skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an excellent article. Much of the discussion about digital vs. dead-tree books is similar to Stallman's "Right to Read" essay [1], which was published 22 years ago in 1997. As a graduate teaching assistant who has taught several introductory physics courses in an American university, I've noticed that book publishers like Pearson and MacMillan have been pushing students to buy/subscribe digital versions of their textbooks. Professors also increasingly assign homeworks online rather than make students do it on paper. This is really sad because it's really difficult to learn physics without actually doing pen-and-paper calculations. As an example, in a particular homework on vector addition, students were asked to draw the resultant vectors on some poorly-written JS based web notebook, and the students spent more time getting the thing to work instead of learning vector addition.

I can also understand why publishers push for digital subscriptions. Introductory physics textbooks have hardly changed in the past 30-40 years (I would even say they were less distracting and had better problems 30 years ago than now), and it should be obvious for the execs at Pearson and MacMillan that their business model is not going to survive unless they introduce subscription based textbooks. You really don't need anything more than an old (SI-units based) copy of Halliday & Resnick to learn introductory physics.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
It sounds like you need to do more research.

It's not a matter of what power is cheapest, it's a matter of what serves the needs of the population without generating fuel for climate change.

Renewables aren't enough, period, because of their variable nature, and "running HVDC between the grids" won't fix it. It's not that simple.
The grass is always greener... over the years I've built stuff with Perl, PHP, node.js, Ruby/Rails, Elixir/Phoenix, and Go. Each felt good at the time, but it's easy to get overwhelmed over the latest hyped frameworks and libraries. Don't like Typescript or Webpack? Nobody's forcing you to use them, you can still use node.js.

Tried and true principles and architectures will outlive any libraries. Remember, React is only 6 years old, do you think new projects will use React in another 6 years? Remember Meteor framework that was all the rage 7 years ago? I don't know anyone using it for new projects. It's the natural cycle of development. Don't get emotional about frameworks.

If anything, build _your own framework_. I don't mean a competitor to React or whatnot, but your own set of tools that can be reused over time across projects. Back in the days before jQuery, people were doing DOM manipulation themselves and everyone built their own wrappers around the DOM. Nowadays, I notice too many people reach for a framework without thinking about what they even want to accomplish.

At the end of the day, "best" is always subjective, relative to your own experience and expectations. For what it's worth, I used to be a node.js developer in the pre-1.0 days and switched to Rails, Elixir, Go, but I'll probably use node for my next project since it's super easy to get stuff running in messy JavaScript compared to something statically typed like Go. In most cases, performance is moot for projects without users. Hell, a CGI script written in Bash could rival the performance of modern web frameworks.
People being reasonable and skeptical?
A tiny pharmacy is identifying big problems with common drugs, including Zantac
Can we estimate how much energy would a server farm of quantum computers (capable of doing something useful) need?
I think that China gets a lot of criticism for the way a small minority of people there are treating endangered species.

Initiatives like this joint venture will go a long way towards reversing that perception if they succeed.
well just an observation, yes median home prices are high in some areas but too many potential buyers aim too high.

throw in all the monthly bills people accrue it is easy to nickle and dime yourself out of home ownership. so many services wanting their ten to thirty dollars a month

however one consideration not mentioned in the article is high property taxes that can raise the per month cost of owning a home beyond what many can afford or safely afford in one half of the income stream is lost. I am in a lower tax area but even that adds over two hundred a month just to own the house not counting all the other assorted costs. Go closer in town and I can see that number double if not more.
OpenIndiana Hipster 2019.10 Released for Advancing Open-Source Solaris
The moment I needed a bloody table with different companies/packages/subscription in order to figure-out how to watch that show I heard from a friend, I just go to a place where i can get it right now and watch it with my food still warm.

Its not customer's fault that the only option for that is now piracy. You want my business earn it, I've yet to see people jumping hurdles and run 10km to get McD burger. Then moment McD does it they are out of business.
Show HN: Managed WordPress Hosting for Marketers
They changed flight control computers from Honeywell to Collins when going from the 737 to the 737 NG. Seems like a new system.
Except if you are in sales. If so it's 1/2 of what the last person said, or optionally 2 weeks.
I knows how science works. That is why I am asking how we can compare the rate of change when the sample rates being compared are three orders of magnitude off.

EDIT: more benefit-of-the-doubt for orders-of-magnitude difference — three instead of six. For example, if we take the yearly average, that’s a sample rate in the micro-hertz. A sample rate of +-80 years is in the nano-hertz range.
Bad JSON Parsers
Reduced ad absurdum I thinks that is pretty much how it works. There is an acceleration structure that is traversed for each ray, to reduce the search space for ray-geometry intersections (probably a bounding volume hierarchy of some sorts), and using instancing only a very small subset of the total of all grains of sand actually need to be stored and processed. I imagine the sand is modeled using some particle system where each particle is actually a small scene of sand grain models in itself, with its own BVH etc, and the raytracer somehow reuses whatever happens inside them for every other particle that has the same lighting conditions.

It’s probably way way more complicated than that though. Extremely interesting stuff.
>your tolerance for bullshit of any kind rapidly falls to zero

I've seen this sentiment and I don't get it.

I've worked with older people in tech who had plenty of tolerance for "bullshit" like showing a modicum of cordiality in a situation like this, on a public forum especially.

To me this mentality just sounds like... inverse ageism? I mean, most people I know would not want to work with someone who acts like this.

The brilliant but abrasive people are usually the ones we hear about the most, but are plenty of brilliant people who aren't proudly proclaiming "Problematic Guy" in their twitter profile.

So if you convince yourself it's ok to act like this because you've just dealt with so much "bullshit" over the course of your career, and you've been doing it so long, are you just saying you don't want to be hired because of how old you are (or how long you've been in tech) unless people are ok with a toxic work partner, in a round about way? It sure sounds like that to me.

I'd rather work with someone 8 tenths brilliant and not problematic, than someone 10 tenths brilliant and problematic, and in my experience, the team with the 8 tenths guy will be a more fulfilling environment to contribute to.
Uncertainty for the bottom 4 quintiles of the populace is the real drag on the economy. Whether it be unexpected healthcare costs, or instability in income due to automation and consolidation, the lack of stability affects not only home buying, but also building relationships and creating networks of family/friends.
Simple solution here is to not have kids and not have a house until you pay off the student loans.

It's like saying "Ahhh you see I want a Ferrari, a mansion, and a honeymoon but I can't find a way to finance all three"
Regarding attention monsters, I didn't found mention in the article about the effort required to maintain a certain level of attention (over time). Please point it out if I missed it.

Reading a book and dealing with abstract thinking clearly requires more effort than loosely scrolling Instagram. It costs less and the (lower or higher) gratification is immediate.

On the other side, Instagram and games have a bidirectional interaction. Receiving a like or upvotes, prices and lootboxes make the attention grabber even more grabbing.
Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker: ‘We’re in a Hell of a Mess’ (2018)
Robotics competitions fit your criteria decently well. They are safe, have educational value, competitive and are decently high profile. More specifically, FIRST and Vex are both fairly wide spread.
Blackstone Takes Controlling Stake in Owner of Dating App Bumble
We may have a pretty good idea that CO2 is driving some degree of change, the nature of the change, impact etc. is not remotely settled.

Case and point: the Met graph time scales are all cherry picked to maximise the 'visible trend' for a given activity - a rather unscientific and propagandistic approach, however good their intentions might be. In short - the charts are 'Bad Science'.

Ironically whenever I see such cherry-picking, or serious people asking 16 year old Swedish girls about 'what we should do about Nuclear Energy' - I can only be made skeptical.

We have to balance the needs of truth and actual science with the need to communicate this information into the commons.
Is that a good link? I get warnings from it.
Lot's of low effort contrarianism in just about every thread is what's happening.

Genuinely, I think HN is now worse than reddit, only reddit has some actual funny/entertaining comments while HN is just... I don't know low effort tedium pretending to be insight?

Maybe HN got too popular?
He didn't actually make that claim, though. The mention of medical science suggests that he isn't opposed to any and all technological progress.

I do agree that the phrasing of the question suggests a more skeptical opinion of technology than I hold, but his basic concern (a bunch of apes that can now hit each other with nuclear warheads instead of sticks) looks legitimate to me...
The World Has Gone Mad and the System Is Broken (Ray Dalio)
Sorry, but your use of the word particle is surrounded with statements about elementary particles. Then, you, not me, conflate this context with another context in which particles are more general. It's as helpful as claiming that quarks are a misnomer, because they are obviously not a dairy product. Here, have a fish, for me it's EOT.
I might be under-informed but "data science" seems to involve a lot of vague BS. Computing has always centered on data.

"Data practitioners", "data practice", "data management" just seems like weird rebranding of stuff that businesses have been doing since the 1960s. Partly what the article seems to be relating regarding SQL.

What is "data science" besides computing, data storage of some sort, and analyzing the data? Because it's "BIG" now? Because now we "extract knowledge and insights" from data, since apparently giant databases were amassed for no reason in the past? Because now we "combine multidisciplinary fields like statistics", since apparently nobody had thought to run statistics on their data before? Because "AI"?
The client code is open-source, btw: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram
This was exactly my point. Not all carpenters would know how to use some specialised hammer and specialised nail. Just like most developers wouldn’t know how to use a specialised language and framework. So developers that don’t know how to develop with DDD would just learn as part of joining a project and they would still be qualified to be on the project. Just like how a junior carpenter might not know everything needed to erect a hose by themselves, but as part of a team of carpenters they would learn the things they didn’t know from school including those specialised hammers and nails for that specific house because the owner wanted something unique or what not.

FYI a carpenter in Norway needs 4 years of education to become a carpenter. 2 years in school and 2 years as an apprentice. If they don’t know how to use a bog standard hammer by that time they are not passing the final examination.
You might be better off linking directly to the source code: https://github.com/m3m0ry/drainfuck/blob/master/source/app.d

For people unfamiliar with D, a mixin is essentially equivalent to compile-time eval. you call mixin() with a string, that call then gets replaced with that string compiled as D code. Combine that with the fact that you can run arbitrary code at compile time in D and you get brainfuck-as-a-DSL in 27 lines of code.
Immutable/stream databases are a fundamental innovation, even if everything else turns out to have been unsustainable performance hack.
Yes, but it would be kind of like Charles Babbage estimating how much coal would have to be burnt to power the Analytical Engine.
$1m is a tiny amount to bring a battery to manufacture. That number is about what it costs to set up production to have a LiPo battery in a specific shape for your electronics.

If they had said $100m then I'd believe that there was finally going to be a serious competitor to the status quo on batteries.
I hope to get this someday even at crazy prices. Permanent cold-storage of digital data can 'kinda' be done with M-Disk Blu Rays, but that is estimated good for 1000 years...which probably translates in reality to 100 or less years. DVDs, HDDs etc. have severe bit rot in comparison to that and are all likely to be gone within a decade +- a few years depending on medium and storage.

This glass? Write it and don't physically smash it and it should be good to go for the rest of your life +, if the claims in this article hold up. Then digital data will have a cold-storage equivalent to a piece of paper. Stick it in a box in the attic, get it out in 80 years and as long as its not smashed or burned it should be GTG.
The most interesting sentence isn't the headline, but rather:

> Landfills accounted for 41% of the source emissions it identified, manure management 26% and oil and gas operations 26%.

i.e. perhaps the best reason to recycle or compost is to avoid the methane emissions from natural decomposition.
The cost of building a plant with old technology is high. That's because it's been over-regulated and because it's old tech.

Newer plant designs will be cheaper to build and simpler. They will need to be regulated differently as a matter of course because they're fundamentally different designs.

What you're saying here is that building a 1960s nuclear power plant design with modern regulation is expensive, which is true, but that's like saying that driving a 1955 Ford Thunderbird is expensive when compared to a Tesla S. That's true, but you're comparing apples and rocks, here.
I usually say that nuclear is on par with wind and solar in terms of deaths/TWh. The numbers at these low levels have large relative error bars, and there's not much value in comparing them to each other when 80% of the world is fueled by fossil fuel, which is very clearly killing at least 4.2 million people/year from air pollution alone, (nevermind future effects of climate change).

Whenever someone says or implies that nuclear is safer than wind or solar it turns into this low-value debate that totally misses the point that nuclear, wind, and solar are vastly safer than our normal way of making power. The surprising bit is nuclear because most people think it's really dangerous.

https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/
Didn't say it wasn't, I was just answering GP's question :).
When they change names, they usually write something like:

> Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

The author did not write that. I don't see any evidence the patient consented to have his case published either.
His World Collapsed the Night the Berlin Wall Fell. Then Came the Hard Part
When you consider that it costs over $3000/month for a single bedroom apartment, the local government prevents the building of high-rise buildings, and the climate is comfortable outdoors year-round, it makes sense. It will continue to be this way as long as high density low income apartment high rises are not allowed to be built in large numbers in west SF.
I really thought the article would be about him.
You can check out the second citation for this value. Also here is a relatively newer link which also explains the calculations: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-sourc...
Triggers definitely have their place and can be very useful. But they can pretty quickly grow out of control leading to lots of side effects making it difficult to maintain and possibly leading to performance issues. I think twice before adding a trigger to consider if it is really necessary because using triggers as your first tool to solve problems can lead to a lot of complexity.

I like the author's point about this:

> The trigger function itself was also written in the “schema.sql” file which meant that everything was clear and documented along with the other relevant schema information, thus easier to track and manage.

In my experience, in most cases the application doing the insert/update/delete is the best place to handle most side effects. That may be an on-demand API, a scheduled/queued job, etc. I've found triggers to be helpful and simple for audit and history tracking. There are definitely plenty of cases where triggers are useful and it probably depends a lot on your architecture.
Do most countries have big fat oil funds to finance the cost of the incoming environmental disasters?

> I don't suddenly get sick from pollution from coal power

Coal power is actually worse for health than nuclear power and releases more radioactive material into the environment.
I overstated it because I was assuming a certain motive (financial), which as you pointed out may not be present. But as a young, unattached person mobility is one of your top competitive advantages in the labor market. I'm not talking about switching jobs in the same metro. I mean moving to an entirely different metro.
OpenIndiana 2019.10 Release Notes
You know that almost all the reactors in the world are corporate run, right?
That is like comparing getting killed by pollution by getting shortened your life expectancy to getting killed by getting stabbed in the heart with a knife.

It is the absurd statistician's view of life. That is not what it actually feels like to people. People would rather have a shorter life span due to say unhealthy eating than having a higher expectancy of getting stabbed to death by a maniac.

Nuclear power is more like that latter. When it happens it is terrifying and scares the shit out of people. It is easy to be a smart ass in hindsight when you know all the facts

But when a nuclear accident happens you will not have all the facts. You will not know the severity. You will have to evacuate lots of people. And it is going to have a severe mental toll on these people. These are factors entirely lost in your statistical approach to looking at this.

Not to mention the Fukushima disaster cost a FORTUNE!! 182 BILLION dollars! That is not pocket change. Who pays that? Not the nuclear power generators. It is tax payers.

In other words Nuclear power is getting a huge subsidy because they don't pay for their own clean. They don't pay for any insurance.

Had they paid for insurance, they selling nuclear power would have been impossible. It would simply have cost WAY too much.
The graphs are independent and you can easily read each. What kind of comparisons do you want amongst them? Other than the 2 of them, the y axes of the graphs have different units.
Searching for Google and YouTube in Big Tech's Political Ad Controversy
It isn't about good or evil, it's about the fact that relying on large corporations' profit interests to solve public ills is a fools errand. So, sure, the public might get some good from a corporation's program, but as soon as the profit dries up, the corporation will move on. This isn't a moral thing, it's just a thing profit-driven organizations do.

People don't want welfare infrastructure to be contingent on a corporations ability to profit, because in the end it will be a fickle thing.
By the time you finished there would be new ones though (someone giving their kid a novel name, a sports team or company rebranding, etc).
Because a) it is the state of the world, and dealing with reality is important to living a healthy life, and b) controlling how others effect you is a tried and true way of maintaining happiness when you're not in control, which you rarely are in life.
You might get it eventually, you might not. Everyone's life experiences will be different. It's not a problem if you work someplace where they care about the skill more than your bedside manner (which is a lot of places!). If you're brilliant and abrasive, you're still brilliant. If you're kind but not so skilled, you're still not so skilled. Enough employers to go around for those who want to work with cordial people, brilliant people, or cordial brilliant people (if you can find them).

People with dark histories of abusing their coworkers get hired into positions of power because they deliver results (not good of course). It should be no surprise that someone who is only abrasive will always be able to find work if they are a domain expert. If you generate revenue (or in a non-revenue role, are a subject matter expert), and can pass a background check (and sometimes even not!), someone will hire you.

Disclaimer: None of this comment is about an individual, only workplace logistics in general and my opinion on the topic. If a mod ventures into the thread, consider detaching this entire subthread as it's off topic.
Any 100% Windows-proof high performance workstation is welcome.
>Builders have cited a shortage of affordable lots and labor as reasons to build fewer or bigger single-family homes

I can't speak to the former, but the latter is definitely true in the Bay Area. I recently doubled the size of my once-modest house and it cost over $400/sqft. I speculate a few reasons:

1. There is a poor pipeline of Americans going into construction and the skilled trades

2. Because of (1), immigrants (illegal and legal) need to fill the gap, but immigration is being tightened at the national level

3. Competition with bigger projects (not really true this year, but was last year)

4. If we are to believe Nobel-winning economist Baumol, since house construction is a low productivity endeavor, it is subject to "cost disease" [1].

I don't think regulation played a big part in my addition's cost because building costs have been going up by 1% per month, roughly, and many of the most onerous regulations are decades old.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
I would be interested to know if a comparison between async and sync API at level exists. I have this intuitive but probably wrong feeling that async often implies memory overhead.
I'm not so sure. I think the center "do-nothing" left is the reason for Trump's popularity. Trump is a populist who has promised to "drain the swamp".

I think returning to the status quo like the center left wants to do is the last thing that Trump voters want, but I might be wrong.
A good data scientist is a jack of all trades - mediocre programmer, mediocre ML modeler, mediocre ETL architect, mediocre statistician and a mediocre analyst. You hire this person because you don't need a specialist in each of these fields But you need someone who can do these things. Also you don't want to pay a metric ton of money so you can't expect some superstar.
Wouldn’t composting have the same issue as tossing it in the dump though?