skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We (two guys in a basement) have created AyeTap, a free tool that we hope will make democracy cheaper, more efficient and viral. To bring about civic and social change. From deciding if your school should re-open or picking a venue for your band or putting a stop sign on your street. AyeTap will help people change their space, at a local level. Micro democracy. To fix the broken windows.

Current petitions only show how many agree with something. It's like looking at a football scoreboard and only seeing what one team scored. And polls are everywhere (including here) but they aren’t actionable.

We’ve been working on this for 7 years, mostly developing the language processing engine that’s the heart (more in #2 below and our search page). It understands that “I like ice cream’ is the same as “I really don’t dislike frozen yogurt even though my friends think so”

On AyeTap, your phone number is your voter ID card and:
1. One person, one vote. Each voter is handpicked and can alter the ballot.
2. No duplicate polls. If you have multiple presential elections, you won’t know who won. On Twitter for every poll that says, “Trump is fake” there is another that says, “Trump is great”. So how do you tally them up? Our NLP engine knows that “Does Taylor Swift rock?” equals “won’t you agree that Tay Tay is not dull and boring?” and allow only one. But it ’ll know that “Does Taylor Swift rock?” is different from “does a swift tailor, rock?” even though every word is the same and allow both. Without NLP, we would be just another change.org petition.
3. Polls on AyeTap can be geo restricted, like a real election. To find out what New Yorkers think is the best solution to the city’s parking problems, you can restrict voting to New Yorkers. If Floridians or Russians vote, the results are meaningless.

As it's only been the 2 of us, we haven’t had any feedback and would to hear your comments

p.s. Our site is only available within the US
>Our solar plants are going to lead to massive poisoned landfills due to their heavy metals.

"heavy metals" as in leaded solder, something that was banned in 2006?
> If I catch the virus, my risk of death is in lightning strike territory.

there's two wrong concepts here - you don't know how the virus will affect you medically. May be you will only suffer minor symptoms, or may be you will almost die with fluids in your lungs.

But that's not important. The most important aspect of you catching the virus is you become a transmission vector. And you cause infection in other people who _do_ suffer from the symptoms. And you cause economic damage because people will need to lock down, or reduce economic activity.

Therefore, it's not a matter of just risk to themselves that is important in the calculus of vaccines. It's the over-all health risk of the society.
Please tell me where you're buying, cause I have yet to encounter an earthed plug included with Apple equipment outside of UK. Only two-pole plugs, on the brick, and getting the long cord with ground wire sometimes requires a wait time.
This is wrong.

ISIS used[1] the X-UAV Talon. This is a off-the-shelf 1.7M wingspan drone plane available for about $150 without electronics (which are around $50-$200 depending on how elaborate you want to get).

It's capable of 100km+ flights[3].

Here's a pic of one after being shot down in Iraq[4]

[1] https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/commercial-dro...

[2] https://au.banggood.com/X-UAV-Talon-EPO-1718mm-Wingspan-V-ta...

[3] https://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/100km-in-the-x-uav-talo...

[4] https://armamentresearch.com/islamic-state-unmanned-aerial-v...
You can’t order a mortar on alibaba, and it requires much more training to use it effectively than flying a drone.

Mortars are also large and heavy and require a crew to serve as well as spotters to direct fire which means you need to have people closer to your target and working communications.

All of this complicates the logistics considerably which makes them less effective and more dangerous to their operators.

Effective mortar attacks can be fairly easily countered in the long term by jamming radios, cutting brush and removing other natural hiding spots and by killing experienced mortar crews.

Drones can be piloted by nearly anyone and with basic consumer grade equipment they can also be piloted from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection.
I don't have much of an opinion here, but the situation is a bit different than the classic trolley problem. With the vaccines, you don't know how many people are on the rails. Yes, a not finished vaccine might safe thousands of people. But what if it causes other damage and the vaccinated people die a year later, even though the would've survived covid?
Fun fact for all Americans who say "Our country is too big, changing to metric could never work here": Canada switched from Imperial to Metric between 1970 and 1985.
Though in practice people you'll encounter people who will use both systems in one sentence...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Canada
Unlikely worst case: there are rare side-effects that get only discovered very late. For example: 70% of those who get the vaccine develops liver complications within 3 years and 60% die a horrible death with no way to cure. Or every women who gets the vaccine becomes infertile within a decade. This is super unlikely, and moreover could only partially detected in a Phase 3. But the longer you give people to look for such complications, the more likely that they're discovered before mass-application.

Realistic worst case: there are some minor complications, and some people will get hurt. This has happened before: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.... , which is why we have such strict guidelines for vaccine development today.

Realistic bad case: the vaccine is not at all effective and does absolutely not protect from (re-)infection, but gives everyone post-covid19-fatigue. It will also be giving anti-vaxxers actual arguments and getting Trump re-elected.
Developers are autonomous, they can decide what to work on and start a rewrite without approval. Call it a cleanup/refactoring if management doesn't like rewrites.
Good luck, but you should consider that this isn’t a ”researcher is good/bad” issue, this is a ”global pharma race for billions in profits” issue with all kinds of interference from management, finance, etc.
Sounds like a cheap shot at politics and manipulating the narrative

If it works, praise the POTUS for being "brave", if it fails, blame the company.

Sure, the vaccine looks safe, and we might discuss if the protocol of Phase 3 testing can be modified and/or what are the reasons for it, but ignoring testing is stupid (and it's not only a matter of safe/not safe, but of dosage, booster shots required, etc)

Wear a mask and protect yourself while the vaccine gets ready, it's not hard. Or not, if you believe the recent misinformation news about "only 6% of healthy people die" then please join the queue for your Darwin Award.
Can you elaborate? Do you mean having a Tsunami is pure bad luck in Japan? (With Tsunami actually beiing a japanese word...)

I see your point though, one shouldnt go too much into 'what ifs', because all accidents are in a sense accidents/bad luck. But I still feel we can apply the what if on the outcome of the disasters, especially if it is that seasonal clear cut with high propability.
Well, the vaccine will only last a few months until you get a new shot. Might as well wait a bit.
How confident are you on that point? I don't have a reference on me right at this moment but I expect it is illegal for a non-bank entity to hand out IOUs at scale. People would be arrested.

I'm thinking of things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_curren... which ended in FBI raids.
Deep learning job postings have collapsed in the past six months
Hobbyists have been documenting step by steps for this since 2008, nothing you’re suggesting is remotely new.

Why hasn’t it happened? What is the part of the movie plot imagination that doesn’t translate quite as well to real life?
That's exactly it - it's not wildly incorrect at all.
As you yourself mentioned, ZFS is different.

The other projects were (for the most part) anonical originals" that they tried to create -- primarily on their own -- to replace existing products. ZFS is going on 15 years old, quite mature, highly trusted, and, of course, it already has a huge existing userbase.

It's certainly not an internal Canonical project that requires them to devote huge teams of developers to it. Unlike the others you mentioned, ZFS will continue to exist and grow regardless of Canonical's involvement.
This post describes a process of decomposing code into very simple functions: http://www.gar1t.com/blog/solving-embarrassingly-obvious-pro...

This results in functions which are, I feel, a bit too small for comfort. On the other hand, Erlang's pattern matching on function parameters has an effect similar to Eiffel design by contract. It has the potential to reduce the number of tests that need to be written (many of which are often very short functions).

Ideomatic Erlang/Elixir code tends toward smaller functions and pattern matching on multiple function heads instead of if/then/else logic.
Maybe the reason they are trillion dollars companies because they care about more important things than obscure or unprofitable bugs and berating their staff.
You think taking the vaccine is just be to protect yourself? It's not.
Thank you for volunteering
Finally, a spiritual successor to Lingua::Romana::Perligata.

https://metacpan.org/pod/Lingua::Romana::Perligata
For better or worse, some US regulations have made it a requirement for certain websites to have accessibility functionality. That has spawned a small ecosystem of plugins that aim to fulfill the regulatory requirements. Does they make for a more accessible websites? Judging by the plugins I have seen so far, I really doubt it. But it is at least a springboard to work from, and a kick in the butt for people who truly do care and are talented enough to pull it off properly.

That said, these plugins, and their failings, are a reminder to me that accessibility can't be an after thought, it needs to be baked into your product's UX.
It means the former (can't give treatment a patient doesn't consent to).

Are there specific types of situations you're thinking about? Outside of cases where the patient is unable to provide consent (minority, mental incapacity, unconscious in exigent circumstances), I believe this is largely followed in the US, at least. Childhood vaccines, for example, are optional if you don't want to attend public (or many private) schools.
Now HR Technology Conference Is Going Online Due to Covid-19
> Well, for now we don't really know how the rules of QM apply to macroscopic objects

Sure we do, "we" just refuse to acknowledge this, keeping a 100 year old debate alive for no good reason.

Macroscopic objects follow microscopic rules. That's that. There's no further debate. There can be none.

I can't even begin to describe how absurd it is to argue anything else. It's like... saying with a straight face that software doesn't "really" follow the rules of boolean algebra if it has enough lines of code. That somehow once a program gets "big enough", it can transcend truth tables and somehow go analog or something.

It's like a mathematician saying that really big equations, the kind that span several pages stop following the rules of algebra.

Get it? It's just... insane. The rules of the universe are the rules for all things in it. They apply to everything, at all scales, at all times.

If they don't, they're not the rules!
Also I work on side projects at work. Not officially sanctioned but as long as you still have time to do your main job and the side project is useful to the company, nobody has complained so far.
Ok, tell me. What are we going to with all the methane and hydrogen that we generated with our power to gas plants if we don't build more gas plants? How are we going to shut down coal plants if we don't have a flexible grid? For reference, an operating coal plant displaces renewable energy because its output cannot be regulated fast enough. Gas plants allow greater grid flexibility.
It might be illegal, but it happens, and the article includes one very concrete example of that.
Your points about getters and setters are valid, and may be skewing the results for Java especially. However, I believe they should be expected to be skewing them in the direction of improving the numbers for very small methods, not harming them.

> I'm also surprised by what counts as a long method - in my experience code starts getting messy with lengths > 20 - 30. These methods don't even seem to be represented in the data.

This is a good point, and I believe it is the main reason the article talks about Very short functions being sub-optimal. I think almost everyone wod agree that a function in the range 1-5 lines of code is very short, while deciding if a 20-Loc method is short or long is going to be more disputed.

> Why favor large functions? Maybe allow them, but why encourage? Also, we haven't established what large is (20 lines - perfectly fine; 200 lines - I don't think this can ever be justified).

My idea is to favor expressing serial logic serially. That is, if you have to do A then B then C then D, prefering to write it that way, rather than A, then foo() [which does B and C] then bar() [which does D]. This implicitly favors large functions over short ones, assuming that the code is required at all, of course. Short code is still preferable to long code, but at the module level, not function level.

> This does seem excessive. Don't you think there might be code that can be locally reused? Does every little thing have to go to a library?

There might be, of course, this is not about strict commandments. But I think that looking at many code bases, there are numerous functions called only once, which essentially act only as comments. A lot of the time, it may be worth it to refractor the code more deeply, and instead of simply extracting a piece of a larger function into a non-reused smaller function, to try to extract some common pattern into a library, and to keep the business logic in-line in the original function.

Just as an example, if you have something like

for(int i=0; i <n1; i++) {
for(int j=0; j <n2; j++) {
arr3[count++] = arr1[i] + arr2[j] ;
}
}

As part of a large function, instead of extracting this into an 'addArr1AndArr2' function, to extract the general pattern and leave so thing like this in the original context:

arr3 = zip(arr1, arr2).map(a1,a2=>a1+a2);

Of course, this will not always be possible, and sometimes a function can just become too long even in serial logic. But a lot of the time, the effort of reducing line count by extracting or applying library functions will be more worth it than simply reducing function line count by more simplistic refactoring.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2928990/

> nearly 400,000 children had been inoculated with Cutter polio vaccine and 250 cases of atypical paralytic polio occurred. There were also reports of the Wyeth pharmaceutical company polio vaccine causing paralysis and death in several children in the northeastern United States. 19 , 21

> It was soon discovered that some lots of Cutter and Wyeth polio vaccine were insufficiently inactivated with formalin leading to live polio virus in more than 100,000 doses. In fact, 16 lots of Cutter polio vaccine were retested and the first six lots produced were positive for live polio virus. These incidents demonstrated the lack of oversight and safeguards put into place before the vaccine was made so widely available.
Do they have a graphical tool for defining these workflows? For me this looks like the business process management tools from the past. With those the idea was not to use them to write program logic, but connect the dots on very high level. See for example the use case pictures at [1].

[1] https://cloud.google.com/workflows
Sorry but i fail to see how it's handy.
To stay with thr egg pack unit, it's much easier to say i want 7 eggs rather than a 0.58 of pack (not even sure it's right in egg/inches).
Even this i find it much more convenient in 10s.
A pack of 10 eggs?

You can easily express any content (0.1, 0.2, 0.3...)
Move to the lower unit (move the coma). A quarter of an egg in egg packs? 0.025
Want to move in the egg unit? 0.25

Please prove me wrong but i fail to see how it's easier in 12th, when using a decimal number system.
> I will be one of the first people in the world with an immunity against SARS-CoV-2

More like, one of the first vaccine-induced immunities. Regular survivors develop an immunity, after all.
Fortunately, there is a world outside the US, and much of it is more enlightened. If other large markets impose limitations on this kind of technology or create a penalty regime for failures that makes it worthwhile for the manufacturers to invest in more reliable systems, that will probably benefit everyone indirectly, even users in the US if a US government of whatever colour sells them out.
The article doesn’t adequately cover the role of central banks in fractional reserve banking.

Back in the days of the gold standard you used to be able to redeem a set weight of physical gold from the central bank for a dollar / pound of paper cash or minted coin. This conversion ratio was set by the central bank and acted as a final brake on inflation. When the gold standard was abolished and the dollar and pound became free floating fiat currency, it only became worth something because the government says it is. The “I promise to pay the bearer x pounds/ dollars” is just a hangover from the gold standard days when you could redeem money for gold directly from the central bank rather than through a private gold dealer. Now you can only redeem an equivalent amount of fiat currency at the central bank if day your dollar / pound note becomes damaged.

Banks can create deposits / reserves at the central bank out of nothing, they just have to promise to pay the central bank back at a later date, plus an equivalent amount of interest equal to the central bank set interest rate. This is how the central bank regulates the interest rate in the economy. If a bank charges another bank a higher level of interest for lending than the central bank, that bank can just go to the central bank instead and get charged the lower central bank interest rate. This acts as a brake on maximum inter-bank interest rates and ultimately what interest rates are charged by end consumers. The same is true for cash deposits, the central bank acts a floor / minimum interest rate for deposits as the central bank will pay interest at the central bank interest rate for deposits held at the central bank.
Therefore your example doesn't support your argument.

A division to 333.3+333.3+333.4 works to the satisfaction of all parties involved. You can also write 333⅓m, no-one prevents you from using fractions with the metric system.

You have the same assumption implicit in your square mile of land, as you assume everyone is satisfied with measuring to the nearest inch (or half-foot, or whatever is realistic with the measuring device).
Really? Footprint of manufacturing a renewables based plant worse than building huge concrete buidling? Do you have data to support this?

Of course I am talking about operational waste storage.

Rare earth mining has so much smaller scale than Uranium mining however.

I honestly do not understand why are molten salt power plants not more popular. They have essentially zero pollution, they do not use anything exotic, relatively low tech, can run even during dark hours.

We do not have energy grid which would cover whole or most of the world. Once it covers USA, Russian and China there will be no need to store renevable energy.
To be fair, squatters rights are specifically protected in law. The idea being that someones right to housing supersedes someone elses right to keep a property vacant indefinitely.
Part 1: https://medium.com/zalopay-tech-blog/newsql-evaluation-tidb-...
Wind is not as predictable as it seems, and most importantly, you don't get to control the production except for clamping down when you overproduce (this results in negative prices on the market and such).

Then you have to add transfer issues, and you have situations where North Germany is exporting, while south Germany is importing, and there's a lot of fossil fuels burned just so you have capacity to keep the grid in shape.

There are of course alternatives, like controlling demand via methods such as informing people they have to reduce power usage ASAP or get cut off (hope you didn't just start washing machine or put food into electric cooker)
Compared to an untested vaccine?
You truly belive you can ensure the safety of a vaccine without multiple years of trials?
Jupyter Notebook Tutorial – A Guide for Data Scientists
I think this is a great example of how specialised numbering / counting can have advantages, in specific domains. Most imperial vs metric arguments tend to degrade into "my <slightly contrived> use case works for my number system, but not yours!", or the more nuanced "the number of use cases where my system works well is higher than yours". While I do fall on the metric side of the argument even for most of these, I think a more reasonable way to approach it is that by standardising, we lose some domain specific tricks and perhaps take on a tiny bit more complexity, in order to have a more consistent and unified system, overall.
I'm so sick of politics... I know it's a byproduct of democracy, but this behavior becoming widespread - or at least more noticeable/transparent/obvious.

Even in a crises where scientist should be the shot callers, and regulators should be on their best game... no...

They became tools of politicians.

It's not only in the US. It's not just another "Trump thing". It's a worldwide phenomena. Every matter goes through the lens of politicians to get a refraction, or a twist.

Doesn't matter if it's a technical issue, or a scientific issue, that would required technical or scientific solutions - it all dilutes into politics.

The majority seems to be trying to leverage this pandemic for their political gains, even if that means cutting corners, hide or manipulate information. It's disgusting.
Speaking of small restaurant: A few years ago I was visiting Vienna with my parents, where we strolled around the back alleys. There we found a small bakery[1] and across from that a small "Kaffeehaus" [2]. There we were able to literally buy some freshly baked bread/pastries from the bakery, walk 20m or so over and have breakfast with what we bought over there.

That is something you can barely ever find anywhere. It is also one of the reasons I try to avoid famous places and instead search out to the hidden parts of the city.

[1] https://www.kornradl.at/

[2] Like 3 tables and with a giant bookshelf of interesting books.
It's not that simple. A lot of technology today is manipulating or is spying on its users.
Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
Do you have scripts or devices that you write to automate some of your work?
Had no idea any other uBlock exists.
There’s too little information in this post. As other have said your complaint aims at the workflow not the technology and you’ve provided none of the reasons your company adopted the new workflow. I can think different situations to which alternatively each one of which is better suited.

Though doubtlessly this new workflow is harder on you than the previous.
I'm sure there are workarounds to disable Windows update too. That's not really the point.
If you read my comments elsewhere in this discussion, you'll see that I've been one of those people.

In this thread, I'm simply observing that there can't be a clear separation between control systems and information systems if we're going to achieve these kinds of autonomous functionality. We need a more nuanced solution.