skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm surprised that not a single comment here suggested that mediocrity is boring.

Boredom is of course a subjective state of mind, but I have a feeling that the average and the boring cannot be entirely statistically unrelated in humans.
It never ceases to bewilder me that nuclear power isn't taken seriously as a replacement for fossil-burning baseload generation.
This article has a really nice little summary of alternative actuator designs. (Alternatives to the DC / stepper motor that is.)
The Spillover Effect
was the ios app for list created with exponent also ?
I agree and I respect more the "strong silent" type. Although this guy is not in that category. Seems pretty flashy to me.
OK, but... any ideas how can we solve that?
Higher education costs would lead to the opposite of what you're hoping for. Generally poor and uneducated families have more kids than educated ones, for a variety of reasons. You'd be better off lowering education costs.
Almost all pages of cat-v.org read like that. It's a good read. Most should be taken in a light hearted way - it's just software, after all. People unfortunately tend to get outraged by it. Also unfortunately, the original author, Uriel, passed away a few years ago. If you enjoy it, try taking a look at suckless.org

Most pages in cat-v (and suckless) tend to favor the Unix way, small connecting components communicating through pipes. It seems sensible to me. It's comprehensible, it's easy to break down and analyze stuff when it's breaks. I never dabbled in Node.js - js is not my favorite language - but it does looks like complex and hard to understand its internals. Maybe it's not.
> People want to eat meat and drive cars and fly on airplanes

Not only that but try telling the billions in India and China "ok, now you're out of poverty you can't have a refrigerator or cooker"
Low energy, high efficiency cooling technologies for home, office, transportation, etc.

Security technology (monitoring to riot control) to help governments deal with the social upheaval.
The top 250 generic top level domains visualised as a subway map [pdf]
In greece, summers are atrocious without AC. But it gets even worse in the middle of polluted cities like athens.

Some corners of Athens are disgustingly unbearable. Tall buildings, narrow streets filled with parked cars. The entire thing is a dust, smoke and heat trap. Temperatures feel 10 degrees warmer in those corners. Not to mention it smells horrible.
Not in huge concrete jungles in hot latitudes in the summer.
From what I quickly found it seems that Greenhouse Gas Tax on meat is still missing.

https://www.google.com/#q=greenhouse+gases+livestock+tax
Are you really suggesting people will play Pokemon instead of screwing? I mean, yeah, if they weren't going to screw anyway, maybe, but the idea of advancing the one as a serious alternative to the other...well, I mean, I know people get really into those games for whatever reason, but that much?
Amazon's DynamoDB. A small instance of DynamoDB can cost about $10 a month but is fully replicated and managed. It is "scalable" in the sense that a small instance is cheap but you can turn the knobs and pay more for a bigger system that can handle a higher workload.
The (old) Oracle JRockit is not really better. It was, but it was probably getting really troublesome to maintain, and with buying Sun they probably felt that it was rather redundant. (There was no need for a clean room implementation since they owned all relevant IP anyhow.)
People in our Florida office have fan heaters running under the desk because the AC keeps it too cold.

The insanity boggles my mind.

I had to go out and buy a sweater and thick trousers to sit in the office while it is 32C/90F outside.
That's definitely true, it's rare to see a fully civilised discussion where those concerns are addressed without the accompanying rhetoric.

Having said that, surely it's a fact that we'll run out of fossil fuels at some point and will need an alternate source of energy, and that will be expensive no matter when we do it, so why not start early?
The article was fine, but what an unhelpful headline. It's like saying "Depression is a warning sign that you need to start being happier."

The time in my life where I most struggled with loneliness, I had just moved to a new big city. I went out looking for social experiences literally all the time, but never found the people that I could form deep friendships with. Transient social interactions and passing friendships, sure, but deep social relationships just take a long time to form. Eventually I moved to another city where I had more friends, and now I'm much happier.

Loneliness is just psychologically crushing.
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I was also surprised. Almost no "machine learning" or "AI" startups. Maybe they are trying to regroup startups sector in theme, so maybe tomorrow?
You should use a real jobscheduler : rundeck, trust me you won't regret it. And yes, it is a real application, scalable. http://rundeck.org/
One thing I noticed is that the developing countries generally lack in payment infrastructures. Most people don't really use credit cards/debit cards etc and cash is the regular way of payment. Mobile payment is also growing traction mostly because they are just moving smaller amount of money and people are constantly on the move.

Developing countries also depend a lot on 'bargaining' because generally there's always a black market. People who value the experience of shopping likes fixed prices, but in general, in a developing country, either you can offer the cheapest prices or save them some time, or they don't really care about the 'shopping experience' at all. There's always a black market for just about anything and most people would just wait for the best prices instead of hopping for every 'sale'.

So for a successful retail website in a developing country we need :

Products/services/stuff we can buy or sale such as groceries, books, electronic appliances etc.
Cheaper prices than the black market/cheap markets where people would rather go for cheaper stuff. Basically the price really needs to be more competitive. Alibaba for example, focused more on giving best prices in the beginning instead of creating the best design for women or stuff like that.
Variety of material. The actual reason retail/ecommarce sites work because people don't really want to browse sites after site to find only one stuff.
Bundles/bargains/discount rates which is proportional to the people's income.
Excellent delivery system. If one or two times people lose stuff or their material gets stolen, they are simply going to abandon online shopping because they don't have much emotional attachment towards the experience of online shopping. They want the service first, style later.
Payment should be either done by cash or phone. Basically bypass most banking services or let third party payment providers handle dealing with banks and use them for your website. Paypal is good but isn't adopted at all the developing countries. So I think mobile payment systems work really well.
Channeling the word of mouth process. Reputation goes a long way in a developing country. Since they have less options, the chances of creating a monopoly is big.(obviously it'd not be as big as amazon though)
Do you have any data to back up your claim that New York is "substantially more sustainable than the rest of the US"? I'd be genuinely curious to look at that data
Yes and no. You can change the carbon efficiency of people's consumption quite a bit with appropriate nudging and consumption taxes. You can also have global agreements paying countries not to exploit their "unburnable" fossil fuel resources.

Little things like the EU mandate for ending incandescent lightbulbs can definitely add up. You need technology and policy and economics. The market for power plants is never going to be "free", it's always full of political considerations for permitting. So countries need to have energy policies that move towards low-carbon energy.

Terraforming I'm much more skeptical about. I can't see how you can make the economics work for anything other than a tiny bit.
There is nothing wrong with using callbacks. Or promises. Or async/await. Or any other abstraction that makes sense for you.
Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear.

I've said this before, and the same climate scientists who first discovered anthropogenic global warming agree, that nuclear fission plants are the only technology that can bridge the gap between fossil fuels and fusion.
The good news is that global populations will begin to decline over the next 100 years!
Anyone else who feel that the climate-related news are getting very scary? If for every month for the last year, there was a new sprinter breaking the last months world Record in 100 meters you'd know something was fishy. Like some kind of incredibly potent anabolic steroid runners were ingesting. With new and improved versions of that steroid being released every few months...
Press and hold the notification, select App Info, disable notifications. That has worked for me very well.
"Add features = language crufty."

Truly remarkable that they got it right on the first pass if that's the case. Rob Pike must be a frickin SOOPER GENIOUS.
> Vietnam has done a much better job of keeping
> politics out of private industry

Couldn't be further from the truth.
Say you dont know C++. Read kernighan ritchie cover to cover.
Don't worry, the sea level rise will come up through the floor and kill their fan heater.
I'm not denying that the world has been heating up since 1900. I'm saying that during the last ca. 36 years it is suddenly going very much faster than it did before.
This sounds like a plug piece about this person's life. Great, he sold a company for a large sum of money, he's stood on the top of a moving plane, he's played some video games. This article very flagrantly displays his wealth, and goes into so little detail on the business. And the staged photos alongside this are equally ridiculous.

unfortunately, this is more a "rich kids of Silicon Valley" than anything else.
Will TypeScript replace JavaScript in development?
I have used JavaScript for many years since before Angular1. Since then I have worked with Angular 1 and React. Tried a few javascript-replacement tools and never liked those. At a new implementation, I started with Angular2, didn't like it because thinking in React is addictive. But loved TypeScript and now switched to using React+TS. I think any large web-app nowadays requires a framework (read: ecosystem) like React, Angular or others. And it feels odd and substandard to not to use development and build tools like webpack.

I like TypeScript for many reasons and just don't want to code in plain JavaScript anymore. But I am concerned if TypeScript will end up dying just the way all other javascript-replacement frameworks ended.
If there's a methane tipping point, we may have already passed it. Have a look on YouTube, and you'll see people in Siberia happily creating fireballs by poking a stick in the ground and holding a lighter over the hole they've just created. And more methane is bubbling up from the Arctic continental shelf every year.
It's not all year round. The rule is pretty easy: when you can't think clearly any more you start your AC.

That's the reason some houses have not AC in the south of Europe but all the offices have.
That the problem is there are too many people in a world of finite resources. A solution is less people.

I'm not suggesting how this is done, but we probably shouldn't e.g. subsidize growth anymore. You shouldn't get a tax break for having kids. It should go the other way.
and here we are, still without any thorium reactor anywhere on the planet in operation.
I don't know really what you're arguing. I don't think that the poster was suggesting that we go back to the flintstones-age, and I'm sure he/she was appreciative of the work that's been done in the past, but that in no way deters from the fact that current and future generations are going to have to do a lot of cleanup from the past generations.
I would guess your footprint is more increased by getting all kinds of stuff (you don't really need). And the stuff being shipped across half the globe.
Ah, sorry for the double post, didn't see it originally!
It's an average over time. People were talking about going to the local lake this weekend because the local weather service reported it was going to be the warmest ever water temperatures for this year - 0.1 degree warmer than last year.
You know what, that's exactly what I'll do. Shouldn't even really have needed to ask such a question :)
> You can abstract yourself in a corner in C as well.

It's much, much harder to do than in C++. It's also much more obvious when it happens, and in collaboration others will spot it quickly.

His tone is harsh but I find it completely right. I prefer to use C at work exactly because the same kind of software would be an absolute nightmare to write in C++ (it is very low-level soft, extremely similar to kernel code).

C++ is good if you can enforce very strict guidelines and if every single programmer that contributes to the code is very good at C++. Those are pretty big if, especially if you work with a partially open source codebase.
I would take it with a grain of salt. In Germany, we had warm summers in recent years, but this year's July has generally been cold and very rainy.
Yes, your upfront cost are expensive, because of course the plants have to be build. But that was the case with fossil plants as well, the only difference is, they are already built.
But in the long run, it's cheaper due to the lack of needed fuel.
Agreed. We no longer have the luxury of being prissy about ionising radiation.
This has been out for years now yet the title is written as if it were just released. Is this just blatant promotion or is there something I'm missing about this story?
> Nothing about the scenario you speculate about invalidates good discussion about programming languages and I don't know what about the scenario makes you think it does.

I agree - nothing invalidates good discussion on this topic. My point is that trying to decide the best programming language for a particular task (or trying to decide why one programming language is ill-suited) isn't something that always needs a perfectly objective answer.
Pretty ironic that this uncritical puff piece makes the front page of HN the day after Gawker wrote their last
The trouble with heavy industry is that it's heavy. You can't ship e.g. bauxite to orbit and aluminium back down using conventional rockets and have the economics make any sense.

The timeframe is unlikely to work either. We're a decade away at least from the first industrial building on the moon, but we need to change CO2 production now.

Edit: the only sci-fi space solution that might make sense is the solar shade, if you can find a suitable reflective durable thin light material for it.
and today we learn about the concept of average...
They're not equivalent (that is, it can't be freely substituted by a dispenser) only because the devices are mechanically different. Knowing how to use an EpiPen doesn't mean knowing how to use an Adrenaclick, even if they are aministering the same drug in the same dose using more-or-less the same kind of mechanism. It's that "more-or-less" that's the key; since they differ in the way they're used and administration is quite time-sensitive, you can't assume that a person trained to use an EpiPen will be able to use an Adrenaclick properly when the time comes (or vice versa).
NPR article is "irreversible in 1000 years scale". Yes, things are different in million years scale. But even immeidately achieving zero emission today will not cool the planet, at least for 1000 years.
But wasn't that on totally different timescales?
Possibly, but it's too slow and expensive to build and insure. Even in the UK, how much solar and wind can we put up before Hinkley Point C produces its first watt?
Hopefully this will spur developments for Cape Wind [1] and other locations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
Read this book https://www.amazon.com/How-Fail-Almost-Everything-Still-eboo... it's all about how to build a succesful future version of yourself.
Ok, I'm impressed. That's actually a pretty cool solution that's missing in every other backtick-enabled language I know.
The code itself is not the problem.
Data, specifically mutable state and dependencies are.
Relying on the platform to figure those out for efficient async execution hasn't worked out so well in the past...
"The broadest and most established definition of derivative work for software is the abstraction, filtration, and comparison test (“the AFC test”) as created and developed by the Second Circuit. Some circuits, including the Ninth Circuit and the First Circuit, have either adopted narrower versions of the AFC test or have expressly rejected the AFC test in favor of a narrower standard. Further, several other circuits have yet to adopt any definition of derivative work for software.

As an introductory matter, it is important to note that literal copying of a significant portion of source code is not always sufficient to establish that a second work is a derivative work of an original program. Conversely, a second work can be a derivative work of an original program even though absolutely no copying of the literal source code of the original program has been made. This is the case because copyright protection does not always extend to all portions of a program’s code, while, at the same time, it can extend beyond the literal code of a program to its non-literal aspects, such as its architecture, structure, sequence, organization, operational modules, and computer-user interface."

https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech5.html
It gets problematic, because then you'd basically have a system where the government decides who gets to have kids.

A better solution is probably a raised standard of living and more education.

edit: By raised standard of living I'm not talking about AC and other energy-intensive luxuries. I mean not having to have 7 kids because many of them will probably die.
I'm pretty sure it is! ( I'm also pretty sure that for a subset of the HN crowd, you may have just proven Linus's point :-P )
I dunno. I don't feel slighted because no Europeans or middle easterners are represented in Chinese operas just because the silk road.
> As long as they're rick enough to do so you'll never stop them.

This is the key. We just have to start charging properly for externalities. Then two things can happen, either only the very rich eat meat regularly or someone finds the technical solution you are hoping for.
Genode (essentially a microkernel abstraction layer, and some useful userland, a full Qt implementation and a reasonable UNIX-y layer) is entirely C++, with some C++ microkernels available for it (Fiasco.OC and Nova being the two I'm playing with).
I'm waiting for this one to drop like a little girl for a pony on christmas. Hope its not gonna be a disappointment for some reason.
It's not even something we need to be prissy about. We've pretty much had the basic "we don't know everything we don't know yet" accidents. Stopping at this point is as much a waste as giving up on aircraft development in 1965 or so would have been.
I think that the "caring about their business" is the grandparent's point: There are a lot of bad low level and middle managers whose whole reason for being bad is either not caring or having no ability to measure employee contributions.

I think of a job I quit a while ago: I was getting all the credit in the world, as I had been hired by the rare competent manager. The department had a non-public document rating each employee and contractor, and their idea of how likely they were to leave. I got to take a peek at it, and any technical employee could use it to easily identify the bad managers, if just because their team's scores were all wrong: Terrible, toxic employees being rated as great and at risk of fleeing because they behaved like Linus. Good people that were actively looking for other jobs seen as under average but with no risk of leaving... completely wrong.

In the last 15 years I have seen plenty of good and bad developers, but, for the most part, there is little disagreements among the technical staff about each other's competence. If kept in a purely technical role, a bad employee can produce nothing. Bad managers, however, are often seen as successes by their own managers, and end up killing teams and companies.
Soviet Cosmonauts Carried a Shotgun into Space
I live in Louisiana, southern US. I generally leave the thermostat set to ~23°C, so the AC comes on periodically to try and maintain that temperature indoors. During the warmer months, that's a significant portion of every day. During the winter, the central heating comes on instead to do the same job. There are some times of the year where neither come on, but they are brief and it will likely be on at night. It would get far too humid indoors without something running, I wager.
The problem there is: what are you supposed to do? Many thermostats are placebos anyways.
I think the technology for that is already there, or nearly so; the financial will really isn't. There's no way you can get $1trn for anything other than a war.
Another aspect is that many spacecraft use thruster fuel over time, both for pointing and for station-keeping. Once you run out of fuel, the spacecraft may lose the ability to keep its high-gain antenna pointed at Earth, so you may lose touch with it completely, especially for deep space missions; but more seriously, it may also stop being able to keep its solar panels pointed towards the sun.

(Some spacecraft don't use thruster fuel for pointing, so they don't suffer from this so badly.)

In addition, if your vehicle is in Earth orbit, it may be assigned a position. For example, geostationary satellites must keep within their assigned slot or else you'll be very unpopular. (See, for example, the Galaxy 15 zombiesat, which went nuts and started drifting into other satellite's slots, while broadcasting hash.)

So if you run out of fuel, you won't be able to do this any more, and as a result some satellites are required to keep a fuel reserve so that they can be sent into a safe graveyard orbit at end-of-life.
> Having grown up in the south, and lived for several years in New England, let me assure you, "humid" in the south is in a completely different class than the exceedingly brief New England summer. I've seen humid days in NE, but it's just a different thing altogether in the south where you can open the back door and walk into what feels like a wall of watery air. I'm sure NE has a day here or there where it gets to that extreme, but it's practically guaranteed in the south.

I've been to the South too; we get like a week of weather like that most summers. Maybe you could quibble about the differences but it gets hot enough that I think the whole question about whether to wear shorts is equally valid.

As far as the parking lot thing... I mean, do you think we all spend a lot of time outside in the winter?
It's not terribly hard to find data on NYC's carbon footprint per capita: http://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/state/analysis/

From the article:
"New York, with a population of 19.6 million people, had the lowest per capita CO2 emissions – 8 mt per capita. A large portion of the population is located in the New York City metropolitan area where mass transit is readily available and most residences are multi-family units that provide efficiencies of scale in terms of energy for heating and cooling."
The problem is the accumulation of these emissions over decades. CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for roughly a century. Also, the recent industrialisation of countries like China means we are emitting more today than ever before.
Well, technically you are just changing the amount of your existing bid. This is not really a useful distinction for eBay on its own, but is when looking at other auctions where number of bids has an effect on the result.
Cold water extraction