skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I explain to people that there are companies that scrape and sell databases of non-public Facebook profiles and data they often audibly gasp or at the minimum get very uncomfortable.

I can guarantee you that most higher level executive positions at fortune 2000 companies have had their private Facebook profiles reviewed during the hiring process.

This is not about tracking. This is actually more similar to your phone company selling your conversations and internet activity.

There is definitely not a common perception that Facebook activity is public.
Bjarke Ingels: Architecture should be more like Minecraft [video]
> nation of manufacture

Barely anything sold on Amazon is not made in China.

What I use to determine what to expect from a product is the quality of the documentation, which is almost always pretty bad (but sometimes better than on Ebay or Aliexpress).
> current position

Careful there, buddy.
Looks at it this way: it will encourage us to get off the planet.
Some interesting companies at the intersection of science/engineering that are hiring software devs:

- https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/ Synthetic biology engineering

- https://www.benchling.com/ Online LIMS

- https://neuralink.com/ Brain Machine Interface

- https://strateos.com/ Programmatic Cloud Lab (disclaimer, I work here)
Wonderful. What better way to drive home the message that the Russian government’s strategy of control over internet and Great Firewall makes total sense from the POV of national security.
"Their project was 17,211 raw lines, 15k source lines, and 637kb"

So a couple of students cranked out 15K lines of code, in basically a subset of their study time, for a single class?

I don't doubt they did it, what I doubt is the quality of what they wrote. Because it's 'just a project' it doesn't have to be fully debugged ...

But that is a vast amount of code to hand-write over a short period of time.

At that level, I think it's basically just 'code like the wind' with not much consideration for whether it works, architecture etc. etc. - which in a way might put the conclusions of the 'mini study' at odds.

At 15K LOC dashed out very quickly ... these are not products, they're comparing 'rapidly written out lines of code', which is something else entirely from working code.

Also, given that everyone is in Uni, and likely may not have been exposed to proper idiomatic code for the language ... this presents another issue. Ideally we'd want to compare reasonably idiomatic code for one language, to another.

Kudos to the author for this, but we should be aware of some caveats.
You really don't need the network certificates for work. They're just a common retirement.
You cited NYT v Sullivan in several places in this thread. What facts lead to you weigh to come to the conclusion that the Gibsons are public figures?

Maybe you have some intellectual humility and give deference to the judge and jury that heard all the facts rather than declaring them to be wrong based on a summary of a summary.
Not exactly an education game, but Shadow President is why I know my world political geography much better than most.

Various games taught me more about the rough timeline of (especially) ancient history than school ever did. Crusader Kings II let me follow the unstated meat of the plot of Hamlet intuitively, in a way that I'd guess the vast majority of modern people without some equivalent experience or very specific education could not.

Mavis Beacon taught me to type correctly. Early Web free-for-all chatrooms and FPS in-game messaging taught me to type fast.
None of it is open source because it was done for a school course that uses the same project every term. The only use for having access to the code would be cheating on that project. The school gets mad when people publish the source for their school projects, especially when it isn't otherwise useful, that's also why my ray tracer isn't open source.
You are thinking of communism. This is the USSR, the scores are all sent to Moscow and then one point is reissued to each player. Then anyone who asks what happened to the rest of the points is sent to the gulag.
Last time i edited some latex document, i ended up in dependancy hell with diffrent packages excluding one another or distorting the results of elements used by other packages. Has that become better?
I wonder if people are reluctant to do this because they would be scrutinized more and perhaps their phd, Grant etc might be at risk?

If so, is the only solution to give"credit" towards the phd, grant etc in the form of hours worked towards pushing knowledge acquisition, and not strict results?
Psychiatry has broken with it's dark past? More like a dark present.
When comparing different languages it becomes more of a measure of the relative abstraction levels of languages. The exact same program will have hundreds (or thousands) of times more LOC in Assembly than in Python.
Loved this part and thought it was hysterical -

> Since my team had all interned at Jane Street the other language we considered using was OCaml, we decided on Rust but I was curious about how OCaml might have turned out so I talked to someone else I knew had interned at Jane Street and they indeed did their compiler in OCaml with two other former Jane Street interns.

Relatedly this is why I get annoyed at people that don’t believe 10x or Nx developers exist - they absolutely do!
It's an end run around contract clauses that tell them they can't advertise pricing until there's a qualified lead (or similar).
There is the rare case of a store posting honest reviews (I'm thinking of DigitalRev TV), to

1) Demonstrate trustworthiness

2) Make sure you think of them when making your decision, increasing the chance you'll buy something from them.
Eh, and PubG got it from H1Z1 which got it from DayZ which got it from Minecraft which got it from the Hunger Games movie, etc. Welcome to remix culture.

What's interesting is that fortnite underwent almost exactly the same journey as H1Z1. Start as a paid PvE, release free BR, cancel survival and focus on BR.
This is about nation state adversaries. There should be no illusions that they laugh at people who think they are safe behind air gaps and routinely cross them. Often both infiltrating and exfiltrating data.
Price it appropriately. For the vast majority of the uses of plastic, it isn't the best solution, just the cheapest. Keep adding tax until something more sustainable is cheaper.
I'll preface this by clearly stating that Zotero is absolutely indispensable; I wouldn't be nearly as organized without it. It's very important to me that such tools be open, and Mendeley in particular is a complete disaster in this regard (see their history with encrypting user data).

That being said, Zotero is very much a "least worst" tool in my opinion.

* Overly rigid in how it goes about modeling document types and metadata fields.

* Doesn't handle bookmarks, browsing history, and other various data types. At first glance it's easy to dismiss such things as out of scope, but I find that my typical workflow results in reams of such unsupported data being generated and manually tracked by me. The problem is that this unsupported data is often tightly coupled to the data I'm managing with Zotero, which is frustrating to say the least.

* An incredibly heavy and inefficient piece of software.

* It's far too difficult to set up and manage my own sync server (last time I checked, at least). I don't really want to share all my data with the developers, but it's very inconvenient not to do so.

More on topic with the broader discussion - knowledge and data management in general seems to be a largely unsolved problem, particularly in science and particularly regarding interrelations between and versioning of arbitrary pieces of data.
When should you push out an update? At the start of the day? At the end of the day? Either of those would mean the whole day was broken. In the middle of the day means one day of trading, one day broken in the worst case and then fixing overnight.
I work around enterprise SaaS sales also and the other reason is that we don't want to give our pricing strategy to our competitors.
Could you explain that a bit?

For example, are you implying that the modern web is somehow too complex? Or/and are you implying that we should've stuck to some simpler alternative than the modern web? And if so, what might that alternative have been?

I don't mean to put words in your mouth, just trying to figure out what you meant.
I always thought the same- it was based on an algorithm that took into account review score and number purchased.

It seems to get things right most of the time, but I always look at others and compare to be sure. Sometimes I don't get the Amazon's Choice.
I personally enjoyed the PvE, just like I enjoyed H1Z1 survival. But as far as replayability goes, I guess PvP has more longevity.

I think what really lead to Fortnite's ultra success was how well optimized the game was, that they even were able to put it on mobile and every low end computer out there.
Usually by small niche monompolies who dont have real competition to fear due to beeing only vendor, or other lock ins in place.

Some do not even have database models where you can register as a customer or integrator. You have to contact them to be registered as customer, so you can get acess to datasheets and manuals - its ridiculous.
Would you prefer systems being very easy to attack or very hard?
I hope it's not too "video-gamey". That was the downfall of "MS Flight". It was highly disappointing to hard-core simmers who had come to expect realistic flight conditions, routes, ATC, physics and a world-wide map.

I was part of a survey from MS about what I'd like to see in the next version of the simulator (this was after FSX went away but before "Flight). The survey asked a lot of questions about my thoughts on making the sim more goal/mission oriented (essentially, more of a game).

I made it really clear that I thought that was fine as an addition but should not replace the current real-world functionality. Give people the option.

I can't imagine my answers were that different from most long-time users - basically it needed to have all the features I mentioned above, plus an open SDK for 3rd party developers.

MS didn't listen and "Flight" was a huge disappointment - at which point I moved to X-Plane.

Hopefully, they've gone back to their roots with this new version because it looks absolutely amazing.
Moxie Marlinespike (Openwhisper Systems, Signal) makes a good argument for why that doesn't work https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM. Recommend watching the whole talk.
Can you expand a little? I fail to see the connection between the quote and your conclusion.
Traditional, static documents will never go extinct, particularly in fields such as pure mathematics. If LaTeX3 wants to engage this crowd, it'd better offer substantial benefits, a fair amount of backward compatibility, or preferably both. In any event, LaTeX moved on from the original set of macros in 1983 to LaTeX 2.09 (anybody know when?) to LaTeX 2e in 1994... in the intervening quarter of a century LaTeX3 has been a work in progress... Maybe the goals set for the next version are too ambitious (see [1]), but clearly the inertia has been lost, a sign that the project has become fairly stable.

As with any long-term speculation, many years from now people may very well get rid of the TeX ecosystem altogether. During our lifetimes, though, I'm skeptical of seeing major changes in (pure) mathematics publishing. As unixhero pointed out, jupyter notebooks and the like will gain further adoption, and the applied math crowd, scientists and engineers will occasionally rant about having to choose between notebooks and LaTeX... c'est la vie!

[1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/986/43202
This is what’s so exciting about the Play date (https://play.date/) - I have the hope it brings back that retro vibe, with a different input mechanic for a twist.
Good to hear that this is still the case. Back in the days, games felt so much more community based, with persistent servers you would go back to day after day to hang out with the same set of people.

With the rise of quick match and match making, it felt like that was dying, and communities are instead pulling into Twitch and Discord instead. Some of my closest online friends were made in online games, so it's good that newer games still allow for that.
Did you see anything actually wrong in the analysis? That table of death rates by age group certainly brings to mind something like Simpson's Paradox [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
From Cuba to Greeneland
If you're into this sort of thing, definitely check out the ICFP Programming Contest -- take next Friday off and join in on the fun! https://icfpcontest2019.github.io/
>It's factually incorrect: a LOT of bombs were dropped on the UK

Yes. After we started firebombing German civilians. I didn't say Germany did not bomb civilians, I said England (the supposed "good guys") did it first.
Since they're actively planting stuff in their systems, I consider calling it an attack appropriate.

That's not "testing nukes in your own desert", that is "sneaking into someone's factories and planting bombs", if we're looking for an analogy.

And I'm surprised that this is openly admitted by the US, and tolerated by both sides, instead of being treated as an act of war.
Reading the article, several of the college faculty claimed the bakery's actions were racist, for which they had no evidence, and plenty of evidence against.

"Students, professors and administrators held protests, charging that the bakery was racist and had profiled the three students."

Literal comments or the flyer would be better, I agree, but it doesn't look like anyone is objecting to this description of the content of the protests.
LaTeX is precisely good because it outputs PDFs that are relatively simple to parse and display. Any document format that doubles as code has its share of problems - how are you going to print it, how does it fare on low-power devices. Postscript can be used to solve differential equations, yet it is not used anymore..

Sure, there is a space for interactive documents, but LaTeX doesn't even try to compete there.

And honestly, I love plaintext way more that any WYSIWYG format. If proprietary Wolfram stuff is the future, then I don't like the future.
Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey
A university dean admitted to passing out a flyer that falsely stated that the Oberlin student had been assaulted: https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/05/gibsons-bakery-v-oberl.... A police officer testified that the Oberlin students had assaulted the bakery employee, not the other way around. The flyer also stated that the bakery had a long history of racial profiling. But at trial the dean admitted that she didn’t know whether that was true. Numerous witnesses testified it was false.

A high ranking university employee handed out a flyer containing damaging assertions of fact, with the intent that people believe and act upon those assertions, and at trial offered nothing to suggest she had even a good faith belief that those assertions were true. That’s not an exercise of free expression.
What makes LuaTeX better than XeTeX, as far as typography is concerned?
You can accomplish exactly that in OOP with careful use of multiple inheritance or interfaces.
Alternately, do be that guy. I love hearing about stuff I would be concerned about if only I were aware and I love personal testimonials from people I know and respect about things I had only read about previously. I often change because of specific things that people said, and like to tell them, because it takes bravery to hold an opinion, put it out there, and to be convincing in defending it.

I guess my ego is strong enough not to feel contempt towards people who know things that I don't, because I've never met anyone who didn't. If I already know, I'll tell you.
Ask HN: News Aggregators
Do you have recommendations?
This is fancy
You must be misunderstanding something here. This isn't "people on Twitter jawboning" - this is about an institution playing vigilante by deliberately and wrongly accusing a store owner of racism when all he did was try to protect his property. This is real life people losing their jobs and money because they dare to try and stop someone from stealing from them. Not even just the store owner but his employees. Quoting from yourself, this is about "keeping them in subservience" and making sure they "stay in their place".

If you really don't see that and want to continue with the racist apologia then by all means, it's a free country.
Not only that, the LOC heuristic depends on the verbosity of the language. Java, for example, is more verbose, than say, Python, even though you’re close in abstraction level.
> It got a software penalty

In other words, HN is not ranking posts by votes, but by some (presumably handcrafted) algorithm that shapes which topics are more likely to make it to the front page. TIL.
What AliGroup umbrella? You mean an unofficial one since Alipay is owned by Ant Financial which is independent.

The post says Alibaba owns Alipay. Not WeChat.
Note that project is the outlier for how much code it contained. That team did have the most trouble getting things done on time and fixing all the bugs, so they passed the least tests, as one would expect given how much code their design choices required them to write. I think the causality goes from their design to the line count, not from the line count to worse design, they had to write lots of code to implement their more abstract design choices. I looked at their code and didn't see any obvious deficiencies in anything other than the design.

Also note that UWaterloo's CS and SE programs are different than other universities. Everyone on all teams had at least two years of full time work experience at 6 internships. The people I talked to were also programming enthusiasts who read online a lot. The only teams that may not have written the most idiomatic code are the person who used Python alone, and the Haskell team because I've heard idiomatic high-end Haskell involves an insane amount of knowledge of abstractions like lens, way more than all the other languages.

This compilers class is also well known for requiring lots of work, so students often arrange their schedules to have a low load from other classes while taking it, which is possible since the CS program requirements have a lot of flexibility.
While I wouldn't go as far as her I agree that political parties are problematic but perhaps also symptomatic of a larger underlying problem with the political structure - that the process of 'making the right decision' and the process of 'winning the election' have two separate strategies. I cannot say for sure if it is solveable or unsolvable and in what contexts or systems.

For instance we know now with game theory that first past the post essentially guarantees a maximum of two viable political parties and a candidate with a political party has a substantial advantage against an independent one unless there are truly unprecedented degrees of bad reputation to the only major political party.

One small advantage that political parties and representatives in general address is 'what to do when you don't know' and division of knowledge and labor. Even in the past when the domain of knowledge was smaller it wasn't really viable for everyone to know everything. It is essentially the Ian Stewart paradox on a societal level that
“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.”

Technocratic concepts had one proposal of limiting votes to experts in domains but that isn't really viable or a good idea. The fatal flaw is in deciding who is the expert and the even nastier feedback loop that has on incentives and truth seeking. Naked absurdities would prevail like miasmists denying germ theory to hold onto power.
Is possible to see the code of this project? And is the same of http://thume.ca/2019/04/18/writing-a-compiler-in-rust/?

P.D: I'm building a relational language and my ideas mimic closely "writing-a-compiler-in-rust" ie: using pratt parsers and similar, but not see much of how do that on rust...
Alibaba doesn’t own Alipay. Alipay is owned by Ant Financial. I think a small minority might be Alibaba owned. But perhaps not even that much.
> public figures

The college argued they were (limited purpose) public figures. The judge disagreed, clearly. I was making a point that to argue there are no First Amendment implications to libel laws is so far from established interpretations of the Constitution that it should give people who care about free expression pause.

> based on a summary of a summary

Are you disputing the summary? If so, which parts? I don't agree that judges and juries are always right and we should not form our own opinions, if that's what you're implying.

Do you think simply calling somebody racist, even when wrong, should be protected by the first amendment? My bet is that you do. And so this comes down to the set of facts. If you have contrary sets of facts, let's hear them!
It'd be nice if you could get the safety improvements without the UI changes, but as in software, that's not really in the interest of the manufacturer.
Alibaba doesn’t own Alipay. Alipay’s parent company is the independent Ant Financial. Considered a startup by some still.
Yeah I embarrassingly thought this was related to the 'shitty robots' girl at first but she certainly seems to have very interesting ideas to consider even if you don't agree with her.
I don't think simply calling somebody "racist" should EVER be libel. Even when inaccurate. But hey, that's me and I'm a free speech supporter.
Hoopl (data flow analysis) would also make a difference. I did a very similar project at my university in Haskell and Hoopl definitely saved us from writing quite a bit of code. We also used parser combinators in the frontend, which I think saved us time too.
yes, for the default settings... but I disabled google search, Phishing and Malware check, etc on mine ... I think I got everything (too bad it isn't the default settings).
Again, the issue isn't one of methodology or technology. It's inherent to the research process.

Let's do a thought experiment and imagine two identical research projects done in parallel universes. Everything is the same between these two universes except that the researchers are different people.

In some fields, you'd probably expect the results to be the same. The researcher shouldn't affect objective results after all. In a social science setting, the results may not be the same even if both researchers used exactly the same research design on exactly the same subjects at exactly the same point in their lives.

It should be very clear by this point in the thought experiment that "objectivity" is not really possible under those conditions. You need some theory to deal with this issue, but honestly it's manageable for the most part.

Now, the real kicker is that researchers affect their research way more than this. They actually design the project and constantly make decisions / interpretations throughout. These decisions and interpretations are subjective by definition. Even if we had a magical way to get objective data, are you really still willing to call it objective after a dirty, subjective human has so much as looked at it, let alone done the sort of filtering and interpretation inherent to academic research in all fields?
>it is simply factual incorrect to claim that Dresden was done before any bombings on allied cities. The Blitz happened in 1940.

I did not claim that. I stated the objective and indisputable fact that England began deliberately burning women and children alive before Germany started bombing British civilians. The British terror campaign against German civilians began on 11 May 1940. The first German retaliation in kind was 4 September 1940.
The bill is only suspended indefinitely, not withdrawn. The protesters don't have what they want yet.

It would not surprise me if the suspension were quietly lifted in the future when the world has moved on from the protests.