skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> you agreed to receiving ads as a part of the terms of service

No, for 95% of the sites I read, I don't need to accept any terms of service. Hell, even the ones I do, often don't mention anything about ad blocking. I can't see anything directly prohibiting ad blocking here on the Facebook ToS, for example:

https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

> how is this any different than signing an agreement with a lawyer

ToS and a contract with a lawyer are very different things. It is not generally a crime to violate a ToS, but rather, merely a breech of agreement, and they can refuse service in return. If I violate a ToS, they can block me from using the site, and that's about the most they can do, unless I intentionally harmed the company (e.g. hacked other user data or compromised their servers).

(In the particular case of Facebook, it would also probably not be in their interest to block me, because I post a lot of original content to the platform that causes other users to spend more time on Facebook, and my presence on the platform is highly likely a net positive for them cash-wise.)
> the premier social media platform for world leaders

Mostly one world leader. The rest of them seem to continue to primarily communicate through press conferences, television appearances and other fairly traditional methods.
> Editors (Juno) do not check types at runtime when the information is readily available

This complaint is really common with people that see types and expect them to do something like TypeScript. Julia is not a statically typed language. The types are not there for a type checker to check your code for correctness.

Instead the types allow Julia to dispatch your method call to the correct implementation for the type of your variable at runtime. This is Julia's secret sauce, and it's the main reason you'll hear about Julia programmers declaring about how composable Julia packages are. I can "reach into your package", and define the behaviour of your functions on my own custom types and then whenever anyone tries to call the function/method with one of my types, it'll just work. I don't need to author a pull request to your package or futz around with anything that you've wrote.

Novice Julia programmers often come in thinking that the type annotations are there for ensuring correctness, but that's not it at all. In actuality, you want to be as general with your types as you can, and by default most parameters will probably be untyped. If you need certain behaviour for the function, then you should probably annotate it, but it's definitely not required.

I'm guilty of this misstep as well, one of the biggest things I struggled with when I was new was using ::Array everywhere, when what I wanted was ::AbstractArray.

> Include() includes (is this PHP all over again?) a file into the script!

Use Modules. Don't fault Julia for you being a beginner and not reading the necessary parts of the documentation.
What is adfraud?
It's been shown that people taking notes by hand during a lecture retain more than people who take notes by typing.
If nothing gets cheaper

Would anything need to get cheaper if everyone was making more money?
Ah, that makes sense, thanks!
Your premise that we should rely on China to compensate for allied Govs' lack of transparency is an interesting one.
Your assumption that wage should align to productivity is false. It’s pretty hard to justify some athlete and artist wages this way, you have to really stretch what it means to be “productive”

Wage aligns with replaceability - how easy is it to replace you? Professional athletes are hard to replace, doctors less so, cashiers even less.

Wages are driving down because, unless you get lucky, there’s not much to do. Big companies chop up specialized roles into a hundred “dumb” ones so people can be easily replaced.
Twitter keeps running themselves into a trap, and it is unbelievable to me that they don't see it: they cannot be the arbiters of truth. It will not work, because inevitably they'll miss something, and then people will assume that that missed thing is true.

The solution is NOT to do censorship based on truth. The entire system needs to be unreliable, because it is unreliable. People need to read things on twitter (and elsewhere on the internet) with skepticism, and they need to evaluate wether those things are true or false individually.
As one not knowledgeable about Clojure, and to play devil's advocate: one of the handy parts about `//` is that you can violate the language rules. E.g. I've fairly often had cases where I want to temporarily remove a check, to see if something behaves as I expect:

//if (some logic) {
do something
//} else {
// something else
//}

Or in other cases collapse two if/else blocks together, or stuff like that. It's not as common as commenting out a logical unit, definitely, but it's far from uncommon.

How would you achieve that in Clojure? Seems like you'd need to copy/paste, like this?

#_(if (cond) thing other_thing)
thing
Ask HN: Non-web developers, what do you do?
People who are developers/software engineers but don't work in web development, if you don't mind me asking, what do you do?

I'm tired of developing web applications and of browsing through a whole bunch of job postings which all boil down to some combination of required language(s), some web framework, REST API, and one of the clouds.

Is that where most of writing code is now? Is there any hope for something else?
Hmmm. Makes sense. I iterated a simulation of 10000 cases, discarding every case where the second random door reveals a car (because this breaks the game; at this point there is nothing to guess anymore) and it gives a probability of winning of only 0.42 if you switch. So it's neither 1/2 nor 2/3. Curious!
Nigerian youths unanimously cry against a rogue police unit
> It's easy to make post-hoc interpretations of these kinds of verses to make them fit anything.

Absolutely. These sorts of post-hoc interpretations are particularly common in some branches of Hindu nationalism, where verses of sacred texts (such as the Vedas) are interpreted as representing foreknowledge of modern scientific discoveries, often couched in an anticolonialist narrative such as "Western science stole this knowledge from ancient India".
Repton was one of the best games for the Commodore 64 but a completely different game.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M3c1F6-7qL8
> What would be the best way for someone holding a H1B visa to startup in USA

Best way would be to get a green card or change to another visa. H1B won't let you do this.
Or, better, the inverse: non-US only. How well do you think either will work?
Grant Negotiation Access Protocol draft (OAuth v3)
Weekly Number of Deaths (From All Causes) in the United States (CDC Website)
>"we're gonna turn it back on in four weeks"

This is my recurring issue when I see most "changes we're making for the election" posts. Sure this seems like a good step for this election.

Fake news and the destabilization it can bring isn't just an American phenomenon though. Are they going to apply these precautions to elections in Brazil, or Myanmar?
There’s one particular YouTube pre-roll ad I’ve seen maybe dozens of times. I literally cannot recall anything about the ad, other than I’m sick of seeing it. I’ve totally tuned it out at this point. But if they wanna waste their money advertising to me, be my guest
I think his point is that every middle man is doing it, so it's more like 100% of the products you purchase indirectly.
> … The language (SQL) is not very composable. This is a fact that most SQL users are not aware of. The relational algebra that SQL is based on is absolutely composable but SQL is not due to the inherent limitation of the language (as it was designed to be natural language-like). When you write "select x from a where z", you are actually building something along the lines of "from a" => "where z" => "select x" in the algebra and you can actually compose each portion separately. If you are familiar with dplyr, Spark or pandas you would get this instantly.

Hmmm. Not a big lover of SQL, but this is a bit imprecise. While the unit of composability is slightly smaller for from=>where=>select (expression) vs select+from+where (subquery), in practice they both encode the same fundamental compositional principles, based on relational algebra. Any from=>where=>select query can be translated into a select+where+from query almost 1:1, if only via:

from t ::= select * from t
q => where p ::= select * from q where p
q => select xs ::= select xs from q

Sometimes the select+where+from ends up more verbose, sometimes there is more brain twisting to grok a given select+where+from query, but that's not a composition limiting factor. Granted, the readability of SQL is sometimes lacking, but it is fully capable to compose recursive relational algebra queries.
I wrote something like this for archiving public Spotify playlists: https://github.com/mackorone/spotify-playlist-archive

It’s nice to know I can easily find songs I liked based on when I listened to them.
The popular, layman's discussion of HCQ has been buzzwords and watered down, and that's where the idea of HCQ by itself comes from. Far as I know, the experts who think HCQ is viable have been pretty forthcoming from early on with the idea it should be used in combination with zinc & azithromycin.
> intelligence could be an emergent phenomena of smaller, simpler, mechanistic interacting components

I think the parent's point is that this idea is already taken for granted, rather than a "rethinking".
After all, our intelligences are the product of neurons and chemical signalling. That intelligence is an emergent phenomenon seems like a given.
I could have bought into this theory... Except that it has these four generations grouped and seems to just cherry-pick good and bad events for each to meet the narrative. I would have expected that every generation have certain crises and certain renaissances active at the same time, and that the pattern of these might loop over time.
I'm working in a relational language that if it work as I wish, could eventually be put on top of a RDBM like sqlite or layer for other DBs:

https://github.com/Tablam/TablaM

It have ideas similar to QUEL...
Nothing shows Twitter’s contempt for their users like the “Show less often” button on these sorts of notifications.
Shameless promotion to my twitter handle for retro tech adverts. I've been posting those amazing old tech adverts out of magazines 90s, 80s and older.

https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts
There are actually no limit for blob size. The clients decide the blob size. It is limited by available memory and concurrency.

By default, the filer client uses 8MB.

Each identifier is as <volume_id, file_key, cookie>. With volume_id, you can locate the volume server. So the volumes are portable and can be moved around.
You actually can't leave the country after filing for the GC, unless you get a special travel waiver (or your GC request will be considered abandoned).

Anyone in this situation is strongly encouraged to consult an immigration lawyer and spend the time to give them all the information you have, and listen to all the caveats they list. Yes, it will cost you a kilobuck, but potentially save you a lot more kilobucks, a lot of time and a lot of anxiety.
> it's long been obvious that "This is wrong/bad [quote]" just serves to further spread the propaganda and raise the propaganda artist's profile.

This has never been obvious to me, and I continue to be confused by it as a position. It seems similar to "don't respond to anyone making blatantly false/harmful claims on discussion forums, because engaging with them just encourages them and spreads their message". In fact, in the Twitter case, it's even _more_ nonsensical to me - because the audience in a forum is general (and so, is likely to contain folks who are "on the fence" or who agree with the troll), but your Twitter followers are, by definition, those who hold similar opinions to you (and so, are likely to agree with your "takedown").

I'm not saying that you're wrong (I've seen enough apparently-smart people espousing this opinion to convince me that I'm the one missing something), I'm saying that I don't understand it. Can you help me understand what I'm missing?
Maison du Beurre
That's not necessarily true.

UK MPs and LEO/IC agencies have shown themselves perfectly capable of public deceit and corruption, in the interest of expanding agency power and budgets.
Nooooo ! :D
Good plan. I use Fastmail with a personal domain and family account. Highly recommended.
I'm all in favor of a 100% land value tax but I'll happily take a higher minimum wage to compensate for a lack of it while the political system gets its act together.
Safety & Consistency.

I buy and sell clothing a decent amount, while I don't do it at a high volume I don't usually stray from marketplaces because it's curated a group of buyers or sellers who have been vetted through transaction histories that they're good to deal with.

Also the consistency of a transaction, I know that there is a third party also making sure the seller tosses the tracking number on the site or remembers to ship it at all. Versus offline may be touch and go if you don't have a history with the seller or the buyer.
All these comparisons miss one thing: after WWII America had a monopoly. We had destroyed our competitors factories in Asia as well as in Europe. It took a while for them to build back and be truly competitive outside their home countries.

Here in Michigan we had a front row seat to this happening with manufacturing. Everything peaked in 1973 and has been on a slow decline ever since. Sure there have been booms but the long term trend has been down.

The Japanese started importing cheap motorcycles to the West coast, then cheap cars. We didn't see them in Michigan and if auto execs did they would have laughed. The Big 3 saw VW and their Beetle as the big import threat. Suddenly those Japanese cars became better in quality. Then the Koreans went through the same cycle and Japan introduced luxury cars as well.

Because wages were much less in Asia even after accounting for shipping this exerted downward pressure on wages. Give America back the monopoly it had in the fifties and sixties and minimum wage would be $24 an hour.
Agreed on Castle Quest, on both counts.

Did you ever play Imogen? I think that one honestly holds up, graphics included. And of course Elite and Exile.
Julia is one of those programming languages where I find it interesting but I cannot imagine a practical use case for myself. I even took the time to `brew install` it and was thinking about it again recently when I saw it update. The same is true with numpy or R - my work just doesn't involve high performance numerical computing. And even if it did, it would always be secondary to some other purpose. Outside of a REPL, if I were to productionize some heavy computational work, even numerically based, I would probably still lean towards containerizing a C++ (or maybe Rust) binary.

It's one of those "right tool for the job" type quandaries. For many popular languages (Javascript, Python, Go, C/C++, Rust, Java, OCaml) I have an intuition on when I would reach for them based on my experience. With Julia - I am not sure the shape or character of the problem where I would reach for it.
Why do you think the pressure is coming from inside? There are billions of people watching these platforms. Even governments scrutinizing them. Unruly employees are fairly easy to handle, as long as there's not outside pressure too, but in this case the outside pressures are immense.
I would guess this speaks more to political mismanagement than an intentional goal. No politician is going to get elected on a platform of higher rents and lower wages. Increased rents, at least, are usually caused more by good intentions gone bad than by intentional malice
I’ve noticed that they’ve replaced this with surfacing tweets from your lists. This is really annoying to me as I’ve moved political follows to a politics list so that I’m not inundated with politics and have to explicitly check the list to see that content. Now I get it all the time.
Welcome to the future, where we must chose between either drowning in a sea of misinformation or sustaining ourselves on a puddle of information that a "benevolent" third-party has deemed safe.
Microsoft will deploy 'browser-based solution' to bring Xbox Game Pass to iOS
I ran the ads product org at one of the 10 biggest websites in the US. I'm pretty sure that ads work the way that I think they do.
I vehemently agree with this .... however I think platform intervention against potential incitement is the best of a very bad set of choices available for how to handle the next six months.

The ability of social media platforms to spread malicious propaganda intended to incite division is incredibly dangerous. The moment where a US president has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election is absolutely not the moment to test how well society can withstand the use of social media as a propaganda platform.

Society needs a long term solution for social media--my take is that it should be shut down completely--but this is a short-term emergency and now is not the time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Being cautious is not a virtue when erring on the side of caution may lead to tanks in the streets.
I especially liked his column about the college admissions scandal, and it wasn't that it was unfair, it was that it was theft. Theft from the colleges. Because you know, they already sell their admissions:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...

Here is one thing that U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said in announcing the charges:

“There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy, and I'll add that there will not be a separate criminal justice system either.”

Level playing field! Here is another thing he said less than a minute later:

“We’re not talking about donating a building so that a school’s more likely to take your son or your daughter. We’re talking about deception and fraud.”

There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy, except for the extremely well-known one where you donate a building in exchange for getting your kid in! “Lol just donate a building like a real rich person,” the U.S. Attorney almost said.
This is the amazing duality of social networking: as soon as it becomes topic specific, the quality of discussion improves in direct corellation to how technical the topic gets. The moment the conversation is just general babble, anonymous / pseudonymous people will find things to argue about.
> but i don't see how they can square

"This makes us money but harms the world as a side effect, but if we harm it too much the retaliation will cost us money. As a result we're going to only use it as much as we think we can get away with."
Twitter should add an option to hide tweets from users that are not verified and make it the default.

And charge $5 for verification every year and verify everyone who wants to get verified.
I guess that's a quote. Where's it from?
Thanks – I've definitely heard good things about Skylines before but went on a hiatus for the last few years after my son was born.
Next you're going to complain about NaN != NaN.
No, it means that the expectation that "herd immunity" will be naturally reached, without an effective vaccine, is a pipe dream. Before vaccines, no population ever reached "natural herd immunity" for polio, which has similar R values; you need effective vaccines, effectively delivered, to get that result.
It's really become a religion at this point, with Capitalization of certain Sacred Words and canonical texts that are required reading to even engage in critical discussion of overwrought, overly broad claims.

The worst part is that the people in these companies rarely have any experience with traditional religion, let alone extreme/fundamentalist religion, and therefore don't see the obvious patterns used by these extreme activists. I grew up as a dissenter in a fundamentalist Christian family, and the reactions I got when I stood my ground and said that I believed in evolution and a billions year-old earth are incredibly similar to what I see when trying to argue with these extreme activists. Also similar to my fundamentalist upbringing are the subgroup (minority) of people who obviously derive immense satisfaction from their piety, and won't hesitate to condemn others in the in-group for not demonstrating their full dedication to The Mission. These enforcers fit a personality profile that is identical to what I encounter at my overly woke workplace. Recently one of these enforcers told a guy (he was raised by Polish immigrants in a poor, inner-city neighborhood of Philadelphia) that he was wrong when he committed the horrible atrocity of celebrating the purchase of his first car, and saying how he "deserved it" after all these years. She was quick to spoil the happy hour at the outdoor bar by forcing him to acknowledge his privilege.
> What evidence do you have that the predominant source of trending information is motivated state-level actors?

I didn't make that post. But the fact that state level actors have manipulated Twitter topics with bots, astroturfing, and other artificial means is pretty well established. I'm not sure I'd agree it's the "Predominant" source of trending information, that there has been state-level influence from foreign actors has been well documented.
Someone else elsewhere made this point: the widget makers are not generally capable of increasing their own productivity because they don't have access to the capital required.

This method of organizing labor and value which disallows workers' to gain anything from increases in their own output keeps them from ever being able to participate in it, leading to alienation from their jobs and living in a perpetual cycle of poverty.
This came up just recently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24435217

> I absolutely love Visual Basic and am trying to make a Javascript version at appshare.co

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21734845
But, then we'd need to track users even more deeply, right?
Here's a fungus that eat gamma radiation, discovered at Chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
Ask HN: Why have trust networks not taken hold?
Many years ago I learned the basics of trust networks and I truly think that they may be one way to help sort the wheat from the chaff.

Why a "like/dislike" button, when a "trust/no trust" (with scale) could be better utilized.

Each person could then be in charge of their own filter bubble in choosing the people that they "trust" which gives more weight to their influence. Not that it woudn't be possible to game the system, but It would probably be better than what we have, all these "facts" thrown around with no way to know what other people truly believe.
"I find it so weird idea that people really click on ads. I don't know if I've ever done so (intentionally)."

In the very beginning - say, circa 1995 when I was building my first websites - I would click on almost every banner ad I saw.

I wanted to send a signal to advertisers, and to the market in general, that there really were people out there.

I was trying to do my part to care for, and feed, the infant industry I was taking part in.
I misread this to be about "magic mushroom" but turns out it's an even better article! Fungi are fascinating, on the same order as viruses. It's a marvel of nature, fascinating and also terrifying.
I sometimes wish I studied biology instead of computer science, it's a fascinating field!
I studied physics because I liked it and the way it describes our world. I then went for a PhD and slowly realized that physics (except a few areas) is basically dead. Particle physics for instance deal with completely outwordly stuff, akin to planning a family trip to Jupiter. Sure, it may happen someday but there are more present things.

I got my PhD and left academia (because of this and petty politics around photocopier paper costs) and the only part I really miss is the teaching and the bright minds.