skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. Blaming the restaurants is an absolutely horrendous political play. They don't need GrubHub. There are many other operators that fill a similar niche.

Accepting responsibility for the communication error (if we can call it that) is the best way to keep a positive sentiment with restaurant owners.

Blaming the restaurant owners sends a message here -- GrubHub feels they have the upper hand by pointing to the legal language. B2B relationships are not ultimately defined by paperwork, unless grave disputes arise. The relationship is fundamentally is maintaining a good rapport.
There are a couple really cool drone tree planter projects out there that are able to plant thousands of trees an hour.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40450262/these-tree-planting-dro...
Matt Levine has some food for thought on buybacks: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-24/would-...

To summarize his article: if you take issue with anything, take issue with the profitability and lack of reinvestment. Don't blame buybacks and dividends because in general, they're an outcome. As Levine says: "But in this story the buybacks are the residual, a result of a focus on profits rather than a cause."
Money. Anything other than x86 has such abysmal margins (by Intel standards) that nothing other than x86 will ever get the resource it needs.

Until the company is at an existential crisis level (a la the DRAM changeover--and even that almost killed Intel), this simply will not change.
This is relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU
It reminds me of the adage "Workplace culture is what you do not what you say you do." I have met too many engineering managers over the years who thought they could cleverly have it both ways by exhorting quality is the highest priority while penalizing or criticizing engineers who objected based on quality or design metrics.
Why would it be in the union's interest to "divert blame from engineers"? Does it benefit financially from it? Do their members somehow benefit from it? Are you saying that Boeing wants to blame their Engineers and this is now a fight between Boeing and it's employees?

Serious questions, I'm not quite understanding that corporate culture.
What's the difference between "operating cash flow" and "profit"? Is it "operating profit", that is, without investing in R&D or capital expenditures?

"Consumed" is kind of a loaded word. It's true that money spent that way can't be invested in capital improvements or R&D. But "consumed" kind of implies "wasted". That's hard to say without knowing what a normal number for an airplane manufacturer is.

And, of course, money spent on "handsome executive bonuses" would also have drawn ire...
I had to uninstall it last weekend because I came to realize my playing it was no longer healthy. I mean, that sounds funny, but I'm being totally serious. I've had a few games like that in my life, and I've come to recognize a few signs that what I'm doing is not good for me anymore.

But wow, what a great game.
This is such a beautiful HN post :) thanks!!
On this site? Pretty confident.
It’s also important to choose local species. Planting a non-native tree species causes unexpected problems long term. See the eucalyptus problem in California.
Nope. A compliant baseline USB-A to C cable contains a resistor.
Moviepass Interrupts Service
I know the mistake was very costly and we are talking about lives here. But, come on.. is there a chance people are over analyzing. We can try hard and do everything right and still something can go wrong.

They are humans and the airplanes from Boeing have been very very very reliable. It's not like every max 8 dropped from the air. A lot of them, most of them flew alright. I know the people who lost their lives paid a big price but, in hindsight everyone has an opinion.
This comment from a 'boeing engineer' has basically no information content.

- He's not a Boeing engineer, he's 'a senior member of the union'. Apparently he was an engineer sometime in the past, now his job is to push anything that will benefit members of the union, which is what he is doing here. He has no specific information about the MAX to offer.

- Cost savings is always the root cause of every engineering failure, so long as you have the benefit of hindsight. I mean once you know what the problem is you can spend money to fix it, and they should have spent that money right off the bat, right? I mean, if they knew there was a problem, which they must have or else there is nobody to blame. We need someone to blame! Of course projects that don't try to limit costs can't fail since they are canceled and never built. Except for the Space Shuttle, which went massively over budget again and again and still had a terrible safety record, which absurdly was blamed on cost cutting. https://www.wired.com/2016/01/to-cut-costs-and-save-time-nas... So no matter how much money you spend, when something fails you are going to be blamed for not spending more. If you budget $1 Billion and then decide to spend $10 Billion to improve safety, whenever something goes wrong they'll say you should have spent $11 Billion.

- Trying to vilify people and attempting to create an environment to produce massive punitive damages and lawsuits, or to bring political pressure to change staffing decisions dramatically decreases safety. The FAA has spent almost a hundred years building up an environment of cooperation with a shared responsibility to understand failures and enable the changing of the entire aviation industry whenever necessary to promote safety. This has been fabulously successful. Trying to place blame and attack people for past decisions will only lead to a closing of the culture and an attempt to hide information in the future. Compare aviation to the auto industry in how they adapt and improve safety, it's night and day for exactly this reason. Creating an environment where companies have to be afraid to admit mistakes does not help us find the root causes of problems and change the system to prevent those problems in the future.
It is a solution rather than the solution really. It is for solving /your/ problems rather than socety's essentially so it is a matter of use cases.
My hope is that asynchronous swarm based applications ("dweb") will work so well without ISPs (e.g. on dynamic local networks and mesh networks) that they will pose an existential threat to ISPs.

"Think WAN, act LAN"

or is it

"Think Wan, net LAN"?

I don't know.
I wonder how stable is such a "wring joint" over time and over mechanical stresses like temperature change and vibrations. Could you use this feature to e.g. attach stuff as a product assembly technique, as a temporary/non-destructively modifiable alternative to gluing or welding?
I didn't think the with statement was removed, as that would break backwards compatibility on the web with any older code that used it. Instead, it's just not allowed under strict mode, but it is still part of the ECMAScript specification. I just tried it in the Chrome console, and it still works.
If you're interested in how gauge blocks fit into the history of precision engineering, a new book called "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World" puts them into context, and presents a very interesting perspective on the events and developments that brought us into modernity. These blocks feature strongly into the industrial revolution. I strongly recommend the book!

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0062652575
I worked at Boeing from '88 to '94, writing test software. I liked it. I liked the people and the atmosphere.

I always thought that when Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago that that was the end of something special. They went from being legendary Boeing to just another hyper-corporation who happens to make money doing X or Y or Z.

In my opinion.
The moment you consider apartments, it does not. There are few if any apartments to get where you can charge your car. This is an area many overlook, but if you don't own a home, you might not have a good place to charge.

This does not fit when the big mantra around EVs has been "charge at home!" instead of "fueling up" at a station. Even now, the DC charge stations aside from Tesla are not fast enough.
I don't think anyone wants Boeing itself to go bankrupt. We want the execs who established this culture to go to jail, and to be replaced with new ones who are now strongly incentivized to do things differently.
One of my first gigs out of college was to build a thesaurus for a government agency that would go through their documents and update outdated and politically incorrect terms with a newer and less offensive alternative. It was interesting to see how language evolved over time.
Boeing made changes that reduced the number of higher-paid engineers in the Seattle area, and moved some of the work to lower-paid and offshore engineers. That hurt this guy's union; it would help the union to get Boeing to reverse that.
Extreme-ultraviolet beams with time-varying orbital angular momentum
> knowing what bugs exist or other issues that effect security is hard

I agree. For example, according to [1]: "In the autumn of 2004, [Dan] Bernstein taught a [University of Chicago graduate level] course about computer software security, titled "UNIX Security Holes". The sixteen members of the class discovered 91 new UNIX security holes. Bernstein, long a promoter of the idea that full disclosure is the best method to promote software security and founder of the securesoftware mailing list, publicly announced 44 of them with sample exploit code."

This was 15 years ago, but it does reveal just how hard it is to know how many vulnerabilities are out there.

[1] https://upclosed.com/people/daniel-j-bernstein/
Its insanity to me that investors are that important within corporate charters. Not the people it employs, not the community it operates in, not the value it brings to society, not even the amount of money it makes. The returns to investors is 99.9% the reason a corporation exists. Its institutionalized sociopathy, and I'm pretty certain it wasn't always this way (or at least as widespread).
It probably depends highly on whether abuse recorded in the videos would have happened anyways. Is the abuser just recording their normal routine, or are they doing things for the camera?
I just wanted to go from my house in Berkeley to Palo Alto and back without having to stop and recharge for an hour at Whole Foods.

It was an ok car if you never, ever needed to use a highway.
SPEEA is a union representing (and collecting union dues from) Boeing's US engineers but not the $9/hr outsourced engineers. [0]

That being the case, the motivation to ensure that the former are not blamed for the 737-Max issue and to call into question the quality of work of the latter is probably clear.

[0] - http://www.speea.org/Join_Our_Union!/FAQ.html ("Where do SPEEA members work?")
Lesson from a Small Firebase Project
Flat suction cups.
As someone who moved to Australia from London, I can confirm: the latency is the real killer.

I'm one of the few lucky ones with FTTP which gets me close to 100mbit speeds. But as soon as I have to connect to a server outside of Oz I am pretty much back to (high) ADSL speeds. Latency to the US and Singapore (the two closest international backbones) is around 150-200ms. It's around double that for Europe. At peak times those backbones get very congested.

Funnily the only country I've been to that has faster and more consistent 4g was Japan.
It's kinda like syncthing crossed with git. Lower level than syncthing, focused on stuff like p2p shareable, versioned data structures and cryptographic verification.

Although you can build applications on top of syncthing's API/protocol, it's primarily a high level application, whereas Dat is a protocol meant for building applications.

It would make sense to build something like Syncthing on top of Dat.
There was an article about ladders, tools and debris being left inside various parts like the tail. I’m sure management put the workers under extreme deadline pressure, but this kind of negligence isn’t simply a small human mistake. It shows there’s a systematic flaw in their quality assurance capability.

Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/busi...
I don't ever continue past the 3rd word of a corporate response for exactly this reason. What they say is always what they "should" say, in line with how things "should" be, rather than reality at the moment. The speaker doesn't even have to be familiar with the issue at hand beyond keywords.
I can't fully lift it off the table, but it gets pretty close.

The fit of my TOTU dongle cable is pretty tight, I guess, now that I think about it.
I've been using the SB6190, and I haven't had any issues with latency or jitters. Even all of the testing didn't show any issues.

Mine is a hardware version 3 though.
Great stuff. We need more of these types of science tidbits on HN. And good links by the commenters too.

I love Feynman's classic style of "explaining to a 5 year old" on Cold Welding.

The reason for this unexpected behavior is that when the atoms in contact are all of the same kind, there is no way for the atoms to “know” that they are in different pieces of copper. When there are other atoms, in the oxides and greases and more complicated thin surface layers of contaminants in between, the atoms “know” when they are not on the same part.

— Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures, 12–2 Friction
Ask HN: What's a small language feature you've grown to love?
For me it's definitely Go's time.Duration type. Having a simple and standard way to handle timespans has been really helpful for my past few projects, and the parsing format has been great for command-line interfaces. No more external libraries or rolling my own, I can just type "1m2s" and Go gets it.

What about you?
I'm not about to just be neutral on everything until they are proven false - if there is a claim for which I have no personal evidence and no evidence is provided, and my understanding of the world, based upon previous evidence, suggests that those items are wrong, I'm rejecting that assumption with extreme prejudice until sufficient evidence is provided. And as always, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
If true, my 5mi commute each way would be possible without ever charging the vehicle in the summer

If you're interested in reducing environmental impact, a bicycle would also let you do that commute without charging and with much less environmental impact than an EV covered in solar cells... though it may be less pleasant in hail and/or snow.

If you're just interested in saving money for electricity, then I'd be surprised if the extra cost in adding all of those solar cells is cheaper than paying for the electricity.
When I last did a calculation ( 3 accidents of the once every thousand years type in 25 years ) I concluded that Nuclear accidents would render the entire land mass of Earth uninhabitable within 250,000 years. This BS oxymoron "nuclear reliability" is just that, BS.
> If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business.

You have no evidence for this, and the fact that a court case to hold Amazon liable for bad products was even required provides a counterfactual.
Some trees are relatively safe in a fire and others relatively unsafe.

Redwood trees (as an example) are relatively fire safe. At the opposite end Eucalyptus trees are fire hazards.

So - plant a fire resilient forest appropriate for your climate.

https://sempervirens.org/redwoods-and-wildfires/
Your link is interesting, Mr. Vance. It indicates that "drug overdose mortality" has changed over time in various regions of USA. Apparently in 1999 all the Appalachian hillbillies lived in California and the Southwest. For some reason they gradually moved East? Yours is a confusing worldview, to say the least.

It's one thing to dislike a particular person, for whatever reason. It's quite another to see that person as an exemplar of the negative attributes of all the residents of another region where you have never lived. It's another yet when the exemplary person you dislike is also not from that region...
In today's value it's worth -16B according to this. If we're going to base things on how negative they are, then this article should assume that the United States land is worth -10K per acre (22 trillion debt with 2.3 billion acres of land). So negative values aside, the math to consider how much something is worth should never be based on the drain it has on society - otherwise why do we even have 22T of debt? So should we just call it all negative and sell it to china for 5B?

I know my math is ridiculous but so is considering selling 535M acres for $1 billion. 50 cents an acre... where I'm trying to buy land it seems it's around 50k/acre.
What do you get out of reading the first two words of a corporate response?
Why doesn't US sell Flint to the europeans or even the russians? Preferably in euros or rubles.
Was there something special about the move that ended the era? That in itself doesn't seem harmful to a legendary status.
HTML & CSS can't do WYSIWYG sufficiently, especially if text is involved. Thus it's apples to black-holes.
The problem has been going since Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing money. Douglas shifted in the 80s to a state monopoly culture, where politics is more important than engineering and safety (see DC-10), a bit like lockeed martin. Boeing was still a company "a la" Dyson, led by engineers before the acquisition (in 97). I think the first Boeing non-engineer CEO was hired in 2004.
I think these are great questions, but I'm probably not the best person to answer them. Hopefully someone else here has a better understanding of unions.

But, as far as I can tell this isn't a fight, but it's more like marketing to the public in a way that might be beneficial for future negotiations.

I guess a union's purpose is to protect and benefit it's members.

A example scenario I could imagine (complete fiction) might be Boeing tries to look good to shareholders by laying off several teams, blaming engineers and management of them for the safety issues. This could benefit the company financially.

By preemptively making sure the public is aware that corporate culture is to blame it'd likely make a move like that far harder to enact.

Making it clear that this is the fault of the corporation, not the individuals, keeps the union members safe in this case.

This scenario is likely unrealistic. But maybe someone has a better explanation/historical example?
The joined blocks can be pulled apart with you hands. See the first video posted in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20366089

So the bond is not comparable in strength to gluing or welding.
Let's say you have a few tens of millions of people using your webapp and you are collecting analytics/usage data from them. You definitely don't want them all trying to authenticate + write directly to a db; you need an intermediate layer to process all the data coming from tons of different sources.

You could potentially do that with a separate microservice you communicate with via http, but this requires a "liveness" of the microservice that isn't really necessary; you will often lose events if the microservice isn't able to keep up with the incoming load, and you need to process the events just as fast as they come in. The data flow is really just unidirectional so the response is unnecessary, you just need to reliably transmit the data.

Kafka lets you handle unidirectional data flows in a way that is lazier. The data producers just write to a service and the consumers connect to the service. In between, Kafka just behaves like a distributed message queue. Obviously this is a huge benefit over directly writing to a db or any other kind of offline storage since it can greatly reduce the connection overhead. The main benefit over using a microservice is that it relaxes the constraint that all the data is processed/handled exactly as it comes in. It makes non-critical data flow more redundant by adding this queue

(I don't think the linked article does a great job explaining why you would use kafka / what the alternatives are)
Granted, I don't know the math and this is intuition from Kerbal Space Program, but I'm not sure that's right. Wouldn't two objects colliding at 0° and 90° orbits result in a higher apoapsis and the same periapsis? Wouldn't it be equivalent to a normal impulse? Some pieces of one of the satellites would have more energy than they did before the impact.
Exactly how big do you think seeds are? Soil already exists on the ground. It is the ground. Take a walk, take some seeds, plant them.

The trend to argue against helpful ideas is contrary to the goals of improving the world. Maybe every idea isn't perfect. Maybe no idea will solve all of the problem. But if the top 100 ideas each is completed with 1% efficiency, maybe that will all add up. Maybe we'll improve things enough to let better ideas come to fruition. So maybe we should stop criticizing, and start acting.
Hmm... the advocates I've run into say that you can add a newline with out modifying the old last line. And that one makes sense, since you tend to (or at least I tend to) add things at the end.
Why does a standard computer keyboard have 12 function keys (F1 – F12)?
In the case of Boeing, it might be challenging to know how much you can cut costs before you materially impact the business. What exactly is essential? I'm certainly no expert in the aeronautical, but who really knows if trimming two sensors down to one has a good ROI? As an engineer, I typically know that redundancy is a good thing. But maybe their historical data showed that those sensors have very, very low chance of failing. Maybe they've never previously even encountered the situation where the second was remotely necessary. They could've backtested the impact of removing the sensor, and found no concerns. We could assume a more ominous intent here, but with Boeing's reputation on the line, I doubt they would've actually been interested in cutting costs at the expense of lives -- we can see the impact that had today on their reputation.

Many little cost-cutting decisions are made, and many are probably likely to be inconsequential. It's easy for us to say, "obviously cutting 2 sensors to 1" was the wrong choice. But you could make the same argument for any other cost-cutting measure they employed, that had no safety impact. The difference here, is unfortunately this one brought a huge public eye on Boeing.

It's good to cut costs (where reasonably possible), and it's good to return value to shareholders. Those are things expected of public companies. They probably compared themselves to their peers, realized that stock buybacks is the current metric to which public companies are being measured by, and over-optimized for it. A lot of people look at their peers to decide what to do themselves, even multi-national companies. This time, it didn't pan out.
I remember this from previous rounds of hn discussions, but I didn't catch last time that the author actually claims that having a code of conduct is distracting FreeBSD from adopting his favorite sysctl and rc.conf defaults. Kind of apples and oranges. Does not paint the author in a good light.
Nah, they mean too bad people are allowed to be abusive.

Using your ability to outSEO your customer to capture the money that would otherwise go to them is abuse.
The Europeans would absolutely love to buy a piece of the USA if they could.
See "cold welding". As far as actual gauge blocks go, they're relatively easy to separate by sliding after you're done with your measurement or set-up. (Good Jo blocks are horrendously expensive. You wouldn't want them to be single-use items.)
Hong Kong mothers march in support of anti-extradition students