jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Sounds like that would get you into a new entry level 15" retina MacBook pro or a high end 13" retina MacBook pro, both fantastic machines. I'd probably do the 13" one since they just got updated, 15s probably won't be until June.
Funny, I've run that line in front of a judge, challenging a ticket for 45 in a 35 that feels like 50 should be safe. He said "That's the most lethal road in the city. Next time, turn up your radio and ignore the honking." I paid full price.
There's an app for that:

http://www.flightradar24.com/apps
I feel like this is just another variant on the utility argument, though. You feel the SSC would have been more useful to scientific research than the ISS. But there is still the argument to be made that we don't know in advance what knowledge will be more useful. Maybe in the future, it will turn out that we really need to know how to keep humans alive in space, but the Higgs is useless for all practical purposes.

But--what I just said is still the argument from utility!

As the GP pointed out, we pay for all sorts of things that have little directly measurable utility, like fireworks and parks and the arts. Yes, towns with good fireworks, parks, and arts will have an advantage in attracting good companies and employees. And I'd say the same is true of space exploration (it helps the U.S. reputation). But once again, we're into utility.

Why do those things create advantage in the first place? Because people like those things. So turn the utility argument on its head and consider: things have high utility because they allow us to do things that we like.

Now consider that exploration is itself popular. Whether it's diving to the Mariana Trench, free climbing a new route on El Cap, or flying to orbit on the Space Shuttle, these are stories that many people love to read, and kids love to dream about.

So I would argue that space exploration can skip the utility argument altogether...we do it because we like it--directly. The purpose of exploration is to explore. This is behind quite a bit of the history of science as well: people exploring places and phenomena simply because it was so interesting to do it.

Edit to add: this sort of reasoning can make fans of science uncomfortable because it's not a logical or scientific argument. But the fact is that emotions like awe, excitement, etc. are often big reasons that kids begin to pursue careers in science. Not many 18 years olds start on a physics degree because of a deep-seated desire to add 0.01% to future GDP.
So instead people just pick whichever thing is first on Google. Is that better?
I'd be curious to know as well.

Given his claim that the NSA and CIA are hiding UFO data, I have to wonder why none of that was released by Snowden.
It's mentioned in like the third paragraph of the article...
"Calling any Turing complete language "more secure" is probably nonsense."

I just wrote an article on a sensible metric by which you can do exactly that: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2942

A lot of people already knew that stuff on one level or another anyhow, but it's helpful to spell it out sometimes and bring subconscious feelings up to the conscious level.
The US air force has two very different missions.

First is to quickly crush a nations standing military. This is where the stealth tradeoffs are less useful. Basically, just blow up anything that uses radar and you win.

The second is to patrol territory. Here stealth can be very useful as you tend to deal with far less capable radar and missile systems. But, they tend to be vary mobile so while there minimal threat at a military level they are a serious ‘let’s not show up on CNN’ issue.

Considering the actual missions flown over the last 50 years I think the Air force’s priorities are much more reasonable.
In practice police are almost entirely legally invulnerable. QI is part of that, and needs to go.
I think a common assumption is that his family was threatened by the Kremlin and his only option was to return to prevent harm to them.
Keyboards were the first platform on a computer.

You should instead think of “new platform” in the context of the mouse. It offered a significantly different user experience. We just happened to call that platform “Graphical User Interface” it could have easily been called “the mouse platform” in its early days and made perfect sense.

Its not ideal to call AirPods a platform, but lend the writer some poetic license, what they are describing doesn’t currently have a canonical phrase in the zeitgeist.
Impressive leap of logic to deem downvoting racist. This seems to be the final argument nowadays when all else fails.

As a side note, I have often wished folks could see their downvote count or at least an upvote to downvote ratio. In the past I wondered if I was quicker to downvote, when I had the ability, than upvote.
The priority everywhere at the moment is still to reduce pressure on hospitals, which (at least in my country, which is slower with the vaccination schedule, probably because countries like the UK and Israel pay the vaccine companies more) is still on the rise despite the number of cases stabilizing and in the past week or so reducing. And of course the number of deaths, which has been sharply declining since the start of the vaccination program, since the most vulnerable people got the jab first.

So yeah. The end goal is to eradicate the disease and to vaccinate everybody, but because of production and logistical problems that's not possible, so they focus on the in between goals of lowering death rate and hospitalizations, and that's been very effective so far.
"Hitchhiker’s is hard to summarize, but one of its overarching themes is that technology, in the hands of big business and bloated bureaucracies, does not make life better: in fact it makes it far, far worse."

Seems Adams was ahead of his time, I wonder what he would have thought if he were alive today given the antics of Google, Facebook et al.

Incidentally, my printer is called Marvin for obvious reasons (Adams almost mandated that name for these cantankerous devices, especially networked ones).
> It might be the right approach but that’s not at all “obvious,”

1. When the vaccine roll-out was started, there was no proof that it prevented infection - only that it prevented death and serious illness and hospitalisation.

2. In the UK it is estimated that having the vaccine in the first wave and vaccinating the priority groups woudl have saved over 90% of deaths that occurred.

It's pretty obvious
If they find a match against the leaked data, that would validate it and prove it had not been tampered with and at least allow them to contact a subset of users. Why can't they do that at least?
I agree that checking assembly output is very good practice and even more important on not-so-common architectures. x86 and ARM compilers are very good now but if you're working on a different processor the compiler might not be so good.

Especially on DSPs and microcontrollers you may end up changing instruction order to avoid pipeline stalls or use on-chip RAM buffers for your often used data.

Also, if you start writing a routine in assembly from scratch it's often surprising how many different ways you can implement an algorithm since you're not as bound by the calling conventions and runtime assumptions made by the compiler.

Not that I would recommend that for anything other than the innermost loops.

By the way, are we talking about anything other than C or maybe Fortran here? I'm guessing Java or C# coders don't spend too much time looking at the IL, I know I've only done it for educational purposes.
What exactly is wrong with Fizz-buzz as a 'spam reduction' technique? Raganwald's method has several issues: it's unfair to people who are very picky and are only looking for the best jobs themselves. Very often they're the best people, for whom the search for a position that will fully use their talent is much harder: they apply to companies that have a long hiring cycle and high "false negative" rates, while they will reject offers they dislike.

Second, there's the obvious problem of privacy: it's a huge problem for passive candidates (again, who are often -- but not always -- best of the best) and a problem for candidates who apply for tough-to-get positions, have a bad day (or the person interviewing them has a bad day) and now become "damaged goods" by the virtue of a publicly known rejection (which could be no indication of their lack of competence).
This sounds more like "what it means to be a startup Director of Engineering". CTO, for what it's worth, is a bit of a vanity title. Also, CTO : Architect :: Dir/E : Developer. Most "smart, gets things done" types don't want the A-word in their title anymore.
I've been aware of it for years. My only consolation in the events of the past few months is that a lot of my friends no longer view my opinions as being in left field.
I don't really see the appeal, but maybe I don't have the perspective to appreciate the skill that goes into dissolving human bodies properly. I still wouldn't call someone crazy if they did.
> Do you really think that ordering something online from the comfort of your couch, in your underwear, is so inconvenient that you need a magic button to press when you run out of laundry detergent?

Maybe that's your daily pattern, but for example in my case, this almost never happens. I just don't sit on my couch thinking about home maintenance; I have too much other, more interesting stuff to do. Phones have really annoying, user-hostile UI, so I don't even use mine much at home. They are good enough for commuting, when I can't really do anything else except maybe read a book, so I schedule tasks I can do from my spartphone for the to/from-work route.
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.db.sqlite.general/9054...

> The latest SQLite 3.8.7 alpha version (available on the download page
> http://www.sqlite.org/download.html) is 50% faster than the 3.7.17 release
> from 16 months ago. That is to say, it does 50% more work using the same
> number of CPU cycles.
>
> The 50% faster number above is not about better query plans. This is 50%
> faster at the low-level grunt work of moving bits on and off disk and
> search b-trees. We have achieved this by incorporating hundreds of
> micro-optimizations. Each micro-optimization might improve the performance
> by as little as 0.05%. If we get one that improves performance by 0.25%,
> that is considered a huge win. Each of these optimizations is unmeasurable
> on a real-world system (we have to use cachegrind to get repeatable
> run-times) but if you do enough of them, they add up.
> If you are aware of that, it doesn't make a lot of sense to respond by talking about how you believe the leaks were actually genuine data.

It actually makes perfect sense, if the data was not genuine we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place, so we use what data is publicly available and hope for more.

Think about the alternative, if Snowden would have released all of it then it would be argued that releasing all of the data was irresponsible (see previous leaks).

That's one you can't win as a leaker and so I don't blame Snowden for that (though personally I'd have preferred if he leaked all of the data without any intermediaries).

> I don't expect that we will see the truth be declassified here.

I'm pretty sure very few people expected the leaks in the first place, and yet, they happened.

> As I recall, they usually wait until 50 years after everyone involved is dead.

Yes, so the guilty are beyond reach of the law and safely forgotten. And so we are trying as hard as we can to stave off meaningful progress.

If it can't stand the light of day it is probably nothing good.

Sunlight is the best des-infectant and Snowden provided quite a bit of it.
It's interesting to note just how applicable these talks are to other languages. That database one is something i'd recommend a high schooler listen to for their next hackathon.
> the FBI's campaign of ... murder of black leaders

Source?
I mean, on your first point, it's an automotive grade part. I think any eMMC put under these conditions (75% full and the other 25% written heavily to with log files) is going to have a relatively short life expectancy.

What baffles me is that who is reading these logs? Can't they just turn then off (pipe to /dev/null) and then have cars that need troubleshooting put into a debug mode at some point?
Anyone know what the "select" cryptocurrencies are?

The focus on Bitcoin's lack of intrinsic value and energy use is really getting boring.

I read Hacker News comments for more information on a story.

How about some of that for a switch? Go bitch about intrinsic value and ecological disaster on one of the other bitcoin threads please.
Can you also please explain what the "||" is doing? That looks really weird to me coming from Swift and don't see it in the docs.

edit: thanks all, should have known it was a lambda :D, in Swift we can omit this. My first thought seeing "||" was some type of OR logic since it's in the context of if/else
"But the fact that the vast majority of adults in the US can afford the disposable income to acquire such a luxury, a device that we could scarcely envision 15 years ago, is a sign of how healthy capitalism is."

I take it as a sign of the deflationary nature of technology and economies of scale.

Capitalism is a very fuzzy word. I'd say markets and the price mechanism clearly work better than barter. Poorly regulated capitalism is unhealthy.
Wow, superb writeup, thank you author for writing it and the submitter for posting it!
So it's still possible on rooted devices? Seems good enough.
For those of us who are a little ignorant, can someone expand a little on the technical details of this? How does one hijack/alter a DNS record? I've only ever had other people host my DNS, so does this mean they were hosting their own DNS and someone attacked their DNS servers? What's the security like around how DNS records are stored? More specifically, had they been using Secunia's DNS monitoring and had been alerted "before the DNS was propagated" wouldn't there still be a lag time between when the hacked stuff propagates and the replacement stuff re-propagates that would leave the site defaced for the amount of time it takes to propagate the replacement?
Language is a primary differentiator in hire-ability.

In case you don't remember, we had a discussion about the job market last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4214543

You were claiming the hiring market was on fire and that being fizzbuzz capable was about enough to get meetings with hiring directors and that your clients were begging you to find them an engineer.

During that time I was spending a great deal of time applying to jobs, going to tech meetups and interviewing and had very little success despite a track record of successfully taking on challenges in the business world and demonstrable junior-level programming skills. I asked you to your back up your claims and put me in touch with any of these clients dying for an engineer, as you might remember.

Now—about a year later—I've achieved the goals I had at that time. I'm working in a purely technical role building a large site that many, many people use. My compensation is at least in the top decile of both programmers in the US and residents of the city where I live. And one thing that was key to me getting a flood of offers from both large companies and start-ups a few months ago was developing domain-expertise in JavaScript and becoming proficient in several frameworks. Putting up projects on github and contributing to others played a role, too.

There is a high rate of unemployment in the US right now. As a result, many, many people are trying to break into the software world. For new graduates, there's a bit of an open door via internships but it's not at all easy in the general case. I've seen many talented people struggle for months to break in and then suddenly get a flood of offers. There's clearly a good degree of herd behavior involved.

Without the specific framework skills that I had, companies would have had a very long list of applicants to consider before getting to me. And both understanding the frameworks and doing well in the technical interviews required some fairly deep understanding of the language. Yes, the company you work for and the team you're working on have a great deal to do with your compensation. But both of those things are heavily influenced by how skilled you are in what technologies, especially for typical engineering roles. Knowing the right stack can open doors for networking around the front-door, too!

>They're getting compensated for non-Ruby things which happen to be expressed in Ruby programs." I call that winning rather than cheating but to each their own.

I wouldn't call that cheating but I would call it a poor anecdote to generalize from. Some people with a legal background translate contracts and earn a great deal of money for it, but that fact doesn't speak much to the market for translators as a whole or show there's no appreciable difference in career trajectories for translators of various languages.
> Thing is, it's use cases like this that are hindering adoption of Linux on the desktop, and I feel sad that these points of friction still exist; they shouldn't.

I am a happy Arch user at home. There is no non-free software installed on my personal machine. Even for my operations research work, when I do it using my machine, I prefer using free software (e.g., GLPK for optimization and Aivika for simulation) over the proprietary alternatives, because free software developers do not pull crap like "The professional edition can only run models with up to 2000 variables. If you need more, buy the enterprise edition."

Sadly, at work I do not get to pick what tools I use. Customers do not want to give up Excel and the proprietary software designed to interact / exchange data with it.

In any case, my original comment ("OpenOffice/LibreOffice suck for what I do with Office") was not meant to be a characterization of free software in general.

> <stallman-clone>We need, in part, widespread adoption of free, open source software to help maintain privacy, personal security, and freedom. (...)

Five years ago or so, I might have dismissed you as a lunatic; but, these days, I find myself increasingly agreeing with this point of view. I have seen OS X evolve from a somewhat restrictive but overall very convenient OS (Leopard and Snow Leopard) to an OS openly designed to limited what users can or cannot do (Lion, I have not used Mountain Lion). Windows has undergone a similar path (beginning with the Windows Genuine Advantage thing).

It is quite a feat that proprietary software has become so restrictive that I, someone who still does not place software freedom too high in his priority list, actively seek to use free software over its proprietary counterparts.

> (...) Also, the era of the cloud as we know it has to end!</stallman-clone>

Word!

> I see you're new too! Welcome to HN! :-)

Thanks! :-)
Database indexes are very frequently btrees; understanding how a btree works can inform how you structure and query data, resulting in substantially better software. They're also a generalization of the binary search pattern, which every programmer should be able to describe and utilize.
I understand your point, and I agree it's an important conversation to have. I'll be happy to chat about it on #docker anytime!
Oh geez,the first page has a pic of a mac laptop with a QR code sticker. I just had a hipster gag reflex but thankfully my fresh kombucha is calming my upset stomach.
Thanks, right now I feel like im ok on nerves.
It's not tedious if you do it right. All of your conversions should be done in your I/O layer and nowhere else. For many applications that means there's a single place to do it. Hardly tedious.

I notice that your library is targeted at notebooks, though. It seems useful in that context, but not for general programming.
Thanks :) I'll try the fix you suggested in that PR
What if all this trading occurred within a two day timeframe then at the end of the two day settlement period Alice’s stockbroker doesn’t deliver Alice’s shares? What happens then?
Ah so you expect housing prices to continue to grow above income forever? Maybe in the future a single house can cost more than the entire country's GDP or something like that right? House prices only go up!
so compared to a run-of-the-mill Lenovo/HP/Dell - where I still can get all parts 5 years after buying it - the innovation is that you have decoupled the I/O ports with your modules, which might reduce wear and failure there. Given that swapping the mainboard will probably just be as expensive for you as for the aforementioned devices (where some by Fujitsu even had standardized mainboards ;)) + you probably command a significant premium in the beginning: I really don't get the value/eco proposition except for reusing the frame/Display (the latter of which will eventually break as well).
Do you at least plan to release schematics so people can try to understand failure modes of the actual things most of us without extensive resources can't repair today?

~ typed on a Lenovo T440s (4GB soldered RAM unfortunately): swapped the touchpad for the one from the 450s, replaced the fan, after it made noises, started with a tiny m.2-SATA, then upgraded to a spare SATA from the Desktop, updated the screen after it broke. Now the bottom shell has a dent in it (full backpack) but I think I'll let it pass. Still seems pretty repairable to me.
China and Japan have Sunday as the first day since the 4th and 8th century respectively: http://chartsbin.com/view/41671.

So presumably, you come from a Europe-centric view: http://chartsbin.com/view/41671
Osborne-1 was before the internet. So if you were not in some Merican university or corporation you were very much on your own. I made chess, emacs, lisp, pascal just like that, with assembler. -- I probably made the assembler too, because I was using VAX assembler with Z80-macros at first.

Aniways I was incredibly good with assembly and machine code. I remembered all the hex-codes and could read and write long programs with numbers alone. In the alternate "Difference Engine"-future this skill would have been eternal and appreciated as genius-level.
Mac Firefox and Mac Chrome both break a bunch of keyboard shortcuts if you use a non-US-ANSI keyboard. Safari handles alternate layouts correctly.

Just yesterday I learned that on an ISO Spanish keyboard, both of those browsers will pop up a help menu for ⌘⇧7. The logic goes: ⇧7 means / on a Spanish ISO keyboard, and ⇧/ means ? on a US-ANSI keyboard, therefore ⌘⇧7 is by the transitive property of inter-layout shift functions equivalent to ⌘?, which is the shortcut for opening the help menu.

They don't pop open the help menu if you press ⌘⇧', the actual ISO Spanish layout way to type ⌘?
While I agree with a lot of what you say, the line about noone ever having been harmed by industrial nuclear waste is not entirely true. Have a look into the Kyshtym disaster and - more recently - September 12, 2011 incident at Marcoule, France.
I'm not military, but worked with them for two years, sometimes with similar schedules.

My view about being a soldier, a serviceman has changed drastically during that projects. The cause is noble, and the thing they're doing is very hard. Make no mistake here.

On the other hand, they're stripped of their emotions and humanity to an extent. They become something else, an hardened being after some time.

Because, they need to do what has to be done and they shouldn't think through it, but just act.

I'm a grandson of a commander. I love soldiers, but this is how they're trained, and this is how they should be to be able to perform this duty.