skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Saying that we should be most concerned with those who are in the most danger ignores their conscious choice in making a dangerous choice in the first place

There's nothing inherently dangerous about choosing to ride a bicycle. It becomes dangerous to ride a bicycle when operators of ~4000lb machines choose to not operate them safely around others.

> as a driver having to veer into oncoming traffic to avoid them is dangerous

I'm fairly certain a driver also put the lives of everyone on the road at a higher priority than their own convenience. They aren't forced to "veer".
The Fastest Linux Distributions for Web Browsing – Benchmarks on Eight Distros
> I don't think you'd be able to get a non-collateralized loan based on putative IPO stock value.

I've heard that people with a ton of stock can find people willing to work with them. If you have $100 million USD in HawtStartup, I'm sure someone who believes that stock is going WAY up would be happy to buy at today's price w/ some discount in 6 months. Kind of like how farmers sell futures. I'm not an expert on the subject, and I've never had the kind of equity locked up, so who knows.
I agreed with you... before I picked up a pair. As with several of Apple's best products, the reality of using them exceeds what you'd expect from merely reading about them. The iPad was the same way for me when they came out.

I bought an LTE iPad a couple of years ago, and had been using Sony Bluetooth headphones for some time for conference calls and such. I was at PyCon and my headphones crapped out on me - since I use them for work daily, my employer was reimbursing me anyhow and I decided to go ahead and splurge on AirPods.

WOW. Just wow. I found myself pairing them to my iPad and purposefully leaving it uncovered in my backpack while walking around so I could talk to Siri. I had a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge at the time, and while I was very happy with it, I went out the next week and bought an iPhone X primarily so I'd be able to access Siri from my AirPods more easily and without having to leave the cover off my iPad.

I've since upgraded my iPad to an 11" iPad Pro - and all because of the AirPods, honestly. I've spent almost $3k in total because of them, and am happy with that.
> You seem to have an unrealistic idea of how much a "drone" would cost.

It depends on the role. Probably a few million at least, you're right, but when comparing to ~90 million dollar planes, comparatively cheap. The Air Force actually already has plans for this, and the F-35 makes a bit more sense in light of that, as it can help control a swarm of drones and they can take advantage of it's enhanced sensor suite.[1][2]

> If you mean an F-16 class vehicle capable of catching an F-35 (supersonic) and carrying half a dozen missiles, then you're in the F-16 cost range. Not having a pilot might only save a few hundred pounds.

Not having a pilot would save a few hundred pounds of flesh. Having a vehicle that isn't designed around a cockpit allows for a different fuselage, with a smaller cross section, which is more aerodynamic and uses less material.

That said, the drone I referenced above cruises at close to the same speed as the F-35 from the info I've seen, and at one of the articles notes that the stated cost is $2-$3 million each.[1] It's not currently specced for any air-to-air armaments, but I imagine if they see a benefit, they'll alter it as needed.

1: https://www.businessinsider.com/air-force-tests-xq-58a-valky...

2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2019/03/27/killer-dr...
> Uber had better IPO this year.

Since Powell lost his nerve, and completely rolled over for the investor class, I think you'll see more IPO's than you can shake a stick at in the very near future. The banker's have realized the IPO Market is wide open (for now!), and better make hay while the sun shines.
https://www.google.com/search?q=fast+food+non+competes
>These people are more than free to express themselves in any public platform or their own platform.

I don't take this position seriously anymore, because I've seen time and time again that people who espouse it immediately flip 180 degrees when some large platform starts censoring content they want to post or see.

The opposite is also true. Some people who speak against censorship flip 180 degrees when they don't like some content. (Though a bit less often, it seems.)

My conclusion: before saying anything of this sort, you have to be able to present a clear general rule (that other people can apply without asking you) that distinguishes between cases of censorship you're okay with from other cases. That's the only way such conversation can start in a rational manner.

Realistically, very few people truly believe that big companies should be home free to delete anything they want, solely their own discretion (including content from human right activists, opposition parties, corporate whistle-blowers, scientists and critics of the platform in question).
> Disregarding external weapons (if it uses any, it's no longer stealthy)

I wonder how much less stealthy it using external weapons. I mean, it's not like an AMRAAM has a gigantic radar signature already. Is radar signature additive? Would an F-35 with external missiles have a radar signature of an F-35 + those missiles, or does having those missiles attached to the body have some sort of interaction that makes the whole signature much bigger?

Because if mounting missiles externally results in reduced but still a decent degree of stealth, you can cram 8x AMRAAMs and 2 sidewinders on the F-35.
Apple Cancels AirPower Product
The article implies they're more on the side of IT.
New legal repository for crypto-related law and lawyers launches
Yes, but there is probably a lot of value in the network you build would would make those remote jobs easier to get.
Who is number 1 youtuber in the world?
I don't really agree with the article's argument that it's so bad if this or that group becomes wealthy. The government can easily solve that through taxation if it so chooses.

I think the more important piece of information embedded in articles like these is the truth of how venture capital (and capitalism generally) works.

I know a couple of the people listed in the web of connections here. In general, I'd say they view their exceptional talents as responsible for their investment success. They are undoubtedly smart and capable people, but the key element in their success is that they get the first look at startup ideas and venture investments because of their social status in silicon valley.

Top VCs can't really outperform the market if forced to invest in a level playing field. They know this, so they focus more on the pedigree of deals than on the actual ideas. That's how you wind up with big-name people investing in frauds like Theranos and obvious con-jobs like U-Beam.

I don't see anything wrong with this necessarily, but it's worthwhile to point out what's really going on. That way, young entrepreneurs and budding venture capitalists know what they're getting into. The truth of the matter is, if you want a sure way to make money, you should join a firm who has this kind of access. Go work at Goldman Sachs or Kleiner Perkins.

If you eschew that path, realize that you are actually taking on far more risk than averages might imply, since you are choosing not to have the first look at ideas and deals. In fact, you'll likely do rather poorly.

Long history suggests the only way to consistently make money in a level playing field such as public markets is the Buffett way -- essentially using behavioral economics to bet against emotional mistakes made by market participants at market highs and lows.

From a policy perspective, I've long thought you could argue for a much higher capital-gains tax on any gains in excess of 20% per year on investments (more or less what Buffett has returned). The rationale is that such gains must have been generated by labor, luck, connections, or some combination of the three. This is not to suggest there is anything unsavory about such returns -- it's just that they are not broadly available.
And, yet, that bacterium isn't consuming and breaking down all the PET around it (It was isolated outside a bottling facility, after all. It should spread like wildfire.).

Why?

Because the energy expended to break down the plastic means that it is outcompeted by the bacteria who get their materials by other means unless plastic is the only thing available.

In the ocean, there is always lots of other things available.

Perhaps this will turn out like the evolution of lignin-modifying enzymes, but those took a LONG time to come about even while lignin is far less stable than most plastics.
"we hypothesized that there may be a seizure-specific olfactory component that would be common to different individuals and types of seizures"

Vague & untestable. This is not a scientific hypothesis because it's not falsifiable.

It's missing a suggested explanation of the phenomenon. What happens between the seizure and the smell? Magic? Fairies? How could a seizure cause an odor?

The study fails to establish that the dogs are relying exclusively on odor. For all we know there could something else happening. For example, we know dogs can sense magnetic fields. What if the seizure patient releases some kind of ferromagnetic material which the dogs can detect magnetically?
How does that gripper work?
This is an accurate description of how pedestrians view drivers.
And like I said before, this isn't a binary. Extremist content is often interesting.
Does Google really think they can make a better iOS than Apple?
I’ve done experiments with Opus that produce intelligible (but ugly) speech at 2.3 kbit/s. It involves downsampling the Opus stream at the packet level—e.g. transmit only one out of every three packets. It was surprisingly easy. Nothing as sophisticated as what’s going on here.

Also based on work by Xiph. Possibly using the same LPC used here.
Nobody Is Perfect, Everything is Commensurable
In other news YouTube released Stories (Snapchat / Instagram feature) to make help users be "more engaged" ... https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/29/18117670/youtube-stories...

... give users so much control over their experience is counter to having algorithms that suck them into spending more time.
Whether a rule is "worth it" or not isn't the evaluation I'm making at all; the first question, before that, is "is there a critical life-or-death reason to interfere with a private transaction". There are plenty of features I'd like to have, and I look for people who sell products with those features. I often support people that specifically provide better documentation, open source software, diagrams, schematics, as well as companies that give back to the people and projects who make components they use. That's my choice, because I value those things. I'd certainly like other people to value those things as well.
What is the infosec analogue to swatting? To me it seems part denial of service attack (distracting resources with false event), and part amplification attack (a small action triggers intense potentially violent response)

The fact that it's possible for a child to trigger a "swat" where people can and have died highlights a significant vulnerability in the procedures currently used by police.

Why isn't more effort being put into making these processes safer for civilians?
It depends on what you're doing and how much of the site it is. An add-in might be an almost totally separate product already, just one that's leveraging the existing infrastructure of WP such as logins, permissions, theming, etc. If it's just leveraging those things (and thereby changing appropriately if you change appearances) then how important is it if it's written in PHP?

I will say that if you're spending 10k+ on add-ins that you should probably make sure you've looked into what you're doing and how. That sounds like the kind of pricing I'd expect if you're having a custom add-in developed rather than what I'd expect for a commercially available one. Something custom may be appropriate, but unless your needs are unique it may not be the best approach.
I definitely agree that there is a perfect world where designs are fully researched with a battery of user tests and for large companies like Facebook, Atlassian, and Lyft this is critical to their success. Every design decision, large and small, matters when you have an audience of billions of people. Furthermore, there is no excuse not to conduct research when you have the resources to dedicate to doing design right.

That said, if you are a scrappy startup (or in the case of an article, a single founder who may not even be a designer to begin with), it is often necessary to simply do whatever it takes to deliver a product. Money, time, experience, infrastructure, personnel, etc., are all limiting factors.

If I were consulting on a project for a Fortune 500 I would tell them to leverage their resources to maximize their change of success. If I were consulting on a project for a small business or startup I would tell them to be smart and triage key pieces that represent their "special sauce" above features that feel more like known territory.
This is curious, as I just did a test with grep and ggrep. The latter is almost 3 times faster for a very common use case I have.
> Getting a high-level language driver upstreamed in Linux is of course unrealistic, so user space drivers it is.

There's work being done on source-level translation from Rust code to C (mrustc is part of this of course, but nowhere near complete), so I'm not sure why this should be seen as unrealistic.
Livpure Smart: Pay for what you drink, powered by IoT water purifiers
Their output decreases but they don't "wear out." This motor requires such little power a small solar panel would work for a very long time.
I'm not angry. I just feel people demanding respect after proclaiming how their arduous sacrifice is bettering the lives of everyone everyday don't quite understand the meaning of the word.

I never expected people to get so worked up about my comment. It was more of a 'oh yeah, here's some of my shitty traffic experiences involving cyclists' if there's some commonality to what others have said, maybe these are actual issues. It was really just supposed to be some musing about these things.

Honestly I spend more time worrying about people in cars. The only times i've come close to death on a road were from idiot drivers. Bikes have frustrated me but they've never almost killed me and thankfully, i've never been involved in any situations where i've almost killed a cyclist and I really never want to be.

If you are a regular bicycle commuter, rather than demand respect from everyone after ranting about how the rules of the road don't apply to you, maybe take these issues into account as you travel and understand sharing the road doesn't just mean people need to be aware of you and get out of your way, it also means you need to be aware and take actions to avoid others, even if others are breaking traffic rules. Again this applies to anyone using a road. This is for your own safety and everyone's.
This was an enjoyable read for me, well-written and reflective and more importantly: critical without being overtly cynical.

There's one thing that's always been kicking around in the back of my mind since I started getting involved in various open-source projects the last couple years that was missing, though: Despite all the unpleasant parts of our participation, we're actually very fortunate to have that inner drive to roll up our sleeves.

There have been so many millions of humans that have tried to answer the call of their era's needs and leave things better than they found them, almost always with scant chances of success and even smaller chances that any of their labors will be faithfully documented and offer them some form of a legacy. While I know VCS often creates its own headaches, it is always silently creating that faithful record of our labors. Sure, there's a good chance that those that come after us will never have any cause to stumble across that one section of the commit log where your ingenuity quietly dominated a problem that people had tried to solve for years, but even so, it exists. I figure between that small perk and the fact that we can listen to whatever music we like or throw up a comforting old TV show from childhood on the second monitor while we do our thing, we have it pretty good even at the worst moments along the way.
I was going to say reinvent X11 and then X terminals but the same applies.
The tax that gets passed along in rent is property tax, which in California is generally pretty low[1] compared to other states because of prop 13[2].

[1] https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-highest-and-lowest...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
There's nothing inherently dangerous about choosing to ride a bicycle. It becomes dangerous to ride a bicycle when operators of ~4000lb machines choose to not operate them safely around others.

Nonsense. The injury rate on bikes dwarfs cars even putting aside collisions with motor vehicles.

https://www.rospa.com/rospaweb/docs/advice-services/road-saf...

Per billion vehicle miles, 1,011 pedal cyclists are killed or seriously injured, in comparison to 26 car drivers6.

That’s per mile traveled, and it’s two orders of magnitude more dangerous by bike.

Almost two thirds of cyclists killed or seriously injured were involved in collisions at, or near, a road junction, with T-junctions being the most commonly involved. Roundabouts are particularly dangerous junctions for cyclists. Not surprisingly, the severity of injuries suffered by cyclists increases with the speed limit, meaning that riders are more likely to suffer serious or fatal injuries on higher speed roads. Almost half of cyclist deaths occur on rural roads.

It’s also a given that all of the billions driving vehicles will not all be safe all of the time, it’s part of life. Some people are drunk, tired, old, or careless... there is no changing this. It’s something to strive to improve, but positive a magical perfect world which allows for cycling to be less risky than driving is fantastical at best, dishonest at worst.

I'm fairly certain a driver also put the lives of everyone on the road at a higher priority than their own convenience. They aren't forced to "veer".

Most people don’t drive for convenience, but necessity.
It's not like anyone could ever change their user agent in their curl config.

Oh, wait...

cat ~/.curlrc
user-agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0"
Do have any data to back up that claim? I assume the "California stop" is not isolated to California.
Probably things like being a DBA.

Intel has a lot of 1-off databases for internal tools used in manufacturing. The database sees a lot of heavy use, but is tied to one particular step in manufacturing, so there aren't a lot of traditional users.

I suspect that they've migrated these databases to versions that don't require as much heavy oversight.
No, but technology does not spontaneously occur. I am in fact a huge advocate of the development of liberatory technology like Linux, but I emphasize that actual people have to be working on that problem for the technology to develop. It is not the case that it simply “will happen”. It will only happen if we build it. The capitalists will not build it.
If you really need three (or even two) JF-17s to counter one F-35, that makes the F-35 seem like a pretty good deal to me. That means you have to maintain and store 1/3 as many jets, train 1/3 as many pilots, burn 1/3 the fuel. Those are not insignificant costs to having an air force, and skilled pilots are a very limited resource.
What's wanton about it, is that as the response is currently formulated, there's no due process. Make an accusation, and people are quickly put in the sights of many, many guns.

If you put that power in the hands of potential pranksters, this sort of outcome is what you get in our current world.

What if we could send an android to calmly knock on the front door and ask questions?
Britain's oldest men turn 111 years old
I feel the same way. I hadn't heard of Liberator, though. We're using Reitit for routing both in backend and frontend and middleware for content negotiation and such. It's an awesome setup (though there were some rough edges starting out), almost everything is easy to understand just by reading the source.

Just today I was thinking how nice it is to have the backend route tree available in both backend and frontend code, so e.g. it's easy to tell in advance in cljs whether the user has permission to use a specific endpoint. The route tree includes authorized roles and I wrote a simple auth middleware to enforce them.
I saw one of these last weekend at the PNW Vintage Computer expo! I coveted those really badly back in the day.
A bunch of pro-trump groups sharing a story about a "bad brown person" isn't exactly news to me. The author of this article is clearly very old and/or out-of-touch with what is happening in America right now.
Actually you can use -A to change the user agent in Curl itself. For example:

curl -A "YourNewUserAgentString” http://url.com

Furthermore, there are free plugins or add-ons for both Chrome and Firefox that let you change the user agent and say you’re using IE, a mobile browser, a google bot, or anything you want the user agent string to say.

Most programmers should be able to write a small script using Python’s urllib or urllib2 to do a basic PUT or GET request with any User Agent. Heck, just type “change user agent python urllib” into google, click on the first stack overflow link, and copy/paste the answer. You can use Go, ruby, java, nodeJS, or PHP instead as well.

Edit: Maybe your comment was sarcasm :)
>technology isn't there yet

In what sense?

>lowered maintenance costs

Not really, actually - hydrodynamic bearings already work on the "zero wear due to zero surface contact" principle. The reason this is using magnetic bearings is just because it needs super-super low friction, under super-tiny loads, in order to work.

>Probably a lot less noise

Bearings aren't generally noisy. If they were, they wouldn't be very good bearings!
Splitting /usr off is mostly done for access control. Plus if the directories are already split up you have the option to move them around later. /opt is usually for 3rd party apps that arn't part of your OS distribution. Like apps that come with precompiled binaries and libraries you want to make available system wide for example.
Such as calling Ben Shapiro an "alt-right sage"? [0]

0. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/03/28/inside-the-...
I don't know much about control, but apparently Emanuel Todorov knows about the basics of Boston Dynamics control in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7enj1FGoYwg around 14 minutes. The paper is this one https://repository.upenn.edu/ese_papers/686/. I don't understand most of it, but it may help if you have some knowledge. But from the few things I understood, not much is programmed.

Also, I'm watching some lectures for a MIT underactuated robotics class (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeEqtTgDXFc). The professor says in one of the videos that the people who end up creating Boston Dynamics also took that course. From what I watched until now, nothing is explicitly programmed (by some vague definition of "explicitly programmed"), you just find some inputs that makes the dynamics of the model behave the way you want.

Almost certainly the birdlike movement is the outcome of the robot dynamics, and not some hardcoded rules. But things like avoiding hitting obstacles or estimating the distance, I think that needs to be explicitly programmed (and then used as input to the model such as "move the end effector to that position").