skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the article makes some good points but it keeps jarring me with the "impossible to recycle" statements.

There is "recycling" as implied by the author of the article which is that the material is converted into feedstock to make the same material again, there is "recycling" which can be defined by "is used again", and their is "recycling" which is defined as "it didn't end up in a landfill or ocean." The nuance is important.

For example, you can chemically break down plastic by exposing it to high heat in an oxygen free environment (like a nitrogen)[1]. For many polymers this will reduce it to essentially various long chain polymers, some water vapor, and some left over carbon. You can incinerate plastic in a closed loop exhaust system and extract net positive energy from it. You can mechanically decompose it (think shreedding) and then either ultrasonically or thermally bond into engineered materials (which are not yogurt cups but can provide structural insulation for example)

I had thought at one time that using an engineered material approach you could make things like picnic tables for Forest Service campgrounds (they would be extremely durable, insect and weather immune, and difficult to burn) however in discussions with people who could advocate for such a program I learned that they often just re-used lumber they were clearing as part of the forest management mission for such things so their materials were "free" to begin with. Conceptually though I still like the idea.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/app.1974.070...
This is newsworthy when you consider that this is extremely unlikely to happen with gas fires.

And considering that my comment may have appeared to critique the story itself (even though my comment was a critique of its parent and not of the actual story), it's a fair point to make, so thanks.
I don't really know anything about MX records or email in general, but couldn't maskmail just always point to the forwarder domain (yahho, gmail, etc) instead of their own hostname?
Self-Supervised Tracking via Video Colorization
How Technology Choices Can Help Your Contact Center Be GDPR Compliant
Years too late. Employees have grown to feel entitled to abuse each other. It's disgraceful.
We should charge per unit of garbage generated (per liter or whatever), and have tracking on how much of it was actually recyclable, which would cause some percent of the price to be refunded (billed at a lower rate to encourage recycling). Otherwise we will be constantly drowning in trash. It blows my mind that we allow people to create as much trash as they want for a flat fee when there's such a negative externality affected on our environment and community, especially since it's a much less controversial and nebulous problem than something like climate change. Billing the consumer for trash affects the design of packaging and shipping of everything they consume.
Wow that’s depressing ...
> It’s 2018 and I still see people walking around with Windows laptop lids open because they presumably have no confidence in Windows’ ability to sensibly preserve state after closing the lid. Software matters, and how it integrates with hardware.

Interesting. I've never seen or even heard of this. Windows didn't do a great job at this in general like a decade ago and the Surface Pros had a bug that was eventually fixed relating to it but I've never heard or seen an issue beyond those. I have multiple Windows and Mac machines and they both do great at preserving state when closing the lid.
Digital Revolution: Why Wealth Managers Should Embrace Digital Transformation
I believe some of them can't be mixed, like if you throw something oily and paper in the same bin, the paper can't be used anymore. Also plastic bags make things very difficult to sort, and are difficult to separate from other things.

I'm skeptical that it will ever be economical in a scalable way to mine landfills, but I don't know enough to dispute it.
You need to diversify your news diet. Buy one of each of your local & regional newspapers (if you have any) and pick one to read as regularly as you can. Watch a local news broadcast or at least read their website every few days.

Do the same with national papers. Avoid cable news, in my opinion.

Pay attention to the sources of the material you find most useful or entertaining from here and other aggregation sites. You will wind up drilling through multiple aggregators. Find the sites and people, and keep up with them directly.

You're definitely just using Hacker News as a dopamine hit, and you're probably not really learning anything from it. You know what will help you break the habit? Create something, and make posting here about what you create your goal instead. It might blow up, or it might fizzle, but it's a better use of your time in either case.
I'll mostly agree with that. If you have a compiler that can check totality (I've been playing with Idris lately at home, that feature is fantastic), then the work of adjusting your switch-cases becomes much easier. But there's still a lot of work relative to, for instance, creating a type class (or in Idris terms an interface) and implementing the functions of that type class/interface for your specific data type.

Similarly, in OO-languages with interfaces, you can apply this same approach. It doesn't eliminate the conditional, it still exists in the code. But it moves where you have to think about it and reduces the redundancy across your code base.

With these things you don't even have to modify every function when you add a new value to your equivalent to an enum, you just add the implementations for that new type/class.

Though it does shift the difficulty when you want to add a new function/method to the interface. Now you will have to go to each implementation and add this new capability. But the nice thing, here, is that most languages with static typing (whether fancy dependently typed languages like Idris, or relatively simpler ones like Java) will make it immediately clear which implementations are incomplete.
We've had people suggest it - but right now we're too far removed from the actual moment someone gets hired to even consider it.

I think that's a very creative model with good alignment of incentives, but frankly I don't know if it works well. A few friends who tried something similar told me they felt that in that model, the people who end up getting jobs the most are typically the ones who needed you the least and can make for some very unhappy customers who don't know if it's worth paying you a % of salary well into their jobs.

We'll consider it though :).
I've been using Linux on my Surfacebook 2 13" since about January. Most of the hardware features work decently (including touchscreen), but overall it's still not great despite the excellent work put into a modified kernel for it, here [1].

IMO, the most notable items missing full support are:

- the battery[2][3], charge or capacity status

- "performance base" dedicated GPUs

1: https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface

2: https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface/issues/28

3: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198145
I have to second this. We are an all Mac company, but service customers on Windows. For testing purposes, our company purchased a Surface Laptop (not a Surface Book), and I was blown away by the quality coming out of Microsoft.

As I use the Surface Laptop, I wish Apple would steal the design and apply it to a new MacBook Air.

The screen is excellent, and coming from the Mac world it is surprisingly how good having a touch screen is.

Battery life is great and smashes my 15” 2016 MacBook Pro. It reminds me of the good old days of MacBook Air (all day) battery life.

The keyboard has travel, but I had to swap around the “Windows Key” and “Ctl key” to stop going mad (I have 19 years of macOS shortcut muscle memory).

Microsoft reminds us that you can still have a USB-A port and SD Card Slot in a nice form factor. It is possible to escape the #DongleLife .

My only gripes are 1) Windows still pales in comparison to OS X 2) the power supply is proprietary (I really like USB-C chargers).
You bet your life on them all the time. Every time you cross a bridge. Medical devices rely on algorithms. The standard of evidence you're requesting here is unreasonable, and not applied in any other domain.
Assigning me a chore that benefits a business that I pay a service fee for is unacceptable. I'm paying them to take away my waste. If they want to sort it or alphabetize it or apply the Dewey decimal system they're welcome to. But I won't do chores for someone else without an employment agreement and adequate compensation.
Call me crazy but I'd love to see the next round of LEED certifications require any food establishment with seating for dining required to serve with reusable dinnerware and utensils, i.e. plates, forks, knives, spoons, cups and glasses. The amount of plastic wasted by people like me who get lunch from a food court, walk ten feet away to eat lunch and then toss single use items is astounding.

Yet there's no other solution without restaurants moving back to reusable items: health code won't allow them to take my container for food nor should it.
Care to try to explain more, Ronilan?
The fact that beaches around the world are covered in huge quantities of washed up plastic suggests that someone, somewhere is dumping an awful lot of it into the ocean. (And not just in Asia)
It doesn't make sense to me. the absence of "advanced" control flow constructs is one of the things that define assembly language - only branches and conditional branches, plus sometimes conditional execution of single instructions. Then I don't see how you can claim a non-existing thing can play nicer with speculation and prefetching.
This example makes me whish an early return even more. Wouldn't it be sweet?
A business that doesn't have brick and mortar shops in high cost locations? All internet businesses?
Nearly anything that's ideally one or two syllables, phonetically easy to say, and can have a reasonable brand built around it. Not that these are awesome but just examples off the top of my head so I'm not just saying "they suck" without providing alternatives...

Ivy - Naturally grows and spreads and often is seen climbing walls. Maybe in this case it climbs and covers a FB wall :-P Also a play on FB being started at an ivy league school.

Greenfield - Maybe a reasonable name for the protocol that those apps can be built upon? "Ivy's built on the greenfield protocol"

Anyway, that's what I came up with in 10-15 minutes of brainstorming and I would pose that those are much easier, approachable, and just better names than these others that simply don't elicit any sort of emotion (or negative ones).

Names matter, a lot. You need to be able to tell a story that moves people to action. That's what marketing folks do that adds a ton of value. Most open source projects don't have marketing folks so... :-)
"AWS Glacier ... charges a literal tenth of the cost."

Amazon Glacier and Google Nearline are not comparable products. What we offer at rsync.net is a live, online, random access filesystem - so the appropriate comparison is with Amazon S3.

I believe our current pricing is reasonably comparable to S3 - and at larger quantities is actually cheaper. Also, the borg pricing (2 cents) is cheaper at any quantity.
the last paragraph is key. even if we recycled 100% of the plastic it still inevitably leads to pollution (all this talk about sorting is irrelevant!). we need to be using better materials.
Maybe because they are "consumers"
Common Lisp at the language level is similar to Python or Ruby as it has strong dynamic typing. One difference is that CL has optional type declarations which (in contrast to Python's take on the same thing) are really specified as declaring types but what the implementation should do with that information is completely implementation-defined with using it to implement C-style weak static typing being completely legitimate and for some time even popular.
I really love this concept and hope it succeeds. Lowering the barrier to entry to highly technical fields is a win-win for everyone. Congrats on your progress so far!

My only question is how a highly productive individual at a top bank or startup justifies taking the time out of their day to speak to a newbie. I know they get paid, but I would imagine it's peanuts compared to their 6 figure salaries. What is their main motivation in scheduling calls?
The article says "Eight percent is pretty good.." Actually, 80% success is unusable. I expect that is fairly close the the ceiling. If they really do roll this out (spoiler, they won't) google will need an army of humans to handle the other 20%. I guess I don't mind google paying a human to be my personal assistant, but I don't know if google will like it.

I hope the human assistants are not randomly selected, but weighted to select the same human you've used before. This will give the illusion that you really have your own personal assistant.
Nuanced UI development in Flutter
The entire population of Azerbaijan is less than Los Angeles (The greater LA area at least). The US is huge and our per capita pollution is a lot higher too.
Ultimately Cloudflare is just another provider you have to trust if you decide to rely on them, just like your web host and anything else you use. For any non-trivial site you should do a risk assessment of the service providers, external javascript and other software you are using to determine whether the benefits outweigh the risks, and for the most sensitive use cases they should be kept to an absolute minimum. As you say, for a static site HTTPS terminated by Cloudflare is more secure than plain HTTP so it makes the most sense in that situation.
They actually do novel stuff, that's not 'off the shelf' - they have smart people who can make smart assertions ... but implementation is hard in any context.
Not down to the planck level. Simulating the universe at the planck level would require at least 10^157 bytes of storage.
Ask HN: What do you think is the optimal educational path for a aspiring founder
How would you describe the most ideal situation (university, mayor, extracurricular activities) for a aspiring founder? What are the DO's and DONT's for a student which pursues this type of career?

PS: I couldn't fit the question mark.
Doesn't moot still work at Google? If someone can setup a scale volunteer basis moderation system, that's probably the guy you want.
Thanks for the kind words jakemor!

We're surprised at this ourselves - they seem to enjoy being in the "expert" seat because most of them are junior level people who aren't traditionally thought of as experts or people whose insights are worth money.

I think we're learning it's a powerful combo - get paid to talk about yourself, show off how smart you are + help other people out who are struggling to overcome what you already did.
>paying you a % of salary into their jobs

Wow, that's a very ambitious idea.
Completely agree with your analysis. Wish you the best of luck with the company, it seems like it could definitely add value in the space.

Sidenote - might be able to help you with some introductions on the technical co-founder front. I'm NYC-based as well, contact info in my profile.
Not worth the added complexity. Exposing sshd (w/ disabled passwords) is common practice and fine for most use cases. Special use cases may require special precautions, but even airgapped systems can be compromised with enough effort. I'll take my chances with the industry standard and update as needed.
> The first thing I always do on a new laptop (or install) is go into Power Settings and change the Closing Lid action from putting the computer to sleep to just turning off the screen.

Yikes! Why? I haven't had an issue with a laptop properly going to sleep and coming back in many years. This was something I used to do back in 2008 but it's hard to imagine today.
I deal with it by taking breaks from browsing. Then I just read the top articles of the week or month.

A lot of articles are fun tidbits but not life changing or relevant for me so there's no real loss in doing the above.
I'd love to learn more about Windows pthreads poor implementation of spinlocks mutexes. Do you have any cool links?
Actually it fails at least 20% of the time. Your floor cleaning robot will fail at cleaning it up 20% of the time. I'm not good at math, but I think that means you'll be spending 95% of your milk drinking time cleaning your floor...
I've been looking into re-implementing my Loss.jpg detector in TensorFlow.js, but I'm a little concerned with the speed achievable in the Chrome sandbox. Loading the linked page on my laptop was tremendously slow and shot my CPU up to 100%.

Is it safe to assume this is entirely due to the app doing training in the browser, while inference should have significantly lower requirements?
Very cool. Just signed up and will give it a try :)
Would also love to learn more about your thinking. Also happy to chat offline if you prefer, I'm at deepak@thelobby.io
Demonstrations of DARPA's Ground X-Vehicle Technologies
It's the same with drought conditions in California, asking millions of people who collectively use like 7% of the water supply to sacrifice, with no attention to the small number of agriculture/industry companies using 93% of the water.
>The idea that the solution is to change the habits of billions of people rather than enforce some rules on a few thousand companies is just crazy.

It's an idea that those companies themselves invented and promulgated. https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern... (edit: archive to unbreak formatting)

As always, follow the money.
In the comment here
Make sure you have exactly the same fonts available (Cambria, etc) as the Windows machine. That solves many of the formatting issues.
There's a store in Berlin selling food without packaging: https://original-unverpackt.de/
With the great circle route it's not that far out of the way (especially from the west coast of the US) and Iceland Air has some great deals. If you spend a night in Iceland, you can get some crazy cheap flights.
Because I close the lid when not in use, and don't want programs running in the background to stop when it goes to sleep.
You can get the 5 bedroom house 15 minutes away from a decent city, 15 minutes away from work, in most states, and not miss out on much from the SV "lifestyle".

I think the only thing I miss out on by not working in SV is working with true world-class talent.
I think it's bubble related.

I've never been happier using Windows with WSL + Docker for Linux based web development. Things are super stable and the computer I built for ~$750 almost 5 years ago (i5 3.2ghz, 16gb of ram, ssd, decent video card, etc.) still runs as fast as it did on day 1.
In terms of language features they are safe by default, but do provide enough escape hatch to make it as unsafe as C and C++.

The big difference is that you as developer will notice that you are doing something that might eventually blow up, because it is very explicit.

For example something like doing a reinterpret_cast would be LOOPHOLE call in Modula-3 and is only allowed inside an UNSAFE MODULE implementation.

As for the rest, yes C and C++ have enjoyed 30 years of compiler research, but as Fran Allen puts it, C has brought compiler optimization research back to the pre-history.

If you read IBM's research papers on PL.8, the systems programming language used on the RISC project, it already had an architecture similar to what LLVM has. Where the multiple compiler phases were taking care of the optimizations. Then when they decided to go commercial, they rather adopted UNIX as platform.

So maybe we would be somewhere else had AT&T been allowed to sell UNIX at the same price as VMS, z/OS and others.

As for the LLVM, we aren't going to throw that code away, but as you also assert, it is possible to use safer languages while taking advantage of the optimization work that went into LLVM.

That is how I see C and C++'s future, down into a thin infrastructure layer, with userspace mostly written in something else.
> Do you expect me to carry the wrapper back to my home or carry a small dustbin along with me every time?

FYI: in many urban areas in the USA, the expectation is that you carry a "poop bag" and pickup all the poop your dog makes whenever you walk your dog.

This isn't true across the entire USA. Its definitely a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. But still, these are the things a lot of liberal cities expect their citizens to do (and things that citizens actually do, because there are enough people who care)

In fact, there are poop-bag dispensers found at parks. There is literally an industry which makes dog-poop bags: http://www.poopbags.us

Here's a picture of what they normally look like: https://imgur.com/13cAJTg
Why is that? A tax is slower and exempts the wealthy while inflicting the costs onto the poor.

Regulation is cheaper, better, fairer and faster at getting policy implemented than a technical tax, and doesn't have the behavioral issues that abound when telling people they are "taxed" for doing something.
Yeah. Kennedy told Grassley last summer that he was going to retire this term.
Similar for the plastic beer pitchers at UW-Madison's terrace. You'd pay like a $1 deposit on the pitcher, if you bring the pitcher back, you get the dollar. Drunk kids or the indifferent would leave their plastic pitcher and some enterprising person would come by pick it up and return it for cash. There is a lake nearby, so it's important these didn't make it in the lake.

The deposit system seemed to be pretty effective. Folks took an active role.

Maybe there are modern day systems that could be developed.
I wonder if people would subscribe to a Uber/UPS like system for fluids like beer, soda, milk, yogurt or water? Comes in sterilized glass bottles using an electric vehicle. I suppose it could be reusable plastic, but for folks paying a premium, glass would be nice. Something like $50 month for a couple cases of beer, going up in price as you order more.
Imagine what GNU could do if they had just a fraction of the donations LF receives.

Publish more rants telling people to stop using all software and services they enjoy? Fork already-free software to be more free? Rewrite popular BSD-licensed software as GPLv3?

Perhaps we could finally get good, affordable hardware that respects our freedoms.

The way to get freedom-respecting hardware is to build something 80% free, then invest the profits into a second generation that's 90% free, then 95%, etc. Companies like Purism are doing this but the FSF isn't willing to compromise so they make no progress.
Office 2007 hasn't even been Extended Supported for two years now. That seems an egregious information security problem and your IT may need at least some modest sanity checks.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3198497/office-2007...
If you have any questions whatsoever, email me at deepak@thelobby.io. let me know what you think!