skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always been at a complete loss as to why and how we ended up with the archaic and clunky in-car systems we have today.

If you look at a smartphone from 5 years ago and a vehicle from 5 years ago, the capability of the phone is going to dwarf that of the in-car infotainment system. In all honestly, that 5 year old phone will likely out perform most of the infotainment systems in vehicles rolling off the assembly line right now. I don't even want to think what consumers are being charged on a line item basis for the outdated hardware in vehicles.

I still can't figure out why car companies are even attempting to build these systems themselves (besides profit, I suppose). Pretty much every American has a phone in their pocket that is much more capable than any infotainment system, and it specializes in the things we mainly want from an infotainment system (music, maps/gps, txt, calls).

Wouldn't it be so much better if vehicles just had a barebones screen in the dash with a connector for smartphones to power the system? You could even have the screen size mirror the resolution of the phone so it's just scaled up and rotated. Doesn't seem like much else would have to be done.

I'm sure I'm over simplifying things to some extent, but it still seems like a setup like this would be much easier to produce and much better to use than anything coming from car companies who are typically pretty terrible at software and UX design.

*of course not all vehicles are for Americans and not everyone has a smartphone.
Editing LaTeX documents is actually far more accessible, since they're all plain text. Every formatting instruction in a LaTex document is just text, while Word and PDF documents have non-text markup like bold, underline, italic, etc, which is WYSIWYG (with the emphasis being on "see" -- you must be able to see to be aware of the markup).
The Online Dating Industry Loves Artificial Intelligence
Under the Shield: Inside Chernobyl's New Safe Confinement (2018)
Isn't the whole point of code review that another human looks at your code?
None? I doubt you'd be able to meet modern fuel economy requirements without an ECU.
Vastly improved methodology and understanding of results. One of the issues of modernist research was that objective data was trash, but no one knew it. For instance, anthropologists would throw out / fail to collect artifacts that weren't usable with the analyses available at the time. You can't recover that from a table that says 50 bone shards were found in a pit. You can begin to recover that if the researcher flat out says they don't believe small bones are useful for the easily (an ideological position). Or, to use the example I gave earlier, if both a white male researcher and a female Afghani researcher studied menstruation in Kabul, they very well might get different results without any deficiencies in methodology by either. You can start to explain that if the researchers both flat out state their approaches and assumptions in interacting with their female subjects. Doing that requires us to understand that the researcher affects the results though, which is a fundamentally different view than standard empiricism.
I think the question I've always had with these visual languages is if they target user friendliness and ease of use in the hope that non-programmers can use them? Or do they actually think it'll be more productive for professional programmers than text based languages?

I think for the latter, it'll be really really difficult to achieve. I can maybe see the former, but I also worry for the former, these are too general, and domain specific graphical tools will always dominate.
Thanks for this. I hadn't dug deeply into this previously.

Reading this, I'm struck by how fragile our first amendment is that you can be sued for participating in a protest. It sounds like the only things that the university did "wrong" was end a contract and also one of their deans took active part in protesting.

Much of the glee seems to stem from the fact that the speech being expressed in the protest was dumb. I, for one, think dumb speech should be protected.
Two hours a week is key dose of nature for health and wellbeing – “Those who sp
Long lines reported at Target amid widespread register outages
> rising incomes would eventually result

Wouldn't write that off altogether for longer values of "eventually". The current government's political legitimacy is in part tied to delivering economic development. But obviously rapid exponential growth can't continue forever. After that levels off (and with incomes/education/institutions etc more developed), it doesn't seem unthinkable that some sort of political reform will need to be on the table again in order to maintain legitimacy. Maybe not from Xi Jinping, but he's 66, he won't be president of China forever.
You’re Going Through Software Engineer Puberty
It's interesting that none of the comments so far complain about the size of the binary (13MB!). Nodejs and Electron projects get flak for this all the time, but Go somehow gets away with it.
Show HN: OpTorch, a PyTorch front end for the Ceres nonlinear solver
Frak!

I totally forgot about Frak. I will have to see if someone has uploaded that being played to YouTube. Inevitably they will play better than I would and I would also avoid the risk of getting hooked into a game...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgiA10MfOu4

From the comments, the levels on stage 1 spell 'FRAK'. As per the comments, I don't think I knew that!

It was such a rich diversity of games then, it was more like listening to music in that you don't just have the one song you listen to, depending on your mood you have different things to listen to. With modern consoles you just have the one or two things in practice, you don't have the repertoire.

As well as the BBC Micro there was also the CUB monitor and disk drives. Imagine that!

This was mid eighties, I don't think I did any formal computer lessons at school, it was a lunchtime thing where things like Frak certainly got played. I know you envy my fortune - and in a regular state school.

During one holiday I made things like a pantograph arm for drawing with - bits of carefully cut perspex, potentiometers and the A/D port, then some code to do the trig and draw something on a screen. This was my first go at using a saw, a file, a soldering iron and also my first experience learning the reality does not match the dream. The noise in the A/D was ridiculous and having real time screen updates was also not exactly without lag.

This was an entirely self directed project, no competition or even idea from a magazine. Just a desire to draw at a time when ambition just worked. It was useless at what it did but there was more maths in that than what 99% of the population ever use, even if simple trig.

To think nowadays kids all have their own laptops/tablets/phones and there is zero recognition that 32K of RAM and a beige box could be special. But they actually do much better things now than anything I was ever up to.
That's an interesting point. A value of '0' is at least better than a negative value.

The problem here IMHO is that nobody else is seeing an opportunity to pay more than zero and make a correspondingly larger gain on the other end.

Waste is a strange thing. On the one hand, it's a physical thing. But it's also a stance about that thing. Once we label something as waste, it loses a huge part of its value in our eyes. Yet in practical terms, it never lost anything. That difference between perception and reality is a huge business opportunity.
Push it out on a Saturday, nobody will notice.
I wonder what the single point of failure was to take out every store nationwide of a 45 billion dollar company.
I question how much of that transition they made though. They ARE decision makers by virtue of their knowledge and seniority, but they are not people managers. They still work mostly on technical problems (either as a lead or doing research). And from the little I read online, they strongly shun the managerial aspects of their positions, letting someone else deal with anything non-technical or that is not a personal pet peeve of them.

In many modern tech companies they'd instead be a (pretty powerful) VP of something and let someone else be the C*O to deal with the people/managerial aspects of the company.
Why It's Such a Deal That Jupiter's Moon Europa Is Covered in Salt
They're pretty important for this free online graphing calculator (widely used by high school students and teachers and even starting to be used on some standardized tests): http://desmos.com/c

There is also some niche use as a component of sandboxing: https://gist.github.com/pfrazee/8949363

Your point is well-made though. Very few kinds of webapps are CPU-bound, graphing calculators being notable as an exception (and even then, Desmos made do with the main thread before Web Workers were usable). And while lots of webapps could use plugins, browsers could provide an API for sandboxing code that runs in the main thread, or with a GIL.

The reality is, though, the cat is out of the bag. WHATWG is committed to making the Web into a fully-featured platform for WORA apps with all the same capabilities as a desktop app, and multithreading is one of those capabilities. Even if the next Spectre/Meltdown dooms Web Workers in their current incarnation, browsers will run workers in Docker containers if they have to.
Morally wrong? What the actual f. The proposed is a perfectly reasonable and decoupled solution that would solve the problem for troves of existing, unstructured paper documents, too. In fact, it likely already exists.
We have implemented SonarQube and found it useful. There was initial pushback from our developers but once we had a couple of review sessions we got some serious value out of it.
>The greatest challenge teams faced with developing software for the stores was figuring out how to effectively build a continuous delivery pipeline to 1,800 deployment targets that was safe and expedient.[1]

[1] https://tech.target.com/infrastructure/2018/06/20/enter-unim...
It probably is. Don't know why you got down-voted.
Except that it did? Or it’s possible that you didn’t pick up on it. Satire can be tricky for some people.
I'm a pilot - flying both manned a/c and UAS (under part 107), and here's my informed opinion: this form of "protests" is terrorism, plain and simple. It can kill people (including people on the ground) or do serious damage. The "activists" doing that belong to jail, no matter how good their intentions are. Charged with attempted murder.
Why is it not unconstitutional in the US to disenfranchise those with a criminal record who have served out their sentence?
I remember being absolutely floored when Unreal came out. I was in awe of that team and still am. No one else was anywhere near them at the time in terms of immersive feel and art design, in my opinion.

It's also one of the few FPS games I've encountered where, for several years, I felt like I could play it almost indefinitely (that is, in what little free time I had). It directly drove at least two major system upgrades. Everything's different now, of course, but if they came out with another single player campaign in that universe I would pick it up without a second thought.
In a similar vein, I'd love to see some form of reward for replication studies, which are also hard to publish, since they're not novel and exciting. However, due to this focus on novelty, we got plenty of unreproducible results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

In my ideal world, a scientific result would not be taken as meaningful until it's been replicated at least once.
Here are some thoughts on this topic, together with software designed to help make LaTeX more accessible, by a blind mathematician.

http://latex-access.sourceforge.net/

The software is designed to work with the LaTeX source, rather than with the ensuing PDFs. From what I can tell, it's not very complete -- but it certainly suggests to me that LaTeX provides a platform which can be built upon.
You have a small mistake in your calculation. 0.15/64 = 0.002$ which equals 0.2 cents. But!

It's much worse, actually. Russia conducted redenomination in 1998 with a coefficient 1000. Which means that 1000 old rubles were replaced by 1 new ruble. So considering this it would be 0.0002 cents.
People migrated from blogs to Facebook so they could selectively disclose their private information, only to the people they wanted. For a time, it wasn't even clear how FB could make money operating this noble public service. Remember that?

The legal argument in the article is just a good old fashioned gaslighting of FB's users, at least the original group. Next they'll claim email isn't private....
I imagine because go compiles to an actual native binary, whilst electron wraps a browser and a chunk of JavaScript in a zip file.

You can’t really say “go gets away with it” as though these languages are doing the same thing.
It was also a key feature of Google reader kind of. You would be able to follow other readers and not just publishers also increasing discovery.
The protesters get what they want: this is the Chinese government's evil plan.
The protesters couldn't get what they want: this is the Chinese government's evil plan.

Next time please just say that the Chinese government is evil, save all the typing.
> But I use LaTeX mainly because the resulting documents simply look better, and I imagine that’s a major selling point for many.

I've encountered a real rabbit hole here, and I'm not sure what to do about it. The naive view is that LaTeX does typesetting the best way. If you want better typesetting, use LaTeX, and if you're using LaTeX, you're done.

This turns out not to be true, which is upsetting to those of us ingrained in the LaTeX ecosystem and used to thinking of it as the best way. The first thing you're likely to learn is that you need the microtype package. Without this package, kerning is not as good as it could be. (Which raises the question - if LaTeX is the final form of a typesetting language, why not do it right by default?)

But the problems don't end there. Modern OTF / TTF fonts have a lot of typesetting information that isn't fully retained if you convert the fonts to use with LaTeX. So if you want modern font support, you can't use LaTeX at all, you switch to XeTeX!

At this point you realize that the microtype package you previously learned was crucial isn't compatible with XeTeX, so you can't use it.

So it's a Catch-22. LaTeX is for people who are obsessed with perfect typesetting. But perfect typesetting can't be achieved (currently, to the best of my knowledge) in any TeX family language.
More or less vulnerable is the question though.

Given the state of play with security, a connection to the internet is pretty much going to always be more vulnerable.
Huawei asks Verizon to pay over $1B for over 230 patents: source
The USG is insane. The evidence of Russian interference in our elections is not that impressive and it probably didn't have much impact (compared with Clinton sending American advisors and billions to Yeltsin in the 90s).

Instead, to paper over the decrepit nature of the American political system, they are attacking civilian infrastructure in a nuclear armed nation. Insanity.
The "objective" approach was never actually objective. It had just as many biases and issues as everything after it, but everyone sort of pretended it didn't. The change was recognizing that the same data wasn't objective and that researchers couldn't make it so. Instead, theory shifted to analyzing those inherent biases and studying how they affected research.
Most rewrites are unjustified, either because the old code is good enough, or because the guys in charge of the rewrite cannot deliver better (whether or not the old code is good enough).

But some are.

Arthur Whitney creates each version of the K language from scratch (he is now at version 7). They are not backward compatible, but every single one so far has been better on the metrics that he cares about (succinctness, speed, and revenue).

Everyone says that the Mozilla->Firefox rewrite was unjustified, but ... the Mozilla codebase looked like a dead end to too many people working on it (from first and second hand accounts I heard), it's not clear that it was viable to continue with the old codebase -- and, even if it was, it is unclear that Mozilla would have been better off doing that: Microsoft was the unstoppable juggernaut playing dirty. IE won not based on technical merit (although it actually WAS the better one come version 4) - but arguably because it was integrated into the OS. In fact, it is quite likely that we would not have firefox today at all if they did not start the rewrite back then.

C# is essentially a rewrite of Java; done for legal reasons rather than technical reasons, but IMO the result is a much better technical solution than trying to retrofit and comply with the (legal) legacy of Java.

But ... yes, most rewrites are unjustified and often end in failure.
Depends.

How many places does it take for you to get kicked out of before you start thinking to yourself 'maybe I'm the asshole?'.
> Just a thought.

I see this put at the end of crazy conjecture posts more often than I'd expect, why do you personally do it?
This should not require a ground-up rewrite though, unless the code is a big ball of mud in the first place. You might need to change the overall architecture (e.g split monolithic code into to multiple services) and/or optimize some critical bottlenecks, but most code (business logic, UI etc.) will be unaffected.
The switch failed at routine inspection probably.
Idk, injustice is a human expression and shared between one another as a word. Maybe it doesn't exist or maybe people can still find injustice towards their existence. The meaning of a lot of words can sure take a different shape with understanding fate. Guilt would even shape differently into an expression denoting misbelief & shame with society not wanting to fix the system of punishment to something else. We're all part of the existence for one another after all.
How to Learn More When You’re Already Learning Nonstop
Target is down. I repeat, target is down.
That's why there will be laser energy transmitters beaming excess heat into space to push spacecraft away from earth. No need to fret.
I know you can't really talk about it in detail but that sounds like an interesting way of filtering posts.

Which is a shame because I'm sure it is fascinating.
I felt the same, and decided to learn how to do that. Followed this one guy i admired a lot. The way he is doing it is to merge software engineering practices into science (in this case AI and robotics), and reduce the cost to do iteration.

For us it means:
1. 1 click binary deployments
2. Safer iterations that allow for making mistakes, so that they can do 10s at the same time instead of 1 really safe one.
3. Logging visualization and whatnot on a unified infra.

We are not scientists, but we know damn well how to scale software and business. It applies everywhere. Think of tensorflow, before most people couldnt do ai themselves, now it is damn easy and more things will happen as a result.

This way they can concentrate on science while we concentrate on scaling it. We are betting on couple breakthroughs as a result of increased enthropy.
Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml
Persistent cloud cover over mega-cities linked to surface heat release
I sort of share that sentiment, but in the extreme version that would mean no anti-lock brakes and no airbags, wouldn't it?
Which RF communication system is reliable enough for this? Surely not cellular data.
I really appreciated this article. I had never heard of Simone Weil but I just bought “Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage”.

I also question how people can go about their lives ignoring the suffering of others, buy into the bullshit that is known as ‘political parties’, etc. I am looking forward to getting to know Simone Weil through Dr. Cole’s book.
> Spent an hour in line today

Why on earth would you spend an hour in line at Target? Did you need to buy medication or something and it was the only option? I would have given up and gone elsewhere after three minutes.
>...Oberlin College in Ohio is the equivalent of the “China syndrome” during nuclear accidents, a point where chain reactions become impossible to stop or control.

You find literally comparing this court case to a nuclear meltdown "level"? I tend to agree with the OP here, this takes an egregious case at a notoriously liberal school and then generalizes it to "across the country" as a clear and present danger. Oberlin was obviously in the wrong here and is being sharply punished for it, so it seems that the system is working.
I found this[0] implementation that does not require replacing the entire OS with Ethos, but I haven't yet tried it and cannot vouch for it.

[0] https://github.com/nimbus-network/minimalt
Does anyone notice how it's always rich old white men hunting big game?

We need an initiative to encourage women of color to hunt these majestic creatures.
Cloud. Hackers greatest dream to take down a single provider or target and it all fails.
It was just brilliant being able to drop down a gear and do stuff in the Assembler. You still had access to all the trimmings.

Not that BBC BASIC was written badly and needing extra assembler stuff. Commodore people had to poke obscure data into obscure places for things that should have been in BASIC.

On the Sinclair machines you were using REM/CODE statements to store HEX, so you would need to look up the hex codes for all your commands and then type them in. So much to get wrong!

So no, the BBC was in its on league.

A parallel today is browsers. Remember when Internet Explorer did not have dev tools? Or when you needed Firebug for Firefox?

Chrome came along with proper dev tools, changing all that. I think that the BBC BASIC was analogous to that.

I am glad I was not alone in finding the PC experience after the arcade grade instant-on performance of the BBC. I didn't get Pascal but Wordwise takes me down memory lane. You had some fine ROMS... All bank switchable of course.
As far as I’m aware “paternity leave” is a benefit offered maybe by a select few employers but certainly isn’t common in the US.

“The [Family and Medical Leave Act] entitles eligible employees of covered employers to take unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons with continuation of group health insurance coverage under the same terms and conditions as if the employee had not taken leave.”

Depending on how the employer arranges leave, an employee can use banked leave during FMLA leave to get paid during that period. Given the terms of FMLA and the significant cost of healthcare premiums it makes sense for one spouse to not take lengthy leave.

https://www.dol.gov/whd/fmla/
Because their sticker price is 2x the competitors and they are willing to take a loss to get people on the platform. They are not winning in the cloud wars.
I don't understand your point. Everything is vulnerable; you can never secure something fully. Security in layers is how security works, and disconnecting critical systems from the internet seems like a good layer to add.
Does that not feel terrible? Superglue feels like the tactile equivalent of nails-on-a-chalkboard to me. Though I suppose it's better than exposure to BPA
Web workers would make a good http203 episode, uses/pitfalls etc
What does this have to do with the first amendment? It doesn't protect individuals from lawsuits by other individuals for civil issues.
A big reason is the backup camera requirement[0]. Why just have a screen for the backup camera when it's marginal to add on the other features.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_camera#Mandates
You're right. My observation was just that the discussions often don't go much deeper than "look at this big binary", so I was surprised to find none of that here.
Indeed, reading through the comments can be quite entertaining at times. I think that many authors don't realize they can be read....