skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There is no way of making a technical conference if some people feel insecure or uncomfortable.

I'm surprised to hear a conference organizer say this, because I think it's an unrealistic goal.

There's a difference between people feeling as if their safety is being directly threatened by someone at a conference and someone feeling uncomfortable with a speaker because of, for instance, some of their personal views that they strongly disagree with.

(Edit: In the original version of OP's blog post, it did not say why people were uncomfortable with the speaker. It said, "My team and I were contacted by different people to warn us that they were uncomfortable with the participation of a speaker and her partner in our conference. They told the organization of the conference that we would have problems with the speaker and his partner. his communication took us by surprise since we had performed a basic background check on the chosen speakers to avoid these kinds of issues." The blog post was later updated to clarify, "They told the organization of the conference that this couple had caused problems to women in the community," which is still pretty vague.)

Obviously, conference organizers should be taking attendees' safety seriously and making sure they're not being subjected to harassment or unjust discrimination.

But if you take a "comfort is priority #1" mindset, it gives a lot of ammunition to people who dislike a speaker's political views or choices they might make in their personal life.

HN has had a bunch of previous threads about how welcoming conferences should be to speakers who hold unorthodox or unpopular opinions -- stuff that potential attendees might object to.

I think the general consensus has been:

If there is real evidence (e.g. past conduct at similar events) that they are likely to engage in conduct that directly threatens the safety of other attendees or otherwise violate the conference's code of conduct, it's a no-brainer. Disinvite.

If they hold unorthodox, potentially objectionable opinions, but there's no evidence that they're going to violate the code of conduct, and the issue is that people merely feel uncomfortable being around someone who holds such views (or they feel as if the conference is implicitly endorsing such views by having the person as a speaker) then you take one of several paths:

If the opinion is unquestionably beyond the pale, like something that 9 out of 10 attendees would say, "Yeah, that's truly awful," then it's a pretty easy decision. Disinvite.

If the opinion is about an issue that is merely controversial -- meaning that in mainstream society, there is a wide range of opinions (e.g. any strong opinion about abortion or guns) -- then you have to do some weighing of principles vs. practical considerations. If maintaining the person as a speaker is going to tank your conference, then even if you don't support disinviting them as a matter of principle, you might decide it's necessary on a practical level. But if it's not going to tank your conference, then you might be able to lean more heavily on principles.
Thanks! I wrote a little bit more about the story around the name at https://nanagram.co/blog/the-grandma-test
I got this link yesterday or so. I breezed through it until the memory latch: http://nandgame.com/
Good thing Apple didn't swallow it.
Category theory is an alternative view on the foundations of mathematics that literally gets rid of sets.
I am outraged by people making and spreading fake news though. These fake news kill people daily (the one that don't want to vaccinate).

They are destroying us as a civilization by spreading bullshit and making us believe that the current world is shit.
Peak Design’s new tripod is full-featured but surprisingly compact
To simplify review, have diffs change behavior or structure but not both
Okay but religion and church aren't a necessary component for community.
Doesn't it make China worse?

US bans a company because it's problematic, not because "It's part of the evil west"
Expectation of privacy. Roads are mostly public, Google Glass can go all kinds of places
So, there is no need to assume otherwise at this point. They are working through the legal system, and haven't named anyone. That's why you don't see any evidence presented, or names, or anything else like that.
I agree. From another perspective, China has been a blatant power in the theft of IP from all over the world and we have been turning a blind eye to it for quite some time.

A lot of people joke about 'Chinese knockoffs' and the 'chinesium' metal alloys that permeate the knockoff/shoddy products but it has some serious problems.

This pushback is long overdue and frankly needed.
At least FB lets you remove them from public view.

I recently tried to script clearing out my twitter linkes. (Some of which date back to before <3s, when a star could mean "yikes, I don't want to RT this but I want to note it". Others were just from when my twitter was more personal, and now that I use it for professional purposes I don't need random likes from the 2012 election lying around.

But Twitter now says I have about 4k likes, but only displays the ones since I tried to run my script.

Occasionally, a weeks or months later older ones resurface, but if I try to unlike them in bulk they disappear again to return at a random interval.
> But I think far more mathematicians point to ZFC, not type theory, as the foundations of mathematics.

That's true, but it's just as true that those same mathematicians only care about foundations as a proof of concept, not a practical device that you might someday want to do actual math in. ZFC is plenty good enough for the former, but you need type theories - or at least structural-set theories - to enable the latter (with the sorts of sanity checks that we've come to expect in any practical formal endeavor)!
I read the whole thing. Sorry there are several things that do not match.

First, you kicked out a female speaker because some people contacted you saying that they weren't 'comfortable with her and her partner. What the partner has to do in all of this? I think she was right in taking it badly, don't you think?

Second, you saw her in another conference just a day after that. How is that possible? that cannot be a coincidence. Do you realize that if she finds you in another conference, you would look like a stalker to her. What she was doing in this conference? What were you doing? you don't specify that.

Third, and most important. Who were those persons that contacted you at first? are they trustworthy? are they anonymous persons? because this smells too much like a smear campaign by a bunch of women and you are being played like a pawn.

EDIT: Fourth: you seem to imply that you are being attacked by someone with knowledge of the Signal messenger. Do you really think that someone would use an attack like that on you? those attacks are very valuable. Sorry but it all points to you being very paranoid.
> Lastly, there’s the “line-of-sight” problem; lasers shoot perfectly straight, meaning a laser shot toward the horizon will eventually hit the Earth’s curves.

Huh, and here I thought the Hollow Earth theory had been discredited, but I guess I might believe Raytheon and its lasers. Cyrus Teed would be so pleased.
Articles that go on forever and ever to hype something up which they won't tell you yet always look super scammy to me. This one is no exception - how much do you need to pay for forbes.com to host your content?

It's smart though. He funnels people over to his scammy riskhedge.com where he's trying to sell them stock tipps. Why he's selling them these tipps instead of getting rich with them, we'll never know, but I assume he's just a good person at heart. He needs $199 from you to show that you're a good person also, I guess. BUT, if you subscribe in the next 2 days, it's only $49.

I sure hope Forbes is taking a lot of cash to associate their name with something like that.
This.

580 Westbound is jam packed to a slow crawl, on a 7 lane highway! With people making commutes 100 miles every day! You would think there'd be sky scrapers everywhere, at least close to the highways. Nope. NOt a single building or house for miles and miles, nothing but green and yellow slopes of nothingness. It's such a waste.

With commute distances x10 more than normal and most global C02 coming from commuting, I can't even imagine how terrible this is for the environment.
This is an advertisement for a financial advisor.
Schemas, Contracts, and Compatibility
Implementing a CPU simulation is a classic college exercise, as you can see in these comments. Super valuable based on how memorable it was for everyone! It really helps de-mystify computers.
Easier said than done when you're a leader, event organizer, company executive or manager. Etc.
To keep in line with the aims of the US Constitution you would need much more powerful weaponry than what is allowed, which currently can't actually be used to take on anyone with any real firepower... but is often used against civilians which was not the aim of the constitution.
> When it comes to ballistic missile defense, “you want to get it into airborne platforms and into space,” said Evan Hunt, a former U.S. Air Force navigator who now works in business development for Raytheon’s high-energy laser products. “It’s better to look down than to shoot up.”

What about atmospheric interference? (And whatever unfortunate soul might be behind the missile assuming the laser misses.)
>Public transit enables higher density, (...) pushing rich and poor people closer together.

The later doesn't follow from the former - there's nothing about public transport that inherently clusters the affluent around it. Good schools & "nice" neighborhoods would be an overriding concern.

Private transport enables[1] mixing and matching, by the virtue of being rather flexible and quick to react to changes in supply & demand. There's nothing inherent in private transport that would cause self-segregation, nor that would allow planned segregation. Your point about density holds true, but it's still a low-density somewhat homogeneous society.

Public transport, by the vice of being mostly fixed in place and centrally managed, is how one channels people into pre-defined paths and spaces. Sure, higher density is possible, but enclaves of the reliant are created around the transportation hubs, while the affluent can settle anywhere - presumably with no unseemly bus stops & metro rails in view.

Build a bus or metro rail stop, who do you think will tend to settle around it?

[1] does not force, but enables none the less.
I’m open to being wrong, but my domain is not and has not been web apps. It’s mostly been things like satellite antenna control software, quantum computers, scientific computing, and AI. Each of those domains, in my experience, has been firmly grounded in open source. (It does not mean, of course, that the end product is open source.) I recognize there are some domains that are steeped in closed source solutions with closed source developer tooling with no viable alternatives, but IME—as limited as it may be—it’s uncommon.

What programming language stack do you (and a lot of other developers) use that’s closed source with no realistic open source alternative? It’s not C, Python, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, Lisp, Fortran, C++, PHP, Perl, Go, SQL, Rust, Objective-C, or Swift? (All of these, of course, not only have industrial strength FOSS implementations, but the first or second most popular implementation is the FOSS one.)
He was harassed at a conference, probably in violation of their CoC, and felt threatened enough to leave. Sounds like real world harm to me.
Did this article put his given name first, despite being about him asking that the media put the family name first? I wonder if he finds that as frustrating as I do.
> Statistically, someone is going to be right.

Yes. If you ask 100 people what the answer to "3 + 5" is, you'll mostly get "8". But that's because you're asking them all for the right answer to the same problem.

If you ask 80 of them the answer to "3 + 5" and 20 the answer to "3 + 2", the right answer isn't 8 and the people who answered 5 for the latter aren't wrong. They are solving different problems.

Given the breadth of computing today, it seems very unlikely to me that all programmers are solving the same problem, and thus that there is a single objective right answer for what language or language paradigm is best. It certainly doesn't align with my own personal experience, where I can't point to a single language that I would prefer for all of the different kinds of programs I've written.

> Debuggers allow this.

Yes, with limitations. A SmallTalker will tell you that debuggers are a pale imitation of the full experience. (I don't have much first-hand experience with it myself, but I know people who get misty-eyed when you ask them about it, despite being very familiar with "modern" debuggers.)

> You generally don't want the user to have this power.

I don't disagree with you personally, but there's a counter-argument that forcibly separating people into "developers" and "users" is itself a moral failing akin to welding the hood shut on a car.

> There is a shocking lack of science in the industry.

I'd like more science too, but I don't find its absence that shocking. PL is very hard and expensive to study scientifically. Doing controlled experiments is very difficult when step one is "Design an entire programming language, implement it and all of its tools and ecosystem, and then get people to spend a long amount of time learning it to proficiency."

That's a lot more difficult than "Take a sip of two sodas and tell me which one you like more", and even that simple experiment turned out to be famously flawed.
Interestingly, Excel et al. achieved that status without the "no-code/low-code" mantra that is the rage in sales these days, where "citizen developers" are expected to relish in GUI editors severely limited in the logic they can accomplish.

On a turing-completeness spectrum, they live on the opposite half of where VBA+formulas stand proudly. Therefore, it is no surprise that for anything beyond "out-of-the-box", it is expected that an experienced IT developer/consultant will be needed to figure something out.

A decent reason to disallow custom code is that these platform are to be upgraded regularly, yet every major version seems to bring its lot of breaking changes while my decade-old macros still run like a champ. Oh the irony.
Perhaps I missed it but is it known specifically why that person was uninvited to begin with?
We at Trail of Bits are also working on "klee-native," a port of KLEE using Remill to dynamically lift and emulate binaries. This project is very early on, though.
Really depends which niche you're in. Matlab for example is also a major player.
Thats how Gates and Allen wrote their BASIC interpreter for the Altair microcomputer and started MicroSoft. They did not have access to a working 8080 microcomputer so they simulated one on a Harvard mainframe from a machine language specification. Bill took the interpreter by punch tape to MITS in Albuquerque. And legend has it their BASIC worked only after an hour of fiddling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE - linked from the article. I still remember walking into those stores with my mother during that era, to my eyes at the time that looked "just fine", I didn't know any better. Looking back now, not so much.

And as someone on YouTube pointed out, that was in Moscow, which had it much better than regions further away from the sources of power.
Oh, I agree. I work with a guy who has his eye on a used Ferrari, and if he takes good care of it, it will hold or increase in value. He buys them at the bottom of the bathtub curve.

However, 99.9% of luxury cars are not exotics. You will rarely see them on the road as they depreciate too much if you drive them daily.
I think I see what you're saying but considering the behavior described, the concern probabbly wasn't just a matter of opinion.

Personally I know of someones who behaved a bit like was described in the article. I would not be comfortable being around them either, even though I was never a target of their wrath.*

*For the record I've no idea who the people in the article are and I'm 100% sure the people I'm thinking of are not them.
Until evidence is provided, we can't. Given their legal counsel recommends against sharing evidence, we may never get the evidence. All this is right now is an attempt at continuity that will show later if they story has deviated from what they claim or has remained consistent.
No, I started this thread by saying that data is not always owned purely by the person playing a role in its creation.

I am tired of the extreme movement that all data I have a role in creating is mine, and I should have full control of it. I am worried about the ramifications on society and our ability to improve products and the way society/civilization works. I think Europe has taken some good steps toward that goal, but like any first try, it also has some stupid parts. Time and debate will improve it.

I'd like to see us start crafting legislation that tries to find that middle ground between the data that should be private and the data that can be used to improve the product and society and thus make sure it is available.
Intent – Chrome extension to show you how you spend time online
Okay, so I read the post and I'm still not clear on what the actual difference is between Mathematica and the Wolfram Engine. Does anyone have any insight here?

Presumably this isn't intended to cannibalize Mathematica sales so I'd expect that many of the things I'm used to doing in Mathematica wouldn't work here but I don't really see any discussion of what it can't do.
Apple announces new MacBook Pros with keyboard fix, and more powerful processors
Public Data Release of Stack Overflow’s 2019 Developer Survey
What is great business intelligence?
Maxima is a fine piece of software, and I’m a huge proponent of its development, but doesn’t compete in the breadth or depth of Mathematica (or Maple) at all.
I have to agree with this.

One thing I miss the most after realizing I didn't believe in God and after I stopped going to church (= being part of the community) is that I had a lot harder time to find a group that I truly belonged to.

It's not as much that you have to like each and every person in the group, is more about knowing that you're there for each other and share a bigger, common understanding of life.

I guess that volunteering kind of has the same advantages, since people volunteering have a bigger goal (= serving others) and accept that they need to be together in this with other volunteers.
Where did you see the photo of the keyboard?
He's handling this without naming anyone publicly, and going through proper channels. She did the exact opposite, making this public and threatening him enough that he felt compelled to leave a conference where she was apparently harassing him.

Not quite the same thing.
Not everyone is an able-bodied 20-something, and not everywhere is sunny California.
Inter-city mail should be by rail, which is far more environmental and much less costly. The only reason highways appear to be "cheaper" is the real costs are paid by other people (passenger cars).
i found that reactions seem to vary, here in the UK the general (uninformed) response is "ooh i dont know about that, seems a bit 1984" or something along those lines however when i was showing people in japan their response was generally "thats so cool! i want one!"
I’ll add to the list: mathematical modelling, optimization, control, essentially all machine learning, etc.

Except for perhaps optimizers (which some of the best are closed source, e.g. Mosek), the entire rest of the stack is open source.
Wouldn't there be more atmospheric interference shooting up than down?
What about meta tags (viewport, description, robots), Open Graph tags, and inline styles?

Is it correct to put a title element outside of a head element?

"Permitted parents: A <head> element that contains no other <title> element."

"The <title> element is always used within a page's <head> block."

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...

Google's style guides aren't very good in general, including Python, which doesn't follow PEP8.
Even better these days, just use the profiler in Chrome. It’ll show you which components are mounting and rendering. I find that I can isolate troublesome components at a glance now.
American Elites should be held accountable?

Oh yes, you got that right. But I'd like to change it around a bit.

ALL elites in the world are responsible for the shit happening right now. And yes, WE WILL hold each and every one of you accountable for the futures you are currently destroying.

No matter what your political beliefs are, or how "good" you pretend to be. All of you.

Like winter, justice will be coming. I don't know when and I don't know how -- but it will be coming. COUNT ON IT.
Those aren't the only options. It's hard to argue that the goal isn't the complete destruction of the USPS when you mandate they pre-pay pensions 75 years in advance and then forbid them from raising prices to fulfill that mandate.

If the USPS is going to become irrelevant in the near-term, does stockpiling 75 years worth of pensions really make sense?
It's a new generation of the keyboard. Hopefully it turns out to be way more reliable.
I am glad this was written without naming the people involved. Although I see nothing wrong with naming names in situations like this (see below) the lack of specific names meant I could focus on the experiences (as related by the poster) rather than having the specific people colour my opinion.

The reason I think specifying people by name would have been OK is that 1 - they were presumably an issue for a number of attendees due to (prior) publicly stated positions and 2 - they apparently made subsequent statements via "broadcast" media such as Twitter, for anyone to peruse. This would be quite different if the people were more private, and if all discussions had been private and/or via non-broadcast tools like SMS or WhatsApp. Plus naming names could cause me to read what they had said and even disagree with the OP, at least on the baseline of non-inviting them. However the anonymity made the post much more interesting.
They used my Datasette open source project to release the data! https://2019-stackoverflow-datasette.glitch.me/

More info in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1130858853573074945
In all fairness it's been around for quite some time.

Moreover, the abundance of frameworks is not inherently a bad thing in my opinion. You don't need to learn it if it doesn't solve a problem for you after all.
Points 1 and 2 sound like a REPL.

Say we had a REPL that also had a table (like excel, each cell has an address... a 2D stack if you will).

Say we interact using a mouse to select a cell or in the REPL to specify what cell we want to write to. Then, if we use a Lisp, we have tabular code and tabular data...

I might code this up for fun.
Ignorant, uninformed question: are insurance actuaries managing mortgages and properties following these updates? What is going to happen to families with land in areas that are going to be permanantly flooded in 10, 20, 30 years? Do we even have a plan for that?
The GP saw a victim and a chance to hurt them. Pure sadism, that's all.
If you think remote workers means a different timezone and a language barrier, you need to brush up on your knowledge.
> Or you could use another method of communication.

No. If you cannot use another method of communication you cannot use another method of communication. Even if you dislike the obvious consequences: Facebook, like all other monopolies, cannot remain private property, much less unregulated.