skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only reason Sparta lasted as long as it did was because it was a valueless minor city-state not worth the effort of conquering until the point that conquering and absorbing it was so effortless that it was done almost as an afterthought.

It was a sick and broken society populated by fanatics, that was quickly (on a historical timescale) out-advanced by its neighbors.

Imagine if a casino-less (Mormon Fort-era) Las Vegas, NV was full of militiamen and religious zealots and got involved in a war with the surrounding area and it managed conquer all of Clark County, the county that surrounds it, and control it for about 30 years by implementing a cruel system that enslaved most of its population.

And then that short-lived city-state collapsed after the rest of the Nevada developed over the decades to the point that a coalition of other small counties quickly steamrolled the now-decrepit and hollow Clark County city-state.

Like, super steamrolled. Like the rest of Nevada had developed tanks and artillery and the "Vegans" still fought with Mormon Fort-era weaponry.

That's Sparta.

I don't get why Sparta seems to be so fetishized, particularly by people who are not pleasant to be around.
I think 1) and 3) are the only ones that do not require advances in fundamental science to achieve.

Space based energy requires a way to send the energy to the surface for monetization. The three ways to do this would be
1) Wireless transmission -- infeasible with current level tech at the distances required.
2) Wired transmission -- requires materials with very high tensile strength in quantities never before produced.
3) Deorbit batteries -- You spend more energy launching/deorbiting and distributing batteries than you gain.

High speed transport (ground to orbit, and interplanetary) have huge problems in scaling, but it mostly can be solved with current level engineering.
It's a verb, so retain, but yes.
Biology is the world.

The single most important aspect of all of this is the metaphysics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou

> Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:

> 1. The attitude of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.

> 2. The attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.

Biology is Thou.

- - - -

When Prof. Michael Levin talks about "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 he keeps saying, "What if our technology could do this?"

The answer is, our technology already does "this". We are 4By-old nanotechnology. You've heard of Grey Goo? It turns out that the oceans are already "Blue" Goo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

> Gray goo (also spelled grey goo) is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass on Earth while building more of themselves,[1][2] a scenario that has been called ecophagy ("eating the environment", more literally "eating the habitation").[3] The original idea assumed machines were designed to have this capability, while popularizations have assumed that machines might somehow gain this capability by accident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage

> Marine viruses, although microscopic and essentially unnoticed by scientists until recently, are the most abundant and diverse biological entities in the ocean. Viruses have an estimated abundance of 10^30 in the ocean, or between [10^6 and 10^11] per millilitre.

> Although marine viruses have only recently been studied extensively, they are already known to hold critical roles in many ecosystem functions and cycles.

We keep making discoveries (like the bacteriophages) that show us that we have no real idea what's going on in the biosphere, which includes our bodies. I think it behooves us to wait a few centuries before we go hog wild on the only known ecosystem in the entire Universe, eh?
And of course Richard Stallman (Emacs Lisp) and Joe Armstrong (Erlang).
Nah, it won't work exactly as expected. Nothing ever does. What matters is the distribution of possible consequences, viewed against the consequences we're trying to prevent.

I think we should prepare to have this tech ready for use in case things get significantly worse in the next few decades. In the meantime, there are less risky geoengineering approaches also worth investigating and pushing up the TRL ladder.
>An approximate CS analog: Writing great commit messages, and using an SCM.

This is definitely not the analogue. The analogue is always doing a clean install of the OS before running your experiment. Or only ever using Arch version x.y.z for replicating lab 1 and maybe a.b.c for replicating lab 2.

It's knowing all the magic undocumented JVM flags ahead of running the application.

Some you know to use as part of war scars/best practices. Some are just pure inside information from working in that lab or having a personal relationship with people in that lab.
I think it is always good to remember that police are law enforcement. That is their reason for existence. Protection is not necessarily part of the description. If you want to be saved, you call a firefighter. Police are there to punish.
I think of engineering as doing something that you can stand behind in court and be acquitted as having met the standard of a reasonable practitioner.
Just the deals you regularly hear about in the news. JVs and multi fund buyers are not at all unheard of.
IYDMMA, what's the illness and what's the cure? I am a "temporary staff" member at a state-run hospital entity, but because I'm not "full-time" (which makes no sense because I work 40 hours a week) I'm not entitled to health benefits. So I am trying to bullshit my way into other "full-time" jobs in order to get the health care I need. The state used to give me free health care, but because I make $40ishK a year, they have taken it away.
xterm in autumn

thick red and amber carpet -

unit test results.
Agreed. Learning Python for side projects and hobby stuff. The zen is real. It’s making me dislike writing JavaScript at my day job.
I'm generally pretty fair and balanced when it comes to police versus public issues, but this is the same kind of shit that excuses the cops that shot the fleeing 16 year old in the head.

Cops are public servants. They have a duty to the public to safely enforce the laws and apprehend lawbreakers. This "get the bad guy at all costs" shit has to stop.
Usually very rich people have a strong incentive to hire private firms specialized in minimizing the impact of bad stuff like this, and doing so in a very discreet way.

I am 100% speculating, but I'd guess that's what Jeff Bezos did in relation to his extra-marital affair, and what Bill Gates and others have been doing in relation to Epstein.
Theranos mostly fooled investors. I worry about companies that mess with the rest of society. "Uber for Biotech" is essentially a recipe for huge loss of life.
Let's see off the top of my head. Sending in an armed drone. Performing a breach of the house with multiple teams and eliminating the threat. Using optics to figure out where he was and then sniping him. All of these were options that didn't require destroying the house. If they planned on destroying the house anyways why not just bring in a tank, attack helicopter, or do it old school and set the house on fire? All of these are viable options for a single suspect in a house if we follow your logic.
IMHO, some facts of life in the US:

(1) You can get "all the justice you can pay for".

(2) Be wealthy: Then if something happens to your house, buy another one and move on.

(3) If you want to be secure in your home, then live in essentially a fortress, immune to criminals, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, forest fires, police, etc.

(4) If you want something like police protection, then hire your own security force.

(5) Avoid the police and the legal system. In particular, there are hints that in the low levels of the legal system a lot of the judges are not very objective.

(6) Realize that there is a long list of rare but really bad things that can happen to you and/or your family. Some of these things are scary but on average not a very big danger.

(7) When government messes up, lead efforts to vote out the leaders, e.g., vote out the mayor and have the new mayor appoint a new chief of police.

(8) Make it clear to the police that you are wealthy, powerful, have great lawyers, are well connected to and respected by the power elite, and can protect yourself. Can do all of this without saying a word to the police: Do it by neighborhood, i.e., with houses at $5+ million each, lifestyle, reputation, etc.

Yes, (1) - (8) are cynical, extreme, partly in jest, should not be necessary, but, still, are roughly correct.

Do realize that typically a newspaper wants to scare people to have smelly bait for the ad hook.

But maybe sometimes people should be scared and, then, vote in a new mayor.
Comparing DNA to a really horrible code base sounds like the perfect analogy.
Add to that list "and there is basically one guy still qualified to work on the system", which is practically the case now for old COBOL banking systems. See http://cobolcowboys.com/
The commoditization of mobile espionage software
Riffing off of your comment:

Neal Stephenson has a pretty good article about path dependence in space exploration: https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s...
The article mentions younger female age groups are also experiencing marked increases in ODs and suicide rates, albeit not as quickly. It is not just men dying more often from despair.

Additionally, the female age-adjusted obesity rate is higher than men's (41%! vs 38%) which can lead to larger health problems later in life, so we may only just be seeing the S-curve for equivalently increased female mortality rates.
Guidemaster: Our Favorite Accessories for iPhones and iPads
Show HN: QwitterBot – a bot that helps people quit Twitter
2018 - strongly opinionated text-editor means one thing.
2019 - strongly opinionated text-editor means something entirely different.
I'm thinking more conceptually and financially. Fire insurance means people whose house never burns down lose money and people whose house did burn down get money. It is literally a redistribution of money as you don't get out what you put in. They do this willingly, of course, because financial security is valuable. But it is in essence a collective scheme.

There are big differences between the US and EU though, not disputing that. But maybe there's a way of describing this difference that makes the distinction clearer?
It's astounding to me that so many platforms/languages still have such mediocre http libraries. Surely basic http capabilities should be built-in or in standard libraries?
It's also used to mean "withhold" or "block", which is why you have to look at the entire sentence to contextualize.
A separate office could have less expertise but a broader perspective, and be less interested in suggesting regulations (although broad experience might give it extra heft in articulating regulatory principles) than in pointing out both ineffective regulations and attempts to undermine effective ones.

Think of the OTA as connective tissue connecting the different regulatory specialties if you prefer.
Generally police must assess the risk to public safety (including the suspect's and their own safeties) and balance that with the need to apprehend the criminal.

Capturing a non-violent criminal would not typically justify a high risk of causing a deadly road traffic accident. In the UK for instance, the National Decision Model must be used to evaluate whether to pursue a criminal; authorisation must be requested to conduct a pursuit.
IMO this is easy to explain by people's infatuation with novelty. Say you took that tree, engineered it to grow to 2 feet tall with bio-luminescent leaves and people would be fascinated by it... until that became old-hat, then it'd be ignored again.
Going for a walk or a bike ride or something that's not so intense you can't let your mind wander is also a great way to get 'unstuck'.
>How do you handle the guards? How do you keep the other inmates quiet?

i think it is much easier task than what happened in Florida in 2008 and the years after when the federal and the state prosecutors and the FBI and the judges all were basically working on the Epstein side to make sure that the slam dunk serial pedophile charges would get nowhere. You can't directly buy that with money. That was done by some large power and influence from behind the scene (influential enough to make all those participants to accept the obviously fake CIA cover as a way out). Couple prison guards and non-working cameras is just a minor thing for such power and influence.
Any neighborhood with $2million homes behind gated community barriers like Greenwood has cops who will shoot at shoplifters and roust bums (jail them and or drive them to the designated poor people zone).
Seven Boston Startups That Have Shut Down in the Last Year
The article made it sounds like Dropbox is no longer pure 100% Python. What other languages do they use now?
Honestly, I have never wanted user-definable menu shortcuts on a 90's desktop application either. Each time I saw it, it was a crutch for making a badly designed menu a bit less worse, and things would be much better if the time spent on that feature was simply spent on a better menu.

Very few CAD programs gained something from customized menus (not icons). But this one was also almost always a crutch for fixing bad designs, and those same few programs always gained much more by having a good keyboard based interface.
But 83% among teens (still ticking up) as of October 2019

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191008005671/en/Pip...
I use a QR code in a photo frame to connect guests to my guest network at home. Works well enough.
I'm weighing doing just that. The problem is that the primary language I use (Julia) has most packages heavily centralized on Github and even specifically designed their central package repository to be simpler to use if your package is hosted on Github. Migrating repositories I maintain to another service is a slam-dunk, but being unable to easily contribute to Julia packages hosted on Github would hamper not just my work but others who may have benefited from my contribution.
> Police officer isn't a bad choice, then. It does not even break into the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America.

Police officer in an area with $1 Million homes in gated communities is even better.

If you're a college-educated, high-quality Police Officer, there's basically no reason to work in the inner-city Ghettos. There's always a suburbia which is safer, quieter, and simpler to work at.

If you can't work in rich-suburbia, then working in those cities with military-grade weapons is still better than inner-city ghettos.
You jest, but this is not unheard of in hand-maintained JSON:

"comment": "The foo widget needs blah blah ...",
Space Golf (Web Game)
They have already done that at DNS level. Most ISPs in Spain have configured their DNSs servers to redirect tsunamidemocratic.github.io to 127.0.0.1

https://twitter.com/armadillu/status/1186315453108555778?s=2...
LibrePCB is an up-and-coming contender that aims to do things right from the library-management perspective: https://librepcb.org/
... or you DEescalate the situation, because we're talking about policing a crime, not fighting a war.

Firearms favor defense, hence the standoff between one guy and many police. The solution is not to elevate the stakes of standoffs with bigger weapons, nor is it to make police more armed than the citizenry. In fact, that misguided approach of arming police with bigger weapons is a root cause of this incident.

The whole situation started with basic theft and kept escalating, which is an explicit choice of each party. At any time, the police could have simply broken it off and tracked him down later. But instead they chose to play heroes with their toys, and somehow managed to get indemnified for it.
You nailed it.

I am disabled myself and I have experienced this. But, I am a dual US|EU national.

I actually experienced a very traumatic injury on Thursday, and had to be seen in my city's level 1 trauma unit. I am physically disabled and fell down some steep concrete stairs, (I probably need to use a wheelchair probably from now on.)

I ended up having surgery to repair the injury on Friday.

My pain was under control in the ambulance, but that was it.

I literally screamed nonstop during Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, due to the hospital refusing to give me adequate pain control. My abdominal muscles are still sore and my voice is gone still. When pain management finally came on Monday, they cared more about what medications I could "get outside" the hospital and "what the maximum quantity would be" more than actually controlling my pain.

They didn't even have any pillows for me on the unit to elevate my limb.

The whole experience was extremely traumatic and barbaric. It was reminiscent of a third world country.

Supposedly this is one of the best trauma units in the country, too.

I am done with this country. I cannot do this anymore. It is killing me.
What happened with the Estatut should not be a carte blanche to secede, it was bad? yes it was pretty bad. But to drag probably half the people in Catalonia through this ordeal is just as bad as what happened with the Estatut. We need politicians doing politics again, change whatever it needs to be changed but inside the current framework.
Not to mention, Epstein had pretty good reason to kill himself outside of anyone who might benefit from it. He was probably facing life in prison for despicable crimes. There's no coming back from that.
Times out here too.

Even if the webpage seems to be under CloudFlare DDOS protection. I guess the binaries are not covered?
The effects of financial education on short-term and long‐term behaviors (2018)
Sparta is fetishized because they beat Athens in the Peloponnesian war and Plato idealized the spartans.
I have tried many options, and https://phonicmind.com/ has had the best results.
> North Korea

You cannot simply make a comparison of X democracy today (or dictatorship in this case) to a city-state of Ancient Greece. Back then it was do or die. Wars were in the daily menu. For a state that was isolated geographically (in comparison to other powerful/richer city-states like Athens or Messina, the only way to stay alive is brute force, be the ultimate killing machine. The landscape also didn't help much. Stuck between two mountains, path to the north lead nowhere, sea to the south was 30-40km away. Perfect place to make it difficult to be invaded but poor enough to not thrive.

Also.. creativity? I would need creativity to beat a MMA pro in a fight. On his side, he would just throw a punch. Creativity is for the weak! (like me)
Are you referring to QPX?
Google and Facebook executives operating in my country have been arrested for failing to comply with court orders.

https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/26/3413476/google-brazil-you...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-executive-arrested-in-...

I wouldn't rule it out regardless of the country involved.
For anyone curious why it's notable, check out the Issues page.
What is wrong with being a generalist? If general perspective weren't important then the military wouldn't have general officers.
"The only real strengths of XML are that 1) it's declarative, 2) it's hierarchical, and 3) it's diffable. But code can be too, without all of these other drawbacks."

Code generally isn't declarative or hierarchical unless your language is those things as well. A declaratively defined interface in C# would end up being some like a bunch of strings or enums passed to some object constructors. At that point I'd rather a an XML implementation that can be verified and processed with tools.

"- For starters, it's overly verbose. If you've worked with stuff like XAML in WPF or XML layouts on Android, you know how quickly those files tend to get bloated."

I frequently write WPF code these days and don't find it any more verbose than attempting the same thing in C# statements. If anything, it's less verbose and it has the added benefit that it's all organized in the same group of files.

"At some point you will need to access your user interface from your application code. Which means you end up with silly stuff like findViewById() to bridge the gap, adding even more boilerplate to your code."

I don't know about Android, but in WPF, you just add a name attribute to your ui element and reference it by name.

"Editing XML kind of sucks. You're more at risk of making silly typos that won't be caught at compile time."

Hasn't really been my experience. Syntax errors are caught by the editor typically and further errors do get caught at compile time for XAML at least. Some errors don't get caught, but these are the same errors that would get missed if I attempted the same thing in C# code.
It's definitely bad but not that broad. See this Myrtle Beach raid where they're stripped of qualified immunity even though he was holding a gun at the time because the police were out of uniform, did not announce themselves, and didn't issue commands.

Also that's something the US is starting to turn the corner on in some places.

https://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/news/local/article23526048...
Once we get this lifting capacity, to me the big win is that we can build and launch Orion ships on the moon. None of the fallout risk if launched from there, or rockets can lift the ship out of the gravity well of the earth.

Once you have orions, you can move a lot of heavy stuff quickly around the solar system. Orions can probably go interstellar if we fire off fuel pellets for them to catch up to, or can somehow doe antimatter catalyzed fission/fusion.
Bummer - especially for folks with ability to work in finland but who only speak english. Good to know though. Fluent finish is not easy!
I was speaking more generally and not specific to the Catalan situation.
How often do guards fall asleep on duty? How many guards have any reasonable amount of suicide watch experience? These don't sound like anomalies.
I work at Bloomberg in derivatives. C++ is our backbone but there is definitely a lot of OCaml in production. To tell it all we have BLAN, an OCaml-ish language that you (as our customer) can use to structure (exotic) derivative contracts and get them priced in DLIB.
My doctor wasn't even there when I contracted the AIDS virus, why should I even care what he says?

p.s. the doctor was there for the autopsy.
Nope, no GDS at all
Is this the most socially aware text editor? From the homepage:

> By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.
The reflight turnaround time is off. SpaceX are aiming to turn around a vehicle from landing to launch readiness in 24 hours as a best case lower limit. It does not include payload integration. This also does not include the time it takes to wait for the launch window, launch, deploy a payload, de-orbit and land. Thats likely to be at least 24 hours, and often more. If operating beyond LEO a lot more. In practice I’d be surprised if the real cargo delivery rate was as much as a fifth of this. It’s still a staggering amount though.