skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No.

Quote about canvas fingerprinting:

"Comparing our results with a 2014 study [1], we find three important trends. First, the most prominent trackers have by-and-large stopped using it, suggesting that the public backlash following that study was effective. Second, the overall number of domains employing it has increased considerably, indicating that knowledge of the technique has spread and that more obscure trackers are less concerned about public perception. As the technique evolves, the images used have increased in variety and complexity, as we detail in Figure 12 in the Appendix. Third, the use has shifted from behavioral tracking to fraud detection, in line with thead industry’s self-regulatory norm regarding acceptable uses of fingerprinting."

[1] G. Acar,C. Eubank, S. Englehardt, M. Juarez, A. Narayanan,and C. Diaz. The web never forgets: Persistent trackingmechanisms in the wild. InProceedings of CCS, 2014.

Other references:

[10] W. Davis. KISSmetrics Finalizes Supercookies Settlement.http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/191409/kissmet.... [Online; accessed 12-May-2014].

[15] Federal Trade Commission. Google will pay $22.5 millionto settle FTC charges it misrepresented privacy assurancesto users of Apple’s Safari internet browser. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/08/googl..., 2012
> no end in sight for Python 2.7

That's not correct. Numpy, for example, will not be supporting python2.7 starting January 1st, 2020 (https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.14.2/neps/dropping-python...), and there are others in the process.

Python itself will stop supporting 2.7 on January 1st, 2020. (see https://devguide.python.org/#status-of-python-branches)

Has it been poorly managed? Yes.

Will a number of companies skip upgrading from python2 to python3 and instead rewrite it in Go or Rust? Absolutely.

But "no end in sight" is not an accurate depiction of the current state of affairs.
A 4-channer on HN. A rare sight indeed!
> Ternary isn't the same as a branch

It should be. The C ternary is just an expression-oriented version of if/elseif/else.

Languages with a functional bend simply make if/elseif/else an expression in the first place e.g. in Rust it'd be

return
if a < b { Ordering::Less }
else if a > b { Ordering::Greater }
else { Ordering::Equal }

Though obviously that specific version is an overly complex way of writing:

return a.cmp(b);
I agree it's strange. A lot of the article is about how Amazon can avoid liability, protect the actual seller from liability, and continue selling an unsafe product. I don't think the Amazon part itself is clickbait.
Hugo for my blog, but I am redoing everything with Gatsby.js now.

My course platform uses Next.js for server-side rendering + Firebase. When I launched it, I have written up a longer article about my choices: https://www.robinwieruch.de/how-to-build-your-own-course-pla...
CC Search is now out of beta and offers access to 300M images
I always feel like the idea of "clear" vs. "clever" is missing the point.

When I've come across - or written - "clever" code in my career, it's always been about making something that normally wouldn't fit into memory - or perform slowly - viable. The examples of this are numerous and still happen plenty today on modern hardware (e.g. games, VMs, NaN tagging). There is nothing wrong with "clever" code so long as it's _clearly_ documented and abstracted away with various types, macros, functions, etc.

Then there's all other code. And what I feel the author wanted to say was that anyone coming along later shouldn't have to think twice about what a given line of code is doing.

If there's a bug, sometimes I'll be lucky enough to have a debugger, sometimes not. But, I shouldn't have to second guess a line of code to determine whether or not the bug is there. In your nested ternary expression, I would be second guessing all over the place; what's the precedence? Hell, whenever I use ternary operators I still force myself to parenthesize the conditional, because while operator precedence in C/C++ is well defined, it's not well known.

Clarity is another reason I prefer type safe languages over dynamic ones for critical code. It allows me to be a little more "expressive" with my code where the reader coming along after-the-fact can be assured that everything works out type-wise.

Having worked on code that people's lives depended on, there are times when getting it wrong isn't an option. I can only feel for the software engineers of the 737 MAX going back over gobs of code and trying to dissect what went wrong and come up with a fix. They'd be heavily scrutinizing every line of code, and I can promise that a nested ternary would be very scrutinized. But, so would a deep chain of if, elsif, elsif, ... and recursive functions (which are often a _big_ no-no in mission-critical code). Although, I don't think anyone here effectively argue that recursion is something to be considered "clever".

It's all about a code reader being able to _prove_ to themselves that the code does _exactly_ what it looks like it does and nothing more.

I'm not a Rust fanboy, but - just like static type checking - the borrow checker adds one more level of surety to the reader that another thread isn't coming along and stomping over the data. And this is without needing the whole context of the code base. This is a _big_ deal.
Something being correct enough is another way of saying "Most if not all of our users will never experience this." That's essentially saying that the code is not buggy.

Now if your code is such that most of your users frequently experience incorrect behavior then I think you'll discover that you'll lose to a competitor.
You don't need to have any experience to enjoy sports and anyone(no matter, body, gender, or anything else) can do it because there is a sport that will be good for you. The most important thing is that you are not scared. Twi examples I can think of that are great are Yoga(usually pretty inclusive and friendly crowds) and Bouldering (It's great because you can chat up a lot of people during down time)
Getting Started with Systemd in Practice
Rent controlling part of the market is so thoroughly considered a failure that it's in economics textbooks. Rent controlling all of the market is a failure to the point where it's in history textbooks.

The rent problem is a de-facto blocker for UBI
I use KeeWeb[1] on MacOS, iOS and Windows, and KeePass2Android[2] on my Android device which has decent autofill.
They all also supports cloud storage natively, so I don't have to worry about keeping them in sync.

I do use Syncthing for other stuff though.

[1]: https://keeweb.info/ [2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=keepass2androi...
> Question: At what point does maintaining the 737 type rating become too much "technical debt"?

I was about to snark, "Sometime prior to people dying as a result of the debt."

But then I considered that (potentially) the $X dollars saved by allowing the technical debt to live on, could probably be invested in some other way that saves far more lives. I.e., obesity reduction, smoking cessation programs, etc. So perhaps the issue isn't that simple.
Stop being Rails developer (2015) [pdf]
"The lithium-ion battery in the laptop sitting next to him had ignited, setting his couch on fire. Battery cells were flying all over the living room, leaking acid."

Lithium-ion cells do not contain acid. The electrolyte is composed of salts, solvents, and additives.
So? Isn't this just evolution in action? Isn't this what's supposed to happen? We kill off 1M species, we eat the planet, humans eventually go through a winnowing process, from lack of resources, or nuclear war, or AI, and in a couple hundred million years, everything adapts to fill out the prevailing ecology again. What makes us think we're so special?

I'm only being partly sarcastic here. With 500 MILLION years of change and adaptation -- to a climate we know to have been WILDLY different in times past -- through <checks watch for latest count> SEVEN mass extinction events -- why is RIGHT NOW the PERFECT moment in planetary evolution which must be preserved exactly, no matter the cost?

To me, it's all Horizon Zero Dawn territory.
To DLT, or not to DLT? That is not the question
Not drinking any water cures it permanently.
No, it's very common in code people will encounter if they read a wide range of other people's code outside work.

If you haven't encountered it often enough that it's familiar, than I think you probably don't read much code outside a small bubble.
This blog post walks through a substantial coding example in DAML, and draws some parallels to how the use case might need to be coded if using more traditional technologies (such as SQL). A really good read for anyone wanting to understand some of the rationale behind DAML. Get the code, download the SDK, and give it a whirl yourself. Would love your feedback!
Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mainframe to AWS
prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

Did you catch the shift in targets?

"Prevalence of sexual abuse" (undefined)..."prison rape".

I've been unable to find the DoJ report this is coming from to find their definition of abuse, but the 216,000 number is thrown around a lot in the press - but never with a traceable reference I can find (and details vary - sometimes 2008, 2011, sometimes "at least", etc.)

One other factor is that a large amount of the abuse is guards/staff abuse of inmates, so it isn't just "criminals in close association with criminals".
What is the difference between decriminalization and legalization in this context?
A leading arms expert imagines North Korean nuclear attack on the US (2018)
The problem with this for me is my voicemail is now so full of spam messages from numbers I don't answer or block that I can't ever get any useful messages if there are any. A lot of the time my inbox remains full and I can't actually receive new voicemails. It's just gotten to the point where the new voicemail icon has become a permanent fixture on my notification bar I totally ignore.
Is there any reason why we couldn't have all browsers on all platforms use the same user agent header? I realize some sites use the user agent as a crude form of feature detection, but it's my understanding that that's generally considered to be bad practice.
People who know nothing about drugs always put all psychoactive substances into the same basket which is a tremendous mistake.

Psilocybin (the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms) is non addictive, has many health benefits, and huge potential for personal growth. Much like ayahuasca, I very much doubt people would abuse magic mushrooms recreatively like they do with cocaine, or even alcohol.
The long term survival of humanity absolutely depends on technology. Aside from the existential threats I listed, all medicine, electricity, clean water... all depend on technological advancement.

I'll take Boeing and Facebook over plague, constant war and lack of rule of law any day of the week.

I'm not sure which period in time you're glamorizing to be much better than today, but the vast majority of humans alive in 2019 have a better life than the humans that came before them.
*cant reply to the parent anymore, but here is the answer to their 'slipper slope' rant about whats next:

most likely we'll have a nation leveraging its resources and productivity. we will have a nation leveraging its tools of governance to support those things exclusively. we won't have people expecting a governing institution to be an enforcer of things they merely don't like, but instead only promoting actions that make it more productive.

there currently are people that expect government to assume the role of avoiding tacit support of actions, by making it clear that it criminalizes any one found doing those actions, to that government's own detriment. it is less likely that people will expect government to make that choice, as private persons and organizations can do this on their own.
Because we like to believe we are intelligent animals that can prevent its own extinction.
I think they’re both true. People who are “extremely online” and up-to-date with technology developments are all done with Python 2.7 and can say the end is near, but they’re not the only people. There’s an entire dark matter world of businesses still on 2.7, maintained by people who don’t live in the Bay and don’t read Hacker News, and so they’re largely invisible. It will be a long time before they all switch.
A counter argument could be that, these private platforms being hugely used by even larger parts of the population, what happens inside them becomes public matter (with public as in "about the people"), especially regarding discrimination and abuse (in all possible ways).

It is a fact that the main behaviour on these platforms became ruled by fear of the mob, rather than by fear of the baselessness of your speech.

By the expectation of constraint and force rather than the appeal of sharing (that used to exist for some short time at the beginning).

All that empowered by automation.

One may not even genuinely have a formative conversation on it, so it's not even good enough for education, unless you already know how to discern and ban discourses on your own.

When your platform becomes one of the two or three main platforms that are used worldwide as a reference by most online people (for news, for representation, for propaganda), it stops to be only your private playground.
I agree with this view of the effects of domestication, but that's a nuanced view of much dogs experience like we do; going from this to "dogs don't experience anything at all" (which I don't think you're doing, but correct me if I'm wrong) is more than a bit absurd, it actually undermines the whole sliding scale of experience that the original notion is based on.
Worker incomes kept pace with investment income through the 19th century where r was consistently higher than g and also in the early 20th where it didn't. If your investments are in machines that need people to work them then better machines mean that people's labor is more valuable.

It's only recently that we've seen we've seen wages as a share of total income slip from roughly 50% to roughly 40% of total income. But the delta can be almost entirely explained by large amounts of capital returns in owner occupied housing which is a far higher share of the US capital stock than it had been historically. And this form of capital doesn't require (much) labor to maintain its value.
> Given the JRE was already started, you'd expect the load time to be a few seconds at most. For sure not 5 minutes before a page becomes interactive.

My recollection of these times is that when the JRE was not already started (which was often the case), it took up to one minute to start - and during this start process, the whole browser was frozen, with a helpful message on the status bar pointing to Java as the culprit. No wonder people started to think of Java as slow.
You need representative data; the sort you’ll be working with. There’s plenty of it for free on AWS. E.g. GDELT.

You then need use cases: things to do to the data. From this you learn how to process it using whatever tools you like.

How to set up clusters ... worry about that less. It’s more and more commoditised over time and it’s the admin part of data engineering anyway.
The fact that land having structures that are "grandfathered in" is a major selling point for any piece of property with said structures tells you all you need to know about how much of a success curtailing people's freedom to build what they want on their own property has been.

>I looked into buying a lot and building, and estimates were showing that the permitting process could cost more than the lot itself.

That's the point. The city is creating an artificial wealth minimum for people developing properties. If you don't have at least $X to burn on their whims then you are not allowed to build in their city.
"I’m a different guy. I’m fun to be around. Once I couldn’t even cry. Now I can."

This really punched me in the feels.

It also sucks that Justin preferred not to share his last name for fear of retribution for possessing some fungus that occurs naturally in the wild.

Kinda reminds me of the veterans in the US who have been trying to lobby the VA to stop being jerks about cannabis. They say it helps with their PTSD. Currently we don't have a lot of scientific certainty on whether it actually does help or not because of the lack of research. But even putting that aside, it's still kinda absurd that we dictate which naturally growing plants people are allowed to possess / cultivate / smoke / ingest / whatever.
Another reason to read it - the codename of the Amazon Kindle was Fiona, inspired by The Diamond Age:

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Fiona-in-Amazons-ebook-URLs
I use Illustrator lightly for 10 years but never know it support Applescript, will take a look at it.
If you want to see some more comments and discussion, check out this HN post from 3 months ago.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19069200

Interested in seeing what discussion emerges this time!
An interesting detail from the paper is why it is called "LAMBDA". That is because in the original notation what current-day programmers would call formal argument of a function were denoted by putting an upward arrow-head on top of variable/name but since that could not be type-set easily the arrow-head was moved in front of such variable which resembles the Greek letter "lambda".
I'm pretty sure if it was an emergency, they would leave a message. For me, that's good enough.

Once the phone companies fix caller authentication, I'll probably be comfortable letting my guard down a bit. Correct caller ID would make my phone far more valuable and I'm always surprised that the big telecom companies don't compete on voice services more.
Deep learning has created a sea change in robotics
> I agree with the sibling to this comment, though, that a ternary is more readable with newlines and indentation:

I think it's even clearer like so:

return a < b ? -1:
a > b ? 1:
0;

Conditions/guards on the left, values on the right. So I emphatically disagree with the OP that nested ternary expressions are never ok. In most sane languages with proper precedence and evaluation order, they work great when formatted as above. I say sane languages, because the nested ternary doesn't work the way you'd expect in JavaScript...
No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different.

Python may not officially support 2.7 in 2020+. What's to stop someone else backporting security patches and necessary fixes as needed ad infinitum? I think you're underestimating just how little impetus there is to migrate from 2 to 3.
I disagree, what is "saved" is your time when reading/understanding... why spend time to read 10 lines and figure out that it actually does what a simple ternary operation would accomplish??

On that same vein, if a ternary operation is going to throw someone for a loop, I've got some bad news about their career in programming.
I'd argue that any reputable car maker would do this.
Or it could be that it’s subjective and there is no truly objective answer.
Decriminalization turns minor possession into basically a traffic ticket. It would still be a misdemeanor or felony to sell or possess large quantities, but it lowers the penalties again users and the priority against prosecuting them.

Legalization would most likely mean sanctioned avenues for legal sales, as well as obviously being totally legal to possess and consume at your own home, above age 21.
The HTML inputmode attribute is now supported in most mobile browsers
They are stopping law enforcement from acting on personal use of mushrooms if you are over 21. It is still technically illegal.

Text of the ordinance can be found at: https://www.denvergov.org/content/dam/denvergov/Portals/778/...
Read the paper that introduced public key cryptography
Reposting this from the other day:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/

Paper: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/pdfs/201406...

"Motivated by contemporary security challenges, we reevaluate and refine capability-based addressing for the RISC era. We present CHERI, a hybrid capability model that extends the 64-bit MIPS ISA with byte-granularity memory protection."
Basically the law is implemented by people and people are subjected to it by those people. There's a lot of neutrality in the rules but in the end personal biases and privileges can creep in at any point.

If judges (and juries) were 100% rational, objective and unbiased, lawyers and attorneys wouldn't exist. But that's an impossibility even technology can't solve.
So because one doesn’t need something, one can’t complain about it?
If people want to contact me, they can leave a message on my voicemail.

The only people who think "just disable incoming phone calls" is not a viable option either have no decent friends and/or family, very little life experience, or both.
I responded within a week of receiving the letter. I didn't notice the fake date on the letter initially, and threw out the envelope after opening- so it's lost forever. Yes, I of course used certified mail to respond to them. I had not spoken with them before the letter.

I will of course try the credit bureaus, but in my experience everything takes 30-60 days to get an initial response etc. At the speed they move at, likely sinks my ability to buy a home this year. Hence my interest in a more aggressive tack
Visual voicemail is one of the best things I've ever seen. Especially with transcription turned on.
just because the dialogue is open right now, here is something about a different drug: I would like to see the government do something about fentanyl, people across all socioeconomic classes are dying and they wouldn't be if they knew what they were consuming.

"RIP everyone has their demons" really doesn't accurately describe that "someone laced their cocaine with fentanyl"

testing kits exist, but a regulated purchase would fix this
Ten characters of unreadable code written by an expert
will have fewer bugs than 100,000 lines of "readable,
clear" C++ code written by a novice.

Everytime this topic comes up someone brings up this point. The counter to it is always the same. In the lifetime of those ten characters someone who is not the original author will have to modify it. Because it is not clear what exactly the code is doing they will probably introduce a subtle bug. Iterate on that a few times and eventually you will have code that literally no one can safely touch and the only way to fix it will be to rewrite it.

If the person doing the rewrite is smart and looks at why the rewrite was necessary they will change those "ten characters" to however many it takes to make it understandable for the future maintainer. It should be exactly as short as necessary to be clearly correct and no shorter. Then you can work at making it faster with appropriate comments about why this particular speed hack is necessary and what you need to know before you modify it.
There are some risks, but they have been vastly overstated. I think the media has been irresponsible in publishing scare stories and misinformation about most drugs. How many lives could have been saved if people with treatment resistant depression or PTSD would have been given access to tryptamines and phenethylamines sooner.