skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Jones Act prohibits using a foreign vessel to ship things from one US port to another. You can import or export on a foreign vessel, but you can't use a (say) Panama-flagged ship to move stuff from New York to Boston.

Ships are subject to their country's rule and regulations; if a down-on-their-luck country wants to look the other way on environmental hazards or lax operating procedures on a ship, that ship can be run for cheaper than an American ship.

If we didn't have the Jones Act, we'd be hard-pressed to justify having any sort of merchant marine shipping at all -- foreign-flagged ships could undercut even moving stuff up and down the coasts or waterways.

Still, it does come up often, especially during emergencies. For example, when Puerto Rico had trouble getting goods shipped in after Hurricane Maria because there weren't enough US cargo vessels on hand to move cargo from Florida to Puerto Rico. The president at the time was criticized for not rapidly suspending the Jones Act to allow foreign ships to move critical goods.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/us/jones-act-waived.html

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/10/25/what-ever...
iOS 12 (through 12.1.2) Can Now Be Jailbroken
> Macbooks are in low percentages

For some reason Macbooks seem disproportionately represented amongst web developers. All the agencies I know in Sydney and Melbourne are full of macbooks.

> There's no incentive for companies or individuals to go switch out all of that x86 hardware sitting on desks and in racks with ARM alternatives which will offer them lower performance than their already slightly aged hardware at initially higher costs.

Uh, why are you assuming ARM laptops will have lower performance and a higher cost compared to x86 equivalents? The ARM CPU in the iPad pro already outperforms the high end intel chips in macbook pros in some tests. And how long do you think Apple will continue to sell intel-based macbooks once they have ARM laptops on the market? Maybe they'll keep selling intel laptops for a year or two, but I doubt they'll keep refreshing them when new intel processors come out. When Apple moved from powerpc to intel they didn't keep releasing new powerpc based laptops.

Once web development shops start buying laptops with ARM chips, it will be a huge hassle if random nodejs modules don't build & work on ARM. At this point I expect most compatibility issues will be fixed, and that will in turn make deploying nodejs apps on arm a more reasonable choice.

Obviously we'll see, and this is all speculation for all of us. But I think its a reasonable path for ARM chips to invade the desktop.
People write about cool things and you can read about cool things. The cooler a thing is the more people look at it.

Keep your vocab limited when explaining to kids. Otherwise you'll go down a rabbit hole of "what does that mean". Which is fine if you want to do that, but a 2 year old isn't going to remember a lot of it.
Yeah, right. Almost no wars in the last 30 years.

Except for a few never-ending wars that last so long that are basically a new normal so we can count them off.
Especially liked the quote from Franz Boas re the numerous English words for water in its variou forms:

“To take again the example of English, we find that the idea of water is expressed in a great variety of forms: one term serves to express water as a liquid; another one, water in the form of a large expanse (lake); others, water as running in a large body or in a small body (river and brook); still other terms express water in the form of rain, dew, wave, and foam. It is perfectly conceivable that this variety of ideas, each of which is expressed by a single independent term in English, might be expressed in other languages by derivations from the same term.”
Lethality is a term of art in milx.
I like both of these options (more than "more")
If the figures for Boston's consumption are for gaseous methane and LNG expands 600x then you would have ~6 days supply.
I guess I'm making an argument around predictability and stability. To be honest I haven't used Ubuntu as a server in several years. Maybe they have improved things.

But I think they can mostly improve things "on top", but not the foundations. Patching over problems by adding layers on top generally isn't great for stability, and is bad for debuggability.

I'm comparing Ubuntu to BSDs, where there's actually a manual, and files are put in consistent places. (as far as I understand, I have less experience with them.)

It's also most of the same reasons that Docker switched its default image from Ubuntu to Alpine some years ago. Alpine is just smaller and makes more sense. Ubuntu does a lot but it's also sprawling and inconsistent.

Off the top of my head:

- Starting services is a weird mix of init scripts and Upstart. And now they're switching to systemd. When they switch they don't update all the packages. There are some weird compatibility shims.

- When you apt-get install apache2, it actually starts the daemon. (This is a problem with both Debian and Ubuntu.) This is bad from a security perspective. A lot of people don't know what's running on their systems in practice and what ports are open, and then they have to set up an extra firewall, which is more complexity.

- the file system is generally a mess, e.g. /etc. There seem to be multiple locations for everything, e.g. bash completion scripts. I think this is a function of the packages being old and patched over.

In general the documentation feels scattered and incomplete. The common practice seems to be googling stuff and pasting things in random files until it works. And then automating that with a Docker container.

That's now traditionally how servers were administered pre-Google :) System administration knowledge / quality seems to have taken a nosedive with the rise of the cloud and cheap hosting. I'm not saying that it's all bad, but it's a downside.

The great thing about Debian and Ubuntu is that there is so much software packaged for it. I think that's generally the reason that people use it. There is a network effect in the package ecosystem.
Exactly. OR other animals!

But "the Amazon" is a good example, because people in European cultures also have a bad habit of considering "primitive" people to be _themselves_ "natural", with implications including: wherever and whatever way they live now (or when Europeans first contacted them) is where and how they have "always" lived, with no history of cultural change or migration; they have had no effect on the ecosystems they live in, which have also always been exactly as they are now.

Usually none of that is true.

Even ecosystems _without humans_ (and before human carbon-producing industry) _changed over time_.

Ones with humans have, as a trend, changed even more, true, but for _as long as there have been humans_, way before modern carbon-producing tech.

But again, this is not meant to be a feel-good "so what we are now doing is fine." Nope, we're totally fucking things up, at an accelerated rate and order of magnitude greater scale. But not necessarily a categorical/qualitative difference.
Confidential Emails Sent by Facebook Executives Leaked Online
"Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions (1976) ...Despite its age, it is still considered an excellent commentary on simple but high quality code.

For many years, the Lions book was the only Unix kernel documentation available outside Bell Labs. Although the license of 6th Edition allowed classroom use of the source code, the license of 7th Edition specifically excluded such use, so the book spread through illegal copy machine reproductions (a kind of samizdat). It was commonly held to be the most copied book in computer science."[0]

I had a look a couple of years ago, it's a joy to read. It's about UNIX on the PDP11. A 1977 version PDF is available here[1] - that page has a cover with endorsement from Ken Thompson and Foreword by Dennis Ritchie, but that seems from a later edition. The end of Lions' preface is funny:

"The co-operation of the "nroff" program must also be mentioned. Without it, these notes could never have been produced in this form. However it has yielded some of its more enigmatic secrets so reluctantly that the author's gratitude is indeed mixed. Certainly "nroff" itself must provide a fertile field for future practitioners of the program documenter's art."

The Use of these notes section:

"These notes, which are intended to supplement the comments already present in the source code, are not essential for understanding the UNIX operating system. It is perfectly possible to proceed without them, and you should attempt to do so as long as you can.

The notes are a crutch, to aid you when the going becomes difficult. If you attempt to read each file or procedure on your own first, your initial progress is likely to be slower, but your ultimate progress much faster. Reading other people's programs is an art which should be learnt and practised because it is useful!"

The end of the Introduction:

"...on the whole you will find that the authors of UNIX, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, have created a program of great strength, integrity and effectiveness, which you should admire and seek to emulate."

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6t...

[1]http://booksdescr.org/item/index.php?md5=6743D838476261CFDEF...
If you like a cancer analogy, blame the cigarettes, not the tumor.

People wouldn't be so interested in Bitcoin if the existing financial system didn't fail so many people. You don't get the cancer without the defects that cause it.

It shouldn't be possible to deny someone the ability to send or receive money. It sounds like a good idea (down with the bad guys), until you also push for a cashless society, at which point it's equivalent to demanding that they starve to death under a bridge because they have no way to buy food or pay rent. That's how to turn people at the margin into violent criminals.

It should be possible to electronically spend $100 anonymously. It isn't anybody's business what kind of books you want to read, or whether you want to donate to the EFF or your church or Planned Parenthood. Your sex life should be between you and your partner, not you, your partner, Paypal, Mastercard and Bank of America.

The existing system gets things like this wrong, which drives people to alternatives. If you don't like the alternatives, remove the demand for them by satisfying it within the existing system.
Chinese reader here. When I was in college about 11 or 12 years ago, a previous version of it is considered as one of our textbooks for the Operating System course. Most assignment and homework is about to add or modify some modules into kernel 0.11.
That's a bit of an edge case.
Maybe WOA will be a thing then too....
"It takes up about 1/600th the volume of natural gas in the gaseous state" [1]

So 600% by your calculation; 6 days?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquefied_natural_gas

edit: darn singlow beat me to it :)
>But as pipeline projects in New England face legal delays and public opposition

They're talking about the northern pass, a proposed 200 mile pipeline from Canada, through the White mountain national forest in to New England.

I know the region has energy and cost issues, but there has to be a better way than to put protected national land at risk.

We also recently had a "catastrophic failure", that caused a dozen explosions in homes, killed one, and caused 40 house fires.

It didn't rally a lot of support for natural gas expansion.
I'm happy they're reaping what they've sown. Company culture. Reason in reasonable.

I hope they drop either the contract, or the workers and their ilk.
It's actually worse than that:

Ships that transport goods or passengers between US ports must be US-registered, owned by US citizens, built in the US, and operated by US residents. It's a bit of exceptionally protectionist legislation passed a hundred years ago that continues to hang on mostly because nobody uses boats to move things between US ports anyway.

It's a mess for the cruise industry thought. Cruise ships are never built in the US, so they have to drop off passengers at the same port they picked them up at, or it's a $778 fine per passenger, even in a medical emergency. The cruise company will make the passenger pay the fine, of course.
Disclaimer: my experience is in containerized cargo, not in bulk like LNG.

I take issue with your first paragraph. While it's true that many American flagged carriers run a mainland to island business (PR, Hawaii) I wouldn't call them specialized. Matson and APL are both very large US flagged carriers that have significant trans-pacific volume (i.e. the most significant, mainstream global tradelane). In fact, Matson (US flagged) has a reputation for being a premium transpac carrier because they operate their own dedicated terminals and can turn around cargo much faster than others.

None of this is to say that the Jones Act isn't a protectionist piece of garbage, but the situation isn't as dire as you lay out.
The threat of disease isn't news, yet the constant propaganda against anti-vaxers is. People got exposed to measles in the past and the vast majority were fine. You can only get measles once and the odds of dying of measles is akin to the annual odds of choking to death.
It begs the question: are you personally responsible if the code you’ve written has led to the loss of life? Many would seem to think so. Either you accept you have blood on your hands, or you don’t engage in business with an outfit like the US military. Can’t have it both ways.
As someone from the UK, “Labour Party” is precisely why it has negative connotation!
Looks like 1440p gaming at a reasonable budget is finally here. Now we just need some good (non-curved) Nvidia-approved adaptive sync cards at 32" 1440p IPS.
Remember when bacterias suddenly decided to artificially dump oxygen in the atmosphere on a global scale? Once toxic and artificial, now part of the natural air we breathe.

Anyway, Wittgenstein would probably dismiss the relevance of defining what's natural or artificial for the world is made of facts and not of things.
Good, I hope this draws the attention of voters in the district.

My employer (very large) was sued twice in this court. Both times by trolls. The lawyers basically described this judge as running a ‘cottage industry’ and were unwilling to even set foot in that courtroom.

The patents the lawsuits were based on were insane. One of them was on any image compression for medical images which was somehow granted in 2005 (that’s another problem). There was reams of prior art but of course we settled. I was very low on the totem pole of the company but it still pissed me off to no end.
Can someone summarize the difference between these leaks and the ones in December?[1] I'm not seeing one at first pass

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-documents-six4three...
I see your point... However, fortunately, we are still able to tell the difference between a city block and the Amazon rainforest. The distinction between the two is still meaningful.
My bullshit detector was wailing at full blast reading this. The details seem extremely exaggerated. I guess you could call it storytelling.

Maybe I'm just annoyed by his slight on public transportation.
The link makes the natural vs mankind argument a little bit, but the notion of an Anthropocene doesn't really hinge on it.

For instance, other epochs are all named after natural things.

Regarding the general utility of the concept, it probably does at least occasionally make sense to distinguish between things that would happen without us and things that happen because of us. Doesn't mean we have to have an implied preference for the one or the other though.
Mcpp: A Portable C Preprocessor (2008)
Understand why it's free and where the offerer derives value.

- If it's from a company that is commoditizing its money-making products' internal dependencies, and it is in your interest for the software to become a commodity (e.g., you're pondering switching to Linux, which has patches from Google), great. Tough luck for those commercializing that software, though - so just make sure that development is sustainable.

- If it's from a company that's commoditizing its money-making products' complements (see https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ if you haven't), think carefully about how that complement relationship works. If it's Red Hat producing a window manager, sure, whatever. If it's Red Hat producing a complex infrastructure platform, and they make money based on support to make that platform work, maybe not so much.

- If it's from a company that's making money in an unclear, unrelated way (e.g., you're pondering using Android, which is developed by Google), look extremely skeptically and figure out what their real incentives are. There is a legitimate explanation for Android and Chrome: it's in Google's interest to promote the web as a platform, because they make money on web advertising. But that explanation might not be totally convincing to you, in which case running the other way is a fine answer.

- If it's from a source whose motivations are not linked to the capitalist machine (e.g., someone with a well-paying day job who's working on a side project on weekends), that's fine. Note that things from companies are almost never in this category.

- If it's from a company that hasn't yet realized that it's beholden to the capitalist machine (e.g., the early years of Ubuntu, or a young company with too much VC money), you might as well take advantage of it in the short term but have some plans about the long term.

- If it's from a source that you can pay, despite it being free, and you can afford to pay for it, do so. Pitch in to that developer's Patreon, buy the paid license for the neat monitoring product your company is using, etc.
Orange Man Bad and all that. There is plenty to jibe at Trump about, however, starting wars is not one of them. That's the exclusive realm of professional Ivy league educated politicians and diplomats AKA our betters.
If I’m being paid about 150% of market average, that’s a win for me, regardless of what the CEO is paying himself.

If I’m paid below average, any cent he makes more than me will build resentment.
Palantir Gotham – Titan Release
May I ask you to link such thread. Am not able to find it on algolia
A Philosopher Argues That an AI Can’t Be an Artist
> This reminds me a bit of how mystics often claim to have seen colors not seen in nature.

There is infinitely more wavelength info even in the visible light of nature than the crude three dimensional mapping our eyes can present to our brains.

One simple example: We can't distinguish green light from mixed blue and yellow light.

So my point, which I know I'm annoying slow to get to, is that we're nowhere near seeing "the colors of nature".

For sound we do much better.
So, perhaps it's me, but why do folks care about the number on the part? It's all marketing. Why does it matter? What matters is performance, right?
Facebook quiet literally figured out how to build a global social network connecting billions of people.

Given they solved that insanely hard problem pretty well, I’d suggest they could also solve this if they had sufficient motivation.
Can Google Target a Person?
https://www.historicaerials.com/viewer is amazing for this purpose. They've aggregated decades of aerials and topo maps covering most of the US.

A great way to analyze urban development patterns and answer local historical questions.
I think you're right about the lecture moment. I forget which doc as well, but it rings a bell for sure.
A novel which accentuated the problems of alcohol would not be very entertaining.

I don't think many people who read Bukowski think "wow, that's the life for me!"
Most towns don’t have anything like that. What local economic activity there is fulfills inherently local needs: healthcare, education, construction trades, retail, etc. Maybe a handful of “legacy” players on the national/international stage still holding on from back when those things were less geographically centralized, with layoffs looming.

Places desperate to become “the next Silicon Valley” aren’t anything to outsiders, as far as I can tell. That’s why they’re desperate.
True, but the Great Oxygenation Event took an extremely long time to effect most species though, and there are certainly exceptions, but that's just it, they're exceptions. Humans are pretty much guaranteed to introduce change (we are innovators/technologists to our core.)
What are your thoughts on the Amish? As I understand it they don't get vaccinated, but they also don't interact much with the rest of society.

Where do you think the line should be drawn in your hypothetical government intervention?
> most today's developers don't care about environment reproducibility at architecture level.

Source for this? Seems like pure speculation.
Deepfakes and the Threat to Privacy and Truth
I like these first two suggestions
That is exactly why I required all of my software engineering students to write a research paper on software flaws that injured or killed people. I wish I could be more confident that all companies producing products that can harm people spent the time and money necessary to discover and remediate all defects but corners are cut all too often and the lure of cheap labor is just too tempting to resist.

Maybe Boeing and Airbus will never have an Ada developer make an error that kills a plane full of people but there's already a push for javascript to be used in embedded systems and I'm sure it's coming from someone seeing the large numbers of javascript programmers coming out of coding boot camps and similar programs.
The outcomes are only bad for lawyers because they all graduate with mountains of debt and get totally shafted if they can't get a super-high-paying job to cover that expense, and those high-paying jobs are in short supply. In some sense, though, society as a whole would be better off if there were more lawyers, and more of them were able to work for less money: poor tenants would be able to afford counsel in landlord/tenant disputes to fight unjust evictions, people wouldn't be stuck in failed marriages for want of being able to afford the legal costs of a divorce, etc., etc. All sorts of people could benefit from legal services they can't afford, and you'd think that market forces, with the increased supply, would drive down cost. It hasn't, though, because debt loads create an artificial floor.

I think exploring more of the possible solution space for how to train and pay tech folks has all sorts of potential for society as there are definitely parallels there in terms of the potential social utility of making technical labor more abundant and less expensive. Obviously there's a downside for people who work in tech and keep wanting to make fuck-you money, but so it goes.
> Good, I hope this draws the attention of voters in the district.

It's not an electoral district, but a judicial one, all of whose officials are Presidential appointees, not locally elected. There's a tradition (weaker in the last few decades, especially when the White House is in opposite hands from the Senate seats in the state) of consultation with the Senators of the state containing the district when appointing judges, but in large states (where judicial districts aren't the whole state, as is the case here since it's the Eastern District of Texas and not the [non-existent] plain unmodified District of Texas) that still doesn't provide a special role for “voters of the district” distinct from those of the whole containing state.
Because it’s nice to be able to have some idea of what the product is without having to dig into a bunch of tech specs.
> Or they may fall on their face, like every other attempt at central planning has.

China isn't centrally planned anymore, and hasn't been for a long time.
Because it’s easy to compare X110 > X109.

Or if there’s a grouping like GP describes, you can quickly ascertain which model is the one you want.
Civil: Community-Owned Journalism Network with a GitHub Repo
Ever look at Esperanto? Every word is pronounced how it is spelled.