skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What keeps them from changing or trying out new ways of designing/building? Is it entrenched interests that resist any changes?

Isn’t it in the best interest of everyone to actually deliver on projects? If they don’t how is it that they continue to be relied on by the military?

Apologies if I’m being incredibly naive, I have no experience with what the military procurement world looks like.
Reusable bags aren't necessarily better. https://youtu.be/JvzvM9tf5s0

On greenhouse gas emissions alone, reusable plastic bags need to be used about ten times to be as good as single-use plastic, and cotton bags over 100 times. Paper bags are no better than single-use plastic.

On total environmental impact, single-use plastic pulls further ahead: paper bags are much worse, reusable plastic bags need to be used 50 times to match single-use plastic (achievable with focus and effort), and cotton bags take thousands of uses to equal single-use plastic.

And if you reuse single-use plastic bags for trash bags, they are far superior to all alternatives.
>now all browsers render HTML the same way.

Is this sarcasm? Writing web apps that work the same across browsers is still the most painful part of web development. The underspecified natural language specs lead to subtly different behaviors in different browsers.

Full specs of a complex systems are very complex.
Here are a few links for you from the last couple of months:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA943-1.html

https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/nato-leaders-...

https://warontherocks.com/2021/07/updating-space-doctrine-ho...

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-space-forces-seeks-allies...

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/g7-nations-commit-to-the-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/world/asia/china-russia-s...

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/21/china/china-us-space-race...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/the-us-military-is-s...
Tips to Become Silent (Quiet Mind)
But does your average person use more than six sources for news? You'll hear people talk about CNN, MSNBC, nyt, wsj, maybe la times. Most people also have three or four local news and maybe a paper.
If you stick with main stream media, I don't think most people look to more than a handful of places.
This is weak sauce - yes he broke the law, but journalists should never go to prison even if they break the law, says journalist organization.

In recent times journalists have constantly put people in danger by making misleading or downright false claims and engaging in what can only be called "doxxing", then evading responsibility by abusing "freedom of the press" arguments. I hope we get to see many, many more journalists going to prison in the future!
Skeptical about the 90% claim. Is time spent on YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video, The New York Times and Spotify (with Joe Rogan specifically) so insignificant as to be relegated to the "miscellaneous" 10%?
So there have been two stories for me recently that just show how important and powerful leadership is. Perhaps more importantly, it seems like the culture that develops with bad or absent leadership can be really hard to correct to the point where it seems like cleaning house and starting over is the only way forward.

The first is obviously Blue Origin. Some important points:

- SpaceX was founded in 2002. Blue Origin in 2000;

- Blue Origin may have achieved a vertical landing first but it was for a rocket that basically went straight up and came straight down as opposed to going near-orbital speeds (Mach 30), which is unquestionably much more technically challenging;

- While SpaceX had delays in shipping (eg Falcon Heavy, Crew Dragon) the track record of the Falcon 9 at this point is undeniable;

- Bezos made an extremely odd (to me) choice for leader of Blue Origin: the former CEO of Honeywell (to the point that I've read insiders call the company "Blue Honeywell"). The result seems to be that things are done incredibly slowly and the delays keep piling up. I wonder if the company is now so risk-averse they'd rather do nothing than risk doing something that will fail. Now compare that to SpaceX's Starship prototypes.

Whatever magic touch Bezos has hasn't rubbed off on Blue Origin and I honestly think they're at risk of sliding into irrelevance.

So the second example is of course (Activision) Blizzard. We actually have a good data point in how another company, Square Enix, handles Final Fantasy XIV (vs Blizzard and World of Warcraft). Some interesting points:

- Blizzard doesn't engage with the WoW community. Compare this to Square Enix explaining the issues and timelines for bringing new servers online to alleviate queues;

- It seems like Square Enix is still player-focused whereas all of Activision is clearly financially-focused at this point;

- The horrific allegations against Blizzard fit into a narrative that Blizzard leadership and employees disdain their audience and almost certainly don't even play their own game;

I could go on.

So the reason I bring this up in the context of Blue Origin is because to me there's some striking similarities here. Blizzard is run by non-gamers. Blue Origin is run by Wall Street financial types not rocket men (or even engineers). Boeing is another data point in how horribly that can go wrong.

A fish rots from the head they say. If leaders want to claim credit and get the rewards for good performance (eg Bobby Kotick's $150m bonus) then the buck stops with them with regards to the culture they've created or allowed to fester on their watch.

But just virtue signaling to the market by replacing the head of the company isn't enough at this point (in either case). The fish doesn't reverse the rot when the head is cut off. It's going to take cleaning house to save Blue Origin (or Blizzard).
> We have no information about the long term effects of it either. Could be infertility, could be cancer, anything. Will take years to find out.

So... what are the long term effects of Covid? Could be infertility, could be cancer.
I think leaded gasoline influence on crime rates was observed in countries where abortion was illegal until different date and influence was as strong as in the US.
I've been working on a toolkit for creating interpreted languages, right now I'm liking Swift a lot as host language:

https://github.com/codr7/swifties
It's always important to remember how shocking it was when Ben Bagdikian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian was writing about only 50 corporations controlling US media.

How could you have a functioning democracy with only 50 companies controlling the media?
If you're going to be spending billions of dollars, would you rather have a working ship afterwards, or not? Accountability DOES matter.
The clothesline was only a clue, they didn't rely on it:

"But the final clue was the clotheslines on the compound, which flapped each day with women’s garments, shalwar kameez worn by Pakistani men, children’s outfits and diapers — far more than the 11 members of the bodyguards’ families could ever wear."

Perhaps you only read the title? because I agree it's a clickbait.
ACAS X is like the sweet spot for AI.

We have a system now, TCAS II which is reliable but has a lot of false positives and has a big limitation: both aircraft need to have TCAS in order to detect and resolve a conflict. It's also an environment that is very simple to simulate and model mathematically compared to virtually anything else AI will ever be applied to. TCAS II will be around for a very long time, like two decades, while ACAS X is deployed. So the AI system will also have a backup that already works.

This is really the perfect target for AI: clear backups, we just need some extra capabilities and warnings, easy to simulate, false positives are acceptable. That's basically unique.

Even then nothing has been deployed yet. We're half a decade away or so at best.
That's true for Kessler Syndrom in LEO, but Kessler Syndrome at higher elevations could prevent orbital space flight entirely, as far as I understand.
I didn’t understand this at first as Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” discussed media consolidation many years ago. But of course the problem is that we’ve gone from a small number of companies controlling _the news_ to a small number of companies controlling _all media_. It’s less Chomsky and more Orwell.
will we live to see an AmazonDisney conglomerate in our lifetime
It's still a dramatically different and faster trajectory than straight up-and-down. There's a reason SpaceX has drone ships out in the middle of the ocean -- they travel laterally hundreds of miles.
They're still selling comma 2 and I still think they support comma 1.

I don't see what's some awesome about this new one, to be honest. I'd like the next one to add blind spot sensors for cars that don't have them.
Agreed. I once had a job like this - the first so many months was little to no work, because of external inefficiencies. Nice in the beginning - I used the time to learn cool stuff (Emacs, etc). But after a number of months you feel like you were put on this Earth to do something useful, and you start looking for jobs.
These ships were designed for asymmetric littoral. The new threat is likely peer+ littoral.
6aff- Don't pay for dating, prostitution's illegal
Available on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.prutle.six...

Are you sick of paying for dating apps? Just got sick of seeing a hot guy or girl in front of you but the app asks you to pay to swipe? Well, you are in the right place.

In 6aff, we never ask you to pay. All the functions in the app is completely free and we will never ask you to pay. You can swipe as much as you want and you can see the people liked you for free.

You may got sick of not getting matched with someone too. Then use our Push Match function. Thanks to that, you can match with someone without him/her liking you. Of course, you will need to open with a good start text so you won't get blocked :)
I’ve taken to look at these programs as a jobs programs, and as an empire tax paid to the US (eg. F35 project).

Basically it’s three birds with one stone, you develop weapons and technology (necessary given international affairs), you provide jobs (important for senators and congressman to make their constituents happy), and funnel international money as a brother tax (we’re in this together).

Yes it’s inefficient, but it greases the wheels.

Similar can be said about the ~$3B/year given to each Israel and Egypt. Keeps the peace, supports strategic interests, and pays for defense (military tech, and jobs - since all funds are spent on US defense).
The greater the government expenditure, the greater the taxes.
Using your backpack for a year makes it maybe superior to single-use plastic if you don't use the single-use bag for trash later on: https://youtu.be/JvzvM9tf5s0
Hmmm I'm all in on ML/AI but I've yet to be impressed by blockchain like at all. Do you have some example where it has actually been "impressive"?
For that to happen you'd also need the people with bigger brains(smarter?) to procreate more often than others. Not sure if thats going to happen..
I think one way to help give the people back some control over the information flow is to educate as many people as possible in the skill of data evaluation. There are definite "outpoints" and "pluspoints" in any piece of information portrayed, and when you give someone the power to differentiate and evaluate the relative importance of individual data points, the controllers of said data become much less powerful. I guess this could be also likened to "critical thinking"? There will always be huge megacorp "mass media" and we need to learn the skills necessary to immunize ourselves to the negative effects of it.
I might be wrong, but regarding the anecdote about the physicists at Michigan’s Albion College attempts to model the spread of COVID-19, I think the author misfired. From what I understand, many non-epidemiologists have been surprisingly insightful during the pandemic.
Had: Orbiter Is Now Open Source
To put it politely. There must be vanishingly few places that'd consider themselves to offer fine dining and also wish to be seen serving it!

I don't think that really has anything to do with it being labour intensive, nor suggests that it must be even more so in the post-lava-cake era though. It just 'went viral', was over done (no pun intended), and lost its mystique.

The same no doubt happened to all manner of exotic (or once exotic) dishes before it.
Heh, I just posted this in reply to two other comments. It's good (counterintuitive) info.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that a culture of eccentricity is a hard-to-quantify edge for any company in the space industry. Amazon certainly seems like a demanding place to work, but (and this could be an outsider's misperception but even that matters) I associate it more with consistency than celebrating outliers.
> The bitcoin consensus mechanism is literally a lottery

It is, but with the probability of winning proportional to the "work" you put in. That is crucial.
I'm a foreigner and I'd have had to look it up.
My friend, who just had a baby, is struggling to pay the IRS the 30k he owes them and the gov't is doing stuff like this and the f-35.

It makes me so angry to see him struggling because of his tax debt and know all of his work is being thrown away on stuff like this.

The project I'm currently working on is millions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule and managed by people whose previous experience was managing I.T. help desks.

But tax money printer go brrrr so there's no accountability!!!!

I'm wondering when the right time is to water tree of Liberty with the blood of tyrants.
Anyone has insight into what BO's problems are? I heard that they had leadership problems but otherwise a top notch staff. People love to flame Jeff Bezos but if you look at his management of Amazon, I wouldn't dismiss him casually with regard to BO. He might not have the engineering chops of Musk but I'm sure he can put the right leadership in place to turn this ship around, now that he'll be focusing on this full time.

The industry needs a 2nd new generation provider. I don't harbour any fuzzy feelings for Bezos but I do hope BO will get somewhere, or that another company will. Perhaps RocketLab or Relativity Space?
I wish it went back further. I have amazon purchase history back to the first few months of its existence, but it won't let you go back beyond 2006.
Like this? https://fusion.tv/story/179818/r-u-a-cyberpunk/

Hello Rio, btw.
Government expenditure in general isn’t bad… if it delivers on what it’s trying to. Like it’s great we get the research and tech benefits (if that’s really what happens) but if we’re unable to deliver on producing best in class armaments, we risk falling behind adversaries that do develop those capabilities.
> FBI personnel abroad serve under the authority of the Department of State, chief of mission at United States embassies, at the pleasure of ambassadors and host country governments.

These are known agents of the United States.

I had meant “precludes availability for covert foreign missions.”

I am not sure of this, however, to me, it does not stand a reason test to use an FBI agent as a CIA agent when they have entirely separate functions and responsibilities.
The trains exist now, either they do, or they do not, perform as intended.

Trial running is at 12tph now, so that's the same as the initial passenger service. If they can't hit the travel time numbers they already know that today. Trial operations will also give real (volunteer) passengers an impression of whether the service can deliver those times since they'll be undertaking test journeys late in 2021.
The U.S. Government Can Nationalize the Bitcoin Network at Any Time
You know the vaccine trains you to make antibodies against COVID so they’re there when you need them, right? This should keep you out of hospital and hopefully reduce the risk of long COVID. It helps society as a whole by removing a naive host from the environment - remove enough hosts and the virus declines. Coupled with masking, it will reduce the chance of spreading COVID if infected, although delta might require a few days of isolation as well. It’s far safer than getting the virus into your system.

If you still do not wish to be vaccinated then at least follow the masking and other steps required to protect others. Get tested if you think you’re infected and isolate until it passes. Otherwise, if this too is something you’re not interested in doing, then you’re just a narcissist or worse. Too many people have suffered from COVID to fool around any more.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2425/
There are many angles.

Two important ones are that the defense contractors are jobs programs, giving good salaries to skilled workers and investing in education distributed across the country. They are also defense preparedness programs: we buy and build constantly whether or not we need things right now because when we do need them, we don't want to build knowhow and whole industries from scratch.

Claiming that it is all being done well is of course absurd, but it is also very hard to build programs that last for decades and through many administrations, many political changes, involving millions of people. And folks are always eager to point out "failures" that aren't always a sign of anything being done wrong, especially from people who have little idea what it's like building an enormous ship/plane/weapon meant to be serviceable for half a century.
I'm not saying there should be mutations. Just that if there are mutations, it's not clear whether the vaccinated or unvaccinated would be stronger drivers of it.
turning the wart into a melanoma
Yeah, most of this is "not even wrong". Like:

> We don’t have any consensus on what we meant by “intelligence,” but all the leading definitions include “comprehension,” and statistical infer­ence doesn’t lead to comprehension, even if it sometimes approximates it.

So now the semantic shell game is stuck on defining "comprehension". In the next paragraph he starts to suggest it has something to do with generalization -- but that's a concept around which ML practitioners are constantly innovating in formalizing, and using those formal measures to good effect.

Also, "comprehension" is absent in plenty of definitions of intelligence. Take Oxford's "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills". Huge parts of the world work around notions of intelligence demonstrated through action, not a philosophical abstraction.

I'll never understand the "ML won't make my version of AGI" crowd's view on science in general. "This won't work in ways I refuse to define" isn't scientific criticism, and doesn't show any particular curiosity or interest in advancing the state of the art. It's just a rhetorical pose that seems aimed at building up a platform for the next time there's some AI pratfall to point out.
Plasma gasification seems like an ideal way to deal with all waste, including plastics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
6 Years of Professional Clojure
That's not literally true, obviously. There's plenty of money for them to go after if they were actually worried about government debt. I think the big secret is that it doesn't really matter as long as the debt growth rate doesn't become shocking.
Once you have authenticated each other and agree to a nice symmetric cipher and exchange the keys for that, yes. Bytes, even kilobytes per second. But note the "once you have authenticated". Public key crypto is brutal number crunching and takes minutes to hours on systems of the 80s, and some noticeable seconds even in the late 90s. I think that's why something like RSA-4096 was not just universally adopted 30 years ago. It was too expensive to compute for casual use.
Could there be a light mode and dark mode or specific monitors for darker skin?

There are also other failure modes like too cold fingers for example.
Perhaps, but at least athletes put in the work themselves, rather than exploiting and taking the credit for the work of others.
I quite enjoyed the pictorial introduction on mobile. Props to the NPR digital team; mobile-first storytelling par excellence.
>a glorified amusement ride.

Oh dear god that is too perfect. I had higher hopes for them as well, somehow they seem to lack direction.
It was not a term that at least I was not familiar with and am glad someone spelt it out!
Suppose the majority decides that they won't halve coinbase (the mining reward) after every 210,000 blocks anymore (thus removing the 21m cap). Maybe that's irrational, maybe that's rational. Who is to say?
> some sort of NAS solution that would be compatible with older versions of Mac OS

http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/ :)
Show HN: TsParticles 1.33.2 released, next gen particles.js
> MMA is the fundamentals of one-on-one fighting

MMA, is not itself a fighting technique, but the name of the sport. It is the official sport rules for using various martial arts techniques together in sporting competitions. UFC is the main organization that promotes the MMA sport.

But yes, if someone trained in kick boxing, judo, Jiu-jitsu etc was attacking me and didn’t use those techniques the fight would indeed end very quickly.

I train specifically to use those techniques first… (Krav Maga), to incapacitate the attacker as fast as possible, and then leave the situation. If for some reason I was unsuccessful, then my attempt would immediately cause the attacker to also attempt to use those techniques.

Either way it would end very fast. No matter how strong someone is, they can’t work out their eyes, grown, throat etc.

Krav Maga, btw can be used under the MMA sport rules, however it’s uncommon, since most of the techniques are banned.

> If you're interested in self defense, just learning the fundamentals of MMA makes the most sense

This is actually the misunderstanding. If you want to learn self defense then learn self defense, not a sport. If you’re focused on MMA your not going to learn how to deal with attackers with knives, guns, etc, or how to deal with attackers using the most incapacitating techniques. You’re also not going to learn how to end the confrontation as quickly as possible since MMA is all about entertainment and sport, meaning fights that last many rounds. Criminals and street fights are dirty by definition, and there’s no holding back.
> Which version produces nicer results when two very diverged documents are merged.

From the user’s perspective merging behaviour is basically identical in all of these systems.

Diamond supports full per character change tracking. So you know who authored what. I think Yjs does this too. I’m not sure what you mean about materialising areas differently? I’d like to have full branch support in diamond at some point too, so you can work in a branch, switch branches, merge branches, and all of that.
I feel a metrics are only valuable to the team itself (if they find them helpful). No one else should be looking at them because as you touch on, they are meaningless to anyone else.

My team points stories and we just that as an idea of how much work to take on for the week. If we under or overshoot, it's not a big a deal, but story points help us relay externally what will likely get done this week. No one is going to be able to look at how many points we did in a week be able to get anywhere close to an accurate representation of how much work we did. Even looking at how often we hit our mark is going to tell them nothing about our productivity.
> You can blame Zeigarnik again. The mere act of making a to-do list relieves so much itchy stress that it can, paradoxically, reduce the pressure to actually get stuff done. “People feel that when they put all their tasks somewhere, they’ve already done most of the work,” Perchik says. But it’s an illusion. The pile of work is still there.

If it went so long without being done, perhaps it wasn't so important after all, and giving yourself permission to quit thinking about it is just what the doctor ordered.