skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation."

The article is more poetic than informational. I am so used to technical readings that I translate the sentences into something more concrete, maybe more journalistic.

I guess that this sentence means that "classic books" define our cultural background, differences between the east and the west, between countries and cultures independently of what you can see now on the news.

Translating it into more plain concepts allows for a better understanding. With this new wording, I can reflect on how current events, video games, streamed videos are shaping our society and will be identified in the future as "classic".

> Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.

I interpret this as you have already "read" the classic as it is part of other works that you have read or seen. That our culture has been influenced by "classic" works to the extend that you can feel like you have read them before.

> The classics are the books that come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through

This confirms my previous interpretation. But, I have then to open the question.
Do "classics" shape society or are only a result of it? If a "classics" was never written our society will be different our we will just miss a recorded piece of cultural history?

> If the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.

I do not agree. I am reading "classics" books out of curiosity or even duty towards being responsible to improve my own education, and last but not least for pleasure. Different people will have different motivation.

Can anyone try to explain this other one? It sounds good, but if feels kind of bullshit. :)

> We use the word “classic” of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans. With this definition we are approaching the idea of the “total book,” as Mallarmé conceived of it.

This post is an interesting read for a change.
That's what safeties are for! We already have a lot of engineering around making elevators safe. TLDR the elevator will clamp on to the rails to slow the free fall.
Neat info below on snapping elevator cables and some of the things that would help you.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-m...
It could be that shoelaces and space elevators turn out to be on the same side of some tipping-point technological breakthrough.
> When I sit at my work desk, I have 2x DisplayPorts to my monitors, a USB 3.0 hub, and often a USB thumb drive. Swapping to USB-C would be a pain.

So with your setup that’s four cables to reconnect each time I need to get up for a meeting, where as I have a single cable (that single cable provides power, USB, a 5K and a 4K display, and Ethernet in my setup). Yep, sounds less painful to me too!
RS details RISC-V processing hardware in the shape of Arduino
> That's hotter than the Hagedorn temperature, there could be some very interesting stuff going on.

Unfortunately it's not made clear in the article, but the temperature they quote is not an actual temperature, but instead a way of describing the specific intensity of the radiation. In this case the emission they're measuring is non-thermal (synchrotron emission), so the "brightness temperature" of the radiation field is not the same as the thermodynamic temperature. I'd put in a top-level comment about it too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17898224
Scons has soooo many problems. You still can't pass in positional linker flags without completely hacking how it calls the linker. :(
That's wonderful and I will be recommending it to my friends from now on, but I've found in my experience of reading classic literature, it's at least sometimes much more useful to read such books with modern annotations, which is why I just check out annotated versions from my local libraries.
Physics would tend towards "No."

Assuming a catastrophic break near the upper end of the cable (before the counterweight), there's not much you can do to keep it from coming down.
That's interesting. Certainly, we've all been cued by the sound of our hard disks that something in our code was wrong or that our computer is up to something unexpected; now that disks are getting quieter and/or replaced by SSDs we lose that important "feature." As code-relevant hardware gets more complex (GPUs and other outboard processors, interaction with robotics or media headsets, etc what-have-you) that sort of hardware-level diagnostic should become more useful, rather than less. Has anyone tried to get this to happen on purpose? E.g., little electrical taps on relevant bus cables, with an audio jack.
Looks cool. Actually gave Julia 1.0 a whirl just now. The best plotting library, Plots.jl, doesn't work with 1.0. Oh well, guess it's not cooked yet.
Onyx Boox series run Android (some old, some new), and go up to 13” in size.
I own Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon.
Its best feature is a built-in broadband modem. No more dealing with USB modem, searching for WiFi or tethering with the phone.
Growth comes with technical issues. As a rule of thumb, 2 orders of magnitude increase in traffic requires significant refactoring or change in architecture. 1 orders of magnitude in team size requires new forms of management. Etc.
What rails? They're not going to run more than one of these difficult-to-build structures up for each elevator. There will be a single cable, and the car will climb it. What happens if the cable snaps will depend on how far up the car is. Low enough, and it will descend to the surface on a builtin parachute. High enough, and it will perform some portion of an orbit, before descending on its parachute.
Great article. Threading in a chat tool is an absolute necessity for me. Regarding embedding, I like to wave and smile without talking to makers while they are working. I say hello and maybe chat with managers. Waving and smiling is friendly without interrupting a maker. It still gives them an opportunity to start conversation.
Is humor against HN rules? I regularly see such posts being downvoted and it doesn't make sense to me.
Nightmarish!
U.S. veterans use archaeology to dig through trauma in Israel
The Historic Capitol Stones Are Hidden in Plain Sight
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

Now in theory you could do error handling without try...catch. Golang especially espouses that vision. However, like C before it, in practice Go programs ignore pretty much every error case.

To that practical situation, I will say, try...catch is far, far superior. Why ? Because it terminates your application instead of running the program in a way that erases the database. As an additional bonus try...catch gives you exactly what happened, and the entire stacktrace that mostly specifies what all the parts of the application was doing (and if you know what you're doing in Java/C++, including all values of all internal data structures. In Python ... well a little bit less but still substantial information).
Out of warranty Teslas hard to get repaired
if you want your startup to begin life with a leech hanging on it then do it with ycombinator if you want to see an antiasshole policy that is afraid of looking in the mirror then ycombinator if you want to see shitmodding and gangstalking then ycombinator
Yeah, RDBMSs do have some big advantages; one of them being the plethora of query patterns possible.

If there are other parts of your application which are consuming the same data but in different patterns, it might not be necessary that systems like DynamoDB work in those cases. You might need to make several secondary indexes in those cases and all of them require provisioning of their own. The other alternative being setting up some ETL layer which transforms the data and sends to appropriate sinks, from where they can be consumed; but for small services that adds more moving parts and cost to the system.
Well, I have to say I am completely unpersuaded.
Bazel, the open source sibling of Google's blaze.
The rails? The car will travel over a stationary structure, not be pulled up by a pulley like a conventional elevator is. So it is failure of that stationary structure that we are talking about.
Kim Stanley Robinson [0] explores some of the failure modes when bad actors are involved. Bad actors with serious weapons. People on the satellite end get flung off into space, the cable wraps itself around the equator, and people on the elevator had better hope that there are nearby spacecraft to pick them up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
I have a 3 something version running on OpenSuSE 11.2 (that thing is ancient) . Spend maybe a day disabling various features to make it compile. Still didn't run into anything that needed cmake to support encryption.
Android NDK supports CMake 3.6 only for example.
> Modula-3 had nothing to do with Modula-3 though.

What?
Given strength and size and other properties that carbon nanotube ropes would need have... Wouldn't a carbon nanotube shoelace be like the worst idea ever? ...strong as a steel cable, but so thin as to be hard to see and handle. And brittle and not so good at bending. => First it slices up your hands when you tighten it and then it breaks when you tie it :)
I feel like this assumes that the errors that might be thrown by a section of code are knowable. For some high level projects with poorly documented dependencies interacting with third party services that are in constant flux it’s nearly impossible to know everything that’s going to happen and try..catch allows you to program defensibly when an assumption the programmer made is invalidated.
I think try catch is fine with some documentation or commenting around why the developer chose to do so instead of specific handling for all the different possible exceptions.
i remember reading here on HN someone explaining why space elevators are not possible. I can't recall why, but he/she had very convincing arguments.

Anyone here remember that thread and can link it back here? Thanks
I know nothing about physics... but wouldn't the space station need to counter the cable tension?
Most humor can be categorized as "insubstantive comments" and those are discouraged.

It is possible to crack a joke here and get it upvoted, but it's hard to pull it off. I even once had a joke upvoted by quite a lot,* like 50 points or something, but most jokes are downvoted not because humor is forbidden, but because insubstantive comments are discouraged.

Some humor is downvoted for being uncivil because a lot of humor is basically poking fun at people or mocking them. A lot of humor is not nice at all. HN tries to meet a very high bar for civility.

* Under my old handle and it hit 59 points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996229
I know, you have to flip some other quantities besides velocities, but I didn't want to make it more complicated.
Presumably you could have redundant cables. But two almost adjacent cables would still be exposed to many single points of failure, especially any caused by a deliberate attack on the system.

And just a cable falling could be a significant disaster by itself.
"near-zero-g"

Why would it be "zero-g" you're not in orbit?
That depends probably on whether you were a lit major or not. I can understand how someone forced into a lit class under general studies would be irritated by texts that seem uninteresting or irrelevant but if you're a literature student that's exactly what you're there for.

Half the use of the classes was getting a syllabus someone had gone to great lengths to organize around an expert knowledge of some area or string of thought.

I usually found a good deal of value, even when the author or work was not to my specific taste.

My classical literature class had a cycle exclusively on Antigone. I was and am not as enamored by that play as was my instructor and the critic George Steiner who we were asked to read. But to loathe the requirement and not focus on deriving the best possible value from that assignment would've been a waste of money.
Thanks guys. I'm out of the loop.
Getting Started with Protocol Buffers in Go
> By this logic, no new language would ever take off.

And in many cases they haven't. Javascript competitors seem like a prime example of this as there are too many javascript libraries that make your life easier, and would have to be ported to a new language.

What makes a language successful primarily is how easy it is to do productive things with it -- and that means easily using existing code (from some other language).
> just don’t write shitty code

Why do you use a screen to look at your code? Sure it helps you see what you are typing but I mean just don't type wrong to begin with and you don't need a screen to see what you just types! Just focus! Don't write that shitty code so you need a screen to keep it from being shitty.

I'm not trying to be snarky I'm trying to make the point that every single tool we use from a compiler, a type system, unit tests, a monitor... are tools we didn't have from the beginning as programmers. And every time a new tool came, there were always people saying "you don't need those crutches, just do it right instead" (Writing machine code, using punch cards etc). Also, they were always wrong.
This a very moving piece of journalism. Thank you for your contribution.

The takeaway for me, I guess, is that you the words "Medical Emergency" and "Dying" need to come out of your mouth on repeat if you are in a situation where your loved one is at risk, in order to make sure you get put onto the right triage list. And I hope everyone understands that falsely reporting a condition in a disaster scenario is effectively killing someone by taking away resources from someone in desperate need.

On another note, I wasn't aware that most 911 call centers in the US still haven't converted to VoIP. I wish Ms. Fink had given some hard data on conversion rates across the US, since it seems like that could be a good place to start to avoid these kinds of tragedies in the future.
You are moving from ground (1g) to geostationary orbit at zero. It will be a slow progression from one to the other (with a very slight lateral acceleration) but imho once below .5g anyone who is going to get air/sea/space sick wont see much difference.
Are there any major success stories of big projects going serverless? I like the idea, but personally it mostly appeals to me as a nice way to reduce maintenance overhead for side-projects rather than something I'd use for a serious project.
Yes, error handling is really useful.
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life with Dr. Robin Hanson
I worried about my clarity too lol. It’s always Ops who’s fixing it (i.e. me).
Building and scaling the Fastly network, part 2: balancing requests (2016)
Also infrastructure.
Several other Oberon implementations exist for different platforms, including embedded systems, native windows executables, and the Java virtual machine: http://oberon07.com/compilers.xhtml
Unfortunately I still host this blog on Wordpress! Just scaled capacity! Should be available now.
On MBPs, the fans “idle” at about 2,000rpm, they are just designed to be quiet at that speed, but are definitely running. 90°C is fairly close to the thermal limit of the MBP (as in, system will auto power off), so no, that’s definitely not the temp the fans turn on, but might be when they go to max RPM.
No, it’s not against the rules, but downvotes aren’t there to enforce the rules.

It’s just a culture thing. HN tends to be more news and factually focused than reddit/Twitter/etc. People here just prefer to stay on topic, especially since humor is very different between people and can be very hit or miss.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160112182109/http://www.shenla...
There are various simulations of what may happen. Here is one that demonstrates what may happen if the cable breaks at various points.

http://gassend.net/spaceelevator/breaks/

In summary, if the cable breaks at the base, the elevator will fly harmlessly into space. If it breaks at the counterweight, a large portion of the cable (several thousand miles long) will collide with the Earth’s equator.
Why would it only be oncologists? Repealing this act would remove the efficacy requirement for the entire pharmaceutical industry, not just cancer treatment.
Whether jQuery, which is written in vanilla JavaScript, was better or not has nothing to do with my point.
Most of the good parts of python's scientific computing libraries are wrappers around fortran libraries.
This is awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Can you add Mirai as well?
I feel like I'm not exactly cut out for it (I can't stomach the agile/scrum collaborative aspects, among other things), yet I do it anyway. Just gotta find a relaxed job with low-ish expectations.
Italo Calvino is a likable person, and I'm glad he wrote one of my personal classics: "Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore" is an extraordinary book. I've also enjoyed most of his works, especially "Le città invisibili" & "Cosmicomics". If you haven't read any of these, try them or his famous trilogy: they all have that special signature of his, but they're different enough that you might like one and not the other.

About reading the classics too early, I've experienced it, but I also had the opposite feeling. I had little pleasure reading Homer when I was a teenager, but was enthusiastic about the "Odyssey" twenty years later. The translation played a big part in that change of heart, going from prose to rimes, but I believe my age and my larger culture was necessary to fully enjoy it.

On the other side, I read quite a few of Balzac's novels when in high school, and my favorites were "Eugénie Grandet" and "La peau de chagrin". Somewhere in my thirties, I reread the latter and thought it was awful, so pretentious and pseudo-philosophical that I dropped it before the end.

Reading the classics is still the best way to travel for me. I feel I've lived many years in some kind of half-mythical Russia of the last two centuries. I saw the whole Mediterranean world through Herodotus' eyes. My years as a child were heroic thanks to Dumas and Tolkien.

Later on, classics destroyed my condescending attitude to past ages. Reading "Orlando Furioso", I was astonished to read feminist opinions by a man writing around 1500. IIRC, Arioste wrote that a woman sleeping with a man before marriage was no big deal, that they should try a few guys before choosing the best one. Another Italian classic of the same period, "La Gerusalemme liberata", had the same impact on my vision of the late Middle Age, and was an even better read. For another example, as much as I adored Shakespeare as a young adult, when I discovered the Greek theater of Euripides and Sophocles, I saw that having emotional and deep characters was nothing new.

Italo Calvino did not mention a special kind of classics that many people know in an altered way: the religious literature, and especially the Bible (not the King James). Some of these texts are boring to a non-religious reader, but other are fantastic, like Job and Qohelet. To dive in an even older world, "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and a bit of Sumerian literature gave me a strong connection to people that disappeared milleniums ago.
Most theoretical designs that have been proposed would require a very large counterweight, e.g. a captured asteroid.
> entitlement to free lunches, plush offices, massages

Are they really so common that candidates expect them, or is it just a Google-et-al thing? Serious question, I know a lot of tech folks in SF and I don't hear about the comical "perks" except from Google and Facebook people working in the Valley.

> See my comment history for who is hiring posts with salaries included.

Done. So out of curiosity do you attempt to pay the same actual salary regardless of the candidate's location?

FWIW I don't live in the US, and I work remotely, and have done for many years. I work with people in Europe, the US and Asia. It always seemed to me you'd be better off setting pay regardless of location, but as soon as I contemplate the details of it (taxes, possible perverse incentives) at anything more than an early-stage startup, my head hurts.

Best of luck with your company!
Show HN: Designer, (novice)Developer, community essay editing tool
> His car and his family were eventually found (from inspection by volunteers of aerial footage)

I don't believe there was any aerial footage. If I recall correctly, he was found by a local person who owned a helicopter and followed some hunches to find his car tracks at one point then quickly located them by following the roads.
https://qz.com/586563/paul-graham-just-accidentally-explaine...
Tesla doesn't just sell cars – here are its surprising 'lifestyle' products
.then().catch() is basically just a fancy wrapper around try..catch, so I'm not entirely sure what the example is supposed to show?

With async that code would be equivalent to something like:

try {
const response = await fetch(...);
const data = await response.json();

if (data.errors) {
handleErrors(data.errors.code);
} else {
handleResponse(data.response);
}
} catch (error) {
error; // handle error
}
I don’t think rope is a good analogy for nanotubes. I think you want to see it used as a cable, like in suspension bridges or trawling. It should be something that is permanently under tension.

A nanotube suspension bridge would be pretty amazing to see.
> Functions don’t call other functions

I think this point may might also be about reducing complexity, not just cost. Pushing to a queue instead of directly calling another function decouples the two functions and might make it easier to reason about how logic flows.
Yeah, because everybody goes around reading Stendhal, Dante, and Balzac.

>you’ll understand them by osmosis

Nothing about the substance of the books can be understood without reading them. It's all in the details and the language, not the plots and the abstract description of their main points.
I'm sure James Last's heirs will be happy to supply the required stock.
Curious if you know, what's the low down on 5g? Is it safe? What about rural ares where they can jack up the range? Lots of conspiracy theories floating around there, some vaguely concerned. My cause for concern is zero precautionary principle approach to the technology.
What is kph? I can't be 200 km per hour and have it take 8 days.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d58n7/paul_gra...
Show HN: Storage and retrieval of Word Embeddings in various databases
No.

What userspace is is where you work happens. It has no universal obligation to protect the kernel.

You could possibly say that the point of working in userspace (instead of in kernel space) is to protect the kernel.
An Introduction to Approximate String Matching
From that document:

This code implicitly assumes that vectors are indexed
from 1; if dest starts at a different index than src,
there is a chance that this code would trigger a
segfault. (If you do get segfaults, to help locate the
cause try running julia with the option --check-bounds=yes.)

So it comes with a tradeoff, namely that if someone else chose different bounds on an array other than [1..n] and you try to access it the standard way, you'll get a segfault.

This would scare me away from using anything other than the default indexing on an array in Julia.
Not sure what do you mean about scaling storage layer separately from the compute layer. It's how it's usually done currently, with the disk being the storage layer.

As long as there are machines/containers to be started, there will always be some latency, though we can expect it to improve in the next years.

AWS now has the Aurora Serverless, though I don't have any real-life experience with it's latency yet (VPC requirement is a downer for now).
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...