skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Curious why the rfc didn't choose base64 as the representation format. It won't change what it looks like on the wire but will result in shorter addresses that can in part have some meaning. Matter of fact has there even been such a proposal.

I naively think '2001:ALN:LabNet01::' or somethig of the like is not only better but displaces some of the need to use dns (at least in a lan). I am so curious about this, I hope someone more knowledgeable can explain.
Gun violence research is a good example of how science can be skewed to make different political points. For example, one of the new tactics gun control advocates have adopted is lumping homicides and suicides together into “gun deaths” even though the policy implications of the two things are quite different. (Suicides accounting for the large majority of “gun deaths,” but bans on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity magazines will have little effect on suicides. Likely red flag laws as well. Those are the three most viable gun control laws on the table right now.)

Measuring homicides versus “gun deaths” also changes whether there is an observed correlation between gun ownership rates and “gun death”/homicide rates: https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/everybodys-lying-a... (there is no correlation for homicides; there is a moderate correlation for suicides). So, for example, whether you research homicides or “gun deaths”/“gun violence” is already a politically significant choice that will alter the results.

So yes, more research and more data is always good. But this data will get twisted and abused for political grandstanding. People need to be prepared to cut through that.

I’d also point out that, at the end of the day, gun rights derive from the Constitution. Gun control is therefore not merely a policy choice to be made based on facts and data. In fact, there are lots of areas where we are quite reasonably sensitive to research efforts being misused for political ends.
I wasn't asked a question.
Just checked gmaıl IDN as xn--gmal-nza.com which is registered by: 2019-02-27
You're probably right, but I see nothing about them not hiring some people in the announcement. They do say some people will probably not want to leave their current jobs. They also say everyone will get some amount of money for notice. Sounds overall pretty good of them, if they actually do it
Depending on the plant, you'll get either of the two species used to make the hybrid instead of the hybrid itself.
The article is written by a political activist. Might as well include solar activity and locust plague map to demonstrate how much the world is on fire.
The two of us who work on this project do not feel deserving of this effusive praise. But it is very encouraging to hear. We will try to live up to this!
> We are not experts in Julia, but since its compilation approach is based on type specialization, it may have enough of a representation and infrastructure to host the Graph Program Extraction techniques we rely on.

A quote from your own link. So they admit Julia might be a good fit. The only argument they gave is the "small community size", which is wrong, because Julia data science and any other computational science community is way bigger to almost non-existent Swift one.
Does Ink have an object-oriented world model like Inform, or is it all about branching narrative based on the user's choices?

When I commented on this aspect of Twine versus parser-based IF yesterday, I think I showed my bias toward parser-based IF. But thinking about it more, I've concluded that a world model isn't definitively an advantage. I imagine there are many interactive stories that people want to write where the defining features of parser-based IF, locations with objects that are usually used to solve puzzles, would just be a distraction. Maybe the writer wants to focus more on choices and their consequences than on puzzle-solving in a simulated world.

So I don't ask about Ink in order to critize it; I just want to know.
Some (admittedly simplified) lessons I learned after feeling the same way as a young college grad:

1) Don't set yourself on fire so that others may be warm.

Deep sacrifices aren't sustainable (not unlike extreme diets or New Year's resolutions to hit the gym every day). Don't feel guilty about aligning things you enjoy with things that help others, even if that's not the best or most efficient way to help. Shoot for "net positive" rather than "most positive".

2) Build a solid resume now, and then use it to be selective about whom you work for.

If you're unable to differentiate yourself in the job market, you may end up feeling a lot of financial pressure to work for a company with neutral or negative impact on the world. Remember that a huge portion of software engineers currently work for ad-tech or are faceless cogs in large corporate machines. Figure out how not to be one of those people.

(Hint: what sets people apart tends to be unrelated to their skill or output as a programmer. There are lots of good programmers, but not all of them understand sales, marketing, finance, management, or many of the other functions of their company.)

3) Be shamelessly public about your good deeds.

Volunteer at a soup kitchen? Post about it on Instagram. Compete in a non-profit hackathon? Put it on GitHub and tell people about it. Telling people are your good deeds may seem uncomfortably self-centered, but it has the positive effect of creating social envy and social pressure that makes others want to emulate you, even if they don't feel any intrinsic pull toward volunteering.

4) Don't micromanage your dollars or behaviors.

Does it make you happy to take 20-min showers? Do you forget to turn off lights when you leave a room? Do you eat meat? If it's maddening to try to remember all of the micro-decisions that contribute to a better world, don't let them steal attention or brain cycles. Opt for "set and forget" good, like installing solar panels, going car-less, or working for a positive organization. The micro-decisions are a distraction and an attempt by political and business leaders to blame consumers for the way the world is, when in reality those changes need to be top-down.

5) Relentlessly try to influence politics without talking politics (too much).

Lots of people are politics junkies and love having ideological arguments, and that's where it ends for a lot of them. How many people sharing political memes on reddit actually voted in their region's last election? Statistically speaking, the answer (except for Australians...) is probably less than 50%.

Do things to support candidates you agree with, help register voters, pay attention to major political news, and of course, vote. Don't think that barraging people with political arguments is going to make you happy, change their minds, or accomplish anything. It tends to be a time-suck with no benefit.

Email me at the address on my profile if you want to discuss further.
How I run a small discussion mailing list
Because that's how the grammar is defined:

https://docs.python.org/3.8/reference/grammar.html

The RHS of the == (comp_op) has to be an expr. You can force "not x" to be an expr by parenthesizing it:

x == (not x)
Loss of life impacts the dollar amount.

Unintentional injury is the leading cause of death for young people. Of which, motor vehicle accident is the leading cause. It takes second place after age 25 due to overdoses. Young people have the most life left to live.

https://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_o...
I think it's worthwhile to look more into GCP's multi-region bucket implementation and how nice it is. It pretty much removes the need to explicitly set up cross-region replication of objects and offers a single endpoint from which to serve objects in the nearest/most available region.
10 labels and app for $99 is a great price, even for the home user. I imagine that would get cheaper with time and scale? I could imagine this product as a "Shark Tank" kind of product. Parents would pay $99 to stick this on their kids most important items (school bag, etc.) to save time getting ready. Most people would use it on their keys. Would be handy on a phone too even if it has a find function using gps.
Chris Lattner is leading the project, of course they're using the language he designed. Personally I think they substantially underestimated the difficulty of setting up a full technical computing ecosystem in Swift relative to Julia. But, fair enough, if I'd designed Swift I'd probably be dogfooding it too.

Some previous discussions that mention the swift-vs-Julia decision: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19714622 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19884273
The World Wants More Danish TV
Also, he used to almost always have a section called "people are worried about bond liquidity" although sometimes it was something else, like unicorns.

Some recent column had a bit where he should have mentioned bond liquidity and he didn't, so maybe he's gotten tired of it.
Mendel's law of independent assortment.
This law won't result in more people with full-time employment. It will result in more job loss.
http://archive.md/lTB8s
Why does this prevent that experience from happening? That's a genuine question, as I perhaps/probably don't know enough about the law to get it.
Amman, One of the Finest Roman Theatres in the World
Just in reply to your point about "editor-in-chief", sbnation's thing is that every sports team gets their own "publication" that covers them, with their own "editor-in-chief". They have more than 500 of them.

Working with the definition of a level levels.fyi was talking about here earlier today, an sbnation editor-in-chief that wanted to be hired by another media outlet might enter at the bottom rung or close to it.
People have been saying some version of this about California economic policies for as long as I can remember, but the state somehow manages to keep attracting business and residents. First it was high taxes, then it was effectively banning non-competes, then it was raising minimum wages in major cities, now it's redefining contractor classification.

I have to say that personally I don't see this going any differently than the previous times - businesses will continue to do just fine, some workers will get forced out of the state, others will take their places, and the net result will be a continuation of rising inequality [1], but not much else.

[1] https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2019/10/income-ineq...
I toured the Renton and Everett plants about a decade ago. They showed us the rail lines inside the factory next to the CNC mills. When Boeing lifts an individual stick of aluminum off the rail car they scan it and pay the supplier, before that the aluminum is still on the supplier’s books.

They have taken just-in-time delivery to an extreme to make that money->airplane pump as efficient as possible.

There are billions of dollars of raw materials in various states of becoming airplanes across the Boeing sites. It’s impressive they were able to run as long as they did without a delivery.
That along with buying an entire new product for a minor gain. So what if the new car is super green? You are replacing one multiton hunk of metal and hazardous waste with a brand new multiton hunk of metal and hazardous waste, doubling your footprint of extraction of resources from the earth but netting the same utility. Or people who replace their perfectly functioning phone with a completely brand new phone to continuing to use the same exact trio of apps on a screen with darker blacks.

The most frustrating part of tech is how disposable it is by design. It's degenerate and seemingly inescapable.
> You are right, but you still have to catch the checked

> IOException.

Rather than which alternative? There are tonnes of IO errors that can occur and are captured in Java that you may not ever even consider. IO is exceptionally tough and programmers should be aware that there could be 1 of a possible million reasons for failure, even if they don't care exactly why.

It's not a massive ask either:

try{
/* Perform some IO that 99.999999% of the time */
}catch(Exception e){
/* Something went wrong and we don't know the state of the disk */
}

Personally I believe applications should have their own wrapper around IO and handle it accordingly. I.e. not caring, re-trying, show-stopper, etc, etc.

A lot of code I've written will have the following if I really don't care if it works or not:

try{
/* IO code */
}catch(Exception e){
/* Do nothing */ // <-- Let others know that this was on purpose
}
I’m a little confused on your overall point here - are you saying that it’s only good to reduce gun homicides, not suicides?
Managed databases are quite good. RDS is very mature and does a very good job with fail over, backups and is very easy to setup.

I don't want to manage anything that needs to be clustered. Technologies like that often need trained engineers with good knowledge of how the product behaves if we want to manage it ourselves.
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10825536
I'm not sure what this law would change about being able to work part time with flexible hours. Could you elaborate?
The fact that we just now found out that this is the case, yet would be completely unable to find anyone complaining about it except in hypothetical terms, tells you exactly how important it is.
Yes, and the next paragraph says:

> picked Swift over Julia because Swift has a much larger community, is syntactically closer to Python, and because we were more familiar with its internal implementation details

So Julia could match well, but the team at Google determined that Swift was a better fit for their new TensorFlow platform.
Why don't your tests catch your TypeErrors? You do have tests don't you?
It seems like the point is that different policies would affect suicides versus homicides, so grouping them into one category is not as useful as if they were separate.
The very first paragraph of the section on Quadriga is about that:

"For a while Bitcoin people got really into putting their Bitcoins in “cold storage” on hardware wallets disconnected from the internet, etching the private keys for the wallets on metal plates, and burying the plates in their backyards. Because Bitcoin was the future of money, see, and the future of money is burying metal in your backyard."

You don't of course need crypto to bury precious metal in a secret spot. You could call it "security through obscurity"...
Isn't it bad government policy to be strategically dependent on a single company? Boeing enjoys its dominant position in large part due to US government policy and the US military's procurement policies (in the 80s there were over 20 major defense contractors, now there are only six). It seems to me like the government has been shortsighted in letting things get to this point.
> Suicides accounting for the large majority of “gun deaths,” but bans on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity magazines will have little effect on suicides. Likely red flag laws as well.

At the risk of sounding grim, if you're looking to commit suicide, a 12-gauge shotgun (very common for bird hunting) is probably your best bet. Nobody's looking to ban those.
Well, in a pure sense, you are correct. But for practical reasons, it can sometimes be easier to define a parsing grammar that is a little loose, and pick up the stragglers by analyzing the AST. Sometimes the “correct”
grammar is needlessly complex and you can reduce the headaches with a quick sanitation pass over the results of a less pure parser.
Persistent decline in the purchasing power of money. I forget the technical definition of a 'good', but I count assets as part of 'goods and services' that people want to purchase.

Anyway, if the technical definition of inflation is only consumer goods, that shouldn't be the focus when talking about QE. If we are creating money we should focus on what that money is being used to purchase. If inflation is only going to be consumer goods then the main threat of QE obviously isn't inflation because it isn't being used to buy consumer goods. The risk is nobody being able to afford non-consumer goods like houses and other financial assets needed for retirement.

My motivation is knowing how much my salary is worth in assets, because I don't spend most of what I earn and I think the political situation would be a lot more stable if everyone got to retire into their own home without having to spend years paying for a banks endorsement that they are worthy to own a home.

I dunno, what do you want to call the steady erosion of purchasing power? We have to adjust asset prices by something to account for expected change caused by creation of new money. My understanding is people use CPI, which is not a good choice for reasons under discussion - the CPI isn't capturing the effects of QE.
Zhenotdel reinstalled
Direct link to the paper this post sets up: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462

Always been a fan of Superdeterminism, happy to see actual physicists working on it.
They more likely started with the McDonnell Douglas merger. After which the company's top management relocated itself halfway across the country in order to be less accessible to the people actually building airplanes, opened the SC plant, and eventually built the MAX.
Mr. dot is evil is the first thing we taught new engineers at Facebook during the security engineering on boarding.

There’s a whole slide deck (filled with real code snippets) with examples where a string was used instead of a better suited object representation and lead to a security flaw.

We eventually build xhp/jsx to get rid of strings-holding-html data, but that was just scratching the surface of bugs caused by user-supplied strings.
That harfbuzz guy, he’s the only one allowed to do it.
Which I am sure will also work at Amazon or have worked at Amazon.
Hopefully this doesn't make me seem like a crank, but it seems to me that the path forward on superdeterminism is to use uncomputability.

1: Untriangulable smooth manifolds exist.

2: The manifolds can be smoothed via Ricci flow in a manner similar to how Perelman solved the Poincare conjecture.

3: This smoothing, applied to an untriangulable manifold, is irreversible, deterministic, and yet somehow must not converge to any triangulable manifold.
Certainly Kotlin vs Java looks a lot like CoffeeScript vs JS.

For one, CoffeeScript had great impact on JS, and still has a few advantages (along its disadvantages). Perhaps Kotlin will play the same role.

But I'm doubtful Java can evolve as JS did. For one, the philosophy and speed of development of Java is very different, and kinda set in stone. But perhaps more importantly, types are part of Java, and they need to be backwards compatible. I think this will make it extremely hard to adopt some of the sane defaults from Kotlin.
> Making it illegal just forces everyone to cooperate and is something everyone would prefer.

Doesn't making it illegal just change the cost structure? The penalty for illegally paying a ransom in your proposed system would be simply to pay a fine. It's effectively how a rich person might look at a parking ticket for a premium parking spot - it might be cheaper for them to simply pick the illegal spot than to have to drive 2 miles away and call an uber to get to their destination.
Anything effective besides surgery is generally a better bet. Based on my limited experience with surgeons, they go out of their way to confirm there really is a problem and that you really want to go through with the surgery. If they don't do that I would be wary about taking their opinion at face value, and like you said it's always a good idea to get multiple opinions.

To be fair, I think everyone should have the same critical approach to any treatment and/or diagnosis, but it's especially important with higher risk treatments like surgery.
I just write a lot of code that looks inside strings, in simple 'crud' apps, so I can't imagine avoiding these kinds of operations. Of course if you can use highly trusted libraries and just pass 'em around it's OK.

But the Github issue was sort of subtle. In hindsight it seems like an obvious one, but it's a mistake I typically see in a lot of code reviews I've done where people just reach for the convenient variable without thinking behind the intent and 'meaning' behind it. The problem is you would probably have code like this:

sendChangePassword(string email) {
userDetails = getUserDetails(email);
if (userDetails !== null)
MailerHelper.sendChangePasswordEmail(email, userDetails.name);
}

How would the don't look at strings thing apply? Well you could not use .toLowerCase inside the getUserDetails, then you are treating the email as a stream of bytes. But it would allow someone to sign up multiple times as fred@gmail.com, FRED@gmail.com. This might be bad for you (spammers) and bad for the user (they don't realise they actually have 2 accounts).

The alternative could be 'well use a library written by experts for dealing with email duplication issues', i.e. detecting that string A and string B map to the same email or not. But we criticize ourselves for the NPM dependency madness, right? So some balance is needed.

It is tricky to not deal with strings in some way!

One pattern I am keen on, and will probably use in a refactor I am doing is using types to add meaning to strings. So in Typescript for example, don't pass a string, but create a wrapper class called, say EmailString, than on construction does some validation (or maybe none), but as a minimum you have documentation of what the string means. You can shift-F12 the constructor to check the hopefully few places it is constructed to make sure they do the write thing, then in the 100's of consuming places you know you are dealing with an email.
A fascinating read. Thank you for sharing. What gave me a stop-and-think moment was the bit about a country being younger than you.

While Canada is by most measures a very young country, I take for granted it being older than the furthest relatives I know of. It gives it a sort of static nature. "Well of course Canada will be here tomorrow. It's been here over 150 years." That's a comforting fact.

The discomfort is in the realization that it's simply not true.

When your country is younger than you are, there's no misunderstanding to be had: everything is fleeting.