skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Putting 13 PinePhone distributions on a 8GiB USD card
We did! Our infrastructure has some unique constraints around filesystem persistence. We use btrfs and regularly take snapshots of the repl's filesystem while someone is editing the repl. However, we don't take snapshots when a repl is only acting as a web server without anyone editing it, meaning that we would need a solution that lives outside of the repl's filesystem.

Keeping each database outside of the filesystem also gives us the flexibility to let people access the same database across multiple repls in the future.

I have lots of love for SQLite; early prototypes of Database were backed by it!
> meanwhile I just saw a report how in eastern Europe women are doing surrogate pregnancies as a paid gig because of their living conditions

I agree that EU vs US discussions can be tedious, but surrogate pregnancies for cash happen in some US states too.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/12/paying-gestational-carri...
Fascinating reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem...

> "A new MRI was being installed in one of our multi-practice facilities, during the installation everybody's iphones and apple watches stopped working. The issue only impacted iOS devices. We have plenty of other sensitive equipment out there including desktops, laptops, general healthcare equipment, and a datacenter. None of these devices were effected in any way (as of the writing of this post). There were also a lot of Android phones in the facility at the time, none of which were impacted. Models of iPhones and Apple watches afflicted were iPhone 6 and higher, and Apple Watch series 0 and higher. There was only one iPhone 5 in the building that we know of and it was not impacted in any way."
That may be what they're referring to, but Apple wasn't using Objective-C at that point, NeXT was.
We have a new phrase, “Gravity abhors a vacuum.”
Interesting.

On first pass, Benford’s Law looks a lot like Zipf’s Law.

What differentiates Benford’s Law from Zipf’s Law?
Really wish I hadn't followed your link, so I can see them post gems like this:

> >There is no communist invasion force openly posturing to invade and occupy the United States.

> No. Instead we have a violent Communist insurgency within our borders. They are determined, murderous totalitarians who will shoot you for wearing a MAGA hat. And it is time to end them.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8752#comment-2450425

Hard pass on that shit.
On safety, note that the same adapters could have shipped with no UL mark. CPB was enforcing trademarks, not safety.

Edit: Regarding below, sure. But there are tons of unlisted adapters that come with electronics you might buy. I'd hazard a guess that most people have at least one in their house. Not that it's okay, just noting that it's common.
Well yes, if you're a student or a researcher working at the University and living in Cambridge then yes, you can get everywhere by bike easier, been there done that myself.

The problem is when you get a job at one of the surrounding companies as most of them are outside the city and once you start planning a family you tend to move out of the city as well.

Then your car is your only way to get to work basically as the city and surrounding region is not dense enough to warrant implementing good public transportation.
This is why "with a password manager" is a crucial part of the puzzle.

You have to fail at several steps if you're entering your credentials in this scenario.
> So assuming an advanced civ is going to do what we'd do - build ships, colonise, hoard and transform resources - is more than a little naive and unimaginative.

The assumption is weaker than you suggest. It's not that your typical advanced civ will do what we'd do, just that some proportion (perhaps extremely small) of civilizations will be expansionary.
No matter how much better some things might be, it's whether it's in the code or not that dictates if your house wouldn't pass an inspection.

One of the things I think would be most likely to throw up a red flag and immediate fail would be the "suicide plugs".

Even though they're not energized (but rather, used to deliver power to the remote end), most electricians and inspectors wouldn't sit around waiting for you to explain your brilliant power delivery scheme.

The only real way to do this stuff code-compliant would be to purchase and install a real hard-wired UPS system, use properly-installed Romex (or other suitable code-compliant wiring), and get things inspected by the local authorities.

Usually if it's not installed by a licensed electrician, the inspectors will be even more stringent.
What are use cases for power inlets?

Also, are they hot if nothing is plugged in?
> What you are saying is that if Company A borrows your TV for a trade show and subsequently someone steals the TV, then your damages are basically the replacement cost of the TV.

It's more like you lend someone your smartphone, they leave it in their car overnight and it gets stolen. The thieves then use your smartphone to gain access to your email, social media and bank accounts.

Is the person who borrowed your phone liable only for the cost of the device, or are they liable for the damages you suffered as a consequence of the device being stolen and misused?
"We are hopeful that we can look at our findings and say maybe we don't need to have quite as much infrastructure focused on power and reliability."

I was left wondering whether they were referring to the project, or just Azure Availability in general. /s
>The problem is that consumption represents value that is lost

No it isn't. Almost by definition consumption means value has been exchanged not lost.

>savings and investment cause value to multiply.

Equally fallacious. There's no way payday loans are multiplying value, for instancr. They're simply extracting it.
>It's exhausting having to constantly second-guess every application you want to run.

Maybe try to have a sip of coffee before jumping for that $3000. Let's not pretend that this is just ToS fatigue. The only reason they installed this app is for the free money.

So yes, maybe if someone is offering you thousands of dollars, you should consider that to be the time to second-guess what's happening.
This type of thing reads like "please compost, recycle, and take public transportation" stuff. That's what I thought of the movie too.

Andrew Keen has the right answer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRbI-Ui9vEI) but nobody likes it. We're still all stuck in the John Barlow trap, thinking that if we just tweaked things here and there all will be right.
Sorry I still don't get what you are saying - wouldn't the probes be sent off to the nearest "interesting object" rather that onto a straight line into nothingness?
$3M Breakthrough Prize goes to scientist designing molecules to fight Covid-19
Thanks for that library, I use it in some of my projects too.
I assume MS has records of how many licenses they've sold (not much they can do about pirated software). They could come up with an estimate of how long a particular OS was probably used on average and calculate how man licenses were sold times how long they were used and then convert that amount of energy use into carbon credits. It's not perfect, but probably good enough.
So you didn't change any keybindings then? I tried emacs in tmux and the very first thing I tested didn't work; in org-mode C-RET does not create another bullet - it only inputs a carriage return.

Update: Well it does the same thing even when I run emacs in terminal, without tmux. It looks like I may need to configure iTerm2 to interpret C-RET properly? I am not sure.

Update 2: C-RET sends a return https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/1897. How are folks getting around this limitation?
That's awesome! We've been working with some teachers to develop free curriculum, if you're interested doing something with data would love to chat (we have budget for this).

https://docs.repl.it/curriculum/Intro
If they patented it in 2017, I'm guessing it probably didn't make it in to this one, but the assumption is that the next version may have that technology.
Have the work section chronological (And omit everything >10 years old), and the education section styled a bit differently, as a bunch of bullet points without dates.

It might be a bit weird, but I doubt it'll fail the HR filters. You can even do something like call it 'Education and Skills', in which case dates don't even make any sense to include. (Nobody ever says which year they've learned C#.)
> Coerced consent is not consent.

It's not coercion or duress simply because the alternative is less desirable. That's hyperbole. And, actually, plenty of people make do without banking services; it's why Payday lenders do so well.

The system might suck and be inequitable--more so than many other systems (no system can be perfectly equitable). And by all means promote legislation to change things. But tossing around words like coercion and duress contributes to the radicalization of politics in a very unhelpful manner. And those words aren't typically the words those stuck with payday lending services would choose, FWIW, even though they're often in objectively much dire financial straits and often couldn't opt-in (literally or at least without worse expense) to the system even if they wanted to.
Apple + Acorn Computers = ARM[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#ARM_Ltd.
Saudi oil barons, movie stars, football players... people who have more money than they know what to do with and think it would be cool.

at the price they're asking, they probably only need to sell a couple of units to make it worthwhile. i'm guessing this operation is just one guy building them, and the materials and shipping cost is 3-4 grand. depending on the aston martin licensing fee, two units a year could be a decent business.
The Challenge of Persistence in Containers and Serverless
> Anyone have a browser extension that can find rss feeds for pages?

I was looking for something like that for a long time after all the browsers kinda removed that functionality. I'm not using the following for Safari and it's great:

https://rss-extension.bitpiston.com
Computer hackers attack Fairfax County school system
Good news is that those youngsters will have plenty of time to plot and wait with their extreme lifespans. People change. Life is change. Why would a longer life span be even more extremely boring and unchanging. I’m not convinced. It’s a big galaxy.

Bad news: we probably won’t be getting extreme lifespan anyways. It’s very political.
Thanks for digging that up, it looks like I am actually golden then
Autonomous Robots Are Coming to the Operating Room
The Obama administration was praised for gathering the same information about users without their consent. Obama's campaign manager said that Facebook told them that if it was anyone else gathering that much information, they would have blocked it, but that Facebook was "on their side". There's absolutely a double standard.
This is only heat. Unless it’s releasing unbeknownst to me greenhouse liquids or gasses, it’s not the same argument.
That you worry about it means you are a great parent.

I wish my father had put an ounce of thought into whether he was a good father.
Show HN: Generate one of those subreddit compilation videos
And notice that you're logged out which is unusual in many cases.

And a bunch of other potential signals that would be missing in a native app.

It's not foolproof but it's a step forward.
The level of anxiety about capital and industrial flight in the UK is also much higher due to Brexit.
There are no standardized “exit exams” for Indian universities, unless one is talking about those colleges affiliated to a specific university system (but those are not referred to as “elite” institutions in common parlance; just terminology, I’m not making value judgements). Many states in India have a 10+2 education system where the “+2” (last two years of high school) are referred to as “junior college”. And admission to “elite” institutions is through specialty purpose entrance exams which are typically considered to be much harder than high school / junior college exit exams. Evaluation in the latter can also be a crapshoot, so scored in the high school / junior college exit exams might not have a very strong correlation with scores in the university entrance exams.

I don’t understand what’s actually being analyzed or commented on (both the Economist article and the source journal article are paywalled for me)
Facebook's EU-US data transfer mechanism 'cannot be used', Irish regulator says
Bingo. Subpoena their emails and undoubtedly their whole defense falls apart.
This is the CEO that said their infotainment system is a HTML supercomputer.
He's now a billionaire and has cashed out 70 million with nothing more than a fake prototype, lies and purchases from suppliers in which they give their equity and call it a strategic partnership.
Can you give an example of real world data modeling where you want more expressive sum types over just using enums? Enums are technically a subclass of sum types, but even those are non-trivial to use at a data format level (Try evolving them in an on-the-wire message format like Avro or Protobuf).
Inlets are for putting power into something, just like an outlet is for getting power out.

They are reversed from an outlet because don't ever want the hot part to be exposed.
I’d say that waiting a few years for stability is not so different from past paradigm shifts.

Recall the early days of Mac OS X. It is easy to look back at something like version 10.6 and see how “nice” AppKit worked but it had already evolved quite a bit by then, over many years. If you go back further, like 10.2, you see many rough edges as the APIs were rapidly evolving.

In the beginning, Cocoa was clearly powerful but also surprisingly lacking in some areas compared to Carbon (at least, from a Mac-like UI point of view, as opposed to NeXT). Interface Builder had different UI element libraries for both APIs. Even the common UI elements between the two APIs were not necessarily identical: there were things you could do in one API but not the other. Furthermore, converting a Carbon program to a Cocoa program was a monumental task, requiring things to be downright rewritten for just a basic Cocoa foundation to work properly.

The big difference this time, in favor of Swift and SwiftUI, is that it is possible to integrate brand-new stuff very quickly. Right now, I can integrate: Objective-C, C++, AppKit, Swift, SwiftUI, and a wide variety of other things, and they all compile and link and run. There is nothing requiring me to rewrite 98% my Objective-C app just to integrate my first SwiftUI View. While YMMV, compared to past endeavors this appears to be a much more practical solution for jumping to a new technology.
Could you point to the source pls ? Wondering how much of that might be just excel
I've been doing a lot of thinking out loud today about the UK's lamentable state with regards to its technology industry today without much disagreement in my back channels – perhaps HN will have more interesting things to say?

It feels like the UK's failings in the technology space are entirely cultural. Looking back at the 70s and 80s when the UK punched above its weight in the microcomputer space, UK tech companies remained very insular and the people who got rich tended to just retire or move on to other industries. This seems to happen wave after wave in the UK. The big names of any decade are no longer around in the next one because they got rich and quit.

The US seems to have a culture of building up business communities in a way the UK doesn't through investment and people staying in the game for multiple decades. There are thousands of paper multi-millionaires who continue to work 40 hour weeks in the US in a way you'd never see in the UK. It's also far less common in the UK for people who got rich off tech to reinvest back into the nascent companies in their space rather than retire. And who's giving multi millions to CS institutions like Imperial or St Andrews in the same way US billionaires do to Stanford and MIT? Where are the charismatic titans of UK technology?

Maybe I'm being unfair, but I can't put my finger on any of it with any clarity because I don't have my head in the UK tech space too much (I live here but virtually "work in the US", so maybe I'm part of the problem) but something smells funny about British culture when it comes to tech and I'd love to know what the cause of that smell is.

The UK is certainly capable of great things. We've seen this in the biomedical, pharma, finance, and energy spaces – how can we be punching above our weight in sectors like those but still have most of our population flocking to American sites like Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram because the local alternatives either don't exist or are terrible?
W/ election cybersecurity experts in short supply, states call in National Guard
How much vacation did you take last year?

What are your working hours?
There is the problem of predatory approaches to women in social networks of course.

But I feel most women automatically take any messages from men declaring their affection, be it genuine or not, in a pretty negative way by default.

I get it's a protective natural reaction, but it can be harmful. If you're a woman, and you take this too seriously and in a negative way, suddenly you start thinking all men are mindless jerks. I've seen it. It's all about the choice of words.

If I were a woman, and a stranger sent me an email out of the blue, but was educated and chose his words well, I wouldn't care at all. In fact I would seek him out so that we get to know each other better.

If not I would simply ignore it. Of course this can be hard if you get bombarded with hundreds of messages, and emails and stuff.

But I would try not to be dismissive and view it in a negative way by default. People live in a defensive state always, and that is really harmful.
I just don't think people are that upset about this. I think there are other things that they are more upset about that happen far more often.

We constantly get anecdotes on here like this post, Yet everyone I know who has a mac never has any of these troubles, or if they do apple takes relative care of them. My mom's macbook still kicks after 10 years. The only issue which I saw a friend have was the keyboard debacle. Other than that, I never hear of these situations.

What are the actual numbers?
It's not a poor question, but the phrasing implies that the ones constructing this test datacenter have not thought about this. Given that the engineers in question have spent many months designing and constructing this device, it's extremely unlikely that some random commentor on HN (even one with interests as varied as Jacques) is going to have questions that have not come up yet.

Asking the questions here on HN instead of in a place where the designers are likely to read them makes it seem it's more of a karma grab than a reasonable "I have concerns" type situation that he really wants to do something about. Nor are random HN commenters very likely to have big, fact-backed contributions btw. It's just alarmism under the pretense of innocently asking questions.
For us, open source is about who has control of the data and the integrations. I don't think the world needs another SaaS marketing tool.

In the past, you needed a large, focused SaaS vendor to be able to store a million users and their properties/events. AWS and friends have caught up and now it's easy. Because of that, we can take that data into your own environment and use it to increase control, customization, privacy, and compliance. The cost is significantly better, too.

Open source is a good way to do that because you know what you are running and can fit it to your needs. Engineers tend to like open source and we've seen interest in extending it. There are thousands of things to connect with, both inside your infra and outside with vendors, and open source makes that possible.
Smart Device Hacks Are Up Since the Pandemic Started
Yes. This has happened a few times. Cakes and biscuits are seen as staple food items and thus don't need to include VAT in the pricing, unless they are luxury items. So there's a lot of discussion about whether something is a luxury biscuit or normal cake.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/16/crumbs-judg...
There are a lot of problems with the dark forest hypothesis, the most critical for this purpose being that it is not a stable outcome. A civilization with the capability to create a Dyson sphere and harness the power of an entire star could easily defeat any invader attracted to their presence. E.g. with gamma-ray lasers that fry anything and everything that might be hostile.

Even with the most advanced technology we can imagine, you can't expect to be able to detect a neighboring civilization, cross the gap between stars with an invading fleet, and arrive with enough power to overwhelm defenses every single time. Local development of solar system resources is inherently an exponential process, whereas mustering of interstellar resources is quadratic. A potential dark forest / wolf entity (I much prefer Alastair Reynolds over Liu Cixin) would have to arrive right within the (cosmically brief) window of opportunity in which a developing civilization announces its presence but before it achieves Type II status on the Kardashev scale. Statistically, someone will eventually be lucky enough to avoid the wolves long enough to get that far, and then they'd have the capability to defend themselves from any plausible enemy.

Where are the Dyson spheres of those civilizations?
At a glance, this looks cool - im in the middle of designing an internal Customer Data Platform/Single Customer View to serve as a single data source for various internal & external marketing tools. Looks like this might be worth looking at.

Does it have an API to access the user profile and group data ad-hoc?

Can you stream data in?

Can it trigger a destination sync when the underlying data changes?

Can it do profile merging (visitor -> known customer stitching)?

How can you do reporting/analytics?
Let me get this straight:

Did "Hindenberg" really say that the hydrogen fuel cell wasn't working?
However, water can also transfer heat to the atmosphere via conduction, evaporation, etc. I don't know the comparative rates, but there is certainly a lot of evaporation.
But of course Jack only went there because (as fictionalized in The Dharma Bums) Gary had told him it was a cool experience.
Thanks for sharing, I’m ashamed to admit that I never really “got” these rule engines, but seeing this example finally made things click for me.

Am I correct that there’s a very large overlap between rule engines and workflow engines, and one could use a rule engine like this to implement workflows?
demanding information that you know nobody will be able to produce is an unethical debating tactic.

obviously nobody but Samsung and their customers will know that information, and anyone who could reveal it is under NDA.

Apparently the prices are good enough that Apple doesn't go elsewhere.
Point well taken, but that doesn't seem to be Apple's MO.

Most of my apple devices have lived far past their life. Now maybe in 10 years I look back to this time and say that is no longer true, but I have multiple 10 year + old pieces of apple hardware that still function remarkably well.
One's a bad prediction, the other's a lie. There is a difference.
However safety expectations are tied to that trademark.
Show HN: Juliette - Reactive State Management Powered by RxJS
You sure? I just did a quick search for EE salaries in London[1] compared to Detroit[2] (the closest large city to me) and Detroit comes out ahead by a lot. And I'm sure rent is cheaper.

However, I agree that salaries are ridiculous in some cities. I'd love to give living in NYC or LA a shot, but the salaries I see for EE jobs are marginally more than what I make in the middle of nowhere.

1: https://www.indeed.co.uk/salaries/senior-electrical-engineer...
2: https://www.indeed.com/career/engineer/salaries/Detroit--MI