skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The quiet malleability of data on this site is disturbing. Titles, article links, and timestamps are all changed without notice on a regular basis. Older discussions become disorienting as their subjects are silently memory-holed and replaced. Users are shadowbanned and throttled for undesirable ideas. There is no written policy for any of this and you feel like you're crazy until you hear rumors from someone who talked to someone who emailed the internet hall monitors.
So `tree` is either a `tuple` or an `object`? Seems pretty terrible in terms of typing.
Do other A16z companies mind being associated with this?
I really don't like some of the philosophies expressed in this article. The whole "put family members in jail" bit feels like a worthless appeal to emotion.

If your family member is a mass murderer, I really don't care if investigators use information related to you to catch them. Even if that data is your DNA, and it was shared contrary to your expectations.

Nobody wants to see their loved ones go to prison, but the Golden State Killer was an absolute monster, and it's an demonstrably good thing he was caught and faced justice.

I understand that people feel that using DNA information from genealogy services to investigate crimes might feel like a slippery slope towards egregious abuse (and maybe that's true), but the Golden State Killer is definitely not an example of such abuse.
There are a whole host of root vegetables that are pretty darn tasty and basically absent from the modern American diet.

Beet, Turnip, Parsnip, Rutabaga to name a few.

Northern climates can and in the past have grown a wide variety of vegetables.

I don't know where exactly to pin the blame for the current (but improving) state of affairs, but it isn't for lack of ability to grow a diverse set of vegetables.
And 997 of those are development tooling dependencies that are not included in the application that you eventually deploy.

Don't get me wrong, I would rather there were fewer development dependencies too, but they are tooling abstractions that you are _opting-in_ to.

If that is still a cognitive burden, then there's nothing to stop you using React a build step through a CDN.
I wouldn't want to be in a WTO where the strongest member is China.
One other thing I've never quite understood is that a child can watch James Bond shoot a few hundred people and that's fine, it is significantly less fine for that child to watch a film of 2 people having sex, even though sex is a normal heathy part of life. In the UK a 16 year old can legally have sex, but cant watch it?!

Tbh I'm not sure, I get turned off by things like Saw, because I don't really think theres the need to go that far, but on the other hand, is Mario jumping on a turtle animal cruelty?

I suppose the line is realism? Mario isnt attempting to be real? Quorn mince isnt attempting to be real, vegetarian bacon is.
One of the biggest issues with the scrum (master|lord|bag) model of Agile is that any process grievances magically transform from "this process has issues" to "that person is wrong."
Ah, the no true Scottsman. If it's not working, despite all the best efforts of your scrum-certified agilistas, it's because you're doing Agile wrong. If it's working, then it's because Agile is awesome!

I've never seen a non-functioning team start functioning after Agile was introduced. And I've been on plenty of functioning teams that aren't doing Agile.

Agile the process is about as useful as a tiger-warding talisman. Look, ma, no tigers!
Agile is fine if it is an organic, bottom-up process. And as any of the founding Agile gurus like to profess, this was the original intention.

The problem is that it is usually implemented as a centralized, top-down imposition by management. The net result is usually just a tax on productivity to ever more process, paperwork, status updates, and meetings.
Maybe it's time for you to seriously consider the possibility that you've been brainwashed and that as a result you are a genuinely morally worse human being.
The problem with current implementation of agile is it tries to standardize a process and use it across all companies and all project.

In reality, I've found that every developer are unique. And together with unique company cultures and projects, the process need to adapt with those things, and not the reverse.

A scrum may work well in a team / project, while it may not work in other.
It looks like after-the-fact trend change detection and then the AI just predicts a target price. Not completely useless, but trading requires a bit more modeling and also a lot of devops to ensure you don't get stuck in a trade if the computer crashes.
Prior to the ability to freeze sperm, the donor needed to be on-site at the time of fertilization. On top of that, the cultural shame around infertility issues meant that the mother didn't want too many details of the donor anyways. It's super-creepy through the lens of today, but only IMO less so (but still creepy) for the time in which it happens.
Introducing Threads
> Recently, I’ve been thinking about the HK scenario and wondering what I can do, but I can’t shake a nagging feeling that I could simply go over there and fight alongside the protestors. I often deflect with observations like “I don’t speak the language,” or “I don’t know what I would do to help,” and yet the thought keeps coming back.

I'd say do it, if you feel this way. This guy did it: https://idlewords.com/2019/08/a_walk_in_hong_kong.htm

Even if you stay on the sidelines, you could probably still help by being a witness, spreading their message, and maybe forging contacts to provide material and logistical support later.

Though, be aware that pro-government propaganda is using photos of Westerners near the protests to fuel a fake-news narrative that they're being orchestrated by the CIA, but don't let stupid, uncontrollable stuff like that that stop you.
Developers love agile. The thing they hate is Agile. Which is completely different. (Notably, it's not agile.)
Isn't helium potentially in short supply?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/helium-smartphones-fibre-op...

Pressurizing train tunnels with significant amounts of helium which would constantly need to replenished may be impractical
I think it is because it was so blatant.
Hong Kong to ban face masks invoking colonial-era emergency powers
The system is just being pushed to its limits. There is no perfect political system, and given enough time a political system will be gamed somehow. Simply, the means of gaming this particular system are even easier now.
The same as what?

"Literally" is being used for hyperbole. It makes the sentence more intense.

The word "figuratively" is not used for hyperbole. It's not a synonym. The sentence being figurative does not matter.
It would be more socially acceptable if you were specific, like asking the person directly about which word was ambiguous.

I think the takeaway here is that compiler errors could use more specificity and grammar checks too...
Thanks, coming out end of the month
I'd argue my rights to not associate with people who'll get me dragged into a lawsuit are at least as important as my rights to free speech.
+1 for having no issues with android phones thus far. I've switched back and forth between android and ios/apple phones and while my apple phones would start great it would take them a year or so before they were almost useless. Plus my headhpones just work in my android phones.
Because the last few threads I did I'd be near instantly downvote bombed and flagged.

Particularly in Hong Kong related threads.

Spread it far and wide. Never let anyone stop the Signal.
Just wait a short while. USA was not tried yet by any internal strife since 60s, and even then that was mild.
It's the dark side of "Information wants to be free." It means that as soon as any information is theoretically public, it becomes practically public.
I firmly believe that the brain is a form of quantum computing. I also believe that moving the consciousness from a 90yo close to death to a cloned body containing a newly grown brain or then later on a silicon based one will be possible in the future.

The best TV show that encapsulated this was Travellers[0]. A damn good show which was cancelled just when things were getting interesting.

I would say it's possible by entangling the particles from the source brain to the recipient one. Once completed the original source is destroyed, so it's effectively a move and not a copy.

There's also the 6th day movie [1]. Imagine being able to spin up multiple copies of yourself and 100x your own output? I believe that will also be possible in the future. Probably outlawed due to lots of ethical reasons. But... I'd like to think why not? Me[1] lives on earth. Me[2] lives in Mars, Me[3] lives on a moon in the asteroid belt. Me[4] is currently navigating out of the solar system. Since all the brains are entangled. I'd know everything in an instant.

How do deal with that is another story. Unless I'm AI at that point, which means the collective are all just a bunch of VMs anyway :P

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99LZwZmSoNo
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VP44dGIi9c
YouTubers lost thousands of dollars as channels were mistakenly demonetized
I don't think the intensifier is meaningless. It is meaningful because otherwise people wouldn't use it. It might be jarring to you, or the meaning not obvious, but an intensifier is by definition meaningful: it intensifies, after all :)
> Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense

That's not a definition of "figuratively".
I notice this also. I wonder whether it's part of the general policy that seems to be prevalent of keeping the public in an ongoing state of confusion.
Lua supports sandboxing via its _G variable, i.e., implicit global scope. When you call a script, you can pass it a custom _G.
Sounds promising, looking forward to the wp!
> In reality, I've found that every developer are unique. And together with unique company cultures and projects, the process need to adapt with those things, and not the reverse.

Which is pretty much the core of the agile manifesto.
It's your responsibility to work on a team that handles bugs like adult engineers rather than school children or politicians. Engineers have a duty to be spokespersons for rational and humane engineering processes.

I've shipped more than my share of bugs live. I've never felt like I didn't have a team behind me. Obviously I shipped a lot of things that work, as well.

Working someplace humane and rational doesn't just happen, it requires work.

I expect anyone with "Senior" in their job title to do that work, both in terms of setting team culture and establishing post-mortem policies with management.
>The problem is that these kind of automated system give governments more leverage than policing using people,

they also take power away from arbitrary police action because cameras work both ways. Surveillance doesn't just discipline citizens, it also disciplines authorities. If you're in a room alone with a police officer, do you prefer the cameras to be on or off?

Automated systems can have bias just like people, but at least with a digital system the data is catalogued, we can reason about why they make the decisions they make and document abuse and fix them accordingly. Try fixing corrupt police in a small town without papertrails.

That the Soviet Union was so good at oppressing people without any automated surveillance actually proves the point. Oppressive systems function just fine with people all the way down.

The narrative of surveillance as just a tool for oppression is one-sided. Citizens would be wise to use this point in time when the laws are still being drawn to use it as a tool to hold authority accountable.
I don't know. I do know that in these kinds of situations, the contract typically spells out clearly what, exactly, the contractor is going to do and how, though.
The point of contention here is whether the publisher should be liable in any lawsuit for non-defamatory speech. You are deliberately avoiding that point.
Why are you comparing linux kernel and cars?
Great article and definitely has a point: Someone killed one co-citizen in their own country and on its own soil. At most, Saudi Arabia must open a local investigation to find the responsible person.

Other countries might not like their law, but it is the same as me not liking Death Sentences in the USA, but what can I do? I am not a citizen of that country.
Grading a multiplication test in grade school might be quick and mechanical but grading trig and calculus is not.

>"Oh, if the teacher were better at their job they would have to work a lot less".

I'm 100% saying exactly that. This is true of basically every profession. Some people are more effective/efficient/faster than others.
One of the great "what-ifs" of history is that when Julius Caesar was assassinated, he was preparing for a campaign against the Parthian Empire. What if, Julius Caesar was not assassinated and was able to launch his invasion of Parthia.

Julius Caesar was one of the greatest generals in history, and arguably Rome's best general (with the possible exception of Scipio Africanus). In addition, as evidenced by his visit to the tomb of Alexander the Great, he idolized Alexander, and I am sure would have loved to try to do what Alexander did in conquering Persia. Years later Trajan did figure out how to invade the Parthian capital city of Ctesiphon by moving columns down the Euphrates - so a successful invasion was possible.

With Julius Caesar's assassination Rome fell into civil war. Mark Antony tried an invasion, but as history showed, he was not nearly the general Julius Caesar was. Julius's successor, Augustus, was not a military genius in any sense, and was too worried about his position in Rome to risk an invasion of Parthia, and was content just to get the Roman standards back that had been lost by Crassus.

Subsequent history may have been a lot different if Julius Caesar had not been assassinated when he was.
That is indeed the interpretation propagated by the western media, and the one that the protesters present. But not all Hong Kongers believe that that is what the protests are truly about. Underneath, there are aspects related to economy, personal identity and historical context, which, combined, call into question whether the protests are truly good for Hong Kong.

There is nothing more I can say here without getting downvoted. Most people here will not believe me. I advice you to read things for yourself and draw your own conclusions: go to https://quora.com and search for Hong Kong questions.
Many Hong Kongers reply there, as well as other groups that are closer to HK such as Singaporeans and even mainland Chinese. Their view on things will fascinate you.
Mine haven't. Samsung's flagship Galaxy Note 3 got so laggy I couldn't even pick up a phone call before it went to voice mail, as one of many examples. My stack of iPhones have had their occasional problems, too. But waving our phone penises at each other isn't the point of the article, eh?
My wife was actually going to do this for a website. She is a teacher and wanted a small site for her classroom so that the kids and parents could keep up to date with the goings on in the classroom and she wanted to use Google Slides for this since she has used it for work before. I was shocked and was trying to talk her out of it. At the end of the day, she decided the site wasn't necessary or worth the effort so nothing came of it but I couldn't believe she thought to use Google Slides for that.
Agile works perfectly fine where I works. We just try to adhere to the manifesto. Works much better than anything I have been part of the last 25 years of my career, for sure. We wasted so much time back then.
I mean, if you use a process that's apparently fixed enough it's worth making certifications around it, it's quite likely not "agile" in both the dictionary sense of the word and in the sense of the agile manifesto.
It seems crazy to me to give these companies your DNA.
Why could this also not happen with free software? Unless you read the code in every patch of every piece of software you use and software your software uses, what prevents this from happening?
As a developer who has been quite unhappy in Agile environments, I don't actually think Agile is to blame, which the article alludes to.

I think the issue with Agile is that software is a field in which is difficult to measure productivity easily. Then Agile comes along and offers the appearance of making it easy to score and and measure team and individual effectiveness. Sure it's "supposed" to be for the team to measure their own effectiveness and empower people to work more productively, but for folks in management roles, the opportunity to 'score' engineers based on Agile metrics is too attractive.

Once it becomes just a way to figure out who's not moving fast enough, or "failing to meet their commitments", of course people will hate it. It gets changed from a tool into a stick.
If you took away "literally" in both cases, it would still be understood to be figurative. "Literally" isn't doing its job of meaning literally, but it isn't meaning figuratively.

I think the correct understanding is as hyperbolic use of the regular sense of literally.

If I say, "I walked miles around the store looking for you" or "I waited for you for days", we don't say "sometimes miles means hundreds of feet and sometimes days means a few minutes". We say people sometimes exaggerate.

In the same way, "Tom was rolling in wealth [so much so that it's almost as if he were literally rolling in wealth, but of course that interpretation is silly and I'm using hyperbole to exaggerate how rolling-in-wealth Tom was]".
We moved to Kanban a few years ago and I think it's been much nicer than the "sprints" we used to do.

There is a board. The board has a prioritized list of things to do. You work on your thing until it is done. Then you pick your next task based on where the priorities currently sit.

It's really not far off from the "sprint" idea. The main difference is it is a constant re-balancing rather than an every X weeks affair.
On the downside though, one of the main characters is murdered in the epilogue for no reason. A most unsatisfying denouement.
It would have been fascinating to study Japan in the 80's, but now really sure they are still "self-sufficient."

Japan's auto industry is still strong, but their future largely depends on impending trade deal with Trump. Their tech/semiconductor industry has been in decline the past 30 years and what little remains today are being sold to Chinese/Taiwanese companies bit by bit. Japanese brands like SONY or Panasonic now accounts for less than 10% of the US market now, replaced by mostly Koreans like Samsung and LG in high-end, and by Chinese by TCL in low-end markets. The consumer camera business is still dominated by Japanese companies, but the business itself is in a crisis as the market, which peaked in 2013, continues to dive by 30% - 60% annually last several years.
> What blocks you from even considering the option?

Human biology, perhaps? After all, haven't we evolved over thousands of years to be omnivores?

> It's a little strange to see a comment so boastful of a lack of intellectual curiosity on HN.

In other words, according to you, people who aren't interested in being vegetarian lack intellectual curiosity. It's a little strange to see a comment so boastful of intellectual intolerance on HN...
1. Not everybody knows that they don't know their biological father.

2. My wife is adopted, has had some contact with her biological mother, but zero reliable information on her biological father (her bio mom lies about pretty much everything). She has shown no interest in the various genetic tests out there, even though she has to keep on writing on those health forms at her doctor "unknown" for all the "Does X run in your family" questions.
Admittedly, the headphone jack thing on iPhones is f'ing BS. I hate it. Just give me the damned headphone jack, Apple.
Perhaps? I (personally) would disagree. To me bacon isnt generic, its as specific as chicken leg. I can see how that would account for the discrepancy though.
The most potent way to suppress is to control money. Deny any unwanted opposition access to funding and suddenly they don't exist as they are unable to compete medially.

(Obviously this means that any party not pandering to rich is doomed to lose, unless there's a general uprising.)
Well there seem to be some indices available.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices
Good point, OpenWatcom is obviously miles ahead of Turbo C, but it's also much more complex. I tinkered with it for a while, and ended up using the latter for its simplicity.

DOSBox can be easily installed on any system, you can save the entire C: in a git repo and it'll probably keep working in any number of years from now :)

Meanwhile, OWC doesn't have packages in popular Linux distros, only a custom binary installer, and on MacOS it doesn't even have that.
Don't wear yourself out moving those goalposts. First you accuse him of lying about what he said; then when he offers proof, suddenly it doesn't matter whether he's willing to do it himself or not.
The page title is actually "Improve CSVs and API descriptions with these Open Standards Board recommendations"
Fair enough, but venmo/google/apple pay is even more convenient than wire transfers and they're not into those either. Checks/Cheques are just a cultural norm in America.
Back in design school, web portfolios could get pretty interesting. One novel way was to put up a collaborative google doc with some initial info that visitors could edit.

An example of this was http://carlyayres.com/ though it has since been updated to a non-editable page.
The issue is not that the contractor only marginally helped these people. It’s that they exploited a massive power imbalance in order to reap a vastly larger reward than they offered.

“Copenhagen Ethics” really just strikes me as a rhetorical tool to defend exploitation. “What, just because I offered this person a job I have to pay them a minimum wage?”
The best of both worlds: R meets Python via reticulate
cute games only work so long.

first rule and most important one... never F the tax-man.
Perverse behaviors like this are what make we worry about the calls to tax negative externalities without earmarking the funds for addressing those externalities. If you tax the externalities, but get to use the revenue for something else, what is your incentive to reduce the behavior causing the problems in the first place?
sonic the hedge fund
If you've not seen this NYT Magazine feature, you'll probably enjoy it thoroughly:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/magazine/sper...
The networks that I belong to and benefit from are that "puritanical," if you want to choose a really stupid word for avoiding insulting half the population for no reason, yeah.
That's how anti-loitering laws work, for example.
Nothing offensive about shit.
> Your explanation assumes that this is true, that superficial characteristics correctly signal group affiliation, something that is simply not true.

It is, because in a society that has racism as status quo, you can be sure that these superficial characteristics are shared between you and your immediate, as well as extended family - people who you can rely to be in your group.
Thanks for clarifying, I didn’t realize that!
If your system goes down together with (the Earth|DNS Routing|ISPs), it's not distributed, it just occupies several machines - a farm.