skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The technology's existed since the 1960s - the Concorde flew for 27 years. They're hiring a bunch of engineers out of existing aerospace companies to do the actual work - these companies all know how to build SSTs, they just don't think it's worth it.

What's changed is the market. It wasn't economical to run the Concorde for most of its service lifespan, because demand for fast business travel was limited and fuel prices were high. Then globalization and income inequality happened. There are a lot of very lucrative fields right now where it's beneficial to be in SF in the morning and Shanghai for dinner, then back to SF for the next morning. And fuel prices are on their way back down.

They can probably build it a bit more efficiently than in the days of the Concorde, Tu-144, and Boeing 2707, but the real driver here is the existence of wealthy firms who will pay a lot to shlep their employees across the globe in a day.
It pains me to see high school English teachers of a certain age keep assigning "Catcher in the Rye" to their students. Those forced readings must account for a large share of the 250,000 copies sold per year.

As the Tablet article acknowledges, most of Salinger's writing is a relic of 1950s NYC. Why linger, stuck, in that misshapen world? We're blessed with so many newer authors and so many different cultures that have something to say. High school is a great time for students to discover authors that speak to them -- whether that's Zadie Smith or Neal Stephenson. If that means hitting "refresh" on the assigned reading list, please have the courage to do so!

Let Salinger fade into the back stacks of libraries, hanging out with Thackeray, Dreiser and other novelists in the land of long-ago bestsellers that now rest quietly in obscurity.
At least they are consistent, go to the compact site, giant banner appears:

> You've been invited to try out reddit's new mobile website!
try reddit's mobile website
Oh, cool. I think I was confused about Apple's rules on this. I guess you are allowed to push minor updates to your app, as long as it's JavaScript being executed by their JavaScript engine/WebKit.

But apparently there is (or at one point was) a restriction that says you're not supposed to add new features via remote executable code pushes [0] (although I'm not sure if they'd notice).

[0] https://rollout.io/blog/updating-apps-without-app-store/
This is really neat. I worked on a satellite from 2006-2012 that had a RISC processor from ~1993 if I remember correctly. Radiation hardened processors trail behind the modern tech pretty far, but luckily, most spacecraft aren't doing too much processing on board.
How does this compare with xarray?
A video showing a guy with nc and bash adding clojure repl support to ed.

https://lambdaisland.com/episodes/ultimate-dev-setup
If you slice the demographic data finely enough, everyone is a member of a tiny minority.

My non-technical retired mom also only uses about ten apps, for basically the same reasons, although she doesn't have the vocabulary and jargon we have to succinctly explain the same concepts. AFAIK its the same for my wife, aunt, and sister (different people, LOL) who mostly use Facebook app, being middle aged women.
Damn, I had no idea that happened.

Stuff like this and the shenanigans at the FCC w/ Net Neutrality really makes me rethink the concept of these types appointments not having more public involvement.
Styrofoam
How would Congress go about getting rid of the Senate? Also, the Senate is representing the states. What people are upset about is how the Senate doesn’t represent the population of states relative to one another. That’s the House of Representatives, but given recent politics by the party in control of the senate, people in states like California feel like their will is being override by small state senators.
An interesting and worth-knowing observation. I ought to have guessed given how off-base public discussion of other things often is, yet I forgot to apply Gell Mann Amnesia.

Which forums would you say are worth lurking in? This one? The Stack Overflow family? Are any specific subreddits not-terrible?
So you are saying that out of the 3B smart phone users in the world 600M will never install a app ever because they fear the abuse of their privacy or some horrendous TOS?

Yeah, no!

I think your intuitive judgement failed you here
This will probably lead to more congested air travel, which may have some economic consequences. Little things like this all over the place will start to add up, and the blame will fall squarely wear it belongs - on Trump, who passed on his own party’s funding.
The hype it had few years ago was taken over by Machine Learning and AI fields in job perspective. The technology however is still good.
Ocasio-Cortez’s 70 Percent Top Tax Rate Is a Moderate, Evidence-Based Policy
I guess you will trust coworkers, people you know irl, well known developers, companies you pay for review subscriptions. You don't have to trust all of them 100%if you require multiple reviews per dependency.
I don't disagree with your post; but I think we're talking about different things, because the article talks about multiple kinds of companies. You're right that the companies that are now relicensing are ones that were born from a tool they built first, before monetization was visible goal. I am addressing companies in a more general sense, when entrepreneurs search for market opportunities. That's where the article notes that some see "open source" as a market strategy on its own.

And really, the dichotomy contributes to the situation.

The ones who built useful tool and years later realized it may be monetizable are hemmed in difficult choices. Do they reneg on open source and go proprietary from this point forward, effectively forking their own product and leaving the gratis, libre one -- the one most people will have exposure to -- stuck on an old version? Do they split into an open core and proprietary enhancements? Do they write a novel license and hope consumers will self-select into tl;dr harmless amateurs and very handsomely paying corporations? And if SaaS providers take their old version, and that fork gains ground?

Meanwhile, the ones who used 'open source' chiefly as a customer acquisition lead will face the same set of challenges. In the end, any artifacts published under an open source license are forever -- as long as the interest is there, a sufficiently dedicated party can take it, use it, enhance it, try to build a business around it, and the like. And any past version is a potential competitor, so your business models must be tolerant of that fact. They rarely are.
Buildkite agent, Cloudformation stacks, etc. are open source.

Buildkite controller and UI is closed source.
That's because Apple and Google are doing everything in their power to keep apps tied to their app stores. If they wanted to they could make progressive apps runs as smooth as native apps tomorrow by enabling better native integration, but they won't.
> In the bigger picture Trump has decided that a trade war with China is a good idea, so of course there are going to be unpleasant consequences.

There is also a massive slowdown of the Chinese economy that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the trade war.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/815565/data-reportedly-signal...
That most of the VCs care is making attractive the company between their investment and their exit, it is completely true.

That is also why quite often they bring in (and sometimes replace founders with) "professional" executives before the IPO. Some of these people are not usually the best people to maximize the long term trajectory of the company but they bring more confidence to IPO investors.

If you want to have a successful relationship with them, you had better know their motives and timelines and make sure your company is one in the fund that looks is going to return enough for their game.
That limit is going to be pretty high. Adaptive capacity (or on-demand) gives you up to 3000 read capacity units / second and 1000 write capacity units / second per partition.

The general solution if you think you are going to get to volume where that is not sufficient is to do something like add an additional integer (or other known symbol) to the end of the key. Ex: `key.1`, `key.2`, `key.3`. When doing operations you would have to run N operations across the key + symbol space. Not as elegant and you'll pay the additional computation for those queries, but since they can all be run in parallel it's not too bad in terms of latency.

Now, if all you are doing is hammering away at a few rows, you are stuck for sure. DAX [1] or some other caching layer may be your only way out of that problem.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/dax/
Ask HN: Should I take a job with a startup that was just acquired?
I received an offer with a small - medium company that's been around for a few years that I'm very excited about. The team was great, and even better the product seemed great, a truly exciting and smart idea. I wasn't alone in thinking this, as during the final stages of the interview the company was acquired by a huge software company for a lot of money!

While I am sure this is exciting for the team there currently ($$$$), it leaves me a little trepidatious. I've been told that there are plans for the startup to pretty much exist as its own company, but they couldn't honestly tell me what might change (totally fair answer).

I'm told the mood seems positive with the decision (I can assume partly because everyone has just made a bunch of money on their equity!), but will that change? I'm mainly making a move because I'm interested in the team, culture, and some future projects planned out.

I don't know anyone or have any experience with how things can change in these situations. I would hate to join and then find that over the course of a year or two everyone I liked meeting quits and the culture sours. On the plus side, I would be getting RSUs and REAL money instead of equity lottery tickets.

Does anyone here have experience with joining a company after an acquisition, or perhaps experience with how things changed after their startup was absorbed into a larger company?
> Now let's look at the ration billion-user-products versus the total number of products. That'll give you the ration of employees having a huge impact

That logic doesn't make any sense. No company allocates staff equally to all their products. More popular products (or higher revenue-generating products) are always better-staffed than less popular products.
So nothing that couldn't be solved by a better mobile friendly web site?
I smell a tool in the making! One where you enter your access patterns as SQL-ish format up-front, and you get your document DB design as output.

Then it should also wrap your new table up in an ORM to protect you from yourself.

Could also support generating migrations to support adding new access patterns, at the cost of modifying the entire database.
> It seems that the people who are supposed to be speaking for the regular programmers aren't doing a particularly good job.

I agree with this. The people at CppCon are very smart, very informed, and very very pro-C++. It's silly to think that such a person (people on the committee, no less), would be a good spokesperson for your everyday programmer.

However, that's certainly not the main problem keeping C++ complexity high. Even though the committee genuinely wants improvement in this area, there is too much fear of breaking legacy code, and too many early design mistakes to overcome on the path back to a simpler C++.
I think employer-provided insurance at scale is a uniquely American problem, and agree that it is problematic, but I don't see how it produces more overconsumption and less centralization than a purely individual market would. In fact, if you maintain a system of private providers (even with a public payer), I don't see a connection between funding and these structural problems at all.
really!? I didn't realize I was the person in charge of criminalizing things in the U.S, a country where I don't even live anymore and of which I was never a citizen!

At any rate I did not say they were bad people, despite working for the TSA, I pointed out that the particular action would be technically fraud (I believe) and if caught would probably be punished as such. Thus, although I did not say this flat out, I am wondering if it is actually happening all that much.

So the reason I phrased my comment about fraud in the form of a question, is because I believe it would rather easily be caught out. I am as a matter of principle reluctant to classify groups of people as being just stupider than I in such an obvious fashion.

Finally I've certainly been poorer in my life than any employee of the TSA currently is, and probably poorer than almost all of them have ever been, and even if I am not poor now I do not need any lessons on the matter.

NOTE: The parent comment was changed, without noting change in comment, which of course makes most of this comment seem somewhat off-kilter. I have edited and put in this note.
I'd really love to see this advancement as most of the flights I take are 10+ hour direct flights.

> On a side note, why aren't there more startups trying to reduce passenger time at the airport instead of focusing on faster airplanes?

Just thought about it, it could actually be harder for startups to work on reducing passenger time at the airport. A main blocker would be convincing airports (and/or governments) to adopt your solution.
I'd say they cant produce a low enough signature with the nacelles on the bottom as currently displayed. see all aircraft in this nasa clip from April 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPd0OHrmCBc
It's also important to note that China is generally experiencing a harsh economic slowdown.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/815565/data-reportedly-signal...

It would seem that this issue is far broader than simply Apple's strategy alone.
Now chant with me... GDPR... GDPR... GDPR...
Not a panacea, but always required. All disks eventually are thrown out. It doesn't prevent all attacks, but it's the only way to prevent a very common class of attack.
Using a separate phone for apps and using another phone for calls/texts can help privacy if you still love to install games/apps
Be patient and wait for deals you can snipe. You can get a server that was considered high-end circa 2010 for $50.

Some high-end Xeon chips are dirt cheap, like $50 each or less, as parts. Certain models were made by the millions and are still good, but got tossed as more energy efficient versions came to market. It's just not economical to use them at scale.
Ask HN: What has your experience with ReactiveX been like?
Correct, that was the purpose devised about 230 years ago.

I don't have a strong opinion on this aspect of representation in elected federal government, but at point do we accept that structures have become suboptimal for a vastly changed country and society?
The "Tesla approach" doesn't work at all with aerospace: the programme costs are all up front and you want to sell as many units as possible as quickly as possible to recover them, and the major demand all comes from the airlines. Scaling to meet demand is much less of a worry than having a product being in demand.

Business aviation is a less lucrative market than commercial, and business-only commercial flights is a market which has almost completely failed to make any profit. In automotive terms, not only are there are a lot more people buying buses than cars, you also don't make a higher profit on the cars either unless you're the interiors outfitter....
Epic _can_ be not as awful as some (it's still a far sight from "friendly" in my opinion). The problem is that it's highly customized in each installation, and the vast, vast majority of them "customize" it in very provider-unfriendly ways (tons of irrelevant required fields for billing, etc).

Even in the best case scenario though, it's a lot of clicking around to find clinical information that may be relevant to a patient (which means it can often go unnoticed).
There's a simple solution for that: always include a label as part of your address, and treat any mail that doesn't include one as spam.
I felt the same way when they sang Imagine at New Years 2019 in Times Square. America is still stuck in the mid 20th century.
Note that in the US at least it no longer contains antibiotics like Triclosan[1]. Plenty of less-likely-to-create-resistance compounds are commonly used now, like acetic or lactic acid.

1: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/02/4923947...
Tell HN: Alexa mute button is not hardwired
I recently plugged in my Alexa and quickly pressed the mute button while it was booting up. The mic icon turned red and then later in the boot process the mic light turned off again all by itself. I assume this means that some software in the Alexa system can turn the light on and off at a minimum, and maybe even the mute functionality itself.
This thread is full of the usual HN Europe-speculation. My speculation is that this isn't something the EU has legislated on, so it varies between countries.

In the UK, "The Immigration (Hotel Records) Order 1972" says:

> 4.—(1) Every person of or over the age of 16 years who stays at any premises to which this Order applies shall, on arriving at the premises, inform the keeper of the premises of his full name and nationality.

> (2) Every such person who is an alien shall also—

> (a)on arriving at the premises, inform the keeper of the premises of the number and place of issue of his passport, certificate of registration or other document establishing his identity and nationality; and
The entire purpose of the Senate was not balance the power of the House, it was to provide states with representation in the federal government. To such end, in the original constitution state governments chose senators -- because the senators represented the individual states -- not the people of those states.

Then the 17th Amendment changed all that and made senators elected by popular votes just like the house members. This, IMO, eliminated the primary reason for having a Senate at all (to represent states). It now simply (poorly) duplicates the same purpose of the House (to represent the people).
What's interesting to me about this is that no major airline wants to go supersonic, for two reasons. First, because of the cost of development, and, second, because you lose a significant fraction of business class revenue to your supersonic fleet, raising the costs of tickets for leisure travelers and affecting routing. However, you don't want to be subsonic if another carrier is supersonic, because then they get your business class revenue.

It'll be interesting to see what happens if they make it.
> Maybe there is some kind of requirement to inform the appropriate organizations of the passport numbers of any foreigners in your hotel?

This is the case in most countries I've traveled to.
I trust you to handle your money to benefit yourself. I don't trust you to handle your money to the appropriate benefit of society and (by extension) your descendants.

Especially if you manage to do enough damage to society through your greed that it necessitates a class war. We can either redistribute peacefully in an attempt to solve problems that largely affect the poor, or we can push them off until the poor get desperate.
> with diminishing returns

Let's see. From the start of Space Age, October 4th, 1957, to the peak of NASA funding in 1966 - almost 9 years. To the last Apollo flight to the Moon in 1972 - a bit over 15 years. Advancements: unmanned space flight, manned LEO flight, manned flight to the Moon and back (overall manned flights ~43, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_spaceflights ).

From the Apollo Soyuz Test Project in 1975 to today in 2019 - 44 years. 3 times as much. Advancements: expanded unmanned space flight, permanent manned LEO outpost, reuseable vehicles (Gemini, STS, TKS, EB, X-37), commercial space flight, international space cooperation (overall manned flights ~270).

Per dollar modern space flights are quite competitive with 1970-s. Manned spaceflight is also safer than it used to be. Per unit of time... Mars flights are quite more robust, but Venus is kinda forgotten. Outer Solar system objects are visited more frequently... Russia retracted from unmanned spaceflight... India, China, Europe are growing...

I don't think funding is the only criteria here. In some aspects Apollo project catapulted humanity to the higher frontiers which are hard to keep, but some other indicators point to steady progress everywhere with way more sustainable longer term approach.
That does make sense. I am just trying to think of it in terms of my current personal project. How I could lay it out, but the problem is it is mostly ad hoc queries since it is historical data. Like storing game results and statistics. I think relational for my current situation works best. However, this is pretty cool in the future for projects I would have just used relational before. Watching the videos about it have been a great help. Helps me figure out the use cases.
> tiny seats, horrible service

Improving either of these would raise ticket prices. If you want more luxury, pay for a first class ticket.

> frequent delays and cancellations

Shit happens. Bad weather, human error, random acts of God. Airlines aren't delaying or cancelling flights on purpose. What do you want them to do differently here?

> constant fees for every little thing

Again, the fees are there because the tickets are so cheap. Look at the airlines who don't have fees - like Southwest. Their ticket prices are always slightly higher than the competing airlines - like United - that do have fees.
How a company begins to how it gets to sell products for $100m is fascinating. Boeing built their first plane soley because they had bought another plane, subsequently crashed it and then posited that it would be faster to build a brand new plane instead of waiting for parts. They sold a couple to the navy who then said "Yeah we'll take 50".

Obviously Boom is doing something orders of magnitude more technically complex than a simple bi-plane but maybe, if they're scrappy enough, they can pull it off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing#History
Sometimes a feature needs to change a shared dependency library.

But in that case you could consider the change to the dependency a single release. And ingesting it into another app a separate release.
> TSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but previously has said officers will eventually be compensated.
I see bryanrasmussen describing the terrible situation these workers are in, not criticising them.
A lot of major airlines engage in fuel hedging. who knows exactly how much they’re paying.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_hedging
It has always been this imbalanced. That is the point... the Senate balances out the House (which is apportioned by population already) to ensure that large population areas can't force policy and laws that are onerous on small (population) states. In other words, this is not a bug, it's a feature.
It's not because they lack expert advice, it's because some issues brought up by the populace are complicated. If you want to pass a law that will help reduce child obesity, it might not be enough to simply contact your congressperson directly. So you hire a lobbyist who has a closer relationship with the congress person to brush up on the topic and convince them why passing this particular law is a good idea. I think you will find that just as many good laws were the result of a lobbyist, either paid or unpaid, as are the bad laws.