skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand what you are saying and agree that algorithmic manipulation is a problem. I think it's very profitable for these companies and people can be manipulated by it. I still think it's a small aspect of the problems of the network & scale of information access/publishing which are leading to conspiracy content and mob amplification. Problems which exist even without algorithmic manipulation being involved. At this point, just due to the network of EVERYONE using mobile devices to connect & consume content it's similar to the eternal September problem but at full scale and saturation. Is the algorithmic manipulation needed for Fox News & other biased media to reach, feed & manipulate its audience? I think you could delete Facebook from everyone's phones and we'd still have a polarized world with these bubbles, conspiracy and mobs continuing as long as everyone still has their smartphones. I also think pagerank and similar popularity based ranking is just as big of a problem as the algorithmic timelines because it directly amplifies what we say and want to hear even without the personalization of search aspect. I'm not defending Facebook and algorithmic manipulation, I just think there is too much focus on that aspect of the problem and don't think we can fix things with that focus.
Data Releases on Dolthub
We recently added Tags and Data Releases to Dolt and Dolthub. Checkout the demo on our blog:
https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2020-09-14-data-releases/
The way you get the job done is also an expression of yourself. There is never only one way to do things.

The issue is that if you work for a company like SAP, you most likely don't have enough personal flavour to come to interesting or meaningfull solutions. If you don't have passion, be it even for correctness, you'll build mediocre things.

Germany paid SAP millions for their Covid tracking app. Reaearchers had already worked out a protocol for them, apple and google had already implemented it. All they had to do was write a simple frontend and be done.

But politicians decided that such a big and important job, needs to go to big and important companies like SAP and T-SYSTEMS, for millions of euros.

SAP tried to be cool and agile, they even forced their employees to create github profiles (something none of the had done prior).

In the end they delivered a month too late, with critical bugs. And millions of server maintenance fees.

A system that was already 90% implemented, with network requirements that can be satisfied by fiber to the home connections, or a single S3 instance.

Why? Because they used mediocre people, who didn't have enough passion to create github profiles. Because they used the least common denominator, Java, and reinvented stuff that was already implemented.
And because everybody just wanted to get the job done and go home, no expression of self involved.

But hey, I heard they pay good.
If I’m going to give away books, I’d rather a library or charity just take the lot and be done with it, if the local used bookshop doesn’t want them.
> Well, we do have laws about False Advertisement

If such laws exist, they aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
Start with No
The average article posted on Medium.com only earns around $1.20 USD
What's mean about it? Brazilian voters are simply reaping what they sowed - "social media" has nothing to do with it. It's called living in a democracy.
I don't have easy answers - it's a complex issue and I don't think it's just about tech but about wider issues with British business in general (how many UK companies have tried and failed in the US?) Agreed on pharma but I'm not sure that there are many good examples of success stories outside of that space in e.g. finance.

Just to point out that one reason why Arm was so successful early on was that it looked for business everywhere in the world. I think Robin Saxby spent incredible amounts of time in planes travelling on sales trips. I'm don't think that this is true for many UK companies and / or they are not very good at it. This insularity means that firms are in no position to compete with the scale of US firms when they move into the UK market.

Edit: great interview with Robin Saxby, Arm's first CEO, talking about the early days of Arm here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI
In an colonization sense perhaps, but the environment is very different. Pressures while high on Venus are orders of magnitudes lower than in gas giant atmospheres.
Blockchain Grants Program, which runs completely on GitHub (approval/delivery)
COBOL and the Pandemic
You can simulate G-forces in an enclosed simulator (it doesn't work if you can see outside) - you're just limited to 1G.

I've flown a 737 simulator which tilted back to simulate takeoff thrust. It felt eerily realistic
That's the most intense and innocent appreciation of language I've witnessed. According to his wiki page, by now he's wheelchair racing.
Since I'm now better educated about the potential fake UL marks, thought I'd note that it's pretty rampant.

The first result for "Raspberry PI Power Supply" on Amazon for me, is this: https://www.amazon.com/NorthPada-Tinker-Supply-Charger-Adapt... I get similar results with other searches for adapters and power supplies.

It's a fake UL mark. The manufacturer isn't listed in UL's database, and a genuine UL mark would almost always have the UL listing number right below it.

There's also lots of adapters there with no UL or Intertek marks or testing.
Companies can't control their employees and you shouldn't be expecting them too. This is part of the problem. We are finally making headway yet people still complain and find ways to degrade. Just be happy that they kind of care and are trying to better our environment. Maybe instead of roasting them you could use your time wisely and suggest even more ways to reduce carbon foot prints.
Unix shell is another good example. It’s a bad programming language, which is not surprising because it didn’t start out as a language.

Yet people use it as one and write tens of thousands of lines of code in it. See https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell-Progr... and https://oilshell.org
You are completely correct.

If people want to use web technologies on the desktop, there is Electron.

The converse is not true.
Wouldn't be their first time. Previously it was Envia Systems promising a 400Wh/kg battery years before this was on anyone's roadmap.

Of course it turned out to be a scam.
I think you'll find this paper very interesting, as it distinguishes between pessimistic loss aversion and sadistic loss infliction.
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451
Due Diligence That Money Can’t Buy
I don't think the issue is that you can't make phosphine abiotically. I think it is that, even at a concentration of 20ppb, there's so much atmosphere on Venus that we are literally talking about many billions of tons of this stuff, and it would get destroyed fairly quickly in the upper atmosphere by solar radiation so there is something down there making very large quantities of this stuff. And there is no good explanation for that.
I was trying to search online to compare student debt in UK vs US. Any idea why the below link shows a high student debt in England?

From https://www.statista.com/statistics/376423/uk-student-loan-d...

> In 2020, students graduating from English universities will have incurred an average of 40.28 thousand British pounds of student loan debt...

From https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/

> It’s 2020, and Americans are more burdened by student loan debt than ever.

Among the Class of 2019, 69% of college students took out student loans, and they graduated with an average debt of $29,900, including both private and federal debt. Meanwhile, 14% of their parents took out an average of $37,200 in federal parent PLUS loans.
Not sure what "rural" has to do with this, because nearly all land in the US is rural and it's super easy to find any sort of rural life one wants, in addition to it being super cheap.

However, there is a massive undersupply of dense living in the US, because it has been legislated out of existence, not because people don't want it.

And I would point out that many "rural" towns have fantastic dense living in their core, that allow people to walk for daily errands, etc.

The real enemy of density is not rural vs. urban, because these do not tough each other at all. The people who prevent density are the suburban enclaves that, through heavy and excessive regulation, prevent people from building anything except for single family residential sprawl for miles upon miles, necessitating a car for something as simple as getting a pint of cream.

Which is the way that many people want to live, which is great for them, and they should be allowed to do that! But we need to stop letting them say to others: "I don't want to live in density, so you shouldn't have the very option of it because the mere existence threatens me."

I've been fighting for smart density in my town for quite a while, and no rural person would ever oppose this, because they are not in town! And I think they realize that the more people in town, the fewer crowding into their rural life.
> I doubt you'll see the kind of Chinese bazaar

The point is that that's what you had (admittedly on a much smaller scale) in the US, but that it's now disappearing, seemingly in response to the push for Right to Repair. Watch his latest video.
> a total compensation less than Stanford new grads despite two years of tenure.

> I failed that interview and my career has been treading water because I had to join Amazon out of undergrad.

WTF? You have an engineering(?) job at Amazon and are complaining you might have done better if you got the internship(?) at Facebook? And that with two years of experience, you make about as much as a new grad? Is this a humble brag?

You're probably in the upper 25% of tech for your experience and the upper 1% in the developed world for your age group.

Is the meat of your complaint that you'd be making more money if you did a stint at Facebook? Don't think it "sets your career for life." Big companies can even hurt carers long-term because you're not exposed to as much. Facebook on your resume will get you calls from Google recruiters and calls back from wherever you apply, but it won't inherently help you pass future interviews.
Staples discloses data breach exposing customer info
This is not true for Signal, the conversations are safe as they are stored on device only, not in iCloud.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
As a fellow kid of the 90's: Yes.
I must be too old because I didn't get it.
You can still do pull requests over email.

Rather than attaching a patch, you simply send a link to your git repository (+branch if applicable), and the maintainer can pull from it.
"“I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count,” she wrote."

The scale of how the platform's being used for political manipulation in every country is enormous, and it's clear that if a junior data scientist is having to independently make these decisions, that there's little interest in proactively dealing with this.
The major difference is that Kickstarter “investors” have no upside exposure.
It's recently been renamed dynamic function exchange (marketing I guess?) but it'd supported in xilinx 7 series and later: https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/implemen...
You Built Your Node App, but Are You Logging?
Announcing the Airtable Platform
I can't imagine the UK competition bodies are strong enough to act, but they really should
Great questions, thanks!

> Does it have an API to access the user profile and group data ad-hoc?

We’ve seen a few approaches here. 1) Yes, there are APIs 2) The Postgres database this runs on is in your data center, so you can read it directly 3) You can write back to your own product database as a “destination”

> Can you stream data in?

We support events via an API. We’ll store the vents and allow your to create profile properties from them. I’m very interested in creating a Kafka or other message bus sort of integration too that brings in data and/or triggers recalculations. No one has needed that yet, though, so it’s just on our eventual list.

> Can it trigger a destination sync when the underlying data changes?

We have schedules, table queries, and events to know profile data has changed. When it changes, it then recalculates groups. Then properties or groups change that are being sent to a destination, it automatically exports there. “Hey Mailchimp, the user changed their first name and should now be tagged as VIP.”

> Can it do profile merging (visitor -> known customer stitching)?

We have the concept of anonymous id before login. When we realize two profiles are the same (usually after logging in from another device or something), the profiles are merged and everything recalculated.

> How can you do reporting/analytics?

This hasn’t been a focus so far outside of our ETL mechanics. You can see who has been imported and exported and with what and when and all of that.

Things get more interesting around properties and their values, but we haven’t gotten there yet. We’ve seen some success at pointing tools like Metabase at the Grouparoo database.
It might be a solution although I think regulating this specific form of political ads would have unintended negative consequences.

I think things like hard cap campaign contribution limits (as in overall campaign fundraising cap rather than by donor type) could do more good to even the playing field. And it should reduce the web of "IOUs" that elected officials come into office with.
Whenever I see Repl product announcements, I'm reminded of this quote from Paul Graham.

If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed,
don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example,
that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too
many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be
asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting
to see you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That
sounds harmless. People can notice you've replaced email when it's a
fait accompli.

I wonder if there's something similar going on with Repl, and if so, what their end goal is.
Agreed, but a reasonable person would also ask: "how well does it drive up hills?", "what are it's miles per charge?", etc. at which point the truth is uncovered.

It's not a good look, but you also shouldn't be investing based on what amounts to a commercial. This should be another stain for the company and another warning sign for investors, but we don't need a law against misleading promo videos because almost all are short on information and high on emotion. It's the investor's job to get the information behind the video.
This looks awesome! Exciting next step.
Extremely aggressive optimizations are really special though, and they tend to require rewrites when new CPU extensions release (and workarounds to work on older hardware). If you rely on super low level ultra-aggressive micro optimizations your code is going to have a relatively short shelf life, different ISA or not.

The vast majority of the code written for any given computer or smartphone doesn't have this level of sophistication and optimization though. I'd wager that for most code just changing the build target will indeed mostly just work.

It won't be painless but modern code tends to be so high level and abstracted (especially on smartphones) than the underlying ISA matters a lot less than in the past.
Layering, Text, & Counters (Font Awesome)
Targeted probes would be more complex, and thus more prone to mechanical or software failure, or copy failure across generations. Untargeted probes could remain dormant in interstellar space, whereas targeted probes would have to remain active (and thus consume energy) in order to course-correct and continue to approach their target.

If the goal is to mine the resources of one specific location, then a targeted probe makes sense. But if the goal is to proliferate and explore (or consume) as much of the universe as possible as efficiently as possible, then targeted probes seem less likely to succeed over the scale of time necessary.
Title should be "Horrible's TicTac deal accomplishes nothing"
Articles to Learn about BTC, ETH, and Crypto
Thank you for the link. I could download the full schematics from the site and also the original assembly manual! Nice.

BTW On my personal TODO list I have this project: http://www.malinov.com/Home/sergeys-projects/minimax8085
But more web-apps.
There's nothing new about using data and analysis to attempt to target voters. The issue with CA was the methods they used to obtain that data.
There is some amount of overhead in the VM due to the dynamic nature of JavaScript values and the need for a GC that can't be avoided (even though VM implementations have had years of effort and optimization put in to address this). You can get around a lot of this by using WASM and having control over the data layout though. In my experiments some times the browser just kicks in and drops some frames in any case. :/ Things just feel a lot smoother in native apps always. Figma for example is doing a pretty good job with a C++ engine running in WASM and using WebGL for their canvas (https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...).
Imagine a suburban dad who wants a cool thing for his man cave and doesn’t want to get too fiddly with anything, and makes $2m a year as a Director at Google or investment banker in Greenwich. They’ve thought about buying one of these online but don’t know what’s good quality and what isn’t - the Aston Martin brand gives them some confidence in purchasing it.
You can via the settings.
You can add garbage collection to Forth, but for the trivial reason that Forth is a low-level virtual machine to which you can add instructions/words for managed objects, and then you can add some words to help you interact with them more ergonomically -- words that run at compile time to change how code is being compiled. I don't think it's right to think of Forth as a "language" per se, although it's true there is a certain language that Forth programs tend to be written in, the one people call reverse-polish and concatenative.

I can't say anything about adding a type system, because it's unclear what sort of type system would even apply here. But at least in Common Lisp (which incidentally already has a type system), I think the way you'd do it is create your own front-end that interprets and checks all the typing/borrowing information and then passes this to the usual compiler. There's a long tradition in Lisps to define interpreters that extend the base language in some way.

SBCL even lets you hook into the compiler, and I saw some article about someone adding vectorization to SBCL using only user-level code.

Regarding BOOST_SCOPE_EXIT, it's yes or no depending on what extending the language means to you. I think it's more useful to use a definition where the answer is 'yes.' It's true that C macros are not a very powerful interface for language extension, though.

Also, it seems like you're saying that "extensible" means "easily extended" or "doesn't take serious engineering." It just means you can extend it (and, I'd add, in a principled way). Writing good Lisp macros can take serious engineering, but also there are other ways to extend Lisp.

In Lisp, you can (and do) define pattern match destructuring and lvalue assignments entirely using macros. These are features that require a new edition of a language standard, usually.
Romania is pretty bad too, but the whole point is joining the EU is to help IMPROVE all this, which it does. I have driven across the EU and the US and at the lower socioeconomic end, neither has much difference, except that the EU is committed to improving the lives of its citizens (as far as I have seen) through investment and legislation, and the US isn’t. Quite the opposite.
I guess it comes down to cost versus benefit?

The nice thing about consumption taxes is you capture even black market money. And the wealthy will pay the overwhelming majority of the tax.
I made something for my masters project for under $2k - using pneumatic artificial muscles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJCORZuLOJk

Still needed a lot of tweaking when the video was made...
I have a degee in chem. Your intuition is spot on. Lets assume Venera 3 wasn't sterilized (reports in 1966 say it was [1] but the effectiveness is contested [2]).

Even if spores did survive the space trip (actually quite plausible, [0], venus trip is ~110 days), the atmosphere is extremely dessicating and acidic (SO2, SO3, H2SO4), and the ground is too hot for any known life. The dessication and osmotic pressure is the real kicker. It's very unlikely spores would germinate without rehydration.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/eu_...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1966/03/06/archives/soviet-says-venu...

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1720963
If you go just be what's detectable by radio emissions, there seems to be another problem.

Back when we started broadcasting radio, we needed very powerful transmitters since the receivers were pretty primitive - you could make receivers with no power source at all (Galena radios).

Then we started using them for other purposes. Powerful radars appeared. TV was invented. Later on we added digital signals and most traffic shifted to binary for computer to computer communication.

Now we have things like WIFI and 5g. The problem is that the technology has advanced so much that cellular antennas can talk to puny transmitters from miles away, while the transmitters are only outputting milliwatts. We can also electronically 'steer' transmissions so they will 'point' at the other party (beamforming).

Long range communication is shifting to satellites and fiber optic cables. Those are pretty directional and not very strong signals, by comparison (and fiber optic of course has none). We have been slowly shutting down TV stations in favor of internet streams.

Civilian radars still exist but they are relatively weak. They are also slowly being phased out in favor of technologies like ADS-B, which broadcast a fraction of the power. GPS signals are very weak.

Military radars are also more sensitive than before - and increasingly look like background noise. Given the high emphasis on stealth, they are also more directional and lower power than before. And may not even be on all the time.

Given this, it is possible that, if you are taking a SETI approach, there's only a very small window before a civilization switches to more efficient and less noisy RF comms.

> At up to 100 light year

At 100 light years you'll have very faint, possibly undetectable signals, as the strength decreases with distance squared. Unless they are pointing at us.
How is this even remotely practical? You're only allowed to have political ads on nationally shown TV programs? Choosing to show an ad in Wisconsin and not California is "targeting".
"It Is Not Enough to Succeed; One’s Best Friend Must Fail"

Gore Vidal's vversion is well-known: "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/06/succeed-fail/
What Nikola seems to have done is outrageous, but am I reading it correctly that the short-seller was trading on insider information?
It's not quite that simple, OP is right, pace on Swift improvement slowed to a crawl for 3? years now as they played whack-a-mole with type inference and got to stable ABI. It was only supposed to take a year, and, it's utterly __shocking__ to find out the type inference whack-a-mole intractable _after_ pushing the stable ABI.

Working at FAANG is an abject lesson in learning that assuming 'competence' (i.e. knowing mastery-level detail, taking responsibility everywhere, and going off on world-creating tangents rather than fixing bugs) is damn rare, nearly all of my career's achievements have come of accepting that and doing deep dives into problems.