skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm interested in insightful descriptions of the physical world for young kids.

For illustration, what might it mean to teach friction well? Is it memorize-and-regurgitate of bogus definitions in late primary? Or plug-and-chug of Arrhenius's law of large objects sliding on pig fat in high-school? Or instead, could we talk about sock nubbies in K-3? Their similarity to cleats and crampons and klister. How to avoid slipping and falling. Sliding and slipping and sticking - pervasively surrounding us. Nanoscale origins connecting nicely with macroscale behavior. And for the numerate, a feel for reasonable order-of-magnitude values. So physics, but coming from sort of an engineering perspective - hands-on, pragmatic, rough quantitative.

Could we approach math similarly? What might it mean to teach category theory to young kids? Perhaps math as a vocabulary for describing similarities among everyday things? "Oh, you missed the square, but you can get it the next time you go around the board":"It's almost one o'clock now, so we'll wait for lunch-time tomorrow":"Missed the parking space, so we'll drive around the block". Movement around short loops is a theme of everyday experience. Could it be taught? Now, or with future AR/VR tech?

In preK-1, learning to describe physical properties is a thing. Rough, smooth, etc. But instead of drawing on well designed vocabularies from industrial design or material science, it's left to dysfunctional ad hoceries. Similarly, K-12 physics education leaves students having seen almost no physics. What about math?

Could math be taught not as a random fun thing to do, like crossword puzzles and fashion magazines, but as a deeply insightful and broadly illuminating vocabulary for describing everyday experiences?
Is there any counterpoint to this?

My great worry about us (and capitalism) is that we are good at short term allocation, bad at long run planning. Is there a way around this soil problem, or some way in which the stat is misleading?
What do we know about marketing gimmicks hidden in Chrome? If they are not made in the form of add-ons, or if they are add-ons but Chrome has a way to hide them (as it hides Flash), we just never know. I bet Google's marketing gimmicks, if any, are not open-source either, and not included in Chromium.

Hence, as you said, the only way is to trust Google here, without much ability to verify.
Did Tesla battery last the whole race? ;)
> so it's not relevant in the conversation

It is what google leads to that matters. Google is the main way that laypeople find alternatives to Netflix, etc.

> HN readers are far more likely to take part in these usage patterns

One group being "more likely" does not make the other group "less likely".

File sharing, game downloads, etc. are still areas that are not very centralized, and that is why average people do care about net neutrality, whether or not they understand that to be the case.

Don't overestimate how many Americans "have zero interest in using the internet that way".

> They think that because their usage patterns could be met by a cellular or satellite internet plan that it means that would fit the needs of most everyone else, too.

Sure, there are a lot of people in that situation, here on HN, and elsewhere.

When file sharing sites, youtube, steam, etc. were new, they showed the limitations most people had with bandwidth, etc. It wasn't until later that most people found themselves with more bandwidth than they needed.

I think it's important that we reverse that order. I believe that if most people have significantly more bandwidth, that new services that use it will appear that wouldn't be possible with the bandwidth currently available to most people.

It's difficult, with many people, to convince them that should be the case, and ISPs seem to be working hard to convince people that providing more bandwidth is unfeasible. I don't believe that.
Most likely in 2017 and the pending 2018 changes make it definitely taxable as both the House/Senate versions restrict IRS-1031 to real estate only. Based on all the discussions around tether, I don't think many cryptocurrency gamblers are currently aware (or care) of tax implications.
Huh... good question. I guess I would just assume that if they were deleting the data, then that must mean the've already sold it to Google, with some type of exclusively contract that mandates the removal.
In my personal experience, organic farming causes much more soil loss than conventional farming.

Organic dryland cereal farming depends on tillage for weed & pest control. Not only is the land plowed during planting and after harvest, every third year the land is left fallow. While left fallow it is plowed monthly.

Conventional farmers have substantially reduced their usage of tillage increasing their chemical usage instead. Those chemicals may be not be good for the ecosystem, but they result in orders of magnitude less soil loss.
When you install Firefox it asks whether you want to take part in these studies. You can also change the setting at any time in preferences (about:preferences#privacy section).
I'm not sure about their reasons, but I would guess it's because the three messenger they support (Telegram, WhatsApp, WeChat) are significantly easier to integrate with, and have nearly a billion active users combined.
Before that we had a president photographed smoking a joint as a young man; before that we had a president convicted of DUI. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I have never seen marketing gimmicks in Chrome, apart from the choice of default search/new tab page.
The title of this article is terrible. They are making it seem like the Chinese mining farms are contributing to the bitcoin price. This is completely false AFAIK. There is no link with mining and the price of bitcoin.
There is zero concrete proof, only people sharing their theories and beliefs so far.
> The issue is that whenever laws are passed requiring voter ID, the law doesn't tend to come hand-in-hand with equally strong requirements on ID availability.

I completely agree. Typically Republicans propose these laws, and they are usually filled with half-considered measures that are ripe for abuse.

Neither party really seems to want to "solve" these issues properly. Democrats typically oppose all forms of voter ID and Republicans typically oppose measures that increase participation (including early voting, easier registration, etc). Even worse, BOTH parties resist increased ballot access for independents and third parties, and neither party seems to be interested in improved auditing of election systems.

The only bright spot recently is Colorado, which just launched formal post-election audits to validate election results. Every district should be doing this!

So much is on the line when it comes to free and fair elections. The worst part about the status quo is that the populace increasingly believes that the game is rigged -- and they aren't entirely wrong -- leading to generally low turnout and even less motivation to tackle the hard problems. It's an ugly feedback loop.
How Software Companies Die (1995) [pdf]
You should.

You absolutely should spend time looking for things you expect not to find, because sometimes you will be wrong.

When you're maintaining an aircraft, a nuclear plant, or anything sufficiently complex or life critical, you should spend a certain amount of time looking for ghosts. You _will_ find them. Your model of an engineered system should include a finite rate of unknown bugs.
Most of places don't have suitable climates for the type of crops grown in CA though. It's a very special place.

On the other hand you could fill an office full of programmers in North Dakota.
That used to be me, however, if you go fast enough with a bike, those low-traffic streets (likely more turns/intersections) or bike paths slow you down considerably. There is a happy medium (big enough road either with separated or minimal traffic), but not always available.

Honestly, I simply can't wait for AI to dominate driving and remove increasingly distracted humans from the loop.
Cover letters might get lost in the HR departments of larger companies, but they're incredibly useful to me when sorting through applications at a small company.

Especially for entry level positions, a well-written cover letter is a much stronger positive signal than a bullet point style resume. Far too often the resume is a regurgitation of university class projects and career center templates.

Think of it like a pre-interview, but you get to choose the questions. Since most entry-level resumes look the same, this is your chance to explain why you stand out. (a passion for the industry, strong open-source contributions, etc)

If the position isn't entry level, my advice is the same. Use the opportunity to stand out and score the interview ( which is where the actual decisions will get made). At a small company, someone will read it.
I would agree with you, if the add-on in question was not developed, shipped, and offered by the people who made the browser, of which the add-on sandbox is a part.

In my view, that sandbox is a trusted area between the browser and the user.

Mozilla has the privilege accorded to it as the developer of the browser, to modify the addon sandbox so long as they don't infringe on my interests, e.g., security, stability, privacy, speed.

For example, Chrome automatically disable extensions that ask for too many new permissions upon update. Chrome will also make it difficult to add extensions that are not listed on the chrome store.

If we remove the right for browser developers to install, uninstall and alter add-ons, then we're essentially forcing them to modify the browser instead, which is overkill for the add-on in question.

At the end of the day, if you can't trust the developers of your browser, then you should install another one and disable add-ons entirely.

3.5 falls into 4.
Connection initiation is killing your web app
Yeah, Netflix is a monopoly, or almost a monopoly.

Amazon Prime is basically US-only.
HBO gets hired during GoT season and then dumped.

Meanwhile, the majority of the people out there have Netflix. We even see ads on the streets and all over the place, while the other two competitors are still inexistent.
Occasionally I imagine that I understand how to set derailleur limit screws. Inevitably, that illusion shatters within a month. b^(
>“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.”

"Only a sith deals in absolutes"

I love phrases like these. Not sure what to call them but they're fun. Recursive contradictions?
I think, you are far from truth. To work on EAD, one needs i-140, which is enroute to green card. So non Indian and chinese, get their green card in 2 years. After green card, every thing becomes immaterial. So ONLY Indians and Chinese get messed up.
I don't understand what's so wrong about that. Surely the interested student would like to learn about the properties of matrix arithmetic as well as vector spaces, linear transformations and their representation as matrices, etc.

I've had a quite accomplished mathematician for a professor who was very adamant that students should learn about basic matrix operations before the abstract theory. According to him, his undergraduate education at Princeton did things the "right" way, but left him quite confused about the main ideas and motivations. He ended up making some quite important contributions to the theory of representations of some certain algebraic structures if I recall correctly.
The reasons planes are so safe is because there are several "unreasonable" things about designing and maintaining aircraft that most engineers would think somewhere between unnecessary and ridiculous.

A lot can be learned from aerospace engineering and the systems engineering used to design air and space vehicles.
Some interesting images to upload

"One Million Colors"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/1M...

"RGB HSV Image"
https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Digital_Black_and_White_Conve...
Unpopular opinion - Is this something that we should seek to overcome entirely? These judgement calls are hard-wired into us for a reason. Whilst there are scenarios in which it is bad, there are scenarios in which it is good.
How to Find Good Business Ideas in B2B SaaS (Hint: It's Not Easy)
Show HN: Distributed hash-join algorithm using scale-out framework Apache Spark
It's amazing how relevant these still are, despite so much change in the industry...
This is where countries with some sort of mandatory service may have us beat. And maybe it explains why American policy was so focused after the big national wars. I don't think there's a better way to force camaraderie. But then it becomes Us vs Them on the other side of the border.
I'm not rich and yet I'm making the argument, because it seems to me that a) life-improving inventions that can scale eventually scale to everyone, even if initially they were limited to the well-off, and b) (and this may be controversial) all in all, still I find it strictly better to have a part of the population with access to life extension than nobody with access to it.
Which is the best text-only browser?
Then why not install it when the user opts in? Installing this kind of crap automatically is sleazy.
I suppose my initial email outreach for my current gig (How-To Geek) could qualify as a cover letter. It was in reply to a Stack Overflow Careers post. Like some of the commenters here have said, just kept it light and mentioned a couple things in the job posting that I really connected with. Happy to share the full text if there's interest.
Reminds me of the tobacco companies hiring doctors to disclose the benefits of smoking.
Modern frequency synthesizers can easily do a few Hz step size up in the gigahertz range and be within a few ppm. That doesn't really matter that much though, since modern radios (at least these digital ones) are built as SDRs. They can shift the signal around and select whatever band they feel like.
Nutrex Lipo 6 Rx – Bom Para Emagrecer Com Resultados
Every blanket statement is wrong! Self-referential jokes like this are always funny.

:)
Strang's exposition can make you a wizard of matrix multiplication and give you quite a good intuition for various properties of matrix operations, in my opinion.
Indeed. I'm seeing people recommending Chromium (not Chrome) instead of Firefox because of this.
The main AIM client was notorious for this itself (at least in the 2000s when I used it), ads, growing installation size, bloat "features", etc.

It's what pushed a lot of users to use alternate clients or stick with old versions.
> So if anything I'd expect that Mozilla pays Mr. Robot for this.

The irony is that Mr. Robot is owned by Universal, a subsidiary of Comcast. So much for that commitment to net neutrality.
Its just a False Dilemma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

More an artifact of our language and people wanting to condense/compress ideas down too far.
> not only the old trees are removed but all the topsoil too

Not sure what you mean by this. In the past old trees were burned on the spot; today they are chipped and the chips taken for use as mulch or other things. Neither process involves removing topsoil.
Silly question, but did you try reloading the page? I've noticed that if I place an order that isn't immediately filled, then tab to a different page and switch back to the gdax page an hour later, the account balance isn't updated even if it shows that my order was filled. Refreshing has always fixed it for me.
FCC plans to dismantle Net Neutrality reported as a ”victory for telecoms”
Portland is one of the few cities in America that has designed their infrastructure without the car in mind, effectively freeing itself from the sprawl problem the rest of America has. Perhaps this has something to do with this?
Always write a cover letter from scratch. It's better to invest time in five most relevant positions and apply with a complementing cover letter (and resume), than to apply for fifty positions without any background research (AKA generic cover letter/resume.)

If you are applying online to a big tech company, it almost always goes into an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). The ATS scans your resume and cover letter for keywords, and matches it with the keywords in the job description or specific keywords as asked my the hiring manager. (You can get through ATS just by copy-pasting the job description in your cover letter. Don't do it). Once you pass through the ATS filter, the recruiter don't seem to care much about the content of your cover letter, but it makes a huge difference when it goes to the hiring manager.

Apart from convincing why you are a perfect fit for the role, share interesting stuff about you like a link to your website (highly recommend this for new grads in tech roles), github profile, previous internship experiences and what excites you about this role.

PS - The most effective way to get a call is to network.(and avoid the whole ATS blackhole).
The British also had about a few dozen warheads and several hundred decoys aimed at Moscow starting in the early 1980s. This was actually pretty sensible: the British wanted an independent deterrent, and with a small force, their solution was to deter the USSR by making sure Moscow would be destroyed. The large number of warheads and decoys was needed to guarantee success against the Soviet missile defense system around Moscow. Smaller players with their own arsenals can complicate things considerably.

A major problem when trying to decode nuclear war strategy is that the rational thing to do after the missiles have started flying is different from the rational thing to threaten beforehand. If your goal is nuclear war, you want to threaten the enemy with complete and utter destruction from which they will never recover. Once it starts, you want to focus on the enemy's ability to attack you further, and probably ignore the enemy's civilian population and infrastructure. But it's hard to present the "total destruction" option as a credible threat unless you actually set up your forces to go through with it.
> Is organic farming all that much better

I couldn't get through any of the paywalls, but there are articles out there that suggest that it is.

A lot of other factors are important too. Good rotation, being careful about what strains are used (many crops have been bred/modified for high yields, but that yield often comes at the expense of the soil).

This is very much a solvable problem. The 1000 year number in the article is how long it can take under just normal circumstances, but that can be sped up a LOT using various techniques including proper tillage, animal grazing, etc.

The big "problem" is that all of these things will make crops more expensive, but any other solution is going to quickly become even pricier than that so it should still be done.

> It seems to me like we might have to make a big push towards solar-powered hydroponics or something of that nature.

Right now the costs (particularly start-up costs) are too high for this to be totally viable, but I think it will become a much more significant method of growing food down the line.
Sam Altman: E Pur Si Muove
You might really enjoy this blog, then. The author has been watching both the decline and advancement of radio of the last few decades. It was interesting to see these big-iron transmitters being replaced by half-a-rack of solid state gear, but then still taking up four racks because of all the other gear.

His last post is poignant, though: "...the absolute soul crushing mediocrity of automated programming is killing the entire industry."

http://www.engineeringradio.us/blog/
Show HN: Sketches to improve performance of stream analytics
Yes, although I like the idea of superordinate goals because I think it eliminates a lot of attempts at bad faith participation. Republicans and Democrats can be aware of their differing views and meet together and get along and chat about their families and maybe a policy decision if they're meeting at church or to play recreational kickball or whatever, if you put those same people together in line at the polling station you'd get a very different result. Maybe the problem is that we have a tendency to only discuss our differences under the worst possible circumstances. But how do you overcome that? I'm not sure, this article gave me a lot to think about.
I buy bikes from local specialty shops because they know how to put the bikes together and service them properly. Other customers like to use them to try accessories before purchase.

The family-owned shop I use in the Boston area (https://farinas.com) has a pretty solid, all-season business model: Bikes on the second floor, lawn mowers and snow blowers on the first floor, and the repair shop on the first floor. I see they also sell generators and chainsaws - items that may not be easy to ship or service online.
I believe there was a deliberate choice to keep DAB quality low to avoid people getting clear digital recordings for piracy.

Subsequently rendered redundant by Napster, but we are stuck with DAB.
A whole mobile bike shop sounds expensive. More likely these companies will make deals with "freelance labor firms" to get someone there to assemble it.

IKEA has already signaled as much by buying TaskRabbit, but my guess is that there's a good opportunity for an independent middleman to sell services for companies that need a broad geographical coverage but don't have enough sales to keep dedicated teams everywhere.
Starry and the first step back to the Open Internet
This is what's going to happen now that Ajit Pai and his band of dick heads are trying to go back to the 90s. Their next step will be to try to kill off these services. In the end, they (Ajit Pai, Verizon, Comcast, etc) will all lose. It's just a matter of months or a year. And, when they lose their customer's connection to the Internet their companies will become toast. I look forward to it. Along with Pai being escorted out of the FCC office on the day he's fired!
They should rename Firefox to Fiasco.
Their bit rate is embarrassing. Dither and audio frequency drops so terrible I asked myself "why was I paying for this?"

That was 2005

It's not any better now.
They are retained by the other organizations. It's good that at least snapchat itself removes it's copies though.
It makes it harder to "tune" it by moving the antenna around, too.
Grassroots movements and citizen created advocacy orgs (non-profits, etc) can be a big part of what often causes government to make policy changes.

But you are right that the primary focus should be on facilitating effective policy change for such issues.

I do think there is some value in individual change as an agent of broader cultural change, but this is much harder to assess. Part of my reasoning is that policy change will likely fail without some corresponding cultural change as well. I'd like to learn more about this complex dynamic though...

In the end, policy change is definitely necessary to successfully defense against large, negative externalities.
According to Miller, the failure of the mating scenario may reflect our prehistoric ancestors not realizing that mating could result in children because of the nine months between mating and birth.

This seems to imply that successful evolutionary neural behaviors are consciously learned, as opposed to being "learned" over generations due to natural selection [0], in a similar way to how a neural network is trained.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/50/10/883/234025
William G. Wright; Neuronal and Behavioral Plasticity in Evolution: Experiments in a Model Lineage: Evolutionary changes in sensory neurons correlate with changes in learning phenotypes, BioScience, Volume 50, Issue 10, 1 October 2000, Pages 883–894
Beside elinks, something newer?