skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Questions about rigor and precision are a function of your goal.

The goal is to determine if a Round Earth model is a more useful model than a Square or Disk Earth model.

I've demonstrated it empirically to my own satisfaction.

I've seen the Southern Cross right at the horizon from the Florida Keys, but not visible father north. I've seen that the North Star rises higher in the sky as I've gone north. And in summer I've seen that the daytime is much longer in Michigan than Florida, and how the sunlight in the evening goes through the windows of the north side of buildings, which it doesn't really do in Miami.

I've driven across the US and seen that the sun rises a couple of hours later in the West than the East.

I've been below the Equator, and seen Orion cross the sky upside down, while the Southern Cross and the Magellanic Clouds were high in the sky. I also got confused when driving because it turns out my sense of direction was based on the expectation that the Sun should be in the south at midday, not in the north.

I was once at about 55 degrees north latitude, in early December, and the sun was low in the sky at noon. By measuring the shadow length I calculated the latitude to within a couple of degrees. (This calculation does require knowing the axial tilt, which I have not independently measured.)

These are all consistent with a Round Earth model, and not at all consistent with any description of a Flat Earth model that I've come across.

Now of course it's possible to say that I've not measured the radius of the Earth to sufficient precision, or demonstrated that the diameter between the poles is shorter than the equatorial bulge.

But that's changing the goalposts. I did not have to appeal to any authorities to confirm that the round earth model is a much better fit to my observations than a flat earth one.

Why are you not able to make similar empirical tests? If you are able to carry them out, why are they not enough for you?

The TV series "Ring of Truth" from the 1980s tried to address the question of how you can test things out for yourself. One of the things they did, in such a way that you could reproduce their work, was to drive along a long north-south road and measure the elevation change in a star. From this they could estimate the size of the Earth. They call it the "Van of Eratosthenes." You can see it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRY2SkMTafc .

Again, there's no reason to trust what the said. Rather, you can use it to reproduce their methods yourself, which is the sort of empirical test you asked about.
I will state that the article itself was a fluff piece. However by posting the title it will bring interesting discussion on hn. I do agree with the title, very much so.

I think the Java then C then whatever else you fancy is the best way to start programmers/software engineers out. Put them in a structured environment (strong typing, little room for catastrophic errors), then learn why the structure is there with C, then let them free roam to Python/JavaScript/Rust/Go with the experiences gained by the planning at the C level
Indeed. My hypothesis at this point is that there's more to the story, including misbehavior at Essential, and that we'll have to wait some time to learn any details. Even within the current trend of righting wrongs, this seems like an overreaction to what little is known.
What to say when a job interviewer asks, 'Why do you want this job?'
I guess that under the hood there are modes the camera can operate in - lower-res "video" mode and a high-res "still" mode. When you're looking at the viewfinder it's kind of a video - so it'll be lower res and presumably will skip some corrections involved when a still is taken.

Edit: oops I thought this was in reply to a comment where someone complained that the photo was taken from a screenshot of the viewfinder instead of using the camera functionality. Been a long day :-)
This is a nice, pro-consumer move, although I wonder if they will lose advertising revenue as a result. One would have to imagine that one of their big sells to Discover advertisers would be that their content is shoved in your face whenever you try to view friends' Stories.
The web became a place to do business. You can't do business just sharing documents.
You can set Noscript to accept scripts coming from the current domain (and sub-domains) by default. It helps a lot.
They can last for 24 hours sometimes or forever in the “memories” section.
Smoking is a revealed preference, lung cancer is a consequence but any person who buys and smokes cigarettes reveals their decision that the expected value of lung cancer is smaller than the expected value of smoking.
Blockchain Governance
Really? Every friend of mine complains about the UI. Just yesterday a group of friends (early 20's) were commiserating over how nothing in Snapchat made any sense and just doing something as simple as getting to your friends list was difficult and unintuitive, requiring a couple false starts where you use the wrong swipe and end up somewhere you didn't mean to.
>Every town has an American Free Diner in it. The music is great and there’s a buzzing neon sign.

I think that latter sentence is telling. No music is "great" to everybody. In some cases any music at all may make the diner unusable, eg. for autistic people with sensory processing difficulties. The author appears not to have considered this. Centralized food provision will necessarily reduce choice, and reduced choice will harm many people.

Of course capitalism isn't perfect either, for all the reasons described, but it makes more sense to address specific market failures with regulation than replace the whole system. Eg. I don't see why corporations should be considered people with free speech rights, so I'd support heavy restrictions on advertising.
I agree with you that this claim doesn't need evidence, but for anyone interested.

Starcraft 2 came out in 2007. These are the original system requirements. https://www.lifewire.com/starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty-requi...

I remember receiving the game as a gift and having to tell my grandma that my single core PC wouldn't be able to play it. I think my PC was only 3 years old at the time, not even 6.
As a near daily snapchat user, and someone who has developed an Android app that use's the camera, I prefer it this way. I'm not using SnapChat to take super high quality pictures, but to share moments quickly. The WYSIWYG works well for that, and a lot of Android devices are super slow to take pictures.

Dealing with Camera 1 vs Camera 2 Android APIs, and device specific issues is a mess, I don't blame them for taking the easier route. The iOS camera system is a lot easier to develop against, so I blame Android for this rather than Snapchat.
In the EU (at least in Germany) this would be illegal in a normal company because it is against the law and/of personal freedom! Why are this personal rules allowed in a company in the USA? Nobody should say to me that's ok or not ok to get in a relationship with one of my coworker and I have not to report it to my supervisor!
I worked on an app that we needed to take a live video stream, run that through OpenCV, but also quickly take high-res photos while that's running.

On Android I really had trouble in getting the preview stream to line up with the photographs. I needed to keep the preview resolution low enough that devices could process it and present to the screen in real time. But not all devices have the same preview and photograph resolutions.

I found there were inconsistencies between the way the image was cropped (on the OS/hardware level) between different resolutions.

You can take a preview stream at resolution X, and it would appear full frame. Then you would take a photograph at resolution Y, and despite being the same aspect ratio, it would be cropped differently. The results varied between devices, with some matching the crop, some vertically, some horizontally, and (as far as I could tell) there was no way to identify programmatically how the camera was doing the cropping. It seemed to be being done at a level much lower than I could access.

In the end we just had to compromise on a resolution in the middle and use it for both preview and photo.

It may not be the reason, and maybe there's a way around this, the project was a year or two since now. Implementing the same thing on iOS I didn't run into the issue.
Canadian hacker pleads guilty in huge Yahoo hack case
Let's make sure that people have the choice for healthy food but it'd be idiotic to spend an iota of effort trying to get people to eat things they don't want to eat.
During the video he says, "Furlexa, tell me about furbies". My echo dot heard this and proceeded to tell me about Herpes.
Plaintext Accounting with the Ledger Ecosystem
I'm pretty sure privacy laws would apply to a simply invited guest; "you can change in there". I wouldn't be surprised if they applied to illicit recordings of a spouse...

People enjoy strong rights in their own homes, they don't trump every right someone else may have.
Still writing in the undefined language, huh? Problem with unit-testing is that it's impossible to catch all possible bugs, especially the insecure buffer overflow and multithreading data races ones. Your only bet is to use a sane programming language like Rust and move forward. Drop your old codebases, I bet maintaining them is more painful than switching to rust. I'll also urge QT developers to focus more time and money towards migrating QT to rust, one step at a time so that we can live in a defined future ahead.
My impression was that they did this because it made taking a picture faster than using the camera and they specifically did not want to encourage high quality photos. They wanted quick personal moments where you don't care so much how you look or capturing the perfect lighting or whatever.
Anyone seen Pascal, BASIC, or Z80s in the wild recently?
People prefer to use it because it shows you the mirrored picture which you're more used to seeing.
Just installed, and it looks great.

One minor thing: my terminal can't show the first page's results without me scrolling up after every search.

I'd like to either have a reverse output (i.e. show the first result at the bottom, since it's most likely to be the one I want, and I shouldn't need to scroll to it), or a way to limit the result count, so I can fit it to my terminal window. Couldn't find either of those options in `--help`
Sliding it back-and-forth would create too large accelerating/braking forces. Easier approach would be to put camera on a rim of continuously rotating wheel and take shots when it reaches positions of 90° and 270°.
Don't forget that Larry dated Marissa for a long time, and she was his subordinate. And then there's Eric, who was notorious...

Anyway, my understanding was that it has historically been OK at Google to date subordinates, so I'm waiting for more to come out because I can't imagine that "he had a consensual relationship with a subordinate" is all that's going on here.

But maybe someone who has worked there for a long time can correct me?
I largely disagree with this article. C has too many pitfalls that a beginner can either be discouraged by a non-working program, or not understanding the subtle gotchas.

Avoiding undefined behavior in C is difficult, even for experts. Failing to understand UB leads to very inconsistent, often latent, hard-to-debug situations long after the bug has occurred. Other languages - including assembly language - don't have this extremely hostile concept of UB. C encourages bad habits like ignoring error codes from I/O functions. Also, doing concurrency correctly in C (or Java for that matter) is a grand effort, but is easier in languages like Go and Rust.

Managing language minutiae in C, like function prototypes and header files, is something not found in newer languages. Another problem is having a global namespace instead of a more structured, modularized one (C++, Java, Python, etc.). And finally, manual memory management means that a lot of extra code is written (contrary to the author's claims about conciseness), and it especially makes string processing hard.

Personally, I only use C to implement cryptographic primitives (ciphers and hash functions) and some numerical kernels. These are straightforward calculations that don't require memory management or tricky pointer arithmetic.
Is this what khuey is referring to?: https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX136003
Given that the woman complained about the relationship to HR, it may not have been entirely consensual.
Is anyone concerned enough with their facebook profile security to want to be verified on this level?

why not a normal 2fa? it seems like there is a hidden agenda behind collecting and analyzing users facial characteristics.
Kanban is better, especially paired up with continuous delivery. Once something is done, ship it and move onto something else. Longer research things can be broken down into smaller cards, you're just constantly pulling them in.

We skip estimates, they prove to be useless indicators of when something will be done so why bother? I think our PM's use velocity as a metric (num of cards done over time) and generally plan enough work so we aren't idle.

If you have a weekly grooming session to keep grooming the cards that are next, there shouldn't be wait times.

Waiting for sprint review before moving onto further steps is wasting time which goes against Lean Software Development principles.
> Americans live on junk food; they have terrible diets, with too much sodium, too many calories, too much sugar, and too few fruits and vegetables.

Yes. That happens because they are able to execute their own free will and choose for themselves - and of course, most people are easily manipulated and choose poorly.

But here lies the fundamental difference between "left" and "right" positions. "Left" tends to optimize for the best utilitarian value from some objective, authoritative point of view (like how good a person diet's is) and would favor a situation where a well-intended authority would choose what's best for the people. Meanwhile, the "right"-wing objective is to optimize a person's individual freedom - which, of course, usually leads to most people making poor choices and having less total utilitarian happiness.

Which of those values we should optimize for, and what is the best compromise is a complicated question that lies at the basis of a lot of modern political debates. In this particular comment I'm not trying to take any sides. But why am I talking about it at all then? Because it seems surprising to me how people on the "left" side of such arguments naively assume that we all want to optimize for the same total utilitarian value, completely disregarding that the other side tries to optimize for a different metric.
Socialising?
Yeah, I teared up like crazy during that episode. So sad yet so loyal. Kind of like the legendary dog Hachiko in Japan that waited every day for his dead owner to return, for many years.
That's a good point. Bear in mind though that each subset can be larger than today's entire Ethereum or Bitcoin network.
Seeing how poorly Wikipedia succeeds at neutrality much of the time, I don't have much hope this project will do any better.
Maybe not quality wise in all areas (I agree with you there) but at least in giving a professional and modern impression compared to let's say Windows XP/7. Maybe operating systems are declining in quality in general, even though organizations sometimes try to improve them. I guess legacy plays a big role here.
“Light Touch”, Cable, and DSL; the Broadband Tradeoff; Importance of Antitrust
The Government has done the opposite of banning bitcoin. They've outright legitimized it.

No, they have not forced private businesses to accept bitcoin.
>more of an "anti BIG business" and "anti proprietary / locked-down / walled garden ecosystem" sentiment

The early days of the computer industry, at least, are nothing like that. The founders of Microsoft were hackers of the highest order, but weren't "anti BIG business" or "anti proprietary".

Likewise with the founders of Apple, HP, and countless more.
Good. What other languages are still being used that teach these concepts?
Not yet. But hopefully soon.
Sounds pretty weird. So if I want to steal someones account I just either A) take a picture of them or B) download a picture of their face from facebook? What's the point exactly?

Seems as silly as uploading your nekid pics so facebook can prevent them from being distributed. If they really wanted to protect you they would just let you download an app that could analyze the files and upload just enough to detect similar video/pictures.

What has facebook done in the past to earn such trust? Seems just the opposite. Isn't it crazy to assume facebook will keep anything you upload secure?
I saw a billboard this morning on the highway for alexa which said

"Alexa buy me an Kenmore washing machine"

wtf.
Remote jobs resources
Uh, the article disagrees.

> In a statement to WIRED, a Facebook spokesperson said the photo test is intended to “help us catch suspicious activity at various points of interaction on the site, including creating an account, sending Friend requests, setting up ads payments, and creating or editing ads.”

They're basically training people to provide PII/biometrics on-demand as the price of using their service.
I always thought this was to ensure you get a photo of what you're seeing in the moment; not something after a delay which is what was happening with older phones. Essentially it's a fast and dirty way for the photos to be WYSIWYG and avoid camera lag.
Pre order your fresh food from a vending machine
I will never do this. I don't even post photos of myself on FB, or use "Messenger" or their mobile app, so it probably wouldn't work anyway, but I have no doubt they're looking to monetize the feature and that businesses and governments are their target markets.
It is expected behaviour that on unix-like systems booting in single user mode leaves you with /bin/sh as init or something very much alike, and, obviously, being root. This is no different than booting a live{cd,usb} and at that point you're a mount/chroot/passwd away from resetting the password. Unless the disk is encrypted of course.
You can edit your previous comment.
Former Google exec Andy Rubin had inappropriate relationship with a coworker
How will they do investigative pieces?
I'm sure the biometric data harvested from these pictures won't be abused by three letters agencies.
Additionally it is in fact expressly illegal in 13 US states (Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Utah) to use video or audio equipment in a private areas without express permission of the observed.

And other restrictions apply in other states: https://www.rcfp.org/first-amendment-handbook/introduction-r...
Teenagers, and for that matter, everyone yearns for smaller private spaces where they can share whatever they want with their closest friends — without any reservations of judgement from their parents, grandmas or uncles. I used to love Instagram, until Facebook decided to make it Facebook v2 by making my entire "friend" list follow me there as well. That means that until I invest a lot of time hiding my story from everyone but my closest friends (and of course no one has time for that), I'll just refrain from posting some of my true self there.

On the other hand, the tight knit and private nature of the Snapchat network is going to keep it more attractive to me. At least for me, the amount of time spent in an app is more correlated with the depth of my relationships with other nodes on that network, and not just with the size of my audience.

I’ve loved Snap as a company for a long time, and I like their pitch of using innovation as a moat: they have consistently innovated every year since their founding (Ephemerality, Stories, AR filters, Memories, Spectacles (although this has largely been a failure)), have a core set of users who really really love them, and are now playing to their strengths by positioning themselves well as the private space for you and your closest friends.
Where are you getting this from? Unless I missed something all they're doing is moving around the menus a bit.
He agrees that both of these points are reasonable in 2017 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/935878538623901696

(though I guess you know that, since you're the one who asked him...)
Semver on the web with Rust and WebAssembly
Works with rust? no? NO THANKS!
AP also does some investigative work. For example, "Americans buying salmon for dinner at Walmart or ALDI may inadvertently have subsidized the North Korean government as it builds its nuclear weapons program, an AP investigation has found" https://www.apnews.com/8b493b7df6e147e98d19f3abb5ca090a
I wonder if this is any relation to Kenny Tilton's Lisp project from a decade ago, also named Cells: https://github.com/kennytilton/cells
Knowing fb, this is for their benefit, not the users i.e, they're trying to catch spammers and fake accounts, not see if you're the one accessing your own account or not.
I have no doubt the block chain is the future and one backed by governments. I think Bitcoin and Ethereum are the MySpace before something better came along. They have so many issues that better technology will win out. Being first doesn't guarantee anything nor better technology for that matter but in this case crypto is all about technology not just an experience.
This is one of the reasons we created Point which we just released the 2nd generation of on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/minut/pointthe-friendly...
You cannot update firmware / tinker with BIOS etc. I will cover this in a breakout session at re:Invent today: https://www.portal.reinvent.awsevents.com/connect/search.ww#...
Also Gemini (Gemini’s public site is up but ability to log in is intermittent).

Kraken and Bitstamp has outages around 7:30am Pacific. (Bitstamp’s public site was up but trading updates had stopped at 7:18).
HDMI 2.1 released: 10K resolution, dynamic HDR, and FreeSync-like game smoothing
so far so good, been doing it since january (so coming up on 1 year).

i remembered what the driving reason was to disable gc:

turning off gc gets my emacs startup time down to ~400ms from ~600ms.
It's a bit further apart than the mentioned dates, but I bought two machines:

* 1998: 32-bit, 500 MHz, single core, 128MiB of RAM IIRC (we later upgraded it to ~500 MiB). 7 GB of disk.

* 2007: 64-bit, ~2.5 MHz, dual core, 4, later 8 GiB of RAM. Hundreds of GB of disk.

There's essentially an order of magnitude improvement…
I tried out Plex Media Server on a Atom server (well, it was a co-opted Eee Box running Ubuntu) and I swear it screamed in pain when it had to transcode. I ended up "obtaining" much of my media in H.264 just to avoid transcoding.

I now run Plex as a Docker image on a Proxmox-equipped home server using an AMD Fusion 2.8GHz w/ Radeon GPU. Plex appears to be well tuned to use the CPU and the GPU to do transcoding, but does stutter if you don't Analyze your library often (this presumably lets Plex transcode in advance).
I don't think so, just trying to use the context of "agrarian village life" that the parent used. The point is that Capitalism provides a framework in which time, and particularly action, is linked directly to financial recompense and in which profit motive - rather than other firms of value - is lauded most highly. That moves away from community spirit, cooperation, fostering others, and towards greater emphasis on individual monetary wealth (and consumption that indicates such wealth).
The pictures were fun, though.