skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The United States is in the privileged position of attracting the best and the brightest. Also, it, together with the rest of the anglosphere, attracts the people who speak English. Many of the people who come to countries like Norway, France and the Netherlands are less resourceful, mostly poor refugees. They didn't receive an education in any western language, so it doesn't matter which country they pick, so long as it's safe and there is money there.
How to Write Good Essays
Study: Two Monitors or One Ultrawide
> there are more websites accessible from Hong Kong than from the EU.

After a quick search, I couldn't find a source that claims that any website is blocked in Hong Kong, and several that claim that no website is blocked.

The Internet connection is monitored, there's pressure and self-censorship, but there's no blocked access to websites. It's easy to be bigger than zero.

EDIT: The biggest collection of the websites I could find lists 1129 that are still blocking access to EU citizens, and 252 that stopped (presumably, once they've become GDPR compliant): https://data.verifiedjoseph.com/dataset/websites-not-availab...
The one reason that comes to mind is that doing it implicitly lets you use structures in terms of interfaces even when those structures come from codebases you don't control .

Suppose Bob's codebase has a structure implA that implements interface A, and you want to use in terms of its interface. If the language requires Bob to declare implA as an implementation of A, you have to persuade him to do so in his codebase. But if implicit implementation is enough, then you can just use implA directly as an A with no changes by Bob.

But yes, this is a sore point. It would be convenient to be able to declare structures as implementations of particular interfaces, even if the current implicit behavior were preserved.
Google Inbox
The ONLY email client I was satisfied with.
Ergo "groups of people". It's easy to dismiss the responsibility that lies on people by saying "this or that organisation failed/was malevolent/whatever". Sometimes results are emergent and unexpected, but it seems starkly - from my observations - that individuals usually do realise, and often are consciously in control of their directing influence.

Group effects are known, cf bystander effect. Actually companies show a bystander-like effect, "what we're doing here is evil, someone [else] should change that".

Just because such behaviours are common in groups doesn't mean individuals aren't responsible. It's easier to ignore your moral responsibilities by invoking the company as the responsible party.
Why isn't pipelining part of TCP/IP, so the OS can handle it instead of the application?
Busy Person Patterns (2006) [pdf]
> I think the reason Wave failed was due to poor marketing. I never truly understood what it was until it had already been killed off.

I wonder why Google didn't put a Wave section into Gmail, or a "take your email conversation to Wave" button for inter-Gmail conversations.
The root of this thread was that then tech companies routinely rebuff requests and the example of AT&T was given and Motel 6 was referenced.

There’s a big difference between “show me your warrant” and “oh, the government asked nicely? I’ll give you the data as a favor”

It’s not just semantics. There’s a huge difference between being compelled and being a willing participant who doesn’t push back.

What evidence do you have that the tech companies don’t rebuff or push back on requests that don’t have the full force of the courts behind them?
It's because most people are only associating it with gaming. And media outlets measure its success by checking if it is capturing the gaming market. But VR has applications beyond that.

I mean, there is a new art form that let you paint in mid air. How are artists not all over this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUW49IKs1kE

A technology doesn't have to be something you spend time with everyday to be successful.
> If instead the oil money went into tax cuts, what would one call that policy then? Antisocialism?

Perfect!
Just like I thought. You have no idea how to do it, what it is going to cost and what impact it will have.

This will convince nobody.
> In every other language you write code. Perl is magic and you write spells.

Really? Every other language?

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...

> The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.

> A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.

> A computational process, in a correctly working computer, executes programs precisely and accurately. Thus, like the sorcerer's apprentice, novice programmers must learn to understand and to anticipate the consequences of their conjuring. Even small errors (usually called bugs or glitches) in programs can have complex and unanticipated consequences.

> Fortunately, learning to program is considerably less dangerous than learning sorcery, because the spirits we deal with are conveniently contained in a secure way. Real-world programming, however, requires care, expertise, and wisdom. A small bug in a computer-aided design program, for example, can lead to the catastrophic collapse of an airplane or a dam or the self-destruction of an industrial robot.

...

> The dialect of Lisp used in this book is called Scheme.
I miss snoozing emails right from notifications on Android a lot. With Gmail I need to open the app to snooze more than two hours.

Inbox: drag&drop a screenshot, then make it an attachment. Gmail: save it as an image in a folder, then select the attachments and browse to the file.
It's always about cost, if it wasn't about cost we could just build so much PV/Wind + Power to Gas/Liquid Facilities as we need and be done with it.
And building new nuclear is way more expensive than projected in your link, (No blame to the authors, 10 years ago they couldn't know that those numbers are not realistic) while Wind/PV are still becoming cheaper every year)

they assume ~1,3 Billion per 1 GW nuclear capacity[0], but right now it looks like 3-5 Billion per 1 GW is more whats happening.
[0] http://withouthotair.com/c28/page_216.shtml
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
The best feature of recent years was when Google started showing you information from your emails on the Android smart home screen (swiping to the left). It was brilliant: have a flight tomorrow? It would show you the information, including gate information which is never on boarding passes anymore. It would show you package tracking info. Estimated traffic coming back from work today. Weather. It had really everything I wanted to know about the next couple days, pulled together in one place. It actually felt like the "virtual assistant" we were promised.

It completely disappeared a year or two and was replaced by a crappy news feed that is so poorly displayed you often can't even read the entire headline. Please tell me Google just his this feature and it still exists.
I'm British, and there's the same fears here, perhaps more so. So I'm not sure it's an english speaking thing.

And looking at how Trump is behaving over the Mexican border, the US has the same fears also.

But yes the US probably does do better at attracting the most talented, certainly in the tech industry.
QA forums are trash and they were totally replaced by stack exchange but general talk forums are still quite good. Private torrent trackers always have forums attached and the quality is usually quite good because its very hard to get a new account if you get banned.

From what I have seen, private forums are much more civil but its tough to actually build a community when its so much effort to join.
Can you be more specific about that bricking? Although I'm in
Europe, so no Verizon over here, it still concerns me that a carrier can render a communication device inoperable.
That in itself doesn't necessarily mean ill intent. Someone who knows what to go after can be very useful, if they chose to utilize that knowledge.

Also, the IRS is big, the commissioner does not decide cases, however it issues policy memos, which have a large influence on enforcement. And these are usually public and or can be FOIA-ed.

So all in all, their pick is very much a political ally, and that he/she happens to be a tax specialist is just a convenient factor. (So that the man is fit to deal with IRS stuff.)
The "great economical advances" of Nazi Germany were just Nazi propaganda.
jqbx.fm is a great alternative. Not a ton of users yet, but it's a neat product built on-top of Spotify.
> Ten fold increase over the next century seems believable given that the projected effect has hardly started yet.

Good example for how these numbers are pulled out of thin air: take an old WHO estimate (which includes Malaria deaths), multiply by 10 for the heck of it and sum over 100 years...
Only on the megaboards. On slower ones like /n/ a thread can hang around for months if it has discussion.
No way to know since warrants are approved by secret courts. I'm going to guess zero pushback.
You can still access it by opening the Google app and tapping on "Updates".
I think Lawrence Krauss would say the flat universe is evidence it was created from nothing, as it is exactly what you would expect if the sum of everything has to be zero.
Again just random stuff you pulled out of your ass.
s/difficult/detectable ?
Using common goods to finance tax cuts is a conservative party policy and it has been mentioned in their manifestos, although not in bald terms.

They could therefore argue for a mandate for the policy.
Reminds me of https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/ in a nice way.
There really aren't any of these in the scale we need, they're used even today to offset peak loads. And all of them still burn fossil fuels.

The US has a fancy water pumping station in the scale we'd need (3000MW)[0], but it relies heavily on the local geography and wouldn't be economically feasible in the Netherlands for example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
More ideas.

Organ meat is relatively cheap because people don't like it. But loaded with nutrients. Another good one is sardines. You are getting the whole fish and bones and people don't like sardines either.

Some keto diets are heavy on using coconut oil for fat, which is cheapish for the number of calories you are getting.
The claim made before is that the description of physics becomes simpler as you go deeper (and deeper means more general). But that seems to have gone into reverse now.
Do you have a source for that? Because I seriously doubt that anyone made that argument for Chernobyl's reactor design.
Modern electric arc steel mills can be stopped and started easily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_mill#Minimill
Humans Produced Complex Technology Without Understanding It
"Thunder" by Imagine Dragons.
This seem fair, why should community moderators not get paid for their work? Reddit gets everyone else to do the work and then scoops up the ad views at the end.
>Pebble smart-watches.

I'm still looking for a smartwatch that hits all the beats of Pebble.
I have long been looking for notebooks where the CPU can be upgraded. Do you have any specific model/manufacturing year where this is possible?
> It's always about cost

As the direness of the climate situation becomes more and more urgent, cost becomes irrelevant.

During times of emergency and total war, dollars don't mean anything. If you have the manpower and the raw resources to do something, it gets done.

Ignoring the politics and economics of energy production, from a physics standpoint nuclear is a high outlier in terms of energy density per resource spent or per unit climate change impact, and that fact will increasingly override dollar costs or public perception as the the climate gets increasingly hostile.

Until the crisis becomes apparent, I am sure nuclear will continue to be a mostly ignored option across europe and the west while political forces dominate the issue. China on the other hand isn't bothered by public sentiment[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-nuclearpower/china-lik...
A system prototyped by hand rapidly finds the bolt or pump that can only be removed or fitted if you have an extra elbow and third arm. Or see round corners. Special tools were to be avoided or used for the rare exception. So plan B before lunch! The old approaches of an access panel over the timing chain or sprockets, or a removable plate fixing a bearing in place barely adds weight and complexity, nor does a grease point on a swing arm or steering joint, but needs a different understanding. Understanding that there's a life beyond a warranty that global manufacturers are trying to forget.

CAD is great for making stuff fit - once. In combination with the progression toward write once manufacturing, the only consideration is the cost and complexity of assembly. Can our factory robots and CNC do this? Can we reduce the component count? Can we use one-time moulded clips in place of those machine screws? Some is driven by cost saving, much by the purely mental visualisation capability of the new process.

Maintenance, even regular expected and necessary maintenance, increasingly takes a distant back seat. What once took 20 minutes to change now takes half a day. It now fits in a difficult corner or got combined with a dozen other systems making it now a £500 replacement.

It's visible top to the tiny fractions at the very bottom - saving fractions of a penny on self-tappers or clips self moulded into the single injection plastic where once (in ancient times like the 1990's) there'd be a small metal captive nut or bracket to bite into, or real machine screws and nuts.

Any and all of these can take years off expected lifespan mainly for the saving of pennies or a production step.
I've had all my apps and projects on there for a few years without issues. I believe their Amsterdam datacenter has more bandwidth than the one in Paris so I switched everything there. I should do some proper tests and write a post comparing networking across datacenters.
Also, for the few times I needed support, it was quite responsive and helpful.
Maybe they don't have the most performant cores but it's suitable enough for majority of my usecases and very worth the price.
Weekly Robotics #33
Chernobyl made a large area a restricted zone, but nowhere near a continent scale. Besides, I really dislike people bringing up Chernobyl as an example of dangers - the RBMK reactor type like the one in Chernobyl still operates in 10 reactors producing electricity(and they will until 2024 at least). Even Chernobyl itself operated into 2000s before the last reactor block was shut down. And the only catastrophic fault with them happened because of an idiotic test that basically was meant to test what happens if you switch off all cooling and disable all safeguards - well, the reactor explodes, that's what. The test itself was criminal.
Yep. Try being a Norwegian living in Australia and seeing up close how they've done it all wrong. To explain it is like talking about the rainbow to someone born 100% blind; the corruption and ineptitude just stinks.

The same goes for their attitudes towards taxing pollution / promoting EVs, but that's a side story.
Of course I am not stating that billions of death would happen overnight, like if we had a supervolcano explosion.

Instead, it would be gradual, over 20-25 years. But you are right that I am overstating things, when I write billions I think 'between 100 Millions and 1 Billion'. (Recalling that over 25 years, air pollution alone is responsible for around 100 millions deaths). It would depend on the exact temperature change: 3°C or 3.5C.

And total civilisation collapse in unlikely (I hope!), except if there is a feedback factor in global warming and we head for 4°C or more.
You Might Not Need Integration Tests
Angular 1.

I must admit, Angular 1 is productive to me. But its custom directive failed so much for a composition model.

It's a pity, though.
* https://www.udemy.com/react-the-complete-guide-incl-redux/

* https://www.udemy.com/coding-interview-bootcamp-algorithms-a...

* https://www.lynda.com/learning-paths/Business/become-a-small...
I had been hoping to some degree that this and Oumuamua were stronger pieces of hard to answer bits that said maybe, just maybe, these could not be easily explained away as "not from other intelligence". I guess I am just left with long, weirdly spinning, rock thing.
I really don't get why they ditched unity since I didn't have the impression that it was (still) unpopular.
> I don't think the wearables market is really that valuable.

Hasn't the Apple Watch been outselling Rolex etc.?

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-outsold-the-entire-swi...
Yes, I'm part of the problem. Unfortunately I can't unilaterally move us away from Western Capitalism.

Why does the dominant financial ideology relate? Because it prefers profit above everything, so externalised costs aren't considered if they'll provide a return on capital -- impoverish your workers, fine if that leads to profit; wreck the environment, fine if that leads to private financial profit.

Changing to a more communist ideology, eg all workers owning the companies they work in, restricting ownership that massively exceeds needs, democratising the benefits of automation. These sorts of things might restrict technological development, but if they can help to save the environment, and reduce the massive wealth inequalities (some of which hark back to feudalism) then that's good.

The FOSS movement seems to have made good advances despite being communistic, perhaps not as great as private software development, but certainly not without progress.

The main problem is that capitalism calls out to greed, which everyone feels and falls to. Communism calls to selflessness, which requires us to rise above our base natures.
I miss Unity too. Sometimes I catch myself with feeling to compile Unity8 from src. :)
Apart from what’s already been mentioned (bundles, general UI, speed etc), the killer feature for me was how Reminders were integrated into the email itself. When an email came in that I couldn’t quickly resolve and move on, I’d write the short ToDo to myself about what I specifically need to do.

Back in Gmail I go to my flagged/starred emails and I know I’m supposed to do something about the email, but many times I’ve forgotten what what specific action was, so I open up the email, read through it and realize that I for some reason or other won’t take the action right now. Having to ”rediscover” actions in emails is such a waste of time. With Inbox there would be clear ToDos written, so I could easily scan a list of emails and pick the right one to take action on.

Also very useful with emails containing many actions within, but only one or a few are left unresolved, or an email with useful links for future reading, so easy to specify what in the email I should focus on and thus ignore the rest.

RIP Inbox. Miss you dearly.
Death toll really isn't a good number to use for gauging the risk to nuclear reactors. Indonesia was more vulnerable to tsunami damage and deaths than Japan for basically the same reasons why Japan has nuclear power plants and Indonesia doesn't.
Don't you think it's a little short-sighted to think just in categories like black and white (i.e. coal and nuclear energy)? Coal is also very bad in my opinion. We should work towards using more renewable energy and its research. And what about reducing energy consumption?
It might be a bit dark and somewhat controversial to think about in light of mental health and what not, but maybe there is a point where civilized entities advance past a need of a survival instinct and just decide to turn off the lights?

When you have satiated your thirst for existence, whats next?
What people failed to define themselves is "Simplicity".
That concept "Simplicity" needs context.

Is it API surface simple ?

Is it data model simple ?

Is it Lines of Code short ?

Is it extensible with small core and huge plugins system ?
...

Is Wordpress simple ?
Is MERN simple ?
Is Rails simple ?

There's no answer here.

That's it. There's no "absolute simplicity", it depends on context.
It's on Github, if you didn't know: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
I had N900. Loved that little linux phone.
I've used both, most recently the win10 app.
There's no one explanation for fast radio bursts. They are a class of things defined by their transient nature but from one to another their spectral appearance can be drastically different. Even from the ones discovered so far it's obvious they're not all one thing.

What remains the same is that they're from really far away and they're short. They can tell they're from far away because the broadband pulse has dispersed relative to frequency and the charges along the line of sight from us to it retard the progress of the longer wavelengths more. So it comes in like a 'swoop' of decreasing frequency on on the spectrum vs. time when reality it was more like a broad pulse.
Thank you for very interesting thoughts. Learned something new.

You were right with the counter-exaple that we have redundancy in place that is 'hardware' - mealbox stickers, production qa.
Safari supports it as of 12.1 (It was available in the Tech Preview prior to 12.1)
I think you may be confusing it with more traditional suffixes like "-owa" and "-ówna". Legal documents definitely do use gendered version of the surname.
It would be nice to see a version of this using the metric system, otherwise international users will have to keep converting ingredients servings between systems all the time. That's boring and time consuming.
I hate the banana equivalent dose. It entirely papers over the substantial difference between alpha, beta and gamma radiation, ignores where radioactive substances accumulate in the body and what effect those differences on the actual inflicted damage have. It’s a cheap stunt to dismiss any sort of reasonable debate. If you cite it in defence of any actual nuclear fallout pollution, I personally consider it as proof that you’ve just disqualified in this discussion.
It's absolutely retarded how the EU pretends the average salary in all countries is the same. This "unique market" thing is, as always, used to screw the poor countries of the EU. But I suppose that as long as it works fine for Germany and France, who cares about the rest, right?
Completely agree. Logs are so important when bugs happen.
> The only way to crack down on this is to prevent apps sending any data at all and to minimise the use of proprietary software.

You're asking for legislative controls which, at the end of the day, can still be bypassed either flat out illegally or via legal grey areas. At best it's remedied after the act or prevents only the most obvious misuse. When you give politicians the mandate to control something often they're too technologically/process incompetent to get it right and to make sure the solution is in your interest.

You want to abate this practice? Exit social media (...and life will improve), use RSS for mass information consumption (I've been doing it for ~10 years now - I can pour through what would normally be a days sifting/reading in 15 minutes while taking the first dump of the day) and use a browser with extensions that give you more fine grained control i.e. Firefox with NoScript.

Be in control of your world.
The Latest in Military Strategy: Mindfulness
Firefox OS was revolutionary as an idea, but the timing was not there. If it came out a few years after, who knows what could have been. :(