skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There have been many uses of hex grids and maps for a while, such as Civilization V, and this awesome hex grid resource from a gaming company: https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

Others have pointed out various indexing systems that NASA uses that support hexagons, as well. H3's advantages over the others is, in my opinion, that we tried to marry as much of the awesome S2 library into a hexagonal grid (short 64-bit addresses for all hexagons at all resolutions, a parent-child tree with no shared parents, minimized area distortion, and a pretty simple API with some built-in utilities, like geofence polyfill, hexagon compaction, GeoJSON output, etc), where the hexagonal properties give you the other advantages I outlined over S2.

To be perfectly fair, there are some things that S2 will still do better than H3, most notably that the area coverage of a parent perfectly matches all of its children, where that's not the case with H3, though we minimized it as well as I think is possible.

Kevin Sahr (whom others have cited in here) worked with us on this library and came up with the parent-child orientation and scaling, and implemented the original version of the code.
Indeed. I wonder how they can get anything done.
(Other than posting on HN itself, that is)
There is for technical contact work in the uk 3x to 2.5x the FTE rate.

The going rate is what the market sets eg for developers in London its £400-500pd for grunt devs in Java or Perl
Another right wing frame... Social Security was in surplus for several years, and it will be several more years before the surplus is exhausted, if ever.

The right wing frame is that the surplus "doesn't exist" or is full of "IOUs" or something. It's hogwash.

Here's how it really works. When Social Security is in surplus, more money comes in from payroll taxes than is paid out in benefits. Payroll taxes come from people who get W-2 income and pay FICA.

That surplus is then used as part of the general fund to pay for various things including thing like tax cuts for lower capital gains. In reality, the general deficit is larger, because the surplus money isn't allocated for those purposes - the surplus continues to exist to pay for social security when it goes into deficit.

If we then pretend that that surplus "isn't actually there", then it means that we've effectively used payroll taxes to fund tax cuts for people that are richer than the people who have paid their payroll taxes. It's a two-step con. It's also false.

Social Security has also transition from surplus to deficit and back to surplus in the past as well.
Arrays, symbols, and realms
And Belarussian. And Kashubian.
My Amazon Fire tests were: charge up, leave unplugged, see how much power it had in the morning. For me, it was always drained.

Power management in those devices is particularly weak.
You with your sensible guidelines, your calibrated metrics, your well-defined endpoints. Where's all the VOODOO!??! Where's the WITCHCRAFT!??!?!
I'm not sure why you'd think that the convenience of a government agency should outweigh any other concerns.
Update List of Best SERP Checkers
I don't think the Mercatus Center is the best place to look for good or sincere ideas on how to distribute resources in an equitable way
Ruby Still isn't dead
Incitatus for consul of the Romans! He's healthy as a horse! ('cause he was a horse.)
On a related note here is a proposal for a recent update to the animal emoji set. It's interesting to see the factors they consider when choosing whether or not to integrate a new emoji. I didn't know that much thought went into what they chose.
Do you really want the POTUS to have the same powers over the national government that a CEO has over their company? Because that would require a substantially different type of government than we have. I suppose the trains will be on time at least.
Lex Luthor did pretty well for himself!
If asked I would have answered yes, of course this is possible, but it never occurred to me. I wonder if these adversarial attacks are possible in ML because there's too much overfitting in the models or they're too high rez or? Can someone in this space help me grow a better intuition of how these work?
Transcript of AMA with Brendan Eich, CEO of Brave, BAT, Creator of JavaScript
Up to at least ten percent now that he's working out, I'd say.
I think you’ll find supper in common usage in the US but always as the same meal as dinner which is the evening meal.

Dinner is definitely most common near me but I wouldn’t blink if someone asked me over for supper or said it’s supper time.
Where did you get that idea? His stance on SSM aside, Brendan Eich is not a guy I typically associate with evil.

The whole raison d'être of Brave is to restore privacy to consumers of advertisements while being fair to publishers.

The codebase is all MPL2 on Github. Nothing stopping you or anyone forking it, yada yada.
Why you can't test a screen reader using JavaScript (yet)
Sure they do. Things change all the time, often for complex reasons that are emergent properties rather than the motivated action of individuals.
Heh, one step closer to a real self-replicating rep-rap :) Now to implement a PID controller..
I have failed many time at interviewing at technical interviews. I have never failed any 'real' world job project/endeavor. I've built an entire org's codebase and this company is now selling products worldwide successfully. Design,coded,built,tested and deployed code in 4 languages , each element being critical to the company.

I am an experienced dev, but couldn't tell you my birthday in a technical interview. All the rest of the interview is fine, I only 'freeze' up at technical questions.

Sucks.
This made me wonder towards if the ocean is therefore becoming saltier & if so, at what pace? Found: https://www.seeker.com/are-the-oceans-getting-saltier-176509...
Why I'm Learning Python in 2018
You can learn far more about Jeff Bezos from watching a few long interviews. He recently did a very interesting interview with his brother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq89wYzOjfs

He's very much the kind of person you want in the supremely high position that he's found himself in. He's basically another Bill Gates but more upbeat and creative.
It could happen just for DSL. The big ISP don't really want to service rural areas anyways.
Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS), which is what this touches on, are a deceptively complex topic. You are optimizing for many performance dimensions, and some things that intuitively seem like they should be optimized for don't really matter, and other things people tend to ignore (like congruency) matter quite a bit.

For example, "equal area" subdivision of the surface is not a particularly useful property. This seems like it is wrong on its face such that most people try to achieve it but you have to remember that equal area only matters if your data is uniformly and predictably distributed. Geospatial data models are neither in a pretty severe way as a rule, which means you'll have to deal with data load asymmetry regardless via some other mechanism. If you can ignore equal area because it is handled by some other mechanism, it opens up other possible surface decompositions that have much stronger properties in other ways.

Compactness of representation and cost of computing relationships on the representation has a large impact on real-world index performance that is frequently ignored. The poorness of lat/lon grids in this regard is often significantly underestimated. A singularity-free 3D DGGS can have an indexing structure that is an order of magnitude smaller than a basic 2D lat/long grid for addressing, and the storage on disk of records encoded in these DGGS are also significantly smaller. This all adds up to a lot of performance.

Hexagonal grids tend to work particularly well for visualization. However, they do have their own significant weaknesses e.g. it is typically not a good representation for join operations and they are relatively expensive to search at large scales relative to some other DGGS tessellation systems.
Best investment for whom, though? Not companies. Not governments, not because it wouldn't be beneficial, but because there's no incentive – the benefits are down the road, probably beyond the time it takes for the current generation of politicians to retire.
What would happen if everyone just... didn’t pay? What would a default of $1.5 trillion USD held by a government against millions of its citizens look like? Presumably the administrative costs of hunting down that much money from so many sources would be prohibitive. I’d guess that an attempt to garnish the wages of half the country would end in rioting, so that wouldn’t work well.
I feel like you're missing their point. You can make the case that a gender studies degree prepares you for a mostly academic career only insofar as companies aren't creative enough to find a way to use the unique skills that someone with a gender studies degree has developed.

Maybe Uber wouldn't have had the toxic culture they ended up with if they had hired conscientious people who have spent time studying things like how gender power dynamics play out in the small - and empowered them to speak - instead of relying solely on business graduates.
I'm not sure if this is actually the case. I'm starting to meet more and more people who aren't that keen on amassing wealth, and they tend to spend decent stretches of time unemployed (traveling, working on side projects, bootstrapping companies etc)
Meltdown and Spectre – Impact on Node.js
I count that as a +1 for Amazon, where in my experience it's far more work focused. At least compared to my buddies at Facebook or google, where these conversations seem to be somewhat common. (Could also be team specific. My team is mostly Chinese and foreign, where the politics separate from work norm seems more resolute)

But they also get meals and maybe a more chill atmosphere? I sometimes wonder if there are relations between these cultural styles
At large scale, I wonder what kind of horsepower would be required to run a "useful" implementation made at a scale that an normal workshop could produce?
Disney says Sandberg, Dorsey won’t seek board re-election
Yes, and more than that we need a good, better thought-out modern successor to POSIX-type interfaces. For instance: I think a process ought to be able to have more than one current working directory and possibly more than one user-ID at a time. It should have the option to insert data in the middle of a file without having to manually shift the rest down. Shell scripts should be able to interact with the filesystem via transactions that can be rolled back if anything fails. Programs should be able to have typed input and output, checked by the shell and/or OS, which could also enable command-line tab-completion to search installed programs for any that match a desired type.

I have a bunch of other random gripes with POSIX-style OS interfaces and find it a bit frustrating that these interfaces haven't changed much in decades and seem to have attained a lot of inertia of the "we do it this way because we've always done it this way" kind.
Add entry to /etc/hosts (or the windows equivalent), navigate in browser.

Too high of a hurdle for your average user though, in which case blocking sites at the DNS resolver works.
/r/netsec is usually topnotch, by the way.
How can you not fault Uber for this? There is a rule of law in this country that has to be observed. Furthermore, it clearly shows intent to cover up illegal activities.
OS isn’t that interesting anymore. We take them for granted, and can’t imagine them doing anything more than they do now that can’t be done well enough in user space. BeOS was exciting because it was doing something that other OSes weren’t doing yet, now it would be old hat.
I think you’ve taken more from my original comment than was given. I don’t think electing a competent President is at odds with a desire for Congress to better assert its Constitutional authority.
In contrast to our current leader, a kumquat is a stable and effective leader with broad popular appeal.
Bezos is gearing up to be a major player in DC, and the times wrote that infamous piece on how bad Amazon is. Although that's sort of a conspiratorial theory, which may or may not be true.
Brain Cells Share Information with Virus-Like Capsules
You are correct that the activity that led to all financial crises will not be mitigated in the domain of national currencies. It will be avoided in decentralized money that is uncorrelated, like gold.

Your concept of decentralization is off. The purpose of it is this: How many points of failure are there? How many of these points can break before the cards all fall? If this happens, who pays for it?

This illustrates that the USD is not decentralized.

Cryptocurrency is an exit from this, much like gold or real estate or other investment vehicles. Cryptocurrency is available to anyone with a phone and internet access -- that cannot be said for any other investment vehicle.

This will take the wind out of the sails of financial institutions as there is another option for people.
Oh I'm with you, you've gotta put other controls in place. Still in my basic acl for every network, because it's one if the first things users will do to circumvent controls.
Thanks for sharing these details!

This looks like a completely new implementation with none of the original DGGrid source. (Unsurprising for some license prohibitions of parts of it that would prevent Uber from using it.)

I haven't had a ton of time to dig through the source, but haven't seen some of the utilities for things like bulk binning of coordinates. (Hopefully the bloggers will talk about this a little bit.) When you worked on it, was Dr. Sahr involved with any of the new API adaptations? [edit: Yes, I see!] He and I had chatted about feature wishlists, and iOS / mobile bindings was at the top of our list a few years ago, but neither of us had much time to work on it. :-)
> The only thing that can improve society is concerted, collective action.

Can you site the source for this claim, or it's just your opinion?
Weirdly I dream recently about this (all start imaging a relational language, then it get bigger and bigger), with new CPU arch, memory, etc (with full sci-fi capabilities)

The main problem is compatibility. The solution is virtualize. Let's say at least provide headless linux (Docker?). This is enough to start. Imagine that linux run not too bad here (ie: fast enough), just to keep dreaming.

The next is why? Why build for this OS if I "just" can run linux here?

The conventional narrative is that the OS is "boring" "invisible" etc. I think instead that is only true because most OS are boring. If we think as a master integration then is more cool.

Consider the posibility to turn the unix text stream/pipelines as the actual UI paradigm (like react) and have the ability to connect not only apps, but components inside. For example, If I'm in mail and wanna crop the image I just put here, I need to detour a lot to Photoshop then return to mail.

Why?

I think is possible to say "This is a image. Any app/component that could operate on it can do it". So, in short, is a UI manifestation of:

MailApp.currentMail.images | PhotoShop.crop > returnBack

So, like in a REST API, the apps publish their URIs with ACCEPT/HEADERS like "json", "xml", "img" etc and this allow to match to others apps that operate on them.

Having also the apps operate on "docker-like" containers by default (fully isolated) yet communicate as Erlang Actors (send messages) to any other app that "Accept: FORMAT", allowing to express to the USER what we do now on the terminal.

---

Other thing that totally need a revamp is the whole file exploring. Is just not rigth that google answer faster than a local disk search.

Also, why not isolated in containers the files of SYSTEM, APP + CONFIGS + TEMPS/CACHES, USER_DATA so if I wanna do a backup just copy the USER_DATA container and be worry free?

This is just some random ideas. Is about time to think of the OS as APP too, and start doing cool things :)

--

In the area of security is also a lot to do. A minimal thing is to acknowledge that most users perform multiples roles on a system, and the case where exist a dedicated user to be admin or dba is just a special case.

So, is reverse the roles/user.

I'm jhon. Now, I change hat to be admin. Then change to be normal user, then change to be developer. I don't need 3 user accounts to be all of this.

Because I'm all of this.
React native module for drive directions
Pretty easily. Just temp whitelist if it's really needed (ie, a bank or government website). Otherwise close the tab and avoid the waste of time that 'web app' sites represent.
I use them for nefarious purposes. But then i use everything for nefarious purposes.
First thoughts: don't link to a bunch of lorem ipsum based documentation from your home page.
I wrote something similar a while back, and it’s in a similar state of not-updated-ness

http://fixfirefox.com
The very government you expect to mandate universal service availability is the government that approves exclusive franchise agreements with predatory cable/internet providers.

Unless you're ready to run for local office and champion municipal/coop internet, or find incumbents who support your cause, you will not succeed.

> Any clever kid can run circles around them and provide a better service. And we let them have their hands on its throat?

A bit of an exaggeration of course; running an ISP is hard, and the margins are razor thin unless you have regulatory capture. It can be done, but that's a governing issue. See what I said above.

TL;DR Run for office. Fix the problem.
"too big to fail" comes to mind. I'm not sure what it would look like in this case though. Probably a bunch of hand-waving, (forceably) forgiven debts.
From who?

I admit that "a few billion" which is clearly beyond what I was suggesting might open doors, but not by just signing up somewhere.

For example, the cable TV company offers Internet service to many people in my city, and indeed on my road. They put unsolicited advertisements through my door every week. But, despite the insistence that I could have "Super fast fibre-based Internet" tomorrow, in fact I can't, my building isn't connected and the owners of the building (an opaque off-shore property holding corporation) would need to sign off on work to change that, which they won't do even if I wanted it.

Now sure, I could buy all the flats in the building, then leverage control of those flats to force the current owner to sell me the building, and then I'd have the right to get that work done. That means now I'm paying maybe £2-5M to get their merely "super-fast" broadband to my flat in a major city. Short of your "billions" but not by so many orders of magnitude...

Or another example, for a few years the incumbent telco technically offered FTTP to any customer who could get their existing FTTC product, for a fee they'd work out what it cost them to run the extra cables and so on, add a percentage and if you agreed you'd pay that to get FTTP. The service was weakly advertised but immediately over-subscribed and it was effectively cancelled altogether without more than a handful of deployments. A few billion wouldn't do much about that I think, you'd need tens of billions to buy that incumbent telco and "change their minds" about the priority of such bespoke services that way.
> Does it seem bizarre to anyone else for a company to have an internal social network?

It seems like a good way to engage employees and organize discussion and collaboration but how good probably depends on the company and its culture.

I work (low-tier FC drone) at Amazon, and they have an internal Twitter clone that I stumbled across while browsing the internal wiki one day. Nothing very interesting happens on it.. mostly managers and developers posting, but it seems to serve some need that isn't being met by email.
You do it. A good chunk of that is copying an alraedy existing product.
> But that inflation didn't happen (still hasn't happened) for reasons that literally no person on earth can explain.

Nobody likes "consumer price inflation can't happen if rich people steal all the money before consumers can spend it" as a theory?
OGC has a spec for Discrete Global Grids at
http://docs.opengeospatial.org/as/15-104r5/15-104r5.html

It has a good overview of the implementation details, and pictures!
Why is there fresh water?
If you have not seen Akira Kurosawa's subtle 1952 masterpiece "Ikiru" (To Live) about a terminally ill Tokyo bureaucrat, I recommend it highly, especially in light of "How to Think Like a Medieval Monk".

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ikiru/
Latest Mono Preview Release (5.8.0.103) Supports Targeting WebAssembly
I like the $25 pricing of the Kindle Fire both as a customer and as a (small) shareholder. Right now, most companies won't bother to build an app for the Kindle app store. This is one reason Amazon needs to keep the price low, so that the market share can create an incentive for companies to build first class app experiences.

I don't know whether Amazon is losing money on every unit sold, or if its engineers have found a nice mix of components that are available at lower prices and are able to deliver an acceptable UI/UX.

Note that most of the costly processor speed improvements on the newer premium SoCs are used to create beautiful animations and transitions and little else. Much of what makes the iPhone and Pixel devices feel like luxury products is the materials design and the state of the art screen. Is that really being built by the best talent in the world? I think it's standard miniaturization and consolidation.

As the killer apps for mobile become more and more clear (video, camera, and a few other useful sensors, a chip for ML models, etc.) prices will get lower and lower as more and more of these things can be baked into a general purpose SoC. There is not an app whose performance is driving demand for faster and faster processors, storage, etc., nor is there any core UX that is a deal breaker (now that Android is no longer visibly laggy compared to iOS).

Apple hit a fairly magical home run by creating a high gloss device that people will pay a 3x or 4x price premium to own. But increasingly the competition is going to be in other areas. Plastics are getting better every day, the $25 Kindle feels solid and high quality... sure not $500 iPad quality, but closer to $200 or $300 quality (in my opinion).

While I agree with the parent's advice that most startups should not try to offer a super low cost product, Amazon is not a startup and is waging what I think is a very smart battle with Google and Apple, both of which are judged in relation to each other and are now in an arms race to become luxury brands, which has allowed Amazon an incredible opportunity to take market share.

Amazon is not encumbered by the typical Android characteristic of having lots of carrier-installed bloatware on the device, and is not cursed by Apple's and Google's fear of taking on obvious but challenging product endeavors (like making a kid friendly experience built into the OS).
I don’t think it’s moving the goalposts. It’s where they were set in the first place. Furthermore, nobody is making promises of solving all the problems, the OP said they were interested to see what might happen, which is a very different statement than “this will happen” or “this will happen and fix everything.”

That is, I 100% agree with your comment, but I don’t see it happening in this thread.
> People need to remember that billionaires are not your friends.

O'rly. Then how much money does someone need to be my friend?