skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google has nothing to do with this. Apple get their bad rep from their behavior on Darwin, webkit and the GNU bait-and-switch (first adopted with great fanfare, then left to rot and eventually purged mercilessly). The fact that they strenuously refused to let some of their desktop goodness leak back into the OSS world, from the very first day OSX was announced, is also an old pain point.
Wow, homeopathy. It's a carryover from alchemy. So you identify a poison, which causes some effect. You titrate the dose-response. Then you argue that some miniscule amount, orders of magnitude below an effective dose, relieves that poison's effect. That's from alchemy. And then people who believe you feel better, given how strong the placebo effect can be.
Risk of 'catastrophic' nuclear accident as world relations worsen, UN warns
> which started construction in 1982

I think you mean 1882.
Tilly's bionic hand [video]
Protip: the quality of any metric used to measure performance will ultimately degrade over time, as the metric itself becomes the target for optimization instead of actual performance. any metric can be gamified
You're being downvoted, but dissenting opinions should be allowed, even when it comes to climate change. There is a reasonable argument to be made that climate change alarmism is not productive. I saw Bill Nye answer the question of 'what happens due to global warming,' to which he replied, 'people's qualities of life will most likely go down because people will fight over resources,' that said, right now we have a surplus of resources in a very real sense. We already basically have productive capacity to feed every person on earth, but it's politics and greed that makes people starve, not resources.

Whether the down-voters like it or not, climate change is a very real and scientifically established fact, but what that will do to people on the world is not a scientific fact. It's just what currently most people predict will happen (and disagreeing with this is feels like some kind of thought crime in the traditional sense--it's not science). The world is not going to end. Biodiversity and Biomass is decreasing. The Northwest Passage is being opened up. Iron fertilization will become a more likely policy to sequester carbon and increase biomass in the oceans. Sea levels will rise. Extreme weather patterns most likely will increase. Productive farm land may or may not increase. Russia actually may have a fair bit to gain from it. But the fact is, there is a lot we really don't know.

In the very long run our civilization will need to harvest as much energy from the sun as possible, but in the meantime we've done a pretty fantastic job of screwing up the planet, so it's a pretty good idea to stop emitting so much pollutants into our atmosphere, since we don't really know for sure, but we have a lot of reasons to think it won't be good. That's really the best argument to end climate change, but it's probably not convincing enough to change behavior in large numbers of people.

That said, the politics and bureaucracies around climate change have started to resemble the War on Poverty and War on Drugs--institutions which now exhibit bureaucratic intertia (have an inherent perverse incentive structure, and they rationally (evilly) place their own survival over that of solving the problems they're tasked with).
Emotional support animals have nothing to do with the ADA, though many people abusing the system encourage such confusion.
Apple Forces Recyclers to Shred All iPhones and Macbooks
Counter argument: American sites should try supporting a language other than English.

Many EU sites have multiple languages sorted into different flags up at the top of the page. Ours do not.
It can be a new living concept when equipped with modern gadgetry including low power electrics, and of course mobile computing and communications.
Sometimes, other times it's just wind farms are put in by companies who do wind farms and buy those rights, often from regular farmers, who continue to farm around the turbines. If you put in solar, then there's nothing left to farm. Though for grain crops solar is likely going to be more profitable on an acreage basis.
> - Unicode support

Agreed, it would be nice if this were standard.

> - Special characters in string literals via something analogous to \x3F, \177, \n, \t, \u+1234.

> - Way to write long string literals split across lines with indentation

I haven't needed these often, but I guess some people would use them a lot and there's no downside.

> - Standardized code walking primitives: one body of user code with no #+this #-that which correctly walks all special forms.

Also agreed. Do you happen to know of an open source code walker that has all the required conditionalizations? I would be curious to see it.

> - expand-full function

Can't this be in a library?

> - native lazy list

I haven't done enough programming with lazy lists to have a good feel for the value of this.

> - require numerically equivalent fixnums to be friggin' EQ, damn it.

Heh :-) Why? Seems like this would be a big problem for ABCL.

> - Overhaul of path names, w.r.t. current OS landscape.

I agree, it would be nice if there were more standardization here.

> - Standardize the Meta-Object Protocol for CLOS.

Agreed; this should be easy by now.

> - Standard support for weak hash table keys and values.

I would prefer a more general weak-reference mechanism that would let us build our own weak data structures. Java has this. It's going to be hard for some implementors, though.

> - Hash tables with arbitrary :test function.

Desirable, though I don't use the built-in hash tables that much anymore anyway.

> - GC finalization support

I've never found finalization to be as useful as it sounds like it ought to be. It also seems to have a lot of overlap, both in use cases and in implementation difficulties, with weak references. I would just go with the latter.

Overall, this is a good list, though I don't agree with every item, and I have my own desires, as I mentioned previously. The question is whether the community can be pushed to any kind of consensus, at least on the point that there are enough things worth doing that it's worth setting up some kind of formal process to decide on them. It seems like an uphill battle to me. (In any case, I have no time to devote to it myself.)
> Except you have a high level of transparency

If you get a background check of everyone in the neighborhood

> no one else is trading your house while you had it

My share is my share- what other people do with their shares has an impact on mine- kinda like what your neighbors do with their property has an impact on the value of yours.
Here's one. http://www.bizcoder.com/how-not-to-write-spec-documents

Most of these bugs will only be found by the people given the task to implement the spec, not users of the implementation.
The idea of an owned cabin for vacations (or even full second home) is somewhat common (anecdotal). You'd need to own the land, as you pointed out.
Firefox automatically sets the Accept-Language header based on the user interface language (or at least it should; see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1005640). It's probably the same for other browsers.

However, mismatches between the user language and the interface language are probably more common than one would think. Here in Brazil at least, I often see computers with the user interface in English, while the user's native language is Portuguese.
> In the end, they use open source strategically. If there's no benefit to open-sourcing something, they won't.

Wouldn't that apply for most companies? Let's not pretend that Facebook, Microsoft et al do open source as a charity
Those are fair objections. Concerns I have myself, but the counterproposals seem scientifically unfounded to me: picking certain technologies (and inevitably companies and industries) and deigning them "the green future" based on our still early developments in science and engineering.

Worse, people are calling people with concerns about subsidizing, say, certain battery companies (at the expense of alternative approaches and competing battery companies) as "global warming skeptics" and "anti-science". As if subsidizing particular avenues of R&D is a scientifically objective question.
Ah yes, the KDE community, holders of the ear of Steve Jobs.

Frankly, I'm not sure Apple ever cared for their thoughts on the matter.
Nearly every time I've ever been to the DMV it's been a pleasant process.

One time I got caught in bureaucratic hell. I had recently bought a house and took my closing documents in to get my address changed. The clerk informed me that all the closing documents represent "one document" since they all come from a single source (the closing) even though they came from several different agencies. I had to go to my bank, change my address there (using the closing documents as proof), have them print an statement that I now live at my new address, and take that back to the DMV as a "second document."

I'm not sure if that clerk was being a prick, over-zealously applying the rules, or acting in a capacious matter. Or if he was following clear direction from above about closing documents. So I'm not sure if I need to blame him or not.

But every other interaction I've had with the DMV has been smooth and pleasant. Quite frankly, my interactions with the IRS have been smooth and pleasant, even when I legitimately screwed up my taxes and had to get that sorted-out.
> barely warranting it for five years

Do cars or anything else often have warranties longer than 5 years? Does a regular house have a warranty longer than 5 years?
Google Maps also does something like this. Open a maps tab in Winnipeg and it will show you downtown Calgary if the ISP is Shaw Communications. Twitter even started recommending I follow former Prime Minister Stephen Harper because he represented a Calgary riding. I don't live in either of these cities.
I could easily increase daily active users of even the worst app by paying people in India to use it. This wouldn't exactly help the business - but if that's all you are optimizing for then its not hard to get. In the same vein I could increase people's time in the app by simply making it harder to use. They'd spend more time trying to get what they wanted.

There are no benchmarks that cannot be gamed.
An oldie but a goody for a curious mind needing a base for learning electronics. The handwritten text & drawings made the task of learning seem slightly less daunting, IME. That was 30 years ago, and yet I still see the smiling electrons in my mind`s eye when problem-solving transmission issues on-board and on the network.

http://www.forrestmims.com/
Like most things, this is ordinarily not done when the economics do not appear to support doing it.
What China got right about grass
It's just a play: one side says they need to align to the other, so they pass law to match the other's limits... and raise them a bit. The other side notices and lobbies for alignment, which again will go a little bit further. Rinse and repeat.

Deflecting criticism by claiming another party forced your hand is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it still works extremely well. See also: EU directives, which are requested and agreed upon by all EU governments, just to be immediately turned into "tyrannical rules from Bruxelles" the minute they have to be applied.
A simple I2C master implementation on the MSP430
There isn't any lack of drinking water in the US other than maybe parts of Nevada. It's mostly used for commercial or agricultural purposes. When there is a shortage the question should be which the least important commercial or agricultural use.

Just using market based pricing would solve it. But western states have a shitty water rights policy that doesn't allow it. Someone growing water intensive crops in an arid region get priority over junior users. It's a bad system.
This is an important point. Birds die orders of magnitudes faster from respiratory failures caused by coal's pollution.
Most plants are nitrogen limited not CO2 limited.
I can't imagine how that would be the case. If I (at Brazil) go into the Mozilla or Chrome download sites, anything that is not a Portuguese translation of a browser for my current OS is pretty much impossible to find. And those localized browsers do send the correct "Accept-Language" header.
> he's making the right decision: he's moving away from something that is, for him, toxic.

No argument there. After working 15 years on something non trivial it's totally ok to get fatigued and bail out. I was pointing out that there doesn't seem to be a valid technical argument to it.
It's a hint that they do not consider the materials very survivable. Five years is an awfully low lifetime for a permanent living structure, particularly one a contractor had a hand in building. Better to just not offer the warranty than offer five years, in this case, since one wouldn't expect to have to rebuild their home's frame three times before their kids graduate high school.

I get that the intent of this product is different, but not different enough to make the warranty not stand out.
You can't know that.

It could have been redeveloped in anything, but kept the original url scheme for backwards compatibility.
Yes, it's not settled. I suspect that the huge ramp up in SOx and particulate emissions from China played an important role. And now that China is cleaning up, reducing dependence on coal, and exporting less, the rate of global temperature increase will keep increasing.
Sure, the towers may not be that advanced, though I bet they're optimized extensively for cost. It is the blades that I'm thinking of. They have to be light and strong, which aren't particularly new requirements, but I bet the scale adds challenges of its own relative to aircraft wings. Also, I hear wear on the gearboxes for these things are a major pain, so I bet they are pretty advanced as well.
This thread got me curious, and while I didn't find a lot of sources talking about it, this one[0] gives some likely possibilities: urbanization means less transport energy costs and less domestic manufacturing means less industrial energy usage.

It doesn't talk much about why residential energy usage has dropped. I'm guessing it's people moving from their giant houses into smaller homes or apartments following the recession (combined with the general trend towards urbanization). I'm assuming it's not just that LED bulbs changed the landscape.

[0] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-10/why-capita-energy-c...
Query in Duck Duck Go, add a "!g" somewhere for it to query Google.
> EDIT If it is for portal.uspto.gov then HSTS is a non-issue but still a very bad move.

Is it? I still see HSTS from portal.uspto.gov with the same age.
I tend to agree with everything you said (except the slight against Democrats). The only point of departure for me is that I don't think Americans will give up on the dream of bringing back, e.g., coal jobs--basically, the imagined blue collar work life of 50 years ago. I would expect a simple UBI to only increase resentment. American culture, and especially American political culture, is built around the notion of hard work and independence and the relationship between the two. In the context of American culture, UBI is anathema to that notion.

No amount of finger wagging and intellectual discourse will change that. Heck, we've known for 30 years that with the economic dislocation caused by globalization America (public and private, state and federal) would need to heavily invest in re-education and work training programs. But we failed miserably even though every single economist and business leader, liberal and conservative, substantially agreed on what had to be done. We not only failed miserably, but large swaths of working class Americans literally resented the efforts.

Basically, I am intentionally conflating what you said with other social issues because my point is precisely that they're interdependent. Yes, a UBI is probably necessary to squeeze maximum wealth creation _and_ income equality out of a capitalist system. But because UBI is not tenable we'll have to settle for lesser options. That's called compromise.
We Need More Universities
So the president of a country on a different continent must know all the laws of all other countries in the world?

Trump is pretty openly pushing for bilateral trade, this should not surprise anyone. The fact that Germany has other arrangements and won't change that until the EU dissolves is their problem. It doesn't suggest that Trump is stupid.

Before everyone hates on me for "voting for Trump"... I'm not an American. I'm just sick of US publications ripping on this president for pedantic shit like this.
I still don't think it's that clear cut, most optimizations are based on these assumptions, it's just that some assumptions are more reasonable than others. A lot of compilers do this to some extent already, avoiding using certain kinds of information for optimization even if they could.
Lat time I played with Java was in 2015. It seemed like there was a new JVM zero-day every month, and every time I upgraded, the Java installer tried to install the Ask toolbar.

After that, I started joking that installing malware one way or the other was Oracle's primary goal.
And if you don't know calculus, there's Mermin's version:

http://kantin.sabanciuniv.edu/sites/kantin.sabanciuniv.edu/f...
Not only is it not original, it's a famous quotation (Edison).

I like that it's about expressed genius, implying genius isn't something you are, but something you do. Inspiration strikes unpredictably. This fits with that TED talk about the older definition of genius as a kind of muse that visits you (the inspiration part).

The inspiration for relativity - that you could make speeds constant by fiddling time and distance - is pretty simple, even childish or foolish. But constructing a consistent mathematical theory from it was difficult. Even so, the maths was within reach of other mathematicians of the time - they tutored Einstein for general relativity. It's the inspiration that you could do it and actually doing it,
Though IMHO the most amazing thing about relativity is that it turned out to be true.

I agree there are many smart people who never did anything. By this definition, they aren't "geniuses".

BTW: HN might dislike this quote because Edison has fallen from favour, and (Nikola) Tesla is celebrated. Though, Edison is by all measures the better model of entrepreneurship (Telsa the better inventor). In general, HN votes should not be taken seriously.
Also, however you discover my language, don't autotranslate your contents into it if you don't have a translation (and worse, hide the way to disable it). If I can't read anything you have, I'll ask my browser to translate, you don't need to bother.
>Well, it's certainly "minimalist" and it's a very nice web site

That website is a monstrosity. You get a blank page with javascript off. When you enable it, it takes about 7 seconds of pinwheel to load anything, at which point you're suddenly assaulted with high volume mood music.
That's interesting. Can you point me to where that's discussed?
You mean like the scientists and doctors who for DECADES claimed a diet low in fat was "heart healthy" and diets high in saturated fats and cholesterol would lead to heart disease, only for that to be rescinded in the last few years?
It's not Apple's fault that they didn't open up FaceTime. They absolutely were going to, and then they were sued by a patent troll (VirtnetX), and was forced to change how FaceTime works so it relays through Apple's servers instead of going peer-to-peer. Since it was now going through Apple's servers, there was no point in opening up the protocol.
One of the idea's for a preinstalled IDE is described in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22876 which so far planned to be part of GitLab CE (free). No plans for streaming though.
> and which is known not to work well

This is commonly said about speed reading, but it seems to me like a bit of a misunderstanding about what speed reading even is. Speed reading isn't about trying to retain the same level of comprehension on a single pass through a text as a normal speed pass through it. It's nothing more than an optimized skimming technique if you only take one or two passes through a text. But the idea is to leverage the time saved through 'speed reading', by putting that extra time into additional passes later on, thus making it more of an efficient spaced repetition[0] system than a reading technique. The idea being that you build your comprehension up with each pass, until you surpass the comprehension you would've had of it if you only took one normal speed pass through it, and in the end still use up about the same amount of time or less as a normal reading.

Continuing with the spaced repetition idea, speed reading also helps that along more than normal reading by making the things you've read more difficult to recall, which is good if you plan to review them again later to strengthen the memories. The book "Make It Stick"[1] has a pretty good overview of different scientifically proven learning techniques that are pretty interesting, and a lot of them overlap with the effects of speed reading + multiple passes.

Personally, since I'm dyslexic, I prefer applying this approach to audiobooks and listening to them at 3-4x speed, then re-listening to ones I liked later, all while taking notes as I go. And I have to say, that works out for me pretty well. My biggest issue is keeping track of which book I learned what from.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition

[1] http://makeitstick.net
> Many of the objectors indeed thought that there would be some other way to get to the same outcome

I really feel like Google is a victim of their own engineering brilliance sometimes: the objectors really thought that because Google made this look easy, that it was easy. They figured if one company could just casually decide to do this, that they could reliably expect that someone else or maybe government or another legal avenue will come along. The reality of course, is that Google is special; nobody will do it now and even Google is losing its "specialness".

And further, because Google appeared to be doing it so easily, they all thought that Google profiting from it in some way was unfair. They didn't see it as reasonable that Google should be rewarded for the genuine investment of labor and intellectual property involved in pulling this off, precisely because Google didn't give the appearance that it was hard. If Google had given more of an appearance of struggling to achieve it - I'd bet the authors would have suddenly appreciated what Google was doing more and probably accepted the idea that it was fair for Google to profit from it in some way.
This is disappointing. I've used IKVM to convert a few Java libraries written by academics where no .NET equivalent existed at the time (NLP and some other math libraries).