skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Women are still fairly underrepresented in the pipeline converting undergrads to phds->postdocs->profs, with numbers dropping most of the way. I am pretty okay with affirmative action happening till those numbers are closer to 50% and then slowly phasing them out.

You're assuming that 1) affirmative action is effective, 2) that women are dropping out for reasons related to sexism, 3) that entrenched policies are so easily "phased out". I'm not sure any of these are true.
Maybe in some very specific situations there are indeed more hurdles for men than for women, but in general, in STEM in particular, there are clearly more hurdles for women than for men, as evidenced by the fact that more men than women make it through.

Though I don't think the solution is to compensate by creating more hurdles for men; we need to identify and remove the hurdles for women. And whatever hurdles remain for men.
One thing that also worked was to open and close the CD-ROM tray. It felt like HDD was waiting for something that open-close action on the CD-ROM drive would trigger some reaction.
https://mariadb.org
Excellent points--if I may, I think you meant "specious," not "facetious."
If you are getting a 404 trying to view the main Svelte site (https://svelte.dev/), there seems to be an intermittent issue with Google Cloud Run.

You can view the site directly at the uglier url:
https://svelte-website-mrf26sti4q-uc.a.run.app/
Had that in an app i was working on ages ago.

We were doing some processing on a database and updating the progress bar every record. We processed the UI messages at that point as well so any click on Cancel could get through.

As customer databases grew, the processing began to exhibit this behaviour.

If I remember well, we fixed it by only updating the progress bar every 1%. It may have been more complicated than that though, I had moved on to another job when the fix was done.
I think here can be a good place to share my story why I never use MySQL in my projects. Once I was working for the company where I was an architect for some new project. And we have few gigabytes of data from a few sources. But with plans to gather much more in the near future. I came up with some database structure for the first draft of the early stage of development. It was nether big nether complicated for my scale comparing to the other projects I was working before. Since I'm python expert I choose SQLAlchemy for ORM layer and use its features to create the initial database schema. Postgres was a natural choice for me and almost fit to my requirements. I was worried about performance in the future but decided that we always can optimize when we have something. As I said it was early stage and we were on the research stage.

Everything was smooth development-wise but the database was pretty slow since we most use desktop-grade computers for prototyping. 3 weeks before the first internal release owners ask me to change the database to MySQL. I was against this step, we don't have time or resources for the experiments. But point was that company have MySQL experts that have more than 10 years of the optimization experience. I simply have no choice. They force me to do this against my will.

Since I wasn't sure that in production we will use Postgres I don't allow to use any special database dialect specific capabilities for the developers. And switching to another backend from Postgres to the MySQL was literally equal to a connection string change.

MySQL wasn't ready to handle 40-60 tables and queries with 5-10 simple joins. On our data, every request just hang server (they quickly provided a server with a lot of memory and storage for this). A few days later we found that actually MySQL is working but the same simple queries run for 4 or more hours. So-called "experts with 10 years of optimization" spent a week trying to fix indexes and other things but it never happened.

After release, I left the company, because of the toxic atmosphere, but it is another story. But since that, I lost all my faith in MySQL. Maybe for others, it is an option but never for me.
It's a little time consuming to set up correctly and manage, but there is Ampache [1], for creating a scalable streaming music server that can be joined to others, so that catalogs are merged. It was created initially by a bunch of college kids (ok, they were college kids back then) at OSU and paid for with beer.

[1] - https://github.com/ampache/ampache/
TF Encrypted launches official website
I'm pretty sure there's a typo in there somewhere.
You can sideload apps on iOS. You can use cydia impactor, use enterprise certificates, or sign them yourself.
That would be enough to get an injunction and prohibit the software from being distributed in the US, which would deny a very important market for the developers.
> emissions and fuel economy regulations tightened greatly and cut both size and power of cars.

Which greatly improved efficiency. For example the new CLA AMG's engine makes 355hp, and that's a 2.0L [0]. In comparison the to 375hp for 7.5L for the Lincoln-mercury. 177hp/L vs 50hp/L. [1]

American cars of that era were literal boats on wheels. They're good if you want to drive straight lines while towing half your house and feel like you're in a sofa.

[0] https://jalopnik.com/reminder-you-can-buy-a-355-hp-turbo-fou...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_385_engine
Yarn Package Manager in 2019: Should We Keep on Comparing Yarn with NPM?
They didn’t have to appeal to everyone. I don’t think it’s much different from the novelty of “clear acrylic” telephones.

What I really don’t get is how anyone would want this station wagons with the fake wood paneling and obtrusive fake trim on things like the Chevy fleetmaster. But I think it’s just one of those incomprehensible fads.
Scale is not just about number of users, it’s also about level of impact. USDS works on projects that help people renew green cards, get disaster recovery grants, receive disability benefits, find jobs and access their medical data. These programs make a big difference in the lives of millions of people.
I've tried, but I haven't seen many unwanted advances in my direction from women.
> However the efforts to correct this bias don't seem to have done their due diligence to figure out what the cause is; because at the moment the entry level incentives are clearly unfair in and of themselves. Two wrongs don't make Right, they make Very Wrong - it is a bad idea to correct bias by introducing more biases.

What if the cause is due to the existing precedent? Then wouldn't positive discrimination be an effective solution?
Harp.gl – 3D Vector Maps for the Web
If you believe that the tragedy of the Vietnam war was due to one man, I have a bridge to sell you. The sheer hyperbole of saying that greatest disaster in American history was a single man should make you immediately question the speaker. Note that this quote was from a 2009 interview - so Baker had Nixon, 9/11, Iraq/Afghanistan and all the other much, much darker times in American history to choose from.

I would also reject that the idea that he was a particularly bad actor in the Vietnam War. There were so many presidents and generals that didn't realize what was happening and messed things up royally. Just read about how out of touch Westmoreland was. This is like blaming the goalie or the kicker for losing a game when it's actually the combined efforts of the whole team over the entire game that wins or loses a match.

The other speaker in the quote is Ford - who we should note is called by Iacocca as 95% jerk - apparently, he didn't get along with anybody.

Other people credit McNamara and his fellow Air Force buddies as turning Ford around after World War II. Wikipedia even says that Henry Ford II made him president (although it was only for 5 weeks).

(I'm not a defender of McNamara, but I also think this lopsided view of him is unjustified - we need to have nuance in the way we view people)
https://www.plex.tv/
What is Benford’s Law and why is it important for data science?
You could setup a honeypot and mess with hackers.
Btw, I’m not from Appalachia, I just did a post-doc at WVU.

Beautiful state and people.
How about we let Libra get released and see what happens before making assumptions about who it will help. Something like this is very unpredictable and it will be great to see what comes of it.
I also got yelled at by my dad for racking up long distance charges in 1991 or 92 but in my case it was only about $150 for calling the Sierra BBS to download stuff for King's Quest games or something :)
Always Protect the Downside
Red, white but rarely blue – the science of fireworks colors, explained
Smarter Fertilizers Can Reduce Environmental Contamination
working on FFT-transformed images is quite the dark magic if you don't understand what you're looking at; this is especially interesting when you look at what e.g. H.264 does to images in FFT: https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/ (look at the 2% mask and the resulting image - it provokes a 'this shouldn't be possible' reaction).
I think most are looking at this backwards. This system is most likely the reCaptcha of facial recognition. The same way Google already knows you're not a robot, and they just use you to improve their image recognition algos. The facial recognition at the airport is one of the few ways to get multiple pictures of people while knowing with near 100% certainty the face matches the name. The system is building out their data set. Running facial recognition in other scenarios (e.g. security footage after a crime) off a single passport photo is hard. Running facial recognition off of a data set with many different photos is much better.
It doesn't matter, because they're looking for a different thing entirely. PostgreSQL TEXT is just without a limit. Simple as that.
Those single shot pictures track facial changes over time - and give additional data points for facial recognition.
Collaborative Telepresence Could Render Distance (Relatively) Meaningless
In the early days after FB acquired WhatsApp, they'd filled entire India with advertisements about WhatsApp.

Advertising apps is not as uncommon as you think. It works, and it creates brand recognition.
As the World Heats Up, Soccer Must Adapt
New Beatles' Songs Thanks to AI
I have my Pi set up with Pi-hole and an IRC bouncer.
Radiation exposure is cumulative. It's a small increase in your risk of developing cancer but it's not zero.
>This is almost exactly equivalent to saying that an average ten year old can read the New Yorker.

It is not because it is fundamentally incorrect to say that the New Yorker is a C2 level text.

The CEFR is not intended as a scale to measure the complexity of written text for native speakers and/or readers of a language, it is intended as a four part (listening, reading, speaking, writing) assessment scale of the overall language abilities of people. At most, one could say that a text was consistent with what would be expected of a successful CEFR C2 candidate in the reading portion of the test.

One of the reasons that you cannot use the CEFR to characterise the proficiency of native speakers is that it assumes that you can understand texts of a similar complexity in your native language. Most such assessments are given to educated people, usually adults, so the texts reflect that.

Yes, there are people who are not highly proficient by the standards of a native speaker at reading and particularly writing in their native language. Who knows, I may be wrong to think that they would easily pass the written portion of a CEFR test, certainly they would smash the oral portions.

However the CEFR tests are fundamentally not designed to assess quality of education for native speakers. You could shoehorn them into that role but we already have other measures of language ability (in the US often calibrated to grade level) that are specifically designed to measure this.
I presume that the fungi grow toward the source of radioactivity until they engulf it, and it is not destroyed, but instead segregated and more easily separable from the environment by bio-accumulation.

I.e. if you seed radioactive soil with radiotrophic fungi, wait a few years, and then mechanically separate fungus from soil particles, the separated soil would be less radioactive than it had been previously.
Atmosphere of midsize planet revealed by Hubble, Spitzer
Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp Down
User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment
I cycle through the year. I put on my downhill skiing helmet at the first sign of autumns freeze.

Statistically speaking, dutch don't wear helmets and they don't get much injuries. It's as much about how you cycle and what the routes are like than having or not having a helmet.
I know it's ironic given the topic we're in, but the technology is actually really impressive!

The coprocessors are really just ASICs designed to run neural networks efficiently. The real cool shit is in the compression and simplification of the networks that allow constant recognition from a small power-sipping chip.

They're also doing a bunch of work with federated machine learning processes. So all of the training data can be kept on the device itself, but they can (i'm grossly oversimplifying this) basically "merge" a full neural net from somewhere else with data learned on-device.

It's that last part that I'm extremely interested in, as it means we can have all the benefits of machine learning systems, but also keep all of our privacy in that all the processing happens locally, our training data doesn't need to leave the device at all, and the algorithms can still adapt and improve for each person individually. It apparently also has side effects that the neural network on your device can adapt to your usage individually much faster and more accurately than a "master" neural network ever could.
The conflict at Walmart thats threatening its highstakes race with Amazon
Especially useful if you have more than two ears.
Internet Explorer 3, an adventure in cross-browser compatibility
Natural Language Understanding with the Quora Question Pairs Dataset
> not fair to your employees

Certainly it's not fair to the employees. Certainly they probably didn't expect to get 10 men and 0 women in their current makeup. There may be no intentional guilt, but it's also not possible to know how they ended up with the makeup they have, 10 to 0, though it was probably incremental and without reflection on the makeup of the team along the way. Assuredly it probably wasn't malicious, but it's also like the people doing the hiring didn't reflect along the way - "hey, we've got 9 engineers and we need 10 and we are going to hire _another_ man for this role".

It's clear they (in this case the company) want to fix this in some way, as instructions "from on high" came down. Again company may or may not know how they got there. The company may also be failing to attract clients who want to vote with their dollars for a diverse company - so there could be a valid business case for this. Or not, maybe they just don't want a company with all dudes.

The original post was pointing out an unfair hiring practice due to this policy. I'm pointing out there is an alternative equitable hiring practice which actually leads to a fairer hiring practice for men and doesn't necessarily involve affirmative action, but that involves starting from scratch again (nobody said you'd necessarily lose your job - they could also easily make those positions available). Obviously this is not a tenable thought experiment, especially in academia thanks to tenure, so that's why we have these systems which, on the surface, may appear to discriminate against men. That said, many people interview for their current jobs in corporate restructurings all the time. That's probably not fair either, but it's accepted practice in the US.
Problem seems to have resolved here ( NL )
> All they had to do was implement a nested set pattern for their groups

The nested set pattern was considered at the time we added support for nested
groups, or improved it with CTEs (not sure which one of the two it was). The biggest drawback of nested sets is that adding sub groups can now
become expensive. The storage needs are also far from ideal.

Using PostgreSQL CTEs allowed us to work around all of this, at the cost of not
supporting MySQL. This seems like a fairly reasonable trade-off, but I might be
biased as I implemented it [1].

> A hack? Their DB creation schema specified a TEXT column when it should
> have been a LONGTEXT column. Using LONGTEXT is not a hack, it's a choice
> when your data is more than 65535 characters, and they made the wrong
> choice out of ignorance.

It's not ignorance, it's MySQL coming up with bizarre limits for the "TEXT"
type. In MySQL, the limit for TEXT is 64 KB. In PostgreSQL, IIRC it is 1 GB.
Looking back there may have been better decisions, but it's always easy to judge
in hindsight.

More importantly, moving away from MySQL allows us to stop worrying about this
at all.

> Alternatively, since this is filepaths and filenames, they could have used
> a nested set pattern again and gotten 255 characters for each component of
> the path and a lot more feature options for their search system!

At the cost of requiring more storage space, and writes taking (potentially)
much longer. You may want to mention that, instead of acting as if nested sets
are a silver bullet.

> This is true, but is it really a show stopper?

Yes.

> Wrong schema specifications and not knowing to implement nested set
> patterns is a sign that they don't have a knowledgeable DBA on staff.

You may want to do some more research before going down the path of suggesting
GitLab employees lack knowledge. For the last two years or so we've had various
engineers with excellent database knowledge working on GitLab, myself included
(though I don't consider myself a PostgreSQL expert).

Some of the weirder decisions were made before the right people were hired, and
often these decisions are difficult to improve upon. Sometimes removing support
for something is a much more efficient way of spending your time. Removing MySQL
support in GitLab is one such case.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/10885
Eventually someone is going to turn up the talking points used to generate these comments.
A Boy Whose Brain Could Unlock Autism
When “Bright Futures” Fade: Paradoxes of Women’s Empowerment in Rwanda
For Better and Worse, We Live in Jony Ive’s World
When code kills: are we headed for a software apocalypse?
Obey. Obey. Obey. Obey.
>one is more difficult than the other

That in and of itself is a weird one. I used to think that physics was harder than sociology, because of the stereotype that physicists were smarter than sociologists. Then I realized that whatever it is that sociologists do, you could make it twice as hard by making them do twice as much, or by raising the quality standards twice as high. Likewise you could make physics the easiest science by altering the publication requirements to be, well, easier than every other science. It's not that studying the universe is harder in any objective way than studying sociology, it's that what counts as success is defined based on other people's success.

To use doctors as an example, the standard for how good you have to be to practice would get lower if all humans were altered to be half as good at medicine. At the same time, med school for doctors is far harder than med school for nurses. I'm not sure what sets the hard-ness levels for these different fields, but the point is, we absolutely could have a society where nurses were driven twice as hard and had to be twice as smart as doctors, but for some reason that didn't happen.
Man, I thought the exact same thing. I must have stolen it from you. Sorry!

In all seriousness is this normal? I write and work on kernel drivers for the company I work for and have always gone out of my way to not view or interact with any code that remotely relates to the work I do (out side of what I coded). Our competitor even released their version of a block device snapshot driver and while I would be tempted to see how they did things I have avoided it every step of the way.
Global Passport Power Rank 2019
Welcome to government regulation 101. Regulatory capture is a term that should be in everyone's vocabulary.
Nice article, but is it just me that thinks it is weird that Google ranks better the pages that are speedier in their browser?

Antitrust here?
Odell will never be rich with that brand or work ethic.
I agree but we need to show some modicum of restraint.

Look at all the ICO scams, companies like MtGox, BitConnect, and many others. Only 2% of the worlds population has been exposed to Bitcoin (not sure if correct - going off memory here) and we have still seen a lot of money being scammed away.

The people who will be using Libra (especially the unbanked), cannot afford to lose money. This needs to be on-point with respect to regulations so that the vulnerable in society are protected.
This reminds me of the most surprising scene in Mad Men.

The family has just driven the family car into a beautiful spot for a picnic. Wife remarks to husband how beautiful the spot is. Husband says "it's perfect."

Shortly after that they get ready to leave. The blanket is strewn with beer cans and other trash. With a flick of the wrist, husband ejects the trash into the surrounding landscape and wads up the blanket.

Trash problem solved, apparently.
I saw a presentation about marine permaculture arrays (MPA) recently, which are floating kelp farms. Floating, but submerged, using wave action to power pumps that provide nutrient laden cold water to help the kelp grow. These pumps
are like the flaps valves in your toilet tank.
Kelp could provide biostock for fuel among other economically valuable commodities. There has been prototype work done in Indonesia and the Philippines. The next implementation looks like it will be in Tasmania. There are a couple of challenging technical obstacles - the cost of current (ocean current) sensors, and nutrient sensors is too high now to make this scale. Some innovation is needed to bring the cost of those sensors down.

From some notes:
The long range vision is to create an industry that will provide a range of ecosystem services
that would supply food, fuel, fertilizer, fiber, farmaceuticals (nutraceuticals). Not just along the coasts,
but in the open ocean. Think of it as biorefinery management.
An MPA would likely have a 3 month service
interval, and 3 year overhaul schedule to deal with things like biofouling that are part of maritime activities.

A one sq kilometer MPA might generate $1 million a year in value from kelp, maybe another $1 million
a year from fish. The fish part is an unknown.

The best way to ride out an ocean storm is to submerge, like whales do. They could adjust bouyancy
of an MPA if satellites tell them a storm is coming.

They intend to use mesoscale ocean current eddy shear levels to move MPA's to different locations in a region (imagine
using foils to tack across the difference in current layers speeds, or to keep them circling in a small area,
and want to develop cheaper marine vessel navigation automation
[This means they won't need to anchor or tether the arrays to the bottom of the ocean]
Wonderful!

Were you also calling into PCLink?

I used to have a challenge with my best friend at the time:

We used to call 411 and challenge to whom could keep the 411 operator on the phone longest.
If one disagrees with an argument because it's superficial, then one might call it "specious." If one disagrees because the argument is invalid, then the word is "spurious." I think based on the counter argument, "spurious" is what was wanted.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/specious-vs-sp...
> Delta’s territory
This feels like the opposite of the GDPR stories from a few months ago. Instead of all the "It's coming" hype and opt in agreements, the company just gets the info without a fuss...