skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard that w3schools has gotten better. MDN is certainly currently the gold standard in my opinion. But since Mozilla laid off the team maintaining it, not so sure how long that will be the case...

https://mspoweruser.com/mozilla-lays-off-dev-tool-threat-man...
There was that movie where the mobster told the incompetent hitman - "Just walk up to them, put the gun to their head and pull the trigger. That way, you can be sure."

Then he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger (because his uzi attack had failed to kill the target)

Anyway, hard to beat the classics. Until the drone can lie in wait, identify the target itself, home in on it and explode at point blank range, well then we haven't gotten close to the traditional approach.
While I agree with your premise, I would just like to point out that in Mexico, the number of missing people far outweigh the number of confirmed deaths. Not all cartel murders result in visible bodies on streets, and many of them do take care to hide their trails.
I would say it's not always as cut and dry for the benefits of Metric over Standard.

When doing math? Yes please, sign me up.

For measurements around the room? Inches is a pretty good unit. CM is too small, DM is too big. There is a reason 90% of tabletop wargames (even those made in the UK by Games Workshop) still use inches for movement. It doesn't matter in a wargame how many inches are in a foot, or how many feet in a mile. You stay 100% in inches, and it just works.

Another interesting place is in carpentry. You can divide 12 by 2, 3, 4, 6... it just works well. There is a reason the bootstrap CSS framework uses 12 divisions and not 10. Again, the number of feet in a mile don't matter when framing a house. Are the studs 18" on center, or 24"?
Enum has one meaning in C family languages. Other languages may have different meanings. For example, in Haskell something is an enum if there is an invertible mapping between that type and (a contiguous subset of) the machine integers (with complications).

In other languages the concept might correspond to (finite) recursively enumerable sets (ie you can list all their elements).
Written English is by far the best language among the globally popular ones and the European languages because it's easier to learn due to its small alphabet with no special ligature rules, small frequently used vocabulary, and low number of word variants.

Spoken English is not so good due to complex and unintuitive pronunciation, but that's not very relevant nowadays where most media is text (and also, it would be easier to popularize a new pronunciation for English, e.g. pronouncing it as if it were Latin, than a whole new language).
To a user "The employee fucked up" and "Management fucked up" and "The developers fucked up" are indistinguishable.

Your blame-free production line won't help you if you're making the wrong thing and/or your UX doesn't help the user.

Example: someone at Google decided that if you make a general area-based query - e.g. vets in SF - street view is disabled.

It doesn't matter why they made that decision. To a user, it's an annoying inconvenience. The fact there may - or may not be - some kind of management rationale doesn't make it less annoying or less inconvenient. Nor does the fact that the code doubtless passes the tests it's designed to pass.

The same applies to Amazon's search options. I don't want to see results for 1.5TB external hard drives or any internal drives at all if I search for "external hard drive 12TB". I also don't want fake reviews, or reviews for unrelated products.

I don't want my own videos with my own music hit with fraudulent copyright claims when I upload them to YouTube. Especially if "my own music" is white noise. [1]

I don't want to have to deal with bugs like Heartbleed, Meltdown, or Spectre. I don't want Excel in Office 365 to fail to respond to double-click select. I don't want my card to be declined for no reason when I'm buying groceries.

I don't want the airliner I'm on to crash because management cut corners.

And so on.

Some of these issues are serious, some are less serious. But what's lacking is seriousness across the industry as a whole. There's an underlying attitude that software is either an annoying cost which can be pared to the bone, or a financial optimisation process, or an interesting puzzle to tinker with. And there seems to be too little deep understanding that it exists outside of a laptop screen, and when it fucks up it causes very real issues for very real people.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523
Well, investment has a price, and there's always some level where a viable business is not a good investment.

I do think that WeWork offer something useful. I've been in them, they have a good vibe, and I think certain segments will decide it's worth using them.

But the comparables are firms like Regus, which is valued like a ordinary business with a known business model that is quite similar. They even have their own startup-vibe buildings.
Is that at all obvious? Suppose there are serious side effects and the scientist loses his arm. You bet that people will say it was unethical by the lab provider to let them try.
It's a bit more interesting when you consider the disparity in infection rates. The people most likely to get it were less likely to get tested for it.

The reality is probably just that these people didn't have damn time or energy to go to a testing center for a blood draw, or were already concerned about spending so much time in public and didn't want to travel more than they needed to. Being working-class in NYC is hard nowadays due to the very long commutes (caused in turn by people fleeing excessively high rental prices).
For some it will be the perfect terrorist tool, tools that cause terror do not necessarily need to always kill.
Yes: when I'm browsing on mobile, I send myself links to topics to look into further on desktop (where it's easier to have a bunch of tabs and applications open at the same time).

This way, I can reserve weekly blocks of time for processing these interesting links all at once instead of being side-tracked every time I encounter an interesting new rabbit hole.
And then the buyer likely had the cost of extra RAM on top of that...
I just want to know why Google Images shows Pinterest at all. It is clearly misleading and just ripping images from other sites which should be the real results. Its almost like if Google search has decayed and Images is piggybacking off of Pinterest on purpose.
As a Pinterest and Duck Duck Go user, I don't know what you're talking about, but this comment feels like digital NIMBYism: "please don't exist, so I can recapture a little bit of how the past felt." Glad you found a work-around though.

Pinterest is a nice place for collecting ideas (photos) related to a hobby, in my case architecture from around the world. It's also (more commonly I think) used for coming up with style ideas, at both personal and home scales.
Excellent comments. I have now made substantial changes to the article. If you would like to review the diffs, they are here: https://github.com/baobabKoodaa/blog/commit/c2f7fef53d621acc...
I pre-ordered the PmOS community edition, and it's getting delivered tomorrow.

From what I can tell, this is the same HW, but without a different distro pre-loaded.

I'm super-stoked to try out the different distros, and will definitely give Manjaro a shot too :)
Permutation City is my favorite novel of his, but in many ways Diaspora is his most impressive work.

His short stories are also criminally overlooked.
Pinterest is fine if you are looking for its content on its site. But if you want a direct shot to a picture and it happens to be off of Pinterest it can be rather obnoxious.
well up until the point where it is an aerosol attack. protection is probably going to be down to specialized sensor arrays and some form of ballistic counter but these solutions will be expensive and harder to deploy than the attack.

drones open the door to all sorts of malfeasance that used to require state level backing to accomplish and counters are only coming into play if not concept
I'm ok with Mozilla making it _harder_ to install add-ons. Requiring going deep into the settings could be a useful enough friction that a lot of privacy and experience issues are solved for the average user.

But a strict prohibition on apps really seems antithetical to what they stand for.
> Btw, is your foot precisely 12 inches, or is your shoe?

It doesn't matter because I'm not looking for a high level of precision when I do that kind of measuring, I'm looking for good enough not perfect. If physicists can handle this notion[1] even when they're the ones tasked with producing SI units I'm not sure why it's not applicable for the rest of us.

> APPROXIMATIONS

> Even though physicists usually try for a high degree of precision, there are times when only a close approximation is neeed. Physicists some times make rough estimates for making tentative decisions.

Sounds like a decent principle to me.

> then complain that things don't make as much sense as they seem to in 95% of the world

It's not Brits that are complaining as we get to choose the measure that suits the aims at the time. If centimetres are appropriate then use centimetres. If feet and inches are better, use that. Do you write all your software in C? Better hope WASM takes off or your competitor using that nasty Javascript will remain ahead.

No, it's the "95%" measuring their height in centimetres (why not millimetres?;) or buying litres of milk that inconvenience themselves while complaining about measures they don't understand because they blind themselves to the advantages. Good sold in Britain have both measures on everything, we're committed, just not dogmatic about it.

[1] http://webphysics.iupui.edu/NH/Projects/TEAMS[2]/err6.htm
Honestly, this is a good example for why our industry shouldn’t be pursuing this particular tech.

Tech (writ large) thrives on shipping incomplete solutions and iterating on them - for better or worse. And that’s not something that’s acceptable for self-driving cars.

Better to put our efforts towards other things, in my opinion. Personal autos aren’t sustainable even if they drive themselves.

Feels like this is the sunk-cost fallacy (or as I prefer, “throwing good money after bad”) but played out across the intersection of two industries.
Also feet, my goodness, is it annoying to read anything with distances given in feet. 600 feet! Wow, that's a long— wait, no, it's about 200 metres, not 600 metres, so not that long a distance. A thousand feet! No, that's not even close to a kilometre, that's just slightly more than 300 metres. And so on.

Really wish book translators would translate the units inside as well. In fiction the exact numbers don't matter much, so that'd be perfectly fine.
In terms of ethics, practically every religion and system of ethics in the past has defined deliberately putting oneself in harms way to benefit others as the one of the most ethical acts: “No greater love has any man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

So if “ethicists” are questioning this, it says more about the “ethicists” beliefs and prejudices, than about the ethics.
Back end Development 101: Prime Numbers and Multi-threading
Should the CTO Still Code?
One example is one of the first bugs I ever fixed as a working developer. A click event was broken on Firefox only because of a nested anchor and button element. As interactive elements, they shouldn't be nested according to the HTML spec, but it's common for developers to reuse button styles on a link by wrapping it with the button element. The behavior is undefined, which resulted in it working okay on Chrome but not Firefox.
The article is not about that kind of maintainability.
Most self driving systems are using redundancy, people have only a couple of eyes.

I was involved in the development of a self driving vehicle and agree that we are still not there, that's why there are no commercially sold self driving vehicles.

OTOH we can clearly see that it is a possible goal, or at least a possible goal to try and achieve, for the coming years and not a very far future.

Remember that what we want to achieve is not necessarily zero accidents but a lower number than human driver achieve.
Tips to be More Productive with Xcode 12
I've always considered both the union and tagged union to be Sum types[0].

> Two common classes of algebraic types are product types (i.e., tuples and records) and sum types (i.e., tagged or disjoint unions, coproduct types or variant types).

Edit: e.g. X | Y isn't so different from 'a' A | 'b' B

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_data_type
Java, I don't think it was association with the browser. I admittedly was still in school at the time, so maybe I'm missing something, but it always seemed to me that everyone regarded Java applets as more of a cute toy than a serious technology.

However, Java did solve one really annoying problem that's hard to properly appreciate if you didn't leave any of your own blood behind in the 1990s: Cross-platform development. There were so many operating systems and architectures back then, and none of them had really risen to prominence as a general-purpose option, so most shops were working with a pretty decent variety of different platforms. At one point I worked at a desk that had three different computers with different processor architectures and operating systems (and therefore basically no software in common) sitting on the same desk, and all three were needed for some purpose or other.

Into that environment comes a new language/platform that offers write-once-run-anywhere with decent (if not great) performance, and one of the first standard libraries that might be recognized as reasonably mature by modern standards.
* The hand he overplayed was the application to the natural world—I think that will take longer to pay off than he predicted.
*

Not that I actually understand it, for I am a UI designer, but Wolfram’s recent physics projects seems to be taking a fresh run at that.

https://www.wolframphysics.org/bulletins/2020/08/a-short-not...

disclosure: worked for Wolfram for 7 years, forgive me promoting stuff I worked on
One view of this is that the question ought to be whether or not those people are right in assigning blame to anyone. If the scientist is fully aware of the risk and willing to use himself as a test subject, it's hard to argue that there is any blame to go around.
Fly a drone to a location and conduct surveillance for the target.

ID target and activate drone bombing protocol.
Indeed. I recently re-decided to default to Ruby for side projects. If you don't need to squeeze the very last drop of performance, I can't think of a more comfortable language.
I worked with a guy like this, long-term contractor at a business institution. Every shell script he did was wrapped in many levels of awk,sed,perl,regex, with no comments whatsoever. And he worked there for 10+ years. At the end it was easier to rewrite his "modules" than to maintain them.
Handwriting Character Recognition Using Deep Learning
It's kind of a gray area, but headings are scoped to sectioning elements so there can be multiple h1 in a page. After all, article content should be considered as stand-alone sections of content. I'm not aware of how this affect accessibility.

But at the same time, I get that this guide seems aimed at people not very experienced with HTML so it may be fitting to deal with details like that later.
WSL2 is just a Hyper-V VM with some UI integrations. It uses an actual Linux kernel rather than a NT kernel personality, so systemd should work like in any other VM.
I have now updated the article substantially. Deposit insurance is now covered in more depth. Diffs: https://github.com/baobabKoodaa/blog/commit/c2f7fef53d621acc...
Occasionally, mostly reminders
Off Topic a little, I think

Do you guys think there is in theory, the best programming language, or will this always be subjective

I started learning Julia recently, and my first impression was , scoping rules are a mess, I like Julia a lot and I think its probably one of the better languages and better communities that exist today (but oh my, scoping, what a gafe (in my opinion))

Is scoping really still a subjective issue, do we not know yet the best approach to scope variables for example?

Static typing, Dynamic Typing, Gradual typing, will this be a debate for ever

Learning languages is big investment, and having dozens of languages around is not productive, human languages are consolidating over a few, English is by far the business language of the world

Why does language design continue to be a subjective topic?
its not like computers need cultures !

How is relevant to Nim, well as I said its a bit off topic, but we can always ask the question, why does Nim exist, or do we need Nim to exist
> when I see people using Ubuntu, I always wondered why?

As someone (still) using Ubuntu today, I have 1 simple answer: OOB experience.

Back in the days, I could insert a Ubuntu live-CD (remember CDs?), and have a fully working system, including proprietary graphics-driver and wifi-firmware. And installing from that Live-CD gave me the same experience once installed.

Basically, it was a machine 100% ready to use, with everything autodetected, with absolutely zero manual effort.

Debian otoh required me to hook up a wired network connection (because those had free drivers), and then manually track down which packages contained the proprietary drivers and firmware I needed.

That single thing made a world of difference to me back then, and it still does today.
The metric system is everywhere in Britain. Brexit was about returning to and retaining common law, as Roger Scuton so eloquently lays out in this speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyLJYW0_F38
Google still lists them on top for almost any query about html or css. It’s the go-to example demonstrating that there is something wrong with Google’s algorithms for ranking results.
It's the same disease that leads to "if a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric."

The purpose of science is to give you answers to questions you didn't already have. But it's hard enough to avoid things like selection bias even when you're acting in good faith. If you start using it to work backwards from a political platform to determine which questions you want to ask to lead to the policies you decided on ahead of time, the thing you're doing is the reverse of making policy based on science. It's manufacturing "science" based on politics. Which isn't actually science.

If you knew the conclusion of a study before it was conducted, its conclusion provides no new support for your position.

This kind of implies that if we want actual science, we can't have politicians deciding what to study, and we can't have scientists getting fired for their conclusions no matter how politically inconvenient they are.
Unfortunately the US has to change from the United States customary system to Metric, not Imperial to Metric. This is much harder! /s
> There are true statements that are unprovable within the system.

I really don't like this, and it verges on being flat-out incorrect: the first incompleteness theorem does not say this at all. It says that there are sentences (and indeed it constructs one, the so-called Gödel Sentence) that cannot be proven or refuted within the system.

For first-order theories it follows from the contraposition of Gödel's completeness theorem that there exist (classical) models of the theory where this sentence holds and models where it doesn't: the existence of models where the sentence does not hold means that this must be a very different meaning of "true" to the one used in common parlance.

In higher-order logics, which do not have a completeness theorem, it makes sense to talk about true statements which are unprovable: there can exist tautologies, sentences which hold in all models of a theory, which cannot be proven from the axioms of a higher-order theory (and you don't need the incompleteness theorem for this); on the other hand, in a first-order theory all tautologies are provable.

Sentences which cannot be proven or refuted within a theory are said to be logically independent of the theory. Famously, the Axiom of Choice is independent of the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory: it's up to mathematicians to decide whether they accept the Axiom of Choice. If they do, they can work in ZF+C; if not, they can work in ZF. Neither system is "more true" from a purely logical perspective, so I really don't like describing logically independent sentences as "true but unprovable": it almost certainly doesn't mean what people think it means.

The first incompleteness theorem could perhaps be stated better for a lay audience as:

No recursive set of axioms can capture our notion of arithmetic it its entirety.

This is a limitation on how we can use axiom systems to represent mathematical objects: even more informally, we might say:

Truth is subjective in sufficiently complex systems.
This seems very similar to monetary amounts in at least (most of?) the US and the UK.

"One dollar/pound twenty," etc.
What's the difference between this and pyimgui ?
Hey, have you heard of "books"? over 1 million new books are published every year, and people have been writing them for like a really long long time.
Unless you are trying to send a message, it seems to me that the best assassination would leave doubt even as to whether the person was dead, or how they died. I think the parent's observation is spot on.
Happy 90th, Warren
Could you give an example of a major task that you think the state of the art could be trivially improved on with the xlnet approach?
Thanks for the information. Do you know how the pandemic affected research output for 2020?
It doesn't matter which prices you choose, old money will always outperform decimal because it has more factors. There are advantages and disadvantages to both but quibbling about the price of eggs isn't going to change them.
Eggs are sold in packs of ten here (Germany).

Oh, and also packs of six. :D
Ha Ha peace, freedom and love.
What a naive idiot
Still on the MDN example. The browsing mode reads the nont-tabbable element but when I try to focus it with object navigation, it says unknown. However, if I move to it from the previous object it reads the text but still does not interact.

I'm not sure what would happen if the element is an anchor but I'd bet on "WTF is this supposed to do".
The purpose of a captcha, and the purpose of the implementation of a captcha don’t need to be the same thing. Said differently, a given thing can fulfill multiple roles and that isn’t an inherent contradiction nor is it wrong.

In this case: yes, the stated purpose of a captcha is to identify humans - ie, legitimate users. The unstated purpose of ReCaptcha (at least) is to train AI. But it does both simultaneously.

The funniest thing to me is that we’re all in on it. :)
This is not entirely accurate. Suppose a fraudulent bank decided to credit my account with a trillion dollars. The federal reserve would not honor this IOU with actual dollars. This is in stark contrast to federal reserve's ability to create a trillion dollars. They could create an actual trillion dollars and give it to a corrupt politician. A regular bank does not possess this ability.
I'd add that the minimum bill is $10000 for anything enterprise. That's a bare minimum to handle all the time and extra work they will incur (months of sales process, dedicated AWS instances, heavy support burden, single sign on integrations, etc...).

As soon as you hear any of these, it's the hint you're dealing with enterprise and you have to up the price tenfold.
It's still one of the cheapest attacks after #1 is plugged with public key encryption or initial off-band (sneakernet) key delivery.