skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks neat!

Would it be possible to show off a demo with an existing data set? On initial viewing the page I'll admit I have no idea what this is for or what I should do.

When I upload the demo CSV I was confused because I only saw a table. I almost closed the page but scrolled to the very bottom, then saw a tool involving pivots, but wasn't sure how to use it.

If you add a headline and short blurb about what this tool does, then show a demo with an active data set showing how it solves the problem outlined in your headline, I think it'd be a pretty nice landing page!

Cheers.
> Is it because of bad laws?

No, it's because of the good laws. Taxation is theft.

And it's not called tax evasion but tax planning. No one is obliged to pay more than the minimum.
First things first. What do we mean by "ethical"?
What's even worse, ethics vary from culture to culture and tend to change over time.
> Just wanted to give OP a tip.

Without providing any actionable information, that tip sounds more like a brag.
The basic unit of information for a human being is a story, not a number or a fact. So it doesn't surprise me that we're obsessed with something as trivial as how Elon Musk's $1/day diet shaped him into an entrepreneur[1].

I don't think it's a bad thing to have a vague awareness of the things that make people successful: unafraid of failure, hard work & dedication, true passion about what you're creating.

But I think it does actively hurt you if you overfit what causes success, because you focus way to much on getting the little things right that you miss the big picture.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
"There are two kinds of overkill: the sort of overkill that lets you write Gameboy emulators, or Enterprise overkill; the sort of overkill that’s only bloat. I have no patience for useless things."
For anyone that hasn't seen the ground abort test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8

It's pretty rocking.
> How often do you look at some code and think "an idiot wrote this", and then realise you're looking at your own code?

Every single day. I am my own worst enemy.
Or thread pool size...
I can sell services domestically up to a limit of about 40,000 euros before I need to register and account for VAT. If I make even a single EU sale, I must immediately register for VAT and pay tax on that sale, either through MOSS or directly to the country my customer is in. The EU is now "generously" considering introducing a limit of 10,000 euros before you need to register for VAT.

I also need to disagree with the parent poster - the rules for what is and is not a digital service are relatively clear - but not clear enough that your local tax officials understand it, apparently. I've had situation where my local tax agency incorrectly interpreted that my services (freelance software development) could be construed as being digital services and thus could fall under this scheme.

Due to this and various other reasons, I am considering emigrating from Europe - some back of the napkin calculations show that I could live a comfortable middle to upper middle class lifestyle in other parts of the world just on the tax difference.
> Curcumin caused higher rate of clearance (81.3%) than placebo though the difference was not statistically significant.
npm (and yarn) literally does exactly all of this, via `npm init funkyproject` and `package-lock.json`.
Loved Dune, nice reference.
Exit-vim: Vim plugin that exits Vim on startup
The fine print around who actually needs to pay. A very simple example - say you sell online courses. Should you register for VAT?
>completely unambiguous to anyone familiar with hooks's work.

That's a shamefully low bar for clarity in newspaper copy editing.
It depends, I am over a year in Rust and it doesn't take me that much longer to write something in it than say in Python. The confidence I have that the thing I wrote is way higher in Rust and it is usually much faster.

And: it is incredible easy to build and deploy.

I think whether Rust is useful or not depends entirely on the application. If you need high confidence in what the thing is doing, it should run parallel and fast and you are familiar with the concepts Rust is using – it isn't a bad choice. For me it replaced Python in nearly every domain except one-use scripts and scientific stuff.

It can be hard for advanced programmers to abandon certain patterns they bring from other languages though. In the first months I tried too much to use OOP, which doesn't make any sense and leads to convoluted code. If you work more in a compositional and data oriented way while making use of Types and Traits, you will end up with much simpler solutions that work incredibly well.

Katherine West's RustConf 2018 Talk on ECS Systems describes this incredibly well and might be even good to watch if you are never intending to use Rust at all, because the patterns discussed are quite universal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKLntZcp27M
Thanks for the feedback. At this stage the goal is purely to dabble in FP with "Advent of Code" style mini-programs, and basically opening my developer chakras.

An added benefit would be to use this new language at work, which means that the size of the ecosystem (3rd-party modules, frameworks, etc.) can be a factor - one in which I guess OCaml is behind F# and Reason?
It is pretty clear to any regular Java developer that bothers to keep up with the news.

Regression tests are required for any toolchain.
Surprised the English stack exchange doesn't reference the OED that often.
Honestly just using strict data structures (one StrictData pragma will do) and strict accumulators in recursive functions will get you there, it's not that hard.
Facebook's War on Hate Speech
Ruthlessly efficient AI is the next "big stick". Nuclear weapons brought us relatively close to world peace (after burning up hundreds of thousands of people and scaring the whole world shitless) maybe ruthless AI can do the same. I'm not particularly eager to see what an AI arms race and cold war looks like though.

Things are decent enough right now, it could be a lot worse; do the upsides of creating ruthless AI justify the risks? Is it an eventuality anyway? At this stage could we conceivably prevent it?
> If ethics could be codified I think we'd have one ruleset everyone agrees on.

People want to deeply believe this as true. I find it false because I see free will as an illusion. Majority of people think free will exists. Agreement on ethics cannot exist with this conflict because it inherently effects morality.
And if you compare to anything but a handful of recent decades, you not only can afford to buy pretty much anything that only the very richest have had access to, you can easily buy things that even the richest have hardly even dreamed of. And yes, still most people find their lives pretty underwhelming.
All these things emacs does, and yet is still a sub-par text editor.
I'd be thinking about the next version. How could that next version be leveraged to require an always connected model? E.g. is there an iOS version that needs cloud sync or is it possible to generate a subscription model?

IMO, non-techies are generally in tune and generally accept that there should be an iOS app for the software and aren't adverse to sub models given the plethora of other things they do. In fact, some might see it as a negative for the tool to not be iOS based and have cloud-type presence.
We’re they taking the psychedelics with the intention of trying to quit smoking, or just to get loaded and have a weird night? If it’s the latter, I wouldn’t expect any change in smoking status, outside of a chance epiphany about what it does to the body.

There’s the idea of “set” and “setting” for psychedelic use. A (mind)set of “party time!” and a setting of “party time!” is unlikely to be effective in the way that a set of “i want to quit smoking” and a setting of “quiet, safe surroundings” would be.

Intention and preparation matter with these drugs—though they’re apparently no guarantee either.
IIRC, under EU VAT regs Google Ireland will charge and remit French VAT rates to the French treasury for digital content sold to consumers in France, so there's no imbalance there.

The big issue is that digital services, particularly advertising, are so insanely profitable that most governments would also like to get their hands on a proportion of the profits accruing from sales of digital services in their country. They see the fact that Ireland / Luxembourg are able to book all the profit in one jurisdiction as unfair. There's probably not a huge likelihood of that happening any time soon at an EU level, so France has gone with the next best option from their POV.

(Tax avoidance strategies that allow a large multinational to not pay much tax to their host country is a different kettle of fish, since most of the benefit of tackling those would probably accrue to the country of incorporation not France - e.g. the Apple settlement)
Docker-Izing Your Go Applications and Deploying Them to DigitalOcean
I thought the going rate for falcon 9 reusable launches was $60 million a flight. With 7 astronauts shouldn't that work out to $8.5 million per astronaut? That's not accounting for the cost of the crew dragon, but I'd be surprised if that increases the cost by an order of magnitude
>> Sounds pretty great to me.

I see. Do you mind spending another 5 and tell the answer to this question: suppose someone sells online courses. And they don't themselves reside in the EU, but the have customers who do. Should they register for VAT?
Only if deployed in production, and there's nothing hard to understand it.
The question was what people should do, not how viable that is. It is up to the voters and the legislature to establish a society where doing what should be done is possible.

I agree that people shouldn't be blamed for looking out for their own needs first (within limits - when billionaires use underhanded tactics to expand their empires, they certainly should be blamed). But I also think working only for your own self-interest shouldn't be idealized, as is more and more the case in the US.

As for which country I live in - one where people are taxed based on their income (from each according to their abilities), and that money is used mostly to fund things for the common good, such as medical care, education, and a social safety net (to each according to their needs). The degree of this transfer is greater than in the US, but that's just it - it's only a matter of degree.
Anyone knows if they considered .NET Core? It has dependency management, can be deployed as a self-contained binary and is memory safe. Seems to match the requirements for me.
Make cash / ad hoc tax free. Want to avoid tax? Buy used!
This type of thinking is exactly why I stay away from the developer communities of Rust and Julia. Both communities seem to have this weird perception that their respective language categorically supersedes other tools in all use cases.

Don’t get me wrong. Rust and Julia are very cool languages with a lot of use cases where they are great choices. But the communities come off as disproportionately full of zealots, which makes me less interested to put effort into yoking real projects to either of those communities.
Does an AI (as we have them now)? If I give someone a paper and say "wait a day then follow these instructions", I'm making the decisions, not them, even if the paper has branching logic like "if it's morning, call Alice but if it's afternoon call Bob."
I inherited a well-unit tested JS MVC frontend written with classes using Resig's Simple JavaScript Inheritance and jQuery, it pretty much looks like modern React code with Pythonic style to match Python backend (self=this everywhere, snake-case etc), but written in 2009. Currently in process of migrating it to vanilla TypeScript with very few difficulties so far. A few months later and I could have be dealing with a coffeescript POC.

On the other hand I also inherited an angularjs frontend written by an ape.
Hardly any different that having to use VTune or perf to optimise C and C++, which require the added steps of recompiling with different flags and redemploying.
Wow, thank you for reminding me, I have ice-cream in the fridge. :)

Joke aside, you can only do that if you are alone. I agree in principle, but in a family setting you need to find other changes to routine that result in less food being eaten by you.
This is a great summation, and could well be one of the great quotes of software engineering.
I have very high levels of empathy for others, but without a viable alternative I am willing to accept the current system. I would be happy to see it improved. The European model for justice doesn’t work either. Crimes are simply not prosecuted.
Do you mean Absolut or “absolute alcohol”? Seems odd that if it’s the former you’d buy so much and still misspell it.
If it’s the latter you should surely not be able to tell the tale.
On reflection, maybe I can answer my own question (but tell me if I'm wrong):

The EU rules demands that, in the market for beer (or trains or spyware) sold in France, the French govt. cannot favor French companies over Irish companies. The buyer must be free to buy from any of them on equal terms.

But it does not demand that the market for goods sold in Dublin is identical to the market for goods sold in Paris. Hence the VAT rates may differ, as may other more narrowly focused taxes, like on alcohol, or hotels. This tax is one more like that. A sin tax on spyware.

Edit: There remains the issue of deciding where a sale took place. Alcohol to be drunk in Paris has to be physically in Paris (even if the sin tax is collected long before the final sale), but an advertisement shown in Paris could have been bought by a company elsewhere. Why can't every French ad agency open a one-man office in Dublin to avoid this?
Does every language have to be suitable for every task? “Operating a business-logic-embedding CDN at scale” isn’t ever something Node claimed to be capable of. I wouldn’t expect any other dynamic runtime-garbage-collected language, e.g. Ruby or Python or PHP, to be suited to that use-case either.

Use the right tool for the job. The PHP website is running PHP, but it isn’t running a web server written in PHP. Web servers are system software; PHP isn’t for writing system software. Same thing applies here. Node does fine with business logic, but isn’t really architecturally suited to serving the “data layer” when you have control/data separation.
To play devil's advocate: The primary function of a manager is to say "No". As one goes higher and higher up the hierarchy, one has to say "No" to pushier and pushier subordinates, and the cost of every misplaced "Yes" is higher and higher. While leaders just under the CEO may understand the firm situation just fine, they may also be unable to say "No" to enough bad ideas for a myriad reasons, including lack of political clout with other leaders, with investors or with peer CEOs.
I can't find anywhere online where it says what his job was. I'm really curious how he financed these adventures.

Now that I think about it, doing the amazing and interesting things are so anomalous, that one could probably make a bit of money doing them. Maybe that's why vloggers are so successful. Talk about having your cake and eating it too.
Empathise with that. What other things do you do for fun?
Also important is that both Government and Industry are often intentionally unethical such that neither would actually want ethical AI to be the standard.

* You can't ethically undermine a democratically elected government for a dictator who will better fit your economic interests.

* You can't ethically avoid health and privacy laws just enough that you make more irregardless of legal fees.

* You can't ethically discriminate hiring efforts based on race and gender.

* You can't ethically discriminate against employees with families.
I'm not a fan of relying on distro package managers for installation of runtime dependencies on servers. Too many opportunites for variables to creep in if the version isn't locked, and then having to make sure all the package manager dependencies and config themselves. Even if you automate you're still at the mercy of the repo to have the version you need etc. and often times you need to customize the install for a highly-available and/or virtualized environment. Bad times all around.
It's mainly different enough so that an experienced Vim user is forced to relearn keybindings and habits while also searching for plugins able to replace the ones in Vim.

Also Emacs cannot be 100% Vim compatible because their control schemes are so different, example: The cursed Esc key which doesn't work properly even in Spacemacs. There's a huge difference between Emacs with some Vim commands and Vim with Emacs functionality.

So, I'm staying with Vim and if others prefer Emacs that's fine too.
I always figured to be an effective leader requires knowing your product. For software companies that means working in their field so you understand the tech or problem area then can make better decisions. You can complement your leadership by getting an MBA which rounds out the rough edges of business.

Career MBAs who have no experience of the area of the business are red flags in my experience. It's like a manager who isn't technical. They make wrong decisions by themselves or listen to the wrong people.
When you say normal product, do you mean users will have to buy the next version?

We should be responsible developers with the ability to patch insecurities in the software we sell. You're also going to have feature requests you'd like to publish to your users. As a sole developer one evergreen version seems much easier to maintain for both these concerns. And I think a subscription model or some recurring payment model makes more sense both for you and your users. Explaining this to your users maybe difficult, but if they actually find a product useful they should want the developer behind it to be able to support it.
Thanks, I'll have a look at F# syntax to see if it resonates. Is there a tutorial or (text)book you would recommend to get started?

> in a world where python is taking over, f# is very refreshing.

Can you elaborate? I happen to like Python but I'm always open for refreshments :D
Is This Media?
Is it git hooks that run a linter before push?
But what if the people 'engaged' in the selling of the cars are only tenuously engaged in the activity and are simply trying to game the law and rack up paper losses?

All the car buying and selling is racked up by agents working on their behalf and they pay absolutely no heed to buying a selling cars?

http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/hm-revenue-customs-hmrc/pressre...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/feb/21/chris-moyles-u...
The weird part is how obvious this seems. Obviously, the things we have don't make us significantly happier. But if we lived our lives with this simple assumption, our lives would look infinitely different.
OVH are amateurs compared to Amazon and Microsoft.
Genetic changes linked to autism now connected to other psychiatric disorders
> On the other hand, the really quite high threshold might well be subject to complaints on the basis of distorting the single market.

It probably should, but this is certainly not the first time a EU member country has tried (and gotten away with!) protectionism. Some other examples are stricter safety/quality standards that only (surprise!) local businesses' meet and government guarantee of private company debt (I have no idea how this is legal).
Nothing. But what about when said farmer buys Farm AI 2.0 that also optimizes the livestock side of his farm. The AI has determined it's more efficient to pack cubes into a barn than keep them out in the pasture (the cubes contain chickens or pigs). Now the farmer upgrades to Farm AI 3.0 which also optimizes the business side of his farm. And it decides to fire a bunch of farm hands, perhaps replacing them with cheaper robots or aliens. The farmer sips his lemonade, absolved of guilt for the decisions the AI has made.
That framing only captures half of the truth though. The quality a gun has that a blanket does not is to enable adversarial actions. So yes, the technology of the gun does enable unethical actions like point-and-click murder. But it also enables individuals and smaller groups to defend themselves against aggressors, which most people would consider ethical.

I'm not disagreeing with the idea that "artifacts have politics" [0], but rather pointing out that focusing solely on the negative actions enabled by guns is fallacious. In fact, the development of firearms is historically seen as having democratized power. It's just that most of what we consider the positive effects have been incorporated into the framework of our society, while we continue trying to diminish the negative ones.

Now having said that, so far "AI" (really ML) is primarily being wielded by large centralized entities against individuals. A less-equipped defending army does not particularly benefit from having a few drones with facial recognition, as their human soldiers are under attack regardless. Whereas it does enable a much larger conquering army to further insulate itself from the results of war.

Even relatively benign uses like voice recognition or recommendations have become excuses to retain large surveillance datasets on our entire society, and to shape the development so results favor large centralizing entities rather than their supposed users - eg the common engagement metric of "human time wasted".

But are the ethical issues the result of "AI" technology itself, or better attributed to the larger system its deployed upon? On the consumer side, I would say that the fundamental ethical problem is that software is not under its users control. If the majority of training sets were being accumulated voluntarily, with the goal of developing applications that actually helped users, then I think the ethical landscape would look quite different.

[0] If you don't recognize the reference, search it.
I started use evernote for this, but it dawned of me after a while that if evernote went down, all my data, diaries, notes etc etc was to be locked in and I have to start over.

Therefore I'm using org-mode, its just a UTF8 encoded file, even if org-mode disappeared over night, I can still read the data.
Makes me more grateful for law enforcement in general. Women are more likely to be victims of violent crimes.
Instead of giving your data to a third party service, just use umatrix. None of the javascript on the article is necessary to read the article: https://0x0.st/zocK.png
Do you actually believe it and why? To me it looks like a fairly pathetic attempt to damn JavaScript but I'm not sure why anyone who has actually used JS for any length of time would be convinced of its accuracy.

The article is hosted at rust-lang.org so one would be wise to take their words with a grain of salt. And Rust isn't even a tiny fraction as popular as JavaScript and so when you use Rust you're choosing from a small set of packages written by experts and the kind of people who use languages that nobody else really uses. Meanwhile, JS has millions of packages written by everybody for various platforms (since JS can run in all sorts of environments where nobody would ever want to run Rust.)

Also there's the anecdotal, yet easily empirical evidence that just about any developer who uses JS can tell you about: I deploy new JavaScript services all the time without any of those problems.

So, I wonder if you're actually asking this question or if you have some other agenda.