skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How about checking that a given string is non-blank?

Because when you try to do this with some object that doesn't have a "length" or "empty?" method, your application crashes.

irb(main):013:0> a = 1
=> 1
irb(main):014:0> b = "1"
=> "1"
irb(main):015:0> b.length
=> 1
irb(main):016:0> a.length
Traceback (most recent call last):
4: from /usr/bin/irb:23:in `<main>'
3: from /usr/bin/irb:23:in `load'
2: from /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.6.0/gems/irb-1.0.0/exe/irb:11:in `<top (required)>'
1: from (irb):16
NoMethodError (undefined method `length' for 1:Integer)
irb(main):017:0> b.empty?
=> false
irb(main):018:0> a.empty?
Traceback (most recent call last):
4: from /usr/bin/irb:23:in `<main>'
3: from /usr/bin/irb:23:in `load'
2: from /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.6.0/gems/irb-1.0.0/exe/irb:11:in `<top (required)>'
1: from (irb):18
NoMethodError (undefined method `empty?' for 1:Integer)

This is why people want a way to know if something they think is a String is actually a String, without risking data loss and outages at runtime.

I think it's rude to dismiss people asking for this as "fixated," and furthermore it could be no less fairly used against people who show up to these debates beating their own drum against it.
That's a murky grey area, I definitely have more aspirations as a musician that prevent me from enjoying it as much as if I didn't care at all about producing a good album.
Doubtful. Why? Because any under the table wages are taxed to the company or owner (if sole proprietor). Why pay your employees' taxes?
None of those alternatives refute the 'fading away' in any way.

And I gave plenty of examples - feel free to point out which someone that's "reality based" would consider no longer relevant, or debunked by evidence. Maybe the environmental crisis is over? Have consumer rights triumphed over DRM? Has corporate transparency become so well-established that we can afford to criminalize revealing trade secrets without fear of stifling whistleblowers? Did the food industry become so conscientious that we can loosen labeling requirements?
Looks like it's the latter, which makes it even more impressive!
doh! good point.

I am not able to spin that into "And besides it's better to force it to be in two files anyway!", I don't think it is, but I guess it's not so easy to do different.
> I am not sure why it was more succesful than Python 2->3

Probably because Ruby had a much narrower area where it was heavily used, with fewer “finished” but critical libraries.
The "embrace extend extinguish" only makes sense when the company doing it has

1) The ability to extinguish
2) Or the business model of the embraced company is seen as a threat.

It's funny when Microsoft launches WSL and "loves Linux" how quick people are to use EEE. But MS has not the capability to kill Linux (1) (that sail shipped long ago) and it's not aligned with it's current business model (2)

About Blender... How is supposed Blender to challenge or threat MS?
Many IDEs do throw up an "Are you sure?" confirmation prompt by default if you try to perform a DELETE or an UPDATE without a WHERE clause. I know some even _require_ you to have a WHERE clause by default (it's a toggleable setting, obviously), which is why you'll see some database devs add "WHERE 1=1" to the end of their queries as a matter of habit.
Absolutely none of that is true, and I challenge you to make a compelling, objective case for any of it.
I'll never understand how the SEC can ensure there was no insider trading in situations like this.
Well, another way to bypass secureboot on old/not updated devices, I guess.

Tangentally, how can I secure my intramfs against an evil maid attack? My kernel is signed by secureboot, and my rootfs is encrypted, but the initramfs is neither... I haven't rally seen that documented anywhere.

Ideally, I'd just sign it with the same key as the kernel, and the kernel would check it matches.
Then you need to be more specific about the requirments
It's interesting to hear you say that. When I was growing up in the 1980s, everything was top-down (NASA, IBM, even pop culture). '95-99 was when the internet popularized the idea of barely controlled anarchy leading to success that we take for granted today.

On a tangent, I personally feel that bottom-up design has been an almost complete failure. The US has lost its ability to articulate what it needs to do, and then execute that plan. So for example, nearly all federal services that we used to depend on are failing. The Post Office is being crippled because it's seen as a price ceiling against UPS and FedEx, not to mention that elections can't be rigged when votes are centrally counted. The IRS has been defunded by the far right and liberals who have sold out to Wall Street, because they don't want rich people or corporations to be audited, because that might reveal widespread fraud. NASA hasn't been properly funded since Challenger, and technically lost its funding when the public lost interest in moon missions. We can argue various fake news interpretations of these trends, but the truth of them is self-evident from an academic standpoint.

What's my point? That maybe we could use a little more top-down planning. I'd rather see the spirit of socialism succeed (the elimination of wealth inequality), rather than what we have now, which is survival of the fittest on steroids. A top-down internet might have had some basic security measures in place, such as HTTPS everywhere. Also some bells and whistles like the free hosting that university students enjoy.

This may all seem quaint, but the loss of confidence in central government planning in the US is another way of saying that our republic is in decline. It's the central conflict in the Republican Party, half of whose members are old enough to remember when American ingenuity was once second to none. Now we can't even temporarily nationalize, say, N95 mask manufacturing. Sad.
Now you know.
Thanks for the detailed info. I'm in this for the long haul so I'll learn OBS. No picture-in-picture needed because believe me, no one wants to see my mug. Already have good audio but thanks for the reminder.
The opinion is a very stereotyped one, that has been very widely expressed all my life and probably far longer.

The conspiracy theory about the drug industry has been common forever, but it fits a more general pattern, like the Miracle Carburetor.

Obviously nobody can answer why something is downvoted, and discussing voting is discouraged, but personally, I'd like to see a controversial opinion that is original and interesting, not cliched.

Me, I wouldn't downvote something for only being wrong (IMO) or weird.
When you’re stressed you don’t make good decisions. You choose the fatty food, TV, booze because you want to cheer yourself up.
Making ‘good decisions’ is so much easier when you have an income and you’re not avoiding creditors calls. I’ve lived through it. It was exhausting.
This decision to give a tax payer funded loan to a company that’s basically been unable to adapt to changing market conditions for 30 years really puzzles me.

Why does Kodak think they can pivot into an entirely new industry? Wouldn’t the money be better spent on a true startup in this area? Investing in several startups would provide some risk mitigation that at least one of the companies could make it in the market. A new company wouldn’t be saddled with all of Kodak’s over bloated management and legacy. It’s also likely that such a company or companies would create more than 300 jobs.
Without Intel's access to AMD64-bit patents, Intel wouldn't have anything better than a 32-bit Pentium4.

Intel and AMD have each other in a MAD (mutually assured destruction) patent hold. If either pulls either patent portfolio from each other, they both die dramatic deaths.

Intel owns 32-bit x86 patents... while AMD owns the 64-bit patents. Modern x64 chips cannot function unless both parts are together.
Those numbers are important! In classic rpgs, both western and Japanese, skillful play consists in strategically manipulating those numbers to defeat challenges. It's a very different feeling than in an action game where skillful play is about manipulating the virtual physics of your avatar.
Even (especially?) oil companies can't be persuaded to set aside money to clean up their own damn wells, or at least their governments can't be persuaded to make them pay. We have zero chance here.
Judge rebukes DHS over false statements in New York travel case
Reddit has a lot of those bots that comment with the summary of a posted article.
> To improve the quality of your idea conversations be picky about who you discuss ideas with.

I’ve now mostly figured out the right balance for me to do this in real life. Where I struggle is with conversations online. I think one reason HN has such a high quality of conversations, compared with other forums, is most people here are motivated by finding the truth behind ideas. Twitter, for example, is at the opposite end. It feels like a firehose of conflicting motives coming at me at once. The only solution I’ve found there is to stay logged out most of the time.
reply
LifeLabs goes to court to block privacy watchdogs from probing 2019 data breach
The 30% cut is not a payment process cut or else this would fall under: usury, profiteering, rip-off.
Maciej Cegłowski is a generally clever and entertaining guy. Check out his (mostly unrelated) blog too... it's very well written.

https://idlewords.com/
You always need to get government involved. The free market can regulate many things, customer interest is not one of them.
> Car manufacturers aren't allowed to own auto dealerships.

Tesla has been working on changing / getting around this.
Origins of the Sarsen Megaliths at Stonehenge
This is very likely true. The millions of no-name, rock-bottom, cheap-ass phones all over Asia and the rest of the world are running the free-to-implement OS: Android. They can't run iOS.

Thus Android has a far bigger "market share" by sheer numbers, but how many of their users are app buyers or big spenders? Way, way fewer than iOS users.
Sure, but you can learn bad habits regardless of the environment you were born into and you can fix those habits too, if you're so inclined to reflect and practice.

This is very different than having your father die while you're young and promising to be the woman of the house and take care of your sick mom and baby sister.
I always thought Microsoft did this in order to make inroads into the high-end graphics market, which they did.
The person above is talking about a newspaper headline writer. Are you assuming motives in communication while telling people not to?

I’m clarifying that the NYT article author didn’t write the current title. Why are you taking that as a value judgment?
They absolutely have the ability to do that though, they clearly have the ability to shut a device down entirely too based on the iOS activation system.

I probably wouldn't go as far as 'dystopic' either.
Are there specific issues that you have with the comment and deeper insights than those described? If so, what are they, and what data do you have to support them?
> a head, a tail, is brown

I wonder if brown would have been an issue, even without the animal context, as a search for object with these properties wouldn't have turned up the cent which is copper color

it'd be interesting to ask gp3 what color is a cent and then redo the riddle with that
You missed a few minor spelling issues, and some issues on an iPad.
https://app.pagewatch.dev/ece9a1806742a1d9c7c99839078f3becfc...
Looks good though, good luck :)
Abstract: The sources of the stone used to construct Stonehenge around 2500 BCE have been debated for over four centuries. The smaller “bluestones” near the center of the monument have been traced to Wales, but the origins of the sarsen (silcrete) megaliths that form the primary architecture of Stonehenge remain unknown. Here, we use geochemical data to show that 50 of the 52 sarsens at the monument share a consistent chemistry and, by inference, originated from a common source area. We then compare the geochemical signature of a core extracted from Stone 58 at Stonehenge with equivalent data for sarsens from across southern Britain. From this, we identify West Woods, Wiltshire, 25 km north of Stonehenge, as the most probable source area for the majority of sarsens at the monument.
No, ezperienced C++ devs with the math skills you need to do 3d dev make 60k or more, 45k is just above fresh graduate level. I don't have an online source, just from what I know from companies and people I know, and doing hiring myself in the past. I made more than 45k 10+ years ago when I was an employee.
There wasn’t any confusion. Their point was they’d much rather pay a monthly fee, because as it is, paying full price to “own” a Stadia game is ridiculous because Stadia is going to end up dead like most other google services and all the games you “own” will likely disappear.
My mind went to a snake, any ideas why it didn't go toward this answer or couldn't interpret 'no legs'?
Red Plenty absolutely does not rob the Soviet people of their humanity. If anything, it emphasis their humanity and juxtaposes it against the inhuman absurdities of a command economy.
Can GPT-3 detect itself?
> I see that as a step in the direction of some kind of "strict" mode that will ultimately enforce type annotations and type-checking

Ruby is not the first or the second or even the third dynamic language that has added static type checking support, has this _ever_ happened?
If you mean mmhmm.app, thanks. Looks like a great product but I'm looking for a way to share code, mostly, not my damn face ;)
On CCP influence operations in Singapore
I like having the patch number set apart. I frequently run into bugs with dependencies where the first thing I check is if they've released a patch, so I can try that to fix the bug before digging any deeper.

Muddle that with minor revisions and that information is lost. Minor revisions, in addition to signaling new functionality, also signal the possibility of the introduction of new bugs.
One big use-case of types is the sanity-check that the value is what you think it is.

A classic example of where I might have an inline type annotation in Rust is when I'm doing a non-trivial chain of Future/Result combinators in the middle of a function. It doesn't take much code for your understanding to desync from reality. Annotating "Result<String, IOError>" inline both documents to others what this intermediate value is but also creates better, local errors as the chain is modified.

Complex stuff does generally get factored out into functions, but at the same time, it's nice when you're the one who decides when it makes sense to extract code rather than a limitation of the typing syntax. Those things don't always line up.
> Odd use of the word "after" in the BBC News article's headline.

It's not odd, the word simply has multiple meanings. Here it means in accordance with, not subsequent.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/after
Yo, GPT-3 is freaky!
> I asserted that American's will notice a travel ban

A very small percentage of Americans will notice an overseas travel ban right now, given that:

1. Only 20-30% of US citizens have _ever_in_their_lives_ traveled outside of North America. (The percentage of people who have ever left the country X the percentage of non-Mexico/Canada international travel.)

2. There's a global pandemic that the US isn't handling well. People in group 1 are not rushing to rub elbows with strangers in airplanes right now.

The only countries that we can unqualifiedly say that "Americans" _may_ notice right now are Canada and Mexico (by car, flying still allowed).
It started as a hoax, because people naively believe the sanity of CCP or HK Government to even act with any decency.

The sentiment gradually shifted, because they lost whatever hope or trust that is left with the government.

It is still not a mainstream view, but it isn't so much a "hoax" like it was same time last year.
While I respect expertise a lot it's not necessarily the case that a disease expert has a more reasonable take on personal behaviour, in fact funnily enough I've met a lot of people in the field who are extreme OCD level germaphobes, that is to say they may be irationally afraid due to their of work

Sort of like software developers turning neurotic about minor glitches because, not despite of their knowledge
Liquor area has a separate entry from the main entry. Every woodman's is the same that way. In any case, that means that the alcohol buyers are generally out of the way.

The rest of the store is chaos though, that part is true.
Bytedance is not some startup launched in the basement by founders living on ramen noodles. It’s a product of the CCP.
Large entities are competing on browser performance "which in turn led to more investment in optimizations" part does not really ring true. We are just benefiting from browser market dynamics.
I'd classify it under "hack that is fine if you know what you're doing". Fancier 68K systems would use a PAL for address decoding, primitive programmable logic.
Broke and poor are different circumstances, usually amounting to coming from a family or social circle which ain't really poor.

A college student can be broke, but a poor person can not afford to be a college student.
> complex technology picked up by cities and counties... will be implemented carelessly and wielded by only the hammiest fists

You don't know that. There are almost certainly nonpublic "partnerships" that you are not aware of.

“This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.” [1]

"Because of partner relations and legal authorities, SSO Corporate sites are often controlled by the partner, who filters the communications before sending to NSA." [2]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-ns....

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/15/us/documents.....
I wouldn't compromise my day-to-day work experience just because every other aspect of the G14 is perfect. It is an incredible machine (especially for the money), but if it doesn't get the job done it's ultimately worthless.

USB webcams or cellphones are a pain to deal with, especially if you just want to grab 1 device and run to a meeting room. "Oops i forgot my webcam brb". Cellphones are problematic because this means you now have to run some sort of hybrid of meeting software between PC and phone. This can increase cognitive load and distract from the actual purpose of the meeting.
> The poor have gotten slightly better off, the wealthy have gotten dramatically better off, and the gap between the two has widened.

That's a fairly common perception. Most often summarized in "the rich get richer, the poor poorer" (at least on a relative basis).

I was born in a Communist country, and I have another perception. Poverty has different levels. The most abject poverty is when you go hungry. My family didn't experience that, but we experienced the next step: severe food rationing. War-style rationing in peace times. 90% of the population in my city being subjected to that (the elite party members were not, obviously). My parents driving to a neighboring city to be able to buy potatoes and onions. My kids nowadays spend too much time on iPads and Xbox, I was spending too much time waiting in line to buy bread.

And I can only guess that there were hundreds of millions like me in all the Communist world (China included). For the most part this type of poverty has been eradicated.

I for one celebrate that.
In Israel in the 60-80's the state created "rent to own" housing projects for poor people.

It worked pretty well.
" once you bought a GM car you could only buy gasoline from a GM gas station"

On a related note: This kind of scam was the reason for the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. Carmakers actually attempted this kind of crap, claiming that your warranty would be "void" if you didn't use special Ford oil or Chevy tires.

The great thing is that the law extends to all products, so all of those stickers saying "warranty void if removed" are bullshit. You can modify the devices you own, and if the manufacturer wants to deny you warranty service, it has to prove that your modification caused the problem that you're seeking service for.
Apple is fully controlling your device, they can always do so if they want to even if they currently have no mechanism for it build-in.

(Except if your phone never connects to the internet or a cell-phone at all ;=) )

Also apple could just require the user to remove the app before requesting refund or at least putting it in a partially removed state from which apple then can remove if.

I.e. there is 0 benefit for any serious acting person. Only people who try to rip of app publishing companies profit from it.
That is definitely not the impression I got from reading the book. I can mostly only recall accounts of ordinary people trying to make the best of the absurd situations they faced.
Your citation of an antifa mass shooting doesn't appear very compelling; the Wikipedia article explicitly indicates no political motive in the shooting. It says he separately may have claimed support for antifa but the article also indicates he also may have been an incel or something.
It might help to clear your watch history and subscribers list to get a bit of a fresh start.
U.S. Warns Against Planting Mystery Seeds from China
Pretty sure PG has talked about this and said something to the effect that all of their money is made on the extreme outliers rather than the ordinary failures or modest successes. Knowing that, it kinda makes sense that they'd rather see the startup push and try to go big rather than just going home.
Might find these interesting if you haven't seen them yet:

https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-res...

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...

(Released this year: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/cloudformation-update-cli-t...)
Positive reinforcement for positive steps. Scott is saying and doing good pro-social things.
Square used to refund the fees, they changed that policy when I was there and the reason was just to lose less money on refunds. I'm not sure whether they had to pay interchange on refunds or not.
> “I do not think that’s systematically what’s going on,” Bezos said. “Third-party sellers in aggregate are doing extremely well on Amazon.”

Cool so cheating is okay if you do it only a little, great take.
Bezos: No guarantee Amazon didn't exploit third-party seller data
Here's a better question: how do people become rich?

Being poor is table stakes for being a human animal. The miracle of modern society is that billions of people aren't poor (as high as 90% according to Hans Rosling[1]). How did we make that happen? How do we make it happen for everyone?

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
so how does one account for early economics writing being light on math. Were economists Adam Smith, Hayek, and Ricardo deluded because they did not know advanced stats?
There are some android features that recently have been upstreamed to the mainline kernel like dm-verity that allow you to boot into a read-only, verified userspace.
> I don't think MOND has any advantage in the Occam's Razor department.

It has one: there's no need to worry about finding a dark matter particle when there's no room in the standard model for one. I'm surprised how astrophysicists take for granted that such a particle will show up in a collider eventually, if they even think that far ahead.
I say the total opposite.

It is barely starting. In 10 and 20 years it will be huge.
Have you heard of Dishwasher Pete? Many people, myself included, seemed to have learned about his zine after listening to one of his memorable public radio appearances:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/102/road-trip/act-one-0

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/115/first-day/act-one-0

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=109915...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_Pete

NOTE: This American Life audio didn't seem to work in Chrome, even after disabling uBlock Origin.