skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It feels so surreal that the science is settled, but some people still don't believe climate change is real.

If you're genuinely curious, I'll give you some insight into the mind of a natural skeptic. I am very suspicious of movements based on expressions like "the science is settled" - in this context, what does "the science" and "is settled" even mean, precisely? No doubt, you and many others can provide a reasonable and plausible answer to that question, but do the explanations match up, and is this science?

I personally believe climate change is real, but based on a wide variety of reasons I am not convinced all players in this movement are informed and acting completely in good faith. When large masses of humans seem to start thinking the same, without really thinking (their opinions being based on propaganda, not science - signs of this already showing up in this page), I get nervous. YMMV

I also perceive that being downvoted every single time I honestly express this genuine sentiment, or dare to point out uncomfortable facts, further strengthens the resolve of my resistant attitude, and based on an extensive reading of forum discussions on these and other contentious topics I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way. Human psychology is a hell of a drug - ignore it at your peril, social engineers.
I don't like this trope because it obscures the one thing that wealthy people know and non-wealthy people don't.

Money is time. It's not gadgets or electricity or running water or toilets. It's time for yourself, your family, your religion (if you have one), and whatever hobbies make you tick. If you're on the hook to do someone else's bidding for 8+ hours a day, you are not wealthy, no matter how much they're paying you.

Today's poor are worse-off than those in times past regardless of whatever trinkets they have. In almost every culture and occupation throughout history up to the industrial revolution, working people have never spent 8+ hours a day, year round, in servile labor. It's absurd.

Regardless of how many Scooby Snacks you're so generously awarded by today's silicon robber barons, you will be poor until you stop measuring your life in trinkets and start measuring it in time.
ha ha I got downvoted. whatever guys. I guess charitable giving is dumb and I should stop.
Pascal and Date have been making these arguments forever: http://www.dbdebunk.com .
I believe that the simulation in Houdini works better with smoother meshes. Plus the shaders look better on higher polygon objects for smooth objects.
Google’s Search Ad Embrace Crushes Online Travel Agents
> Right here there is a private company trying to help ease the homeless problem and everyone is just shitting on them for not doing the way they think they should or are getting angry at them for making a profit on it.

They aren't doing this because they care about the homeless.

They are doing it simply because they promised 13% to 15% annual returns and that Wall Street is unhappy with their Medicaid margins. They said it themselves.

They ran some numbers and realized that housing people made their shareholders money.

This is not the incentive you want to solve homelessness.
I can't fault Jason Scott for his attitude considering how passionate he is about his work. With enough age and time in tech, your tolerance for bullshit of any kind rapidly falls to zero. Agree he does great work.

It's ArchiveTeam's fault a company that took $10 million in VC funding to provide GIFs to the internet couldn't properly implement a publicly exposed API (including rate limits)? Hardly. Gfycat should be appreciative that there will be a Wayback archive of the site after it goes bust (who pays for GIFs?).

EDIT: Disclaimer: ArchiveTeam participant, full supporter of their activities to preserve digital culture.
> Solar and wind already are cheaper than anything else out there

Yes if you conveniently choose to ignore the availability problems (in the night and in no wind). And that no scalable battery/storage solution exists yet?
Did you mean to say declarative? That’s what makes it clear in intent isn’t it? That it’s declarative. Whether or not SQL is also functional is orthogonal to that isn’t it?
I cant roll my eyes hard enough at you dude! Get a grip of yer life mate.
They also have drastically worse living conditions than everyone they see on a daily basis. This includes bad housing (often infested), lower quality more fattening and processed food, little exercise, reduced access to medical care, understimulation, a reduced sense of their role in the community, reduced freedom and energy.

We've all heard the idea that everything is better for a poor person now than a king 1000 years ago but that idea measures embarrassingly revealing notions about human wellness held by the person doing the measuring. I don't think we are measuring the right things is what I'm saying.
Best Practices for NLP Classification in TensorFlow 2.0
Not quite.

The bigger problem with solar and wind isn't baseline but rather the fact that they are variable in nature. That makes it harder to have a baseline power plant.

The reason natural gas is taking off is that it can quickly respond to differences in production vs demand (it's a peaker plant, as in it handles peaks in demand). Solar and wind make those peaks more pronounced while lowering what baseline can do.

This is why coal plants are dying, they are slow to respond to demand and renewables decrease the baseline that can run at (well, that and fuel costs keep rising due to inflation).

Storage solves both problems. Baseline can be higher, storage will consume it, and peaks are less a problem, storage can handle those.

Alternatively, load based demand would make sense (at least to solve the baseline problem). We could, for example, eat excess energy doing CO2 extraction (though, that only makes sense if baseline doesn't produce more co2 than what we are consuming).
>Old college roommates from 15 years ago who live on the other side of the country. Coworkers. People they meet in bars. None of these are legitimate.

But you can lend those people a Blu-Ray, which only deprives you of watching it while they have it.
EVs outsold manual transmission cars in the US last quarter
The know-how seems to have been lost though. The latest nuclear power plant they've tried to build (the Flamanville EPR) is severely late, and the budget has ballooned to several times the initial estimation.
i highly doubt apple will port that to android, so unless they open source the technology...
This is essentially a souped-up https://portier.github.io/

I applaud the initiative, since it removes the couple steps it takes a user to reset their password via "Forgot password" flows. However, this type of auth should really be self-hosted or baked into the most popular frameworks, instead of provided by (yet) another third party you'd have to trust with your users' email address (at the very least).
Each diagram should have a FAQ with answers to questions like ekianjo's, otherwise a conspiratorial attack is too easy.

The "pro" side should read and learn from forum discussion like this (other issues pointed out: "All of the charts should use the same time scale. It's confusing and misleading to use different scales for each", "I wonder why the chart for CO2 concentration starts at 1960 vs 1850 for the global mean temperature difference", "Interesting graphs, but it's a little confusing that all but one of them use difference of the metric (i.e. relative values) instead of absolute values -- what and when are the differences relative to?"), making notes on criticisms and improving their presentations. I think "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results" has some relevance here.
On the contrary, a lot of homeless people’s primary impediment is the fact that they don’t have their own living space. There‘s a lot of evidence that “housing first” is an effective way of combatting homelessness [1].

More broadly, unless a system is truly overwhelmed by bad actors, I’m inclined to not worry about them at all. Is it really that important that we only help anyone who “truly” need it — and burn the whole system down to that end?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
I've switched to using Signal for voice calls as much as possible. Signal voice quality is very consistently excellent.

Unfortunately it does not help you if you want to use the regular dialer to access the telco voice networks and/or nobody you know has the app.
>>Software does not need to be this complicated.
>>Design a damned airframe that's airworthy without needing stabilization hacks.

In effect you are stating that you understand better than the hundreds of engineers involved with this project why these design trade-offs were made. Careful with that line of thinking. You're nearly guaranteed to be wrong.

There are a host of reasons for the design in place: Efficiency, ease of implementation, familiarity with the components/technology, reliabilty of subsystems, availability of components, cost, maintenance complexity, etc. etc. etc.

And, don't forget, efficiency standards. As the whole world freaks out about CO2 and global climate change/cooling/warming, and the insta-crowd 'air travel shames' those who use these magnificent machines, it's important to realize that some of these design decisions maximizing efficiency are the hereditary descendants of cultural pressures, too.

Not to excuse any engineering f-ups, but there's a lot more to it than just 'build a simple tube with wings and an engine.'
All of the charts should use the same time scale. It's confusing and misleading to use different scales for each.

The argument for doing it is likely because that's all the good data we have for each, but it would still be better to scale them the same way.
Single Event Upsets are a real thing and if they had a failure mode that missed that, it's a problem that needs to be fixed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset
Pumped storage works where available. Norway's dams are the secret behind the success of Denmark's wind.
Delivery workers say they’re being squeezed by ever-changing algorithms
Has Facebook Become Too Big to Fail?
China's mainland stock market has outpaced the rest of the world
Nuclear energy is often talked about as if it is in opposition to other clean energy sources, as if we need to choose between solar/wind and nuclear. Global warming is an existential threat to human civilization and we need to throw absolutely everything we have at the problem. Wind, nuclear, solar, even hydrogen (and whatever other esoteric energy generation methods you can think of) - these are not mutually exclusive. It doesn't have to be one or the other. It can't be.
it is not sensible to provide homes to everyone, the silent homeless, the ones you don't see, are the ones that are more easily helped. just identifying those with small children would go a long way

it is the homeless with mental issues that you do see that we cannot just "give them a home" because it won't help them and you likely cannot even get them to stay in one anyway.

States are stuck behind the issue of having to prove someone is a danger to themselves or others just to confine someone and it may be required to do so to treat, see O'Connor vs Donaldson for most of it . yet you will find organizations tripping over themselves to block this on case by case basis which makes the cost untenable to nearly everyone meaning in the end they don't get help.

So it is up to Congress to define how it is determined that someone is a danger to themselves or other so it can withstand a court test and even then you are bound to have suit after suit using cherry picked cases. There is too much money to be made in the legal profession to let mental health cases be treated.
Why I strive for boolean values as a founder
I can't say I agree with this (besides how silly it reads). Outright avoidance as a periodic tact sounds like jarring panacea. One day I wake up in a flood of sensations and the next day I stick my head in the sand? Where is the adaptation, the learning, the evolution?
As a young person who could afford to buy a home, I'm not, simply because I expect the housing market to crash, and I absolutely don't want to be upside-down on a house right now.
For those not familiar with that meme, like myself, here are some examples: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hide-the-pain-harold
UHC still made 12.68 billion net income in 2018.

https://www.google.com/search?q=unitedhealth+net+income
I've never heard of anyone developing IN the database, rather it's a place where you deploy code, so you can do fun things like spectral_cluster((select ...)) or gp_predict_value((select ...)) in the db, avoiding needless serialization and transfer.
I've cancelled Netflix a couple of times. What actually got me back is the fact that they didn't inundate my inbox like some services and stores do. I mean like one email every couple months. There are some stores I get at least half a dozen a week.

They also didn't pull what XM/Serious do and make it nearly impossible to cancel. 4x 40m phone calls, then all I wanted to do was drop one of 3 radios when I sold a car. After the third call drop after a 40min hold time I cancelled the entire service. If I ever use them again, it will be a disposable single use cc #.

In the end, 2-3 streaming services is all I'm willing to pay for. More than that and if rather pirate just for the usability aspect, let alone the costs.
According to every project manager/“agile coach” I’ve ever worked with, that would be part of a one-hour “grooming meeting” and if it takes longer than that, you must just be an incompetent developer, in need of more “coaching”.
An Oral History of LimeWire and the Untold Story of Grapevine
Maybe they use Cloudflare DNS? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
The article could have used the industry term, Single-Event Upset, rather than use the more eye catching gamma ray term over and over. It's a failure mode that aircraft and spacecraft have to deal with.

You keep CRCs of data in critical areas of memory and constantly check them to make sure you are only processing valid data, or use equivalent of ECC memory.
Rel is a DBMS based on Codd and Date's Tutorial D.
https://reldb.org/c/

For a discussion on how SQL speficially falls short of the
relational ideal, see this link:
http://www.nocoug.org/Journal/NoCOUG_Journal_201308.pdf
Viewpoint: Toward a Computer for Visual Thinkers
Reduce your Apple footprint?

I try to stay away from that company as much as I can, but since users unfortunately use that company.
Quoting Horan:

But how close does the hand on that doomsday clock move to midnight once we “can harness an exponential number of amplitudes for computation"?

Looks like a claim to me.
The definition of "monopoly" doesn't matter that much though. What matters is whether new players can realistically enter a market and compete on merit. That's what creates incentives for innovation and low prices.

I agree with you that the film industry itself doesn't currently have a monopoly or oligopoly problem, especially not internationally. But the fact that there are huge problems in related areas of digital content distribution and discovery (app stores, search, social networks, network operators specifically in the US) is cause for alarm in my view.

The problem is spreading rapidly and it wouldn't be a surprise if the film industry was one of the next victims.
I want all the insurance companies to get together and go a calculation and see if banding together and opening a nationwide series of no questions asked homeless shelters with meals would bring down their costs at all. They could each contribute an amount that was proportional to their market share or something similar. Off the top of my head I want to say it wouldn't be worth it, but if this article is accurate, and the costs for insurance companies are actually going down, then who knows.
Interesting: all the authors have Chinese names. I wonder if any of them has any relatives on the Xinjiang Uygur region.
the cross platform dream is so appealing and I've used Ionic off and on for years because of it. At the end of each project I say to myself "never again, i will just learn Swift" ( i already know java ). Then, slowly but steadily, the cross platform dream takes root and blossoms. Off I go with the latest Ionic and "this time it will be different".
the rate of change this time is ridiculously high. that is the problem, not the actual temperature
The secret and frustrating life of a Google contract worker
Don't forget to have them carry around 3D printed full auto assault turtles.
Seth Godin on why leaders don’t hide behind data
> Google and Facebook are violating it so badly it should be a very easy case...

Not really, because Google and Facebook will also fight any accusation tooth and nail in the courts and through lobbying. The case must be very well documented and defended.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's too early to tell.
It sounds like you should research window functions: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/tutorial-window.html
>use Elasticsearch

Found your problem.
I’m back in SF after a few years away. I had developed some thoughts about the homelessness challenges that Reno was facing, but when I landed in SF/Oakland it was immediately overwhelming, occurring on such a different scale and with such visibility.

I have no solid ideas of what “we need to do” but I know that in the European cities I frequent, it’s not like this. Other comments in this discussion touch on the social infrastructure that we’ve forsaken... the things that cost money, require continuity and depth in the community, and which... in other cultures, seem reasonable and required for their humans.

That said, I wonder about what the infrastructure looks like that helps people months before they hit the homeless force functions. There’s a funnel in the descent of resources... the homelessness activists can’t fix the infrastructure of social support and the economic cliff son many people teeter on.

I just spent a couple of months traveling, living in quarters not my own. Had a very minor health issue that was difficult to treat outside of my home base. It was inconvenient, then challenging, then debilitating, and ultimately pretty deflating. I had the resources to fix things, but if I had been financially constrained, my confidence and autonomy and self-esteem could have plummeted to hard-to-recover levels. I could feel how vulnerable other people probably would have been. And I know my friends in other countries would’ve shaken their head and muttered something about our system here in the US.
Indeed. It's also possible to further minimize harm by not transmitting when marine mammals can be seen or heard nearby.
I use react native svg with low level d3.js utils to produce data visualizations with a utility class that holds all the animation values across components and screens which is sort of a hack but very clean for animating several pseudo svg components.

For me it isn't about look and feel so much as being able to quickly manage massive amounts of data for interaction and data viz. I use the ramda lenses, sagas, redux, and selector stack to manage state of the data. It is clean and quick to develop. Everything is memoized with selectors only changing if the reference to the object it is using on the state tree changes.

Nobody can work data the way I can with React. It makes sense.
Despite nuclear being statistically the safest power source per electrical energy generated, people will always complain that it isn't perfect, and that we must wait for X speculatively perfect technology to be developed before we can stop melting Antarctica and choking on smog.
I don't disagree. But death numbers I think gloss over the antinuclear point.

Nuclear problems have been catastrophic black swans. A nuclear plant is mostly great. Unless it's not. In a way nobody expected, (that is probably obvious in hindsight). Whereupon the cleanup is huge, requires state intervention, and possibly decades.

When someone dies because of an accident in wind power the implications are far more local.

It is not entirely unreasonable to prefer more highly-constrained danger to a smaller risk of catastrophe.
It's hard when so much of commerce is conspiring against us. I truly enjoy using Facebook (in the absence of a non-evil alternative) to interact with family and friends, but every time I do so I have to fight the platform's design that optimizes for quantity of interactions.

I have tried doing a bit of woodworking when I need a break (I work from home), and I've found it's much better for my mental, emotional, and physical well-being compared to going down a social media rabbit hole (like I'm doing presently). Not only do I feel like I've accomplished something and have gotten some exercise, but it also doesn't usually suck me in for hours at a time—especially since I mostly use hand tools that tire me out fairly quickly.

tl;dr: rabbets instead of rabbit holes
Because there's an actual real world, with real people around us that we could be interacting with, rather than staring at a smartphone screen?
Facebook Staff Lamented ‘Unethical’ Practices but Were Rebuffed
What Is the Next FPGA Platform?
The article is just an opinion piece on Bill Gates opinion, it really adds nothing of value, no investigative journalism, no fact checking.

I argue that the only reason people are interested in this article is because of Bill Gates opinion not the ny times.

I think search results for the original opinion would be much more relevant than a random persons opinion of the opinion. The opinion of some one else's opinion is not worth money, if ny times considers that as quality journalism I think it says a lot about the quality of their journalism.
As the article says, many metros (including the one in the article) combine automation with drivers. You only need to pay for the bit of automation that actually increases frequency and use the driver for all the fiddly bits.
Sure maybe their motive is economic rather than altruistic but to quote my mother "if it's stupid and it works it isn't that stupid"

I mean Steve Jobs didn't care about anything but the profits when launching the iPhone but it was arguably a significant factor in getting us to the state where we are at today where pretty much everyone has an internet enabled smart phone.

It just sometimes there is the group think on HN that all companies and big corporations are always evil and are some sort of malevolent force and so we can't give them credit for any good they do because they don't meet our moral standard. I mean that's like saying Lincoln's role in freeing the slaves was fundamentally evil because he didn't also extend everyone the same protections enshrined in the Civil Rights act.

Ultimately in my years of software engineering I have become convinced that big huge grand programs are almost always bloated ineffective and full of bugs whereas most real value derives from incremental improvements.
Who let their Markov chain in here?
The physicality of a book is why so many people prefer the form factor of having thousands of books in a single, tiny, lightweight device they can keep in their purse/backpack.

I never again want to own bookshelves of books or have to track down a physical copy of an out-of-print book that I want to read.

Help one of your buddies move houses when they have thousands of books in bookshelves and tell me it's just publishers who have something to gain from e-books. :)

Btw, OP himself in the post even says that his Kindle has allowed him to "convert into a more fervent reader."
Let's split the difference. It'd be like parking outside the drive-in theater and watching the movie from the top of your car without having bought a ticket. Still not good, but of limited harm caused.