skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you said that you worked on the LHC for several years - what was your role, and how were you involved with the vacuum system? Because your answers show a serious lack of understanding.

First, part tolerances are not a particularly important issue with engineering of high vacuum systems (sealing is effected by compression of gaskets, usually soft stainless steel gaskets for UHV systems).

Secondly, the difficulties in maintaining a large UHV system is usually related to "outgassing", from multiple surfaces and/or material imperfections, and are rarely due to "a single flaw in one part".

Thirdly, you are using the word "exponentially" wrong, even in the context of your flawed claim which is addressed below.

Finally: "the force on the pipe" is not, in a meaningful sense, proportional to the square of the radius. The forces in the pipe wall are proportional directly to the radius (formula is stress=pressure*radius/thickness), if it was otherwise pipe thickness would grow as the square of diameter and large pressurised pipes would be physically impossible.

Happy to do the math for you when you need it, best to leave it to the experts.
Car companies don't sell their race cars.
> ie you still need your mutexes, semaphores etc. if you want to avoid race conditions [...] In Twisted, you know that you only have one thread running at a time, so you actually don't need any thread synchronization primitives when accessing non-local state.

I disagree (unless you have a toy example or demo). As the software grows it becomes peppered with yields at the top level. Everything start yield -- authentication is an yield, launching a background job is an yield, writing to the databases. At that point you might find that some shared data has to be protected as well from concurrent IO requests so you still need semaphores and locks.

Heck, Twisted has http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/9.0.0/api/twisted.interne... I had to use it too because multiple callback chains modifying and accessing the same state had a race condition. Yeah I knew I could multiply a matrix quickly without having to acquire a lock, but I wasn't multiplying matrices I doing IO-bound things. With concurrent IO requests there is still a potential for a data race.

> So green threads may be great but they don't bring anything new to the table.

Green threads bring:

1. Lighter weight concurrency units than native threads.

2. Green threads don't fragment the library ecosystem. (For a language with batteries included this is rough). If you have been using Twisted you know what I am talking about. "Oh I found a library that does this protocol. Ah, but it is not Twisted, can't work with it. Start writing a parallel implementation

3. Provide a better abstraction without extra code bloat. When you really want to put an item in a shopping cart, do you really care anything underneath yields? You want to write : authenticate(); get_price(); get_availability(); update_cart(); respond_to_user(); and such. That code should not know about select loops and reactor and awaits. Lower level frameworks should handle that and top level code should be clean and obvious.

After switching from Twisted (even with inlineCallbacks) I cut the total lines of code in a large code base by half by using eventlet (that was before gevent), because it cut all the callbacks and handlers and all that stuff. Those are lines of code cluttering the business logic, they need maintenance, they need people to read them when bugs happen.

Are Gevent and Eventlet ideal? No, they have been always a hack. But in practice I'll take the monkey-patching vs awaits, yield or deferreds and having to hunt for or rewrite libraries which speak that particular IO "language". I understand that on paper and in small example those look neat in clean, in practice it turns into a mess.
k. - Tim Cook
So valuable. We have an in person CTO mentor network that's about 3 years old now with approx 70 members. Check it out 7CTOs.com
The reason motorcycle companies invest in racing is not just to establish cred, but to actually push the boundaries of technology and innovation that they can then incorporate into their "consumer" models.

A "true Pro grade" computer offers no such advantage - in fact most of the innovation comes from making things smaller and thinner - as soon as you take away the weight/size restriction, sure you can make supercomputers in a box, but it's also pretty darn easy to do so.

And the final point - consumer bike customers usually watch bike racing, and probably dream of being a pro bike racer - few Mac customers could care less about "digital creative professionals" and don't really want to emulate being one of them.
> Earlier today a friend sent me a video of her bed-bound grandmother taking VR tours of distant cities to which she had never traveled.

Would you happen to have the name of that product, that's the sort of thing I think a lot of older people would be into, rather than games, etc.
I'm using an rMBP and the XQuartz treatment of text on there is literally painful -- simultaneously blurred and pixellated if that makes any sense. This isn't the hedonic treadmill effect with regards to the retina display as I have no problems using other systems with "standard" displays.
This is not at all a new problem for Python. In fact, it's possibly more of a problem for Python than it is for C++, because Python's dynamic nature and exposure of many internal mechanisms makes it possible to do some pretty crazy stuff in the libraries.

For example, speaking of async - even 2.7 already has Twisted, and an ecosystem of libraries around it.

The only two ways I can see it being solved is either by making it more of a toy language (which is great if you're just writing short scripts, but it's not really what it's supposed to be about); or by having a very centralized "best practices" enforcement that basically forces libraries to conform through peer pressure, like Java - which has its own disadvantages aplenty.
That's one perspective. Another is that once the pieces line up, the capabilities are so overwhelming that the transition only happens once. It's a bit like mitochondria and ATP: an energy pathway for life which was so overwhelmingly beneficial that it happened once, and any previous (multicelluar) life simply couldn't compete.

Fermi's Paradox is another fascinating element, and there are a number of other possible choke points and filter which could also come into play: the Cambrian explosion (complex multicellular life), sex, intelligence, ice ages, the Moon, fossil-fuel stores in the first place, arrangements of continents, etc., etc.

But several changes seemed to have emerged fairly widely and across multiple regions. Agriculture in particular arose independently and at roughly the same time (perhaps a few centuries difference) in the Middle East (Mesopotamia), Yangtze River, Mayan civilisation (Yukatan Peninsula), and possibly a few others, within 500 - 1,000 years of each other. *This at a time when there was no communications between the Americas and the African-Eurasian continent.
> Still dubious, though many are transformations of LoC images
> which the blog owner claims copyright on.

Specifically, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ — hundreds of thousands of catalogued, searchable images.
It is a complex problem. As far as I understand, in the criticism to any work on climate change in the west (at least in the US) is that people are still debating if it is real or not, in the face of evidence; hence there's lack of political will. And, in countries like India or China, the criticism is that lots of people need cheap fuel to get out of poverty and imposing restrictions would impede that. Though, the per capita consumption is way less compared to countries like US. That said, I wouldn't say these countries are not doing anything. I can speak for India, for example, there is the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission[0] that is a goal to achieve 100,000 MW of solar power generation by 2022 and I see developments underway in many states in India. There are similar initiatives in other areas like Wind energy etc.

And, the defeatist attitude that no one takes it seriously, lets just do nothing and hope it works out is dangerous. As far as I can tell, the island nations will be the first affected, not to mention harsher weather, more storms, followed by massive shortages of food and water. I wouldn't be surprised if that leads to more wars than funding research and innovation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru_National_Sola...
> The diversity. I like the mix of cultures and the exposure to things that are new. I'm one of those people who constantly craves novelty, and there's not many cities that can provide that.

I think the only US city that fits that is NYC and even then you have to go look for it.
Ask HN: Best Command Line Web Browser
What do you guys recommend for browsing the web with command line interfaces and no JS etc. I mean as a regular browsing experience and not programmatic/experimental way..
Some really interesting points in here.

>So I guess I wish there was a tool with which I could manage type information in the program in a lot more dynamic way than I currently do.

I write a small amount of Haskell for personal projects and I always use type annotations for top-level definitions for two reasons. 1) I write them in advance because it helps me think about what I'm doing, and 2) I like that the compiler will tell me if I accidentally change the type between successive compilations. If it weren't for the first point though, I can imagine it would be nice to omit the type signatures and then have the compiler not only infer them for me but actually place them into the source code to save itself the trouble next time whilst improving my documentation. If it could do that, the logical next step would be to have another tool to strip out all the type signatures, to give you that design-time dynamic feeling whilst still being very much static at compile time. You can refactor all you want changing signatures and the compiler will put them all back in again when you're done.
Thanks.

I'm always looking for insights, sources, and more than anything else, criticisms of things which are incorrect, unclear, or don't stand to inspection.
Honest question: How many people are left without some form of ad-blocking? It seems to have become incredibly ubiquitous, and when malicious ads aren't teaching people to go and get it, loud and obnoxious ads are.
I personally use www.sharelatex.com (which is open sourced under the AGPL license).

Downloading LaTeX locally on macOS (or rather, Mac OS X as it was called at the time) is not very difficult. As I recall, it's basically just: download this .pkg file, run it, and you're set. That being said, I did _not_ enjoy having LaTeX installed locally. It wasn't harmful, it just wasn't at all beneficial compared to using an online LaTeX service.

The install size is easily tens of thousands of files (totalling a couple GBs), most of which are only a couple hundred KBs each. The vast majority of those files went unused. It clogged up my file system, gave me a marginal amount of benefits, and figuring out how to change the config files to do one _tiny_ thing was horrifically difficult.

As a result, I migrated to using ShareLaTeX. It was just simpler than having to manage the install myself. The value proposition of a (hosted instance of) ShareLaTeX is that I can use LaTeX from any computer (connected to the Internet) to access any of my automatically synchronized files and have an automatically updated install of LaTeX. I personally found that value proposition worthwhile.
I did the same, odd.
"This is actually worse for freight than for passengers, which is why the speed limits on curves are lower for freight trains than for passenger trains"

I'm 91% sure that this is less to do with freight specifically and more to do with the amount of weight involved and how it's distributed in each car. Then again, I'm no expert on freight trains.
Interesting reading.

Since 2012, I've tried Elementary several times but I always come back to whatever other (Debian based) distro with LXDE because there's one thing, really JUST ONE THING, on Elementary I can't stand: the Application Switcher (alt+tab) animation. It's slow and distracting and, even switching any and every UI animation off, I couldn't speed it up.

I still like the project and I really want to use it as my main OS some day (at least for 1 year or so. I'm always switching OSes)... I'll give it a try again next month to see how things are going.
also he started a successful, innovative new rocket company
Yeah, I've read that article and largely agree with it.

Personally, I'm as anti-authoritarian as can be, to the point of considering myself an anarchist. My childhood was spent around conservatives though, so I guess you could say that I'm "culturally Republican". I noticed early on that Trump's support within the GOP was predominately among those who had no problems with using the power of government to shape society to their own notions.
The CEO of Google Fiber just resigned, and they had a layoff. I don't think Google will be saving us from the cable and AT&T monopolies anytime soon.
Indeed it can!

"rapid deglaciation promotes earthquakes ... rebound stress that is available to trigger earthquakes today is of the order of 1 MPa. This stress level is not large enough to rupture intact rocks but is large enough to reactivate pre-existing faults that are close to failure."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound#State_of_...
It's worth keeping in mind that the first European fixed-track transports were also human or animal-powered. Most were in mines or associated with moving ore relatively short distances.

The railroad was a generalisation of tracked road, wheeled cart, and prime mover.
Diversify your income: All my ideas for making money online
When people who use your products because they are best in class stop using them the clear message is they no longer think they are best in class.

Being a fan and using Apple sends very little signal regarding their quality. Being agnostic and using Apple sends a larger signal. Right now the signal seems to be that Apple is no longer making professional class hardware. Fans and status symbol seekers will still want them. People who need to get work done will slowly stop wanting them.
Digilent academic pricing is for students, but you'll have to write some words about your project and it's a manual verification process. Worked fine for me, though.
iyn,

Author here. Thanks! That's a great suggestion. As you can tell, right now the site and the mailing list is the most minimal of an implementation. We want to build a network, connect and mentor one another through the simplest and easiest mechanism possible - email. Once we have a medium-sized community with dozens of experts, we plan to add community managed content. Perhaps through a wiki?

I'll share the books and articles that have positively affected my career. These aren't tried and true and maybe dozens of people would disagree about their value but here they are, for what they are worth:

Management:

- High output management (Grove, 1995)
- Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win (Useem)
- It’s your Ship  (Abrashoff)
- The score takes care of itself  (Walsh)
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things  (Horowitz)
- Where good ideas come from  (Johnson)
- Extreme Ownership (Navy Seals) — (Willink)
- Work Rules — (Bock)
- 5 Dysfunctions of a team — (Lencioni)
- Give and Take (Grant)
- This is what impactful Engineering leadership looks like - http://firstround.com/review/this-is-what-impactful-engineering-leadership-looks-like/
- Notes on startup engineering management for young bloods - http://www.elidedbranches.com/2015/10/notes-on-startup-engineering-management.html?m=1

Engineering:

- Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk (Duval, Matyas, Glover, 2007)
- Continuous Delivery: Release Software Releases through Build, Test and Deployment Automation (Humble, Farley, 2010)
- Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2nd Edition (The XP Series) (Beck, Andres)
- SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
- Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
- Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
- Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
- Refactoring Databases - Evolutionary Database Design (Ambler, Sadalage, 2006)
> Mozilla decides to drastically redesign their user interface, removing tons of flexibility

Or you can just use Pale Moon which is literally a Firefox fork without the Australis UI.

> and next on the chopping block are their more-powerful extensions

They're not "on the chopping block". If they stop working, it's only because they haven't been maintained for a long time anyway. Mozilla doesn't break backwards-compatibility for the heck of it, it needs to do these changes to get to the same level of security that's offered by Chrome (with its multi-process architecture), to get to the next level of performance that's hinted at by Servo, and to get rid of the massive maintenance nightmare that is XUL.

(I don't say that the transition won't be painful at places. I'm very worried that Vimperator does not support Electrolysis yet.)

> Gnome decides to totally throw out the old paradigm of desktop user interfaces with version 3.

Or you can just use Mate, which is literally a Gnome 3 fork with the Gnome 2 UI.

> Every major Linux distro jumps on board with systemd.

Yes, because it has tremendous technical advantages for distributors. And it's also good news for independent software vendors because it steamrolls over a lot of useless incompatiblities between distributions, so if we see more commercial software for Linux in the future, systemd might play a small part in it. (Of course, stuff like that doesn't make the frontpage.)
Thanks, this is fascinating! This is the sort of thing that makes me think Vernor Vinge wasn't so far off when he described the concept of programmer archaeologists.

BTW, can you upload the original doc file somewhere? Google Docs appears to be mangling the formatting in a few places (page 28, for example).
Mobile users. There just aren't any pleasant ad free browser experiences for stock mobile phone users. Firefox for Android is quite poor and fixing through chrome requires root, something most users are not going to be doing
Best comment [1] I read a couple of days ago:

>One thing constantly said to founders here is "don't let a vocal minority come in, tell you they love your product, and then turn into bullies that tell you how you should make said product. You never made it for them; they aren't your market. Don't get confused into thinking they are, just because they're loud." I think that about sums up the relationship between Apple and software developers who use their hardware.

Which is good advice for Tim Cook and all of Apple. You don't want to end up making the MBP version of this [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818193

[2] https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/2236.html
>but for now tesla only turns a profit as a car company coupled with government incentives.

Subsidies and protective tariffs are the norm in the auto market.

It would put any car company that didn't get them at a significant disadvantage.
I don't have any data beyond what a web search would get you, but from past reports I have seen, somewhere between 20% and 40% of web users block ads.

I use an ad blocker on my desktop but not on mobile.
I pipe all my reading into Pocket, which does a great job of stripping the ads out.
Jesus Christ that is well overdue - I know mono isn't exactly like Microsoft's projects but why Microsoft never treats security - especially cyphers and protocols with any sense of urgency baffles me.
I paid for it and put it on both of my kids' computers. They like it a lot.
I have heard good things about block-this, which creates a VPN connection that just strips out ads, but it seems (unscientifically, because Android doesn't track VPN battery usage) a battery suck.
Hyperloop can leverage trillion in highly relevant fundamental R&D also. For example aircraft already operate at low enough external pressure to quickly kill the passengers ex: concord was under 1/20th ATM. Yet, loss of cabin pressure is a very rare situation. There is a lot of proven technology to maintain low vacuum cheaply, as a first step to achieving high vacuum. Massively improved battery technology enables reasonably high energy density's which are very much necessary. etc.

Now, sure there is a lot of new tech that would be needed. But, less than you might think.
Interestingly they're aging at 1 year per year, which is only a tiny bit slower than the people who live high in mountains who age at 1 year + epsilon (where epsilon is gravitational time dilation) per sea-level-year
Yes... it clearly is a manageable issue. The opening comment writer was the one who was overwhelmed, and no surprise given his lack of understanding demonstrated in his answer elsewhere. I just hate it when people with such a lack of knowledge make rude, hateful remarks.
>models now are 16gb of ram only

Do you have a use for more than 16gb? Serious question.
Real estate taxes pay for services. They're indexed to land values, but generally with a multiplier. That value has as a predominant factor the earning potential of the land itself, though with a confounding factor of of land's role as an asset class, which, ironically, is inflated by not taxing land highly enough, according to cogent arguments.

All of those factors scale, more or less, with inflation. So your tax obligation should be keeping reasonable track with your earning capacity for that land.

If you can't afford to pay taxes on your land, then the problem, generally, is that you're squatting on valuable property that's better reallocated to a more beneficial use. If you're simply looking to squat and retire, head to the outback.
The correct question to ask is why did it happen when and where it did. I believe that the common and correct answer is that the necessary confluence of ideas and social structures and incentives and wherewithal came together.
It drops about the first half-second of every stroke when you're using the pencil or brush tools, and completely loses some very short, quick lines. Which is a problem for someone like me who's been trained to draw with a lot of quick, confident strokes.
Some challenges in post-quantum standardization
Thanks for responding. So what is insulting about specifically asking for coding? It is not that different than asking someone to look at code at the interview and asking for comments. We do both things at my company. I am not persuaded by the famous musician example, think of someone trying out that you haven't seen play. Someone famous who is active and say not recently suffered an accident is in a different category.

We interviewed some experienced people who did terrible in the in-person interview. So we tried giving experienced people a pre-interview question, that maybe took a couple of hours of focused effort. The idea was the people who couldn't do it great during that instant could sit down in their preferred environment and code something up and take their time.Some people did better with this. I personally hate pre-interview questions, so I argued against it but we still tried it.

I find the code review of bad code too easy, not persuasive. Is it a bad idea for a service to hand out ids that are memory locations of runtime structures, and take them back? Obviously, but a surprising number of people don't see that, including experienced people.