skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the different variations of HIV found inside an infected person evolved inside that person from one or two initial strains they were infected with.

The various HIV strains inside the body compete with each other over infected cells. Once you kill some of the strains with a treatment it opens up space for the other strains to to fill.
I keep my Facebook open for the events and messaging, but use the Newsfeed Eradicator extension to remove even the temptation to scroll endlessly. I live/work around DC, and 50% or more posts I see are political in nature. I'd lose my mind if I spent even a few minutes going through that.
I sort of agree, but at the same time, I don't use social media to advance my career. I use it to keep in touch with friends, which is important because I moved away from most of them two years ago.
> Your religion or political opinions should not matter at work.

Keep in mind though that that's just a current fashion, not a law of the universe. You could just as easily make the case that if your religion doesn't matter at work, you should get a new religion (or a new workplace).

The only reason our current beliefs are in fashion is basically that the continual development of new technology has made public morality irrelevant. But if we ever stop being able to innovate ourselves our of the hole we're digging then the party's over and we become an islamic republic or whatever.
I've always wondered why telco central offices don't have windows. (I always assumed it was for security.) Thanks!
Previous discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8275970 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300953

(not because I want to dismiss conversation here - did want to read up on it myself)
> I've recently been finding it really hard to concentrate on my work

I've overcome my Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter problems, but I can't seem to shake Hacker News.
The ring is bragging rights...

I drive a sports car.... some women love it others wonder why it's not quiet(it's a convertible) or super smooth and assume it's broken.

Have you seen the cars most women buy? Slowest, low mpg, boat like cars on the road. Basically Toyota in a nutshell, no wonder they do so well.
One aspect not mentioned is that in Germany when you sell liquid drinks AND provide seats to sit down you also have to provide a toilet for customers.

I'm not sure this initiative is actually improving matters. I more believe it is trying to stem the tide of key codes at toilet doors. See this article from last year mentioning "nice toilet" initiative: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/rhein-main/wc-nur-fuer-gaeste-fra...
Google translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=h...
Ah, true. I was assuming an even distribution.
Not so every month I see line on my pay check for National Insurance.

I am now a net beneficiary but for the first 30+years of employment I wasn't that's how it works.
Boston has blue laws around the sale of alcohol.

See also: no alcohol sales before noon on Sunday, no discounted liquor at restaurants, and every bar/pub that sells liquor must also sell food.
I had a girlfriend at one point who used her mandatory volunteer time at her Christian company to make calls for Planned Parenthood. So proud she stuck to her beliefs despite pressure to do otherwise.
60 days without paying, for free. while on AWS https://aws.amazon.com/free/ you could not paying for a year if your usage is low
- Curtis Yarvin, creator of Urbit, disinvited from presenting at the Strange Loop conference on programming languages after Steve Klabnik and perhaps other participants threatened to withdraw over Yarvin's political blog posts.
So if your co-worker believes that, for example, black people and gays are subhuman and expresses that view you think that's ok and we should all just put up with it?
I quit Facebook for 6 months and I felt that a big burden was dropped off my shoulders. I found myself reading more books and frequenting a lot of interesting blogs and discussions. I also focused on personal projects without the need of social validation. Then I reactivated it for a week to give sign of life to my "friends", but felt a pressure to be active, to post and respond to messages. I had gone back to checking my Facebook as my first tab and felt suffocated by the need to always "keep up." I finally decided to deactivate it once for all and never looked back. I personally think that instant messaging is the sweet spot, allowing me to communicate with friends I actually care about, without the need to rack up likes and keep up with the joneses.
Yes.

However, any true reactionless thrust is equivalent to a perpetual motion machine, because reactionless thrust drives produce the same acceleration regardless of speed, but the kinetic energy produced by the same acceleration goes up as the speed goes up.

If you accelerate one kg from 0m/s to 1m/s, you impart 0.5joules of energy on it. If you accelerate it from 1m/s to 2m/s, you impart 1.5joules of energy on it. If you accelerate it from 2m/s to 3m/s, you impart 2.5 joules of energy on it, and so on and so on. Each added m/s costs more in energy.

A reactionless drive working in a system with no preferred frame would add the same amount of acceleration for the same amount of cost, regardless of how much energy there already is. This would mean that eventually it would be going fast enough that the added kinetic energy would be more than however much energy it draws in. Then you can build a gigantic carousel that is spinned on the rim and takes energy from the middle and feeds some back in to move it, and now you have perpetual motion.

This is why no real physicist actually thinks that this will be reactionless thrust. However, that does not necessarily mean it's useless. If it, for example, allows you to push against the earth's magnetic field more weight-efficiently than current magnetic propulsion systems, it would be a major win for satellite stationkeeping.
Hmm. First you call my post absurd, then you basically repeat everything I've written. The only point really left is that medical equipment is cheaper for Swiss. I really don't think this makes much of a difference - the main difference cost wise is what we both wrote: Regulations such that health providers and insurers have strict boundaries. Btw. I'm Swiss, if it hasn't been obvious already.
Having people contribute to society that feeds and houses them is extremely racist - who knew ?
>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)

If social media really is addictive, then moderation might not work. Most alcoholics aren't capable of having just one drink, most smokers aren't capable of having just one cigarette. Absolute prohibitions are cognitively much easier than moderation.
I'm not a big fan of social media, but the argument here seems specious.

Here's another way to put it - "If the first thing a person does when they get up is eat, you'd say they're a glutton". True?

(Or indeed "if the first thing a person does when they get up is go to the toilet, you'd say they're incontinent.")
Consumer product prices will always race to the bottom. Environmental protections with non-zero costs will therefore always take a back seat to a more competitive price.

I agree in principle with your sentiment; however, I have yet to come up with an alternative which does not involve strong environmental legislation. Which, in the US at least, is only likely to happen after it's too late, if ever.
Why I built another Personal Finance App
So many parallels to Zen here. Fascinating. For others, if you like this type of thinking, then I would recommend checking out the much larger body of resources and practices around Zen Buddhism.
God the nytimes had become so click-baity, it's sad to see this happening.
> What does that make you if the first thing you do when you wake up is checking Facebook?

Under 30?
potentially you do not need any interpreters available at all, which certainly increases attack difficulty.
In Germany you receive welfare no matter of your work history. True, you need to sell your assets, like your house, but I think that's understandable. Your 65 year old retiree would receive ~410€/mo. + costs for an apartment (incl. heating etc). Again, I'm not at all saying that makes a decent living. Just that no one is really FORCED to work there.

Greece has a 25% unemployment rate. Therefore if you did not find anyone wanting to do your job, it must have been a really bad one. Or - my guess - you just didn't offered to pay a reasonable amount.

I don't know the exact employment rate among migrants, but I guess it makes no sense to discuss it here. I'm just sure that, if the unemployment rate amongst the migrants would be low, you were crying about the bad migrants taking over our jobs.
Pentagon, Intelligence Chiefs Push to Oust NSA Director
4 Disciplines Are Key to Perfecting Business Skills
> "* 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 agree that it is expressed in a too strong way for me. I will probably say that it is better to read twice the best 5 books in a topic that to read 10 on that same topic. Variety helps, but repetition is also good for retaining ideas. And for me the "best" books are the ones that present that ideas more clearly. The value of re-reading probably depends on how good is your memory and varies for each individual. I like the combination of re-reading with reading more on the same topic to get knowledge.
I agree. You have to separate out the Newsfeed from Facebook's other features. Its messaging app is pretty good. The "networking" features that let you stay in touch with people is great. But the Newsfeed, with its constant dribble of garbage and the constant temptation to contribute, is the problem.
Live Coding with José Valim and Josh Adams This Week
I check it once every other month or when I need to interact with someone who uses Facebook. The idea of endlessly scrolling through status updates is bizarre to me though.
I've been telling everyone I care about to follow my lead and leave facebook, twitter behind. Like the author, people seem surprised that someone in my field is against it so much, and once I explain why, they seem to understand but not want to process that understanding (like explaining to a smoker that tobacco kills).
Rise of the Maple Syrup Mafia (2013)
I have found it weird that despite the commentators here being the loudest proponent of privacy, you cannot actually delete a Hacker News account and all comments with it.
I think the problem is that in popular news you often just get the impression that a "breakthrough" happened but it isn't super clear what the scientist actually did, what are the limitations of their work and what you should expect from future research.

So instead of seeing news that say specific things like "this might lead to a monoclonal antiboody treatment in 10 years" or "this could help vaccine research" you end up with a bunch of headlines that sound as if AIDS is going to be cured tomorrow.
An interesting read:

It's the story of the UK's attempt to become a force in the emerging microprocessor industry of the 1970s, told by the man who was the driving force behind it.

In the first part Iann Barron describes how Inmos came into being and the thinking behind the revolutionary transputer.

In the second part, which starts at the point when Inmos had just secured its second slice of Government funding, Iann Barron charts the company's decline and fall.

http://www.transputer.net/fbooks/iandt/inmos_transputer.html
Should be mentioned Paris' automatically cleaning toilets. They are definitely slow and not great when there is a lot of people needing them, but for an otherwise rather dirty city, damned if they are not cleaner and more convenient than what I've seen most other places.
But most people are not alcoholics, and are capable of having an occasional drink. Social media could also be like that.

One reason I do not wish to close my Facebook account is for the groups and events. Facebook Timeline is not something I look at daily, but rather once or twice a week, to find upcoming events I might be interested in, particularly ones in which people I know have already expressed an interest.

When being on Facebook becomes an activity in itself, then I think it becomes problematic.
allowing the government to negotiate for the best price would be a start
When I read the title I thought it was about tackling a different issue, I didn't even think what they've solved is an issue. The real problem whether a toilet is owned by a business or government is about cleanliness. If it's true like you say that Japanese toilets are clean then this is not a financial issue but a cultural/behavioral one. Here in London whether public, a coffee shop, or a pub/bar excpect to walk through pools of urine and perhaps even find some poo on the seat. Changing behavior is harder than changing a funding model. Related is how many people will have shoes on seats on a bus or leaving half a sandwich on the chair.
Asking your butcher for "zero carbon" cow is pointless, I agree, it is also the equivalent of attempting to avoid buying things with "huge" carbon footprints (like everything that has plastic on it which is pretty much everything useful), much like buying in artisanal shops, or asking for "grass fed beef" or "free range eggs", it is all highly inefficient which is a problem with our growing population. They are all labels often as meaningless as "organic". The vegan and vegetarian options are rather more efficient and simple ways to achieve the same thing with the added benefit of not torturing animals for no good reason other than a particular taste. Once meat is gone from your diet that's it, no debating whether this you're buying has a huge carbon footprint or not, or simply lying to yourself with the zero carbon, dolphin friendly, free range, organic or grass fed labels. I know the usual argument, you're never going to get people to stop eating meat, but then again how are you going to get everyone to care for these labels (which usually carry a higher price in them)? and more over, policing that these labels are actually true?. Think about it, even in the futuristic scenario of populating Mars, are we really going to carry cattle with us, I think it is time to leave it behind.
So 1.2 mN/kW. By comparison the ion engine on the Dawn probe puts out 34 mN/kW (236mN / 6.9 kW). But of course that's for an effectively infinite exhaust velocity rather than just 42 km/s.
I've rationalized somehow that HN is okay because the content is relevant, insightful, etc.
Create the perfect beer using genetics
And what proportion of the US population has $30K spare cash that they can use in this way.
It doesn't. Deaths from <5 year olds are explicitly excluded from life expectancy statistics. You'll find them under infant mortality.
>When you post on Facebook or Twitter, you're publishing content in the public sphere, deliberately.

I would argue that Facebook is private, Twitter is public.
This is offtopic, but I put "unplugged workshop" into Google (without the quotes) and got very few results. I added "tom" to the end of the query and instantly found his page. I would have thought the first (less specific) query would have generated too many results and adding more terms would have narrowed it down. In this case, the opposite appears to be true.
> To take a few examples

If you're talking about political strategy, then there's not much I can say, as I have no idea what is the best strategy to dismantle a caste system. But if you're talking about a descriptive model, then I don't think cooperation is the same thing as support. The definition of power is exactly the ability to get others to serve your interests. The fact that a group with less power (the influenced) cooperates with a power structure that serves the powerful (or the influencers) is no indication that the interests originate there, too.

> If we tried to predict this result using perceived power of each group, we would get something like W/M < W/F < B/M < B/F

I think that you're assuming that power (or lack thereof) manifests itself in precisely the same way in every situation (male/female or while/black). It is, I believe, an incorrect assumption. Because men are dependent on women in many ways, it is not in their best interests to have women incarcerated more. My expectation would be that in every scenario, the outcome would be the one that best serves the interests of the group with power, regardless if they happen to coincide with the interests of the less powerful group in that particular scenario. Also, social dynamics that shape social perception are, of course, statistical and work globally. Locally we can get behavior that doesn't tell the whole picture. For example, if you only considered how men and women behave on dates, you may wrongly conclude that women have more power because men pay for them and open the door for them.

> it does make sense that not all groups have the same power in all situations

That may be true, but on the scale any researcher who studies social structures who isn't a psychologist is interested in, the more powerful group gets its way in almost every case. It's just that social dynamics that perpetuate such large-scale power are usually not visible on a small scale.
Get to know your local saw doctor, most of us are happy to give recommendations, tips and the like. We often have good quality secondhand tools for sale.
Yes, it is free country.

Big part of HN believe that black people, gays and even women are "subhuman" who need special help and special protection.
It's not impossible. I went from a hourly checker to only checking it twice a week. You just need to practice self control and realize most tech news aren't interesting or useful to know.
- GrubHub CEO saying that anyone who voted for Trump is not welcome.
> mandatory volunteer time

Why work at a Christian company if you find their beliefs oppressive?

I say this as someone who thinks there is a thin line (a birth canal) between infanticide and a legal abortion.

And there's always the option of working at common ground. Instead of picking a point of contention, serve at a food bank. Nobody objects to those.
Have there been any studies done that link social media and a decreased attention span?
> There are just bigots who can not tolerate different opinions.

Nor are they obligated to. To paraphrase, I may defend your right to speak your opinion but I am not required to be your friend or to spare you from any social consequences of your speech. Make no mistake, there has never been a time when unpopular speech did not have consequences for the speaker and if this bothers you then feel free to exercise your right not to speak or select a society that shares your beliefs.
Consider reading the HN guidelines, unless you are actively trying to get hell banned.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Work isn't the appropriate venue to have those discussions. Sometimes ignoring junk behavior is the way to handle junk behavior.

If said behavior persists and it's a distraction to the team, disciplinary action should be taken.
How's this address my point that we're moving forward to a web that needs to be done for most people, not by?
Apple's 10 hour battery life estimate assumes that you are just browsing the web. If you want to do "pro" activities put the CPU/GPU under any sort of sustained load, the smallness of the battery will become apparent very quickly (see for instance http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/11/review-cheapest-2016-ma...)
The collection of closing parentheses at the end is considered good style for all of the Lisp languages I'm familiar with (Scheme, Common Lisp, Elisp). Here's an example of the style in a file from the SBCL implementation of Common Lisp: https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/src/code/bignum-ran...

Any decent editor will balance the parentheses for you.
Looks like you're going to troll with a throwaway account, but I'll bite.

Does he express his views at work or somewhere else? If he's professional at work, I don't give a shit what he thinks.
(edited to add: Note that superoptimization isn't something you do to a whole program, it's more a thing you do to speed-critical sections of a larger program, ideally on the order of a few dozen instructions at most. That alone makes things a lot more tractable)

(edit 2: I've read the relevant papers now, and have corrected some of the stuff below. Corrections are in italics.)

The paper says that this system is built on top of STOKE, which uses the following verification method:

* Generate a random set of test cases

* Each intermediate code block gets instrumented and run on the host processor

* The intermediate code block are given a cost depending on how different their results are from those of the original block on the current test set, as well as an estimate of the running time

* If we get a code block which is correct on all the current test cases, we ask a theorem prover whether it's equivalent to the original one. If it isn't, the theorem prover spits out a test case which proves they're different, and we add that to the test set for future iterations.

Finally, the fastest few provably-correct results are output, where they can be further tested in a full run of the original program they were taken from.

The main room for error here is in the theorem proving step, which requires knowing the full semantics of the host's machine code. But it feels like that part should be share-able between different projects, as it's pretty much independent of the search method used.
Rubik's Speedsolving Wiki
The recommendation to take notes is helpful. I prefer to make my notes directly in the book. This has the added bonus of making a book's value much clearer to me when it comes time to cull.
In the future, remember that you heard it from me first: The gulf stream is now coming to a stop.

The warm water that usually is chilled enough to sink to the bottom and be flushed back to the Mexican Gulf to be warmed up again, is now gathering around the north pole instead. It will be a number of warm years until the entire gulf stream comes to a complete stop, then it will be cooold. Winter is coming.

You should visit Iceland and the Nordics while it's still nice there in the summers.
You may find this article interesting that criticizes the abstinence-based approach of Alcoholics Anonymous. Research has shown that cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing and medication to control withdrawal symptoms is more effective for a large population than absolute prohibition. In fact, I wonder if there are medications that address withdrawal symptoms from social media?

https://www.google.com/amp/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/3...
Every company has core values. If not stated otherwise, the core value is profit and reputation for the owners and executives.
True. I should have explained it better, and say that I didn't mean it literally.

As you said, repetition is good to retain ideas.
Also, I was able to get different ideas and insights from the same books, just based on my inner personal state, and my life circumstances at that point in time.
Regardless of your privacy settings, it's public to the system. There have been reports of accounts that can see all accounts, and regardless, if Facebook decided to change their policy, things could become public with no input from you.

You have no expectation of anything on Facebook not being public.
I think the answer Obama gave had some merit to it. If Obama pardoned people left and right, trump would start doing the same. If presidents started behaving above the law it could get dirty very fast.
using the kill newsfeed extension for Linkedin makes the app bearable for me.
When will humanity have enough sensors and computing power to give a similar forecast that Dark Sky provides today, but 7 days in advance? What will that system look like? It seems like it is a mostly matter of time, but I just don't grasp what all will need to be done to get there and if it is 15 years out or 100.