skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much more efficient is it? The fact that you have to carry propellant with you anyway seems like a big factor in favour of traditional rockets, where the fuel becomes the propellant. And burning the hydrogen way hotter seems like a big engineering problem - rocket motors already run at temperatures which pose materials science problems, increase that a few thousand degrees and you might as well say we should run the spaceship on fusion power.

I don't doubt that the physics works, and it's important to note that say a 2x gain in thrust-to-mass ratio would lead to enormous advances in trips out of Earth's gravitational well (10x? 100x?) due to the tyranny of the rocket equation. But I'm curious whether this is the 2x gain of replacing oxygen+hydrogen with hydrogen, plus a big complex reactor, or the millionfold gain of replacing hydrogen fuels with uranium.

Edit: TFA says twice the specific impulse, and presumably that's the optimistic estimate. But still very good!
This is a very roundabout way of expressing inability to accept that such a paper may still be more accurate in its reporting than other papers that you prefer.
> and she's terrified about what happens in Q2 2021, when leases will start terminating en masse.

I thought the general expectation, or at least the hope, is that that's about when things start to go back to normal.
Even "appliance" devices can be used in a manner which increases freedom, e.g. retain iPad flexibility and reliability while using it as a thin client for self-hosted content and services on FreeNAS/TrueNAS on open hardware. Choose iOS apps (e.g. Omni, 2Do, DevonThink, GoodReader, Codebook, Netnewswire, LumaFusion, Textastic, Working Copy, Secure Shellfish, PhotoSync, Jump, Screens) which support synchronization protocols like CalDAV, WebDAV, ssh/scp, SMB, DLNA, RDP etc. With the recently introduced iSH (user-space Linux) on iOS, more integration options are available. You can also use an iOS remote desktop with mouse/keyboard to drive remote desktops and VMs that have less OS/app restrictions.
I'm in London for the best part of a decade, and haven't ever had a power cut at home, but a few years ago we had a brief brownout in the office (monitors and lights turned off, but servers and desktops carried on running).

I guess YMMV... but it's not something I've personally had to worry about, and won't do anything about it unless the electricity supply gets significantly less reliable. They are saying that the move to renewables might make the grid less stable over the next few years though, so worth thinking about perhaps.

Frankly, I find nowadays I can't do much without an internet connection anyway... Maybe we should put ~5 second batteries into desktops just to sync disks and power off safely.
> We shouldn't be having Zuckerberg or Pichai's opinion on the relative moral differences between Leila Khaled and the CCP affect what speech we can hear regarding it.

Then don't use Zuckerberg or Pichai's website. Your website works on the exact same internet as theirs.
Worth pointing out that you can already do 3 month trips to Mars with chemical propulsion, it just requires refueling:
Page 37 of the pdf: https://www.spacex.com/media/making_life_multiplanetary_2016...
I made this playground:
https://play.golang.org/p/S1Yh0Oq24q-

There are a ways to do unique enums with implicit repetition.
Like this:
I
0
1
2
II
101
102
103
III
201
202
203
IV
10
20
40
80
A cross-country database of Covid-19 testing – Scientific Data
My Aero 15 would never throttle, with a 7700HQ + 1060. There was a 700mhz penalty in that generation (3.5ghz vs 4.2ghz for the 7700k), but I kept it pegged for hours and it was rock solid.

Most laptop cooling is awful, but you can certainly find laptops that are well built if you look for it.

Not sure you should weigh bloatware, either. You can trivially install a fresh Windows or Linux and you have to on a custom built PC anyway. If you buy a premade PC, it probably comes with the same crap.

For what it's worth, I switched to a desktop once the core race heated up - now I've got a 12 core 3900X.

I can't believe how much faster it is when it's using all the cores. Night and day. Highly recommended. And 12 cores is barely scratching the surface of the crazy workstations you can build these days.

For tasks 4 threads and less, it would be a bit faster than a current gen Intel laptop chip, but I don't think it would have been worth the portability penalty to me personally if that's all I did with it.
> Businesses and residents are leaving both cities are a cadence unlike anything we've seen in decades

There is no data underlying this statement whatsoever.
There are really two axes that everyone seems to conflate into one. There is funding, as in whether or not there is sufficient funding to achieve certain outcomes. Then there is competence, as in managing the resources to achieve certain outcomes. Both are necessary but neither sufficient by themselves, only together.

The U.S. seems to be stuck in a loop wherein the available funds are argued about endlessly, and everybody acts as if that's the only dimension about which to speak and win. Not nearly enough is done to boost competence in the government sector. I think this is plenty true even if we set aside the current U.S. administration in which a number of federal entities are headed by naked toadies (to be fair, it's certainly not true of all federal organizations even now).

I tend to agree with you that the U.S. is probably not taxing enough for consistently high-quality outcomes in areas where the government is responsible. Yet I'm sympathetic to those that point to places where tax rates are high and so is wastefulness. But when the only lever it seems that can be pulled is on the revenue/spending, it's no wonder the correlation between that lever position and good outcomes is low - it ignores the competence with which any of those funds are managed.

I think it's entirely possible to have competent government if that is made a priority and addressed with some flexibility.
My apologies: one laptop, three hard drives. My point stands.

He had been a senator in Delaware, but no longer lived there at the time. Why would he travel across the country to visit a repair shop in the middle of nowhere with a conveniently blind owner and conveniently erased camera footage. There is no universe in which this story is plausible.

Before accusing me of not understanding the story, please take a moment to read what I wrote. You are contributing to the gaslighting around this topic.
Thanks for vouching, that was the thread I linked in the GP post dang was replying to. Constructive ideation on fixing a community problem of censorship is now "metadrama", Orwellian. I'm open to it not being a problem, but we can't even have that discussion.

Taibbi frequently gets flagged, he's not liberal enough for the site. I don't have the motivation to now but if someone wrote a "HN has a flagging problem" and got lucky with timing, maybe they'd listen? I may have to just accept one of the last decent sites for discussing tech events is going down the same path as the rest of them, though tbh it's been on the path for a long time now (I've noticed at least 15 decent articles in the last year flagged for essentially being "not liberal" despite high quality content).
Amazing quote - couldn't stop laughing.

For what it is worth, Johnson's biography is worth reading - though I think one should read some of Johnson's writing first (don't start with his English language dictionary, regardless of how much you want to). It will give you more of a reason to care about Johnson as a person - which, given the length of the biography, might be needed.

"He was a perpetual drunk, a degenerate gambler, a sex addict, whoremonger, exhibitionist, and rapist. He gave his wife an STD he caught from a prostitute.

Selfish, servile and self-indulgent, lazy and lecherous, vain, proud, obsessed with his aristocratic status, yet with no sense of propriety whatsoever, he frequently fantasized about the feudal affection of serfs for their lords. He loved to watch executions and was a proud supporter of slavery...

Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. [...] Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal."
A fair while, probably about 3 years? But the majority of it I re-researched for making this page in the last week or so.

I'm keeping some of those older projects up despite their age and development status as I think they're still useful tools, though I haven't used everything on the page personally so I could be wrong.

There's also a ton of projects and links I didn't include because I thought the learning curve was too high to be of use to anyone but the people that wrote the code to begin with or because the art they make is just sorta ugly (The guide is opinionated after all)

Some of the other livecode projects and tools I found along the way wound up in https://opinionatedguide.github.io#/Music/m8-musicsoft but I haven't really done anything but drop links into that page yet.
Dual booting is a good solution, but you actually could also buy a bit more RAM and run Ableton in a mixed VM Windows-on-Linux.
I disagree. If I only had to come into the office, say, once or twice a week (3x might be pushing it) I'd be willing to live much further out because I'd be willing to tolerate a horrible commute if I only had to do it a small percentage of the time.

For example, in Austin, these days anything located within a half hour of downtown tends to be horribly expensive. But just go a little beyond that and house/real estate prices drop precipitously. You're going to see a boom in these exurbs as these "mostly remote" jobs increase.
Just needs a web browser (interface; obviously the browser engine is there)!
Thanks, that's a very good point. We'll at least add more disclaimer text around them.
Corporate Founder's Dilemma
I was under the impression that ocaml’s optimization was pretty good. Granted multicore is not here yet.
Comments exist on many prior HN discussions of Twitter and Facebook that demonstrate confusion around whether the bill of rights applies to private companies or not.
> we don't really have a "right" to post anything to them.

The article never talks about rights. The article is about journalistic failures.
Rather: "some technologies seem to exclusively make the news when used to commit crimes."

Headlines are not statistics.
The problem here is something new, as Matt points out.

Law enforcement, tech companies, and the news media are operating under on some type of cooperating agreement which is not transparent to users or the creators of content. In normal human society you know the binds that bond, this is a reasonable expectation, and an expectation that even been challenged in the law. As the law infinitely expands, who am I (as a commoner) to know what I did wrong? Do I have the opportunity to change? Do I have the opportunity to face my accusers in a forum?

Our rights, and the framework they reside in, are far too outdated for this sort of problem. The leaders we have in both business and government are too cowardly, weak, or self-interested to directly address the McCarthy-esque patterns that are beginning to emerge that seem to be opportunistically aligned to further narratives.
>or the frowns you get in Tahoe or Austin

Austinite here who moved from New York, and previously from California. People actually talk to you out here in general and have been nothing but pleasant. There's also far less of a homeless issue and you can actually buy a house with a low six figure salary. Austin is great.
When Google tweaks its algorithms, some other business will win if another suffers. I would imagine changes are done for a reason, e.g. site A has better reviews than site B.
Not OP, but I know three different families who are actively visiting other states to decide where to live next because they so loathe Newsom and the California governance writ large. They never liked it, but the wildfires, pandemic response, and ability to work elsewhere pushed them over the edge.
I think it is a sliding scale. Should we be permitted to discuss whether the moon landing was faked? Whether 9/11 was an inside job? Whether Hunter Biden dropped off his laptop someplace other than overwhelmingly the most likely place? Whether Trump has ties to Russia? Whether the gender differences in computer programming are satisfactorily explained by choices or not? Are lockdowns still justified? Should we force people to be vaccinated? If so, can we force a first-revision COVID vaccine on everyone? Should capital gains be taxed like ordinary income? Should we have a pledge of allegiance? Should it include “under God”?

There are hundreds of tough questions, even if you don’t find any of those difficult to adjudicate (whether they can be discussed and examined).

I fall pretty strongly on the “the government shall let everyone discuss everything” side (yes, including Nazi rhetoric and being a racist sphincter), because it’s too easy for me to imagine the danger of leaving the government in the business of judging which thoughts and speech are categorically “acceptable for society”.

Society can do that better than the government can, IMO.

https://xkcd.com/1357/
I think you will find that material prices are <20% of the capital cost.
Israel is an ally of the KSA against Iran, though they both pretend not to be for domestic consumption. They are indeed both in conflict with one another, because in truth Iran is really the only country in the Middle East that could threaten to become an independent power, on the level of say, Turkey.
Left without school or day care, farmworkers are bringing their kids to work
Ask HN: What is a good source to master Gradle?
Gradle seems to be much more popular for new projects than Maven these days.

I do like that the build files look smaller, but they also look like magic incantations. I can't understand them the way I can understand POM files.

When I learned Maven, I could find properly structured material that explained what was going on, and taught it concept by concept, incrementally. There are lots of plugins, but they mostly follow a regular, predictable structure.

Gradle, on the other hand, has documentation all over the place. The official documentation is quite non-linear. Each plugin seems to define its own DSL, making discoverability a pain.

In summary, even though I can eventually find my way around Gradle builds on a case-by-case basis, I can't form a coherent mental model of how it works. The syntax in particular seems to lend itself to way too much "magic."

Is there a good, unofficial source that can help me master Gradle? A book, maybe? I hate using tech that I don't understand.

I struggle with it every time I come across a Gradle project. It makes me feel like dealing with autotools again.
Good. The rent was too damn high anyway.
> Where once GCHQ et al were desirable places to work

From a US perspective, Britain has low salaries in the private sector, but the civil service is even worse.

You would have to squint carefully at the benefits before joining.
"I want to upgrade from my simple eight bits, but will you still love me when I'm sixty-four?"

Therein lies the question; for me, the past is in the past.
> Companies like Apple endlessly mouth their desire to get more kids to code, then their arms release devices so closed off that even trying to take a quick peek at how they work triggers eighteen system integrity protection alarms. You can't have it both ways, Apple.

Apple C-Suites: "We want kids to code."

Apple Ads: "What's a computer?"

Whilst it might be me, somebody somewhere doesn't understand something.
billionaires are fine and few of them rely on real estate wealth.

The real losers are the middle class whos savings are invested in securities that rely on corporate real estate. and then obviously the lower class because they get screwed no matter what and they provide services easily stopped by covid.

plenty of people are doing fine, that's why they're going out to buy million dollar covid homes.
At first read you would go to "god, as a musician this must suck" but I think Jarrett is going to find a way to express his musical spirit come what may.

That scene in "Amadeus" where F Murray Abraham is being Salieri and the full force of Mozarts music is in his head, reading the score, even when Mozart can only weakly moan the refrains.

People give Jarrett a lot of room for his vocalisations during play, they don't give Glenn Gould. I think they're cut from a similar cloth in some ways.

The story about Jarrett being frozen on stage and calling "give me a note!" and then riffing on it when somebody does, I want it to be true but I know, there is something deeper going in in a musician at these times.

Jarrett can range from emotionally intense, expressive, to freeform, to almost trite. He really is across it all.
Eurocentric biases are dominate across various academic disciplines. they either deny the attribution to our culture or call it plain superstitious belief.

enlightening article on devastating effect of it by śri lankan biologist:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-of-co...

then the onus of proof lies with us to prove suśruta was indeed a great surgeon, whereas we never see Europeans giving evidence to establish that Euclid was a real man.

Following book by prof. CK Raju on Euclid is a worthy read for anyone who wish to learn how Academic Imperialism works to perpetuate the aforementioned biases.

Euclid and Jesus: How and why the church changed mathematics and Christianity across two religious wars

http://ckraju.net/Euclid/

https://www.amazon.com/Euclid-Jesus-mathematics-Christianity...

please do explore other work of prof. Rāju.
In 2003 SF office vacancy rate exceeded 20% with 17 million square feet available. This 12 million is smaller in absolute and relative terms (about 14%).
Yabai is the one I was using.
turn it into affordable housing :) ?
What happens when the hydrogen runs out? Control rods to slow the reactor? Or eject it?
Can the placebo exist without the "real" pills? More practically, does anyone prescribe placebo outside of a clinical trial?
I don't think I want to live in a world where all software engineers have to bow down to US foreign policy.

If there is a real need to put sanctions in place to avoid a war, they can go through the UN and a vote on the UNSC.

Otherwise, it's just great power games, and I don't want to have to deal with that.
I’m not an expert but I’m pretty sure the only way to orbit via nuclear is riding the shockwave of one or more nuclear explosions. There was a program to develop one called Project Orion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...
how do you want strava estimates to be reliable? they can't take wind into account they can't take the efficiency of your bike, they can't take your shape (which influence the air resistance) into account that can't be reliable at all. 89w is nothing
I'm on Zoom calls for work about 10 hours a week and custom backgrounds are very popular. Personally my office is a complete mess and putting a custom background on is much easier than cleaning.
I never left. I have a few subnotebooks around for emergencies and travel, but all real work is on desktops with a good keyboard, a big screen at eye height, a mouse, and a fast wired Internet connection.
If you don’t like hanging out in a cordial place, head to 4chan.
Exactly. What happens in the future when people quit caring about computing freedom?
Hi! I work in this industry.

What equipment with what personnel is dispatched is incredibly complicated. You would be shocked. And most fire districts/departments regularly tweak their "response plans."
worth noting that in the python 2 to 3 story, a migration path was mostly provided along with tools that tried to automatically refactor your code, the latest 2.x release was supported for nearly a decade, and there have been directions on how to temporarily write code to work on both python2 and python3.
> Currently a handful of billionaire oligarchs own a majority of the sites used for public discourse by ordinary people

They own the sites, not the people or their discourse. The people are in complete control of which websites they visit and it costs them nothing to use another website, which of course literally everyone does.
Humans (and every other species we cause suffering to) are gonna have a bad time.
There's a middle ground, where one buys a small form factor desktop (SFF, NUC, or a "Mini PC" like the ASUS PN50), and uses USB3/Thunderbolt/NAS for extensions/eGPU/extra storage.

This keeps most of the advantages (the processor is weaker on the smaller form factor thanks to the cooling requirements), while also keeping some size, mobility and power-saving benefits.

I got into this because I got tired of opening up the large cases, moving to a smaller form factor and external devices was much easier. I don't care for working on the move, and every place I'm likely to ever want to use the computer at will have spare monitors/keyboards/mice.
> And it's completely unfalsifiable. When Trump wins, the true believers will say "We gave him a 9.684% chance of winning! It's only your ignorance that makes you think we were wrong" and they go back to poring over their race tables.

> It's an orgy of false precision.

The false precision is pretty obviously coming from you, not the FiveThirtyEight pages that never show more than two (or rarely three) significant figures, and emphasize in every other way they can that the numbers are approximate and uncertain. Have you seen the width of the 80% confidence intervals on their graphs?

As for falsification: all of their predictions are for testable outcomes. We'll always know soon enough who actually wins an election, and which states they won, and by what margin, and who turned out to vote. That's all public record. The only part of the post-hoc analysis that is non-trivial is figuring out how a candidate fared with specific demographic groups. It's imperfect, but between exit polling and precinct-level demographic information and election results, it certainly is possible to detect large pre-election polling errors resulting from inaccurate demographic weighting.
I believe the term is perverse incentive. Parking fines are supposed to incentivize compliance from road users. The perverse element is that they incentivize local governments to generate as much non-compliance as possible.

Any time a government has a profit motive to enforce the law against its citizens you end up with corruption, it’s the same basic reason that civil asset forfeiture is such a big problem.
Based on other comments here, I did a little digging on Wikipedia, in case others with zero background (like me) are curious.

This appears to be a nuclear thermal rocket [1] which would use a nuclear reaction to directly heat propellant (e.g. hydrogen) that is ejected.

This is different from a nuclear electric rocket [2] which would produce electricity which would then generate propulsion [3] using a smaller quantity of propellant, e.g. using an ion thruster [4].

It is also different from a fission-fragment rocket [5] where the nuclear fission products themselves are ejected for thrust directly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electric_rocket

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrically_powered_spacecraf...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket
No. You are censoring the other by attempting to compel their speech. Their speech is no longer free.