skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The CIA is collecting data from these devices as I am writing this.

Citation needed.

The CIA is almost certainly ignoring all of that data. [Ed: Since this was unclear, by "ignoring", I meant not interested in and not capturing it. As in, they're "ignoring" the information stream by not tapping it.]

If anyone is collecting it, which is largely doubtful, it would be Facebook collecting microphone noise or Google collecting location data (or other apps doing similarly). Of course, people have volunteered that data themselves, and you should be annoyed at your classmates for recording you.

The CIA (and other letter boys) can gain access to the data stored by these commercial companies after the fact, as part of their chartered duties.

You have some kind of voyeuristic fantasy that just because spy tools exist at a spy agency, they're somehow -- ZOMG! muh democracy! -- breaking their charter in a massive way by domestically spying on a bunch of students sitting around in class.

No. That's paranoid fantasy. There are real issues with the CIA, but that they own computer spy tools (and your fantasy of being watched hundreds of times right now) isn't one of them.
Oh the dreaded "details left as an exercise." Personally, if I can't fill in details readily myself, I use Google or "just take there word for it" and hope it doesn't bite me later.
The benchmarks make it look bad but to be honest aren't that relevant for day-to-day use. I can't remember the last time I saw performance issues in Atom and the plugin infrastructure massively outweighs the occasional possible issue
Why do Western maps shrink Africa
A question I'm interested in that is related to this topic: what are the limits to improving conditions through education? For example, if we improve chances for everyone we might end up with thousands more aspiring brain surgeons that will never have the opportunity to pursue their dream, simply because there's a limit to the amount of brain surgeries we will ever need to perform.

Isn't improving chances for all going to create misery for those that have their prospects raised, but whose ambition exceeds their talent? I'm reminded of an essay titled The Rise of the Meritocracy in which if I recall correctly a perfect meritocracy is depicted, and one of the problems is that the unsuccessful genuinely have no one to blame but themselves for their status and are even more miserable as a result!
>A workaround for folks who are similarly obsessed about battery life

That's odd wording. Obsessed because I don't want to waste energy, which leads directly to pollution? Or don't want a short battery life on my laptop? Power savings shouldn't be seen as irrelevant geekery.

13% is half the capacity of a single core in a four core processor. My 5 year old 2500k peaks at 120 watts. So 15 watts to render a cursor?

Microsoft needs to stop it with these terrible levels of QC. Its inexcusable.
Doing things has a positive (+) impact on feeling good, which has a negative (-) impact on depression. The sign there is important.
My two cents: you get what you pay for in your IDE.
Most of these don't support it (yet?), but I personally love the idea of having my editor of choice on the web with all my settings and with no install/permission issues.

The real reason to me though seems that it's just the easiest way to make a cross-platform UI. And in this web powered world, everyone knows how to code html/css, so why relearn a bunch of new tools?
GP is lamenting the fact that this is "barely news" and the bit about Wikileaks being a threat was sarcasm.
Yes. We quickly forget what those CPU cycles and abundant of RAM consumes electricity => heating the planet.
Robot company claims to create, not kill jobs
The US did the breaking. Sweden had to 'own it'.
Not all niches will attract VC funded competitors. There are plenty tech companies that are profitable, well-capitalized, have moderate organic growth, and compete with similarly sized companies. There certainly is a middle ground.
"from Greek barbaros 'foreign, strange, ignorant,' from PIE root *barbar- echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners (compare Sanskrit barbara- 'stammering,' also 'non-Aryan,' Latin balbus 'stammering,' Czech blblati 'to stammer')." I don't know if the source I'm quoting is reliable, but I find the same reference to Sanskrit in a variety of sources.
Oh, wow, yes. A very apt quote.
That's right. At the start of the crisis, I had landlords offer crazy incentives - 2 months rent free on a 13 month lease. They just wanted to lock people in. In a few months, when it was clear that people abandoning houses were moving into apartments, these deals disappeared and rents actually started to increase!
NYC is more the equity side of finance, Wall St. and all that. Chicago is home to the largest futures exchange in the world, the CME and the largest options exchange, the CBOE.
according to FreeBSD's own site, their GPLinBase tracker, you're incorrect. Only a handful of GNU or GPL stuff was ever in base, and your example of 'tar' isn't one of them.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/GPLinBase
"As a result, if your definition of objective is that something has a definite state independent of the context, that is demonstrably false." Here is where we differ - it's not my definition of objective. In this context objective just means having the quality of being an 'object-in-itself.' In other words, an external world exists in some sense whether I'm there to observe it or not. In what state it exists prior to my observation I do not know and in fact cannot know.

So the definition of objectivity I'm using does not contain a notion of determinacy, of having a 'definite' state. I'm saying that we know reality exists, but nothing at all about the indeterminate or determinate nature of that reality.

So in a way, Kant's philosophy harmonizes with quantum mechanics instead of contradicting it. In Kant's proof, in fact, we know that independent reality exists while simultaneously limiting what we can know about it - much like QM.
>What exactly is Chicago good at?

Corruption.
I have to disagree strongly. I live in NYC for work. I actually hate living here and I don't like the people I'm around. I am desperately looking for a way out of this city but my family lives on Long Island, so it's hard to justify going to another city.
As was pointed out numerous times in that thread, they aren't 'embarassing benchmark numbers', they are 'irrelvant benchmark numbers', because no such 'slowdown' is actually felt by most developers that try VS Code.

> But they have no place in text editing.

Their popularity proves otherwise.
Why is this getting downvoted? I can not see a single sentence in this comment that is not accurate.
Yep, I'm assuming the solar cells are on Earth. Seemed like a good assumption to make.

If you just send them into space with good enough radiators, you'll be able to get 3 9's of efficiency (mid way to 4). But you don't get to reuse the heat waste.

You may be interested on that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain
Beautiful and nice to use. After playing with the anxiety & depression model for a while, here's a thought: let me bring up magnitude/time plots for each of those circles. Density of arrows flying around the graph is not very readable. Adding proper plots (maybe hidden by default) could boost the exploratory capabilities of the tool without diminishing its ease of use.
Sure, they still make a ton of money, but I am arguing that their power is declining due to stagnation in innovations. Once the cycle reverses the profits will follow too. All IMHO, of course.
Job Concurrency in Kubernetes
> All scripts should be run with "-eu".

More specifically, every shell script should have "set -eu" at its second line, directly after the sh'bang line:

#!...
set -eu

For debugging or logging purposes, sometimes adding -v and/or -x comes handy:

#!...
set -euvx
I was really hoping the Wikipedia article on Roller Coasters was better. I wanted to write a piece of prose paralleling roller coasters and programming languages, but unfortunately, I have such little info to go on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_coaster).

I feel like roller coasters started because people wanted to go fast, and this crazy death contraption was the only way how. Subsequently, ride operators, in order to avoid the death of their patrons, advised them not to stick their limbs outside of the car. Unfortunately, this mechanism only reduced injuries, but far from eliminated them. Not only do accidents occur because of the actions of the riders themselves, but ride operators can pose introduce risk not only by malice, but negligence. In extremely rare cases, riders can be injured by compiler failures.

Roller coaster operators soon learned that these contraptions were fundamentally unsafe, and the only way to induce safety was if the systems which drove the coaster had safety as a fundamental concern. Therefore they introduced these things like "PLCs" -- a type of computer to make sure the operators could only do so much to endanger the riders. In addition, by following the basic rules of physics at build time of the coaster they further increased safety. Since people have stopped building coasters that relied on the rider's healthy sense of caution, and the operator's awareness of safety, they've become one of the safest ways to enjoy oneself.
Or at least this is how I was hoping the story went.
If that is true, they they are running incredible margins to afford that. A human sized negative pressure chamber is not any easy thing to obtain or maintain, even to airplane climates specs. Most likely, they rent out time on someone else's chamber or just take a chartered flight and test on the plane.
Well, it probably depends on your area. I work with embedded systems, so I rarely see "people actually use" my products anyway, even if the project is successful and goes to the production as these are mostly niche products and/or part of a bigger system. If I was webdev, that might be different though..
I cared and cared enough to quit. Worked my last (and first real software) job for about 5 years and quit a month ago because of this kind of thing, at least in part. I was getting good at making the v1, but never learning how to really do anything beyond that. And figuring out how to ship an MVP is the least important part, so if that's all you're learning you're missing out on what will make you successful at a place that's actually successful.

Plus, I'll just generally disagree with you, sitting there making stuff that falls right into the garbage can is incredibly depressing. What's the point?
I remember hearing a variation of this claim by rationalizers for the dot-com stock market bubble in the 90's and the housing bubble in the 00's.

I recognize you're not trying to rationalize this, but you've identified the common factor to each bubble: a new and unsophisticated source of investors being aided by the financial industry.

With the dot-com bubble, it was daytraders and online traders generally (including me). With housing bubble, new untraditional homebuyers who bought homes with exotic mortgages. With education, student who traditionally would not have gone to college going to college.

These could have all been positive examples of American upward mobility at work. But as was especially evident with the housing bubble, the financial industry turned people looking to improve their lives into consumers and, in many cases, exploited them.

With rents in metropolitan areas, it seems to be driven by wealthy investors (institutional investors and wealthy foreigners) pricing marginal middle class homebuyers (e.g. yuppie millennials) out of the market and then turning around to rent to them. Renters, like tech workers and young white-collar professionals generally, can stretch to afford these rents. But they definitely have a ceiling and all of this has been fueled by a growing economy. As soon as the economy falters, aid will dry up and the roof will cave in.
Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain makes similar claims for Scythian ancestry, and that the Scythians were in turn refugees from Troy.

He also claimed that ancient Britons laid seige to Rome.

Pretty funny how his bullshit survived and was repeated through the centuries.
The US not being very good at cleaning up the messes they make is fairly well documented, props to the Swedes (and quite a few other countries besides) for doing far more than their fair share (which would have been 'nothing to very little') in this.
MAG-LEV Audio – Levitating turntable
One approach is to look at a few different but overlapping primers on the same matter and do the exercises. If one treatment doesn't click, another might. And for well-known subjects, topics are often covered in roughly the same order. Maybe not for graduate classes, not sure, but linear algebra, set theory, group theory, analysis it's generally the case.

Unless you can afford a tutor to teach it several different ways until it clicks, which is functionally similar.
Yes you are right. My mistake, although I'd be very interested for wikileaks to reveal which shipping companies are complicit, whether it be USPS, UPS, or the packages are intercepted in China before they even reach the states.
>Especially for information technology, I don't understand the rationale why it has to be concentrated at certain places. As long as there is a good net connection, it could be anywhere in the world.

Because face to face is high bandwidth. You can have everyone work from home but it will reduce your ability to collaborate effectively. Teams worry about being in separate buildings or even just split across floors because the friction introduced reduces impromptu face to face conversations significantly.

Now, if you're asking why an entire company can't move, that's because the talent pool is where it is and many engineers will not be willing to relocate. Moving is disruptive and for married couples where both work at different locations, it may be effectively impossible.
Was not the point of the thread that money is not the only factor in life?
Then how do we get the politicians to stop thinking in terms of "there's us" and then "there's the people"?

edit for clarification.
> Wouldn't it be better to make native application

Better in what way? The market has voted with their downloads, they don't agree that the problems with Electron apps are as bad as you feel that they are.
I think you have answered it yourself partly. Creating a highly configurable, UI/UX predictable cross plattform editor is not an easy task. If you start from scratch on a native platform you have to code a ton of code (pretty sure more than VSCode has) just to get started. Editors on web platforms can be modified with CSS, JS (or TypeScript like on VSCode), HTML. Try to be that configurable on a native platform... you literally have to code something equivalent to CSS, HTML, JS to reach that level of modularity. It's good to stay on the shoulders of giants and start there ;)
Much more readable than using `;` as a separator, imo.
Indeed. Seems like a reasonable defense to me.
You're cherry-picking the biggest, most visible of Apple's acquisitions. You should be comparing Workflow to the dozens upon dozens of Workflow-sized acquisitions they have made.

I can't recall many of them off the top of my head anymore, because they're gone and lost to memory.
Similar to wind speeds on Mars, you read about hurricane speeds of 200mph+ then remember with the low density that would feel like a fairly strong breeze to a human standing there.

The problem with the storms is dust and blocking of the sun.

Planet wide storms have been recorded, that bodes poorly for solar powered installations without significant battery backup.
"but it's not perfect, someone could just xyz and abc and get around the system."

DRM is not about being perfect against a dedicated pirate. Just like locks on doors, it's about putting up a few barriers that serve to keep the vast majority of people honest. No one is under any illusions that DRM will stop movies and games from showing up on torrent trackers.
Ask HN: Did you attend any meditation courses and did they help you?
I have heard a lot about how meditation helps people to think clearly apart from other benefits like improving quality of sleep etc. I am currently planning to attend one of those events(like Isha Inner Engineering) and wanted to know if they make any big difference or if there is another better way to start doing meditation.
How to Install the Django Web Framework on Ubuntu 14.04
Sure, but that is for some very limited cases. And even then you should generally check for browser and its version, not the OS. Browser makers go to great lengths to make browsers run identically on all supported platforms.
I find it kind of weird that this is so similar to things like Automator and AppleScript. Which are things that Apple has never really put a lot of work into. They introduce it with sparse features and then it just stays that way forever. Apparently they already released a new version of the software that removes integrations which work with Google etc. So it's typical Apple, they're pulling back any features that aren't helping with Lock in and that's about it.
USAA is in San Antonio!
Why?

With JavaFX where you can customize it using CSS it looks nice, and you don't need to use a scripting language to do it.
From Toronto. We have it worse. We are actually thinking of moving to Vancouver and renting :-p The rents in both places seem the same, except Toronto has shitty traffic, very limited tech opportunities, bad weather, and bugs. I looked around at jobs in Vancouver and it seemed a bit surprising how many tech employers there were.

Can you shed light on why you are fed up with V? Where else are you considering?
Trump Sort – A new sorting algorithm
The last Concorde airframe rolled off the factory floor in 1979. It never competed with lie-flat business class seats, and it's not possible to paint the failure as passengers having voted for slower but more comfortable options. The ban on overland supersonic flights simply made Concorde a non-starter.

The comfort onboard Concorde was fine. I miss it each and every time I fly transatlantic. But with British Airways and Air France allotted just seven aircraft each, obviously it could never be a mainstream product, no matter how compelling it was from a passenger perspective.
Agree, but be aware of subshells, these options don't propagate there.

$ set -eu
$ echo "$(false)"

$
This is a good point. IANAL, but I imagine there definitely are routes to take when drafting various legal documents (e.g. employment contracts) that would allow employees to pursue personal projects. Its likely just easier (and as you say in the company's best interest) to avoid figuring out how to word such clauses.
If “Real People” Commercials Were Real Life – CHEVY Hatch [Swearing]
I actually was just thinking about this problem the other day in the context of active vs passive systems and customization. I used to use Reddit a lot and found it to be a powerful tool for finding things related to my interests but nowadays(post college) I'm finding it hard to justify the time waste of actively scrolling through for new things. I have started building a chatbot that will learn your interests and then actively bring you the best things it can find. Then you can tell it "Good job" or "I'm not interested in that" and it would learn over time what news sources our prefer, what topics you like, or even the average length of an article you prefer. I also think Reddit is powerful but can be difficult to set up for non-internet-nerds. Turning the initial setup of a custom "channel" into an active conversation might lower the barrier and help get more people access to the content they're craving.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!
I don't know why you're saying they are slow. vscode starts up pretty fast. Sure it consumes more resources than vim. However having code completion, debugging, linting, and a bunch of IDE like features is super useful including the fact that it's cross platform and open source.

It's very hackable. Just last night I fixed an issue that had been bugging me for a while.

Pages with ads use a lot more of my CPU so I'm not really worried.

This looks like a chrome problem more than Vscode. I do know that they take perf very seriously and this will be given some attention.
Emacs is a little harder to write plugins for, but it runs natively and the only impediment is that more people know JS than they do elisp.
"It's really not the same thing. America always feels like America. Travelling in the US is no substitute to travelling abroad."

Except for New Orleans.
Engineering something so that it is reliable JUST ENOUGH so you can make more money from it failing sooner is not a trade off between cost of producing it and its performance.
As opposed to names like "Chaos Monkey", "Zesty Zapus", "mustache.js", "MongoDB" and other such open source project names discussed on HN?
>No, we all together own the result and fractionally each of us. That's the price of living in a democracy, and one I gladly accept. In a dictatorship you could argue like you do (and even there there are options, but with a much higher personal price).

Well, you said I could change things, I'm telling you I can't, because I don't get to choose. We all do, and the majority, by now, disagrees with me.

>That is a vanishingly small fraction of those entering. In fact, the vast majority would like nothing better than to turn back if not for the fact that their lives are in danger where they lived. Sure, there are people who move with economic motives, but those are even less likely to be a danger.

I am aware of it, but it's not worth the risk to let any of them in.

>Yes, it is a security issue. And you deal with that like you deal with any other security issue: through law enforcement.

That's supposing law enforcement can stop 100% of terror attacks before they have happened. Isn't it better to just remove the root of the issue?

>Do you actually believe that these 'millions of Muslims' are going to pick up arms and attack the citizens of the countries they have shared their lives with and who for the most part employ them and ensure their bread is buttered over the silly statements of some dictator?

No, not millions of them, but just a few ones are enough to wreak havoc.

And yes, they are going to attack us, first because they are bitter we made them lose everything, and second because there's definitely not enough butter for all of them (in my own country, there isn't even enough butter for us natives!).

>No, sorry, he really doesn't. Erdogan, for all his bluster is incapable of ruling Turkey the way he wants to without vast human rights violations, there is little to no chance of him being able to rouse the Turks in Western European societies in the numbers required to cause a real problem.

Nobody talked about Turks. Turkey will covertly support ISIS as long as ISIS keeps killing Kurds, and they will because, let's be honest, all Muslims hate Kurds. And yes, ISIS lone fighters will keep terrorising us. It just happened yesterday.

About the rest, that's wishful thinking. I don't believe for a second two cultures that are fundamentally so different will ever manage to work together for one specific goal, let alone create something viable in the long term.
Is it just me or did the whole turn to the general idea that "space is hard" feel like an odd turn for the article. It felt like, specifics, specifics, generalities that have no meaningful tie-in.
Why should I care a spy agency has spy tools? (Which is all these leaks show.)

I mean, the CIA could always have broken in to my house undetected and set up tiny microphones -- why should I worry now that they use computers as part of that, but not then when it was bugs transmitting radio?

The reason people don't care now is why they didn't care then: so what? Do you really believe the CIA gives a shit about what you have to say?