skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well it doesn't need to be a global network of stratospheric balloons - i.e. there are related aspects that could be undertaken with much more limited funding on a local scale.

For example, if you wanted to use a laser link to communicate between two ground-tethered weather balloons, you would need to account for the movements of the balloons to correct the link alignment. Lo and behold, first patent on the list (https://loon.com/legal/patents/) is for that exact thing (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8634974B2/en).

What about control the descent of a balloon by letting out some of the gas? You know, like flight balloons use, but "with a computer". Yep, patent for that too.

LOADS of the patents are basically "mesh network but with ballons"

These are obvious things you would need to do, and yet they are patented.

In short, they took away the ability to do ANY balloon based communications - not just a stratospheric global mesh network of current maneuvering autonomous balloons.

Of course, this shit shouldnt be permitted. The patent system is broken, as we often discuss around here.

IMHO, if these megacorps had ANY honour, they would release all patents to public domain - with revocation clause from another entity if that entity creates a derivative patent without same license. THAT is how to foster innovation - everything else should be a trade secret.
The author adds

> think how much easier it is to type on a smartphone with your thumbs versus trying to stab at a virtual keyboard on a large tablet with just your index finger.

My experience typing on a touch screen on bumpy roads or even a seemingly smooth highway at normal speed (as passenger of course) is that I miss a lot of keys, even if I grab my phone with two hands and I type with thumbs, which are a little too wide. Luckily I learned to swype and that works much better because of the constant contact with the screen. Fingers can't jump away. Still, getting shifted characters right is a problem. A physical keyboard is much better in that environment.
Amazon Web Services forked Elasticsearch, Kibana. Was that part of the plan?
EStimator.dev: the modern JavaScript savings calculator
It's depressing that you both have to worry about being flamed for expressing that view, and that those fears appear to be completely justified based on the responses you're getting. It's quite clear that Google's moonshots are largely about doing good for the world, and building exciting technologies to make the world a better place. And we should be commending them for it. Technology has consistently made the world better, and its been mediated by people and companies with an ethos of innovation, and a maybe slightly naive desire to pursue those goals even when they don't completely make financial sense.
Other search engines can't compete mostly because they don't have enough click data to build good ranking models.

If Google shut down for just a few days, competing engines would quickly gather click data, and would rapidly be able to close the gap.

Add that to the fact users will change their default search engines away during any Google shutdown, and very negative Google press, and you have a recipe for Google losing the entire market.
The syntaxes of those languages are fundamentally different from Python’s. They don’t have an “expressions may not contain statements” rule - they don’t even have statements.
Most importantly, their fleet could be made obsolete by personal ownership of assisted driving vehicles. So by any of car manufacturers... (Better version of Tesla autopilot for instance.)
On Bricks
there hasn't been a real precedent for a tech player getting booted like this on a moment's notice

Gab after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting?
Jason Scott of the Internet Archive seems to have said they were offered the data https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1352523064874053632
Thank you for these wonderful resources. I had no clue.
I like the project, but the Code of Conduct is literally the only reason I will not be trying Funkwhale out.

I am very respectful towards homosexuals, transsexuals, women in highly technical roles, people struggling with disabilities or mental illnesses, am very open to interesting political discussion even with my ideological opponents, and always ready to change my mind if proven wrong.

But I have a very bad feeling any social-justice driven CoC can and will be abused, and in the long term no one is safe from being labeled a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe or any currently fashionable -ist or -phobe one day.
When there's a sufficiently malevolent will, there's a way.

Just wanted to say that.
Complete tutorials on building Responsive Webpage
It’s not happening anymore, partly because of reputation and partly because they’re no longer the 800lbs gorilla they once were - but the “Microsoft kiss of death” was a thing - cooperating with Microsoft often resulted in great damage to the other company.

SGI; Nokia; Sando; Spry; there were many others through the years.
Link to paper extracted from tweet so you don't have to:

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2018.326...
You seem to be reading lines of code rather than understand what the application does.

Someone used the mechanisms within LACNIC to deplatform.

> Deplatforming would be LACNIC terminating the addresses

No one is saying LACNIC deplatformed anyone, it was Ron Guilmette.

I guess it's up to you how you want to interpret reality.

Like I suggest read the book. It gets good reviews in it's own right even if you don't think the processes in the book would apply here.
I think they even ship powershell now for non-windows OSs.
Rivian
Why are people today so sceptical of anything that looks like good intentions?
The issue there is not that those messages existed somewhere hidden on the platform. It is that Amazon found them and told about them to Parler. Parler refused or was unable to take them down.

The issue is not that someone somwhere posted something bad and Parler merely failed to notice. The issue Amazon claims is that Parler had not done even bare minimum - taking down few dozens of posts that Amazon told them about.
Have you seen drivers license photos? Mine has never looked like me.
> The notion that everyone is entitled to cooperative anonymity is a message board meme, not an actual norm of society ... I am allergic to the argument that, because something is a norm on HN or Reddit, that norm binds on the rest of the world.

Well, luckily, neither Scott nor any of the ancestor comments uses "it's a norm on message boards" as the sole justification for their position. Or, indeed, as justification at all, from what I can see—that seems to be an argument you brought in.

Instead, they talk about the expected negative impacts of name-publishing: death threats, loss of professional opportunities (citing examples of what's happened to other people and to Scott himself in his earlier career), etc., while also saying there's no positive impact to name-publishing. In other words, they argue for the norm on its own merits.

The NYT is free to say "Yeah, we'll cheerfully do this unnecessary net-negative-impact thing for no good reason we've been able to articulate", but they should suffer reputational costs for that. Even if—or especially if—that thing is standard operating procedure for them.
Yes, it can be personal study. You don't need to be affiliated with an institution. Perhaps if you're asking to look at a Monet they might want a bit more information (Marcel Broodthaers isn't exactly a household name!), but if your hobby is painting and you want to study the brushstrokes I don't think they'd be able to turn you down - the whole point of these institutions is that they're paid for by the state, and by extension the taxes of its citizens.
Using monopolistic power to influence legislative agendas.

It's time for big tech to be broken up.
Walrus operator: not even once.
Light emitting diode as a fundamental technology is reliable and has very long lifespan, if the application is designed and implemented correctly, including thermal management and power supply. Unfortunately many consumer LED bulbs are cheap shit, but you can't blame the LED technology itself for that, it's the usual story with economics/marketing etc.
> I'd be very surprised if you told me back then that we're all OK with apps calling home to check for updates regularly

I'd have been fine with it from a user control/privacy perspectie (this was back in the day when people were fine downloading and running random shareware with zero sandboxing or memory protection whatsoever), but we didn't have the bandwidth or memory to do it.

With a modem you were almost never online. You maybe went online for an hour or two in the evening. If everything started updating as soon as you dialed up your 28.8k modem, you'd never get anything done. And with the tiny RAM sizes and poor multitasking of those old OSes, background update daemons and such were out of the question.
What an idiotic comment. Lawns are stupid? What about the roads you drive along daily? Or the car parks you park in? Or the gigantic concrete buildings you work in?

Lawns are very obviously the least of society's concerns.
Elon Musk says he will give $100M to best carbon capture technology
Not really.

Python's lambda does pretty much what you would expect from Scheme. It creates a callable the binds arguments to parameters in a lexically scoped namespace and then evaluates the body of the lambda in that namespace. And with an open parenthesis, you can write multiline lambdas and indent it however you want.

All the usual wizardry is possible:

>>> (
lambda n: (lambda fact: fact(n, fact))(
lambda n, inner: 1 if n == 0 else (n * inner(n - 1, inner))
)
)(5)
120

Also, Python has rough equivalents to some special forms in Scheme:

(if testexp posexp negexp) ⟶ (posexp if testexp else negexp)
(cond (p1 e1) (p2 e2) (else e3) ⟶ (e1 if p1 else e2 if p2 else e2)
(begin e1 e2 e2) ⟶ [e1, e2, e3][-1]
(and e1 e2 e3) ⟶ (e1 and e2 and e3)
(or e1 e2 e2) ⟶ (e1 or e2 or e3)

Some statements do have a functional form but aren't well known:

class keyword ⟶ type(name, bases, namespace)
import keyword ⟶ __import__(name, globals, locals, fromlist)

You have map(), filter(), partial(), and reduce(). The operator module provides function equivalents for most operators. Also, the itertools were directly based on their equivalents in functional languages or array manipulation languages.

That said, Python does lack some essential tooling that you would really miss:

- There is no way to create new special forms.
- Some important special forms are missing: let, let*, and letrec
- The language spec precludes tail call optimization.
- Some Python statements lack functional equivalents: try/except, with-statement, and assert-statement
How old are you? Everyone’s a genius in a bull market. Don’t get caught out when the tide turns.
Incremental Replication for SQLite
A fish rots from the head. These GRU/FSB boys enjoy complete immunity from prosecution, why would they stay professional if only loyalty is rewarded?
Opera did support torrent downloads. On quick reading of the above links, it appears this project supports streaming of torrent video and audio files directly in the browser (in addition to downloads I presume).
Elon Musk donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology
For those who did not get the "Portal" references interspersed in the article, you can listen to it here: https://open.spotify.com/track/3za3bQrlpdEwcT2C4t5Cag?si=U97...
I bet for Solid State Wheel.
Still a favorite of mine:

https://slipsum.com/
What are the biggest cost centers and differentiators for EVs? I have heard that a big reason why traditional automobile manufacturers are behind is because they don't have the software foundation that Tesla does. I imagine the "skateboard" integrates software, electronics, batteries and motors in a single platform, but will that be enough to counter Tesla's competitive advantage, while being able to differentiate the product enough from other folks using the same platform?

I wonder if an Android like fragmentation of the market makes sense here - a company like Google developing and maintaining the software, another customizing it to fit inside custom hardware.
Waymo may / will earn them some money, either they sell it to a crazy big investor, or they license the technology out to a company backed by a crazy big investor.
I really want to like system76 laptops, but I can't help but feel they are literally straight out of a prefab China warehouse, same old crummy quality plastic crap.
The way I see it, this is what programmers do, they turns things into programs. A good example are hardware description languages, where hardware designers write programs, and at the end a very complex chip design is generated. Which is then taped out. Those are very complex systems with very complex constraints. The output of these are locations of hunderds of billions of transistors with their interconnects.

Assuming you know JavaScript, you get some advantages over doing it via gui:

* Source control support: the model is text and can be stored in git. Multiple people can work incrementally in a branch. I assume cad models are binary, or very complex text. Having readble code will also allow for code reviews.

* Parametric modeling: you can define components (parts) as functions with function parameters to customize the behavior. You can have if else statements inside the functions to change the behavior. For example you can have a bolt function that can generate any type of bolt based on parameters

* Automation : In a programming language you can have loops that can generate any amount of components, and you can customize position, and object parameters in the loop. Making grids if objects is trivial.

* Testing : if you're using a full language like JavaScript, you can write unit tests for your more complicated parametric models. This can help with edgecases, and make your models more resilient.

* Code reuse : you can create a standard library of parametric models, ex: pipes, bricks, bolts and so on, and use them quickly on new projects

* IDE support : programming languages often have ide support that make reafactoring, code navigation, code exploration much simpler

* Familiarity : learning a complex gui app can take time, especially when the GUI is very complex. If the person already knows JavaScript, and can use an ide, with fuzzy searching through the symbols. In my opinion this is much simpler to start and get complex results than searching for some obscure feature in a deeply nested GUI. Of course this can be alleviated by a fuzzy search of UI functionality from a single place, ex: GIMP / command, and the new blender searchable menus.

Anyway, these are a few from the top of my head. There are probably many more. Of course, there are disadvantages, mainly that not everyone can program, and of course the people who use CADs are less likely to be familiar with coding. But capable people can learn quickly.

I'm looking at this as a software developer than wants to design some complex models, but doesn't want to learn a complex UI of a cad system. I'm quite familiar with working on complex systems in code, and find this approach much more suitable for me.
There’s massive innovation in biotech right now. RNA vaccines are winning the COVID battle, based on extremely cool technology (pseudouridine to evade innate immunity, two prolines to lock the spike in prefusion conformation, lipid nanovesicles for delivery,...). RNA drugs are also being developed to treat cancer (by vaccinating against patient-specific neoantigens), MS (by inducing immune tolerance to suppress autoimmunity), etc.

AlphaFold2 appears to have solved the protein structure problem entirely in software, which will lead to breakthroughs in drug design.

Deep learning is being used to augment microscopy leading to amazing advances in resolution.

I could go on. Last year saw the greatest number of new drug approvals in a long time, and VC funding levels were also very healthy.

Biotech is where it’s at.
Interesting. Did anyone make a similar checklist for passwords and what not? I have something in a binder which is meant to be used in case of emergency, but it's a bit out of date and I wanted to revamp it.
> They haven't produced polarization, radicalization, scams, privacy issues like Facebook, Youtube or Twitter.

You must be reading a different Stack Overflow, then. SO has had

* a grand leak (or series of leaks),

* revelations about spying on users with ads,

* polarization between the company and power users/moderators,

* a radical scandal over pronouns and thought policing, with a SO top manager spewing libel against an ex-mod in an interview leading to an out-of-court settlement,

* and overall decline of quality across the board.
Yes, and this is a good reason for not adding 100 times more satellites/balloons/whatever again.

NB: currently we don't have "trains" of satellites, i.e. ten white dots one behind the other in the sky. The mega constellation projects would create this.
Not sure one should be excited about companies themselves, when I was more of a technophile (which I now certainly am not anymore) I used to be excited (for lack of a better word) about some particular people's concrete actions and deeds, most of them programmers or IT people (because I'm a programmer myself), but I'm sure that viewpoint can be extended to other domains, too.
Wasn't it: Let's close [all] windows and open it/them again and try anew?
> In conclusion, we present data suggesting that the 501Y.V2 variant first detected in South Africa is able to escape the neutralizing antibody response elicited by natural infection with earlier variants.
We expect data in the next weeks from phase 3 vaccine trials being conducted in South Africa. If the variant does have an effect on vaccine efficacy, then there may be a signal in the data from these clinical trials.

Vaccine efficacy is still inconclusive but we’ll know soon.
It is like Chess

ElasticSearch move was very easy to conter-attack.

Amazon does not lack smart guy to its side.
Anyway the way cloud providers are using open source project can become a issue and "drain" day by day the open source community, especially smart startup creating a value in the day by day.

I think there is some space for new ideas and new startup to find out a way to balance these forces and find out a deal in a win-win scenario....what do you think?
There's no need. We're very much EV-only since 2014, am yet to drive one that is underpowered in any practical driving circumstances.
FFI (Fortescue Future Industries)

The chairman is giving a cracker of a talk on it this weekend:
https://www.fmgl.com.au/docs/default-source/announcements/dr...
> Feed Sonama does some version of that. The distribution part. But that would work in Sonoma county. Sonoma is an Ag county. It means you can have a cow or pig in your backyard garden and that’s fine.(not exaggerating) Not so much in Bay Area where we have a housing crisis and no such thing as unused lots. Or electricity.

I'm familiar with Sonoma's Ag, I helped with a conversion of an organic farm to Biodynmic in Petaluma and you're right this is not going to work in the Bay Area due to the immense population density and scarce vacant land as is, but honestly it doesn't have to; you could just onboard people into a CSA while growing with this practice in Sonoma/Napa counties and use things like Cropmobster and distribute in a major city like say Palo Alto or Mountain View or some where people from even SF can come in and get their food boxes. It's going to exhausting regardless, as we had a team of 5 dedicated people in my apprenticeship handle a 300 client CSA and we worked roughly 14-18 hour days dueing the Spring, Summer and Fall months when I was in S. Germany.

The goal is to get school children involved (middle to HS aged), we tried to do that, but could only get them to come to harvest for a few hours a month and tour the farm: my friend's mother was a member of the ruling Green party in Baden Wuttenberg and we had so much red tape to deal with to ensure the children's safety, thus this needs to be done either on a volunteer basis after school or as a in-school program. But if I'm honest, now with COVID school shut downs in CA I bet parents are just dying to get their kids out of the house and it could get lots of traction.

> I know because I tried. Then there is liability, insurance and red tape and legal translations. It’s hideous and exhausting.

Honestly, I don't doubt it, which is why I wouldn't bother following the rules in CA and just resort to things like guerilla gardening and bypass it entirely if I wanted to take the challenge. I remember the riots that happened at UC Berkeley when people tried to use the vacant land for gardening/farming, not sure if it was OWS people but lots of them were sympathetic and got maced just the same. Occupy the Farm covers this [0].

It seems like we have much to discuss, I still need to drop you an email. I'll drop you a line before the end of the month, just got a lot going on, but it'd be cool to chat and share resources.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09DjPh6OQyk
SiFive [1] "SiFive is the first company to produce a chip that implements the RISC-V ISA"

I think they have a bright future ahead. If there was a way to buy their stock / invest in them, I would.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiFive
This is The Lancet, dude. The single source of truth for the medical profession ;-)
Australia should have just said "there is a tax on search engines. We will use the money this tax raises to subsidize our media industry which is struggling".

Governments tax and subsidize things all the time. They're well within their rights to.
Typographic Defaults in Tailwind CSS
1) Personal favourite:
Collaboration between Fairphone and E-foundation
https://e.foundation/fairphone-and-e-expand-the-availability...

2) https://www.radicallyopensecurity.com/
(Non-Profit Computer Security Consultancy)

3) https://tutanota.com/

4) The ActivityPub and Mastodon contributors

5) Matrix (https://matrix.org/)

6) Signal (https://signal.org)

7) https://brave.com

8) Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/)

9) Standard Notes (https://standardnotes.org/)

10) https://Plausible.io

11) https://small-tech.org/

12) https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/english/

Why: Because these organisations seem to take a moral responsibility on (some of the) things I value, like 'people-first', digital sovereignty, privacy, mitigating the climate crisis.

Also because a non-profit like ROS donates all their profit to NLnet, which in turn supports amazing projects:
https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html

Just a quick list but could keep on going for some time :)
I’m not a lawyer either but I’ve dealt with AUP enforcement.

You don’t have to be perfect at content moderation. You do, however, need to be very responsive to the hosting provider. If they contact you about a piece of content in violation of the AUP, you better take it down ASAP.

Ultimately I think that is the core distinction between Parler and Twitter. Twitter has a professional moderation program that is responsive; Parler was not responsive, according to Amazon (and I’m sure they have the receipts).
What would be the point of that? Why not just cut down the trees, bury them and grow new ones?
What is the equivalent of “Apple removed 3.5mm jack” of your favorite products?
> Something that has been lost in all glass cockpits is the tactile feel of pressing buttons and knowing you got a response – I found you could enter Lat/Longs by feel whilst looking out the window. This is something you definitely can’t do ‘on the glass’ on current jets.

I also really miss this from the dumbphone era. I used to be able to type SMS texts by feel using a T9 keypad while walking down the street, and only occasionally have to check the screen to see what I wrote. Smartphone QWERTY makes this impossible.
Originally created by Aaron Swartz AND Kevin Poulsen. Please stop with the fanboyism.
SpaceX.

Watching Falcons land is one of the few things that still give me warn and reassuring feeling about the future.