skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 33,636 deaths due to guns

.. or four Srebrenicas, or roughly the entire historical body count of the Troubles. If it was concentrated then we would say that it was genocide.

The big threat of the moment is "stochastic terrorism". If you tell enough people that X is a threat that is coming for them - that they are going to be victims of a holocaust - then eventually one of them will follow the logic that they can use their gun to avoid the holocaust by pre-emptively murdering the threat. Most people will recognise these messages as lies and nonsense, but there will be a number who believe it. Of those, eventually one will take action.

There has been a steady drip of those people "taking action", such as by going and opening fire on synagogues. Often they leave behind surprisingly similar manifestoes. They speak the same language and are radicalised in the same way, despite never having met nor being part of the same organisation.

Now, this is ""fine"" as long as there's only one such movement carrying out occasional massacres. What happens when someone decides to start pre-emptively shooting back? Reprisals? Riots? As soon as there's two armed groups in politics there is the risk of horrible escalation.
That's what we're doing with the WCML. Adding two new tracks to the existing 4. Obviously they can't go through the middle of towns - demolishing that many buildings would be unthinkable even without the cost, so they bypass the towns they don't serve (currently half the high speed trains run non stop through places like Harrow, Watford, Hemel, Bletchly and Milton Keynes)

Building new tracks (and indeed building new highways), even in the countryside where land is cheap, is very expensive and has massive amounts of opposition.

In London, crossrail is adding two new underground tracks to the central line. It's running years behind schedule and costs billions. And underground is crowded too -- there's one point on crossrail where they had a 30cm margin of error between existing tunnels.

Free public transport in London would cost £5b a year. This would mean those who travel a lot on expensive services (like city workers on the tube) will be being subsidised by those who don't travel (like people who walk to work in the local school).
> Your phone does none of these and that’s why it’s a lousy tool at best.

A phone is not a lousy tool, from the perspective of it being a tool it is actually quite effective at what it does.

> People now spend 2.5 hours on their phones, daily. That’s 17.5 hours a week and, unless you work part-time at a call center, that’s way too much.

This is a silly point, in my opinion. It is not the quantity of time spent on a phone that matters but the quality. If I call my grandparents each weekend for 30 minutes is that already reaching my quota for phone usage that day?

I think this article is a rushed thought that should have been polished. The core issue with phones, it seems to me, is not the phone itself but the self-control of humans that overuse it.

I know people who scroll through social media for hours on end, in my opinion that feels like a bad use of your time.

But what stops someone from reading a book? Or connecting with their distant family? Learning math? Keeping track of their life?

_So_ much can be achieved with a phone, we have got to stop treating it like a Devil's implement.
Yes, but the post you're responding to, was responding to this:

> German trains (not in train stations)
I really dislike season tickets as they offer no financial incentive to do a 4, or even 3 day week.
Nowadays there are NVMe SSDs with significantly less random access overhead, asymptotically approaching no overhead at all as I understand.
Maybe something closer to APL: https://curtisautery.appspot.com/5776042744610816
I don't get why many people think it's sane to make everyone's life worse (by making public transport scarce, expensive, and denying economic growth coming from increased efficiency of a good public transport system) just to avoid someone getting something for free, i.e. homeless getting reasonable accommodation. Bus seat seems like a pretty low bar to clear for a wealthiest country in the world, and yet apparently even the wealthiest state in the wealthiest country can't provide anything better for its residents. How come?
How one deaf Overwatch fan is trying to make the game more accessible
Judge: Number of 'Unprovable' Piracy Cases Is Alarmingly High
I work for a company that uses message queues for just about everything that moves between (different) hardware, and we've yet to experience problems from a properly configured queue setup.

We've used message queues for 30+ years, and I would say things like reliable messaging/guaranteed delivery, exactly once delivery, as well as not having to care about byte order, has saved us a lot of trouble over the years.

We move data between mainframes, pc servers, and whatever system the customers use, and once the security setup is in place, the queues deliver data reliably.

Without message queues, each application would have to know the details about the receiver, or each client application would have to know the details about the sender, and the implementation would be very specific.

With message queues, you can replace part of your implementation, i.e. migrate it from the mainframe to a unix daemon, and nobody will notice.

That being said, it does come at a heavy cost, and as i started out by saying, we only use it for X-platform messaging. Anything done locally communicates via "something else", files, pipes, shared buffers, or similar. Also, anything idempotent, if using queues at all, is not using "exactly once" delivery, which has a large performance overhead.
Profile of Israel’s NSO: the business of spying on your iPhone
We just launched this project and we're excited to talk about it if you have any questions. :-)
With reasonable expectations, sure!

Doing so with the expectation that one change will permanently 100x something might be considered by some to be slightly less than maximally reasonable.
Depends on how much local autonomy there is which in turn depends on how much taxation is raised by local government. In some countries local governments are funded from central taxation and are more or less instructed on what they can or can't do with it.
Huawei founder 'would shut it down' if China asked it to eavesdrop
Not as silly as it sounds:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
The Global Village Construction Set would be a great project, if it can be completed.
>the 6 million regularly claimed to be the total for the Holocaust

Not to mention the other 42 million civilians and prisoners of war (mostly Russian and Chinese) killed by soldiers during WW II.
"don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood
with the squirt gun of truth." - RAND Corporation https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...
Mac Games to Play in 2019
Regarding the importance of the degree distribution, we have pretty solid theoretical results on how it's actually the spectrum of the adjacency matrix which acts as a global metric for how well epidemics spread. I always like to recommend Ganesh et al.'s article [1] for how we came to understand this phenomenon but also Prakash et al.'s paper [2] for their theorem which holds for a very large class of epidemic models.

What's pretty interesting is that the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of an undirected graph lies between the average degree and the maximum degree so the gut feeling you get when playing with the degree of a graph is legitimate.

I will jump on the opportunity do shamelessly self-plug our most recent work [3] on how to modify the topology of a network to have the epidemic go subcritical and quickly disappear.

The basic idea in our paper is to keep the maximum number of edges from the original graph under the constraint that the adjacency spectrum is bounded. Since that's a NP-hard problem we go for an approximation algorithm.

In any case, Melting Asphalt's essays are really an example to follow! A gold standard for expository material!

[1] Ganesh et al. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1498374

[2] Prakash et al. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10115-012-0520-y

[3] Bazgan et al. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-04651-4_...
This is a good example of policy makers not falling for the fallacy of "efficient public transport system = financially self-sufficient". A good public transport system has to be cash-negative because of its positive externalities. If it's cash-positive, it's either too expensive, under-investing, or both. It's a government's job to price the externalities in by reaping the fruits of economical growth (via taxes) and investing it back into public transport.
> Why would you sudo rm -rf /

Come now, that's being a bit hysterical/hyperbolic. There's plenty of other things you could do in the course of your command-line activities that are at least as destructive.

I know your example is meant to be trivial but there are plenty of ways when you're mucking about with pipes to ruin your day.

Like I say, "it is known" that git checkout is destructive, and while I can sympathise that perhaps the "-rf" is implicit I honestly can't see how you'd end up doing something like that in day-to-day activities, and if you did ... well if you'd spent any significant amount of time on it it probably should have been checked in anyway.

EDIT if you want to see some "good" examples of how you can inadvertently trash everything take a look at https://svnvsgit.com/ (warning, not as impartial as the title might suggest).
They could go back to regular test piloting I guess. But I agree that anything would be unfulfilling compared to what they achieved.
That's not as much as I thought it might cost.
Amazon rolls out Alexa Guard to help protect your home
Poor people shouldn't be punished because upper- and middle-class people are narrow-minded.
Hah! I live inside one of these bubbles in Mitte.

The truth is the grid of Altbau (pre-war) buildings is great to live in, especially if you don't share the flat and can utilise the "back" room as a bedroom. But pretty much most side streets (at least in the West) are super quiet -- thanks to speed bumps, narrow lanes, treeline and wide sidewalks.

EDIT: Also many points are in heavy-industry areas (like Westhafen) so being far away from the street doesn't change much.
There should be different permissions for foreground and background access to APIs.
Their is an entire industry that either is already or definitely would be doing this if there were deliberate bugs in Apps.
What do you see as the best tool for the job?

Depends on the job. If you're making a game in Unreal, perhaps take a look at Perforce and Perforce integration that Unreal offers. Doing post work on a movie, consider something like Alien Brain. Doing some collaborative writing with a bunch of non-technical co-authors, then the tools that come with Google docs might be the best fit for you.
> Chattem house

Chatham House
> Is there any evidence that people with flexible schedules choose to jump on peak hour standing room only trains?

Yes

From Upminster into London, the price is the same on the fast train and the district. The district you get a seat, but the fast train you have to squeeze on. People take the busier train.

Conversely people take cheaper means of transport. If the coach from Exeter to London was the same price as the train, why would you take the coach (2 hours longer)? You'd end up with an empty coach and a full and standing train (I for one would rather stand than take the coach), rather than a mostly full coach and a mostly full train.
Genuinely curious what do you mean by that?

Did they do meth/heroin type of stuff, have tumultuous personal life, or professionally they didn't achieve much after being astronauts ?
It is sexism in the other direction. Men who choses jobs that pay less get lower social status, have fewer children, smaller social support network, higher stress, and worse health. Men are punished harshly for choosing low income jobs. Women are not punished if they sacrifice high pay in favor of more personal security, more freedom in the work place, and more meaningfulness in their chosen work.

If you work 7 hrs rather than 8 you get distinct benefits. Physical health goes up. Mental health goes up. Happiness goes up. It does however have a drawback which is lower income. Women on average spends one hour less working than men. Why are men expected to work longer hours then women and severely punished if they don't?
Some of us do snapshot backups.

Would be nice to have a tool that everyone on the planet could use to run against those backups and find a common source of the infections, along with an idea of when it was found in the wild.
Why does one preclude the other? "Free public transport" and "give poor people money" can both be excellent policies, there's no reason one should only pick one.

The point with specifically making public transport free is because using public transport instead of using cars is A Good Thing. It's like a reverse pigouvian tax: we want to encourage people using public transport, so lets make it free. Instead of charging for it, tax something we don't like (i.e. cars) and pay for it that way.
How about the examples I gave here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907595

And if you're going to claim they should be using online-only tools, please explain why it's wrong for them to instead choose the tools that work locally...
My phone (iOS) is perennially on Do Not Disturb + let calls through. In my life, calls are super rare, and 99% when they happen I want to know. Everything else can wait until I check my phone. Sure, sometimes I check it often when I'm bored, but when I'm concentrated / in the flow I am never interrupted.

I can't believe most people keep notifications on, and sometimes at full volume. It would drive me crazy.
I don't understand why people are surprised by this...Twitter has an ideological bent, as Jack Dorsey said himself multiple times on his YouTube tour. Apart from that, the transgender debate has been politicized to the point where you can not discuss the topic openly.
> Your toothbrush is the greatest tool of all time. You only use it when you’re supposed to for as long as you need to and then let it go.

I use my phone to play blitz chess online (I'm a chess player; if you play chess, you shouldn't focus exclusively on blitz, but it does have its place eg. to help quickly practice new openings)... to listen to podcasts (for instance when I'm washing the dishes - no dishwasher where I live right now, now that's quite a setback)... or to read articles on Hacker News, for one. Do I need to do any of these? No. Certainly not in the same sense as I need brushing my teeth. But these are my pastimes. I also don't need reading a book, listening to a radio show or going to standup comedy. It's entertainment.

A smartphone is not like a toothbrush, and there's no reason why it should be. Its applications go beyond bare necessities by design.
It is said because it is true. Same goes for all other companies like Airbus, too.
No atmosphere on the moon, technically you could orbit it at 47 feet. Just hope you miss any mountains and large boulders.
The first humans to walk on another celestial body? I'd say that's a defining moment in human history alongside the discovery of fire, agriculture, metals, oil, plastic, flight, nuclear fission etc.

Just because we haven't fully achieved the potential of sending humans to space yet doesn't make it less of an achievement. Perhaps when we finally colonize space we'll appreciate how pioneering the Apollo program really was, especially as we forced it all through before we were even really ready, technologically.
as someone who had to drive a relative to a hospital during a heart attack and just about the worst travel conditions possible, the idea of an otherwise healthy car preventing that drive during a panick due to a flaw unrelated to the powertrain and core driving functions is extremely worrying.

These are 'sports-car' problems. If I was shopping for a vehicle to fill the role as my primary transportation these flaws would exclude Tesla from my checklist, and I have a hard time believing that i'm the only one.

A 500 dollar Geo Metro from the mid 90s will get me to the hospital when I need it to. It'll get me away from an evacuation area. It'll drive me away from the forest fire. A Tesla is more glamorous, but when dealing with transportation being a means to someones survival i'm gonna stick to KISS -- and I wish that Tesla had the same idea in mind with regards to many things about their cars.

(keep the ambulance/911 comments to yourself. It was N/A in the situation I found myself in.)
Someone posts things on twitter, automated system flags account, human unflags account and apologises, websites write adticles about it.
> go after the officers with criminal charges, and make the shareholders liable financially

Even if the officers serve a prison term and forfeit all personal fortune, companies will still put them on some comfortable position (pre-bribing other officers as a side effect) after they get out.
Why is this okay?
> _So_ much can be achieved with a phone, we have got to stop treating it like a Devil's implement.

I agree, that is why it is not the phone that is the devil tool itself, but what's on it. Broadcasting tools like Instagram are the most time consuming and addictive without actual benefits. Using those tools are actually detrimental to mental health [1].

Thus I believe without understanding what makes phone usage harmful to both productivity and mental health, we are bound to fall into the same traps with other technologies.

[1] https://www.salon.com/2019/01/30/a-gold-standard-study-finds...
“The Matrix” at 20: How the sci-fi gamechanger remains influential
This is telling me that 45 tweets are coming from North Korea.
1) We have been around less than 1 million years. Our industrial revolution began less than 300 years ago.
We constitute 0.01% of earths biomass, yet have destroyed 83% of wild mammalian life https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506
We have polluted the oceans to the extent that plastic bags and radioactive fallout from WW2 can be found in the bottom of the Marianas trench.
We are in a mad rush to burn the accumulated carbon reserves from millions of years inside of a span of decades.
We are currently on a trajector to turn this planet into a place inhospitable to most life forms, including ourselves.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
Last year was the highest carbon-output year on record, just as the year before was, and the year before that one.

We are utterly destroying the only known home to life forms in the universe. We are doing it rapidly.

You seem to be living in a delusional parallel reality in which establishing a space society doesn't consume the resources of our ONLY current home planet and doesn't pollute it.

We must change our ideologies, our thought patterns, our cultures, and our entire industrial societies patterns and habits (not to mention energy source) within the next decades to survive, let alone thrive or develop further.

I don't get the sense that you comprehend our actual condition on this planet. There is a very very steep footprint curve with regards to both our population (There was roughly 1.5 billion of us the last time we all tried to kill each other, World War 2. Now there are 7 billion of us. Before, the consumption footprint of a person was rather low, now each person consumes more resources than ever before, and this amount of consumption continues to rise. The Chinese middle class will surely want every accessory their American counterparts have, right?)

How has this entire predicament avoided your scrutiny until now?
"for a magnetic drive, reading data sequentially will be significantly faster than random access (due to increased overhead of page faults),"

...err... no.

Magnetic drives have slow random access due to seek-time, i.e the time taken for the head and disk to physically change position.

In comparison to that, SSDs are effectively zero latency but they still have read-ahead/buffering/caching latencys to deal with.
oops my bad I have ben spelling it wrong for all these years
The billionaire class and the multinational conglomerates under their control.
Or second life! Oh... wait....
The accounting rules were necessary to prevent understatement of liabilities, because as the previous poster wrote, today’s decision makers won’t be around when the problem happens 30 to 60 years into the future.

Employers shut them down because insuring such risks decades into the future is too costly, not to mention the inability to reliably predict events that far into the future.
Guide to user testing in virtual reality
"tolerated"
nothing like we've thrown at it in exponentially increasing form every year since 1900...
and by all accounts it's not "tolerating" it very well at the moment.
Fisheries? Sea water contamination? Air pollution? Groundwater contamination (fracking? agricultural runoff?)
Rainforest loss (The Amazon! how many hectares lost per day? Palm oil plantations supplanting Indonesian rainforest, etc...)
all on top of human caused climate change...
Niche Marketing Strategy: 7 Methods You Can Steal for Crazy Results
If their automated system's flagging algorithm is biased, that is biased, that is worth discussing.
I think we would need to develop a system that restricts the potential jurors to those who are qualified without restricting it so much that they are drawn from a small set of gatekeepers who can easily be corrupted.

Perhaps both lawyers could be allowed to negotiate requirements for the jurors (e.g. they must have a technical background, at least half must have college degrees, etc.). Or perhaps each lawyer negotiates requirements for some of the jurors with the judge.

Another approach would be to make changes to the legal system. For example:

Make it illegal for a lawyer to present evidence that they know to be scientifically or technologically unsound or to present a witness that they know to be unqualified.

Make it perjury for an expert witness to knowingly present scientifically unsound statements or to comment on something that they are unqualified for.

Make unsound science valid grounds for overturning or appealing a case.

Require statements to be backed by data that meets statistical requirements.

I'm not a lawyer and I'm sure these wouldn't be a perfect solution, but perhaps they would help.
Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?
If you're using SQL Server, you can use indexed (materialized) views to enforce uniqueness across multiple tables.

There's also a neat little trick with indexed views and cross join[1] that you can use for more complex constraints. I've never used it for anything more than reference tables, so I can't comment on its ability to scale.

[1] https://spaghettidba.com/2011/08/03/enforcing-complex-constr...
I'm in pretty much the same camp here. One day I was chatting with a collegue and he asked if he could call me to work out a problem and I realized I had no idea where my phone was, the battery was dead when I found it. I hadn't even used for a few days.

The majority of my time spent looking at my phone is for 2FA , taking a photo, or bored somewhere waiting.
You need to go to the app store app, then the updates tab and pull down to refresh(yes, the updates tab, not WhatsApp listing in the store). When you do that, you'll see the newest version becomes available for update. This happens whenever an update is set to phased release and hasn't reached 100% yet.
Yeah, what if we make a better world by mistake!
Free Download – Components of a World Class Mobile Application
Today you can head over to www.jamiemaison.com and download a free PDF i’ve put together on the Components of a World Class Mobile Application.

If you have a project that you’re looking to get started or simpy want to reach out, then get in touch!
Is this trading bot you’re writing available online?
Why would anyone else be more equipped?