skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The world is turning into a desert. Run for the hills!
"Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert," begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it's happening to about two-thirds of the world's grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

Back on planet Earth, a review of the current scientific literature would appear to disprove this thesis. IF the Sahara desert is expanding, it is a local issue. Elsewhere, the deserts are retreating and on average the trend is to global greening.

E.g.

Greening of the globe and its drivers - Nature 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
"Satellite records from 1982–2009 show a persistent and widespread increase of leaf area (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing leaf area (browning).
Ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilisation effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (4%)."

Elevated CO2 as a driver of global dryland greening - Nature 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20716
"Recent regional scale analyses using satellite based vegetation indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), have found extensive areas of “greening” in dryland areas of the Mediterranean, the Sahel, the Middle East and Northern China, as well as greening trends in Mongolia and South America. More recently, a global synthesis from 1982-2007 showed an overall “greening-up” trend over the Sahel belt, Mediterranean basin, China-Mongolia region and the drylands of South America."

Global Greening Is Firm, Drivers Are Mixed - Harvard 2014 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AGUFM.B31A0515K
"Evidence for global greening is converging, asserting an increase in CO2 uptake and biomass of the terrestrial biosphere.
Global greening refers to global net increases in the area of green canopy, stocks of carbon, and the duration of the growing season.
The growing seasons in general have prolonged while the stock of biomass carbon has increased and the rate of deforestation has decelerated.
Evidence for these trends comes from firm empirical data obtained through atmospheric CO2 observations, remote sensing, forest inventories and land use statistics."

Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36130346
Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: "It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models).

I hope all you empiricists will join me in celebrating this good news. Cheers!
While I really like what music streaming services gave me (an opportunity to explore quickly lots of new music), I think it is also coaxing, pasteurizing and generalizing music to the 'most added value possible' or 'most hype created possible per track', to which the epitome of this concept is called 'lo fi hip hop music', which now everyone making mainstream music tries to emulate or incorporate.

I know this will sound harsh and obtuse, but if you notice, all 'dope' pop music now for kids is some variant of alternated trap-like rhythmic hihats and a really sloooow beats with a looong, bassy kick tail. to fill that huge nothingness pocket between the stuff, add some nice lush vocals (saying whatever, it doesn't matter much) and that's it.

or maybe i'm just getting old and cranky.
Could someone eligthen me. Why not just use JavaScript? It is being used by Cloudflare on the edge, and AWS lambda. Why need to go to WASM?
How I Easily Code for 8+ Hours Without Feeling Tired (My Productivity System)
> I get it for a game or a desktop app, but a website?

Browsers "had to" replace Java Applets and Flash. With the great side effect that users can no longer easily just disable those plugins to get rid of the malware build on top.
> just as thinking hard and deep about food does not make it taste better.

Sure it does. This is just false.

The senses are trained; cognition isn't separated from the body, it is a conditioning process on it.

Absent reflection and training, you cannot appreciate as much.
And GCP storage buckets has been built on top of spanner sine 2018- giving the same guarantees.

If anything. AWS is playing catch up.
928Mhz. That's some GSM-Booster ET is using there!
Go-style type systems won't save us, but Go's type system is literally from the early 1950s. It's closer to Python's type system (i.e. unityping - "static type system" is a tautology, the things that Python calls types are not types) than it is to a post-ML type system. Judging the limits of type systems based on Go is like judging the limits of VR based on the Virtual Boy.
That’s just redundant
It's a brief article, and worth a read.

If you use software to guide and support you in any environment and it's not free software (free as in speech, and as in the definition provided by the FSF), then even though that non-free software may provide you with short-term benefits (that may be worth it), you've given up some of your autonomy to another party.

People will downplay that aspect of software all the time - "proprietary software is good for business thanks to support contracts", "people don't care as long as the software works", "free software has poor usability". That's understandable and those are beliefs that those people usually genuinely hold, but it doesn't change the underlying principle of the situation.

(this generally applies to hardware and computing platforms too)

[1] - https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software
It is a pity that this study did not mention such Boeing flaws, I would certainly update it: https://ivypanda.com/essays/boeing-strategic-plan/
I think you summarized it well. There is little incentive to test the limits of stability as manufacturers typically control channel inventory quite tightly. I know my company targeted maybe 14 days on hand? So going much beyond 2 years stability didn’t make much sense as most product was consumed well before it expired.
Seems weird that pilots doing tests for boeing would need to be reminded about MCAS countermeasures, I would have guessed that would be on their mind already.
This is one of the trio of great books that Springer Verlag produced around the same time. The other two are The Science of Fractal Images and Beauty of Fractals.

https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781461283492

https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783540158516

Two other books that I think are good (but which are for general audiences) are AK Dewdney's Magic Machine which has a chapter about L Systems: https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Machine-Handbook-Computer-Sorce...

And Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty by Clifford Pickover: https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Pattern-Beauty-Clifford-Pic...
> WHat happened to the guardian?

In the aftermath of the Assange and Snowden stories, it was found that 1) hard-hitting investigative journalism can alienate government officials on which newspapers depend for more ordinary scoops, and potentially bring hassles from law enforcement, and 2) the big money to be made today in the advertising-based market is "snackable content" and stoking the culture wars. Consequently, The Guardian has become less and less distinguishable from other online newspapers.

What always irks me is when someone on a forum comments that an article at The Guardian is intentionally furthering some crafty and intricate left-wing, working-class, Marxist, etc. mission. While The Guardian was founded as a socially-engaged newspaper for the working classes, the last decade-plus has seen an exodus of anyone attached to that 150-year-old tradition. Sincere political beliefs and idealism just don’t keep a newspaper going in our modern internet era.
Actually this seems relatively news- I was looking at old clips and in 2000 they weren’t using the film, couldn’t get it lit and had to use the backup kit the day before. This seems to have started afterwards.
Unfortunately the Great Wall doesn't seem to be doing so well.

This article is from 2024. I looked for updates and found the Wikipedia page.

It contains some contradictory statistics but this is the most recent: "In September 2020 it was reported that the Great Green Wall had only covered 4% of the planned area".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall
> or maybe i'm just getting old and cranky.

Quite likely. There are a lot of studies that show that we're "programmed" to like music we listened to as teenagers. Even though we like other kinds of music we listen to as adults, they don't trigger the same level of response in the brain.
> you cannot express anything malicious in Wasm

This feels like a comment that will as age as badly as “you can’t get a virus just from looking at an email”
Cynicism doesn't help anybody. The GP asked for specifics, if you don't have any, you're not really adding to the conversation.
Because the cases people talk about are about the police confiscating the first thing they stumble upon, and deciding on the spot to confiscate it with no cause other than "they feel like doing it"
You're right that it's not always clear how government investment benefits society.

Maybe some day we'll have the technology to keep track of it all. Like ubiquitous micro payments for every form of transaction. The ultimate accounting system.

Or we could all just be satisfied that healthy governmental revenues in the aggregate is good enough. For government work.
The world’s largest iceberg is headed for South Georgia Island–and its wildlife
The issue is quite symmetrical, isn't it? Somebody could ask: why not use just WASM? Why need to go to JavaScript?

This is a better question, actually, if you already have a codebase in another language that can you can easily compile to wasm, but not to javascript.
Or in other words:

Expert in field X disappointed that regular people are not experts in field X :-)
That is ... exhaustive.
At Google it's commonplace for a single engineer to be able to run a MapReduce over the entire internet. Or do experiments with training huge deep learning models.

The fact that approval is not required (aka 20% project) to use staggering levels of compute is the advantage I'm talking about.
What our (Lithuania) officials say is that about 5% of the cases are hospitalized.
We are close to the top by the number of new infections per 100000 pop.
> Whether or not a technical solution is good is not dependent on it being employed by other companies

You said it's state of the art and simpler as WASM. I'm not actually aware of a single company using seccomp for what Shopify is doing (letting people upload custom code) so I would be quite curious to hear who does.
No. It might be useful for some but it would make it much harder for others

I question Unicode as well.

A readme file should work as expected in simple text editor.
Like an early version of VI from 30 years ago.

Anything fancy should be able in the documentation hierarchy for the project
That's a pretty bold statement. I'd like to see an in depth analysis between the two before supporting that.
2.5 years for a cop in jail is like 100 for a lay-person. /s
You’re projecting your free time / dedication to discovery on other people and that’s unfair. Spotify’s discovery tools for example are a real boon to many.

That said, I do feel the same as you about the “good old days”. Owning music was a very different experience. It doesn’t help that streaming apps haven’t worked out the UX yet (god knows why, they’ve had long enough).

But... flip side... if I could time travel back to being a teenager and say “for £10 a month (even in that money) you can have access to pretty much all music commercially released” I would have cried with joy at the thought of it. There are so many bands I probably wouldn’t have worked through the catalogue of because they weren’t on my radar or popular within my social circles - even major artists like Bowie or Queen - and Spotify has enabled me to work through most of the great 20th century pop/rock/indie music, plus explore a lot of dance and electro I wouldn’t have.

Problem is I think it’s (the?) jam today and bread tomorrow... I think popular music peaked just before the internet arrived. A good tell is the many festival line ups full of very old bands. If you make a list of the greatest bands/artists of the latest 10 years and compare it to any decade since pop music got going, it doesn’t compare. I don’t think that’s the commercialisation of music (that hasn’t changed so much) rather the financial incentives are no longer there. Appropriately for HN, a lot of kids dream of a building a startup instead of making music.
I was surprised when reading Keynes texts where he criticized capitalism, seeing him counting the concentration of capital as one of the pros of the system: it allows efforts that no one else could take on.
Vinyl seems higher quality because it's such an unforgiving medium. The mastering has to be done well or it'll sound terrible. The MP3, CD, and vinyl are not necessarily done by the same person, or someone with equal skill in each. FM has someone in a sound booth who knows what they're doing.
hey, this is not PC in China
Was that MP3 encoded from audio ripped from the vinyl (with a good ADC)? ABX tests show that 320kbps MP3 is usually transparent, so for it to be "night and day" suggests the vinyl had better mastering. It's not always the case, but vinyl is sometimes mastered with higher dynamic range than the digital versions.
Apple’s 8GB M1 Silicon Isn’t Magic, but It Is Magical
By mentioning data consistency and transactions - your microservice is supposed to be self-contained and self-sufficient, doing its own job only. True, it may rely on other service, but not in the way that the two services would do the exact same job together as if you're invoking a `private` method helpers.

For ex., filling a shopping cart should be its own thing. Searching for stuff to fill that cart can be another service that is just a dumb catalog. No data consistency problems here.
Why do you need the minimum == 0 test in the following chunk of code ...

if i > 0 and (minimum == 0 or i < minimum):
minimum = i
I agree that if you only need one specific part, than your needs are better met by using just one of the other frameworks. But in my experience that is rarely ever the case. Usually I have to work with at least 3 or 4 different ones. You don't even have to use all of the possibilities for a unified framework to be simpler already. So the word "simple" is meant in relation to the fragmented alternatives.
A clever strategy to deliver Covid aid–with satellite data
For my money, I can't help but think of people who have legitimate reasons for wanting privacy and how my relative lack thereof deprives them of it. For every one of us that has a well defined presence, it becomes that much easier to spot people who hide, and like you say, there are perfectly legitimate reasons to do so.

I would venture out even and say that categorically, there are unjust laws that people should be able to hide from - I would want to help them do that. By creating a culture that respects privacy, we insulate ourselves against a lot of the damage that can be done by a poorly managed legal system / toxic culture / opportunistic economic structure. I was just recently reading about how the military buys adtech data to track foreign nationals. I feel like we're living out a Gibson novel.

I do try to "fuzz" my presence as much as possible, because of this. However, like you mention, it ain't easy.
thanks for the pointer, haven't tried this yet. cool!
Which companies besides Moderna are at/near phase 2 for vaccines against other diseases now?
>It's higher fidelity than 320 kbps

No it's not. SNR is at best 65dB, low frequencies go through processing before getting cut to account for limitations of the medium and channel separation is less than 30dB. Furthermore, there's wow, flutter and rumble. You also have issues with RIAA equalization (many preamps STILL can't get that right) and cartridge loading, that end up affecting high frequency response. The latter is also affected by stylus and record wear.

With vinyl being such a technically flawed medium, ofcourse you could A/B between that and a high bitrate MP3 file that most probably is transparent to a lossless source. MP3 reaches transparency at lower bitrates, as has been proven by ABX (not A/B, those are useless from a scientific perspective) tests conducted in many communities like Hydrogen Audio.
Sounds like the promises made about the jvm.
The fact that browsers allow websites to see whatgpu you have installed, driver version and enumerate your fonts is clearly put there for the benefit of tracking people.

Otherwise browser developers would create generic classes of device that segment users into large groups based on features.

The fonts thing is proof. For years, you install a custom font on your pc. Then you are unique.
Maybe they meant pay for a more expensive ticket. In my country the national airline sells different types of tickets. You can get cheap non-refundable, non-transferable tickets, or you can pay more to get a ticket that allows you to reschedule any time.
How would you write tests for the following problem with random output?

Write a function biasedcoin(n,p) that takes the number of coin flips, n, and the probability of heads, p. It flips a biased coin n times, and returns the ratio of number of heads/number of tails. p is guaranteed to have two significant numbers eg. p = 0.60 or p = 0.74. You should use the random.randrange function to generate random numbers.

Example implementation

def biasedcoin(n,p):

import randrange from random

heads = tails = 0

for i in range(n):

if randrange(100) < 100*p:

heads += 1

else:

tails += 1

return heads/tails
This is more Murdoch press - every day they have a number of incendiary articles about china.
lol, the timing of this is impeccable. I was literally just playing through Cyberpunk 2077 and thinking about procedurally generated cities.
Pro tip: use incremental compilation rather than full builds, especially if you're at an airport.
Jupiter, Saturn merging in night sky, closest in centuries
You just need something that is truely airborne, not just able to fly with sneezes and exhalations.

Something that spreads like measles and kills 5%, maims some, etc.
Good to be cautious but there’s a lot of CYA in those SEC risk disclosures.
>What always irks me is when someone on a forum comments that an article at The Guardian is intentionally furthering some crafty and intricate left-wing, working-class, Marxist, etc. mission. While The Guardian was founded as a socially-engaged newspaper for the working classes, the last decade-plus has seen an exodus of anyone attached to that 150-year-old tradition. Sincere political beliefs and idealism just don’t keep a newspaper going in our modern internet era.

I fully agree and I know that was the initial purpose of the guardin, as a right winger I did not have a problem with that as at least that marxism was honest. However as you say all this suuden change pf marxists for neolibs has been horrible. Particularly within the whole context of the corbyn persecution, we cna only wish that real leftists are able to regroup and form a real opposition newspapers as both the labour and tories seem to be getting away with destroying the uk.
Ok, what the mechanism for the long term consequences would be? mRNA itself is gone in days. All what's left is antibodies and some immune memory which should be the same as if you had real COVID. Is that more dangerous than catching covid which may affect your body in many more ways than vaccine which makes your cells to produce a particular protein?

I do not know what the long term effects of the glass of water I just drunk will be.
Just use test@gmail.com or something similar, there is no confirmation necessary.
> A chair is a chair, in real life. But in terms of data-transformations, in terms of what we do, these classes are really only superficially similar. In the context of a game, we have a Chair, a PhysicsChair, a StaticChair, a BreakableChair. These things are not at all similar.

I feel like that comment either takes a very literal and naive analysis to the problem or fails to identify the objects being used.

Just because the word "chair" pops up in a few objects that does not mean they are supposed to be the same thing, and thus modeled as specialization of a common Chair class.

For example, PhysicsChair makes sense as a specialization of a physics-related class, not a Chair-related class. Breakable hair would also make sense as a specializationof a physics object, which might be comprised of multiple discrete elements or track damage to generate new particles when a threshold is reached. If we take the single responsibility principle seriously, it makes sense to have specialized physics and graphics classes that implement the functional requirements of handling a chair.

This by no means implies that class Chair should be a superclass of all these other cases, or even that it makes sense to even consider them to be related at all. A failure to identify the models and their functional relationships doesn't mean that your domain has to include relationships that don't really exist nor make sense.
Parent poster is referring to a full build, which are not really representative of a daily workflow. Incremental builds, in particular of a project where the large part of a full build is on external crates (which don't need to be recompiled) are much faster.

I can't test on an old machine, but modifying the project code and performing an incremental (standard) build, takes around 5 seconds on a modern machine.
So vaccine looks more dangerous to you than COVID, despite numbers showing that's not the case? 20 in 1000 dying from COVID-19 is somehow acceptable, but two in hundreds of thousands getting some allergic reaction is not?
How does one even justify that logic?
To me Spotify has this vibe of musical ignorance all over it. A friend and I joked about their ceo wearing a t-shirt that had something to the effect of "I love music" on it. Which IMHO no-one that deeply likes music would wear. He also made snide remarks about how musicians should adapt to their platform wrt to publishing more music more often (instead of adapting Spotify to the needs of the musicians)

The story I linked also has a similar feel, the music is basically avant pop and neo soul, and instead of forwarding this cluster to someone with a musical/cultural background, a techbro comes up with their own label that comes off as basically "it reminds me of my favourite thing".

From the outside it seems they are really only approaching it from a purely technical point with a subconscious arrogance, ie they are adding the value not the musicians.

Their programmers probably make more money than most musicians on their platform and that's frustrating as fuck.
I never said anything was “state of the art” or made any claim that any company is using seccomp to accomplish what Shopify is doing.

I said that companies typically run third party native code, e.g. imagemagick, in seccomp to process untrusted data, e.g. user-uploaded image files.

If I were tasked with doing what Shopify is doing with wasm here, I would employ the seccomp-based solution since it’s equally applicable, it requires less code, and it’s more efficient. Whether or not other companies use a seccomp solution for this particular use case has no technical basis in determining its applicability for this use case. Seccomp was specifically designed for running untrusted code on your infrastructure, this exact use case.