skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I strongly agree with the sentiment here, but a few things:

> Meanwhile other people are working on getting to orbit, so as to provide infinite room

In addition to orbit, there's Antartica (it's certainly not colder than Mars, with more plentiful water ice and oxygen), oceans (desalinization + sea based habitats), not to mention very sparsely populated parts of the US just a few hours drive away from Bay Area.

By all means, let's go to orbit, explore colonize the solar system, and at the very least send probes[] to the stars.

One other side effect of tremendous growth in energy production: we can use that energy to do things we've never thought powerful, such as accelerate a probe to ~5% of c, allowing a probe to reach the Alpha Centauri system within the lifetime of someone born today...

> "In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180million human beings on the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’"

Imagine if the population did stay at ~200mm through the time period. _What_ tremendous advances would we have missed out on had the extra billions of people not been born?
Really cool seeing this after I just read a brief origin of Spacewar in Walter Isaacson's, The Innovators.
> In the final section titled "Oil-Clouded Crystal Ball" the author ignores fusion. The word "fusion" appears nowhere in the article.

Why not blame the author for not mentioning one of any other miracle energy sources that might never happen? I don't. Commercial deployment of fusion technology might never happen. Cleaner sources of energy are already here and now.
Great for retention, pretty terrible for recruiting though.

AFAIK most TLAs invest a lot in training since they're going to really struggle with recruiting people with the specialised knowledge they need; which is fine when that's a reasonable path for your org, but as a company, training AI experts seems really tough.
>This is the story of what I learned—about my fellow prisoners, the guards and administrators, and the system in which we operated. It is a cautionary tale of friendship and betrayal. It is a story of how politics prepared me—and didn’t—for prison, and how prison prepared me for life.

This kind of perspective reminds me of how frequently leaders in large organizations have so many layers of buffer between what line-level employees do and what they hear on a regular basis, that, in the long run, nobody wins.
Fortran is widely used for scientific computing and in high performance computing some knowledge of assembly language is useful in making use of vector instructions - compiler auto-vectorisation still needs a lot of help.

Fortran and assembly language are key skills at every national supercomputing center in the world.
Welcome to inetd/xinetd. They've been around for a long time :)
Evolution. The propensity to have many children in our current environment was not selected for previously because our species evolution didn't occur in this environment. But it is selected for now.
Well, the likelihood of being killed by a terrorist is closer to whatever near-zero percentage of this ridiculous example than it is to being killed by a police officer.

The FBI counted 460 deaths at the hands of police officers in 2014 -- and reporting is voluntary, so over half of the nation's police departments aren't included in that number. Unofficial numbers from citizen watchdog groups are closer to 1,000 people nationwide in 2014, and those numbers have reportedly spiked in 2015.
Maybe it was more effective when it was first released, but I watched it for the first time less than a year ago and it seemed more like a bad comedy. If birds really did turn on humans (already stretching suspension of disbelief because there's no reason for them to do so) then they would win a few early victories at most. Birds couldn't stand up to modern weapons. And with no Geneva convention in play humans could use chemical etc. weapons against them. The birds wouldn't stand a chance.
well, with https://www.getsync.com/ you can have decentralized files of lat longs for each region and the app receives the files and presents the user where supply and demand is.

Each driver and user can make their own decisions based on that.
It's sometimes a little arbitrary where we cut the branch, but I would say no: although that comment does contain religious flamebait (like capitalizing 'lord'), it's saved by substantive historical information.

If we can't talk about religion historically without getting sucked into the generic black hole of religious dispute, then we can hardly talk about history at all. That would not be ok, because history is interesting. So everyone has to exercise some discipline here.
It depends on how you want to view the question.

Compared to before the Pleistocene? Humans decreased biodiversity.

But if rewilding is meant in the pre-Columbian sense, then the hypothetical would be to compare the ecology in the year 1400 had humans in the Americans died out in, say, the year 900.

We simply don't know the answer to that, that I know of in my limited understanding.

We do know that human fire practices change the landscape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Yellowstone_Ecosystem#... mentions the decline of quaking aspen, and how one of the factors may be fire-return intervals. Humans have long used fire to clear out underbrush, but I really know so little of archaeology or related fields.

So in that case? Humans may have help prevent biodiversity reduction.

I can point towards Australia as an example of a longer-term ecosystem adaptation for human fire practices. The general belief is that "Burn-offs or small, cool fires were thought to be used by Aboriginal people both for hunting and for the prevention of larger fires" and "most Australian plants wouldn't be distributed around the country the way that they are now if people hadn't burned-off the land through history." - http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2010/12/aborigin...

That's not saying there was more or less biodiversity, only that there are different ecosystem patterns with and without human. But I don't see how it's possible to compare biodiversity when there's been 10,000+ or 50,000+ years of ecosystem adaption.

Is there less biodiversity in North and South America because of the Great American Interchange? Should pre-Panamanian land bridge be our goal once we've restored the Pleistocene era ecology? There had to be a goal besides "improved biodiversity." My goal, btw, is to point out that humans are part of the ecology.
Extension for Visual Studio Code to jump to a source code line in GitHub
Can someone explain why this was downvoted?
Because Rust uses LLVM to optimize the gap between C++ should be small enough that architecting for memory allocation and cache locality should FAR outweigh the difference in language implementations.

If you look at things like Ogre and Box2D, they can likely be sped up by a factor of 10x in either language. (not total fps in ogre, just the engine part).
This is on my todo list: https://github.com/zed0/clang-format-configurator/issues/1
If you have any more issues or suggestions please add them.
The threat from asteroids is that years of perpetual winter shut down our agriculture for years or even decades. But even in the case of a really massive, Chicxulub sized impact, earth will remain more hospitable than mars. The temperatures will be milder, sunlight at the surface will still be stronger, the air will still be breathable.

If we can build a sealed habitat on mars capable of recycling water and growing its own food, we can do the same here on earth. Just give it a dedicated fission reactor to keep the greenhouses running, distribute half a dozen of them around the world so that they can't all die to direct impacts, and fortify them heavily to keep the starving masses out.
Definitely worth mentioning! I completely missed this release. A bit sad too, since it's the first release (since Rust started listing contributors) that I didn't contribute to :'(
i tried to look up several four-year U.S. institutions just now, including one major research university, and none were in the list.

from the article, apparently they excluded universities when the scorecard dataset was missing one or more factors; it would be useful if the tool at least showed the university anyway as a placeholder and indicated what data was missing.
Seattle (for city council, mayor elections, school board hires) seems to have a history of bringing in "outsiders" who are used to throwing stones at the process, who then (surprise surprise!) fail when trying to work within the process. (Edit: This is indicative of the people themselves, but also of that horribly over-inclusive beast dubbed the "Seattle Process").
My fun postgres story is the time I spent a week learning and using CouchDB to do some operations across five to eight million tweets. I mean, surely a relational db is ill-suited to something like that, right? After no small amount of frustration, I just threw a cleaned-up version of each tweet into postgres and did a `LIKE` query across all of them. It returned in, iirc, less than a second (vs nearly a minute for couch).

The lesson, of course, is not that couch is bad and postgres is great, but rather as the OP said: "Human intuition about what might be slow is almost certainly wrong."
The reality is that's not how research works. Inspiration and breakthroughs don't come out of thin air; they come from the freedom to interact with other scientists, process their ideas and work, and then combine them with a new perspective which is tested and then occasionally turns out to be better than the state of the art. The process of research builds a lot of tacit knowledge that can't just be picked up by secretly picketing machine learning conferences.

It's a lot of hard work, and the benefits to doing it in collaboration with the wider scientific community far outweigh the added value from being able to keep some marginal contribution secret. The top-secret, non-collaborating research lab always falls behind, with perhaps the rare exception of certain large and well-funded government organizations.
Out of curiosity, if a startup is invited, are all of the founders required to attend the interview?
It doesn't, because the numbers of time have an independent meaning that people follow that is unrelated to the sun, which is the entire reason that daylight savings time even works: people don't just ignore it and work 9-5 this week and 8-4 next week even though those are the same natural times.
Orwell estate sends copyright takedown over the number 1984
Ask HN: Validating 2 Ideas in 1 Survey
I have a few questions about validating ideas in a survey. I'd like to use mechanical turk + a survey site to validate my idea.
Do sites like mechanical turk give you info on a responder or do you have to ask for demographics in the survey itself?
If I wanted to validate the combination of two ideas combined, would I put all of the questions in one survey, or break out it by idea into 2 surveys? I'm trying to not lead responders into answers. Would the data even be valid if split between surveys?
And the reason he blew up was because any changes to the way 911 operators worked had to be approved. Wow. What I can't believe was that he was allowed to resign and wasn't fired on the spot.
>>... is valid for some readers to conclude that some programs are "cheating", while other programmers may differ.<<

Which takes us back to the unanswered question --

Veedrac, are you saying that the benchmarks game programs you wrote "cheat" ?
You're drawing a line that doesn't exist. By all means, alcohol is an addictive hard drug with withdrawals that can actually kill or cause long-term brain damage. The only other class of drugs that have the same dangerous withdrawal are benzodiazepines, which target the GABA system. Alcohol is dirty in comparison, touching your GABAergic, serotonergic, dopaminergic, opioid and glutamate systems in your brain. You can overdose and die from consuming too much alcohol, which is not the case if you consumed too much marijuana or benzodiazepines (by themselves).

Of course, if we define moderate use of a substance as the level of consumption where health effects are little to none, you can consume something without jeopardizing your health.

You seem to be implying that either heroin or cocaine cannot be consumed in moderation (which is false[0][1]), or that their moderate consumption is tremendously bad for your health. If it's the latter, prescription opioids and stimulants like methylphenidate can be taken in moderation with limited health effects.

Many prescription opioids are very chemically similar to heroin. All prescription opioids work primarily via the same mechanism as heroin. Heroin is used in a medical context under the name diamorphine.

[0] http://jod.sagepub.com/content/13/2/219.abstract
[1] http://www.doctordeluca.com/Library/AbstinenceHR/ControlledH...
I sorry I am unable to get you the medical attention you require as the police have jammed the cell signals due to a nearby protest.

Short sighted policy policing puts everyone at risk.
The Arch installer starts out as a root shell (on a ramdisk used to bootstrap the system.)

...

This will be fun.
ESPN just did a round a big layoffs last week and dropping TV revenue was a big reason for that. Grantland was never really expected to turn a big profit and was always the concept car of ESPN's journalism enterprise. It was about branding, prestige, and "doing good work" and was never about money. But when it comes time to lay people off and cut costs, it is hard to justify keeping a project that will continue losing money for the foreseeable future.
Integrating NetCrunch with SCOM
On one hand this makes complete sense. ESPN wants to appeal to the largest possible audience, which means lowest common denominator coverage (basically shallow analysis and gossip, IMO).

On the other hand, ESPN is large enough that if they gave a crap about providing anything a bit "smarter" for snobs like me they could easily keep Grantland afloat.

Very disappointing and not the least bit surprising.
clang-format uses clang's C++ parser to get a real understanding of the code, even in syntactical edge cases. Because of this, clang-format can provide more specific and contextual style rules that go beyond what astyle can do.
Calcetines con Papas
A self-driving car will have better reactions, but it's still governed by the laws of physics. Beyond a certain point, all the self-driving car can do is minimize the collision speed. After that, you can be sure the cameras on the self-driving car have recorded exactly what stupid maneuver someone pulled.
It's going to be hard to find a person with the right set of skills regardless of their age. One of the skills required is patience and another is absolute dedication to getting it right first time. Not a job for a Scrum enthusiast.
It seems pretty clear that the captain wasn't dismissing the helpfulness but rather dismissing Clemans' authority to deploy the project.

It's a power play, and Clemans' disdain for rigid power structures clearly contributed to the friction between him and the SPD administration.

EDIT: the captain's response is not unwarranted at all. Emergency response call centers are a critical public resource and he is ultimately in charge of them.
>why THIS time things are different.

Because all growth since Malthus' time has been due to the use of stored Carbon energy. Malthus' observations had been largely true until then.

Maybe we'll figure out some way to replace our stored carbons inputs in a way that lets us keep the same energy surplus.

But, that's the short answer for why things may be different: the past 200 years have been a historical aberration. The fact that an effect takes a while to work itself out doesn't mean that that effect is nonexistent.
That's a shame. They did some really good work. So good that I've broken down and bought their dead-tree Grantland Quarterly in the past.

There was a story earlier this year about the guys in Boston that started the Yankees Suck t-shirts, and another article about bare-knuckle prize fighting in the 1800s that was some of the best writing I've seen.

Best website since Saving Private Ryan...
>You won't be able to guarantee there are no cars around you without human drivers.

By the time we have 99% market penetration of automated cars, we'll have had V2X standards for a decade or more. You probably would have a report of every vehicle nearby, but... At that point cars could just interleave at intersections, and the lights can just switch on when a human driven car shows up.
> the author ignores fusion

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2015/09/you-call-this-pr...

"We continue to work on nuclear fusion (note that we have succeeded in producing fusion in Tokamaks, for instance, and also in the spectacular explosions of hydrogen bombs). Should we succeed at controlled, sustained, net-positive fusion, we would qualify it as a new face at the table. I might characterize it as the most expensive way to create electricity ever devised (and electricity is not the hard nut to crack). If that’s our only substantial hope for game-changing innovation, we risk losing this game."
>"The government generated the numbers by matching individuals’ student-loan applications to their subsequent tax returns, making it possible to compare pupils’ qualifications and demographic characteristics when they entered college with their salaries ten years later."

So the dataset excludes students who do not apply for loans? (i.e., this analysis penalizes schools who admit the folks most likely to make lots of money, and the schools that have the lowest expected student contribution.)

>"...based on a simple, if debatable, premise: the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much money its graduates earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere."

If we are only to look at financial incentives, a more reasonable analysis would be to compare the expected future earnings _distribution_ as opposed to just a central tendency statistic like the median.
I think it's more of a thriller than a horror movie.
The 2016 Chevy Volt: An energy-efficient car that doesn’t drive like one
There are now more ships in the oceans than fish. [ https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/ ] Does it matter that we won't run out of energy or space if we run out of life itself? At this point iconic species like the Monarch butterfly and the Chinook salmon are in serious trouble.

Calling environmentalists a "death cult" is hardly appropriate. I know very well that many of them are very naive when it comes to "sound bite" advocating, and there are a few extreme crazies that don't hesitate to advance scenarios that imply mass extinction of great numbers of people. But the author of this piece isn't one of them and, frankly, deserves better.

At least admit that your position is one of faith, not reason. Do you predict the future? No. I have faith in science and human nature, I think we will solve our problems through e.g. fusion and psychology.

But do you want your grandchildren to grow up in a world that has no Snow Leopards? No tigers? No whales?

I believe future generations will hate us, profoundly, if we don't take care of the living world that is our inheritance and legacy.
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These seem unusual because of the assumption that these were exclusively nomad lands. Take that away and agriculture/irrigation/livestock of some kind seems a lot more likely and a lot less mysterious. There is no information about contemporary techniques in the area either.
While I'm curious about these, there are some clear red flags of cultural superimposition in the original research.
If that is the asteroid I think it was, Earth surface temperatures reached ~600F for weeks. Not really hospitable.
I read it as: how do authors publishing packages on npm maintain compatibility between multiple versions of node with breaking standard library changes?
Yeah, they do have a meaning in terms of coordinating when we do things with other people. Which seems to be a better reason NOT to mess with it at all, really...

There's no DST where I live. That's a good thing. Now I only have to worry about people who didn't resend Outlook invites after the time change or such.
Review Board 2.5 released with many improvements for code and document review
They threw in the usual one-or-the-other red herring. We can go to Mars, and learn to treat our own planet better.
A touch table you can stand on – see the video
Thanks I updated the link
Make sure you have the required ~16GB of free disk space that it requires temporarily for the download.
The article is hardly conclusive evidence. It even says so for the last three paragraphs.
I don't see it here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:chimeracoder%20medicare&sor...

I don't think you would have linked it in a comment where you didn't mention medicare.

I'm honestly curious about it, I certainly believe that Medicaid reimbursements are not matching costs, but I think for Medicare they often are.
Let's not go overboard. Hopefully, they learn from this an stop letting in "useless" Facebook for X startups. Or at least have a more rigorous interview process.
> Why are there so many breaking changes in 1 month?

Because that's when the planned functionality was coded, tested, and ready to deliver.

Node's development model is a form of the fairly common model where you avoid wasted work (that is, work not delivering value for customers that want it) by delivering features as soon as they are ready and tested, while periodically splitting off and committing to support long-term-support releases for customers that are more concerned with longer-term stability than having the latest and greatest the moment its ready to use.
Unfortunately, policing culture is very territorial and operates at extreme levels of testosterone fueled territory marking.

A tech-nerd (with possibly some autistic traits from the descriptions) is never going to get along in that environment without someone seriously watching over them. And whoever that is, will have some serious work to do in order to get the best for the department.

Cops are trained to push peoples buttons and make them lose control. Tim seems to have not seen the play coming and was fairly easily sideswiped before he even got far off the ground.

It sounds like SPD are not up to the job - even though someone at least seemed to be in the right direction when they hired Tim in the first place. If they had been able to follow through with the right support, SPD could have been an incredibly awesome exemplar of Policing and tech done right. To me, it sounds like there are serious management problems with the department - this situation would never have happened if people were properly competent.

Sadly, in my own experience, Policing and tech are never done terribly well. It always ends up with the snoopers and intrusive abusers gaining more ground and the things which really help keep people safer and more secure being thrown in the ditch or run over completely.
How will you code it if "goto" took zero cpu-cycle ?

Clue - You will need to use both "left" and "right" movement.
I do so dislike the term 'rewilding'.

"Wild me, Sandfella." (Logan's Run)

"She like to do the wild thing" (lyrics, Tone Loc)

Yeah, another term might be a good idea.
Considering that the average new molecular entity requires about $1 billion dollars over 10 years (factoring in cost of refining approximately 10,000 candidates into 1 entity capable of succeeding in Phased trials and receive approval), I'm not so sure these startups are anywhere near the "pharma" level.
Stop playing games with time. Instead of year-long daylight saving time, I'd rather we stick with standard time all year long.