skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, they're getting pretty close to matching us in mindlessness and stupidity. Call me when they can match us in our highs, not in our lows.
I'm surprised it's still so thick with neutron star matter. I would have thought that was at least a scifi route to efficient neutrino capture.
Windows 10 is full of distractions, one time I thought my display was broken - transparency on title bar. And animations just add latency.

Disable transparency and windows animations (Settings > Display > Show transparency on Windows, Show animations in windows). Also disable "Fade or slide menus into view". Much better experience and not much to offload.
I didn't know anything about the topic before I clicked the link. Nothing in the comment that introduced the link revealed anything about the topic. And I only clicked the link because I was intrigued by the discussion here about rudeness. I was not motivated to click by the suggestion that watching would be worth my time (without any further details). That I found the topic interesting-sounding came after I swallowed the bait and clicked. Such things happen sometimes. And I still don't know if it actually is interesting, I won't actually know until I have set aside 3 hours to watch the video.
Nature Astronomy paper cited in the article:

Detection of green line emission in the dayside atmosphere of Mars from NOMAD-TGO observations

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1123-2
Fed will begin buying individual corporate bonds
Totally off-topic, but anybody who is into databases should at least have heard the name dBase, which was the most successful database in the 80s. However, they totally fucked up the release of version IV, which had serious reliability issues (not something you want in a database, in case you did not know). This lead to a dramatic decline and eventually the death of dBase. Who knows how the database and software landscape would look like had they released a version without major bugs.
> Local news breaks much earlier than national.

On federal cases involving a multi-billion household name company ? Not to my experience but perhaps.
> SCOTUS rulings are much more durable than executive actions though.

...and yet, they aren't meant to be. The system was designed such that the legislative branch would produce the most fundamental and enduring changes to our system of laws.

Looking to the SCOTUS to make legal/societal reforms is not only counter to the design, it's dangerous as it enables one branch to usurp the power of another.

Moreover because they are appointed for life and appointed by the president, this new paradigm effectively erodes the most deliberative and democratic institution we have - the Legislature.

It's sad to see such judicial advocacy so broadly applauded.

I suspect the reason the courts are so ready to act to change law, rather than arbitrate law, is a consequence of the ineffectiveness of congress. ...which is, in turn, a consequence of the political polarization worsening in America.

I wish we could return to an environment of more constructive in-depth discussions and less a war of emotional hyperbolic soundbites.
Here is a good jumping off point: https://www.facebook.com/NPR/videos/701877010588148/
Just a warning, amazon has been pretty bad with fake soldering irons.
Is there any existing term for "funding for business that will never be a unicorn but can clearly become profitable and provide good returns"? Is there an equivalent of VC for "lifestyle businesses"?

If not, if someone can establish a term it'll be easier to talk about this.
A local businessman in our area began day trading and options trading. Soon was fudging the books and lying to corporate about inventory. They soon came and locked up the joint, hauled him to jail and his family had to sell out to make up the losses. They'd owned a huge mansion and estate outside town - now its a development.

He was in his 60's, been a rock in the community and nth generation in the family business.

I'm not in favor of loosening the rules on who can trade risky investment.
Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out
Kongregate's John Cooney did a flash games postmortem @ GDC which seems appropriate here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65crLKNQR0E
This guy is trying to emulate x86 in the browser and run the actual Flash player within that:

https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-...
> Apple made a similar decision in the late 90s when they didn't ship a floppy drive in the iMac. Perhaps they hastened its demise, but not by much.

To be fair, Apple's influence was far greater in the smart phone space than the PC space.
One of the first C programs I wrote pulled data from an Ingres Database, all running on a PDP 11/34. I now use PostgreSQL heavily on AWS. Thanks Michael Stonebraker!
For fun, keep count of how many times Matt does something that you wouldn't have thought to do on your own, which would torpedo the whole project or be way too hard to self-diagnose.

I hit about 20 before I said "this project is way beyond my skill level." But I still got a vicarious sense of pride from watching his success!
The same thing that is required for any court case in the protection of a protected class to proceed - evidence.

There are many such cases that are successful going on all the time.

Your comment is baseless cynicism.
I see a virtually 0% chance that Hertz emerges from this as the same legal entity as when they went in.

That said, I have witnessed several corporate miracles within the last decade, and I am hesitant to dismiss these sorts of herculean efforts. Perhaps they are grasping at straws, but maybe someone knows something I don't. I usually default to the latter assumption when dealing with matters this complex. Keep in mind that when people are up against the ropes and running out of options, the amount of innovation that occurs can start to skyrocket. Nothing is out of bounds anymore. Everything becomes an option.

As a result, I have bought an incredibly small # of shares in the extremely unlikely event that Hertz does emerge from this a viable company. If those shares evaporate into nothing tomorrow, I won't lose any sleep over it.
NFL Players and Covid 19
Why won’t the defense simply include the video?

Why would you expect the prosecution to make the defense case?
I feel for you, that's a really shitty situation to be in. I'd be fighting it though, what kind of airport doesn't have cameras?
I concur, Assange is being slowly tortured to death while awaiting this sham trial.

But I do think the leaks will continue. Those of us paying attention to the Assange saga have seen a new wave of evidence of crimes against humanity being prepared for release. This problem is NOT going away for the American people. The magnitude of the crime is just too large.
The parent was correct, and you are changing to a definition used in a statute that was never enacted.

The top description on the Wikipedia article says Mens Rea is "the mental element of a person's intention to commit a crime; or knowledge that one's action or lack of action would cause a crime to be committed."
That's why I'm leaning toward TailwindCSS in almost every project. It's just a collection of classes. No prebuilt components, no big decisions being made for you, etc. It feels a bit freeing after 15+ years of CSS.
What is wrong with people these days?!?
> Perhaps, but ...

Isn't that what I wrote:

> > it's probably not possible to realize a latency win here

?

> On top of that, if you used some kind of pulse scheme (i.e. morse code with neutrinos) it has to be slow

"slow pulse" == long pulse. It will be "fast" in that it will go faster than the speed of light in fiberoptics and the path will be shorter, but it will be slower because error correction will demand a great deal of redundancy which, among other things, means long pulses.

I think we're in agreement.
A better way of looking at this is from the perspective of where they make money: targeting Windows makes sense because it's core to Microsoft's business, their reputation is heavily linked to it via all of those enterprise contracts, and their revenue scales directly with the number of people using Windows.

In contrast, Flash was an Adobe acquisition which they never had a clear vision for and the model of selling tools but giving away the runtime for free meant that your app being popular didn't make more money for them. Anything security-exposed like this needs substantial amounts of ongoing maintenance funding but from Adobe's perspective that was mostly overhead or something Google would subsidize for them.
Zoom is getting more publicity now than ever before. When you think video conferencing, you think zoom. It may be overvalued now but not in terms of future perceived growth and that's what counts. When you look at growth rate, you see that it's growing very fast. Keep in mind that YouTube and Instagram where booth thought to be over valued at one time but look where they are at now.

My suspsion is that they will get better at monoterizing their platform. The fact is that it's a popular player in an increasingly important industry. I would not count them out.
Ask HN: New chronic pain condition, not near as effective an IC – how to handle
I posted this here:

https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/158853/new-potentially-chronic-health-condition-means-i-may-not-be-the-same-engineer-as

The advice in the accepted answer is good, and the way I think I will proceed but I was wondering if there were any other experiences or recommendations from the HN community from people in HR (yes, I know, not necessarily sympathetic to my situation but rather the company's) or other ICs who have faced similar situations.

MY GP and specialty doctors have told me it may be chronic pain without much to do other than pain management (NSAIDs, CBT,...). To be honest, even NSAIDs don't do much. I've been depressed and anxious about my future. It's likely not bad enough to qualify for disability, but honestly, I don't want to go on disability. I was doing really well at a FAANG type company and I don't want to lose what I've built for myself, however, if this physical pain and mental state continues, I will not be the engineer I was before.

I will say this, regardless of what happens to me, my eyes have been opened to what many people deal with and it sucks. Maybe I'm in the bargaining phase, however, if I get better or learn to deal with my condition effectively, I want to think I will do something to help others rather than looking out for just myself. That being said, I realize that looking out for myself is the point of this advise seeking post....
Thank you! I appreciate the kind words.
The nice thing about Delphi was that one could start easily with a toy project and then turn it into a quite high quality product. With solutions like IntraBuilder one is tied into a tight framework, which integrates only in limited ways to the Web.

The closest thing I know is Oracle Apex, which has its flaws, lock-in and costs $$$$ but some results I saw are quite nice and as a user hard to identify as being created by such a tool.
No this is not what tmux is fore. IMO tmux and screens are giant hacks:

- multiplexing: better to use ssh multiplexing, which is just nice in general

- persistence: Yes, you want to open a pty on a the host, but you should actually emulate the terminal on the guest: one should just forward all the pty messages between the guest and host (graphical emlator). In other words, a lot more like regular ssh

- sharing: graphical emulators should just understand that multiple can be hooked up, have some support for this, we can relay the input from one emulator to the others as needed.

For my terminal-inside-shell, I would use a customer server + protocol for managing all the ptys (remember because backgrounded commands there can be multiple).
If visual editing of the web died, why do I see squarespace ads everywhere?
If they are legally allowed to buy it, I would sell it to them but put a waiting period on it ("yep, you own it now. You can pick it up in 5 days"). During the waiting period, if I thought they were going to use it to commit a heinous crime, I would contact the FBI and provide them with all of the buyer's details.

I don't like this contrived example though, and I suspect you've only set it up so that if/when I say "nope, I won't sell the gun to that person" you'll then say "in this case the gun is GitHub and the felon trying to buy it is ICE" which I do not think is an apt analogy at all.
Judges are nominated and confirmed by elected officials, which are determined by the voters. Which part of that is "undemocratic"?
Let's Say You Wanted to Back Up the Internet Archive
> No, I want the world's energy and carbon footprint to reduce, rather than have people with a decentralisation fetish invent new ways to incentivise thrashing.

Then any way to dismantle the existing consume-everything-to-make-a-profit economy, which is caused by archaic and inefficient monetary systems, should be good, right?

How much energy is wasted / burned because of our existing monetary policies?

cryptocurrency PoW is bajillions times more efficient than, i dunno, exerting currency dominance by shows of military power or shipping goods all over the world because its "cheaper" to make things here and sell things there.
AMD Ryzen 4000 APU can apparently run Crysis without a CPU cooler
Agree with your points, hard to know what the future looks like but it’s clear it’s not going to look like the past.
> Why is it that these projects so often promise the world early on only to continuously chip away at their own promises and undermine the faith of the community that gave them business to begin with?

As they say, never attribute to malice that which is explainable by incompetence.

I've seen this kind of thing 100's of times when some naive people get into product development. The team promises life-time subscriptions or other completely unsustainable business models because it _feels_ like the right kind of payment plan. They genuinely want to give their users the best features at the lowest prices.

Then the reality of maintaining and updating a large software product/service sets it. Engineers are expensive. Marketing is expensive. Operations are expensive. What started off as wide-eyed "wow, we're making a million dollars!" turns into "oh no, we only made a million dollars". Expenses start to rise faster than income.

Then someone who actually knows how to run a business steps in and does the Picard facepalm while reviewing the companies pricing plans. How did they ever expect to build a business with such a totally unrealistic model?

So the now battle scarred founders are forced to face the music. Change their pricing and product offering or watch their company evaporate. They aren't doing it to be mean or to squeeze blood from a stone, they are trying to keep their business solvent.

I expect that navigating this transition is one of the hardest things a fledgling business will ever have to do.
I purchased Zoom during its IPO, then sold half my stock @ 105, then sold the remainder @ 62. My thinking was, "if the stock is this volatile, how will it do during a recession?"

Sigh.

Right now, I think buying Zoom is, even with the outrageously high P/E ratio, might still be worth considering. I would look at growth and profitability over P/E. Zoom's breaking into Fortune 100-200 companies with strong momentum, and there's really no structural issues it needs to deal with. The current stock price makes sense if you take into account future growth; worst case scenario, it corrects and it'll make it up after a few more strong quarters.
Yep, that's how everyone wants to spend their time and effort these days, in an age of pervasive, easy and free banking... memorizing multiple seed phrases so their anti-state opsec is up to scratch. Better pray you don't screw up on page 63, subsection 5 of the "Big book of keeping your bitcoins safe" or whoops! There go your life savings with no recourse.

Do you coiners ever step back and listen to yourselves?
> The difference is that the DAs dont really like to pursue criminal charges against the police, so in many cases of misconduct nothing comes of it.

So perhaps instead of abusing civil law for that, there should be a way for private prosecution of criminal law?
This got posted a couple days ago but didn't get any traction (3 points, 0 comments). As well as being topical due to the Internet Archive's recent legal troubles, there's some interesting discussion there.
China's censoring its critics on Zoom. Will the tech company continue to comply?
The osmium, too!
Okay so what would you propose as the mechanism for focusing on that primary issue?
I’d agree accredited investor rules should apply for any public company fundraising while in bankruptcy.
The real reason he wasn't disappeared long ago, is that he had access to such gargantuan quantities of very real evidence of very real crimes that he was able to surf the shock wave, and he successfully leaked it in a way that would guarantee some light on the case - clearly not enough, but he did not disappear into darkness after the first war crimes were revealed. His followup was his defence, and the only reason he got caught in a web of intrigue is that he stopped focusing on the mission and got caught in a honeypot.

Julians flamboyance and charisma are the reason the general public are complacent about his torturous treatment. His character was weaponised against him by those with immense resources to do so.

However, you can't dispense with leakers you don't see. And here is the weakness in the US Governments' strategy of disappearing Julian - Its not the leaker: its the leaks.

And since the West has committed war crimes at such stupendous scale, these leaks are not going away.
Would that be such a problem? I use GitHub every day, but if they burn a bridge with the federal government it's no skin off my back.
> In other countries, such as France, bachelor-masters is common to do together, in only 4-5 years (or is this only in my field

Some schools in the US offer this to undergrads as well; the fancy term that some schools use for this is "submatriculation", which people sometimes shorten to "submat".
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035
You should listen to the allegations listed in the press conference. This goes well beyond "bullying" in both scope and severity. They travelled cross-country to try to plant a GPS tracker on the couple's car for example, and that's honestly among the _least_ egregious and extreme actions they took.
Yeah this is where it would have helped if I had discussed what I meant by "new".

AlphaGo is a supervised learner that outputs optimal Go moves given opposing play. It yields new discoveries in the same sense that a model designed to predict mechanical failures from labeled sensor data would: I didn't know what the model was going to predict until it predicted it, and now I know.

But what the factory owners want is a machine that can take raw, unlabeled sensor data and predict mechanical failures from that. They want insights. "Why not just feed all our data into the model and just see what comes out?" they ask. "I don't see why we need to hire at all if we have this neural net."

The reason you need a human somewhere in the system if you want insights is because someone needed to program AlphaGo specifically to try to win at Go. At the factory, someone needs to tell the machine what a mechanical failure is, in terms of the data, before it can successfully predict them.

Then, neither "winning at Go" nor "mechanical failure" are states that the system hasn't already been programmed to recognize. That's what I mean when I say a supervised learner cannot generate "new" output.
Doesn’t really matter whose fault it was: the experience was abysmal, which further led to its downfall.
> Ending a contract with an agency that runs concentration camps is good.

If ending contract with an agency that runs concentration camp has any meaningful impact on said agency, the only thing you achieve is making their service a bit worse and life of people in their custody a bit miserable.

That's the opposite of good, you're just hurting people you supposedly care about.
I agree with the Windows 2000 UI being great, but Windows XP ran better for me.

To get the best of both worlds I ran a spare copy of Windows Server 2003 as my "daily driver" on a Thinkpad back in the early 2000's. It had the Windows 2000 UI with the behind-the-scenes updates that came with Windows XP. Most software that installed on XP installed fine on Server 2003. It was nice.
On an android, I assume you're not using any video sources that exceed the capabilities of a stereo jack. It's not like it's HDMI pass-through from a home cinema.
I don't see network effects at work here. Network effects function by increasing the value of the product itself simply because there are more users on the network, that is to say, the users contribute value to the network itself, for example, because they generate the content others consume.

If you have more people on Zoom you just have... more people. Conferencing and video software don't really have a lot of moat. Skype, Teamspeak, Mumble, Google Hangouts, Discord etc.. there's always been plenty of competition and churn.
To add to this, a significant portion (I think) of opening a restaurant goes into purchasing physical assets: fridges, grills, safety equipment, tables/chairs, etc, and banks know how to liquidate those assets if your business fails. Taking a failed software company and selling off its assets is a much harder proposition.
Agreed, I think this is the craziest investing story in my lifetime.

I remember people buying off-the-market IOUs for bitcoins from people who had accounts on Mt. Gox at a significant discount after they had announced they were illiquid and couldn't find them lol.

Link to the company:
https://bitcoinbuilder.com/

Looks like they're still in pending status! Wow
> But who on earth could have thought that morals notwithstanding it was even a vaguely sensible thing to do

They should be criticized for their morals, not their stupidity!
Sounds like he's almost accidentally stumbled upon the idea of intersectionality.

Many businesses have a "front of the house" consisting of people that interact with customers, clients, etc., and a "back of the house" that might be comprised of warehouse workers, etc. Many businesses in the south used to only hire white people in the front of the house, and only men in the back of the house.

After civil rights laws came into effect, many of these businesses argued that their hiring wasn't racist, because they employ lots of black people (in the warehouse). And they're not sexist, because they employ lots of women (in the front of the house). But if you're a black woman, you're still out of luck. Because of this, the courts ruled that these policies are still considered discrimination on the basis of sex/race. Yes, these hiring policies weren't discriminating against ALL women, but just a subset (women who happen to be black). Or looked at differently, a subset of a race (black people who happen to be women). Either way, it's still discrimination against a protected class - both intuitively, and by law.

Similarly, this decision states that firing someone because they're lesbian or gay would be discrimination against a subset of women (women who are attracted to women), or a subset of men (men who are attracted to men).

In cases involving the protections of individuals, you can't start by looking at the aggregate of all the people working at the company, and analyze the company hiring policy, attribute-by-attribute (e.g. sex, race, etc)., in isolation. It'll still lead to discrimination, because each individual has many attributes, and the combination of those attributes can be the source of the discrimination.

Instead, you have to start with the individual affected person who brought the case forward, look at all of their attributes, and if changing any one (protected) attribute (in this case, sex) would lead to a different hiring/firing decision, then it's considered discriminatory.