skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not saying that wikipedia is equivalent in every way to twitter, vis-a-vis the public square concept. It is a very important media though, and faces a lot of the same issues.

Whatever issues social media has encountered around politics, covid, etc. are arguably more acute for wikipedia... because of its authority and role as a source of objective information. Meanwhile, it has handled everything much better by default. That's why we don't think of it as part of the social media problem.
Binutils 2.35 Released
Not everyone lives in a democracy where the tiny individual is to be concerned with national healthcare and defense. Some people just want to discuss state solutions for Flutter. Political discussion is very democratic-centric!
I stopped reading news for a while as an experiment. It made me start to dwell on my personal life. Money issues, my love life, loneliness, my future in general, etc.
This can either be a happy thing or not. I imagine the more bleak one's personal life is, the more we are drawn to news.
Here is my review for, Weapons of Math Destruction: https://www.audiobookreviews.com/single_post.php?id=634

One of the absolute WORST books I have ever read.
> But my current job has very, very little that would benefit from static typing

Would you mind expanding on this? I'd be interested in what processes you have and if you use any additional tooling.

Thanks!
The EU needs to get either more federal or break up.
Sounds like you are conventionally-minded. ;-)
As a (mildly) aggressive non-conformist, I prefer the motto "non serviam"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_serviam
My favorite is "Learning from Data". Builds from first principles and simple algorithms, so I really understand what makes machine learning work, and how to debug as well as build my own techniques vs use off the shelf black boxes.
They can be identified by their badges, just like any other law enforcement officer. They all wear badges with unique badge numbers.
also, it is pretty amazing what you can do without a framework and how simple your code can be if you code in an "interface as a function of state" style.

example: https://github.com/tantaman/fk-your-frameworks-todomvc
> By analogy to "power vacuum", it's tempting to call this pattern an "ownership vacuum".

It doesn't work that well. Power vacuum is called that way because there's a tendency for the vacuum to be filled by anyone as soon as possible. On the other hand, lack of ownership in a company can persist for much longer if left alone.
The media tries to induce fear and rage so they get the maximum number of eyeballs to see their ads. Couple that with high access to information and low transformative power on the part of the individual and you're set: almost everyone seems to be expecting some kind of "happening" to turn the tide towards their own ideology, since they cannot participate themselves. The media abides, but only gives them some breadcrumbs here and there to keep them glued to the screens.
> I've worked as a developer for almost 2 decades now & some of the best programmers I worked with were high school or college drop outs. And some of those that went to elite schools were mediocre.

Within the software industry there should be a negative correlation between school quality and performance as an employee. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox . People who are unqualified and unfit to do good work have been removed from the pool. Anyone in the pool who is unqualified must be fit to do good work.
It's complicated (TM). There was an arguably surprisingly large amount of cohesion over Brexit (possibly aided accidentally by Brexit figures who telegraphed their intention to exploit European division to screw up the process), but not so much over covid, say.

For all the constant imminent doom of Europe predicted, though, public support for EU membership is actually quite high relative to historical values right now.
When we say 'startup idea', it adds too much noise to the initial validation process as the industry(Successful Entrepreneurs, Investors) almost unanimously agree that the first step is solving the right problem[1].

So shouldn't the first step always be 'How to validate the problem you are trying to solve?'

In my early life as an entrepreneur, I've failed multiple times since I didn't understand this difference between Startup ideas vs Problems. Understanding the importance of solving the right problem i.e. the problem with enough need gap that people are willing to pay for getting it solved and of course the problem which we want ourselves to be solved played a huge role in me building successful products later on.

When I started coaching entrepreneurs a year back, I found this again to be the common theme for failure among early stage startups i.e. building something just because they can and hoping everyone needs it. It became a professional necessity for me to come up with a way to validate problems/need gap.

So, I started building needgap[1] a problem validation platform where problems are the first class citizens. Posts are created by the consumers(incl. entrepreneurs) who have a problem, want to find a solution for their problem, check if others share the same problem, how ever small the problem might be[3]. Builders can post their products in the comments if it solves that particular problem or else discuss with others to create a product to solve that problem(There are couple of products built/being built for problems from needgap).

I'm not saying I've solved the issue of validating problems, far from it. I think I now have a direction towards understanding the 'language, grammar of problems and startup ideas' which might one day result in making validation easier.

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

[2]https://needgap.com

[3]https://needgap.com/problems/12-identifying-letter-o-from-0-...
It does not make sense to me that we should say the actions of a government are less important to criticise or examine because we can vote on that government.
> So far, no amount of fines, or laws, has actually changed anything as far as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google or Microsoft are concerned.

That seems like hyperbole. E.g. all the three big EU-Google anti-trust cases (Shopping, AdSense, Android) resulted in Google changing their practices on the issues in question.

(Shopping, Android: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google, AdSense: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_...)
I think it wasn’t an issue before because most airlines aren’t going to keep a plane they have in storage for multiple days. They’ll sell it to another airline. Otherwise they still have to maintain it and pay storage fees plus whatever lease or finance costs are associated with the plane. Boeing runs a finance corporation which is how a lot of planes are “sold.” They have to plan for maintenance windows and unexpected failures but when your fleet is big enough these events are regular enough that you can tune your fleet size to absorb these events without needing idle capacity.
What about them? The majority of immigrants do not arrive at the border with a suitcase and $100. But it makes a great story for the bootstraps demographic.
How would it reduce the cost? They are only return data from inside the header of the request they received and doing (an unnecessary) lookup to turn the country code into a country name.

What would you cache it cheaper?

No matter what his worker needs the smallest time/memory slot there is. You cannot make it cheaper while still using workers.
I agree with you. There is a related joke (?) that goes like this:

"I don't like to waste time writing tests, because I need that time to fix bugs on production that happened because I don't write tests".

The relation to static typing is that static types are a kind of test the computer automatically writes for you.
In the United States, much like in similar authoritarian countries, the police appears to be able to arrest journalists without probable cause. Happened live where journalists reporting live have been arrested and / or beaten. A sad state of affairs.
I skimmed the book a few days ago and thought it looked interesting, and put it in my reading list.

Got any other companion book recos?

I'm particularly interested in data sets that I could play with in Tableau, Google Data Studio, and Excel.
> Out of curiosity, do you know what happens to the decomissioned hardware? is it scrapped for useful parts like perhaps the PSUs? or is gold and other metals extracted from the chips and the metal sold for recycling?

I cannot state with 100% clarity what happens after the systems are acquired by surplus vendors, but I can say that we have received certificates of what was "recycled". Once the surplus vendors take possession of the hardware, it's theirs and they can do what they want with it. In fact, we recently had to purchase EOL'ed, refurbished Infiniband switches to continue to support an interconnect fabric still in use (~2016). Interestingly enough, some of the switches still had "core" and "edge" labels on them.

> Is there anything useful someone could do with it or it's just too much of a problem to set it up and repurpose it?

In my opinion, it really depends on the node. If the chassis supports hot swappable & redundant hardware (HDD, PSU, etc.), then we'll typically cannibalize several chassis to create an administrative and/or infrastructure node. Case in point, a large portion of our older 12 core nodes have been put aside to serve as administrative nodes, all fully redundant (RAID1 HDD's, dual PSU's, ECC memory, etc.). Since we have a stack of these, we're fairly confident that these will serve us for the next few years, worry free, given the abundance of parts lying around.
I can't speak for all the companies listed, but I know we've spent a lot of SDE time ensuring we're compliant with GDPR and various privacy laws. Building new systems and changing existing systems (on the scale of dozens, probably 100+, of individual teams). It's more likely that it's hard to quickly change the direction of large ships. I've certainly seen my leadership (and engineers) take things like GDPR compliance extremely seriously, to the point that I've seen it as a cultural shift over the last couple of years.
You are mixing thought and values, in both of your questions.

Independent minded people can find themselves agreeing with people in power; the independence of mind is about the “why” not the “what.” If you independently, critically evaluate an issue and settle on the common belief that doesn’t make you conformist.

Likewise, if you settle on the opposite side and don’t act on it, it takes nothing away from your independence of thought, rather it’s a question of values. The answer to “is this worth my time?“ is yes or no independently of whether you agree of disagree with the zeitgeist.
why would they swap in a 8 tb one thah still has value and not a idk 500g one and profit more ?
As an example of this, I've been working through Crafting Interpreters off and on. Chapter 5 consists mostly of discussion of the visitor pattern (is this the same thing as double dispatch?). The author notices that the amount of code that must be written to implement the design is so large that it's best to write a program to generate all of that code. I followed along as best I could, and at the end I wrote the equivalent code in my preferred language, which I've included in this comment:

self[expr.type](self, expr)
When you return an item to Amazon, one of the reasons you can select in the dropdown menu is "received used item" (or something similar).
> Peaceful protestors being brutalised by police has been documented in almost countless cases by now

Yes, I've seen plenty of evidence for that[1]. On the other hand you said "protestors are being arrested by secret police in the US". That's quite a different claim and I haven't seen any evidence for that. I've heard a few reports and associated videos whose reliability I haven't been able to verify.

[1] For the avoidance of doubt my belief is that that kind of behaviour does not belong in a civilised society.
I recall seeing youtube videos about people who purchased pallets of returned items from Amazon. Kind of an "unboxing" video for a huge stack of returned items. Yes I was bored.

They had a few similar scenarios where people had clearly purchased expensive computer components like motherboards etc and then returned the box with some worthless motherboard in there instead of the expensive one. You can imagine some poor Amazon warehouse worker receiving the package, opening it up and seeing the motherboard "yup - looks like some computer gubbins. approved." and off it goes.

The video people seemed to react like this was quite a common occurrence.

So this makes me wonder, if amazon are bundling-up returned items into pallets and selling them in bulk, how did clearly returned items get sold back to an end user? Frankly I am amazed the scammer went to the effort of putting in a 8TB device and connecting it, rather than either returning it empty or with some random old IDE drive in it as a decoy.
I lived directly behind the loading area for a large grocery store for a few years and personally I thought noise concerns were overblown. After the first week or so I was just used to those noises and slept right through them.

Granted, that might not be something everyone can deal with, but I imagine a lot of people can.

P.S.: It was great having a (24 hour!) grocery store that close. I thought of it as my personal walk-in pantry.
Such a country can be considered a democracy, as long as the government isn't too successful in suppressing information and the press. Especially if, in the end, the citizens vote that government out of power.
People don't want to admit that evil is done by people like ourselves. Asking what your dead evil ancestors would do is different from asking what you would do.

If you were born back then, with no knowledge of the future, you would be a Good Person no matter the conditions, right?
Show HN: Solving my problem of losing track of job applications
My only problem dropping a smartphone has been there is no alternative for authenticators. I have a few authenticators including:

Google authenticator, Okta Verify, Battle.net authenticator, ESET Secure Authentication and SecureAuth.

While I might be able to find an alternative for the Google authenticator on a dumb phone, I feel it's unlikely for the others.
React Native vs Ionic – How to Make the Right Choice
Here is our review of React Native vs Ionic with their pros, cons, and respective strengths.
I don't like his analysis. I don't think it models what's going on currently. And because of that, it doesn't allow us to think about the problem correctly.

IMO, the key thing that's happened since 2010 is that there has been a coup on "the progressive side" of politics, with "Classical Social Justice" (MLK-like) being replaced with "Critical Social Justice". It has been a mostly silent coup, until recently.

There's been a dramatic change, and most people on the left don't even realise it has happened, much less what it means. The shift is from empiricism, universalism, justice, equality of opportunity, and liberalism to ... frankly, pretty much the opposite of those values: lived experience, identity groups competing with winners and losers, maoist group-think, purity spirals, etc. The profoundness of the change can't be overstated.

IMO, the good people of the Left (classic liberals) have to take it back from those that have stolen it (the Critical Social Justic people). But, I'm not even sure that's even possible now. It has gone too far—what a disaster.

And because "classic liberals" want the left to go back to how it was ... they have almost become "the conservatives of the left" and they have been forced weirdly towards the centre - except those to the left of them are now more facist than those to their right. So weird.

Bottom line: the illiberal, Clitical Methods Left now holds sway (Newspapers, Hollywood, Universities) and it isn't going anywhere in a hurry.

The worst part about this is: the current sensemaking apparatus (newspapers, etc) has been hollowed out by the Internet. And they aren't even capable of analysis any more ... just activism (as a business model ... a way of generating clicks). How can a democracy function when the population is not informed? I really like Eric Wienstien's analogy for this: the Media has now become like Iago in Othello, whispering madness into the ear of those that will listen (on both sides).

All very broken. Suddenly.
Interesting that the vast majority of 737s were flying so frequently that this was not found earlier.
For their entire 20-ish year service life, those planes are never left idle long enough for this part to rust! Amazing.
Goes to show how popular and successful the 737 line is.
If you're working 8hr straight I'd guess you're following up on work you previously invested a lot of time into.

I don't really see "coding" as productive work. The entire point is the write as little as possible. Most of my day is full of reading and thinking about the problem. The actual coding part is quite small.
The law-abiding culture of authorities was completely corrupted post-9/11. It was "everything goes" from that point forward. And too many people said nothing against it or even supported it.

And I'm sure at the time many were dismissing comments about the "slippery slope," too. Well the slippery slope was very real, and now we've arrived at the bottom of the slope and it's much harder to change back the culture or revert the policies. It will probably require people dying before they are changed back (just like in the Civil Rights era).
I wanted to build something that kept all the details of a specific job application in one place, while giving me an overview of the status of all my applications.

I found Trello to be a nightmare to organize and structure with lots of data. Spreadsheets were too messy for me.

The best solution I found was creating a note (using Evernote or Bear) for each job application.

I’d paste question/answers to the online questionnaire lots of companies have you fill out so I can A) reference the questions in the interview or cover letter, and B) have some snippets to reuse in other applications. I’d add all relevant links, if I knew someone at the company, etc. This was great for keeping info in one place but didn’t give me the overview of all applications I needed.
You can still go after a seller for making false claims, but you are liable for your actions - full stop. Unless the seller forced you to fire someone or arrest someone based on the model, you executed the action.

Someone who writes your legal contract isn't liable if you badly enforce it.
Pro tip: don't bother with Amazon France, order from the UK.

For some reason, all the non-consumables that I ordered in France were re-furbished items sold as new. In contrast, the UK has always been stellar. Once Brexit hits, I will stop using Amazon altogether.
This is one of the best points made. I felt the same way in HN being far too harsh. Seeing other apps along the same connectedness theme gives a good perspective.

I had only tried Pragli and it is underwhelming. Too much cpu usage even after they removed snapshots of you. The Spotify integration is te one nice feature none of the others have.

Thanks for the names of apps. Going to try the latter two.
I much prefer static typing - but the metric used in the article is around bug reduction. Regardless of static (Go or Java), dynamic (JS), or a bit weird (plpgsql), I don’t generally get the type of a variable or object wrong - because when I’m using the object I necessarily must already have a mental map of what it represents. It’s pretty rare to try to call the “fill()” method on a “line” object, so to speak, because I know it’s a line when I access it.

So I’d guess that the number of type related bugs in dynamic languages is just a little bit greater than in static languages, simply because it is harder to make that kind of mistake in a typed language. But as a category, they aren’t common mistakes in the first place.

I can confidently say that I’m a bit of an expert at writing bugs :) and of all the kinds of bugs I write, type related bugs are probably no where near the top of the list.

That’s not to say that static typing isn’t better - I definitely think it is. But I can also believe that it doesn’t necessarily reduce the bug count by a huge margin. (For whatever it’s worth I think the main benefits are documentation and refactoring...)
> Self-improvement of the transhumanist sort requires that we adopt an entirely functional understanding of who and what we are: All of our abilities can be improved upon and all of our parts are replaceable. Upgradable.

Yeah right, but we're so far away from creating even a single "upgrade" that's comparable with the human body. For example, even the best cameras would never even be in the same competing arena as the human eye. No sensors come close to our sense of touch.

The transhumanist ideology is nothing else but some kind of perverted ideology that we somehow would be upgraded with a usb port sticking out from the skin.

Even the very best tools we have today to save lives and help our bodies sucks in comparison with the biological counterpart. Sure there may be a future that we would "upgrade" ourselves, but when that time is here (which would be very, very far into the future) everyone will instantly do it because it will be so much better. There wouldn't be some kind of discussion about it since the result is so obvious.

For it to happen, whatever we replace something with will have to have all the features that we currently enjoy + a lot more.
>> That's how things tend to work when people are so alienated or disenfranchised from the system that change within the system becomes impossible, yes.

And the endpoint of that process is revolution. Again, not a good thing. Revolutions are bloody.

How can you fix the democratic process so that works as it ought and prevent the disaster you're heading for?
Also, these businesses don't need walls or public restrooms. If the floor is concrete, CVT, carpet, or whatever they still just roll out some padded mats. No one cares what the ceiling looks like or if the heat works. No remodeling required to get their tenancy started, and none required to replace them with a more lucrative business. Landlords are not afraid to sign up such tenants even if the rent they'll pay is low. A tenant like a dentist or coffee shop requires more complicated improvements, will be charged higher rent, and will signify that the strip mall in question is not dying.
Yes. Democracies aren't about public funding of poorly viable corporations.
But from a business POV, it makes sense. Assuming that they have a million returns monthly, and from those only a dozen are scams (I have no idea about the real numbers, just guessing), it would be way more expensive to them to do a deep inspection on every returned item than do a soft/cheap check on the returns. When something falls throught the cracks (and the user find out), customer care will just send a new one (usually it's hassle free) and the company absorb the damage from that one scam, which it's usually cheap.

I know it hurts when amazon relies on real customers to do their deep inspection, but it's all about costs. I don't expect this to change.

I would love to stop using amazon for a million reasons, but this is not one of them.
> You need a well-educated population with equal access to opportunities, a free, healthy, and diverse press, an independent judiciary, a healthy political landscape, etc.

Then the US isn't a democracy?