skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aside: every open-source project I've worked on that uses make as it's primary script/build pipeline interface doesn't work correctly on mac, windows or many linux environments.

npm happens to run on windows, linux and mac with minimal problems.

Also, the tools in TFA are something someone spent time on creating, that serves a purpose that works within the tooling that most of the people that would use the tool already use... and all you've done is poop on that because it doesn't fit your preconceived notions of what the "right" language/platform is.
I strongly agree.

As far as I can tell, this wording covers any sort of misrepresentation set to film: creative editing, lookalikes, photo composites, etc. What constitutes undue creative editing is worryingly undefined; there are a lot of practices which create 'inauthentic records' for both innocent and malicious ends, like cutting segments out of an interview. And it seems to have seriously strange edge cases, since unlike libel rules it's not defined by harm to the person misrepresented - can you edit an interview favorably and be charged for that?

I suppose the "intent to facilitate criminal/tortious conduct" clause is supposed to bypass all of that, but I'm not convinced it actually does so. §1041.b.2.A requires actual knowledge that a a record is false for distributors, but §1041.b.1 does not. Presumably the idea is that creating a deepfake shows knowledge, but the deepfake definition itself doesn't require intent by the creator; it's sufficient that the resulting record be false and seemingly authentic. If "intent to facilitate criminal conduct" is read in the same way as e.g. conspiracy statutes, it could connect intent to the conduct, not the criminality. (As a further bit of weirdness, it would then be legal to create without intent to distribute, and later distribute without knowledge. But if you create while intending to distribute, you're in hot water.

An extreme example: someone rounds a corner and sees Person A punching Person B. They arrive too late to see that B initiated the fight and A acted in self defense. They quickly take some video so there's evidence, and after the fight ends send it to B, who requested it as evidence with which to file an assault charge. The taper has now created with intent to distribute what falsely appears to be an authentic record of A's conduct (intent not required). And they reasonably expected that the record would be used to affect the conduct of a state judicial proceeding (§1041.c.1.A). The videographer, without knowledge or intent, is now facing 10 years in prison for creation of a deep fake.
Do you think the government should ban all harmful activities?
Show HN: Discover exclusive creator interviews and resources in tech
What's unique about this is that they don't seem to be considering banning other forms of nicotine. This means that (unlike most substance bans) this could have the effect of pushing smokers toward safer alternatives like transdermal patches and gum.

To my knowledge, a ban of only a single delivery system is unprecedented. I'd be interested if anyone has another example, to see how that turned out.
I can second this, and I have a bias against it. When it came out I couldn't wrap my head around why people were excited about it. I've used IRC for like 20+ years and I didn't see it as much of an improvement from IRC.

However, I currently use it every day and honestly have no complaints. I still don't know why a chat app is worth so much, but it does what it's supposed to (lets me talk to others in my company in a single place), and basically everything you could think of has an integration for it. I haven't had an even remotely annoying user experience since the early days, and as a "slack hater" I've been actively looking for things to complain about.
Just a heads up, it also includes blocking timers ringing set on DDG and Google. I found that out the hard way with over-hard boiled eggs two days in a row.
Five years ago I was contacted by a stranger, Prof Peter Davies, an eminent water scientist. He wanted to meet because he had news he thought would interest me. The night we met Davies told me that the south-west of Tasmania – the island’s vast, uninhabited and globally unique wildland, the heart of its world heritage area – was dying. The iconic habitats of rainforest, button grass plains, and heathlands had begun to vanish because of climate change.

I was shocked. I had understood that climate change’s effects on Tasmania would be significant but not disastrous; the changes mitigated by Tasmania being surrounded by seas that were not heating as quickly as others: the island’s west would get wetter, the east a little warmer and drier, but compared to much of the world it didn’t seem catastrophic.

But it wasn’t so. Tasmania’s sea waters were warming at two to three times the global rate. Davies’ work, with that of other scientists, was revealing the warming and drying of Tasmania’s west and highlands, and the growing impact this was having. The highland lakes of Tasmania would, for example, in the next 70 to 100 years see between a 10% and 20% drop in rainfall, coupled to a 20% to 30% increase in evaporation. By the end of this century a significant proportion of these lakes and wetlands will cease to exist or be largely dried out much of the year.

It gets worse from there.
> The construction costs are high predominantly as a result of inefficient (or in this case purposely obstructive) legal requirements.

This seems unlikely given a) several western governments are dead keen on nuclear renaissance, b) the high construction costs are historically, and in recent times, seen in each country dabbling with new nuclear fission plants, and c) the absence of claims from construction companies and investors in new nuclear fission plants about this alleged obstacle.

(Aside - Jeremy Legget's site has some great resources for cost and scheduling blowouts. He's partisan, but I've found no reason to doubt his sources or conclusions.)

> The energy produced through fission from one pound of uranium is the same as from burning 2.7 million pounds of coal.

I wasn't suggesting a disparity in source fuel volumes - I'm aware of how both burning stuff and fission works.

My point was that obtaining clean high quality fissionable material is non-trivial (if it weren't the case we'd probably all be dead).

I'm unconvinced that existing fuel rods can be used to power newer model fission reactors -- unless you're talking about MSR's, which I thought went out of favour last century, and we don't really have any 'modern' plants built (yet). Again, I refer to some of Leggett's work analysing some of the new UK plant constructions - way over cost and time expectations, and likely about to be abandoned by investors.

> Decommissioning costs are a thing invented to make nuclear seem more expensive by counting it in one place but not the other.

I don't understand. Are you suggesting it shouldn't be counted, or the comparison costs to renewables is being misstated?

Comparing it to coal mines is disingenuous, unless you think I'm pushing coal (I am not).

Comparing it to mines for 'raw material that go into solar panels' is more interesting, but I highly factoring that in would shift the balance sheet in favour of fission.

> And long-term waste management is only a thing for legacy reactors. The newer reactors use their "waste" as fuel, solving both problems.

If you're talking thorium and MSR's here, it's not strictly true, is it? Apart from the absence of any existing viable reactors, thorium reactors need, and produce, rare isotopes of uranium, with longer half lifes than say 235 or 238.

I'm at the edge of my knowledge here, to be sure, but ultimately the ramp-up times to build MSR's, the sheer volume required to replace the existing fission reactors, the experiences around the world of cost / schedule blow-outs, the trend for wind, solar thermal, storage, and and even solar PVC -- all seem to indicate fission isn't really a sensible option now.
Similarities in Law and Programming: Using Abstraction
Assuming you agree with the decision to start with, aren't you de facto say all those other things don't matter relative to your decision? I think you may of meant something a bit different: perhaps, that if you believe that government has a role in dictating certain health related choices, then what options do you have to achieve that other than something like this?

If so, then you're just debating implementation details which I think is less important and less interesting than the real discussion about what personal autonomy, and personal responsibility, you should have to live your life as you see fit.
Facebook: Where Friendships Go to Never Quite Die
It doesn't strike me as a huge loss to society if source code updates are only released, say, once per year. It's not ideal but it's not terrible either.

(Of course, if the updates aren't happening at all because of opaque internal procedures, that's a different story.)
Expanding on this a bit, there's a huge difference between not punishing drug users and allowing commercial sales.

The latter opens up a Pandora's box of regulatory capture, since problem users account for the vast majority of profits in recreational drug industries.

Meanwhile coming up with a defensible reason to criminalize possession in amounts for personal use is a bit of a stretch. You either care about drug users as people (in which case alienating them from law enforcement is bad) or you don't (in which case there is no reason to regulate drugs at all). There's a bit of a gray area around discouraging initiation of new users, I suppose, but mostly it comes down to punishing people for getting high in ways you don't approve of.
Doesn't the 0 byte executable involve spawning a shell to run it? Better would be a tiny elf executable that just returns 0 (maybe hand written to avoid the compiler adding bloat)
"I don't want x y or z" -> "I can choose to not have x y or z and not force my desire to not have x y and z on everyone else" -- It applies to every scenario you can dream of

It's this concept called liberty that people have seem to have forgotten.
Show HN: Slack chatbot for quick text analysis
Didn't they recently nuke the unix infrastructure and replace it with cloud services? Or have reports been exaggerated?
Drugs that require manufacturing infrastructure to be to a massive scale to meet demand are really easy to target. Cigarettes aren't really something you can make yourself to the quality that people expect from automated processes at the capacity they demand them.
outputs = [y for x in inputs
if (y := f(x)) is not None]

I can't stand this new syntax, y is declared and assigned after the first instance of its use.
I suppose one useful role is in denormalising smoking. Current smokers probably started when smoking was 'normal', criminalising may give people cause to stop and reevaluate. Other drugs havent been legal in living history so aren't seen I the same light?

Theres also in the case of passive smoking, so smoking is demonstratively damaging to innocent people. Which leads to.

There's probably a question as to what the states responsibility is. If little Timmy goes out and buys (legal) heroin and dies, how culpable is state in that situation? What about if Timmy just gets addicted and goes around breaking into peoples houses?
This might work:

x = gross_income / median_income;
if( x <= 1 )
{
return 0;
}
if( x <= 50 )
{
y = ( x * Math.ln( x ) - x + 1 ) / Math.ln( 2500 );
}
else
{
y = x - 0.5 * Math.ln( 50 ) * Math.li( x ) + 4.862;
}
return y * median_income;

Math.ln() is the log function for base e, and Math.li() is the logarithmic integral function.

The constants are based on the income at 50 times the median income having a marginal tax rate of 50%, and the median income having a marginal tax rate of 0%. Marginal tax rates above 50% asymptotically approach 100%. There are no loopholes or exemptions.

If the median income is $32k, and you earned $31k, your tax is zero. Your only obligation is to report your gross income honestly, so that the median income is calculated accurately for next year. If your income is $96k, your x = 3.0, your y = 0.1656, so your tax is $15.9k . If your income is $1.6M, your x = 50, your y = 18.74, so your tax is $600k . If your income is $32M, your x = 1000, your y = 657.5, and your tax = $21M.

The only effective ways to reduce your tax would be to reduce your income (as reported) or raise the nationwide median income, such as by paying your lowest-paid workers more in the previous year.

Seems fair to me.
Ok. One generation might be a bit confused thinking that what they see on video is what actually happened. But further generations as the technology becomes common will just intuitively understand that video by itself proves nothing and it was most likely made for the lulz than recorded as it happened.

Video of Trump saying something already proves nothing especially not that he ever said it because now he says he never did. And all that even without deep fake technology.

People care less and less about history of reality. They become aware that it's to large extent unknowable drowned in narratives.
JDL-Studio diagrams
Timeworks Publisher ST was another desktop publishing app for the ST.
Much love for Stylelint. My last company had some unique style guide rules, and I was able to encode all of them in Stylelint with only a few custom rules. The custom rules were very easy to write and plug in, and everything auto-fixes. Absolutely eliminated a large chunk of developer time wasted in code reviewing the wrong things.
r/vimkeyboard
> I see a lot of those things still happening in tech companies, which leads to women underperforming in mixed groups.

It's an ironic tragedy of the commons.
[video] I think, therefore I might be
Used it. I don't think anyone liked it too much. Switched to Zulip, which seems a little less objectionable. Still I'd prefer good old IRC.
You can try https://logomakr.com/ - they have an upsell, but you can get the basic version of the logo for free.
I am not sure if fear of China is an adequate justification to allow rampant misconduct of a corporation here. Consider that we could just the same argue that having a minimum wage that's (still woefully inadequate, but higher than China) also significantly harms the competitiveness of our country's competitiveness in many industries on the global stage.

It would probably be better to deal with issues of other country's power via trade agreements and political pressure.
An interesting approach to a common problem. Great write up!
It's easier to justify these practices when they have the real payout of reducing duplication.
> Do you have issues with their current app?

I've got Slack open right now, I'm a member of 2 teams and it's using 1.5 GB of memory across all of its processes.

I'm wondering if you think that's an acceptable memory usage? I don't personally feel that's acceptable for an app that isn't Photoshop, a video production suite or a 3D modelling program.

I'm a member of a third "occasional team", but I don't dare open that because I really don't wish to give more RAM to Slack!

Curious: What OS are you using and what's your total memory usage for Slack and all of its helper processes?

Another problem with the Electron app: there were drive-by trolls in the public Clojure Slack team a couple of weeks ago, because it's possible to open the JS in the Electron app and interfere with user role permissions and notify thousands of users with extremely obscene photo messages all at once.

I'd switch to a proper native app that respects the norms of its host platform in a heartbeat.
Or none of the women techies you know want to admit in front of you they want a place like this.

Not saying you don't know them, but I am saying that admitting to wanting to talk to other women has traditionally been admitting to weakness in the workplace.
Correct. true being a 0 byte shell script is a good example of classic Unix's bad habit of doing the overly-cute thing instead of the sensible thing.
Well I'm googling it, but no I'm pretty sure you can't buy a new Lada 4x4 for less than 7000 $.

On the other hand in Europe you can buy a new Dacia Sandero for under 7000 euros. It comes with power steering, front electronic windows, heating, airbags and 4/5 safety rating.
I think your focus on the CFAA is somewhat missing the point. The assertion being made is that Facebook and Google (and perhaps one or two others, like Amazon and Twitter, maybe) have become so big and so powerful that they are able to act like the trusts of yore, leveraging their data to stop competitors from having any realistic chance of disruption and even affecting other peripherally-related industries. If we suppose open data access to be a remedy, in whole or in part, then "don't allow companies to use the CFAA to stop third-party data scrapers" is an insufficient proposal.

Suppose the CFAA wasn't applied so indiscriminately, but Facebook still didn't want third-party clients to access their data and there was no requirement for them to do so. So they make sure there's no publicly-available API, at least with any terms of service that let you build a true third-party client. Assuming there is still some legal mechanism to make unauthorized access to computer resources illegal, then tapping into Facebook's private APIs counts. Doing what 3Taps and PadMapper did -- just scraping data -- can be a Terms of Service violation (as can the private API access, presumably) and could conceivably even be charged as a copyright violation. It's asking for trouble. It's also potentially a constant cat-and-mouse game. And, last but not least, there's no guarantee that data scraping will actually get you the data that you need to do a good job of building a new business on top of Facebook's social graph.

What would be better, if you accept the original premise, is not new regulation, per se, but antitrust action specific to these companies forcing them to build open APIs. Simply saying "hey, Facebook can't sue you for data scraping anymore" just won't cut it.
Consul 1.2 supports service mesh deployments with a new feature called Consul Connect. It includes a sidecar proxy.

Good podcast episode about Hashicorp today: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/02/04/scaling-hash...
So, make something better... shitting on people that spend time writing useful things is not really helping anyone. The fact is, I appreciate electron apps... they let me use the same things on Windows, Linux and Mac, which I use all regularly.

VS Code works better than any IDE with similar or more features that I've tried, including those in compiled or preferred languages. Most other Electron apps are good enough. Yeah, they use a little more ram.. I've got 32GB on my desktop at home... I'd rather use 1-2gb of ram for half a dozen apps than to not have said app.

I don't know what you think, but I, personally feel that you are presenting like a pompous asshole who wants to shit all over useful things that people make because it doesn't fit your arbitrary opinion on what is the right language to use. If you want something better, in your opinion, you make it, and watch people shit all over it because it can't match the features of a tool built in a lesser language.
Or in other words: a good estimate is itself a project.
> emoji reactions (yes they really are useful)

Fun, sure, but useful? Ehh...I dunno. It seems like you have some specific use in mind and I'm curious, so if you don't mind me asking, what do you use them for?
This sounds like case of bad default settings. AFAICT users were previously able to turn off autoplay in the settings.

For Firefox, about:config then media.autoplay.default and set to 1.

For Chrome, chrome://flags#autoplay-policy and select "Document user activation required".

But there is an even simpler way

"... when you're just trying to read an article."

If reading is all you are trying to do, then there is probably no need for Javascript to be enabled for that particular website.

(Nor do you need images enabled, if all you are doing is reading.)

Firefox "reader mode" might be one alternative.

Another is to disable Javascript for that particular website in the Firefox settings.

Aside from Adobe Macromedia Flash, are there any examples of autoplay video that do not rely on Javascript being enabled?
If you turn off Javascript (and Flash), then you also turn off autoplay.

That has been my experience.
Tesla short sellers create website to share their research
I'm having to switch CentOS servers over to RHEL servers because... support(?)

Some state work got in trouble a few years back because they'd updated guidelines that no applications could be on the same machine as a database server. Enforced separation, for security. Having enough staff and management to distribute that message to people dealing with the apps and servers didn't seem to be a requirement, however. And... when I was given this mandate, I had to ask for another server, then told there weren't any available, and I'd have to wait for several weeks, and I probably should shut down the current service (which had run for 3 years this way, well before the guidelines were in place).

Navigating govt IT stuff is crazy. About half the people I've encountered are between competent and really talented, and the other half don't understand the basics.

FWIW, if the web server can't communicate 'directly' with a database... what process do you use to communicate between them? Some sort of proxy? Or something else?
Just because you don't care how something looks doesn't mean that's true for everyone.

Fashion and style matter to lots of people. If 2 things are roughly equivalent, the one that's cool and looks neat is going to be the one chosen by the people who do care about those things.
I wonder if one way to help this bias is to have interviews be an exercise in teamwork rather than a lopsided relationship as it is now.

What I would suggest is that when the interviewer and candidate get reach the "quiz or coding exercise" part, have them pick a question from a website that provides a question at random, and let both work together towards a solution.

This matches more closely with what they will end up doing anyways if the candidate is hired, and will remove the "I've seen 20 different ways to solve this" bias while also generating empathy for the candidate when the interviewer him/herself also struggles with a fresh problem.

Of course, the interviewer can try to lead the candidate and can hold back from telling the solution right away if s/he can clearly see it, but if not this could set the stage for a fairly realistic way to sample all kinds of qualities, from technical, to communication, to empathy, to teamwork, etc...

I think it would also be less stressful from the candidate's point of view: a candidate often feels like an interview seems unfair because s/he is being asked about something that the interviewer has had a chance to review and prepare much in advance.

When interviewers ask trick/complicated questions, I sometimes wonder what would happen if they were to ask the same question to the rest of their own team. Are they expected to answer it well? Would they know? Think about the places you've worked and the questions you've given at interviews: do you think your own colleagues would have aced them?

Obviously, this doesn't completely remove the additional stress on the candidate, since the interviewer's job isn't on the line, but I think it would provide a more balanced assessment of the candidate's abilities and personality traits.

In practice, I'm not sure interviewers would be very receptive to such method, as it could turn an interview into a stressful event for them.
I also have the link buried under an equivalent named 'h4x0r later' folder in my bookmarks since 2015.
There are so many interesting things I'll never manage to play with in my lifetime, that I apparently have "postponed".

It's great others document and share their entertaining results to lazy lads like me :)
Maybe _you_ can only go 25mph, the other vehicles have no such restrictions.