skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quick summary for anyone in a hurry. Thorium-232 fertile material absorbs a neutron in a reactor and quickly transfers through Protactinium-233 to Uranium-233, a fissile fuel. Pa-233 is a strong neutron absorber so reactor designers like to pull it out of the reactor chemically to let it decay to U-233. Problem is, if you pull it out and let it decay and you're a bad guy, you can get fairly pure weapons-grade U-233, which is like U-235 and Plutonium-239.

Countermeasures are to make sure there's some U-238 around to blend it down (but then it makes Plutonium and minor actinides), use faster neutrons (not as affected by the Pa), or install safeguards around the reactor.

I'm a huge proponent of nuclear reactors but I have yet to see a design that is truly proliferation-proof. All reactors require safeguards. It's still well worth getting that low-footprint 24/7 clean energy, which nukes alone can produce.

Thorium is great. It doesn't automatically solve all issues in nuclear. Here are the highlights of modern common Thorium Misconceptions: https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html
Ouch.

There is a reason my backups are held on a separate machine in a separate building (and also on large external encrypted drives that leave site everyday).

Sometimes you learn these the hard way.
I agree on nuclear. But, you will not see a government agency predicting imminent doom. They’re constrained by politicians not to do so. The individual scientists, however, are more grim.

I can’t find it, but I read an article of some of the top climate researchers in Australia basically planning to abandon the country for themselves and their children.

Just the other day, there was an article here where the world’s leading coral expert was saying unequivocally that almost all the world’s coral will die within our lifetime (it sounds like he expected more like 10-20, though he wasn’t specific). He noted that 25-33% of ALL ocean species have part of their lifecycle in this coral.

Article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17842553

Unless we reverse this (sucking carbon from air using nuclear or solar power?), we emphatically do not have 200-300 years.
Well if we're posting links to documentaries here one from the BBC about Tetris. The Tengen vs Nintendo suit comes up. I haven't watched it in a while but IIRC the editing makes the Tengen guys look like that had some really bad luck thinking they had a legit license and it also makes Nintendo seem like a bunch of jerks for being so mean about it, as if there was no way to figure out any kind of mutually beneficial outcome. Also IIRC Tengen's version is considered better than Nintendo's

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ohCy4ktA5w
Yes, generally, on stackoverflow (but not only) "going astray" replies are actually due to both:

1) responders that either have not read fully the question or not knowing the actual answer decide to suggest something else that they know (or believe) would work

2) badly asked questions, sometimes it is a good thing to be synthetic when asking, but sometimes providing an even minimal background and particularly listing what attempts have been done before make a better question
>So if, in Excel, you can fit a regression from "scratch", (i.e. not using any built-in regression functions) and use the built-in functions for convenience, that's fine.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "can". Much like whiteboard interviewing, I bet I can't sit down today and implement a regression from scratch, because I'm out of practice. I have had no need to retain that information; there are tools that do it for me.

Could I do it quickly with a stats 101 textbook in my lap (or 10 minutes of Googling)? Absolutely.
Funny that you recognize the externalities of loan forgiveness but not defaults.

It isn’t just the defaulter’s problem when they default. That loan was securitized and exists in our retirement accounts. That default increase the cost of credit in that market, so loans cost more for the rest of us.

Anyway, not arguing we should erase all student debt. It, we have to acknowledge the problem is bigger than a few people’s bad financial choices.
Cross-language interfaces between C and C++
> Think about the fact that almost 140 years ago, civil engineers stopped building bridges that fell down. They stopped building them because the failure of one bridge was laid bare so publicly.

Yes, but how many bridge projects failed in the last 140 years because of cost overruns/missing deadlines which is a more direct analogy for most of the arguments in TFA.

And I'm guessing we're just talking about the UK since earthquakes have taken down a bridge or two in my lifetime...
I do not have a good reason. A lot of my recent stuff isn't technical, so it's only on the Medium pages. I guess I tend to post those links often now.
They will garnish your wages. if you default and destroy your credit rating.
Because it is cool to hate on zoos. Zoo attendance is down. Schools are afraid to take kids to even the best and most ethical zoos, but look at all the zoo-based tv shows. We want to see and learn about the animals. We just dont want to be seen seeing then.

The thought of kids only seeing sharks in a VR helmets is more politically acceptable these days. That future fills me with dread. Too many people hate sharks already.

Lol, the votes on my previous post are bouncing between -3 and +2 every minute. It is more devisive than trump's twitter feed.
Except we have zoos now and we treat animals very poorly, consider the billions upon billions of animals we slaughter every single year who’ve been forced to live in torturous conditions — zoos haven’t saved them.

Perhaps zoos aren’t the solution, maybe if we stopped the wholesale destruction of animals in our every day lives that compassion would spread to wild animals and we wouldn’t need zoos to remind people that animals aren’t just tools for us to abuse.
Do Open Source Developers Respond to Competition?: The (La)Tex Case Study (2007)
You should be more precise on what kind of role you're aiming at. I know plenty of "data analysts" who use Excel and little else. It really depends on the task at hand.
That is currently one of the things that annoys me the most.

Well, probably a toss up between that, and breaking out a recipe over a 10 page slideshow.
True but sometimes it can be very large indeed.

Nearly half the population of the UK watched the England vs Croatia world cup semi final.
Some people see it as a lottery. But in the case you loose (99.9% of the times) at least you learned something in the process.
It's worth your time, as Agner does some of the best 3rd party documentation for x86 processors out there. You should be embarrassed to have issued your idiotic and shallow rant about the style of his website. It takes a few seconds to click through his site and get to his amazingly high-quality PDFs that cover how modern processors actually work. I worked at Intel and there were people at the Fellow level there that regarded Agner's material as a worthwhile reference source. I guess they didn't get the memo about his bad popups?

Just goes to show that there's always an idiot out there with a bikeshedding comment.
Important to keep in mind, while tigers may have statistics showing a better life than in the wild, reproduction in the zoo has been a problem. There is still more thay can be done but I agree that there is valid arguments for zoos
It may be more interesting to work in the other direction, where the comparison with the economic data is used to estimate the quality of the OSM data.
The problem is that the lender exists in the first place. Becoming a barber shouldn’t require a five-figure investment. At most, it should be a few weeks of classroom and “lab” training, followed by a short apprenticeship.
Phone Numbers Were Never Meant as ID. Now We’re All at Risk
Curse you, overly prude auto-correct!
Tetris – From Russia with Love
> Except we have zoos now and we treat animals very poorly, consider the billions upon billions of animals we slaughter every single year who’ve been forced to live in torturous conditions — zoos haven’t saved them.

There's a false equivalence here. Zoos--and other tools like them which grant exposure--bring awareness to a challenge or a problem. Without them, awareness would be fleeting if not entirely absent from the western world as a direct consequence of the fact that far too many species housed in zoos just do not exist in the same regions of the world as developed economies right now.

In other word, zoos beget awareness, which drive people like yourself to protect and care for the many forms of life with which we share this planet.

I suspect there would be a much harder time convincing people in the developed world to pay e.g. Africa or the Pacific Islands a visit without an initial exposure to their simulated wilds in a well-maintained zoo.
Except for the last 30 years...
Some words of caution about moving away from mainstream products like Office (or Gsuite, to a certain extent). Most alternatives have today very good features, but inter-operability between platforms remain somewhat an issue. Arguably my experience of this is a bit dated (2 years) but at the time there were still issues on format conversions. It is less of a problem with .doc formats (though I found Libreoffice messing up on how these are converted to/from, for example when images where embedded between text), but if you work with spreadsheets in a meaningful way (i.e. you build heavy models and financial projections, with pivot tables etc.) can you afford to doubt whether a file will operate as intended once converted to/from xlsx when you need to share it with someone outside your team/company? Gsuite is much more basic, in terms of features, than Excel so i believe this is less of a problem.
Am I meant to be able to expand columns in this? It seems like I should be able to given that there's a lot half hidden content, yet I can't work out how to.
I always had the impression 99% of all space-electronic problems come from the fact that you have to lift stuff from earth.

You get plenty of sunlight to power your stuff and since gravity isn't as bad as on earth you can build stuff big enough to be shielded from almost everything.

But well, it has to go up somehow :D
I'm not the original poster, but Mermaid - https://github.com/knsv/mermaid - looks like a decent way to put easy-to-edit graphs in Markdown.

I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but I want to. It's not part of Github Flavored Markdown.
IT'S TIME TO STOP SENDING MONEY ON VENMO
Airplane noise complaints are skyrocketing because of an AWS IoT button
If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
Good to know - I broke up with a girl I would have married because she kept complaining I worked too much on my startup on weekends.
17 of the last 18 years have been the hottest on record.

If you want to know the challenge ahead of us go visit the slums of Manila or walk on practically any beach in the world and count the pieces of plastic.
How do you get rid of them? Term limits? Then we go back to the problem of having people who can get things done...
UPS to Deploy Fuel Cell/Battery Hybrids as Zero-Emission Delivery Trucks
Incremental steps up might be easy for high performers, but finding an amazing job is really hard, you have to identify a position and then grow yourself to fit it – not something that can be done in a couple hours a week. This is why executives are funemployed for long periods of time.
Also capitalism ends once you’re in a company. It becomes a miniature command economy with all the same inefficiencies.
Or, collectively, we figure out how to ensure college doesn’t cost hundreds of thousands in tuition for a BA.

When I attended UVA, back in the late 90s, my family was able to pay with no loans. Same for my sister a few years later. Looking at current tuition, that might not be true today. That’s with an engineer father and mom was a teacher (ie, we were comfortably upper-middle class, far from rich, but def. never had financial worries).
> In all honesty the smart practice is to search for a new job immediately after you get one and keep updating your backlog of potential jobs (you don't have to apply, just keep them in mind)

This is certainly the advice given if you're ruthlessly careerist, and it can be a good strategy if you're still looking for that dream role, but it can also backfire on you.

As someone who often needs to recruit I pay fairly close attention to the stability of an applicant's career. In general I don't like to see a lot of job-hopping unless it's in the early years of someone's career, because it can be hard to find a role you really like. Periods of contracting are another exception, although some evidence of stable employment for some period is also beneficial.

Recruiting is hugely important, but sucks a lot of time and effort from a team, and incurs significant costs, both direct and indirect. If you've been working for a decade and have never been in a job for more than 2 years that can be a pretty big turn-off.

You could of course argue that because I'd prefer to recruit people who will stay for more than 2 years, the roles I have available may not suit you.

Bottom line: there's a trade-off you're potentially making by behaving this way, which is fine, but it's important you understand that fact. Still, it's a good idea to start looking for a new job before you've started to hate the old one (bitter experience speaking right here): leave on a high because it'll probably set you up much better for the future.
The organization that pays the market wage will usually out-compete the organization which pays based on hours and seniority. Seniority is a poor proxy for productivity (theer's definitely a correlation, but it's not strong and it ignores individual variation, which is large), while paying based on hours is rewarding poor productivity.
> And I'll bet you all my bitcoin the experiment data was not collected during any year from 2008-2012.

From the paper, data was collected starting from January 23, 2013 for roughly a year.
Maybe lending should be risk based like other types of lending.

250k for med school, sure.
100k for undergrad in women's studies - no government guarantees for you

I'm sure there's enough data already on the RoI of various programs. Seems like there should be a floor / bar based on the RoI for programs to qualify for government backed loans to students.
Without the social component we as a species would not have accomplished as much as we have. We would not, for instance, have been so successful at sustenance that we would have time to sit around griping about our bosses - people who are there precisely because without them - we would not have time to sit around griping about them.

Organizations scale at the cost of efficiency - but scale they do. Incredibly powerful and inescapable - your idiot boss is here to stay.
Interestingly, confucianism extends this concept of obligation to society at large, in which case you're never flipping the table as a good person.

I wonder if that's a better paradigm than the more individualistic one we have in the West.
Wow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17843149
>the slow population growth in industrialized countries indicates that depopulation is possible

Slow population growth, does not lead to depopulation.

(Not that we would need depopulation anyway. More just a point that slow growth, is still growth.
Interesting observation by Aaron Swartz. That could happen because the barrier to entry for adding to a text blurb is much lower than that for contributing to a code base — maybe because we practice the former for a decade in school.

For code, ease of access (edit ability) is non-obvious and therefore, an important axis along which to evaluate open source projects.

So, funnily enough, I agree with you because the data you quoted for Wikipedia is much less likely to apply to code :-)

Btw, I recently came across a talk by Evan Czaplicki (creator of Elm lang) on “What is success?” for an open source project like Elm, and he raises some interesting points about how measuring projects by Github activity is strongly biased by a model of how the larger Javascript community works: https://youtu.be/uGlzRt-FYto
Sex, Steroids, and Arnold: The Story of the Gym That Shaped America
Here's a screen grab.

https://i.imgur.com/VsLb7Zc.jpg

Just a reminder, to bypass the pay wall just do a search for the title and then click on it. WSJ lets you read articles if your referral URL is DuckDuckGo or Google or whatever.
Why? You can watch people in captivity working their dead-end jobs for free.
Salty water is a problem, but pure chloride salt is less corrosive to stainless steel than pure water, according to a presentation I saw by someone from another chloride reactor company.
A surprisingly large amount of commentary on business and being at the right place at the right time, too:

Joe Weider was an excellent promoter. Hoffman wasn’t. That made the difference. Weider began to create more romance—he had a sharp eye for photography—and he was a better businessman than Hoffman. The one thing I respected about Joe Weider was, he gave everybody an opportunity to do something with themselves. He gave us exposure. It was up to you to take advantage of it and do something with it. Many bodybuilders expected money to fall to them. That ain’t the way it happens. You gotta get out and hustle your ass off. The ones who’ve prospered the most were guys who took advantage of the publicity and let that spill over to other aspects of their life.
Except that smartphone is a declining business.
Well, I just learned that the id attribute is what one should use for fragment anchors. All the HTML source code I've read (probably within the last year or so) used <a>. :/

Perhaps the moral here is that "newer" code was so obfuscated (minified; framework-infested) that I wasn't able to read it, so I only ever ended up looking at very dated HTML to fish examples out of. (Figuring out how to phrase something to Google can sometimes be slower and/or harder than simply looking in existing source code where you know you'll find something...)

FWIW, I started tinkering with HTML circa 2003 and have slowly (not especially concertedly) studied it over the years, which is my excuse^Hdefense. HTML5/CSS3 aren't especially intimidating to me (thanks to browser compatibility :D) and I could probably photocopy 60-80% of the designs I see here given significant time (this likely describes a lot of people here), but I don't really actively develop for the Web, so little oversights like this happen. Goes and reads how to include a CSS file again
> Many managers seem to think that they can easily change the requirements in the middle of the project.

"But of course I can change anything I want, whenever I want, and you all are supposed to handle it. That's why we use Agile!"
I generally noticed a recent change in tone of reports and documentaries regarding environmental issues towards admitting defeat. In terms of software engineering - we aren't going to refactor our society and economy - instead we'll deploy monkey patches, work-arounds and flashy new features until somehow the plug gets pulled.
Did I read this correctly that proposing caused an insanely strong 5 point reduction in happiness? And that having a kid was also quite negative?

It sounds like the takeaway is that if you're on the fence about any of these issues, you should quit your job, break up with your romantic parter, don't have kids, don't get engaged, and start your own business?

To me, it looks like the common thread through all of these is that happiness goes hand in hand with independence and freedom.
I totally agree. I feel like the audio editor is having fun for their own sake, and it takes away from the show for me. It makes the listening experience super irritating, despite the fact that I often find the content interesting.
Agile (of the scrummy, we just meet sprint goals that we set type) is not a project management solution, it is saying “well this seems hard, so we’re not going to do it”.

Project management is happily alive. Thinking Agile in some way solves project management is insane.

Plan out your system, estimate the time to build it (you don’t even need good estimates), execute ruthless change control. It’s not hard, just takes discipline. Ruthless change control is the hard part. That doesn’t mean saying no, it means saying “if you change things, it costs you schedule days”.

If you want a clear cut system, iDesign has some good classes. Imo at least.
>I mean, it made it sound like data scientist is just the same as a business analyst?

I think this demonstrates how hard "titles" are, because a "business analyst", in the sense that I learned, is not at all like a data scientist (or data analyst):

"Business Analysis'' is a research discipline of identifying business needs and determining solutions to business problems. Solutions often include a software-systems development component, but may also consist of process improvement, organizational change or strategic planning and policy development."

Most BA work I've done involved translating business requirements into technical or software requirements.

In other words, who knows...
CLINTON: If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.
You're arguing that a lion that sits in such a small cage it cannot run, has nothing to hunt, and little to do, is better off because they might get ticks out in the wild? Really? And if you want to talk about starvation, then let's talk about the source of Lions struggling out in the world, like human encroachment on their hunting grounds, farming, deforestation, etc.

A theoretical zoo paradise could work, but such a zoo would look more like a wildlife refuge than what we're typically used it. And members of the public may even have to put up with wild predators actually killed their food, and not seeing some of the wildlife very often.

Most zoos have small enclosures for economic reasons, not because it is what the animals themselves need.
According to his Twitter replies, he found them all on Flippa.
Can I ask where you heard of that book? I was only made aware of the idea of wicked problems by my favorite business professor in university and have never heard anyone else mention it
I guess the filter worked then
Change the url so you aren't looking at the html view: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ro4QYK1raqu3pNFMAjP9...

Then 'File', 'Make a copy' and you can edit and resize as desired.
Given the enormous scope of some of these projects I wonder if a prototype phase would help. Humans seem to have a hard time with conceptualizing and a slow, barely/non working and unscalable prototype might be worth the added cost/time. If it’s part of the requirement gathering process with explicit expectations set that it’s a prototype would it facilitate better requirements input? Naturally you’d have some people making assumptions about its fitness as a final product or MVP but (if a UI is involved) giant bright warning banners plastered all over might help with that.
It's pretty rude to bring someone's race, gender and sexual orientation into an argument. That's not good faith.
But not taking the step may send you over a cliff some later time. You might be quite happy now, but without a family or maybe a business you might be lacking a sense of purpose later in life. So investing 5 points now, may set you on a path to long-term happiness.
Boss Key
Okay, so your company delegates the decision to managers in other companies. The effect is the same.