skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Benchmark-driven query optimization
Simplified Hands in Inkscape
2-in-1: facilities of full backups with the effectiveness of incremental ones
I'll put Tom Wheeler (or any Democratic appointee) up against Ajit Pai, Michael Powell (or any other Republican appointee) any day when it comes to which side is more pro consumer and which is more pro big monopoly.

> Part of the way the cronies keep us in line is to direct our fire at "the other wing", instead of at them

And part of the way the right wing justifies its atrocities is to claim that "both sides do it", "both sides are the same" or some similar flat out bullshit.
Been a while since I had the time and energy to sit down and write a tutorial. Today I finally finished a quick tutorial on creating simplified hands in inkscape using just rectangles and lines.
During the Cold War, Sweden was a major part of the Western European defense against the Soviet Union. Russia has historically been expansionist and imperialist. Whether modern Russia can field a credible threat to them is uncertain.

"Since Peter the Great, Russia had been expanding at the rate of one Belgium per year."

Henry Kissinger
Exactly the same experience here. I always felt bad about those periods that I wasn't able to even put in 20 productive hours a week, until I started writing detailed hour log: every bad period was always preceded by a very productive period where everything seems to come together.

Even the last three weeks: I was stuck on a design problem and couldn't really move forward/get productive for two weeks. Then when the solution finally clicked you can have a few days of just coding it all, that feels so much more productive.

Also got similar experience with being able to easily work 16 hour days on tasks that always have a clear and small next step, like CSS/design fixes.

What I've learned is to take advantage of those days that everything just works out and make the extra hours and not feel guilty when they don't. Works much better for me than trying to stick to a fixed number of hours per day.
You might add in some basic (useful) encryption like RSA. There's a running joke in the CS department at my university that every other class has to teach RSA, so it is not incredibly difficulty to do.
Maybe I misundestood, but I think this already exists and does not suck. MS Access could do this 20 years ago.

Expressing the connections isn't always easy, but this is more of a problem of the underlying programming language, not of the visual elements.
This thinking is exactly the problem. "There are a lot of people with dark skin in basketball, your skin color is looking like theirs, therefore your path to success must be basketball". But the solution you seem to be implying is even worse - "ok, we succeeded in convincing you your skin color determines your path in life. Congrats to us. But now we'll close this path for you because we already have too many people looking like you there, so no success for you, sorry". Both ways of thinking are idiotic and both if followed can ruin people's lives. We need less of that, not more.
The point is to be able to work in different windows in the same session, not have two different sessions. I can see how something similar can be achieved in tmux but it would require getting used to a different workflow.
What a fraud of an article. Comparing the wind energy, which is mostly used just for electricity, with oil wood and gas. Is like comparing the percentage of people using a boat daily with those using a car. It just isn't the correct metric.
Also by lumping people burning cow dung in with electrical generation.

(Hey, I'm burning calories typing now, can we lump in "eating" and make wind appear even smaller?)

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

Nearly 6% of electricity in the US is from wind.
Over a third of some state's electricity is from wind. But since when was popularity ever an argument? (Linux is better than Windows in my experience. Market share schmarket share.)

But there are some valid points in the article.

Wind turbines are resource intensive to build. (But again, he misleads by saying "it takes this much coal" but without specifying how long they turbines last.. he seems to pretend it's a yearly thing and soon the entire face of the earth would be covered in wind turbine to keep up). I'm sure there is some depreciation schedule that would almost certainly show you get more energy out of wind turbines than you put in with less pollution total per unit of energy produced. If this isn't the case, ya, stop wind turbine usage but probably it is the case.

I also agree with his final analysis. Nuclear is I think the way forward. But sadly because the arguments he presents are pretty weak.
Finland begs to differ:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War
Is it something you are doing as open source - pls share link if so (above comment downvoted, why ?)
Let's agree to disagree on the Efficient-market hypothesis, what cracks me out there is one of the pioneers Paul Samuelson, Nobel laureate economist - who ended up co founding one of the first quantitative trading company Commodities Corporation - I guess hi did hedge his bet... and let's finish with one of my favorite Warren Buffet quote:

“Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace, and those who read their Graham & Dodd will continue to prosper.”
I would sort of expect Julia to be on the list for "good math language for people not quite happy with clojure". But it's much younger than the others listed, obviously.
Did anyone else think that the language used in this article was really hyperbolic and over-dramatic? Loads of unnecessary superlatives I thought.
Here are osha safety guidelines for ultrasonic sound:

https://www.osha.gov/dts/osta/otm/new_noise/appendixc.pdf

tldr: Maximum 115 dB

Here is a calculator to convert decibels to watts:

http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-soundlevel.htm

tldr: ~0.3 watts per square meter

Surface area of a google pixel: 14.3cm x 6.95cm = 0.01 square meters

Therefore approximately 0.003 watts over the surface area of a phone at safe volumes. At 5v that's 0.6 mA. Barely enough to light up LEDs. It looks like they're working with larger holders, say 20cm x 20cm that's 0.04 sq meters or 2.4 mA at 5v. It takes about 10 mA to trip the "charging" indicator on an android phone:

http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/what-does-it-ta...

This is based on the raw power of the sound waves. There will be inefficiency converting from sound to electricity, so they are probably dealing with greater than 115 dB sound at the phone. They are probably just barely tripping the charge sensor for 100 hour charge times. If they are charging significantly then they are working with very excessive excessive sound levels (>125 dB).

Given imperfect transducers for 100% conversion of sound to electricity and the above dimensions they would have to be working with > 122 dB sound at the phone for 10 mA charge current.

So, it's either a scam or it's not safe. Jamming that much air pressure in a small space will cause problems and will probably be inefficient.

Sound is not a laser. You can beam form it, it just won't be as tight as a laser, or even a flashlight. You can't expect clean narrow patterns within a 45 degree cone from the source. There will be high and low intensity interference patterns. You can even see it in the demo.
Ask HN: Help developing tech-focused curriculum for Bay Area high school
Hello!

Background:

I am a high school teacher at a school in the Bay Area that is adopting a focus in tech. Our goal is to have our kids get jobs in tech after they graduate. We're offering courses in computer literacy and introductory coding, and are trying to get all teachers to integrate more tech-focused assignments in classes, including discussing tech as a topic and using more tech in all classes. I have been designated tech curriculum developer, because I am young and proficient with tech for an English major (i.e. I make documents in LaTeX and have played around with coding). However, I am dealing with tech-phobic faculty, so myself and a few other colleagues do not have much support in finding opportunities for our students.

I work at an alternative school in a rough area. Our kids face enormous challenges, but are incredibly tough, resilient, and learn quickly (most have had really terrible school experiences, many were not their fault). We are in a high-poverty area and few of our students go to 4 year colleges (many go to community college). Most get low-paying service jobs after they graduate and continue to live in poverty. But they have dreams, and they are intelligent and wonderful. I want the best opportunities for them, and with the growing tech world in the Bay Area, I want them to be prepared for the future.

Questions:

My questions for this community are: what opportunities exist within your fields for students such as mine? What internships and entry level jobs are available where you work? What skills should we teach them to be prepared for those jobs? What areas (frontend, backend, IT infrastructure) within the tech world would be best for students who will not be able to go to a 4 year college?

We're working to create a partnership with Hack the Hood and Girls Who Code, but any other organizations that you know of that are trying to outreach to high schools would be great.
the bomb does not explode "near" the ground.

the relatively small bombs of hiroshima and nagsaki exploded about a mile above ground. the goal here is to make the shockwaves double up near the ground, causing more destruction.

i'd assume that bigger bombs would detonate at higher altitudes to achieve the same effect further out.
Google has this option in the Google iOS app (and presumably the Android one).

Interactive Brokers have had something like this for a couple of years.
Thanks for sharing. My kids are really interested in computer art and found this tutorial and the site fascinating
Dupe, currently #1 on front page

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14482132
One word: Steganography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
Doesn't insurance segment by model? Or are you saying that 10% of a $10k tesla repair is $1k in overhead, and that gets amortized across the customer base?
There are only a handful of shops around where I live that will even touch a Tesla when it comes to body work. Aluminum is hard to work with. OTOH someone who has paid $100k for a car should be able to fork over $300 more a year.
Even in a language where garbage collection or the type system theoretically prevents the existence of invalid pointers, they still can come into existence via the FFI. Even when both languages are safe in that respect, it's generally trivial to create a invalid pointer over the FFI.
Richer insurees have more assets to go after if they are involved in a the 2-sigma events (eg killed someone while drunk driving; insurance can come after a wealthy person's assets).

It wouldn't be shocking that tesla drivers are expected to make fewer claims, based on the halo bias towards wealthy people.
> when you have a complex multithreaded bug because of sloppy optimization, faster compiles won't help.

Code that cryptic is exactly the kind of code I often want to modify with more instrumentation, logging, sanity checks, test cases, etcetera. "The problem seems to go away if I do X" isn't a real solution, but it can be a great hint at times, especially if you've got a small and relevant resulting difference in the disassembly. "X asserts right at the site of the fundamental bug" is handing you the solution on a gold platter. Slow build times discourage adding these things, and refactoring systems to be harder to misuse. If it takes hours to rebuild your full setup, nobody but the crazy people (such as myself) will touch common headers to preemptively add such things to make the codebase more maintainable.

Even if it's not helping you in the instant, it's helping you in the long run.

> BUCK and other build systems make compile lightning fast

It sounds like you have compile times under control wherever you are. I'm happy for you - and perhaps a little envious ;).

BUCK won't magically solve multi-minute link times. Full builds of a lot of things I've worked on require zipped, compressed, and cryptographically signed packages of gigabytes (which must then be verified, uncompressed, and unpackaged to test) - BUCK et all can't solve this terribly well either. Distributed build systems are pretty magical about solving embarrassingly parallel compiles, although even for compilation it doesn't help me too much when I'm on the bleeding edge doing hours worth of builds just to test a reasonable subset of our build configurations - maxing out a 6-core - before rolling out the latest SDKs and compilers to the rest of the build farm and my coworkers.

There are various tricks one can employ to help keep build/deploy/test cycle times in check for the common case - faster linkers like gold, distributed build systems like BUCK, dev builds which stream unsigned assets from host computers instead of from a package, etc. - but someone has to do the work of setting those all up.
Can you use the resulting Ebook for whatever you want or is it only for publishing to their platform?
Be more thoughtful to my wife.
I'm somewhat disappointed there is no content on the Nuclear Weapons Effects Calculator, a specialized circular slide rule included in a book of the same name. There is extensive documentation about it, and while a collectors item, can still be found on eBay or Abe books occasionally. A nice simulation of it, and templates for anyone willing to make their own, are available at [1].

[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/
Why would Russia attack Finland? And what would Russia have to gain by invading Norway?
So worth it. If you read it, you'll wish there were more.
I wouldn't expect Wikipedia to accept "WikipediaSucks.com" as a source either.
"It is a remarkable advance to have identified the dimensions used by the primate brain to decode faces, he added — and impressive that the researchers were able to reconstruct from neural signals the face a monkey is looking at."

"These dimensions create a mental “face space” in which an infinite number of faces can be recognized. There is probably an average face, or something like it, at the origin, and the brain measures the deviation from this base."

"Dr. Tsao said she was particularly impressed to find she could design a whole series of faces that a given face cell would not respond to, because they lacked its preferred combination of dimensions. This ruled out a possible alternative method of face identification: that the face cells were comparing incoming images with a set of standard reference faces and looking for differences."

I'm surprised that they didn't attempt to generate a face with exactly 0 on all dimensions.

It would be fascinating to know what the most memorable face looks like - and if it's different per-brain. (Presumably it is monkey shaped!)
No, the argument is that when a Tesla is not at fault then some other insurance company is paying more money to fix a Tesla than say a similar BMW.
I too am curious about what you've built, feel free to email me (on my profile)...I have been working on Solvent (link in profile) and have been exploring Angular or Vue as the UI building component.
Words of a man with not much to lose. Once your net worth is in multiple millions, the calculation will change quite a bit. You will most definitely not want to lose your life's savings on a moral crusade.
Yea, I agree. Yudkowski found his voice starting around chapter 20. The initial chapters could use a good rewriting.
Also very curious to see what you've built as I'm building something similar right now. Would you mind sending a link to adam@useindio.com?
And cleans all those pesky stereocilia out from your inner ear!
Thanks for sharing, I'd somehow never heard of softcover before - it looks really nice! (Not the OP, but Open-Publisher is my project).
Always bet on text: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8451271
I'd like to hear Mr. Money Mustache's take on this.
Think of something you don't do yourself, but would like to see banned. Could be guns, drugs, fox hunting, cars, eating meat, religion, anything, it doesn't matter.

Now consider there are people who feel exactly the same about your thing as you do about theirs. Civilisation absolutely requires that for them to leave you alone, you must be willing to do the same.
Forget MMM, Jack Bogle and Warren Buffett are the ones to ask, and I'm pretty sure they'd agree.

(Warren Buffett needs no intro, Jack Bogle founded Vanguard Investments)

EDIT: Autocorrect fail. Fixed. Thanks!
Because language and abstraction goes hand in hand. The great leap 50,000 to 100,000 years ago did something to our brains that brought both our use of language and capability of our mind to another level.
You misremember. Digg said it was "social bookmarking" for a while which caused me no end of headache, but Reddit never did and I don't remember anyone ever talking about them in that context.

Neither Reddit nor Digg offered actual bookmarking, so if you thought they were similar to Delicious you didn't really understand the product.
How do you skip college and invest the tuition in the S&P 500?

Ah, you can't: Of course, lenders won't give out large loans for an individual to skip college and dump tuition into the stock market, this is just a hypothetical scenario.

So this article is unrealistic.
It's fuck or get fucked. I'd rather not get fucked, same as you. It's just that now I'm on the other end.
> Theresa May says there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read"

The article focuses largely on the technical difficulties and implementation risks that make this goal impractical. I would like to point out that the goal in question is explicitly Orwell-style surveillance.
Damn. Office has ruined me. I started reading thinking this was (a somewhat funny) post about the single important (presentation) slide rule.

This was cool as well though. Learned something more valuable today.
The repo _does_ include a sample book, but you're right, some screenshots would be nice. I actually created the tool to handle all of my wife's books but I avoided linking to them from the project because I don't want it to look like a promotional tool/grab. But if anyone is interested in seeing books "in the wild" that have been created with this tool I'm happy to send you links.
I'm currently on my phone on a streetcar in San Francisco. I'm pretty confident there's one of those platforms I could access now with the greatest of ease, and the other would take some doing.
> barely disguised corporate graft on top of a historic shifting of the tax burden away from the wealthy

How does the minimum wage affect taxation on the wealthy? Corporate taxes, high or low, are paid by the consumers, no matter whether what the cost of that taxation is.

> combined with actual market forces that are concentrating wealth

If the paper is correct, and the minimum wage doesn't affect employment, then by proxy, one has to argue that it doesn't affect profitability. If it doesn't affect profitability, then it doesn't help or hinder wealth concentration.

Further, it's worth pointing out that income !== wealth, and while a $1-5 bump in the minimum wage might help the lower income people accrue wealth, it doesn't meaningfully impact the wealth gap -- though it may be more likely to address the lower class having zero or negative wealth, but if the assertion is that more money paid to the minimum wage-class increases velocity in the market (read: it gets spent, not saved) then probably not.
Oh right. The chance of two simultaneous catastrophic events is ... the chance of one multiplied by itself, not by two!
No mention of discount rate? I don't think wages appreciate competitively with the stock market, so time preference strongly biases this.
If your parents were going to pay for your college you could do this.
> Only ~10% of the ~1250 colleges listed on Payscale generate an average ROI higher than the 7.1% generated by foregoing college and investing that money

Most of anything is not great by definition :)

It's all really funny when schools like 42 are free (42 is a private university in France)
AlphaGo does not use GPUs but instead the TPUs.

"AlphaGo was powered by TPUs in the matches against Go world champion, Lee Sedol, enabling it to "think" much faster and look farther ahead between moves."
This article doesn't explain why we should believe that stockmarket performance, going forward, will be anything like the S&P's performance from 1993 to now.

It's also not clear why we should believe the Payscale College ROI figures. I clicked around a bunch and couldn't find any description of their actual methodology for computing it. In particular, before we can take it seriously we need to know how well they've done at estimating the true counterfactual earnings of people who could have gone to University X but did not. And that's really hard to do! (Without multiple universes handy)
I've been thinking along the same lines. The "fighting your editor" problem cannot be ignored, and it's common in VPs. Real programming code needs "jank". We need to be able to move between different states:

Bags of characters <-> Unstructured trees of tokens <-> ASTs

(BTW paredit is super cool and I'd like to see more of its kind!)
Definitely an interesting thought experiment. This article assumes 7.1% annually, and gets that by choosing an arbitrary start and end date of stock returns. In reality, it seems to be more like ~4%, which makes this conclusion much different.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110...
Peeve of mine: spelling his name wrong. It's Buffett.
Its making some assumptions that don't seem right, accounting for people having safety nets, minimum livable standards, and (for ages 16-66) more sweat-equity to invest tomorrow. If all that money's going into the stock market, compounding, how do you eat? Don't you put some of your higher salary on graduating into the market too?

How long will the no-college person spend unemployed, and will they bounce off bankruptcy?
Some experiences in college is priceless.
It's even worse than that: Colleges draw their applicants from a pool who are likely to earn above-average incomes to begin with.
A telnet based BBS or packet radio? Please post it when complete. I was playing around last week with my C64 and some telnet BBSs; the good old days.
The Goal and then the Phoenix project.
The true value of a college education is intangible.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f7f7e126-8aac-40bc-9478-70b6bea...
Well, you could repeat it for all the 24-year periods from 1917 through now. I wouldn't expect very different results, though accounting for college deferments will be fun.
I think this is a minority perspective, but I generally think coding has a lot more in common with writing than it does with engineering. (I guess Literate Programming would sort of support this idea). Can you imagine trying to write an essay as a flowchart? I think it would just obscure the point, rather than simplify it.
I guess because there's no simple infix operator for every operation implemented by the machine. Also, the addition may be floating-point or 32, 16, or 8 bit, signed or unsigned, possibly vectorized. An opcode is a good place to express these things.
Show HN: Search Engine that searches Interactive Mind Maps to learn anything
Your parents being willing to pay college fees vs giving you all the money to invest are very different things
If that isn't evidence for capitalism being a joke I don't know what is. By all means go to college, get an education, all so vultures can use your brain to enrich themselves while paying the minimum.

To say nothing of the finance industry which has made an art of skimming off the top.