skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored – that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and flawed as to permit a field of study to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...
So basically we now do Agile, whereas in the past it was all Waterfall?
I tracked this myself for a few months and found that I was fairly consistently estimating around twice the actual required time. That was for fully scoped out and planned work, mind you (and that I was the one who scoped and planned).
Thats where things like Domain Driven Design are going, and really it makes a lot of sense. Why express and model your domain in terms outside of it? Its like forever living through a translator instead of just learning the language in the first instance, you add more points of potential failure.
I know from a "getting bugs fixed" perspective it's important to make sure that things are being fixed, or followed up on... but geeze, is it ever a time sink.
The gender pay gap: how a Bletchley Park codebreaker helped explain a paradox
> Parisian fire brigades held the line. They kept the fire from spreading into the towers of the western face of the cathedral.

It's hard to overstate how hard this fire would have been to fight. That any of the structure was saved is testament to the skill and herculean efforts of the firefighters involved. If they had simply kept the fire from spreading to the buildings north of the cathedral, that would have been a "win".

It's clear from reports that the decision was made very early on to salvage what they could from the structure and set up to defend the western towers. The first fire streams put in place were in defense of the towers, not attacking the main body of the fire[1]. That was clearly the right tactical call, and trying to fight the fire head on likely would have resulted in the loss of the whole structure.

To highlight a few of the challenges...

The building itself had a huge amount of fuel (the tons of wood that have had centuries to dry), plus the significant amount of wood in the construction scaffolding supporting the renovation.

The fire likely burned undetected for some time in the attic space. By the time it was visible, it had a solid head start, and extinguishing it was never an option.

Once the fire was detected, getting sufficient manpower and equipment to the scene would have been the next challenge. The cathedral is on a small island, with limited access, and limited room to park vehicles in the vicinity. This would have been an "all hands on deck" fire, with off-duty staff recalled, but that takes time, and the initial incident had to be managed with relatively limited manpower (relative to the scale of the fire).

The next issue would be getting enough water to the scene. A fire like this requires tens of thousands of gallons of water per minute. There's likely only one or two water mains serving the island, which puts a hard cap on the amount of water that could be drawn from the local hydrants. The fact that it's an island obviously means there's a huge amount of water near by, but using that water has its own logistical challenges, as it requires special equipment (you can't 'suck' water through a soft fire hose), and special training. While I'm sure they had some capability to "draft" water from the river, it's not a skill that gets used often by urban fire departments, and it's likely not something they were set up to do in any significant way. In any large scale incident like this, there are often more firefighters working in "water supply operations" than there are actually fighting the fire.

Huge kudos to the firefighters on scene, and hopefully they'll have an opportunity for some well deserved rest in the coming days.

[1] https://twitter.com/shivmalik/status/1117864730453061634
One of my favorite memories from traveling in Mexico was visiting cathedrals or churches and seeing them full to brim with church goers.
If I were Global Dictator of UX, I'd mandate that every chatbot accept an "eject" or "escape" command. This would take the user to a plain old HTML form with the information already filled out to the extent that was provided within the chat.
"oops, there's nothing here!"
<posts load, showing everything that's there>.

This happens on every subreddit, every. single. time. I can't believe in 2018 we got a front-end that does this, just shoddy, shoddy engineering.
That will be another book "Vector, Matrices, and Linear Algebra for Programmers". Expect early draft releases in May/June.
Which society are you talking about?
Not unlike a president granting their children and children-in-law positions within the country's administration.
Yes, some might, which is why I specified that people must be free to choose their own culture, and, of course, people must be free to speak their mind.

But the price of living in a society with diverse communities is that we occasionally have to hold our noses when people embrace shitty ideas. In fact, we have to defend their ability to do so.
At the individual level I'd like to think that there are many people who care about future generations and find motivation to work towards their benefit. I don't expect me or my generation or my children's generation to live on Mars, but I still see space exploration as a multi-generation effort to benefit and possibly preserve future people.

Not that I'm thinking about all that while struggling with a race condition.
It is by no means unreasonable or unscientific to suspect whether plastics in your stool, the air and water around is a special threat. Animal studies have shown cause for concern. Sensationalist? Perhaps.

I've used this information to try to eke out my single use plastic use. (Use of single use plastic? single plastic use?)
Great game, was my introduction to the Zork world. Like 8bit/16bit games, I wish video capture adventure games would make a comeback, even though I know it's a pipe dream...
Microsoft had a pretty impressive demo of a 3D recreation of Notre Dame using photos scrapped from Flickr back in 2007:

https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photos...

I believe they used to have a viewer for the model available on the web, but I can't seem to find it at the moment (maybe it died when Microsoft killed their PhotoSynth product).
Does it switch automatically after each landing somehow, or because the pilots tell the plane which FCC is going to be primary for the flight?
Similarly, Snorri Sturlson writing in the 13th century explained that the Norse gods - Odin and that lot - were all actually refugees from Troy as it was sacked by Agamemnon.

https://bladehoner.wordpress.com/2017/11/16/snorris-ancestra...
I thought chatbots were "the cool thing" in 2016/2017, and are out of favor again now.
To paraphrase an old saying....

The world can stay scummy longer than you can stay solvent.
Part of the answer might be that the game had to be small (fit on one floppy disk, say), which limited complexity (or rather, the complexity came from intricate connections and puzzles, rather than much "content").

Imagine the game had been easy, fair, and providing guidance, as today's casual games - you'd have played through it in an hour and a half. And for that you had gone to the mall and paid quite a sum!

So, the games were harder, and you had months of fun (for some value of fun...) playing the same thing again and again, until you made progress.
Should the interior be recreated as it was, or simply rebuilt in a new way? Attempting to recreate it might result in never-ending comparisons to the original.
St. John the Divine in NYC has been under construction for over 100 years, with no completion date set and future funding uncertain.
Process is not a four letter word
Not a pilot either. Perhaps to show different information to the pilot flying vs. assisting? E.g. only the pilot assisting needs to see checklists?
Remember - the pressure is to get you to work unpaid overtime under the (mistaken) belief that more hours = more software.
Partially. Except (1) that only works on platforms that support it and(2) the advertising platforms will just work around it anyway.
This seems to be about a cathedral in Washington, D.C., not Paris.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/208826-mysteries-of-notr...

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150622-andrew-ta...

Talk about Notre Dame.
About Long Now

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

http://longnow.org/about/
Thats exactly the boat I'm in--my grandmothers write me notes and cards and they use beautiful old style cursive. It just looks like squiggles to me--I hand the letters over to my wife and she reads them to me.
As everyone's pointing out, this problem seems to have exploded in the past 1-2 years.

I myself had a few trivial counterfeit purchases (batteries, lightbulbs) and one serious one: a ladder. The rung snapped out from under me, and it was dumb luck that I wasn't seriously injured. Anyhow, it's time to move on. Amazon is moving into advertising, and the convenience no longer outweighs the other costs.
> Modern historians worked hard to get rid of all the bible-based histories. A few generations later, the Bible (and lots of other old books and oral traditions) is a surprisingly reliable source... as are folk legends.

Do you have a source for that? My undergrad education is in history, and I am not aware of any attempt to get rid of bible-based histories. Are there attempts to look at the actual historicity of the events and to place them in their appropriate context? Absolutely, but there's no attempt to simply get rid of the histories.
The Art of Product Management: Q&A with Google PM
Many of them did in fact object to working on a legacy project. Many long term projects have significant architectural changes over the years, meaning that the whole is not completely consistent in style. The Spire at Notre Dame for example (added in the 1800s) is one way latter generations objected)
This is one of the most beautiful cathedrals I’ve been in, but one of the worst experiences. And the time I went it wasn’t the Americans who were being loud, it was people from another top-5 world population country.
I really enjoyed https://woebot.io/ for a few months. I was really surprised at its depth when I kept on discovering new flows after weeks of interacting with it daily.

But that kind of chatbot is surely an exception. And Andrew Ng is the chairman of WoeBot, so I expected it to be good quality.
I don't need to reconcile the two. It's fact what they went to the police for originally. What they want now, is very different.
China will break the Boeing-Airbus duopoly, not because of Boeing's problems but simply because they will be offering a third option.

They also have the domestic market to support vast sales number even before looking at exporting, a bit like the incumbents have.
Arguably, China is not capitalist. Granted, China has a market economy, but capitalism refers to the ownership of bulk of assets by private parties. The Chinese government holds a lot of the wealth in China, and does not operate on a level playing field with private parties. Conversely, in a capitalist system, you would expect state ownership to be minimised to assets necessary for the practice of government activities (e.g. schools, courthouses, and military hardware), or even eliminated and contracted out to private enterprise.

Private ownership rights for real estate and securities are also much weaker in China, compared to typical Western nations.
For the US-based folks on this thread, I think the don't-pay-me-with-checks is mostly a non-starter.

4 of the last 5 banks I dealt with now let you do mobile deposit, where you can endorse the check and deposit it into your bank account by taking pictures of the check with your smartphone.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Where does law say to give 5 years warranty? I'm only aware of 2 years.
Sounds like someone appropriated the Aeneid to their local gods!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeneid

Edit: Of course the Scots/Irish origin myths might be an even vaguer retelling of the same story.
My impression was that the terrorists didn't exist and the explosions were just due to malfunctioning systems and technology.
Reading through the example email given, and perhaps reading on mobile spurs this idea, summary structure had a lot of headings and bullet points, which makes for a really long list of a summary. Would it be possible to instead make it a mind map of concepts and cross reference related ideas, instead or as well as a one dimensional list?
Ugh, what a humorless bunch!
How to go paperless in your home office
Because Bosque has Visual Studio integration, I suspect it's purpose is related to that. A DSL for the purpose of integrating its abstractions into existing mainstream tools...a language built to investigate and solve Microsoft's problems. Maybe it becomes mainstream. But like most programming languages, it's unlikely because most individuals and organizations aren't trying to solve the problem it was built to solve.
> We don't really have projects like that anymore

Sad but true, although one that is still running is the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Started 1882, and expected to reach completion in 2026.
These exploits work on a hardware level, and do not require the malicious app to know what else is running. For example, a VM does not know what other VMs are running on the same host in AWS, but Spectre/Meltdown still affected AWS hosts. They are reading data other apps have written to memory.
But remember the cathedral was built, owned and run by a supranational organization, sometimes supporting, sometimes in conflict with the monarch.
I studied physics and literary theory, and I greatly enjoyed the paper at the center of the Sokal affair [0]: Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

[1]: https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2_noafterword.pdf
I guess the fines will have to be much higher so the dividend is not just slightly lower. If employees knew their job is at stake they may also be less wiling to play along. I work in medical and we sometimes get pressure to cut corners but employees know that the FDA may shut down the whole thing so they refuse.
> We might be able to attribute that to advances in technology allowing for faster development times. But sometimes it seems we've lost sight of the grandeur that existed at those times, and perhaps we are not challenging ourselves enough.

I'd argue it's a good thing that our modern political systems aren't well-suited for pissing away our society's resources on monuments to hubris.
Again…why? who cares? Why is picking from a pre-approved list better than just letting people type in their instance domain name and allowing every instance by default?
Sharing Progress on Our Cage-Free Egg Commitment
Built FOR men? Lol.

More like built by men - at least the most physically dangerous jobs, that is.
Here's the fun bit. A lot of the brilliant engineers that worked on incredibly important historical projects were not getting paid $$$$.

Only in silicon valley ad-tech do 'brilliant' engineers make 40 times more then the janitor.
SpaceX is landing rocket stages on a drone ship after having them drop from 7400 km/h at 100 km altitude. JPL has a city car sized rover craned from a hovering lander on Mars and DeepMind has a computer win against the acting Go champion. Pretty sure that rules out the "today's engineers are bad" hypotheses.
There are also buildings where they stopped in the middle so a church has only one tower instead of the planned to.
Cologne Cathedral was finished more than 500 years after the work started
The full title is: Decoding the gender pay gap: how a Bletchley Park codebreaker helped explain a strange paradox

The UK Office for National Statistics puts out interesting blogs to describe and explain their work.
I'm also willing to bet the personal attacks are kept to a bare minimum at Mastadon, where as with Twitter, you just have be idk...opposed to one popular political thing publicly to be regularly attacked and harassed.
An infamous scene in Bureaucracy was when you had to order some food in a diner, and you'd spend 10 minutes on that (How do you want the burger, rare, medium, or well done? With fries or onion rings? Small, medium, or large? Coke or Fanta? Regular or light? etc. etc., really drawn out), and then the waiter comes back and explains that the computer crashed and you had to go through the whole tedious process again...

Come to think of it, why did we put up with it?? :-)
cool bit to know... sad they passed, unless it was for the Bangalore window and they haven't picked the batch.
I live in a chinese neighborhood, and bakeries serve the exact same function for older locals.
Hi, Joel here, I'm founder of a conversational platform here in Brazil (Ubots). In fact launching a bot should not be a technically complex task. On the other hand there are several disciplines where the complexity resides, such as dialog management, dialog state tracking, analytics (decision support), and mainly designing conversations which actually solve people problems in a simple manner, given that the big picture can become increasingly complex over time (if you want some control over it). There are also less supervised approaches where you normally need less / none intervention, but the more unsupervised it is, the less control you have.
I don't think we should be glorifying any specific group, nor should we be trying to specifically trying to push a certain type of person into science.
Did I say I'm speaking for all applications using chatbots? No, I related a specific experience/product/company. Of course it's biased!

Chatbots can be useful, but this just wasn't the case for our audience (which is very mainstream oriented)
Wait, the forgotten employee from Dilbert [0] is real? Learn something new every day...

[0] https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-05-05
Being truly able to influence RNGs would break a not insignificant portion of the cryptography currently in use.
At the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in NYC (at least as of a few years ago), they train their own stone masons, because they just don't really exist.
Does Dwarf Fortress count? It may turn out to be just one lifetime of work, but what appeals to me romantically about that crazy product, is that (until recently anyway) it was never in any rush to appear complete, and one could imagine a future, like a software Sagrata Familia, that it could survive it’s original crazy/genius architech and people could pick up the torch and continue to add even more baroque and unfathomable complexity for at least another century or two.
Maybe a new fighter jet

Practically though, this doesn’t really make sense. Kind of like waterfall development but tripled down on all the bad parts
it's just a figure of speech, it means "we're working on it"
As is the NYC subway renovation ;)
In a sense this sort of adaptive throttling does exist in traffic flow via ramp metering. Upstream sensors detect the traffic density and the signal at the ramp is adjusted to allow only enough traffic to bring the freeway up to capacity.
The search has landed :)
In unrestricted areas, this link says the average speed of cars is in the 140-150kph range, and about 20% of all vehicles above 160kph, so while you're right, it's not as extreme a difference as one may infer from your tone.

https://mil.brandenburg.de/cms/media.php/lbm1.a.2239.de/stud...
Build a Financial Plan for Better Money Management
Buildings like this are under permanent renovation so Paris should be used to it and the expertise should be available too. I have been to Paris quite a few times and as far as I remember there're was some scaffolding going on every time I was there.
You hit the nail on the head with regards to the culture in this industry. This is my experience as well.

For an engineering oriented industry you have an alarming number of engineers with an aversion to learning anything new. As much as incoming / lower level software engineers complain about tools, management / senior engineers just go ahead and choose the shittiest IBM or Oracle product for the job because some vocal graybeard minority in a meeting will complain it's not Clearcase.
It's about the time value of money.

If you give me 100, and I make a profit for you of $0.50 a year on it, it's profit right? But this other investment, investment B, makes $5/year. Which one are you going to put your money in?

Investment B every time.

The companies don't want profit, they want the MOST profit - especially because if they don't choose wisely, they'll find it difficult or impossible to seek extra financing.
So if I go into Srttings -> Privacy -> Advertising and click “reset advertising identifier” once a month does that accomplish this manually?

It’s not a perfect fix but adding a once a month calendar todo seems like a good short term fix for the privacy conscious.
DoH => DNS over HTTPS
It was replaced in the 1800s. The original one was all beat up after 600 years.
I close to double mine, but it also depends on the tasks. Some tasks I just know I'll complete in 1X my estimate. I do have a rule that nothing is ever estimated at less than 2 hours; no matter how small the task. Invariably, any time I have broken that rule, someone has checked in code that won't build (or something similar) and I have to spend time dealing with that.

I notice some devs like to underestimate to make them look more productive. Most of those tend to spend a lot of time fixing bugs that QA pushes back to them. They sometimes spend ever more time arguing that it's not their bug.
I was about to write about how big a challenge it will be, not only in term of engineering and craftsmanship but also in a social point of view. French people are keen to debate any kind of topic, and this one will be a tough one, with tensions around the origin of foundings and how it should be repaired.
Is that some kind of angle bracket lisp?

Can anyone shed more light of zil files?
Does the cathedral of of St John the Divine in New York count? Planning started in 1887, construction began in 1892, the first services were in 1899 (in the crypt!), the cathedral was fully open in 1941, construction was disrupted by the war, and construction was continued in 1979, with the last scaffolding removed in 2007.
When I played these in the 80's, we just called them "text adventures." The box did say Interactive Fiction... Nobody called them that.
That's almost certainly "rosy past" bias. Even Aristoteles is said to have complained about the terrible youth.
I think the best of the Sierra games was the original Kings Quest, as all the puzzles were based on various fairy tales. Also, some display glitches helped such as items that you could move would be drawn on the screen last.

The worst section of a Sierra game was in Leisure Suit Larry, where the official way of getting money is to save the game state every time you win at the casino. If you lose a round, then restore the game state. To me this was "breaking the fourth wall".
Revolutionary new FPS gaming controller to make gaming keyboards obsolete
It seems good. Will check up on it
As a french person who travelled a bit in the US and lived in Paris for years, I noticed there's a huge cultural difference between americans and french people regarding what is acceptable noise or not.

It's very noticeable in churches, but also in theatres, libraries, restaurants, pretty much anywhere where a lot of people gather.

This being said, I don't think one culture is any better than the other, but they seem noticeably different to me.