skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can answer some of these... keep in mind this perspective is from the Android ecosystem, where I was able to get a similar system working.

1. Apps can be running in the background. I'd say its more common than you think
2. You need to provide location permissions (either the ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION or ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION). It seems like every app requests these permissions anyway, so not a red flag just on its own.
3. Something scanning for a WIFI devices has no way (easily) to coorelate those addresses back to a user. With this bluetooth low energy method, the users own phone is the one who reports the detection back to {company}'s servers, so it can pass along any/all other information it has about you. Their location accuracy is also pretty crazy (radius is within centimeters if they've done it well).
4. Bluetooth low energy is actually crazy easy to set up, see here for more...
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/blue...
Great, just when we have a once-in-a-generation chance to combat noise pollution (one of the major things making cities unlivable), we go ahead and NOT do that.
yeah, the list is very interesting to read. The screenshots are a plus !
> Courts will determine whether including 10 lines of GPL code make your product derivative or not.

OK but in reality that means the cost of including those 10 lines is that you are exposing yourself to an unknown amount of legal risk, and our legal system has a highly nonlinear penalty system, so it's basically as if the 10 lines infect your whole codebase with GPL.
Maybe Eich should have gotten fired for some other things he did cough cough js cough cough but what's "intolerant" about donating to a political organization which is pursuing its cause by entirely legitimate, non-violent, tolerant means? And what's "tolerant" about firing someone for donating to the _wrong_ sort of political organization? In fact, some politicized organizations, e.g. unions, do engage in violence every now and then, but firing someone for donating or contributing to them would still be beyond the pale. That's how strong the taboo against "you donated to a political organization I don't like, you're fired!" is.
Maybe they can't make editorial recommendations for the long tail but they absokutely could do so for the top few thousand videos each week.

Would that yield an improvement? I don't know, but it would have an impact.
As someone from the Midwest I can assure you that we don't have a larger percentage of crappy coders than the coasts and tech hubs do. We spend just as much time fixing the code from your terrible developers as you do from ours.

It's really a lack of training provided by companies and that most 4 year degrees don't actually prepare people to write good maintainable code so new developers have to luck into finding a mentor that can teach them these things.
When I started thinking about it I made a number "line" that had an origin (0) with positive in one direction, negative in another, and urgative in a third.

The reasoning is that a different sign takes you towards the origin, then in the direction of the new sign. The answer to your question is:

-1 + +5 = +4

+4 + urg3 = +1

to illustrate some other examples:

+5 + urg10 = urg5

-5 + urg10 = urg5

urg5 + -10 = -5

urg5 + +10 = +5

I never actually proved that the arithmetic was consistent, or even useful in any way.

Multiplication was much easier to reason about because setting the sign was just the result of a truth table. This is when I figured out the true/false truth tables extended the 3 symbols pretty trivially. I worked through boolean logic and then got bored with it and forgot about it until that time talking to my Calc 3 teacher during office hours.
As the grandparent comment says, you just get used to how Firefox works. For example, I would've never even thought to type "news" to look for hackernews in the omnibar after using it so long-- I just instinctively know that Firefox will find it easier based on domain name, so I type "yc" for "ycombinator.com"

I can see how this is going to be confusing for a new Firefox user, but it's easy to get used to.
Trello is the same way. I hate it.
Spotify has 40M tracks total. On YouTube, more than 5B videos are watched by users every day. Different scales of problem demand different solutions.
It cannot and won't replace the current monetary model (nor is there any need to replace it) . People who spread this have something to sell.
I think the best way to see how society could not see what would happen is to watch any TV show that has ever tried to predict the future ever.

Smartphone? Rarely seen but critical to our society.

Twitter? Ha.

Facebook? People actually spoke to one another.

Global warming? Didn't see that coming...

Flying cars? Nope not yet.

Pervasive Nuclear? Nope not that either.

Humans suck at predicting the future. We're so terrible at it. Market crashes, war, etc. We just have no idea. While what you're saying make sense to an economist, that's not how society works. The best ideas don't always win out the most popular ones do. People WANTED their kids to be better off, so they sent them to success factories that told the parents they'd be better off because in the past people were better off.

Until they weren't.

EDIT: I'm not saying no one saw this coming. I'm just saying a most people (society) didn't.
cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPeRrJ...
How is Spotify's different from Youtube?
> I'm sad all the Ruby guides I've seen ban "and" and "or". I don't find them to be such an issue, and they are nicer to type & read. For one thing you can say `foo or raise "msg"` but need parens to say `foo || raise("msg")`.

To me your example seems to be the proper use of the `and` and `or` statements - unless the team decided that the `raise("msg") unless foo` variation was preferable.
Agreed, OCaml has looked good for a long time.

And I have a similar feeling of sadness that Racket (or one of the other Scheme variants) isn't used more.

I've wondered whether one of the barriers is still that students' only exposure to these is usually using it in school for some contrived homework assignments, and dismissing the tools for "real work" before they've tried applying them. (And at least some schools are emphasizing having students ready for internship/interview with popular languages now, so innovative languages can get even less attention.)
Formatting :( Cant even edit to correct it
Spotify simply does not have the content over which an algorithm could loose control.
You skipped right over "most likely" and only focused on "the ... cause". To me it sounds like they are saying statistically Mg deficiency is the most widespread underlying factor. Their language is strong, but it does not come off that absolutist and the "most likely" suggests other causes.
Freedom and democracy are never requirements for being a global financial center. What capitalists want are stable government, low tax and few regulations. They don’t care if some political dissents are sent to Beijing.
It should have a big e-stop on the robot. This is to insure that if it runs over kids or malfunctions then you can shut it down.
4 months should be enough. If they aren't doing their best when on probation then they're an idiot, and if they're not doing well then how bad are they going to be after probation?
True, but the difference between C and Haskell hash-bangs is that GHC Haskell provides an interpreter.

GCC hash-bang is still an edit-compile-link-debug cycle. Just like with Python and Ruby, Haskell hash-bang accelerates the cycle by jettisoning the compile and linking steps.
It’s worse. I have personal knowledge from a lot client work in this space.

There are companies offering some basic functions like “wayfinding” so the retailer or mall wants to give wayfinding to the user in their app. Sounds good, in fact it’s cheap, and they will even handle the beacon deployment... hook up sdk to wireshark and find it sending lots of data, some of it comes to me (retailer api) but a metric ton of it is going back to the provider. Being able to see the installed solution in multiple retailers and seeing the app code you start to notice persistence between them... retailer and mall didn’t even ask for this. They just wanted wayfinding.
An intentionally facetious art piece based on neapolitan(italian) folklore (and other countries I guess, indian/chinese guys please confirm), that everyone familiar with italian culture will recognize as such.

Didn't expect some of the messages I'm reading here, awww, guys...
That's a good personal workaround, but it's not a solution to a problem - much like moving to a different city doesn't solve the problem of the manufacturing plant poisoning the water supply of the city you live in.

Adtech industry needs to be torched. GDPR was a step in the right direction, but unfortunately isn't nearly enough (I'd start with more aggressive enforcement of it, though). Something to pressure your politicians for.
I wonder if they were or weren't. Slavery in the Roman empire took a lot of forms from manual labor and prostitution to skilled and educated slaves. Depending on when you're talking about slaves even had some explicitly stated rights.
The economics of open source by C J Silverio – JSConf EU 2019
We've had several sit-downs. The problem with a low-skilled senior developer is you'll never convince them that they are writing junior-level code. It would shatter their world view.
I think the kernel design is fantastic. I think Jupyter has a lot of legs and will be great for many, many years ahead. But I also think you can make a 10x leap in data science tools, but you need to look beyond the R/Python/Julia style languages. Observable gets to start fresh and build a language that best enables an interactive visual notebook environment, whereas the others are great languages but that kind of notebook environment came later and must be shaped to fit the languages.
Shouldn't Apple ban apps using those SDKs? Is it identifiable from a source scan or binary trawl?
I sent your information over to someone. If they're able to help they will reach out.
Efficient Metholds for Evaluting Polynomials
“Many error messages were improved.”

A few months ago someone on HN mentioned that error messages would be greatly improved in this release, which would make learning OCaml much easier.

Does anyone have more details on this?
Data at Rest / Data in Transit Encryption
> This person is so convinced that they are a good developer that they refuse to take direction or ask questions

While I agree a coding exercise is valuable - this is the actual problem. The way I test for that humility is by asking "tell me about a time you personally did a poor job." I then follow up by asking for a time they identified a failure of a colleague. I look to see if they're empathetical, open to being wrong, and declaring they're always trying to improve.
Let’s look back at the original quote of Karl Popper:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

You think that Brendan Eich and people like him would meet you with fists and pistols if you didn’t suppress him by force? Or are you merely, contrary to what Popper recommends, suppressing all intolerant philosophies?
In a low margin commodity business, such as retail and grocery stores (that don’t cater to top 10% by wealth), it absolutely does come down to spending less.

Proof is the success of Walmart, Amazon, Aldi, Costco, Dollar General etc. Customers don’t care about anything but buying goods at the lowest price.
You're talking about Saul? Incredible inventor. I meet him occasionally as I live a few dozen yards from Other Lab. Do you live nearby? Would love to get coffee if you're up for it. @HNusername at gmail.
Britain has a duty to help Hong Kong out of this dark moment
If you don't want them I can take them off your hands for you :)
I disagree in some sense. I personally have found the recommending system on YouTube pretty good for the main page of the site. The thing that bugs me is the recommended bar right (or bottom right) of the videos, which can be really annoying and infested with clickbait etc.
> This is marketing at its worst.

This is marketing at its real. As practiced.

> I don't think telling people the product you created to serve their need is inherently evil.

Of course it isn't evil, but this is not what marketing is doing - and claiming so amounts to a motte-and-bailey defense of an industry that's rotten to the core and quite openly malicious towards their fellow human beings.
I don't know what the comment you are replying to meant, I interpreted it to mean the algo takes you down a rabbit hole to darker content, however for me I miss the days when it actually recommended relevant videos, similar to the one I was watching.

My entire sidebar is now just a random assortment of irrelevant interests. For instance I wanted to learn to play a denser piano chord, I learned it ages ago but I still get like 20 videos that explain how to add extensions to a 7 chord, even if I'm watching a video on the F-35 fighter pilot.
At least in HK you can still protest. In Singapore you’d be put into jail for public disturbance.
I use the same approach. Also has never failed me. If you can code system X, then you know how to use an if statement.
You saw me covered in blood on a bus
Canada is blacklisted by China now because they stand up to China more often...
But how does she smell?
I don't know if YouTube's problems are so bad that the argument applies in this case, but in general, "We can't comply with this regulation, it would be too difficult at our scale" is not considered a valid defense. Just as banks shouldn't be allowed to get so large that they can't fail without wreaking havoc on the economy, if algorithmic recommendation and moderation can't work, then maybe social networks shouldn't be allowed to get so large that human moderation is not possible.
Haha I did a very similar thing for mine - it was using these to replace clock in systems for hourly workers, no more need to clock in or out, the app would auto detect when you entered/left the building
Binary Numbers
I replied to the commenter. I started thinking not about boolean logic, but about a third arithmetic sign. I was thinking, if there are conceptual dimensions we can't perceive, maybe there are directions in those dimensions we also can't perceive.
The usual word is "benevolent" fwiw. It's studied extensively wrt. sexism as opposed to racism, but the basic dynamic is entirely the same. And I think it's actually borne out by the data - leftists tend to have a "soft bigotry of low expectations" attitude to minorities, whereas the right tends to be a bit more demanding of them in some ways, which can be either a positive or a negative depending on your point of view.
I'm not a fan of needing a name/gender in the title, because I think having a FOSS mixtape is interesting enough to the readers on HN.

That said, I really like this mixtape - I'll be downloading it and adding it to my current rotation.
Big Boy Bail Bonds, Inc
off the top of my head i can think of a few non-racist, potentially useful motivations. here’s a random one: say you’re an EMT responding to a medical emergency and you have limited time to check for the top few health emergencies likely in the presented situation. you know that, based on the “perceived race” of the patient, condition X is more likely given this ancestry than condition Y. this is the only visible information that would influence your decision. your time is limited - it’s only rational and responsible to check for the statistically more likely condition X before you check for condition Y. does that make this EMT a racist? or “obsessed with linking [...]”?

in the same way biological sexes might have medical correlations (color blindness, for instance), the things we’re loosing calling races may also. why not use this potentially useful information in order to save resources and improve lives?

i can’t help feel like you’re descending into ad hominem - you’re mostly agreeing with the facts of what i’m saying, yet claiming that looking at these facts at all makes one a racist. that’s a non-starter. the facts are the facts and what you choose to do with them is what potentially makes you a racist; not merely their acknowledgement.
The less-known part is the widespread practice among app authors to just include random adtech SDKs that do all this evil stuff.
insert unrelated rant about Crowder despite having nothing to do with the crux of her article

NYT ladies and gent.
Everyone agrees with you on readabilty. I think that's why they had to add this bit about this (A bit of History) section...

"This is the style established in both "The Ruby Programming Language" and "Programming Ruby". Historically it is derived from the fact that case and switch statements are not blocks, hence should not be indented, and the when and else keywords are labels (compiled in the C language, they are literally labels for JMP calls)."
Other useful materials:

- Chaos Monkey Guide for Engineers https://www.gremlin.com/chaos-monkey/

- Recent HN discussion on Resilience Engineering: Where do I start? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19898645
A detail missed due to the HN title matching the linked page's title: the byline is Salman Rushdie.
I think so, seems to be the logical progression of their crackdown on particularly egregious 3rd party analytics implementations.
> donating to a political organization which is pursuing its cause by entirely legitimate, non-violent, tolerant means

Restricting the ability of a class of people to marry based on their sexual orientation re: consenting adults is not tolerant.

There is no "legitimate" way to restrict these human rights - gay people were not an "intolerant" class in this scenario, they were a persecuted minority. Therefore, Eich engaged in a form of intolerance that justified the blowback.
Yes!

I don't understand that Firefox shows me a great start page with my recent visited pages with thumbnails but my bookmarks are still an obscure text list.

I've searched for an extension that would turn the bookmark sideboard into a full page with thumbnails but I haven't found one. (And I am too lazy to start such a project. I also assume that the Firefox team will light up a turn the bookmarks sideboard into something like the start page.)

Adding an option to store a copy of the page in the bookmark would make this a great usability enhancement.
I thought this would be referring to the Observable ie Observer/Subscriber pattern as a primitive in JavaScript, of which RxJS (Reactive Extensions) is the best known implementation followed closely by MobX. I like this project quite a bit, but it is unfortunately named.

It feels kinda like naming your project "Array map for JavaScript."
"I loved driving when I did the two hour prime deliveries. But as they hired on more people, it became harder to get work. I had to pay to get someone to get me shifts,"

This will always happen. As something becomes more popular, the supply of drivers increases, the demand decreases, and it becomes more difficult to make money as easily. This is natural to any market.

In 1998, you could make over 6-figures if you knew simple HTML and could throw a website together. Because there was a rush of people learning HTML, you now need to have a much bigger skill set to make that wage.

Driving is not that difficult. Anyone with a license and a good record can do it, which qualifies the majority of adults in the US. I wouldn't expect this job to pay that much.
Kinda the same story for me, right down to the debt level. I only credit myself for taking what was offered even when my advisor told me I should hold out for a better job more in line with my CS degree.

I took a guaranteed job that started one week after graduation over starting out higher up on pay scale and with relevant work experience.

Had my job search the following year not gone well, I could very well be trapped in underpaid, overworked sysadmin hell. :-/
Maybe the existence of such toolkits is a Chesterton's Fence that says you can't make this work without something installed on the phone. But this would be possible without these trojans.

If the Bluetooth beacon configures itself as a master, and enters inquiry mode, phones that pass nearby will happily respond with their Bluetooth ID (see https://www.bluetooth.org/docman/handlers/downloaddoc.ashx?d..., section 8.4).

You can also do the same with Wifi access points: Phones are constantly broadcasting their MAC address during active scanning for networks. The location from signal strength isn't as good (a Bluetooth beacon can pin you down near the Yoplait yogurt, a Wifi beacon and signal strength measurement just put you in dairy) but it's getting better (worse?). See: https://www.crc.id.au/tracking-people-via-wifi-even-when-not...

I imagine it would not be perfect but would be acceptably easy to use these "anonymous" MAC addresses to connect you to a name and address on a debit card. If your MAC and 20 other people left the store Friday at 2PM, and you and 20 other people went through checkout, and then your MAC and checkout are seen with 20 different people next week it's pretty trivial to identify you.

The cynic in me, though, says that even a minor loss of fidelity in tracking data weighed against the minimal risk and cost of building the spyware makes it worth building both.
I'd love to but I'm on the East coast, put my roots down here. Thank you though!
I really want to use Ocaml for web application back-ends, but last time I checked the ecosystem around that in Ocaml is less than extensive compared to languages like Python, JS, java, etc. It really is a shame. I need to set aside some time to really dive deep into Ocaml and make a simple micro framework or something.

From my small amount of exposure, I can say that I love Ocaml's expressiveness and flexibility.
There is a virtually (that bandwidth and storage aren't infinite) infinite supply of any digital good.

If nobody pays but everything else keeps costing money, there won't be any new digital goods. So you can't say there's an infinite supply of digital goods.
Setting aside the personal responsibility angle for the moment (which I agree with you on!) don't you think that negative externalities should generally be managed?

YouTube is a paperclip maximizer (where paperclips correspond to eyeball-hours spent watching YouTube) and at some point optimizing paperclips becomes orthogonal to human existence, and then anticorrelated with it.

I think it's a perfectly fair thing to say that maybe the negatives outweigh the positives at the present.

(This argument doesn't apply solely to YouTube, of course)