skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wikipedia:

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

"The Silurian hypothesis is a thought experiment[1] which assesses modern science's ability to detect evidence of a prior advanced civilization, perhaps several million years ago. In a 2018 paper, Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute, imagined an advanced civilization before humans and pondered whether it would "be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record".[2]"

The geological record is an interesting possibility -- but a better question might be:

"If you wanted to preserve the record of an advanced civilization across super long periods of time -- how would you do it?"

I've thought about this question long and hard.

Stone buildings seem to last no more than 10,000 years, and by the time they are discovered, they have usually been ransacked by grave-robbers and treasure-hunters:

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

Satellites would fall out of orbit by that time, and I don't know any piece of high-technology that has had an uptime of more than maybe 20 years... the more complex something is -- the more prone to failure it becomes.

A USB Drive from an advanced civilization in our past -- just wouldn't make it through to today...

So here's my idea:

Why not put the knowledge of an advanced civilization, into the DNA of some plants? 98% of DNA is unused, aka, non-coding DNA, aka, "Junk DNA":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA

So... why not put it there?

But... there's a problem! DNA is going to shift around a bit over time, so we're going to need to account for that! (We'd accomplish this by replicating the same information over and over at least several times).

So with all of that in mind -- here is my top candidate as one potential carrier of that information:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2010/10/scienceshot-biggest-...

The Flowering Plant: Paris Japonica

Why?

Its DNA apparently contains 130 billion base pairs... that's a lot of room for information, and replication of that information!

Maybe there's something in there, or then again, maybe I'm a crackpot!

History will tell! <g>

But, that would be my top candidate for where that information might be, if it exists anywhere at all...
You mentioned Twitter uses server sent events. Do you have a link you car share about that? I'm interested in learning more about how they use SSE.
iPhone tracks where you go
What Bloomberg Misses About Citadel Securities
It's been posted and attacted some attention:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833718
Affordable IVF Treatment in India
This. I was excited for it a year or two ago, but even in Australia which tends to be somewhat similar to the US it was difficult to follow it. I'm sure it varies by state too, it's probably what you find in Californian supermarkets or something.

It really needs to separate the dishes by region if it's going to succeed internationally. I'd pay good money for this service if it had the exact cheap ingredients in my local supermarkets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTRtCgaAEDE

is really neat
The article was about not having to maintain a site for non techies like us. WE can happily maintain a range of things, but a chemistry doctoral student will hit a hurdle and may give up.

Paying for a server - mentioned in the article about the provider changing access.

its all about hurdles.
Course on Crafting 404 Pages
What exactly was the policy that caused this? In my (luckily very limited) job searching experience, the salary is something that gets negotiated. I ask for something on the high side, they offer something on the low side. Repeat until you end somewhere reasonable. The only thing I can imagine causing someone to not be hired on salary without them knowing the reason is if there's no negotiation.
If you enjoy thinking about epic timescales I recommend Olaf Stapledon's 'Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future' fairly outdated, heavy going, but unique.
You said "Any" question :(
Someone on reddit comments pointed out how ridiculous it was since the guy is named "Christian" and then this comment:

> He said in a deleted post he wasn't Jewish. He's German and was just being offended on their behalf.

I don't have words really
Second Aussie checking in. Lived in every capital along the east coast, bar Hobart.

Also swear I've never heard of this in Australia :\ Make of that what you will.
You are basing your argument upon the false premise of doing everything that systemd does. Several people, perhaps most notably the Uselessd Guy, set out to do only a subset. After all, one of the common critiques is that one really does not have to reinvent things like a resolving proxy DNS server and an NTP server in order to manage services. (A resolving proxy DNS server is one of the things that is notoriously easy to reinvent badly, moreover. The DNS is full of traps for implementors.)
This seems like a great place to plug C++ - Destructors are what you want. While I'm personally a fan of C++-as-a-whole, there's nothing stopping you using C-with-classes.

You can "emulate" the defer statement with a Scope Guard[0], or if you're willing to use a macro, you can use the __COUNTER__ macro as an "anonymous" variable.

[0] https://github.com/ricab/scope_guard
Sailr – A Git Hook for Adhering to the Conventional Commit Specification
I also closed my PayPal account today. Honestly.

They’ve had 20 years and billions of dollars to make their site, their whole experience, great.

They failed to do that. I’ve had enough. Same with eBay. Enough is enough.
User Research Without Interviews
Hi thanks for the feedback, sincerely appreciate it! Have to agree that it is pretty bare bones at the moment, and been haphazardly done in a few hours as I was too impatient to test it out lol. It will be chiseled in the days to come.

I'd add that we wouldn't disappoint on the product, which is the quality of the answer baked in 42 minutes. And of course we're happy refunding in case we do :)
"...hands and mind together..."

mens et manus - does MIT really practice that or is it just a motto with no action behind it?
an experimental browser is to be considered something which will last a long time? Or would it need lots of maintenance? I can predict that in the next 5 years there will be some api change and users will have to migrate. And some users will not. If users will be dropped then it is not a perfect thing that makes pages last.

Yes it probably is great to get started for newbies, but the article was about things that last
Note that bridged networking does not work if your computer is connected to the LAN over WiFi.
> Don't quote CAA without NRC.

Why not? They are two very separate things. Infact, CAA can be applied without the NRC. There is no compulsion that CAA has to be followed by the NRC.

> CAA along with NRC is an anti-poor, anti-muslim law.

You do know that the current government has done the most out of the past governments for the poor and muslims, right? The Ayushman Bharat scheme has been successfully providing free healthcare to the poorest of the people. The triple talaq law gives muslim women the same civil and divorce laws that the women of other religions enjoy in India for decades. Interestingly, the political parties that are right now going on about minority rights where the one opposing the triple talaq act in parliament. Make what you will of that
Alternatively, they didn't come from Africa but from Asia.
Orbital test flight of Boeing Starliner (livestream)
Indeed. This is one of the areas that the POSIX standardization effort specifically shied away from.
When the table is less full than some cliff-effect-threshold the probability of failure is arbitrarily negligible.

If having a failure rate of 1 in 2^hundreds is still not good enough for you, you could augment the data structure with a vector of insertion failures, which will be empty in almost all universes and so scanning it on every query will cost nothing but a single well predicted branch.

If the number of candidate insertion places is fairly large (like ... 8) then the cuckoo filter can be quite full while still keeping a negligible chance of insertion failure.

[Of course, all assuming someone can't attack your hash function.]
I've used an OpenMoko Freerunner as my sole phone for about 10 years. Their freesmartphone.org API is pretty nice: it uses a daemon (the v1 reference implementation used Python, I think v2 uses Vala) which accepts commands over DBus.

There's a program called "cli-framework" for commandline interaction; it opens a Python terminal with a library that wraps the DBus API. I've not used the commandline for calls, but I have used it to read and delete SMS (when I'm too lazy to go and pick up the handset, so I SSH into it instead ;) ).

One project I've not gotten round to yet is an answering machine, so calls are immediately answered and audible (via headset), and I can choose whether or not to "pick up". This looks like it would be easy enough with the freesmartphone.org API, some Python and GTK+.

From what I can tell, this isn't possible on Android due to the API not allowing access to calls. Symbian allowed it, and it seems to have a few answering machine apps.
> everything wrong with the anti-systemd crowd in one sentence

Everything wrong with pro-systemd crowd in one sentence. Namely, ignoring real issues and focusing on strawmen.

Look, systemd as such seems like a decent idea. The real problem I have with systemd is the attitude of the people who run it.

Off the top of my head, issues I've seen with systemd:

* At some point there was no way to say, "bring up this service once the network is up". I mean, there was technically a "network" target, but it considered "localhost" as a network. So if, say, you have automounted NFS, the automounter starts running before your main interface has DHCP. This setup been a widely-used configuration for decades; the systemd maintainers didn't care.

* At some point, if you typed "reboot ; exit" in an ssh session, the "reboot" would hard-kill your ssh session and your shell before the "exit" would be run; so your ssh connection would then hang until the machine came up again and refused a TCP resend request.

* The whole thing with systemd reading the kernel's command-line, deciding that "debug" was meant for it, and spamming the logs making it completely unable to boot; and forcing the kernel to introduce a work-around to hide "debug" from systemd.

* The whole interface renaming thing that's happening in Debian now; every time we've upgraded our test systems from jessie to stretch, and then stretch to buster, we've had to spend dozens of man-hours figuring out why our network configurations aren't working.

The problem here isn't so much that there are these sorts of bugs; the problem is that there seems to be an attitude of, "Well my set-up works; yours doesn't matter." That's not the attitude such a core piece of infrastructure should have.

And your response has exactly the same attitude. "systemd is fine; anyone who doesn't like it must be a raving lunatic and can be safely ignored."

Nobody should be threatened with violence over a piece of software, and the comment you responded to is absolutely out of line. But the reason people are becoming raving lunatics is because they're not being listened to.
The ports trees in the BSDs make the process fairly straightforward.
I'd build something that's impossible to miss, and hard to destroy. A stone henge on the moon maybe.
Same thing which Manmohan proposed in 2003:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/news/when-manmoha...
8 Irritating misconceptions about computer programmers
If I have never seen a European decimal comma I would certainly be very confused -- most people aren't familiar with foreign currency notations and a hundred separator assuming that's a thing (most people aren't equipped to answer the question of whether it's a thing, me included) would be as foreign as a decimal comma if not less when you're familiar with comma as a thousand separator.

(I was confused for a second anyway but tipped off by the outrageousness of $420.)

Edit: Since this is Hacker News, let's talk about programming languages. 4_20 is the same as 420 in Python (3.7+) but not 4.20; 4'20 is the same as 420 in C++ (14+) but not 4.20.
> I was too impatient to test it out lol

And you want me to give you money? C’mon.
Well I used LaunchBar and then Quicksilver for many years. Spotlight has never been as nice and hackable as those.
Heaps of twisted, rusted steel on the surface is a much more efficient source of iron than iron ore in the ground. Ditto for aluminum, which is easy to handle and recycle once it has been refined (provided you can pick it out of the garbage dump) but terribly energy-intensive to extract from the ground.

Anyone who comes after us will not have much coal and oil to burn, but they'll have orders of magnitude easier access to useful metals. Imagine venturing into the half-collapsed vault of an ancient bank and finding tons of pure gold! There's a lot of fun waiting for the Indiana Jones of the next civilization.
We're happy sending you LinkedIn profiles of the people who are behind the answers. Transparency is our mantra.
Maybe you should care for your grandma and not expect a megacorporation to parent her. Maybe grandma shouldn't be using the internet.
Long Names Are Long (2016)
This is not a practical language with dependent types tho lol
Well, before it wasn't a problem, largely because the init system just murdered everything that didn't drop dead when told to (ie, your desktop apps will be SIGTERM'd along with the X Server). Systemd certainly takes a more safe approach.

Atleast in my experience, systemd certainly tells you what is hanging. The issue with "timer reset" is that some service that is hanging is also blocking some other service from shutting down (either because the hanging service depends on it or the blocked service needs to be shut down after the hanging service). Old Init systems didn't care either, if the system was to shut down, it just killed in order of runlevel so stuff like "The database was corrupted because init forcibly killed the NFS mount too early" was certainly possible.
x.509 certs all have a validity period. Of course they could have set them to 2099, but as far as I know you cannot change the validity without reissuing the cert.
A little bit, but my intention was brevity. I didn’t realize how small the character limit was
You are right. Sometimes I wish I were better at English.
There is already LXD for Win/OSX,
https://ubuntu.com/blog/lxd-client-on-windows-and-macos

That is, you get a native LXD client, and then configure the appropriate `remote:` to connect to the VM that has LXD running.
It'll probably take some time for desktop apps to register as inhibitor. KeepassXC has done this IIRC so now if systemd tries to shutdown with an unsaved database, you can't. Various other desktop apps do too these days, so it's largely a question of time.
The World’s Oldest Forest Has 385M-Year-Old Tree Roots
Arcing from poor quality brushes in a DC motor.
On a traditional keyboard the second row of keys ("sharps", typically black) are not only displaced further away from the player than the white keys, they are also higher. This facilitates thumb crossings, playing passages in thirds, makes common chords more comfortable, and so on. It seems these advantages are lost with this alternative keyboard. Ease of transposition is not a big advantage for a trained musician, who should be able to do it well for other reasons (like reading orchestral scores), and the contexts in which it might be useful are pretty small (accompanying a singer, pretty much).
While Java is stagnating, the JVM ecosystem will always be the leader of the server.
It's the only place where you can get modernity (Kotlin, etc) AND the most production ready, feature rich library ecosystem.
I don’t think the Santa hat belongs in VSCode, but not for the reasons outlined in this issue. I don’t want my editor changing its UI every for the holidays
Archive.org also support adding custom pages to be saved.
Is miss a feature on the WeyBack Machine chrome extension to automatically check every bookmark, and auto save if it is not already saved:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fp...
Fair point, though I'd add that information is free and knowledge isn't. If it were the case, student loans would be coming down instead of spiraling to record highs.
Glowingskintips skinwhiteninfairskin clearskin clearskintips – Makeup 365
The user is clearly trolling, firstly his name is Christian, he says a Santa hat is a "religious symbol" (???) and display of such religious symbols is almost as offensive as a [nazi] swastika, an offensive statement in itself!
Not gentoo. I think you are thinking of chromeos.
Can't you just install desktop Firefox?
There's also some amusing issues being reported in response: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3...

> Color themes are offensive to blind (and colorblind) users

> Snowflake doesn't represent people in the southern hemisphere

> Don't add "santa hat" as it's really a coca-cola's santa and I like pepsi more
What is your agency's policy for answering Newcomb's problem?
R&D is the way of escaping vicious economic cycles that selling mainly commodities and investing in industries that, generally, does not deliver and exist because of state controls. The Argentinian problems are corruption and extreme inefficiency that always ends up in economical problem.
I think it should be an opt-in not an opt-out. The better way to distribute some holiday cheer would be to release an official VSCode Christmas theme. That way my editor it’s changing its appearance for no reason every year
Small tip, the url isn't masked and shows it's a WIX site. This doesn't mean it's inherently bad but it seems less professional for a site that accepts payment so you may want to mask the domain to show "fortyq.com".
The ruling doesn't look arbitrary to me:

Uber pretended to not be part of the transaction, while they were a) the public face to the customer, b) offering the ride at a given price, c) negotiated with a specific driver to fulfill it (and only then got the middleman on board to sign off on the transaction).

As usual for Uber they went for the sketchiest way possible to deal with regulations, as if they're looking for ways to argue about them in court as often as possible.

Their problem: no court (except one) in Germany makes law because we don't have the Anglo-saxon concept of case law.
Or washed all the phosphorus deposits to the seas. The future is going to be interesting.

https://phys.org/news/2019-09-global-phosphorus-crisis.html
The primary use-case of defer (cleaning up resources) can be done with __attribute__((__cleanup__(<destructor>))). This effectively allows you to do RAII in C, though it does require some careful thought when copying variables (you need to "move" them a-la Rust).

But the really classic way of doing "defer" in C is to do what Linux does:

int foo(void)
{
char *ptr = malloc(13);
int error = 0;

error = bar();
if (error < 0)
goto out_free;

// do something else

out_free:
free(ptr);
return error;
}

Once you get used to it, it feels very natural to write and understand.
The AA will now use what3words to find your breakdown
I loved RSS for a while, and my client of choice was Google Reader. It solved aggregation of the articles, feeds implicitly have inherent notification, and the standardization of presentation elements bring calm to the consumer experience.

RSS has its flaws, some like the non uniformity of discovery were starting to standardize through customs, others, like the scaling and maintaining being left up to the individual while arguably a strength were at the time poorly supported.

When Google Reader disappeared there were few other quality readers polished enough to take over. Many offers tried to rush into the vacuum, some by revigorating their development, others by rushing out a Google Reader clone, but for the most part people did not follow because (a) alternatives were less slick and (b) for many the required housekeeping they had neglected for too long meant their overall feed file had accumulated so much cruft that they didn't want to reboot the effort.

I still do not know exactly why Reader which was extremely successful at the time was given the boot. I can imagine less add engagement, and also we were supposed to transition to Wave or G+ or was it still Orkut at the time?

Anyway, for the internet masses server side aggregation won, client side aggregation lost. The demise of Google Reader most certainly accelerated the transition, but longer term I do not know whether if it had been left to evolve it wouldn't have morphed it into another one of the server side aggregated/curated walled gardens years ago.
LXC uses it as well, and they have additional macros to "move" pointers and file descriptors to make sure you don't double-free or similar things.
Back in 2017 there was a person on Twitter who was collecting every time that one of his machines had a systemd shutdown problem.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15896376

Machine shutdown is one of the parts of service management that often does not get enough attention.
Firefox Replay in Action (Video and Developer Survey)
How much more economically efficient will it be than 1980s French nuclear reactors?

That's the question that matters.
and we don't know when it will be the end of the world so we should all stop breathing now
To avoid becoming EOL'd these days it's about time to start inquiring about learning to code.
Microsoft has done the right thing here. The non-issue could be created an issue of. Who'd want the negative PR.

That being said, it's prudent not to add the most common religious or cultural symbols for a global product. If you cater to one, you'll be expected to do the same for other cultural rituals.
And being US-centric means a lot of the choices a quite gross and really unappealing for people in other countries. Buttered toast? Peanut butter and honey? Yuck, I'd rather not eat at all.
The article mentions ocean anoxic events as possible markers of civilizations that ended in disaster. But the opposite might be even more fascinating to ponder.

What if there was a civilization ~2 billion years ago that thrived in the oxygen-poor environment, who accidentally unleashed cyanobacteria upon the world? Kinda like how we're recklessly dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, but on a much grander scale. Life would have had to re-evolve from the unicellular stage, and all evidence of the oxygen-dumping civilization would have been erased by geological forces by now.
I could imagine something like this being applicable towards large legacy codebases with a history of memory leaks and segfaults. With legacy codebases you're often only able to tread water and won't be in a position to track everything to it's root cause.
Pentagon to stockpile rare earth magnets for missiles, fighter jets
Seems like an ad for Heroku and Wiix.
Scala 2 Roadmap Update: The Road to Scala 3
Amusing, but I think inappropriate. The VSCode team shouldn’t have to deal with all of the fake issues raised in their repo
In Britain it's normal to separate pounds from pence with a comma, at least in handwriting. In handwriting people also use a dash. A dot just isn't visible enough. If you do use a dot then it should be a proper decimal point (£1·50), not a full stop. Typewriters are the work of the devil.

EDIT: It looks like I'm wrong about the comma used to separate pounds from pence: that's not normal in Britain. (What about '='? I think I've seen that in handwriting, but I can't say for sure in which country.)
Airbnb Isn’t Uber, Says European Court of Justice
Christian is a normal and very common German first name. That alone doesn't tell you anything.