skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Self publishing book vs. writing a blog series
Is it worth authoring a book and self publishing it or converting that book into a blog series?
His goal is to somehow run a tunnel boring machine on Mars, right? He'll certainly be testing out new tech if that's the goal. These machines are magnificently heavy at present, aren't they?
But does developing your spelling actually matter?

Maybe being able to spell perfectly is about as useful a skill as putting shoes on a horse or chipping a piece of stone into an arrowhead.

What if 100% of the time that s devoted to spelling was devoted to something else, like just reading?
I'm not talking about not allowing. I merely explained, because you asked, why pattern matching does not play well with mutation, and it doesn't. equals and hashCode also don't play well with mutation, and indeed they are not automatically generated for mutable objects, but they are for records. As the author of a class you can provide a reasonable implementation of them, as well as of a deconstructor for pattern-matching, but that requires knowing more about the particulars of the class.

There are other reasons for not allowing mutable records, but most -- including pattern matching -- can be summarized as "that's not what records are about, which is being 'dumb' data aggregates". You can read a more detailed discussion of the subject here: https://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/amber/datum.html
"In 2014–15 mineral extraction in Australia was valued at 212 billion Australian dollars. Of this, Coal represented 45,869 million, oil and natural gas 40,369 million, Iron ore 69,486 million, Gold ore 13,685 million, and other metals 7,903 million." [1]

45B is still a lot of money to remove from the economy. It's less than I would have predicted (mining is only 5.8% of economy), but it's still a non-trivial amount. And 45B gets you a lot of lobbyists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Australia
That Sydney Metro tunnel is coming in at nearly double the initial budgeted cost. It's over $1B per km of tunnel. Australian infrastructure projects are hardly something to be proud of.
I don't know about Northrup Grumman, but General Electric, also a major defense contractor, could fire anti-Iraq-war hosts from MSNBC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program
There are large-scale anistropies in the universe, and the origin of symmetry-breaking at cosmological scales is an unsolved problem. Either a force or type of matter is unaccounted for / incorrectly modeled, or the big bang was not symmetrical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_(cosmology)
I probably wouldn’t have attempted it when the oldest was that young, but my girls were 7 and 5 when we started.
> You are completely missing the point of Nullable

Am I? Apparently so is everyone else because Microsoft has re-worked Nullable<T> in C# 8 to be almost exactly like Java Optional! Silly me right?
Thanks, I hadn't heard of the term past practices before. I guess I haven't experienced being unionized, and just take it for granted that an employer can make my life worse if it wanted to. Sort of boggles my mind that a union can negotiate things with the employer in vague terms, and the understanding is that things will always be "just as good" unless explicitly spelled out.
My pet hypothesis is that the universe we experience is on the surface of the singularity of our black hole. This neatly explains some things:

- The Great Attractor would simply be the volume deeper in singularity. The cone of influence for the entire universe tends towards the center of our singularity.

- Dark energy, and the varying quantity of it, would simply be the amount of matter falling into our black hole. It would naturally start as a large amount (consisting of our parent star/mass) and later see variation as matter falls into it.

- Dimensionless physical constants may have been fields in the parent universe. As an infinitely small point, our universe singularity would resolve a continuous gradient to a single value. Our child universes would have a single value of gravity, for example, which could change over time (but would be constant across the universe as they changed).

I've got a huge list of interesting consequences, but as an armchair physicist it's probably all quack science :)
Yes that's the "official" view but relatively few people actually believe that.
Sure but it has a huge financial impact. Its the second largest source of export earnings and the main source of electric power. The Australian economy has been hugely successful thanks due to coal, there is no way voters will take a big cut to their standard of living, especially with most of them overleveraged into property.
First stable semiconductor neutron detector heralds hand-held devices
Search for "minimalist design timeless google" and you'll find an endless number of posts exactly like this one. Bloating the web with these copycat posts isn't very minimalist.
Yes, it's absolutely not innovation - but this is actually really cool in the context of Java, which was never an innovator.
Sure, you could do a lot of things. I'm not arguing for capitalism as a fair and moral system, just that i think that OP should account for why this isn't happening/doesnt work in order for his argument that the issue is concentration of capital (as opposed to some other issue) to make sense
Usually real-world code has a lot of context and references such that stand-alone expression evaluation is often of limited value. Maybe there are tricks of the trade to solve this, but they are not obvious to newbies.

It sounds like one has to throw away years of "imperative habits" and just do everything different: reading, debugging, structuring, etc. For us non-Sheldons, it's hard to overhaul our head in a month.
"Alternative News" as in "Alternative Facts"? It looks like all sources are disreputable fake news outlets..
The best overview of the back pain industry is the recent book, "Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery"[0]. The author's interview here[1] is a chilling survey of how the back pain industry extracts money from the population. The article mentions back pain becoming independent of injury, and that idea is from Dr. Sarno[2] in the 1970s, and he was ridiculed for decades about that idea. It is now recognized that a pain circuit can establish itself and run long after all physical injury is healed.

One reason back pain is tricky is that the intravertebral muscles spasm to protect the spinal core, and the spasms don't stop for up to ten days. By that time, the patient may have seen three doctors and had three different therapies. When the spasms subside, they associate the last treatment as the one that "healed" their back, when in fact, 80% of all back pain resolves itself with or without treatment.

There is a growing body of evidence-based research into exercise and back pain. The most studied device is the MedX lumbar extension machine[3][4], invented by Arthur Jones, the genius behind Nautilus exercise machines. Slowly the knowledge to strengthen the specific perispinal muscles is spreading[5].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Crooked-Outwitting-Industry-Getting-R...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztdKosnQHaE

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Sarno

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z-FyeG7pqY

[4] http://ssudl.solent.ac.uk/2270/

[5] https://highintensitybusiness.com/podcast/dr-ted-dreisinger/
I'm having a very, very hard time believing this. I agree, there is geopolitics at play, but it's the cause and effect which I dispute.

It's about hazardous chemicals and hazardous waste which aren't tolerated in the west.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-15/american-...
It's worth pointing out that Lab Lord and Swords & Wizardry have free PDFs, and emulate the Holmes-era/pre AD&D rules, with optional "advanced" rules. Old School Essentials is reputed to be the best organized restatement of the B/X rules. OSRIC is meant to be a restatement of AD&D 1e.
> leading to mess in all JVM-based languages like Scala, Kotlin or Clojure

!!!

Type-erasure of generics is what gives the other languages flexibility.

Scala eventually gave up C# precisely because CLR reification proved a huge challenge with Scala semantics.

You may not like JVM type-erasure but Scala would literally not be possible without it.

---

If anything, I would argue that Java should have done full type-erasure, not just type-erasure of generic types. (That does come with downsides though.)
Scenes from the latimes newsroom: We are all supposed to take phishing training
I can add one data point to the glute component. I used to see a chiropractor. They are mostly useless for this kind of thing°, but did recommend glute foam rolling, which somehow helps a lot with my lower back pain. I would encourage people to try it even if they're sure the pain is in their lower back. Something about rolling those muscles really well helps me a lot.

° IMO. I'm sure it helps others and is not a point I make very strongly.
I personally admire Lisp conceptually. It's a work of art. It's the practical use as tool in a team environment that you cannot carefully control hiring is where I have skepticism.
Ok, then Tesla should really prove they can provide that or find ways to compensate those with land based astronomy tooling. They have done neither and have not communicated in any form that they want to.
Not in the U.S.
NSA and GitHub ‘Rickrolled’ Using Windows CryptoAPI Bug
In addition to the other points, it seems like it would be much easier for the Chinese to infiltrate Taiwanese industry with spies/saboteurs since they share cultures.

Blackmail of key individuals is probably easier too since Taiwanese are more likely to have family members on the mainland and/or Hong Kong.
According to what? Just because you're not in survival mode in the truest form of the word doesn't mean you aren't trying to maintain whatever you have. Expectations can still be set, email doesn't turn off, and personal relationships (kids, family, friends) continue on, along with personal goals, health, increased cost of living, etc.

Just because it's 'voluntary' doesn't mean it's not work or it's not stress or it doesn't affect you.
Which means Japan needs to exit the coal import business, they are the largest importer of Australian coal.
American coal production has dropped significantly too, though not as dramatically as UK consumption:

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

and

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php

From 896 million short tons in 2015 to 690 million in 2019. More decline ahead in 2020:

EIA estimates that U.S. coal production declined by 65 million short tons (MMst) (9%) to 690 MMst in 2019. In 2020, EIA expects total U.S. coal production will decline by a further 14% to 597 MMst because of anticipated declines in both exports and domestic consumption in the electric power sector.
No insects but many more ticks.
It's an area that is plainly in the need for global regulation that currently has none.
I'm a-ok cancelling government backed student loans if the government gets out of the student loan business.
When the news got out that the Der Spiegel top journalist were inventing stuff (and got fired, but not before winning several prices for made up articles), there was a note that fact checking had a major exception. Original work by journalists did not get fact checked. If they claimed they traveled to the moon and ate a rock made of cheese then a story about how the moon is made of cheese got printed without any checks.

Did BBC have similar exceptions?
From Ivory to Metal (Concatenative Programming) (2017)
Depends on the telescope, but yes.
I flew from Shanghai to Amsterdam 2 years ago, there was a point there where there were windmills as far as the eye could see 100s and 100s, I tried toicount and gave up .... looking closer they were clustered around open cast coal pits and presumably dirty power stations - this was west of Beijing and I'd guess a big source of their horrible pollution.

It's a smart thing to do, essentially they're leveraging the existing transmission line infrastructure for coal for future wind
>Estimating distances? Layout? I can't see how the difference between decimal and binary changes anything.

Whether it changes everything is neither here not there.

It might still result in the same output (e.g. the lack of precision might not matter for layout purposes), but there's absolutely no domain need to do the calculations in FP except for performance or lack of a better number type in the language.

In all of these cases, the exact match would be better than lack of precision, aside from the performance and similar (memory, etc) costs.

That is, if decimal was computing-wise as fast and as available as FP, there would be absolutely no reason to use FP. It's not a choice of mathematical need (e.g. not imposed by the calculation) but a choice of computing constraints.

>Decimal math isn't built into most of the languages or processors we use, so that's why I keep asking what you'll use.

In my experience many languages have it (C#, Java, Python, Javascript is getting it, etc) and people don't use it.

And in most cases, being in the processors wouldn't matter - we use FP for all kinds of non-critical performance calculations, not because it's needed for the speedup, but because it's there.

When there is indeed a need for the CPU-support, I'd use FP myself, sure. But not in most other cases, and absolutely not for money and other cases where precision matters (but people still use FP).
This is my main gripe. How do I actually combat the BS once I've detected it?
They all typically have some kind of hypothesis that guides their investing. That doesn't come out of the blue.

Now what their investment strategy is versus what pays off, well that I'd love to see empirical data to shed some light.

I'll also say that building up their networks to get those deals is not just a matter of luck, especially for those that repeatedly do well.
The internet produced thousands of wonderful things. Your argument is 100% baseless.

Astronomy is nice too, but I will choose the internet every time, if forced to choose. We have wonderful images of the whole sky in all kinds of spectrum in incredible resolution.
I don't think that Portland is very far behind Seattle in this problem, though.
Programming languages aren't able to express arbitrary real numbers, so to "determine whether a given real number is representable as an int or not" is mostly meaningless in a programming language as opposed to a computer algebra system.

What you can do is:

- determine if a float is an integer (trunc(x) == x),

- convert a float to a certain integer type with some kind of rounding, or get an error if it's out of range (see my comment with double_to_uint64),

- convert a float to a certain integer type exactly, or get an error if it's not representable (e.g. by doing both of the above).

The basic reason that so many people fail to use floats correctly is that they act like operations on floats are equivalent to operations on the real numbers they represent, when in fact they are usually defined as the operation on real numbers rounded to a representable value.
fracking is a very expensive form of gas, versus say Qatar. Also seems to have large greenhouse effects via leakage.
KnowledgeNet: A Benchmark for Knowledge Base Population
I hope that all reforestation programs in the future will use local native species and will not use fast-growing non-natives such as Eucalyptus. The "woodland" around, for example Berkeley California, is so depressing to contemplate due to the dominance of Eucalyptus and the corresponding lack of fauna.
>I merely explained, because you asked, why pattern matching does not play well with mutation, and it doesn't.

What you explained so far is that it doesn't play well with concurrent modification. And then I said that the "not playing well" comes from the concurrent part, not from the modification part.

I'm less interested in the philosophy of records and more in the use cases they support.
I consider the storyline that one of the generals has in regard to: water supply contamination, as a main plot.
We have a subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/osr.
You believe there's no use in developing global cooperation to regulate issues like this? Because if so, we have far more to worry about than satellites.
Just the country, but only one day a month, business hours only, and it's an hour drive each way to the dump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
> Only time will tell if I am in fact right.

I guess you prove a point here: you trust that the deployment of your GKE module allows you to be safe, so your investment vs risk trade seems to satisfy you. But you, yourself, cannot even predict how insecure you are at the moment due to the complexity of the software solutions you are using.

> I suppose we'll see if companies with sysadmins have more breaches than the guys who run their own ops using container orchestration etc.

Oh, I do agree, at least with the current state of sysadmins out there.

But the problem is that you loose control of the integrity of your system once you reach a point where software complexity becomes your security entry point.

If you are sure the containers you will be using are secure, have sane defaults, are up to date, etc, then fine, good job! I just don't trust that most people will be able to reassure me that. And please keep in mind that in your case, the target is not your container platform, the target would be the containers in that platform, and the services they run.
> AFAIK (IANAL)

I see what you did there.
Why would you prefer this over, as another commenter already pointed out, a web standard like the CSS `prefers-color-scheme` media feature? A web feature like that works across websites, is better equipped to deal with user accessibility issues, and doesn't require Javascript.
Here's my high level summary, as a former instructor.

1. Berkeley offered tuition remission as a benefit to grad student instructors essentially as a stipend/subsidy of living.

2. The union representing instructors negotiated tuition remission for undergrad instructors doing the same job as grad instructors, primarily to protect grad students from being short-changed by departments trying to hire cheaper undergrad instructors over the grad instructors who had greater need for the income.

3. CS class sizes increased, and the CS department lacked the funds to hire both enough grad and undergrad instructors to properly staff, so they offered 8-hour positions to undergrads as an alternative.

4. Undergrads were more than happy to take these positions, spend a few hours a week teaching, earn some income, and get close to professors. As 20-hour-a-week instructor, I still felt like it was an incredibly cushy and privileged job.

I wouldn't argue that the union is to blame here. It seems that only the CS department (as opposed to other departments) has hit this budgetary issue of being unable to afford enough instructors to staff its classes--the solution to me is that the university should look at the massive growth in the department and allot commensurate funding for instructors. Instead, the department took a (fairly reasonable) alternative solution which apparently has run afoul of some labor agreement.

Also, as someone who knows some instructors who stand to benefit from this decision: almost no one is happy about it. No one gains except these instructors--the department, future students, and future would-be instructors are all getting screwed (unless the department gets much more funding as a result of this).
If we collapse the two concepts of

- best possible X

- most popular X

are we loosing possibly interesting perspectives on X?
Don't forget the ugliness that is AMP. I understand the pursuit of answers rather than links, but for a variety of reasons, it's not working. DDG is nice, but the results are often lackluster (especially local results, as you say).

The sad reality is, I am having trouble discovering new content online even if I have a fairly specific search query. I am fed a list of the same websites ad nauseam.

I can't find much in regards to in-depth discussions, interesting blogs, or thought-provoking material. The worst part is, for communities that do provide this content, secrecy is a feature not a bug.
Launching big telescopes into space is really expensive.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Answers to your questions/comments:

1. "Quality" of each source is a historical rating for each site. This varies as sites write higher or lower scoring articles over time. So not a judgment call we are making.

2. Factual tone is a set of NLP algorithms evaluating the degree and extent of emotional words used as a percentage of the total text. There are also other indicators like how many first person statements are present, unnecessary adverbs etc. Not perfect but directionally accurate and useful as part of the overall rubric.

3. Author expertise does not have subjectivity. Articles are classified into one of several subject areas and we look at how often the author's prior work falls in the same subject area and how well those prior articles rated.

I'll add to our FAQ after your response to see which issues remain unresolved after my comments above. Thanks again.
I used it as a media server. I could still use it for that because a media server doesn't need a screen, but my wife won't allow it to sit in the living room if it doesn't have a pretty screen saver running on it.
Launch a bunch of small telescopes, connect them with a rigid structure. Keep it shaded. Shouldn't be impossible. And with no gravity and no atmosphere, even a light structure will keep it all positioned very precisely.
You describe precisely one of my points there. Its incredible how comfortable people are touching components that they don't fully understand. :D
Australia produces ~6% of the worlds coal [0]. That is the only thing nature could care about; figures like % exports and per capita numbers are meaningless. 6% is a big enough slice of the pie for everyone to argue about. The 34% figure specifically is a bit meaningless because it is by value and there is big price (about x4?) difference between met coal (Queensland) vs. thermal coal (NSW). It doesn't make sense to try and compare Australian met coal exports to, say, Indonesian thermal.

Also as a counter argument, attempting to pressure China economically by choking their imports would probably end badly for us.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_prod...
hacker news has been incredibly influential on me in exemplifying what a site could be.

I too have been thinking about the philosophy of a minimal amount of "design." After a certain point or certain amount of "design" I feel like we have to ask ourselves, "what's it all for?" I've been getting into more front end territory and have been delighted with how much HTML does.

For me, it's not so much about minimalism. I feel that minimalism semantically conveys, "the absolute bare minimum possible." Whereas I like to see the design goal as, "what is necessary to fulfill the required purpose."

Shameless little plug here, this is a little experiment I've been working on:

erictheread.org
Terrible decision. The Berkeley EECS department is already cash strapped while serving an ever growing CS student body. This probably will lead to massive decreases in class sizes, as it is not worth it to appoint 8h TAs (incredibly common in CS classes across the board). As a result, the CS GPA cap to declare will probably go up to 3.5 or even 3.7, and CS education will be denied to many students.

Speaking from personal experience, as an 8 hour TA for 3 semesters, I think the current wage ($30 an hour) is more than fair. Usually 8 hour TAs just hold a 1 hour weekly discussion and OH session, along with some grading -- tuition remission sounds a bit excessive.
Musk never learned that most of the cost of subways is the stations and supporting infrastructure, not digging the tunnel itself.

Musk has not proposed any improvements to the expensive parts of tunneling.