skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never said social media was not powerful. The question is what percentage of the "economy" it makes up. This source[1] puts the share of the "internet economy" at 5.6% of US GDP. I'm not sure how those terms are defined in this study. But the point remains that no matter how powerful you think the internet and social media have become, the economy is large and diverse.

Here is one breakdown of GDP by category[2]. Even if you are generous and include all retail (6%), information (4%), and entertainment (4%), that is still only 14% of the economy. I think people forget just how much economic activity is tied to things like government, real estate, healthcare, manufacturing, etc. The poster I replied to seem to imply that social media was making up most of the economy, and I think that's demonstrably false.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/250703/forecast-of-inter...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#G...
> It seems that whenever we consider conditions too extreme to support life, we find that it flourishes. From the hydrothermal vents of the Mariana Trench, where temps can reach 340 C and pressures of 1100 atmospheres to tardigrades surviving in the near vacuum of space

Tardigrades can survive in space, but they can't flourish there.
I'm making the exact opposite point. People use Java for whatever reasons, it's not really a contributing factor. People avoid Java because of ShoelaceTyingStrategyFactory reasons. How likely is the average Java developer to make a ShoelaceTyingStrategyFactory when you convince the vast majority of people who avoid that sort of thing to use a different language?
GUIs are really great. They're a recent development in the computing industry that help mitigate this sort of problem. You can even put prompts in that get you to confirm Yes/No to continue.

I think Borland do some RAD systems, and Microsoft have an IDE of sorts on the way too.

EDIT: Please note that this is humour.
Speaking as someone who went through compulsory service (12 months at age 20 in Norwegian air force), I don't think "motivation" is the problem.

Once someone is in the system, they can of course be flake out, but the routine and schedule both limit just how unmotivated individuals can be. In Norway, if you're a contrarian and refuse to do push-ups along with everyone else, eventually they'll send you home. That happens all the time, and I don't think it's a problem for the military: After all, they can just grab more people from the pool of candidates. But most people, once they're in the system, just don't dare to rebel.

There are countries, like Israel, which do make compulsory service work. My own experience in Norway was that the service was not executed seriously or even competently. Kids entered in with zero belief that war was ever likely to occur, and the attitude was that if it did occur, they were not going to play a meaningful part. This attitude was entirely validated by the ridiculously half-assedness of the training itself.

Generally, the basic training was more like a taster than real training. I was taught to fire a gun, but I probably fired 30 shots in total, and didn't feel I got good at it or comfortable wielding a gun. I was taught to throw a live hand grenade — one throw. Presumably they wanted to save on materiel. At one point, we were to do a rather exciting two-day war simulation in the woods, but around midnight, just as we were getting to the "dig a trench and watch for enemy patrols" stage, some colonel stepped in and shouted that we should all pack up because a lot of people were leaving for the Christmas holiday the next morning.

Also, the way compulsory service worked in Norway, you had one month of basic training, followed by 11 months of being stationed at some base. If you're, say, an army engineer, you might have some useful experiences, but for most people, it's just sitting around doing very little, and learning nothing. The real jobs are done by career professionals.

Long story short: If you want a good army you have to train them well, not treat them with kid gloves. Norway's system lead to a situation where a lot of young kids were given a small, not very serious look at military life, after which they'd go home and promptly forget everything. (Not that I'd have appreciated harder training at the time; I really didn't want to be there.) Part of fixing that would be to invest in recruits, just like you do with a regular army: Better materiel, more simulations, more specialization, and so on.

That still leaves the problem of what you do when people go back to real life. Norway's solution was to recall part of the population for a one-week "repetition" exercise every decade or so, which of course was just as silly and half-assed as the original endeavour.
M4 is a standard POSIX utility and it's Turing complete. It's difficult to out-class recursive string macro expansion for sheer simplicity and sheer ability to confuse the heck out of yourself.

Alas, while it's a mandatory POSIX utility (AFAIU), some Linux distributions have saw fit to remove it from base installs.
I tried really hard to value this, but failed.
Study reveals air pollution can alter the effectiveness of antibiotics
1. Binary formats are great, until they break. I would take plain strings configuration over Win95 registry any day.

Actually, I'd take plain text conf over Win10 registry any day also. How do you transfer your (arbitrary) program settings from one computer to another? I can tell you how on Unix. How would you on windows?

2. / based filesystems are head and shoulders better than Windows.

Why should moving a directory from my internal hard drive to a SSD over USB change my location?

On Unix I can keep my home directory (or Program Files) on a NFS share, SMB share or SSD harddrive.

Can I do the same on Windows?

3. It is, which is why SELinux was invented. But that's to hard, so no one uses it.

4. All major OSs (Both Unix/Linux and Windows) are C or C++ based.

But here's something interesting: in the 90s, it was considered "advanced" to have the GUI an inherent part of the OS, rather than being just another program. Windows and Plan9 did that.

Yet, it turned out that admining a system without a 1st class command line is a pain, so windows is rolling back with Power shell.

Maybe Windows will one day make their Server headless, and where you can do full sysadmining through SSH
thank you, I totally missed that.

That's awesome!
Exactly. I suspect a lot of people who deleted the Uber app (quick and easy) never bothered to subsequently log in and go through the process of actually deleting their account. In fact, many likely assumed (incorrectly) that deleting the app deleted their account as well.
I should add that someone from the AWS team reached out to me in response to this comment asking for feedback on how they can improve their usability. So I give them credit for that.
Prefer an original older funnier version : http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/operating-systems/linux/

I suspect the author of this site have contributed to the linux haters handbook.

Some quotes:

“Linux printing was designed and implemented by people working to preserve the rainforest by making it utterly impossible to consume paper.” – Athas

“ALSA is like the emperors new clothes. It never works, but people say it’s because you’re a noob.”

“Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.” – Edsger Dijkstra

“[firefox] is always doing something, even if it’s just calculating the opportune moment to crash inexplicably” – kfx

....
UCBerkley removes online video content starting 15 March
C4 handles a similar subset of C to what selfie does, but is a full order of magnitude smaller : about 600 lines. And it is very readable despite the terseness!
Aging faces could increase security risks
Even in multi-threaded benchmarks, where it should shine, it's getting murdered.

ARM is a very promising platform and there's no technical reason why it can't out-perform Intel. It's just a matter of engineering it with that intent. Right now it's primarily intended to be efficient and good enough for mobile phones.
EU parliament shouldn't be called a parliament as it doesn't do much other than to provide a false sense of democracy, they could call it something else, like "debating bait"...
Anywhere you need a small but longer lasting battery and don't care about mass. The primary issue with a larger mass is accelerating and decelerating it. However with the larger capacity, it would be less efficient but perhaps could still lead to longer range in the car if the extra energy stored overcomes the added cost of moving it around. Probably not a good thing but could be useful then in something like an electric race car or something.

Submersibles (which may not care about weight due to ballast anyhow), Batteries for Solar Storage (price dependent likely bad at first), Pacemakers, Hearing aids, once it's invented if robotics outpace man engineered human biology, maybe smart blood.

Perhaps also Nanobots, Active 3d Glasses, Cell phones, Laptops, Tablets, Smart Watches that go for smaller space vs weight.

Outside of that perhaps home appliances like a portable bread machine, or a hand-held wireless electric apple peeler, very small things like a rock that has a hidden microphone / camera in it for spycraft, perhaps a heated travel mug to keep your cider warm, or an electric bowl for keeping great-gravy from coagulating on the dining room table, maybe a warm pie plate because who doesn't like warm cherry pie? Perhaps some sort of autonomous mud tunneling microbots, rather have a large boring machine just let these small guys go and be patient and in a decade or two you'll have your tunnel, electric candles in churches could cut down on unnecessary wax use, and helmet lamps used for stuff like lead mining could also find a use (added neck strain not withstanding). Not sure if the added weight would be too much for a target-practice duck that swam around in a lake or not, but if not, that might be the right answer.
Why literature is the ultimate big-data challenge
IDEs are very very easy to parallelise, since most of the hard work is done in background tasks, which can run simultaneously. Compilation also parallelises very nicely.
If you value the integrity of your data, particularly in longer term archive / recall / processing scenarios, then you value having ECC RAM as /part/ of a solution for detecting and correcting errors.
worth mentioning: sunflower[http://sunflower-fm.org/]
> Is Snap big enough that indexes tracking the S&P 500 would buy up Snap?

With the risk of stating the obvious... index funds tracking the S&P 500 index buy exactly the 500 stocks that form the index, no more no less (modulo some derivatives that are highly correlated with the index).

So they will buy Snap whenever S&P decides to include Snap in the S&P 500 index. Snap has already surpassed the minimum necessary market cap (~U$5 billion). There are other criteria, but ultimately the inclusions and exclusions are decided by committee [0]. When they do decide change the index, they announce it well ahead of the date when the change is effective.

[0] S&P U.S. Indices Methodology http://us.spindices.com/documents/methodologies/methodology-...
If You Get the Chills from Music, You May Have a Unique Brain
Congrats! I acquired more practical knowledge in her CS145: Intro to Databases than any other single class.
I have a 1973 CL350 which I am currently getting back on the road. They are fantastic bikes, largely because they are robust, dead simple and Honda made tens of thousands of them. Having said that, they did have some components that have not aged well.

The number one flaw on these bikes in my opinion is the stock carburetors. Honda used a constant velocity type carburetor which in theory provides very smooth throttle action and is easier to ride. In reality the vacuum diaphragm is a very delicate part that frequently fails with tiny air holes that leak vacuum, causing a mismatch in the throttle input between the cylinders (twin carb two cylinder, one per cylinder). This is a similar failure mode to your modern Suzuki air pressure sensor failing.

The other pain point is the mechanical points in the ignition system. This is an area of constant fiddling with adjustment and new condensers. It's much preferred to simply replace the points system with a "modern" (1980s technology) electronic ignition system. This removes the moving parts and greatly extends the life of a tune-up.

Old bikes are super cool and the 350 platform is a fantastic one but even back then bikes had "high tech" parts that did not age well and gaps where better tech had not been invented. The great thing about the 350 platform is that due to its popularity people are still coming up with solutions. In this way a Honda 350 is similar to Unix.
well if we are not following the same definition, then there is no use in arguing. The wikipedia article on Slavery refers to Aristotle's definition as a specific type of slavery called "chattel slavery", but suggests a more generalized definition:

"Many scholars now use the term chattel slavery to refer to this specific sense of legalised, de jure slavery. In a broader sense, however, the word slavery may also refer to any situation in which an individual is de facto forced to work against his or her will. Scholars also use the more generic terms such as unfree labour or forced labour, to refer to such situations. However – and especially under slavery in broader senses of the word – slaves may have some rights and/or protections, according to laws and/or customs."

Being forced to work extra to keep the money from your labor you already worked and being partially owned by the state is de facto slavery, even if it doesn't meet Aristotle's definition.

> "That states have laws limiting absolute freedom does not equal slavery"

The argument I made was not that the lack of absolute freedom equals slavery. Even in the absence of a state, people will rationally form voluntary contracts that would limit their freedoms for mutual benefits. Provided that these contracts are entered into consensually is key to whether or not it is slavery or not.
I don't know how well-known molly-guard is, but I've never heard of it before. Definitely enabling it on my servers next week.
I noticed that too. Also expected 'but we keep them off the net and it's secret software and we cannot change things' posts. I wonder when history will stop repeating itself.
Thanks. Good to know containers are in the core.

Telemetry isn't an issue. If anything, it can be fully disabled. And yours is done right - all the data sent is properly described and observable. (Although it would be cool if there'd be a helper "let me decide later" mode when I can let browser collect data for a short while, get notified to review it, and then decide whenever it contains anything I consider sensitive or not...)

Maybe this is silly and irrational, but... While it's all your work (and thank you for this!) and decision, it just somehow doesn't feel right that an locally-installed software - no matter how experimental - is ephemeral, almost like it's not a software but a service. With normal AMO addons - even the experimental ones - I can browse the version history and roll back if something's not right. Test Pilot feels like end-user is completely out of control of whatever happens (unless they don't participate and just install from Git repos).
Note that they're primarily rebadging existing products, while apple is far more involved in the design and manufacture of new products.

Also note that their niche is shipping Linux preinstalled devices. If they did have a killer mass consumer product, they'd have a difficult time coping with consumers expecting and demanding windows on PCs.
We actually didn't get acquihired -- Sandstorm is still an independent company, and I'm still the CEO and majority shareholder, but we no longer have paid employees. We're continuing to work on Sandstorm, and have even pushed some major new features in the last couple weeks (e.g. the Powerbox UI for connecting apps to each other and to the outside world with explicit user permission).

What did happen is we're all getting new full-time jobs elsewhere, since we aren't making enough money to pay ourselves. Most of us actually haven't started our new jobs yet (taking a little break) but we'll have a blog post when it happens in a couple weeks.
Please don't change this title to the original one. The original title obfuscates the meaning and importance of this article in my opinion.
Ordered a laptop from them back in the day. Worst purchase in my entire life.
My favorite is when somebody makes a blog post "A Great Way to Do X in Unix" and then posts a bash script they wrote.

You can just start the countdown until all the unix greybeards come out and slams them with why it's so wrong and how to do it with some obscure bash feature.
> Am I just having a senior moment here? Has everyone just gone nuts?

Don't worry, I'm sure we'll all get there at some point. But yeah, you're having a senior moment. They are entertainers. They become social influencers because people enjoy watching them. It's no different than a street magician or a busker at scale.
Show HN: Clean My Forks – A free, helpful tool to clean your old GitHub forks
>The primary issue with a larger mass is accelerating and decelerating it

It's actually friction, for electric cars. Regen is pretty effective at recapturing acceleration, so the energy lost in the wheels is the biggest factor.
Or an XServe.
> it does worse than regular Li-Ion batteries.

Why do you say that if it's 3x the energy density per volume and "only" 2.5x heavier? That should give it at the same volume as Li-Ion 82.5% of the weight.

I agree this doesn't solve the weight problem for EVs, except only a little it seems, but if these batteries can be made competitive on price with Li-Ion (Eventually), and unless we find a much better alternative weight-wise, then this sort of battery would still be very useful for EVs because of the safety they give.
No worries; I was responding rhetorically to a rhetorical questions. I wasn't suggestion that it actually be used as a hiring filter.
Can you expand upon this please? I'm considering doing the same now but this gives me pause.
Because then you have an empty bus while it charges.
It's absolutely awesome in this role.

I don't know if a few hundred lines of shell scripting and Helm charts are considered building around it though, but that's enough for a Git hosting service (Gogs) and a CI (Drone 0.5) with persistent storage with vboxsf.
Blogspam of

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nustar-helps-find-universes...
Making a phone battery 1/3 the size and 2.5x heavier might be an improvement-- smaller, denser phones feel more "premium".
feel sorry for that user, I'd want to hide in a corner
Inertia is only proof of inertia.
Twitter's Secret Weapon for Performance Advertising: Event Targeting
As a name for an inventor, it's good enough ;-).

In all seriousness, it's a wonderful step forward. Certainly for stationary situations it's a great leap forward.
No sure if you already do this, and know it has been said 1000xs before, but seriously, reducing/cutting meat consumption is probably one of the largest/cheapest impacts you can have for the personal cost.

https://foodtechconnect.com/2014/01/17/infographic-of-the-we...

And if you have the financial means to take the risk to be picky about your job (and are technically inclined), have a read of Bret Victor's "What can a technologist do about climate change?" post, so much to be done assuming it's not all too late already.

http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

Most charities are about damage control, not dealing with the problem.

Another option, is invest in a Solar Share program if they are available in your country. Possibility for good returns and helps build more solar energy.
Tech entrepreneur wants to put homeless on cruise ship
Could you please make a throwaway account for this shit? How can you be smart enough to write your own OS and yet dumb enough to not realize that the #1 impediment to Urbit's adoption is your political blogging?

I say this as a supporter, a star owner, someone who wants urbit to succeed: please stop giving ammunition to those whose job it is to farm pageviews by identifying right-wing bogeymen for the internet to hate. Honestly, I have nothing against you or your politics. (Nothing for them, either.) We've emailed, I think you're perfectly decent and that the slanders against you are slanderous. In a just world, people (especially HN commenters) would judge you by the product, not your blog. But in this world, shit like this post makes me think Urbit's best chance for widespread adoption is for some rando with a decent CS pedigree and blandly-inoffensive politics to hard-fork it.

/rant
What in particular are you referring to? I ask honestly, because this "my way or the highway" attitude has never been the Rust community's way.
Well, to be fair, it's not just one data point, that's failed customer service for an entire product—most likely thousands of data points.
NHTSA’s full final investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/19/nhtsas-full-final-investig...

Here's the evidence.
"Public university" is true but misleading. UCSF is a teaching hospital associated with the University of California. While it offers professional and graduate education in the health sciences, it more closely resembles a health care system than a public university.
I have no problem with this outsourcing as long as they first outsource the football coach and the President's personal administrative staff.

On second thought, why would the University President neef to be in campus anyway? I'm sure someone in India can do just as good a job. And if they can't, we'll just force the President to train them to get severance pay.
One surely can edit containers in Nightly. I did this for myself long time ago, when I've first learned about container tabs, as the default set was almost useless to me.

There's a setting, privacy.userContext.ui.enabled than enables management UI in the "privacy" section of "options" system (about:preferences#containers)
To be fair here, having to send an email to delete your account is true of the vast majority of companies.
Book review: Newton and the Counterfeiter
I cant see this being reality at any scale until they are autonomously driven. Engineering and reliability issues aside, think how many human errors there are with car accidents. But instead of bumping a car park pole you're now hitting high power wires and dropping 50 meters. Not that computers dont make mistakes but I feel we need to remove the human element or make flying so 'assisted' its one massive risk factor gone.

We seem to be at a good place in the world where technologies are converging. I dont doubt in 50 years we'll see flocks of commuter drones heading for cities in the morning. Maybe clustering to fly in V's like birds to encourage fuel efficiency.
Maintenance "headaches" are part of the appeal of old bikes. It's much easier to learn how an internal combustion powered vehicle works on an old Honda bike than a new one, or on a new car.

Compared to other bikes of their day these are very simple to maintain and they were designed from the start to be kept running by the average person. It really depends on what you are looking for in a bike.

If enjoying turning a wrench on a Saturday makes me a hipster then pass the beard wax.
> Are we drug dealers?

An additional explanation is that you're a bunch of self-absorbed cunts.
I never said Rustaceans don't see flaws or that they don't defend bad choices. But I've never seen someone say "if you don't think so, then you Just Don't Get It" or any variant thereof in the Rust community.
This is an absolute garbage tier article. What on earth is it doing on the HN front page? The author has no clue what he's talking about (and admits it several times) and makes many logical leaps (one time the author said Gnome should have used a registry, so UNIX configs are bad?) all over the place.