skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Purely anecdotal, but I was a tutor for two years out of college and planned to be a teacher (originally college, then high school). I went into a different field for 3 reasons:

1. Pay

2. Professionalism - all of the teachers I saw and talked to under 65 were treated like dirt, and were micromanaged instead of being treated like professionals

3. Barriers to entry. By the time I got my Master's and decided I'd rather teach high school than spend several more years getting a PhD, it was financially impractical for me to go back for more years to get a teaching degree. It was also very difficult to find internships and open positions. One guy I know who did a straight teaching degree interviewed almost a HUNDRED TIMES despite doing incredibly well in his program and student teaching at a prestigious high school.

I'm sure the kids are doing fine without me, but I had stellar reviews from every kid and parent I ever worked with, and from professors I TA'd for. People have told me my whole life I should be a teacher (came up again just the other day with the guy I was pair programming with). I'd happily take less money to be a teacher, but when you add in factors 3 and especially 2, it just isn't worth it to me. I'm not going to suffer a bunch of professional abuse and take a financial hit to boot to do something that my society doesn't seem to genuinely value.
Good. One of the biggest tragedies of modern British history is the apparent implosion of her homegrown nuclear industry. The recent 'new' nuclear power station debacles using French and Japanese technology paid for by the French and Chinese governments are beyond embarassing.

Rolls Royce has been banging the ‘small modular fission reactor’ drum for a while now [1] — i'd love to see a discussion about the concept's merits or otherwise.

We need smart, adventurous thinking on power generation to fill the gap before fusion comes on line (fingers crossed) — the UK has one of the healthiest renewable markets in the world, I see no reason we shoudn't be pushing nuclear alongside. Just smart nuclear, not dumb monolthic last generation nuclear with little benefit for local industry.

- ed

[1] https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/nuclear/sm...
false dichotomy and i'd argue that small minority isn't so small.
That won't grab as many clicks and eyeballs though.
uBlock Origin, same as anywhere else.

https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=com.el1t.uBl...
washingtonpost.com is going in my hosts file.
Also the choice to use petrochemical plastic rather than plant derived plastic or some equivalent non-plastic is mostly "because it's there". The industry exists, so its products are cheaper in the supply chain, so by the time you get to consumer level all the decisions have been made and it's the only choice offered.
What a Journalist Can Teach Lean Startups about Customer Interviews
It's such weird revisionism to think that the US was ever really enthused about welcoming immigrants. That's the ideal, but the reality is that people are clannish and tend towards a "fuck you, got mine" attitude.

It's more like pledging a fraternity; pay the dues, get shit on, go through the hazing, and eventually you come out the other side assimilated and ready to haze the next incoming pledge class.
Ah, good to know. I'm not sure if they changed that since launch, or I was just conflating them with one of the other extensions.

This sounds more like Safari's newer behaviour, which sounds good in theory but in Safari's case where it can't be turned off, it breaks things in practice.
This seems like a good solution for people that are aware of what's happening enough to pay attention and disable it when something is not working as expected, but makes a bad default for the typical user.
I would like to point out that honking at cyclists is really annoying as a cyclist and can even be quite dangerous. From inside your car, it doesn't sound so bad but, on the outside -- particularly when you are as close as bike lanes often are -- it's pretty extreme noise pollution and borderline deafening.

Drivers in NYC are constantly honking for no good reason other than their own self gratification. (And how good can it even feel?) It's completely normalised socially but is clearly a useless and negative act in almost all cases. I find it extremely selfish for people to choose to take up so much space and so much noise at the expense of others. If you really must choose to drive rather than bike/walk/subway, at least choose not to fill the air with more noise than needs to be there.
That's africa, not the west.
The backlash is entirely justified. There's way too much plastic waste, and too much of it is ending up in our oceans.

Plastic vs fuel is not an either/or thing: they're both problems. We probably can't eliminate either of them completely, but we should try to cut back on both as much as we can.

A tax on plastic packaging would be a very good idea.
I'm upvoting this story, but only to highlight the inconsiderate reporting in the media of such an emotionally charged and delicate case.

Please read the comments instead of the article.
The "problem" was that ILECs never followed the rules and regulators never punished them for that. If a CLEC wanted to add a customer, they got a schedule for 3 weeks, even though the ILEC would do it in less than a week if the customer were signing up with them. Anyway, the schedule was also a fiction, because the ILEC would come up with half a dozen reasons to delay it to 5 weeks. We're not talking about a technician visiting a customer's house. We're talking about a couple of switches thrown in a central office, an operation that would take less than a minute. How could anyone attract new customers in such a situation? That is why all CLECs went bust or were acquired for pennies on the dollar.

In other nations, with functioning regulation, unbundling was considered unworkable so they required that a separate entity would own the local loop.
What’s wrong with new nuclear power coming into service on 10 years? Is it because we’re 10 years away from climate disaster? Because people have been saying that since the 70s. If that’s the only obstacle to some long term thinking then I can’t see what the problem is.
How reciprocal are international study opportunities? What I mean is:

Do US students have similar opportunities to study at foreign universities as foreign students have to study at US universities?

When comparing universities with similar entrance requirements (e.g. state schools, prestigious private schools, ivy league, etc.) are there a comparable number of US and foreign openings?

How often is instruction in English? (I realize this isn't entirely fair, but the reality is that high quality foreign language training isn't available at many US schools in the same way it is in Europe; which isn't the student's fault).

It seems to me that if the opportunities are not symmetrical then it is reasonable for there to be at least some protection/preference for domestic students. However, I think that needs to be balanced against the benefits of attracting foreign talent and expanding diversity. Either way, my understanding is that the US visa system is largely irrational and broken so it should definitely be reformed.
But the chart is forecasting 11+ billion!
I don't think the cost in Oil is the issue.

We need to do lots of things, this particular thing is easy to do so we should do it.

I don't buy the argument that because we aren't doing other things that we should not do this too.

You can use the same logic to never do anything at all.

The best thing about these bans is they are very visible and raise awareness, giving you the critical mass you need to solve other issues too.
So, to put it simply, more and more people have to work to support more people than before, right ?
I love the idea of using OEIS to automate finding mathematical patterns in the solution. Also, plotting the search space immediately is something I know is often unreasonably effective, but I almost never take the time to do. This is a fantastic little article.
So she died of starvation after the doctors agreed to stop force feeding her?
Distraction in the Technology Age (2017)
> exceptions in disguise

In disguise? I do not believe there is any mystery that panic/recover provide exceptions in Go. An exceptional case is exactly when you would want to use panic in a Go program. panic is provided in the language specifically to deal with exceptions.

If anything, it is other programming languages where exceptions are usuals in disguise.
Maybe but we also need an increase in quality of life, not a decrease. While a plateau (and even reduction) in number of people would not necessarily be a bad thing, it needs to be in a kind of controller fashion to avoid a broken age pyramid, ending up with too many elders incapabke of substaining their means by themselves, and too few working age people to support them, ending with both group living below the means we should strive for them to reach.

The age pyramid in some european countries, in china, in japan, ... Is scary, and not because of the decline of population it represents, but because unless we also change and adapt society accordingly there simply won't be enough people to pay for those who can't work anymore, and the few that can pay end up paying more than their fair share.

It's a huge issue, and nobody wants to change it much, making it feels like we will wait until the situation explodes before adapting.
Who was making configuration changes on a Sunday afternoon?

Not many engineers at Google work Sundays, and most teams outright prohibit production affecting changes at weekends.

The only type of change normally allowed would be one to mitigate an outage. Do I suspect therefore that the incident was started by an on-call engineer responding to a minor (perhaps not user visible) outage made a config mistake triggering a real outage?

That seems likely because on-call engineers at weekends are at their most vulnerable - typically there is nobody else around to do thorough code reviews or to bounce ideas off. The person most familiar with a particular subsystem is probably not the person responding, so you end up with engineers trying to do things they aren't super familiar with, under time pressure, and with no support.
They buy their baseload from France, which at this point has one of the most vibrant nuclear industries in the world (and no surprise, fought hard to make sure ITER was on French territory).
> They improve people's quality of life

Plastic straws improve quality of life? Give me a break.
I hope you mention this in interviews. I'd imagine it fits your brand very well, as it says a lot about how you approach things. I wish I was this motivated at that age.
It’s someone’s homage to the National Park signage, nothing more.
Except the strike price used is far above the current market rate, with no real indication that it would reach that level naturally. Describing it as a generous subsidy might not be strictly accurate, but isn't far from the truth.

If the strike price used were the current market rate (or maybe a bit lower), that would seem reasonable to allow a company to have the required long term security knowing the bottom won't fall out from under them, but an implicit subsidy does not seem like a good strategy.
Best comment ever for this topic. I've done the same to get in to programming via sub-game script path so I can relate myself.

Ironically, I always believed the importance of the schooling but recently started to think maybe learning by doing without the necessity is easy to forget. Maybe we need new education methodologies.
Huawei row will damage Arm, says co-founder Hermann Hauser
You can disable iMessage at any point and it works. New texts from iMessage users get sent over SMS instead. You don't have to do it in advance—I just did so out of paranoia, and I don't think other people need to do the same.

(Of course, one side effect is that you can't use iMessage any more and iMessage-specific features are unavailable to you, e.g., group texts might get weird. I don't know of any platform that has the property that you can quit it and still use its features.)
I don't think it's just anecdotal, some data suggests this is happening. The book 'Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline' talks about this. The only place in the world with high total fertility rate is now subsaharan Africa, even countries you might think have a lot of children don't really anymore. China is well known to have a low TFR now, but even India appears to have reached replacement level, although something called population momentum will mean population continues to increase for a couple more decades, and then decline.
The oceans are being polluted with plastics at an alarming rate and will be littered for thousands of years without human intervention. And littering isn't the big problem, it's the broken system/lifecycle of plastics which doesn't have a safe, efficient way of disposal, reuse, or breakdown.

Even if you take every plastic and drop it into a bin, you're either going to burn it or dump it. Most of the plastic trash in the US is also just shipped to other countries with more lax laws so they just either burn it or dump it. Until we have a proper process for disposing plastics safely and cleanly, we must reduce using it in the ridiculous way we're using it. Single-use plastic bag should never be used if you have a way to use a reusable cloth bag instead.
Great content on this blog, I’ve read many of his articles and I believe we’ve corresponded via email. However, I got tired of the ads (gut doctors beg you to blah blah blah) that have made it through firefox focus on my phone so I stopped reading. I am happy to support content but ads like that are why ad blockers exist.
If you want to see oil companies shrink nationalizing them is probably the worst way to go about that.
I'm on the Epic store because they have been giving away games I had wanted to play, specifically Transistor and What Remains of Edith Finch. It remains to be seen how much money I'll spend there. Most of my purchases these days are on GOG.
Could EEG sensors be commoditizated ? I have sleep apnea and I find my fitbit + the CPAP readings lacking.
Some companies even consider all work you do during working hours (regardless of the device you use) as their IP and I've even had a contract that stated that any work I do inside or outside office ours is considered IP of the company unless I have explicit approval of my manager (an email saying it's OK I work on my own open-source projects).

So just check with your manager/HR what the rules are.
Can eyes movement be measured through eyelids ?
This may have something to do to with making sure mainland doesn't block them.
Pretty much, yes. Those projections are extrapolations from past numbers and don’t consider any potential drastic political actions to stop that growth, but given the total lack of enthusiasm to make such measures happen, they’re probably pretty accurate.
It could be more a product of the current economic system that requires both parents work full time jobs and have a career path. Its possible that in the future we could see a different system that actually increases birth rates.

Also, demand for fertility techniques for couples over 35 is going to drive a lot of research into that area.
Kik originally was what WhatsApp became - a multi-platform messaging service set to replace SMS/MMS. Back in 2010, it was set to become the next BBM as it exploded in popularity and was available on every smartphone platform - Android, iOS, Windows Phone AND mobile, BlackBerry. There may have even been feature phone support as well.

This was before iMessage too, so the group chat and photo sharing capabilities were attractive. Facebook Messenger barely existed, and there was no such thing as Twitter or Instagram DMs.

Their app has barely changed since then and it’s taken new life as an AIM style messenger where you only need to exchange usernames to communicate. It’s bloated, slow, and has features that are stuck in 2013.
Isn't 64 a rather arbitrary number?

65 used to be retirement age (for men at least), it clearly needed raising years ago, but was hard to do politically in many countries. It is finally being raised. When pensions were first introduced they were meant to run 5 years, not 20.

In the UK, at least, you could argue we're left paying for a generation of Baby Boomers who are swanning about on cruises, golf days and health spas on pensions they never paid even half towards.

Most are perfectly able to work for another 10 years at least (and if you're younger than 50 you'll have to work those extra 10 years), but for some reason we need economic migrants for economic growth. Even though we're not building anywhere near enough homes, schools, hospitals and transport infrastructure for this mass immigration, and we're not training enough nurses, doctors, teachers. We are effectively just shunting all the economic problems of the end of continual growth 20 years down the line. We even scrapped bursaries for student nurses! Utter madness.

And then, rather ironically, it's this same generation who overwhelmingly voted for Brexit to even further destroy their children's and their children's children prospects because they're not happy about the changing face of the Britain they're not even going to live in.
Sounds about right. If people don't die young, the population pyramid becomes a rectangle, so there should be approximately the same number of people under 5 as above max age - 5, let's say 80.
> Most of the plastic trash in the US is also just shipped to other countries with more lax laws so they just either burn it or dump it.

Because people in the first world won't stand for modern incineration plants. The NIMBYs who would personally be negatively affected spread FUD about a .00001% increased chance of getting cancer or some crap like that.

Burning trash in general is a damn good way to get rid of it. You're left with ash which takes up a fraction of the space and is much easier to contain than the original trash product. Sure, it emits some nasty stuff but when you run an incinerator in the first world you can scrub that out of the exhaust. When you ship that stuff to the 3rd world you lose oversight of what happens to it.
IBM is giving away free DJI drones to coders
Up until the sixties or seventies asbestos was just far too useful to be replaced easily.

It was used everywhere - as filler, as insulation, as fire retardant, and was so cheap it even got used as bulking agent, as fake snow for Xmas and in packaging. We got rid of it in new applications in just a few years once it was realised that the health cost was far in excess of its utility. It costs thousands to rip out some of the old insulation in buildings, especially where it's part of the fabric of the building.

Lead in petrol was far to useful to be replaced, etc etc...

I just think it's part of the new innovation debt coming due. It's only now coming due for plastics and oil and the extreme cost of profligate unconstrained use is starting to be realised.
This could be a really tough problem to solve. How do we keep economic growth going if our main driver (human capital) is disappearing?

1. There is so much waste and distributional inefficiency in our global economy that there is plenty of room for growth by correcting these

2. Fewer people means that less growth is required to maintain and continue to improve living standards

3. Human capital isn't disappearing, its rate of appearance is slowing; there will always be new humans unless the global birth rate goes lower than the global death rate and stays that way for a long time

4. Human productivity is becoming decreasingly dependent on human capital over time
Hasn't a lot of GDP growth over the last century been caused by population growth? What happens when the GDP pyramid scheme pops?
I still think this notion of saving up (401(k) and superannuation) is going to fall in a heap. What good is money if no one is around to do the work? Demand will increase and all that saved up money is killed by inflation. The government is going to have to step in anyway, and do what it always did with pensions. That is, redistribute tax to care for people who are limited in their ability to do it themselves... because the tax will represent current labour than the false notion of nebulous saved "value".
> going to see population growth flatlining and global population starting to decline

Western population growth is flatlining. I have Beduin neighbours, who I have terrific relations with, who have over twenty children each. Some have over thirty, like the guy I buy my gas from. Some have more than that.

One guy that I know of, but have not met, is mentioned every time the subject comes up. If the Wikipedia list of most children had less of a Western slant, then he would be around number sixty on that list.
Without a doubt that plastic is a usability improvement over paper. Sure it's only a minimal improvement in overall quality of life but it's non-zero.
It’s not really that narrow. Historically, people had an extended reproductive window. Elizabeth Schuyler (Alexander Hamilton’s wife) had half her kids after 35, three of them after 40. Risk goes up, but it’s still pretty low through the 30s. The NHS labeling is based on the medical community’s attitude of reducing risk at all costs, without regard to cost-benefit analysis.
CO2 also pollutes the environment for thousands of years.

"About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years." --IPCC AR4

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/how-lo...

Plastics are a visible but small part of our environmental damage. Plastic straws doubly so.
There will be several hundred million migrating from Africa to the west.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
This is exactly what Node-red does!
https://nodered.org/
Some of the interesting things that can be done with it are that it can interface with the Raspberry Pi I/O pins,
use OpenCV for realtime face recognition (https://randomnerdtutorials.com/car-plate-recognition-system...),
Parallel nodes can be used to create a heterogeneous cluster (https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-dnr),
create UIs visually with the Dashboard (https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-dashboard),
you also have access to the full complement of npm packages,
you also can do web APIs really easily with this system, including logging, error reporting and recovery etc.

I've put together a POC which allows NodeRed to run on iphones/android phones and allow visual programming on the device: https://github.com/alexisread/noreml

What's missing there is a table component to really finish off being able to create a more general-purpose UI.
I think banning plastics here seem like a silly empty gesture as most of the plastics are flowing into the oceans from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

We would be way better of funding cleanup efforts in these rivers.
Really interesting. Where can I learn more about building something similar myself?
Plastics cannot be reduced to their CO2 impact, they cause tremendous damage to marine animals, they are pollutants themselves, they release endocrine disruptors in the environment, they can persist many many years in the soil and water. The equivalence you imply is not valid.

> The solution [is] enforcing existing laws against littering

That's the classic industry argument: it's not their fault if there is pollution, it's the end users that irresponsibly throw stuff away. Ignoring their heavily-funded lobbying to avoid plastic reduction laws and minimize recycling obligations.