skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good one. She’s still a TERF.

The biggest problem with JK Rowling is nobody asked her.

Nobody ever asked her what her opinion was of trans people.

She literally, out of nowhere, started blasting out her opinions about a group of people that have nothing to do with her. Nobody provoked her. She just started with occasional retweets, graduated to tweets, and now writes whole essays about the subject.

Being calm and well-reasoned and doing some research isn’t really an excuse. A lot of people who have opinions that harm other people based on their race or identity can come up with research and sound educated, or even be educated.

People make racist arguments about Black people in America based on things like crime statistics, and they even sound educated and intelligent while doing so.

In my view, all the research she cites is used as a retroactive justification for her underlying and unjustified fear of trans people. The evidence of that is that she talked about being a sexual assault survivor in her anti-trans manifesto. Again, not related to being trans, just TERF bathroom fear rhetoric.

Rejecting her bullshit is not an example society of going off the deep end into some oppressive world that rejects well-reasoned debate. She’s not being oppressed by the government or censored. We are all free to call her what we believe she is: a TERF who won’t shut the fuck up about trans people who have nothing to do with her and her privileged billionaire life.

(And as a disclosure, I have read her entire essay, the first one she posted a few weeks back. I read that whole stupid thing. I’m not speaking out of ignorance on the subject. You really can’t argue with her because you’d be arguing with someone who isn’t speaking in good faith.)
For some more digging, here is a list of S.E.C. registered companies loosely matched to the dataset using the company name: https://pppreport.org/sec.php

-list contains any company with a ticker [current/previous OTC stock or other]

-likely to contain many false associations, but still full of surprises

$NTN, $6.3m Market Cap
$TRNF, $22m Market Cap
$FAT, $40m Market Cap
each received 1-2 million in PPP
This is why there are population surveys of criminal victimization. See table 12 on page 12. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf
Or how can a nation created on the principle of self-determination declare itself indivisible?
While you're here, can I ask: the integricloud main website says:

> with our fully redundant power systems, uptimes generally exceed 99.999% with overall availability typically at or above 99.9%

Do you have an SLA or other uptime guarantee?
MacGyver Feelings
The Road to Openpilot 1.0
Non-paywall:

https://www-ft-com.ezproxy.babson.edu/content/bcebd77c-057b-...
I love it. At least, the idea, without having tried it yet. The moment you support Office365 calendars, you can have all my money.
Loopholes are so maddening. We need to ensure full lifecycle consideration for all consumer products. If it doesn't decompose within N years, the manufacturer needs to have a recycling solution. The current situation has the free market degrading our public environment for private profit. As you note, why should a 1mm bag be banned but a 2mm bag be ok?
I presently don't use LinkedIn at all, but am thinking of joining it just to create an anti-necktie group and see what sort of people I can collect together. Profile picture with necktie = no membership. 85% for fun, 15% serious.
I downvoted it because I thought it was a low effort joke, and I wanted the comments to focus on the concept rather than the name. Also, I thought you were suggesting "totally gross binary" as a general replacement for the established term "fat binary", and it didn't seem like a good idea. I treated Super Duper as just a sarcastic title for a blog post, and don't think it's actually any better. Apologies if I misunderstood your intent.
Indeed, for what are classes and functions but specific kinds of macro (roughly speaking); or, macros and classes as special kinds of functions..

I'd include overloading operators in that list. It can be convenient, but comes at a cost to newcomers to the codebase.

I suppose any kind of shortcut or abbreviation carries this risk, to increase the cognitive load of the reader - things they have to remember and mentally substitute the shortcuts until they become second nature.

(Oh, right, what we call "shortcut" and "indirection" are both examples of abstraction, its value and cost.)
Above is one of the many reasons I prefer defclass to defstruct. Defclass doesn't do this ridiculous nonsense.
Nope. Volume varies with the cube of the length. A 1:60 scale model only takes up 1/216,000 the space of the original.
thanks for this great post. I was wondering how does the Tech community in Nigeria feel about the renaming of Tech jargon as currently implemented by Githab, Redhat, Twitter and others (links below). Do you think this is something companies should be doing? It seems like a cheap shot to me personally and it would be cool to get your opinion on this in a future post on your blog.

thanks!

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/03/tech/twitter-jpmorgan-sla...

https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially...

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article243876977....

https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-dropping-coding-term...
Stairway to Gilligan's Island
No one said it had to do with AI. The point being made above is that while you and me may dislike Pinterest, the data may be showing that to most users, it's actually very valuable.

If anything, ML would be able to detect my and your use cases and intelligently hide Pinterest for us while hiding it for others. So chances are they aren't using ML yet which is why it's just favoring the majority rather than us (the minority).
> I'd like to see a return of paper bags. That technology is very ecologically friendly.

How? Random search turned up

>According to the previously cited U.K. study, it takes three reuses of a paper bag to neutralize its environmental impact, relative to plastic. A bag’s impact is more than just its associated carbon emissions: Manufacturing a paper bag requires about four times as much water as a plastic bag. Additionally, the fertilizers and other chemicals used in tree farming and paper manufacturing contribute to acid rain and eutrophication of waterways at higher rates.

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable

I guess you can argue that paper bags are compostable, but I'm not sure whether that matters much. Plastic bags that are sitting in the landfill doesn't harm the environment, and their bulk is negligible due to how thin/light they are.
I think people are trainable but companies are loath to do do that. They hardly want to train people they’ve vetted and hired.

And yes, ignoring people from boot camps and other alternate learning systems is a problem.
I remain unconvinced that so many companies were on "thin ice" that a do nothing approach would have caused a collapse. Any evidence of this?

I would've been okay-ish with the arrangement if there was some narrow qualification criteria like being in the grocery business or medical supply chain, etc.

Fine dining restaurants: not essential
Summer camps: not essential
Non-profits: not essential
Law firms: not essential either!

And yet we paid them millions... _why?_

I picked a random company from the 150k list. A pizza place, around the corner. Been in business since 2007. They received $150,000-350,000. So a place deemed essential by the governor and that's permitted to operate curbside and takeout delivery after being open for 13 years is eligible for 150k? What kind of drugs are we on?
That seems closed. I just came across this ... https://ncase.me/loopy/ definitely looks fun!
This! I once was in a car accident and wanted to record the conversation, I started recording, locked phone and put it into my pocket. camera app stopped recording when screen was locked, edge case but really unexpected one for me.

Web browser shouldn't be doing it tho.
I think you are not addressing the point, which the GP tried to make. It's not about teaching or not teaching, but about the time when stuff is taught. Surely all these things have their time and place. Perhaps there are gentler introductions to some of these topics available?
You don't need IQ test results. The SAT measures actual performance at solving math problems.

https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/sat-percentile...
IDK about Dune 2, but Dune 2000 has a ton of expansions/mods on the moddb.

On that note, there was an official reboot to C&C released last month.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer_Remastered...
Modules have nothing to do with comparable structs. It's just that making a comparable struct uncomparable could break users of your API, so it's something to be on the lookout for if you value backcompat. (The module system ensures that users will get the version of the code they want; you only have to worry about backwards compatibility if you expect users to upgrade to your new version.)

There are millions of ways to break users with an update that machines can't detect. For example:

Old version:

func Lt(a, b YourType) bool { return a < b }

New version:

func Lt(a, b YourType) bool { return a >= b }

This is not specific to Go.
You have to look at the excess deaths figures. That is, how many usually dies from January to June in a normal year and compare that to how many extra that died in 2020. For Sweden the excess deaths almost exactly matches the number of Covid deaths, give or take 10%.

That is not the case for many other countries. For example, the UK had almost twice the number of excess deaths as Covid deaths in a few weeks in April. That indicates that Covid deaths were under reported in the UK. There are also some indications that Covid deaths have been under reported in other countries.

In other words, comparing countries by their Covid deaths/capita rates is meaningless. The statistics are likely completely wrong because different countries use different definitions of "Covid deaths" and different reporting procedures.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2020/may/29...
It's not as much of an edge case; spare (particularly, old) phones and tablets are used as DIY home security systems, baby monitors, etc.
That’s interesting, I wasn’t aware that was a thing. Thanks for sharing
To be frank the only hubris I see is from the critics who complain about YouTube that it "shouldn't be that big" and that "big tech is ruining society and democracy".

The critics think that they know better than society and impose demands not codified in any law nor how things remotely work. How the hell should YouTube have decided to keep its size acceptably small then? Youtubes 1 to 99999 and hope people go to the right arbitrary subsegment? The demanda are arrogant and clueless as saying that builders should only use rubber headed hammers and nailguns should be banned because it would reduce construction noise knowing nothing about the field or its practicalities. Now /that/ is hubris.
Neural Network Learns Physical Graph Representations from Video
Please try your luck with Quillette[1] - it's a dissident media magazine, not only open for, but indeed interested in, publishing articles that go against the popular narrative.

--

[1] https://quillette.com/about/ the "How can you pitch an article?" question
Would you be happy if a math teacher teaches you that 2 + 2 is cultural and fro western imperialism?
How many ancestors you have it just a function of how many generations you look back, and with each successive generations it doubles. At some point in the past, the entire world is your ancestor.

https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/all-europeans-are-relate...
Most countries/cities I have seen where free single-use plastic bags are banned people bring their own bags, as the "reusable" are too costly over time to use only once all the time.
What kind of person can block video titled "Dune : il faut sauver la planète des sables | Retrogaming Made in France | ARTE" from being viewed in certain countries?!
That's exactly why I like the link I posted. It tries to provide context on how many people die with covid, flu, pneumonia, or some combination of the 3.

Then more importantly, it looks at the overall death rate. Because even if you completely ignore the covid count, the fact that there are so many more people dying than normal should grab people's attention.
There's a couple of points to be made to that.

First, we should be extending our hardware numerics to support the extended real number line, inclusive of infinity, in a way which causes a lot of these exceptions to disappear. Division by zero should result in an inf, not an exception or NaN.

Second, those exceptions which can't be eliminated DO need to be handled anyway. To say "but then we'd have to handle a bunch of exceptional cases everywhere!" is exactly the point. They do need to be handled.

Finally, language and compiler improvements can make handling exceptional cases easier. E.g. let numerical methods specify domain and range requirements and have these be compiler-enforced. Then the implementation is freed from handling exceptional conditions that only arise with inputs outside of its declared domain.
Show HN: Social network with no ads, no tracking, no likes, no contact spam
I'd prefer the article to be more upfront about "racial diversity" being "what % are Black", and not "what % are Black, Latino, Asian, etc". Billing Black %, though important, as racial diversity erases all other non-Caucasian groups.
This is what was happening in Italy:

"The figures are questionable

Angelo Borrelli, the head of Civil Protection, who announces the latest figures every day at 6 p.m., said Saturday night that the 793 new deaths have been caused “by and with” the coronavirus. “We count all the dead, we make no distinction between with and by the coronavirus.” However, one wonders whether these daily figures reflect the situation correctly. The dead are said to have almost all had one or more other diseases, which leaves a question mark as to exactly how deadly the coronavirus is. At the same time, it has become clear that a large number of people who die at home (which is often a retirement home) do not undergo a coronavirus test."

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/03/22/als-italie-het-voorland...

"On Friday, April 24, 2020, Vittorio Sgarbi, a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, denounced what he claims are false coronavirus death statistics. Sgarbi feels that fake statistics are being propagated by the government and the media to terrorize the citizens of Italy and establish a dictatorship.

The member of the Forza Italia party slammed the closure of 60% of Italian businesses for 25,000 Chinese-Coronavirus deaths from the floor of the legislature. “It’s not true,” he said. “Don’t use the deaths for rhetoric and terrorism.” According to the National Institute of Health, 96.3% did not die of coronavirus, but of other pathologies stated Sgarbi – which means that only 925 have died from the virus and 24,075 have died of other things claimed Sgarbi, “….the virus was little more than an influenza. Don’t lie! Tell the truth!”"

https://rairfoundation.com/italian-leader-slams-false-corona...
Interesting how so many of these problems are probably hard for a fraction of the people that want to pass this exam simply because of the language in which they are expressed.

For example, and I've noticed this pattern with some regularity: large and complex expression in a paper or some other document. Actual implementation: one or more for loops with an add or a multiply in the body of the loop with some initialization. I get it that mathematical notation is nice and compact and a quick way to communicate an idea but pseudo code would quite often be more clear.

The same for a lot of the other terminology used in the questions. How much of studying in order to pass an exam like this is simply to cram the definition for a large number of terms?
Ireland and the UK wrap all the Fruit and Veggies in more plastic than I've seen anywhere else. It's probably the biggest contributor to our waste stream in my house.
Just fyi, it's "cue" not "queue". As in "stage cues".
Looking forward to having this in Outlook 365!
For an alternative point of view, I write lisp for my day job and would not approve any code that just shoved a bunch of unrelated data in a list. Thinking about the destructuring code, especially if you don’t have access to pattern matching, is enough to give me a headache. You know that‘s not going to be documented, and if it is, people won’t be able to find the documentation. Just use records; every lisp has records, and it’s the point of records, and it’s not any less “elegant” or “beautiful” or “lispy” or whatever to have named fields and nice printing and accessors for free.

The one exception I can think of is procedures with variadic arguments.
I read this book before I learned to drive... it taught me more about computer basics (e.g. how the address and data bus work) than University did many years later!
One thing that I find absolutely bonkers, is that the Whole Earth Catalogue website, http://www.wholeearth.com is broken and nothing has been done to fix it.
Open Position: Analytics Manager [pdf]
I contend it didn’t strengthen the employees’ bargaining power, for the reasons I stated above. Unconditional cash would have.

The powers that be know that loans obligations have been made that can only be satisfied if labor costs remain contained. Their primary objective is to make sure the mortgages keep getting paid, and paying employees double would endanger that.

An easy illustration is the fact that “essential” employees at much higher risk of getting the virus are getting paid with their old near minimum wage per hour jobs with signs that say “heroes work here”, and their management bosses are working safely at home with minimal risk of covid earning the same pay.

White collar employees continue to earn higher salaries from the safety of their home, and “hero” janitors and housekeepers are getting the same $10 to $15 they received as before, except they get to deal with higher chances of coronavirus.
WindowSwap: Open a new window somewhere in the world
No. It refers to a supposed part of the process of joining the Freemasons. The members of the lodge vote anonymously whether to accept a prospective member by depositing a white or black ball into a closed box, with the black ball representing a “no” vote. So “blackballed” refers to some exclusive group excluding outsiders.

I’m not a Mason so I don’t know if this factual, but that’s the idea.

Of course, someone could be blackballed because they are black—if a particular Masonic lodge had racist members—but it’s not inherent to the concept.
While some terms can be improved or neutralized, it’s also true that people in Africa like any other place, are also afraid of the dark. It’s part of the human experience. And lack of light or darkness is one ingredient in how or why people perceive things in particular ways.
You wouldn't know if companies you don't work for are having financial problems. Most of the time you don't know even when working there until it all crashes down.

These loans don't cause unemployment. Those same people would be unemployed even if those same businesses didn't apply for the loan.

We are only a few months into a multi year pandemic, so even if a company isn't suffering yet, they most likely will be soon. Getting a loan while it is available to preserve jobs as long as possible as the pandemic gets worse sounds like a sensible and ethical thing to do.
> Teams has fared so poorly that the company is going to re-introduce the software next week -- with some Zoom meetings (uh, don't we already own Skype FOR BUSINESSSSSS?)

Teams entirely replaces Skype for Business when you actually turn functionality on. The real WTF is why you'd use Zoom instead of Teams itself for a Webinar to explain how Teams works or Streams (the "Business YouTube-like" in O365/MS365), unless they aren't confident they actually turned on all the Skype for Business replacement features correctly.

I agree that the fact that Microsoft leaves so many "core" parts of the application able to be turned off by over-zealous IT micromanagers (often at the behest of over-conservative corporate lawyers, yes) really does not help at all, and leaves too many companies just shooting themselves in the foot and wondering why their foot hurts so much when they use the software they way they've configured it.
I stayed near Shiodome some time ago and came by this while it was moving by luck. Stood there in awe for several minutes while the show was on (it starts moving a few minutes before the hour when the clock is supposed to 'perform'). A very nice surprise to our trip.
> Lets set aside for a moment that the flat earth movement is actually a religious movement disguised as science-based.

Flat eartherism is probably 99% trolls masquerading as a movement.
Understanding asset prices (2013) [pdf]
Arguably, paper bags are "better" because they don't require petroleum to produce, and even if not reused can be burned in incinerators or plasma gasification waste disposal operations as part of the waste stream. If landfilled, any breakdown byproducts (biogas) are going to be captured and burned off (either flared, or the new hotness, burned for electricity). Trees sourced for wood pulp can be grown without fertilizer, and water is a renewable resource.

Failing all of the above, it is unlikely used paper bags end up on barges destined for the developing world for recycling, only to be dumped into the ocean.
> The CDC does not know if vaccines cause autism, they only know (assuming they are telling us everything they know) that a causative relationship has not found.

No, they also no that the controlled-for-other-factors correlation that would indicate the possibility of causation has not been found outside of research that has been established as deliberately fraudulent.

And they know that there has been extensive research into the question because of the popularity of the fraudulent research cited for the opposite conclusion.

If there is a mechanism by which vaccines cause autism in some specific cases, they must also prevent autism that would otherwise manifest in other cases enough to mask the effect in aggregate.

In any case, the evidence-based rejection that vaccines cause a specific harm is not equivalent to propaganda that they are harmless.

The existence of the compensation program is an explicit acknowledgement that they are not harmless, as well as an easier route to compensation for games than exists for most drugs.
Yeah but they'll save your IP, OS, screen resolution, etc, so they have an extremely good chance of being able to reidentify you.
Eh, I think the way I described it was fine. These are loans. I don't know anyone who's had even a single dollar forgiven yet. As far as I know there has been no official "forgiveness".

What do you call a loan that you still owe? A loan. Once the forgiveness guidance is finalized and people are actually receiving it, then perhaps I will recharacterize my description.
Just a few that came up on my Google search (basically, most are turning various sheets into something else!):

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19902856

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21004039
I randomly happened upon this while traveling in Japan several years back. I didn't know anything about it when I came across it, so it was quite the treat. Honestly, the photos and videos don't do it justice.

Nonetheless, here's a video I took of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF0iYFvkrEU
The nation is pretty evenly divided so I wouldn't say that they go against the popular narrative, instead they go along with one of the two popular narratives.