skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is as good a time as ever to point out that it’s a misconception that companies are somehow legally bound to maximize shareholder value at all costs.

Only some juridiction actually have any law to (broadly) that effect. In practice, corporate officers have extremely wide latitude to decide what’s in the long-term interest of the company. That’s why companies can support charities, or not engage in warfare, or innovate in recycling, or taking the lead in privacy, or leave China due to censorship without any legal risk. One can argue that such efforts are in the shareholders‘ interest for PR reasons, but then one has essentially given up the argument, because anything can be framed as an excersize in PR. I have also witnessed countless acts of charity that never became public, such as donating leftover goods or keeping employees in personal crises on the payroll.

The only successful challenge along this line of argumentation I am aware of is Craigslist, and that required the founder to explicitly state their intentions to harm the company for rather esthetic considerations.

A shareholder-above-anything philosophy is also just not good policy. While capitalism has been a stellar success in harnessing selfishness for the common good, that is not evidence to suggest attempts to go beyond-and-above what’s legally required are actively harmful. Capitalism works well because bottom-up decision-making works best. Centrally (top-down) enforcing selfishness is bound to be just as detrimental as Moscow deciding what to plant this spring.
Underscore is very commonly used to signifiy "I don't care about this argument" in Ruby, so at least on it's own it'd be confusing, and _1 is a valid local variable name, so would risk breaking existing code, though I've personally not seen it used, so maybe it'd be an acceptable risk.
What a fantastic talk! Witty, well-paced and truly insightful.

"Operator error is a symptom, not a cause."

Ms. Leveson's book "Engineering a Safer World" has a free PDF download at http://sunnyday.mit.edu/safer-world.pdf
This is very interesting. Especially since other vector engines are either unmaintained (like Antigrain) or extremely hard to build (Skia, Cairo).

I do wonder if these kind of libraries shouldn't be supplanted by hardware accelerated rendering, though.
There were always plenty of forums full of people with only a passing or casual interest. Even outright enormous lunatics - it's just that it always seemed a bit more reasonable overall: Everyone cooperated to not let the place go to shit immediately and the need for huge and unilateral moderator intervention was limited.

I think the large social networks have mostly poisoned a lot of people with harmful memes (the need to shout, weird conspiracy theories, etc) and now that the damage is done it's too late even for the old format. As a society we've moved past being adults online and degenerated straight into childlike behaviour.
Huh... We had a Diamond Viper V330 or something and it was rock solid. Worked fine on everything I threw at it, seemed comparable with a Voodoo 2 in terms of speed/quality. Maybe it was the card vendor rather than the chipset?
Well, thanks a lot, now I have no other choice but to google at least two of those.
I would really love to read more about this, with some examples and antipatterns for small systems
UK, non-government public sector, very senior people still have secretaries - often described as personal assistants. The PAs handle interfacing and information flow, the senior people can get on with the thinking.
Funny site search bug in Safari on iOS 12.2
I agree, but my point was rather that you can't typecheck Pandas (or a similarly complex library). Gradual typing for the win!
Plus they just release it when they die.... that’s not a solution for petroleum and coal based carbon since it was environmentally sequestered before we dug it up.
Ain't that the truth, but he said so at least the once, and now I guess that's how we remember him!
Um, no. I am Russian, and I live in Russia. Whether I like it or not, I hear
the state propaganda every day. I probably should have mentioned that.

Putin and his, erm, colleagues constantly use “multi-polar world” and
“prevention of (implied US-American) hegemony” as a reason for their actions.
This includes the desire to make Russian Rouble one of the world's currencies.

If anyone, I am extremely tired of US-Americans blaming their poor policies on
“The Russians”, but in this case, the possibility of US Dollar losing some of
its value does indeed align with the Kremlin's wants.
I never used a password manager, call me paranoid, but giving my password to a third-party (often not free software) for me is just pure madness.
My second order thinking holds me back in some ways, because when I think of something new, immediately I start thinking of ways why it would not work etc.
The US first gives them cancer and then rushes into to cure it. But all it's got for a cure is snake oil. It makes billion selling that.
Everything I have read says that Saudi Arabia is a major ally of the United States. There is at least one major US military base in Saudi Arabia, and I believe they have quite a lot of US or British military weapons.

In that context what you are saying makes no sense.
NaOH manufacturing is electrolytic just like KOH, and is similarly limited by power generation.

As to why they can't use NaOH, NaOH being a cheaper material does not imply a cheaper process -- reaction rates matter to amortized unit costs. For example, the reaction rate of KOH is almost certainly much higher than the reaction rate of NaOH, which means it requires much less physical plant/material per unit of sequestration throughput. This plant cost savings could easily offset the lower material costs of NaOH. If it actually made sense to use NaOH, the designers of this process would have used it.
awww man those were the days!!
Apple fraus
You seem like you appreciate good timers. If you ever want to revolt in horror/have a few hearty belly laughs, look into how windows has and does handle various granularities of timing
Nuclear energy
Everything you have written applies equally to young folks too.

I was shocked when I discovered how our kid's friends are with tech - youngest is 20 now, and has been messing with computers since 4. Shocked because unlike my parents generation they've all grown up with, and been educated around tech their whole lives. All I have to do to get a significant number of them to believe $conspiracy, or 2+2=7.234 is put it on a convincing looking website. They'll mostly install any and every app that passes under their nose. In the days of FB among the kids, and FB games and surveys, they'd go with every single one of those too... and share, and ping their whole contact list... Before that every drive by popup/malware install...

At least my parents generation had their expectations fixed in the 1930s and 1940s. Receiving something in writing meant something. Honesty and ethics were mostly to be expected. The scams were far more about in-person confidence tricks, or the dodgy tradesman charging for work that's not needed etc. I don't blame some for not adjusting their model to everyone's a spamming scammer. :)

I do blame the youngster's generation. How the hell do they not get it and so glaringly badly?
> There's certainly not a cabal of project managers forcing C++ down peoples' throats. So instead of calling the reasons stupid, why not try to find out what this hidden variable is?

Project managers do still matter. I've had an incredibly hard time convincing my current project manager that pure FP languages will pay off for us and that's even after showing code that abstracts over what we do in other languages in fewer lines and with more extensibility.

I've shown things that are impossible to do without higher-kinded types that solve real issues we've had that have impacted business. I've also shown a lighter version of that relying on phantom types to solve the same problem, in order to show that there are levels to this. The core of the problem lied in ensuring that logged data was anonymized. This is something you can encode in the type system with no runtime overhead so that it's impossible to log something that's not pre-sanitized.

It's very hard to convince someone who's experience extends to Java & JavaScript that there are languages that allow you to more precisely and safely encode business logic in ways that make misuse hard if not impossible. It's even harder to convince those people that the overhead of learning something like PureScript will be amortized by the ease of maintenance that you get out of it.

The main issue, as far as I see it, is that we continually solve all the issues that arise from our lack of good language choices. We've yet to end up in a situation so bad that we can't solve it within a day, which makes our choices "good enough". The "good enough" that you have right before you is better than the seemingly unknown that someone is promising you and no amount of code examples addressing your issues is going to change that.
What if you get a bang on the head and forget how to reconstruct your password.
Best 20 Cold Calling Tips and Tricks for 2019 to Boost B2B Sales Conversions
Does this actually work now? It used to be broken to the point that everyone rolled their own
Peer to peer trading as the next step?
Could the future of trading/commerce be peer-to-peer based?

Using concepts from the Blockchain (and sharing economy) to implement a stable "system", which allows global trading between (anonymous) individuals. Like your NextCloud installation, which allows you to offer and request goods or services.
Drab London office block was GCHQ spy base
I would trust them infinitely more if they could just say we fucked up, sorry, we'll fix it properly, then take a hard look in the mirror, and change.
Sure but we wouldn't go out looking for open doors. If you want me to patrol then you need to pay me.
> it implies that it's all zero sum and there's nothing that's ever unconditionally better or worse than anything else

Not necessarily - to start with, a good trade-off is unconditionally better than a bad trade-off.

Also, progress brings with it increasing complexity. Recognizing the best path includes assessing many more parameters and is far more difficult than deciding whether to use a hammer or a rock to nail things. The puzzling nature of many people to over-complicate things instead of simplifying them makes the challenge even more difficult.

By the way, the closest thing I've ever found to a silver bullet in software development (and basically any endeavor) is "Keep it simple". While this is a cliche already, it is still too often overlooked. I think this is because it isn't related to the ability to be a master at manipulating code and logic, but the ability to focus on what's really important - to know how to discard the trendy for the practical, the adventurous methods to the focused and solid - basically passionately applying occam's razor on every abstraction layer. If this was more common, I think articles like "You are not Google" would be less common.
Im not sure. Simulated observers could also observe the direction of time progression; that orders in the past become irrecoverable to them is a mechanistic result of infinite precision not being preserved from one moment to the next.
A dead planet is orbiting a dead sun in a distant dead solar system
Except you don't. [1,2,3].collect{|x,y,z| ... } is perfectly valid ruby if "..." is an expression that does not blow up when y and z are nil.

Likewise

[[1,2,3]].collect{|x,y| [x,y]}

is perfectly valid even though 3 will not get assigned to anything.

So you're being forced to spell out which arguments you want to be able to reference, which is probably related to what it will get passed, but not required to be.

So if you don't know how many parameters there will be, you're in trouble either way.
Miners weigh in on Ethereum’s future prospects
So the Hungarian healthcare system is in complete shambles, because of lack of funding, drastically severe power imbalances (doctors are scarce so they can do whatever they feel like, and they exploit their privileges, usually they simply ask for money to make up for the aforementioned lack of funds - but then nurses and other staff see almost nothing of these "funds"), and of course enormous lack of efficiency (due to lack of funds, patients wait a lot, travel a lot, and then wait some more, and then the doc doesn't have much time for each patient, so the results/outcomes are not great, many things get overlooked).

GPs get money from our NHS thing (it's called Country Healthcare Treasury), after patient visits and after assigned patients (patients can choose their GP), but they have to bear the fixed costs (leasing an office, scribe, etc). Since the GP system is sort of overloaded, there seems to be enough money for every GP to afford a scribe.

It's much less common in hospitals though.
What is the number one tool a Sales Manager would want?
So it does - though later under "Use on the web", it turns out that it's primarily talking about the BMP, and higher-plane characters will require another file. (It doesn't seem to notice the lack of support for plane-2 CJK at all.)

The article title "Banish the � with Unifont" is also misleading, actually. � is U+FFFD, the REPLACEMENT CHARACTER that typically indicates an encoding error or binary garbage; it's not the same thing as the missing-glyph symbol (often a simple box, though it may vary) that generally appears when font support for a valid character is lacking.
Good RAMDACs cost good money. That's why analog outputs of laptops (those that still have them) are usually crap.
I think that way too. VR and AR are our big step to the brightest future of tech. You know there are some high-tech companies wich have already provides a lot of services to people . I suppose this kind of tech would be improving every day and that's all
Show HN: MNTR – Teach Anything, Learn Anything
I gave up on PHP around 1.8b6 or something like that. However, before mod_perl arrived, I have used Perl to generate PHP code: a minutely cronjob would read the database and generate the PHP code with the right pulldown values from the database. It was the best of 2 worlds: a sane programming language and fast (non-CGI) execution.
This is a fantastic example of my favorite programming technique:

When nothing makes sense and you're real emotional about it and want to give up... GIVE UP!*

*But you have to write another one from scratch tomorrow because there's good odds you'll do it right on accident and will then be able to diff and understand exactly where you went wrong. Being able to identify this situation and when doing this is useful as early as possible will make you very valuable. The break between attempts is important, go do literally anything else besides code.

I once spent a week going in literal circles because of some degree/radian conversion errors. The rewrite took about 15 minutes.

Never trust anyone's ability to count, not even your own.

It's particularly useful in this exact situation, where the differences are mere +'s and -'s, off by one here or there, maybe a bad copy paste with similar looking variable names. Typically math related
Okay, name one country which became rich by unilateral free trade except Hong Kong. I am waiting.
The US-Saudi relationship is much less critical to the US now than it was 15 years ago.

Since the US shale oil revolution, the US is essentially energy independent.

Basically all that is left is that Iran is more poisonous in US politics than Saudi Arabia for reasons that relate to the Iranian revolution and the - moderately reasonable - fears that Israel has of Iran.
I agree with the previous poster that the example given is pretty bad, even if choosing a most trivial case was the goal.

Perhaps it is a good idea to associate health and intelligence, and to achieve that it would require higher order thinking. Still skeptical though. Intelligent people probably lead statistics in being healthy, but extrapolating a correlation would be primitive first order thinking, no?
Yes, and by a great deal.
Innocent children in Yemen who wouldn't burn to death from USA munitions might appreciate such a development...
Add “cowardly” to that list.
But if for some reason that training was absent I would expect pilot to seek the information themselves.

Here[1]'s a rather sobering read for you what happened to a pilot who tried exactly that.

Spoiler alert: It was not a smart carreer move at that time.

[1] https://qz.com/1584233/boeing-737-max-what-happened-when-one...
Aphex Twin.
Anything with drones.
I cannot see this product being more than a rounding error in Amazon‘s revenue, ever. In such a light, I am surprised they keep at it despite the bad PR it has already caused.

Maybe they have dug in for purely emotional reasons now, and need some shareholders to set them straight. Or maybe there even are enough shareholders that value behaving ethically more than money. There’s no law of either governments, physics, or human behavior that prohibits that.

I guess there is a tradition of deference to corporate leadership, especially among institutional investors. But there have been cracks in that consensus, with for example Blackrock (the largest of them) making more noises wrt such issues (trade in weapons, climate change, etc).
Why should only tech people decide our lives? They don't have any ethics as we have seen in american companies like Google and fb. They only care about money. These companies definitely needed some people outside their tech bubble long time ago.

Tech people can design the tech. But here we are talking about the impact and those people should not be the one deciding everything. They are doing that over a decade and disappointed.
I cannot believe no one mentioned Music for Programming[0].

[0] https://musicforprogramming.net

--------------------------------------------------------

From their about page :

Through years of trial and error - skipping around internet radio stations, playing our entire music collections on shuffle, or just hammering single albums on repeat, we have found that the most effective music to aid prolonged periods of intense concentration tends to have a mixture of the following qualities:

- Drones

- Noise

- Fuzz

- Field recordings

- Vagueness (Hypnagogia)

- Textures without rhythm

- Minor complex chords

- Early music (Baroque, lute, harpsichord)

- Very few drums or vocals

- Synth arpeggios

- Awesome / daunting / foreboding

- Walls of reverb

Music possessing these qualities can often provide just the right amount of interest to occupy the parts of your brain that would otherwise be left free to wander and lead to distraction during your work.
I don't see how preserving a neighborhood involves kicking out 350 people.
I did some back-of-an-envelope calculations on converting beef grazing land (with its high methane emissions) to forest, specifically for Ireland

tl;dr - it's not cheap, but it's doable

A cow produces around 2.3 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per year [1]
You need 0.184 hectares of grazing land per cow [2]
So each hectare of beef-grazing land emits around 12.5 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year

Irish forests sequester on average 3.36 tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year [3]
So converting beef-grazing land to forest offsets around 15.86 tonnes of CO2 per year per hectare. Cost of grazing land is around €25k/hectare [4]

Cost of planting a forest is around EUR3k per hectare [5]

So the cost of offsetting 1 tonne of carbon per year by converting beef-grazing land to forest is around €1750

Ireland's total emissions are around 61 million tonnes per year [6]
So to offset it ALL would cost over a hundred billion euro, and a little more grazing land than actually exists in the country (and not all of that is beef anyway)

Or in other words, offsetting carbon by converting beef grazing land to forest would take around 1 billion euro per percent of our total current emissions. To put that in context - Irish govt spending is currently around EUR75 billion per year [7], and under the Paris Agreement we're committed to a 30% reduction of emissions by 2030 [8]

[1] https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-m...
[2] https://www.teagasc.ie/animals/dairy/statistics-and-links/fr...
[3] http://woodenergy.ie/media/coford/content/publications/proje...
[4] https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/2018-agricultural-land-...
[5] https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/forestry/advice/establishment/r...
[6] https://www.rte.ie/news/enviroment/2018/1205/1015300-greenho...
[7] https://whereyourmoneygoes.gov.ie/en/2018/
[8] https://www.dccae.gov.ie/en-ie/climate-action/topics/eu-and-...
Isn't this what OKR(Objectives and Key Results) is about? OKR seems to be working? Although yes, it is challenging to scale to national level.
Let’s do a quick substitution and see if you argument holds if we insert something we can hopefully both agree would definately be insignificant.

Let’s assume someone scheduled a vote to force Bezos to get a hair transplant or quit his position. Could we agree then that this would be insignificant to Amazons business? Could we agree that it would still be insignificant even if Amazon fought to drop that vote? I’d think so.
Google has now cancelled its AI ethics board after a backlash from staff
True, but nobody is using a rock still to hammer nails, or advocates for it.

Given any important problem field, it's quite likely that among the extant top solutions there is no product that is strictly dominant (better in every dimension) - most likely there will be trade offs.
“Never twice without a third time.”
You get a patch file as an attachment to the email, which you can then apply to any branch on your local copy that you'd like.
Partisan? Hasn't he always been quite transparent about his desire to destroy the US?

If Assange is partisan who is he partisan for?
This is huge news.
The implications of cheap C02 extraction are immense.

See this paper on what it means.

https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/r...

The key thing is that in 2100 to keep C02 ppm at 450 ppm it would cost 0.6 % of global GDP.

This comment was originally submitted for the first submission of this article at : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19566711

The reaction to this development on twitter and other places is fascinating. Many people are clearly upset that C02 capture at scale is likely to become economically viable.
One theory might be that it could be good for Russia for a certain period of time, up until Russia's currency was so successful that it did indeed threaten the US hegemony. But having the world order tilted back that way could cause tremendous economic problems for the United States as well as putting pressure on the US-centric military apparatus to maintain its hegemony. It could even lead to a war between major powers.

Its almost like the bully being afraid to take his foot off of his victim's neck because he might get up and then he has to actually fight him. I think the reason other countries may not be anxious to push things is because a global war is probably going to be much worse for them than just having a weaker currency and less resources etc.

The other aspect is that it seems like history very commonly ends up in a situation like this with hegemonic powers (otherwise known as Empires). So for now people some people may hate the United States, but sooner or later people will be resenting the Chinese or the artificial superintelligence that starts controlling everything. Personally the current paradigm benefits me so I hope it will continue for awhile, and that we can arrive at the next one without too many people dying. It would be nice to imagine an equitable world, but that doesn't seem feasible given the preponderance of propaganda despite democratized instantaneous mass communications.
Nobody opposes Google's growth because it benefits existing homeowners.