skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're closer than most people think. Isaac Asimov's essay "The Power of Progression" from his monthly science column in the May 1960 issue of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction", and reprinted in the collect "The Stars in Their Courses" in 1971 [1], goes through the math for how long it would take to reach various population levels at the rate the population was growing at the time.

It was doubling every 47 years then. That's slowed down to about every 63 years currently, so the times to reach those levels would now be longer, but his original numbers are still instructive for how fast exponential growth can get away from you. Here they are.

• Suppose we populated the entire Earth to the density of Manhattan at noon on a typical working day, when it is at its highest density. By "entire Earth" that means covering every square meter of the surface, including the oceans, with people.

That would take 585 years.

• Suppose that every single star in our galaxy had 10 habitable planets with the same area as Earth, and that we could trivially expand to them. And suppose that there are another hundred billion galaxies with the same number of habitable planets as ours, that we can also expand to. Surely now we are set for billions of years, right?

Nope. That just takes 4200 years at the growth rate he used (doubling every 47 years).

• OK, suppose we don't limit ourselves to planets. We find some way to tap into hyperspace or something for energy, freeing us to use all the mass in the universe for human bodies. All the stars in all the galaxies converted to humans. Let's multiply the available mass by 100 to account for dust and debris and other interstellar and intergalactic matter.

It takes 6700 years to reach that level.

• He also looks at how long, given a population that consists just of humans and plants for the humans to eat, limited only by the amount of solar energy and the efficiency of photosynthesis, until we are at the limit. That's 624 years.

I've also seen a similar calculation that uses the volume of an average human and the speed of light. I had thought it was in that Asimov essay, but it isn't. That one asks when, if you were to take every human and pack them into the smallest sphere that could them all, would the radius of that sphere have to be increasing faster than the speed of light to accommodate population growth. I don't remember the answer, but I think it was somewhere in the several thousand years range.

There's no amount of even remotely plausible technological hand waving one can do to make a case that we could ever actually achieve any of the above, except maybe the "cover the Earth" one.

To convert the numbers above to other doubling intervals, just multiply by the doubling interval you want to use, and divide by the one Asimov used (47 years).

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Stars-Their-Courses-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0...
What?

Do you think the photo was faked?

Yes, or no.
Kind of fun/interesting the first time around but it’s like paying yourself less than minimum wage to sharpen a piece of metal. Not worth it
Impressed to learn about this hardware for XML processing. I came across an old article that mentioned the price started at $55K!
This has so many layers mental gymnastics and fiction applied it's hard to know where to start.

The US overthrows the Iranian democratically elected government to maintain BP's regional dominance because the government threatened to use their country's natural resources' profits to benefit its people. Installs puppet and helps the puppet plan to build 23 nuclear reactors (and the secret police Savak among other things). Puppet gets overthrown by the people and now Iran has 'nuclear ambitions'. And that's after getting the other puppet Saddam to go to war with Iran and then getting rid of the other puppet because now he's US armed like ISIS. And now Iran has a sanction and the sanction is used against other geopolitical rivals.

This is a pyramid scheme of imperialism laid upon stacks and stacks of dead bodies but China cheats because they changed the name of a ship?
The protest started from a proposed law to extradite HKers to China. That point is not nuanced, it's just a contextual fact.
> but holds for JavaScript.

Held, in 2015 but doesn't any longer since js had async/await.

This blog post isn't really interesting anyways, and its popularity mainly comes from the zealotry of gophers.
You can get data for free from places such as alpha vantage

https://www.alphavantage.co/
Non-imessage doesn't mean SMS. There's lots of e2e solutions that work cross-platform.
Right on. My concept of MVC just helps guide me on how I’m going to go about building some particular web functionality, irregardless of whether or not the end result is more or less SPA in nature or not. Some parts of my app are nearly completely Ajax driven and server side rendered, other parts are just static web pages. The model means, what classes or methods do I need to build to store the data/state. The view means how am I going to present the to the client side, with a mix of html/template engine working with a backend view class/methods. The controller is how am I going to network the model with the view, and that is generally with forms and other supporting logic. The level of people on this thread that are talking very confidently about things with which they are clearly novices, is pretty shocking. I haven’t seen such a thread on HN in a long time. I’m a python guy using Flask, but congrats to the Rails users and thanks to the developers for continuing to drive it! You’ve made the web a better place.
He's not a serious guy at all, he's a nutjob who likes listening to himself talk.
It's easier to claim that a real adblocker is a net negative for performance while implementing in a slow language than admit that they can't realistically do better this decade due to the complexity of the task and the fact that it's basically one guy's part time project.
Arctic sea ice loaded with microplastics
"Users should not ever do this"

Overall authoritarian tone aside, that's the one phrase from the reviewer that really pisses me off; what happened to Firefox being the browser that "puts users in control of their online experience" (or whatever the variants thereof which have appeared numerous times in the Firefox marketing material/slogans)?

Instead, it seems now that Mozilla have built their walled garden, they are reluctant to let it go and have really acted against the principles upon which it was founded and gained much of its user/fanbase, all in the name of "security". The demand reads more like it came from an Apple app store reviewer, not Mozilla.

It is almost exactly 4 years ago when Mozilla started to build the walls of their garden, and some of the comments on the discussion there are well worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10038999

The saddest thing about all this is that today's browser "choice" is really between the even more restrictive Chrome-clones and Firefox, and the latter is slowly edging in that direction too.
There are no winning strategies. Its all BS.

There are people who are addicted to tracking weather fluctuations on Pluto and there are people who are not.
That will be done after round B funding, rest assured.
It's called decency in public discourse. Read up about it.
The term illegal number is like calling ink contraband because the use of ink in a manner which communicates something illegal may itself be illegal. Illegal numbers aren't illegal themselves. (And, anyway, by the theory justifying calling them illegal, every configuration of matter is illegal, since not only can any information be encoded in a number, but any information can be encoded—by selecting the right encoding scheme—in any finite number, and any configuration of matter can be represented by a number, so any information can be, by choosing the right scheme, be encoded in any configuration of matter.
What about a fork that only differs in allowing a second more permissive addon store.
The Flare-On Challenge 2019 Started
Yep, that's pretty much. It has nothing to do with which is better. Nothing whatsoever. It's just that a handful of companies that hire a ton of programmers and pay them a ton of money happen to share the same bias, and even that's probably because of copying each other. Even if you controlled for current company, alumni of those few have probably carried the gospel even further, again no matter if it's right or wrong. It's like observing that people who dress like Wall Street brokers make more money than people who don't, without considering what else it might mean that someone works (or had worked) on Wall Street.
> ...are you in the US? That isn't true at all. You start with the country code.

With limited exceptions (e.g. on cell phones or VoIP that automatically corrects you), to dial a domestic long distance call, you actually begin with the domestic long distance prefix, which just happens to be 1 in the US. This is entirely separate from the NANPA country code, which also just happens to be 1.
Being integrated into the system is not necessarily a good thing. https://www.phonearena.com/news/iMessage-exploit-allows-hack...

In that case you can't even remove it to protect yourself.
Purchase controls for TV, movies, apps, etc, which all actually work, screen time controls, time-of-day control, web site limits, etc. Along with reporting functionality and integration with parents' phones for ad hoc approvals and time extensions.

I haven't found anything on Android that allowed me age-appropriate fine-grain controls that didn't require exceptions like turning the entire rule off just to allow a single purchase, or having the same functionality controlled in two or three different overlapping spots, etc.

If you really want to see how bad it can possibly get, take a peek at Amazon's Fire Tablet parental controls. Those take the cake for opaque settings that sometimes do what they say, sometimes much more, sometimes nothing.
It would be a poorly thought out idea with zero merit and lots of downside.

Edit: To be clear

- Tridactyl for xul already exists its called pentadactyl

- Rewriting Tridactyl in xul is basically creating pentadactyl from scratch. This is a lot of work for no reason.

- There are many legitimate improvements that have come into being between firefox 38 which is what Palemoon basically is and 70 which you would lose.

- It's highly unlikely that a fork of firefox 38 by a few acceptably skilled developers has the chops to keep up with what mozilla can do with millions of dollars.

- Your browser is the most dangerous app in your system running an old version means that anyone with access to the list of patched vulnerabilities for current firefox may well be able to trivially turn these into exploit vectors for old versions.
It doesn't guarantee a job at google, but I don't think that was the point. If he feels that the reasons for his disqualification are absurd, how should he voice that frustration while not being perceived as entitled? Are hiring practices beyond critique?
I think western population development has gone sustainable largely due to social advancements re women. Not all parts of the world have yet had that kind of progress, and are still happily multiplying in an unsustainable way. Unless we manage to export this kind of progress, I fear we will not be able to avoid all overpopulation issues. One problem is that costly (in loss of lives) regional wars over resources and the enslavement of women as a means of replenishment for your armies are a circular feedback mechanism. Unless the circle of war and patriarchy is broken, some cultures will probably expand to their malthusian limits.
And that's not to mention all the deaths from diseases associated with air pollution.
The Live Transcribe Speech Engine
After the 2019 corn crop is harvested, the USDA is projecting 51.5 days of excess stocks in the United States
Model 3 is assembled outside in a tent, what did they expect?
Can anyone point to a parallel article that makes Oberlin College look like the "good guy" here? This article does a pretty convincing job of making them look ridiculous, but I presume there's another version from a different point of view that makes them look more heroic.
Well, another $12 billion subsidy is coming their way, I'm sure. But nobody would dare call farmers welfare queens...

( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/us/politics/farming-trump... )
Those companies breed seeds, they don't farm them.
If it looks to an outsider like you work for company F, but you actually work for and are managed by company A, then company F has deemed you not worth the trouble of direct responsibility. They don't even see you as expendable, they just don't see you.
> SF is popular because the weather is incredible.

The weather is polarizing, to say the least. Some of us like feeling change, as in through seasons. I fucking hate feeling cold in August. There's about three good weeks of warmth in the year and the rest of the year you need layers.
Effortless Elixir Releases and Deployment
Heating with electricity is plenty efficient if using heat pumps. In fact, a very high efficiency natural gas advanced combined cycle plant providing electricity to heat pump heaters with a COP of 2.5 or better (often 3 or more) is actually more energy efficient than burning the natural gas for heat directly, as crazy as that seems.

But yeah, finding clean sources of electricity in winter is a challenge for a place like Poland. Poor hydroelectric resource. Only modest geothermal potential. Modest solar (not good for winter load). But wind potential isn't too bad in the north of the country and in the Baltic Sea. Nuclear power should be considered, however, as it is in Finland.
Honestly, no they don't. If the car is following all applicable laws, no one should ever be in any danger. If someone has violated the law, they have inherently accepted the risks of their decision, and thus the car should protect the occupants.

Someone tied to the street, doesn't apply because (in my state) the car should be moving at a speed that it would be able to stop in time. Someone thrown from a bridge into a cars way isn't one either, the car should try to protect the occupants again, because that's the case where it'll do the least amount of damage to other nearby cars. In the latter case, Humans wouldn't be able to make a moral decision in that amount of time either, and thus, should default to doing the least amount of damage.
Add me to the long, long, long, long list of people living a better life because of your tutorials. Thanks.
That also happens when you kill all the farmland, and deplete all the groundwater.
Can we pretty please stop dragging all the smartest people in from psychology, mathematics, civil engineering, the carnival, astrobiology, submarine warfare, neurosurgery, and gene splicing in order to increase advertising engagement stats by another 0.1?
The government system of subsidizing production is a good thing. The problem is it's not planned enough (or planned to service certain interests). When we didn't have subsidies, we had underproduction of food crops because of the vagaries of market forces. This lead to starvation and displacement.

However, I think I could agree that corn and soy in particular are overproduced. I've heard that you can eat less soy by eating soybeans than by eating livestock raised on it.
Because it’s interesting?

“The C++ and OCaml implementations of this ray tracer perform almost identically. However, note that the C++ implementation has been optimised by using pass by reference for structs. In contrast, the OCaml implementation is unoptimised.”
That would be my response as an adult. I'm not sure if this is as easy to see by kids. But for teenagers, I think it's an interesting conversation: "Your friend will exclude you if you don't spend hundreds of dollars on a tech gadget, even if a no-cost solution exists on their side. What do you think about this?"

If it's an activity group they really want to belong to, that's ok. If it's between friends who want to stay close... something's not right.
Neat. I like both Nix and containers.

Though I'm curious. Can someone explain

> This is not an officially supported Google project.

"20% time" I guess?
Environmental Impacts of Natural Gas
Not sure who you're arguing with, as the post you're responding to literally only addresses sequestering. Offsets alone are not a solution to the urgent need to turn the tide on climate change. They offer an easy way for CO2 emitters to sort of greenwash what they're doing and keep doing it.

"Private companies trying things" is fine but as we can see from the reactions to this press release that the standard for private companies trying things is incredibly low and nowhere near what's required to hit the IPCC targets.

We agree on one thing though: government has not done nearly enough historically. Of course much worse could be said for industry, the primary source of CO2 emission (along with the military) and fundamentally incentivized to exploit externalized costs and pollute our planet.
I've never shed a tear at work. But I wish I did, because I typicaly feel better after I do.

Instead I am left with a much more crushing and anxious feeling that is only partially remedied after arriving home and laying down, wiped out from a day of sitting.

And then we repeat this 20 times per month or so.
NOAA Data Confirms July Was Hottest Month Ever Recorded
Does anybody have a definition of "hate speech" other than "points of view that I disagree with"? And if your definition is going to be something like "encouraging harm against groups of people" can you then point me to a single quote from a "hate speech" site demonstrating this?
> What does this have to do with anything? The problem with too much US debt is that we have to make interest payments on that debt, which now makes up ~10% of the annual budget (or about $400B/yr).

That may matter to you as an individual but governments get to print money. It's like if I issued IOUs denominated in Steve's Funbucks that I'm the sole issuer of, and those IOU holders lived across the ocean and also I had half the world's armed forces at my disposal. Then when things went sideways I fired up the Epson and paid you off. As it turns out inflation is not directly connected to the issuance of new money, although it does contribute. Balancing a federal checkbook isn't the same as your home finances.

I'm not saying you should go to town and print a ton of money and that nothing would happen, I'm saying it can play a role and isn't directly equatable to small-scale finance.

(Edit) further, borrowing to create economic activity is not zero sum. If you borrow 100K and create a business worth $1M, and reap the tax returns, it doesn’t matter how much you owe. If I borrow $1T and create a $5T economy, I doubt the kids will mind. This is in part why the money supply increases over time — to reflect the new scope of the economy.

The only material risk of taking on debt is that you need to create returns in excess of your interest payments.
Maryland Recalls 8k Real ID Driver’s Licenses
Just wrote a userscript to auto-delete all DOM nodes on HN that contain "China", "Chinese" etc.

I guess this is what passes for "intellectual curiosity" among some "hackers" these days.
Headline should be "Treasuries". What the heck, CNBC. You're a financial network. You can't spell "treasuries"?
I'm not sure who you're trying to convince but it sounds like you should think about why you're so eager to defend that as it's not a very controversial statement.
No. People just have no concept of objective morality today because everyone is hyper-sensitive to everything and can't take criticism at all.
Tried them, felt bad, was harder to drive. The same goes for stuff like Schwalbe Marathon. When i look back into the times where i bicycled more, i wonder how i managed with the tires which had just a thin mesh of wires embedded? I feel like the
modern stuff has more planned obsolescence built in. Tubeless makes no sense economically to me, so i go with a small can of breakdown spray.
Ooh, that makes perfect sense.
what is "legacy ETL" exactly? you have a transpiler but what code does it transpile? what if all my ETL is written in Haskell and SQL (it's not - I don't have any ETL processes - I'm just trying to figure out what you're transpiling)
Has preemptive scheduling landed in Go ? Because last time I worked with it (Go 1.10) it was still cooperative and you had to worry about it otherwise you could get bitten badly.
Sorry for the possibly lazy comment, but why TAHOE-LAFS instead of IPFS?
I too am curious how I can get China to give me instructions on how to operate their satellite. Any pointers?
> The government system of subsidizing production is a good thing.

How is that a good thing, shouldnt the free market take care of it? If there is shortage of wheat why cant wheat be imported from other countries to take care of the shortage?
Agreed.

The next epoch will begin the moment the first AI become sentient.
Yes, that's in the specs. But what I meant is that there is nothing intrinsic to the format demanding unordered behavior.
Is there an actual argument somewhere for why these subsidies are desirable for the nation? Let's say, written by people who agree with them. What is the stated purpose? This should be written from the perspective that most industries should not warrant any subsidies. I don't understand why taxpayers should subsidize farms, and I'd like to read the rationale.
https://www.cnbc.com/id/32462271

>The short answer is that the "misspelling" is on purpose, done to differentiate Treasury bonds from the plural for the Department of Treasury, though I'm not sure why you'd ever need to pluralize that. In any event, a number of business news organizations, including CNBC, use the "Treasurys" spelling.
One important insight of mainstream economics is the idea of "economies of scale" and "specialization," both of which improve productivity and both of which rely in part on a larger population or increased trade. Once you've globalized trade, you're limited by population.

This is especially true for things somewhere between niche and commodity: it's not worth automating something if you're not producing enough of them to justify the capital cost of the automation equipment. It's not worth reusing your rockets if you're only launching like 3 satellites per year (still have to keep the factory open and practiced). This is why Moore's Law has slowed: tech has tapped basically the entire world's population (more than 5 billion people have mobile devices now); there aren't vast new groups of consumers to sell to any more, so the investment in the next step is not worth it like it was before.

In short, more humans actually increases the per-person productivity.
And no zoning laws whatsoever — which is great until some chemical plant next to a retirement home blows up and people die (or are seriously injured).
There is something (in the US) askew about mental health coverage. I think that regulations were passed to try to get mental health conditions treated more like others, but it seems like there is a shortage of counselors, social workers, and doctors, much more than other kinds of medical professionals.

I have this feeling that there's something about the incentive structure under the ACA that is choking off the availability, but I'm not sure what exactly it is. I'm very curious about the economics of running a mental health practice these days.

If you can't pay $70-140/hr to talk to a social worker every week or two, they may well offer you the option of online chat for $150/month. But I feel like there is a mystery there, because why should it cost that much? And yet, the people who charge that much seem desperately overworked and barely functional. Where does the money go? Not to doctors, because everything is done by non-MDs these days. Not to insurance, because deductibles are in the thousands.