skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, Linus's law [1] is false in scientific research. There's a popular view that peer review is a strong filter that allows other researchers to have confidence that a claim is correct. My guess is that this might contribute to Linus's law being false, because many researchers actually do seem to think "it's been checked, so it must be okay, I don't need to check anything myself". Or, perhaps, people don't do much checking in the first place.

My view is that peer review is a fairly low (and random) bar to pass that doesn't necessarily say much about the validity of a work. More people should check things more carefully.

Recently I got reviews for a paper I wrote back, and a reviewer was skeptical of one claim I made because (paraphrasing) "If this were true, that would mean all previous researchers were wrong." They're exaggerating as it would only mean many researchers were wrong; I think some were skeptical of this for a long but kept quiet about it. But the idea that "everyone seemed to accept it, therefore you are probably wrong" independent of any arguments made seems popular, despite it being obviously fallacious. I have some arguments. The reviewer should engage with those arguments rather than make some appeal to popularity. Edit: To be clear, what I was claiming here would overturn something dating back to the 1930s that last received a well-accepted revision about 40 years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law
I went from troubled foster kid to scholar at Yale and Cambridge
An Astronaut’s Guide to Mental Models
I've been meaning to learn Julia. Is there a recommended text for doing so?
That's a very vague question... need more information.
I'm curious if you'd use the same word "fashionable" to explain the popularity of Google Chrome or Visual Studio Code. If not, why not? What's the difference?
Backlogged this, I'm highly interested in this considering the old rat race seems out of style to me.
I remember when Python was a new and exciting language and people said the exact same thing about Perl. "You'll never see Python replace Perl for string processing, Perl has such a huge ecosystem!". At the time Perl was the de facto interpreted/"scripting" language.

Sure Perl is around still, but it has become a rather niche language used in a small number of specific communities.

I use Python everyday, and still haven't had enough time to properly learn Julia, and I would certainly not be shocked to see Julia take over the lion's share of numeric computing from Python in 20 years.
>A "hot" war between two powers would be of such a great cost in human life, you would want to avoid it at all costs.

I was very careful to specify "respond with the use of force as permitted by the UN Charter and international laws and norms." In other words the UN Charter only permits a response in proportion to the offense. I do think an act of cyber warfare may legally allow us of "armed force" but it would likely have to be limited to targeting the installations where the attacks were coming from (but realistically it is a new and undeveloped area of law with respect to cyber warfare).

The problem in my opinion with failing to act is we signal that there will be no military response, and these acts of cyber warfare escalate to hacking power grids or other infrastructure than results in indirect lose of life. Then due to political pressure all out war becomes more realistic.
Firebase Test Lab
Rash of YouTube channels hacked to promote crypto scams
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22286925
By that token, Europe should have gone to war with the US for spying on its very leaders — Angela Merkel, François Hollande, etc. (The Snowden revelations and the aftermath).

I honestly don't see how the US could spin anything positively on the world stage in that regard, they are by far the worst offender as far as spying is concerned. It's not even funny to compare. And there is documentation that tech/trade secrets from foreign companies aquired by e.g. CIA or NSA was given to US companies — industrial espionage isn't exactly new or surprising, but when conducted by Federal Agencies above any control, responsibility or accountability to the US public, let alone the UN or the world...

Your suggestion is disingenuous at best and, I'm sorry to say so, terribly blind to the reality of the world, wherein the US is certainly not an all around good guy. Especially these days, it's clearly a hostile power to most others. As seen from the EU, at least, I can't speak for other places/cultures. But I hear it's not that great in general.
The Aggregation of Marginal Gains
I didn't ask for truisms.

I asked a rhetorical question which targets the issue of wasteful exploitation being the default where cooperation would have a lot of upsides.

In the best interest of a whole society, sometimes you have to cooperate to end wasteful competition (e.g. form utilities), and sometimes you have to compete to end wasteful cooperation (e.g. break up monopolies or cartels)
Instead of breaking up big tech, let’s break them open
Ask HN: experience enforcing the YC Open-Source Sales Agreement?
YC generously offered their YC Open Source Sales contract, which we've used as a base template for all of our client relationships.

Recently one of our clients was acquired and their parent company doesn't seem to believe they've inherited this contract. I don't see provisions in there for kill fees or for arbitration. I'm curious if anyone has had to enforce this contract and what their experience was?

(Ours is an exclusive relationship with a big upfront investment on our part, hence why I feel we'd have to enforce it.)
I've been seeing discussions about the need for more transparent peer review, and more replication. It strikes me that if the peer reviews of an article were published with the article, like the commentary next to court cases in a law textbook, we would have a much more accurate idea of exactly what the peer review validated about the published article.
So if the government collapses, is murder still murder, or do we have to use different words? I posit that something need not be objectively defined to be meaningful. We have the intersubjective for that.
I agree its pumped full of cash but I think you would be surprised at how much worse the Chinese military can be.
What Warcraft 3: Reforged Seems Like a Third-Person RPG
I don't think you can find k equally spaced class bounds in linear time.
> the thermal protection is so effective that some of the instruments have heaters to keep them warm enough

That's very impressive.
To be clear, the war games had US military playing the part of the fictional middle-east enemy. This story was news to me and you made it sound a lot more interesting than it turned out to be
Ask HN: What is the right way to start learning ML and AI?
How can one start learning ml, ai the right way?

I've had people tell me that most of the people working in the industry are not putting in sufficient effort to master the field. So, if an individual is motivated enough to learn and become good at this field and he/she is ready to spend the next 10 to 20 years in this. What would be an ideal roadmap to start learning?
If nothing else I appreciate the author linking to the Ward Cunningham post on technical debt http://wiki.c2.com/?WardExplainsDebtMetaphor

I've heard so much talk about technical debt (and done plenty myself) over the years and it almost always gets used to talk about improving the messy code of the last idiot who worked on the project and didn't know what they're doing. I really appreciated reading Ward's clarification that his original metaphor was about going back and improving the code to show an improved understanding of the problem. Assuming implicitly that the code is clean and well-written in the first place. So now I don't know what to call the effort required to clean up bad code written by inexperienced predecessors. Incompetence debt? Student loans?
>Profit, by definition, is what the capitalist gets to keep for having done nothing but owning the capital that was used to generate the profit.

No. That is a dishonest distortion.

If providing and owning capital is such a nothing, why don't you try it and see how easy it is. Capitalization carries with it immense risk, which Communists conveniently ignore. Whereas the labourer gets a salary regardless of how the business performs, the one who capitalizes does not have this privilege. I've seen first hand how much work and how difficult it is to start and run a business. You only need to look at bankruptcy stats to see how many businesses fail and take down all the capital that was invested. It's not very pleasant to run a business, sink your life savings into it, only for it to go under with your savings and years of life.

>So like when Bezos makes $4M+ per hour,

That is another dishonest distortion.

Bezos does not make $4M+ per hour. He holds stock in Amazon that rises in value at that rate (Amazon's actual profit is on the order of 2% after close to two decades of 0 profit). The value of stocks stems from the fact that there are people who are willing to buy it at that price. This carries risk, because this willingness by others to buy the stock is subject to many factors, and it can go down to zero. Again, if you think it's easy, feel free to dump your savings into Amazon stock and see how easy it is for you to live of that or even make a good return - though I'm sure in your fictitious communist reality this would mean you would make millions without doing anything!
Current discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22289826
e: ignore
2020.06 Ready for Brewing – Rakudo Weekly News
My windows computer is for goofing off and gaming. That is the only reason I keep it. If I want to get real work done I boot back into linux or use a macbook.
Local public health departments work to try to contain the coronavirus
I’ll take a stab at it. This is less true than it was, for sure. A big part of this was also pure marketing. Even so, there are reasons.

I could go into details, but the audio APIs for Windows and Linux were complete hot garbage in the 1990s and 2000s. Not so big a deal for games or web browsing but a pain in the ass for audio production.

In the same era, the software for working with video on the Mac was just miles better. QuickTime was really amazing. Everything was super editable. If you had iMovie and iDVD you could easily create an amateur movie and hand people DVDs. Famously, there’s an email from Bill Gates in 2003 where he just rips into the terrible experience he had with Windows Movie Maker.

Desktop publishing is a similar story. Installing fonts and working with printers sucked on Windows in an era when it was super easy on the Mac. The desktop publishing apps on Mac had a much better UI when it came to integration. You could just drag and drop images however you wanted between applications and it just worked.

This is no longer true but people still remember it.
Perhaps years later he stepped out. Not at the beginning though I assume. iPhone announcement day was a lovefest between Steve and Eric.
If you as a driver or your vehicle cannot move quickly enough to overtake another car on the autobanh then the fault is with you. That “rocketship” behind you should not have to decelerate because of this. The other poster is right: you are at fault here.
I imagine the process is similar to how these guys [1] exposed Chinese APT hackers but with access to better tools and intelligence.

[1] https://twitter.com/intrusion_truth
Or mobx :)
A little of both, I guess. The biggest issue is that I, personally, get uncomfortable with dynamic typing when the project starts becoming over 1-5 Kloc. So I tend to stick with stuff like Scala, Rust, or OCaml for non data science tasks.
Lovely, caring ways for your spouse during and after pregnancy
Oh for sure. I’m quibbling over the use of the word “malware”
I think you and I will be surprised more often going forward.

>"The FBI has about a thousand investigations involving China's attempted theft of U.S.-based technology in all 56 of our field offices and spanning just about every industry and sector," Wray said.

>John Brown, FBI Assistant Director for the Counterintelligence Division, said the bureau has already made 19 arrests this fiscal year alone on charges of Chinese economic espionage.

>In comparison, the FBI made 24 arrests all last fiscal year, and only 15, five years earlier, in 2014.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-is-investigating-more-than...
If that is the appropriate response then everyone would be shooting at everyone else long ago. You think the US doesn’t hack China, or Russian or pretty much every other country?
If you have front-end development, the much better move in my opinion would be to master modern back-end development in ruby / elixir / go / etc... and become a true full stack developer. I made the move to iOS 5 years ago and regret it for a few reasons.

1. I became "stuck" doing iOS development. I recently had to switch jobs, and even though I have some server and web experience, it was more scattered and dated than my iOS experience. I was looking for senior software engineer positions and with my track record of iOS development, the only positions that gave me an interview were the iOS ones of which there were a lot less. If I had a history of server work, I have a feeling I would have gotten a lot more interviews even for jobs that didn't use the specific stack my experience was in. At this point, if I want to get back into full stack dev, I would either have to convince my current job to switch teams, or take a cut in seniority and pay.

2. iOS development is behind on modern UI dev concepts. Developing for iOS feels like going back to jQuery or Backbone.js from React. Things like a declarative user interface, automatic DOM re-rendering and UI Bindings are in their infant state in iOS, while they have been core concepts of web frameworks for a decade. As a result, a lot of iOS code out there is very messy. While the web moved towards light user interface components and centralizing business logic in the Redux state, iOS stayed with the MVC pattern which in practice often results in giant, untested view controller files very reminiscent of the big jQuery script files of the early 2000s. You can try to fight this by adding your own architecture and external libraries, but such approaches will always be second class citizens, not the default.

(SwiftUI is going to address some of these issues. However, its a newer technology and most existing iOS apps will be slow to adapt to it)

3. It will be harder to pass a FAANG interview. One of the crucial interviews is the "system design" interview which is almost always server related. As opposed to the algorithm questions which are easy to study for from a book, the only good way to answer these system design questions well is by having experience in designing and building such systems. If you stay on the client side doing iOS or front end, you won't be able to answer such a question effectively.

The reason I moved to iOS from front end was because I wanted to get outside of the browser to a more full feature platform. In retrospect though, the obvious platform to transition to is not iOS or mobile dev, its the server. The server is a full feature platform which gives you the ultimate freedom to do whatever you want. And while frameworks like Ruby on Rails or React come and go, I found that job openings were pretty indifferent between the specific framework you worked on as long as you have server experience in general.
> Those are "easily" manipulated if the issue is important enough to someone powerful enough

Perhaps in theory, but in practice it's not really true, especially with regard to the nature of information that is worthwhile to censor; the kind of situation where the powers-that-be would hack twitter to manipulate the timestamp of a hash string are very far-fetched.
Top IoT Security Challenges
I've added an export function now which exports to Esri .asc format. Not sure how difficult it is to turn that into a .stl, but I found this article[1] which looks helpful.

[1] https://research.umn.edu/units/uspatial/news/3d-printing-mod...
MS is still sour they lost the browser wars?
Amazed to see the US attribute anything to China instead of the usual transparent lie that North Korea was responsible
Nah. Microsoft bought Github among doing other things (WSL, becoming top member of the Linux Foundation etc.) because they want to replace GNU/Linux with their MS/Linux which could be mostly Open Source and mostly free, but I'm sure will be engineered in a way that gives Microsoft full control of it.
There is no need to put Linux developers out of business when Linux developers themselves already use a MS dev system (VSCode) on a MS platform (WSL). Just wait for the day applications will start to nag users with "For best user experience, this Linux application should be run under WSL".
How are useless xterms different from uselessly used space for a simply centered window?

I have 2x4K monitors at home. Moving to i3 is the best thing that happened to me.
Thank you, this is starting to border in the realm of fake news/click bait. Thanks for setting the record straight.
The same reason developers like them. They're fast, relatively free of setup or update hassles, you don't need to worry about viruses, the software is good, and if you're reasonably well off (or someone else is paying) the price isn't a barrier. The keyboard is certainly a downside but not necessarily a reason to get a different laptop.
Don't forget that China dumped the OPM database and can cross correlate individuals in important places with credit issues. Foolishly poking at them is the sort of inept strategic thinking this administration is so good at.
Thanks. Done. I actually thought it was there already!
How is office better than Google Docs?
We rarely get to learn about sources and methods but here is a recent case where cameras in buildings were hacked.

https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2213767-dutch-intelligence-...
Thanks. The 3D view is generated from using the latest raw data but the 2D map tiles are all pre-rendered en masse, so this spot must have been added to the data since the tiles were lasted generated, which admittedly has been a while - it's a long job.
I like Firefox, better logo
If you want to know a whole lot more about this, I highly recommend the book "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America." It's a deep and long book, but super enjoyable and easy to read. It explains in much more nuance, the origins of various American accents and their roots in different historical British cultures.
Unfortunately, the legislative process may be inherently broken. The bar to pass legislation is 50%+1, and it's very hard to find any issue on which you can get a genuine majority entirely in isolation. What happens instead is that allies are made, and they agree to support each other: I'll vote for your thing if you'll vote for mine.

That's most effective when you can lump those votes into one, rather than two bills voted serially. That happens sometimes anyway, but some bills (especially budgets) contain thousands if items each of which is only of interest to a minority. That happens even without bad faith or earmarking. A bill to build a road between two states is most favored by those two states; a weapons system makes jobs where it's made, and the runner-up gets nothing. That's the ordinary give-and-take of trying to run a large country.

A line-item veto upsets the ability to do that... which seems appropriate when it runs off the rails, but also prevents legitimate business. I don't have a good solution to that problem, and I'd be very happy if King Solomon were to propose one. Running a country of hundreds of millions of people with diverse, and often competing, interests is hard even under the best of circumstances. And today, I believe, the circumstances are not best.
Google chrome and visual studio are not status symbols. They are not optimized for outward appearance. And they are purpose built tools, which either work or not.

With a laptop, any old laptop will do 99% of what the typical user needs and do it well enough most of the time, regardless of whether you spend $3k on a pretty MacBook or $1k on something else.

I suspect there's a good deal of overlap between the kind of person who buys a Macbook and the kind of person who buys Beats earphones even though for the price they are subpar (at least earlier iterations were). It's the same concept - status signalling with expensive and outwardly pretty tech.
It worked fine so long as you didn't hold it wrong...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998352 is two years old but points to specific (e)books and online courses.
Yep - this comes up as soon as you open Firefox, each time you install a macOS update. I've just finished updating a Mac to macOS 10.15.3, so I saw this loathsome dialog not five minutes ago.

Without having seen what MS are doing in action yet, this really doesn't sound all that different on the face of it. I particularly dislike that the only buttons are Later and Try Now - you can't dismiss it without some measure of acquiescence, the Fuck Off Forever button being unaccountably missing.
Neither side would win a War.. there would be no winners, just survivors, with both economies reduced to almost nothing, both population decimated both by direct costs and indirect( poverty, famine, etc) costs

No the idea that either China or America would "win" a war with each other is naive at best
Survey of Windows update formats: The Full update
Implementing an Interface in Python
Ask HN: How do I stay motivated to learn?
There are a lot of great things I want to learn but I often drop the intensive learning process after a few days. How have you found ways to actually learn things through? How do you stay motivated?
As a software developer that has never had any GIS classes, what is the best way to get started in this?

Every time I see something as cool as this I want to learn it and find some way to apply it and create something cool, but I never seem to find a project that I can dive into or be able to apply it in real world. (But I'm sure this is because my surroundings just aren't interested in it)
Is anything really going to change? If you had a role in US intelligence you're already going to know you really shouldn't leave the western bloc.
Robotic submarine snaps images at foundation of Antarctic glacier
Limit the impact of a security intrusion with systemd security directives
Body Count
What Happens When QAnon Seeps from the Web to the Offline World
Bounced around 2 projects in the last 12 months, one Angular and one React, that are using the Flux pattern. It is a real bitch to unit test anything but the individual pieces, which ends up being kind of meaningless.
> R shows how you can succeed just fine with a kinda weird language.

One thing that most people don't appreciate about R is the subtle influence from lisp world. This makes it really feel like the language is optimized for data science down to the most basic syntax level.
Yeah, Tim definitely have not envisioned the rise of JS crap, nobody has, even not Brendan Eich.
One way to look at the use of "space" there is that an English speaker would say "room", as in "chat room".
so in this case, once say the Julia ecosystem grows then migrate to Julia. or wait for optimizations to be done, e.g have pandas, numpy etc handle multi-core processors etc ?
Like that hasn't happened before with no consequences when investigative forces were handed a cool new toy.
could just reduce the save interval... maybe every 30 seconds?
Is this what an early-stage slowdown looks like?