skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recommend Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now for a data/evidence-driven case for optimism on the environmental front. Still plenty of cause for pessimism/alarm, but reason for hope as well. As societies progress beyond poverty they expand their circle of concern beyond immediate survival to their surrounding environment. In fact this entire discussion is part of that expansion.
At the same time the global oil subsidies was close to a trillion dollars in 2018. If only that was spent else where...
It's fair to say the wealthier society has become, the more respectful it has become of the environment. It's just that with greater capability comes greater capacity to do harm. Prehistoric humans probably had a limited concept of environmental protection, but it didn't matter--there wasn't much they could do to it.

Given the unpredictability around both environmental respect and capacity for destruction, together with incentives from person to person to act or resist, it's difficult to predict much with certainty.
I like DDG android app. Nice that you can automatically set it to clear the data/history after 5/10/15 min of inactivity instead of having to remember to manually do it.
An Almost-Secret Algorithm Researchers Used to Break Thousands of RSA Keys
Learning to swim in a shallow pool is _easier_ than just getting thrown into the deep end, but it's not faster, and the learning isn't as likely to occur.
That's what experts were saying before 1914, too: war is really unlikely because the economies are more integrated than they have ever been.
You can send and receive dollar-denominated tokens through a p2p network using open source command-line tools without a bank account.
Just checked the article Talk page and the editor who added it linked to https://www.thestar.com/amp/news/cannabis/2018/09/13/canadia... from there.
Writing 100% bug-free smart contracts that can't be exploited by an adversary.
Form it into bricks and build things with it?
> It's a good idea, but facebook can't be trusted.

In my opinion it seems like the foundations for a Patron/Client relationship. Those typically only really work out for the two parties involved.
Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking
There's no such thing as a safe tan
When would we use this instead of a normal relational database? At which scale?
I initially thought this article might be about programming by coincidence [1] or maybe about user experience superstitions [2], but after reading it I wonder if this isn't just about the practice of debugging. Software is complex. When someone begins investigation into a bug, if the fix is not immediately found, it becomes a matter of running down a list of hypothetical causes. As one's experience deepens, both the "running down" and the curating of the "list" become more efficient. IMHO this article is merely about a developer who was unaware of certain hypothetical causes.

1: https://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/coinc...

2: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/quality-assurance-ux/
Interestingly, I find Apple Maps to be at least par, and in some cases better, in California. This is following the push they had this summer to improve their maps here.
Yup, this has happened on the S a few times. They quietly put out a new OTA which took ~24 hours to roll out across the fleet and it was sorted.

Much different than Fiat/Jeep when they got owned via media console a ways back.
I cover my webcam because a lot of conference software starts it up by default and I'd rather know that it's black even if the camera is on. Not really "my computer is hacked" kind of threat but more casual privacy for a real and repeated scenario.
To support your anecdote, I've seen this comment posted by a number of users the last few months in relation to environmental-destructive posts. And to add my own data point, I too, have noticed the same as you on road trips through various parts of western US, although I always just thought I was just crazy. I can't say as of when exactly, but I really started noticing the last 3-4 years. Even hiking around where insects used to be numerous on warmer days, sometimes annoying in-your-face at every turn, seem to be nearly void of creatures.
Moon-mined Helium 3 is currently a non-solution in search of a problem.
You can ship a 40ft container with about 25t capacity for about $2000-$5000 between any major ports on Earth, and probably for even less for bigger volumes.

SpaceX BFR has about 100t capacity to Mars. While the total cost of a Mars mission has not been publicized, I suspect it would be fair bit more than $20k.

Biggest container ships these days carry about 20k TEU, or about 500000 tons of cargo. You can try putting that number to the rocket equation just for fun.
I don’t use Gmail. FastMail works nicely for me, with no google-login required.

Don’t see why DDG (a search engine) should run an email-service, nor vica-verse really.
Indeed, residents of Bay Area definitely like trying to vote away the microeconomics of supply and demand.
Everyone’s 2019 Photos Are So Much More Attractive Than Their 2009 Ones
Or any self-destructive behavior for that matter...

I think the problem is we don't know the exact point when a pleasure becomes a problem. Or, how to effectively help people even if we did know when they crossed a line.

Society will pay a price somewhere. It's just right now, we seem more willing to curtail our freedom in that area than we are to help those who make mistakes.
> Define "Fine" when 90% of the animals on earth are extinct?

If humans go extinct, human timescales cease to be relevant. Since we're talking about the Earth, reverting to geologic timescales makes sense. Earth 10 or 100 million years after humans may not be that different with or without humans.

(I agree, however, that the platitude is unhelpful. We're human. We care about the Earth on a human timescale.)
/u/Reedx, this isn't addressed to you, but...

NYT, if you want credibility on the issue of "call-out culture" and "social justice", for God's sakes, don't have a Republican columnist write the piece. I know David Brooks is a genteel Never Trumper. It doesn't matter. You don't build credibility to talk about an issue by speaking as the enemy.
To me it seems that the greatest obstacle to space colonization would be maintenance and production of materials and technology needed to sustain and expand the colony.

Zubrin's estimate of this in The Case For Mars is a half million people. That's an estimate for the minimum size of the population which can support the knowledge base required to make everything to sustain a modern industrialized civilization.

You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization.

It's been demonstrated that a single person can build up the infrastructure of an 1800's colonial village all by himself, up to and including a blacksmith's shop. That guy from Turtle Island Preserve could do it, dropped into a forest with a single knife. There's a YouTuber who does all that sort of stuff without the knife to begin with.

It will be harder to do such bootstrapping on Mars, of course. I'm not sure that the half million estimate above included chip fabs. I somehow doubt it.
Show HN: Mathematical Art for plotters
Show HN: Package of nice open source stock analysis APIs
Hooks are an attempt to reuse stateful logic. This is a problem that React never solved well moving from mixins, to higher order components, to children as render functions, and finally to hooks (maybe!). Ideally, hooks would also fully replace eg usage of react-redux even if that isn't their stated goal (managing global state across components is not really the same thing as reusing stateful logic). In fact, I don't really care about the former at all in the case of the later.

The current hooks API is not up to the task, or even up to integrating with react-redux given constraints around the new concurrent rendering and reasonable performance [1]. Hooks run during render with no ability to bail, while react-redux requires a way to avoid calling render in the first place to avoid every connected component re-rendering on every state change (ie, basically the whole tree)[2]. The new context API is also not ready for the limelight [3].

Hooks would solve some problems but at the expense of introducing yet another way to do some things. They can't replace react-redux or even provider a cleaner binding. Using hooks is risky because the API really ought to change to make them more useful, and they aren't particularly performant or powerful.

1. https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/14110#issuecomment-...
2. https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/14110#issuecomment-...
3. https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/14110#issuecomment-...
Funny story. I once worked in a mainframe team at a large financial org that, since the company was going through a period of "digital transformation" (or some such weird corporate jargon that I have suppressed) declared itself agile and had scrums, a kanban board, a scrum master etc agile trappings.

... and ten-page long Word forms with 15-item drop-down lists that had to be filled in before a single line of JCL could be changed (we did not touch the COBOL. Nobody touched the COBOL).
Difference Between a Professional and an Amateur
> "For starters, Airbnb says it was profitable on an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) basis for the second year in a row in 2018."

Not sure if this is financial engineering or if they're actually profitable, but I'm so curious to see how Wall St responds to this "profitability", especially since growth plays (e.g., FAANG) just cratered in Q4'18.

Not to get too involved in the dichotomy but I'm interested to see if AirBnB plays like a Snapchat (i.e., tons of hype then gets killed in the public markets), or more like a Dropbox (i.e., takes a bit of a haircut but share price remains fairly stable).
We can't currently send people to the moon, unfortunately. SpaceX is working on creating that capability in the next decade or so though and with there track record it might even happen.
How in the world do you consider it a raffle? A raffle is when more than 1 person pays money ahead of time with some chance of winning a variety of prizes, and the odds are basically known depending on how many people bought the raffle tickets.

A loot box is literally "Pay $1 and see what you get!", and there are percentages behind what you can get (unknown to us). It's literally no different than buying a lottery ticket, except you always get something (maybe equivalent to the value of the lottery ticket) with a chance of getting something more valuable.

Now maybe they are adjusting lootbox percentages on the back-end so too many people don't get something unique if that's how you are trying to claim it's a raffle.. but I still don't think that makes it anywhere near the definition of a raffle.
Improving access to sexual health education in Kenya with AI
Both IAH and MIA allow this sort of transit on international-to-international connections, but only if flying United (through IAH) or American (through MIA). Bags don't have to be collected but passengers still have to clear immigration and hold the appropriate visa or authorization.
my wife just told me that they're presenting recipes to her for her to save in some other corner of her facebook ... experience.

they really are attempting to become an "internet within the Internet." kinda reminiscent of how AOL started.
I've been in the US for almost a decade now, never entered the country for any reason other than work, where I'm paid a pretty nice salary, have a passport from an otherwise ordinary country and can tell you this:

I have been treated like a criminal almost every single time at the port of entry, being asked the same question multiple times, yelled at for giving more information than was asked, despite being asked that exact information later on in the interrogation, and sent aside for further questioning.

This has been pretty standard in the time I have been here. Only in less than a handful of occasions have I been asked a few reasonable questions and been treated nicely by a CBP officer.

The exact opposite applies to my experience entering, say European countries, while not being an EU citizen. It's always been a pleasure, and taken no longer than a couple of minutes worth of questions, if any questions at all.
I could see Proton* making this play.
I get it, you hold $TSLA and you're hoping it goes to the moon.

The US market is not the world market, and world-wide Tesla is inconsequential. Even in the US it's highly localized, and in those areas it's still inconsequential.

The Model 3 has suffered from ridiculous levels of mismanagement and process problems. They are so far behind on targets it's amazing their entire management team hasn't been sacked and replaced with people who know what they're doing.

One day a company that's competent, like Toyota, will brush Tesla aside without even trying. Until then Tesla has a fraction of a fraction of the sales in the US.
> But for many other digital services I think it would work out fine.

A centralized system works fine for those situations though. Adding Eth into the mix doesn't improve anything in this scenario.
If there is a chance this would break someone's website, why would you default this feature to being on?

Please Daddy, don't be so rough.
The weird thing is I grew up in a neighborhood with obsessively trimmed grass. There was still no shortage of fireflies 30 years ago.

While our monoculture lawns are certainly part of the problem, it seems there's more to it than that. They are losing on multiple fronts including our chemical warfare on the local environment and various climate change related issues.
Even 'living well' isn't quite right. By and large, we have swapped out physical for psychological suffering.
How would that work? Surely they'd need to index your documents and emails so you could search over them. And I think many DDG users would find that pretty unappealing.
Surely a company using the analysis of your behaviour to effectively manipulate and trick you in to making decisions that might not be in your best interests is in itself harmful?

These companies that do this do not care about your interests, they care only about their bottom line.
MPs start historic voting on Brexit deal
when will these be fully released?
Old Thing does W, X and Y imperfectly.

New Thing does W and Z imperfectly.

Therefore, New Thing is doomed.
Gradual typing is mostly a good thing for metaprogramming I think. Even if it was just a compromise for backwards compatibility I'd still take it over C#'s rather limited generics.
Launching a free Feature Flags solution for development teams
Ah yes, the entirely viable project of moving water from a bone dry vacuum rock to a planet 2/3 covered by water.

Water as a space resource is primarily talked about for use in space.

I'm not sure it would be viable to return gold from the moon even if the moon was made of solid gold.

It turns out it's a lot cheaper to return stuff from the moon, than it costs to send it to the moon. This is especially true if the stuff is dead, and you don't mind subjecting it to 10's of thousands of g's and you can use electromagnetic accelerators running in free vacuum on the surface, instead of rockets.
I'm looking forward to the day that privacy and convenience are mainstream again(if there were ever). This feature is a right step on that direction.
>> Contract negotiations are often a sign of things to come with the rest of the engagement

I'd qualify this with "if the person(s) you will be work with are the sticklers for the contract."

Often contracting is just a line item for the manager that wants to get going and the legal rep is the one causing the delays. When this is the case I don't find the experience with the legal team has much bearing on the experience actually doing the work.
This is very interesting. I wonder what key generators were used to create the insecure keys.
it would be interesting if they also show whether those 90% are necessary or not to get that 1% back. I mean we kind of suspect that probably not, the interesting part here would be to show proof or at least some good foundation.
Using neural networks to extract high-level summaries from text
You will never be able to come up with all possible test cases to cover all possible scenarios. That's the idea. This applies to all practical programs. There is literally not a single piece of software that doesn't have a missed edge case in the world.
How is a raffle not gambling out of interest?
I found the tesla rules: you need to exploit as many systems as possible as hard as possible:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5894c269e4fcb5e65a1ed...

via https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2019/1/14/pwn2own-van...
I'm just guessing here, as one who did not join the downvote brigade, is that everyone else sees the house burning down around them, with the ceiling joists beginning to collapse, while someone walks up and says, "what's the big deal? Fires happen all the time. Sometimes even nature causes the fire!"

The California Monarch is the proverbial (and perhaps almost literal) canary in a coal mine. When the canary dies, sad though that might be, that is not the tragic event. No, the real tragedy is yet to come (when the mine blows, or you all suffocate on methane).

So though your question might be honest, it is likely to cause one to wonder, "where the hell have you been for the last ten years?" and irresponsibly hit the down button.
Ask HN: Pressure to pursue patent
I'm the cto of a small, funded company. Before I joined, they applied for a super general business methods patent (A talks to B, B makes a decision and notifies C, etc, etc).

It's been rejected a couple times and we keep amending it. I'm getting pressure to continue to "enhance it" and even to file another one. It isn't enforceable, even if it is granted. All the VCs we talk to rightfully shrug at it, and worse I think it makes us look non-serious. I've mostly treated it as a stupid thing you do because it is part of the game, but I'm just tired of it.

Should I put my foot down and say - no more? I just down see any upside to it other than being able to say "patent pending".
PR-MOD: An advanced pull-request reviewing tool
Won't take much time, since Safari betas already have it.
Hackers broke into an SEC database and made millions from inside information
Could you give an example of a practical contract which demonstrates this problem?

My contention is that the overlap between useful smart contracts and ones which demonstrate those theoretical problems is basically nil.
You can "disrupt" without being in the Valley, plus a lot of companies that claim they're disrupting are just cherry-picking customers and barely moving the needle in terms of net-new technology.

It's easy to make a billion dollar start-up if you get two billion in cash you can blow on acquisitions. It's hard to make that company survive more than ten years.

When Tesla runs out of VC money, which they will, things are going to turn ugly in a hurry. All this money they've blown on door hinges and sending cars into space will be gone and they'll have to turn a profit. I'm not sure they can without massively cutting back and radically simplifying their product.
I know mathematical logic but I don't know much about conventional philosophy. The Gettier argument seems to indicate that a system of false propositions used to arrive at a conclusion could be called "justification" in normal epistemology - that seems a bit disturbing. Being "justified" in believing X means just having some reason, maybe utterly bogus but existing and convincing to you, for believing X (and then X becomes knowledge even if X happens to be true entirely different reasons). How could no one have commented previously if that was how the system was?

Edit: the main practical implication of the argument seems to be that one cannot assume that when you have argument for X and when you then you get empirical evidence for X, you cannot take that a proof your argument for X is true. It might be suggestive of the truth of the argument but the structure of the argument also has to be taken into account. But that's been a given scientific and statistical investigations for a long time.
> just like Maps.app.

What is a maps.app?
Making glass and aluminum should be relatively easy on the surface of the moon.
Maybe numbers are down because it has an image problem? Monarchs haven't been popular for a while now, perhaps try renaming it to Democrat Butterfly?
Yeah most of the people commenting in this thread probably come from countries where major airports are used primarily for international transit, and run by for-profit companies that want to maximize transfer passengers.

They have no concept of an airport getting 90 million domestic passengers a year.
>A post denouncing Emily also went viral. She, too, was the object of nationwide group hate.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

>The guy who called out Emily is named Herbert.

Ditto. Judge not, or be judged. I won't cry on the day the mob rips Herbert apart.

And the cycle will continue until everyone's broken or tired of breaking people.
Why not?

Sure, you can’t in the general abstract case, but my exact point is that you can do this in practice, for programs which we actually write.

Perhaps you could show an example of a useful program we can’t do that for?

In my experience, it’s not due to either of those theoretical considerations that we don’t see it done — we just don’t see it done in practice for cost reasons.
Too long by what metric? Personally, I dislike short trials. If I get distracted by something more important before I have time to fully investigate the product, I'm likely to just forget about it when the trial prematurely ends.
Agreed, they got it done. That's all that counts. They're heroes.
Except this is exactly why a society entirely planned around markets is bad, markets left alone would only result in every social ill being magnified as any given addictive and harmful substance would become cheaper to produce and further marketed towards us.

Facebook playing algorithmic mind games with people of all ages to keep them hooked with the goal of maximizing profits is no different than cigarette companies marketing to children with the goal of maximizing profits.
> Reduce branching & branch misprediction

I wrote a parser for a "formalized" URI (it looked somewhat like OData). This parser was being invoked millions of times and was adding minutes to an operation - it dominated the profile at something like 30% CPU time. It started off something like this:

int state = State_Start;
for (var i = 0; i < str.Length; i++)
{
var c = str[i];
switch (state)
{
case State_Start:
/* Handle c for this state. */
/* Update state if a new state is reached. */
}
}

Hardly rocket science, a clear-as-day miniature state machine. VTune was screaming about the switch, so I changed it to this:

for (var i = 0; i < str.Length; i++)
{
for (; i < str.Length; i++)
{
var c = str[i];
/* Handle c for this state. */
/* Break if a new state is reached. */
}

for (; i < str.Length; i++)
{
var c = str[i];
/* Handle c for this state. */
/* Break if a new state is reached. */
}
}

The new profile put the function at < 0.1% of CPU time. This is something that the "premature optimization crowd" (who tend to partially quote Knuth concerning optimization) get wrong: death by a thousand cuts. A single branch in the source (it ends up being more in machine code) was costing 30% performance.
'Our' doesn't connote ownership. Our families are not owned by us.

If anything the relationship is the other way around: we belong to the world that has formed us.

> implying that we are killing the planet

That would be a meaningless assertion. We our killing our world, which is a network of evolved complex living systems, not 'the planet'.
This analogy doesn't tell us anything useful. It is not a logical certainty that W, X and Y render the need for W and Z useless, but it's certainly logically permissible depending on the actual values of the variables.