skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Capital Weather Gang usually does a better job explaining things to the masses, so that's a little disappointing. Having a similar conversation with family and friends, it's challenging to explain the hype.

Weather is incredibly complex and difficult to model and predict. We have multiple sources of truth to provide the input to our models: radar sites spaced hundreds of miles apart, balloons that are launched twice a day and hundreds of miles apart, METAR stations that record ground observations, satellite, etc. Satellite data is the closest you can get to seeing the entire atmosphere as an interconnected system with no gaps in data, but is limited by being a top-down view (better spectral information will help), somewhat low resolution, and 5-15 minute update intervals (storms can go from nothing to tornadic in 45 minutes).

CIMSS and other groups of researchers are doing great work with our current satellite data like identifying when supercells are likely to produce tornadoes and estimating instability in a column of the atmosphere. Increasing spectral information, resolution, and frequency will enable products to be refined and new products to come out - such as lightning detection, which currently relies on private networks.

Severe weather nowcasting is only one of the areas that will benefit from this, but the one that I'm familiar with as an amateur meteorologist. GOES-R has the potential to cut false alarm rate and increase warning times for severe weather. Weather nerds are rather excited, as this stands to be a powerful new tool.
I know i pay for these things through taxes, but i think in the end it's cheaper if we handle this through a tax system. No huge corporations looking to improve their profits at the cost of service to customers.

I like to think of western-europe as an all-in or full-service country. Maybe you pay a bit more, but you get way better service, and by not having to decide and buy yourself you're left with more of what's really important: free time.

Most of what is state provided is fairly high quality: from health-care, to education to infrastructure our government does a pretty good job.
You're absolutely correct. Conservatives will label it "socialized medicine".
I'd put a slightly different spin on that. Instead of saying "personal life and work are separated," I'd say "the public and the private sphere are separated."

When you post on Facebook or Twitter, you're publishing content in the public sphere, deliberately. Published ideas are for public consumption and judgement. If you don't want those ideas and opinions to be judged, don't publish them. Talk to your friends and family about them: keep them in the private sphere.

There's a perverse modern idea that you don't have an identity unless it's a public identity. You barely exist unless you're seen to exist in Instagram pictures, Facebook posts, and Tweets. Not only don't you exist unless you build a social media identity, but because identity is sacrosanct, whatever you publish must be accepted without reservation and judgment — because it's just you being you.

That's bullshit. You have a private identity. You don't have to publish your opinions in the public sphere, and if you do everyone has every right to judge those opinions. If you don't want to be judged, keep it private.
I found this hard truth by myself. I noticed how my attention spans were decreasing. I've always been a really distracted person, but social media made it worst.

I ended up adding Facebook, Twitter,9gag, Reddit and other sites to my /etc/hosts (0.0.0.0). Was the only way to fix it.

While I work I leave my phone at a distant table, with notifications turned down. The only thing that I get are phone calls.

I remember Simon Sinek saying something like: "if there's a person that the first thing he does when he wakes up in the morning is drinking a glass of whiskey, you'd say he's an alcoholic". What does that make you if the first thing you do when you wake up is checking Facebook?
The value of the better society I live in is greater than the value of what I pay in tax.
> fire people, based on their opinions.

Lest we forget:

- Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla, fired for a donation,

- Douglas Crockford, uninvited from NodeVember, the general opinion is that he said something that a woman didn't like,

- Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, upon an unproven accusation,

- And all people and the 2 colleagues who have been fired in smaller companies, in smaller events, without proof, only based on lynching and without demonstratedly due process to determine what they're guilty about (@mr-kanks from PyCon, I think about you every day I talk with a woman at work).
How You Can Make at Least $2,625 Each Month Online
English seems to have an extraordinary number of euphemisms for "that room":

Bathroom.
Restroom.
Water Closet.
Loo.
Bog.
Khazi.
John.
Privy.

I wonder if other languages have such an array of words for a toilet, and how much confusion they cause for foreigners.
The SLAM Missile Would Have Been a Flying Chernobyl
In half of OECD countries, including the UK, the employment rate is higher among migrant men than among native-born men:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/13/male-employment-r...
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals"

-- Agent Kay (Men in Black)
> Not my area of expertise but even if we can address 99% of strains, wouldn't that last 1% just take over and become the new 100% leaving us back where we started?

Yes, this is something to worry about and is exactly the reason why it is so hard to find a cure for AIDS. HIV mutates inside the body into thousands of different configurations and no matter what treatment you throw at it there will generally be at least a couple of strains that will survive and take over.

> Or is the promise here that we can combine this discovery with another that solves that remaining 1%?

That would be hard. There is always a chance that the additional treatment will only treat 99% of that 1% and even a single surviving virus might be enough to restart an infection with resistant strains.

> Or, do the mutations of that last 1% make HIV less virulent or harder to transmit?

One of the other comments here, from someone that read the paper, says that the antibody found in this study binds very specifically to a part of HIV that is crucial for infection so the 1% of strains that resist the antibody (due to mutations in the binding site) are less virulent. The antibody also binds only to parts of HIV that mutate very slowly so it might mean that it would take longer for virulent resistant strains to evolve.
The closest comparable to journalists running their blog is hackers to run their github portfolio. There seems pressure to run one almost professionally and on the other hand there are others in the industry that are doing well without one.

I like his scarcity argument there is something to it.

I'm less convinced of his argument that he and Steve Martin don't need it. Yeah right - but they already got visibility. Arguing against marketing from the top of the hill may get you print in the NYT but it still feels false.

There may be generational aspects to this story too.
All good points. Personally, its an idealism versus practicality argument. I personally believe (take this with a grain of salt) that we should deprecate awful languages like JS if there is truly a better alternative out there that gives superior power, ease of use, and safety. The economist in me points out that this would've already happened had they really been that much better. Kind of like one-hit wonders like "ice-ice baby" are actually not crappy songs but amazing works of art according to the masses. Maybe one day P6 will get optimized and polished enough to where all users of (P5, Python, Ruby, and TCL) say "I want that" and switch. Individuals might do that. Companies are more like glaciers.
Well, sure, but that is a work of fiction.
>How does it compare with the great buffalo herds that roamed the plains 200 years ago?

There are about 92 million cows and calves in the U.S. today.[1] Estimates for the number of bison at their peak range from 30 million to 60 million.

[1]https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2016/01_29_2016.php
It's not a zero-sum game, there aren't a finite number of hospitals and doctors. 26% of our doctors are immigrants. Immigrants pay tax, which we can spend on more hospitals and doctors. They're disproportionately young, so they have a disproportionately low need for healthcare. Immigrants are part of the solution, not part of the problem.

We simply don't spend enough on healthcare. We have an ageing population with increasing medical needs, but our spending hasn't increased commensurately. As more people reach retirement age, the ratio of workers to pensioners falls. We don't want to pay more in tax, so inevitably we'll end up spreading our resources more thinly.
I have to check my Spam folder for false positive constantly, so it's not as if GMail has solved the SPAM problem.
Like how it would be insane of McDonald's to unilaterally agree to use cage-free eggs?
When I was student in french "classes preparatoires" (between 19 and 20yo), my binom was fond of books. He read between 2 and 3 books per day when most pupils had difficulties to cope with workload.
Wouldn't it be better/cheaper just to make and feed the cows some bromoform ?
I bet most of the people aren't completely in line of "companies beliefs", the only difference is finding this out and broadcasting publicly with modern social media and its witch hunt influence.
Yes agree, just look at canned tuna. How is it acceptable to sell products that kill dolphines? Yet "dophin friendly" is treated as a marketing thing. It is like having a note saying "no kittens strangled" on a bottle of milk. It would be better to require objective ethical discolsure upfront on products. So you have "child labour may have been used" alongside the fat content and ingredients.
Put two emdrives on the ends of a rotating beam. Use the violation of conservation of energy/momentum to drive a generator. Infinite speed and energy are yours to command!
I'd like to see some research on how much redundant and unnecessary information is in typical books. I have the feeling that the essence of most books can be simplified to the size of, say, an average blog post.

Can't we make reading a lot more efficient than it is right now?
If you define sticker as published rates - I know of many companies that are paying list sticker price (published on web sites).

You have to get pretty big to get discounts from published prices, far bigger than $1M/year, more like $1M/month.
Since this is aimed at environment efforts, I would ask how much 2-5% reduction in feed is in acres of land dedicated to farming and usage of pesticides. To my knowledge, seaweed farm are considered quite eco firendly, not size constrained, and don't need pesticides.
Please don't format code with ))))))) at the end for the love of code! Use readable indentation instead as your whole point is to make things look simple to understand. That actually warrants a slap the back of your head from a team of onlookers, one at a time.
But this is fairly practical and honest: I'd want to know if the person had student loans taken out of their paycheck before giving a mortgage. It might make a difference on how much I loan the person: They obviously don't have the disposable income as another person making the same wages yet not having a loan taken out.
> Botnets appeared as a way to get around RBLs, and in response spam fighters mapped out the internet to create a "policy block list" - ranges of IPs that were assigned to residential connections and thus should not be sending any email at all.

While I understand that _some_ residential ISPs don't let you run services on your connection, policies like this make me sad because it means the web is becoming more-and-more something you need other people to do for you.
Zcash – The Design of a Secure Ceremony
It only counts against you for mortgage applications because it reduces your net income, just like any tax does. A rise in general Income Tax rates would have a similar impact.

It doesn't show up on your credit report, you can't miss a payment and damage your future creditworthiness, and lenders don't include the value of the loan when calculating your total indebtedness.

It's much closer to a graduate tax than a personal loan for mortgage purposes.
The market forces around laptops would seem to be a ripe area for serious academic study. I honestly can't find a laptop I _want_ to buy only ones I weigh silly trade-offs. (to be fair: my biggest complaint is around the lack of keyboard choices). It seems that the market desires either can't drive laptop options, or the market is vastly different than I perceive. For example: Why did it take so long for 720 screens to die as an option? For $50 more you get a 1080. I watched this for 6 years (2009 to 2014) and really can't fathom it.

Now... this is for Windows based machines, and I'm sure the forces are different for Apple, but it would be lovely to read a serious study on this. I suspect there is something along the lines of cost and supply chain factors dominating the "refresh cycle" but this used to be handled by different product lines with wildly different configurations. (it still kinda is... Alienware vs Inspiron vs Yoga vs T vs P series but Apple seems to buck this trend completely) Anyway... I just need the cathartic release of posting (venting) with these laptop articles.
> " It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5 different books on the topic once."*

I think the author has a point. Maybe re-reading a book 5 times is not better than 5 different books, but re-reading it at least once is still a good investment. First, it turns out one doesn't remember all that much from the book after the first read. Second - and more important - when you're re-reading the book, you benefit from having the overall big picture in your head already, so you can re-evaluate earlier parts of the book using your knowledge about the whole.
I disagree that you should quit everything entirely. You can be an occasional Facebook user. I check it a few times a week to see what friends up to and it's not a major distraction to my life. It's become a social hub, a way to organize events that not having one makes you "that guy", a pain to invite to parties, a pain to get a hold of. You can have a Facebook and use it as a tool rather than an addiction. Everything in moderation.
> SpamAssassin is worthless, it is a piece of shit that does nothing.

This is not entirely true. Spamassassin, dspam, and all the bayesian based ones need constrant training and feedback loop to work. The time trainings lasts for is getting shorter and shorter, but it's not entirely inefficient. ( I'm running dspam on my mail box. )

Combine this with weighted blacklists ( postscreen in my case ), add dkim and dmarc checks and it's fine for a small provider. Far from ideal, but working.

I'd love to see an open source implementation of what google was referring to as domain based trust, but it's also a nasty thing.

I've recently tried to change my mail address from a .eu domain to a .net, and most of my mail landed in the recipients' spam folder. It's a fresh domain, no one ever sent anything from it, so I'd assume fresh domains are untrusted by default, which is really bad and is generally wrong. If the trust is not OK by default, spam is users consider it spam, that's going to kill domain based mailing, which is horrible, and gmail will be the one to blaim when we have not alternatives to few providers.
Careful, I think you lumped together the retirement and health branches, the health side has a lower deficit than the retirement side, that means that the health insurance has a lower deficit than what you stated.
But even there, the components are made from the same intermediates as high volume products. "You don't just take sand from the beach to produce a dataprobe", if I may quote a computer game.

The supplies question makes one off products just as dependent on proximity as high volume products. Or maybe even more so: if you set up high volume production, no matter the cost, you will be able to source your components at somewhat acceptable prices anywhere in the world. If you do the same with lower volumes, being close to the existing supply chains that developed around volume buyers makes all the difference in the world.
Newbie question: is it really voluntary? When I was in Germany last year I used the toilets at a bar where I was a customer, and not understanding the etiquette/signs, I walked out without paying. But the "creepy guy sitting alone at a table right outside the toilets" started yelling at me loudly about Geld... at which point I understood he was the cleaner and tipped 2 Euro.

(I'm approaching this as an Australian, where public toilets and toilets in shopping malls / department stores are always free. But I don't mind a user-pays system.)
Most companies have no right to any sort of "core beliefs". We are doing business, not church or homeless shelter.
I don't think it would help to create a vaccine directly but it could help vaccine research.
How my father, JG Ballard, foresaw our strange present
Spikey Spheres
Even if this was useful, it presumes the ability to prove a application correct while modifying it. This would only be doable in very limited circumstances not general purpose applications.
Our engineering guys maintain images that are stripped and hardened for the dev team.

That way we don't waste time optimizing at deployment time or deploy crap into production.

Our java people need more memory and we addressed it by giving them server VMs and CI tools.
Public vs private is irrelevant. There are just bigots who can not tolerate different opinions.
Here even folks below the poverty level pay a little bit on the VAT taxes and so on, as do children. (Even if the money they are spending originated with the taxpayers)
When you've got a negative population trend, it's hard to argue against migration under any circumstances. Maybe capital and automation take the place of younger workers, but that's a pretty serious bet to gamble social welfare program solvency on.

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-refugees-d...

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2016/jan/06/refuge...
Yes. But that should not be new or surprising information to anyone.
Humans might stop AI from producing another Beethoven
While I would like to have read the entire post, the constant flashing ads and overlays gave me a health crisis and I was forced to abandon the article.
Backbone with ES6
So true. I like the idea of taco bell programming:
http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-progra...
The facs in France are well known for their laissez-faire attitude vis à vis students' personal work.
The faculty personnel has a limited engagement with the integration of the students into the cursus. Combined with the moderate interest post-high school students show this leads to about 50% of the promotion not quite dropping out.(+)

And then there's the 'diplomas for all' aspect which incentivises the faculty to reach out and lower the barrier of passage into the next year, with obvious consequences....

(+) oh the humanities, mostly
From Developer to DevOps: My Story
Best Android Smartphones with Powerful Camera You Can Buy Right Now
I know those people would be glad for the money, but damnit it was 80 Fahrenheit on Friday and it's nearly Thanksgiving. Whatever's going on with the weather, humanity doesn't need to be making it any worse.
smtpd_helo_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
reject_invalid_helo_hostname,
permit

smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
permit_sasl_authenticated,
reject_invalid_hostname,
reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
reject_unknown_recipient_domain,
reject_unauth_pipelining,
reject_unauth_destination,
check_policy_service unix:private/policy-spf,
check_client_access pcre:${config_directory}/dspam_filter_access,
permit

This is in my postfix config. The invalid hostname and non_fqdn tests are working quite well against residential hosts: they don't have valid reverse DNS or an fqdn, and so they get eliminated fast.
Let's be a little more careful than that. Obamacare is more than just the exchanges, and the exchanges aren't failing in every state (premiums are even going down in a couple states). There was also a provision for federal funding of the unpredicted expense that was blocked by congress.

Anyway, my point in my other comment was that while Obamacare did try to shift costs to younger people, low participation wasn't a problem to be solved, it was seen as an opportunity to grow the pools and make it sort of work. The pools probably should have been grown by ending group policies.

Broadly speaking, I probably agree with you. Spending is unlikely to solve a pricing problem.
But the Sierras could lack snow for either of at least two reasons:

1. It's too warm in the region, so water remains liquid and snow does not accumulate.

2. The moisture that normally falls out of the air as snow has gone somewhere else in the world.

I suspect the drought is due more to [2] than to [1] which makes the link between the drought and global warming less direct and more tenuous. But I would love it if someone who knows more about the relevant meteorology could share some facts about this.
That's not entirely true. Your student loan repayments are deducted from your net income when calculating affordability, for very obvious reasons. The amount of debt isn't a factor and student loans aren't recorded with credit reference agencies. Student loans don't significantly affect the affordability of housing. If you're on a salary of £30,000, your student loan repayments will reduce your net income by less than 4%.

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-tuit...
> Also, theorizing an entity beyond our understanding is fundamentally different from theorizing an entity beyond our universe.

No, they are functionally and ontologically equivalent.
/offtopic

> vintage: 2014.

Email is from the 70s and you label anything from 2014 related to it as vintage?
I'm not familiar with German Welfare but in the UK we have means tested welfare. It is a wicked poverty trap

If you earn £1 you lose £1 of welfare.

So if you want to do a hour a day of toilet maintenance you need either a very strong sense of community or another income.

One of the reasons a Negative Income Tax might work better than means tested benefits

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
More hand waving. Pardon this patriot.
This part really resonated with me:

> Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it’s engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media in the way it’s designed to be used — persistently throughout your waking hours — the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit of stimulus at the slightest hint of boredom.

I've recently been finding it really hard to concentrate on my work and I genuinely think this might be the reason. I find myself compulsively opening twitter and tumblr and scrolling through for ages before realising that literally none of it is interesting. I'm just scrolling past brightly coloured images and auto-playing videos while completely distracted and detached from the real world.

I agree with the sentiment elsewhere in these comments that the solution isn't to completely delete your accounts (I think they can have some value when used in moderation), but rather to change the way I use them. Maybe deleting the native apps and using the webapps will raise the barrier to entry high enough that I'll only use them when there's actually something I want to do on them.

As for Facebook, I deleted that a few months ago and my quality of life instantly increased.