skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> me, down voted <

HN is a toxic place.

> me, up voted <

What a fine symposium of scholars.
>Just because the government is big doesn't mean it can't own (digital) property.

The topic of whether there's any meaning to the concept of owning digital property when anything digital is a post-scarcity asset that costs essentially nothing to duplicate is something that society still hasn't really agreed upon.
Maybe that's my European view on things, but I doubt that. They would have to tell me in the privacy policy that they share my phone records with third parties, with which category of companies they share them, and for what purpose. Moreover, after moving to Germany and getting a phone bill twice as high as I expected the first month, I could not even get my records to check what I was being billed for, because I did not opt in to storing that data. They (said they) didn't have the data because I didn't ask them to store it.

It wasn't a large enough amount (by far) to take it to court, though, so I can't know for sure, but lying about not having the data and keeping it secret when hundreds of employees are in the know (if they are indeed selling it, or at least a handful of employees if it's just storage for billing) sounds rather conspiratorial. A little like dieselgate, so I'm not ruling it out as possible, it just seems very unlikely.
Ah I see. So if I have information in digital form and someone gets it via unauthorized access to my hardware, it isn't criminal because I still have my information. LOL
> The problem with not using JSON is that the alternative almost always is "some proprietary format" or "an undefined dialect of something that looks like a well-known format".

Sorry, that’s nonsense. JSON is young.

We lived happily with many easy to read & parse file types before JSON arrived. Everything has changed because CPUs are fast now (so parsing overhead isn’t noticed) and storage isn’t worried about (JSON is bloated).
What's nice about ansible, if you can grok how the inventory system works, custom modules and plugins are super simple. So, OP could indeed program in the manner they wish, with a very nice/simple abstraction on top.
It's been said already, but a man's got to eat. Ain't nobody got time for this.
Sure it's a blurry line but some formats are better than others for some specific tasks. JSON isn't the right tool for every job but it's a good enough lowest common denominator for data sharing.

I wouldn't want to use if for config files or passing complex data but then it's not designed for that.
Ask HN: Advice on Liquid Mercury Disposal
I have approximately 1/4 cup of liquid mercury in my garage here in Alabama that I prefer was not in my garage. Can anyone give advice on safe and legal disposal?
Seems like it's too obvious as it's a chat bot, but I think meetcleo is pretty good (disclaimer: I work there)
The theory is interesting, but the engineering question is simple.

How many times do I have to drill a hole?

By redefining "hole" as the use of a drill, surface-mount components don't use any holes. Cups and plates have no holes. Filled doughnuts have one hole, where the jam is injected. Doughnuts with a less-fattening centre were made without a hole, whatever Tim Hortons would have you think by selling you "doughnut holes".
"Quantum leap" is similarly misused to mean"big change" when it's physical meaning is smallest physically possible change"
This a misunderstanding of what I am saying. I don't think the existing system is fine.

Fix the judicial system itself, don't offload that responsibility onto businesses. If arresting a person is so easy as to be able to ruin their life (and I agree that it is), there should be a higher bar to arresting people than < says here his phone was near the scene of the crime >.

If a system is conceived in which a business is able to fire and quickly rehire someone who was wronged by the police, I am supportive of that. But some general idea of, "Well let's just make it illegal for businesses to do that!" is beyond absurd. It's papering over a problem caused by another problem. Businesses are not responsible for fixing a problem caused by the police. This would be as absurd as a business suing the government for failing to prevent a valuable employee from being murdered.
This is a question to which I haven't found a satisfying answer yet: why do old houses look better than new ones?

There are answers like "only good looking houses got preserved" or "it's just perception, in a hundred years people will love the houses being build now as much as the houses which were build in the nineteenth century". I don't really buy such arguments. I had some musings about people no longer caring about living in a beautiful house because with fast transportation there is less incentive to make a good impression on your neighbors. Or maybe it's something about craftsmen making less design decisions because of more planing and prefabrication. But these too are just speculations.
I am not sure the "niche" Facebook used to fill even exists anymore.

The social landscape has changed for the worse. People no longer want to connect with friends, they want to show off how better/popular/wealthier they think they are.

Even if someone relaunched that era's Facebook without all the crap I wouldn't be surprised if today's society still manages to make it toxic.
Does anyone here believe that rocket system would exist without Musk?
Why would you expect that a bank teller has their own apartment? Your own apartment isn’t some kind of birthright. I had roommates until I was 27.
But we're talking about proprietary government information here. Just because it's digital doesn't mean that it can't be criminal to access it via unauthorized channels. It isn't a matter of "oh you still have your copy" - I'd be surprised if anyone actually thinks that because something is a string of bits it means that there can't be an illegal way of obtaining those bits.
It does happen in two weeks sprints, that is what refinement planning, spike stories and research sprints are all about.

And in case you missed, the large majority of companies that actually moved into agile, nowadays are doing what we could call scrum-waterfall.

Plenty of bottlenecks and usage patterns are already clear from reading the RFP documents and preparing the respective sales pitch offer.

Surely if one codes away without thinking about overall system architecture, like the TDD proponents, then these problems aren't possible to predict.
Ask HN: How do you shed your digital skin?
This weekend I have decided to clear and delete a lot of my old accounts and emails and start afresh.

I have done the following

- backed up necessary files and important stuff
- installed debian on my personal machine
- removed and deleted old email accounts
- deleted old social media accounts
- cleared ad preferences from facebook and disabled account
- searched for personal information or emails to find leaks

Interested to know what things I can do to minimise my digital footprint going forward?

Any other tips to see what personal information is publicly available?
A layer of lipid, really, although there are certainly proteins in the membrane.

I've no idea about pressure adaptation, but a quick google gives this (open) paper that looks useful:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5487899/

From the abstract:

>Maintenance of the functionality of the membrane during changing environmental conditions relies on the cell’s potential to rapidly adjust the lipid composition of its membrane

So in other words, bacteria at depth seem to use a particular mix of lipids in their membrane.

Since things have to cross the membrane it makes sense to me that it has to be stiffer or less so at different pressures.
> I think he is more of a musician’s musician

This is the best way I've seen it put.
Food used on farms decomposes directly into the atmosphere, including methane. Food sent to landfill decomposes poorly with an increased methane output, but some of the methane can be captured to generate electricity.

I'm not qualified at all to analyze this properly. The former method makes use of food to displace use of fossil fuels in farming. The latter displaces use of fossil fuels for electricity generation.

Is there research which demonstrates that one method is better than the other?
Hits the nail on the head.

For me the main uses of FB are now:

1) Rolodex of friends, with reminders from the ones who actually use it.

2) Bad version of stumbleupon. Seriously large amount of unuseful content, but it does kick up something interesting now and again.

3) Reasonable funnies stream. There's always someone with a good meme.

There's no real content though. All the news commentary is simply terrible. Loads of people trying to be funny. An enormous number of flamewars. Very few people who know anything at all, not just in politics but science as well. The actually insightful comments are drowned out completely.

Other things:

- Loads of comments are just people tagging a friend so they see an article. FB could fix this very easily, I don't really care if Richard Head wants his friend James Smith to see some article.

- Autoplay videos are annoying

- Obvious parasite accounts aren't dealt with. I know my dad hasn't started a new account with the same pic and added me. Do something about it.

All in all, I'm not sure FB would have become FB if its product was what it is now 10 yers ago.
Free Courses to Learn Git and GitHub in Depth
> FB is pure evil

Oh they definitely are and they keep reminding/proving this every chance they get.

> everyone else is amazing

Trackers and advertisers have built a cancerous nexus that we cannot shake. We have every right to think they are the scum of the earth, and if they want to prove that they are not, they should give OUR data back to us. But they don't. Scum of the earth. No words will change this, only actions. I am happy with GDPR because those scums are finally paying the price for their actions. I am not in favor of companies closing and people losing their jobs. I am also not in favor for scums to ab-use MY data.
Learning a new language doesn't necessarily deepen the vertical bar if the language cannot really be used to improve productivity/innovation on top of an engineer's current toolset. Learning TypeScript on top of Javascript can be thought of as vertical, but learning say Lua or C# on top of JS is probably better described as horizontal unless you're already intending to do some really specific desktop application.
There's a flip side to the common use case of documentation... How do you solve the uncommon use case when all the docs it seems are showing "how easy it is to do xyz." A month ago, I started on a new web front end. It was set up with React, Redux and webpack. Since it was primarily going to be me solo on the project, I wanted to integrate TypeScript. There are tutorials everywhere for starting with TypeScript but good luck finding something to say how to integrate it in.
Calling make a "turd" is understandable, that is, to someone (like myself) who is used to Windows and the conveniences it provides, "make" does indeed initially look like a step backward in software development.

But, make has a larger history than might first be realized.

To start off with, "make" comes from an era of different, mostly incompatible-at-the-binary-level Unixes. They were incompatible at the binary level because these different Unixes ran on machines with different architectures and different CPUs.

That means that you couldn't simply download an .EXE and expect that it work. Nor an installer file. There was no "App Store" for these early and architecturally incompatible machines.

Now, even though these machines were incompatible at the hardware binary level, one of the ideas of Unix was that you could abstract away the underlying hardware, and come up with a standard interface that would be "more-or-less" compatible from system to system.

You've heard the expression that "Everything is a file" in Unix? Well that's the abstracted interface! (Well, that and more-or-less-standard API calls to work with those files).

To develop software which would work on Unix, any Unix, regardless of the underlying hardware, you would write code in C, and you would call Unix's more-or-less standard API.

But, this required that you compile your source code for each Unix architecture.

Since C programs typically have multiple files, it made sense to put the compilation commands into a single "batch file" (shell script in Unix parlance).

But, as more time went on, these "batch files"/"shell scripts" were called upon to do more and more. That is, until they evolved into their own mini-programming language (note that you see the same evolution in Windows installers, e.g., NSIS).

But on Unix, because again, there were subtle differences from version to version, these scripts would be called upon to do more and more, such as use additional Unix tools in the compilation process, and that brought additional problems, for example, what if one Unix's version of grep or awk or cat or whatever -- had some feature that was missing in some other version... and what if that feature was required to do some functionality related to the compile/install process?

Anyway, here we see that there's one problem, the lack of binary compatibility amoung Unixes, that creates all of these other problems related to compiling and installing.

A polished turd? Well maybe, but one very necessary to solve those early software development problems... But even as it stands today, there is no standard processor/hardware for Unix/Linux, how do you get your software written for a PC to run on a Mainframe or Supercomputer?

So is it still a turd now that the problems it was meant to address are better understood?

I agree it's far from a perfect solution, but it's sort of "what we have" for those problems...
I need to recheck my W-4. As far as I know, I pick the right things there and still get a stupidly large refund.
Same for Salt Stack I'd say. Just a yaml wrapper around execution modules which themselves are either wrappers around cli's or pure python versions of them.
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Pace of Bering Sea changes startle scientists
I'm skeptical of Musk's claim that Teslas are an "appreciating asset". That doesn't make sense in the automotive world, and it's claims like this that make him lose credibility.
Werner Herzog describes LA as “the city with the most substance anywhere on earth”. The thing with LA is that it can be anything. It’s so huge, and so diverse that you can find absolutely anything your heart desires there if you seek it out. There is the superficial glamour of Hollywood, but also the high tech cutting edge manufacturing of aerospace, endless immigrant communities from every corner of the world, every food imaginable, even family friendly enclaves of community. LA requires that you know what you are doing and what you want; it wont drop anything in your lap. But the heights of experience to be had there are like nowhere else.
> The price is 350k per plane, but they're buying twice the fleetsize. Let's assume that's half because of charging time (takes longer than refueling between students) and half because they expect to grow by offering lower cost training. Then the price of 1.5 of these vs 1 traditional is 1.5 x 350 = 525k vs about 400k for the 172.

Why are we comparing 1.5 new planes to 1 old plane? The way I understand your hypothetical division:

- They have x planes.

- They want to replace their x old planes with 2x new planes.

- Of the additional x planes (over the old fleet size), 0.5x are due to (projected) increased demand, and 0.5x are a logistics cost that didn't apply to the old fleet.

- So, the extra logistics cost represents adding 0.5x planes on top of what would have been 1.5x old planes.

Then wouldn't the right cost comparison be 1.33 new planes to 1 old plane?
Aren’t these jobs going to be less and less needed as population decline ?

I know there is the wave of elderly people who will be SOL, but to put on my cynical hat, I think the current government has already given up on them, so I see no help on the way for them anyway.
> Most of your skepticism of inter-EU wealth transfers applies equally to intra-EU wealth transfers

I know very well the issue because it's been at the center of a bitter north- south dispute in Italy for decades. (the rich, productive north complains that too much money has been given to the south without appreciable results).

But in the national case the transfers are decided at national level, the regions have no say in it; if there are protests, a national police keeps order. The tax money is collected by state entities, and then redistributed to the regions. There have been pushes to partly change this, but there is also a strong cultural resistance because there is a sense of national unity, of shared history, cultural and family ties, and a historical foundational myth.

All this stuff is weak or non-existent for the EU as a community. It's not impossible in principle, it's simply not there now, and given all the differences- especially linguistic- it seems that it's going to take a long time and a lot of effort to create, provided that there is even the will to do so.

I don't think we fundamentally disagree. I agree that it's possible, it's just that there is going to be a lot of resistance along the way and that the national governments, which still hold the majority of the power in the EU and are still the intermediaries between their citizens and EU institutions, will be extremely cautious in implementing such a system without a complete support from their citizens.

Ah, 2100 is very, very far away. I'm not sure we can wait that long.
I've lived in LA for many years. The impression of superficiality might come from people expecting LA to be one city, when it is actually many cities with their own downtown and culture centers. Also, visitors tend to drive too much, which isolates them to touristy areas.

Some of my favorites:

1. Old Town Pasadena
2. Baldwin hill Overlook
3. Little Tokyo and Sawtelle
4. San Gabriel / Alhambra (Chinese food)
5. Signal Hill / Downtown Long Beach
6. Melrose and the area near Laurel Canyon

I could go on, but really there's gems everywhere. I've found that LA is more so a place you live than a place you visit, despite it's reputation otherwise. It's packed to to the brim with artists, developers, and good food, and there's space to stretch.

Not really hacking news, but file this under lifestyle.
It depends on what you mean useful. My startup tracks everyone’s mood, activity, and experise on HN. Checkout yourself:

https://hnprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=&search=julienres...

This can be used to great effect in companies. Essentially, we deploy a search engine for tribal knowledge in a company. Overall, we see significant improvements company wide. Reduced turnover and in turn improved knowledge retention
That may be a part of it, but OP is right that after the initial years FB changed and not for good. It's kinda like how I remember loving watching videos on MTV as a kid in early 90s, but by late 90s their programming had changed and it simply sucked.
This is pretty contrived but it took less than 10 minutes and required 0 googling:

https://jsbin.com/nedesuvozo/edit?html,output

The important two css classes:

.Example--outer-container {
display: flex;
flex-direction: row;
}

.Example-three-column-inner-container {
width: 33.333%;
}

Browser support: https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox
Emma is a Chrome Extension that combines NLP and psychology to tell you more about someone on LinkedIn.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/emma-by-bunchai-ne...
Oil is constantly spilling into the ocean at small rates, and has been for eons. Without these bacteria it would build up forever, fortunately as long as the rate of introduction is not excessively high it gets metabolized.
Past NLP researcher chiming in here. Google Home and Alexa use pretty sophisticated speech to text software to decouple your voice from background noise, and then translate our speech to text, and then from text to program triggers that ie turn off your lights. It may sound trivial but the Home work so well it really is kind of magical.

The Chatbot stuff is more questionable, especially the ones based on deep neural nets ( again I've published in this domain so I looked at it pretty closely ).

Twitter/FB/Douyin/Google all use NLP to tune their feed or give you search results.

Just to give you some examples...
I think it's just that those kinds of conversations and communities are migrating. I find that a lot of Discord servers are a throwback to the old IRC days. Just remember that the nostalgia factor might be clouding you to remember how toxic and time consuming it can get sometimes.
Can you name some of the good things she has done, besides her populist large "refugees welcome" sign on a public building and this badly thought plan that essentially moves traffic from the center to more residential areas?
How to organize a study group, book club, online group or event
No a law is needed that prevent foreign individuals or other entities owning lots of property for the sole purpose of renting it out. Half of London is currently owned by them. And the normale working class is barely capable of paying the rent
The part in this interview where Elon Musk asserts that Teslas are "an appreciating asset, not a depreciating asset" is just hilarious, classic Musk. Even he, an accomplished liar, can't help staring up and to the left when he says it. https://twitter.com/whistlerian1834/status/11168617070982635...
Kinda seems off to ignore the actual example of the article ... but be concerned about the tweet.
Part of the point of a board is to advise and temper the passions of the executives. This is why having board members subservient to the executives is always a warning sign, yes-men get the negative reputation they deserve.
https://leehamnews.com/2019/04/05/bjorns-corner-et302-crash-...
No company is forever.
From the article:

>Investigators who spoke with The New York Times said they had not sent geofence warrants to companies other than Google, and Apple said it did not have the ability to perform those searches.
Neither the sentiment nor the difficulty of the problem matters. Big A gets a cut of a sale whether or not the reviews or products are genuine so they won’t do more than the bare minimum to deal with it, until their tide starts to change.
The number of Tesla-related deaths is much higher than Tesla reports.[1] At least 4 in California, at least 11 worldwide.
That article points out how low the death rate for large luxury cars is, too. Tesla is at about 4x the death rate for the luxury car industry.

[1] https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...
Nothing comes to mind developed in the last 20 years that's a good alternative to Delphi. Delphi lets you create commercial-grade software intended for a very small user base (less than 100). There's really nothing like it on the market. I imagine it's still used in many corporate in-house projects.
Thanks, I don't think I can say it better.

When I lived there, it was best to live/work/play in adjacent neighborhoods, and then explore as you found yourself available the rest of the time.

I do love the global diversity aspect of it.

But I sympathize with those who didn't like it.. it's a really easy town to "miss" on.
There are 2 films with this title, from 2001 and 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heist_(2001_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heist_(2015_film)
Both have stellar casts.
If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy a recent post discussing similar themes in the context of investor meetings: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/11/the-importance-of-seating-...

Personally I love these kinds of body language/group dynamics analyses. I also find it to be a good reality check - whenever we start thinking of ourselves as these high and mighty enlightened beings, to realize that we still follow these very basic scripts in social contexts. Human social behavior is fascinating.
Show HN: RecurSaaS, the first recursive SaaS platform