skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here we have a difference of opinion. I strongly believe corporations are less accountable to the general public than individuals or (democratic) Government, including the Military. I simply do not believe in corporate personhood.
I do think there is a large distinction between individuals and corporations, and corporations, on the whole behave much more unethically and can wreak much more havoc than individuals. The large ones also seem to have an uncanny ability to perpetuate their existence (in various guises and incarnations) and generate some really nasty externalities.

I do think that the level of freedom and lack of accountability (vis-a-vis individuals and governments) corporations enjoy in the United States has reached insane levels. One the other hand, I do prefer it to the situation in China, where any corporation is likely to become a tool of the State. I believe corporations can and should contribute back to the Military if they have benefited financially from military technology. Perhaps not as much as would have been the case in a Socialist/Communist country, but definitely at some level higher than the present.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9698870

Also article about its reception: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/7740986
I haven't personally used the Intel compilers in about a decade. I agree that they are very finicky. When I did regularly build code with them, my group would stick with a particular point-release for months at a time. Even minor revisions could cause previously stable calculations to fail.

But, like many others, we kept using Intel's troublesome optimizing compilers because execution time is very dear when you run compute-intensive code from several hours to a few days per run, sometimes on hundreds or thousands of CPUs.
I don't get why you're downvoted so much. Coal certainly has a place, even nuclear does in a country as big as the US. Going on a "monofuel" energy production (which would be gas, for now) has a lot of hidden costs on top of the obvious ones (gas is significantly more expensive than coal on industrial scales for energy production, but still far cheaper than nuclear or solar).

Not to mention that using coal extends the deadline on your country's gas reserves, reduces the much-hated fracking etc.
That problem has been described in sociology and is called a Matthew effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
I'm pro UBI and think we'd all be better off if everyone got enough to live and then companies could offer a penny a week if they wanted, since employment would not longer be tied to your ability to live.

This will never work.

First, it is a myth that X amount of money provides adequately for everyone, in part because there is no standard issue normal person.

Second, money reduces friction in trade, thereby providing valuable efficiencies. But if income is entirely unrelated to creating or husbanding some kind of value, the entire system can rapidly come unraveled.
was it braudel’s history of civilizations?
"Software engineering" is definitely a real thing. The vast majority of people who call themselves "software engineers" aren't doing it. They're doing the equivalent of cabinetry at best.
GoToMeeting, Hangouts, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, ooVoo, Viber, etc

Wire or Signal is probably the closest in end-user use / UX to FaceTime, but I think their video calling is only 1:1 so far.
Probably the most cost-effective way of sucking CO2 out of the air is planting trees on a huge scale.
You mean burning coal and capturing carbon back to profit from the price spread?
Yes, I'd expect to see something like https://goo.gl/maps/dbp2fx79ihz

I could easily imagine a stressed human driver unfamiliar with the area following that unstriped gore area as a 'lane', too.
They love their walled garden. When you point out > 80% of new devices sold are Android and can't use FaceTime, they don't care and just downvote without comment.
SQL on Rails
Economics and policies aside, I’m a bit skeptical about the approach described in that article regarding the use of potassium hydroxide (production, transportation) and it’s subsequent processing (to re-release the captured carbon dioxide, somehow transform it into fuel, and let people release again!?); even just the logistics would most likely be releasing a good amount of CO2 if cost is such a huge factor in this.

It just feels like the carbon dioxide released would be a substantial offset to that captured. Ultimately, it would still be viable if the net outcome is a reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide; but I’m not convinced, at least with the approach in question, that humanity’s interest is at the top of the list.

It would be absolutely fantastic and very much appreciated if someone who knows about the actual “accounting” of carbon dioxide in this type of carbon sequestration technology can comment.
I think Twitter has a lot of "myspace risk". They are currently sort-of-cool, but many of their users constantly complain about the service. Their clients are extremely clunky to use and their 'feed' algorithm is laughably bad. A superior alternative would be relatively easy and straightforward to code (and several exist), it's just network effects keeping them alive. People are starting to realize that the way Twitter is designed reinforces and encourages reductive language, hot takes and extreme opinions.

With how much they've gained already this year, I think they are a pretty risky buy. Hell, if Trump stopped tweeting the share price would probably drop 20% overnight.
Maybe. But basic Fortran is pretty easy to learn - it's a somewhat warty but very simple language. It might well be the case that spending three days learning it lets you spend two days writing some straightforward but really fast code.
Apple doesn't have anywhere near 1/3 of the worldwide market. It's closer to 11%.
Consulting is just relationship management and perceptions.

And lots of travel in my experience.
How to suck carbon dioxide from the sky for fuels and more
I got a summer job in college as a web designer for a startup in Texas. It paid $40/hr, which was a ludicrous amount of money for a 20 year old in 2001, or at least it felt like it after having made $5.50 in high school.

So I spent about a month working on the website, and doing buttons and other stuff, and then I was out of things to do. I literally might have a 10 minute task in a day, and no other assignments. I could (and did) watch full-length movies in my cubicle uninterrupted.

Awesome right? It was the most miserable job I've ever had. I'd leave early and forgo billable hours because I just couldn't stand it. Being without purpose, but still showing up and pretending you should be there is really demoralizing.
I meant to say that the “VC or bust” myth works in favor of VCs (since anyone in need of any money at all will feel like they have to work with VC terms)
Suicide rates have increased? That's news to me. I'm skeptical.
The vast majority of lots can be addressed with a handful of designs. No need to solve for all outliers.

Complete bespoke design can be wonderful, but comes with high cost and time.

Fixed designs can also be wonderful, and much more accessible.

Check out https://www.acre.co as an example.

Disclaimer - I'm a founder.
Guys, why are you spending so much time studying lightning? That's never going to be useful - people in 1850.
What makes you think this?
17M people have watched a surprisingly uplifting breakup on YouTube
J.J. Abrams Launches Bad Robot Games
> these plants are in effect starved for CO2, because they evolved during time periods with much higher CO2 levels

Oh, the old argument trotted out again. What do you mean, plants "evolved" in the past and then what? Stopped evolving?
If plants were starved of CO2 now they would go extinct, which they aren't. To prove my point, I present exhibit A: The Amazon rainforest.
It's a question of scale, the oil industry is vast. Exxon has ~1/4 of a trillion dollars per year in revenue while profits swing they tend to be very good over time.

Renewables on the other hand are fractured. Do they go for Wind, Solar, Batteries, Bio fuels, or what? It's not that hard to keep Exxon alive through this transition, but you also need to keep it huge and profitable which is very tricky.

IMO, they might be better off going into chemistry or engineering because being an energy company sounds fine there is little connection between renewables and oil. But again how do you keep that kind of scale?
Corporations are not Persons.
Money is not Speech.

Fix those (which also implies taking the money out of politics) and the rest will follow.
I've worked in 2 out of those 3 professions. I'm a little surprised they are at the top of the list. Contact with nature on a daily basis is really refreshing. However, economic struggle in these fields is really bad: low wages, price competition from industrial-scale companies, seasonal instability. Still surprising that those are the top 3.
Nothing about “make a boatload of money” is bullshit unless we treat capital / wealth as meaningless. The issues that structuralize incentives different from reality is what makes an activity bullshit.

The marketing people are there to discover / address possible customers to feed back to sales, and sales’ purpose beyond simply “just sell” is to work personally (read: emotionally) with powerful decision makers into developing a relationship with the company. And that is the crux of it all - with power concentrated into fewer and fewer hands at companies (mergers do not help here), there is a mass, highly lucrative industry of bullshitters so removed from reality and mostly interested in emotional responses trying to sway these specific people to make high-impact (in terms at least in dollars and real results ideally) decisions. It’s similar to a lot of real estate and car commercials catering to the tastes and cultural norms of the already-wealthy - working with those politically or capitally deficient is a sucker’s game, which only further reinforces the status quo of the powerful primarily accomplishing tasks through higher level relationships built indirectly on the backs of non-bullshitters than anything connected directly to material, concrete real world outputs (the less bullshit work). To me that is the bullshit, not sales and marketing jobs in itself (I have plenty of respect for sales and marketing as professions - the good ones make it clear there is a need and benefit for society to have them around). In practice, many higher level decisions are also meant to make one’s organization appear better than it really is whether it’s to impress outsiders or for internal political capital. But unfortunately for humans at scale, perception becomes reality because so many things get bootstrapped just because people believe in it working.
Parsing is a fairly simple and common activity with a huge background of research. Anything for which that is true in your field is something you should understand.

Parsing, databases, concurrency, floating point numbers, optimization, common data structures, regular expressions, networking, operating systems, recursion, complexity theory, etc., are all things you should understand to be considered a competent programmer.
The oceans may also end up being a higher priority at least at first because there is already evidence that acidification caused by absorption of excess atmospheric carbon us causing ocean ecosystems to break down while disruption on land is still relatively minor.
Also, athletes look like...athletes, with non-facial physical characteristics, such as height and muscle mass, that make it easier to pick them out from a general crowd. A congressmember is less easier to pick out in a room full of other suit-wearing middle-senior aged people.
And lots of people who don't live in mining country identify culturally with the miners. They see themselves as the "real Americans", being victimized by shadowy cultural elites and unnecessary regulations. So the coal miners as a political force aren't relevant per se. The coal miners as a symbol are extremely relevant. This only becomes more potent as American conservatism drifts away from a free market ideology and toward a protectionist/nationalist ideology. It doesn't matter that market forces are doing this to the coal miners. Their traditional way of life must be defended! The importance of intergenerational poverty and black lung disease cannot be overstated!
You mean like the iCloud thing where a bunch of famous women had home videos of themselves stolen?
The reality doesn't matter at this point just what people think.
> way more money and attention might end up going here, increasing the chance of its viability.

This has no chance of ever being viable. Reducing energy usage is way more efficient than 'mitigating' carbon. And if you wanted to mitigate carbon, it costs $0.03 cents per ton just to reduce deforestation, whereas this costs $94 per ton.
Adding privileged containers to Docker Swarm mode
It would have profound philosophical implications, which would surely have a big geopolitical impact over the following decades.
Robin, most of what you mentioned in your article are true and I agree with them. I had very similar situations (conversatons may end up with "alright, this is Product Owner’s call") and I understand most of developers get frustrated about this. I had been there and I was the developer who got frustrated, but I managed to change it (yep I also agree Scrum does not teach us how and we had to figure it out ourselves) by understanding PO, influencing them about what we proposed by describing value and making a plan for win-win. It is not a fun journey to be honest, but once you are there (we are not completely there yet) your team will trust each other and work more collaboratively. I am really happy to know I am not alone and I have so much to say and share, if you are interested in it, saw my experience at https://medium.com/@ericjwhuang/how-scrum-fails-and-what-you...
There's a difference between "difficult" and "can't be done". Yes, facial recognition has come a long way, but it's still non-trivial to set up a custom facial recognition service for your particular needs.
Considering the US has literally entered wars that cost trillions over oil disputes, I think you are pretty much alone.
Are you saying you enjoy doing something you believe to be utterly pointless, or do you enjoy doing some part of the work that serves a purpose except that it's being used for a completely pointless goal?
Consider it this way. That entire liter turns to gas when burned, and in doing so it combines with O2 and other things in the air, resulting in the total weight of the liter + what it combined with entering the air.
Average US build time is 4-6mos for production builders. In areas like CA, it's closer to 12mos.
A Radioactive Lens
To expand on this , growth is real , and it's not random. Value for society is created by having money directed towards more beneficial projects.
Don't forget the phone-sanitizers, the lack of which caused the extinction of the Golgafrincham people to a rare ear-wax virus.
The gap closes, but it closes both ways. Minority groups climb incrementally up the ladder of political and cultural relevance by tearing down the power structures which have implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) served to benefit the white majority, and some white people feel persecuted as their identity with that majority privilege and the assumption of their point of view being the cultural default diminishes.

It sucks to be ostracized, to be tarred with inaccurate stereotypes based on your gender and race, and to have political and social barriers put in place to hold you back on the basis that you are somehow wrong because of the circumstances of your birth, the color of your skin or the configuration of your genitals?

Yes. Yes, it does, doesn't it?

However... no one is lynching white people from trees, holding picnics for it and selling photos of it in drugstores. That is what "institutional hatred" looks like and nothing even close to it is happening to white people, or likely would be tolerated in modern society. What they're getting is the kid-gloves introduction to relative minority membership status.
Most of front-end work isn't making stuff more "user-friendly". It's an arms race of "fancy", showing off that your company is technically up-to-date and has money to burn.
Docker acquired unikernel.org awhile back, so another path to adoption could be for them to roll something useful out to users of the existing docker pipeline.
Others have beat me to it, but gosh, you really don't have to try very hard at all to find examples of him denying that it's a thing.
I'm aware of those sorts of application level logs. I used that sort of thing when I worked at Uber, and I saw it built up over time as more classes of errors were encountered. :)

But there are a whole class of application failures that are handled out-of-band, which is what I was referring to: If you need to debug issues involving hardware then not having an interface to that hardware separate from your application can make it harder to inspect and determine what failure you're running into.

And again I point to application failures within the application frameworks themselves having issues (such as logs not being written out at all) that having an out-of-band monitoring process with a mostly-uncorrelated probability of failure seems to me to be very necessary for handling these less common but potentially more catastrophic issues.

I'll admit that this next statement is a bit of a Call to Authority fallacy, but you'll note that not even Uber or Google use unikernels in production, and I believe these two problem domains are why.
Socionext Implements AV1 Encoder on FPGA Over Cloud Service
This is pretty much the reason at my work there is so much Fortran code already written a lot of it dates back to the '80's. This is mostly fluid dynamics and thermo stuff the math hasn't changed in decades so there is little impetus to rewrite.

I am a Materials engineer I work with Chem/mech engineers on process modelling and simulation in an industrial plant.

You can kind of tell the vintage of programs around here by looking at the languages used.

There are Fortran programs from 80's to 90's.

From early to late 90's there are C++ programs.

Then from late 90's to mid 2000's there are VB6 programs (for a while our work was big on Microsoft, Visual Basic and Access was everywhere - boy did we get burned by that).

From mid 2000's to early 10's there are java programs.

Python seems to be goto nowadays.
Ballmer Peak! https://xkcd.com/323/

But seriously, how would it be a problem? In the afternoons, we often have a beer at our desks while working. I often work at night after having a drink at dinner or in the afternoon after lunch at the pub. Having a pint beside the laptop while answering emails or working on a side project or making content changes for a client wouldn't be especially difficult or problematic.

I've worked for myself for 20 years (http://www.isaacforman.com.au/) so there are rarely issues with time and place of work either. I'm mostly anchored to my desk because I like the room to move of four displays.
Currently the broadest definition of life would be something like: A self-replicating cellular structure having a metabolism to organize resource input and waste. "Cellular" lets us rule out things like fire and crystals, but viruses and RNA soup are also swept away.

I think if we found a population of some kind of self-replicating RNA analogues on another planet, it would be significant enough to revisit that "cellular" constraint. On the other hand, that definition is already so broad that we could conceivably build self-replicating 3D printers that would qualify as life.

We might also take a top-down approach and come up with a good definition of "ecosystem", and then define living things in terms of their role in an ecosystem.
Huh, I lump us in the other camp - the producers / creators. That's the whole reason I went through the trouble to become a web developer. I had a bullshit job before - contract recruiter. No creation. Only added value because engineering managers can't be fucked to figure out how LinkedIn works.

Maybe your product sucks in your eyes? What about the frontend for couch surfing? Helps people connect with locals when they travel. Or OkCupid? People have been married through it.
Software Art Thou: Knit One, Compute One with Kris Howard [video]
You are conflating startups vs small businesses. And small businesses are mostly irrelevant in unionization discussions. Employees rarely bother to unionize at a small business because the more equal balance of power and the closer human relationships between employee and employer yield more reasonable outcomes.
This comparison just sold me on how morally wrong it is what Tesla is doing. Intentionally misleading and marketing to customers a feature called Autopilot that is only a marginal improvement on what other cars already offer. What if Volvo started calling their (clearly not independent) feature Autopilot and saying it was the future of hands-free driving? Seems inexcusable.
I didn't agree that lawyers should go (unless there's some way to make the law simple enough that literally anybody can defend/attack as easily as a company with massive resources), but lobbyists I think should gtfo. It's naked wealth disparity - I can't afford to pay the tens of thousands it costs to whisper into a senator's ear every day, but Monsanto sure as fuck can.
This is my question. There's been no changes. It's still a great platform. Is it that guaranteed that Microsoft is going to mess it up?
Wasn't that more social engineering and password guessing though? Nothing they can do there apart from more security layers in the password/login but people will still not use string passes and be suspectible to social engineering.
Yeah, giant dragonflies roaming the air scare the living crap out of me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganeura
> Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every morning compiling useless reports

This passage starts getting into why these jobs have to exist.

1. There are fewer useful things that need doing than employable people, so not everyone can get a useful job.

2. Everyone needs some kind of income.

3. Basic Income and welfare are politically difficult because of our Protestant cultural belief that income must be earned through work.

If 1, 2, and 3 are true, then bullshit jobs must be created, or people starve/riot.
The GDPR tricked people into being ok with the gov deciding what you can remember, this just takes the next step. It's a standard incrementalism approach, shrouding them in "just for the corps" to start.
I am currently contracting for a major corporate retailer and this is absolutely spot-on. 10 managers with zero tech experience pushing 3 developers (I'm not kidding) to complete a massive project.
It's pretty evident if you just look. I literally just grabbed some headlines off the North Korea Summit topic:

- WaPo: Trump dangles White House visit for North Korea’s Kim if summit goes well

- Fox News: Trump forced Kim Jong Un to 'beg' for meeting, Giuliani says

- CNN: How is Donald Trump preparing for the huge North Korea summit? He's not.

- Reuters: Latte art and a gym ad: Kim Jong Un's softer image in South Korea
Godot gets a brand new animation editor with cinematic support
I've recently read "Walkaway" which posited that the most satisfying life is one living in a community with what amounts to essentially a public Trello board with tasks on that anybody can do at any time. "take out garbage for the bread and breakfast" "clean solar panels on hospital roof" "priority: emergency!!! Man with broken leg needs bones set" that sort of thing.

Given how satisfying I find open source work, I find the idea very attractive...
Deluxe Paint