skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems like the CEO of this company decided that trying to avert a threat to democracy was worth the damage it might cause. It's reasonable to disagree with that - it's a difficult judgement call. But, people seem to be caught up in pointing out why a CEO wouldn't normally want to send this kind of email, not focusing on the more interesting point which is whether or not the threat from Trump justifies this kind of breaking of norms. In a way, breaking those norms is a feature, not a bug - it highlights how seriously he's taking this message that he would risk damage to his company to deliver it.
If you follow the link, you'll see that there are no examples of data in the format and the README declares things like that it will provide a BNF when the specification ready. The context seems to imply that it is in an early implementation stage and not ready for non-enthusiast consumption. Also, last updated in 2014.
All GUI frameworks hide a lot of what’s happening in the insides. There is a scale to it but personally I think that reasoning about a “reactive” program is quite easier than untangling a ball of callbacks written in say, GtK.

Reactive frameworks indeed hide a lot of complexity but that does have positive impact on the user code. (IMO)
If you look at the past century, democracies have been more successful, but if you look at the past millennium, dictatorships have done just fine.

The fact that Democracy has had a really good run for the past 100 years is nowhere near a guarantee that Authoritarianism won't rise again for the next 100.
Ask HN: What are the best computing resources for children?
What great resources (books, e-books, podcasts, apps, websites, MOOCs, etc) have you come across that help explain the world of computing to pre-teenage children (or even newbs or adults) who are trying to understand the core principles of computer science?

And what techniques do these resources use to communicate and teach some of the more difficult elements of computing eg recursion, polymorphism, computational thinking, logarithms, advanced networking, logic, discrete mathematics, electrical engineering, etc?
I sincerely hope that my book aids this problem that you are speaking of - both by allowing programmers and implementers of other languages use the techniques that originate in Lisp, and to try and bash at the Lisp-as-a-meme prejudice that I've seen in many places by showing what the condition system is actually useful for.
>Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but the product of the pressure that activist shareholders, stock-based compensation schemes and financial markets impose on corporate directors.

Your link agrees with me. If shareholders believe decisions are being made which lead to less profits leadership will be removed.
It sort of is, under "S-Expressions", but I think it should have been in its own section.
Doesn't iPhone have live tiles now/soon?
AFAIK Filecoin and Sia are the only ICOs that have actually shipped anything, and neither has shipped something really compelling for their problem domain.

The vast majority of ICOs were scams or ill-conceived projects doomed to failure. It was an absolutely incredible amount of money flushed down the toilet.
A lot of software is set up to be run in a corporate environment, because that's where the money is.

There are a bunch of spam blockers that utilize these features in order to keep, for instance, a browser, from misbehaving too badly.

So from that standpoint, you need a piece of hardware you can trust implicitly, and tell your other applications and hardware that they're only allowed to talk to the Internet by talking to this machine.
Even here, if they reaaaaalllly cared (and had good reasons to, other than "we want to lock in customers"), they probably could take the feature away - they'd just need to play the CYA game much better, and be willing to risk a hefty fine based on whether a court believes your reasons for technical infeasibility. After all, not everything that was technically feasible stays so in a changing environment.

Another think they can do is just try occasionally, and see if people give up.
Most customers don't actually interact with CRM-y tools (usually). There might be integrations to (revenue cycle management for example) from customer facing to back-office, but that's usually the delineation.

But to your point, there's some grey area here.
I understand that, I just mean the two are related: I think lots of pastimes of billionaires are silly, for example, but the fact they have the money and time to do them is a sign of status. If I can go off and spend years on some ‘silly’ project, I’m probably not worrying about putting food on the table, and therefore must have achieved some degree of status.
This is not just a problem for Gig workers. It's amazing how difficult it is to find a place to pee in most cities.
this is also one of the main ideas behind Noria[1] (built by @jonhoo, who also gave his PhD dissertation[2] on this recently)

[1] https://github.com/mit-pdos/noria

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GctxvSPIfr8
I am an European citizen employed by a subsidiary of an US company and I received that email. Definitely a GDPR violation.
2 New Amendments: Score Voting & Pooled Representatives
What's your point? The only reason to point what would happen if China did close would be to show that they have leverage over the rest of the world. But if they can't or won't close, and everyone knows it, then they don't have leverage.
XML can be a bear, but sometimes you need a bear.

Phrase heard at conferences in the 90's/2000's:

"XML is like violence. If it doesn't work, you're not using enough of it."
Russia’s Clandestine Chemical Weapons Programme and the GRU’s Unit 29155
China had been the most advanced country for centuries, having lost this position during the capitalist advances in the West. This should be welcome as it returns China to its traditional position as an advanced civilization.
> Yes technical debt is bad.

Technical debt is like any debt. It's bad if you come due on it and don't have the resources to pay it off. Unlike cash debts, technical debt rarely comes due in a tangible fashion.

If getting to my next round vs. failing means leveraging technical debt, I'm going to do that by all means. It's not necessarily easier to fix tech debt at scale, but having more resources means it's less impactful on bandwidth.
We use callback style at work, with heavy use of async.auto ("async" the node_module). One of the greatest function that npm can get you :)

I'm a scala person, so I naturally tend to like promise style (and async/await is a nice sugar) but my experience interviewing a lot is that people that were not exposed a lot to callback style don't understand what asynchronous means, which is a good enough reason IMO to keep callbacks :) the fact that the std lib is also full of them (we are using node 12, I don't know what is the current status, but for now most of the std lib is callback only for us) does not make me want to do the switch at all.
This is like trying to argue that cars shouldn't have safety equipment because you don't want to pay for something you don't [yet] agree you need. A web browser is extremely complex and usually the most security-sensitive software most people use. You don't have the resources to maintain a fork so if you really dislike the decisions made by the Mozilla developer team, switch to a different browser rather than making your browser experience worse and putting yourself at risk.
Using pnpm for few months on 'serious' codebase if I may use same wording as my predecessors. No issues so far.
Chrome Tests Shopping Ads on New Tab Page
Twitter labeled the pictures as "potentially sensitive content", despite it being just screenshots of the Google Translate text boxes. How on Earth does Twitter make these decisions?
Their leverage is exactly to continue doing commerce. They don't have any intention of stopping this.
Yes. Can't agree more.

This coming from someone who hates XML, avoids it at nearly all costs - there are times it's the right tool for the job. And you list that time. If you have a 1-1 API contract, don't use XML. If you have 1-N, don't use XML. But if you have N-N API contracts? Where you're talking to half a dozen other services, and they're all talking to you? XML is an excellent choice.
I'll use this space to recommend a podcast called Sawbones which is hosted by Sydnee and Justin McElroy. Justin might be familiar to some podcast listeners as a host of My Brother My Brother and Me or Adventure Zone while Sydnee is an MD.

They go through medical topics each week and a big portion of the episodes is Sydnee recounting the medical history of whatever their topic is, often citing Greek or Egyptian origins of disease or related treatments; I always find that portion of the show fascinating.
I found this NSCAI presentation "Chinese Tech Landscape Overview" extremely interesting:

https://epic.org/foia/epic-v-ai-commission/EPIC-19-09-11-NSC...

It's from May 2019 but was obtained under FOIA more recently. It was submitted here at HN a couple of months ago, but under the baity title "NSCAI Eric Schmidt says Mass Surveillance killer tool/opportunity" so it missed broad discussion. Surveillance is only a small part of the document.

It also addresses:

- China's homegrown digital innovators

- China's dependence on imported semiconductors

- AI in transportation and medicine

- Banking and payment systems

- The future global manufacturing landscape

- The future of global development and governance

Among other topics.

It was the most riveting slide deck that I can recall reading.
There are many dimensions to technical debt, but the biggest one is the sociopolitical one: developers hate fixing each other's bad code, but the people who wrote it are often in a position where they can transfer the ownership of this code to someone else, either by being their manager or by quitting their job.
Building a WebRTC video broadcast using JavaScript
This article will show you the basic concepts and features of WebRTC and guide you through building your own WebRTC video broadcast using Node.js.
In some sense JSON is unimprovable, because some properties of JSON are reached their limits.

The idea of JSON is to offer two important ways to aggregate, which are different enough that they deserve separate treatment - ordered array and associative array. They are economically represented, with [] and {}, and internal structure is also made with small costs - commas (,) between elements and colons (:) for keys in associative array. We can argue that both of those features are required.

Chosen primitives - numbers, strings, booleans and null - are also selected from what's regularly and consistently used, and the choice is supported by two decades of JSON application. Roots of this selection are in design of JavaScript, which in turn relied on common practice for basic primitives.

If JSON is considered as what I think it is, structure out of basic primitives, it's at the optimal point. Crockford's decision to avoid JSON versioning makes a good sense.

Applications of JSON - human-readable texts, performance-optimized communications - can suffer from e.g. lack of built-in comments, non-extensible "type system", non-optimal bandwidth usage (if direct ASCII or even UTF-8 is used for JSON encoding, not some other compressed approach). They however can be fixed by building on top of JSON. For example, parties can agree upon reserved keys and compression schemas, constraints in form of grammars (JSON-Schema). This flexibility stems from the fact that JSON is at the very foundation of data structures, so "better than JSON" is to an extent like "better than two's complement number representation".
What's missing is major projects using it I think. Note how for every example he lists the big players keeping it alive.
On Chinese history:
The Search for Modern China by Spence (1990)

On China's history told through several biographies:
The Search for Modern China by Schell and Delury

On modern China and it's ambitions, from Xi himself (these are speeches so there will be propaganda):
Xi Jinping: The Governance of China Volume 1

On tech in China:
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World by Kai-Fu Lee
I was stating that I have great success showing how said items should be prioritized and budgeted, across numerous organization types, sizes, and industries - and making it happen.

That is my experience, it may not be others.
Node also ships "util.promisify" in its core https://nodejs.org/api/util.html#util_util_promisify_origina...
This is an unacceptable use of customers' information (email). It would be equally unacceptable if he was urging a vote for Trump.

This type of politicization of communication channels is an unnecessary imposition on customers and an abuse of trust.

If they feel compelled to continue this, there should be a checkbox in preferences "I consent to being sent political information"
Unless China stops antagonizing India, I think there will at least be a conditional alliance between the US and India. We may also see slight shifts as Indian-Americans become eligible for US political office.
What on Earth are you talking about? Wisconsin voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election from 1988 to 2012.
Perhaps especially HN. The language of philosophy isn't just unfamiliar, it's specific to particular authors. You can't discuss de Beauvoir without reading de Beauvoir herself, and the things that de Beauvoir was reading.

HN readers tend to be inspired by the model of science, which is more settled in its vocabulary, and concepts are less immediately tied to the speaker. That is, you can study relativity without knowing a word of German. It would sound absurd to tell somebody to read Einstein in the original in order to understand it. Quite the contrary: later re-formulations are preferred, as they benefit from later developments in framing the questions. The numbers it yields are identical and therefore at least as good.

This is a challenge for anybody studying any philosophy. HN readers are generally smart enough to understand it and even be interested in in it, but the way discussions are framed tends to put them off.
But why down to the second? I can see why syncing clocks +/- 30 seconds could be useful (train schedules, etc.) but this chart is about being within a second.
I prefer TDD. More entertaining.
Actually, that's an interesting UX idea "[ ] Let my selected representative vote for me on all unmarked propositions". Vote on the ones you have insight on, leave the rest.
A Ring of Content-Marketers Submitting Disguised Paid Posts to HN/Reddit
China's parliament has ~100 billionaires, and the concentration of wealth is even more extreme than that when you count those with a net worth exceeding, say, $100 million instead.

The difference between those at the top in China and those at the top in the US is not one of wealth concentration or inheritance or intelligence. The difference is access to raw power, national unity, and a massive foundational population. The Chinese government operates very differently from the US government and can move initiatives forward dramatically faster and at lower cost by essentially bulldozing through what would be vast legal and regulatory webs in the US involving dozens or hundreds of independent parties with various ownership stakes or legal claims that have to be balanced and negotiated against.
It is not a whataboutism. Complaints about energy usage are only meaningful in comparison to the alternatives.

>The energy consumption downsides of proof-of-work systems are pretty well known. And those particular downsides don't apply to the systems you listed.

What? I have no idea what you're talking about.

Proof of Work energy requirements are not necessarily proportional to usage of the chain, while almost every single complaint about it has made invalid extrapolations under that assumption. It can easily be incredibly more efficient than the existing financial system.
A simple react/redux app is definitely much harder to understand than a simple vanilla js app. But a large, complex react/redux app is far easier to understand than 99% of large, complex vanilla js apps.
If you always have a perfect vision of your software and the team is very small then I would agree. (I.e.: I don’t write tests for my hobby projects)

But testing is mainly important so a developer not familiar with the program will not break it by modifying something seemingly unrelated.

Lack of tests will absolutely bite you.
I don't know much about React, but I look at projects on github all the time and you nailed everything here. Demo right up front, well organized & well written docs, tests passing.

Fantastic job!
Good point, we’ll add more login options.
Although there are counter-examples of Snowden, Assange, and others, I do generally agree with you that there are fewer political crimes in the U.S.; however, words are cheap, it's actions that matter. My point is about the results: the government continues to grow in depth and breadth. So, yes, if you're on the socialist end of the spectrum, you may feel very free to accomplish your goals. Those on the other end do not.

As an example, how did all of our free speech help in stopping the war in Iraq based on a lie about WMDs that killed millions of people? Is anyone even arguing that China has killed millions of Uyghurs?

To be clear, I think both sides are wrong. I'm just saying they're not qualitatively different by a magnitude.
Is wealth uncorrelated with intelligence though?

You write as though that is obvious, but it seems like most new billionaires we hear about on HN etc, are pretty intelligent.

It’s obvious that there are a lot of intelligent people who do not become wealthy, but that’s because becoming wealthy requires not just intelligence, but being in the right place at the right time at the right age. I.e. it requires the right kinds of opportunity.
That makes sense. Ships used time to help get their location back then and presumably even a second deviation could put you off course.

Ships also used Greenwich Mean Time (which this cannon is tied to) and astrological data for local time (which this cannon also used for its time).
In the two academic fields I've worked in, materials science and deep NLP, China already has the cadre of experienced researchers. China has some of the best research universities in the world.

I suspect you haven't traveled to China recently, if you had it'd be pretty hard to claim the things you're claiming about where China is.
I don't think so. The nature of systems it that they tend to become corrupt if they can be corrupted.
To weigh in on the XML vs JSON debate, this article https://engineering.instawork.com/when-xml-beats-json-ui-lay... has been posted before and shows JSON and XML's strengths with different kinds of data, i.e. lists vs trees.
I think section 4.11 is the most important of the new material.
> The West has a huge military and space program. So does China

I don’t think this is true. China’s military is quite weak compared to the US (dollar amount, global reach, navy, nuclear) and it’s not able to project power globally. Even as far as the Middle East would be a problem as they don’t have bases or carrier groups.

This is actually kind of an advantage as they can funnel money into more productive purposes, but I think it means they won’t be the sort of unipolar force that the US was.

I think the 21st century will be multi-polar and if I had to bet on a single country, I would bet Nigeria or maybe even somewhere like DRC or Brazil. A truly digital world will be best for countries in Africa who have so much untapped raw power and resources.
The phone had great software and could run on incredibly low-end hardware like the Nokia 520. I had that phone and it was functional, fast and far better designed than any of the Android equivalent low-ends at the time.

Biggest flaw at the time was Google's shady nonsense involving banning Google Maps/Youtube on Windows Phone without a native app.
Yeah, OpenOffice first springs to mind. Is like a retirement home.
The difference is that mutual defense pacts (WW1 alliances) are very different from trade agreements (modern alliances).

If you have a 1-year stockpile of food, produce only enough food for 50% of your population to not go hungry, and depend on imports to make up the slack, that is a dampening force on the decision to go to war.

These agreements are now negotiated at the national level in trade agreements, and at the international level by the WTO. It's a very different system from the one that existed prior to WWI.

...

Although, that's not to say that trade did not play a role in WWI!

Incidentally, the German pre-WWI german economy was dependent on migrant labor from Poland and Russia to exercise successful harvests in Prussia. When WWI broke out, they were not able to replace these migrant laborers in the fields, and experienced crop failures.

This led to significant food shortages during the war, signaled by large increases in the price of bread, in particular.

The military elites (Luddendort, Hindenburg) of the country must have known why prices were rising (because there was a gaping hole in supply), but successfully spun the narrative for the common folk that it was merchants (price-setters) who were to blame for the war.

Needless to say, price being a function of supply and demand, and the post-zollvereini/unification interdependence of the German commodities economy was not as popularly-understood of a concept as antisemitism.

The reality was that the war was poorly-planned and poorly-executed, but this was an unconscionable admission for the Prussian elites.

This was one of the load-bearing columns for the dolchstoss myth that was weaponized to develop German anti-semitism in the interwar years.
Well, you gotta clean up files you've hand-edited in `node_modules`, too, if you've been adding a bunch of `console.log` statements :)

at least this way it's just deleting the temp package folder or running whatever the "replug" command is, instead of having to go figure out all the files you were editing.
So, where's the link to the paper showing this? Or, are we just reposting peoples' opinions on Twitter as discussion topics on HN now? If so, plz delete my account, kthanxbye.