skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Its high time that humanity moved past the notion that sending meatbags into space is a good idea.

No machine can come back and tell you how it felt to be there. How the Apollo 8 crew reacted the first time they looked back and saw the distant Earth as a planet, no different than the Moon ahead of them. Or how was it to be completely cut off from all of mankind while behind the Moon. Or to take that now famous earthrise picture.

There are two things here. The first, is the quest for knowledge. About how things are and how things became. Robots can do that wonderfully well.

The other is the quest for our place in the vastness of space. One is the quest for knowledge, for information. The second is the quest for meaning. No machine will give us that.
Apple has quietly been moving into a hot new market
Well, essentially, all of the traditional text-only clients do (such as Mutt, which is what I use), I think Thunderbird does as well, beyond that, no clue, but there probably are others.

Traditionally, if you chose to reply to an email, the mail client would put the mail you were responding to into your editor, with > marks in front of every line. The only socially acceptable way[1] to write your answer was to insert your responses in between those quoted lines, without > marks, and to delete everything of the original mail that was irrelevant to establish the context for the reply.

That's how easy it is.

Usually, a good mail client would also color quoted lines so that it's easy to see and read only the response lines in a received email, so you'd only have to read the quoted text if you weren't sure about the context.

Clueless developers and users around the turn of the millenium then somehow didn't understand the purpose of providing you with a quoted version of the email you replied to, and started putting the reply above the quoted mail, thus ending up sending a copy of the mail they just received back to the person they received it from ... and nobody seemed to notice how idiotic an idea that actually is, and so it became sortof the new norm in large parts of the internet to attach large blobs of completely useless and often close to unreadable text to every mail, up to the point where some people even invented justifications for the behaviour that mostly tend to describe how this "feature" allows them to work around the lack of proper thread handling in their mail clients.

Obviously, easy quoting traditionally relies on plaintext only mails with fixed (short) line length, but format=flowed encoding has since been invented (the original RFC is from 1999) to accomodate screens and windows of variable width while maintaining backwards compatibility with old clients.

[1] https://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html
Well... They are running Debian on the ISS. That should reduce the need for sysadmins, at least.
>an exception is better than a silent failure in almost all situations.

>this is an argument for not using 200 for all; not against

The practical side of me disagrees.

Experience bears out that plenty of developers are at a loss when e.g. a login callback page shows an unhandled exception error despite error-checking code being in place and running against the response's "error" node or whatever is used.

The problem is that there just aren't enough people out there that can understand the entire stack, and the end result is that people who've paid (good/bad) money for development - and their end users - end up with services that'd otherwise be decently functional showing the odd exception error instead.

(the technical side of me agrees with you absolutely!)
Show HN: Wsq – WebSocket task queues
Predictions on Artificial Intelligence and IOT
1. F=ma, Newton's second law, can be replicated easily. It's a fact.
2. If I kick this soccer ball right here, applying a force, it will accelerate away from me. It's a fact.
3. Look, it has accelerated away from me, it's a measurable fact!

...a short time later...

4. Oh, I was standing at the bottom of a hill, so the ball just rolled back to my feet.

Do you understand? We are discussing an insanely complex system, with feedback loops everywhere, and a scant (at best) 100 years of quality data on a planet 4 billion years old. There is nothing simple about this. The physics of the radiation balance isn't in question, but for all we know it may be dwarfed by negative feedbacks. They are forced to fallback on computer models for a reason.

Nobody talks about 99% of doctors and smoking, because we can empirically test this. Hundreds of millions of people have smoked, and we have observed the effects.

The smoking/cancer analogy always makes me smile, because it is actually a very good one. Let's turn it around. The physics of how smoking causes cancer is pretty solid. We know about toxins and carcinogens, etc. But let's say I hand you a single human being, and I ask you, "if he smokes for the next 40 years, will he get cancer?". We don't have a freaking clue. The human body - the feedback of the immune system defences, nutrition, genetics - are beyond our power to model. Science is hopelessly unable to answer that question. And ponder this for a moment - we have 6 billion potential test subjects to work with! We have one earth. This is the state of climate science. The biosphere/atmosphere/oceans/etc. are every bit as complex as a single human body, and we have only one patient to study, and data for maybe 0.0000025 of the patient's lifetime.

But, I hear you say, "shouldn't we be cautious then? Shouldn't we quit just in case?". And fair enough, we probably should be cautious. But the counterpoint to that is that fossil fuel usage isn't a nicotine hit. It doesn't deliver us a few moments of pleasure in return for the risk of cancer. It fuels our entire industrial civilization. So the risk/reward calculation looks quite a bit different, doesn't it?

In one case, we have the potential risk confirmed by the empirical evidence of a test set of hundreds of million of smokers, and the potential reward being a nicotine hit. In the other, we have no way of testing the theorized risk outside of models, and the reward is the energy to power our entire civilization.

So yeah, it is an analogy that always makes me laugh a little.
EU to force firms to report major cyber attacks
A not quite scientific test of Alcohol vs. LSD
How to be hired by the best clients
Abusing Android ClipData
> Overstressed vowels: A lot of the time, people are lazy about pronouncing certain vowels—they’re un-emphasized and neutral, and just sort of hang loosely in the middle of the mouth, making an “euh” sound, regardless of which vowel it actually is.

Here's a funny notion. Perhaps in modern American English (at least the midwest accent), perhaps many of the vowels have actually become schwas and it's only the historic nature of the orthography that makes us think they should be something else. There's no vowel that sounds like the schwa naturally, but it's clearly a "missing" letter in the modern alphabet since it's also the most common vowel sound in American English. So every other vowel ends up being pronounceable as a schwa in various contexts.

Strangely, most people who use the schwa vowel regularly make a specific point to pronounce other key marker vowels correctly in order to distinguish the words, the rest of the vowels are unimportant to distinguish.

Imagine how much better English orthography would be if we could just use an 'ə' everyplace an unstressed vowel existed.
On stateless software design
The FAQ says 'storage level encryption' which presumably means volume encryption, but in any case is unlikely to protect against anyone gaining access to the box, only against someone making off with the physical storage.
We live in a big universe that's greatly unexplored both at the macro- and the micro- level, both in the physical and the spiritual realms (since you allude to less material motives in your reply). Anything we do (even large-scale, government-sponsored meditation) has the potential to "yield dividents in ways we probably can not even think of today". That's why you need economic calculation (and a firm grounding) to quantify that potential and decide which of the infinite projects that individuals, governments, or humanity can undertake makes the more sense. Colombus voyage actually made perfect sense from that perspective as it was all about economic calculation.
http://chesstempo.com is the state of the art for tactics puzzles auto-adjusted to your strength.
and so the cycle begins again
Stay private in Dropbox with Skycryptor
For casual fun games, the opening is completely irrelevant. Just aim to use all your pieces, control the center, keep your king safe and aim at the opponent's.
It surprises me how few people seek for professional help in these cases. People here can tell you about their experiences but they won't match completely with your particular case. Find a good psychologist and work with him/her on your improvement.
Engineers Combine Biological Energy-Harvesting with Electronic Circuits
Why you should go to school HAHAHA
In fairness, I think the DCSS developers agree with you. Branches are for the most part getting shorter (extended excepted). Lair is still pretty long, but I'd rather it was made more varied than just shorter. Hall of Blades is now in Elf, and Elf is only 3 deep. Crypt's only three deep. Depths is actually pretty varied anyway. The main rune branches are all four deep.

Still rock hard though.
This will be the only chance for our climate/planet as I don't count on our leaders to agree on a strict climate protocol.
Yeah it's like how there always seem to be a few too many films from the last 5 years in "top 10 best films of all time" lists when the public vote for them.
Skycryptor provides zero-knowledge solution. It never can get access to user encryption keys or even search queries. Innovative key management solution allows to share encrypted files with contacts just via native cloud sharing experience and our proprietary searchable encryption algorithm keeps all your files just a few keyword away..
Like 'spell checkers' for bad thoughts? Who decides what's misspelled?
EU Strikes Cybersecurity Deal to Make Companies Boost Defenses
You only need two symbols to make an infinite length non repeating string.
503 = Service unavailable (temporary overload / maintenance)

429 = Too many requests (rate limited)
I apologize, I misread your statement as to say that the Apple store near you ONLY sells the iPhone 5S, intended as sarcasm or snark. I thought you were implying that the retail side of Apple's operation was simple. Obviously you understand it isn't :-)
How to Teach Close Reading
How to Insert Excel Spreadsheet in Word Document
This seems to be the most important bit, but Ars skip over it:

Or, a GMP customer can buy a Powerwall outright for $6,500 and share access with GMP, receiving a $31.76 monthly credit, which a GMP press release says "represents the value of leveraging the battery to help lower peak energy costs."

So this utility (which is generally progressive compared with their peers) is acknowledging that people having energy storage in their home is a benefit to the utility, and are even prepared to put a price on that.

There's a parallel battle going on with rooftop solar, with some utilities paying money for the value they recieve from this which is above the consumer cost of electricity in many cases, and other utilities trying to shut down users by imposing fees to cover the costs they claim they are incurring.
#Nokia closes #maps_unit_sale to #German_car_makers
I watched a press conference about astronaut selection from the 60s. The press mostly wanted to know about religious persuasions and marital statuses which felt like major culture shock to me.
Windows 10 restarts after selecting shutdown
Well yeah, if I just make up numbers and imagine a world where a single CEO would have the same impact on multiple companies. Of course that's not reality at all, well unless the increase in revenue comes from political connections that supply legislation that favors your business of course.
Nine Percent of All Kickstarters Fail, Study Finds
Yes, tech founders are making more money, but athletes and musicians are more famous.

Unsurprisingly brains tend to win at the economic game while physical talents dominate the social one. Of course being truly exceptional at either can help a person with the other.
Gil Tene, the author of wrk2, has a fantastic write-up on the assumptions that lead to Coordinated Omission (and how to avoid them) here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mechanical-sympathy/ic...
That made it so hard but then again I wasn't microing as much
lol, but then I realized.. maybe it's done on purpose to validate an article's appeal.
You seem to be stuck on economy so I'll limit to that.

The Potential of successful colonization of another planet is a total unknown, just like the potential of colonizing another continent is a total unknown. At least we know the other planet exist, whereas America was a bit of a surprise for Columbus.

Letting economic calculations guide you in the day-to-day running of a business is fine. But we as humanity can afford a little bit of money set aside for things that have no immediate value. Art and culture are amongst our most valuable possessions, but their value seems to be appreciating with time relative to the time when they were created. Much of our scientific knowledge had no immediate value at the time of discovery.

Columbus voyage may have made 'perfect sense' from an economic perspective in hindsight because it worked, but there was no guarantee that it would and plenty of people were arguing this was a waste of resources at the time.

I'm just as proud or more so of what humanity has achieved when economic gain wasn't the immediate focus as I am of the things we've achieved when economic gain was at the forefront of our thoughts guiding us to make our decisions. There is room for both of those.
Why would that make things "better"?
I wonder if the notion that computer wizards are kids isn't an artifact of the 80s and 90s. Back when computers were first reaching a wide audience, you often needed to do some work to manage to install games and have them run smoothly. The machines themselves were less reliable, but more simple than machines today. I don't mean the UI, which was not as welcoming as today's touchscreens, but the internal logic and organization wasn't as complex. So you had kids making the effort to learn these things their parents didn't really get.

Even if it was never the case that most kids were computer wizards, to many people, most computer wizards were kids. The way our minds work, that's just about the same thing.
Excellent analogy! Just imagine where we would be if the Spanish and Portuguese had followed that advice...
Didn't get that far. Dropped it around 10 or 11 (just after the bus journey). 5 hours is more than enough of a chance to give a series.
Trust is certainly one of the issues when languages migrate to requiring themselves to bootstrap.

However, by far the most infuriating (and one I run into frequently in my line of work, hence the anger) is when you are trying to get the language running on a platform for which binary bootstraps do not yet exist.

Portability matters. If you want your language to be useful and available to as many people as possible, why would you seek to artificially limit the number of platforms it can be built on, just so you can avoid writing the bootstrap in C? I'm sure there is some amount of pride on the part of the language author when their language can bootstrap itself, but it certainly isn't a pragmatic decision.

It's especially frustrating when the bootstrap requirement itself changes so that only very recent versions of the language are sufficient (e.g. GHC), leaving the porter to have to reach back into the archives and carefully plot a path through building multiple versions from the original C-based bootstrap until they finally get to master.

This is painful, painful work, and then has to be done all over again for e.g. 32-bit vs 64-bit. It doesn't have to be like this.
I believe dkokelley meant could the police achieve the same result or does their _police_ uniform cause a response among the drinking public that the street pastor uniform does not.
In my experience working in the ambulance service, there is a threshold of aggro above which the police struggle to de-escalate (but can still overpower). I can't say if street pastors can do any better as I haven't worked alongside them.
Then Paper is likely going to be next.
What’s It Like to Have Perfect Pitch?
Trivially easy for a human, maybe. In most cases it's pretty straightforward, but there are a few notoriously tricky language pairs that any automated solution is going to have trouble with. Most notably Norwegian and Danish (and Swedish to a lesser extent), and Czech and Slovakian. There are also some tricky cases in the Iberian area where some dialects of Spanish are quite similar to Portuguese, and in the Balkans Croat, Serbian and Bosnian are basically identical as well, although in some cases they can be distinguished based on the writing system used.
Imagine a company doing $12 billion in yearly revenue. If "the right guy" manages the joint, it will do $11 billion. Are you willing to pay 10 million a year for this person?
I don't know how the taxonomy of degrees works in the US, but wouldn't computer science be considered either a mathematics or an engineering field? Also, there is a list of engineering and science-related degrees that are excluded, and computer science is not on it...
He's clearly biased towards using tons of mysterious acronyms.
Economists Suggest Silicon Valley Startups Aren’t Really Creating Many Jobs
Not true. Brands can prevent others from marketing on their trademarked terms such as brand name and product names [1]. Unfortunately this is not automatic from Google. Whether or not brands choose to chase this down is on their own time.

[1] - https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en
AOL Lays Off Another 100, Two-Thirds in Its Dial-Up/Membership Division
WazHack. It is not nethack, but is a very well-done derivative of it.
Windows Phone won't ever succeed, says IDC
"We are seeing the emergence of an anti-visual design movement, as more and more customers are becoming distrustful of smiling faces, soft tones and soft language."

Not seeing that yet but it can't come soon enough.
"Salaries for civilian Astronaut Candidates are based on the Federal Government’s General Schedule pay scales for grades GS-11 through GS-14"

From http://www.federaljobs.net/salarybase.htm#SALARY_TABLE_2015-... it sounds like civilian astronaut salaries then range from $51k to $112k per year. That feels pretty low, but presumably astonauts assigned to a mission can make money through public speaking, etc.
The trouble with KTH is that somebody could go through all of this song and dance, and it still wouldn't mean a thing because how do you trust them?
Lemonade brings in a sweet $13M seed for P2P insurance
PyTwitter – delete all your tweets even if more than 3,200
I used to play quite a lot too. I think the thing that stopped me was the realisation that to get really good, you have to memorise openings and responses to openings. If you don't, you'll be working from a disadvantage from the start (if you play someone who knows the opening responses).

My favourite bit was always the middle-game - fun through pure invention and strategy that can't be laid out in a book for memorisation because of the almost infinite possibilities!

I really the book "My 60 Memorable Games" by Bobby Fischer- it really gave you an insight into a great players' thinking:
Uber's Labor-Free Fantasy Won't Last Forever
False Positive FMRI Revisited
You might like to read The Right Stuff [1], the film is good too but the book goes into quite a bit of detail on how the astronauts were seen as representing the nation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_%28book%29
Reissues, past subcultures and the dead foot of the market
Local UK Pharmacy Finding Software
Why to start a startup?
If a given CEO really is 10% better than the guy who'd do it for $49 million less, then sure, he's a bargain. But is there any evidence that he's actually 10% better?
Eh... isn't the Joint Photographic Experts Group the one that patents everything?
Cosma Shalizi's article is correct, as far as it goes (as far as I know). But some of the commenters here did not read the whole thing. He adds, capitalist free markets can't optimize either:
'If it’s any consolation, allowing non-convexity messes up the markets-are-always-optimal theorems of neo-classical/bourgeois economics, too. (This illustrates Stiglitz’s contention that if the neo-classicals were right about how capitalism works, Kantorovich-style socialism would have been perfectly viable.) Markets with non-convex production are apt to see things like monopolies, or at least monopolistic competition, path dependence, and, actual profits and power. (My university owes its existence to Mr. Carnegie’s luck, skill, and ruthlessness in exploiting the non-convexities of making steel.) Somehow, I do not think that this will be much consolation).
[...]
'Both neo-classical and Austrian economists make a fetish (in several senses) of markets and market prices. That this is crazy is reflected in the fact that even under capitalism, immense areas of the economy are not coordinated through the market.
[...]
' The conditions under which equilibrium prices really are all a decision-maker needsto know, and really are sufficient for coordination, are so extreme as to be absurd.(Stiglitz is good on some of the failure modes.) Even if they hold, the market only lets people “serve notice of their needs and of their relative strength” up to a limit set by how much money they have. This is why careful economists talk about balancing supply and “effective” demand, demand backed by money.

'This is just as much an implicit choice of values as handing the planners an objective function and letting them fire up their optimization algorithm. Those values are not pretty. They are that the whims of the rich matter more than the needs of the poor; that it is more important to keep bond traders in strippers and cocaine than feed hungry children. At the extreme, the market literally starves people to death, because feeding them is a less”efficient” use of food than helping rich people eat more.'

The article has another weakness, which is that Shalizi does not seem to understand how capitalist corporate planning works in real life. Increasingly, whole supply chains are balanced to point of sale events and other signals of incipient demands. And those whole supply chains do not do open market exchanges, the members are contractually bound. It's not optimal, but it's good enough. And all of that could be done without prices or money.
"That's why you need economic calculation (and a firm grounding) to quantify that potential and decide which of the infinite projects that individuals, governments, or humanity can undertake makes the more sense."

Well, my experience of large scale EU funding programmes was that all the efforts to predict the economic yield of research projects was, at best, complete nonsense.

After all, who thought that by funding a nuclear research organisation (CERN) we'd get something like the Web? Has anyone got an economic model that could have predicted that?
> The pricing should factor in the uncertainty and risk of the performance of someone in the position of CEO.

This is what options/share-based compensation seeks to do in large part.

Still, when those packages pay off, people get all kinds of jealous butt-hurt over that as well...
Hello! As a friendly warning, you shouldn't post "thanks!" type posts on HN. They'll get d/ved to oblivion.