skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Help Build Finnish Duolingo Course
The evidence that life started almost as soon as it was physically possible indicates to me that there's probably some kind of strong inevitability behind it. Here's an interesting theory about emergence of life being driven by thermodynamics. [0] In short, physical systems naturally evolve in a way that maximizes dissipation of energy, and life is really good at dissipating energy.

Genes probably came after metabolism in my view. Certainly, a "critical gene sequence" is no good without the other chemical infrastructure to make use of it, in much the same way code is no use without a runtime environment. Yes, RNA can also form enzymes, but it's not really the same thing because in that role they don't have to fully define a life form; it can just be part of a life-like mess. I also like droplet/membrane-first theories of abiogenesis [1].

My guess is a lot of stuff co-evolved before "cells" were really a firm concept. Proto-life would have just barely worked at first, hardly distinct from the environment, with a lot of useless or counterproductive material along for the ride. "Living" systems would have replicated by simple physical phenomena (like the droplet division in [1]), with genes taking over as emerging competition justified the complexity.

Side note: probably one of the reasons, if not the main one, that people don't want to engage on the improbability of abiogenesis is that it smells like Creationism.

[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-t...

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/dividing-droplets-could-expla... (edit: previously https://www.wired.com/2017/01/life-begin-dividing-droplets-h... which is a reprint)
Builders and Dreamers: How to Build Your Own Dream Team
> DDL normally supposed to be always outside of a transaction

A basic element of the relational model is that metadata is stored as relational data and that the same guarantees that apply to manipulating main data in the database apply to manipulating the schema metadata.

It's true that many real relational databases compromise on this element in various ways at times, but it is absolutely not the case that DDL “is supposed to be” non-transactional.
???

All sound is a sum of sine waves. The term "sine wave speech" makes as much sense as "wet water."

The demo is cool, but pick a name that makes sense.
They progressed a lot recently and few days ago there was about 80% done. Although, now it's 75 again due to COVID-19
My apologies. That may have changed with SIP. A _fully optional_ feature that is great for security, and can be turned off if its too prescriptive.

A little disappointed to see the apple hate on this thread, especially as I spent the morning fighting with debian install on a raspberry pi to just have a clean upgrade. Again, these linux issues are much less common when dealing with linux on a server, meant to run a single program, or collection of production programs. But trying to maintain an ubuntu desktop is not without work, and Windows is loaded with telemetry and ads.
It made sense to me. I guess it's how you interpret the controls of an actual aircraft and how they map to keyboard controls. In aircraft controls it's "pull back" to increase altitude (up) and "push forward" to decrease altitude (down).

I imagine it this way, each direction key maps to a part of the topside of the aircraft

- up: front/nose of aircraft, pressing up pushes pressure on the nose which would make it tilt downward, hence going down or losing altitude

- down: back of aircraft, pressing down pushes pressure on the backside of the aircraft which would make it tilt upward, hence going up or gaining altitude

same for left and right
#+foo A B

This says if the Lisp supports “foo” as a “feature” (a precise term in Common Lisp), the A will be included. Otherwise A will be treated as a comment. B will be included regardless. It’s roughly equivalent to

#ifdef foo
A
#endif
B

The opposite is #-.

#-unix A B

is roughly

#ifndef unix
A
#endif
B

So you can write portable source code this way.

(defvar path-separator
#+unix "/"
#+windows "\\"
#-(or unix windows) (error "idk"))

This will define a variable called PATH-SEPARATOR which is / for UNIX, \ for Windows, and a compile-time error otherwise.

The rabbit hole goes deep on this. There’s a reason it uses ‘#’, and as you pointed out, it has to do with built-in (dispatching) reader macros.
The point here isn’t to do only what is “necessary”, but to do it because they care and want to.
Show HN: Pi Stats, a macOS menu bar app to view and manage your Pi-hole status
Alternatives to Microsoft HealthVault?
I'm looking for something that allows individuals to store and access their own patient records securely and ideally with additional sharing functionality built in.
I read the website and the readme, I don't understand what that is.
It is common in the sense that it's done frequently enough that we don't need to reinvent it. Most orgs don't want that level of security & inconvenience. FWIW I personally have never encountered it.
They'd have to quarantine from the moment of potential infection too, because of asymptomatic spread.
Since their introduction, I've had no issues telling the agent "I'd like to opt out of the scanner". This adds ~10 minutes as I have to wait and perform a manual pat-down, but personally that's not something I mind. Others obviously may feel otherwise for varying reasons.

I've found this article (10 years old now, : https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/are-f... ) to be fairly well-rounded. I wonder if, since then, there has been a better analysis of actual/measured results of these technologies.
Weren't there single-button ones that would continuously drive forward unless you pressed the remote control button, which would switch it to reverse-left?

So to "stop" you had to keep tapping the button.
My photography archive, including about 10 years of high-volume commercial photography, is about 14 years old and at about 23TB. At present, it grows about 5GB a day. I have stopped routinely shooting RAW because storing it all has become a mess.
I think this could be done well, single-threaded, but Python reinvented the wheel a half-dozen times now, and I don't think any of the wheels are that great. Having them all in the system at the same time, and without great connections, is what makes this a ball of mud.

There's very little glue between them. And none of it is duck typed, like the rest of Python. If I switch between them, I need to rethread the entire system.
Having worked with competent and incompetent managers. I can tell you a competent manager increases my productivity by a significant fold.

By shielding the team away from dumb political games, providing technical / architecture / design input, and controlling meetings and direction for meeting. Ex: one of the competent managers I knew could always “win” the argument for our team, I saw them convince an otherwise unshakable team to make changes by themselves (convincing an entire team to make a necessary change).

The best managers I worked with were less about control, they trusted you, and ensured no one got in your way, and they were also skilled at architecture / coding themselves.
I see other commentors saying book clubs as primarily social gatherings and about the book second. This strikes me as odd. If you want a social gathering, why have the pretense of reading books, just organize the social gathering, perhaps a weekly meeting at the local pub or someone's home. When I attend book clubs, it's about the literary aspects of the book first and any social interaction is incidental, such as if I really like another person's opinions, I'll go chat with them afterwards. Indeed, I would be particularly annoyed if I spent time reading a book and went to discuss it, and all I got were people not talking about the book, either in depth or at least shallowly, and I'd find another book club.

In regards to the ongoing nature of book clubs, discussing every chapter, I think is is a great idea, and the best avenue I've seen it happen through is a medium like Reddit (or Tildes.net), with a nested forum post for each chapter that people can not only look back on now but in the future. Indeed, r/bookclub and even other media related subreddits, like r/anime or your favorite TV show like r/gameofthrones, have such weekly threads for reading or rewatching the requisite media. This feels to me the best way to accomplish the author's goals. Of course, there is no real social interaction, but again, if you want social interaction, go to a social event that is explicitly (or sufficiently implicitly) stated that it is for socialization, such as a pub gathering. No one's going to be reading books with their friends at a pub.
Our Log House (and the Dome)
Or a very inefficient implementation.
They were retired before May 2013.

Officially retired due to the "FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012" which banned scanners that produced nude images, but the scanners came under continuous criticism for safety and were banned in the EU and elsewhere.

I'd be surprised to see them try and re-introduce backscatter x-ray scanners when the less divisive Millimeter Wave scanners work "well enough" for their security function. Backscatter was just a political lightning rod.

The Wikipedia article goes back and forth on the safety aspect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner#Backscatter_...
I really enjoy reading fast books which have no value other than to make me chuckle or give me a thrill[1] where my aim is _not_ to be productive because well you know life isn't just a big ol hamster wheel ...

though I agree that most books which I read which stay with me mentally and where I see myself going back to them are far from easy. These are in the class of being at least x years old (Jacques Ellul, Marx, Mumford, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Zapffe, Heidegger, Foucault, Bertrand Russel, Cioran, Dostoyevski, Kafka, Orwell, Sinclair, J. Austin ...) and preferably in the public domain.

A book which I never read at least twice isn't something I'd consider having an impact on me. But then sometimes drifting aimlessly with "wtf did I just read?" moments has more impact/effect on me than anything that is listed as a great classic. So there is no reason to be elitist imho (and I can't overstate the _humble_ here since 20 years ago I thought Dean Koontz novels were the bees knees).

[1] "Bill Bryson", John Cleese, or the absolutely hilarious "Let's Pretend This Never Happened" by Jenny Lawson.
This article reinforces my stance that bad defaults are a bug. Defaults should be set up with the least number of pitfalls and safety tradeoffs possible so that the system is as robust as it can be for the majority of its users, since the vast majority of them aren't going to change the defaults.

Sometimes you end up with bad defaults simply by accident but I feel like for MongoDB the morally correct choice would be to own up to past mistakes and change the defaults rather than maintain a dangerous status quo for "backwards compatibility", even if you end up looking worse in benchmarks as a result.
Books often are read and finished. I commit to such act before I start, even.

But I'll grant that any given set of ideas and concepts and wild fancy in any form of literature, this conglomeration, is truly strengthened by frequent mindful re-visits. Whatever the subject.

Books are up to the interest of the reader, on behalf of the author. Getting through one, in one or many sittings, is a pretty nice endeavour.
.emf files on a web site?

There's a reason that the scanner manufacturers got exemptions so they wouldn't have to report measured radiation.
I am surprised that Labanotation and other dance notations still are not in Unicode.
That was incredible to watch. I'm assuming that whole edifice collapsed due to the impact from the mining, right?
Changing the culture of an organisation is really difficult. Ideally you'd need support from senior leaders as well as front line staff. Without both of those it's going to be next to impossible.

I like these (although some of them use lots of business jargon).

https://www.health.org.uk/sites/default/files/HowCanLeadersI...

If you like video you can try this by Professor Amy Edmundson from Harvard (it's a bit clunky because it's an online conference): https://youtu.be/rhVXwdzdPcc?t=880

You're right that there's a lot of content about the benefits of psychological safety, and how nice it is to have it, but not nearly enough about how to create it if you're stuck in an org that's reluctant.
> + Screen brightness is specified (most of the time, you just have to hope that the screen is readable in sunlight, though I used to work outside more when I had a public transport route with switches so it's not very relevant for me now)

Luminance: 321 cd/m² (aka 321 nits)

That isn't bright enough for working outside. Macbooks are 500nits, iPads are 600nits. I'd pay extra for an option that went to 1000nits (HP elitebook dragonfly / MSI are offering this).
New MIT Study on the Costs of Uncoordinated Responses to COVID-19
Bare metal != On premise

There are plenty of hosting providers that will provide everything you mention plus the actual servers for a monthly fee without requiring you to buy anything.
If you worry about data, you should not use automatic failover. It's nearly impossible for standby to know why master stopped responding. Maybe there was a hardware failure, or maybe master is just busy. This is why manual failover is better, because you can know the real reason and decide whether you should perform failover or just wait.

With tools like repmgr it is just a single command invoked on the standby.

If you absolutely don't want to lose any data, you should have two masters in close proximity (so the latency isn't high) set up with synchronous replication, then have one or two standbys with asynchronous replication. This will reduce throughout, but then you can be sure that the other machine has all the same transactions. If something happens to both you then can fallback to the asynchronous one which might be a bit behind.
> It’s not really the same as a random piece of JavaScript on a webpage jail breaking your phone. I think having a rootable device doesn’t inherently mean your device is insecure.

Heh this was actually the case for a couple of Safari-based jailbreaks, all the way up to 9.3.4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe
Is “Tuxedo” a brand applied to whitelabel laptops? If so, they may have no control over hardware issues, and you might be able to get the same laptop at a better price / with better support elsewhere.
The question is, which one of us is the message meant for?
cool thanks, this looks interesting. never heard of it. much appreciated.
Or just get pre check and 90+% of the time you’ll be quickly shuffled through a metal detector. Then opt out the rest.
I’m on the latest beta and it still kernel panics for me with the same message.
> You act like you can just go through life and never contract covid.

You can go through life right now, until we get a vaccine and/or better treatments, doing your damndest to neither catch, nor spread it.
I was in a classics reading group. We met weekly and plowed through material. It was not a democracy but instead run by a guy who knew his stuff. I read a lot of stuff I didn't want to (way too much gore in the Greek tragedies for my taste).

It wasn't an excuse to meet and kvetch. It was closer to a class. It was about the books. Every other book club I've been in has been a pale imitation. The one I'm in now is stocked with PhDs and Berkeley profs and isn't even a drone fest. It doesn't even reach a high school level of engagement with the material.

Our sports club is sidelined because of the quarantine. So I'll admit, they're not very good at this. I'm going to suggest that we read books about the sport next time.
Makes me think of the episode from Malcolm in the Middle where "book club" was an excuse for housewives to get drunk together.

Sometimes you need to pretend that you're being responsible!
>> - A tool to improve scanned document images and create a pdf

Would you mind sharing the approach you used or the product page if it is public?

Incidentally, I was trying today to get two images combined into a single image and convert that into a single PDF. Tried with paint.net, MS Paint 3D etc., It was messy and the resultant PDF was also huge. Finally, gave up and manually pasted the images into a word doc and exported them as a single PDF.
I found this while searching reddit:

https://www.old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/3ibtw5/the_many_...
Yep no big conspiracy here.
Good point, I should change that to a ~ instead of a + because it's good that they mention it even if the value is not what one might hope.
> All sound is a sum of sine waves.

No, it's not, though that's a popular way of encoding sound data. A square or triangular wave will still be a sound, with a distinct character to a sine wave of the same frequency.
That’s just moving the problem down the pipeline. But it’s the same problem. You can have a daemon to update the data, but if the data is updated slowly, or if the UI is updated slowly after data update, the user experience is still terrible.
We have a complicated system and migration is ~3 months we won't be shipping features.

We have a roadmap we need to meet and so far we have been trying to spill money on it rather than developers (paying mongo atlas) and adding features incrementally as Mongo gets them (like transactions).

If this wasn't a startup we would probably rewrite.
Mathematics suitable for decentralized commerce [pdf]
Allocation heavy Java is also very slow. But it is much easier to avoid heap allocations (and virtual calls!) in C++/Rust than in Java.
X Li – Wangleta (Official Music Video)
Well Google is kinda more resourceful than Mozilla, so they could rewrite it but did not.
I've got two T480s (a personal one and a work issued one). I've been really happy with linux on these machines. My previous machine was an XPS 13. The XPS had nicer specs but I've been happier with the T480s. Specifically, the T480s has a better keyboard, no coil whine and more expansion options.

It seems like the T480s is more similar to the Latitude line than the XPS line.
When talking about viruses, it's a little more complicated than a label. Viruses naturally differentiate in a measurable way from host to host as part of their function (hijacking the host's cells). Scientifically, viruses are lumped into common behavior and generic similarities. Many individual variations do not propagate enough to be noticed, but some do. There was quite a bit of talk from some people about the 112 strains of coronavirus, which was not constructive, but technically correct (re: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/is-there-more-than...? etc) awhile back.
I’ve had a similar experience to this with “Six pack and a paperback” style parties — everyone brings some beer and a book to share.

After a couple of them with similar people, there’s inherently a dialogue about which books you previously had taken or brought, why you chose to bring a particular book this time. The general context is very literary focused by framing.
One thing that's funny is everyone keeps saying 12-18 months. But it's already been 3 months so shouldn't that estimate at the very least be (12 to 18 minus 3) if the confidence was going up.
Nitpick: this calculator uses only one of the core ideas of CORDIC: that one can compute sines and cosines by repeated rotation. It doesn’t use the other core idea that you can approximate any angle by successively halving each step.

It doesn’t do the latter because of lack of memory to implement it in. http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simul...:

“How can sine and cosine be computed efficiently in a calculator that has a hard time even doing multiplication? The trick is to do repeated rotations by 0.001 radians until the desired angle is reached.

[…]

Other calculators use algorithms such as decimal CORDIC that are much faster and more accurate, taking time proportional to the number of digits.”
I've seen this exact information before, multiple times actually.

It seems like it's just a rehash of the same generic advice

What I'd like to see, is if you enforce this in a dysfunctional team, would that team still be dysfunctional?

Are these habits things that come out organically from some high functioning team? Cause I bet if you enforce these kinds of habits to a dysfunctional team, that team would still be dysfunctional, but most likely better.

Highly functional teams, would always make things happen, and if you join highly functional teams, you will be part of their culture and reinforce habits

There are also, enjoyable teams. Teams that have an amazing culture. Those teams are great to be in, but have a different culture compared to highly functional teams
Do you also opt out of millimeter wave scanners? I did opt out of the backscatter ones, but do not do that anymore.
I think that it'd be super-valuable to do an analysis of an RDS Postgres deployment. Amazon is doing some dark magic with RDS that sits at this really interesting "distributed, but not that distributed" inflection point, which impacts the basic assumptions of lots of distributed database design.

I believe RDS Postgres is probably the right answer for lots of applications, especially for those that already depend on AWS for baseline availability. I'd love to see if that holds up against a rigorous analysis.
Covid-19 Coronavirus poll results: Average Americans vs. FSP supporters
While I definitely agree with the "you don't know what you don't know" point, I also think there should be a healthy dose of judgement for what should be considered "mandatory up front" as opposed to "you can learn it when you need it."

My last on-boarding, for example, I thought was approximately the right balance. Bootstrap the most basic credentials, set up MFA that covers 90% of your needs, get your access badge, take care of HR stuff, get walked through the HR stuff you will need to set up in the next month or so (health insurance, etc.), get handed a list of resources you will probably find useful, sit through a talk about company principles, and then you're off to meet your team where the remaining 80% of your on-boarding that is more specific to your division/team/role will happen. Your laptop will be waiting for you at your desk.

I think, for example, being made to walk through exercises querying the company org chart app is superfluous, but handing you a cheat sheet that includes the URL to get to the org chart app is a great idea.
>you need to hire well
This! It is odd to write but the more time I spend in the industry the more I find myself thinking back to that statement, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks."

The five dysfunctions of a team have been the hardest things to change in my opinion once habits form that prevent them.

I ponder at times if this is truly why "hyper growth" startups tend to hire on average much younger candidates and our industry says that ageism is rampant.
This is extremely exciting news. Here’s to hoping that the UC system can create an unbiased exam-free admissions process that increases access to college.
For me it’s more about making sure the hardware support is good.
This sounds to me like: "It was really one inch away from losing all the data"

You discovered the failing disk by chance; if chance hadn't been in your favour it would be the other way round and an other drive had failed on you.
In the list of features which are somewhat custom to their use case, they listed "Disable POSIX advisory locks".

Turns out this is available stock right now as the "unix-none" VFS implementation. We're using it in an almost-but-not-quite-POSIX RTOS that happens to be missing advisory locks.

See also https://sqlite.org/vfs.html