skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And yet none of the food we farm hasn’t been modified, genetically

On one hand we have a complex adaptative ecological system we lived in for millions of years and adapted to it. We leverage it as a context to make plants change in a way we tested for a lot of time as well. All that happen in the boundaries of this tested system, but only benefit from the self-balancing mechanism of said system.

Then, the result itself, by nature, is slow enough that we can assess the effects.

On the other hand, we have a very new barely tested tool we use to make a big change on a very small and limited characteristics of an organism. We have little feedback on it, we don't have the context of a huge ecosystem to drive it. We just think, that, according to a few variables we know, it should be ok. Also the result are very fast and we can't see the effects yet.

It's like the difference between loosing weight with quick diets and one with a balance diet. The first one can have very accurate variables it works on, and kwow scientifically the causes and effects of what will make you loose weight.

However, it's almost always better to loose weight on a longer, but more global balance diet. The system of your body adapts to a lot of things, and is not an island without a context. It's not just a program with a few variables. It has a LOT of variables, evolves, and is influenced by what's going on outside.

The way you see thing is a very reductionist thinking. It means because we understand small parts of a system, we understand it all. And since we understand it all, we are safe from mistakes.

The thing is, I know many friends who can tell you exactly what are the social interactions happening on a diner table, and yet can't do anything about it. The reductionist mindset make for great rocket scientists, but terrible gardeners.

> Are you as worried about new strains of rice?

There is no such things as a free lunch. Selective breeding coupled with intensive farming have caused a diminishing of biodiversity and rendered a lot of our crops vulnerable to predators and parasites. In return, we use more pesticides, which has been shown to have harmful consequences on our health, but also on the ecosystem, e.g: killing a massive about of useful bugs.

The thing is, I don't really trust for profit entities to make the right decision when it's about the future of the human specie. It's not their agenda. It's not about being bad or good, it's just the nature of thing: when something is not your priority, you don't do it.

> But perhaps it’s because I’ve not been exposed to the anti-GMO propaganda

I'm not American.
That’s what I thought you meant at first, hence my size comment.
An honestly held belief that their child would have a miserable, depressed, ill life I could understand - especially because those traits can be heritable. I can also understand sour grapes. However the other arguments seem very ill-motivated.
They don't depend on geothermal activity. They depend on the relatively constant temp of the ground below the freeze line. In most places if you go down a few feet the earth is 40-50 degrees F. Its basically a heat pump that uses water instead of air.

My sister outside of Pittsburgh, PA has had a https://www.waterfurnace.com for 17 years. Her system has paid for itself a few times over. She has 1500 ft of plastic tubing burried in her front yard.
The fact that it beat Stockfish9 is not what is impressive with AlphaZero.

What was impressive was the way Stockfish9 was beaten. AlphaZero played like a human player, making sacrifices for position that stockfish thought were detrimental. When it played as white, the fact that is mostly started with the Queen pawn (despite that the King pawn is "best by test") and the way AlphaZero used Stockfish pawnstructure and tempo to basicaly remove a bishop from the game was magical.

Yes, since its a game, it's "useless", but it allowed me (and i'm not the only one) to be a bit better at chess. It's not world hunger, not climate change, it's just a bit of distraction for some people.

PS: I was part of the people thinking that Genetic algorithm+deep learning was not enough to emulate human logical capacities, AlphaZero vs Stockfish games made me admit i was wrong (even if i still think it only works inside well-defined environments)
Agreed. I highly advise against this. What I heard when I read this headline was 'WebAssembly has no vulnerabilitities so we can run remote WebAssembly code in ring 0 without worry'. Almost everything has some kind of vulnerability, it is simply a matter of the time necessary to find it. The more analyzed and tested a software is, the more time it will take to find the next vulnerability (Barnhill's Law).
I think that this is a critical point to understand and it highlights why Scrum has been so successful. We know from research in the 80's, and 90's 90% of Software projects failed, due to things like poor estimates or wrong requirements or delays.

Agile/Scrum has addressed a significant portion of those concerns by introducing lean processes. This visibility has enabled the business to understands what is happening in the SDLC quickly and can reprioritize and redirect if things are no longer matching expectations.

Where Scrum tends to fail (IMHO) is that it doesn't integrate well with other business units. I think the industry needs to focus on release management (predicting outcomes) as a process to help marketing teams, sales teams, etc... if they need to know what is happening in the next quarter, etc...

Either that or everyone needs to wait until engineering is finished before talking about new features (sounds a bit like the tail wagging the dog)
Despite the fun part, if they keep notes of their client names, it has to be GDPR compliant.

That’s the example I give to my client, but with a hairdresser. If they give you fidelity card and they got a copy of your name in a cardboard box, then yes they have to comply to GDPR.

Here in France, even the media says that GDPR is for internet companies, not explaining that it’s for every companies. So most of them are surprised when you tell them they have to be compliant.
I like the concept of "cheap talk". In my company they always celebrate sales growth and higher profits loudly. It really seems to motivate a lot of people while at the same time salaries are frozen so most of them get no benefit from the "good news".
For a typical working man job, this is the unfortunate reality of the job market

For tech jobs, this is why people jump ship every few years.
Our engagement ring was an heirloom. Additional gemstone jewelry has mostly been synthetic corundums, as I find the superior hardness and refractive index of diamond to be flawed by its 4 planes of perfect cleavage. And also, we wanted to poke the DeBeers cartel in its eye, by not giving them any of our money, ever. That was explicitly a concern about diamonds.

The synthesis process for the giant corundum boules used to make lenses and windows and such is pretty cool, too.

> "Synthetic diamonds, which can be produced in about 500 hours, share the same physical, chemical and optical characteristics as natural stones. But they are not nearly as valuable."

This "article" is an advertisement. This bullshit statement seals it. Value is demand driven. The only way for DeBeers to force mined diamonds to sell for more than grown diamonds is with relentless marketing to make people think there is a meaningful difference. And there is. Mined diamonds have historically resulted in a lot of human misery to bring the stones to market, whereas grown diamonds use some electricity and can come from any industrial park.
How do you know they are coming from "good" teams? And if so, isn't it reasonable to suppose that they might carry over good practices in their new environment?

I don't doubt that there are bad developers---I've definitely encountered them. But software development is a team sport, and it makes no more sense to just "recruit good people and leave them alone" in software than it would to do the same in basketball. Great teams have both talented people and winning strategy.
Having worked at primarily at “informally agile” software companies in Silicon Valley (and I count Google as one), I see an important bit of truth in the article that Scrum ideas have become the embodiment of agile, and ideas from Scrum that may not make sense in isolation have become standard practice in software development and are somehow seen as the alternative to “waterfall” development, even if they have nothing inherently to do with waterfall vs agile development.

For example, it’s
never made sense to me to have a powerful product owner while treating the development team as N interchangeable workers who may have “areas of focus” but have no roles, responsibilities, or organization among themselves, smearing out any sort of power or responsibility for technical quality like butter spread on toast. And yet, the fact that Scrum says to do it makes me wonder if that’s why everyone does it. Reading Scrum’s idea of a development team made me facepalm.

I don’t think the article is attacking a straw man that Scrum can turn a bad team into a good one. It may be pointing out that Scrum is regularly used to turn a good team into a bad one. Because everyone wants to be “agile,” even if they never use the word Scrum, they are implementing bad Scrum or cargo-cult Scrum by default.
It sounds like a perfect question for XKCD's what-if? (https://what-if.xkcd.com/)

Too bad it isn't regularly updated anymore.
Defect attractors
The language is memory safe, so it is theoretically limited to the surface area that the non-memory-safe OS libraries allow. Of course, that is assuming there are no exploits in the WebAssembly compiler, and no exploits in the OS libraries.

Access to syscalls would not be unusual in any case. This is the normal attack surface for an OS. The new attack surface is the WebAssembly compiler and checker.

To be honest though, given the processor vulnerabilities that have come about, I don't know if I really feel so bad about software protections like this anymore. Nothing is a panacea, even magical processor protection rings.
One problem I have with pan-spermia is: Why is there only one tree of life? Not several independent trees. If life evolved in one of the exo-planets, is not possible that several independent forms of life evolved in several planets and some ended up on Earth.
You are supposed to take the promotion, update your linkedin, and find a real position with that title elsewhere for more money.
ERRATA: Not Arrheniius: Amontons' laws; da Vinci's experiment.[1]

[1] Slides 2 and 3 of http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/suspensions-c18/robbins/
I gave a talk in November at GOTO Berlin about why a globally consistent transactional database is a better fit for most distributed ledger applications than a blockchain.

If you are interested in the relational database approach, the middle of the talk (and the associated example code) might be a fun place to start. https://blog.fauna.com/talk-video-build-a-serverless-distrib...
Google Assistant vs. Alexa Development
SWARMing: Scaling Without a Religious Methodology
Ask HN: Anyone got any suggestions for good product marketing resources
I find myself in a product management role for multiple software products. Having got here via a technical route I recognize my product marketing knowledge could be better so would welcome suggestions for good resources to help me better understand product marketing.
At some point, it has to be cheaper and logistically simpler to transfer ownership and not transport the bits. Or the old fallback:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. - Andrew S. Tanenbaum

s/station wagon/"40 foot trailer";s/tapes/disks
More context:

http://lsneff.me/nebulet-booting-up/

http://lsneff.me/why-nebulet/
It seems to be targeted at content creators that routinely have to send very large (~1TB) files. If Masv can do this in a fairly sane way, without issues like "whoops, failed at 99%, try again!" then that's quite a good niche to be in.

Especially since there are plenty of post-production companies that host their own 'customer portal' where files can be uploaded/downloaded, which probably has plenty of security issues and so on. This can then be replaced by a branded Masv page, I guess?
Not sure if that trick works any more in recent updates.
Google Drive allows files up to 5TB https://support.google.com/drive/answer/37603?hl=en but does not give any guarantee you will not breach some magical limits set.

I guess MASV is transparent about file sizes (no limit) and bandwidth is the resource you pay for, so there is transparency on the SLA.
Ask HN: Any interest in project PhD$$$ – monetise your PhD?
Hi all, I am now working at PhD$$$ www.phdsss.com , a new internet project aimed at helping people monetise their PhD through a dedicated job board, tailored news, data science findings and hopefully a community. In these populist times, it may be useful to reassert the value of peer reviewed knowledge and methods against gut feelings and unchecked opinions, that’s why I think this project can stick around long enough to become profitable. I can go bootstrapped & solo for a lifestyle business or with seed money & co-founders for a startup attempt: any interested party out there? Thanks.
What is this? A Node.js runtime equivalent for TypeScript? But written in Go and V8?

Is it single threaded, non-blocking IO? Or will it more closely aligned with Go coroutines? i.e. do I have to deal with callbacks and/or async/await?
I think it's pretty awful and, as someone who cares about privacy, feels kind of disrespectful. (Layering disrespect under humor doesn't change it.) The basic attitude is: yes, we use all the tracking technology available and give your data to all the scary third parties, and no, you shouldn't be surprised because that's internet standard these days, and you don't know how this tech works anyway, so haha and good luck.
Hands-On: HomePod’s AirPlay2 UI [video]
it's also why they try to instill&enforce the 'job hopper' stigma
> (especially given about half will end in divorce)

If a person was married in their 20s and 30s but their marriage ends in a divorce in 40s this person spent a very significant part of their life with a companion. It simply doesn't matter that the marriage ended up with a divorse, as long as it lasted and both parties were satisfied, it was a marriage. The fact that the marriage ended up with a divorce doesn't make it less quality, or less worthy to spend more money on.
Hmm, yup, that's way more eye candy than I thought was available. Agree that it should be very difficult to get to that stuff during auto-pilot.
agreed, what's the difference?
فوائد العسل الابيض للحامل في رمضان
Powered by what?
The data appears to come from here[1], which describes it as,

> Once we have constructed the individual hourly earnings data, we match the hourly earnings of individuals observed in both the current month and 12 months earlier. The matching algorithm results in an average of 2,400 individual wage growth observations per month. We then compute the median of the distribution of individual 12-month wage changes for each month.

That seems to indicate that it does not take inflation into account.

[1]: https://www.frbatlanta.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker.aspx?pan...
That goes below a discontinuity, 256 base pairs is well below the smallest organism ever observed. A single gene is on average around 10^4 bases, and the simplest organisms have around 10^3 necessary genes. Life below 10^3 base pairs may not evolve at the same speed. It's certainly not safe to talk about it in terms of base pairs, in that era there might not have even been any.
This is the only version I've known— I haven't read the book.

I highly recommend this story to anyone who's even slightly curious.
I wonder if scientists in the future will ponder how microchips were invented before the steam engine.
Four planes of perfect cleavage.

That's why my favorite stones are corundum and nephrite.
We are so happy, you experienced our fantastic continously integrated customer epxerience that we release carefully untested to our selected users.

To be honest, that windows could degrade that much, without the people running en mass to chrombooks or linux, shows just how far these are away from what people expect from a desktop experience.

They dont want to relearn gui concepts, they do not want to miss theire programs, they do not want to study computer sciences to use theire machines, and they suffer in silence through all this for that. Im sure this is supossed a statement to show how bad windows is, but it truely reveals how pitiful the competition beyond niche-groups is.
12 Little Daily Tasks That Will Change Your Life Forever
(2006) Dependency Injection Demystified
Those warnings turn to errors of course. That’s what they’re warning you about.
A well-groomed backlog is not working code. So I don't get how that somehow means there's nothing to talk about. If there's an agile MVP, it's "write some working code, get feedback on it, then repeat until everyone's happy within some tolerance." Scrum is designed to increase feedback, but it's a floor, not a ceiling.
npm, gems, rvm, protractor, node-debugger, etc

Random advice from the internet. The root problem space is NP. Ignoring that NPM -> node and javascript, gems -> Ruby && gems -> g >= 2, rvm -> Rubies >= 2, protractor => Angular, and minimizing etc. to c == 2, there are 7! combinations. Or more visually, a graph with 5040 edges.

1.3e12

More realistically, there are > 15! edges.
Prune the graph with 99.99% efficiency and you've still got a billion things to get wrong, misunderstand, ignore or wire together. Consider starting with the simplest thing that might work. Side projects probably don't need end to end testing. Probably not Node and Ruby. At least in the beginning.

Circling back, to the 7! there are only a handful of humans with those qualifications, even fewer of them that are consultants, and ~0 that are likely to read this thread. It is likely that you are among the leading experts on the 15! technology.

All this complexity gets dealt with by teams. One person knows RVM, Gems (2!). One person knows NVM and Node-Debugger (2!). One person knows Protractor and etc. (3!) and the problem space starts to look more like P than NP.

Good luck.
Essentially, in the case we of somebody cheating you, they would broadcast a transaction co-signed by you that would close the channel in their favor. This wouldn’t be effective immediately but would have a time component associated from when the channel was opened. To prevent this state from closing out this way, you would be able to broadcast the proof of the actual offchain ledger balance (with the valid signatures for all transactions) and the co-signed transaction to close the channel. For all of this proof, you would also get to take the cheaters money, further disincentivisimg this behavior. However, if the time ran out before you noticed, none of you proof and signed offchain transactions would matter.
RAFT Explained: Introduction to the Consensus Problem (part 1)
A dam built on a 1920s understanding of geology and dam construction is your argument.

And you are ignoring the fact they are trying to tunnel through something with very similar geology.

Okay.
The two are very different. A book is mostly prose, in black and white, by the author. A cover is graphic design elements (and even the text is treated as a design element on the cover), most often in color, created by someone else.
Melting ice is a positive feedback loop (less light is reflected, thus more warming). I wonder which contribution is greater: melting ice, or CO2 trapping waves (?)
It's relative. ring 3 / the hardware isn't guaranteed to be free of vulnerabilities either.

What probably has the most bearing on the securability of a platform is its simplicity, which is on WebAssembly's side.
2022 Chevy Corvette C8 will have nearly 1,000hp
Because people regularly do "recruit good people and leave them alone". At my first job I was the only developer working on the project and I rarely spoke with my boss. He came back from a month long vacation and I had not noticed he was gone.

That's surprisingly common across the field. Most developers work on small teams doing small but often very long lived projects. Code staying in production for 30 years is surprisingly common outside of SV.
There is at least one old house right here in Atlanta, GA that uses geo-thermal.
That's... actually pretty accurate? Dang.
Classic Computer Science Problems in Swift
We do have experience with traditionally grown plants and mixing and cooking them for centuries. So we have the feedback on that.

It's actually a big problem currently for a lot of food.

We do have more cancer, diabetes, obesity and such disease than ever. Those are all problems that are at the very minimum influenced by food. But it took a few decades to manifest.

We may also have many others we do know we have yet, or that we don't know are linked to food.

Occam's Razor, though, says that there are far less likely to have problems with a raw cucumber that we have been eating for 1000 of years than with a Ben n Jerry ice cream we just recently invented, and optimized for people pleasure and the cheapest batch production.

And I really, really love BnJ.
This is the right answer, they are simply making you more marketable, and you are now gaining "New Position" XP
Maybe it makes sense for an apartment building or an entire block, together? (That said, a 2.5% inflation-adjusting yield isn’t terrible.)
Nonlocal Position Changes of a Photon Revealed by Quantum Routers
Do you chunk the upload so if I lose internet for a second, it can just upload the chunks that failed?

This is an issue I have with one of my employees. They only get consumer Comcast, and the connection is crap. I ended up writing a bash script that will chunk and scp the files to a central server, and if it fails a chunk, it leaves it in the directory for her to manually re-run.

That said, I pay $20/mo for the file server (which i would no matter what) and it has 3TB of outbound bandwidth and unlimited inbound, and is less than 5% of your cost.
is this a problem with pg bouncer? pg bouncer supports transactional pooling which is meant to only return connections back into the pool when they are not in a transaction. so seeing as it keeps tracking of the transaction status it seems pretty crazy that it would put a connection back into the pool that has an open transaction.

i tested this on my local machine and if i drop a connection while it is inside a transaction it closes the server connection.

client close:

2018-05-30 15:28:42.068 21702 LOG C-0x7f9728816a10: DB/USER@[::1]:64342 closing because: client close request (age=85)
2018-05-30 15:28:42.068 21702 LOG S-0x7f972980a190: DB/USER@127.0.0.1:5432 closing because: unclean server (age=85)

client unexpected death:

2018-05-30 15:33:57.197 21702 LOG C-0x7f9728816a10: DB/USER@[::1]:64376 closing because: client unexpected eof (age=15)
2018-05-30 15:33:57.198 21702 LOG S-0x7f972980a190: DB/USER@127.0.0.1:5432 closing because: unclean server (age=10)

i guess it sucks that it doesn't reuse the connection but presumably this shouldn't happen that often that it would actually be a problem.
"..it's the exact same thing."

This seems like flawed logic. It's not the exact same thing. If a painter reproduces a Picasso, otherwise knows as art fraud, does it have the same value as the original? Why not? I'll leave it at that.