skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because once you start talking about economics and fiscal issues you rapidly lose control of the political discussion. Suddenly, the issue isn't 'we must do x' it is 'x costs y and has z payoff.'

This is a major political problem because the way public understands most issues is that there isn't a tradeoff between costs and benefits like this. When there is it's usually hidden behind a myth like 'the space program produces lots of commerical knowledge' or 'military spending produced the internet.' Of course, neither of these is true in any real sense. It doesn't mean that the space program or military spending don't have benefits in and of themselves but claiming that they didn't cost anything because they produced ancillary benefits that just so happened to cover their investment is magical thinking.

You have the same problem with discussions on green energy today. Saying we have to invest in green energy not because of climate change but because "that is where all the jobs will be" and "renewable energy pays for itself because it is cheaper" are basically the same kind of mythmaking to rationalize away costs.

From a political perspective, this makes a lot of sense. If you want a discussion about actual costs and expected payoffs you can't claim that climate change legislation has no downsides; which, while true, is incredibly problematic to assert.

What you want to do is have the costs managed internally by the political coalition so you can handwave away hard discussions about fiscal issues. Of course, it always turns out that the subsidies required are either always politically acceptable or do much less than what population expects.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would use Geohash? Because it's one number instead of 2?

The short definition is "A geohash is a convenient way of expressing a location (anywhere in the world) using a short alphanumeric string, with greater precision obtained with longer strings."

Here's another way to "use a short alphanumeric string" and "get greater precision with longer strings": "37,122", "37.7,122.4", "37.77,122.41", "37.774,122.419"

That seems so simple and universal and has been a standard since before our great grandparents were born, time to disrupt it to save a couple of bytes?
Heavy Debian user + webdev + automation dev myself and have ran 8, 9, and 10 with minimal issues on an old T430. In my experience you will almost always have issues with Debian laptops and hibernation.

I also run a custom fan profile for my T430 too because I tend to run it hot with multiple VMWare Workstation VMs, 5+ Docker containers in orchestration etc. It can handle IntelliJ, Chrome with tons of tabs, and the above virtualization/containerization in-parallel very successfully.

I prefer the older Thinkpads because there's more info out there for it, and they tend to be very upgrade-able. I specifically run a very similar build to "The Definitive T430" seen here: https://medium.com/@n4ru/the-definitive-t430-modding-guide-3... ... Also there's SO many great communities out there that are willing to help! (reddit.com/r/thinkpad being the top IMO)

---

I mention my old T430 because you have budget constraints - you can get a base system for approx $150 and I would STRONGLY recommend 16G of RAM (DDR3L for better battery performance) and the screen upgrade. All-in-all my build cost around $550 but I went all-in. It may not fit your "light" criteria but for me I still comfortably travel all the time with it, even with the extended battery. I also put "repairability" at the top of my list too.

Only thing I've found lacking on my custom T430 is video performance - however that's my problem because I make it run two HUGE displays for screen real estate.

I also run a T440p for a Win10 system (ewwwww) and that's outstanding as well - although the trackpad upgrade for that one is a must.

PS: Thanks for being a fellow Debian user as a webdev! Sorry for the stream-of-consciousness response ha
I feel like when a country doesn't do something for a decade or so it tends to lose the people with the expertise to pull it off.
No and I'm actually shocked it took two crashes for all of this to come to light. You'd think that over 100 dead passengers would have sent shock waves through the industry. I would have guessed every 737 MAX pilot in the world would have been scouring resources on learning about the crash and how it might impact them in the future.
Please don't use HN for regional flamewar or ethnic flamewar or racial flamewar or political flamewar or nationalistic flamewar. We ban accounts that do those things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How useful is Windows Boot CD is?
I used to care about them a lot, but for the last decade or so, Linux + DOS (for f/w updates) was all that I needed.
This is also why training often sucks: the teachers write the presentation not for the people sitting in the class (who are often required to attend), but for the people who run the training office or the supervisors who order the training.
Ha, I don't live there anymore! The actual "miss"!
Laser cutters sold on Amazon and elsewhere are cheap, fun–and dangerous
> wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up

...That's not true, at all? Adjusted for inflation, wages have at worst been flat for certain sectors. The vast majority of people have seen inflation adjused wage increases.
I've used HP EliteBook series since G1 (current is G5) all worked great with Ubuntu. G5 series is lightweight and IMHO well built.

Currently using HP Zbook G3 which came with external Nvidia card that I had to take out in order for suspend and screen brightness to work, other than that Zbook G3 works great with Ubuntu but may be too bulky for some.

It is worth checking HP outlet for notebook deals: https://h41369.www4.hp.com/pps-offers.php (under section "Notebook PCs")
> You would have to browse in incognito

Or with a recent version of Firefox. Or with an ad blocker. My thoughts are this: just because most users will likely leave trace with Google by visiting from SERP, doesn't mean you should volunteer more data points for third party advertisers, especially when we're talking medically relevant data. And there will be users who will visit your site via links from other sites where they weren't tracked (e.g. from here!). So please don't do this.
Sex workers' clients exposed by Dutch hack attack
Rayleigh is well covered in Wikipedia. Mathematicians don't cite Newton and Leibniz for calculus.
I'd posit, though without experience of contemporary systems of the era, that the article's more correct title would be 'the birth of standard error in Unix'..
To be fair, you launched GoToMeeting. You brought a product into a marketplace that already had a huge player. Might as well keep pushing on until you can't push on any more, or until you unseat a giant.
Depressed People See the World More Realistically (2017)
Ask HN: What best resources and tutorials to level up my JavaScript?
I have some time to improve my JS skills. What is the best way to level up my knowledge?
I think the author are just being thorough
Indeed! I've got a six and a half year old W530 that I stull use pretty much on a daily basis. It's survived I-don't-know-how-many hundreds of miles in the saddlebag of a Harley-Davidson.
Well sure a couple F9's dropped on a city would cause some problems for sure. or maybe you are thinking launching a bunch of titanium rods and dropping them.

Sure he could definitely DO that, but I don't think he could do it anonymously.

Once Starship is up and running, his ability to cause destruction def. goes up, but he would have even less anonymity.

Fans (and I'm sure govts) closely monitor all of SpaceX launches/development/etc. Also, once you got a bunch of rods or rockets or whatever you were going to drop, they don't exactly hide in space, they are pretty easily tracked, and publicly tracked even.

Since they are backlogged with rocket orders, it would cost a LOT to do and lead to to economic decline, if not financial ruin of the SpaceX business.

So could he do it? sure, easily? Not really, but certainly WAY easier than Bezos or anyone else. But anonymously? I really doubt it. Plus who else even has the single handed capabilities? The US Air Force, Russia, India and China. That's pretty much it. Bezos maybe in a few years.
Your original comment set up a dichotomy between China and the US: businesses have to be wary of arbitrary Chinese government actions, but can count on predictable, fair treatment in the US.

That dichotomy is not borne out by the facts. So far in this trade war, capricious actions by the US government have done far more damage to businesses than such actions by the Chinese government. China has yet to pull anything of the magnitude of the Huawei ban. That's not to say they definitely won't in the future, but so far, they've held back, so as not to scare off foreign businesses.
Alex Garland's 'Devs' explores free will in the age of predictive computing
I've been using a refurbished Dell 7270 for the past few months which I bought for less than $300, this is a 12.5" ultrabook.

I've been pretty happy with it, since it has all the required ports (except maybe a VGA, which I can live without), has 2 ram slots which I can use for upgrading to 32gb for less than $100 in the future. Also it runs Ubuntu Mate flawlessly without any issues.

Overall I can't really find any flaws in few months that I've used it.
vitamin D deficiency.
https://youtu.be/74F22bjBmqE
I understand this point of view and am sympathetic to it, but that's not what is happening here. This isn't an overture of non-interventionism from a Changed America, it's Erdogan calling in a favor in order to extend his human rights abuses from an increasingly authoritarian USA; there isn't some concomitant immediate pulling out of troops in Afghanistan or any of our many other foreign footholds. Framing it as such is mistaken, and maybe disingenuous.

So, to the sentiment you express, I agree! But still think this specific incident is not an example of that sentiment, and I still think it's really, really shitty.
How would those lobbyists find out, if it were so secret?

We can look at other projects, like Bussard's Polywell. Either all of these lobbyists could figure out that it wouldn't work out, so didn't fight the development, or there isn't a major lobbyist effort as you describe it. I strongly suspect the latter.

Or, consider nuclear power during the 1950s, when the fossil fuel worker union was far more powerful than now. What lobbying effort was there, and it doesn't seem that effective.

Or, consider whale oil, which once a major industrial oil. Despite the number of people involved in whaling, and the money involved, it was replaced with other oils. (Wikipedia says it was used in transmission oil until the 1970s!)

The strategic effort you mentioned are essentially the same as those used in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program . Mining requires more than just electricity - look at how much work the Gotthard Base Tunnel took, and those were all electrically powered. Where do the spoils go? Where are the ventilation shafts?

As for "there are very few people that know where the United States keeps any of it's various strategic stock piles" - what are you talking about? The strategic oil reserve locations are located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U... , the National Helium Reserve is listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve with lat/long even.

Again, the benefits of secrecy you mention are far, far outweighed by the benefits of it being public.
How do you deal with stress, anxiety or depression as a founder?
Founder mental health is a huge pain point for founders and I'm interested in solving it. My idea is a place where people in startups can go to relax, reset and get support. They'd be places where you can rest, eat, work out, socialise and get support from your peers or licensed professionals. Mental and physical wellness would be at the core as well as having a community to lean on. What do you think and how would you go about solving the issue?
There is Telegram!
They use domain fronting - very hard to block without blacklisting everything else: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/telegram-in-russia-blocked-w....
I was wondering when this one would come up.
"Snitches end up in ditches" mentality is at fault here.

You pretend that someone cracking everyone's password is not a problem that the organization should address or even know about.

We should not turn our gaze away. "This is not my problem" is simply not a correct response. Snowden knew that, and yet, some people call him a snitch and a traitor.
There would be no reason to charge the end customer less than the hydrocarbon electricity, as long as the demand is there.

It could be 0.05c/kWh less and still be an economic solution.
Firstly, I applaud that you are upfront about compensation early. I think that definitely deserves an accolade.

However, asking that candidates donate 1-2 days of their time (probably burning PTO at their current gig) just to have a chance at an offer? That's a very unbalanced risk/reward for the company vs the candidate.

Maybe you pay candidates for their 1-2 days of interview time + comp PTO for time spent if they get the gig?
You will atrophy when you never learn new things. Time off does not prevent you to learn.
Looks interesting, but I don't see why I would visit this on an ongoing basis.
> I think this gets it wrong. The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining.

No, that's not it.

Take something like filing taxes. The tax laws are very arcane and convoluted. And yet, we can take something like TurboTax that (if we disregard the upsell dark patterns) can make the average joe competently file their taxes. It has wizards to guide you step by step, it will hide crap that is not relevant and not even prompt you for it.

On the other hand, there are some countries, like Brazil, with their own government supplied software. Compared to TurboTax, they are a nightmare. There is zero guidance on what you have to do, they have all fields you may ever need in any tax situation in your life. The only thing it does competently happens when you press "send". That, and importing older returns (kinda, sorta, provided you have explicitly saved the old backups in the correct format, or you have last year's version installed).

> very few companies have the billions of development dollars the above handful of companies have to throw at the problem to try to make it tractable.

Sorry, all I hear is a bunch of excuses. You don't need to have billions of dollars, all you need to massively raise the bar is to have a UX team – or frankly, a single UX person that is listened to and is able to engage with actual users.
The Vatican was raided a few weeks ago at the same time AG Barr was visited the Italian intelligence minister. I would bet money this is related somehow.
Ah I see.. sadly, I never really figured out a great way to support full COM interop in Go. It would be ideal if you could implement an interface and register it as a COM object, but I hadn’t hashed out exactly how.
> Though we notice we only greet for mornings and afternoons so always having to pass “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” becomes a bit annoying.

There are solutions for this specific example not involving currying, like making a simple convenience wrapper:

func greet(greeting, name string) string {
return fmt.Sprintf("%v %v", greeting, name)
}

func goodMorning(name string) string {
return greet("Good Morning", name)
}

Or just binding "Good morning" to a variable like gm and using that in repeated calls to greet: greet(gm, "This Person"); greet(gm, "That Person"). That is still reasonably ergonomic, and avoids repeating the greeting string.
My impression is that a PhD in CS can be beneficial in industry, but the benefits generally derive more from the kind of work you get to do, not in the salary you earn. Some positions available "only" to PhD holders may allow you to bypass many of the unpleasantries in software engineering (technical whiteboard exams, SCRUM, limited autonomy, deadline pressures), but they don't necessarily pay more. And if you do go for the SWE position, a PhD won't keep you from having to go through the SWE hiring gauntlet.

I say this based mainly on personal experience and some browsing of positions and salaries with limited data. I'm a onetime doctoral student who left with a MS and went over to Sun Labs for a bit. Salary-wise, the newly minted PhDs didn't really earn much more than the newly minted MS students[1] - and almost certainly less if you compared them with MS holders who had spent the last 5 years working. But I did get put in giant due diligence projects where I had to recreate and verify ever SQL query in a giant operational software system, while the PhD researchers pursued more interesting projects with greater autonomy.

And if you're the sort who will burn out and decay to poor performance if you're bored, it could make a difference. We can compare MS to PhD generally across a population, but we can't really compare them for the same person. Fortunately for me, I actually like digging into long, complex, chaotic data pipelines, and if you find you enjoy something high impact and complicated that bores people, well then, that's not a bad way to get paid. But if you don't like it, that's a recipe for misery.

I believe, strongly, that we greatly overproduce PhDs, even in employable categories like CS (mainly because I think many of these CS PhDs would have found equally if not more fulfilling work at a potentially higher salary without the long years in grad school). Some people just need to do the PhD style work if they're going to succeed in life, and for them, more time in grad school combined with no clear financial advantage may hide a number of benefits they get from these jobs.

[1] one aside - salaries were notably lower for engineers and scientists in tech companies back then. This was back in the 1999/2000 - I was a grad student at Berkeley, and I was shocked by how much lower all engineering starting salaries were, at the MS and PhD level, than salaries out of the law and business schools, especially since the companies that were responsible for this pay disparity were lobbying congress fiercely to do something about this critical shortage of US citizens studying graduate engineering and science. My impression is that this gap has closed considerably since then.
Even if the creator of a tool does read the thread, discussions like these are not the place to report bugs.
The point is at scale you can't guarantee equal but something around there
Somehow after a while playing Rimworld, it started feeling like one of those restaurant games where you have to serve food to customers.
Well, yes and no

Suicide is one thing. But Facebook's refusal to change anything as regarding to the cause of this employee's passing is jarring, for stuff like fire fast, highly stressful Sev meeting and etc, and super high peer pressure.

Even Amazon does change its way of handling internal transfer after employee's attempted suicide.

Not to mention there are Facebook employees defending on other places, claiming this is nothing burger, because Facebook's suicide rate is below national average, which ironically signals the issue is indeed internal and not normal.
There a four other standardised languages you can use.

Ladder is good for some things.
https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/3194/privacy-inte...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877945
> how is it possible that one moment the company is ready for an IPO...and then next month be desperate for cash?

An IPO is fundamentally a fundraising event, so it makes some sense.

The harder question would be why is some successful, well-funded company looking do dilute shareholders for even more funding.
Why would anonymizing the actual inventor be a matter of national security when they could easily have prevented the patent from being disclosed in the first place:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act
Badly managed, yes, but how is WeWork a fraud? They have a product that's well liked and used by thousands of people. They have real revenues and increasingly, assets they own.

The founder did a lot of shady stuff, yes, but maligning an entire company with more than $2.5B in revenue as "fraud" is very harsh. $2.5B annual is higher revenue than the vast majority of businesses will see in their lifetime
"but more difficult" sounds pretty subjective... I can get behind the "less reliable" comment because Erlang is rock solid.

Sorry to be that guy, but I can find a TON more people capable of supporting ECMA vs. Erlang and/or Elixr. I say this as a huge fanboy of both.

I know I'll get rolled on HN for saying this because we all drink the optimization Koolaid but I feel this is worth mentioning.
I will make a heretical suggestion on the other side and say that unless you're pretty certain up front that your app will succeed, you need to get it in front of users ASAP, and if to you that means cutting corners on the SDLC and infra, so be it. If the app falls flat in the market, you'll never get a chance to amortize all that work.
Ask HN: How does SEO work on the darknet?
The US isn't the only country with nuclear reactors. Some of them, like Sweden and Japan, have high technological capabilities, and existing nuclear reactors, and don't have a nuclearized miliary to influence policy.
An important thing to note about the Saez effective tax rate analysis is that it ignores transfer payments back to low income individuals. Other important assumptions have a big impact on calculated rates.

Suffice to say the analysis that Saez did with Piketty, shows that the top income earners have a much higher tax rate (40% vs. 30%).

This is a pretty good analysis of the issues.[1]

Saez and Zucman (2019) argue that the U.S. has a relatively proportional tax system across all income levels. However, federal taxes are progressive, as shown by Piketty and Saez
(2007), Auten and Splinter (2019), The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the U.S. Treasury, and the Congressional Budget Office.

[1]http://www.davidsplinter.com/Splinter-TaxesAreProgressive.pd...
Man I just realized that the "Read the whole story" button can save so much bandwidth. Imagine how many people click on your site but don't actually read the article or potentially click any ads, they just scan for 2-3 seconds and hit the back button. If you only show 5% of the content, you only send so much bandwidth. If you ask them to read more, because they have confirmed they are interested, and then yous end the rest of the 95% content, you can save so much bandwidth bills.
Main Highlights of Korea Blockchain Week 2019 – Recap
Software companies can be breathtakingly clueless when there's a layer of indirection between them and their users.

They aren’t being clueless at all. Companies care about their customers - the people paying - not the users.
Tuply Singleton v3 (With Proof)
The pilots did the best they could. They increased airspeed to have at least some lift despite the excessive mistrim, and they turned electric trim back on because in the 737-NG autotrim stops when the yoke is pulled. No one told them about MCAS and how it behaves different from the model that they knew.
We used to replace the character generator ROMs in Z19 terminals with our own that had two-pixel-wide verticals. It made all the difference.