skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It isn't technology that holds back water desalination, it is energy availability/cost. Even the most promising desalination tech is only a small efficiency boost over simpler established methods. Yeah efficiency gains certain help over the long term, but the overall energy costs are still enormous and nearly require dedicated power plant for any significant amount of clean water.

The best bet in actually desalinating population scale levels of water would be investment into nuclear power. And the desalination could double as a buffer for the nuclear plant so that it could be run at peak power and efficiency nearly full time.
That's interesting to consider a code walkthrough as different than a code review. How would you describe the differences?

To me code reviews can catch style and functional problems in code that get by your automation systems, but the primary impact of a code review is on the team, not the code. It imparts not just an understanding and ownership of the code, but also establishes/negotiates how the team works together.
>People dying is what it's going to take to muster up enough of a fight to make the actual change.

No it wont. If anything it will just start a war and/or a(nother) refugee crisis. Plus dead people. I think hoping for disasters to catalyst change is a sadly naive worldview.

>we can hit the panic button

What panic button? Where?
I posit that it's not greed. It's laziness. Why do a great job, when "good enough" is good enough for 90% of the people? That's how business works today.
Not only that - with cheaper launches you could have more frequent launches. At any given time there would be at least one supply ship on its way to Mars that could be diverted to a different landing site. Even if the capability for multiple launches a day never materializes, it'd be safe to assume there could be a vehicle ready to launch in weeks. With a payload capacity of 100 tons, it could do a significantly higher energy trajectory with supplies for a single person. With 5 tons of food and replacement parts per flight, you'd still have 95 fewer tons to push to Mars. Not sure about my math, but it looks like it'd have about 11 km/s of extra delta-v, which seems to be a lot (more than twice what you need for an optimal trip from the Earth to Mars).

And that is if the only upper stage developed for Superheavy is the reusable Starship. An expendable upper stage could carry a lot more fuel and cargo. On a mission you don't expect the vehicle to return, it'd be fine to use a lighter one. I'm thinking a truncated Starship with a Red Dragon lander, doing a burn to slow down enough the lander can get safely to the surface with the supplies needed.

Finally, with that much launch capacity, I'd be pretty sure there would be more than one crew on Mars at any time. Watney's rescuers could probably just drive to his door with food from over the hills.
For pickles?
Yeah, right now YaCy doesn't seem amazing, but those companies have/had millions thrown at them. Those could've gone into the development and improvement of an existing product.

Plus, peering would allow them to improve each others results and they could build their own plugins to differentiate. It wouldn't be necessary to pay Bing.

Maybe another company will do it, maybe not.
I guess now he'll know one of the known unknowns.
List of installed apps vs entire content of your device backup and all your photos?
View CO2 for 800k years and with temperature record
The huge waves of human migration caused by climate changes will not only lead to suffering and death of millions, it will also bring us to the new brink of a new world war.

Whole regions becoming unlivable will affect us all. We can't wait around until some invention saves us. We need to act now. We can turn this around with WWS alone.
Estimating the penalty of including Boost libraries
> I certainly don't mean to offend you, but a phrase like "your replies are unwelcome" doesn't take away others' right to respond in a public forum (imagine if it could!), and doesn't change my responsibility to correct the record when people make false statements about how HN functions.

Dang, I think we disagree on what “correcting the record” entails, or what even is “correct.” I also don’t appreciate the continued downvotes I’m getting in these discussions with you. I just want you to know personally that your responses towards me are unwelcome.
More accuracy may be better, but I’d like to see a quick method of extracting analytic geometry from a 3D scan.

We have laser scanners and Faro arms at work, and in the end it’s a person manually entering the geometry into Solidworks as the point cloud is useless.
Stupid question. Can't we just let the brine evaporate and then compress the minerals left over?
Walmart has tons of sketchy 3rd party sellers as well, but yes, clicking Retailer=Walmart will get you Walmart. To my knowledge, they don't do the same inventory intermingling that Amazon does.
Hypothesis: the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, not because it didn't think it was important, but rather because:

1) MA policy on taxing NH workers for MA companies is set to expire anyway (so less urgency for this exact case)

2) It is a very important question which will come up again, and the Supreme Court wants to have lower courts thrash this out for a while first. This means it gets studied from every angle by more judges, and by the time the Supremes have their say, they can feel more confident that they have all the relevant facts on the table.

Generally, if you're an impatient, "hurry up, this is important" kind of person, you don't end up on the Supreme Court. All things considered, that's probably for the best.
>your job can be done by many others living in a country with lower COL with much, much less money

Then why isn't it being done by them already? Do you think companies hate saving money and just prefer to throw it away on more expensive employees who aren't any better?

Someone has an inflated self worth and ego issues but it's not the guy you're responding to.
If it was that stimple, then why it was not implemented and/or widely used before?
Everytime you take your car think about the discomfort you felt by reading the headline.
The one time I had an office with a door it was my worst location, because it didn't have a thermostat so it got too hot to leave the door closed.

It's surprising how bad smelling the coffee from a Starbucks iCup machine is though.
Maybe that's because the author is not a native english speaker ?
The only specific ctiticism is the following sentence, the rest is designed to create fear, uncertainty and doubt:

These websites do not include protocol registration with methods, search strategies, inclusion criteria, quality assessment of the included studies nor the certainty of the evidence of the pooled estimates.

This is false. The ivmmeta.com page says:

Typical meta analyses involve subjective selection criteria, effect extraction rules, and study bias evaluation, which can be used to bias results towards a specific outcome. In order to avoid bias we include all studies and use a pre-specified method to extract results from all studies (we also present results after exclusions).

They also compare prospective and retrospective studies and see no significant difference. You could have at least scrolled through the page before blindly copy-pasting something from Google.
> Not saying that in any disrespectful way, I know some people get a bit butthurt…

Incongruence detected.
I've yet to see the automated test suite that replaces a skilled, sapient, human, functional tester. The automation takes away the drudgery of repeating tests, but it takes a skilled human to figure out what risks are in the code and figure out coverage to determine whether those risks are realized. If you have developers write good unit and integration tests, and build their work to their local environment to make sure it basically works, you avoid most of the "throw it over the wall" mentality. You also deliver way fewer needles in the haystack, if you will. Testers are free to look for more impactful bugs manually, and then to automate coverage as appropriate.
Slightly OT:

So after reading this, I went and tried cadquery ... it's really nice, but it is very, very unfortunately tied at the hip with anaconda, which is a monstrosity.

I'm not sure why they would tie such a ball and chain to an otherwise super nice CAD scripting tool.

There is luckily a docker based solution [1] that cleanly lets you wrap and try the whole cancerous thing without it spilling all over your system.

[1] https://github.com/RubenRubens/cq-containers/tree/master/cq-...
25C vs the over 40C in monday is heaven
It's not ideal if the brine is dumped in one location. If it is dumped deep enough it gets a chance to be diluted before it hurts the environment.

In the end, all fresh water goes back to the ocean so it's not like we would be creating an imbalance, there's just a risk of causing local damage.
A heat wave (like other weather) by itself isn't evidence of global warming, but extreme weather events like this (and like extreme winter storms) are made more frequent by global warming. You should expect to see more "once in a millenium" weather events as the planet continues to warm.
I did say "for example".
Your question is, why isn't the federal government of the United States, a country of 330M people, as efficient and effective as the government of the Netherlands, a country of 17M people?

Large organizations are less efficient than small organizations. This is true even in private enterprise. Large bloated, centralized government bureaucracies are the most inefficient of all.

Part of the "classic American anti-government stance" comes from the realization that American society is too large and too diverse to be effectively governed by a centralized bureaucracy. This is why you hear people complaining about "state's rights".

However, for people who explicitly wish to control society and don't care about efficiency, centralized power is great. It means they only have to win one argument to impose their will on 330M people, not 50 separate arguments. This is why so much attention is paid to the federal government in the US, as opposed to state or local government.
Cataloging and indexing and searchability are also not cheap if you are doing all of that on your own time.
In the US, at least, air conditioning is somewhat common from what I know. It was as hot as +35 in northwest part of Russia last week, for several days, with sun barely coming down at night, and that felt like a torture at times. Some historical records were broken.
We've suffered from the same problems as highlighted here. What helped us was a low code solution, https://smashtest.io, which is basically an English wrapper over Selenium. The developers spend less time on tests, and the QAs aren't an afterthought.
This reminded me of another story I read in 2012 that was actually posted here.

Any sort of low level job would easily get 200+ applications. A hiring manager threw away half the resumes to cut down on review time: "I don't like unlucky people."

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134

2 - https://web.archive.org/web/20130116104843/http://raganwald....
You should have specified that. Sure, big media ops like Greenpeace are anti-nuclear. However, many actual scientists like James Lovelock is staunchly pro-nuclear [1].

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/18/james-lo...
From an employee/engineering perspective, spinning out products with seed funding sounds like the coolest possible way to approach growth for established companies. The idea you could work somewhere big and then have the opportunity to do a startup with a direct piece of the upside seems amazing. From a product perspective, you get a clean slate and some sales support from your old company who have a stake in seeing you succeed.

How do investors feel about that though? I worked for a company that had raised several rounds from institutional money over a decade, and then it spun out one of its technology products into a new company with some select employees and a new cap table, and it was promptly acquired by a unicorn (8-12mos), leaving the other employees left behind to develop another product, with a good chance of this happening again, and the investors holding a piece of a what was essentially a farm team development shop.

Congratulations on this seed round, it's just exciting to see GitLab doing something this cool. This other pattern probably isn't a factor here, but I'd be interested in how you pitch spinoffs to investors.

Maybe swap some of their current equity for shares of the spinoff startup? It's interesting because I can think of a bunch of companies that have become too big to do anything new, and packaging this could be a real play.
It's not a technology problem, it's an incentive problem.

Had the web somehow been centralized (I have no idea what that would even look like), content still would not be archived, it would be constantly changed, and subject to censorship. Just like in a decentralized web, perhaps even more so.

Archiving costs lots of money (and costs keep growing if you only add and never take away), can be highly challenging (in the case of web apps or complex dependencies), whilst providing zero immediate reward for the organization carrying this heavy load. Not only is there no incentive, many couldn't even afford to if they wanted to.

And it gets worse still. Digital archiving means paying forever. Imagine paying a 100 years of electricity, hardware replacements, migrations. The entity (business, person) is long gone before that.

As a ridiculous example of this: Facebook has several very large idle content data centers. Mega scale buildings full of servers storing photos of Facebook users they haven't accessed in years, and likely never will again. Yet should a user do this, they expect the photo to still be there.

That's why I believe the problem should be addressed with more pragmatism. Focus on things of unquestionable long term value, and think of a good solution for this smaller scope.
> which would require some minor adjustment in the app server code, isn't it?

Yes, that's what the code fragment does:

> if e.cause.is_a?(PG::ReadOnlySqlTransaction)
it is misleading really. so many people who didnt understand legged , or options in general got into really bad positions which is hilarious to watch the revolving door
Life on Venus Impossible Due to Lack of Water
If this interests you, I recommend Norman Ohler’s book Buzzed: Drugs in the Third Reich[0]. One example from memory: while the French soldiers had as their ration of drugs some chocolate and 2/3 bottle of wine per day, some German soldiers during their push across France (relevant to the events in the movie Dunkirk) were awake for 17 days, driving over 150 km/day, thanks to prescribed methamphetamines. French troops in many checkpoints along the way were caught off guard due to the inhuman speed at which this force moved.
This was an engaging look at WWII through the lens of drugs, and reminiscent of John Krakauer’s journalism.

[0] https://www.worldcat.org/title/drugs-in-the-third-reich/oclc...
Apple’s developer problems are much bigger than Epic and ‘Fortnite’
It's the HR equivalent of posting "experienced applicants only" signs.

Résumés: There are too many liars and too many lazy hiring managers and HR who will let anything pass.

Certifications: Skills tend to be inversely proportional to most certs.

Buzzword bingo: Okay, fine, I'll grocery list everything to check the robotic résumé scanner's boxes.

In truth, "minimum requirements" are wish lists and "preferred skills" are wet dreams.

I swear, modern HR operates like a person trying to find their soulmate with one meaningless signal.
It's neither good nor bad, but robinhood also simplified the UX to quote the bid ask midpoint as the "price", then attracted a great many poorly informed speculators who like to trade illiquid options on shitstonks with wide spreads, who then complain the "price" moves when they submit order. Outrageous front running!

The combination of robinhood's ineptness and their users ignorance created an environment in which a lot of crazy thrived.
I am really surprised no one has mentioned that a whole book devoted to this topic has existed for 15 years: https://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Deve...

It's by Steve McConnell (also author of Code Complete) and largely covers what this author does (but more, and in more detail). I have found it consistently one of the more useful books in my library - particularly for its emphasis on error bounds and on how bad people are at estimating confidence intervals...
San Jose to require owners of firearms to pay back taxpayers for gun violence
Monday in Portland was crazy. We went to a friends house to eat. Our car said it was 119 when we went in. When we came out 2 hours later it was 82!
The headline is so non-descript that it makes it sound like the Microsoft executive is shrugging this off, but the testimony says otherwise:

> Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.

> “Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.
Hypothetical:
I make kerosene.... we made a bad batch that doesn't burn just right and could hinder products it's used in...

We're located in California.

We've paid politicians to look the other way while we drop it over forests, in fire zones. It's a lot easier than getting rid of it other ways.

We're enriching ourselves which is the American way, so there's definitely no problem with this, even though it may make fire season a major bitch for some people, luckily all our CEO's have homes in safer areas that won't be affected....

^ Are you saying you'd say to the above scenario: I have no problems with this.

If the answer to the above question is you would say that...

What's it like to be devoid of morality? Is there anything resembling a conscious at all?
Nearly all of earth has plenty of water for drinking...

The thing we don't have enough for in many places is agriculture, industry, watering lawns, bathing, etc.

Although as usual the human problem of doing a suboptimal job of allocating a scarce resource applies...
Sorry to hear that! I had a similar issue happen to me where my Lemur Pro wouldn't boot after doing a series of upgrades — including a kernel update.

After hours of panic in Recovery mode and approaching a re-image, the fix was simply pinning the kernel to 5.8 instead of 5.11 and using kernelstub to use 5.8.
Well, yes. Estimation is design. Only if you call it "estimation" the engineer who's been berated into crunch-overtime for a miss in the past won't want to do it and will do it badly when forced, and the cheap company owner whose own behaviours drive teams to estimate badly ("that estimate's huge, I'm not paying that, estimate it again but smaller") won't have had good experiences to understand why that design phase is valuable.

There needs to be enough time in the schedule to design to an adequate level for the problem at hand. You don't necessarily want as clear a picture as possible, but you do want as clear a picture as necessary.
But the path where the cost of _sum is extra is the error path; plus that'll end up being 0 iterations anyway.
We have to remember that, when The Martian was written, reusable boosters were... science fiction.
The same headline is not coming up every year, at least with regards to the weather event the article is about. Seattle's previous record was from 11 years ago in 2009. Seattle also hit triple digit temperatures two other times, in 1941 and 1994. Source: https://www.seattlepi.com/local/weather/article/10-years-ago...
We had a very large QA silo in a previous company. ~150 people all working under a former QA (non-developer) person turned into a "QA VP". It was a disaster in so many ways. Empire-building tendencies, large numbers of bad hires, etc.

The solution was to break up this silo and getting these people into the product teams where more technical people could handle management and hiring.
How do US voters go about changing climate policy in China and India?
I've had moderate floaters for a long time. I developed many more after having to look very near the sun for quite a while a number of years ago. And I may have found a way to help remove (at least some of) them.

Although I've never read this, my own conjecture is that one cause of floaters is that you're actually cooking the proteins in the vitreous humour, and that this is especially likely if you're nearsighted, since that means there's a point in front of the retina where the rays converge to a point. I suspect this provokes a localized maillard-like protein cooking reaction (irreversible, just like cooking an egg) and that it's hard for your body to clear that out.

This view is (slightly) further buttressed by the fact that my floaters have gotten a little (not hugely, but noticeably) better since I've been taking significant doses of senolytics (fisetin, quercetin, etc.) I wouldn't have expected those to make too much difference, since if the problem is just junk protein floating around, it's hardly alive, and I don't know why a senolytic would help unless the cooked cells still are alive, so maybe it's the result of some of the other things that I started at the same time (high dosing of K2, for instance) - it's hard to know for sure, but my floaters are definitely somewhat better than they were a few years ago. YMMV, but trying anti-aging treatments is probably won't hurt (but that's not certain, either!), but may help a large number of conditions. We still don't even know what we don't know about this stuff, which is one reason I get really chapped about people thinking they know what to do about new viruses using unproven gene therapies, and then trying to pass those off as "vaccines". But that's another rant entirely...
I agree it's probably just attention grabbing nonsense, but I'll note there are a bunch of communal shelters being used by people who don't have facilities otherwise to get out of the dangerous heat levels. Bringing a bunch of strangers together into a communal heat shelter isn't ideal in a pandemic.
How do we know this is the result of climate change? It's meant as an honest question. Though it is largely ignored in the mainstream discussion, I've heard for years to be careful about making a distinction between weather and climate. Are you thinking this is not weather, but climate? How does one tell the difference? If there's a record winter of cold temps, would it be evidence that the climate is cooling?
Limited admin practice isn’t just to save money. It’s a security practice and it’s a good one. In a large business, no one understand the whole business maybe except legal department and CEO.
He's off to face the great big Known Unknown.
What is WWS in this context?
How's this for some proposed legislation/regulation: Anyone who wants to use a share trading service has to first complete a one month "training period" where they use the service with virtual money only. The UI would be exactly the same, but you couldn't top-up or cash-out your balance.

The catch, though, is that you "fail" this training period if you don't make a profit (or enough trades) during that month. You are also prevented from attempting another training period with that service (or any other service) for another 11 months.

This would have the dual effect of locking out the large proportion of users who don't know what they are doing, and also preventing a sudden influx of users from taking advantage of (or falling victim to) some meme scheme that generates a lot of short-term media attention.