skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> in June the economy will celebrate a decade of recovery from the Great Recession

Or the US already suffered a mild recession in 2015 and the recent higher growth is a bounce out of that.

S&P 500 corporate profits contracted for four straight quarters from mid 2015 to mid 2016. Sales contracted for six straight quarters.[1]

From July 2015, to November 2016, manufacturing employment contracted slightly (essentially was flat). Manufacturing employment has exploded higher since that month.

The U6 unemployment rate was stuck between 10% and 9.6% between Sept 2015 and Oct 2016.

The civilian labor force participation rate for 25-54 year olds (the single most important participation rate), was fairly stable from January 2013 until mid 2015 (after finding a new general floor post great recession), and then suddenly plunked to a new post great recession low of 80.5% in July 2015. It has been setting higher lows and higher highs ever since that drop.

Consumer confidence, which had been rising persistently for years post great recession, stopped going up and then declined from early 2015 through early 2016.

The S&P 500 index was near a peak in May 2015 at around 2134, then proceeded to go nowhere for a year to ~June 20 2016 when it was at 2032. During that weak year, it hit a low of around 1810 (~15% decline).

The small business confidence index tanked from the first quarter of 2015, until early to mid 2016.

The markit US manufacturing PMI began tanking from a high in mid 2014, until it bottomed out in the second quarter of 2016.

The consumer price index had been rising for years post great recession, stopped rising in mid 2014, flattened out until Oct 2014, plunked lower until Jun 2015, then proceeded to go nowhere for another nine months. In net the consumer price index went no higher from Jun 2014 until Mar 2016. The price index then resumed climbing after Mar 2016. That ~20 month dead spot was the longest post great recession.

In 3Q15 GDP growth dropped dramatically from the prior five quarters, to 1% (3Q14 was 4.9% by comparison). 4Q15 GDP growth dropped further to 0.4% (4Q14 was 1.9%). 1Q16 was 1.5% (1Q15 was 3.3%).

If you've got 1% and 0.4% quarterly growth back to back, with a near zero fed rate, what you've got is a recession.

There are countless more data points that indicate the US suffered a mild recession at some point over that year.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/corporate-profits-set-to-shrink...
This is great. I'm actually working on an app that's literally designed as the perfect incremental reading/learning platform:

https://getpolarized.io/

Here's how it works. You basically add everything you're reading to Polar.

Right now it supports PDF and captured web pages. It works offline and your data is yours. It's a desktop app with a webapp+mobile coming soon (like 2 weeks).

Polar supports suspend and resume of reading with "pagemarks" which are basically "boxes" covering multiple pages with a start and end.

https://getpolarized.io/incremental-reading.html

This way it's very very clear what you've read and what you have not.

While you're reading you can annotate and take notes directly in Polar.

This includes comments, highlights, but also flashcards.

The flashcards can be sync'd with Anki which means you get spaced repetition built in so you NEVER forget anything.

Here's a screenshot of my current reading:

https://i.imgur.com/jdnuhVB.png

The progress bar on the right is how far I've read within that document.

All your annotations and highlights are yours. We support markdown export and the on disk format is simple JSON.

It's also Open Source and we'll have a web and mobile version soon. Works on Linux, MacOS and Windows.

It also supports cloud sync so if you have multiple computers you can keep all your data in sync.

If you just want to avoid the cloud you can not use the cloud sync.

However, if you do, you can also use the web version which is coming out soon and which also means you can use it on a tablet device.
The article mentions perfect math SAT scores. A perfect SAT score is much more rare.
> Without a connection to existing civilization, and without a source of easily accessible water provided by nature? No, we have never done that.

Civilization had to start somewhere. At some point humans started a civilization without any connection to an existing civilization. In all likelihood, several times in different places on Earth. And on Mars that would not be "without a connection to an existing civilization" They would absolutely be bringing equipment and supplies from Earth and have a communication link.

Easily accessible water is a different story, but that's just a technological problem.
Our team actually uses Franz. It is fantastic. I generally subscribe to the "one screen" philosophy that most people primarily use one screen for work. Franz is the one screen for me, connecting multiple Slack groups, FB messenger, WeChat, and WhatsApp.

I heavily recommend giving it a try.
"Special status may also be given to increase opportunity for underrepresented groups, in the interest of campus diversity." That's all fine and dandy as long as people still enter by own merit and not to artificially inflate diversity, which seems like an ongoing trend in American academia.
Ask HN: Environmental Cost of Semiconductors?
Is there a recent review of the environmental cost of semiconductor electronics covering the full life-cycle from resource acquisition (including mining footprints) through manufacture (including release of greenhouse gases) through disposal or recycling?
Many of the Ivies admit that they have multiple freshmen classes worth of qualified applicants every year.

The lottery doesn't mean everyone who applies gets the exact same chance. It could choose among the qualified, perhaps using some sort of weighted system.
> They aren’t doing anything illegal

Isn't there an active lawsuit claiming their use of race in the admissions process crosses the line?
VPN Buyers' Guide
I'm pretty sure Harvard benefits from tax breaks on the donations it receives. The tax breaks are on the donor's side, but the economic effect is the same as channeling public money to the institution (it simply takes the form of foregone tax revenue).
But maybe this time we'll be able to prevent it! ;-)

The media loves to point fingers at specific individuals/organizations that are ostensibly responsible for each recession, but there's no known way to completely dampen the oscillations without deep-sixing the economy.
Munich-based IoT startup KONUX raises €11.5M with backing from Alibaba
Mars One could live again thanks to a mystery investor
This article uses the common criticism of there already being existing institutions and security systems for money transfer. However, this may be true in well developed countries but it's not true at all in developing countries. IMO, this is a common oversight by critics.
Your argument does not work from a technological and economic angle.

On the technical side, most game code is present in the final distributable as abstract MSIL, running inside a VM. So you wouldn't need the game source code to port a game in 99% of the cases.

Big budget titles use engines for which they have source code access. So studios can just go and update thesw titles whem they want and that is what they are doing. Small studios and indies don't have that luxury. They use Unity because it isncheap to get locked into that plarform and get the game out. If Unity ever goes under, there is simply no engine code that they can maintain. No indie can afford a Unity source license - it's multiple of their entire budget. They would have to recreate their games almost from scratch on a different engine if they ever want to re-release them. And the results will always be subtly different from the original. This is a fate that awaits about half of the games of the Steam catalog.
So basically supply and demand?
.. that makes sense? or does it?
Raspberry Pi Cases – Best Raspberry Pi Cases
It's pretty easy to listen to the real WWV, though it'll be delayed by a few second (making it less useful). Visit https://sdr.hu/map , then click on one of the pointers in the US.

In the lower right, there's a controll panel. Type 100000 into the text box in the upper left of it, hit enter. Make sure AM is selected (it should be), and you'll be hearing WWV.
> Maybe they could start there.

A lot of kids take those tests. The fact that there are thousands of perfect scores isn't necessarily a problem as long as the score distribution looks reasonable, right?
Ah I see your point. What I was trying to say is that learning Vim is a separate commitment. If you are not prepared to make that commitment, Vim will slow you down instead of speeding you up.
That's so awesome. The NextCube is one of my dream machines, along with an SGI Indigo and Amiga 2000

Cool challenge too - maybe ill give it a whack
if you can't survive in the middle of the desert, you're not going to survive on Mars. Even if climate change radically alters the planet, it'll still be more inhabitable than Mars
As someone, who never written a book this makes sense, however is it that common that you move text between chapters that often? I guess it varies from writer to writer. However I would go mad with a single file that size.

A 4k monitor with 20 small windows would be me approach :)
The learning curve is pretty insane but once you get past that it's a really fun language to work in especially if you want to build or test something really fast just to see if something will work.
I'm not sure if you've studied other "indicators".

But the point I'm trying to make is that we ALL know that indicators in economics are kinda bad. But of all the bad indicators economists have, the Yield Inversion is one of the most powerful, predictive, and correct indicators in existance.

That indicator alone should give people pause. Well, when it happens. The 10-year has NOT inverted yet, but its darn close to inverting.
Our society is like that cartoon monkey who tries to pick a bunch of coconuts: she holds three in her arms, she tries to pick another one, but two fall out. She tries to pick the fallen ones, but drops the rest...

We proclaim "more focus to women" and we immediately forget "more focus to black people" we put on our banners ten years ago. We then jump to "more focus to lgbtqrst" and completely forget about women.

Should we indeed focus on personalities and abilities, not on whether a person has a vagina or a certain skin color?
> to never flush toilet paper

Interesting note.

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-not-flush-down-toilet-pa...
> and you didn't even have a unique experience since hundreds or even thousands of people did the same trip

You just described 99% of all vacations taken by humans on the planet. People still go on vacations, and even go on the same trip multiple times.
People tend to get upset when they are excluded from a group. Do you think that the right way of going against it is by further exclusion? I do not think that this is the case.

> "Black Lives Matter" highlights an actual problem that needsd to be addressed

So what is that problem? Does it have to do with exclusion? If so, why do not you promote "All Lives Matter", to make sure no one is excluded, then?

> "All Lives Matter" is just a bland retort to try to get the spotlight away from "Black Lives Matter"

And I could say that "Black Lives Matter" is just a bland way of trying to get the spotlight away from the fact that everyone deserves equal treatment, and that we should not discriminate people, or exclude them for their skin color, which is what it is actually doing. It is doing exactly the same thing it is fighting against.

Fighting fire with fire is not a good way of doing it. You do not even have to create such groups or whatever to address these issues. In fact, I cannot think of a reason of why shouting "Black Lives Matter" is a solution at all.

> In the case of women, their sex is not irrelevant, because the demographics of people in science overwhelmingly show a skew in sex and gender.

There are men who have been underrepresented, and there are women who have been underrepresented. Why focus on women only? What is the point here exactly?

> Highlighting how women were relegated to footnotes much more than men were is an interesting bit of information

So were men. How is it interesting?

Back to the matter at hand, what could be the reason that some men and women get shoved into the footnotes only? Does it have to do with the merit of quality of their contributions? Why do we assume that it has to do with their sex to begin with? Maybe it has to do with the contributions themselves, or something completely different.
This is absolutely right. The wealth in the West was largely gained through colonialist/imperialist means. Developing countries don't have this option.
Kernel Self Protection Project (:

https://kernsec.org/wiki/index.php/Kernel_Self_Protection_Pr...
I would love this.

Even parents who want to have their children home with them for the majority of the time would benefit if they could drop their child off at daycare so they can step out to a dr apt without the baby in tow.

Or a parent who needs a day, to sleep, to have the opportunity to drop their child off for a few hours.

It’d also be a built in easy way to socialize your kid or to meet other kids/parents who work or live nearby.

For other parents who are struggling financially or got pregnant too early, accessible day care could be what enables them to go to a job interview or to work an extra shift in order to put their family in a better financial situation.
Beware New Windows .exe Malware Found Targeting MacOS Computers
> However much the effort of a similar technique can be reduced, it doesn't scale linearly with the size of the program

[citation needed]

Sure, you can write an arbitrary application where that's true, but AFAIK it doesn't have to be. IMO, sel4's really cool part isn't that it just was formally verified, but it's total design specifically for verifiability.

The argument reminds me of all the people in the late 90s talking about how unit tests would never take off because they tried to introduce it in their legacy spaghetti codebase, and it wasn't amenable to testing.
This is Bill Gates' infographic:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DxSZ58_XQAAoxM8.jpg:large

It does show a 75% in extreme poverty. That happens to be a straight down trend. Nobody even disputes this. It also shows a number of other things, such that "democracy" is actually stagnating. Bill Gates' actual remark on it is that people underestimate how much things have improved over the last two hundred years.

Hickel picks that one graph and turns it into the "Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing, he couldn't be more wrong" headline:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...

That's dishonest. First of all, extreme poverty is decreasing. That's the actual claim and it is true. Secondly, poverty even by Hickel's standards is also decreasing. It may not have been decreasing consistently over every single past decade, but indeed is decreasing today and for the past decade. Hickel then goes on to say that "the number of people living in poverty" has increased. Indeed it has, as has the number of people living. The actual percentage of people living in poverty has gone down.

So what exactly is the problem with what Bill Gates actually said? He never claimed that poverty is solved, nor did he endorse "neoliberalism" as the solution.
Yeah, but that doesn't apply to the yield inversion indicator. The yield inversion doesn't have a false positive over the past 40 years.

The 5 times the 10-year yield inverted, were followed by 5 recessions: 1980, 1984, 1991, 2001, and 2008. That's 5 for 5.
Then allow me to be the first to tell you about the magical land of r/programming...
Some commenters are mentioning that you can’t pursue MS w/o having BS. This is not true — it’s possible.

I’m pursuing master’s at the moment and I don’t have bachelor’s. It’s from red-brick university, part of the Russell Group. The program is online/remote and it’s suitable for working professionals. To meet the entry requirements I had to prove ~10 years of industry experience, incl. gather glowing recommendation letters from c-level execs.

@OP — I was in similar situation as you and I enrolled when I was ~29 years old. I don’t regret my decision. I can hit you up on mail if you need more details.
Not only that, it would turns the elite of the country into plebs. We can't have that, can we? Many good jobs in prestigious companies are open first to Ivy League Grads.
IT managers can get what they need from the HR department
》 Meaning - they clearly are doing something correct

Good/Correct as in a self subsidized oligarchy?
Double True, but I'm expecting to start seeing thousands of keywords in the footer of sites white text on a white background. It's like SEO is coming full circle. Just surprised Google is allowing ancient SEO tricks to work again.
LinkedIn debuts LinkedIn Live, a new live video broadcast service
Another person happily paying $60 for a subscription. Software needs to be maintained and improved, it's never finished. I'm happy to pay for the continued security of my passwords, as well as new features and the ability to seemlessly sync everything across all my devices.
while I use vim a lot at the console, I still use GUI for real coding, I use geany which is super light, but geany is not strong in markdown editing(sadly). I really hope vim has a light-weight GUI version, better than the existing gvim and geany, that integrates nerdtree and bundles a few "must-have" plugins out of box.
Or they could just admit more students..
>What language is Volt written in? V. It's a new language I created to develop Volt.

That's some dedication to create your own language for a single program; but looking through the V site and it looks solid. Live reload, blazing fast compilation, and good interop with C/C++ (including conversion from C _and_ C++ code).

> `In the age of 300 MB chat clients and 10 MB web pages we started to forget how powerful our computers are and how much can fit in 1 MB. A lot of time and resoures were spent to ensure the small size and great performance. `

I like the philosophy. He has fit more into an entire desktop program than most sites fit into their initial load. The optional icons that volt loads are larger than the entire code base by 50%.
CO2 has some commercial uses too (greenhouses, chemical industry), so they can actually sell some of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Agricultural_an...

Carbon Capture - like every single other measure - won't save the climate alone but it can be a useful element in those situations where there is so much solar/wind in the grid that you need some extra consumers to not waste it. Research in that area definitely is useful, in the end it will come down to the actual prices they can achieve in reality.
Again, I'm glad you reminded me about this book. About to introduce it to some friends through our book club. I'll be re-reading it soon, so maybe I'll put on that movement while I read the end :)
By now, who would expect the UK government to ever not say something should be regulated?
The idea of "regulating" google and facebook isn't to provide accurate news or facts. It's to make sure the elites get to control propaganda. So when the elites want to start an illegal war somewhere, the people are bombarded with pro-war propaganda only.

No government is interested in educating their own people on fact checking and logic because a truly educated population is hard to control. All governments want their population fat, dumb and brainwashed.

Also, we are constantly told the lie that news companies hold power to account. But what's interesting is that every major news company was created by the government, banker, politician, etc. So power created these news companies to keep themselves to account? If Trump created "Trump news", would anyone believe he created it to keep himself in check?

Name any "credible" major news company. They were all founded by either a government, banker, politician, etc. Power created these companies to constrain power? I find that hard to believe and it's historically false.
I agree. Not to mention that it's very, very hard to find a router that's aimed at the consumer market that is actually good.
My favorite so far is the org-mode format. It has more features than Markdown(like tables) and can also be mixed with LaTeX syntax.

RST seems pretty interesting and versatile as well.
I also have larger long term plans for Polar.

The idea is to build out a collaborative learning platform.

However, first I have to attract and audience together that is large enough that could benefit from collaboration.

So one step at a time.
rs232 is simple singalling with high and low voltages and a ground pin. Ethernet is differential signalling with no ground. That makes ethernet less susceptible to ground loop issues, and interference issues from long distances. I think it's just something to be aware of, and you likely won't have to do much to adress. But don't plan for running an rs232 to your neighbor's house without isolation.

Many modems (notably Dreamcast modems) require line voltage to work. A normal POTS line provides a good amount of DC voltage when the line is off hook for various reasons, and a modem may use that for powering parts of itself or as a check to confirm it's properly connected. Something like this could help supply that voltage for picky modems http://dreamcast.onlineconsoles.com/phpBB2/guides_pcdcwin98....

Many modems will also default to waiting for a dial tone before dialing, but that should be configurable via the dialstring.

As with all things Telco, the terminology is strange. You're looking for the g.711 codec. It's basically what was used for T1s, so it's just right to fit a modem, because actually most ISPs were receiving calls via T1 --- that's how 56k works.
> Does Taiwan want to be recognized as an independent, sovereign nation?

Yes, probably. The current government is pro-independence, and I think the majority of the people are as well.

As this point, the PRC is the party that's most strongly against an independent Taiwan.

> As far as I'm aware their claim is that they are the legitimate Chinese government.

Officially, yes, but it's very complicated. In the mid-20th century they were firmly committed to that idea, but now they mainly pay lip service to it in order to walk a very fine line with regards to the PRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_independence_movement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Consensus
Oh apologies. Did you manage to get in eventually?
I agree with you that the quality of education is maybe not worth the price compared to a UC say, but at the highest tiers (say top 10), the network and the name alone will get you pretty far. Also, if you're close to prodigy level in your field, then it's probably worth it to go to the best schools.

The people who are really screwed are those who paid $50k a year for a low-demand major at some private school no one's heard of.
But how is that threshold itself determined? Seems like it's completely arbitrary and at the discretion of the institution.
I’m not sure allowing 1000W unrestricted bikes on cycle lanes is a good idea.
“Increasing opportunities” and “artificially inflating diversity” are effectively two different definitions of the same thing. It may be a good or a bad thing, but we can’t have one without the other.
I think the point is too subtle to be broadly appreciated. Any crack in the dam of meritocracy is likely to become a flood. The illusion must be preserved.

wrt to point 2: I guess it's about perspective. It's fine to propose systems that in theory would be nice but without an eye towards what could actually work, what's the point?
In December of 1994 the 10 year minus 2 year was at 0.15 (currently it is 0.18 in Feb 2018), but then we had to wait for the next recession until 2001. It could go back up like in August of 1984 or January 1995, or continue downward and put us in a recession in a couple years.
On what basis do you think they are failing to reach school children?