skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm inclined to agree.

One of Python's strengths in this space is that it's a procedural language with just enough in the way of object-oriented facilities. That makes it possible to write reasonably object-oriented libraries with easy-to-learn interfaces, while still sticking to procedural idioms for the actual data hacking.

Which, in turn, means makes it a comfortable environment and interfacing mechanism for both engineers and analysts.

That said, sometimes I look at tools like https://moosetechnology.org and desperately wish I could be using something like that at work.
Three Letter Agencies don't approve of that kind of behaviour and will discipline employees caught doing it. The fact we've heard about it is because those doing it got caught. Indeed, talking about the US in particular, many of those stories originate in an unclassified letter the NSA Inspector-General sent to Senator Chuck Grassley back in 2013, which the Senator released to the public – the fact that the Inspector-General knew about the cases means those people got caught somehow.

Some complain that the Three Letter Agencies are too soft on the perpetrators – a reprimand, a demotion/paycut, a forced resignation, or termination instead of criminal prosecution – but going soft isn't the same thing as approval. (Also, the agencies themselves don't have authority to prosecute, the most they can do is send a referral to the prosecutor but it is up to the prosecutor to decide whether to proceed.) Given how much emphasis those agencies put on staff reliability, getting caught doing stuff like that is a pretty serious career-limiting move.

I reckon those agencies – and the prosecutors too – care a lot more about employees stealing bitcoin from targets than they do about employees spying on their neighbours or love interests. Bureaucrats always care about money; and thefts are more straightforward cases to prosecute than LOVEINT.
>and their ability to audit manufacturers is much different from your ability to audit a contractor.

Apple could audit them, but is it common practice to do so? Otherwise this seems like a case of hindsight is 20/20.
But could be a better company. Something like the Path app did years ago.
Incredible! Now how about those exorbitant fees and the price of textbooks!?
It's interesting that no one seems to give a shit about real freedoms like free speech or democracy, detention without trial or access to lawyers. But when you close the pubs (or the artisnal pasta makers), suddenly we're on a dictatorship.
Haha when you put it like that, it helps Apple's case. They're only making less than 10x more than Costco for all the serious technical innovation vs large-scale reselling.
Tracking how much I've spent on Uber, and making a Chrome extension for it
I think the generally accepted definition (as I understand it) is any startup with a private valuation over $1bn. So there is a lot of room for very successful companies that are not unicorns.
100% agreed, if you can choose your own language, there are certainly better options than Bash. It depends if you can do that or not.

In some contexts, Python is also a pretty good option as it is available in a lot of places as well.
Not sure why the final insult was warranted
Yet many folks would call you racist or xenophobic for speaking out against globalization.
JavaScript Frameworks, Performance Comparison 2020
Pay $1500 for a laptop and it will often have crapware installed. Buy a $1000 Samsung TV and it will track your viewing, sell the data, and show you ads. Buy a high end dishwasher and seemingly 50% of the logic on the device is to encourage you to use Jet Dry (because they get a kickback per unit from the Finish people, not because it's more than marginally beneficial).

Simply paying alone often isn't enough -- this sort of sleezy behavior is endemic.
I deleted my fb account 5 years ago and I hate fb. But so many of my friends are semi active on fb. Most of them hate fb but still use it cause it provides them some relevant info. For e.g; I know a mom who finds answers on her local moms group that makes her life super easy.

Also read this

https://notboring.substack.com/p/everybody-hates-facebook
"If I remember correctly some fundamental aspects of fuzzy-set theory are still unproven and possibly shown undecidable."

If I remember correctly, and I may not, fuzzy logic fell out of mathematical interest when it was proved all fuzzy logic statements can be converted into conventional logic statements without loss, by adding some additional terms representing various ranges of values, e.g., if we have a sensor $T that senses the temperature in a range from 0.0 - 1.0, the fuzzy statement

if $T > .6 then TurnOffBurner else TurnOnBurner

can be converted to the conventional-logic statements

$TAbove0.6 -> TurnOffBurner
$TBelow0.6 -> TurnOnBurner

With the obvious mapping of what the two values on the left are.

Proving that the entire logic can be so converted is less trivial as the statements interact but IIRC it was done.

The whole hype of fuzzy logic is, well, how it was presented in this article, that it could somehow deal with the real world better than conventional logic. The proof that there was nothing it could say that conventional logic couldn't ended that conclusively.

However, it can still be a useful "programming API", for obvious reasons. But then, you don't really need a specialized "fuzzy logic" necessarily, for a lot of tasks, a big set of if statements based on non-boolean values (which, you know, are easy to come by in programming languages) does the same job. While expressing it directly in fuzzy logic might open up some mathematical analysis possibilities, expressing it in conventional programming languages opens up a lot of software engineering possibilities, so shrug. This is just another expression of the decades-long and ongoing arguments about how mathematical programming really is.
Oh I wish this AI photo craze died out. I see that it may appeal to some people as a kind of "nicerising" effect, but without the context a casual viewer may take the picture as unaltered snapshot of the world. Of course the alterations are rather minute in the grand scheme of things, but if we continue looking at these taking them without context, I wonder how our perception of the world will get detached from reality? I think pictures computed by AI should be specially marked to let viewer know they don't look at the real thing.
> if you have taken a below-market salary as many startup employees have

I think this is part of the startup mythos. At the three startups I've worked at (~10 people), none of us had to sacrifice competitive salaries for stock options. The options were on top to incentivize staying at the company longer.

I wonder how common it actually is for people to take significant paycuts in 2020 for a startup opportunity (founders aside)
I think debian comes with dash.
"Apple only users debate advantages of universal standard"
I think you overestimate how much negotiating power an individual worker has when deciding the price for their labor.

Anecdotally, in the Software field there is a lot of "price anchoring" where a large employer decides that a software engineer makes ~125k, and both smaller/peer employers decide that a software engineer makes 125k +/- 10%.

From past experience the base "going rate" in a given market doesn't seem to change all that much unless a large employer decides to change the going rate because a higher or lower price point better suits their business - other companies will set their salaries to the baseline. Big Tech has recently been dragging wages up across the board by both hiring in volume, and paying more than everyone else.

I'd be curious if anyone has a formal study on price anchoring in wage negotiations.
> I was dreaming of so many things, but with time I learn how much harder they are to implement than they seem.

This one really kicks me. I tend to start a bunch of ambitious projects that get walled quickly due to costs or complexity. Mind you none of these are side hustles or ever monetizable, but the cost still runs out of hand quickly. It also doesn't help that I find that the skills I need now are exactly the things that I'm not very good at
This is an interesting idea, but I would hate the place where I live to be a guinea pig. Have any country ever tried anything like that?
> Colleges grapple with a shrinking number of high school grads

This ^^^ is the key. These colleges aren't being nice. There is simply not enough demand for the amount of supply. That is, prices fall.

On the other hand, this was also the root of the student loan crisis. Supply is relatively fix. But cheap and easy to get loans drove up demand. Which further increased price. Which required bigger loans. You see where this is going :)

There are plenty of good reasons for the biz model shoe of higher edu to drop. It looks like that's finally starting to happen.
Unicorns are startups with private valuations over $1bn, but I don’t know anyone that wouldn’t be happy with 1% of a $100M non-unicorn exit
Bellingcat report on the call: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/12/21/if-...
> The problem is that data collection still wouldn't stop just cause you're paying.

Completely agree! There's cannot be any grey area here. It must be all ad-based or all-subscription. But the move seems impossible
I'm not sure. Even if you could do it in eBPF, I really don't think you could get it past the verifier because it's not just like formal verification it actually has to be trivially bounded (so parts of it definitely could be done without Turing completeness but you ain't writing your GPU driver in it).

The JIT isn't necessarily turned on so it's probably not a great idea in the first place
My bad. Thanks!
Emacs and every Emacs developers custom elisp setups would like to have a word with you. Of course, I'm not entirely sure of another example of mass adoption of Lisp in a commercial setting outside of Hacker News if you consider this setup commercial. I would argue HN definitely provides value back to YC by bringing plenty of exposure to their startups, but in all honesty I don't think a single soul on HN would complain against it, considering the alternative is much worse.
It's common, including in "commercial environments" - eg. I've seen multiple things that would qualify as "lisps" built in banks.

Why? Probably because they are easy to make and extremely expressive given that limited effort. Is making an expressive custom language with no tooling to solve a single problem a good idea? Nope. Do people do it anyway? Yes.

Edit: And never forget Greenspun's 10th rule: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
I found the feeling sort of when I started playing with 3D printing, that led me down a rabbit hole filled with SBCS like Arduino and RPI, plus milling machines and laser cutters. It wasn't quite as exciting as the 1st time I connected my TI to a local BBS, but it was close the 1st time my RepRap started laying down filament.
Most boats are covered in protective sealants/paints so I think this is not a major concern unless the boat crashes
There definitely are, and I didn’t argue that Facebook was the only way – just that it has done more good for the world than bad.

There are indeed plenty of other ways to connect people without intrusions into privacy, and hopefully Facebook will be forced into those corners (chat apps broken up, content-based advertising instead, offering a subscription, etc.)

People seem to think that the whole thing is rotten and we need to get rid of it, and it’s a great first instinct – but frankly Facebook is here to stay. We need to figure out how we can make that more sustainable.
Mini-CP: A Lightweight Constraint Programming Solver
Rob Landley is working on implementing a full Bash clone (called toysh[1]) in his Toybox project[2], so hopefully the need to target BusyBox ash will go away in the near future.

[1] https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/toys/pending/s...

[2] http://landley.net/toybox/about.html
I learned the hard way that options agreements tend to have additional clauses allowing the company to unilaterally restrict sales. The contract might look like it has a straightforward process for employees to sell, with a company first right of refusal (with the company purchasing the stock instead). But there is usually additional fine print that basically gives the board veto power over any transfer of stock.
Wish this was a blog. I won’t use Twitter. Too much noise and crap.
Strikes me as a modern interpretation of the age old "US brought pens to space, Russia brought pencils" debacle. As the article states, we don't have to brave it because we out-smarted that situation. In no way does their environmental condition prove intergalactic superiority.
For anyone who wants to put their money where their mouth is, you can buy a Librem 5 USA edition, which is fully made in the USA and costs $2000. (For comparison, the third-world labor edition costs $800)

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
The Stanford vaccine algorithm that left out frontline doctors
They are a believer in defaults
True, that is why we need legislation like GDPR to not repeat our mistakes.
Help me understand this as it sounds interesting.

So when do you get this equity? Is it only at a liquidity event?

Because normally you pay taxes when you get something of value, equity in this case but you can't always sell said equity due to your company being private.

I'm assuming your company is private as a public company doesn't have these issues, they just give you stock, you sell stock, everyone is happy.

Or put another way, how does this setup not give you a tax bill each year, assuming you get your equity each year, that you have to pay with your own cash?
The cine lens and professional photographer lens market is big and irreplaceable until they figure out how, for example, to make an f4 600mm prime without a 150mm front element. Many problems to solve until we see the last days of optical professional lenses. Price points for these start at $2000, the cine lenses are around $4500 for primes and that 600mm I mentioned is a Canon lens, has a front element grown from fluorite crystal and runs about $12,000 and is currently on version 4.
Hence my enclosing Freedoms in single quotes.

I tend to communicate quite drily - that's often hard to put across online.
> The same for me is definitely true with Twitter and Facebook. An infinite feed of shiny, entertaining, funny, and outraging things, but almost nothing that's ever satisfying.

Facebook has been making it pretty easy for me to quit - it's mostly been an unending stream of boring advertisements with maybe one or two meaningful posts from friends.
Top tier colleges (and even state colleges) teach a lot more than what is inside of a book. They teach interpersonal skills, social skills, work ethic, self care, professional networking, etc.

I think it is misconception that these schools are respected because they teach the subject matter better, or that they provide no value outside of the lecture hall. If anything, >50% of the value is outside of the lecture hall.

Also, I don’t think academic research shouldn’t be expected to have any return on investment. The job of a professor is to further academics, not profit.
Librem 5 USA.
Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills
Comparison of Symmetric Encryption Methods (Including Block Cipher Modes)
I've had the 300PF for several years and it's my most-used lens. I photograph birds and wildlife and being able to fit an extremely-good setup (a D500 with 300PF) into my smallest camera bag (Lowepro hatchback 16l) encourages me to take it on almost every outing.
The population has grown from 205 million in 1970 to 330 million today. If you think 50% of the people join the workforce that is an increase of 65 million more people working.
How do we measure the development of production quantum computing and it's effect on cracking hash algorithms and other cryptography? Is this even a valid concern?
This isn't about sourcing raw materials, though. This is about sourcing manufacturing labor.
Lol, I just won't pay him -assholes
Any Devil wears Pravda takes from Craig Murray yet?
Correct the primary data source was open street map.
> an increase in labor supply due to women entering the labor force

In the USA, there has been a (relative) decrease in labor supply due to women leaving the work force. Women's participation in the labor force by percentage has decreased over the past twenty years.
Nice use of real <form> and submit handling!

Note that HN apparently ate your "delete" character(s) (happened to me with "recycle" sign as well).

Props for HTML escaping, was not in task, as well as separate delete buttons. Note though that entities in the document.write are transformed, so the "html escaping" is broken in effect; either double escaping or codepoints should make it work.

`<li>${x.value.replace(/\u0026/g,`\u0026amp;`).replace(/</g,`\u0026lt;`

Or, you know, the mighty glorious ancient deprecated "example" element, that is still very well supported. Provided you are OK with danger of '</xmp>'and will not prevent it, result would be quite terse:

`<li><xmp>${x.value}</xmp>`.
There are a lot of alternatives being tested out right now. Most of them do a great job of the training and certification parts of college.

The problem is that we've also loaded in a "maturation/social growth" responsibility onto college. It's a place where teenagers can move out and meet people their age from different places and do dumb things with minimal consequences. Lots of people argue that this, and the networking opportunity, are the far greater part of the value of college, and nobody seems to have a good alternative for that.
I have not gotten that feeling back in years, but I do not see that as a problem. I get excited by seeing my children growing up, by exploring the world, seeing new things in nature.

If nothing gives you an excited feeling, that is a problem. But if tech is now just a job to you, and you get excitement in other areas of life, there is nothing wrong with that.
Yes, it's possible just not usual to replace everything without effecting interfaces.
Can startups appreciate how amazing WhatsApp's monetization model was?

- Free for first year.

- Then $1 per year.

The idea is, if you aren't using the app, then don't pay for it, but if you are, you will pay for it.
I never went to school, but have found that many books I want to read (incl. texbooks) can be found easily as a pdf with a google search (although this is becoming less common for me, sadly). I once, suggested to a struggling friend that instead of paying for a textbook, they should see if they could find it in such a way. Turns out, many newer book require codes to unlock assignments that can only be had by purchasing the book.
It's not obvious to me that a supply chain department would be interviewing random line workers of suppliers to make sure they're being paid the advertised wages.
Yes righ, space-x rocket can return. Russian rocketa can not return but can lift more heavy cargo up to space. And if space-x rocket will not return and will be lost somewhere. So can space-x team work outside at -52°C or not?. That was the question of that Russian - about warm chairs.
How is your comment contradicting mine? Emacs is 1 out of hundreds if not thousands of editors out there.
I think we should start limiting tuition by making it be tied to the first year salary of students graduating from the same school with the same degree. If you want federal money, that is the rule. And room/board must be optional, you can't be forced to live on campus.
True, they might not have a legal obligation, but the court of public opinion should have way more influence on something like this. With their billions, they should have the means for oversight enforcement and inspections (including inspecting these companies financials since they're getting millions).

Unfortunately ... who's going to stop buying Apple products over things like this? Not many who don't already dislike Apple to begin with. It wouldn't make a dent.
As a parent, I'm not-so-secretly hoping we will see some correction. Especially with the proliferation of online options. If I sent my kid to Oregon State to get an online CS degree, they'd pay the same tuition as if they were on-campus. If they went to somewhere like ASU for the online CS masters, it is similarly overpriced. Meanwhile, I'm just about to finish my Georgia Tech masters in CS for under 10K for the entire program. If other institutions follow their lead, it'll put a lot of downward price pressure on the rest.

Especially for online classes that can scale pretty inexpensively, the current tuition rate is absurd.
> Game of Thrones is medieval fantasy, and as the second-biggest medieval fantasy series of all time it will have a significant impact on people's perception of the medieval time period.

I'm sure that, of relatively modern fantasy series, it will have one of the largest impacts while it remains popular. What I don't see is evidence that it (or even the #1 modern medieval fantasy series) has much impact (I would accept, without specific evidence, that it has non-zero impact) on perceptions of the medieval period on an absolute scale, rather than relative to other modern overtly fantastic literature not specifically tied to history which also may not have much absolute impact.

Now, clearly fantasy has some impact; things like post-medieval Arthurian stories have been a vehicle for transmitting a lot of misconceptions about the medieval period. But those presented themselves as history and tied to specific times and places in history, they weren’t overt fantasy set in an obviously-invented setting that was merely inspired by a mix of history and historical mythology.
How to Pitch Investors via Zoom
I have been seeing a lot of Apple Watches on wrists, lately.

Lots of AirPods, too.

But that is anecdotal, from a limited geographic perspective.
IBM snaps up Nordcloud as battle with AWS, Microsoft and Google heats up
New Vegas is a great example, and is better than I remember on this dimension [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/gzF7aHxk4Y4
This reminds me of Doctor Who from the 70s and 80s. The effects, props, costumes, etc were absolutely awful. But the stories were, generally, great.

Most people dismiss Atari 2600 because they cannot get past the visual “deficiencies “by today’s standards. But if you can suspend that and play a game like Adventure or Golf, you might find yourself hitting the reset button to play again for several hours...
As far as optical quality goes, focusing only on f-stops is like focusing on horsepower for cars. Even in f-stops, not all f-stops are equal since some lens transmit more light than others at the same f-stop. This is called t-stops and is used a lot of in pro video lenses.

Another example is if I focus on something and then zoom in and out some lenses have to refocus and others maintain focus. This is an important feature for video and any kind of fast shooting. Many lenses have much more "focus breathing" than others. That is, the change of the effective focal lens as the lens focuses closer and closer. I had a lens that was 200mm but it was really only at infinity. At close focus is was closer to 135mm since the focus breathing was so pronounced.

Bokeh, chromatic/comatic abberations, geometric distortion are other things I can go on and on about.
I think this have everything to do with bitcoin’s name. Anyone not in crypto just think crypto=Bitcoin. It’s like Hoover or xerox. Everyone else thought too hard and tried to be too clever!
BTH News 20December2020 – Between the Hacks