skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My grade school neighbored a hospital. I recall occasional loud rumblings of the backup generators during recess, presumably they were tests. Legend was they came from a WWII submarine! Neat!

Years later I had a tech support job in that hospital and all the PCs had small UPSs to keep them alive for the 30-60 seconds it took the big generators to come online.

I never did get a chance to see the generator room.

e: Another personal anecdote that is more relevant to the topic.

I was working for a VOIP provider back when Hurricane Sandy hit NYC. Part of our production network was housed in a telecom building in Manhattan. We received daily updates on how many floors the flooding was from our equipment and about the fuel deliveries to the building backup generators. Apparently the generators were on the roof? I'd love to know more about the setup in that building because we had zero downtime.
For reference: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/66205 (you obviously need to be root)}
The Weather Station on Everest
The crux of the problem here is that most people don’t want to really put much effort into the basics. All these things are to improve things at the edge, like a pro runner choosing better cleats.

Exercise and diet alone will lower all cause deaths risk by something like 50%. But no one will do this simple thing because who wants to believe that doing heavy squats and cutting out refined carbs will help?

don’t hold me to that number it’s somewhere near there for %.
It doesn’t suddenly become about moral vision and fairness only when it’s something progressives want.

The notions of private property and free markets are about moral vision and fairness. They are enforced with the threat of violence, and they benefit members of society unequally. Some people like to pretend that they’re natural, that they’re a given, and that challenging any component of them is imposing one’s own morality on some God-given system.

That is false. No economic system is more or less about morality and fairness than any other. You believe in letting the capital retain more of the earnings than the labor because you think that is moral. It has nothing to do with some supposed position of neutrality.
Wikipedia is directly harmed, in the most definite way, by not being able to collect donations from the people that rely on the information it collects.
Violence including riots and political assassinations have massively decreased from the 1960s and 1970s and overall life satisfaction has increased. I realize a revolutionary tone is in the current zeitgeist but it's unlikely to persist if Biden wins. Bernie's hilariously one sided defeat is perhaps the best indicator that most people don't agree with a radical future for the US.
Realistically the window of opportunity already closed back in March. At this point community transmission is so widespread that to actually "beat back Covid-19" would take a long, strict lockdown (very few "essential" workers), extensive testing and contract tracing, and closing the borders. Even if those steps might leave us better off in the long run, they are simply no longer politically feasible. Wishes won't change that reality.
You mean something like this?

https://www.atx-upsu.com/

Looks like it's capacitor-based, removes the need for an inverter, and even has a clever way of communicating to the host, by taking over the power switch connector.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a price or where to buy. Would love to see more momentum around products like this, and marketing directed at home systems.

EDIT:
Thought of one more system that uses capacitors to limp to a clean shutdown--the Unifi Cloud Key Gen2.

Again though, the power solution isn't packaged for consumer use.

Though, maybe it'd be amusing to try to hack together a NAS out of Cloud Key Gen2 Pluses... there's a hard drive bay in each one ;D
I wrote a piece of software that still handles all engineering project management for one of the larger communications companies in North America (>2.5 million customers). I developed it in 1997 and it is still in place today, chugging away for ~400 daily users and getting minor updates a couple times a year. I didn't remotely think it would last on this timescale and I have paid the price for some poor design decisions many times over. Still, as much as I cringe at some of the older sections of code, it has been nice to see it keep going.

The client has started internal projects to replace it 3x over and each has been cancelled; sum total spent on the cancelled projects easily exceeds what I charged by an order of magnitude. In retrospect I didn't charge nearly enough back then! If only I could have used a SAAS model.
The Guide to Building a Mobile Friendly Website
Succinctly: you can have sensible default reactions so your brain isn't spinning and the reaction is smooth (think cache). You can take advantage of low stakes contexts to train, as opposed to trying things in a professional context where the price may be hefty(think sandbox). Empathy: seeing a situation from the perspectives of all people involved is extremely useful, effective, and profitable.

Details and rationale:

There are a lot of common situations. These are situations that either have a high probability of happening in a context, or happen frequently. Note I didn't say XOR.

For example, someone complimenting you. A default reaction would be to smile, and say "thank you". Making eye contact with someone: smile and say Hi/Good morning.

This will take the load off of your head. Most people I've seen who describe situations they reacted inappropriately in simply don't have a repertoire or haven't been around the block. Many people get "weird", in their own words, during some of the most banal reactions.

Sandbox: practice on the streets. Buying coffee or groceries. Being tactful and smooth takes practice, and witnessing instances of handling situations. Leveraging everyday situations to learn more about people and expanding your comfort zone. For some people, holding a five minute conversation is daunting. They can practice as they go about their business. The pressure to do that in the workplace can be unbearable, and inappropriate behavior may be a consequence of that. Low pressure situ, low stakes.

The empathy part: the ability to predict how a situation or event will be lived/interpreted/felt by different people is, again, extremely useful. In a professional context for example, running a decision to be made against different world corresponding to people will often lead to a pause and figuring out it ought to be changed because X or Y. In meetings with clients, it allows to have a loop running where you interpret what something means for one member or department of the client organization, and how it'll play with other departments.

Again, this is extremely useful.

Also, as an aside for professional contexts and useful things to do/learn: the moments before, but mostly after a meeting is over where you chat up the people who were there are the most valuable. You rally learn things and information that couldn't/wouldn't be shared because of inhibition or other factors. People will share fears, apprehend, resentment sometimes, enthusiasm with you.
I have problem comprehending how a company which requires hundreds of wiki pages to function somehow does not have if not versioning system then at least a weekly backup of essential documentation.
A slightly different spin has been working on some 20+ year old C/C++ code that is relatively nicely written, such that you can still expand on it today.

I had a lot of joy recently reading the Voyager 1 image decompression routines and some X11 window manager sources.
British sausages are better than any German wursts. Change my mind (don't try if you only had the cheapest stuff).
You can check out this "executing multiple queries in a single operation" thing through the GraphiQL clients on the blog post.
...and I'm pretty sure DOS inherited it from CP/M.
“The Agony of Atomic Genius” – A piece about J. Robert Oppenheimer (2006)
Hello,

Initially, I want to fulfill the most popular topics and topics that cover my specializations. When it gets to topics that are too niche, I am planning to hire some people that work in the niche. Thus, some independent researches with experience in learning using books will collect the best information, and then they will discuss and structure it.

The app is new, so all books are modern. However, later all topics of course will be updated

Thanks for your feedback, share the idea to get more feedback and refine it.
Nobody mentioning what the original article said: people of the time affected by what was going on chose the colonization administration as the lesser evil.

Mentioning this is flaming? And completely dismissing the content of the article and pushing current trending political stances is not? Not to mention down voting anything that does not agree with "Europe bad, Africa good"?

I think somebody needs to say these things, no matter how unpopular they are at the current moment. If you think otherwise though - your site your rules. Just say so and I am out.
The near and far pointers bit is also the reason why in the Windows flavor of Systems Hungarian notation, you have a lot of “LP” prefixes; I believe it means Long Pointer and would give you a far pointer. It’s typical to have one pointer typedef for Long Pointer, like LPBYTE, and sometimes one near, like PIMAGE_DOS_HEADER. Of course now it’s all ignored so if you see someone writing LP in modern code chances are it’s just tradition.

Also, today the segment-jumping far call still exists on modern AMD64 machines, and is how you cross “heaven's gate” to go between 32 bit and 64 bit execution.
For PDF vs Epub, I have recently seen the combination of traits of both, in a very devastating way.

The characters were overlapping, no matter which reader I use, what margin/line/character spacing I set, until I adjusted the font size to two points smaller, and everything was right.

It turns out that whoever made the epub, turned every word into a single html element, with a fixed position!

So, it was like PDF in a sense that every thing has a position on the page. But it was like epub in the sense that everything's size can be changed (albeit within the "div" element). And the default size doesn't event work for the book.

I cringed so fiercely that I nearly deleted the book.
How to Brainstorm – Remotely
Adobe had been pretty open with PostScript. From the PostScript Language Reference, 3rd Ed:

> However, Adobe desires to promote the use of the PostScript language for information interchange among diverse products and applications. Accordingly, Adobe gives permission to anyone to: ...

Source: https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf#page...
Having too many customers trying to buy your stuff is something folks would call a "nice problem to have"

It's a TERRIBLE problem to have not addressed in advance because now you're loosing money and people may wander off.

almost everything folks call "a nice problem to have" is not really "nice". It's frequently business hurting and sometimes business killing.
That is true, but has nothing to do with "==" vs "=" vs ":=". You can do:

func(x = 42); /* syntax error: expression operator expected, got '=' */
x = 42; /* OK */
x == 42; /* warning: statement expression has no effect */

just fine if you require "=" to be a statement.
Many companies have tried this in the past: make sure you make different mistakes from those predecessors.
The mask mandate for gyms in Ontario is…odd. You apparently don’t need to wear a mask while actively exercising; you just have to wear it while walking around and in the locker room.

Which seems like a hell of a loophole.

https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/you-don-t-need-to-wear-a-mask-whil...
It's a GNU/FSF article about software freedom, it's not about pricing.
Is there case law on the price targets? That one seems yet hazier to me, given the inherent uncertainty of predictions vs. (still uncertain) estimates of current truths. I guess in a deterministic universe they're the same thing, but that seems a bit too philosophical for most lawyers' taste.

In any case, large companies with near-infinite legal budgets still don't get to (openly) violate well-settled law, since judges do see what's happening and seek to minimize the burden on their opponents--and even award legal fees where possible, which it probably would be here under the Copyright Act. Their advantage comes when the law is at least slightly unclear and a victory would be worth a lot more dollars to the large company (for the precedent) than to their opponent. I believe that's the situation here, and the reason why CNW chose not to pursue Google for copyright infringement; though even with matched legal teams, I'd still bet that CNW would lose.

Finally, if that mass of the Earth isn't copyrightable, then no concept of fair use exists, because that concept exists only for copyrighted material; so I don't think your statement there makes sense. If a copyright for the CNW dataset did exist (which I doubt, but maybe), then Google could still argue fair use. I'd bet Google would lose that one, since they're using the whole work, without transformation of the original, in a way that destroys the commercial value of the original.
I don't recall Biden ever making a promise to not seek re-election. I remember him expressing the idea, but mostly within the context of addressing criticisms that he's pretty old. He never committed to it, however.

I cannot think of a single President in recent history who actually refused to run for re-election. Can you?

Regardless of whether he seeks a second term, I don't think he would sabotage the Democratic Party by refusing to sign an M4A bill, if one is put in front of him.
If I had to choose between memorizing a sequence of facts curated by some randos in the government, or being taught how to scrutinize sources for reliability/credibility and come up with my own judgements, then you won as that is far better.
In my first job we did project/information management systems. Initially for civil engineering projects, later more generally for governments and enterprises.

In some cases we had to have contingency plans for the software and data in case the company goes out of business within the coming 15 years.

Next I worked in advertisement, where clients spent similar sums as the above for cross media campaigns lasting maybe 14 days

That was quite the interesting contrast work wise :)
I have to disagree. I love consuming content through PDF format, even books, especially when paired with a great PDF reader.
Medical schools are the method by which doctors control the supply of competitors (as the AMA controls school accreditation).[1] The schools are simply collecting their share of the rent.

[1] https://medianism.org/2018/03/31/occupational-licensing-is-t...
The tiniest fiddle in the world is playing for you.

It's easy to have these bullshit opinions when you're a white male adult who didn't get eaten by wolves at 5 months old because there was a whole society and social structure that allowed you to safely grow up into the adult you are now.

And now that you've benefited from all that society has given to you in order for you to be where you are today, you want to opt out?

Pay back every dollar spent on you by everyone else, since you were born, and only then you can go live alone in the mountains..
The group whose leaders were thrown into jail, stripped of citizenship, and forced to flee to Mexico?
Working in a 911 call center this is how it worked for us. Except we had larger UPS's that could last probably 30-60 minutes in the building and then a large external generator in a small building beside. You'd see stuff like the lights that weren't on the UPS's turn off for a few seconds before the main generator fired up.
It's more like each population center in the country has its own (mostly) independent wave. Those waves then stack up on top of each other to produce a single national wave.
I guess it matters to people who want to bring colonialism back to Africa, Lebanon or Hong Kong. I think HN is pretty down with the last one so I don't know what you're talking about.
> it's difficult to test this equipment

Can't you just flip the circuit breaker or just pull the plug out? Or does a real power outage usually look different to that in some way, like a surge followed by a shutoff?
Not 23andMe but Ancestry.com was just bought by Blackstone [0]. I would say any privacy concerns are very valid if not invalidated by your DNA already being out there as you suggested.

[0] https://medcitynews.com/2020/08/blackstones-4-7b-acquisition...
There's a slight misunderstanding here: the main purpose of tax is not revenue for government spending, but to impose a policy on the actors in the economy.
It's a way to take out the excess money from circulation that central and retail banks printed, effectively controlling inflation.
As you are on Mac, Safari is your best choice. It is already optimized for it. I recently switched to it as my main browser, and I doubt I will look back.

Sure it is closed-source (although WebKit is open), but you already use Apple's OS.
To these I'd add the classic Vampyroteuthis infernalis by Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/vampyroteuthi...
I was considering this but then I stumbled across some ~7 year old micro towers. Those little thin client boxes that were popular for a short time as a thing that can connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor to a corporate network.

Refurbished with a Windows license (if I ever want to use it) was less than a surplus laptop. Power usage seems acceptable but I'll compare with a Kill-A-Watt. I have one on the way and if it works out I'll grab a few more.

I do like the idea of a surplus laptop cluster, mostly because of the built in UPS factor but there's a lot of wasted hardware there, such as the monitor and keyboard. But I suppose that's kind of a feature too.

I have shower thoughts of some kind of custom bladecenter made of old laptops but that's a lot of work for probably zero benefit.
All science starts with a hypothesis and many of those are rooted in partiality. The point is to have an investigative method which proves or disproves that hypothesis.

The fact that science reveals truth even though it can start with partiality is why the scientific method is the gold standard.
> I don't think he would sabotage the Democratic Party by refusing to sign an M4A bill, if one is put in front of him.

He wouldn't need to, they'd never put one forward. Just like card check.
It's not a matter of addons or private mode; the blog text is completely absent from the HTML file.
It is also often paired with cheese, both hard as well as the local "queijo minas", especially the "frescal" variety, which is a very young kind of cheese.

"Romeo e Julietta"
HPE took it; killed it.
You first, management.
Advices on Writing Blog Posts
Well, the real truth is that we're all able to survive on very low wages. If your options are shit job that delays death 10 years or die now, you take the shit job.

Bare survival is very cheap in America.
I don't know about the riots not causing a spike in Covid cases. Here in LA County the spike started on June 15 and hit its highest points in July. That would seem to coincide nicely with the incubation periods of the initial riots and then spreading it to others.
Why would being porous help, unless the mud is damp and there's some evaporative cooling going on?

I know in the American southwest adobe construction is popular, but that's about sheer thermal mass moderating the effects of the heat. Small windows also help.
I don't know why some Brits keep saying this. Wine is not posh, expensive sausages are not posh, quality food is not posh.

Why are you trying to create a divide, and why are you on the "lesser" side? Ignore the strange "posh" elite, they're morons. You can do whatever you want in Britain, no matter your situation (coming from an actually divided poor country, yes, really).
> some other smaller specialty networks as well

Like what?
Self Updating Go Binaries
The shell is whatever you use as a shell. Be that cmd, powershell or your own invention. My point is that it doesn't matter. The shell can process the command line however it likes but all the application receives is a single string.

The application can then do whatever it likes with the string. Sure you can use an entry point that parses the arguments in different ways but that's still the application parsing the string. You're just using a library function to do the parsing instead of doing it manually.

At no point does "Windows" do anything. As far as its concerned it's just a string being passed in at process creation.
Yup, unless there’s a pill, people don’t want to take the effort before it’s already too late. It’s probably a reason why there’s such a bias towards medicine, even over basic stuff like healthy eating.

A good documentary on that subject was The Magic Pill. Well worth a watch!
> intelligence + longlivety does not provide immediate advantage

You gotta wonder what sort of environmental pressures make intelligent animals less fit for survival by creating communities. Few predators? Very simple environments that don't require passing on information to future generations? High competition for resources?
I've heard a fun story from the old timers in my org about a fiber outage in Brazil. A routine fiber cut occurred. They figure out how far from one end the cut is (there is gear that measures the time to see a light pulse reflect off of the cut end.) Then they pull out a map of where the fiber was laid, count out the distance, and send a technician out to have a look at where they expect the cut to be. All standard practice up until this point.

The technician updates the ticket after a while with "cannot find road." The folks back in the office try to send them directions, but then the technician clarifies, "road is gone." Our fiber, and the road it was buried under was totally demolished in the few hours it took to get someone out there. The developing world can develop at alarming rates.

Other tales from the middle of nowhere: People shoot at arial fiber with guns. Or dig it up and cut it for fun. One time out technician was carjacked on the way to doing a repair.
Semi-related but check out the research on creatine supplementation too. It's nigh impossible to get the full amount of creatine in your diet daily -- your body does a good job creating what it needs via methylation. You can free up methyl groups if you supplement with it. But yeah, Google for yourself IANAD.
> Basically I want an API where I can torture an EC2 instance to see what happens to it, for science!

And one day there will be PETA [0] for EC2 instances!

[0]: https://www.peta.org/
Check out Thrill of the Fight - well made boxing game that will leave you winded in 15 mins and sore for a day. Really easy to get into.

Plus Beat Saber is also pretty good exercise , once you get to Expert or Expert+.
I'd say this is more relevant for (customer facing) features and not so much for (technical and architectural) problems.

Work on the most important features first but find the middle ground between some spaghetti that just works and an over engineered system.
I'm pretty fine with the script kiddie thesis. But if we go for an intelligence agency, we have to explain why the hack was so.. small. A local privilege escalation that is relatively easy to find* should be of very limited use at best. They(tm) get ability to fake linux kernel source and that's all they do!?

* Even if the linux kernel folks had failed to notice the CVS hack, someone would have eventually diffed the kernel versions and found it. Assigning uid to 0 is rather obvious, and quite a lot of linters warn about assignment in comparison.

But if they had included (for example) some sort of off-by-one buffer overflow, the hack would have been a lot less apparent. Now do that for a remote exploit, and they get way more possibilities.
I like the neon colors, big hair, and just the flamboyancy of the style. Shoulder pads I could do without :-)