skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> and you can get approximately just as much correctness with pretty low-touch unit & integration tests in most languages

You can get about the same amount of correctness in Haskell or Rust as you can in typical languages by omitting all unit tests.

This is where people saw a certain sliver of Haskell or Rust community pursuing increased correctness with diminishing marginal return and assume they must represent all of the Haskell or Rust community. But didn't the same communities advertise their languages by that magical feeling of "if it compiles then it probably works"? Plenty of people use only simple language features, write no unit tests, and achieve a similar level of correctness as software in other languages with unit tests. But they aren't as visible because efficient boring software engineering doesn't get blog posts.

Besides that, I actually totally agree with your first paragraph. Not all software needs to be totally correct. But my argument is that if you know you don't need total correctness, it will be less work to achieve a certain level of correctness in Haskell or Rust than in typical languages.
Center for Applied Data Ethics Tech Policy Workshop (11/16, San Francisco)
This reads to me as, “You filthy FP advocate, you have no clue what real maintenance is!” I’m not saying the type checker alone is enough to perform large scale maintenance, you and I both know there is more to it than that.

At the end of the day, sure, we all have opinions on tools and how they make our lives better. You and I may not agree that FP is the right tool, but I’m not going to make sweeping generalizations that you know nothing about large scale development and and maintenance solely based on your language paradigm choice and a few focused HN comments.
Sklearn standardscaler to transform input dataset in Python
> ...it is simultaneously claimed that targeted ads are so powerful that they are single-handedly responsible for every right-wing political victory in the past few years

Not surely so. There's the argument[0] that political misinformation is:

* Weak in high profile partisan races because pre-existing beliefs hardly change

* Strong when people don't have string pre-existing opinions, e.g. misinformation about voter ID laws causing people to stay home from the polls

I think targeting work best on people at the margins. There was also some good discussion this week on HN on the effectiveness of digital advertising[1]

[0] https://www.vox.com/2017/11/6/16504454/misinformation-fake-n...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873
Top Weight Loss Top Weight Loss Myths
In which case you can run FOR NO KEY UPDATE.
Yes, wouldn't want to waste any time; who knows how much harm it could have.
Even a “legal name” can be different things in the same legal jurisdiction, or not be a concept that really exists at all. I’m in the USA and my birth certificate doesn’t have distinct first, middle, and last name fields. It’s just a single line with my whole name typed out.
Although I'm probably of the right generation I don't remember these. I learned who he was a few years ago when a friend of mine (I think) read a biography about him; he was apparently a pretty interesting character. And he came up again in the context of research for a book I was writing.
> We really need federated communicator.

Federation has enormous downsides: since anyone can join the network and send messages, there aren't good ways to police bad actors.

The two largest federated communications networks today are email and PSTN. They're both infested with spammers.
Draw.io is free and open source. Online, Mac, Windows, Linux.

Online: https://www.draw.io/

Desktop: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop/releases/

Example diagrams: https://about.draw.io/features/examples/

Source code: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio
Mostly everyone pushing kindness these days are sadistic manipulative bullies promoting an agenda. They gang up with others of their kind to destroy the lives of those who have displeased them or questioned their agenda.

Kindness is overrated. Not being a sadistic manipulative bully? Now that is a great thing to advocate for.
I don't believe that changes the meaning.
I once met a guy whose name is Tree. That's it, just Tree.

I cant imagine how often he must encounter systems that get tripped up by that.
Use two fields: name and display name. Anything else will break for someone. In most cases where something asks for my name its really not even necessary and certainly not necessary to split it into first/last/display/friendly etc.
One dollar being one vote is a cliché that refers to the wealthy having the most say in governance, not that US elections are literally the process of counting the individual candidates donations and declaring the candidate that got the most the winner. Also, stop playing the victim.
it's probably quite a similar risk. But who does that?

After downloading you can at least do some sanity checks - even if you don’t checksum it if you are familiar with it does it look right? Is make doing anything weird? Whereas curl|sh doesn’t give you this opportunity.
> "someone who believes that your ethnicity implies you are, most likely, a criminal"

> "believes I am a rapist based on my ethnicity"

This is your assumption. Nobody said this. Nobody believes this.

The stretched association is then calling anyone who wears a hat to also be a supporter of this incorrect assumption. That's the problem. It's creating outrage against a made-up position that nobody holds.
While robocalls are annoying, what's the moral justification for making this illegal? If a person is allowed to call you, why can't a computer? Also the line is getting blurred recently, so it seems like a problematic distinction at this point in time.
ambulances don't typically sit at hospitals, they drive around and attempt to keep an area covered as best as possible.
> Humans are simply wired to use aggression as overriding evidence of the person being wrong.

This is not always true, many mathematicians and physicists can be mean when they argue but they still listen to each other and acknowledge when they are wrong.
Not all records have date of birth.

Other similar examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676904
Looks like HN hasn't had a large thread on Parkinson's Law before: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I was thinking to post that we are lucky we've avoided war and destruction between ourselves and the soviet union in much of the world after ww2, but then I remembered that there is a living hell in Syria right now and many other places in the middle east, bombing, fighting, huge refugee camps. Let's give a thought to our fellow human beings there too.
I can’t use online question verification systems.

The people I bought my house from have the same last name as me. So every time I do one of those, it asks me questions about them. I know none of their information as I never met them.
If you're trying to sell towels a conversion rate of 1:1,000,000 is hopeless fail. If you're trying to goad some mentally ill asshole into shooting up a synagogue, 1:10,000,000 is worth it.
Exercise causes minor temporary inflammation, but lowers chronic inflammation

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/315255.php
Error values have a long history. Plenty of C stdlib functions return a status/error code, with the result being provided via a pointer the function was passed. Common lisp lets you return multiple values, which can be used to signal success/failure (it's how retrieving nil from a hash map is disambiguated from not finding the key in the map) or include related data, e.g. the fractional part of a truncated number.
And it doesn't look like it hurt his career much either. It seems that in many cases it is more important to be a bit more right than it is to be a bit more nice.
I think the companies are biased to the left, especially Facebook. The benefit the right sees is as ad-buying customers, or as users of the platform.

Which isn't anything the left arguably couldn't also do.
Sounds like you've fallen victim to The Clbuttic Mistake.
A note that this is from 2006.
tl;dr: Conclusions: In this large sample from a population-based randomized controlled trial, neither vitamin D nor n-3 FA supplementation over 1 year decreased these biomarkers of inflammation.
High Paying Side Hustles You Can Start (2019/2020)
#text stream in xi.zulipchat.com (requires registration, is open to anybody with a Github account).
Targeted ads are still so incredibly stupid. Like... I watch anime. So then I start getting targeted ads for more anime.

Sometimes I'm watching an anime, and then during the ad break I'll see an ad for the anime I am currently watching.

It would be like if you were watching Jeopardy, and then during the commercials all you saw were ads for Jeopardy... so moronic
True, but the people I know who run PostgreSQL at that scale do not complain about foreign keys. Not since PostgreSQL added separate lock levels to improve concurrency with foreign keys.
For an industry known for its ponderous glacial pace, thats basically a record - nothing ever moves that fast.
> All I can tell you is that it would probably be judged hate speech in France and fined if said publicly.

Extremely unlikely. Members of the P.I.R. (black/arab racialist party) and other organisations who swim in the same waters have been spouting many many worse things. Or a few of the crazy chicks who took over the U.N.E.F. (student union) and have said stuff like "the whites should be gassed".
That's terrible :/

The "birthday paradox" means you need just 23 people before you have a 50% chance of a collision, and 70 gets you 99.9%...
I remember finding some physical constant in a Wikipedia article with more decimals than what I knew about. I've verified that and have found that these decimals were bogus, and existed there in the article for quite a while (e.g. two years).

I've never tried to right that wrong, believing it would take a lot of my energy.

Don't believe Wikipedia blindly, even for the physical constants.
> the ways Haskell & Rust enforce program structure is a huge cost

In my experience, it is the opposite of a cost - "worrying about types" doesn't slow me down. Instead, types help guide me, help reason about my code, and help documentation. Coding with types is, for me, faster than without.

In fact, I find myself worrying about types the most in dynamic languages - I'm never sure what I can pass to a function, or what a certain thing is, so I have to manually review what a simple type signature or inferred type would tell me.
Yet, some things are just plain wrong. The world does not improve by constantly coddling other people's delusions. Facts do matter, especially in STEM fields.
What if our entire history is a hoax + confirmation bias? Sounds crazy but some sources claim they know what some guy said to another guy a few thousands years ago - isn't that crazy? You could make some part of it in the 17th century and no one would notice as long as it sounds pretty and does not contradict previously made stories.
Obama and the Democratic Party are, by no stretch of the imagination, far-left.

I suspect whoever had used it first would have been celebrated at the time. Every new innovation usually reveals its problems only later. Targeted ads 15 years ago were touted as being able to ensure we'd have a healthy relationship with ads, and only get ads we desired. Didn't turn out like that, did it?

If Cambridge Analytica had come along 5 years earlier in the political cycle, the Republicans would have been lauded for finding a marvellous new technique to engage the electorate, and the Democrats caught the flak for breaking democracy. Give it a couple more elections and I imagine much of the developed world will have outlawed micro-targeted political ads.
This is beautiful. Thank you for sharing
This is super cool. I love things like this being done in gnuland.
The far left in the UK barely exist, or at least are spread so thin they barely matter.

I don’t want to get into an ideological flamewar (hello dang!) but this factually isn’t true. Momentum have gotten so out of hand that even Tom Watson is telling people to vote for BoJo now.
The economic toll of climate change
This comes up every 5 years.
Because as always, the average user is boring and adds nothing to an online discussion.

Reddit allows the average user to participate, but their crap will not be visible to other users unless they willingly sort by new.
Mind you, your chosen nick is appropriate: it's some random system which dislikes the name, not the bearer. "Everyone change your name to an ASCII-representable one so that the devs [i.e. me] have an easier job" is truly shortsighted.
D'Von?
"It’s worth noting that the ability to assign an IOSurface to the CALayer contents property is not properly documented."
If you're getting decent at being kind and empathizing, you naturally won't end up being patronizing. Being patronizing is a lack of empathy: you're not understanding the others point of view. And, of course, it's insulting, which is unkind.

In terms of promoting kindness, I wouldn't worry much about that. If you're trying to be kind but end of patronizing, you probably just need some more practice.

Anyway, there's definitely a difference between coddling and being kind while telling the truth. It's not necessarily easy to find, especially since it often depends heavily on the other person's perspective (hence all the talk of empathy).

> ...making your grandma cry by articulating her self-inflicted harm due to smoking is, imo, much kinder and empathic than being "understanding" and keep quite maintaining her short-term good mood.

I don't think that's true. I suppose you're thinking that confronting Grandma with the facts will help her quit.

However, it's likely she knows those facts, yet has been unable to quit anyway (hence the bursting into tears -- you're reminding her of her failure, her accelerated mortality, and the associated anxiety and feelings about failure). So you aren't helping by providing her with facts she already has. You're only making your Grandma miserable. A better approach to helping your grandma might be to encourage her about cessation treatments and focus on what she has to gain (not what she's already lost).
Read about organized crime, specifically Latin American gangs and American Mafia. The organization gets deeply ingrained in your family and friend support structure such that it is very hard to get away from it, even if you want to.

Even though it is fictional, "The Godfather" is a very good illustrative example of this phenomenon.
Yes, because some of the "others" were actually there, then...
isn't brew itself a curl'd script?
Oh I'm not for killing anyone. Heck I have a problem with a LOT of our system. I'm just saying if I knew I was guilty I would like to have the option to die.

I'm very against state enforced killing.
Who, the Top Causes of Death
Not everything is about need. I don't see too many residents of NY or Boston clamoring to get rid of their respective marathons because they're inconvenient. You could say the same thing of other notable sports and other events.

It's true they bring in money and it's also true that most residents are sort of proud of them even if they don't participate. But I'm not sure how any of those things are so horrible.
That already happens:

"AT&T Threatens Persistent Pirates With Account Termination"

https://torrentfreak.com/att-threatens-persistent-pirates-wi...

The question isn't "can this be done?" It is: can this be done, fairly, effectively, reasonably, and with appropriate safeguards?

The fundamental principle of regulation is that it applies methods and actions which can be harmful if misused. The key is to ensure they're not misused. Not to ban the concept of regulation entirely.
And I can write a similarly plausible narrative in the opposite direction.

"Somebody who is starting to do yoga is definitely going to be affected by a yoga mat ad. But political opinions involve deeply held personal convictions, cultural values, and moral intuitions, and may even be determined in large part by fixed personality traits. How could an ad possibly change all that?"

That's why deciding on the conclusion you want and then writing a plausible narrative in support of it isn't good enough. A narrative can be made to support any conclusion. To decide which is true, you need actual evidence, which in the case of social media and politics is sorely lacking.
Because many, if not most of these calls are scams.
The correct link is: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-c...
Well, fairly simple to solve; mail services should be able to restrict sending mail (possibly only to family contact, limit of 25 contacts or so) until the matter is handled, ie temporarily if it's not blatant abuse of the service (ie spam). Otherwise, receiving mail should be a right once you have a mail address at a larger provider.
Is there a science of leading ?
I’m happy to discuss, and I even indicated as much (a.k.a. there’s nuance). But people would rather play emotional games and feign being offended. Just look of what I’m being accused - wanting to win, misleadig, ego investment, trying to offend, being an asshole, ... I think the replies here perfectly demonstrate my point, ironically.
> The best thing to do is to define a "sentinel" to go at the start and end of a sentence. For example, a "$" sign, or a NUL byte.

The $ sign would get in the way if people actually use it in conersation, and maybe other things don't like the NUL byte.

Maybe '\x1F' (ASCII Unit Separator) or '\x1E' (ASCII Record Separator) are better candidates?
Effect size and comparison to other causes matters, because every study will be used as evidence for some political argument.

This study ("Marathons kill people!") will be used to argue for banning marathons in cities by people why are inconvenienced by the road closures.

A comparison to other common and accepted causes of traffic delays - or positive health impact of marathons - will prevent this misuse.

A similar thing happens with wind turbines killing birds. Yes they do. But radio towers, power pylons, agriculture, pesticide use, cars each kill 100x more, building windows 1000x more, and cats 10000x more. Yet it is still a popular argument used by people who are against renewable energy for other reasons, while nobody argues for banning skyscrapers.
That's true. But I try not to fret about properties of HN that are true of humans in general; not that that's easy.
How did whole-paragraph hyphenation mix with text editing? I’m guessing people didn’t want to see words shifting around as they types a paragraph.

Do hyphens cause accessibility issues for users with low literacy?
You don’t have any single non-degraded copy but you do have billions of degraded copies. Assuming errors are non-correlated, one ought to be able to reconstruct the original sequence given enough of them.

The idea would be to use some far-future technology to enable a kind of DNA repair that cells themselves can’t do, using non-local information from other cells in the organism.
Publishers Should Be Making E-Book Licensing Better, Not Worse
Business opportunity.
Nobody's disagreeing with the statistics, they're disagreeing that statistical likelihood of success is a good criteria for determining whether to congratulate somebody on something or not.

I suspect that if we used that criteria, we'd end up reinforcing a lot of existing trends. For example, my daughter gets into a computer science program, but I know that most women don't end up getting jobs in that field, so I withhold congratulations. Why are you yelling? I'm right! I'm backed by decades of statistics.
I have looked into it. I tried hard for a time to find evidence. The church claims miracles that are pretty suspect. Mother Teresa did great things (while also appearing at times to kind of celebrate poverty) but I never saw why it rose to a miracle of god. Look at the stories of people seeing the virgin of guadalupe, then it was kind of converted to being the virgin mary by the church, but why are they never happening where they can be recorded? Same thing with ghosts. I wish there was an afterlife, then my grandparents wouldn't be dead in the ground and ended.
The extraordinary story of Jo Whitehead – female soldier of the first world war
Waiting for one to show up. We need a better ranking system for content that doesn't confuse "popularity" with "quality". Every comment/article moderation system that has crowdsourced upvotes and downvotes suffers from this. It inevitably leads to groupthink, herd opinion, and shutdown culture.
How far from the original source is the end result? If it's packaged and has a list of 1000 ingredients that you can't pronounce, it's probably heavily processed.

Otherwise, don't overthink it.
Could you please not post flamebait to HN or take threads further into flamewar? We're hoping to avoid that here.

(Also, if you read them to the end, you'll find that the site guidelines you not to go on about downvotes in comments. Downvotes can be annoying but the posts about them are boring and do no good.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't think everyone is on Twitter, and I'll readily admit your tone makes me think you don't care about the people that are on the Fediverse.

> The only reason I would go there is to get complete freedom of speech, anything else, Twitter already does it and better thanks to network effects. If you are going to censor political speech you don't like just like twitter, then I see no point in switching.

Twitter can ban a person from the entire network/product versus no-one can boot a person off the Fediverse. Plus native integration with blogs and music and videos and other forms of content produced from other kinds of apps. Try leaving a facebook comment from a Twitter account, let alone trying to view such a post cross-applications.

> With the blockchain, you could be banned from a client, but the distributed ledger would still allow you to follow people using other clients. Big difference.

You can always spin up a single-user instance that is receive-only to ensure you get the diverse content you want.

Blockchain or Fediverse, replying would still be filtered out (by the popular blockchain client that filters your stuff, or by fediverse blocks on your send-and-receive account).

I'm going to step away from this conversation, I've pretty much said all I can on the matter, and have been talking in circles.
Probably the best definition requires you to actively test your glucose levels after eating. Look to identify foods that spike then drop your numbers. But I know things like white rice and white flour really leave me high and dry quickly. I also try to pick foods that have relatively few, whole food type ingredients. So once we’re talking dozens of ingredients with chemical names instead of easily identifiable names. You’re right, it’s not obvious.
Someone to Tomp: "I have brain cancer."

Tomp: "Chances are you will die within the year. Just stating the facts hurp, don't know why everybody I talk to is so sensitive."
I actually got thinking about Grumman aluminum canoes which are obviously denser than the equivalent volume of water. Apparently they do have some flotation built in.
Right. For each purpose, add a new field and ask the user.

I wonder how many fields would be the end result. I have no idea.
Or just upper case first letter and full stop?
Could be a matter of population. 300 million residents vs 83 million means they have a larger pool of gullible people to target. I don’t mean that to sound mean, really. It’s just a fact that this is a numbers game for these scammers and they want to find the most number of people who will fall for what they’re peddling and milk them for everything they can.
Easy Relaxation Practices to Share with Your Children and Teens
A Sociologist Examines American “White Fragility”
Basically, targeted ads are a waste of time in a large percentage of cases but can be quite destructive if you can figure how to target a particular group that might be subject to just the sort of obsession you want to sell.