skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Crawling the web is expensive, barrier to entry is very high.

Many alternative search engines claim to have built their own crawler, however their coverage is small and they have to fallback to Bing or Google.

You can actually check this btw. The results on Bing are identical to DuckDuckGo's in many cases, which are often inferior to those of Google. When different make sure the "location" parameters are the same and clear Bing's cookies, although local searches are absolutely terrible in Bing/DDG anyway. But they sometimes diverge on some queries, either because DuckDuckGo's cache is not up to date, or because it had relevant results in its own index.

But yes, if Bing closes its API, DuckDuckGo either switches to Google or it's dead in the water.
Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?
There are what I would call "good oldie" MOOCs that people frequently recommend, like algorithms on coursera. Most of them are from 2012-2013.

Now will be some rant and justification for the question, the question itself is in the last paragraph.

At the time (2012-2013) I was very hyped and enthusiastic, imagining new courses of the same quality and kind will be appearing at the same rate in future. By kind I mean university level subjects, fundamental topics that have high return of investment.

But it seems to me it went quite differently. I don't really see any new courses being published and recommended on the lists among good oldies. My own experience with stuff that came later also wasn't as pleasant, I started dropping courses much more often.

The platforms themselves changed significantly:
1. Switch from fundamental to hands-on subjects like technologies and frameworks.
2. Switching to paid model (not that I have anything against it, although being poor in a poor country I avoid paying as much as I can and haven't paid for a single certificate). This leads to less people checking out the course and giving it a "media coverage".
3. Switching from strict start-end date to "take anytime you want". Because of that the social element for me has been essentially lost, the forums are half-dead.
4. Increased amount of courses. Together with (1) this makes it hard to find something by random exploration. When I open edx computer science section I have to go through pages and pages of microsoft courses about their technologies.

This made me gradually lose interest in MOOCs and switch to books and self-learning. I occasionally go back to MOOC platforms or MOOC aggregators, thinking maybe I just missed something or something interesting came out recently.

Did you take any good (valuable, mind-expanding, long-term rewarding, intellectually stimulating) courses that aren't famous and have a high chance of being overlooked?
Perhaps it would, if the plumbing takes up most of the space in your apartment and requires complicated maintenance.
Demonstrating again that interviewing is mostly about confirming the prejudices of the interviewer.
Yes, this is literally hacking of the mind. These people should be thrown in jail like blackhat hackers.
> Thanks! Just out of curiosity, do the gulf carriers keep PIA in high regard and have a friendly relationship or they are continuously trying to bring it down?

Pakistani airlines were not the only ones whom Gulf carriers have brought down. They dominate the entire region, and rightfully so (aside from heavy subsidies.) Their service is superb.

PIA used to be a much more higher-end airline, and it was on top of global ranks before the troubles started in the country. A lot of Pakistan's talent called it quit at that point, and immigrated en masse, aviation cadres included. A lot of them settled in the UAE, where they crossed paths with the gulf money, and set the foundation for many of Emirati airlines.

Naturally, conquering Pakistani market was very easy for them given their local knowledge.

> I don't think PIA would be aware of fake licenses and keep them as well?

They would. The phenomenon started with Gen. Zia (who died in an airplane crash, ironically.) The country has been ruled by three political dynasties that effectively normalised the state when state companies were given away to children, relatives, and friends to be ran like family businesses.

A double digit of all professionals in the country are fake degree holders, and that's not surprising in a country where now two generations of people were raised internalising the idea that earning money straight, and fair was made impossible as such, per-design.
For a quick search engine it's hard to beat Sphinx. I especially love that you can just point it at a database and give it a query and it will just work.
The only benchmark I know of testing async PHP was flawed big time and was debunked a few days later.
It's not a publication, just a post on some reddit clone
Do you literally want to give the racists power to cherry pick from all of culture to take things that have existed for thousands of years and lock them away behind censorship?

If someone is specifically using the Nazi version of the swastika, then by all means handle it. But if it's the non-Nazi version, then why do people not get to reclaim it?
> In 1821, Stefano Barezzi, an expert in removing whole frescoes from their walls intact, was called in to remove the painting to a safer location; he badly damaged the center section before realizing that Leonardo's work was not a fresco.

This made me laugh. I wasn't aware of its history. It's amazing how much effort has gone into preserving it over the centuries.
'Allah' is just an arabian translation for 'God'. Both arab christians as arab muslims use it to refer to the object of their respective belief.

You might want to question why muslims drop arab words in their non-arab current language.

Then again, thanks to hollywood, most non-english speakers say stuff like 'oh fuck' in their non english sentences. Sometimes they don't even know enough english to realize they are basically requesting supernatural intervention from the act of human procreation.
Windy
Many collect evidence for something after the fact. "We don't look at the data unless something has come up, because it would be a privacy violation otherwise". Which is pretty much how police is supposed to work in normal life either way.
I have two small kids and I still find time to work on projects. It's specifically not watching TV, not Facebooking, and not playing games that gives me that time.

I just hired a person at work where part of her resume that stood out to me was that she knits and had designed and sells a knitting loom that a person can use one-handed, after she broke her wrist some years ago. She had kids and volunteers at her local fire department, too.
At least then it was the means of accessing the web, rather than the web itself.
Examples of simple Laravel projects for beginners
Delta always seems to land at the gate in Belgium, you walk over to Amsterdam, then walk to the baggage claim over in Rotterdam.

Every time I fly in, I’m amazed at how much time we spend taxiing and how far from passport control our luggage claim is
How do you dump general purpose, encyclopedic data into a relational database? What database schema would you use? The whole point of "triples" as a data format is that they're extremely general and extensible.
There's this undertone of "I should be payed as much/more than Data Science people because I'm better than them at statistics and data science = machine learning = statistics".

My experience doing data science at small companies that can't afford to hire more than 1 person for the role is that it is so much more than just building models or doing statistics.

You have to:

1. Build APIs and work with developers to get predictive models integrated into the rest of the software stack

2. Know how to add logging, auditing, monitoring, containerizing, web scrapers, cleaning data(!!), SQL scripts, dashboards, BI tools, etc.

3. Do some basic descriptive stats, some basic inferential stats, some predictive modeling, work on time-series data, sometimes apply survival analysis, etc. (Python/R/Excel who cares)

4. Setting up data pipelines and CI/CD to automate all this crap

5. Trying to unpack vague high level requirements along the lines of "Hey do you think we could use our data to build an 'AI' to do this instead of manually doing it" and then coming up with a combination of software / statistical models that perform as least as good or better than humans at the task.

6. Work with non-technical business users and be able to translate this back to technical requirements.

Hey, if all you do all day is "build models" then that sounds like a very cushy DS job you have. It's definitely not been my experience. I would describe it more like a combination of software engineering and statistics and business analyst. That's why it pays higher than just statistics. But this is just my experience..
Could be worse. If it was godsplan2, He would have made a mistake ;-)
If you have admin on your machine, turn unload the kernel extensions and turn it off. One dirty secret is that many IT departments wont notice or wont care.
Lionrock Batteries – Flexible Lithium Ion Batteries
As someone new to mapping and who wants to learn in a React or JS/web context, are there any articles,tutorials, books or videos you would suggest?
That's entirely different issue, that doesn't have technical roots. The world didn't migrate en-masse to Windows Phone either, despite it being quite nice mobile OS at the time.
> triggering fighter intercepts

Also this costs tax money. Why spend the money on intercepts when you can ban the people causing the problems?
(I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, just a forum conversation where I tell what I believe: "as far as I know", etc.)

What country is this? Here in France, your employer may only complain if they can argue that your activity causes them harm. Side projects, even when benefiting from your work experience, should, as far as I know, be okay.
Every database probably hits similar problems in development. But it is probably better to just use sqlite if you need it to help out.
We monitor just about every aspect of the machines and JVMs that we own. When the Heap graph climbs steadily over days/weeks at a time, i.e. each GC still results in considerably more overall memory usage.
My anecdotal experience suggests that today it is slightly more difficult to find pirated content than in "the golden age of Piracy" (namely the mid-noughties to mid-10s). My hypothesis is that having a critical mass of people willing to search, consume and generate pirated content is important.
Tamgucalc: A spreadsheet in character mode with Lisp formulas
> how much of this nuance is achieved by having discussions about issues which have real life-or-death impacts on people but without having any of those people inconveniently present

I find this comment difficult to understand. On an uncharitable reading, you would seem to be implying that non-white people are incapable of nuanced discussion about race, which I'm sure isn't what you meant. Or are you saying that what we take to be nuanced discussions about race are only considered nuanced because there are no non-white people? Or that it is impossible for white people to have a nuanced discussion about race unless there are black people present?
To Gmail, Most Black Lives Matter Emails Are“Promotions”
Does someone have the knowledge / expertise to dig into these critics ?
Well, the critics about partnerships and Cloudflare look like low level activism BS, but am interested in what is said under the section "Direct Privacy Abuse" in the article. Are these statements true and do we have to worry about that ?
You already have a political divide by not wanting him to have that right.
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText

"In July 2016 the Linux kernel project decided to transition from DocBook based documentation to reStructuredText and the Sphinx toolchain.[8]"

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.18/doc-guide/sphinx.html
I talk regularly with business people who have hired data scientists, and 5 and 6 is always the biggest complaint. That, plus new hires are always unprepared to handle how messy real-world data is.
I think people are underestimating the Disney+ value prop. The back-catalog is absolutely phenomenal - the right mix of nostalgia and pop culture. The Mandalorian was one of the best shows I have seen lately - technical magic and very entertaining. I don't think any Netflix franchise comes close to matching Disney's top 3 (Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar stuff), and Disney will probably milk all of it for the foreseeable future. They have the talent to keep it from going stale.

I suspect Netflix will continue to dominate the adult/indie streaming scene while Disney will get a majority of the pop culture market. And pop culture sells in the physical world as well.
> you have a hammer and everything looks like a nail.

Actually, that comment made me see things differently on a project that had me scratch my head for the last couple of weeks, so thanks a lot!

Don't know if it's related but I tend to feature creep.
Getgee: Universal Database and Commons
> I've yet to meet anyone who successfully multitasks in Zoom calls.

The thing is that in all too many meetings, a certain percentage of the attendees is only required for a certain period of time.
Just wondering if I could get some suggestions from the community

I've been asked, preliminarily, by the lab I work for to produce an application that will overlay daily/weekly water quality measurements on a map. I've got no idea where to start as I've never done anything GIS - but I do like keeping things open source. Would this be something to integrate with OSM?

The problem seems simple and generic enough that I'd expect it can be done with zero programming. I just need to find the right place to feed in a table of coordinates and measurements

I know the problem spec is a bit vague, but what's a good place to start?

And if I do need to write an app, is there any way I could stick Clojure/JVM?
Think of the people behind creating wealth and think about the people who actually get wealth. You will find that the two groups differ drastically.
It is extremely concerning, because it indicates how quality control is abandoned in search for every lower costs.
Embarassing if one considers that most of these issues should be caught by automation before code review even happens.

Such a symptom indicates extremely sloppy development process, and low security culture.
It would be interesting to use such fragmentary news to correct stock pricing, with respect to current management and processes.
Google-backed groups criticize Apple's new warnings on user tracking
Well, the SK airliner basically couldn't find the ILS and descended below a safe level, ultimately hitting approach light stands in the Bay, and then the pier(!), and cartwheeling, possibly twice. It was actually filmed by a dude in Oakland. I would call that uncomfortable with visual approaches.

The only good news in this accident is that aeronautical structural engineers were quite impressed the plane stayed intact.

For more detail, one of the SFO ILS has been out of service or shutdown for about a a decade. They cost around $2 million (max) to install, so I don't get it. Major US airports charge over $10,000 per landing, so they can afford to maintain navaids.

The other notable thing was that the pilots sat stunned in the cockpit after the accident (likely knowing their careers were over), and a stewdardess took charge and ordered the evacuation after 90 seconds passed.
It is basically the standard take of a statistician who tries to understand machine learning. "It's yhat, rather than betahat" is a common slogan.
Britain's Chernobyl: Covid-19 and the Cost of Lies
I'm glad iOS14 is showing this but IMO it's the wrong solution. I know this is easier said than done but basically the OS should make it impossible for an app to read the clipboard unless the user chooses "PASTE". I have no idea how that would work on iOS. It can work pretty well in the browser. I'm not saying the browser is doing this well, but it is possible for the browser to be made so only a browser level paste gives the current page/iframe the contents of the clipboard so you know the user specifically wanted whatever is in the clipboard passed to that page/app.
Every single person I've met who had kids and complains about spending time with them keeps them from their projects also watched a lot of TV or plays games or wastes time on social media after the kids go to bed.

Every person I know who has kids and finds time for their projects are bringing their kids with them to meetups, getting the kids interested, and not spending time on consumptive pursuits.

Spending time with your kids, being a good, engaged parent, has little to do with working on side projects.
I really like the 747-8I it is a pretty plane and actually also economic. Widebodys are more comfortable and the upper deck is just awesome. For those who wanna fly with the 747: Book a trip with Deutsche Lufthansa or Korean Air. They both use the newest type and probably will keep them flying for a long time. Passengers is what keep them in them flying :)
It took me years to notice a flaw in this approach: it's based in the premise that everyone has time for side projects.

From that point I think about it as a bias. Nowadays I try to assess if the candidates with no public activity on GH and no side projects have the passion and interest I look for, but can't take it further outside of work due to their specific circumstances.
You might be interested in asciidoctor.js and asciidoctorj
A look at the state of Scala development in Vim
https://leafletjs.com ?

If there is a lot of data, you have to take the zoom-level into consideration and aggregate the data on the server side.

Most news papers I have seen use LeafletJS, and Wikipedia are using it
> how much of this nuance is achieved by having discussions about issues which have real life-or-death impacts on people but without having any of those people inconveniently present?

Uh, not much? This comment seems to be assuming some weird things about what the blog typically focuses on. Actually, he writes about trans issues a bit, got some flack for defending Blanchard, and a large fraction of the readership is trans.
Username/username is a special repository that adds README.md to your profile
If you consider Helen Pluckrose to be anti-trans, I worry that means you haven't actually read any of her writing on trans people, and rather only heard her opinions filtered through her very vocal and vitriolic critics from the critical theory swathe of twitter - and I certainly doubt you've seen the vast amount of vitriol thrown at her on a regular basis by gender crits either.

I'm not going to link any of the vitriol because it's mindless and horrible, but she gets called "a traitor to women" and told she wants her daughter to be raped on a fairly regular basis by such people.

To understand Helen's actual position, I recommend people read this:

https://areomagazine.com/2017/09/27/an-argument-for-a-libera...

It's somewhat long and somewhat nuanced, which means most extreme activists at both ends of the argument hate it, but I'd claim that it is, overall, very much more pro-trans than otherwise and the majority of trans people I'm aware of who've read it came away with the same impression.
> The group of European marketing firms said the pop-up warning and the limited ability to customize it still carries “a high risk of user refusal.”

It‘s somewhat odd to see this framed as a bad thing.
> This is beyond "an honest mistake" and it should have been caught by any of the (many) scans the bank orders for its websites. And the scan/report should have caught that. Who does their scans/reports? What is the scope of these scans? Who reviews these reports?

It is partially baffling at least. We had to do a standalone website ad campaign for a bank (same level/recognition as barclays) once, some kind of rewards program where all you could do was browse what was possible to redeem your points for. No accounts, no cart, no integration whatsoever, it was basically a static site (with some user interactivity). We'd get scanned constantly and were always made aware of mistakes or issues, one of them being 3rd party resources.

On the other hand, I wasn't too impressed with their security scanning. Two issues had come up that made me dubious of what all good this actually did.

First was some kind of ssh vulnerability. We were using an older (but still supported) amazon linux ami. The ssh was actually patched but the version did not match what they wanted in the security tool's version. We had to get them to talk with AWS to ensure it was an actual patched version of ssh and the security scanning tool just wasnt accepting it as valid.

The other was some kind of javascript vulnerability in a library. There was an open cve on the library, an open issue on github, with comments on how to fix it, but the library itself wasn't being updated. I manually patched it and named it version x.y.z-patched or something. Report comes back that its still a vulnerability. I'm like what? Impossible I just patched it and tested it myself. The CVE no longer works. So I just renamed it to x-patched.y.z and poof, we pass validation.

This was my version time with vulnerability testing and I was kinda let down by it. I assumed they had people (or tools) actually trying to exploit the site like how I tested the patch for the javascript library prevented the CVE from working instead of just looking for version numbers and comparing to a list of known issues.
Ask HN: What are the best books for people new to CS?
I'm going to be an advisor for new students in our company (we pay for their degree and provide on-the-job training during their semester breaks) and want to put together a little "welcome packet" to start them off on the right track. Most of them come straight from high school and have never done any CS or programming beyond school classes, so I thought it would be nice to include a book to introduce them to some basic principles and prime them for what they're going to be learning and working with in the following years.

Back when I started studying CS, I read "Code" by Charles Petzold which I really enjoyed and would be perfect for this purpose thematically, but I feel that at ~400 pages it might be just a little too lengthy. What are some reads you would recommend to beginners?
see also https://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/tag/statistics/ for Haldane, “The Faking of Genetical Results“, Eureka #6

"But I shouldn’t worry too much about the higher orders. The only examiner who is likely to spot that you haven’t done them is Haldane, and he’ll probably be interned as a Red before you send your thesis in."
"using as a CDN" implies a deliberate choice to me. Why not "because it was a convenient way for their developer to include it"? You don't know why. A lot of web developers don't know what CDNs are for too.
I don't think so. Nuclear fusion releases tons of neutron radiation; neutron radiation induces radioactivity in things it hits. It's a common misconception that a fusion power plant wouldn't create radioactive waste; in truth the neutron radiation would turn the reactor itself into radioactive waste. One of the hard engineering problems of fusion power is creating a reactor that can be serviced using robotics since it would be too dangerous for humans technicians.

If you used a pure fusion bomb to dig out a harbor, much of the the rock and soil the bomb threw into the air would be radioactive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation
https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/ for quick table->map creation.
Any chance you could provide a brief overview of what you think makes this different? I've meditated with a few different secular and Buddhist groups and retreats and was wondering how this approach might differ.
Looking for recommendations for an online course in data visualization
Heads up for anyone using HTTPS Everywhere on openculture.com: you'll just get a "Forbidden" page.