skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since this is freshman-level "think, don't believe", here's an equally valid counterargument at roughly the same level.

In Heinrich's book "The Secret of our Success" on cumulative cultural evolution, he gives an example of pre-Columbus American cultures whose diet was based on bitter manioc (a.k.a. cassava).

Like the name suggests, in its raw form it's too bitter to eat, but these cultures evolved a set of traditions around the correct way to prepare it, and any deviation was taboo. The traditions involved pounding, scraping, straining and boiling the manioc over several days, most of the steps could only be performed by women (at least in the studied Tukanoa culture) and the women seem to have spend half their waking lives processing manioc.

So let's say you decide all the traditions are obviously bogus, do an experiment and find that just boling the thing for a couple of hours removes the bitter taste just as well.

The problem is the bitterness comes from cyanide, and boiling removes the taste but not the cyanide itself - something which the traditional process is really good at (Heinrich has studies and graphs to support this claim). Ten years later, you and the small pre-modern rationalist community you've founded are all in an advanced state of degeneration from cyanide poisoning.

The general principle here is called Chesterton's Fence (see the obvious wiki page for details), which is that if you come across a fence in a field and think it's stupid, make sure you really understand why it's there before you tear it down.

There are more examples like this in the book, such as a taboo in Polynesia on pregnant women consuming porpoises. It turns out that they do in fact contain chemical compounds that increase the risk of birth defects.

To quote a review in the now-deleted Slate Star Codex blog by Scott Alexander Ocasio-Cortez: "For basically all of history, using reason would get you killed."

My own view is that "don't take anything on faith ever" is as bad a life plan as "always follow traditions without question", and it's easy to think of lots of freshman philosophy level arguments why (your 5-year old is too young to properly understand electricity, would you want them to question your house rule against poking things in power sockets).

_P.S. it's become a kind of in-joke among SSC followers to invent a surname when they mention him now._
More sensationalism - this is possible anytime an illness causes fever, COVID isn’t special in this regard at all
Why is it at all interesting that you define open as merely viewable, while other people define open as also being usable? I see no pedantic correction here, merely an opinion on what one individual personally cares about. IE, you think visibilty is the important part. OK good for you. So what? That does not define open or correct any other definition of open.
Not at all. Twitter gave everyone access to bigger microphones, and one of the main benefits of this went to asshats who would have ordinarily been booed off the stage.

The fact that these people exist isn’t new. They’re ability to do what they do at scale and to such a large audience is.
This doesn’t actually change the hierarchy of commands, as evidenced by the fact the keyboard shortcuts stay constant. I appreciate hiding these first before Font, since I use Font more than Styles or Editing.
“I’m lovin’ it” or a jingle in the background would be enough for many brands without interrupting the call.

Clearly it would never be accepted though.
We're also seeing an increasing number of cases where high-profile experts are making high-profile claims that then fold in full public view; or experts that make contradictory claims, under which case: from the perspective of a non-expert, who's right?

Education is essential, and yet is not a panacea for thinking well. So when experts can't seem to give people a straight answer, they'll simply turn to their peer group and hope for the best. And right now, as you noted, peer groups primarily consist of highly self-selected social media groups.
Your comment basically boils down to 'how dare others request empathy'. I find that childish. How do you 'know' for a fact that their concerns are 'cheap gestures' or 'empty' or 'mockery'? And if you don't know this for sure, and accommodating is cheap, why not? Making a big deal of it strikes me as immature.
This underscores something that is going on with the COVID-19 pandemic. There are a lot of complaints about face-mask ordinances that claim there is no "hard science" to show that masks are effective, followed by some sort of statement that public policy should be "based on hard science".

For a lot of reasons, hard science isn't all it's cracked up to be, certainly not by the lay public, who seem to treat it as a "final, definitive word" on subjects. First of all, it gives a lot more credit to science than even scientists give. But most importantly, you don't need to know the mechanism of a problem if you have statistical evidence that your actions are having an impact. You might not even know it's the direct result of the actual action you're taking, it might be a knock-on effect from some other action people are taking in response to the mandated action.

But that doesn't matter. What matters is that lives are saved. You can figure out the mechanism later. In the meantime, do the superstitious sky-god dance. Especially when it's really not that big of an imposition.

We know for a fact that most places that have strict mask ordinances are seeing large reductions in infection rate. Some aren't, but that's actually not an argument for not wearing masks. Indeed, it's the exact opposite. While the "hard science" is supposedly unclear, you absolutely should still wear the mask, so that the confounding variables are easier to discover.
> I’d wager that you have a better chance of translating OCaml or non-fancy Haskell straight into Rust than you do C++.

I found that translating OCaml code to Rust is frustrating, because you cannot easily and cheaply replicate the functional approach. It's much more Rustic to take an object by mutable reference and modify it in-situ than it is to take an immutable reference and return a new object. The reason is that in OCaml, you have structural sharing, i.e., multiple pointers pointing into the same data structure, which is a big no-no in Rust, so if you want to replicate the functional OCaml code, you begin allocating a new, complete data structure every time, and that's costly.
> You can patch it all.

As I said, impractical, not a solution.

> If world does not match your view it may be you who is outlier.

Looking at the amount of software that does follow the base directory specification, actually you're the outlier insisting on obsolete conventions.

You and a bunch of other developers insist on those things, in reality that is the actually harmful behaviour for open-source.

Interestingly but yet non-surprisingly, that insistence very often goes in hand with the stubborness to stay on obsolete mailing lists, ugly user interfaces, insecurity by-default, git-email, buggy issue trackers, 80-column commit messages, obsolete security standards and practices and so much more.

> I quite like current convention - hidden files in $HOME belong to applications.

The future is now, home folders aren't to be filled with trash. Move on or stay behind, seriously.
> iOS does not offer auto fill for third party password managers

Yes, it does - see the section very literally titled "Integrate a Password Management App with Password AutoFill" at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_....

But again, many devs don't actually keep up with and/or look up the proper way to do things on the platform they're deploying on.

> and there is no unified service that Apple offers for web and desktop and works across OS and multiple browsers

Apple has a duty to its own software. Why exactly is the onus on Apple to offer a magical grand unified service instead of on third party software developers to actually take the time to study and use the appropriate tools on each platform they want to deploy on?

If you want things to be secure you generally have to put in the work for it. 1Password spends resources building & maintaining browser extensions to integrate directly with input fields - why doesn't your password manager of choice offer similar? As a developer one could use named and/or private clipboards to actually have control over when and how the data their users clip is accessed - why not do that over complaining that a shared, global buffer that applications can access programmatically by design is, while convenient, also not exactly the most secure way to transmit sensitive data?
Ada and Object Pascal also have it.
Financial markets as well.
Not at the moment. Would that be useful for you?
Before working from home, I used to set my alarm to two hours before work. I would shave, shower, brush my teeth, have a quick breakfast, then commute in.

Now I set my alarm for fifteen minutes before work. It's preferable for me if I go to bed early enough that I wake up with enough time for a shower, but if I don't I can take one after work (or during lunch). The only reason I need a whole fifteen minutes in the morning is that it takes a couple of minutes for me to log in my Mac and VPN in.

At work we have nice coffee machines with free coffee. I have coffee at home too but I am less tired in the morning. Not that costing a little prevents me from drinking coffee, it's more that it being free is an enticement to drinking it, as if I am missing one of my perks of the days at the office when I skip coffee. Also, I am getting less physical activity every week now, so I also avoid coffee for the calories, and go for water instead.
there have also been reports of nytimes.com, duckduckgo, and several other sites being blocked out of the blues by the DOT for a while.

Indian government's internet sites blocking rules and procedures are pretty opaque. Even Collegehumor.com is blocked in India for god knows what reasons.
Choice isn't free. It imposes costs on other teams and the company as a whole. Other teams need to deal with more idioms and performance patterns, need more libraries, need to operate a more heterogeneous network etc. The company itself faces higher costs for integrating data, higher difficulty in rotating engineers between teams, has more difficulty hiring, can't get cost efficiencies by investing in optimisation of fewer platforms and so on.

Engineering isn't art. It's engineering, a field where creativity and innovation works within economic, technical and moral constraints.
Astrofox – motion graphics program for turning music visualizations into videos
So many buzzwords. Is it candycoat sugar infused explode your brain type pop-psych drivel or more of an empty vacuous endless void pop-psych drivel style?
I used yahoo for a really long time but, predictably, they fixed their site about a decade late.
I think you’re correct here. The author assumes you have the starting knowledge out of undergrad (or ability to self teach) and everything in grad school is sorting and signaling.

My view of school is more nuanced. Both undergrad and grad have a mix of signaling, sorting and learning. Since the financial barrier to entry to solving math problems is low, the easy problems are solved. To solve the hard ones, you need several more years of post-undergrad coursework to get to the edges of the field, and several more being mentored on how to push the edges. It’s hard to get there without the more advanced guided tour that grad school provides.
Agree on the aspect of time. As we have progressed, we now have many levels of abstraction that it is hard to think deeply about the problem. Almost à la like a code that has grown too deep to understand every "bit" of it.
Moreover, I think people now work in teams rather than one individual thinking about the system holistically.
Yeah, that one seems reasonable to me too. I am somewhat cop-averse (at least in the US), but the justification for keeping the name are reasonable.
Why not make it unreasonable for employers to fire except for cause?

(I'm told that won't work in the sister post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802578 )
What I was trying to say was if you can't get .com, which is considered the "default" by many, it doesn't matter which of the other ones you get.
Yeah, CRDTs don't require keeping history of every change forever or at all. In other words, all the changes coming from a bad actor can be merged locally into a single change or a small set of changes or whatever is appropriate that will actually be propagated to other nodes. Plus nodes can easily know how far all of them have progressed and drop history before the most far behind point. Only during outages history should grow a bit more than usual.
There used to be a landline company that provided free calls in exchange for playing ads during the call.

EDIT: It took way too long for me to find details, sorry.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JiENVG...

Would you listen to a 15-second advertisement in order to make a free two-minute long-distance phone call?

BroadPoint Communications Inc. of Landover is betting that enough of you would, and is launching its service in Pittsburgh this week with "thousands" of subscribers. A Baltimore rollout could come this summer.

But before you bid good riddance to long-distance bills, be aware that -- surprise -- there are strings attached.

Before using BroadPoint's service, you'll have to register at the company's World Wide Web site and give up personal information, such as household income, number of children and ethnic background.

Once you've sent this information -- which BroadPoint says it will never sell to other companies -- the only thing separating you from unlimited free chat are a few ads, selected specifically for you based on your survey responses. For example, if you told BroadPoint that you have seven young children, don't be shocked to hear a diaper commercial.
Side note: The Knick was a great TV show about a hospital in the early 1900's before standard treatments for common conditions existed. If you liked this article, check out this show.
> James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google.

I'm not sure what your mean here, but this applies most readily to James himself. He posted the memo to larger and larger mailing lists until finally it spread.
I have my evidence that Lena is not harmful to women, at least to this woman. It’s one data point, but better than zero.

You are making a much stronger claim without evidence. How is Lena harmful? How many women did Lena drive out of CS?

Do you have some proof, some data, besides neo-Marxist crap such a intersectionalized mysoginistic oppression?

It reminds me of that video that showed that college students are outraged by stereotypical Mexican Halloween costumes, but actual Mexicans are fine with it.

Are you fighting for women, or for your ego?
I agree with the very general principle -- but in practice, this public list of all licensed amateur radio operators is about the least interesting (public) database I'm on.

Public records are a legitimate service.

I might even argue that any license issued by the government that gives individual citizens additional rights, should be publicly disclosed. Not necessarily all the details, but the existence of the grant of super-citizen rights.

Hairdressers, plumbers, property owners, drivers (caveat: DL for ID makes this tricky), gun owners, ...

Basically, if you have a special set of laws applied to you, I think it's reasonable for that to be public information.
I used to work at Discord. There's a reason virtually every Trust and Safety (the division that handles online harassment cases) Associate has a physical covering over their webcam.

Regardless of how bad actors are accessing these photos, its eminently obvious that people are getting webcam photos of them taken without their knowledge.
> If people get swayed away from an entire profession because of a few words, how can they have the mental capacity for constructive criticism?

First, you probably mean emotional capacity.

Second, very easily, especially if they have other lucrative and rewarding alternatives, which people with the mental capacity for software development probably do.

Having the capacity to deal with necessary unpleasantness to improve one’s quality of work doesn’t imply the lack of self-respect necessary to voluntary put up with completely unnecessary unpleasantness just to work in one of the very many fields one has the facilities to successfully perform in.

But thanks for bringing out the classic hazing defense.
The reason why people cut a cross in the base of Brussels sprouts is so they tough part cooks faster so the more delicate leaves don’t go soggy the evil spirits thing is just a nice story
So this is not what the article is about.

It discusses a new method to generate integer values according to an arbitrary probability distribution, using as input a uniform random generator. Whether the input generator is truly random, pseudorandom, cryptographically secure etc, is irrelevant: the output will presumably only be as random/secure as the input RNG.

Admittedly, the article does a poor job at explaining what the FLDR method is about, and it looks as biased as the method itself (sorry for the easy pun).
From my understanding of the paper [1], the method is better than the state-of-the-art Alias method [2] only when the entropy of the target distribution is low. When entropy is high, it performs similarly (or may even be a bit slower) but uses up to 8 times more memory space.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03830

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alias_method
Is the thesis of this article: "it's important not to consume media or accept popular opinions that trigger cognitive dissonance BECAUSE our preferences are often determined by arbitrary aspects of our environment, bolstered by post-hoc rationalization?" If so, that seems like the exact opposite of a good idea, because the dissonance is probably there because of the exact same arbitrary forces.

It also seems to imply that majority opinions are things to reject, rather than interrogate. It applies a sort of inherent "don't be a sheep" mentality, but if it's very cold outside then covering yourself in wool and keeping your calorie ingestion up might actually be the most reasonable way to stay warm.

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I think this realization leads to the need to challenge everything about your environment, accept the idea that different points of view exist, and carefully evaluate if ideas are good and truthful independently of their popularity. Implicitly siding with the minority opinion every time leaves you just as open to manipulation as trusting the majority every time, and we see both approaches used in many nation's politics.
Sure, but that's not intuition.
I feel like it’s leaving something out. Some major advance in RNGs is just based on padding the possibilities so they’re a power of two and throwing out the “padding possibilities” if they come up?
> If you find yourself saying things like "this database is ACID compliant", "we have an SQL database with transactions, so we're fine" or "let's just add replication to Postgres and we'll be fine", you need to read this book.

can you elaborate why? are these sentences fundamentally wrong? they dont appear so.
Their true goals I suppose being putting you in a scary gulag?
Made $45K in 2020, but the business is in trouble, losing the market share. Help
Hello everyone

First of all excuse my bad English as am not a native speaker. I learned a lot from this great community, but now I want to share my story and asking you for help :)

I’ve started a business in 2019 and it has been doing well until recently , but I see that the future is not doing well as I keep losing market share and a lot of new business getting into my space to compete.
Here’s a list of question that you might ask, I’ll answer it one by one.

I need your help in three things:
1-Increase the market share from %10 to %50 at least
2-Your feedback about the new business model. (See below)
3-How do I implement the new business model that I plan to make the business more efficient.

What is your business?
I sell question bank for multiple local exams in my country.
The website is doing something like https://www.pastest.com

What is the Market size?
I target 7 local exams (One exam is source of 90% of the sales)
Market size is tiny ( Max is about <5000 students/y)

Sales vs cost ?
In 2019 I made total 123K , total cost about $60k/y
This year as you can see $45K (%20 lower than same period of 2020) and the cost is $20K so far

Cost structure ?
I use Upwork to outsource content writing (They make practice questions from old test papers)

The issues?

Many student don't want to join they rather review the past papers themselfs via study groups in telegram. (%70 are studying for free via study groups)

I can’t increase the market share no matter what I tried as you can see since jan 2020 I got only 500 of them and I tried to increase the market share by offering free demos , self assessment exams , discounts, lowering the pricing above all increasing the content quality.

What is your new business model?

I give away the questions for free and sell analytics and advance filters to go through all questions + ability to view their mistakes and so on.

Please share your feedback and tips
Thank you
How is that slippery slope? Are you saying only some people have the right to express hurt?
The buffet line is a simplified test, meant to isolate an effect. Compare going to the grocery store with making a grocery delivery shopping list. You will find that end caps, promotions, coupons, shelf position, etc. all have an effect on you.

You will also find a lot of literature saying these things don't work. What they mean is "they don't work in the way they were sold to the people buying the end cap." But they sure do have an effect.
depends how you interpret ACID. for some interpretaions, only strong consistency qualifies
ARRL Field Day is the best! I just got back from this years Field Day two weeks ago and its still really active and a large event even though band conditions are really very poor.

One year I setup a VHF/UHF log periodic and was able to get 5-10 people to get confirmed contacts with astronauts on the ISS. It was probably the most exciting time I've had in amateur radio, and definitely not something everyone gets to do in life.
I'm old enough to recall when people were "cancelled" by extra-judicial execution. That's even worse.
Java can modify bytecodes since the JVM ClassLoader is a first class construct in Java. Using distinct ClassLoader roots, one can have multiple diverse versions of the same canonical ‘type name’ (e.g. foo.bar.paz.MyList) at the same time in the same running process.
Inless GPUs are an absolute must, just use Hetzner and never look back at AWS.
I’m just gonna leave this right here on the matter: https://youtu.be/JwzDG_kIq68
From my (admittedly very limited) experience implementing CRDTs it became clear that even technically correct is not good enough. Optimistic merge strategies require a very clear understanding of user intent and expectation.

Properly consistent can still mean utterly confusing.
Again, “much” harder is quite the exaggeration. I mean, maybe for you, sure, but I’ve had plenty of time in the past 13 years to figure out where things are. If I’m ever genuinely searching for something I don’t scan the ribbon option by option, I use the search bar.

As far as “deciphering” pictures, there’s an association that builds over time. When I see the picture I make the association automatically. There’s research that shows people recognize pictures faster than they read words, since words all look visually similar and pictures have more cues to differentiate between them.
Because it was C++ that made it mainstream.
Not working for me. I get this error:

This page isn’t working www.hnminus.com redirected you too many times.
Try clearing your cookies.
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