skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the 3000 number for maria comes from taking the total death rate in puerto rico in the 6(?) months following the hurricane and subtracting the average death rate for that period in previous years. it's an nonstandard way of calculating disaster fatalities, chosen specifically because it gives a big number that is useful for relief lobbying purposes (it's like 9/11!), and if you calculated 9/11 casualties the same way you would surely come up with a significantly higher number. the number of people killed directly by the hurricane, during the course of the hurricane, was under 100.
Only Java and C? What about C++, JavaScript, Objective C/Swift, Python, etc.? And there's also stuff like MATLAB and R, which are the defacto standard in their own areas ...
I guess this is the actual beginning of asteroid mining, it's so exciting.
Did you use language interop for matplotlib, or saving/loading data files?
https://archive.st/archive/2018/9/www.economist.com/e4g0/
>I love fallout 1/2, for example, but it is pita to wait for slow-animated enemies to chase you or attack (fire geckos, I'm looking at you!!).

You may be interested in this mod: http://falloutmods.wikia.com/wiki/Sfall

I enjoyed playing Fallout 1 and 2 as a child, but I had very low standards back then. I now consider them unplayable without using this mod to speed up the animation.
Telltale hit with devastating layoffs as part of a ‘majority studio closure’
“I find it difficult to understand how this flow of funds analysis validates an assertion of general principle. What is described is a special case where a highly leveraged bank could find itself temporarily insolvent, with a very limited window of exposure before the bank would be found guilty of criminal fraud.”

https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/dodson-edward_revi...
> It's sad to look at

From 40 billion revenue down to 9 billion revenue. But what if costs shrank to zero? That's an exaggeration, sure. But the cost of producing music is less than it was in 1999. The cost of distributing music is significantly less. The cost of promoting music is probably similar or a little less.

In any case, as you see elsewhere in this thread -- professional artists earn their living by doing live performances. Their labels tend to make a lot of the money from sales, little of that is left for the artists.
Kind of surprised this stuff hasn't totally blown away traditional video compression techniques yet.
Pinkos or not, sci-fi writers have been emerging independently of latitude and longitude just because of tech progress: Stanisław Lem, Boris Strugatsky, Isaac Asimov.

I wanna share my tiny observation.

Typical USSR-originated sci-fi story tells you about space travels, space ships, interstellar journeys, aliens, valuable resources discovery. This aligns well with USSR and Russian space achievements and ambitions and fossil deposits development, and treating cybernetics as a pseudoscience or just funny crap.

On the other hand, non-pinko sci-fi is biased to soul, thinking machines, different lifeforms, artificial intelligence, coexistence of human and robot.

Interestingly, the concept of Information Society emerged in Russian Empire before revolution by Pitirim Sorokin[1], he was expelled from USSR to USA. He wasn't sci-fi writer per se, but the point is the way of thinking renders itself into everything including fiction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitirim_Sorokin
It's arguably more error-prone, e.g. Rob Pike justifies Go's decision to use curly braces like so:

>Some observers objected to Go's C-like block structure with braces, preferring the use of spaces for indentation, in the style of Python or Haskell. However, we have had extensive experience tracking down build and test failures caused by cross-language builds where a Python snippet embedded in another language, for instance through a SWIG invocation, is subtly and invisibly broken by a change in the indentation of the surrounding code. Our position is therefore that, although spaces for indentation is nice for small programs, it doesn't scale well, and the bigger and more heterogeneous the code base, the more trouble it can cause. It is better to forgo convenience for safety and dependability, so Go has brace-bounded blocks.
Due to GC Julia will never be as fast as C, C++ or Rust.
I knew these little rovers were small, but I didn't realise how small:

1.1 kg

Diameter: 18 cm

Height: 7 cm
The question of MySQL's popularity comes up often in HN Postgres threads. The answers naturally skew towards being a bit one-sided, as most people clicking on a Postgres article tend to be Postgres users currently (and sometimes former MySQL users in years past). This can result in comparisons of modern-day Postgres to 5+ year old versions of MySQL.

That said, and with a disclaimer that my own bias leans the other way (as I have a lot more MySQL experience than Postgres experience) although I try to be impartial about these things:

* Spanner: I've heard this second-hand and might be incorrect, but as I understand it, Google's original internal MySQL team was shuttered in ~2009 and some of those folks may have transferred over to the Spanner team. I wouldn't say that Spanner is particularly based off of MySQL anyway though, but I don't have enough familiarity to say that conclusively.

* Aurora: AWS now offers a Postgres-based Aurora as well. As for why the built the MySQL one first, I'd assume that was likely a business decision based on mysql-vs-postgres RDS usage at the time.

* Those two aside, there are definitely major products based around Postgres. AWS Redshift is one example. Or look at CockroachDB, which chose wire-protocol compatibility with Postgres. (There are some examples the other way too; e.g. TiDB, which chose wire-protocol compatibility with MySQL).

* Regarding why MySQL has historically been popular, there are a lot of factors. I'd say the biggest one for large users has been replication; some of my older HN comments delve into that more, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16880663 for one example. For smaller users, ease-of-use has been important. The other discussions in this thread hint at this, especially around silly simple things like the "exit" command.
The problem is that anonymous information is worthless unless it can somehow be verified. There is already so much fake propaganda that I'm starting to disregard anything without verifiable provenance.
From the quick glance I had the salaries seemed really low.
Anecdotally I'd say that research salaries in Italy seem quite low. I did an internship together with an Italian student in Switzerland. He had a full-time offer in Italy for what was seen as a good salary. Still, he made substantially more as an intern in Switzerland than he would make as a scientist in Italy.
+ use mercenaries
I was talking about the social trend it represents, but it was kind of an incomplete thought.
I’m willing to have peace of mind that my money won’t dissappear (and will be replaced if it does) and forgetting my pin doesn’t keep me from my money forever.
Exception Handling Considered Harmful
Warmer Arctic waters attract surprising visitors: Clams, fish and whales
E2E with OMEMO and HTTP Upload? Check!

This looks like a real modern alternative to dated XMPP desktop apps.
Kent Sorenson: The tea party hero who lost everything
We offer a fast, smart search of algorithm/hyperparameters. All others do random search. Plus hosted offering (unlike H20 and TPOT). Also much less expensive than DataRobot.
Now it's critical for everyone.
GC is a nogo for some stuff.
Optimal text segmentation for QR Codes
Political posts are quite rightly frowned upon here, but I think this story is excellent.

It focuses more on the incarceration aspect than the pure political side of it, and his views on jail after experiencing it first hand are very interesting.

The commonplace quid-pro-quo political dealings are also pretty shocking, especially when you contrast the minimal punishment those involved received (Kent included) against the people he met whilst in jail.
Uh, that's completely the opposite scenario that I've seen over the past several years, where any accusation made against a white male are met by hoards of keyboard warriors quickly pointing the finger on social media, handing out a metaphorical death sentence before any trial has occurred.

The need to ask for somebody to go public before investigating their claims is so that you can attempt to discredit their claim by discrediting their person.
> Though it may be interesting just to let users choose whether they want to see animations in general.

That would be the ideal solution. Make a setting in browsers and devices where users could turn off all animations. Designers could test their UIs with the setting on and off. Everyone would be happy.
I am a Spaniard living in Germany... part of that very same problem. Anyways, "taxes and bureaucracy" is not the problem of the of the european south. In fact, taxes and bureaucracy are both way higher in Germany.

The problems are more complex and historical. The EU economic crisis have been abused by right-wingers to argue that we have a too heavy social system. In fact, the demolition of the social system in the south is precisely preventing it from really leaving the crisis. I want higher taxes if it comes, for example, with free university, like in Germany.
I don't remember the exact numbers (this was 2011), but the overhead of using e.g. CLOCK_MONOTONIC were substantial. Under Xen, the cost of reading CLOCK_MONOTONIC was a few orders of magnitude higher than reading the TSC. I think on Xen PV it was like 500ns per read, while on HVM it was at about 2000ns-3000ns or something like that.

I remember with 8 disks that should have been able to do 60K 4K IOPS each (early SSD models), we were capping out at 90K IOPS with all disks in parallel at a queue depth of 32 while reading from CLOCK_MONOTONIC. When we switched to TSC I think we ended up getting around 320K IOPS. Still not perfect, but we were also capped by the particular HBA we chose (which didn't have multiqueue support).
I used goss for testing ansible roles. It is simple enough to put in my CI and to configure. Having a .yaml syntax similar to Ansible makes it the appropriate choice for the task.
A particle can have intrinsic properties like charge and spin that are directly measurable attributes of the particle itself. Other properties like temperature and even size are called emergent because they’re not truly fundamental but rather “emerge” when we observe the particle in some system of other particles. We can measure emergent properties but they’re more akin to properties of the system as a whole than some specific attribute of one or more particle. I hope I made sense, it can be confusing.
Those options all make the assumption that you have to carve that time out of regular working hours. I'd just like to add an option #6 - work on your project on nights and weekends, launch it on nights and weekends, and make the leap to working on it full time once it becomes profitable.

Meanwhile, increase your savings rate so that you might be able to make the leap sooner. That way if it gets to the point where you're profitable, but not yet making enough to cover your expenses, you can potentially jump ship earlier than you would've been able to otherwise.

It's pretty much the plan I followed and so far it's working well (left my job ~5 months ago). On the topic of increasing your savings rate, some of the ideas/mindset from https://mrmoneymustache.com were helpful.
I refuse to buy digital downloads. I want the physical CD, though the first thing I do is rip it. Downloadable media formats change and companies disappear. 16 bit audio on a pressed CD will last a long time if properly stored. I’ve had to re-rip my library a few times, but it’s always there to rip.
We don't hear, smell or taste light either but somehow measure it.

Exclusively using our unique human senses to reason about the nature of something seems pretty fallible.
Alibaba to set up new semiconductor firm to develop own chips
Go Go LEAF Challenge
Are there a lot of American expat software engineers in the UK? For most people, it would be a steep pay cut to move from the US to anywhere in the EU.
White House Drafts Order to Look into Google, Facebook
Yes but if everyone did that there’d be no money or technology to save those children.
Try "StInt: A fast and portable stack-based multi-precision integer library in pure Nim"

Being stack based and having some nice compile time evaluation features should make it very performant.

Here: https://github.com/status-im/nim-stint
U.S. gov student loan forgiveness program has rejected 99% of borrowers so far
I like how this gives evidence to some kind of latin-germanic divide of the south-western Europe, or what we usually just call Western Europe. Apologies in advance for superficial labeling.
> jai compiler – not released yet …

That's ... like the most important part?!?!??
Might be nice for scripting games in Unreal Engine? Looks like someone else had the same idea:

https://github.com/pragmagic/nimue4
Sticky headers are an example of something breaking the normal scrolling behavior as mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18045207

A sticky header changes how page-down works, so I have to adjust my eye movement to compensate. Because of this I consider allowing web pages to set sticky headers a browser bug. Browser devs disagree, but at least I have the tools to disable this kind of user-hostile behavior.
I didn't know that. Do you have a reference?

(I believe you, just want to learn more.)

NVM, I was confused over another statistic. ~97 percent of all new money is created in local banks, the government only creating ~3 percent.
I mean, answering this question is most of the article.
Two small things: the list says to buy an iPhone Se, 6 or 7. Obviously newer iPhones have been released. Someone could construe that as implying there is something wrong with the newer iPhones, when it’s quite the contrary on the security front.

The list bans laptops, all laptops. For no explained reason. I assume it’s because of hardware encryption, and since last year we now have hardware encrypted computers from Apple (the 2018 MacBook Pro and the iMac Pro).
In some countries you can live for almost a year on 10k, so that means having all that time to build whatever you want on your own time. That's way more than enough to make a product on free tools, and get enough customers to get the ball rolling!
I saw a similar (junk) article a while ago about how our minds must be special and can't be replicated on silicon because we can implement pure functions in our minds, but that is impossible in any stateful machine. The author's point hinged on the idea that when I add `2+2`, I am doing the platonic ideal pure operation of addition which is demonstrably false so the entire argument falls away.

Similarly, it hasn't been established that our minds possess mutual information in the ideal sense. One should first note that there are well known Bayesian methods for approximating mutual information which sound much closer to what our brains do operationally.

Now consider the fact that if you actually were creating mutual information when you looked at a sign, it would be impossible for you to be mistaken about the implication of the sign! You would infallibly understand every streetsign that you read because your undertanding of that sign is mutual information. This is demonstably false. People are mistaken about trains of reasoning they make all the time, in fact this article is a fantastic example of that.

Given that, it sounds much more like our minds are Bayesian machines approximating mutual information but not creating it.
> JSON support, ability to query it

MySQL 5.7 has this, and MySQL 8 improves on it further. Note that MariaDB's implementation is substantially different than MySQL's here.

> consistent behaviour

This one's a bit vague :) But generally using strict sql_mode and innodb_strict_mode go a long way towards alleviating this common complaint.

> online backups

Online physical backups can be created with Percona's xtrabackup, which is open source. Or for online logical backups, there's always mysqldump, or third-party concurrent options like mydumper.

> real spatial extensions, timescale extensions

Yeah these ones I definitely see Postgres having a substantial edge, if they're important to your application or workload.
Peasants did taught their children to farm and craft to the extend that was possible. There is a lot of knowledge captured in sayings (at least in my language) that rhyme for better recall. When literacy started in region, farming advice and hints written into book are first usages of it. It is that useful. Writing changed farming, effectively.

This kind of learning had definitive limits. Great example of it is Russia which had feudalism longer then west and had large illiteracy rates. When literacy started to be a bit more common, before WWI essentially, the way they farmed became way more effective - they used much less effective methods before. The style of learning you describe happen to coincide with low effectivity, poverty and social problems.

The reason apprenticeship learning could be based on observation only is that the amount of knowledge to learn was smaller. Landlords and aristocrats had tutors and teachers - because you won't learn that by observation only. You don't learn history or math or chemistry either.

You don't learn reading like that (there are only few exceptions).
I wonder if this is small enough and performant enough to run on an Arduino. Or does it rely heavily on Intel instructions?
That's a very good book. I first read it while in college or high school, IIRC. Should buy a copy again, it's worth it.

BTW, for others who might not know, it is not applicable just to math (although Polya was a mathematician). It's good for general problem solving.

And there is a book that was inspired by it, called How to Solve it by Computer. I had and read that one too. It is very good too. See descriptions of both books below.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It#Influence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_it_by_Computer
I suspect that a combination of the two is where it's at, ie, store a lossy classical compressed version, then remove the artifacts/dream up details with deep learning
There's clearly not enough in deposit to sustain this model. In the US, a large majority of people don't have enough saved to last 3 months.
What is so different from physical access to an unlocked iPhone than an unlocked Mac? You’re screwed either way, no?
Surely a major factor for problems in both Italy and Spain is the crippling effect of the Euro and EU regulation. If the Euro were scrapped, it could make the economies much more competitive. Just look at how the drop in the pound over the last two years boosted British industry and exports. That's not an option for countries shackled to the Euro.
Well, even though I had it installed, I never really used it.

Does this change anything with GPG Keychain?
Which "expedited processes" would you be referring to? Are there particular processes you have in mind? As far as I'm aware, we've become more and more of a police state, but the actual system has remained the same: we require a trial by jury and sentencing by a judge, except in the case of a guilty plea, which a judge can still invalidate. In my opinion, that is still better than what other western countries have (in the UK / Denmark / others, there are many instances where a jury trial is not involved, even without a guilty plea).

I hadn't considered the pressure from heavy penalties on the potential for innocents to plead guilty, that's a good point. While I'll admit that's definitely a possibility, I'm not sure you can really claim that is actually happening without some sort of backing evidence? I'd love to see some numbers if you have them, even some good case-studies.
DOCX is an open XML based format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

Some more information here: https://www.toptal.com/xml/an-informal-introduction-to-docx
> And even today on the Internet, if there is reporting of anonymous accusations against someone or a company for wrongdoing, people will ask (on this very message board) "oh if it was real, why won't the accusers come forward and be named?"

An anonymous accusation has no weight. But that's not what they're for. They're a suggestion to investigate something. Because if it's real then there should be other evidence -- third party witnesses, documents, phone records, surveillance footage, a pattern of behavior where a more recent incident can actually be proven, etc.

No one should take them seriously as evidence but journalists should take them seriously as tips. And if the journalists following the lead actually find something that can stand on its own, it's only then (and not before) that you have a real story instead of an unsubstantiated anonymous accusation.

Anonymous tips are not worthless -- they're actually really important -- they're just not evidence.
Sounds like Vueify
While I'm sure that in reality terrorism is rather a great political leverage than a biggest threat, it also has one specific property that HN should be familiar with: scalability. Hurricane, shooters and road/cancer deaths are not scalable, i.e. they cannot be over-produced because it's just weather, psychopathy* and other statistical accidents. Terrorism though can be scaled by orders of magnitude by pretty simple means.

* terrorists can be viewed psychopats, but let's leave that question open, since it is more military than civil.
Linux has mostly stopped using CPUID to serialize at all. When full serialization is needed, we use IRET now. In the future, we could optimize a bit by writing to CR2, except on Xen.
Ask HN: What's the best tool to convert any doc to PDF?
I am working on a side project that needs to convert any document (typically word/excel/text) to PDF that can be rendered on the server via pdf.js

I see lot of cloud SaaS products that seem to do it - but I don't know how good of a quality they provide. What's the best open source tool that can handle this ? I would consider commercial product also as a fall back. Appreciate pointers.
humans pretending to be robots pretending to be humans
-deleted link- may be a DMCA violation
I like Jeremy Ethier much better, not only are his videos more dense, but they also tackle precise question with general applicability. They're also backed by solid science that is cited in the video, and feels less shaky than the "science" peddled by supplement vendors like Cavaliere or Jim Stoppani.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCERm5yFZ1SptUEU4wZ2vJvw
There are always side effects to geopolitical powerplay. The lives of the "them" are never as valuable in an "Us vs Them" scenario especially when the players and their motives are complex. The modern hegemony is the same as those of the ancient world. We just have better projectile weapons.
Makes sense to think of it as a general purpose processor when speed is growing quickly enough compared to gains of using a specialized design that using one device for everything is the most economical. Now that that has come to an end the model is breaking down and we need to consider the details more carefully.
The Architect Who Wanted More