skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Truth is the solution to your problems is a 2 page bullet pointed list of actionable items that work. For which you wouldn’t even pay $1 because there’s no way to verify the information before buying and once it’s out it’s out so there’s no profit in creating it.

Solve it yourself or throw real money at the problem if you actually care.
Hmm. When was the golden age of Slashdot? Because I was active in the late 90s up to the early 2000s, and it was already showing the faultlines of the present day. Posting of shock images (goatse was invented there). "GNAA". Trolls got downvoted, but they maintained their own culture down there in the negative comments.

It was always a popularity context. The groupthink was so bad that adequacy.org could very effectively parody the obsession with Linux and AMD, as well as other tropes.

It looked like a golden age because "we" had a community that was "ours", but the only reason it was "ours" was that a lot of people invisibly bounced off it.

If there was a golden age, it ended somewhere between the Columbine shooting (remember /.'s response to that?) and 9/11. The response to that by Adequacy parodies so many comments before and since : http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html

> Of course the World Trade Center bombings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. However, we must also consider if this is not also a lesson to us all; a lesson that my political views are correct. Although what is done can never be undone, the fact remains that if the world were organised according to my political views, this tragedy would never have happened.
> On this topic I've noticed something quaint on HN: people making excuses for China's "special" situation or even arguing against democracy itself.

I don't think it's quaint or HN-specific, especially if you talk with people outside of tech. People make excuses for China because the official narrative ("we're Good Guys who do Good Things, they're Evil People who Hate our Freedom") is bullshit, and are also impressed with their ability to execute large-scale infrastructure projects, something the West no longer can. On the other side, they look at how democratic governments are primarily a tax-funded, continuously running standup comedy.

But the conclusion from that isn't "China good, democracy bad"; you won't find many people who would actually prefer for their government to be replaced by the CCP. People are just asking, "could we stop with the bullshit good/evil narrative, try to understand them and their motivations instead, and perhaps figure out how to do infrastructure again and make our politics be less of a shit-show"? I'd say it's a fair sentiment.
Listen, knowing only OP's side of the story it's easy to sympathize. Especially if he's a part of our inngroup of technical people.

Dismissing the whistle-blower as a "kid, that wanted to just fuck someone over" is hardly fair.
Because robots are not that flexible / multi-purpose?

Except if you mean T-1000 or something...

And because they eventually want go to Mars, have a little scientific colony, etc?
For the same reason I cared to run linux even before we had open BIOS. Would you have been shouting at young Torvalds that he was wasting his time trying to write a free OS in a world of proprietary hardware?

We won't get to a fully open ecosystem in a day. It wont be a single project, and the more experimental parts you add to the platform, the higher the cost you pay in instability, complexity of maintenance, and performances.

I am not always running windows. But I have it installed for when I have to test aginst it.

I am not a dissident, a journalist or a spy, so my threat model is not the NSA or PCC prying on my contact list.

My threat model is the scenario "Microsoft and a random hardware vendor team up to make sure <Technology X> can never work on linux" which history has shown to be a credible one.

Actors like System 76 fight against it and I am grateful.

Getting CPUs, motherboards, GPU and drive drivers provably clean and incapable of spying is a magnitude harder, starts being feasible, but so far I am not in a category where I absolutely need that. I am pretty happy that some people start offering that too but it helps no one to pretend that people working on these parallel lines are somehow opposed. That's a self-defeating attitude!
Compared to other languages, I find Go's syntactic support for partial application and currying lacking, and every http.HandlerFunc I weep for the redundancy I create.

I get that that is Go's design philosophy, but IMO a little syntactic sugar would be nice.
>Had no idea [head of NASA] Bridenstine had visited SpaceX. This is really cool.

Why would it be cool / unexpected? Isn't most of SpaceX's funding public money funneled through NASA?
Robotic missions are cool. I'd certainly like to see more of them in inhospitable parts of the solar system!

Getting people out of Earth's gravity well and setting up a base somewhere that could grow by itself is super useful though. Imagine it like climbing out of a deep valley onto a plain (it's not literally a plain but the requirements regarding delta-v are so much lower when not going into a well at a planet). There are other valleys (or rather pits) in this plain (i.e. the gas giants, which have gravity wells that we wouldn't get out of again with current technology) but it's a lot easier to do useful stuff 'up there' once you don't have to climb out of Earth's gravity well each and everytime you want to do something out there.

Edit: Here's a graphic I just found: https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057669320
Site Manager Course
For anything creative or intellectual ten hours makes no sense at all, those extra two hours at the end of the day will be the least productive.

Americans should have more days off but not by squeezing the existing work into a shorter period.
Online suicide games: a form of digital self-harm or a myth?
JCT Contract
At your annual review, "I kept our rickety leaning tower of tech debt from falling over" doesn't sounds as good as "I deployed blah blah systems to (do whatever)".

This is bad, of course, but it's generally how things go.
Palo altom also has its own utilities but was subjected to the blackout anyway.

In the 2000 blackouts the state forced us to have rolling blackouts out of “solidarity” even though we had access to plenty of power.

Unfortunately the phone system was sold off in the 60s, the cable plant in the 90s, and the animal shelter a few years ago. Short sighted.
Ask HN: Is there a free registry of investors for a specific company?
I know that there are services like AngelList or Crunchbase. What I'm looking for is whether there's some sort of free version of that? I suppose it could be created by the government?
I just need a list of investors that a specific company has and be able to use their API
Good news is, you don't have to go.
I would argue that it is not obvious. The impact of ships on low level liquid clouds is a very different process and is comparatively well understood. There is even a wikipedia article on it [1]

However, convective invigoration by aerosols is a different issue. They are suggestions that suppressing warm rain (rain formed through processes that don't involving ice) might lead to more intense updraughts in convective systems [2], but the observational evidence is unclear. Convective storms tend to form in humid locations, where satellite observations of aerosol are biased high by the humidity [3].

Even in this case, it is not clear that the result holds outside the local aerosol enhancement generated by ships [4]. Do aerosols affect convective clouds at a large scale? I would argue that there is no strong evidence either way at the moment.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_tracks

[2] - http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1160606

[3] - http://doi.org/10.1002/2014GL059524

[4] - http://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL078682
Review of 737 Max Certification Finds Fault with Boeing and FAA
Ask HN: What is your experience with smartwatches? Is it worth it?
I am thinking of getting Fitbit for my sleep tracking and fitness. Still haven't decided. What is your experience with smartwatches? Which one would you recommend? Is it worth it in your opinion?
Is it safe? Most fast charging android phones have 18W chargers, and Macbook has 45 to 60W charger.
And how does it distinguish between

lat=-1, lon=-1

and

lat=89, lon=179

Both seems to yield

recopy-handset-disband-handed-turkey-lure

Shouldn't the longitude be modulused 360 and the latitude modulused 180 (rather than 180 and 90, repectively)?
It can atleast be independently verified. Nothing coming out of the chinese govt's mouth in these circumstances can ever be independently verified
There are many people who succeed with simple textfiles as a digital solution. Nowadays there are also many building up on this, adding more complexity by using markup languages like markdown or org-mode, and building tools around this.

Digital only really fails at some point if you wanna utilize the full power of computers, and go full database, automation and complex architectures. Which is kinda paradox.
Curious why do you wonder that. Is there something in the structure or composition of the Nobel Committee that ties them to China ? (I could not see anything obvious from the current composition [1].)

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Nobel_Committee
> I don't see much utility in getting first-character detection ..

> .. in the event that your medium has no error detection ... add a zero synchronization byte

How would such encoding deal with non-utf8-safe editors, copy-pasting, programs truncating, then inserting previously broken sequences, etc?

Encoding obviously can't fix all errors, but it is quite useful if broken sequences are obviously broken and non-broken sequences remain valid when handling text in non-aware/non-safe applications.

I think in UTF8 two splices can generate a random character, but in a characters + splice combination, the character remains recognizable in any order and combination and a lone splice is also recognizable as an error.
Obligatory XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/681/
Elm has interop, it's called ports.

What the poster is referring to is that Elm 0.18 had an unsupported, undocumented way of calling javascript code directly. This was inherently unsafe (Javascript can throw exceptions and Elm doesn't support exceptions, let alone catching them) and people were abusing it, so it was removed from the language in 0.19.
Given the fact that there are still some pretty difficult tests ahead and that they already incurred a significant delay as a result of the explosion in April I wouldn't bet on this happening on the proposed time table. Too many uncertainties.
I don't see why not? The prizes are handed out by the Nobel foundation, which is independent of government, and as far as I know, financially self-sustaining, so there are no sponsors to upset, and no government that has oversight.
Because some of us want the hope of getting the hell out of here one day.
XKCD's are not obligatory. As I wrote before they are the clever person's reaction gif in many cases and only occasionally provide useful content.
It's the current pet topic of some posters. Which means every thread must devolve into a discussion of China.

Last week it was RMS.

Just flag it.
Because robots are not that flexible / multi-purpose?

Considering the limitations causing a person harm would put on a mission, and the complexity of bringing them back to Earth again, I'd have thought it'd be more flexible to send a bunch of robots.
I don't disagree. But I find it interesting that Amazon is thought of as this juggernaut when Walmart has literally double the revenue they do.

Sure, they may be going in the right direction, but the amount of product they are moving and their bargaining power as a buyer pales in comparison to wmt. Especially considering that a large chunk of their revenue is from non retail services and fees from 3rd party sellers, the products of which they may never touch.
> "iCloud services and all the data you store with iCloud, including photos, videos, documents, and backups, will be subject to the new terms and conditions of iCloud operated by GCBD."

How do I know if my data is on the Chinese iCloud? I've been to China once and connected to iCloud.
This is what happens when you're the sole arbiter of your platform. Give us the ability to control our own hardware and maybe this kinda PR scandal wouldn't happen.
Why are human missions so much more costly than robotic missions? Answer: Life Support.

If our (very) long-term goal is to stake humanity's claim on other planets/asteroids/etc., then it makes sense to work on improving and expanding Life Support capabilities in harsh environments. I see it as an investment in the future -- it may not seem to have immediate benefits, but these are key milestones and steps for reaching the ultimate goal.
> You might be ascribing quite a bit more leverage to System76...

This may be true, but I think that selling corebooted computers is literally just a marketing gimmick. If a computer ('s motherboard) is corebootable, I can coreboot it myself, or lacking the technical skills, ebay have it done for ~$50 (maybe with video proof that the flashed rom is what is expected by showing hashes)

I don't expect ANYONE to be able to make intel or amd do anything about this situation, which is why I acknowledge your point:

> Now, offering something else (ARM, RISC-V, POWER, anything but x86) as a truly open source alternative...

I would love to see a POWER laptop, but I don't have the technical knowledge or money to help make this happen.

What I think is holding this back the most is that there are very few people with an ecosystem where they can compile all their own programs, meaning that 99% of computer users won't be able to make use of the general purpose computer underneath, because the software they NEED for their work absolutely will not run on it.

As a user however I think freedom is paramount, I'm about to finish up my CS undergrad, and about 3 years ago I became aware of the issues surrounding freedom in computing (literally never brought up in any of my classes), and I bought all the components needed and librebooted myself a thinkpad x200, which I've been faithfully using with parabola/debian ever since. Thankfully this as a platform was within my financial reach.

> With our baseline blob-free systems...

I laud the efforts of raptorpcs, but these systems are completely out of my reach. My previous sentence should show that I'm willing to compromise a lot to have freedom (no usb 3.0, I stopped playing games that have proprietary code, rebuilt my ecosystem so as to never have to move away from totally libre software etc)

I recognize how the fact that these machines exist means that a motivated company can choose to have a free system and that's great!

What I'm looking for as a normal user though is a LAPTOP that has these features, and that's why I get hype when someone claims to have one, but it's always a dissapointment, eg. purism.

I feel like I'm ranting, but it's honestly a little unclear what I'm responding to.
Video footage of the PDP-7 on which Unix started
The internet was better in the past and that had nothing to do with the types of people using it. It could have been used by alien circus clowns and it would have been better. Why? Because it hadn't been weaponized yet. Nobody important realized in the 90s that there was going to be an upcoming war for attention span, for control of the narrative, for monitoring of the population, or for industrial/state-sponsored espionage. And it all was going to happen on the internet.

So if you ran across a discussion on X, you could poke around, find some scholarly articles on X written by, well, scholars. Not by scholars who were paid off or were looking to become the next internet superstar. So no, people didn't magically agree on facts, but there wasn't this endless chasm of belief-reinforcing bullshit that there is today, either. You could just go look stuff up.

There's another, larger discussion about whether it's good or bad, how to sew a silk purse from a sow's ear and the rest of it. But a difference in quantity can result in a difference in quality. Simply having more and more people come online and do things changed the nature of the net.
That's always a nice one. I had to exclude xkcd to find another graphic of the gravity wells because the use of this graphic is so widespread that it hid all other results.
Thank you! The Abstract and especially the "Plain Language Summary" are written great. Sometimes even abstracts can be hard to understand if you are not experienced in the field, and I appreciate news sources summarizing those papers in more layman language, but in this case the article just makes it worse.
Because I want my computer to be optimised for productivity, not watching YouTube.
Just googled to see if 'sleeptech' is a thing. And yes, it is. This is where we spend 1/3 of our lives after all.
I think his work has been impactful in his immediate neighbourhood. Hong Kong/China is too far away for his opinion to make a difference. Plus, why limit his opinion to only China/Hong Kong. Should his opinion about the USA and Cuba also matter? What about Russia, Turkey, EU and the USA in Syria? Should his opinion on Trump and the Republican's attitude towards migrants in America also matter? I think the only thing that should matter is based on the resources and opportunities under him what has he done with them.
What about people not wanting to pirate? However small, I'm sure the demographic is bigger than the content creator demographic.

Then there's Christmas. My partner happily bought me a Nes Mini for Christmas, I don't think she would have been so happy to get me a raspi, controllers, case, possibly install emulators, roms, etc.

Its like building your own PC, most people on HN could probably do that no problems, the majority of the population would prefer to get a Dell.
If they are fairly major your best bet is for their media team to contact their local and national news and international news outlets to run a story.

If you want to help, search for journalists that have written about them before and reach out to them as they are more likely to help you.
It doesn't take a whole lot of googling to find thousands of example of poorly run government services. I gave 2 I thought were obvious examples but you can search and find 1000s more.

I'm not defending evil and corrupt PG&E. I'm only responding to the idea that government services are magically incentivized at "getting their job done right". Their incentives rarely align to "getting their job done right".

Other examples off the top of my head, public schools in the USA who have more money per student than pretty much every other country but have worse outcomes. I don't have a solution but clearly they are not "getting their job done right"

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

Another example might be the USA's militarized police force killing its own citizens. Some people have arguied they're incentivized to buy all the military equipment because it raises their budgets. Again, they are not targetting "getting their job done right". And again I don't know the solution. Just pointing out making something a government serivce does not magically remove all bad incentives.

you can read I guess a right leaning POV

https://www.charleskochinstitute.org/issue-areas/criminal-ju...

or a left

https://www.vox.com/2015/5/31/17937892/ferguson-protests-pol...
Open collection of tools and tutorials that helps dealing with complex designs
The interesting problem for me here is shrinking quickly by > 1 pixel. I can think of multiple ways to do it, but I'm not sure I know what the fastest way is.
See also the human effect matrix on https://examine.com/supplements/blueberry/
Author here!

I'm pretty happy that I can use Go to do these things, but you are absolutely right that without the syntactic sugar it gets quite messy to read!

Lambda expressions - sure you can do them - but it'd be nice if you also had the syntax we came to know from other langs. (->, =>)
I'm running under Python 3.7.4.

Are you sure you checked out a commit after 6ce39f54564f4a5cd0439989e19a2f68c105d3cb?
Did the teacher write his ideas down somewhere? Could you point me to them?
Debeers is on its way out. They may come up with something to stay relevant, but they are getting desperate to come up with ever more sophisticated machines to detect man made diamonds from their mined blood diamonds.
On a more serious note, I wonder what people thought about lightning in earlier ages. For one before the concept of "God" was a thing, and also what the first seriouse sciency ideas were.
Come on guys. You're fighting anecdote with anecdote.

Here's some date I could dig up by a couple of minutes googling:

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all
https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/os-linux

Other sibling comments link to more.
It, depends.

I worked for a company at one point where there was two teams. One team was maintaining the company's main product which was consistently making positive returns to the company year after year. The second team was working on green field projects whose value was entirely speculative. I started on team two, and quickly switched to team one.

After a year when the layoffs came, which team got cut?
>An organism that has been around for a hundred years has a bigger change of surviving to the next day compared to something born yesterday.

This is extremely not true for modern humans. And possibly all humans too. (of course depending on how you define 'organism')
Related HN post from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20285242
I wonder how much this "Apple is fighting for your privacy" image isn't even intentional PR, but just an accident. Watching HN threads over the years, as Google kept doubling down on surveillance capitalism, the usual "Apple vs. Google" / "Android vs. iPhone" threads started to point out that Apple is not doing what Google is doing. I have a feeling the opinion of Apple being pro-privacy has spiraled out from this.
Off-topic: I see 'medium.com' and I don't tap because I can't face the pop-ups and nag modal. Sad to think, at one time Medium used to be the cleanest reading experience.
I have just such a 2 page bullet point list here:

https://til.secretgeek.net/sleep/Getting_to_sleep_and_stayin...

Also recommend Meditation, PMR (progressive muscle relaxation) and listening to binaural beats (via Spotify).

And wish you well :)
Robotic missions are multiple orders of magnitude less inspiring or interesting to society as a whole, probably because human beings like to see human beings doing things.

For a good example, consider that the Moon Landing was a global, civilization-wide event, whereas even the most famous robotic mission has never been anything more than a popular news item of the week.
Wow that looks really neat! Too bad that there seems to be no Webclient, although it seems to be a Webapp (based on Electron) ... Last weekend I hacked a tiny WYSIWG flat-file HTML wiki for documenting a small hobby project with a non-coder friend, but now Zettlr looks like all I ever wished for, for that purpose. Except I would've to bug my buddy to install the Zettlr applciation as well.
I think going plaintext might be the best way here.

I wonder, though... I think writing something by hand gives a different feel for it. I don't know how to explain it. It's like your mind works better if you write by hand.

So maybe an app, used with a stylus on a tablet or large-ish phone might be the best combination? It should then create folders and textfiles, and just store the text there. Which would require OCR and proofreading, of course. But that shouldn't be an issue.