skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is more a question of how lost and for how long. The authors write "modern bladesmiths have been unable to use the methods to reproduce the blades", where the context suggests that "modern" refers to the preceding two centuries. The implication seems to be that, despite the surviving information about the process, it could not be successfully replicated, which strikes me as a reasonable definition of 'lost'.

Once the studies described in the article revealed details of the chemical and physical structure of the blades, and, in particular, of the necessity for trace elements to promote the formation of carbides, the authors successfully replicated the process.

This leads the authors to suggest that the decline in quality and eventual disappearance of the practice of making such steels was due to the exhaustion of ores yielding iron containing the necessary trace elements. The manufacturers, having no knowledge of the existence, let alone importance, of these elements, were in the dark about how they might rectify the situation.

I imagine that all the factors you mention were also relevant, including the relative cheapness of Bessemer-process steel, the relative ease of creating good quality knives from it, and the supplanting of the sword by the gun.
That isn't a situation where 1+1 isn't 2. It's a situation where 1+1=2 but also 2=0.
I often see discussions on China taking the starting point of how to get the gang together back again without asking underlying questions. I'd say a more productive approach is to ask what made democratic countries fall off the wagon in the first place.

It's similar to the approach most European political parties have with their local far-right colleagues. They rush to make a common front but never spend time considering how their own failures provided the biggest boost.

If each member of the alliance has systemic issues they aren't dealing with, forming an alliance is no longer sufficient to counter a threat.
Agreed. I generally encounter these kinds of complaints from safety-compliance perspectives. At the core is a lack of alignment and collective ownership of the necessary final outcome.

My overriding impression has always been that at the high level, both safety inspectors and the people in the labs want the same thing: a safe working environment and the ability to get science done. There is always some tension there (scientists, especially young scientists, are sometimes willing to accept more risk to get science done, as it is their time, and hence lives, being gradually consumed by additional measures to improve safety), but there is general agreement that safe working conditions are a huge net benefit.

It is difficult for the workers in the labs to place themselves in the shoes of the safety inspectors -- what seems like paperwork is actually a surface check to see if you are organized. If you can't explain your safety procedures to someone versed in scientific safety, how can you possibly explain them to an untrained worker/student?

The one thing that can frustrate the entire process, which I suspect is at the root of most university troubles, is a lack of goal-alignment between departments within the organization. If safety inspectors don't feel ownership of getting quality science out the door and only want to reach internal safety targets and scientists are only interested in holding their small lab's accident rate to zero, rather than that of the much-larger university as a whole, nobody's goals will ever get met.

When things are going right, inspections are a chance to show off how awesome your systems are and an opportunity to improve.
> you can see that the lever is pushed by its center, hence both sides have the same length. So the same force is applied to both wheels.

This is not necessarily true. Imagine a similar symmetric lever with a weight on one side, and a force on the axis that accelerates rotation. The acceleration of both ends of the lever are equal, but the force is not equal (since the weight is 0 on the other end).

Anyway, the point of my comment was that a thorough analysis of this configuration is more involved than this video of which it was claimed that it "perfectly" explains how this works.
Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet
As of about 10am on Saturday, we are still without service
If a group is hoping for a negotiated settlement they basically have to do it that way, both because mass casualty bombings tend to make negotiations impossible and because it increases confidence that a group could stop the bombings if their demands are met. Deadly bombings only seem to work when the group using them is trying to start a war.
What are the most important soft skills to have?
Can you share the exact model?
Lol. I just looked at that car online. Comparing it to a bmw is laughable in every sense.
Performance, not comparable.
Safety rating, not comparable.
Exterior and interior styling, laughably non existent in the Leon.
Give me a break.
At that time the ZeroCoin protocol was known, but an example was only shown for simple transactions, and anything else would have been a lot more complex, and nobody who claimed to understand the snark construction at that level was willing to do it. Gavin was just cranking it out as an op code state machine because he knew he could do that himself. Vitalik would engage with all the big crazy ideas in the room, bringing as much as possible into the idea that was ethereum, and Joe was kind of like the interface between selling the dream and delivery on what they knew they could do. I realized much later that ethereum needed all three personalities in separation to succeed with the crypto community, because they were three different types of promises, not all fully congruent, but the big unifying vision was in the eye of the beholder, a belief that it would all bend eventually toward their personal vision: a utopian egalitarianism for some, and vast plutocratic wealth for others, a gpu mining business for some and environmentally friendly staking for others, etc etc.
Thanks, I didn't go into this expecting it to be new, or a production ready thing, I did it because it was dumb and I learned a few things along the way
That sounds awesome and also a huge headache. I've found its much easier to work with an ORM that is specifically designed for GraphQL, like TypeORM[1]. Otherwise you are just kind of trying to force a square peg in round hole (like Graphene[2] for Django). As for not exposing some data, just use "private" schema directives, etc.

[1] https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm
[2] https://github.com/graphql-python/graphene
Gave it a try, even with no tracking the ads at the top of the page are still annoying. And this comes with a results speed decrease.
My favorite essays of life advice (2020)
Gotta call BS on OP here. Anything time sensitive like self-driving cars absolutely has to be built on a real-time operating system. If you’re in the U.S. there are Dept of Transportation requirements to even be allowed to test drive the thing on any road surface other than your own driveway.
Credential stuffing attacks and possible solutions for web frameworks(ie Django)
personal-management-system.pl seems to be down. HN hug of death?
You (and Almost Everyone You Know) Owe Your Life to This Man
Microsoft is making an azure wide change to how key vaults behave at midnight on the 31st which seems equally as silly
Sometimes you can use technology without having to understand it. You can use put together a solution using HTTP without having to understand the entire protocol stack under it. You can create some small service using an scripting language without having to learn algorithms or data structures, memory management, multi-threading, etc.

But when things do not work, and you are required to do retrospectives and post-mortems detailing why things break, and when you are required to mitigate risks from things breaking again... that's when you can no longer get away with simply seeing yourself as a someone abstracted from the low-level stuff. You will now have to understand things, and if you don't, your organization will find someone else that will.
Of course it's not "groundbreaking"... But they are executing very well, including online, which is less common.
Hey everyone I want to share my personal and real-world experience about credential stuffing attacks. These are very hard to solve because fundamentally it's users fault, especially the ones with password-reuse habit. Nevertheless we responsible developers are the ones who should keep the internet safe, so feel free to chime in, evaluate my solutions and maybe we come up with "the" best practice against this type of attacks.

If there's interest I want to make this into a library and open source a django-specific solution as it's my everyday framework. The discussion applies to ALL web frameworks.
> SOC3 facility, located 25 feet below street level in 8 foot thick concrete walls

One of objectives for encryption at rest is shredding. The drives may not remain in the secure facility after the end of life.

> your files are distributed in pieces across millions of drives throughout the data center

Distributing data could actually secure it if individual pieces are meaningless.
> Humans are fallible.

This is the real problem that techies tend to ignore. You can have the most technologically secure communication platform in the world, but it all falls apart the second someone circumvents it. Phishing attacks are usually engineered to convince people to circumvent security protocols.

For example, a phishing e-mail might claim to be the person's boss, claim that the boss lost their phone, and ask someone to send the documents via e-mail "just this once" to close an urgent deal until the boss can get back to the office and work with I.T. to fix their phone. Underlings don't want to get fired for ruining the deal by ignoring direct orders, so they send the documents over.

Past a certain point, increasingly sophisticated security measures begin to increase the chances that someone will choose to circumvent the security protocols. At the extremes, people become so accustomed to the idea that the security protocols are too slow, complex, and failure-prone that circumventing them becomes a weekly or monthly occurrence just to get their jobs done on time. Once you reach this point, it's easier than ever for phishing attacks to convince people to do bad things.

If you try to force everyone to use PGP all the time, you're going to end up with a lot of employees communicating on unofficial channels simply because they want to get their jobs done and move on with life.
Yet at the same time, that series of fallbacks has a tendency to become an attack vector on the process and a weakness in the system.

To take a tech example, TLS downgrade attacks: you want to keep things working for older clients, but it’s possible for some party in the middle to intercept the traffic and feign non-support of the newer version (or stronger cipher suites), in order to push both parties to the older version or cipher suite, and if that older version or cipher suite has anything broken about it, now you have an easier target.

Applied here, if you allow a no-fingerprints route that’s less secure, be aware that attackers will devise ways of getting onto that path for their own malicious purposes. Perhaps they’ll forge a doctor’s certificate, perhaps use some kind of acid that temporarily removes their fingerprints, that kind of thing.

It’s an unfortunate balance. With TLS, you decide eventually at some point that the problems of still supporting the old, less-secure version are too serious, and so tough luck for people stuck on the old version. With this, I certainly hope it would err much more on the side of not locking people out of the System. (Fortunately, although this particular condition is very rare, there are a much larger number of people that have damaged fingerprints or fingerprints that don’t work in whatever readers get used.)
Bat origin of human coronaviruses (2015)
2FA is great, but the only options Apple provides for 2FA are SMS/call and a proprietary 2FA that only works if you have an iDevice. If you don't own one and you don't want to give Apple your phone number, tough luck.

Neither TOTP nor FIDO2 is an option, as they would be for most other accounts.
You've missed the point of my comment entirely.

I've put the "as far as I can tell" part in there precisely BECAUSE from what we CAN tell i.e. has been declassified or leaked, it pretty much all terrible shit that has nothing to do with protecting national security.

Of course there's a lot we can't tell, but given the stories we can tell the ratio of good/bad is way out of whack in favor of the bad, especially given CIA's tendency to selectively leak good stories about itself and its extensive declassified historical record, the amount of 'good' should be a lot higher than it is.

Destroying torture records for example shows that it is way more concerned with illegally concealing bad behavior than avoiding it in the first place.
Why I order at Domino's but not at any other food delivery service:

- Lowest minimum order value

- Fastest delivery (bc of own delivery guys)

- No perfect pizza but still great enough

- For me, ordering food == instant gratification == doesn't have to be healthy
That is a very odd article. It mentions the actual cause “approximately 90% of waters from the River Jordan have been siphoned off” while going off on several tangents.

Compensating with ocean water isn’t going to displace native wildlife as the Dead Sea is devoid of more than extreme microorganisms and added sea life is just going to die off. However, picking a specific sea level might end up a contentious topic.
I think I have you covered by stating, that you have to believe in statistics like mean reversion for financials in order to sell. If you don't believe that, okay, that's fine too.
This is my only complaint about apple really, give me more info, logs, real error messages ect.

Not that windows is much better
Surely this is a troll.....
SmartTrade
I wonder if it is possible to set up some sort of supplementary feeding stations. Suet or vegetable oil minced with crickets(or other mass raisable insect grubs??).
They would have to be on poles to stop predators and would have to suit the birds habits, with the ability to feed hovering birds as well as perchers. It will take some research, but lines of these just off roads would provide a number of lines of feeders that could be maintained via the road, with a liftable hopper top I think many birds would adapt to this lifeline during their migration. It would involve many tons of food for the migratory season and to be established in advance.
Software development is more like being a machinist. The bad ones just do what they're told, the good ones know what is possible, and the best ones know the principles as well as the practice.

A pure computer scientist is like the engineer that designs with SolidWorks and has never actually run a Bridgeport, or had to pop the access panels and grease bearings day-to-day.
Cryptographic question: Why don't you just SHA-2-hash the Bcrypt hashes?

hash = sha2(bcrypt(plaintext))
Oh come on. Anyway, the sun doesn't shine at night. In the winter, the situation is difficult too. You need storage but you don't necessarily have to move the storage across countries.
No one has ever been fired for buying IBM. Same goes with hiring consulting firms.
A wish list for web performance tools
I used to recommend TDM, but it doesn't get updated very often. These days I would say that https://nuwen.net/mingw.html is a much better bet, particularly in view of all the libraries that come with it.
Why would that make any sense?

(Synfuels are really, really inefficient, you basically only want them in places where you need the high energy density and can't avoid them, like aviation.)
I'm pretty sure the initial restore from iCloud when setting up a brand new device gives you the option to pull down everything or transfer stuff stored on the other device locally if you still have the old device nearby. If you restore from an iCloud backup later, you can't get other stuff, just the stuff in iCloud.
What makes hydrogen interesting in aviation is that it is possible to convert existing engine designs to burn hydrogen apparently. There have been a few tests with this recently.

Mid term, hydrogen is the obvious way to clean up the aviation industry. Basically as soon as hydrogen prices drop below kerosene prices, companies will start doing this by themselves because it makes economical sense. Right now it's more of an investment for the long term. Airbus is clearly betting that this is going to happen in the next two decades or so. If you look at clean energy cost dropping over time, they might be right about that.

Battery powered planes also make sense; just not for the bigger planes any time soon. But with another decade of battery improvements, GA planes & battery is going to be a no brainer-solution for a lot of use cases. Basically, this will be driven by cost. At some point battery powered is going to be cheap and good enough that the added advantage of low energy cost and vastly simpler/cheaper maintenance is going to be a killer argument. E.g. flight schools are already switching because it makes economical sense.

If you look at the R&D pipelines of companies in this space, ten years could solve a lot of issues. Think double/triple the range of current electrical planes at half the cost. Small planes are expensive to operate currently and fuel & maintenance are big factors here.
We have HN to combat this- it is somehow anti-Reddit in its guidelines.

What I worry is how the pandemic and awareness of misinformation could move people from that toxic demographic to here- but I trust in HN moderators and community to regulate this :)
Trump isn't British, what has Thiel's support of him in an NHS deal got to do with anything?

It's the sort of pathetic "supports Trump - must be a bad guy" association that is the hallmark of bad and biased journalism.

If you really struggled to see that and weren't being disingenuous you should clarify how it's relevant.
That's mostly because the performance requirements don't exist, certainly not in the same sense as they do for mechanical engineering.

Imagine someone designing and constructing a bridge, and right after it was possible to walk gingerly across one part of it, the people in charge of the project said "hmm, could you put a parking area in the middle?". And then, right after you had done that, came back and said "great, but we'd like to make the whole thing a double decker so we can run a train line across the lower level?". Miraculously, you pull this off, and then they announce that they've realized that the bridge needs to open in the middle to allow large boats through.

We (generally) do not allow engineering projects rooted in the physical world to have fluid specifications, because of the cost and complexity of doing so.

Although there is a real cost and huge complexity to allowing software engineering to accomodate goal flexibility as much as we do, it is vastly less than would be the case for most mechanical and chemical engineering projects.

And the reality is that human goals do change as exposure to a project takes place. There are probably many people involved in bridge specifications who wish they could have gone back and significantly altered some part of the design, based on things learned during construction and early use. But we don't allow that, and so we're left with an impression that only non-software engineers are good at handling performance specifications. It's not true.
Reaching the (current) limits of Rust's type system
Is math science? Science is generally about testability, right? If math isn't science, it's still extremely useful, and a valid, rigorous field in itself. I don't think it's so easy though. If anything, it seems like in software engineering, you come up with a "model" of how it ought to be done, and then see if that actually works in the real world. Food for thought :D
Mix in some blockchain and you can sell it to any upper management ;).
Remeber, it doesn't have to make sense, only sound amazing
They were also massively propped up by the agri industry (dairy) when they were in trouble.
I attended the same school as the author in Slovenia. The amount of math and theory was too much for me. One graduate of the university is a prof. of AI at Harvard, another one teaches graph theory at Berkeley, another one who thought me math is a prof. of AI in Toronto and director at Nvidia.

So I dropped out, went working for a few years, then enrolled at an another university, then went working again abroad. Now I'm preparing myself for my last exam and will write my Bachelor thesis in the first half of next year.

I plan to graduate, even if it's the last thing I do in life.
Whalebrew[0] has been doing this for years, though Subuser appears to provide more configuration/access control.

[0] https://github.com/whalebrew/whalebrew

It's not a new nor crazy idea...Jessie (jessfraz.com) talked about doing this[1] in their desktop environment back in 2015.

https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...
They only tested in the range from 350 to 380nm [1]. With wave lengths under 370nm the efficiencies are quite high; at 380nm it falls to 33,6%. That could either mean that the catalyst works well with light at small wavelengths or that it only works at this specific range.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2278-9
You mean that my loan originator telling me housing prices would be increasing exponentially was hyperbole? Because I’m really counting on my 256 thousand dollar home investment being worth 65536 million next year. Drove me crazy all throughout the house buying process, it seems like every realtor says stuff like that.
Yes, tweaking could make things smaller, but the point is that nobody bothers these days.
This is muddying the waters though, though I think you’re in good company.

I’m not sure if mathematics belongs in the sciences or art; it really has hallmarks of both.

It a modeling language that can be used to describe the universe. You don’t have science today, without the math.

Yet some of the proofs and mental exercises in pure math are almost divine; inspired in a way that resonates like a beautiful work of music.
+1, it's an amazing video. Although I'm a daily user of crystal oscillators (right now on my desk there are 6 circuit boards of my own designs, powered by 12 crystal oscillators), previously I just couldn't imagine how they were made by hand without laser cutting and trimming back in the day, and someone directed me to this video, everything is well explained.
Computer Science has about as much to do with software engineering as astronomy does with telescopes.
One of the things that's interesting about modern languages like Java and Typescript is that they target software engineers that want things like generics, type safety, etc.

A lot of data scientists DO NOT want this. They're heavy on the science and less so on the software engineering.

I think this is one of the reasons Python took off.

Having to learn generics, type safety, exception handling, etc turns out to be a real pain when you're also learning about neural networks, AIs, etc.
No, because e.g. the monolithic linux kernel is filled with many things that you do not need (but others do) in very constrained environments.

If you have a very small microkernel, then you can very explicitly only install the software in user space that you need, without having them pre-installed via kernel.
> "Nature is of no consideration whatsoever in pure mathematics" and I'm quite sure that the pure mathematicians would agree.

Only if you have the audacity to call Arnold "not a true pure mathematician"... He mockingly said that the parts of "so-called" mathematics that have no connection to nature are useless mental masturbation.
He said the new Mac came with Catalina (that's the old OS). The new OS that came out a month ago is Big Sur. Thus your comment makes no sense.