skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you orient them? The dumb ones weigh 1g. How much will they weigh if they're smart, powered, and have reaction wheels for orientation? That's orders of magnitude again.

Better to send up 10,000X dumb shades with random orientation and spin. Not only are the dumb ones much lighter, they're proportionally much cheaper too, since they're basically just structured aluminum foil rather than needing thrusters, reaction wheels, computers, etc.
> Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine.

I wonder what the stats would be on the number of forums and overall forum activity today vs. 5, 10, or 15 years ago.
Your comment is glib, but you're not wrong. It wasn't even a word at the time.

"AREPO
unknown, likely a proper name, either invented or, perhaps, of Egyptian origin, e.g. coded form of the name Harpocrates or Hor-Hap (Serapis)."

However, I do think that the concept of word squares in general is still "cool", and this one is important because of its history.
To me the main feature of both Access and SQLite has always been the fact they're single files. Very easy to manage.
More and more video games require an internet connection and server to be playable. They can't be archived or revisited in the same way that an old Nintendo ROM can be. When World of Warcraft rereleased their "classic" version, there was a lot of dialogue of what that classic experience was and what warranted revising.

How could a computer game historian play 2009's Farmville in 2109?
Python literally changed my life. I was in a bad situation when I started learning it, and from that point, job offers never ended, a whole new world opened for me. Not sure if another language could have done that for me.

Thank You, Guido!
> And this can be very confusing, unless you come from a self-centered elite worldview where (a) and (b) aren't highly differentiated.

I'm a white dude from a family that was totally fine financially (though more due to good money management than sky-high income) so I can't and wouldn't claim any disadvantage on those fronts, obviously, but socially there's just so much my upbringing didn't prepare me for in the world, or didn't expose me to. We 100% did not run in privileged social circles, even a bit. Rural poor, mostly, in my extended family and such. It's been wild learning how differently those with other social backgrounds see the world, and what's considered acceptable behavior.

It would never, ever have occurred to me to attend office hours just to get to know my professors. Woulda seemed pretty dickish, actually. But it's normal and expected and confers all kinds of advantages. Go figure.
A decent online diagram creator. One that handles the layout in an automatic way, making it easy to insert new intermediate nodes without dragging everything around manually. Creating a good architecture diagram is currently an exercise in tedium. Many tools don't even snap / route arrows well.

Would be great if it allows data entry via either text or graphical UI. Basically, a modern version of DOT and DOTTY.
If you modify your emissions related software, how do you know that your modifications meet or beat standards? You determine this by having someone who is qualified, and documented to be qualified (like a certified lab) do the testing. Since a prime motivation for mods is to get more performance out of a car even at the price of 10x the pollution, it isn't surprising that many jurisdictions regulate this.
> reddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully.

Pot, kettle, etc...

> What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and sharing knowledge.

You are describing the non default subreddits.
Lightyear One solar car sets record for world’s most aerodynamic car
God bless this man.
GitHub Student Developer Pack
Word squares feel like something you could programmatically generate, although trying to imagine the algorithm to do so efficiently hurts my head.
"Private schools could be outlawed. Rich parents who want their children to go to better schools can donate to their city's public education budget."

This awful idea makes sense only if you think the state owns people's children. As a parent it is my right, within certain bounds, to decide how my children are educated.
When did beauty become something we loathe? Any attempt to make something look nice invites scorn from the programmer community. Get out of here with your styling and your white space, we only want to see black text on a white background.

I mean, I get it -- it's about load times, readability, accessibility, yadda yadda. But does that really mean everything has to look like shit? Why is it a binary choice?

"Well, I actually think that motherfuckingwebsite looks good. It's beautiful in its simplicity."

Fair call, there's no accounting for taste. But does this attitude also extend to, say, public spaces? What about architecture? Should a house be designed like motherfuckingwebsite.com?
"dommageable" is "damaging", for anyone who couldn't guess.

Can you go into detail about what his party has voted for that's so bad for higher education and research?

I consider myself pretty academia-friendly, and there's a lot of things I'd vote for that most people would consider damaging to higher education and research.

For example, I think free college for everyone is a terrible idea. Most people consider that heresy.
US Forces Untrained, Unready for Russian, Chinese Jamming
This is a great point, but ducking out of politics is exactly the right move here to avoid that kind of charge.

Regulation will come with any functioning democracy. If an entity other than the State has too much power, Democracies will eventually dismantle or defang it, as they should.
There are still the default subscriptions, but the front page has switched over to a more diverse selection of posts. r/askhistorians is I think my favorite example of a very well run and moderated subreddit.
There's an Automation Crisis Underway, It's Just Mostly Invisible
>spaces vs. braces: I don't hate braces, but spaces makes it more readable

Really?? This is my least favorite thing about Python. D: It can't possibly be more readable when you're talking about large code blocks. It just happens that we're never supposed to be talking about large code blocks in Python. "If you want to write a lot of code, you use another language," they say -- probably one with braces, which syntax highlighters can match-highlight on. In Python, you just hope the indentation is far enough to make it obvious where something ends and another thing begins.
Who takes over if you unexpectedly die or fall into a coma? That’s the hardest question I can give you, I don’t like thinking about it either .. but before I trust a huge business decision with a new SaaS these need to be asked. Do you have a team, a cofounder?
Just master rails -g and you can be done in an afternoon.
The way Twitter works for me is to select very carefully whom to follow. And to turn off retweets from everybody. If somebody tweets fluff, I immediately unfollow them.

It completely escapes me, what you can do with Instagram. You cannot do text posts. You cannot put links in your posts. I have never seen a single intelligent discussion taking place on Instagram. What do you use it for?
> Restrictions in Bazel are critical for having a good performance on a large codebase, and for keeping the codebase maintainable.

Note the vocabulary--"restrictions". Your build system isn't solving a technical problem--it's solving a political one and trying to cloak it in technical terms.

We already have a problem. Your build system is now IN THE WAY if I'm not at scale. Any build system that makes people take notice of it is an a priori failure.

Thanks for posting this though. I've had a nagging irritation with so many of these "scalable" things, and this is the first time it has really coalesced that "scale" is almost always intertwined with "political control".
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21401973 (twitter.com)

Currently #1 on the front page.

Other sources for this story, possibly with a different take and hence possibly worth a compare-n-contrast:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21401965 (nytimes.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402083 (vice.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402101 (thehill.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402388 (bbc.co.uk)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402405 (theverge.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402448 (nbcnews.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402938 (twitter.com)
They have to provide a risk-weighted return similar to the current average stock, otherwise they should be revalued to the point at which they would provide that.
Why did the CEO of Audemars Piguet send his staff for military training?
Ahh, he would have been a great add to the poll! I didn’t think about it when I made it!
> Based on the way he was treated by his peers, I’d argue that he was one of the most privileged students at the school

Wasn’t he also phenomenally rich in wizard money?
One benefit is that people will stop writing dumb posts about what companies you should buy
strictly speaking, a company doesn't have to grow (no, there's no law nor even fiduciary duty to grow), but it's certainly incentivized as such, because valuations are most sensitive to growth rate.
It is at times like these that I wish Hacker News included number of views in addition to the number of replies.

Threads like this give the impression that everyone is miserable and fill up quickly with sad stories.

It’s good the internet gives those people an outlet and a place to connect, but if this was say viewed by thousands and only got 60 replies it might provide some perspective. Most people are just fine.
Good for interview prep, then!
Probably negligible. I mean, the company will still have 70+% of it's revenue/income just from it's flagship product.
I love this idea and I really appreciate you sharing it!

I swear, one of my largest struggles with writing is finding exactly what to put on the page, as well as putting it on the page in the first place.

Sometimes I write a lot of words, rewrite them, don’t like them and then delete them because I don’t think they’re worth saying or they can’t establish the point well enough for me to feel like they are worth keeping.

Perhaps I should simply put them in an archive instead to come back to later and see if I can refine them.
Those pesky Americans with their free speech... doesn’t anyone here see what this really is about? The elites have lost control of the narrative so they are doing what all elites do in a time of crisis: ban it all. Shut up you mere mortals and go back to doing what you’re told and thinking what we want you to think.
Any good tips&tricks to find this personal sites without exactly knowing what you are searching for?

The crazy part is I have google but I tend to visit my 5 (mostly more commercial) news&tech websites nowadays.

Gone are also the days with my well structured bookmark lists.

Only thing I do nowadays is to keep a personal list of Markdown notes for all important topics to look up.
> merely 10% of the population biking every day would be huge, and that's easily within the number given.

The US city I live in is far more bike-friendly than most, and I assume that it has a higher percentage of bike commuters than most (but that's my personal assumption).

The city has automated bike counters scattered around, and annually does a manual bike count where they tally the number of parked bikes that are publicly visible, in an attempt at estimating the percentage of commutes that are done by bike.

The most recent figure they published (last year) put their estimation right around 7%.
Not for a company like Apple.
I disagree with your statement on asteroid mining.

The profitability of mining asteroids doesn't come from bringing the metals back to earth and selling them on the traditional market: It represents the ability for spacefaring communities to build their own ships for a much lower cost than building and launching terrestrial rockets on Earth.

Furthermore - Space Stations, orbital manufacturing plants, multi-generation starships, solar arrays - all of these become incredibly cost effective when the metals used to make them become hypersaturated from asteroid mining. It's a means to an end, but by no means is it without value.
A Disaster of Our Own Making (2018)
This sounds like a long complaint about your dad veiled as commentary about the article. I suggest you take him out to lunch and have a good time, without spending too much time wondering how much he is or isn't trying anymore.
Not to detract from a very good rant, on a site design which exemplifies and models its message, but the most critical element for design to me is that design complexity should be appropriate to the problem domain.

Note that in most cases, the problem domain is relatively simple, and the design should reflect this.

Also: the design AND problem domain should have minimal sufficient complexity.

But beyond that, I see several specific cases of obviously bad design:

- The design is needlessly complicated. It is excessivly complex for the problem domain.

- The design is insufficiently expressive. It is overly simplified for the problem domain.

- A variant of the second: the design sweeps complexity under the rug. Usually a small area pattern with three horizontal lines. A/k/a, if you're relying on a Hamburger Menu (or its diet power-yoga version, the kebab menu), you've probably got a Complexity Impedence Mismatch Problem.

Cases of design insufficient to a problem domain are ... well, pretty much anything which requires repeatitive actions on more than about 10 elements at a time. If your interface can present me with 10s, 100s, 1,000s, or more, elements or options, and there is no way to meaningfully group or class those actions, then you have insufficient design capability. You've created an appearance of simplicity by squooshing the complexity into the user-site (or -app) interaction.

Power-user tools are examples of more complex, but also infinitely more capable designs. As a long-time user of tools such as vim, mutt, awk, etc., a small number of advanced capabilities allow me to work with ... 10s to 100s of thousands of emails, millions of files, documents numbering in the thousands (or more) printed pages, etc.

Contrast, as a totally random example, Google Chrome/Android, in which managing open tabs becomes effectively impossible at counts above 10-20 open tabs -- a milestone I can achieve in seconds after starting a new session.

My Firefox session, on a desktop, using Tree-Style Tabs, has 1,530+ tabs open (among other features: the browser includes reporting, buried, but available, of open tabs. I literally do not know the equivalent count on my Chrome session, it's not available).

The count is, admittedly, high.

*But the browser remains useful and usable, and (given time to go through and process the tabs), I can in theory deal with the overage. I can at least identify and contain the parts of the session associated with various projects.

Firefox's "Pocket" article archiver is an example of a tool exceedingly poorly matched to its problem domain. I have ~15,000 articles saved within the system. The browser is actually more useful than the putative archival tool.

(I've written on Pocket's many failings: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...)

Also: bradley_taunt: "if you" should be "if your", typo.
Thanks for the reply. Yes indeed, Bell was famous for its many discoveries and applications. It was also famous (among science and engineering pros of its time) for granting its employees lots of time to spend on their own projects. Why they dropped-the-ball on Jansky's find is probably complicated.

The person that did lead the way to the (now enormous) field of radio astronomy was Grote Reber. He had a BSEE degree. It was his life-long passion, in his free time, at his own expense, and he had to struggle to get anyone to pay attention. He personally discovered Cygnus A in 1939 (and lots more). But he didn't get the physics Nobel in 1974. Instructive story:.

http://www.bigear.org/CSMO/HTML/CS13/cs13p14.htm
I like how a site with autoplay ads is reporting this.
>The whole concept of "discussing your grade" is another overlap. People from a certain strata do this constantly and it's a perfect example of something bluring (a) and (b).

I've seen this happen with working class people in high universities. It's not a class issue, you can learn it from others.
Unfortunately that redirects to Reddit's own search engine, which is often worthless for what I'm looking for.

For example, if I'm looking for a comment that refers to my lat 2014 model of some widget, Reddit's search will fail to find it, and try to show me subreddits instead that are tangentially related to what I'm looking for.

Still a good tip, don't get me wrong. But I find that asking the search engine to do the search for me—with "reddit" as one of the search terms—often gives me the result I'm looking for faster than using Reddit's own search.
LOL, fair enough but this whole thread has been a bit of a dumpster fire. I'm a bit curious as to why it's on HN. I shouldn't have commented, to be honest. The whole "original population" v. "migrant population" argument has always been a little odd to me, is all, as humans are inherently migratory and invasive. Our tribal natures have always made us warlike, we just have a tendency to do it on larger scales (though WWII was the epitome, seemingly), and this goes back to chimpanzee lineages. I just threw in a jab when I should have walked away =)
So you are writing hundreds of rename rules.

Well, unlike treeform, I like it to be:

api_call(system_call.inspect_something())

Which I find much more readable. What now?
But that's mob justice. I'm not saying you're wrong, but failure of our courts can lead to extraordinarily bad times.
You don't, the reality is it's extremely unlikely this happens and if it does the worst outcome is high bandwidth use + the image doesn't load for everyone. Hardly the end of the world.

You can very easily host things on a paid server though, which these days cost very little, use another image host or S3/similar when if things went crazy popular.
Ask HN: How often you donate to open-source, and why ?
> Knative is about to hit v1.0 and become «stable», has a solid community.

I'm sorry for the negativity but I'm skeptical about the reliability.

AFAIK it still doesn't really address instabilities. Software crashes, hardware fails, power goes out. It is trivial to lose data, and it is trivial to be blissfully unaware that there is a possibility of data loss because when everything's green, things work perfectly fine.

My anecdote is, I was at a conference, listening to the "Introduction to Knative" talk. Knew just the name and that serverless is a hot new thing. There was a simple app that has sourced earthquakes and displayed a map, or something like that. Things looked neat and simple, so I wanted to jump on that bandwagon, but... My first (and quite obvious) question was, "what happens if during the event processing a hardware node that runs a service instance suddenly goes dark?".

I was surprised that there wasn't a meaningful answer, so I've tried to research it myself and found that - in my understanding - the event is just lost. Unless someone had taken extra care to implement such guarantees by adding more and more statefulness. As I get it, it's still K8s, and I can deploy my own message bus/queue, but this devalues Knative for me.

https://github.com/knative/eventing-contrib/issues/656 is the issue that tracks it, and it was shoved away to the eventing-contrib repo...

It could be that I don't understand something, or that I've made the wrong conclusions.

---

Update: Found https://github.com/knative/eventing/pull/1949 - seems that they've merged in something just yesterday. Seems that things are improving. That's good.
The instructions use the word "flash," which should indicate flashing the entire system and running Ubuntu as the OS.
In Norway political TV adds are banned, I wish it would apply to all media. The democracy works much better when you have to make a proper argument instead of just having the best ad.

I'd also like to ban political polling, it is used to push a narrative far too often instead of discussing the actual issue. Another issue is that parties will shape their positions according to polls and not what they actually think. Lastly, some people want to be on the "winning team" and will pick party based on who is in the lead.

I fully support this move by twitter.
You are confusing projecting power over a sphere of influence with expanding the sphere of influence within which one can project power. These empires ruled over vast areas of land by threat of force. That is projection of power. The fact that they later projected power over a larger area has no bearing on this.
Looking at it again I think I was reacting primarily to the last sentence.
Modern-day Access: Filemaker Pro was the contemporary competitor and still lives and has usergroups today; Airtables and similar (all SQL-based form managers) are the modern options.
The state already imposes certain basic aspects of welfare on children, from vaccines to the fact that they have to go to school at all. In fact (I believe) private schools already have to be certified by the state. So it wouldn't be an enormous leap to simply stop certifying private organizations that want to play the role of state-certified educational institution.
> best and most eligible women live in Ukraine and Russia

wut
Deriving a piano keyboard from biological principles using clustering (Jupyter)
Jack's "earned not bought" effectively means that Twitter's opaque & self-serving algorithms, rather than explicitly disclosed prices & targeting, will control what political messages get "reach" on Twitter.

Twitter's bullhorn will thus only be available to those people and messages that Twitter likes.

Those messages that Twitter doesn't like will be algorithmically confined to a unlighted cellar, for display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
That's disingenuous. Smaller communities are better because they tend to be more focused, on-topic, and familiar for their members. When they grow large they can drift off-topic and fall victim to status-seeking and other obnoxious behaviour. The only way to mitigate this (I don't believe it can be prevented forever) is heavy moderation.

HN has survived due to the tireless efforts of some very smart moderators. It continues to creep away from its sense of community, however, and political flame-wars seem to be becoming increasingly common.

Early sites on the internet had not developed the appropriate tools and social norms to moderate effectively against the deluge.
That's just a convenient excuse for the consequences of one's actions.

Thiel doesn't "agree to disagree" about the various atrocities of the Trump administration. He simply doesn't care about the people being affect by those policies. He is weighing whatever personal benefit he saw in supporting Trump higher than those harms, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with criticising someone for being egotistical.

Beyond that, the idea that "you have to support every plank..." is a strawman: In a two-party system, you never agree completely with either party. Therefore, such a requirement hasn't ever been a thing, nor is it today.