skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Amazon has no incentive to police their reviews, because they just want volume.

Amazon, the company, has plenty of incentive to police their reviews. Fake reviews deteriorate customer trust and drive customers away in the long run.

The problem is there are two parties who have large incentives to create fake reviews: 1) Merchants 2) Executives whose compensation is tied to short-term results .

Right now these two parties with adverse incentives seem to be winning the battle, but it wouldn't surprise me if this changed in the near future.

Yelp's battle against fake reviews and Google's battle against SEO spam both come to mind as examples where the company was largely able to get things under control and aligned with their best interests. There will always be an escalating cat and mouse game between the "company's police" and the "fakers", but Yelp and Google seem to stay one step ahead while Amazon is one step behind.
I absolutely loath statistics terminology. It’s such a road block for people and an example of erudite traditionalism not being challenged enough.

(although the current terms in question are very mild and not knowing them probably speaks to how the vocab in general blocks people from learning stats rather than these particular terms doing it)
For English, it's always '?!'. The question mark gets priority over all other punctuation but an ellipsis (which is pretty rare).

Other countries and languages (Japanese, in particular) give the exclamation point the priority.

As a side note, I can't recall ever seeing the ligature of ?! before today. It feels like one of those typesetting relics we're better off not using.
A mod probably added the year - we'll take it out. Thanks!

Previous thread for those who are curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20614129
Calling this 'universal learning' is a stretch (and in HN speak 'click-bait'). The paper only talks about a particular subclass of learning algorithms in supervised learning domain within PAC framework.

Specially they talk about learning algorithms that minimize some error function from training examples. That's not how learning happens in living organisms. Therefore calling it 'universal' is an unwarranted generalization, kind of like 'theory of everything'.

A more appropriate name would be 'Distribution-dependent Supervised PAC Learning' or something along those lines. It's a solid work which addresses a particular niche of a particular theory.
Doom 2.5D in 140 chars by tomxor
Yes, Apple runs the largest hedge fund in the world, but the question isn't whether they're getting some return on their investment (I'm assured that their hedge fund is). But rather, where's the long-term research that's necessary for future growth and human prosperity?

If the logic of the comment I was replying to held, then Apple would be investing a commiserate amount into fundamental research. They're not. They'd rather seek a return (however, meagre) by buying bonds than fund research.
One thing that comes to mind, if a call comes in accompanied by screen message of a kind that I have never seen before I'd be twice as alarmed as with just some random unknown number calling. I might end up googling recently updated apps for news of a malware takeover instead of answering the call.

But it would be a good idea nonetheless, it only requires to be accompanied by a serious information campaign preparing first time receivers for the surprise.
malta cyprus, ireland etc are useful for setting up business there . you can set up a local business that receives royalties from other companies and benefit from relatively low tax.

He s probably not doing it for taxes, but for a convenient EU passport and a humble abode in the mediterranean
> The type of error objects is still a mess. Rust needs something like Python's exception type hierarchy and a consistent way to convert special error types into more general ones. I notice there's a Rust working group on error handling, again.

Anyhow[1] and thiserror[2] really help here, no?

1. https://github.com/dtolnay/anyhow
2. https://github.com/dtolnay/thiserror
Our human bodies and minds have objective necessities to stay alive and thrive. The value of art may be abstract in most contexts, but if I'm hungry an apple is valuable, and if I'm cold, wood is valuable.
Incremental Migrations
Something like this? https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks
My 10 Year Search for the Perfect Camera Brought Me Back to APS-C
I really like the idea! Two small suggestions:

- Have an option to start camera/mic turned off, and make it clear that your camera feed will be visible to people you approach. My own camera view and mic (and the option to turn them off) are also kind of easy to miss on my 27" screen.

- If I press and hold, say, S and then tap D, the avatar starts moving right and doesn't stop moving right until I release S. I'd expect it to continue moving downward when I release D.
I don't read safety sheets often so I'm likely off base here, so please correct me if I'm wrong. My interpretation is that when used correctly it's safe.

Section 2 states it is non-hazardous.

Section 4 states it is not expected to present a significant ingestion/inhalation hazard under anticipated conditions of normal use.

Finally, Section 11 indicates that the Ammonium compounds present in RNALater may be harmful, but only when they are administered at LD50 concentrations.
> Renouncing citizenship never works as a tax dodge, unless you have some reason to expect large future gains in your assets that aren't reflected in their current market prices.

It also could make sense if you expect future income tax rates to be much higher, or if you expect new taxes (e.g., wealth taxes) to be enacted.
To be fair, they didn't say they're making room for their new innovative [sic] products.
Crating is horrible. How about that to start with. String -> Str() -> String. Macros? Really Macros? Bindgen doesn't work, exceptions are not handled properly, creating a thin layer between Rust and Ogre3D was seriously inconvienant.

I heard all of the hype, and I completely fell for it. This is not a language for game developers (35 years experience in game development here).

Oh, how about some simple data structures you need. Like developing dynamic graphs with pointers needed to and fro. What a serious PIA.
Might have something to do with all the provable connections to Russia the Trump campaign had. People are sitting in jail for lying about contacts with Russia.

You really can't pretend these are similar situations.

And it's also a huge difference between undermining the entire process vs claiming that Russia conducted psyops on American voters in favor of Trump.

Trump is saying you cannot trust the vote counting. That's a big deal.
Indeed. I started using emacs in ~91 and put an effort to really learn it in '93 and been reaping the benefits of it ever since.
Worth mentioning, there are quite a few people on another thread pointing out this person is not very pleasant, having done some seriously not-ok things and has an attitude that suggests these claims are disingenuous.
why? what s the use of having them as citizens if they won't pay taxes
Sometimes I feel like... I am glad the developer is getting paid to do what he does best. Earning a living wage from it. Please appreciate what they've done. Not everything closed is evil oracle megacorp endeavor.

I am 100% ok with Pico-8 being closed. It's a fucking game engine, not a crypto library. I am a fan of FOSS, but I often see people demand and feel entitled for free stuff. This is wrong.

Once in a while, sit back and enjoy what people create without a slightest bit of dissapointment, entitlement, itch to make mods and hack it, etc. It will bring happiness and peace. Look at it from a different way - it's someone's unadulterated, unbikeshedded vision of what a tiny game engine should be. No PR drama, he doesn't need to answer hundreds of angry assholes on Github, ... I think its beautiful.
Great overview of all the operators at a glance.

> "'>>>=': Honestly, I don't really understand Bitwise operators; hopefully this MDN link will help you out"

Extra points for honesty like this :-)
USA expatriation taxes are quite steep. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that all unrealized gains of all assets are taxed upon exit as if the assets were being sold. Further, I think that income generated by through US companies (like investments) are taxed as US income for ten years after renouncing citizenship.

Also, forget about coming back (say for a friend's wedding or an important medical procedure), the laws assume that high net worth individuals are leaving to avoid future taxes.
I don't care what Lightfoot looks like, I don't understand how you can watch a deeply segregated city attempt to isolate its poorest residents from its richest areas, even temporarily, and not see a problem.
Tell HN: Open-Source Does Not Have to Be Intimidating to Non-Coders
I've been on HN a lot of years and I have wondered how you get involved in open source projects as a non-coder. I've also spoken with other non-coders looking to get involved who felt just as stymied as I did.

Yesterday, I submitted a pull request to correct a typo in the documentation of a open source project. I first spent a lot of time digging through stuff to figure out what I should do (pull request? submit an issue? something else?). A pull request seemed to be the right answer, but I was hesitant to do that for various reasons -- partly because in my mind that's for updating code -- and when I have asked around, no one has ever told me "Oh, you can get involved as a non-coder by submitting a pull request to correct a typo."

When non-coders say things like "Who do I talk with?" or talk about cultural barriers, people try to be nice and assure us "We aren't all hateful to non-coders. Come join our email list for this thing!" And it's the wrong answer.

The correct answer is "None of that matters. You can submit a pull request if you find a typo or other small issue and that's the best way for a non-coder to get involved. It's small. There's no one to talk to. There's no email list to join. Just submit the pull request. They will either approve it and merge it with the master or they won't and no one will bite your head off about it. And now you are contributing to open source. Voila!"

If you want non-coders to get involved in updating your documentation and so forth, you need to find some way to let them know that "All you have to do is submit a pull request." The current approach misdirects people like me into trying to "make connections" to people and all this garbage that is completely irrelevant, counterproductive and a waste of time. It actively interferes with answering the question of "Where do I start?"

You start with a pull request for something small, like a typo. Done. Now you are "a contributor."
Red Teaming Templates
This is not a theoretical problem, it has been researched and the results are not encouraging even for "modern" C++.

Either some of the biggest software companies (Mozilla, Microsoft, Google) are all incompetent or there is a problem with C++ in the real world which still hasn't changed despite "you only need to follow best practices in C++".
Definitely easier, but it would sacrifice a lot of the style IMO. I did hardcode the 'host greeting their guests' part.
Tim Berners-Lee startup launches privacy-focused service to secure your data
Estimates for herd immunity are between 20-80%.
People are doing that at my institution. The average GPA increased by several points.

The thing is, if it's perceived that it's easier to cheat than to learn, people will do that, honor system or not.

I admit that there is a difference between an institutionalised honor system, designed with respect toward and in collaboration with students, and a last-minute arrangement by an unprepared organisation.

Students have been putting up with a lot of nonsense from universities this year. Their trust might have eroded. If universities are not perceived as honorable themselves, a honors system is not the answer here unfortunately.
It seems dangerous to assume that GraphQL decouples your API from the database, considering that there are still performance implications.

If your GraphQL schema requires expensive queries because it has a different schema than your database, is it really decoupled?
> kind of a shithole,

well not exactly
The ice: unlocking a melting time capsule
You're right, of course. But I am so, so tired of having to "sell" over and over just to have the value of my contributions recognized. And I think gp would agree.

The poster, marak, is a founder [0]. They definitely understand product-ization. Yet two weeks ago they suffered an apartment fire and have been struggling to keep a roof over their head [1].

I can definitely understand the kind of bitterness that comes out of going through something like that only to realize how little the fellow humans around you really value you. Realizing that for all the positive signals (such as "popularity") you received before, precious few are willing to actually put resources on the line for you.

So, I think gp and marak aren't coming from a place of misunderstanding the world as it is, but rather a depressing understanding of our world.

Imagine, if you can, a much different world. A world where helping or recognizing the efforts of others meaningfully didn't put you worse off. A world where your quality of life wasn't determined by your ability to take more than you give (or to have started off with enough resources that you can afford to give more than you take).

Once you really see what could be, I think it's difficult to suffer what is.

[0] https://twitter.com/marak

[1] "I lost all my stuff in an apartment fire and am barely staying unhomeless." https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272
Did you somehow miss the whole Panama papers shebang? Yeah, the rich do hide their money abroad.
> If one entity is allowed to take always take a loss on their operations how could another entity that needs to pay their employees ever be able to compete?

So, you're saying that regional loss-leading, and the typical VC business model should not be allowed to exist?

A city's constituents have democratic control over their budget. If they want to use that budget to buy broadband for everyone from a local supplier, that's their prerogative.

Who is the private sector to dictate how I, as a constituent, choose to spend my tax dollars? If I want them spent on a vanity sports stadium project, they'll be spent on a vanity sports stadium project. [1] If I want them spent on providing better broadband to the city, they'll be spent on providing better broadband to the city.

[1] For some reason, nobody ever complains that cities subsidizing the construction of sports arenas is bad anti-competitive behavior that destroys the business model of private sports-arena owners...
I'd argue that including a package in your code is not participating. It's consuming, but not participating.

Football players participate in a football game. Fans consume that game.
I tried this out a few months ago and enjoyed using it. I love the idea of bringing the experience of in-person interactions to an online platform. I hope we'll be seeing more of this in the future.
It simply said they're "trying to contact me and the interview will only take 5 minutes."

Yep. That was probably about COVID. Health privacy laws prohibit even the vague mention of a condition. The caller has no way of knowing if they have the right phone number, and the last thing you want is "Attention, Rando McUltrarunner at 42 Crustacean Crest Drive, Cleveland, Ohio! You have been infected with COVID! Run, don't walk to your nearest testing facility!" on some stranger's voicemail. Or worse, "We are following up to see if you're doing well after your abortion" ending up on the voicemail or texting app of a 15-year-old girl whose parents might have access to her phone.

Source: Recently completed my company's mandatory annual HIPAA training.
I believe Bevy (rust game engine) does leverage multi-threading for running game code (most 'data oriented' frameworks do). The most popular older engines like Unity do not (unless using the experimental DOTS framework).

So, the phrase "a tremendous amount of game code doesn't benefit from multithreading" is actually true since most game code is in unreal/unity, but it's not a hard constraint for all game engines.
> have created a completely parallel schema - new classes for every object in the GraphQL graph, which are analogous but separate from the Rails models, each one acting like a combination of controller and presenter

And IMO this is good. Now you have dedicated place (namely `app/graphql` folder) for API-specific data mapping and validations. And in general GraphQL-Ruby gently pushes you to decouple your API from your database schema so you will be able to refactor and optimize things under your application hood later.
The “Build Systems a la Carte” paper famously compares Excel with build systems such as Make and Bazel. Recalculating a spreadsheet efficiently is the same problem as compiling source code.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...
Can we not go down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Until any of these allegations have been verified, I don't see the point in speculation.

> kicking out GOP poll watchers (and only GOP poll watchers)

Zero evidence anywhere this happened. Much evidence to the contrary.
I found this: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/topological-sorting/ very helpful when I was trying to figure out how to solve a toy spreadsheet I was working on. Includes a couple alternative implementations in a variety of languages.
As others here said, while this is cool, it uses voxels which are unrelated to the techniques used in early 3D video games. Not much nostalgia value there.
There is always some effect whenever any foreign molecule is injected in your blood. Simply knowing ONE 'mechanism of action' doesn't tell you the 'mechanism of reaction' or all the other cross reactions that happen. It also doesn't tell you what will happen when some one is already on medication for other health issues. The body is simply too complex to many any definitive statement like that.

So there are many reasons to think otherwise, but the simplest one is - Every single medication and vaccine that we've ever made has known side-effects. Not all side-effects are known right off the bat, and many take years to detect.
Look, I'm not against going after HP for loss of use as here, and I'm all for the end users hacking the hardware they purchased to suit their desires, but where a lot of these activist groups loose me is when they try to force their ideas of how these business relationships should be structured upon everyone else.

And at the end of the day there is a reason why brands and trademarks exist. The reputation of a business has value.

Caveat emptor.
Pretty neat idea! Being able to highlight exactly which areas of a photo were modified is much better than an image-wide "pass/fail."

Sadly the "doesn't survive compression/re-encoding" problem is kind of a show-stopper. I think steganography still has some important usecases, like covertly sending messages, but I don't think it's practical for "watermarking" images that are expected to be widely distributed.

btw, I noticed that the Merkle tree package you're using doesn't use a distinguisher bit in its node hashes: https://github.com/cbergoon/merkletree/blob/master/merkle_tr...

This can be a security issue in some contexts, since it means you can construct a leaf and a pair of nodes that have the same hash.
> This is similar to the case with many statically typed programming languages ... that have worse-than-exponential blow-ups in their type systems that essentially never show up in practice.

I'm not so sure. Type checking/inference with "degenerate cases" (e.g. Hindley-Milner) is in FPT (fixed-parameter tractable) as are, AFAIK, all problems that are hard in the worst-case but could be easy in practice (e.g. SAT). Program analysis, (assuming "FSMification", of course, to avoid undecidability), was proven in 2005 to not be FPT.

> Yes if you program in a fragment of a language you're fine.

I'm claiming that analogous code to that which would be feasibly checkable in a restricted language would also be feasibly checkable in a non-restricted language, and that both are subject to the same difficulties.

> By this standard all programming languages are indistinguishable at a general level (which is true, but not very useful).

Right, but that doesn't mean that a specific empirical claim should be assumed true until proven false, rather than the opposite, which is the scientific norm.

> Barring this, we have weak (but not unusually so for the field of programming) evidence, in the form of user communities of Turing-incomplete languages today, that people aren't generally creating heat-death style code on accident.

Are you talking about niche languages (like configuration languages) or those intended to be general purpose?

> The name of the game when creating programming languages is to target code that "a normal user would write." Completely restricting the entire language is just another lever in that process.

Perhaps, but this claim requires evidence, unless we agree to keep it in the realm of art and aesthetics, which I'm more than happy to.
Yes! That's a good idea, feature and customization based Pricing. Just imagine Linus would be such a winy Rumpelstiltskin...well he is, but not a winy one ;)

BTW: Whats with the 211 others that help him?
Maps of Alternate Histories
confiscate intellectual property if they fund it

"Confiscate" is a very loaded word to use here. You don't say that I "confiscated the farmer's tomatoes" when I trade money for those tomatoes, or that an employer "confiscated the employee's code" when they traded that code for salary.

How much tax money would be derived from the multitude of businesses that would arise if more government-funded IP was freely licensed instead of granted to a single spinoff company?
> copy/paste rectangles of text, interactive regular expression replace, dynamic abbreviation expansion, edit remote files via SSH, exchange words, ..., saves multiple cursor positions

Most of the popular text GUI editors (VS Code, Sublime Text, etc) can do these things.

> treat words, lines, sentences, expressions, functions as movable units, works on a bare terminal, works via X, spawns windows on other displays while sharing the same buffers, supports macros that can cross modes (open/close files in the directory browser and mod them in a single macro),

These ones not so much, but then you also give up quite a bit by being in a terminal, having to deal with modes, etc.
Url changed from https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/mcdonalds-plant-based, which points to this.
Have you tried channeling that gaming energy into physical sports? Golf? Tennis? Those things are at least good for your health, and you can't exactly play tennis all day long, you have to share the court, and you can't mess up your sleep.
Yes, but what little detail there is sounds like something which almost any language could have done acceptably. I'd believe that Go would require a few less servers than, say, async Python but the title really should have been something like “A little architecture goes a long way”. The approach they described is no doubt considerably more polished but people built websites using the same techniques back in the 90s to avoid SPOFs and then XHR made that even easier to do robustly.

To be clear: this isn't to say that their work wasn't good but really seconding the point they're making about how the original design was the wrong architecture for a public website and there's no easy way to band-aid around that.
Link goes to agility cms home page.