skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to say I don't understand many things about your comment, so I'd be glad if you were to clear them for me.

1) You blame your "individualistic natures" for the appearance of pointless jobs. Now, I haven't lived in the US, but that seems odd to me. I live in Romania, a society that is profoundly focused on the community, and the abundance of pointless jobs, particularly in the communistic years (communism being a profoundly anti-individualistic ideology) was absolutely staggering.

It just seems to me pretty self-evident that, as you move the focus from the individual, and his own happiness, he will find less motivation to do a meaningful job, and be contempt with a pointless, but simpler job.

I may be missing something important here, as, again, everything I know about American culture I know from the internet, so, if I am, please feel free to tell me.

2) "Public jobs are low-paying and staffed with people who couldn't find jobs in the private sector, resulting in little incentive to do more than the absolute minimum."

I'm afraid I just don't follow here. Wouldn't the low pay motivate people to work at pulling themselves out of those jobs and into the private sector?

3) You claim, quite rightly, that companies are not concerned with the public good, just with their survival and/or success, and consider jobs given out as "saintly privileges".

Firstly, all of the modern advances of mankind, from the industrial revolution, to the ridiculously cheap products provided by Rockefeller, Edison, and the like, to the supercomputers almost every human in the civilized world carries with him in his pocket, were made, not in the interest of "the greater community", but in those people/companies' self-interest.

Secondly, which worker do you think is more productive? The one that says "I am owed this job by my company"? Or the one that says, "My job is nothing but a privilege given onto me by the company, and I must prove every day that I deserve it?"

In any case, I'd be really grateful if you could explain these points to me. Thanks in advance!!
Time Crystals in a Two New Attlee of Materials
The frustrating thing is though: we have plenty of real demand

Social work, infrastructure repairs, mental health services.

But all the effort coalesces around BIG Corp. and Douche Co. needs first

Somehow we’re convinced that Bezos and Koch’s are more important than our neighbors

Some looney economists will tell you it’s proven in physics these people are just better

Ignoring the history of violent imperialism and collusion, and oppression that prevented and neutered whole swaths of people from catching up or getting ahead

My take is humans are ignorant animals who are emotionally captured by novelty and special interests keep peddling it to stoke that dopamine buzz

Then when you read in open access government documents they’ve been studying exactly that since WW1, and handing that research to unis who turned it into journalism, advertising, marketing, and management courses, you don’t go “oh deep state!” You go holy shit are we dumb. This is right in front of our faces, no conspiracy theory needed. Documented in official record, in plain view, how government has been dictating what we work on in the land of the free

The first topic that got me onto this pattern: was doing a research paper on thorium reactors since they were all buzzwordy a few years ago

In the 50s they were THE leading effort for energy

That all stopped when a Naval officer realized submarines could be equipped with quieter nuclear engines and weapons and be parked on the coast of whenever undetected

Thorium research was archived and we got to build unstable, by comparison, reactors as a result

And then you see it’s like that all over the historical record from the era

And you realize Bezos and Koch’s aren’t special. They were lucky to be alive now in a heavily curated system with a plain paper trail
Looks like it's chess symbols, by Michel Eftimakis. See the raw font: https://github.com/xero/figlet-fonts/blob/master/eftichess.f...
i'm not a west coaster, or even an american. just a 30-year-old who works a full time software engineering job and can't afford a house.

In this instance, the problem really is bigger than just silicon valley's bubble.
> I have a PhD from a top institution

I'm sorry but any comment that starts out "I have a PhD from a top institution" reeks of Appeal to Authority:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

Then you appeal to science without actually citing any science, but yet more anecdotal data and thoughts from your own mind.

Your arguments are just not very strong because they're all coming from your own experience and thoughts. Your qualifications in exercise and academia (especially on a partially anonymous internet forum) do not make your thoughts any more valuable than anyone else's here without resources to back them up.
> It's frustrating that these sexist and racist policies have spread like a cancer across our industry.

It's dismaying that you've gone straight into name-calling with a throwaway account. Please have more respect for the community than to do that, and follow the site guidelines instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Good point! If you managed to capture all this information, it would theoretically be possible. However, being able to get this much control is essentially impossible. We emphasize "pseudorandom" because nothing is ever truly 100% random.
Ask HN: What makes 4Chan Unique? Why people love it?
Based on what? Lots of Natural gas was just released into the air at oil fields before they started capturing it for sale.
> but why is it happening in China first?

Countries where the 24 month subsidy cycle is dominant will have a lot more inertia that countries where they are rare.

Also, China is home to the "cheap flagship" brands, so much of the middle range of the market will already buy close to the technological limit. In countries where the middle of the market is mostly held by the lesser offerings of more premium brands, upgrades to a higher price tier can effectively substitute technological progress (for a while): customers expect a faster phone after n years, and if the technology doesn't deliver many will be willing extend their price range. If it helps. For those who already had a "cheap flagship", it won't.
TL;DR: Don't build your own database -- here's how and why we (Microsoft OneNote) did anyhow and it worked out really well for us.
Enlightenment Foundation Libraries?
So 30% of marketshare belongs to clients built on the browser technologies of HTML and Javascript, the same technologies you claim are "inappropriate" for the new client that we're discussing.
The new magnetism of mid-size cities
> I don't see how much of any of this is going to change the sailor's life

While sailors' lives are important in themselves, what do you see as the connection to the issue at hand, reducing climate change impact?

> it will kill you

Every sailor dies? I don't understand what you're getting at.
In embedded you can usually modify every step from boot to main. They are just pieces of code you can interact with and make them do whatever you want and initialize stuff in whatever order you want, providing you know what you do.

Deviating with a war story now, I once modified some startup code so it self-detected its boot location and initialized the ram data according to this location shift. It was fun, but debugging code you relocated is a pain because you need to somehow relocate the symbols as well.
16 bit minis were, well, not common, but still used in numbers in labs and the like. Consider that d. computers are mostly used for information systems nowadays, meanwhile analogue computers were not used at all for that purpose. So apart some inventive examples I won't rule out, no company migrated from paper to analogue computing to digital computing, because analogue computers were not suited for information systems.

That's likely why analogue computers persisted for fairly long after the introduction of digital computers: they solve very different problems, and an analogue computer could solve simulation problems at a speed that the 16 bit mini right next to it would never achieve. Also, they are highly modular (in fact they are nothing but a bunch of fundamental modules like integrators, diffs and other filters that the user interconnected as required) and very easy to extend with specialized circuitry and the like. Thus, from a purchase/investment point of view, analogue computers could easily be scaled, while this was more difficult with digital computers.
I'm sorry, but this is completely ridiculous and flies in the face of economics and capitalism, and deserves to be called out. Remember that David Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist.

Pointless jobs exist because of inefficiences. Someone higher up couldn't be bothered to automate it, and there isn't enough oversight of the budget. An entrenched interest (like a no-longer-needed union regulation) is too hard to fight. Etc.

But capitalism is the most marvelous machine for removing inefficiencies, and therefore removing pointless jobs. Why? Because the owner/capitalist will make more money when they're removed/automated. It's easy to say McDonald's cashiers have pointless jobs, and they're being replaced with kiosks. Or taxi drivers with driverless cars. The same way the original human "computers" were replaced by calculating machines. The process isn't perfect and certainly isn't instant, but it happens and is relentless.

Pointless jobs decrease over time. And trying to claim that they're rising, as Graeber does, is simply disingenuous and dishonest.
The date submission form is broken in Chrome and won't let me type in anything that it perceives as valid.

Which is a shame because the one I found was really interesting!
I'm saying that the rules of supply and demand are not as simple and as clear cut in reality as they are presented in Econ 101.
From the DEFCON presentation I mentioned elsewhere, it also seems like if he hadn't flubbed up and tried to claim the 16.5 million dollar prize, he (and his friends/family) wouldn't have been caught at all.

I can't believe he put the code in when he knew it would be audited, but then I doubly can't believe he would poke them to take a second look by suggesting something odd was involved at all.
I work in health tech. Here are some problems:
* Helping patients select the right doctor. Currently most people use Yelp or through referrals. The problem is that Yelp has little correlation to quality of care. It's very difficult for patients to evaluate a doctor - usually what they end up doing is evaluating the customer service aspect of the doctor (did they speak to me nicely, did they make me wait for an appointment, etc.) but no one is able to evaluate doctors based on the quality of care.
* Helping doctors and patients estimate costs - Neither doctors or patients understand costs. it is very routine for a doctor to suggest getting a lab test from X place because they have experience working with the center. They have no idea that for your specific insurance plan this will cost you 2x another place and so you with an unhappy patient who blames their doctor for ripping them off. There should be tools to patients and doctors estimate costs.
* Helping patient select a health care plan from their employer or a marketplace - most patients have no idea what health care plan they are best on. However, theoretically if you have their history of claims and some guess on their future behavior, you should be able to tell them which health care plan makes the most sense for them
* Helping patients manage their chronic conditions. Most people are very lax about managing their health conditions, they skip appointments, choose brand names over generics, ignore refills, etc. Technology should be able to nudge them in the right direction and help them optimize on quality and costs.
* Building technology that encourages health behavior - A majority of the diseases attacking Americans are caused by lifestyle issues (diet, stress, drugs, exercise). If you could build technology solutions that help nudge people to healthier behavior, you would make solve a billion dollar problem for insurance companies; they would love to reduce the risk pool of their patients. This is a tough battle because even people who care about health are inundated with false information (think Dr. Oz or anti-vaxxers or people who insist every person in the world is a celiac and should go gluten free).

As you can see the bulk of the problems in the health care industry is understanding how to navigate the huge mess of the US healthcare system. A longer term solution is for us to build a single payer system and incentivize patient care over patient procedures but I doubt that will happen.
Can confirm. SQLite is great. I've written an e-commerce website for a customers a few years ago. Most of the data was static and only updated a couple times per day in bulk. It was easy to do the main import/data update completely offline, then copying over the db file to multiple servers and doing mostly read-only queries on the DB. SQLite was more than fast enough and not having to manage another service was totally worth it. It's good having SQLite in your toolbox.
> Causal linkage just means that that event participated in causing this event. The sun being in the sky is causally linked to me believing it's day time, for example.

Great example! In Ptolemy's time "the sun being in the sky" would have meant that the sun was in a particular phase in its orbit around the Earth. Now we understand that the sun is not actually "in the sky" but it is a hundred million kilometres away. Our understanding of what it means for the sun to be "in the sky" will likely undergo several revolutions in the next 100,000 years.

Second, the actual facts are not causally linked to your belief. Your perception that the sun is in the sky is causally linked to your belief that it is daytime. If I am a schizophrenic and I hallucinate that the sun is in the sky even though it is night time then do I "know" that it is daytime?

All of this probably sounds overly pedantic but teasing apart the details is exactly what we're trying to do here :)
There are a few questions about an "overview," so I'll give that a shot here. This is some imagery I've been using recently, about how our observed signatures are related to crystals.

Sometimes physicists think of phase transitions in terms of "symmetry breaking." Imagine zooming in very close on the molecules in a glass of liquid water, all tumbling quickly into and out of your field of view. The situation is highly "symmetric": if you closed your eyes and I shifted the field of view slightly to the left, you wouldn't know what I'd done when you opened your eyes again.

Now suppose the water freezes into a crystal of ice, so that the molecules are arranged on a regular lattice. If I repeat my "shift-slightly-to-the-left" experiment, you'd be able to tell I moved things. That is, somehow the molecules chose a particular location for the lattice, even though any other location of the lattice could have done just as well. In jargon, we say the water "spontaneously broke the continuous translational symmetry": the defining equations of motion are agnostic about the particular location in space, but the state of the system chose a location anyways.

In our experiment, we do something similar in time rather than space. We drive the system with pulses once every time period "T", so the equations of motion are identical under this "discrete" shift in time. However, the state of the system (in our case, the direction of the nuclear magnetization) only goes back to itself every time 2T, and so "breaks discrete time translational symmetry."

There is one more important feature of the observed signature in this analogy: if you nudge an atom that is in a crystal lattice, it will want to return to its original position. Similarly, the period of the magnetization's direction-reversal is robust to our pulse imperfections, if we allow the quantum interactions long enough to act. So, the "region" of parameter space where you can observe this effect is not confined to perfectly ideal pulses, but is instead robust to our pulse imperfections -- the "robustness" depends on the amount of time we allow the nuclear spin interactions to take place.

---

I hope this helps. I recommend the synopses available at prl.aps.org, and searching for the PDF preprints on the Arxiv (not yet quite as good as the published versions), if you don't have Physical Review access.

---

[Edit for links]

[2012 overview] https://physics.aps.org/articles/v5/116

[2013 overview] https://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/31

[2013 quanta mag.] https://www.quantamagazine.org/perpetual-motion-test-could-a...

[2017 overviews: "recipe" and first two results]

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v10/5

https://www.nature.com/news/the-quest-to-crystallize-time-1....

[2018 announcement] https://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120...

[A different background by (the great) Natalie Wolchover of Quanta Mag., which provides context for the original thrust of one branch of this research. Our first significant involvement was after a talk about "Time Translational Symmetry Breaking" by Chetan Nayak of Microsoft's Station Q.]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-aim-to-classify-al...
> A larger bit rate is useful for lots of digital summing as I mention here [1] and I assume what you allude to, but for most home applications nobody

Yeah that's why they said audio production, and not home use. 96db of dynamic range sounds like a lot, but not when you're stacking 45 tracks. Also compression and saturation later in the chain will further bring up that noise floor.

And you don't get that full dynamic range because you want to prevent clipping in a recording, so you give yourself something like 12db of headroom away from the maximum, and now you've lost a good chunk of your dynamic range. 24 bit recording lets you keep plenty of maximum headroom while also staying far from your noise floor.
WTF, HTML, CSS, JS
Anyone else noticed that endurance athletes look 10 years older ?
Because I want a great camera in my pocket. It’s only a few dollars more a month.
All: if you're going to comment in a thread like this, please re-read the site guidelines first: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Then you'll know to assume good faith, to make your comments more civil and substantive as the topic gets more divisive, to avoid name-calling, and to respond charitably.

HN's rules exist for deep reasons based on many years of working with community dynamics. If you break them, you contribute nothing to resolving any social issue—all it does is rile up the other side and fan flames—but you do contribute to destroying this community. That's bad for all of us.

If you're feeling like venting about how wrong or bad someone is, don't post right away; pause until the needle goes out of the red. Then review your post and edit out any bits that still break the guidelines. That's what I do, and it's the only way I know to make this place work ok.

Hacker News is large enough that it lives in a precarious state: the forces that tear an online community apart grow with size and win by default. If HN's health points go to zero, it dies as a place for thoughtful discussion, so please take care with the health points.
He did win, in 1998. Even if he hadn't, he's dead now, so he wouldn't be eligible.
This click baity title didn’t come from the article. You’ll never guess what happens next!
Check out the Nokia 8
Publii hotfix 0.26.1 released
(a) Then how should Sun Tzu have entitled his famous work, if not "The Art of War"?

(b) Krav Maga is clearly a highly time- and energy-efficient tool for hand-to-hand combat; why should any martial art strive for any different metrics? (other than coping with exceptional circumstances via malicious compliance, such as that old French martial-art that focuses entirely on kicks not fists)
Alpha is certainly not big endian. And MIPS today is probably little endian more frequently than big endian.
Goons are often highly skilled and highly compensated. So that's one difference.
That sounds like an open source collection of things, rather than a startup idea.

i like it though, could really help in some situations.
Exactly. Checklists are great for non-critical tasks. Hospital triage uses the same checklist for pretty much every new patient. Triage is boring, but the fact that it is checklisted is what helps drive efficiency in the ER.

Similar boring processes in a tech business can be checklisted to increase efficiency, and the checklist itself can be iterated over. Everything from designing a new feature, to troubleshooting an error, to addressing a customer support ticket, to getting access to a new resource should use checklists.
Ask HN: Should I “open source” my projects?
I have a suite of business apps (cherrypc.com), and now a multi-user Blog app (ibloc.com), that I'm considering putting on GitHub.

Both are written almost entirely in Javascript, so most all the code is visible and easy to copy right now.

Both use CouchDB and PouchDB, which I think are fantastic tools to build apps like these, but there's not a lot of apps like these out there using them at this point, so they may help others get an idea of how these differ from using PHP and MySQL.

What can expect if I do this?

I am a bit concerned that if I take the time to do this nothing at all with come of it and my time would be better spent working on the apps.

And also that I'll be making it possible for anyone to compete with me without near the investment it took to create them or helping to improve the software (though I don't think that would necessarily affect me much because neither are well known and both have much better funded alternatives).

On the other hand, it would be great if others started helping improve it. I and my users could certainly benefit from that.

Any insight on this would be much appreciated.
Closer. Things like being able to see the logs of all your apps and searching them is a common thing I assume. We have all the tools today, that's not the problem. The problem is me having to read pages like [0] just to do what almost 100% of companies have to do. I am having trouble articulating the simplicity of what I would expect.

0 - https://docs.openshift.com/enterprise/3.1/install_config/agg...
For real?

How high do you lift it?

How's your back?

Who's we? (can I join)
There's no 'start' of a cycle, they are circular. I.e. the cycle 1->2->3->1 is the same as 3->1->2->3). I.e. picking a locker at random is equivalent to picking a chain of length N with probability N/100.

In fact, the prisoners aren't given any information about the cycles and can't communicate, so they can't choose a cycle "at random".

Not sure if your question can be formulated as follows (which requires giving more information to the prisoners): Suppose that we color every group of lockers that form a cycle in a different color, and every prisoner then picks a random color and then picks a random locker among the lockers of that color. What is the chance of winning?
Use Arq, backup to Backblaze storage, and pay $0.005/GB/month. That 50 GB would cost $0.25 a month. If you can afford a MacBook, you can afford an encrypted cloud backup of your HD.
Show HN: Instabug for Product Managers – #1 ProductHunt of the Day
That is not nearly enough. These ships are heavy. To put it into perspective, 6,500 HP would be just enough to meet half the auxiliary power demand (eg, HVAC, electrical, motors, etc) on the 500-foot training ship I sailed on, which is a toy compared to commercial ships. Propulsion required a 60,000+ HP steam power plant.
Could you not go with serverless and eliminate all of that complexity?
I think one major distinction is that Foundation DB can be used to build most of the databases you mentioned above because of its architecture.