skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s not just radioactive material that would betray a past nuclear war. Some of the stable decay products are extremely rare in nature, and their presence in the ratios we know atomic weapons produce would be a dead giveaway.
It has a halting problem.
Great post, although I would like to know his approach for handling the last case. There is a related post: "Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize"

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050114-00/?p=36...
The feature side usually does decrease every generation; it's just that the feature size for, say, a "7nm" process is not exactly 7nm.
Far easier to dump meth in the water cooler
There's a ragout made from lungs (Beuschel) that is enjoyed in the former Austro-Hungarian empire area and absolutely nowhere else. If you want to try it, the best can be had at the Meierei, just don't forget to reserve a seat a few weeks ahead especially if your lunch aligns with the strudel time, the place is packed to the gills then.
This is consistent with my observations in the Jiading area - low pollution days but mask usage around 80% for general populace and 95% for service workers (store clerks, etc).

We’ve decided to leave China before things get any worse. I’m not looking forward to bringing my family through the airport this week though...
Emoji, part 10: state of the nation
"In the end none of the above matters at all."

It matters critically if China, or anyone else, is in any way lying about anything.

Official reports are 2K infected, if it's actually 100K and they are not telling the WHO, it's really, really bad.

What the 'put on the news' is another matter and gray area concerning information control in crisis times (i.e. trying to stop mass panic). But with the WHO and other governments, it's another story.

It's not like they can entirely hide these things, I really wonder what kind of other 'interested parties' are making their own clandestine measurements.
Interesting question, and not one I'm finding ready answers to. Among the better:

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5583/can-an-artifi...

Low-Earth orbits will decay over periods ranging from years to millennia, based on residual air resistance.

Those effects are minimal in geosynchronous orbit, though there's still some residual atmospheric drag which might be significant over millions to billions of years. The period under concern is roughly 5 billion years, at which point the Sun will have ballooned to a red giant, enveloping the Earth. (Increased solar radiance, as well as various cycles and changes on Earth will likely have long made it uninhabitable by life within the next 800 million years or so.)

Other effects include solar wind, possible interactions with the Earth's magnetic field, precessional effects caused by the Earth's axial tilt and irregular geometry (to use that word in its literal sense), as well as gravitational perturbation from the Moon and possibly other bodies within the solar system.

There's a slight possibility of impacts, though those would be highly unlikely -- space is big, as Doug said, and satellites tiny. Even the Earth only gets wallopped every few tens of millions of years. Though any such impacts might create a sufficient debries field within the orbital zone to affect other satellites. The Geostationary band itself is quite narrow, and preferential placement is above the equator, which would focus placement for potential interaction.
Seems like Google (etc.) could add a "avoid roads that aren't well-traveled" feature with the data they already have.

The data they use to figure out whether traffic is light or heavy (GPS location, speed, heading, path, etc.) could also be used to figure out whether roads are well-traveled.

And they could even throw in month or season (or weather) as a variable. If the road is well-traveled in the summer but not in the winter, maybe there's a reason.

This could be useful not only for winter but also for other issues like people who are driving an unreliable car or are low on gas (or not good about filling it up).
There has always been high level statistics and theoretical modeling going on in biology. Biology is a vast field, encompassing field work to lab work to clinical work to computer science to quantum physics and theoretical math in the context of evolution and population genetics.
But plastics don't occur spontaneously in nature, do they? So why would any species of plastic eating life form survive until our days after running out of all the available early plastic?
Here's a radical request.

A living wage for non-tenured faculty.
+1. I think this is something that gets lost in discussions around null. Generally, everyone complaining about C's handling of nulls will recommend languages that make nullable-pointers opt-in by having non-nullable references and making them the default. The argument people make is not that C should somehow drop the entire concept of null; the argument is that people should use languages where a type has to opt-in to accepting null.
What's your personal take on habit formation?
I. E what are some non obvious tricks and connections have you made on your own journey to form and maintain good habits?
Organizing large group trips via 1 spreadsheet
Reminder that 84% of US stocks are owned by the richest 10%: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/02/stock-bubbles-r-us.html

News like this is a horrific display of wealth inequality, rent-seeking and late stage capitalism. Suffering of the many, for the benefit of the few.
Hollywood pays male actors more than it pays female actors. Usually. There are exceptions. Some females get equal pay. Asked why, asked how, asked what's makes you special, one actress said, "I asked for it."

Woody Allen said ninety-percent of success is just showing up. (I paraphrased that.) You've showed up. Now you need to ask people to pay for the value they receive.

I recommend a book titled "Guerilla Advertising." Brainstorm with friends. Ask everyone you know... This is like phrasing a Google search; What you get depends upon what you ask. Your first question should be, "What should I ask?" I ask, are you marketing to the wrong people?

Read about the failures of Abraham Lincoln. The moral of is story - and the stories of many others - is that is isn't "failure" until you accept it and give up. Until you give up non-success is just a part of the learning curve.
Late reply, but it often is if you find the right doctor. The problem is the right doctor is often very expensive. All doctors should do this however there are so many quacks that read webmd and think they should be part of the given and take. It reminds me of the thread about words you can use that let people know you know what you are doing. Usually once I mention "peer reviewed" it seems to help.
The Polygons of Another World: Game Boy Advance
What’s Important in Financial Planning / Investing
Brave is easier to fingerprint than Internet Explorer
86-DOS
The Threat Posed by Technological Disruption (World Economic Forum)
> Star fuel management is a difficult but necessary problem for advanced species to solve.

I imagine that's not necessarily true. It may be that advanced civilizations harvest energy from stars, but live in interstellar space ships (which would also explain why we can't spot evidence of them).
Yuval Harari at Davos 2020. Key points:

- Humanity faces three existential threats this century: nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption.

- Technology risks dividing the world into wealthy elites and exploited "data colonies," he explained.

- "If you like the World Cup - you are already a globalist," he said, making the case for better cooperation to tackle the challenges.
Different, yes. Unknowable, no.

We know the general distribution of continents dating to 550 million years ago (Gondwanaland), and to some extent prior, though that largely predates the Cambrian explosion of complex life on Earth.

Ancient coastlines, estuaries, and riverbeds leave quite distinctive geological traces and would be detectable. We'd be looking for ancient civilisations on or near such features.
I remember reading about that on wikipedia years ago. Don't remember the name, but it's the site of a large crater, and I think there was also glass in the area similar to what's created by modern nuclear explosions.
"Stocks only go up"
> An important theorem in dimensional analysis is the Buckingham π theorem, which states that the laws of physics do not depend on the choice of a specific system of measurement.

That's not what the Buckinham pi theorem states. The Buckingham pi theorem is a statement about the functional dependencies of dimensionally homogeneous equations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckingham_%CF%80_theorem

I guess the writer mirrored some language on Wikipedia which indicated that the physical laws being independent of the choice of units is a consequence of the theorem.

Anyway, I don't mean to detract from what otherwise appears to be an interesting and comprehensive summary of dimensional homogeneity checking in programming languages.
Problems with Working Remotely from India
Are you familiar with binary coded decimal? Decimal format floats are in somewhat the same vein.

See, for instance, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal32_floating-point_for...
Ah yes, downvotes. HN shows its true sociopathy.
Show HN: Remote91 – Payroll, Taxation, Hiring of Remote Developers in India
That works with clean water. Most people can go a few days to a week without water ("3 days" is an oft-quoted factoid), but that's about it.

Having water, survival without food is hard limited on a person's body fat and their metabolic rate. For example, I have 80 lbs / 36 kg of sacrificial body mass. Assume extracting 3400 kcal/lbs of fat and a 2000 kcal/day RMR (let's call it 2500 because of activity). That works out to ~109 days / ~3.5 months of survival.

IANAD: Also helpful to prevent death & long-term damage would be:

- electrolytes and minerals (Na, K, Mg, Ca, Fe)

- vitamins (c, b12, a, b-complex, e, k, d)

- small quantities of lipids to empty the gallbladder to prevent gallstones.

To accomplish this, a six-month supply of multivitamins, a dried electrolyte mix and a large bottle of shelf-stable oil would be the bare-minimum. (Do the rationing math ahead-of-time so that you don't die.)

Even better would be to avoid this scenario altogether:

- carry a properly-registered GPS PLB ($250-400 USD) with a maintained battery (I saw one model of PLB lasted 5 years, after which it needed replacement at a dealer for an unspecified cost. It also has a hard limit on the number of self tests that can be performed without a battery replacement service. This is exactly why we need the right-to-repair. I came across a PLB with an user-replaceable battery, but it's $1000 USD and the batteries cost $175 USD (when it costs about $15 to make), so clearly the PLB business-model is a razor-blade/inkjet-printer economy that is all about planned-obsolescence and lock-in.)

- a signaling mirror (with aiming hole)

- a multi-chamber, insanely-loud, rescue whistle
Any adult in America can buy stock and participate. At Robinhood.com, you can buy fractional shares for as little as $1 and no commission on the trade.

No, I'm not a robinhood user nor do I own stock in robinhood. It's just an example of how it is never been easier for any American to invest in stocks.
I love racket. Does anyone know of a Racket to Javascript compiler. Would love to be able to create Racket powered web games with this for educational purposes
Yep, such is the nature of inflation.
It seems like it is?

>The Metropolitan Police Service announced on ... that it will begin the operational use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology.

>The technology, from NEC, provides police officers with an additional tool to assist them in doing what officers have always done – to try to locate and arrest wanted people

Or are you asking why they don't just hire more police? Because presumably the answer is that you get better savings by augmenting the existing force to be X times more effective than it currently is.
Why Luanda Leaks Is Bigger Than Angola
Or QE.
Should perma ban whoever posted this to hn. Either this is marketing attempt or someone not having a single clue what they just read (hint it's a marketing attempt and a very bad one as well).
You are being downvoted but I think this point is important: increasing stock prices disproportionately benefit the wealthy and widen the gap between rich and poor.

edit: and now I am being downvoted for merely pointing this out.
Hi Ben, kudos for building something you believe in.

My first impression is you have to talk to customers more and use face to face interviews.
There is already a market for this kind of product so the issue might be:
- bad targeting. Are you sure you talk to the right people? Who buy this kind of product ? Is the same people buying the product than the one using it ?
- low reach. Conversions can be rare. Have you reached enough people ?
- messaging. Do people really value your differenciation ? Do they understand your message?
- price. Is it too expansive ? Not expansive enough to be credible
- bad channel. How does the other company sell their product ? B2B sales ?

It seems to be you rely extensively on digital marketing to "talk" with prospects. Most of the time, one face to face can bring 10 times more info quickly.

I would also suggest to read the "Test Mom". You may have done customers interview the wrong way

I hope this help and wish you good luck
Don't get too excited, it doesn't yet support add-ons like ublock origin...
So a few passive-aggressive comments are "hateful"? I find this a really strange way to put things, to put it mildly, especially considering that overall, Lobsters does better than most of the internet which is often filled with much more direct content.

I rarely see content moderated (the mod log is 100% public). Lobsters is much more narrowly focused than HN, so off-topic stories tend to get removed. That's ... a feature, not an attempt to "censor dissent". Honestly, if you want to make these kind of strong accusations you should back them up.

The same applies to the "censorship by merging" claim from the parent comment. Reasonable people can disagree on how to best merge stories etc, and that's all fine, but claiming "mod censorship" is quite a strong accusation regarding the motives of the mods.
How does this compare to a wiki[1] ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
My 401k is invested in that same stock market, along with the retirement accounts of every other person in the United States. I hope the market continues to rise, especially since my parents will be retiring soon.
Just spitballing here, but I'm thinking the bottom 90% doesn't own much stock due to lack of funds. Not because they don't know how or because transaction fees are too high.
This reminds me a lot of the semantic web attempts back in the pre-2010 years. How do you plan to succeed where so many other have failed? Or will this end up as a glorified notetaking app like Notion?
> Even so, it's worth noting that "hero" comes with baggage and that other terms like "rockstar," "champion," "leader," "grunt," "maniac," "dominatrix," or "martyr," might have been used instead and might have conveyed different implications. But for the sake of simplicity, let's stick with "hero."

For the sake of simplicity they could have left out these two sentences.
Are you a member?

...hook me up? =]
I guessed so, but to believe a similar scenario where a man-made virus or disease isn't going to happen in the future is extremely naive.
Much of the wealthy got that way by investing in stocks to begin with. If you don't invest in stocks, you won't benefit from a rising market. Why not do the obvious, and start investing yourself?

Don't invest in lottery tickets, which are mathematically a losing game.
You live in a Thai village? How do the costs compare to living in a larger city?
Now that's an interesting thought - look at biological adaptations in the ancient ancestors of existing animals. If a 40 million year old extinct insect appears to be able to process plastics, that's a pretty good indication that _its_ ancient ancestors had a diet of plastics. Biology might just be the "last artifact".

I suppose that's not terribly useful when looking at mars though :P
I used to do Search and Rescue and I can absolutely tell you in all cases the best thing to do when lost is to stay put. Unless you are in immediate danger, or can move to a high point to get a cell signal but remain within visual range of your car/tent/etc. don't leave.

SAR teams only have the resources to search a relatively small area (dozens of square miles at most), so if you start wandering off from your point last known (which we determine based on interviews with people with knowledge of your plans, tire tracks, open gates, cell phone pings, and other clues) you are removing yourself from the area where professional searchers and first responders are looking for you.

Your time should be spent trying to create a signal. Make a small fire that you can keep under control and burn rubber/plastic to create dark smoke. Lay out reflective materials. Whistle, clap, or yell every 15 minutes. Keep listening for rescuers calling out.
“It’s ok”
>who is buying these stocks? It’s not individuals. It’s not even pension funds. It’s not the private sector. Almost all the stock purchases are being bought back by corporations in share buyback programs. In other words, companies are buying their own stocks in order to push up the price

stocks keep going up while only a minority benefits and not much is returned into actual growth http://michael-hudson.com/2017/08/stock-on-trumponomics/
Haggis (Programming Language)
You can start investing in stocks for as little as $1. Lack of funds is not the problem.
Yeah that's way more than what I thought you initially meant. I recently bought a car and the max I could pay with a given payment source was $7,500. So even if I wanted to pay cash for the whole thing they apparently wouldn't have allowed it. I guess they wanted to spread out their risk. A place that allows a $50k all cash payment might actually be somewhat hard to find.

My main point is that the finance companies don't provide enough value to warrant a % of every dollar I spend. Not to mention that the % is most likely already baked into the price of everything I buy, so that charge is actually being paid by me the consumer, rather than by the retailer. I don't think there's ever been a time throughout history where finance companies have been paid on so many separate occasions throughout a single product purchase lifecycle: e.g. finance charges trickled throughout the supply chain before it arrives at the retailer, finance charges paid to/from retailer vendors, the % collected being discussed here, the extra % charged if the purchaser doesn't pay their CC bill on time, etc. The best and easiest way to begin taking power away from these companies is to simply start paying cash at all times, especially for the more expensive items considering they charge a percentage. Then switch to paying with personal check once your cash-holding-amount discomfort exceeds your retailers-will-have-my-personal-info-and-might-use-facial-recognition discomfort.
If you have something of good enough value, you should be able to get something cash in return.

It could be that you're not creating enough value? Sure, there's some. But true product market fit is when they beg to throw money at you.

It could be that you're using the wrong revenue model. Firefox, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google all make a lot of wealth/value, and they're also pretty rich. But nobody directly pays for the service.

To quote Paul Graham:

"If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup. It certainly describes what happened in Viaweb. We avoided dying till we got rich."

There is one reason to not shut down: you have a lot of data on what didn't go right, and you could use that data to see where else to go.

The only real reason to shut down is either you've run out of money or willpower. Even in that case, you could still sell off the site to competitors as the domain name and newsletter itself has good marketing value.
So what if the rich are getting richer too? Are you suggesting that the poor would be better off without access to stocks or that we should ban stock trading because the poor can't invest as much? They still see a return on their investments and receive a better return than they would from keeping the money in their bank account.
La Nuit Des Temps by Barjavel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_nov...
How many Americans have a 401k, retirement accounts, or pension funds? I'm having trouble finding concrete numbers, but it seems to be around 40-60% averaging the sources I came across. In addition, most people reading Hacker News probably work at large public tech companies and own stock in them, so this news is relevant to them.
The osdev wiki has a barebones example for a few languages. However, they're all x86 centered and literally just get you booted to a main entrypoint. Which, arguably, is about as far as they should since osdev takes quite a bit of dedication and research.
"The poorest third of households buy half of all lotto tickets, according to a Duke University study in the 1980s, in part because lotteries are advertised most aggressively in poorer neighborhoods."

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotteri...

[EDIT] It's not an insignificant amount either: half of $70 billion. From the same article:

"According to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, lotteries took in $70.1 billion in sales in the 2014 fiscal year. That’s more than Americans in all 50 states spent on sports tickets, books, video games, movie tickets, and recorded music sales."
If I only have $2, why would I put $1 in stocks when I could put all $2 in food?
If the author has a sense of humor anything like mine, yes but it is worth it.
People making $180k a year lack funds to buy stocks? Yeah, that’s a no from me.
The Future of Food Is Zero Waste
Never talk about stocks on HN. You will be downvoted by people who missed out on the 10 year bull market and desperately trying to justify their mistake by saying its a rigged scam that is akin to playing roulette at a casino.
I also had a similar question as the GP, but more specifically, is it useful for a Rails app? I'm trying to think how much code we actually have that performs "deeper" business-logic, and then it tends to be also used in very specific paths... There isn't a huge amount of that. So is Sorbet helpful for views/controllers/models/presenters as well?
Performance may not matter that much, depending on the application. I've got some arduino capable boards monitoring temperatures once a minute, but I'm using lua because the documentation for my board was less handwavy for lua than for arduino (it's an esp8266 board; the c environment is a little weird).
Microsoft’s sneaky plan to switch Chrome searches from Google to Bing
84% in value? or in denominations?
The History Channel had a 20 episode series called Life After People that looked at what would happen if every human suddenly disappeared.

The National Geographic had a similar, but only one episode program looking at that questions, called Aftermath: Population Zero.

I have a vague recollection of seeing something like this on one of Discovery's channels, too, but I may be mixing that up with an article in their magazine.

My recollection is that they all concluded that in the very long term (tens of millions of years), if some other species evolved intelligence it would probably not be able to tell we were here.

Some of the materials we used might survive, but things like glaciers in ice ages would grind them to a powder. The next intelligent species might notice these odd concentrations of unusual combinations of metal particles and powdered long chain carbon compounds, but there would be nothing to tell them it wasn't made by some unknown natural process.