skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A lot must have happened since then.

Yes. As others have said, 'java is stable' which means the old stuff still works. Which in turn means that a lot of people are still using it and still writing blog posts about it. That still makes these old things often obsolete, or needlessly complex and just 'lesser than'. They don't support certain nice features or support them very badly, or have other significant downsides - 25 years of experience does lead to insights, after all.

20 years ago, you loaded your JDBC driver with `Class.forName`. You _STILL_ see this in many examples (and it hasn't been necessary for 15+ years).

These days, you:

* Use a load balancer like hikari
* Consider raw JDBC as basically nuts as far as an API goes, and you use JOOQ or JDBI. Or JPA/Hibernate of course, if you don't want SQL/want DB independence and don't think you'll need to performance-tweak queries too much.
* You use serializable transaction levels and toss _all_ the code that interacts with DBs into a lambda so that the framework can handle retries for you.

And that's just DBs. As a general trend:

Libraries tend to wax and wane. Right now spring is _very_ popular. JSP is the kind of outdated crud that is just a straight up 'do not use this right now' (even if it still kinda works). For date stuff, use java.time. Libraries in general are more focussed on configure-via-java-code, and dip more into code generation and annotations (example: JOOQ). You don't use The JSONObject API, you use jackson or gson. The list is very long.

I have no particular advice on how to know all this stuff as someone not familiar with the (modern) java ecosystem, though. Just pointing out that 'stable' doesn't translate to 'not much new in the past 15 years'.
I wonder about the confounders of Politics. In today’s America, the political party that opposes unions is also dismissive of Covid with such subgroups as “anti-maskers.” Could be correlated.
Indeed! Perhaps instead of deplatforming them like college social justice warriors would we should instead put forward our own, superior, conception of what free expression means?
Custom low volume parts are more expensive than off-the-shelf parts, who knew. Looks like they've since found a low cost alternative.
Refuelling was banned because 1) it was dangerous, and 2) Ferrari at the time was dominating with Schumacher, they had perfected a technique based on multiple refuelling stops during the race that most other teams couldn’t employ (they had different tire manufacturers that couldn’t match Bridgestone’s performance on short stints). So F1 banned refuelling and moved to a single tire manufacturer for everyone (as well as banning in-season tests, which only Ferrari and a couple of other teams could afford).

Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley, for all their shortcomings, were absolutely ruthless when it came to nerfing teams to guarantee competition. After they left the scene we’ve had almost a decade of complete dominance by one team.
So everyone living in California is, absent of any evidence, automatically assumed to be a political enemy of the Trump administration?

IMO this is one of the most damaging effects of the electoral college. There are plenty of Republicans in California (particularly once you leave the cities) and a whole lot of people who aren’t really politically anything and might not even vote, but it’s a “blue state” so any nuance is lost.
Because they do not foresee their situation becoming less precarious in the future.
> "What he wrote is the same memo we have seen in multiple industries subsequently," says David Michaels, author of The Triumph of Doubt, which details how the pesticides, plastics and sugar industries have also used these tactics.

Meanwhile big corporations go unpunished for killing people in the thousands and making live worse for millions things would not change.

The result of their actions is death at a scale that most criminals cannot even imagine. But, as they commit their murders with several degrees of separation from the consequences it seems that many people don't hold them accountable (and dirty money also helps).

Related news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24535241 (Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists )
I am not offended and you have been polite, so please don't remove your posts.

Renting vs buying is fine. We can choose to rent all our lives and frankly in the Bay Area buying isn't even that slam dunk of a decision anyway.

My point was a bit more general. It's very common for people to argue 'technically' about how others should live their lives while missing their ground reality. For instance, it's easy to say "Well technically H1B is not an immigration visa, it's a temporary workers visa so why are you making long-term life decisions while on it". But the ground reality for most Indians and Chinese on H1Bs in the US is that they will never get a green card (permanent residence), and they will spend their whole lives here under H1B, so while the question is well-meaning and genuine, it translates to "don't buy a house, don't get too many possessions, don't marry[1], don't have kids".

[1] Unless you marry a citizen, in which case you are sometimes accused of entering into a 'green-card marriage' and seen with suspicion.
You are baiting too hard
I am not ignoring scientific evidence. I read the paper, it is not convincing. This is not a double blind experiment, it simply looks at data and asserts causes. Take this paragraph:

"An increase in the share of workers with an H-1B visa within an occupation, on average, reduces the
unemployment rate in that occupation. The results indicate that a 1 percentage point increase in the share
of workers with an H-1B visa in an occupation reduces the unemployment rate by about 0.2 percentage
points. The findings suggest the presence of H-1B visa holders boosts employment among other workers
in an occupation. The results provide no evidence that the H-1B program has an adverse impact on labor
market opportunities for U.S. workers"

There is nothing scientific about this. No experiment was performed. They simply looked at the data, saw there was lower unemployment in occupations with higher percentage of h1b, and then asserted that means there is no evidence that the program has an adverse impact on us workers. They are reversing cause and effect.
After over a decade of turning stimulants into code, I've just had enough. The idea that someone can do this for 40 years is absurd to me.

If it was possible to go into stasis, floating in a vat, hooked up to a computer, where your employer could extract optimal productivity from you... would you do it? How long would you stay in the vat?

Because that's how I feel taking stimulants every day to get my job done. Sure, I'm an effective employee. And yes, "it works". But I can't help but feel something important has been lost.
That’s how exponential growth works. The NYTs article you cite is from March 16th and was based on the US continuing to operate as it had. So changes early can have a huge effect.

Of course the US still delayed at the federal level for another 2 weeks to do really anything of substance. The governments responsible for reducing the death toll from 2M To 200K are the state governments of NY and California. The US federal government largely delayed advocating a shutdown until 2 weeks later. Even on April 4th the President was still saying Covid-19 was “going away” [1].

I encourage everyone to go look at the new cases curve on the days proceeding and following April 4th to see what utter complete bullshit such a statement was. Worse, he knew it was bullshit even as he said it, as the conversations with Bob Woodward have revealed.

To give the US federal government a grade of “not too bad” is disingenuous. Their discordant and adversarial response is why we have 200K deaths.

1- https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/politics/coronavirus...
It sure sounds like a lot but historically its not, not yet anyway.

This is a graph of historical deaths in Sweden which has a similar death rate as the US. https://twitter.com/PanData19/status/1297919439212552193/pho...

While this year isn't over yet there has been years in my life time with worse death rates that went by completely unnoticed. Looking back in a couple of years I don't think people are gonna say that a lot of people died this year.
I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from this study. It is a study limited to NY state for one (strong government-union political relationships), and the authors themselves mention that the various limitations (like confounding variables) preclude causal interpretations of the correlation they observed.

Some relevant quotes:

> Even with these adjustments, the available data and observational research strategy preclude strong causal interpretations due to bias from unmeasured confounders and selection into our study sample.

> While our study design precludes causal interpretations, our results suggest that unions may have reduced COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents by successfully demanding PPE for health care workers.

The study also claims it adjusts for some of the following variables but in the analyses it wasn’t clear exactly how they adjusted for it:

> Unionized facilities were also more likely to be for-profit, less likely to be associated with a chain, had lower LPN-to-resident ratios, and were located in more populous counties with higher per capita rates of confirmed COVID-19 cases (supplemental exhibit 1).

The higher levels of PPE access, which the study thinks may be a trait of unionized facilities, could be due to many factors such as random luck, facility size, political connections, etc. I wonder how causally predictive those would end up being in studies that dive deeper into those variables.
This was really poorly written. I found it difficult to follow his logic
Perhaps a few passes with the editor’s pen is called for.
Best of luck!
> First, the banks actively filed these reports, so it's not like they were trying to hide these transactions. The ones they really wanted to hide, you won't find in these reports.

The takeaway I got from the article was the banks filed the reports, but the government organisation designed investigate and take action is underfunded and staffed so reports probably never get read or actioned upon.

So the banks continue doing custom with those they suspect are doing bad things.
Right but the balance should be more like 99/1 on those
Obama hasn't been president for 3 1/2 years now.
Show HN: Programmer Trends
This is the singular easiest change that would make lives for H1B employees easier. Even immigration-averse countries like European ones work this way.

Give us a general work visa that let's us work for N years instead of making us puppets of the company we are currently working for.
tch-rs is really nice. I have built a Rust sequence labeler + dependency parser + lemmatizer on top of it. It supports multi-task learning, finetuning of BERT-like models, model distillation, etc.:

https://github.com/stickeritis/sticker2/

Unfortunately, when I started this guillaume-be's rust-bert crate wasn't around yet (I think), so I also ported some of the models from Huggingface transformers:

https://github.com/stickeritis/sticker-transformers/

At any rate, I can highly recommend the tch crate if you are looking to build neural networks in Rust.
I recently also suffered through some horrors with Cups. A new version was released, and old drivers didn't work together with it. And the manufacturer (Samsung, which sold its printer business to HP) didn't provide updated drivers, of course. So I'm happy to have some reliable facility to at least print PostScript.
But Cups is fine if you get a proper and current driver for your printer.
Non sequitur from Bloomberg article. China bans Google, Facebook, Twitter. At least U.S. has due process.
Anyone who is avoiding "master, black list or sanity check" probably thinks abortion is super awesome and that the term "abort" should never be stigmatized.

Best not to worry about such silly things and keep writing code.
I feel it's odd that you capitalized the "N" in "native". I assume you're not talking about these people[0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Amer...
It's not cognitive dissonance, it's pragmatic geopolitics. We can talk about ideals all we want, but the real world is a matter of power and leverage. China is rapidly gaining power and is on a path to usurp the West. This is part of an attempt to slow that at least so that the transition isn't rapid and traumatic.
It is very hard to open your first bank account in the UK as an immigrant due to AML regulations(They require proof of address, it creates a catch 22 situation). The joke goes that you need to be a drug dealer or a warlord to easily open a bank account in the UK. Maybe it was not all jokes after all.
Honestly the 3rd point is cute but message passing seems like level zero of networking approach for large scale systems. I wish to find more thorough models.
I realize its a long article but it really deserves being read before jumping on the first trigger word (suspicious activity report).
Printing in Windows is frustrating because the printer manufacturers insist on including their shite user space tools. It's often difficult to get "just the driver, thank you" without all the cruft.

The Windows driver setup seems fairly rich and well done otherwise. Though I do have to occasionally run services.msc to bounce the spooler when it has a stale idea of printer state...like "out of paper".
New release: GRDB 5.0.0 (Swift toolkit for SQLite databases)
Reminds me a bit of the prank they played at AT&T by sending reverse form feeds to the printer, so that the victim had to insert the paper afresh.
Why does it matter what services China blocks? Are you saying we should take cues from the great firewall?
> POWER-powered low cost SOCs akin to Arduino

More in the range of the arduino than the pi, you could get a Colorlight 5A-75b for ~$15 on AliExpress and reprogram its FPGA to run an OpenPOWER core. It's a board meant for driving LED panels, but it has a Lattice ECP5-25F FPGA with a JTAG header easily accessible plus dual gigabit ethernet MACs and 4MB of SDRAM. The downside is all the rest of the IO is stuck behind one-way buffers since it's only designed to push data out to 5V LED panels. But it's been well reverse-engineered by the chubby75 project, the FPGA is well-supported by the open-source yosys+nextpnr FPGA toolchain, it's supported by the litex SoC builder (which also includes microwatt core support, though maybe not colorlight+microwatt?), and it looks like some have had success getting OpenPOWER cores to boot on it: https://twitter.com/antonblanchard/status/123177893988802969...
It remains unclear if high and/or general intelligence necessarily implies consciousness. If that turns out to be the case, you'd be right, but we don't know enough about these possibilities yet.

We will very possibly have conscious AGI, maybe even well before the first superintelligent AGI is developed, but it may always remain a subset. And who knows, maybe it'll be the opposite, and constructing something akin to general superintelligence (by some subjective definition) will somehow turn out to be much easier and will come much sooner than constructing the first conscious entity.

We might come up with different terms to make the division very clear. Maybe "abio people" or "digipeople" or something. They'll be a completely separate category (kind of like animals and non-animals), and "AGI=ABP" will probably be an important philosophical problem, someday.

My blind speculation is that they may be correlated in some ways, but are mostly orthogonal. That is, perhaps you could have things that are conscious but very unintelligent and ungeneralized (like some animals), as well as things that are extremely intelligent and generalized but as conscious as an inert chunk of rock in a canyon.

If true, in the latter case such a thing would essentially be non-conscious by nearly all definitions. Or instead of a rock, perhaps it would be bounded by a minimum level a bit beyond that, but only to the extent that stars or viruses could also be said to be conscious. By the definitions where they are conscious, it doesn't presently seem evident we should attribute moral value to such entities. (Maybe our thinking will eventually change on that, but I don't think it's extremely likely.)

If the minimum bound turns out to be closer to or above, say, an ant, then I think it could get very slippery and we would have to effectively assume all AGI-seeming entities are or may be conscious, and limit how we can interact with them with laws and rights. Better to give the benefit of the doubt that something is conscious than to unintentionally treat a conscious being as if they aren't conscious. Though we can't currently seem to get that straight for animals, so who knows how things might go for future conscious entities.
That's correct. The law that the executive order cites targets financial transactions and specifically exempts information services.
First off, typically this requirements have a degree of flex in them.
Additionally, it might be your understanding of the requirements, not the requirements that are in error.

Yes, people need to encrypt their double locked box high up on a electric pole, because people will figure out how to get at it.
nice username.
Ask HN: Resources for HFT?
High frequency trading (or more broadly systematic trading) is a notoriously secretive field, but one that I'm trying to learn more about (specifically the quant side). I suspect that there are some decent resources out there (either books, notes, articles, reading lists, message boards, videos, ...), but as a non-practitioner it's hard to judge the quality of them.

What are some good resources?
Doubt they will raise taxes more than what is already the highest rates in the country. More likely outcome is that as salaries across the spectrum decrease their spending will too. This has every chance of going well for the city as it does the other way. Hard to predict the second degree effects on things like crime anyway.
No; the point is that confidentiality and integrity of communication are different concepts and that some choices of encryption algorithm will only provide the former. If you care about being able to detect message tampering in a robust way you need to make the right design choices.
The book Dark Towers on Deutsche Bank is enlightening on how many employees there ignored many "mandatory" checks and 'know-your-customer' provisions:

* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/16/dark-towers...

DB ended up being the only 'mainstream' bank that'd deal with Donald Trump and family.
You shouldn't rely on any "just like X" systems for tests, you should use X exactly, including correct config and version as production.

What you want is having a Postgres server, but optimized for tests. What I've done is
1. One instance per pipeline
2. Parallelize by having separate databases per process
3. Build schema once
4. Before each test, purge the database (or run tests in transactions so you can just rollback in the end)
5. Run in Docker, use tmpfs volumes for writes (no disk writes)

It runs fairly quickly.
It seems to me that the SV tech scene was produced by established players getting rich and funding new players. The NY scene was founded by people who wanted to live in NY. A lot of people had no interest in going to live in a suburban area like that, especially in the first 10 years of their career.
you could make the same argument about a lot of things on your PC, or elsewhere. simpler is always better, until you need to do a lot of things.
Why turn everything political? Especially when it seems you didn't even read it. Just using the title as a jumping off point to put in political points.

The study, if you read it is mostly based on NY data. It specifically states as much in the limitations:

> this study may not be generalizable outside of the State of New York.

I personally think the study should have published the raw data as well as the aggregate data.

But the study seems to be quite open about it's limitations, listing one particularly limitation which to me is the greatest one if you want to critique the study:

> We are therefore unable to adjust for the possibility that unionized health care workers may transfer residents to hospitals earlier and thereby reduce their facility’s COVID-19 mortality rate.
do they hold any significant influence? I've never heard of either one. I lived in WA state too.
> This is largely what prompted the American Revolution

The American Revolution was much more about representation and the rights that British Parliament held (or, from the American perspective, didn't hold) over the colonies. The primary effect of mercantilism is exclusive trading agreements with the ruling empire, which was not being argued against by the colonials. It even says as much in the paragraph you linked:

"However, the colonists took pains to argue that they did not oppose British regulation of their external trade; they only opposed legislation which affected them internally."

It's not an equal comparison to China and the Opium Wars.
A Perspective on Computing Research Management (2016) [pdf]
(Wes here) I appreciate the Arrow shout-out but note that Apache Arrow has been a major open source community collaboration and not something I can take sole credit for.
Are you certain cancer rates haven't gone up with industrialization?
I think you're misreading the quote. What it suggests is you can absolutely ban WeChat for being connected the behavior you describe, but you need to bring evidence to show that connection.

It's not about politics, or national security, but following a logical, fact-based process.
Most interview questions around data structures, algorithms, etc. follow the same patterns. In the end, it's just a pattern recognition problem (IMO).

Once you recognize the different variations, you solve a bunch of those problems to become more efficient at 'em.

Really, it's no different than solving certain calculus problems. If you've solved enough integrals that require certain substitutions and identities, you'll notice them right away - but of course, if you've never seen 'em before, the problems can become next to impossible - given a very limited time fame to solve them.

Sure - some candidates will be highly intelligent, notice intricate patterns right away, and solve them on the spot (in the same way they'd perform on IQ tests), but for the majority it's just discipline and preparation.

There's a reason people are following these ridiculous study guides, which involve hundreds to thousands of Leetcode/hackerrank/etc. questions. If you actually study the problems, and do them over and over again, you'll get there.

And by "just" doing that, you can indeed outclass the so-called elite candidates.
> Not saying the cuts need to come from that segment

Are you sure? You didn't mention any other segment.
It would! But it would also be a security nightmare. Exploit SQLite and you could use it in Safari, Chrome and Firefox - everybody could be affected.
Also the headline 'by serving oligarchs...' so what? Last time I checked beeing an oligarch was legal. This article reads, I dont know how to describe best, like xenophobic? Like who would do business with rich foreigners if not shady banks? I mean how are the banks supposed to smell if the transactions/client are dodgy?
They are required by law to file SARs. If the huge volume of SARs are overwhelming the regulators, perhaps the regulators should not have set the requirements so ridiculously broad for filing them.
> The governments responsible for reducing the death toll from 2M To 200K are the state governments of NY and California.

...New York has almost the worst death rate in the country (only New Jersey is higher).

Comparing across US states, it really does look like doing nothing would've resulted in less death.
Can you please provide a link to a study that supports your assertion that Vietnamese have higher exposure to coronaviruses? Thanks!