skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Confucius Institutes are arms of the Chinese state that operates on US university campuses that monitor and report on their citizens' activities while they're studying in the US, as well as organizing propaganda events in the US. US universities must stop collaborating with these institutes and expel them from campus, even if only to protect their students as much as possible.
Yeah, but then she did end up actually supporting it (and that statement was a pathetic triangulation on her part, which is part of why I never liked her all that much anyway). Most of today's Republicans never supported it and just went along with it begrudgingly after the Supreme Court case was lost. Some are still fighting it.

It's very clear that the modern Democratic party overall was in favor of legalizing gay marriage and that the modern Republican party overall was against it. And that, to this day, Democrats are still much better on LGBT issues than Republicans.
> then the reality is that no big effect has been found for the choice of programming language on software quality

Substantiate that. I say it's garbage.

<https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/karkare/courses/2010/cs653/..., and this BTW is from 1994 so this evidence has been around for ages

Language LOC Documentation Lines Dev time (hours)
(1)Haskell 85 465 10
(2)Ada 767 714 23
(3)Ada9X 800 200 28
(4)C++ 1105 130 –
(5)Awk/Nawk 250 150 –
(6)Rapide 157 0 54
(7)Griffin 251 0 34
(8)Proteus 293 79 26
(9)RelationalLisp 274 12 3
(10)Haskell 156 112 8

(Edit: all aligned with tabs but looks like they've been stripped. See paper instead)

comments of note:

(2) The Ada solution was written by a lead programmer at NSWC; in this sense it represents the “control” group. The developer initially reported a line count of only 249; this was the numberof lines of imperativestatements as reported by theSun Adacompiler, anddid notinclude declarations, all of which were essential for proper execution. The line count of 767 is based on the actual code in and does not include lines with only termination characters.

(4) TheC++solutionwaswrittenbyanONRprogrammanagerafterhavingfirstwrittentheAwk
solution described in the next paragraph. In addition to these 1105 lines of code, the developer
also wrote a 595-line “test harness.” No development times were reported [Note: C++ has evolved a lot since then, but perhaps so has haskell]

(10) Intermetrics, independently and without the knowledge of NSWC or Yale University, con-ductedan experimentof its own: theHaskell Report was given to anewly hiredcollege graduate, who was then given 8 days to learn Haskell. This new hire received no formal training, but was allowed to ask an experienced Haskell programmer questions as issues came up during the self study. After this training period, the new hire was handed the geo-server specification and asked to write aprototype in Haskell. Theresulting metrics shown in row 10 ofthe tableare perhaps the most stunning of the lot, suggesting the ease with which Haskell may be learned and effectively utilized.

Also mentioned was "The use of higher-order functions [in haskell] is noteworthy" so language features did help. Actual evidence.

> As lack of evidence in favor of a big effect is evidence of its lack

yeah right. Let me rephrase that for you - Lack of knowledge by an HN poster is not evidence of lack of evidence.

> What has been shown to drive quality up or down is process

Evidence please? My experience is that process can be rigorous but useless crap. My old boss said "process is not sufficient to produce quality, but it is a necessary"

There's plenty more in that PDF, please read it.
I would compare it to telling Wright brothers after their first airplane flight that we will land on the Moon in 66 years. If there will be a reason to do it, we will. Still, I would agree that we will have close to 100% effective recycling of metals before we will start bringing them to Earth from space.

But in time we will start to utilize space resources.

SpaceX, Blue Origin will latch to any possibility to make money in space.

Space mining is exactly how Bezos thinks O'Neill cylinder could be built in 100-200 years.

BTW - You could bet for worthless internet points on Metaculus:

> Will any asteroid or comet have been mined in space for commercial purposes before 2030?
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/1662/will-any-asteroid-o...

My prediction is 10% :) .
Just as a note, you can put a pin in Any random location in India and it'll be 80% a village or town with a good amount of people living. A train ride through the nation in any non-national park route would show that you very rarelt see a stretch of land go more than a few miles without a couple houses.
Or we will simply not accept the refugees. As you said at current numbers it’s been really bad. At much higher numbers it will simply be a better and more popular option to close the border.
It shows really poor grammar though.
Stand on Zanzibar deals with overpopulation too, but that's probably not it either (it's not a central plot point).
Social roles are roles that an individual has in a social context, right? So a role cloud be a friend to someone, a child in the family, the clown of the group, the poor kid, member of choir, a character in an online game community, etc.
I think it's interesting that people (willingly?) pigeonhole themselves to the extent that they're a "Java developer" or a ".NET Engineer" rather than more simply a "Software Engineer".

I'm a Software Engineer, and while I have my go-to tools, I'd like to think I make an informed choice to use what fits the task at hand .

An Engineer who's a comfortable polygot is perhaps also a better Engineer overall.
Window snapping and tiling doesn’t really scale past maybe 6 windows. Once you go past that, you need to start hiding windows or using virtual desktops. And the random access of an arbitrary window when you have many dozens of them is tedious with a keyboard. With a mouse you have spatial memory of where you put the window.
Maybe advertisers need to go back to the drawing board and devise a better way to deliver their message. Ad blockers exist because ads are annoying and even crippling.

Google's Adsense (or whatever you call those text ads that appear next to search results) was a reasonable compromise, unobtrusive and often useful, whereas full window timed ads that force you to click the "x", and similar excessively animated distractions and pop-ups, are what motivate people to install add blockers.
Wiping out a 100k population does not have the same effect as wiping out a 10k population which also consumes and emits 10x.

Climate change due to population is not a simple numbers reduction game.
That’s a good point! The world is shifting.
Yes, I do. I think the fact that there is a very strong opinion for or against a political opinion makes it controversial, by definition. In effect, it means that any discussion on the subject is going to be charged and unbalanced. The more people are on one side of the debate, the more so.

This is perhaps why articles on, say, vaccine denialism or climate denialism and other strongly politicised subjects like that are not well received on HN. On the one hand there are very strong views around them, on the other hand it's very clear what those views are and where they come from after years of these "debates" raging online and there's really nothing to see there anymore.

Scientific controversy of course is another matter. That comes down to robust debate between experts from which everyone has a lot to learn. That sort of article is also commonly flagged on HN, which I think is unfortunate.

Anyway, I've contributed plenty of politically controversial articles myself in the past, and contributed to such discussions. Maybe I was wrong to do that. I don't know if there is a place on the internet where I would feel more comfortable than on HN to have such discussions- but maybe HN is still, just, not the right place for them. Edit: maybe, if we keep having more and more of those conversations on HN it will stop being the place where I feel comfortable having them.
My wife can't go through these scanners, as she has a medical device that the device manufacturer has warned have not been certified to go through them, and will not be liable if the device stops working (which in this case would mean she dies.)

At the airport, she always has to opt-out and get a pat-down (or did, until she broke down and paid the brib...err, "fee" for pre-check.)

Will she be safe walking around areas that use these scanners? Will the users of the scanners be required to announce that they are in use? Will there be an opt-out process? How would that even work in a public space? If she opts-out, is she going to end up getting felt-up by some untrained minimum wage pervert with a power complex? Who is liable (legally and financially) if her device stops working because someone made her go through a scanner without her knowledge or consent?

This is bullshit for so many more reasons that surveillance (though that is also important.) This is literally a life or death concern for us.
>Another option is using something like Pi-Hole, says Wright. “This works on the DNS level and has blacklists of adverts as well as malicious URLs.”

You can also run a ridiculously simple script from time to time (or create a cron job that does it for you, for example) to update your hosts file periodically, using the same blacklists[0]. No extra hardware needed.

[0]: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts.
https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n exists for Windows
In general there are renters rights and the lease contract survives a sale. When you buy a property you need to look at contracts in place and whether they are incompatible with your desired use.
Imagine the ever-growing demand for ACs and the ever-decreasing amount of water.

Luckily for India, it has a long shoreline.
Low lying islands like the Maldives will be first. But the population is relatively small. You already have climate refugees in Africa. The Sahara is spreading south. Destroying lives of those that live on the subsaharan border. They flee to neighbouring countries and eventually Europe. The major concern is countries like Bangladesh. It’s a low coastal country with a huge population.
GitHubber wants to revive the first Unix in a PDP-7 emulator
Thanks, I didn't know about Magnet till you mentioned it. It looks like it's a lot better on an iMac than MBPs, because when you try to split the screen vertically some apps need to be wider than half of a 13" screen.
That's true but it is referred to colloquially as "The Syrian Crisis" here, in any case I don't what the solution is, I deeply admire the Germans for what they did though.

Taking 1.5 million migrants with a population of 82 million, if the UK (my country) had done the same ratio that would have been 1.2 million, best figure I can find for UK is <20 thousand.

One thing I do wonder is what western culture will look like in a hundred years if the world bank figures are right (140-200 million displaced people).
I think you underestimate the poverty of the average Indian.
From the intro:

> Elections hold a vulnerability that can bring democracies to a halt. [This vulnerability] makes it possible for people to elect a malicious authority that will later refuse to organize future elections.

> This paper is […] aimed to tackle this problem from a cryptographic point of view. […] The algorithm still requires authorities to inscribe voters.

This sounds pretty useless. First, it requires an _already_ honest authority to register people in the system before any elections can take place. In addition, this authority needs to be trusted _forever_, as it needs to add more people to the system as they are born.

Even if this problem was solved, this paper doesn't even question what power means. If a ruling authority already has the power to stop regular elections from happening, it also has the power to ignore any results that come out of this scheme, to pressure people to not vote through new laws or force, and to imprison anyone who does.

An example (and this applies irrespectively of what opinions you hold about it): in Spain, a referendum was convoked to decide about the independence of the region of Catalonia. The government declared this referendum unconstitutional, although it still took place. People voted for independence and won. Still, the results were void, and the people who convoked the referendum are now sitting in court, charged with rebellion. Does it really matter if this referendum was held using physical ballots and boxes, or using digital signatures? You can't remove a central authority just by pretending it doesn't exist.
Needs to be split up but the problem is the advertising side needs all the free services to harvest data to drive the ad business.

A split up google may not be a viable business.
Peter Norvig made a comment here that agrees with you about process and architecture over language (he was talking about why he started using python instead of lisp)

"In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815
A Java shop inherited a Clojure project and rewrote it in their preferred language. It's silly to read more than that into this.
Yeah I'm familiar with the area (about to move from South Bend to Chicago). There's a lot of effort going into building a startup scene in South Bend, both around the Innovation and Ignition Park developments and at Notre Dame. At least a few of the companies that I'm familiar with (Vennli, Carextech) have gotten traction; the existing economy there is pretty manufacturing-heavy, especially around auto, appliances (Whirlpool) and medical devices (J&J has pretty big presence in Warsaw).

I might try and work through the area colleges (St. Mary's, Notre Dame, IU South Bend) if you're looking to recruit there.
I think you have made your position completely clear. You first please.
XUL was the markup language used by the Mozilla Communicator Suite for designing user interfaces. It was what Add-on development used.

Mozilla deprecated it not that long ago in favor of HTML but stalwarts have clung to it and complained.

I use to maintain a couple Add-ons and developed some simple UIs for it. I was never impressed by it and it was easy enough to use so I had no objections either.
"Would it be a tragedy if humans went extinct?" - The planet doesn't care. The only species that cares is humans. Tragedy? Not really. The universe will move on. We are quite insignificant as-is.
I am observing it in my farm where I have installed precision agri devices from Fasal (https://fasal.co). Fortunately, during this period there wasn't any active crop. Showing new crop now.
Most places in the US have minimal tenant rights. Leases are often 1 year and because of rental price floors geographic rents tend to not vary much.

Geography determines school placements, what little league your kid plays in, who your local representatives are, etc. I don’t mean to cast tenants in a bad light. It’s just hard to have deep roots if you have to move frequently.

The places that are exceptions have rent stabilization or weak markets. Rental markets always devolve into little geographical cartels where tenants have no leverage. But we live in an era where we pretend it’s a real market and dislike regulatory frameworks.
Thanks for posting this. It's something that's really hard to communicate about climate change to people. It's also super depressing.
I went down with heat stroke once and I get know what this is like. I was in hospital for 4 days after a close brush with kidney failure. So many people just think it'll be just a bit hotter in the future.
If you think that is the answer, call it bigoted instead of playing the race card.
Yes, it's called Edge.
> I've seen many proposed implementations but they all fail because if I can prove my vote to myself in any way, someone else can make me prove it to them either to buy or coerce my ballot.

There is a way to prove that your vote was counted without being able to prove what you voted for by using homomorphic encryption. So, if someone wanted to coerce you or pay you for voting at all for whomever you want, they could do it, but that's fine. Microsoft is actually working with Galois on a system operating on this principle[1], and here's a good video explaining the basic concepts of how it works[2].

[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2019/05/06/protect...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRTvoZ3Rho
Pegging Clojure as a prototyping language relative to Java is hardly encouraging.
>b) An advanced, spacefaring race (or races) travel to Earth and spend over 70 years pulling pranks on military pilots.

70years might not be that long for them if they are on mission across galaxies, they are operating on different timeframes.
Reader mode is a huge UX upgrade here. Recommend it.
This is not real DDoS protection since it does not deal with jamming the pipes. It is more of a resource exhaustion protection.
The doctrine of public view meaning there are no rights to be enforced is not internationally recognised. Google even gave up on Street View in Germany, despite public streets being public.

There are good logical and moral reasons, IMO, why the doctrine is unsound. For example: individual photos are qualitatively different to movies, even though movies are made up of individual photos; the fixed interval conveys speed, which individual photos are quite poor at. Similarly, pervasive photography is different to individual photography: instead of an incident at a single location, someone's whole day may be mapped out, and who they're talking to, etc.

In other words, reasoning about privacy is not transitive or scale invariant. You can't say that the end result is ok or moral based on its component parts. Composition changes the thing qualitatively.
The value of the land would go through the roof. Houses would absolutely be getting torn down to build high density apartments.

There is more to it than monetary considerations however, communities will be destroyed, the feelings and romantic notions people have about the area will be stepped on.
Your comment includes footnote references but none of the footnotes themselves.
Are there web developers in this thread?

The only praise for a browser that I am hearing in this and similar threads is about how a browser is superior for content consumption (browser X is faster, etc.). It’s never about how one browser offers better developer experience than others. And I have not yet found a browser that is nicer to develop in than Chrom(e/ium).
I really like the Enlightenment desktop environment, but always fall off it because I can't get the tiling working how I like. If the tiling is fixed to be consistent with Awesome/i3/dwm, Enlightentment would certainly be what this article calls for.
At current numbers, the effect on our own society from our own reaction has cause much more damage to ourselves than the effects from the refugees themselves.

I suspect you may be right that the popular option will be to close the border. I do not agree however, that it is the better option.
Right on. Forbes.com hosts my blog. They provide minimal editorial oversight, usually limited to making sure you capitalize every word in the title per their style guide.
Submissions like this one make me wish Hacker News had a downvote button...
Human beings may owe their existence to nearby supernovas
I don't know whether it's legally possible to decay equity. Equity is seen as property, so once it's granted you can't just revoke it. You can expire or revoke options, but options themselves don't grant any right other than buying or selling the underlying asset. You could do something like a maturing bond, where it grants payout rights, but that doesn't give equity. You can just plan on a constant level of dilution, ala Bitcoin, but that doesn't ever actually remove previous ownership.
Frankly I've never seen a single massive data collection project since the HGP that has had made any real consequential contribution worth it's investment since. That modencode fiasco still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Here are some reasons to doubt this working hypothesis:

1) It is inconsistent with the personal experience of most developers. Few would claim that C is just as productive and safe as some garbage collected language (provided that both are suitable for the task at hand), or that a SQL group by statement is not more productive to write than the equivalent procedural code.

2) The methods used to study the subject are completely unfit for purpose.

3) It is inconsistent with the few results that seem at least somewhat well supported because they are simple enough to measure, such as the constant bug count per line of code.
Surely it has everything to do with pattern matching? A C-style switch statement is an extremely primitive version of pattern matching, and in the article the flattened equivalent of the nested switch structure is just tuple destructuring and matching, just like in Rust I could write

match (foo, bar, baz) {
(1, 2, 3) => something(),
(3, 2, 1) => somethingelse()
}
> At least in Europe the summer solstice is regarded as the beginning of summer.

I think in Europe it's called midsummer - middle of summer. That's what Wikipedia says as well.

> Traditionally, in many temperate regions (especially Europe), the summer solstice is seen as the middle of summer and referred to as "midsummer".
Russian imageboards found VK profiles of quite a few porn actresses and prostitutes using findface.ru. Of course, they immediately started harrassing them and sending messages to everyone in their friends list.

However, ethics aside, the cat is out of the bag. People can shame the guy into deleting the data, but computing power will only get cheaper and data matchers faster. Sooner or later some will do this again and launch a Tor site with an up-to-date database. We have to adjust to the idea that if you have a social media profile any public images of you will lead people to it sooner or later. And it will be sooner, not later, with every passing year.
"Why (does) the Boeing flight computer needs pitot tube input at all ?" If there is a strong tailwind, the plane needs a much higher ground speed to avoid stalls.

If these accidents prove anything, it's that we need a computer that takes many different inputs (GPS from the tail and the nose, pitot, barometer, AoA indicator, input from the pilot, engine RPM, etc) and put them into a mathematical model of the airplane before overriding the pilot.
Uk is not London
The same story about Findface project was big news in Russia several years ago. They scraped the whole vk.com (Russian Facebook copycat with almost entire Russian population in it) and applied some very fine ML to find a person by his/her face.

2ch (4chan ancestor) users identified girls from porn and harassed them, outing them to their families and friends using this service.

Later company discontinued this service and now sells technology to the Russian government to monitor CCTV footage from Moscow subway.

VK kind of fixed data scraping issue (not sure if they actually changed much).

Usually Russia copies everything from the west, interesting to see western news follow Russian lead after a few years. Not saying I am proud of mother Russia in this case, just an observation.