skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Give people HTML and most e-mails will be a complete undecipherable garbage on the markup level.

Basically almost everyone puts anything there so that they get some visually pleasing result, the markup semantics be damned.

One would think that lack of features of various mail clients would lead to using the lowest common denominator of some basic tags like b, i, a, hr, and maybe img.

Not so in reality.

One bank I've seen e-mails from even abuses invalid parsing of HTML comments, to produce whatever insane result someone somewhere dreamed up, like this:

<!--><div style="some:crap"><!-->...

Which is straight up invalid HTML, that sanitizing parsers like caja will reject. I had a fun of telling a client, that I will not purposefully break parsing algorithm of a HTML sanitizing parser just so that their customers can read mails from their bank.

(Experiences from writing a web mail client to be used in a real world.)
> Imagine 50 years ago, how few options there were for people with tumor problems [...] And then imagine 50 years in the future where there could be more of these solutions coming.

50 years ago we thought cancer would've been totally cured by now.
A good reason for adding a modern string type to C would be for better interop between other languages and C.
No, there are no software ideas that are truly patentable, because ideas area not patentable.
Code is copyrighted. Algorithms shouldn't be. If you spent developing a better compression, then sell the software, but don't release the algorithm.

Some of the problems with software patents is "on a computer" or "on a server" just aren't novel enough. In fact, that is the problem with most patents, they aren't novel enough.
what makes a "physical" patent you consider valid different from a software patent?

The investment. When you do process development or manufacturing the outlays for research and development are infinitely larger. You need a pilot plant, prototypes, testing, and soon you have spent tens of millions that you need to recover. In software you pay the salaries of a team of programmers. The investment in research that needs to be recovered before you can turn a profit is infinitely smaller, in software you have a government-protected money printing machine. Trade secrets work well enough.
Targeting cardiac fibrosis with engineered T cells
This is great, looking forward to seeing what will happen in the next year and how it affects residents/businesses.
How to stop vanity marketing from killing your startup
Should the US Federal Government nationalize McDonald's then? It's already an ambassador for the country anyway.
Love my Nokia Brick phones. I was so bored as a teenager I mastered snake and was able to dodge anything on a Nokia or a TI-83.
6 mph. First search suggests Olympic race walkers average about 7.7 mph. Another site suggests power walkers max out at 5.7 mph.
Or memes... banned memes!
Going after public sector unions at all is extremely difficult. The most successful attempt to do so that I'm aware of was Gov. Scott Walker's in Wisconsin. And even he didn't go after the law enforcement unions. (It might be possible to split off the police unions from the prison guard unions, but it's not clear to me that it is.)

Law enforcement unions are one of the few American institutions with completely bipartisan protection. Democrats don't go after them because Democrats are pro-union. Republicans don't go after them because Republicans are pro-police. Furthermore, you really don't want to pick a fight with police unions. What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike? It's against the law in many places, but if the police are on strike, who's going to enforce that? There is a very significant risk that you'd have to call up the National Guard just to maintain public order. And even then, how many National Guardsmen does California have? How many LEOs? And most of those National Guardsmen are not actually trained in law enforcement. In effect you would be declaring martial law. It's not worth it.
Groupon is reportedly weighing an acquisition of Yelp
Vehicles cost half a dollar per mile to operate. Excluding the cost of labor for the driver, public transit will be in general cheaper if there is at least some demand for it. After a certain point, moving towards a shuttle system over a fixed route system might be best.

https://newsroom.aaa.com/tag/driving-cost-per-mile/
Foundations of Digital Money [YouTube]
I don't know if the OP suggested that Heidegger's philosophy should now be suspect, but rather claimed that his philosophy in the eyes of academia and the public has garnered more scrutiny simply because of his ties.

If some great painting was found to have been created by a Nazi, would the merit of the art be suspect in the eyes of art historians and the public? I wouldn't think so, but of course it's a different medium entirely.
Patents are about protecting how something works.

Copyright doesn't do that at all.
You do however build software. Even with DNA, if you manually assemble a sequence, is it not something you've built? DNA imo is special not because of being something you discover, but because it's an integral part of everyone and the process by which sequences occur naturally is too random to guarantee that a sequence will remain unique.

Software on the other hand, is still the product of a thinking mind, so it should be given proper protections as intellectual property. However, the standard for the patent needs to be much higher than it is right now (presumably because those determining the uniqueness of the idea aren't all that experienced or up to date with the industry the idea relates to).

Either that or a better way for people to contest the validity of patents.
There's the terminal customization, and no-holds-barred buffet-style Just a Bunch of Food to mixup.
Let my explain:

> Aren't python and java "old" now? 20-25 years? C is... what, 40 years old?

"Modern" (Even though it's 25 years old) languages usually forced on productivity more: The language is easier to understand and use, the programmer can focus on the logic of their program instead of battling the system etc.

And, since we already in a well-developed industry, productivity can translate to profitability, and usually it does.

Simplify my opinion here: Productivity (or profitability maybe) drives tech tend.

Python is hot today because it can be used in many fields which is hot today. Back-end dev, script, and maybe some machine learning + data research etc. And Python makes doing those things easy (in terms of easy to use) because both of the language itself (not a bad language) and it's ecosystem (Many of things you wanted are just one pip away).

Also, even I do not think JavaScript is a good language, but I must say it's a easy language to get started: 1) You don't need to learn a lot to write "Hello World" (`alert("Hello World")`) and later other simple functions. 2) Web browser is the playground which you already have. 3) The ecosystem is huge (Many things are just one npm away). 4) Let's don't forget that you can make money from it.

Now imagine if one day you have to understand compiler, linker and manual memory management to write webpage scripts. Much harder, right? :)
If it hides user's IP from all websites, how can it not be used to evade geoblocking? Where in the setup would evasion of geoblocking be prevented?
I hoped this would be about this:

https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/lightweight-v8-e...
That's a very distorted and interesting view of the software industry as a whole.
I have tried golang, Java, C++, js and recently rust. I can still confidently say python code is the most readable of them all.

Indeed so much so that python style is adopted by swift language and it does look cleaner than others.

Obviously I like concise perl, Haskell code too they have a beauty of their own, but that does not make python whitespace is bad.

It's just people who feel it's a burden to explicitly follow whitespace hate python indentation based on my observations. Since suddenly instead of braces or statement end one need to use a visual sense of beauty along with logic.
Although not a technical book, 'At the Existentialist Cafe' goes quite deeply into Heidegger's relationship with Arendt and Husserl and his time as a member of the Nazi party. It's quite damning if it's true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Existentialist_Cafe
Patents are not granted according to development cost or profit potential.
Yes, I'm well aware of the racist sentiments and actions of the past in the US. The simple fact of the matter is that we still let them in the country.
There's a major extra aspect to the approach mentioned here; via multiple passes you aren't limited to the progressive/incremental mental image that a single pass, no matter how well-focused, would provide.
I've never used a rope library, but having read a few essaying on those I keep coming back to it.

I also keep coming back to hiding implementation details behind closures. I'm likely not smart enough to understand why that's a bad idea tho.
Users today are users yesterday and tomorrow. People will be people. Betting against human nature comes with very, very, very long odds. Far better to organise a system by accepting human nature and working with it than against it. Safe by default, opt in, privacy protecting by default, etc, etc.

People care, they do, but the feedback loop from shiny feature to creeping authoritarianism is too long for monkey brains to grasp. What you call lazy, I call dopamine. You can't expect us naked apes to just ignore that hit. Change the game instead.

It's easy to blame it on "people". But if we put ourselves in a situation where we rely on us fallible beings swimming upstream day after day, on snowflakes feeling responsible for the avalanche, do we then really have anyone to blame but ourselves?
>"Static type checking" does not mean "every conceivable program is safely expressable by the type system". Haskell doesn't make this promise and neither does Go.

No, and I didn't make this claim or demand this either.

But it should mean: "any algorithm variation where just the type changes should be expressable by the type system without me having to rewrite e.g. a sort list for int64 lists, int32 lists, float lists, etc, it's 2019 already".
But up on the horse he is faster than a pedestrian, it's better exercise than an e-scooter, and he doesn't have to worry about stepping in the ubiquitous poop.
Strange, search for Kickstarter and it should come up
You should also have some kind of hash of the order as a simple hex string, or "correct horse battery staple" thing, if you always order the same thing. Or the terminal could read a QR Code.
We do have people who are highly educated doing useful things. This is so incredibly obvious that I am not sure what the purpose of your statement is.
If "gaming" the system means less recidivism, that sounds good to me.

Prison ships to Australia were originally paid per passenger that boarded in Britain. The death rates were horrible, in the double-digit percentages. When the transport ships were instead paid per passenger that _arrived_ the death rates went down phenomenally.

And someone like you might say: "omg these prison ships gamed the system by saving lives!!!" Yes, that's what we want to happen.
I see that now. With the two booster stages, the Ulysses spacecraft weighed > 15 tons in LEO, and the Dnieper rocket has a capacity of 4.5 tons to LTO. And you do need to get to Jupiter to turn the orbital plane of the spacecraft out of the ecliptic.
I am only claiming that you are an organism that was created by sexual reproduction, and that your current state of being is a result of genetics and environment. Surely this does not require evidence.

We don't seem to get wrapped up in questions of why a particular tree is "that" tree and not some other tree. It seems to me, as an atheist, that once you start carving out a special metaphysical nature for humans you're dabbling in the religious.

What requires evidence is this spiritual "you" that was "assigned" to this planet. If we admit that, whether the mechanism is a spiritual hand or a spiritual lottery machine is purely a theological question.

This isn't some mere abstract debate - the meme you're expressing is a radical egalitarian (Protestant) system of ethics being smuggled in under a secular guise.
The less wealth and income you have, the more likely you are to have anxiety about needing something in the future and possibly not being able to acquire it or replace it if you once had it and disposed of it.

If space is cheap (ie most of the US outside of expensive urban areas), this is the optimization you’d expect to occur.
I think we should focus more on the advantages and disadvantages of WSL and SPIR-V, and their relevance to existing or future ecosystems -- not debate over which language had the first web tests.
Remove Richard Stallman
What if they issue 100 billion shares? Or 10?

People often make the mistake of comparing a company at $5 a share to a company at $100 a share as if all else is equal. In reality the company at $5 could be worth twice as much by having fewer shares outstanding.
F-35 was such a nightmare lol. Definitely with you that competition is always good, I like that while the NDP isn’t likely to enter office any time soon there’s 3 or 4 (if you count the Greens) major parties in Canada. That gives me the warm fuzzies even if I don’t agree with all the policies of each.

Two parties rounds down to one.
> Except patent lawyers and multinationals. That should tell you everything on whether they're a good idea.

I know you're implying "no, it's a bad idea". But doesn't the involvement of the individuals who do patent law as their sole job qualify them to know more about it then "almost everyone"?
Here is a web page comparing the different C library implementations:

http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html

For the .a size:

musl: 426k

uClibc: 500k

dietlibc: 120k

If you statically link to these, your final binary will only pull what is actually needed and be smaller than this.
I think a reasonable rule might be that you can ride them on sidewalks as long as you stay at least 25 feet from pedestrians. So basically if the sidewalk is empty, go for it. It might mean taking the side streets rather than the main ones, but that's ok.

Nope:

I once saved a kid from serious harm. I was waiting for my kid to come out of a martial arts test and I was waiting outside on the sidewalk. There was a class after my kid's that had lots of little kids in it. They were waiting inside, mostly. Basically, I saw a guy riding a bike down the sidewalk, about 30m away. I also saw a group of kids about to rush out the door, running. I literally just had enough time to hold out my arms and stop the bicyclist before he could get to where the kids were running. In essence, I put my body in front of him and he stopped.

The conversation didn't go well. I said he could have seriously injured the kids as they ran out of the door, 2-3 feet from him, and he decided to yell at me that he would have seen, blah blah blah.

> Pedestrians need to be aware of their surroundings too.

That means walking in a perfectly straight line and never deviating from that line unless you clear your blind spots. But, that isn't even enough. I've been hit twice, in the last 20 years, by cyclists on the sidewalk, when I was walking in a straight line. Both said: I didn't mean it. Incidentally, 100% of bicyclists, when told it's not legal to ride on the sidewalk reply to me, said "I won't hit a pedestrian" and then somethings I get the f-word yelled at me (I was very polite to start, but not at this point).
How do you get Karma? I can't figure it out
Any tips on how I can earn a little bit of karma? Thanks! :)
I've read recently that some if not all brokers are largely supported on the money they make on uninvested cash balances, so they actually would be better off if their customers didn't do anything.
Singing showdowns in HK pit the city’s unofficial new anthem against China’s
Hacker Rapper Attorney General Raps Political Corruption in We the People
That's not what static typing means. If you want it to mean that, go right ahead. I agree that Go should support that feature, but it has no bearing on the definition of static typing nor on Go's position relative to Python with respect to speed or safety.
That is the problem. You have people patenting the problem space, and then they just squat there, preventing innovation. Imagine NMR processing. One company patents fast fourier transform, the other patents entropy maximization. Everyone else gets to pay licenses. The power of government has been suborned for private profit with no public benefit.
I may not be the sharpest, but isn't top level await just shoehorning synchrony into a language that has been laughing at synchrony for decades?
In theory, that's true but I think you're making it sound a lot easier than it actually is. I don't know a single owner of a profitable business with employees that works less than a $250k/yr FAANG engineer. I sure as hell didn't any of the times I've run businesses. In general, you end up trading one set of issues for another - typical employee frustrations for typical business owner frustrations (closing new clients, dealing with employees, fighting competitors, keeping clients happy, managing all the overhead operations that come with business ownership, etc.)

It's possible to run a low-stress lifestyle business, but I would say it's not the norm and tends to be fragile unless we're talking something like lone wolf 1099 contractor self-employed without significant family obligations.
That hardly supports your argument that it’s a free market, and that’s the point I was making. The rest was an aside. I don’t know there’s evidence that not subsidizing corn (the vast majority isn’t for human consumption anyways) to below the cost of production is the only way you ensure lack of famine. Either way I’m not sure why this socialism is okay but medicine is beyond the pail.

For instance grain crops can be stored long-term by the government [1] and of course so can raisins [2]. None of this has to do with the farm bill.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_grain_reserve

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Raisin_Reserve
I hope everyone involved with this company dies painfully
"If you're not using <thing that my company sells> you're doing it wrong"
Air Force-Affiliated Researchers Want to Let AI Launch Nukes
> In contrast, you are putting forth a fully general counterargument to any incentive structure. But clearly financial incentives work in many cases.

Yeah but I think the big question here is - in what cases?

There's a lot of evidence to suggest financial incentives are in some cases, bad.

Take for example, the financial incentives given to people for running a private prison. Bam.
Sure, perhaps if I had known nothing else... Except it's not a convention any other platform ever followed.

Of the few people I've bumped into who had it set to natural, and had for some considerable time, well even those were happy to learn it could be changed, and didn't want to go back. So there's probably something makes it feel odd, and stay feeling odd, for many. What I couldn't say, but not just restricted to those who spent time on other platforms too, like me. Of people whose machines I get to use from time to time at work, they're all set to unnatural too. We're nearly all iPhone users. So it's not just me being odd and rare edge case. :)

Personally, I don't want the same mental model between phone and desktop, as the metaphors are different. UI should look different, act different, suited to using each device. The Win 8 on, Lion on desire to make my laptop "feel" more like a mobile, continues to feel like a huge mistake.
You can lower recidivism rates by reducing rates that people are released. Or, for that matter, by providing legal assistance to ex-cons who reoffend. Not sure people who want to see real criminal justice reform would be happy about either...

(edit: not sure what the downvote is for, but I want to be clear that I'm not for gaming the rates in this way. I'm merely saying we don't want to incentivize lowering recividism rates at the expense of everything else)
If software patents were “ended”, what would replace them? Trade secrets? Everything out in the open under a use license?
Started in 2016 and still has no major IRC networks support it.
That's like saying the supreme court's verdict is the only metric for whether something is constitutional. If that's so, then where do they get their rulings from?

You're implicitly denying the difference between correlation and causation.
The Pragmatic Perfectionist – Get past perfectionism to get things done
Tesla touts raceway record with 3-motor powertrain prototype
Patents are supposed to be not obvious. Pinch to zoom it's an idea and shouldn't be patentable. The process of how you pinch to zoom is a different story though.
The amount of work required shouldn't be an issue.
How exactly can a private prison "illegitimately pursue" having a lower recidivism rate?

Simply handwaving it away with incentives being gamed seems to complete ignore that you are suggesting that there will be widespread systemic corruption of the entire nation's judicial system. Perhaps the general counterargument could really take a moment to focus on the details.

Prisoners not being convicted of more crimes down the line seems to be a no-brainer in societal benefit, or does the line of generalised argument presented here think that's not the case with some more handwaving about optimal outcomes?
Not with the GRiSP board, but I’m working with Nerves and embedded Elixir. Even using Erlang distribution to communicate between devices over an internal Ethernet lan. Works pretty well actually.
> At the other extreme, where you have a regular bus coming every hour to every house in very sparsely populated area

Obviously mass transit makes less sense without the masses, in cases like that there are many places that offer community bus services that operate more like taxis. You call and say you want a pick up and the bus will pickup and drop off anyone else along the way. Think uber pool but half a century older.

There are even private companies that run free shuttles just to get old ladies pumping their pensions into poker machines.
Until you are on the wrong side of it...
Yeah I was going to say the same thing - love that optional chaining syntax... Would cut down so many checks and balances needed to avoid those errors.
Wintergatan has an excellent YouTube channel cataloguing their efforts to build a better marble machine
Just the impression I got from the general developer community, and articles such as https://www.infoworld.com/article/2619609/why-software-paten...
The magic cards that cost thousands only cost so much because they aren't in print anymore. Ones with that kind of price point are collector's items and aren't even legal to use in the formats that are commonly played
Matthias Wandel here.

Funny how my old stuff shows up on hacker news from time to time, though it was less than a year ago that I ported it to javascript, used to be flash, cause when I created it more than ten years ago, javascript canvas wasn't mature enough yet.
Every patent is composed of ideas, based on a description of something that can be made by humans, thought of by a human.
Indeed. This exact attitude was satirized in an A Bit of Fry & Laurie sketch waaaay back in 1990:

Hugh: Ah, yes well now you see, I have campaigned for years now to have tourists banned from Venice.

Stephen: Have you? Have you?

Hugh: I have, I have. It sounds very harsh, very cruel, very ...

Stephen: Deglante?

Hugh: Very deglante, thank you. But I'm sure it's the only way.

Leslie: Who was it, who was it, who said "He is a tourist, you are a holidaymaker, but I am a traveller?"

Hugh: Oh, was it Humbert Wolfe?

Stephen: It was Cocteau, surely?

... etc., etc...