skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No. It's simple. Snowden = Good.

Sure, if you only read his side of the story. Anyone looks good if they get to make up their own narrative about themselves.

The fact is that anyone with half a brain should have known decades ago that the US government, like all governments, does all kinds of surveillance and classifies all kinds of information, and not all of it is going to be pretty. When you tell the government you want it to protect your security and stop terrorist attacks, it's going to do whatever it takes to do that. For Snowden to talk as though he just found all this out when he got access to NSA's super sekrit systems doesn't show that he's good. It just shows that he was ignorant.

Also, while it's perfectly reasonable for ordinary citizens to question what level of surveillance is justified and what kind of information the public should get to see in order to hold the government accountable, it's not reasonable for an individual to just decide on his own that it's OK to violate the law and the agreements he signed up to when he got his security clearance. That is exactly the kind of personal hubris and lack of accountability that we are trying to stop in people who have privileged access to government secrets. We have processes for holding our government accountable: we have FOIA requests, we have lawsuits, and ultimately we have elections. Those processes don't always work well, but that doesn't mean it's ok for one person to arrogate to himself the right to bypass them all.
I think where your mind is going is a form of Mccarthyism or "guilt by association." In a public conversation, connecting someone to a label like "anti-vaxxer" or "truther," even if you don't make the actual accusation is a form of slander. Then holding someone intellectually hostage and saying "I'm glad you're not X," as if I'm beholden to what you think of me, is sleazy to say the least.

You might not be doing this consciously, but you are doing it nonetheless.
The design of this site seems identical to the graphic design that Adafruit used for their I2C address compilation advertisement art[0]. I don't want to jump to the conclusion that this is a ripoff - is this a standard design template that someone offers?

[0] https://learn.adafruit.com/i2c-addresses/overview
One unfortunate thing about the opposite, very polite or "guess" communicator, is that sometimes when one provides all necessary data immediately, that communication is simply not heard.

Very polite communicators actually can have trouble processing a situation that's fully laid out before without the protocols of etiquette. It's heck of annoying but one can learn to adjust to it also.
The conventional technique in poker is to glance at the seconds hand on your watch
Wouldn’t it be nice if the whole stack is perfectly tested and alerts are there for every small detail. Unfortunately in the real world that’s not always the case.
Not RTS, but certainly real time, and as old as the hills.

Railroad Tycoon

The sequels never really did it for me. Transport Tycoon sucked up the hours, but nothing really did it as much as the feel of that first game. Maybe it was the time — the CGA monitor (which couldn’t cope with Civilisation), no mouse of course. I did play it years later and it want the same.

I doubt that feeling can be recaptured. It probably never existed - its a sepia tomes memory of a feeling from a different time with different expectations - but for some reasons the original Railroad Tycoon really stuck with me.
It is and it isn't
Yeah biochar is very interesting. We definitely shouldn't massively start using it in the short term though - its effects are not so well understood. Most "knowledge" is based on terra preta, Amazonian dark soil which is hundreds of years old and man-made with charcoal, pottery shards, bones and other organic matter. There have been field trials but many of them by biochar organizations/companies who might not be completely objective and once we put it in the soil we can't really take it out anymore.

I think the evidence suggests that turning waste into biochar and applying it to fields at a local scale has a lot of potential. Growing trees for the purpose of biochar might be a different story (this has many of the downsides of biofuel production).
Has anyone here ever worked in this industry? I'm curious what the justification for these prices is?

I can't imagine it is quite the scrooge mcduck caricature where the people reaping these profits are literally trying to defraud people. I would love to talk to a health insurance insider or something and ask them to justify this stuff.
Marshmallow is good but it can be slow. We also use it over a Flask API for input/output serialization and in the worse cases it can take a significant amount of time if the objects are large enough (maybe a hundred milliseconds). We also use the Marshmallow models in conjunction with a project called `flask-apispec` by the same authors to generate Swagger docs.

I've wanted to explore using the Typing module to replace Marshmallow since it started making the rounds to see if it results in better performance, but haven't had a chance. I would have liked to see Instagram release a library to go with this blog post so I don't have to do as much legwork.
“Alien” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” at 40
Show HN: Social Service for Internet Unified Reputation and Real Small Gifts
that's nothing against the european hooligan scene, who meet to literally bash each other's heads in, in the extreme cases. While the societal affiliations hardly compare, the disparity is the same.

If you lose, it's your fault, but if you win, then we win. It's symptomatic, whether with burned out programmers, upto and over 50% of university drop-outs (in certain programs like maths or physics at least), blue collar workers who break their backs, etc. etc.
Is it really possible that from Me Too to Purdue to tech anti trust that we are really at the beginning of a true populist backlash against entrenched power?

I am skeptical but there are many threads spinning here.

(Also, to be clear, I think the current Warren tech-are-utilities thing is bozo)
I upvoted you not because I believe Purdue shouldn't be held responsible but because doctors definitely contributed to this crisis. They are not innocent in all this. They've been benefiting from big pharma to push their drugs.
Growth is a much more direct proxy for power than pure cash.

Why would we allow someone to gain power without giving back to the society which provides safety nets for that power?

I am pretty certain Scientologists enjoy every bit of that money (be it expensive cars, free travel, more followers for your ego) they don’t pay in tax.

The same goes for universities: growth without purpose are only there to satisfy the egos of those who manage the money they never earned.
I would like that, thank you! A few people have tried over the years, and we even contacted the person who made the original image, but he didn't remember how he did it ^-^;
2004, 2006, and 2007 for Dawn of War, CoH, and SC respectively. More well known titles like Red Alert 2, Command and Conquer Generals, and Warcraft 3 were even earlier than that. Starcraft 2 was the last "AAA" RTS game that I can think of. Deserts of Kharak is probably the only RTS game I've played in the last 8 years that I really enjoyed. I tried CoH 2, but the micro transactions put me off. Eugen's Wargame series and Steel Divison had interesting and deep nuanced mechanics, but single player was very rough and the multiplayer player base wasn't big enough to sustain a good matchmaking experience.

Personally, I think the main culprit is that MOBAs like DotA 2 and League of Legends are too similar in genre and won over much of the RTS player base. Anecdotally, most of the people I knew that were into SC 2 started playing League or Dota 2.

Edit: I totally blanked out on the Total War franchise. That's definitely a staple of mine, and still playing Rome 1 and Medieval 2 mods to this day.
I’m most amazed that they started at all. The whole idea is just bonkers. Why would cinemas give away free tickets to a third party so that they can make recurring revenues that would siphon their own? No, and they didn’t. Even if they would be as stupid as to go along with it, the first mover advantage for MoviePass was so low as they could easily be outcompeted. I would love to see the pitch for this pipe dream in the cloud.
> I think buying swag from startups to sell after they fail would be a better business model than the moviepass model.

If this is your thing, and you happen to find yourself near the Bay Area, I highly recommend stopping by local thrift stores. So many failed startup shirts!
This is a great followup to the steel issue raised by Gates discussed earlier here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20813496

It seems like the carbon cost for creating this stuff might be much less.
Archilect API
> Toasted Marshmallow implements a JIT for marshmallow that speeds up dumping objects 10-25X (depending on your schema).

https://github.com/lyft/toasted-marshmallow
I liked TA much more than RA. The strategy felt deeper, plus I liked the idea of the Commander unit representing you on the battle field. Sending him into battle was a risky move. The D-Gun made him extremely powerful, but if he died, you lose.

The nukes in RA were also just plain pitiful and not really worth the time to build.
In the era before the internet, they had these printed things called “newspapers”, for which you had to pay money to read, and yet people of all classes of society read them, and got good (indeed, significantly higher quality) news than we get today, and participated in democracy.

So there’s some evidence that “having to pay for news” hardly makes news the domain of the elite few.
I always think that in threads like this one a little name and shame is called for.

Most people would be surprised how closely hospitals and other medical companies pay attention to their social media and Google alerts.
The Air Force has a similar guide that has been around for decades, the "Tongue and Quill." We were introduced to it starting in officer training.

https://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/saf_cio_a6/p...
“much of the regulation is based on good faith simply because the manpower required to verify everything made would be massive”

This is where I wish there were more tolerance for enough government spending to employ as many people as it would take to test properly. We’re talking about medication being used multiple times a day for long term-amongst many uses.
A couple things you should know. First, there is no such thing as late fees or interest on a hospital bill. Second, if you have called to question the bill, they cannot send it to collections until they have fulfilled your reasonable requests for more information.

If you really did just get the bill it will be several months (and several more copies of the bill sent to you) before a final bill would show up that would indicate the account is "PAST DUE" and heading for collections.

IANAL but you can safely wait for the itemized bill.

In the future to save on costs, you might try to find a 24-hour Urgent Care instead of full-fledged ER. Unfortunately the level of equipment that they have to keep in a full ER means just having someone in a bed costs them a lot of money, even if they are just swabbing your throat for a strep test.
In WA to get a license to weld you have to pass a 4G or 5G test. You can't really pass those without a penetrating weld as the lack of penetration will be very obvious when they slice and fold the cupon. I could see that people who can pass the test would not know how to weld in many positions or on many automotive type materials/parts, but they should at least know how to get a penetrating weld.
It's not really a passive sentence, even though it has all the attributes the Army apparently deems necessary and sufficient to declare it as such in section e.

But a passive sentence is one where the subject is absent - but in this sentence, the subject is 'you'. 'Entitled to jump pay for the time you spent in training last year' is an adjectival phrase. The sentence makes an active statement about the recipient:

You are entitled to jump pay for the time you spent in training last year.

is no more passive than

You are a fine soldier.

A passive version of this sentence would be more like

You are being granted jump pay for the time you spent in training last year.
If healthcare costs are so astronomically high, why are so many Americans supportive of mandatory insurance that forces insurance companies to pay those prices? It sounds as bizarre. It's like if a normal pair of shoes cost $1000, and people decided shoes are a right and everyone should subsidize each other's $1000 shoes. How about fixing the root problem first: a pair of regular shoes shouldn't cost a thousand dollars! Find the laws that enable this to happen (patent, IP laws, etc) and change them! Forcing everyone to pay those prices seems to mainly benefit the very people charging those ridiculous prices and enables it to continue.
> Regardless of if he is a hero or villain, he does have integrity.

Edward Snowden became an international celebrity because of what he did, and traded a comfortable life in Hawaii for a comfortable life in Moscow. Please don't speak of him in the same vein as, for example, a disappeared Chinese dissident who has actually sacrificed everything for what they believe.
I'm aware.

I actually think that sort of thing is a major underlying problem in male-female communication. When a woman says and does the same things as a man, it can get interpreted completely differently due to either the simple fact that she is female or due to subtle differences between "male culture" and "female culture" so to speak. (as just one example.)

I get that there is no single standard that works everywhere all the time. But I've personally found it very helpful to realize that low context culture is not somehow "socially worse" than high context culture. Viewing it that way implicitly promotes xenophobia, which ends up being justification for things like white supremacy -- ie "You people who are not like us are fundamentally Doing It Wrong because you are doing it different from how we would handle it."

It was helpful to me to realize this is a legitimate form of communication that faces specific pitfalls in the world and not some sort of character defect on my end. That helps me make judgment calls about when to approach things one way versus another and also helps me make my peace with "You can't please all of the people all of the time."
Throwing some numbers out.

In 2018, nuclear accounted for 4% of global energy production [0]. Since we have been shifting away from nuclear, this represents an underestimation.

Going back to Chernobyl, we have had 2 class 7 nuclear incidents. Scaling this up 25x, this gives us about 1 class 7 nuclear incident every 8 months; assuming no advances in safety occurred since the 70s, when both plants were built. For simplicity, I will round this down to twice a year.

So, how bad are these class 7 disasters? According to WHO estimations [1], Fukushima caused an estimated 0 acute deaths from radiation; 400 long-term deaths from radiation and 1,600 deaths from evacuations (I suspect elevated due to the trigger tsunami). For reference, the trigger natural disaster had about 15,897 deaths [2].

So, in terms of casualties, Fukushima made a natural disaster ~10% worse.

In terms of cost, Fukushima is estimated to cost about $187 billion USD in decommisioning and compensation (Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, 2016) [3]. In addition, the disaster also caused an estimated $266 billion USD in fuel imports to replace the lost power (as of 2016, so 5.5 years of imports); I should discount the hypothetical operating cost of Fukushima, but can't find the numbers for that.

So, to get to 100% nuclear power, we are looking at 2 Fukushima's a year. That is 3,200 deaths and $374 billion USD a year. (In practice, this would not work because there are grid problems once nuclear becomes a significant chunk of power production, but we are really talking about the margin; just extrapolating out to make the numbers clearer). Also, these costs are concentrating in the near term to the incidents, so will go down fairly quickly once we shift away from nuclear.

I was going to compare this to global warming, but it is hard to find good estimates on the damage, and this comment is also already involving much more research then I intenended to do.

In 2010, an estimated 3,000 people died from fine particle pollution from US power plants. [4]. This already almost exceeds are estimate for annual global deaths from nuclear power, so I can stop looking for all the other deaths non-nuclear power causes.

Estimating the cost of not nuclear is more difficult, and at this point I already spent way too much time on this.

I would, however, like to reiterate that this analysis started with me (in my judgment) comically overestimating the cost of the counter-factual nuclear disasters.

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

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

[3] https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/836/econom...

[4] https://www.catf.us/educational/coal-plant-pollution/
> Then I guess it's a good thing that CLIPBOARD and PRIMARY selection are separate and not synchronized by default.

Wasn't this a theoretical about if I did switch to using PRIMARY, why I would be upset? Wherever I wrote "clipboard", I mean all copy and paste mechanisms. I don't want it messing with anything.

And I really don't need two or three of them. Let me have one, which is bound to both sets of key combos and no naked mouse actions.

> Personally, I prefer the feature than having the system do nothing when I middleclick a text field.

Middle click scrolls for me.
How have you stressed or tested your welds?
When you say superglue, do you mean an off the shelf superglue that you would pick up at a hardware or craft supplies store? Did it just dissolve on its own after X number of days?
Virtually any behavior might lead to future litigation - you operate within the bounds of the law, and worry about the rest later.
The domination of StarCraft has always bewildered me. I really loved the Battle for Middle Earth games back in the day as they were much more slow paced than SC. I absolutely loved spending an hour in total silence frantically constructing a base or two with massive armies before sending them off en masse against my opponent(s) - usually a friend or two connected via a LAN so you could hear their occasional grunts and chuckles, before cries of dismay or triumph. So fun!

Actually, when my son was little 10 years ago, we used to play Lego Battles on the Nintendo DS, which was a mini RTS and that was surprisingly fun as well! Definitely sad the genre disappeared.
> they had these printed things called “newspapers”

..which were heavily subsidized, if not outright paid for, by ads.
Launching F9sim (Falcon 9 – First Stage Simulator)
It’s more like the later than I’m comfortable with tolerating.
I remember seeing news reports back that far - particularly about how people were crushing the drug.

Reporting about Reporting in 2003 - https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/orlando-sentinel-o... (and the pressure applied by Perdue Pharma on the paper after)

2005 - https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=506167...

2007 - http://www.nbcnews.com/id/20327132/ns/health-health_care/t/p...
If you can prove knowledge and intent, you can charge under a whole variety of crimes.

Has the US criminal justice system gotten so weak from prioritizing easy wins for the sake of getting hired at a private law firm that they don’t even know how to prosecute or even ask Congress for transparent mechanisms to prosecute?

What is even the end goal beyond giving US intelligence a bad day? Your allegations do not pass muster.
What was the con exactly? Selling dollars for cents is not a con, it is stupid. Different thing.
Note that we don't need particular laws against structuring. Those engaged in structuring are engaging in actions intended to evade the original law and that's enough (though there may be precedent and laws in this regard, they aren't necessary).

Also note similar laws in other countries are cited.
> Sure you can. In civ for example, sail your fleet one way under fog of war, move your army another to suck in units.

That's not getting around a distracted army.

Even if we ignore player focus, and pretend everyone can multitask perfectly, you're still losing options. You can't engage in a big fight on one side of a map just long enough for a flanking force to hit a critical target, then immediately retreat out of the main fight to avoid losses. With turn-based movement, that big fight is either unnecessary or it's likely to get your army crushed by the non-split-up force from lack of retreat options.

And you can't dodge an intercepting force with most forms of turn-based movement.
While both great games (we ignore III), the Myth games were better classified as real time tactics, not real time strategy. There is no growth past the beginning of a campaign. There is only range, terrain, and formations (veteran survivor prowess notwithstanding) until your units die. Also carpet bombing, remote lightning, and phantom trow kick glitch attacks. I'm not crying, you're crying.

To this day, though, I don't think a better pair of games has been made, and I will always be sad about Bungie abandoning the franchise during the Microsoft purchase.
And? Newspapers still cost actual money, running $30+ a month at the newsstand. Paywalled newssites are routinely criticized for charging a fraction of that, and somehow there’s still handwringing that they’re suddenly “depriving the poor of news”
BLUF is completely disarming to sensitive people. Consider it a subcultural impasse.

BLUF, as a generalized communication style, is a way of thinking that impatiently violates the social pleasantries of socializing for the sake of being social.
You absolutely did the right thing in not paying a cent. There is virtually zero chance you will ever hear another word about it.

The $42k is a fantasy figure which they collect approximately 0% of the time. It's the easiest $42k you ever saved.
Would you give me a link or two to start?

I get that Piketty's work isn't without controversy or criticism. Summers and others have criticized it, but their critiques haven't seemed very strong.

One article [1] (which discusses Piketty's shortcomings) claims the biggest reaction to Piketty is silence:

"But perhaps the greatest rebuke of Piketty to be found among academic economics is not contained in any of these overt or veiled attacks on his scholarship and interpretation, but rather in the deafening silence that greets it, as well as inequality in general, in broad swathes of the field—even to this day."

...

"The economics elite, it seems, answered by stonewalling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so it would not have the impact on economics research agendas that it merits."

Anyway, it's not clear to me that Piketty's fundamental thesis is wrong. Happy to follow a link or two, thank you.

[1] http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-...

edited for a typo
Discord to discontinue Nitro Games store