skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your handwaving on the Rodney King riots is unpersuasive. I already pointed people at an expert: David Neiwert, and in particular his book Alt-America. And your logic is very poor. By it, we could also prove that vaccines don't do anything, because clearly we had diseases both before and after their invention.

So as mentioned in my bio, I think you've used up your ration of my time. You'll have to carry on in your support of violent white supremacists without me.
Reading is undervalued, and just writing better won't fix it.

Good readers tend to underestimate this problem obviously. If you read the article I bet your colleague didn't, and he or she isn't interested in reading your better-catchy-succinct-effective-if-not-superlative writing either, and he or she is going to rewrite the system.

(Oh but exceptions I can think of are Harry Potter, and also the LKML as a vehicle for developing linux)
I could have written every word of your comment and it would have been accurate haha.
Necessity is the mother of invention. I think a couple of these problems are overstated and if truly forced to create substitutes many non-US companies would step up to the challenge.
I have kept around and distributed multiple copies of The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, for the past few years (lots of revisions of this out there, 4th might be most recent iirc). It's like a 9$ book and the guidance is priceless.

https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style-Fourth-William-Strunk/...
>Dunno about others, but the semi-darkness was crucial to the awe and spiritual depth & mystery that NDC made me feel when visiting it.

Absolutely. It being a giant dark gothic cathedral was the whole point. It would have been something else entirely if it was bright.
> Solar plants with natural gas backup turbines are still cheaper than nuclear plants per mwatt

That might very well be true, but if we're going to deal with climate breakdown in an effective way, gas isn't acceptable: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/5/30/1864381...
> The problem is that the economic incentive to exploit the environment will always outweight the economic incentive to protect it.

That's quite literally why government exists. To solve coordination problems like these.

> Solutions like green technology or carbon credits seem to rest on this assumption that we can prevent environmental collapse without significantly changing our consumerist economy, standard of living, and energy consumption. This seems like magical, faith-based thinking.

On the contrary, thinking the opposite - e.g. that everyone could "just" reduce our consumption - is magical thinking, because it goes directly against the gradient of human nature. Humans want to improve lives for themselves and their children, which creates incentives for consumption, and utterly suck at coordinating at scale to achieve a long-term goal, which is why we had to invent governments and markets to provide necessary incentive structures. Any solution for the climate crisis has to work with these constraints, not against them.

> There are theoretical limits on how efficient any energy conversion will be, no matter how advanced our technology is.

We're nowhere near the limits of efficiency in technology.

> The more our economy grows, the more we consume and produce...the more energy we use and the more waste we create.

More energy is good. We need energy to fix the damage we've done to the climate. And waste is a waste management problem, only partially related to the issues that are critical now. Trying to shut down the economy won't help save us from upcoming climate issues, it'll only make a lot more people suffer. The problem of weaning off the growth-based economy is something we can handle later.

(It's also worth pondering, what exactly is it that we want to save here. The planet? No, the planet will be fine; we can't really do anything to hurt it. The animals? To the extent of our knowledge, animals don't care. They don't think. Human race? Humans as a species will be fine too, no expected climate damage scenario would wipe us all out. What we're trying to save here is ourselves, our children, our way of life. Which essentially boils down to technological civilization. Civilization that's dependent on the shape of the economy we have now. Trying to drastically alter it is as risky as climate change itself.)
I always found implementing fractals very satisfying, so this was a good read. Shameless plug for my own subpar Julia set viewer (Julia set results "make up" the Mandlebrot set): http://thejamespaterson.com/scripts/julia/
In HN terms:

Reimplement the interface so it passes all external blackbox test, using more robust internal modern technology.
Deeply concerned about the insertion of new schema. That would make it an absolute no-no I feel.
The only point I'm making is that the median worker's wage has gone up, in spite of the charts showing the median worker's wage looks flat. We know it's gone up because we've discussed how it if all else were equal it SHOULD be down measurably due to things like there being more single families in the median household chart, adding a lot of lower wage workers through women's rights and immigration on the median worker wage chart.

I'm not making any claims that the gains have been perfectly proportional across all segments of the population. Only that the average worker is really better off today than they were before, and that the median wage charts don't give us very helpful information to gauge how much better/worse off they are.

These new additions to the labor pool don't just add another worker/job at the lower end affecting the median chart, they provide downward pressure on everyone's wages because they compete for those jobs. These workers are productive, so GDP goes up, but there is downward pressure on all wages. That is a big part of the story of the increasing wage/wealth disparity between the rich and everyone else. It's not the only factor, but it's a significant one.
It’s bizarre how somehow the risk of nuclear is thought to be worse than the destruction caused by atmospheric carbon.
I don't know anything about Jonathan Cook but calling somebody a regular writer somewhere when they actually just write articles for syndication feels disingenuous.

UNZ is fringe. It definitely posts some anti-semitic stuff, some truther stuff, some straight up foreign propaganda... That said, I've always seen it as a sort of free speech public service, a place where you can go and dip into some wrong stuff. It's an intellectually interesting place even if you disagree with most of the articles there.

You can also read Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul there. There is something to be said for writers allowing a place like that to exist. By allowing their work to be published there, they are making a statement against censorship. UNZ feels more philosophical and principled than some sort of hate speech depot. This isn't Stormfront.

Here is a quote from the mission statement:

"This is not to say that I personally agree with all or even most of what these writers believe or claim. However, sometimes the most valuable insights are obtained by reading opinions sharply divergent from one’s own. Facing a sharp intellectual or ideological challenge forces us to more effectively frame our arguments and buttress the weaknesses in our logic and evidence that had previously remained unnoticed. Taking the measure of an effective critic is always more valuable than listening to a mindless echo. And I would always prefer reading something disturbing than something dull."

https://www.unz.com/masthead/
Absolutely. And that reminds me of a favorite cartoon: https://twitter.com/nathanwpyle/status/1031008855210123264?l...
That interpretation is absolutely wrong. The current mayor lost 2 crucial seats that undermined her re-election, 1 was due to the internal feuds in her own leftist coalition (about 40k votes) and at least another seat from the center-left who lost votes to the liberals and even the far-right in their own strongholds.

All of that happened in very low income neighborhoods that are not significantly impacted by the LEZ and outside the M30. In fact, she even got a small but meaningful vote boost from LEZ residents.
This library is also quite minimal: https://github.com/f/graphql.js
Or they're just full of sugar. Ice cream isn't unhealthy because it 'lacks nutrients' it is unhealthy because it is basically just shoveling sugar into your mouth.
Does anyone know of a list/summary of all the different ways OoO can be exploited to create vulnerabilities? It seems there's a new attack coming out every month, it'd be nice to see a list of attacks, affected configurations, and workarounds if they exist.
So we just need a disclaimer

“The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.”

And everything should be a-ok
I just double-checked and you are right! Filed Jan. 17, 2019. Apologies. For some reason I thought it was filed a few days after Trump became president, but I was mis-remembering.
I completely agree. I think a good life is balanced and not being the best for the sake of being the best.

I'm interested in Ivy League universities admissions though. From their point of view I think they want the best of the best

I wonder if they try to filter out the people who are smart but would rather enjoy life than change the world.
That's ridiculous. Without evidence, stay uncertain.
This quote reflects my sentiments exactly, and expands on them:

What’s been more depressing than the Notre Dame fire itself is the aftermath. The alt-right hate crew roll in to blame the Muslims (for, um, sneaking inside the roof space to start a fire that hardly damaged the structure at all ah yes, much more likely than an electrical fault: like and subscribe). Floundering President Macron seizes on it to try and rally his gilet-jaune agitators into some sort of patriotic common cause by promising it’ll all be fine in five years. Billionaires donate a bit of pocket change at a 95% tax deductible rate to get themselves on the golden wall of donors when they should simply be paying more tax on their obscene wealth. Saddest of all, a load of spreadsheet architectural firms get free publicity by doing stupid renders where they put a swimming pool on top of the cathedral, or a glass roof to let light in, revealing that they don’t even seem to understand the concept of a vault. The hack journos lap all this up, and don’t try to talk to the people hard at work consolidating and assessing the structure.
There were people outside complaining they turned their phone on and hit the data cap within a couple minutes.

Not one of them wondered what the hell their phone is doing to continuously max out the modem's bandwidth until the data runs out? Regardless, I don't use the work WiFi, stream music a lot of the day, and it still takes a week or two to burn 1GB. IOW, something doesn't sound quite right, like they shorted you on the data?
> Of the well-known accidents, all of them were unexpected.

What accidents are "expected" in any industry, energy or otherwise?
>You should throw out all the games. I'm serious. I never really began to succeed until I stopped playing stupid games and became a man.

I feel related to this comment and I think I know what you mean, and it's most likely that the other guys are misunderstanding you. And obviously, the guy "beta testing a new optimization to play and be productive" is having addiction issues.

What I relate to is that most of my life I just used games as a scape mechanism (of pretty much everything) and it was my default thing to do most of the day. Even when I was bored of playing, I just kept playing to pass time by and avoid doing anything worthy. I tried to leave them several times (unsuccesfully) because whenever I felt bad/sad/any negative emotion, I said to myself: "I'm just gonna play a little bit to get into a better mood", and guess what, before I knew I was all overconsumed again. At some point, I realized that if I wanted to progress in my life, I needed to go cold turkey on games, ALL KIND OF GAMES. I was mostly a PC gamer, but I know that console or phone games will drag me to the addiction again. So now I don't even consider gaming, it's completely forbidden for me (unless it's a social thing, with friends to hang out for example). I'm even considering doing the same with T.V., it's mostly wasted time.

So to sum it up, leave games all together if it doesn't help you progress in your life, can't achieve what you want to and are addicted to them; this will help you "become a man".
So much to unpack here.

1) Intelligence isn't linear. How could it be. Problems in the general sense are terrifying graphs of graphs with meta edges everywhere that are conditionally relevant depending on what "value" is at any given vertex. Being good at one type of problem doesn't necessarily translate into being good at another type of problem. Being gifted doesn't mean you're necessarily smarter than your peers it just means that you're better than they are at a particular type of problem that you aren't generally expected to be good at.

2) Problems get harder at an exponential rate while utility from intelligence improves at a linear rate. Example: Brain surgery is pretty hard. Fighting a gorilla is pretty hard. Now imagine trying to perform brain surgery while simultaneously fighting a gorilla.

If you are gifted as a child then you're solving problems that are harder than what your peers can solve. But as the set of problems you want to solve gets more difficult the value of your giftedness is going to be lessened.

3) Utility = effectiveness * alignment * time (more or less). Having your head in the game (alignment) can make a real difference in whether or not you're useful. Being able to commit more time can make a real difference in whether or not you're useful. And intelligence can affect effectiveness, but experience or having good mentors can also raise your effectiveness (sometimes more than intelligence can).

4) As far as I can tell, some people like to unify all of their experiences into a singular framework of understanding the world and some people like to compartmentalize their experiences into different spheres. To some extent we all do both. Unifying as a child can make you look gifted because you'll start to understand complicated topics where your peers only mimic competency (think having an algorithm that calculates outputs versus a lookup table that just gives out memorized results). However, often in the real world (tm) mimicking is more than effective enough for what people want to get done. So the compartmentalizers are completely adequate. However, the compartmentalizers also can deal with incompatible scenarios much better than the unifiers. If you try to unify the cold logic of a computer with the fuzzy interpersonal relationships of office politics, then you aren't going to be making any progress without years of studying both. However, if you can compartmentalize the two, then you can start being productive and advancing on day one. There's going to be some cap to what you can do as a compartmentalizer, but that cap is probably far above what you need for nearly all domains that most people are likely to encounter.
The concept that seems to justify forced arbitration is that both sides agree to it.

A few years ago just as an experiment I went looking at the handful of mobile providers available to me in my area.

I couldn't find one that didn't have an arbitration clause.
So if I didn't want to be a part of forced arbitration, I just couldn't have a cell phone (well service for it) at that time.

It seems a bit absurd that the legal system is cut off from me for an entire service that is increasingly a standard for participating in society efficiently.
I used to be a huge proponent of learning to write well as the most important skill an engineer can learn.

Now, I think it's the second most important skill.

The most important skill is sales.

The key value of writing well, in a workplace environment (or other environments, really) is to convince others to agree with what you're proposing. Convincing people that something they don't initially understand or trust is going to be a win for them is a sales problem. Clear writing is only a means to that end.
Writing well? I've had to read engineering drawings for QC in a precision engineering shop working with critical industries. Screw grammar and style being undervalued. You get told to fuck off if you complain about spelling.

edit - there is a pathological aversion to updating a drawing, not because of the work, but because of the process. People will do almost anything to avoid having to get an update signed off.
My take on this: I believe the 2nd WW is the major historical event that led the most bright scientists of that era to the USA. From that point on, most major technological advancements were made in the USA. Whoever has the most advanced technology wins the war. At the beginning the other equally technologically advanced site was believed to be the USSR. Nowadays is China. Europe relies on the USA for protection and the price to pay is to stay technologically irrelevant, which means irrelevant in every sense.
Yup, this is a huge problem on my company's website. We really like reCaptcha but, alas, have to fall back to our home-rolled version because reCaptcha completely fails for our Chinese users.
I don't know if this is true of the Dreamcast era Sega but it is for the Saturn era. They lost source code for some of their games.
A lot of Dreamcast games were ported to other console when the Dreamcast died
Laws are not global but US has agreements with EU about personal data.

Read this article for more details
http://www.mjilonline.org/fines-under-eu-gdpr-in-non-eu-juri...
Amazon is obsessive about this stuff. I'm surprised the article never mentions it.

There are internal classes offered on writing better documents (and it's a great class). There's videos, guides, documents, everything. Writing well at Amazon is key to a successful career here. Got a project idea? Write a very good 1-pager explaining it and you've got a much higher chance of it actually happening. Want to share a design? Write a 6-pager (often 10-15 pages with appendices) explaining what, why and how you're going to build the system.

I've been in meetings that start with 15 minutes of silent reading, then 45 minutes of discussion. No PowerPoint presenting.

It's very weird for newcomers, but I don't know anyone who finds that it isn't better than the alternatives.
TrueCar's Journey to True CI/CD
GM of M
Takes me back to IRC script-kiddie scene where [other people] would use tools like smurf and pepsi to knock eachother offline in hopes of taking over a channel.

Kinda funny how all that became, like, serious with actual businesses and dollars at stake.
Firmware to address remote code execution on AirPort Extreme released
EHealth apps benefit from Back end as a Service
Ask HN: Dressing Up for a Job Interview?
I haven't interviewed in about 10 years (IIRC).

I have an interview with a bank for a developer position. It's 2 hours both personal and technical interview combined.

I don't own a pair of slacks or a tie. I can go buy clothes to wear but is this really required now-a-days?

Can I just go in a "dressier" pair of jeans and a button down or sweater?

Or is the interview process still a dress up event?
Show HN: Fist – Easy to Deploy Full-Text Search and Indexing Server Written in C
Hi from Apollo! We appreciate your honest feedback. Part of my team (Developer Experience) is responsible for our documentation. What features are inadequately documented? We'd like to fix that for you if we can.
> I do think that writing smsesque (...) is a really good way to make yourself look dumber, especially to non-engineers.

Maybe they do that in purpose, then?. They do not need to be admired by everybody, especially not by non-engineers. Like the very rich people who dress extremely humbly, with torn-down clothes.
Your brand is what others say about you when you’re not in the room
They already built the damn thing, how hard could it be to land it in stable orbit 1.5 gigameters from the planet? This ain't rocket science, people. Wait a second.
Snoopy and Friends TV Show Shirt
they have 6 or 7 years now

average is 65 months for new cars

https://www.autotrader.com/car-shopping/buying-a-car-what-te...
Perhaps we could cut back on entitlements , too. That would bring bigger savings and help with the governmental fiscal responsibility thing. Lower debt would let people keep more of their money to spend on making their lives better.
About GMO, you don't need to be anti-science to be against them.

My problem is that GMO seeds are proprietary, that is you need to buy them from whoever produces them. And you don't get to use the seeds produced from the plants themselves because either they're sterile or you're legally prevented to do so. I mean, there's even a concept of "seed piracy", which to me is crazy.

The day we have "free-as-in-freedom" (and, of course, safe) GMOs is the day I won't be against them.

I'm a bit perplexed when people here go crazy because John Deere refuses to let people repair their own tractors but as soon as someone is against GMOs it's anti-science.
On the Pleasures and Sorrows of Life Without Screens
Waiter there's a compiler in my shellcode [video]
The Bosses Who Walk the Walk on Paternity Leave
I'd rather have finer control on a site by site basis than wholly disabling js though.
82% of IoT device manufacturers say their devices are inadequately secured
How long until people with student loan debt are denied passports
> clean interface for readers

The point of the post being that many authors don’t believe Medium provides this any longer and may be looking for tools to switch to a service that does.
In another comment I quoted Roger Scruton who wrote about the desire of "all forward-looking architects from Le Corbusier to Richard Rogers, of razing Paris to the ground and rebuilding it in concrete, steel and glass" but I didn't expect to see someone actually arguing for the perspective Scruton was lampooning. I suppose he was not exaggerating as much as I had thought.
Google Rejected Me Just to Tell Me “Yes” the Year After
He might not earn an obscene amount of money: there was an article here recently about spending habits, and doctors seemed to be the worst.
Hi from Apollo! My team (Developer Experience) is responsible for making sure you can find what you need in the docs. What improvements would you like to see?
The Rabbit Hole
If anything, good writing is more persuasive than face-to-face. A well written document carries some gravitas.

Of course, you have to get decision makers to read it...
That might be a step forward, but the problem with this is that it will under-lend to things that are societally valuable but not personally lucrative.

For example, we want lots of teachers and librarians, social workers and nurses. But if we only pay based on personal income, we'll get lots of people with low social value but high income. E.g., corporate lawyers, investment bankers, corporate raiders, advertising executives.

I think the better thing to do is publicly fund education and the have the government capture the gains via taxation. That's harder to tune, but I don't have reason to believe the outcome will be more lopsided than a purely market-driven approach, and has the big advantage of not funding a whole industry of student lenders.