skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That really sounds like they haven't been backing up their server

Nor rolling it and both testing this procedure and putting people off mutating the server.
Yes it uses hack
Ask HN: Why don't word processors automatically add close quotes?
One of the things I like about my IDE - as opposed to working in a word processor - is that whenever you type an open quote, a close quote automatically appears. The same goes for parenthesis, brackets, etc. It was annoying to go back to Word after I got used to the convenience of this feature.

Perhaps there is a setting buried somewhere that allows you to turn this on, but I am curious as to why this wouldn't be enabled by default.

Is this simply because of precedence or is there a design decision behind this?
I've heard the phrase "well, a T7 said otherwise, who am I to argue" and similar from people.
> The fossil record shows that biodiversity in the world has been increasing dramatically for 200 million years and is likely to continue. The two mass extinctions in that period (at 201 million and 66 million years ago) slowed the trend only temporarily. Genera are the next taxonomic level up from species and are easier to detect in fossils. The Phanerozoic is the 540-million-year period in which animal life has proliferated. Chart courtesy of Wikimedia.

The fossil record is incomplete, of course. We keep finding new fossils, of new species, many of which are very incomplete. It can be hard to determine if two fossils are the same species or not, depending on what you find. Plus, not all organisms leave fossils, like animals with soft bodies (no bones) or hard shells.

If anything, that first graph looks pretty fishy to me, just with the rapid explosion of growth in the last 200 million years. Of course, those are the fossils that are also on top.

When stamp collecting (or fossil finding) you're at the mercy of luck and statistics.
It's all covered here in the discussion section: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/arrow_functions_v2
I agree that it's uncertainty of what the climate will do that's why it's serious. But alarmists don't say that. They're somehow certain there will be a disaster. There might not, and we're not sure, but they're don't dare express that uncertainty because either they're fooled themselves or they're afraid the common people who believe and vote for whatever the media tells them might use it as an excuse to not worry. That's perhaps reasonable for their goal because people generally can't handle uncertainty and convert it to a simple yes or no instead. But it's also wrong.

As for people taking radical steps, of course we will - when it affects us. We'll move our cities and farms, build sea walls for the most valuable locations, etc. That's not a big challenge because almost every building on earth was built within the last century and most of them won't last another century regardless of the climate. So even if we somehow have to rebuild all of them, that's what we would have already done anyway. Infrastructure of cities is mobile on a time scale of 100 years. The CBD of my hometown was under water in the 1800s but now it's the capital city, all dry and well functioning because of massive civil works.

As for nobody making those extinction arguments. Myley Cyrus said she wouldn't have children "until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water".
ColdFusion was terribly expensive, like all the other stuff like WebObjects or Netscape. The Microsoft stuff was expensive AND insecure. CGI (i.e. Perl) was cheap but annoying to learn, setup, and maintain. Java was sluggish and unusable in shared-host environments (i.e. expensive, again).

PHP hit an optimum equilibrium between usability, features, and price. This only changed when virtualization changed the hosting game. Arguably PHP is still very close in terms of usability - deployment is fundamentally trivial - it's just lagging elsewhere.
I don't like the language but the execution model is unbeatable. Not having to worry the whole server goes down if your code breaks or runs for too long, is nice. I'd like to know if there is some way to run JS code just like that.
Tom Gold wrote that paper after the discovery of life forms in underwater thermal vents, during that period he was trying to build a theory of non-biological formation of fossils fuels the discovery of life forms living in extreme conditions at extreme depths made him reconsider his stance somewhat but not to abandon it.

His paper was about microbial life feeding on petroleum and so he postulated that it would have to reach several KM in depth at least.
Antibiotics are given to animals to improve their growth. I assume this is because the animal does not have to dedicate a lot of its metabolism to its immune system.
I have a lazy-man's way of doing this. I put some oil in the pan and spread it all around, then wipe it up with a paper towel until there is just a very thin layer. Then I put on a lid and turn on the flame as high as it can go. After a minute or two it starts to smoke. I turn down the heat a bit and let it smoke for a minute, then turn off the heat and let it cool.

I know, this is not as good as doing it right, but it is a whole lot better than nothing, and the surface works well for my cooking.
The book has been in process for years. The previous 2015 draft was 824 pages, it's now 928.

I suspect a periodically-updated LaTeX draft with an auto-date macro.

From the preface:

This document is a continually-being-revised draft of a textbook on the philosophy of computer science. It is based on a course I created for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

The latest (August 2019) edition significantly updates/adds chapters 5 ("What is Engineering") and 20 ("Computer Ethics II: AI").
The US already uses 3D airspace: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspace_class_(United_State...

The issue is the distance reserved is conservative so people slightly encroaching don’t instantly cause problems.
I would guess (could be wrong) that the laser turntable involves some DSP and a DAC.

Normal turntables have a very simple analog signal path, with the needle moving electromagnets which emit the signal.
I don’t really see why you’d need such a thing (apart from marketing to audiophiles—who are willing to pay the buck—or for research/archiving purposes—who are also ready to pay the buck).

If you want supreme sound quality you don’t play from a vinyl. A CD (or even FLAC file) will always “sound” better, even from first play. I, at least, don’t really care about the minor degrading my mid-range turn table does to my records. Almost all of the new records I buy come with a download code, so if, for some reason, my record becomes degraded beyond listening—however many listenings that would take—I always have the option of listening to the higher quality FLAC file.
This.

In his book on the topic, William Stein did not get around to the connection to the product of primes until page 121.
I don't know, the vector units vary a huge amount. Let's say you have an AMD chip with AVX2.

For Excavator you have something like 2x128 adders and 2x128 multipliers, split over two cores.

For Zen 1 you have 2x128 adders and 2x128 multipliers per core.

For Zen 2 you have 2x256 adders and 2x256 multipliers per core.

And you can combine an adder and a multiplier to do FMA.

And for Intel chips you generally have 2x256 units that can do add or multiply or FMA.

There are a lot of workloads where you want very different strategies across these architectures.
If there is life on Mars, that's where it is!
> But does the syntax really collide?

Yes.

$a = [ $x => $x * 2 ];

Is this an array mapping the key $x to the value $x * 2, or is this an array mapping the key 0 to a function that doubles its input?
All these comments and no one has mentioned reel-to-reel tape decks. That will be the next hipster craze.
The world does not start and ends with the US, one of my colleagues had one of the first 10 model S’s in the UK he haven’t been pulled over for like 5 years before that he still jokes about being pulled over 13 times during the first week because the cops just wanted to take a peek at the car.

Driving a flashy car has implications like it or not, driving an obnoxiously flashy car is even worse.

And in the US it’s likely even worse since a traffic stop is one of the most dangerous interactions you can have with the police.

It also has other implications, parked at a block you don’t live on around the time a crime occurred? Well take a guess which car would be definitely reported as suspicious during the testimony sweep...

P.S. I’ve seen conflicted studies about the benefits of a dash cam or stating to the police you are filing the engagement; while some studies show it reduces the “aggression” officers might display others show that it increases the chances of them basically wanting to fuck with you; if you think you can never be baited into acting out or they can’t confuse you during questioning to give a contradictory statement e.g. asking where you’ve been and where you are going multiple times then by all means drive what ever you want.

I would rather minimize my interaction with the police because I can’t think of a single interaction with them that would be objectively pleasant under all conditions and I can’t guarantee that they won’t catch me on a bad day when I’m in a pissy mood and I might act or say something that could be taken as aggressive or suspicious.
Oh, interesting! I was discussing how people might aggregate their data for their own benefit with someone from MIT. I would love to talk to some and see if this idea is valuable.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20908317.
I'd understand the reasoning if the removed features could possibly make more sense in a separate app or some kind of optional add-on module, or if perhaps the point is really about the user interface not being overwhelming — and yet Microsoft manages to take apps with perfectly straight-forward user interfaces and twist them until the one or two features that an app has are uselessly hidden behind one or two hamburger menus.
Where are you getting the idea that Minsky knew any of it was at Epstein's direction or that she was underage?

The description by Benford was that at Epstein's event a young woman explicitly propositioned Minsky, he rejected her advance and was put off by the experience enough to remark to Benford about it.

It might well be that there were additional details-- that the offer was "Hi, I'm 17 and my boss says I need to have sex with you", or what not, and I'd agree with you if that were the case-- but no one there has suggested this yet.

Nothing obligates you to take the most charitable interpretation, but if you're going to claim you are doing so you ought to actually try.

I'll grant you that it sounds like it should have been inescapable to Minsky that Epstein surrounded himself with women where there were huge age and power imbalances, to the point of it being obviously creepy. But the same could be said about, say, Richard Branson or Donald Trump. It's a big jump to go from your original allegation of Minsky engaging in statutory rape and prostitution to 'he had to know that this guy running events for him was at least a bit of a creep'.

Maybe once investigations happen and disclosures are made it turns out that Minsky really did partake in those awful things but at this point they haven't even been factually alleged, much less persuasively demonstrated.
And I imagine if you were a dirt biker, you'd think many National Parks were an ideal place for them as well.

I get that some of the existing drone regulations, especially on private property, may be overly restrictive. I could barely fly a drone around my multi-acre property between general aviation airports and a nearby Army area.

I also get that striking appropriate balances for multi-use of federal land is difficult. For example, I'm perfectly happy to argue both sides of very limited snowmobiles in Yellowstone in winter.

However, other than individually-permitted commercial drone use, (or SAR etc. obviously), I see no scenario where hobbyist drone use in National Parks should be an allowable activity.
Wallets: Securing Storage
> the falseness of the “work hard and you will succeed” ethic washed over me

It isn't about working hard. It's about working smart.

Make a list of things you love. Make another list of things that others will pay for. The intersection is where to make a career.
Does #2 mean that you could, say, for Google Cloud’s SDK which heavily relies on Netty, avoid it exports Netty to the rest of your application, avoiding dependency hell?
Move over, Libra. Telegram’s own cryptocurrency is apparently coming soon
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20750140
4) That's a terrible way to make laws.

By that description we should ban dogs. Surely the number of people terrified by dogs far exceeds the number of people scared of drones, by a huge number.
Please don't reply to a bad comment with a worse one. That's exactly what we don't need.

The fact that we don't want nationalistic flamewars on this site doesn't mean comments of that nature never appear here. Of course they do. That's why we keep having to say we don't want nationalistic flamewars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Creating Hyper-Accurate Maps from Open-Source Maps and Real-Time Data
It is a criticism of the notion of RCT as the unimpeachable "gold standard" of evidence. The limits of a tool are the most important thing to learn about it, and, for RCT, few can be bothered.
Awards are political.

People are human.
Most governments, when building out subways, will choose to build two lines out and get twice the coverage rather than build one local and one express line that serve the same location.

New York was able to avoid this choice starting out, because its CBD and densest areas (Manhattan) are built out in a long, narrow fashion, and you can only thread so many lines through such a narrow space before you start having to make choices between missing transfers and building stops way too close, so the decision was made early on to concentrate tracks for easier transfer facilities.

It's also worth noting that New York's subway was built in an era where buses and streetcars were slow (and in some cases still pulled by horses), so the local lines have stop spacing optimized for walking to a station and the express lines are the actual commuting heavyweights that people transfer to. More modern subways are designed with medium-speed last mile transfers in mind, either via cars that park and ride (BART, DC) or lots of bus transfers (Asian systems.)

Eventually a city becomes too big and belatedly realizes that it needs to have regional express service running through the city, because transferring rail+subway+rail is way too slow. Cities that developed first during the Industrial Revolution can depend on the dense legacy rail networks that were developed during that time (Paris RER, Berlin S-Bahn, London Crossrail) and this mostly consists of building connecting tunnels through the city center with stops at major activity centers.

Those cities that developed during the 20th century mostly don't have dense legacy rail networks, and have to new build after the fact, which can be hard and difficult. Seoul is building a similar network to the above cities, but it's a massively expensive project that they have to build 50-60m underground because no provisions were made to accommodate it before hand. I suppose Beijing and Shanghai will get around to building such a network when they reach a similar level of wealth and can afford it.
Life on Earth developed without oxygen.

The oxygen only appeared 2.4 billion years ago, as a side effect of photosynthesis and the event is sometimes called the "Oxygen Holocaust", since it caused almost all life on Earth to go extinct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
This sort of comment will get you banned here. Please post thoughtfully and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The ugliest thing about that car is the godawful off-center front license plate.
Quite a lot of shops choose not to use Scala because of the power. For instance, I can easily write Haskell-like code with Scala and build DSLs galore, which for me is great. But what happens when you need to hire more developers? That's the rub.
This was linked above and sound like the theory your footnote describes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghirardi%E2%80%93Rimini%E2%80%...
You can't have a career in automobile racing unless you're rich, either.
It would make the phone thicker which is not going to happen.
> If you're buying a lower quality audio option that degrades with usage, then you are buying into the hype at least a little bit.

I buy them, I don't listen to them. I don't even own a record player, but I have like a dozen of titles I really like to listen to. It's the same with books, I've personally never opened the physical copies of the majority of titles on my bookshelf. I've read them on an e-reader and liked them so much that I wanted a copy that I can actually lend to people.
This is a lie.

It's actually part of a propaganda campaign, but that's not relevant just interesting.

You should easily see a lie like this no matter the reason. If not, it was explained on HN when this old story came out.

Anyway, I guess it's up to the individual whether they are in or out on fake news.

Reality is whatever you make it. Religious people of all faiths live longer. Can't all be right... Yet in some ways they are all right.
Yes I use it daily, it's got some important distinguishing features compared to the competition like Todoist. For example start dates, do not under any circumstance show me a task until it's ready to start. Why Todoist haven't added this after all these years I've no idea, I have so many regular tasks that this is useful for.
I am not that much interested in what versioning scheme a language used and very curious about what is new in Scala that makes it a more attractive platform tomorrow than it is today.

I just read that post and so far there is nothing really that interesting. Maybe it is just me.
Yes, excuse the ambiguity.

To me a philharmonic concert sounds... very different than recorded audio. I'm confident I can double-blindly 100% tell the difference. And so can everyone else. This is one experiment I'd be happy to participate in.
Self-hosted != free

It’s more like going to Best Buy and just buying a computer. End of analogy. Because that means you now own the computer and Best Buy can’t one day prevent you from using it or stop you from getting your data out of it.

Btw, I use Todoist and don’t need all my software to be self hosted. But I understand why some people do want that.
A tech lead discusses how he disciplines unintentional personal context-switching by relegating communications, development, etc. tasks to separate devices.
HN hug. Got a mirror?
>Cassette tapes could replace vinyl someday as the hip alternative to digital music

That happened a few years ago
If a large public corporation does it, it's a statistic, if it's a small business, it's a tragedy.
And is not + just a mere shortcut for typing a larger number?
> the cost saving amounted to less than 1%

The figure is doubly misleading:

* In a low margin business, 1% cost savings could easily be hugely increased profits. Toyota's profit is about 6% at the moment: changing to 7% would be significant. Many businesses have lower margins.

* "Less than 1%" is anywhere between 0% and 1%.

I would guess similar savings are being made by other manufacturers.
I mean the juxtaposition here is pretty damning for the author's point:

> In this, the Media Lab has apotheosized the capitalistic philosophy of its parent institution ... Theoretically, at least, professors are salaried and tenured so that they can conduct research pursuant to this communal scientific ethos free from any profit imperative. This is not how modern academic science often works in practice, and it is certainly not how things have worked at MIT for the past 100 years.

> Over the course of the past century, MIT became one of the best brands in the world, a name that confers instant credibility and stature on all who are associated with it.

So MIT has followed the "capitalistic" approach instead of the "communal" approach for the last 100 years and it has been ... wildly successful? That doesn't seem to be the author's point, but it is the logical conclusion.
Hierarchical note taking tools aren't new.

Here's my favorite:

http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/
woops. fires are also essential for the renewal of the ecosystem. Of course, not the ones started purposefully
If you think what is says is inaccurate, then you should provide some specifics.
The ELP Japan has some pretty back drawbacks other than price...

It doesn't work with coloured vinyl and it's worse than regular turntables when it comes to dust since it just reads it instead of potentially moving it away

There are some videos about it on YouTube and it looks like you have to meticulously clean your vinyl before playing it.
> the university is trying to retain researchers not turn a profit on the research.

Depends on the university. Most claim ownership of researchers' inventions and have ambitions of profiting from them (many stumble at the commercialisation/monetisation step). For example, Stanford has reportedly made hundreds of millions off Google's PageRank algorithm, because Stanford owned the patent, not Larry Page. That's a good incentive not to work as a university researcher.
Please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to Hacker News. We've had to ask you this before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Any where I can find more info about circles before creating an account? Your website (at least on mobile) has almost no information about what I am signing up for.
The Future of Theming on Gnome
There is a notion of feature death with products but to improve retention you do need to keep shipping out new features so I disagree here.

It feels like this article is piggybacking off the minimalism advocated in design schools. Minimalism is not the same thing as throwing out or ignoring features. How does the author reconcile their thesis with the fact that they're suggesting ignoring customer suggestions?

The attitude of if it ain't broke don't fix it is really you asking to be crushed by a competitor.

This said, the caveat here is when it comes to ideas. Better approaches to solving a problem are often simpler or more elegant, and require an out-of-the-box approach.
That's an interesting setup. Is there a specific reason why you run your big experiments on your own machine instead of AWSs machines?

I'm very interested in the field myself, but I haven't yet reached the point yet where my Sagemaker bill has broken the bank.