skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. This has nothing to do with the story.

2. The Kingdom of Dahomey is not modern-day Benin. In fact, Benin was deliberately renamed from Dahomey (the French had used that name for it as a colony).

3. It's probably not productive to single out any one African people in the slave trade. What seems to be the truth is that the slave trade was a vicious cycle driven by demand from outside the continent: great world powers would trade military technology for slaves, meaning that most tribe/states in Africa were essentially locked in an arms race to avoid themselves being enslaved. There was slavery in Africa (like basically everywhere else in the world at one point or another) before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but the Trans-Atlantic Trade was a sui generis world-historical event, at a whole new scale (by percentage perhaps the largest forced movement in human history) and it wasn't caused by Benin.
They have different performance metrics, they act differently when you unplug them, and they have different administrative features. Only the power loss scenario is something an application should ever care about, and even then it would either be "requires ZFS" or "doesn't care".
I use both osmAnd and Maps.me from the fdroid store.

Maps.me: https://f-droid.org/app/com.github.axet.maps

osmAnd has a ton of features. maps is more basic but is better for navigation since it has a 3d option
> If you have a lot of money, there will be constant pressure upon you about ways to spend it or invest it "wisely".

The pressure is even greater for someone who has to live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Gets me thinking about the term evercrack...
I switched to Syncthing a while back and haven't looked back. It's self-hosted, so there are no storage limits, and if you care to put in the work (setup is a tad more complex), it's also pretty easy to hook it up to a cloud server, which nets you an off-site backup.

Syncthing doesn't quite have the "Just Works" factor that Dropbox's offering has, but I don't need that; the ability to synchronize several terrabytes of my personal archives (I have a lot of data) was more than worth the effort.

https://syncthing.net/
> Linux has too many options. Mainstream users want to be able to get the same thing (or near it) on every computer they use.

While I personally rejoice at the choice, unfortunately I believe you are right. I have switched quite a few people to Linux, technical and non-technical. The technical people tend to get excited about choice, and sometimes go read for hours on the different DE options. Non-technical people get a look of anxiety on their face, and even a little panic. I started defaulting *younger users to Gnome 3 and older users to MATE, and it has been a terrific decision.
> however sayings like "no doesn't necessarily mean no" is part of a sales mindset.

Precisely why I abhor 'sales' folks. No really does mean no for some folks, and many people in sales cannot differentiate between the 'no means no' and 'no means meh, maybe?' groups. Here's a pointer: one group you will convert into mortal enemies (who can/will influence the other group), the other group you might make a sale.
I often get asked about what my views on doing a PhD are (I am more-or-less finished with one now), and one of the ways I frame it is the following:

You know how you've take a course before where the professor was just surprisingly awful at teaching? These professors are often some of the most knowledgeable people in a subfield of the subject you are taking, yet their teaching ability is severely lacking and you have to scramble to learn the material some other way (or just never learn it).

During a PhD, there is a decent chance that your adviser is similarly a bad manager. Unfortunately, having a bad manager for 5-7 years of your life can be a fairly awful experience. You will work with someone who you, on the one hand, look up to, but on the other hand, who seems to not care at all about your mental health, your possible career desires outside of academia, your work/life balance, or the exact reason why this week was a rough week for research in your (human) life.

I have a lot of other thoughts on the matter, but I thought I'd try to keep this post more concise =).
Same. Had to move to another continent to be together, but you can learn alot about someone while repeatedly trying to kill an invading demonic horde.
The Unpleasant Reality for Women in Sports
As a current PhD student in CS -- seconded. I'm fortunate to have a great advisor, and my research career so far has been largely fun and productive as a result. I have also seen equally (or more) talented and hard-working students have worse experiences because of worse advisors. It's just hard to become a good researcher without good mentorship.

As far as practical advice for finding good advisors, track records of previous students can be a helpful first filter once you've made a list of people who wrote papers you like. Probably the most helpful thing is talking to current students at the admitted students day and listening to them. Bad advisors usually have at least one notable case, and there will probably be at least one person who'll take you aside and tell you about it. Listen to them carefully. Even great advisors can have at least one unsuccessful and bitter student through no fault of their own...but they usually don't show up to the admitted student events unless there's a real cause for animus.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It's about how to listen to people in the right way. You have to set up communication systems that allow you to dial in to what THEY think is important and get out of your own way
What typo? “Beard tax” is indeed correct; it was a tax on those who wore facial hair, as part of Peter the Great’s plan to ‘westernize’ Russia.

Edit: I see now; it’s the year (1987). D’oh!
You could create the log table as "unlogged" so that it doesn't go to WAL.
> But you'd have to have one or two distros that were particularly good for gaming that the majority of them used

Right, that's probably closer to what I'm getting at. There's probably always going to be a bunch of options for Linux, but there should (?) be a few main ones for most people. And then anyone who wants to customize can then customize to their liking.

But it'll all be open source, not proprietary
If the differences between filesystems were not interesting, we wouldn't have different filesystems.

The differences between filesystems are largely implementation differences, not interface ones. They all essentially provide a way to store hierarchically named streams of bytes.

If it was something like a formatter, fscker, defragger or similar utility I could definitely see the reason behind "only X filesystems are supported" --- they need to access the low-level data structures, but (disclaimer: haven't used it before) AFAIK all that Dropbox does is sync changes in files between your local filesystem and some cloud server --- which doesn't seem like the sort of functionality that requires anything more than the basic FS API.

(If it hasn't already been done, someone should write their own client, or patch out a stupid check and show that, yes, Dropbox does work on just about any filesystem.)
Good stuff. The B2B UX Design guys at http://fairpixels.pro talk about similar approaches on their blog.
Depends what type of PCB[1] we're talking about.

[1] https://www.nano-di.com/dragonfly-2020-pro
I wouldn't recommend having syncthing be your only backup, at least for important files (like photos/videos of your kids). It was a couple years ago, but a syncthing bug was eating large files.

Take this anecdotal report with a dash of salt. It didn't happen to me. Happened to a friend of mine. That said, I wouldn't make Google Drive or Dropbox your only backup either.
You'll get bitter when the rent is due, watwat.
Twilio amicus brief on net neutrality repeal [pdf]
3) Hardware support is dependent on kernel version, regressions occur.

4) There isn't a universal anything. There's no base system for developers to depend on, there's no consistency to the interfaces, widgets, clipboard behavior, or anything else.

5) Pretending there is no line between "system" and "application" and relying on a package manager and repositories is a terrible paradigm with a long list of problems roundly dismissed and ignored by the community.

6) The community is terrible. If you have any issues you'll be told you're using the wrong distro (no matter which distro it is), you should read the manual (even if you did), you don't really want to do that (I do, actually), "normal people" don't do that (I care why?), and finally that the source is available and you can fix it yourself.

7) The whole system is a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine of disparate components developed largely in isolation and slapped together by whoever decided to build a distro today.

And probably about a hundred other reasons. But rather than try to solve any of them the Linux desktop community prefers to pretend that they don't exist, and the REAL problem is that Microsoft is a bully and won't let companies install Linux by default or something.

This guy maintains a more comprehensive list: https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...

To be fair, some small progress has been made and Windows is currently being sabotaged by Microsoft, so Linux Desktop may yet win by default.
1) The slave trade is extremely relevant to the article about the “amazons”. In the nation’s annual festival in those days, the Dahomey “amazons” would reenact capturing slaves. The Dahomey military (and the “amazons”) spent most of their fighting time attacking neighboring nations to get slaves to sell.

2) We agree. The place was called Dahomey. The place is now called Benin.

3) The kingdom of Dahomey was less than one third of one percent of the land area of Africa, and yet sold twenty percent of africa’s slaves that went to the new world. If ever there was a nation in Africa that could be discussed in the context of the slave trade, this is it.
> If it were actually more valuable then someone would buy the company, fire the noblesse oblige and hire new management.

Comical. "The Market" is far from perfect - especially in more monopolized industries. Consider the 2008 housing crash for a recent[1] example where "the market" did not behave rationally across a wide swath of professional investors. Add to that the fact that the "someone" in your example is most likely part of the noblesse oblige themselves and will default to respecting the opinion of the board (no matter how wrong) and not the workers.

> If the “happy workers make more money for the company” truly had a positive ROI, then the market would pay it.

Most often, the market behaves like a gradient descent algorithm - seeking slightly more optimal operating conditions without rocking the boat too much. This normally leads to finding local minima, not global ones. The most notable exception is "startups", where the initial conditions of the search may be radically different than a typical big-co - sometimes leading to better results.

Now consider that most medium-to-large companies have been operating for years (maybe decades) on the assumption that cutting costs - including wages - is the best way incrementally optimize profit. Reversing direction would mean going back uphill for a while as the culture, employee attitudes, and recruitment pipeline slowly change in response. How many boards do you think would put up with years of declining profits during the attempt to find the better way?

This doesn't mean that there aren't examples of companies that take this approach even for low-skilled labor[2][3]. Just that it's rare because of conventional wisdom and the corporate politics involved in making it happen.

[1] An even more recent example is Theranos - where companies that should have known better bet big on partnerships with a vaporware medical company against the explicit advice of consultants they had hired to advise them on these matters.

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/costco-pays-retail-employees...

[3] http://brandautopsy.com/2007/01/the_starbucks_e.html
I wonder if Braintree warned their customers that they will be changing their operations / policy and gave fair warning before flipping the switch.
> ChromeOS is doing ok I guess, but if that is how linux wins the desktop, it’s a very pyrrhic victory. ChromeOS is Linux, but not any of the parts I like about it.

Partially agree, although using Crouton it's been very easy to run Ubuntu on a Chromebook for years. Also Debian is about to get first class support. That and the ability to run Android apps is becoming really compelling to me.
> ...it never ceases to amaze me that Linux has yet to take hold on the desktop market.

If you don’t get this you should probably just admit you don’t understand the desktop market and refrain from commenting.
> People will be trying to port their existing code, and will be unpleasantly surprised.

I agree with you 100%, but this made me laugh.
I use OneDrive with the unofficial client by abraunegg. It works _almost_ flawlessly; and the twice now that I've had a bug they've fixed it within 24h; even when one happened on a Saturday.

https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive
Maybe as the first "smalltalk" question you'll get a brake pedal, but yes your Saturn-type question will be the "make or break."
First principles of doing a PhD and taking up an industrial jobs are quite different, which this article sidesteps. I am talking from the perspective of someone who did a PhD, postdoc and migrated to be a founder/CEO.

A PhD system trains you to think about unsolved problems in an given domain deeply with a larger time runway. The end goal is not a tangible product that reaches millions of people, but rather a set of ideas that can take a crack at the unsolved problems in your field in a novel way. A good work should inspire others in the field, and eventually a larger audience to pick them up and expand and build on top of it. To give a small example, a majority of the fundamentals of machine learning was charted out by many, many PhD works over the last 40 years. Implementing a linear classifier is 2 lines of code in 2018, but many Bothans died to bring us this information :-) .

The goals of industry are more immediate. Expect for a privileged few research labs in industry, your work is expected to be monetized, and rightly so. The goal is for you, if you run the business, else your management team to first figure out a problem of high relevance and monetary value. Build products/solutions for that problem, that can be used by someone who is less versed/ambivalent of your technical solutions. Efficacy of solving that particular problem often defines the merit of your contribution.

The fundamental of choosing the PhD or industry should be taking stock of what kind of contribution you want to make as an individual. If it is a few set of ideas to science, which on a later date might become something fundamental in our understanding of the world, then PhD is a good path. If it is a set of contributions towards a product/solution that eases the pain of many users then go into the industry first.
This is quite an unfortunate article. Author goes on to list several folks who don’t have PhD but have “made it” and asserts that many people can do fascinating and cutting-edge work without PhDs. There are always outliers in stuff like this but ask yourself: How many people you know who don’t have PhD and have freedom to explore at work full time what truely interests them? Author has rather twisted view of the selection bias.

People should do PhD if they are genuinely interested in doing scientific research. If you are doing PhD under pressure or in hope of getting better paying jobs you will be dissopointed. It is an arduous process and taking up your precious years but it gives you opportunity to have freedom to explore and work on your interests for rest of your life. You won’t be coming to office everyday doing assigned task on your backlog and reporting your status in scrum meeting. Instead you will be reading about new creative work that was literally published yesterday, mulling over that in lunch with colleagues and apply your original ideas to actually get published under your name. The downside could be lower pay and/or no stock bonuses for many outside of hot areas like AI. But in general, you have much better chance of doing cutting edge work that you are truely passionate about if you have PhD in that area.
Can the Manufacturer of Tasers Provide the Answer to Police Abuse?
Why would this even be a question? Boards are nothing more than a way to represent owners. You can't have shareholders vote on every single decision.
Highlights from the OpenStreetMap conference
My son and I played for years together. We got pretty competitive so when he leveled to 80 slightly ahead of me, I was pissed at him for several days!

Good times.

Oh, and seeing Ozzy live at Blizzcon was pretty sweet too.
Clearly a matter of perspective.
Happily living in Xfce-land on my various Arch-boxes, my rare excursions into the world of Windows are always occasions for disbelief: 'Do people actually live with this, day in and day out?'.
The prescribed choices, the licensing popups, the installation and upgrade rigmarole, the opaque policy management, the dependency hell, the anti-virus idiocy, and the Mickey Mouse conventions of the file system. Please, take me home to sanity.
But as I said - perspective. I must assume it all somehow makes a kind of sense if you're really into it, and that pacman -Syu could equally freak you out if you came visiting to my side. Windows users rarely do, though.
Scapegoating and killing seals will not save orcas
Predicting the Sun’s Corona for the Great American Solar Eclipse
Colorado Regulators OK Early Shutdown of Coal-Fired Plants
Regarding 3, it seems that 70%+ of the African slave trade went to the Middle East, not across the Atlantic.

Also regarding 3, I wonder if, comparatively, the Soviet Union forcefully moved a lot more people (even percentage-wise) through its network of concentration camps. African slaves going over the Atlantic were what.. 2-3M deaths over 300 years, whereas the USSR easily disposed of 10-30M between 1917 and the 50s and later in its various GULAGs.

Much better organized, more ruthless, exterminating its own lawful citizens, thanks to the wonders of ideology. All for the greater good of society and the working class. No ethnic difference necessary to justify unprecedented genocide. Neighbors reporting neighbors to the authorities with almost total certainty of execution, for many decades.
Again, that is true of many African states. To get arms, you dealt with slave trading nations for them. To get the slaves to get the arms, you raided other nations. To defend themselves, those other nations needed arms. To get the arms, they dealt with slave trading nations for them. All you're point out is that eventually "winners" emerged. And?

Later

(The comment I replied to was drastically edited after I responded to it.)
I'm a fan of Nextcloud, which is self hosted and very nice.
I'll take a moment to spell out what's going on here, since they seem to be beating around the bush in the article itself, possibly for fear of imitation in the wild.

They take a smart lightbulb with certain features: infrared and media decoders.

They specifically hijack the infrared portion of the bulb's spectrum only. Why?

Because standing right next to the bulb, you wouldn't notice it flickering hot/cold, at millisecond intervals. So they can create a channel in the IR range to send anything they want, and go unnoticed.

So, then, at any time (not just while you are watching movies) that bulb can be made to send any information, and not just add atmosphere to your viewing habits. Indeed, it can both exfiltrate arbitrary data, without you noticing, by flickering in the invisible heat region, AND also follow along with your movies, independently, Much in the same way it can blend a blue channel and a yellow channel into green ambient light.

It needs the media decoder, so that they can gain fine-grained access to the bulb's transmission state. It needs malware and local network access to create the implant and continuously relay data to steal.

The benefit here is that it might ba able to amplify reads at a distance, perhaps greater than wi-fi. The signal is degraded at 50 meters, but if one wished to transmit a very course signal at lower bandwidth, it need not be a high-detail image, such as lena.

It could be the heavily aliased bitmaps of your password, read from across the street from a hotel parking lot, where a hotel has installed these bulbs in every room.

It could also use a control signal sequence, to automate sniffed passwords. For example, have a passive video buffer watching a specific window, waiting for S-O-S, before it starts recording, then it captures 60 second interval, and ceases for a 5 second quiet period, to await the next S-O-S.
Autonomous Driving by Cruise Lead
It depends, but yes it is not free. It is however quite cheap if you have a full car. So for example anyone going for weekend with family, highway is cheap and is MUCH faster then normal roads.

Japan also has a developed highway rest areas, you will often see people sleep in the car there, often whole families in vans that been outfitted for it. There is washroom, restaurants, sometimes shower and even hot spring, they are also clean, might have local produce being sold, alcohol etc

Here is a priceless use case for a salaryman from Tokyo. Get off work, get drunk with coworkers, get in the car with family at 10pm on friday. Car delivers you to the closest michi-no-eki to a ski resort and parks itself. Wake up at 6-7am, get to the resort by opening lift, grab breakfast at conbini drive to resort. There are lots fo places less then an hour off highway. Being able to sleep and being driven on highway would be incredible.

Company that delivers that feature in the family van will destroy competition until they can duplicate it.
would linus torvolds please stand up? he uses fedora; could fedora be The One? (in the article, author argues for a "standard desktop distribution" to rule them all)
Where are Toyota's electric cars?
> And probably about a hundred other reasons. But rather than try to solve any of them the Linux desktop community prefers to pretend that they don't exist, and the REAL problem is that Microsoft is a bully and won't let companies install Linux by default or something.

At least with 4, 5 and 7 they don't get solved because they are also strengths and a large part of the reason linux is so successful. I also don't see why you complain about package management but also complain about it being a rube goldberg machine, the former fixes much of the later which is still an issue with windows.
The Dell XPS laptop comes with ubuntu and is the best laptop I've ever had.
> Linux will be the "obvious alternative" when the software actually works with off the shelf consumer hardware, compiling your own drivers based off of something you've downloaded from github is a non-starter, and getting things like waking from standby to work isn't a series of frustrating googles.

When was the last time you tried Linux? Unless you're using something very experimental, you don't have to download drivers from github and install them (unless you want to). Even Nvidia, which is the only exception I can think of, is packaged in a way that's pretty darn friendly (a couple of clicks in a UI to enable them). What you described is more what Linux was like in the 2000s era. If you use a distro with an even remotely new kernel (Fedora, Arch) it will likely support every piece of hardware you can buy (proprietary hardware is an exception for obvious reasons).
I have been using the alpha, beta and rc so far on a project that's scheduled to go live before the end of the year, and @babel/preset-typescript has been a joy to use (minus can't use const enum)

Congratulations to the @babel team, this release is hard earned
You can't pretend there is no sexual innuendo. There's a reason the room was laughing, that's because they got "the joke"