skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Neither are new books, but this year I both read and subsequently gifted

* 1491 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...

* Stranger in a Strange Land (the "Original, Uncut version") https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Strange-Land-Robert-Heinlein...

1491 is about the societies in the Americas prior to European contact. And if anyone knows of any books on the topic that have been written since then (and thus are even more up-to-date with the current state of the field), I'm very, very interested.

Stranger in a Strange Land is just... excellent. I really appreciate Heinlein and I like his world view. Though I've never read the traditional "cut" version, I've talked with people who have read both and I'm sold on the unabridged version. As an aside, if you enjoy Heinlein, then I also recommend reading "For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs." It was Heinlein's first book, but was never published (until recently, of course). It's not polished, but it is very interesting to see how he had already formed in the 1930s a lot of the ideas that would dominate his writing for the rest of his career. A good and enjoyable read.

---Alex
It's always hard recognizing problems in one's own writing. But to give an example:

> "I'm absolutely struggling with how to change the way I write to be less complex, when I myself don't recognize it as being verbose or overly complex in structure."

could be written more shortly and simply as:

> "I don't believe my writing is verbose or complex, so I don't know how to make it simpler."

Not picking on you, if I were writing that I'd probably end up with something closer to your first version in the first draft. Which is why you want to revise into a second draft.

Luckily there's a book that can help: "Revising Prose" by Lanham (http://amzn.to/2f9pUjN). Your local library probably has a copy. It's pretty entertaining read, too.

If you want a more extensive guide, "Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace" (http://amzn.to/2f9zqDp) goes a lot further. Again, I read a copy from the library. Beyond the style of your prose, if you want a conceptual guide to business writing, see this review: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/06/15/writing-book/

But "Revising Prose" will probably suffice.
This reminds me of a related incident that happened in May 2016 when a bunch of people walked off the boardwalk at the Grand Prismatic Spring [1].

A lot of people have a very cavalier attitude about this stuff. They'll deliberately walk off the track, ignore prominently displayed warnings, feed wildlife... basically do the opposite of what has been instructed. And worse, make you feel stupid for following the rules.

In some cases, they are only hurting nature, in others, they are literally jeopardizing their own safety.

[1] http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/online-filmmakers-...
If an i-device breaks on the first day and you take it to an Apple Store, the tech fixing it has:

* A repair manual

* Parts

* Tools

* The ability to replace your device on-the-spot with a new one if they brick it
Hmm, it seems like you are looking at how you should triage an applicant if they let you test them very painfully. I am interested in games I can play where mastery also serves as a potential initial triage and could lead to interesting discussions.

Just as I like project euler gamified as a fake ideal programming project, I would like a systems game where the point is optimizing for the worst case with minimal tools.

Add an IDE, a choice of editors, all kinds of softskills requirements that are more significant to an employer than these base primary skills. Now, I wonder why I am working for free as I am no longer just practicing our core/universal skills in an idealized/timeless environment. The better place to do that form of showing off work realistic skills is in OSS projects.
> I don't see how you got there. What about simply understanding the right's position magically brings the two sides together? Wouldn't both sides need to agree?

That's why I said "to some degree". Let me state it in reverse: Knowing only a strawman version of the other side's views will make it less possible for the two sides to come together.

There is some hope that, when you see your opponents as having a position that makes some sense, even though you don't agree with it, you can regard them as something other than ignorant hicks who are too stupid to understand how much smarter everyone else is. You can lose an election and not feel that ignorance and propaganda defeated the side of the right. You can stop hating.

> Let's say the right is exactly as racist, sexist and homophobic as the left currently thinks and that more than 50% of the American people actually, truly want a return to the days when homosexuality was outlawed, blacks were slaves and women were property. How does understanding that make politics more sane?

Let's not say that. Instead, let's say that someone could vote for Trump (or at least against Hillary) without being racist, sexist, and homophobic. Understanding why they voted for Trump might make politics more sane. (Or again, take the opposite - saying that they're all racist, sexist homophobes and therefore can be ignored and treated with contempt certainly does not make politics more sane.)

> ... considering BLM's motto these days is 'kill all whites'. I don't know about you, but as a white man, I find it unlikely that I would ever sympathize with a sentiment that means I no longer exist.

Obviously, no compromise is possible with such a position. But is that really BLM's motto these days? Can you document that it is? Because I've never heard that.

But even if that is BLM's position, and you can't compromise with it, then what? Then you can't do anything but oppose BLM, and explain why as clearly as you can. The proper response, though, is not to say "Therefore clearly BLM has no legitimate grievances" or "Therefore all blacks are irrational killers".
What were your takeaways from the book?

Also, Citizen of the Galaxy and Double Star are really good reads in the same sort of vein of political-minded science fiction.
I believe "stop pollution" was always the goal and they had to crank the message to alarmist levels to get any traction.

As technology progresses and we get better at keeping our local environments clean, I predict their predictions will become increasingly dire. These doomsday warnings are just a sign that we're improving.
Nice Firebird feature is the ability to embed it and run without a server.
Stephen Hawking says we've got about 1,000 years to find a new place to live
Please enlighten us, then, how should we take the official charge brought forth against Galileo?

We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo ... have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture
Yeah, Georgia, what a shit hole. With its triple-AAA bond rating, below-average debt per capita, and solvent pension system!
Yet GPS works.
The answer is in the article, sure (OP: much lower altitude satellites, so much lower RTTs), but that was an incredibly rude way to say so.

Please don't do that.
Can't lay fiber to the entire planet for $300mil
Specs for minimum ping of some internet technologies:

2G (100–400 Kbit/s) 300–1000 ms

3G (0.5–5 Mbit/s) 100–500 ms

4G (1–50 Mbit/s) < 100 ms

ADSL+PPP (0.1-200 Mbit/s) 40 ms

Cable (2 Mbit/s - 1 Gbit/s) 80 ms

Fibre (1 Gbit/s - 100 Gbit/s) 5 ms

Note that this latency is just the transmission delay, it does not send your data more than a few hundred meters (technically up to 200km for fibre, but usually the actual distance sent is still hundreds of meters).

After that, you should consider that your data is probably being sent at least to the capital of your state, or some other large city, before there is any routing (meaning a packet to your neighbor gets sent to this large city and back). This distance tends to be more than the distance to LEO and back (but of course, your wouldn't be sending it straight up to LEO but at an angle, so the number of satellites makes a large difference. At 4000, it won't be a huge angle).

So this can still beat every technology except perhaps FTTH, which is hugely expensive and not widely spread at all. Furthermore, it can beat every mobile last mile technology.
Based on the details in the arstechnica writeup, it sounds like the wetlab work was all done with cell-free systems?
These satellites are orbiting at around ~900 miles up, which is about a 10ms round trip ping. I average around 75ms ping on my T Mobile LTE connection, which I think will be in line with SpaceX's offering.

The altitude of the ISS is only ~250 miles above sea level, while the distance from SF to LA is ~400.
The potential for labor cost arbitrage is disappearing as China scales the value chain, its nominal wages increase, the yuan appreciates and purchasing power increases, all the while the US and EU see decreased real wages.

A moderate increase in manufacturing technology turns employees into controllers rather than workers, increase's productivity and so makes manufacturing feasible in the EU and US.
"Doing exactly this" is kind of a misrepresentation.

SpaceX is launching a fleet of low-earth-orbit satellites. The rocket that blew up was carrying a single satellite, owned/built by an Israeli company and destined for geostationary orbit; Facebook had signed an agreement to lease part of that satellite's capacity for several years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos-6
I think the point is that after the extinction of humans and a large proportion of existing species on earth, life itself will continue and the next few million years will result in speciation to adapt to new niches on a planet with radically different climate.

I don’t understand how anyone finds this comforting, however.
Musk Says Tesla’s Solar Shingles Will Cost Less Than a Dumb Roof
Craig, I thought about it more. Hearing about customer development and the nitty gritty details of how the startup reached product market fit would be some details I would like to hear an in depth discussion on.
They could sell bandwidth to LTE providers too who will upsell to cell consumers.
I mean branch-and-bound - i.e. just reject when solution becomes infeasible and back-track. No cutting planes in first year college. ;)

I think the heuristics may have been based on selecting cells that had the least possible solutions, in order to quickly 'zoom in' on the areas where you can quickly prune infeasible solutions.
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Leif Babin and Jocko Willink
Tesla’s solar roof to cost less than a regular roof even before energy prod
You mean Guy Consolmagno? He co-authored "Turn Left at Orion", which is one of my favourite reading recommendations to beginning amateur astronomers of any age :)
tiny lol at "Tesla plans to launch the satellites..." Guess I'm not the only one who makes this mistake from time to time :)
For those using Rails, rails_admin and activeadmin gems provide a similar admin for Rails models.
The antarctic maybe. Though interfering with native ecosystems has never ended well.

On the plus side, we get bi-polar bears.
Are all of those ethernet cables? I can't say I know much about wiring, but that seems like a bit overkill.
Graydon Hoare on Ousterhout's Dichotomy and Julia
AIUI, GPS isn't a connection. It's broadcast, one-way communication. Also, I assume the information transferred is much lower, not much more than time and position, plus redundancy to handle things like interruptions due to landscape.
Looking at their diagram, there appear to be multiple injections of hydrogen peroxide, but no products of hydrogen peroxide.

Maybe it just requires a finite amount to get the reaction started, or there's some subtle reaction going on that's not in the diagram.

Or they decided a trickle of conventionally produced H2O2 was an acceptable price to keep the reaction going.

Wonder what I'm missing.
Isn't the pixel the phone that was just pwned inside 60 seconds by security researchers?

And doesn't google have a terrible track record of releasing data to federal agencies?

So, aside from purchasing a phone that is built by data-mining, internet advertising giant, google can't even begin to make the claim that they value user security.
You think $300 for internet at gigabyte speeds ANYWHERE is a lot? Are you serious?

Right now people are paying Comcast $100/month for 25mbps, and Verizon $100/month for 5mbps at a cap of 10Gb...

I grant you you wouldn't hit a billion users at those prices, but you wouldn't need to at those prices. I guarantee internet like this will start at a premium, maybe $500/month. Then as more people adtop it'll quickly drop to something more inline with $50/month (or less).

You say I'm exaggerating getting millions of users. However, Id like to remind you Tesla preordered how many cars? Google Fiber had how many customers switch over? This is a game changer, and one that makes financial sense on both sides. Honestly, this is going to be like the Model T or iPhone, they'll easily have a million users their first year, ten million the next, and so on until they reach market saturation.
Either by a symbiotic relationship with cyanobacteria or by transferring the genes from cyanobacteria. I mean, we're already talking about combining nine organisms into one, why stop there?
I used Airbnb (in a basement rental apartment ) the last time I visited San Francisco for a week. It was way cheaper for us and more centrally located than any hotel could have been. We enjoyed the experience greatly. This change means that I'm not going to be spending my next vacation in San Francisco. I'm sure that Daly City would be nice.

"... — the rental giant’s refusal to provide the names, addresses and guest stays that would be part of a mandatory registration system for hosts."

there's no reason at all that the City of San Francisco needs to have any of my information just because I'm spending a few nights there.
Same here.
I remember the private tracker scene being referred to as a hydra (cut one head off, and two will grow back) back when oink went down. I wonder if that hydra is still alive...
Why the hell can't C be in the web?[1]

1.https://medium.com/@lucperkins/web-development-in-c-crazy-or...
I was disappointed to see Lightsquared go belly up. I'm glad to see another (more formidable) disrupter in this area!
I took a number of Operations Research courses in undergrad, and one course was almost entirely on Linear Programming and Integer Programming. I strongly recommend engineers to get familiar with them because they are powerful tools for solving a whole class of really tricky problems.
Are we failing to fund Python's core infrastructure? [audio panel]
Can you provide a citations that Antarctica as a whole is gaining ice mass?
Well, there's going to be 800 of the suckers. There are only about 33 GPS satellites. Although 700 miles is lowish orbit, it's still above the horizon over 2000 miles away.
"Rising CO2 lifts all thermometers"?
Who Will Command the Robot Armies?
As far as I'm aware, the unhealthy mixture of theology and astronomy was basically just him arguing what Augustine did, cf https://www.pibburns.com/augustin.htm
Because the incentives are not aligned with presenting complex realities to readers of the media.

Practice intellectual self defense: Read books, and lots of them, read the comment sections but skip the articles, and engage in communities online and on the ground to gather your own information about the world.
vacri@thingy:~$ rm /sbin/init
rm: cannot remove ‘/sbin/init’: Permission denied

I don't seem to be able to blow away /sbin/init.

If I've elevated myself to be a global administrative user, then I should be able to do global administrative things, without being treated as an 'uneducated user'.

> it is not unreasonable to expect some basic level of literacy

I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect some level of literacy for administrative-level tasks, and that's what nix does.
I used to have a sat phone (Thuraya) and it was pretty reliable if you were outside. They don't work well inside buildings.
Apple launches repair program for iPhone 6 Plus ‘touch disease’ flaw
A great decrease in population, yes. That is different from extintion.
Brave performs better in terms of blocking ads - I tried it today vs Focus and have switched to it now.
I've always thought that Andrew Wyeth's paintings were more troubling than comforting. I know nothing of the man and his politics, but to me there has always been a pensive sadness to the work.

I love the classic Mad Men scene that describes nostalgia as "the pain of an old wound" [1]. That's the most apt description I've encountered and I think much more of what we are dealing with in Wyeth's paintings.

[1] https://vimeo.com/20736616
What's a Social Media Company Worth?
I'm always amazed at how cheap meat (especially chicken) is in the USA. Here in New Zealand we pay over NZ$10 per kg (US$3 per lb).

And unlike our beef, which would understandably command a premium being grass fed (like they're supposed to), our chicken is made the same way as the USA, in cages.

At least we can get reasonably cheap pork shoulder, sometimes it's as low as $7 per kg (US$2.25 per lb). I can also get lamb chops for less than NZ$10 per kg (US$3 per lb).
Im using firebase as well, it is pretty easy and good enough for a small project
And apparently, inflated chicken prices.
Had 16th century Astronomers had the power to re-arrange the orbits of the planets according to their theories, the results would certainly not have been the same, so even from that particularly mathematical point of view, they were still incorrect.

This isn't mere pedantry, a good example of epicylic type theories being used to modify the system under study, can be found today in modern economics.
Since Tesla will be making solar panels that look like tiles, they could also make mesh networking antennas that look like chimneys...
Where are those numbers from? I get a consistent 12ms ping with my cable internet (200Mbps) to local cloud servers, and have seen as low as 1-4ms on fiber.
Some of us are in the arse end of the UK, so our packets are going across the atlantic and back again.
Spreading true (well, at least less wrong) information is a noble goal.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure we're not seeing such information availability providing avenues towards a smarter, more progressive planet.

Instead, the internet seems to be helping people create cocoons of ignorance and "evidence" to support even the most specious claims - such as the world being flat.

Knowledge does not seem to be enough. Wisdom and the ability to sift through knowledge with some degree of appropriate skepticism need to spread at least as fast as the knowledge if we are to get a smarter planet.
The Overton Window and How Creative Business Ideas Arise
Real Dragon Caught by Fisherman
My guess is that gave just implies transfer of something, but gifted specifically implies giving something as a gift.
Well, it's certainly putting the fox in amongst the chickens...
Top 5 Best Android Data Recovery Tool
So they'll be able to get awesome bandwidth (by today's standards, anyway), but the monthly plan is might be a little pricey.
It's a sentiment that I'm unfortunately starting to accept. I don't think we are in a position as a society to act properly on climate change.
Geo is really really freaking far out compared to LEO. There are to-scale images floating around that really put it in to perspective.
I'm responding to mona3000, not the post.
It only has fiber to compete with, and light only travels at 2/3 speed in fiber compared to free space.
All works of Carl Jung, great writings, I love them.
It wasn't my intention to be condescending. Are you saying that rationality always wins in humans over belief? I think I'm just making a statement about all of us as humans here and I'm possibly sometimes just as guilty.
> I thought with their whole advertising of "24 hour support" they identified customer support as a weakness of theirs, and are trying to remedy it. Nope.

I'm very sorry you had that awful experience. I know it doesn't remedy your past experience, but please know myself and many other Googlers have been and still are putting a lot of work into the tools being used by the customer support reps around the globe to better help you.
>First we'd have to stop the massive deforestation that's happening right now. A lot of that is for agriculture, so we'd have to find another way to feed those people.

You say that like we couldn't just let them starve. If their descendants are going to be wiped out by global warming anyway what's the difference?
Should be, but then shareholders wouldn't get as fat of a dividend, and the board members might have to live with a 20' yacht instead of a 27' one.
I'm not sure I agree, if they served no purpose the engineers would remove them. I think when they are in 'lift and coast' the gear changes are different, and I'd guess when they turn the engine modes up they would change again.
Very sorry to hear this, mate. With depression, we lose sight of the small wins in life like a beautiful day, or a walk on the beach. Society measures success by wealth/status but individually, deep down, all of us know that the accumulation of small wins is the ticket. My son has asperger's and this is what I try to instil in him. I hope you're OK.
1. rutracker

2. /mu/ archive (sometimes obscure stuff can be found in sharethreads)

3. everywhere else (TPB, DC, Soulseek...)

4. Spotify for when I'm not at my machine
> Well obviously the "opinion-making elites" in the "mainstream" media were not able to "make" the opinions of 50% of the people. So 50% is mainstream? Where do the other 50% get their opinions?

No, they weren't able to "make" opinions in that way. They sure were able to make more than 50% of the opinions aired on radio, TV, and in print though...

The people with the microphones control the discussion. It can happen that at least half the country plugs their ears and stops listening. But it still is very difficult to have a different discussion from the one that the people with the microphones want to have.
Depends on where it's coming from. Some of those increases are because of on land glaciers thinning and spreading over the ocean.
What skills should I learn to become successful?
So just use couchsurfing.org
Cause startups are not the answer to everything. Find me a VC who's willing to invest in a chicken ranch, and maybe I'll change my tone.
AudioKit 3.5 released
Not sure about tectonic activity, but definitively more extreme weather events. Each 1°C increase does not mean that the whole atmosphere goes a little up uniformly, but that in general there's much more energy available to make stronger storms, more tornadoes, etc, and mess up with established climatic patterns.

Not Global Warming, but Global Weirding.
So developers want more money?
Am I the only one that thinks Elon Musk is scattered and overextended? Literally a new grand idea every few months..
So giant computers are a thing again? :-) Of the three so far this year I like the giant 6502[1] for "wow", the giant 80/20 thing[2] for presentation, and this one gets honorable mention for an simplified construction.

[1] http://monster6502.com/

[2] http://www.megaprocessor.com/
I don't know how many people really understand the algorithm that ranks posts, or perhaps more importantly, how much human intervention is a factor.