skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm wary of social hypotheses that place an irrefutable / indefensible burden on "me" (well, actually, on anybody), especially if the only reason is by association because of correlations with arbitrary traits.

I can very well admit that some cultures (in a very broad sense of the term) have agressive characteristics perceived by people used to others and, to the extend the advantages are greater than potential drawbacks (which are often not even present or can be short term, granted), try to be careful about that in hopefully a benevolent way. Also, people classified as privileged might also perceive tons of things as aggressive against them, and mere injunctions to stop or act as if not in all regard, are not productive -- it does not really matter who is "wrong" or "right" if an action is de-facto antagonizing and polarizing over and over (well, from an individual ethic pov it does matter very much, but from an outcome that's debatable...), unless you are ready to escalate, and that seems a terrible idea.

So I don't believe people with characteristic X or Y shall be approached all the time as if they are a mean representative of their "group" and shall as a result apply a parody of Bayesianism blind to all other traits, and blind to individual variance, and blind to the knowledge of themselves.

I don't see why, from time to time, there would not be people who are "true" about things they won't even say, but that does not seem a very powerful thing to act upon. I just don't know what to do with that, and especially I'm not sure I understand where to go from that to the conclusion.

Some intelligent people think X and other intelligent people not X?

Yes, that happens. Very often. Extremely often.

But is there even an absolute truth when "cancel culture" is concerned, and what even is the precise definition? The wording is typically used to talk about things believed excessive. For example it's one thing being associated with Epstein and people not wanting to work with you anymore; it's another thing to be fired because you told a silly joke to a friend during a conference, and a third party ears it.

Absolute truth in social subjects is rarely to be seen, especially when we talk about blurry concepts.

(edit: typos)
Tesla's mistake there was not making it clear that was a "brand name"/"trade mark" rather than a description. If everywhere they were very careful in all their marketing with something like Tesla™ Autopilot® Cruise Control System style branding, they'd be in less hot water. "We call it Autopilot® because that is our registered brand mark, not because that is a complete and accurate description of its capabilities."
Always post your opinions anonymously on Internet. Nobody wants you to succeed.
> how is that comparable to killing and dismembering a human being

It's comparable because it happened in France? :)
You can combine the shopname with a salt and store it in your password manager.
But the only people reading 100-year-old articles will be historians who can/should track down those references.
TXR Lisp:

This is the TXR Lisp interactive listener of TXR 240.
Quit with :quit or Ctrl-D on empty line. Ctrl-X ? for cheatsheet.
1> (defun filter-using-exceptions(list)
(build ;; build macro: implicit, procedural list building
(each ((item list))
(catch (throw 'keep-it? item)
(yes () (add item))
(no ())))))
filter-using-exceptions
2> (handle (filter-using-exceptions (range 1 10))
(keep-it? (item) (if (evenp item) (throw 'yes) (throw 'no))))
(2 4 6 8 10)

Variation:

3> (defun filter-using-exceptions (list)
(build
(each ((item list))
(catch (throw 'keep-it? item)
(yes () (add item))
(no ())
(substitute (this) (add this))))))
filter-using-exceptions
4> (handle (filter-using-exceptions (range 1 10))
(keep-it? (item)
(cond
((< item 5) (throw 'yes))
((= item 5) (throw 'substitute 42))
(t (throw 'no)))))
(1 2 3 4 42)

An exception handling system in which exceptions throwing does not unwind can do thing similar to generators or continuations, but without any of the implementation complexities and overhead. Plus the flexibilities of the exception type system: handlers found by subclass matching, and the potential for a handler to examine and decline exceptions so it can go on to match another handler.

In TXR, I simplified the concept by eliminating the duality of conditions and restarts. There are only exceptions. catch frames take an exception with unwinding. handle frames take an exception without unwinding (they can potentially decline it after looking at it). In the above example, keep-it? is an exception and so are yes, no and substitute.

So, why would you do the above instead of just, say:

5> (mappend (lambda (item)
(cond
((< item 5) (list item))
((= item 5) (list 42))
(t nil)))
(range 1 10))
(1 2 3 4 42)

You almost certainly wouldn't; it's just an illustration. There is a relationship between the two in that the mappend is an incomplete specification of a behavior which requires a function to be specified by the caller.

In the exception example, that is happening also: a function is required from the caller to complete the behavior. But that function isn't passed as a parameter; it is dynamically bound as a handler which is labeled by an exception symbol. The function doesn't simply return a value, but chooses from a menu of restart points.

That points to a whole different set of ways of organizing the code, and options for extending and maintaining it.
It seemed like this one area was a definite plus for the rewrite in Rust. I recently added some OpenMP goodness to some C++ code. Making the loops run parallel was almost trivial. The challenge was going over a couple thousand lines of code checking for safety. There were data structures being created and shared in various was but the code was written in a very functional style so it worked in the end. With Rust, all that analysis is done by the compiler. So for that code migrating to Rust is probably a good idea.
"Its ok to be white"
Talking with Chinese expats in America, one that really sticks out for me is:

Despite massive economic backslide under Mao, China would not have industrialized without him. I've heard people who are otherwise very critical of Mao say this, seems ubiquitous. The American perspective of course is that Mao was only a negative and stunted Chinese growth. I think the idea is that land owners were overly conservative with capital investment and Taiwanese/Hong Kong growth is explained by foreign investment that Republican China would not have received.

And not as ubiquitous but several have said that the Japanese military is a major threat to China, which seems absurd. Haven't gotten a real justification for this other than "they make good technology", like they're secretly developing a Gundam.
Paul Graham has written about this dynamic in Keep your identity small: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
I don't even play LoL and I still think of Riot = Riot Games.

I'm willing to bet that was also a factor in their name change. In fact, a quick Google search for Riot brings up Riot games as the first result and the wikipedia entry for them appears on the side bar. So I'm guessing this was the case for the vast majority of Americans.
That's the most annoying thing. Usually when I get notifications from monitoring about some issue, the first thing I do is check the vendor or provider's status page to see whether it's an issue on their end. If there's nothing, I go and investigate.

Recently, more and more of them take 10-15 minutes until they mention a service outage. I don't work in super HA, I don't want to get an alarm because a single ping failed etc, so I'm lenient and have a few minutes of a delay in alarms. If I'm writing an internal incident report before the official status page is updated, that's bad.

This seems similar: external users noticing the outage and posting on HN before GitHub notices & acknowledges it.
I don't know if you've ever read a history book, but humans have been pretty viciously murdering each other for just about all of forever. Along with torturing, raping, pillaging... you get the idea.

Whatever bubble you live in, don't forget we're animals.
Google is promoting Flutter on it's search ads, but why?
DTEN is the company actually making it and their site lists some specs. 1080p screen, runs "DTEN OS" which I assume is some sort of custom Linux distro, 100mbps ethernet, AC wifi, has an HDMI input, weighs 14lb.
It's comparable because usually you don't get these kinds of violent reactions when you disrupt a market
Never mind where the blurry line might be. Can we just get a bare minimum working as expected? Going incognito in google maps shouldn't then bombard me with notifications to rate the places I've been to, let alone send me smug emails listing my recent history!
It's a shame that these LEDs aren't exposed to the OS so you can control them in software; so the firmware turns them on by default to indicate power, but then once the operating system loads it is able to turn them off if necessary.
That is not a list that provides examples of truths being cancelled.
Right, good point. It is a quality of uniqueness for searchability and marketability. On top of my head I can only think of a couple of counterexamples: Windows and Messenger, but your point is still very valid.

I guess in practice, for search purposes, we will see some kind of suffix attached to the name, Element Chat or similar.
> "everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I won't even think about it anymore"

I would like to quote pg's own rhetoric of "is my situation unique?":

> And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.

I suspect that many people, myself among them, think "everyone seems to disagree with me on this, so I am likely to be wrong." Otherwise I am forced to believe that I am the only person who can see things correctly, a mindset that is at least statistically false, even if it might very occasionally apply to a particular person. This response I think naturally worries a lot of people, since it sounds awfully close to silencing dissent, but there are two things that I think make it meaningfully different.

1. If everyone disagrees with you about your scientific, or otherwise verifiable, ideas, then you definitely should not say "oh well, I must be wrong." You should test those ideas. The risk (failed investment in a test whose outcome was widely predicted) and reward (being the scientific or other leader in a discovery that upends expectations) here are both high, and many parts of science, at least, are set up to reward individuals who decide to make that trade.

2. There is a difference between my saying "everyone disagrees with me, so I am likely to be wrong", which I think is a good thing, and my saying "everyone disagrees with me, so I am wrong", which I think is a bad thing. Experiencing widespread disagreement should make me carefully examine my assumptions and biases, not just import opposite assumptions and biases.
Torx, Philips, whatever, we can all agree that they're both 10x better than Allen-head screws.
I was under the impression they had a 30-day return guarantee, no questions asked?

The effect depends a lot on the specific color deficiency each person has.
For a phatic ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression ) greeting like this, you're pretty much safe to respond with any other phatic greeting. These phrases just serve as verbal handshakes of acknowledgement, and don't need to be interpreted literally.
The economics tend to be different for most hobbyist pilots since they rent instead of owning a plane. But if you own a plane, my impression from talking to a few amateurs is that it's closer to an RV than to a boat. You need to get the plane inspected and serviced fairly frequently, but sitting in a hangar doesn't place a toll on a plane quite like sitting in water does for a boat. And planes, by virtue of being able to fly, can be stored in cheap hangers in the middle of nowhere. People love living on the coast, so marinas tend to sit on expensive real estate.
Due to my experience you are in a very lucky position if there are too many good ideas popping up in your team. Of course, you also have to manage them and do some prioritization, in the best case together we the team to get the buy in and to find the most promising projects you want to work on. Maybe you also have to align them with company goals but so far, I haven't encountered a situation when ideas were impeding the business.

Have you already encountered such a situation?
This is an interesting article. I have often wondered if there would be benefits to porting scientific simulation codes to more modern languages. In the end I've always reluctantly stayed in C or Fortran for scientific simulations. The article touched on the some of the issues (and the ever present issue of "If it isn't broke, don't fix it"). But I do think that the article ignored what I think is the biggest issue.

To me the biggest issue is that some simulations just need to run on 1000s or hundreds of 1000s of cores, and the primary technology that lets this happen is MPI (Message Passing Interface). I've been writing new Fortran code only because I want the simulation to be able to scale to this kind of size. The issue is that MPI only has official bindings for C and Fortran, so the only real choice I have is to keep programing in C or Fortran if I want to use MPI.

Any thoughts on this? Personally I would love to move towards more modern languages but without the proper libraries it is still a tough decision.
While I'm sure there were elements of communications and observation in the widespread move towards open plan offices, I think it's very likely that real estate costs were at least an equally significant driver.

I had the pleasure to work in a genuine had-a-door office environment from 1997 through 2002. It was amazing for focus, productivity, and I found our employee communications to be generally excellent as well. I'm sure it was also stratospherically expensive on a per-dev basis, but probably still a rounding error relative to our compensation.

I hate open-plan offices. Deeply. I also see my overall "building occupancy charges" every month and am acutely aware of the pressures to be frugal. (I think real-estate is the wrong place to do it, but I understand the bean-counting view which is very apparent and productivity of expensive employees is not readily apparent [in a dollars/cents way].)
There was a pretty good line about this in the John Adams dramatization from HBO:

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

(No idea what this website is, it was the first search result I found that had the quotation: https://livingforimprovement.com/two-powerful-life-lessons-f...)
> It's more selfish IMO to make yourself the arbiter of your unborn childrens' future

This is a pretty bizarre statement. If you had a pet dog, would you consider it immoral to not provide that dog with a mate, so they could flood the world with puppies?
When you say personal data, what do you include in that specifically?
1. Are you advocating for committing an act of war in response to this?

2. Jamal Khashoggi was similarly butchered and there's little doubt about the perpetrator's identity, yet we still trade with them and accept their VC money for our tech startups. I wouldn't hold my breath for a serious response unless the perpetrator turns out to be a government we already don't like.
> With Apple App Store, there is no alternative

There is google play store, huawei app gallery, amazon app store and so on.
I was seeing PRs failing to update & webhooks failing to trigger upon pushing code for 30 minutes before GH's status page acknowledged anything. I'm surprised they don't have monitoring in place that would catch webhooks failing within minutes of the failure beginning.
It's nicely specced, but the fact that it's limited to a single service, Zoom, makes it unappealing to me, especially since I almost never use Zoom (we did some family virtual gatherings over Zoom for my kids' birthday and another family virtual happy hour). School meetings have all been Google hangouts (which we ended up moving to an old MacBook so we could use a Chrome plugin to get grid view instead of the default Google setup) and work meetings have all been WebEx with the only video being when someone shares their screens (I moved to a new team on June and I have no idea what any of my team members look like except for one person who put their picture in their WebEx profile so her face pops up when she speaks in a meeting when no one is sharing their screen).
America Should Prepare for a Double Pandemic
Probability and Computing by mitzenmacher is a very good book
Are you certain that people believe that, or is that a straw man idea that you are characterizing them as believing?
Being unfamiliar with ML work, when does it make sense to build one of these vs spinning up some instances on AWS or gcloud?
I didn't realize Twitter and Reddit were suppressing discussion of the blueLeaks data.

It's an interesting position to take. If you can discussion of all leaked data dumps do you draw the line when it is about state actors?

Can you discuss Equifax hack, that is about personal information as well, but was done by state actors?
If the COVID crisis has highlighted anything, it's that science literacy in the US is so bad that nobody really debates issues of science, they grab the label and bludgeon people with it.

What I find really distasteful is when people start with an argument like yours, then use it to argue their pet issue. eg to rail against the central dogma of genetics, the impossibility of evolution, or complain about "reproducibility/observability" and try to tear down whole areas of scientific research.
For me, purpose comes from my impact on other people. Is it positive? Does my existence lower the suffering of others?
I don't think purpose should be comparative.

I'm not very familiar with Buddhism so I appreciate you sharing. For philosophy, I tend to look more at Stoicism. What I take away from Stoicism as it relates to purpose, is that how you live your life is more important than the things you accomplish. Living a virtuous life can be a purpose onto itself.
Sure, because the populace had more power than they thought, and they organised. It didn't matter how rich the aristocracy were, they couldn't buy enough loyalty to defend themselves. Down the line you probably will be able to buy a robot army, and robots aren't squishy.
A comment telling us that this type of murder is more common in the culture where the victim comes from than the culture local to where he was murdered without passing value judgement hardly seems like flame bait to me.
Including address and phone number? Doesn't that also enable public workers to be target of harassment?
> the assumption behind this very essay is that there is such a thing as a rigid, singular concept of "truth"

I don't think that assumption is required by the essay. It says that people with orthodox privilege believe that anything outside their orthodoxy must be untrue. So it merely claims that certain people believe (often falsely) that they can conclude something is untrue because it's unorthodox. A crisp universal definition of truth isn't necessary for them to believe this.
Why would demand for labor go up in a society with a shrinking population? Both the labor market and the consumer market draw from the general population - so I would think that a shrinking population would cause both to decrease. The net per capita effect would be for things to stay the same.
Join the Freedom of speech movement on Ruqqus
Ruqqus is a Reddit clone that has simple rules. Most of the speech is protected by the first amendment. With these exceptions:

Fighting words (i.e. incitement to violence)
Advocacy of imminent lawless behavior
Threats and intimidation
Fraudulent misrepresentation
Defamation (Negative and harmful remarks about someone else which the speaker knows to be factually untrue)
Additionally, there are legal restrictions on certain specific types of speech. Examples of these restrictions include (but are not limited to):

Pornographic material may not be distributed to minors.
Copyrighted works may not be distributed without the permission of the copyright owner.
Weapon design information may not be exported to certain countries
Courts may issue a non-disclosure order ("gag order") to participants in a legal proceeding, preventing the participants from discussing the proceeding publicly.
Or worse, if you hold idea X, Y, or Z, then you're a racist. See this: https://twitter.com/byronyork/status/1283372233730203651?s=2...

"The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more."Oh, and emphasis on scientific methods.

So, for the sake of identity, let's attack modern civilization. This. Is. Fucking. Insane.
Ann Druyan, Sagan’s wife, responded to this article with the following:

> Lepore has done history and science, your readers, and my late husband, Carl Sagan, a great disservice. Her article’s central thesis demeans Carl’s scientific acumen and his character, wrongly asserting that, in his “grandiosity,” he harmed the environmental movement by advancing an exaggerated theory of the long-term consequences of nuclear war.

> From Lepore’s account, readers would conclude that Carl’s interest in the greenhouse effect on Venus was something that he picked up from a bright grad student. In fact, five years earlier, Carl had published his own dissertation, viewed as the beginning of our modern understanding of Venus, which included his groundbreaking greenhouse model.

> Lepore also gives the impression that the theory of nuclear winter has been debunked. If anything, more recent scientific research indicates that Carl and his colleagues were conservative in their estimates. Tellingly, she makes no reference to the findings—in peer-reviewed, refereed publications—that fully support, and expand on, the models created by Carl and the other nuclear-winter scientists.

> Carl is also faulted for “partisanship,” in part for declining an invitation to dine with the Reagans in the White House—a choice that I made, in response to the El Mozote massacre and other crimes in Central America for which I believed Reagan bore some responsibility. Does Lepore find those public figures and celebrities who refuse to be co-opted by the Trump White House to be partisan? Or is that an unwillingness to lend your cachet to policies that you abhor?

> According to Lepore, Sagan “made some poor decisions” and “undermined environmental science.” She leaves the reader to wonder what those bad decisions were. Fighting for the reduction of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons? Sounding the alarm on global warming decades before others started paying attention to it? Mounting the world’s most successful campaign for public scientific literacy? Attracting multitudes to science and reason? Turning the camera on Voyager 1, which was out by Neptune, to point homeward, to make us see our true circumstances in the vastness? What better decisions have other people made?

> Ann Druyan

> Ithaca, N.Y.

—https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/letters-from-t...
And every startup says it's revolutionizing the world even if all it does is sell overpriced pizza. Welcome to marketing.

I don't think there is any new condo in NYC that doesn't advertise itself as luxury. So if you want modern features such as insulation, central cooling, heating that doesn't require open windows in the winter then your options are all luxury units.
The terms "glove", "mask" and "suitcase" don't appear in the linked article.