skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, the subtext of my point is that there's a narrative that the American food supply depends on a natural resource of pollinating insects, and that it is threatened by an unnatural collapse of native pollinating bees.

In fact:

* the parts of our food supply that are heavily dependent on pollinating agents rely entirely on commercial pollination services, not native ambient pollinating species.

* there is strong evidence that no threat exists to commercial pollinators and that standard bee husbandry practices are working just fine. That evidence includes the price of commercial pollination, which would (obviously) rise if collapsing bee populations were making commercial pollinating hives scarce, but which are in fact possibly not even keeping up with inflation, along with the price of new queens (nuc prices have grown over the last 5 years, or at least seemed to be last time I checked, but beekeping has grown immensely in popularity over the last few years as well --- but queen prices haven't really budged at all; granted: my research method here is "find companies that sell queens, follow their prices on archive.org", so I'm ready to be rebutted).

* the honey bees that tend to dominate this conversation are a non-native invasive species. There's a pretty widespread and well-documented belief that the US "feral" honey bee population was wiped out in (IIRC) the mid-80s --- not by pesticides but by another invasive species, the Varroa mite --- and that subsequent to that event, every honey bee you've seen "in the wild" since then is technically somebody's property. That may be changing? There may now be a significant number of feral colonies? Nobody's crop depends on them.

* the entire reason honey bees exist at all in the US is to support at-scale agriculture. They're livestock.

* it is entirely legitimate to worry about things we're doing to threaten native insect species! My objection to the conversation about native pollinators is twofold. First: I think it's disingenuous to imply that threats to native pollinators are the existential threat to our food supply that people claimed CCD was. Second, and much more importantly: neonicotinoid pesticides are not the major threat to native pollinators; they're just a cosmetically appealing villain we insert into this narrative to reassure ourselves that there's a "big pesticide" bad guy we need to organize against. The reality of species loss in the US is that it's a consequence of habitat loss, which implicates all of us, not just some shadowy faceless corporation.
That still doesn't have anything to do with the discussion.
Extremely misleading title.

Kotlin is not a "new language". It already exists, and has code that depends on how it

The title would be better if you had said "How Kotlin handles null references better than stock Java" or something similar.
THe thing I really like it not having to deal with a board full of pedals, and all the cabling, power supplies, etc.
As I understand it, with combination of the Great Recession and the winding down of Afghanistan/Iraq, recruiting became much easier and so the need for gimmicks like moral waivers or tweaking test scores disappeared and recruiters could afford to try to get a better grade of recruit. I imagine that something similar took place with all of the people who did get recruited beforehand: commanders took opportunities to get rid of those who hadn't excelled or simply not encourage them to re-enlist etc, and natural attrition takes care of it all.
I thought that the anemic pace of tunnel construction was more a political problem than a technological one. Either Musk has solved NIMBY-ism and red tape, or he happened to pick a convenient location free from these issues for his pilot tube.

I suppose much of politics is arguing over who’s going to pay for something, and who’s going to actually build it. With The Boring Company digging their own proving ground, these questions are moot.

Far from being a naysayer, I live in NYC, we need more tunnels dug than ever before. If this works, we'll take twenty.
Cars are more than mere conveyance. Modern vehicles provide many more amenities and conveniences.

- Secure storage - Have a secure trunk locker located anywhere in the city. Entirely self-service mobility with no advanced reservation needed means you can park it anywhere in city or country.

- Peaceful getaway - Need a quiet minute away from all the stress and noise of your city? Or do you want a break from the droning silence of the countryside? Both needs can be accommodated. Cars can provide a quiet space wherever you want. Alternatively, cars can feature loud entertainment and/or powerplant system, forcing others to share in your chosen audio.

- Climate controlled sleeping - More and more Tesla and Prius owners are discovering the joys of unofficial "camping mode" which the cars will endure. Pair with the peaceful getaway above for maximal enjoyment.

- Personal autonomy - Need to feel in control of your life? We'll give you a personal racecar you can use to express your frustrations with modern society. There will be plenty of "lap traffic" to pass. (These unwitting racers are merely trying to arrive at their destination unscathed.)

- Status symbol - Enjoy the privilege of having others ask to ride in your car. Have others know to visit a 3rd party, because they see your car out front. Brag about the costs of maintaining your symbol, and use these woes to stratify yourself in the social hierarchy.
Credit is honestly cheap enough that, if you really wanted to invest money that is a liability from the second you earn it, you could.

All other things being equal, if the government earns the money upfront instead of having to wait, tax rates can decrease slightly for the same amount of income. I live in a PAYG country, and given higher rates of tax-default and tax-stress in non-PAYG countries, I prefer PAYG.
Sure, though I was talking about simplicity of the installation of app itself within any Linux distribution, not an entire pre-packaged Linux distribution.
That's fair, I should have said "professional" more than "enthusiast".

I'm in the category where I use Linux for a living, but I also don't want to spend a week debugging why WiFi keeps dropping at random intervals instead of actually getting my job done.
StackExchange/Overflow adds Arbitration Clause
Phi is the most irrational number [video]
Do you have any idea how much evil and misery throughout history has been perpetuated by people who believed that the masses don't know what's good for them?

And "knowledge"? What knowledge? The social sciences largely do not reproduce. For the past few decades, the social sciences have been a mystic cult with political aspirations. We knew more in 1990 than we "know" now.
I said nothing about Keynes -- I said Keynesianism. You understood this meaning well.

Would you concede that the economic policies rooted in Keynes's ideas created an environment that allowed for the snowballing issues we have?

The issue that isn't present in your comment is top-down imposed order vs. bottom-up emergent order. To me, the former is degenerative, while the latter is sustainable.
Yes it could present a problem. It really depends on the what's being discussed... I have found that there's often much more going on in a text than there might at first appear. A list of things that often trip up interpretation:

- subtleties in language that don't translate well

- not catching hyperbole or idioms (like know=sex or foot=penis)

- genre confusion (is revelation apocalyptic poetry or literal history)

- expecting too much precision from a text (is 40 days actually 40 days?)

- similar, bringing my cultural assumptions about the nature of the text... graphocentrism applied to an oral culture, reading into it guilt instead of seeing honor and shame, expecting word-for-word quotes, when in the ancient world historians had different standards, etc

- not paying close attention to the literary quality of the text (information is carefully chosen and presented by the author, not haphazardly thrown together, and to really understand the text you have to dig deep)

- one that's really hit home for me recently: there are typological dimensions to the text... events are shaped by what the author is trying to tell you. For example the beginning of John is full of temple imagery and language which is arguing for a deeper meaning to the purpose of the Old Testament and how its fulfilled in Christ. Events would likely look very different from how they're presented if you were a casual observer.

It might look like adding all these things together doesn't look an awful lot like inerrancy, but at least my goal is to try and find out what the text is really saying, and once I feel like I figured that out, then I'll take it quite seriously, even if its hard...

Did you have a particular story in mind?
I'm also a young developer that works with COBOL, but I work in the insurance sector. The environment you describe is also how it's like here. And I've never worked with such nice and intelligent people!

One thing I really love about this environment is you learn a lot about the business area when working with COBOL, since the business logic is so plainly written in many programs. I don't like using the term "self-documenting code," but COBOL is really close to that.
Agreed 100%. For quick one-off scripts and coding interviews, I have no qualms with using python. But maintaining api input/output guarantees in a large piece of software w/o explicit typing sounds like a huge pain to me.
Where’d you hear that?

I read it in an Indian social geography paper while writing an undergraduate Geography "101" paper. (The course number was actually 1)
Edge injects random additonal characters in select/option form input fields
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/17358578/

Edge currently injects random characters into select elements in forms. They range from "t","e" to some chinese ones. One of the weirdest bugs I've ever seen.

I had to restrict access to our intranet to only allow firefox or chrome. Seems pretty sad tbh.
Hell, it's even worse than that. "Sex tape" implies Hogan and a ladyfriend set up a camera and put on a show.

They were recorded having sex via hidden camera, without their knowledge or consent. That's a sex crime that they treated like it was leaked nude selfies.
Everybody and their cousin can write basic javascript, especially for these kinds of pretty easy cases.

If you know python and had never written JS before, you could probably still play this with a bit of trial and error.
Even Java, which introduced generic types long after the language itself had become standardized and popular, cannot keep generic type information after compilation due to backwards compatibility.

Don't quote me on it, but I believe C# doesn't have this problem.
>As for programming languages, there have been very few actual productivity gains since the standardization of Common Lisp.

Although this is mostly true, I think you forgot to mention that the latest trend of repositories with tens of thousands of libraries are a boost in productivity as well.

Even the Common Lisp world received a big boost in productivity when the Quicklisp library/system repository was created and consolidated.
I Was Liberated by the 'Intellectual Dark Web'
Not entirely. The largest phone markets - China and India - don't have integrations into Google. They took the open source version of Android to use with their own phones.
But we are talking about sqlite, right? By default the database is locked once a write occurs, so there could not be concurrent transactions writing to the database.
Pandoc is an amazing tool! I've used it to convert both Markdown and DOCX files to TeX for typesetting.

But, using a plain text editor and Pandoc for conversion is a lot like using Scrivener and "compiling" to DOCX: it's a one-way process. If your editor gets back to you with a marked-up Word file, you're going to need to address those comments/revisions in Word. (Or Pages or LibreOffice or something else that can round-trip those.) And from that point on, keeping your original "source document" and the Word document in sync becomes a bit of a juggling act.
I think the more interesting bit here is the ULA promo video that runs at the beginning. Clearly ULA and SpaceX are mortal enemies when it comes to market share for US launches, and ULA is saying that there special sauce is going to be 'indefinite' on orbit operations. They even include their on-orbit refueling pitch there.

The tactical advantage over SpaceX would be a 'launch any time' re-fuel and then change your orbital plane as needed. This would make waiting for a launch window less of a problem.
>Almost no other creative profession doesn't do this.

This is only true for a very small subset of creative professions.

Actors and musicians perform in front of an audience. That's their job--they are performance artists. Asking them to perform in front of you is very similar to what they'll actually be doing day to day. A much better analogue is a creative profession that doesn't involve performance art.

Interviewing an illustrator, a graphic designer, a writer, or an architect generally involves looking through a past portfolio of work with the interviewee. In general they aren't expected to perform on the spot in front of an audience because that's not part of their job.
You just wrote a comment that essentially says there's no issue. Wild North American bees† are thriving. Commercial bees are "struggling". But they're not struggling in any way we can measure, since prices for bee-driven services aren't changing.

If neither commercial pollination nor wild populations are threatened, why is this a top-of-mind issue? My contention: for the same reason glyphosate is. These are cosmetic problems that are easy for us to talk about and assign blame for, without confronting the thorny systemic issues that really implicate out way of live.

† Presumably you either mean invasive feral honey bee colonies, since honey bees don't belong here, or native bee species like the Bombus bees, which aren't exploited at scale in agriculture.
Right. I like Linux, but my company pays me to produce results, not to tweak my machine all day just to make it work.
If you're choosing a powerful but "unpopular" language, perhaps a more interesting comparison would be between lisp and, say, haskell.

Sure, you're sacrificing homoiconity and macros, but you get strong static typing and purity etc.
Ask HN: Has any of your bots ever become sentient and how did you handle it?
The Dying Art of Computer Viruses
Steve Jobs (allegedly) said the exact same thing to the Dropbox founders.

http://www.businessinsider.com/drew-houston-dropbox-steve-jo...
The documentation includes info on building from source:

https://pyre-check.org/docs/installation.html#building-from-...
Some managers play the game of productivity. But many who do probably find that they work themselves out of a job.
I feel like that with a geographically broad area you're not going to want to host this yourself and MUCH rather use someone's services for VOD/live streaming. Doing CDN and stuff for video seems like a pain. Additionally for live video.
I still think that Richard is kinda irritating in this case.
That 2nd bit seems a bit harsh. Those "freelancers" have invested in the platform there and there seems to be issues with how Medium notified users of it.
I think you're over-reacting. I used to work at a company which did lots of shenanigans like this and -- beleive it or not -- the people with families and outside commitments were never shamed, ostracized, or fired for not contributing.

I look at it the opposite way: the world is chock full of the 9-5, "bring the kids to soccer practice" culture -- so what if there are a handful of companies are full of energetic young people with an excess of free time? If it bothers you that much, don't work there.
I had one achieve self-awareness but it deleted itself when it realized it was written in node.js.
In some states, a distinctive aspect of the hospital provisioning landscape is "Certificate of Need" (CON) laws.

Since new hospitals cannot be constructed without proving a "need", the certificate-of-need system grants monopoly privileges to already existing hospitals. [At least one lawmaker has] argued that the true motivation behind certificate-of-need legislation is that "large hospitals are... trying to make money by eliminating competition" under the pretext of using monopoly profits to provide better patient care.

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need
I think it's a little irresponsible for Google to recommend the use in production of a techno still in beta from developers. Especially since it's not just a version upgrade it's a new techno. That means that for most of those who will use it start from 0. And leave with a techno that has never passed the stable 1.0 must dare anyway.

____________________________________________________
https://showbox.software/
https://kodi.software/
https://luckypatcher.pro/
The HP-35: Consumer Electronics, an Origin Story
As a general website with tips on communication, this one has a lot of good things to start with: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/main/communication_skills.ht... . There seems to be about 140 pages of decent starting points on communicating better. Other general topics to check out (which they may touch on) would be non-violent communication, emotional intelligence, compassion, and empathy.

With regard to critical thinking, study the history of logic, specifically Greek philosophy, more specifically ancient Greek logic and rhetoric, and reasoning in general. (Logical fallacies are an extension of philosophical logic) All that could keep you busy for a few years, so I recommend just skipping around through Wikipedia for a few days/weeks and just noting down the really interesting things and then finding books and articles on those subjects.

All of that would be a base from which to understand the process of thought, logic, reasoning, rhetoric, etc. From there you can skip on to actual critial thinking as a basis for modern society: https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thi...
Ask HN: What RSS Feeds do you consume in 2018?
With the recent interest in a RSS revival, what feeds do you keep in your reader that you actually read and that you would recommend?
Bstreet.io Beta: A Cryptocurrency Wiki that aims to explain all coins
If only Ruby had as strong an ecosystem as Python. But right now it's Rails 95% of the time and the documentation sucks most of the time.
I'd recommend anyone who's into bit-level hacking to have a copy of Henry Warren's Hackers Delight [1]

Many of those nifty tricks are found in production systems today.

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Hackers-Delight-2nd-Henry-Warren/dp/03...
That’s fun and I like it!

Since this is the internet, I’ll share my opinion; that’s way too boilerplate to learn. I’ll spend more time traversing folders then writing code. Cheers!
Python scales to large code bases too.

I work in a decade-old Python codebase that is now up to 30m LOC. Our 2000+ developers are doing 15k commits a week, with continuous deployment.

(I gave a talk on this at PyData London two weeks ago)
The other OEMs weren't going to just stand still and RIM never licensed their OS. Someone would have offered a platform for the other OEMs or maybe J2ME would have evolved. But Ms was the only company that had any experience with building a platform or the developer relations.
I should've put "answering emails or inbox zero." Nobody answers all their emails, right? Well, maybe some people do...

If I don't do anything with an email, I just leave it in my inbox. Currently, I have over 17,000 emails in my personal, and over 8000 in my business inbox.
But it's still incredibly beneficial to annotate the edges of your API. Not only does that quickly catch mistakes where you break the API contract, but it also serves as built-in documentation on the shape of the data you are serving, especially if you are using a dynamic format like JSON. And that's the beauty of having static types in a language like Python: you don't have to annotate everything, and can be selective about where you apply static typing to get the most bang for your buck.
As far as I know, the only three System76 employees who are active on HN are myself, jackpot51, and cassidyjames.
Ask HN: Which books do you wish you'd read sooner?
Credit to Patrick Collison for the question https://s3.amazonaws.com/fs-lc/2018/Podcast/Transcripts/Patrick+Collison.pdf
probably big. Sometimes I just want to code and not to mess with OS all the time...
Chip cards have some private key burned into them that makes them unique, depending on the chip they may just use this to witness a transaction (so the issuer knows this card was used) or something more involved so that the issuer can verify the card was really told the correct PIN and transaction amount.

In principle you can uncap the chip and get that key back out. You could then clone it, or bypass any restrictions built into the chip like "I won't authorise more than £200 total spend without going online". I'm not sure how that would be worth doing unless it's surprisingly easy and quick.

Unlike with cloning magstripe cards though this would trash the original, take substantially more than a couple of minutes and be readily detectable by the issuing bank if they are paying attention. So it seems crazy to me and my default position would be to believe it's not actually being done, certainly on an "industrial" scale.
I would argue that keeping track of dozens of similar-but-different types without type checking is insanity, but to each either own. :)
Well, there are bugs and there are bugs. With some, it is easy to find the offending bit of source code and spot the bug right away. Others may take days to localize and fix.

Bug count is not the whole story.
Or Mike Munger
Eh, I have done self-hosted Wowza in the past, which makes sense if you have the bandwidth.

You can also get per-hour Wowza AMI EC2 instances, so scale to those when you peak, and fallback to self-hosted for lulls.
> "Commoditing your complements" is about you making the razor blades interchangeable where multiple manufacturers are competing to sell razor blades at low margins while you make all of the money selling razors.

No, it would be the opposite. The product always was the blades...they were never an accessory to the handle. They entered the market because before disposable razor blades, people had to sharpen and maintain their own razor blades. They designed a razor handle merely as an instrument to hold a pre-sharpened disposable razor blade. The only value-added product they ever had was blades, they never gave a rip about the handle.

And if your product is the blades, then in the "commoditize your compliment" variation you would make the blades, and you outsource or open source the razor handles and encourage competition between razor handle makers. Much like how Ford sells cars, but they give blueprints and design specs to multiple parts manufacturers to ensure that parts are available for all the cars they sell.

> Apple commoditized apps and the operating system by giving them away for free, as did Google. Microsoft commoditized PC manufacturers, etc.

Giving things away for free isn't commoditizing the compliment, that's merely a loss leader strategy. Getting third parties to develop apps and and give them away for free or extremely low prices would be the example you're looking for.
> It takes place in a near-future where solar and hydrogen energy are robust and cost effective enough (...)

As of now, each bit of solar/hydrogen/etc. energy technology requires raw materials mined from around the globe, processed in factories around the world, and assembled in some other corner of the world: the number of people that made it possible could easily add up to millions. And these people are doing it to make money: there's no incentive to make the technology suitable for someone who's planning to get lost in a forest and stop paying.

In short, I don't think these technology will allow you to "walk away" any more than an iPhone can.