skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not necessarily my point of view but I keep seeing the term bullshit jobs being used frequently, this is the best summary I could find:

In Bullshit Jobs, American anthropologist David Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, because of "bullshit jobs": workers who pretend that their role isn't as pointless or harmful as they know it to be. Graeber contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:

- flunkies, who serve to make others feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants

- goons, who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations

- duct tapers, who fix problems that shouldn't exist, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code

- box tickers, e.g., performance managers, in-house magazine journalists, leisure coordinators

- taskmasters, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals

Graeber argues that these jobs are largely in the private sector despite the idea that market competition would root out such inefficiencies. In companies, he credits "managerial feudalism" as employers need underlings to feel important.

In society, he credits the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labor of capitalism into religious duty: that workers did not reap advances in productivity as a reduced workday because, as a societal norm, they believe that work determines their self-worth, even as they find that work pointless. Graeber describes this cycle as "profound psychological violence".

Graeber holds that work as a source of virtue is a recent idea, that work was disdained by the aristocracy in classical times, but inverted as virtuous through radical philosophers like John Locke. The Puritan idea of virtue through suffering justified the toil of the working classes as noble.

As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income, a livable benefit paid to all without qualification, which would let people work at their leisure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
New material eliminates need for motors and actuators in future robots
It also brings along a 50mb dll for the ride
How would this scenario change, if there was a Big Bounce? And how would we potentially recognize alien civilizations preparing for that? And finally: in order to find out which of the two cosmological models is actually the correct one, we just set up SETI to find signs as to which of those two hyper-engineering projects have been undertaken - by civilizations that are a bit further in their cosmological understanding ;-)
I think that impulse is correct. As a clojure-lover, the state of error handling, and particularly Rich Hickey's decision to neglect it for so long and not code defensively, makes me a little sick.

That said, clojure remains my favorite language despite this flaw, and I can't wait to spend more time in it. It's beautifully designed. The design communicates well how to use it well, and it's only when you're abusing the language (or making mistakes) that you run into this kind of stuff. Not an excuse really, I'm just excited that errors are going to get somewhat taken care of by incorporating spec into the core.
If you are properly paranoid, a VPN won't offer much anonymity. VPNs may still keep logs (even if they say they don't, or when they receive NSLs they may be forced to do so).

For real anonymity, Tor is a much better option. Especially if used from a distribution like Tails.
Overstock’s TZERO to Receive $160M Investment from GSR Capital
I think you are using a concept of space-time that is quite limited. You are at most using concepts from Einstein's Special Relativity. Everything changed with General Relativity.

Space is not "created", space-time is warped. Gravity is the deformation of space-time by mass/energy. The distance from point A to point B is measured by the time it takes for a light ray to get from A to B using the shortest path. But if you move objects with mass (or with energy) near A and B, the shortest path will change. Also, it's easy to measure distance in seconds when you know the speed of light.
Having implemented a text selection algorithm for pdf files. I hate the format now
Diminishing returns on Kaggle competitions rewards
Checks are turned off by default. Are there performance implications even when they're turned off?

Reference: https://clojure.org/guides/spec
A Scheme compiler that doesn't do tail recursion isn't crappy; it is incorrect/nonconforming. A C compiler that doesn't do tail recursion still conforms to the abstract language semantics.

In Scheme, local functions are used for looping (via tail recursion). C doesn't even have those (other than as a GNU C extension).
Just like the sound of an ambulance.
We could just about do interstellar now if an existential threat called for it. Project Orion or a nuclear salt water rocket are both possible already.
Aside: Figuring out (roughly) when we can start decommissioning hydro is on my todo list.

Motivation: Restore habitat. Try to save the pacific salmon, humpback chub, others.
The markup rules were downgraded years ago. No h1 or title or meta tags shouldn't be the primary cause. Probably more to do with https, mobile and amp than the above factors.

Google has no problem scraping html pages and getting importance and content topics from inbound links, social media links and the actual text on the page.
This might be similar to the "write it down so you can stop thinking about it" effect. I often have an idea, e.g. for a blog post, that I just can't seem to get rid of. My mind just keeps turning it over and over. Then I write a draft, and poof I stop thinking about it. The fact that I usually don't finish turning the draft into a real post is a separate problem. ;)

There really is something about "offloading" those thoughts into some external place, and I really don't see why the authors even think it's relevant if it's subsequently deleted. The damage has already been done, the thing already partly forgotten, the instant the picture is taken. Did it ever seem likely that we'd have to check back multiple times to see whether a memory was stored elsewhere before forgetting it? Certainly when I've forgotten stuff that's never how it has been. Once is enough.
So far, I really like ProtonMail as a gmail replacement. Their web interface is great. It costs quite a bit more money though (compared to free gmail).

I've been using it for half a year now, and the only gmail features I miss (their spam filtering and automatically prioritizing mails) are those that require them to read your mail. Which I like that they cannot.
Well, the "less partying" part sounds accurate. :-) In grad school, for example, I had some good friends, but very little "party life" and certainly very little dating life---not out of choice, just because I didn't even know how to start. As a result, I was often severely depressed. On the positive side, though, I was more productive at research than I've ever been since! I had unlimited time to think, and also enormous drive to succeed so that at least something would be going right in my life. Just as important, though, I loved actually working on research problems (still do), as opposed to just the recognition you get from other people after you've solved one. I could form an infatuation with a particular problem that would last weeks or months.

Now that I have tenure and a wife and two kids, and get to travel the world and study what interests me, I'd like to tell myself a story according to which "all the hard work and sacrifice ultimately paid off." On the other hand, I know people who had fantastic social lives all throughout college and are now also highly successful---an instance of the general phenomenon that there's no justice in the universe. :-D

Anyway, if you're interested, I told some more of my story in my Scientific American interview with John Horgan - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/scott-aaron...
Software guys have it good thanks to software guys; especially the code-sharing, open-sourcing software guys. And mostly just in the last quarter century or so.
The biggest thing Elsevier does that requires actual work is final typsetting and editing of your article. They have someone take your preprint submission and take care of the formatting for the final article.

I don't think this justifies their ridiculous fees and business practices, but it is a service they provide that costs money.
>As such, your using them as examples or counter examples of developing countries is confusing (at least to me), and I think is misinterpreting the meaning of the original statement.

Indeed. Me coming back to Russia was nowhere near a typical "downshifting" case. If I were to compete with locals on the job market, I wouldn't have lasted long. People who can ace ACM olympics prequalification tests are only passing as junior devs here.
I have a somewhat similar setup with the addition of BufferGator and YCM.

That said, what’s described here is nowhere close to “vanilla” vim.
Rust pointers for C programmers
Fresh water is running out. If you have enough cheap energy, desalination solves that problem.
> It's really godawful. Software guys have no idea how good they have it.

You can also look at it from the other perspective: at least you can still make money making hardware tooling. That is not possible for software tooling, as everything is open-source already.
California man arrested for threatening to kill FCC Ajit Pai over net neutrality
The distance to the moon is already beyond intuition, but you can still understand how to get there by doing calculations. If the numbers say that it's possible then it's possible.
Can Elon Musk and Tesla Reinvent the Way Cars Are Made?
There is a hybrid response here. Those who are self-taught may not be aware of various algorithms or techniques for handling certain scenarios.

Self taught may have fundamental skill sets, but there is benefit in having some sort of educational background which introduces one to some of the more complicated aspects of application design and implementation.

It is that, or being a voracious reader of technical books and being a conference goer, ... ie, basically somehow being able to keep track of and understand the goings-on of current paradigms.
Lisp idioms like (mapcar function list) replace both looping and recursion with an aggregate operation, similar to APL; it's just not obsessively condensed into a single character syntax.
Why soccer players take dives – Vox
Highly unlikely. Unless wormholes are setup with strange restrictive configurations they allow sending messages back in time, without needing any new physics.

Once you have a wormhole, if you use gravity to accelerate one of the ends away then bring it back near the other end, they will have a time difference, due to general relativity. If you bring them close enough, that time difference will be greater than it takes to travel between them in normal space, allowing you to travel to your own past.

This video gives a quick explanation of the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUqxzH0652w&t=186s
I don't want to hide my IP address. I'm not paranoid about being found - nothing I do is illegal (I don't download, I watch streams, and that isn't illegal here, only if I downloaded the videos). For me it's only about system security, not legality. The latter would not be helped at all by using a VM.
Netflix is moving television beyond time-slots and national markets
Eventually, for the sake of cost savings abd efficiency, all other means of investigation will be cut, wound down and abolished. Then you have Gilliam’s Brazil, and you won’t have any recourse because you won’t know any better either
The study tested people who would lose access to the photos immediately or delete them intentionally, and they still succumbed to the effect... so I'd expect it would be similar for analog.

I think the the more important distinction you mentioned is that photographers who are a bit beyond amateur are more likely to analyze what they're shooting, and therefore remember it.
Have you never had a speeding ticket from an automatic camera?

Any given AI won’t spot general unlawfulness at this point, but they are getting designed to spot specific laws getting broken.

Perhaps I could have phrased my “in general” better.
I find myself using Bing all the time precisely for this reason.

I would love to subscribe to netflix, hulu, hbo, etc but all my favorite TV shows are always on different networks. I wouldn't mind paying for the service (but not for 3 of them), but the online streaming mirrors are really good at what they do.

Bing just works. Its has significantly less bias than google which is why I always use 2 search engines.
I expected the Tandy 1000 to have similar performance - IIRC, their video modes are very similar.
Many great ideas fail at first, and for a long time, because they’re massively ahead of their time. The helicopter, airplane, submarine, gun, and many more are fine examples. The submarine though has literally hundreds (or thousands if you stretch the definition) of years of abject failure before about a hundred years of resounding success.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_submarines

That’s a long time to be essentially sending people to a watery grave (with a few limited successes) before materials and engineering technology caught up to the vision of submersibles.
The advise from the article is essentially to avoid the least and the most popular languages and stay in the middle.

I suspect that if I needed to give such advise, it will be the opposite.
C for utter beginners is probably like being tossed into a tsunami for swimming lessons.

"Okay, now this is how you float on your back; but watch your head: there a protrusion of iron rebar sticking out of a broken concrete bridge support, and you're heading straight for it! We call that 'uncomfortable behavior'."
I haven't used ddg as it used to be fairly terrible, but google may have slipped enough and ddg may have improved enough now, I'm going to give it another shot.
I was just reminiscing with a friend about 3d landscape generator/modeller VistaPro last week, and here it is, along with a great many other nostalgia-inducing things. Thanks!
I work at a small liberal arts college, St Michael's College in Vermont. I have a much greater expectation of teaching effort than professors at research institutions would have, although here there is also an expectation of professional activity. So the writing is not anything like full-time. But it is a creative outlet, which is great.

> I have a graduate degree in math, but I unfortunately I don't use math in my day job, so I am afraid that the material I produce will be too low in quality to be useful for people...

It is good to have feedback from real people. I work through material with my students in classes, and sometimes I've had what I thought was a great approach and it would just not work in practice.

I don't know if there are online groups of people working on writng stuff like this, either at the college level or at high school or earlier levels, but if you could find such a group, it'd be good to get in with them. (And tell me. :-) )
Doesn’t that just put bounds on which wormholes are possible, rather than proving no wormhole is possible?
I don’t need to accept that the earth is flat to fight for increased government transparency (something flat earthers would be interested in). I don’t need to deny climate change to find other benefits to promote more efficient energy use.

I think most people would agree that the US healthcare system is overly-expensive, complicated, and excludes a vulnerable portion of the population. That doesn’t mean the right solution is federal health insurance or even single payer.

tl;dr I don’t need to change someone else’s beliefs to work towards mutually beneficial goals.
Minor correction: The Bundespräsident (President of the Federal Republic) is elected by the Bundesversammlung (Federal Convention), which only exists for this purpose. It consists of the members of the Bundestag and an equal number of members chosen by the states.

It is a quirk of the German constitution that the executive positions in the government are voted on by the legislative branch and not by the people directly. It prevents populists from gaining easy access to important government positions.
I'd argue the opposite: it only takes one non-hibernating species out to dominate and it will hunt down every sleeping civilizations data center and annihilate them - so that they remain the most dominant species. Such a "hibernation data center" must thus be the most well guarded / hidden place in the galaxy...
Wonderful, thanks!

Is anyone able to offer some advice on how I might be able to take a wrl/vrml file and actually meddle with it in 3D?

Perhaps I'm missing something supremely obvious, but I can't import them into 3D software I have and even simply trying to view them in Firefox results in them being opened in Internet Explorer (using the recommended Cortona3D plugin).

I didn't realise how fundamentally put to rest vrml has become - there's very little by way of new stuff out there on the internets...

Help? :\

- ed

Also, why are the responses in here reported as being 2 hours old, when I distinctly read them yesterday?!
If only they would downrank sites that exist purely to defame: ripoffreport, stdreport, blacklistreport, etc.
You might enjoy "The Last Question" by Issac Asimov:

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Nectarine Demoscene Radio shuts down after 18 years
When I search for TV shows I watch it inside a VPN sandboxie on a isolated incognito browser I don't use everyday. Any data that writes to a local DB is done through an isolated folder instead. I've learned the hard way having to reinstall my computer too many times. I don't run things like umatrix though.

Torrents and pirate sites are actually fairly safe. You can always double check the SHA hash signature of the file you download as well with the official source.

I don't endorse pirating at all and usually pay for all my software though. Its just all my favorite TV shows are across multiple networks. I would pay money for a netflix that encompasses every TV show based on my usage. Such a service doesn't exist though.
Floating point D&D dice!
Google seems to prioritize affiliate network blogs that aggregate basic information on a subject.

This makes it difficult to locate information that exists on a term that isn't just surface level facts you can find by browsing Wikipedia.
">> instead of fixing the stupid site"
Fix what? If Google wants to demote you, doesn't matter what you do. See https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/special-reports/insider-thr...

What happened that it went from #2 to page 3? Nothing. Page 3 is a black hole, used to be called a page 3 penalty (get zero traffic, might as well be banned.) The site is accessible and readable. A lot of sites are old fashioned...see Drudge.
Many small businesses use flow through taxation, so they don’t pay both corporate and personal tax. S corps and LLCs.

Even if the personal tax was capped at 5M, it then doesnt make sense for personal distributions greater than 5m, so the money stays in the corporation for reinvestment.
Looks really good, props. I have a few friends looking to learn React and this looks to be a good place to start.
I have published with Elsevier and Springer. Every single time they proof my article it comes back as unreadable garbage. Sometimes a non-native English speaker has 'corrected' my grammar by adding incorrect articles everywhere, sometimes they fail to wrap formulas that are wider than the page, sometimes they make tables or figures so small they are entirely unreadable.

Elsevier and Springer and others hire the worst bottom-dollar outsourced 'proofers' they can find and every single time it takes so long to get across to them what they've done wrong and to pore through the paper to find all the errors that it would have been better for everyone if they just told me how they wanted the paper and I supplied the PDF!

Anyway I don't disagree with what you've written but I had to get the rant out. Has anyone NOT had this experience??
I'm fascinated by how much React Tutorials exist over the internet, and how one can replace another five minutes after it get published.

It feels like the community it still struggling with this framework , while it has existed for many many years... Very interesting.
If you write C or C++, this script is handy for switching between source and header files:
https://github.com/vim-scripts/a.vim
The headline in that article vastly overstates the significance and reliability of this result.
Marzipan: An Engineering Leader's Perspective on Bringing UIKit to the Mac
I don’t know how HN readers would know that “Dan star[r]ed the repo” without spending way more time on it than any reader does.

My guess is that the different results are a mix of chance and the fact that the repo, and thus the HN submission, now contains “a simple tutorial for React.” The longer title is much more informative: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fkay-i...

If there’s a lesson here, it’s to use informative page titles, even for repos :-)
Fascinating read. Interesting to see how zipper's evolution into today's ubiquitous household utility went through many stages of evolution, including the classic S-curve that today's successful tech products almost (inevitably) go through -- a testament to robustness of economic theories across widely varying industries. [0]

Another interesting fact that blew my mind recently -- 80% of all the world's zippers are manufactured in a city entirely dedicated to manufacturing clothing harnesses (hook-and-eye, Velcro et al.) in southeastern China. [1]

[0] http://innovationzen.com/blog/2006/08/17/innovation-manageme...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiaotou,_Yongjia_County
IoT Security Mailing List
I started reading this and then thought "what a waste of time". This pertains in no way to my life or the life of anyone for the foreseeable future. I read it just after the one about taking pictures preventing people from experiencing things and remembering them. Putting these together reminded me that reading some of these things on HN is preventing me from living. And with that, I'm gonna close this laptop and go do something rather than worry what people a trillion years hence will be doing.
> With every change of the ranking algorithm there's a bunch of sites going up or down and nobody can tell you the exact reason why

And that is a problem. No company with as much influence on the web as Google has should be able to hide behind a phrase such as "it's just the algorithm". "De-rank every web site with the word humuhumunukunukuapua’a" is an algorithm too.

Every ranking should have a very clear reason, and legitimate web sites (yes, this is a judgement call, but a site with a history like this one would qualify) should have access to that reasoning behind their ranking.
7:57:148–Volkswagen makes racing history with record-breaking electric race car
This is certainly a possibility. It's also possible that one civilisation will attain dominance and then aestivate. It's also possible that there are no other civilisations within range of us (if there are other aggressive civilisations nearby why haven't they have wiped us out already?).
This is an interesting blog post about creating high quality Animated GIFs with ScreenFlow: https://framer.com/blog/posts/how-to-create-high-quality-gif...
On the other hand, photos reviewed 2-3 times (especially after few months/years) become much more durable memories than those simply observed directly. I tend to only remember things I have photographed in the last 20 years, that is why I take photos of things I want to make sure I will remember. A photo can revive a whole lot of extra memories associated to the moment.