skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is the big weakness in our current implementation of capitalism/market economy. It's supposed to depend on perfect information about producers and products, but how can the average person know what's in a firefighting foam, and how it will affect them?

Even if you take the government aspect out of it - consider if your bought this foam for your own use. How would anyone know what it would do to them and their family, in time to make an educated decision to avoid poisoning themselves? Are we supposed to all get a degree in chemistry, build a lab in the basement, and analyze every product we bring into our homes?

If no one knows it's poison, or if the only ones who know are the producers, or if the purchaser is separated from whoever gets poisoned (i.e. govt purchasing personnel -> people drinking the water at the bases), then there's no incentive for anyone to make an alternate foam, especially if the most effective/cheapest version is the poisonous one.

A less effective or more expensive foam would be a hard sell when the people buying are not the people getting poisoned.

Without a requirement to verify that a compound is safe for long-term exposure before being sold, this is going to keep happening, no matter who is buying or selling. Unfortunately, you can't say regulation in the USA without getting shouted down as "anti-capitalist" or worse, "socialist."
Maybe we just haven’t gone long enough. That debt could crash everything and then you would have been much better off with that hunk of metal or bitcoin indeed. How do we know Buffett just hasn’t lived long enough yet? His statement could be as silly as someone in October 1929 crowing about how everything is just fine and bragging about their paper gains.

How is having that much debt a good thing?
I can't decide if it's more or less ethical to turn down these type of jobs. Even if you are anti-war, by declining such a job you open up space for the next person in line who may not be as talented of a programmer. The weapons will exist either way, but now they'll have an increased chance of having severe bugs because all the best programmers chose less morally ambiguous jobs. Maybe working for a military contractor is how you prevent the world from accidentally being destroyed. Or that's how you help it intentionally get destroyed, I don't know.
What's a Flintstone-style propulsion system?
First of all that is ridiculously slow. Secondly, unlike Matlab you don't have everything you need available after starting the REPL. For instance if you want to plot something you might run `using Gadfly`. How long does that take?

16 seconds. Sixteen seconds. For real. This is not usable.
> Date formatting - use type="date" so you get native mobile support for date entry.

I do work for GDS and while we offer a date picker for date fields in the app I work on, we also have three day/month/year fields, because date pickers are terrible for accessibility and we would fail assessment.

So is having one field that tries to magically parse what you mean into a date. Just let the user enter the numbers they want, and return a 400 when they post the form if the numbers don't make sense.

Imagine if you're blind and you try and enter a date into those `dd/mm/yyyy/` magic fields
I'll probably continue to own Berkshire as long as Buffett-selected managers (Jain, Abel, Combs, Weschler) are running the show. They've been making many of the important decisions for years now, and I would trust them to act in the spirit of Buffett & Munger when evaluating risks and opportunities.

I won't speculate on an era after that because ideally they would stay as the management/investment team for quite a long time.
1) I think you'd be surprised at what some people will believe. 2) the more likely threat is botnet comments and fake social media accounts than publishing.
I respect what he is saying, but at the same time he is essentially advocating for looking for your lost keys under a streetlight because that's where you can see well, rather than around the area where you most likely lost them.
Sigh I am sad we cant have a productive discussion without going into "grass is greener on the other side".
Sat:
8:45am kettle bells / body weight workout
9:15-10am boxing fitness class

Then home, shower, breakfast

11am-3pm work (my own stuff)
3:30-5pm massage

Might do another hour work after that, but otherwise relax

Sunday - maybe a couple hours work, otherwise time with gf, brunch / go out and do something and relax
Over and over again, the pronouncements of debt crisis have proven to be wrong. Had you sold your stocks n 2010 due to the national debt being too high, you would have missed out on 200% inflation-adjusted gains in the S&P 500 that followed. And also the US dollar is stronger than ever in spite of high deficits and Trump tariffs.
> though I no longer get annual flu shots and lots of people are very quick to demonize me as an antivaxxer over that detail.

I assume you are american? Here on the other side of the pond (I'm in Denmark) the flu shot is only being recommended for weakened and old people and is not generally something that people get.

Translated from https://www.ssi.dk/vaccinationer/influenzavaccination/sporgs...:

> Why is vaccination not recommended for everyone?

> Vaccination against influenza is given for the prevention of serious influenza disease or complications. In younger, healthy adults, vaccination will also prevent disease caused by the specific influenza strains in the vaccine. However, influenza does not pose a serious threat to the health of younger healthy people.
Oh gosh, packrats are such a PIA. They seem to love garages when they can get in -- I guess no snakes, no birds of prey, no bobcats, etc. And this thing about chewing wires in cars.
> third world you have to regularly bribe police,

Been living in India for more than 2 decades. Never had to bribe the police once.

> hope no one visits your family in the middle of the night,

Funny you mentioned that. USA has worse criminal violence than most countries in the world. Gun violence is entirely a US phenomena.

> don't have access to clean food or water.

Never faced the issue of clean food or drinking water in my entire life. And I am from lower middle class.

> Even life at the lowest rungs of US culture have it way better than most in a third world country

Really? I prefer to live in a country where I can afford healthcare atleast. Probably a great idea to visit some so called "third world" countries and see for yoursevles. If you dont have time for that read Fact-fullness.
Try using an app like Daylio to track habits and mood. Then try both ways, work your ass off for 4 or 5 days, and then just chill and do whatever for 2-3 days. Then try splitting up your day so X number of hours are hard productivity and the rest of the day is more relaxed. See what works for you.
I don't know that I agree. The "right direction" is something that is hard to define alone and is likely to be defined by the social context you find yourself in at any given moment. Finding something that you enjoy and doing that can be the wrong direction as well.

It seems that I've been the most productive when I've felt the greatest weight of responsibility--first child, first few mortgage payments, first employee--and I have been the least productive when I attempt to avoid responsibility. Productivity, at least as defined as "what I need to get done to feel satisfied that I have fulfilled my obligations in the least amount of time" for me requires motivation, and nothing is so motivating as honest responsibility.

Saturdays are often filled with work for me, now. I work towards my master's degree, and I work on and around the house, and I work and play with my children. I rarely work on the business.
The plant looks pretty close on google maps at less than 20km from Chernobyl and that city was evacuated soon after the disaster. Yes, the point should be located closer to Pripyat but that’s only about 5-10km from where it is. Not perfect but pretty close.

You would think that the big new structure would give a clue as to where the plant is/was.
This is so out of touch with reality. You have traded an insanely rich country for another super insanely rich country and called it a day. This in no way can even start a productive discussion.
> Move to SV, get a job with Google/FB/etc.

I'm not sure americans understand how annoying it is the process of getting an H1B (or any other visa to be honest)
And if you lose your job, you're screwed.
Well, you did call this project "hot garbage trash." Surely you can take a little criticism.
The issue is the trend lines.

Play the tape forward on our continual lack of infrastructure investment, our slouch towards oligarchy, our fractious internal tribalism.. the root causes behind 3rd world problems are sneaking up on us.
It's supposed to look like a video game level. There are a lot of different hardware configurations. Could you please go to http://webglreport.com/?v=2 and tell me what "Unmasked Vendor" and "Unmasked Renderer" say?

For Firefox, could you open up the console with F12 and tell me what that says as well?
Don't allow the evil come to this world via you.
Steady Growth and Integration Push Amazon Alexa to the Top
I think I agree with your summary of what's happening in the US re: magnifying problems - our range of experiences has become much narrower as things have become safer and more controlled, so it takes less and less extreme experiences to reach the extremes of our personal experience.
I would disagree and say is the best representation of Europe. High output similar to Germany, and Sweden. High unemployment in the realm of Spain and Italy. While other countries sit on various points of different graphs (education, unemployment, immigration, GDP, etc) France just kind of sits near the center of most of them.
YC should IPO. They can make a much bigger impact with bigger funding
> I will not say that "authoritarian governments are bad" full stop. I used to think like that. I don't anymore after realizing how the world is not so black and white. If we demonize a third party, it is easier to not understand the third party.

I just don't buy this moral relativism.

In some societies, it's ok to beat your wife. But I think to normalize this behavior as a simple difference in cultural practices would be doing a disservice to the global political discourse and the larger concept of human rights.

Concepts like "due process" and "freedom of speech" are maybe less clear cut than "Is it ok to beat your wife?" But are they really? I think every society ought to have those things. They are major political innovations to come about over the last few hundred years. To do otherwise would be a regression. Yes that's a judgment. So is "beating your wife isn't ok". Understanding why someone beats their wife doesn't make it better either. It's just something that you shouldn't do.

As far as governments, disappearing people for saying mean things about the president is something that they shouldn't do. There's nothing to understand, they just shouldn't do it. I don't think this should be a controversial opinion. It's possible to understand different cultures while still standing up for what I would consider to be basic human rights and due process. I'm lucky I can do that from here, because to do so in China would be a jailable offense.
No, the implication is that US uses its prowess disproportionally to advance its military abilities.
ok but then since lisp already has an extremely small syntax, why not simply define functions in the language rather than using the macro system ?

Unless your goal is to be source compatible with another lisp variant, of course.
> That was 2016. Since then, the Defense Department has admitted that it allowed a firefighting foam to slip into at least 55 drinking water systems at military bases around the globe, sometimes for generations.

Where's the list of locations for the 55 systems?
I mean that already exists, it's basically just an RV park, right? Without the philosophical bent and off-grid aspects, you can already find those things. I spent a big chunk of my childhood bumming around the country on vacation in an RV, and I think that's ultimately the source of my wanderlust, but it doesn't really build a community for the longer term.
The comments on the article page (not here) show that the commenters are not reading the article carefully.

This is a scrupulously written article with deeply meaningful conclusions. Rust is an immature language -- a stage every language goes through! -- and you can tell. What no one knows, yet, is whether its designers have painted themselves into a corner that prevents fixing it. The compiler, too, is immature, and will certainly get better at localizing the causes of problems, but that is a research project.

C++ is legitimately criticized for complexity that comes from its complicated history. It inherited all of C's warts, and more from early experiments that didn't pan out. You can mostly avoid most of them, but promiscuous integer conversion and overflow always lurk, and you never know when you will encounter old-school code that revives the old monsters.

Rust claims benefits from not inheriting legacy hacks (except C linking conventions, which affect function call details), but is rapidly growing its own legacy of past design choices that constrain future choices. The only limits on this problem are foresight and mathematical rigor of design formalisms, and both are limited.

It might be that Rust programmers will need to learn to rely less on type inference, and state types "unnecessarily", just to get understandable error messages. Improvements in the compiler might include its identifying choke points where such a type annotation would help.

Modern C++ coding gives much the same experience of spending extra time satisfying the compiler, then the program mostly works when you do; but the error messages don't take hours to figure out. Usually, the most obscure complaints come out as mismatches between long function-and-template argument lists, where you have to pick out the one word that doesn't match, but these take minutes, not hours, and could be automated without a research project. Much of that will disappear (not all!), with Concepts in C++20.

The difference between the C and C++/Rust experiences is very much like the difference with interpreted languages -- you depend a great deal more on exhaustive testing when the compiler does less.
These are awesome.

Does anybody know of a good library that can generate images (jpg, png etc.) from ANSI art files?
For "2D indexing" into a 1D array it's actually a little awkward. With an n×m matrix,

- zero-indexed: i×m+j

- one-indexed: (i-1)×m+j

OTOH one-based is slightly better for trees stored in 1D arrays:

- zero-indexed: parent=(child-1)/2; children=2×parent+(1, 2).

- one-indexed: parent=child/2; children=2×parent+(0, 1).

My favourite fact about this stuff: in VB (or was it VBA?) when you asked for an array of size n, you actually got an array of size n+1. So people could do 0-based or 1-based indexing and be none the wiser...
Mars InSight Mission: Mars Weather
I suggest including a few of the largest open trackers by default. You'll have a high hit rate for semi-popular torrents, and they can be faster than waiting for a cold DHT lookup in most clients. It's a minor decrease in privacy, but the BitTorrent network isn't really eavesdropping-resistant in the first place.

I wish IPFS had finished their BitTorrent support so we could use their standard gateway paths instead. The prefix https://ipfs.io/ipfs/f017b1114 should identify a hex-encoded BitTorrent infohash, letting us use a full URL like https://ipfs.io/ipfs/f017b111464d052f755e01d1c947848ad3d2218... through any IPFS gateway, which would resolve the content using a combination of IPFS' own network and BitTorrent with its DHT, but the implementation was never completed.
Jupyter Lab: Evolution of the Jupyter Notebook
India is number 2 on this list, the US is 14:

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violen...

You haven't had issue with clean water? I'd say you're pretty lucky then:

https://water.org/our-impact/india/
> That means they aren't actually cryptocoins.

That's not the argument here. I'm showing you that there are legitimate alternatives to USDT.
> InSight is taking daily weather measurements (temperature, wind, pressure) on the surface of Mars at Elysium Planitia, a flat, smooth plain near Mars’ equator.

Press release: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7337
> Korneyev’s sense of humor remained intact, though. He seemed to have no regrets about his life’s work. “Soviet radiation,” he joked, “is the best radiation in the world.”

Wow.

How does one survive multiple visits to "the Elephant's Foot" long enough to tell these jokes?
> Perfect example of "post your professional experiences on HN and get it ripped apart immediately."

that's why i try not to make blanket statements without qualifications about my specific case. know your customer, and all. we also have a direct phone line prominently shown in our header, so for those who do encounter issues, they simply call in to finish their order and we're happy to sell them additional things and/or give them better pricing. it's one of those odd "worse is better" situations.

our product takes some planning before purchase and is not a commodity you can buy elsewhere (we mfg). those who start the checkout process are unlikely to leave if they encounter minor issues.

if you're strictly a reseller, with no sales phone support, or have a huge international market, then sure, a lot of what we can get away with could lose a chunk of buyers to competitors for someone else.
Is there a single programming language for which static analyzers are a part of the language rather than external tools?
A parser generator is m-expressions to racket's s-expressions - which is all about syntax, whereas s-expr based DSLs are focused on semanics.

Not sure if that makes anything clearer but I can't think of a better phrasing.
The poster you mention absolutely does not say that. The poster says Flint’s clean water problems are the kind you would find in a 3rd world country.

I think you are clearly misreading both the article and people’s comments to it. No one is suggesting the US is a 3rd world country. But in certain areas it’s statistics resemble 3rd world country outcomes more than it does developed country outcomes.

The reason this is important is that the US is usually an outlier in developed countries in this area, which means solutions to these problems exist.
I assume you are american? Here on the other side of the pond (I'm in Denmark) the flu shot is only being recommended for weakened and old people and is not generally something that people get.

I happen to be American, yes. But, I think we have the same policy here.

However, given my diagnosis, it is recommended for people like me. I handle my vulnerability to infection by working from home, avoiding large crowds and so forth. (I can't remember the last time I had the flu.)

Correction: We used to have the same policy here. From the CDC website:

CDC recommends annual influenza vaccination for everyone 6 months and older

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/vaccination/index.htm

When I was growing up, vaccination levels were talked about in terms of success. "We have successfully vaccinated 90 percent of people."

These days, they are talked about in terms of failure. "We have failed to vaccinate 10 percent of people." This is often followed up by classifying that last 10 percent as antivaxxers, nutters, holdouts, etc.

The reality is that there can be legitimate medical reasons why one chooses to not vaccinate. But this has become such a politicized topic that such people tend to get lumped in with "crazy antivaxxers."

Having spent time in the antivax community, I feel they largely exist because of that. If families with a known history of problems or simply personal concerns had their choices respected without so much public outcry and so many strangers butting into their (HIPAA protected) medical choices, I think you would probably see a lot less antivax propaganda. People who feel that vaccines are a problem for them and their kids would handle it a lot more quietly.

FWIW, I get demonized by both camps. You can't currently have a moderate position on this topic. Antivaxxers hate me and vilify me just as much as anti-antivaxxers.
Do insurance companies in the US pay out for preexisting conditions?
Huh? Why? I'm an American who had traded America for Germany. It's no panacea but it is a marked improvement along multiple axes. That's real and unambiguous. Which is, I think, worth discussing.
And it's a lottery in the end. You can't count on it until you're selected.
Stop Building Car Boats – Tech Debt 101
Agreed Octave works excellently as a linear algebra/numerical subshell for Shell scripting, better than Python IMO.
Curious to see what the results are ADJUSTED for median income.
I guess to avoid having such a huge scandal[1] again, it makes sense to preempt any negative spin by admitting that they had problems, and putting focus on how they turned it around instead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recruit_scandal
The highest ranked countries are also the fastest growing. When I was in my 20's we worked M-S in the industry I was in. Today, we celebrate a M-Thr work week. Time is going to tell as to how sustainable this may be from a long-term economic and productivity standpoint. I'm well aware of the arguments for a 4 day work week, and I often adopt that schedule. Nevertheless, I have my doubts about it.
> If you like this, you'll go nuts for this woman's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/bionerd23/videos

She has a video named "rat taxidermy with LED eyes mod - full video - gore warning!" [0]. What the hell?

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B1pz-V_YGg
Languages designed by academic computer scientists are less used in the real world than languages designed outside of academia. It seems that academic computer science does not often lead to the design of languages that are actually chosen by working programmers to solve their problems.

I think there are some very interesting and elegant ideas in some languages that come from academia but it seems that something is missing when it comes to designing languages that are actually widely adopted. Despite their elegance Haskell and Racket are much less used than Go and Java.
More Butter Higher Levels of Satisfaction – Big Think
Approval Rate Declines for H-1B Visas
You have to look at Per Capita. India is a far more populous country than the US.

And guess what. The US is at 99 and India is at 107 which reinforces the idea that the US has developing country outcomes in certain areas. It’s not the worst (there are 98 worse countries), but it’s signficanrly worse than its wealth should indicate it should be.
I am fully convinced you want to dismiss any real issue the US may be having. Police brutality, the opioid epidemic, over-prescription of medications, poverty levels, children going hungry in schools, and now publicized election fraud.

There are problems. Stop acting like we can't have problems because other countries have problems you see as worse.
Tally Ho: Rebuilding a 1909 yacht
Having spent 10 days in France and driving from Paris to Lyon to Nice, this doesn’t jive with my experience at all. French cities were clean and nice. French villages look pristine and well managed. Unlike some of the broken rural areas in the US.
I have lived in Europe earning an above average salary for a swe and never saved enough to really feel I made it in life.
The healthcare was just good enough, almost mediocre and living there felt like all in all just "good enough".

I moved to Asia, to a country with much lower taxes and live a much better life.
"If you refuse to obey the laws of the country of course you will be arrested. They will not be violent!"

Are we talking about the US? Perhaps you're not a person of color, so you don't understand what it's really like here.