skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But the author's point was that arguments shouldn't be dismissed as merely semantics, but that semantic questions are important and has to be resolved for it to be meaningful discussion.

Yes, the different sides have a genuine disagreement about the point at which life begins, but that is because they mean different things when they say that something is alive.

So this discussion is becomming a bit too meta, but now we are discussing meaning of the term semantics. Considering that the author himself took up the discussion about abortion as an example of something that is "purely a semantic one", I'm convinced that he meant the same thing as I do when he used the term semantic.
Influenza is also new every year. There have been other Coronaviruses before.
The flaw is in comparing COVID-19's "season" with influenza's season while leaving out a full quarter of a typical influenza season.

To be clear: the flaw doesn't flip my interpretation of the results or anything, but it's still a glaring flaw that doesn't seem to be addressed in the article.
It's the etiquette. The community standards are by no means perfect, or always adhered to, but in general, if you want to dismiss something or post a joke, you have to put some work into it.
Not saying that the whole industry will be replaced, just that tech stacks might change, paradigms might change (see going from mainframes to PCs) etc. It would suck to find yourself unemployable in your mid-50's, let's say. It also kind of sucks to always have to keep up with the newest trends - perhaps at some point in your life you would actually want to do smth else than program all the time.

In a world of atomized workers, even the ones who can run fast on the treadmill are only good as long as they can run fast. If the treadmill changes or they get tired they're out.

Unions help because they have political power. They can make it so that societies are also about people, not just about efficient allocation of capital.
Completely burning one gallon produces about 10kg of CO2. Sequestrating it would cost around 5$ at today's prices (500$/ton).
How did they determine the numbers?
> When you reach mastery you will usually end up breaking most rules.

This is so true, and expands wildly beyond the area of mastery. I was in the fortunate position to be able to spend days with numerous world class piano masters, both during rehearsals, dinner & regular daily activities and was always impressed with their "breaking of rules" both on and off stage. Some do this completely natural (Lazar Berman, who picked his performance piano within one minute "You have to understand, picking out a piano is like picking out a partner, you feel within seconds if you like her or not." ) with others it felt more like an act (not going to write her name, but she insisted to have a friend turn the sheet music, who was not able to read music and thus was either too slow or fast and she had to swiftly flip to the correct pages while performing...).

The more mechanical piano players where never really my thing. I love the players with their own style and interpretations & personal particularities (Lazar Berman again: Bring me to some cheap shops, I get tired of all the fancy places people take me all the time."). Critics are often not so much into that, however. So the number of "rule breakers" was always limited to a maximum of something like 20%.
> If you believe the problem is with "everyone else", the problem really is with you.

The problem with aphorisms like these is they lack nuance. I don't mind it as a general guideline, because it stimulates people to ask themselves whether they're the asshole - a good inroad to introspection that in many is sorely lacking. Likewise, in the context of nerds, it probably applies more often than not.

However, there are situations where the others are the problem: racism, mysoginy, homophobia, unjust laws, macho culture, historical social control exerted by the church, etc. It isn't always true that because behaviour is present in the majority, said behaviour is actually without fault. There is at times a thin line between belonging and herd mentality, and between seeking group harmony and conformity for conformity's sake.
> the other wants free heroin dispensing machines in schools.

Even followed with a "more seriosly", that's an unfair and misleading representation.
Neither does a CS degree, if it comes to it.

And if your working on big clusters you will using a distributed software system MPI Map Reduce Hadoop etc
This has a kernel of truth in it, but only a tiny kernel.

Mantle was much, much simpler than what eventually was shipped as Vulkan 1.0. When mobile vendors got onto the bandwagon, it turned into the monstrosity it is today.
What is the "hell" here? Just the fact that extensions exist?

From where I'm standing the only real problem with extensions in OpenGL is that they are all enabled by default so it's easy to accidentally rely on one that happens to be supported by the hardware/driver you are testing on. This is not the case with Vulkan where you explicitly need to ask for the extensions you want.
There is a difference between "suggests injecting disinfectant as treatment" and "tells people to drink bleach". There are many possible treatments being suggested for covid, but that doesn't mean you should try them until they are confirmed to work.
Wrong things that programmers believe: https://boingboing.net/2016/10/18/wrong-things-that-programm...
Another lazy title. Article writers, please stop!
I'm surprised people expected differently from a platform where every conversation is a shouting match by design.
> Technological advancement is good in its own right.

Holy shit, it's 2020. Look around.
Do you know if docker and minikube work inside wsl2? I loaned my only windows machine to a colleague and won't get it back for a week or two, otherwise I would check it out myself.
> Frankly, if you were to ask me what the top 3 sources of my headaches in Python are, number 1, 2, and 3 would be, receiving a None value when I expected something else

Curious example, because that's absolutely something a sufficiently advanced and well-thought-out static type system can completely solve.

You're right that the type systems of C and Java do not meet this bar, however.
Afaik such things happen, although I don't know about Sweden. But many reports that induced panic were just things that happen from time to time, only the population was not used to seeing it (no reporting). There were other aspects, too, like morgues closing out of fear or because of regulation (can't handle the dead because of risk of infection).

Edit: HN doesn't let me post more comments atm, so here is my reply to "needs citations":

They "need" citations? Why do they need them, because it is my duty to convince you? Why?

If you are interested, you can ask if I have citations, or you can google yourself. But there is no "need" as such, because it is not my duty to convince you.

These things made the rounds at the high time early in the pandemic. Maybe if I have time I'll google them later. Maybe you could google for "Morgues closing corona" or something like that.

New York especially afaik has a problem with Morgues, even in normal times there are not enough of them, and it is not easy to build more because of regulations.
Intel Announces Rocket Lake 2021 Release Ahead of AMD's Zen 3 Announcement
Isn't this what turbolinks already does?
so you're saying that as long as you can limit the reach of a message, anonymity is fine? Where and who decides that line?

I think society should either accept that if there should be anonymity, that there must also be free speech (which includes free speech you may not like). And the inverse is also true - that if there's no anonymity, then there can be no free speech (including free speech you _do_ like).
This is something that's bothered me for a while, but I'm beginning to make peace with it. Everything is ephemeral, nothing good lasts, and if you want to find the good stuff you have to keep searching. It's the cycle of life for anything of value - first it's niche, then it goes mainstream, then it turns to crap. True for online communities, products (digital and physical), and probably much more.

Ok, there's one thing that seems to last: the linux desktop never takes off. Some people bemoan this, I like it. It means that the Linux I love won't go away...not just yet, anyway. Every year that linux fails to popularize on the desktop is another year I don't have to go looking for a new niche tool that will do what I want instead of what its creators want.

edit: typos
> So straight up, do you believe that the government is infringing on people's rights by banning child porn, yes or no?

As I recall it, people can and have been prosecuted for drawing and owning cartoons of child porn. That is a victimless crime - so yes it probably has gotten to the point where the government is infringing rights unreasonably. The government can walk in and created a loser in a situation where nobody was unhappy. It is the production of the porn that worries me rather than the possession. I'd be ok with the whole situation if everyone was sticking to one cache of obscene material produced 50 years ago and nobody new was being harmed.

But more to the topic at hand, CP isn't a free speech issue. The crime is, by and large, possession of child porn and so the issue is one of privacy rather than speech. They may as well legalise distribution, if anyone were stupid enough to do it publicly it would make it easy for the police to find everyone involved and prosecute them.
TBH that’s good moderation (And scalable algorithms to delegate such privilege) at work. there are plenty of flames and toxicity here, they’re just suppressed.

Also the really controversial topics tend to get flagged.
Real Estate Photography at Present
Scaling to $5.5m in ARR in 2 Years with Jonathan Ronzio of Trainual
Att the start of the pandemic Sweden had the next-lowest number of ICU places per capita in Europe (Portugal had the lowest). The capacity was doubled, field hospitals were built... and not used since the hospitals could handle the inflow. This was partly due to some very controversial and in my opinion unethical guidelines which mandated morphing instead of oxygen for certain groups of elderly (i.e. involuntary euthanasia) but it is unknown if those policies had much effect on the park ICU occupation.

Apart from some bad mistakes in the beginning where the infection was allowed to spread in care facilities Sweden has weathered the epidemic (as in the local version of the pandemic) no worse than surrounding countries and certainly no worse than e.g. New York.
there are torrents and local collections
It’s be great to tackle for smartphones. And an experienced repair shop tech could probably write it all!
Making a Reddit-alternative right now - although nowhere near ready to share yet, unfortunately.
As the great architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously said: “God is in the details.”

Mies’ work wasn’t without flaws or detractors, but then compare one of his subtle, perfected masterworks to the infinite cheap and nasty boxes that leveraged only the sketch outline of his style.

Now translate that into any field, absolutely including online community building. There’s no question where HN stands.
It's better to learn to accept it.

It used to really bug me. It's going full tilt this morning, the loudest it gets, and doesn't bother me at all.
For the subreddits I track with RSS I've yet to encounter anything political or someone not arguing constructively. Is this something with the platform or each forum? I often don't mince words either.
After a while in a community one tends to have "seen it all", so it'll be longer between nuggets produced.
I think the political power argument is both the best and worst reason for union membership: In my opinion, democracy is basically dead unless you can raise a lot of cash and use it to force your issues.

So you're either disenfranchised or you're a billionaire or you're part of a group like a union that can raise cash and use it for things you care about. That's a good argument to be in a union.

Or it would be, except (apart from a few specialist groups like police unions) unions seem to be amazingly bad at actually doing this. We haven't had pro-worker legislation in decades as far as I can tell. I don't know why unions are so bad at this as (at least IMHO) it seems like a core responsibility AND a major selling point. But they are. We've seen fewer and fewer rights for workers, higher taxes for working people, the removal of benefits for working people, higher student loans, sky high house prices, you name it.
This is another problem with using the market rate to drive salary expectations. Roles aren't the same between companies even if titles or grades are. Basing a salary on what other companies pay "Developer L5" assumes that "Developer L5" is the same job everywhere, and it really isn't.

We all know people at companies that give devs 'lesser' titles (and lower wages) and then expect the person to do the work of the higher title role.
I find https://adguard.com/ very handy for those cases.
A patent would mean it was publicly available information. You're thinking of a trade secret. In any case, this won't apply to an actual paper (and without a paper, what are we talking about?) because the paper is supposed to describe what is going on.
If I remember correctly when Judge was asked about what company hooli was supposed to represent he said something along the lines of “hooli is not one company, it’s all of them [FAANG]”.
Exhaustive? Does net seem to be that exhaustive to me.

It doesn't have my last name nor the last names of some family and friends I tried.

Perhaps just "a large list of scraped names"?
> level of discussion here is amazing

The demographics is different. Reddit audience is 50% random teenagers and 90% teens + college students -- browsing on an app looking for quickly-consumed content. HN is probably majority people slacking off at work and hence more "mature"...

(It doesn't hurt that dang will just delete the content-free pun/meme comments when people get tempted to up-vote them.)
Also Influenza is not a novel virus, so if 40k people die of Influenza this year, doesn't mean that it couldn't have killed more people, because in fact, there was another 40k who died the year before and therefore don't die again, and another 40k who died 2 years ago, etc.

Basically Influenza is endemic and the deaths are evenly distributed over long periods of time, whereas a novel virus will obviously have a huge initial death count in year 1, but subsequent years will see equally many less deaths logically.
> What does fully evolving to big crowds look like?

birds, fishes, insects

basically some kind of hive mind
Update: How to effectively evade the GDPR and the reach of the DPA
In a recent letter, the CNPD further clarified their argument as to why they don't investigate the several breaches of the GDPR (Legal Basis, Purpose, Transfer, EU Representative) for thousands of Luxemburgish (and hundred thousands of European) citizens. Highlights are mine.
You are critiquing your own question, which I was answering directly.

What I said also applies to any other metric, including (for example) income generation.
It's the first time I see an open source project publicly letting the world know about this kind of issue. This is boring and hard but important work, and it happens in the open and in a very professional way. Thanks, postgresql.
Lack of math knowledge won't limit much as a practitioner, but will definitely make it harder for you to understand what is going on.

Luckily, the math involved is not so difficult. For deep learning specifically you should be comfortable with linear algebra and multivariate calculus, and for machine learning in general you should be familiar with probabilistic thinking.

"Mathematics for machine learning" [1] is a good introduction to these topics.

[1] https://mml-book.github.io/
Deep fried anything used to be a luxury, because calories were expensive, and a whole pot of boiling oil is a lot of calories.

IIRC, southern fried chicken in the US descends from cooking styles that only the aristocrats of western England could afford. Which their 2nd sons (or rather, their 2nd son's cooks) brought along to Virginia.
The fact that a person can just study programming on their free time for a few years and then get a job paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year is proof that at least in some cases meritocracy works. All you need is proof that you are great at programming, doesn't have to know anyone or have any kind of prestigious background to do it.

That is what I did. I studied programming for a bit, started getting among the top in online programming competitions, applied to Google and got a really high salary. Anyone who is intelligent enough can do it if they have a computer with internet access.

People sometimes counter with something along the lines of:

> Just because you could do it doesn't mean others can do it, you are just an exception!

Yeah, exactly, other people are dumb so they can't become among the best of the world in these competitions within a year. If they could they would easily get similar jobs as I did though, there was no luck or privilege in what I did just talent. So the problem isn't that meritocracy doesn't work but that merit for these tech jobs is so unevenly distributed.
A "third rail" along the runway and a dodgem/Scalextric type conductor springs to mind.
It will be different. The question comes down to P(winning by switching | monty reveals a goat). The key difference is whether P(mony reveals a goat | you chose a goat door the first time) is 50% or 100% (if you choose the car, there's a 100% chance he reveals a goat in either case). Since 'winning by switching' is the same as 'choosing a goat door first', you can apply bayes theorem to see how the results change.

To put it another way, if Monty is choosing randomly, half the time where you would win by switching, instead the game just ends/isn't counted, but the same is not true of the case where you win by not switching. From a bayesian point of view, Monty randomly revealing a goat should increase your belief that you picked the car the first time.

That said, switching is not worse than not switching unless Monty is biased towards revealing the car instead.
KDE as a whole keeps improving every update.
The same app couldn't detect my babies head. He's white. Even with two sets of image correction in the photo shop, we couldn't get it work.

At what point can you say it's not racist, just not very good?
From the post about the potential for upcoming anti-trust actions against Big Tech earlier this week[1]:

“One thing that occurred to me is the potential that Democrats could be using the threat of anti trust actions to pressure the tech companies to be more proactive, re: misinformation prior to the elections. Guess we will know if they make any significant policy changes over the next week or two.”

Now I guess we will see if Google and the rest to make any announcements :-).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697860
Will be disproven by the existence of bablefish. Already has been in less backwards parts of the galaxy than ours.
Unless Assange meet the person who provided the documents he would not be able to know for sure who it was.
The problem that the Internet has exposed is that the average person is too susceptible to lies to be a useful contributor to republic-style electoral governance.
Agreed. I have a strong background in 'bad' programming languages like Go, Python, C. Half a year ago I had a short stint at a Haskell shop and was thoroughly disillusioned.

That particular 'writing against the compiler' approach lended itself to write-once, over complex type juggling code. Because why make it readable - if it compiles, it works, and if it works, there won't be any need to read it, right? Well, except you still get bugs, and then debugging anything is like making sense of brainfuck. Maybe smarter people than me can juggle a handful of types and operators simultaneously in their head - I can't.

My favourite example of 'just because it compiles it doesn't mean it works is' Maybe [a]. I've had a colleague scratch their head for hours over something like this:

userCount :: Foo -> Int
userCount f = length $ getUsers f

This compiled, but always returned 1. Why? Well, because turns out `getUsers` returned `Maybe [User]`, and not `[User]` as the programmer expected, and somewhat asserted in their mind with types. And it also turns out that in Haskell, `length` takes a `Foldable`, and `Maybe` is a `Foldable`. Thus, a `length` of a Maybe will gladly return 0 or 1, which makes perfect sense from the point of view of the type system, but zero sense when it comes to humans. Whoops.
What a healthy ego
Sure, there is a lot of nuance - for example, the Unix CLI is very much seen as a kind of API, and appreciated mostly for API-level decisions (pipe-able commands, everything is a file, everything is text), not necessarily so much for CLI-level features (such as variable handling, looping etc.).

Also, some Unix OS APIs are much preferred over Windows alternatives - e.g. many people think fork()/exec() is much more elegant than CreateProcess(), same for pthreads vs the Windows threading model etc.

The bottom line though is that people have opinions about API design, it is clearly seen as a creative process, it is not rote technicality.
Firefox on Android has uBlock, plus you can set nextdns on your phone as well.
But the activated charcoal too contains all kinds of structures, including nanotubes. It's the filter construction that prevents them to end up in water (and they are much less dangerous in water than in air). If it can filter 3 times as much water before needing to be replaced, why not?
A trick I discovered for becoming a better manager: Doing a side project
Strong claims, all these points need citations. It would be interesting that medical professionals did not notice that if true.
What complications would it have produced? Eg Elm has `List.head : List a -> Maybe a` and it's just fine I think?
The article says the following. "Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary...Abortion is the canonical example of [a semantic] argument: once you have decided what 'life' is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one."

So the author does seem to be saying that the whole abortion debate is purely a debate over arbitrary definitions, not merely that it's important to clear up semantic issues before getting into the meat of the debate.

If the issue were purely semantic, it would be possible to resolve the debate simply by introducing unambigious terminology agreed on by both sides (e.g. using 'alive*' and 'alive†' rather than 'alive'). If this doesn't satisfy both sides, then they aren't really disagreeing over the meaning of the word 'life', they're disagreeing over the nature or essence of life itself. Informally we can say that they disagree over what it means to be alive. But philosophically it's important to be clear that this isn't just a semantic issue about the meaning of a particular word.

Another way to bring this out is to think cross-linguistically. Do we really have to have the abortion debate over again for every one of the world's ~6500 languages and their corresponding words for 'life'? I think not, because at heart the debate isn't a debate over word meaning.
> If a tie indicates a truly divisive issue, might it be better to be stuck with the tie, and be forced to find a compromise?

If 3 people prefer the bike shed to be "pale blue" and the other 3 prefer it to be "cornflower blue", does that make the color a "divisive issue"?

Ultimately, even for an issue where people have very strong feelings on both sides, it's far more important that forward progress be made. At some point, standing around arguing is only going to be counterproductive.

I gave a talk on a particularly divisive decision we had to make a few years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0kiy56hGm8