skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> you can let your tap water be tested for free if you have a newborn to ensure and confirm that you can use it for baby food without doubt.

Without doubt? We just found out that they are microplastics in bottled water, how can you be sure there aren't things in tap water that we haven't discovered yet?
I'm wondering which version of San Pellegrino they tested, since it also comes in a glass bottle.

It is probable that a significant contamination factor is the plastic bottle itself, which would explain why San Pellegrino is low on the list.
Pretty easy to find http://msdssearch.dow.com/PublishedLiteratureDOWCOM/dh_08d6/...
He's demonstrating that he ate his own dog food. Instead of "restoring the middle class" (bullshit), they are producing short form video and podcats (not bullshit).
Yang vs. Warren: Who Has the Better Tax Plan?
> Why is this downvoted? This is informative and (in my opinion) basically correct.

I once wrote that Chernobyl had no chance to explode in a nuclear explosion in rebuke to some guy called Moxie Marlinspike. I had -4 for the next few days on all my posts, and somebody even bothered to find my work email, and futilely tried to troll me and my colleagues into deleting my rebuke for a week.

"That" demographic is definitely there, and working in a "tech" occupation does not preclude a person from being a part to it these days.
My rule of thumb is that anything that’s not part of a calculation will be a string. Any chance I ever want to multiply a zip code? Doubtful. String, it is.
So, there's one thing here that strikes me as really weird. And I think it's best summed up at the end, where it discusses closing over a loop variable.

It discusses how if you close over a loop variable, people expect that each function created will get a different value of the variable, even though there's only one variable, and closures close over variables, not values. It treats this as a special case. But to my mind this isn't a special case; it just highlights that having closures close over variables rather than values is, well, not right. Like, if I write, to use some sort of pseudocode,

x = 1;
f = function() { print(x) };
x = 2;
g = function() { print(x) };

...then I expect that f will print 1 and g will print 2. Because, well, I'm coming in from lambda calculus and Haskell where everything is values. Of course, there this problem doesn't come up because there's no mutability -- but that's still how I'd expect things to work once you introduce it. Closing over variables just seems horribly counterintuitive to me.

This came up earlier, too, when the was going through all the machinery with upvalues, and I was just like, why doesn't it just copy in the values? And after reading further, it's like, oh, it's because they want to be able to modify the variable outside the function! Which, like, whoa.

Like obviously what I said above about how I expect closures to work isn't workable if you want to be able to mutate the closed-over variables, outside the closure, from inside the closure. But maybe that just shouldn't be allowed? I think if I were writing a language from scratch, and it included lambdas, they'd close over values, not variables, and mutating the closed-over variables would have no effect on the world outside the closure (or perhaps be disallowed entirely).

So, basically... are you sure that people expect that behavior with loop variables because they are thinking of each iteration as a new variable? Or is it because they don't expect closures to close over variables at all, but rather values, and would be surprised that loop variables are being treated as a special case rather than closures just always working that way? Because in my case it's definitely the latter.
Or because the tap water just doesn't really taste that good. The one coming out of my line just tastes too "metalic", I often tried getting over it but I just can't.
Wow, to think it's been almost 30 years since I wasted money on Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. Too bad it was the first Yourdon book I'd read, because it was also the last.
Little Scheme in TypeScript, Python, Go, Dart, Java, C#, and Itself
There's a lot of capital, and not as many investment opportunities. So successful companies are trying to differentiate themselves and lock people in by replicating infrastructure.

When capital disappears or the economy becomes more dynamic, this will change.
A simple one is eBay's "Buy It Now".
I can't say from personal experience since I haven't had to write a profile on anyone in the time when social media backgrounding became a common thing. In terms of what things to search for, I imagine it's all subjective, just as it's subjective on what you should judge someone for (social media, criminal background, etc), but I'm sure looking for common bigoted slurs would be standard practice.

One thing worth noting: As I understand it, Mr. King's charity campaign was heavily based off of social media (after the initial appearance on ESPN GameDay) – meaning that he spread it via his own Twitter account. Which makes looking at his Twitter account and past tweets more routine, since social media is essentially a large part of his current fame/notability. For other kinds of profile subjects, such as "Teacher of the Year" or "veteran recalls memories of war on war's anniversary", I'd be surprised if reporters did a social media check. Because unless that person themself says their social media profile is a big deal, then the reporter probably won't even be aware of it.
I used to use Thunderbird on my work laptops, but currently it's been easier to just use Rambox to wrap the Gmail web interface.

At home I typically use Claws or Alpine.
So one-hot encoding, plus one "none-hot" base case.
Why not just one-hot for all? To save one input?
Apparently HN is quite fickle on when something makes it to the front page :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mattwarren.org
Important to note that a federal wealth tax or sales tax are both unconstitutional so would require constitutional amendments.
You're not wrong, but one of the skills we're here to build is containing annoyance, rather than venting it into the commons. I think this is an interesting occasion to practice that.
Your source continues...

EPA estimates that the generation of clothing and footwear was 11.9 million tons in 2015 (4.5 percent of total MSW)

If 4.5% in the majority, they have too many categories.
I suppose the whole thing makes sense if you see humans as just a composite organism with colonies of functionality. I wonder if we'll get mouth bacteria transplants for tooth health next!
Everyone says to do this but the blocker is that my rent must be paid on the 1st of the month and my paycheck arrives on the last business day. Because of the archaic system that we in the United States call "how to move money between accounts," and my credit union outsourcing its bill pay feature, the check will not be mailed until the funds are present and it is sent from the East Coast when I live in the Pacific time zone so I stick with the 52-second walk from my apartment to the drop box.

Yes, I could leave sufficient money in that account to deal with it but I send most of my paycheck to savings and retirement accounts that earn much better interest than the paltry 0.05% my credit union's checking account gives me. Plus, the walk is good for my health.
What I notice the most is that on 24-hour news stations, everyone is yelling. The correspondents, the pundits, even the anchors at times. Regardless of one's opinion of NPR's content, the tone of their news pieces is nearly perfect.
Not really fair to include Peleton in his analysis of one year post-IPO performance based on a single day of trading. Particularly because it's fairly well-known that IPO pop isn't really any kind of useful indicator.
> For small and quickly growing orgs, ie the majority audience here

Is there any data on this?
> ...damn...its hard not to want to start another MUD...

docker run -it --rm -p 4000:4000 -p 4001:4001 -p 4002:4002 --rm -v $PWD:/usr/src/game evennia/evennia evennia start -l

docker run --name dreamland -p 8001:9001 -it dreamland/local

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ClockworkSoul/dead-souls-d... > docker-compose.yaml

docker-compose up -d
Perhaps they did and are lying about the diamond.
This is manipulation and quite despicable imho.

Besides I'd rather make my own "nudging" (or spearphishing) campaign and save a few bucks if need ever showed.
You’re the guy who came up with mithril.js? If I recognize the username anyway.

Do you think mithril will solve these issues or is a good alternative?
My rent is $2,385/month but they are flat fees charged by the electronic payments processor. (I've confirmed with a friend who lives in the same set of apartments but who has rent that is half of mine that the fees she sees online are identical down to the penny.)
I once heard a haggling tip when buying something: make an initial offer, when the seller make a counter offer, walk away. Then go back a little later and offer slightly less than your first offer. The psychological effect is to make the seller feel like he’ll either lose the deal or end up at an even lower price. It sounds like you basically used the reverse trick on this particular buyer.
I mean the chart was drawn with comic sans, I doubt it is intended to be axiomatic.
What's the control group though. Where do you find a good sample of people not exposed to them.
I don't think it's commenters' fault if the article's... you know, like this, and they comment on how it's like this. Topic's fine but if commenting on the article's not OK then it should be different article.
I don't get why people think this is some killer defence of Stallman.

Most of us realise that fucking children is wrong because it's harmful to those children. We don't need to be told this.

He talks authoritatively about stuff he has no idea about. That combination of arrogance, ignorance, and stunning lack of sensitivity is pretty hard to take from someone who is supposed to be using language as a tool of their job.
GDPArrrrr: Using Privacy Laws to Steal Identities
The bottles themselves are suspicious and have been implicated [1]. All plastics have been found to leech
chemicals, including PET [2] which is used for bottled water.

If you think that in a typical warehouse or storage facility (before it hits a supermarket or sales point),
bottled water is never refrigerated and that the temperatures it is exposed to are very frequently 'extreme', it should come as no surprise that the plastic can break down and contaminate the water.

A most troubling observation is that even plastics labeled BPA-free or strongly marketed as baby-safe seem to make no difference, in many cases actually being orders of magnitude worse than the plastics they replaced [3].

The precautionary principle should strongly characterize -all- plastics as unsafe but in reality, governments are very slow to respond. Especially, in the US, regulatory capture has made the FDA ignore plenty of scientific evidence and basically treat all chemicals as safe unless proven otherwise. [3]

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/07/expos...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/04/29/2555698.h...

[3] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/tritan-certi...
A lot of the buildings in Berlin have very old pipes and while the water to the building is alright, we (in Berlin) have to rely mainly on glass bottles of water (bismark) as if you don’t run the taps enough there’s a nice colour that comes out...
Yes, and I think they still technically do. At some point they changed it from a single target email to requiring 20, but you could get around this by uploading 19 others of a different gender, then use gender as a filter later on when creating the target list.
Ah, corporate apologia.

> Companies did move millions of office jobs to India, the Philippines and other places where they could pay workers less. But those job losses were more than balanced by growth elsewhere in the economy.

That's like saying there will be an apple shortage but ignoring it because we grew more oranges.

> But many companies discovered that labor savings were offset by other factors: time differences, language barriers, legal hurdles and the simple challenge of coordinating work half a world away. In some cases, companies decided they were better off moving jobs to less expensive parts of the United States rather than out of the country.

The thing is, rents and expenses continued to grow where these jobs used to be but wages stagnated. Offshoring is a contributor to wage stagnation, which would be acceptable if rents and expenses ebbed and flowed at the same pace. But wealth inequality and rent-seekers continue to squeeze the average person. The result is people who are underemployed or working multiple jobs.

> Ms. Lund said she saw parallels between offshoring and automation: Both trends threaten one set of jobs but should make the overall American economy more productive, creating new job opportunities, albeit ones requiring different skills. And she said the pace of change should allow workers, companies and governments to adapt.

Learning new skills isn't free. It will harm workers who have their jobs automated. Our employment system isn't worker-friendly in this instance. Those displaced workers will still need to pay rent and buy food ALONG with buying new skills. They will probably end up underemployed.
Simple...data representation is not the same as data meaning.

I teach an introductory stats course and we hammer this in. Categorical data are often represented as numbers or other short indicators for storage purposes. Typically I fmultiple choice the encoding is by the order of the choice options.

I not infrequently see average of gender because male = 0 and female = 1 or vice versa and someone generates a table without thinking.
Any one know what happened to Saturn's fixed price cars idea? I know the brand is gone, but not sure if its troubles had anything to do with fixed prices.
> Yoga teachers in the West, however, mix pseudo-scientific or New Age BS into their practice ("unite the chakras", "harness your inner goddess", "elevate your spirit") to make themselves be seen as being more than fitness instructors.

You're right about the author's point, but this is a gross generalization and is unfairly dismissive of a lot of different practices that people find personally beneficial.
32X was a similar concept, with the idea of packaging up and reusing enhancement chips in a base cartridge that would add 3D support to the Genesis. The Genesis VDP is still used in 32X games, usually to render the background while the 32X's VDP renders flat shaded polygons on top.

The Saturn uses a similar architecture of using two VDPs, with one mainly dedicated to rendering the background.
Got some on right now, love them.
List of Patterns in Computer Languages
The most generic and obvious set of questions ever.

Every single interview I’ve participated in (on both sides) has included some or all of these questions. There isn’t really anything new or interesting here.
This was the story I had heard years ago, that they are left in the heat/sun and the plastic of the bottles can melt into the water.
I think some languages let you choose to capture variables or values - does C++ do that?
Can you really, honestly say that you have never said anything that you regretted later?
The obligatory link to the excellent Radiolab episode "Words" was missing from the comments. Here it is: http://www.capradio.org/news/radiolab/2014/07/16/radiolab-wo...
A good strategy is to off-shore jobs in a function that is to be eliminated. When it comes time to close the operation down, there isn't as much mid-level management inside the company opposing the closure. It also minimizes community and political backlash.
No, that's just the style of the blog. The post has zero supporting data other than the chart.
You have to look at the equipment used in the processing as well. Whats in your food? No idea. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/whats-in-your-chil...

On the other side of things, maybe your glass bottled water is microplastic free, but has other serious contaminants. The second largest arsenic bottled water was in glass containers: https://www.consumerreports.org/water-quality/arsenic-in-som...
We need more talk about "human obligations" instead of "human rights." How much camaraderie should the society really be expected to show for a political ideology that openly calls for weakening and ultimate destruction of society, wrapped in fake concerns for environment (true goal is to weaken the economy) or fake concerns for an ever increasing number of "minorities" in supposed need for protection (true goal here is to balkanize the society into countless splinter groups fighting each other).
The transition from small to large insofar as it defines an executive's role happens pretty fast. I'd guess it should happen in as little as one quarter of a person's monkeysphere. Not many people would consider a 30-ish person organization to be "large".
> and I had no problem paying and receiving money from anyone in any of those countries.

And no one in the US has problems sending and receiving money from anyone else in the US either...

The parent's point is that legacy systems still exist in the US, as I'm sure they do in the EU. That doesn't mean that getting paid by a paper check is particularly common for regular workers. The vast majority of people are paid electronically. No one likes dealing with checks and for the most part no one really has to. The only times I ever do that is when I'm paying a contractor many thousands of dollars for e.g., work on my house. Usually those guys are older and self-employed, and either don't know how to accept money electronically or don't want to because of fees (and I don't blame them). In those instances I get a cashier's check made. That's the only time I have to deal with it.

There are of course instances where an employer might not provide direct deposit because they find the added expense too much to bear (as another poster pointed out). We're not living 50 years in the past, as you might imagine. Checks are not particularly common.
> Many experts consider biological notions of race to be largely debunked

Apply principal component analysis to human DNA, and not only does race pop out, it even coincides with the 'socially constructed' categories [1,2,3]. A 2004 review of anthropologists by Leonard Lieberman found 31% in the US recognize biological race, and 43% in Europe [4]. A 2009 survey of physical anthropologists in Europe by Katarzyna Kaszycka found that 51% (N=123) recognize biological race - 33% in Western Europe, and 70% in Eastern Europe [5].

Why is this article trying to lie to me?

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_compon...

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Individual-level_hum...

[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3D_PCA_plot_of_Xavan...

[4] https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/

[5] http://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01076.x
Was surprised to see that the car dealership would accept personal cheques but I wrote one this week.
Some hiring processes are accidentally bad and benefit from feedback. Other processes (like 6hr take home tests) show an irreconcilable difference in value systems that mean it was never going to be a good fit. No amount of feedback is going to change that.
Yep, you've correctly deduced what I do. At lease renewal, I write out twelve more checks and drop them in a convenient location. When my phone reminder chirps, I take the next envelope to the drop box, usually along with the recycling to the hopper in the adjacent room.
My favorite one-man (I think?) MMO was Cursors.io: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8477124

The genius of that game cannot be overstated. Its ludicrously simple mechanics somehow resulted in emergent gameplay that was deeply affecting.
OCaml Lenses via Modules (2017)
There are two problems: annoying articles, and comments that rush to complain about the annoyance. Both are at fault.
Low code startup Modulz raises $4.2M
This doesn't seem like the "feature" that would get you the outcome you want.

People more exposed to the traditions and practices of securing wealth for posterity will do so with cryptocurrencies, and others get no aid in avoiding the lose of everything. It just serves to reinforce what was, no merit required.
I mean, you might have a philosophy that says that's what the US is.

In practice, none of those details are really true anymore.
Yea, it undermined his point and methodology (both of which I'm inclined to agree with more than disagree with). I actually like the idea of rating the relationship of mission to business and seeing if there's any kind of trend there, but he clearly made his hypothesis, drew the chart, then started to look for data to support it.
Another example is that some people describe thinking as needing to talk out a problem with others and if you can't speak freely you can't think. I don't know where the meeting point of all these descriptions of thinking meet, but we're rapidly just ending up with information in > information out.
"From 1973 to 2011, there was a decline of more than 50 percent in sperm counts among men living in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand."

"The researchers said that they cannot determine from their data what might have caused the decline, but it could be related to environmental or lifestyle factors."

https://www.livescience.com/59948-sperm-count-drop-western-m...
I think that the term "politics" makes it very abstract what we're talking about. If you substitute in some salient issue, like "jailing children", then it kind of changes the tone.

It's just politics -> It's just jailing children

People are ending friendships over politics -> People are ending friendships over jailing children

"Team Red" and "Team Blue" -> Team jail children, Team do not jail children
> How has that worked out in the PC era? You’ve never had to remove random crapware from your parents computer?

No. Once or twice from the computers of classmates. Malware was a far smaller problem than gfx drivers, printers, network issues, failing software installs etc.

Of course there were some IE bars and nagware that had to be removed but in a way that has been normalized today with "free" ad-infested, data-gobbling apps.
This is one of the types of things quants at hedge funds do.
The man wrote the first versions of emacs, gcc, gdb, make and bison (a compiler compiler). He created the FSF and hired programmers to write other parts of GNU like glibc.

He also wrote the GPL which is a wicked legal hack.

Maybe he's no Knuth, Ritchie or Bellard, but a hacker he is. Certainly among the top 5 alive today.
Of course not, but that's also the case in real life and that doesn't mean the permanence of the internet is a problem that needs fixing. Like the other comment mentioned, things from the past should be taken with a grain of salt online or otherwise.
Kenya's Dirty Telecommunications War
The sex drive is the most self-important part of the mind. It's the only part proclaiming itself as "indispensable". The feeling in our pants is definitely signalling to us "if I wasn't here feeling these urges our species would be dead by now."
Hear hear. One thing missing from our society is a venue where people are forced to defend the opposing viewpoint. Instead, we have polarized news and twitter tribalism. I have often thought about ways to disrupt this. For example, a podcast where the people involved switch between role playing right and left viewpoints (believably) every ten minutes. Crude, but demonstrates the point.

The healthiest and best immunization one can have in this kind of environment is to avoid internalizing their identity as belonging to one of the two “teams”. It’s nearly impossible to find commentary these days that is objective and not agenda-driven — currently those who are performing the daily mental exercises to avoid the trap of slipping into tribalism must do so internally and without expressing their views: anyone who is not a member of either tribe will be considered the enemy of both.