skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personal preference does not make any option objectively better. So, my suggestion is to explore your options. I enjoy a 4” foam pad on plywood over several thousand dollar mattresses, but it’s not a question of cost just comfort. Water beds are another cheap option that have largely fallen out of favor.

PS: Body weight is a huge part of this. Gain or lose significant weight and your preference is likely to change.
Tangent: is there a reason that CPUs’ instruction sets aren’t designed with explicit “hint”-ops in them to let a compiler assert “I’m going to execute some instructions that’re going to draw a lot of power about 1000 cycles from now, so start ramping up for it now”? That’d basically eliminate what Intel calls “license-switching” costs.

Do they just not believe in compiler authors to be able to emit these kinds of hints? Is there too much legacy code that would come without the hints for it to be worthwhile? Would it just not be worth it given how often OS context switches could drop the CPU directly from regular code in one process to AVX2 code in another process?
>While what you say is true, the contents of these meetings should be public knowledge.

The decisions, yes. But not recordings of every brainfart of every participant.

>means there is probably something there are is damning to someone

Probably. At least something that can be spun to be damning. However, I do not subscribe to the view that the end justifies the means. We live in times where every bad joke by a member of the elites is twisted into an outrage, and not too much good comes off this.
A climate-friendly carpooling app idea
Greek GDP is still 40% below 2008. Almost no serious reforms were passed. Greece did the largest default in history and somehow still ended up with 181% dept/gdp with absolutely nothing to show for it, the Troika just continued funding the kleptocracy.
No doubt because most large web corporations have completely switched to javascript for their anchors (ie, #) and no longer use HTML spec anchors that actually work. I'm looking at you Microsoft Github.
It is a pet peeve of mine when I hear a scientist parrot this trope:

"always kind of wondering why there’s persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on"

It seems like we have lost all rational and respect for skepticism and correlating verification in science.

Personally I think warming is real (I am skeptical about all the doomsday predictions, as all of them have been flat out wrong.) but I would far from venture to say it is settled, there are still really big issues like the disapproval of the Hockeystick paper which a portion of other research relies on. The Pause Buster paper and the major discrepancy in Tree Ring data. Not to mention that the CRU antics gives plenty of valid reasons to be skeptical of clear agendas invading science. These bots being more proof of the case, there are clearly agendas on both sides and everything needs to be validated. Skepticism is a health part of science and making authoritarian statements like "it is settled" only invites the suspicion that one is trying to deflect true scrutiny, whether that is the intent or not.
Does anyone else find it suspicious that a government run by the party that is suppose to be hands off and “pro business” is going after a company run by “left coast liberal elites”?
Presumably the lasers have produced enough energy to ionize helium generated in the target. It's quite unclear how a net energy gain will be extracted simply by grabbing the moving ions electrically. That sounds like a huge extra challenge on top of achieving net positive controlled fusion.

There will inevitably be a lot of heat produced that has to be cooled. Generally people plan to use the coolant as the working fluid in the power cycle.

If there's an innovation here it'd be cool if they put it way more up front.

In any case there will still be a coolant.
But no one involved in creating universal credit did so for any other reason than as an excuse to cut the number of people who are eligible.
C++ General-Purpose Polymorphic Function Wrapper
Efail worked with the default settings on almost all clients except Mutt. Most email clients do not have a "plain text" mode. They all display emails as HTML and apply some formatting to make the "plain text" mode be monospaced.

Also, one of the Efail exploits (the CDC gadget) was a cryptographic vulnerability. The fact you could manipulate the ciphertext to inject HTML tags such that GPG wouldn't scream bloody murder (because the MDC wasn't required and had very odd semantics, where GPG would output data to the caller before it had been authenticated and clients showed it as a warning and still rendered the HTML exploit) was definitely at its core a cryptographic bug.

All of this was explained in significant detail in the CCC talk about Efail[1].

[1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9463-attacking_end-to-end_email_...
Google Just Gave Millions of Users a Reason to Quit Chrome
Show HN: Build your own Vim emulation for VS Code
We crossed the Rubicon in 2008 with government intervention in money markets.

Consider this: "France's Richest Man Gets a Free Lunch From the ECB" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-07/louis-...

Or this: "All-star economists urge Fed to use QE and ‘new tools’ to fight next recession — just move sooner and go bigger than crisis" https://www.marketwatch.com/story/all-star-economists-urge-f...
I grew up in a country that joined the EU and boomed afterwards. We had the same crisis and probably even worse austerity measures than Greece after the 2008 crisis and some politicians are still in a tough spot until this day.

In all aspects, Greece was in much better shape before the 2008 crisis than Lithuania. Now Lithuania has a higher GDP per capita than Greece. How did that happen?

But never once, anyone in public considered on "asking on forgiving on our debts". It really makes me wonder the audacity of the people that claim it's the Eurogroups fault that they have lent money to Greece.

It really makes a difference, when people own up to their future.
Lucky they didn’t selectively unblock the c level
WSJ is the origin of the story (even Forbes links to them as being the source). How is it clickbait? Also, the title on the WSJ article right now is: "Google Resists Demand From States in Digital-Ad Probe". Also from the article:

> Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading the investigation by 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam, said the company’s actions suggest it is withholding information that could be damaging.

> “Every indication right now is they don’t believe that they’re clean because they don’t act in any way like they are,” Mr. Paxton said in an interview.

There are lots of responses from Google's side of the aisle about why they think they are in the right, but this is just a battle of he-said she-said until they go to court to fight it out.

(I'm a googler, opinions are my own)
I originally didn't respond to this because you had a pretty good point and I didn't really have anything to add to it. You're apparently getting hammered, though, so I feel like I should say something, so... you're spot on here.

In defense of humankinds' innate fairness, though, I feel I should point out that all the reasoning about genetics and demographics and 'those people' in the world will not overrule someone's intrinsic assessment of a potential partner's attractiveness. The young lads and lasses will go out and shack up with whoever tickles their fancy. The older generation will tut-tut and justify their disapproval, but who ever listens to them?
A lot of these seem to be issues with out-of-date information, which is not unreasonable for a 12-year-old document.
Saudis Weigh Breaking Oil Alliance with Russia as Virus Crimps Demand
Books on Enterprise Architecture
True, so many articles show a spread of tweets that say one thing or another but it's unclear if they even reached out to those people for comment, if they exist at all.
https://archive.is/dTt01
Also check out Anne Ogborn's tutorial "Creating Web Applications in SWI-Prolog"
http://www.pathwayslms.com/swipltuts/html/

Following that I made a very simple ("hello world" simple) server that serves Tau Prolog ( http://tau-prolog.org/ ) to the client and establishes a websocket connection between them.

It's here FWIW: https://git.sr.ht/~sforman/yrad-nettles (WARNING: it's not meant for public consumption, I think it might be broken at the moment because I was experimenting with serving prolog scripts like js scripts when I stopped working on it... I'm putting it out here in case you want to try to glean some insight from it. I was looking over it myself just now and I forget a lot about how it's supposed to work, so read it alongside Anne's tutorial, if at all. Cheers! Also, I should mention it depends on a whole different project, an implementation of Joy programming language, to actually do anything, because it's meant to act as a remote shell/UI for that language hosted in a Prolog server. So, yeah... you're gonna want to comment that out.)
I disagree, code is for and by humans. There are likely very real runtime consequences to having code that is "ugly", because the next human to touch it will value it less and do a suboptimal job.

Of course all of this is highly subjective, but my understanding is that it's important to consider if you want highly successful projects.
Ubuntu released a version last December that fixed the 64-bit problems pi4 has been having (USB and RAM issues primarily).

https://ubuntu.com/blog/updated-images-of-ubuntu-for-the-ras...
Show HN: Built a community to let other people take over your old projects
I don't know. I think a really flashy website would be more concerning. This is a serviceable website that gets it's point across without consuming a gig of bandwidth on a video in the header background.
That's very mature of you.
Also, another aspect to consider is what is the basic minimum to be integrated in society and exist socially.

In the 20ies cars were not a social necessity, but beyond the 70ies, not having a car generally means partial social exclusion (more difficulties to get a job, etc).

Today, not having a computer/smartphone/tablet and an internet subscription would impact social integration.

This basic minimum need is not set in stone, it's a shifting target. Rephrasing the problem with "What is the current median revenue Vs What is the basic minimum to be an integrated member of society" would be a better way to put it.
Choosing a Tech Stack for Full-Cycle Web Application Development
It also doesn’t state what is obvious to those of us who build infrastructure: Germany and Denmark have no way to store wind power so it has no choice but to pay others to take it. Norway is home to one of the worlds largest batteries.. its hydro power. Already cheap, but has the added benefit of being storable for sufficient duration to take german and danish wind power when it suits them (ie when they get paid). It baffles the mind why the danish and Germans don’t use some of their subsidy to invest in storage — but therein lies another catch 22. The lithium needed for that isn’t being mined in sufficient quantities in Europe and 100% of the supply from China is earmarked to autos. There are some jr mining countries spinning up in Europe but it will be awhile before any meaningful impact will be felt. One wonders if by then other storage techniques will be viable. In the meantime, they will be forced to pay the Nordics to take their green energy while supplementing with coal from Poland or succumbing to the siren call of another controversial Russian pipeline.
Counterfeit items, e.g. video games, are all over eBay. I’ve reported many auctions over the years as infringing and have never seen one taken down.
Aren't these quotes about fiction writing? Do you think they apply to essay writing as well?

I don't think I got your point with this selection of quotes, if you don't mind explaining.
I’m in the South East US and I’m a full stack web dev with 15 years of experience. I’d be willing to pay a recruiter to place me in a good job.
Given what you do, do you think open-source projects ran "on premise" (i.e. with your cloud provider of choice) paying a licence to use has a future beyond the enterprise scale?
Clickbait can be true and still be clickbait because it picks out a single controversial sounding aspect of a story and uses that to draw people in.

There can be a an actual reason that Google is not giving up documents immediately, which is brought up. I don't expect any company/person to give up everything willingly to 3rd parties.
A theory is like a library full of books and papers. You can pull down any book and probably find something to argue about in it, but the overall story told by all the books all clearly point to the same conclusion.
That's a great point. I accept 4Chan and despise Twitter, both of which being cesspools of lunatics, but now I realize that I'd feel the opposite if the media reported on 4Chan drama instead and mostly left Twitter alone.

Which is to say, if members of the media were 4Chan users instead of Twitter users. Or more generally, the social ills I've been blaming on Twitter are really the result of the commentary class inflicting its own obsession with social media on the rest of us.
A Tale of Terrible Customer Service
That is sort of the thing about receptors, it is really had to know what will actually work. When you run these types of programs you'll get a number of possibilities that the simulator will spit out, that be from an AI or more traditional stat generated model. There were a few articles very similar to this with Coronavirus cures. They then have to go work in a well designed clinical trial, against a placebo, and then in humans, which is way more unlikely. It's most likely that all 9 don't work, unfortunately. I'm not saying the fact they found them was luck, the luck is if they actually work.
Ask HN: Who is working on Coronavirus and what sources do you use for info?
There are a lot of sources of information on the state of the outbreak including cdc.gov.

However it is less clear which authoritative sources to go to in order to better understand the progress towards a “cure”.

A) what are good sources to track the progress towards a cure ?

B) Is anyone in HN working on teams that are working towards a cure ?
> it is very complicated to install the base stack to develop in OCaml

I'm not sure why the author decided to use such a complicated setup using Make and Docker.

They could have just ran `opam switch create 4.09.0`, which would have created the compiler, then `opam install ...` for the dependencies.

Still, an interesting article. I wouldn't recommending using OCaml/ReasonML for gamedev since getting it to work with Windows is pretty much impossible.
Again, the article is misleading and fails to understand the German electricity markets (!), how the EEG works, how the electricity production/distribution/sales works in Germany, the pricing and how consumers buy electricity.

For example: the renewable produced electricity is delivered onto the grid and the distribution takes it. As much as is possible. This is mixed with non-renewable electricity. The consumer then gets delivered the mix. The normal consumer has no choice - he always gets the mix. He/she can't prefer fossil fuels or renewable. If there is more coal generated electricity, the renewable energy electricity has a preference. By law:

https://www.buzer.de/s1.htm?g=eeg_2009&a=8

'Netzbetreiber sind vorbehaltlich des § 11 verpflichtet, den gesamten angebotenen Strom aus Erneuerbaren Energien und aus Grubengas unverzüglich vorrangig abzunehmen'

translates: 'Grid companies ... are required to take all provided electricity generated from renewable energies ... immediately and with preference.'

That's the German law, the EEG, the renewable energy law.

Thus there is simply no choice: ALL AVAILABLE RENEWABLE ENERGY IS PUSHED INTO THE GRID IMMEDIATELY WITH PREFERENCE.

The provider of renewable energy gets a guaranteed price, based on some calculations. The goal is that this price goes down over the years.

Additionally coal gets further price burdens, which last year had an effect that a lot of coal was driven out of the market, because coal generated electricity was suddenly much less competitive.

Currently there is no time in Germany when renewable energy electricity drives the country 100% or more. There are weekends with lots of wind where we reach 60%. These days are still relatively rare.

On these days the consumer can not choose to get more wind electricity, since he AUTOMATICALLY gets as much as possible via the mix provided by the grid.

The producer gets his price. Now there might be additional capacity available and there might not be a buyer for it. Thus the price on the spot market gets zero for some short period of time or even negative.

But for me as an end consumer I can't choose what kind of electricity I get delivered. What I can influence is where I buy the electricity from and where the profits from that are invested. For example I buy my electricity from a local provider, which invests in renewable energy. The company not only buys renewable energy on the market, but also has its own renewable energy production. The provider invests their profits into more renewable energy production.

For coal its currently tough to make any profits and they are slowly driven out of the market:

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/hunderte-millionen-ve...

Last year in the first half brown coal power plants were 650 Million Euros in the red.

Thus the consumer doesn't give the coal power plants any advantage.

The added capacity of renewable produced electricity is each year planned (but not completely determined) and the government has instruments to influence that.
More accurately, the party is pro free market - which makes sense that a Republican-led government would want to enforce anti-competition or antitrust laws.

That said, in theory at least, the US Justice Department is supposed to be unbiased and not directed by the whims of the parties.
Understanding the Mathematics Behind K means Clustering
The war on encryption continues...
The mouse genome is about 14% shorter than the human genome, although that could mean a lot or a little depending on certain other factors.
That's not entirely accurate. Between 1930-1970s (with some hiccups) the USSR was indeed "catching up", but this was because they were industrializing from almost nothing, plus rebuilding after the war.

It was the stagnation in the 1970s where the centrally planned economy couldn't adapt to consumer goods, light industry, and technology where they fell further and further behind. Various incentive problems exasperated things. Things would have been much worse in the 70s if high oil prices didn't mask these underlying problems, allowing the USSR to obtain hard currency to import goods.

Don't get me wrong, communism was bad. However, there were periods where it appeared to look superior. The quality of life in North Korea was "superior" to the south until the late 70s (much of this was backed by soviet subsidies, etc), but the optics still existed. There was a similar, though much more brief, period where east Germany had a faster growing economy than the west. There is a reason the Berlin wall was built in the 60s and not earlier.
Pretty much any and all reparations were cancelled for Western Germany and today's Germany by continuation. It was a mix of "we need Germany now" and the less than stellar experiences with reparations after WW I.
> Integrapp

That's amazing in a horrible way. Got reminded of r/THI
IEC is a different fusion scheme.

"Millions" is pretty much a shoestring budget for fusion projects. There is some experimental data, but without actual fusion since the lasers weren't powerful enough yet.

This team didn't invent the lasers. They've been waiting for the lasers to get sufficiently powerful to attempt fusion with them. Those lasers are finally becoming available for researchers to use, so it should be quite inexpensive to test this idea. Worst case, they have to build one for tens of millions, which is comparable to other private fusion projects, but hopefully they can run the experiment on other people's lasers.
Suspicious? No. Obvious? Yes.

Not Google, but part of the overall strategy:

"“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/faceboo...
> computer case basically a Faraday cage?

If it was designed well ;)

But that's only effective for addressing radiated emissions, not conducted ones.
>I got into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it continuously (mostly in advanced fission) ever since.

What is your opinion on SPARC and tokamak energy?
What could be good uses of a prolog-based web service? Calendar availability? Scheduling appointments? Issue diagnosis?
I absolutely would but my web framework doesn't have support for it.
To the people who think Greece deserved that:

lender is responsible for checking how much the borrower can take. My bank reasonably doesn't give me a billion.
Default likelihood exists because there is an interest that prices it.
When default happens, shame on the borrower and shame on the lender for having been a bad checker or just shame on no one if that default was one of the "expected" and covered by all the debt+interest already cashed in.

An any case increasing suicide-rate and child mortality-rate is not the right answer, unless you are called "mafia" or "IMF".
> "always kind of wondering why there’s persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on"

> It seems like we have lost all rational and respect for skepticism and correlating verification in science.

There is a huge gap between skepticism and denialism. The deniers aren't out there gathering competing data; they are simply declaring 'no' to established data.
The title should be How to Write [an Essay] Usefully.

This blog post is NOT about writing in general. It's not about the craft of writing, or the many varied types of writing (fiction, memoir, biography, essay, marketing blog, etc).

Instead, it's a formula that Mr. Graham gives the reader:

>I believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty + correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay.

For a good essay, maybe. For writing in general, no. It's formulaic, which may very well be a horrible approach depending on the context.
I certainly feel your pain when it comes to non-modular linear end-to-end scripts.

The DSL I'm working on is already quite modular so as to reduce repetition, to hide complex-looking things like CSS selectors behind user-defined names and to support the definition of data sets independent of the tests that use them.

A test for a given page can import test steps, adding further actions and assertions if required and injecting one or more sets of data over which to iterate.

Sets of data can be defined inline (to support quick learning) or defined in separate files and imported and referenced (more ideal).

Properties of a page being tested can be defined separately to the test itself, including aspects such as the URL and named locators expressed as either CSS selectors or XPath expressions, referenced later as needed by the user-defined name. This reduces to one the number places many page-specific details need changing, as well as allowing the tests (which reference by name pre-defined locators) to flow more naturally.

I'd greatly appreciate your feedback in a few months when we have something workable to demonstrate. My email is in my profile if you're happy to help.
It seems from what I've read here that digitalocean has always carried relatively higher debt than other, similar companies. It might not be a good example.