jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> For example, Iowa has lost an estimated 10 inches of topsoil in the last 150 years.

Interesting. Reference?

When I was in the Midwest farming communities
in Indiana and Ohio, the row crops were
heavily corn, wheat, and soy beans. Then
after harvest, there were
lots of dead corn stalks,
wheat stalks, and soy bean plants on the
ground, and those plants got plowed under.

Heavily those plants were carbon, and the
first cut guess where the carbon came from
was CO2 in the atmosphere and not from the
existing soil. So, net, all the plant matter
was heavily from the atmosphere and adding
to the soil. So, typically annual plants,
year by year, add to top soil. Indeed, it
is fair to say that that was mostly the
origin of the top soil.

For another example, as a child, we lived
in one house for about 16 years, and I
got to mow the grass twice a month or
so for much of that time. Well, over the
16 years, the top soil rose with respect
to the concrete driveway and walkways,
rose 1-2 inches. So, we added to the
top soil.

So, if we are losing a lot of top
soil from, say, Iowa, then where it
is going? Well, it could blow, but
then it stands just to add to
top soil in Illinois, Indiana, and
Ohio, not a net loss.

Or, we're carrying the top soil away
via the corn kernels, wheat seeds,
and soy beans themselves? Tough
to believe that the seeds take more
soil than the rest of the plant
adds.

Or the top soil could get
washed into rivers which about has to be
the Mississippi River. So, should be
able to see
all that Iowa top soil along the
Mississippi River and, then,
into the Gulf of Mexico. Can the
USGS and Corps of Engineers find
that top soil for us?

I can believe that the tree cutting
of the mountains in the East US
by 1930 or so resulted in a lot of
top soil from the mountains
washing into the local
valleys, but Iowa, Illinois, Indiana,
Ohio, etc. are nearly flat as a table,
in part because at one time they
were lake bottoms.

I'd want to see a good and careful
argument about loss of top soil
in Iowa.
I have yet to hear a "pirate" (in the political sense) argue creators should not get compensated. The argument is mostly, as I said above, that distribution is a commodity.

Note that a commodity still exists, but it would probably mean that the age of exclusive distribution deals would be over. It also implicates prices should go down, so more money should reach creators.
> and theres no stupid ^ (hat) symbol in sight

Easily avoidable with CComPtr.

The major complaint of many Windows C++ developers is that WRL could have been made more developer friendly instead of spending resources on C++/CX.

Maybe Windows 10 will make it so, and C++/CX will join ranks with Managed C++ (.NET 1.x) and C++/CLI (does anyone use it?).
I use Poweramp because apparently AOSP doesn't ship an MP3 player (or at least not in this Mediatek build)... quite powerful, has equalizer and some fx, but unfortunately no crossfeed.
I don't know much about the nix language, but it looks to me like the gpgme support is optional:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applicatio...
>I assume you must be talking about Market Cap and that just happened

Indeed. Market cap is what gives companies weight to throw around. Apple is in a position where they can acquire a large portion of the industry, and where their actions cause tremors of fear. That's the impact of market cap.
At the very least Google is now currently separating out stuff that is definitely not "precious". I used to never look at my inbox until they started taking out all the updates, newsletters, etc into separate tabs. Leaving my inbox relatively movement-free and with only very important things.
What's wrong with an animated GIF? Is this a problem that needs to be solved? I thought it was solved in the early 90s?

On a positive note, those animations would be great if they were GIFs - they're nice.
Karpathy's JavaScript demos are the first thing that I would show to a newcomer:
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/
This video is excellent.

Slides: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/system/attachme...

Sample code: http://ecchacks.cr.yp.to/
For what it's worth, Hewlett-Packard had a very similar problem with a line of theirs using the same GPU (and the same lead-free solder), and Microsoft's Red Ring of Death is fundamentally the same problem.

The fact that you can only get a discrete GPU'd MBP now if you buy the most expensive model while the Iris Pro is capable of doing <i>everything</i> a discrete GPU did indicates that Apple's cut their losses with this technology. The motherboard's fine. The decision to accede to EU environmental mandates was the point of failure.

No one in the industry sufficiently tested leadfree solder in GPU BGA mounts before going into production and to be fair, it was a year before people started noticing failures. Apple's dismal head-burying response only made it worse.
UK (and Canada, Australia, etc.) did declare war on Finland, and attacked a Finnish harbour[1]. While USA didn't declare war, I doubt anything would have changed if they did, since Finland was out of their reach anyway.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Kirkenes_and_Petsamo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation_War#Finland_and_th...
A new avenue for ethical cross-site scripting.

I did not know about this particular keyword sensitivity google mail: http://boingboing.net/2009/07/31/how-to-avoid-ads-in.html

Maybe everybody should add "I'm sorry for your loss of ads" to their email signature?
IIRC the Lisp Machines supported C in addition to the system's dialect of Lisp.
a fiber Internet connection is different. 3mb is fine for browsing but fiber opens up the possibility of using the Internet for things like offsite backups.
But if everybody else had a small copter too, wouldn't the air traffic be just as bad?
And just to think: what if the human race from the beginning of time, never lost any knowledge. No libraries were burnt, books and theories weren't banned, scientist kept their heads...on their bodies, info after a fallen empire was retained, the dark ages never happened, the pyramid mystery would never have been one, etc..., would we be several hundred years ahead of where we are now? Or is there some existential force that dictates the progression of innovation? Is it tied to the evolution of the human brains' capabilities?
> Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles. The earth does not have limbs and muscles; therefore it does not move.

> - Scipio Chiaramonti [Professor of philosophy and mathematics at University of Pisa, arguing against the heliocentrc system, 1633]

I can't help thinking that particular sentence context is more political than `scientific`.
But if the product is already working, chances are that you get away long enough (to do a graceful migration) by just doing small bug fixes, changes to support OS updates, etc.

This is what we are now doing for a project with Berkeley DB XML, which hadn't seen updates for five years. When there finally was an update, it was buggy and moved to the Affero GPL 3, which conflicts with other open source licenses used in the project. So, we continue to use the five year old iteration with a small set of patches.

(Lesson learned: once a product is owned by Oracle, prepare your evacuation plans.)
If America wants to claim some sort of moral superiority in this stupid pissing match, it becomes quite difficult to do so when engaging in the same kind of bullshit state censorship that other countries routinely engage in.

Oh well. Maybe this will accelerate the move toward app platforms that can't be so easily censored arbitrarily by the state.
Human's want health insurance and 40 hours work-weeks. The super-smart AGI that will exist 20 years from now won't.
Yes! I use this daily.
That's how I felt. Just like stories on how everybody pitched in, or the boss giving an employee that walked to work a car, or the one where a boss allowed (!) an employee that lived in their car to park in their shop's parking lot overnight, or the one where employees "donated" their paid time off days to another because of circumstance (or the apparent fact that paid time and sick days off are such a weird concept in the US).
I'm a liberal, but I agree with Trump on this. The world needs to stop China.

China is stealing Western tech to gain an economic and strategic advantage. They're going to out-compete our tech and leave us in the dust. They have far more engineers that are willing to work "996". (Sure, founders might work "996", but our workforce doesn't/can't/won't.)

Playing unfair isn't great, but it's not the most worrying component of this. Our opponent has concentration camps, organ harvesting, no free press, crushes dissidents, disappears billionaires. And this is a regime that wants world domination. This gives me nightmares.

We should be doing everything in our power to disentangle and stop China.

When China has a military that surpasses the US in terms of scale and tech, they're going to start invading and taking more than they already do. They've shut off water to Vietnam, set up shop in the energy/resource-rich South China Sea, etc. They're not going to stop.

Our media is already censored and caters to Chinese tastes. None of our movies are ever critical of China. They're actively manipulating us.

Western democracies aren't primed to fight this. This is such a lopsided fight. We have to start playing hardball.

edit: I'm being censored right now. This is the game we're playing.
European countries are free to take whatever actions they see fit against US companies.

China is an authoritarian state and it's respect for the individual rights of people is nowhere near that of the US.
Axa, about 10 years ago. Forums are full of similar stories for almost any private insurer.
> any directorship must be occupied by a human being: if you interpose shells in the way, they're collapsed until a human being is identified as the responsible party.

But what if there really is no human ultimately responsible?

I' thinking, here, of a goal-driven agent that self-replicates by forming corporations, having those corporations purchase machine time on cloud hosting services, and then running algorithms (e.g. Bitcoin mining, e-commerce) which are more profitable on those hosts than the cost of said cloud resources.

The first such entity might be "blamed" on the person who wrote it—but what if its codebase includes code to detect beneficial open-source patches to itself (on Github et al), and spawn its descendants with those patches in place? Eventually there could be a whole ecosystem of these things doing different things, coded effectively "by the world" but running for nobody's benefit in particular but their own. They'd be "AIs that compete with us" in the literal sense. (And if you think about what a real autonomous AI agent would have to do to survive fault-tolerantly on the Internet, it'd probably look very similar; this is sort of a porto-AI-rights thing.)
The luck comes in that they opted to play Dota at just the right time. If someone had instead opted into becoming a really good Heroes of the Storm player (only to have the developer stop work on it) they would be in a really different position.
Completely off topic: I just went down a rabbit hole of old submarine games. After seeing some of the graphics in the article, I remembered I used to play a submarine game but couldn't name it. After plenty of googling (and finding out there are A LOT of sub simulations), I found it. Enigma Rising Tide was the game. It was the most janky game I ever played but that was part of the fun.
I'm pretty sure you just described modern academia.
> This is the top comment, while someone calling it a conspiracy theory is down-voted. That is sad.

Perhaps it's my perception, but I've noticed this more lately.

I mean, there's always been a perception, for as long as I've been on this site that "things used to be better", so take that with a grain of salt, but objectively, if we don't have the "antibodies" in this community to reject obvious conspiracy theories like this... we're in a bad spot.
Sad to hear. Every job I've had I've been able to get into that flow. But Ive also always had my own office or work from home. 20+ years of doing this professionally and as a hobby.

My advice is to find some way to take some pride in the work you do and or change employers when that flow stops happening. life is too short not to.
Interesting that cynicism is ancient Greek for "dog-like".
Cul is almost a pejorative for sex in France

so it means

sex in a bag
Is this just a policy change? How could they enforce this?
This is a really nice example of how a "simple" problem can take years and a great deal of tinkering to find a workable solution. I've been thinking about--and building--bookshelves for a lot of years, and only recently came up with a design that I really kinda like: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1499

The optimal balance between imagining and prototyping is a fascinating problem, and seems to depend sensitively on the problem domain.

Prototyping even simple components is relatively costly in time, materials and tooling, but gives you knowledge.

Imagination is free--it can often be done in time that would otherwise be wasted--but it cannot create knowledge, and almost everything we imagine is wrong.

Imagination can be fun. Prototyping is generally considered less so, although the Maker community is working to remove that unwarranted stigma. We never talk about "leaps of prototyping" the way romantics talk about "leaps of the imagination", but maybe we should. One good prototyping experience can take you a lot further toward knowledge than almost any amount of imagination.
What your talking about is a type of overly simplified model that's irrelevant for actual computing. My point is there are other models out there. If you actually want the fastest algorithm out there you need to design it for actual hardware with finite data, cache, limited registers, limited ram, and sometime aproximating a real instruction set etc.

However, by changing your assumptions you can still use O notation with more complex models.
Wonder exactly how insane the world was for letting me have such an important job.
seriously? when was that? was it not so long ago we had armed plane hijackings almost every month?
VVVVVV Ahh, ayup, you're correct. Brainfart.
Facebook does use SSL for login.
How do you know your current reality isn't implanted?
totally agree -- i have three: 6,5 and 1. The joy on a young one's face at the sight of a balloon ... or bubbles ... is simply mind boggling. If anything could make me that happy ... <sigh>. Kids come with hope, optimism, and fearlessness - its up to us not to ruin it.
Love this question. I have a partner who comes from the retail world and he is constantly leaning toward perfection before launching for an idea that may or may not be a good one. I agree with kingsidharth but it's hard to convince him. Seems most people who build a retail location need it to be as close to perfect when you open as possible.
Events that are just part of our generally-interesting day to day tech landscape will probably be analyzed for decades by future historians.
> much of the commercial world is thinly veiled NSA work

While security agencies of various governments are on the buy-side on the "zero day" vulnerability market, majority of commercial "cyber" security companies are not dealing in "cyber weapons" and are not involved with NSA. There are plentiful examples of successful "white hats": H. D. Moore, Dan Kaminsky, Tavis Ormandy, Michał Zalewski, even our own Colin Percival and tptacek etc. You don't have to do work for government to play in this area.
i suspect you don't actually have children.

as a parent, the places these buttons would need to be for me are already child-proofed. if it's sitting next to where i keep my laundry detergent, that space is already child-proofed. if it's under the sink next to my bottle of 409, it's already child-proofed.

know what i mean?
If I was running an organization that collects world's private data and builds self driving military robots while their robotic woman is planning to chip general populace (http://allthingsd.com/20130603/passwords-on-your-skin-and-in...), I'd totally want my people to think that they are helping the world, just like Hitler did.

When they'd found out what evil thing they have collectively assembled, piece by piece, each of them blinded by his inexperience and enthusiasm for pure science, it would be too late.

And I'd finally have to replace them with expensive hired guns, or more clueless people, like some SV 20-something startup kids who would kill for 20 minutes of techcrunch fame.
Thank you! Very useful hack.
I just did a quick article on the design:
Showoff.io feedback and design impressions -
http://nerdr.com/startup-showoff-io-first-impressions-and-fe...
The whole point of AWS is to forget about maintaining hardware infrastructure.

Amazon are the ones who should have made backups in multiple regions, and transfer the load on failure.
Dropbox is one service for which I definitely have no problem paying $10 a month.
Seems i was wrong, though backup is encrypted. The "issue" is that the encrypted backup contains a copy of your key used to decrypt the (encrypted) messages within the backup.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
Cronjob that re-generates the static HTML every 1 minute would work just fine for a use-case like this.
> Their healthcare system is now the 2nd worst in the EU

WHAT? Now I haven't been to every European country, probably around 30% of them, would be my guess. But literally the country with the best healthcare system of them all, that I've visited a hospital in, have been Sweden.

You got any numbers to backup this claim? Spain, Italy and Greece clearly have a worse healthcare system, and those are just three examples I can think of quickly. Surely lots of countries in eastern europe has it worse than Sweden.

One source showing the opposite of what you're saying:

> Sweden is ranked third by the Commonwealth Fund, with a high proportion of doctors, above-average healthcare spending, and relatively low prescriptions of drugs.

From https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/09/which-countr... which is using Commonwealth Fund as it's source.
That assumes vast reductions in emissions from every other sector except air travel, for physical energy density reasons.

Air travel alone is not sufficient to affect climate much... if we were to get rid of fossil fuels on the ground.
It would be nice to hear from a virology / genome editing expert on his/her thoughts about the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 being engineered. There are lots of theories, but I'd love to hear the mechanics of how it could happen.
Whereby (https://whereby.com/) is also web-first and works really, really well. Simple, no fuss, people don't have to install anything to join your meeting. Highly recommended.
As a non-asthmatic person, reading this caused me enough anxiety to clearly notice it became harder for me to breath.
SEEKING WORK

Location: Washington DC

Remote: Yes

Email: ethangj@gmail.com

Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethangjones

---

I’m a marketing / product consultant with a focus on data and research driven analysis to help early stage startups find the right idea / prune the wrong ones.

I’ve consulted with TechStars alums, nonprofits, small businesses, ecommerce sites and more. Past life cofounded a boutique data-driven marketing agency and a consumer/social startup.

I can help with customer acquisition, product strategy or even understanding your startup’s market.
Shlepping atoms around between stars is probably way more expensive than it's worth, unless the destination star's orbiting bodies have a debilitating paucity of those particular kinds of atoms.

But, really, why would we consider colonizing somewhere so iron-deficient, for example, that we need to tow space rocks of the stuff in?
The language is actually called ECMAScript. It's in its 5th version right now. As its name suggests, it is standardized by ECMA.

JavaScript is a name that is licensed to Mozilla by Sun Microsystems. Technically speaking, only Mozilla can use the name "JavaScript". The Microsoft version used to be called JScript. The Adobe version is called ActionScript (ActionScript eventually turned out to be its own sorta language that vaguely conforms to ES standards).

Because ECMAScript is just a specification, it is up to the implementors to conform or not to the spec. Mozilla itself does a lot of weird stuff that doesn't actually conform to the spec. But for the main uses, all three major engines(V8, Spidermonkey and Chakra) are all pretty okay.

If you learn JS for use in node.js, then you are mainly learning the quirks of V8's implementation (of which thankfully are minimal). You may think that V8/Chrome is the dominant JS engine out there, but there are some softwares like CouchDB which uses SpiderMonkey as its engine.

In the past, I believe there used to be a mini language out of Java, also called Java Script, but that quickly fell out of use.

JavaScript as a language was designed to look similar to Java, to catch on the Java-is-the-best-thing-since-sliced-bread bandwagon in the early 1990s. Of course, when you mix paradigms, you have weird shit like ASI in JavaScript.

source: I am writing a couple of books about JavaScript.
Very interesting, but the article mentions they're using amazon turk - "real" people. Probably.
That's a pretty good piece. I'm often surprised at how many people read what I write and how strong the responses can be.

Blogging for the hell of it is how I started writing and I really don't plan to give up on that. So no 'themed' blog or off-limit subjects or worries about whether the content will be a good fit for the audience.

The easiest way to stick to the 'blogging for the hell of it' mode is to simply ignore the stats and to write from the heart even if that has an adverse effect on the readership numbers.
They're contractors not employees, but you are correct. There's nothing illegal about the arrangement.
I think we have to bite that bullet. I wouldn't quite characterize it as "China is right" - there's no plausible claim that social stability will be threatened by Winnie the Pooh, he's banned just because Xi Jinping doesn't want to be made fun of. But the vision of a future where anyone can say anything to an arbitrarily large audience is, I think, going to have to be buried.
Right, it mentions libpurple (represented by the purple square https://matrix.org/bridges/#libpurple), which is a library (probably best known for use in the Pidgin frontend) that can use 10 protocols without plugins, including XMPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Supported_pr...
Conclusions: The incidence of [ventilator-associated lower respiratory tract infections (VA-LRTI)] is significantly higher in patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection, as compared to patients with influenza pneumonia, or no viral infection after statistical adjustment, but residual confounding may still play a role in the effect estimates.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33388794/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=ventilator+covid19&fil...
I've had far more problems with yarn, which sometimes decides it and it alone not longer has internet access and none of the "fixes" published over the years have worked. Instead, you have to just set your timeout really, really high. That's been the only fix for a good while, and it frequently does not work.

Older NPM could be a pain but modern NPM is pretty smooth and works just fine.
Rachel Maddow is a direct equivalent.

https://deadline.com/2020/05/rachel-maddow-one-america-news-...
"The World Reveals Itself To Those Who Travel on Foot"

- Werner Herzog
This is what Youtube's actions convey to me. They believe that China is doing the right thing with their censorship actions.