skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The rocket equation is dv = isp * g0 * ln(m0/mf) [1]. For dv we assume 10% the speed of light, isp of a ion thruster is say 19300 s [2], for g0 I will use 9.80665m/s^2 and mf is 1kg. For m0 this gives us m0 = mf * exp(0.1 c / (isp*g0)) = 6.2e69 kg. The (baryonic mass) of the observable universe is something like 1.5e53 kg [3]. Or in other words about a factor 4e15 (much more than the 2e9 the grand parent poster claimed) less then the necessary fuel.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Comparisons
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
Why? Because you can end up with a single machine than having have to constantly worry about having same environment and data and all that between multiple machines.

If you plug in your laptop to an external monitor and a keyboard, you essentially get a desktop, except you can take it out there with you without worrying about leaving any data or config behind.
My experience with startups lately is if it’s a greenfield project that started within the past 3 years then they’ll do everything by the book: sometimes even down to storing email addresses as hashes in the database, requiring a user to login first for the software system - and the company - to know their email address).

Older systems which depend on having PII and even financial information as cleartext in the database are the problem - and its essentially technical debt with far-reaching consequences, so no-one will fix a system that uses tenants’ customers’ SSNs as a primary-key (yup).
When you engage into any transaction, you have to gain something and the other person has to gain something. You'll find that very few people are going to be willing to give up their time to help you, and those that do will do it because they feel good giving up some of their time to help somebody who is really trying to learn on their own. So in that situation, you are getting much more than you are giving. If you're looking for somebody to help you out of kindness, which I'm happy to do in certain scenarios, I'd expect that you have:

(a) Shown them some research effort (and are)
(b) Are asking very specific question that takes little effort on my part to help you with

I have to be frank with you, asking for a mentor to guide you through the basics is not really a fair thing to ask of anybody. Especially since there are hundreds of people who have given up many hours of their time trying to create learning material that you can use to learn your basics - they are all over the internet (googling learn to code will provide many useful hits). I worry that perhaps your idea of what a mentor should be, is not realistic.

You must take a greater responsibility for yourself. Remember, with enough effort, you can do it! If you need help along the way, there are many places you can go for help - (stackoverflow, discord chats, etc...)

Best of luck on your journey :)
Nothing is particularly special about the Broadwell X1, in that it isn't better than the subsequent models (thajt . It was, however, point where the X1 line hit its sweet spot and stabilized, while also having the first Intel iGPUs to have the oomph to drive multiple HiDPI displays for non-gaming workloads (technically Haswell did as well, but the Haswell X1 had an "experimental" keyboard design that utterly sucked, including a touch bar four years before Apple!).

If you look at the X1 line since then, it hasn't changed much except incremental CPU upgrades (and that's a good thing, the design works!) and fixing an occasional generation that had lackluster speakers or a lackluster maximum screen brightness.

In an era before Dell's "XPS Developer Edition" line hit its stride, one reason you would get a Thinkpad was that so many developers of Linux had one. As a Linux user (versus someone actively contributing to DEs, WMs, drivers, etc.) you benefited from their hard work put into fixing their personal annoyances with drivers. Remember this is coming out an era where the very idea of a Laptop's WiFi working in Linux was a dice roll. Issues still exist, for sure, but things really have improved since the 2000-2010 era.

In every case, there is always a chance of warts. Picking a specific distro or DE or version thereof may still bring more pain than others. Nonetheless, my personal and direct experiences with Dell XPS (13-inch, no dGPU), Thinkpad X-series and T-series, and System 76, have all been positive since about 2015. Total number of systems configured and supported (loosely, for friends over time) with each is over 5 in each category. At work we have many System 76 Galago Pros in use. They do good work, and as others have noted you can get nice things like 32GB of RAM. The physical fit-and-finish is still a half-step lower than Dell and Lenovo (imo), but the overall value is good, and we still use them partly to support such an awesome, Linux-focused company.

Again, there will be occasional warts [0], but far less than getting an MSI "gaming laptop" that has better hardware specs for cheaper, and trying to run Linux on it. It seems like a good deal, but then and after fighting Nvidia drivers for hours, you finally get into a working environment, only to find that keyboard function keys may never truly work (just one example among many, from many tier 2 brands, that I have personally helped troubleshoot), or some other deal-breaker in the experience.

I have no direct experience with Purism, unfortunately.

[0] An example of a random wart: even though I have helped set up four Thinkpads with Ubuntu-derived Distros (Mint, Elementary, Ubuntu itself, PopOS) in the last 2 years, a friend recently had issues with stock Debian on the latest X1 Carbon (I was not involved, but he is a Linux guy who knows what he is doing). Mint just works on that model, but he prefers the free-as-in-freedom of Debian and ran into some snags.
> To do this in a way that would be perceived as positive for all tracks, you'd need to put more resources towards the higher numbered tracks, and make it clear that's what's going on. Smaller class sizes / more instructional aides / better teachers go to the kids who need more help

The problem is the reasons kids end up in the bad classes are all different.

Some kids have a learning disability that requires individualized attention. You need more teachers for that, or more parental involvement.

Other kids have a different learning disability where the only thing they need is more time to do the same work. You can put them in a normal sized class with other students who work at the same pace and everything is fine.

Some kids have a bad home life and what you can do for them is to get them into after school programs so they have more time at school to do homework and interact with other students and less time at home where everything sucks. But in that case you don't need smaller classes, you need longer hours. More after school programs.

Some kids used to have a bad home life and now it's better, but the experience affected them and now they act out. What those kids need is counseling.

Some kids have been exposed to environmental toxins at home that predispose them to violent behavior. They needed prevention -- lead abatement etc. -- because once it has already happened they're pretty much totally screwed and there is not a lot the school can do about it.

All of these kids have to be separated from the other kids or they'll disrupt the class, but "pour money on those classes" doesn't fix most of it because most of the problems don't come from the classroom to begin with. The school can't fix the fact that some of their kids are living in apartments with lead paint, so spending money on smaller class sizes for kids with lead poisoning is a lot less effective than spending the money on lead abatement.

Problems in school generally have causes (and solutions) outside of school. Treating the classroom is treating the symptom.
That is absolutely horrible.
Subjective. I have a 4K screen and a 5K one, macOS text rendering blows Windows' out of the water. Linux is second (with some custom FreeType patch I forget the name about)
Its funny how we let this all slide when it comes to tech. Imagine if someone said "Food safety regulations only hurt the small businesses, they don't have the resources to wash a cutting board after cutting chicken while McDonalds serves unhealthy but legally safe food"
It’s also a poor proxy for what really matters: door to door them.

UPX runs every 15 mins.

If you time it right, great, but if you don’t...
Because the solar system is moving relative to the local interstellar medium. So effectively you get a "headwind".
> the city that is actively pushing the office/housing ratio way out of wack like this.

No it's not. The city is trying to make them build only housing and no office, but they are using SB35 to go around the city. The city has approved a ton of housing but the developers aren't building it because the city won't approve the office space the developers want to go with it.

The city is trying to improve the housing ratio and the developers are trying to make it worse.

Apple could push the developers to make the housing ratio better if they actually cared.
Yes it’s sad to see America’s giving up before even trying. Defeatism I believe.
Why do they even need a third party captcha implementation? They could roll their own.
Other providers like scaleway has been offering ARM servers for a while now[1].

[1]:https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/arm-instances/
I have real time voice to voice that runs on low end CPUs. You can impersonate celebrities and cartoon characters.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zRvJEGJjTpKvvzel-J0agh3fKBn...

I'm integrating it into a "Snapchat filter" type app with lightweight social features just as a means to bring it to market and hopefully attract Facebook or Snapchat or Tencent into buying it. I'm building it to sell, essentially.

I need capital so I can fund my real ambitious start-up of end to end computational filmmaking. Graph-based story language, light field camera optics, tracking and localization in prerendered environments, content-aware shaders, real time storyboard population and automated editing, posture estimation and mistake correction...

With patent protection, I think it could unseat Disney and make more money than they do with Marvel and Star Wars.

I need a lot of capital to build my lab. Optics (good sensors and glass), a modest studio with rigging and tracking set up for experiments, and a handful of engineers.
And coriander leaves (uk) are cilantro (us)
Not sure hiding/removing the project build or manifest is the best approach. Documentation seems like it’d be a better target. Use the software free full OSS but non-simple or extensive documentation for a subscription fee. It seems a number of OSS devs make money by writing books, and it could incentivize good documentation as well. There’s been many times I’d not want to pay for a license but would’ve begged for in depth documentation.
Python + Pandas + Jupyter Notebook/Lab
The Nash Equilibrium, Explained
Case in point, my original tuition value of ~16k/year was reduced so much by scholarships that I was actually making money going to school. This is an unusual case, but it wasn't unusual for other people at this school to be getting thousands in scholarships per year.
Who said about end users?

Many embedded systems and such use BSD because they don't have to release their changes as open source, which pretty much forbids their use of Linux.

If you meant by "servers" such on clouds, maybe it's already Linux only.
>they can't return profits to shareholders and instead have to spend them or keep growing the endowment.

This is same as saying that they exist for the illegal profit of their managers (laundering away the profits) rather than legal profit of their investors?
We mostly agree on everything, we just use different terminology.

I do agree that the Saudi Arabian numbers deserve some doubt.

When I say that the supply of oil is elastic, I am talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_supply

Elastic in this context means that an increase in the price will bring forth more supply. That's very much the same thing as your statement that we are running out of cheap oil.

In the short run, oil supply and demand are very inelastic. That means that even if oil prices were to double for a week, it wouldn't much change the amount of oil consumed nor the amount of oil produced.

It takes a while to explore and exploit new oilfields, and it takes a while to shift consumption to and from oil. Thus in the longer run, say over a few years, oil supply and demand are much more elastic.

Especially if you add in new technologies, like we saw with fracking.

The longer run being more elastic than the shorter run means that the longer running price is more stable than in the shorter run. (Of course, more stable doesn't mean constant. We still see the secular rise in real oil prices.)

That's all still totally in line with everything you say.

Now you correctly mention that renewables are getting cheaper. For most applications, you just want power say for electricity generation, so you can easily substitute renewables (or coal..) for oil. That further contributes to long running stability of the oil price.

For some applications like fueling cars, or even more so: planes, carbohydrates are harder to replace. So they get substituted later, or perhaps never; depending on how effective relative prices (including taxes and reputational effects) move.

(In principle, we don't need fancy electric batteries: you can use electricity from renewables to synthesize aviation fuel from scratch. It mostly just carbon and hydrogen. It's not just worth it at the moment, and might never become worthwhile.)

I'm all in favour of replacing fossil fuels with renewables. My point is just that the market driven replacement comes mostly from renewables becoming cheaper, less so from fossil fuel becoming more expensive.

> If you want to burn public money you can accelerate the process a bit with taxes and tech development (this is already being done and it could be done a bit more) but ultimately the future doesn't depend on that, just a bit of timing.

Yes. Though I do wish we had a carbon tax, even if just a low one. Not just for any of the effects of steering people away from fossil fuels, but to show that combating climate change should be a money-spinner for the government, not a money sink. That should make it easier to argue against government efforts of trying to pick winners like the pretty much useless German photovoltaic subsidies of the past: Germany is not known for its long days of blasting sun..

(And about competitive effects in regards to other countries: just treat the carbon tax like VAT when you adjust for products and services crossing borders.)
I am aware of a legacy system powering a local business which runs on Rails 1 on a version of debian from 2012 and stores users passwords in plaintext, downcased.

I have tried to explain so many times that this system needs to be replaced urgently not for security reasons but because no one actually knows how to use rails 1 anymore.
I quit tech once to open a coffee shop. It was horrible - you deal with a lot of uneducated people under you, really cheap suppliers. Went back to tech. I like how in tech, you can eventually pay people higher than you pay yourself, but in the cafe business, the model only works out by paying people as little as possible.
I don't think the current system is abysmal or anything like that—I don't think I am that vociferous or opinionated—but what I do think is that in your first and second year it is likely that you don't know yet whether you want to go the "applied" route or the "abstract" route.

So you might drop out of either of the two by year two and so you don't have the full four years. [1]

[1] In South Africe, a bachelor's degree is three years. I don't know whether this is a good or bad idea, but that is how it works. Your fourth year is called "honours" and is a separate degree.
I watched the video segment. I really appreciated the presentation style and visuals—the explanation of your procedure is very clear.

But I'm having trouble understanding how this works in the real world.

In your example, the thing that took 62 seconds to build and test four times is "invoke an empty constructor in another file". That is the sort of thing that I think of as a single task, perhaps taking 10 to 15 seconds. Dividing it into four tiny tasks would only generate work for me; testing it four times would provide no benefit because the task is so simple. The example feels to me like a toy example.

I'm having difficulty seeing how to extend this technique to non-trivial tasks. The moment I do "real work" (e.g. match a string against a regular expression), writing a series of tests that verifies enough cases to establish correctness does not take 10 seconds; it can take 2 or 5 or 20 minutes.

And that's where the author's complaint starts to make sense. It may be that when I write the code, the requirements I have in mind are underspecified or incorrect (e.g. I don't yet know whether I need whitespace to be significant because I haven't designed the rest of the program yet, so I plan to write the regular expression without allowing extra whitespace).

This is where I get stuck. In situations like this:

(a) If I write tests that verify only the requirements that I am absolutely certain will not change, then I risk ending up with a program that has lots of incomplete tests and bugs going undetected.

(b) If I write a test that completely verifies the behaviour of the code I'm about to write, then I risk ending up with tests that overconstrain or incorrectly constrain the code, so I get the problem the author described: as I'm building the rest of the program, I realize that I need to make adjustments (e.g. it becomes clear that I should ignore extra whitespace), which means I now need to go back and change the test as well as my code, and repeat.

It's not possible for the requirements to always be 100% complete and perfectly correct in my mind in advance. The type of situation the author is describing happens all the time because the process of constructing the program is a significant part of how the requirements become clear. This is what the author is getting at, I think.

Have I deeply misunderstood TDD?
The big transcontinental railroads own several feet around the railroad, which is prime real estate for cables and the like.
I believe Toronto’s new Eglinton LRT (the first that would be called LRT and not streetcar) will be exclusively RoW.
Agreed. This thread showed me a new level. Top comment: "I was fourth picked for g&t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked." I don't know if it's normal to know everyone's ranking (one other commenter knew their own rank), but it doesn't sound healthy. Feels like it would compound the problems you mentioned -- not only were you G&T, you were 2nd-best of the G&T... until one day you're barely average, let alone in the top 2.
That falls under "political" problem. Who's going to build it? Who's paying for it? Where are they getting the land? Is it existing rail lines or new ones?

The obstacles are known, they need to be overcome, and that's very difficult in the 3rd-biggest country by population and land area with an incredibly diverse set of national and regional governance and cultures.
You are not paying for my parking spot, that's bullshit. The store made a business investment to attract customers, it has nothing to do with you.

When I read such comments, it just reinforces my belief that Switzerland is a car hating country.
We hedge against old buildings then. [1]

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Universi... Quite the concrete jungle...
I think heavy rail needs to meet FRA (Fed railway admin) standards. Including things like handling .22cal bullet standards against their glass and other crash tests.
Used VIM in the past to open several GB of SQL files to edit them without problems.
Patents predate the pharmaceutical industry by a few centuries. Even back then, I doubt the initial motivation for government-issued monopolies was to advance the apothecary industry.
AFAIK Google has gone to great pains to attempt to comply, at least within the advertising and analytics space. I've seen significant product updates in Google Ad Manager, Google Analytics, AMP, BigQuery, etc to allow for consent, right of removal, designating a DPO and more.
Comparing the approach to high school sports and academics really reveals how intellectual ability is not treated as a talent to be developed, at least in the US. In high school, there are junior varsity, varsity, and sometimes amateur level sport teams officially organized and recognized by school. They have formal tryouts, limited in the number of people accepted, resources dedicated to develop the talents, and school-wide recognition by other students. Rather than a gifted and talented program for students, perhaps there should be "varsity" level teams (i.e. classes) for subjects such as math, science, and literature, etc. There would be tryouts. And once a student is accepted into the program, official support for coaching, practice, development, competition, and official recognition with a varsity jacket, similar to that of sports.
> and you’re the one who has to pay the cost of commuting distance

In Japan, the company pays for your commute, and the price of your commuter pass has no bearing on your pay. (There is a cap at most companies, and the average is 15170.8 yen per month (according to https://venture-finance.jp/archives/4982).)

(Unfortunately, as the company is forced to pay for your commute, the company is also allowed to dictate what route to take, which may in some cases mean less comfort. Neither you nor the company pay tax on this money, so misuse (and paying more than necessary could possibly be construed as misuse on part of the company) could in theory have bad consequences.)
It's one thing to say "mitigate," which you do here, acknowledging that significant risk still exists. That's very different than the wording of your first comment, "technical solutions." A solution implies the risk is negated.
It's not useful to generalize like that. America is far bigger than most can imagine and the current challenges are much greater than the benefits.

The US doesn't just need trains as good as Japan, it needs them to be at least twice as good for the investments to make sense.
This is a container OS with additional security features. While it might be better, making it adopted widely would take a long effort.
2.3M trips / 7300 users / 30 days is more than 10 trips per day.

When I took the bus in DC, each trip was 45-75 minutes long (12 mile route, during peak traffic) not counting wait times. Zero transfers.

Who has time for 10 bus trips, plus wait times, per day?
It has to generate profit, subsidized or not.
@alecdibble Could you try LibreOffice's Calc [1]? It's my daily driver in Linux, it mostly works well as an excel replacement but I'm interested to see how well it does on a Mac.

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/
Financing the development is not the problem, getting the neighbors to consent to it is.
You're right, but they probably can't afford to do it right. And since enforcement on this is lackluster it makes sense for the companies to just ignore it altogether, because if they get caught then it probably doesn't really matter if they took some steps to help privacy or none at all.

I think there should be some exceptions to it for small companies based on the impact of the PII. Eg if the company handles email addresses or first names then that should be far less strict than if a company handles medical information, home addresses or credit card information.

On the other side, we should have audits in companies to see how the personal data is handled. Particularly in ones that deal with sensitive information.
looks at missing esc key on my 2019 mbp

yea sure, "I'm in control"