skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I would specifically not consider "affirmative action" to be a form of racism [...] The specific reason I wouldn't consider it a form of racism is that I think racism implies animosity/hatred and not just discrimination. [...] the overwhelming majority of proponents of AA over time have certainly been genuine in their intentions to reduce suffering.

Agreed. Whatever differences of opinion we might have, this was well said, and I agree with you there.

The last part of your comment seems like it switches back to calling affirmative action racist implicitly though? Or, maybe I can't tell. I don't really understand the distinction you're making between positive discrimination and affirmative action.

I would totally agree that hateful discrimination is a bad thing, but from the top of the thread down, all we've been talking about is affirmative action, as far as I can tell, and nothing else. When @manfredo said "such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination", by "discrimination", he means affirmative action, right?

> You promote equality by promoting education, prosperity, and western/judeo-christian values.

Yes, true! And... this is exactly why some colleges have prioritized making sure they admit a few extra people from minority groups known to be suffering from discrimination, right?

> most people (including me) who are "proponents of fixing the problem" will naturally disagree with the idea that racism can solve the problem

Except nobody proposed racism as the solution in the animous/hateful sense. People proposed affirmative action as the solution.

> As previously mentioned AA has probably not had a net positive impact even if it was well-intentioned.

It sounds like you're hinting at the mismatch theory here and elsewhere... which is a common criticism, and it has been debated and studied at some length. Might be worth looking up some of the results.

Since AA has been used a lot, I'm not clear on why you're saying that racial tension and opportunity has improved dramatically, but that AA had nothing to do with it? Why are you sure that AA isn't the reason things are now better?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Mismatching

This article demonstrates some of the positive effects of AA, and also some of the negative effects of banning AA:

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/18/07/case-affirmative-a...

I guess if I have a single point it's that framing affirmative action as discrimination isn't clear thinking. It sounds like that's not what you're talking about, but this is what I jumped into the fray to say. The argument used above, not by you, is trying to suggest and imply there's a hypocrisy to taking any action to prevent cultural discrimination because the action is also discriminatory. That's true only in a technical sense, but is only FUD that confuses the issue. The goal is what's important, and the goal is equality of opportunity and removal of all animous/hateful behavior. Taking actions to meet that goal have worked in the past and will continue to.
I am all for free filing software for the people!

What TurboTax offers that a free version may not is the ability for a CPA to sign off on one's taxes. That is worth paying for in my opinion. B/C they carry the liability if I were to be audited.

I think the IRS needs to simplify the filing process so that a CPA is not needed.

Sadly, this issue is more complex than intuits lobbying power.
I did say probably...
The odd part here to me is that it seems to be the norm that, if you want to join the maintainer team of Guile, you ask RMS and you don't even need to talk to the existing maintainer team first. I agree that the response sounds reasonable too, and in any other development project I would be confused by how a reasonable-sounding person can take such an unreasonable-sounding approach - so I assume that this approach is reasonable and that this is in fact a norm.

I think that the idea that anyone who isn't involved with the project (RMS or otherwise) gets to pick the maintainers of projects, and doesn't just defer to the existing maintainer teams in all but exceptional cases. is untenable (and has been causing unnecessary interpersonal conflicts in GNU for decades), and I hope one of the long-term results of all this is to get rid of that norm.

For an example of doing things pretty firmly in the other direction, I've always liked how new hires on Canonical's OS engineering teams aren't immediately appointed Ubuntu maintainers - they have to go through the same process anyone else would. Of course they have lots of advantages (a full-time job where they work closely with most of the existing maintainers to learn everything they need to publicly demonstrate their fitness for the role), but it makes it clear that the maintainership of Ubuntu is driven by Ubuntu and not by managers at Canonical.
Yeah, this is literally my point.

I was quibbling with the point that because FP languages often don't give low level control they can't become successful even though nearly every language on that top ten list suffers from the same perf oriented deficiency.

To write performant code in any of those top ten languages you have to understand the characteristics and nuances of the underlying tech stack.

And honestly people who don't write performant Java because they didn't bother to learn about the GC wouldn't have magically done otherwise writing C++. Trust me, that language does not intrinsically cause you to write performant code. It does intrinsically cause you to leak memory though.

But the bigger point is that in many domains performance is second to many other concerns. Like you said pick the languages that matches your needs.

So I think we pretty much agree.
Define "curing". Is it giving some decent percentage of people an extra 10, 20, maybe even 30 years of reasonably healthy life, compared to what they have today? Or is it making people live forever? The first objective, as challenging as it is, sounds a lot more plausible than the second. If we ever achieve either, I'm sure the first will be reached long before the second is.

By a literal definition of "curing", only the second is a "cure". But the first would still be an amazing achievement, and is probably a prerequisite to ever being able to achieve the second.
Fake news is fake because the facts aren't real. machine learning isn't going to learn how to identify it when sentient people have difficulty.
Reminds me of the nytimes journalist who overheard Ty Cobb (Trump's former lawyer) talking about the Russia investigation at a restaurant in DC: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/us/politics/isnt-that-the...
If they told you sooner that you weren't elligible, your return would be lower, and maybe you'd feel you could "get more back" by using a different tax preparation program, but at the juncture where you're told it isn't possible, you already feel more invested in using Turbotax and ultimately filing with it.
Thank you for linking the notes.

Also, "buzzword-salad", I like that.
synchrotrons are amazing. I spent 24 hours on a beam line (the parts of the synchrotron where the super intense photon beam is sent out to experiment stations). Each station has a hutch where you put your sample and it has multiple interlocks to prevent you from being in the hutch when the beam is exposed. There are alarms and knobs and levers and knobs to pull before you can expose your sample. After you do, you will see a nice hole burnt through your sample.

And then there's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski
Zappos 2012 data breach settlement
Maybe a small nitpick, but it was actually the city council that voted, not NYC as a whole.
I'm really happy to see this effort! I participate in the rustc project dedicating myself mainly to diagnostics and ergonomics and I believe that the industry hasn't scratched the surface of what can be done through error messages. In Rust, my own personal rule of thumb is that the compiler should be your first tutor and act as a pair programmer. Rust has one advantage for doing so that was arrived to "by accident": the fewer things are valid code, the bigger the distance between valid and invalid code. In the boundary of these two areas there is code that can be reasonably imagined to be valid by somebody who knows a fraction of the rules of the language. I call this the "negative space" of the language. You can think of a case (again, in Rust because it is what I am familiar with, but the ideas can be applied to any language) like

fn main() {
let x = "a" + "b";
}

which is invalid Rust due to reasons, but the compiler emits the following output[1]:

error[E0369]: binary operation `+` cannot be applied to type `&str`
--> src/main.rs:2:17
|
2 | let x = "a" + "b";
| --- ^ --- &str
| | |
| | `+` cannot be used to concatenate two `&str` strings
| &str
help: `to_owned()` can be used to create an owned `String` from a string reference. String concatenation appends the string on the right to the string on the left and may require reallocation. This requires ownership of the string on the left
|
2 | let x = "a".to_owned() + "b";
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Is it perfect? No, it is verbose and you could make the case that the language should be extended to accept the code as is. Because we have design constraints that don't let us accept the code, we've extended the compiler to support the construct in order to provide the fixed code, while simultaneously allowing the language to conform to its constraints. The hard part of this is that now your compiler is as complex as it would have to be to support the superset language. Also, the less negative space there's in the language, namely, the more expressive it is, the less you can apply this strategy

I am reminded of a recent tweet: "We spent decades trying to invent a sufficiently smart compiler when we should have been inventing a sufficiently empathetic one"[2]

Edit: if you have to Google to understand what the compiler is saying, I consider that a bug. File tickets for confusing diagnostics!

[1]: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=nightly&mode=debug&editi...

[2]: https://twitter.com/mostlysafe/status/1176170363266449410
But to think it won't _ever_ be possible? After a thousand years of research?
Do your research on the guy who writes these articles.

Alex de Vries (blockchain hobbyist with no scientific / economics background who started digiconomist)

https://hackernoon.com/the-reports-of-bitcoin-environmental-...

Oh yeah, and he invented this energy consumption index...stop letting yourself get trolled.
Is the vote of the election ever: "Can you make this one website that is messy better?". People are more focused on big issues and annoying software won't often make the platform.
Maybe for you next YC app, take or leave this idea... Put Wibbitz out of business by developing AI that can create short videos based on text from written content. For instance, the video at the top of this page, which was adapted from its attached article. https://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/recipe-collections-f...

I don't know the first thing about AI or video, but I do know the humans who make those sorts of videos just read the article and search Getty images. You could prolly train the AI to have the right "taste" based on all the content created by Meredith Corp lifestyle brands, like Real Simple, Food and Wine, etc. Meredith now owns Time Inc, and I know that they and every other media company are doing whatever they can to compete in the digital space. One way is by adapting their written content into short, digest-able, social media-consumed videos.
Now, these are much more substantial complaints, in my opinion. But to the extent that sort of reasons truly drive the calls for removal, much of the rhetoric and all of the timing is extremely inappropriate.
Probably because a lot of people on the internet are not native English speakers, and so struggle to see the difference between "cat" and "code".
I think Andy Wingo issues with GNU should be more focused on his RMS management style and not his political or social views.

But it is clear that a number of people involved in the GNU projects have had issues with the management style and personality of RMS quite separate from his non-conformist views raising views on sexual mores.

Andy Wingo focusing on his views relating to sex risks turning one thing into another. He should just focus on the management issues within GNU projects and ignore the unconventional sexual views.

The Epstein case shouldn't be an excuse or a rationale for focusing on the leadership of RMS.

Having RMS as the leader of the GNU project is like having mildly eccentric relatives, especially parents. You just have to live with them.
Non-native English speakers whose native language doesn't distinguish countable and uncountable nouns is a possibility, but it's still very strange to say "two codes" in those languages, it doesn't have a clear meaning.

Until you see that "code" in ordinary-day language is an ugly word, it's ill-defined, and is used to refer to so many things, but usually with implications of secrecy or espionage. For example, it can refer to the combination of a lock, e.g. a password. It can refer to an encoding scheme or an encoder, e.g. Morse code, Pulse-Code Modulation. It can refer to a codename, e.g. Project X. And most commonly, it refers to an encryption algorithm (or its output), e.g. AES (or ciphertext), or a sentence of something written in a programming language, e.g. "one-liner".

And most people who don't have an engineering background usually don't realize those are not the same thing, they think a telegram in Morse code, a ASCII-encoded string, the combination of their lock, an encryption algorithm, or a line of code in programming language are the same thing, they just picture it as a number (well, they are numbers, all information is numbers, but their visual representations and purposes are very different) - when you have this mentality, "a code" or "two codes" makes sense.
However ridiculous or dangerous their rules are, they're the right of private corporations in the US. The First Amendment protects public speech from govt censorship. It does not require private entities to broadcast everyone's speech equally.
Oh of _course_, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion's_share

Which is obviously intentionally ironic considering that

> The lion's share is an idiomatic expression which refers to the major share of something.

I wonder what other countries tuck these kinds of harmlessly blatant humor in similarly unexpected places. It's nice.
Roguelike Tutorial – In Rust
Golden Rice, the Genetically Modified Superfood That Almost Saved Millions
it is telling that the only way you seem to judge entities is through the lens of efficiency and profitability on a short term basis.

could you please share your thoughts about internet access in the US of A? it seems that despite the best efforts of Saint Market, long may he reign, and all of this wonderful competition and efficient allocation of resources and so forth optimizing for short term outcomes has led to mediocre speeds and monopoly-ish behavior/choice in most areas.

or that Saint Market has led to pretty poor health outcomes in the USA despite spending massively amount more per capita than other nations

or that Saint Market's desire for profitability and efficiency leads them to, say, not replace lead pipes which ruin health of various communities (probably far away from yours, so it's OK .... for now)

it's almost like evaluating things based on extremely myopic criteria that people use to judge for-profit companies leads to outcomes that optimize for local maxima but are horrible when viewed from even slightly more far out, like, i dunno, a few years.

can you acknowledge that some things are best evaluated on performance outside of "profitability" and "efficiency" in the time span of 3 months?
If someone values optimal architectural choices even when it damages the political cause of software freedom, then what is he doing in the Free Software movement? There is a sister movement that was set-up explicitly to be technical and non-political: Open Source. The licenses are even compatible so if you discover you accidentally joined the wrong movement it is easy to switch to the other one!
To give you some more info: We had signed up in 2016 timeframe when they had a more generous free tier. The one that I see now has 5 users [0]. Also, the startup is in India. Perhaps they're offering different tiers depending on the country?

[0] https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
There are limits on how much you can donate to a candidate's campaign; however, you can contribute unlimited funds to a PAC, but the PAC's advertisement efforts must be separate from the candidates; they can't be coordinated.
It would be totally hypocritical for the right wing to break up Google. The Democrats tried that with Microsoft back in the late 90s, and as soon as Bush took office the case was dropped because Republicans don't believe in enforcing anti-trust law.

>the companies are only lobbying for things that make them more money

Every company does this if they can, and it's either going to help or hurt some political side. The case you're making here is that Google is bad for Republicans. Maybe, but coal companies are bad for Democrats (they give money to Republicans to help them win races), so why is this OK for coal companies, but not Google? I don't see the difference. As long as other companies or industries are allowed to influence politics with money, it's perfectly OK for Google to influence elections however they want, and it would be wrong to break them up because, as I said before, the Republican party is opposed to anti-trust law.
VScode is not open-source.

And the open-source version (VScodium) does not support some of the most useful features like remote dev
(https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/196)

"it appears to be a deliberate licensing choice by Microsoft to not allow use of the Remote Development extension pack with vscodium"

Microsoft is doing the same vicious trick as Google with Android, Fushia, etc. : "guys we're cool, we're open source blabla" which attracts lots of people & dev, but then it quickly becomes full of proprietary blobs, telemetry & spyware.

Sure there is still the open-source part (AOSP, VSCodium, etc.) but we all now how unusable AOSP is without all the proprietary stuff.

The same thing is happening to VSCode, MS is adding telemetry, proprietary parts and the most useful extensions are from MS and not compatible with the open-source version.

Microsoft is just using open-source as a marketing buzzword.
Note that this is to make Haskell more readable to non-Haskell programmers (which is a bit of a weird goal IMO). It is not for readable Haskell in general. Advice like "not using $" just makes code less readable if you're familiar with Haskell and is quite frankly just bizarre. I do not think you'll find many programmers, Haskell or otherwise, who find lots of nested parenthesis to be the paragon of readability.¹

If the goal is to show snippets of cool Haskell code to other people this article is… fine I guess? But I don't think it's good for much more. Not even for teaching Haskell, since people should probably learn the language as it is used instead of some arbitrary "more readable to non-Haskell programmers" version. Using do-notation is probably even counterproductive for teaching since it obscures what's actually going on.

Honestly this sentiment from the Haskell community that Haskell is somehow bizarre and impenetrable to outsiders and needs to be somehow watered down so that normal people can understand it just feels extremely elitist and if anything only scares people away from Haskell.

―

¹ Lisp programmers aside, but even then in Lisp you're basically just drawing a tree and so the parenthesis kind of fade away, but in languages with infix syntax and operator precedence you can't ignore them.
Well, I had no idea what (&), but you just place the cursor on it in emacs and it will say `(&) :: a -> (a -> b) -> b` that, after you learn this language is enough to understand that `v & f` runs the function `f` with the parameter `v`.

If I was trying to discover what function does that, I'd type the `a -> (a -> b) -> b` (yes, it's that obvious) string on Hoogle, and it would show me the operator.

I have never got that experience with Perl. Every new symbol requires a query into perldoc in a new window, every time you don't know what symbol to use, you keep not knowing, because it's impossible to discover.

Besides, Haskell has a consistent value + operator + value structure, while Perl has a mess.
What expense does AirBNB even have that'd make a dent in their revenue? I'm at a loss.
A nitpick for whom? OP copied the title from the Times.
Five years, $6M a year, 60,000 sq feet (roughly 150-300 employees, depending on how it is organized). You lock a lease and you're on the hook.
Intriguing product - and amazing work! How do you handle column renames and more complicated data migrations (e.g. split "full_name" on whitespace)? Django's migration framework handles these by having you check into your VCS each "diff" in the migration DAG, and providing enough metadata to know how to go forward and back, but this also means that to change VCS branches you need to roll back migrations in a highly counterintuitive way. If there was a way to have a checked-in declarative schema, with metadata to indicate how data migrations should work so you can just `git checkout; skeema push`, it would be a gamechanger.
There is a discussion about introducing "descriptive" diagnostics of the same style happening on the Swift Forums at the moment - https://forums.swift.org/t/pitch-extended-error-messages-dia....

I this it's a great idea and with new diagnostic architecture described in the blog post it would be relatively easy to archive.
She initiated the conversation in the first place and I was trying to backpedal pretty much the whole time, but she just kept pushing.
Grad students to thesis committees: no more hors d'oeuvres
I agree that it often works out that way... but it shouldn't.
Cannabis Buddy Dispensary
But, they have to adjust the screen protector's position before the wrong finger registers. That video makes it look like the protector was contaminated with a fingerprint before the recording began.
Perhaps it’s similar to how Shazam fingerprints music. It’s a fingerprint of a fingerprint so to speak.
> A painting stored away in a climate controlled vault where no one can look at it is just a dusty canvas rectangle.

It may just as well not exist at all.
Exactly. As just an anecdote, my intro do FP class in university was taught by a professor who tended to rant about different levels of purity and elegance between his favorite and least favorite languages. Of course, the favorite was his pet project and we had to spend most of the class using it. I also know that Emacs is partly written in Lisp because it was the only editor he would touch.

FP can't even sell itself well in school as a language where useful things can be done, when the student is stuck in a deep valley of ___morphisms and other alien concepts with claims of aesthetic elegance as the only motivation. I recall the math nerds loved it as relief over C that the rest of the department used, but with me being rather mediocre in math, the weirdness and cult-like vibe from the prof and TA left a really bad taste. The impression was so deep that I have no issues recalling this class a decade later. I've never touched any FP since, unless you count borrowing clever lambda snippets.
If you clicked the article, you would see that it is in the first few paragraphs in bold: marketing and sales. Pretty much what most growth companies have to spend on in the earlier stages.