skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What we currently have going on right now is a complete collapse in confidence. So many commenters are debating the death rate, case counts, hospitalizations, etc, which is all besides the point.

Heres the thing: even if you believe people are being irrationally afraid, telling people they are stupid and should just suck it up isn't going to get people to cooperate. Do you want to be smugly right, or do you want things to actually get better?
People are scared, that's just a fact, and they need to feel confident that action is being taken in their best interest. Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb.

We all know that this is an exceptional event and that there will be missteps. People will forgive mistakes and setbacks and take on more risk if they are confident that there is a plan - but so far there isn't one. We're almost six months into this and the messaging is still chaos. The lack of a national strategy is what is causing this pandemic to worsen. The rot really does start at the top.

The United States is currently choosing the worst possible combination of options. We locked down - causing enormous financial damage, but we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus. So we get to have the deaths and have the financial damage as well. Yay us!
Btw., you can read a bit about the background of Smalltalk and the Raspberry port in my article:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/relive-part-xerox-parcs-histo...
I agree. I wish it could cast to my TV but otherwise it's great.
I imagine the timing of this post is correlated with release of the documentary Bit Player about Claude Shannon. Haven't seen it yet but looking forward to it.

The article does a decent job at graphing and laying out some of the concepts of entropy for information theory, but I'm not sure who the target reader is, since prereqs are perhaps only slightly narrower than what one needs to read Shannon's paper[0] and the article is really illustrating only a fraction of the concept.

It can perhaps work as a primer for what shows up starting on pages 10-11 of the original document, in any case, provided you grasp the mathematical definition of entropy through thermodynamics, and the microstates-based definition through Boltzman, as well as "basic probabilities" (expected value, typical discrete distributions, terms like "i.i.d"), you should be good to go. But then you might already know all this..

And if you do, and you like what you read, then the full original thing by Shannon is a delight to explore to truly grasp what has been so foundational to a lot of things since 1948.

[0] http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon...
Not just the money & the need to obtain another protform for app development (MacOS) but also the te inability to public GPL apps on app store (if you manage to get that far):

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12827624
Meanwhile when right wing terrorists took over federal property in the same state nothing happened to them and they’re now threatening neighboring states, including invading state government buildings in Idaho.
Stop seeking attention on the internet. It's unhealthy. You and I both know you have no personal information on this case.

You were friends with Fahim and I'm a talking dog. Woof.

See how easy it is to spew nonsense?
Isn’t point 2 a consequence of the law that they have to follow? Don’t know about rest of the world but I think in EU they are forced to disclose your personal information to the government if asked to do so. This is also in their privacy policy.
As others have pointed out, if you're being subjected to consumeristic propaganda, might as well make it non-targeted so there's less chance of you buying in. It's like being dipped in a tub full of insects. You could choose your favorite type of insect to be crawling all over you... but would that really make the situation that much better?

Personally, the only time I had mildly relevant ads was back when I had an account on Instagram. It served ads for local businesses that actually kinda matched my interests. The rest is just "oh, you searched for info on a long-dead general? Must be interested in WW2 replica medals, buy fifty!"
“Segway will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy,” Kamen asserted. Steve Jobs thought the product would be just as important as the PC, while venture capitalist John Doerr predicted that Segway Inc. would be the fastest company in history to make $1 billion in sales.

After that much hype, of course it was a disappointment. If it had been pitched as a mini version of small electric industrial carts, such as the ones seen in big industrial plants, no one would have been excited about it, but it would have been a minor seller.

This is the second article about the Segway which mentions its durability as a minus.
FSD is very cool. But Musk also parrots the idea that Teslas are investments, which makes no sense to me. Why would my $50k Model Y be worth $75k in 10 years, when a brand-new Model Y in 10 years would also cost $50k (assuming prices stay constant)?
Charter schools compete for the same low funding pool, while only accepting well performing non-SPED students, leaving public schools with less money and a harder (& more expensive) student body.

This artificially increases Charter School's performance, and artificially lowers Public School's performance.

But this isn't an accident, Charter Schools are designed to de-fund public education for political reasons, and while discriminating against SPED kids is illegal, the % of SPED kids at charters is disproportionately low[0].

> Charter schools are significantly less likely to reply to students to the IEP message than to the baseline message, while traditional public schools are not. There is also some evidence that schools are less likely to respond to families with Hispanic-sounding names.

[0] http://www.columbia.edu/~psb2101/BergmanMcFarlin_school_choi...
Show HN: A simple, free, photo food journal that tracks smilies, not calories
It also works in practice almost half the time in states that allow the defense to reduce a conviction from murder to manslaughter, and not only for police, cause juries are made up of humans.
Just use a single google doc sheet, everything goes in there and you can access from almost anywhere.
Writing with Synesthesia, Seeing Colors in Music
I agree - this never really occurred to me either. My girlfriend's mother is a preschool teacher who just had to go back to in-person sessions and she believes some of these kids will have trauma's from being young and terrified. One little girl is afraid to touch anything and constantly asks if objects have been cleaned/safe to touch? it's heartbreaking to her.
They key part seems to be:

> There is no contest for the popular vote.

And that since the rules weren’t “whoever wins the national popular vote is president” we can’t know how campaigns and voters would have behaved under that rule set, making appeals to the “popular vote” meaningless. A position which I actually agree with, despite very much not liking the last couple R presidents who won despite “losing” the (meaningless, and not a useful measure of much given the above) popular vote.

It’s fun to complain about when your (our, perhaps) person loses but is about as meaningful as “our team should have won because we had more men-on-base”. Well, OK, but baseball is played to optimize for runs because that’s how you win, so no, you shouldn’t have won, and also if the other team had been optimizing for men-on-base you may still have lost—we simply can’t know.
It was actually submitted twice before, but both submissions linked to the linkedin article, not directly to the github repository.
Spark has a strange partitioning behavior on large cross joined dataframes. Reducing the number of partitions on the input DataFrames speeds up computations on the resulting cross joined DataFrame.
Article on Classful Networks and Ifconfig, with Help from HN
A few weeks ago I posted a question, and a couple of folks were very helpful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655176

I wanted to let you know that the article I was working on is posted, with credit for the assist. :)

Thanks!

https://prgmr.com/blog/2020/07/17/classful-networking.html
Personalized means I’m buying more relevant ads and paying with my integrity. It’s better to see relevant than irrelevant ads but the amount of personal information I’m willing to give up is tiny and includes zero of my history online.
It is true that the pandemic has brought to the fore some things that could be improved. I'm not based in the US but I think it has a lot going for it. We may argue about some of the drawbacks associated with the status quo but this is the country that landed people on the moon. It has brought us Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Starbucks, Hollywood, Disney, etc. In spite of the retoric from some quarters it still welcomes people from all over the world. And what is more they almost immediately identify themselves as American and embrace the values and start making working towards the American dream. I think you'd struggle to find a better place in terms of upward mobility. Certainly not in Europe. I think we have to see it in terms of trade offs. The things that some admire in other nations come at a cost. And in some cases can't really happen in the US because the policies don't scale as well. There may be other nations catching up in some areas. But I think America is still a great nation.
I live in a city that is so dangerous the police have to use pepper balls on protesters so that the president can have a chance to pose with a Bible in front of the church of his choice.

But guess what? The prosperous areas are quiet as they were before this. Yes, there were burglars who took advantage of police distraction on the night when protesting turned into rioting, not just downtown but uptown. That's over. The murders remain where the murders have been, i.e. in the poorer ends of town.
Ultra-Black Camouflage in Deep-Sea Fishes [pdf]
I think people have felt the same about having children throughout most of history.

Do you want a child born into slavery?

Do you want a child subject to a totalitarian government?

Do you want a child born into extreme poverty or famine?

I feel like if you want to have a kid you have one and you deal with whatever adversity comes along.

Take the opportunity to prepare your child to deal with the world that exists regardless of the circumstances. The more children that grow up with thoughtful parents that prepare them to face problems in the more possibility the world will be a better place in the future.

I'm sure my argument isn't well thought at being that it's 4:30pm on a Friday, but I really feel like regardless of the issues we face in society today we are living in the best time to be alive ever and if you have the means to care for a child, and you want children, there's nothing that should stop you from having one.
Why most conversations are crap – How we play Tetris with our words and phrases
I've had several disputes / legal issues come up in the ordinary course of business, mainly through ineptitude / incompetence of the other party rather than actual malice, but unfortunately it is indeed rather impractical to use the legal system for practical resolution of problems since lawyers are too expensive, and small claims court / pro se litigation is too time consuming.

Big companies, landlords, employers and the like know this, and often totally ignore disputes/problems faced by consumers, even if they'd obviously lose if it ever went to a court.

I think it would be interesting to try some alternative funding mechanisms for legal services - something like a co-operative with attorneys on staff where you can refer issues, and members vote on which ones to pursue? Or a lottery system? Or have any damages awarded go back to the co-operative to fund new cases?

The general idea would be to find a practical way to fund even a small subset of cases to set precedents and have large corporates, landlords, employers behave better towards members of the co-operative.
Wow, so charter schools allow for stack-ranking their pupils all the out of the school if desired? Is there a list of reasons that a school cannot use to suspend or expel a student up somewhere? In addition, a list of active conditions with associated constraints for when they can?
This is completely false. Mismanaged school systems have failed minorities. Rampant wage theft and inequality has failed minorities.

Schools can only do so much within a broken society and broken system. They were doing the best they can with the tools given to them.

How does public schooling failing help minorities in any way what so ever?
What about the gas station workers? Grocery store workers? Millions are working during COVID as they're deemed "essential". Teachers are just as essential.
I have a small personal recipe blog. I tend to structure my posts like this:

1. Ingredients.

2. Instructions.

3. Notes/thoughts/musings/etc.

Sometimes section 3 is quite long, sometimes it's completely absent. It is *never" the first thing you see, ever. Why? Despite the fact that I'm one of the people who enjoys reading/writing that kind of stuff, most of the time when I'm looking at my blog I'm looking for ingredients ratios and instructions, so they are first.

I don't want to have to scroll through a bunch of noise when I'm trying to cook. Just like the reviews on sites like Amazon don't appear on the page before a picture of the product and its price/description, so are reflections on a recipe out of place before the recipe itself has been listed.
BN looks interesting, but it doesn't matter how good an insulator is if, in use, its thickness approaches the wavelength of your charge carrier, enough so to tunnel through easily. For reference, the wavelength of an electron "at rest" is ~0.1 nm, but QM rarely conforms to simple arithmetical intuition.

My expectations for continuation of Moore's law are pinned, possibly too optimistically, on spintronics.
This doesn't solve the problem. If I forget that I had a message I need to act on I'm not going to remember to go back. The problem is that slack is "done by default" where as email keeps it in my inbox until I explicitly say I'm done.
Summary: Switch from the current adversarial method (you are expected to find any and all arguments in your favor), to an inquisitorial system (where the judge attempts to find out the details of the case by asking questions and bringing up things you may not have thought of).

The inquisitorial system is already used in small claims court.

The only drawbacks mentioned in the article is a greater potential for Judicial misconduct.

It seems like a pretty obvious thing to do (perhaps make it optional). Are there drawbacks I've missed?
Blazor is fantastic. We've been using Blazor server-side for about 8 months now. The part that still hurts my brain is when I realize I am basically done with a new feature after I finish writing my business service. I can just inject & call it from the blazor component and directly draw whatever data without any mapping layer required.

I may have forgotten how to write controllers and juggle headers/query strings... It's really nice. Remember, every hour you spend writing some controllers or debugging query strings/serialization/status codes/et.al. is an hour not spent on your core business features.
What happens in between the time of rebuilding it? Why were other countries able to repair and mend their education system without putting the lives of teachers, children, and parents at risk?
Are you getting the prices from this [0] page? I think that's the pricing for the old API, because it still hast the standard/premium/enterprise split.

> In the past, the Twitter API was separated into three different platforms and experiences: standard (free), premium (self-serve paid), and enterprise (custom paid). As a developer's needs expanded, it required tedious migration to each API. In the future, all developers — from academic researchers to makers to businesses — will have options to get elevated access and grow on the same API.
> (https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2020/i...)

[0] https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing
AdminLTE – Coded in Flask (MIT License)
Interesting. Would be cool to hear your thoughts: what was meh about it? Lack of tooling maybe?
My wife is a teacher. She's quitting in two weeks so that she can give her mandatory 30-day notice in time for the beginning of the semester.

The planning being done for the next school year where we live is complete bullshit. The politicians and administrators running the planning have no idea about the realities.

They are driving these hybrid models with kids doing remote and in-person learning in alternative days/weeks with the in-person class sizes being about one third of the normal class size. To do that they would need at least twice the amount of teachers (one to teach in-person, and one to teach remotely to kids staying at home), possibly even more. Are they planning on hiring more teachers? No.

It's going to be a complete shitshow even without teachers quitting en masse.

There's this completely unrealistic sense among the people in charge that teachers will just magically make it work with no additional training, no proper support, no additional resources, nothing.

And I'm not even addressing the difficulties families, especially those that have multiple kids and/or can't work from home, will have with these proposed schedules.
I remember thinking how insane it was that a big chunk of browser audio/video apps ran off of a library authored by one random dude.
It seems like the ultimate lesson of the Segway is not to over-hype your product. I recall reading quotes from people who had seen the device back when it was just (IIRC) "It" and they said things like "cities will be redesigned around this new invention." When it came out people were unsurprisingly let down and the jokes began.
I'm not worried about your sensibilities. I'm worried that your actions may indirectly cause harm to me.
I worked at a retail store when I was a tiny 16 year old, I got a ton of NPS surveys by telling people I got a pizza party if I got enough of them. It worked crazy well, I quickly became top in the company for NPS. It was hilarious watching my older coworkers attempt to pull it off and fail.
Is there another library you can recommend?
My SO and I were just talking about this:

> Today most people simply can’t afford to use the courts to sue, and if accused of a crime they must mostly settle as if guilty, even if they are innocent, all because the system is now crazy expensive. (It didn’t use to be.) Inquisitorial judges would change that, and give most people meaningful access to a legal system to defend themselves.
>Are you giving up on society yet?

The answer to this for me depends on what the election in November holds.

Making a mistake once and having to live with it for 4 years is manageable. Institutions can recover. But another 4 years of this is would be an unmitigated disaster for the republic.
A reasonable observer could conclude that they are almost certainly American law enforcement. Is is difficult to tell that these German fellows are police officers?

https://i.redd.it/b6xjl7nugoq41.jpg

The LGM had no patches, no flags, nothing to indicate to a reasonable observer where they were from or what authority they might have. This was more pronounced with LGM in civilian clothing:

https://i.redd.it/2sukgo8bjjl41.png

I'm not a giant fan of the cammies. I think a solid color would suffice for all but snipers and it looks less militaristic. But that doesn't negate the fact that all of the videos show men with POLICE patches in the middle of their plate carriers and American flags on their uniforms.
If you want to say someone's toe hurts because they stubbed it, you can refer to it as "stubbed toe pain". Even if "stubbed toe pain" isn't an official diagnosis in some health organizations, that doesn't mean it's junk science.

I don't get why the article's attacking the term "excited delirium" in the first place, though. I mean, do the authors think that the correctness of police-brutality hinges on whether or not there's such a thing as "excited delirium"? Do the authors think that, if there's such a thing as "excited delirium", it'd justify police-brutality?
I've been in a lot of subway cars where you're so packed in, you can't move an inch. Even if the NYC subway was twice its capacity, I don't think you would have had the level of social distancing necessary to do much about COVID. Maybe it would have been less bad, but I think it's hard to say.

And remember, if the subway capacity was increased, subway ridership would likely increase as well, as it becomes a more appealing mode of transport.

What NYC really should have done is shut down businesses on March 1 instead of March 15. But... I don't know, I think that's a lot to ask of politicians. The public would not have responded well to schools being closed and restaurants being shuttered. We needed a wake-up call.

By contrast, I feel like Florida, Georgia, etc have really had that wake-up call, and have chosen to flout it anyway. I don't have much sympathy.
I don't understand what is the issue if user can add their own keys - just release the app with default set of keys or even without and let the user set their own.

Other than that, indeed Mastodon and co. are great. :)
> Another point to make is that the main problem with the Senate and the House has nothing to do with the inequity you describe: it is the simple fact that Congress has very low approval ratings but very high incumbent reelection rates. That means members of Congress are effectively never held accountable for bad policy decisions.

Wrong.

Individual members of Congress tend to have high (often overwhelming) approval in their districts (or states for Senators); members generally do a good job of representing the people they are elected by.

Congress as an institution has low approval rates because people dislike what it does in aggregate, not what the people they have a vote in do. If Congress was more effectively representative—which is a matter of apportionment and electoral system—the aggregate approval would be higher.

This is not only analytically obvious, but borne out by actual results of surveys of public approval of representative democratic governments in general and legislative bodies specifically when compared to measures of effective proportionality of representation.
> They use language that describes cashflow, savings, and debt.

If you want to have an actual company that can continue paying your salary, somebody better have a good handle on those things.
There are people whose living is made from YouTube and it’s advertising component.

Whilst I would personally prefer videos with no ads, is this not stealing?

I would be very interested to hear this groups view on why this is morally ok. Also what alternatives there should be to an ad revenue model for YouTube type sites.