skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> We are starting to see crop yields decline in some tropical countries

We are seeing crop yields rise in other tropical countries.

The prediction wasn't that crop yields would fall in some countries and rise in others with the overall result being steadily increasing food production per capita through the 2020's.

The prediction was massive famine with hundreds of millions dead in the 1970s spreading to the industrialized world by 2000. And the prediction wasn't based on climate change, it was based on simple population growth.

We currently have the lowest percentage of people living in absolute poverty in all of human history. And the birth rate is under the replacement birth rate almost everywhere outside of Africa.

The doom population explosion scenario that was predicted simply did not happen. Technology won.
Lucasfilm hires YouTuber who deepfaked 'The Mandalorian'
The V8 blog is a good starting point for learning how it works under the hood: https://v8.dev/blog/fast-properties
One of the stories I often hear, is that people have decided to move house to the countryside, as they are now able to work remotely.

I don't know how true this is: are these people not concerned if their employer decides to reopen offices and require employees to work in the office again when the pandemic inevitably ends?
> So have many artists and writers.

A site like this is bound to have naive views of arts like this. But it's not correct.

Art lives within the world of physical reality - otherwise, we would not be able to perceive it. Art is the enhancement of some aspect to reality, not a departure from it.
I wonder how much the difference in labor laws between the U.S. and Germany plays into this.
There’s almost no population within a kilometre of the site - it’s on the absolute rural edge of a city the size of Reno or Aachen, in a switchyard on the main power transmission lines. There’s maybe a handful of people and a kangaroo that’d be in harm’s way, and it’s been a cold and windy week - they’d probably not mind having the windows closed.
> I have an enormous portfolio of exemplary work

Lol
"lead poisoning also has symptoms such as depression and fatigue, which could marginally sway people towards inaction."

That could be counteracted by stimulant use, for example.
Can you explain this further? It sounds like you may be assuming employers are able to simply not hire and bear the opportunity cost. How are you weighing that up against employee urgency?
If you want to save lives the only option is WFH.
Stereo Leslie Speakers in the Gameboy Mega Machine
I assume you're referring to Alexander Senki, or "Reign: The Conqueror"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign:_The_Conqueror

I wouldn't say the animation style is the same, necessarily, but you are correct in noting the similarities, as Peter Chung provided the character designs.
Just wondering, does FB still use PHP / Hack for new services? I personally don’t mind the language but for some reason I imagine it being unpopular internally.
In the last decade, the proliferation of smartphones led to billions of newly "connected" people using the default browser, not knowing or caring about what a "browser" is. Firefox doesn't ship its own hardware so...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Those sound like all second hand accounts.. we could watch videos and read stories of plane crashes and say they are unsafe but we know that’s not true.
Though popular fodder for the media because they are profitable, killings by cops are extremely rare. I believe there are about 1000 murders-by-cop in the U.S. (a nation of 330,000,000 people) in a year, and in the vast, vast majority it is not at all ambiguous whether or not the cops acted in good faith. Picture someone running around stabbing people: the cops killing that person isn't something most people would find questionable.
I can imagine how frustrating it would feel as a Firefox dev reading reports like this and wondering wth is going wrong. Because I'm "just a user" and I've never seen FF being slow to start or loading pages.

Same with sync, I recently install Firefox on a new laptop. Clicked the sync button, logged in with my account and done. In 2-3 minutes all history and addons sync'd \o/
UX wise I really love that Firefox Android has the address bar on the bottom :D

Except some Google stuff like the GCP console.

EDIT: formatting
That also means housed workers will be in more demand, command higher wages and increase cost of living for everyone. So I agree it's good for worker power if that's the point you're trying to make.
People who are furloughed are still employed. They are not contributing to these statistics.
Profit. Recycling rare materials is profitable. Keeping stuff out of landfills is not really why stuff is recycled- thats why we had that whole crisis recently with Recycling materials building up with no destination
And the employer perspective: Why would I try to compete with unemployment benefits that are ending in a few months?

The situation is temporary and has obviously causal factors that are coming to an end soon (unemployment benefits, school out for summer).

Journalists seem to be going out of their way to ignore these and pretend that something else is happening.
That is precisely why the managerial class see themselves as so important. They generally view employees as exchangeable livestock in a sense, with managers being in charge of choosing the right stock and seeing that each cattle is optimizing production.

And just as you don't pay your cattle much (food, benefits) but you do pay a good herder, similarly you shouldn't pay your employees nearly as much as the manager.
It's not a joke and he certainly isn't clueless.
They won’t beg. They’ll vote.
Someone who isn’t willing to pay enough does not qualify as demand, thus is not considered a participant in the market, and therefore would not impact a shortage situation. A shortage occurs when an external mechanism prevents price from rising. Choosing to not pay more is internal.
Speed?

Lack of in-browser ads? (Google websites have ads but as far as I’m aware Chrome itself doesn’t have any, unlike Firefox which has sponsored sites and “snippets” on the new tab page - enabled by default obviously).

Lack of constant nagging? Firefox in its default configuration has always something to nag you about. Whether it’s Pocket, Firefox Sync or that it’s just updated and there are potentially new features.
My insurance only covers amalgam. If that is common, then those without the means to pay the difference are likely to end up with amalgam.
Ask HN: Jobs in Software/Technology Activism?
I'm currently looking for a new job and in addition to the many more typical jobs I'm applying to, I'd be very interested to hear about positions in what I'm tempted to call "activism". I'm not 100% sure what it is I'm even asking for, which is part of the motivation for this thread; hoping that someone more knowledgeable might be able to guide me in the right direction.

What I'm looking for is this:

- Champions of Free and Open Source Software / Hardware, Right to Repair, and other like causes
- A full-time or part-time role (with other programming responsibilities) within a product or consulting company which gives time and resources to a team of like-minded folk, or
- A full-time position as a writer / evangelist / technology new reporter, or
- A policy oriented position with a US politician, or
- Everything else that I'm not thinking of...

I'm a coder by training and at heart, but I currently am having a hard time turning a blind eye to the state of our industry. I'm thinking I should at least try and ask about way I can devote my time to the solution.

On that note, if a paying job addressing these issues isn't really in the cards, I'd be curious to hear how others are making meaningful impact in their free time.

Thanks.
It would be true almost anywhere.

If things went crazy in the US, Washington DC would be dangerous, even from the viewpoint of getting caught in the crossfire.

In France, Paris would be dangerous but some little town will probably miss the action.

This is much more the case in a developing country where geographical inequality is even worse and you are more likely to have family in the country.
It isn’t unreasonable to want to hire people that will be able to grow into senior positions. If you are demonstrating that you’ll never do that, this is a red flag for hiring.
Ugh, gross. That’s just slavery with extra steps.
Came to make a similar comment. I think my main gripe with the Hole Hawg analogy is that it's one tool, not a bevy of tools. Unix is more like if you went and looked into the workshop of a Hole Hawg owner, catalogued all the other tools that person uses, and realized that they're all built to interact elegantly with each other.

(I've definitely had my share of being "spun around the hole" with accidental dd misfires.)
Pretty much.

I was sceptical of that they did in Aus but it sort of worked.

Instead of just giving everyone unemployment they,

Doubled unemployment for those that needed it

Created a new system that injected money into businesses, but only if they kept you employed, i.e. subsidized wages.

This let things snap back really quickly. Though there is still a lot of damage and the new lock down in Sydney is hurting without the same measures again.

The thing were finding is those that left jobs are just hard to get back into jobs, it takes time to hire negotiate and train people
Very good point. I don't really watch sports and 339 was the best representitive number I could find for total medals awarded. I imagine if you knew how many medals were team based, the fixed sizes of teams that get medals, and so on you could work this out more accurately then.
He uses a piece of glass on plywood, with a ground file for a scraper. He's only scraping aluminum.

I don't think Gingery wrote these books as a way to demonstrate bootstrapping. When Gingery wrote these books there were no Chinese machines available, and hobby lathes (say the Southbend 9" or the myford 7") were way out of reach for a lot of people. He wrote the books to let people get to a machine with what they had. Everyone would be able to find a piece of glass and a file.

I built this lathe, but with much heavier sections and out of ZA12 rather than aluminum. I did a pretty good job, I think, but it is still inferior in every way to a Chinese 7x12. Zero regrets that I did it though, even with those better machines available.
It's a great article - really informative and enjoyable to read. Thanks for making it happen. :)
We have good tools for diagnosing COVID-19, and have had them from almost the start. If your looking for medical AI problems, start with the 12-lead EKG which fits on one piece of 8x10 piece of paper, is 2D, and current formulaic algorithms misread about 50% of the time when compared to a paramedic or nurse. Much less a physician, cardiologist, or electrophysiologist.

If this algorithm was better it would absolutely save lives and make everyday life easier for clinicians.
Have you considered that this model is perhaps only a current trend and that it isn’t necessarily the “correct” model?
Meanwhile: Brave Passes 25 Million Monthly Active Users

https://brave.com/25m-mau/

This seems relevant as it was started by the former co-founder of Mozilla and creator of JavaScript. Maybe Brendan Eich is good at finding out what people want in a browser.
I’m guessing most new languages are moving in this direction? rustc for example allows for different formatters, here’s the setting for enabling Json output: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/json.html
Still a weird function, hard to find a use for it :-)
Switched from Chrome to Firefox around 2017 then to closed-source Chromium-based Vivaldi and haven't looked back since.

Whatever architectural changes Firefox made around '17-19 broke the browser for me. Tabs would randomly go dead, accepting no input. Mobile Firefox was worse.

The old Firefox was perfectly fine, save for being noticeably but, for me, acceptably slower than Chrome. Then Firefox Aurora or whatever happened and things went from stable went to crap. I'd try and go back to see if things got better occasionally, but then gave up and uninstalled it.

Most aggravating is when you have negative feedback about Firefox in forums, including on HN, you immediately get "have to tried" suggestions from avid fans. The intent is good, no doubt. I get that it works for you. But I'm beyond trying already.
> On a personal level, I am biased because I have quit a job due to exactly the type of behavior in question, where everyone thought what we were doing was the greatest thing in history and they remained undeterred no matter how many times I said what we were doing is a pile of shit

Perception is reality. If there is one thing more complicated than theoretical physics is predicting human reactions to ideas, theories and events.
> Certainly improving physical reality remains valuable, but the non-physical world will likely grow in real as well as ephemeral value at a higher rate.

Value requires purpose, so the question is: from what is each individual's purpose derived in the virtual world, where we can leave the physical behind? And is there a purpose to our physical being that we do harm by neglecting?

To me our physical world has much purpose, and the virtual world, in whatever form it takes, is only valuable to the extent it allows me to fulfill my purpose in the physical.
It seems like your argument is now "there were differences but there's no way they were big enough to change how we developed". Unless you've got understanding that vastly exceeds current science, I don't think you can say which differences are relevant.
I try to put everything into the context of other concepts that I have already understood. Find parallels, identify the differences and what they mean within my context.

When encountering completely novel paradigms, like FRP, I experiment and play around with them until I develop an intuition. Not having an intuition for a concept feels quite bad, like an itch that needs scratching. The downside of this approach is that many concepts are very hard to learn because intuition requires deep understanding; the upside is that I rarely completely unlearn a skill.

Taking notes might speed up the process for me, but I’d never go back to them since I prefer to instead skim over another blog post and gain more insight.
That's because American's can't afford vacations without more money.
Those are terrible things, but in order to understand them in anything approaching a meaningful way you need to have the denominator. How many people are there in France? How many police interactions in a year? Without meaningful denominators to give context it doesn't help to know these things, and I'd argue you should probably avoid knowing them. I think you should avoid knowing them because they are merely attempts to exploit your attention for revenue.
We can't create a well defined or objective method of choosing, but we also don't need to. Like most things, it's a judgement call. It's reasonable to add a label for basically anything if you know people are affected by it. It's reasonable to omit a label for something you don't think will affect people. It's reasonable to criticize the absence of obvious labels in obvious contexts, and not reasonable to criticize the absence of non-obvious labels in non-obvious contexts (but it's reasonable to request them politely!). We can't define any of that, but it would be a fallacy to use that as an excuse to attack the concept of content warnings.
The only shitty thing here is, that many companies will fail and close down in the meantime, meaning less jobs openings for people who just lost unemployment benefits.
I think this is largely the point of competitive sports, the performance for a crowd. Sports which are done purely for those doing the actual activity are great, but tend to be more recreational than competitive.
Cognition (and Learning) on the Loose – Thinking Outside the Brain
I wonder when someone will see if the rise of home gaming consoles had an effect. A Nintendo effect, if you will.
This is bullshit. Firefox users simply block analytics.
That doesn’t sound liveable. How do you pay for rent?
If only there was a better way to get people to work shitty jobs... like maybe paying them more...
Well, they did. Viola [1] was a very early browser. As well as Grail, mentioned in a sibling, there was at least MMM [2] with OCaml applets. (Those were choices for Emacs browse-url of the right vintage.) There must have been Lisp applets, but I don't remember an implementation; at least Emacs/W3 didn't have them. There was the question of security/trust, of course.

For what it's worth, the very early web looked primitive and rather uninteresting if you already had scripted networked hypermedia (with NeWS), knew of Zanadu, and entirely missed the significance of the protocol and naming system. One learns, at least.

1. http://viola.org
2. https://github.com/aryx/fork-mmm
> no other browser has containers

THIS. The first damn thing I do on a new PC/VM. I work with multiple clients, they each have their corporate SSO stuff and its so damn convenient to keep them all in their own containers. Same with Google stuff, containers are so much more consistent to switch between Google accounts than their own switching thingy (just try switching between accounts in AdWords).
This the painful in-between time when citizens realize they have to take those jobs
> Are you considering the modifier here to be the word "male"?

Yes.

> If so, your statement is simply absurd. That’s like saying the term "female cheaters" equally insinuates men and women as the cheating-gender being discussed.

No, it is not. It is like saying that the using the phrase “female cheaters” to specify which cheaters are being discussed implies that female cheaters aren't the only kind, and that there are also male cheaters which are not currently being discussed.
It’s more that the sport is strategically designed for lots of downtime. The match does sometimes continue during ad breaks, but only as long as the ad needs to finish playing. Aside from the “downs” system that stops the clock almost every play, the coaches are awarded gratuitous and lengthy timeouts with which they use strategically to do things such as interrupt successful streaks from the opposing team. And yes, during those plus the 4 quarter breaks there is a lot of just standing around.
Designing Internet-Native Economies: A Guide to Crypto Tokens
> How they have pushed Chrome as a "better browser" on the front page of Google (were no one else have been allowed to advertise) to Firefox users since way before Chrome was anywere nearly as good as Firefox, making it both a lie and - more importantly - a massive abuse of dominance in one market to gain monopoly in another just like Microsoft did with IE.

Microsoft’s primary offense was illegally tying Internet Explorer and Windows. They refused to sell the two products separately, and instead required OEMs to buy the bundle. Windows was the product everyone wanted, and Microsoft abused its dominance in operating systems to increase its share of the browser market by refusing to sell you Windows unless you also took Internet Explorer.

By contrast, Google does not condition the use of Search on the use of Chrome. There’s nothing wrong with promoting a product to customers who use one of your other products (or we’d have to break up pretty much every multi-product company).
open devtools, edit CSS, speed is usually in seconds transformation takes, bigger number = slower

EDIT: or even better

document.getAnimations().forEach(animation => animation.playbackRate = 0.1)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Animation
I would encourage people to read Snowcrash. I first read it like 20 years ago and have re-read it several times. It's funny, it's readable, it's prophetic, it's wacky, it's thought provoking, there's a lot in a small package.

It's also not as described in that article, the author is shoehorning something written a while go to fit a currently popular narrative. I don't think Stephenson really does dystopian / utopian, right / wrong, moral / immoral. He constructs plausible settings where people roam and do as people do.

As a tangent, I hope this new hype results in a high production value adaptation of Snowcrash or one of his other works (seveneves!), Stephenson really deserves a higher place in our cultural pantheon.
Kenyan Shares You Should Own(NSE)-Ajulu's Thoughts
Thanks for the correction. C support in MSVC was terrible just a few years ago, but googling I see they added better C support starting in 2019
There is a year of lag, but you can read Mozilla's financial statements and Form 990. The latest ones are linked at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2019/
Nowadays if somebody wants to build a machine without a lot of tools available, and doesn't have the goal of recreating industrial revolution processes, I'd recommend looking into epoxy granite casting. Epoxy granite will result in a way better machine since it has vibration damping qualities similar to cast iron. It also avoids melting metal, which everyone can do but some might want to avoid.
My child's school uses Google Classroom. The Google experience is unusable in Firefox. Meet doesn't work (e.g. he sees nothing when the teacher screenshares). This seems really quite anti-competitive.

My child cares about privacy and switches browsers. Chrome for Meet, Firefox for most non-Google things.
I started at the very bottom (build engineer) and transitioned on the other end to management. It wasn’t SE0-SE10.
Do any other browsers support containers? That has been the killer feature for me.
I came across this last night - interesting story about the possible implications of technology like Neuralink.
I must say that when it comes to discrete optimization, the genetic/ant/simulated annealing/etc. stuff is more popular in academia than in industry (at least the industry that doesn't heavily include academics).

Works like Lin-Kernighan heuristic are extremely rare and a bunch of knowledge exists in industry only. Even the mentioned heuristic was for decades being implemented incorrectly until one individual came and demonstrated its superiority (K. Helsgaun).

I mean, most of the code that gets released today, doesn't even handle time windows constraint in the best way possible (optimal updates, constant time feasibility evaluations etc.). I believe all open source vehicle routing libraries do not have any data-structure relevant optimizations for handling time windows, task precedence, dynamic workshift starts etc. All are fairly simple implementation tricks that just got lost under giant amounts of population based heuristics or mathematical linear programming approaches.
Employers need employees, and employees need employers. If you have orders to fill, and noone to do the work, you're just as fscked, as if you have bills to pay, and no money to do it. Employers get an added benefit of being able to wait it out a bit, since they generally have more money than workers, and workers have unemployment benefits, which means that they can wait it out (until the benefits stop).

The problems will be more apparent when the benefits stop, poorer employers will close down in the meantime, and when people have to go back to work, there will be fewer workplaces for them available, bringing the wages down.
No, Microsoft's primary offense was making non-Microsoft tools awkward. Windows without IE was awkward. Windows wasn't done until it gave odd error messages on DR DOS. Borland always seemed to have incomplete documentation, late. Etc.

Google works poorly enough on non-Chrome browsers that it's the same thing.