skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I'm failing to understand about the Hyperloop concept (apart from all the issues with thermal expansion, maintaining a near vacuum, safety consideration and passenger capacity):

In real life tracks will have to include curves, as there's already terrain, existing buildings, etc. Trains have to lean into curves, just like motorbikes. With high speeds, anything exceeding a more traditional maglev train, the angles required will become rather extreme with the track climbing up the sides of the tube. What is supposed to happen, if the train has to decrease speed below the planned cruising speed for the given section or even to halt? What about passengers inside? How could this pass any safety checks for mass transport operations?

(Notably, this was the only new thing addressed by Musk's original "air hockey puck", front fan driven air cushion concept, as this could have avoided any fixed installations, like rails or guards, (at the cost of other stability issues) and could have allowed a variable leaning angle. But, since this feature has been universally dismissed, how is this supposed to work?)
> > Bad programmers worry about the code

> And yet, I see a whole swath of the industry hyper-focused on various linters/styling/rules.

I've come to a severe distaste for this good programmer/bad programmer mentality I've seen on the internet for, I guess decades now

There is skill in programming, yes, obviously. But this simplistic divide seems to me to be more about putting one's own ego on the superior side. It leads to simplistic heuristics and flames rather than nuanced discussion

In this case, in my opinion, linters/styling/rules help people to focus on what matters. And sure, with sufficient skill you might not need any of that to help you focus on what matters. But so what? It's better if we can make the trade more accessible, and can make it so people can focus on what matters with less experience
Okay, I've changed my mind [1]. Your comment is the one I give 1000x endorsement to.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24127377
If we are talking about End of the World level conflict, then yeah no preparation would mean anything, but that's not the case for most of the conflicts, if any since WWII, aren't they?

And TBH, following that reasoning, that there is nuclear bomb, ground force should be cut to save cost and tax money too.
Game changers, table stakes, distractions
Puerto Rico's Arecibo Radio Telescope Damaged by Falling Cable
Go helped me learn about designing good interfaces, and how to write tests using dependency injection rather than just patching stuff out.
If you aren't allowed to leave your job, no matter the justifications, it's slavery, yes. If the South Korean OLED engineers aren't allowed to leave it pretty much is.
That's fair. I was just thrown by the comment suggesting that people didn't actually want them!
Everybody has used them, but nobody wants to admit it ;)

I for one, would like to know who does their SEO... they are often at the top of the results for many searches.
Would you rather they stay the same and die as a company? They've just made an incredibly hard choice.
Last Blockbuster Becomes an Airbnb
It isn't so much that analog is expensive, but digital gates are really really really cheap, robust to noise and interference (except for designed-in noise like floating point quantization error), and often field-configurable/programmable/etc. This isn't entirely fair, but:

ANALOG: a TL082 op-amp has ~30 analog transistors and costs $0.10 = $0.003 per transistor.

DIGITAL: a GeForce 2080 Ti has ~18.6 billion digital transistors and MSRP $799 = $0.00000004 per transistor.

The kind of analog computation I'm demonstrating requires that the 4 BJT transistors be well matched to each other, which can be expensive in terms of silicon die area. Digital computation doesn't require well-matched transistors. It requires that each of the individual transistors is just barely good enough relative to some absolute threshold. (And if it doesn't, we'll just clock the chip slower!)

Of course, there are tons of critical analog circuits in your smartphone. The RF interfaces for cell/wifi/BT, the capacitive touchscreen, the cameras, the battery management system, audio, display... But given the cost difference and other advantages, it makes sense to do only what must be done in the analog domain, then convert to digital and do the rest.
This is a really stupid, even clickbait, study. No one goes through a stack of resumes sans pics (the US norm) thinking about hair. No discounting stupid prejudice at actual interview time of course.
Indeed, the hate has gone too far on w3schools. MDN is the gold standard of comprehensive API reference, but w3 is nice for quick simple answers in an easy to read format.
That was me. W3Schools has gone from good to crap back to good again.

It looks like an organization that fired all's the vanity-metric chasing PMs and is coming back to "first principles"
Have you considered making your background draggable? (Example: https://beta.mindcast.com/ )
Chinese property leases are for 99 years, I don't think it's that much of an issue.
> If they've been doing so much work, and it's just the "moderation is hard" problem that has slowed them, why do all of their sites make it so convoluted to report content?

I think they are trying to narrow what can be flagged. I think they want to avoid people just flagging posts they do not agree with. There is a quote "History is a set of lies agreed upon." To me you could replace history with social media and the quote would be true. Or at least thats the lie I agree with.
> But I still remain skeptical that so many claim they require home internet. At the very least work email can be done on a phone.

The graph says "internet at home", not "home internet". If that is the exact wording of the question asked, then some responders might reasonably interpret that their mobile plan would count.

I admit it is a bit confusing that the article says "home internet connection" in other places. It would be nice if the survey question and article were more specific.
To those doubting touch screens in cars, how do you explain Tesla cars amazing real world safety data then? Despite having most controls via touch screen they outperform other vehicles in avoiding accidents over ten-fold.

"Q2 2020
In the 2nd quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.53 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.27 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.56 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles."

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
Upvoted for potentially interesting discussion, but with the standard first question of how long we have to wait before the safety regulators ban the foolishness of using touchscreens for important driving controls entirely.

There are some very interesting display technologies for cars that have been at least the subject of experiments or small-scale applications. Imagine if the little HUDs, night vision systems, navigation displays and camera feeds that have been appearing in recent years could be combined, AR style. When you were driving at night, your main view could be enhanced with the night vision and danger recognition technologies. Essential navigation information, such as the required lane/path for your route, could be clearly visible right in front of you as you approached each junction, though subtle enough not to block your view of the outside. Displays from external cameras could be overlaid as appropriate depending on the type of driving or manoeuvres being performed.

There is so much potential in these kinds of technologies to make driving safer and easier. And yet manufacturers are going with touch screens and naff UIs, because shiny and, presumably, much cheaper for now.
>The fig leaf of Free Speech will no doubt be brandished as the greatest good and too sacred to be messed with but the facts are that every form of free speech has limitations. And that actively trying to harm others by abusing that right should come with some kind of limit or at a minimum a way to reduce its reach. Most of the reasoning around free speech rights and such are from a time when getting a letter across the country took three weeks.

This is what the seed of authoritarianism looks like: moral justifications for forcing people to believe, communicate, and behave the way you think is correct.
And from the perspective of the labor, what good are your highly specialized skills on a million dollar machine if you don't have a million dollar machine? Your only choice is to work for the few companies that own one and take whatever pay they offer you to try and make up for the decade+ of lost income from grad school.
And yet whenever people suggest it should be a municipal utility like the telephone the response is astonishment.
Ok, I guess that makes more sense then. I was really surprised to see S (LO) agree to that deal.
Looks great, I recommend looking into mix releases instead of calling mix in your docker container. Also, are you hiring?
The administration part of a truck drivers job likely requires a personal internet connection these days.
Amateur mathematicians worry about patterns, professionals worry about numbers
> You might make the case that running more trains off-peak would increase maintenance costs.

Alon Levy has done the math [1] and found that providing extra off-peak service is about 20% the cost of providing extra peak service, since the capital costs and labor costs dominate the actual operational costs.

[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/01/22/base-train-ser...
Churches are increasingly about merch.
Not sure ridesharing is the best fit for decentralized solutions. A big role of these companies is performing background checks and dispute resolution, and those seem hard to do in a trustless decentralized system without exposing loopholes that can be exploited.
I recall reading that. It's all very true, but it also glosses over the fact that some people acquire money through regulatory capture, violent crime, inheritance, etc, etc.

I think capitalism is the best system we have, but Atlas Shrugged espouses a rosy picture of anarcho-capitalism like Marx espouses a rosy picture of anarcho-communism that doesn't work when real humans come into play.

I've come to believe that having market forces bring out the best in society is a state of constant work to cultivate those forces in a human direction.
Attack of the week: Voice calls in LTE
None - the product will be a failure, because it doesn't solve any problems.

A phone OS, then why not use a phone? Oh, bigger screen? Use a tablet. With huge phones nowadays this just doesn't serve a market.

it's a glorified nintendo DS for 1399. Embarassing.
There was a lot of interest last time on this topic in a previous hacker news discussion [1] so posting this article by my wife (the parathyroid surgeon) here. If you have any questions feel free to post them here and she will check in.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24061164
It may depend on the manufacturer, but my impression was they were usually about the simplest white goods to repair. You can buy the pumps, valves etc cheaply, and they’re quite accessible.
Poll: Have you ever purchased anything because of an advertisement?
Yes, less a year ago
Yes, more than a year ago
It was a lot of fun exploring how you're UI/UX worked. I like the particle effect into a selection tool especially.
Express, Daily mail... Are also forming a new superpower, the toilet paper!
I'm not sure if this rises to the level of a "huge dilemma" when we don't even compensate the "useful people" enough to live. As more jobs become redundant, the standards of the wealthy will become more extravagant, and require more bodies to fulfill. The difference in the income of owners will continue to drift farther from the income of workers.

Middle class people don't even have servants anymore, so we've got a long way to go before we have to worry about anything but an arbitrary number of unemployed decided through fiscal and monetary policy.
I'm personally a huge fan of `mdbook`, which seems to be the Rust equivalent of R's `bookdown`. I've switched out internal documentation over to it from `gitbook`.

https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook
Many, many people in the US are employed with multiple companies at a time. Everyone who "works two jobs". Employment is not exclusive.
The structure of the blue whirl revealed
What questions you never asked to yourself?
In areas with very hard water, it may be the only way to prevent calcium deposits that make dishes feel rough and fog glasses. An appropriate amount is < 1/8 of a tsp (~ 0.6 ml) per load.
Marketing material does not cause the universe to reassert itself.
One way we're all misinformed is because "things are pretty OK" studies like this never go viral.
Which is sad because unions and trust busting showed that regulated capitalism was better than the Ayn Rand flavor so popular now. (Yay child gig economy.)
The specific limit of free speech is where it causes legal damages to others.

The particular form of authoritarian scaremongering on display tries to undefine that court-testable line to include any useful moral panic, but never really addresses the notion that loosening that line means their own speech could also easily be suppressed, as the "other side" could use the new suppression tools as freely and subjectively as themselves.
caymanjim is unlikely to answer. The poor thing is knackered out from typing their post.

I think that they might have been a little disingenuous. Their post was far too long and properly typed out to be from a real sloth.

Fibber.
Is there a chance maybe Mozilla had this plan even from before the pandemic and now it's the perfect time to justify it?.
uBlock Origin with all but the regional languages filter lists gives:

133,215 network filters ＋ 155,733 cosmetic filters

In the stats. Network filters being URL based not just domain based. The lists are easy to view from the uBlock settings page if you want an endless supply of examples. They are used in pretty much any style list: ad, privacy, annoyances, cookie banners, tracking
It wasn't a good thing in Aushwitz, Birkenau and other death camps for those who were about to die, while others around did nothing to stop it.

It isn't a good thing for people in Belarus right now with dictator applying brutal force when he didn't manage to win even unfair elections. Police simply shoot people on the streets and even aiming to home windows if they scream in protest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ynUNGNHdk
Heh, look up "vacuum cannon" on youtube. The tunnel would need to be slowly depressurized, otherwise anything in it would turn into a bullet when the atmosphere rushes in.

This also applies to any sort of failure that compromises the vacuum. A dipshit with a rifle could kill anybody in the system in a fraction of a second. Burying the tubes is probably the only way to avoid this, but thankfully the whole thing is vaporware anyway.
End-to-End Network Programmability
Which company that cares about the “open web” pays well - instead of just paying lip service to openness [1].

Have you checked Mozilla’s salary? https://www.levels.fyi/company/Mozilla/salaries/Software-Eng...

I was making almost that much pre-Covid as a regular old SAAS CRUD developer in the south East US. It was comfortable but far from not needing to work for a few months and hold out because I was concerned about “open source values”.

I jumped at the chance to work remotely at BigTech three months ago. I’m sure many of them would too.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/arubin/status/27808662429?locale=...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...
In the article they claim to run the dishwasher twice a day. No time for sticky foods to become extremely dry I guess..
Interesting comment! I think you’re describing a surmountable barrier.

If local governments can own the roads and power utilities are forced to share power infrastructure there is no reason municipalities shouldn’t be able to own their last mile installation.
hehehhe I have actually put some data that do not change more often than once a week hardcoded in the code base and commited in source control... whenever a change needs to happen in the data the CI/CD runs and deploys a new version of the app.

You don't wanna know how that was done before. It is like < 1 GB of JSON as well.
Mozilla would go with another partner and/or change their structure to accept donations for the browser.

If money wasn't a consideration perhaps ddg become a good partner. That combo could shift as much as 5% of google traffic away from search.
> So for me it just a daring publicity stunt (a borderline scam IMHO), something that Elon Musk is also known to be good at.

Agree with you on this point.

Sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I talk with friends about Hyperloop. From an economic and engineering standpoint, it’s a complete non-starter.
DMelodies: A Music Dataset for Disentanglement Learning
> I posit the conspiracy theories play a role in some other societal processes

We do know what happens with conspiracies, and it is our neurological processes and societal processes getting stuck in just the right way.

Take 2 forces -

1) Human brains are pattern recognition machines

2) A particular person always goes against the grain

With these two forces alone, this person will always orient their pattern interpretations against what is held by the "majority".

None of these things are bad, they are quite useful to the majority when someone tells them that tulip mania (for example) is irrational.

A book that I keep thinking about years after I read it, is Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_Explained).

While the topic is religion, its more an examination of beliefs, superstition and cultural norms through the lens of anthropology, evolutionary pscy, and other cognitivie theories.

Relevant to our discussion is it highlights how often brains encode information in odd ways, to increase recall, or just as a quirk of our mental wet ware.

A common example in cultures around the world are objects of a category, say Mountains/ancestors, that have an aberration or trait of another category (Eat people/are incorporeal)

Our brains fill in the necessary blanks - no one worries about the structure of the mountains digestive tract, or why ancestor spirits seem to be so human or don't dissipate in the wind/randomly follow movement rules for corporeal people.

The same applies for conspiracies. Somehow when people discuss conspiracies, the agencies involved have super human coordination, error checking, wealth and power.
> In fact, it's probably what causes you to develop a "computers are so fast now, no need to think about performance"-mindset

This is the complete opposite of Rob’s mindset, which you’d know if you had any familiarity with his work.
Great observation on space utilization!
It would be nice to know _how_ those games lead to negligence more than other games.
I'm not sure it would be cost-effective.

On the other hand it is the greatest for cleaning pans with burned-on food.
I work at a large tech company. I have to maintain a certification for human experimentation with my IRB. Usually, A/B testing falls outside of the experimentation framework as the actual feature in question cannot cause harm, is engaged with voluntarily, and users are already aware that the software changes arbitrarily (usually through marketing material as "continuous updates"). We usually only get into the human experimentation bit when we send out a survey or the like.
One study does not obliterate anything, even if the methods were not questionable.

Look at the bumper of any long-haul truck and tell me insect populations are not down vs 40 years ago, and I will laugh in your face.
Yeah I agree mainly. But I disagree that anything, even math, is infallible. Anything and everything can be challenged and the person doing this shouldn’t be killed or jailed, etc. They can have their ideas challenged and refuted and made an ass of though. There’s no guarantees that your ideas will be gently excused. So you ought to have some great evidence if you believe something commonly agreed to be factual is not.

The framework of liberalism - the very system that allows math and science to thrive - is that their is no authority. There is no plea to humanitarian feelings or egalitarianism that makes things right because they feel right. Ideas are free and freely challenged. Anyone can argue 2+2=5 but I doubt they’ll go far with it.

You could say almost anything in Spain but if you spread blasphemy you would be killed because it was sacred and the word of God. Is this what you want? Those people felt just as right and righteous as you and we both probably agree they were wrong. It always leads to violence.
Uber probably isn't making much money right now, so shutting down is not a big deal.
I don't see the problem here
It's true, Bertrand Russell had a leaning towards communist libertarianism (anarchism), but is it any worse than so many articles discussed here that originate in large corporations, that are associated with capitalism? Even people dedicated to maintaining the status quo (conservatives?) are partisan.

I'm not sure that the Labour Party of the UK really counts as socialist these days, it's social democrat at most.
> Uber argues it is a technology company first, and drives/delivers second, whereas the judge argues the opposite. Convincing arguments can be made for both sides.

Uber is a mess.

It clearly needs to be a franchise.

You have Mother Uber that develops the app and sells the franchise and Uber SF, Uber LA, Uber Seattle etc that hires the drivers. It's utterly unclear to me what efficiencies can be found for having one company doing all that.
Yes you can be whatever the limitations of your resources and responsibilities allow you to be.

Turns out for many people, there’s not much else they can be that would be an improvement over whatever they currently are.
Then make zero mistakes in your planning, and have no accidents or unseen needs. Sounds easy for a family.
What do you mean? What kind of meaning can you project on dice, for example?