skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it.

But not quite. This paradox assumes that a more technologically advanced society would naturally expand it's energy usage and output to the point that it could be detected by us. That is, expand it's energy output to be much more than our civilization's output since we actually couldn't detect a civilization of our own scale if it was on even the nearest star.

So the paradox is entirely speculative. Alienation civilizations might go in all sorts of ways. They might spend their resources on computation (as suggested by the article), they might consciously create low-energy-usage steady-state utopias, they might eventually destroy themselves, they might just never discover a way to attain such high energy usage, they might become so efficient they don't leak energy into space or something else we haven't thought it.

It's not that Fermi is entirely ridiculous to consider but the way is presented, a lot of people wouldn't know that the universe could full of earth-level societies and we wouldn't know and that's a bit annoying.
> in which case the condition is not useful

I contest. The reason for the condition need not be only to indicate whether the other value isn't null; if it was, you could just remove the condition and check nullity. In fact, unless there is either a case where the condition is true and the pointer is null or a case where the condition is false and the pointer is non-null, the condition is useless because checking the pointer would've been enough.

Consider the following silly example, where we have a function

f(Conductor *c, bool isDriving, Train *t)

with the guarantees that c != NULL, and
isDriving==true => t!=NULL. Note that the case isDriving==false does not imply t==NULL; indeed, c could just be waiting for the signal to start driving.
You see a guy making a creepy move, you call him out. Simple as that.

You don't know if it's "working" because she's trying to keep him at ease til she can dash for the door, or why.

See shitty, harassing, abusive behavior, call it out. For too long, we all let this stand. No more.

Risk your job, risk short-term awkwardness, risk whatever because the women in the world deserve better than being targets while we stand around like cowards.
The History of Retail
My graduate students are funded directly from my startup funding and grants.
How is 1080p low resolution???
I would have concern in that unions are typically great when labor is fungible. If there's a wide spread in individual productive value, unions are not so great. Unionizing is basically capitulation to the ethic that grad student labor is a commodity, which it may already be, but is certainly not the aspiration. If I were a grad student at the uofc I would almost certainly be a strike breaker. Your experiment waits for no one.
Myanmar Is Now a Study in How Democracy Fails
Because when I admit a student to my lab, I'm talking about spending five years helping someone grow as a future colleague, and, in the process, advance the science produced in my lab.

"Cheap labor churning out publications" doesn't support those goals.

I also was a graduate student once, and am endowed with basic human empathy.
... which is practically impossible with larger projects that you can't oversee in a glance.
Can you define what "nested sets" means more specifically?

Postgres supports hierarchical/nested structures using the "ltree" column type. There is nothing stopping you from defining a primary key of (eg) "set1.set10.set100". There is also support for recursive views/etc to operate on these kinds of sets.

Again, if you have some kind of "sparse" column, it can make sense to put that into a JSONB column. This is effectively the same thing as attaching an unstructured document to a record for this use-case.
Ask HN: Renting satellites like servers?
Perhaps not guidance/ability to make it crash/hit stuff but would be cool to just "SSH" into a satellite and then access its sensors and what not. Maybe a camera feed up there.
That's another thing that gives me worries - or motivation. The electronical components are virtually guaranteed not to interoperate with competitor products (I hope I'm wrong though).

While electronics should open new hackability options, I'm afraid that's just not going to happen. ANT+ standard, for example, requires an NDA before you can make an implementation. Bike computers themselves don't have a serious open option (Jazda needs more work before it can be sold).
I may have missed seeing a mention of the work done by Dr. Michael Merzenich[1], professor emeritus at UCSF and an expert on neuroplasticity, who has been showing for many years that mental (and physical) exercises can and do remap parts of the brain to our benefit.

His 2004 TED Talk[2] on neuroplasticity is IMHO well worth watching.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Merzenich

[2]: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_b...
That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site.

I took a quick look at your recent history and it seems fine, so I'll take the rate limit off. But to prevent it from kicking in again, please stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I recall that we had to ask you many times in the past not to violate that, but hopefully it's all in the past now and things will be nice and guideliney going forward.
Sounds reasonable to me :)
Yes, both unique and shared ptrs default to null and in many ways are drop in replacements for naked pointers.

If the empty state thing was in reference to smart pointers, it'd be a remarkable misunderstanding of how they work and how they should be used.
Or perhaps recognize that "left leaning" is not a monolithically held block of universal ideas.
Well, that quickly went where I wasn't expecting it to go. I would, at the very least, appreciate a mention of the fact that the article linked has accusations and explicit descriptions of sexual harassment and assault in the title, please. Or, if that's not manageable, at least tag the thing NSFW.
I never stated that it was poorly run, acting like this might get better results. I was replying to the poster who postulated what could happen if a hit piece was ran in a public setting against someone for their OSS contributions and how it seemed like reality wasn't already too far off from that to me
ok. congrats! While I would spend a few hours you would spend 30 minutes.
However, this guy just published something to start making money, and it's working for him, no matter who is able to create what in how much time.
The only difference being that in the case of a smart pointer, you can't ignore the possibility of a null by accident.
The general non-emergency braking advice with derailleur bikes is to switch gears before stopping. While I can't speak for others, I do it at the same time. That requires a braking hand and a shifting hand.
I always think this when people talk about scaling. You can buy off the shelf now boxes with 48 or 96 cores, 1-2T of RAM, internal bays for 10s of T of SSD or connect it to an AFA and get 100s of T. This is not even an exotic custom build system, just a commodity, and has been for years. Running a recent version of a conventional database on a box like this goes a very, very long way, with very little hassle because you don't even need to think about "sharding", and you can always add a hotstandby for offloading reads, or for redundancy in another DC, or whatever. Systems like this can quite happily bottleneck on the network before the database starts breaking a sweat.

Remember, sharding isn't scaling the database. Sharding is admitting your database can't scale so you're offloading the problem to another layer.
Re rate-limiting see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513929. Slow-banning was dropped years ago.
It seems almost silly that 20 years ago, TV addiction was a huge thing. Nowadays who would get addicted to TV when you have tablets and smartphone who do TV plus one thousand other things
No.

Economics rents (not strictly the same as the money paid in rent. It is the return above costs that accrue to the supplier rather than renter of the property. The net problem is the combination of the two phenomena David Ricardo noted:

1. The iron law of wages: wages tend toward subsistence level. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages

2. The law of rent: the rent of a land site is equal to the economic advantage obtained by using the site in its most productive use. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent

Given the latter, rent is determined by economic benefit, not by the cost of provision. A land tax, set to the difference between the value of utilisation and the cost of using the land, secures that surplus value to the state. (You'd want to leave "normal economic profits" to the landlord.)

The effect of this is to introduce a carrying cost, to the landlord, on the value of the land. The price of the rent itself is bound by the beneficial use (say, 30% of prevailing wages). If someone cannot afford to pay that amount, they will seek alternative accommodations, or move out of the area. Any landlord charging more than that amount will have no takers (rational actors, long term), if the number of units on a property isn't sufficient for the landlord, the alternative is to increase density (build higher, smaller, or occupy more of the land space).

Meantime, the tax revenues go to fund urban services.

In much the same way, raising wages does not increase prices, but rather secures more of the manufacturing profit to labour rather than owners, as prices are established by the overall market (net of imports from elsewhere).

That's the principle of Georgism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

More generally: if you go back to the classical economists (Smith, Marx, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill), you find a number of distinct classes of goods being transacted. Generally (and adding a few):

1. Commodities.

2. Labour.

3. Capital.

4. Rents (monopolies).

5. Interest (and risk).

6. Investment assets.

8. Natural resources.

8. Public goods.

(Subject to possible consolidation / reordering, though that's the gist of it.)

Quite significantly, each of these has specific behaviours in terms of pricing, most specifically as to the relationships of the true economic cost of production (cost), the true economic value (value, for which I don't follow Bentham's Utility theory), and exchange price (price).

The ideal, as Smith notes, is for price to approach the long-term true economic cost, but in the case of the goods classes listed, that's frequently not the case (also noted by Smith). Marginal analysis describes this in terms of market function, though that misses critical elements, including market failures and distortions.
But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes.

Personally I like the hypothesis that states eventually all comms will be encrypted and therefore indistinguishable from white noise.
I do. It has volume bottoms, call answering buttons and others, but exactly ONE essential button, the damn horn which is right in the middle taking up the full width of the wheel center.

I don't know why this observation seems controversial.
It's just standard Gnome with user installable theme and icons. Well that they preinstall. I would not call this OS but more like UI bundle.
One of the comments at the bottom of the post points out what I believe to be a likely scenario:

"As we develop VR tech that allows us to simulate any world we desire, recreational or purpose driven, there is less and less reason to explore the rest of the universe."

Using humanity as a example for how intelligent life advances, we can look at the developed nations. The develop nations are the ones who would create any sort of technology that would get us out of the solar system and into contact with other life. Most, if not all developed nations are built through commercialization of products, with the citizens consuming those products. Only a very, very small portion of people are working on the advanced technology to take us elsewhere. So the majority of our species are not advancing galactic technology, but they are becoming larger consumers of entertainment, at least on the scale since early civilizations. Keeping that in mind, we are also somewhat physically locked in our solar system due to the laws of physics, at least in the near term. So, to me it would seem much more likely that instead of advancing space tech to the point where we are sending robots to other planets to self-replicate and spread across the universe, that by that time we would have already perfected VR and that our entertainment-based population would be well-satisfied simply living in our perfect little VR worlds. The two scenarios aren't mutually-exclusive. We are in fact advancing VR and building rockets for Mars as I write this, but I think it's also possible that simulating our reality could replace our desire to move outward. Since the universe is seemingly too far out of reach, we will just create our own here, for cheaper, sooner.
As far as I know, computers are not required for tests/exams. But are allowed as 'aid'. Therefore, they won't care about one's desktop at home, but only about the laptop one will be bringing into the test/exam room.

So with this proposal, if one refuses to let the school check one's equipment, one can still attend the test/exam, but without one's equipment. Or one can be expelled.
Open the link in incognito, or just hit enter on the address bar again so the referrer is removed and it's a direct resource request. (refresh won't work).
ARC Engines were one of the companies graduating at the recent TechStars demo day in Adelaide. As another commenter pointed out it seems much of the innovation is the improvements you can make to the internal chamber design through 3D printing. I also gather they’re onto (at least) their second generation of working rocket

http://arc-engines.com
I'm pretty sure this is already a thing. Except you probably have to use some monstrosity cobbled together in LabView instead of SSH.
I hadn't realized until now that you can have F-Droid auto-update your apps(using the Privileged Extension) even on Android 5+. First you have to install this:
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged.ot...

It will download a zip file to /data/data/org.fdroid.fdroid/ota/ that you have to flash. After having flashed that file you can use the regular privileged extension to update the system app:
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged/
See my response elsewhere in this thread, or read on the economics of land taxes.

That understanding is incorrect.

Most particularly, landlords themselves are paying rent in the form of interest. Property values would tend to fall.
You'll Need Ikea's $5 Saw If You Buy That $1000 iPhone X
It is my goto yes. I use it anywhere from checking how some method or function is named again to finding out what I can do with certain types of objects or classes. The search is really practical for me there. I also peek into the source code of functions etc. it is the only pinned tab I have usually.
Or simply using tech we haven't discovered yet (i.e. some faster than light method).
In order to have a valid complaint, Boeing had to identify a "Domestic Like Product", which was indeed the 737-700 and 737 MAX 7, capable of carrying 126 and 138 passengers respectively, comparable to the C300's capacity. That part of it is true. The aspect in which boeing's product does not compete is that the 737 is a 50-year-old frame by now, whereas the C300 is a modern and technologically far advanced design. Needless to say, Boeing did not over-emphasise that point in their submission.

Boeing's complaint is actually factually correct and pretty much rock solid. BBD is indeed being subsidised via tax breaks and sweetheart loans from its various interested governments, and it did indeed sell the airframes to Delta at well below cost. The trouble is that Boeing does exactly the same thing all the time.

These kind of tactics are, regrettably, par for the course in competition between Boeing and Airbus. I think the main reason everyone is pissed off at Boeing is not only that the C300 is inarguably a profoundly superior product to Boeing's ageing cash cow, but they're employing their most ruthless "nuclear" legal tactics against a company so much smaller than them, in a friendly, neighbouring country, which is a customer to boot! At the very least, it's not very gentlemanly. It's pretty rich to shriek about "predatory behaviour" from a company a hundredth their size.

For anyone interested, the public version of the complaint is available here: https://leehamnews-5389.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04...
Yes, of course that's possible. I was trying to point out their usefulness to the programmer as well as potentially to the runtime/JIT. Next time I'll list the obvious exceptions!
I paid 10 times more for years happily.
Nobody gets banned just by browsing.

If you're concerned about a specific IP, and haven't been abusing HN, it should be easy to clear up by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. And even if you have been abusing HN, we're always happy to unban people (and/or their IPs) if they give us reason to believe that they've taken https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to heart and will follow the rules in the future.
I've been doing about 30 XP of Spanish on Duolingo for more than year now. 30 XP is about 10 minutes of practice, so very little.

One day I was watching a show or movie that had many scenes in Spanish, and to my surprise I could actually follow much of what was said! I didn't realize how (relatively) effective even those 10 minutes a day can be.
Whenever I read about theee proposal I get excited to find out about the unintended consequences.
Why "ikea's" saw, that's just a standard hole saw.
Agen Judi QQ Online Terpercaya Di Indonesia – Judi QQ – Asiapoker303
Researchers simulate wear of materials as they rub together
You're right of course, and I would hardly claim to have a fully articulated theory. I'm fairly confident though of the minimal notion that aggregate "economic growth" (sorry, I need the scare quotes) is at the cost of entropy increase in evolved ecologies (another way of putting 'matter transfer from living to dead').

There was much talk in the 90s of decoupling economic growth from 'resource use' (sorry about the scare quotes again: I also think the term 'resource' masks a related myth). There were even individual companies that claimed to be getting there (eg. IIRC a carpet company that leased carpets to offices so they could control the whole lifespan?).

But evolution has had millions of years to explore state spaces using recycling. Carpet companies notwithstanding, on a planetary scale I doubt we can do it any more efficiently than evolved systems do, without developing systems of comparable complexity. And we're clearly centuries (at least) away from being up to that, and we don't have centuries to play with.
Can Artificial Intelligence Transform Farm Equipment?
Move your data out of Google products
Messenger for Desktop
> right to punish by, for example, detaining the student's private property for up to a day

No it fucking doesn't. Not on any planet I'd be willing to live on.

Ridicule and shame are appropriate here.
> advanced civilizations just want to compute

We got the answer right here. It's much more interesting and probable to meet AGI than aliens. Space travel is dangerous, but virtual space is just as interesting.
> The suicide might have happened anyway, but

There has to be a better way for you to argue your position than hand-waving away the gravity of a suicide. If there isn’t, maybe that should tell you something.
I didn't cook, but then I started learning how, and the way was.. actually, I thought of things I liked to eat out at restaurants, and decided to try to make them at home.

Fast forward a year, and I can now cook almost everything more to my tastes than any restaurant serves. The one exception is dim sum, which I tried a few times and decided it was far too much effort for far too little food. Very fiddly, you need a lot of patience.

But just, what do you like? Look up a recipe on the internet, go buy those ingredients, and it's gonna suck at first, but practice, practice, practice! (And now, turns out cooking is sexy. Nice side-effect to discover for having been out of the game for a while.)
Their 13 XPS laptops are always out of stock in Germany, so I never managed to try them out.

ASUS used to sell 1215B ones with Ubuntu on the German Amazon store, which I managed to get for travel purposes.

But in spite of those two examples, I don't see most OEMs would play ball regarding OEM distributions and updates.
You're not kidding. The silver lining is that if it goes ahead (there's much doubt over the project being funded), it is quite likely to prompt a surge in activism greater than anything Australia has seen in decades. It is not a popular project.
The higher rate is there to incentivise more people. The stable state is at the point where enough drivers opt-in that they all get to just the break-even point.
Global civilisation collapse is unlikely to be a one-day event. It will be a gradual process over several years, for instance there would be a financial market crash, than an obligation market crash and a global debt crisis, then several of the G20 countries would fall into deep crisis like civil war or dictatorship, global trade will come to a halt, wars on resources would erupt at many points on the globe, then for instance the EU would cease to exist in fact but not in law (governments would pay lip service to it for years without actually complying to its policies) etc. We wouldn't be able to say for sure "this is it, today the civilisation is collapsing". However, at the end of a several years period, billions of people would have been killed by famine, epidemics, wars, etc.

Just like the fall of the Roman Empire has been dated to some more or less arbitrary date, but actually was a many years process, actually beginning a century or more before the point we date the "event"; and for people of the time, the Empire wasn't actually dead before several decades at least (and Justinian failure to capture back Rome).

So we date the "fall of Roman Empire" to september the 4th, 476; but it was in the making for a century, and wasn't a done deal for another century. Similarly, the "fall of the thermo-industrial civilisation" or "American Empire" or whatever else we'll call it will be set up to some day at some later date in the future.
We could not detect civilizations at our level because standard transmissions decay the square of the distance and so such would be quantum noise by the time they got to the nearest start. And less than that by the time they further.
Yeah, that's the worst part of Hugo by far for me. The default template engine is just terrible.
I wish HN would tag these with a [paywall] label. It is incredibly annoying to find out after the 2nd paragraph that you can’t really read the article you were suggested, turn around and do the google search dance.
If you sleep you're at the mercy of who doesn't sleep. You can take countermeasures but you're going to have surprises when your wake up.

Btw, the latest scifi I read on the subject is http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/fermis-last-surv...
isDriving remains connected to t. Specifying an Option reference for t allows you to convey two pieces of information: if None, that isDriving is false and you do not care about t, and if Some, you have train t
RiftSketch: Live Coding in VR with the Oculus Rift