skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have such mixed feelings about ITER. I hope we learn the things we want to from it, and that what we learn is good news. But ITER is very far from being a demonstration of a practical power plant -- it's a science experiment first and foremost. (Well, it has really been an experiment in international government cooperation...)

I'm concerned that fusion research could have an 'AI winter' if there are any problems with ITER. (Similar to what has happened to inertial fusion in the failure of NIF to achieve ignition.) On the bright side, I think Commonwealth's SPARC experiment has a chance of beating ITER to hit 'scientific' break-even (Q>1) -- although ITER should top out around Q=10-20, where SPARC is aiming for Q~4. (Q~20 is needed for a power plant.)

The issue of 'disruptions' (rapid unscheduled disassembly of the plasma) has not been solved. ITER's construction was premised on the idea that we need it to be solved, so therefore it will get solved. The situation is very similar to that of self-driving cars -- avoiding 90% of disruptions seems pretty doable, but a percent or so happen without warning.(https://fusion4freedom.com/pdfs/Disruption-Risk-poster-Wurde...)

I hope that people don't get the wrong idea about fusion from ITER. Fusion reactors don't scale down well, but they also don't have to be quite as large, slow, and expensive as ITER. Tokamaks only use about 10% of the available magnetic field pressure, which means about 100x less power density than is theoretically possible, for a given magnetic field strength. Also, ITER is limited by its superconductors to about 5T. REBCO superconductors could potentially triple that, which would increase power density 81 times. So, there is a ton of headroom to improve performance -- dealing with the outflux of power becomes the major issue, actually.

Ultimately, fusion is a long way from market still. It's hard to innovate rapidly with devices that cost billions and have life-cycles of decades. Private enterprises are pushing down on those numbers, though -- that's where I'm pinning my hopes. Given that renewables are approaching grid parity, it looks like the goalposts will start receding before fusion even achieves net power production.
Where exactly is the disk image? can't find it on the repo (also, github redesign removed file size?!?!)
Another horrible piece I've had the displeasure of reading.

"According to a study by Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy, the number of Britons self-reporting as “happy” halved in just three weeks at the start of lockdown.

Using data taken from YouGov Weekly Mood Tracker surveys and Google searches, the researchers found that the number of people declaring themselves as “happy” went from 51 per cent just before the UK’s first Covid-19 fatality to 25 per cent by the time lockdown began on 23 March.

However, once lockdown restrictions started to be lifted, these figures reversed, with happiness levels increasing back to close to what they were pre-pandemic, reaching 47 per cent by the end of May."

- No link to the study

- Happiness levels 51 percent -> 25 percent -> 47 percent. The baseline/absolute level of happiness did not increase. Also I'm not sure how you can claim the lockdowns increased the happiness when levels increased when lockdown restrictions started to be lifted.

I don't know the general perceived status of Independent as a news/media source compared to the BBC or CNN or Fox or NYT, but the title could use some serious improvement.

It also irks me when all across the internet today I see validity given to a topic if a certain paper or study is cited as reason for the fact they claim. I believe there are too many studies out there that both sides claim as proving their point. Examples of this can prominently been seen related to COVID topics and on Reddit where comments counter one another with papers being cited. Rarely do people question the validity of the paper, the integrity of the data, the motives of the researchers, etc. Precedence is given to institutional status in the name of science. (ie. A Stanford or Oxford paper)
All of the add-ons I use are now unsupported. It's extremely frustrating and unwelcome for them to break things like this.
Totally agree. I've almost never completed a take home project (even though I liked the concept) because there were always other companies I liked that didn't demand as much of my time whose interview process moved faster and who gave me offers before I finished the take home interview process.
> I'm just responding to that quote from your last post.

You said, “seems insane to me to judge the boringness of a person by the price of their sunglasses”

This is some kind of straw argument—to be clear, it’s not what I wrote, it’s not what I meant, it’s not what I implied.

> And outside of being "good" or "bad" at non-verbal communication you're forgetting another important direction: people who do not care.

It is a mistake to think of “does not care” as some kind of meaningful third position. It is not.

Here’s an analogy. Let’s say I ask you, “Did you take the last slice of cake?” It’s a yes/no question with social stakes—maybe I’m upset that I didn’t get any cake. Is there a way that you can avoid communicating a response to my question? No, not really. You heard the question, I’m waiting for your response. You can say yes or no, you can change the topic, you can dodge the question, you can turn the question around, and you can even stay silent—but it is nearly impossible for you to avoid making a conscious decision to communicate a response.

Clothing is like that, but the question is implied and the response is nonverbal. Under ordinary circumstances, you must choose how to dress yourself. You can choose to grab whatever is on top of the pile, you can choose to pick out an outfit, you can choose to go outside in your pajamas or stark naked, but you cannot somehow choose not to make a choice.

Take a moment and visualize what “I don’t care how others see me” looks like. Do you pick average clothing to blend in? Do you wear whatever you like? Do you carefully observe gender norms when buying clothing from the store? Do you wear whatever has the most pockets? Do you wear the same clothing sitting around the house as you do when you visit a friend’s house? Do you wear T-shirts with characters from your favorite cartoon? Do you wear something from the pile of T-shirts I got for free from vendors at tech conventions?

The problem is—once you are aware that you are making a choice, you aren’t really in a position to abdicate that choice.
I haven't seen portfolios mentioned yet, but that's another option. Pros: do it once, use it at multiple interviews. Cons: more difficult to make sure it's original work, difficult to come up with ideas. I did CV screening and very few people had anything, it's not like a portfolio project needs to take more than 2-3 hours to create.

Portfolios are a common requirement in other fields where creating a portfolio is even part of the educational process.
Kodak always was in the chemistry business. Drugs are chemistry.

Kodak is why we have 35mm and 70mm movie film: it's the production cycle sizes they could make when acetate was invented as a chemistry flow process.

Ten minute reels and the crank rate for film, and lenses all stem from production limits to technology when Kodak and a small number of like companies made the photographic world.
And we'll deal with all those old standards by having our own new standard!

He discusses "open firmware", which is not Open Firmware.[1] That was a boot ROM system from the 1990s. It was written in Forth, and was intended for use with a console interface. That's not what you want today. A good question to ask is, what do you want today at that level, and what do you not want. For example, a security oriented "cloud" company might want to load the machine, restart the machine, and freeze and dump the machine in an emergency, but not have the ability to examine or alter memory while running. Who patches a running production machine any more? Today's server firmware, with an administrative CPU that phones home and listens for commands to do who knows what, tends to have way too much capability for making small changes quietly and listening to what's going on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
Hong Kong has been teaching Cantonese Chinese without using a romanisation system to do so and its literacy rate never lagged.

Pinyin may help second language learners greatly, but was never the cause of the literacy spike. It's the rollout of the education system to villages that caused it. If they taught Chinese characters without Pinyin, they would most likely have decreased literacy rates to a similar extent also.
So many fusion sceptics in the comments that it sounds like a congregation of anti-vaxxers. Funding for fusion has been ridiculously low for decades and it's exactly because of sceptics with myopathy like the ones present here.

Countries could've been pumping trillions into fusion and other clean energy, together, for years, but we'd rather vote for politicians willing to bomb the oil out of a poorer nation than think more than a decade or more ahead. Now that climate change is finally becoming more of a reality, the myopathic sceptics are turning into temporal sceptics "but we won't have enough time". People like them create the issues we have and every time a solution is proposed, they'll cast doubt.

I'm glad things are moving along at all. I say stop oil, petrol, gas subsidies in every country, and get out of countries you all shouldn't be sticking your noses in. Invest in something that will actually let your grandchildren inhabit a planet with less friction and a much smaller threat to their way of life (climate change, overfishing, plastic pollution, etc.). Stop being so selfish.
For the context of this thread, a better representation of the Moscow Metro would probably be this one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro#/media/File:Mosco...
You gotta start somewhere! The plasma discharges will eventually last several minutes, but they will 'exercise' the machine very carefully/gradually over the course of a few years to be sure that nothing breaks.
> The best we can do is backup.

No. The best you can do is use mathematics to compensate.
In essence represent the data as a set of equations and generate extra ones that will be useful in case you lose one. They have been doing this for decades in telecom/storage.
If I were setting government policies, "no harm, no foul" would be a 100% legit defence to anything (as long as the people potentially being harmed were aware)
Same here; indeed
I loved reading "Last chance to see". That, and the essay about the palm top bought at a airport shop to pass time.
The reason work on alternative theories of gravity is important:

We have one reality R, for which we have various possibly imperfect theories T(R) and a large set of possibly imperfect observations O(R).

For gravity, we know that general relativity doesn't perfectly match current observations -- GR(R) != O(R). Since R is the same in both sides, this is not supposed to happen.
There are three ways to resolve this:

- GR() is incomplete,

- O() is incomplete,

- both are incomplete.

Dark matter focuses on the second, MOND on the first. We shouldn't give up on any option until there's either a solution or a counterexample.
They need to bring it back.
It reminds me of Reagan who spoke of "certain intellectual luxuries we can do without" and that taxpayers should not be asked "to subsidize intellectual curiosity".

Where I'm from (Belgium), there's also a tendency to focus more on educating for jobs instead of stimulating human curiosity and knowledge.

It's the same type of people who advocate progress and innovation, and just don't see how moulding people's education to an existing situation is counter-productive to their hopes for progress.

It's also the type of people who pay lip service to agile development methods, but cannot stand the insecurity of not knowing what the outcome will be.

We're living in times where many people fear being unproductive or producing something only to discover that is has no immediate value. Instead of moving us forward, such fears bring us to a standstill.
Stream some media. Maybe audio into different network-attached speakers in your house, or setup a DIY home security system with a webcam on a raspberry pi streaming to a more powerful computer, or maybe make a youtube clone, or write an app that lets you control your computer with your phone, etc.
Great piece, thanks for sharing. It makes me want to dig up my old gear and start playing again.
SRE Tooling – The Clever Hans Fallacy
The story of a clever horse and what it teaches us about the mindset to cultivate when choosing the right SRE tooling.
If I'd stolen it, I'd have picked something prettier!
I've worked both as an electrical engineer, and as a SW engineer/developer.

"Find the first duplicate": In my actual SW roles, this was trivial: Use a hash/map/dictionary/set. However, this isn't a typical Leetcode question - often it will be with additional constraints (cannot use a set, need O(1) space, etc). I don't doubt there are domains where this is important, but I've never had to do this in my professional work.

"Traverse this graph": Probably had to do it a few times. Less than once a year.

BFS: Never for my job.

Linked lists: Never for my job.

Yes, it is good to know what a linked list is and know if your library's data structure is using one, but again: That's not your typical Leetcode question. You'll be expected to write a linked list to solve some problem.

I do get what you're saying: Stuff like linked lists and BFS are fundamental, even if most SW jobs almost never require them. It would be a red flag if a candidate didn't know the basics about them. It's another thing to ask them to code it on the fly.

Going back to my electrical engineering experience: We have to take and use a ton of calculus to get the degree - much more than a CS grad will take algorithms. Yet it's a common trope that most electrical engineers will never use calculus on the job (literally not hard to find one who had a whole career in EE without using calculus). If you're doing research or are at the forefront of a discipline - sure, you'll need calculus. Or if you're doing electromagnetics, etc. The theory is built on calculus, but you don't need to know it to apply the results of the theory.

Would it be a red flag if a candidate clearly didn't understand the basics of differentiation (i.e. rate of change) and integrals (i.e. summing quantities)? Perhaps.

But should I ask someone to do a tricky integral for an EE role that will not require the person to do any calculus? I would be criticized by my peers, and if I kept doing that I would be excluded from interviewing. In fact, even if I ask them to do non-tricky integrals I would be criticized.

Asking people to figure out a trick to solve a linked list problem is equivalent to asking EE candidates to do tricky integrals or differential equations.
I just express my option with a few people that I know will criticize me, but at the same time wont attack me.
well that’s it then! Can’t be any more to the story
Every Spotify update I wonder what they mess up next. 'Is it sorting or filtering this time?".
Out of interest has anyone tried setting up an alternative appearance in Apple’s Face ID with a mask on yet? I only have my normal appearance set up and a mask is enough to stop that working - which is pretty unsurprising. I didn’t realise you could have an alternative appearance set up, curious how well that’ll work - can it accurately learn and then recognise with a mask on?
Screenshot of Google's managed NFS service
These celebrities will be forgotten as soon as their Instagram account is gone or followers appear to be dead accounts mostly. Some artistically influential will get to the mainstream thanks to their fans hoarding and sharing the data, like all these last century music/film stars who left tons of material in any medium, now digitized and shared/pirated. Although I get a bit worried about p2p sharing as multimedia rental walled gardens got too popular.
You mean to say that something that covers half or more of the thing being recognised makes the recognition worse? who'd have thought?

The real news is that the error rate for the top algorithms only dropped to 5%. I can't find these numbers in the original report on my phone:
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2020/NIST.IR.8311.pdf
That was exactly what Universities where doing here in the 90's. We didn't have physical disk space or bandwidth for a complete feed, but where able to provide all the non-binary groups in the main top levels (including alt.*).

The ISPs needed the binaries though, because that was all they were used for. People read the text on their Uni systems, where they got free dialup, rather than chew up their ISP connection time quotas.
I was a Macromedia fanboy. Photoshop is still a second class citizen in my mind to Fireworks. Even though Adobe felt different and nuked their best editor I still run it.
Breathing works, just as basic spirituality. But, further you get into cultish stuff and "spiritual" experiences because you're basically restricting oxygen.

In Zen they even warn of it.
Thanks for sharing these!

This is my page with my lenses, it includes links to the relevant Flickr pages for most of the lenses: http://gerikson.com/blog/photo/Lens-list.html
With respect to the Bullet Cluster (which is often mentioned as a counterexample to MOND): discussion of why that does not rule out MOND:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160721044735/http://www.astro....
Discord has been really good with their changelogs but their changelogs in app stores are not as good as the ones in the beta channels. I liked their transparency when they introduced tabs in their Android app.
Does it theoretically also run A/UX ? I remember the Quadra machines were able to do so...
I posted this elsewhere today here on hacker news, but my Discrete math teacher once said to our class that to learn something you basically have to already know it so in that sense I see a lot of things as barely if not far out of my reach. I also understand he kind of meant by this that knowledge in theoretical fields like Mathematics comes in steps. So I never think oh I could never do that. Currently actually grasping linear algebra. I never took a course for linear algebra in my CS curriculum I chose the least math involved emphasis I could in CS and I turned out to regret it because once I got to the funner abstract math I actual found out I enjoyed it. I’ve felt Linear Algebra is just outside my reach so machine learning has been something hanging over my head for a while now, because I haven’t put my time into it yet because I haven’t meet the necessary prerequisites. But honestly I’m kind of just trying it anyways. I have a decent enough Math background at the moment that I can just go for learning machine learning but I haven’t yet. I keep circling around it but I think analysis paralysis is getting to me. Self learning is a bit hard for me when it comes to dedicating my time solely to one thing because there is so much I want to learn across the CS discipline.
> What makes scientists believe that the solution to nuclear fusion power is only a matter of scale?

The sun is nuclear fusion, so it is proven to work if your scale is big enough ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eid_al-Fitr
What’s depressing is the de-evolution of Evernote performance.

Every year it seems to get worse.
Why does this point to a hardware-level protection rather than simply removing the dependency on C? I mean wouldn't moving to rust mitigate most of these vulnerabilities? I can't help but think that if hardware protection from vulnerabilities were useful we would have enabled them 30-40 years ago.

I just don't see any value of this to the end-user: the result (a crash) is the same.

If they can get it to work it might be beneficial, but it would also validate the idea that C is broken as a system language because it can't know at compile-time whether or not an fault will occur on memory access, which has been proven to be the correct way to reason about memory.
Finding Tail Latency Bottlenecks
Usually the backwards compatibility is good enough, that updating to declare support for it has almost no positive gain.

(Even more so where updating to explicitly support the new version means dropping old versions.)
Idiosyncratic is quite a friendly way to describe it.

Written English is jus plain awful and makes no sense whatsoever. It is basically impossible to read english without knowing the words and thus how to pronounce them.

You can read whole german sentences without understanding a word but still pronounce them correctly.

This is something you will often find in children reading a book; where the pronunciation is basically correct and then they ask what a certain word means at the end.

English speakers just stutter step across unknown words and are often unable to finish the sentence when they encounter something unknown.

This sort stuttering is really jarring and happens a lot even to adults.

Being german but reading a lot of technical stuff in english, the nonsensical nature of written English is just mind boggling.
Table Sticky Column in CSS3
Show HN: Humans vs AI – A/B testing GPT-3
Downloading 10 gigabytes of SDK just to run the compiler is not fun.

This is not very accurate. Just the compiler/linker (which doesn't need the SDK to build and run programs, i.e. equivalent of getting just gcc) is about 300mb to download. Then, assuming you're talking about the Windows SDK, which as far as I'm aware you only need when targetting OS-specifics is abut 700mb.
It's just on Android.
I don’t know if this would work on iOS (or if it’s already implemented), but any idea if I can make the app pop up directly every time I unlock the phone? This would mean that I don’t need open the app manually myself /keep the app on top before I lock the screen.
Department of Energy unveils blueprint for quantum internet
Britain maintained it's imperialist reach well into the "capitalist" age (into the 20th century!). The US maintains limited imperialism to this day, although less so than in the Cold War era.

If you're going to argue that capitalism is incompatible with imperialism, then sure you can be pedantically correct, but then you're arguing about capitalism as a macro-economic policy and not a micro-economic policy, in which case capitalism has nothing to do with personal liberty whatsoever, it has to do with tariffs (and we still aren't doing a good job of it).

That's not usually an interesting discussion to have. And if you're going to make that argument, you sort of also have to accept that Socialism has never been tried (and that it might result in greater personal liberty).
How is this on the front page? It's just a tweet with no evidence that this capitalism hater was fired for requesting time off.
I love this forum.
No, they are not doing dns over https because they can’t do raw tls (wtf?).

The reason for dns over https is that it doesn’t look different from any other https traffic so can’t be blocked to force use of the ISPs monetizing dns.

It should be plainly obvious to anyone that application level software is able to perform raw tls connections.

This isn’t a DoT is better/worse than DoH comment, it’s merely saying that the states reason for chrome and Firefox doing DoH is blatantly wrong, and the rest of the argument is predicated on that incorrect reason.
> it's from China! [...] 1,700 years ago people preserved fish in rice!

> The rest of the article is about how sushi is actually American. According to this article, sushi is from South East Asia, Chinese, and America! Does that sound like a reasonable conclusion to you?

No, it sounds like an absurd misrepresentation of an interesting article on the history and origins of sushi from a veteran Japanese chef that, unless you're genuinely as ignorant as you're making yourself look with this post, you can't possibly be serious about.
How to Pretend That You Are Smart (Featuring PG)