skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might want to read the second paragraph of your link. It's extremely relevant. Throughout much of the developed world we've started seeing reduced IQs since sometime around the mid 90s. Wiki has a link to a fair number of contemporary papers and other information as well. [1] To be clear this does not mean a decline in the rate of growth of IQ, but as in people having literally lower IQ.

I expect one reason we have not seen this reversal more well studied in places such as the US is that we don't have any normalized form of IQ tests. The areas where it showed up first, Scandinavian nations in particular, have compulsory military enlistment which, in turn, comes with compulsory IQ examinations. People in many (and it may end up being all) developed nations are literally becoming less intelligent, at least so far as IQ is able to work as a measurement of.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
Those 100 yen machines are rare. I lived in Kyoto, and can recall seeing only one in the city. People would go out of their way to use it. More typically, you will see machines that have 120円 prices by reducing sizes. Buy the same drink in the conbini next door, and you’d get twice the volume.

Regardless, if you’re in a place where vending machine prices are lower than usual, it only means that the store prices are lower still. There’s no magic here; the vending machine operators are making a healthy profit.
This is bad news for Macromedia.
Mostly right. Thought installation is more like $10-20K these days.
Even (and especially) in sparsely populated worlds, people have to share space. Look at Antarctica, the desert, etc.
I think that's up to your "human" interpretation of the "correct" one. We can go even further down and say the painting is just a collection of atoms, or further up and say it's just a piece of the museum building it's contained in.

All of them are "true" and "correct", but which one is relevant? That's when you need to start to place things into context, and it wildly varies depending if you're an ant, a human being or a rock.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/27/tech/zuckerberg-contempt-cana...
Just as I don't want to dismiss the OP because of the industry they are in, I also don't want to blankly believe the WHO. We should be free to discuss this and come to our own opinions and having this article flagged goes against that.
I don't think of any of those things as "iffy", myself.

But if you wanna take a shot at dismissing anything that Nietzsche or Heidegger wrote, without resorting to cultural bias points, be my guest. There's a PhD in it for you.
I wonder what zizek has to say about this
Nice article, I was wondering why Julia wasn't featured considering its support for math syntax. I wondered whether this could have been an old article, but there is no date in the article.

I checked the RSS feed and couldn't find the article in it. I cross-checked the oldest article in the feed with the index of articles on the site, this article seems to be written before Dec 2014. This makes sense for why Julia isn't included.
> If I remember correctly, plots and artistic decisions are made by committee

This is an extremely important point, needs to be backed up with some citation.

It's the exact condemnation of "the suits" making decisions in cable's heyday. FWIW, I've heard the opposite, that Netflix has an almost completely hands-off approach -- the Netflix execs find creators and give them a budget, then move on to finding their next creator. I don't know if that has any more truth, but I'm inclined to think so.
What does Google-backed company mean? Is that a bet (under Alphabet)? Something outside that even?

Did you contract directly with the company or were you working for the agency, who contracted you out?

I was a contractor for four years as my first job and I was a full-time employee of that contracting firm for the entire time. They paid a decent salary, gave me healthcare, retirement, and other benefits, etc. It was actually my best offer compared to some other SWE positions. Some company like Google could have been one of my clients at some point (and indeed was at my next job), but instead it was mostly banks and insurance companies.
I like it. I don't believe they will achieve cold fusion, but who knows? If there's even a slim chance for it to work it's worth looking into by respectable scientists that will enable other labs around the world to replicate their results, unlike the dubious experiments we've seen in the past.
On OSX, Firefox and Google Drive work fine, but Gmail is a whole other kettle of fish. I don't know what UI change they implemented last year or so, but it is nearly unusable on Firefox, from absurdly long load times, to a 2-3 second wait for contextual options to appear when you right click.

Switched to ProtonMail's free tier and will gradually migrate everything there aside from newsletter and software beta signups. Those emails are mostly trash anyway.
It's really hard to say because Parliament wields extraordinary powers. It once found the Government itself in contempt, triggering an election; IIRC, the only time that's ever been done was in Canada.

In the few other times contempt charges have been laid no punishment was applied, at the discretion of Parliament, or Parliament dissolved before any punishments were prescribed.

What's really fun to consider is that Parliament could apply criminal charges upon Zuck, and the USA may have to arrest and extradite him.
Attempt of versioning the HTML was failed miserably in the past. I prefer living document than outdated standard.
About two years ago we had a new surgery center proposed in our area. Right now there is one, owned and operated by the local hospital.

They nixed the idea that a local clinic could run a surgery center, and threw up every road block they could in the process.

Their argument was that the increased competition from the other surgery center would drive prices up.

The local county and city board tasked with deciding whether or not to allow it listened to them for two years. Two years of this nonsense.

The board gets mostly replaced by new members because of this issue and the new surgery center gets approved. . . and the prices at the existing surgery center drop to half of their previous levels overnight.

WTF
As was mentioned in the article, many users of emergency rooms do not have health insurance or are on government funded health care.

There is a law in the US that an ER can not turn down someone that needs care. So emergency rooms end up flooded with non emergency issues, but have to staff like it is all emergencies.

It is essentially the most inefficient method of health care. Hospitals typically lose money on emergency room services on the whole because of the uninsured that will not pay at all and the government funded insurance that pays much lower than the hospital's actual cost to provide the care.
I once took a programming class from a later (post-Andreessen)NCSA Mosaic team who would joke about Netscape coincidentally having the same bugs as NCSA Mosaic.
To a certain extent I feel your pain and get where you're coming from. The problem is --

A) The user agent isn't always specific enough. I've run into rendering bugs that were specific not just to individual browser versions, but individual browser versions on specific platforms. I've seen bugs fixed and introduced that didn't trigger user agent updates.

B) Browsers lie about their user agents. Firefox fingerprint protection normalizes the browser version reported in the user-agent to reduce the amount of information leaked.

So yes, agent checks can be useful. I've used user agent checks to reduce CPU-heavy animations on older versions of IE, or target rendering bugs that literally can't be detected any other way. I get it. But when I apply those checks, I'm doing it in the spirit of progressive enhancement -- and recognizing that those checks are error prone and might fail in the future. I never gate an entire application behind a whitelist or blacklist.

Bear in mind, all of the stuff you're talking about falls under the category of "I've found a bug in a weird situation and I just want to try and figure out if I'm in that situation." Not, "I've found the X situations where my site works, and it will only work in those situations." Very different approaches to web development.
Begging is very dangerous (where this took place) and involves being healthy enough to get yourself to somewhere it's even possible. Eating thrown away food seems like a good way to end up with something nasty.

Eventually, both of these would become options, but when you believe your situation has to be temporary, it feels safer to starve a little.
Grad students are remarkably hard to kill. Deprive them of sleep, food, and water. Expose them to high radiation levels and dangerous chemicals. They even survive brief periods of vacuum. Grad students are like academic tardigrades.
HBO's Chernobyl really is very good, but the writer made an execellent point:

"The lesson of Chernobyl isn't that modern nuclear power is dangerous. The lesson is that lying, arrogance and suppression of criticism is dangerous. The flaws that led to Chernobyl are the same flaws shown by climate change deniers today."

https://twitter.com/clmazin/status/1115135743045718016?lang=...

Edit: Purely by coincidence I read "Chernobyl: History of a Tregedy" by Serhii Plokhy a few months back - one of the few books that has moved me to tears - the self sacrifice of many who worked there with full knowledge of what the awful consequences would be is stunning.

"If not us then who?"
Sometimes, but not always...

For example, the Edge bug was at [1]. It didn't reproduce when the devtools were open, it only happened if the optimizer tried to optimize it which was non-deterministic, and it would only trigger in some cases in pretty weird spots with a lot of supporting code.

Feature detecting that would be a nightmare, but UA detecting it (since I now know the exact versions impacted) is super easy and simple and the fix is extremely small. I don't have that in our codebase any more, but it was a perfect example of a bug which can't easily be feature-detected.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/ChakraCore/issues/1415
Licensing information is now available.
I worked in the field services space - sending people places to do things around 2008-2012 programming Windows CE ruggedized devices. The market was large enough even around 2011 for there still to be plenty of jobs for Windows CE programmers even though MS abandoned the platform with VS 2008.

The market has to be much larger now.
That is only partially true. In the US, we are able to vote for the specific person we support, a huge difference over UK's system for PM, and never has the electoral college gone against the outcome of that vote.
F.lux vs. Night Shift vs. Blue Light Blocking Glasses
SpaceX raises $704.74M after Starlink launch
China stopped accepting trash last year.
It seems there's a misunderstanding. According to me you are actually pointing to the same logical fallacy. The systematic error is indeed to think that correlation does imply causality. There's no more reason to think prefontal cortex anomaly causes psychopathy than being male does.
Suffering Through Windows Update
You make a very good point, and I upvoted it.

That said, ixtli has a very salient point on the subject of how implementing these things is a whole lot easier when you start shutting down factories and arresting scofflaws. But you probably don't necessarily need government as authoritarian as China's to do those things.
Ask HN: What is minimum viable product?
Share your thoughts on finding and executing viable ideas.
This appears to be a simple user agent issue. I doubt this was intentional and/or conspiratorial.
I find the concepts of responsibility and blame to be leaky beyond use in a lot of situations. Can you help the situation? Great, it would be wise to do so. If not, try and get yourself into a position where you can, if possible, otherwise don't worry about it. I often bring this up in the context of climate change. Are humans to blame/are they responsible? Maybe, maybe not, but if it's happening, and we can fix it, we should do the cost-benefit analysis anyways and take action if it's worth it.
Postgres is the coolest database – Reason #4: It is extendable
Depends on the resolver configuration. E.g.: unbound has cache-min-ttl, a way to increase cache efficiency (and a mitigation for attacks such as rebinding).

> Time to live minimum for RRsets and messages in the cache. Default is 0. If the the minimum kicks in, the data is cached for longer than the domain owner intended, and thus less queries are made to look up the data. Zero makes sure the data in the cache is as the domain owner intended, higher values, especially more than an hour or so, can lead to trouble as the data in the cache does not match up with the actual data any more.

Which is one of the reasons I think this is manly effective against home networks.
It seems like an obvious measure would be for sites served outside the private-use or loopback ranges to be unable to request content from servers in private-use or loopback ranges.

> Did you know, some very large enterprise environments squat on public IP's for private intranet internally due to address space exhaustion (IPv4 anyway)?

Sucks to be them. If they've exhausted their private use IPv4 addresses, they can either rest comfortably knowing that NAT and IPv6 can solve their problem or they can ignore IETF recommendations and build a card house network that breaks if you give it a stern look.
This kind of shenanigan is why everyone should have a user-agent spoofer on their browser. I even think Firefox should ship with it natively.

Far too many sites ban non-Chromium (sometimes even non-Chrome) browsers.
I'm not talking about any specific guides or manuals, but yes the OpenBSD FAQ, FreeBSD Handbook, etc are the sort of manuals i am talking about. But those are not made in manpage format and at least the OpenBSD FAQ HTML pages seem to be edited by hand. And since those are in HTML (at least the OpenBSD one, i didn't look into the others) they lack the indexing and ebook-like reading features that something like info provides (e.g. there are no browsing links - there used to be a pseudostandard with special <link> tags, but it was only ever supported by classic Mozilla/SeaMonkey and it never caught on).

EDIT: i see some of those are authored in DocBook but still info files can in theory be written in DocBook too. The main focus of my comments here is the end user format and viewer capabilities, not the authoring format (and honestly i'm not a big fan of info format with its hardcoded text formatting).
I've seen the same thing in north Texas and Kansas but wind isn't everywhere in such large quantities (with tons of farm land to easily build on to boot).
This is precisely why I added that note in my first comment. I'm talking about general trends as a response to this:

> What does it matter? Is there a US cultural/social nuance that I'm missing?

I'm not familiar enough with Google's specific practices to reach a conclusion about that.
I think at this point, with two recent disparities between the popular vote and electoral points, most people realize there's an abstraction layer in between their vote for president. My point stands though: In the US, you vote for the specific individual you want to be president. In the UK, you do not vote for the specific person you want to be PM.
No content of value.
Kik launches 'defend crypto' fund to fight SEC
Leonardo da Vinci may have had ADHD, new study says
Whatever works that demonstrates an idea of something that can be achieved.
Despite the Chronicle's attempt to lump Caltech in with other elite schools in not explicitly having policies which forbid this from occurring, it is nonetheless impossible as pointed out in a Q&A done by the Chronicle with various institutions.

See: https://www.chronicle.com/article/We-Asked-20-Elite-College/...

> Q. Will your university exert more oversight over how students are designated as athletic recruits in the admissions process? If so, how?

> A. Caltech does not reserve admission spots for our athletic department nor do we take into account legacy status or family wealth. The main criteria in our evaluation process focuses on academic and personal performance/potential as well as demonstrated STEM passion and achievement.

> Q. Does "Operation Varsity Blues" show a broader need for reform in selective admissions?

> A. This case is an important reminder how hypervigilant selective admission offices need to be in evaluating candidates and their credentials.
I worked as developer support for Google cloud (for Platinum/gold customers). I worked alongside their FTE support staff (called TSEs) and the SWEs and SREs on many GCP projects like App Engine and Spanner. I loved it, learned a lot, met a lot of great people, etc. But customer support burns you out after a while, and I figured I learned enough for a proper engineering job elsewhere, so that's what I did.

Also they took Memegen away from me. WTF.
University of Chicago Launches School of Molecular Engineering
One of the biggest issues with social network is when you scale from a specific region to global scale. For example - carrying a weapon (for safety or religious reasons) could be totally normal in certain parts of the world but now when you put that on a global scale it can cause lot of conflicts in views of other people because they may not find it OK. This is something all social networks have failed to address on bigger scale.

Going after company executives is not going to solve this problem, maybe they should try to force companies to address these issues.
IS there a TODO app with google spreadsheet as backend?
> You can’t do that with feature detection.

This... is just wrong. If you start from that base feature set that works on all browsers, and then utilize feature detection to progressively enhance the experience, you can definitely do just what this statement says.

Its just easier to rely on UA sniffing, but don't spread misinformation that it isn't possible. It is a LOT more work, particularly to ensure that the experience is a good as possible on both ends of the spectrum.

It's possible that there is better performance using UA sniffing, as the server can decide what code subset to send. So I don't discount it as a potentially valid solution, but just not as "the only way". Thinking like that is how we end up in situations where "best viewed in ... browser" happens.
I have known plenty of white collar contractors be converted to full-time. Note that this isn't a promotion technically, but rather, a change of employer. They're going from being employed by a staffing firm to being employed directly by Google. Also note that a lot of the white collar contractors are only 'temporary' at Google itself; they are full-time employees of their staffing firm, and if their gig is up at Google then they'll go on to the next client. They do tend to get benefits like health insurance and retirement accounts, albeit not as good as the ones offered directly by Google.

Also note that this path is only available for white collar workers. There aren't any full-time positions available for janitors, cafe workers, security guards, etc., as big companies tend not to employ those positions directly as it's outside their wheelhouse.
Apparently, I'm not an engineer.
> Haven't nuclear waste recycling and safety features gotten really good in the past few decades?

I thought you were being snarky at first, but the rest of the comment appears to indicate you're being serious. In Belgium we've been stuck in endless discussions regarding what to do with our nuclear waste. We used to dump it in the sea, which was probably a bad idea. Now it's stored in barrels which are apparently leaking some kind of radioactive goo[1].

So either this waste recycling isn't as good everywhere, or we have a different definition of the word "good".

[1] https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/informatiedossiers/radioactief-afval... (Dutch)
The urgency of needing to deal with climate change mandates we do both renewables and nuclear.

We have the resources to push hard on both sides.

There's this idea that we should prioritize resources on one or the other. In my opinion, we have plenty of resources such that we'll reach diminishing returns (due to employment/skill/geographical/material bottlenecks) if we applied all of those resources to one or the other such that there's nothing lost by investing in both.

As an example, at very least we can address the siting constraints of nuclear by installing any new reactors at existing sites and maintaining and upgrading existing reactors. Solar and wind can both saturate an area and reach diminishing returns (see: duck curve) and require curtailment such that the resources become much less economic than you think they would be. And curtailment is not a totally bad thing, either.

So absolutely it's feasible to add more solar and wind (even to the point of curtailing a lot of it), but there's no time to waste by not also pursuing nuclear. We have more money than time (and costs of nuclear, if scaled out, are exaggerated).
Show HN: Backordr – An honest ccTLD drop catching service
> They were great for the first 160-170 podcast episodes. After a certain point you will see that the average episode dropped from 2h to 35mins, and most of the 35mins are pushing to their Patreon paid podcast.

For a minimalist podcast, it doesn't seems minimalist at all to have 2h podcast ;).
Oh, absolutely. Though as for security updates, I think even most non-pixel flagships are out of luck on timely updates.
If you read Hegel (or read someone interpreting him, I don't recommend reading Hegel unless you're a masochist), you'll find a key part of his approach was the limitations of observation. And Hegel wasn't even first to the gate on that one - philosophers have been questioning the value of observation relative to a comprehensive understanding of reality since the ancient Greeks (and the ancient Chinese, if you bring Taoism into it).

There's a lot more to it than "meaningless unfalsifiable piffle".
You have to take the mindset that "giant bundles of JavaScript" aren't how we want to build the web but to begin to ship more and more of the web baked into browsers instead. And that even "static HTML" requires accessibility improvements and adaptations to new device types. For example, split screen phones, where you've a mobile device that starts at one size, but then can open up to a larger size. Tiny watch apps, new camera APIs, Responsive @media queries, better support for print media, less onscroll jank through the use of IntersectionObserver, new authentication APIs to support Windows Hello, advancements to link tags for prefetching resources and DNS, CORS security enhancements, discussion about proprietary browser implementations of features so they're not proprietary, using origin trials (Chrome) or the Develop menu (Safari) or preferences (Firefox) to encourage web developers to try new features on their sites and report back on how they work (origin trials make this trivial), non-vendors building new features for the web such as Intel and Facebook, and ... well, it's hard to summarize how many advancements there have been in web standards since HTML5 became a thing. I'd also point to a useful parallel in how ECMAScript versions their spec, it's in a constantly evolving state also as new proposals move between stages. To me, this reflects how standards bodies now can use git much more easily and effectively as a versioning mechanism and how they've learned to try and use the best of open source instead of locking up versions behind paywalls and private interest groups. Literally anyone can contribute to these specifications, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1TEPQz02iU
well, hegel did-apparently-love his contradictions.