skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They aren't easier to work with for any reason other than that sizes of standard components (pipes, beams, etc) are sized conveniently in US units and have US units printed on the spec sheets.

If you go overseas outside of North America, you find that the sizes of everyday objects are conveniently sized in metric, and building codes and standards and material strengths and densities are specified in SI units, and suddenly working with the metric system in those industries is easy and convenient.

Do you deal with building insulation? How would you interpret a material spec of "1 BTU ft/(in^2 hr °F)"? I had to work with these units in the US and it was not at all convenient.
Well, the point I was arguing was "why not" have two separate systems ?

As for "why" to have them, well there isn't a good reason intrinsically -- if there were a way to magically convert the US to metric overnight, it wouldn't bother me. It just seems very unlikely and difficult in a country as huge and culturally diverse in the US. Especially since, by the standards of the rich/developed world, the US is pretty poorly educated, and also very difficult to govern (Obamacare, a law that would have seemed like a moderate reform, relatively simple to pass in any parliamentary system, is the most radical change in any area of policy enacted by the US federal congress in the last decade).

The thing a lot of people miss about the ultra-gridlocked US system is that there's a huge gulf between it being obvious to most people that "we should enact some policy" and anything actually changing. The best answer to "why doesn't the US do this or that" is often just "its political institutions can't".

Since it's so unlikely to change, and given my argument that it isn't a big deal in practice, I guess my main point is that we rationally-minded people should stop worrying/complaining about it so much.
A Slice of History: Pizza Through the Ages (2012)
On the bright side, the more restrictive these apps become, the more susceptible they become to competition.
I have no knowledge of apple's decisions here, and no experience with iOS, and you're generally correct that any sort of batch processing should be able to recover from bad input, but I'll try to make an argument as to why this isn't as simple as it sounds.

1. Creating a graceful degradation path is a complicated and expensive, from a UX, product, and testing perspective - if you silently drop the message, that's much worse than crashing; if you insert some sort of tombstone "this message could not be parsed" into the UI, you have to figure out if that's something users will actually understand. These code paths are hard to exercise with normal integration or manual testing, and it's likely that over time they may stop working correctly.

2. Monitoring graceful degradation is more complicated than tracking crashes, especially for unforeseen issues like what you're describing. There's a real risk that if this periodically showed up with "failed to parse" messages, the actual issue would have remained undiscovered by Apple a lot longer.

3. Again, no familiarity with iOS, but on other mobile operating systems I've worked with there's a significant memory overhead to using multiple processes and IPCs this way. If your device is under memory pressure, the extra cost of a pipeline like this introduces new failure modes. First, your other process may be killed by the LMK, which the sender process could interpret as being a failed message. Second, you may increase the amount of memory required to receive a text message in the background - this can directly affect critical high-memory use cases like taking a live video with the camera. There may just not be enough room to do both at the same time.

4. There's significant input processing that can't be done in another process, or meaningfully isolated from that of other messages - the best example being UI rendering of the text. If there's a magic string that causes view measurement to fail, that's extremely difficult to attribute to any specific piece of input - so adding this extra process to do validation won't really help you, since the "validated" string will fail later on.
I would say most people prefer the one they learned first. For doing science metric is usually better. Easier unit conversions. I think inches/feet are better for construction as you have more options at what level of accuracy you want to work with and splitting things up unless you need to have a fifth of something.
> It's a really unfortunate strategy the Atlantic has taken.

The Atlantic's title is "Killer Tulips Hiding in Plain Sight."

Or did they change it?
There is also already a Python-implemented-in-Go[1] and a Python-to-Go transpiler[2] — albeit both somewhat limited.

[1] https://github.com/go-python/gpython

[2] https://github.com/google/grumpy
WebAssembly Pathtracer
Super fantastic idea!
Burger pass. $30 for a burger pass. Gets you burgers for $4 for the rest of the year. or pay $20 for a burger now. You can secretly give out burger passes to locals when the tourists aren't looking.
Fascinating. Are you certain of this or is this conjecture? Feels like this could be exploited if true.

Maybe it's more sophisticated like votes must be from people with high karma points?
How We’re Using Machine Learning and Trading Bots to Predict Crypto Prices
Your argument that because bees display a similar behavior, that it's grounds to invalidate the credibility the people conducting this study of Orangutan's cognitive abilities is based on conjecture. You are conflating a reference to another intelligent species as evidence to support a counter view to a commonly agreed upon advanced cognitive capabilities of the Orangutan.

A previous study shows Orangutans do indeed have excellent memories and are able to communicate with humans using commonly agreed upon visual symbols. Long past the 120 seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwslHICR7K4

side-note: I feel that often, parent's comment gets a lot of likes, not for the validity of the argument but rather being contrarian for the sake of it. It's troubling because often it appears that they are providing commentary on an area totally unfamiliar and outside the usual field of expertise like engineering. Instead what I see is erroneously inferring logic based on the specific pieces mentioned without taking account in to the larger picture. These scientific studies are conducted not one off but to support previous widely held beliefs by the scientific community with vastly more focused experience on their topic of research, just wish that HN folks would give them a more credit and practice modesty. Some people on HN don't even bother reading journals or studies being posted here, instead they just blindly hop on the bandwagon with serious holes in the argument.
12 and 60 are superior highly composite numbers¹ — as is 360, the number of degrees in a circle and the number of days in a year (with a little engineering work TBD).

Speaking of circles, SI hasn't fixed Hz vs rad, have they?

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_highly_composite_numb...
Note that "domain" has been added on top of "kingdom" for quite some time now; that's probably why they went with "supra-kingdom", as this division seems to be above kingdom but below domain (since these creatures are still eukaryotes).
For the same reason that we use both temperature and energy and find them both useful. We can talk of the energy of an electron. On the other hand, temperature, is an statistical property defined for many particles.

Using mole (based on Avogadro constant) makes it easier to do statistical mechanics, but it's not a microscopic property like mass.
mingling =/= open office. I can still have a quiet space where I can actually get things done, but still interact with coworkers at, say, the coffee machine or water-cooler.
One of the sad things about this sort of list is that it's literally just one guy's opinion. Sure, he tried all the burgers. I'm sure all the burgers in the top 100 are good burgers, but there's probably very little separating them except some personal preference. For example, I probably wouldn't have rated this place as high because I don't care for grilled onions on burgers; I would much rather have raw onions.

The only reason anybody cares about that reviewer's opinions are because he has a platform and people are desperate to belong to something, anything.
Exactly. US uses methods similar to Putin's who sends assassins to kill his enemies.
Great article. A paragraph with the gist of what I enjoyed in it:

"Or is this just what we are now -- a horde with a checklist and a camera phone, intent on self-producing the destruction of anything left that feels real, one Instagram story at a time?"
> Cost of living calculations are misleading.

I can totally agree, but using isn’t GDP units more misleading since GDP inherently reflects neither income nor cost of living?

> The biggest expenses are rent, transportation and food. Those 3 much much cheaper in poor countries. ( joint families, public transport and dirt cheap food)

Totally, the relative costs for various things I would expect to be different in different countries. But I don’t understand why that invalidates cost of living as a metric. It should be an absolute number that accounts for locally adjusted costs. I expect the local cost of living to account for whatever the normal average costs are for rent & food, regardless of how that compares to other countries.

Of course there are a lot of problems comparing costs in the US to India or Ethiopia. But isn’t looking at what the average person makes relative to what the average person has to pay to live there a lot more relevant than the country’s GDP?

> Mumbai is 5 times cheaper than Boston. I am making ~10 times (for 1 person) more than what my parents made (for a family of 4) and QOL is not much different.

Right, exactly. You’re only making in relative terms 2x more, not 10x. And not all services scale the same way. Hiring human services in the US is relatively much more expensive.

That’s all expected and agrees with what I’m saying. I don’t see how any of this supports GDP per capita as a QOL metric. Maybe the PPP adjusted metic like @nabla9 suggests, in which case the teacher pay factor in Ethiopia is 2.5x compared to the US, not 7x.
That’s a very good point. The modern web browser must be a low-level application.

Still, a web browser somehow seems different from other pieces of software on your system. This is because everything you just described is traditionally provided by the operating system. Hence, the browser has replaced the role of the operating system.

I believe my original critique still applies, but with some modifications. It may be appropriate to implement a particular low-level component (like a web browser) in one of these new languages. But that does not imply that all uses of C are inappropriate.

An interesting question is which complements are suitable for implementation in these languages?

To clarify: I’m reacting to what seems to be an umbrella recommendation by certain people to replace all software written in C with software in some other language, or that it’s inappropriate to use C for any new system components.
Sure, but you have to multiply that with the (perceived) probability of it being an issue with the expected benefit. That is probably a calculation that often comes out as "get it, dammit".
That's actually exactly why I like working in Imperial when woodworking. You're composing and dividing things by 2 all the time, so a base-2 fractional system is great.
... except if you take 6 two-inches you'll see something different than 12 one-inches. Our universe is weird. Defect of mass and stuff
The new noise-cancelling champion appears to be Sony's WH1000XM3, which retains the same eye-watering $350 pricetag as the QC35s.
On the cpap subreddit, they frequently mention the 'superman phase'. As with most things, you'll adapt and that will become your new 'normal'. But for a time the contrast is striking.
Just to add a little subtlety to your comment, Franklin (no s) BBQ revolutionized Texas BBQ when it first opened. Nowadays, there are several places that can go head to head with it (Micklethwaite and La Barbeque for example), but at the time, there was nothing even close.

Many of those famous places in the hills or even, gasp, Lockhart, really weren't that good once we had Franklin BBQ. I've noticed a lot of these old-school places have had to up their game in recent years and are now competitive again.

That said, waiting in line at Franklin is sort of an event of itself. Most people bring coolers of beer and turn it into a tailgate-like atmosphere. You're right though, I haven't waited in the line for years because I can get something similar much easier.

I'm with you 100% on the Bose headphones comment though. Those things are a ripoff.
Enterprise has always primarily meant size, not "old". It's about the complex requirements that only really come in at a certain scale.
Here are the limitations:

1.) It seems to listen to messages from the cell towers rather than listening directly to phones. This means you are likely to catch IMSIs from a very wide area (i.e., every phone that connects to the cell tower you're listening to), which means you don't get much information about "who was in the local vicinity". This probably also means you can't tell the phone's signal strength, as the received signal strength is that of the tower not the phone (unless the tower modulates its transmit power based on how poor the phone's signal is?).

2.) It can only listen to one frequency at a time. This means you need N RTL-SDRs if you want to listen to phones connecting to N cell towers. (But the RTL-SDR does have about 3MHz bandwidth, so in theory it should be possible to listen to multiple cell towers simultaneously).

3.) It can only see IMSIs when a phone first connects. I don't think the IMSI is sent when making a call or transferring data.

4.) It only works on GSM, i.e 2G. Hardly anyone uses that these days. (I don't know if a similar passive approach would work on 3G and 4G, it may be that only software is required in order to support more than 2G).

The benefits of this approach compared to other things I've seen are that it is totally passive, so even a savvy target is unlikely to be able to detect that his IMSI has been caught, and it is extremely cheap to carry out.
Don't miss the video for the DIY Lego watt balance.

https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/nist-do-it-yourself-kib...
I wonder what does Oracle fusion middleware guy have to do with selling cloud tech
> All the stuff I read about "established tech companies" like Google

What did you read about Google? I have never seen an article stating that they overwork their employees, but I have seen articles saying that they encourage people to work less.
Legally, you would still owe them money for the continued subscription even if you cancel a specific credit card. It's just that usually they take the hint and cancel the subscription if they can't collect.
"In the news columns of The New York Times, the celebrated Sydney Schanberg wrote of Cambodians that ``it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.'' He dismissed predictions of mass executions in the wake of a Khmer Rouge victory: ``It would be tendentious to forecast such abnormal behavior as national policy under a Communist government once the war is over.'' On April 13, 1975, Schanberg's dispatch from Phnom Penh was headlined, ``Indochina without Americans: for most, a better life.''"

"As the death marches out of Phnom Penh proceeded, Lewis [NYT Columnist] went on making excuses for the Khmer Rouge. He mused that it was ``the only way to start on their vision of a new society.'' Americans who objected were guilty of ``cultural arrogance, an imperial assumption, that . . . our way of life'' would be better."

http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/...
Better is subjective. Places like Egypt, Turkey, Iran, China, Peru (among others) are a veritable treasure trove of archaeological goodies.

The remark about the economy is interesting. The cost of maintaining so many monuments, prosecuting looters, postponing critical construction projects when major archaeological treasures are discovered, etc has a significant cost to the economy (when these resources could have possibly been applied to improving healthcare and economic opportunity). It is therefore no surprise that not all residents of these countries share the same sense of wonder and excitement of their ziggurats or temples as foreign tourists.
Which google cloud projects have shut down this past year? Or Ever, for that matter?
Mesolab – Optical Mesoscopy at the University of Strathclyde
That's because the Earth's orbit is within 0.5% of a perfect circle.

(Just kidding.)
Oops, I was skimming too fast. Thanks.
At that level, he just isn't the guy making the decision to add a boolean type to the DB server or not. According to wikipedia, Oracle has 3000 products, each with their own management.

The role is organisation and team psychologist more than API design. If you want to rate his performance, the products are a worse indicator than, say, how well-adjusted and mentally stable his teams were...yeah, you're right. GCP is fucked.
I guessed 4 as well. My take away from the passage was that despite what people think, what is often represented as heritage can be selective in nature. The clue was in the phrase "why they have been selected from the near infinity of the past".
Would be nice to see another version compiled with threads, since both Firefox and Chrome have them available as flags.
> What's wrong with these people?

> I really can't understand it.

Why does anything have to be wrong with them? Why can't it just be that they have different tastes?

I have no issue with you having your own opinion (it's stupid; I won't do it, I can't understand). That's all well and good.

Saying "what is wrong with these people" about something you don't understand, but that is harmless thing and doesn't involve you significantly... that's just plain close-minded.

The comment above yours at least tried to provide some reasoning (people following recommendations, fooling themselves with cognitive dissonance), but it didn't try to draw a distinct "me vs them, something is wrong with them" as your comment did.

You should reflect a little if this is your gut reaction to people doing something you don't understand but that is harmless; it shouldn't be "something is wrong with them", it should be "I wonder what they see in it? I just don't get it for some reason; I guess we live different lives"
For work related info, I have my team take notes in structured pages in Confluence.

We use this to help onboard new hires as well as to communicate better.

I have used some of the information in the book Organizing Knowledge by Patrick Lambe to help keep things accessible
I found this youtube talk a while back. It's given by a consultant who's selling these skills and has slides titled "Use of coercive monitization".

Some of the more disturbing parts are when he highlights forum posts about targeting whales and people who say things like "I have to do every challenge and every side quest and it takes away from my enjoyment of the game" and "I've restarted this game hundreds of times because my character isn't perfect".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zex3b2mDnUw&t=17m16s
Understanding mass in molar terms is necessary to do a lot of chemistry correctly. The mole is effectively a count of the number of molecules kicking about, although the count is large enough that terms like "quadrillion" don't cut it. (One mole is about 600 sextillion molecules). Knowing how many molecules are around lets you actually compute how much stuff can react in a given chemical environment, and other aspects of chemistry end up being pretty related to molecule counts. Vanilla mass doesn't cut it since an atom of iodine weighs about 6.6 times that of fluorine but can still only react with one other molecule.

The flip side is that the molecular count is less useful to us in the everyday world. We can gauge the weight of a kilogram much more than we can gauge a septillion molecules. And if we're trying to figure out how much stuff a shelf can hold before it collapses, it's the weight that matters, not the actual molecular count. (Note for pedants: in the familiar environment of Earth's surface, mass and weight can be treated as the same quantity in most cases.)

So mass and molecular count are both very important quantities that have importance in different fields of science, and they don't have a trivial relationship to each other. Avogadro's constant and molar mass is a way to express their relationship.
Essentially this brings it one more step away from using another artifact for calibrating things. Instead this lets us define the kilogram against what we believe are universal constants, in this case properties about the electromagnetic force.

It's much simpler to understand looking at it with a watt balance, even though it's not going to be as precise or accurate as a kibble balance [1]. Basically now anyone with access to a kibble balance and the right set of numbers/information can make an exact 1kg object.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewQkE8t0xgQ
You missed my point. I elaborated in this comment [0]. I'd call the malleability you're talking about cosmetics in comparison. The examples I gave are human-centricity and sexism embedded in the very way we refer to objects.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18468142
If it's not aiding me in navigating directly without delay or distraction to what I want then it's an ad. Whether it looks interesting or not is irrelevant.
There's like 15 comments in this post and 10 different suggestions on what visualization library to use. That's not great.
It's even affecting non-business locations now as well, as a result of geotagging and instagram.

What happens when nature goes viral - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itjc14Fm-gs
Suggested apps can be turned off from the right-click context menu on one of the items: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/faq/id-3250630/turn-suggested-...
Thats not a solution for the problem though, if your goal is to keep your old customer base. It is only a solution if you view your restaurant as an investment instead of a passion. The counter example from the article is Paiche.

edit: To give another example, I have a kebab shop in my neighborhood who will not take any orders by phone let alone online. They dont have flyers or a web presence. Its a small street faced window run by an immigrant family who keeps the booth open throughout the day, from 11 to 11 longer or shorter depending on when they are out for the day. Most of the time the place is empty but during mealtimes there is regularly a line for half an hour. For the area, this is extremely well. And they sit right next to two other kebab shops, a pizza place and two asian places with mostly no line, literally the street down in 3 minute walking distance.

The reasonable thing would be to close the shop in the afternoon and take orders in advance, but thats not what they want for their shop. They want to talk and be a place where people meet, despite them not having any tables and not serving any drinks except a tea on the house from time to time.

And their food is absolutely amazing. Home made sauce and bread, it is worth the wait or to eat at 4pm in the afternoon. They dont let them self get rushed and it is always an amazing meal.
Google is an advertisement company and their long-term view is getting revenue from showing you ads. The rest is just the means of maintaining the "we are not evil" image so people won't get scared away to alternative search engines. In that perspective, making constant buzz about new projects and closing them once the hype is over makes full sense.
> Albeit much less competitive China

I'm not sure about this. From what I've read, Chinese society is more competitive, not less.
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