skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Discussions of the Fermi paradox get swamped with people's individual hypotheses. It's nice to see an article that tries to develop a whole different kind of answer. The known possibilities seem to be:

1. We're alone (or very nearly so) due to an early filter. i.e. it was vanishingly unlikely for life to develop as far as it has here.

2. We're alone (or very nearly so) due to a late filter. i.e. life develops in lots of places but, terrifyingly, it becomes overwhelmingly likely to wipe itself out rather than spread.

3. Life develops frequently but there's some sort of interstellar ecology that makes species stay hidden or be wiped out.

4. Life develops frequently but is overwhelmingly likely to develop some other interest (becoming inward-looking, or exploring other dimensions) rather than colonising all of space.

This article's suggestion that Earth may be in a backwater wouldn't be sufficient by itself, so it is coupled with the idea, derived from observations on human colonisation of Micronesia, that expansion happens in waves and life on Earth happens to be in between waves. The problem is, advanced technological civilisations expanding across the galaxy isn't the same thing as Polynesian explorers eventually being followed by Europeans. Why would the waves die away? This is a late filter with extra steps.
Redash helps you make sense of your data
People pay for government services through taxes and if enough of them were sufficiently unsatisfied for a long enough time there would be a revolution of some sort. It’s not as easy to connect the dots as it is in an open marketplace but suggesting a government does not or cannot produce value is absurd.
It's easy to report: talk about what stuff is actually being implemented in the next 6 months. The problem is you won't get as many people to read your article because what 5G could do in some places in 5 years if you believe the carrier press releases sounds a lot more fantastic than what it actually means for people now.

The same thing happened with "4G" (which never became the actual 4G standardized in 2009).
The idea of the bet was that if there was a bubble in 2015 it would have deflated by now.
Isn't Unreal Engine an alternative in 3D space?
It's far easier to solve individual issues than societal issues.

If you, personally, are having trouble with employment (or anything, really), then you, personally, with the support of those around you, should do something about it. Realistically your only other option is sitting around waiting for a magic fairy to fix your life, and it just doesn't work that way.

But on a societal level, if the employment landscape is changing rapidly it's easy for whole groups to go under in a short period of time.

That uncomfortable truth doesn't change the fact that for any individual the best course of action is likely going to be improving themselves rather than hoping the entire world changes around them instead.

20 years on, my hometown is still poor, and I'm not. In another 20 years, the situation is likely to remain the same.

Is it insensitive to point that out? I'm not sure. If you'd asked the younger me, I'd tell you that 'sensitivity' was a thing that rich people worry about. The poor are trying to make ends meet, they couldn't give a fuck about ivory tower waffle.

Perhaps you try your best and it doesn't work out anyway. Life can be a cruel mistress.
You can just do little things. I bought some WeMo smart outlets that plug in to regular sockets- basically a WiFi lamp timer. They have been a pleasant upgrade to old fashioned dial lamp timers, easier to change the schedule, trigger with sunrise/sunset, etc. You can combine them with all sorts of appliances. For example, I'm always irked how much idle power my garage door opener draws. Well, I could throw a smart switch inline to shut it off at night, and in the event of late night door usage I can override the schedule with my phone.

If they were to fail or EoL, I'd be out some money but all you have to do is unplug them.
It’s all about trade. The USSR was brought down because they had no nations to trade with and refused to play ball with them and excluded them from the world diminishing their growth and power. The key difference this time around is Europe seems pretty complacent to let China keep doing its thing.
> We're all just one big JSON object now :)

JSON aren't objects though.
Yeah, they generate revenue by locking you into an expensive ecosystem which has zero transparency, so we actually don't know what Apple is doing.

We don't know if Apple is violating our privacy. Who knows who Apple is selling your data to.
A Look Back at the Top Apps and Games of the Decade
Godot is worth trying. I found it easier than Unity/Unreal to pick up, especially for 2D.

Also check out https://defold.com/ — it’s an excellent game engine that perfectly suits your 2D/mobile/lightweight requirements. The team behind it (at King) are very active both in listening to the community and with their release cycle. It has a bunch of features bigger engines still lack (hot reloading, fast testing cycle and export process).
You misread. I wasn't railing against action creators, I was saying your method of generating them was bad.

So yes. We disagree strongly but it's because you are outright wrong in your claims. Putting function calls in mapDispatch does not do anything to their reusability or their testability. They're still functions. You're making taste claims but treating them like they are factual.

If you're wondering why my tone is so dismissive it's because yours is so prescriptive. I've worked on a lot of react and redux projects and I know my way around. If you're attempting to reify your development taste into a framework of "best practices" you need to be prepared for criticism. Responding to me with footnoted appeals to authority does nothing for your argument.
Inform 7 is interesting, but I never really liked coding in it; I feel like its almost-natural-English-but—not-quite syntax falls into a sort of “uncanny valley” of programming. Because of how much like natural language it is, it always feels like you should be able to write things in a lot more ways than you actually can.
I would strongly recommend to use cloud formation through a typed proxy like troposphere. Also would not recommend to use terraform at all since you will run into warts and fundamental issues quickly. I have done projects with both and my current blessed workflow is a custom python driver which uses CF via troposphere and minimal boto3 as glue. Also I work at AWS.
I’ve found that jq is great for quick one-offs. But it also has a very rich syntax that allows for more complicated use cases. That said, instead of heading for the jq manpage I find it’s much easier to hack something together in Python. What’s the draw of jq here? The ability to parse with only a command line?
It seems like some of you have some real love for Godot. How come you decided to use/recommend Godot over Unity when it was less mature? Was it much better along some axis that Unity didn't provide? What makes it better along that axis?

Usually happens when something is 10x better at something new that people care about that the incumbent is blind to or is structurally incapable of addressing. I'm just wondering what it is in this specific case.

Ease of use? Beginner friendly? Open source so you don't have to pay? The node system makes it easier to do X?
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21921293, which has the advantage of being submitted by the author.
Yeah I ended up using uBlock on the sticky footer, but that's not what I should be forced to do.
Except you've added a library. And the function is no less testable than the thunk.

I fail to see why adding access to the entire application state is an advantage. This is just cargo culting. In fact that you held up that counter example as a preferable practice tells me everything I need to know about your library.
That just sounds like normal consequences. I don't think it is reasonable to think that the government is going to protect you from the private-actor consequences of your "political views, worldview, and way of life".

To do so would require the government to become an arbiter of those things, which would be antithetical to the protection of individual rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of association, and in general individual liberty.
By the numbers nuclear is very safe but it does have asymmetric risk and most importantly a bad reputation. Next gen nuclear should be a marketing rebrand in addition to new tech. So Yang is right to focus on thorium.
So does the Playstation 4, if you have a camera attached. I'm sure there are other devices that do this as well. But that is all the more reason to be aware of it, and decide for yourself whether that is OK with you or not. Hopefully the concerns will remain an active topic of discussion so that device creators keep making it an easy-to-change setting to turn it off.
Happy new year and decade, everyone!
On productized services: (https://www.productizedstartups.com) with interviews of productized service entrepreneurs.
Your first link actually shows Dan deciding that the flux-based "store" name should be changed to the JS-based "reducers".

Any reason why Dan isn't contributing to your new special toolkit, by the way?
There are features Rust has that aren't in C, and so have no precedent. So it's not really possible.

We did take a lot of influence from C, though.
Right, but the number itself is useless. If you as a homeowner hire the neighbor kid to mow the lawn, you have a trade deficit with him/her unless he/she pays you to do some task for the same amount.

To say that it is somehow better to have no deficit in the above example is just as absurd as applying the concept to international trade.

Also, trade is complex and involves many countries. Supply chains involve imports and exports from many different countries.

To arbitrarily declare that trading flows should be symmetrical is simply a political weasel meant to inspire people to support policies favoring exporters over those that favor importers.

Bottom line: government meddling in trade is bad for everyone and makes everyone worse off.
Ah, no, that's exactly what I don't want to do, more-or-less for just that reason.

Just riffing...

It would be a kind of vertically-integrated real estate development
company, along with some manufacturing and tech/software company-ish.

Essentially, it's a terraforming company and the eco-cities it makes are
the product.

We have the technology: Christopher Alexander's "Pattern Language" et.
al.; Permaculture (applied ecology if you prefer), including
carbon-neutral integrated alcohol fuel production (also, tug on this
thread: "New Alchemy Institute" "living machines" [1] ); Bucky Fuller's
"Design Science Revolution" for inspiration and large-scale
efficiency[0]; etc... (Those are just my own "favorite hits".)

The idea is both 1) sell/lease cheaply ("affordable housing") to alleviate
economic pressure, and 2) provide a steady income to members to offset
economic obsolescence.

(I maintain that UBI makes sense only in the context of wide-spread
inability for the "average person" to compete in the job market. And I
think that's already happening. I mean, if I wasn't good at computers I
don't know wtf I could do to make a living. I'd probably be homeless!)

I don't want this hypothetical company to be political or ideological
(not even Hippie ideology) just economic (to the extent that that's
realistic, eh?) We can work out the politics of everything once people
have a place to live and a steady "three square meals a day", and it's
ecologically harmonious, which is another way to say cheap and bountiful.

Frankly, I'm not qualified to run this sort of thing. I'm a recluse,
with ways different than your own. But it seems to me that it would be
sooooo easy, and that there are enough people and enough "free-floating"
capital to make it happen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project

> It is moon-crater-shaped: the crater's truncated cone top opening is a
half-mile in diameter, rim-to-rim, while the truncated mountain itself is
a mile in diameter at its base ring. The city has a one-mile (1.6
km)-diameter geodesic, quarter-sphere transparent umbrella mounted high
above it to permit full, all-around viewing below the umbrella's bottom
perimeter. The top of the dome roof is 1,000 feet (300 m) high. The
bottom rim of the umbrella dome is 500 feet (150 m) above the surrounding
terrain

Some more information and a couple of pictures of the model at:
https://solutions.synearth.net/a-community-dwelling-machine/

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22New+Alchemy+Institute%22++%22li...
Some I follow:

https://apenwarr.ca/log/ - programming, high level perspective

https://www.benkuhn.net/ - programming, startups, effective altruism

https://danluu.com/ - programming, hardware

https://pedestrianobservations.com/ - public transit

https://sideways-view.com/ - lots of interesting ideas, very eclectic

And plugging my own blog: https://www.jefftk.com - effective altruism, contra dance, diy, not very focused
100 years ago, prohibition went into effect
Every night I trigger a ZWave scene via the light switch in my bedroom when I head to bed. That scene shuts off all the lights, makes sure the doors (both "human" and garage) are closed and locked, sets the thermostat back, etc. In the morning I trigger a different scene that brings the thermostat back to "daytime" levels, turns on a few lights, etc.

There are a couple lights that are set up to come on automatically at sunset, but only if either my wife or I are home (there's a bit of an issue there in that the house can still be occupied when we're away if the kids are with a sitter, but the lights are just a pleasant convenience).

I've been considering adding an automation to gradually turn on the lights in the kids rooms at an appropriate on school mornings. This could potentially be done with a timer built into a smart bulb, but at that point it would just be another app I'd have to use to manage it... easier to just do it via Home Assistant.

I also use ZWave smoke detectors (they just function as normal "dumb" smoke detectors with a local alarm), which trigger all the lights in the house to 100% if smoke or carbon monoxide is detected (unless it's the one in the kitchen...).

There are plenty more (I added a wifi enabled microcontroller to my "dumb" doorbell and do some fun stuff with that, etc), but those are most of the light based automations.
Laser-Shooting Planes Uncover the Horror and Humanity of World War I (2018)
Indeed, the Federal Reserve is over 100 years old. However, I fear the Fed is such a powerful and entrenched legacy system that it is extremely unlikely for it to be politically re-evaluated unless there were some sort of catastrophic system failure.
Oh i just saw that.
This comment breaks both the HN guidelines and the more specific guidelines for Show HN. Could you please read them and stick to the rules when posting? We're trying not to be the nasty sort of internet place here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
I find Joel Spolsky's (CEO of Stack Exchange and Co-founder of Trello and Fog Creek Software) blog to be informative for software engineering and management (link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com).

I revisit his article "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" (link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...) every time I get the itch to rewrite code from scratch.
Ok but the choice is not democratic in every part of the world. Think e.g. about China.
I just checked the emails I received from Amazon from Christmas purchases, and it is not false. I don't doubt you, but I'm curious what the difference is. I'm looking at order confirmation emails and package ship/delivery emails. They only list order numbers for me, and I need to click through to the Amazon account to see the actual items.

Is there a different category of purchase that you're looking at, or is there something I'm missing?

Edit: I am looking online and I'm not seeing any articles that reference Amazon hiding orders specifically to thwart Gmail tracking, so it's very possible I'm wrong and that's just anecdote. But that being said, they definitely aren't showing individual items in my email confirmations. Is there a preference for this that I forgot I toggled?
All cars will be required to have dashcams. Either by insurance companies or by governments.

All cars will be required to have GPS, and be tracked in real time. This is already the case with the majority of commercial vehicles.

Incremental steps in autonomous cars, first starting with 'drone' cars. Cars and trucks that are operated from a remote location. This will be piggy backed on existing technology. Cheap cameras, cheap cell networks etc. Think of delivery car, one person drives a truck from a remote location and one person is inside sorting packages, carrying them to the door. People with kids can work from home as Uber drivers and delivery drivers.
Kali Default Non-Root User
> This will affect nearly every industry in terms of economics, some sectors potentially catastrophically like long distance transportation, but the biggest effect will be degree to which we will become able to empathize with others around the world and create novel, deeply impactful forms of interacting with others in a physical and emotional sense.

Careful. I remember reading similar sentiments about the web in the 90's. Turns out it's true, to a degree, but also unleased all the misinformation we see today. I can imagine something similar in the future where you can't tell what's real, not only news, but also what you see in front of you.
Roomba et al is probably the biggest recent advancement in chores, although it doesn't work in every home.
Wow. Thank you for such long, detailed and insightful comment. I look at this now as marketing challenge as well and I am trying some alternatives ideas.
New Quantum Paradox Clarifies Where Our Views of Reality Go Wrong (2018)
> Myspace -> FB

Some of you may be surprised how far back this chain goes. Back in the (pre-www) day we used the `finger` command and `.plan` / `.project` files as rudimentary versions of social profiles.

I'm not able to find anything that gives a decent sense of how these were used in practice but if you have no idea what I'm talking about there's an animated .plan demo at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMFzspwuQZw.

I've always assumed that the MySpace (and later, Facebook) verb "poke" was inspired by `finger` but I have no evidence for that.
Network effects are important, granted.

Regarding economies of scale - it's all so cheap that it doesn't matter for most cases that don't involve utterly tremendous amounts of resource usage.

I mean, the primary thing holding this back is consumer level ISP's being arsey about servers. A 10 year old machine hooked up to my 35mbit home connection is more than enough to run most internet services.

And that's effectively free because I already have it.
Used to be hate speech, guess now it is okay again.
They are migrating several modules from C++ to C#, by making use of their Burst compiler stack, and have introduced a new ECS based framework named DOTS, on the quest to appease to AAA studios.
No, endless expansion does not require stability over very long time scales. It just requires that each colony produce, on average, at least one successful daughter colony. It's not even necessary for the colony to have any cultural continuity between when it is created and when those descendant colonies are created.
> We keep getting ads for the thing we bought yesterday, ads for dating sites after we got married and had kids (continously, for ten years despite my utter lack of interest), search results keep getting worse[0], obvious spammers keep on spamming in social media (seriously, it seems a simple regex filter could have done a better job to reduce crypto scamming in replies on Twitter than whatever was there last time I checked.)

That's because in a lot of cases they're optimizing for the wrong metrics, as in maximizing their revenue instead of your utility.

There's way more content on the web than there was in the early 2000s, most of it in form of "content marketing" and explicitly attempting to game the system.

If you look at recent results from TREC, it's pretty clear that machine learning provides a large boost over the traditional retrieval systems, on any metric that you want to optimize.
I'm the mentioned Stephen Grider - to clarify, I don't advocate using Redux on every project by any means, and I apologize if I said anything in my course to that effect.

Instead, I advocate using Redux on larger projects - especially as a beginner - because it naturally provides some structure. There is a large community of engineers that advocates using as few libraries as possible. I generally agree with that sentiment, but not for beginner engineers. A beginner engineer doesn't have the skills necessary to architect a large project from scratch (hence the 'beginner' designation), and can benefit from being given a bit more rigid structure.
Yeah, the Nest was ahead of its time in 2010; but by 2012 the big players like Honeywell and Carrier had caught up. At this point they beat Nest on both price and features. A good friend of mine owns an HVAC company and would recommend a dozen thermostats over a Nest on functionality alone.
I have developed something similar on top of the AWS CLI that incorporates a bunch of integrations with other tools like the cloudinit and various bits of Batch-related instrumentation: https://github.com/kislyuk/aegea
I’m hoping that in 2020 fewer VCs will try to market themselves by making random predictions for the future.
Sure, If there’s something that can be done to level trade, let’s do that. It’s just unfortunate that many of the same people whose industries were ravaged by outsourcing had found ways to exist in the post outsourced world, and were again ravaged by this new trade war.

Maybe that’s a necessary cost but it sure is a cost on the backs of people who’ve already paid a lot.

Peter Navarro, who’s directing White House policy in China, was literally hired by Jared Kushner googling for experts who were China critics and finding his ‘Death by China’ book. He is essentially a crank with no academic support and as soon as he was elevated to the national stage, people found substantial fabrications in that book. I have next to zero faith that this crew is the one who is going to right the trade ship.
That's a pretty nice writeup, but I suspect some of the use-cases could be solved more easily with off-the-shelf parts.

For example I bought a couple of small LED-light boxes, they're about the size of a match-box and contain 5 LED lights and a motion sensor.

I've stuck a couple inside cupboards, and low down on the walls of our bathroom.

When it is dark and you walk past they come on for 30-seconds or so. Additional movement keeps them on.

Getting up to use the toilet in the night is much nicer with these low-level lights than turning on the proper lights and killing your night vision. (No lights would be fine 90% of the time, but children's toys get everywhere!)