skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For what it's worth, Arthur Ashkin began working in optics in the 1960s and is considered the father of the field of optical tweezers[1]. Considering he's the creator of an entire branch of optical sciences, I feel it warrants a wikipedia article.

Gérard Mourou, while significantly less famous than Ashkin, has still been the recipient of many awards in the field of optics prior to his Nobel win[2], had previous discoveries to his name, and was the head of some labs and organizations.

Prior to the Nobel award, Donna Strickland was an associate professor. The three were definitely not equal when it came to notability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G%C3%A9rard_Mouro...
Until a society experiences negative consequences of environmental pollution (generally a long-term but sometimes a short-time issue) then there's no incentive or impetus to not just dump things anywhere. Part of the solution is only allowing goods to be supplied in certain packaging. Not creating waste is the best solution.
Another option is to specialize to a very large degree. It's possible for almost anyone (assuming sufficient motivation) to become a leading expert in a field or the one of the best at some activity, as long as it's sufficiently niche. You may have to go in a subfield of a subfield of a subfield in many cases, but it's much more realistic to be in the top 10 of something with just a few hundred practitioners than something with a few million.

Take music, becoming one of the top 100 pop musicians on the planet in terms of popularity is incredibly unlikely, but top 100 of some more obscure genre (such as synthwave) is more achievable. You can add more qualifiers - (e.g. Italo-disco inspired synthwave) until you feel comfortable with the pool of competitors, and you'll be far less at risk of feeling insignificant and overshadowed.
I tried to only focus on runtimes, although the line got a bit blurred at times! But yeah, it would be nice to have included a mention of NGEN. When I get a chance I'll update the post

> And the cloud compiler created for Windows Phone 8.x, based on Bartok from Singularity.

Interesting, I didn't realise that all this came from Bartok, thanks for the info
Yes absolutely. I stopped using it because I felt weird and voyeuristic about knowing what people were up to that I hadn't seen in years, long before any of this controversy started.
Xamarin.Forms has to manage a lot of friction interfacing with the native UI controls. It's both an advantage and a disadvantage to it's approach. It has to conform to the common denominator of the native platforms, but gets to leverage the native look and feel. But this seems much harder to maintain long term.
It would actually make sense if they created a XAML platform (like cross-platform UWP) that used its own rendering stack (similar to Flutter's approach) that wasn't beholden to the design decisions of an externally developed platform and having to reconcile the differences between different platform paradigms.
But is it the same resolution as your desktop?
> It cuts both ways at least, those with inherited wealth are just as unworthy as those who never accumulated any.

In theory, but in practice that just means that those with inherited wealth expend some of it on building a personal myth of being self-made independent of their family legacy. It's often paper thin, but as long as they make the gesture to ritually acknowledge the norm, it seems to suffice in practice.

Obviously, no parallel equivalent exists in the other end of the economic scale.
Yes. Will there be the macOS version?
2019 conferences to help you become a better boss/manager
It's definitely possible to configure this... it's just not a default on any distro I'm aware of. Linux Full Disk Encryption definitely stops very early and asks for the FDE password before being able to continue booting. After that, you would just have to have your user set to "automatically log in" for it to just go all the way in.

In fact, I think you could choose to set it up this way from the Ubuntu installer directly. By default, it just encourages you to sign in manually in addition to setting up FDE.
This is the case for me. I live about 6.5 miles from my office. Congestion is so bad (I'm in the Seattle area) that it can take upwards of half an hour to get to work -- yes, that's an average speed of 13 miles an hour in a car. Miserable.

However, on the bike I can average nearly 15 miles an hour, so I actually save time! In all fairness that time is more than eaten up by the additional steps (don bike gear, load bike, etc.) but it's nearly a wash.
> The origins of the CLR can be found in the purchase of Colusa in 1996 which had the Omni VM for running C++ in a sandbox. The original C# language was called cool and came from that project.

Thanks, I'd heard about 'cool', but I didn't know the part about Omni VM, that's interesting to know
I'm already a Wavebox user which is pretty great for this:

https://wavebox.io/

Any improvements offered?

What's the plan to monetise. Wavebox is about $50 a year.
In 2015, I went to the International Union for Quaternary Research conference in Nagoya. The Emperor and Empress of Japan attended the opening ceremony. There was security screening, armed guards in suits sat throughout the audience and we were told we couldn't take photos during the ceremony.

This wasn't a large conference and the delegates were either the cargo pants wearing sort of scientists or students. Definitely not the sort of conference you'd expect elderly royalty to take part in. Most of us thought either the emperor or the empress must have had a personal interest in the topic area, but no one I talked to really knew why they were there. This article solves that little mystery for me!
Huge respect to any developers tackling these sort of problems. Most people don't notice it or just gloss over it and accept it as the way it is.

But flicking screens or flicking resizing windows are like nails on a chalkboard to some of us.
To me a good bike is one that fits and is properly maintained.
Couldn't agree more, that doesn't mean it's always going to be the same. A lot of programming jobs these days are putting information from a database on a screen, then updating it in the database after it's been edited. Doesn't feel like that should be an impossible thing to automate in a fairly sophisticated way. Though that's been true for a long time and we don't seem to have made much progress.
I've done something very similar, albeit with a more bottom-up approach. Pretty much everything he's suggesting is good advice.
Hi Vanadium....I'm a journalist and saw a post of yours on an older HN thread that I was hoping to ask you about. Any chance you'd be willing to connect so I can share details about me and what I'm working on? Cell is 847-380-0751
Here's a demo of someone using these switches to enter and run programs on a PiDP-8.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMRDAD1JNWo
If you go from $12/hr to $15/hr, that might not seem like a large difference, but it might mean going from a net income of -$50/week to +$50/week, which is a massive difference - one means a debt spiral, the other means building savings. Or $20 to $120, 6x the disposable income.
Chef got to where it is today because people used it to build systems at a scale that was simply not feasible before. And as it grew more capable, people built more tooling in and then leveraged that to build even larger systems.

So, if you're not building systems at the Netflix or Amazon scale, then Chef might have features and tooling that you don't need -- today. But as you grow and you find you do need those tools, they will be there.

I can tell you that Chef was a key part of the system for taking the Raytheon GPS OCX system and letting us build out an entire virtual datacenter in a matter of hours instead of months. Once everything is racked and stacked and cabled together, just press the "Go" button and everything builds itself and installs itself in a fully automated way.

If you're not familiar with GPS OCX, that's the next-generation ground control systems for GPS satellites -- both the current generation of satellites that is currently aloft and the next-generation fleet that is being developed.

With regards to Ansible, there are many lessons that the Puppet and Chef communities learned years (or decades) ago that are being re-learned yet once again -- like ssh isn't a very scalable communications mechanism when you start talking about handling thousands of servers.

The concept of "just let me run my custom scripts everywhere" is a nice one, so long as you're talking about a dozen or so machines, each of which is a unique snowflake "pet". But when you want to start building a cattle farm, that method stops being so useful.
This is now the third Sednoid discovered.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sednoid
Are you guys reading the same list as me?

How would you categorize the following as a "rich white guy problem"?

"Air conditioning – As more people in hot climates enter the middle class, and as climate change accelerates, the demand for air conditioning will explode. What innovation is possible here?"
I'd like to reinforce what an earlier commenter has already hinted at, with a story of a collapsing marathon runner. A lot of hobbies get much more dangerous with increased ambitions. Always ask yourself if that's worth it. As someone once said, "He who does not sore with the eagles does not get sucked into jet engines." And they didn't shoot Ringo, did they.
I think people give skiing lessons a pass because you can break your neck if you make a mistake on the hill. You're a lot less likely to die while playing tennis.
That's just my experience. If a customer pays for a new gizmo, they want the "latest and greatest". If it doesn't look latest and greatest to them, they feel slighted. I'm not saying it's necessarily rational, only that it's the way customers on average react. They don't always say it directly, but word gets around. I've seen it many times. Humans judge books by covers.

As far as old-looking sites like Ebay, if an Ebay competitor appeared with equivalent services and product choices, yet LOOKED fancier/stylish, Ebay would start to lose customers. Lucky for Ebay, no such site exists. (If they appeared, Ebay would probably spend on a visual revamp.)
They were paying you that, sure. But then you showed them that they didn't need to pay you that anymore, because you automated that job away. So now they won't pay you nearly so much.

You're welcome. Now, get back to work, you slave! ;)
It's interesting that his list is rather long but it doesn't mention enterprise at all.
Why not a single logo on the boot screen, and if you hold down Shift you can get the full dump of everything that's going on.
Whenever I see humanoid robots, I’m always reminded of this TechLoaf joke: https://www.techloaf.io/2018/06/05/a-i-scores-sweet-summer-j...
Parking protected lanes seem pretty bad if there are frequent intersections or driveways. It's pretty nice going upwards on Western Ave (by Pike's Place), because there's not much reason for cars to turn there, and it ends at an all-way stop sign that always requires caution. However, the other one I run into, on 9th ave going north between Harrison and Republican is really hard to navigate.

On the one hand, people's dogs run into the street to urinate, on the other hand, I have to slow down every time I approach the intersection, because I have no visibility of the flow of traffic because of the parked cars; and the flow of traffic has no visibility of me because of the parked cars, so I can't even get upset at drivers who are ready to make a right turn there and don't give me space.
Similarly, the early worm gets eaten.
Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

Define: Good Faith
I kind of agree with this. In fact, I often wonder how much the wisdom of age is actually just old people's preferences.
I do? I mean, I don't consider myself an unusual athlete or anything. But if I'm biking or lifting, I almost always have a smile on my face, even while pushing myself. So do other people I know, so I really don't think it's unusual.
> It's only really effective in preaching to the choir because they've chosen to hobble themselves by using only a third of the tools available to rhetoric.

There are multiple audiences and many will reject emotional appeals out of hand. Certainly if you oppose New Urbanism, a guy ranting about how you're a racist is unlikely to change your mind.
If you have kids, this kinda changes for a lot of people. You'll still have these feelings, but the little monsters change your view points a fair bit. Being on top, or really comparing yourself to others that are far far away, kinda drops away. I'm talking from a male perspective here, as I know the mommy-bloggers are demon spawn in the comparisons regard. But when something that REALLY is super important comes along and keeps bugging you to play monster trucks, that hierarchy urge transforms from 'me me me' to 'them them them'. Sure, parenthood is hectic as all get out, and providing for the puke machines is NOT easy. But there is a personal existential calmness that smooths out the ambitions of self towards an ambition of family (and 8 hours of sleep!).
Ah, but you didn't automate the job away. Like I said, you did the automation on your own time, with your own resources. It wasn't work-for-hire; they don't own the rights to it. And there's no instance of it already set up for them to use. As of the moment that you offer them the opportunity to subscribe to your SaaS service (and note that you don't have to mention that it's your SaaS service), they're still in the position of having no automated process, just you sitting there able to do the process manually.

So they have two decisions to make: whether to buy the SaaS service (in order to receive the benefit of the automation); and whether to keep paying you.

They can choose to say "no" to both... but now, not only do they not have an automated process, and just as little idea of how to automate it as they did when they started; they also don't have you there to do the process for them, and they lose your hard-won expertise on the process that would be crucial for building any sort of in-house automation.

(I'm assuming here, note, that the company isn't one that tends to automate processes—if they did, they'd probably have already found the low-hanging automation fruit that your job consisted of. As such, they likely don't have any in-house automation expertise, nor do any in-house expertise for evaluating the competence of automation consultancies.)

ETA: my original point was that everything I'm saying here (and more) is what some person with sufficient motivation to think through all the details would be saying to their boss to convince them. "Convincing your boss" includes "thinking through all your boss's objections and having rehearsed, polished counters for them." Have I done that? No. But I'm not someone with an automatable job.
I'm not saying they "don't work", only that other features/designs can often do them also without using/adding new constructs: parsimony of language features. Can you suggest a forum to continue such debates? If not, I'll see what I can find. (My past favorite forums died.)
Indeed, Launch HNs are for YC startups after they've been accepted (best of luck!). How about a Show HN instead? https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
You can be a free-market capitalist and also realize that corporations are superorganic entities that, like their organic components, don't always make the "right" decision when faced with a choice between mutual gain and zero-sum thinking. Empirically, the argument that raising the minimum wage would close these warehouses has an extremely low prior probability. Amazon's warehouses exist where they do because Amazon's customers exist where they do.
That actually brings up an interesting concept that never occurred to me.

We could get automation of complex tasks far earlier than I had thought. We're at this divide where we're getting capable with our understanding of motion and mechanics, but intelligently figuring things out is a massive roadblock.

What if, as you say, we make very dumb robots where their interaction with the world has been entirely laid out by humans. Ie, a humanoid robot making toast seems difficult. Yet if we give it the exact dimensions of the room, rf sensors for locations of shelving, cabinets, bread, etc, it seems possible with our current tech that the robot could be programmed to handle dynamic environments as long as the inputs were laid out ahead of time.

There's limited value in something like toast making, defining the inputs would be a hassle. Yet, for house building, or factory automation, if every piece, shape, location and dimension was known it seems a fleet of robots could build a house with quickness and ease, no "intelligence" needed.

Humans would need to lay a foundation to a spec of dimensions, but then the bots could go nuts. Neat!
Why?

>BIOS vendors support this because otherwise the BIOS boots so fast (with modern system requirements) that they don't get as much branding opportunity

So that the speed of my computer isn't decided by a marketing team, that's why.
Oh, c'mon!

In Praise of Mediocrity (nytimes.com)
120 points by anarbadalov 2 hours ago | 78 comments

A ‘Dinosaur Artist’ Who Trafficked in Stolen Fossils (nytimes.com)
4 points by behoove 1 hour ago | 0 comments

And all the nytimes.com links in these last weeks, all up there, and this is flagged and dead!

I'm not even American or in America, but this is news, and there are a lot of commenters with something substantial to say about this.

I'll refrain from pointing to the latest examples of this, what is going on?
Location: Silicon Valley
Remote: Both
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Rails, Rust, Go, Elixir, Web, Python, Java, Unity, Lisp
Résumé/CV: https://atamis.me/downloads/resume.pdf
Email: atamiser@gmail.com

I'm a recent graduate looking looking for my first full time position. I have a broad base of experience, with a vocational focus on web application development. I've been programming since age 9, and I really enjoy solving technical challenges of all sorts.

I'm currently working on a bytecode compiler, a game in Unity, and some data analysis. Email me if you'd like to talk.
I really like the idea of an open app runtime. The only problem is that it would require a whole new phone and app eco-system, unless it's built on top of the existing Android platform.
Ask HN: Would you use a predictive health assistant?
I’ve been hearing about a lot of innovation in health tech and am shocked that nobody has built a simple dashboard that allows me to see analytics on various health data. I think it could be very useful for preventative health, would you use something like that?
> truth is that .NET still has a bit to catch up outside Windows, while Java lost a bit of its mojo on desktops.

I agree, that's quite a nice summary of the 2 ecosystems
It was dark, but I remember finger and touch commands being invoked inside my chroot jail... when I tried to use who, it just said nobody.
I appreciate that you are satisfied with your income and that the desire for more irks you. However, I think one thing to consider is that capitalism always means that people are making money on top of the cost of your labour.

Maybe the capitalists took a huge risk of investing (employing) you and you feel grateful to leave more money to them. Maybe the capitalists do a lot of work for themselves too and are rewarded appropriately in equity.

But it's not uncommon that labour is just exploited.
It's a very practical list. Looking at the areas he's interested in, it struck me that all or nearly all of them can actually be solved with products, i.e. something you buy that solves your immediate problem.

I think that if you get into many of the BIG problems that sound really exciting, you'll find that they can't actually be solved. My first startup idea after striking out on my own was to fix unemployment, which was a big, impactful problem that disproportionately affects underprivileged people. As I researched the problem, though, I realized that it's not really something that can be fixed. Hiring is hard because it's fractally fucked up: it's a many-participant market where everybody rationally follows their incentives but the sum total of those incentives is a system that massively underutilizes human potential and makes everyone miserable. Now, you can fix individual problems within the space like finding job postings (Indeed), tracking applicants (Lever), giving coding tests (TripleByte), etc, but each of those just makes life better for the person giving you money, and arguably makes the system as a whole even more fucked up.

The same goes for many other hard problems. Political polarization in the U.S. is a huge problem, but there's no one solution that will fix it short of mind-controlling or eliminating everyone who disagrees with you. Alleviating poverty in the developing world is a huge problem, but countries that are poor today are usually poor for a constellation of different reasons, and unless you fix them all you're not going to make the country un-poor.

The author seems like he's deliberately avoiding any areas that are not product-fixable. That limits his list to fairly boring problems. It's likely hard-won experience as an entrepreneur, though: I know that I started the entrepreneurship journey thinking I was gonna solve everything and have a big positive impact on the world, and have since learned that unless you adjust your expectations, you are bound to be perpetually frustrated.
If introducing a functional language was the aim (EDIT: that's my reading of the motivation here) then, given the political context described, I can't help but feel a better choice would have been F#.

It ticks, or half ticks, most of the points in the "Benefits of Using Haskell" section. Whilst also coming armed with C# interop and integration with the .NET ecosystem in which they were already invested.
After Budget Cuts, the IRS’ Work Against Tax Cheats Is Facing “Collapse”
I'm doubtful it will, because that conversation is rarely productive. In the US, opting out of consumer credit is a privilege of the wealthy or an inadvertent misfortune of the unbanked poor. A determined person can attempt to follow through, but they will encounter issues renting a professionally managed apartment, receiving pay, buying a car, or buying a house. And because of the prevalence of rewards credit cards, people paying with cash will miss out on kickbacks that effectively reduce the price they would have paid for goods and services.

While it's tempting to consider consumer credit a convenience, the shift in ability and expectations makes consumer credit a baseline and its lack a detriment. This is not unlike how an automobile was a luxury item a hundred years ago, eventually enabling settlement patterns to shift away from needing to be dense and close to public transport, but now most of the US needs automobiles to travel between home, work, and services. Because of the prevalence of cars, there's a large pool of customers (or renters, or workers) available to any particular establishment, so losing access to one's car will rapidly deprive them out of opportunities, housing, and jobs. This is also similar to the way requirements for educational attainment rise over time, or how the rise of two-income households has meant that one-income households are finding themselves at more and more of a comparative disadvantage.

Surveillance of public streets is an unfortunate matter, because there's no realistic choice to opt out. One can be staunchly opposed to them, but avoidance is difficult and often draws even more attention.

The 'data factory' issue is distinguished from these quandaries precisely because opting out is attainable and within reach, subject only to (the still-high bar of) convenience and social fashions, as opposed to some inconvenient economic reality.