skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The $2T cited in the book does not refer to the direct costs paid to Russia but to the total amount spent on reunification which came out to something like $100 billion per year for twenty years.

The opposition of the rest of Europe and Russia has to be put in context. Russia would not have been able to support the East German economy nor would it have been able to afford to maintain a pointless troop presence that would no longer have local support. The rest of europe might have been opposed because of historical reasons having to do with security but not allowing unification would have created a massive roadblock for the european economy. Short of reunification, there was not an acceptable legal regime to end Germany's limited sovereignty(which the rest of europe supported).

Given that Germany strongly supported reunification and the US was in support for obvious geopolitical reasons there was no way for any other power to stop the process. Russia could either be paid to leave or get nothing and spend money it doesn't have to maintain the troop presence to boot. Poor relations with Germany would have had a catastrophic impact on the Russian economy. The UK was never really serious about stopping reunification and barely tried to bluff. Similar reasons apply to France which could not oppose reunification and support European integration.

For all these reasons I find the the focus on contingency to be rather overdrawn. It was not inevitable in the sense that it had to happen(you can come up scenarios where the soviet union continues into the 21st century) but given the collapse of the Warsaw Pact it's hard to understand how unification could have been ultimately prevented.

You can see a similar dynamic taking place in South Korea where unification is broadly supported by the younger population in the face of titanic security and economic concerns. German unification has been supported for hundreds of years for comparable reasons.
Ah, not the first unification that springs to mind. I wasn't aware of that, and reading a bit about it and the timeline - you may be very well right. Certainly it interesting to look at how historical events panned out with hindsight and cause and effect. Whole aspect of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8...
takes some getting your head around.
Yes, and I'm really impressed with what we've been able to do with it in OVN lately. The patches aren't posted yet (probably Monday) but (with Leonid Ryzhyk's help) I managed to take one benchmark from about 110 seconds in the C version of OVN to about 35 seconds with DDlog.

We have other internal-to-VMware use cases for DDlog. The OVN use case is the one that's easiest to evangelize since it's all open source.
Machete Mode: Tagging Frames
As I explained in more detail in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26525109, those are "Western Arabic" numerals, not "Western/Arabic" numerals, because they were invented by the Arabs in Morocco and thereabouts, which is to the west of the Arabs in, for example, Syria.
Thanks for sharing, I'll definitely get into this.
Speaking with my VMware hat on, I don't know of use cases there.
I don't know the literature around ECT (I'm a computer scientist, noy a psychologist or psychiatrist) and so I'm going by what the article above says, which is that there is no sufficent evidence of benefits from ECT, because there are only a few studies with many methodological flaws. I understand your point about the motivation of the author, but that's common with experts: each will inform you of their very own preferred interpretation of any data and they will invariably present it as if it's the commonly accepted truth (or at least they won't bother to point out that it's their -expert- opinion).

To be honest I was a little unsure what you meant by "the balance of evidence for most guidelines".

About homeopathy, I bring it up for two reasons. One is that homeopathic treatments are still available on the NHS and also in Greece where I am currently pretty much every pharmacy sells homeopathic remedies (which I found very upsetting but I digress); and the other is that homeopaths conduct painstaking studies and then report their results as evidence that homeopathy works, but this evidence is typically rejected because of poor methodology by mainstream scientists. So "evidence" can mean anything depending on the context.
Ghosts of Chrome Violations
Well, that's fair; for a catastrophic outcome 1 in 3 are not odds you'd want to take. I thought "only" because I have a sense, based on conversations with other people, that the perception is that this particular virus was inevitably going to lead to a pandemic once it evolved. Instead, as you say, this opportunity probably arises all the time, and the dice were against us on this one. Which seems like a useful bit of perspective.
For me, the main takeaway is something we all already know: that even though the CFR is low in younger healthy people, the hospitalisation rate is extremely high, and that's been one of the most important factors in this pandemic.

It's nice to finally see the hospitalisation risk presented clearly.
> To arrive at this forecast, ARK used a Monte Carlo model with 34 inputs, the high and low forecasts incorporating 40,000 possible simulations. [1]

Yeah..

[1] https://ark-invest.com/articles/analyst-research/tesla-price...
Because of the rivaly between Austria and Prussia.
Not in the trillions, but more like "25-40 billion euros or $31-50 billion" https://www.dw.com/en/how-kohl-and-gorbachev-sealed-the-deal...

Helmut Kohl negotiated a very good deal. Money was not an issue for Germany but speed and total withdrawl of the Russian troops. Germany would have paid much more. A year later and it might be too late for the reunification (Gorbachev was kicked out of the Kremlin).
Personally, I dislike python. However, it's indisputably safer than C.
Me too. It shouldn’t take this long!

Ps: hard drive image clones should also do the trick.
Patch for Ubuntu was released on Feb 24.

https://www.ubuntuupdates.org/package/core/groovy/universe/u...
I’m expecting to see a website called “this pasta does not exist” anytime soon.

It’s a shame that we have such powerful AI (and of course blockchain) tech which hasn’t been applied to pasta yet!
True but I was mainly reacting to the tagline of the article:

"The unity of the German-speaking lands goes back a long way"

The third paragraph also defines unification as such.
p-adic is quite different though. It's not really that relevant to this conversation though as far as I can tell as it's not just about representing the integers or rationals in a different way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number
Earlier this week I left a comment about how I'd stopped using my customized WM setup to stick to a simple KDE install. Since then openbox has been on my mind. I'd used it for a few months a couple of years ago and really enjoyed how light, fast and uncomplicated it was.

I reinstalled it on my laptop and my configs still work, everything is super light and fast, and I can't be happier. I still love KDE and the merits of fully configured systems aren't lost on anyone, but I think I might honestly like it more to install a full KDE/MATE desktop and then just log into openbox rather than the DE.
> He has accomplished everything he said he would do, except the ones he hasn’t yet.

That is true for absolutely everyone in the world.
> Of course, there is another very real, very important reason lots of work gets done in investment banks during weekends. It is the obvious, best time to consummate mergers and acquisitions, when public markets are closed and the last minute scrambling on deals can’t kick up disruptive rumors or market movements.

Smart people will always gravitate to something like this to justify all the abuse. It was inevitable, reading this, I figured it was coming up in the first sentence.

Bankers are perpetually late on shit. The industry can barely manage to transfer money expediently. Listen to yourself. The abuse - which by the way is totally orthogonal to whether or not you work through the evening - is absolutely not about the workflow or timing or whatever, because I can’t think of a white collar professional more dogshit at doing things on schedule than an investment banker.

I’m confident 40 years ago the abuse was worse. And the money was worse too! They’re just not correlated. That’s the misconception, there’s no brilliant insight into how the abuse translates into more dollars. The real transformation in the industry is that the computers are better at making the real money than the human beings are, and like in many white collar professions, there are givers and takers of all that computer-generated surplus. Fortunately, when you work for a money printer, like at a giant tech company, some of whom have trading desks with AUM bigger than many hedge funds, you can relax a little.
I've switched to fusilli from elbows for mac & cheese because it holds more sauce. But radiatore looks good for that too - I'll have to try and find some in my area.
Show HN: Feedback from the People You're Marketing To
Hi HN community
I’m Peep, founder at Wynter (bootstrapped). Long-time reader, first-time posting a product.

360 view: get feedback on your website copy / marketing from the people you’re trying to market to.

You probably collect and analyze almost every imaginable metric, but how do you know your messaging is working? The symptoms of ineffective messaging aren’t easy to spot.

When people read your website, do they get it? Do they want it? Are they nodding their heads or rolling their eyes?

Our tools tells you. We have real people - lookalike audiences of your actual customers - looking at your website, and answering questions about what they’re reading.

Essentially we’re a B2B panel company. We have a panel of people in our database, and we know many things about them: their title, industry, company size, etc. Like software developers at SaaS companies or product people at ecommerce.

On our platform, you can request people representing your target audience, and get feedback on your marketing/sales pitch.

Get data, optimize, write clearer / more interesting copy, convert more customers.

Thanks for any and all feedback!
Open Source E-Commerce Platforms
I feel like this might be the Elon-style reaction to Tesla's perennial body panel alignment problems: "fuck body panels, make it a single die."

That is one thing I admire about how Elon thinks. Don't solve problems. Make them go away by simplifying the design.
How could a company conduct itself in such a way, and still expect to retain a fruitful business?

As someone from europe, I sometimes don't know what to think of japanese work culture from stories like these. Regardless if it's real, I often feel as if I'm missing a lot of context.
There's a patch available, yes. Debian and Fedora at least are shipping it.
If you're talking about building the DDlog-to-Rust compiler, then it's not that hard. Really it's just a matter of installing Haskell then typing "stack build". But each release also comes with binaries for GNU/Linux, OS X, and Windows, e.g. for 0.38.0: https://github.com/vmware/differential-datalog/releases/tag/...
Those were presses, but this appears to be a casting machine. Slightly different.
Nvidia already dictates what their consumer products can be used for, and legally restricts you from doing business-like activities without moving up to the enterprise cards
We open source a lot of our tools ( https://github.com/fusionauth/?q=&type=public&language=&sort... ). We welcome contributions but definitely spend some time reviewing them.

The first thing to consider is what are your goals for releasing this code? Is it to get other folks to help? To give back to communities that have helped you? To commoditize your complement? To make a name for yourself, either for sales or hiring purposes? You might say "all of these" but which one is the primary focus. That choice will drive what makes sense.

Like some of the sibling comments mention, you just need to be rigorous about how you spend time improving the tool.

It also might be worthwhile to think about the difference between pure OSS and open development. You can have one without the other. For instance, you could post your OSS tools on your org's github and explicitly disavow any support. Any PRs that come in might be merged or maybe not, but you aren't trying to build a community of contributors.

One fav quote about startups: they don't starve, they drown. Focus on swimming.
I don't think so, at least not in the near future.

The most unhappy states are the poorest who get subsidized by the rich states. So if they would leave, they wouldn't get money anymore.
Doesn't even have to send the full history of the chat, it can only send you the encryption key while the history is stored on the server.
I had a 386/40DX that could run Second Reality, and I was blown away. When I upgraded to a 486/66DX2 the first thing I did was run Second Reality, and I was shocked at how much of the demo content I had missed before from parts being truncated.

Also it’s worth noting that a lot of Second Reality’s source code got released to GitHub several years back: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality and here’s an incredibly deep dive into the code: https://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/

Finally, here’s some rare footage of the creation of the legendary demo: https://youtu.be/LIIBRr31DIU (English subtitles available)
I believe it's the issue fixed in patch #366 reported by Ormandy, who is in the article's mailing list links: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html

So that should be easy to tell whether your system has it fixed or not, beside the Fedora and Debian links in the article.
If you eat pasta with a spoon, you don't have to worry about getting enough sauce. And you also won't have the pasta fall off your fork because you didn't poke it hard enough. Just be aware that you may look uncultured.
Very nice even with the SCSI mistake. Plenty of production systems shipped with more bodge wires than that.
Yep. But how does that compare with the difference in wages over 40 years? Just do the math.

Now if you take on $500,000 in debt because you choose to go to a private college with no grants or scholarships, that's a different problem. And maybe it's not a good choice. But that's a different story than a 4-year public, in-state university.
There's no coercion for sure, maybe I'm using the word "exploitative" badly. What I mean is that we've built an economic system to exploit certain flaws (vanity, need for status, etc) which we call luxury. I'm fine with building a better gadget, marketing its benefits and selling it at a profit. I'm not ok with preying on the insecurities of my clients. Which is what I think conspicuous consumption goods are 99% of the times.
Management advice that I learned the hard way –

Force yourself to talk less. If you're talking too much, just stop wherever you are or even say something like "hey actually let's hear what you have to say first."

Separate solutioning from listening + understanding. Try to listen and understand first, and then consciously separate that from any solutioning topic. It's like writing and reviewing code – you write first, then check things over, and then get a review which is done separately (and in that case, by a completely different person).

(another potential tactic – don't try to solution in friendships and relationships at all unless someone asks you to)
I haven’t seen that yet. Do you have a link saying that you have to select text? That would help a lot in the mean time if true.
Emoji Pixel Art
This is 100% my experience as a developer of Shopify POS plugins (building features that "should" just be included in the core product). I entered their ecosystem 9 months ago bright-eyed with the hope of being the captain of my own ship and hopefully building a living; I now feel like I have essentially signed myself up to build core features for their app (and dealing with frustrated customers who, rightfully, believe this feature should just be free and included), with the added handicap of being a third-party developer, and making significantly less than what I would make if I simply worked or contracted for them.

For now my apps are growing each month, but the culture and practices have left a bad taste in my mouth such that I also know that this is not for me in the long-term, and hope to someday exit their ecosystem.
Body panels can be replaced. I'm worried that this advancement means it is cars which must be replaced.
Depends - does it supports UTF-8?
A better source than Russian Wikipedia: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...
"The “science” that politicians have claimed to follow rarely resembles the centuries-old process of making informed guesses, testing hypotheses, assembling data, and asking new questions in an effort to teeter toward the truth. It is rather a void at the center of technocratic politics into which leaders cast their responsibility."

What would author suggest in March last year? What would be a better option?
https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-11-04

I particularly like the phrasing "I'd have to say" :D
Use the nonviolent communication model:

- recognize that anything we do is a strategy to meet one or more universal basic human needs which we do not control (e.g. safety, to matter, contribution, respect, play, sexual expression etc.)

- recognize that how we do things depends on our experience and conditioning. Many of the strategies we have are suboptimal, or harmful, or meet some needs at the expense of others

- acknowledge that we don’t control our condition, and neither do others. Genetic makeup, rest level, conditioning, life experience, trauma, attention level, mind chatter, current thoughts, blood sugar etc. all influence our reactions and our reactions come out of all of these. Free will is a myth - we don’t control our preferences.

- feelings are useful indicators of basic needs being met or not.

- learn to look for needs and the feelings present in the people around you. Start observing them in yourself.

- learn to weave in the needs and feelings when you communicate. NVC language is clunky, the way I teach it is to weave in the essence but stay closer to less formal language.
If you redefine 'forks' to refer to the minority chains you are of course correct that "popularity contests don't think much of forks", but this would be a) tautological and b) not the correct use of a well-defined technical term.

ETC is not a fork and it wasn't 'made' by anyone. It is just the original, unaltered transaction history of Ethereum. ETH was 'made' by introducing a hard-fork and altering parts of Ethereum's transaction history, diverging from prior consensus rules.
Newegg already upcharges significantly past MSRP (they scalped the shit out of RX580's back during the RX580 days a few years back), and _forces you to purchase items with incompatible, unreturable bundles_. Like imagine being forced to buy a last-gen Intel mobo to be allowed to purchase a Ryzen. No refunds, no returns, no exchanges.
Why do retailers push financing options so hard if they only get 9% less money?

Lots of stores (here in the UK at least) will, after you've decided to buy a product try to persuade you to use their financing. Sales reps usually get bonus only for customers who use financing. I always assumed companies earned more if you used financing.
Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth on building AR assistants you won’t hate
https://archive.is/J6Hkj

The Washington Post mentions 14 * 10^9 DEM, or ~7.210^9 EUR or ~910^9 USD at the time.
Absolutely, which is why I definitively prefer OSM for that purpose.
>"As someone from europe"

The way Europe (Italy in particular) treats for example guest farm workers is hardly better if not worse.

Edit:

Downvoters might want to take a look at this for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/world/europe/a-womans-dea...
This is the first I've ever heard of this, wow. I have an nvidia card and certainly do "business-like activities" with it, not at any particular scale but for my own income and whatnot. Is this something I should be considering moving to AMD over?
All languages are unsafe the same way all diseases are fatal.
Show HN: I calculated the monthly cost of ownership for products
Ghost Leg
Yeah, but also most people don’t try anything new in their lives at all ever.

The real next level of the expanding brain meme is, “don’t make things for enthusiasts, make stuff for people who try new things.”
> What would author suggest in March last year? What would be a better option?

The technocratic apparatus might have been deployed toward a strategy of creative mitigation — say, mass manufacturing of N95 masks, test kits mailed to every American, testing at a large-enough scale to isolate only the actually infected instead of everyone. Instead, our leaders decided to indefinitely maintain crippling restrictions on individuals, schools, businesses, and social gatherings and take a Hail Mary pass at a vaccine, a gamble that paid off faster than we could have hoped and slower than we could bear.
With all of the annoyances that Safari ios provides, I genuinely consider it the spiritual successor to IE.
> forkability

> sauceability

> toothsinkability

Today I learned that that suffixal semantic satiability exists

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
> Why was the Holy Roman Empire never restablished in the post-Napoleonic era

Well, that was one of the ideas behind the "Third Reich" (Roman Empire, HRE, then German Reich). Of course, it was under Hitler, not any hereditary emperor.

> If I remember the last HRE was still around for many years after the outster of Napoleon.

No, the last recognized HRE (Francis II) was defeated by Napolean.

But technically, there still is an heir, although his family has renounced any claim to that or any other title (among other reasons, because Hungary and Austria don't permit the use of such titles):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_von_Habsburg
Or, if you're not big on giving money for whatever reason, have all your meals come from delivery for a month or two! That will help a lot of people go back to working.
I don't know anything about Souffle so I can't directly answer the question. But there is some related material.

The DDlog repo includes a Souffle-to-DDlog converter: https://github.com/vmware/differential-datalog/blob/v0.38.0/...

The Souffle converter is somewhat incomplete: https://github.com/vmware/differential-datalog/issues/174
The cost per month of ownership feels like a great metric that shifts consumer mindset - the longer you own something, the more you save. Seems obvious, but most people don't think that way.
Our newly introduced metric could help saving money and consume less.

The cost of ownership is a huge concept, explained well in a Terry Pratchett book:

"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."