skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was talking about the “users who don't want new features and just want software to stop being buggy and acting like a goddamn haunted house.” so the selection bias is yours.

Most bugs are just annoying, consequences are not catastrophic if your favorite tuner app forgets your settings, your word processor messes up the formatting, your pdf reader crashes. You can recover with some frustration and wasted time. The perception of these being catastrophic failures shows the sense of entitlement users have because they are used to a certain smoothness in their experience and expect everything to go their way. This doesn’t match the underlying realities of the task; it is very easy to construe a sense of a working program in one’s mind but it is exponentially difficult to make the implementation actually bug free, usable and functional the way user wants.
This is the brigading I'm talking about. Every thread anywhere on HN or lobsters where anyone gives Rust anything but blind praise, you , Klabnik, Skade, Matklad or one of the entourage write walls of text like lunatics.

Let it go. Even by your own reasoning, reading anything into the Cloudfront article would be a mistake, right? Yet, here it is on the front page. Dutifully upvoted.
Related: https://careersjs.com/developers/how-to-get-paid-more/
>Every other society realized it at the same time? Which would imply every other society is roughly born at the same time, which sounds unlikely. So some of them (like us) should not yet have discovered the danger of broadcasting signals.

And I'll play Devil's Advocate to your Devil's Advocate. :)

It's entirely possible that there have been other technological civilizations over the past 13.7 or so billion years. That's a long time. As such, any civilization that stopped broadcasting in our direction, if they ever did so in the first place, any more than 100,000 or so years ago, would be completely undetectable to us -- ever.

What's more, as was pointed out in another comment, we haven't been looking for such signals for long (~60 years) and haven't surveyed anything close to the entire galaxy.

I guess the most accurate thing we can say would be that we haven't detected another technological civilization within 60 light years or so in the few places we've looked.

Given the lack of data, the Drake equation[0] is less a predictive device than a way to categorize our ignorance.

The Fermi Paradox[1] and its "where is everybody?" question is more in line with what I perceive to be your point.

Given that we haven't looked very hard for very long (as I mention above) in an enormous galaxy that's existed for billions of years, it seems to be in a similar position as any predictions from the Drake equation.

It's interesting to speculate, but without enough data, speculation is all it is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
> I think this statement is untethered from reality, and matches approximately zero people I know.

Note that I'm referring to Visual Studio, not VS Code.

In my last job, we didn't use any plugins with Visual Studio for a bunch of years before one developer convinced the rest to use Resharper.

> Almost everyone using a text editor is using it for purposes which would definitely be helped by task-specific enhancements (plugins which are typically much easier to get in other editors/IDEs)

I find this statement untethered from reality. I think this gets to the crux of much of this discussion. There seems to be an implicit assumption that Emacs exist for writing code (hence the comparisons with VS Code, etc).

I think if you poll most Emacs users, while programming will definitely have more weight, a lot of people use Emacs for all kinds of things unrelated to programming: TODO management, document authoring, writing emails, etc. Most of my Emacs usage in my first job was simply editing text files, not programming. This is in line with most non-SW engineering jobs: They need text editors, but not plugins. Over 95% of my home usage is non-programming related.

So when you imply almost everyone using a text editor is using it for purposes where they will want to look for plugins, that's simply far from the truth. Until recently, most people who used text editors used Notepad (the default Windows one), and I've never managed to convince a Notepad user to use anything more powerful. Nice plugins would not sway them.

While Emacs is heavily used by some programmers, I do not think it is the aim of Emacs. It is a general purpose text editor, and a platform for writing text oriented apps.
Why I turned down a million dollar job to code and do Lambda School
oh i hadnt seen this, thanks.

what a prime example of how totally fucked the war on drugs is. $225 in drugs, permanently seized his brand new $40k vehicle. has trouble getting a job due to his record, has to borrow a neighbors car once he does.

thank fucking god we can at least put a ceiling on what cops can take from you. this decision is great, but im not sure it makes sense for cops to have to have a means to fine people via asset seizure.

i have a suspicion that at some point in the future, all extra-judicial and extra-legislative asset seizures will be determined excessive.
Planets are on average very small compared to their host stars, so you need extremely precise measurements to be able to detect a drop in luminosity caused by the transit of a very small object in front of a huge one.

It's already hard to do within our galaxy (~200k light years across), so outside of it (here 23M ly) is quite impressive.
I did a lot of work in Smalltalk earlier in my career, and it's still the best toolset I've ever used.

On one hand, yes, having the method as the unit of code is great. You just avoid all sorts of editing and versioning of non-semantic textual changes like you have in other languages. And it was really easy to look over your list of changes to see who did what when, or group them together to form larger patches.

On the other hand, collaborating with bare change sets was difficult. With no dependency tracking it was just a manually-maintained bag of class-and-method definitions. You could write those out to a file and import them into another image, but it was hard to make sure you had all the necessary bits.

This led to several Smalltalk-specific VCSs. The early ones were powerful, but basically required you to be connected to the net to do any work, because they were constantly communicating with a central server as you worked. Later ones were more snapshot based. I think Monticello was the first real distributed VCS - it preceded git by a couple of years.

What's interesting about Pijul is it gives you that "maintaining a set of patches" workflow that made early Smalltalk change management so pleasant, but also tracks dependencies between the patches so that you can easily mix and match functionality without anything getting left out.

The ultimate tool would be something that combines Pijul's theory of patches with Smalltalks semantic versioning. That would be amazing.
If I were burglarizing a home and a small, expensive drone started following me around...I'd just take the drone with me. But who would bother stealing a security camera?
After reading the article, I was wondering if Sal Soghoian had any relation to the privacy researcher/activist Christopher Soghoian (https://www.dubfire.net/), and it turns out that Sal is Christopher's uncle. Not really related to the article, but interesting nonetheless.
Sure, my counter is just that the Drake equation uses conservative probabilities on those questions. Even pessimistic answers to those questions turn into optimistic projections given the scale of the universe.

We’re obviously discussing a bunch of unknowns, but my intuition was actually more pessimistic until I saw what the Drake equation observed
He also endorsed Trump.
That post really doesn’t make sense to me. It’s always in your interest to shop around. The author calls them “collectors”, sounds like he’s upset he loses good candidates over money and wants to rationalize his loss.
They also reserve the right to selectively enforce those provisions so don't expect any of those to actually be banned. Maybe your reports can be used as evidence in some future anti-trust trial though.
There’s a lot of things I don’t love about startups, the Bay Area, etc.

Jessica and Paul (and Trevor!) are definitely among the main reasons why I love those things. There’s hopefully no doubt in anyone of their minds how big an impact they made, but if there’s even a shred of doubt: thank you. The chili was never that great, but everything else was life changing. And I’m confident I speak on behalf of hundreds of people.
>Given that we haven't looked very hard for very long (as I mention above) in an enormous galaxy that's existed for billions of years, it seems to be in a similar position as any predictions from the Drake equation.

Also remember the search space isn't even just a single galaxy, it's the entire observable universe with a hundred billion galaxies, give or take.
I recently setup Emacs on a Windows work computer and the install process is definitely needlessly difficult. Other "popular" editors have a big download link on the homepage while Emacs you have to scroll through the lecture on non-free systems, and then link to an ftp server where you have to try to figure out which file you need to download.

From the Emacs install instructions:

"Nonfree systems

The reason for GNU Emacs's existence is to provide a powerful editor for the GNU operating system. Versions of GNU, such as GNU/Linux, are the primary platforms for Emacs development.

However, GNU Emacs includes support for some other systems that volunteers choose to support.

The purpose of the GNU system is to give users the freedom that proprietary software takes away from its users. Proprietary operating systems (like other proprietary programs) are an injustice, and we aim for a world in which they do not exist.

To improve the use of proprietary systems is a misguided goal. Our aim, rather, is to eliminate them. We include support for some proprietary systems in GNU Emacs in the hope that running Emacs on them will give users a taste of freedom and thus lead them to free themselves.

Windows

GNU Emacs for Windows can be downloaded from a nearby GNU mirror; or the main GNU FTP server.
Unzip the zip file preserving the directory structure, and run bin\runemacs.exe. Alternatively, create a desktop shortcut to bin\runemacs.exe, and start Emacs by double-clicking on that shortcut's icon."
For obvious reasons :D
People said that (as well as Skittles OS) since it launched.
Back off of Venezuela already
Yep. Even switched it over when you went to the lower resources usage settings.
It's all the definitions in this discussion, but also including "the description is not the described".
Note that you will always pick a red ball because it’s the only color you can pick, regardless of whether there are 99, 50 or 1 red balls in the urn. I believe that makes such a single data point meaningless, sidelining any statistical argument about its averageness—we have to rely on our understanding of physics, cosmology, astrobiology, etc. when estimating how frequent a red ball can be, at least until we have a large enough sampling of red balls.
> If I could suggest just one change to make Emacs feel more "modern," it would be to entirely redo the Customize section to make it behave more like VS Code's preference system

It's probably not hard for someone to do that with Emacs - all the bits and pieces are there. I wouldn't be opposed to this.

> They're both difficult for beginners to get used to, but once you get over the initial learning hump, Vim was always much easier for me to tweak and configure.

At the risk of starting a pointless war, I suspect it may be because Vim just has an order of magnitude fewer features than Emacs does. Many people have wanted Org mode in Vim, and no one has been able to make a good one.

> when it comes to not stomping on one another. Every attempt I've made at getting serious with Emacs has ended in spending hours trying to get two or three extensions I want to use to play nicely with each other

I believe you because this complaint does come up from time to time. I must have been simply lucky that this has been a very rare problem for me. In fact, I often tell people Emacs is great because one can take disparate packages and use them together to get powerful features. To me it exemplifies the UNIX philosophy of combining tools better than most UNIX utilities themselves do. The worst I've encountered is a conflicting keybinding.

> you can do almost anything with it if you learn Emacs Lisp, but it often feels like you must learn Emacs Lisp to do almost anything with it.

I view that as one of the biggest myths. I was a power user for about a decade before I learned to even write a loop in Emacs lisp. The most I knew was setting the value of variables. That's enough to be a power user.

Now that I know Emacs lisp, I don't have a burst of productivity compared to when I was ignorant. I've customized to solve a few annoying problems, but I've not had any moments of "Oh man, I wish I knew how to do this all these years."

I don't encourage Emacs users to learn elisp. If I ranked things they should explore in Emacs, there would be a lot of stuff higher on that list than learning elisp (org-mode, etc).
There are a lot of good VCS systems, but it seems like nothing can compete with Git in popularity.
Should be:

git log --graph --oneline --decorate
Cuties.
It wasn't. It was just as stable as 2000 as long as you weren't a tweaker and stuck with stock. Almost every single OS becomes unstable with shitty drivers and/or cheap hardware that wasn't designed for it.
Also half-jokingly I feel like the exact same thing happens in grocery stores.
Likewise, I’m glad to have new priorities. I think what I miss is the progress and freedom to pick what I learn. These days I have to fit in what I can as I’m able to, which isn’t quite as engaging or exciting. At the same time, it’s a lot more sustainable.
Karateka Two Player
It's special because it's a different field. Radio/light are oscillations of the electromagnetic field, and sound is an displacement in a physical medium. This is an entirely different medium: the metric tensor of spacetime itself. And the universe is, by and large, completely transparent to gravitational waves. So these signals would not be blocked by intervening matter.

A similar thing could be said about the prospect of sending messages using neutrinos.

But it is only just now barely possible to detect the loudest gravitational wave signals with extreme difficulty and machines costing on the order of a billion dollars. It will remain impossible for humans to generate gravitational wave signals of a detectable amplitude for the foreseeable future.

Source: PhD in gravitational wave detectors.
The geography of Taiwan is not important. There are plenty of places for the US to set up shop in that area, and the US does not want to set up shop there anyhow, because it is 'too close'. In a full-on war, there might be some advantage to the fact it's an island, but not really.

The political significance of an independant Taiwan (or not) is 100x any tactical advantage of geography.

S. China sea is actually more important because it's international water, and territory that overlaps with other countries.
It's really not that painful. In college I spent two weeks forcing myself to use emacs for everything. I printed out a reference card and unplugged my mouse to prevent cheating. It was not a productive two weeks, but afterwards I was proficient in emacs editing and have been ever since. (Of course true emacs mastery goes much deeper, but it really doesn't take that long to become proficient.)
Windows Source Code Leaked
im pretty sure everybody already knows.
da question is:
does this matter? what is the impact?
Windows XP original theme was the best. Not at a nostalgic level only (which of course affects me and my memory), but I felt it was so easy to use and so easy to find everything. Today, Windows 10 control panel is a mess.
>We are not talking about the privacy of you and me

You're right, we're talking about the members of a private organization that has no governmental role.

Are those people not entitled to the same level of privacy to which you and I are?

And if those folks aren't entitled to privacy, who is?

How about all those celebrities[0] whose iCloud accounts were hacked and naked photos and private messages spread far and wide?

Are they entitled to privacy? If so, why them and not others? If not, why not?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_phot...
Simple Startup Cashflow Projections - All Founders must start with this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ILiW2AHtqbYA4RWPlXJ3...
So who would be making consumer and commercial loans under this model?
I think you're talking about power users, programmers, and IT. Regular everyday users still don't care and install whatever they like.
Let's talk about safety of Pinephone
You are detecting a planet (let's say bigger than Jupiter) of radius 100,000 km (1e+5 km) from (let's use Andromeda) 2.5 million light years away (2.3e+19 km).

Note that is 14 orders of magnitude.

So, let's scale that to a grain of sand (1mm or 1e-6 km) so that's 1e-11 in scale which makes the distance of 2.3e+8 km away--or roughly the distance to Mars.

So, to detect a planet in Andromeda is like detecting a single grain of sand on the Earth from Mars.
The original title of this article is: "Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves." (October 2018)

I think the word "Mathematicians" here is pretty important. :-) No physicist doubts that gravitational waves can transfer information, but we all doubt that it will ever be practically possible to generate gravitational waves of an amplitude that we can also detect.

For what it's worth, here is the paper that this press release is touting: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/aace79

The abstract:

"A definition of an affine-metric space of the plane wave type is given using the analogy with the properties of plane electromagnetic waves in Minkowski space. The action of the Lie derivative on the 40 components of the nonmetricity 1-form in the 4-dimensional affine-metric space leads to the conclusion that the nonmetricity of a plane wave type is determined by five arbitrary functions of delayed time. A theorem is proved that parts of the nonmetricity 1-form irreducible with respect to the Lorentz transformations of the tangent space, such as the Weyl 1-form, the trace 1-form, and the spin 3 1-form, are defined by one arbitrary function each, and the spin 2 1-form is defined by two arbitrary functions. This proves the possibility of transmitting information with the help of nonmetricity waves."
True they are hybrid but most drivers lived in user space except for ultra critical performance stuff if I recall correctly (mainly graphics stuff if I recall correctly but I never took a complete inventory). IPC was a core part of how both drivers, system daemons, and apps communicated with each other (with thin shim APIs to make it friendlier). It was pretty great at how consistent a lot of it was.
It is not bad. Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End.

Get out of the apple cult.
> emacsclient to an emacsserver on another machine works fine. You'll want to tunnel it over ssh.

Yeah after a bunch of dumb stackoverflows said it was impossible because it uses a unix domain socket (eyeroll), I tried that.

> If the machines don't have a shared filesystem namespace, I suggest writing a small wrapper that translates the file's pathname to what the server needs (whether that's a mounted network filesystem or a tramp string or whatever).

Err but I don't want to try to align the file systems at all. I want the server to do all the work so the client is just doing human<->computer IO.
> We do have a choice: not to make hasty generalizations.

I don't think anyone is making a generalization in the sense you seem to be implying. No one is saying: given our current observation we have concluded that we are (or not) the only ones around. Things are being discussed in term of likelyhood, not in term of certainties.

> You can say next to nothing about a bin of balls from one sample.

You can definitely say something: That there are 99% likelihood that the urn was filled with 99 red balls and 1 green ball, and 1% that it was the other way around.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. I would happily pay $10 a month for a brand “deluxe” version of Firefox. We all complain about how Firefox isn’t making money and we continue to exist in a world where I cannot pay for it.

It boggles the mind.
I have heard it said, that if you understand yourself you understand the universe. Some say there are levels to go through in order to get to this "universal understanding". There's this one Youtuber who filmed himself on 5-MeO-DMT - his gateway drug to universal understanding. Well he was more blunt, in that he became God.
It would be have been great if the different OS's had similar surface look & feel, to facilitate people being able to use both. I fear intellectual property concerns at the time may have discouraged MS from making this public.
No joke. Up until just a few years ago, we thought Pluto was a planet. Apparently, we can't even decide what a planet is. We also can't even find Planet X in our own solar system. We can find planet in other galaxies, but not our own solar system. This is what passes for science these days? Sheesh! /s
Wow, I thought about it the other day, I never understood why we organize our work in tasks or todos and so on when we fundamentally try to organize what we're going to work on in the next days, months, sprint, half, whatever.
> What correlation do you observe? Where i am, it seems all rich and poor follow the rules (with some minor exceptions). I mean makes sense who wants to get sick?

https://twitter.com/sheela2010/status/1309053011168288769?s=...

This shows how difficult it is for the common man to follow the rules. I am sure the rich people in Mumbai are following social distancing.
It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? I’d happily pay a month fee for a branded “deluxe” Firefox.
Ask HN: What is your favourite HN comment and why is it cperciva's “Yes, I did”?
We're assuming they communicate the same way we would.

I'll make up something scifi like. On planet x they use short term Seismic wave to move data around. How would we on earth ever pick that up
A hobby of mine is taking sayings like that and saying, "Well, if it weren't mumbo-jumbo, then what might it mean?" In this case, it would seem to be: At the start, you have a bunch of knowledge, concepts built on other concepts; studying Zen involves breaking all of that down and reforming it from scratch; at the end of the process, you have a new bunch of knowledge and concepts built on concepts, and you have similar labels for the concepts of material objects like mountains and waters, but it's possible that (e.g.) the lower-level concepts they're built on are different.

Physics is kind of like that as one develops successively better models of molecules, atoms, and particles, replacing the bottom-level concepts each time. Though the stuff on top of them doesn't change a huge amount every time.
I tend to cancel the subscription as soon as I've purchased it so that I can't possibly forget in the future. You'll still have the 1-3 months you initially paid for, and if it winds up being a service that's worth continuing then you can subscribe for longer (I'll usually pay for a year and immediately cancel at that point).
That actually seems like the more nefarious route, and thus the more likely one for Google.
Salesman slaps a black hole, "When you modulate this baby you can send a signal clear across the galaxy!"

That you can detect a modulation on a wave, and thus transfer information, is something of a tautology, the tricky bit is modulating gravity. If you can do that we're in a whole different ball game and sending data is probably the least amazing thing you can do with that capability :-)