skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
State machine processor reference implementation?
I'm rewriting a state machine processor for a system at my company. The primary goal is to implement declarative JSON based language for describing state machines so that we have a higher level way of thinking than the current, purely-java solution. The second, more challenging goal is to abstract the components of the system such that the initial implementation can be single node, but getting enough of the correct interface definitions such that it could be refactored to support distributed execution and fault tolerance.

Since I've not written one of these before, I'm rooting around the web looking for reference implementations / papers / boxes-and-arrows that could provide inspiration. Any thoughts on what to read?
> If there's zero crackdown, the people in pro Hong Kong stuff will look a little goofy in retrospect.

If there's zero crackdown, then the protestors have won and they have a platform to show their support in a public setting for HK. I don't see the downside here. Isn't that what people want? To be able to protest the Chinese government and their actions in HK freely and without punishment?
Ask HN: Which problems you face as DevOps?
Uber Expands in Money
> The card issuer could easily institute a "no retaliation" clause in their contracts that forbids deactivating a user's account for a sustained chargeback.

On the contrary, AFAIK some banks or at least payment processors now clearly state than some "sharing economy" services cannot be subject to charge backs, or payment reversals, like if you use Paypal for a Kickstater. So it's basically the opposite of what you wish.
How do I view the read receipts? It was either not apparent or not working.
Or maybe you have incorrect view of what equality is.
> These extremely difficult/impossible things didn't really give an advantage.

One of the videos I watched compared APM (Actions Per Minute) with EPM (Effective actions Per Minute). AlphaStar always has them nearly identical, which would be (according to him) basically impossible for humans.
Chain Fountain
I expect quite a bit of drama during this event. The actions since last Blizzcon have left a sour taste in many people's mouths.
So, it's a boilerplate generator that you'd use instead of a library providing an abstraction layer?
General public bought their tickets and have been planning their trip, costumes, etc. for almost a year.

Cancelling those tickets would be an even bigger PR disaster, and that's saying something.
That's a long link, so the part in question. Note this is from a taped pitch from the president of Cambridge Analytica, this isn't hearsay, it is from the horse's mouth:

> Nix moved on to pitch his next case study – a youth mobilisation campaign. Again, all is not as it seems. “Trinidad is a very interesting case history of how we look at problems,” Nix said. “Trinidad's tiny – it's 1.3 million people – but almost exactly half the country are Indian and half the country are Black, Afro-Caribbean. And there are two main political parties, one for the Blacks and one for the Indians… when the Indians are in power the Blacks don't get anything, and vice-versa, you know – they screw each other. So we were working, I think for the third time in Trinidad, and we were working for the Indians, and we did a huge amount for research, and two really important things came out.

> “One was that all the youth, Indian and Afro-Caribbean, felt disenfranchised … And secondly, amongst the Indians the familial hierarchies were really strong. There was huge respect for their elders and their parents and their families, but not so for the Afro-Caribbeans. And that was enough information to inform the entire campaign.

> “We went to the client and said, we only want to do one thing, we want to run a campaign where we target the youth – all youth, all the Blacks and all the Indians – and we try and increase apathy. And they didn't really understand why… but they allowed us to do this campaign, and the campaign had to be non-political, because no one, the kids don’t care about politics. It had to be reactive, because they’re lazy; inclusive of all ethnicities; bottom-up. It had to be exciting, because kids want to do something fun.

> “We came up with this campaign which was all about ‘Be part of the gang, do something cool, be part of a movement.’ And it was called the ‘Do So’ campaign… A3 posters. And graffiti, yellow paint, you know, we cut stencils with the jigsaw… And we'd give these to kids, and they'd get in their cars at night, you know, just make a drawing, get in the car, and race around the country putting up these posters and getting chased by the police and all their friends were doing it, and it was fucking brilliant fun…

> “Do So. Don't vote. Don't be involved in politics. It's like a sign of resistance against – not government, against politics. And voting. And very soon they're making their own YouTube videos. This is the prime minister’s house that's being graffitied! … It was carnage.

> “And the reason why this was such a good strategy is because we knew, and we really really knew, that when it came to voting, all the Afro-Caribbean kids wouldn't vote, because they ‘Do So’. But all the Indian kids would do what their parents told them to do, which is go out and vote. And so all the Indians went out and voted, and the difference on the 18-35-year-old turnout is like 40%, and that swung the election by about 6% – which is all we needed!”
Presumably, this hypothetical biotech startup is going to be focused on some narrow niche of CRISPR technology, so being a specialist is exactly what's required in my mind. If the OP just wants to learn about CRISPR he could probably do a masters or even a year or two of self study. I find it very unlikely that they would be able to come up with something novel and marketable without even more hands on time.
>> Cruise missiles have had similar technology for a long time.

so that's where Boeing got the idea for 737MAX!
This is German copycat of Onion you linked :)
What can an early-stage founder learn from a full-time salesperson?
Why would you continue to give airbnb your business, once experiencing something like that anyways?
A typical single engine piston plane might fly at 130kts burning 10 gallons of aviation fuel (100LL) per hour. Or, roughly 15 statute miles per gallon. More efficient options are available on modern planes. Most of the fleet is old though.
Anyway.. anything Google or Facebook does these days.. give me creeps .. I am worried that internet evolution is going towards corporate censorship with licences and we have to have lifeline socket open to Google's data center 247.

That's real HALLOWEEN for me tbh.
It's a bait and switch like the original Prime membership. Offer really great deals for members at first then start jacking up prices once they're hooked.
I absolutely don't disagree with you. Personality traits and aptitudes are strongly inherited, along with some genetic randomness and some environmental conditioning. What I don't like is full on genetic determinism. Human beings transmit both genes AND memes for a reason. As sentient beings we inhabit two universes. The one made of atoms and the one made of thought and ideas.

Compare, say, humans and ants.

Ants seem to have a ROM of sorts: software embedded in genes and immutable within a single organism's lifetime. They only inhabit the world of atoms.

Humans have a ROM to cover basic functions but also writable memory. We can change our behaviors within a single lifetime and then if that wasn't cool enough we can also TRANSMIT those behaviors without genes via the world of thought and ideas (language).

We ought to never forget that. Fatalism binds us too strongly to the physical world. It's a bad path that leads to nihilism (struggle against nature is futile), cruelty (everyone deserves their lot in life since if they were capable of more they would have achieved it), and despair (self-actualization is impossible, I am an automaton).
> Second, we can now pass in different implementations of our dependencies when executing in test. This is very good, but let me rephrase that in more general terms: the values associated with certain names are now dependent on the environment in which we are executing.

Earlier, they established the idea that this was a bad thing by having the printGreeting() function print a message you probably don't want. The change in the value caused bad behavior.

However, with dependency injection, you should be following the Liskov substitution principle. You might get different values, but they should all be following the same contract.

The acceptOrder() function might get different implementations of BankService, but the difference should be opaque to it. Calling bank.chargeMoney() should work the same regardless of which one you got.

The reason I bring this up is the crux of the argument presented here against dynamic scoping is, "Dynamic scoping makes it hard to figure what our program actually does, without executing it, and that’s not a quality we want our programs to exhibit."

To the extent that you successfully pull off having different subclasses follow the same contract, this weakness doesn't really apply to DI (or inversion of control).
To be fair, if you're gonna be in access, their SQL query writing interface is a steaming pile of issues. In my experience:

1) You can't do multi-line queries. After executing, it'll smash it all to one line again.

2) You can't add comments. After executing, it'll delete them out.

3) It doesn't do any syntax highlighting.

----

Years ago I worked for a company who had tons of manufacturing production data. Someone built an interface to query the data - used by just a couple people. Mind you, this isn't Access, it was homebrew software. Eventually word spread about the data you could access, and dozens to hundreds of people got access.

They never got to the top of the priority list to make it multi-user, separate profiles, create permissions on queries, etc.

There was a mandatory 8 hour training session with a test before getting access to the environment. Dev queries were automatically deleted 90 days since last run. On prod, 365 days. This was to reduce clutter. Query names were terse. You had to know people who knew what queries did. Comments were used sparingly. Anyone could edit and view any query available.

I copied a query, made edits, then executed. Got weird results. It took 1.5 days to figure out the parser was messed up! First, line comments using ' were excluded. Next block comments using /* */ were excluded. However, if a macro was called inside a block comment, it was executed.

That was the most frustrating bug I've ever debugged. Literally I'd copy the query, it'd run successfull, I'd comment out a couple returned values, and it'd fall on it's face because of how macros worked.
Do you have to pay a monthly fee for everybody who uses your Airtable app though?

I think there are also some very low limits to the number rows/columns you are allowed to use?

I'm not really sure - honestly asking...
Honestly if Airbnb helps people scam you do you want to be on their platform?
Hardcore gamers are mostly young single adult male population.

All the testosterone you need
Sure, I guess my wording wasn't clear. It is the system itself that is complex, not the equations or statistics we use
Stop being so adversarial.
The fundamental problem is that one party thinks the people voting for the other party could only possibly do so if they were tricked. This attitude alone will get some people to vote against you.

The government elite, of course, see through these shenanigans and are just out to protect people from voting wrongly.
I wonder why AirBnB doesn't pay people Uber-style to inspect properties. $5-10 to go to an address and check that it can be accessed and matches the photos as an unannounced spot check? Send someone out on first listing, periodically, and every time a host cancels for a "maintenance issue" to verify the claim.
Another thing is - to build space cannons - for industrial raw materials, to be prcoessed in orbit.
Dont rocket, if you must not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun
In your situation, I would seek out the services of a professional matchmaker. Online dating is going to garbage considering the resources available to you. If kids are important, I’d even move the lower age bound to 27.

Just my two cents, I’m a bit younger than you but similar means, married but in an open relationship and date. Be picky, but cast a wide net.
> "NYT, which quotes that UN report, Iraq had WMDs"

You left out the last step,

!= Bush administration says Iraq had WMDs
It would be a mistake to do that. The headlines would write themselves at that point: "Blizzard bans Winnie the Pooh outfits from BlizzCon". We're talking 'The Onion' level kinds of headlines here.

That's the real problem they're facing with this situation. They pretty much lose right now regardless of what choice they make. I do feel a little bit bad frankly, but at the same time, I'm also quite excited for some schadenfreude.
>Why didn't the journalist contact Airbnb in the first place? Or after he arrived at the 2nd place and it wasn't the location listed/promised. (yes I can understand being tired, frustrated, etc)

She did:

>When I asked about the status of my refund, they ghosted, which led me to contact Airbnb. Though I had been moved to a flophouse and then told to leave early, Airbnb only refunded me $399 of my $1,221.20, and only did so after I badgered a number of case managers over the course of several days. The $399 didn’t even include the service fees Airbnb charged me for the pleasure of being thrown out on the street. But my power was nothing compared to that of a company valued this year at $35 billion, and I figured it was probably the best I could do.

The article details how much of a pain in the ass it is to get a refund from AirBnB:

>But Patterson didn’t care about that. She knew she had been scammed and wasn’t going to stand down until she received every penny back.

>“I’m an attorney, so I love to argue,” she said. “I just didn’t stop calling.”

>She eventually got her full refund, but it indeed came with a harsh review from Becky and Andrew for doing so. “We would NOT host or recommend her to the airbnb community!!” they wrote. Patterson couldn’t help but wonder how people with fewer resources and no place to crash would have fared in the same situation.
If this happened to me I would see getting banned as a problem. I wouldn’t be using Airbnb again anyway!
I think this should be the top comment, not buried on (currently) page two. The debates about truth in political advertising and Facebook are about something different. Both are valid issues to discuss, but it’s off topic.

What matters when running for an elected office is visibility and recognition. This recognition and unpaid organic reach may have not been what won Trump the US Presidency, but there is little doubt it won him the republican primary.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his income depends on his not understanding it." - Uptown Sinclair

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
I imagine that the "consensus" has been proven, sure.

"scientific consensus" is not a thing. Also, "proven
time and time again"? Just to let you know, water vapour is a much larger contributor.

Sure, sue because the Government lied. Why don't you vote them out? Can you sue them?
They may be marginal but at this level of competition the margins are where the differentiation lies.
About Parcoursup, more substance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21409203

The fact that Villani did not say anything about it and even supported the change says a lot of things on how he is now a politician and his mathematical background does not count anymore. I don't know of a single person with basic knowledge of algorithm who wouldn't be horrified by the design decisions in Parcoursup.
>This is pretty naive

I think you may be misunderstanding me. Ethics stands above the law in that if ethics and law conflict, a person ought to do the ethical thing rather than the legal thing. It does not mean that people who disobey the law should be off the hook so long as they were obeying their own personal code of ethics.

If this view is naive, then I believe most all work in moral philosophy is naive. I don't think there are any major viewpoints that would elevate obedience to the law as being a concern higher than ethical behavior.

Do you think that the entire field of business ethics is bunk and can be reduced to the single maxim, "Follow the local law"? Is the code of ethics by which I would be required to abide[1] if I became a professional engineer an unnecessary restriction?

[1] https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics
Blizzard has a problem.

World of Warcraft is growing stale and they seem to not have a replacement (as far as zero leaks).

Overwatch has been a big success and leaks suggest Overwatch 2 with more PVE.

That's fine and all but that's not going to be the cash-cow that WoW was for them. I was a dedicated player since launch but left after Legion and won't be returning.
I believe it's used in New Orleans. That's the only place I'd heard it before going to Australia.
I wonder which game is more complex, start-craft or DOTA
That was the case years ago. Facebook does not show every post in your followers stream. Once you get to a certain size, you have to pay to ensure the message gets delivered with boosted posts and such. Many of these political organizations have popular Facebook pages and still have to pay to get their posts into their followers streams.
> I don't doubt there are definitions of privilege which are falsifiable, as those pertaining to discrimination. But those are seldom used

Discrimination, both subtle and overt, are the most common forms of privilege. Why do you think it is seldom used?
The most awaited tribal festival of India is around the corner
$3 isn't enough. It would need to be well above $30/yr.

Average revenue per user in the US/Canada is $26.76 [0] per user per year. Globally, the average is over $6.

I'd wager a bet that the ARPU for users willing to pay $30/yr for no ads is even greater than $27 - likely above $100 - because the only people who would pay extra to remove ads are people with disposable income (which are usually the exact people advertisers want to target when trying to sell stuff).

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...
For most of the things you actually do in practice as a scientist in that field you generally need to be trained by someone that knows the particular area of biology and the specific methods you're using. It's not just about the general background knowledge, which is certainly important, but on top of that you need specific experience for each specialized area you work in.

Biology is a vast field, and there is simply an enormous amount to learn. And you also need to understand the methods and techniques used to perform experiments, which can get pretty deep into physics at times, and requires a lot of very specialized knowledge for many of the more complex methods. Statistics is also important for many types of experiments.

It's really not easy and fast to gain the necessary knowledge, people in the field generally have a bachelor/master and a PhD, and that is the start of your scientific career.
ERM and the Euro, whilst somewhat entwined are not mutually inclusive. The reason the UK never took on the Euro, was many fold and nothing to do with Mr Soros and the great EMF gamification for printing money.

If they did a referendum upon the Pound and the Euro in the UK, the result would be much clearer and conclusive than any membership referendum. Heck, even Scotland if it leaves the UK, wants to keep the Pound.

AS for the Euro, it worries me, so much QE has been actioned by the ECB, that it just feels like, once that eventually stops https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eurozone-ecb-qe/the-life-... though they have instigated new QE measures this year.

One aspect the UK has impacted the Euro has been in blocking (as a members vote) many initiatives to control the financial markets and with that, been instrumental in curtailing the controls needed for a large encompassing currency.

But I totally disagree that the UK's primary reason for adopting the Euro was due to the ERM shenanigans. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/215/uncategorized/why-uk-... covers some reasons. But to say it is complicated is part and parcel of any currency control.

Remember, the UK's key income area's are Financial and Services, two area's in which the EU has been stymied to take control of, mostly due to it not being in the UK's main interest. Heck, even opening up services has been a backfoot EU initiative with members still not opening up those markets. But that is another matter, equally complicated and hard to summarize in a few sentences.
The UK uses think tanks to get around media restrictions on political advertising. They put out press releases that get reported as "news".
Because we know it's not the cleverest idea in the world and therefore we don't want to play that game.

No-one is opposing separatism by the way, it's just that the whole country has to agree. The catalans signed up to the constitution like everyone else.

Why should they be able to shit all over it? And by the way is less than half of catalans who want this.
The real problem for me is the way political ads on social media (and on the web in general) can effectively undermine FEC attribution rules. Between direct targeting with ads that run for short periods, and promoted posts of new accounts, there is basically no way for existing regulators to enforce attribution to a PAC or candidate, so outright lies and shady adverts fly under the radar with even less consequences than in the television or print media. The debate here has to be about steps they can take to help the FEC enforce it's rules I think, not about banning it altogether.

It feels like a false dichotomy, especially when freedom of speech is invoked.

We don't talk about freedom of speech for drug companies when we require a side effects disclaimer at the end of a pharmacutical ad - it feels disingenuous to me to talk about it here too when we should be talking about enforcing the FEC's attribution guidelines.
> you are going to need a PhD if you want to truly understand all of the background of the field

Is that the need, though? Few SaaS CEOs truly understand all the background of computer science. They do understand the problem space, but they leave it to the experts in the organization to get into the details of applying computer science to the problem.

Is biology different, where the level of expertise needs to be at a more detailed level in order to lead an organization?
> Not being robust to strategies it hasn't seen before is a serious shortcoming in a real time strategy game.

I'm not sure if you've actually played or followed competitive SC2. This is absolutely normal. Players will pull something completely unexpected out of a hat and win. The losing player will learn from it in future games. That's just how it goes. Unexpected strategies are really hard to counter when you've never seen them before, and they're often employed to directly counter what you're doing right then and there. So you've been countered and dealt a devastating blow, which means figuring out how to come back from that can be hard to impossible. It's a thoroughly human failing in every way. I'd be more concerned if the AI wasn't able to learn to counter it in future matches.
Paid advertising to get ideas out has existed for at least as long as we've had newspapers and probably a lot longer.

Take this case, for example. URL says it all: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/muslims-take-out-full-page-n...

It sounds nice to say that we are going to keep some communication channels free of political speech. It is an option. But it is possible (I claim: likely) that more communication leads to better political outcomes, so sealing off easy-to-use channels like advertising may not actually help.