skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The top voted comment from basically the same thread in 2017 [1] does a good job of presenting a point of contention in a relatively neutral fashion:

from the /u/aleyan:

> The figure was given in a secret diplomatic cable from then British ambassador to China, Alan Donald.
> Mr Donald's telegram is from 5 June, and he says his source was someone who "was passing on information given him by a close friend who is currently a member of the State Council".

Here we have a telegram by a guy (British Ambassador) who heard from a guy (unknown) who heard from a guy (unknown State Council) facts about the events of the day prior (massacre was on June 4th). Where did the unknown State Council official get his estimates from; were those official or just something he heard and repeated (and when did he get them)? Initial estimates of disasters are often quite wrong; here they were produced in game of telephone in a day or less; and they are not collaborated by any evidence we have now.

I rank the quality of new evidence as low. Rumors repeated in old official telegrams are still rumors. I expected BBC to have reported more critically. Alan Donald is still alive; BBC could have asked him if he received any updates to that first number that he trusted more.

I also have to fault BBC for it's phrasing around Donald's source. At first reading it sounded like Donald's source is an unnamed member of the State Council who is a close friend of the Ambassador. After reading BBC's sentence a carefully however; it sounds like the Donald's source is a person who is a friend of an unnamed member of the State Council. This ambiguous sentence is deceptive.

EDIT: I see vote count moving up and down on this comment making me think it is controversial. If you disagree with my doubts on the veracity of this story, write a comment. Maybe I missed something.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15993956
I guess I'm saying it is relative. If you stand to lose your child's college fund, your home, or the ability to eat next week I'd classify that as, "more to lose" than 100 million dollars.

I understand why this isn't practicable. Those who have large investments have a large incentive to educate themselves on how the market works and how corporate governance will impact overall success for the company.

Sometimes hard and unpopular decisions are necessary in order to keep the company profitable.

I do, however, see real value in having input from a sector that's focused more on long term success than short term profits.
Just spitballing, but as Facebook use declines I'd imagine their huge data center resources will become increasingly less utilised. They clearly have some incredible data center engineers (see https://www.opencompute.org/). FB could have made for an interesting AWS competitor. It would've certainly hedged their bets because right now unless Instagram/WhatsApp are utilizing capacity which FB's stalled growth is ceding I see them outsourcing data center operations to another vendor eventually.

There's so much potential in FB or was till very recently (Open Compute and React to name two very impressive projects) - I imagine employee retention can only have become harder as the privacy scandals have hit and the share price gains have slowed.
>That’s not entirely accurate, see Henry Ford suspending shareholder dividends, raising employee wages and lowering price of cars for consumers to fulfill vision of every American family owning a (Ford) car.

It wasn't to fulfill any kind of dream or vision. Ford didn't like his shareholders, quality was getting hammered by high turnover and he had a weird paternalistic desire to exert more control over his employees (as well as to head off the looming strike threat).
The missile defense system issue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Failure_at_Dha...

> The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent to a miss distance of 600 meters.
Sure, but those are not features you want in a cargo or passenger aircraft.

The Global Hawk has a wingspan over 50% as long as an A350, yet it weighs 1/10th as much. There is no comparison.
Apple wants to kill the ad industry. It's forcing developers to help
IIRC can't an SSH tunnel leak your browsing through DNS leaks, or am I misunderstanding? I thought you usually want to use an actual VPN protocol like Wireguard.
Something similar happened with "Blood is thicker than water", a phrase used to convey the importance of family, where the original quote is "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb", which conveys the exact opposite, that ties you make yourself are more important than family.
What makes you say that? It's already decaying.
I suspect the commenter is responding to “the world’s most advanced aircraft”, which does seem like a qualitative statement.
It doesn't say it's for the same number of passengers, equivalent travel time and distance traveled.
Where on earth did you get that? And you are clearly incorrect as he/she hasn't answered my question. Therefore I cannot be "smearing" him for a response he hasn't given.

What ridiculous ad hominem.

I asked a genuine question that hasn't been answered and you inferred far more from it than there really was.
That's mostly from a global perspective. From a business perspective, increasing efficiency without sacrificing customer satisfaction increases your competitive position, and would be a good thing, not?
I'm curious if anyone here has thoughts on 'Operating Manuel for Spaceship Earth' in this context. A quote that has tuck with me for a long time is 'specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.' I generally agree with this, and have tried to be a generalist to the degree that it is allowed in today's workforce.
Those systemic forces, if real, don't force engineers to work at facebook. It's a choice they make every single day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-48

Note 1: Boeing once toyed with a blended wing-body, a sort of flying wing, to produce dramatically better aerodynamics and fuel efficiency. Passengers would have sat in a wide cabin, rather like a small amphitheater. But tests with a mock-up produced such a negative reaction that the company dropped the technology, except for military refueling aircraft.
To add a bit more detail: the required level for other Apple OSs are macOS 15+, tvOS 13+ and watchOS 6+.
Hey, cool to see my article on the front page of hacker news. Never expected THAT article to hit hacker news.
Got a question, I could answer.
Don't act like a spade if you don't want to be called a spade. Its about the concept of personal responsibility. We are all always responsible for everything we do. The debate is over, its been litigated, there is no nuanced or intelligent position that defends the assertion that you aren't responsible for your own actions whether you are getting paid by someone else or not.
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See youtube https://youtu.be/MvekG31FbJM?t=9 for an artists conception of the seating layout.
Those are great resources. Thanks.
The headline is misleading. What makes Generalists more valuable is the rate of change. That is, as change increases, the ability to adapt is essential. It's not the (less valuable) skills you had, but your ability to pick up new skills (that's more valuable).
I've been using iPhone and MacOS for years and successfully picking & choosing different parts of the ecosystem. Sure, the defaults are usually set up to opt you into their own products so it takes a bit of fiddling but it's not hard to opt into just the set of services you want to use - i.e. sync only particular services like iCloud Notes and password manager, but use gmail for email and calendars (using open formats to sync these natively to your phone), use dropbox instead if iCloud for file syncing, etc. It's very configurable and I don't feel particularly locked into anything.

And iMessage seems like a particularly bad example of lock-in because you can take your identifier (phone number) with you. If you switch from iOS to Android pretty much all that happens from a user experience perspective is your message bubbles are now green instead of blue when you text your friends with iPhones. It's very seamless between SMS and iMessages as far as messaging platforms go. To the extent that group threads with your family become harder, that's because group SMS sucks, not because you're locked in to iMessage.

It really seems like most of the time when people talk about lock in, all they mean is that the feature is particularly good. It does what I want and makes things easy, so there would be friction to change. How dare they build features like that!
> and for cleaning up the debris that might result from expiration of, or collisions between, tens of thousands of commercial satellites

FWIW, at the altitudes Starlink operates at, that completely hypothetical scenario would only take a few years to remedy, and would cost $0 as the debris naturally de-orbits due to atmospheric drag.
Eh, there are applications. A pickup truck mostly becomes necessary when you need to do both "heavy" and "far", when your alternatives are a car and a tractor. There are some loads, eg, towing a livestock trailer to market, where it is too heavy for a car (or even too small of a truck) to tow, and a tractor would be infeasible from a "speed" perspective.

(But yeah, you definitely don't need to be using your 4x4 pickup as a people-mover most of the time, and even most hauling applications a truck performs can be handled by a car with a rather modest trailer.)
So you're saying we should give control of the means of production to the workers? ;)
Yes it is. However in general a CEO has to do it "for shareholder benefit" as the shareholders could vote the CEO out, this it is useful for a CEO to blame decision on the need to get a return for shareholders. Zuckerberg has the shares set up so that shareholders have no voting rights, they cannot get rid of him. He could forego some profits by introducing some level of customer privacy and he would be safe from being replaced. That he doesn't means that he himself must take all responsibility for pissing on users privacy.
Python Dataclasses and attrs: when and why
In league of legends, there is a concept of "one-tricking", where you have a mastery of one champion, and use that mastery to win, rather than game knowledge and good macro play. Interestingly enough while the top ranks are full of these players, they very rarely make it into the professional scene.
> Shareholders sued and won because Ford owed and violated his duty to shareholders. [1]

I didn't know about this case so I read about it. It doesn't tell the whole story.

"In the 1950s and 1960s, states rejected Dodge repeatedly, in cases including AP Smith Manufacturing Co v. Barlow or Shlensky v. Wrigley. The general legal position today is that the business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive. Management decisions will not be challenged where one can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole. "

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
I wonder what the comfort level would be like in a rough landing being so far left/right of the center of gravity if the plane was doing a lot of rolling corrections?
They put the lightest, thinnest foam imaginable over the incredibly rigid seats.
Yeah, markdown or something like it would be a nice flourish. But I guess HN kinda likes to keep it simple instead. shrug (hey -- that's some formatting right there)
Yes, for outdoor applications, the glue usually doesn't hold, though sometimes, for some joints, if its tight enough, the glue can keep the moisture out. See here: https://woodgears.ca/deck/repair.html
I am a certified iOS Engineer and fluent full stack engineer with over 5 years of professional engineering and leadership experience. Developed a multitude of applications for iOS, macOS, and web, offering users intuitive and friendly experiences. When I'm not developing things, I enjoy playing Golf, watching sports, and more.

Location: Fort Wayne, Indiana

Remote: Not Required

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Swift, JavaScript, Node.js, PHP, Python

Résumé/CV: https://tyschenk.com/resume.pdf

Email: ty@tyschenk.com
So your idea of improving the situation in China is to cut ties with the country? Looks like it worked well with North Korea.
How is this a new concept when blended wing body (BWB) existed since 1920s [1], with Boeing X-48 being the latest in 2007-2012 [2]?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_wing_body
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-48
A general studies major doesn't ascertain that you have a basic competency in any desirable skill.

The kind of generalists we are talking about actually have the competency to at least make MVP quality work in a few areas.
Fallacy of Distributed Computing #3: Bandwidth Is Infinite
So then you ask them for their email address and password once and link the accounts together?
Why would this be significant? The separation altitude in the launch was around 450km, according to the numbers in the livestream. The orbital shell being targeted is 550km. This doesn't constitute a large difference in visibility.
Simple, Useful and Slow: Statistics Functions in UTF-8
Brief summary of the Patriot missile failure in Saudia Arabia in 1991:
http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~arnold//disasters/patriot.htm...
Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
> The satellites are hard to spot already,

To the naked eye, perhaps. But large telescopes and their instruments are incredibly sensitive. So even if the satellite constellations are minimally visible to the naked eye they can still have a substantial impact on science.

Additionally, these satellites are likely to be very bright in the radio portion of the spectrum (due to their uplink/downlink), which could negatively affect radio telescopes.
Paul sellers is all about spending the time on it, vs just getting it done.
Jeremy Corbyn presented this idea in the UK: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn...

The media, of course, isn't owned by workers, and so rampant character assassination is par for the course for anybody who moots ideas like this ("czech spy", "arch brexiteer", "anti-semite", "terrorist sympathizer", etc.).
> Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t plan and are helpless.

obviously not. But anecdotally what I see where I live is that it is a large enough inconvenience that it makes an impact. If you work 8 hours, then have to spend 2-3 hours getting groceries you already have a 10-11 hour day not counting any other commuting you need to do. What if you have kids you need to get off a bus from school?

trying to blanket say anyone not willing to make that trip just isn't trying isn't fair.

It is well documented that low-income areas have less access to good education, healthcare, and other facilities. blaming the residents doesn't help them improve their quality of life. Not everyone will make it out of that.
Googled it, it's just dextroamphetamine. 1. you can't get it legally where I live either (concerta-ritalin and a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (only gives me anxiety) I can't remember the name of are the only thing doctors can prescribe) 2. I've tried it illegally and it didn't help - it indeed calms me down (feel so serene) and helps to concentrate but... on listening/watching/reading only, not on doing (while desoxyn concentrates me on doing and I stop wanting to learn).
The Sun and planets basically do form a disk. The fact that the solar system as a whole is also moving through the galaxy is not relevant to its shape, basically because any external forces (like the tidal force, a difference in force between radially separated points on orbiting object) are not strong enough to affect that shape.

My understanding is that the solar system formed out of a volume of gas and dust. Over time, gravity caused that volume to collapse inward; this in turn led to a bulging in the plane perpendicular to the axis of rotation. This is the same reason that the Earth bulges at the equator. But since a volume of gas and dust is rather less dense than Earth, nothing opposes gravity condensing it further. So it gradually flattened into a thick disk.

Wikipedia’s “Protoplanetary disk” page explains this process with far more fidelity than I ever could. My point is, there’s a good reason the solar system is a disk: it was formed that way to begin with.
I find it quite humorous that he may drink beer and as far as I can tell, seems to be actively urinating the picture of him on the platform.
Sending Email with EZGmail and Python
PyDev of the Week: Stefan van Der Walt
Mozilla Expands Firefox's Myriad Privacy Features
Any advice or insights on creating and fostering that community for your projects?
The idea that a Facebook run by the shareholders would be a kinder, gentler, less evil company than the current iteration of FB is laughably naive. When shareholders revolt against management it’s almost always because they want the company to be more ruthless about cost cutting and boosting profits at the expense of customers and employees. You really believe that a Carl Icahn type is going to spend billions of dollars buying up a bunch of shares just to pressure Facebook into being more socially responsible?
Hackers Have Infected 50k Servers Worldwide with Hidden Mining Malware
Can anyone recommend a 'Bayesian statistics the hard way' book?
https://www.jbenad.com/flyingv appears to be the original source and PhD candidate behind the design with great info / pictures / etc.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett Pick Up a Shift at Dairy Queen [video]
Ask HN: What are your hacks for apartment/housing searches?
There seem to be a few startups out there focusing on apartments and rentals but all of the listings generally just look the same. I was wondering if there we any good hacks HN can recommend.

I'm specifically looking around Oakland / San Francisco and need to commute to SOMA, but any general hacks or sites would be awesome.
I wouldn't be so sure about that.

* An iPhone 7 will likely receive timely updates for another 2-3 years, going by Apple's track record. Can the $450 Android phone guarantee that?

* The $450 Android will likely have a mid range chip -- which will likely not run Android very smoothly. iPhone 7, on the other other hand, runs iOS 12 like a charm. Sure, it is not as smooth as iPhone XS, but that is not what we are talking about, are we? And while I suspect that iPhone 7 may not beat the $450 Android on benchmarks (or maybe it can -- at least on single core performance, which matters more than one would think), benchmarks do not necessarily represent the real world performance.

* Resale value of an iPhone is always superior to any Android in my experience.

* While the camera quality varies from phone to phone, I suspect the iPhone is still above average in that regard.

* Sound is still better than most Androids I have seen -- including those costing $100 more.

* Should something go wrong with my phone, I can be reasonably confident that Apple will be able to fix it -- that they will have spare parts available. I can't say the same for Androids -- even flagships do not do well in this area -- I've been burnt too many times.

The only thing you'll miss out on is the latest design trends like bezel-less display and the notch. But I don't see how that counts towards value for money.

I know there are phones like OnePlus which are supposed to be flagship killers, but they come with their own caveats. Search for OnePlus privacy goof ups. And the latest OnePlus is not exactly cheap.

I use an iPhone and an Android on a daily basis -- I am not merely speculating here. I am just not motivated enough to collect data to substantiate my claims.
It would probably lower turnover. Transparency and flat org structures are already all the rage. This just seems like the next logical step.
You could try but you might end up breeding out the very qualities that made them useful as well.
> For inventing a new medication, maybe a speciality is a way to achieve that. For starting a business, maybe generalist is the better toolset.

I feel that for any end result, you can define the concept of overspecialization. Taking the medication example - you likely want a specialist in biochemistry involved, but if said specialist is actually a specialist of a particular metabolic pathway, they may arrive at a partial solution, and miss the insights that come from being aware of other pathways and how they interact.

Some problems (and I suspect biology already has plenty of them) may also be tricky in the sense that they simultaneously require breadth and depth that's near-impossible for one person to have simultaneously. Those problems will need a mix of extreme specialists with some "less deep" specialists.
Thank you for this comment, it's spot on.

You're not the only one that feels this way. I love the deep dives into a given topic, but at some point it just becomes too much and/or uncertain/divergent.
> JWST is for researching high-redshift object - the most distant things we can see in the universe. It's not a planet-hunter.

JWST is a general purpose observatory. It will make significant advances for high-redshift objects. It will not survey large numbers of star for new planets, but it will be able to observe and characterize planets that have been identified by other missions/observatories.
Control, Freedom and Harm
Sunblock.
Why didn't he join the screwed pieces with glue? I was always under the impression the whole point point of screwed joints is to stress the glue, not to actually bear load (Because of the small surface area and hardness difference of the materials)
From what my dentist told me, while a water flosser is nice, it doesn't replace flossing. It basically does half of what normal flossing does.
Crash will send you flying between the seats, it looks like. The seats would need to be oriented differently.
Yes, screws are fine for most applications, but at a right angle, if strength is critical, not the best option.
I just wish I could upvote your comment three more times.

To compound the problem, the fact that you're competing against many of your peers for the few jobs there are, and jumping positions every 1-3 years after grad school, means that best practices are not disseminated by working with a stable set of coworkers. This is similar to your 4th paragraph point.

As a mentor of grad students on projects that these days are increasingly using machine learning, I am trying to figure out how to add this stuff to my teaching load, essentially, because the pain of my students using nested for loops when they could just use a single vectorized expression is real... but I myself have no formal CS training......
I am looking for someone to help me with CSS. I can make basic websites (inspite of reading theory and following tutorials on countless websites). I want to make a few simple websites along with my tutor so he can answer my questions in real time. I have tried JsFiddle, Stackoverflow, treehouse etc. I am not a beginner but also definitely not an experienced frontend engineer.

I am a backend engineer in my day job. I can help you with Java, APIs, system design, algorithms and anything else non UI related. I have expertise in compiler design and hardware design also.

Email in profile.
Will signal continue to be free if they have a billion users like WhatsApp? Who will fund the infrastructure and development?