skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> can only be evidence of manipulation.

That statement is a non-sequitur. It _could_ be interpreted as evidence of manipulation, but that's hardly the only possible explanation. As much as we all wish science was given all the funding it needs and scientists wouldn't have to resort to hoarding information to protect their turf, that's not the world we live in.
The problem with

> She cited new research urging that children be identified based on their genetically predetermined educational abilities and then put in separate schools that could be used to foster different kinds of learning.

is, we already know that constructing social categories based on biological traits is bullshit, simply because the relevant criteria are not given by science. Science can only give a classification of some measure, but it can not reasonably define if the measure is relevant. For an extreme example, even if you get a "obviously relevant" distribution, you have to choose at which values you draw the line.

But lets assume for the sake of the argument, that there is initially no difference in the outcome of the education ( defining this is left as an exercise to the reader), one of the school types will be perceived as better. So it will get more applications, can afford harsher selection criteria and actually become better. At which point the better school will probably get more resources, and the cycle continues.

So calling "racism" on non-biased factual evidence is harsh. Assuming that non-biased factual evidence includes citations to the roughly 100 years of research how oppressive structures develop. (These 100 years of research are usually called feminism.) But we know that precisely these footnotes are the first to be dropped.
Re Invalid types as warnings:

Ghc since 7.6 has had a -fdefer-type-errors flag --- http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.6.2/html/users_guide/defer... --- which produces warnings at compile-time and exceptions at runtime.
Whenever I stumble across a Quora question, the website hides everything with a subscription overlay. Even after getting rid of it, I'm only shown the first answer. After some time, my mind has associated Quora with “I don't want to be there”. Stack Overflow (SO) gained a lot of popularity by having open access; that's basically the Foot-in-the-door (FITD) technique.

On the other hand, I have witnessed that up-only websites usually have a better content (e.g. HN) than up-or-down websites (e.g. Reddit). This is easily understood because people will tend to use the down vote against things they do not agree (politics, to obvious of a question, etc) with instead of badly-shapped posts.

I think the way SO goes is pretty good despite the known flaws, and I would not be competent enough to propose solutions for these.

Edit: removed incorrect expression "out of random"
Upload the code to github.com. Use a permissive license like 2-clause BSD or MIT, or even better make it public domain.

You can add compiled binaries using releases: https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software
One interesting issue the article raises is putting children into different schools based on their genetics. As far as I understood it, the genetics of intelligence wasn't this well understood...

I couldn't find anything on the matter. For me their is still no evidence for practical use of genetics in Education....
I agree with this advantage, that's what I meant with "the modularity aspect"; a non-OO programming language with support for modules also offers this. However, as soon as you get to non-trivial and often gratuitous inheritance hierarchies, it gets in the way of at least readability and probably also maintainability. Example: instead of String, you get AbstractMutableStringOfWesternCharacters, all the way to ArrayBasedStringOfASCII and everything in between. Suddenly to understand one function, you have to read and understand n classes, because they are part of the inheritance chain.
I had a really bad ant problem with sugar ants a few months ago. I used a bait called terro that is actually just borax and sugar water. Mine were coming from the wall somewhere, and coming up under the carpet, I put the baits underneath the carpet and it took about a week but finally I have not seen a single ant since then. You have to resist spraying them, and let the baits work. Once they find them, there will be a lot of them as they mill around the bait and eat it, and bring it back to their nest, where everyone eats it, and then dies.
Definitely worth doing, make sure it is compilable and include a readme + put it on github.

Of course nothing may happen (See autodesk animator and Executor) - both of these were open sourced over 10 years after they were popular though.
Why Persona
"in the States, you have to pay for your health like for any groceries."

In the US there is no functioning price mechanism. So, it it is quite unlike a trip to the super-marche. Your money disappears down a rabbit hole (insurance) for which there is very little practical choice; and the rest of it is like a giant "dark pattern" puzzle where all kinds games are played to milk out the most money. That is not to say introducing "market pricing" is the correct answer, in a naive sense, this is not correct. Because markets don't function with opportunistic negotions under duress and asymmetric information (ie, typical medical situations). So, the problems with healthcare are precisely this: money changes hands but it is part of a system that is neither here nor there. As such, its just a corrupt opaque and insider-exploited bit of social engineering. Of courese, that likely describes many of the alternatives. (Hence, tough choices and an unwillingness to do anything other than something well thought out and pragmatice.) At least EU countries have evolved a unique ecosystem over time that has developed it own internal logic. The US is a frakenstein system, and the more money we spend trying to "rationalize it" (buzzword of the 1990's?), the worse it gets...MBA type's and the hippocratic oath don't really mix.
For me it increased the perceived trustworthiness of the website 10 times. I've seen illustrations drawn in similar style in Scientfic Amercian and subconsciously carried over the trust I have for SA to this site.
>We kind of take offense to the idea that us bringing extra work to these painters in China is "exploitation," and it's easy for a lot of comfortable Westerners to take this stance because the standard of living here is so high and we have the luxury to think about how much we'd all like to get paid.

Well, I'm not that much of a "confortable Westerner". I'm from Europe, true, but my country has been in a dire Euro-crisis condition for years.

Since that happened we see all kinds of foreign and local businesses coming to exploit the situation, offering wages that we consider insulting and near-substinence but are forced to accept for lack of options.

The only reason business say the "cost of living" in country X matters regarding to how much to pay a worker is because they can get away with it. I don't see why an American working at X is worth more than a Chinese or a Portuguese working at X. Especially with all the talk of a globalised economy.

It seems the main idea businesses take from a globalized economy is to take advantage of it NOT being globalised enough, ie. to play national economies and cheaper labour against each other.

I'd like to see a real "global economy", where everyone is paid the same.
A hilarious love ballad
If I had piles of govt money to spent I would rather support the development of already established OSS projects with adequate teams and would try to influence further direction by contributing "scientific basis" and "rational reasoning" about functionality I think is necessary. That means I would enjoy "free" community testing and support and probably even bug-fixes.) The mantra for Open Source is "make something for others to [re]use", which, I think, govt officials could never understand.
All rules cost you. All of them. Even the ones you need.
The Ubiquitous B-Tree Original Paper (PDF/17 pages)
Warning: using a permissive license like BSD or MIT will make certain people hate you. I was a bit shocked to discover this.
When Persona was released, they split the FOSS crowd between OpenID and Persona adoption. Having two similar tools that solve the same problems (regardless of which one is better) did nothing beyond create two incompatible camps, each advocating for one while discouraging adoption of the other. I see it as a rather large blind spot of Mozilla to not recognize this.

As an administrator, I would also like to complain about this behavior from a practical viewpoint. Spending first mindshare and time implementing OpenID to solve a real problem, Persona came like an unwanted alternative to a solved issue. Had they joined like an upgrade (i.e. backward compatible with OpenID), my reaction would to be an advocate rather than skeptic.
Yep, and as an Aussie I find it extremely worrying. I'm fine, I have private insurance, and my family and myself are not struggling financially. But that's not the case for some of my best friends and their families... And those are the people that are going to suffer.

Also, screw Translink. I still can't fathom why a 15% increase in price for a worse service makes sense. Sigh
In Spain it seems the reverse: public institutions push the natural birth route much harder, whereas private clinics routinely perform C-sections or fully medicated or induced birth simply for their own convenience or to collect the extra money from the insurer. After the baby is born and all is well, public hospitals will assist moms to breastfeed if needed, whereas private places just want you out of there ASAP.

If I want convenience and pretty flowers for simple procedures I'll go with private, but for anything serious public all the way.
Don’t make the same app store mistake as we did
The US dropped 13 Points in the Global Press Freedom Index
Since I've been using native Javascript, StackOverflow has become a pointless visit for this very reason.

The comment or answer to any Javascript question seems to be essentially 'use jQuery' (and sometimes just that alone).

This is never the answer that I am looking for, so I always look elsewhere.
Who gets mad for this reason?
What is out of random? I've never heard of it and unfortunately it has a very ungooglable name.
I apologize that my original comment was lightweight and lacking sources. If I make such a claim, I should back it up with sources. I'm about to fall asleep though, and I don't remember where precisely I saw it.

Within the last couple months, there was a pretty big discussion featuring BSD licensers vs GPL licensers. If I remember correctly, the GPLers were saying that by using BSD, one enables software freedoms to be taken away, and therefore BSD and MIT licenses should be strongly opposed.
Isn't http://xkcd.com/1133/ a lot more relevant to hemingwayapp?
In my experience, the people I know never deleted any email account. Email accounts simply stop being used. That's a big difference.
Stack Overflow appears to be starting to suffer from Wikipedia editor syndrome. All is well until a few people suddenly realise they have a bit of power and instead of using it for good, decide to just yield it just because they can, putting more effort into fiercely enforcing minor rules to push their own agenda, rather than providing useful content. Yes rules are important, but some battles are more important than others.
I hate this so much too. StackOverflow needs a "no jquery" filter.
It depends a bit on what you mean by "intelligence as we understand it". As I see it animals have varying levels of intelligence - even amongst flies buzzing around the room I notice some of them just blindly crash into things but some of the larger species understand the layout of the room including windows and fly about without crashing. At a higher level Orangutans have been known to watch their keeper lock the door and then try to pick the lock. I don't think you can say only humans who can say play chess are intelligent and the rest doesn't count. On this scale computer systems are at around the smart fly level and improving. As regards the the argument that AI is just human developed algorithms, you and I are probably just evolution developed networks of neurons. How does that prove whether either system is smart or not?
Flexbox is actually very good and works on all the mobile browsers today and most desktop browsers if you ignore old IE.
Weird, I took an antacid and it was good.
My suspicion is that both health care systems are unsustainable because of rising geriatric care costs. To counter this we'll be forced to navigate the minefields of legal euthanasia and life extension technologies.
The problem with amateur American historians on the internet is that they seem to forget anything pre-1900 happened. You could start your remedial reading with: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_American_Revolu...
The overall ethos of rigidity at stackoverflow has gotten out of control.

On the one hand if I want to make a one character edit because some code snippet is broken in a non obvious way that will frustrate the next hundred people, I am told to add six. If I add six, say a comment on the edited code, I am very very likely to be rolled back. Good luck making diligence work for you in that scenario.

On the other hand, if I ask a question about a specific, mildly arcane manipulation of a data structure in python and I ask it in ordinary language that will probably make for good googling... But the answer, not the question already exists, I get voted to close. I.e., why didn't I already know the answer so I would know the correct terms to google when I googled my question five ways before asking?

Overall, it has become a more and more frustrating experience to participate in over last few years. Still a valuable thing to have exist, but I do not relish the moment when it occurs to me that an SO question might be the most expedient solution.
Quora is more focused towards open questions, I don't think a technical specific question is common there.

Also, keeping things behind a curtain is very debatable.

It is unfortunate that janitorial tasks are being rewarded disproportionately in SO, looks like they're headed the Wikipedia way of a closed editorial group.
it is not enough to have a free public service, tho. I have no idea about the Uk, but Canada also has free public healthcare yet it is so quite worse than the french system that it feels like they are not in the same league, imho.
I'm having difficulty parsing your prediction. Are you saying that in a free market, nobody would offer insurance against the possibility of developing a rare, expensive medical problem? Or that once you've developed an expensive medical condition, you'll no longer be able to get insurance against it? Or something else?
Fitbit for the mind: Eye-tracker watches your reading
It's obviously {}, duh! ;)

(In one of the ways of constructing the natural numbers within ZFC set theory in mathematics, one identifies 0 with the empty set {}, 1 with {{}}={0}, 2 with { {}, {{}}} = {0,1}, and so on.)
Oddly enough, here in Italy, regular doctor visits have very little red tape. They just type your name in their computer, and then get on with asking what you are there to see them for. If you need a prescription, they print one out for you, that you can take to the pharmacy.

By and large, Italy is not a stellar example of how to run a country, but the health care system is less bureaucratic and easier to deal with than the US, and generally not something you have to worry about much.

That said, it's not perfect, either. When our son was born here, it felt very much like a factory operation with the pregnant woman as an input and a woman+child as the output. I felt they were competent in the event that anything went wrong (in our case, everything was fine), but it was all very impersonal and felt designed to maximize throughput. I was not allowed to be with my wife for most of her labor, for instance.
The main thing that's "better" about them seems to be that they rarely sting humans. But they appear to be considerably more troublesome for infrastructure.
I want to point out that I'm not the creator of that page. ;)
Some people have massive, powerful shoulders. And they need them. To carry that chip on their shoulder for so long.

Whether their personal chip is racism, sexism, or any other -ism, their chip is the real problem. So, how do we stop them foisting their chips onto the rest of civilised society?
It's not a name, just me badly translating "au hasard", which roughly means that I'm pretending to have picked HN at random while it's the very website where I'm posting. I'm removing it from my post for clarity. I don't know where this came from.
I believe that was Ayn Rand's point: Acting out of self interest helps everyone.
Armadillos tend to avoid densely (human-)inhabited areas, and have a habit of ending up roadkill when they violate that preference, so they aren't that effective at pest control in urban areas. Maybe they do more in rural areas; not sure.
Time Warner Cable Internet Speed Upgrade? Journal
"The standards of English language are useful but for matters of taste and social differentiation not communication"

There are people living in the same country as me, speaking the same language, less than 200 miles away, whom I struggle to understand in conversation. We spell and write the same way, so we can communicate through the written word. If we relied on phonetics to be able to communicate, we wouldn't be able to. Having standards means we can communicate; I suppose what I'm saying is that I just plain think the statement above is wrong, based on my own personal experience.
To play devils advocate for a bit: Perhaps it was a "basic" question, but it's also pretty terse. More importantly, you have not given me any reason why I should want to help you.

You don't provide any information about what you are trying to do, what problem you are trying to solve, attempts that you have made to solve your own problem. You tell me no story, nor prove that you are a "peer" -- someone who has put the same effort into that craft as a potential person who may have the answer will have.

Ultimately you haven't answered the "What have you tried?" question. http://mattgemmell.com/what-have-you-tried/

You are asking someone to help you; a little more humility couldn't hurt. I don't get paid to help you solve your problem -- other than worthless internet points -- so just give me a reason to want to help you solve your problem. I want to help, but not if you are going to be a jerk.
When Persona was released, OpenID is already dead. I implemented OpenID on a few sites (I was an early proponent) and had nothing but trouble. Nobody could remember their OpenID URL, whereas everyone knows their email
address.
Registrations are now re-open!
Is that the same as Subclass.prototype = new Superclass()?
HN is not up-only for anyone over 500 (?) karma.

The downvote button should be used early and often.

Downvotes are not used enough on HN. Upvotes are used in a weird way.
Mina: Really fast deployer and server automation tool
...

My love is like localhost, always there when you call its name

My love is like fopen("a"), always growing to the end

My love is like SYN, looking for a connection

My love is like gdb, willing to take things step by step

My love is like DUAL_EC_DRBG, sneaky 'round the back door

My love is like Lisp, if parentheses were hugs
It's interesting that so much time and effort is spent by JavaScript developers implementing classical inheritence when this is a concept increasingly shunned in classically typed languages.
A stopped clock is right twice a day; if everyone is helped by someone acting out of self-interest, it's a lucky by-product.
I've been using stackoverflow for over 4 years. I have asked hundreds of questions. Over those years, it has become virtually impossible to ask questions because it "does not fit the guidelines".

I've grown so frustrated by the negative experience, I have visited that site less and less and my engagement has fallen off.

I've complained about this issue for years ago on meta.stackexchange, that new users will experience negativity from the cynical comments if not the discouragement from the censorship (downvoting and closing the question) regarding the context of the question being asked, and that the mods are taking the questions literally as it is written without the human compassion of trying to understand. As if on cue, the question was downvoted to damnation and I found myself fighting a flame war with angry set of engineers and was eventually blocked from adding to the discussion as if some verdict has been drawn. It didn't help that lower reputation members agreed with what I was saying, because your reputation on SO is measured by how many accepted questions you can show to your potential employer (btw many employers seem to dislike finding leads on careers.stackoverflow.com for some reasons).

the chat at stackoverflow is even worse. I don't know if it's the "brogrammers" slacking off at work or just university kids trolling, lot of the starred comments in the chat are vulgar. Even the high reputation members seem no different at times.

Honestly, I think that stackoverflow has shot itself in it's own foot. It's feeling less like a community and more like a system of cold engineers ready to rip a newcomer's question apart or how well they can emulate a computer.

I don't like Quora because I dislike the fact that you have to be logged in to view more of the answer or other stuff.

I've sought refuge in Ask HN because so far, no "but this is not efficient obviously OP doesn't know what he's doing" type of comments often seen on stackoverflow, stackexchange sites.

Everytime I ask a question on stackoverflow I feel like I'm walking across a minefield and I've been a member for over 4 years.
The point is that these people think that they are doing something good. However, they do not realize that they are in a context where contribution is done on voluntary participation and that they are making contributors flee. They still think as if their website was some kind of closed circle where people want to belong.
As I explained in issue 1523, the above is misunderstanding Persona and conflating various issues, and is wrong. Pretty much the only way Persona uses DNS is to perform an A lookup to get the user's domain, which could be SRV (or have an SRV fallback instead).

The issues above talk about delegation, which is a whole other matter.
no, Object.create() creates the object and sets __proto__ but it does not call the function. "new" also calls the function.
Yes, and those are perfectly legal.
A bit OT and naive question maybe but when do you need OOP in JavaScript? I code a lot of web stuff but the only time I've used OOP in JS is when I make games (where inheritance etc makes sense). Does anyone have a real-world example?
Which they can already do with accounts they most likely already have: Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIN any OpenID provider... So the only potential benefit of Persona is the privacy, and if a user doesn't care about that then it's just another account you have to worry about (i.e. the very problem it tries to solve). As it stands, Persona's problem is that it just reinvents the wheel with slightly different spokes when people already have wheels that they consider good enough.
How much reputation do you get for janitorial work on SO? I was under the impression that it wasn't much, especially compared to actual answers.

I tend to agree that the moderation has got a bit vigorous.
Focus on how they got the chip on their shoulder and then make sure it doesn't happen to anyone without one.
Then you may want to taste each one of them and make your decision;)
I spent my collage years, about 4 years, to have almost all of my interests tried.
Thanks. Would an empty Superclass constructor result in the same thing?