skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even currently, many world class high-precision mirrors are ground and polished by hand. I believe the machines you're describing are just copying the same procedure that is done by hand (a robot or swivel arm imitates the motion that a hand would make), and this process produces surfaces that have an average roughness of less than 1 Angstrom across the optic.

However, there have been other technologies that will polish out tiny non-uniformities and 'bumps' on the order of nanometers tall across a few square microns. These technologies, such as MRF finishing https://qedmrf.com/en/mrfpolishing/mrf-technology/how-it-wor... are the current state of the art to get the best surface finish.
Oddly, "what about Twin Peaks" was my immediate thought as well. I'm guessing that if I were older, I'd probably have thought of an even earlier example.

Still, there was definitely a change from the way TV told stories in the 90s to the way it tells them now, and I think that the article is right about Buffy being an early part of that.
It's not just psychological. According to some measurements the cold light from screens, neon lights, white LEDs etc. causes an increased heart rate, making it more difficult to fall asleep.

The Voyage is supposed to have a warmer backlight mode, but I only have experience with the Paperwhite(I only read during the day anyways).
The last sentence reminded me of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy for some reason.
Depends on what you mean by perfect. its very precise, but I'm sure if you examined the surface with an electron microscope you'd still see imperfections.

Edit: was incorrect about what I said below. Leaving it for posterity

It's important to remember that the final surface - the one that actually reflects photons - is created chemically by releasing a gas inside a vacuum that very evenly coats the surface with reflective metal atoms. I'd wager that process fills in the ~last nanometers~ or so of imperfections. Or at least averages them out enough to not affect the optical performance.
I think you hit the nail right on the head. I believe there has been research with rats on this type of thing (sorry I don't remember the name of the study). The sort of 'ambiguous' stress of modern life is much harder on the body/mind than say, being chased by a tiger.
It was only occasional free-fall, but William Rankin's story of ejecting at the top of a giant thunderstorm is still one of the craziest "fall out of the sky" stories I've ever heard: https://www.damninteresting.com/rider-on-the-storm/
If the marginal applicants rejected from dental school wouldn't make good dentists, then sure, it's likely the case that the marginal graduates aren't good dentists.

It's not really the case that we learn anything about the capabilities of applicants from the rejection, the number of people admitted to dental schools isn't adjusted to account for particularly good or particularly bad applicant classes.
I'm often reading in bed or on the sofa where highlighting would be a pain with a physical book - with my Kindle app it's so easy.

What's even better is how quickly I can access my highlighted notes. I often find I'm in a conversation with someone and say, "hey there's a great quote on the topic we are discussing from book I read years ago - let me show it to you".
Babylon 5 did the full series arc before Buffy, as did Earth 2, and space: above and beyond, though those series were less successful.
When Will You Be Able to Buy a Driverless Car?
Rent seeking is a transaction where the rent seeker accumulates money without contributing to the overall wealth of a society, basically getting paid without labor effort, offering a product or otherwise advancing innovation or the human condition in some way.

Land rent is the original example of rent seeking. SV rents would probably qualify, since the cost of rent in SV is more connected to the land and location, as well as the regulations on that land, versus the improvements on the property. Maybe $4000/mo of your rent is based on "rent-seeking" and $1000/mo is based on the property itself.
I'm not sure you understand what rent-seeking is. Rent-seeking is the deployment of resources by firms, organizations, or any concentrated special interest group to pass or preserve legislation that benefits its directly in the short-term and possibly long-term while harming progress, growth, and innovation in that field by being able to bargain for higher prices from people who need those services.

In less abstract and wonky terms, it's when you change laws in ways that benefit you directly but harm others who have to use what you're providing. Examples of rent-seeking occur in the beer industry where "regulation capture"--another beautiful term from the literature--restricts, I believe, the sale or transport of beers into states. The people who have established oligopolies within a particular state have access to the market whereas other smaller breweries have difficulty to making inroads on that market.

Deaton is talking about the legislation and policies that health care and finance are introducing that protects them from competition with the knowledge that others will still need to use their services. Usually, this sort of rent-seeking is done under the justification that it provides quality control over goods and services being provided which is, to be fair, sometimes the case or atleast a possible outcome. More often than not it is preserve advantages and create barriers to entry to prevent competition from eroding revenue and, of course, margins.

It's only business school that you learn about the powers of competition. In reality, businesses hate competition and they'll do whatever they can to prevent it from entering. Rent-seeking describes how that occurs.
I think part of the issue is that when we, innocent readers on Hacker News, read something like this, we only know part of the story.

So we can't tell which party is the problem, and what the issue is and we end up second guessing the person asking the question.

The advice invariably tends towards finding an objective standard so that the person asking the question can check that they aren't the problem person.
there's no ethical issue, it's just Vaccination 2.0
Nothing at this scale is trivial.
Absolutely, those are very good points, though not all of those problems are best solved by manned missions (e.g. exploration can be more efficiently performed if life-support systems are unnecessary). Increasing human survival odds definitely does require manned missions.

But, from a cultural enrichment/learning/individual experience perspective (which I, perhaps incorrectly, assumed the parent comment was referring to) a sufficiently accurate simulation with appropriate man/machine interfaces is a far more efficient solution than manned spaceflight over interstellar distances (provided people can get over their discomfort with the ontology of simulacra).
I was a tester for a few years, and then moved into development. With tight deadlines on projects, I appreciate having a tester to send my work to for validation. Unfortunately, I am not doing TDD or any other automated testing, so having a second set of eyes is not something to take for granted. And usually, they don't laugh in my face when something is broken.
Design Overflow No. 5 (From the Stack Overflow Design Team)
Sorry for that. Apparently, that can happen from time to time. Re-loading will give you a fresh dungeon, if you have enough patience for that.
Clojure. I guarantee - you're gonna like it.
> I wonder how much of this is due to being a public company

Private companies want to make money too; this is just how an evergreen OS where users don't pay for updates feeds into MS's desire need for recurring revenue, which isn't a desire unique to publicly-traded firms.
Or they won't, or they'll get worse somehow, or we'll all drown first.
I wanted to buy one, but then they didn't release it with Linux as expected! Looks like they want to upgrade you to a Precision instead. Not sure I have a need for a workstation graphics card.

Also, I don't like the 16:9 ratio and glossy screen, sigh.
HTTP2 does not magically bundle all connections to one. It still very much depends on how you build up your page.
Counterfactual history can be fun but it's highly speculative. That's true even for well studied historical events - it's even more true for something opaque like a private company's growth. What were Trello's main customer acquisition channels? Without knowing that how can you hope to derive an alternative history?
Rules are annoying; passwords are what's terrible, full stop.

They are merely the only thing we know how to do which meets the expected constraints on auth. I can't even give them a grudging 'least bad option' because they're so bad, in our current context and multiplicity of identities.

They are so unmanageable for normal humans we have a bunch of helpers, which become the new single point of failure.

Yubi dongles on a keychain may well be where we're headed.
Yeah, that's what I meant. :)
In addition to the points brought up by the others, physical objects that are readily visible serve as reminders and are much easier to introduce and share with guests than a purely verbal introduction and attempt to talk it up.
Daily movers: be on time at 7am.

Next day 7am: get into the truck, don't forget to sign the daily contract, pays is monthly at the end of the month. Come tomorrow at 7am, if you did your job correctly you will have another contract.
So instead you're fine with saying "your child will have cystic-fibrosis; she will grow up her entire life unable to breath without pain and likely die before the age 25".

Today rich people pay for better access to care through out all stages of life. That doesn't mean we should ban heart surgery (for example) because the rich can disproportionally afford to get it and catch conditions early enough to treat.

The "natural is ethical" argument disgusts me and I think you really should consider how much we already depend on progress before you argue for going back to the stone ages.
Ask HN: Is it dumb to line up your code eg. semi-colons
At this time this is the worst for me with CSS, I keep ligning up my colons so they're all aligned (per group eg. a class)

I also do this with arrays/general assignments (aligning equal signs) I think I understand this doesn't matter for compiling, regarding minifying these spaces would be a waste.

I do feel the "slow-ness" when I'm sitting there banging away at the space key. I use 2-character spacing instead of 4.

I don't know it looks good to me... I'm just wondering if I should get rid of the habit.

Example:

CSS

.square {

position : relative;

width : 300px;

height : 150px;

display : flex;

align-items : center;

justify-content : center;

background-color : white;

}
Disagree. There are a lot of paths into writing code for a living, and some of the most interesting ones involve other fields. CS per se teaches you a lot of very useful theory (data structures, algorithms, compilers, and so on). That's going to be crucial if you're writing core libraries, implementing databases, or creating new programming languages. But there's a lot of hidden demand for domain experts who can also write code, and that argues for studying something else and taking CS as a minor, or even as an elective.
Somewhat relevant:

http://topgunbase.ws/i-flew-my-wingsuit-into-trees-and-woke-...
> Notes/Marginalia/Markup are available on both, but with vastly more expressiveness and options on paper

I wouldn't want to annotate or highlight a paper book - that feels like damaging it.

> No batteries required.

Not really an issue for a Kindle-like device - it lasts about 30 days without a charge, which is long enough to read more books than I'd care to carry on a no-electricity trip.
I would pay a recurring subscription for an only audio Youtube app. This app should:

- Let me create playlists.

- Keep track of the audio progress.

- Work offline.

There is so much valuable content in Youtube that I would like to consume but that I don't make the time to actually sit down and watch the video. The video component of this content is irrelevant to me and being able to listen to the audio on the go would be really neat.
Kubo: Kubernetes on Cloud Foundry Powered by BOSH
At least for Broadcom (nee Cypress) WiFi chipsets used in a lot of these devices, the canonical MAC used by hardware is encoded in one of three places:

- Onboard SPROM: easily modified by a driver, but shouldn't be rewritten to achieve randomized MACs; you'll blow through your flash write cycles.

- Onboard OTP (one-time programmable memory): also easily modified, but it's one-time writable; you can only set bits to 1, never 0.

- External NVRAM / NVRAM image (e.g. supplied by the driver): totally controlled by the driver/host OS, can be set to whatever you want.

Changing this behavior would require changing the firmware image uploaded to the WiFi chipset by the driver.
Great read! I must admit, I have thought about this a few times in the past when I was on an airplane and thought what would I do if the plane split in two and thought about some of the things the author mentioned.

One more tip, always wear the largest rain coat you can find onto the plane and keep some nylon rope in one of the pockets so you could fashion a parachute on the way down :)
It does. But macOS comes with Git so Homebrew works without any dev setup.
Well, we are not going to be able to stop that. Money rules the world. Furthermore, these technologies will appear, regardless of whether we want or not, be it legal or not, so why not do it from the start the right way, so that everyone can benefit from it? Reminds me of the age-reversing debate. It's going to happen, so we might as well bring it as soon as possible instead of letting people die.
Why are there no national healthcare brands? Why are there no "budget" healthcare brands? Why does not a single goddamn hospital know how much a glass of orange juice costs? Where are the Walmarts, the Costcos, the Trader Joes of the healthcare industry? Why aren't we complaining about how Big Box hospitals are super inferior and bragging about the extra buck we spend to treat ourselves to an organic mom and pop MRI?

Is there any other industry like this? It's 16% of our economy and it doesn't seem like a single flicker of free market is left in it.
It's hard to understand what someone is really thinking and feeling. In the past I've found a lot of issues like can be traced back to safety, consider making safety a prerequisite [1]. Have you tried pair programming? Prioritizing the resolution of bugs over new feature work?

Try proposing some small experiments for the team to try over the course of a couple weeks that can pull your coworker into the team.

[1] https://www.industriallogic.com/blog/modern-agile/
Flecks of Extraterrestrial Dust, All Over the Roof
Even at home, I prefer the ergonomics of holding a pad that's flat open. Paperbacks - new ones especially - require pressure to keep open, usually a thumb/pinky grip. Often the words nearer the spine are read at an angle and with less light. Kindle is more evenly lit and more comfortable to hold.

As mentioned above, it's great for linear reading e.g. fiction; poor for computer books.
Yes. You also had a steering column that would impale you if you crashed into something.
For the people using their product, yes. If you're using Google, you implicitly trust their result ranking and presentation (else you wouldn't be using Google.)

What is the problem here?
No, because the steps are exponential. You can sit down and type your way through 64k. If this was an argument by induction, then 1 bit would have been fine too.
Totally agree, my mantra is "The enemy of my main project is all the other projects." Starting is fun and seductive, finishing is a grind, but boy does it feel good when you do. It's how I finished a novel, a massive YouTube project, an iPhone game, etc.
> bounce steel blocks on a vibrating drum

Wow, is that real? Do you have a link? I want to see.
How easy is it to control your body's attitude during a free fall?
Gattaca is a movie filled with terrible science (there is no evidence of a simple gene change for intellectual ability, etc) and characters that are terrible people (NASA today doesn't allow people with heart conditions to go to space, no genetic dystopia required, because having astronauts die in transit is suboptimal to the mission).

I really wish that movie didn't get brought up every time gene therapy makes another advancement.
> "People who claim that 'women earn 77 cents on the dollar as compared to men' - when studies overwhelmingly show that this is false when taking into consideration roles and hour etc. - are definitely 'dividing genders'."

Women didn't start anything here in terms of division by gender. Did you think JFK signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963 for fun or something?

If there is overstepping, consider that they may just be trying to correct the overstepping of the other side. It's one of those things you can only appreciate by having your own skin in the game.
You get depressed if you have an idea in your head all the time, but you can't finish it. Or you boggle down your head with details and never end up having something you can show to your second half. That's the problem with shipping personal pet project. You are your own manager unhappy with yourself as an employee.
That time Facebook went too far
Excellent read. Just a few more pointers from personal experience. When over water, "pencil" your body, feet first, at the very last second. Molecules of atmosphere, which are your friend at 120mph, are not so much when they are of water.

Also the author didn't mention my favorite survivor Juliane Koepcke.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliane_Koepcke
We have found that well-crafted small problems are enormously successful predictors of good hires. Sizing them to require an evening, possibly two, of work is what to aim for.
RoomAlive Toolkit for Unity – projection map dynamic scenes
And what if intel is compromised? Mass rootkit installation!
> I think that with dyslexia printed words are slightly easier because it's easier to see the edge of the ink

What e-book reader have you tried?
The more expensive Kindles have a high resolution, on my Paperwhite the edges of the letters are very sharp just like in a printed book or magazine, no matter how close I hold it to my face. Combined with the right backlight setting and some daylight it really looks like a printed page to me.
Optical Illusions Show How Past Experience Dramatically Influences Perception
Brain hardwired to respond to others’ itching
OK... Rails is an executable too. So is Rake... tons of executables are easily installed and managed with Rubygems.
Then there are people like Alex Honnold who don't seem to have this fear at all, able to free solo (climb without ropes) that same route

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKAloYst7p8
A couple of months ago there was another article about Trello here on HN that basically held Trello up as a model of disruptive success:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13485462
Oil Shell: oil-dev is alive
Whendon writes dialog with a very specific and intentional style. You may or may not like that style, but I think it's unfair to claim he cannot write dialog.
I just wish the "Your Highlights" interface online was faster and better designed. It just feels like they did it to placate users but didn't put a lot of care or effort into making it feel like a great experience.
> The only difference is that they also validate the organization's information of the certificate requester.

Right, but if I go to PayPal.com and the address bar says "Comcast [US]" or "National Security Agency [US]", I'll know something's up.
The site itself has a page of freefall survivor stories. Links at the bottom.
Cruel and unusual punishment?

Sleep deprivation has some pretty serious negative side effects
Got a reply this morning, 98 words. I think it was a good reply - it was mostly what I was thinking but it's valuable knowing that someone like Andreessen, who may know many secret things and has seen many tech sigmoids come and go, takes a similar view of things.
When Microsoft Buys ServiceNow
Yeah, but you don't have experimental design for the alien intelligence "hypothesis." This is just emotionally satisfying drivel. There's nothing unscientific about not having a hypothesis when more information is being gathered. The paucity of data on FRBs makes any hypothesis right now almost worthless.

We don't even know for sure that the majority of FRB data we have are from non-terrestrial phenomena. FRB occurrences at Parkes correlate strongly with lightning storms near the observatory.

But sure, it's probably angels or little green men. Why not. That's a hypothesis, you're doing science Jimmy!
Currently crystal doesn't have a large "standard" framework like Elixir or Ruby. There's Kemal, which is what most people use to create web applications in Crystal, however its quite small in scope compared to the previous two mentioned frameworks.

I'm sure large, opinionated frameworks will appear for Crystal but in the meanwhile Crystal and its community are just finding their feet and experimenting with what feels natural in Crystal and what doesn't. Once that's done, I'm sure that knowledge can be crystallized (heh) into a framework like Rails.
Any advice for using this tactic without ending up with ulcers from an overly heat-tolerant palette?

I used to eat some pretty spicy stuff to open my sinuses up but it stopped working for that without going to gut-wrenching levels of heat.
Why getting a good job is so much harder for today’s college graduates
A 'counterpoint', such as it is. What makes you think that isn't happening to any 3rd party host you can name? Why single out Cloudflare as adding risk to sites that are hosted on AWS already?

The risk here is real, but it's much more pervasive than one data handler.
This is a better link (it is Intel's original blog post):

https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/business/chipsec-support...

It includes a few more details about what was released:

It extracts EFI firmware from flash ROM memory
automatically if the firmware file is not
specified.

We recommend generating an EFI whitelist after
purchasing a system or when you are sure it has
not been infected:

# chipsec_main -m tools.uefi.whitelist -a generate

Then check the EFI firmware on your system
periodically or whenever you are concerned, such
as when a laptop was left unattended:

...

An analysis of the approach they are taking would lead to some pretty easy improvements.
Yet I have only one idea - that we can permute the elements somehow (in a O(1) reversible way like a Gray code) so that the cycles would form something computable in O(n) time and O(1) space
While we're talking counterfactuals, how about the scenario where Trello chased that $1B dream, lost focus on what users liked about the product and ended up as an acqui-hire.

Which, I'll point out, is an extremely common scenario. The guys behind Trello stuck to their vision of the product and made an obscene amount of money. Good for them.
Cloud runs on the exact same underlying compute, storage, and network infrastructure as search, gmail, and other Google services. The big google services are not built on top of cloud themselves (e.g. not inside GCE VMs) partially because they existed before cloud did. Some cloud services are also public versions of existing internal Google services (cloud spanner, cloud bigtable, etc)

Source: work at google, but on search, not cloud.
We have a desktop app and build several times a week sometimes.
My thoughts exactly! What a great way to get rootkits on people who want to protect themselves.

The code is here: https://github.com/chipsec/chipsec
Thanks for the info. I'll dig around a bit and see what life might be like with slackware again :)
Not at all. Trello is quite snappy and back when I first started using it in 2013, it was remarkably so compared to all other similar tools I'd seen.