skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In addition to the human story, the latter fourth of the article has a lot of interesting/worrying detail about the systems and failures involved. A couple of examples:

- Lack of interoperable comms was obvious after Sept. 11 and continues to be an ongoing problem with fighting over radio spectrum. Or even agencies just being hostile and uncooperative with each other.

- Attributing deaths to a disaster can involve arbitrarily narrow criteria. 36 deaths in Harris County are considered storm-related because the victims drowned. But the county recorded ~2500 deaths overall in August, 200 more than in July, and an outlier compared to past Augusts.

The growing use of social media as an ad-hoc emergency system when 911 is overwhelmed is really interesting, if worrying. Facebook posts and streaming video are invaluable for people to communicate with their loved ones (e.g. Wayne streaming video to his friends/family showing that the water levels as stopped rising). But given that individual agencies had trouble filtering duplicates and tracking call status (e.g. dispatchers personally text fire captains in an attempt to get priority attention), I can only imagine the problem being much harder across the open web.

The story notes that agencies weren't "prepared to respond to distress signals posted on the public's technologies of choice: Facebook and Twitter". But I can't imagine what it would take to truly prepare for that. You'd have to have a full-time and well-trained social media staff akin to what big companies have for customer service, e.g. what airlines have, and this would be in addition to your 911 phone dispatchers. And then there's the problem of reconciling duplicates when someone, quite understandably, is repeatedly pinging you from as many social networks as they have in the belief that it increases chances of getting noticed. At least with traditional phone calls, there's more of a one-to-one relationship between phone numbers and people. OTOH, if the bandwidth could handle it, being able to communicate with dispatchers via FB Live/Facetime/Periscope/Skype could be incredibly valuable in avoiding the kind of miscommunication detailed in this story.

For me, one of the most troubling aspects of this story is how Wayne Dailey acted how I probably would have: being patient and reasonable, understanding that the dispatchers are overwhelmed, wanting to avoid making things worse by freaking out. Based on the reporting, though, it seems had Wayne been more pushy, more relentlessly belligerent -- emergency workers would have grasped the actual severity of his situation.

Even when he got through, it seems dispatchers dropped the ball on passing along his info, leading him to think he was in the rescue queue. Meanwhile, someone else in his neighborhood gets a helicopter evac because they have a friend who knows the district Congressman who has a line to a federal agency. Can't blame that neighbor for trying everything and anything to save their loved one. But it's worrying to think that every-person-for-themselves might be the optimal survival strategy as opposed to organized triage.

(disclosure: the author is a former colleague)
> using six oval-shaped cars, each measuring 18m x 7.2m holding 30 people

Hmmm...is that 30 people/car or 30 people/6 cars?
You will be enclosed with them on 18m x 7.2m, that's 120m², for 8 days!

The former case would sound like torture, in the latter case it could be done comfortably, though, but it would still require some good nerves by the travellers...
All the source files of standardebooks.org books are up on Github, it might be possible to write a script to automatically convert the files to LaTeX.
You still somehow have to think about the future though, but you gotta make sure to keep it simple as well. It's all about juggling different needs vs available resources.
I think the advantage would be that you only have to deal with dynamic forces the static force of gravity would not be a problem. The diffrance between a bridge and a helicopter.

Maybe the required energy would be sucked out of the earth's rotation, but that seams insane.
Given enough investment, Stirling engines could beat internal combustion for many applications due to a theoretical efficiency advantage. However, economies of scale and many decades of R&D give internal combustion such a huge advantage, that this probably will never happen.

At what point does the 20 year amortized cost of a system involving a space fountain or launch loop acting as the 1st stage of a vastly simplified and downscaled rocket break-even with some small multiple of the 20 year amortized cost of a space elevator? I suspect that this multiple might be small enough that economies of scale and optimizations of other systems could keep space elevators out of the picture forever.
This isn't a scale model of a real space elevator at all.

From the article: Shizuoka University and contractor Obayashi aim to launch two small (10 sq cm) satellites connected by a 10m steel cable from the International Space Station.

I don't see any ways in which this is a space elevator related experiment.
So, to me, "future proofing" has some very specific connotations. It doesn't mean building for eventualities that you know will happen and already know how to build for (though, if it takes extra time to do so, you do need to be mindful of the cost of delay), and it doesn't mean things like writing well factored and loosely coupled code (within reason) so that you get a system that's generally easier to modify.

It means going out of your way to try and handle scenarios that you don't know will occur, or whose details you don't really understand yet, with clever one-off facilities.

E.g., I've come into a couple projects now, where I'm supposed to add in some new feature, and I discover that the original author has thoughtfully added a bunch of extension points to try and help me with that. Both times, I also discovered that building in those extension points accounted for a large amount of the pre-existing complexity in the code, even though they weren't actually being used for anything yet. And both times I also found that none of them actually addressed my needs, so all that extra effort and complexity was a waste. One time I was unfortunate in that the existing code was of the "600 line functions and a whole mess of mutable state and temporal coupling" variety, so changing it would have incurred excessive risk, and I opted for just jamming my square peg into that round hole. The second time it was well-factored code, so it was easy enough to rip the round holes out to make room for square ones. But it would have been even less effort if I could have skipped that cleanup step and just jumped straight to adding the extension points.
A rocket is heavy because it has to carry all its own fuel. A space elevator does not.
>but if we're talking about value-conferring ideas contained in works, it seems likely that they would become common parts of culture given enough time and exposure.

Even if we constrained them in their "value-conferring ideas", the power of such ideas in those books comes from experiencing the emotions and subtleties involved in their storytelling.

Without that, a raw "takeaway" idea will have neither the required buildup, nor the emotional impact required to affect one hearing it.

Plus, a key part of literature is not about value-conferring ideas, but about experiencing others' lives and ways of thinking and looking at the world. This is totally lost in plot summaries.
> Should we have error handling at all ?

> Software engineers: no, too much work to think about every possible error case

> Sysadmins (looking at above statement): NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I hope all developers that are not completely incompetent agree with the sysadmins here.
Instagram 'listening' to your conversations (2016)
The Diplomatic Couriers Who Deliver America's Secret Mail
This is a good idea. Although don't make me describe a real place or let me pick a place to describe.
Somehow I'm never happy with CMake guides. The official book is ridiculously outdated among other things, the official documentation is complete and current but provides no guidance, and none of the blog-documentation about it gives a complete picture. Some of it is bad advice. This one doesn't talk about the dependency graph, something I consider very important in a build system. It is also missing a lot of other stuff. (Fair enough, it's provided for free.)

I wrote the CMake training material for KDAB (www.kdab.com) while I worked there. In my biased opinion it's the best CMake guide around, especially after it was extended and polished by coworkers :). I tried to mix explaining the "inner logic" of a build system, and CMake in particular, with examples, resulting in something I'm reasonably happy with. The main difficulty was ordering the topics to avoid too many forward-references while also not starting with a lot of not-obviously-interesting groundwork [1].
(I don't work there anymore btw, so the interest I have is getting my work used)

This intro to modern CMake should be good because Steve is a major CMake contributor and good at explaining. The presentation even contains a dependency graph! https://steveire.wordpress.com/2017/11/05/embracing-modern-c...

[1] Aside: I figured that "There are two types of bad software documentation: math textbooks and cooking recipes. The former does not explain why you are doing things and other helpful context, the latter won't help you if you need to do something differently, which is almost always."
Well, if you follow the statistics,

which I'm not sure you've been tracking,

the composition of Hacker News

has a larger number of gents than ladies.

At least it was so, the last time I checked.

However, that having been said,

I will maintain gender neutrality in the rest of this reply to your very much appreciated response.

FWIW, I am considering using the kernel to build an I/F above it.

One of our side projects at khitchdee (hhtp://www.khitchdee.net)

involves the design of a single interface

for a large population of users

through an app designed to help design them

I am planning to use this kernel as a base for that work.

AFAIK, the kernel is written in C which is my language of choice.

I do not think I will have trouble modifying it.

--- x --- x ---

At the risk of being intrusive into your precious time,

would you happen to know someone who knows where the kernel code is archived?

It's very old code and likely poorly documented, or, my guess is, completely undocumented.

However, if I were able to get a printout of that code,

I'm pretty sure I could browse through it and understand how that kernel functions.

It is notoriously known amongst C programmers

that if you can't read another programmer's code, you must not claim to be one.

This is an unwritten code of conduct

which few people know about or are aware of in this era

of very few C programmers.

One of the most famous quotes

of the author of the famous "The Art of Computer Programming" trilogy,

Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, Donald Knuth,

was

"all programs must be literate"

which, literally translated, means other programmers must be able to read them.

After he made this statement,

he was vehemently criticized by the programmers of his time

who claimed that this statement was a suggestion of the existence of their unwritten code.

In other words, he was the first person to even hint at its existence in non-verbal form.

--- --- ---

Long story short, I could use a pointer to the where-abouts of that code.

I'm guessing the base code is under a thousand lines.
cmake actually has an issue where a dependency it has depends on cmake, worlds of fun.
> This is a false dichotomy.

Nevertheless, it is the subject of the debate and the debate also goes into why you would want scarcity as the basis of a money.
Stylus[1] (permanently removing all the fixed elements) and Firefox reader mode are the only things that make Medium bearable. Static site generators are the way to go.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/
Well, they're both Indo-European - evolved from the same language.
I happen to have a number of gas station owners cousins. Their sentiment is, if there is demand for something, they’ll supply it. Charging stations, replaceable batteries, whatever. If there is profit to be made, they’ll do it.
Be wary and skeptical of what you see on the internet regarding allergies. There are a lot of people trying to push quackery to make a quick buck online.
The most general answer to your question is Peter Drucker's (famous management guru) observation that every doubling of production of an item (over the lifetime, not yearly) resulted in a cost reduction of 20-30%.

So right now, with very few LIDARs produced, we have a high price, which will start dropping as more are produced.

You might find this interesting: a single transistor used to sell for roughly the equivalent of $8 USD in today's money; today the cheapest ones are 6 Cents USD (price checked today from Mouser.com) in qty 1 pricing...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/h...
The advantage of going up by pulling oneself up on a space elevator over pushing oneself up with a rocket, is that one doesn't have to push oneself up with a rocket.

The tyranny of the rocket equation! The energy use of a rocket isn't just "how much energy is needed to have that kinetic energy and that potential energy", but also includes the energy needed to lift and accelerate the fuel used to provide that energy, as well as the fuel needed to provide that energy, as well as the ... and so on.
One tip that is not covered: If the user already has the app installed, right on top show some message like, "you can only read 2 more exclusive articles this month", which expands to some marketing speak and option to pay $50. This will make the user immediately run for their wallet and subscribe. I just noticed that Medium has this down.
Depending on what it's made of, a break in the cable wouldn't be instantaneous, but happen in stages. Perhaps cut the earth end at the red alert stage up top.
> Fiat money is money that some authority, generally a government, has ordered to be accepted as a medium of exchange.

The core idea is that "some authority" doesn't assign the value to the money but requires it to be accepted under penalty of the law.

Usually, historically speaking, when a currency is separated from its underlying commodity by fiat it retains its value due to the fact that people have associated it with the value of the commodity -- up until the point "some authority" fires up the printing presses and the historic link is broken.

Anyhoo, not that I'm disagreeing with you on principal it's just that "fiat currency" has a specific meaning that "some authority" has spent a lot of energy trying to disassociate it from.
In a mobile browser, they also obscure the article text with an "Open in app" button that stays on screen as you scroll.
The use cases of cryptocurrencies are the same as any currency: paying for stuff.

If enthusiasts think that paying for stuff with cryptocurrencies is going to become popular, I don't think it's just a "dismissive media tune" to point out that after ten years, it hasn't happened.
I'd say if you haven't got checked for this (and if it hasn't been discussed yet) it's advisable to ask for getting a check. It's easy to test if they have the right tools available and I'm not sure how many optometrists are aware of Keratoconus.

Back then it felt like poor luck that they've diagnosed me.
They reference this paper on Byte Pair Encodings
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P16-1162

they tokenize text and then learn an embedding for those tokens using (in their case) both the source and target lanuage. This presumably captures regularities for languages that are not very different and has the benefit of having a small dictionary.
Ha! Satire aside:

With high quality open source publishing tools like Hugo[1] and Ghost[2], and free hosting from GitLab/GitHub pages, there's little excuse not to self-publish.

Even using a paid service like Squarespace would be a step up in my opinion.

[1] https://gohugo.io/
[2] https://ghost.org/
Just clear your cookies.
The core idea of MUMPS is actually pretty cool. A transactional key-value store built in to the language itself. NoSQL before the term was invented.

The worse part of MUMPS is simply the syntax, especially the abbreviation of keywords. If it didn't allow you to abbreviate "IF" to "i", "SET" to "s", etc, nobody would be complaining anywhere near as much. (But, back in the late 1960s, as an interpreted language that ran on PDP-7s which only had 9-144KB of memory, saving a few bytes on keywords allowed you to write longer programs, and hence do important stuff you otherwise might not have been able to – I guess they hadn't thought of the tokenisation approach that 8bit BASICs used, store keywords as one byte but expand them fully when listing/editing the code.)
ABRIR Puertas de GARAJE Con Teléfono MÓVIL * ABRIR GARAJE *
I know, but the bedrock is unlikely to have changed that much. You could make a ballpark estimate on the mass and energy needed for that alone.

Still, I understand the top layer composition matters a lot in terms of how it could absorb an impact. Was it full of water? Earth? Sand?
I am not going to try to debate "gwn7".

Please do your own research while seeing a Gastroenterologist or registered Dietitian. Specifically a specialist you are referred to from your primary care doctor. Do not go looking for a Naturopath or GAPS practitioner!

Please also do look into blogs that have debunked the people mentioned in that comment.

Please, please, please do not blindly follow the advice given by the comment by "gwn7".

Some discussions that I feel you might find informative:

https://medium.com/@ZDoggMD/naturopathy-is-99-9-bull-hit-but...

https://badsciencedebunked.com/2015/09/10/trick-or-tweet-dr-...

https://angry-chef.com/blog/want-to-see-something-really-sca...

https://www.naturopathicdiaries.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mercola

https://www.theringer.com/2017/1/5/16041098/dr-joseph-mercol...

https://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mercola.html

https://owndoc.com/diet/gaps-scam/

I wish you luck in finding the correct medical treatments for your daughters' conditions.
I did look at the data. I really wanted to buy a Nissan Leaf but it just didn't make sense with having to deal with battery replacement headaches. If I could afford buying a new car every 4-5 years like a different commenter in this thread it would be a different story.

How about c'mon and read your own article. Your "data" is an article centered around one specific EV that achieved 400K miles, which btw went through two battery pack replacements:

> A lot of people are probably interested to know how the battery pack held up, but unfortunately, it didn’t. It was replaced twice during the vehicle’s 400,000 miles.

Womp womp. Have fun with that when you're outside of Tesla's warranty.

The fleet-level data is interesting but not terribly relevant to compare the driving habits of an in-city luxury taxi service to the typical American, who will be making longer range trips. It's also skewed to be comparing the maintenance cost of luxury cars (Lincoln Town Car and Mercedes GLS) - the comparison should be a Nissan Leaf to a Honda Civic or an Accord.
like so many things written about software, this ignores everything in the process that isn't a computer program. Future-proofing is a natural consequence of a management style that doesn't clearly set goals and boundaries. Engineers wind up future-proofing because their goalposts are constantly moved. Picture this scenario:

Engineer: I can build it in different ways. This simple way will accommodate N users, this more complicated way will accommodate M users but will take three times as long. I recommend we do the first option, because it's unlikely we'll see more than N users.
Management: no, we want to get to M users, build it the second way

That sort of situation is exceedingly common. The reality is that the vast majority of engineers don't get to set the product development road map based entirely on engineering concerns.
Those look like exactly the kinds of dependencies I'd go for if I needed to write a new C build system. Nothing ridiculous about them.
It’s difficuly to do outside of the US and some European countries.

Most companies will just incorporate in the US and use a US payment processor and operate as a US company. If, for example, you have a business in Brazil and you want to sell digital goods it’s not so easy to accept payments at all, let alone international payments. And incorporating in the US can be a hurdle if you don’t live here or have somone who can help you navigate getting set up with things like a US bank account.
For writers who feel stuck on Medium given it's recent downward trajectory, I'll just leave this here: https://github.com/ageitgey/medium_to_ghost
> Also, forget about sending email from home. Email sent from residential IPs are instantly deleted....

Sorry, but this hasn't been my experience at all. I see this claim all the time, and, obviously, ymmv, but I've been using residential IPs for ~10 years with no issues.
> but the bedrock is unlikely to have changed that much.

We're talking about the time before the continents had formed, the scale we are looking at here is non-intuitive.

At that level of impact energy everything starts to behave like a fluid, even planet earth, so whether or not the top layer composition was water, soil, sand or rock is not that important. What's amazing is that there are traces left that much later, even more how large those features are. That's a testament to how enormous the impact must have been.
An easier way to understand it is in the context morphology: word prefixes and suffixes mean things, and words have common roots.

For example, polymorphism could be decomposed into poly-morph-ism. Antidisestablishmentarianism, which is unlikely to appear much in the corpus, becomes anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism. Now the system can learn how to reuse "anti-" or "establish" from other examples more easily than trying to learn the full word's meaning from the one or two examples it might see in the corpus.

BPE is a clever way to induce these sort of decompositions automatically without any linguistic annotation, making them useful in multilingual settings. Other languages are much more morphologically rich than English, and there it really benefits.
One thing that might make it _slightly_ better, is that when I had read something for one of my language courses, they'd give us a list with a selection of books we could choose from.

So at least, you kind of can read a bit about each book and then see which one you'd like best. Still, the selection had to fit in the school curriculum so it wasn't exactly free choice. And a few of them were mandatory for everyone.

I'd say the experience still wasn't great, but perhaps was better than being forced to read book X.

Intrinsic motivation to read does make the experience a whole lot more satisfying, and as others have noted before me, reading some of those books again now makes me appreciate them more. Just recently started reading some of Tolstoy's work and I can imagine that a decade ago (in high school) I wouldn't have been able to find motivation to read anything he wrote.