skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not exactly sure why this is here, but for context, Firefox 54 shipped this week, and 55 was promoted to Beta.

As part of our effort to eliminate the pre-beta ("aurora") channel, 55 spent twice as long in development: instead of promoting to "aurora" six weeks ago, it stayed in nightly until this week, where it moved directly to beta. Future releases will continue this nightly -> beta -> release cadence.

A few of the changes in 55:

- startup and session restoration are dramatically faster, as we can now defer almost all of the work related to restoring unloaded tabs.

- SharedArrayBuffer is also getting turned on by default, and my teammate Lin Clark just wrote an excellent three-part article on it at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/a-crash-course-in-memory-m...

- Object destructuring / spread, async generators, and requestIdleCallback are all in.

- WebVR 1.1 is enabled on Windows, with other platforms working in Nightly

- Flash is moving to click-to-activate

- WebExtensions will be able to configure proxy settings

...And a whole bunch of miscellaneous performance improvements, features, and the further rollout of multiple content processes in stable Firefox.

All of this is leading up to Firefox 57, which will be a major release in November that marks the deprecation of legacy add-on APIs in favor of cross-browser "WebExtensions", an overhauled UI ("Photon"), and the integration of many components from the Servo Parallel Browser Project ("Quantum").
Ask HN: Do we know enough to guess the purpose?
How Communicating More Can Help You Succeed as a Product Manager
In Tasmania they are used to make paper.
Maybe you're special. And contracts can even be negotiated with a group to recognize individual performance! But the data is pretty clear that when workers bargain collectively, they can negotiate higher pay and better benefits.
Apparently man has long wanted to know
about the universe, God as maker of the
universe, etc.

Well, now we know much more about the
universe, our solar system, earth, and
life on earth than just 100 years ago.

Here is a little of what we know:

At

http://www.askamathematician.com/2017/06/q-where-is-the-midd...

is

Q: Where is the middle of nowhere?

Posted on June 13, 2017 by The Physicist

with at

http://www.askamathematician.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/...

a map, amazing, of our local universe,
within about 500 million light years from
earth.

Amazingly there are large voids. Can see
several voids 100+ million light years
across on the map. Off the map there are
voids maybe 1 billion light years across;
considering that the big bang was about
13.7 billion years ago, a void 1 billion
light years across is surprisingly large.
Where there are stars and galaxies, there
are strings, sheets, walls, etc.

Weird stuff.

But we know much more than in such a map.

We must ask:

Q 1. What the heck was the propose of
creating the universe?

Q 2. Then we ask, do we know enough now to
start to guess a purpose?

Maybe the most amazing thing we know about
so far in the universe is human life.
Well, even if human life now is a bit
messy to serve as a guess of the purpose
of the universe, the amazing parts of
human life have increased a lot in just
the last 100 years.

So, we ask,

Q 3. Give human life another short time
to develop, say, another 100 million
years, what might human life be, how
knowledgeable, powerful, advanced,
amazing, and then ask if that state of
human life could be a guess at a purpose?

Note: So far it appears that there were
some physical laws. Somehow they were
enforced. Then someone clicked on the
button "Big Bang", essentially left hands
off, and let just the physical laws -- the
same ones without any changes -- take over
from there. Amazing.

Guess 1: Maybe the purpose is just for
the universe, i.e., humans, to discover
the physical laws.

Note: So far it appears that humans are
quite strongly locked into the universe
and, in particular, just our local part of
it. With the amount of energy required
for space travel and the speed of light
speed limit, it's tough to see how humans
could explore more than just a tiny
fraction of the total: Yes, I know,
humans could start colonizing and
eventually have descendants explore and/or
colonize our galaxy all in a reasonable
interval of time, say, 1 billion years.

That given, for humans to explore the
whole universe looks like one heck of a
challenge.

So, it appears that humans are locked in.

Guess 2: Maybe the purpose is to see if
humans can get out of being locked in, to
explore and understand the whole universe,
what made it, how it's made, how the
physical laws get enforced, how space can
expand, etc.

Q 4. As we look at the data and
understanding we have so far, e.g., that
map above, the standard model of physics,
the 3 K background radiation, and much
more, can we get some good hints about the
purpose?
During the last election cycle I stripped all of my online social media of any real life references. Except for my name on Facebook and my LinkedIn account, which I never use for non-work stuff or private opinions. Definitely doesn't make their work impossible, but why make it easy?
What is Kivy? the only reference I found is about some python framework
Meshmixer gets extra hate from me because the update no longer worked with my graphics drivers, and there is no mechanism to run the older version that was working perfectly before they broke it.
I use my Raspberry Pi as an always-on Emacs computer; all on a framebuffer. It's very refreshing to be able to turn on a monitor and be able to write a journal entry or manage a to-do list and then commit and push to a remote git repository. There's nothing to distract you besides M-x tetris.

I once considered buying an AlphaSmart Dana for this purpose, but you can't beat Emacs's keybindings (or vi's, if that's your thing).
Any Currency enables crime.

in fact I'd go as far as to say that it's a driving force for Crime...
Are you sure about that? The marketing materials [1] for the Falcon Heavy say:

"Falcon Heavy can lift more than twice the payload of the next closest operational vehicle, the Delta IV Heavy - at one-third the cost."

[1] http://www.spacex.com/falcon-heavy
Some more than others, e.g. see Bitcoin and ransomware proliferation
Do you get a few random phone calls every hour from someone you don't know?

Your ssh port is.
What did your father do within the union? Did he vote for reps that were against practices like this? Did he stand for election himself? Did he advocate that the union adopt a policy sexual harassment being a valid firing offence?
Australian programming language hit parade Jun 2017
I know someone who used to work for a paper forrester --the trees they plant are exclusively grown in managed timberlands for conversion to paper --no other use. They use fast growing varieties of trees[1]. The likes of Wayerhaeuser and others.

[1]https://www.quora.com/How-fast-do-fast-growing-trees-for-pap...
This is like making taxes optional.
> I can get a better deal on my own

That's 80% because the supply/demand dynamics currently favor your profession, giving you leverage, and 20% because {markets reward value creation, you are good at bargaining}. Right now it's a harmless attitude, but when the weather turns, or for professions where it has already turned... not so much.
Certainly a risk, but this is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook we are talking about here. The largest public companies in the world. Some of the most technologically advanced as well. If they cannot bring pressure to Intel, no one can.
FYI they are planning to remove this requirement, so it should not be a bother much longer
> All that is required is the desire to provide a useful service for the least consumption of resources or energy,

Please explain to me how something like spacex, a private space startup started by individuals could exist in any system other than capitalism?
This is more a story of "Why the Union movement has been dead since the 1980s".

Amazon employs tens of thousands of people. These people are trying to organize 27. And failing.
This Custom Built “Commute Deck” Makes It Easy to Work on the Go
Quick question: what are the properties of this paper? Can I burn it? Fold it? Eat it?
I won't argue that when feeding is legal/winked at, the deer show up. My finance's mother has them eating out of her hand when she goes out with the bucket of corn.
That's not exactly irony. Almost every product has dangerous phases of production. Home exercise equipment started its manufactured life as molten steel. Baby aspirin starts its manufactured life as a bunch of acutely toxic and corrosive chemicals. You wouldn't want either of those hazards in your home, but it's not dangerous to use the final products. It's the same way with solar panels: if the manufacturer takes care, the final product has a low environmental impact.

By way of contrast there is no way to use internal-combustion power without emitting a lot of CO2, even if the oil driller, refiner, and fuel retailer all devote extraordinary care to environmental and safety issues before the fuel reaches a car's gas tank.
Nice work, hope you get the job!
Indeed, collective bargaining doesn't mean that an individual has no ability to negotiate their own contract with their employer, there are just certain restrictions. See, for example, the collective bargaining done on behalf of professional athletes by unions, like the NBPA or MLBPA.
Has any crime happened with IMG Special Drawing Rights?
As a French, I hope this will also bring large "big5-like" compagnies to open engineering offices in my country as well. I'm always a bit disappointed to see them have offices in London or Dublin but not here where we have a lot of engineering talent as well.
As we saw with WannaCry: the type of people who fall victim to ransomware attacks are also the type of people who aren't really able to use Bitcoin.
Request: please do a mainstage redesign!
Isn't being a contractor like the complete opposite of being in a union?
That sounds like the same argument made against single payer.
What industry were / are you in?

I'd really like to hear about this from people in blue-collar jobs, with small incomes, and smaller bargaining power. I am not sure if a Silicon Valley perspective about this is necessarily representative or useful.
The idea, I believe, is building camaraderie among your users as they teach each other how to use it.

IMO, Snapchat should be the easiest to decentralize and federate b/c the ephemeral nature allows expectations to be set for simple hosting like Digital Ocean. Who cares if data gets deleted?
Oh man, if you like that paper do I have the list for you. We used this list while doing some literature review when we were doing research on HPs memristors http://webee.technion.ac.il/people/skva/new_full_reference_l.... That covers a pretty wide range of topics related to memristors
I'd be fine with this, just don't expect any of the rewards that unions fight for. You can negotiate your own wages, your own holiday leave, your own cost of living increases, your own disciplinary process, etc.

I'll stand up for your right to opt out and get none of these benefits.
You get notifications when people people send you snaps. 24-hour stories don't need you to be on the app the whole time. For example, I check my Instagram and Messenger stories once a day and that is good enough.
That is completely irrelevant. The point is this is a reason to better regulate or ban digital currency, because it's massively helping the proliferation of ransomware. That people who get attacked by ransomware don't know how to use such currency is such a bizarrely irrelevant statement.
Let me remind you that you know of this from the same sources which, until Comey's testimony, swore on a stack of bibles that Trump is under investigation.
This is one of the most responsible comments I've ever seen on Hacker News.
Well, if that stuff is bad for the third world countries, then why don't they make environmental laws themselves that stop it?
I wonder if this issue with unions now is related to the same issue we're having in government politics, the voting system. If unions are using a first past the post system to vote in reps then the inevitable result is a concentration of power in a few parasitic individuals that and then exploit the employer and the union members for their own gain.
The article says the $422m is "maximum amount the Air Force believes it will need to pay, per launch".

Are you saying that the air force ALWAYS pays the maximum for every launch -- no matter the payload?

If not, then clearly the number includes much more than just a subsidy.
>But they are less biodegradable and less renewable than the trees of which paper is normally made.

This is not the safe bet many people think. If you look at the entire lifecycle of a product, plastic bags (to take an example) have a better footprint across the board than paper ones.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/whats-better-environment...
> - Flash is moving to click-to-activate

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but hasn't this been the default for a long while already?
Information "wants" to be gratis only in the sense that water "wants" to flow downhill. It turns out that devices that impede that flow (like a cup) are useful.

The corollary then to your particular analogy is that since anonymity on the internet was the default, it turned out that much of the commercial value eventually accrued to companies that correlated online activities with each other (searches, clicks, posts, likes, etc.) and tied the bundle to an identity.
This is a bit like saying the wealthy are all bad or the poor are lazy. Sure some could be but if one takes the worst examples to draw a conclusion then it becomes idealogical.

The demonization of unions in the country is a pointless exercise and seems ideological.

Unions are an organizational structure, like industry groups or lobbying groups. Just like the latter exist to represent industry interests, unions need to exist to represent workers rights and interests. Like any other organization they can do good or bad depending on their management and objectives.
That's an attitude that's a byproduct of the short term thinking that dominates modern business.

Companies that I've worked for or have been associated with that were really good at running facilities always used in house staff for facility maintenance and usually had facility services run by a former Navy chief of the boat or senior army sergeant.

If you give a shit, and are big enough to have enough work, you can do janitorial, maintenance and security/reception at a reasonable price. You may save money by having maintenance done by people who give a shit vs. those who care just enough to not get fired.

My current employer successfully "insourced" pure utility functions like electricity generation, because it delivered a positive ROI.
The future of grocery – in store and online
Their statement is that as a contractor they are my empowered to negotiate better rates then as a full time employee. I believe this is a attempt to say that if we, software engineers, utilized a union we'd be able to negotiate better pay for ourselves.
I think the real issue is what "benefits" means. If benefits means healthcare, then i'm all for it. If benefits means it's nearly impossible to fire someone, or that seniority trumps performance, then it seems more like it will negatively impact many workers than it is supposed to benefit.
WWII's mass propaganda did not have the 'zero bar' suggested in your article. It was state propaganda, not 'the babel fish'.

It's also not like WWII Europe was a 'harmonious group' (or Europe of almost any era). I think that's a core error in the article; that before the babel-fishing internet our societies were harmonious.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14562326
In a way, sure. But it's also the opposite of accepting the lowest-common-denominator offer/ saying "There's got to be a better deal than this". The problem is coding isn't a closed shop and can't be as currently structured.
Seeed Studio Fusion Launches Advanced PCB Service for Demanding Customers
Yeah, that. From now on I am going to wait and let you give better responses than my own. Please don't go on strike.
Beautiful!

I have a question for you, lots of people have been claiming memristors are right around the corner for almost half a century at this point, what do you think about the viability of the memristor in the future?
Papr – rate papers on biorxiv in a single swipe and help science
Because the foreign companies are stuffing wads of cash into the hands of the appropriate officials, either directly or indirectly,
iD3: An IDE for D3.js
I'm more curious about the byproducts and energy consumption of each manufacturing process. I have no idea, does anyone have a good comparison?

Aside: supposedly global pulp production is 34 percent recycling, 45 percent from sawmill waste, and 21 percent 'logs and chips.'[0] The wikipedia article later states, from another source, that 16 percent of production comes from tree farms. The gist of your general point stands, as I understand it: we're not going out and cutting old growth or even secondary growth forests for paper (though we make use of reject trees when we target them for other reasons).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_(paper)
Poe's law strikes again.
A couple of Native American tribes used octal because base 8 works for the number of things you can carry between the fingers. Would have made computing a bit simpler if that had been adopted instead of base 10.
Android Kotlin – RxJava Create
Don't forget the huge perf improvements to session restore!
I think you mean Kiva?
Reading this is painful, is there any way to turn

"inserting before the semicolon at the end the following: “, or any digital exchanger or tumbler of digital currency”;

into a proper diff?
When in "long mode", meaning a 64-bit OS, you can execute everything other than 16-bit protected mode code. You can still run 16-bit code that was designed for real mode. This means you could run some really old DOS programs, but not ones with a 16-bit DOS extender and not 16-bit Windows programs.

Of course, a 64-bit OS could pop in and out of 64-bit mode as needed.
Do you think the company you worked for wasn't handling them properly? Do you think the industry in general doesn't handle them correctly? If so, what changes do you think need to be made?
British Hacker Pleads Guilty to Hacking US Military Satellite Phone System
Money laundering in practical terms means whatever the government wants it to mean. It has been successfully prosecuted as the simple deposit of funds the government doesn't like the origins of. The obstacle isn't law, it's the resources required to bring a successful case.
Yes. Polyolefins are highly flammable. They aren't the worst plastic to burn, but they will melt and stick to things, and you really shouldn't breathe the smoke.

Yes.

With the right attitude, anything is possible!
(really, don't, though.)
we as a tech community

There is no we that comprises a coherent tech community.

People with malicious intent are also able to write code and assemble hardware.
Forget FOMO. In Digital Minimalism, It’s All About the Fear of Burning Out
It's unrelated, but the sentence has an awkward structure that's hard to parse.

Terrorist groups could be punished for planning any one of 277 crimes.

And so could criminal groups.

The "277 crimes" range from arson to copyright violation.

Took me a second to grok it, too.
If you're in the U.S., this is an interesting layer to the labor rights debate: "right-to-work" states.

Now 28 states (including all of the South, where wages are low) have passed laws that guarantee those who opt out of unions in unionized workplaces receive the same benefits as those who are members.

As you'd guess, that works really effectively to undercut the appeal of joining a union.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
Computers use base two because their most natural unit can occupy one of a couple states: 0 or 1. One, two, base two.

Human hands, on the other foot, have ten fingers. Since our favorite mapping between things and integers is finger counting, we naturally end up with more than two states. Zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and the fully-extended state, ten. That's eleven states, which is why the global human standard is base-eleven.

Wait, what?
One thing they did get right with the movie, Unix is dominated by hackers.

Apple had to buy Next to save itself as Macos wasn't good enough any more and Apple needed to merge with a Unix brand to survive.
The problem I have with these sorts of articles is that they have a clear agenda behind them. Okay, so they used binary numbers 600 years ago. But why is that posted here? It's not because it's interesting. It's like a 'hey look they were ahead of us on one thing' sort of thing. Which isn't true, obviously.
We're never going to run out of lime. Ever. It is literally everywhere.
I think this epic rant against rewrites still is mostly valid 17 years later:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
'The Chinese people agree their government's stance on south china sea, Tibet and Taiwan' doesn't mean 'they agree everything with their government'.
Facebook Enlists AI, Human Experts in New Push Against Terrorism
https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter/

Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter gets my vote if you're willing to muck around on the CLI to get to advanced features.
That's all true, but I think we're talking past each other a bit. My point isn't about what mechanics would be used or the type of memory order specified (that's the irrelevant part), but merely to highlight that this could use more attention in the docs. The atomic used may be viewed as a "lint" to a reader/user that something interesting may be going on with how this type is used - similar to how *mut isn't automatically Sync; it's an opportunity for people to pause and think things through. If you're looking at a type absent of any atomics or concurrency primitives, it's not apparent that it may be used like that (particularly since Sync is auto-derived and doesn't appear in the source code of the type).

I know one can look at this as being unimportant because only unsafe code that works with Sync types carries the burden of upholding the invariants. But, I still contend that memory ordering ought to be discussed, somewhere, while there's no official memory model documentation (not even sure that's in the plans, although I feel like I may have come across a github issue for that).

Anyway, I don't think I'm saying anything new in this reply over my others. If you feel existing docs are adequate in this regard, that's fine - we can agree to disagree :).
I had one of the most beautiful writing experiences with pencil on stone paper, it is amazing (Field Notes).

On the other hand, it is not for fountain pens. I think it is specialty paper that is very useful but will not replace regular paper and also should not be sold as ecological alternative.
There's a lot more possible states than eleven. 32 if you count just whether a finger is extended. More if you allow crossing fingers, interaction between hands, etc. And this isn't theoretical either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_number_gestures
[video] OsmAnd adds Sea depth map feature
From a monetary viewpoint, do you think having one app is better?

Supporting iOS 8 seems unnecessary at this point, but it is nice to see (I support 8, and on some apps I would bet it still works on iOS 6).

How are the repetition implemented? I built a flashcard app as well but in the end I kind if winged it and built it so it worked for me. I am wondering if maybe using a more 'standard' way it better.
Apparently not on the release channel, according to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1317856 and https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/07/20/reducing-.... I'd verify, but I'm not about to voluntarily install Flash ;)
ISRO working on using kerosene as fuel for semi-cryogenic engine