skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think money is the issue. NASA has a much larger budget than SpaceX, courtesy of taxpayers. But NASA is a government agency, with more red tape and bureaucracy than necessary. SpaceX doesn't have to go through a 6 months approval process to order a part.

SpaceX also benefits from a constant, unbroken vision: develop cheap, reusable rockets -> lower launch costs -> build a spaceship to go to Mars. That's roughly the plan, and they've stuck to it since their founding. NASA, meanwhile, sees every new administration flip the table and change the mission, because every president wants to have their Kennedy "We choose to go to the Moon" moment". This makes long term planning impossible, and budgets are cut when Congress gets impatient.

NASA is still riding on the coattails of the Apollo program, but it takes more than that to inspire people to work for you. No doubt that NASA remains a desirable employer full of bright and motivated people eager to contribute to the larger goal, but NASA just doesn't have this "it" factor anymore. If you asked someone on the street what NASA is doing back in 1970, they would say "send people to the Moon". But today? NASA is involved in a plethora of projects, from the Mars rovers to aeronautics to climate change monitoring, which is nice, to be sure, but also sucks time and resources from the kind of "Moonshot projects" that SpaceX and other private actors are working on.
> It’s really easy to write PHP, which means that people who don’t know about escaping input write PHP.

Not trying call you out on this point, more it made me laugh. Our lead developer strips out characters that break his XML importer (lets just say they are standard common characters, heck, he changes chr(13) to a string so he can switch it back later because he doesn't know how to handle multiple lines in an XML value). People who don't know how to escape inputs / actually handle data properly are in every language. We cringe on a daily basis.
Considering something like the Concorde wasn't even possible to operate at a profit, I'm very skeptical.
>As you should know as a software developer, development of major new capabilities is an incremental process

Hopefully software developers with such an idea are not allowed in medical devices, aviation, missile guidance, space industry, industry robotics, and automobile...
>3. A well crafted examination/certification can do the same for less money. See the accounting industry's certified public accounting exams or the legal industry's BAR exams.

Only four states allow you to take the BAR exam without going to law school (edit: and good luck getting a good job without the law degree). The CPA exam requires either a Bachelors degree or 120 college credits to be taken.

So, in other words, your examples are in fact showing the exact opposite of what you think they do.
I don't claim that it's libertarian. Libertarianism, at least as I understand it, is too simplistic. Personal liberty is of high value, but it shouldn't be made into an idol.
Comparing them to Google/facebook and saying they are benign misses the point. They are not using your data for there non-existing web ad-network but they are sending you ads directly through your operating system. You are safe on that front but losing control quickly.

They are funneling you into their cloud services. They are changing purchase models into subscription models. They own your operating system and can do what they want with it including kicking you off. And they also partner with law enforcement freely. Where thoses boundaries start/stop who knows but there does seem to be more underaged porn arrests with a single image found. Didn't microsoft develop some image detection that the police use? Perhaps scans are happening locally.

Facebook will polute your feed with personal ads.
Google will polute the web with personal ads
But microsoft will destroy your life.

Not sure who's better but why do we trust large brands?
Agreed. There are software companies that can't get iteration down to less than a month and this guy is going to do with rocket ships - absolutely amazing.
There's a few mechanisms but they're essentially all market/regulatory forces which might not be adequate enough for some. At the end of the day you're still just shifting your traffic from the ISP to the VPN provider and you still need to trust your VPN company like you would (or wouldn't) your ISP.

As far as the forces go, the first and biggest force should probably be the legal one, companies generally can't lie or mislead while advertising or entering contracts. If a VPN company advertises that they don't keep logs and it's discovered that they keep logs it's a pretty good case for a claim against the company to get out of the contract at the very least. This all depends on specific countries, VPN companies involved, what claims those companies are making, etc. It should be noted that an employee doesn't need to leak anything for this to be the case, if the VPN company is involved in a public court case then it can be inferred whether they actually keep logs, this has been the case with at least one company.

The second force tends to work in favour of the VPN company and is the market forces involved, generally you might only have a handful of ISPs to choose from if you even have a choice as you could be stuck with a single cable company for instance. This isn't the case for VPN companies as you have literally thousands to choose from and they can be located anywhere in the world, and while this might not be a big deal if you're from a first world country with good network infrastructure and regulatory environment already it'll be a bigger deal for people living outside of these countries.

The third is somewhat related to the second, there's obviously a use case for privacy focused VPN companies whose value added product is simply to provide a good service and there's more than enough people that will want to make a business out of it. This is obviously the case for ISPs too where their value added product may be technically competent staff and ensuring that they'll uphold your privacy and won't engage in censorship, etc, but again access to these ISPs may be limited.
As a motorcyclist, these videos are sickening. Especially the guy purposely using smart summon to cross LIVE traffic (not in a parking lot).

These kind of low speed collisions are not a big deal to car drivers. But for someone on a motorcycle, having a Tesla with no driver obliviously pulling out into live traffic in front of a motorcycle (even at low speeds) can cause significant injury.

Please, people... don't be stupid.
They take big risks. Also known as 'innovation'. People forget that innovation is a gamble.

This is also why there are no shortage of people always saying 'this thing Tesla or SpaceX is doing is not going to work'. Those people are correct in a sense, in that there's definitely a chance that the various things Musk is attempting will fail (FSD etc). Thats why he's attempting them. If they were sure bets, someone else would have done them already.
On AWS, Boto. On Azure, DSC (Powershell) and ARM templates.

You will need to maintain separate TF codebases for each one anyway, but with the native solutions you get easy access to all features of the platform and don't have to spend most of your time jumping through stupid hoops to try and pretend that one tool can do everything.

No-one would write code worrying if it was valid in both Java and C# but that is the same level as what TF claims to do. It's complete shit, ditch it and you will be 10x happier, I guarantee it.
The altitude where the waste is exhausted matters too. For instance, the GHG forcing from your everyday airliner is about 3x compared to the same amount of CO2 and H20 exhausted at sea level. This difference is almost entirely due to the H20, IIRC there's no altitude dependence in CO2 emissions.
The Air Force Is Deploying Its First Drone-Killing Microwave Weapon
Do not underestimate Blue Origin. They work quietly that's why it is easy to think they don't make much progress. In fact they do.
Albert: A Lite Bert for Self-Supervised Learning of Language Representations
Thank you for doing this!

I was subscribed an otic cream that cost over $200 when the pharmacist told me there were similar, slightly less effective drops for $50. I spent 2 hours at the pharmacy calling back to my physician and waiting to try to get the prescription changed. Most don't have that time flexibility to do that.

I think the pharmacist regretted telling me, as it was such a pain to get the prescription changed with my Dr.
How to Be a Poor Programmer
I feel like Rich Hickey, Clojure and Datomic deserve to be mentioned here; given the amount of effort he's gone through to communicate these ideas and provide neat tools to make them easier to implement.
Well, this is nothing new. The same story resurfaces pretty much every release of windows 10, as it did almost every release of windows 8.

Not that it makes it better.
Very neat! Any blog post on why you chose Common Lisp? I assume you wanted to build your own DSL with macros, but several other tools can do this (Smalltalk, Clojure, Racket, Chez Scheme, Julia... etc). I like CL and think it is as good a choice as any, but what made you decide to use it over some other options?
Or bicycles, which offer the personal freedom of an automobile but not the catastrophic environmental impact.
In France, there are several unknown or hidden art sculptures in limestone cliffs. One of them is like a 4m high human face. Even though these are recent works, not like Greek sculptures, they are awesome. these things are beautiful to discover because usually they are in overgrown vegetation etc...
> Note that they have a quantum computer that can solve a very specific type of problems.

Yes, it's an adiabatic quantum computer, not different from D-Wave's device.

Calling it a quantum computer is like bunching an electromechanical differential analysers with modern CPUs because both use electricity.
JavaScript Framework Benchmark – Speed X Size Scatter Graph
IIRC this particular family had several thousand children. I don’t think it was a mistake.
Reminds me of this quote.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
I've been using Executor recently, but this looks to be way more powerful. Thanks for the tip.
Did you know that, according to Canadian sex work laws, living off the avails of prostitution is criminal. So, any sex workers with children face the reality that their children can/will be arrested for the same laws created to protect them from pimps. Also, it is an interesting thought experiment to ask yourself what you know about pimps that is not from white supremacist cultural productions.
Wow, sick web design and a sick idea. It's like Augur without the bullshit
If you're incredulous that Tesla would let people oversee a moving car at 15mph in a parking lot, wait until you hear what happens next after the car gets to them!

I think driving is a special case for safety, because we have put humans in charge of controlling 2000+lb cars at high speed in close proximity with other humans doing the same thing, and we've either designed or retrofitted this activity into almost every dense human habitation on the planet. Obviously we would never make such a decision now, but it gives a special context to today's safety decisions. It is a major ongoing source of death and injury as well as a major source of pollution, and bringing that era to a close is a special priority. In the United States roughly 100 people per day die in car accidents, and many more are seriously injured, so you could say that every day we can accelerate the end of human driving saves a hundred lives.
You're quite right -- that was a typo. ;)
Developments in all the areas you mention start with baby steps and incrementally progress toward greater and greater capabilities. This should not be news to anyone here.
Fuzzed? That's a rarity in tests, that's awesome!
Well, okay, at what amount of warming attributable is it okay not to invest in reducing CO2? What's the spread in impact estimations if we should have reduced emissions, vs if we shouldn't?

Basically, how do we do Pascal's wager?
No. That counts as an anti-sex worker perspective. Sex work takes skill, talent, customer service skills and most sex workers derive the bulk of their profit from regular customers who they build relationships with. Also, sex workers are a diverse group who all hold different opinions and experiences of work. Just like some people still like working at Facebook and Google, and some do not.
Small clarification: it’s 5 mph for now, not 15.
Dropping out of college can actually be a very smart decision. There's an opportunity cost to being in school, and if you can do what you want to do without it, better to not waste all that time and money and get maybe get the other benefits elsewhere.

I've hired dropouts who had a good reason, and were otherwise qualified. I'd do it again. But there are plenty of people who drop out because they can't make it, because we idolize founders who dropped out, etc. And it's not automatically an admirable thing if you don't know why you're dropping out.
Drive File Stream. You need a G Suite account for some weird reason tho.
Yes but JSON what everybody knows. I have seen a presentation about a not too small company where the engineer explained how much hurdle is to have JSON everywhere in their big data platform. I asked him why they do not use something like Avro instead. He just gave me this weird look like I am asking something extremely stupid and could not come up with any reason. Some engineers just have no idea of the alternatives or the pros and cons of chosing different file/message formats.
when I ride to work I take a completely different route that is significantly longer just to avoid two intersections and a couple of blind high speed crests.

The long route also a long twisty section, so that helps too :D
ISPs will quickly move from domain names tracking to IPs tracking. How many times pornhub changes their IP? Never?
I started reading Rebooting AI last night. I think that Marcus and Davis (so far in the book) take a reasonable approach by wanting to design robust AI. Robust AI requires general real world intelligence that is not provided by deep learning.

I have earned over 90% of my income over the last five or six years as a deep learning practitioner. I am a fan of DL based on great results for perception tasks as well as solid NLP results like using BERT like models for things like anaphora resolution.

But, I am in agreement with Marcus and Davis that our long term research priorities are wrong.
سادسا: المؤامرة على المرأة المسلمة:(2) الآثار السلبية لعمل المرأة
I think that what most of them are missing are testing hard questions and projects without hand-holding. Many of the courses I have taken have been good, but they will just graze the surface of anything approaching harder mathematical questions on tests and projects are too "fill in the blank (function)" rather than requiring critical thinking. I took one Udacity class and I certainly felt like I had been cheated, more cutesy animations and polished videos than real content.

I would use them for an introduction, but would definitely pick up a well recommended textbook after, or do a medium sized personal project after. Although the Coursera Cryptography class I took was just as good as my University one so I guess it really depends.
No, they can stop the car pretty much instantly. No magic required.

And for the case you mention, a kid on a bicycle, the car will stop itself if needed for safety.
Blurry but Clear Enough
A new theory on fusion. It's actually a government organized strategy to keep nuclear scientists/engineers occupied on a sisyphean task that can never be completed. If they're hard at work on fusion, they're not taking payments from foreign governments to work on weapons or subs. It's pretty great because the cause is so high minded and noble that it can attract all the engineers and it's very difficult so it attracts the brightest too (those suckers are smart). Indeed, it's so difficult that they (the government non-proliferation people) may never have to think up a new way to keep the nuclear scientists occupied. US did something similar in the 90s after the Cold War by hiring/importing all the Soviet scientists, after WWII by hiring/importing German engineers. If you're working for us, you're not working for them.

At some point, maybe weapons engineers could start getting paid to just sit on their hands. Learn to make the bomb, get paid to not make it.

Is fusion a brain sink designed for non-proliferation? It's a pretty effective non-proliferation tool with total US fusion research at less than $1B/yr. Compared to a trillion dollar war or 10s of billions in monitoring etc.
Where do you find bitmap fonts that are high resolution enough for modern displays?
I think it really depends on what you're trying to do and learn.

Lots of folks who have taken my Flask course[0] said they learned more about web app development in 10 hours of self paced videos than they did in 4 years of university. Lots of them felt like they finished the course really knowing how to build something, and many of them have gotten hired for work shortly after.

But the course doesn't touch algorithms or any theory around computer science. It's just 10 hours of exposure to building a real SAAS app in stages.

I personally believe experience trumps almost everything and courses can be very good for people who consider themselves self guided learners, because you always have the power to research the theory while treating it as something that's on a need to know basis. Taking a course on a specific subject lets you focus your time on the exact thing you're trying to accomplish and some course instructors also provide free support (I do), so you always have an out or 2nd set of eyes to help get an answer for things you can't figure out alone.

I never went to college but I do sometimes regret missing out on the social / networking experience, but I have no regrets about taking a self guided approach to web development for the last 20 years and I'm happy with how things turned out.

[1]: https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/
The "offline account" was simply renamed to domain join. If it's an sentence selection error i won't be suprised. In this panel, there is nothing about domain join.
> Having read your link 2 and 3, I see they also don't support the point you are making (the first describes how to recycle turbine blades into concrete and is looking for more applications, the second says solar panels are 90% recyclable

The 90% recyclable figure refers to the materials that can be used in low grade applications. The remaining 10% are the rare earth minerals that actually make the panel work and need to be mined.

You’re not talking about recycling, you’re talking about downcycling to a nearly worthless product. It will be cheaper just to send the old panels to landfill.
How are these power sources renewable if they are only possible if we keep mining our dwindling natural resources?
It'd be great if you can write up a paragraph or two about your thoughts on Berlin for everyone else. Thanks!
From the link I posted above: "On the technical side, the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSB is the same as the "normal" Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB. But: Not on the licensing term side."

...whatever's truly true and factual in this case, I don't know, but I'm simply pissed that there's ambiguity about this. And that's just one of the reasons I avoid Windows 10 like the plague.
Anheuser-Busch and Venmo missed a huge opportunity. What they should have said is "this is exactly what people should do - apologize for their youthful transgressions - move on and raise $1M for charity - we support him"
It seems like you’d need to read at least a few dozen languages fluently to be able to meaningfully reason about some of these issues. I can’t imagine what sort of educational background experts on rendering would have.
I don't think you should be sure of anything at a 50 or 100 years horizon.
Titan: Better Development with Data
This is part of it. It is extremly easy to import json and write and read json files and mapping them to Python dicts.
I guess this line of thinking might be reasonable when hiring young people, where college is still a recent memory.

I dropped out of college. There were a number of reasons, but really it just boiled down to the fact that I was not a mature adult at 20 years old. I was enjoying my life and my freedom living alone (arguably too much!). I don't regret any of it. I started learning to code about 3 years later and worked my way into doing it professionally.

At almost 40 now it feels absurd for me to be judged based on my 20 year old self. I know I'm biased here but, if anything I feel like the college you went to and the number of years attended say just as much about your level of privilege and rigidity of your upbringing than it does about your character.
A 90 day supply of my 3 generic drugs using GoodRx is cheaper than 30 day supply using insurance.
It’s possible many of these collisions are caused by other drivers.

I mean even parked cars get hit by drivers every day.

There is a bit of news hysteria effect happening here.
Climate alarmists sound like apocalyptic death cult. Read the writings of the heavens gate cult and tell me its not almost 1:1.
I don't think it's necessarily Elon, but the goal. Elon and SpaceX are aiming to colonize Mars. That is something that is inspiring, ambitious, and will radically change our species forever. It's going to attract people who also want to see this goal achieved and are going to work to make that happen. By contrast when companies don't really have a goal, outside of making money, they're going to attract employees who also don't really have goals, outside of earning money.

There was a really awesome multi-part piece on SpaceX and WaitButWhy [1] that was proposed by Elon and made with his input. It covers pretty much everything and provides a really great overview alongside lots of nice little insights.

[1] - https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-...
> Even with perfect 24/7 targeted advertising, Toyota's maximum possible upside is selling me one Camry every two years. Once they reach that point, any further marketing spend is wasted.

Not necessarily. Growing their brand and making it more trustworthy has intangible benefits, but they do exist. The idea is to make you feel better about their company.
We need decentralized communication
Nothing has ever been or will ever be perfect revision 1. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen. The real world will always be where flaws get light shined on them.

To your point, no one is still using Model T’s, flying Wright Flyers, or still living with a Jarvik 7 heart implant (note the 7 implying incremental progress). Further, the entire history of space exploration is built on learning from failures and explosions.
Your example about php source, or any of the bundled extensions would be a valid point if they were maintained by one or two single developers.

As you say, it’s impossible to review everything.

But how many projects have been caught out by sudden changes to previously working dependencies? Either revoked code, malware inclusion, breaking changes, etc.

If your dependencies are versioned and go through a review like internal changes, it’s much easier to spot changes.

I agree that a trusted source is invaluable- my point is that (a) npm hasn’t shown itself to be that and (b) the “externalise all the things” approach pushed so heavily by the nodejs community means it’s not just your dependencies you need to worry about - it’s the crab-grass like tree of nested dependencies.
For me it's more about avoiding the kind of puzzles I don't like. I would be disappointed if I spent hours on this only to find out the solution is language-based.