skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do we need Google captcha?
Many of us remember the early batches of captchas. Annoying and sometimes next to impossible to get right. Googles "one click" captcha was a fresh breeze when it came. I'm not so sure anymore though. Now instead we have to use brain power to press 2-4 images in an AI quiz or said differently "help Google improve their ML data-set for free" which I'm not at all comfortable with. Isn't there a better way to fight bots? Could not the community make a FOSS alternative? How hard is this really?
I had a powerpc laptop in 2005
> To use the example from the article: lifetimes are not a hard concept to grasp. Knowing when the Rust compiler will require you to make a lifetime explicitly part of your type, vs. when you can elide it? Hard.

There are only three (or is it four?) rules about when you can elide. Personally? I never write lifetimes, and then the compiler yells at me, and then I fix it by adding them. It's not something that you need to actively think about. You see

error[E0106]: missing lifetime specifier
--> src/lib.rs:2:8
|
2 | x: &i32,
| ^ expected lifetime parameter

and you add it in.
Kinda like Japan's economy. Lots of old companies trying to keep up and very little outside entrepreneurship to disrupt and progress the industries.
Lifetimes aren't a worse version of GC, just like static typing isn't a worse version of dynamic typing. They're different trade-offs.

Rust can express ownership and lifetime of objects statically at compile time, as opposed to dynamically at run time. For beginners this is a new aspect of programming they need to learn, and it adds to the learning curve (same as you need to think about types in C++, instead of winging it in JavaScript), but it has very nice side benefits:

• Deterministic destruction. You don't need to remember about closing handles/cleanups, and all things are freed immediately when their scope ends (rather than "finalized" sometime later). Some languages have `defer` or `withFoo(callback)` to handle these. In Rust it's automatic and more flexible.

• Ownership adds useful information to the program. You know which args will be kept or shared, so you don't get shared mutable state by accident. Libraries don't have to copy their args just in case the caller changes them unexpectedly later. And as a caller you know what each function does to the data you pass in.

The last point is especially useful for passing buffers around, because you control at all times when you give exclusive or shared access, and how long each part of the program can keep them.
Every “Game Form” (which is like a “Game” in the Game Theory sense, except instead of having the results be utilities for each outcome, it just has labels for the outcomes) which is “straightforward” (meaning, for each participant, what utility that participant alone assigns to each outcome label (not depending on the utilities anyone else assigns) is sufficient to determine what choices they should make to maximize their expected utility) must be either a simple vote between exactly two options (as in, everyone votes for one of the two, and an outcome label happens if it gets enough votes), or dictatorial (a single person picks an outcome), or a probability mixture of games of that form (for example, pick a random voter’s ballot, and pick whoever they picked. Or, another example, pick a random pair of candidates, and hold a vote between the two).

That is to say : any deterministic voting system with more than 2 candidates, and where no voter is a dictator, is subject to tactical voting.

This is Gibbard's 1978 theorem.

Though, I wonder,
are there game forms which are not “straightforward” but which are a Pareto improvement (in the sense of “regardless of their assignment of utilities to the possible outcomes, every voter’s expected utility is at least as high as it would in the alternate option) over game forms that are straightforward?

I think probably yes?
If each voter puts their utilities, and then the system computes each voter’s utility under random ballot voting, and then checks whether any probability distribution over candidates would result in a strict Pareto improvement on the expected utilities of the voters, and if there is, pucks one, and if not, defaults to the distribution from “pick a randomly selected voter’s first choice”,

Well, we know that this wouldn’t be a straightforward game form, because it isn’t (equivalent to) the form required by Gibbard’s theorem,
So, strategic misrepresentation of one’s (normalized vNM) utilities must be sometimes useful in it (because if it were not, then one would only need to put the same utilities each time, making it a straightforward game),
but perhaps the degree of misrepresentation that could be useful would always be small enough that it would never select an option as being a Pareto improvement of the reported utilities from the random ballot method, unless it was also an actual Pareto improvement over it, using the true utility assignments?

But, I’m really not sure.
The crucial difference to Haskell is that this program:

fn main() {
println!("{}", 3 + 1.0);
}

Also fails with substantially the same error message. Rust is consistent that you can't add integers to floats. Haskell's looseness around numeric literals means that it isn't.

Mind you, Rust does have that kind of looseness within the integers, so this:

fn three() -> u8 { 3 }
fn one() -> u16 { 1 }

fn main() {
println!("{}", 3 + 1);
println!("{}", 3 + one());
println!("{}", three() + 1);
println!("{}", three() + one());
}

Fails to compile only on the last println.
I think the GP meant that describing Trotsky as primarily an intellectual, and omitting his other activities, amounts to lying through omission.
Probably as opposed to calling the CFO "the finance guy" in the same sentence as "the IT guy".
I agree that there's a programmer cost to having a multiplicity of ISAs. However, ISAs still have some relation to the design of the microarchitecture, which for x86 processors is not open. The RISC-V ISA for instance was created mainly because it helped the effort to create open CPU hardware.
Google Chrome Tab Ordering – “Can It Be Done in React Native?”
I’ll have to remember that for later use. The reason I am learning Python is to setup some home automation using Raspberry Pis and a flask based api/app to complement the data they collect.

You peaked my interest. Guido van Rossum on the subject:

> But the complexity of any proposed solution for this puzzle is immense, to me: it requires the parser (or more precisely, the lexer) to be able to switch back and forth between indent-sensitive and indent-insensitive modes, keeping a stack of previous modes and indentation level. Technically that can all be solved (there's already a stack of indentation levels that could be generalized). But none of that takes away my gut feeling that it is all an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption.

https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358

As a side note, there are more than 100x the number of jobs with Python in the description vs rust. Out of the 30 or so jobs with Rust in the description most are for automotive techs.
Caveat emptor I suppose
Most of the symbols used in Rust are used for the same thing as they are in the C family of languages. And if you don't recognize them, https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/appendix-02-operators.... is there to help.
As someone else pointed out, Hobby Lobby and the Bible Museum have rather close relations beginning before the Museum existed. Their acquisition techniques have also been quite sketchy since that time. (Yes, Hobby Lobby attempted to smuggle cuneiform tablets into the US as "tile samples". https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/united-states-files-civ...)

Further, ancient artifacts have value beyond that of the cost of their materials, whether or not "gold and jewels" are involved.

"and that gets all the bigots out in arms."

Could we avoid the irrelevant ad hominum attacks?
It's not a secret but it's been under reported that one reason that softbank money was so wastefully spent was because there was a gusher of it coming from S.A.
Looks like another example of Schrödinger's Capitalism. Western Europe is capitalist whenever anyone praises it, socialist whenever anyone criticizes. In point of fact very few people want to abolish private enterprise. The "socialism" they want is of a very moderate form, setting limits on a free market which is still the dominant form of economic activity. The "100% laissez faire or Stalinism" false dichotomy never does these debates any good.
Would that force them to be united? Putting some kind of rule in place might just force parties to balkanize. The barrier to candidate proliferation might be the ability to raise funds. Would a party get more out of one candidate, or two candidates with half the money?
Are you saying that it's good because they only need to trust these 2 entities? Isn't it better to not have to trust either? There wasn't a need to provide this info before.
Absolutely!

Don't move around all the dang time. I've lived in two places and have an incredibly strong network in both. I find people who are bouncing around 50-times-over usually lack the deep business relationships that it takes to establish trust to solve "big" problems.

As far as getting started - once you start, just never stop. Solve every dang problem you can get your hands on big or small, and continue to publish code every day.

Tools to study and learn - web web web. Also Microsoft Excel automation is an incredible need for lots of businesses. Puppeteer, and learning how to mimic what a browser can do without using a browser would be the two most useful skills I have personally. If you don't have a VERY solid background in webdev you need to get that going first, so much of what I do is reverse-engineering someone's website so I have to be very versed in the way that sites are built (all the way from ancient ones to the most modern of frameworks).

How to find work is network. Once you have the skills, you need to know people that have potential needs. I've already reached out to two people who found me through this thread and regardless of "making money", I genuinely want to help them, if even to just point them in the right direction (like yourself).

People are (*generally) awesome if you put aside your own ego, and I would be absolutely nowhere if I wasn't a sociable person. I love to learn about the world by making connections with people, and genuinely want to help them with what I can do!
ah, now the article sounds like a hit-piece
> How about the 1800C furnace that melts sand into the silicon for the solar panel

I wonder if a process similar to that used for molten salt batteries, using reflected, concentrated sunlight, could be used to melt sand into what is needed for more solar panels, electronics etc, and use the stored energy while it cools off, essentially combining the processes? And of course for other [s]melting processes powered by fossil fuels today?

Hmm, after doing a bit of research: the melting point for saltpeter (used in molten salt storage [0]) is only 550°F, while silicon's is 2,577°F... would a reflecting solar array be able to reach those temperatures? If I'm reading this [1] correctly, you could only practically get to 3,698.33°F (really close to your example of a 1,800°C furnace) if you collected all the sunlight falling onto earth. It's got to be much worse than that though in practice, because to focus all of it onto a single point would require beaming reflections from the perimeter a long distance through air, and also around the curvature of the earth...

So, we need to build this on the moon or in orbit? Oooh, Futurama actually showed us what could go wrong here [2].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Molten_sa...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Ideal...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qksm5cRtcU
(Saasify Founder)

Thanks for the feedback! It's really, really important for us at this stage of things.

> I am also unsure how is this related to OSS, except for using it as a marketing gimmick to draw "customers".

Definitely not a gimmick. 80% of all revenue goes directly back to the OSS authors that wrote the underlying open source project. Given that we're giving back the majority of the money to OSS, I'm not sure how this would qualify as a gimmick. As an open source author myself, this is the most important part of the platform by far. I realize that the current version doesn't do a great job of making this point clear, but we're actively working on improving this messaging.

> I would have expected something more declarative.

We're working towards this, but product development is a process and the current version is definitely a stepping off point. Right now, all you have to do is write a 100% normal TypeScript function without dealing with HTTP, encoding, parameter validation, etc, which is pretty simple compared with what it would take to traditionally create SaaS APIs.

> It's funny how people have different interpretation of general availability: "this product is in beta and ready for general use"

Anyone can signup and create their own SaaS products, and the service has already been tested by a few hundred developers. Would love to hear how we can improve on our beta's messaging here :)

---

We're working on rolling out more example saasified OSS projects over the coming weeks, but here's one that's available today: https://github.com/saasify-sh/saasify/tree/master/examples/t.... It provides a simple, hosted, SaaS version of this OSS project https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural with 80% of any revenue going directly back to the project's OSS maintainers.

-- Travis Fischer
Don't wait to fix it. If you want to release it ask for it to be released. Doing anything else is being fake-open-source; the real reason you don't want to release it is because of some value you think it has, not that it would actively hurt other people through its design (how...?).
Instant Run-Off may not be the ultimate voting system, but it is a incontrovertible step-improvement vs. First Past the Post.

The idea of marshaling your entire population, and then discarding everything except their selection of the least-worst candidate is ... laughable or tragic? Comical, maybe?

Respect for basic thermodynamics demands that, at least, you discover your citizens' true ranking of preference, and respect that.
Blatant ad, and not a very good one at that.
Solar Powered Automatic Chicken Doors
Wow those are some pretty high salaries for what I expected in a non-profit business. My Wife works in a non-profit agency and makes significantly less money than I do, but then again she is a social worker. She also gets far more time off than I do so there are perks I suppose.
Missing Theo de Raadt as well.
It seems to me that your link and its comments give plenty of hints that property is suspected of having been misappropriated, e.g. "The sheer volume of all these new texts was raising concern." or https://brentnongbri.com/2019/07/03/dirk-obbink-and-the-muse...

Given that some of the people involved are deep pocketed and litigious, and British defamation law appears to be fairly plaintiff friendly, the participants in that discussion probably exercised extra caution.
Exactly. The only thing I use Chrome for is Google stuff (GSuite, some YouTube). Everything else: firefox.
Business with no real plan for making money failed.
Business who depended on the clients being able to pay ridiculous prices with the VC money failed.

Basically, if it didn't provide critical and provable value to a business, its money sources dried up, and it failed. Tons of people were laid off. They stopped paying devs stupid high salaries, and competition for jobs was _fierce_.

My advice, find your way to a company that saves other companies lots of money (and makes that clear to them), that makes something other companies can't live without, or is so tightly integrated with the functioning of its clients that they can't get rid of it even if they want to.

Also, live frugally, and save money for the coming storm because there's a good chance you'll get laid off. It doesn't matter how skilled you are or how invaluable you think you are.
To be honest, I do personally think score voting comes the closest to what is truly most democratic and accurate, even better than Borda.

I hesitate to recommend it, however, because I'm not entirely convinced it's intuitive enough for the average voter to understand and apply properly. I'm also afraid it's too open to criticism of seeming overly "subjective", though I personally don't think it is.

I would be very, very, very happy to have evidence that my fears are unfounded, however.
Do you use AutoHotkey ever?
This doesn't deserve to be downvoted, it makes a good point! I had not thought about the likely-to-be-outbound-heavy nature of cloud providers and how that affects things.
Ethereum Based Protesting – Reigning Emperor
Automated the shit out of a customer service process. Current doing contract work doing the same thing. It pays bills.
You can always launch several parties.
Why is it more important to have an objective definition of deafness
than it is to understand deaf people's definitions of deafness? The most important difference between deaf people and hearing people, for deaf people, isn't "5-4=1".

I really hate it when objectiveness gets in the way of compassion and respect for human beings and life generally.

Also, of course deaf people agree they cannot hear and have one fewer functioning sense. In some signed languages, the sign for deafness is an open hand, but with one of the fingers flexed (4 of 5).

And I will argue in fact it's hearing people who get "emotional" about the idea that deaf people don't care about not hearing. By the way, "5-4=1" is not the most important difference for hearing people either. Hearing people will talk about hearing birds songs and stuff.
Here's the basic model:

- McKinsey hires a bunch of "top" school grads

- after a few years, some hires clearly have the potential to make partner, and most don't

- McKinsey encourages clients to hire the people who aren't partner material at an attractive wage

- feeling good about making a step up after capping out at McKinsey, most people gladly accept

- McKinsey now has an alumni network at client's which are a good source of future business

- repeat as desired to build up alumni network
If nobody is willing/able to lend dollars overnight secured by borrowers' treasury notes as collateral, and the Fed steps in to lend, the problem is either there's not enough dollars around to lend or people don't trust the collateral.

Since treasury notes are trading at normal interest rates in the overall market, it seems pretty clear it's a liquidity issue. The potential lenders in that market don't have enough dollars to lend (in part due to post-2008 regulations and post-2008 behavioral changes by those lenders).

If it were easy to become a lender in the overnight market, you would see people swooping in to make nearly risk free loans for 8% (apr) overnight. The swooping would rather rapidly lower the interest rates back to near normal. The Fed has authority and ability to swoop in, and a desire to keep the interests low, so there you go.
> After starting out as a typical mechanical-robot (“mecha”) anime, Evangelion gradually evolved into an existentialist deconstruction of its own genre, immediately winning critical acclaim.

What does that mean?
> Thirdly, make use of a build cache across crates, including third party dependencies instead of building the whole world from scratch.

This already exists and is easy to use: https://github.com/mozilla/sccache
Maybe I'm just projecting, but I think the expressiveness of being able to rank candidates appeals to the same type of informed voters who would advocate for electoral reform.
Can you explain how that is solving the said problem? sin^(x) + cos^(x) = 1, right? Is it periodic? Sorry, been sometime since I last did this kind of math.
Much like the massive opportunity in "DIY Civil Engineering" - those engineers deciding how a bridge should be built don't know that with a couple of two by fours and some selective welding the gray market can give far better outcomes for an order magnitude lower cost
Great call -- now that we've launched, our primary focus is to improve docs / messaging and add dozens more examples over the coming weeks.

Thanks for checking us out!
I've found the exact opposite. People i've worked with who are keen on Haskell have tended to be keen on building castles of unnecessary abstraction. People i've worked with who are not keen on Haskell are less so.

(Giuseppe, if you're reading this, you're the one exception!)
Australian chiming in. I think it depends on what you mean by dysfunction - the Australian electorate seems fairly evenly split between the two major parties, while adding some minor parties thanks to IRV (in the House of Representatives) and proportional voting (in our Senate). This has created a sequence of minority governments - where neither party has a majority in either chamber - or slim majorities in the lower house (where our Executive / Prime Minister is chosen from).

That does create some gridlock and there’s no clear mandate for a change of direction.

I think that’s still a fair ways removed from some of the major-party obstruction (specifically the GOP, and specifically Mitch McConnell leading the US Senate) which defines current US politics from the outside.

I think IRV is a good thing for promoting a wider array of voices in politics, but I don’t suspect it will do much to prevent inherent checks-and-balances from becoming partisan roadblocks to policy.
First I am a former elected DNC Delegate.

I absolutely hate Ranked choice voting. I never know where my vote will end up being allocated. Its deliberately confusing. This helps no one.
You may be correct in that the bulk of the market is in standard pizza & t-shirts, but the internet/computers didn't create that market.

The article was pointing out what ordering over the internet with computers can potentially add to the ordering experience. Using the "web" in the same way one might have used a fax machine isn't particularly interesting then or now.
What's the likelyhood that Intel, TSMC or some other fab company already stumbled upon the process in r&d and binned (hehe) it due to some unforeseen difficulties making it not worth investing?
Farmers Business Network - https://www.fbn.com
This seems perfect for the US, and they could even pitch it as such. Although you do start to open the game theory floodgate once you veer beyond dead simple voting systems, which could turn into a gerrymandering game if not carefully restricted.
I'm not sure I follow why IRV means the centrist would be ignored. That assumes people actually _want_ to vote for the extreme polarizing candidates.

People may currently only be voting for the more polarizing candidates because they get the most press and they seem the most "electable".

With IRV people could actually vote for the boring centrist candidate without worrying that their vote isn't going to count.
California’s historic overhaul of cash bail is now on hold, pending referendum
Ben Popper Is the Worst Coder in the World
But it also doesn't delete my passwords, like Chrome does every single damn update I think. It's been an issue for 10 years. [And don't start with me about lastpass, etc. ...]
Which part is confusing? The browser sends lots of data to the server with each request. The server usually logs at least some of that data. Among other things, that data can be used to generate a subset of the data that is typically gathered by GA and other client-side analytics tools.
The Machine Learning Software Engineering Interview
The Demise of Physical Comedy