skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I agree that human history is filled with all sorts of atrocities, and slavery and race-influenced violence is among the worst. However, within the past couple decades, we are finally reaching a point where "true" equality is attainable, and I think that the only way we're going to get there is to see people first and foremost as human beings, not as part of some arbitrary collective (race/gender/sexual orientation/etc). We can appreciate those superficial differences, but when we let those differences define us then human nature is to qualitatively favor/disfavor certain groups.

As for the justice system, yes it is heavily skewed towards punishing minorities, particularly because of the drug war. I don't know how we fix that, but I do think ending the war on drugs would go a long way.

Your post can be summarized as believing we have not made as much progress as I think we have, but I am a bit more optimistic, and we need to begin converging on a permanent state of affairs, being carful not to over correct, lest we increase racial tension and regress. The only way towards true equality is to learn from our history, but at the same time look to the future while being careful not to make the same mistakes. This means that modern individuals belonging to historically disenfranchised groups should not receive preferential treatment just because their ancestors were mistreated. We need a healing process, not pay-back. It's the quickest, most painless way we're going to eventually reach true harmony as a species.
>Correct. I state you should pay me $20 for reading my post. Are you morally obligated to do so now? This is a serious question, your moral code is not clear to me. Mine is quite simple. I am not morally obligated to capitulate to random people's arbitrary demands of me.

These types of idiotic pretzel logic statements only appear since you are trying hard to justify not paying someone for the content they create, there isn't much more to say than that.
> If you want to use some of the same validation code for user input validation and internal validation, I suppose you could modify the notation pattern to conditionally throw an exception when adding a new error depending on whether it's on the client or the server.

Or you reuse the validation code itself, but called from a wrapper that turns notifications into exceptions, rather than adding branches.
There's also http://www.areweplayingyet.org/ which appears to be by SoundCloud, not Mozilla.
Take this with a grain of salt, but I think there was a comment in one of the (Norwegian) video repirts on this that the Norwegian secret services got a heads up from the journalists, and was allowed to remove their equipment before they logged the data that is presented in map form on the Aftenposten web site. Implication being that the quarter surrounding the parliament is under surveillance (not surprising, possibly of questionable legality in Norway - but there might be directive somewhere allowing it (public or secret)) - and that there are "unknown" parties surveilling the area (my guess would be US, Russia and/or Israel).

There's also a possible angle here re:Ukraine. There's a big push to paint Rusdia as dangerous (again) - yhis could be a Russian op, a false flag op, a NATO op to dilvulge a Russian op through alternate channels for better propaganda value...

It'll be interesting to see what the investigation by Norwegian intelligence services (choose to) reveal.
I think game theory isn't too concerned about how one might design utility functions, it is mostly interested in what one should do when utility functions are already given
possibly not fetishizing CS over a more useful general introduction to programming might help.

I haven't had to do any of the big O stuff in anger but I have had to make sure a major telcos billing system reconciled.
This has been around for a long time.[1] Has there been any noteworthy changes/improvements that prompted the making a new submission? I've always wondered if I should run this but ever since DuckDuckGo came out, I never went through with setting up a self hosted search engine.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3288586
The problem is that we like to imagine the hippy version of the Men Who Stare at Goats, but that's not the reality of the kind of people who kill for a living. More aptly, The Men Who Stare at Goats ... and try to kill them.

Doesn't make them any less dangerous or insidious, perhaps even more so! Hanlon's razor may be a strawman that should be put in the dustbin of rational conversation, but nevertheless do not doubt the malice hidden within incompetence.
Sounds like there should be a single metric based on these stats (~= multiplier for failure risk?)
Are you serious? The color of your complexion is the same as being "armed" to cause serious physical harm?

Really look at that and think about it: a pale John Boehner turns into a lethal John Boehner just by adding a bit of spray tan. I put on too much bronzer and suddenly I'm a killer (perhaps a killer clown). My multiracial husband is more physically harmful after mowing the lawn in the summer, maybe even more "lethal". (The complexion change is dramatic, certainly.) Hm. The things I never knew.

There's a reason blacklivesmatter is a hashtag that resonates, and that reason is illustrated by your comment. Better go get my bronzer so I can prepare for the fight for justice.
They all were killed because police had the right and executed it at will, not because it was necessary. That execution being allowed by the law to go unpunished is what infuriates people. If somebody is guilty of minor offense, to use it as an excuse to execute them that is what infuriates. Remember video of Oskar Grant executed in cold blood? Minor excuse - oy! I thought it was taser - allowed to avoid murder charge clearly due there.
Unfortunately Germany has had a number of very high profile terrorist incidents where it went pear shaped.
And just for review, advocacy consists of logical arguments, emotional ones and character of everyone touched by the argument.

People resonate on these three in varying degrees. Your average "Uncle Liberty" FOX news viewer, for example, will rely strongly on emotional and character arguments, only lightly touching the rational. (why is a much longer post, and again, no slight on FOX viewers, I'm just highlighting an easy example we've all seen)

That fetish completely marginalizes a person who is otherwise solid and in their best interests.

An effective advocate can leverage that and convince somebody to support a much worse person for them, on character and emotion alone.

Your technical, smart, rational geek with modest to poor people skills will not consider emotion very strongly at all, and will be marginal on character.

To them, somebody who is a vital part of the process, but who may not be technical, or reason quite as well as they do, will be marginalized on that basis.

Say we've got a smart person, who is fighting for the people, who happens to have a fetish. The fetish has nothing to do with their policy vision, but they will lose on character arguments every time.

Other examples should be obvious now.

So then, we need to step back and understand the purpose of the dialog. We may be thinking, "let's get at the truth", where a bunch of people may be thinking, "let's make it better" (which is a different thing), and some others may be thinking, "let's make it the way it ought to be."

Honestly, few people are interested in the truth in political discussions. They are more interested in seeing it go their way, or favor them, or see "those other people", "taught a lesson" more than anything else.

Advocacy rules here. The strictly rational doesn't. Sorry.

What does that mean?

Lots of things. First, it means debate isn't the norm most of the time, even though we frame things as such.

It also means stories matter. Yes, stories. Personal experiences are extremely potent advocacy.

Lots more here, but let's just say framing things in terms of debate isn't inclusive enough to be broadly effective given the dynamics of how advocacy actually does work.
Tournament management platform
Can anyone think of any reason other than "reaching for the Officer's gun," even if we give Brown every possible benefit of the doubt? Seriously, I'd love to be persuaded.

Ok. How about the cop grabs and yanks a teen that's near his window starting off the struggle. Teen struggles, pushes and or punches cop to break free as cop grabs gun and lets off shot or two while Brown continues to punch/struggle/push to break free, in the course of which Wilson suffers horrible injury that looks like a razor bump. Breaking free, Brown runs approximately 100 feet. Wilson, enraged that he was not immediately obeyed as ordered, starts firing, chasing brown and hits brown in some way. He fires 11 more shots as he fears for his life even though he is armed and pursued him for at least 150. Brown finally turns around, shot at least twice already. He faces a hail of bullets from Wilson, fatally struck on the top of the skull and dies. Wilson, knowing that officers always get the benefit of the doubt with the law and there is no objective evidence of the encounter and that dead people cant testify is somewhat assured his version of events are going to be believed. And he is right. Plausible, if not convinced?
Both, the obvious example is the fibinatchi sequence f(x) = f(x-1) + f(x-2). There are lots of efficient ways of coding it but the most obvious O(n^2) approch is n depth and it can't be tail-call optimized.

Granted, you can write much more efficient code that can be tail call optimized, but there complex and less obvious. There are also languages which cache previous results so the native approch becomes O(n) with fairly elegant code that's still depth n.

PS: Anyway, tail call optimization only works when you can rewrite the code as a loop for more complex structures it's less useful.
Wow this is great.

I have always wanted to create a window manager ever since I read "The X Window System: Programming and Applications with Xt, OSF/Motif" years ago but unfortunately never got around to it and never had the motivation to look back. This makes it easy. Thanks!

Edit: If you're going to downvote, explain why.
>The form of abstract ideas, the direction of thought. These things can be studied.

Indeed you are on to something there. I have long called for a return to our Enlightenment roots for just that reason. It encourages an independent and able mindset, which is precisely why education has been deliberately manipulated in to preventing any such thing.

Education of the populace is not in the interest of the international or domestic oligarchs. Remember this.
My 10yo daughter got a school-provided tablet. This would have set off an avalanche of time-wasting grooming virtual horses, tending virtual gardens, raising virtual horses and doing $deity-knows-what, were it not for the fact that she is limited to an average of 1 hour of screen time a day. She already had a phone which runs a home-built (Android) distribution with a few tweaks to keep her sane. It runs a variety of free software, does not show any advertising, and has a white-listed time limit on activities.

As the mentioned tablet is made by this site's favourite company and, as such, rather restricted in what can be done with it, I started to create a few tools to get her to use the thing in a more productive (versus the mentioned 'consumptive') way. For now, this is mostly related to reading books [1][2] and other documents from our rather extensive personal collection. I also got her a Raspberry Pi 'just for fun, to see what can be done with it'. We'll probably set it up to control the RGB LED spot she got for her birthday, 'just for fun'. I put this between quotes because I do have a deeper meaning with these experiments: show her that she can use her creativity and imagination to make things happen that did not happen before. Things she made herself, which her friends do not have. That creating something can be more giving than grooming that virtual horse for the umpteenth time...

My other daughter is 3, she goes to daycare ('dagis' in Swedish) for 15 hours per week. At 'dagis' they also have one of those mentioned tablets, when I ask her what she's done that day she'll respond with 'I played on the tablet'. But did you not do anything else? 'No, I only played on the tablet'. This does not seem to be true, as they state children only get about 10 minutes on the thing, but it does make me doubt the wisdom of having these tablets in a daycare centre. The whole idea with sending her there is that she can interact with other children after all...

[1] https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php?content=167127
[2] https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php?content=168132
I assume you mean programming?

I do freelance work online as a writer. Most sites out there seem to let the writer sell themselves, bid for projects, state what they will do for X amount of money, etc. The most successful writing market I am familiar with makes the person hiring decide what they want done and sets a preset price and lets workers read the specs and select what they are willing to do. Workers get rated on the quality of their work and their rating determines the kind of work available to them.

The lower skilled pools of work are very competitive (in terms of assignments rapidly disappearing) because there are a lot of people at those lower skill levels. The service provides feedback and a bit of training in terms of letting you know what kinds of things they are looking for at the higher quality levels and what you need to do to achieve that. If you are willing to work to improve yourself, you can get yourself up to a higher rating. Once you are at that higher rating, you also qualify for select teams.
A few comments up you are saying that Steve's problems with the benchmarks game are invalid and the game isn't considered for the sort of comparison Steve (and many others) dislike because it says all over the website that

> These are not the only compilers and interpreters. These are not the only programs that could be written. These are not the only tasks that could be solved. These are just 10 tiny examples.

etc.

But now you are saying that obviously people will do naive comparisons using the benchmarks game. This validates the dislike of widely publicised one-dimensional benchmarks like the benchmarks game (NB this applies to a lot of benchmarks on the internet, the benchmarks game is just a particularly famous example, please don't get too defensive again).

Sure a discussion is taking place, but essentially any discussion about the benchmark game degenerates into either an argument about why the benchmark game doesn't cause one-dimensional comparisons (with the pro-Benchmarks-Game side consistently being overly defensive), or an argument about why using every unsafe corner of language X to basically mimic the fastest C program is perfectly reasonable, idiomatic and common in the real world.
Nothing ground-breaking in here (but at least well written for previously uninformed people) so short version:

- instead of shielding devices, build chips so they're shielded in themselves

- have 3 of each component do the same and vote on the result

- make software check its results more
I can't imagine that declining revenues would hurt Chrome. There are lots of other ways for Google to cut costs before limiting their investment in the browser.

And Mozilla has always been happy to ride the coat tails of Google Search. Declining AdWords revenue just means declining Mozilla revenue. Even if the two aren't partnering together going forward, Google helped Mozilla negotiate a high bid with Yahoo.

Long term, I think Mozilla wants to see Firefox OS compete with Android. There's a lot more revenue potential there and the best chance to rapidly grow their user base.
The following will sound cynical, but I'm serious. The "justification" is nothing more and nothing less that the original creators of the exception intended it to be used that way. It's the same reason people still quote Alan Kay as if his opinions about "object orientation" apply to everything that happens to wear that label 40 years later, and as if his opinion is some sort of controlling vote over whether something is "truly" OO or worse, good OO.

While I am all about respecting our predecessors and their good work (probably more so than most HN folk, though my respect rarely shows on HN itself; much of it is on topics not HN-related), I dislike that sort of fealty to their opinions. It shuts down thought and conversation. Whether exceptions should be "exceptional" should be something discussed carefully, not simply true by definition. Personally I'd observe that due to immense variances in exception semantics and performance in all the various runtimes and languages of the world there isn't a blanket statement you can make about whether that is true; for instance, C++ and Python have radically different criteria for what an "exception" should be, written into their nature, and just dogmatically repeating "exceptions should be exceptional" won't help you understand anything about the details of either language, or how they differ.
Maybe understand - as I can to some measure understand somebody who was abused as a child, grew up as a violent adult and finally when insulted by somebody strikes out and kills him - but certainly not excuse or support. Even this understanding is somewhat strained - so the problem is police thinks they should be extremely tough to citizens and always suspect they are violent and up to no good - and to prove them wrong, lets burn our city down, destroy local businesses and pelt the police with rocks and firebombs? Then, surely, they'd know the errors of their ways and learn to treat us as responsible non-violent law-abiding citizens that we are. Does it sound like something that makes sense to you?

>>> The current wave of protests are not those riots

This was this monday: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/12/08/violence-erupts-at-berk...

I have doubts the same people have changed in a week and would be completely benign now.

>>> Moreover, your approval means nothing while those lives are still destroyed and dominated by unjust systems and institutions.

It is true, that my approval means nothing to them. I'm just explaining why myself - and I suspect, many others - while supporting the overall goal of lowering police brutality - and actually having been supporting it way before current events - would not take part in these protests, as the top comment suggested. I think it is still relevant to the discussion.

>>> while those lives are still destroyed and dominated by unjust systems and institutions.

If you want to convince the silent majority the police is going too far and ends up hurting innocent people (or hurting not-so-innocent people way more than it is acceptable), making their TV show them pictures of fires, destruction and general mayhem may be not the most effective way to achieve it.
But Mozilla is itself mostly funded by Search Engines. Who pay to be included or set as the default engine.
> A citation to what? When few are allowed to publish,

I think you just exposed the root of this.

You're thinking a citation has to be a scientific paper or something equivalent. I'm saying that when you argue something, you should be willing to cite ordinary evidence, of which a scientific paper is just one kind.

A photo would be a perfectly reasonable thing to cite as evidence.
> Good points, but I think I still disagree with the power of citations. Just because a peer-reviewed article exists doesn't mean its true. Appeal to authority is, and always will be, a logical fallacy.

Incorrect. "Appeal to authority" is a form of argument which is a fallacy when misused.

Further, a citation can be an appeal to authority, but usually its not, its incorporating an existing argument by reference and/or incorporating supporting evidence for
the existing argument by reference.

> But my beef with asking for citations as a counter-argument is that it is shifting the burden of proof. If someone makes a statement that you are questioning, you may ask for clarification, but the ball is in your court to find evidence for disproof.

No, if someone is making a statement that you are questioning, it is quite fair to ask them to support the claim. As the one making the claim, the burden of proof is on them -- the position you take above is the one shifting the burden of proof off of the person asserting a positive claim.

Its true that making the opposing positive claim places the burden on you, but some simply stating something doesn't suddenly make it the default hypothesis. If there is no prima facie case for the positive claim, then it can be discarded as unnecessary without counterevidence, you don't need to prove the negation.

> The existence or non-existence of a published supporting article is neither proof nor disproof.

The content of the published supporting article, however, is often at least evidence, and may be proof where the question is subject to definitive proof, e.g. there exist no positive integers x, y, and z such that x^n + y^n + z^n = 0, for n > 2 [0].

[0] https://www.math.wisc.edu/~boston/869.pdf
This has to be the first time Ronnie Coleman has been referenced on HN. I approve of this.
In short, you move more product by selling treatments than cures and it behooves you to maintain the illusion that the disease still exists and is worth fighting at any cost.
"Only a few romantics like me continue to hope that one day the links between biology and cosmology may be restored."

David Deutsch's Constructor Theory could be a missing link.