skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Taking the approach of a scientist, i.e. a data scientist, this is a hard problem to solve. Not only does Facebook have to implement the simple user.delete.all.data(), but think about the number of internal products that are machine learning based. In order to preserve the usefulness of those models and the hundreds of millions in R&D spent to develop them, you have to carefully understand exactly what products and algos will be affected by just deleting a single record.

This is not a science problem and it is not hard to solve: a scientist would delete the data and re-derive their models because they want the best data possible. This is how you "preserve the usefulness of those models," by ensuring that the data has integrity.

facebook has to figure out a way to understand exactly how thousands of records per user, being deleted, will affect it's models.

This is looking through the telescope backwards. You create your models with the data that you have, and if some data is removed then you regenerate.

You can bet your ass they groom their data after detecting stuff like new botnets and fake clicks, and individual user data does not have to be different.

That is an entire community and classification of people that facebook has to figure out how to reconcile the loss of data for, and fix its machine learning models

Again, they already know how to do this, and they do it all the time. There are no nuances to it outside of roadblocks installed by FB themselves.

It's 110% a business problem, and 110% Zuckerberg's choice to make it difficult, and to invent difficulties in bringing it about.
Stories of Financial Windfalls
Aren't all the Windows ARM devices locked down? Can users purchase and install their own copies of Windows on a non-MS-affiliated piece of hardware?

That's a requirement for Bootcamp, unless Apple strikes some special deal with MS, and I don't foresee that happening.

Also, the software ecosystem for Windows on ARM still isn't great. There's an emulator built into the OS, but it's an emulator.
The purpose of an H1B visa is to bring in "foreign workers in specialty occupations" (engineers, architects, etc), not foreign workers that are able to command a very high salary (e.g. CEOs).

Sometimes foreign workers are able to negotiate an above average salary, sometimes they can't, because the company has a very high reputation or access to unique resources and uses that as leverage (for example, NASA, Harvard, etc).

Most likely, they'll get an average salary in exchange for being able to work at the company in a first world country, so they'll be able to afford whatever the 'local' Americans are able to afford in the area. Can your average American afford a 4 bedroom house and 6 children in 2019?

That's the real deal that's being sent in a Word document requiring your signature. Yes, you don't have to accept the deal, but the US government doesn't have to prevent spouses from seeking employment either, causing more issues for the immigrant families.

Which one of these 2 options benefits the US more?
I seem to remember some colleagues once getting performance problems because V8 didn't optimize switch-cases with more than 512(?) cases. Which was easily solved by adding an "if", splitting the table into two, until V8 removed or raised that limit.
> "Privacy" is taking a new meaning in today's world than what it would have been understood to mean previously.

Try to imagine the most personal and private thing about a person, what would it be? Their medical and biological information, of course! In the future we'll be able to look at 3d renders of our body systems, see real-time health statistics, and be able to discover our ailments near instantaneously.

Now, who else should have this data? In my opinion, only the doctor. Definitely not the government, and definitely not my neighbors. Possibly some businesses for product development. Possibly medical researchers, for educational advancement.
Code Complete is a great book that thankfully my first boss required me to read when he hired me but I personally feel that Clean Code covers most of the same and is an easier read. Just my two cents thought.
One would assume this to also be the case for apple. I definitely would not call them a "medium" company.
Odin Language
SpaceIL Use of Gravity to Get Free Moon Fuel
My New Single “Yogi”
> I think most uses can be solved by a simple database hosted by a trusted authority

People say this in every blockchain related thing that pops up on HN but it excludes literally the only legitimate use case for a blockchain. That being the scenario where you don't have or don't want to rely on a trusted authority.
For people reading this article and immediately passing judgements on Facebook, do remember that other networks/SDKs including Google, Applovin, Appsflyer - all capture the same information from the app which WSJ is reporting here. Of course, it makes the narrative softer if you blame all tech companies vs. their favorite whipping candidate (which is Facebook) these days.

Here is a question to consider. If Facebook doesn't do this and all other companies do and use that data for optimization and measurement purposes, won't FB unilaterally lose out? The solution is either no one does it or everyone does it. There is no in between.
Pact: Automatic Formal Verification for Smart Contracts
I'd suggest reading the book The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahamsa Yogananda.

Don't worry, it's not about yoga in the western (posture) sense. Yoga means union.

It's about realizing your "true self" as a tiny fragment of the greater whole. Like a water drop merging with the vast ocean.

Fun fact:

Steve Jobs instructed everyone at his funeral to receive this book as his final gift...
It's already hard to do on an AMD processor, but yeah, this is going to be so much worse.
A large issue with this is that like the DARPA ALIAS project[1], and another project which I do not have a reference to but saw a demonstration of last year which made a traditional helicopter autonomous with just a bolt on avionics box, it is entirely possible to have "manned" systems that are made autonomous with a bolt on. This means that any country could develop autonomous warfare systems entirely in secret and then convert everything to unmanned overnight just before an attack.

You can't see software.

[1]: http://www.aurora.aero/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/ALIAS-Broc...

Edit, found a reference for the autonomous helicopter:

https://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=103769
>A trusted authority with legal obligations of honesty.

It doesn't even need to be that trusted. You can stipulate in the contract that they must stream the log to you and then scream bloody murder if they try to monkey with anything. A blockchain is just a trendy write-ahead-log.

You could do this on pretty much any database I know of, but it's a kind of dumb idea.
You can get sneak-peeks on Stephen's twitch livestreams (he's been doing design reviews live for a while now, including a lot of the v12 functionality). twitch.tv/stephen_wolfram (also on Wolfram's youtube channel for archives).
He tweeted Monday about burning down bugs for v12, if you follow the extrapolation, a good guess would be release of v12 in late March to early April (assuming there are no killer bugs left)
That I agree with. I've seen some pretty interesting proposals for on-chain games.

But it still adds new problems. Electricity use, the irrecoverability of data/auth if you lose a key, the inability to erase problematic data.
> In other words, anything illegal.

It seems to me this could mean both:

1. Allowing illegal activity. (Eg when legal system can’t be used because the action in question is illegal).

2. Preventing illegal activity (Eg when legal system can’t be used because of difficulties to verify and/or execute).
This probably is my own problem but I totally hate threadless communication for whatever that goes beyond a personal chat for 2 people. IMHO every meaningful collaboration needs threads.
Well in many other countries the mass shootings are done by the government, make these shootings pale in comparison and don't get reported in these kinds of anti-gun articles. Also...this list is nothing compared to the bombings worldwide that kill boatloads of people. It also only attempts to show one side of the coin; the other side being how many people in the world are saved by the responsible use of guns.
> I don't trust them

Go with your gut
I have been concerned about occupying a similar space myself. The great secret that we all do well to remember is that being humble is simply a matter of practicing being humble. In particular, when I treat other team members as experts in what they do, and trust that they'll value me for whatever it is that I do, I become much more efficient, and feel more relaxed too. Yes, there are still times that I notice myself acting vain, but these days a few slow, grounding breaths goes a long way toward resetting me.

In fact, I wonder if the narcissism you speak of might have more to do with insecurity, deep down. In my experience, when I see myself taking a behavior that I consciously am against, the cause tends to be emotional and the solution tends to be to gently, curiously observe those situations and start questioning how I feel. When I love and take care of my emotional world, it becomes way easier to interact in a way I feel is more optimal on the fly.
> That's bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test "at home" (and by "at home" I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment).

I know lots of developers who work on macOS, and deploy to Linux. Back when Mac was PowerPC, I knew lots of developers who worked on PowerPC, and deployed to x86. Or worked on 32-bit, and deployed to 64-bit. Or worked on single-core, and deployed to multi-core. Or green threads to kernel threads. Or big RAM to small RAM. Or the opposite of all of these.

This disaster he anticipates just doesn't seem to be a problem in practice. It's nice when your server is exactly the same as your workstation, but it's never been required. Even today, I have x86-64 on my desk and x86-64 on my server, but they're not the same CPUs, and they don't have the same features (or core count, or RAM, or OS, or ...).

> Which in turn means that cloud providers will end up making more money from their x86 side, which means that they'll prioritize it, and any ARM offerings will be secondary and probably relegated to the mindless dregs (maybe front-end, maybe just static html, that kind of stuff).

Are databases also "mindless dregs"? There's a lot of Postgres/MySQL/Mongo/... instances out there, and even if you're worried about the costs of porting, you only need to port those once (which AFAICT is already done for all of the major ones).

If my database service told me they could cut my price by moving my Postgres instance to ARM, I'd click that button in a heartbeat. I have zero fear that anything would be fishy due to it being a different architecture than my workstation.

> Do you really not understand? This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is literally what happened, and what killed all the RISC vendors, and made x86 be the undisputed king of the hill of servers, to the point where everybody else is just a rounding error.

I've worked with many companies, and in every case, going with x86 was 100% because of price. We didn't avoid SPARC or POWER or Itanium servers because of endianness or any other technical reason. It was just a lot more expensive.

Likewise, we switched the servers to 64-bit when it was cost effective, not at the same time that our workstations switched.
I used to like Redis, because of its simplicity. But these days it is growing so complex, with so many distributed algorithms being implemented, that I'd much rather use FoundationDB, which at least has the benefit of being extensively tested (in fact it was written test-first) and provides a full distributed database with transactions.

I think there would be value in a "simple Redis": a well-maintained tool for a certain class of problems which do not require a distributed database.
The book is specifically written around the Idris language, so some aspects would not work in most other languages. If you are willing to accept the loss of tooling, you can apply the development practice but you lose a lot. With Idris, a partial program is still verifiable even if not executable. Compared to an incomplete C program.

A particular quality of Idris is the ability to leave "holes" in programs. That is, if I don't know what's going to happen in this function, I can leave a hole:

main : IO ()
main = putStrLn ?greeting

I can then extract that hole into a new function and develop its particular capabilities. This will type check. Idris understands that ?greeting must be a string (or something which will produce a string).

If you have some experience with Haskell or SML or OCaml, it's not too hard to pick up the language (particularly the first). It'll look and behave very similarly to what you've seen before. If you aren't familiar with them, you'll be learning a whole new language, but the book is a good introduction to the language and the concepts the language introduces.
Sociopaths lie, I am tired of captive agencies giving these criminal rackets free reign. Put him in prison now for ordering the theft of billions of contact info right of cellphones.

If some teenager goes to prison for hacking NASA, Zuck, Sandberg, the senior execs, the direct managers and engineers involved in this all belong in prison too.
It goes further back than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula
How long is a piece of string?

Have you spent your 13 years aping the legacy code and doing no personal development? The books will almost certainly help. Have you taken advantage of those 13 years to make yourself the best CRUD programmer you can be? You've probably read these books already.
F# comes from ML by way of OCaml.
Touch friendly is mouse friendly.

We've known about Fitz's Law since the dawn of the GUI and have decades of study on it. It's not any more efficient to need to "headshot" everything you need in an application 100% of the time, and in fact it is often rather the opposite that it gets in the way of actual efficiency.

Mousing through most "mobile" applications is great, whether "first class" or not.

Desktop and mobile OSes don't need to remain separate, and it's really past time that a lot of super-cramped "desktop apps" got the death they deserved for their decades old RSI problems, accessibility issues, and garbage UX.
First of all, no. Global, trustless coordination is a hard problem and is not necessarily illegal.

Second, legality is subjective around the world. It is currently illegal in the US to gamble online, for some reason, even though casinos and lotteries are a thing.

It is illegal in many countries to transfer a certain amount of money out of the country, for some reason.

Certain sexualities are illegal in quite a few countries.

Illegal != bad
Exactly. Not every issue where you have a fuzzy notion of trust is a legal one.
More possible states, more possible errors.
The New Digital Eyes in the Frozen Food Aisle
http://westby.io/

I just have a few posts right now, mostly related to climbing. Hoping to update the site and write more this year.
The problem likely results from:

var i = someFunctionWithANonObviousReturnType();

Type inference may be easy when the left-hand side is a literal, but that's often not the case. And when the left-hand side isn't a literal, it definitely optimizes writing code at the expense of reading code. You can argue that IDEs should be helping us by show us the type when we mouse over or auto-completing available methods on the variable's type, but there are situations (code review, pair programming, etc) where we can't rely on tooling to help in this regard. I get why people like type inference and I use languages that have it on a daily basis, but I've also realized that I need to adapt my coding style to it or I'll end up with code that's difficult to read. In particular, I'm constantly considering whether the code I'm writing is understandable using local reasoning only and that I'm not forcing a reader of my code (who's likely to be me several months from now) to jump to some declaration somewhere else in the code.
Counter example: De Beers.
Because they're fixing some other problem they want to work on. Not the problem they actually have. They know it.
Off-topic: this post, like other posts on the author's blog, is written in Markdown. But rendered inside <pre> tags. Seems a little odd considering the site also uses regular Serif fonts for the title / meta.
The margins are not as huge as you imply. The engines are sold at a loss, with profit only being made up later in maintenance. If the airlines want to cut in on that business, they should be prepared to pay a lot more for the engines.
>To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain.

The comment above says that the blockchain provides a satisfactory answer to enforcement of contracts. People really do seem to think that contracts made on the blockchain will magically enforce themselves in the real world.
My version of #9 I'm dealing with is: Is this an feature that a customer will use? Or is it internal improvement? Yes to first, no to latter.
The long, relative peace on the Korean peninsula has persisted despite a massive manpower advantage by the North. The presence of hard defensive positions augmented by landmines and autonomous sentry guns allows South Korea to deter Northern aggression without having to keep up with North Korea's punishing and impoverishing level of military spending.

Like any weapon, robotic weapons are only a problem if you use them for evil.
Agreed 100% on AgentJayZ
Ask HN: Are You Interested in a Space Startup & Science Email Newsletter?
Hey HN! I'm planning to start a short weekly email newsletter with a selection of space science updates, aerospace startup news, DIY space stuff (ground stations, cubesats, simulation software, etc.), and other geeky space content that I found interesting during the week.

Would this interest you? If so, what specific topics would you most like to hear about?

I'm planning to send out a first edition next week. If you're interested, here's a signup form: https://goo.gl/forms/uGi2AL7ELpJK86bx2
Has redis broken any of the "simple" features? I don't use it that intensively, but always got the impression that most new things are optional and easily ignored.
Startup Trends and Predictions to Watch Closely in 2019
If I had the time (and I probably would because I consider it important), I would just go down the rabbit hole and explain the internet in the simplest terms possible. You press some buttons and other people around the world see the buttons you pushed and they press some buttons and you can see them too. With every new inevitable question, just keep explaining in terms the child is able to understand, and keep going until one gets tired of it. You can then say it's enough for then and you can continue some other time.

I consider curiosity in a child to be a valuable resource to nurture. If you make it a positive experience for the child, he'll want to do it again. Careful not to appear annoyed, because then, as it resulted in a negative experience, the child will know to avoid doing such things in the future.
Than you for this explanation - it helped me understand why I tend to enjoy and get more out of books of this nature. I've liked Gladwell's books, at least the ones I've read. Deep Work by Cal Newport is another book that is frequently characterized as being "an article unnecessarily expanded into a book by padding it out with redundant examples", but I really loved that book as well. Done properly, the repeated examples and stories help reinforce the idea and provide different contexts and viewpoints of the same core concept.

Thanks to you, I'll no longer feel nerd guilt for thinking highly of books like this :)
> Most people who are even a little bit serious about working/investing in crypto, are well aware of this

Not really sure how you can back up this claim. After hundreds of interacts with blockchain enthusiasts, I have observed that most of them subscribe to at least one of false use cases listed in the article, especially #7 and very often #1-3 and #6 as well.
> My concern is that they will work just fine: this would bring the domestic costs of warfare to near-zero

As an adjunct viewpoint to this - what happens when such weapons are available to regular people?

In theory, that's possible today; witness the number of instructables and other similar projects detailing how to create a nerf or paintball automated tracking gun system. It wouldn't take much to upgrade that to mount it on a decent mobile platform with a real weapon.

Right now, the objective or use-case for such a device isn't clear, so we haven't seen criminals build or use them, beyond perhaps drug trafficking via consumer drones and similar.

I'm sure, though, that it is going to be a problem in the future...
Here's something I don't quite understand, and where some of this feels a little hypocritical: Apple, the most valuable company in the world, could be working to reform patent law in order to make this a non-issue. Everyone talks about US politics as pay-to-play, it should be possible for Apple, Google, MS, Amazon, etc., to lobby for Software Patents, for example, to be reclassified as "math" and therefor not patentable. If they're actively doing that, then I'm not aware of it. If US policy can be bought and sold as we are led to believe (maybe this is actually a false premise) then you'd think the most valuable companies in the world would be able to change it.

What this implies to me, is that they want the existing patent system to work in their favor, i.e. to protect their monopolies against new competitors, but they don't want to deal with the downside of the patent troll abuse.

Don't get me wrong, I'm aware of the documented corruption of the court in Texas, and I think it's abhorrent, along with all the trolls, but this feels like a situation where Apple wants it's cake and to eat it too. Shouldn't we just do away with software patents all together and instead rely on copyright law?
Shameless plug: https://datasciencetexts.com/ is a list of books related to data science that you all might enjoy!
This is done explicitly, for the reader to have the same feeling as opening a Markdown file with vim or Emacs.
Or even in the first world, where you don't want the expense, paperwork, time, of having to deal with the legal system.
> Are you saving it for later? (I joke, but your "common sense" assertion seems like a total non-sequitur to me.)

Hilarious.

> He told them, it's right there in the lawsuit.

No, he told them after they attempted to contact him. That's not requesting in advance.

> He had the day off to begin with

Clearly he didn't. Even he says all this managers employees were emailed with the expectation they'd be available via email on weekends. That's horrible and a place I'd never work. But that's not illegal.

> Normally you don't have to work during "time off".

It's not "time off" if they obligate people to be available. It's permanent on-call.

> The company is liable because they fired him rather than make reasonable accommodations as required by law.

And their argument is going to be he didn't request reasonable accommodations because they weren't requested in a reasonable time frame. If he had a request a week in advance this wouldn't even be conversation.
Nature Yanks Article That Was Advertisement on Controversial Stem Cells
This is actually what I love about redis. They added clustering, obviously a massive feature, in 3-4 and you could totally ignore it if you wanted to, while still receiving the stability and speed increases without changing much of anything.
This is not the case with Delta. Delta techops is one of the world's largest airplane repair organizations