skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Google Search and Maps are two inventions that are so insanely useful, they may standalone be responsible for decades of faster progress.

I don't know about this. Google Search was a great improvement in ranking by relevance, but an important invention itself?
As for maps: as far as I'm aware, Google Maps was "just" a combination of two existing technologies - online maps and car navigation systems. They launched Maps in 2005, even Germany had online maps by 2000. Granted, they didn't look as good as Google's and the UX was inferior, but it wasn't a horses vs cars situation imho.
What’s Life Like as a Student at USC? Depends on the Size of the Bank Account
Closed indefinitely due to deaths in 2013. https://patch.com/maryland/aberdeen/aberdeen-proving-ground-...
No, he did not. The question is: is the government allowed to go for that course?

Look into why "plea deals" have exploded in popularity. People get faced with the choice between pleading guilty and getting off with a light(ish) sentence even if they are innocent in reality, or having to face the "full force" of the law which can mean a sentence longer than the live span of whole generations.

The "right to due process and a fair trial" may still be there, but are you free to choose the right to due process and a fair trial if you know you can end up for life?
Not sure about the "able to do so since the 80s" part, but generally, I agree.

It's the same problem we see with Tesla, Uber, etc and autonomous cars. If it's to be truly autonomous, it needs to do so without ANY human intervention. As soon as a human is added to the loop, the system needs to be understandable by any human operator.

In the case of the MAX, even with Redundancy sensors, there is the possibility enough of them fail that the plane doesn't "know" how to resolve the problem. So, control must be returned to the pilot with enough time and enough information to avert disaster.
Investment banks don't even have the secret sauce, hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies and D. E. Shaw & Co. are the ones that have it
Often it's the domain renewal issue. People won't keep paying the domain for an irrelevant website, even if the hosting itself is free. OTOH, why would we want to keep everything that was ever written on the internet, forgetting is a natural process in culture.
I've been skipping Westworld, but the fact that bicameralism plays a plot point is going to pop it to near the top of my queue now.
You can keep your opinion, I don't need to spend any more time trying to convince you, but to be pedantic one last time, you omitted the part of that snippet that would have made it clear the named parameter is not needed and unnecessarily verbose:

courses.map{|course| course.some_method + some_str}

is unabashedly and unnecessarily verbose, I know it's a course as it's from courses. No need to repeat yourself twice.

courses.map{@1.some_method + some_str}

by comparison is perfectly clear, once you know the syntax.

Edit:

I just installed ruby-2.7-head and I made a typo, first thought it is not permitted in a do-block. It is. I think it's bad to use this in a do-block. But like I said, there are already plenty of ways to make your code into unreadable garbage, it's up to the author to make a good decision. Some programmers will choose poorly no matter how hard you try to prevent it.

In my opinion, this syntax is for one-liner blocks only. You should avoid using tools in incorrect ways, and code that has numbered parameters strewn everywhere without any attention to naming, is guaranteed to have more than just one bad code smell in it.

But I disagree that it's the responsibility of the language to keep potentially dangerous tools out of the hands of developers.
> free webspace is dead

Nope, it's better than ever. You have non-profit providers like https://neocities.org/, regular shared hosting with free plans, and stuff like Github pages and Netlify for those with a bit more tech skills.

Way better than the times when you had Geocities and such injecting ads into your site.

> the desktop is dead (the laptop close behind it)

No need for those to build a website. Any cheap Android phone can do it.

> ftp is dead

Nope, the previously mentioned shared hosting providers still offer it.

> HTML is much more complex (e.g. responsive design)

Old-school HTML pretty much works the same, and is actually quite fine on both desktop and mobile screens.

--

Frankly, I don't think the problem is that making your own site has gotten any harder, it's that there was no FB/IG back then. Had there been FB pages from the start of the web, you'd probably would have never seen so many custom sites in the first place.
They might be more usable if they weren't plastered with ads. If you disable your adblock, many sites are far worse than sites from 20 years ago.
Economics Is Driving the Growth of Distributed Energy Resources in Texas
I am from Java(Back end development) background with 4 years of experience. I am really interested to learn and work for machine learning projects. Do you think I should try here?
Can you please send me job description if possible, my email id is swapnil.javanjal@gmail.com
>Venmo and the like.

Works great if you're settling transferring between friends doesn't work for buying/selling goods[1], otherwise you get charged the same 3%. Also, the "free" transaction aspect is most likely a loss leader.

[1] https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/217532097-Can-I-use...
> Why are you fixated on permanently sequestering the carbon? As soon as a tree dies, all you need to do is replace it by replanting the tree. It doesn't matter if the tree's carbon is immediately released in the atmosphere (by burning) or it happens after hundreds of years. The new tree will re-sequester the dead tree's carbon.

Because a solution that can only possibly delay the climate change by a decade or two with extreme change to global ecosystems by immense program of forestation is no solution at all. Seriously, what’s the point of doing this, if it require extreme global efforts, and will only make marginal difference? It is much more cost efficient to simply replace emissions with (also rather inefficient) solar and wind, not to mention nuclear power, instead of offsetting them by planting trees, which has no chance of having any effect other than delaying the climate change by a few decades theoretically, and a few years in practice.

The question rather is, why are you so hung up on the idea of planting trees, if it’s not going to make any difference?

> Also, if a tree dies, it frees up space for another tree. So in effect, as long as you keep those 1.2T trees growing (and replace any dead ones promptly), you will keep that carbon sequestered.

Indeed, these 1.2T live trees will sequester the carbon. I do not question that. What I question is the point of doing that if you keep emitting carbon: this will only delay the climate change by a few years, because after you use up all available space and grow these 1.2T trees to maturity, you won’t be able to capture any extra carbon: all carbon captured by the trees will be offset by the carbon emitted by decaying dead trees (or huge forest fires, which are inevitable if you don’t remove fuel from these huge foerests), unless of course you bury them.

> Feel free to do so, but you haven't provided any reason why it won't work.

No, I did, you’re just ignoring it. Again, to recapitulate: planting trees will not offset carbon dioxide emissions unless you take on extreme effort to bury these immense amounts of lumber (which would also be stupid if you keep removing more fossils from the ground and burning them). Planting trees will only delay these emissions, by the length of time that is relatively trivial compared to extreme effort necessary, and insane amounts of ecosystems destroyed. Planting 1.2T trees would destroy so many ecosystems that it would be more ecological to simply do nothing.

Planting trees to offset carbon dioxide emissions from fossils is like putting a yoghurt cup under leaking drain pipe. It will work for a while, until the cup overflows, at which point you’re back to square one. You can then replace cup and pour out water in some other drain (that is, bury the lumber), but that’s stupid, because the whole point of a drain is to pour waste water into it, and if it is leaking, you should fix the leak instead of using some silly cup-to-other-drain scheme. Similarly, planting trees will only delay the inevitable, and when the cup overflows, that is, the tree dies, you need to figure out some other way to sequester the dead tree.
a secure database under the control of an independent government entity

I think that might be an implementation sticking point. You might as well ask to break the laws of physics.
Open source knowledge, remove impediments from those who want to better themselves. Decrease the irrational social value of a degree.
Link to PDF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462452
Keep data off your devices during travel, and download it once you're safe. If corporate, require external activation by someone from the company before the contents of your device are restored. That way you cannot be forced to divulge any company trade secrets, because you simply don't have access to them while you're crossing the border.
I kinda think getting rid of the VC status is better than you can encourage investment in something unethical and risky without being on the hook because "we are just the advisors, it's the person with money who takes final shot with what they wanna do with their money"

I can see why it can help if the opportunities are shrinking in the legit space.

Maybe the winter is finally coming?
They can also tell you when it is simply not possible to make a wonderful thing out of that material alone.
Climate change: 'Magic bullet' carbon solution takes big step
Netflix only requires level 2 for HD streams, IIRC. SD streams can be level 1, I think.

Level 3 requires a secure path all the way to the display (so the decryption happens in a Trusted Execution Environment, the keys are stored in a Trusted Platform Module, and HDCP or similar to the display). Level 3 practically only exists on mobile currently, as Intel's SGX (their TEE) is typically disabled by default on what processors do support it.
> Nothing good will come from giving your email account password to Facebook (or any company).

To clarify: nothing good for you. Ignoring ethical issues, Facebook certainly benefits.
I think we're not going to have easy wins here, and people will need to think about their values and make
their own ethical decisions.

Prohibiting these databases will absolutely take a useful tool away from law enforcement, and it will also absolutely reduce the potential for abuse.

There might be some middle ground out there, but nonetheless at some point we, as a society, will have to decide if, when, and how we prefer liberty (and some criminal risk) to authoritarianism (less criminal risk).
Ask HN: Sick of staring at a computer all day. Burnout? Or do I need new career?
After 5+ years in tech, I'm getting really sick of staring at a computer screen all day. Especially this time of year, when the weather starts getting nicer. I spend all day wishing I was outside and then spend the nights dreading the next day in front of a screen. I'm about to just throw away my phone, computer, and every other electronic device and go live in the woods.

The work itself is still interesting, but the idea of staring at screens for hours a day is starting to cause serious depression. I can work remotely and I've tried working from the park or a cafe, but it still feels like I'm living an artificial life, disconnected from nature and the people around me.

What to do? I feel like most interesting intellectual work in 2019 requires sitting at a computer for hours a day, which makes me a little scared for my future. Working a purely physical job is a waste of talents and I would feel unfufilled.
tldr;

Something is actively producing methane in Mars but it's not necessary microbial life.

> methane gas dissipates relatively quickly—within around 12 years on Earth

> they conducted two parallel experiments to determine the most likely source of methane on Mars to be an ice sheet east of Gale Crater—itself long assumed to be a dried up lake.

> The most likely source was a sheet of frozen methane beneath a rock formation, which the team believes periodically ejects the gas into the atmosphere.

> "Methane is important because it could be an indicator of microbial life," he said. "But life is not required to explain these detections because methane can be produced by abiotic processes."
Hey Jerf, maybe this helps. A good recipe for laughter, is to mix a danger signal with a safety signal. The signals might be physical, like almost falling or tickles. The signals might be grammatical, puns (mistaking one word for another). The signals might be social, things that almost can't be said. I'm sure you can think of examples.

Now, always send safety signals ahead, first build trust and pay attention to how others perceive danger. Make a hypothesis of what signals would work, and test them. Laughter is a great teacher.
The switches, which is what drives most of the "feel" of the keyboard, must have been standard parts (the older ones were, AFAIK, Honeywell) and I would be surprised there aren't any manufacturers of similar parts making them now.

We can try at least to characterize the action (force x displacement curve, contact point, audible feedback) of the switches to find something similar. As for the keycaps, 3D printing will only get better. We may need to wait a couple years, but we'll have them.
But mozilla/firefox is actually in a position to block all ads. They just need to make a browser better than Chrome.
Looks great, I'd definitely want to use this. Consider releasing this as a beta with discounted price.
>Second, kids from rural Idaho, (kids from rural anywhere really), are given special consideration at most elite schools. They're essentially given the same consideration as poor minorities. Most elite schools have a mandate that you must admit a certain number of males and females from every state in the union.

That may be true. But to tell a kid from rural Idaho she has a shot at MIT, when her parents never graduated from high school, may not be something she'd believe, even if she could get into MIT. Even if she'd get a full ride, her parents may encourage her not to apply, since they'd tell her it's too expensive, and she may believe that over reality. Just because a university tries to help such people, she may never get the message. It isn't like rural America is where Harvard is sending their representatives to educate poor rural kids their opportunities. A talented poor person may not realize they could actually get into Harvard, so why waste an application fee? Being poor effects you in ways most non-poor people cannot begin to understand. It effects your mindset, attitude and outlook on life. It can artificially lower your goals and scope.
The difficulty of Chaucer for modern English speakers is exaggerated because of the unfamiliar spelling. The reason that modern editions don't modernise the spelling is that if you do this it becomes hard to figure out the rhythm. For example, in the Ellesmere manuscript [1], line 9 is "And smale foweles maken melodye", but if you modernise this to "And small fowls make melody" then you only have seven syllables and it is hard to figure out how this was ever scanned as iambic pentameter. Modern editions end up compromising between spelling and scansion, making the language more difficult-looking than it really is.

[1] https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/ellesmere-manuscript
I have been thinking about that these past few months and asking myself when and why I started using my real name online even though I was raised in the pseudonym era of the 90's. I think it's around when Skype was introduced and it made sense to use real name for discoverability.
Bundles were easy to setup and have a special relationship with the inbox. Now on gmail you can have labels for a bundle but it will show you all the emails in that label (inbox or no).

You can then further make the search "label:foo in:inbox" to try mimic inboxes label. But that's a custom search and where do you store that? You can only save/create filters, not searches as a label.

So then you have those custom searches, you start archiving items (which is like marking as done in Inbox). But the search isn't smart enough to update. It still shows all the items, you need to refresh or navigate away for it to stop showing the items you just archived that shouldn't match your search anymore.
Looks like Tim Toady finally got his hands on Ruby.
Why does “moving onto other things” mean that everything gets worse? It’s not like the contents of the 1990 Usenet posts are in flux.

Is google just hiring so many incompetent engineers that they wreck any project made 5+ years ago?
It feels weird to agree with this, but it is really important that people understand the distinction between "bribing" a school with billions, and literally bribing an admissions official with 20K or whatever.
An aside but surely this must be positive in terms of environmental impact. Imagine the millions (billions?) of desktops and laptops that have not been manufactured or powered because of the widespread availability of phones.
The devices are still sold. However, they're increasingly just used as browsers. I was just saying to someone that it's something of an irony that Chromebooks seem to have settled into something primarily for the K-12 education market when they're really all the PC that most people need.

I actually travel on business with one a lot of the time but will probably replace it because no one really makes the hardware I want.
No.

Overly complex interfaces are part of the problem.
The concern is innocent people could get implicated by a search, such as "all licence plates in location X at time T1 and location Y at time T2".
Personally, I find all those amenities so sub-par(even in expensive hotels) that I rather bring in mine and wouldn't really pay anything. The price point for which you would be able to provide decent amenities it's probably too expensive and again I would rather bring in mine.
Haha, what’s funny is I’m terrible at spelling, so I asked my wife how to spell anatomy she must of miss understood me (she is good at spelling) and she spelled “autonomy”.
It's not that this is itself a straightforward strategy. It's that the possibility of this, even if odds aren't great are something that adds to the list of possible exits and thus reduces the total risk of an investment that isn't consciously intended to go this way.
this is just how titles in finance work: analyst < associate < VP < executive VP < managing director* < C-level executive

The lowest level managing directors typically have several additional managing directors between them and the C level executives. In other words, you can be in charge of a 15 person unit and be called a managing director or you can be in charge of an entire division of 500 people and make as much as some fortune 500 CEOs and be called a managing director. Generally, your clients are fairly sophisticated and know exactly where you are in the totem pole.

In addition to just being a rung on the ladder, the VP title often also means that you are a corporate officer, who can enter into agreements on behalf of the company.
I took the ferry often as a kid, and a couple of years ago took it from Crete to Athens. It was excellent. Leaves around 9pm, gets in around 7am, and a private berth for two costs about the same as a hotel or flights, but you're essentially getting both in one.
Which is where something like the Pi-hole comes in handy. Defense in depth is the only way to go with this stuff. Like most IT people, I use multiple browsers. I want everything blocked with every browser, not just Firefox (my default).

Let's say the advertisers and websites do start giving grief to end users who are proactively protective. I have an idea that I believe can be done, but I'm at a loss with my current skill level to achieve it.

Quick anecdote: when Flash was a thing, I used to symlink .adobe and .macromedia to /dev/null to let the Flash cookies "think" they were being written to the HDD, while allowing me to view Flash content without worrying about the LSOs tracking me. I wonder if there is a way, if ads/websites figure out how to block adblockers, that would allow the "loading" of ads, but shunt them into /dev/null (or similar bit bucket) making the website think they have been loaded, but not. A man in the middle, as it were. If I could figure out how to begin this, I would undertake it as a project. Hosting this online and allowing others to pass their traffic through it would be ideal. MitM/proxy. Methinks it will eventually come to this if enough people continue to add blocking tools to their tool set.

Any ideas?
It's insulting to compare students whose parents have committed criminal fraud in exchange for university admission to political movements for equal rights for groups that have seen even their most capable members discriminated against.
I wouldn't call that success, unless parasites are successful. At the end of the day, we need people to do real work and produce real results. You can't "game the system" into building a good road or writing a good operating system or growing healthy food. These people leech off of others who are doing the real work and they drag down everyone by accumulating resources without providing real value in return. Like any parasite, they should be removed.
OTOH, one of the best ways to learn something is try to use it on a language that doesn't support it. Back when I was a kid, I tried translating a Pascal quicksort from a textbook into BASIC. Those old BASIC's didn't support re-entrant functions, so I ended up having to implement my own stack. I didn't understand re-entrancy and recursion before that exercise; but certainly did afterwards! A similar later experience with a game engine in assembly language taught me a lot about object orientated designs.
Blockchain Architecture Wants You to Monetize Your Data
Daily stormer and Alex Jones?

...unless you think they are terrorists.
And the iPhone is "just" a more expensive version of its predecessors with a slightly better touchscreen and UX, and Dropbox is "just" a ftp mount with svn on top of it.

Also cars are just faster horses so that works too :)

Honestly I find it hard to argue that Maps and Search haven't been some of the internet's biggest worldwide productivity boosts.
A new game that your character is a monster
My own solution, which might be useful to those using javascript (nodejs or browser):

I use mathjs.quantileSeq() and log 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. This seems to be good for "casual metric logs".

I've found that this gives a good shape of the data, as well as the absolute min/max values. If you use 1% or 99% you'll miss the absolute worst performers, and I want to be at least aware of what the worst performance numbers are.

https://mathjs.org/

https://mathjs.org/docs/reference/functions/quantileSeq.html
> Well, maybe we’ll still have Linux... None of the major Linux companies — Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE — makes the desktop a priority anymore. The Linux desktop will continue on, but it will keep going in the same way it is now: a platform only for power-using enthusiasts.

I'm a "power-using enthusiast" because I use Gnome3? Gee, thanks... but wasn't desktop a thing despite (in spite) the so-called "Major Companies". Canonical for one made "Unity" which was about as painful as a Rubix-cube covered in shards of glass. It couldn't have died sooner. I mean that what you get when a "Major" company tries to dominate the FOSS space - layoffs and an alienated base. Red Hat was corporate from the outset, they never pretended to otherwise, which is probably why they are actually successful and not using millions of person fortune to put on a show while loosing boku bucks in the background and laying off employees.

In short, desktop is not dead. FOSS people love desktops. Microsoft doesn't dictate anything anymore.