skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't seen StyleGAN used in such an abstract way -- the results are really beautiful, very biological. Sometimes it reminds me of cellular automata, at least the very high resolution ones that stabilize into cellular-looking blobs. Are these trained on some input data or is it parametrically produced somehow? It's been a few years since I was reading about GANs so I can't really put together how you're getting the images and textures here.
Could you pls elaborate on the WTO -> no WW3 angle ?
This is an excellent point. It would in fact reduce it by one, making an odd number.
Could be used for ubfuscation
This argument reminds me of the pre WW1 pro-bismark arguments for entangled, complex alliance systems, because they would make "war unlikely"..
XML's verbosity massively harms its human-readability in my opinion.
Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product?

There are clearly many measures of success. It's best if you mean best-selling maybe just to say that, as it may be important to salespeople but not so much to (say) end users.

[Airpods...]Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.

That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way.

To an extent, that's a compliment to the way it has built it's brand over time, but it means it's important to bear it in mind when judging rather sweeping superiority claims.
Yes legal action is the way to solve this problem....
Disagree--XML to me is much harder to read, if you're talking about human readable.
It’s not JavaScript-on-desktop that’s the problem- this was a suspicion often cast at Gnome’s bad performance, until Canonical got involved, started fixing performance issues, and it was discovered that most of those issues stemmed from inefficient waits and stuff.
The reason why Electron apps gets such a bad rap (and I fully agree, I hate them too) is because they carry basically an entire Chromium with them in addition to whatever you wanted to accomplish.
HN is pretty split on Electron afaik because whilst it killed native apps for Windows and Mac, it has brought a lot of them to Linux.
Leaving aside the fact that p2p is certainly not feasible in mobile devices, something being p2p or federated does not improve the service's ability to evade censorship.

How would you block a p2p network like TOR? Just ban all the entry points. You can use proxies to access those, but then you can use the same proxies to access a centralized service.

How do you ban a federated network like Matrix or e-mail? Ban all the servers you can find, then you're back to proxies.
An open-source project to teach effectively using interactive visualisations
> ....but, for most of us, that will not be the case.

Article then written 100% about Not That. Really: thinking this had anything to do with censorship would only be defensible in the context of a realllll naive bag-of-words model, not a human brain.
> it doesn't have generics

It doesn't need them IMO. It brings no benefit to the language, really. They would need to be type checked at runtime, which can become quite expensive. Static analysis is a better option for an interpreted language. Read this answer from Nikita (one of the top PHP contributors) https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/j65968/ama_with_the_ph...

> doesn't have real data structures

Untrue. See https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.spl.php It's usefulness is limited though, because it's rare that you need those types of data structures for web applications.

> no threads or async

Untrue. All kinds of projects like Swoole (gives you a runtime similar to Go) and ReactPHP (runtime similar to Node) and https://github.com/krakjoe/parallel for lower level concurrency. There's also pthreads https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pthreads.php But again most of these aren't necessary for most apps because of PHP's request-response model. Useful for one-off services though.

> typed function parameters

Completely untrue. https://www.php.net/manual/en/functions.arguments.php#functi...

> no method/function reference

You do those like this: [Example::class, 'someFunction']

I hate it when people write such blatantly misinformed comments. Sigh.
That is a well thought out response. The kind of response I was trying to illicit from the parent comment. The parent commentor had one quote and a one word response that did little to expand the discourse here.

The scare text you are referring to:

> grand solar minimum:
a period during which solar activity diminishes, resulting in drastic climatic and geophysical changes to our planet. These include increased galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), seismic activity, and volcanism; the latter often results in a global reduction in temperatures (see "the year without a summer" -- and much more on the IAF wiki).

A piece from NASA(not technically a reputable study as you asked):

> But if such a Grand Solar Minimum occurred, how big of an effect might it have? In terms of climate forcing – a factor that could push the climate in a particular direction – solar scientists estimate it would be about -0.1 W/m2, the same impact of about three years of current carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration growth.
https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2953/there-is-no-impending-min...

I think three years of climate forcing offset is a "drastic climatic and geophysical change". However it would be difficult to link GCRs, seismic activity, and volcanism to it.

From the Discord TOS:

> The Company reserves the right to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, the Service (or any part thereof) with or without notice. The Company reserves the right to refuse any user access to the Services without notice for any reason, including but not limited to a violation of the Terms

They were kind enough to give the server admins a reason for their termination!
Switching from Factory Worker to Web Developer at 50 Years of Age
I reckon they'd be great flying in small-island states that depend heavily on tourism (inter-island travel). AFAIK they are very cheap to run, using gasoline rather than avgas/jetfuel. Think Hawaii, Fiji, the Caribbean nations, Seychelles, Maldives, etc.
Hmm, but then the b-factor (and therefore also resolution) is dependent on the flexibility of molecule you want to look at? Does that mean that these guys just found a system for which the main chain was rigid enough such that the thermal fluctuations are low enough?
I still think Retail Stores were a red herring. Even if people bought unlocked Windows phones directly from Microsoft Stores they couldn't get SIMs from half the major carriers at any given time as Microsoft was forced not to support given Verizon SIMs as one point due to a dumb war with them and Verizon flat out refusing to allow the devices on to the network. (At a different point AT&T almost did the same thing, but relented.)

On top of that, even though that was towards the end of the era of massive phone hardware subsidies from the carriers, it was still the era of massive phone hardware subsidies from the carriers if you bought directly from them.

Apple had/has "luxury brand" caché that Microsoft couldn't build into its stores if it wanted to, and first mover advantage on top of that. Many consumers didn't blink if there was a huge sticker price difference between the iPhone in the AT&T Store and the unlocked one in the Apple Store, because it was a luxury brand. Microsoft was never going to earn that. Additionally, if a lot of people showed up to an AT&T or Verizon store with an unlocked iPhone and were refused a SIM that would be a major scandal, and would get a lot of luxury good "entitlement" people out of the woodwork. People told that they couldn't buy an unlocked Microsoft phone and use it on their carrier just shrugged and moved on (to an iPhone or an Android).

> And with their recent closing of Microsoft stores, it’s clear that they are doubling down on rent seeking from Office and Windows licenses.

Windows and Office are still getting improvements, it is a bit disingenuous to consider those products "rent seeking".

Xbox and Surface are doing just fine with or without Microsoft-specific Stores.

Besides, both before and after the Microsoft Stores, Microsoft had good retail relationships with Best Buy and others. It's not like there is "zero" Microsoft retail exposure without Microsoft owning their own boutique retail stores.
So in some sense that's what this is all about. The resolution of an electron microsocope is dependant on the energy of the electron, but higher energy electrons rip your sample apart. The trick that cryo-em does is to stiffen the structure of the protein by embedding it in a glass matrix (the glass is actually just really cold water that is prevented from freezing). Since the protein is stiff, you can use higher energy electrons, and thus get a higher resolution.
Normal and necessary are different.
I'm curious why the bay area doesn't have an ekranoplan ferry service. One could imagine longer routes like okl-mtv or okl-rwc or even okl-sjc becoming reasonable. Would it just be a regulatory mess?
The only complaint is that you can't resolve the progress by diplomacy towards the later parts of the campaign due to the set up the story.
Good lord. I've seen 'political' messages, but this one takes the cake. Narcissism is right.
Mentioned in article, too:

> Personally, I find it no fun whatsoever, and I’ve heard many others say the same thing.

disclaimer: I agree with the article.
Yeah, the author didn’t specify why he thought EDN wasn’t more than “a good start.” I’m curious what it’s missing!
Another vote for CBOR. I had actually designed my own binary JSON encoding out of frustration with BSON (which nobody should use IMO). My format was focused on compactness, but I dropped it when I found CBOR which was very similar and even slightly better in places. One notably thing about CBOR is the support for both Indefinite and Definite-Length Arrays and Maps (typically streaming generators need the former whereas parsing the latter can be more efficient).
> I'm fully expecting plenty of whataboutism and false equivalencies in response to this comment and others making a similar point.

Please don't poison the well. If you believe I've made such an argument, please politely point that out about a specific statement and I'll try to understand my biases and correct it.

> do you really believe the there's no meaningful difference between China's vision for the future and the West's?

If we were comparing to Mao, Stalin, or Hitler, then, yes; but, modern states, no.

The U.S. imprisons millions of people for petty drug crimes and kills millions of people in imperial wars. Is that so different than the treatment of the Uigers, Taiwanese, or those in Hong Kong?

The social credit system and Great Firewall are being implemented through different means: social ostracism and social media oligopolies. I've personally experienced it.

> No difference between the future each will create for you?

I'm actually generally optimistic. If we take the evidence of the past few hundred years, we are likely to innovate and grow despite such excessive governance. It's the innovators that will make my future better. As far as the government goes, the practical difference seems minimal: I will meticulously pay my taxes and follow the laws so as not to receive the glare of either of the Saurons.
I am quite familiar with realpolitik, the American post-war perspective and how the idea of international cooperation was undercut and destroyed by our national bourgeoisie. The UN system was put in place for America to exert its post-war dominance. China is a complicated nation. It is constructing a parallel system to the IMF/World Bank that under-girds US hegemony. It also controls a huge fraction of world manufacturing due to the laziness and greed of the business community. However, because it is not a pure capitalist country, it doesn't have the same imperial market imperatives that western countries certainly have.

If we don't try to build a better future, we will realpolitik ourselves into a dystopian one.

Also, nations are fake creations of the elites. The working class is international in scope and we have no quarrel with one another.
This is better I think:

> A vaneless ion wind generator or power fence is a device that generates electrical energy by using the wind to move charged particles across an electric field. Ion wind generators are not commercially available, though working prototypes and proofs of concept have been created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator
No pausing on the end of the exhalation? Pausing there is the most relaxing part of breathing, IMO.
China looks like Japan in the 20s and 30s. Rapidly developing country, with territorial ambitions around the seas /islands close to the coast, and a almost predatory commercial way of doing business, and a almost nazi like squashing of minorities.

History doesn't exactly repeats itself, but it certainly rhythms...
> I can't imagine this did anything but piss off a lot of people.

I had the same reaction. I think Trump is probably the worst President in history so obviously I'll be voting for Biden, but I still agree with most of this person's reply letter.

If a vendor decided to misuse information that I trusted them with, or tried to tell me who to vote for, they'd instantly become an ex-vendor - even when I agree with their opinion.
Only one I could find at OU of that age with either a bio or cv online was Andy Magid, who graduated in 1969 and did a postdoc before taking a tenure-track position there. Seriously, if you have evidence that this was common, provide it.
After 20 years of training, my meat-based XML parser is a well-tuned machine, and I prefer it over any of the other wannabes.
Oso: Authorization policy engine written in Rust, has SDKs in other languages
I think I write code the way people describe Jazz. You have to listen to the notes he isn't playing.

I leave breadcrumbs and openings in my code all the time so that the next time I'm in there, I'm set up, invited even, to ask the question I left unanswered before, and maybe do something about it. I leave the option of adding a feature, instead of building a config framework to support it and then defining one implementation. Which will end up not being the correct API when (if) I write the third one.

Sometimes people beat me to it, and get excited because they had an idea they're now invested in. I usually just let them have it, don't point out that I put the idea in their head. It's so infrequent people get that invested in functionality, you have to encourage it. There's too many things I'd like to do and never enough time anyway. They've just nominated themselves as a candidate for maintaining that module when I get tired of looking at it, freeing up my time for things nobody else cares about until it's done.

It's like if you were designing a house with plans to expand it later. You'd be very careful about certain decisions, like whether you should put a bedroom in the logical spot for an addition, because now that bedroom also has to be a thoroughfare. For 20% extra effort, you've extended the calcification threshold for that house/code by 80%.
Good thing that's not the only feather in Tim's cap. He's vastly expanded Apple's valuation while simultaneously introducing new, successful products, and growing Apple's place in the tech world.

Steve was visionary, but Tim has taken that vision farther than anyone ever gives him credit for.
> Apache is the tragic junkyard of open source projects

This made me laugh more than it probably should have.
I'd call React and Redux both massively over engineered. There's a ridiculous amount of lines of code being executed to do the simplest of things. You do something like `a.b = c` and really `a` is a proxy so that setting `b` the setting gets tracked going through 100+ lines of code all of which has tracking structures that get setup and torn down between components. They claim this will make your life easier but when the facade breaks you end up having to design your entire app around the fact that `a.b = c` is not simple, it's complex and so you have to avoid it as much as possible my piling on more complexity.
Ask HN: How do you handle a non-reproducible customer reported bug?
Every now and then, a customer reports an issue that's not reproducible. There's a back and forth of emails to try and understand the issue, but all details provided don't help the investigation at all. What's frustrating is that this is only happening to this one customer.

How does your support and development team handle this?
> we are approaching an aristocratic, low-churn society with a bunch of favored failsons at the top, then that would make more sense than trying to frame it in terms of Intrinsic intelligence.

Uh, I'm not sure exactly what you're disagreeing with. I think intelligence is a thing, I think tests can probably reflect it at least a bit, and I think the fact that wealth is not really correlated with it means that there are probably a lot of dummies making capital allocation decisions.

> immigrant-founded or run companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Tesla

I'm talking about ownership and capital allocation, so the management of any particular firm is somewhat irrelevant. The immigrant founders of Google, for instance, only hold 14% stake in Alphabet. Much of the ownership is by these "favored failsons" as you put it, even if they aren't the managers. That's not even getting into the fact that the vast-majority of America's economy is not these popular-to-talk-about tech companies or that Google's have to run-the-gambit of getting green-lighted by "failsons" just to have a chance of being funded.

We could have a whole separate conversation about the effectiveness of China's bureaucracy, but all I'll say is that - even if they have the same problems, ours have had more time to solidify, and China's wealth Gini coefficient is smaller than ours, so the problems would be less magnified.
Tesla Begins “Full Self Driving” Public Beta as Waymo and Cruise Go Unattended
You were slightly shocked because you are misunderstanding the table. Those are FTE (full-time equivalent salaries). The actual students work at most 50% time (during the 9 month academic year), so get at most half the amounts listed there.

I remember being a Graduate student in math at UC Berkeley in the late 90s, and getting just over $13K/year - it sucked (and grad students were striking back then)! So I also took out many student loans, which worked out for me because my salary once I got a real job was enough to pay them back very quickly (as I was used to living on so little money). I was a grad student at NAU in Flagstaff before that and got under $9K/academic year...
This is by far one of the best HN articles and discussions going on I've come across. Some really great conversations happening in the comments here, it would be great to open this conversation beyond the comments section in a more public forum.
This problem with this argument is that it can be flipped on its head to justify an aristocracy: the wealthy today are the ‘best’ and they will pass on their genes, successful values, and educational strategies to their children.
I’m also not happy with Koalas but at least it’s a step towards API unification.

Pure SQL vs DataFrame— just write any typical join, groupby & count OLAP query as SQL and again using the DataFrame API. I’m saying the SQL query is more accessible to non-Spark users (e.g. a DBA who might need to approve your code) and as-is can be thrown into Hive/Presto or any RDBMS pretty easily. The DataFrame version is definitely more extensible, but in my experience Spark is more often used to inform the design of a larger data pipeline versus serve as the pipeline year after year. Appreciate there are places where the opposite is true.
These are the same people who made dedicated effort to trick Lobsters users into giving them invites so they could spam our site back around the start of 2020: https://lobste.rs/s/utbyws/mitigating_content_marketing

If they're still spamming for LoadMill eight months later, that strongly implies to me that the clients know what they're getting and are OK with the tactics.
China is simply not behind in military technology. Neither are they "decades behind" in lithography, nor in launch, nor in satellites.

Their first reusable rocket is due for a test launch in a few months, their second domestic carrier is in construction, and in hypersonics they are, by the DoD's own admission, well ahead.

They have a fully domestic rocket online with a launch reliability over 94%, and their launch cost is only barely higher than that of the Falcon 9, at around 70 million dollars vs 50 million. They are also building a super-heavy, 140 000 kg LEO rocket.

In silicon tech, they have a 14nm fab online, which is hardly "decades behind".

In sat tech, they have pretty much all they could ask for.

I don't really get this viewpoint. China doesn't really advertise their capabilities, but it's clear that they aren't far behind in more than a few crucial sectors, and clearly ahead in others. At this point they are near competitors of the west.
Branding helps in selection process. Product awareness helps in choosing a product to fit their needs. Coupons and other promotions are often sought after.

It seems you're unaware of what marketing actually is and are just personally against ads yourself. That's fine, but it doesn't mean there are any absolutes.
"But this time it's different!" Such, I imagine, are the thoughts of "Team Blue". Next time, Team Red. Repeat ad nauseum.
The Axios Sinocism email list.

Edit: this whole thread is insane. Anyways, Sinocism is run by people who have spent significant time in China. It conglomerates Chinese, Western, and Asian news sources and provides balanced commentary.
I’d be more inclined to tie it to the rise of smartphones if we’re speculating on causation.
Amazon Inexplicably Removes Apple Card from Payment Options
Around 2009, I worked on an application whose web interface and API were the same url -- it was served as an XML data file, with an XSLT transform to make it pretty for the browser. It was so comfortable.
Coconut Oil
In my experience with BSON it's ridiculously wasteful compared to CBOR. I haven't compared with JSONB, but it seems unlike that it improves on CBOR.
Thanks! It combines so many of my interests into a coherent goal.

It's more interesting to me than video games (though at times it can be vastly more frustrating than even the worst video game!)

I expect this is a project I will be working on for a very long time. It's actually rather comforting to feel like I have something that could span decades, and remain satisfying, relevant, and renumerative.

Thanks for the kind words!
After half a decade of "better than JSON" mentality, fiddling with thrift, protobufs, custom serialization methods, I came to realize JSON/HTTP is usually the right tool for 90% of jobs.