skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ideally developers would ask their users so that information would roll towards Qt developers. In practice developers just ask for whatever shiny toys they want to play with.
This led me down the rabbit hole of finding out how a person could have a moral problem with Grand Juries. Fascinating stuff. It seems they're sometimes used as an information-gathering tool and a method for stifling free speech. Having done further reading, I applaud Ms. Manning's principled stance.

One explanation: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-137-10929-3_...
There are many, many social pressures applied in most protestant churches, which contributes to the high percentage. From childhood, kids are told, "read your Bible and pray every day." Human nature is what it is, so even the "every day" crowd likely misses days here and there, but anecdotally, people take this very, very seriously.
Speaking as a software engineer who became an attorney, I would say that most attorneys could benefit from basic programming knowledge (e.g., simple scripts, macros, and SQL).

I say this because the bulk of work for many types of legal practice is information filtering/search/organization/and presentation, both in wrangling evidence and in exploring the law itself. Basic programming knowledge can do great magic in terms of making these processes more efficient, such as by programmatically manipulating the hundreds or millions of files that can be produced in legal cases.

In terms of more in-depth knowledge of programming, there is a definite place for it in the law (it has worked to my benefit), but I think that role is specialized/limited. I think improved software tools will, generally, fill the profession's need rather than every attorney attempting to specialize in another field enough to roll their own apps.
A list of network services and web applications which can be hosted locally
It's good to see language compatibility mentioned, and I hope they follow through with it.

There were really fantastic Common Lisp bindings for Qt4, but they relied on a tool called "Smoke", which stopped working with Qt5. My understanding is Smoke was used to create the early Python binding, but a different mechanism was used for the Python bindings in Qt5. For some reason the new technique wasn't as easy to use from other languages, so a lot of alternative language bindings stagnated on Qt4.

I don't know if it's improved lately, but between using C++, the non-standard moc pre-processor, qmake, and little support from Qt itself, it's really hard to generate bindings for Qt now.
I think you're missing the two words before militia: "Well regulated". Who is going to be doing that regulation if not a governmental body?
Gender studies is considered a social science in most universities.

And professors of all majors are almost monolithically left-leaning, compared to the population.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-d...
Who Are America's Vegans and Vegetarians? (2018)
It's not that clear cut. I'll use the environment as an example. Nobody wants to drive mass extinctions or ruin America's agricultural climate. There is no party in favor of doing those things. The only way to have absolutely no push-back against industries that do that stuff is to deny that it's happening. You could accept that it's happening and then try to bargain based on future discounting and economic growth, but then the answer would be some kind of restraint greater in magnitude than zero. If you want to have absolutely no restraints you are forced to convince everybody that there is no problem. The moral obviousness of the choice turns a political issue into a scientific one, and brings the politicians along with it.
Depends on how you value the life of a puppy in your area versus the life of a nameless human across the world in a country you've never been to. Human emotion doesn't always follow logical or even moral/ethical boundaries.
Uh. This is exactly what is wrong with scientist pairing their results and methodology with politics.

> They should be fired, we can't have science legitimize fascists movements.

Ok, if you want to get rid of a strong scientific community continue on with this fantasy. Propagandists making things up should be exiled.

The climate change assertions should be challenged. That's apart of the scientific method. You don't publish directly to a respected journal. Also, correlation does not imply causation.

Their unbiased* findings should assist in the creation of solutions which involve policymakers. It's not a scientists' job to make a decision that affects everyone.

Unbiased means: As unbiased as you can get. Get it peer-reviewed. Work with others to test out effective change strategies to avoid unintended consequences, present options, accept failure. (Yes, that last one is the biggest thing)
> At the beginning pausing video and switching between media player and dictionary proved to be a bit too exhausting, so I also wrote a tiny program that did that with a single hotkey before I really started doing all this.

That sounds like a great idea for a service to help learn languages: subtitled videos with links from each word (or idiomatic phrase) in the subtitles to dictionary definitions.
> “What should we do about it?”

It can be used to model if doing X or Y is more efficient or effective.

The issue is so many policy choices are good for society and bad for someone specific. Which means a huge number of people want to use some other means for deciding what to do.

For example, farmers really don’t want people to eat less even if that would be good for society.
Actually science does have something to add to discussions like that. In the case of social security, a quick Google scholar search led me to this: https://www.nber.org/papers/w9183.pdf

Science can help us figure out how our decisions will affect society. What society optimizes for is up for political discourse.
And when some scammer uses your number (since any number can be used by a scammer, it's just a number not a phone line), then under your scheme, you get cut off from all of your friends.
Different Archetypes of Organizations
Is this the same as this from 19 days ago? "Show HN: I built a service to discover rapidly growing Google search topics" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20478339
This analysis confuses cause and effect. Science became "leftist" because the right rejected the findings of science in areas like climatology in favour of its own pseudoscientific nonsense. Consider how the Evangelical right decided to even reject bedrock ideas like evolution because it conflicted with ideology.

Complaints about "gender studies" are mostly a red herring. Social sciences are not the same as geology, climatology, or biology and don't inhabit the same departments in most universities.
If your stance is that you can't risk alienating people who already have decided what you do is without value and based on lies then I don't know what to tell you because you have already lost.
I suspect the controversial part of the oath is the following:
'Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.'

Like I said, not killing people is so behind the times :D

Of course, perhaps there is a bit of concern people may have when the person holding their life in their hands no longer takes an oath to preserve it, but what did the ancients know?
I can accept your argument, even if it leaves me grumpier than when I first asked the question.

States convention, anyone?
The reason I'm so excited about this development is that it's a commercial product-focused company putting a level of effort into polish and refinement into this domain. The lack of that kind of polish is an enormous inhibitor to adoption and acceptance of these classes of tools.

Most, not all, formal methods tools are a tire fire of incoherent UX, bespoke Byzantine runtime requirements, and scattered piecemeal documentation & tutorials.

Which makes complete sense when you consider where they originate, what they're typically used for, how they're maintained, and who their subset of end users are. You have to reeeeaaaalllly need to reach for one of these tools to put up with how bad they are, and the population of developers who have that need is significantly smaller than the population who could derive some value & benefit from the methods were they not also unnecessarily painful to use on top of their already being conceptually challenging for the uninitiated.

Their niche status becomes self-perpetuating. A company like JetBrains making a move like this might stand a chance of breaking the logjam.
This is not correct. The vast majority of subprime loans were issued and packaged by private entities into structured entities — those high-risk securities were then rated as low-risk by rating agencies. Your misunderstanding is probably around how Fannie Mae/Mac bought some of these securities and then had to be bailed out. They actually held fewer risky loans than most banks!

Banks did collapse! (Lehman) as they were not, as you suggest, backed by the government. And a legislation-backed bailout was necessary was because again, these risks were not backed by the government.

In broader sense, however, I agree that the banks and government both knew they were “too big to fail” and therefore could take risk without risk.

I’d hold the murky position of the ratings agency higher on the list of malefactors in the crisis than FNMA.
This "productivity is more important than raw performance" meme again... Your first paragraph claims the opposite of what's happening reality: there is a noticeable difference between clicking that highly optimized C++ button and going through XML, as seen in Mozilla's XUL or typical web apps.

I can't even imagine why you'd think that reading and parsing XML and constructing a UI would be cheaper than any other way of building UIs.
Has anyone else noticed that flies seem slower now than years ago? I feel like now I have a 50% or better chance of getting a bug with my hand. Seems like years ago it was much more rare.
Science is more than just a tool or procedure for generating data and building models, though. It's a humanistic tradition that says that humans can look at and interpret the world to understand and manipulate it.

If you have a government undermining the institutions that make that practice possible, it's certainly appropriate for scientists to speak out about it. If the US government cuts off funding of climate change research and bans scientists from releasing their findings, scientists can certainly speak, as scientists, and call out the administration doing so as anti-science.
Most of the phone companies have similar apps.

AT&T's seemed to work OK for the first few months. Then calls started slipping through. Then AT&T started trying to sell me an "enhanced" version for $x/month.

So now the telcos have found another way to make money from phone spam.
Thanks for hearing me out, I appreciate it.
While not a platform, my site sells and hosts our own advertisements which are only static images and are sold per month. We've been doing this for the last 5 years or so and it seems to work well for our advertisers.

Selling advertisements based on impressions incentivizes publishers to maximize impressions through various means such as click-bait titles, auto-refreshing ads while you're on the page, or implementing slideshows. All of these things degrade a website's experience in the long-term for the sake of ekeing out a few more dollars in the short term.
> Nobody is arguing with basic research

This is patently false. Maybe you aren't arguing with basic research, but people absolutely are.
Grand Juries are held in secret. Counsel for the witness is not allowed.
Look at security startups.
Hearst Magazines Will Target You in Print Based on What You Read Online
If you have to deliver a parcel anyway, why delay?

In the UK Second Class post is just held back a bit. It isn't like it gets sent by pack horse instead of by truck.

Now you are a good sort, but your neighbour might be on the phone to them on Sunday evening saying 'I ordered this Friday, moan, moan, moan...' if it was not delivered so promptly. This would incur 20 to 30 minutes of customer service time and could possibly lose them as a customer, for them to write negative reviews and bad mouth the company.

It is less work to do deliveries really promptly and have no queue to manage. Don't feel bad for the people that work to achieve this, imagine how much more miserable they would be if they had a backlog, a veritable mountain of stuff to deliver on Monday, for them to not get it all done and to be going home fretting about it.

I am no fan of Amazon but I can see what they are doing.
They should all be super hacx0rs because that is super legal...
It only takes a small, vocal minority to turn the tide of civilization.

Vote with your wallet, and demand organic produce and pasture raised, locally butchered meat. The uptick in price is quite small, and the differences (both health and flavor) are huge:

- Pasture grasslands sequester carbon and increase topsoil quantity/quality

- Industrial farming, livestock finishing and meat processing is of dramatically lower quality, both ethically and nutritionally

Just 5% of the population expressing their refusal to consume industrially raised and finished meat, and non-organic produce would up-end the supply chain -- because even non-interested parties would begin to change their buying habits, to satisfy the "wacko" uncle or cousin who only eats organic, pasture-raised stuff...
You're on point about the strategic focus. Think long term, who these shipping companies want to align with: Target, Walmart, other companies with physical presence and a need to grow their e-commerce to compete with Amazon. By not renewing the Amazon contract you can focus on helping your long term partners and let Amazon deal with figuring out how to continue providing the same level of customer service with it's relatively young last mile delivery portion of shipping. And any bad Amazon customer experiences that result due to the last mile delivery damage their brand, and can result in lost sales, hopefully a gain then to one of these shipping companies long term partners.
Probably not, if we were immortal.

But since we aren't, I don't understand the tunnel-vision glorification of programming.

What about any other interest or skill one can develop, from a daily reading habit to philosophy to handy work around the house to electronics to being able to repair your own clothes with needle and thread or learning another language or...? I get that we programmers like to see programming as an essential skill -- easy for us to say.

#learntocode really has gone off the masturbatory deep end. Great time to sell a coding bootcamp (pickaxes), though.

I'd like to see more calls to action for us developers to learn other crafts instead of patting ourselves on the back for already learning the one and only craft.
It's hard to have respect for scientists these days. Things like the psychology replication crisis have really undermined my confidence in academia as an institution.

I remember getting into a debate with a (facebook) acquaintance of mine, ultimately it boiled down to me asking them for an example of what they'd consider a good sociology paper. The paper was trying to test whether sexual harassment training actually worked. After reading through it, it was almost laughable how bad it was. Their system for measuring if the training worked was waiting two weeks and testing if people retained the knowledge. It was also done using a small group of college students.

Of course that's just one paper, but the event stuck in my mind. He was a relatively well-respected grad student in my peer group, and that was what he considered to be good science?

There are a lot of examples of really dubious stuff coming out of the academic community. Things like the sokal affair, or the infamous "feminist glaciology" incident. Like it or not those are getting lumped in with legitimate scientists in the public conscious, and if academia want to get taken more seriously it needs to get these ridiculous excesses under control or at least de-emphasize/disavow them as much as possible.

I think there's a lot to be done to gain back that trust, but most of it has to do with cutting out the garbage. Publish or perish seems like one of the bigger problems that need addressing, but the lack of open-access journals certainly doesn't help. The academic writing style probably needs an overhaul as well.

I don't know, it's sad but for me at least there needs to be some big changes before I start regaining respect of academia as a institution.
Ask HN: First time at defcon how paranoid should I be?
This will be my first time at defcon, and all I hear about is the mythical hacker who can get all your creds from your phone unless its turned off and wrapped in tin foil.

I am just trying to figure out what sort of protections I can take that will really help vs what won't and isn't necessary.

For reference, I am already using a vpn, but plan on being in airplane mode for most of the time on both laptop and phone. I happened to have an old phone that I am using for a burner, and an old laptop for the same purpose. Is there anything more I should be doing?
Cities can run parks, I'm not saying open up your lawn to others, our society's too batshit crazy for that. We have some city-run parks, they're just way less common than they could be with somewhat smaller lawns and part of the cost savings from smaller yards going toward park upkeep. Could have a house-lot-sized one every few houses by just squeezing the houses very slightly closer together, and could have huge ones every few houses with significantly smaller lawns. Every single house within a two minute walk of a nice park, maintained at a cost lower than maintaining all that space divided among a bunch of individual families.

Of course cities seem to quickly be abdicating care of common spaces to HOAs anyway, with neighborhoods and common spaces laid out by developers with little or no incentive to fix this problem—another part of the death of the commons and the atomization of civic life and the growth of "eff you, I got mine" generally—so I'm just pulling an Old Man Yells at Cloud here. Though this is literally why we can't have nice things, so it remains frustrating.
I wish our laws were in source control, even the bills that don't pass. I'd love to see who added the pork, who watered it down, etc.

With a 2,000 page bill, it would make it easier to keep up with the changes, even if you don't yet know what is in every page at the start.
Very true, actually thinking about it contracts and laws are perhaps the perfect usecase for source control - plaintext, can track who changed what and when, etc.

I guess the main blocker for this would probably be the formatting used to produce the documents. It would have to be a human readable markup language of some kind. Does anyone know what the standards are for, for instance, contract generation, in the legal industry? Are markup languages etc used or is it mostly just MS Word -> pdf?
I’m one of the freaks who believes that the 2nd Amendment exists in part to allow the citizenry to defend ourselves from federal tyranny.

However.

I’ve recently been wondering how we might maintain this bulwark while eliminating individual firearm possession, except in extraordinary and limited cases.

I wonder if incorporating the 2nd at the municipal level rather than at the individual level might be the answer.

Individuals could “own” guns, but would be required to store them at their local police station, and could check them out on a time-limited basis for recreational purposes, or for self-defense against a specified threat (using a similar process as getting a restraining order). Periodic psych evaluations would also be required to maintain check-out privileges.

And, if the federal government goes berserk, there still exists a massive arsenal outside of their immediate control. Even 5-10% of municipalities refusing to go along with federal orders would be enough to sustain an armed resistance that would make Afghanistan look like a tea party.
So long as the WWW is a public network ran by private entities, essentially every decision is extrajudicial. I completely see the issue you're trying to highlight, but it seems that limiting the abilities of reporters and activists isn't healthy for democracy. If the services CloudFlare and others provide is regulated like a public utility, then standards like guaranteeing equal access regardless of ideology, or enforcing standards that have been democratically adopted. Is there a middle ground between regulation and corporate discretion in all matters of speech on that use their platform?
It's much easier to get away with that if you are old enough to be assumed to be senile.
The problem is using juries for this. Music copyrights should be adjudicated by a panel of professional musicologists, funded by a cut of the awards. That way there’s at least some consistency. The concept would extend to other disciplines.

Of course a purely functional improvement to governance is a political nonstarter in today’s environment.
A Deep Dive into ARM Cortex-M Debug Interfaces
It's a fairly popular defense in legal proceedings. Lawyers have a couple ways to combat it.

- Compelling testimony. Something like "if you testify that you helped this guy rob a bank, we won't go after you for the crime." Usually this involves signing documents swearing to what your testimony is, so you can't go back later.

- Getting more than just testimony. Getting documents (emails, texts, phone records) is often much more valuable because you can't play the "I can't remember" card with those. And lawyers can use those as evidence, and sometimes use the information in those records to get testimony (i.e. "How could you not remember sending all these emails setting up the bank robbery?!" -- "OK, OK, I was there")

- If it's egregious, you can be sanctioned by the court. If you're claiming you don't remember if you saw the defendent murder 3 people right in front of you last week, you better have a pretty good reason for why you can't remember.
Yup. In BC, we basically have to read a law textbook covering contract law, professional liability, use of codes + standards, intellectual property, and other such topics and then pass an exam about it. Among many other requirements...
Sandee Wants to Be the Yelp of Beaches
I always assumed it's peers as opposed to superiors. I.e. Your jury is not the king and queen but other commoners like you.
Company Profile Presentation – Padma Perfumery Works
Dart asynchronous programming: Isolates and event loops
Wow this is one of the most elegant and interesting things I've read in a while. This is absolutely genius. Amazing!
So to clarify, you want them to haul up a solid booster that has enough thrust to slow the rocket down during reentry and then deploy parachutes?

Just the fuel for retropropulsive landing is already a major blow to falcon heavy or 9's payload. How much of a payload hit do you think this will be?
The amendments and such are generally public, right? Presumably someone could put that into Git.

It would be an interesting project. Particularly if you could also wrap up the git in an interface that's accessible to non-programmers.
Lamborghini Urus 5 Slide Video Made Through PowerPoint