondered lately whether a more "batteries included" approach like Django could be helpful once a db / more logic is added..
I would expect this task to be CPU bound, not IO bound. Maybe that’s incorrect.
This is a cool project. I was trying to find the source for the project on the page. There’s an oss page [0] but that’s about the software used.

Is this an open source project? Or what’s the way for licensing to use with US data?

[0] https://data-in.place/open-source
Scala, Reason, Guile

Favorite: The pragmatic and approachable simplicity of OCaml/ReasonML (bonus points for Scala/Akka for very different reasons).
I'm still waiting for an app that matches based on DNA, or scent (pheromones), or both.
Considering how well organized the attack seems to have been, I assume those behind it know a lot about airports/drones.

I wonder if it could be a government researcher worried about a lack of funding/preparation for this kind of attack (similar to the FBI's conclusion regarding the anthrax attacks)?

It doesn't seem like a protest, so unless it's economic terrorism or a state-backed attack, what else is it likely to be? A former pilot with a grudge?
a lot of codebases don't support hot reload, but even the ones that do often require multi-second incremental compile times during hot reload if they're big enough [1].

[1] current project is very slow w/ 250kloc (2.5mm kloc w/ dependencies). even seen it be slow on my last project which was only 40kloc.
This is a very nice niche use of the various ideas discussed in that book. Perhaps you could write your own book that could outline some of these techniques and sell it into a niche. Know a few Mechanical engineers who have a general aversion to anything programming and they would lap itup. Just a thought.
How to improve marketing and sales?
Unfortunately Visual Basic because we still have it kicking around at my new job.

More fortunately, linq. It’s the thing I miss most when I’m not using the .net platform.
Great point.

Reminds me of /r/tinder lambasting some guy's Tinder bio because he was specific about what he wanted. He wanted a woman who would cook and clean for him, something like that.

Yes, easy to make fun of (virtue signaling is always tempting), but I don't see the problem. That kind of bio works out perfectly for everyone: the man gets what he wants, and women know of his expectations before they even interact with him. It's ideal.

What people don't want to acknowledge is that the default is to hide our expectations and instead engage in some form of manipulation or leak them out down the road. And that's the problem. Not some guy being upfront about them.

Like you said, it's better to be able to filter someone immediately than deal with sleeper/masked issues down the line.
This might be true, but Babel is a big, important project. I’d have expected performance to be something they’ve invested in. That may be wrong.
> I think there's an important difference between the implicit, intuitive, relational knowledge that we build via direct interaction, and philosophical knowledge that the other poster is thinking talking about

In the same sense that there's a distinction between counting and mathematics, or throwing things and physics, or conversations and psychology, or various other academic disciplines -- that is to say, a very artificial one.

In every topic, people think about them as a routine course of events -- they just form very simple effective theories on the subject, because their life doesn't require a more advanced one.

"Physics" the academic subject is just a very advanced version of the intuition you build about throwing balls, smashing rocks, walking on ice, and not jumping out of windows.

Similarly, your argument seems deeply confused:

The burden of proof is on the people asserting that an arbitrary distinction in what's clearly a spectrum of things is meaningful. In this case, it falls to you to show that there's a meaningful difference in kind between the sorts of thoughts a child is having about ontology (eg, that a positive version of a shape and a negative version of a shape are the same "shape") and whatever other example you want to use.

Each of you has clearly admitted that they're on the spectrum of ontological thought, because that's why you recognize it so clearly as an example, then just had special pleading of "Well, simple ontology shouldn't really count as ontology, because that would make me wrong."

So again, we see that philosophy is useful -- the "burden of proof" is a philosophical concept that lets me just reply, "No, how about you show that splitting ontological thought into 'true ontology' and 'not really ontology' is useful in the first place."
The name is not so bad as you two think. The act of measurement of a quantum state can be thought of as a filtering procedure after which a normalization operation is applied. This is the same protocol that occurs when conditioning on an observation in regular probability. If you take away normalization and stop propagating weights, that same operation corresponds to applied constraints or guards, which trigger backtracking operations, in logic programs for example.

This algorithm is actually an instance of constraint propagation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_consistency and constraint satisfaction algorithms generally, that find use in say, computing graph homomorphisms.
That’s my point: why do I care where the strip is legally located? Casinos have reason to care, I don’t.

And if you’re discharging a firearm, yeah, you better make for damned sure you’re allowed (what was my one example that wasn’t related to race?). Your linked example calls out towns I’ve lived near (lived in Gastonia), and the reason there’s a need for such lawyers is due to morons that think ownership of a firearm and a box of ammo is all they need to shoot in their suburban backyard. But that’s not city-specific, it’s a safe bet that if you’re within city limits anywhere in the U. S. you best assume discharging a firearm is illegal (it probably is) until proven otherwise.
Yes you are right. We want to introduce other features like auto creation of CRUD nodes, but we are not sure if this is what users want.
This year was quite fruitful. I started off dabbling a bit with basic Neural Networks. Nothing stuck in my mind until I did a mini project. In 2019 I plan to expand my knowledge to cover more algorithms and try some ML engineering tools such as MLFlow or Sagemaker. Next I learnt some Big Data technologies (Hadoop, Hive and Spark) due to job requirements. This is an ongoing process compared to Machine learning which was just a curiosity. Finally I learnt quite a bit of Ansible and little of Jenkins, once again for job requirement.
While these are the major bits, I toyed around with few other tools such as OR-tools (operations research), Pandas, Matplotlib, Scrapy. On the whole, 2018 is a year I would like to replicate every year in terms of personal development.
Dude, that UI was not merely 'confusing', it was clearly intentionally deceptive. Nobody here is dumb enough to fall for such blatant PR spin.
Some mules (a very few - something like 60 in the past 500 years) are actually fertile. Does that change your mind about whether or not horses and donkeys are distinct species?

The reality is that there is no good definition of species, and cannot be. Yours is a common one, but has a lot of problems - declaring wolves and pomeranians the same species is a tough bridge to cross for most people: you've made the definition so broad it means little. Biology is messy and in the real world there are no clear-cut, convenient dividing lines.

Another problem with that definition is that there is no transitivity in real biology. Animal A and Animal B may be able to produce fertile offspring. Animal B and Animal C may be able to produce fertile offspring. But Animal A and Animal D [a sibling of Animal C, thanks KMag for that point!] may not be able to.

Of course, we also would find it strange to declare that two humans incapable of producing fertile (or any) offspring different species.
In this day and age, with Python and all, is Perl still worth learning?
Spent some time really doing a deep dive into Zircon. Then also the RISC-V ISA.
That is–not to put too fine a point on it–a dumb idea. It’s essentially impossible to enforce, and doesn’t stop the data from being accessed by anybody else.
It the only, but maybe the easiest.

Having a data review process with automated integrity, confidentiality, and quality checks is not terribly difficult.

But having a prototocol to export the pdf to csv is also dead easy for confirming only the data relevant is included. ASCII is just as “easy” as scan, but it requires training clerks to be data-oriented rather than document.
Perhaps you should educate yourself about the fallacious logic and death cult-ism of incel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0
Why have some people here such a hard time acknowledging that strong network effects can be one form of market failure? A network effect is a classical prisoners dilemma / tragedy of the commons / whatever it's called for everyone but the few involved making money... youtube and publishers.

The "market" will have a hard time fixing itself. As with other market failures, it will probably only happen because of regulation, or the threat thereof.
I think Zossima's arc from Brothers Karamazov feeds Messiah complex better than Idiot :)
I'm sure. Works both ways, though ;-)
>What part of rust prevents the writing of bugs

Expressive type system, strong and static - JS is weak and dynamic. This is not limited to Rust - but if you're aiming for correct code pretty much anything after C/C++ and maybe PHP is better than JS and it's million and one way to write unexpected bugs and 10.000 ways to do the same basic thing (with an NPM package no less) of which each dev/library chooses it's own path for cool factor.

Who would even argue that JS is better for writing correct code over a language that's obsessive about security and correctness. Last time I checked Rust wouldn't even upcast ints FFS, meanwhile in JS you can't even be sure what "this" refers to in any given context and 0 == '0' == [0].
I started learning Haskell again this year. And I finally got to work with it professionally. I'm also using PureScript in the same project, so it's really exciting.

This year I also discovered R. I had to do a Python to R translation, so I got fairly familiar with R.

I also discovered a few languages, but I haven't started learning them yet: red-lang and Pharo.
Quora's whole model is "like Stack Exchange, but with venture capital for a big IPO".

Everything after the comma explains why Quora is junk.
As a guy, if you use Tinder it feels like every woman is just looking for a reason to disqualify as a date (because they have so many options).

If you register an account as the opposite sex it is incredibly informative. Women essentially swamped with matches. They ignore everyone but the few they want to talk to. Men basically swipe right on everyone, there's no point on making a choice because women have the real choice.

It's fascinating how a symmetric system can turn so asymmetric so quickly.
Thanks for correcting me there. Rust _does_ have a more than the borrow checker that are helping the programmer avoid common dynamic language issues (and rust is awesome).

I just know that even if the compiler of the language I am writing is very smart and can catch a lot of my silly mistakes, it would behoove me to think that I could write "bug free" code as a result. I would still write my code defensively, even in rust.
The problems with this approach are:
- It can take a long time to extract the package, especially if you are looking at gigabyte applications. We are able to launch huge applications instantly because we avoid the extraction step.
- Windows applications are typically hard-coded to read files from global locations like c:\windows\system32, side-by-side DLL locations, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry, font folders, services, etc. If you try to copy most applications to a single folder, they won't run. Some apps can be designed to run from a single folder, but this is the exception rather than the rule.
- Ideally you don't want the application writing to other parts of the filesystem or registry because it might screw up other apps. We solved this by doing copy on write access to other parts of the PC and redirecting the writes to a local folder.
We certaintly have PRs around perf https://github.com/babel/babel/labels/area%3A%20perf but we don't have explicit benchmarking for it, and have had work from v8 team and others https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/924349334346276864?s=20.
Tagged union types (called `enum` in Rust), recursion, and pattern matching are great for tree data structures, such as ASTs, and help catch many bugs. This is the reason why so many compilers, typecheckers, and interpreters are written in languages like OCaml, F#, Haskell, and Rust.
What is a "bro"?

Is advertising a male business?
In addition to the points you make above, having the world’s most trusted debt also helps to make the US dollar the world’s most stable currency, thus affording the US enormous influence in global fiscal policy. If contracts around the world started getting settled largely in Euros or Yuan, the US would find itself in a much less powerful position at the global negotiating table. As with most things in life, those who control the money have the power.
> Just consider volume: it's estimated that around a quarter of a million theorems are proved every year. That's real, measurable, progress; what's the metaphysics equivalent?

I'm not sure I disagree with your overall argument, but this point here is silly. First, I'd like to know where you got that number. (I must admit it sounds rather high to me, but I'm sure it depends how you count.)

But more importantly, measuring mathematical progress by number of theorems proved is absurd. I can write a computer program to prove theorems; it will almost surely prove more than a quarter-million a day (though eventually it will have to slow down). But they will not be _useful_ theorems. Nobody will read them, nobody will use them, nobody will build on them, nobody will find them beautiful, nobody will apply them to any practical problem. "Number of theorems proven" may be measurable, but it is not "real progress".
Off-topic, but you should want to pay for news. You should want to pay a lot.

Which kind of meal would you prefer?

1) Expensive, tasty and healthy.

2) Cheap and loaded with sugar (so you come back to get more) while ads flash all around your plate and on the tip of your fork.

Same goes with cars, cosmetics, education. For some reason paying more for those goods is universally accepted. Why wouldn't people want to pay to get high quality news? "No sir, just give me the lowest quality, most clickbait news you have. Yes, I strongly prefer that to paying $10 a month."
Is C/C++ knowledge important for learning Rust?
Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: The Hardware Software Interface 1st Edition PDF eTextbook
It can depend on the particular U.S. State. It's sometimes useful for non-Americans to think of the U.S. like a federation of weak semi-autonomous countries. Each state more or less runs their own affairs unless there's some federal interest in which case the national interest overrides the state one. What this means for this topic is that states organize their territories in sometimes different ways that can seem sometimes bizarre to outsiders.

For example, Connecticut divides itself into eight large counties and those counties are further divided into towns. Thus the meaning of "town" in Connecticut means a geographic subdivision and may have nothing or little to do with there actually being a cluster of buildings or even any interesting population at all. In fact, in Connecticut, a city is located within a town and is subordinate to it! Towns may set their own general method of local governance but are subordinate to their counties and then to their state.

Louisiana is divided into Parishes that mapped to the Catholic Parishes present in the 19th century instead of counties and are generally run by a governmental body called a Police-Jury which is a combined legislative/executive body with enormous local powers.

Virginia is divided into counties, which may have towns and other kinds of human settlements. But cities are independent of their surrounding county and act at a parallel level to counties in terms of political power. The county seat where the county government resides may or may not be in a city, but if it is there will be a parallel and equally powerful city government in the same area. Cities in Virginia, as defined governmental territories have very controlled borders, but may have very small populations. But in other areas, the cities are so large they no longer exist within a county at all and the historic county no longer exists. This has impacts mostly for taxes, schooling and property. But practically the most you would notice is that you could eat at a restaurant on one side of a street and cross to the other to get some coffee and pay a different sales tax on either side.

It goes on from there. From a practical standpoint, it almost entirely affects the locals and can be a deciding factor with where people choose to live. For outsiders, it doesn't matter much except that your sales tax might be highly variable as you transit through local governing zones.
Blink is riddled with problems (as Gladwell seems to sometimes admit) but IMHO is still a far more honnest book than TFS.
I, too, am interested in this dataset.
Have you ever lived or worked in a city? If so, you probably paid several thousand dollars in taxes.
Thinapp solved this by presenting a synthetic view of the filesystem and registry to the app. This view merged the contents of the real system with the contents of the package, so the app thought everything was were it expected when it runs. In addition, we provided a copy-on-write sandbox of this view, so any writes would be redirected to a local folder without the app knowing about it. If you delete the sandbox, the app goes back to it's "first run" state.
That period of supposed social stability had more violence be it political, non-political or within familly, protest marches turned bad, more crime, more teenage pregnancy etc.

We do have problems, especially around financial gap raising between rich and poor, but it is not like the past was some happy panacea.
Rust doesn’t implicitly create bug free code. I’ve created lots of bugs in Rust.

But there are classes of bugs that the language eliminates. Thread unsafe dataraces (not important in JS), unhandled exceptions, with no GC it helps reduce memory usage and make it more consistent, the type system allows you to build complex state machines easily and correctly, the type system itself can allow you to express states that should never occur as compilation failures, the compiler protects against concurrent updates in iterators and other situations.

The list goes on, but these are the things that make it such a powerful language and allow me to focus on logic and not runtime bugs. Oh, and it’s really fast which is a nice bonus, generally as fast as C.
You have to think about how people respond to things. Social media in its current state has basically turned into a system that takes an event, removes all context, spins it in the most negative way imaginable, and then dogpiles on it to no end -- virtue signaling for imaginary points. There are often lots of things in government, and in life in general, where you must choose between two very negative choices. And the decision there does not necessarily imply that you're in any way satisfied with it, but you see it as the decision least likely to produce an awful outcome. Social media and this sort of logic are wholly and completely incompatible.

Take Khashoggi as a contemporary example. Undoubtedly there have been countless heavily classified conversations weighting the pros and cons of any action against Saudi Arabia or MBS as a result of this. How we are extremely dependent on Saudi Arabia for reasons outside the scope of this post, and they know this. And this is all happening at a time when Saudi:US relations souring would greatly stand to strengthen the geopolitical position and power of nations such as China and Russia. In my opinion it's extremely likely we will do nothing, but that's because it's better than doing something. If this was not classified, social media would throw a nonstop hissy fit. Not because they actually care or think we're making the wrong decision, but because it's an incredibly easy way score those imaginary points and followers which are the hottest commodity since sliced bread. Another issue here is that knowing the mechanisms of our decision making here, and how close we came to 'breaking', would be incredibly valuable information to nations such as Saudi Arabia which they could then use to exploit the US.

So while I do agree with you that classification is very often abused, I also think there are indeed vast amounts of information that must be classified. People are not mature enough to impartially process our decision making processes, and the details of such processes would provide invaluable information to other nations which could then be used to exploit the US.
Next up: advertisers making deals with wannabe influencers to post ads for free, to give the influencer "exposure" to help them get paying ad deals in the future. The usual art business climate.
You should certainly also read the books "Technological Slavery" (2010) and "Anti-Tech Revolution" (2016) by Kaczynski