skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if we _can't_ make the alternatives more appealing?

What if, for example, infinite disposable plastic bottles are actually the easiest solution, and the sustainable solutions are actually a bit more work (e.g. water fountains and bottles you carry around).

Yes, sure, perhaps we can fix landfill. Devil's advocate though - it is definitely not the case that every aspect of our current ecological nightmare has a win-win solution.

We _need_ to start pricing in externalities, whether people moan about it or not. Seriously - this is putting the seat belt on in a car level stuff. Deal with it.

Is the morning after a night out a regression? Not the hangover; the every-day life. No - it's absurd to paint it that way - the high life was the abnormality.
No, they do not on the whole do anything well.
the results are indeed relative. the smarter one gets the same thing still applies. it's a theory not to point at others and say 'he's on mount stupid'.. but rather one to be wary of yourself being on this curve, which in some sense or aspect one always is, as one is never a master of everything in their lives. it's a theory about evaluation of self only applicable in that domain.
There are some seeds of change in this, one of my local supermarkets is running an experiment with more loose produce.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48498346
Ask HN: Best pathway for security certifications in career?
Hi:)

I was a postgraduate student in IT security and am about to work as a security engineer in a company. And I'm considering ... a long term plan (like 5-7 years, not sure) to get a series of certifications in the security industry. The reason for the plan is not for a higher salary or being better-recognized (but who hates them?). The main consideration is to find something that keeps me learning things systematically (I presume leaning stuff in the working is fragmented?), that keeps me sharp. I enjoy the process of learning and it doesn't hurt if it gives me something in return.

So I'm looking into different types of certifications. I did some researches and currently consider these certifications: CompTIA Security+, Pentest+, CEH, CASP, CISSP. And my personal preferences are:

1. I'm not really into management. Technology thrills me.

2. Certs don't have to be so recognized as long as it teaches something and interesting.

3. The year doesn't matter. It can take 10 years if necessary.

So my questions are:):

1. Are these listed enough? Any more recommendations? And if I have to switch to the management position in the future, what is the baseline certification?

2. Could somebody please help to ... sort of "design" a general pathway (not based on my case. I hope it helps others as well) based on the easiness or the interesting level? like "take A because it's usually the start, X years later you can take B, or you can take C if you want challenges" something like that. I know it's kinda rude but if we do research for tons of certifications out there, the result wouldn't be necessarily good.

3. I notice most of certs are valid for 3-4 years. And there's a renew price. What does that mean? I pay the price and don't have to take the exam again?

Thanks for anyone replying. I'd be better if you did actually take part in one or some of them:) Cheers
Regarding the first point, Caplan personally estimates that about 80% of education is signalling and that 30% is the lowest figure one can plausibly maintain.

As for the second point, I wouldn't bet my life on it. But I think the case is strong enough that experimental measures in that direction are warranted.
Just noticed the 10k ceiling. That would make sense. For whatever reason I thought the proposed law was more restrictive than it actually was. I guess the late hour here is taking its toll.
Is this really a good thing for the environment? Grid power is still mostly fossil. Even if we posit that fossil -> power station -> grid -> battery -> motors is, say, twice as efficient as fossil -> fueling station -> combustion engine, it's a lot more than twice as cheap. So wouldn't we expect the shift to EVs to cause energy consumption to rise, and hence also emissions?

I understand the argument that it's easier to upgrade centralized power generation to green technologies than the entire fleet of vehicles, but the timing is critical if that is to be a net win for emissions, a nuance which seems to be swept under the rug as everyone's keen to avoid fuel taxes by switching to EVs.

Of course, if everyone switches to EV electricity demand will spike and prices will rise, and governments will be eager to reclaim lost fuel tax revenue with other automobile focused taxes. It might not stay cheaper.
More generally, you can't attack the reasoning with any amount of imaginary horrors or delights. This is because the ontological argument doesn't try to argue imaginary things that are not God exist. Just that the imagination we have of God does exist, as the greatest thing ever. This is because of God's special property, that of being the greatest thing ever, that any imagination greater would just become the new God.

This property is not shared by things that are not God, such as Santa Claus. So you can't use the ontological argument for God to also show that Santa Claus exists. Santa Claus isn't the greatest thing ever, so Santa Claus isn't bound by the rules of logic to exist.
This week's issue features a stunning animated map by Nadieh Bremer showing how satellites capture images of Earth every day, amongst the usual collection of other spatial goodies.

Please reply here if you have any feedback or suggestions so I can respond
Just crushing, cutting or suffocating weeds (under a tarp) are really more effective indeed, it acts as mulch and protection
Yes, it's definitely vulnerable to situations where a large number of people have been "seeded" with the specific belief that they are part of a minority that holds the correct answer.

Still, the article says this:

Because of the relatively high margin of 10%, there can
be high confidence that the [surprisingly popular answer
is correct]

I would maintain this holds true, even though we can name some easy counterexamples like flat-earthism.

One, I'm sure that nowhere near 10% of an educated population believes in flat-earthism.

Two, I think this technique is certain to yield the correct answer quite a bit more often than it will yield an incorrect one. Since it claims to achieve "high confidence" and not "absolute confidence" I think it would still be a pretty valuable metric in many instances.
When the market is not informed or cared enough to make the move, it needs external push from the government.

This is exactly why I see a ray of hope since Canada announced she will ban single use plastic in near future [0].

I hope international cooperations grasp this chance to abandon as much plastic as possible altogether in the global supply chain, not just to cater to Canada's upcoming regulations.

[0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/canad...
"We did not cut corners or push the 737 Max out before it was ready,"

The family and friends of 346 people would beg to disagree.
I have. It was less than 10k and paid by bank transaction.

But how much an economy still relies on cash varies a lot per country. Every time bank or payment discussions come up here, I'm surprised by how primitive US banks still are. A few decades ago, my parents still had to pay the down payment of their house (f30k I think?) in cash. It makes sense that some countries are more ready to move to a completely cashless economy than others.

Whether or not that's a desirable development is a whole different and interesting discussion, of course. For tax and anti-fraud purposes, it is. For privacy not so much.
> Major reason is : they don't know what else to do

no, they just don't like the risk of innovation. A share buy-back program is guarenteed to increase the share price, which is benefitial to executives who hold their bonuses in shares (and share holders would also like it).

Doing innovation comes with risks - which may or may not pan out. If it doesn't pan out, the executives would get chewed for it, and if it does pan out it is unlikely to pay off for a long time (in terms of bonuses - at least, not within their tenure).

Gov'ts should just invest in startups, rather than give tax breaks. Invest in up and coming students who show promise, and get to claim a share of their innovation as taxes as well! And if it fails, it fails - the gov't doesn't need to be profitable.
I bought the Abit BP6 motherboard and installed twin 533 Mhz Celerons as well! I still have the machine, it dual-booted between Linux and OS/2.

Fantastic performance for the money.
This fails to mention that German recycling of paper, biowaste, cans and bottles is excellent.

Plastic is a huge problem because it is a different beast and technology isnt there to efficiently recycle a lot of different plastics economically at nationwide scale.

Some plastic needs to be used as ignition help when burning other garbage in power plants (where filtration massively reduces negative effects from burning in a centralized manner).
Right on cue
Wrong chart, it should be split by manufacturer.
Our local council accepts food waste, turns it into compost which we can collect for free. It can be done and the benefits appear obvious to me.
Nice! I never thought about this. I believed part of the reason they chose "C#" is because of musical terminology: "C#" means C-sharp, which is on a higher pitch than a plain "C".
I’m curious to understand what you mean by free market. Civil aviation is probably among the most regulated industry you could find, isn’t it ?
This is something that has been discussed in the UK [0-2], with particular reference to the ambiguity around the definition of "grossly offensive" and the balance between freedom of expression and an individual's reasonable expectation of living without harassment or abuse. Weight is also given to the context, circumstances and intentions on a case-by-case basis.

As with all law, a certain amount of interpretation is unavoidable. Your example doesn't prove anything because it relies on a particular meaning of "grossly offensive" which you have contrived to make it work. It is not generally a gross offense to merely object to or question someone's beliefs. "Gross" in this sense means that the communication must be a flagrant and obvious violation of acceptable language in a tolerant society.

[0] http://merlin.obs.coe.int/iris/2006/8/article101.en.html

[1] https://research.edgehill.ac.uk/files/20207198/Bliss%20-%20C...

[2] https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/social-media-guideline...
What human nature? If the last few centuries have thought us anything is that "human nature" doesn't really mean anything. It's way more arbitrary than people trying to find truths in lobster hierarchies would let you believe.
There is value in moving away from those statistics and looking at the other part of DoorenMichele’s story, which to me feels like one of compassion.

Having people around you who can support you while maintaining their own boundaries, without getting themselves involved or colluding with that state of mind you’re in, can be really powerful. It means you’re still being treated like a human being who has needs beyond what they are panicking about in the moment.

Anecdotally, I’ve been through far too many of those kinds of breakdown to count and I was grateful when the friend I was with (who understood the underlying causes) asked if I needed a hug, or said “I love you,” and basically didn’t react to whatever I’d started crying about. I could be another statistical outlier in that sense but there was always a better alternative than engaging the conversation, and making it more real. You can probably guess that was family related.
Cold War, H-Bomb, "duck and cover", nuclear winter, Threads.

Red Scare (first and second), Communist takeover, "better dead than red".

Ehrlich's The Population Bomb predicting world-wide famine by the 1980s, followed by the Zero Population Growth movement.

The destruction of the ozone hole.

For the more Biblical prophecy oriented, "The Late, Great Planet Earth", predicting the end of the earth by the 1980s or 1990s, sold 28M copies.

I could probably come up with more with a bit of research.
I don't know what partial comma is.

But depression exists for evolutionary reason to conserve energy when we are sick, to limit the risky behaviours like movements (jumping from rock to rock, running after a wild buffalo) etc...

But the problem is that the mechanism which can set us into depression can be tricked by our perception of the reality.

What your eyes see and what you sense does not only depend on your eyes or your senses but also on how your brain interprets those.

If your brain interprets a perfectly sunny day as warning for really long winter, your system can be tricked into sending yourself into depressive state.

Now this can happen for variety of reasons like family problems, where you see your mom and dad hating each other while you were still developing at age 5, your brain development is affected and you sense more danger and pessimism than what a normal person would sense.
Well, if you really want to be convinced how hairy C++ has become, just have a look at the implementation of the Boost libraries.
They don’t have to return bool.

Even when they return bool, in some cases both greater and less must return false. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN#Comparison_with_NaN
Hey. That looks like what happens with crude/natural gas/agriculture/any commodity. While it is worth being reported, this is Econ 101 supply and demand. Price volatility is part of the market.
>Schwandorf charges €150 per ton of industrial waste but this can increase to €800 per ton depending on the material.

That's about 3 cent per package if the average package weighs 42g. That's dirt cheap for a pretty clean solution. We suck as a society.
Why is less mobility necessarily "going backwards"? We have the technology for large-scale remote working, but companies still require employees to be on-site mostly for historical cultural reasons. If the government brought in regulations requiring companies to provide remote working as a choice, unless there was a good reason to require employees to be on-site, I don't think people would see that as "going backwards", so much as being forced to go forwards.
From all over the world. Germans cannot recycle most plastics - it's simply not viable at scale at this time. Therefore things are shipped to Asia.

The plastic created and received in Asia often lands in landfills and subsequently in rivers. A handful of major streams transport massive amounts of plastic waste into the Pacific ocean [1].

That's at least where a good chunk of it is coming from. That's how you get US or European plastic running down rivers in China into the Pacific.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
That's unfortunate, and I guess we got lucky with our dog then. We have never had a pure-bred dog before, so it was kind of interesting to get her ancestry information from the border collie association, and see that her ancestors were Welsh herding dogs just a few generations back.

They're really lovely dogs, in personality. A challenge, to be sure, but she has such a strong desire to please and work hard.
Slack still can't set custom notification sounds 4 years after feature request
You're being downvoted because that is mean-spirited, but the reason we needed these packages is to find out what the right size of package is. We now have a lower bound.
Lahja – A generic event bus implementation written in Python
Pdf so badly needs a standard open source reference implementation. the problem with java is that it isn’t easy to reuse in other programming environment...

something in C, or anything that compiles through LLVM would probably be a better choice i think.
it's also rather frightening

I suppose that depends on which side of the financial scales you are on.
How we send 22k emails every hour
I am, indeed, serious. Democracy offers us to satisfy all our immediates needs, without any regards for the long term concerns. Democracy will be our doom.
>>Rather than marry or live together, many of them have separate homes and see each other several times a week, or three times a month; they often say they are highly committed to each other but want personal space and independence.

In other words, they are not couples, just people that date sometimes. Next story please :)
Air travel is particularly carbon intensive on a per-journey basis and cannot be decarbonized using current technology. We can replace your car with an EV, we can run your air conditioner on renewable electricity, we can swap your gas furnace for a ground-source heat pump, but passenger aviation is going to involve burning tonnes of kerosene for the foreseeable future.
There are plenty of people worried about this from my experience (in my bubble). But most of them also feel powerless, as the belief is that governments need to get their act together to fix the problems.
A carbon tax will definitely mean less driving, flying, AC and meat.
And this tax can make it possible to give out vouchers so vulnerable people who cannot afford AC will not die in heat waves.

So public policy can both incentivise everyone, not only activists to make the right choices. And it can save a lot of lives.

If a suitably large group of people refuse to vote for politicians that don't support a carbon tax, cap-and-trade and other climate policies, it will lead to better outcomes.
He’s throwing shade on his former boss
Yes, and especially for my pet daydream nuclear reactor in space, or on Mars, etc.
There will be, I just woke up this early morning thinking about climate change, and thought people will definitely want to migrate to cooler places but some nations will object to this due to conflicting interests

In another viewpoint on climate change, do remember that the Earth rotate around the Sun in elliptical manner, it's not perfect circle - there will be surely a time when a new Ice Age will happen - we're just at a period when Earth is getting closer to the Sun on it's rotational axis
I tried to find a good comparison to PDFBox but came up short!
Do you have data to back that up? I had a quick look and couldn't really find anything about them in particular, just this NAB report [0] linked elsewhere in the thread that breaks down by a number of other attributes.

[0]: https://www.nab.com.au/content/dam/nabrwd/documents/reports/...
My experience is that

And mine isn't. Among some of our clients, being able to do anything in Excel is an unusual skill. Among others, they do nothing more than basic spreadsheet work, using nothing more advanced than cross-sheet references. In twenty years of this job, I haven't run into any of the fabled Excel spreadsheet apps. I'm sure they're out there, but I'm also sure there's plenty of the world that doesn't use them.
It selects the language based on browser locale - what is yours set to? Should definitively improve this...

From Dutch you can switch to English using the menu in the top right corner (click "Engels")
> I agree with the idea of having a cashless economy

Just remember that a cashless economy is one where you must secure permission from a person you can’t see and have never met every time you wish to acquire food, shelter, or clothing
All these suggestions are just temporary solutions at best, as long as the root cause is still in place: overpopulation.

Perhaps at this point in time we could just make things work by cutting back our lifestyles: but 20 or 30 years later the grown population would again need more food and more natural resources.
And hungry people don't care about changing the world but about getting food for today, sustainable or not.
Liberals have embraced capitalism leading to stagnation? I prefer Eric Weinstein's formulation of the root cause. There has been limited technological growth in almost all tech fields (except semi-conductors) from 1970 through present day. Physics, chemistry and biology for example are not producing new technology that fuels growth. The explosive growth in semi-conductors and computers have obscured this reality. We have greater knowledge in all those fields today, but it's not translating to the rate of tangible progress that was seen in previous years (like 1920-1970).
Downvoted because your comment lacks substantial content. Yet I’m curious what do you mean by it.
Also, don't know if this applies to others but we (uni I work for) maintain public ftp servers because we are obligated to do so by rhel. I think beinga uni we get a cheaper rate this way. We also host some of the foss software we use on these servers too.
Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types
The way the bill would work in practice is that if the government found more than $10,000 in your possession they’d steal it.

Seems pretty straightforward.
Why? The role of the grid will still be arbitrage between power generation and power consumption. A flat in a high-rise in a city doesn't have anywhere to put solar panels; a factory couldn't possibly sustain its power consumption with on-site renewables, and no amount of on-site battery storage will change that. Somebody needs to buy power from net producers, and sell it to consumers.
The Swiss Ephemeris is a GPL high precision ephemeris developed by Astrodienst
I think the argument is that people wont get paid 75k to 175k for relatively simple work much longer, so this group will see their salaries and prospects dwindle in the coming 10 years.
Ethereum 2.0’s Latest Strides Forward
> with a high enough level of corruption (from low-key bribing an inspector, to higher up lobbying at highest government levels), doing this efectively is impossible.

That's a great way of putting it — nice!

What I'm looking for is a way to put responsibility where it truly lies. Blaming regulators alone is reductive, because the architects of the regulatory framework and the context in which it exists have ensured that corruption will occur. Those architects are the ones most at fault, starting with the Roberts Court.
I'm not sure I understood your comment about the shape of the earth's orbit.

The earth's orbit around the sun is an ellipse. But it's an ellipse that takes one year to traverse. The closest thing that gets us in terms of an "ice age" is winter. And, in fact, "winter" is what happens when you're closer to the sun, due to a change in the angle of incidence of sunlight (in the northern hemisphere).

Are you referring to something else?
Apple fans should brace themselves for bad news about the next iPhone
This would be ideal but unfortunately laws are written by corporations that profit from plastic.
obvious to us yes, to big corp this is the opposite of a solution.
Lots of people that are housing and food insecure, desperate and in need of basic resources?

Historically this is a recipe for raising cheap armies, and finding something to do with them.
I enjoyed that show for the reason that they're showing how hard it is to sustain yourself with nothing but you find in nature. I'm a scouts leader and shows like Bear Grylls make surviving look way too easy, and prompts people to take unneccesary risks that will lead to certain death.

What I didn't like about the Vancouver location is that they were prohibited to hunt for food, other than fishing. Especially with winter in view, surviving on plants and fish alone would be very, very difficult, if not impossible.

What baffled me was that most of these 'survival experts' had little knowledge of local flora/fauna. I'm not certain if they knew where they were going on forehand, but if it were me, I'd make damn sure I would be able to spot at least some basic staple foods around the world.

What I like about 'Alone' is that it really shows that surviving isn't just about knowledge or skill, but that psychology plays a vital part, too.