skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> > equivalent of a 5 megaton explosion

To be clear, this didn't happen. No one said it did. There was a chance something like this could have happened (the Chernobyl miniseries does a great job of showing this). The issue was that there were large water tanks under the reactor, and that the reactor material would eventually melt into those tanks, superheat the water and cause an enormous steam explosion, further scattering radioactive materials into the atmosphere, and destroying the three other reactors at Chernobyl, scattering their material too.

That said, the idea that a 5MT explosion at Chernobyl would have levelled the city of Kiev is not particularly realistic [0]. (note that the fallout effects from Chernobyl would be much worse than from a nuclear explosion, so given winds, fallout could have made Kiev, or even Moscow, uninhabitable). And in fact, as explained elsewhere, the explosion wouldn't have been 5MT, but much smaller, although that wouldn't have mattered much for the issue of spreading radioactive material.

[0]: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=51.3906031&...
No Blackbird post is complete without a link to the Speed Check story:

https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/speed-chec...

It all had lasted for just moments, but in that short, memorable sprint across the southwest, the Navy had been flamed, all mortal airplanes on freq were forced to bow before the King of Speed, and more importantly, Walter and I had crossed the threshold of being a crew.
+1 for root-id, this is a huge failing in a lot of threaded discussion table designs.
I am mentoring two guys myself and know a couple of friends who also have their mentees. If you are determined, you can achieve it by cold emailing people (this is how I got my mentees). Find a person, which has some skills or achievements that interests you (eg. he/she is a startup founder) and ideally you have something in common with them (eg. alma-mater, hometown, nationality, niche hobby etc.).

Then simply reach out on linked-in, introduce yourself, expand on something which you have in common to establish some familiarity and clearly state that you would be interested in some advice/mentoring to achieve your goals. You will likely get a reply that your mentor is too busy for this, but maybe he/she can spare an hour every other month, which would already be plenty and super useful.
It's about time societies started processing their own trash. If the economics of processing some kinds trash does not turn out great then maybe we should stop/minimize generating such trash?
Some may write him off as a crazy person, but he sounds like a broken man who just gave up. Life fell apart and no where to call home...
It would be imperative to thank the request handler, example images would be maple leaves and example data sets would be hockey teams.
I've found it to be incredibly rewarding to let the relationship develop organically. I try to have insightful conversations on Twitter and Linkedin. A very small portion of these conversations turn into strong relationships. Some people are on the lookout for "rising" talent and would initiate the relationship if they see you as one...
>slowly approaching a post scarcity society.

Two things. Neither of these is meant to be hateful.

1. Which is more likely: That society as a whole will evolve into a benevolent post-scarcity society providing basic necessities for everyone in it, or that our new-age feudal lord-owners of everything will use automation to drive costs down far enough so that everyone can juuuuust afford to live?

2. Doesn't post-scarcity require energy inputs from a non-depleting resource?
Would an arbitrary image upload alone allow exploitation of this, or would it require an operation on the host along the lines of a 'docker cp' as well?
The main reason for the current inflection point is that the cost per unit energy for solar/wind has dropped precipitously (and continues to drop), while the cost/energy for most fossil fuels is growing rapidly (natural gas is an exception, due to new fracking tech). And nuclear is such a massive long-term capital investment in a rapidly developing energy picture that the risk profile is really bad, even if a new plant operates perfectly with no problems for its entire planned lifespan. Nobody wants to be the one who decided to build a nuclear plant for X dollars/gigawatt (most of that cost up-front), only to have solar going for .5X before the new plant is even operational.

And it's not just the cost of solar/wind that's dropping... it's the cost of short-term energy storage, by way of batteries/thermal/hydro/etc. Nuclear plants are base-load power, good for long-term stable output rather than quick spikes up and down. But short-term storage allows solar/wind to act as baseline as well, capturing more when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and dumping it from storage when needed.

Committing to expensive nuclear power plants now, with this much disruption going on, is a good way for a utility to go bankrupt twenty, thirty years from now.
Have you seen real world inflation lately? If not, I encourage you to do so (disclaimer: stressful days follows)
I would think you'd want a good clump of green tree canopy to hopefully take the impact "slowly" and stop the plane without the sudden smashing associated with crashing.

Such as:

http://www.fox5ny.com/news/plane-stuck-in-tree-idaho
> This will occasionally lead to problems, but they tend to be temporary and easily fixed. And in the long run, your system will age better.

This is the reason I love archlinux. Most of the time, updates are no big deal. Sometimes, they break the system. Rolling release distros force you to deal with each change as it happens, usually with a warning that breakage is about to happen, and a guide for how to quickly deal with it. Once the system is up and running, basic periodic maintenance will keep it that way. In the past, I've used arch machines continuously for 5+ years and they work great and stay up to date.

Compare to intermittent release distros like Ubuntu. Every time I need to update an ubuntu machine, I end up reinstalling from scratch and configuring from the ground up. There are too many things that need tweaking or simply break between when releases are 6-24 months apart. And I'm not convinced that locking down dependencies actually solve anything. Wait six months after an LTS release, when you need to get the latest version of some package. Suddenly, you are rummaging through random blog posts and repos trying to find the updated package. PPAs, Flatpacks, Snaps, oh my! Intermittent distros offload a lot of their responsibility onto users by pretending like package update problems don't exist.
> though I'm sure it does, my initial research suggested it's not quite there yet for Python packages)

Can you expand on what's missing? I've successfully used nix to cross-compile a pretty substantial python application (+ native extensions, hence the cross compilation), for embedded purposes, and it pretty much worked out of the box. Adding extra dependencies was straightforwards.

I think you can use pypi2nix for pinned dependencies, and you can run it periodically for security updates.
I'm Canadian and I've lived in South America and South East Asia. I've travelled elsewhere rather extensively.

In my experience, no need to point out that it's not universal, the US is the only place that worships the profit motive whilst aspiring to fascism. Lots of places have those things by de facto argument but nowhere else does conservative thought mean desiring a state where these things come as a secondary consequence if not a primary motivation.

Let alone while being championed as freedom(tm). The US is a very strange place; perhaps the one metric it is most exceptional. I've met, lived & worked with and admired many American people. I can appreciate the American experiment and ideals. It's just too bad what those Americans do in the name of those American ideals that seems so very.... unamerican.
>Yelp's a household name and doesn't seem like a bad actor

Everyone should assume their "free" app is being paid for via the use of the data they can glean from it. It's not like people don't know Yelp is a business and has to profit to continue to exist.
This is great advice. A lot of people are busy but there are some who are more than happy to be mentors, it's just a matter of finding them. Could become a numbers game which is worth it imo.
Very good clues!
Solar power _is_ safe nuclear power
For reproducible builds, `python:3.7` isn't specific enough. python:3.7.3-alpine3.9 is more specific, for example. There aren't supposed to be breaking changes in the bugfix releases, but they'll happen anyway.
Yes, airplane check lists do tend to make sense.

Still, there is some humour in the laconic terseness and finality of that checklist, which is probably why it was brought up.
Numberphile Puzzle: Cat and Mouse Game
I'm jealous of your workplace's attitude and latitude towards testing
> And you care about by value vs by reference because copy constructors exist and you need to reason about performance or if you don't need to why are you using c++ anyway?

That's an implementation detail of the function you're calling, not a performance issue at the call site. The call site should not have an opinion on this. Either the object is big enough it should be pass-by-reference, or it's not. You don't need to sprinkle that detail at every call site.

> You mostly care whether it's by value or by reference because what is passed could be altered with the latter unless it's marked const.

For mutable parameters I agree, those should be passed by pointer. Because they actually have an influence at the call site.

But const references, which is what we were talking about, have no behavior change at the call site. So they should not stand out or be marked special, since they aren't.

> But yeah some people are so smart that there is literally nothing in coding readability they need and sneer at those of us who take a different approach.

If you insist all pass-by-const-refs should be pass-by-pointer then you've also lost your ability to code-style distinguish mutable vs. non-mutable parameters. Which makes it much easier to make mistakes, not harder. And also litters your code base with meaningless, non-behavior-altering noise.
It's not, as we aren't even producing useful crops in many places. In the central valley there are lots of almond and cotton farmers with outsized political sway, for example. These are water intensive crops that we actively subsidize and allow to freely pollute, but do we really need to waste all of this water and subsidy and taint the water supply for airline snacks and mattress-stuffing-grade cotton?
I hate it when movies try to portray foreign language speakers as speaking accented English. That’s not how any of this works!

If they want to go for accuracy, the actors should speak the actual language. Provide subtitles for outside audiences.

Otherwise, just have the actors speak normally. It’s no less authentic than speaking with an accent, and the actors can focus on acting.

Another prominent Soviet example of doing this well is The Death of Stalin. You actually get a sense of the people as real people instead of scary foreigners.
Ask HN: Why am I receiving calls associated with my .us domain?
Last week I registered a .us domain name. Every day since I have received about 10-12 calls per day from people trying to sell me services related to the domain. I now realize that 'who is' privacy is turned off for .us domain names.

My questions are: what is who is privacy and why is it not enforced on .us domains? Also, why am I receiving so many calls? Has the DNR sold my data to these companies? I'm trying to make the decision to keep going with this domain or dissociate myself with it because these calls are becoming very disturbing.
Interesting, especially when you consider the environmental disaster that occurs when something goes wrong with nuclear power. Think Fukushima or Chernobyl. From the actual HN list right now: https://moxie.org/stories/chernobyl-scene-report/
But why does the curve level off? Supply and demand. Assuming that renewable energy is superior to fossil fuel from both environmental and cost perspective (it is, or soon will be), then it can reasonably be expected to grow until all fossil-based sources have been displaced, and it is no longer profitable to build more capacity.
> struggling to understand why anyone liked this one at all

The reason this process took so long, is that most people feel exactly like you do, except that they don't agree about which proposal they hate.
This is a great example of why syntax and semantics can't be separated. This works great in GC'd languages, but in Rust, these two things may not be equivalent. With the distinction between owned and temporary values, this may change the lifetime of what stuff is in scope and when. This is reduced a bit with non-lexical lifetimes, but it's not, strictly speaking, actually equivalent.
Those legally enforceable restrictions last for less than two decades; it's already been 30 years since the Pons and Fleischmann fiasco.
That's also a bit impossible. There aren't any easy solutions going forward.

You want to replace most power station with non-base load renewables (wind + solar). Well, at peak power are going to add more batteries, to make sure your energy doesn't go to waste. Want to add more batteries, oh you'll need more renewable sources keep it net positive during the winter months and probably keep those battery from draining completely. This is ofc, before the quetion arises, what happens if you have weeks/months of no sun at all :)

Geothermal? Not everyone has access plus possible increases in tectonic activity.

Hydro? Not everyone has access plus possible destruction of ecosystems.

Burning waste to produce power? Probably not enough burnable waste.

Don't get me wrong. Solar scales great if you have a backup to fallback to. California going from 1.9-2.5% of solar would cost as much as a small nuclear plant (around $18 billion dollars).
The noise we're hearing about climate change now is just marketing, there's no possible way of reversing it short of artificially creating a devastating nuclear winter type scenario. Hopefully the problems with antibiotics never get to that point.
Is there a single page PDF?
One of the comments there points it out: The government keeps passing subsidies for solar that nominally expire, then renewing them again before they expire. Then the government's models assume the subsidies expire when the law says they will rather than getting renewed time and again.
I'm surprised that "security by obscurity" is touted as a way reduce attacks. This is almost guaranteed to lead to less diligence in the code — and more risks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
The final example in the article is broken. Python interpreter as PID 1 can't handle linux signals.
Appreciate the conversation as well, and if you find that I'm wrong please do tell me! Always open to learning.
>This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript once we know they will be able to handle it.

It might sound naive, but why would fetching more JS later degrade the experience? I thought that bundle splitting was an accepted good practice. For example, you have your main core bundle, then some polyfill bundles (that get downloaded if the feature detector says it is needed), and then you have separate bundles for obscure and not-that-often-used stuff that gets loaded on demand. It is a genuine question, and I would like to learn what's wrong with this approach, because that's something I work with on a day-to-day basis.

P.S. Please don't go into the negatives of bundle splitting every little thing into its own bundle that gets loaded on demand, I am aware of downsides of that. I was talking about more sensible approach to bundle splitting (which I described in a somewhat oversimplified way).
Yeah that's how I read that term as well now. It's just linux in some form.
BMW E-Scooter
This is old capitalist trick comrade: company hires other company, easy firings, fewer benefits, no danger of being accused of pretend-contracting like Uber.
I cannot recommend this book enough!!!
As an American, "garage" is still perfectly valid nomenclature
I was simply remembering the end of the first movie where Doc drops a beer can, a banana peel and so on into the Mr. Fusion so he can take Marty and his girlfriend into the future and joking when Doc ended up in 198-whatever Mr. Fusion would refuse to work because it was out of support. I think you're interleaving the timelines of later movies?
> That doesn't really work because solar can't produce at night

photovoltaic no, molten salt yes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_...

btw, driving by them at daytime is pretty weird... the collectors look literally like close-up stars floating above the surface
It's actually wrong on several levels. First of all, in the show the characters explicitly state that they are referring to a steam explosion. A steam explosion in the megaton range isn't just implausible, it's patently absurd. The upper bound on the real number is lower by 4-5 orders of magnitude. Don't get me wrong - it would still have been extremely disasterous and could have increased the total radionuclide emissions by up to an order of magnitude, but all the stuff about half of Europe being uninhabitable or everyone in Kiev dying immediately is nonsense. Instead, the only way to get remotely close to a megaton range estimate is to assume the steam explosion would cause a nuclear explosion in one or more of the reactor cores. That possibility was briefly considered and quickly dismissed as improbable in the extreme, which it was.
Class Action Lawsuit Filed: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/first-class-action-lawsuit-fi...
Not locking it to a specific version is better for security updates. Do you want it to run stable with vulnerabilities or to run secure and broken?
My list of potential mentors has more ideas in it than just my list of actual mentors, so here's both:

- A boss who regretted giving up coding to become a manager

- The most senior/productive engineer on my second project

- Lead Devs that understand delegation (really anyone who
exhibits willness to groom you for success)

As far as broadening your horizons, there are a lot of non-devs who can teach you useful skills. Some of these relationships tend to be shorter but important:

- A boss with enough Agile experience to write a book

- Senior QA and NOC and UX people (your counterparts can teach you about collaboration)

- Senior QA people (test automation, and talking about test automation)

- Senior NOC people (how maintenance concerns and physics should inform software design)

- Multilingual people (grammar, internationalization)

Also look for anti-mentors. Wise men learn from the mistakes of others. If someone insists that certain work doesn't need to be done but the team keeps paying for those decisions, you should take a hard look at that.

I like to teach but my skills aren't that rounded and I'm usually juggling a lot of different things (I have trouble letting the ball drop so I tend to accumulate too many responsibilities.) If some junior person is already asking a lot of good questions I'll tend to scoop them up, because they can often be made into a primary contributor within 18 months with the right encouragements. I don't know how to teach instincts, or even if you can. I still try, and I help people be better, but with many I give up on them ever being good, and instead I focus on finding tasks they can be trusted with. My mentoring experiences are probably all cases of "when the student is ready, the teacher appears", both giving and receiving.
> WHATWG's formulation of HTML has deliberately distanced itself from SGML out of ignorance

I don't think that's a fair characterization at all. Ian Hickson was pretty intimately familiar with the SGML formulation of HTML.

What led to that being dropped was that no browsers implemented it in practice and that trying to implement it as written in the HTML 4 standard actively broke web pages (which had been written against browsers, not against the spec). Firefox tried going down that route for a while; I should know, because I implemented some parts of that and reviewed the code for the implementations of other parts. We eventually had to remove them, because of compat problems with websites. Comment parsing was a perennial favorite there.

> For example, the keygen element has been removed

That is a good point, yes. Arguably it should have been left in as a void element with no behavior to avoid parsing issues of the sort you describe...

> So tell me why, as an author, I should follow WHATWG's vision for HTML?

Honestly, because that's the thing browsers will implement. That's the only reason.
I’m not entirely sure, as I could only read 50% of the article’s text on my mobile phone...
Wealthy Towns Build Invisible Walls to Block Affordable Housing
I have mixed feelings on this... on the one hand, I don't like Amazon abusing their market position. On the other hand, counterfeit products are the bane of commerce right now.
I would say that your non-deterministic components here weren't a good thing - instead the test was poorly written and didn't cover the assumptions of the code under test well. The fact that this bug was revealed by a test is useful, but I should hope that now the tests have cemented that case in a regression suite in a deterministic manner.
I don't know if there is much of a solution aside from blocking the domains not owned by an app publisher or not approved by apple (an ad tracker list, for instance).

The best way to avoid being tracked is to use apps that you pay for, not apps that are free and make money with your data. You can also bookmark websites to your home screen instead of downloading apps, that way you don't grant apps the extra privileges. Finally, you can disable background app refresh.
When I shop for a new car, I go to "auto row" where the dealers are clustered, then it's easy to comparison shop. If I go to a dealer with nobody near, then it's harder. The dealers know this when siting their business.
And it's not true that MalwareBytes is "scareware". I'm sure the person saying that is simply some 12-year-old who wants to show the Windows user that he runs Linux and is a "l33t h4x0r" or something and knows better than my (commercial) security software.

MalwareBytes is actually reporting that something on that page is trying to make an outbound connection to port 50685 on ip address 45.33.49.119. I don't know what to make of this, but it smells fishy. It's very odd that this program will make a claim if there isn't something going on. I'm not going to risk visiting that page.
I can't believe how fast that website is. I actually wrote to their contact address to ask how the heck they managed that.
And `python:3.7@sha256:35ff9f44818f8850f1d318aa69c2e7ba61d85e3b93283078c10e56e7d864c183` is even better.