skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There’s something wrong with your numbers. 120kph for two minutes is 1km, or 250 4-meter cars, bumper to bumper. Four lanes, 4.2 occupants, that’s 16,800 passengers per two minutes, which is a full order of magnitude more than a 12-carriage train packed with standing passengers[1] - and the people in the cars are all sitting down.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_700
It's so sad. I studies this stuff in depth for almost 1 year in college... And now after 2 years of working as a software dev I forgot almost everything.
Jellyfish Don't Have Brains, but They Do Sleep
I don't think any "real" countries have any interest in cryptos becoming a competitor to their respective national currency. That would be giving away control over the economy, and why would any government want to do that? Thus I think we'll see both South Korea and Japan taking an increasingly hostile stance towards cryptos alongside all other developed countries.

I could imagine, on the other hand, freeloader countries like the Cayman Islands adding cryptos as a supported way of stashing away money. Thus, they could become a gateway between the legit economy and the crypto economy in the same way that they are already a gateway between the legit economy and money raked in by tax evaders, drug lords, and dictators. Thing is, the crypto part doesn't really add any value to their offering. And the real question with respect to Cayman Islands etc. is why we don't simply outlaw bank transfers back and forth from these places.
I found this video useful: https://youtu.be/uXnDwojRb1g
> Their HiSeq X platform can put out a human genome right about $1k.

That's what Illumina will tell you. But that really depends what you mean by "a genome" and what you intend to use it for. Getting anywhere near the quality of the Human Genome Project is not possible.
A really great selection of 10 podcasts, every e-commerce owner should follow
> If we did not give private corporations any free public money, they would still build their business facilities, because doing so is a necessary part of doing business, which is what businesses do.

Listen, I hate Big Companies as much as the next guy, but let's be honest here. There are very valid arguments on both sides of the equation. I'm going to look at a different, but related (and better-studied) phenomenon: farm subsidies.

It's not hard to see that farm subsidies have some upside: they stabilize the agriculture economy, and this policy treats food as a matter of national security[1]: it would be a very bad thing if food production ceased. On the other hand, others argue that farm subsidies hurt the economy and the public more than they help[2]. There's no easy to answer to this, but it's not like FDR started subsidizing farmers out of the blue.

Similarly, there must be arguments both for and against allowing Amazon's doing. I would genuinely like to hear both -- after all, I have no horse in this race -- but this article is too slanted to form any kind of educated opinion.

[1] http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/2012/03/13/the-importance-of-f...

[2] https://www.heritage.org/agriculture/report/how-farm-subsidi...
IANA biologist. That said, if by "inherent" you mean primarily genetically determined, I'd say that explanation seems most likely given the evidence.
> Why do walls marking national boundaries proliferate amid widespread proclamations of global connectedness and despite anticipation of a world without borders? Why are barricades built of concrete, steel, and barbed wire when threats to the nation today are so often miniaturized, vaporous, clandestine, dispersed, or networked?

Because some specific threats, specifically to sovereignty, can be deterred, retarded, and/or prevented by a wall.
> I prefer the more explicit form

Huh? It's not explicit, the purpose is implicit. You are writing down an algorithm that implements a popcount algorithm. The compiler than has to infer the fact that you actually wanted popcount (maybe you just wanted to waste a bit of time in a timing loop?) and then substitute something based on that inference.

I am all for it being explicit, i.e. some library function that has a name that somewhere mentions "popcount" or some such. Then have the compiler generate whatever code it needs for that function.
Bitcoin is dead. Long live the Blockchain
VCs would not throw wads of cash at a business plan that uses RC planes. But have it use quad-copters, and boom! They make it rain.

It's the novelty of it, basically. We're not yet inoculated, as a society, to the charm of quad-copters.
Your treating marriage as an advantage rather than a risk to be offset.
> How could a border wall possibly influence searches of personal devices at crossings far away from it? This makes no sense.

I did not make that argument, sorry if I wasn't clear enough.
A Guide to Getting Started with Scrum This Year
Java’s -XX:+AggressiveOpts: Can it slow you down?
I'd rather pay the guardian (and I do) for content than pay any news limited (murdoch) for the same (I don't) both have a bias, but only one is being even remotely honest about it. News ltd try hard to claim centrist positions but are both far more rightward than they want to admit, and much less open about advertorial and content which materially advances Rupert Murdoch's personal causes. The guardian wears its heart on its shirt. Many comments in the guardian are vituperation but if you break the paywall to read news ltd comments they are racist, and worse. They have editorial control on comments and chose not to apply them which I feel speaks volumes to their readerships expectations and their own.
Nervous? Not at all. My point is, it isn't my responsibility to ban them or take any other action on my end. That's a problem to be resolved between the EU's governments and its citizens.
"I went to Google Translate to write my question and show him. Seeing what I was doing he said: “no, no, no, WeChat, WeChat”. I didn't get what he was saying at first. But he quickly showed me that he could type in Chinese on his phone, I would get the text in Chinese, long-press on it and get a menu that allowed me to translate it in English. And when I sent a message in English, he'd be able to translate it to Chinese."

That quote is buried deep in the article, but should be emphasised for anyone travelling in a Chinese-speaking country: WeChat is easier to use than Google Translate!

It also is worth emphasising for people developing iMessage, Skype, LINE, KakaoTalk, and other platforms, who seem to want to avoid "feature creep" by denying people this kind of functionality. Users like features.

If you're interested in learning Chinese, I wrote a program to do that, but I recommend chat-based translation tools like WeChat for temporary visitors.
How to Move SSL Certificate from One Windows Server to Another
Dear writer,

without any sarcastic intent, Amazon is a business, and business has that "for profit" mention to is mission.

I operate my business in the U.K. I could have chosen any of the other 140-160 countries, but I didn't. It is convenient AND profitable to do so in the U.K. taking advantage of the goodies this state offers (for my case).

I am a nobody, and therefore I have no bargaining power to get more out of this setup. I follow the rules and drink my tea at 5pm.

BUT (big but here) if I could, then I would most definitely bargain with HMRC (UK's IRS) to pay 1% instead of 15%-30%, and have a couple of steers named after me. :)
I did do some guard duty. The bases I was at were dead silent in the middle of the night.
https://allpoetry.com/A-Worker-Reads-History
"It’s simple maths. We are chopping down about 15 billion trees a year and planting about 9 billion. So there’s a net loss of 6 billion trees a year."

ehhhhhmmmm no. It's not simple math. Or if it is, those are the wrong numbers to pick. Trees can reproduce themselves without human help and there are around 3.04 trillion trees in the world so a lot of potential for these net loss figures to be waaay off.

As far as we know, the number of trees in the world is actually growing. Higher levels of CO2 and the arrival of plastics and aluminium have contributed to reforestation of large areas of the world (we used to make everything out of wood). There are more trees now than there were 100 years ago.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in the US, forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. Same goes for Europe. The story might be different in Asia and certain parts of South America but in aggregate numbers I'd bet that we have net growth.
The GDPR isn't as good as you think it is. It's going to turn into one of those laws where small software startups / or normal small businesses are just going to be in constant violation, because the amount of resources required to do it properly requires a team of 5 or 10 expensive software engineers. It's going to be a great way to nip small companies in the bud and consolidate this kind of stuff into bigger companies.

It gets even worse with it's extraterritoriality, because you can still be under it if your dealing with a person who lies that they are an EU citizen and they are using your service in your own non EU country as a resident of the non EU country. It's like data FATCA.

And there are other loopy catch 22 ambiguities, like if you want to delete someone from your audit log, do you delete their personal info (which is fairly expansive definition under GDPR) from the audit log too? Then how can you show you deleted the person's info if they are also deleted from your audit log?

Read this to see more from the small company side and how much of a mess it is:

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2017/12/gdpr-stopped-selli...

Think of this theoretical situation. If your an EU citizen vacationing in a developing nation who has a medical emergency, could that hospital just decide to reject you because the hassle & cost of dealing with GDPR is too great? Remember, it's a developing nation, they can choose to just refuse service to you.

Kind of like how a lot of americans get rejected by non US banks because dealing with FATCA is just too much of a pain ass today?
I seem to recall Minitel was cracked, too, and used to spread spoof stock prices? Read about it in high school in the 90s but can't find anything about it on Google.
There's a ux problem here, because Google needs to be able to determine if it can save the data and the company using google analytics might also have a requirement to notify the user they are saving other types of data.

Too many notices, requests for confirmation will be a problem. So I expect the company should be able to instantiate analytics with a parameter saying that they asked for confirmation and what the response was.

Aside from that I think there might end up being a performance benefit from the GDPR. The difficulty of keeping permissions to track across different adtech providers becomes onerous, and big media companies start throwing out a bunch of them.
High five to all the godot developers, I've been on the edge of my seat waiting for this one for a while now!
That's not all that practical. Modern cars are rolling datacenters. Most have 50-100 computers in them that are on several different networks. Features are distributed over several nodes ("ECUs") and everything is statically linked and scheduled. (i.e. almost no OS akin to what you would find on a PC or smartphone) It's very difficult to do anything complex without having special tools and know-how. Which someone at a shop just won't ahve, because a shop does not debug the software. They just fix hardware issues, which as far as ECUs are concerned just means changing faulty parts for new ones.

source: I work on this, but not for GM.
FWIW, my engineering school's IT team still has Minitels in use in their various server rooms, because it can be used as serial console for a variety of devices (you know, just in case everything is broken and physical presence is required). The Retrocave Man should be able to do the same and enjoy our AZERTY keyboard.
Vastu Tips for Master Bedroom
How China is leaning on its tech titans to digitize public services
Show HN: Memory AI – Fully Automatic Time Tracking Powered by Deep Learning
What makes you think that these companies didn't go through that process?
> vb6 had a pretty sane feature set comparable to "modern" languages like go

What's not sane about Go's feature set? (Except for its debatable omissions.)
It also does not require a VPN or foreign sim card
If narcissism is something that has penetrated the popular consciousness as being an "epidemic", then perhaps surveys are showing less narcissism because people have been trained to answer the survey in a way that minimizes the recognized markers.

Certain younger people I know seem to be obsessed with the concept of narcissists being the root of all evil, and defending millennials as a generation from charges of various faults. It seems weird to me because nobody I knew talked in this way about Generation X or mental disorders when I was at a similar age. I suspect the internet and optimized clickbait of reaching some sort of critical mass that may be interfering with the mental functioning of people who would otherwise be reasonably sanguine about the world.

The more people worry about narcissism, the more I would expect them to conceal anything indicative on a survey.

A screed I read on the internet many years ago about narcissism was written by a guy who self-identified as such, and the overriding impression I got was that his issue was vast and malignant self-hatred, to the point where I didn't really believe he was as horrible as he claimed. I was unable to tell whether he resembled the "canonical" narcissist, whatever that might be. It made me wonder if a narcissist can be self aware or not, by definition.

I think the use of surveys to define and monitor mental disorders is a morass of confusion and misunderstandings.
Tangentially related, but I normally wear boots and I'm asked to take them off every time I fly inside EU. But that's the worst what can happen, have never been ordered to unlock my devices or asked personal questions.
I think an adult extracts joy from other sources, which kids (or undeveloped adults) can't appreciate yet. The kid shakes the sign because for him it's a novelty, a new experience. He is curious about the world and discovers it through little 'experiments'.

But adults do the same, they learn new things, they have hobbies, visit new places, try out new foods, learn new languages, work on personal projects...
>political challenges (see WMATA funding woes)

See also: why BART doesn't go further south than Millbrae (hint: NIMBYs and thinly-veiled racist worries that it'd bring in "undesirable" folks)
NextSeq is expensive, but there are cheaper options (from 30k) and you can just send your samples to a sequencing service. I’ve seen costs for a whole human genome at high coverage of between 1 and 3000USD.
The article concentrates on the technical and administrative sides of running the Guardian, but it completely overlooks the political situation.

The Guardian benefited from two very politically-charged years where left-leaning groups were dramatically beaten. This sort of event traditionally results in increased attention for left-leaning media in the aftermath. They've also reigned in their all-out campaign against the current UK Labour leader, under pressure from their own readership.

These factors are pretty big on their own. I'm sure the internal reorganisations and wikipedia-style appeals helped, but going where the readers actually want to go likely helped as well.
Will you be traveling to an EU country at any point in your life? Imagine fines are levied against you or your company and you refuse or ignore them and continue to operate as before. Could cause you trouble at the border
Show HN: Create interactive maps with one line of JavaScript
It only takes a couple weeks working in any company that has young employees to know that 90+% of those employees under 30 think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread and that all of their amazingness is simply unused and underpaid.

It's really sad actually because it means in 10 years we are gonna have significant work depression levels due to children being raised to believe their reality would be much different than it will turn out.
This is a bit of a problem. Fire departments are a classic public service, local monopoly, emergency use only... Journalism benefits from diversity, choice and independence.

OTOH, most countries have a public broadcaster funded by a TV tax or somesuch. These are (IMO) hard to justify as public services in 2018. Newspapers are becoming the place where the gap is, and I think public funding is justifiable. The trouble is finding and implementing a good way of using it, one that preserves independance.

On the third hand, I think it is very dangerous guaranteeing business continuity to any business or sector. Disruption happens and the publications themselves need to figure out alternatives. Like the Guardian found, the type of revenue model is intertwined with content and quality. I feel that independant publications scraping to find business models is likely to yield some important finds, like this patronage based model.

We need to remember the distinction between currently important publications and journalism. Like the difference between pro business and pro economy. These can be at odds with eachother in some cases.
So if another country says it's not legal to comply with the GDPR in their country, they get off scot free? :P
"make it clear, your intent is to waste as much of their time, energy and resources as possible."

I'm sure they have many more means to waste your time, energy and resources, so I wouldn't recommend that, unless you have no plane to miss and nothing better to do.
I skimmed the state department report justifying the tariffs and one of the justifications they gave was "local governments in China promoted local solar companies on their websites. This amounts to free advertising, which is a subsidy".

The phrase "clutching at straws" jumped instantly to mind. I think they weren't expecting anybody except the Chinese to actually read it. There were zero reports in the US media on its contents. They basically just reported that the report existed.

I have seen precisely zero evidence for 1. Frankly, Chinese solar tech beats US tech hands down. The US might be better at making ridiculously expensive panels with 2% extra efficiency to go on satellites but Chinese companies aren't even competing in that market - their tech is centered around making panels that are acceptably efficient with aggressive cost cutting in their manufacturing process. They're hands down the best in the world at that.

China does get an implicit subsidy via the suppressed yuan but that applies equally to all Chinese products, not specifically solar panels, so if you're going to slap 30% tariffs on solar panels why not assembled iphones too?

The geopolitical game being played here involves one of misdirection. If you follow the trail of money it becomes clear what is really going on. The US solar manufacturing industry is small and makes almost no political donations. The US solar installation industry - who lobby against tariffs - is much larger and contributes much more. Both are completely dwarfed by political contributions from coal, oil and gas.

The idea that Obama and Trump (the latter especially not being known as being a friend of clean energy) are simply trying to help a weak and politically irrelevant industry out of their green, green hearts and only coincidentally helping their "real" friends I frankly consider an insult to my intelligence, but hey, people lap this shit up.

Don't they?
So here's an awfully uninformed question that will probably get me laughed at by actual engineers (as in, not 'software engineers' like myself - and yes Canadians please bite your tongues, I've heard your shpiel by now): when you have a more powerful computer to work with, isn't it much easier to just derive some regression parameters and call it a day?

My use case: I have this home-build growhouse that I use to start my seedlings in at the end of winter (and as a fermentation chamber for wine). It's controlled by a Raspberry Pi and as inputs I have 4 groups of LED grow lights, a 30w heating element, a fan that draws warm air out of the box and thus brings the temperature within the box towards ambient temperature, and DHT22 sensors that measure temperature and humidity inside and outside the box. The goal is to keep temperature as close to a certain target temperature as possible, keeping in mind that I want the lights to be on for a certain nr of hours per day and the lights give off so much heat that they will pretty much always make the temperature go over the target (so the fan then needs to bring it down again). It's easy to get this working the naive way with an hysteresis of say +/- 2 degrees (which is fine for my purposes), but the nerd inside me sees it as a game to make that band smaller. So I've been reading up on PID controllers and dear baby jesus I can't even work out how I'd get started. So the pragmatic part of my brain goes 'just run it for a few weeks with incremental inputs between 15 and 35 degrees (C, of course), measure the responses, toss all measurements into R and derive some regression parameters'.

Does anyone do this in industry? Probably not because everywhere I've asked, everybody's who's ever done real work on this uses PID controllers - but is that because they're easier to build on microprocessors (i.e., need less number crunching)?
Interesting tips in this article for the paranoid. But it's way easier to do it old school: don't use a service that gobbles your data up, no matter how free it is.

It'd be great if there were better "really free"--noncentralized--alternatives built on open source. Maybe there are.
> I do most work on the commandline in text-mode (no graphics layer)

I'm pretty sure there is some graphics layers even in your work environment.
Guangxi wants to become China’s blockchain hub
Reading all these comments makes me feel weird for actually liking UWP apps. Of course certain things don't make sense for them, like games, but I definitely prefer UWP apps over web-apps for things like Messenger and Todoist. I honestly wish more programs were UWP instead of Electron since they would work way better most of the time.
There are a number of architectural styles that aren't call/return:

1. Dataflow

With the popular variant pipes + filters. There is also synchronous dataflow, which can be compiled to state machines. This has recently been bastardized as "FRP" (distinct from Conal Eliot's original FRP).

What's kind of amusing is that traditional programs typically get translated to dataflow variants twice: first, the compiler turns procedures into a dataflow graph and generates code from that, later most OOO speculative processors turn the computation into more or less a dataflow graph again.

2. Asynchronous messaging

See Erlang/Actor model. You send messages (calls), but they don't return.

3. Implicit invocation/broadcast

You send out messages/broadcasts. Clients can register. There is no 1:1 correspondence between call-sites and receivers. May also be asynchronous (but doesn't have to be).

4. Constraints

Both dataflow constraints (see spreadsheets) and "solver" constraints. You just specify the relations you want to hold.

5. Coroutines

Normal call/return runs the callee to completion. Coroutines interleave. The Floyd paper mentions nested coroutines, which I have to look at.

etc.

A good reference is Software Architecture: Pespectives on an Emerging Discipline by Shaw and Garland
> Warsaw, Breslau or Tokyo (and Rotterdam, for that matter) do not compare even though the destruction there was widespread.

It really must have required special kind of ignorance to write this sentence.
not true, it becomes harder and harder to pass through the GFW.