skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure. Absolutely existing geosync satellites exist, the iridium network exists. They are not very accessible tech, and neither would be used to stand up an emergency tower. And maybe it's just my impression, but it seems when I read stories of someone lost in the wilderness, it's often people who don't take precautions, are casual hikers. And for them, having a cellphone that functions, with maps, text and calls, could be lifesaving.

As a personal note, a relative was doing coastal sailing (US east coast, bahamas), and while he wanted access to the iridium network for maps and emergency contact, he couldn't afford the data rates and device costs. He settled for downloaded maps and checking in by cellphone when possible. So, if he was lost out in the crossing to the bahamas, there would have been no contact. (yes, I realise that at present, Starlink is not yet offering ability to move around with your dish, so RV and boats are out of luck for now, apart from the possibility that more towers may spring up)
That applies to all satellites not simply large arrays. Large constellations all on the same frequencies aren’t even close to 1:1 as bad as normal satellites.
You mean like a "mole" or "sleeper cell"? :-)

Just give it the right input and it turns on its masters.
When you pay people to stay home what do you expect?
You touched on a lot of important things and I will try to respond to all of them without distracting myself.

I posit to you that 'people hurting and what not' are not merely think pieces ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Elegy ). I remember driving through PA months before Trump's election and recall seeing some of the sadder signs you can read including "Save us Trump". It is not "triggering the libs"; it is genuine despair of no options other than triggering the libs. It is important to understand where it comes from, if one is to have a hope to counter it in any meaningful way. Just using that slogan is a mental shortcut that undermines our discourse.

I do not see that understanding. What I see is more targeted messaged intended to inflame pre-existing passions. I do not see discussion. I see bumper stickers.

As for democracy, there is an argument to be made that it relies on educated and engaged populace. I am not the biggest fan, because US has neither and a lot of ways to manipulate public opinion are well understood now. And yet, it is still a better option than benevolent dictator, monarchy or some sort of theocracy.

Now, we can quibble over whether US is a democracy, which in itself is a discussion for a couple of pages.

I do think you have a point with vaccines, but I want you to consider the question of choice, mandates and so on in regards to government imposing choices upon you. What is the lesser evil here?
Facing Dire Drought, a Utah Town Pulls the Plug on Growth
Adobe’s billing practices use all kinds of dark patterns though. Let’s say you have an annual subscription billed monthly that renews on January 1. When the monthly charge comes through on the 1st of January (like it has every month) and you realize your one year subscription is up and would like to cancel most places would either (a) refund the January 1 charge and immediately shut off your service or (b) keep the January 1 charge and shut off your service at the end of the month. But Adobe, Adobe opts for (c) na-na-poo-poo read the fine print - we got you for another year of monthly charges, sucker!
I used this feature in AIM (AOL's instant messenger) and felt very connected with my friends
Ask HN: How do you deal with information addiction?
There is so much information on the internet that I feel like would benefit my life immensely, but I can't consume it all, and that makes me feel uncomfortable. I bookmark, bookmark, and bookmark all kinds of interesting things I come across on the internet and have amassed a few thousand bookmarks, yet I feel unfulfilled and my hunger for information feels unending.

I feel like if I stop, I'd lose out on something that'll be valuable.
Yeah. If there were truly no other options, I'd certainly be in favor of a debate about bringing near-universal broadband to people, in the same manner as electricity and telephones.

Of course, that only applies country by country and presumably leaves poorer countries SOL.

However, given that we do seem to have a good option with the tradeoff that there will be more satellites in LEO, that seems to be a reasonable tradeoff. There are already a lot of satellites in orbit, to say nothing of planes, and a lot of light pollution. So this idea that we're besmirching the virgin night sky seems... overwrought.
(2009) even
> I find the mindless rich-people-hate to be nothing more than juvenile hate.

maybe it's the fact that a small school's population of people own 60% of all wealth on earth that gives these vanity shows of wealth a bad taste in their mouths.
Yes. Satellites are just a drop in the ocean compared to city light.
> Outside the West, 2020 represented the decisive death of neoliberalism. No one is looking to America for the future anymore.

Interestingly, even America had its only explicitly-anti-neoliberal (in rhetoric, at the very least) President in the last 3+ decades in office at the time. Think what you will of him—I certainly have some thoughts—he was notable for that highly unusual, for a national-level US politician with the backing of a major party, policy stance.

That aspect of that particular phenomenon hasn't received a ton of attention (to be fair, there was a lot of stuff to focus on) so I'm not sure whether it represents any kind of trend, but neoliberal policies are actually fairly unpopular among voters across the board, though very popular among leadership in the two major US political parties for quite some time.
No need to be snide. Prices will drop hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a few years, well within the means of many millionaires.

Democratization of space FTW!
Solid Objects: 16th-Century Geometric and Perspective Drawings
Hurricano
Neuralnet/ ML version of "Order 66"
A classical analogy for entanglement: suppose I have two balls in a bag. They are identical in every way, except one is red and the other is blue. I randomly grab one in each hand and show my hands closed. Now the states of the ball are entangled: as soon as you see the color of one ball, that "determines" the color of the other. (Not claiming that this is a perfect analogy, but I don't see where it diverges from how entangled quantum waves would behave.)

> Among the fundamental differences is the fact that classical information can be copied but quantum states cannot be cloned.

The no-cloning theorem says that there exists no universal quantum machine that can perfectly clone an arbitrary quantum state. However, that does not preclude a machine that can imperfectly clone any quantum state, or machines that can perfectly clone some but not all quantum states [1]. (Clearly the information transferred to my brain is not a perfect copy of your brain's state, and your DNA is not perfectly copied every time.)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9607018
The guy who invented this, the historical Buddha, recommended many more techniques than just vipassana.

I think what happened in the west, is that—aside from zen centres/monasteries which draw upon a wider, established set of traditions and practices¹—we have focused too much on a single technique.

Especially in clinical settings. I imagine that to get your therapy to be approved in clinical settings, and to get funding, you have to publish papers and your paper can't be a survey of hundreds of differing 'treatment' approaches.

You would get more traction by isolating a potent subset, preferably a single one, and then using it and publishing your results.

None of what I said above is to imply cynical motives to the researchers doing this, it's just the usual reductionist worldview applied to a tradition spanning thousands of years, and what happens when "early results are promising."

tl;dr: Buddhism is more than just Vipassana. There are multiple techniques that complement, counteract each other. The Buddhist 'system' included different approaches for different personality types. More is not always better.

[1] Not that 'tradition' is sufficient to insulate these organisations from problems either.
Hi there. I went to a 2 year college, spent hours outside of work reading and working on my craft and was still the highest paid line cook at a multi-million dollar restaurant at a WHOPPING 15 dollars an hour in 2016 in New Jersey.

The industry is terrible. If you didn't work in it, your solutions sound a whole hell of a lot like "bootstraps". I think "there should not be such thing as poverty wages" or "if you can't afford to pay people you can't afford to run your business" are better
China doesn't have the national road network like the US, so they built out a train system. As far as air travel, their Comac airplane has been accused of being a copy of an Airbus. It has about 300 orders from Chinese companies and no deliveries, as far as I can tell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919
how could they do ab initio? They depend on multiple sequence alignments.

If I'm mistaken about this then I'll happily take back what I said, but there's no way that AF2 could work wihtout MSAs, therefore, it is not ab initio.

Ah, OK checked the paper again. They're working on the "template" category which means there is structure-sequence information... maybe CASP organizers consider this ab initio ? The paper never mentions anything about ab initio predicitons. Is that what you're saying, that template methods are ab initio?
What are the delta V's for a ballistic trajectory taking off in Texas an landing off the coast of Morocco? France? Western Australia? Hawaii?

You don't need to go all the way around to have a story. Low earth orbit is apparently around 84 minutes per revolution. There's a lot of space in the middle for ballistic orbits of 5-15 minutes, right?

We got in a rocket in Texas and had a light dinner on a yacht off Morocco 90 minutes later.
I think YouTube lets you put multiple titles, and it'll automatically use the more engaging one
https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/...

or https://archive.is/FqcDj
I get a laugh imagining that Bezos took that boy/bidder up as insurance he would be allowed back onto the planet
Wasn't it basically modelled after the Autobahn?
> he cost is well worth it

to you. Not everyone shares your values and has your priorities and preferences.
> perhaps like some progressives, I am not sure there is as big a difference as we'd like to believe between selling one's spring days to be a cog in any commercial operation and selling participation in sexual gratification.

There is! In the first case, you work with colleagues who may become friends, you learn how to treat people and build stronger relationships. The "cog in [a] commercial operation" quip is an abstraction. Generally, people have relationships with their peers and are not "cogs."

Whereas on the other hand, the sex worker deals with people who treat them badly precisely because they've paid to do that. They even enjoy it. This is a twisted model of human relations, and the sex worker is both the enabler of that awful exchange and has a target on his or her back.

So the progressive "view" of this thing is absolutely insane. It's constructed from a position of privilege where the reality constructed by toying with such ideas need never be encountered.
How much light pollution will this actually create? I've read that SpaceX wants to launch 40k satellites that are 200 miles above earth. Each satellite is the size of a table. Could one see a table-sized satellite 200 miles away? Also given the surface area of the earth, the satellite density would be something like one every 50k square miles. How meaningful is that when it comes to light polution down at the surface of earth? How about for astronomers?
Which makes me wonder ...

How do you secure a railway?

If trains go 600 kph, do we get a TSA circus along the length of all railtracks? Is this even feasible?
I challenge you to find a pirated copy of IEC 61362 "Guide to specification of hydraulic turbine governing systems" online. It does not exist. The company I used to work for, which specialized in turbine governing systems costing millions of dollars, would not pay the $300 for that document.
High speed railways are not that expensive. I'm not talking about 700km/h but around 300km/h.

Spain has plenty of them, according to Wikipedia only China has more. And if I'm not wrong, Spain is building them in other countries too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/video/web-exclusiv...
So hard to post: why my last three blog posts are wrong and how I (cont)
In this sense, this person is talking about empiricism as the outlook that only what can be measured matters. Hours spent in meditation can be measured, but your embodiment of right view can't (or isn't, at least).
I saw a related picture from Austin Powers on the front page of Reddit, this afternoon.
The Paxos paper...I mean it seems funny, especially so to the author's academic audience who get all the references? From the distributed systems class I took, the main takeaway was Paxos seems inaccessible mainly due to the byzantine writing style. We also read Paxos Made Simple and Paxos Made Live, and when it came time to actually implement anything, nobody used the original paper at all.

So yeah, the original paper might be fun or funny, but not the easiest for understanding the basis for consensus protocols.
Yes, I imagine that in the future we'll be writing these sorts of tools in memory-safe languages like Rust.

In fact I believe that it's hubris to think that we can write massive, complex systems in unsafe languages and -not- overlook some bugs here and there. We had no choice but to use these languages before, but Rust, etc, give us alternate choices now.
Also, just to note, Monzo USA and Monzo UK are identical in name only. The US version has a fraction of the features of the UK version and they don't seem to be iterating as quickly as other neobanks after Simple's departure.

I switched to OneFinance and have been generally happy with it as it caters most closely to the old Simple methodology, especially with configurable overdraft that was launched last month.

If anyone has experience with the others and how they've matured since Simple's departure, I'd be interesting to hear what you like and what you're excited for on their roadmap!
wedding photography is a full time job in itself. Not only are you giving up a bulk of your weekend to be at the event taking thousands of photos, you then have to edit them under a deadline previously agreed upon. It doesn't help that the people who want those photos are fairly demanding overall (because who doesn't want perfect wedding photos), so if you mess it up in any way there goes your wedding photography credentials.
> I found it annoying, even a bit insulting, that they kept referring to the people in the capsule as "astronauts".

When you reach a certain threshold of wealth, you get access to an unbelievably efficient PR machine and you can become basically whatever the hell you want and rewrite reality to suit your imagination. Hell, you'll even get people to believe it and ruthlessly defend your reality.
I'm using the word here to mean a philosophical position which only accepts knowledge that can be gained via direct meditative experience and rejects everything else. I'm open to suggestions for a better word to describe this position.
I feel like saying something spooky like, "If you leave the front door open, you never know who will walk in", but the fact is that meditation is just a practice that emphasizes and strengthens certain brain states/EEG rhythms, neural synchronies, and given heterogeneity in brain structure, connectivity, and genomes, there will be no guarantee that this will be an entirely positive shift in neural dynamics. For analogy, for many people keeping themselves busy at work keeps themselves from constant rumination of a traumatic past.
This was the "Aha!" part for me:

> Get a customized offer based on your card sales through Square, and then choose your loan size.

and then a bit further down:

> Repay it automatically with a percentage of your daily card sales through Square.

Such an incredibly obvious idea in hindsight. While I can see why putting all your eggs in one basket like this can pose something of a problem, there's no denying this level of integration is amazing for a small business.
I'm mostly referring to Jeff, who he has an extremely public feud with.
I was amazed at how routine it felt. Definitely a rich person’s rollercoaster. I could see hotels in space as a thing.
I buy this to some extent, but it also reeks of hubris and discounts the value of marketing.
You couldn't be more wrong, do you have a single example of a rich kid with an idea spending many millions to make others build a game and it was successful? I haven't heard that happen even once!

The reason AAA developers almost never innovate and instead just release the same game year after year with new sequels is that good game ideas are extremely rare. Most games wont sell well enough to make back the money if you pour 100 million into making them, so each AAA studio haves one or two ideas that they know will sell and then they just repeat it.

Indie developer are the ones building new ideas and they do it for a very small amount of money. See factorio, hollow knight, valheim, darkest dungeons etc, lots of games that sold many millions beating many AAA studio products with new ideas and very modest budgets.
Trials also need incentive. Everything does. Is your answer is to nationalize everything? If not, where do you draw the line? The world doesn't work the way you want it to and you're not making a real argument that it should.

More people die if research isn't done _and_ developed. In no way does just not paying improve the situation.

"Think of the children" is just an empty appeal to emotion over reason. Great indicator of a bad faith argument though.
More young Canadians died from 'side effects' of the pandemic, not Covid
The point I'm making is that the scale of this is unprecedented. If you wanted to read comic books or watch TV or smoke cigarettes, there were effective physical limits. Yes, people ruined themselves with addictions then, too. But now, every person I know has a slot machine in their pocket they can pop out and get a dopamine hit by using. And it is never-ending.

You can binge watch or binge on social media or binge on anything, with unlimited supply. It's completely unprecedented.

I notice little compulsive ticks in myself now too — they're hard to escape. I have many friends I only contact through WhatsApp or Instagram. That pulls me into my phone and a nightmarish sea of influencer garbage every time I want to talk to someone. It sucks!
Gerard 't Hooft believes we would still have quantum computers faster than classical computers in a superdeterministic universe. However, the speedups would be more modest and factoring huge numbers in poly time would be out of the question
It took you 2 years and 800 support tickets to learn basic communication skills.
They’re funding 2500$/month, it’s nothing, they just want a seat at the table to influence the product.
> There's been a concerted, conscious effort to desacralize Buddhism to make it more palatable to Westerners

This is a big generalization without a clear definition of what is "sacred".

> it's pretty clear that it's a religion.

I understand what you mean but using the world "religion" creates a lot of generalizations.
I've started with Blender after the UI changes and wouldn't have otherwise (I know, because I've tried several times).

The next x users are many more than the current y users.

Annoying the y for no reason would be stupid. But not making improvements for the x because the y were there first is a recipe for declining relevance.
It's frustrating, because I'd like to get excited, but relative to even the regular things going on in aerospace this isn't interesting. Interesting enough, I guess. Guy went up and down. There are six people going around and around right now on the ISS and a second station is coming into orbit. He never left Earth? CNSA has a rover on the moon, and NASA has several rovers, some satellites, a helicopter, and a Will.i.am single on Mars.

Max altitude of about 100km? Alan Eustance managed half that with a balloon, and then he jumped out of his capsule like Master Chief and fell back to Earth.

They're planning to build a moon rover in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh. Three rivers, some department stores, a couple abandoned steel mills, more bridges than they can afford to maintain, and a mission control center.

I'm generally in favor of more people being involved in space technology and space travel; I still consider it a long-term existential need. But about this, it's just, kinda... Step it up or step out, Bezos.

It is nice to live in an era where this accomplishment feels mundane, though.
Afaik this should work on Android for some time now too right?

Got unrootable old (but still fully working) phone there, might try to play with it.
Previous discussions:

10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922108

12 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496830
Exactly. And scaled massively. And overdone in the usual US style, with US-style repercussions.
This isn't a consumer service; it's for business customers already using Square for payments and other business related expenses.
That's a subjective question. Different people value different things and have differing preferences and priorities. At best, it depends on our goals. This is why these things need to be dealt with publicly and democratically.
C/C++ compilers commonly have warnings for narrowing conversions, and separate warnings for mixing signed/unsigned conversions for same-sized values.

While some folks aren't too fussed about warnings like this, those folks generally aren't writing secure code like kernels. I'm very surprised that kind of conversion was permitted in the code.
wow they have IEC standards for 22 euro instead of 300!
>the main flaw that I see in nationalism: it's that it uses culture and nations as a proxy for principles, as opposed to digging for the actual principles underneath.

I think the problem that you are going to run in to is that culture and nations as a proxy for principles works pretty well since those things are highly correlated. Unless you have a strong civic identity that aggressively assimilates and ensures respect of those civic norms, you have an inevitable clash that just becomes a question of scale.

>If my country decides that Islamic Law or autocratic dictatorship is a better form of government than democracy, I'd rather drop my country than abandon my principles.

In your hypothetical, how exactly would this situation come about? You should be able to venture a guess.
That's what happens when Apple pays 100k for a critical bug bounty and governments pay millions for the same bug exploit.
I'm working on a video project and I needed to create a nuclear explosion animation.

After Effects doesn't have the physics engine necessary to make something like that, so it comes with a trial version of Maxon Cinema 4D. However that version is pretty limited and couldn't do what I needed. Presumably if I paid Maxon I could get the "full version" or whatever, but instead I went with Blender, which proved to be a very good tool.

Meanwhile, After Effects was effectively rendered (pun intended) irrelevant in that process. I assume Adobe is aware of this kind of thing and wants to keep itself as relevant as possible.