skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a good point. The difference is that 'jerk' is on its face a subjective assessment, an opinion, while 'racist' is less so. I have a feeling there's supreme court precedent drawing a more exact line.

Of course, devoid of context, 'racist' is pretty subjective as well. I'm guessing if the statements had been left sufficiently ambiguous, they might have gotten away with it. But they weren't - they accused them of a very specific racism, and demonstrated a reckless disregard for the truth.

From a quick search, looks like in cases such as these, the standard would be that the statements are made with 'actual malice' [1].

Edit: I noticed you asked what the law should be, not what it is. I guess I'm not so sure of the answer, but I'd venture that statements made with 'actual malice' should be included in libel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_statements_of_fact#Priva...
I don't know what the original content in it was but the first few posts to really blow up were satirising the Bernie subreddit.

They kept posting these really pathetic "gave my last $20 to the Bernie campaign, don't know how I will feed me and my dog this week, still worth it!" celebrations of poverty and faith, and The Donald parodied the shit out of them. It was hilarious but then a week later The Donald was 50 times more prominent as the Bernie subreddit.
See also https://www.firstmenonthemoon.com
> The truth is that everyone operating HN would rather keep users in the dark about how and why stories land where they do

Well, yeah. Did you think that was a secret?
Hackers behind dangerous oil and gas intrusions are probing US power grids
Is it just me or does this article feel kind of shallow? Like there's a lot of fancy text boxes and nice big text, but it doesn't cover a whole lot of information. Like how did the MTA build this infrastructure? Who lead it? What went into their decision making process for OS/2? Were there other options? They briefly discuss how the MTA is moving to contactless payments and casually mention Andy Byford's hiring (incorrectly citing him as the former head of the Tube—unless the MTA hired another former Tube employee?), but they don't delve into that either.

It's nice to have a succinct article, but I'd much prefer a long form version. If this article ran in say, the New Yorker, it'd provide a level of depth and information that I'd find really valuable. I assumed from the design of the site, namely the very pretty interludes, that I'd be in for some really good long form journalism. Unfortunately not the case.

Edit: Here's a funny snippet from an article about Andy Byford in which the credit card processing for the Metrocard machines goes down.

> It seemed that only Miguel knew how to log in to the relevant subprocessor and do the reboot.

> “Where is Miguel?”

> He was in a car, apparently, on his way home. He wasn’t answering his cell. He lived in Port Jervis.

> Byford looked at Meyer and Nugent. They shook their heads. Port Jervis was upstate, three hours away.

> “Unbelievable.”

> More calls were made, more cages rattled. Was it really possible that hundreds of vital machines, the main revenue engines of the subways, could be repaired by only one person at the M.T.A.? It seemed so.

Perhaps an upgrade isn't such a bad idea.
I think the "beat thing you can do" when someone's stalking you is often "go to the police"
>Could you use a standard word processor to approximate LaTeX, while obtaining an arguably better experience? Introducing the WordTeX template [for Microsoft Word] .

From the SIGBOVIK 2018 presentation, "WordTeX - a WYSIPCTWOTCG Typesetting Tool" : https://youtu.be/jlX_pThh7z8
> If the social sciences had a better general track record of producing reproducible results with practical value for society then I would be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But the reality is that most researchers have squandered their credibility by chasing mirages. If it were up to me I would cut funding for the entire field.

Is that not the definition of intellectual laziness? You've just given up intellectually on an entire field.
It's thought that China got F-35 plans via hacking into the contractors. That would be enough to understand the board.

Actually having the board means they can embed a chip inside it.

Combine those, and they can MITM all sorts of data. Depending on the purpose of the board: They can effectively grant stealth to their non-stealth aircraft. They can cause the F-35 to emit a response to a coded message.

Without much knowledge of the board, there is still hope for causing mayhem. The modifications could check for kill codes on many traces. China could deliver these in a multi-spectral way, not knowing what data actually flows through the board. So the kill codes show up on all the RF frequencies that the F-35 is thought to receive, and on anything optical, and so on. The kill codes could then disable the board, supply high-voltage pulses to other boards, or perhaps even make the board detonate.
So is the moral of the story to melt down any gold you find and disguise its origin? I found it sad that the insurance companies were trying to make a claim from the 19th century as well. That seems pretty out there.
The UK only tried to introduce it after they knew they couldn’t hold on to Hong Kong anymore. So they did it out of spite.

But the UK did try to convince Portugal not to offer the people of Macau citizenship, because they didn’t want to do the same for the people of Hong Kong.
I'm surprised how well an engineer needed to make this device, would actually go ahead and make it with the obvious purpose understood.
> So they were not exactly novices in their language of choice.

The Haskell team had "maybe a couple thousand lines of Haskell each" at the start. This one project ended up being 9.7k lines, so it constitutes half of their collective experience with the language. I'd say that counts as "novice" in terms of prior Haskell experience. Under the circumstances I think they did remarkably well to produce a thoroughly tested and maintainable end product in just twice the lines of code of the quick-and-dirty Python implementation.
There were people with 2k to 10k loc of experience in some language. That seems extremely low for any meaningful comparison and I would really hope that “average” programmers have way more experience than that...
I think I was pretty junior after writing north of 100k loc and working on 1M loc projects. And for sure I don’t consider myself highly competent in F# after writing some thousands lines.
I agree with the conclusions when they say that the design decisions are much more important than the language of choice. But I still firmly believe that the language makes a very big difference in real world projects. In toy throw away projects obviously metaprogramming cuts a lot of locs.
Scientist like Wu needs a clean, unbiased, trusting, politics-free environment to do their work. When that environment turns to one of suspicion and discrimination, of course she choose to leave.
I wholeheartedly agree with what everyone else is saying: "Truly incredible", "almost unbelievably great", "REALLY amazing", "unprecedented", "I love it", "the attention to detail is extraordinary", "an absolute masterpiece", "so awesome", "absolutely remarkable", "Incredible", etc...

In a comment you mentioned not having much money. I would highly recommend taking a day or two to set up a Kickstarter or similar for your next release (even if you would do other missions for free anyway). Also consider Patreon or similar. Allow people to give something, even if it's a small amount.

While the pieces (audio, video, photos) have been "available" for some time, you probably don't realize how much value you are adding to multiple lives by making them "accessible" in this way.
Fixed. But that was funny bad timing.
fixed the problem.
Vaguely related: 1888 was the longest year in history, to date -- typographically as expressed in Roman numerals.

Thirteen characters: MDCCCLXXXVIII.

That record will stand until tied in 2388 (MMCCCLXXXVIII), and won't be exceeded until 2888 (MMDCCCLXXXVIII).
One instance of a single part of any device being tampered with by the Chinese government would be enough to cause every western company to move all production out of China.
What problems would arise if they skipped numbers that exceed the 6 characters? Like, go from 37 to 39 (XXXIX). Then you have a solid run until you run into 78.

And 78 ought to be enough for anyone.
Oh I wouldn't call Worms "little-known". The whole series was a pretty big success in the 90s
I (and a lot of my friends) got their first real start with programming using Roblox back in 2006. Most of us now work professionally in software or security, directly as a result of our experience with making games in Roblox, or hacking the game.

Writing exploits for Roblox gave me experience with everything from binary analysis to web security and cryptography.

I've heard similar stories from other people for games like Runescape or Minecraft. It's really astounding to me the ways in which a dedicated enough teenager can take advantage of games to turn them into something really educational.
I just remember reading (or hearing) that it was a tough business because demand for new releases was very high, and then tapered off quickly. So a lot of DVDs would only get rented out 2-3 times and then would never be needed again, if you're paying $20 per DVD it's tough to come out ahead.

It's all ancient history at this point so my memory is fuzzy, but I think hobbyist stores actually had the better business model by that measure (they'd focus on a limited selection of classics that people would rent again and again). Then Blockbuster came along with these studio deals they were able to negotiate based on their volume, allowing them to offer practically unlimited copies of new releases. In conjunction with a decent selection of classics this enabled them to lure customers away from the hobbyists. A combination of pressure from the studios and the emergence of competitors with lower operating cost (Redbox, Netflix etc.) later crushed Blockbuster. And watching the studios raise their fees until Blockbuster collapsed surely contributed to Netflix's decision to produce a lot of original content. And now we're caught up to the present day.
That would be reassuring if it wasn't a part of the biggest subway system in the world.

I think you'd need an obscure OS and an obscure organization in order to significantly decrease the risk of the internet hating you enough to infect you with ransomware.

Oops, a third requirement: your obscure OS can't be the same obscure OS used by the biggest subway system in the world. Because if someone did end up hitting NYC Subway why not hit the other instances that showed up in a scan? Is the hacker really going to think the extra 0.01% profit isn't worth the zero dollars it costs to infecting a few more machines?
Kids these days have it easy with their movie credits. In my day, you had to pause the tape to work out what year the movie was copyrighted.

Die Hard: MCMLXXXVIII

Avengers: Endgame: MMXIX
That damn Constitution! It actually allows a president to stop us from going to war! We never knew, because no president in living memory has dared defy MIC...

(current office-holder is no exception)
This comparison doesn’t tell absolutely nothing about the strength and weaknesses of dynamic types languages vs static types languages in real world projects.
Obviously dynamic languages are better for toy projects.
If for you 4-5k loc is a project of “significant size” then we must have pretty different points of view.
It's difficult to tell what's true and what is made up by the US military as a pretext to keep ratcheting tensions up (and justify their existence):

https://theintercept.com/2016/12/31/russia-hysteria-infects-...
> In the same vein of idea, it’d be interesting to know how Go would fare in this project.

I would say a bit worse than the mentioned alternatives, which all have better type systems and thereby e.g. make it easier represent and manipulate the trees that are everywhere in compilers. But most likely it's still fine, and the line count metric would be more influenced by the fact how experienced the author is than the language.

Things will get worse in Go if one wants not write a lexer/parser manually but use tooling for that. Parser combinators and other tools benefit a lot from generics.

On the other hand e.g. writing a network server with decent performance will be in Go a lot easier and more straightforward than in any of the other mentioned languages. While all those languages are general purpose programming languages they definitely have their strengths in different areas. Some are better for some tasks (e.g. compilers), other are better for others.
That is amazing - the generational spans. I was born in the 1980s, but I can only imagine the feeling of that day in 1969.
It's the AKC. Stupid traditions are the point.
That almost perfectly describes those of Gaelic lineage.
I've always wondered about this, but never had the time to actually investigate if this is possible. What's the best way to protect oneself against this sort of "attack"?
They dont have to be connected to the internet directly, the attackers can move laterally across segmented network boundaries or deliver a USB or backdoored device implant for their initial access.
Your individual documents can be pretty easily exported and self-hosted. The parser, runtime, standard library, etc. is free software. https://github.com/observablehq

It’s just not going to have all of the editor GUI, community features, etc. of the Observable platform.

> absolute guarantee that your documents will disappear

Okay sure, but that is true of every digital document.

The documents that survive from <1000 BC are almost all either carved into stone or impressed into clay tablets. Pretty well everything that was written on a flexible organic surface from 2000+ years ago has been destroyed, but scattered bits of oral history retold by generations of storytellers and some written books repeatedly copied by generations of scribes have managed to survive. A tiny number of original documents written on papyrus, animal skins, etc. have stayed partially intact.

If you want you can certainly carve your Javascript programs into stone, but I wouldn’t bet on anyone being able to run them in 4000 years.
I think Citibank did too, for the longest time. I had multiple occasions of visiting their ATMs and being treated to a space invaders style interface ...
The Bright Side of Unionization: The Case of Stock Price Crash Risk
In Finland the nation wide test in math are now digitalized. Which is good bit neither memorizing latex commands or menu hunting feels as natural as "drawing" by hand. This will inevitably spread, what to do?
It's also hard to massage your invariants into a form that a type checker will accept, since you're now restricted to weird, (usually) non-Turing-complete language.

A good example of this is matrix operations - there are plenty of invariants and contracts to check (e.g. multiplication must be between m x n and n x p matrices), but I don't believe there's yet a particularly convincing Haskell matrix library, in part because the range of relevant mathematical invariants don't cleanly fit into Haskell's type system.

For those cases, checking the invariants at runtime is your escape hatch to utilize the full expressive power of the language.
The MVMs have been on Windows for some time... you can see when they crash.

But yeah, it was huge in banking when they released 2.0...
> Maybe instead of struggling to apply management concepts to the development process, companies would achieve more by breaking things up into 6-person sized teams.

How do you coordinate the six person teams, prevent them from ending up in contention, etc.?
Or milk.
I liked it. The clickbaity title leads the reader to learn what a barycenter means.
I assume you are using ccache?
It's too bad she didn't orbit near, in spacetime, to Lord Byron.
Here you go: https://outline.com/uRhJrw
I used Feedly for quite a while since google reader shutdown, but switched to Inoreader about 3 or 4 months at. Generally I’m happy with it, although most of the time I access the feed via the Reeder MacOS and iOS apps
Incidentally, while having a look for Ruelle's book on thermodynamic formalism I stumbled upon a book title something along the lines of "the dynamics of roulette". I expected something about rare events in probability theory, perhaps betting strategies for optimising expected profit for certain levels of risk, but it ended up being on the mechanics of the roulette table itself - pages upon pages of hefty calculations of roulette balls including spin, velocity etc etc. It is crazy how much effort people put into getting an edge at a game.
I don't think so. The raw materials can be literally synthesized from thin air with enough energy input and you can burn plastics to get rid of them again.

What we definitely need to stop completely is letting plastics escape into the environment. Clothes made from plastic fibers for example need to go away.
Wow. The last time I saw OS/2 in production was at Egghead Software's back-office on PS/2's in the very late 1990's.
Yes. One of the reasons why Wine is a thing is because the primitives provided by X11 map nicely onto those provided by Windows. No Wayland port of Wine is in the immediate offing, also for this reason.
because human life is relativistic, it's more about fitting in a clan than absolute truth
Milk cartons contain plastic.
> If we take tobacco laws, with the cancer side effects, frequently going "omg don't expose the children to it!".

Indoor tobacco bans in public spaces were pushed largely by labor groups as a workplace health and safety issue.
Ask HN: While developing, do you run all the dependent services on your machine?
Development requires running many dependent services, like databases, caching servers, queues, other dependent (micro) services etc. Do you run them on your machine? Or you use other server infrastructure to run them while only running the specific service you are developing on your machine? How do you enforce consistent dev environment across your team mates?
Windows XP Embedded counts as a RTOS.
What if any are the restrictions on characters in the dog's name?

GOODBOY_FLUFFBALL_TAILWAGGER_DOGGO_BESTY_4EVAEVA~1

GOODBOY_FLUFFBALL_TAILWAGGER_DOGGO_BESTY_4EVAEVA~2

Etc.
Kind of a weird, deceiving title choice. There's no rule or law anywhere requiring this ... you can name your dog whatever you want. Apparently there is an organization called the AKC (never heard of it) which allows you to register your dog. Their record-keeping system can only hold 37 dogs of each name / breed combination because of old technological requirement.

So if you have a dog you want to register with this specific organization for whatever reason, there might be limitations on what you can name it. That's much less interesting to me than the title suggests. Does everyone register their dog with this organization for some reason? I'm not sure why you'd want to do that.
Makes sense to me.

Another moral: Don't hide from the Feds in the US.

Edit: And that reminds me. A decade or so ago, I chatted with people who claimed to be doing the Cryptomonicon thing. That is, pouring molten gold into a cave on their property, and issuing gold-backed electronic currency. They were likely crazy, or putting me on.
being ok was not the point, society moves before laws are made, and to pay their bills they found selling user logs were a way to do so

they probably discussed making people pay a small fee but I'm sure many web things died when they asked for money
Okay, maybe you're more reasonable than it seemed at first. I understand some paranoia about foreign opinions.

But, how often does the news need to talk about the Opium Wars? I would say there are plenty of long-form articles talking about it, but does every article about Hong Kong need to give century-old context?

It's brought up in Chinese media far more often because it's useful for the CCP to remind people. It helps keep them in power and feeds their narrative that China must never be seen as weak again. And while I personally don't think excessive nationalistic propaganda is a good thing, it's at least understandable.

However, my point is that this part of history being brought up more often in Chinese media doesn't mean it's the natural state of things, or that it should be brought up more often in Western media. No one reasonable thinks the British or other foreign powers involved did the right thing there.

You claimed straw-man really easily before. Don't you think saying that HKers think this one bill will turn HK into a 1984-like society is a bit of a straw-man? I think most of them might say that the problem is not one bill, but more of a slippery slope type thing. Give an inch, give a mile.

What beliefs do I have about why parts of the world are unstable? I don't think I've expressed any, so you must be making an assumption there. And actually, if you ask around, I don't think you'll find many westerners who think colonialism was a good thing, although I'm sure there are some.

Finally, about the British wanting Hong Kong to be democratic. After further reading, 60 years might not be right. There was a plan in the 40s and 50s for democracy, but it sounds like it was the British governor of the time who blocked it for unclear reasons. I don't know if there were other attempts before the negotiations for the handover began. The 1980s are more accurate, so maybe about 20 years before Chinese rule.

That said, I still think it can be assumed that the CCP opposed democracy in Hong Kong. If you want me to say Britain messed up with Hong Kong by not allowing democracy, then I can agree with that. And I'll certainly agree that Western colonialism was for the most part a terrible thing that made the world a worse place.
The table in front of me would rot really quickly if I put it in a composter.
The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds
So I can pass a complex value as a prop without needing to convert it or catching the underlying HTMLEntity? The tree will update once a property updates?
E. coli, staph and salmonella are everywhere and all over you, but we still call things that have them "contaminated".
When we work out rigorously, our bodies limit our ability to expend energy
Regardless of precisely what a “melt down” is or whether this was the appropriate term here, the Chernobyl explosion was caused by an excessive amount of fission output in a super-critical reactor. As I understand it, in a fission- or accelerator-driven reactor, if you turn it off, fission stops rapidly. Decay heat will remain, but that’s a smaller amount of output power and is presumably a good deal less dangerous.
Roman numerals remind me of that adage that obsolete technologies never really go away. There might be more people alive today that use Roman numerals than at the Roman empire's peak.
Wonderful that we can do these things during peacetime.
I recently did something similar with Tcl (instead of Python) and Duktape (instead of V8): https://rkeene.dev/js-repl/

All the Tcl runtime is in the "runtime" object, so like "runtime.puts('Hello World')" or "runtime.expr('2128')", etc

It was a lot of fun
Also, my handle in Roblox was Aeacus! Hit me up if we ever played together :) I'm sure there's a ton of overlap between HN and the smallish Roblox scripting community of 2006.
Appalachian Balds
My dad even talks about that - he’s in his late sixties and has been pretty blue collar careered his whole life.

How he simply couldn’t even begin to fathom something like the internet being a thing when he was in his 20s.

Makes me wonder what I can’t imagine now that I might see in my lifetime.