skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>High-rise buildings are a hugely inefficient use of land and energy.

High rise buildings are MORE efficient, not less. The more dense the city, the more energy efficient it is: http://www.citylab.com/work/2012/04/why-bigger-cities-are-gr...

>But it is not height restrictions that preclude that kind of development in central London. The foremost problem is a lack of available land.

You just have to look at the number of people packed into a smaller area in Manhattan to see that that isn't true.

>We could build millions and millions of houses in the green belt.

You could also build millions of apartments inside it and then maybe people wouldn't have to live in Uxbridge and Barnet AND you wouldn't have to make air quality in London even worse.
Yes, effectively. The alternative to effectively giving oneself a life sentence is to comply with the order and allow the government the access they need to proceed with the criminal case. This man's incarceration on contempt charges will end on the day that he complies with the lawful order.

Rawls is rolling the dice here. He's hoping that he can press this issue on constitutional grounds and that he'll prevail, which will prevent the investigators from accessing the contents of his disk and, in all likelihood, prevent his conviction. If he wins on the constitutional matters, he'll be able to walk free as a bird when the case is decided (and may end up being entitled to compensatory damages). That's the outcome he's hoping for.

If he loses the constitutional case, he will probably decrypt the disks and allow the justice system to finish processing his case so that he can get an end date on his incarceration. In all likelihood, complying with the order will lead to his criminal conviction and a sentence of at least several years. After that sentence completes, he will be a convicted felon, and in most states, he will have to register as a sex offender. He will have to live under a variety of restrictions related to those statuses for the rest of his life.

Rawls's hope is that the court will rule that he cannot be ordered to decrypt his disks on constitutional grounds. This is all a wager on his part. As his incarceration on contempt charges is essentially voluntary, characterizing it as an "indefinite" or "life" sentence is improper. He has no sentence. To go free, he need only comply with the lawful order that was served upon him (of course, he will probably be arrested on charges related to the data on his computer shortly thereafter, potentially before leaving the jailhouse), or convince a higher judge that the order should be stayed pending the outcome of the lawsuit challenging its validity.

Another potential avenue to freedom, at this stage, would be convincing Congress and the President that the law should be modified so that either a) the judge's order is invalidated by new statutory requirements and the constitutional matter is no longer relevant; or b) the crime being investigated is no longer criminal.
The usage is correct, but very rare; I observe it more among non-native speakers, who generally are less intimately familiar with the farrago of special cases that constitutes so much of English usage rules in practice, including that which has "mustn't" by convention only used in the imperative mood.
> Then work on that.

I disagree. If you don't already have Social Proof, then it takes a big investment to try getting it. I believe for 99% of all startup teams, the time is better spent by working on your product or acquiring customers.

Networking is not working. I have seen so many startups in Berlin, who had a good shot of making it, but who wasted time in "fundraising" or "networking" and therefore killed their business.

Now obviously to each his own and for some it might work. But I believe only very few people on very few occasions get something out of networking.

EDIT: added a paragraph
Computers don't have general human-level vision, but they can now do certain tasks acceptably well (classification, tracking, SLAM, facial biometrics). The general task of "what's in this image and what does it mean" is still handled pretty badly. We still need manual image moderators, for example, although that's undoubtedly being worked on.

The history of what used to be called "CASE" is absolutely full of people promising tools that would automate parts of programming that fail to deliver. The difficult (or at least most time-consuming) parts of programming are all to do with meaning, intent, purpose, communication, and prioritisation.

What is likely is that "code assistants" will gradually improve, both in the form of language constraints (Rust borrow checker) and IDE advice (Visual Studio's endless tooltips).
GitHub labels and Emojis
Whistleblower Attacks Plans to Extend UK Secrecy Law
I don't believe programmers will be completely replaced by AI for a very very long time.

Suppose such an AI exists, one that can write perfect code and get the job done. How do you tell the AI what to code? Any language specific and accurate enough to tell the AI what to code, is in itself a programming language. Someone needs to write in that language, and that person is a programmer. All the AI does is make for a better compiler.

Programmers will be (and already are) augmented by technology and AI, but someone has to tell the computer what the goal is.
Mind providing a source for that quote?

Both Google and Bing link to your comment as the canonical source for that quote from Barksdale.
Compare like with like, don't count screens one way and count preconfigured command lines the other way. If you have $VCS set up nicely, it's a one-liner there. If you have GitHub set up nicely, it's a one-liner in GitHub too. If you don't have $VCS set up, it's a large number of obscure manpages. If you don't have GitHub set up, it's a couple of clicks in a friendly UI (and actually far fewer clicks than you list, these days).
This looks so cool. Makes me wonder why don't all karting/motorcycling helmets do this?

OK not really "why not all?", but I am surprised that i'ver never seen this before.
Interesting part of the article is also "Mark also pointed out that the number of investments he personally makes in San Francisco has dropped by 90%.
"
It's 64 lines of rs, hardly enough to demonstrate anything for the real use, and it's suspiciously badly written, if I understand correctly:

The C code:

void integrator_leapfrog_part1(int n_particles,
double x[][3], double v[][3],
double half_time_step){
for (int i=0;i<n_particles;i++){
x[i][0] += half_time_step * v[i][0];

...
int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
const int n_particles = 2;
...
while(time <= time_limit) {
integrator_leapfrog_part1(n_particles,
x, v, half_time_step);

The Rust code:

const N_PARTICLES: usize = 2;
...
fn main() {
...
while time <= time_limit {
integrator_leapfrog_part1(N_PARTICLES,
&mut x, &v, half_time_step);
...
fn integrator_leapfrog_part1(n_particles: usize,
x: &mut [[f64; 3]; N_PARTICLES],
v: &[[f64; 3]; N_PARTICLES],
half_time_step: f64) {
for i in 0..n_particles {
x[i][0] += half_time_step * v[i][0];

The way I understand it, with the C code the compiler during the compilation of the function doesn't know the size of the array, and with the Rust code it does, it is explicitly written? I refer to the difference between the capital letter constant and the plain variable. What would happen if the C compiler only knew that much too? that is, having the presence of the N_PARTICLES in all declarations? I can also imagine that just adding the proper compiler and linker options for C, not used in the makefile, can maybe give the benefit of that constant propagation in this particular case? I mean what happens when the "-flto" is added?

The N-Body on this site, with other implementations, has clearly faster C than Rust:

https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.ph...
Hire a lawyer with a "dead man" instruction to instigate such action if he's not informed otherwise within 48 hours. Keep money for legal fees in escrow for that purpose. Shouldn't be difficult to set up.
ReMarkable – The paper tablet
Wow. That's the typical Medium post in a nutshell.
> We are at a crossroads of consumer attention when it comes to reading, writing, and the “blogosphere”. With the seemingly endless amount of standalone blogs out there on the web, the market is thirsting for a platform that will consolidate blogging, and bring the value it provides into one convenient and curated location. ... YouTube did this exact thing for filmmakers, comedians, musicians and more. Instagram did this exact thing for photographers and models. Let’s do what we can do to make sure this happens on Medium!

So we are saying that centralising on one platform is the only way forwards? That may be right, but I feel like that's a point that could do with a hell of a lot more consideration ...
"We live in a world where digital products are inherently undervalued relative to other products. We will shell out $5 for a pumpkin spice latte in a heartbeat, but the second we have to pay $1.99 for an app, we begin to conduct cost-benefit analysis as if we were buying a damn house."

This is something I think about a lot, especially as a developer of a service that will one day require subscription (Yipgo).

When I buy a coffee, I walk into a physical building, staffed by people who I've got a two way relationship with and I get a physical coffee. As well as the experience itself, there's more a more tangable product in the coffee than there is a blog I might subscribe to. I'm not saying we shouldn't pay for it, I'm just suggesting that might be the phsycology that explains it a little.
> Studies show that you generally need a level of < 150 mg/dL to avoid heart disease. That's quite a bit below the average "normal" level. But today's average is NOT physiologically optimal.

My point was that people see the “no cholesterol” message and start eliminating cholesterol from their diet...but then they end up replacing all the sources of fat in their diet with carbohydrates, or in some cases end up not getting enough of some nutrients which are often found in foods that are relatively high in cholesterol (e.g. iron or calcium).

The message about cholesterol should be more nuanced - less “don’t eat cholesterol”, more “don’t consume more than X mg”.
This is definitely the case on mobile where everything has been driven to 99c or free, but the Mac App Store still has a healthy range of prices, including a bunch of desktop software in the $20-$100 range.
You might benefit from changing your perception of your work. Rather than think about the result, think about the 'duty' of each day's work. This is what I do. Most people think of the word 'duty' similar to a 'chore', but duty is a very honourable word. It means doing the things that need to be done at that time. Don't worry about the result, think about the work itself in a very unemotional way. Just plant yourself down in a chair and do it. And you do it because it's your duty; your duty to yourself and the people that are important to you.

I would suggest that, if you haven't, you should read the Bhagavad Rita.
One of the use cases Matrix was designed for is Internet of Things, so I think it's just fine for you.

Video calls come thanks to WebRTC in browsers, Matrix is just a transport protocol. I think it's quite light.
Forget ‘Fake News.’ for Markets, It’s Never Been More Rea
They are there. At least CTRL+{A,E,U} are.
Importance of Keyword Research for Digital Businesses
How does a programmer at a company know what to code? Generally they're given instructions in a human language. An AI replacement for human coders would likely have to do that same, which likely means you need something very close to a strong AI. And a strong AI by definition can replace nearly every human job.
> this isn't per-se a new paradigm

If you look how regular websites work, I think it is.

In my last project, people were kinda baffled, why the changes they made, didn't propagate to the other users instantly.

5 years ago everyone knew you had to refresh a page to see changes. Today everyone seems to expect these changes to be pushed to them.

It also was a fight to get this whole stuff working with React and Redux. So I think, if you want to build a good realtime site, you have to think about this stuff before choosing libraries, if you want to get good results.

For example, GraphQL has subscriptions that can be delivered via Websockets.
HelloFounders: resources and tools for startups
I remember reading about the "gravitaiton experiment" for your basement and now I'm pleasantly surprised to see the page was updated: "Bending Spacetime in the basement" https://www.fourmilab.ch/gravitation/foobar/
> One way you're not getting that is by being the foreigner just off the plane (or even there for a couple of years) that can't speak German

So, like most people in the Berlin startup scene?
> Stress makes you lost tons of vitamins and minerals.

Source?
>You can already build in the city. In fact, New Labour put in subsidies and incentives to build multi-storey houses, which are probably still in place. So why don't developers just go and replace low-rise with high-rise? Because nobody really wants to live in flats in England if they can avoid it. It's a cultural thing and it has nothing to do with land scarcity, it's probably a result of the failed '70s projects mixed with the hardcore individualism that emerged since then.

I live in London and this is just about the most ridiculous thing I've ever read about it.

You only have to look at the prices to see that people want to live here.
I have a train line ca. 1km away where the ICE high-speed train from Hamburg to Berlin passes. It's not driving there with full speed though. The train is basically not to notice. Though I hear the freight-trains or sometime the local trains (S-Bahn). Of course the ICE train is very silent and sure uses no horns - why should it - there are no level crossings. The tracks are placed higher and crossings are under bridges. The track is just next to other tracks for local trains, which then also have no level crossings inside the city.

What disturbs me slightly more are the planes.
> So we are saying that centralising on one platform is the only way forwards?

Peter Gasston has a great talk on this that's well worth watching: https://vimeo.com/181110920.

The short answer is: right now, yes, that's becoming a fairly dominant strategy across the board, but the future isn't necessarily as bad as it looks.
Social proof is a catch 22. Social proof is proof of previously being successful(or perceived to be). They want the return of investment to granted as possible. And for that they want previous successes.

But to get those success you need social proof.

It's a hard problem.
Apologies. I'm not a native English speaker. Still having a problem imagining in what sense an SMS service might be "publicly available", and how public availability helps in proving control of a phone number :-$
Well, the coffee has a marginal cost that is non-trivial. Downloading an app has essentially zero marginal cost.
That is true, and while it is bad, a large part of the difference is to what extent it is likely to affect you as a regular visitor. The US has always been stricter than most places in my experience - I've gotten far more scrutiny on entering the US than China, or anywhere else other than perhaps Canada.

But what has changed is the predictability and the extent of use of these types of powers.

I used to feel safe that I would not get taken aside and have to deal with this type of thing, but now I see no reason to any more, because there seems to be no reason to assume that the rules won't suddenly change overnight.

On entering the UK on the other hand, I still feel reasonably safe that though I know they can, the odds that they will are extremely low.

It used to be that I'd consider what to clean off my laptop before entering places like China. Now I'm not sure I'll even want to bring my regular laptop to the US.
By definition, 'whistleblowing' is always a positive thing.
It's speculative at this time so I can tell my point of view: you tell it in English. Sometimes it's going to ask for clarifications, other times it's going to get it slightly wrong, or it will have to fill in the missing parts of the specs and take micro-decisions. Just like a human programmer would.

I don't think it will write "perfect code" whatever that means. It will write code with its own idiosyncrasies its own writing style, etc.
With the current state of electrical storage, doing this on some old-timey-looking goggles might actually be feasible.
> Why would I subscribe to Medium in the hope that it becomes some sort of real organisation, with good writing, when those already exist? Sorry, but I think I'll just keep paying for The Guardian, The LRB, N+1, MIT Technology Review etc and patronising my local bookshops.

I think I read more and better content on medium than all of those put together. (Of course there's also a huge amount of dreck on there)
From the TC article (the new link), looks like they're charging readers.
How to create strong passwords in Linux
Victorian Valentine's Day Verses for Rejecting Undesirable Suitors
>If Medium can get enough of its readers to subscribe to a paid product with extra features, it may be able to achieve its initial goal of building a different business model for publishers.

A subscription model is different?
The way I see it if we manage to reach a level of AI strong enough to replace software engineers it means that basically anything can be automated. It's not just the end of programming, it's basically the end of jobs altogether. The consequences will be tremendous for humanity as a whole.

So I'm not really selfishly worried about this. We'll go eventually, but we'll probably be amongst the last to go. By then society will have to figure out how to deal with mass unemployment, it's already a massive issue today and it's not going to improve any time soon.
> When you find yourself replying to every branch of a thread

I didn't, please check your facts. Once again someone tells someone not to do something they're not doing. Well done.
Once a fair number of hackers become dinosaurs, working from home might become the new norm.
Isn't that his point? That you need money, success, etc, not looks.
Big Picture of Calculus (2010) [video]
Computer Science Concepts That Non-Technical People Should Know
Distribution was also key in the demise. The business model for decades, explained in one of Buffet's shareholder letters, was to become an area's key source of news: Once you're the last newspaper in town, you get to milk the area. That flew out the window when internet came along.
Thanks for your insight :) I think this is a true contributor to the situation. That physical product also provides a physical reward (taste, calories).

The relationship of speaking to a cashier, being in a warm building, feeling like you belong to the cool crowd, is a very deep psychological reward that in my opinion likely releases all sorts of chemicals in one's brain. This all furthers the reinforcement to buy again in the future.

On the software side, video games achieve many of the same effects. Feelings of belonging, both to a crowd and to digital images on a screen, deeply affect humans.

My bet is that a simple app that doesn't achieve this is a less justifiable purchase since there is no physical demand within the person to buy
How to Read and Debug Clojure Stacktraces
"More worryingly, six were caused by staff members "pressing the wrong buttons."

I'm sure in one of the classic UI books (maybe Psychology of Everyday Things by Norman) there's a photo from a nuclear power plant, where there's two giant levers right next to each other, and the plant workers have attached a handle from a beer pump to one of them to distinguish it from the other, because as built they were identical and they kept pulling the wrong one.

edit: found a page referencing it, but the actual image has gone:

http://bactra.org/reviews/everyday-things/nukewiser.html

You can see it here:

https://issuu.com/design.nerve/docs/the_design_of_everyday_t...

Page 95 as the book is numbered, but page 111 in the web interface control.
Pomegranate and Its Health Benefits for the Body
Silly question: Are you German? Do you have an academic degree? I ask because then you have some options for a state sponsored fellowship.
Petition Against the Unitary Software Patent in the UK and Scotland
I don't think I've been brainwashed much with that respect - I spent my youth involved in left wing political organizations that just a few years earlier would have barred me from entry to the US, to the point that I called the US embassy to check before my first entry (they stopped caring after the Soviet Union collapsed), and that means there's almost certainly a file on me with Norwegian security services. I've been highly critical of US governments most of my life.

The reason I find it bizarre is that I've visited the US about two dozen times over many years, and while I know there are plenty of issues for many visitors, it used to be fairly predictable who would get stopped, and I used to feel safe that I would not get pulled aside and face more invasive questioning or searches.

As I've noted elsewhere, part of what is changing is that it appears this predictability is out of the window: Things like NASA employees stopped or how a few days ago a former Norwegian Prime Minister travelling on a diplomatic passport was stopped. And so.

In a way, I suppose, I get to finally experience the uncertainty people from less favoured countries and/or darker skinned/with a muslim sounding name have dealt with for much longer. That is perhaps the only benefit of this mess: It's finally affecting groups of people that may cause it to become politically untenable over time.
True.

The German start-up scene is pretty shitty.

Last time I checked about incubators or accelerators, most of the companies that work in that space were like "Oh no, we are not one of those, we do [insert some crap no founder needs] to help startups!"

Basically no one gives you money for anything if you don't know the right people and those who do want to own the company in full, which defeats the whole startup idea in the first place...
I like Medium and I DO hope it goes ahead with the subscription model. It will make it easier for me to stop procrastinating and to read something more useful, like arxiv articles.
Whats the product?
50% of people, in the US at least, have less than $1000 in savings. They don't have $10,000 to put into your startup.
Citations?

>"It react by using only 85%, storing that extra 5% in case things get worse later on. So the body expects that later on, supply could drop to 70% or much less. Then those stored 5% are really useful."

This doesn't sound right.
> Also, I believe only the year of first publication is technically required anyway.

Surely adding later years must have the effect of pushing the copyright expiration date?
Yep, that would be useful. :)
Interesting read. There really is a lot of thought that goes into these things. Bought a set of silicone/rubber wipers the other day. They were covered in a very fine gray dust which at first seemed to be like spray paint.

So without thinking I started to "clean" them. Half way through it came to me there was too much of the stuff to be by accident and there was no marketing reason for it to be light gray.

Couldn't think of what to google at first? Painted wipers? Dusty wipers? Then I tried graphite powder + wipers because it resembled what a ground up pencil might look like. Bingo.

Apparently, it's a lubricant to prevent squeaking, shouldn't be disturbed before being placed on the vehicle. Of course, I had already wiped it almost clean off of one wiper. Felt a bit stupid afterwards.

Good news is wipers don't squeak.
Very interesting article about the early years of Tesla, but there's a weird jump at the end from the Roadster just shipping, to announcing the obscure D-version of Model S.
Quantifying the RoI of Mobile Marketing
Just a matter of time until only Dinosaurs will remember what AI was ;P
Trouble at Infosys due to Panaya acquisition