skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disregarding security issues, it breaks a level of abstraction. If you provide an API for say "user data", the client doesn't have to know the schema behind it. Whether the data is stored in a single table or multiple tables. Imagine if you have been using a system for a while and then they decide to alter the schema. You would have to relearn the schema, change all the queries you've been using, etc. Whereas with an API, backend changes wouldn't affect you as you'd still be getting the same "user data" via the API.

Another problem is the SQL flavor implemented by RDBMs. Every major RBDMs has their own distinct flavor of SQL. So forcing everyone else to learn a specific flavor of SQL is going to be a hassle. Especially if the RDBMs was changed.

But the biggest issue is security and performance ( especially true for sensitive data ).

APIs are there to make things secure, user friendly, consistent and of course robust in the face of back-end changes. I doubt most companies or people would allow direct access to their DBs. If people wanted to run queries on their dataset, they might let you download the dataset and run the queries locally.
Well, not 100%; AD&D Battlesystem was a thing.
Opinion – The Economics of Soaking the Rich
I feel for him. When my old machine learning email filter, POPFile(1), was popular there was a great community around it. But sometimes I would get hate mail. I still recall one person who accused me of having destroyed his computer (I guess something bad happened to his disk) in an email filled with swear words, threats and more.

(1) http://getpopfile.org/
This is why such a high rate of homeownership is pernicious. When the costs of TVs, food, or gasoline goes down it’s widely recognized as a good thing. When the costs of housing—a universal necessity—-goes down it’s a national emergency about which something must be done.
What happens when you call ReactDOM.render()?
David Rowan on why most innovation is pointless
>Yes, it's given that iPhones have a longer update cycle. My comment was not related to that though.

But that aside from duplicate apps, my 2nd more important point was SECURITY. An iphone user w/ phone from 2013 can still feel confident that his phone is secure , an android user from 2013 is laughably insecure.

If you use your phone for any work related sensitive data , and android phone is a huge gamble.
Get out of here with your false equivalency. On one hand you have the explicitly stated reason why the document was released at all, and on the other you have a single sentence buried somewhere.

Come on.
I wonder if it's because men are much more likely to smoke and drink heavily...
You may be right about the tax issues. My criticism was of his attempt to hang all of society's ills on Uber/Lyft/etc... It's inaccurate at best.
I think it makes sense.

I have frequently seen it that "Product Owners" don't know how to specify anything in enough detail to estimate or plan the work, never mind do it.

Good specifications up front can have a 10x or more impact on a team, see:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201000...
Check out Simon Schneegans' useful and beautiful application launcher, Gnome-Pie, which he's been developing for many years, and is rearchitecting as OpenPie for Wayland.

Gnome-Pie 0.4 (7 years ago):
https://vimeo.com/35385121

Gnome-Pie (6 years ago):
https://vimeo.com/30618179

Gnome-Pie 0.6.1 (3 years ago):
https://vimeo.com/125339537

Wayland Gnome-Pie 2 (WIP) (1 year ago):
https://vimeo.com/224827490

He's written all about Gnome-Pie and the concepts behind it on his site:

http://gnome-pie.simonschneegans.de

And his Bachelor Thesis analyzes Gnome-Pie and realizes some really innovative and cool looking forms of pie menus:

http://simmesimme.github.io/news/2012/10/10/bachelor-thesis

Including the Coral Menu (6 years ago): https://vimeo.com/51072812

And the Trace Menu (6 years ago): https://vimeo.com/51073078

He discusses the problems of Wayland properly supporting pie menus and other non-traditional, deeply customizable user interfaces here:
http://simmesimme.github.io/news/2017/07/09/gnome-pie-071

>Wayland – in it’s current state – makes applications such as Gnome-Pie hardly possible. Due to security concerns, applications are much more isolated. There is a good summary on the cairo-dock forums. Here are the big bummers: [...]

More recently he's written about his latest ideas for bringing pie menus to the modern Linux desktop with OpenPie, with a new architecture that solves some of the problems with Wayland, and enables any application to use pie menus and other novel types of menus:

OpenPie: http://simmesimme.github.io/news/2018/05/31/openpie

>With the advent of Wayland Gnome-Pie will slowly die. OpenPie is my new concept for bringing (pie-) menus to the Linux desktop. In this post I will give a motivation and describe the planned software architecture.

I've written more about the work he and other people have done with pie menus here:

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective:
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
I wrote a book in Word. It was a nightmare, but a useful one: a version conflict across users or something in the copyediting phase glitch-deleted all the math from a chapter ... but in laboriously reconstructing them I found and fixed an error in the original. So thanks Microsoft?
Oh yawn. Use the tools that work for you.

I write primarily in Emacs and use markup. I don't try to convince anyone else to do the same. If MS Word (or TextEdit) work for you, great! I tend to write large documents for which I find those tools to be clumsy, but if your milage varies, no problem.
But most people aren't travel writers. I travel on business. I want to get safely from one place to another, with as little drama as possible.

Fine, Uber isn't for you but other people's preference for that style of transaction has nothing to do with infantilisation.
Kolmogorov had deep insight into bandwidth needed to send information, i.e. the limits of compression. Shannon showed the limits of communication over a noisy channel. CAP teased out constraints on distributed information processing systems over large distances.
I'm personally rather hopeful that Yggdrasil, or something similar to it, could be used to provide connectivity in harder-to-reach places. I don't think it's a bad dream to want to localise networking more.

One project that comes to mind is the the OLPC project - they had a go at meshing their devices with 802.11s but, like most other routing protocols, it wouldn't scale up as far as it needs to.

Wireless meshing is something we are definitely interested in though. I am hopeful that with the iOS port that we may be able to experiment with true meshing over Multipeer Connectivity/AWDL (if Apple allow us to...) and there have also been efforts by the Toronto Mesh community to adopt and test Yggdrasil.
The demand from these mega companies and their pay keeps your pay high.
How so? The equation editor in word is great and even understands LaTeX formatting. I too write scientific papers with lots of equations and find Word more than sufficient.
Around where I live, people are abandoning Uber everywhere because there is a cheaper competitor (with smaller cuts for the drivers, and smaller prices for the rider). And Uber still didn't have any profits here.
Reporting on bad privacy practices while having an atrocious consent dialog...
This is the reason I've stopped surfing the web and stay on news aggregate sites. It's madness how many dependencies sites have.
Having Little Snitch on and not allowing general port 80/443 will make you perfectly aware.
Sadly, communicating effectively is the speaker's responsibility, no one else's.

(Which isn't to say that HN doesn't need to fix that shit. But it's still your fault if you don't account for it.)
Sorry, your data can still be identified even if it’s anonymized
Yeah, but I think removing the possibility of those experiences introduces too much intermediation into daily life for everyone else.

I cherish those possibilities, like I cherish freedom.

I may not exercise my full freedom every day, but I do cherish it.
No, at least not through the official Android Play store.

I don't know about the other application stores such as Samsung's 'Galaxy Apps' store, which is particularly intrusive. It is known for auto-installing apps even if you didn't ask for it. The best solution would be to delete Galaxy Apps store itself. Unless you use it voluntarily of course, but who does?
This, this, and this a thousand times. As a PhD student about to write up his thesis I'm on the cusp of deciding whether to go down the Word or LaTeX route. I cannot describe how unbelievably angry I have gotten at Word screwing up document after document.

My last effort was a journal paper submission, and the journal in question supplied the (80MB!!!) template which was so crammed full of macros, custom styles and miscellaneous instructions that my AV program quarantined it. When I eventually managed to use it, I literally transferred the content from Notepad++ (my go-to for the act of actually writing - take note, OP) and images etc. from file and spent DAYS trying to get the format right. A hateful experience.

Word is great for casual use. For academic or professional use beyond the barest of basic typesetting, absolutely not.
You make the mistake that the relationship between income and value to society is inverse. Delivery people, for example, or store clerks or the like are all not paid well, but their impact on society isn't particularly profound either. The loan payment structure gives people an incentive to have a lower paying job as opposed to a higher paying one, which isn't the right way to go about it.
> python 3 (without any library or optimization) was faster than compiled nim to count words on a moderately large text.

I'm not a fan of Nim because types go after the variable. But the fact that you did not consider that you may have messed something up and just thought "yeah totally, a language built to compete with C++ is slower than python", really discredits your entire post.
This is how Canada’s housing correction begins
People who need to produce Word documents and are writing things like books or scripts may find Scrivener very useful. It's a lot more stable on very large documents.
Latex lets you write equations quickly. Whether that makes it worthwhile to learn depends on how many equations you write and how quickly you want to be able to change them.

I also like being able to write my papers in vscode, with all the shortcuts and vim settings that I’ve gotten used to from coding. If Vim is second nature to you, it’s frustrating to have to switch over to ms word. Vscode has a good latex plugin.

That said, it did take some getting used to. Anything hard and potentially useful can become a “fetish” whereby we fool ourselves it’s the usefulness that motivates us but really it’s the hardness. I recall a time when I tried to use matplotlib to format all my plots, with labels and such. Horrible experience but I was really proud of these ugly graphs I’d make entirely from code. Then one day i just started saving them and opening them in illustrator for all the bells and whistles. Haven’t looked back.
did you see that ludicrous display last night?
There's a similar modern story of a Romanian man who gamed the modern lottery by buying all possible combinations. I wonder is he was inspired by Voltaire.

https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times
CES revokes award for vibrator for being “immoral”
While GDPR is supposed to apply to any controller processing personal data where the processing activities are related to the offering of goods or service to data subjects in the Union, I believe it is fair to say that we have no idea yet how this will exactly be enforced outside of the EU (when it is enforced) until the first attempts appear.

It's true that this extra-territorial scope is a bold move when it comes to international law. I see a trend in the latest EU regulations that would suggest they are not close to abandoning this idea.
People come and tell you that you are doing things wrong. You think about what they said, start to doubt yourself, wonder if you are indeed wrong, decide that you are not wrong, tell the person your decision, and feel exhausted. Then the next person shows up to tell you that you are doing something wrong.

It's not an issue when it just happens occasionally. But it is an issue when it keeps happening again and again.

The worst people are the really argumentative people, those who don't stop trying to convince you. You tell them no, and they come up with yet another argument. And they try to make you feel bad for ignoring your audience or something.

Most decisions are somewhat subjective, so no matter what you decide someone is going to complain.

And you don't want to ignore those people, since they use your product after all. But it's just so tiring...
Also, the environment and predation plays a role in monogamous behavior. Penguins are monogamous and have shared parenting because
one parent has to be with the egg or chick at all times lest the egg/chick freeze or be eaten by predators. Pretty much the environment leaves no room for polygamous or inattentive penguins as their offspring and hence their genes don't make it.
> By aether, do you mean an underlying medium that allows forces to be propagated? I guess that using that definition, there is an 'aether'.

That's what an 'aether' is -- that background medium which the interaction is happening within.

My conception of it is that Michelson-Morley disproved an infinitely rigid aether, which was the conception at the time and squared with Newtonian physics because it's equivalent to an infinite speed of information.

Einstein then corrected the aether models to account for the finite speed of information through the aether, and the impacts that aether waves have on causality.

My impression has always been that dropping 'aether' was merely a branding move, rather than anything technical about the term. (Not that I fault scientists for this, it's politically savvy -- but it's weird to see their marketing used as arguments decades later.)
Why don't you use a blocker extension?
Agreed. Smaller nations/states almost have to do that to remain competitive.

Especially the newer EU member states that have been experiencing an incredible amount of brain-drain i.e. people moving to bigger/"richer" countries. Bigger countries profit from that while smaller die out - unless they make themselves more attractive somehow. To some extent its happening within bigger countries as well with urbanisation - in Germany for example villages that are not close to bigger urban centres have the same problem.

Whether you call it a "tax haven" or subsidising - in practice its virtually the same thing. Of course you need some rules in place to prevent creative tax practices by multinationals (like linking taxation to physical presence) - but its a do or die sort of thing.
Ok, people are terrible. Now what? The platform that brings out the worst in us is something that can be changed.
http://getpopfile.org

It seems that https is not supported
> When the costs of TVs, food, or gasoline goes down it’s widely recognized as a good thing. When the costs of housing—a universal necessity—-goes down it’s a national emergency about which something must be done.

Actually, drops in food prices aren't seen as an unmitigated good thing, which is why a number of food prices are subject to price supports.
Xiaomi's A-series phones (A1, A2, "A2 lite" - a misnomer, in some ways it's better than the A2) are quite nice especially for the price, can be unlocked very easily (for installation of a custom ROM) and are sold globally including in the U.S. Their MIUI-using phones (and Huawei's, with their EMUI) are a different matter, though.
> They seem to love the game, but have absolutely zero interest in rules crunch.

I ran a campaign for my brothers when they were more or less at the same age.

They picked up interest in bionichles and kid being kid their way to play them was screaming "I hit you" in a growing brawl at each other until mom intervened.

of course I did not use dnd or any other crunch system, just contested rolls on every action and some rules based on range, and I did it so it could be used both for storytelling and wargaming, and they had a blast.

it's a GREAT way to start channeling their ruffle play into something more structured, rules be damned. just pick whatever some group of kid likes, throw some game rules and they'll figure out a way to make it work. it took less than six month for my brother to start playing at school with the rule given and then grew up into dnd.
Isn't every "field" in QFT basically an aether?
LaTeX indeed seems overly obscure and the fact it mixes the content with formatting does feel bad but I still can see no viable alternative. It seems the only code-based typesetting system (am I wrong?), the only typesetting system that provides such a degree of power and arguably the only way to produce beautiful PDFs with reasonable ease. So far I have chosen the way of writing well-structured HTML or Markdown (to separate content from formatting), rendering it to LaTeX with a Python script and using LuaTeX to produce final output.
That may be the case but don't pretty much all coins have this potential issue?
I've been coding for less time than you. What I've told some people is that I love coding, but I'd rather code solutions for problems I find interesting, like side projects, than to code professionally.
That's what's great about them. They definitely want to be perceived as premium brand, and installing crapware or selling off your data does not go well with that image. So they don't do it.
I see what you're getting at. I took the question as being "on whom does the responsibility lie," which I would place with the individual. Anonymity does certainly contribute, but I'd still say that an individual can choose to contribute positively or negatively regardless of the medium.
I'd add that even for digital applications that are not web-based (native apps, console games, etc), there is still a need to talk to a server.

So regardless of market fluctuations, server-side development will always be in demand, and server-side dev is a subset of "web development".

So yes, definitely, web development is a worthwhile field to go into.
Plug: for those who might be interested in any ML jargons
https://www.dataplot.co
So basically not even one substantial issue (not to mention most of these don't even hold).

Contrary to hipster belief "Mutable strings", "Mutable everything" is not some accusation against a language...
Anyone know/guess the username/password for the staff intranet?

[Edit]
Nevermind :)
Known unknown in those areas is the effect of securities-backed loans aka shadow margin. They are not tracked by SEC or margin debt statistics.

Once you have non-retirement financial assets over $100,000, you may get a low interest revolving loan (SBLOC) from the broker that is 50-90% of your portfolio without other restrictions.

Mortgage against the house + SBLOC might combine into very high level of risk. It has been amazing leverage during the decade long stock market boom, but if there is downturn, it can create massive havoc. These loans are subject to a maintenance call asking more collateral with little or no advanced warning.
I'm glad it worked out for you. I would have gone mad if I'd tried to write my dissertation in Word. (As it is, I'm, nearly a decade later, still a bit touched after trying to do much minor work involving lambda calculus in Word.)
Imagine if everywhere you went in life there was a handful of people talking shit about you and calling you names.

Everywhere.

All the time.

Anytime you're around other people, at least two of them will be loudmouth assholes to you. Relentlessly so.

You really can't see how that would get to you eventually?
Thanks for a reasonable disagreement, unlike the other respondent to my post.

I was saying that govt should perhaps not give subsidised loans to individuals (as in the Australian example) to study things like art because:

- the subsidised loan program needs to have a positive measurable ROI for it to continue. Otherwise, the next govt may bring it to an end, because there are hundreds of projects competing for government resources.

- in a world where poverty still exists, programs that are more bang for the buck may have the maximum positive impact on people. I live in India where millions are poor. Some amount of money should definitely be spent on arts / culture, but probably 100x more should be spent on pulling people out of poverty, and the way to do that is to identify high ROI investments in people.

- there are already other venues than Australian-type student loans for govts to subsidise arts / culture-type education, like university grants.

- I'm not sure about the ethics of giving a loan to a student for a course that may not pay back financially, but the loan will with the student for life, even if payment is delayed till his income increases. If arts are considered important to society, is it ethical to burden a student with the loan?

It was just a thought. I'm not adamant about it. I'm happy to see that we've had a good exchange of views, which is supposed to be the purpose of a forum like this.

Thanks for sending the link to the OECD report. I'll read it when I'm free to learn more about this topic.
On my old 486, I wrote about 80 page document about signal processing in Word, full of painstakingly created equations, until one day, all equations basically disappeared or became uneditable. I learned my lesson there about wysiwyg.
> It's not just FB, my Samsung S9 came preloaded with 'undeletable' Microsoft apps too. But this is nothing new, Samsung phones have came preloaded with bloat since forever.

I'm old enough to remember when this was standard. Before smartphones almost all cellphones were bought through carriers and came pre-loaded with a bunch of carrier crapware (often unremovable). One of the best things about the first iPhone was that Apple retained control of the pre-installed apps and AT&T was not allowed to put a bunch of their own garbage on it. 12 years later the lack of crapware remains a key differentiator for iPhones. But what's most surprising is that in an industry where everyone seems keen to copy even Apple's worst ideas (no headphone jack, notches) only a few are copying some of their best.
Generally I would say that if your document doesn't include at least one equation it's not worth learning LaTeX to do. If your writing is going to involve lots of inline maths, or you're submitting to one of the journals that requires it, then it will make your life much easier.

Some of the Stackexchange sites make widespread use of MathJax for this purpose: https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-b...

(Word does now store equations as XML internally, but it's pretty horrible - 5 kilobytes for the quadratic formula, for example)

Edit: I've just remembered that when I was at university in the late 90s, there was a small community of non-maths LaTeX users ... who were doing things like New Testament Greek. There may be other specialised use cases where having fine control over WYG is more important than WYSIWYG.

Now I've gone looking for it, I can find an example : http://jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~mma29/essays/dissertation/ - I think the intent of using LaTeX here was really for Bibtex, the bibliographic system, which is an extremely important part of all true academic papers.
Sony introduces a wireless turntable for vinyl records
30+ Custom View Filters for Google Analytics
> I believe it was this post

Incredibly entitled AND toxic? Yeesh. What a combination.