skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is believable, the author points out some very real challenges that I think will make it impossible for us to travel to other stars in our present form.

Just some criticisms, the author doesn't seem to understand the idea of sending probes to survey a destination before loading up a huge generational ship. Instead, the author seems to think humans would just load up, travel for 200 years, and arrive at some unknown destination and hope that there's a habitable planet. This is nonsense. Could you imagine spending 200 years on a ship hoping that your destination is even hospitable to life?

In any case, some very good points are made about the challenges. Personally, I don't think we're going to be going to other stars as humans, in our human bodies. If we could someday build AI, and machines with brains that think like humans -- those could voyage across the galaxy.
I'm not trying to pull a gotcha anything. I'm legitimately trying to understand the point that was being made. The point looked to me to be that spending more money is by itself a benefit because it represents a greater commitment. I then verified that I was understanding correctly, and was told that this was not in fact what was intended.
Compulsory purchase ("eminent domain") has been the solution to this since the development of the railways, when it required an Act of Parliament.
I'm the author, let me know what you think about it!
You are correct that it does not literally destroy it, but it's also true that there is a finite water supply in that system, and that number is dropping.
You can try https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/Documentation/technic...

But sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and read the source. I also found the git mailing list to be pretty helpful.
It's not vague; it just highlights a personality difference. For me, after having a succession of short-sighted (and often borderline disastrous) decisions made at higher levels it's hard to keep faith that the founders/management have a reasonable chance of fixing the issues. I actually admire your ability to keep your head down and focus on the work.
https://github.com/rtorr/jsbundler
I'm also a little weary of cheap Chinese products that connect to my network... I'm always a little worried that they'll be doing something malicious, and I don't have the network know-how to prevent that.

That said, I'm not entirely sure the risk is that much greater with off-brand Chinese products than "American" (designed, programmed and made in China) ones.
That would be using a security vulnerability to reprogram the game then, of course if you can do that you can do anything on the computer. Since Minecraft is sandboxed in the JVM that might prove difficult though.
I think the article has probably misstated the usage and that the 180 gallons is for the household.
Im actually adding this functionality to npmcdn
30yo. Grew up on a small farm in rural Illinois. Studied Physics / Math at a no-name liberal arts school in the Midwest. Got a job as a programmer out of school working for Sears Portrait Studio (no lie). Wrote a piece of OSS software over Thanksgiving break 2012 that front-paged on HN. Major tech co reached out the following week. Got the job, moved to SF, etc. I now work for a fairly well-known startup, living 'the dream.' Incredibly thankful for the opportunities that I've had.
It would look a lot like IRC or usenet or mailing lists today, but on a vastly larger scale.

I suspect culturally it would look a lot like amateur radio / ham radio, the majority constantly making leading questions about "does that still exist today for grandpas?" despite actual continuous long term demographic growth.

So the right people would find a way to hang out together while being marginalized by the masses.
True, but since everything is made in China these days, probably half the products in your house that connect to a DC source are cheap and Chinese.
"logically oriented religion"...

o...k....
Python Bite of the Day: Do you know what's returned, if nothing's returned?
I'm normally enthusiastic about new things, but honestly I found it much easier to find deep interesting content back when Geocities was live and Yahoo Directory and webrings existed.

In particular I find blogs encourage a throwaway attitude to content. Almost certainly more information is being written down in blogs now than was being written in people's webspace ten years ago. But webspaces were constructed as a permanent, indexed thing (people even made "site maps" telling you what page was where). Which made them worse for disseminating news or other time-sensitive information, but much better for the "long tail" of information that you now simply can't find, short of trawling through a complete archive.
It's so funny to see how surprised people are about the "corp" IT compared to the "free" IT world. Once I was also surprised about how long it takes and that very important things can be out of scope.

I think the reason is that in fact in teams >10 people nobody really knows what's going on. That anything happens is more the result of many attempts and some luck. That nothing succeeds is the default.

Think of it more as "Twitch Programs Flight Ticketmanager App" than actual software development as you read it in a book. (I once worked with >5 other guys on getting a string in one computer pointing to another computer, took the whole week)
Sprawl in the US, and the lack of public transport, is influenced by the legacy of racism. There are still plenty of people who will oppose public transport on this basis.
31 years old - in a couple of days I reach my 3rd year anniversary in the industry.

I had the typical profile of a student who was going to get into any college I wanted (700+ on both math & verbal on the SAT I, 740 in Math in 7th grade, 800 on the SAT II Math 2C in 8th grade, 730+ on 5 SAT IIs, including Writing, captain of varsity tennis team for 4 years, played varsity for 5, etc.), but ended up not getting admitted to any of them, in large part due to my bad college essay. I went to a state school in NY instead, and entered college with 56 college credits (including Calculus III/Multivariable Calculus & Linear Algebra in 10th grade, and college chemistry & differential equations courses). I was a bit of a bad student in college - failed 3 courses in my majors (math & mathematical physics) in part due to laziness. After my second year, I turned around my work ethic and started working hard again of my own volition, and excelled.

I dropped out of my PhD math program at UIUC after 4 years, largely due to extra-academic issues. Spent 2 1/2 years looking for a career track job - I was willing to do whatever it took, I even enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve to try to get a better chance. 2 years into the search, I got fed up looking for any sort of job, so then I started teaching myself programming. A half year later, I got my first job, but my efforts at learning did not stop there - I experimented with tech from didn't languages/platforms from Java, Scala, Ruby, Python, PHP, and Node.js. My first job also had me doing frontend, and using angular.js just before it became hot. I was mentored to drill down into source code to figure things out. I also lurked in the angular IRC channel and asked for help once in a while, but also tried to help as many people as possible.

As I spent more time in the angular community & using angular, I became uncommonly versed in the intricacies of the framework, and picked up being disciplined in writing unit tests. This turns out to translate very well in the profession, and I have been able to turn this to become a lead frontend engineer at one point - I switched jobs 4 times so far, and am currently a senior engineer who does some open source in my spare time (lead development on UI Bootstrap, developer for the ng-bootstrap & UI Router projects, occasionally contribute to Angular).

Some luck, and self-initiative, hard work, and smart decision making has helped me succeed.
I was a Historical Theology Student and had thousands of plain text files which I personally used for research. GREP was my best friend.

I think this would have kicked into over drive, but I need Latin, Greek, German, Danish support for the searches which unicode would be perfect but these plain text files were written in ascii. To bad I am not in the field anymore nor a System's Librarian. Would have sunk a lot of time into this.
The way I see it, piracy was easier 12 or so years ago.

The rise of P2P, in the days before regulatory sanctions and when user tracking was less sophisticated, you could get nearly anything on P2P.
Big leaks in her house? Landscaping your garden is part of "bare minimum" for survival?
How the 'Quiet Eye' Technique Makes Athletes More Coordinated
It seems like the little sibling of 'hey, focus on these gender/race issues, not those class issues'.
The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live.

Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is why the economics encourage centralization. You don't need "major parties" to "adhere to agreements" if users just use the software they like to interact with each other. The problem with the Web is everyone using software on third-party servers to write rows in third-party databases because everything else is technically infeasible given the architecture of Web protocols.

You need a DHT or some other kind of decentralized matchmaking service in order to actually connect users to each other. At that point using HTTP makes no sense either, and users don't have the time or resources to write complicated HTML or hire web devs to write it. Web technologies are not really useful for users-talking-to-users without server-based mediation.
Just came back from a month in Rome. On the Tiber walkway there a bunch of art installations, bars and restaurants I ate at, never noticed the Starling "problem". To be honest the whole Tiber outside of the immediate walkway is pretty overrun by weeds and plants. Loads of places for them to nest. I would say start there.
The steampunk alternative to GPS
That's an interesting point. But virtually social (I just made it up, not sure if it's correct but you get the idea), I believe, is very different form physically social.

I think in case of video stores, it's quite similar to coffee shops.

I have some good quality coffee beans, a decent machine, so I can totally make coffee that's good enough to compete with most of the coffee shops for a fraction of price and time that has to be spent. That's similar to Netflix. Quick, convenient, often good enough.

But still, I like to go to a coffee shop from time to time (which is similar to going to a video store). It takes much more time, it's not as convenient (can't just go straight from bed in my underwear), but there's something rewarding about the whole thing. Dressing up, getting out of home, all these things makes this as a sort of ritual.
I always find it a bit surprising that Shannon is remembered far more for Communication Theory than his Master's thesis (which I think was very significant).

It seems to me that everything about universities and funding these days is very conservative, making it quite difficult to do the kind of research that can lead to great contributions.
What an awesome project - I always wanted to do something like this in college. Apparently, I wasn't alone - there are whole online message boards focused on really bright flashlights
Yeah not sure if I'm down for larger highway 84, where are they going to push out into? Ardenwood Farms? The Fremont city board already has told residents that it does not plan to slow down the building of new homes in the area. Which is a big issue because current public schools cannot fit all these students here... 1LTC says that y'all are being paid for by the same development companies from SF to build housing here.
Mostly I just want to know which systems exist and roughly how they work in case I'll have to integrate with more of them.
At least one cultural solution might involve people adding a new letter or word to any blocked content. I understand this would result in a new hash/ID. Republish, redistribute, and repeat. Would this work?
The Most Recognizable Thing on the Planet
Well, if they do catch fire, at least they still provide illumination even when they fail!
I feel you. I had the same experience working as an ME in R&D and left for programming. What languages did you end up learning? What was your first?
Italy, we owed you a debt for all the delicious foods your emigrants brought to America with them.

We're... we're good now, right? All squared up?
Interesting. How are starlings viewed in Europe? As far as I know they're not well-regarded in North America; they're only here because, and I am not joking, the American Acclimatization Society wanted to have all birds mentioned in Shakespeare to be present in North America. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_starling#North_America)

Just wondering if this is a new problem, some kind of ecosystem imbalance, or something else?
Linux side: I still use krunner (KDE) and I also like dmenu for simple launcher in tiled window managers.
Your story is factually off, I'm afraid.

Canonical comes up with a replacement for sysvinit called Upstart.

Actually a replacement for both sysvinit and sysv-rc, along with some overlap for hotplug and other demand-based/lazy operations.

Everyone agrees sysvinit is a dumpster fire on wheels careening around at high speed, so a new init system is welcomed as a Good Thing.

Hah. I wish.

In fact, the painful truth of the matter is few people really cared. There was lots of prior art (and indeed, Canonical themselves chose to write Upstart instead of adopting the emerging initng at the time for largely handwaving/wish-wash reasons [1]), but not a lot of interest in seriously tackling the problem domain beyond introducing a host of band-aids on top of sysv-rc like LSB dependency headers and startpar.

Some people from Red Hat wanted to contribute improvements to Upstart, but Canonical insisted on a Contributor Licensing Agreement that would allow Canonical to relicense the work however they wanted, including commercially. Shockingly, Red Hat employees couldn't get clearance to do uncompensated labor for a Canonical project like that, so rather than contribute to Upstart, we got systemd.

In fact, "some people from Red Hat" already had deeper architectural failings with Upstart (which I agree with, but absolutely not with how they decided to "solve" them) and its event model. The beginnings of systemd (prototyped under the name of Babykit) were lying around for several years on Lennart Poettering's machine.

And at that point... game over for Upstart. Ubuntu uses systemd now. Because they don't have the resources to package everything for Upstart if Debian is moving to systemd.

Which, ironically, is a form of cooperation. And look what cooperation gets you: homogenization towards a Red Hat solution.

The thing is, Canonical isn't that well resourced. Look at who contributes to the Linux kernel.

I'm well aware of the massive corporate contribution, and Canonical's low activity there.

But they're not succeeding at it and they're not GOING to succeed without some way of becoming profitable that has yet eluded them. And developers don't want the burden of having to support Canonicals quixiotic insistence that they are the Apple of the Linux world.

Again, Canonical are at a loss, true. This is their loss, not developers'. There is no "burden" placed on them unless they decide to ship their software in binary form only, in which case the problems already exist for any distro with its own packaging infrastructure.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReplacementInit
Meet the activists who would co-op(t) the tech industry
Art doesn't have to be abstract and emotionally complex with historical context. It can just be pretty pictures and interesting shapes and such.

Children can absolutely enjoy art. But they're going to enjoy it on their own terms. They're not going to understand it or appreciate it the way adults do, yes. But that doesn't mean they can't appreciate it.

Obviously if you take your children to an art museum and insist that they spend five minutes staring at each piece trying to understand the context, they're going to hate it. And obviously, you should only do this if you want to teach your children that art is terrible and museums are places to avoid. But if you just let them do their thing, and answer their questions, and try to point out interesting features, they can enjoy it a lot.

If your child is young, referring to it as the "fart museum" is a good way to maintain interest, too. This is also a good barometer of the adult's attitude: if you can't stand calling it the "fart museum" because it's disrespectful or too crude or whatever, then you don't have the right attitude to take a small child to the fart museum!
Hydra can modify its genetic program
The water as element (H2O) is not being destroyed, but the water source (usable groundwater resources) may actually be destroyed or at least depleted so that recovery takes a very long time.
That happened about 15 years ago when Microsoft made the decision to make computing media-friendly and embrace DRM.

A better outcome would have been to divide computing into business computing and consumer computing, and only allow consumer computing to have components that the owner of the hardware can't control.

Now almost every computing device contains parts not under the owner's control. Even trying to see what those parts are doing could constitute a crime. A network of machines you don't control isn't going to be an engine for positive change.
"Intellectual property is designed to encourage innovation and the dissemination of knowledge by, somewhat paradoxically, restricting access to knowledge."

For software this still makes no sense. As far as protectionism is concerned, protectionism is precisely the way first-world economies became such. It's a myth that trade liberalization moved any economy indigenously forward. (This does not mean that all liberalization is bad)
PR run.
Ask HN: How do you get remote work as a Front-end Developer
Hello, I have been a lurker here for some time now.
I wanted to know how people get remote web development work, I know that in the U.S and Europe remote work is almost normal. For a proficient front-end developer with 5+ years experience, located in West-Africa, highly motivated and can put in 6+hrs everyday and can even work for free to get my foot in the door. How does one go about it?
I have some questions, feel free to not answer if it's too intrusive.
Please interpret "you" as "your team" in the following :

- what is your nationality ?

- where (country, town) are you based ?

- do you receive fundings, if yes where does it come from ?
Why it’s so hard to keep up with how the U.S. gov't is spying on its own people
More than 180,000 robotic vacuum cleaners sold on a single day
Fantasy devices, never likely to have been built. The Nazis were good at making designs on paper that would never have been produced.
To be fair, when it happened, Debian rebranding Firefox as Iceweasel was an unhappy decision at the end of an acrimonious discussion. It's only with the passage of time (and by comparison to Canonical's obfuscation) that it looks like a clear and appropriate resolution to a trademark issue.
> The pornography in the original novel [Who Censored Roger Rabbit?] also had to go ...

I would have appreciated more background on animation for adult audiences. Some of the early Betty Boop stuff was extremely sexual. And Bugs Bunny was barely in the closet. As a kid, I loved his drag bits.

I even recall seeing an X-rated version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There's lots of third-party Disney porn now, but that was reportedly done at night by the Disney team.
What is reason, beyond sensing, sense-making, logic, verification of facts/premises, and response/conclusion?

Computers absolutely will be (and are today!) capable of reason - but as with humans it will be limited and imperfect - just in different ways than humans. Having worked in the semantic web space for example, some logical inferences are computationally way too expensive to bother with, and a human will often be better. Other cases are better. Research on building reasoning systems for medical diagnosis , prescription and contra-indication are getting very sophisticated for example.

I suspect what computers will long be bad at are imagination, curiosity, ambition, emotion, and intuition... All of which relate to your examples of weaving through the bureaucracy.
It happened in the fall of 2007. I was actively reading both sites and saw it happen.
Seems even more ridiculous actually

> to just 178 gallons per person each day.

which would be ~21000 gallons per month for her family of four. Has to be an error right? Either she is a total idiot or the Times can't do math and it's not per person per day.
The problem with the statistic you bring up is that it lacks context like what percentage of the general population eats dark chocolate. If only 20% of the population eats dark chocolate then it's a very interesting statistic.

When I look at the article I don't see any crimes against statistics, and I'd be curious what statistic you think is contextless or misrepresentative.
I think that's half of a τ turn. http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto
That was an example; the general problem of people whipping up a mob, hate campaign, harrasment or slander against someone remains as something the victim cannot easily opt out of. Even if they try to go off-net completely.

(Trigger-happy policing is certainly its own problem)
There service is provided by Sculpteo and is not an in-store service. I cannot just go into the store and get something printed like I can with a copy job.
Should Batman Inherit from Both Bat and Human?
That seems very young. I think I only know one person who had accomplished that, and she's a 4.0 student who skipped grades and actually finished her masters on time.
Soft Updates are not an alternative to journaling.
Andy over at NetBSD killed that as soon as they had wapbl.
I'm going on what an OpenBSD supporter or developer... not sure which... said to me in a prior discussion here. I brought up Theo's rant against x86 virtualization. Others showed up to clarify a bit. One posted a video interview where Theo pretty much said they hadn't cared about that and some other things that the market was big on. However, that they'd finally need to adapt and pay more attention to such stuff, esp virtualization. Now, there's a VMM.

So, given prior conversation, I thought of their recent efforts to do what they were against or not interested in to be a compromise between how they wanted it and what OpenBSD needed for more use in market. The first of hopefully many which might bring more coders and capabilities to the project.
Bitrig already did the work.
We will see if it ever gets accepted.
I think there's a legitimate question to ask about how some kinds of commercialisation (selling privacy; expensive in-app purchases bought by children or compulsive gamblers; etc) are in some way deceptive or dishonest. It's certainly not as simple as a direct upfront payment for goods or services.
Check out dmenu for Linux.

http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/

Pipe a list of things into it, it'll graphically prompt the user for a specific thing, and then it'll print that thing to stdout. I use it to switch to named workspaces and to launch programs.
They act like traditional banks in a sense that you can have them hold your money for you and some give out interest rates!!!.

Their biggest difference with a traditional bank is that their "bank" accounts are tied to phone numbers.

Once they have your money,you can do money transactions more or less the same way you do with a debit/credit card.

You can also have your "bank" accounts on these companies tied to a "bank" account from a traditional bank and you can move your money back and forth between them.