skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Provocative title. The author argues - more or less - that quantitative and mathematical approaches do not lend themselves to questions of the humanities or social sciences.

As an example they take a network analysis that was done on social relations of characters of fictional works. While the author finds this use dubious, I think it's the contrary. While the researchers might not fully understand the methods, they could very well have a mathematician on hand. What do we do in math if not model real problems of real people?

It might be nice for some people to not know an application of their research but for humanities to find novel ways in which to use mathematical tools is great and should be encouraged. Of course they will miss but they will also hit. We need a peer review where those methods are understood within the humanities and social sciences, in order to not draw false conclusions.

Of course, qualitative analysis isn't going the way of the dodo and the author agrees on that.

I just think the occasional misuse of mathematical models for humanities research is well worth the possible gain. Those problems should follow some rules with a mathematical models, right??? Let's help those researchers instead of banishing them to qualitative methods.
Lots of people like to use backslash escaping, and you are so used to it that you used it in your spec even though it leaves the ambiguity of whether \n and \r are literal or the LF and CR characters. I feel like it's perfectly expressing how it "contains the seeds of its own destruction". How much data expresses a double quote as "\"" instead of """"?

It would be easy to use CSV if you never did any data interchange with it.
The alternatives would be the government not giving people a reason to riot.

If we're at the point of debating which weapons are or are not allowed to be used on a civilian population, then the government has already failed in its most basic responsibilities.
Looks interesting. Thanks for sharing. I will take a look though I know nothing about Shopify and only familiar with WordPress.
This post has a lot of good context to nuance the dynamics on WhatsApp message confidentiality: https://makensi.es/privacy/e2ee/2020/03/23/can-facebook-read...

There are specifically two points that make me not confident in WhatsApp keeping my messages secure:

* I don't have time to dig out a good source for it right now, but I remember seeing a credible claim that they already have in-place a mechanism to instruct the client app send back cleartext messages to a server. If they do not, it would be trivial to add it in an update.

* The client will keep nagging you to enable cloud backups of message history. If you our your counterparty does this, message history is stored in cleartext on one of the major cloud providers. Are you confident that the person you're talking to hasn't enabled this, maybe even by mistake?
I was oversimplifying to convey an intuition on why this is so hard. But yes, this is an active area of research.

In this academic field the standard for privacy is usually extremely high. Even if you only access half of the rows, that still leaks one bit of information and would not be considered zero-knowledge.
The person running that channel was actually hired by Criterion.
Even if people work from home more, we will still want to shift freight from road to rail, and the WCML is full.
They're working on the phone number issue:

> PINs will also help facilitate new features like addressing that isn’t based exclusively on phone numbers, since the system address book will no longer be a viable way to maintain your network of contacts.

https://signal.org/blog/signal-pins/
Because not everybody wants to be in STEM. And because even those who are in STEM need to know that humanity does not live by STEM alone. (We'd like our STEM to treat people like humans, rather than like machines.)

A "liberal education" originally meant that those who pursued it were free. They weren't pursuing an education of mere techniques, which was for slaves. Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person.

That's from the more idealistic side of me. Now here comes the cynicism. Why? Because people still want to major in them, so that they can say that they have a college degree without having to major in something rigorour. And those people pay tuition. And the colleges like getting paid.
Fair, although, depends on scale again. As they say, at scale, every implementation detail is something customers rely on :)
That's their point. P2P doesn't scale to 100s of people. For even more than 10 you need a server. One service I've used forever is whereby.com (used to be appear.in) but even they acquiesced with their professional option for more than 4 people to ditching pure P2P using WebRTC.
> On that note, some organizations (e.g. The US Government) have cycles where words go from good, clued in meanings to bad, evil, outsider meanings.

Quick anecdote: I remember the day when "Information Assurance" was out and "Cybersecurity" was in. Took a few years for it to fully propogate in policies and org names... but it did.

They don't even really have the same meaning, but nevertheless... we all had to Find-and-Replace.
Ask HN: I got bad news about my housemate
I got bad news about housemate it's related to his work stress. Any advice for me please ?? News below is encoded due to its sensitive nature. Please only decode only if you are mentally strong.

bXkgaG91c2VtYXRlIGNvbW1pdHRlZCBzdWljaWRlIGxhc3QgbmlnaHQgOiggaXTigJlzIGhhcmQgdG8ga25vdyB3aHkuIGFwcGFyZW50IHJlYXNvbiBpcyB0aGF0IGhlIHdhcyBzdHJlc3NlZCBmcm9tIHdvcmtpbmcgZXZlcnlkYXkgZm9yIGxhc3QgNCB5ZWFycy4gSSBndWVzcyB0aGlzIGEgcmVtaW5kZXIgZm9yIGFsbCBvZiB1cyB0aGF0IHdlIG5lZWQgdG8gbG9vayBhZnRlciBvdXIgbWVudGFsIGhlYWx0aCBhbmQgc2VlayBoZWxwIGlmIHlvdSBhcmUgc3RyZXNzZWQuCg==
Note: Author is Eastern Europian, so #totes
As much of a shit show FB tends to be, it's still a personal choice to create an account and/or use the one you have. Put simply, don't use it. (I know, easier said than done, especially for the people that rely on FB to stay in contact with family and friends.)

We can live without FB as difficult as it may seem for some. We did just fine prior to the social media paradigm and can certainly do without the hate and vitriol promulgated through social media platforms, especially FB. Let the down votes begin!
Signal doesn't have arbitrary emoji reactions, that is one feature I do wish it had. Though obviously I'd prefer a better desktop client first.
I do agree it can totally suck to be on the receiving side.
The communications latency of MPC would probably exceed the time required for FHE in this particular example.
This conflates social science with the humanities. I agree with respect to the humanities. Less so with respect to social science. People in large groups do in general follow certain trends and we do have decent ways of establishing causation. Now there is a lot of stuff that people do that we can't analyze quantitatively due to lack of data or other blockers. For these qualitative methods will have to do. Fine, but then we should accept that the conclusions from qualitative analysis are less firm and judge them accordingly.
Okay, hmm. It seems like if you already have a lot of high-priority work then logically, most new bugs will go after them in the queue.

And if you're running out of time, that would amount to the same thing, since you'll never get to it.

Also, so long as you have enough work queued up for a few weeks, there is not really much point to stack-ranking the remaining queue items anyway. Everything else is "lower priority".
The link is just an example of how some speech is bad.

The point of the original comment was that badness should be determined by laws, and not by the moderation policies of private companies. I don’t see how the linked article forms an argument for or against that position.
I actually never new about bugs being assigned to people as opposed to products, interesting to know.
Okay, now here's the next paragraph:

>Proponents of HS2 will point out ad nauseam that the point isn’t the journey time; it’s the increased capacity that a new railway will bring, allowing faster trains to shift on to their own track, and rendering the network more efficient. “We’ve been working off Victorian infrastructure on our national rail network and demand is increasing at an unprecedented scale, and we need more capacity,” explains Adam Tyndall, program director for transport at London First, a business advocacy group.
I am right handed but 20 years ago swapped mouse to left hand due to right hand temporary injury.

Took a few months of practice to feel natural and after my right hand was 100% again I decided to keep using left hand for mouse ever since.

It is handy leaving my right hand free for note taking.
> libertarians will step up and help those in need just as much any anybody else would

There's just no plausible evidence that people in general are charitable enough to fund all the necessary hospitals and schools and so on that society requires. It's just not human nature.

So to the children who will go uneducated and die of sickness, that insufficient charity isn't going to mean much.
If you match its speed, sure you'd be already independently traveling to interstellar space at the same speed as it was.

But landing on it and using the free large fuel tank of hydrogen it has now became you can 1) accelerate more 2) decelerate at your destination 3) steer (at least a bit).
It can equally well be used as an example of why hate speech should be outlawed rather than moderated.
Well, the returned value leaks all the bits of information, unless that is randomized too to prevent replay attacks.
Birmingham will definitely benefit as it will mean that more local and regional trains can use the WCML when intercity trains move over to HS2.
That's unlikely to be true. Standards commonly beget all kinds of bureaucracy and effort downstream. Sensible-sounding regulations (e.g. "we should certify that our city's water systems comply with all relevant EPA standards!") conspire with "no-cost-you're-already-meeting-this" standards to increase the burden of documentation, verification, certification and so on.

And maybe that's fine! But the supposition that the EPA setting a standard relevant to tens of thousands of municipal water districts will generate zero costs for those municipalities glosses over how the bureaucratic wheels turn.
As the frontpage says, intentionally deferred :P
i am surprised that this is possible under windows. for ubuntu, it should be possible to disable the daemon that runs the update checks. at worst by hacking a script where the process is started.
I'm still not 100% clear on how the 2016 election was influenced on facebook. Both American parties say the Russians interfered in order to help the other side. Liberal FB employees are upset about Trump, while conservatives think they are being censored on the platform.

Can you point me to any clear, neutral, unequivocal research that illustrates the effect, including impact? Did it swing the election to Trump, or try to steal it from him? How does this compare to traditional political media advertisements?
Apparently the natural sciences were once grouped into liberal arts as well
And what if it doesn't get done voluntarily?

Experience shows that not only is voluntary assistance deeply insufficient, but that it's also often extremely biased and prejudiced.
Yeah they should just stop hosting public profiles and figures.
Say i agree with the sentiment expressed here, what does the curriculum of a neo-classical humanities look like. Let's presume you'd want to keep the good stuff, things like Arrow's impossibilities theorem, Bayesian statistics, Network theory, Language pragmatics, ect. You know the sort of stuff that might aid the organisation of complex systems without repeating the mistakes of the past.

Maybe it is unfair to judge the hole field on a silly paper, in all fairness they write about non existing geometries in physics
Please take care of yourself. It's not your fault.
Iguanas, the ‘Chicken of the Trees,’ Skitter onto Florida’s Menu
I've noticed this too! I've seen schools describing their curriculum as STEAM, and all I could think was "Isn't that just normal school, but without history?"
Those competitors are fueled by VC money which let's them price their products below sustainable levels. In other words they're doing predatory pricing just as much as Amazon. Banning it will probably help Amazon more than it hurts them.
Any of these for the moon or other planets?
Wanderbar: Playing SNES, NES, GBC games in multiple languages
Henrik Huseby's fight with Apple over the right to repair in Norway
I knew Signal was against federation but I hadn’t realized they had pretty much banned third party clients. That would otherwise have been a really easy win for people that actually care about the system integration, performance, and architecture of desktop clients enough to shun electron “clients.”
That's funny because I actually think that the opposite would be nice. You never know what technical knowledge you'll end up needing, so it would be nice to have technical education integrated with work throughout the first several years of working. But everyone can benefit from having a broad education in liberal arts and sciences.
Are the US and China Heading Toward a Cold War?
I think anything can be a subject to scientific study. Methods are what is essential for a study being scientific, not the subject.
I find it useful to differentiate bug from feature because they have a very different information set associated with them. Bugs need to provide description, steps to reproduce, expectation, observation, workaround and are require a write up as part of their completion (root cause). Features, on the other hand, need only a requirements list.
On the first point, their understanding of Signal's key management doesn't seem to be correct. The private key is held only by the client on the mobile phone, which is one of the reasons that the desktop client is rather clumsy - it is dependent on the mobile app for initial key setup. It's also just very slow compared to the mobile app.

On the second point, I think they are quite correct. Yes, this depends on your use-case, but I consider the ability to have multiple and disposable identities to be somewhat critical to any messaging system calling itself suitable for security-sensitive use. Unfortunately, Signal is designed explicitly to make multiple or disposable identities impractical. Above and beyond their desire to be a drop-in replacement for SMS, a reason for this is almost certainly to reduce spam, as the need for a valid phone number makes it difficult to register accounts en masse.

In general, this method to mitigating abuse means that Signal cannot practically be used anonymously, which somewhat conflicts with the popularity of Signal as a mechanism for e.g. contacting journalists.

In the vein of criticizing Signal, I would also throw out that it largely abandons the problem of key distribution, effectively implementing a TOFU model that is lightly enforced at that, with "safety number changes" being pretty much normal. It is possible to verify Signal identities out-of-band but not common, and the Signal app does not really provide much tooling to make it easier.

I wouldn't say that Signal is bad, it does a great job of implementing effectively the identity semantics of SMS (including the shortcomings) but with the addition of E2E encryption and TOFU. I would stop short anyone who claims Signal to be a "perfect" or "complete" solution for encrypted messaging as there are common use cases that it has actively decided not to address.

I'm also, to be honest, somewhat baffled that your starting position seems to be that no criticism of Signal could possibly be valid, when attributing the other's viewpoint to fanboyism. Don't take that too seriously, it just stood out to me on reading. :)
My favorite is "static linking for millennials"
> I could well be wrong but this was never one of the touted benefits of HS2 when it was being (mis?)sold to the British public, which makes me very suspicious.

HS2's PR has been, frankly, awful. Hell, its name has been its biggest failure.

If you read any of the published reports into HS2 then you'll see that capacity is the reason for the project.
Why not just unblock it to read? It’s right within your sphere of action
When you have quarterly profits larger than some small nations entire yearly GDP, it’s as much a question of if you need international relations so much as it’s a question of if you would benefit from having one, and the answer is an obvious yes. They can afford the best, so they can meet with and wine and dine the best.

Perhaps all this familiarity is finally breeding contempt from certain quarters? Perhaps it’s a bit of envy on both sides; nations envious of multinational profits and reach, and multinational firms envious of national self-justifying existence.

I wonder how long til Starlink starts providing extraterritorial/extraterrestrial VPS?
Let nobody ever again say, "we'll ship it now and fix it once it's in prod".
And thrust in general.
This might be a stupid question but how can the site run multiple maze generation algorithm at the same time? My understanding is that javascript is single thread.
I wish they’d classify investigations of racist groups based on race: “black separatist extremists” vs “white separatist extremists” for example, but that they’d open the investigations regardless of race. Tracking based on race would let outside observers keep them honest.

I guess they’re doing the opposite: Biasing investigations, and failing to track the statistics that would make this obvious.

(It sounds a lot like software metrics and bug tracking in corporate America, if I’m honest, except with worse repercussions.)
Looks great. On mobile now but will try it on desktop later. Is the pricing really sustainable though? Seems incredibly cheap for something that’ll be sucking up bandwidth and CPU for 8+ hrs/day.
One of the most valuable courses I took as an undergrad was an anthropology course. In it, we studied the life of JR Oppenheimer and his relationship with the government patrons of his science.

The sort of scoundrels naturally attracted to power will always find cynical use for talent of the kind possessed by Oppenheimer. However, every aspect of such a relationship will be thoroughly cynical.

If you are a future STEM person, understanding this fact will save you a lot of grief. Learn it early.
> This highlights a flaw with the UK's infrastructure projects. The UK is focused on connecting cities with cities, not connection within cities and towns.

I agree, but HS2 will provide a huge benefit local and regional rail services rather than what most people assume: Faster travel in and out of London.

Frankly we need a lot more investment into light rail (trams etc.) and buses as well as HS2 and NPR.
For what it's worth I don't have this problem on OSX, Ubuntu, or Manjaro. My roommate also uses Windows 10 and seems to be fine.

During the past month I've seen more errors and hiccups. Like delays. I assume that's just a scaling issue.

But I do have election apps. They just eat away resources.
By using the event loop, with functions like setTimeout
> But that isn't correct. You can have a team pull from a single queue of tasks assigned to the team as a whole. There's no need to proactively assign them to individual team members.

Agreed. My point was more about that there has to be a single person responsible for making sure there are no leftovers.

> But the development team itself can do that, no problem.

Yup. To the domain point, I do think that collaboration on that boundary is needed.

> It's relevant to estimating velocity (...)

Fair, if you only define velocity as adding features and if you automatically prioritize bugs.

> We must recognise this as simply being an expression of the author's deletionist aesthetic preference, not a fact about the world.

I think this doesn't hold over long term. It is true as long as you do have an idea what's in the rest of the pile. But the moment you change the person responsible for managing the tickets and suddenly they have thousand tickets to go through and orient themselves in, it matters. And if they don't go through all of them, they don't actually do the prioritization against each other.
You mean how after the Cambridge Analytica scandal when he testified in front of Congress? And how literally nothing came from that?
> If 90% of Ruby code works in Crystal unmodified

False, premise, since it's not the case at first place. 90% of your Ruby code will absolutely not work in Crystal unmodified.
> The issue with a high speed rail project like HS2 is that the people most affected by it are the ones who don't see much direct benefits from it.

>If the line is coming past you then you have to put up with the noise from it and the building and land use change issues, but you don't get to actually use it as there won't be any stations for you. It's not possible to add stations mid-line as that would slow down the "high speed" aspect.

Except that's actually nonsense.

Most of the benefit comes from moving the intercity trains off of the WCML meaning more local and regional trains can be run.
> the next refresh can be delayed by up to 60 days, after which a refresh will be performed regardless of the refresh.hold value

Taking a leaf right out of Microsoft's book, I see.
You should compare them to what the performance numbers where 5 and 10 years ago. Homomorphic crypto systems have become many orders of magnitude faster quite rapidly. While they are still no where near non-homomorphic solutions (and likely won't ever be), they have only recently become practical for applications where performance doesn't matter and privacy is valuable (in the sense that people pay a premium for it, which is often not the case).
Because music, history, and literature are just as important to human society as math, computer science, and physics. This unthinking disrespect for the humanities is embarrassing.
Body cameras should never be able to be turned off. The most that should be done is an officer should be able to hit a button to drop a marker into the timeline.
If I understand your description, you reset your account. They delete the messages for safety when you reset. An attacker could reset by getting ahold of your phone number by sim jacking or the govt getting your text. It's a safety method so no one can take you texts. Of course many people want to carry their texts along, but this is a safety risk if you lost control over your number. So that's what signal is doing. If I recall when I had to reset my own number they did say they were deleting my old messages.
How do they account for the differences between what the sensor sees, what our eyes see, and what our screens show? I like the idea, but I want something that can calibrate to my eyes, so that the color that I capture matches exactly what I saw.
That's what colleges are for. Even for the hard sciences you don't really get much "real" world profit-seeking experience.
No clinical benefit from use of hydroxychloroquine in patients with Covid-19
> Minimum font size 14pt or 25px.

Is this a typo? Most guides will suggest 24 pt as a baseline, and maybe 20 pt as minimum. 14 pt is really small for a presentation.
It's not just me. My SO, her mother and my parents doesn't either.
Really good question actually!

I peeked at the javascript and it looks like when you hit `run`, it is calling the step at a setInterval (if I'm reading this right, as fast as the browser can call run)

So at the end of each run call, the interpreter figures out which setInterval timer to execute next and has the chance to pick other mazes. (I don't know much about how the JS engine resolves which "not quite thread" gets run next when there are multiple candidates)
Unless your entire dev workflow happens in Google chrome I'm a little confused why you bought a chromebook for development work