skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you folks heard about OData? How practical is to rest-enable databases with OData? The idea is to make the databases accessible to analytics users while abstracting the database behind the REST APIs. Thoughts?
Typescript.org
> It is possible for two things to simultaneously be true: things are awful for many people, AND things overall are better than they used to be.

That is correct and I agree.

What I am saying is that the global average getting better is a skewed and rather meaningless metric. The fact that 100_000 EU/USA citizes are slighly better off at the cost 1_000_000 asians -- random numbers to demonstrate how an imbalance can be evened out -- does not mean that humanity's economy is getting better. Not at all.

We should strive for everybody to be ever so slightly better, not that the average people that are extremely poor number to go lower, because that doesn't mean anything as the author proved -- $1.90/day for food as a measure for poverty? Laughable and irresponsible. Please try it yourself for a month and let's talk again.

Hence my angry reaction to the claim that the global average numbers are entirely pointless and non-informative. The world is too big, too much is going on. You cannot even know why something fell down by 0.1%.

> People seem to hate Pinker because they interpret his words as saying their suffering doesn't matter.

I am one of these people. And I will stand by it. Middle-class well-to-do authors do not belong in discussions like these. Go recruit people from the suffering countries. We the Westerners have almost zero credibility when talking about poverty. At least I am realistic enough to be acceptive of that.
I've played poker overnight in Atlantic City and made about $100 with $100. Not exactly profitable.

The cash, bonds, and stocks advice sounds similar to what Ben Graham recommends in the Intelligent Investor. Thanks!
On youtube now you can find flight simulator reenactments of most every crash and air incident. They are quite fascinating and much much better than TV style dramatizations.

Here is this incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzY-hzxlqig
Full text: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Basically, an ML model trained with many factors - including microbiome composition - is more predictive of post-food glucose response than the current nutrition-based methods (carbs and/or calories) alone. At least based on the limited studies so far, this seems the case for non-diabetics, pre-diabetics, and diabetics. More on the ML model: https://genie.weizmann.ac.il/pubs/2015_david_2.pdf
This is the worst most distracting website to ever exist. As soon as I start reading a line something pops up (first a man, then another popup at bottom then sharing buttons covering up more screen). Why do you do this :(
The redwood trees are still able to sexually reproduce with other variants, unlike the banana trees that are cultivated for crops.
I posted this on the blog but thought I post here too.

Last year I set up a WorldWideWeb.app (version 0.15) running in the Previous emulator on Ubuntu for a CTF challenge for DEF CON 2018 Quals (they had to exploit a buffer overflow in HTTP.c). There's a lot of other cruft around to set up and automate the challenge and getting input to WWW, but there's Vagrant and ansible scripts to set up and run everything.

There's a lot of work to set up networking in NextStep and getting all the pieces right (I think I even set up an SSH server running on NextStep).

The source is all here:
https://github.com/o-o-overflow/chall-www

I'd be happy to help, I love this idea of software archeology/preservation.
“That affects the behavior of all the population” seems a bit hyperbolic no? I can’t imagine everyone being equally affected by media operations since not everybody believes everything they are told by any number of news outlets. Accountable in what way? Who they sell their ads to? Seems like a big disadvantage to place on one portion of the advertising industry. And you think Congress is going to be up to the job of actually regulating here other than just bringing people in to grandstand and provide platforms for elections. I’m interested in how this would look, I just don’t see how government is going to be effective here for the people and not just for it’s own ends. Should these companies be allowed to run psychological experiments? I would postulate all advertising is an attempt at psychological manipulation and therefore an experiment by a group on the populace at large to see if that manipulation is effective. So.. no advertising then becuase some people are willing accept what they are told because it supports what they already believe or don’t have the tools/info/want to find opposing view points? When is the onus placed on the consumer to consume with some level of skepticism? I have a hard time believing the consumer is blameless here. Information is power and is expensive. Believing that any article is telling you any whole truth is entirely misguided — everyone wants to sell you something whether it’s a product or a way of thinking that supports someone else’s agenda.
I'm not glossing over it, it's a different point. They are implying a causal link between the 7% and the 59% when they haven't demonstrated that. They show that individual authors got a lot of help that wasn't awarded with authorship. You can point out that nowadays this work would be worthy of authorship, and that women were somewhat overrepresented in the acknowledgements without authorship. That doesn't demonstrate the big claims of sexism they're stating/implying. If they showed men getting authorship for only the programming help, and women not getting authorship in comparable situations, that would be a different matter.

I didn't say sexism didn't (or doesn't) exist, there's plenty of other evidence that it did/does. I'm just saying it doesn't follow.

And if I say something can be explained by evolutionary psychology that doesn't mean that therefore it's fine, or that it couldn't be changed given the right system of incentives.
So meta haha. How much have you needed in production? According to https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/... they say its counterproductive to use less then 8 GB but maybe you have seen different results?
I am excited by this project and so are a few people I showed it to.

I have 3 or 4 of these messengers open at any given time. Resource consumption has never been an issue for me - needing to have multiple "talk to people" windows/programs for what I consider the same task annoys me every single day.
Should I add another dependency?
Healthcare and education are heavily subsidized, but electronics and clothes much less so. To buy clothes and electronics on credit requires credit card debt as high as 20%/year but student loans are just 5%/year, and unlike electronics, education gains value to to increased wages and better job prospects.
Probably. But, so what?

If your threat model depends on something like this, plan for it.

As long as there are computers, there will be zero-days.
I don't care to litigate Hickel's argument, and I don't even necessarily agree with him. It just seems like you're ignoring the actual points Hickel made. The questions you're asking here are all answered in article, so maybe read it again?

The main argument is one of degree. Hickel isn't contradicting whether the trend is down or up, and indeed it's somewhat irrelevant whether the trend is down. What he's pointing out is that the infographic is quite misleading in the impression that it gives to the lay person. Extreme poverty has a specific definition that isn't very useful when trying to understand the big picture, because "extreme poverty" is below the line where you get enough food to live, and it's very far below the line where you can expect a reasonable life. The high level message that the infographic conveys is that poverty in general is nearly gone, where the reality of global poverty is quite different, and not going away as fast as "extreme poverty". Saying that Gates & Pinker never claimed poverty is solved is hiding behind a technicality. The social media they're sharing has a very clear implication, and most people aren't digging into the details and minutiae of this argument.

It would settle this whole thing to put all the trend lines for extreme poverty vs regular poverty vs lower class vs middle class vs upper class all on one graph. No matter what your opinion is here, it's true that using only extreme poverty on a single graph is cherry-picking and likely to not convey an accurate impression of the overall situation.
I run IntelliJ and WebStorm on i7 iMac 4k with additional 4k monitor and have no issues.

I think for me key is RAM size, I set the heap size to 4GB because I work with big projects and it helps a lot.
The United States has never had a problem supporting aggressive states in contravention of international law with a history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. It is itself such a state.

From the perspective of U.S. planners there are both costs and benefits to aggressively projecting power over the middle east (and for that matter the rest of the world). You've only identified the costs. You omit the perceived benefits and implicitly exaggerate the influence of a small, (primarily) ethnic domestic lobby.

That is like saying the Roman empire was a bad idea because it obviously would lead to collapse--true--but instead of chalking it up to outsized imperialism by the Romans themselves you blame some like Mesopotamian lobbyists for overextending it.
There's a number of ways that a fake card will look different from a real card - we aggregate these signals and form a decision on real vs fake (sorry, we know that's a terrible answer - we would disclose more, but it's best practice to keep specifics of fraud detection a secret to maintain efficacy). Surprisingly, the gap between real and fake is wide enough that we can with good precision separate those cases. Of course, someone could build a replica indistinguishable from a real card, but at that point you've raise the barrier of committing fraud much higher than simply having a stolen credit card number, so chances are the fraudsters would migrate to some other platform
Interesting point. I also think there is a sense of predestination that comes with a believe in God. This can have a reassuring effect when it comes to worrying about if you're on the right track in life (the track to "meaning"). I have read that some psychologists hypothesize this sense of predestination is what (in part) causes lower suicide rates among religious folks vs. non-religious folks.

Even though I'm aware of these positive effects, I still can't bring myself to believe in any God. I was raised atheist and I've always felt like a believe in the supernatural doesn't mix with an intellectual, scientific view on the world. This is of course completely due to my upbringing; there are plenty of great scientists who believe. I think this is an interesting inner conflict which I'm sure I share with many others.
How catastrophic must a software disaster be to receive the benefits of such safety regulation?
Yes, coast redwoods grow where there’s plenty of ocean influence. Hence the name..
Has this ever happened with Google or is it pure speculation?
Kroger already has this with the ClickList grocer pickup service. So instead of loading the groceries into your car the same employees will just load the robot and it will drive to your house. No extra effort or overhead because the same clicklist app will be used for both use cases.
You don't need Emacs in order to work on org-mode documents, in the end it's just a text file.
I write all my org documents in Vim and then convert them via Pandoc or with a keybinding making Emacs convert it in batch mode. It's barely different than working with Markdown, it just offers much more.
> expecting them to do it in India would be a bit strange.

Why - one of their strong brand values is that their products are "user-friendly" because they listen to customers. So I don't see anything strange in making it easy for their customers to spend money on their platform, as it would only earn them more goodwill, not to mention increase their profits.
Duuudeeeeee this was like watching a movie!
You should totally turn this into a blog, perhaps even a book
I bet you learnt lots along the way, you're literally the poster boy/girl for try, fall down, stand up, try
Thanks for this :)
They also can't easily be outsourced, which this article mentions as a much more significant factor.
An independent review? I haven't seen one. There was a pretty egregious report alleged to be from the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition[1] which appears to have been taken down. (It was conflating ground water contamination from fabs in the 60's with modern fabs, for example)

If you were looking for a project it would probably be a good one, I for one would be interested in reading something that was backed up by solid research and objectivity.

[1] http://svtc.org/resources/reports/
They're using iPhones themselves inside of the company, trusting the devices as part of their Beyond Corp security mechanism, so they have an interest in the software trusted to their company network being as secure as possible.
> the simplest ones would involve 1) a mandatory breathalyzer, 2) speed limiters, 3) sensors that shut down the car when reckless driving is detected, and 4) shutting down the car if seatbelts are not used.

1) Some (many?) states require drivers with a history of convinced DUI/DWI to get these systems installed. From articles I've read, they're rather a PITA -- it takes a lot of breath pressure, and you may be prompted at random times as you drive down the road. This seems reasonable for someone with a history of drunk driving, but for the majority of drivers who don't drive drunk, it would be a major turnoff; people would likely just drive pre-mandate cars for as long it takes to get the mandate overturned.

2) Let me know when you have a system that can determine what speed is "reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway". If you want to put a limiter at 100 mph, that's OK with me -- setting up the gearing so above say 80mph is unattainable seems reasonable too. It's very rarely reasonable or prudent to travel at that speed on public highways. The posted speed limit may offer a suggestion of what's reasonable or prudent, but it's very often not the case.

3) What do you propose here, that doesn't shut down my car when I'm avoiding a road hazard? Hooning feels like something where you can know it when you see it, but may be hard for a sensor system to detect accurately. Doing donuts in a field with no one around isn't unsafe. Doing it in the middle of an open freeway is. If we were able to compute this type of decision, we wouldn't have human drivers, and hooning would be dead. It also presupposed that there's a reasonable way to shutdown a car without consent of the driver that's safer than whatever the driver is currently doing.

4) I can't believe people would drive very far with all the godawful alerts that go on when you drive any distance with the seatbelts off. Again though, it's a question of is it safer to stop the vehicle without the consent of the driver or to let them continue to drive and annoy them into compliance.
Another way I've seen this put: we can already write software that's reliable the way bridges are reliable. The only problem is that people don't want to pay for it, wait for it, or accommodate it.

Cleanroom development supposedly lead to production code with 1 bug per 10k lines back in the 80s, and NASA famously managed Shuttle code with 0 bugs in 500,000 checked lines. Other projects like Ariane 5 were not so lucky, but the general error rate is still incredibly low. To my knowledge, software in general has killed fewer spacecraft than other narrow issues like voltage inconsistencies or launch vibrations. And after the Therac-25 incident, medical device software has followed similar a development track. Even automotive software, subjected to far fewer restrictions and more varied environments, has a better critical-failure track record than well-understood components like brakes and tires.

Producing software like that is orders of magnitude more expensive than producing 'normal' code. It takes far longer, in ways that more money can't neatly displace. It rarely talks to other systems, because doing so requires exhaustive testing at the interface (for every version), or testing both systems as one (with exponential testing requirements). And it's severely limited in range; freeform inputs and best-guess behavior when adjacent systems fail are out of the question.

There are institutional changes that could bring us better software under existing constraints, definitely. But it's also true that the general approach to design is sort of hopeless; the sheer amount of software getting built is inconsistent with what rigorous design looks like in pretty much any field.
Couldn't agree more, go from problem to solution, not the other direction, or you will be a hammer in search of a nail. Even better if you personally feel the pain.
This sounds like the "Compounding Knowledge" post from FarnamStreet last week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19094502
Somewhat hilariously, the problem isn't lack of talent in programmers, but lack of talent in companies. Someone on this thread claims everyone is being stolen by top tech companies, that means it's you who needs to make your business more attractive, not that there's a shortage of coders.

Experienced programmers know they don't have to settle for less.
We're already headed down that route with the gig economy as a whole. The W2 is the first thing to go.
Differentiable Drawing
Use Cloudflare to Protect Your WordPress Login Url
I used to fly out of an airport that had the same frequency as another airport that was a very popular skydiving destination (Lodi, Ca). One of the pilots for that outfit was on frequently; weekday, weekend, it didn't matter. Same radio calls, same slight drawl. Day in, day out. He sounded completely bored out of his mind. Even the announcement that he was dropping meat bombs ... "Skiy-diivers in the skieee over Low-die Airport, 18 thousand feeet.." like he'd said it ten thousand times. And I think he may have!
Cool product! You should integrate with the Stripe wherever possible out of the gate. I use Stripe but still accept the CC info directly through their widget. You could really polish that phase for me.

On a side note: It annoys me when I see a page with little info on the homepage, I click "Demo", and I'm presented with a form. Why not at least put your Video on your Demo pages and then use the form for a "Personalized Demo" aka. sales call.
>For me personally, the hard thing is reading the thoughts of Plato, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, etc. and then trying to understand how we had such amazing thinkers 2000 years ago and that we don't seem to have moved any further at all in the year 2018.

Seems like pretty good evidence that people are deeply flawed, sinful creatures.
The problem with that reasoning is that nearly every language with static typing also has some kind of type inference. You'll just wind up with a bunch of autos/vars.
I'm glad this issue is getting some attention. I found the "Exceptions are not exceptional" section to capture something I've noticed several times — that code in Python can fail at a huge number of points even in a small function, nevermind the many exceptions that might happen in nested functions, or code we're using from libraries.

We should have language-level mechanisms for being explicit about what's supposed to happen when unexpected situations happen.
Seconded. It's fair to say that almost any imaginable task involving mainly text - including many UIs - could be done better in Emacs.

For instance, for my freelancing I track both tasks and time spent in Org Mode. I wrote myself a little bit of Elisp that, when invoked with the name of a customer, turns my Org Mode agenda into a table with line items for an invoice. I've been copying that into my invoice LaTeX template for a while, but recently I've been working on finishing the Elisp code: the end goal is to have a three-step process:

1) Press a key to generate a table with invoice line items and another with all other data that goes into the invoice.

2) Review the table, adjusting as necessary (e.g. rounding off stray minutes).

3) Press a key for Emacs to take these tables, fill a LaTeX template according to their contents, generate an invoice and file it in appropriate location.

At this point I have 1) and 2) fully working, and 3) missing only the "fill template" and "refile result" steps, which are rather trivial to add.

I'll release this publicly when I'm done. The current solution is somewhat specific to invoicing for services according to my country's regulations, but it shouldn't be too hard to make it universal (I'd love some help here, especially in form of examples of invoices for other countries).

Did I spend more time on it that I would if I used a web tool for invoices? Yes. Do I expect to ultimately get ahead on this solution? Maybe. Is it worth it? The interface (read: an org-mode document invoking some elisp) is already more fluid than any web tool I've ever seen, and I don't need to be on-line - so a huge YES!
You shouldn’t rely on your tools protecting you because they won’t.

I do part time work as an external examiner, sometimes for first year CS students, so I get to see a lot of silly code. Like the result of having been tasked with doing Fibonacci recursively. Which, as most of you no doubt are aware, can be done correctly in several different ways. The most basic is to simply implement it with its two base cases and run it until you meet them for every sequence. A more efficient way is to implement it with a way of keeping track of Fibonacci sequences that you have already computed, as to not do them more than once.

Both these ways work perfectly fine within the toolset, one just does it a lot better.
I'm not sure how much we've needed, but so far we've had no issues with 4 and 8 GB. Upgrading that soon though, just in case. :)
I couldn't agree with your post more if I tried.

The first time I ran a static analyser over an old codebase of mine it was deeply humbling.

I'm a competent programmer who works deliberately and carefully and the tool still went "did you really mean to do this stupid thing?".

Of course sometimes you do mean to do stupid thing because there is a good reason for it and as long as the tool gives you the ability to say // @allow-stupid-thing: punch-myself-in-face it's all good.

Since then I throw as many linters, formatters and static analyses tools as I can reasonably get my hands on at every codebase.
Internalize profits, externalize costs.
Cryptocurrencies doesn't remove all trust. It's about removing trust in third parties to send and receive transactions. That's it. And that's a big deal.

> Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless.

Honestly, he makes some good points but this is ignorant.

For example:

* Uncensorable donations to wikileaks

* Avoid having PayPal or other payment processors freeze your merchant account for X months, on a whim

* Avoid the risk of charge back fraud for online payments

* Ability for weed shops and porn sites to accept digital payments

* Fleeing Venezuela with your wealth intact

* Send money to and from countries where no banks or western union operate.

* Financial privacy for everyone not just the ultra rich (lookup Monero before commenting)

Cryptocurrencies have some very good features.

There are issues of course, but how can you claim all these are useless?

> For bitcoin, that's the cost of the additional bitcoin mined

No, that's the cost of securing the network to prevent double spends.