skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just want to know where that estimate comes from - as far as I know, any estimate of cost is a WAG. For example, my WAG with today's new info:

- 167k per sat construction cost

- 20 mill per launch (at-cost WAG)

- 333k launch costs per sat

- 500k per sat total cost

these numbers give a final 12000 sat constellation cost of 6 billion. The initial 1600 sat constellation comes to 800million

But if my assumptions are off, it could be way less or more. If they make the satellites even cheaper, or at cost launches are less, or they end up being able to launch on Starship, it's significantly less. If sats cost more, or launches are more, then the cost goes through the roof.
The Socratic method doesn't come with the intent of making the other person "lose" by blunt-force contrarianism, is a difference I'd like to think matters.
> in the present huge amounts of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels

That is true, and unfortunate, in the US. At least fossil energy is declining and wind is on the rise. Brazil and Canada are more than 50% hydro. We can, if we choose, reduce and eliminate fossil energy. Choosing is the hard part.

> Everything requires resources, which costs are real

Of course that’s true as a generalization. But, you’ve just compared burning some coal for every single watt to building a windmill or dam once and letting the watts generate themselves for years and years. There is a massive difference in the resources needed to produce energy with fossil fuels vs wind, solar, and hydro, so please don’t imply it’s some kind of equivalence.

> When things don’t happen because voters don’t want them that’s democracy.

This is cute sounding, but not very helpful or even particularly true. The majority of US voters have never voted on whether Evian bottles should have deposits or whether grocery stores should use plastic bags. Now that some cities are voting on bags, they’re starting to vote them down.

Other reasons things don’t happen are not knowing what’s possible, lacking imagination, inability to work together and/or pool resources, fear and misinformation, fear of regulation & taxes, etc.
Possibly. I do admire the way they put their foot down, but admittedly sometimes I just want a binary GPU driver without a lot of hassle. There's certainly an argument that getting most of the benefit of free software is better than "all-or-nothing" if that mostly results in "nothing". Especially if growing the user base of free software would give the all-or-nothing crowd more leverage with corporations in the future.
Really beautiful pieces. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t give any details as to their creation. Just check out the pictures.
Nvidia Sued for Patent Infringement
Whitelisting is safer than blacklisting. Mount /home noexec, mount ~/bin exec. If you're going to go this route.

I don't go this far yet, but do strongly recommend nodev and nosuid except where absolutely needed. This is also a strong argument for multiple partitions rather than single-partition formatting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tierney_(journalist)#View...

"Joseph J. Romm has written that Tierney is one of the "influential but misinformed" skeptics who have helped prevent the U.S. from taking action on climate change. ..."

--

Back in the day of dial-up BBSes, our offline mail readers had "twit filters". Precursor to today's ad blockers.

Gods I miss that functionality.

I keep day dreaming about what today's twit filter might look like. Maybe a RSS reader.
Of course you would, this is the same reason ASICs have come onto the market.

I'd say the inefficiency is one of the smartest moves in the design of Bitcoin. Not only does it counter Moores law, it also provides a scarcity; the more bitcoins that are mined (so there must be a demand for them), the harder mining becomes (limiting supply) - Adding inflation into the mix.

Had they just dumped 21 million Bitcoins into the market, it would have never taken off, and it would have probably been written off as a Ponzi scheme.

While you may not like the social or environmental impact of Bitcoin, it is hard to deny there is some brilliance in its design (like how the coins become the product of their own transaction logs).
I wish that were enough, but even though having my computer restart when I don't want it to is annoying and microsoft's forced updates infuriate me, at the end of the day I use my computer to get work done and using linux would really make that a lot harder, unfortunately.
Tracking Down a Fifteen-Hour Email Delay from Outlook and Office 365
Harold Bloom has written extensively on this subject calling the profession Literary Sudies nothing more that a "rabblement of lemmings" running off the cliff to their own destruction.

Literary Studies used to mean the study of great works as great works by their own literary and aesthetic merit. It valued the unimpeachable greatness of Shakespeare and Dante and Milton. It believed in genius, the author, aesthetic value, and literary beauty.

Today, Literary Studies is more cultural studies. It is collage of different perspectives: queer, feminist, marxist, ect, that treat the work nothing but a product of some external force with no intrinsic value.

Any sensible person, of course, would run away from that.
Recently installed the VeePN application, it works well, it suits me
If you found this interesting, I can't recommend Blind Man's Bluff[0] enough.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...
You can’t imagine that there are people who are smart enough to code, but wouldn’t otherwise be doing so if the salaries weren’t so good? The pay is really good right now. Lots of people I know who did boot camps were doing things like research in other STEM fields. They are definitely coding now because coding offers them a more comfortable life, not because writing enterprise software is more rewarding than say, researching climate change.
It's different because the block reward is very biased at the beginning. By 2016-07-09, 75% of ALL bitcoin that will ever exist has already been mined. I doubt that's the same for gold reserves on earth. Furthermore, mining serves a dual purpose of also securing transactions, so for a fair comparison, you'd also need to factor in the costs of securing gold for storage/transport.
Hey, it served it's purpose -- as a shiny prop for whatever political candidate championed it to come and spout some pretty words and get a nice photo op.
Can 'sudo apt-get remove [write]' destroy my Ubuntu?
Bit annoyed I missed this run up. I think it's been driven by institutional investors like Harvard's endowment fund buying into crypto. https://www.ccn.com/harvard-bought-cryptocurrency-thats-a-ri...

As soon as one or two go many others are likely to copy.
This could also be considered gaslighting, or just plain old attention seeking behavior.
Cleveland.com wants to text its readers (and to make money)
That is just not true. Broader definitions are actually very useful when you're trying to describe general principles (like in law) — using a word that's too narrowly defined can limit the scope of what you're saying.
In Telugu, I use vitanda vadam to mean something closer to a rhetorical fallacy than deliberate dishonesty.
Can we send two parallel streams of video and audio and then at the receiver, pick each packet selectively? If a new packet arrives in either of the streams, pick it if it is the latest, and discard it if we already got one with the same id..Something one the lines of adding redundancy to compensate for the poor connection?
I have come across this in some friends. It's super interesting but also dangerous. It has taken me sometimes years or a decade to fully come to terms with some past debates. My friends would seemingly hold opinions and cling to them dearly, opinions I felt were so unconscionable I could not imagine holding them. Friendships were strained and maybe some lost. They tell me now that they were doing as you do, and that they did not hold those opinions but were merely testing them and practicing debating, learning about both sides, etc.

But I wonder about the unintended consequences of this. How many 'opinions' are out there in the world purely to cause pain? What portion of opinions that are shared on social media or the news actual opinions from those people, vs crafted statements of trolling themselves?

When you take the 'other side' for practice, is there really a valid [1] other side to take? I find often that the other side is based on logical fallacies and is not, at its base, a valid argument. I wonder if you are creating distance between you and others while you test out the opinions of propagandists? How valid [1 again] really are all these opinions?

[1] Okay here we go with this. I am indeed calling some opinions "invalid". What I mean is, I do not think it is a valid opinion to cause harm to minorities on purpose. I think this is cruel and amounts to a crime in our society. But you will find people advocating it loudly on social media and TV - and their arguments are based on treating humans cruelly for no reason other than the cruelty and other various logical fallacies.

If you are to take stances that you don't agree with, please check them logically first before putting those arguments out there in the world. Some things are better understood without trying to understand 'the other side', simply because it is not going to be based in logic and has no possible outcome of being 'understood'.
There we go, it was curiosity then. I was a late bloomer and didn't program till I was 12 and that was modding Command and Conquer.

If you don't have intellectual curiosity, then I think your career prospects in software engineering will be limited.

Perhaps I should have articulated it better above.

What I meant is that many of these bootcampers don't have that curiosity or drive to have touched code before their course. Even after getting a job, I've asked them about coding outside of work etc. they're not interested.
> even if you're actually using the computer at the time.

?? Windows 10 pops up a "schedule updates" dialog when there's an update to install. And when the time comes, I can still postpone it.
I think gish galloping is the modern phrase, gish gallopers are toxic.
Quote from the article:

The region’s method is detailed in an 1876 publication by the Scottish photographer John Thompson, who traveled extensively around China. According to him, an artist first used a lathe to rotate a block of ivory, shaping it into a sphere. They then drilled evenly distributed conical holes towards the ball’s center. Accessing the interior with an L-shaped tool, they would carve grooves to form concentric gaps, creating layers. “Hole after hole is in like manner centered,” Thompson wrote, “until all the grooves are cut, and meeting each other, the innermost ball falls into the center of the sphere. This inner ball is then moved about and carved with long tools passed through the holes, after which the bent chisel is again brought into play to cut out the next ball.”
>"Open Source" community has given to commercial companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Oracle

What are some examples of these 'compromises'. From what I have seen, all these companies publish source code and abide by copyright law for any open-source code they use in their products.

Or are you simply against the principle of for-profit companies making money from open-source?
Not for passengers. Not anything that in any way competes with flying.
> So I was involved in protecting national security

How. By bombing some random people in the desert who never did anything to you or your family? All you Americans should get a grip. Build a wall and stay behind it. "We found weapons of mass destruction" my ass.
One of my favorite episodes of Radio Lab talks about this, and opens up so many interesting subjects—truth, silence, grief, secrets, law.

Highly recommend if you’ve never heard before: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/confirm-nor-deny
There is a very interesting documentary on this expedition. One of the guys mentioned that when the grabber arm broke, they could see on their monitors an ICBM slipping through one of the tubes, heading down the bottom. Everyone in the room braced for the impact with the ocean floor...
>Having said that, I think the compromises the "Open Source" community has given to commercial companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Oracle have done much much much more harm to the community and goals than " Stallman acolytes" ever have.

So what? First, when you develop software you get to choose the best licence for you. Open source means that big companies can use your software. If you open the source under a permissive licence then it's because you wanted that to happen and didn't expect anything in exchange.

Second, users have the choice of what software they run, and they aren't going the way of Stallman acolytes. Why? Well, we all have our reasons.

But all in all everybody wins.
Judge rejects Musk’s arguments to dismiss “pedo guy” defamation suit
A Parade of Web Tech
I'm aware. Hence my saying that they're a part of a long term solution.

The linked article doesn't actually say what an EV in West Virginia pollutes (just flat out states that it's less than a conventional car), but the national average quoted is a bit less than half of a conventional car. The OP -- as people often do -- pretended it's zero. It's not. If you want zero emissions: walk. Or ride a bike, which is a rounding error off of zero. I hope you're just as quick to post your article when people make that mistake.

The number gets lower as grids get cleaner, yes, if they get cleaner. But we're at best struggling to clean up our grids, and moving transportation to electricity is going to roughly double the demand; at least if we pretend we don't have to simultaneously change the way we "consume" mobility.
You would switch from Windows because the Linux kernel has become so ubiquitous that all the software you need is now developed for it. That's the future that this makes me hopeful for.
This sounds like paranoia. I have absolutely no malicious intent, do not make such arguments by lying, and don't do it for attention.
Ask HN: How do you save a meaningful amount on your AWS Bill in 2019?
>What is the downside of an additionally-running Windows kernel?

- You must pay hundreds of dollars to Microsoft

- You must tacitly agree with Microsoft's ToS/EULA

- You must endure whatever Microsoft decides you need to (surveillance, forced reboots, etc.)

In short, you're under corporate hegemony. Game-theoretically, it's pretty sad for you as the user[0]. You're shackled to this company not even due to the superiority of its products but the massive coordination problem that is that people collectively settled on an inertial default and the entire [consumer-facing side of the] industry sclerotically built up around that default.

>Is it the usual everything-should-be-free-and-non-free-is-evil paradigm?

TL;DR yes

>What is exactly Linux Desktop? Isn't Linux Desktop = Linux Kernel + Mostly Free Software?

I use tons of non-free software on Linux though (games, cloud software, etc.). To me, "Linux Desktop" means "desktop running a Linux distro".

I assume parent's saying, "If people who would otherwise be burdened with dual-booting into Linux to do something like use Bash can now use Bash in Windows or Chrome OS, they'll stay on Windows and Chrome OS instead of Linux." ... I guess that's a valid anxiety.

But if developers are encouraged by this to develop stuff that works on Linux because it'll now somehow work in Windows, to me that's a win -- Linux gets more dev-incentive.

0: https://youtu.be/pgY7qYaoMWQ
You don't need brain imaging to sort out those with a natural talent and affinity for math, the challenge of an education system is to maximize the level of those without such affinities.
I look at it the other way around. I get paid 115k$ in a very cheap area to do code reviews and go to a few meetings.

I make things at home now. I don't want to go back to the stress of rapid fire "three parallel orthogonal lines for Miss Business" development. The baby-devs are a cudgel of tender emotions with which to push back against the exploitative wiles of business.

I fondly imagine I'll actually have the time to strike out on my own any day now, but the reality is that my life is already better.
The moral of the story is wrong.

If people are going to go ahead and cheat the system en masse, no system of incentives will ever work properly and they will languish.

Civil society requires us to generally do the right thing, most of the time, because there's ample opportunity to be shortsighted and cheat.

FYI Here's how Alberta git rid of rats [1], though I don't see any mention of rewards either, more of a publicly managed awareness program with hired pets killers.

[1] https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...
They're not just running side-by-side though; the Linux kernel is virtualized, with Windows being the ultimate authority. WSL gives you a little box of software freedom, but outside that box the usual rules apply: you're not allowed to look and you're certainly not allowed to change how it works. And Windows can collect whatever telemetry it wants on the running Linux instance, if MS chooses to do so.
They mean keep a local copy. Likely that was written by someone who uses the word download for all computer related operations.

I didn't have any intention to make a local copy but I am going to now, just to spite their ludicrous prohibition.
GitHub adds Package Registry to publish software packages alongside source code
"This traditional art from Guangzhou can never be produced legally again."

Weird tagline, both crass and wrong. There are legal sources of ivory, mainly antiques and mammoth tusks.
RFC2181: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2181

10.3. MX and NS records

The domain name used as the value of a NS resource record, or part of the value of a MX resource record must not be an alias. Not only is the specification clear on this point, but using an alias in either of these positions neither works as well as might be hoped, nor well fulfills the ambition that may have led to this approach. This domain name must have as its value one or more address records. Currently those will be A records, however in the future other record types giving addressing information may be acceptable. It can also have other RRs, but never a CNAME RR.
Bionetrics are never going to be able to be used to directly produce a strong key, so it always reduces to a question of how secure is the enclave, and bugs in the pattern recognition.

In this case there was no Secure Enclave at all. If you do have a enclave you trust to keep a private key safe, my preference would always be to use a simple (not trivial) password/passcode and depend on strict rate limiting.

The only way to avoid a private key being stored in an enclave is to derive the key from a strong password. This avoids the whole class of key extraction attacks but, now there is a password that can be attacked offline.

If you combine a decent password with an online hardening / rate limiting system then I think you have something which stands a chance. But I’m building a commercial product in exactly this space, so I’m not entirely unbiased.
Custom Lightning Payment Jackpot Website from Scratch, This Is What I Learnt
Most of these problems have solutions. For example, the US could print its money, in the form of 1 cent notes, on paper made from recycled pizza boxes. Then we use that currency to pay China for manufactured goods.
I think bitmex's numbers are fairly kosher though it's leveraged futures trading rather than direct buying/selling of bitcoin.
I think you need to hire the best people from your pool of candidates, regardless of gender. I think you need to build a process that minimizes bias, and anonymity is one good way to do that. I think if you're concerned about team diversity (and generally I think people should be concerned about that), you address it through outreach --- you address it at the top of your hiring funnel, not the bottom.
Because configuration was all part of the desktop environment (why exactly do you call it "breaking" though?) back then. Now I have to break stuff to make other stuff work. Doesn't make any sense, does it? It should be just making stuff work.
How does one convert $10M dollars in a Nigerian bank account into USDC? That seems like a necessary first step.
Probably manual sorting can offset some cost, however it's not clear (as I'm not an expert in this matter) if that makes a difference. Garbage prices can't go extremely low due to transportation costs that are constant. So at some point it doesn't really matter if sorting costs are offset to citizens or not - the transportation costs prevent them from being sufficiently low for the manufacturers.
They could still administer a coding test to the bootcamp certificate holders. Just because you have a CS degree does not mean we hire you without a coding test. Some of the least productive coders I have worked with have had degrees. Most degrees only prove that you have some ability to memorize things, practical application is a very different skill.
> She doesn’t know the motives of the people at Mined Minds, she said, whether they had bad intentions or were just “incredibly sloppy” with good ones.

Is there a term for this kind of hustle? Raising money from unsavvy investors for a technically-complicated effort, then "failing" in a way that isn't obviously fraudulent.
> What is exactly Linux Desktop? Isn't Linux Desktop = Linux Kernel + Mostly Free Software?

I think a decent working definition would be that the platform layer of the system is all free software (Kernel + Windowing System + Shell + Drivers, etc.), but user-space applications are whatever the user chooses.

> What is the downside of an additionally-running Windows kernel?

Well, arguably, you don't know what's in there, how it's using your network bandwidth, if it's sharing your personal data, etc. (I'm not a conspiracy theorist, obviously microsoft has a lot of eyes on them and it'd be detrimental for them to do something against user's trust, but that would be the argument)
I've tried them. They can help but don't work for everyone.
My original comment wasn't intended as refutation of anything. It was intended to offer a broader perspective on her piece.

She waited 18 months to say publicly what she thought about it. She's still quite young and 18 months is not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things.

I'm 53. I had an affair in my twenties. I then read as much research as I could get my hands on.

Some common themes:

People frequently are unfaithful while physically separated from their spouse. It's a common feeling that it somehow doesn't count if you are far apart. In fact, some people use that stance as justification to have an ongoing long distance affair.

Affairs are common in stressful situations. When things are overwhelming, humans have a weird habit of reaching for a smidgen of distraction and comfort amid the chaos.

Although popular opinion is that affairs ruin relationships, cause and effect almost always runs the other direction: Affairs don't kill relationships. Instead, relationships in their death throes foster affairs.

I generally consider 18 months to not be a whole lot of time to gain perspective on international and cross cultural experiences. Cultures and nation's tend to be far older than the individuals in them and it can take quite a long time to digest the intersection where two such things meet in one person's life and, unfortunately, all too often grind on that specific individual.
That implies that he acknowledges the problem, which is more than he's said previously. Whatever the 'solution', it won't come from inside FB.
The Night King is coming!
If you are to take stances that you don't agree with, please check them logically first before putting those arguments out there in the world.

You know, some could make the argument that in order to satisfy the second demand of your sentence here, one has to indulge in the first.

I don't know if I would, but maybe that's the point ;)