skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Is the air too thin to support any sort of lighter than air vehicle?

Yes
There's been a few links regarding WiFi backscatter use around here recently.

Connecting RF-Powered Devices to the Internet : http://iotwifi.cs.washington.edu/

3-D printed objects connect to WiFi without electronics : http://www.washington.edu/news/2017/12/05/in-first-3-d-print...
I don't understand the authors choice to limit himself to Apple or Google. You've been able to do development on Linux notebooks (and Windows notebooks, of course) since decades. I can absolutely recommend Dell (and ThinkPad, though not from personal experience) notebooks with Ubuntu preinstalled/officially supported. Or is the question if a Chromebook is en vogue to use this season at Starbucks?
It sounds like it might be feasible: the atmosphere on the surface of Mars is described as the equivalent of Earth at "100,000 feet" (30 km) but the record for a weather balloon is 53km, and balloons carrying people have gone as high as 40km.

The helicopter being proposed is "the size of a softball", though, and not the main focus of the mission. The high altitude weather balloons have been much bigger and would probably need a dedicated mission.
What do you mean? H-index applies to individual researchers. All nature journals have high impact factors - and readership among hard scientists, but i dont think ML researchers read Nature every month. I understand that some reserachers need the prestige factor. But honestly , in the case of deep mind, i think they are giving prestige to Nature as an ML journal, where they previously had none. They could have published their results in a reputable open access journal like eLife instead, and do a service to the open access community. Publishing closed access is not a great direction to move towards. Also, why didn't they pay for Nature's open access option, it's not like they don't have the money.
Perhaps the App engine is intended to aid in creating that desert of profitability.
I don't know, there's the "unvote"/"undown" buttons to correct these kinds of mistakes, but I guess most people won't double-check.
Almost no junk mail can be easily unsubscribed from in my experience.
PyCon 2018 – Conference Day 1 (May 11)
Curso Dr. Barakat – Conquiste Equilíbrio E Resinificação Em Sua Vida
Emacs encourages this behavior because its operations that work on sentences require the use of two spaces after a period. Although it's possible to make it work with single spaces, it won't be able to reliably distinguish between abbreviations (such as etc.) and the ends of sentences.
And why's it always malicious adversaries? Why can't we ever get some benevolent adversaries around here?
When I was growing up in the early 80s, my engineer father had an HP-35 that he adored. He ultimately added an HP-12c, too, and when I was in middle school I was gifted an HP-32sii. I was the only weirdo using RPN. :) I upgraded to an HP-48g in high school when everyone else was using Ti-82.

I can't really think of any other company or product line I've had such a longstanding relationship with. FWIW, I still have both of my HP calculators and they work great!
How has your experience been with battery and portability? I'm leaning towards buying a new laptop that I can carry around comfortably. I'm comfortable with remotely working on a more powerful PC if needed. Any models you'd recommend? I much rather would pick anything else over a MacBook.
Ask HN: Are governments and other public sector organizations exempt from GDPR?
I've been getting mixed opinions/interpretations regarding this, although I believe they shouldn't.

Can someone elucidate me?
Nixon’s counsel for domestic affairs, John Erlichman, later said:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

IOW the War on Drugs is based solely on an obsolete, sinister political agenda.
They mock vegans and eat 4lb of steak a day: meet 'carnivore dieters'
So why isn't that happening? It seems odd to me that in an ostensibly free market economy, a good investment opportunity would be ignored.

Does the government just say "no" to letting wind and solar producers add capacity?
My pressure sometimes would drop just after the donation while still in the seat, until I figured out it was due to dehydration; the one thing that solves the issue completely for me is drinking plenty of water the day before.
Persistence and QA. Find your own mistakes before someone else does.
I remember reading a Dutch study where nearly all "child is allergic to milk" diagnosis by parents turned out to be false. Unfortunately, I can't find the study.
I did it at 32. Went from VFX to react and react native dev.

I started with HarvardX CS50, they teach you coding and coding concepts from scratch. Highly recommended.

After that, do side projects, look for junior jobs and viola! You'll be missing your free time in no time!
Being Productive Does Not Make You Learn
Reddit has always seemed to have error messages that go away when you refresh or wait some time, sometimes on page load and sometimes on actions like voting/commenting. I assume they're all just server load errors but they have some heuristic to not explicitly tell me their servers are overloaded every day.
I'm just glad you were able to corellate saving lives and spam emails. /s
You speak the truth. Vampires is what the red cross should call themselves. Of course, being bluntly honest about the aggressive nature of these organizations, or sharing any negative related to a percieved "social good" simply MUST be silenced! Unsurprising.
There's one Dell model that all of the hardcore Linux devs in the office use that I've heard called the rough equivalent of the MacBook Pro. XPS 15, I believe.
I've been doing that for years: http://kmkeen.com/c100p-tweaks/

Development doesn't require any more CPU than word processing. You're type stuff up, and there is a pretty strict grammar check. I don't get why people why people want to run huge things on a laptop. It is way more economical to shell into a beefy server when you need big iron instead of carrying it with you.
I recently noticed that I don’t learn much on productive days at work. Rather I learn a lot when everything seems to be falling apart and I struggle to get features out.

I think this counter-intuitive fact might have some implications on many of our careers because we are continually pushed to be productive, not necessarily to learn. Therefore I wrote about my observation in detail, and what we it leaves us to do.
Yeah I resist it to my own detriment. But on the other hand, I get people not wanting to hear about what I think about Canada's foreign minister (my favourite politician) when they're following me to read data science and cyber security articles.
> Having everything already in the cloud in a production-like environment has enormous advantages.

Could you talk about this a little more? I have never used C9. I use git and an IDE on multiple devices (Linux on home desktop, Windows on old ass laptop, macOS at work) so I can work in basically the same environment on any of those devices any time. Granted, I can’t just pull up a browser on any device, but that seems like it would be a rare use case (for me, anyway).

Sounds like you don’t need that MacBook anymore, wanna sell it to me cheap? (:
The xps 15 is quite good in terms or performance and battery life. I have the 1080p model and it usually lasts around 9 hours with light usage on battery.
No Death, No Taxes the Libertarian Futurism of a Silicon Valley Billionaire
Maybe it’s the cost of the actors and actresses
Some people still write code that is compiled.
What does social science have to offer the data industry?
Did you remove the Siri button from the touch bar, or disable Siri altogether? Maybe try doing both.
Well, at best it could be "open" in a tivoized sense, but nothing more than that.
This part of the article struck me as strange:

> You can reduce your blood viscosity by donating blood on a regular basis, which eliminates the iron that may possibly oxidize in your blood.

The whole reason why blood is red, why red blood cells carry oxygen, is because of the iron, which is oxidized to transport oxygen ... ?

Given that only healthy folks are allowed to donate blood, surely there's a fair amount of selection bias going on?
Russia was allegedly buying pro-LGBT ads? Surprising.

Also there are several posts with russian text on the picture like this one [1].

But this doesn't look like a state-level operation. A single person could easily make all those pictures.

[1] https://www.documentingreality.com/forum/russian-ads/2015-Q2...
You can make functions with default arguments right now (a little easier thanks to Impl Trait):

http://play.rust-lang.org/?gist=4f74d3dcee0031e99cb99bb54da5...

Concerning keyword args as I remember them from Python you would probably have to hack something together with an Into<Option<HashMap<some_type_for_arg_names, some_enum_with_variants_containing_acceptable_types>>>

Concerning "named paramters" I think you would have to apply some of the same trickery in order to be able when calling the fn to leave out args or give them in a different order than specified in the fn header.

Or what I've sometimes seen written was (e.g. for configuration passing) structs created with Option<some_type> that were then passed to one or more functions which in turn get the values (named params/default args if you will) from that "object", being able to pick and choose the appropriate values to get in a given function/method.
A development philosophy
Why does the BBC use "Nasa" instead of "NASA"?
Had to read the documentation to see that serving the comments-widget one time consumes 1 credit, but sending a single email-notification consumes 15.

It seems very "expensive" to send emails.

Looks like a cute product, and the pricing mechanism is interesting. Good luck.

(I wrote some a simple self-hosted system, far less featureful, but it seems popular enough - http://github.com/skx/e-comments/ )
Why don't they test the helicopter at 100k feet then?
It would be interesting to see how the helicopter handles potential dust storms which can have winds of up to 94 km/hr.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Effect_of_dust...
The government is mandated by law. GDPR clearly states that requirements set by law take precedence, doesn't matter what kind of organization or business.
Because then it would be a yet another completely unremarkable and uninteresting device with no reason to buy it, like other Android or iOS phones.
The pixelbook is rather expensive for what it is.

I have a secondhand hp z620 (32 cores, 64 gigs of ram) and a 4k screen. Total cost < £700

Whilst being about 4 years old, its still much much faster than a top end macbook. Yes its not portable. However I don't move around that much at work (If I do, everything is in git, or one can ssh in from another machine.)

if I need to work from home, I have any old laptop to ssh in and work.

being able to make -j 30 on a large project, is worth every penny, or not being able to move it about.
Pretty much all MacBook Pros. Maybe 15-20:1 these days over devs on Linux machines from what I've seen.

It's funny because growing up as an Apple user in the mid 90s it was reversed. And we didn't have a package manager like Homebrew on OS 9. It's so much easier to be a Mac dev today than historically.
The guy isn't southern though, he's from Africa and learnt English as an adult. You'd expect his accent to be closer to one of someone from Benin (or perhaps neighbouring Nigeria). It doesn't read too different from the way people from Nigeria speak today.
And to think we called blood-letting quack medicine! :P
This site has more info : https://www.eugdpr.org/gdpr-faqs.html

But I would say government offices and public sector organisations do fall under this:

".. It applies to all companies processing and holding the personal data of data subjects residing in the European Union, regardless of the company’s location."
Yes, there is also a simple derivation in Boys's classic book, "Soap Bubbles: Their Colors and Forces Which Mold Them", p. 136. [1, 2]

[1] pdf link (it is out of copyright): http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/soap-bubbles-boys...

[2] google books link (free preview), go to the very last page for the color plate
The Dell XPS 9560 is a 7700hq + NVIDIA 1050. I had it, it was great. Just was forced to upgrade to a XPS 9570 that has a 8750H + NVIDIA 1050 Ti.

It is a great laptop and cost effective for the 9570 right now, $1699 CAD right now with the coupon code: http://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/dell-laptops-netbooks-and-tab... I have a larger SSD and memory sitting around the office, so I don't count that in the cost.
ChromeOS is actually well designed and secure, has pen & touch support for 2-in-1s, and is going in the right direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16813796
I mean, the spectrum still has a width, it's just a very large width -- which is why the coherence time is very low.

In a more abstract way, you're right that we are reaching for a metaphor here: if a frequency distribution is sharply peaked around one frequency then we can roughly say that the light "is that frequency" but then modify this by saying that the bits that are off-frequency, while they are "also that frequency," become "phase-incoherent" after a characteristic time or distance. That is not actually correct; they are simply different frequencies -- but it makes the interpretation easier. That metaphor begins to break down when you've got such a wide spread of frequencies: red light can only "pretend to be" blue light for a vanishing period of time.

To put it more plainly, the phase-coherence time is the inverse of the spectral width in frequency-space; multiply it by $c$ to get a phase-coherence length. If you applied it to a truly monochromatic ideal source, you would find that the time and length are infinite -- it only makes sense for real distributions with normal spread. But that's all distributions, including blackbody distributions like sunlight -- it's just that those distributions have very large spread and therefore very low coherence lengths: but it's the same definition either way.
>Where you would normally say the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR, NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art201307021...
And annoyingly every link you click tries to open a new tab, or uses ajax to open things inline. It's really annoying to click links and see "Firefox has blocked a popup", etc.

Once the new look becomes mandatory I'll be moving to another site, even if I have to write it, host it, and populate it myself.
That letter should be required reading and the anecdote further cements the 'fish rots from the head' proverb as accurate. After all, without ethics at the top there is no corrective action against such relatively minor nudges in the wrong direction and over time that will accumulate until you get a completely different version of the company. One that will never ever have the kind of stature that HP enjoyed.
I love coding on dual 4K screens powered by my laptop. How does a web-based Cloud 9 work on dual 4K screens? Can a Chromebook power dual 4K screens that are external?

I currently run an XPS 9560 but am waiting now for a 9570. Laptops are definitely replacing desktops even for high powered tasks, but I am not sure Chromebooks have the horsepower yet.

The other place that Chromebook's fall down is when traveling. Lots of places like airplains, trains have spotting wifi/cell coverage. With a Chromebook you are dead in the water. If you spent a lot of time traveling, not being able to work is sort of a bummer.
I also remember an article about a very low power camera performing read operations in an analog way with no onboard power. I think. I can't find the article though.

Also there was https://github.com/seemoo-lab/mobisys2018_nexmon_software_de....

If you think about it, there are a lot more things that can be done with wifi if you can arbitrarily TX/RX signals. In fact I'm getting a bit scared now.
Building GCC as a Cross Compiler for Raspberry Pi
There are plenty of shows that lose money during the first run with the expectation that they will make money in syndication, streaming, etc.

Most production companies though will sell the right to the network to run the show at a price where the network can make money off of advertising during the first run and the production company will take the hit and make it up later.
I was mostly excited about slice patterns because of a pattern I wanted to be able to write:

some_collection.windows(2).filter(|[a,b]|a==b).map(|[a, _] |a).collect();

Turns out the compiler rejects that with a "refutable pattern" error, because the args part of the filter/map closures do not handle the situation where the slice could be empty, which AFAIK can not occur when using windows/chunks/...

Maybe there has to be some special case handling for this pattern to be valid?
> wasn't part of the platform tooling

I think lisp did (to a lesser extent still do) suffer from the "whole system syndrome" that also affected Smalltalk; I'm still not sure that I'd find it comfortable to marry small lisp programs with a shell pipeline, or convenient to work with sockets, files or even databases in a familiar way from within common lisp. Nor would i know how to easily share such code (although quicklisp has made strides her).

That is to say, you could probably write ansible/puppet in common lisp - but I'm not sure if you should.

Certain special programs, like unison (in ocaml)[1] combine breaking new ground, doing something a little complicated - and justify the use of a powerful language. Other examples might be pandoc (haskell) or gnu guix (scheme software/Os manager).

Perhaps it's wrong to throw scheme under the bus, for common lisp being too full of features.

But my (admittedly superficial) impression is that even "pragmatic" schemes tend to be difficult to integrate as system glue; that means both on a single platform (use for scripting, piping files, writing config files, start/stop services - Running Os commands) and as cross-platform (either distribution of artifacts for different systems, like an exe for Windows and elf binaries for Linux and bsds - or readily available run-times that work well on multiple platforms).

It may well be that many of these issues are fixed today - but the impression that sbcl is a poor fit for a system language for writing parts that are easy to integrate well remain. Both if you want a deb/msi package of a gui app, and if you want to drop some binaries in /usr/local/bin to call snippets of code that work well with the shell.

[ed: What is funny/sad is that java kept almost everything that was bad with lisp/smalltalk, and very few of the really good parts. But they introduced a more familiar api for files, streams etc - and managed to push for the jvm to be installed everywhere.]

[0] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/index.html
Can you tell me more about powdered sulfur to avoid tick bites? I'm very prone to ticks and can't handle deet and essential oils don't seem to cut it. What type of sulfur do you use and can it be used directly on skin or just clothing?

On the plus side I hear they are testing now in the North East for various tick borne diseases and Zika in the South on donations. Progress is just slow and the current tests are not perfect.
Phishing with EV – conclusion
I forgot to add: in Switzerland. Switzerland is big on pumped hydro. Is pumped hydro in Switzerland cheaper than batteries?
I use a x230 with the biggest battery. It's decently thick/heavy compared to the modern ultra-slim laptops, but it's compact, fast enough and it set me back barely over 300€ total and the battery lasts 9+ hours.

It sounds like budget is not your problem, but I thought I'd just mention this for any students etc. passing by.
XPS 13 user here, big fan
RUSSIA-LINKED FACEBOOK ADS TARGETED a SKETCHY CHROME EXTENSION AT TEEN GIRLS
That is correct.

There are some small exceptions, such as in San Marino, where their small population (~32,000) and sharing of phone infrastructure with Italy makes it difficult to calculate a valid independent televote. And televotes can sometimes be ruled invalid by the auditor (PwC) if their auditing suggests it has been manipulated.

https://eurovoix.com/2017/03/08/san-marino-ebu-rejects-broad...
Flutter for mobile
Is it possible to run flutter on mobile, right away from coding to running in device?
I've got a Dell XPS 13", and I'm absoluting loving it; especially the keyboard works great for me as a touch typist/vi user, which I didn't expect since the keyboard is what ThinkPads are acclaimed for. That said, battery mileage is no match to Apple notebooks in my experience. I can get 3 to 4 hours max, though I'm occasionally doing CPU-intense stuff which will reduce this to 1-2 hours. If Apple actually would produce a "Pro" notebook with a usable keyboard and without the TouchBar thingy, and with actual "Pro" port options and replaceable parts, I'd be considering Apple again since I had a good experience with my PowerBook back in the day.
You'd be surprised how many Linux drivers (new and old) actually come from netbsd or freebsd.
Thanks for the link to your system. Is there a demo instance somewhere?

Yeah, emails are quite expensive. AWS itself charges $100 per 1 million plus additional infrastructure to manage subscriptions + email validation & dealing with bounces.

Therefore, email notifications are an optional feature. I hope in the future push notifications will be supported much better by the browsers so that it won't make sense to use emails.
I removed it once. I may be mistaken here, but if I recall, removing it slightly shifted the layout of the other keys throwing off my muscle memory for the f keys.

I'm interested in a solution. I probably hit that key unintentionally 10 times a day.
> the onus is on you to show it before claiming that.

"White-Flight" is a well-known concept. Also of note, the onus is on the accuser in most Western societies...
What differentiates you from freelancer.com and upwork.com?

The Problem at freelancer.com (currently testing that) is that it is hard to differentiate yourself as a good contractor it seems more like quantity then quality. However isn't that just the result from getting big?

Maybe there is an inherent stochastic process in freelancing platforms that lowers the average rate as more people get on it. So your main challenge should be to avoid that but that seems like a hard problem.

Toptal does screening, which does not scale, Upwork and Freelancer do nothing (or do upselling via courses, bid-boosts, etc.).
Does it have a replacable battery? I'd be less annoyed about 4 hours of battery if I could swap.

(Also if anyone knows of a model that's got more of a focus on battery life for someone who is SSHing into external machines for most CPU intensive tasks I'd be all ears)
Semi-related question: is the reason smaller people can't donate smaller quantities of blood that transfusion volumes are completely standardized and odd quantities of blood not practically usable? I ask as someone who's never been close to passing the (apparently universal in the US) 115lb threshold and maybe never will.
Well, he doesn't actually have however many billion dollars. He had the equivalent value, mostly in Amazon stock.