skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's been a year of grieving for astrophysics pioneers. First, Stephen Hawking this summer, then Riccardo Giacconi [0] just weeks ago, and now Nancy Roman. (Giacconi directed the Hubble's "earth base" Space Telescope Science Institute for 12 years.)

It's hard to overstate the importance of the Hubble. It empowered physicists to prove that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating in its expansion (commemorated in the 2011 Nobel Prize). Its beautiful images also captured the popular imagination of people, inspiring myself and others to pursue scientific careers.

To those wondering why she deserves credit, from the NYTimes writeup [1]:

'''

It was Nancy in the old days before the internet and before Google and email and all that stuff who really helped to sell the Hubble Space Telescope, organize the astronomers, who eventually convinced Congress to fund it, “ Edward J. Weiler, Dr. Roman’s successor as chief scientist for the Hubble, told the Voice of America in 2011.

[...]

In addition to coordinating the efforts of astronomers and engineers in their development of the Hubble, Dr. Roman wrote testimony for NASA representatives making the case for the Hubble before Congress and she pitched the project to the Bureau of the Budget.

[...]

Dr. Roman also took part in development of the Cosmic Background Explorer, a satellite launched in 1989 that confirmed the Big Bang theory of the universe’s creation.

[...]

She later joined the United States Naval Research Laboratory, specializing in radio astronomy, and was recruited by NASA in 1959, a year after it was founded.

[...]

"The idea of coming in with an absolute clean slate to set up a program that I thought was likely to influence astronomy for 50 years was just a challenge that I couldn’t turn down,” she recalled in her National Air and Space Museum interview.

[...]

Dr. Roman retired from NASA in 1979 but continued as a consultant as work progressed toward the Hubble’s launching.

'''

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/science/riccardo-giacconi...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/obituaries/nancy-roman-di...
I hate that most websites are so heavy. I enjoyed browsing on my Kobo eReader but loading times of several seconds to a minutes makes it cumbersome. I limit my browsing to "lite" websites and HN suits that well. I also use the Pocket service because it's builtin and reduce the computational need required to read an article.
What makes you think the changes would be accepted into mainline?
Reciting a number in unary vs binary is the difference between O(N) and O(log N)!
This is very similar to the Allegory of the Chariot [0] from Plato's Phaedrus (370 BC) [1]. The Greeks were sometimes a keen bunch and Plato was one of the few of them that survived to the modern day. In this allegory, the person (really only males back then) had a soul divided into 3 parts: The charioteer, a base and somewhat evil pegasus, and a noble and good pegasus, with each of the pegasuses harnessed to the chariot. In life, the goal was to rise above the clouds to view heaven (more strictly, the 'forms' of Beauty, Reason, etc). The charioteer had to guide the base and the noble pegasuses and keep them from attacking each other, rioting, and generally distracting from the goal of reaching heaven.

In the allegory, the charioteer is the reasoning part of a person, the base pegasus was the 'appetites'/greed/hedonistic and the more 'limbic' parts of the person, the noble pegasus was the thumos of the person. Thumos is a very different mental model for us moderns, but was common for the ancient greeks. Think of it as 'spiritedness', but the word as used by Plato had elements of victory/political/hotheadedness/manliness baked into it [2]. The pegasuses weren't just 'good vs. evil', as even the thumos pegasus could get out of hand for the 'reasoning' charioteer, and the base pegasus was needed to tell the person to eat, to have intercourse, to react to danger, etc.

I point this out to give the parent commentor another mental model to help process things in life. We're MUCH more than just the 'higher' and 'lower' parts of ourselves. Plato thought of himself as a tripartite soul, and in typical Plato fashion, totally forgets about things like humor that can't be included in his Chariot Allegory. I'd encourage others to look into other traditions and philosophies to see of any other mental models work for them. 'Eudamonia'[3] is something we all should reach for; not every mental tool is one-size-fits-all.

[0] https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/what-is-a-man-the-al...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)

[2] https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/got-thumos/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia
It's not stupidity. It's distrust.

They don't believe there isn't some backchannel for the regular government (the executive mostly) to influence a court ruling when it really needs to.
Read the text, it is not what you think
>Why not? Self control isn't some moral, righteousness, trait.

Exhibit B. Personal responsibility is increasingly fading from the collective American vocabulary, and articles like these, which normalize nonsensical, narcicisstic decisions, like throwing away a decade pursuing 3 low demand liberal arts degrees, make the media complicit. Self control absolutely is a moral, righteous trait, particularly because those without it lower the standards of living for those around them.

Somehow other cultures tend to place virtue in the development of discipline, a personal responsibility which can mitigate all kinds of external erosions of self control. But in the U.S. a sizable minority, if not a majority, expect the world to throw money at them and their 3 children in LA for an advanced English degree.
I work with video codecs a lot; to me the blocking on the AV1 picture looks like chroma subsampling rather than a compression artifact. It's much more noticeable on red than in other colors. Unfortunately, at least as of last time I checked, the AV1 still image converters were mostly only 4:2:0 and it's quite noticeable on some images. But this should go away entirely once they're used without subsampling. In other words: don't use that part of the picture to judge the quality of AV1.
> Every space scientist would give thier entire career, every dollar ever spent by nasa, for even a hint of such a discovery.

Not everyone (case in point: me). We're not all obsessed with the search for ET.
Exactly. Heathrow was setup as an airport in the middle of the last century, and continues to be used as if London hasn't grown in that time, and won't grow in the future. With plans to extend. I regularly get woken at 4:30am. Undoubtedly, at some point during the day I'll see headlines or commentary about mental health or strain on the NHS. I wonder how many would be feeling considerably better if they simply weren't subjected to sleep deprivation and a plane flying overhead every 120 seconds.
I guess I hate to beso cynical but.. yea I kinda figured :-/
> Cantonese is also writable, but is only really used for things like TV scripts, it isn't generally taught.

I've only been to HK twice, but from this article [1] it sounds like the Cantonese script is used for more than just TV scripts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese
“In 2018 the blockchain/decentralization story fell apart”
I used to, but quit completely around three years ago.
Run "independently" but financed by ad revenue, since that's where 90% of Google revenue comes from. "You can't make a person understand something if his salary depends on not understanding it".
EDIT: THIS IS ALL WRONG AND BACKWARDS, SEE BELOW

--------------------------

> Rust println!() flushes after each call,

To be clear, println! does not flush after each call.

Many terminals are line-buffered, and so when println! emits a \n, the terminal will flush. So, println! will probably cause a flush, but does not flush itself. println! is the exact same as `print!`, except for the additional printing of \n https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/src/std/macros.rs.html#157-...
There's an empty lot near our building and it gets occupied by students a lot. I just open my window and shout (I am the "Ruhe bitte guy"). From their perspective, someone is crazy enough to shout outside the window, so it works 100%. My next step would be calling the police but honestly never had to do this. Even if I did, the police in Germany are usually too kind to scare them :)

I don't feel like any sane person can reason with drunk people (worse, teenagers) who are making noise at 2 am - except when they are your neighbors or you know them somehow.
Why, in theory, isn't Congress made up of 50% women + 50% men?
What Jobs Are Most Common for Financial Independence?
RStudio uses it.
You also lose your benefits if you move to another country and give up your citizenship. What do you call it then?
It's good that the student got help, but these students are adults, aren't they? Why can't they use the same resources as everyone else?
I did read the text. It's humorous. But the question itself is no less important. And considering what happened with Torvalds' position this year, one might think it is a follow up to that question. So I think adding '(2000)' would definitely be helpful, if not just accurate.
If you're new to him, you're in for some fun. The spider article is great:
http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html
Right. I was waiting for the author to get to this point, and much to my surprise they never did.

The takeaway shouldn’t be “strings are hard”. Strings are hard, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is using inappropriate data types for the task at hand, and the takeaway should be that representation matters.

Representing an IP endpoint as a string only really makes sense at the human-computer interface. In general, the first thing a program should do with such a string is convert it into a more suitable data type. And as noted elsewhere, more often than not there will already be a library function to do so.

Strings are especially pernicious because they are ubiquitous, in that just about anything can be represented as a string, but the operations one can do on a string representation of an object do not generally correspond with the operations one would want to do on the object itself. This disparity is the source of many bugs, which the article exemplifies (though falls short of directly addressing).

Similarly problematic are assumptions that converting an object to a string and a string to an object (i.e. `parse` and `format` functions) are bijective. This is not generally the case. (Wise practitioners might choose such a mapping, though, when the opportunity presents.)
> In my view, we are part of an unbelievably huge quality of life theft right now, a generational heist, pulling wool over everyone’s eyes to think that defined contribution retirement vehicles are somehow an acceptable alternative to defined benefit retirement vehicles.

At the end of the day, it's all a defined contribution vehicle, because the future is unknowable. The question is whether you choose to deal with that reality up front or kick the can down the road.
Universities shouldn't have special obligations any more than any other employer or government agency. Another way to look at it is that regular people shouldn't have less protection against online harassment just because they don't happen to be university students. Rules and protections should apply equally to everyone.

Should public libraries be obligated to block online content that harasses some of their patrons?
All data has limitations and context which must be understood, or else one may reach wrong conclusions. I think the limitations of quantitative data are often not properly acknowledged. Of course, data can be still be very useful.
A disclaimer doesn’t prevent civil legal action by customers.
Uuh, i thought the whole point of a static server was to not need an application that needs to prepare the content?
It's supposed to be a dumb web server that accesses a folder structure or similar storage backed...
I think it is you who is missing the point. What is different between "forbidding posting crap like that" and "banning billboards"?
We analyzed 100M headlines (2017)
I'd be interested. The two still offending tools (spell and f77) sound super rarely used these days. I think it's fair to compare samples of commonly used tools in 1995 with samples of commonly used tools in 2018 even if those samples are widely different. This would be more related to the change in the probability that an average user sees a crash.
Real Story Here. A colleague and I developed a training course on the Foundations of DevOps. We started the course off with a discussion about risk in Software Delivery and IT in general. Attendees would often surface the "Key-Person Risk" or the "Hit by a Bus Risk" to which we would use as a teachable moment for pair programming, cross pollination, and measuring and improving the time it takes for new joins to become productive with the systems and or code base. We would illustrate that one of the ways we mitigated the Key Person Risk with the course was to always deliver it in pairs.

My colleague was tragically struck by a car and killed about three months ago. The course suffered an immense blow to the knowledge capital it had - but due to the fact that we had planned to mitigate against key-person risk by pairing - the course was able to survive and retain a fair bit of the legacy my colleague left behind.

I just share this to say that the getting "hit by a bus" scenario is something that, much like this post, we throw around in jest and treat in a laissez-faire fashion. The fact is that it is a tragic, unimaginable, event that does in fact occur from time to time and something I will take seriously for the rest of my life.
> identify or avoid methodological flaws like p-hacking,

It is not trivial to identify them. If it was then there would be no replication crisis. Avoiding is easy in theory: you need decide on math methods in advance. Generate random data before you start to gather real data, and write an R program to process this data. Test it, debug, and when you get real data just feed it to this program. Without changing the program. It is harder in practice though.

> understanding correlation vs causation

> I'd love more information on best practices especially for experimental design

I learnt it with experimental psychology. С. James Goodwin "Research in Psychology"[1], there are some specific psychological topics covered (you might not be interested in ethics of psychological research), there are not a word about chi squares or other math methods you mentioned (data processing is out of the scope of the book), but there are a lot about different experimental setups, with a lot of examples. IIRC there is discussion of p-hacking too.

I believe this book is a good read to anyone interested in design of experimental and/or correlational research methods in general, not just for psychologists.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Research-Psychology-Methods-Design-8E...
The Rust Evangelism Strike Force is gunning for the embedded space, too. As soon as the tooling becomes widespread enough to support the most-used microcontrollers, C will be a niche language even in embedded.
"We're only in this fight because fossil fuels are killing people, so we're stepping up to help stop that."

This resonates with me. I was an activist for ~10 years (for a different issue). Me and every activist I met stepped up because of the need (vs innate interest). Personally, I would have rather been doing pretty much anything else.

Thank you for stepping up.
I wish this would also work with military flights. There's a lot of people here talking about NIMBYism and how you should know before you buy your house and what-not. I agree with most of that, except I don't think it fairly applies here in many cases. Take myself as an anecdote. I bought a house in a nice, quiet, neighborhood 7 years ago. I also live in a city with multiple active military bases, including two Air Force bases which do training flights. At the time it was established practice to limit training flights to daytime if they were overflying residential areas, I worked night-shift so it was annoying, but what can you do?

Now I work days, and multiple times per day and into the late night (stops around Midnight/1AM) there will be military training flights over my neighborhood. These are not high-altitude flyovers with some noise, these are young Air Force pilots in training flying over low, and sometimes breaking the sound barrier over my neighborhood (but at least high enough altitude that it's not breaking windows). I've adapted by basically shifting my sleep schedule so I go to bed around Midnight when it stops. What else can I do?

Short of using my personal connections locally to find out who their CO is and calling them on the phone directly, there is basically no process for me to complain. I'm also pretty certain that generating sonic booms over a neighborhood at night is probably against their training orders, and they'd get disciplined, but since I have no pathway to complain and it's something that could not reasonably be expected, I'm just stuck with it unless I want to move.

It's not a daily occurrence, but probably happens at least 3-4 times per week after 9PM.

There's a reason the pricing for homes is lower next to the airport or next to the Air Force base vs in my previously quiet neighborhood which is in a suburb more than 5 miles from both.
Dinner for One: New Year's Eve Sketch Beloved in Germany Finally Screened in UK
Minneapolis seems like they might be getting a start on the zoning issues, they’ve removed all single-family zoning from the city!
Tailored music playlists blog
https://stolenbeats.com

Music playlists from my own youtube likes (latest 15 days) and scrapes from magazines and charts (HNHH). The idea is to try to update the content every 10/15 days or so.
I will add an about page in the future and keep the blog alive.

The site is built using Gatsby js, many free icons and unplash images. It uses a keen io script to count visitors.
Hi, I’m the sole developer behind Talon. It’s not open source for several reasons, one of which is that I work on it full time, live on my savings, and give it away for free (because the best thing I can get out of releasing Talon is reducing hand pain in others at scale, not money). It has eye/head tracking, noise recognition, and an extremely advanced scripting engine, so it’s not just a speech recognition project. It also might come to Linux sooner than you think.

It doesn’t depend on Dragon at all, and Nuance dropping support for Dragon 6 isn’t a huge problem yet as long as you can still buy it (Talon has a builtin speech engine, and also fixes/works around most of the long-standing problems in Dragon Mac, and I’m probably more able to help with problems than their support). Integrating more engines is on the roadmap, but slightly after multi platform support (since there’s already a good free engine on Mac).

Let me know if you have any questions or if there’s anything I can do to make Talon work better for your use case.

It’s also worth reading back through my HN comments as I’ve talked in detail about Talon there.
> I hate that most websites are so heavy.

Most of which has nothing to do with compression format, to be honest. No image compression format is going to save us from websites that use 2000x2000 sized photos for 200x200 author thumbnails.
Of course. I looked him up again but this I included HIV in the search. Can't believe I missed it the first time.
It is interesting to hear that, what I had assumed was strictly an electronics issue, occurs in other industries as well.

I recently read Andrew "bunnie" Huang's book "The Hardware Hacker", where he talks extensively about building electronics in China, and it sounds very familiar to this. Despite some problems with counterfeit SD cards, he eventually brought the Chumby to market.

So, it sounds like you can get great results and low prices, but you have to be able to keep your eyes on the process the whole way through, or find people you can trust who do.

But if you get it wrong, you get to write a story like Keyboard.io[1], as we discussed previously[2].

[1] https://blog.keyboard.io/post/181333242149/december-2018-a-s...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18692244
If people want to set up annuities that is totally welcome. But they shouldn't be tied to the employer. It should be a separate company that exists solely for the purpose of paying the benefits at retirement.

Depending on an employer for your retirement is, in the modern market, a proven bad idea.

It's terrible what happened to your grandparents (to anyone else nearing retirement, take this as a cautionary tale and get your money in something safe). But hearkening back to the "glory" days of employer-paid pensions is not a viable solution.
How bad does it have to get, eg CO2 ppm or global temperature average or whatever, for this to be a catastrophe?
I think of Talon more as a tool for building interactions like the zoom mouse easily, than the sum of its current features. Zoom mouse took me about a day at a user’s request (someone who had trouble using their neck for head movement to fine tune the cursor).
You know perfectly well that housing in London is a mess, resulting in people living where they might not prefer.
If you need closer to a ELI5 version I recommend this - [1].

Disclaimer: written by me.

[1] https://blog.statsbot.co/support-vector-machines-tutorial-c1...
If you keep more than $100k in BofA, you qualify for Platinum Honors status which gets you an extra 75% on your credit card rewards. We have a Premium Travel BofA card, that comes with 1.5% back on everything, and together with 75% bonus, you get 2.625% cash back on everything. And if you book travel through BofA portal, you get an additional 1.5% (for total of 4.125% back on travel).
I recommend that you first see any psychiatrist who has experience treating depression (ask your primary care provider for a referral or find one online). Think of depression like any serious medical condition; if you aren't satisfied with a given provider or approach, then explore others.
Try some Kaggle challenges first. It will get you familiar with the tools and basic workflows.

Once you've done a couple of challenges, try to find a task of your own and attempt to apply ML to it. Ideally go all the way and collect your own dataset. This will give you experience in formulating your problem, defining what is a good/acceptable solution and how a dataset can be created to solve it.
Does this mean that Universities have to block Facebook since a lot of harassment is done over it?

(yes wishful thinking)
I’d agree with you, but you are comparing apples and oranges.

The selection you quoted focuses on absolute language eg always, never. But the comparison you’re making is on pronoun choice eg I, you, they.

You do mention absolutist words but the selection you quoted doesn’t mention pronouns so your critique shouldn’t either.
>Imagine a billboard that says "Joe is a deviant criminal"

Well now Joe has a libel claim. If Joe is actually a deviant criminal then, well... he pissed off the wrong person. What's the issue?
Leaders lose mental capacities, most notably for reading other people (2017)
There's a big difference between Irish starvation in 1850 and the food insecurities of America in 2018.

The former resulted in ~ 1 million deaths. The latter results in a ~17.5% drop in standardized math scores in affected children.

The latter is definitely a massive problem, but we have made progress.
Long Life Vehicle
somewhat cynical perspective: maybe the long-term cost of a suicide on campus is greater than the cost to prevent them? one or two over the course of many years is sad, but probably not that damaging to the institution. on the other hand, if your school becomes an outlier, you probably start to feel it in the admissions department.