skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> this particular kind of trolling doesn't work (and didn't work in the case of the fashtag) if we all relax a little about dogwhistles.

No, that's exactly when it works. They aren't doing it to laugh at reactions as an end goal, the mockery exists entirely to delegitimize attention paid to racist/fascist dogwhistles, whose whole purpose is to get paid attention to by the target audience but ignored by the wider audience, which doesn't work when the wider audience is sensitized to and vigilant against them.
What I was trying to push back against is that the overarching culture of the site is right-wing. I don't know that it is, and as someone who uses the site, I don't see that. I would love to hear a real argument for why this is the case. The boards on the site have their own internal owners and moderators and it is those people who are actually crafting the content moderation. There are christian boards, technology boards, literature and philosophy boards, sports boards, islamic theology boards, cyberpunk boards, I can go on and on.

To say that the place is nothing but right-wingers and that any other boards that aren't are anomalies, is unfair. Further it shows you have never actually looked at the site beyond the front page, if that. The overarching philosophy of the site is one of free speech, which attracts people who are interested in odd things from all corners, not just the right.
It's a strange turn of events, especially when you consider the long-standing ties between chaos magick culture and strongly left spheres, like the Beat movement, cacophony society, and industrial subculture. Of course the early internet had much of this anarchic influence and hacker culture has been colored by anti-establishment, disruptive and radically progressive ideas, in particular radical free speech. "You can't stop the signal". This is a big part of the background early 4chan spawned from.

Now it's fascinating to see the alt-right and fascist-lite communities, fundametally authority-based philosophies, try to co-opt ideas like chaos and "meme magick".

On one hand, it seems what started as a joke/critique of fascist ideology steeped i heavy irony, has moved on while being picked up unironically. On the other hand, it's getting ever harder to tell the difference between genuine beliefs and those parodying them, once obvious satire has gotten boring, and the only way to get a rise is to make a more convincing charicature of the target.
I guess I'm not understanding the difference between net-worth and wealth in economic terms here then. I assumed they were roughly equivalent.
Building a successful business requires taking responsibility for all the boring details. Complaining that it is someone else's fault wastes precious time and hurts morale.
Five lessons from Apollo for the new space age
Amazon is typically quite clear about what's a purchased advertisement and what isn't.
ZFS on Linux 0.8.1 Brings Many Fixes, Linux 5.2 Compatibility Bits
Which couldn't be more ok. Hacker news comes down hard on people who casually throw out their unrealistic work hours, but for some of us it's the only way we'd stay competitive. I'm 26 with 5 years development experience and frankly, not the smartest man in the world. Things don't come easy to me. I take longer than my peers to learn concepts in software and business. But where I win is in my ability to work harder than my peers and compound the knowledge I do have. Sometimes even, I am perceived as "smart" by those who haven't worked 1 on 1 with me. Watching someone learn something in a week that took you almost a month; or building a reasonably successful company without doing the 80 hour week thing kills me a little inside. But that's life. You're given some amount intellect and if you want success you will have to pay your own costs to reach success, which may or may not be as much as what your peers have to pay.

The only golden rule I follow, never expect another human to work as hard as me for something that mostly benefits me. I do not believe in shaming employees that only put in their 40 and get out. That's great, they care about different things in life. Some of them have hobbies, families, responsibilities, etc, and I respect that. But for the rest of us who have chosen personal business success as our long term goal and aren't particularly intelligent, we should not feel guilty for our 80 hour weeks. Sometimes it is just plain necessary. Stupid if it doesn't work out. But necessary if it is to work out.
The critical question clearly seems to be what evidence do the plaintiffs have?

Presumably, the plaintiffs could at the least have records of various advertising that is uncannily targeting related subject matter to what the children may have been consuming and outputting, though I wonder how they could prove that the children didn't inadvertently activate Alexa and provide this data. Perhaps that is enough to subpoena Amazon?

It seems like the marketing industry will be at the front line of the battle over what age is enough to give your own consent in many aspects of life, and I personally am standing on the other side of that line.

I hear that some scandanavian regions have laws prohibiting adverters from targeting children, and I wonder how tech companies will deal with such restrictions.
Someone in my network who is in marketing at Alexa accidentally linked to one of these articles instead of an internal blog announcing a new feature for kids.
No, they weren't. They were meant to be a first step of many as part of a sustained programme of international action. We mostly didn't bother, so it's rather academic anyway. We lost the luxury of 30 years of steady incremental managed and subsidised change and now need to apply the emergency brake.

I'm not sure which environmental extremists you are thinking of. Environmental extremists like the UN IPCC - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose current chair is an economist - are contesting Western society by disrupting all economic output? There was me thinking they are working to try and keep the possibility of some economic output by avoiding civilisation crash.

This is not some cliche hair-shirt 70s environmental hippies going overboard on the ganja at peace camp. This is chemists, meteorologists, climatologists and economists, etc appointed by the world's governments. Governments that are, I assume, mostly not seeking a rerun of 1917.

XR want to achieve the IPCC's aims. Nothing more. I see regular people from a diverse mix of very normal backgrounds with regular jobs. I see no reds under the bed.
Companies can fund art directly (and many do, such as Google/YouTube), instead of wastefully routing it through government.

Government can provide UBI and healthcare to the whole population instead of picking politically connected artists to make government approved art.
Link should be: http://computerarcheology.com/
Excellent point. I cannot afford providing funding, but I can fund myself for 3 years to work on useful software.

> the software I wrote has enabled quite a few projects which otherwise would have not been possible or taken much longer

What's the common practice with such software? Is that published somewhere, open sourced? Or kept private in hopes of being monetized, with IP owned by the author/university?
Technically, the Earth does orbit around the sun and orbits around other objects.
It's an always-on Internet connected home microphone. What do people think it is doing?
Enabling Revolutionary Nondestructive Inspection Capability
Some players will even just gather around without shooting or killing each other to talk or mess around or whatever.
Fortnite was initially a huge flop - it wasn't free to begin with - I played the alpha and beta, the game was basically a boring PvE (player versus environment) building. Minecraft with better graphics. Users had to build "bases" with material to prevent zombies over-running them when they spawned and attacked you. A little bit like RUST (another game not the programming language) - except the raids in this case are usually done by humans, raiding for resources other players' stocks inside bases.

Then somehow out of the blue - Fortnite became huge: they did a Battle Royale mode, which was free to play, and compared to the competition, the game ran smoothly on almost any PC using it. This coupled with its young cartoony look like League of Legends and riding the Battle Royale hype without the realism, helped surely fuel it.

Let's not forget that Tim - the man behind Fortnite - is also the man behind Unreal, Unreal Tournament (huge RIP Unreal Tournament and its fanbase - that's another story not many would wanna know about now ), Paragon (another RIP and an angry fanbase) and the Unreal engine, which is Epic Game's biggest asset after Fortnite ( actually I have no data to compare what makes Epic Games more money, Unreal Engine or Fortnite at this time)

P.S. If you're into this stuff also look up Cliff Bleszinski / Cliffy B: he's another big name from the Unreal scene but retired from Epic Games when Tencent bought a huge stake and "peaced out' from the scene after his career flopped when he tried to do solo projects.
Perhaps you should post again? I would expect upvote behaviour to be quite arbitrary sometimes.
> In college I took a great "Philosophy of Physics" class, where on the first day the professor asked everyone to write one page on whether the Earth revolves around the sun, and the final project was another paper on the same topic, so we could see how nuanced a question it was and how our views had evolved over the course.

A lengthy and enjoyable read of the original controversy is "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown."[1] (I prefer to start there, as it's easy to tell whether you are interested in reading after the first few paragraphs, but he did put a ToC together, too.[2])

[1]: https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

[2]: https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
Of course you need to develop domain knowledge. But there's tremendous opportunity lying in these libraries, you just have to spend the time looking for it.
I would go talk to scientists and try to understand deeply what they’re working on, how they do it, and what systems (social/technical/political) allow them to do it. I’ve done this a few times and it’s always illuminating and inspiring.
Growing Up Poor Leaves a Mark on Your Genes
Yeah, but it's "just" speed of execution, while for most things the bottleneck of making something possible is correctness and ease of developing while keeping complexity in check. So yes it's important but still mostly less important than some others :)

Tensorflow is interesting in this respect. Leveraging a lot of parallelism and using a parallel pl under the good, while presenting itself as a dev friendly Python lib on the surface.
Because, other than a universal cryptocurrency like Bitcoin which already exists, there is no real use case for the fully distributed blockchain. What FB is making is a centrally controlled digital coin, no different from Beanz, an early attempt at the same thing. This is just a play by FB to get into fintech and try to take away some payments business from PayPal. There isn't really anything decentralized or crypto about it.
Surely the mechanism for change is the political process. And at a smaller scale society is full of people trying to influence, change opinion and mainpulate. Surely you should just adopt those same methods?

It would be interesting to try and model people more directly. Like what political campaigns do, but with a more noble intent. Use the data to discover how to serve people's needs.
I wonder as well. I did a project with him when I was a teenager and we didn't entirely get along. He was a very talented guy, though, and I wasn't entirely fair to him. I hope he's doing all right.
Darwin’s Finches Are in Danger Because a Parasite Is Changing Their Mating Song
Fun thought, that I never see anyone bring up. A Windows “window” is (and has been, since Windows 3.1) pretty much the same thing as an Erlang actor-process: a light pseudo-execution-thread that carries its own state and can send/receive arbitrary messages from peer windows, and—while normally only “doing” something when it receives a messsage— is conventionally driven to tick at regular intervals by timer messages it asks the system to schedule to send back to it.

It just-so-happens that unlike an actor-process, a Windows window usually has a GUI element attached to it. But not always! “Hidden windows”—i.e. plain actor-processes without the extra GUI bits—were the design pattern for doing background stuff for a long time before Windows introduced background services.

I bet some Windows developer here has a story of “that time I built an actor-modelled system just using Windows primitives.”
It is an expression of dominance. Male and female dogs both do it.
How critical is the unpatched Nginx resolver vulnerability 3 years later?
A consequence of your argument is that most everyone on the left who said the electoral college is becoming unacceptable due to Democrats winning the popular vote but not the White House (Gore and Clinton), in fact had empty arguments and talking points. I'm not sure that's a consequence you'd want to accept.

Regardless, do you think the multiple millions of additional votes Clinton received is not at least minimal evidence that the country is a bit more left-wing than right-wing?
For those studying Japanese, this one is amazing: https://nihongo-app.com/

It has sets for all Japanese school grades, split into daily chunks so that you can keep going forward with the app for years.

The only thing missing is kanji stroke orders, but the dev has hinted that those would be coming soon.
At the moment it's "available within collaborations". My former supervisor has had some bad experiences with people using his open-sourced software without acknowledgement etc., which is of course not quite ideal if you actually want to build a career in academia for yourself. Monetisation is not really an option.

My toolkit is maybe a bit non-standard in that it has attracted a few external collaborators using it as well and I like to think I have taken better care of upholding coding standards, documentation etc.

Normally software in my field is kept within a group and dies after one or two PhD students have left.
I believe this illusion is exploiting a quirk of human sensory vision so any machine learning will not be affected. It's the same property that most video encodings and compression algorithms exploit: Our colour and luminance perception does not have equal fidelity, i.e we dont sense as much detail in colour, where as we can sense more detail in luminance... in this case it means we can perceive the stripes, and given stripes alone we can just about discern their colour, but when mixed with a background colour it effectively blends the colour without blending the luminance.

I think this might be the same biological reason that we can't perceive much (or any) colour in low light, rods vs cones.

TL;DR our retinas are not CCDs they are a patchwork of two discrete components.
Thanks so much, mussung, for your excellent practical feedback! Both alternatives that you listed are very tempting.

May I please ask you some followup questions? There's no email in your profile. My email is marius.andreiana@gmail.com

> A command line tool that allowed someone to run SQL (or SQL-like) commands on a gzipped CSV file FAST would be invaluable. And if it could JOIN across CSV files ... wow!

What prevents one importing each CSV in a postgres db as tables, creating indexes and then start running queries? Disk space availability? (My local drive is only 1TB)
Caches are cheap, build a lot of them for the front end
(Googler, opinions my own. I also do paymentsy things.)

Carrier Billing has definitely gotten better and easier. From the Google Play side of things, there is an API that is used to help with things (no public docs I can find sadly).

If you want to get a feeling of what it looks like, you can check out Standard Payments: https://developers.google.com/standard-payments/
Cellebrite Claims It Can Unlock iOS 12
fwiw, according to Dr. Gundry the buns and meat you are eating from McDonalds are carcinogenic and disrupt your hormones as well, so even if they didn't give you a receipt, you probably shouldn't be eating McDonald's anyway.
Inside a low budget consumer hardware espionage implant (2018)
> Cliff Bleszinski / Cliffy B: he's another big name from the Unreal scene but retired from Epic Games and "peaced out' after his career flops.

Cliffy B was an early investor in Oculus. He put a lot of money into Lawbreakers which flopped.
true, but also open software it more exciting for some people
China rolls out rules to guide SpaceX-style commercial rocket research
How to effortlessly create, publish and share cloud-hosted Jupyter Notebooks
Common wisdom says to use the best tool for the job. Why wouldn't the same thing apply to licenses? The MIT vs GPL argument seems silly to me. Use whichever one best applies to your situation.

Writing a library and want maximum adoption? Use MIT.

Worried about patents? Use Apache.

Want to ensure the code stays open-source? Use GPL for an application or MPL for a library.

Obviously these are grossly oversimplified examples to make my point. But I wouldn't write a web application in C or a device driver in JavaScript. So why use the same license for all of your code?
It took me a lifetime to realize Reader Rabbit is a play on Peter Rabbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rabbit
> With that said, I don't think there's any valid answer besides "you can define your terms and points of reference such that it does or doesn't; there's no particular physical reality to the matter".

Isn’t the article linked here exactly the correct and valid answer of whether the earth orbits the sun? Philosophy likes to make things all seem like perception and mental frame of reference, and sometimes it is with people, but the earth’s trajectory relative to the sun doesn’t change if we think about it different or define terms differently.

Maybe the whole problem is asking an invalid binary right/wrong question, when the actual valid answer is that it’s not binary. This one hinges on your definition of “orbit”, when the real valid answer is that there are more than 2 masses, so using orbit in the first place is misleading. Another valid answer to whether the earth orbits the sun might be 99.87% yes and 0.013% no.
> they did a Battle Royale mode, which was free to play

Let's be honest here, it's more accurate to say they saw the massive popularity of PubG, copied the gameplay mode, and made it free in a transparent attempt to boost a failing game and get in front of the PubG juggernaut. The initial version of Fortnite BR wasn't that great, it was just free.

Where the Fortnite team really did a good job was taking that initial BR version and turning it into something with huge global appeal and continuing fresh content to keep players engaged for multiple years.
I wrote a BASIC interpreter in golang, and have amused myself programming in it. There's an example which embeds the interpreter into a HTTP-server, so you can open your browser, and enter BASIC code to draw images.

Naturally enough I call this "visual basic" ;)

I've not "seriously" programmed in BASIC for decades, but this was still enough to make me smile and feel nostalgic.
article: normal was thought to be 300wpm, meta analysis of new study says it's 238wpm, also speed varies between languages.

Never got tested for reading speed in school like the article says some schools do. That's good for me as I would have failed the 300wpm mark.

Tried speed reading software in high school and college, my normal speed is around 150-200wpm. Even with faster skimming sessions it never got over 450wpm and reverts back to my normal range when not using software. Learned to be okay with it as it seems my comprehension / memory were optimal at my normal range.
> have a huge persecution complex and believe they are being censored when they are simple being told to take their soapbox elsewhere.

How many places do you have to get kicked out of before your 'belief' that you're being censored becomes true?
I was in University and had exams.
Agreed - for the first time in history 50% of the world is middle class [1]. I’m much more optimistic than the article’s POV.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27...
A lot of high school memories this brings up. I was a huge UT player, in a clan, competed, everything.

I emailed Mark Rein in high school about getting into 3D programming. He was the president of Epic Games back then and emailed me back.

I stopped playing when I went to college. What happened to the UT fan base? Is there an article about it? Genuinely curious.
Microsoft was ruthless and technically competent, but in many ways they were also strategically stupid.

- IE was a Windows-only product (after Microsoft dropped Mac support), so as Windows lost its dominance (thanks to the internet, and mobile devices, and Linux, and Apple's rebirth, and...), so did IE. It helped sow the seeds of its own destruction.

- Chrome has an open-source core, so they're going after the embedding market much more than IE ever did. That means that a lot of "Chrome" use is in places where users feel the consequences, but have no control over being able to switch engines (e.g., Electron apps).

Google's web browser group feels like the classic "big, smart" quadrant competitor that nobody will engage. If your only goal were "take over the world usage share of browser engines", it's hard to imagine doing a better job than they're doing now.

The client-side web was not traditionally Microsoft's home. They were a little late to the game, they didn't quite understand it, and they needed a good browser on their platform but it wasn't fatal if it wasn't theirs. (They're doing quite well in services and games and many other areas.) Google was always web-first, and they will never cede that.

Crazy tech prediction: Chrome will be the last dominant web browser engine. What defeats it will be the successor to the web, not another "web browser". Its successor will probably even embed Chrome for backwards compatibility, like Edge embeds IE, or Chrome embeds FTP. We'll look at legacy Chrome-compat internet sites the way we look at Electron apps, or non-TLS websites.
Well done for releasing something and hitting the top of HN.

It looks like a clean UI, but I'm confused what we're seeing.

1. What is W for each point and how is it set? I assume something like 'weight', rather than a third dimension, but neither Bezier nor Catmull-Rom curves have an additional per-vertex parameter [0]. And NURBS are a ratio of two B-splines, but you still have only X, Y & W [1].

2. In the demo, each of the curves is listed as 'degree 2' (which suggests quadratic to me). Catmull-Rom curves are cubic (and it appears yours are too), so maybe 'degree 2' means cubic. But then the Bezier: they can be any degree, but the example only interpolates its first and last of five points. Even if the control points are hidden, it is clearly neither cubic nor quadratic, unless new control points are being generated somewhere but not shown.

3. NURBS are non-uniform, but here they are locked to fixed sequential integer parameters. With that and the lack of a ratio, is it really just some variant of a b-spline?

4. Given the list of XYW triples, in JSON, and the non-standard math, how do you anticipate a user constructing the curve - would they have to use your code and the way it interprets the W parameter?

Oh, and

> Motivated by the lack of freely available curve designers

seems like an extraordinary claim.

---

Edit to add:

[0] Did you mean the cardinal curve / canonical spline, rather than Catmull-Rom? That does have a parameter (tension, usually τ rather than W). It's not very common, but that's the best I can think.

[1] To be fair, editors often don't expose the ratio, and expose only a knot vector. But the W values given don't seem to correspond with knots either: there is the wrong number for a start, isn't there?