skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>all the negative aspects of it stem from some location other than people haggling over limited resources.

This only serves to express your view (or rather, ideology) that we're living in a post-ideological world in which battles are no longer fought over beliefs but only material access to resources. This is only valid as a pretty bad caricature of Marxism, in fact.

>to a land of total freedom from capital/tyranny (left & right respectively)

The left not only opposes capital but tyranny too. If you've read any leftist works after the year 1920 or so you'd know that most of them deal with various 'gross' ideas.

>because the problem was people all along.

No. The work in political philosophy isn't only to criticise our systems we currently have, it's to explain how these systems arise out of individuals and perpetuate themselves. Of course the problem was "people all along" - but people also have a habit of conjuring systems bigger than themselves[0]. Societies change people but people also change society[1].

The very notion of utopia has been criticised on the left, in particularly of course in the light of the Soviet experiment. What you're saying seems to imply we must abandon (i) any and every plan towards a better society (ii) any superindividual critique of totality, because both are doomed in failure due to the human condition. This is known as the 'human nature' argument against social projects and it's not very convincing.

[0] "Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells." (Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto)

[1] "The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice." (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach)
Ultimately, this is an ordinary agriculture problem. The media will be all "WOOO POT!" about it because it's new and controversial, but the odor problem is the same problem you get from all sorts of farming practices, some of which smell considerably worse than even a big pot farm (which is pretty stinky). It'll get solved the way all such problems get solved - zoning. Same thing that keeps you from having a hog farm or a chicken slaughtering operation near people's houses.

I don't expect grow operations will ever hit the scale of other agriculture, either - there's just not enough demand, and legalization isn't going to make some order-of-magnitude change in that. When I was in Colorado this spring, in a small town way up in the mountains, my host pointed out multiple well-known growing operations in various buildings in town. All hydroponic, indoor farming, so the light and temperature and water can all be controlled. Easy to air filter that.
When I read the Bob Shaws book "Vertigo" in 1979 about personal flight-vest, I designed navigation rules of all aerial vehicles big and small. It is as follows:

If the vehicle is X meters from the ground, the only allowed direction is (X mod 360) degrees, and the only possible speed is X/10 meter per second. Hence the vehicle moves along helical path until it reaches the only height where the desired speed and direction is allowed. There cannot be any major collisions only some slight grazes.

Ingenious, nicht wahr?

The problem of what is the "ground level" and how passenger jets behave is beyond this brief introduction.
> Google are better package maintainers than Debian

My intent was to challenge your statement that google are better package maintainers than Debian, specifically w.r.t. reproducibility of builds.

It's disrespectful to Debian to think that they haven't been pushing for secure, auditable, trusted software running on trusted computers.

It's practically their reason for existing: taking open, auditable software, packaging it in reproducible fashion for use by anyone who wants it.

https://www.debian.org/social_contract.html#guidelines

Imagine if Debian had similar financial support available compared to Google/RedHat? The best info I could find is here: https://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/annual-reports/2017.pdf

`This covers the Period January 1, 2017 – December 31, 2017`

`Gross Income -------- 635,311.59`

...and in that way, yes: google can afford more package maintainers, more scrutiny, but if they are "better package maintainers" it's at those margins and due to economics rather than ability or desire.
The biggest reason I support self-driving cars is because on a bicycle you really see how often drivers roll through stops signs, don't use blinkers, and break traffic laws.

100% selfish reasoning, but less human drivers makes the road safer for cyclists (assuming robots use their blinkers).
Thank you, that was a very empathetic response. You're right in the fact that, applying what you learn and teaching what you learn is a great way to deal with this.

I haven't tried mindfulness or meditation, but am interested in learning a spiritual way of acceptance.
“Did partners get access to messages?
Yes. But people had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first to use a partner’s messaging feature. Take Spotify for example. After signing in to your Facebook account in Spotify’s desktop app, you could then send and receive messages without ever leaving the app.”

Does anyone have a screenshot or remember what the opt in UX was like this for this? I have been logged in to Spotify via Facebook since basically the very beginning. I worked in tech as a dev, PM, and designer of flows. I never had the understanding that my Facebook connect with Spotify gave them read/write to all my messages. It’s certainly possible that this permission was requested in an auth form that I quickly granted without realizing, which would make this more of a dubious product decision that blatantly unethical. Anyone have info?
Once safety improves enough, other considerations like fuel economy, available parking spaces, acceleration etc become more relevant and slowly drive weight down.
I would suggest reading Phillip Agee. If you believe in America's STATED ideals (which are different from its ACTUAL ideals), you will not want to work for the CIA after reading Agee's first hand accounts. If you still want to work for the CIA after reading Agee I'm not sure how to advise you. I think that's the sort of job where they seek you out and not vice versa. I also think that it's a "family business."

...But if I had to guess what a potential "in" might be, I would say go to an Ivy League university, enroll in Officer Candidate School for the Air Force, take a commission as a second lieutenant in the USAF upon graduating from university, and request to work in intelligence.
> He said a vehicle at the demonstration didn’t drive because its battery had died.

I don't know what is worse: If that's true or if it's a lie.
Are there ways that an AI practitioner would be able to tell whether a neural network is doing human-style symbolic reasoning?
I want to be able to freeze this. Give me 30 days to OK a bulk data download. I don't want a single lost access token to have such an easy way for someone to get everything.
Uber loses latest UK legal bid to block worker rights for drivers
Expect fat people can eat KFC in the open.

Fat people aren't being sent to jail for being fat.

Heroin addicts are being judged and looked down on. No one is fighting that.

No one is saying 'be proud ye heroin addicts'.

I have hear fat people basically say 'be proud of ye 'curves'"
Considering all the money and fuss that well heeled San Franciscans and SV people throw at coffee, the relative difference between them and ordinary people in Tuscany is pretty eyebrow raising.

If one is really a smart and self-aware person, it pays to be aware of how clueless one can still be, especially if it has to do with cultural or sub-cultural knowledge. It's the ability to see beyond groupthink which is the actual "reality distortion field." It's actually the ability to see past the existing reality distortion fields, which is the key.

Just how subject to groupthink are Bay Area folks? They are so subject to groupthink, they will spend lots of time and money for inferior product, in ignorance of cheaper, superior existing solutions.
Mocking with Protocols in Swift
Significant whitespace is syntax. Errors will happen, a lot, and the parser will have no chance to catch it.
Not sure why this was downvoted as it's a valid issue. For the last 16 years I've used some kind of Mac hooked up to a stereo receiver as a media server and had a similar concern.

2002 - 2006 G4 tower
2006 - 2016 2006 Mac Mini
2016 - now 2012 Mac Mini

For music, the Mac Mini is used headless via screensharing. But it's set to never sleep because it sometimes doesn't wake up properly.

I'm always curious if an Apple TV would basically pay for itself over a few years with reduced power consumption vs having Mini with an 12TB external dual-drive running 24/7 (the drives do spin down on their own though).

edit: formatting

edit2: I did some rough math. Apple TV at idle (2w) vs 2012 Mac Mini at idle (11w) = 9w difference. At roughly $0.20/kWh the 32GB Apple TV 4k ($179) would pay for itself in just over 11 years.

Probably sooner because:
1. Electricity prices are likely to increase in the next decade.
2. Assuming the power usage difference is higher when actually playing/streaming music (given how bloated iTunes has become).
3. Even more power saved when streaming Netflix / Amazon Prime on Apple TV vs in Chrome on the Mac Mini (and up to 4k vs 720p on Chrome).
Ray Dalio has a really cool book about this. I'm just starting it myself but I think it would help explain a lot of the questions in this thread. He has a FREE pdf which you can download to any eReader, or you can buy the hardcopy.

You can find it here: https://www.principles.com/big-debt-crises/

The short of it is interest rates are a tool used by the Fed to attempt to control the rate at which people and institutions take on debt. Too much debt = recession. Too little debt = recession. I'm greatly oversimplifying here but Ray does a fantastic job explaining things. If anyone wants to dig in deep I highly, highly recommend you read this book.
Reminds me of when MailChimp quadrupled Mandrill prices, with almost no notice. Severe disruption to our company; I had to pull engineers off key projects to migrate out email system.

I'm not sure why people keep trusting them given their track record.
Regarding those two points:

A very good laser has a beam divergence of tenths of milliradians, or 0.01 degrees. At the radius of planet 9, this is a very large beam, and we'd have a hard time putting out enough power to compete with the sun.

Furthermore, the sky has an area of 40,000 square degrees. Our little laser beam projects a circle with an area of 0.0000785 square degrees. You'd need to aim at 500 million spots to see the whole sky.
There's been a theory circulating around for a while that Musk's Boring Company is well-positioned to construct utility tunnels, and their seeming focus on transportation is essentially a loss-leader PR effort to drum up support from investors and the general public. Utility tunnels aren't exciting enough on their own, but there's a fair bit of money to be made in that industry.

Musk has been long mum on the subject but he recently said, at a National League of Cities event in Los Angeles on 2018-11-08 [1][2], that's he's open to the idea.

Of course, the big issue with tunneling, and construction projects in general, is often utility relocation, and not necessarily knowing where other utilities and surprises lie ahead of time.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2018/11/09/its-not-... [2] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/11/elon-musk-on-double-dec...
If you're okay operating in an organization that can't help but play a Molochian game of necessary evils, then you should consider it.

Otherwise, you're probably going to get burned out by the constant braying of naive idealists that believe foreign policy exists in a vacuum that conscience moves rather than context.
They aren't ordinary legal businesses. It is a fact that they are still illegal under federal law, regardless of whether you or I agree with that. If you have ever spent any time in Humboldt County, you would know that if you don't enjoy being shot at, you should stay away from marijuana grow operations.
TIL that WSJ, Bloomberg, BAML, and a plethora of financial institutions are all "Russian agents attempting to attack the US economy".

Reading the comments was clearly a mistake as the paranoia has gotten completely out of control.
After I quit, the way I perceive the smell of weed did a complete 180. It now smells like dirty socks, a smell I'd rather not get in my nose.
Yes, exactly. We had a combination of DECstation 2100 and 3100s for the grad students to use.
Glad to see more sites jumping on this party, I just wish more tools were out there that interpreted data from these dumps directly and made them more readable.

I've started the practice of keeping backups of somewhat recent "all my data" dumps from each site that offers them.
Why allow it?

$$$$$$
Disappointing article. There are no clear reasons mentioned for migrating away from MongoDB. "All these problems" and some issues with Ops Manager are mentioned, where "all these problems" is a couple of outages. As if other database technologies prevent outages. As soon as they experience a couple of outages with their new stack they will migrate to something else, presumably.
There doesn't seem to be much reason to challenge the assumption: humans aren't good at solving any problems that we know to be uncomputable (e.g. the halting problem). Sure, it's a thing you could investigate, but the explanation for why it's not a popular topic is that it doesn't seem like a fruitful area of research.

Also, personally what my mind is doing doesn't feel like it's invoking an oracle for my problem solving. Generally when the search space for a problem that I'm solving increases I experience the kinds of blowups in the difficulty that would arise from me following an algorithm. Now, not everybody is the same. Do you feel like your problem solving calls an oracle?
People only want safe cars if they don't interfere with regular conveniences. I'm sure I've posted this on here before, but if people really wanted safety, we'd have roll cages, harnesses and helmets. But we want safety only when it's convenient.

I think people talk a lot about safety, but I don't think that is as primary of a concern as everybody says that it is for them. How many people actually go research and learn about all the cars they are shopping, vs people who just go to a dealership and listen to a salesman and buy what's in their price range?

Most people don't even read the damn owners manual, they don't even know what that big yellow light is (TPMS or CEL) that has been on for months. They won't buy winter tires in the winter, even though you can get a set for like $700. $700 is too much to spend to increase winter safety by a large margin on a $30,000+ car. Hell, people don't even use turn signals. The little stick that is less than 2 inches away from where your hand should be, and you don't even have to take your hands off the wheel to activate it. The problem is you'd have to decide which of your 16 cupholders to put the cup in, then reach way over and put it down before you could signal.
Yeah, see, no one is bothered by that because no one is saying:

Be proud of your true heroin addicted self. Show it to the world. IF they don't accept your heroin addiction THEY ARE wrong.

See. If any movement said that, I'd be against it. Because they are trying to remove stigma from something that SHOULD HAVE IT.
>Apple practically invented the concept of "planned obsolescence"

I don't think so. While they have indeed closed down self-repairs and upgrades, and stop supporting some models after 5-6 years:

a) Their products keep their resale value higher. That's the opposite of "planned obsolescence"

b) They update iPhones/iPads for as many iOS releases as they can, whereas Android phones have historically been (and still predominantly are) left off with no updates post-sale (statistics verify this)

c) Their stuff might not be user operable but can be upgraded at their stores and is also regularly refurbished (and it happens by the hundreds of millions too)

d) They also have recycling programs in place

That said, easier repair and upgrades would indeed be more environment friendly. Even better, less models, as opposed to a new model a year and having people chase it.

A heavy tax on buying gadgetry (proportional not to the value of the product, but to one's income) would help. But of course the whole economy is based on "more more more, externalities be damned".
>Apple appears to be taking the environmental impact of their business seriously:

The keyword is "appears" , having to replace half of a laptop because a key is broken is not environmental friendly even if you could 99% recycle the materials since you consumed ton of energy and created CO2 producing and then recycling those working parts.
Yeah, I agree about it being off-putting. There's very little science in programming language ergonomics, so it all comes down to taste, right?

However, I wonder how much of this is a difference in substance and how much is about writing style? There is an older, authoritive style that has an implicit "in our opinion, of course" and sounds pretty grating these days.

I remember being taught in school to remove "I think" and qualifiers expressing uncertainty, under the theory that in an opinion piece, that's understood.

Especially these days when hyperbole is common, I prefer writers that have a humble writing style, but also try not to get hung up on stylistic differences.
Possibly, the flat image might come from Arizona being flat where a large number of the people live, like Phoenix and its outskirts.

Grandparent's "damn near perfect grid" comment also jives with the layout of much of Phoenix.
If somebody is teleporting back then, the fact Mongo had a _global_ Mongo instance level lock for writes should be more than enough for people to run screaming.

I worked with databases that only had table level locks(not row level) and there were more than enough occasions I cursed the creators.

Instance level(& indeed DB level) is insanity unless your DB is a read only DB.
Eating less saves both time and money. You can save money by buying less food. You can save time by shopping for food less, preparing food less, eating less, and cleaning up less. You can eat less at home, at work, at the bus stop - anywhere, and while doing any activity. Anybody can eat less, no matter what their life is like.
Strangely, coffee is taboo for children, yet Coke is fine.
You mean that Lenovo isn't offering a GNU/Linux pre-installed OS? Why not just install it yourself?
Has no one here hit a dear before?
People just don't know there's another way to make coffee than pod machines? I'm sorry, I just don't accept that premise. What am I missing?

People are making a choice — an admittedly consequential one, yes — but they're making it based on their personal priorities, not because marketing has deluded them into thinking there's no other way. They're paying someone else to have done all the work of making their cup of coffee, except loading the pod, pushing the button, and making sure the water tank is full enough — for them, at least.

Hell, even that illustrates the point: in every environment I've ever been with a shared pod coffee machine, I've had to fill the basin, more often than not. People can't even be arsed to make sure there's enough water in the stupid thing for the next person who wants a cuppa. It's laziness.
This is the experiment that put the idea in my head in the first place. And also the reason I prefaced the question with the fact that I KNOW it's going to need to be a ridiculously powerful laser. Making something detectable that's hitting something with an unknown albedo and angle of whatever the photons are impacting makes the requirements start to bump up against the laws of physics, much less what we are technically capable of.
Your year was better than you think
Agreed! I don't think enough engineering orgs appreciate the value of a great narrative on any technical topic.

Part of my duties at work require me to deal with "large" issues. While a solution to them is usually necessary and quick and high quality, I've seen the analyses that come after them vary in quality.

Good writeups tend to stick around in people's memories and become company culture, and drive everyone to do better. Bad writeups are forgotten, and thus the lessons learned from them are forgotten as well.

This particular article stands out for me. English is not my first language, and I've spent most of my life dealing with very fundamental technical details, so most of my writeups aren't the best. I'm going to bookmark this one and come back to it to learn how to write accessible technical narratives.
Assuming you can build a laser bright enough for your detector, you are forgetting about the time & distance problem. We don’t know how far away this Planet X sits at any given point in time. You would have to pulse your laser at a spot or set of spots long enough to irradiate the possible region of space during the time it takes for Planet X to traverse said space. Then wait hours or days on the off chance the pulse comes back. If you look away too soon to examine the next spot, you miss the more distant object. If your pulse is too short, the object may pass in front or behind the pulse and be invisible.

The Sun on the other hand is irradiating all space at all times. Aside from eclipses, we know Planet X is currently reflecting sunlight. We just have to look at it, compare to background, look again, compare to background, and notice the movement.
Cozy Kingdoms Generation
How? Submit your resume. [1] Make some calls.

Should? That probably depends on your personality and skill sets. It's nothing like the movies. If a movie motivated you, that would be the wrong reason.

On a side note, many people in the tech industry indirectly work for them. Many are not even aware. There is more money on the civilian side of things anyway. If you are already in the tech industry, look at the businesses funded by In-Q-Tel. [2] That list is not all inclusive. There are thousands of companies missing from the list.

[1] - https://www.cia.gov/careers/application-process

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
But that's the problem. It shouldn't be about the fact they made it easy. The truth exists irrespective of that
Priceless if you read "the little prince"[1] - if not, stop now and invest the hour to do that first. I make all my (adult) guests listen to the audiobook when driving through Tarfaya, where the author was working as a pilot for French aerial post.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince
This is some more good advice. Here's my summary of your comment:

Try and solve problems with what you know first... As there's always a newer method to learn.
Addiction to opioids is also partly genetic. Should being a heroin addict be fine?

The healthy while fat movement specifically tries to remove a stigma that IMO should not be removed.