skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issue is that in China's case, authoritarianism has been good for both people in authority and the majority, as evidenced by increasing economic growth and standards of living. You could make a theoretical argument that if China was democratic, then everyone would be even better off. But people in China use India as a mirror since both countries had massive populations, were underdeveloped, and gained independence at roughly the same time. That's not a flattering comparison.

As for suppression of free speech, the attitude in China is much more pessimistic about the ability of free speech among the public to produce good governing decisions. There is a difference between speech that can be used to gauge public opinion, and speech that seeks to spur the public into taking rash actions. Currently, governing decisions are made behind closed doors by a group of elites that carefully deliberate their choices after taking public opinion into account. Free speech that attempts to sidestep this process by not just allowing people to air their grievances, but tries to rally people into pressuring the government and seizing the decision-making levers directly are suppressed. At the end of the day, it is an authoritarian system to tries to keep the existing holders of power entrenched. But when the current philosopher kings are doing so well, only a minority of people on the margins of society really want to rock the boat.

At the end of the day, every society limits free speech in some way. The US sets that limit at threatening physical harm on specific individuals. China sets that limit at upsetting the status quo without going through the proper channels.
Sterilization was standard procedure for Han Chinese women for decades: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/world/asia/after-one-chil...
"I may be mistaken but Han Chinese weren't imposed forced sterilization. "

Sadly, you are mistaken. A simple google search will show you.
Hardware Acceleration of Sparse and Irregular Tensor Computations of ML Models
Here is a typical example (from Genesis Rabbah)

> And Cain rose up against his brother Abel. [...] With what did he kill him? R. Simeon said: He killed him with a staff: And a young man for my bruising (Gen 4:23) implies a weapon which inflicts a bruise. The Rabbis said: He killed him with a stone: For I have slain a man for wounding me (ibid) indicates a weapon which inflicts wounds. R. 'Azariah and R. Jonathan in R. Isaac's name said: Cain had closely observed where his father slew the bullock [which he sacrificed, as it is written], And it shall please the Lord better than a bullock (Ps 69:31), and there he killed him: by the throat and its organs.

From a Christian perspective, a more interesting example might be the Gospel's atomization/recontextualizations of text as Messianic prophecy ("out of Egypt I have called my son", "behold, a virgin shall be with child").
There was a time when McKinsey could probably say they “hire the best of the best” but I’m not aware of anyone that honestly believes this to be the case today. Top talent doesn’t want to work for consulting firms anymore.
Outside of publishing a public API almost any modern language and enviroment should make this easy.
My thoughts on causing less regret, and to boost likelihood of success & happiness (based on long experience, observation, and study): http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854586947.html

and http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854592298.html

(simple site, non-JS, I hope skimmable with depth)
> Unless we are willing to go to war - there are no viable ways to prevent China from doing whatever they feel like in the territory they control.

This just seems false. There are no ways to guarantee that they won't do something, but China, like everyone else, is vulnerable to international pressure. An optimistic historic parallel to which one could look is the Helsinki Accords, where diplomatic measures far short of war wrung what turned out to be dramatic human-rights concessions from the Soviets.
How about asking each time whether they’d be interested in your input?
There is an easier explanation: Kremlin just started to spend money on its Internet presence and opposition could not match it, which got amplified by more people getting connected to the Internet (thus instead of tech savvy crowd sympathetic to opposition, you get a bigger share of conservative "simple man"). Opposition just got relaxed and thought that Internet will be their home ground forever. And it's far easier for opposition to blame Google for collusion with the government, than to work hard on quality of their websites. Compare the old "non-systematic opposition" influence with the drive behind people like Navalny and you can see that there is no conspiracy, just laziness vs hard work.
Once you ask what the class is you're no longer even "OOP crazy".

You've just capitulated to the complexity and do whatever it takes.

I don't want to sound (too) condescending. I know how easy the best intentions can lead a project there. This job is hard.
> Should ...

I just wish the CSS committee asked themselves these questions ... Like I said, it's more involved than you would expect, but on the other hand it's not rocket science, really.
UK cannot simultaneously piss off Brussels and Beijing. Not going to happen. And UK is 1/6th of China economy.
That's actually not true. The Han Chinese are imposed forced sterilization. Even worse, pregnant Han women who violate the policy have been taken from home to do forced abortion. I hate this policy as much as anybody, but I won't call it genocide.
In a way though, he's still coding, just at a different level of abstraction.

Metaphorically, he used to generate bricks himself, then add them to his castle. Now people bring him bricks and he choses the ones he likes and which to discard. So at the end of the day, perhaps this is still a castle of his design. meh?
3DChan V2, a 3D Imageboard
>What is 3DChan?
For those who don’t know what 3DChan is, it’s an hybrid between the imageboard culture and Second Life.

>Concept of the V2 (more on my blog)
This version won’t be online, not exactly. You will be able to post file and build level in local before sharing it via bittorrent. It’s pretty close to the concept of decentraland, but without the virtual estate agent thing.
Ask HN: How have/can employee stock options in place of compensation be abused?
I am trying to figure out the ways in which options can go wrong or ways in which they can be watered down, or other malicious patterns as many startups use stock options in place of compensation.
DuckDuckGo coming back online in India following country-wide block
I do think it’s weird that a lot of the people most vocal about Uighur persecution were also the cheerleaders for every Middle East intervention as well as building concentration camps for undocumented immigrants.

I have racist family who have historically hated Muslims that are enraged at China over this. You call this comment whataboutism if you want but the inconsistency is bizarre.

(I am no fan of the Chinese the state at by any means)
it didn't. In fact it gave rise to the middle class, caused the coming in to being of inheritance and real estate laws, and empowered workers. Why? A wealthy land owner was only as rich as what the owned land produced. With all the deaths the workers who remained became valued. Similarly, who inherited what became very important as literally whole families died. And with the laws came fairer treatment for everyone.
Surprised trump doesn’t use this to place sanctions on China and up his base’s support.
It's a really interesting post but the net thought I have coming out of it isn't "let's fix this" but "f* it, the whole social media experiment is so conceptually broken, we should all just stop and try something else.."
This diffusion of responsibility just strikes me as bad leadership.

If you are a leader of an organization, you still have to own those decisions. After all, whose decision was it to follow that advice or hire those consultants?

It’s like when a leader blames their employees for a problem. Whose job is it to hire or train (or even fire) employees? Truman famously had a “the buck stops here” placard on his desk; did this leadership ideal get lost somewhere along the way?
Fair enough
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23725966 (18 points, 4 comments, Flagged. Posted 1 day ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23727763 (10 points, 3 comments, Not Flagged. Posted 1 day ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23738264 (22 points, 4 comments, Flagged, Dead. Posted 3 hours ago)
& yours (21 points, 14 comments, Flagged) I don't have a stance on the topic (that I want to discuss or is relevant here) but I nearly skipped it since it seemed a bit Off Topic in regards to the submission guidelines and possibly a bit 'hot button-ish' but was intrigued enough to take a look and comment after seeing a 21 point submission being Flagged. Hope that helps
[Edit to add - I didn't downvote or flag any of these but up till now had not read any of the links nor comments]
Exactly. With experience, you learn not to abstract too soon.
Does China really treat ethnic majority and Uyghurs equally?

> Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang

> The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply

> But while equal on paper, in practice Han Chinese are largely spared the abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions and detentions for having too many children that are forced on Xinjiang’s other ethnicities, interviews and data show. Some rural Muslims, like Omirzakh, are punished even for having the three children allowed by the law

> Leaked data obtained and corroborated by the AP showed that of 484 camp detainees listed in Karakax county in Xinjiang, 149 were there for having too many children - the most common reason for holding them. Time in a camp — what the government calls “education and training” — for parents with too many children is written policy in at least three counties, notices found by Zenz confirmed

> While fines also apply to Han Chinese, only minorities are sent to the detention camps if they cannot pay, according to interviews and data

> Seven former detainees told the AP that they were force-fed birth control pills or injected with fluids, often with no explanation. Many felt dizzy, tired or ill, and women stopped getting their periods. After being released and leaving China, some went to get medical check-ups and found they were sterile

https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
If you dare point out that every contentious thread about China is brigaded by obvious professional Chinese propagandists, then dang (who is utterly determined to keep his head in the sand on this issue) will ban you.

Stick a fork in hacker news. Its abject naevity about popular anonymous message boards has killed it.
A pattern one can modify ad lib: If it were a sushi, it would be fugu. If it were a car, it would be a Crown Victoria. Etc., etc.
https://docs.mapbox.com/vector-tiles/specification/
But abstractions reduce possible state and allows you to specify that state in obvious ways, e.g. on function parameters. Do not underestimate the power of functional boundaries.
I’ve noticed it to be the primary defense mechanism of China sympathizers. Funnily enough USSR used similar arguments
He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.
Mods this article is old, should be labeled 2016.
I think a big part of the value proposition that firms like McKinsey and BCG brought during the 70s'-80s' is the idea of operational excellence.

Many companies work on the same markets and sell the same products than others, but operate much more efficiently. Best practices are hard to share though, because companies cannot become full monopolies or engage in corporate espionage. McKinsey became then a discreet way of ensuring that your operating model was at least as good as the competitor, as they would share with you some fully anonymised benchmarks related to how competitors are operating.
Early de duplication is the equivalent of early optimization: a bad idea that boxes you in.

Duplicate code is a sign that there could be a generalization missing.
I suspect the need to reallocate in simdjson is a factor in performance but that is really part of the benchmark. When using a parser it would be a very rare case to have the luxury of embedding the string to be parsed in the code. Usually a string comes in through some other means such as over HTTP or maybe a simple socket. Then again it could be passed from some other part of an application. If the parser has a requirement to expand the string to modify it in some fashion then a realloc or really a malloc and copy is part of the parsing process.
This is one reason I love working in the Unity ECS framework. Your data is public and state can’t hide. Your systems are still free to contain a plethora of bugs, but they are easier to track down due to the functional nature of a system.

In the regular Unity OOP land, developers inevitably sprinkle state everywhere. Coroutines are by far one of the worst offenders. Good luck seeing the current executing state of your game when it’s hidden in local variables inside a persistent function body...
If we know what the Chinese government is doing to ethnic minorities does the motive behind the media covering it even matter? So long as the atrocities stop I don’t think I really care who benefits from having a public discussion or how.
You think Trump or his base is concerned about genocide of Muslims? That’s giving them an awful lot of credit.
The difference is now the population growth is collapsing, even after they loosened the limit to 2 kids per family, China desperately needs more babies.
The eyes are connected to sinuses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasolacrimal_duct
Yes, removing duplication is closer to refactoring, not abstracting, although I don't think they are mutually exclusive. Abstracting is hiding everything BUT the essential elements of something. Good abstraction only exposes what's necessary, and thus the epitome of abstraction are interfaces. Coding with good abstractions is about writing interfaces at every level, from the functions to the user. At the mathematical level, Category Theory is the math of abstraction and basically describes interfaces formally.
Every failed IT project that I have worked on in the last 20 years (except those where the cause was non-technical such as bad planning/ bad requirements), failed because it used too many layers of abstraction.
How to Divvy Up Startup Equity
This so, so much.

Too many people think that commit message is to explain HOW you did something. Unless you did something extremely clever (and in any commercial project, 99% of clever solutions are wrong - simple is the king), it should need more than few words.

WHY you did it this way is the most important part. Given known and understood set of constrains, a lot of engineers will come up with similar solution, or at least understand it. And you can’t work effectively on something you don’t understand.

Not having this context is reason for so many rewrites. Developer thinks a solution is supper crappy, goes to rewrite it, with grand vision. Only to learn along the way about all the edge cases and reasons for hacks.
Depending on how he played it, he might get support from everybody. Stopping genocide is pretty hot right now, as is sticking it to China.

But he's not a very subtle chap. I doubt he could restrain himself to stick to a line.
Ask HN: What do I move on to from Django?
I've been a Django backend engineer for most of my career of 7 years, and recently shifted to working on NodeJS+Express because the current company runs on it.

So, is it okay to stick to Django in 2020? The last project I made in Django - I used v3.0 and it was still fine although a lot had changed from v1.11. Except of course I forgot DRF a bit and had to throw out some APIs I wrote in it before deciding to roll out my own way in CBVs as going back to docs for custom stuff in DRF was too complicated/required unnecessary efforts. Same for allauth, drf-rest-auth, etc. Okay for basic APIs, not as much for customization. Sorry for the digression. And Django 3.0 still doesn't have event loop based async processing like Node, at least not fully.

Honestly, after working with Node+Express and having to write all the "magic" parts yourself, I feel more light and free, - not having to understand a framework and then thinking about my app's business logic later. In Node+Express I can simply scaffold a basic server and start writing routes, integrate with SQL queries, and be done with it. Maybe even install a couple of libs to sort out CORS, session auth, security stuff etc. And the performance is definitely better than running a Django app for simple serialization of DB data and sending that back. The biggest pain is obviously Django ORM - it's honestly light years ahead of anything in JS. But I can live without it, having spent a year on manually created migrations in my company that I know can be automated.

So, what do you use and recommend for backend development in 2020?
When you have to write a POC quickly for an app idea you have, what's the technology you use to flesh its backend out?

P.S: This is not a rant against Django - I love Django and my whole career started because of it. I'm forever thankful to the Django community and Django itself. I just want to gain some insights into what other Django devs have been using regularly.
Ask HN: Anyone working on text classifiers or NLP projects at work?
Hi,

Previously, I led an AI/ML team at a bank where we’ve developed a text classification model for categorizing transactions for production use. We noticed issues with classification and developed a way to monitor changes.

I now am running a startup built around that same idea of monitoring and troubleshooting text classification/NLP models.

We’re looking for beta testers, collaborators and anyone who has a big passion for model performance post production.
The comment they're replying to is also not exactly smelling of roses. It makes some pretty unsubstantiated claims.

I read Peren's claims, and IMHO they're very thin. It seems to be a classic case of "I don't like this" (which is fair enough) and then trying to find "objective" arguments to support that position. Not impressed.
It seems but it is not. China is ascending power whereas USSR was in the first stages of decay. The only game the big boys play is Realpolitik.

And they were not binding anyway. And I can assure you that USSR and the eastern bloc didn't comply at all.
If you're truly OOP crazy you will always find ways to avoid resorting to branching on types or even avoid branching altogether (just on the language level of course). "There's a design pattern for that" :-)
I dunno - I think that the old MySpace autoplay bullshit was my first experience of "Ok I need to learn how to stop that ever happening again"
I think one can choose per app wether to use icloud sync and backup (but not within the app which individual files to keep on the phone). For Files one can also explicitly tell to save them locally (but then they are not duplicated in iCloud.
Sssh, you're getting close to noticing that HN, a popular anonymous message board, has become the clear target of professional propagandists. You'll get banned for that. The mods are determined to never see this particular elephant in the room.
Are we? A survery in The Lancet estimated that the Iraq invasion caused an excess of 650k deaths by October 2006. A simple extrapolation would surely put the excess deaths in the middle east into millions.

It's different though. We're the good guys.
The Anti-Bitcoin Bubble Is About to Burst
Indeed nonexistent
"With C you can shoot your own foot. With C++ you can blow your own leg off". I feel the same is true here.

The abstraction may be right at the time of writing, yet further on it often becomes not only wrong, but a massive hindrance.

With time and effort, hacky code and be worked into shape. An eventual wrong abstraction normally means a rewrite.
Slightly related, a couple of weeks ago a guy named Fizzi released a dolphin build with rollback netcode support for Super Smash Bros Melee, making it a game with better netcode than most current big name fighters.

The way he implemented it is insane, he had to reverse engineer a way to generate arbitrary game states in game, as using dolphin savestates was not performant enough.

He's also added other amazing features, like in game matchmaking, or my favorite, being able to stream a game state through the Wiis ethernet port, so two players can be competing on original hardware while a stream setup upscales that footage in realtime to 16:9 4k through Dolphin, and also generates real time match stats, saves replays... Incredible stuff.

Here's the project page: https://slippi.gg/
and a video from a top melee player showcasing the matchmaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erbZV8u6-hA
Reading that article and the context of the quote, it appears that Carmack is using that statement to extol the benefits of functional programming styles, not commenting on abstraction.
> loosened the limit to 2 kids per family

Still a limit, and a low one at that, so doesn’t sound “desperate” at all.

TFA says “I uncovered evidence that the Uighurs are subject to internment in camps if they violate birth control policies, have too many children.” Presumably too many is greater than 2, but who knows.
According to the Reddit thread linked in this thread, no one has ever been blacklisted:

> We have in fact never had to terminate a relationship with any customer of ours. We build trusted relationships with our customers, so any talk of "threats" or anything else is simply completely fabricated (as you obviously noted, anyone repeating such claims has no evidence whatsoever for them).
> we supposed to be past this type of thing as a species already?

There is no indication of that.

Just decade after WWII British government did yet another genocide in Kenya. Concentration camps, floggings, torture and rapes. After that there has been many others.
Sign up is broken.
This is a neat project, thanks for writing it up.

Does the Retroputer instruction set have an equivalent to the x86 ja instruction?

If so, here is a trick[0] that can be used for optimizing character class checks.

low <= x <= high is equivalent to x - low u<= high - low

[0] Chapter 4 - Arithmetic Bounds of Hacker's Delight by Henry Warren
This is so true, but so shallow too.
I think the big mistake is to treat the code as "the main thing" when in reality it's just a model (a golem) mimicking some "other thing"

We're missing an entire set of code characterizations. Yes we have a "pattern language" but there's not much to characterize it structurally wrt "code distance" from one part of the code to the other (e.g. in call stack depth as well as in breadth).

And again all of this needs to happen wrt the "abstraction" not the code itself.
Having 10 methods 90% duplicated in a single file with 10% pecent difference is many times better than trying to abstract it.

Having the same "unit conversion" function duplicated in 3 parts of the code can be disastrous.

These two examples are very easy to see and understand, but in reality you're always in a continuous state in between. And "code smells" like passing too many parameters or doing "blast radius" for certain code changes are only watching for side-effects of a missing "code theory". An interesting book on the topic is "Your code as a crime scene".

The bottom line is we're trying to fix these problems over and over again without having a good understanding of what the real problem is and this leads to too many rules too easy to misinterpret unless you are already a "senior artist"
It wasn't about "all groups" though, ethnic minorities (like the Uighur) were exempt or allowed to have more children.