skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We emphasize here that both our definition of news and fake news are extremely broad. In the case of news, we include, for example, morning shows and portals, while our definition of fake news includes highly biased and hyperpartisan news sites such as Breitbart.com

> As expected, young adults spend less time consuming news than average and far less time than the oldest group.

What the oldest group views as news the youngest view as fake news.

The definition of fake news is not broad enough because it doesn't end at hyperpartisan outlets like Breitbart. Those are just the extreme end of the spectrum.

On average it are the news sources from the center that have legit credentials to have the most impact as producers of fake news on the population. Manufacturing consent comes to mind from Noam Chomsky.

> the deliberate spread of online misinformation

Even when it is only expressed by the choice to not give a subject attention and thereby censuring important aspects of the "news". Censorship is most worst form of lying George Orwell wrote.
I agree, but I think its interesting how everyone earns what HE has defined for himself to deserve. It's like Matrix. Your imagination build your world.

So, I'm not interested in making tons of money, I'm just interested on WHY I make 4k instead of $100 or 40k.
It especially bothers me to find the same kind of post every X weeks. Compiling pitch decks, hundreds of pitch decks, use these pitch decks from successful companies. You can be one of them too! That's a lie, you can't.

Not only economic conditions, political environment and personal relationships matter, but we are simply selling the same idea to hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. The boomers are determined to explain to us how successful they were and the steps they took to achieve their enormous fortune and success. What they forget to explain is how a large part of their success is based on the economic conditions created by their parents and mostly on fraud or dubious behavior.

We sell the idea that they can be Google or Facebook, that they can compete or create new markets. But this idea is false. They have capitalized on all economic sectors, all market verticals and captured 90% of the existing opportunities. And if they forget some of them, they can eventually buy it. They drown you before you're born.

The market is rigged, even if you find market-traction, you will fail to attract investors even with the right relationships (no luck for you syrian refugee). Even the idea is good and represent a jump in a deep tech space, you essentially will get nothing unless you come out from MIT, Stanford and so (No luck for you Italian engineer)

Your pitch deck doesn't matter to anyone. VCs are waiting for 90% of projects to sink without financing, for months to get better conditions or simply to keep the surviving companies. Something their parents would never have done.
> but the previous UK Prime Minister had exactly the demeanor you could ask of a public servant.

Who, Theresa May? She was a big user of 'spin' and chicanery too, only -- she wasn't very good at it. She had her own "master of the dark arts", Nick Timothy, who was fired after her embarrassing loss in the polls.

I think you'd have to go to John Major if you want an old-style Tory. Tony Blair himself was a big user of 'spin' and media management. IMHO, and this may be controversial, there's nothing wrong with spin and media management if there's some sincerity behind your beliefs, and Blair was an unabashed left-of-centre neoliberal, like him or hate him. Obama had a very good spin machine too, but of course there was a fair amount of substance to the man -- I say this as someone who laughed at his Nobel Prize win.

The current lot are very empty in the ideas department, are incompetent, and are only clinging on to power thanks to the first past the post system which makes it hard for a divided Opposition to win a plurality of seats. That is, any pretence of governing from the centre is gone. They're happy to use data science to ferret out the path to victory and use polarizing social media messaging tactics to win key seats.
Any theory on why it works for a while?
You might like to read https://serokell.io/blog/why-dependent-haskell , which describes a roadmap for making dependent types practical in Haskell.

Useful steps on the road: singleton types (needed to make it easy to represent basic values as types), higher-kinded types (needed to implement functions at the type level), kind polymorphism (needed to be able to reuse the same functions at the type and the value level). Rust is I think getting the first, is gradually implementing little subsets of the second, and is nowhere near the third.

The other thing you need to worry about is how dependent types interact with existing language features. In particular, if not implemented carefully then they may break type inference, and I imagine Rust's lifetime inference might have similar issues.
Great write-up of WeChat's history here.

So Tencent (now as big as Facebook market-cap wise) owes a large part of its success to an acquihire? Impressive.
Perhaps generators or heavy construction equipment would benefit from something like this. Lower pollution, lower costs for the operator, while still offering some flexibility that electric tech may not even in a decade.

There are still hundreds of thousands to millions of work horses around the world. I'm still very much for improving old tech where it's possible and makes sense, even if it's niche.
I already knew that but defining such a subset that it is at the same expressive and flexible enough is a challenge by itself. More even so if it is used to build a GC. Now I am curios: can you provide some more details about what C# subset are you using?
Thanks for those links. I found them really educational.

Does seem like we need some more tooling to avoid as much webpack pain as we can.
I agree with this take. I think almost everyone can understand why he would have done what he did, but that's because lots of people were caught in similar situations and had to make the difficult decision whether or not to follow the official guidance that he was involved in making.

Lots of people did follow the guidance despite it being really difficult for them to do so, and it's yet another story where it seems to be a case of 'rules for thee, but not for me'.

The right way to handle this would have been to confess and apologise and say it was a lapse of judgement - I think lots of people, understanding the difficult situation he was in would have accepted that. To brazen it out and claim it was good judgement and responsible behaviour is to admit that the government guidance and response as a whole was flawed.
I'm trying to separate it. I also think that is one of the problems.
Eisenhower (Supreme Allied Commander Europe the President - hell of a CV) has a famous speech known as the “Change for Peace” speech in which he expresses those sentiments exactly.

> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
Worked fine for me in Firefox on Android.
It's all spinning mirrors and backroom smoke. Cummings is an accelerationist whose policy is destroy as much as possible so it can be rebuilt. There is no indication that he's in any way competent at making good use of data to inform policy - if anything he's good at finding people who can make data look about right to justify a policy he already likes.
As the workhorse example, consider the length-indexed Vector:

data Vec : Nat -> Type -> Type

Each Vec has its length in its type. You get a type error if you try the following:

f : Vec 3 Int -> Int
f [1, 2, 3, 4] -- error: wanted a Vec 3 Int, found a Vec 4 Int

and with that, consider the following program:

import Data.Vect

readInts : (n : Nat) -> IO (Vect n Int)
readInts 0 = pure []
readInts (S n) = do
x <- getLine
rest <- readInts n
pure $ (cast x) :: rest

main : IO ()
main = do
length <- getLine
ints <- readInts (fromInteger . cast $ length)
pure ()

The above program doesn't know what the type of `ints` is in the do-block precisely. It has a length specified by the user! But we can reason about its length - and the type system would ensure that its length is propagated and handled properly everywhere we try to use it.
Release of open source Android anti-censorship library
We are very excited to share with you the release of Envoy - our open source C and Java Library derived from Chromium Cronet which can be used to make Android apps resistant to censorship. We have uploaded the library to our GitHub page:

https://github.com/greatfire/envoy

This library can be integrated into existing Android apps. Android is by far the most popular mobile operating system in China. Even though Google Play is blocked in China, there are many other ways to get Android apps onto your phone. We hope that this library is used by a wide variety of developers, but in particular we hope that larger organizations, whose websites are blocked in China, consider incorporating this library into their exisiting apps.

We have created demo versions of how this code can be integrated into existing apps, so that you can see the library in action and can see that it works. Demo versions have been created for Wikipedia (“the world’s largest source of information”) and DuckDuckGo, the world’s leading privacy-based search engine.

All of the world's largest internet companies, from Facebook, to Google, to Twitter, could theoretically incporate this code into their existing Android apps and be able to reach their audiences in China free of censorship controls.

If you are a developer, we hope that you and your peers can take the time to try out the code. If you know of someone who might find this code useful, please do direct them to this post. We stand ready to answer any questions which you may have and to provide assistance in any way we can.
For all the net-neutrality proponents: isn't this an argument against net neutrality? If ISPs could discriminate depending on traffic and apply better QoS priorities to sensitive content like video calls, reprioritizing downloads and p2p applications, we could have video conferencing that works, 99.9% of the time.
Oh man, I had the chart which could decode dell part numbers and date codes, you explained it perfectly.

Let me see if I could dig it up...
Yes, he’s very much adept at manage teams who use data. In the run-up to the UK’s referendum on Brexit, his big insight was to realise that it was hard work to convince ‘remain’ (pro Europe) voters to vote leave. But instead he had the insight, setup the teams, and got the funding to launch a massive online social media campaign, to find people who had never voted and convince them to vote for Brexit. The models were computer simulations that were regularly calibrated from proxy measures. And then the models told the teams where to spend money on targeted Facebook advertising. Like telling young men in coastal communities that Brexit was better for fishing rights.

Without Cummins’s insight Brexit would not have happened and Boris Johnson would not be prime minister of the UK.
Good one! THANKS
As long as you have enabled backups, this is a fairly reasonable solution. And on a 'Product' NAS like Synology backup is fist-class, 1-click solution.
John Major has notably spoken out against the current lot

“The NHS is about as safe with them as a pet hamster would be with a hungry python”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/05/john-major-...
Flow batteries are a possible solution. Energy density is substantially less though, so they may not be practical for applications where the battery is only rarely used.
Typed Python on LLVM
Ah, Czech problems. Yes, I can imagine its very frustrating to have grown up in such an environment, where duplicity and subterfuge were used to undermine the Czech people time and again. I believe we won't solve those kinds of problems with bombs, but rather education...
Just a marketing term. Wikipedia/media should focus on objective output; not the millennial shit talks like inclusivity etc.
* Adds GPU usage - this wasn't available even in details before.

* Adds graphs for disk usage and GPU usage (per GPU).

* Adds a few useful columns to the applications tab, including disk usage which wasn't possible even in details before.

* Applications tab has heatmap highlighting thing, which is a bit gimmicky but is actually useful.
Atari Floppy Disk Copy Protection (2014) [pdf]
I agree completely with the sentiment of your comment.

But I wouldn't hold Theresa May up too highly.

Here is Theresa May deleting her 2009 blog post with her strong opposition to the 3rd runway at Heathrow...

https://www.tmay.co.uk/news?page=31

After she reversed her decision as Prime Minister betraying her electorate who are under the flight path.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111007162146/http://www.tmay.c...

This is the now missing article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130103045701/http://www.tmay.c...
> Immutability is an implementation detail with no inherent value. What we actually care about is referential transparency, encapsulation & tracking of effects, performance, abstraction, thread/type/memory safety, etc. The State monad in Haskell is implemented without mutation, but presents an API with mutation. The ST monad is implemented with mutation but presents a pure and referentially transparent external API.

Both State- and ST-using code is harder to understand than code that doesn't use them. Immutable semantics are easier to reason about. Of course the implementation of those semantics may involve mutation at some lower level. But ideally we would have a runtime system that could implement immutable semantics with no loss of efficiency compared to implementing those lower-level mutations explicitly in our code.
Today, most definitely. Back in 1946, the US army could've stayed a little longer.
To get more creative freedom.
I'll offer two explanations. First, there's a contrarian dynamic on the internet: people rush in to express whatever they disagree with or dislike about something (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and such comments tend to get upvoted because, for whatever reason, critical/indignant comments get upvoted. This is a weakness of the voting system (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).

Second, though, I think you might be describing your own shock experience here. Not every thread starts with a shallow dismissal—some do, but actually most don't. (Moderation is a factor, because we downweight petty and indignant comments whenever we see them at the top of a thread.) My bet is that you're seeing these sometimes, and because they're shocking and unpleasant, they somehow expand into your experience of HN overall. That's a shock experience, because the things that strike us unpleasantly end up dominating our sense of the whole. I've written about this a lot, but in slightly different terms: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Trying to figure these phenomena out is an ongoing process.
"Can't do a linear list of Javascript files that you import on the page in order" - sounds like a problem that a BCPL developer has stumbled upon 50 years ago while writing his include directives.
> I can see that choosing topics to be gendered is itself problematic. Is the implied assumption that knitting is a women's interest not inclusive, and an unhelpful stereotype?

The person you are responding didn't choose to gender the topic.

Society did that. You may not like it, but in 2020, most people do, in fact, gender those topics. Ignoring that is ignoring reality.
> In 2020, he realises that specifically mentioning SARS and Coronavirus in a blog post about pandemics will seem relevant or look prescient so he adds it back into the quote

And that’s the problem isn’t it? He claims that he talked about the risks of Coronaviruses before the pandemic, and yet the only evidence is an article about biolab security (frankly not particularly relevant unless he’s insinuating that’s the origin of this virus too) amended well after the current pandemic began.
Ask HN: How to do a major back end refactor?
Hi,

Some time ago I've partnered up with a guy who had an app and backend developed by a software house. It's a niche SaaS business iOS app + RoR backend.

The iOS code was total trash, the backend was somehow working but not reliably. So I set to remake the iOS app and bugfix the backend. Now a year later, we have about 100 paying customers and would like to develop futher.

Now, I'm not a RoR specialist, but I can tell that the API was not architected properly, the performance is poor. Everytime I have to do bugfix or extend backend I feel like walking on a thin ice, even though I've a staging server.

What do you think would be the right way to grow? We have a lot of features to implement, but we also need to provide a stable system for existing users. I feel like this system is too rigid and just bad to continue developing on.

Have someone gone through something similar?
Is there any backend technology I should check? (maybe something abstracted like Parse used to be?)
I think it's more a case of social attitudes being about 50% split* between "follow all rules whatever" and "use them as guidance but apply your own judgement".

Of course when making the rules you should bloody well get them right in order to be fair to people with the first kind of attitude.

*if I remember correctly from my previous work on the british social attitudes survey
"Why are links pouring in from wordpress.com?"

Because it's a large hoster of – in one case mailing lists, in the other case blogs – that many different people use.

It's nonsensical to consider substack.com a single site.
You should have used a reserved TLD like `.local'. If you set it as the local domain name `ai' and `ai.local' would work. `ai.' would not work, as the dot at the end tells it to look at the top level. (like the slash at the beginning of an absolute path)
Why is AI so useless for business?
Dominos in the UK has similar incentives but put in place less rigidly - any medium/large pizza will run you £18-£20, but there are loads of 40%-50% discount above £x (x >= 35) or 2-4-1 deals. This makes it more difficult to justify a solo order (unless you get 2 pizzas, which, fair enough) and incentivises ordering with friends or not at all.
I can't understand why this upsets me.. I mean, this is obviously a person not interested in computers, and, that's really okay. But somehow, I'm left upset, maybe by the choice of ignorance? Maybe I feel offended by this person not caring how to learn the basics..

And, that's entirely my problem.. If they're fine with it, then that's all that should matter.

Damn, I was 13 years old when I ran my first webserver, I started by installing the OS and configuring Apache (got a lot of help on IRC) and I remember having to find a place, physically, to put it.. I was eventually allowed to place it in a room in the school, they arranged a static IP, and the trade was that they could also use it for hosting some image files..
I got my first domain back then, had to fax forms, on paper, with signatures, in ink, to hostmaster :D

Anyway, I guess, I'm offended because the things this person does not find interesting enough to learn, is the stuff that got me hooked.. Even in recent times, when, a few years ago, I discovered the awesomeness that is JQ.. And this person, they've not bothered to learn it, even though it's so damn good and can do so much for them...
Maybe I'm annoyed on their behalf.. But I've no right.

If they're happy, that's all that matters, and all I can do is rant, and wish the world was more like I wanted it. ;-)

Maybe I'm upset because this person tells me that they don't care enough to learn all the things I think are cool and that people should learn, because I like them.. My problem, entirely.
To an extent I’d agree.

A good example is SpaceX we now live in a world where rockets can launch payloads in a commercially viable way and then fly back to their drone ships to land... and it has become routine.

I remember watching the first successful landing in sheer and absolute awe, “we” as a species knew it was possible, the technology existed and some early starts had been made but it took one person and a boatload of cash to convert a folly into a mundane reality.

For all the stupid things musk does, He will always have some of my respect for bringing back the feeling I used to have as a kid in the 80’s watching a shuttle go up.

Had they not been able to make it work for whatever reason in the decades to follow it would have been regarded as one of those ambitious projects that never went anywhere.
Transfer Learning for Multi-Class Image Classification Using Deep CNN
Isn't the thing with fractals that they get more details the closer you get? It feels like there is just one fractal with one detail level, copied and pasted where ever you go.

Correct me if I am wrong, I like the site nonetheless.
YouTube censors comments relating to Chinese propaganda
Halley VI is my favourite, it looks like something straight out of a Simon Stalenhag painting and yet is a practical design.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halley_Research_Station#/med...
You can turn that around just as easily.

If I run off to start a farm, and I buy an existing OTS used tractor, it will have a tank that I can pour almost any flammable liquid into to make it run. If I want to plug the tractor in... well, that'll get the engine to turn over, but it won't get it moving anywhere.

If I build myself a cabin in the woods, I can burn wood or wood pellets to keep cook food, or keep warm during the winter. Alternatively, I could purchase batteries, PV panels, and the necessary charge control electronics, in order to run an electric heater.

Burning recently-alive biomass does release carbon, but it's carbon that was in the atmosphere as recently as a few months ago. It isn't zero emission, but it doesn't contribute a long-term increase to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
This will be very interesting to observe because it might apply western concepts of good behaviour to a global audience. Previously it let different chapters, different parts of the world behave differently. In effect Wikimedia should want to allow users who are actual signed up Fascists in their countries to contribute to their project, whilst also ensuring they behave themselves.

To me, (most probably because the language of this has been shaped by progressive politics in the west and the article is written in English and Wikimedia is primarily English speaking) this might well be an experiment with applying the western, middle class, highly educated, liberal and progressive values which really do work well on monocultural programming and tech communities to a really globally diverse and actual multi cultural project.

There really is no other global project like this which spans and crosses actual cultures and languages. None.

This will be fascinating to watch, I hope they get it right, or at least publish their failings if they don't.
Isn't a representative democracy necessarily a government of salesmen?

If you really liked Theresa May, perhaps she was just more successful at selling to you than the others.
interviews.school: get a job at Google
I developed productized services back in April when my SaaS clients started requesting faster turnarounds on projects, with more limited budgets.

It was also a good excuse to have some more fun with branding!
https://www.mightyfinecopy.com/shop