skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Humans descended from primates, which have been eating a mostly vegetarian diet for about 55 million years or so. Why not got with the diet that stood the the test of time for much longer?

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest...

Drawdown.org found that plant-based diets are a top solution for climate change-- something that wasn't a concern 200k years ago.

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

Harvard research also found that we need to eliminate beef and dairy to avoid climate catastrophe.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14693062.2018.1...

Mother nature does have a good filter for harmful things: If humans don't address our contributions to climate change, we may be the thing that's filtered!
> and a surge of new, sometimes govt-backed competitors

Eh, if you build it, they won't necessarily come (e.g. google+).
Progress in Clinical Development Programs for Crispr/Cas9 Gene-Editing Therapy
Two comments:
1. The ACA has by all accounts kept the growth of healthcare costs in check. Yes they have gone up, but at not nearly the rate they were going up before it, let alone the increased rate that most expected. If you start getting into the details this makes a lot of sense, but those details often get lost in the conversation about mandatory coverage (and the subsidies to make that possible on the low end).

2. This sort of cost savings to the insurers is more moving the costs to other people, thus negating most of the cost savings incentives.
Facebook is reachable through the official Onion Service at: http://facebookcorewwwi.onion/

Look into bridges and pluggable transports if vanilla Tor is blocked.
ehh, 10 year old CPUs kinda suck. I upgraded from a 2010 MBA to a Thinkpad X240 in 2015, and it's been much better.

The Penryn Core 2 Duo made the Macbook warm and noisy (the joke was that it's called Air because the fans push a lot of air all the time), while the Haswell-ULT chip literally pulls ~1W for the whole package at idle, and the fan often just stays off, and even when it's on it's very quiet.
The question "what is truth?" is as old as time, and so important that we've created a system to analyze it and attempt to come to a consensus[0]. If an idea is untestable, it is logical and good for your sanity to assume that it is false until proven otherwise.

We assume that certain aspects of reality are real because they are testable and repeatable. We say gravity exists because every time we drop something, it falls down towards Earth, and if we apply other assumptions while looking out in the sky, we see other objects falling towards each other. The assumption is logical and testable.

It is impossible to test whether we just materialized, therefore it's safe to assume it did not happen unless repeatable testing indicates otherwise.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
16:9 for a work machine is a bad choice, and the resolution is horrible.
Seriously, anything that is not fully readable without going through additional hoops should be removed, or not even posted in the first place.
It's difficult and painful to negotiate anything better than than a payment plan if you don't have a lump sum to offer. Patients have very little leverage.
Exactly. You can't say "That won't happen" or "that's unlikely to happen". You have to have a way that handles it so that, even if it does happen, the guy on the sled doesn't die.
> If anyone's considering moving their email addresses over this, please take the time to get your own custom domain to host email on. That way you can switch providers more easily and actually own your email address.

Seconded. I'd also add make that domain a .com, .net, or .org.

Yes, some of the other TLDs are cheaper, especially since they started making TLDs for almost everything. But spammers have jumped all over those, using them in from and return addresses. I suspect that a fair number of people have black holed email from entire TLDs due to this.

I know I have. I'm currently dropping all email from domains under: accountant, bid, christmas, click, club, cricket, date, download, faith, gdn, gq, help, info, link, loan, men, party, press, pro, racing, review, science, site, space, stream, team, top, trade, uno, webcam, website, win, work, xyz, and zone.
> It's amazing to me that the people who write these laws are the least capable of understanding their impact.

Kind of makes you wonder about the other laws they write that touch things you aren't as familiar with...
... isn't that the hardest part, predicting workload, for many companies. Scaling up within a colo can be troublesome due to procuring hw, having remote hands rack it, setup, etc.

If you can predict workload then you could also reduce your cloud bills, in theory, by moving spinning up/down instances.

Many are going the cloud route because the cost of entry is much easier to start developing but eventually, yes, the cost skyrockets and you do end up paying for putting little forethought into the real workload requirements.
Reed Solomon codes are cool
If you have someone who knows how to design systems and your workload is constant most of the time with occasioal spikes you could run your base load on your own machines and offload the spikes to AWS.
Even a doctor won't diagnose without having a look at the patient in question. You are asking laymen to come up with a medical cure/prevention. There are so many factors involved. All the life long choices contribute to the chronic conditions. You should go ask a doctor/specialist/diagnostician.
> It doesn't have functions they are normally thought of - but most BASIC languages of the era (generally Microsoft derived) did have simple "DEF FN" style:

Um, yes? That’s exactly what I meant by “an even more limited form of Python's style of lambdas”. Which is what they are. I never used them myself; I never, ever, found a use for them.

The rest of your argument seems to be “If you’re careful, it’s techically possible to write structured code.”, but the same can be said of most any language. Even assembly language for $FOO’s sake, usually has labels!
Maybe you saw https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.ht... a year or two ago which does something similar in generating rhyming definitions, also using a word2vec approach.
>No, it's like having someone a poor sense of smell detect which things smell and which things don't.

I'd guess most can identify murder and gore films even if they don't mind them. They're pretty obvious.

I don't understand why taking advantage of this "dysfunction" is a bad thing.
You could always adopt kids and give them the benefit of your intelligence, education, and motivation.
A friendly reminder, that you also should not use sunscreen.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2380751/sunscreen-sun-exposure...
And anyone who down voted this comment is clicking the "I am a moron" button.
It's great that you're not super gung-ho over the current approach, and still searching. While not convinced currently, I'll keep you guys on my radar in the future. I'm sure there is an application for VR/AR in this space, but I'm also sure it'll take some time and a lot of elbow grease to figure out what it is.

In the immediate future, I hope someone figures out a way to build a video conferencing solution which lets me "raise a virtual hand" when I'd like to speak, and for the person running the meeting to designate the current speaker. I think the current solutions all suck because there's no way to do it (so you have to talk over somebody else, fighting considerable audio lag), and I think VR would only exacerbate this because the experience is more visceral.
For those interested, the pdf of the datacenter book is freely available on the publisher's site: https://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/10.2200/S00874ED3V01Y2018...
Intelligence analysts who know the material they are analyzing is propaganda still need active intervention to prevent them adopting the views they are analyzing critically. It’s just an issue with how our minds work.
I have worked at a startup that was paying > 20k per month for AWS. I am certain the whole system could run on one dedicated blade. There was just this culture (made easy with docker containers) of "spin up another box" for every silly little tool. I have met self taught dev ops people who did not understand that you could create more than one user on a aws ubuntu machine. I was like: "if cost is a big issue, then lets spin up one beefy machine and create users for each dev", because thats what everyone using unix did back in the day (it works fine). The reply was "thats not possible" so every dev got their own dedicated instance that was 99% idle. We are paying >3k per month to aws and the business team is complaining about waste. sigh. old guy rant over.
> 60-90 minutes

That's really, really low for a *40. Unless you mean like 90 minutes of full CPU usage.
>Planes gliding to a safe landing after losing power isn't something anyone should be harboring disbelief of to begin with. I've experienced it twice myself.

You must have been really lucky.

Sure, planes are perfectly capable of gliding to a safe landing after losing power. The problem is that there usually isn't a safe place nearby on the ground to land them at. So instead of a smooth, safe landing on some tarmac, they have a horrible crash-landing onto some kind of ground, if they're lucky. If they're not lucky, there's only mountains around and they just crash into them.

The nice thing about helicopters losing power is that a helicopter only needs a very small patch of level ground to land safely. Airplanes need an airstrip of some kind, and big airplanes need really long ones. Usually, if they're lucky, there's a decently straight highway close by.
Exactly. Because the recorded history shows those constructs are nearly impossible to use correctly.
Yes. It was part of why certain assurance activities were in TCSEC at B3/A1 levels. It's why they had to model every behavior, every information flow, allow independent replication, and allow building from source locally. Leaves little room to hide backdoors.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Eval...

DO-178C also traces code to requirements to spot dead code or back doors.
H-1B changes will simplify application process
Initiative to Bring Vulkan GPU Acceleration to Safety Critical Industries
On the other hand, a powerful concurrency abstraction can make it much easier to reason about a large system. But I agree that the “fearless” part is mostly unjustified.
While those primitives you mention make it possible to get a correct result, they require consistent and correct use from the programmers. While some of us may do this perfectly most of the time, bugs are inevitably created. This is reality.

Fearless concurrency means guaranteeing many of those problems cannot occur. That frees up brain cycles, eases maintenance, reduces bugs, and perhaps even opens up concurrency to a wider audience or set of use cases.
Some years back, the California legislature passed a bill which limited what hospitals could charge uninsured patients to the Medicare reimbursement rates. Schwarzenegger vetoed it.
Another woman who only invest with other women, this is not diversity but #genderwars.

I thought people were enlightened enough to understand that discriminating against others is bad no matter how you do it, as in this case discriminating against men.
First contact: what if we find not organic life but ET’s AI? – Aeon Essays
Some of the worst offenders, which are generally companies and governments, are led by educated, motivated kits in the developed world.
Back then we already had the bucket for a few years and the person who set it up probably didn't think about the implications and simply chose to use the AWS-provided bucket URL.

And that person isn't alone. If you look around, you'll find a lot of services on the internet which directly link to S3 buckets using thee AWS-provided endpoints.
At a high level there are names for what the author attempts to describe in computer science:

1) Schema on write

The schema is enforced by the storage layer when data is persistet, optimized for defined use cases and fast. ACID. Typical RDBMS systems.

2) Schema on read

This is was big data query processing and data lakes are about. Data is not interpreted or given meaning until it is read from the store and put into context.

Just thought that might add value to the discussion.
> Why would a physically instantiated function feel like anything at all

Because its life depends on it. Seeing a berry and not distinguishing its colour could be fatal.

> rather than just a bunch of matter moving around

We're all a bunch of matter moving around. But we have perception - which is just a neural net converting images to image representations (and other senses in a similar way), and a value function - which rates the expected future rewards in a situation. Perception + value (emotion) creates what philosophers call qualia. These systems have been created by evolution because they are useful for survival.

> The question is about why the feelings themselves exist.

Again, because we have specific apparatus that computes perception representations and estimates future rewards related to our current situation and action, and because these representations are essential for life to continue.

The key differences between an agent and a non-agent are self replication and learning. We have these qualities while rocks don't. Self replication enables evolution and gives an intrinsic goal, a constraint if you will, to the agent. The constraint is what learning and evolution optimise against.

More fundamentally, it's a process that maintains low entropy (order) of the body inside the environment by actively compensating for perturbations.
Second this. There is too much readability lost, for the style gained.
Practical Facts about the Human Brain
+1 on a Thinkpad. I have a T420s that's almost a decade old now, and it still works pretty well (the beast still has a drive bay!). I swapped that out for a SSD that's configured to be the main boot drive few years ago. I think it'll last at least another 5 years.
I guess I still don't know exactly what the more general statement is you're referring to. Do you mean just that a non-zero probability of a single event happening equals 100% probability given a large enough sample of events (which may take a large amount of time)?

I feel like Murphy's law as stated captures that idea adequately. And it's certainly true if the event probability really is non-zero. Sometimes, though, we can calculate event probabilities that are apparently non-zero based on known information, but are zero in reality.

One example in my head is quantum tunneling. Maybe this is along the lines you're talking about? And this is the way my physics TA described it many years ago, but caveat I'm not a physicist and I suspect there are some problems with this analogy. He said you can calculate the probability of an atom spontaneously appearing on the other side of a solid wall, and you can calculate the same (less likely) probability of two atoms going together, therefore there is a non-zero probability that a human can teleport whole through the wall. The odds are too small to expect to ever see it, but on the other hand, with the amount of matter in the universe we should expect to see small scale examples somewhat often, and we don't. There may be unknown reasons that the probability of an event is zero.
Very cool idea, I like where you're going! If you haven't already, do some in-person playtesting with people, stay totally quiet and watch them work through it. Or use userbob (no affiliation to me).

I think you'll find lots of usability bumps that are getting in the way of the cool thing you have here.
It’s only a viability issue because everyone does it.

Regulation can help here.
> I recently read Shoe Dogs

I suspect you're referring to "Shoe Dog" (singular, not plural) by Phil Knight describing the early history of Nike.

It is a fascinating book, indeed.
In 1985, putting your own pixels on the CRT was a pretty big deal.

We used to write goofy games, share them, hack on all of it, and had lots of fun. Imagination.

Now, the blue dot is the baddie, and you....
There's no black and white here. Yes, rewriting your software from scratch is the worst mistake you can make. Most of the time. Except for those cases where it is actually the right decision. Good luck figuring out up front which one is the situation you are in.
> I have never seen a company where a large number of people were actively harming the company and the company survived.

"To survive" is a temporal measure.
It's pretty common for companies to survive on a successful product (or group of products). The rest of the company was a shell and revenue sink for that line.
Hospitals cannot charge less than they charge insurance otherwise it would be constituted as insurance fraud.

This implies that all insurers pay the same rates, which I think is not true.
As far as I understand, it doesn't have any kind of boosted resistance or anything, so it shouldn't dominate and replace wild rice the way other modified rice might.

That said, if farmers move from producing a wide variety of rice strains to only golden rice, that's still a significant reduction in biodiversity. Maybe they should make beta-carotene versions of more kinds of rice.

Mixing in a few greens is surprisingly hard when people are almost too poor to buy rice.
Yes they are. I decided to leave O365 business and was ready to switch to FastMail when this law was passed. I decided to keep looking and found German mailbox.org and chose them instead. So far so good.
Yeah. You can give Microsoft a lot of crap, but what never ceases to amaze me is how inventive they were in keeping everything as compatible as possible, which they usually (successfully, mostly) pursued at all cost. Of course, that came with a high price, in terms of complexity and kludginess.
This is not hell.

I have had mercifully little exposure to this world, but I once had to implement ACLs for a storage system my company bult. We stored ACLs, and needed to make them available through Linux and Windows interfaces.

Linux was easy.

Windows (ca. 2006) was a fucking nightmare that puts this document to shame. From what I could tell, there was no concept of an API. There were data structures, and the interpretation of them depended on many things, including minor OS version.
I guess it depends if your kid is a vegetarian then :^)
Maybe they mean something else but I expect a GET request is $0.0004 per 1,000 requests (i.e. $0.40 per million requests) regardless of whether it returns a file (200) or not (404). Sounds more like a nuisance than a financial risk.
From what I skimmed, the article covers almost everything from the business side. It lacks some developer's points of view, however, more content would do this document not readable.
It's also pretty good writing especially in the times where cross-platform development gains more and more hype. ReactNative and Flutter are the future. What do you think?
Cold weather layering tips for the polar vortex, explained
Another way of looking at it is that you have a schema whether you like it or not.

If I write some code to sum up account balances, it's going to expect a series of account objects, and they need to have some `.balance` field.

And those fields need to be decimals, because addition will choke if they're not.

Your code implicitly defines a schema, and it's utterly rigid because it will crash if the data structure is incorrect.

Or worse.

Imagine if some of the "balances" are actually some irrelevant field that happens to be a number, or some are missing because some of the JSON misspelled the field name and you skipped those records. Now the result you're processing is silently wrong, and who knows how far the corrupt data gets before someone catches it?

All schemas are enforced rigidly because that's how computers work. The difference is whether you want the DBMS to nag you while you're coding, or whether you'd rather be woken in the middle of the night by an angry customer or boss.
Unfortunately most things are 16:9. Some MacBooks are 16:10, and Surfaces are 3:2 which is really cool, but 16:9 still dominates :(
> Why would you want to download it in the first place? You can read the documents in your browser just fine

Because you don't want it to 404 on you after a year or two.
It's low-value work. Facebook doesn't value these people enough to employ them so they likely don't have access to properly engineered tools.
I have an application written almost 20 years ago using unstructured storage (imagine a JSON blob but not JSON) and it still has code to handle the various schema changes that have happened over the years.

The data itself is what would be considered unstructured; basically many dozens of different document types. This is why I chose to store it this way. However, in retrospect, it would have been much better for maintenance, performance, quality, and code-size to have created every document type as a separate strongly-typed table.
I asked them (Posteo) about this 2 weeks ago and below is the response I received. I'm not an expert in this area, but the response sounded reasonable to me:

> We do not offer domain services because we do not save any personal data
for any of our services. This is not possible with domains.

> Domains must be registered to a person’s name and address. As a
provider, we would be required to store inventory data for all customers
that use their own domains with us. As a result, we would have to
provide this information to government agencies when requested.

> Additionally, security reasons also play a role in this decision. With
customer domains, the owner of the domain is responsible for setting up
security features like DNSSEC (and as a result also DANE). Even things
such as SPF and other protocols for delivery would lie in the customer’s
hand and could not be guaranteed by us.

> Because of these reasons we have decided not to offer domain services
and instead to remain consistent with our focus on data economy.
From their FAQ:

> If you don't charge fees, how do you make money?

> We earn revenue from the interest on deposits in Azlo accounts. We also earn a small sum every time someone makes a purchase with an Azlo card—the merchant pays to process the card transaction, and we get part of that payment.

Is this sustainable? From what I’ve seen businesses do not use debit cards, they prefer credit cards so Azlo wouldn’t be making much from the (already limited) debit fees.

The interest on deposits is a hell of gamble as well. Assuming they get about 2%, how much would the average account actually have on hand? Anybody with more than a couple $K to pay their rolling bills is better served with their own dedicated business savings account to get the 2% for themselves. That’d leave small accounts that are going earn next to nothing for Azlo.
Likewise the colors. The red and green circles are nigh indiscernible by me.
The last couple of years at my previous job I was working in life sciences domain, got to meet several researchers that were using VB.NET for their research projects.

In all cases they were people that could already do some stuff in Office VBA, got IT to have them a VS install made available to them, and just coded away on VB.NET when needed.

It helped that many devices in life sciences tend to have Windows only drivers, sometimes COM based, as such on their specific domain, having .NET based applications around was already pretty common anyway.
My daily driver is mid-2012 pre-retina MBP. It's entirely adequate. I fear the day it dies because there are no more non-glossy MBPs, and I'm either going to have to make the choice to give up a matte display or give up macOS.

It did recently go down and I pulled out a 2008 MBP. Mostly adequate, lag does start to show, though. My guess is that it's an issue of constrained memory (max 4GB?) as much as processor. Tops out at El Capitan, though, so it won't be viable too much longer. Linux seems to be the slow lane of the upgrade treadmill.