skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This [1] is Greenwald explaining why Bolsonaro was elected.

And let's take a look at the rhetoric used:

> THE RIGHT-WING AUTHORITARIAN

> his tyrannical movement

Knowing what I know about the two gentlemen, absolutely nothing about Greenwald's coverage was surprising or unpredictable.

Let's look at the rhetoric CNN uses to describe this chap.

> https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/28/americas/brazil-election/inde...

Actually, it's a lot more fence-sitting and clinical, and 'just the facts' than Greenwald's. So, in short, exactly the sort of predictable, unsurprising, 'both sides' horseshit that I expect from CNN.

Both publications are biased, neither publication's biases result in particularly surprising or unpredictable coverage, so I ask again - what is the difference? That Greenwald's a bit more introspective?

There's introspective writers in the CNN opinion pieces, too - you just might not be biased towards their flavour of introspection. I know I'm not.
>you can typically just write down the code you want to write, rather than being forced to find a library that wraps a C/C++ implementation like in python/r.

I don't think this is really a feature. It's nice that you can write more performant code in Julia directly and don't need to wrap lower level languages, without question, but the lack of libraries or library features is not a good thing. It's always better to use a general purpose library that's been battle tested than to write your own numerical mathematics code (because bugs in numerical code can take a long time to get noticed)

For specialized scientific computing applications, which would normally be written in C/C++, I would absolutely look into using Julia instead (though not sure what the openmp/mpi support is like). But I would also recommend against rolling your own numerical software unless you need to
No insurance provider has only one customer. They always pool risk across all of their customers. A company signing up lots of their employees doesn't increase the size of the pool -- it just adds an intermediary.

The reason often cited for employer-based coverage is that it avoids some self-selection problems, but that's a different and complex topic.
Yeah those are different things. Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) tells you if your prices are competitive (i.e. if anyone will buy from you). Capital costs tells you if you can afford to build the plant in the first place. You probably can't get investors to cover the capital costs if you can't convince them that you can make a decent profit on a low LCoE, so of the two, LCoE is actually more important in determining whether a plant will be built and if people will use it.

Edit: I don't know what the equivalent of LCoE is for a power-storage facility, but hopefully you get the idea.
Starbucks will stop selling newspapers in September
Amount of lithium available is not a limitation for several orders of magnitude more (at least until well after Kardashev Type 1), and the lithium is not consumed when you have to replace the batteries, a cost which is already included in these calculations.
Not just controversial or political. I've added edits with valid sources to non-political and non-controversial pages only to have them immediately reverted by a zealous editor who looks things just as they are.
The domain name is the tipoff.
Agreed and honestly blog posts these days need to use more basic english and not go on and on in a long post.

Think of it as long form tweeting!
Why does it need to have new things of interest? Strava works perfectly. I love that it hasn't significantly changed its model in constant search of squeezing out profits.
One can use matplotlib in Julia by PyCall'ing it. So it is at least as good as anything else.
Obligatory JWZ quote:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.
Sorry “break even”

The company is projecting solid growth in the summer months, when it expects to break even, excluding capital expenditures.
Key points:

> No logging, other than of cumulative aggregated statistics for load measurement.

> It’s not a forwarder; it performs DNS resolution itself.

You can use it by setting the DoH server in Firefox to https://doh.li/dns-query
Show HN: Photographic Memory for B2B Meetings
Maybe we will look back at today’s web, the same way we look back now at OS before protected memory was a thing.
The SDK used the compiler from the IDO 5.3 package which was provided by SGI for developing in IRIX 5.3 (if you paid the extra for that option).

I think by then it would have already been pretty mature.
This is so exciting! I can't wait to buy one.
They had already budgeted for it earlier this year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/facebook-ftc-f...
I've been using this instead of the password store for over a decade now.

https://chriszarate.github.io/supergenpass/

Works every time and is portable as hell.

How are people still using password lockers?
Agreed. San Jose in particular is rough.
That is something really interesting that I never connected the dots on. Thank you.
I support a national ID... But for people who don't, what is the functional difference between a SSN today and a national ID, apart from SSNs being broken for such a purpose? It still gets asked for very broadly (not just for credit-related things... let alone for social security related things) and people very easily give them up.

One might also ask the same question when IDs for different purposes are used -- why not a fuss over driver's licenses and passports, which are context-dependent IDs?

We can always call it something else. "National signature card". The ideal implementation would be something like Estonia's ID card.
I already have a national ID, it's called my social security card. I need it to open a bank account or get a job or get a realID so I can fly.

I'd much rather have something more secure than a literal piece of card printed decades ago.
I remember Evince working on GNU/Linux phones already 10 years ago, so yeah, I wouldn't worry about PDFs :)
So where are you going to get that much land close to people so you cheaply transport it?

Why would you need the land to be close to people? Electricity transmission losses over 100-200 miles are minuscule, and there's plenty of cheap land in the radius of 100-200 miles from literally any point in the US.
Homes with solar have some unique benefits, like added resilience from grid fluctuations, but it remains to be seen what monetary value people will place on such features.

What are you talking about? It's extremely easy to put a monetary value on it: how much rated capacity, how much exposure, cost of local electricity, and voila. It is worth the number of kilowatt hours it generates at the retail cost the electric utility would charge you.

Every early adopter I know has run the numbers. It's as easy as a simplified NPV spreadsheet.
Enough to put shareholder equity at risk, or in other words, a fine on the scale of bankruptcy risk.

FB is flat over the last year, I would like to see a fine that results in a significant loss of market cap, preferably something which would require selling off business units to stay solvent.
>I assume they're talking about a travel insurance product

Nope. This is full blown global medical coverage (except NA).

For an affordable price too. Employer covers UK...I kick in an extra 600 USD per YEAR to make it global (except US).

...let that sink in...my surcharge for everything global for a year is less than even a trivial operation in the US.

600 a year to cover all my shenanigan on travels...I'll take it.

>excludes areas where the Foreign Office

Nope. As I said this isn't travel insurance.

No Sudan yet, but I've pushed a lot of Africa claims through this with zero questions asked. Never had anything denied thus far
FTC Approves Facebook Fine of About $5 Billion
It'll help. Ask for some customer references, maybe someone with a similar house. But it could also cause other problems. Older houses are naturally leaky and that helps keep them manage mold/mildew and radon. Your water heater and furnace could also backdraft. So that's something to consider. Modern houses are basically sealed inside a plastic bag so you need active mechanical ventilation to keep things in order.

If you have a really old house make sure you don't have vermiculite insulation which might make things way more expensive cause it likely has asbestos in it. Apart from that you can also DIY it but it's messy. Your state may offer incentives for doing it too.

https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/attic_air_...
Polyform 1.0.0: standard noncommercial software licenses at last
Liquid air storage offers cheapest route to 24 hour wind and solar
Thank you for the clarification. Following up on this, I found a blog post [0] that explains why you don't get bizarre consequences like the Banach-Tarski paradox this way:

> [The constructivist method] avoids the basic problem with the axiomatic problem. You can’t have something ridiculous like the set of all sets that don’t include themselves, because the only way to show that a set exists is to show a process to create it – and there’s no way to create a paradoxical set! You don’t get nonsense like [the Banach-Tarski paradox], because the division of the spherical topological space into the non-metric subspaces is impossible: you can’t show a process that produces it. In the world of intuitionism and constructivism, existence proofs that don’t produce concrete examples don’t exist!

[0]: http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2014/08/18/the-constructivist-r...
By 300,000 years I hope you mean 200?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...

Not the only source but I couldn't bother to search more.

EDIT: this article says 90 years normally and 5 years if everything was run on nuclear power https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm...
Wish more people talked about / knew this!

How a big part of the reason the US healthcare system sucks is just a weird fluke of history!
Thanks! I only looked at it a little awhile back, but thought it was really cool...as a newbie I need more of an intro text to leverage it.
Prisoners 'to be given own cell keys as reward for good behaviour'
lithub.com. tl;dr'ing literature is senseless.
Britain planned to put a man on the Moon by 1968, lost documents show
But the first thing I want to about C is not a compiler written in C. That's an unfriendly intro to almost any language.

I want to see a procedure call, "Hello world" I/O, some math or string manipulation, and how to run that myself.

After that I can look at compiler sources.
The mythical $100/kWh figure for car batteries is for the pack cost, not the cells. Much of that cost is focused on a compact, lightweight solution for cell cooling, voltage balancing for ~100 batteries in series, etc.

Utility installations have much cheaper solutions for cooling, the balancing is much easier with lots of parallel cells, and even the chemistry benefits from smaller charge/discharge currents.

We're not down to $30/kWh yet, but we're not that far off. Certainly well below $300.
Postmates has explored a sale to Uber or DoorDash instead of going public
> Fuerza Publica which handles broader security and law enforcement

See that's a force that has a daily purpose unlike a standing Army that waits for battle.

The 70-something strong UEI is something most countries have since the 70s to fight terrorism, like Germany's GSG9. Again, not a standing army to fight another army.

A standing army on the other hand is a very large and very powerful tool, either to fight outside armies or to impose internal repression. The whole point about abolishing the military was to take this force out of the larger equation. The UEI will never be a threat to Costa Rica itself, a standing army would be.

In my native Germany you can consider a chunk of the Bundeswehr to have a right-wing/extremist mindset (E.g. Franco A.) and I wouldn't trust it much in a situation like say a Green-party leader becoming Bundeskanzler.
Even if something is profitable it might not be worth the risk, opportunity cost, or capital investment.
I used to commute by train and bike, and would sometimes forget to turn strava off before getting on the train. I would have to go back and delete these myself because strava rarely caught them. How do they not have a filter for speeds in excess of 60mph? that should be pretty obviously not human powered. Not to even mention the rise of e-bikes...
* It's as cheap as it is for residential solar because of government subsidies. Ultimately a subsidy just means somebody else is paying for it, so this falls apart at scale when you're talking about something that everyone will use somewhat equally.

* I looked at residential solar and it looked to me like if I paid it off for 5 years at the rate that it saved me money, I would be further behind than if I had waited 5 years and solar panel prices continued to decrease. So why buy now? They decrease in value faster than they save money. It wouldn't have been a financially motivated decision.

* The solar company said they could eliminate my electricy bills if I bought solar, and they did a bunch of upgrades like improved insulation. The insulation had a much higher return on investment so I did that anyway - it's easier for me to simply need less energy than to replace all my energy sources (similar to a lot of environmental issues, IMO - we could overhaul recycling infrastructure, or I could just buy food that results in less non-compostable waste).
It's unbelievable how many languages are introduced without an example on the homepage. Imagine an Apple homepage without any iPhone pictures.
Show HN: NoHQ – Learn how to build a remote team
People install solar or various reasons. The main ones I noticed are:

1) Long-term climate change effects

2) To reduce the electric bill

2a) To blast the AC when the sun is the brightest.

But you also have to account for land costs, as large-scale solar installations require large fields of panels.
And yet you'd be surprised how many companies rely on a VPN (basically a glorified office network). Good read: https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp/
You're exactly right. I called them out on it and the bill mysteriously vanished. Funny how that works.
Wow! Never thought I'd see an article from my field on HN.
I generally agree, which is why I made the distinction between "pay" and "buy". Although you also have to factor in that rosters have a limited size. If you are calling up a player, you need to get rid of a player. Veterans have guaranteed contracts, so adding a young player to replace a veteran will increase payroll like you suggested. However a young player's salary doesn't have the same guarantee if they are removed from the roster. Therefore shuffling out one young player for another generally has little to no impact on the overall payroll.
Good. Oracle tried and is still trying to destroy the foundation of the global software ecosystem by copyrighting APIs. Anything that damages that company or costs it money is a good thing.
Now available in eurasia now that we have always been at war with east asia!
The tax cut cost the government $1.5 trillion, but provided that same $1.5 trillion directly to the taxpayers. It was a pure transfer, not a cost in the sense that we're talking about here, which involves the consumption of natural resources and human labor, for which the dollars are merely a numerical representation. A better comparison would be the cost of some boondoggle defense program, or the prison system, or unemployment.
When you do not have a publicly-funded garbage collection infrastructure, then the private enterprises that fill in those gaps can, and will, make use of any physical or informational resources they find in the trash they pick up in an effort to make a decent living. Examples given include "a nice camera", "drugs", "porn", and "knowing exactly how much money an ambassador is making". There are no examples given involving blackmail but I feel that's definitely an elephant sitting in the room of this story of one journalist's relationship with one private garbage collector.

Now that I put it that way I feel like this is the core of a good argument for nationalizing social media.
Just so incredibly disturbing. For all of Facebook's fault, it's very easy to opt out of using it. When a service that the government forces you to use loses your data, heads should roll.
The time to second plot will be a few milliseconds, in the same process - in the same Julia session. So, while the time to first plot is frustrating, it is ok if your interactive session times are longer.

Of course, we continue to work on improving compile times. About half of the time is spent in LLVM compilation, which has actually become slower over time.
I tend to agree - they'd work better on smooth, wide, grade-separated pavement. In other words, bike lanes.
I am a curious and very amateur person, but do you think that if "100%" uptime were your goal, this:

"[Three months prior to the incident] We upgraded our databases to a new minor version that introduced a subtle, undetected fault in the database’s failover system."

could have been prevented if you had stopped upgrading minor versions, i.e. froze on one specific version and not even applied security fixes, instead relying on containing it as a "known" vulnerable database?

The reason I ask is that I heard of ATM's still running windows XP or stuff like that. but if it's not networked could it be that that actually has a bigger uptime than anything you can do on windows 7 or 10?

what I mean is even though it is hilariously out of date to be using windows xp, still, by any measure it's had a billion device-days to expose its failure modes.

when you upgrade to the latest minor version of databases, don't you sacrifice the known bad for an unknown good?

excuse my ignorance on this subject.
Ask HN: What phone do you use?
What phone is everyone using?
"Honoring the promise you depended upon to get users to install the feature in the first place" isn't ideological, or pearl-clutching.

Imagine your point in other contexts:

"If your company is about to go bankrupt unless it gets some serious revenue, then sure, you start selling the user data you promised not to, ideological pearl-clutching be damned."

"If a priest receives the confession of the killer in an unsolved mystery, he should report it to the police, religious pearl-clutching be damned."

And "critical degradation of service" is overstated; users always had the option to use another browser (like Mozilla seems to want these days). When they shut off everyone's unsigned, whitelisted addons in 2016, that wasn't regarded as a critical degradation.
Good news: non-carbon energy sources will, faster than most of the world currently thinks, force carbon energy sources off the market. This has already started to happen with coal.

Bad news: Well the Left may lament the fact that it will not be due to any change of heart or international cooperation, it will just be due to mercenary calculations of cost, and technology. But all of us have to consider what will (not may, will) happen to places with very oil-dependent economies, when oil goes the way of coal. Imagine Saudi Arabia in the state that Venezuela is in right now.
It's generally not even unmet need. Usually the duck curve hits at times well below the actual annual peak so there's enough generation capacity available.

But some of that capacity is slow to respond and need time to ramp up, which may be longer than the time taken for solar to ramp down.

The simple solution to this is to start those slow to ramp sources a little earlier and throw away their excess energy output.

Obviously that's wasteful, but as long as the generation mix is overall cheaper and less carbon intensive with solar added, which it is, then it's not a big deal. And obviously as soon as you add storage then they can help these sources ramp more efficently at first and expand to replace them entirely over time.

All in all it's one of the least problematic problems that ever got its own name.
It sounds very nice in theory, but I wonder how many of their employees actually end up taking a solid month of vacation to travel the world. (And if my employer expects me to answer the phone while I'm on vacation, it's not a real vacation.)
Another one-pass data point is Action![0] for the Atari 8-bit computers. The compiler is extremely efficient for its day and a source code release was made just a few years ago. [1] But good luck making sense of it -- besides being all 6502 assembler, the source code is tremendously complicated by the amount of codesize optimization taking place, and discussion in the AtariAge forums from the folks who got it released indicates that writing this compiler pushed the author to his very limits. It probably could have benefited from a compiler-compiler!

[0] http://wiki.c2.com/?ActionLanguage

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/atari-action/
What does "actual ID system" mean?

SSN is literally a national ID system. Assigned at birth/immigration/residency. Used by national government to pay benefits, track Medicare membership, receive taxes, etc.

If you're talking about adding photos and fingerprints and stuff to SSN or equivalent...that's not a cost thing. That's 100% a privacy thing.
You set up a successful business on Amazon having done a lot of marketing yourself and now you are forced to use them to sell everything. You are now working for Amazon, or lose your business.
The earth can make more oil given enough time. There will never be more fissile material in this solar system.
Recommending an alternative is not so easy, it really depends on how you've been using Strava.

Have you been running, cycling, triathloning...? Did you use it for route creation and discovery? For data analysis to support your training? Just for keeping track of your own activities? For segment leaderboards and KOMs?

If you're talking about cycling: I'd say MapMyRide or Komoot for routes; TrainerRoad or TrainingPeaks for analysis and training support; Garmin Connect for tracking rides, and I myself just decided to give Velo Hero a try (I find Connect to be very confusing). Segments and KOMs was Strava's only real USP because of the network effect and the wealth of data they had.

(Look, I'm already talking about them in past tense...)

This is all made a bit harder since Tapiriik, the file syncing tool, was disconnected from both Strava and Garmin Connect, for reasons I do not know.

At least Strava provides a way to export all your data in bulk (which now also includes power data for cycling).
Strava is a horrible implementation that has done basically nothing for core functionality in several years. I'm tempted daily to make an alternative and just give it away for free, maybe ad supported. The cost to operate the features they currently have can't be bad -- there are dozens of videogame stats website that do essentially the same thing, with more data.

* It's pretty ridiculous that I can see others 12-week history, and even my own on the website or iOS, but I need Strava Premium to see my own on Android.

* No bulk updating

* Very unsatisfactory implementation of gear. Essentially nonexistent on mobile.

* Their postprocessing of routes for estimations are always way off

* I commute every day via bike, and track it on strava. I tag is as "Commute", and I expect that strava would do something to filter it so my friends don't see all those every day. They don't do anything with that extra metadata.

Hell, even Lance Armstrong abandon ship