skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their model uses night-time lighting data collected by the SUOMI-NPP satellite to infer medium-voltage grid connections. Grid paths are based on Dijkstra’s shortest path, with accommodation to follow roads and avoid water. The authors state an accuracy of 70 % of their model predicting grid paths within 1 km of existing power lines. Prior attempts to model grid paths using satellite imagery failed due to the diversity of shape and orientation of poles, and false positives attributed to vegetation, shadows and similar infrastructure.

The rationale for creating this model is the lack of up-to-date electric grid location data, especially in developing countries. While I find the approach fascinating and well documented, I think the error in this model’s results is much too high for further use. I would not want to rely on any electricity system planning that utilizes these model results, because the model may omit entire branches of the grid.

Can anyone think of any useful applications of these model results?
Huh, they don't have secret voting in Idaho? Isn't that federally required?
I doubt that Dacia Sandero can compare to Lada Niva when it comes to off-road performance, though.
Yeah some little side project of mine, want logo, can't make fancy pics... there ya go.
Cave That Housed Neandertals and Denisovans Challenge View of Cultural Evolution
Unless you've also ceased usage of Google search, maps, and YouTube they didn't lose your business. You're still helping deliver 84% of their revenue.
I was told by one government contractor that it takes forever to review the code and pull out any hard coded passwords.
This may be illegal in California. Discrimination on the basis of sex for events open to the public is forbidden. It’s quite broadly construed too, for example bars can’t legally have ladies night.

Edit:
To clarify, a nonprofit women’s forum appears fine, but turning it into a business not so much.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act
FOSDEM: Take your loop mounts to the next level (video with subtitles)
I thought Omikron BASIC [1] was even better

but both were really awesome compared to what existed on other platforms back then. In particular, I liked their documentation. Those were great times for documentation (not just BASIC, also TOS, GEM etc from that time more than today's. Either there were more qualified tech writers per product, or the products were simpler ... or maybe just nostalgia.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omikron_BASIC
They don't have to disclose how they inferred the age but they can absolutely say that they'll ban anyone under 13 from streaming. The rule must be made transparent and clear - how they measure it and its boundaries can be somewhat opaque to aid enforcement and prevent reverse engineering
&str is not the same as &[char]. &str has the same memory representation as &[u8]. char is four bytes, not one.
We don't need to be quite as paranoid about the plainness of a directory navigation tool, as needed for a command interpreters path selector. It would need to be combined with potentially destructive operations in a script to be dangerous, so then on thy own head be it.
Steinberg pro 24, or Cubase. as studio-class software. Usually hooked up to akai s900/s1000 samplers, and Yamaha DX7s
If it was notation, then C-Lab Notator

GFA basic or Hisoft basic (along with the many other dev languages that Hisoft had)

Calligrapher in the UK, Pagestream, Calamus.
Oh lordy, I guess everyone’s making service meshes now.
Most gifs being served on the web aren't .gif files anymore, but .webm or .mp4 files instead. That css wouldn't even stop half of the gifs most users see on a daily basis.
By lock-out do you mean the vendor shuts down, or you get banned, or something else?
"I'm scared of vendor lock-in, so I'm going to build something that's completely provider agnostic" means you're buying optionality, and paying for it with feature velocity.

There are business reasons to go multi-cloud for a few workloads, but understand that you're going to lose time to market as a result. My best practice advice is to pick a vendor (I don't care which one) and go all-in.

And you'll forgive my skepticism around "go multi-cloud!" coming from a vendor who'll have precious little to sell me if I don't.
I don't know if it's the reason, but USPS at https://www.usps.com/ship/shipping-restrictions.htm (expand 'Cigarettes & Tobacco') says "Most cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products may not be mailed domestically" while "Cigars may be mailed domestically."

Ban cigar sales and many people will get deliveries by domestic mail. That doesn't hold for cigarettes.
A lot of embittered Ops engineers shaking their fists in the comment thread of that article. "Real engineers write assembly, on punchcards, blindfolded" etc.
There's an option between #1 and #2 that they're not listing. They could allow merges, but only merges after a rebase on top of upstream produced with --no-ff.

The advantage of that is that you get "linear" history as far as the just-pushed topic topic building upon the last one, and you can use merges to group commits, which allows e.g. easy reverting of an entire buggy feature introduced over N commits by reverting out the merge.
New York Tackled Subway Crime. But Is It Starting to Come Back?
Company valuation isn't based on the complexity of the product, it's based on potential/future earnings. Sure, valuations aren't an exact science, but the fact of the matter is the market has decided at the moment that Slack in its current state has more earning potential than SpaceX.
Heh, I remember saying the same thing about a story a few years back when they glorified pickpocketing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6065058
Would you be willing to file a docs bug so we can clarify this?

It’s possible that it used to be only those types, but was expanded. We should fix this!
Lada Niva is quite robust. I guess that it will crash whatever it hits. The same will happens to the humans inside. The car itself does not break easily :)
You'd like the subreddit /r/ActLikeYouBelong.
I agree with this - in the recent discussion on Slate Star Codex about Thiel's views, the point was made that outsize success and profits are generally a sign of lack of competition.

To me, after a reasonable period for them to capitalise on their innovation/higher quality execution, any company making huge profits in an area with few competitors should be subject to a range of measures designed to reduce barriers to entry to make it easier for new competitors to emerge.

Some natural ones would include rules about standards, providing apis, user portability, etc.
Elephant seals took over a beach during the government shutdown
I wonder why they're all going public right around now.
This is not true.

For example:

Using this template.

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-express

I’ve been able to deploy the same code as a regular Node/Express app and a lambda with no code changes just by changing my CI/CD Pipeline slightly.

You can do the same with any supported language.

With all of the AWS services we depend on, our APIs are the easiest to transition.

And despite the dreams of techies more than likely after awhile, you aren’t going to change your underlying infrastructure.

You are always locked into your infrastructure choices.
@wmf I should have explained better in my post that I am not talking about automating an existing AWS/Google infrastructure. What other companies are doing is they are generating automated scripts which will create an infrastructure for you and then you maintain it.
What I am proposing is a new PaaS service which will parse your configuration and create an infrastructure on demand, publish your application in that infrastructure and send you a working link back. The developer does not have to interact with the infrastructure at all.
> are constantly having to start CI pipelines

Presumably the tooling does this automatically though? They're not literally have to start CI pipelines themselves?
Maybe because the US seems to prefer giant SUVs with more interior space than your lounge room?
>> Acquisition by Google is the only reason YouTube exists.

>Even if that's true (which I doubt)

Literally one hour ago Alphabet CFO went thru some advanced mental gymnastics to avoid straight answers about youtube profitability:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19080868

- No youtube breakout of revenues, Again not a bullish sign for that division, stil nothing on youtube on the call.

- EDIT on the earnings call they did talk briefly about Youtube, no real new numbers though, just their assurance that youtube is crushing it

- Porat is doing gymnastics to talk about youtube but not actually say anything about youtube. Are youtbue numbers really that bad????

So, it seems that OP is mostly correct in his assumption. Normally CFO of public companies are not shy talking about their successful bets.
This is interesting:

We've heard from our customers, if you cross $100,000 a month on AWS, they'll negotiate your bill down," said Polvi. "If you cross a million a month, they'll no longer negotiate with you because they know you're so locked that you're not going anywhere. That's the level where we're trying to provide some relief.
Hey! Nim core dev here. I was going to offer my support when I saw your original comment but based on your critique so far there isn't that much that I can do, other than keep doing what I'm doing already (evangelizing Nim as much as I can).

This kind of thing does really worry me though, it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, you aren't going to use Nim because you think there isn't enough people using it :(

Do you have any ideas of how we can make you and people like you change their mind?
I currently live in London and the first thing that came to mind is, so this is why the entire city feels so run down outside a few rich spots.
Well, GV is interactive by some definition, but awkward. You need to listen to the headset to hear the callers introduction, then type 1 to accept the call or hang out and send caller to voice mail.

Real time transcription would be much nicer, very true. GV is apparently on a lifeline while Google is trying to push Fi. Just like Duo and Hangouts.
Yes Riot really needs a way to swap keys using NFC, so you only have to tap phones together when you meet. We actually did get an encrypted chatroom going at the last KVM Forum in Edinburgh, but it was insanely tedious to do all the key verification.
> The company added nearly 20,000 employees over the year.

Some of them probably are from HTC acquisition.

> - can't find any Cloud break outs,

They never published cloud break outs, but they posted 6.5B revenue of non ads business, which is essentially cloud + office + pixel sales.
Ohhh, now that's super handy.
Thanks for sharing these. The comment very much resonates with me. There are some other resonating comments in these threads. It feels good to read those; I feel less alone.

Those nicely articulated thoughts might honestly help me deal with my episodes.

I should take a look at the book too.
I edited my comment to respond to that.
How do you do that? With all the stories in play, and all the comments being added, how do you notice within four minutes that one of them says to add the date to a title?
>I personally don't get a lot of productivity gain from putting stuff into space

You don't use phones, digital maps, or are glad that your national defense is up and running?
Aside from the civil versus criminal distinction, it seems significant that this statute judges harm differently than libel laws. Libel/slander requires reputational damage to an individual, while this is about facilitating criminal/tortious conduct in general. That seems to cover some fairly significant non-libel cases, like knowingly creating a video for someone to use as an alibi.

I agree that it still seems like premature legislation, though. Even from the viewpoint of a random programmer, it's both overbroad (this covers any video editing, not just 'deepfakes' as commonly understood) and incomplete (what happens when no recognizable people are represented, but an edit is still used to facilitate criminal action?)

If doctored video becomes as believable as authentic video, it's going to be a major upheaval, returning us to a world where seeing isn't believing. Probably not completely; there will be an obvious market for hard-to-fake authentication, even in forms as simple as registering a video hash with a trusted source as soon as it's taken. But the departure from a world where a high-res video of an event is reliable proof is going to be a very big change, and I seriously doubt any law written today will productively adjust for it.
This is exactly it. I'm building https://getartemis.app, which, as you can see on the home page, has an automatic muted video playing of the demonstration of the product. Most people without such autoplay will not want to click play, and thus my email sign-ups will decrease, which is the same rationale as every other site with autoplaying videos.

When I first learned Chrome disabled autoplaying videos, I converted my video, which was around 500 kB, to a GIF, which was now 30 MB, with a noticeable decrease in smoothness and quality. Companies will not stop autoplaying videos, they will merely find other ways around it, because autoplaying videos work for the vast majority of users.
Correct, the pipeline is automatically restart, but it takes a good 5 minutes to run to completion in which time another developer might sneak in a merge and the cycle continues.
joined HTC employees?
> provably unambiguous ruleset

I think that statement is against the very idea of tax law :)
That seems ethically like a slippery slope explanation. Good thing the legal system doesn't behave this way when one is arrested (in most places).
I suspect it means using technology for which a vendor drops support.
Let it continue to 'cut both ways' - should we apply the logic of 'assume worst case predictions and act accordingly' to all that ails society?

The worst case predictions of muslim immigration into Europe are pretty bad, should the E.U seal the turkish border and Med ports with the gusto they hereunto reserved for greenhouse gas reductions?
git rerere and mostly automatic rebasing. very rarely there are conflicts.
This seems like politics as well. I know a lot of people with well-formed, thoughtful opinions that I think would do a great job making laws, but have enough self-doubt/disinterest that it's never going to happen.
If it were more about physical education (literally) and had less emphasis on actually doing intense exercises I think it would be a lot more beneficial. Leave the crazy intense physical activities to extracurriculars. No personal trainer would create a one-size-fits-all training routine, but for some young students that's literally the entirety of what "gym class" entails.

By Physical Education, I mean learn about basic health issues, commons diseases and symptoms to look out for, learn the importance of diet and exercise, standard first aid, that kind of thing.
> At some point the worsening user experience will negatively impact a site's reputation and people's willingness to view/use it.

You'd think so, but the same argument is used to claim that blocking isn't needed at all. "Obnoxious ads will negatively impact a site's reputation and people's willingness to view/use it."

Another problem with adding rate limits or other ever-increasingly complicated heuristics is that it makes the Web platform ever more difficult to deploy applications on. You may not see that as a problem, but it pushes app developers to support only native platforms --- where you can't block anything. More unintended consequences.

Web browsers are part of a complex ecosystem where seemingly straightforward actions have all kinds of unintended consequences. Browser developers think about these things all the time and have, in some cases, decades of experience dealing with them, yet they constantly get lambasted by armchair strategists who've thought about these issues for five minutes and decided it's all easy.
I’m sure a not-insignificant portion will move on to Evil mode.

Vim -> Emacs is a better direction than Emacs -> Vim, because you’ll learn the more efficient editing style, then have access to the better environment, instead of getting used to the great Emacs environment minus the Vim keybindings, and feeling constrained by losing this when moving on to Vim.
Nice, had an Atari 800XL, then a 512STfm, and then I was one of the 3 people who purchased a Falcon 030.

Learned Atari basic from a 2 page leaflet that came with my 800XL when I was 8, then progressed through True Basic and GFA Basic.
I think the worst thing about gym is that I didn't learn anything there.

I didn't learn about calories, or healthy eating. I didn't learn about basic cardio, why it's good for you, or how often to do it. I didn't learn about how to build muscle, what reps or sets were.

Gym amounts to mindless busywork. Do stuff or you get an F. It could serve as a foundation of knowledge to set yourself up for healthy habits for the rest of your life. Instead, it has the opposite effect of training you to hate fitness.
I was at Matthew's talk. Great energy and highly informative talk.

I really wish though that instead of rewriting Synapse in Python 3 that they would adopt Status' new favourite language: Nim :)
> The libertarian argument against government breaking up monopolies is pretty simple, we believe that most monopolies were created by the government in the first place.
> Here are some pretty standard arguments:
>https://mises.org/wire/many-ways-governments-create-monopoli....
>https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly

These seem like they can be summarized as regulatory capture
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
I definitely agree this exists. However, totally free markets can be dominated by monopolies through different mechanisms. new technology is monopolistic in nature because it often starts from a single/few place(s). Incumbent corporations can amass orders of magnitude of wealth making it functionally impossible to compete. This has become less prolific in the last 2-3 decades, but has been painfully true at every other point in human history when physical resistance (violent or nonviolent) was the only way to affect change.

This, by the way, assumes no purposeful anti-competitive behavior. Current anti-trust law requires houses where I live to be serviced by mutiple ISPs, so me (and almost everyone I've ever met, residence or corporate) have a huge menu of choices from company A, or a 56Kbps line from company B. What a coincidence -.-

> I'm curious, is there a particular sect of libertarianism that you identify with?

Not particularly.

> I don't think I've heard any of the mainstream branches make the argument you did, and I would like to see how your line of thinking fits into the larger libertarian cannon.

I think most Libertarianism has become a refugee camp for people recognizing and fighting government corruption rather than a conscientious political philosophy on it's own.
The problem with that is, there's only one thing, some product manager somewhere, that sits on a light switch of your company or project's success or failure. They could even unintentionally end you with a price change.
Most systems out there are not in cloud (and multi cloud is even more far fetched).

There is however a large number of painfully learned lessons of vendor locked in systems... no one got fired for buying IBM, right?
Unsurprising that when your continued existence (in this case CoreOS) relies on something being true, that every alternative to that is false.
I don’t know where you’re getting any of that. If you really had read all my comments, you may have caught the bit where I said:

> This isn’t a dig at web developers either (like I said, I am one)
Why even bring up guns in the first place if you're not willing to have a good faith discussion of the topic?
What about the bans on alcohol inhalation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_inhalation
It does, at times.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/fbi-would-rather...

> In order to ensure that such wireless collection equipment/technology continues to be available for use by the law enforcement community, the equipment/technology and any information related to its functions, operation and use shall be protected from potential compromise by precluding disclosure of this information to the public in any manner including but not limited to: press releases, in court documents, during judicial hearings, or during other public forums or proceedings.
You can definitely join - you can put in your website, or anything other link that we can verify your identity. Let us know if you run into any trouble hi@elpha.com
After using lambda and serverless myself over the past year, I really struggle to see where this lock-in is. If you're already writing a stateless API as most are these days, and the cloud platforms support many language options, going between say EC2 and Lambda really isn't that much difference in code. If that changeover time is too costly for you, that's far more likely a sign of changing infrastructure too often.
True. It is hard to disconnect from them entirely, but at least this way I'm not giving them my money directly.
My use case for loving IRC is this: I like to chat with other people while learning a language/framework. What do you guys use these days to do the same? Are there public channels on discord or slack, so to speak?
> Stop the stupid auto-playing video. Nobody wants it.

I want it on specific sites. For example, if I'm watching a video tutorial, I want the option to proceed to the next video and automatically start playing.

Saying, "nobody wants it" is simply not true, and there are incredibly valid uses for it.
(Assuming you're disagreeing with the parents framing rather than me)

Perhaps, but as the guidelines state

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Fool me once, and all that, and at the end of the day I expect reasonable answers to my imperfect questions, its unfair not to offer the same to others.
> It’s never the end of the world with vendor lock-in.

I think that's a matter of scale. Using Oracle for your counter example isn't very persuasive, as that's a huge vendor, so there's a market to extract you. Not so for many other vendors.

> Most companies don’t survive

...and ensuring they can control their costs and pivot away from solutions that prove too complex is part of being able to survive.

I mean, I agree, vendor lock-in doesn't have to be the end, but it also makes sense to extricate yourself when you can. When I worked for Virginia state govt they made a deal with Northrup Grumman...one that the legislative audit group came by later and said it was such a terrible deal that we should drop it...except we couldn't afford the exit costs, so we had to stick with a deal that was bad in terms of both money and quality.

That's a position you don't want to be in, and that result "It's bad but we can't afford to get out of it" is what the fear of vendor lock in is all about.
For me it is accepting the things as they are, and just getting on with life and pretending to be relatively happy to satisfy my SO.

I generally try to help others, but I'm talking about bigger things like income inequality, healthcare costs of which I don't have any control over. I make enough money now, not to worry about those things but many people do and it bothers me.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25165808