skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Whatever happened to simple USB mass storage where you can just plug it in and copy files back and forth?

I agree that it should definitely be an option because there are plenty of situations when using this device where you might not even have connectivity.

> the default behaviour of requiring one to send files from a computer out far away to some server on the Internet, and then back to the tablet sitting only a few metres away seems rather silly and wasteful.

It is definitely silly and wasteful but it's oh so simple when it works correctly. Instead of dealing with SMB shares, email, FTP, rsync, cables, mass storage devices, properly ejecting things, or any other technology; you instead just put a file in a designated folder and it's available on all of your devices in a matter of moments.
"Python extensions I've written just use C/C++ data types and only occasionally passes python native types back to python."

See my other post; was your system basically using Python as an extension language on a system fundamentally implemented in C/C++? That's not the problem this discussion is about, which is when you have a large pile of Python code that is the main component of your system, and has proved to be slow. Piecemeal extensionization is not a very good option there, and non-piecemeal extensionization is "rewriting the system in a faster language".

If it's a lost art, it's because the domain where this is the best option is steadily shrinking. There's an increasing number of languages that interop well with C (and sometimes C++), are more convenient, and are still fast. Many of them are fast enough and convenient enough to simply implement your code in that language in the first place. As a result of that, I personally think that dynamic scripting languages have reached their peak and are now facing inexorable slow decline; the problem they solved in the 1990s is increasingly not a problem as a crop of languages that are both convenient and fast continue marching forward. JavaScript is, as ever, an exception due to its currently-privileged place in the browser ecosystem, though over the next decade that's going to fade as WebAssembly hits maturity.

(But let me emphasize that "slow"; I'm talking decades, not months. There is still plenty of opportunity to graduate this semester, get a job in dynamic scripting languages, and be in that space for 20 years. But I think in another 2-4 years we're all going to be able to agree they've peaked.)
This is a common user behavior on Macs as well. It's an easy place to put things and find them later (as long as nobody helpfully cleans the bin in the interim)
> He was from that area and told me that ranchers will let their cattle graze where ever they want, even on protected federal land, polluting pretty much every water source and everything downstream. They were very right. We saw cattle feces everywhere. It was very unsettling.

Maybe this is an ignorant thing to say, but before cattle, there were massive herds of buffalo everywhere doing the same thing, right?
Mate Desktop 1.20
Apple isn't making a more affordable Sonos, the HomePod is £319/$349, the Sonos Play One (with Alexa) is £199/$199 and you can get two for £349/$349. So it's more expensive than a Sonos One however it's probably got better sound quality. The more comparable sound quality Sonos Play:3 (no Alexa) is £249/$249, still cheaper. Only the Play:5 is more expensive at $499/$499.

I would bet that Sonos has a "smart" Alexa enabled version of both the Play:3 and Play:5 in the works. When they launched the "One" they launched it at the same price point as the old Play:1 and dropped its price point by £50, again I would bet the same will happen.

Apple needs to make the "smartness" of Siri the selling point to win over Sonos customers...
I watched last evening alone (my wife wasn't interested, sadly) and this morning again with the entire family.
> Does anyone believe that other industries think like that?

Software is very unlike other industries.

> For any complex project, making it work and fast only at the end will either result in massive cost overruns or an outright canceled project.

Citation needed, because my experience is the exact opposite: projects that put effort into making it fast from the first never get off the ground.
> that is, we have enough fuel to spare that we can make correction-burns if necessary during the trip to Mars.

Stage 2 of the Falcon would not be used for long flights. This was the longest it ever coasted (6 hours). Any longer, and you run into all sorts of limitations: running out of batteries, RP-1 freezing, and LOX boiling off.

For longer trips, stage 2 would separate after the earth escape burn and the craft's own propulsion system would take over.
Joseph Polchinski, Fundamental Physics Breakthrough Prize Laureate, Passes Away
I might be interested in helping you build it, my contact is in my profile.
It's a big leap to go from a few supposed differences in personality characteristics to concluding that tech should therefore be utterly dominated by men in a >4:1 ratio. Even assuming that there are real personality differences between men and women, and that these differences have an impact on the propensity to get into technical jobs, you'd still have to establish the magnitude of these effects. What if the "natural" effect is that the ratio of men to women in tech should be 1.3:1, and that the vast majority of the actual discrepancy is in fact caused by bias and discrimination?

Also, you're ignoring cultural factors. See this article: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/stubborn-obstacle... There are and have been many societies in which women were much better represented in technical fields than they are today in the US. How do you explain that if it's all supposedly just innate biological differences? In the USSR a majority of engineers were women, and the reason for it was actually very logical: Men are stronger and are more suitable for physical labor, and women are thus more suitable for knowledge jobs.

And there are many character traits that men have on average more than women that make them worse engineers. A higher prevalence of mental illness, for starters. More of a tendency to be overly verbally combative and thus detrimental to team functioning. Less ability to focus on "boring" tasks and study, which is why you now see girls dominating boys in school performance at all levels, kindergarten through university.

Who is more "suited" to be an engineer is an entirely different discussion that is not even close to being resolved. What I was talking about was the very real fact that most women in tech experience gender-related discrimination that makes them feel unwelcome. That assuredly has a real effect and is on less shaky grounds than arguing from biological factors.

But I don't want to get drawn into this discussion because I really do have lots of work to get done today. Just refer to everything that was said in the wake of Damore -- I'm sure we wouldn't cover any new ground that wasn't already covered then.
Thanks! Weird that this was not included in the paper itself.
We already have a phone with a decent email app. If "pages" and pdf files can easily be exchanged or synchronized with your phone, you do not need email app.
Very good points; I'm in general though space skeptic in the following sense. Human race as a whole always seeks more, bigger, further, faster as solution its problems. I don't think space is the solution to our earthly problems.

Maybe 1000 years from now, people look at us and say god damn it. I wish they had stayed there and learned how to live in earth well. We are now speared all over the place and we all hate hate each other; and just right now I hear Martian went ahead and annexed Venus and they also seem to be interfering in Andromeda elections.
bad news for 90% of internet population
For those (like me) who are not that familiar with Javascript, the Javascript spec for Math.random says: "....The implementation selects the initial seed to the random number generation algorithm; it cannot be chosen or reset by the user." Furthermore, the seed usually changes. It seems that Google has modified their Javascript library, perhaps by allowing an explicit Math.Seed function.
Right now Coinmarketcap lists 1500+ cryptocurrencies. This article says many of them will fail in the future, as many have in the past. This is not revelatory.

I would have been interested in Strongin's opinion on which coins will survive, and why; or a timeline of when "most" will have failed.
We're trying to do complete DevOps with GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/11/from-dev-to-devops/

What part of the Atlassian stack are you missing in GitLab?
Do you know whether its ticket management functionality is available from the CLI?
Amazon Is Fixing a Security Loophole with Its 'Key' Service
>Others said they weren’t changing their behavior at all, stressing that they are adults who understand how consent works and know the difference between harassment and asking someone out on a date.

I think that is the biggest problem today: understanding consent and self awareness.

Will be interesting to see how corporations deal with work place romance.
I wonder what the chances are of it bumping off something and eventually crashing back into earth in a few hundred/thousand years.
Are biological components like a scorpions tail, or eyes or legs coded in a special way?

Not a biologist but it appears that biology is really good at preserving the integrity of body parts even though they can be found in multiple species.
By a certain definition, they are. They obviously can't run springboard or UIKit, but they share the same underlying technology; that is how they can run Siri and have a very tight integration with your phone.
I skimmed https://medium.com/function-core/cislunar-economy-101-part-7...

It enthuses that colonization should be the end goal because it will drive funding. I remain unconvinced that there are actually enough incredibly wealthy people that want to go die in space to drive a vast economy.
We’d love to hear your feedback! Ping me and I’ll get you a Live Share preview invite.
I see what you’re doing...
Just these two work pretty well as a short list: "Always", "Never".
You need a third body to pull that off, and I think Mars’s moons are too small to be useful for this.

Looking at practical considerations rather than just theoretical, you also need the ability to perform course corrections along the way. The initial trajectory won’t be precise enough to make it work from just the departure burn.
Flutter doesn't yet support iPhone4/5 and x86 Androids
Let me tell you a secret - it’s the drier. Clothes last far longer when you hang dry them.

You’re right that fast fashion has reduced overall quality, but you can still get more wear out if them if you avoid the drier.
How many times Musk says something and doesn't deliver?

Missing Mars and not knowing what are you doing is just the latest example...

Musk is where hype goes to die...
It could be colonies on the Moon or whatever. But I'm thinking a space-based industry to produce more space-based industry. If it could be self-sufficient, the question of "what does this do for Earth?" becomes moot. Like the Americas are not here to serve the old world.

Getting started, it could be a scheme of space development futures. Bet on the value of things in space, which puts money into the development of more things in space.

By 'in space' of course we mean everywhere in the Universe except tiny 'ol Earth.
Yup - I remember that Windows PCs at work became far easier to use after Windows 95 (actually 98 I think) reached them as I was using an Archimedes at home.
To remedy this:
File > Options > Save >Save to Computer by Default (yes, agreed that this is ridiculous).

A habit that I've developed from earliest computer classes in elementary school is to save the file in the location you want as soon as it's named, so ever after Ctrl+S saves it with no hassle.
is there any way to tell it to use your cloud service instead of theirs ?

In other words, what good is a custom reimplementation of it if you can't make it point at them without dns hacking?
Those first images were incredible.
The Baltimore Police's official position on Transparency. https://www.baltimorepolice.org/transparency/overview

How does the audit culture work in the US? Are government agencies required to establish compliance with their stated positions (e.g. their position on Transparency) ?
To me the last sentence nullifies the entire argument. People doing a lot of numeric computations aren't (typically) doing it all in Python. They write critical sections in C (or some other "fast" language), or use existing libraries that already have done so. If they aren't writing those sections in C already, perhaps because they don't know how, or it would take too long to do right, then why would they ever choose to do the whole thing in C?
The only way to project the path of an object in the solar system is to computationally model the solar system and then run the simulation forward. Obviously space programs like NASA and ESA have such models; that's how they get space probes like New Horizons or Rosetta to their destinations.

Interestingly, I've read that these simulations use Newtonian physics, not general relativity, to model the solar system. At interplanetary speeds, the error between the two is just too small to matter.

So if you want to project the orbit for the "lifetime" of the Roadster, you'd have to just run the simulation forward until it finds a collision or the sun burns out.

This would take a lot of energy and time... it would not be worth it.

The main reason is that interplanetary space is very empty in general, so without running any simulation we can guesstimate that an accidental collision is very unlikely.

Also, probably no one really cares if the Roadster hits an asteroid 513 million years from now.

Finally, a physical model simulating that many objects is chaotic--even eensy weeny teeny tiny little errors will compound over time and produce a divergence from reality. I doubt anyone has characterized this drift beyond the horizon needed to plan missions--a few decades at most. So even if you ran the model forward for 513 million model years, there might be no way to constrain the accuracy of the final predicted location of the Roadster. Heck, maybe the difference between Newton and GR would matter at these time scales.
Now I am curious — what are programming clothes? I actually think hiking clothes would be awesome to program in — comfortable layers, freedom of movement, durable.. a suit makes no sense for programming; restrictive collars, a tie (!!) and a propensity to wrinkle when sitting.

I think you might have sparked a business idea! Clothes for Coders. Couldn’t be any more ridiculous than when Tiesto released a shoe for DJing!
The cost of colonies becomes small(er) with the incredible resources available in space. It wasn't the incredibly wealthy that colonized the New World.
>globally-recognised phrase - "Only in America"

That's an incredibly feeble-minded and edgy-childish thing to say.

Yet, if corruption happens in African, Middle Eastern, and Asian nationas nobody says "Only in Russia, China, or Saudi Arabia". That's just called normal.

There are European nations that are more corrupt than the USA.

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept...
Laravel 5.6 is now available
And my nightmares now have new fuel.
The farther we look, the earlier back in time we see whatever we look at. There is good reason to think that the rise in complexity of organisms is a global feature of the universe, so other intelligent life may simply not have developed early enough that we've had time for the light from them to reach us yet.
Speed’s Still the Thing
i'm curious if that's in any way related to the pink bacteria that grows in showers.
Low or zero gravity can also be a hindrance; how do you mine an asteroid if every wack of the pickaxe also propels you away from said asteroid? Clearly asteroids won't be mined with pickaxes, this is an illustration that gravity is in fact critical for all known terrestrial manufacturing processes!

When considered in this light, shallow gravity wells like the moon or mars, which are cheaper to access from a delta-v perspective are actually super important.

Also, O'neil type cylinder habitats (which I think Bezos favors) are a suitable alternative.
I finally got to watch loving Vincent [1] (in the plane safely, but really glad they had it !) what a great movie !! I highly recommand it, stunning work ! Rarely have I had goose bumps this much when watching a movie ^^ and the end credits are really cool.

It discusses quite a bit the relation between Van Gogh and gachet. Very interesting. This article goes in a lot more detail tough.

[1] http://lovingvincent.com
The lines between politics and business continue to blur.

Is there anything to prevent Facebook from fully funding a Zuckerberg campaign? I could see them arguing that it's a marketing expense as Trump went from household name to the object of everyone's attention during his run for President.
Sorry for the delay. I don't check HN often. Pls email me on kkartik@gmail.com with subject line Ovarian Cancer Trial. I can put you in touch with the Professor conducting it.

https://today.uconn.edu/school-stories/recruitment-begins-wo...
I really just wish Windows had a Miller Columns view in Explorer like OSX. All the apps on Windows that promise this are utter garbage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns
even with all the resources available today you're gonna spend six month minimum learning the basics, self learning is not cheap if you factor in cost-opportunity.

splitting equity either with a tech or financial founder seems much more attainable.
ingenieroariel is being humble here. He is one of the first (if not the first) to do this with the Ford Fusion.

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/1
Aren’t humans half microbe by percentage of cells? Once we send someone on a one way trip it’s over.

Hopefully we don’t intend to keep this treaty forever, or we’ll always be stuck on this one rock.
> The quoted argument that "easy to write but slow languages are better because programmer time is far more costly than CPU speed" was pretty common, and I honestly think correct, 10-15 years ago. But things have changed.

I don't think things have fundamentally changed in the programmer time is cheaper than cpu time calculation. What has changed is:

1. Classic dynamic languages (ruby, python, etc) all heavily assume the world is single threaded and blocking io can be scaled well enough. Unfortunately, these maxims from the late 90s do not hold about modern CPUs. Languages that embrace non-blocking io such as node.js have been incredibly successful as a result.

2. Software projects have gotten bigger. Extremely anecdotally projects in dynamic languages get uncomfortable with about 10,000 lines and unworkable at about 100,000 lines. A lot of the popularity of these dynamic languages was that you didn't need to type out your types all the time. Newer languages languages have shown have been able to get the best of both worlds with type inference and structural typing. Typescript's meteoric rise is because of exactly this.

Go and to a lesser extent Rust, have recognized these two issues facing last generation dynamic languages and have been successful because they address these issues head on. You can start a new Go application and have a similar time to market as python or ruby, but have it scale with your company, both in developer time and performance, for a long time. Why wouldn't you choose Go or some other new language?
Don't forget about repeated use. Do your users come back, or do they use the app only once !?
I thought it's not chemical trails but rather aluminum and other materials for reflecting light back into space? Afaik, chemtrails conspiracy people think these small particles are dangerous, but I am not even sure of any program the government runs to do this.
> I would bet that Sonos has a "smart" Alexa enabled version of both the Play:3 and Play:5 in the works.

I know it's not the same, but there's a Sonos skill now, so I can control, and play music on, my Play:5 using my Echo Dot.

However, I cannot stream all music on the Sonos. There are either license restrictions or arbitrary Amazon limitations on what songs I can stream from the Amazon Prime catalog.
that it takes 10 minutes to get a plumber round?
> Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his classic 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning the Internet variety, calling it a “hijacking” of the original term.

I'd hardly call the video where he calls it "hijacking" showing him "bent on disowning the Internet variety":

https://youtu.be/GFn-ixX9edg?t=4m8s

Nor his attitude to the word being "reappropriated by the internet"[1]:

The meaning is not that far away from the original.
It's anything that goes viral.

In the original introduction to the word meme in the
last chapter of The Selfish Gene, I did actually use
the metaphor of a virus.

So when anybody talks about something going viral on
the internet, that is exactly what a meme is and it
looks as though the word has been appropriated for a
subset of that.

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes
Diversified Investing: Alternative Assets for Everyone
I've got a counting dog. For much of her life there were 4 people living in the house. Intermittently through the day she would walk around the house until she counted 4 people, then settle down. It didn't really matter which 4 people it was, just that there were 4, if there were more people in the house she'd stop at 4. As children moved away she'd have bad periods where she couldn't make quota and would keep searching. Eventually she'd update the target house population and only count to 3 or now 2.
This is nice, but..the iPad Pro starts at $636, pencil is $99 extra, not much more than this $600 device.
I prefer it over Windows Explorer. I prefer the Classic Mac Finder to both.

This article from 2003 lists the problems with the OSX Finder. Since it was written, it's only got worse.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
Physical chips would be a huge starting point to redeveloping computers a second time. The population loss associated with that kind of knowledge loss seems like a much bigger issue.

We need vast economies of scale to continue current chip production. A world population at say 1% our current size would have issues building and maintaining modern equipment.

PS: Also, with a smaller population hydro power would easily meet our energy needs. Long enough to bootstrap wind / solar again.
I was thinking about getting it as an Apple TV speaker but however, after reading the reviews I found that it will drop the connection if you play something from another source. It would need to reconnect as an audio output. Can anybody confirm it?
To be clear, they analyzed the likelihood that the Roadster would hit a planet (exceedingly small), not the likelihood that the Roadster is carrying biological life from Earth (which is exceedingly high).
That uncertainty is always a given... addressed in the first three words of "it looks like you'll fit in". I still don't see how that can be perceived as offensive or insulting.