skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of my all-time favorite “what if” questions. Some years ago a friend of mine coily posed this same question to me: What does humankind make that would survive 60 million years into the future, and if some other advanced industrial civilization had existed 60 million years ago, how would we know?

It turns out my friend had put a LOT of thought into this exact question. Enough to do a masters in geology, his work ultimately making it into a high profile journal with writeups in places like the NY Times.

He started talking to various geologists about what might survive as telltale markers of our civilization. Buildings or structures of any sort? Ha! Statues and monuments? Maybe we’d notice the odd deposit or two of minerals.

After going through a long list of candidates, he settled on carbon cenospheres. These are little balls of carbon almost exclusively made in internal combustion engines as the result of aerosolizing fossil fuels. Sixty million years ago, our love of the ICE will show up in the fossil record as a light dusting of cenospheres covering the earth—contemporaneous with massive numbers of species going extinct due to mankind’s other influence.

And as my friend was telling me his story, this is where my hair stood on end. Sixty million years ago we see a massive species extinction... and a light dusting of carbon cenospheres covering the globe.

But we also see unnatural levels of iridium at the same point. And, while it’s hypothetically possible some industrial civilization was mining iridium and blanketing the globe with it, it’s more probable that the iridium was delivered by an asteroid.

But how would you know? So my friend, as part of his research, went taking samples of his cenospheres from around the globe. What he found was interesting: namely, the further one gets from the Yucatan (where scientists had already validated there was an asteroid strike), the cenospheres get smaller. The big heavy ones precipitated out of the air closest to the Yucatan asteroid strike. Hardly likely to be coincidence.

So much for ancient civilization this time around.

However, his work rewrote a critical understanding of the KT asteroid extinction event. Namely, we previously thought most of the carbon at the KT boundary was the result of giant forest fires ignited by the strike. However we now know that the strike must have aerosolized massive oil fields under the Yucatan at that time and set them ablaze.

Not a bad contribution to science starting from a sci-fi premise!
The Secret to Shopping for Blonde Wigs as an African American Woman
"It’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don’t support."

We should all do this at least once. What a great practice.
For what it’s worth you can “maintain law and order” without having to have a dictatorial state in place. Not living under a dictatorship also comes with the added benefit of being free to read and speak whatever you want to, which I (and other people like me) regard as a fundamental human right.
Probably the most straightforward way of getting additional information beyond the format of the scientific paper is to have additional supplementary videos. I'm fortunate to be in a field (computer graphics) where there's a culture of having submission videos alongside the manuscript.

In a world where the PDFs are being backed up, the videos are also usually backed up and are just as available. I think in most cases, having an animation gets most of the value that you'd get from having complete interactivity.
An older period: Carboniferous [0]

Lots of plastic non biodegradable (at the moment): lignin. That's why we have coal, which fueled our Industrial Revolution :)

Ended with the Carboniferous rainforest collapse, caused by climate change.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
A physical constant’s value shouldn’t depend on how you measure it
> Their rationale is that these items are perfectly good and were discarded due to slow sales or being discontinued. That's objectively false: most was discarded because it is either expired or defective.

What does party A's rationale for discarding something have to do with party B's utility of the thing? It's possible a merchant may not want to stock an item that someone else wants, perhaps because the merchant can't sell it at a profit or they want to protect their brand. Something about trash and treasure.

For food at least, the expiration date is usually the manufacturer's "best by" date, meaning when they no longer back the product with their brand, not whether the food is still good to consume. This, among other practices, leads to a mind blowing amount of retailer food waste in the US. I'm all for scavengers being able to profit from what would otherwise be wasted as long as they're honest.
Why did the Internet hate on Juicero?
Amazing tactics to get traffic to your blog for free
Amazon is an eCommerce company with low overheads and costs which dint scale. If it grows from 1 million to 10 million orders the cost magnitude might not change that much.

Tesla on the other hand is into manufacturing. It will see some of it's costs scale as well even when it is doing better.
He’s not too far off what this article suggests as a marker of civilization in the past. But they have positives!

“Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we experience today. It was a world almost without ice, as typical summer temperatures at the poles reached close to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Looking at the isotopic record from the PETM, scientists see both carbon and oxygen isotope ratios spiking in exactly the way we expect to see in the Anthropocene record. There are also other events like the PETM in the Earth’s history that show traces like our hypothetical Anthropocene signal. These include an event a few million years after the PETM dubbed the Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin, and massive events in the Cretaceous that left the ocean without oxygen for many millennia (or even longer).”
Or that prior civilizations had enough forethought to not even start burning oil for energy.
Are they? There’s a lot of electric car companies, they’re just lower volume. Sounds like the question is “Why is rapid scaling of automotive manufacturing hard?”
Sure, I know Haskell too, and that code above is a mouthful... I'm undecided what is worse in terms of "control flow is all over the code base" and "code is hard to understand" - C++ RAII or Haskell error handling. Moreover the latter comes in a thousand incompatible flavours. Have fun writing Monad transformers :-). It's next to impossible to engineer a robust and readable/maintable application this way (besides simply dying on errors).
You claim:

> The objective is not "control" of the tech sector as the article pretends, it is just greater collaboration.

From the article:

> This quasi-nationalization applies to China's startup scene, too. One recent report found that 60 percent of Chinese unicorns have either direct or indirect investment from the BATs. China's venture-capital sector is dominated not by traditional tech dealmakers but by the state: There are more than 1,000 government-owned VC firms in China, controlling more than $750 billion.

So the Chinese government buys stakes in most Chinese startups, through its wholly-owned VCs and other vehicles.

These stakes give the Chinese government control over these startups.

You further claim:

> You can say they are making a police state, but at least they can maintain law and order, and are willing to keep thinking long-term and keep innovating even in government.

Which frankly sounds like PRC propaganda.
Pip 10 has been released
There’s a difference between saying it needed to be changed and ceding economic leadership to China. Trump’s flip-flop is presumably after hearing from large businesses about the cost of being left out entirely versus changes they would have been comfortable with.
They aren't, though. COME FROM can come from anywhere; catch can only come from somewhere an exception actually got thrown. That is a night and day difference.
Radio host Art Bell dies at 72 in Pahrump home
Perhaps we are looking at it from two different angles. It seems you may be looking at it from the 'educational to have one', while i'm looking at it from feasibility at an institutional level, which I thought OP was referring to.
I know nothing about ipads, so I'm not questioning it as a device. What I'm questioning is why anyone thinks it is realistic for schools to spend the money on the, vs similar options at a fraction of the cost. Teachers in multiple states are walking out over pay, right now. Teachers in most states are underpaid. Most students are on free lunches. Where does the money come from to buy kids an ipad? Seems the state doesn't have it, nor the parents.
Paid for it, maintained it for 38 years, paid taxes on it for 38 years, paid interest on it for 30 years, paid insurance on it for 38 years, paid a realtor to sell it, made sure no junkies squatted it for 38 years, took the risk of the government force buying it for pennies on the dollar, took the risk of an earthquake destroying it, took the risk of other events completely devaluing it, didn't cash out for 38 years, etc.

Also took the risk of it decreasing in value relative to the dollar in 38 years.

I mean if it's free money, why don't you go buy up a $900K property and get some free money in 38 years? There is a little more to it, and of course, you realize, that it might not have increased in value over 38 years like it did the last 38 years.

Of course luck has a lot to do with it. I've lived in my house for about 15 years or so (not in CA). It's nearly doubled in value, but the interest payments alone over time cost about as much as the property, so it's a break even, then add inflation and I've probably lost some. I live in my house though, and I'm eagerly awaiting the day when I can live here without any more mortgage payments.
I don't see the point, though, in taking the right to vote away from prisoners.

It's not like stabbing someone makes your opinion on taxes less valid. Or drug dealing makes your opinion of the education system invalid.

Even if you rob someone, your opinion that the poor (a.k.a. probably you) should be financially supported by the government is not less valid.

There can a point be made that you're not exactly participating in society while you're in prison, so if we act like politics always perfectly reflect people's current needs and don't cumbersomely shape over decades, then you could argue that they shouldn't be allowed to vote over other people's society, therefore should only be allowed to vote when they're going to be released in the next legislature period. But that's just not the case. A moron in presidency can and will negatively affect people's lives for a long time after he's gone.

Lastly, I suppose, if you view prison primarily as punishment, then taking away their right to vote just extends that.
Are You Paying Your Crypto Taxes?
Actually. I'd say it's not about taking risks, but mitigating them. Perhaps this is what you mean by "manage them"?

A normal person looks at a problem, see the risks, can't see how to get around them, and backs down.

An entrepreneur see the same problem, the same risks, identifies possible ways to mitigate the risks, and then attacks.

Entrepreneurs as risk takes is myth, or at least a false label.
Dual deployment also increases your cost. It requires that you have two cosutmers who want to go to the same place at the same time.

This often causes significant delayes and increases the planning effort of all the companies innvolved.

Another problem is that this model does not work for many costumers because there simply is no other cosutmer who wants to go to the same place at the same time.

Arianespace had many problems with this and in their new rocket they are moving away from that idea because of that.

> Falcon 9 launches are only around 60MM if the first stage can be recovered

I'm pretty sure that is false. I think all cosumters pay 60MM no matter what SpaceX does with the booster.

Their early reusable rockets gave costumers a 10% discount from that 60MM but it seems that this is no longer the case.
YouTube demonetized my tuba videos (also, I make tuba videos)
Startups, Beware “The Next Big Thing”
Wouldn't you find human artifacts all over the place even 60 million years from now? We have fossils much older than that, so wouldn't many many objects like gold wedding rings be around 60 million years from now?
I guess Atlantic doesn't need that website it software it runs to reliably help them do their business and make money...
The Amazon supply chain is fantastic indeed. And the end-user experience can be astounding.

I'm in Singapore and am thinking about ordering a standing desk from the USA. Delivery is free in 7-9 days. The desk cost $200. At any other company the delivery would be $200. The local cost is much more. How can anyone compete with that?

And in-country, tonight at exactly 20:45 I placed an order for a tripod and about 50kg of boxed water on Prime. It's being delivered, free of course, 10am tomorrow. The total order cost was S$60.

Think about what it takes to orchestrate that. First you have to have the stuff and know you have it, ok that's standard. Then the app with realtime inventory & delivery availability. Then you have about 12 hours to get that picked and packed, labelled, and into the delivery van you knew you had available at that time, oh and sorted in the optimised delivery order you meanwhile figured out please so you do that at the last minute. You need to make all that happen for what, $3 max to still be profitable? Frigging amazing.
Bug hunters: The hackers earning big bucks ethically
The title is somewhat loaded, Islam is also found to be problematic, albeit less heavily correlated. In danger of stating the obvious: the quality of life in nations that find themselves in opposition, isolation or subservient position to the major industrial hedgemons have a lower quality of life.

It’s also worth noting China is not present in the basket, neither is Cuba which prides itself on its healthcare system.

It’s interesting to note the autocratic nature of “communist” and “muslim” regimes with their strong personality cults. I’m not all that surprised that escaping one crappy political system, then having a puppet regime/dictator being installed by foreign imperialist intelligence, and having the economy colonized by ruthless multinationals leads to a crappy quality of life.
And the verbatim lines are explained here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
[ANN] SirixDB – A Time Machine for Your Data
> they live in socially stratified societies

This is gross anthropomorphism. Ants don't have societies any more than the cells in our body have societies.

An ant colony is an organism. Each individual ant has just enough neurons to do the one task that ant does. The overall organism is quite capable, true, but it's not intelligent. It doesn't learn novel things, it doesn't purposely invent, it doesn't 'know' anything.

Ants may take over the world some day, but they won't know it.
They looked like the kind of persons that can have the same drink everyday for a century :)

To avoid misunderstandings: they weren't related but they both were extremely self-disciplined, stubborn and healthy.
I'd say one of the biggest shifts since 1998 is the wider availability of the internet and then computer like devices in school. Instead of doing the rote learning, they make learning into a game. Where everyone advances at a glacial pace from what I've seen.

Now that kids are growing up using handheld phones/tablets for their consumption, the likelihood of them sitting down and reading a book (be it digital or paper) seems less likely than during my childhood when we had to dream about these futuristic gadgets.
Risk is relative. One person's high risk is another's snooze fest.

I also feel you could factor opportunity into the equation. That is, I might accept less autonomy for more opportunity.

And of course there's timing. Life is funny like that.
Not OP but I can second this. When I have a really hard topic I need to understand that requires rapid context switching to check on details nothing beats a book. Highlighters and post it book marks make it much faster to browse through than PDF on my IPad.
The e-mail does not get hidden. The recipient can still see the e-mail after the expiration time. The backend has been changed, as this link feature would require a new backend.

The headline "Google is allowing you to hide emails from its public interface after a specific amount of time" implies that this is just a change to an existing interface and would only work for recipients who use gmail.
Here’s How the World Is Reacting to the Missile Strikes on Syria
Indeed, I was in the same boat - funding out of my own pocket. Now I still have full control of all my equity, which of course feels great. Otherwise, you risk becoming a glorified employee again and the control you worked hard for slowly fades away.
I was able to buy an Apple ][+ with my high school job at a supermarket. The Lisa was amazing (when it came out a few years later) but obviously not affordable by me. ;) Nor the Macintosh when I was on military pay a few years after that. Maybe I wasn't their target market by then. :(

But I don't think the Lisa was right for the corporate market either - since it didn't have connectivity to the firm's mainframe or midrange. On the Lisa, you had a mouse port, parallel port, and two serial ports. The serial ports could have worked, but IIRC the SNA network stack needed wasn't on the Lisa (and Apple would have been quite hostile to IBM if they'd tried to add it). So firms would have had to share data via sneakernet, and that was the same thing they'd been doing with their Apple ]['s for several years now -- so the 10x price difference wasn't worth it, even if the UI was gorgeous.

There was also the matter of the installed base of machines the company might have had. The Apple ][ used standard Shugart 5-1/4" mechanisms, but the Lisa (originally) used their new FileWare "Twiggy" drives which placed the top/bottom heads on opposite ends of the diskette. So information couldn't be shared between Lisa and Apple ][ users.

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

Also - this may be my only chance to say Thank You for your work. So .. Thank you very much.
It can be a lot faster and less memory-hungry than javascript. That opens up a lot of things you can't feasibly do in JS. Game engines, image decoding, even video editing. http://webassembly.org/docs/use-cases/
Gmail was clearly better than any other offering and in most ways still is but it wasn’t paradigm shifting like YouTube.
It's really cool to see Racket being used like this! Its power really shines through:

> Due to the way Hackett is implemented, many things that are language features in Haskell can be derived concepts in Hackett. In fact, Hackett’s ADTs are not primitives, they are actually implemented as a library via the data and case macros
Here's the paper:

https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstrac...
I guess you don’t like the Daily Mail because it’s a source of nationalist sensationalism rubbish at its worst, and I completely agree with you about that.

But I’m worried that, by filtering it out, we create tribal echo chambers. Personally, I hold my nose, read at least some of the articles, and try to argue against them.
Read to your child for 30-60 minutes a day from Day 1 and by Kindergarden there are books piled on every flat surface, books piled in the car, books in the refrigerator, and you won’t be able to tear the book from their tiny little hands.
> Not saying that starting a company is easy, just saying that the world offers many different perspectives to the same problem.

The number of famous and wildly successful startups outside of the US says otherwise :(
Ryan Zinke’s Great American Fire Sale
This is what should give you pause before using face authentication technology for anything.
Irritating? Not me. A bit of braggadocio? Sure. But I'll allow him that.
Kind of weird how the internet cuts both ways

For some education was too slow relative to the potential learning of the internet. But now the internet is hampering education

Meanwhile the internet is seen as an equalizer to dispense information globally. Yet software eating the world is siphoning wealth inequality into the hands of a few

Another: it's a medium for the most distributed uncensored encrypted communications, while also allowing intelligence organizations to pry deeper than they've ever in the past
> similar to why Stack Overflow isn't overflowing with trash despite its immense scale

Oh boy. You haven't checked out the newest questions page on SO, have you? There are oh so many new low-quality questions.
That said, they're mostly so badly written, that they rarely show up on Google. But if you're actually trying to answer questions, then good luck finding any worth answering.

I simply gave up answering questions unless I stumble upon them while googling.
Indeed, if you invested 50k at 5% interest at 38 years ago, it would be 319k now. And that is the baseline if you spent zero on taxes and maintenance.
To take an example from this weeks notes:

- [ ] fix `params.key_` copy pasted code
- [ ] add ui to search mls listings
- [ ] review pr

Not sure how the extra param ended up on the search API but its there. Now have to pull it out and see if any systems are relying on its existence.

Etc. I have one system to write everything out, and put todo's wherever is relevant to what i'm writing about. I then have the system parse the notes, pull out all the todo's and collect them in a single place. If your needs are less "estimate, time track" and more "here's things I need to do, and whether i've done them." it works great.
That’s the one! I was hoping someone would be interested enough to fact check me :-)
Yes, comrade, you are so very right! It is much more useful for us to see the truth of how great China and it's future are! Truly there is no need to worry, the Party will take care of all!
I was in the same boat so I started buying quarts of cream. Put yogurt into a bowl, add some cream and mix with a spoon, add berries or a dash of cinnamon or whatever for color and you're set!
Half truth, the age of the domain matters.
I think they are just testing the waters in a small suit to see which strategy will work better for them to enforce rendering fixing their products illegal.

Apple now is a full on evil corporation.
People misuse exceptions. They use them as control-flow, like another form of "if...then", and as you point out, they're terrible for that.

The proper way to use exceptions is when you want behavior that bubbles up. So if you do x=f(g(h(x))) and h(x) fails because the user didn't configure something, you only need the config-checking logic in h, not in g or f. This use-case is quite rare though, and overall not worth the extra language complexity.
The article asks about detecting an industrial level civilization.

But what about a former civilization which only rose to the level of the Roman Empire lets say? Could we detect that?
On the contrary, I think that’s an argument against implicit conversions. u8 and usize have wildly different ranges, and treating them as the same could cause some maddening bugs. I can’t imagine there are that many places where you’d need to use a u8 as an index; if there were you could either wrap your data structure in a struct which accepts u8 instead, or use usize more instead...

(Not that I’m claiming to know your code base or specific challenge or anything; I’m just speaking generally)
> The intelligence services would say something that would make you skeptical of the motivations of leakers.

I'd assume most intelligence services love leakers. They just want to be the recipient, not the source.