skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting data set, but what I'd want to know is what is the farthest you can get from the farthest road.

This tells us that wherever we are, IFF we walk in one of the 2-3 the optimal headings for that circle, we'll hit a road in ~18 miles max. That's the best worst-case.

What about the worst worst case -- if we head in the most un-optimal direction? How effed are we in that circumstance?
This is in specific national parks though and includes all motorized vehicles not maintained roads.
Hows the screen quality on that?
We've updated the title from “In the contiguous US, you can never be more than 18.76 miles from a road”, which breaks the submission guideline that asks for the original.
I have a bunch, I don't play games often enough for the lack to bother me. Plus some really good multiplayer stuff.
I am
not clever enough for deep clever digs. I just do me. :-)
I think there are FAA or airline rules against passengers on commercial flights using aviation radios -- and those rules might include aviation radios that you synthesize yourself.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/8939/can-i-fly-...

(It seems that the rules are meant to avoid having unexpected devices onboard using aviation-related RF energy, rather than to prevent passengers from monitoring aircraft communications.)
But I could do it, because I've absolutely written a book's worth of words over the past few years.

It depends on the genre and if it's fiction or non-fiction. Non fiction, yes. But fiction is harder because of stylistic attributes and the fact it all has to connect. It's not like writing 300 300-word blog posts.
Just use one of the many ad/tracking blockers. Websites will still work. Blocks sketchy-analytics.com. Why make this more complex than it needs to be?
That's why they brought back the stylus^H^H^H^pencil! =)
>>> The radius in miles shows how large a circle can be fit into each area, and how remote each point is.

That distance is rather meaningless on the ground. Terrain matters. A big wall climber can be only a few hundred meters from a road on a map but still days away. On foot, 18 miles of Idaho pasture is much smaller than 3 miles of Florida swampland.

I expect that there are parts of Lake Michigan that are more than 18 miles from the nearest road.
Performance on standardized testing is not a good measure of writing ability. It mostly has to do with hoop-jumping, a little bit to do with ability and nothing to do with motivation. Writing a novel is exactly the opposite: it requires a lot of motivation and a little bit of ability.
If you're REALLY lost look for powerlines, microwave towers, rivers, or easy to build in low-lying areas.

If river, follow down stream.

Anything else, vaguely, follow the power / sight lines towards obvious markers or a way of calling for help.

'way of calling for help' might involve tripping security sensors.
In northern Scotland id would assume Norway and Sweden you can get a long way from roads Loch Ranoch area springs to mind
You're free to start your own bank (or credit union). All you need to do is fill out the paperwork and find some investors to put in the initial capital. Then you can offer loans at 1% interest or whatever. See how well that works.
So it is an interesting fact at least for me.

I was reading recently about the attack and the very detailed planning that went into it, especially WRT timing.

Also if you a "prepper"/security type dude, listening to ATC for situational awareness is an option.
https://uploadvr.com/flight-is-a-photorealistic-vr-app-for-f...
Serverless Bot Framework
The CC fee gets baked into the price, so you don't notice it - if a store takes card payments then all its products are ~2% higher than they would be otherwise.
> it does not matter if one is born in china or UK or korea - children are given huuuuge amounts of training to become literate. We don't dumb down the writing system, and we don't dumb down the literature written in the system, we spend more on training the kids.

We definitely dumb down literature for kids. In fact, we dumb down literature in a gradient to provide a gentle on-ramp.

For the writing system, that's a bit more complex of a question, but at a minimum we judge their use of it more tolerantly (same with spoken language)—this seems somewhat parallel to using a simplified language or environment in programming.
Magic Leap One's Reported Field of View Leaves a Lot to Be Desired
I'm sorry if my assessment has offended you. I don't think it's counterintuitive or "from a complete alternate reality", but even more than that, I don't think it's a good idea for you and I to debate further.
I hear they do live demos of Spacewar on a PDP at the Computer History Museum and I keep meaning to check that out.
Yeah, by putting the trash they create, into a garbage bin that mounts to the floor of my car... I am a target customer for this and no amount of head-shaking is going to make me feel bad about it.
It's pretty light compression from what I can tell - basically just squashing down runs of nulls to a single count.
Short of cutting off all access to the internet, it is very difficult to block access. Someone could always set up some kind of tunnel via an allowed site / channel.
I grew up in very rural NM, and while you can find a road in some of these areas, I doubt you’ll see more than a few cars a month during peak times of the year.

Just because there’s a road doesn’t mean that it gets much use. Some are only used to haul animals, oil or timber a few times a year.
Some companies work around this by encoding videos as gifs or loading keyframes one by one when playback is not available :(
Or cutting down a power pole.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/stranded-man-cut...
Yeah it really looks like their algorithm is not doing something so fancy as considering the forest roads which in theory are motorable (but may not have seen one in years), so much as measuring from drivable roads and park boundaries which are quite jagged, with significant amounts of park outside the drawn circle... I wonder how much larger the circles would be if you allowed for roughly 1 radian of the circumference to cross outside park boundaries
Why create a Kickstarter for 1.7 k if you make 15k a month. I call bs.
That is a pretty good visualization. One of the things that really stands out is the growth in services. One way that has personally effected me has been with music on my iPad.

It has become harder and harder to have purchased music live on your iPad for playing. They have completely skewed what was their signature 'appliance app' (from the iPod of days gone by) from 'carry your music with you where ever you go' to 'portal to our pay per month music service'. Every time I upgrade IOS I worry about how much harder it will be to put my music on the device so that I can listen to it without being connected to a network or paying a monthly fee.
Well, I was hoping this would be the Steven Johnson of fftw fame. The curse of common names...
Because when I go to use a website its an interaction between me and them, I never want any third party involvement. Allow requests to subdomains but nothing outside that.
But I mean a good marathon time, and getting a book accepted by a publisher, in which there is an advance and royalties (not self-publishing).

If by publishing you mean Amazon, then yeah, anyone can do that. Even robots can. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-kindle-spam/spam-c...
Well hold on, I don't disagree that we are on a planet of dwindling resources. It's the method of environmental improvement that will have the greatest positive effect that is the root source of disagreement. That's the crux of the problem - what is the process of solving these problems?

I would argue that arguing over how big our websites are is not the important factor. I submit to you that PC electricity usage is the most relevant quantity we need to discuss when it comes to consumption of bits. I argue that the increased load on the network of sending more bits is negligible compared to the many endusers and their PCs that consume our data.

If we agree that PC electricity consumption is the most important thing to address, then we must ask whether or not the electricity generation process is bad for the environment. Most likely, electricity is generated by hydroelectric dams or coal/combustibles power plants. Suppose we replace those two types of power generation with low-maintenance, 50-year-lifetime solar panels (for which the tech exists). Can you still argue that the increased amount of bits sent over the wire for heavy modern websites is an environmental negative that we should address? I would say, no, at this point we have reduced the environmental impact of most electricity-consuming devices, and we can ignore PCs for the time being.

Therefore it is not the personal computer and the quantity of bits it consumes that should be your focus. It should be electricity generation.

I would like to ask you to consider whether or not your compassion-based arguments contain any resentment. Are you acting and speaking entirely on the grounds of compassion? And if so, how can you be sure that your supposed actions are going to reduce suffering of people and the planet and not have the opposite effect? How can you suggest solutions, like decreasing the weight of websites, and know with a high degree of certainty that it will produce the desired outcome (environmental preservation)? Could it have an unintended consequence?
iTunes is a ball and chain.
Shooting earmuffs + 33db foam earplugs will block a lot. Though, it’s painful to wear this all day. Fun fact, dbs don’t add up if you layer up like that. It’s about an additional 5db on top of 33db. Best advise would be to search for another job in a much quieter place.
GCP and Digital Ocean would be excellent. :)
NoScript cuts the bullshit down to 1.35 MB with all scripts blocked and it's still readable. I can barely tolerate the web without it.
> why would I use this instead?

I can't speak for the developer, but a few things stood out to me:

1) It's Python. Which means there's no impedance mismatch in using numerical/data science libraries like Numpy and the like. For data engineers trying to productionize data science workloads, this is quite compelling -- no need to throw away all of the Python code written by data scientists. This also lowers the barrier to entry for streaming code.

2) I had the same reservations about CPU efficiency, but it looks like they're using best-of-class libraries (RocksDB is C++, uvloop is C/Cython, etc.). I was at a PyCon talk where the speaker demo'ed Dask (a distributed computation system similar to Spark) running on Kubernetes and it was very impressive. Scalability didn't seem to be an issue. Dask actually outperformed Spark in some instances.

I wonder if Kubernetes is the key to making these types of solutions competitive with traditional JVM type distributed applications like Spark Streaming, etc.

3) Not all streaming data is real-time. In fact, streaming just means unbounded data with no inherent stipulation of near real-time SLAs. Real-time is actually a much stricter requirement.
Please, please, please, please complete this project. Like the OP, I have an ever increasing, ever debilitating, downright crippling fear of flying. It's only getting worse as I get older, and I'm already missing out on opportunities because of it.

I have an Oculus Rift, and would happily pay for such a simulator.
And here I was thinking their $1000 laptop was an iPad Pro with keyboard.

That’s not saying it’s what I want in a $1k laptop, but what Apple thinks it is.
> I've said about structs of ints already

Yeah, but you were wrong (you said other kinds of structs would escape to the heap). The innermost struct could have a string member and a `*HeapData` member; it wouldn't matter. The difference in number of allocations between Go and others would remain the same. The difference isn't driven by the leaves, it's driven by number of nodes in the object graph; the deeper or wider the tree, the better Go performs relative to other GC languages.

> In haskell you could have unboxed array with unboxed records. Check Vector.Unboxed.

For sure, but in Go "unboxed" is the default (i.e., common, idiomatic); in Haskell it's an optimization.
Wait... living organisms have to get food in order to eat? Next you are going to tell me that they are in competition for finite resources.
Using Zapier, Node.js, and Firebase Together
I achieve this with an RSS reader, in my case Miniflux.

Runs on a RPi under my TV and I stay well below my 300MB data cap, while consuming dozens of news sources.
82m as of today: https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/31/playstation-4-sales-pass-...
Matthew Walker Ph.D – Author of “Why We Sleep” (podcast)
He also previously wrote "Bitcoin is Evil" in 2013

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil...
It was great when the Air line was introduced. Not so much in 2018.
There's also the assumption that Wilderness Areas are automatically the furthest from roads, machines, and motors. That may be true but I don't automatically take that as automatically true given the size of some of the National Forests out west. It's probably true given the different rules governing Wilderness Areas vs. non-wilderness areas of forests. But I wouldn't make a big bet.
The following is a review by some guy:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R403HR4VL71K8
Western Europe is extremely crowded with very few areas away from any amount of population.
That is not so clear. The Bitcoin network can easily be devoured by another cryptocurrency, if that other currency provides greater returns for a unit of work. The larger network within the crypto ecosystem may well have value, while affording zero tethering to any particular currency.
Because if your topics' throughput is low (say <1000 per sec), all those tools might be overkill as most of them require a new cluster, significant setup and using new framework. This library might help quickly build consumers with little to no extra setup/infra.

Also, Robinhood using this in production says this performs reasonably well and battle tested to handle some operations behind a popular app such as theirs.

Definitely excited to try this out to see how this fares compared to Kafka Streams and Spark Structured streaming, both of which we use.
Edit button is gone. Too late to scrub the internet of my mistakes...
I got a near perfect score on the verbal part of the SAT, but I don't see how good reading comprehension and a large vocabulary are particularly important to being a good storyteller. Reading comprehension is mostly about subject knowledge and vocabulary is something you can learn.

If you can craft an engaging story and you have the motivation to write, an editor (or a thesaurus) can help with vocabulary.
Yep. I loved to listen to that communication even as a non-pilot... all the way from the ground where sometimes I could hear the discussions about trying to leave the gate (or getting a gate on arrival if we were late) and all the way in between. I use to go out of my way to fly United just because of that feature.

Probably the cheapest value add the airline had, even for the relatively few that probably cared. Oh well....
Logical Replication vs. Streaming Integration
the site would have been nicer with a few images. Also the text layout was tedious - different fonts should've been used to convey metadata about the information in it.
Show HN: GDPR Compliance Software
That didn't really answer my question. What is the benefit of owning FB shares, especially if someone is a retail trader? Quarterly revenue growth is underperforming Apple’s services and it does not have a balance sheet like Apple's. Apple pays dividends and has a conventional ownership structure.
Nah, you'd have trouble stringing together enough words that make sense. Joyce threw a typewriter down some stairs for a month and now we all hail Finnegan's Wake as a master piece.
Yet no one is making that a surcharge. So if I pay with crypto, I'm paying twice, as the credit card cost are presumably baked in for all.
I too wish they would abandon an open standard like USB-C for a cornucopia of proprietary and legacy plugs.
>>"... pretty much any CNN article page includes an autoplaying video, a tactic which has allowed them to brag about having the highest number of video starts in their category. ... People really hate autoplaying video."

The result is that, even though I used to watch CNN often, it has been years since I've intentionally opened one of their web pages, and when I accidentally do so, I almost frantically close it to shut off the damn, auto-play -- and that's even if I was interested in the video content.

I'll get it somewhere else, thx.
Very dissatisifed with the evidence in this article (only national parks?), so I did my own digging.

Here is a 2005 USGS map [1] color-coding nearest road distance for every 30m x 30m square [2] in the lower 48. Surprisingly, it seems to hold up the article's claim reasonably well, and without resorting to discussing 'machines' or 'motors'.

[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2005/3011/report.pdf

[2] Edit: the map shows 1 km x 1 km averages of the higher-resolution 30 m x 30 m bins.
Revenue up 17% YoY, Net Income up 40% YoY up from the largest profitable base is not stalled growth.
You know what... good for him.
...or bury that length of communication fiber you remembered to bring along. "A backhoe will be along presently to dig it up."
18.7 miles is a long distance. If you're 18.7 miles from the closest motorized access point, you're in the middle of 1098 square miles of untouched land. Based on my memories of exploring the woods as a child, you could spend a full year getting to know the details of even a single square mile of natural landscape.

I think it's an interesting irony here that, primarily because of motor travel, we imagine that an 18.7-mile radius is not that substantial. (Yes, a marathon is more distance than that, but those are usually on paved roads and not through wilderness. The legend is that the first to run a marathon died of exhaustion on its completion.)
There used to be an open source self-hosted (php) ad application called openx. It worked well for quite a while. In its later years, it suffered a number of high-profile security vulnerabilities, and the open source version was poorly maintained since OpenX [the company] was focused more on their hosted solution which probably had migrated to a different codebase or at least was a major version past the open source codebase.

The open source version has been renamed "Revive Adserver", and it looks maintained, but I don't think it's used nearly as much as the openx [open source version] of old.

If you use Revive Adserver or you design a server-local ad system in-house, it won't be as sophisticated as gigantic ad-providers who can do all sorts of segmentation and analysis (producing pretty reports which execs and stakeholders love even if that knowledge adds no value to the business).
Absolutely, I see what you mean. Thank you!
No, it's not. The screen is not even full HD.
> Frankly, I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. Before the web was popularized, designing a layout meant a using a simple layout tool. Now it's a stack that is at least HTML, CSS and JS, and often more. We're doing more, to be sure, but you can't honestly claim, without a deep ignorance of the past, that it's easier or more inclusive.

Since we're on the topic of UI, I think this is actually a great place to discuss what has happened to programming.

You used to be able to use a simple layout tool. But we traded that away for a substantially increased level of visual sophistication that wasn't practical with the predecessor technologies. For visual sophistication, you had a couple other quite complex options: render it yourself, or for about 15 years, use Flash.

However, we've also smoothed out the learning curve a lot. Even if you have to learn the HTML/CSS/JS triad, we've figured out how to teach it more incrementally.

Even UI in 3d games has gotten dramatically easier. These days you can hack something together in Unity with barely any coding knowledge. When I first started learning 3-d programming 10 years ago, your options were basically to learn C++.

Maybe it's not a 100% obvious conclusion, but I think on the balance of things it really has gotten easier and more inclusive.
Apple of recent has a habit of selling old Macs that you should not buy. For example, they sold the 2012 non-retina, DVD equipped, 13" Macbook Pro for four years(!) after it came out, for $1100.
Completely agreed. I could continue by comparing it to the amount of bandwidth in a 30-minute CNN broadcast, all to read a few thousand words at me.
Crypto Portfolio Management App Shrimpy Is on Product Hunt
Sounds nice and all, but if I can’t use it, not super interesting to me. I can’t imagine we’re less than 5 years away from having this broadly available, and I personally would guess more like 10. Hard to get excited about something that far off. See ya when we see ya.
I do have a book in me, but I question its value as I'd most likely be pulling it out of my ass.
That doesn't stop it from being a bad user experience, it just means no one wants to do it better.
I believe was meant for another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17642751
ZZT was an early example of a game that included a level editor and scripting language. Lots of people say they got their start in development work by modifying games, and their "this is how I got started" stories are interesting to me.

Sometimes on HN you'll find someone involved in the original game, and their stories are usually interesting.
If you are lucky, there is a maker space within reach. Even if they don't have the tools, maybe some member has.

Or the old-fashioned way: Talk with local shops who use the tools you need and get some quotes.

Edit: or look for alternatives to parts you cannot make yourself (material or design or both).
If those coal power plants are replaced with alternative forms of energy, I don't see the problem... Talking about just "shutting them down" with nothing to replace them has absolutely nothing to do with that sentiment or the original cartoon... it's not remotely a reasonable reading of what I was saying.

Not to mention, my reply is to parent comment, not to the article in general. In no way did I say I completely agree with the author of the article- that's not what my comment was about.

However, if a news article with a load of JS and ads is considered to be this "modern web" then good riddance to it. I hope it goes away.

Yes, cool things can be done with the web, and some of those cool things take a lot of bandwidth or payload to accomplish- the examples (news sites, etc) are not these things.

What are your reasons for thinking the modern web is terrific? I agreed with that statement when I saw it, but as I think about it, I'm not so sure I do
> universe is a closed system by definition

By which one?

> randomness - it always comes from somewhere

Unless randomness is a fundamental property of matter.

> can't rule out fairies pushing atoms around

Wasn't it exactly what the Bell's experiments disproved?
Report: Magic Leap One's Field of View Detailed in Developer Documentation
That SSD is the fastest SSD in any computer currently available.

> Thou shalt heretofore use USB-C and dongles or will be sent to dongle Hell

That's a temporary state of affairs.
It's from this book https://strategyzer.com/books/business-model-generation
Information Rights of Conflicted Directors
Do you though? Except for gas, everything I buy costs the same whether I pay cash or credit. If a store started accepting bitcoins, I doubt they're going to recalculate the price to be lower than the cash price because you don't have a credit card transaction fee.
what really helped me was reading about how airplanes work. The technology was fascinating to me anyway, but once I found out how crazy redundant all the systems were I feel much safer than in a car. A car has redundant brake systems, but that's usually about it. Big commercial planes have 3-4 of nearly everything