skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How would you power a weed-whacker via non-traditional methods?

AFAIK there are three main technologies in use today: gas, battery, and plug-in electric.

Assuming that gas is on the way out, chemical batteries have contamination/recycling issues, and plug-in electric isn't appropriate for all use cases (definitely less convenient).

I can't think of anything other than those technologies which comes remotely close to power a small engine for ~30 minutes at a time, once a week.

Will we ever get to "nuclear-powered" weed-whackers?

Wouldn't it be Great(tm) if there were the equivalent of AA/AAA rechargeable batteries but for larger devices? Maybe the 6-cell laptop format is the winner (but look at the variation in that use-case)...
I recently got a Dasung Paperlike display... It's pretty amazing! It has a reasonably high refresh rate and I can use it outside in full sun.
"Three safeties: memory, type, concurrency, for all code."

Right. I've been saying that for, sadly, decades now, ever since my proof of correctness days. I sometimes word this as the three big questions: "how big is it", "who owns it", and "who locks it". C is notorious for totally failing to address any of those, which is the cause of many of the troubles in computing.

Then, for way too long, we had the "but we can't afford memory safety" era, or "Python/Java/Javascript/whatever are too slow". It took way too long to get past that. Ada was supposed to address safety with speed, but it never caught on.

Rust looked promising at first. Huge step in the right direction with the borrow checker. But Rust was captured by the template and functional people, and seems to have become too complicated to replace C and C++ for the average programmer. We have yet to see the simplicity and stability of Go combined with the safety of Rust.

Duffy makes the point that slices are an important construct for safety. Most things expressed with pointer arithmetic in C are expressible as slices. I once proposed slices for C [1] but the political problems outweigh the technical ones. I'd like to see a C/C++ to Rust translator smart enough to convert pointer arithmetic to safe slice syntax. I've seen one that just generates C pointers in Rust syntax, which is not that useful.

The Midori people seem to have gone through the effort of understanding why "unsafe" code was being used, and tried to formalize that area to make it safe again. When I looked at Rust libraries a few years ago, I saw "unsafe" too often, and not just in code that interfaces with other languages.

Duffy writes, in connection with casting "For example, we did have certain types that were just buckets of bits. But these were just PODs." (Plain Old Data, not some Apple product.) I referred to these as "fully mapped types" - that is, any bit pattern is valid for the type. True for integers and raw characters. Not true for enums, etc.
One way to look at casts is to treat them as constructors to be optimized. The constructor takes in an array of bytes and outputs a typed object. If the representation of both is identical, the constructor can be optimized into a byte copy, and maybe even into just returning a reference, if the output is immutable or the constructor consumes the input. So that's a way to look at sound casting.

Once you have that, you can separate allocation from construction and treat a constructor as something that takes in an array of bytes, consumes it, and outputs a typed object. Constructors are now isolated from the memory allocator.

For arrays, you need some way to talk about partially initialized arrays within the language. Then you can build arrays which grow as safe code.

That takes care of some of the common cases for unsafe code. It looks like Duffy's group got that far and went further. I need to read the papers.

[1] http://animats.com/papers/languages/safearraysforc43.pdf
Tech companies make products that every consumer interacts with. Defense contractors make products that every consumer pays for but rarely interact with, especially since the draft was eliminated and military service in the US became all volunteer. While I agree with that change, the lack of “in-your-face”-ness of the defense industry means our endless wars and endless payments to the war factories go unexamined.

Plus the hero-worship of soldiers, even those that spend a career washing dishes in Texas, has made any criticism politically untenable.
The cycles for air liquefaction and separation are highly optimized, but the basic idea is to compress air, cool the compressed air back toward room temperature, then send it through an expander (a turbine, say), converting much of its remaining thermal energy to work. This leaves the expanded gas colder than when you started.
France is basically decarbonized for electricity. It is very attainable with nuclear.
You can leverage dependencies that are not published to a CDN, such as local dependency code.
I suppose it also means that if she gets attacked half way through the move, then there will be lots of ants around to protect her.
I'm not suggesting that corporate farming consolidation is good for humanity. I'm suggesting that there is a benefit to using modern farming equipment.

Fundamentally, I believe that corporate farming consolidation is a risk to the global food supply. ADM is proof of how terrible that can be.
Nice to see the hn ethos of attacking ideas, not people, in action.

It's more like a death row inmate worrying about another cigarette.

Anyway, like I said my current life is fairly low impact. Remote work helps a lot. But it doesn't make any difference, especially inasmuch as me not buying fossil fuels made infinitesimally cheaper for someone else to. It will stay that way until we price emissions appropriately.

Converting a few acres of sheep grazing land to forest could make this chunk of my lifs carbon negative, for that matter. Lamb is especially bad.
I think about it all the time. Love my beagle, but I've concluded that the ownership of an animal is unethical. I'm not exactly doing anything about that because I simultaneously hold the usual line of thinking (despite the obvious conflict) that hey, he gets treated better by me than nature would probably treat him.
..and then eventually, having no aerospace program, Canada goes on to buy F18s from America.

I think the Arrow was an economic threat couched in strategic language. The arrow was kick-ass long before 14s, 15s, 16s,18s entered the science. And yes, they have different mission scenarios, but like Avro wouldn't have owned that space.
#disgruntledCanadian
> I shouldn't need to read the last 8 chapters to figure this out. It's not my responsibility as a reader. It's the responsibility of the writer to ensure that when a reader jumps into a chapter, there's enough context and substance to figure out if it's worth reading.

What an absurd thing to say. Would you say this about jumping into chapter 9 of a book? What about part 9 of a guide to learning a new programming language?
He makes plenty of good points, but completely fails to make mention of how plurality voting (also known as "first past the post") results in two dominant parties, rather than electing people who represent the preference of the median voter. This is known as Duverger's Law, and I would argue it is about 90% responsible for everything he speaks of.

Voting systems that don't do this exist. Approval voting is one of the better ones (unfortunately, Ranked Choice voting doesn't do much at all to alleviate this). Approval voting has been enacted in Fargo, ND and is being considered for St. Louis, MO.

The charts he included show that there actually is a reasonable middle ground and lots of voters are there. The problem is that candidates that are in the middle can't get elected. Imagine how different things would be if our election system tended to elect the first choice of the median voter.
It's more than that though, it's that I need to be able to create "core tables" that only privileged users can modify the schema of, but then let anyone create tables with relationships to those core tables.
Eh, maybe. But neither could the F-104 and he liked that plane. But the F-104 was also an American plane, so maybe that has something to do with it. Then again, he almost got himself killed in a rocket boosted NF-104.

https://twitter.com/GenChuckYeager/status/643965329115185152

https://twitter.com/GenChuckYeager/status/120470368609990656...
Belated reply (Christmas!)

> the failure was not necessarily technical

Well, that was exactly my point ;-)

If you only look at the technical issues, ur doin it rong.
I basically disagree with this formulation on the grounds that it does not sufficiently respect political opinions as being reflective of self-interest; these opinions are often a result of not just consistent messaging but tangible incentive.

It's much more straightforward to view the public politics and culture as a primarily top-down construction: "let's make these groups more upset at each other; let's make these other groups reconcile". This decision, made for cold reasons of accumulating power for oneself and immediate cronies by herding public opinion, subsequently filters down through the system via funding grants, access to information, and the occasional revolving-door or literal kickback. It gets amplified because job holders and job seekers spot the opportunities and threats awaiting them through a simple agreement or disagreement: they therefore start conducting themselves accordingly in "the way of the times", taking up the causes of the powerful with a bare minimum of overt messaging, hoping that they have backed a winning horse. This scramble happens across a broad range of industries, at many levels of the career ladder, and in seeking friends and relationships. There is a lot at stake in having "right opinions," in fact. The way in which the country seems to "come apart" or "come together" on issues is therefore most reflective of disagreements at the top, and produces a four-year cycle in a political-cultural feedback loop tied to electoral results: the politics become the culture, disseminate through media, and in turn inform the politics of the next cycle.

The wedge that breaks the cycle, on an individual, issue-by-issue level, is good storytelling. Stories have the power to change self-narrative towards a direction independent of the structural narrative, and their fulfillment generally comes with some way of overcoming structural forces.

But as for why there's the specific conflict we're experiencing today, it's pretty simple: it's a local vs global conflict; when you globalize, there are some "powerful losers" at the local level. And so the narrative has been a competition of these interests, proxied through various parties and institutions.
Nope sorry, it takes all of this into account. From their FAQ :

"We use a life cycle analysis (LCA) approach, meaning that we take into account emissions arising from the whole life cycle of power plants (construction, fuel production, operational emissions, and decommissioning)."
Beware: a lot of the off-the-shelf sauces don't have any trace of tamarind.
Does he only read comic books? Black and white screen is ideal for most of the world's books.
There is another data point.

Zen 4 will be PCI-E 5.0 and DDR5. Unless Zen 4 is a gigantic leap forward in performance and not an iteration. The cost of Jumping in those tech will be quite expensive.

So Zen 3, PCI-E 4.0, DDR4 will be like the sweet spot for desktop for a while.

( I do wish I am wrong and they drive down the cost of PCI-E 5.0 and DDR5 faster. But history has shown those tends to take 2 - 3 years to pick up the pace )
Hey I made an account but only see

> You have not created any apps yet.

with no way to create an app that I can see
A Kalman filter solves the specific problem of estimating a finite-dimensional state vector from uncertain measurements, where the measurement errors and their correlations follow (or can be approximated as) a multivariate Gaussian.

That works quite well for, say, combining GPS (which has short-term noise) with inertial/odometry measurements (which suffer from long-term drift) to determine your vehicle's position, orientation, and velocity in 3D space (expressible as a 9-dimensional state vector). But it's not directly applicable to problems like combining map data with LIDAR and vision to generate a representation of your surroundings.
I'm not sure what you mean -- both my MacBook and iPad let me reduce the backlight intensity to very little, and there's zero "flickering like crazy" at all.

What devices have this problem? I've personally never encountered it on any LCD screens I've ever owned.
LIDAR units have different effective ranges and, most importantly, number of points they capture. These cheap units generally have a small number of points. Looks like the Velabit has a range of about 100 meters, but FOV is 60 degrees horizontal by 10 degrees vertical, so you would need to mount several of these around a vehicle to get the equivalent coverage of a 360 degree unit. The press releases don't say how many points are in its point cloud, but I'm guessing it's probably 1/10th of a larger unit's.
1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/16/dating-app-g...

2] https://www.dnaromance.com/

Well, there are many already.
Gene drive is not the same as selective breeding or GMO. Gene drive is not the same as CRISPR. It's not just giving an organism a particular favorable trait and waiting for nature to take its course by spreading that trait throughout the population.

Gene drive involves artificially increasing the likelihood of transmission of a gene to offspring. One such theoretical technique (according to my layperson's understanding) is basically to use CRISPR to encode CRISPR into an organism's DNA, in a way that is self-perpetuating. Then the genetic modification will spread through the entire population regardless of whether it improves fitness.
jQuery is 80kb. How is that better than 5kb?
You can however build extremely large applications in Vue/React without much of a sweat.

Try without them with jquery only and you'll hit some walls. You'd basically ending up by rolling your own stuff with something vaguely similar.

Sure you can do static pages all day, but the whole idea is maintaining state and stateful transitions.
Right. It was meant to intercept Soviet bombers coming from the North. For other purposes, like air superiority, it would have been ill suited. People thinking it could be resurrected as an alternative to the F-35 are wildly confused.

If you compare the specs with contemporary aircraft (like the English Electric Lighting) the Arrow is impressive but not vastly superior. The "brain drain" after the cancellation of the program seems the biggest tragedy to me.
In my day job I make high tech equipment for ships. My customers are users on all types of ships from arctic to Antarctic and everywhere n between. 1/2 our engineering team is SW. all our engineers go in the field (be it local boat tests for the day or customer visits on the other side of the world). There are 100s of companies that need software engineers in the marine market. My work involves science to make our technology effective but we are not marine scientists. You can find these types of companies all over the place but many within driving distances of universities with marine science/technology programs.

That being said, I’ve designed lots of field tests for our products. I’ve worked on joint projects with scientists from academia. And I’ve been invited to the ice trials on board famous research vessels.

If you want to do more direct science, then you want to work for the users of marine products. These people are in the field a lot more and often performing the “science”. Research institutes associated with universities always need professional sw talent. But they don’t pay anywhere near industry. Check out institutes in FL, MA, RI, CA, MS, WA, NH.
Suspect we agree on a lot. Aim for the best, prepare for the worst, etc. We decided it was wise to seek another citizenship.
This is not true at all. Plants are closing because of onerous NIMBY regulation. They can be made cheap if they are built at scale, see South Korea for an example of cheap plant production.

Indeed, SK produces nuclear so cheap that they are exporting plants to other countries.
Please see my sibling reply.
This makes more sense as an argument for dynamic typing or GC by default than a “safe” keyword, imo.

From my experience with Rust, there’s basically _never_ any cost in sticking to safe code. The standard library and crates pretty much always give you enough tools.

Unsafe is really only ever needed if you’re implementing the core of an abstraction, which is probably not something that’s going to deter “casual” users imo.

The borrow checker and and type system definitely can be thorny at times, though. Other times they’re very easy to work with! But having a more ergonomic way to fall back to Java-like behavior, if only for debug builds, would make languages like Rust _much_ more accessible.
That game (Alpha Centauri) had an amazing number of insightful quotes, both from real individuals and from in-game individuals. That was one of those visionary games where so many things were artfully done.
Algorithm Removes Water from Underwater Images
That's interesting! Clearly that's what happened to packing the PSW into the PC†, but what other features are you thinking of?

† though there are an awful lot of ARM processors out there today that have less than 64 MiB of program memory and need their interrupts to be fast, so I'd argue it might be a reasonable idea for many applications today if it didn't involve breaking toolchain compatibility in a subtle way
Are you sure? Looking at the price tags page I could swear I've seen those in Sweden before, and this image looks like it may be from a Swedish (or at least Scandinavian) store: https://tw.eink.com/uploads/images/application/showcase/ESL4...

I may very well be wrong, but I live a block away from a Coop, Systembolaget and a few other stores, I can do a quick sample test tomorrow. (I know they have tags similar looking to these but I couldn't swear they're e-ink. I always thought those tags were pretty cool but it drives me nuts when they aren't set and so you have to go around hunting for a price anyway. (Looking at you, Bauhaus!)
There's a finite number of journalists and a finite amount of energy that can be spent on writing exposés and critical editorials.
Historically accurate-ish; she’s clear in her author’s notes that she created some characters to fill gaps. Would second the recommendation, though. The major events are generally real enough, and it’s a compelling way to read about it.
I did a bit of government contracting early on in my career and this seems about right to me.

I think overall the government contracting experiment has failed. I saw my fair share of corruption and ineptitude on the side of the contractors who did everything they could to stall out projects, under deliver or embed themselves hard so that the government was forced to keep using their horrific product.

I think there's just too much incentive for contractors to cheat the system that it results in poor quality software. The people I met were fantastic engineers and smart workers, but management would hold people back or actively engaged in efforts to sabotage developers because getting work done actually meant less profits for them.
They are completely related when you understand that there is a fixed computational budget in which to operate.

Not to mention for Tesla having to abandon all of their training data.
Basically, precisely what they promised back in Dec: https://www.uber.com/blog/california/keeping-you-in-the-driv...

IMHO the lack of precise pricing will hurt them a lot.
I find myself agreeing in some ways. I had my hey-day on the frontend, enjoying all the new things being built for JS devs. Not just the big libraries like React or Vue, but others ones like Rx, Ramda, Lodash, and every other novel abstraction you can imagine. There's some really cool tech there but as a whole it's immature as hell.

My satisfaction as a software dev has increased massively since I've renewed my focus on the backend, and also spent some time with Java and other mature languages.

We still get things badly wrong but at least it's wrong in a way I can understand. I've looked at some new frontend projects and I would have to learn 7 or 8 different abstractions, inside a monorepo, just to understand how to build a simple interface to a collection of APIs.

Fuck that. The churn is too high and you might wonder how people built GUIs at all when you look at a modern web-app codebase.
iOS supports this with "Guided Access" mode. It has to be enabled in settings, then a triple click will turn it off/on. It can have its own passcode as well. I use it when handing my phone to my kids--start a video, enable guided access, and not worry about who they might inadvertently call or photo they might delete.
The top comments are all about the complexity of front ends nowadays and X and Y comparison.

But they're missing the point, this is a really good idea.
Yes. I've been programming for nearly 40 years and I only had to use Subversion a couple of times; I never really learned it. OTOH I have to use git for all kinds of projects. Learning git is essential in a way that SVN never was.

I think part of the reason is that SVN never took over from CVS as completely as git took over from everything else. I think another part of the reason is that the number, size and scope of open-source projects exploded since git and Github appeared, and they mostly chose git.

Also relevant: the only project that I recently interacted with that was using SVN is LLVM, and it was faster/easier to use the Github mirror than to use SVN.
> A weed is merely a plant in the wrong place.

Nah. A weed is an undesired plant, primarily, but also typically one that grows and spreads aggressively and doesn't play nice with the sort of plants one actually wants to cultivate in an area.
I said it was a dumb take, which is an attack on the idea. Saying that one is responsible for ones own impact on the planet isn't a personal attack either.

This is like someone saying that, since other people litter, there's no harm in me littering too. Sure, your individual action doesn't matter but collective action does.

Similarly, by your logic, why should I vote? After all, it is extremely improbable that my vote will have any impact on an election.
Stem 1.8
Are these tags connected to a network? In that case I can definitely see the appeal for chain stores where you need consistent prices across stores in multiple cities. Set the price centrally, and have it come through everywhere without the need for any employees to go around setting new tags. Given all stores are chains these days (sadly) I can definitely imagine those savings add up to offset the cost of the tags. Especially over time and considering how massive some stores are.
I've been to the place they mention in Florida. It's ok. But there are many other trails in the various state parks.
Getting in trouble for looking around on the computer is also a memory I have from certain elementary school teachers. They must have been so paranoid that a kid would wreck the machine by touching it wrong... such expensive things, so hard to fix by their standards.

Luckily, not every teacher thought that way.
>> It's the responsibility of the writer to ensure that when a reader jumps into a chapter, there's enough context and substance to figure out if it's worth reading.

On the one hand I see your point, I could open a random chapter of a physics textbook and likely get some context or motivation for what follows.

On the other, opening a novel to a random chapter would have me totally lost. Did the author fail in their responsibility?

This is chapter 10 of a series of long form posts, and the author explicitly asks you to start at the beginning. I don't think they're beholden to an expectation for a quick recap and justification.
Leaving Pittsburgh because of industrial air pollution
What happens when you get a mutation in CRISPR?