skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a totally different game. Of course I have individual airline accounts, and of course I accumulate those points. Hell, half the time the points and website account are the same thing now.

But that's peanuts and will never add up to much because I only fly a few times a year and it's usually on different airlines. The real miles game is accumulating points from other purchases, and churning those into free travel and such. Both generating and redeeming points in those volumes is a lot of work -- I've done it and eventually decided it wasn't worth my time.
> stop progress

More people thinking about what they're doing wouldn't be "stopping progress", it would be progress.
I feel like that's a small step towards rectifying the destruction of a generation. This country has too much inequality as it is.
> Put another way, blockchain is a database—one that is never backed up, grows forever, and takes minutes or hours to update a record. Sounds amazing!

Did he get this wrong? Don't blockchain ledgers always get backed up? Isn't the difference being that instead of just backing up to one place and at one specific time like most database setups, blockchain data is backed up with everyone all the time with every transaction? - which is why it can take hours to just updated one record
"Pay $20 to double your bonus miles!" is the airline equivalent of buying in-game currency.
And you honestly think that is a workable solution for most people on the internet?
Searching for "nixpkgs" instead of "nix" often provides much better results.
Microsoft's semi-official stance on why VS isn't 64 bit...

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2015/12/29/revisiting...
I don't doubt they contributed, but this isn't like a coal company getting emissions restrictions relaxed.

There's a pretty common world view that financial viability should not even be a concern in young people's choices of what field to pursue, and subscribers to that are what created this policy. Lenders benefit, but this is driven by what a large group of people want society to look like.

Even if the government subsidized all higher education and removed the lenders from the equation completely, we'd still have increasing numbers of young people graduating in their early and mid-twenties with degrees in fields like gender studies. They won't be in significant debt, but they're still comparatively behind by four years and woefully unprepared for the workforce.

Are the students better off from being financially enabled to get in that situation? Is society better off from enabling thousands of people to do it? I don't think so.
It takes about 5 minutes to make a nix expression for a "./configure && make && make install", with most of that time being figuring out the dependencies and calculating the checksum of the tarball.

Example:

https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#ex-hello-nix

For any standard build tools (cmake, scons, whatever) it's just one extra line. Applying patches is one extra line. For a non-standard workflow, you can supply a shell script for each step (unpack, configure, build, install, &c.). so it's just however many lines that is.

I've had zero issue getting any source-based third party stuff running. Binaries are a pain, but that's always true if you aren't running the exact distro that the binary was built for.
> Statists will only go as far as their people allow them to.

We're talking about inter-governmental spying, a state's own political system has nothing to do with the topic. So your point about Statists isn't relevant here.

> Believing there is any effective distinction, on the other hand, is not merely complacent but incredibly naive indeed.

You think it is "naive" to believe there's a distinction between two states spying on each other and a state's own security services spying on their own oversight organisation? What?
Yep.

I understand that half the world runs on this stuff nowadays. That doesn't make it any less insane.

Your customer database is in a random DC somewhere halfway across the world running on the same box as some other arbitrary code.

Nice one. It's Web Scale(tm).
Why not just go on reddit and look for subreddits you are interested in, to find these like minded people?
What percentage of software churn is based on developers being reluctant to call out mistakes by other developers on their own teams/in their own companies (while having no problems calling out flaws in internet strangers' code)?

'Curating' what developers are allowed to do has been the focus of the last few jobs I've declined. "The guys at the other office are too dumb to learn (React|Angular|CSS|tech X). Obviously, we need a team to invent something that uses (React|Angular|CSS|tech X) behind the scenes but has a totally different API and no easily searchable documentation or support outside of our company."

Tailwind looks like one of those escaping into the world, when telling your devs to pay attention to a style guide would have been the easier solution.

Technology does not have a glorious track record in solving cultural issues.
https://getsol.us/home/
After 6 months of using this, I can say that this definitely delivers on its promises.
My understanding is that the German health care system still has disincentives for sporadic work, because you pay a higher rate under the philosophy that "you have to insure yourself first, and make up for the expected lulls in income" or something like that. I read stories on reddit about immigrants getting burned by that when they were self employed.
Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord
Some do. Monkeybrains in SFBA and AAISP, Bogons in UK are a few possible examples?
> 2) Every extension has to provide schema of any data it intends to send out of browser.

Just because I supplied a schema does not mean I'm not exfiltrating sensitive data, in a way that would not be obvious from the logs.
I wonder a) if this would "pull" more energy with a traditional steel induction ready pan (not sure about the rate of spin/frequency) - but more importantly b) would this make sense as a pure movement to heat system, using a bike, water wheel or windmill?

How fast, hard and long does one have to pedal to boil a litre of water? :)
> more than doubled from a couple years ago

Yes, this is the most unsettling part. Even if we can afford to pay our own healthcare now, it's very difficult to predict how long we'll be able to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nixos.org
Do things that don't scale.
Now that Microsoft no longer has a "Windows or Office" angle to everything they do, what is their angle here (i.e. how does a cross-platform .NET target contribute to their bottom line)?

I know they generally want to grow (1) Azure, and (2) developer mindshare. I see how a cross-platform .NET Core contributes to Microsoft's developer mindshare, and perhaps how Azure could follow up by cornering the market on really great back-end .NET Core hosting and operations. Is there anything beyond that?
5 Things to Help You Sleep Better
It's clear that vendors do have a serious interest in supporting SPIR-V as specified, not just SPIR-V as produced by glslang. I can assure you that I have reliable sources for that, though obviously it's up to you whether you want to believe a random internet person.

Also, the Vulkan Conformance Test Suite is open source.[0] Contributions of better SPIR-V tests would certainly be accepted, so Google (or anybody else, really) has an easy path towards forcing better support in drivers if they care sufficiently.

[0] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/VK-GL-CTS/
> Sadly, maturity and nuance were killed and buried years ago.

irony
I don't know about RPL, but GPL has been tested a lot. For example, in the early 2000s, Linksys was forced to release the source code of their router firmware. This project was forked and is now maintained in the OpenWrt embedded linux distribution.

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

Here is a list of GPL enforcement cases from the Free Software Foundation:

https://wiki.fsfe.org/Migrated/GPL%20Enforcement%20Cases
I found buildFHSUserEnv to be somewhat more fragile than actually using ubuntu. Again, I could probably get it to work, but the container is trivial.
Do people not use bitcoin to purchase drugs anonymously on the Internet?
I understand your argument and respect your point of view.

Hold on to this statement: "There's no need to establish a nanny state where venues that disadvantage those that aren't even participants are ruled out from the outset."

When you experience being disadvantaged in your career because you could not participate in a non-business sanctioned event or venue where decisions that affected you directly were being made, then think back to how you feel right now.
“allowing Bitcoin owners to purchase drugs on the internet without the hassle of showing their identity.”
Except for the fact that it is kept in a public ledger for eternity.
He's just a pretty no-nonsense individual.

Bureaucracy, and coded ways of doing things, seem to be irresistible to many.

He types some words into a phone, presses an enter key, and a decent subset of the world loses their minds.

Golly gosh.

If I were him, I'd be doing it for the amusement factor alone.
Define suspicious. Have you ever even seen the number of requests that Chrome itself makes to the web, tons of unrecognisable URLS.

What happens when you change a feature on a proper extension? Submit a request to all the anti-virus vendors to whitelist it?
If you or your dependents have any medical complications or are something other than young and healthy, the costs can increase drastically. Also employers often provide a lot of resources via HR and FAQ websites for navigating health care related topics. And I think there is safety in numbers so to speak. Insurance companies don't care at all if they loose one customer. They care a lot if they loose a big contract with a big company. Maybe they'll decide you provided false information in one of their 1,000 forms and thus will deny coverage when you desperately need it. They're less likely to pull that sort of crap if you can complain to your employer and have them apply pressure.

Put simply: there's little incentive for health insurance companies to provide good service to individuals; there's lot of incentive to provide good coverage to company employees.
couldn't that be that it can't recognize him at all?
Yeah, although you have a lot of flexibility regarding how much of your system will be rebuilt.

Like, if you add a little patch to libpng as an overlay over your entire system, then you'll recompile a lot of stuff, but you can also choose to only use that custom libpng with a specific package.

Even in the latter case, it's true that Nix will always recompile the package that depends on libpng, instead of using dynamic linking and only recompiling libpng. This is because Nix has no way of knowing how your libpng patch will affect its reverse dependency, and because link paths are always content-addressed in Nix for reproducibility.
What? Google Photos has two storage settings: "High quality" and "Original quality". High quality includes unlimited photo and video storage for photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution.

The "High quality" is free and I am totally happy with it. Never even seen a 16 megapixel camera and most of my videos are of VHS-quality.
> Student loan debt can't be discharged by bankruptcy.

Yes it can, though it is more difficult to do so than it is for other unsecured debt.
- Location: Campbell, CA

- Remote: why not

- Willing to relocate: No

- Technologies: HTML CSS JAVASCRIPT REACTJS PHP

- Résumé/CV: https://dewulfdavid.com

- Email: contact.dewulf@gmail.com
lol. On what planet is trump any of that?

He's a left-leaning independent who happens to espouse a few republican type ideals like low taxes to stimulate the economy, and a few democrat type ideals such as legalizing pot and lgbt rights. He could have credibly run for the democrat party's nomination and probably won it, in which case he'd be the darling of the left (and Hillary would still hate him). Remember, everybody on the left, including the last president, said all the same things he said about the immigration issue just a few years ago.

He's not "right" or "racist" in any way, and he got where he is through the democratic process...

I would agree with you he's not a libertarian. I am going to laugh my rear end off when he tells the DEA to take pot off the schedule though.
As a Python developer, are you actually surprised by breaking changes?

The Python 2/3 split originated a decade ago, after all.
I’m pretty sure until recently they didn’t even share information that would help protect companies from state level actors.
FreeAgent, Edinburgh and REMOTE

https://www.freeagent.com

At FreeAgent we help freelancers and small businesses be more successful by putting them in control of their company finances.

We have built a multi-award-winning accounting app that offers full end-to-end compliance, from time tracking to tax return filing. We're based in beautiful Edinburgh and we're growing from strength to strength with over 70,000 paying customers and strong YoY growth. Our NPS is amazing (68!) - customers love what we do and our team get to make a real impact.

We're a growing team of over 160 people. The majority of our team are based in Edinburgh, but we have staff distributed across the UK (50% of our engineering team are distributed). We're going through a growth spurt so if you want to help us make small businesses awesome at doing their finances, take a look at our vacancies (more details here -> https://www.freeagent.com/company/careers):

* Product engineers, mid/senior/principal - you'll be working predominantly with Ruby on Rails but you don't need to have experience of this tech - we'll get you up to speed.

* Platform engineers, mid/senior/principal - opportunities to work on large-scale refactorings, developer tooling, cloud migration (AWS specifically)

* Engineering managers/team leads

You can apply directly via the website but feel free to get in touch with me directly (olly [at] freeagent [dot] com) if you have any questions. Happy to chat!

(We are looking for UK-based full-time staff only right now)
Rainy Day Style Hacks
I thought this was crap three years ago, and I think it is worse now.
No constant addition and removal of new APIs. Lockdown of special purpose APIs with explicit user request to unlock: 99.9999% of sites will never need WebGL, 99.9999% of sites don't need an Audio API. Modern JavaScript has the attack surface of Java and Flash combined and enabled by default, instead of hardening this against attacks browser are stuck in the same feature race they have been in since back when IE6 was still dominant browser.
It's true and I think an other problem is that "uplifting news" generically is kind of a lower common denominator: it's easy to come up with an actual newsworthy information that would be almost universally considered terrible but harder to find something that everybody will find uplifting.

Country X allows abortion? That's going to make people angry. Forbids abortion? Now the rest are angry. A new law that makes polluting more expensive? Surely that's uplifting... unless you have to drive your car for work and you end up losing money because of it. It rains a lot? That sucks. It doesn't rain enough? Now farmers are complaining about the crops.

Completely untainted positive news are hard to come by.
This is bullshit actually. They should also come out publicly and announce if .NEt Framework 4.8 is the last version or not.
Right. Or any other append-only system, really. I mean, one wouldn't ask "how do you prevent someone from deleting an email they sent you earlier?"
Creative Commons Search: beta updates
> And the data had probably been obtained through malicious browser extensions.

Any reason we shouldn’t suspect a malicious mobile app?
Humans are so bad that fitting the network to our games trapped it in a region of local minima that weren't even close to the ideal, I guess.
> The tech required for search and rescue is the same tech required for search and destroy.

Haha, no, no it's not. (I'm very active in SAR -- headed out to a large search this weekend, even.)

We've had "search and destroy" for a decade now, but SAR still doesn't have effective use of drones. Quadcopters can navigate tricky terrain close enough to the ground to see a sufficient amount of detail, but they only get about 25 minutes of flight time.

Fixed-wing drones can get much better flight time, but we can't put them anywhere near close enough to the ground to see the average missing person.

Typically the next thing people suggest is IR. Yeah, IR's great, there's just one problem: there are a lot of IR sources on the ground, even in the wilderness, and people with clothing on aren't that great a source of IR by comparison. At a recent multi-agency training event, I reviewed footage from a repurposed Reaper drone flown by the national guard after the southern California mudslides. Making out the difference between a person on the ground and a streetlamp was impossible.

The only documented drone find I've heard of so far was a person sitting in an orchard. Probably there have been others, but the point is: SAR is a wildly different situation than people imagine.

There was just a study done by DJI and European agencies that found that drones were of negligible benefit in the missing person scenarios they tried: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2018/october/01...

Helicopters and civil air patrol are superior to drones in almost every way. I've hung out the side of a UH-60 and a couple of Lakotas during exercises looking for brightly colored objects on the ground. At around 100 feet above ground level our success rate was around 60%.

Heck, we had a missing small aircraft, in the snow, a year and a half ago. There were hundreds of searchers on the ground, multiple CAP and helo overhead. Guess who found it? Some folks on snowmobiles a few weeks later.

We use a number called "POD" -- Probability of Detection -- in our reports after every assignment. It's an ass-pull guesstimate at what our odds were of locating a responsive subject, an unresponsive subject, or a clue during the assignment. High POD for a close grid search pattern on the ground in light forest for an unresponsive subject is about 70%. Average POD for an unresponsive subject by a fleet of quadcopters in the same environment would be like 5%. To effectively rule the area out, any decent search manager would deploy a ground team anyway.

So, in the first place, this MIT experiment -- while very cool -- still suffers from a lot of the same issues that this technology has in a SAR context. And in the second place, shooting down efforts to develop this technology for civilian use is silly because, well, I hate to break it to ya, but we've been killing people with (mostly autonomous) drones for a while now. That horse is already outta the barn.
“One study says the close relationship between the government and banking insiders during the financial crisis affected trades.”
The economy does feel like a game of musical chairs at times.
I chose core over node, because it has a better standard library with less 3rd party reliance.

On my last project, dealing with the multiple layers of dependencies with node became troublesome.

(static vs dynamic has equal balance, in my experience)

However, if it where not for Linux support (and Rider), I would have gone with node.
AI smart enough to recognize that a dismembered head would be pale ;)
Cancer Risk May Increase with Height for a Simple Reason
I can't believe this question is even getting asked in 2018. History has tried ignoring the truth in favor of religion in the past, that gave us the dark ages.

The tenets of social justice and intersectionality place more weight on feelings than the truth. What is religion, if not a lie to make you feel better. Social justice is 2010's religion, that eclipses all others and argues for the decimation of the scientific process, if said process doesn't make one feel good.

But, truth has a funny way of catching up. For humanity's sake, please choose the truth, academicians.
Isn't nomad just a skin over KDE plasma?
Guix isn't an OS (and neither is Nix); Guix is just Nix with the Nix language replaced with Scheme.
I'm unsure what's ironic about it. Hooks feel significantly easier to me than classes in a bunch of dimensions.

Classes come with a whole lot of syntax & concepts like constructors, instance vs class properties, autobinding, that are otherwise not used at all in React. They present barriers to optimizing code with compilers, and property names don't get minified.

Hooks are Just Functions though. They don't even have to deal with the most confusing aspect of functions in JS: "this"/calling context. You could easily consume them in ES3 by just not using array destructures and function keywords and it would barely get less readable.

Contrast this with classes, where new devs are often pushed to learn experimental and often-changing syntax just to avoid the awkwardness of working with the current specification for classes in JS. The following isn't allowed per the spec or any stage 4 proposal, but it's all over intro tutorials so that people don't have to manually bind methods in the constructor.

class Foo { handleClick = event => {...} })
If a satellite is in a very low orbit then any debris fall to earth quickly. Almost all cubesats have a orbital life of six to five years.

So then it should be possible to shift the world's global satellite infrastructure to low orbits, even if the unlikely worst case would happen. You wouldn't have geosynchronous satellites anymore, but we could work around that.

If every satellite we have put into space magically exploded, and the debris was magically moved to a high LEO altitude and evenly distributed to avoid any holes, then we could still launch through this orbit of death to higher altitudes with only a 1 in 1000 probability of impact.

Much better odds than flying the Space Shuttle. Much worse odds than flying on an airline. That would still curtail civilization's expansion into space, though it wouldn't stop it.
Adopting Lessons from Offline Ray-Tracing to Real-Time Ray-Tracing [pdf]
I can’t think of a reason why the number of gender studies students would increase under a universal higher education system for qualified students. Europe does not appear to be overwhelmed by gender studies graduates. Given the sexual harassment problem at Google, Uber, etc perhaps it would be good for there to be an increase in gender studies.

California has free higher education until Reagan became governor. It worked well then and provided it is only available to qualified students I don’t see why it can’t work now.
Honestly not sure why this is downvoted. Would really like to hear from the contrarians since none of this strikes me as controversial.

I am curious why "snapshot images" are bad though. What's the fundamental difference between this and shipping a static binary (they're just a different image format, right?).
Living in a neighborhood with a lot of tree cover, I have recently been very impressed with Apple's 3d geometry lately. My area is effectively houses in the woods. I'm amazed they have been able to extract geometry and textures below heavy tree coverage. The foliage geometry is often rough, but the houses, yards, decks, walkways, etc below are quite detailed. Having a little experience with photogrammetry years ago, I'd love to know their process.
56M is 17% of the population! That's way higher than I would have guessed. The UK — with its degrading universal healthcare — is at roughly 3%.

https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18474/uk-has-2-million-freel...
Python 3 was released a decade ago.

Python 2 is still supported until 2020.

2to3 exists.

Python actually give a shit about their users.

What a lot of people seem to forget about .Net is that for those of us who have been around since day one, we've been burned over and over again by large product and framework deprecations over the years. This is one too many.