skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's put quantum mechanics aside and suppose we live in a universe that is 100% deterministic. In that universe, we still can't predict chaotic and overly complex things very well, like rolling a die or shuffling a deck of cards, even though in principle it would be possible if we had incredible computer models and incredible knowledge about the state of the universe beforehand. That's the kind of randomness that we're talking about when we talk about predictability. It turns out most kinds of randomness most everyone deals with is that kind of randomness. Even in the our universe with all its quantum weirdness, we could in principle predict perfectly predict most die rolls with good enough measurements and computers. It turned out that's what we meant by randomness all along. It isn't tied to physics or philosophy. Most of the things we call random, aren't truly "random" in the strictly physical sense, so we realized that we ought to have a theory that is agnostic to physics and philosophy. It turns out that the predictability version of randomness does a great job at both, so we don't have to talk about that other stuff when we apply it.
Not an expert, but 28 is very much a low estimate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... A United Nations study estimates the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster will be around 4000

However, the rather large exclusion zones are another large risk. The cost of insurance to pay for such events is very significant.
That's a great point. I've heard of some smaller companies (compose, elephantsql) but to be honest, I have definitely not considered them. The reason is that I just want all inclusive solution and I don't have much context for these companies. How healthy they are, what's the likelyhood of them going out of business, etc.

I think you bring up a good point. I'm going to put aside my bias and give a smaller company a shot. Thanks for sharing.
Still sounds speculative to me. I suspect there is an unmentioned underlying cause they are circumlocating.
At some point, everyone was adding lead to paint, and using asbestos.
and if it was my firm might actually buy some other wise the mini pc's that levano do look like our next desktop.
It is probably better that stack overflow can support itself. Donations would put them at the mercy of others whims. A donation model doesn't make sense when a company can sustain itself while still preserving its core values.
That's just a list of the positives. I think it'd be useful to your argument to also provide some "real world" nuclear experience.

E.g.

* The tax payer in Germany is picking up most of the estimated 100+ billion Euro cleanup of their reactors over the next 100 years.

* Sellafield cleanup alone is going to be £120 billion [1].

* New reactors in Europe are 2-3x over budget and not finished yet. So if we started constructing immediately then 2030 is optimistic [2].

* The chunk of Japan that's a no-go zone isn't that small. Have a look at Google maps some time.

I'd rather spend the 200 billion that new reactors will cost us on energy storage and many lower-risk, known-good providers like wind, thermal to spread risk.

[1]
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
To be fair, that is a fairly defining feature of "Workstation" vs "Office PC" if selling PCs.
> The best scifi, the really good stuff, doesn't hit a home run with reviewers immediately.

Wait, so your expectations for the movie would be higher if the Rotten Tomatoes score was lower?
This is really neat!

I uploaded an image of a gopher and it automatically detected the shape and drew it on the code.

http://assets.avi.io/screen-shot-2016-11-15-f4w73.png

This is impressive. Would love insights on how you did that.
You are missing something very important here. I can setup almost every Linux I can think of for desktop / everyday usage. My relevant question is: "Is it worth my time?", and most of the time, it's not.

Look, it's fine if you breathe Linux in your free time and you don't watch movies or play games, or nail your girlfriend, or even watch the ceiling in half-meditative state with all lights out. That's not sarcasm. Everyone has the right to do what they want with their free time.

But many of us are hackers / coders AND have a happy personal life and don't want to bring their work to their free time. And want to make the best use of their work time, too.

Linux gets the job done and I very much like my XFCE 4.x on my virtual Debian, but it's still far away from a full-blown user OS on the desktop. Numerous articles agree with this fact.
You can start by not buying cheap Chinese Android phones and hoping for the best.
Your appraisal's right, his work is more philosophical/speculative than "hard" SF. But I don't see a problem with that. There's room for both in science fiction. If you don't particularly prefer the spec-fic stuff, there's nothing wrong with that either. It depends on what you see the purpose of scifi as being: Is it to explore cool tech/science we can't explore in reality yet, or is it to use tech/science to ask questions we can't answer in reality yet?
> My opinion still is that data must be normalized with explicit procedure calls. Doing stuff implicitly is neither beneficient to efficiency nor to comprehensibility.

It can certainly benefit comprehensibility. Needing to explicitly normalize before I can apply standard comparisons leaves more space for things to go wrong. "Having a value of this type means that I have a normalized value" means I have fewer things to keep track of. (I do note that there is significant space between "it can benefit comprehensibility" and "it will always benefit comprehensibility" - that depends on what I need to be readily able to pull out of the implementation from a quick read of surface syntax)

Also, some things may have an easy equality check while normalizing may be expensive or impossible - although I sadly can't think of any examples off the top of my head.
Hi norswap,

Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. That is a valid concern, thanks for
bringing it up. I worry about this myself, being the #1 user of the tool. Do you
have any idea how to fix it, though? I thought of a dead man’s switch kind of
thing, in which I would periodically add an “everything is still working” for
low-volume feeds, but I didn’t do it because I would consider such entries
spam. What do you think?
https://github.com/bpowell/brocker

The place I work at is not ready to use something like docker, so I made a cloneish of docker for us to use. We are still in the early stages of it right now. Brocker is a combination of docker and kubernetes. Sorry for the bad documentation, I'm slowly adding more.
For cloud computing not being real, there is a lot of money being spent/made on it.

"Cloud computing," "NoSQL," "SOA" are concepts/ideas. They aren't "technologies" per say. There are, however, technologies that implement these ideas (AWS, CouchDB, Ostrich).
Who knows the definition, but I can tell you who is included. ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN.... Watching the anchors on these channels respond to Trumps performance on election night was jaw dropping. I was amazed that they weren't even going to try to pretend that they were impartially covering this election. I've always known the Fox and msnbc were a joke, but I have zero confidence in a single US based news outlet after this election.

BTW Huffington Post stands out as an exceptionally huge steaming pile of partisan garbage as well.
See also the Intel NUC thing: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc6i7kyk...

What really astonishes me though is how you can have these really nice machines and Apple doesn't bother to update the Mac mini. Seriously, an Apple version of this would be a nice desktop.
"considering the newspaper just had a 96% drop in profits last quarter."

Without knowing what the drop in profits is due to, I think it's. For example, is it because people are getting more of their news online and letting their paper subscriptions lapse? In my area home delivery is between $5–$10 per week, and that's at the 50% off introductory rate, compared to $3.75/week online only. Of course, that doesn't take into account printing and delivery costs.

Another reason could be that people no longer see value above and beyond what's available elsewhere that they can get for free online. That's different from no longer trusting the paper.

Looking up the reporting on the NYT profit decline, they note

- decline in print ad sales, increase in digital ad sales (which is expected given the print -> digital migration)

- significant investment in digital publishing

- net profit losses mainly due to restructuring charges related to reducing workforce

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-newyorktimes-results-idUSK...

Of course, that's not to say trust in the paper isn't going to affect profits. I think it's fair to look at the entire picture.
Hi akamaozu,

Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. First, thank you for your interest. Nothing
technically prevents you from using the tool in the way you propose. But I ask
you not to, if you can. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12957555.
What's up with Fogbugz?
Down yesterday (Monday) morning for a few hours. Then again down today with intermittent 404's, JSON errors, errors from IIS. We rely heavily on fogbugz and it feels like the wheels are coming off.

Any updates from the Fog Creek team or anyone else? I'm pretty sure we're not the only dev team having trouble starting our week. I've had to reschedule meetings until FB is back up and in some cases take screenshots when it briefly comes up so we can have the essential conversations we need to have.
It's very good, I'd recommend seeing it. Avoid spoilers if you can.

The cinematography is gorgeous and the whole movie just feels extremely tight and well put together with nothing extraneous. Its small flaws are overshadowed by just how good it is. HN commenters just like to shit on things as soon as they're popular to feel smart.
I was looking for a lib like this 2 weeks ago and I've never heard about this one... Looks like it's the most stared repo and it's actively maintained, but the Github link is not on the first page of Google with the keywords "react chart". (Edit: the "official" site is in 6th position, I've probably missed it or didn't scroll up to it)

Finally I've been using React Chartjs 2, based on Chartjs 2.

https://github.com/gor181/react-chartjs-2 (157 stars, actively maintained)

https://github.com/chartjs/Chart.js (26,256 stars, actively maintained)
> I think this sort of brag about how

If anyone is bragging here, it's you, so no need to be a hero. If you're hearing this a lot, maybe it's not us and instead it's people like you. The whole point of a good UI is to make it easier for people that don't regularly use your system. So if you're hearing this a lot then maybe it really isn't good.

> Linux is an industry standard

On servers it is, on desktops Windows still rules and that's for a reason. Common users don't need to hit up a Reddit beginner forum or spend hours pouring over documentation to learn the command line and all the various utilities for their chosen distro.

On the server, yes it's rock solid and I've had a pretty good experience with it. On the desktop, no. Also, my experiences are not from 20 years back, try 2.
I am not complaining. I don't trust myself with the responsibility anyway but I have 500+ and I cannot down vote stories.

I used to avoid voting on comments on my phone for a while because I was afraid I'd end up downing with my fat fingers but they've fixed it with an undown link when I down vote. Maybe they've relieved me from the responsibility of down voting stories?

I don't know how I feel about down voting because there is always a desire to down vote dissenting opinion.

tl;dr that's for comments afaik
Also, the video of the presentation: https://youtu.be/SijPcSOhev4?t=1517
I truly enjoyed the movie Arrival! Highly recommended.

The least amount of "its a movie" was required of any movie I have seen in years. I did not see where it was going, and I was thrilled when it got there.
Thank you for this one :)
Hi ourcat,

Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for your comment. Indeed, the
tool generates Atom feeds instead of RSS. It is a better format. But RSS is a
more popular term, so I went it. It’s like the TLS vs. SSL: I only use the term
TLS with highly technical audience.
How to defeat dementia
Hi sincostan,

Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for your comment. I tried the
tool you mentioned before creating Kill the Newsletter! Of course, I was trying
same work :)

Unfortunately, I ruled it out for two reasons. First, it required a Google
account, thus binding my identity with my reading preferences. Second, I set up
a throwaway Google account just to test the service and it didn’t work. I can’t
remember exactly why, though.

It was definetly an inspiration for Kill the Newsletter! It gave me an
indication that the project was feasible.
The position offered to me was not as interesting.

Basically I would have been developing their PHP/JavaEE website where they display news, sport, weather, announcements, etc.. With some interaction stats behind.
I think it's useful to think about this issue from an Effective Field Theory perspective. This implies that there are hierarchical descriptions about the world and higher level descriptions may not apply to lower level phenomena (though they are derived from lower level). E.g. a roomful of air has temperature and pressure but a single air molecule has none of those properties. Here. temperature and pressure are higher level properties which arise from a large number of molecules. Similarly, the concept of personal identity is very useful in everyday circumstances, but it breaks down when we consider amoeba/teletransporter like thought experiments.
Hi ommunist,

Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for your comment. I think it’s
cool that you’re using an email reader that doesn’t require any clicks :)

But, seriously, of course the tool I developed is for a niche. In particular, I
had only my own use case in mind. I know the benefits of newsletters. So much so
that Kill the Newsletter! starts with copy saying “I love newsletters …”.

The name Kill the Newsletter! is only a joke. I’m sorry that you seemed not to
appreciate it. After all, joking with death and killing is not exactly
G-rated. So the joke is actually on me and I apologize if it caused you any
inconvenience.

I hope you can still consider Kill the Newsletter! an option if you ever run in
the inteded use case.
Erlang Battleground – The Hidden XML Simplifier
Enhancement idea: RegExp field to blacklist/whitelist files in the repo (I tried to do this with my PhD thesis but the central part of the image is the boring .bib file). Still, pretty neat!
As someone who has purchased ECC SO-DIMM form factor RAM in the past, it is very much not cheap. (it was basically 4x the cost of ECC DIMM sticks)
Benchmarking and Scaling WebSockets
Hi all,

Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. First, thank you ProfDreamer for finding my
service and posting it here. Thanks too to everyone that took interest in Kill
the Newsletter! and commented or wrote me emails. I appreciate the kind words
and testimonials that the tool was useful to some of you. I also appreciate the
suggestions for improvements, I’ll try to implement them in the near future.

Kill the Newsletter! ended up on an LifeHacker article:
https://lifehacker.com/kill-the-newsletter-converts-newslett...
As a long-time reader of the website, I’m flattered.

Finally, I want to say a word about the name of the service. The copy on the
website starts with “I love newsletters …” This is true, otherwise I wouldn’t
have created the tool. So don’t really mean to extinguish the newsletters. I
understand RSS users are a small niche when compared to email users. I also
understand the business reasons to prefer mailing lists. The comments on this
thread had some very interesting arguments on that topic. I certainly learned a
lot by reading them.

The name Kill the Newsletter! was supposed to be whimsical. But I understand
death and specially killing are sensitive topics to some people and I apologize
if I offended them with my joke.

Still, I hope everyone can enjoy Kill the Newsletter! if they ever need to
convert that mailing list into an RSS feed.
Keep fighting for LFTR. We need to beat the CO2 targets, not miss them. Unfortunately, even hitting the targets seems like a pipe dream at this point.
> Is the angle -90 equal to 270?

This is trickier than it might seem. Is this a description of static geometry, or is this a delta that I'm going to want to interpolate/integrate/etc?

In the latter case, -90 is very different than 270, which is different than 630...
> any reason why the number row could not serve the same purpose exactly as well?

Then you lose the ability to change the code while you're debugging it, or end up with a modal UI. No thanks.
> You're financially supporting the wrong people.

I support Blizzard because they make good games which are fun to play. Who is this other person I should be supporting instead?

What graphics tablet maker that provides first party Linux drivers should I support?

As good as Gimp and Blender are, they still can't compete with the Photoshops, Illustrators, Mayas, and Fusions of the world.

The "right people" don't exist; not yet. And I can't afford to support someone on the off chance they sill someday produce an equivalent product.
Video: The First Invisible Car (2012)
The modern-day tensions are frustrating for many reasons. I always feel like Persia is an under-discussed historical civilization in pop culture, and I think that's due to modern perceptions, too much baggage associated with the region. I might be imagining it, but when people talk about the great empires, it's always Rome, Egypt, China, the Mongols... the first Persian empire controlled up to half the world's population at its height, and is one of the really fundamental civilizations of human history.
I pay more attention to the user rating than the critics rating, critics are either paid off, or what they like in a movie is different than most movie goers.
It has to. 135W power supply for a device which is 8.5x8.5x2.3"

There's no way that much heat is going to be quietly removed by those tiny fans.

I'd love some high res photos of the inside so I could look up the data sheet of the fans in use.

Considering HP servers ship with cooling ducts to direct airflow and this thing doesn't even seem to have them. I mean look at the CPU exhaust! From the photos it looks like the only vents are at the corners, but they've decided to exhaust the CPU (and presumably the GPU, hard to tell since it's under a hard drive) straight into the rear IO ports which don't have any vents to the outside.
Columbus and the Lens of History
Thanks :). Glad to hear you liked the product.
I struggle with this.

A rising tide raises all passengers (sic)

So more people get more news than mainstreamville. That is better than the way it was. Imo
I made software that track pour rate of liquid glass at 1800 centigrade using camera and control its pour rate by moving ~1 MW arc electrodes. I was in my teens and a local company need to quick fix it. My first actual earned money. 13 years later, its still working. :D
It's even more shoddy reporting if, as some commenters are suggesting, he in fact took his own life (which seems especially likely if he was indeed bipolar). Turning tragedy into a sensationalist story purely for the sake of it.
I mean advanced nuclear as in GenIV guys like Molten Salt Reactors, HTGR (which can do process heat and expand the market), fast breeders, etc. None of these have been shown to be cheaper in practice yet but they have attributes that logically would reduce cost once developed. The problem here is that advanced nuclear development is very slow and costly. So far really on the US Navy has done this successfully and at scale (giving us today's LWRs).
Is God powerful enough to create information that even He could not predict? I think these paradoxes actually hi-light that there's something wrong with the idea of an omniscient agent, at least as we conceptualize it.
I've used this more than a handful of times. Thank you!
I am pretty proud of

http://gosort.it/

My business partner and I often needed clients to sort things (features, objectives, pains, restaurants, you name it).

Eventually we built this tool together. You can create a list, sort it, then invite others to sort the same list and create an aggregate sorted list. There's lots we'd like to improve but it's pretty useful right now.

Hidden behind the JS front end is a Clojure sort-api server that provides an API to sort arbitrary data. We've no idea when that might turn out to be useful.
getpapers - https://github.com/ContentMine/getpapers

Command-line tool for mass-downloading scientific literature that matches a search query. The crazy thing is that it didn't exist already.
Automated Health Tracking App – No Manual Input
Low hundreds of future deaths for a nuclear plant that was standing for over 40 years is a hell of a lot lower than a single coal plant, as well. Fukushima sucked, but the potential loss of life is MUCH lower than fossil fuels.
Much of the HN crowd is against nuclear. We had the debate 3 weeks ago when I posted this TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...

You can read past arguments here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12777901
sftponly is really nice, needs updating and wider distribution (more packages for more distros).
Pretty cool indeed. But I guess one problem is that if everybody starts using this, then it loses its coolness factor.
Yes, per capita.
Challenge accepted (if I can find the free time)!
> We're talking about adding a single drop of water

But why should we add even a single drop, when we now have alternatives that don't require it?
That's cute. You make it sound as if Apple doesn't share your data with the US government when asked. Oh, look what do we have here:

>In one of the leaked emails sent by Apple Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives Vice President Lisa Jackson to Podesta, the Apple team clearly stated that the current methods of encryption in place allows the firm to essentially send an unlimited amount of personal and sensitive user data to law enforcement.

>Jackson further emphasized that Apple already has a 24-hour live team established for the sole purpose of handling law enforcement and government requests.
“Thousands of times every month, we give governments information about Apple customers and devices, in response to warrants and other forms of legal process,” Jackson stated. “We have a team that responds to those requests 24 hours a day. Strong encryption does not eliminate Apple’s ability to give law enforcement meta-data or any of a number of other very useful categories of data.”

You have to love that 24 hour live team whose sole purpose is to provide customer data to law enforcement and government people.
You speak as if this is only a problem for the New York Times.

How can a democracy function without an informed populace? If not the New York Times or some other existing "news" entity, what entity can possibly provide reliable information going forward?

Also, this isn't just about bias. Reporting with a bias can still be useful for informing people, as long as the information presented is accurate. Over time, outlets with varying bias can cover various sides of an issue, or various scandals, etc. from different perspectives, and as long as the information is accurate, over time most of the relevant facts should become known.

Not sure leaving it to the Macedonian teenagers will work out as well.
Ask HN: Alternatives to Fogbugz
We're considering moving away from Fogbugz in light of recent events. What are medium (23 people) sized dev teams who are distributed using for bug tracking?
How i win an iPhone 6S Plus
First GRACE Follow-On Satellite Completes Construction