skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am in the perfect demographic for the Bolt: I am a previous Chevy owner (with a car that ran well for over fourteen years!), I want an electric car, and I'm not afraid of being an early adopter.

I can't buy one.

Chevy doesn't appear to be manufacturing them beyond a handful of review units for magazines like Motor Trend and a small number of end-user sales in states where they need the ZEV Credits. People are unenthusiastic about the Bolt because they're matching Chevy's apparent level of enthusiasm.

The rhetoric around the Bolt ("Chevy did it! They were first at scale with a $35k car!") is arguably even more disconnected from reality than anything people are saying about Tesla. The Model 3 isn't a compliance car that is masquerading as a serious effort. Tesla is planning on selling it nationwide. They didn't restrict pre-orders to California and Oregon. Setting aside the actual cars, these are big differences.

At Chevy's current roll-out pace, my Model 3 pre-order will arrive long before any local Chevy dealerships are willing to sell me a Bolt (while passive-aggressively pushing me towards an internal combustion vehicle the entire time).
(I used to work in aerospace).

Yeah it's not all C. At my Rolls-Royce we used SCADE and assembly, and we hired a guy from Raytheon in my last couple months that was used to working in Ada. In my experience, the difference tends to be civilian vs. military projects.

But those decisions are almost always based on platform. We used C because the platform we chose shipped with a C SDK, and we had a lot of tooling based around C, not to mention standards and processes (MISRA, FAA certification, etc.). The perspective is that hardware is a stricter constraint than software is, so as a software engineer you just make it work.

But what this means is that C is pretty dominant. Rare is the occasion you'll find dev kits shipped with Ada SDKs.

> And the parts that do use C use such specialized subsets of it that general-purpose C knowledge isn't very valuable (e.g. you won't be able to use any of the libraries you're used to if you're working in aerospace).

Ehh, I wouldn't say that. Depending on the product, you might even be doing such crazy things as parsing JSON/XML, running a PHP interpreter or a JS interpreter, or other non-embedded things, and you'll choose C because of hardware limitations, like running on a 32-bit 400 MHz chip.

Usually the most stringent requirement is "no dynamic allocation", but that doesn't rule anything out, you just need to know your constraints ahead of time.

Specifically on one project I worked on, we ran Redis and used MessagePack for IPC between our processors/boards. This was an embedded Linux project with essentially no certification requirements, but our hardware was so low-spec that we needed to be very focused on maintaining efficiency. C was really the only option with existing libraries, sufficient tooling, and the necessary performance profile.

But we were careful. Our codebase was under 20k LOC. We ran unit tests, integration tests, and fuzzing. We ran code through code reviews multiple times. We had a strict coding standard. We followed MISRA (mostly), even though we didn't need to. We wrote reams of requirements and specs, and documented our code meticulously (I spent more time flowcharting my code than writing it in the first place). None of that is gonna go away by switching to a memory safe language, so it's hard to say, "Hey, switch to this language that you're unfamiliar with, even though you'll still have to do all the extra 'be careful' work anyway".
Unlike the US, Israel and Turkey have been actively targeted by real, no-BS terrorist activity and their security measures are not the security theater that is the TSA, nor are their policies inspired by underlying racism but actual evidence-based security policy.

I'm 100% sure it's unpleasant, but their motives are far more trustworthy than the TSA's.
Newsonomics: The halving of America’s daily newsrooms (2015)
Right!? I mean, you have 18 year olds in 2 very different environments of the military and college. Like, in the military you have to also do incredibly complicated things under a lot of stress and it takes a lot of mental fortitude and training, and then you don't even know when that training will be tested unlike with a final exam. Passing classes is much simpler than landing a blackhawk into a firefight or the logistics of supplying a battleship, things 20 years olds do in the services. Yet the bar for entering college is generally much higher than for the military but the stress, responsibility, and workload of the average warfighter is much higher than for the average college student. I just don't get the real moaning and groaning and trying to make things trivially easy for the students (we all complain from time to time to get things off our chests, I get that though)
What does this mean for Instacart? It can't be good.
I'm ALL for taking out ISIS. But, with carpet bombing huge areas, the likelihood of unintended collateral damage is very high. Which brings us to the general attitude of the U.S. in war - "When it comes to innocent lives, only U.S. lives matter!!"

There's ZERO chance that the U.S. would tolerate collateral damage on it's own citizens in the name of getting ISIS, so why accept the possibility of non-American causalities?
Ask HN: Review my startup
Would love to have your feedback on my startup named Sportal - it helps you find players in your locality for playing any sport you want.

Here's the link to the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.getsportalapp.sportal&hl=en
Why does it necessarily have to be one or the other? Is it not plausible that there were replicators and metabolizers forming in tandem?
I wonder how this applies to humans now that photographs are so common.

At a young age we might not recognize ourselves, but anymore, especially with social media, we're constantly surrounded by pictures of ourselves in different situations (or even something as simple as profile pictures on nearly any website). A young child probably isn't using these but I wonder if constantly seeing oneself in images all the time reduces the proof that this is a form a 'higher' thinking as suggested in the introduction of this article and more of a learned thing due to the immersion with this.

It's not a mirror per se so it's not a live look at you, but nonetheless it's still you that you're seeing.
Without bots, I doubt that /r/place would have been very interesting. It's a nice thought that a million random strangers can be cohesive without automation, but for some reason I don't find that to be particularly realistic..
Fedora's strong point is that packages are pretty new (not quite Arch). This is also its weak point. The idea that it's stable is just funny. It also doesn't even pretend to support upgrades. If you want stable, try CentOS or Debian Stable.
Hello there, congrats for the launch!

I have a question regarding your back-end: What speech-to-text service are you using to transcribe calls?

I'm guessing that it is powered by one of the major players in the field (Nuance, Google's Speech API, etc) and I would like to know which one you ended up selecting.

I'm developing a service myself (on an unrelated field) that uses speech to text as one of its cornerstones, and I'm still trying to decide which service to use, so your experiences while selecting one may be of use.
Or how about heat? Ok, maybe I'm biased here...

/I call Phoenix, AZ home...sigh
> The tech is here.

While I WFH quite a bit, I have to disagree with this statement. For a lot of interaction modes, being remote still lacks a lot of the bandwidth (for lack of a better term) than in person. If you're working out a problem/presentation/etc. with a group, it's still hard to beat a conference room with a whiteboard.

Things are better than they used to be. Something like Google Docs can certainly help. But working with a group F2F, serendipitous encounters, informal interactions, etc. can be hard to replicate. And, again, I say this as someone who works remotely much of the time and doesn't go out of my way to commute, even though it's not a bad commute.
Great work - love reading this stuff.

As a sort of mini-rant - with so much 'incident transparency' with Slack, Email, Dashboards, Hangouts, etc high-sev issues can devolve into all hands events if you haven't nailed the culture as well. These can be intensely political - where you got random managers/execs who haven't touched code in years in the Slack channel trying to look engaged and competent offering suggestions like, "Have we tried rolling back the release?" and the smart engineers who could actually fix the problem are afraid to do anything because everything they do is broadcasted to the entire company. It's relatively easy to adopt the tools and processes of successful tech companies but it's hard to get the culture.
Self-updates are great for browsers that people are using every day, but please, please don't use Servo as your everyday browser just yet. :)
>"I feel life Walmart did a good job forcing other retailers to up their game."

Can you explain how exactly?
Self-respect is a luxury.

I'm a man in my 30s with a wife and kids. If my best option to keep a roof over their heads was to have sex with the landlord, I would absolutely choose that over their being homeless.
Got some proof of phoning home?
As a 6'1" passenger myself, I can only assume you have short femurs. I've had that exact scenario happen to me on a flight - when the person in front of me reclines, my legs from my rear end to my kneecaps do not fit in the space provided in an economy seat.

I book seats that are Economy Comfort (I fly Delta) or exit-row seating, but when flying with my wife and children I sometimes need to choose comfort or sitting near them. (For the record, I choose to sit near them when I am forced to choose.)

I'm a little unhappy about being charged an extra $100 to fly Economy Comfort just because I happen to be in the 90th percentile for height, but I understand the engineering and social issues of providing seating in a fixed space for 200+ passengers.
Our younger cat has learnt to use mirrors to watch us around the house, so I'm pretty confident it has worked out what it does: https://goo.gl/photos/mZkiFcBUNKSUFwKx5

As an example, if I get food out in the kitchen while it is watching in the mirror, it comes running to check it out. Non food things - just keeps on watching.
Same was done in Holland several years ago. The one million pixels site. Each pixel was sold for a dollar. All was sold.
Functional languages and advanced type systems.
I went through several different ways to approach responding to your comment before writing this version. I think this is most succinct.

Self-replication can itself be viewed as a metabolic process. You really can't have replication before metabolism, because replication is metabolism. The question is which metabolic process came first.

Since replication is anabolic and requires an energy source, it seems like it makes sense to deal with energy first.

You can have reactions that harness energy to do nothing useful -> reactions that harness energy to cause self-replication -> life.
I think Snapchat is currently already overpriced, so I don't agree with your comments that it's fire sale prices, but only time will tell :) Note that I don't own any long or short position on the stock.
> We don't do BrExit here forcing (legal) residents out.

How about the Muslims?
Amused and happy seems like a misnomer when applied to overwhelmingly invasive, unnecessary procedures. Have they actually convinced you that this is improving security?
Nintendo Discontinues the NES Classic Edition
>The ones who don't, who are homeschooled alone, turn out "weird".

And those in the public school system are juuuuusssst fine...
Frontier Diary #2: Two Good Ideas That Aren’t Good Anymore
Postscript had the concept of dropping a mark on the stack that allowed commands that would consume the whole stack to also stop at a mark if encountered.

5 4 mark 3 2 1 sum -> 5 4 6
Russia wouldn't need to plan an attack and disable NATO early warning systems. If all their nukes were detonated, humanity would be doomed regardless of where they were detonated. The fallout would eventually encompass the entire earth.
Magic Is in the Illusion; Abracadabra… Understanding Trump Magic
Your comment made me wonder, could tools like prettier be the first step towards developer-customized code styles?

See it as views. Code could be stored in a minified (spaces and new lines are not necessarily saved), and then every developer in the team can view the code in any style he chooses. His code would then be committed using the underlying "minified" format, so that the next developer can pick up that code and view it in his own code style.

Does that even make sense? What could be the gotchas of such a thing?
How Erdogan's Referendum Gamble Might Backfire
But Elon Musk is literally Iron Man/the God King. What does it matter if I don't understand anything about the industry, Elon will lead me to the promised (of mars, or hacking the matrix).
It's hard to not be bitter, if you live in China for years as adult person and not some student enjoying parties and iresponsible youth years. The amount of ridiculous stuff you have to deal with every day (incompetent Chinese management in companies, unproductive Chinese coworkers, people blocking sidewalks and in general extremely selfish people anywhere you look, overcrowded subway, fighting to get to suburban bus and constant flow of people cutting the queue, toxic air, toxic food, dangerous roads, visa harassment, etc. etc.) is just unbearable after some time and eventually everyone will move away. It's not exactly country welcoming foreigners, which would explain why they have like 0.5% of population consisting of foreigners, now tell me other country with comparable population of foreigners.

But yeah, most of HN readers saw China only online and see how is it booming and stuff like that. Like look at amazing Beijing subway with many new modern nice and dandy lines, somehow everyone fail to see they are still at 50% level compared to any western city (in west you have roughly one line per 500K served population, in amazing Beijing 1mil sharing one line with no suburban trains or trams to supplement it). Same goes for their amazing HSR - omit the fact they stole German and Japanese technology, omit the fact their prices are more expensive than faster and more convenient flying in Europe and that they closed most of cheaper slower lines, so end result for people is to pay significantly more to get home.

Chinese gov propaganda department must be smiling reading comments on this website.
I was merely noting Snopes' intellectual dishonesty in dismissing anecdotal data solely on the basis that it is anecdotal (and obviously, inconvenient to their conclusion), but then using anecdotal data to support their conclusion when it is convenient.
Can you clarify your statement?What does a low-level person do to improve infrastructure?
I'm a software engineer at Amazon and enjoy my job.
Show HN: Tor Control Protocol Client – Node.js
MIT (in the 1980s) almost never had early morning classes. In fact, notoriously, Unified Engineering (aero-astro core sequence) started at 9AM; on the first day of class they apologized to us for the 9AM start saying that they just couldn't schedule it any other way (all the AF ROTC kids were already up so maybe this was a fig leaf excuse).

On the other hand I had more than one undergraduate class start in the early evening.
Patent Owner Can’t Use Foreign Court Order To Block EFF From Speaking Out
Well, there is more than one social allegory related to Moloch. Many of them have no obvious relationship to Google. Which is why I asked the question in the first place. So people tried to be helpful and identify any sources that might be related.

I just read the character description for Moloch in Paradise Lost, and don't see any obvious theme you might tie to Google.

In fact, I'm still not quite sure what the original comment was trying to say. Apart from some fuzzy notion that capitalism is sort of like Moloch and we keep feeding it with our "children". Where children is what? Privacy? Money? Open source tools?
What if this were survivor bias, and those who can't function at such an early time wash out in training? It's a possibility!
Is yet another piece of Tesla FUD in an endless stream really contributing to the discussion? If the article has merit, it can be its own submission, but this looks like the same old gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts that I've seen hundreds of times. Headline: "Tesla competitor thinks Tesla no good!" Seriously, there's nothing there that hasn't been said for years.
Yes, so that would have to wait for a bit. Still, it would make for very interesting reading.
Up their game meaning, either go up market or go out of the buisiness maybe.
Video: Print your breakfast with this new 3D Pancake Printer
Agree up to "type 2 diabetes doesn't seem to have an impact on ability to pass on ones genes, so natural selection would be blind to it."

Individuals who have extensive family support do better than ones who do not. That's why we don't die the moment we stop being able to produce offspring. Grandparents care for grandchildren, and help pass on knowledge that is very helpful for survival.

So not blind to it. Reduced impact, yes, but not blind.
Reddit itself has been very stable these last few years. Reddit search on the other hand is a complete crapshoot even to this day.
The English law is a mess, and can't really be described as decriminalized or legalised.

The core activity - people exchanging sex for cash - is legal, but a bunch of other stuff around the activity is illegal.
All other commentary aside, I find the "imparted as a child" distinction creepy and infantilizing. It sounds like "I know you think you believe this, but you were raised that way so your views don't count as real opinions!" My gut reaction is something like "screw you, hold me accountable for all my beliefs!"

Even more obviously, childhood beliefs affect us in lots of different ways. If someone becomes a Satanist because they were raised with oppressive Christianity, is that any less "imparted as a child" than sticking with their Christian faith?

This is a bizarre distinction that seems like a way to exempt popular beliefs from being held accountable for their content.
Track how technology is transforming work
Show HN: Seeking Evaluators for Beta Release of Algorithmic Trading Application
STATS4TRADE is seeking evaluators, who are interested in providing feedback for the eventual development of an automated, mobile-based application for equity trading with buy/sell signals from machine-learning algorithms. The current beta release is free and intended for small private investors – particularly technology-savvy investors, who are interested in disruptive approaches to investing that bypass high-fee funds and brokerages.
Are typical Java GCs "badly designed"? The issue with nondeterminism and complexity is well known... you trade other things off when you optimize for throughput
How does openSUSE do compared against Fedora, FreeBSD and Debian (testing) for developers?
I'm currently running Ubuntu but the experience is not as smooth as I want: I've had several freezes and kernel panics, even though my laptop is well supported (from Ubuntu 14.04, at least).

I want something that's a bit stable with more recent packages.
FreeBSD seems to be semi-rolling release, comparing package versions in the 'current' release with that in the snapshot versions.
Debian testing has packages as recent as I can use, but I heard it's less stable than Ubuntu and bad things happen too.
I'm considering Fedora, but I prefer rolling release distros to fixed release ones (I don't want Rawhide for stability sake).
OpenSUSE has older packages in its repos: PHP < 7.0, gcc < 6, ...
Ask HN: What's the best way to help 2 people agree on a recurring meeting time?
I've been dealing with this challenge for a while and have decided to open it to the HN community.

Context: I'm trying to make online learning more supportive by using synchronous collaboration. People sign up to a course, get a partner assigned, they agree on recurring meeting times, and they meet always at the same time to work on a project (e.g. they build a REST API doing remote pair programming). The "recurring" part is the key since this is what reduces dropouts (i.e. you have a person holding you accountable).

Problem: it's incredibly hard to help two people agree on a recurring meeting schedule when you don't have a large number of users.

Imperfect solution #1: People sign up to a pre-defined schedule (e.g. Tue & Thu 6pm - 9pm). This lacks flexibility and it doesn't work well with multiple time zones.

Imperfect solution #2: You ask people for timezone and how many times per week they want to meet and you assign them to someone in a similar timezone and let them agree on meeting times via email. This requires a lot of back and forth via email, some people are not super responsive, etc. This is very flexible and maximizes the chances of people agreeing on a meeting time.

Imperfect solution #3: People sign up and select meeting preferences (number of days per week, preferred days, preferred times, etc.) and, using an algorithm, you match people with similar preferences. This lacks some flexibility because someone people might be open to times other than the "ideal" ones they have selected. This also works really week with scale, but not so well with less than 100 users per course.

Imperfect solution #3.1: Same as the previous one, but you show users "schedule preferences" of available users so they can select them and they get assigned to that person automatically.

What would you do to maximize the chances of getting two people to agree on recurring meeting times and to reduce the back and forth in the conversation at the same time?
Where I live, at certain times (say middle of July or August) I could walk down the street at midnight, and get heatstroke if I don't carry water with me.

/dead serious here
I wonder if some of it is the perceived relative stature of Grant relative to other presidents of that era (other than Lincoln of course).

I'm not sure that presidents like Buchanan and Johnson used to be perceived as so near the bottom of the barrel as they are today. And while Johnson's impeachment was History 101 in American history classes, I don't remember it in the vein of "he really deserved to be impeached" but as more as a political thing.
I had an intro economics professor who was very similar. I think the class was at 8:30AM and the professor was very proud of the way he handled late homework assignments.

There was a box for homework at the front of the large lecture hall that 10 minutes after class began the professor would place the lid on the box and tape it shut. If your homework wasn't in it before then you got a 0 with no recourse.

Total nonsense, but it was a required class for engineers. I barely passed and did not give a fuck about that.
Many times it's harder to tell. The counterfeits even extend to cosmetics which have huge margins if you fake the label and fill it with crap.

Buying from first-party sellers may help but even then Amazon doesn't always ship YOUR inventory. If the "same" product is physically closer to a user than yours, but they bought from you, they might ship from another seller which can be counterfeit.
In defense of HW engineers, they're often staring at a cost of goods spreadsheet.

Earlier in my career, I had a driver that compiled to about 8500 bytes. I noticed the part was spec'd at 16K and wondered if it could get re-spec'd at 8K if I got it down to 8K. Yep and I got mad props from the HW types.
Besides its concussive pulse, the weapon is designed to draw in air from underground/fortified structures in the blast radius. E.g. asphyxiate people hiding in tunnels. It no doubt will leave a crater, but my understanding is that the crater would be less than that left by a similar quantity of TNT.
Dark matter bridge holding galaxies together has been captured