skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But when Orlin did the calculations, he found that the size at which objects take on the shape of a sphere is about 400 kilometers in diameter, which is significantly larger than the ~160km Death Star.

> That's why Orlin's hypothetical Imperial team physicist keeps insisting the Death Star should be more lumpy, shaped like an asteroid.

That conclusion doesn't make any sense. A big object (400km) made from a standard material (rock) in space must have a spherical shape due to gravity. It doesn't imply that a smaller object can't have a spherical shape. The Sputnik had a spherical shape in spite it was small (58cm=.00058km).

If you build it, and it is not big enough, you can make it with the shape you like, a sphere, a rocket like object, a giant robot like the SDF-1. It's more complicated and as you approach the threshold you will have problems with stupid long shapes, and you will forced to pick a sphere like shape. But spheres are always possible (assuming an even internal distribution).

(If it is rotating, or the internal distribution is not even, you will be forced to a shape that is not a perfect sphere, like the Earth.)
Or to speed up the Internet experience.

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-p...
I would suggest that the first autonomous weapon was likely to be animal in nature - like Ceaser's "dog's of war". Train dogs to be as vicious as you can, and let them loose on the battlefield.

I don't think "opposition" in the sense of an organized political movement was as much of a feature of life back then. You did whatever you could to win, and there was no "international community" to tut at you for it.
If you think that any leaking will be used to spy on you, you'll better deactivate bluetooth completely (seriously).

I you know of any real (not theoretical) threads, let us know. Until then I (we) enjoy the convience of modern technology.
Finding a mentor
> this is a $30 device to hook up TVs,

Nitpick, but more like $70; you may be confusing Chromecast Ultra with the base Chromecast.
CloudFlare makes their money differently than Google though. Google wants figure out how to most efficiently put other people’s ads in front of me, and to sell my attention for the most value. Even if they have absolutely no ulterior motives (evil or otherwise), Google’s business is one such that they have every motive to abuse my privacy for their own gain.

CloudFlare doesn’t make their money off of brokering my attention, they have a decent track record of doing the ‘right’ things (or at least not the ‘wrong’ things), and they’ve made some decently pro-privacy statements in the past.

It seems that everyone wants to collect data on everything and figure out how to sell it off, so I’m not putting it out of the realm of possibility that CloudFlare could do shady stuff and abuse my privacy as well- but their general line of business doesn’t require it the way Google’s does.

All things otherwise equal, I’m gonna trust the company who’s business isn’t selling my profile a bit more for most things. I used to use Google DNS a lot, now I use CloudFlare’s. I trust them both more than Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon with respect to technical competency and security at the very least.
PWA2APK – Get Your Progressive Web App into Google Play
In my experience compilers are very bad at figuring out what is "actually called", probably because this is non-trivial in C and C++.
Not sure what you meant by "1337 hacker skills" (sounds sarcastic to me) but the guy in question helped create the Domain Name System!
I'd be interested to read a follow-up on how to incorporate other data structures such as quad trees, spatial hashes or scene graphs into an ECS.
I recall a dinner party where a few people were discussing the web, probably 1994. Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for; the best ideas we had for solving that problem were pretty bad.

Google changed the world. What used to be buried on the 3rd or 4th page of Altavista results, if it appeared at all, was suddenly front and center. (Yahoo’s directory was rarely useful at all.)

I’m not a fan of Google today, but for years I would tell everyone I knew about it.

(Edit: fixed the year.)
Society only punishes you if society knows about it and has enough power to do something about it. If the US signs a treaty to ban killer robots but builds them anyway then nobody can force them to stop.
You want -flto and to strip the binary of symbols if you are looking for a small executable size. The C runtime is about 800K.
> You'd have to rebuild EVERY SINGLE THING on the system to build with that new kernel

like containers? surely this is the same thing as you suggest, and is a good solution.
Discrete Mathematics, an Open Introduction [free, Online Book]
It is absolutely stranded and "train to nowhere" is a wonderful phrase I wish I'd thought of myself.

No one is going to take Amtrak's poor, slow trains to Merced, then ride high speed rail to Bakersfield, then get back on a slow Amtrak train to reach their final destination. Nor will they drive to those stranded stations just to connect by HSR. People will just drive (or fly!) the entire way.

What this author fails to point out is that America's Interstate Highway system is unique in the world and has led us to a road-based transportation system like no other. That's not a bad thing. Europe and Asia never had an interstate and trains make a lot more sense there.

The other factor is that airline travel is cheap and readily available in California. No one is going to goof around connecting through the "train to nowhere" when you could take a point-to-point trip on any airline between several airports. In LA, you've got LAX, Glendale, Burbank, and Ontario. In Silicon Valley, you've got SFO, Oakland, Sacramento, and SJC. If you look at the timetables for those connections, you could choose flights on 30 minute increments. If you took the "high speed" train to nowhere, who knows when the heck you'd arrive.
This brings to mind a microwave beam developed by Raygheon to down drones [0] and an article I read well over a decade ago about EMPs. Wonder how these are doing on the consumer front?

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hlmf032NmHU
It doesn't even have to be strict. Driving vehicles is the most dangerous and lethal thing most people do regularly. Software is the most unreliable system most people interact with regularly. Autonomous cars will be lethal and will cause deaths. It's crazy to me that they are being allowed to drive on public roads in such a haphazard fashion. There's no way these cars would pass a driving test.

Additionally, in a quarter of the USA for a quarter of the year driving conditions are such (permanent snow cover) that there are no visual indicators of where to drive or park. Cars would need all roads pre-mapped with ground penetrating radar at the least (a giant data set). And even with that it would be difficult. I know this because it's difficult for me as a human and I often have to rely on my contextual knowledge of how human society works and how people behave to know where to drive on a surface, avoid getting in crashes, and figure out how and where to park. None of this is possible for current or near term computers.
How is "hardcoding 8.8.8.8" a "massive amount of trouble?"
> better to hustle the rich.

How so?
They hire consultants to do that stuff. Or acquire.
> larger research teams did the work of consolidating the ideas and solidifying the evidence

As someone who works in science, I hate that this was just kind of a side note in this article.

If you want to know how to create a replication crisis, just value "novelty" and "disruption" way more than correctness and replicability.
What I ended up doing to ensure this for any of the devices I have is use pfSense to force all DNS queries to go to my DNS server:

https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/dns/blocking-dns-...
I don't think people are saying it's like being hit by an astroid.

It's gradual, like a frog being slowly boiled alive.

There is lot of science in here: https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-i...

Other climate scientists (like P. Wadhams) think that report is too conservative.

The way I understood it is (some major points):

- The arctic ice is melting, which will reduce how much sunlight is reflected back into space (albedo effect).

- melting permafrost releases methane - a very potent greenhouse gas, which can accelerate global warming.

- More droughts can cause crop failures and eventually can cause social instability, starvation, malnutrition and wars for resources.

This is a good summary of the IPCC report - it says we have around 12 years to avert major climate catastrophe:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-w...

Also look into what Dr James Hansen (ex NASA climate scientist) says.

I think the scientific community is in consensus that climate change can become an existential threat if we don't act now.

I don't understand why you don't think that's the case, even though there is so much scientific evidence out there. Or maybe I misunderstood your comment.

Edit: typos and clarity
Yeah, the whole page focuses on how it's built, not so much on problems it solves. From the link you posted, it seems to:

* say "hello"

* tell jokes

* generate random numbers

* download videos from a given YouTube URL

* check status of a domain

I can't see why any of those need AI.
I think we all know from experience that working in a big organisation can be stifling.

What I find interesting about it is it's the larger organisations that encourage specialisation. You would think that would increase innovation but it seems to do the opposite. YouTube, GitHub, Whats App, DeepMind, LinkedIn, these companies weren't created by big business, they were bought by them.
[citation needed] on that "likely" word. I've seen instances of that, but they're extremely rare because intercepting DNS altogether is a fucked up thing to do for an ISP.

Seen far, far more instances of:

- ISPs shipping shitty network devices / awful factory settings

- ISP's own DNS servers being terrible in various ways

- Uncle Steve "the IT guy of the family" having messed with the network settings and nobody knows why 1 youtube video in 20 doesn't load but we just ignore it.
China Brings Us Together
Dark mode for Chrome
That's probably because for daily tasks we have much better tooling in Windows already that doesn't require us to use the command line and interactive construct it. I can easily administer the configurations of thousands of computers through AD, for instance, and while I could use PowerShell to do so, using ADUC is just easier most of the time.

If you do a lot of work with Exchange though, you'll probably end up using PowerShell much more, because the web UI for it is not so great.

No matter what you think of the specific implementation, a lot of PowerShell's ideas are good ideas. Unfortunately UNIX culture is such that they'll probably never implement any of them.
I'm guessing the practical meaning is that the inventor is not required to license the invention "at a fair and reasonable" price but is free to ask whatever he/she feels is appropriate. I could imagine a case where the industry the inventor wishes to market to is controlled by a cartel which colludes to offer a low price for the invention. In this case, the inventor may wish not to sell or license in the hope that the cartel breaks up or gives in.
>My Chromecast went through massive amount of trouble to use Google's DNS servers

No it didn't, it just queried 8.8.8.8 instead of whatever DNS server your DHCP configuration told it to use.

Putting "nameserver 8.8.8.8" in /etc/resolv.conf and marking it read-only would have the same effect. Doesn't look like much trouble does it?
Imagine if someone asked "What are the biggest threats to white race?". That would be recognized as a racist question and racism is seen as a bad thing.

For some weird reason racism is bad but speciesism is good. These types of articles are typical specisist garbage. What about threats to other species? Why are members of homo sapiens species superior to other species?

This wouldn't fly when it comes to racism since people now recognize that racial superiority is a bogus concept.
Are you claiming that when two apps on iOS use a webview, there are 2 copies of the system library implementing the webview in memory?

If not, why are you appealing to iOS to help make your case?
If you just want a text substitution utility, then this is proof that you can implement that by using sed in a controlled manner. Why bemoan something for doing more things than you need it to right now? This is what general-purpose computing is all about.
I actually wrote a really similar extension a year ago, please give me feedback!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/target-search/nohm...
There's nothing in principle preventing private companies from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and storing what remains in long-term underground storage. It's just illegal for them to do the reprocessing and too politically unpopular for any local government to consent to having a storage facility built on land it manages.

It's misleading to refer to a 'magic government solution' as though the nuclear industry is expecting the government to invent a magic wand that will disappear spent fuel with a flourish of the hand.
Here's a page which contains some authoritative discussion of the Plan 9 attitude to shared libraries: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/

Your "most people I know" comment is bizarre: even hardcore terminal users need to browse the web, and it's been years since lynx or w3m could be claimed to be adequate for most web tasks.

But the Plan 9 folks consciously made it difficult to write or port web browsers and other consumer software. I think I remember Tom Duff stating that writing a web browser was a "fool's errand", which I guess captures the sense of heightened seriousness, privilege, and lack of concern for the average mainstream user that informed Plan 9's design.
An overwhelmingly large (and growing) population of ignorant people who don't value critical thinking, learning, science, or anything but themselves and their immediate desires.
Which network effects are locking you in to using Facebook and not self-publishing, or using Twitter, reddit, hackernews, Medium, Tumblr, or any other website?
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Also, your comment seems to break this guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Most likely the GP didn't realize that there was this sinister angle, and was just commenting on the nichiness of the genre.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I know, and yes, it was intended to be sarcastic. ;)

He of all people should understand that the practical implementation of DNS and DHCP has become so broken by bad-acting ISPs that consumer electronics devices end up side-stepping the spec entirely so the thing works for the common consumer user.
> but about one per project per year is the right amount for HN to host

Does that mean the arbitrary, catch-all VS Code release threads are finally going to stop, too?
Not really, the Itanium VLIW architecture bet heavily on instruction-level parallellism as opposed to thread-level parallellism. In theory, the Itanium could issue and retire 3 instructions per cycle thereby making it competitive with x86 even on modest clock speeds.

The main problem was that not many programs could sustain 3 parallel instructions in their critical path, which meant that the compiler would often generate NOPs to fill the empty instruction slots. IIRC the Itanium typically achieved around 40% of its theoretical performance on conventional workloads. The term "NOP density" was coined specifically to research this problem.

There is another interesting observation in [1] that I haven't realized before: even if the compiler were to succesfully generate 3 instructions per cycle, the processor then had to possibly fetch 3 memory locations in that instruction cycle. If two of those were already in cache, the instruction would still stall on the third memory fetch. Contrast this with the implicit parallellism of hyperthreading, where the processor can continue executing a different thread when the current thread encounters a memory stall.

[1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2793...
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They chase profits. These businesses tend to be very siloed and if they lose money on a new business venture, it's their money that's lost and not depositors. They are probably absorbing a tiny fraction of the risk they absorbed by making shaky but traditional investments in the early 2000s.
Yes, you're correct. The Chromecast Ultra isn't sold here in Europe so I didn't make the connection.
I rank this guy as a pretty big threat... This sounds like something a James Bond villain says right before he releases the virus that kills 90% of the human population.
> Isn't D memory unsafe by default?

Yes, but it only takes this to guarantee it:

void main() @safe {
// ...
}
Because we've all been heavily brainwashed in to requiring constantly "new" stuff. It's going to take a World changing event to break us out of that cycle IMO.
A joke about a memory-hungry program use to be that EMACS stands for Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
We're hardwired to only believe in what we can immediately mentally visualize - a plane crash is so much more dramatic than a car crash, and the images of Fukushima stick with people when compared to the completely absent ability to mentally picture what a coal plant's damage looks like.
We're either with you, or against you.
A song by MongoDB folks
Sure, if they fit the criteria. Keep in mind that we don't see everything and so can't catch all of these. If you see one that we appear to have missed, it would be helpful to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.

Edit: while I have you, could you please not create per-comment accounts? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. For explanations about why, see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
I got the impression that it's mostly about influencing people who charter a yacht for a party.
how is it showing you ads ? Haven't seen any yet.
It'd be remarkable if it wasn't used for spying, given the history of features added to web Javascript. When has an API that gives JS access to more data or device capabilities not been used in this way? Often spying's among the top use cases in the wild for a new feature. At a minimum it'll be another dimension for fingerprinting.
Is there a reason you don't store the images of submitted games? Acquiring real-world training data to test changes with would be very useful. Perhaps make it an opt-in feature people can select when uploading a game so people are "offering" you this information to you rather than you just "taking" it.

One way to choose between two legal candidate moves would be to look forward for the next move by the candidate pieces and see which ones make sense given. If you are trying to choose between e6 and e5, for instance, look forward and see what the next e pawn move is. Plenty of other ways to go about this, of course.
Are there numbers for that? I'm thinking of comparing that to a flywheel or even just different electrical storage options.
What do you mean objectively? I don't see a lot of other species asking and answering these questions...

That being said they're all good points.
No, man I'm not a threat. Your remark reminds me of a common situation of someone being accused of being a race traitor by a white supremacist.
From Side Project to 1B Pageviews/Year
Probably the loss of fertile soil in farmland and increasing need for fresh water.
Not to mention the Butlerian Jihad in the backstory of _Dune_, and the enduring ban on thinking machines. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
Fselect: Find Files with Sql-Like Queries
Altavista was my favorite search engine before Google. Being able to put in a query (which could have logical expressions) instead of a directory of links was awesome!
Startups Can Be an Emotional Rollercoaster, You're Not Alone
I guess the difference is whether you can order a new one every week without breaking a sweat
It's a straightforward interpretation.

At the very least, they count as "arms," just autonomous arms, which makes them necessary for a free state.

Let's not twist the Founder's intent here, or underestimate their foresight. They thought very carefully about these issues, and understood that a government's monopoly on violence going unchecked by a disarmed populace inevitably leads to tyranny.

Therefore, we must deploy an autonomous militia of killer robots programmed to enforce an Originalist interpretation of the Constitution with ruthless efficiency as soon as possible. The cause of Liberty demands no less.
The Communal Mind
This article is interest for me because I'm a human and I'm interested in threats to humanity. Would it have been about white people only, I would have asked why white human only, because we are all of the same specie and there is, to my knowledge, no threat to white human survival that doesn't apply to the others. And if there is such a threat then that article wouldn't be racist.

Moreover I believe that I'm superior to the other animals.
How many people have to die for you to consider it a threat to humanity. Not trying to be dramatic, just understand that small changes in climate and crops have the potential to starve millions if not billions.
I may be totally misunderstanding asark, but the model I thought they were suggesting was something like how COM works in Windows. You can, for example, talk to other COM components and pass data back and forth using an efficient binary message passing protocol while still letting them live in their own process space.

It allowed some interesting things. For example, you could write applications that could read, display and modify the contents of Excel files, except they didn't do it directly; they delegated all the actual work of opening, reading, and modifying the *.xls file to Excel itself.

I wouldn't personally consider consuming a COM interface like that to be a form of linking.

That said, getting back to the broader context, I've no idea how you'd make something like that work for a GUI toolkit. But WinRT is supposedly based on COM, so maybe they got something figured out?
I'm a board member of Clojurists Together[ct] who is trying to solve this problem for _just Clojure_. Obviously this is a generic issue and while most Clojure libraries are hardly core infrastructure underpinning 2/3ds of the servers on the Internet, every language community ends up with projects everyone uses and no-one maintains in earnest.

Clojurists Together asks maintainers to put together a proposal, then we vote on projects and give them money. Donors ("members") are both companies and individuals[members].

It works! I wish more communities had this. Stuff like the core infrastructure initiative is fantastic, but I think it's hard for them to identify or even justify "niche core infrastructure".

[ct]: https://www.clojuriststogether.org/
[members]: https://www.clojuriststogether.org/members/
US, Facebook negotiating record multibillion-dollar fine after privacy lapses
It's a Tory party issue. Their Universal Credit system is designed to restrict people's welfare payments, and if possible eject them from the system by hook or by crook. I'm not playing politics here - all the metrics show large jumps in 2014, when the system was introduced (replacing the older benefits). Rough sleeping spiked. Unemployment (as measured by people on benefits) plummeted.

The UK is plenty rich enough to feed all its citizens. It just chooses not to.