skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> really gimped our performance

I'm a native English speaker in the US and have never heard or read "gimp" used as an adjective this way. Never.

I have heard it used as a slur against people with disabilities many times, in real life, movies, and books.

Even the usage you're claiming is the most common sounds like it's a synonym for "cripple".

The entire etymology for the word "gimp" supports that it was conceived originally as a slur and continues to be used that way.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/gimp

Either way, why would anyone want to download something with that name? It's embarrassing to recommend it to people.
Perspective Taking in Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents
Seriously. Even a super generic name like "GPaint" would be a huge improvement. Some parts of the Free Software world are run by programmers and programmers only and it shows. It would benefit to listen to a marketing person every once in awhile.
You could look into Gleam [1] and Alpaca [2].

[1] https://gleam.run

[2] https://github.com/alpaca-lang/alpaca
Bring it to Des Moines, Iowa! I'd be there every day.
You can train people technically, but it's hard to unasshole someone.
I don't understand what you're saying here. An async function just returns a Promise, that's it. You don't have to await on it immediately - you could just as easily assign it to a variable and await on it some time later.
The last paragraph is pure gold!
Forest Restoration Could Greatly Slow Global Warming
Please do, I'd love to read more about this!
At least government should mandate all the manufacturers to disable all the default passwords. It's simply a good practice, we're not even talking about security loopholes on the device itself.
Jony Ive
I've recently set up this blog : http://www.dndchronologically.com/

I'm reading through all of TSR's D&D products in chronological order. Part of this project is to compile the most accurate chronological list on the net.
Thanks! What i cant work out is if/how dup can be made to be owned by a different process. it needs to be only accessible by that process and should be removed once that process dies. I would like to separate the transfer, of the handle, and the translation of the handle.
All the ops folks I know wouldn’t gloat at something like that. They’ve been through it themselves.
Awesome, I just shot you an email now. Thank you for the help.
My wife makes our dogs food once/month. The cost comes out to about the same as one of the expensive brands of kibble.

She does have to cook everything which takes a few hours though.
Heh I mean I know it can be cheap. I think people just mean that the way many people do it isn't - McDonalds, Coke, chips, etc. But yeah, my freshman year roommate lived off of pop tarts for the whole year, since they were so cheap. He got saving on them down to an art, with coupons and timing bulk buys. He developed a pretty terrible chronic illness at some point later on, probably not related, but I've always wondered.

Good tip on the hotdog, that actually sounds kinda tasty.
I ask a lot of questions here sometimes. None of them have been nearly as rewarding at this. If you ever need a remote-buddy to discuss/hack on things, let me know. I can't imagine what you're going through but it's good to remain positive and productive. My email is j.horne2796@gmail.com
To be fair, it's open source software that makes the maintainers of it $0 of profit. Its closer to a form of art than it is a product. It might just be they don't actually care to gain adoption or "win the market".
> The sales and marketing departments in most companies are more powerful than their R&D departments.

Yes, this is correct.

> Hence, the design, conduct, reporting, and dissemination of this clinical evidence becomes an advertisement tool.

This does not follow well logically. The design of clinical trials still belongs to R&D and not Marketing/Sales departments. Even if Marketing/Sales want to target for a specific outcome, there is nothing saying that this particular outcome will be met until you actually try it clinically. And specific outcomes are usually desirable outcomes: for example, showing that your drug is non just superior to placebo, but superior to the current best-in-class treatment. Or measuring patient-related outcomes that are tied to economic value (for example, making a patient recover faster has tangible societal benefits - they can come back to work, be an active family member, etc...) is also relevant these days.

So, there is not a strong link between "pushing for an outcome that you can advertise" and "this outcome being clinically meaningless". If it were meaningless, FDAs and other regulatory bodies would not even accept it during the clinical trial design review phase.

> As for basic research

Basic research should be the responsibility of academics, not companies. And they do. But not many academics focus on "checking whether what we have been using for 20 years really works", there's too much priority on new clinical targets.
My question: Is there an idea or ideas here, in terms of price and/or efficiency, that the Vietnamese street food vendors understand better than the undisputed king of price and efficiency, McDonalds?

Maybe the question should be phrased as an apparent paradox, which is:

"Can McDonalds, despite being the leader of efficiency and price consciousness, be even more efficient and price conscious?"

?
This sort of argument gets used against all sorts of renewables. It doesn't have to be about replacing 100% of energy usage with renewables with zero compromises. If you can slap a kite on a cargo ship and save 10-20% of fuel costs, why wouldn't you? If the wind dies down you can still motor along just like you did before.

Best is the enemy of good, and perfect is the enemy of possible.
There is nothing about Java that requires a VM. That is just how Sun decided to implement it.

GCJ, for instance, allows AOT compilation of a Java program that requires no JVM.
Or just on your laptop. The controller is only required for setup, the AP's can run in standalone mode just fine after being setup (they just don't have any user interface to speak of on their own).
Apple Products “Just Working”
I don't think it's a microptimization, it's not that terribly complicated if you are careful about the code you write and it's definitely fun.
There is a `mix dialyzer.explain no_return` and such, which gives you at least an intuition about what the errors are looking for. Re: my library, the Erlang error messages are just wholly inappropriate so it lexes, parses and pretty prints them to give a much better user experience, due to an upstream decision to not offer the errors in AST form.
Interestingly enough, duck duck go does way better at that search term than google does
I have tried it with meshes in the 300-400 meg range and it works fine. Time depends on the kind of geometry.
Sure, but then you need to make sure they never get out of sync. If you add a "remove order" action you need to remember to decrease the sum. Really, if we're smart and diligent enough to be able to correctly update all the derived state after we've changed a bit of "core state", why have things like react or redux at all?

In my view, the point of them (whether you agree with them or not) is to avoid having to make those updates to derived data. Changing core state is unavoidable, but there's just a lot less that can go wrong if everything else is (seemingly) re-derived from scratch whenever those changes happen. It's the "turn it off and turn it on again" approach to updating derived state.
Humans Can’t Watch All the Surveillance Cameras Out There, So Computers Are
Attackers and state actors sometimes appear to behave indiscriminately
Ostracod
Where/how are you sourcing product? Do you have any experience in cosmetics?

A brand called “War Paint”, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, recently created some buzz and quickly attracted a lot of negative media. Did you learn anything from the negative feedback they received?
Depends on the speed at which you reel it in but I can't see it being hugely significant. You would, however, recoup that energy when reeling the kite out again if the winch has regenerative braking (assuming the wind speed is constant).

If the wind speed isn't constant then you could save power by only reeling the kite in when the wind slacks off. If you felt especially proactive you could generate power by reeling it out during gusts then back in during lulls.
Go 1.13 can report custom metrics from within your benchmarks
Thanks for the Skeptvet! Reading through all these comments, all I could think was, "Maybe I should rethink Blue Buffalo, where can I get some good information?"

We don't feed our cats grain free, so they're probably getting enough taurine, but it might make sense to have them screened for heart disease.
I quit my job last month to work full time on (what I think is) an under-explored area of climate change: how institutional investors block shareholder proposals calling for firms to adopt more climate-friendly policies.
I have just published the first bit of research with data on how 500+ funds from the big 3 fund managers voted on climate change-related proposals in 2018: https://voting.greengovernance.org .

Later this year, I'm planning to launch a "governance-first" ETF that gives investors the same exposure as other funds but is much more aggressive in fighting climate change.

I'd love any feedback! Feel free to email me at <hn-username>@greengovernance.org
async/await helps a lot, but there are still a few common errors with them...

1) Not calling promises in parallel. Easy to do because it's impossible to run them in parallel with just "await", need to use Promise.all() or something.

2) Forgetting to write "await". If you try to use the return value then now you have a Promise object instead of the actual value. But the worst is when the code doesn't use the return value. Then it has a really subtle race condition that's hard to find. Or if the promise has any errors, then you might get the dreaded "Unhandled promise rejection" with a useless stack trace, and you might need to search the entire codebase to find where it happened.
Micro-Service Open Source Ecology Report
Wait how do you work on a git repo without having an up to date local copy?
Sweet. Thanks for the tip.
> This does not follow well logically.

Instead of trying to reason from first principles about whether or not what he's saying is true, maybe instead go on Amazon and buy one of the dozens of books on the subject.
Also see "Brilliant Jerks in Engineering[1]" by Brendan Gregg.

[1] http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-13/brilliant-jerks.html
Now try doing that with a 4k monitor at 60Hz. You can’t.
That sounds like a great idea to me!
It's a great stack. I've been primarily using it for the last 5 years although for a largish .5 million unit IOT backend not web development.
Look at all of the flack the JavaScript ecosystem gets for having everything as a "dependency", and in this thread 3 people are cheering that Rust makes the executor required to do anything with Futures a third party library. Wild.
Sorry, by forget to await, I mean you call an async function but then don’t ever actually use the result. TypeScript can also diagnose that one by illuminating unused variables.

Still, I think it is easiest to never mess up if you await as soon as you have a promise value. In many common cases this is easy enough.
> You get houses on Palo Alto going for well over ten times the price a similar house would cost in metro areas that allow more and denser building

Disagree that dense building is the deciding factor in a 10x difference. The home prices being higher than other metro areas reflects the strength of the Bay Area job market. There are plenty of markets less expensive than Palo Alto, some of them allowing more construction and having good jobs, but there is no metro area in the United States 10x cheaper than Palo Alto with the same access to a job market of the same caliber.

Example: Seattle is cheaper, builds more and is a tech hub. But it's not 10x cheaper, maybe within 2x last I checked a long time ago. To get a 10x difference you need to sacrifice on another metric, and go to a place with a less booming economy and fewer jobs.
Erlang is strongly typed.

In my opinion OTP/BEAM is the killer feature of Elixir; however, there are a lot of other niceties as well. Macros, pattern-matching, tooling, readability, similarity with Ruby (a plus for Ruby developers) all spring to mind.
Try IEx.pry. It's everything breakpoints and watches are and more, in my opinion.
I work ~12 hours a day, but in my free time, I like to work on a lightweight, full-featured blog engine. It’s fast, easy to use, platform-agnostic, and I’m pretty proud of it. I ported it to Python 3 last month, and I have some big plans soon. https://zacs.site/blog/first-crack-release-notes-0619.html
The article uses "English" and "British" interchangeably when describing events in 1702. But the Acts of Union that united England and Scotland creating Great Britain didn't happen until 1706 and 1707. I guess that means you can't call them British yet (unless you mean to name the island they came from, but not their nationality and identity, but that seems a stretch).
Not enough details
HQ Trivia lays off ~20% as it preps subscriptions
I'm not going to test this, but I seriously doubt it.

My 13" MacBook is very light, and I can even lift it half way with the USB-C cable. Pretty certain it would fly to the floor if my feet swept the cable that way. Of course, I don't have it set up so that can happen.
Unfortunately in the age of international copyright agreements this would only make sense if the work originated out of the US.
Everything I'm hearing sounds like a choice. Married? That's a choice. Kids? Choice. MtG cards? Choice. Fruit stand? Choice.

America is a place where you have more chpices, but also bear the consequenses thereof.

Let me take the opposite: should you be able to live behind a fruit stand in the woods and have your wife taken care of and kid put through college? Who should pay for that?

I don't think it's "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" as "make your chouces and deal with/don't whine about the consequences".
I dunno, seems easy enough to give a set of rules to follow in the workplace but as someone who's worked as a college tutor, it can be hard to impossible to get some people up to speed technically.
We're drowning in emails and Instant Messages and need AI to help make sense of it all. As a former CTO for a fast growing startup I was struck by how often everybody was asking the same questions about connections and skills, and how much time and efforts were wasted in mid-size organizations because of lack of transparency and visibility.

I'm building AntEater (www.anteateranalytics.com) with my team to bridge this gap and empower everyone who uses Gmail and Slack to be more knowledgeable - and as smart as the entire team, using AI. This is a radical shift in terms of information flow in organizations but I truly believe a more transparent workflow will lead to less work and less frustrations.

You can check out the project here - it's free for small teams https://try.anteateranalytics.com/
> Asshole behavior begets additional asshole behavior from others. Non-assholes are hardened into assholes over time to survive, and a spiral of incivility reigns.

I've been infected by this before. Never again. (I prefer to slap up so I ended up getting shown the door.)

Before we go through a hiring round with my team nowadays, I like us to review what I've seen approvingly referred to over on Metafilter as The Baboon Article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-bulli...
I think the trend of software startup companies to use 3rd-party services to run their business is similar to the JIT (Just-In-Time) practice in manufacturing industry. When something happens in the supply chain, it will affect the whole ecosystem, too much dependency.

How many of the startups still run their own servers? Standalone service without database PaaS? No external CDN Javascript libraries? :-)
I've become bored with software. I just started a masters degree in Biology and have a vague and naive plan of becoming a cardiologist and running a lab with the primary goal of reducing human suffering, rather than money (been there, done that).
thanks for all the support I'll check the links.
BEAM based languages lack "good" debuggers, because they historically depend on tracing instead of debuggers. I recently wrote a blogpost about the tracing landscape in Elixir. https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/a-guide-to-tracing-in-...
But the main reason is that BEAM languages are mainly used for concurrent computing which is a very difficult problem to debug with classical debuggers. I know it is not a mainstream way to "debug" but a very useful one once one learns it.
California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure
> If it were meaningless, FDAs and other regulatory bodies would not even accept it during the clinical trial design review phase.

Go look up how many corporate stooges are in the place in the FDA over the years.

A good starting point is the history of Aspartame, I'd link some articles, but I suspect the sources would be shot down and evidence ignored. The people at the FDA were complicit in its approval, despite scientific evidence showing it was dangerous.
That’s pretty common. Similar to people using Russian and Soviet interchangeablely
What do you mean? Lane assist software is so good&safe, that Boeing put it in one of it's planes!
Make Your Site More Accessible with These Tips
Also "Picture unrelated" are unrelentingly cunning.
We are drowning in emails and Instant messaging, esp. in our workplaces. As a former CTO of a fast growing startup I was struck by how much frustration and wasted time there was due to inefficient communication and lack of sharing knowledge about who we know and who knows what.

I'm building AntEater to make every on teams as smart as the team - using AI. It's free to try (for Gmail and Slack - https://www.anteateranalytics.com/) for small teams and helps share knowledge and activity for truly transparent teams to help individuals work less and work better.
> This does not follow well logically

I think it's an observation, not a philosophical argument.
Oh wow thanks! I thought this was still being proposed but I was reading Wikipedia. Cool that the sulfur reductions are in place, but that's still not going to affect co2 emissions, and because these rules apply - lets assume equally - to all ships it doesn't necessarily impact the economics. If the sail really reduces the cost by the stated amount minus the caveat at the bottom of the article that would be impressive.
Ask HN: If you're building a Facebook competitor, should you delete Facebook?
It doesn't account for user interaction but I might attempt to do something for that in the future.

The desktop version uses puppeteer so I do force a hover state on each element and get extra psuedo selectors by doing that. I'm also planning to add something so you can interact with the page first to get the page in the state you want, because right now the selection process cancels all other events (you select something by clicking).

One of the first difficult issues that I ran into was that I had to modify CSS selectors to target the subtree. For example let's say there is a selector:

#mysidebar #atable tr

Now I only want to Snip/Extract the #atable element. I have to modify the selector by chopping off #mysidebar because the html I'm giving the user is just #atable and everything below that. The problem is modifying selectors like that ruins CSS specificity. That's just one example of how things became a lot more complicated than I originally thought it would be.
Public transit based commutes typically are longer. In downtown DC, you can often bike faster than the subway though downtown because of all the stops.
This is the way with any issue of public importance, which, as a capital-F Free Software project with a lengthy history and many contributors, GIMP has grown into. The software's functionality is commendable, and they have made some strides on UX as well. That makes it worth recommending, but for the parts that hold it back, of which the name is increasingly a major one.

When these issues come up, and there is a perception of gatekeeping behavior, protest is normal. The developers hold the power here. And developer arguments to avoid popular change tend to become more incoherent as the popularity of the software grows, because it positions them as both serving a popular interest(lots of users, open development) and not(private whims trumping popular ones). Developers on prominent products with many users generally are not following their fancy anymore; they are making their career. If they want to sully their career, dying on this hill is a way to do it.
Why do we believe this concept? It's a business or political decision to delete something after X days/years, not a technical limitation. It's similar to government policy about data retention policy for X years. This concept is invented to calm the public, but there's no difference in technical aspect. The servers still keep everything. It's the contrast of the old days, when the mainframe has to discard data because there's no space left, or it's simply too expensive to keep everything.
Copyright applies to any work that you produce with intellectual value by default. You don't necessarily have to register it for it to be protected. The big issue for me with copyright is how long the term is and how it can be assigned and theres no details on who actually owns it.

I would say a limited time without registration would be perfect. Then an extended time period if you register it. The registration would then include all the individual parts that make it up.
So would deciduous trees better than evergreens for this given that they shed tons of leaves every year?
Some older libraries will still be callback driven, and one important thing is always resolving or rejecting promise.
I walk a lot, but I'm thinking on start a video series with fitness exercises.
A lot more knowledge in the relevant space that I have. I could spend a week or two learning necessary information, analysing our use cases and then implementing it finally (which I would never get the time to, from a business perspective).

Or I could use an off the shelf product that is probably better than whatever I could come up with, given, even, unrealistic amounts of time to perfect it. I could come up with something more suited to our use case only, but the moment the use case changes, I'd wonder why I didn't just go with Redis.

I haven't actually looked into a DIY method though. I just know I want something like Redis for our user table, because it's hit a lot, and the traffic tends to be repetitive.
I'm not sure I fully understand. Interoperability is as simple as wrapping the non-standard API, no? This way you have a standard calling style in your code. It's not a weakness of async/await that some libraries don't have promise friendly APIs.
This writer is brilliant, very tight article. I wish someone would write the news this way, everyday. Life wouldn't be so dark...

Because after all, assholes are popping up in the news constantly.
I would appreciate links to articles on the subject, if you have them handy!
Exactly this. When I write Scheme code, it trips me up when I have to re-spell variable names to avoid clashes. Experienced Scheme programmers don't find this difficult; they think it's weird to have to use funcall. It's just a function of what you're more used to.