skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Today, the VA spends more than half of its $4.3 billion IT budget on maintaining increasingly archaic legacy systems.

Not difficult to see how they’d claim their Great New Thing would cost less to maintain than the Really Old Thing that nobody likes which was built by someone else.

> employees were shunning another troubled IT program, called Catamaran, that manages supplies through predictive analytics

> employees complained of frequent crashes that made it difficult to order supplies

Also, if they stopped infecting people with Hepatitis and HIV (most likely among other things) due to using dirty equipment they would realise savings through not having to pay compensation and/or treat those people for the rest of their lives. That could also be done by following proper cleanliness procedures but that would require some leadership to achieve.
What's holding .Net back is a lack of the vision thing. That's a shame, since in many ways it is a better designed framework, with a superior flagship language (C#) compared to the Java platform. Their framework and language designers are truly world-class, probably the best in the world.

The problem with .Net's vision has been painfully obvious to anyone following .Net over the years - it is still Windows First. While in Enterprises and Startups [1], Linux is what matters on the Server.

As an example, just last week I was looking for some http2 libraries in C#. Go and Java have mature libraries already in production, while .Net only supports http2 services on Windows. That in turn affects other ecosystems as well, such as gRPC Services. This to me is a red flag. Given how important something like http2 was going to be, how come Microsoft is so late to the party? What exactly is .Net's niche, given front-end wars are over?

Another example, the very promising CoreRT project (https://github.com/dotnet/corert) page says this about Linux: "Same as Windows, the libraries are less complete."

As a late comer, .Net faced an uphill climb. High-end web tooling is almost exclusively JVM based (Kafka, Cassandra, Elastic Search, Kibana etc). The upcoming competitor is Go, not .Net. If Microsoft doesn't pour a billion dollars into getting .Net ready for Linux in 2018, .Net is over.

[1] I've been a consultant to several Small and Medium sized businesses (especially in Medical) which predominantly use Windows and .Net, and that's still a huge market. But even they are looking to move off Windows.
I think the north Koreans see that any state opposing a major force in recent history got pushed over and trampled upon for oil and various reasons.
Well except for Pakistan.
Pakistan is a ally. Does not even have to export oil to be one.
Okay, it has al quaida hide outs - but it is a really good friend.
Loyal, as long as the bri- the budget doesn't run out.
Totally different from afghanistan.

Another great country, that totally does not get pushed around comes to mind. Israel. Surrounded by enemys, with some really nasty wars in its recent history- that suddenly stopped.

Or India, dear god, that country was fractured and ripe for the taking- and yet, suddenly its independence is well respected- just like it is by all those companies and foreign powers in africa.

I wonder why.(not)

Delusional Intentions do not equal good outcomes, just because they timewise correlated.
A Programmer’s Journey – From Zero to Hero
There is still wide resentment towards Microsoft, just go to /r/programming and check out threads about .Net, there's at least a few threads at the bottom going "EEE".

Plus dotnet core wasn't API stable until recently. I think we're still 1-2 years from mass adoption.

Also check @librexpr's comment above, there's a lot of confusion around.
Real[ity] criticism definitely takes a hit when a craft/hobby becomes popularized such that juicy reviews aggrandize. A vicious cycle forms, such that the projects with the most incredible claims get debunked by popular people -- which causes more people to check out the project and use it. Rinse and repeat. One of the least bad things is that for open-source projects, usually even if a project is built badly before it attains it's five minutes of fame, newly minted contributors often turn the ship around if the original architects have a shred of humility. It's not all bad...
You just clean and bend the fibre it until enough light escapes for you to detect.
2017: The Year Europe Got Serious About Killing the Internal Combustion Engine
This is so common that there are dedicated ICs to count in base 10.
I am baffled by some of the twitter responses. If a real person were crossing out one drug and writing in another would people be rushing to their defence? Here is a good rule:

It is never right that a computer should do the wrong thing.

It may be explicable, it may be avoidable, it may be correctable but if it is wrong it is wrong. We will be living in a world where computers are increasingly autonomous in their actions. Defending their behaviour now sets a dangerous precedent. Will the same people be blaming victims of self driving cars?

So whoever added drugs to the spell checker didn't think it through properly. They need to be told to take them out or put them all in and keep them updated. If we work around things it is us who will become the servants.
What happened to the plan to use a laser to push it of course?
How are you building or is your gf Thai? Isn’t there a law against foreign land ownership? I know it’s possible to rent land for 90 years, but seems risky.
perl -e 'print "yep, is porn\n" if $filename =~ /(Porn|Sex|XXX)/;'

Should spot the 99% of cases.
The blockchain that wouldn't die
One has to wonder whether any of the qualitative social sciences really even have a right to soundblast about concepts that have no provable metric...no way to be tested, and cause no difference in the world whether they are right or wrong. Is it time for the social sciences to throw in the ringer and reform their teaching and relevant arguments into a more mathematical/axiomatic foothold? I for one think so.
Walter H. Brattain: The Material Inventor of the First Transistor in History
While undoubtedly tragedies in their own right, Ukraine, Iraq, etc. are tiny conflicts in comparison to major industrialized economies making total war on each other in the years before nukes existed.

By the most liberal estimates, the Iraq war killed 1 million. World War 2 killed 70 million easy.
The rise of static site generators was a similar topic some months ago, I think those two play together very well.

There seems to be a trend in disconnecting content and interactive input elements, sourcing out handling of comment systems to providers like Disqus. It allows a smaller publishing interface without the need to invest in big backends. As soon as there is no more input handling needed on my infrastructure, migrating to static content is a logical step.

Secondly, I hold myself to the same standards I want to see from other website owners: no bloated adscripts, no tracking and no excessive execution of code inside my browser.

Pages that do not display content with disabled Javascript should rethink their priorities - it not only excludes people with no JS, screen readers or text-browsers; it also fails to make me recommend the link on Twitter or Facebook.
Does it really matter? Most of the important data is already encrypted (and even the unimportant stuff like youtube video streams are served over HTTPS, not even sure why).

The real problem is them cutting or blowing up these cables.
Order of the Shadow Wolf Cyberzine 5
I’ve been doing remote for the last 10 years. I’ve worked from home a lot. But also took the time to travel, which was awesome and I met a ton of cool people, which is networking too.

But recently I started working from a coworking place. And that’s great too. It’s only an 8 minute walk, which I love as it helps me to reach my daily step count. And I get to talk to some interesting people.
Veterans Administration warned of failure in $543M RTLS contract
Gas station “television” must cease to be a thing.
Get that old SUN Keyboard out into the light
Show HN: Going Serverless
Nowadays, latest versions of Android have this native (called LiveDisplay in LineageOS), macOS/iOS have this native (called Night Shift in macOS). Windows 10 have this native (as you already mentioned called Night Light). Windows was last btw.

There was a time where F.lux was basically the only way to reduce blue light. BTW, F.lux has more advanced options than any of these OSes but it requires rooted device on Android/iOS. For macOS and Windows it will work out of the box.
dotnet core = new, entirely cross platform runtime + core libs meant to serve as the new core of dotnet. In the future everything dotnet will be based on it, for now this isn't the case cause of legacy code. Basically you'd have dotnet core + Windows stuff for the Windows framework, dotnet core + various bits for Mono, etc.

Regarding the ecosystem, even Java has proprietary libs on top. For dotnet, Windows stuff is still proprietary, but even that is changing. You won't care about it anyway.

Just make sure you stay within dotnet standard (i.e. cross platform API standard for dotnet) and either use Open Source Microsoft extras or just use community-developed stuff.

For Linux C# dev, Jetbrains Rider or Visual Studio Code + C# plugin.

Regarding extensions, the battle has shifted. Microsoft is fighting Azure and GCE these days. The proprietary bits are in the services. The clients are Open Source to get mindshare, so no worries there.
Eelo: Neues Android OS Ohne Google Anbindung Auf Kickstarter
Always confused that people talk about .Net as if it's failed on here, any time I look for employment in the UK there is a seemingly unlimited amount of high paying C# jobs available and it doesn't take long to get hired. Even my university taught in C# for the first year.

Net core is a slow moving project for sure, and it's not at a stage to use in production yet, but it'll get there and I look forward to further improvements made in 2018.
Sure.

https://gist.github.com/25facbfd1aa3816457ba9c5d2040cd3c
Honest question - what happens if you don't know the password on your Mac, Windows, Linux box? Are there routes to recover the information on the hard drive if the user does not have the password and there is no admin?
Java may be the JVM's "flagship language", but why would I replace the whole platform with C# when Scala and Clojure exist, and stay compatible with the JVM?
Judging by the replication crisis discussions over past two years, I'd add quite a bit of medicine to that list too. And I don't mean just psychology, which is social science with a medical degree - but also drug research.

All of this, though, shows how hard those disciplines are. Relative to that, hard sciences are easy, because they study precisely defined things pretty closely entangled with laws of physics, and you can't easily bullshit mother nature. But as you move away from physics, complexity rapidly increases, the questions themselves become fuzzier, and the answers less clear.

So IMO, the probability that academic success is crapshoot or scam increases with (Kolmogorov) complexity of the subject domain.
No laws requiring ISPs to apply filters. It's just a voluntary agreement between ISPs and the Government. The Digital Economy Act 2017 has provisions in it to allow ISPs to apply default filters if subscribers agree to them in terms of service.

There are requirements in the DEA 2017 for 'adult' websites to verify the age of people who visit the site with the threat of their website being blocked if they don't comply. Check openrightsgroup.org for more on this
‘Now, if there’s anything you need, anything at all, just you come to me, and I’ll show you how to do without it’

Class.

Mind you things got grey and boring in the winter in the 60s and 70s - and that was in a highish density town at 54N not nowhere at 58N. A few bright lights and some bling now and again do no harm.
No one who needs Oracle cares about quirky syntax. They care that Flashback Query or some other major feature works.
That headline. FFS. It's either child abuse or pornography. It can't be both.
> In my field of anthropology, the minimum acceptable number of pubs per year for a researcher with aspirations for tenure and promotion is about three. This means that, each year, I must discover three important new things about the world.

This is typically not the case. Academics will have a number of students working for them and many academics push them incredibly hard while doing very little of the actual research themselves. Instead they spend their time chasing funding. Projects are often built on prior work so many new papers explore new areas of a previous discovery or measure said discovery in a new way. So you’re not discovering three new things every year. Some academics will even be bold enough to publish the same data in multiple journals with minor changes in analysis.

With academic research it’s often a case of two steps forward one step back. You spend years working towards deep expertise in a field through postgraduate studies and then a postdoc or two. Then when you become academic staff you suddenly become an inexperienced manager and teacher. So you pass the work to inexperienced students who spend years relearning everything and often suffering from over aggressive supervision or complete abandonment. The funding bodies, as is their right, are increasingly looking for commercial outcomes to research so the scope moves from Research to r&D with a little ‘r’. So we see research on battery technology making ludicrous claims or graphene in all the things rather than real progress.

This stunts the potential of scientific discovery in favour of pushing revenue generating students through universities and chasing funding for short term gain.
Twizzler: An Operating System for Next-Generation Memory Hierarchies [pdf]
I think the parent's comment may have been glib.
Fantastic idea about the plastic packing material to diffuse light, I've been looking for a solution like that for one of my projects. Does anyone know what kind of packing material it is?
The house will be full property of my girlfriend. She already had the land. But like I said, the house will be not very expensive, the costs to build the house are around 40.000 EUR.

Even if we ever would separate, I wouldn't want to fight over the house - she can keep it. I would rest easier knowing our daughter has a nice place to stay. I would just buy an apartment somewhere else in Thailand. Apartments can be full property of foreigners.

But of course I do hope we will stay together.
One possible, very sad long-term effect could be that the Sciences (results, theories) will be deemed less relevant, less trustworth, less worthy of attention. Eg. I started a Phd in Physics, but I never finished it, I got disillusioned with Academia and some specifics in today's Physics research (like String Theory, Inflation). 5 years later, people are still beating on those drums, and whenever I read about some crazy new model, I think two thoughts: (i) nonsense (ii) I'm so happy I'm not spending my time on this.
I keep thinking Intel should have something like big.LITTLE - chips with fast/power-hungry cores with other slower cores with low-power running the same ISA. Processes with lower priorities (or causing less load) could be moved to the power-conserving cores while stuff that creates large loads could occupy the faster ones. The threshold should be configurable so you could have as much or as little running on your power-conserving cores as you want your batteries to last. That, in addition to aggressively managing clock as we already do for power/thermal reasons should yield a very interesting generation of laptops.
I guess we are just splitting hairs here, but that's like saying that quantum physics is not physics because it also deals with complex-number-based probability theory.

Behavioral economics is a different matter though. It explicitly acknowledges the relation between economics and psychology/sociology. That being said, when I was studying at economics college (I've dropped out quite quickly) nobody have even mentioned behavioral economics. If things have changed since it's a step in the right direction.
I kind of dislike the "misleading" title of "took me two years" which implies "because I didn't touch it for a whole year".

By that metric, I have thirty-year projects to replace a light bulb.
The internet is broken but the web's top minds have a plan to fix it
Middle-eastern countries have used water for centuries to clean after the act. Nowadays, they are converting to western style as it seems luxury!
That's because older MacBooks could draw more power under 100% load than the power adapter could provide. Instead of shipping with a bulky 90W adapter, apple decided that 65W one is sufficient for almost everyone, and if you need to run your machine under 100% load it would just draw extra power from the battery. Hence, if you don't have a battery or its dead, the machine will never allow 100% load(this might be different if you actually plug in a 90W adapter, but I don't remember the details now).
Nina makes mini NeXT Computer
I installed it on Windows, so the installer was the best bit :)

Maybe it's better on linux but it didn't use system dialogues, the UI behaved a bit strangely and it wasn't particularly intuitive.

Maybe I'm just not the target - in a previous life I supported a HP TRIM ECM which may have left a mark on me.
Another month of clean code
You could learn the basics of substractive synthesis (the most common one) for free with software emulations, either on desktop (VST/AU plugins) or with iOS apps (Android is not very well served in this area)

Here's a free barebones synth plug-in (you'll need a VST/AU host, for example Garageband that comes bundled with macOS) : https://tal-software.com/products/tal-noisemaker

To be honest many producers in the younger generation haven't ever touched real hardware synths (let alone real analog synths) and do everything "in the box" using software. There's endless debate on whether this sounds the same (it's the "Emacs vs vi" wars of the synth world), but as Tatsuya says in the last paragraph of the interview, you'd be hard pressed to hear any difference once in a mix.

A few of the best sounding classic-analog-emulating software synths would be : Diva, Serum, SynthMaster, Sylenth1, Spire, and the Arturia collection.

Hardware synths are fun though, and most importantly their interface can spark inspiration where technically equivalent but mouse-operated software synths wouldn't.

A small selection of hardware synths, by rough ascending price :

- The cheap and fun Korg Volca range mentioned in the article.
- The Boutique range from Roland. Spot-on virtual analog (=DSP-based) reissues of their classics, the JU-06 is probably the easiest to figure out and most faithful to the original Juno 106 (a staple of the 80s), but it's sold out in most places.
- The Arturia microBrute and miniBrute. They spearheaded the cheap analog renaissance a few years ago and sound lovely and gnarly
- The beautifully designed Korg Minilogue mentioned in the article.
- My all-time favourite interface on a synth is the Nord Lead 3's. It's full-featured but especially suited to beginners because of a truly unique feature : endless rotary knobs with LEDs indicating current value. It's virtual analog (DSP-based) with everything you'd expect on the substractive synthesis front, plus the easiest FM synthesis interface you'll find anywhere. It's been discontinued for years (and its successors don't have the LED knobs), but some units pop up on eBay regularly.
- At the higher end of the price range, there are also dozens of options : the Prophet 6 and OB-6 by Dave Smith Instruments (the inventor of MIDI) are poised to become modern classics. The DSP-based Virus TI is incredibly versatile (although it's getting long in the tooth, as CPU power has caught up with DSPs meaning a plug-in like Serum is just as good)
Fedex is regulated as a train company so the NLRA does not apply and they can be legally prevented from forming a union. It is very unusual in this day and age.
This was new to me - for anyone wondering have a look at:

https://github.com/aspnet/JavaScriptServices

https://dotnetthoughts.net/using-node-services-in-aspnet-cor...
The only thing that is holding .NET back is the significantly slower compilation speed when compared to Eclipse's incremental java compiler.
You seem to be implying partially that it's about which style of music to play. That is not what I mean, although I do like or not like certain styles.

I think that people who don't care much about music either way (who are responsible for most bad music) are easily convinced of something better. A famous example of great taste in music is John Peel. He could figure out what people would eventually like because he just knew it was good. AFAICT he wasn't just trying to predict what would sell best in the near future, he just trusted his taste.

Taste isn't 100% subjective - otherwise what's the point of ratings? This discussion comes up on sites such as this regularly and I'm on the side that good and bad art exists. I don't think it is worth rehashing that discussion, if we disagree we should just agree to disagree.
"simply a ledger" that for some reason didn't exist until Satoshi nakamoto created Bitcoin.
I agree, I publish in the engineering field and in the field most "proofs" are validation by simple comparison against experimental data, DNS numerical simulation, analytical expressions, etc.

In some areas there isn't even validation at all, it's just "we put this interesting thing in the expensive and exclusive machine, and these are the results you guys". For instance testing different fuel mixtures in a rapid compression machine, testing prototypes in a wind tunnel/flow rig/anechoic chamber, etc.
Kotlin is very much threatening Java's dominant position in Android development
I was once asked to edit a sociology paper for grammar, spelling and style, but ended up deleting large swaths of it containing claims made up of thin air and found nowhere in the data or the citations. Of course this was not well received and I expect every one of those passages were promptly restored, complete with their horrendous spelling and grammar.

The claim? That the biggest challenge facing remote poverty- and alcoholism-stricken communities of indigenous peoples were not enough tablets to be able to "Netflix and chill". Because surely that will solve all the world's problems.
A majority on this forum, including those people who believe their financial situation to be dire are still in the top 1% of the richest people on the planet.

Should our minimum wage workers be funding anti-poverty programs?

I think not, it's obviously more complicated, but the logic of such articles can usually be applied in such a way and that makes me distrust everybody who thinks in this way.
Cryptsetup 2.0.0 introduces new on-disk LUKS2 format
I didn't know that, that's awesome - wish I'd known when I was working on a halloween costume this fall :/
Can you share some of the designs you use?
Uranium supply is limited, but there is far more Thorium.

Thorium technology is quite immature at the moment but India and China are developing it, although it'll take quite a while to get to third, or fourth generation level maturity.
I am not sure where you live but it is not usual to tip for regular package delivery in the US.
If you're interested in ruby and the upcoming ruby 2.5 release on Dec/25th - may I highlight the Ruby Advent Calendar 2017 [1] incl. Ruby 2.5 news and highlights 25 ruby libraries / gems. Happy holidays / christmas and hacking w/ ruby.
[1]: https://planetruby.github.io/advent2017
What happens when a Google Street View car meets a Bing car on the road?
> empirical social scientists with lots of pubs in prestigious journals are either very lucky, or they are p-hacking.

That’s the money quote. This is mainly applicable to “empirical social science”, which many already know as a big scam.