skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a nice thought experiment. Our capability of harnessing energy from renewable sources (but not electrical energy) covers 3,000 years already: sailing ships and windmills. By the time magnetism and later electricity were discovered, we already had wind-powered propulsion, milling, and water drainage.

What made them impractical for industrial uses (the first applications for coal power were steam-powered textile mills iirc) was the same issue we have with solar and wind today: output is dependent on external factors that we can't control. Coal became valuable exactly because it was the first controllable energy source.

It's hard to imagine us making the same amount of progress without an ever-present energy source (coal caches, fuel tanks, and the electrical energy grid). And it's hard to imagine why we would construct an energy grid without a prior ever-present energy source. Looking at our current means of energy storage, it seems that only hydro-electric storage is a viable option if you discount fossil fuels.

So without fossil fuels, I think an electrical grid could have originated only in very specific locations: lots of wind power, and a natural basin to be converted into a reservoir with relative ease. We would have seen massively different industrial sprawl in such a scenario, and I wonder if such a situation would ever give rise to a truly continental electrical grid like we have now.
Ask HN: What’s the best to find a mentor in the tech field?
What’s the best way to find a mentor for someone who’s trying to get into the tech seen?

I am set to graduate in one year with a B.Sc. degree in Application Development.

I have bunch of questions and I need someone to guide me.
> The only really satisfactory conclusion is that we’re the first or only civilization to approach a BvN launch.

That's carrying a lot of assumptions. That there's not a probe lying somewhere in the solar system watching us, that aliens haven't found a better way to observe us than probes, that they even care about observing us in the first place. Take the last one for example - 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone. It's entirely possible that we're not important enough for advanced societies to care, the way you're not going to stop and mess with every random anthill you pass by.

Imagine a couple of tigers talking. "Someone says there are 9 billion humans in the world." "That makes no sense. Take the amount of good hunting habitats in the world, divide it by the amount of territory an adult male would need to call their own, and divide that by the number of humans. You would have multiple humans fighting for each chunk of territory, and marking their scent everywhere. Yet I don't smell any human urine so the question is...where is everyone?"

As an aside, why do people focus so much on self replicating probes? Assuming aliens did want to send out a probe fleet - why not simply mass produce probes in one system (or a handful of systems) and send each in turn to their destinations? Having to accelerate, decelerate, build a probe, have the new one accelerate, decelerate, build another probe, have this new one accelerate, decelerate, etc., seems like it would take a lot longer than simply sending a probe directly to its destination (no need to constantly decelerate along the way, no need to waste energy moving replication units, etc.).
Even so, why would you allow students to bring their own devices? Just provide some terminals managed by school IT.
This actually seems relatively decent. If you care about privacy you format your laptop before bring it to an exam as an aid.

That way you also avoid accidentally bringing along any books, old essays or other remedies you're not allowed to bring.

Note: IMO, people shouldn't cheat :)
You too can love the MonoRepo
From that list, I edit Frontend Focus and JavaScript Weekly.
> It just felt so unfair how this unintelligent bloke managed to con everyone into thinking his opinion mattered

What is your definition of intelligence? Some would define it as the ability to effectively take advantage of the way things actually are in the world to achieve your goals.

By that measure, people like Scoble are highly intelligent: they see the way the world is and do the things that grant them status and wealth in that world. The same is true of politicians, successful executives, and others that know how to "play the game".

One can have a genius-level IQ and achieve nothing at all because of an unwillingness or inability to play that game. Intelligence isn't worth much if it isn't pragmatic.

Complaining that you'd like people and the world to be different, to allocate status more "fairly", usually won't get you far. Although hopefully exposing the abuses of these people will change things for the better.
> I disagree completely. Having a numpad on a laptop is the only way of getting cursors and function keys (from Home to Insert to Delete) in a sane place. On my current laptop, were it not for a numpad, I'd have to press a Fn key every time I wanted to use Home/End. I'd also need to hunt for Delete somewhere above the Backspace, and PageUp/PageDown being on both sides of Up arrow (and close to it!) is simply infuriating. And it's a Dell Latitude[1], much better in this regard than tons of normal laptops.

I've found the layout used on the VAIO Z to be very practical, with Home/End as FN + Left/Right, and PageUp/PageDown as FN + Up/Down:

https://www.replacementlaptopkeys.com/product_images/images/...

It appears to be close to the Dell Latitude, but removing the dedicated PageUp/PageDown keys, and instead having larger arrow keys likely works better.
or maybe just look people over the shoulder :)

IMO, requiring the use of a school supplied computer isn't the worst either. And then you could just set it up with a key logger and a screen recorder.
I researched a bit and apparently they had a bug which made the cloud sync leak the personal data of others: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2016/7/29/12326152/swi...
I guess there's a "different strokes" aspect here, as I have heard similar complaints (and in both directions). I must be in the Steve Jobs camp of aesthetics :-D
Calculators have been fully programmable computers at least since the 90s, you can download programs, games, etc. For example: http://www.ticalc.org/pub/86/basic/math/
> I can only conclude that other people are somehow "lesser" in your worldview

Curious - how did you come to such a strange conclusion?
To be fair, I am being very picky :-D Given that most people will be using this for testing or scaling the images down, the differences will likely be hard to pick out in everyday use.
Or don't bring your own laptop as an aid to the exam.

Bring a netbook.. or backup your laptop and do a clean install before going to the exam.
Wow, that's way larger a dose per pill than used to be common when I got my information. Goes to show how much local scene knowledge you need in order to have a chance of trying these substances safely, which is one of my big gripes with the 'war on drugs' phenomenon. Prohibition is definitely a case where the cure is worse than the disease.
I just had an image of a bunch of insect-like robots crawling over and through a giant metal block, chipping away at internal spaces with precision cutting tools to produce the desired shape, carrying away waste material, like an robotic ant colony digging a smooth steel nest.
The baseband processor isn't started as first boot, and as I understand it can be selectively enabled/disabled while main cpu is on.
I don't know what a CAS is but I disagree that it is needed for "any serious math".

Perhaps trig, calculus, differential equations, etc. aren't "serious" enough??
It's surprisingly easy to switch to the English layout. As a programmer, it was refreshing to leave behind the convoluted key combinations while coding. (I'm looking at you, `tilde`, on a Hungarian keyboard)

On Linux, writing accents using a compose key isn't much slower than typing the letters directly either.
Understanding Channels
When Does a Startup Become a Grown Up?
> QEMU is great because you don’t have to worry about accidentally destroying your hardware with badly written OS code

Is that actually possible?
> Let it go. Let it crash

It must be nice to work in an environment where nobody cares about results.
If you invest into ICOs without a private discount, you make other people rich
> If you're doing any serious math you need a CAS.

You must be joking. There is no math course I’ve ever heard of from 1st grade through graduate school which should “need a CAS” (or even an electronic calculator of any kind) on exams to demonstrate understanding of the content of the course or fluency with its proofs or problem solving tools.

In most cases designing exams around CAS use (or calculator use in general) makes them far worse at testing student understanding or problem solving skill.

The reason calculators are used in mathematics exams is because calculator vendors (especially Texas Instruments) were very effective at making back-room deals with textbook publishers and standardized test sponsors (and sometimes public officials), and ran decades of great subversive marketing aimed at anxious parents. Not because of any particular pedagogical value of the calculators.

Tools like Mathematica or Maple can be very helpful for mathematical research or mathematical modeling in other technical fields, and are worth learning for undergraduates, but should by no means be used on exams.
If the data structures can be split (as it seems), then the first step should be to get the head k element of both collections, so we only have to work with a maximum of 2k elements. Then the solution is not O(2 * log(N)) but O(2 * log(min(N,2k))).
Berlin's Math42 just got acquired for €20M
I'd say yes. Especially if you mess with ACPI and, say, turn off the fans...
I basically have the same technology in my 4 year old Zenbook (1080p screen, no USB-C ports, etc.). The CPU was upgraded, but is still outdated. But that I could maybe compromise on if the build quality was good.

What are absolute dealbreakers are the missing keyboard options for my country.
Summary: News misleads, is irrelevant, has no explanatory power, is toxic to your body, increases cognitive errors, inhibits thinking, works like a drug, wastes time, makes us passive and kills creativity.

Undoubtedly some of this is true but what a generalization on behalf of all of us!
How about a USB numberpad with all 16 hex characters?

http://www.ipv6buddy.com/

I am in no way affiliated, I just searched "USB hex numberpad"
I wonder how many of the responses here are from folks who went through CS/STEM graduate programs and who have no idea what their current/former colleagues in the humanities go through. One person alluded to how privileged a grad student is to have their tuition paid while being afforded the opportunity to become a "domain expert" in their field. Tell that to the average history Ph.D. in the US who takes 7-9 years to complete her degree, spending the prime of her youth to end up working 4/4 course loads as an adjunct in some godforsaken community college with no health insurance. And yet that individual carries with her the collective knowledge of thousands of years of human intellectual endeavor.

As for the news from UChicago, I congratulate my former colleagues, and yet I also know that it's not enough. I started a Ph.D. in the humanities at Illinois and left after 2.5 years. Our union was great, but no union is enough. We were fighting to prevent the administration from docking our meager $17k/year pay for frivolous BS reasons, and while I'm grateful for what the union did for us, in another way it was so shortsighted. Why were the stewards of civilization making $17k/year in the first place? Why couldn't we make far, far more, worthy of the years of specialized knowledge that we had developed at great cost?

The union could never answer these questions. Actually, most people thought I was crazy for even asking them. We spent all day denouncing capitalism, and yet we were enthralled to the myth of the Protestant work ethic, that compensation is somehow tied to our self-worth. And that misguided albeit well-meaning hypocrisy why I left academia and joined Silicon Valley.
It is sadly the way that FOSS ends up because of pressures to be more "commercial".

Frankly i dislike the new version, as i much prefer the list layout of the old. Never mind that now i have to dig into the settings to see what apps i have installed that match what is in f-droid repos (and thus can update via f-droid rather than Play).
Elon recently noted that Raptor (unlike SuperDraco) won't be fully 3D-printed. It will have 3D-printed parts, but most of the engine will be machined. I guess for a larger engine the things you mentioned have to be more tightly controlled to be able to print the whole engine. Might also be a cost issue as size increases, I guess.
Automile Raises $34M – IoT: Real-Time Tracking for Fleets and Assets
Completely agree with this, we tend to state that we will support the latest version and two major previous versions and if any other support is needed we can accommodate that at an extra cost which some of our clients have refused to pay.

For development purposes I use Chrome for work stuff and Opera for personal projects.
Netflix and Why the Future of Streaming Looks Like Old-School TV
Completely off-topic, bit I feel compelled to mention this: The timestamping of this article is exemplary.

Even if it only showed a date, and no time, the time zone is relevant. The Internet is supposed to be for the whole world, not just one time zone.
Thank you for sharing this, I was looking for a group doing investments like this!
I’m a little bemused when people say this is a problem in the “tech industry”. It appears to be a problem in every industry. Tech people with blogs haven’t worked in other industries, apparently.
The problem is that this gives other countries a big stick to beat you with, just by refusing to sell you more aircraft or spare parts or whatever. Iran is a case in point. Under the shah, Iran was a US ally, and purchased US aircraft. After the revolution, the US shifted its favour to Iraq and refused to sell spare parts and supplies for the aircraft, severely hampering the Iranian air force. This might not have been such a problem, but Iran was at war with Iraq at the time.

This sort of thing is why most countries are keen to manufacture as much of their military equipment domestically as possible.
The only times I've heard of destroying hardware with software have been:
1) stopping the ray in a CRT monitor through special purpose registers and using it to burn through the phosphorous.
2) Early floppy drives where you could position the head to an impossible position causing the servo to burn.

Haven't heard of anything like what he is describing the last 20 years. Perhaps you can overheat some stuff - but most likley it'll shut down before anything bad happends. There are however some worrying notes on OSDEV about causing potential damage when probing for memory, perhaps the author read this and got worries. It isn't detailed or likely, imho.
Does Lockheed Martin have much of a footprint in commercial aircraft, i thought they were a predominantly military focused firm?
This is not accurate.
Wow, there's a name I haven't heard in years, literally. Never understood his appeal, particularly because I felt he was pretty bad at whatever his job was.

He knew just enough about the technology he covered to convince non techies that something was cool I guess.

I know he's publicly stated before that he had a drinking problem and was seeking help for it at one time.

Sad to see he's actually one of these toxic people.
What I've always thought about is if all life eventually struggles for power and destroys itself? Imaging what would happen if the whole world just worked together!

Is this something that is in our DNA, to be on top of everyone? 1% controlling the whole world, limiting their potential... Can we someday put aside our differences and work towards the same goal? Life on earth (humans and animals) don't really work together on a global scale. Is this only because of our nature, here on earth, that we need to destroy thing to live well (coal, forests, animals as food, ...)

Maybe there there are planets that have excess minerals, resources to build starships without killing their environment, without the need of wars (for oil for example).

Haven't we just had bad luck, being evolved on a planet with limiting resources, or just bad luck that we chose to use limited resources for our civilisation, or just bad luck that we need limited resources to survive? Are there a lot of civilisations struggling with the same problems? Or maybe there are aliens that can just drink water to survive and fly to other suns with just oxygen (just to make a silly example)?

This was kind of a response to "Can a civilisation really peacefully exist without destroying itself or the rest of the universe".

On the other note, imagination is such a big advantage of humans, we can achieve so much just by using our imagination. Also the whole topic of "Are we alone and where is the rest" is so interesting!
Free Tutorial – Introduction to Bootstrap 4 Flex Layout
Modern processors just thermal throttle to the extreme if the heat can’t be dissipated, no?
The mission goal is right and honorable, but I hope they don't let their web designers anywhere near the operating system UIs.

I would like to see a more radical approach towards a productivity/creativity OS though, so far it looks like just another Linux distro.
You've got it backwards; gp is saying because python handles it for you so well, only a non-python programmer would hate it
Also don't bring a personal laptop as an exam aid, if you don't want it inspected.

IMO, a clean format, or just removing sensitive files to a backup drive seems reasonable.
You can also order Dell machines with ME disabled. Additionally, most current Dell systems can disable Intel ME in the BIOS settings as well. This is a trap door setting - once disabled, there is no way to turn it back on.

From what I've heard, this disabling is done through the Intel HAM (high assurance mode), but I have no idea what the differences between the Dell and Purism approaches are.
Short and always with a terrible example. I would never trust W3Schools with the simplest stuff. Take this form documentation, they don't even mention using <label>

https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp

Sadly, "html forms" brings up 3+ W3Schools pages of at the top.
Are you prepared to pay or you need to find pro bono one?
They will shut down the whole computer.
I've tried regular USB numpad, but it's just not the same as having everything in a single keyboard. You need table or stable base for that and typing is slower when you have to reach for it, especially if it's not fixed and moves constantly. Still better than nothing though.
> Fully observable and we still have no idea what the hell it's doing.

Of course we do. It's matching a smooth multi-dimensional curve to sample data.
Yep.

Back in the early days of GNU/Linux, getting X to run could kill your monitor.

Another example, many hard drive controllers used to blindly move their heads to whatever position they were told, even if it was an incorrect position. In the old days you also had to use something like PC Tools to park the heads before moving the computer.
i proved i am divine king
Awesome, I subscribed these newsletters since a long time. Really good job! I'm always recommending these newsletters to my team / students. For people who don't spend a lot of time doing research (some students and professionals I know), it's a great way for them to have a short "overview" of what is happening and which articles are more interesting at the moment. Please keep it up!
Considering the replies to this comment, could you either point out how they're inaccurate, or alternatively apologize and withdraw your support for ESR as a non-racist?
Not for almost a decade. Ruby web servers and job processing frameworks have used forking out of the box since the release of Phusion Passanger 2 in 2008 and Resque in 2009.
On computers where `efivars' is mounted read-write, you can possibly brick your UEFI by deleting the contents of that “file system” https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
In dense areas you usually don't need a car. All shops are close enough to walk as there are enough customers around. Dense mixed areas can also lead to short commute times.

And walkability is not just about traffic jams, it's about health. Walking to work is likely to improve health vs. driving.
Not exactly numbers, but unicode characters - yes. It's easier to memorize some codes if you have a numpad. Also it helps to have dedicated keys for basic arithmetic operations.
It's a bad excuse, but a good thing to watch yourself for. The GP seems to mean it in the second sense, i.e. if you're the kind of man who gropes women when he gets drunk at code camp, you either shouldn't get drunk or shouldn't go to code camp.

If you know you're going to fuck up, there's no point in saying "it's just willpower, I won't do it this time", because that doesn't work for alcoholics or heroin addicts or paedophiles and it won't work for molesters either.
why dont you try to make a toilet. i dont think you are ready
This proposal assumes that Aliens need sleep. Maybe they really work 24/7 (or whatever are numbers on their planet)
Is current society so depend on ready prepared meals that people don't even have basic knife skills? This is mind blowing to me.
A New IoT Botnet Storm Is Coming
Hi tixocloud, thanks for the correction. I have fixed it!
As recently as 4 years ago there were Samsung laptops that could be bricked by installing Linux. Apparently there was a special physical memory address that you weren't supposed to poke and which Linux did, which resulted in bricking the laptop.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/booti...
I've never met Robert Scoble in real life, and have only ever had one interaction with him.

In 2003, I was unemployed and trying to each myself VB.net. I emailed him a question, and he replied to me. I was kind of surprised to get a response.

This obviously doesn't excuse what he has done, but I was grateful to him at the time.
That's why many European cities are trying to go back where they came from. London changed many roads in the 60s-80s, introducing one-way roads to improve traffic flow. This is now reversed to slow down traffic and improve life for pedestrians & cyclists. In other areas (bank junction, oxford street), cars are banned completely.

Big cities with good public transport have no real need for any private traffic at daytime. Deliveries are mostly done overnight anyway and taxis are only tolerated because they create a lot of jobs.
WJS #115: Top articles from the JavaScript world
Build realtime VR app in less than 10min [Tutorial]
On the Kardashev scale, we are probably only in the range of level one.

Level one civilizations can harness the entire power of a star for communication.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
I am not sure if I have to means to pay for a mentor at this point.
While I think high population density is great, I wouldn't want Google to redesign silicon valley. Cities formed by a single company (or even single industry) suffer when the industry leaves or collapses. Today's tech companies won't be around forever.
How to Submit Facebook Messenger App for Review
It's a great write-up (follow the next parts if you've only seen the 1st one)

I wonder how this changes by booting from UEFI (and not using any 'emulation mode')
Your premise is dubious.

The entertainment industry unions are among the most longstanding and effective and there are no greater spreads in economic value than there are between a novice actor or screenwriter and a global movie star.
Why would it? In the Colemak layout, 't' is on the left-hand index finger, it couldn't be more convenient.