skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Wouldn't the capital they need be pretty minimal?

Hard to say. Uber seems to employ large numbers of extremely expensive silicon valley engineers doing god-knows-what. Maybe those are necessary to run a successful ride dispatching app?

On the other hand, groups like Lyft, Ride Austin, and Curb seem to have cloned Uber's main app.
I think the big question would be how much the base equipment costs and the significant power density limitations. It takes time to get established against a very mature technology and batteries are a big limiting factor:

“Even assuming huge advances in battery technology, with batteries that are 30 times more efficient and "energy-dense" than they are today, it would only be possible to fly an A320 airliner for a fifth of its range with just half of its payload, says Airbus's chief technology officer Grazia Vittadini.”

I'm sure everyone would like to switch for environmental reasons but that sounds like a really big gap to fill.
This sounds like "Maybe most of us would prefer to just think 100 tiny thoughts, feel 100 tiny emotions rather than one large thought, one complex emotion", and I think you're probably right, which is probably sad. After all, isn't the point of movies to spur you to think thoughts and feel feelings you wouldn't have thought and felt otherwise?
The services offering helicopter rides to the wealthy
It's produced by an American historian at a US university for the American operation of the Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/info/about-guardian-us

Presumably intended for their growing US readership

https://www.theguardian.com/us

Why wouldn't they then focus on their home US readership?

As a Brit I notice that since they formed Guardian US and Guardian AUS there's a marked growth in local stories, features and investigations for those two countries. Pieces on US and Australian politics and other news that wouldn't meet the usual "of global interest" bar for international reports.
For all but the last instant of our cultural evolution, humans have been information starved. In one generation we have become a culture that has instant access to unbounded quantities‡.

In the same way, over the last century or so, we became a species with ample access to calories‡. With foods containing the evolutionary markers of high calorific content (i.e. sugars, carbs and fats) being the cheapest.

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that we are similarly primed to overindulge in both. Nor that we lack the innate intuition to determine quality. I very much expect the nascent 'tech detox' movement to develop into a broader healthy thinking movement.

---

‡ #NotAllHumans, obviously.
The Same Exact Foods Affect Each Person's Gut Bacteria Differently
As a gas at 1 atmosphere, wikipedia says 0.011 MJ/L, compared to jet fuel at 35 MJ/L. You'd save weight (it weighs less than air so this would make you float) but need 3000x as much space if it's not compressed.

Compressed at 690 bar (about 680 atmospheres) it goes all the way up to 5 MJ/L, only 7x as much volume of fuel required compared to jet fuel. But the tanks to pressurize something that much are presumably very heavy and not a reasonable solution in an airplane.

Liquifying it gets that up to 10 MJ/liter and I don't think you need as much pressure to store that (as long as you keep it very very cold).

Per weight instead of volume you beat jet fuel (by 3-4x), so that aspect is a win. Having enough volume to store it and keeping the storage equipment light are the challenges.
Tragedy of the Geopolitical Nerd
This is super interesting: "We observed a general increase in sterol δ13C signatures with depth, which is likely related to a combination of particle size effects, selective feeding on larger cells by zooplankton, and growth rate related effects"

https://www.biogeosciences.net/10/2787/2013/bg-10-2787-2013....

Carbon-14 is created in the atmosphere where it is C02 and photosynthetic organisms convert it to more complicated organic compounds. The rate of diffusion of the Carbon-14 through the water column is measurable.
I’m not the person you replied to but...

I use Inkscape and Gimp at work, very tiny minor part of a small part of my workflow.

Today Inkscape was crashing when I tried to rotate a spline with six nodes in an otherwise empty workspace.

I’m probably going to buy a commercial vector graphics app even though my employer won’t pay for it because that sort of bug is a show stopper right when I need the program most.
The Land Where the Internet Ends
Primary energy consumption includes all forms of energy. Electricity, but also fuel, heating, etc. If you make it fully renewable the country becomes pretty much carbon neutral, save for things like metallurgical coal.

Energy storage raises cost a bit, but not too much, depending on the quality of the electric grid. You don't very much storage if your grid is good because it's always windy somewhere. Excess energy can be converted to Methane via power-to-gas and stored in the existing strategic gas storage facilities.

Better informed people than me wrote long papers about this, and also looked into scalability issues. It's a bit hard to reproduce in HN comments.
YouTube under federal investigation over allegations it violates child privacy
I think adding the key use a different mechanism - there are two JS interfaces for U2F, and FF only supports one of them.
TBH I've added my key to GitHub with chromium, but have since moved to FF; so that might be what you're seeing with GitHub.
Happened to my 2013 one this year with half the trackpad not clicking and the fans spinning crazy loud.
I ended up paying apple $300 to fix it which at the time annoyed me but they ended up replacing the battery, fans, trackpad, case, keyboard, and potentially even the monitor so it felt brand new when I got it back which was nice.
"narwhal bacon" is what came to my mind, an ancient story I heard from reddit
> Oh and it would be so quiet.

would it? I was under the impression that proppelers were much louder!

what is the biggest source of noise in an aircraft/type?
However, the West sends plastic to Asia.

If a country sends plastic waste to Asia and then it's mismanaged there, what country gets the blame for mismanagement in those statistics?
Fantasy Grounds is virtual tabletop RPG software, for doing things like playing D&D or Call of Cthulhu with friends over the internet. It's a desktop application which all participants install, and the players' computers connect to the computer of the person running the game. It has features to handle various polyhedral dice and modifiers, character sheets and stats, maps, etc.

A full discussion of FG or a comparison vs the browser-based competitor Roll20 would be off-topic, but the company behind FG officially supports Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Their app is a Windows app on all platforms. For Linux, they test and document Wine, and I can confirm firsthand that it works.

For Mac, I think Wine is involved too, but although they do have documentation about that case, I think most of FG's Mac users (and many of their Windows users) install it via Steam without having to care about Wine. They don't have a version packaged through Steam for Linux.

This example may go away in 2019 or in an upcoming year: they're working on a rewrite to be based on Unity. But this isn't a case where they can just use Unity for the next game in a series. They have a long-standing product with a lot of features and users that shouldn't be broken in the transition, and a small staff that has other priorities alongside the rewrite. The product just happens to be a tool for gaming. So the rewrite has understandably been a slow years-long background effort.
Gadget/tech journalism has always positioned Google as a 1:1 competitor to Apple, which leads to a very skewed perspective on Android. Google's own Android hardware always gets compared to Apple, even though OEM's implementations have usually been superior. Google built a good enough base for OEMs to improve upon.

For all the breathless 2000-word articles iPad Pro productivity, Android has for me been far better as a laptop replacement as it has for years supported:

- mouse + KB

- USB OTG (external storage)

- microSD slots

- MHL/mini-HDMI (for external displays)

Samsung introduced multi-tasking and pressure-sensitive pen input with their Note series of tablets in 2014, whereas Google's official Android didn't support split screen until Android N in Aug 2016. iOS 11 started offering it a year later. Samsung's DeX gives you a limited version of Linux on Tab S4 and S5e, which makes the desktop experience even better.
The rationale for lowering the age is universal suffrage, same argument as giving women the vote, giving those with no property the vote, giving those with no education the vote. Share the responsibility for the terrible decisions.

Historically those with the vote have often pretended that they vote wisely and newcomers could not be depended upon to do likewise. There is no evidence for this proposition, Trump appealed perfectly well to retirees, to men, to those who owned country estates, and only lost marginally among the well-educated. If there is wisdom, it's not the domain of the existing electorate.

As to why it shouldn't coincide with emancipation, government policy doesn't wait until you're emancipated, everything from whether the air you breathe is toxic to whether you have to do gym class is a matter of government policy, why not give those affected a say?
`Avian Incident' Knocks Out 84% of a California Solar Farm
Open Source Trash Eating 3D Printer
A very good point. We are both blessed and cursed that we do not have any ultimate purpose pre-programmed, we even can question and reject the call of the fundamental instinct to reproduce.

Although, through our history most humans lived in conditions where existential questions could not arise, plus religions did their best to spread their answers.
I've seen dozens of comments over the last 24 hours saying that people have swelling batteries but their serial number is not covered. I would hope for a more comprehensive recall soon since these issues just keep popping up.
I would never ever have guessed such use case.

Another proof that you never know how people will use your software.

Reminds me of this XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/1172/
“Stop and watch“ is still intervention. Twice I’ve broken up what seemed to be incipient fights by stopping and staring intently at the aggressor. Unless they are drunk, they don’t want to be observed. They will walk away if someone is staring at them.
I think it is because there is much less usage of home internet in India. Thus what North America and Europe split between mobile and home internet is all on India's mobile.

This means that India is actually much lower in total bandwidth usage per month per person than North America and Europe overall.
House Democrats and GOP Favor Domestic Surveillance Powers
I was the primary producer on this at the agency that designed/developed it Domani Studios (Now defunct) if you have any questions.
These are easy to like answers. They sound right. The truth is ugly and not really useful at all in making any decision: there is no purpose. Let me explain my theory as brief and clear as I can.

Humans are not designed to work as individuals but as a whole population. If you judge at the species level it makes the most sense to try and push in every direction available and let natural selection take its course.

Is it better hard working than lazy? You get hungry if you don't go out to hunt but it is better to set up traps than to fight animals hands on, or better yet delegate the work to others. We wouldn't have progress in comfort, security, etc without laziness. Laziness is not bad!

This applies to all qualities in human nature. A balance is better than any extreme of course, but that balance cannot be deduced intellectually, emotionally, morally, legally, etc. You can only try, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", etc. The right balance changes in time and space, it varies from individual to individual.

On top of that there are lessons to be learned from individuals who do take things to extreme.

For me it is clear we are doomed to be drones sacrificed in every direction possible to explore by algorithms deeply embedded in our hardware. Any sense of purpose, any rationalization of why our direction is better - an illusion. An useful illusion ofc. If you don't manage to fool yourself jumping off the bridge is the only option.
Our best bet against burnout is self-care, just not the kind you think
Not really, because Kotlin uses concepts that aren't exposed in Java the same way, let alone the clunky J++ used by Android.

For example extension methods or suspend functions.

Hence why there is a guide on how to write Java friendly APIs from Kotlin.

Jetpack Compose is an interesting story, looks like it sprung into existence as response to Flutter, without any concrete ideas on how tooling should look like and total disregard for the ongoing efforts to sell constraint and motion layout editing on the graphical tooling to android devs still using the old layouts.

Having watched all SwiftUI tooling related talks, and from experience how Android Studio has evolved, I don't have great hopes that by Google IO 2020 we will see demos at the same level as WWDC 2019 SwiftUI ones.
You spend a career training in skills, not training in specific tools.

If you limiting yourself to a single tool and refusing to learn anything else you are doing yourself a disservice.
Own a single engine piston that's fuel efficient. In my plane 100 miles would be about $40 in fuel conservatively. Amortized maintenance costs are much higher than $40, but still not even close to $400. The article mentions a Caravan which is a bigger single engine turbine, not piston.

Fewer moving parts doesn't mean reliable and not subject to catastrophic unforeseen failures. If it hasn't been out for five years you're a test pilot.
I don't disagree with your premise but stating "all evidence" and providing none doesn't help.
What, no one backed anything up before "the cloud"?
50$ donated! I hope that's good for some beers :)

On a sidenote paypal donation took way too long. If anyone is interested in making open source donations simpler feel free to ping me.
Toward a “Kernel” Python
And once in the army they can also drive many vehicles at lower ages than in civilian life (17 vs 21 in some cases).
By accepting that event cinema is the only thing the movie industry has left in its favour right now. As they say in the article itself, many people watch maybe four films a year, and usually stick to those with the highest profile.

So I think that's really what film as a medium is going to be in future. It's going to be the place you watch the next Avengers or Star Wars or James Bond or what not. The place for big picture films with million dollar budgets and rosters brimming with A listers, and nothing else beneath that.

Or okay, maybe indie cinema may exist on the fringes or something. But fact is, the industry has probably got to accept that low/medium budget films are pretty much history, and they've been replaced entirely by streaming services and sites like YouTube.

Still, it's not all bad news. No, if you want bad news, that's probably the future of television. That's on the way out right now, is probably going to completely supplanted by streaming services like Netflix in future, and as a format has pretty much no advantages over the internet whatsoever. Seriously, could you imagine trying to selling the experience of watching TV in a society that already has the internet? You couldn't. It objectively be a worse solution for most people.

So yeah, I think film is probably gonna be reduced a bunch of blockbuster films by large studios mixed with some arthouse works, and TV is probably just going to be completely replaced by streaming services and video sharing platforms.
My first PC - an Acer 486 had a plastic case. It's also why I kinda screwed up the construction of my second PC - studied the construction of the acer one, saw it was screwed into the case. So I screwed the new motherboard into the new case... I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't power on.

Took it to a friend's place, he just about fell over laughing when he realised I'd missed the copper risers.
Wonder if this is a similar situation to the exploding Samsung notes. Faulty battery manufacturing.
Short-form and long-form are essentially different media. (I'd add that serialized long form, aka prestige TV, seems to be doing pretty well right now at least at the top of the pile.)

Short-form media has always been harder to monetize. We've had the technology for a long time to sell individual short stories, articles, etc. It doesn't seem to work very well. (Tangent. Why can't I buy an arbitrary short story on Kindle?) Most authors of 300 page books don't make much money either but there does seem to still be a fairly robust writing and publishing pipeline there.
For work in Windows shop,sure, until I need Docker, although I could with faster I/O!

For home and companies that don't architect themselves around specific workstation OS, Linux all the way. I personally rarely use Wine, if ever, but had to use it for my kids requiring software that was available on Windows only.
The fact that µBlock Origin is fast provides exactly zero evidence about other extensions abusing the WebRequest API resulting in battery drain, disclosure of private information like account credentials, and a bad user experience because of an apparently slow browser.
From the article:

> Even assuming huge advances in battery technology, with batteries that are 30 times more efficient and "energy-dense" than they are today, it would only be possible to fly an A320 airliner for a fifth of its range with just half of its payload, says Airbus's chief technology officer Grazia Vittadini.

> "Unless there is some radical, yet-to-be invented paradigm shift in energy storage, we are going to rely on hydrocarbon fuels for the foreseeable future," says Paul Eremenko, United Technologies chief technology officer.

> The big problem with this is that 80% of the aviation industry's emissions come from passenger flights longer than 1,500km - a distance no electric airliner could yet fly.

The market would be in an arms race if energy density was sufficient for long haul flights. Electric flight is awesome but until energy storage/density gets closer to hydrocarbons, conventional planes aren't going anywhere for the majority of travelers and cargo.
"Uninvited to speak at a major conference" != "ostracized"

People with Hurd's views are welcomed in most places in the country. Despite having minority viewpoints, they form the majority of elected officials due to the way districts are drawn. They're CEOs, board members, and prominent parts of almost every group. It's absolutely ludicrous to suggest that people like Hurd are ostracized in a general sense.

Also, having unpopular views as a lawmaker (so not just having them, but trying to enact them into law) means that a brand may not want to be associated with you.
There's also the in-between, with TV shows telling season-long story arcs in 30-60 minute chunks.
Yes, to CDRs that turned out to self-destruct in a year or so.
Even in 1998 such destinations as Neopets had graduated age-gated permissions. I was technically in one of the youngest age groupings, but in order to get full access to the website, I either had to get my mother to fax a permission slip in, which sounded like a hassle for both of us, or I could just create an account with an email address and claim I was 18+.

So I created my first email address and did that. Wasn’t even a hassle, and bonus: I had an email address now. My mother didn’t even have that yet, and I don’t think she had one of her own till 2006 when I signed her up for Gmail.

Whether or not it makes sense for the age gating to be 13 or not, I couldn’t tell you, but whether it is 13 or 30, kids at whatever age we define them to be at will do as they wish one way or another. Given reality on the ground, additional legislation to try to force the reality we want is more likely to have additional costs rather than additional benefits so rather than centering our laws around age, we might want to try and center them around privacy for everyone.
Do you think the people who made your clothes were paid enough to live on? I highly doubt so.
Yeah I have wondered about this option as well. Hydrogen fuel cell cars make very little practical sense for a lot of reasons, but most of those reasons don't seem to apply so much when you're dealing with air travel:

- It'll be a long time before fuel cells are cost competitive with gas or electric cars, but for planes the cost of fuel and operation is much more significant than with a car, so the upfront cost for building the plane seems less significant in comparison

- Refueling infrastructure is much easier to implement at a (relatively) small number of airports than it is to build many small consumer refueling stations everywhere

- Space is more important than weight in a car, but the opposite may be true for a plane

- Crash safety is a much bigger problem for cars than planes - plane crashes are rare, and if a plane crashes there's a good chance everyone dies anyway, but if you're designing a car you're going to have to be really careful to make sure every other fender bender doesn't result in a hydrogen explosion

Of course there's the issue that most hydrogen today is created from fossil fuels, but perhaps there are ways to generate it sustainably and still remain competitive with the cost of jet fuel?

Electric cars can be a very competitive alternative to gasoline cars, but electric batteries are not yet energy-dense enough to make long-distance air travel viable, so it feels like hydrogen planes might be the least bad solution if we want to get off of fossil fuels.
Wine project fears problems with 64-bit Ubuntu
But the 32 bit code physically won't be part of the distribution. What do you imagine you'd be running?
Uber drivers in question are faced with first world costs of living. You're moving the goal posts in support of economic slavery (comparing third world workers in the third world to first world gig workers in the first world, with first world costs of living).

If you can't pay your first world employees a first world living wage, Bye Felica.