skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Asking for any evidence is appeal to perfection? Or saying that it's unreasonable to demand an extraordinary, serious, world-impacting claim be disproved, while simultaneously not supporting it with any evidence?

Also, I'm just saying any evidence that anything may have escaped by mistake; not that it was intentionally spread. Sure, CIA and such can discover such evidence much more effectively than any commenter here, but in that case, shouldn't you let the CIA / US government make those accusations instead of a random commenter who has no knowledge of the situation or basis for their claim?

>China has hundreds of documents of this base and backgrounds on all scientists, which it can release to no detriment at all, supposing the lab had nothing to do with corona.

What documents, exactly? And how would that help disprove that the virus inadvertently escaped from the lab?
Confirmed this is a great a recommendation!

Shout out to Azla[0] near DTLA. It is Vegan.

[0] http://azlavegan.com/
not too obscure
This is what overnight "regression" & "aging" (where you run the test suite over and over, to try and capture those rarely-seen corner cases) tests are supposed to capture.

I'd be surprised if the VM developers didn't run these.

More likely, the environment the VMs are run in has changed in the decades since their development: amount of RAM, cache size, latency of one subsystem over another....
Totally true. JITs are just about making the dynamic languages perform better than if they were interpreted. If you want native perf you need a statically typed and ahead of time compiled language.
Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux
This is a wildly oversimplified and inaccurate picture of nuclear waste, that I've seen all too often.

Nuclear waste is problematic because it emits radiation. It emits radiation because the atoms are unstable, and are decaying into other, more stable atoms. The rate of this decay is normally measured by the half-life - which is the time by which 50% of the element has changed into another, more stable element. The by-product of this decay is that it emits radiation, which is harmful to life. However, it emerges from this that the rate of the decay is directly proportional to the amount of harmful radiation that is emitted. Many things encountered in ordinary life are unstable to some degree or another, but ordinarily either the quantity is so low, or the rate of decay is so slow, that the amount of radiation we recieve under normal conditions isn't particularly harmful.

Now, nuclear waste. This falls into three broad categories. First is those with a half life of less than 50 years, like strontium-90 and cesium-137. These are horribly, horribly dangerous isotopes, and will do horrible things to you if you get near large quantities of them. However the fact that they are so very dangerous means that they are by turn, not going to be a threat for very long. After a short period of time (~30 years for the two I mentioned), they are half decayed already. Devising a storage system to store these sin't very challenging - the quantities are small, and they don't need to be stored for terribly long.

The second category is the one that the anti-nuclear lobby loves to blur with the first. These are isotopes like plutonium-239, with half lives in the tens or hundreds of thousands of years timelines (~24000 years for Pu-239). However what the anti-nuclear lobby fails to mention is that by the very fact that these elements have such a long half life, they are by definition not emitting all that much harmful radiation - many of the waste products in this category similar radiation per kg than coal ash. If we're happy storing coal ash behind nothing more than a chain-link fence, objecting to these waste products is sheer fear mongering, nothing else.

The third category is the problematic one. Here we have things like radium-226, which have half-lives in the thousand-year range (1300 years for ra-226), but are still radioactive enough you want a bit more safety than just piling them up behind a fence. However the good news here is that the quantities of radioactive products in this range are tiny. So tiny the entire non-military waste of these isotopes we, as a species, have ever produced would probably fit onto a single train. I think getting rid of one of the most effective ways of power production we've discovered to date for this amount of waste might, just maybe, be described as a colossal overreaction.

Sorry this post got a bit long!
I mostly agree, but compilers intentionally don't explore every optimization path to save compilation time, and a JIT is able to trace the program for real data and find places that could benefit from additional attention.

I don't think JITs are the only way to address that trade-off in compilation time vs runtime performance metrics, and whether their benefits are worth their other costs is an interesting, program-dependant question, but they have strictly more information available than a naive compiler and can potentially use that to make better decisions.
Here is an analysis of the cost difference between in house and outsourcing closes captioning.

https://www.3playmedia.com/2019/02/04/closed-captioning-in-h...

Best case was $2.94 per minute, worst is $5.87

Arguably they can afford the 3.5 - 7 million dollars but if they aren't reusing the material for current students they may reasonably desire to spend the money elsewhere.

I would argue that you shouldn't acquire an obligation by providing something for free without benefit to themselves.
Yep. I was going to take a potshot at Twitter about how they must be feeling some competitive pressure from Mastodon if they need to rip off features, but it looks like Twitter has actually had this feature since some time in 2016, and I'm not sure when Mastodon added it.

Either way, anything that makes Twitter a little less awful is nice to see.
Thanks that was very educational.
Probably the first article Ive ever read about lexical parsing with code that i have actually understood - and I dont even program in golang. Great job.
Screw nuclear power!! Utter garbage
I’m currently working on a PhD in cryptography and I ran into this particular entry a few months ago while trying to wrap my head around entropy as an information theoretic concept. To be honest, it triggered a cascade of revelation that I had not felt since the last time I took psychedelics.

I read another article recently about the unexpectedly large role that randomness plays in embryonic development, and an idea clicked into place:

Life is about sustaining order amongst chaos, negentropy in a sea of entropy. But how does evolution lead to larger and larger pockets of negentropy that are capable of sustaining in increasingly hostile environments? How exactly does evolution lead to more and more “advanced” life forms?

Enter the magic of randomized algorithms. Randomized algorithms can often solve hard computational problems very efficiently, with the tradeoff that they have a small chance of failure. We can envision evolutionary leaps as computational problems, such as finding just the right folded protein to catalyze a particular cellular reaction. The magic of evolution is not just in building stable order, but also in harnessing randomness/entropy to solve environmental problems and then bootstrapping those solutions to solve higher level problems. Think about how just enough randomness is allowed into the process of meiosis to create perfectly functioning new humans that are wonderfully unique.

DNA and RNA are the non-volatile memory of the biological computer. Central nervous systems eventually reached a level of complexity that allowed them to persist memories, which opened up an even higher order problem solving mechanism. We humans have taken it even further with a cerebral cortex capable of abstraction, leading to complex language and the technology to record that language permanently.
I would like to see a cite for the claim that fewer "millennials" have driver's licenses and/or cars than the equivalent age group in 1971. I am skeptical.
You might look up the recent Comcast v. National Association of African American-Owned Media for how alleged race discrimination against a corporation can happen in practice.
It would be useful if he provided examples. What makes an "evergreen note" as opposed to a transient one?
Dozen of residents that sold their land.
Happy to! I hope it's been useful.
Daniel, did you see this article: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.987222v1

I haven't read it, but the abstract suggests that a milder strain with a large deletion might have already been found.
> do try to behave

Wow, what insufferable arrogance obnoxiously delivered. Nothing I said was jerky. You seem to be projecting.

From your first reference:

> an extensive literature review produced no scientifically reported cases of fatal CO poisoning attributed to diesel fuel exhaust.

Petrol engines produce 12% CO. Diesel engines simply do not do so, contrary to the claims of the ethically challenged injury lawyer source you provided as your primary reference in your earlier post. Can Diesel produce high CO levels? Yes, but it is hard to force this. The Nazis used diesel to asphyxiate Jews with CO, but they had to meddle with the engines.

Submarines and mines. How does anyone survive there in the presence of diesel combustion engines.

1955 study of relative emissions of diesel, gasoline, and propane engines:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00966665.1955.10...

Note in particular the charts beginning on page 105.

> exhaust gases from Diesel engines contained less than 0.1% carbon monoxide, whereas the carbon monoxide concentrations in the exhausts of the carbureted engines ranged from 1.5 to 12%. The reason for this difference is the well-known fact that carbureted engines generally operate with a deficiency of air whereas Diesel engines always operate with a substantial excess of air

It's basic science that has been known for a very very long time.

What you are claiming is wrong and has never been known to be the truth by anyone qualified to discuss this matter.

Tell you what. I bet you $1 million USD that you are wrong and that a normal diesel engine produces vastly less than 12% CO emissions. We each put our funds with a third party broker, we have an independent party do the testing, and winner takes all. Do you consent? If you would prefer a different wager amount, so state. Funds to be transferred to the third party broker by each of us in advance of testing. You're a well known famous billionaire guy so this will be peanuts with a guaranteed payoff for you if you really believe your claims.
It occurs to me that, in practical terms, the "steady state" of performance with the increasingly large blobs of JavaScript we find littered throughout the web tends to impact the user more than other JITs. As the user navigates from page to page, the VM is reset, a fresh set of minified blobs is downloaded and JITed, and a core or two is pinned to do so. That translates pretty directly to a hotter phone, less battery life, and a frustrated user. Sure, when your JVM startup is 0.1% of the runtime of your program, it's not as big of a deal, but when it's more like 20% of the time a user spends using the program (their web browser), it's a lot worse, and has slim potential for improvement.
The list titled "Things That Memories Demo is Smaller Than" would be a bit longer than the Turbo Pascal list.

This is amazing.

Note that the current version depends on specific configuration assumptions that may not hold on all machines. The WinXP version is 263 bytes.
How does discreetness imply imprecision and randomness? If anything, it should indicate some degree of certainty.
Due to Covid-19: Documenting the signs of the pandemic
Until you can purchase merchandise inside Disney+ it's as much a sales channel as HBO Go is for Game of Thrones.
I came expecting a web app showcasing Smalltalk, the language. Boy was I confused for a second haha.
How to open United States Economy after Covid-19?
Implementing support for advanced DPTF policy in Linux
a critical review of this approach: https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/399.pdf
It depends on your rules for rounding I think.
Courtesy of Dabney Hovse’s official website: https://dabney.caltech.edu/wiki/doku.php?id=dei (see the end paragraphs about the moon and Voyager)
You also need to have either no competition, (or incompetent) and some barrier to entry. Otherwise companies will just by from your competitor.

History has plenty of examples where it works, however in many other cases the policy just limits those trying it. Most people don't care enough about your prejudice when they can get a better deal and suddenly the out group becomes normal business partners.
...or just join the demoscene :)
Best (and Free) Books to Understand Machine Learning
Don’t forget the anthrax used here either a month after 911.
There is a pretty nice parser combinator library in the capnproto compiler: https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/tree/master/c%2B%2B/s.... Here is an example of how it is used: https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/950d23a13f1d602d...
I appreciate Rickover's quote more and more every year in I spend in the nuclear industry. My hope for some of these reactors, especially the very small ones, is that they will provide a way for new reactor designers to get some practical experience while risking less than a few billion dollars.
>then there's a "cutoff" to the actual number of digits to pi. Because a chunk of spacetime can't contain infinite information? sounds good.

It's more subtle than that. The "infinite digits" of pi isn't information, no more so than the endless decimal 1/3 = 0.333... is "infinite information". You can't use it to "store" anything. This is a distinct notion from the practical reality that real spacetime is quantized. An alternate universe with un-quantized spacetime might, or might not, allow you to store infinite information in a chunk - but every digit of pi would be relevant there.
I'm not a lawyer, but it's not clear to me that the law does actually support you in that. Quoting the CA supreme court, in Marina Point v Wolfson:

> Indeed, the basic rights guaranteed by section 51 would be drastically undermined if, as the landlord contends, a business enterprise could exclude from its premises or services entire classes of the public simply because the owner of the enterprise had some reason to believe that the class, taken as a whole, might present greater problems than other groups. Under such an approach, for example, members of entire occupations or avocations, e.g., sailors or motorcyclists, might find themselves excluded as a class from some places of public accommodation simply because the proprietors could show that, as a statistical matter, members of their occupation or avocation were more likely than others to be involved in a disturbance. (See, e.g., Atwater v. Sawyer (1884) 76 Me. 539 [49 Am.Rep. 634] (innkeeper's exclusion of all members of the militia, because of disorderly conduct of other militiamen, held impermissible).) Similarly, members of a particular nationality or ethnic group might be excluded from an apartment complex simply because the landlord had found from his experience that members of that nationality or ethnic group were more likely to play [30 Cal. 3d 740] loud music or to damage the landlord's property than tenants of other backgrounds.

> As these examples demonstrate, the exclusion of individuals from places of public accommodation or other business enterprises covered by the Unruh Act on the basis of class or group affiliation basically conflicts with the individual nature of the right afforded by the act of access to such enterprises.

(emphasis added)

https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/3d/30/...
> players backing gas are much more powerful

Many players backing U.S. shale gas are just naive and greedy investors who are getting their haircut as I write it. European countries, which counted on long term U.S. LNG imports and invested in required infrastructure, e.g. Poland, are in for a rude awakening.
That's awesome!!! I'm actually really interested in the semantics of how a defer{} statement might work in C. If you have any kind of a draft or anything, I'd get a kick out of reading over it.

Re: developing a paper for constexpr, that's an interesting idea. I hadn't really thought about writing one up myself but it'd be an interesting thing to try out. Can you recommend a good example proposal that I could read? Shoot me an email at nicholas dot clark on the gmail if you ever see this.
I simply stated a fact which is easily verifiable by checking news from its government, so why the downvotes, I hope it's not that we have CCP watchers here at HN.
Oh yes, yes.

Every 15 years or so we get another piece that goes like "Sure nuclear was bad, but we're going to be reaaaally safe starting... now!"
So just to play to your hypothetical. If there were two login methods, and they were separate microservices, if only one failed and the other remained up, that would be the graceful failure scenario.

I'm not telling you that you must to do this. Others may have requirements that go beyond yours.
I can understand the naivete of Americans on the receiving end of this, like Walker or the president of the town for just being lured in by the idea "investment => profit". Foxconn however is obviously much more sophisticated and the story alludes to how manufacturing is cheaper in Asia; so the premise of why they'd invest in a plant here doesn't make much sense. Although it flirts with answering this question I still don't have a clear answer. It sounds like they received tax incentives, which, maybe were incentive enough for production demand that they at some point may have? It just doesn't make sense to me if they weren't planning on actually hiring 13,000 workers, what's the incentive? Tax breaks do you no good if you generate no revenue.
I ROFL'd so hard when the HBO miniseries said 2-4 megatons from a steam explosion. Like, what!? We engineers did a similar bounding calc as the one in your link and got about the same conclusion. So ridiculous.

I do a lot of nuclear outreach in seattle. Audiences are skeptical but open. If we can scale the facts and education, I still think nuclear can and will play a major role in decarbonizing. Especially as intermittent renewable fleets get bigger and the intermittency issue becomes more serious.
The keyboards are mediocre at best anyway. My MS sculpt is the best keyboard I've used and try to bring it with me even if I'm just using my mbp as a laptop
Legends of Caltech, page 69 has the story and a photograph (looking at my copy right now). It was a valve package plate on the Voyagers ink-stamped with “DEI/FEIF”.
I'm a brit and would be in favour of nuclear if it was cheap and safe but the progress of our Hinkley C reactor has not been promising on the 'cheap' bit.

>construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion.[7][8] The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion,

As a result I say go batteries, wind, solar!
This is actually fine as long as they pee 10 feet apart.
Stupid question for people who know more about these things. Why can’t we fight the warmup time by running an already warmed up snapshot of the program? Or say dumping some data structure when it hits steady state to give hints to the JIT the next time it runs?
Today's nuclear is actually already competitive with all clean energy futures. Yes, wind and solar LCOE is dirt cheap today, but only when the wind is blowing or sun is shining. They're riding on the back of the fossil-dominated grid. As we deeploy decarbonize, all studies I've seen show costs rising 30-50 $/MWh to deal with intermittency. At those prices, current nuclear is already in the game.
Ask HN: Is it possible to be successful without getting into a top college?
There are countless YC founders and other notable engineers who dropped out of elite schools like MIT and Stanford and yet more who talk about going to their state school despite getting into better institutions. I never got into anything better than my state school and my career so far has been exceptionally mediocre. From what I understand people don’t generally change after they reach adulthood - am I doomed to mediocrity? Are there folks that were able to succeed later in life?
One of the largest international demoscene competitions was just held over twitch (Revision 2020 [1]). It normally has a few thousand attendees + a live stream, but this year was just the stream and twitch chat. In lieu of having people come to the venue, they released a game that was a model of the venue, so you could walk around and have some of the same experience as going [2]. At any given time the main stream had several thousand people watching and in chat.

This all worked pretty well for what is decidedly a very social activity, I presume breakouts could just happen in other streams with a moderator handling chat q&a for the presenter.

1 - https://2020.revision-party.net/start

2 - https://www.sofaworld.net/
Nuclear is the only power source that's good for the environment even when it fails disastrously :-P
Use the best tool for the job I say. If it’s BSD for you or your project then so be it. If it’s Linux then use that.
* Cryptocurrency

* Fiat currency

* Economics is not a real science

* I understand what the author is trying to say, but I don't like how he says it

* I didn't read the piece, but website that published it is problematic

* The title is clickbait, and I'm unaware of the concept of newspaper headlines
> If the cooling pool leaks into the ground and you can't refill, as might happen in an earthquake, you could have a meltdown.

The article claims that these reactors don’t not have that problem. They didn’t describe why or how, but they say the heat would simply dissipate into the atmosphere even if the cooling pool dries out.
How ventilators work and why Covid-19 patients need them
Many (most?) countries follow the "Loser Pays" principle in law-suites.

That is, whoever loses the case has to pay both their own and the other sides legal costs.

This radically changes incentives, and much of the abuses in the US system just don't occur.
Just do something and you will be ahead of the majority of your peers. Don’t live in a self-induced paralysis when it comes to your life.
Luminus – A Clojure Web Framework
20 years ago it was just around the corner. In fact, they said the Russians were about to deploy them: container-sized nuclear power plants that were basically maintenance-free and just ran on their own until they shut themselves down. Made by the hundreds from standard pieces. Safe if messed with. Safe after retirement. There were websites and nice diagrams and mock-ups and everything. Tell me how we're in a different phase now.
Plugging my own tool, but I wrote a Chrome extension that checks websites for SEO, speed, and security best practices (it's a crawler so it can check 100s of pages in a few minutes):

https://www.checkbot.io/

It saved me a lot of time and caught tons of mistakes before they got to production while working on multiple websites as a contractor

For example, I was assisting a team on one sprawling dynamic website with a lot of SEO and performance issues - the site had been hacked together over the years such that editing one page would usually break groups of unrelated pages in unexpected ways. My extension helped me get on top of which pages were dependent on each other, to prioritise what was worth fixing, and to confirm improvements had been made without breaking anything.
31% Can’t Pay the Rent: ‘It’s Only Going to Get Worse’