skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Social Darwinism/"what is supposed to fall, you should push"

I always wondered how one could misinterpret natural laws, that whatever you do you cannot not obey, as human commandments, that you can obey or not.

Considering that Darwin findings would command us to ignore the weak (or that any knowledge could command anything, for that matter), is like considering that sending rockets into space would be an offense to the law of gravity, and that it would command us to spend our lives crawling on the ground like snakes.

(In the case of Nietzsche, maybe that's the "Will" subconsciously manipulating the puppet of consciousness, as a defense mechanism against the purposeless void reached by thinking through the irrationality of life).
Nice
What do you think about blackblaze
Latest round in CRISPR patent battle has an apparent victor, but fight continues
I'm skeptical that Microsoft, Apple, and Google have all failed at this, but some dude on HN has a simple solution. I think you need to expand on your concept a bit before I take it seriously.

What does the software solution look like that distinguishes between a crypto miner and a media player?

How can you tell when an app legitimately needs access to files from another app versus being malware of some sort?
Ask HN: Which team is responsible for automation tools?
Which team in an organisation should run/maintain/own the automation tools like Jenkins, TeamCity or Octopus Deploy?

I am a DevOps Engineer part of a product team. So are all the other DevOps engineers in the company. We all use a shared Jenkins cluster someone created a while back yet no one 'owns' it. Updates are done randomly and if it breaks no one is responsible for its uptime.

I'm trying to figure out who should be responsible for the tool. I'm think there should be a team responsible for these automation/development tools. What other responsibilties should they have?
Clone of the endangered Przewalski's horse is born of DNA saved for 40 years
Interesting and perhaps shows the cultural differences between ML and stats people. I took a machine learning course in my bachelor's and two more ML courses in my master's (CS). These weren't some "deep learning lite", mess-around-in-Keras courses, because DL wasn't even big back then. We covered lots of stuff, Bayesian linear regression, Gaussian processes, Gibbs sampling, Metropolis-Hastings, hierarchical Dirichlet processes, SVMs, multi-class SVM, PCA, kernel PCA, perceptrons, CMAC neural nets, Hebbian learning, AdaBoost, Fisher vectors, EM algorithms for various distributions, fuzzy logic, optimization methods like conjugate gradients etc etc.

But not once were the "Gauss-Markov conditions" mentioned. Frequentist theory was only marginally addressed. I taught myself some of that stuff from the Internet, such as hypothesis testing theory, p-values, t statistic, ANOVA, etc.

Also, I'd say I'm good with data structures and algorithms, complexity theory, graph theory etc.

I thought these skills would be a good fit for data science jobs, but I guess it's really such a wide umbrella term, that probably you're more looking for people trained in the frequentist, statistical side of it. What application field are you in, if it's no secret?
> But with that positive comes all the negatives of YAML, especially around arrays of structs vs regular arrays or arrays of structs which contain one key-value pair each

Are you able to elaborate on this problem? I'm not going to defend the complexity of YAML but I've never ran into any issues with storing complex structures within in.

> and especially the struggles around multi-line strings or other kinds of entries in YAML.

YAML actually has pretty sophisticated handling of white space within strings. The problem isn't that whatever edge case you run into can't be done, the problem is that YAML covers so many edge cases with different parsing operators that it becomes a bit of a cryptic mess trying to remember which operate is needed when. Though in fairness, JSON was never intended to be human readable (it was meant to be machine generated and machine read) so it's not any better in the readable whitespace department.

> I don’t think it’s worth the cost and would rather pass some extra keys in JSON that my parser ignores (since additive changes should never cause bugs in data contracts), or a regular key ‘comment/description’.

A third option would be to use hash-prefixed comments (like in Bash) then run that JSON through a YAML parser since technically YAML is a superset of JSON (literally, valid JSON is also valid YAML). Though I do accept that would be an unattractive option to some because you end up with less strict format checking of your source JSON (less strict in the JSON sense).
I'd argue yes, they should definitely still be employees.

When a person flips burgers for both McDonalds and Burger King, they're still clearly an employee with two different jobs at two companies, and not some sort of "independent food consultant". If you work as a cashier at both Shell and Speedway, you are today an employee with two different jobs at two different companies, and not some kind of "independent petroleum cashier contractor". Having two jobs at different companies happens all the time in the US today for low/middle-class folks, and has for many many decades now -- these folks are generally all still considered W2 employees.
That only applies to... niche stores and food ordering, maybe.

If you're working on SaaS that is meant to help someone make money or work faster, there's a good chance you'll have people using your software as a part of their dayjob - i.e. 2-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. If you treat your users as idiots and don't implement space for them to grow (i.e. power user features), you'll be wasting a lot of life for a lot of people (and a lot of money of their bosses).

That's a heuristic I'd like to see being used in UX design: assume your software becomes a tool in some company, and you have full-time users spending their workday on it. Design to that group.
If you think that, do you think Word should start refusing to open .doc documents at some point?

Code is sometimes alive and changing, and sometimes an artifact. Requiring that code become alive after being an artifact carries significant risks. One might say "code should never be unmaintained" but I think that ignores the reality of limited resources that all of us deal with.
Artemis vs Apollo: Is NASA's Artemis Program “Sustainable?”
> And where is the option for those of us who don’t mind less battery in exchange for actually getting prompt notifications for services we use?

You always have the option to build your own phone. With easily available components and open source software it’s never been easier. And with cheap and flexible Chinese manufacturing, Kickstarter and Patreon it’s never been easier to manufacture your own phone design.

Otherwise, your demands don’t reflect the needs of the vast majority of Google and Apple customers. The world doesn’t revolve around your unique desires.
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra in 1982 on "users" [1] (please read the rest of the EWD as it is too much to paste here):

"The computer “user” isn’t a real person of flesh and blood, with passions and brains. No, he is a mythical figure, and not a very pleasant one either. A kind of mongrel with money but without taste, an ugly caricature that is very uninspiring to work for. He is, as a matter of fact, such an uninspiring idiot that his stupidity alone is a sufficient explanation for the ugliness of most computer systems. And oh! Is he uneducated! That is perhaps his most depressing characteristic. He is equally education-resistant as another equally mythical bore, “the average programmer”, whose solid stupidity is the greatest barrier to progress in programming. "

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
Citations needed? This comment smells a lot like:

https://xkcd.com/793/
Yeah, that works unless the quiz is cherry-picked to demonstrate the opposite.
That’s painting it in the most charitable light. For the first months of the pandemic, they specifically said “don’t wear a mask because current evidence is that it does not spread airborne and most likely infection vector is contact with a contaminated surface, don’t bother with masks but wash hands and scrub surfaces.” It wasn’t about asymptomatic cases not being transmitted in the air but in general about the coronavirus not being “primarily” transmitted via the air, which would have been patently false even at the time, except for the “primarily” weasel word. (You can look at the archive.org snapshots for the CDC website.)

As a scientist, my answer to “should we wear masks?” wouldn’t have been to deflect to contaminated surfaces - even setting aside that subsequent research showed that to be largely a non-issue.
For those that think migrating from python2 to 3 is easy: no. You’ve clearly never tried to migrate different companies/environments.

Sure, the code now runs in the py3 interpreter, but guess what!? That was the easy part! Now go hunting down Byzantine build scripts and environments to find out how it was deployed and tested. Tested lol? Ugh and guess what? The code base has commits that we’re never deployed to prod. What do you do now? You basically own a service that hasn’t been deployed in 4 years and a branch that was never deployed ever.
A lot of the things that "everyone knows" are wrong. The point of science is to have a systematic way to tell the difference between things that seem intuitively true and things that are actually true.

I did a quick search and found a study about percentages of couples raising children [1]. They have a table by couple type and marital status. The difference isn't as stark as you might think.

Looking at the smallest difference in the table, married female/female partnerships have a 30.2% chance of currently raising children, while married male/female partnerships have a 38.7% chance. Is it obvious to you that this would be so close? Would you be surprised if there were countries where the numbers are reversed?

[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/same-sex...
Thanks to microlens arrays, moire filter, and sometimes the sensor outresolving the image, this is not actually an issue.
"too much duplicated functionality"
What should that be? Who decides when its too much anyway?
No one cares about duplicated functionality in stuff they don't use. Probably 90% only want to download form YouTube. So why would they care if part of the code is used in another downloaders they don't use.
If you create a kernel/OS/Distro sure you don't want duplicated functions but this is just a downloader tool.
Also if there are generic functions that can be used by different tools you create a lib.
No one has to reinvent the wheel. Would it cause more work if summed up? Yes most likely but the work is shared and independent.
If you compile with -Werror, then you are intentionally running it in no-backwards-compatibility mode. That is not really comparable with Python situation.
Oh please.

A non-user modifiable app killer isn't the fine line separating us from media app currency miners.

How are Google's devices keeping OS guarantees while delivering some of the best in class battery life figured on Android

Also, imagine seriously implying it's ok they blanket-kill user installed media players because there's a chance they might be currency mining?

https://www.cnet.com/news/vlc-for-android-blacklists-huawei-...

> The decision came in response to the Chinese phone maker's decision to cut off all background apps except its own, which stops VLC's audio playback, VideoLAN said in a tweet.

Here's a real, not made up, not founded in a slippery slope from allowing music to allowing crypto mining, example of what these manufacturers are doing to users and devs alike.

-

It's not about battery life, it's about flexing their power to seem like they're doing something, while ensuring their bundled apps are the best option for a wide range of tasks

In fact, you can look at the manufacturer list and come to that conclusion yourself.

The manufacturers at the top of the list of breaking optimizers are mostly selling devices heavily subsidized by bundled services. Even Samsung is more aggressive on cheaper devices that target BRIC markets because they need revenue from bundled services.

-

Google is the only exception to the rule... until you realize their devices are just following the guarantees Android makes.

And they still manage to have some of the best battery life on the market.

That's because it's not even as simple as just blindly killing background apps.

When you kill these background apps, users get in the habit of opening the apps back up manually to not miss updates.

Repeatedly waking the radio is more battery consuming than if the OS just keeps it's promises and smartly wakes these apps.

It's not like they get infinite processing time anyways, having this stuff be managed intelligently instead of just taking a sledgehammer to the concept of background processing is better for everyone involved but a manufacturer that wants their music app to be the only functional one...
Unfortunately, 30 year old Fortran code did not have such good luck in my company. VB6 compiler is hard to come by these days, and I have been tasked with rewriting it for "modern computers" ! The newest executable we have is from ~2008. Kudos to Microsoft to keep it running at least.
Agreed. Mostly. But some ui decisions dont do favors neither for newbies nor powerusers. (disappearing scrollbars, links and buttons that dont have any visual cues tha they are links and buttons might look nice, but they do obscure the controls of interface for everyone; im still thinking somebody having a stroke is the reason for ribbon interface)
Wait, it wasn't Expert Sexchange? No wonder I never left with my questions answered...
I feel like we don't give tools like Microsoft Excel, Game Maker, Photoshop, or the web enough credit for the ability they empower users of computers. Without any formal training or education, they're able to use computers to their ends.
It’s a mistake to give people too much credit too. Of course you shouldn’t assume people are stupid but I don’t think it’s so simple with assuming laziness. One of the great books about UX is called “Dont make me think”, and there is a reason why.
Wikipedia Matters (2019) [pdf]
History of Read
There's apparently not many documented cases, just 2 mentioned here, with the one at the link being a whale the ship had injured:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Alexander_(ship)

Sperm whales ramming ships that attack them seems less remarkable than whales in general attacking ships during the wooden ship whaling era.

Update: The article on the Essex mentions quite a few more incidents, but still only a handful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)
Russian gas has absolutely not a single thing to do with nuclear energy. I repeat: it has nothing to do with it.

Why shutdown nuclear? Why do you have to ask me that question when you've been ready to form such a strong opinion in the first place? Did you do no research? Didn't you at least look at the wikipedia article? Something about waste, not needing it, being expensive tech from the last century? Nothing of that came along in your research? No? The single thing that you got from your sources was: "something something Fukushima"? Didn't you at least question this at some point? Because I question your abilities to form an educated opinion here.
As someone interested in esoteric databases, I’d be curious to hear which ones you’re aware of that in your opinion don’t live up to claims or do. For instance, I’ve been very impressed with Clickhouse and have messed around with Jd (from Jsoftware ). Any other good ones I should check out?
I don't really understand all the grumpiness around Python releases. There are lots of programming languages that depend on interpreters or VMs (Java, Erlang / Elixir, Go [kinda]). Those languages have versions which are no longer supported and, as far as I know, that's not controversial.

The old versions exist. They are not supported. You can choose to use them if you wish or use the latest. I don't see many complaints about the fact that Java SE 6 (or whatever) isn't getting updates anymore.

I think the Python team fucked up the 2->3 transition, but that was 12 years ago! Do other people have explanations as to why old versions of the Python interpreter are associated with so much emotional investment?
I'm not "defending Apple" here, I'm pointing out simple economics. A typical app costs upwards of $50,000 in developer time to build. Even if you are building your own app, we're talking about a person with valuable skills investing months of their personal time. This idea that for a typical developer $99 is a huge burden is just not an issue.

This is true if you love Apple or hate them deep in your soul for a million burning reasons.
I am well aware of that. Deleting the entire article by removing everything but the introduction makes the article significantly less useful, especially if much of the information was properly sourced but you got rid of it because you didn’t like it, or got into a revert war with authors of the content to show that you controlled the article. The behavior of the Wikipedia involved is not in good faith.
Interesting article, the direct link to the paper is:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7425399/

ALS is a difficult disease, both to detect early and obviously to treat. This paper is looking for a biomarker to try and detect it earlier and as a way of measuring the course of the disease. I watched my grandfather fade away from it, thankfully after a full life, so it's something I've experienced and wondered about

As a tangent, there was a recent trial of a new therapeutic agent with modest benefit published in the NEJM.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1916945

And accompanying editorial:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2021144?query=rec...

Both are paywalled (the abstract is available in the first) unless you subscribe to NEJM or know your way around these kinds of things.
I wonder if it could be done with nothing more than "solar sails" at ground level, aimed so they reflect the sunrise and push back against rotation, but exert no directional force the rest of the day.
A great white shark's liver is huge, heavy, and oily. I'm not sure an orca could physically even accomplish the task of separating out a human liver and if it did, it sure wouldn't be satisfying.
If a vendor uses dark patterns in API/SDK configuration, they may not be happy about light falling on said patterns.

This would be a "vendor documentation annotation" service not controlled by vendor.
Only if the home environment allows it... they must not have surveyed knowledge workers with kids at home and no daycare.
I’ve worked in the field for 7 years now so not that long but long enough to build some heuristics. The best data scientists are just people who try to understand the ins and outs of business processes and look at problems with healthy suspicion and curiosity. The ability to explain the nuances of manifolds in SVMs is not something that comes into it outside these contrived interviews. I prefer to ask candidates how they would approach solving a problem I’m facing at that moment rather than these cookie cutter tests which are easy to game and tell me nothing
One issue I see here is that some of us just don’t want all that control. When i use a new tool, I want it to work. If I see tools mentioned here, I see a lot of people looking for “super duper mega ultimate fine point control 259”. I don’t want a company spending time on the 5% of genius computer users or experts. I want things to work. I don’t want 90 buttons on my ps5 controller. I’m ok if I can’t do the crazy Uber loop you get 3rd place in the world. I want fewer buttons and will trade that for less control.

Many on here will seriously disagree with, but almost my entire corporate office won’t.
As long as you are willing to spend some of that budget continuously patching and maintaining the old 2.x interpreter to address security vulns as they are discovered (IF they are discovered), sure. No need to upgrade!
I like turtles! (Yeah, I deleted my comments and edited this one because of the gaia mob. Sorry.)
People often resort to this "wrong opinions" canard as an explanation for why they were moderated, but actually you've just been posting bad (for HN) comments. If you expressed your opinions thoughtfully and substantively, there wouldn't be a problem.

We don't care about opinions. We care about how you treat other users and if you're dumping junk or toxic comments into the community.
Or people can just read the error and fix their code.
According to the Ad I've just seen on television: they have.

That's why you won't see any comment about it here ;)
I like the sagebrush and the wide open spaces. Lived in Eastern WA for a few years. Haven't really been out to Carson valley area much just seems appealing. Also, not sure I want to deal with shoveling tons of snow at Tahoe after 20+ years in Canada and the Midwest.

Might need to reconsider Minden though https://twitter.com/markpmeredith/status/1304932801649623040
> This doesn't immediately result in fewer flights because air schedules are meticulously planned in order to maintain specific routes

That's all well and good, but in fact the pandemic did essentially immediately result in fewer flights. Flights started getting cancelled within days of lockdowns starting in NYC. If this is a second order effect, then everything is a second order effect. Reduction in travel demand is a second order effect of the pandemic. The pandemic is a second order effect of globalization. Globalization is a second order effect of trade efficiency. Trade efficiency is a second order effect of air travel. Etc. It's not a useful terminology.
I'm in the process of changing jobs and will be hiring/rolling this out in my new role. Will reach out once that happens.
Having print as a statement was a mistake with a lot of downsides (see https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3105/ for the rationale).

It would take quite a lot of effort to offer the new print function and the old print statement at the same time, and it would require either a lot of special cases or renaming the new print function.

And there's really no upside. If the only legacy thing in your script is the use of print statements, that's trivial to fix by hand or with one of the automatic converters.
At face value, everything you stated makes sense. I’m not an expert in this topic, and so I’ll share my naive view.

If we were talking about a Western democracy such as the Germany becoming more competitive with the US in terms of more or valuable research, I’d have no qualms.

What concerns me about China catching up with the US is my lack of trust in China - they aren’t a democracy. They control information, and my fear is that my children or children’s children may end up in a world where China has an economic advantage to the extent that it becomes oppressive against Americans. I can already see that China’s growing economic advantage means that American companies operating in China will bend over backwards for the Chinese government or even engage in censorship (in alignment with Chinese law). This concerns me a lot. Globalization already wiped out segments of America’s labor market. A recent book I was reading (Good Econonics for Hard Times) says that those people whose jobs shipped away (primarily China) actually dropped completely out of the labor force. It’s not that most people just retrain or move to a different part of the country.

Anyway, I am making a connection here between research and economic growth. I think scientific progress will provide China with a economic benefit. I don’t know what economists have to say about this, and so I could be wrong.

Some of the things I’m stating are hypotheticals and you could accuse me of fear mongering. America itself doesn’t have a clean track record (I don’t think many people remember or even knew the destruction we’ve caused in the Middle East since after 9/11).