skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the case you're making is that you think that there should be a national effort to correct for historical injustices that were done by the state by actively discriminating by race, that is a completely different discussion.

That is what proponents of the structural racism model are doing. Here's an example I took from the book Weapons of Math Destruction:

When people are convicted of a crime, they undergo a number of personality tests, including the LSI-R (Level of Service Inventory - Revised). This is a highly detailed questionnaire that asks about prior convictions, whether the prisoner had accomplices in their crimes, whether drugs or alcohol were involved, etc.

It does not ask about race.

What it does ask about are things which highly correlate with race, such as the number of police encounters (no criminal suspicion necessary), the number of friends/family/neighbours who have committed crimes, etc. If two first-time offenders have committed identical crimes but one of them grew up in wealthy suburbs and the other grew up in the rough inner city, they will receive very different scores on the LSI-R.

So what do they use the LSI-R for? They feed it into a model which assigns the offender a recidivism risk score. Then they use that risk factor directly when determining the person's sentence, restrictions, parole eligibility, etc.

So now we're not even talking about historical injustices, we're talking about ongoing injustice based on historical injustice. It's a vicious cycle, or a negative feedback loop, if you will. This is a serious problem!

Edit: Just to add another piece of the puzzle, the reason wealthy suburbs vs rough inner cities correlate so highly with race is a direct result of the historical racist practices of redlining [1] and white flight [2]. Now combine that with grinding poverty (also a result of redlining and segregation) and the war on drugs, and the result is high-crime neighbourhoods in the inner city. Those high crime neighbourhoods attract highly increased police presence, which leads to more convictions, which leads to more patrols, etc. This is another vicious cycle which feeds into the above statistical model.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
Tell me what I'm missing here. The colors representing the data have widely varying buckets. 6/10ths, 1/10th, 0/10ths, 4/10ths, 16/10ths. And they overlap at the boundaries. This appears to be a non-story with poorly represented data, topped with bad visualization. F-, would not view again.
Thank you for mentioning this.

>quicker time to fight or flight response

If cops are more likely to stop you because of your skin color (also further increasing the chances of further abuses), that would probably have an impact on your physiology over time.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/the-stop...
You left out the best part! (Although, to be fair, the entire article could very well be called "the best part")

> After the introductions are made, you are invited to come up with some new ideas, but you don’t have any because you’re a propulsion engineer and don’t know anything about bridges.
I'm not sure the financial incentive of such a site would be significant enough to generate a faster response time than the channels you already mention.

Besides, isn't part of the beauty of side projects that you get to go down rabbit-holes figuring how something really works without economical pressure?
Oculus Quest becomes first VR set with native hand tracking
Transferring Avro Schemas Across Schema Registries with Kafka Connect
This reads like an advert for Eurostar. And it is absolutely not true that traveling London-Paris or anywhere else in Europe is now the norm, most people still fly.
So, if you really are this price sensitive, here's a flip-side.

I built a simple email verification service for A company I used to work for. Used API gateway, lambda, s3, and sqs. Few thousand users a month. I don't need to maintain it, check for security updates etc.

The monthly bill for all that was ~$2 NZD.
Ask HN: How will the “best hacking” manifest in the 2020 election?
A recent article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21742974) has a quote regarding the upcoming 2020 U.S. election. "Ignore the campaign rhetoric, but stay for any lessons imparted by some of the best hackers in the world." How would those "best hackers" manifest? So far, we've seen some pilfering of weakly configured email servers and rather effective social media advertising. Not much to show the efforts of "the best hackers in the world." My question is, what would that actually look like?
It also no different from using 'make install' or installing packages from a community repository, like Ubuntu Universe, homebrew, Arch AUR and so on.

There is an absurd amount of trust put in distributions and their package managers.
Unless people are paying for it, or use very old software, they probably don't get the level of security they expect.
This post was on the front page 10 minutes ago but now it can't be found anywhere. It's pretty disappointing that it has been removed solely on the basis of being about race or being controversial. Race and racism are a part of society and it presumably made it to the front page because it's a topic that enough people found interesting to vote for...so why remove it?
Much more critical stories of Apple than this one have been published on the News app. It's 100% a bug. Can you imagine the PR disaster if it turned out Apple was actively censoring negative stories about itself?
It would seem then that the real business opportunity here is probably in reselling used legos on an as needed basis.

You buy or just get donated legos from people that no longer use them and then you can sell custom sets for people by running through the semi sorted bins and creating the order. So you don't want to sell the machine but rather, sell Legos. Perhaps the main issue is whether resale rights are allowed but seems solvable.
Not sure I can really agree with this. I will preface the rest of this with saying I did have a good 4 years professional experience with Golang, more if you count my current gig with does involve working with it occasionally unfortunately.

It's main selling point is ubiquitous support for concurrency via a green-threaded runtime and standard library.

You could additionally argue compilation speed is very good.

Also it has a quite low latency GC, I think that is also an important feature of Go.

However that is pretty much where its pros stop and its cons begin.

Arguing for "simplicity" sort of falls apart given its rather expansive runtime. It's not really "simple" in the way C is and it's not "easy" in the same way Python/Ruby are.

I would instead say it's "easy to learn" but I would also go on to say that it's very hard to master because of the complex interactions between channels, strange behaviours that can be encountered with cgo. Sharp edges in the standard library is also another big one that places mastery out of the reach of most. I think this ends up being a net con as the investment required to reach mastery in Go is much higher than what is required to each competency in a language with a better force multiplier.

Lack of a reasonable type system given it's vintage, primarily no provisions for generics despite in-built generic data structures being the very foundation of the language - just not implementable in usercode.

Really poor quality packaging and distribution for the majority of its lifespan, even now Go modules have more sharp edges than is reasonable.

Go is plain awful from an expressivity perspective which results in verbose code and by extension impacts readability of business logic in particular.

I could go on but the reality is that it's not a pleasant language to use beyond it's core domain of shuffling bytes from one socket to another.

If you need low memory footprint + concurrency + performance then you probably want Rust. Higher upfront learning cost but much more pleasant thereafter.

If instead you want a workhorse language for less constrained environments I recommend Kotlin. It's a JVM language so there is some investment required to get your head around that ecosystem but in turn - huge return with access to full JVM platform.

Kotlin has all the features Go should have been built with, gets away with minimal faults despite great Java compat. Is fast enough for almost anything you might want to do. Great type system including awesome generics, including reified generics, data classes etc.

The only thing I wish Kotlin had that Go does is a fully async/coroutine aware standard library.
Rust is getting this with asyncstd but it could be a while before Kotlin gets the same.

In summary despite spending quite some years learning Go, writing some big and high performance programs in it I didn't learn to love it, I grew to find it tiresome and despite all my investment don't pick it up to solve problems except in very specific scenarios.
That's the scaffolding, basically. A launch script in itself is not malicious and the idea is this would be less noticeable to automated or manual scans.
It's a hyphen, not a minus sign
>Because, as a statement of fact, it is very probably false. Anti-ADHD medication will make up (and then some) for crappy diet, no exercise and bad sleep (this one probably only to a certain extent).

This is provably false.

Amphetamines reduce the appetite; they in no way "make up" for crappy diet.

Amphetamines increase blood pressure and heart rate; while this keeps one skinny when combined with the above point, it does not strengthen the cardiovascular system. It doesn't "make up" for no exercise.

Finally the comorbidity associated to bad/no sleep is exacerbated by amphetamine usage.

I am impressed at how every point you made is false.
So a solved problem since 2000.
They do not know that information unless they’re monitoring on-the-server in the clear. They simply know they’re talking to Signal servers. This new feature protects in the case of Information Requests because they themselves don’t know who is in what groups.
There are some very real effects that need to be acknowledged in order to design a good system. Here's a hypothetical example I gave in a similar thread here a few months back. It's loosely based (Though not too far removed from reality!) on some real-world systems that failed to address this:

Suppose you are designing a facial recognition system for police to use in the field while investigating a recent crime to see if anyone with a criminal history is nearby.

(Data taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...)
Because blacks are over-represented in the US criminal justice system (40% of the prison population vs 13% of the population) and because part of what defines "black" is the outward appearance of certain facial features, a facial-recognition algorithm which is trained to recognize criminals, with a cost function based on prediction accuracy alone, and facial features as input parameters is likely going to have false positives that over-represent blacks.

It's very important to consider this when you develop a training set. The developer error (who mostly failed to understand Baye's theorem here) might work something like this: They take 100 innocent people's faces at random. (On average it will have only 13 blacks) Then take 100 random criminal faces from inmates. (On average it will have 40 blacks.)

Then mix up the groups into your training set and assign a prediction score 1 or 0 depending on whether or not your classifier has correctly predicted whether or not a face was in the criminal group. Then, based on no other feature than race, your neural net can get better performance based solely on guessing more often that black people are criminals. That's not a good thing. In fact, if it's looking at a black face from its training set, the odds are nearly 2 to 1 that it's one of the criminals, even though the odds that are at least 2 to 1 against a random black person having a criminal history.

The likelihood of being falsely identified as having a criminal history is much greater based on the only variable of being black. And this type of thing has happened several times already in production systems!

Conversely, the same system, trained on the same data in the same training set, can get higher performance than random by simply guessing that any non-hispanic white person does NOT have a criminal history.

Thus, it's pretty important to correct your training set to reflect the correct Bayesian prior, and the underlying structures that sometimes go by the label "structural racism" or "institutional racism" are essentially exactly that reality in this case.
I think the rankings are based on the papers that people save. There is a separate page for Twitter based rankings, which seems noisier (ie top paper from the last month is about Hearthstone). It does seem that survey/review/tutorial type papers are slightly over represented.

No ranked list is ever perfect, but this passes the eye test IMO.
Avid sci-fi reader here. Gibson had maybe 3 good books in him. 30 years ago. Cyberpunk, although influential, was a short flash in the pan. Him and a few others (Rudy Rucker, etc) made some contributions.

There's far better out there and I never understood why Gibson has been written about so much when his output is so little.
Human beings have adapted to environments as diverse as the arctic, jungles of Borneo and the Kalahari desert, all without 'modern' technology.

I think we can handle a style of city that's already pretty common throughout the world.
I recently had to evaluate using Go vs Rust vs Java (current) and while Go did bring notable resource usage bonuses compared to JVM, Rust seemed to give significantly more if we did switch.

The drawback of both Go and Rust for our group was that Java developers were so much more abundant in our market(not major technology hub city in the South).

I think cities with smaller amounts of talent have the same problem when trying to find Go and Rust developers of all skill levels.
Specially since Kotlin/Native semantics are not 100% like Kotlin on the JVM.
This comment breaks the site guidelines. Would you please review them and stick to the rules when posting here? Note this one: "Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine." People need to be able to discuss their work and their interests here without being harangued, and any substantive point you make can be made respectfully. Pummelling people helps no one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We've had to ask you about these things before. Continuing like this will get you banned. I don't want to ban you, so would you please re-read the rules and fix this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21364952

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19913987

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18991979

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18553828

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506399
Now imagine getting 10 of these, as a user who has no idea what those words mean, nor care, because you just want to see the latest meme on Facebook, and you just blindly press Allow on everything and quickly become desensitized to all prompts.
Instead you allocate 1 GB to work around lack of GC tuning.
> Besides, isn't part of the beauty of side projects that you get to go down rabbit-holes figuring how something really works without economical pressure?

Definitely, that's the whole reason I'm doing it (Learning Rails in this case). Part of what is fun for me is also to see what's the "right" way of doing it so getting some professional input sometimes would be nice.

I do also have a bunch of other projects with different objectives where I just want to ship something even if it's held together by some duct-tape.
The real problem is that there are mutually exclusive desiderata from your models.

1. If you have two people with identical relevant behavior and different races, you want the model to score them identically.

2. Each race should receive a comparable distribution of scores.

3. The scores should be as accurate of a predictor of ground facts as possible.

Relax the first desiderata and your model is now either explicitly or implicitly (via irrelevant proxy variables) using race to determine results, opening you up to racial discrimination lawsuits. Relax the second desiderata and your model is now creating disparate impact across racial groups, opening you up to racial discrimination lawsuit. Relax the third and you're leaving accuracy, and thus money, on the table.
If one exercises his willpower a lot†, then one has a progressively harder time doing so again shortly after‡. This is so because willpower is a finite, expendable resource which has to be renewed (through not exercising it).

† - for instance, by denying himself bad, tempting things

‡ - gives in to temptation

It's not flimsy at all, it just appears to be wrong.
I was happy to see some Python tips I actually haven't already seen. That was a good, short, interesting read. Thanks for writing it up!
I agree with this. I've always found theories of everything to be unsatisfying in this way, because they never explain how the laws of physics got the way they are.

Assuming the existence of some abstraction called spin to derive the fundamental forces is a great exercise in internal consistency, but hardly meets any definition of "bootstrapping" as I understand the term.

The only theory I've ever encountered that passes this smell test to me is the mathematical universe hypothesis[0] because it's intuitive to me that math just "is" in some sense and does not require any upstream mechanisms or assumptions. As far as I'm concerned, if you have to assume the existence of anything whatsoever, it's not bootstrapping.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
Well said. As setpatchaddress highlighted downthread, Volker was responsible for undoing the socioeconomic order the New Deal put in place, setting the stage for our new gilded age and all the political and economic chaos that has come with it:

https://mobile.twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/12040573856...
Bananas, AI and surveys – web development news
The excellent film "Three Kings" dealt with a very similar topic, from back during the first Gulf War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kings_(1999_film)
I've been waiting for his upcoming novel "Agency" to come out for a long time! https://www.amazon.com/Agency-William-Gibson/dp/110198693X

Excited to hear about this:

> “Agency” is a sequel to Gibson’s previous novel, “The Peripheral,” from 2014, which is currently being adapted into a television show for Amazon, executive-produced by the creators of “Westworld.”
BTW, the parent commenter is saying that Go is their favorite programming language. They're using a form similar to "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time", which was quoted by Churchill.
I like Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg as an explanation of how spin arises from a modern understanding of physics. The book was written while the author was a Masters student, and so it is much closer to the way an undergrad physics student would explain it to another student. The author is willing to skip details in favor of more general understanding.

The way the book will describe it is from the perspective of group theory. If you assume that the laws of nature in a relativistic flat spacetime do not change under rotations, translations (in both space and time), and boosts (transformation between frames of reference of constant velocity), then these transformations define a Lie group called the Poincaré group. Representation theory then says that the representations of the Poincare group are characterized by two numbers. These two numbers are identified as a nonnegative mass and a spin. One interpretation is that these representations are indeed what "particles" are in Quantum Field Theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_classification
Solving the Service Mesh Problem
Your experience is anecdotal, and whether inflation helps or hinders is still up for debate by economists [0]. Remember that many of the poorest do not keep assets in banks, let alone in stocks or other assets that appreciate or keep pace with inflation. Every recession causes pain, and no one man can cause a recession. I doubt we'll ever have enough data to determine if a given policy during a past recession helped or hindered.

[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/inflation-may-hit-the-p...
Neuromancer by itself is enough to make him worth studying.
No. No. No. What is the point? Why can't we just video conference when it's necessary? How is 3 seconds enough time to "prepare" to be revealed? The advantage of remote work for me is that I'm not being micromanaged or distracted. FYI if I worked for an employer who introduced this sort of privacy invasion, I would quit immediately.
Maybe for small values of 0?

;)
It would be nice to have something like this with common words used in programming contexts added to it. Maybe as a VSCode plugin or something.
Where's the one where I import my 1000 unsorted bookmarks and get a neat categorized list of bookmarks?
I'm surprised a bit by the "Translation Steps" part at the end.

I assumed much of the steps listed happened during parsing, such as processing escape characters and converting newlines, but those are done beforehand.

Perhaps it is because C uses a preprocessor and some macros would not be possible if all the steps were performed while parsing?
I thought it would be another Turbo Pascal/Delphi with automatic memory management, instead it turned out to be just a little better than Oberon 2 + Limbo, brought back from ca 1992.

Still, better than increasing the LOC of C code available out there
I’m really glad that I’m at the stage where my decision to use a language is not influenced by HN articles or especially comments.

Understanding the design decisions for languages, especially languages like C++, JavaScript, and (less so) Java, is a problem for historians and not really suited for a technical explanation. For Go this is less true, but for the sole reason that Go is less than half as old as any of the other languages I listed!

For this reason, I find the comparisons between languages of different “generations” to be pretty uninteresting. C++ is a mess, but the reasons why it is a mess are interwoven with the historical context of C++’s creation. JavaScript likewise.

The main reason why we talk about Go’s selling points relative to e.g. JavaScript or C++ is because Go is popular enough and supported well enough that you can defend writing your corporate project in Go, and has enough libraries that you’re not going to be in trouble the moment you need to something simple like call into cloud services or open an image file. But at the same point, a comparison to JavaScript is really boring because JavaScript is so heavily constrained by 25 years of historical baggage, and Go is not.

So I see there being two bases for comparing languages that make sense.

1. You are solving an engineering problem, and need to pick a language to solve it in. You need to evaluate the language itself, available expertise, community, tooling support, interop, libraries, etc. Your choice needs to be defensible in some way so that you don’t get fired for picking that language. For most environments, Go passes the bar and is defensible as a choice, but the elegance is not really that salient.

2. You are solving a programming problem, and want to pick a different language to solve it in to stretch your experience or see what other languages are like. For this, you might look at detailed comparisons between languages like Pony, Nim, and Zig. Elegance or other personal criteria are of prime importance here.

I don’t see a use case for comparing the elegance of Go, C++, and JavaScript.