skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of one of the episodes of the documentary series "Endangered Civilizations". From the description[1]:

> 9. The Books Under the Sand

> During the time of trans-Saharan trading, its strategic location along the caravan route enabled it to prosper. It was also the gathering place for the pilgrims from western Sahara as they began their journey to Mecca. It had already attained the position as a prestigious economic and spiritual center. Chinguetti was considered the capital of the "Land of the Moors".

In the episode, they reference and show a lot of very old texts. If I remember correctly, they mostly came from the days when the area was replete with trading activity, around the 12th or 13th century. One of the things they discuss in the episode is the fact that there aren't enough researchers/scientists that are studying them, so many of the books end up being inadvertently destroyed or buried under the always-shifting sands.

While I was watching the show, I remember thinking how awesome it would be to have some sort-of machine that you could point at the ground and be able to just see what's buried deep underfoot, for a wide radius. There's so much history in that area that is just completely inaccessible to us because of the climate and geography.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B079J3NT2V
That is very true. When I read the title it immediately brought to mind the 2006 events of James Kim disappearance and death. Although I'm on the other side of the planet and didn't know him or ever followed his TV show, the then news of him and his family being lost in the wild got my attention until the sad ending.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/STRANDED-FATHER-S-HEROIC...
I call it "struggleware."

Some of their tech is awesome (as confirmed by friends who have tried it), but they are struggling to solve the final technical issues and get it to market.
People sometimes forget that the other side can also have billions of dollars.
Isn't that fair? If cheap headphones work you are getting what you paid for. No one should expect a $12 headphones to be as good as $100 headphones. A 5 star review for one means something different than 5 stars for the other.
The problem is a lack of skill.

The solution is lots of practice.
The “privatising public spaces” issue isn’t just limited to the internet. To understand the point better the above poster is making you might be interested in reading about how private malls became our de facto “public” spaces.

Legalese and dodgy analogies aside the above poster is focussing on the practical effects of these sites being so big and ‘default’.
> Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people.

You sure won't see those in your analytics dashboard.
But it would be 82 million Apple TVs overnight after a software upgrade.

Not to mention PlayStation Vue could become Apple Vue.
It might be worth it. In our case being listed on Stripe's website brought a non-negligible number of new customers.

For Stripe, it may be a way to filter out not serious applications.

Other payment gateways often need you more than you need them ;)
I like the idea, it should work but I expect it will be difficult. I’ll be watching this thread, good luck!
Why is it different? How is it different? The behavior and impact isn't, is it? Can you give us something more than "it's not the same" because this response isn't wholly convincing.
Ask HN: Upcoming competive cybersecurity events in the fall?
Is anyone aware of any competitive cybersecurity events this Fall for a college based club to compete in? As cyberseed at Uconn will not have their event this year, we need to find another event, and the only things I've seen are conferences. I don't find attending a bunch of talks to be particularity attractive.
SD Card is legacy.

Legacy: (noun) a useful, established technology that Apple's designers feel it makes their computers less pretty.
Most credit card company contracts explicitly say stores can't do that. I'll bet if a visa rep drove by and took a photo, that gas station wouldn't be taking credit cards at all a week later.
The plane didn't leave the ground - the engine blew up as we were accelerating for takeoff. That's now something I now find reassuring: takeoff seems to be a time of maximum stress on the engines - if they're going to break (or explode), hopefully it will be before the plane leaves the ground!

This was 20+ years ago now, but I remember being awed by the performance of the pilots and flight attendants. The plane braked hard right after the explosion, so the pilots clearly noticed it and took immediate action, even though I heard later that people in first class were so far away they didn't initially know why takeoff was aborted. In the moments that followed, one pilot was giving first aid and I saw him run down the aisle - blood on his hands and shirt - to get more help and medical supplies. Yet he was calm and professional throughout.

Some people yelled to "stay calm" or "don't panic", and people listened. Announcements were clear when there was no further danger and how we were to exit.

We were kind of dumped in the terminal at the end of it all, though. I remember an announcement that there were no additional flights that day, so we couldn't get rescheduled until tomorrow. Seriously? There were ambulances, news vans, and Red Cross vans at the terminal almost immediately. The airport was clearly completely closed down - I don't know for how long. And no baggage claim, of course: it took about a week to get our luggage back.

In the weeks that followed, the FAA sent a questionnaire that was extremely detailed. They wanted essays about every aspect of the flight and it took a long time to complete.

A couple of years later, I was on a cruise and met a young pilot who'd just got his first job with an airline. I mentioned this experience, and he said, "No kidding! We totally studied that accident in school!" I find that very reassuring... aviation seems to learn from mistakes and experience better than any industry I've worked in.
generally, good writers are good readers. Competent writers have a varied vocabulary which does not come across as forced (which is often the case when someone relies on a thesaurus). I don't think too many are surprised that mathematicians get perfect scores on the math part of the SAT, so I dunno why writers scoring equally well on the verbal is different. Yeah obv. being a mathematician is a lot more involved than scoring well on a test, but it shows potential.

I don't think vocab can be taught. The reason is, vocab is very highly correlated with IQ, which is stable thought life and cannot be boosted. A large vocab requires a strong crystallized memory, which is a part of IQ. Most people when they encounter new words either are unable to infer the meaning and or forget it, but smart people do both.
I guess my point was that success in these things at a reasonable (i.e. definitely not expert) level has far more to do with perseverance than "natural" talent or physiological characteristics - you seemed to be suggesting that the latter has far more to do with it than it really does. Neither of them are out of the normal range of human capability the way, say running a 10s 100m is. People consistently underestimate what they are capable of in these sorts of things.

Ignoring the problems and gatekeeping attendant in publishers, I belive most people could write a book that a significant number of people they didn't already know would pay to read (this may fall well below the numbers that would make a publisher interested). It probably wouldn't be their first book. Similarly most people could run enough to post a decent marathon time - again, probably not on their first marathon.

The main characteristic is not "raw talent" or physiology, respectively - the main characteristic is trying, failing, learning from your errors, trying more.

I forget who said it but "talent is a pursued interest". If you pick a random person and they choose to put the time in odds are extremely good they could write an ok book or post an ok marathon time. They aren't likely to write a best seller or break 2:30 - but that's not the point.

It is undeniably true that the overwhelming majority of people will never do either of these, but that is not because they are incapable of it but because they do not choose to focus time there.
A website that allows all legal content would be like 4chan. Ask moot how many advertising dollars 4chan attracted.

That's why Facebook is in the "business" of policing content.
Definitely a good point. You'd imagine they'd have at least 1 person who optimizes the site for page size / load speed.
I would say just the opposite. Dell laptops have single handedly made me never want to spend money on Apple laptops. They are cheaper with more versatile configurations.

I have no complaints about either the cheap Dells I’ve had over the years or the midrange ones - just always buy thier business line or from the Microsoft store.

I have a 2008 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell that’s going strong as my Plex server. It was one of the last great 15” displays with a 1920x1200 display.

My current work and personal laptops are midrange 2n1 Dells.

MacBooks just aren’t compelling to me and this is coming from someone who has an iPhone 8 Plus, an iPad, a 6S (without a sim) and 5 AppleTVs (2 free from DirectvNow). Not to mention I had two FrankenMacs in the past - an LCIi with a //e card and a PowerMac with a Dx/2-66 card and later two Mac Minis.

On the other hand, the 5K iMac is compelling.
I mean, I'm incredibly happy with my $24 Chinese bluetooth headphones.
I guess while we are on the topic of licenses; how crazy is it requiring users to obtain their own Oracle JDBC driver in 2018? Why won't Oracle just let us distribute software ready to connect to their database?!
Use noscript then.
Yes, it's quite complicated now (but it's getting better).

But it's not as easy as replacing it with something simpler. If you do, you will discover all the things you can't do with it. So you start to improve it, add features, etc. And after a short time, it's probably even more complex as html/css and still not as flexible and powerful.
I don't necessarily disagree, but typically an organization wouldn't let a non-degreed employee use or touch ASM (fair or not). It looks dodgy from a P/R perspective.

I also forgot to mention that many engineers and scientists used FORTRAN and BASIC back then without knowing much about the guts of computers. It's largely why such languages were made.
>Thats like giving a data scientist 1/3rd of the available data, and saying "thats good enough".

And it could easily be enough. Having 1/3 of a quantity of something doesn't mean you barely had enough before.
What a morally convenient position when certain people are actively leaning into the disinformation for political gain...
Your descriptions of their styles (sarcastic-vs-optimistic, whiny-vs-syrupy) are reasonable for their lyrics, but this analysis seems to focus only on the instrumentals, the melodies, chords, and so forth.

Their lyrical differences are reflected in the melodies, of course, but I would not describe Lennon's chord choices as "sarcastic", for example.
Perhaps, but perhaps it is simply suited just fine to its users' needs despite looking dated.
> To pay in cash, yes. To pay digitally? You're paying high credit card fees. So, no, not really

What high fees do you mean? Credit card fees in the EU are capped at 0.3% iirc.
> IBM, on the other hand, has always competently (and sometimes quite viciously) protected their products legally.

Viciously, perhaps.

Competently...well, the Wintel PC market—long ago “The IBM-compatible PC market” might be an indicator that they can fall down hard on that.
I don’t get all the hate on the new MacBook Pros. I have a 2016 with TouchBar. It’s not a beast but it’s definitely faster compared to the 2015 model I replaced.
Aerial Views of Mexico's Dystopian Housing Developments
> England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland makes 4 countries, just FYI.

...yes, that's the point. When people talk about "the NHS", as they usually do on HN, they're conflating four different systems (or, more commonly, thinking only of NHS England).

The point, in case you missed it is that nobody outside the UK has what can reasonably be called a "national healthcare system" in this context.
This surgeon wants to offer cheap MRIs. A state law is getting in his way
That's how I describe monads - a programmable semicolon.

Basically {A; B} becomes semicolon(A, B).

Then you can have hidden state in the semicolon function and have complete control of how (and whether) you execute A and B, and in what order.
>Reading comprehension is mostly about subject knowledge

Actually reading comprehension is about everything _besides_ subject knowledge.

It's about the pure ability to understand something you've read -- e.g. to understand tone, intent, turns of phrase, idioms, writing styles, patterns, argument building, etc -- not about having some particular domain knowledge.

In other words if you read an article about a physics experiment but didn't understand it because you don't know what "spin", "wavefunction", or "interferometer" means in QM, then you don't have a reading comprehension problem. You just have a lack of physics knowledge.

If, inversely, you read an article about something you know very well in real life (e.g. baseball), but miss what the author tries to say, mistake the intent of some metaphor, misunderstand the argumentation, etc, then you do have a reading comprehension problem.

Of course to comprehend something you read you also need to be familiar with the thing it's talking about to. But reading comprehension is about everything else but that part -- it's about being familiar with the written word and the ways people express things in writing in themselves [1].

[1] "Fundamental skills required in efficient reading comprehension are knowing meaning of words, ability to understand meaning of a word from discourse context, ability to follow organization of passage and to identify antecedents and references in it, ability to draw inferences from a passage about its contents, ability to identify the main thought of a passage, ability to answer questions answered in a passage, ability to recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage and determine its tone, to understand the situational mood (agents, objects, temporal and spatial reference points, casual and intentional inflections, etc.) conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining etc. and finally ability to determine writer's purpose, intent and point of view, and draw inferences about the writer"
Depending on your age and what exactly you count, probably around 5ish.
Right, but based on the article title and phrase that's repeated throughout the article, it would be called "You can't write a computer program", but the point of the article will be "your good idea isn't necessarily a startup."
This article (among others) suggests that the most remote from a road is a corner of Yellowstone where you can get about 20 miles away. [1] I sort of expected that the distance would be greater even accounting for the fact that many "roads" in the West aren't really what a lot of people would consider roads. I have also read some claims for a greater distance from a road, such as in the Wind Rivers, but I haven't seen anyone arguing for more than 30 miles or so.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/25/yellowst...

[ADDED: The USGS map is really interesting although I wish they had given the "winner." It appears that there are a fair number of spots that cluster around about the 20 mile point. Some are in places you wouldn't necessarily expect although many of those are along a border which reduces the number of directions where a road could lie.]
How is buying back shares a better usage of the money? Sincere question
Great tip, similar to evening, early morning is my favourite time to fly because winds seldom pick up in the early dawn morning, plus better visibility and no traffic on the way to the airport. And it's beautiful!
And even if you had a building process that made circular/n-gon-based rooms practical, furnishing and laying out those rooms would be awkward. See the problems people have furnishing dome houses.

I'd least envy the people trying to arrange shelving in the library...

Still, interesting. I'd be curious to see results as he adds more practical constrains.
Value is subjective. But you could say that the Bitcoin network has a price: the sum of the price of the miner hardware and electricity usage.
This is precisely why I like Apple. The fact that I got 5 years out of my last MBP was totally amazing. I used that computer at least 10 hours a day, every single day!

I don't care about saving $1k or $2k when it comes to a device I use that much. We're talking about a dollar an hour here. I've literally spent more money on coffee over that time.
I've often toyed with the idea of using multi-user systems over SSH running Gopher and Lynx to achieve something like this.

In the process, it would also decentralize communities and establish digital equivalents of coffee shops (i.e. places to work in public and meet strangers)--basically SDF, but deployable on Raspberry Pis with more modern userland toys (i.e. software actually designed to be multi-user on the same system).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
> I'm asserting that the NYT can achieve the substantial majority of the advertising optimization and targeting it needs to do to be profitable

Majority, not all. Why should they leave money on the table, exactly?
Many bus rides are much longer, available to people who don't have a credit card, and have better traffic density.
Question about that, if it's something that takes us too far into the weeds I'll stuff it and save it for later in the interest of keeping us on topic:

When people make the argument of-wrt suppression or censorship of speech "Legally no but socially/in the court of public opinion yes", I often want to fire back "But...are not our laws a distilled and concentrated output of what we value in social publics? If we start allowing exemptions and exceptions to that value system to get an outcome that takes away liberties in social publics, are we unwittingly creating the 'case' to erode those values in (the grander) legal establishment-given enough time?"

(This might be a long winded argument of 'slipper slope', unsure. Someone call me out on this if so)

Maybe it's a question of ethics versus law, or perhaps ethics in the context of buffers between person/individual and state/government?
> Samsung stopped making drivers for their MFCs so I needed to toss a perfectly working laser MFC because it stopped working with Linux, just like that.

Erm... The old drivers stopped working with this particular device?

I had a very similar case with perfectly good HP laser printer, which doesn't
work on Window 10 anymore because... dunno? No drivers from HP, though. I'm
sure it would work just fine with generic PCL or PostScript driver under CUPS.

> Later, a HP MFC caused endless pain, seemingly every other Arch update broke one of Bluetooth / printer of MFC / scanner of MFC.

Well, that's probably self-inflicted because of your choice of Arch, not
because Linux (e.g. Debian).

> Plain Wifi eventually worked more or less (but see the endless string of bugs with 5GHz) but enterprise wifi always has been a pain.

Enterprise Wi-Fi has always been a pain, also under Windows.

> The strange F5 VPN our company used was not particularly Linux friendly

VPNs are usually that way. Very few companies can write sensibly working
software that would run under Linux.

> -- I could only get it to work by running Firefox as root (yuck!).

You get pretty much the same under Windows, though you don't see it as
clearly.

I don't get why you bash Linux. Windows has the exact same problems.
That story reminds me of a guy who made a CRUD application (tracking, reports, & statistics) out of MS-Excel VBA. I was asked to start supporting it, and did a lot of similar head scratching. Amateur programming can be worse than no automation at times.

He wasn't bitter, however; just confused about my assessment about it being time-consuming to support. I had to explain that typical programmers use abstractions to make code maintainable and not rely on our ability to read, well, spaghetti code fast. I've met some programmers quick at deciphering spaghetti code, but I confessed I wasn't one of them. I used the analogy of taking a custom-built amateur car with a custom-built engine to a generic auto-mechanic and expecting them to figure it out as fast as a regular car. That story seemed to click.
Oh yikes does it really? Ignore my misinformed comment...
Anecdotally speaking, I have a couple friends in medical school right now and they do everything on their iPad + keyboard. My mom has used an iPad as her primary computer for the past 5 years. For a lot of people who primarily interact with their computer using PDF's, slideshows, a little email and video, I think that it is a totally respectable replacement.

I would be curious to see what percent of the market is people that want their computer to be doing things powerful enough to justify a computer more powerful than an iPad pro is.

Disclaimer: Obviously a $300 chromebook destroys an iPad in price but you know so do a lot of Android phones and people still pay the premium for iPhones because they are sexy[1].

[1]https://www.recode.net/2017/9/12/16290910/apple-event-iphone...
Mac Mini's have utility. I have an office full of Mac Mini's, a dozen of them or so, and keep buying more.

I still love them for my team. I have it down to a routine now, I buy one of the cheaper ones from the Apple refurbished site for about $400-500 or so, and buy an SSD from Crucial on the same day.

When it shows up I swap out the unusably slow internal 5400rpm drive for the SSD. That's a little tricky but once you've done it twice you can do it again in 10-15 minutes no problem.

Then I get it all fired up. I have a bunch of Dell IPS 4k screens in various sizes and get a another used one or two from B&H if I need more.

I'm very happy with this workflow, but it's still a hack. It sure would be better if Apple just made more reasonable desktop machines.
How do you know if the client has an error and the content was not loaded/displayed as expected? How do you know if placing the content on the right side or the left side increases conversion rate by 10% if you don't do A/B testing? There are huge business advantages when you use analytics. You don't care about creepily "tracking" a specific person, you just care about getting better conversion rates and happier users.
soar helped me a lot. the whole thing with the "strengthening exercise" is pretty hokey and just totally ignorable IMO, but the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise single-handedly solved my problems with turbulence. i do it whenever the plane shakes and it damn near puts me to sleep every time; and over time i find that i don't need to do it as often, because i've gradually become calm by default in turbulence. which is great!

it's totally a night-and-day difference, i used to be terrified of planes and now they're just a mild irritant.
Right now, proof of stake seems like the best solution to the energy problem. AFAIK, bitcoin is not looking to implement PoS, so my bet is on Ethereum to address this issue.
It's hard to educate people too. You have to go hard and deep to convince them enough not to spend money on their next mall trip.
Probably because the argument "but he was wrong about other stuff" doesn't invalidate this article at all and doesn't add anything to the discussion. If you disagree him on Bitcoin then state why
Accept your death every time you sit in the seat.