skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why would it not be possible to fashion an extremely powerful laser and sweep it across the sky in an area where gravitational clues indicate a dark object may reside?

Lasers are not the important part here- collimation is. The closer the illumination is to a perfect cylinder, the more visible it stays. Lasers often happen to be highly collimated, but it's not a defining feature. For instance laser diodes emit laser light in a cone 20+ degrees wide, and lenses are needed to produce a beam.

Bottom line: lasers aren't a panacea- generating a collimated beam isn't trivial, and just because we can make immensely powerful lasers that doesn't mean they are collimated.

> Unless the object was utterly black on its surface, I'd think we would be able to monitor wherever the beam traverses and look for tell-tale spectra coming back in our direction due to the laser being scattered by a solid object's surface.

There isn't really any tell-tale spectrum available- obviously you need something below X-rays, because those will be absorbed rather than reflected. In practice you also need something above millimeter waves, because those are also absorbed but more importantly the collimation of an EM source is inversely proportional to its wavelength. So millimeter waves are ~2000x less collimated than visible light, unless you use a massive antenna.

Just above millimeter waves are infrared waves, and just below X-rays are ultraviolet waves. Along that entire range, the sun is very active, so any light is going to be washed out against that background. You don't really get to rely on the spectra being unique.

> the necessary power needed for a laser strong enough to travel to such a distant point (it might not be physically possible to create a laser large enough to exceed the light we would already see reflected back from the already formidable output of the Sun)

The reflected light of the laser has to be brighter than the suns reflection over the entire area of the object you're trying to see. For an Earth-sized object at 1000 AU, that's 174 gigawatts. Not only do you have the impossible task of actually hitting the object, you need to have a hundred nuclear reactors powering a single source the entire time you do it.
You cannot be old-school and hype. That's the reason why it is old school. And the people who can't make good database design choices are exactly the kind of people who should be using SQL. Postgres knows how to optimize and plan queries efficiently based on the actual distributions of values in your dataset. These poor choosers should be doing that... by hand?

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/planner-optimizer.html
The new Python model is pretty similar to what Django has been using for years (and even admits that it copy/pasted significant chunks of text from our model). I didn't realize how grim things were!

I've served on Django's technical board -- its equivalent of the new Python "steering council" -- for several years. The technical board has the following responsibilities:

* Act as a final tiebreaker for any decision that the dev mailing list can't manage to make through normal discussion

* Review major proposals for changing Django or Django's processes (DEPs, our equivalent of Python's PEPs), with the ability to veto

* Review proposals to add new Django committers, with the ability to veto

The first category has never, as far as I can tell, come up, and for the other two the technical board has never vetoed a committer or a DEP. There also aren't many of them -- 24 in a bit over four years.

I'm trying to push through a significant change to how Django works, but it wouldn't do away with the technical board; instead it acknowledges that the in-practice way Django runs -- discussion on the dev mailing list, open to everyone, with a couple people whose job is to merge PRs -- is working well enough that we no longer need to give special privileges to a large group of committers.
Yet the best place to incorporate a company is still Delaware
Well if you want to receive a message that someone sends you then you'd also need to grant Spotify read permissions. In essence, you'd be using Spotify as a client app for fb messenger. How else could that work without Spotify getting read/write access to your messages?
> Since all our other services are running in AWS, the obvious choice was DynamoDB – Amazon’s NoSQL database offering. Unfortunately at the time Dynamo didn’t support encryption at rest.

Whoa, that was close. I really don't see why anyone would choose DynamoDB as a general purpose data store, unless they enjoy wasting countless hours finding ways around the limitations it imposes about how data should be stored and accessed. At least that was my (admittedly limited) experience. Postgres is a much better choice.
It is very interesting to see everything that has always been known as a series of good hard practices
I think you'll enjoy the series then, I spent several months investigating and made the same point about JSON and the Javascript-like CLI (plus great Node support, plus savvy marketing). For example:

> 10gen's key contributions to databases — and to our industry — was their laser focus on four critical things: onboarding, usability, libraries and support. For startup teams, these were important factors in choosing MongoDB — and a key reason for its powerful word of mouth.

Startup Engineers and Our Mistakes with MongoDB

https://www.nemil.com/mongo/2.html

The Marketing Behind MongoDB

https://www.nemil.com/mongo/3.html
MogoDB is proof that with the right strategy, marketing and luck, you really can fake it until you make it.

Not that that's really a surprise or was unknown, it's just fairly new to see in the open source ecosystem instead of the enterprise one.
How to Change Bathroom Sink Faucet Handles
It's the same underlying image, just hosted somewhere else :)
People do have different metabolisms. But, the "genetically obese" thing is not true. That does not mean we should put the blame 100% on these people, however.

I encourage you to have empathy for these people. Because what it takes: Going to the gym, going hiking, getting physical activity, is not available for a lot of people. It is a huge privilege to live somewhere AND HAVE THE TIME to do these activities.

Most people live paycheck to paycheck, a gym membership is a meal they cannot put on the table. Their houses are small and working out inside of them is miserable. Or they are working multiple jobs and they choose not to spend the 2 hours of free-time they have a day working out. Who can really blame them?

Outside there could be violence, or the constant threat of being harassed by the police. Or, it could just simply be a paved-over wasteland where the community did not think that maybe people will want somewhere to walk around for a while.

My anecdote: I used to live in Chicago, and I was a serial "join the gym and never work out" person. I got pretty overweight at 190 lbs, 5'10. I moved to Portland, Oregon. And something interesting happened: Portland is smaller, and getting to the gym means meandering down a few tree-lined lanes until I reach a huge converted warehouse that now serves as a gym. The gyms I had seen in Chicago were squat-ceiling converted office space. I found going to the gym MUCH EASIER, due to the quality of the gym and the environment around me.
I've not seen anything that would suggest either ratio.
What is a "big calorie deficit" relative to others?

For me, I’ve found 400-500 below my maintainence works best.

> It is must more useful to classify based on muscle fiber composition. People with a lot of fast twitch muscle fiber build muscle quicker, etc.

I agree with you here. I needed labels to bin the two (very general) categories of body composition types, so I chose those two.
I'm glad you are willing to come out and state your positions clearly. For that I thank you.

I disagree with essentially everything you have said. While SIS may not be a panacea, they are definitely on the right track.
Nope, Apple does a lot of stuff specifically to make it so not even technicians (not customers directly) cannot repair an iphone.
>“But postgres isn’t a document store!” I hear you cry. Well, no, it isn’t, but it does have a JSONB column type, with support for indexes on fields within the JSON blob.

> approximately 2.3m content items.

I had a previous project where we did a similar thing (except with HSTORE instead of JSONB) and it exploded rather dramatically (very simple queries took multiple minutes or timed out entirely) after around 30m rows. I hope the Grauniad doesn't run into a similar issue, or at least anticipates it better than we did.
Homeowners have a relatively simple way to fight back!

Simply grow some hemp plants, and kill your females.

High quality marijuana production requires the female plants do not get fertilized, which means an absence of male plants.

Once fertilized, cannabis puts its energy into seed instead of increased flowering.

Wind and insects will distribute the pollen to your neighbors, and the plants will start making seeds instead of stinky flowers.
A killer feature
Ask HN: Can you suggest educative react projects for newbies to make?
I'm already made more than three react todos with various tech and features, and now I'm tired of it. So now I want to make something interesting, newbie-friendly, and educative (like todo app). If you had an idea — please suggest.
Indeed, those people could be producing things for me.
The problem is that for many people (in the US), a car is simply a necessity. And car safety is an important part of that. A lighter car would fare poorly against an older, heavier car in the case of a collision. Therefore, the lighter car is less safe.

That's why it's a chicken and egg problem. No one wants to be in a less safe car when there are so many accidents (and deaths from them) every year.
Plenty. I'm very fit all my life, but as I have gotten older, metabolism slowed down, less time and energy, I am still exactly as fit as I was, and still eat w/o a diet, often before bed.

What's changed: every morning I wear an ab belt while getting ready for work. With every greasy mean I pop an orlistat. I wear a couple of electrodes on my chest/back/arms under my shirt while at work, instead of a workout most days. 5'11, 170lb, 6% bodyfat, bench 300 20 times.

This is 100% because of medical science, because I'm a lazy 40yo slob. Just a really fit one despite the daily cake and pizza before bed.
Kim Stanley Robinson is a great SciFi Writer. "2312" is probably my favorite of his works (the first I read).
I enjoyed the hopefulness of the article. Being part of the next decades will be very interesting.
November 2018 NPD: Nintendo Switch outsells PS4 in dollar sales
Standard rules about performance optimization apply. Denormalization can improve performance, but it can just as easily harm it.

For code, I think by now we all understand that you should always start with clean, well-factored code, and then optimize only as much as is necessary, which is usually not at all, and always under profiler guidance. It's the same with DBs: You start with a clean, well-normalized schema, and then de-normalize only as much as is necessary, which is usually not at all, and always under profiler guidance.

Also, keep in mind that improvements in compiler technology over time mean that the performance tricks of old can be useless or even actively harmful nowadays. This is true of SQL every bit as much as C.
That was a feature of windows explorer not the filesystem. It worked by copying the file to a temporary location. That's why if you tried to launch an exe from a zip file it would fail to find any DLLs packed with it.

This should make features like that much better.
Well, guess I'm mostly talking about startups.
Genetic conditions cannot (currently) be changed, so not trying to change them is a reasonable approach.
Your comment on stapling their eyes shut made my day.
I don't necessarily disagree that Der Spiegel could be more humble in its tone (I can't tell, not being able to read its indepth explanation in the original German). But I don't believe that Relotius deserves any sympathy or leeway if these allegations are true. Fabrication is a far bigger transgression than "massively overdone" it. What does visiting a high security prison in Kurdistan have to do with anything?
BlinkIdentity
The HIV/AIDS problem in the third world could easily be solved the same way. Instead we waste billions of dollars every year on research and aid.
Germany shrunk already last quarter.if they shrink another quarter it is officially a recession.
You can also die from caffeine. What is your point, beyond "the dose makes the poison"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...

Everything old is new again.

As to why it's not currently done, if somebody comes up with a significantly lower cost method of doing purely underground construction (cut and cover trenching), directional drilling or small tunnel boring that doesn't cost a huge amount of money per linear meter, they'll become a gazillionaire. Not just "loops" but all electric, gas, water, sewer and telecom utilities will clamor for the tech.
You've missed my points. All of them. Sadness ensues.
it almost sounds like they don't want your customers to know your product is not affected. hypothetically speaking, could one of your clients make a possibly bad hasty security move by being under the immpression your product is vulnerable?
It doesn't need to be continuous, but we take pictures by looking at all the light over some short-ish time. Even at 60fps we are talking about up to 16ms of light, and with telescopes exposure times of minutes or hours are the norm.

Unless the pulses are long or frequent you get more light from an equally long exposure with sun light
Excellent point! It's not just the reduction in space for the human passenger, but also a reduction in weight and resource usage from not needing (as much) safety features on the vehicle.

I'm guessing this would also make the cars safer to crash into, or be crashed into by, given that passenger cars would continue to be heavier and sturdier.
I don't know what to say. It's not a global media conspiracy. For decades there have been actual fat acceptance activists and communities. Good luck.
without even looking at it I can tell most of this will be swing states because .. reasons!
Bonds didn't enable the payment of the settlement. The tobacco companies were going to hand over ~$8B cash every year. The securitization added a layer of complexity that capitalized on greed and, surprise surprise, looks guaranteed to blow up in these state's faces.

> Nine states — Alaska, California, Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and West Virginia — and Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and Guam decided to get as much of those annual payments as fast as they could by mortgaging any future payments as collateral and issuing bonds. They traded their future lifetime income for cash today — at only pennies on the dollar.

> A typical bond is like an interest-only loan with a balloon payment in 30 years. But to avoid having to pay yearly interest payments, these 12 chose to issue capital appreciation bonds, deferring all interest payments and repayment for up to 50 years. Then the entire amount is due — with no plans made as to how it will be repaid. By the time these bonds come due, the legislators who approved them will be retired or dead.

> The 12 issued $22.6 billion in bonds, receiving only $573.2 million in cash. With compounded interest, they will have to repay $67.1 billion. Imagine borrowing $200,000 to buy a house today and your children having to pay back $234 million in 40 or 50 years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/opinion/how-the-big-tobac...
I am just pointing out that no downtime applies to failing over very specific services. In general AWS had pretty horrible track record on outages. A single top tier DC has way better uptime vs AWS Region.
because Le Petit Prince is one of the most translated and sold books ever, and that the title was a very direct reference, I just didn't feel it would be necessary to include a note saying it's based on the little prince story since it felt obvious to me. My bad.
If you enjoy helping support totalitarian dictatorships and friendly puppet governments, then sure, join the CIA. If you want to help make sure drugs get distributed in the US while millions of people rot in jail for non violent drug crimes, then sure, join the CIA. If you want to help put people in jail using "parallel construction", then yeah, sure, join the CIA.
Just 30 Seconds Over Tokyo: How the Doolittle Raid Doomed the Japanese Empire
I started with a 'real' espresso machine and bean grinder. The process for making a cappuccino in the morning was as follows:

1. Turn on the espresso boiler and allow it to warm up for 20-30 minutes.
2. Grind beans at the correct setting, then tamp them into the wand with just the right amount of pressure
3. Insert wand into machine, turn it on, and perfectly time the pour
4. Dispose of hot coffee grinds, rinse, brush and clean the wand.
5. Pour milk into frothing cup and steam for 60+ seconds or until optimal temperature is reached while ensuring that the steam properly turns the milk to achieve desired froth.
6. Combine milk and espresso in cup
7. Clean espresso shot cup, clean milk frothing cup, clean up errant coffee grounds, remember to turn off machines.

The process for making a cappuccino with the Nespresso machine:

1. Pour milk into frother, press button.
2. Insert pod, press button. It will finish within about 20 seconds, and a few seconds after that the milk will also be done.
3. Pour frothed milk into the cup that the espresso was dispensed into.
4. Rinse milk frother.

I had time for the full machine routine on a Saturday morning, but not before work.
> This was a programming problem, and the only programming language I knew was the one I made the game in: it’s called Game Maker.

This reminds me of a kid I used to play MUDs with. He started getting into programming by writing scripts for the MUDs, but he refused to learn any other scripting or programming languages. Over the years I saw him implement a chess engine, a web server, and even a whole MUD all using his MUD client's integrated scripting language.
i don't think an apple pr executive could have said it any better! it's a great strategy to spin bad behavior as nominally neutral things, or to divert with red herrings, so as to diffuse the application of ethical or moral considerations.
Cleanup? A regular coffee machine uses disposable filters. The advantage of the k-cup over this is brewing for a single cup of variable size. However this is easily achievable with pourover or "clever dripper" methods, each of which use the filter and thus have little to no cleanup. There's no justification for the cup system at all.
> that a recession is just around the corner.

I'm sure economists/data-scientists have models for that, and if there would be any obvious sign, we would know it by now.
What did I just read? Is this a legitimate Facebook post? Are they actively trying to defend and justify their actions? First step in crisis management would be to acknowledge the crisis for what it is. Without that stage Facebook will never get out of this. It's like Microsoft's security before Bill Gates's trustworthy computing memo. Facebook you have to change.
Privacy no more: How machine learning in the cloud will strip us naked
I just want to add that materialistic commitments don't even necessarily imply computability. Entropy, for example, doesn't seem to be computable[1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/0808.1678.pdf
Nothing can make shit and rotting carcasses smell good. A lot of people think weed smells amazing. I love the smell. As another poster said, it's like anything else you enjoy. I like the smell of coffee, beer, freshly-cut wood, etc. Mostly because of the memories they invoke. Same with cannabis.
Netflix OSS and Spring Boot — Coming Full Circle
I assume the point here to send someone a message on FB with a Spotify link, so they click on it in their messages and it opens up the Spotify app. If you just want to send a message from one Spotify user directly to another in Spotify, you don't need FB messages at all, right? Spotify has a list of all your FB friend IDs already and knows which Spotify accounts each is connected to
Claas Relotius: CNN Journalist of the Year 'Falsified Articles on Grand Scale'
Yep. Nowadays you'd be more likely to see it as:

return () => {
const next = i;
i = i * 2;
return next;
}

But in this case the two are equivalent.
I think Uber is uniquely positioned to weather a recession, its business has counter-cyclical properties... in a recession when people are losing jobs, it's easier to hire drivers and induce demand via lower prices. That stands in opposition to ad-based tech companies which seem to be hyper-cyclical.
This sounds like a great way to get murdered.
It’s worth noting that this sort of thing is done for closer objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_astronomy

The problem is that the power requirements go up sharply with distance. The amount that hits the object decreases with the square of the distance, as does the amount that’s returned. The end result is that your power requirements are proportional to the fourth power of the distance. Twice as far means you need sixteen times more power.

Now extrapolate that to something hundreds of times farther away than the closer planets....
I wonder why most autonomous vehicle projects are piloted in Arizona ? loose regulations ?
Go's main use case is for writing concurrent servers (mostly web servers) or daemons and command line applications that need to be really fast. Go is a generic programming language, but Python is "more generic", which I mean that you can go far more in a lot more domains (one of them is scientific computing and data analysis) than with Go. If you want to use go for data analysis I suspect that it would feel "a lot more work" to do the same thing than it would take in Python, mostly because it's a lower-level language and the ecosystem is not that huge than for Python yet.
This line of reasoning can be applied to almost any fundamental scientific discovery before it was made.

Why do we believe man can make fire? Well, dammit, we WANT to make fire. Let's figure out how to do it!

Finally, if we were able to explain the brain well with "metaphysics" it would then be just "physics". It seems that all you are saying here is that there is a mechanism that is not yet understood and it may be fundamentally different than other things we have studied so far (which seems unlikely, I might add).
The upstream images are also validated from source to built image, and constantly scanned for vulnerabilities.

At best such a comment is completely ignorant of the existing ecosystem.
Or sued.
How fast is AI growing: From VC investment to AI startup pace
Haha - Yeah - thats the basis.

Whats funny is when I was twelve years old - I designed a magnetic lev train built in a balsa-wood frame circle, with a cabin which was suspended in the tube-frame...

I was really pissed when Musk came out with hyperloop in that I was like "Any twelve year-old can design this!"

:-)
I'm glad that RedHat didn't feel that way when they were sponsoring kernel development, or that Netscape had panicked and locked down Netscape instead of opening it up, or that Sun had given Java a terrible license. Or Google and Kubernetes. LinkedIn and Kafka. Airbnb and Air Flow. I could keep going like this all day.

Mongo made a lot of money building a projects that runs on top of many other projects that were released as Free Software. Now they're upset that other people are building on top of Mongo in the same way.
I'd give that award to the light bulb cartel at the turn of the century that agreed on 1000 hours as the target lifetime.