skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An interesting overview of Edward Bernays' life, work, and life's work cementing his position as the creator of modern commercial propaganda is Larry Tye's _The Father of Spin_. It's the source of a hundred little ingenious anecdotes that demonstrate the imagination behind Bernays' campaigns, but one of the most alarming is that of Beech-nut bacon. Here I quote from one of Bernays' own books, 'Biography of an Idea':

"The sales of Beechnut bacon were falling off because people had slimmed down their breakfast to a piece of toast, orange juice and a cup of coffee.[...] Beechnut favoured breakfast habits of a century before, when people started their day with bacon and eggs, doughnuts, pie and coffee. If the trend of breakfasts could be reversed, beechnut, the dominant breakfast bacon, would regain its sales.
Physicians confirmed to me [i.e. Bernays] that heavy breakfasts were scientifically desirable. The body needs food replenishment twelve hours after an evening meal. I enlisted a well-known New York phyisican, Dr A L Goldwater, to write to phyisicians thoughout the country for their opinion on heavy verses light breakfasts. Physicians from all over the country gave overwhelming support to the hearty breakfast.
Six months after widespread publicity on the survey, Bartlett Arkell, president of Beechnut, announced that Beechnut sales of bacon had increased “enormousely in the past half year. Nothing else did it , except the recommendation of American doctors.”/

Bernays recounts this anecdote in such a way as to minimise the appearance that he himself deliberately sought or bought trusted medical opinions to confirm his campaigns: they simply 'confirmed' things to him. But while the Lucky Strike and soap-carving contests he organised often get the most attention - they're beautiful works of creative showmanship and inventive campaigning - quick portraits of his work tend to obscure just how data-driven he actually was. Rare was the PR stunt he pulled without extremely thorough research behind him.

It's also traditional to comment that either Ivy Lee or Walter Lippmann were in fact the 'real' fathers of public relations. One of Edward Bernays' most interesting commentators was Jacques Ellul, whose work expands and develops the role of propaganda in mass or atomised society. He's not well-known in the Anglophone sphere because he published in French, but his book 'Propaganda' has been translated into English and, despite first being published in 1962, actually remains shockingly relevant. In his estimation, 'public opinion' was infinitely malleable, and any political or commercial system that answered to public opinion, without recognising just how vulnerable that was to anyone with an agenda and a good means of delivering misinformation, was doomed. Both he and Bernays make excellent reading in the context of modern political advertising and 'populism' i.e. when public opinion is led or actively wanders into dangerous territory.
Quiver from Happen Apps : Best Notebook so far . It does have some minor hiccups, but overall the best app to replace all of the above tools if you can learn how to organize the content . Its note taking app , and it does that job super well . Other fluff like cloud sync .. multi level note taking is something you have to deal with ..
Thrasio, a Profitable Startup That Just Raised $110M at a $780M Valuation
This is pretty cool.

On a related note, Chrome makes it easy to "move" your open tabs from one device to another via history / tabs from other devices / open all, which is very helpful if you tend to open a ton of links in new tabs to read later, but need to switch devices.
This is fascinating, but I'm not nearly sewing-literate enough to fully follow it. This is the best resource I can easily find for exactly what is being discussed: https://seekatesew.com/sewing-101-ease-sleeve/ I guess people literally make the circumference of the arm hole in the sleeve smaller than that in the torso portion, and compress it to fit in the process of sewing them together.
>Anyone who's seen "to catch a predator" knows that most pedophiles are borderline mentally handicapped and are way more likely to get caught by their own incompetence; no extra laws necessary.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that pedophilia correlates with lower intelligence, but a more accurate conclusion to arrive at after watcing TCAP is that most people who fall for a fairly obvious sting operation (in some cases, after having watched the show themselves) are borderline mentally handicapped.
I find it really sad that cybernetics completely evaporated as a field with the closest remnant being cognitive science. I think there is a huge need for more interdisciplinary fields
I don't know. If I'm running an application server with only my own code on a dedicated server, and I can flip some switches to make it go faster, then that's pretty nice, no? Might save me from upgrading to a bigger (pricier) server. What am I missing?

I mean, sure, that site is nuts, it sorely needs documentation. But not every scenario needs Spectre protection.
> - Don't mention other languages, lest you reveal that most of them have similar dependency bloat problems.

The post contains a graph with the package counts for other languages [1]

1 https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/7481900a584f733e7e9db7...
On Exception Handling and Clean Code
Branch Metrics Lays Off 20 Percent of Employees
An easier way to fix that across all industries is to make the proprietor or CEO personally responsible, criminally.

We need to do the same thing with parents of minors.

A lot of things would be resolved with a little bit of personal responsibility and finally CEO risk would match the pay.
Most source code is already three dimensional, and running code has at least two, but oddly, only one in common. Any block of text has an X and Y axis. But we keep jumping in and out of it to other files or functions, which is another degree of freedom.

A Turing machine has one dimensional storage, but the order of operations matter quite a bit. So the second axis is time. But in a network, where it happens also matters. Although one might argue that the entire network is a single synthetic Turing machine with a segmented tape, and thus it’s just 2 dimensions.
Zoom townhalls with people of differing opinions and cultures is a brilliant idea.
Scientists develop a better redox flow battery
The risk here is low. After all, the manager could easily have sniffed the coming recession and hedged against it. All assets do not lose value in a recession, you know.

Knowing only the returns the manager has yielded over several years tells the official very little about how the manager will perform in a recession, in a boom, or in a boring year.
> If not, please show me where 2 branches rejoin where there's no H transmission nor mutual fertility.

Viral infections modify host DNA, and can also incorporate host DNA -- this is a mechanism by which lateral gene transfer can occur between macroscopic organisms. The platypus has mammal, reptile and avian DNA, and they seem to have come about long after those branches diverged -- evidence that lateral gene transfers occur between macroscopic organisms.
Automata Studies (1956)
Plasma Metabolomic and Lipidomic Alterations Associated with Covid-19 [pdf]
Clojure did have quite a bit of hype 5-10 years ago and a bit of slowdown in 2017-2018 where this meme of "Clojure is dead" probably started.
Just to make sure I understand you right - you're claiming that the academic discipline of linguistics is not "language science," it's "proficiency in an actual language", and a school with a "language science" program instead of a linguistics program would teach introductory language science in a conlang?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics
So bad, had to stop reading.

>> cubic crystal lattice that allows electrons to move within the lattice under certain voltage conditions. But it doesn’t allow similar movement for photons, and that’s why light can’t move through silicon easily.

Uhhh.. not really. I’ll try to explain (forgive my ad-lib MatSci from 20 years ago). Efficient light generation is a matter of direct or indirect bandgap. A direct transition is one where the electron wave number is unchanged in dropping from the high to low energy state, so it can be completed with a single photon (light). An indirect transition fails conservation of energy and momentum with one photon, so it requires phonon (heat) interactions. Semiconductors have an energy gap between the highest few occupied state and the lowest few unoccupied states, and these are the only states that can exchange energy. Direct transitions generate mostly photons, so even if it gets absorbed, it will get re-emitted intact until it leaves the material. Indirect transitions means that phonons remove energy each time, so it all becomes heat. In normal conditions, Indirect materials are more transparent, although direct materials can become transparent by population inversion, which is when there are more electrons in the high-energy states then the low-energy states for the bandwidth of the photons being generated. Then any photon generated is more likely to generate more photons on its way out (stimulated emission) than to be absorbed. This is what you want. Okay I’ll stop now, but there are tricks that you can use to get this behavior in silicon, an indirect-bandgap material, which is the topic of the article.
OpenShift also has some features that help with known attacks (easy cluster upgrades, image vulnerability scanning, etc).
The only suprising thing here is that some journalist seem to assume these tests are 100% acurrate. Assume they are less than 100% accurate and many of these kind of headlines can be dismissed.
The main issue of Stack Overflow is the YX problem. The YX problem is, of course, the reverse (perverse?) of the XY problem, whereby, confronted by a question that stumps them, an SO user will, instead of admitting so, do one of the following:

-Attempt to second guess your use case for you. Are you sure you really want to do X? Don't you want to do Y instead? (No thanks, I really must do X and can't do Y because I have Z, A, B and C constraints.)

-Claim your use case is wrong, should not exist, or at the very least is exceedingly niche, and they couldn't possibly imagine why someone would have your use case

-Claim your use case is literally impossible to fulfill with the constraints you've given. While this may well be the case it is a way stronger claim than most people realize.

-If someone does provide an answer to your use case, will scramble to insist that this solution is clumsy and shouldn't have be written in the first place because it could give people wrong ideas.

-Insist you didn't do the research and if you did you'd find the solution is Y. (Yes I did, and it really isn't Y because my problem is X, thank you very much.)

-In the worst case, wrongly mark your question as a duplicate of Y

The strength of SO is that it is purely a question and answer website: I give question, you give answer. Forums always sucked because the question askers were often new and inexperienced and formulated questions the wrong way, and the entrenched users were patronizing and insisted a certain way of solving questions be used or say useless stuff like "I don't owe any of my time to you" (yeah well why are you bothering writing this post in the first place then?). With SO's system of questions, answers and comments, everything is clear or clarified, all the chitchat is dispensed with and no room is given to subjective stuff like 'is your question correct?' Because no matter how good of a hacker you are, your knowledge can't possibly cover 100% of all computer programmers' use cases.

I'm not pessimistic as other people as to the future of SO and I still think it is and will be an invaluable resource in the following years but if trends of the YX problem go for the worse it could mean a return to the forums that sucked.
If these claims were true, we would have seen some examples by now. Instead, we get some tired invocations of "leftpad!" along with some more tired FUD. Who has been hacked because they used javascript instead of some other "more mature" language?
Yes, that's precisely my point - the webpage appeals to people who want easy answers whether or not the problem has easy answers.
That statement indicates that the author is not part of the Clojure community. My company uses Clojure and I know of many fintechs that also use Clojure as their primary language and are actively hiring. It is not a large community by any means, but it is very much alive.
Corundum: An Open-Source 100-Gbps NIC, FCCM'20 [pdf]
The Scala team pulled out all the stops with Dotty. It's a real tour de force, on a par with the sea change of C++11. Even with the plaudits he's earned, Martin Odersky is for me in the top three language designers of our time. (I'm sure I'm being unfair to other members of his team with this comment, though.)

Dotty's union types are a thing of beauty, its implicits are really second to none, and _so_ damn useful. Their decision to embrace whitespace sensitivity, while simplifying the syntax for predominant use-cases (again, union types!) betokens flexibility, and a desire to swing for the rafters.

The only thing that saddens me somewhat is that Scala Native does feel like a bit of a second class citizen. The `stackalloc` feels a little sad (coming from C++ -- it should be inverted!). I wonder if it's possible for Typesafe to leverage Scala Native in a manner akin to Python with Numba/Cython. With whitespace indentation - native code inlined and FFI'd automatically - right there with the rest of the nice JVM stuff.

I can't resist citing my email from Feb '07 asking (politely) why we needed a 'new' keyword. Dotty apparently removes the need for that keyword. Should have listened earlier, team Scala ;)

http://www.scala-archive.org/quot-new-quot-keyword-td1989540...
Gravity is used by the oil and mining industry to find deposits.

https://www.hartenergy.com/exclusives/gravity-and-magnetic-g...
> Additionally it comes off as insecure

You definitely have to ask it in a very secure way.

If done the right way, I'd find it quite impressive!

Someone who can bring up difficult topics and talk about them in a productive way is a huge asset to most teams.
This was my question as well. If the change can't be measured even with a benchmark, what is the goal?
Usually probably about 1000 tabs, spread over 100 to 200 windows on 10–20 virtual desktops. (I also block Javascript by default, so Firefox still runs alright.)
I've worked with Dotty a bit and read about it a lot.

I am very excited about Scala 3 :)

Scala 3 isn't a python2/python3 situation. It will take years for large codebases to be upgraded to Scala 3. However, the tools to migrate code from Scala 2 to Scala 3 will be reliable and highly automated, due to Scala's strong type system. Most popular Scala libraries and frameworks will be available on Scala 3 right from the get-go. I expect that most Scala programmers and companies will want to write Scala 3 code asap.

Within the Scala community, the only truly divisive aspect of Scala 3 afaik is the introduction of optional python-style and Haskell-style syntax with significant whitespace. I was stridently against significant whitespace and now prefer it after having tried coding Scala 3 for awhile.
As far as I’m aware there isn’t really any equipment that’ll help with kickback, other than a built in kickback bar. A full face shield might help, I suppose.

My dad had a coworker that had a kickback accident on the job. It apparently cut all the way to his carotid or jugular - as in, one more millimeter and he would have been a goner.
Python also has a Logo-like Turtle graphics module in the standard library:

https://docs.python.org/3.3/library/turtle.html?highlight=tu...
Well, it's been a while, but the last time I tried VNC it was much, much slower than RDP. Also, (and I haven't really thought deeply about why this is) I much prefer "remote desktop" solutions (like RDC) to "screen sharing" solutions (like VNC, TeamViewer, AnyDesk) for day-to-day work. (That having been said, I love TeamViewer for helping my parents with their computer issues. But luckily I don't have to do that too often.) My ideal is something like ssh, but, you know, with graphics. So I should be able to login with my usual credentials, and not have to set a special uber-password that can hypothetically allow someone to connect to an ongoing root session (like VNC does). Bonus points if it's installed by default and I don't really have to configure the server. Windows RDP does all of this.
Algorithms and automation: new guidelines to prevent human rights breaches
They also strategically avoid mentioning the payoff which is that your project is entirely self-contained. `node_modules` is at once your complete development kit, build tool, compiler, and collection of runtime dependencies.

Once you check out a node project with a package.json you can reasonably assume you can install it and run it anywhere. A docker image for a node project should just be "install node && npm build". You're side-stepping the entire dev ops nightmare. Find me another language with JavaScript's popularity and that level of simplicity. I'd go as far to argue that this is what happens to any massively popular language that has a functional package manager from day one.
Yes, the mass of the earth was estimated in 1774 by measuring how much a nearby mountain deviated measurements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiehallion_experiment
Any reporting about this should focus on dangers and law-breaking, while completely obscuring times and names of the involved. I realize that this is a website that's likely pro-cannonball that's reporting on this, but my question is: is it legal to do this, or could you potentially be held accountable for this in the US?
Nah. Im pretty angry with Facebook
Agreed. I switched from scala to python and oh man what a relief.

Scala is a heavy weight languange. By heavyweight I mean,

1. Even intellij struggles to figure out the meaning of implicits in the given context. And then there are macros.

2. Way too many theoretical concepts, monads, monoids , isomorphisms ect that make you feel stupid. There is always a nagging feeling that you don't 'get it' when you program in scala.
Here is an example of scala conference in 2020:

https://scaladays.org/2020/berlin/schedule

Features talks like these.

> a. Composition with Functional Effects

> b. Scala 3 and Abstract Algebra

> c. Describable, typesafe computations for the less monadically inclined

> d. Understanding Scala's Type System

> e. Roll your own Effect System

3. Every code base is written in its own flavor of scala.

I was spending absurd amount of time "learning scala", now i look back at that and cringe.
Thanks for that! A valuable comparison to the official glowing reports of the 'valuable lessons'. Looks like a cover of pure diamond would resist the scratches, and in the netherland, their groos national product would enable them to cover a few square meters a year. This is a dog that never hunted, not a paw hit the ground, this dog is as dead as Monty Python's parrot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZw35VUBdzo
I hear your concerns - and you are correct that phrasing of such questions can set the tone of the conversation. But I don't want to work in an organization that cannot have hard conversations about how they got to their status quo. If probing into their history is painful enough to them that it turns me off as a candidate, I'm fine with that. The best teams I've worked with had zero problems answering "Why", no matter if the answers were great or, "Yeah, that choice didn't turn out so well, and we need to improve." The worst teams I've been on were ones with defensive leadership.

I do agree with you 100% that answers that don't match personal preferences aren't red flags - everyone can learn from each other and expand their perspectives by working on new things with new people.

Even so, a tech leader who freaks out over being questioned is a red flag.
That was interesting. I really didn't know who Moore was (I think I recognized the name), but everyone else in his circle was genuinely famous.
2-D Random Walks are Special
YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account
Mr Wizard taught me how to improvise a record player [1]. I doubt our great-grandchildren will be able to improvise a CD reader.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJa6Ik6xmiU
Scientific View on the Impact of Eliminating Social Distancing with Covid-19
How Google Is Teaching a Robot Dog to Imitate a Real Dog
> Do you default to action, or default to inaction?

This is the reverse "Where do you see yourself in 5 years". Don't ask ridiculous questions like that, you know what answer you're gonna get.
Snapy Collect – Snap Images, Share Images and Earn Rewards
Is node's biggest crime is that it's easy to publish packages? Is this an argument for intentionally complicating package systems?
That's their selling point for country managers and boy do they deliver. But it's not that interesting for the general population. Very few people want rapid growth and "social harmony" by themselves.
Careers You Didn’t Know Existed in Engineering
I like the concept a lot, especially the timer. From experience, there's a lot of power in timing yourself while you pick up a new routine because a lot of people will get competitive with themselves and naturally start optimizing.

Besides saving time, the optimizations will force you to choose and order specific steps that are smaller than the name you've given your task.

So you write down "brush your teeth" but that's really pick up toothbrush, uncap toothpaste, put toothpaste on brush, turn on faucet, etc. There's a little wiggle room in what order you do those things and in order to really turn "brush teeth" into an automatic habit, you need to weed out those microdecisions.
I thought the mercury delay lines were the craziest thing I’d heard about in computer evolution until I learned about using a cathode ray tube as memory.
That’s a very unfair take. Many interview protocols specifically mention not discussing the candidates performance with the candidate
Everything you say happens in real life. But these are all signs of bad management and a toxic workplace. They're not at all inevitable.

When a company works you don't hear about it. You just see their success, or maybe you don't since there's more to success than sound process. You always hear the bad and the ugly.

The software industry is plagued by managers without domain knowledge, people faking it till they make it and immature processes. I think this is probably the main reason you have had such a tough time all these years.

I think process definitely helps mitigate these things but you also need reasonable human beings at the helm. If a 2 week development cycle is not fast enough for you, then you have some serious problems.
Agree. But slowdown in internet hype doesn’t mean slowdown in industry adoption though.
200 megabytes is not that bad. I’ve seen it rise above 700 MB easily.

A reasonable complaint! Instead of npm, try pnpm [0]. It uses file links to avoid duplication.

[0] https://pnpm.js.org/
The article was a good read, but I wanted to try to answer this from the perspective of a fortune 100 enterprise (I work for one, in their cloud team).

We're starting a journey on Azure and AWS at once with limited financial resources, and limited talent(it's tough to hire in cloud skills to work for us, and our stack is so old it's not an easy transition for people who only know that). Operating AWS and Azure and require different skill sets and different approaches and they're far from transferable. All the tools and techniques we develop or acquire for managing AWS are not applicable to Azure and vice versa, and because we're splitting our effort between the two everything takes twice as long.

I think the right way for a company like us to approach this would be to go "all in" in one, build expertise and offer a lot of value back to the business, then look to build out the second cloud to meet your BCP/Cost Savings goals.