skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not clear what was the method to measure this. The article mentions "preferred alcohol," "drinking," "drinking pattern" and "production."

This can be misleading as many comments state below. For example, Romania is a big wine producer, it's most known for wine, but a lot of that wine goes for export.

For drinking, a one liter of vodka equals four liters of wine in terms of alcohol content. So a country that drinks 1.5x more wine in quantity over vodka isn't necessarily getting drunk on wine, because you may order a couple glasses of 2dl wine but hit 6 vodka shots of 0.5dl each so basically your main drink of the night was spirit even though quantity-wise you consumed more wine.

Often times, in central eastern Europe, you order beer which is half a liter but you get several shots with it.

For preferred alcohol, it's kind of like when you ask people if they prefer theatre to cinema, most will answer theatre even though they'll only go to cinema.

Or ask them if they prefer to read Economist or Buzzfeed. Nobody ever answers Buzzfeed, yet it is one of the most read media in the world.

So ask me if I prefer beer or wine, I'll say wine because I do. But when I go out I'll have a beer because it's cheaper allows me to sit in the pub much longer without getting drunk too fast and everyone else drinks it too.

This is hard to measure. But overall for main countries like Spain, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Russia etc. it's seems to be correct.

The correct way to measure this, in my opinion would be to measure which beverage delivers the most alcohol content for the said population for that will be its preferred alcoholic beverage.
You might also enjoy this one http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php
"There can't be back-propagation in evolution without biological time-travel of information." You still can't do such time-travel in computers, sure you could simulate it but on a chronological scale in reality, your not time traveling.

To equate this into evolution, if you viewed a species as the model, each generation adapts to the previous generations experience, hence it feeds back into the next generation. That evolution may prevail or that whole lineage dies off. It gets down to the perspective of how you measure that time aspect and define the start point of your time perspective. In a simulation you are arbitrary resetting that time baseline on each model, so the equivalent would be to view the human as a baseline of each birth. yes it gets confusing, but to dismiss it just because you have no actual time-travel from a cosmological perspective and compare to an arbitrary time perspective that runs in a linear temporal realm of the universe is unfair.

But many things are hard to equate, you could say it is like comparing apples to pears, but then there are many perspectives in which you can compare them and find them equal. But you can't take one single perspective and transpose that upon another perspective and presume a conclusion.
Not on topic but the BBC allows unencrypted HTTP requests?

Then 302s a https request to http? It wasn't browser cache as I tried in a private session too

Request URL:https://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190828-the-two-bizarre-ho...

Status code:302

location: http://www.bbc.com/future/stor…hat-tricked-arthur-conan-doyl...
Sorry, I forgot to actually answer you. I easily loose my train of thought.

But yes, I would say I've gone through a similar change, but maybe less severe.

I still like to talk to people, but I don't read much of that kind. It's entirely unfulfilling without the possibility of getting clarification, pondering the statistics, and thus maybe actually learn something new, or teach something new.
> competing to see who's last

That's a very interesting observation but to really get it to work requires very close cooperation between parents. That takes a lot of time and goodwill which is not easy to create or maintain except in very special circumstances or in rather closed groups.

Our fatal mistake was to get a phone for our son when he started to walk home from school in case there was any change in the usual schedule. Once the genie is out of the bottle any protocol or agreements are negated pretty much instantly. There are so many pressures to encourage phone use (messaging, etc.) it's impossible to restore any level of control without (potentially severe) social consequences for the kids.
How about something like org-brain [1] or simply an index, using headlines like you would otherwise use hierarchical tags?

[1] https://github.com/Kungsgeten/org-brain
Which sort? In this case, every possibly option is discrimination.
Call Me Coco T Shirt – Teespring
I personally prefer firefox's dev tools to chrome's ones.
I'm sure that they will learn lessons that railways, hospitals, airports should perhaps not be the first to lose power, that trains should be able to restart quickly, and that generators should be comprehensively tested to respond to real situations, and it will be no-one's fault.

I fully agree with you that this is the likely outcome.
- LinqPad

- Paint dot net
I always wanted a MacBook (the 2015+ Retina one), but they always seemed too expensive once the storage was upgraded, and sadly this year Apple discontinued it. But last month I happened to look on the right Amazon site and hey, they have unsold brand-new stock for the latest model with the upgraded storage in the colour I want, discounted several hundred euros. Finally a good price :D
Neo colonialism? It's just leveraging an imbalance between markets at the expense of the imbalance itself. If more wealthy people go to a place to leverage their market advantage in a location, that market advantage pretty rapidly begins to disappear. It's beneficial to all parties involved, and consented to by all parties involved. Colonialism is not by consent.
where's your source for that? the addendum to the post says that "fitness functions" have been abandoned
No, they didn't abandon it. Werner Vogels just last week affirmed that they're still doing it:

> And we continue to work in two-pizza teams today.

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2019/08/modern-applicati...
> The only think keeping me on Fx is a sense of ethics

So do I. At least I still use Firefox as my secondary browser.

My own main recriminations:

- The download manager is awful. I sometimes download several times a file because I didn't see it started. And I could describe half a dozen bugs with it. For example, under some conditions, the size of a download is replaced by the sum of the previously downloaded files (4GB/4.1GB instead of 0/100MB + 4GB old files).

- about:config is broken. When I open the settings for power users in Chromium, each option has a short description. With Firefox, the documentation is not linked to the setting, it's in a wiki or blog posts.

- I need an extension to confirm on quit. I sometimes press Ctrl-q when I intended Ctrl-w. The config browser.showQuitWarning and browser.warnOnQuit have no effect. I had to read FF's source code to understand it was intentional: the code had evolved (IMHO, in a bad way), the doc had not.

- Local extensions are removed when FF stops. I heard that this is not the case with "developer FF", but I don't want to drop the OS packaging of ESR FF. And that feature is already in Chromium based browsers. I don't even know what devFF is, though I've heard it's based on a FF beta branch.

These are mostly not problems for the main target of FF. My parents main problem were that an update once replaced their custom starting page (tailor made) with the default one (recently visited sites + ads). They also had a few UI hard times, but these were either fixed by FF (adding a link to the starting page was impossible without reading a doc) or my parents got used to them.
We’re using testleft from smartbear, but I can’t really say how it compares to other commercial products.
Yes but also, northern countries don't grow wine, and if they do it's very small quantities and generally not a great wine.

It's a rarity to find English, Polish or Danish wine, they exist but are overpriced for what you're getting.

Both beer and spirits are made from grains, which are much easier to grow there as well as easy to import. Thus vodka, whisky, beer.

Although many would disagree, there's way less to appreciate in beer and vodka than it is in wine. Beer doesn't even have distinct recognised regions and for vodka you can't even tell whether it's made from grain, rye or potatoes, unless it's a really bad poorly filtered one.

On the contrary the appreciation culture for whisky is alive and well. In central Europe, lots of home-made spirits from local fruits are made and people like to taste and compare also.
From the little I know UK settlements have substations that serve something like 1000 homes. Older ones are open air affairs, newer ones are prefabbed enclosed buildings. They're oil cooled transformers and switching gear. One serves the village where my parents live, in a city there are two within about 400m of me (serving different neighbourhoods). Sometimes a neighbourhood will trip out, like in a thunderstorm; or get turned off (maintenance). I assume that the central grid has a switching order for these to be turned off to maintain essential supply. Factories, hospitals, and such have their own substations.
Correct, my people too (Romanians)
Perl6: To compute a constant of calculus (A treatise on multiple ways)
I started out with NetNewsWire, but have in the past transitioned to Inoreader - web apps work perfectly for RSS as you don't need to sync anything between devices (EUR 20/year for ad-free version)

Now if only all services could retain RSS, there's a new CMS being used by Norwegian press that don't support it - I'm actually considering cancelling one subscription because I will miss a lot of the content :/
more and more ive come to hate what the world is becoming, i was going to go off on a rant but i dont think i even have it in me anymore
I don't recall any problems with pod placement, mostly because the machines are big enough to have ample room left over. We did move our ELK stack to a separate VM-backed k8s to be able to scale it better, but that was mostly because the storage box of the bare-metal cluster didn't have enough space to store more than a week's worth of logs.
From that article:

>"In Japan, the western half of the country runs at 60Hz, and the eastern half of the country runs at 50Hz – a string of power stations across the middle of the country steps up and down the frequency of the electricity as it flows between the two grids." //

That's, err, curious.
I have trained for years to expand my stomach enough to become my own two pizza team.
Leon Sans
Mind-Controlled Robot Arm First to Work Without Brain Implant
ELY5: When you're at a playground, and you're pushing the roundabout round and round, it gets harder and you get slower the more kids jump on it, right?

ELY not 5, but I'm no expert either: in terms of phase sources like generators lead [0] sinks, by an amount proportional to their over-production; so the more sunk, the less they lead, and the lower the frequency.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_and_lagging_current

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_factor
Most things in a modern home don't care about frequency.

The problem is mostly at the generation end.
The electrical grid is essentially distributed transmission locking all the generators across country together. They will all rotate in sync at the same speed/phase, it might as well be a mechanical linkage.

The entire system is under too much load and the generators are all physically slowing down. Unfortunately the generators are all designed to operate over a very narrow frequency range. If the frequency continues to drop, the safety systems will kick in to protect the generator.

If the load isn't reduced, more and more generators will drop off the network and there will be less and less supply to meet the demand. The frequency will drop lower and lower. Eventually the whole network will drop to zero and nobody will have power.

It's basically the same thing as stalling an engine.
AFAIK the reason for using NFS is that it's supported in k8s out of the box. I don't recall any performance issues for the things that we're doing. When we had database issues, it was the usual stuff: missing indexes, suboptimal config settings etc.
There are two in Scotland: Cruachan (the "Hollow Mountain") and at Foyers with a new much larger scheme proposed for Coire Glas above the Great Glen.
How do you do (for example) column names or types with ASCII only?

How do you extend ASCII?
> The main niceties are the increased granularity (nobody would use half °C in practice)

One decimal place is commonly used.
It actually sounds like this was really useful though, as a lot of the systems involved will be improved in the future.

I'm not sure if the grid is already doing this, but they should trigger failures randomly, including Low Frequency Demand Disconnection schemes from time to time to ensure that all downstream systems are also ready (like the hospital someone mentioned that had an issue with the backup generator, or the trains that stopped working when the frequency failed). A bit like caos monkeys in dev environments.
> Lisa Nowak, the lovesick astronaut in the diaper

This reeks of a complete lack of basic empathy and rudimentary respect towards another human being. How can anyone write this sort of junk, leave alone publishing it?

Flagged.
> We don't live off the wild.

You don't eat fish? You don't eat food that requires pollinators?
"Would you not prioritise an airport, a hospital, the railway, over residential areas?" Yes and they do.

As mentioned, things get added to the grid all the time, case of the airport was that it was not on a priority list. Yes that is an oversight, but who's fault and accountability we do not know. The onus would of been in the airport to inform the power distribution and if that failed to happen then the airport would be the ones with the hands up, if they was and the distribution failed to add it, then their hand would go up.

But hospitals as I mentioned operate and a designed and planned for such issues with them having backup power supplies. Which is the solution for many installations as many will not have or justify the cost of being upon their own distribution spur.

As for the "we never had to use it before" that's down the testing and covered in previous comments fairly well without repeating it again.

But if you wish to focus upon being able to point a finger at somebody and say it is there fault, then fine. But I and I'm sure many others would not be focusing upon that, though I can appreciate that mentality due to the way media/tabloids cover such and all issues in life. After all, power cuts today are not that common on this scale, decades past and in less developed countries they would be so common that they wouldn't even make the news.

But remember, if the weather forecaster says it will not rain and you go out and a light shower makes you wet - would the forecast be wrong or would we have the mentality to go, that mistake was within acceptable parameters and just one of those things. It gets down to what we are used to and what we accept. So yes, I get that blame need to be lain in many eye's but is that fair all the time?

But then - nothing is perfect - better to focus on getting closer to perfection than expending energy stagnating as too busy pointing the finger.
Imagine if you are running on a conveyor belt at 60 steps per second. This belt is turning a crank that, let's say, moves water. You are the energy input (the sun for solar, heat energy for steam turbines, movement of wind for windmills, and so on), the crank is the generator, and the water is the load.

Now imagine the water is suddenly turned into vegetable oil (more load has come on). It is more difficult to move. For a brief moment, your energy input is still the same but you can't push as much of the new liquid so your pace slows down a bit, to 58 steps per minute. You increase your exertion (add more energy input) and your pace climbs back to 60 steps per minute.

Finally, imagine that you're running as hard as you can. That 60 steps per second to push that vegetable oil is as much as you can do. But the vegetable oil turns to heavy cream (even more load). You've put in as much energy as you can but your pace falters and drops to 49 steps per second.

That's why the frequency falls.
What a Senior Staff Software Engineer Does
Your ideal browser did once exist. It was called Phoenix.exe. It was a little executable you could run from anywhere that launched quickly. Compared to its competitor at the time - the bloated, boat-themed Netscape Navigator suite - it was sleek and efficient.

The rest is history: Phoenix.exe literally became Firefox, and now the cycle repeats again.
If they were synchronized, it would mean that in the case of any larger failure that would draw too much current over the undersea link, the link itself would have to trip out.
Having better Linux support than Chrome does would be a nice first step. Better HW accel. support, better integration with DE's, better themeing support.
How dare they try to improve Google Play whilst YouTube Kids has an issue.

By the way, how dare they try to improve YouTube Kids whilst Google Play has an issue.

Deadlock.
It's not something that I even considered when I got my current position and now I'm trying to figure things out.
> They spent $253 million (45% of revenue) on software development, presumably the bulk going to Firefox.

I'm curious if anyone can locate information on how much of that was spent specifically on Firefox, the browser. It seems like Mozilla was working on a bunch of peripheral stuff during that 2016-2017 period.

* Work on Firefox OS was still ongoing through 1H 2016. (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.fxos/FoAwi...)

* They were building a free subscription service to check HIBP for your info. (https://monitor.firefox.com/)

* They were building a file-sharing service (https://github.com/mozilla/send/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md)

* They were building a new VR-first browser and content aggregator (https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/09/18/firefox-reality-now...)
Streaming on YouTube: Confessions from a Presidential Hit Squad in Gambia
i guess it would be entirely possible that some form of organic/biological computer system could have come about instead, one which much more freely connects to the human body and works more like the brain than our model, similarly maybe they would have found a way to power it via organic means too, rather than being plugged into a wall the tech in your house may be connected not to a power plant but an organic plant in your front yard which generates your power (you may be able to power it from humans too technically in this scenario but a person likely wouldnt produce enough spare energy to power a full house hence the plants)

obviously im just spitballing totally random crap but an alternate timeline could technically be anything so its valid i guess
Or the premise is a false one, that a configuration language is not the right approach. And everytime yet another such language falls flat only serves to reinforce this very point.
I suspect (but haven't verified) that modern compilers are actually implementing __builtin_expect() as a no-op. Much better alternatives exist today, e.g. GCC 8+ __cold__ and profile guided optimizations, which don't have a negative impact on code readability.
The syntax looks a lot like Coffeescript, which I use for defining and generating data.
>Wolves and chimps have power and political struggles all the time. Along with taking care of those injured. But an individual that has a history of taking more than their share and not helping the group doesn't get as much help when injured.

This is not politics. I feel as though this discussion is stupid, since I think it's reasonable to say that the degree to which animals have "politics" is lesser than those animals which have tool use. You cannot forget that technology is always coupled to a certain stage of historical development, it does not happen in a vacuum. There is no such thing as production in general.

>Said hominid then lived for many more years. A sign they were taken care of.

A lot of animals take care of each other, it doesn't mean much in the way of how humans do it.

>So, how is morality, politics and philosophy closed off to engineers?

It is closed off in the same way that engineering is closed off to liberal arts majors, as the parent commenter claimed. That is to say, you must learn it, and learn how to argue about it. Of course I don't claim that you need to be a liberal arts major to be moral or even have cogent ideas about morality, but you still need to learn how to argue your point if you're talking about it, and you can only do that by learning about what's been argued before.
For the same reason a car engine’s RPMs will drop when you start going up a hill (unless you increase the throttle).

Spinning up the generators, and keeping them spinning, takes energy on top of whatever the load is. If the load increases, but the input energy does not, the difference is robbed from the momentum of the spinning mass. This slows the generators down thus the frequency drops.
> Heck even simpler, sometimes is just to use a bunch of small VMs and bring them up or down based on a schedule, number of messages in a queue, health checks, etc and throw them behind an autoscaling group.

Kubernetes is the tool I would choose to do that.
https://www.westernpower.co.uk/downloads/4093 is a pdf for one of the local power distribution companies that includes an explanation. The short answer is that they have frequency-sensitive relays that automatically disconnect some or all of the feeders downstream of 132kV substations as frequency drops through various specified limits.
Low cost, 10 h battery live, Linux support.
I've been doing the same since I was 12, just one simple .txt file that I've managed to keep alive since then!

I only write in there when I remember, which is usually 1-3 times a year, usually after an important life event - so it's really fun reading back through it...
As a write once read many system, the abandonment of systemd isn't a big deal I suspect. You don't write to the system area and expect it to persist, and so making modifications to the init system basically isn't going to happen. The modularity doesn't really make as much of an impact then. So any backlash from unhappy users who can't install xyz with one click and have init work properly, not a big deal. Anyone who uses something more complex like an overlay system with it likely has more of an interest in the internals anyway, particularly given the nicheness and age of the distribution.
Audiobooks. My father used to read to me growing up and while I’ve tried to get into reading a few times I’m just a terribly slow reader. I have to read the same page 4/5 times to grasp any situation and honestly I just feel like I don’t have the time to read.

Audiobooks have single handedly fixed all of this for me. I’ve been able to listen to and grasp things like the dune series and how to win friends and influence people (unabridged).

Simply listen to an audiobook in your car or headphones on your way to work or at the gym or before you sleep <3
Crazy costs for simple stuff can easily happen with on-premise systems as well - I once had an in-house infrastructure team quote £70K for infrastructure to host a single static HTML page that would be accessed by about 10 people.

There was even a kind of daft logic to their costing - didn't make it any less crazy.
I see a lot of hate about systems and I used to loathe it too.

Then I took a course on systemd specifically and it opened my eyes, and now I'm quite fond about it.

Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. It's the missing layer between kernel space and user space. It has quirks and bugs like all software, but I think it works very well, all things considered.

To those who say that it's complex and does a lot of things: it's complex because it does a complex work.