skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A friend of mine went to Afghanistan to help rebuild over a decade ago. He said some of the funds they received for schools were then allocated to lonely concrete blocks without teachers or equipment. But all the contractors involved would go there to show off their amazing progress.

Remember that the companies you talk about are not the only ones that profited here. It's not that different from when Hillary Clinton was laughing at the camera and saying the greatest thing about Lybia's liberation would be that they would pay for the reconstruction.
You often need to use signals, unfortunately, and they stink. The only way to spawn multiple processes and being told when each of them die is SIGCHLD. I mean, I suppose you could spawn N threads and call waitpid on each one but it would be so much lovelier if you could poll on an fd to know when a child dies. Maybe pidfd now provides that, I hope it does.

Windows has it right with WaitOnMultipleObjects supporting mutexes, child process deaths, socket and IO reads and timeouts all in the same interface. Even the BSDs have kqueue now. Only Linux is stuck with the alternatives.
If a Muslim country will invade a Christian country, say Sweden, to improve democracy, what will happen when they will leave?
China, at least, is not limited by public perception, and will have no qualms about doing war crimes, and they will call it conquering.

On the other hand, it seems a lot of Afghan soldiers deserted to the other side. They see no upside to the new Afghan regime.
Genuine question: what type of bad outcomes does it lead to? Now nobody checks for vandalism and local flora, so ok what happens?
When you really need it, they taste amazing.
« Marketing over results ». Please explain to me how the results achieved during the previous administrations have been worth the enormous financial expenses.

From my point of view, the current policy of spending zero and getting zero result is much more efficient than the previous policy of spending trillions and getting microscopic results.

The mistake was starting this shitshow 20 years ago. And this is on the Bush administration.
I do accept what you have said (indeed it's chaos theory dogma that I am mostly still on board with!) but I also think reality is quite far from binary in whether chaos-theory concepts apply-to-it-or-not, seems a bit like it's mixed-in everywhere a bit, depending how information is mixing. (I'm calling chaos Class-3 Automata style)

There are, I think still tools that we can build and use even in the face of this type of sensitivity to initial conditions!
It's available at many Japanese restaurants and Asian grocers in Sydney, but it's not a stock mainstream supermarket product.
I just compared 730 kb/s Flac with 160kb/s Opus, I can see no difference even on spectrogram using 'mother of mp3' track: Tom's Diner (Live At The Royal Albert Hall, London, UK, November 18, 1986).

Very surprising, will be migrating all my music to opus to save space.
Nice detailed Linux-on-ThinkPad review. As a counter-point, my almost two year old ThinkPad E495 (Ryzen 3 so not nearly as high-end as yours) keeps on chugging on 20.04 with absolutely no hardware/driver problems whatsoever, including power management. It sure helps that the thing doesn't even have a fingerprint scanner.

No match to the XPS I had before (at twice the price) in terms of display and keyboard, though. And lack of keyboard lighting sure sucks. But then, Dell doesn't do AMD so you need a dysfunctional setup with Nvidia/optimus to get half-decent graphics.
Yeah really bad, and Germany is still doing extraditions there. :(
out of direct sunlight, solar panels can produce a 3rd of their max output from ambient. This is only during the day.

Ambient light however, cannot travel even a km, as soon as the sun stops hitting that part of the earth, the output drops to zero.

This is despite the human eye being able to see.
I think you perhaps overestimate the bandwidth available to most telephone handsets in most of the world.

I'm in a hotel in a schengen country right now and I am lucky to get 200kbps via the wifi.

Other, less industrialized countries are frequently worse.

It's safe to say a ~billion people's lives can be improved with better low bitrate codecs.
The media narrative is only the cover story for the plebs and democracy/terrorism have been great ones over the years. US military actions around the world, especially decades long ones, tend to be strategic in nature. Although as some point out above, even that might be a cover story for Congress, and the real motive is private profit.
That makeuseof article from six years ago has little or no relevance to any new ThinkPad you might buy today.

Lenovo's consumer and business divisions are best thought of as nearly separate companies within one conglomerate.

Lenovo (formerly Legend) sold laptops and desktops for years before they acquired IBM's personal computer business. But they didn't just buy the ThinkPad name, the people came along with it.

The old Lenovo became the consumer group, and the IBM team became the business group. It's very common to find different approaches on hardware and software between the two lines.

As an obvious example, every ThinkPad (with some recent exceptions) has a TrackPoint, but no other Lenovo machine does.

This applies to software too. If you see something bad that happened on Lenovo consumer machines years ago, it's very unlikely that it affected ThinkPads. It just wasn't the same people making these kinds of decisions.

The ThinkPad team's bread and butter is not individuals like you or me, it's corporate customers who buy hundreds or thousands of machines at a time - and have IT staff who scrutinize the hardware and software.

The 2015 makeuseof article made three points. Let me address them in reverse order.

(3) BIOS-Based Malware. The source for that reporting is this Ars Technica article:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenov...

Lenovo followed up quickly with a description of the security issue and provided a removal tool:

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_n...

Near the bottom of the page is a list of the affected models. Note that they were only consumer machines, not ThinkPads.

(2) SuperFish. This was really stupid on Lenovo's part, but again, it was the consumer team who did this. The ThinkPad team would never have allowed something like that, and didn't.

(1) Lenovo Is Spying On You. Some guy bought two refurbished ThinkPads in 2014 and claims they had some Windows spyware. And this is somehow supposed to have anything to do with a Linux ThinkPad you may buy today? Give me a break.

Full disclosure: I am a major ThinkPad fan. I got my first one in 1998, and I have four of them within arm's reach right now: an X1 Extreme and X1 Carbon from work, and my personal P1 and old Yoga 460. Also have a mostly retired W520 and X220 Tablet in the other room, and a few older busted machines. I'm always happy to talk ThinkPads with anyone. :-)
AdiliusWSDG – Automate supply drop gathering for you Webhallen.com account
What is the progress in using hard drugs to call it this way? The Nedherlands system is a bit better, but still it cannot be called progressive.
Can Individuals Write Code?
I started around the end of my teens. And it was a conscious decision, I didn't fall into it. Thankfully, I found that I enjoyed it.
Still, use of IPv4 does not constitute anti-trust.
Good. Hopefully humanity as a whole would soon reach this phase of zero population growth (through lowered birth rate, not increase death rate).

This is absolutely the only way to be long term sustainable on a single planet.
Is Technology Running Backward?
Same reason Android, iOS and OSX require it: vertical control over the platform.
I have not seen one cogent argument why the US taxpayer should be funding the role of policeman indefinitely in faraway lands.

Terrorism in Afghanistan has zero to do with the US constituency.

A "foothold" is useless and unnecessary.

I feel badly for the Afghan people, but ultimately it isn't the US' problem, and never has been. If they'd like to have a civil war and get those assholes out, let them.
Metanomics – Building the Economy of the Metaverse
In my opinion, they are quite expensive for the hw specs!
Interpolated translation is continuous and easily differentiated. There's lots of work on machine-learned video codecs already, from Nvidia, Qualcomm and others.
Seems like the Taliban are holding back to allow foreign personnel to evacuate. I wonder if that is part of an explicit agreement, or just them not wanting to create problems for themselves when they've already clearly won.
Why do you think they would throw away years of work to start over?
> […] squandering all the blood and treasure that has been expended in 2 decades.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy. So much resources have already been spent, that stopping now means those would have been wasted.

The problem is that no amount of extra resources will lead to a different outcome, and the resources are already lost, so stopping outright is the only sensible move. Current events (a somewhat peaceful transfer of power seeming imminent rather than years of (more) war) support this.

It would be different if some other outcome was possible; it doesn't look like anyone involved in the decision found this likely.

(Note that this outcome sucks for many Afghans, it just sucks less than the alternatives.)
Obviously Trump would not have exited in such a disastrous manner as this. Trump has said he would have made it a conditional withdrawal.

Trump was so close to peace with North Korea (to the point where NK and SK competed together in the Winter Olympics, and which no career politician would have been able to achieve). Yet he still did not sign a deal with NK due to their insistence of not giving up nuclear weapons first. Similarly Trump would have made withdrawal from Afghanistan conditional. This failure is all on the Biden Admin.
Using preinstalled OS is weird. Just reinstall it front the scratch. Issue with Lenovo was that their BIOS injected their malware anyway. Dell is not so advanced.
is that coz no "msft subsidy" ?
A conditional withdrawal, like Trump said.
I’ve heard rumors, maybe myths, when the pandemic started and everything was remote, people would add a second job, and actually be employed by two different FAANGs simultaneously, and I’m just wondering if anyone can confirm find that actually happened? Seems so unlikely or impossible. I mean it must be super casual atmosphere with low expectations if you can actually work at two such companies without anyone noticing?
It's not difficult to propagate gradients while translating an image. Learning "pick a 8x8 patch from (145,17) apply X to it and translate it by (4,-8)" from data is on different level, is not it?

The premise was using e2e learning to avoid patent issues. I am sure that with some preprocessing you can plug a NN inside the deciding process and learn very meaningful stuff.
I don't even want to read that. Working too much is not sustainable. Reach financial freedom by spending less.
Yes, the M1 is about 0-20% faster in single core benchmarks and slower in everything multi-core. https://www.notebookcheck.net/R7-5700U-vs-M1_12978_12937.247...
It's tricky, because most phones can't be flashed with an alternative aftermarket OS. I know that LineageOS etc. exist, but most phones don't have a stable build and a lot of SoCs will never work reliably with an aftermarket OS.

In that case whoever will exploit your phone first is the one who owns it, not you.
... for them. Not us.
That is so nice. May he have all the support he needs to build more things.

Long time back, some of my friends and college mates built a solar car [1] that we took to Australia for world solar challenge 2011. It is a 3000km race across the continent. We were very happy to see the community around the solar cars is quite strong. The same has lead to companies like LightYear[2] working on extending range of EVs with solar.

It was quite a struggle back then. Our LiFePo4 batteries got lost in shipping so we had to use 4 times heavier car gel batteries, our car had to be sawed in three sections a few days before the shipping, so we could ship in time, we got bad media coverage in Australia as we spent a few nights sleeping in the garage trying to join the sawed parts together (They kinda hinted we were poor and did not have a place to live, while we had a hostel but still had to work round the clock to make it in time as some people arrived late due to delays), and we often ran out of money as the university could only sponsor the car and not all our expenses. So, we lived on credit. When we came back, we heard foul things from people who thought we stole their funding, I had low attendance in the courses and was about to be flunked. I cried to the administration to let me sit for the exams. But we stuck together as a team.
I am happy that we did it. I learned a lot.

I guess, projects like these should be encouraged. Even though the car we made was not a great one compared to the western fordian ideals of efficiency and speed, but we felt that India (and other developing countries) need representation and visibility in this domain. We built a car with whatever we had and hey! it still runs robustly. It is a bit slow, but hey! Australia is soo beautiful, we gotta take our time. We did make it to finish line without any major repairs. The cost of our entire car was equivalent to the cost of the spare motor used by one of the top teams.

I always think, there are other ways of looking at things than efficiency and speed, like initiative, frugality and the spirit of creation. There are often less stories on the second side. This story is one of them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjHEYckl8xI
[2] https://lightyear.one/
It is hard to interact with modern society without Instagram or WhatsApp.

(I don't have IG or WhatsApp accounts.)
You reheat it and deoxidize it. No waste.
i tried that. The t9 keyboard was hell to text on. This at least seems to have a real size keyboard.
That’s a fertile ground for companies to start requiring to install spyware.
It's hard to describe, but I can feel it when my blood sugar levels spike.
All the time browsing that website something felt off. Thanks for pointing it out.
The modern Nokia's with kaiOS have a official WhatsApp client build in.
Testing is different from creation, though. In creating software, you make exclusive choices between options for how it will be made. But in testing, you can apply every testing strategy and they will complement each other. As one exhausts itself, mining out its favored part of bug space, the others become relatively better at finding the remaining bugs.
Interesting idea but not really an interesting proposition without maps and whatsapp/email. It's nice these are planned but planning means little. I prefer just disabling apps via ADB on Android when I need a non distracting phone.
> It’s more sensical to instead measure the value gained by the activities you do embrace and then attempt to maximize this positive value.

> Optimizing your use of the tools that really matter, can significantly improve your life.

> Focus on the much smaller number of activities that return the most value for your life. This is a basic 80/20 analysis: doing less, but focusing on higher quality, can generate more total value.

> Will this add significant value to something I find to be significantly important to my life?

-

In other words: Stop obsessing about social media! Start obsessing about self-optimization!
Noooo. I was a desktop software developer in the 90s and the conversation definitely started then. Remember we are talking about desktop software not web development (and by the late 90s bevels were seen as archaic as “under maintenance” GIFs).

To illustrate the timeline: Windows MSIs were often compared to Install Shield with regards to the difference between the newer flat design elements of Microsoft vs the older 3D objects of the previous iterations of Windows. By Windows 2000 Microsoft had already cemented that flat design was their way forward. Sure buttons were still 3D but a lot of other design elements had been flattened or removed entirely (panels, toolbars, image boarders, editable text areas in some cases too).

While you are right that Metro / Modern was another massive leap forward in terms of flat design, by that point Apple had already dropped much of their skeuomorphic design elements. So the discussions by that point were less about skeuomorphism vs flat design and more about accessibility concerns with regards to removing all hints of 3D in flat design. Basically by 2010 flat design had already largely won over skeuomorphic design. So while designers were still endlessly debating these things, it certainly wasn’t the start of the conversation.
>There's some weird push (for interpreters specifically for some reason) to be "saved"

that's coz these people are valuable potential spies in future
Do the interns get paid?
dev.to ?
That's just an attempt to make fossil fuels produce green hydrogen. A thing often attempted by the fossil fuel industry to stay relevant.

There are other ways to make hydrogen from water.
Of course, you may have to follow the breadcrumbs to find the current active forum after the mass-exodus(es) from the previous 'go-to' forum after the admin(s) did something to initiate a subset of the users to fork.
Using it doesn't. But having a pool of 200 times more than the next competitor does. I'm not sure whether according to the letter of the law. Courts would decide that a decade later if any administration went to court. But certainly in the spirit of free competition.
> saving like $100/mo on 4G plans.

You could get most of that saving by switching to pay as you go; at least in Europe/Scandinavia. I spend perhaps 20 USD per year on my mobile because I hardly ever make any calls or use mobile data.
This is false. OSX runs fine on non-Apple hardware without patching.

https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
I went to Fujitsu.com and found their laptops, but no way of buying directly. I googled fujitsu + store, buy, laptops; all returned results for european sellers and refurbished laptops from 10 years ago. They have a list of resellers, but all they carry are scanners and printers. They don't make it easy.

I went to Dell.com and the first thing I see is a giant banner that wants to sell me a laptop. When I click on Products, I get a page describing their main product lines and the all say SHOP. They want to sell me a laptop. HP wants to sell me a laptop. Lenovo wants to sell me a laptop. Fujitsu does not.
Cap'n Proto has a remote object system using interface references.

When a reference is constructed, only the creator has the capability of invoking the interface. If the reference is then passed to another server, they and only they have the capability of invoking the interface.

That's what they mean by capability.
I use the same controls. I think they should be the standard for these games. I got my 3D sea legs in the evochron games. Once I figured out how to dogfight those games, going back to descent felt so much more natural.
Helsinki has a pretty decent system. Great engineering and a design guided by realism (needle disposal, etc.)
Social media is already reporting thousands of refugees walking in Greece.
This just applies the herbicide to anything that's green and not dirt.

That's not nothing, but still the last tech improvement is using Blue LED's because they see green better. Also cool.

It's different to attacking only the weeds, which this technology can't do yet because it's still science fiction for a few more years yet as the headline points out. But it will be cool when it can.
I am not sure fuel won't be coming in magically and everywhere besides the middle East or permafrost all easily accessible fossil fuels have been already exploited.
I think JSON is an easier configuration format than YAML. YAML is so complicated when you include all the edge cases. For example I still have no idea when you need a leading `- ` and when it's not needed.

I'm not saying YAML can't be learned, but why learn all the quirks of a new format when we can just use JSON which everyone already knows? It does the same job, especially when you use JSON5 or HJSON. It's still intuitive, also supports comments and multiline strings etc, and you don't have to deal with the mess that is YAML syntax.

If only...
Here is a quick review of the geopolitics: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/07/16/geopolitics-afgha...
You can have a forum for "lively and active" discussion or you can have a forum for curated, high-quality discussion. You can't have both, and to have the latter you need aggressive moderation. And the bigger and more diverse the userbase gets, the more aggressive the moderation has to be to prevent Eternal September from eating everything.

Its either that or ban all accounts made after, say, 2015 and have membership be invite only as Lobste.rs does.

I can understand the opposition to this - i've clashed with the mods, been flagged and slowbanned, I get downvoted to oblivion every time I give an opinion that goes against the zeitgeist of a thread - but Hacker News is what it is.

If you want to discuss CIA torture, this isn't the proper venue. But if you want to color outside the guidelines, you have to realize you've become the problem that this culture wants to rid itself of, and eventually it will.

And to answer the dead comment below: a lot more political stories probably need to be flagged here than are - I think the bar for "interesting new phenomenon" needs to be a bit higher. I don't see the value in threads about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, for instance. It's a worthwhile news story, but the threads are generating more smoke and heat then light.
>Their interest is purely domestic this time around.

and their support and finances from China
Just as a side note, spectrogram are not in any way indicative of compression quality.

Its interesting that you didn't see any differences between flac and opus, as opus has a hard 20 kHz low-pass filter and is 48kHz-only.
Linux support usually improves in ~6-12 months after release. It is just a reality with how Linux kernel development process works - it takes some time for drivers to be accepted upstream and then for kernel to be released and propagate to distros.

However, this is good thing in my book compared to usual vendor "lol idk lets just outsource development of crappy drivers to lowest bidder and preinstall them on Windows (and also put bunch of workarounds for broken bios/fw there because it is cheaper than actually fixing and updating any of the firmware blobs)". Case the point - my X1C g6 now works quite well with Linux but I had some troubles initially when i bought it.
IIUC what s/he's saying is that there's not a shortage of beds per se but staffed beds. And the staffing shortage is because a lot of staff has been diverted to covid cases.
Why do so many sites insist on not having links to the home page? I had to delete some of the url to go there which is just painful on mobile.
To some extent, surely. In their samples they have some music and some audio with background noise. The music survives ok and the clanging of the background noise is reduced to clicking so maybe languages with clicking sounds do ok too.

I suppose there are a few futures:

- the paper was very innovative but nothing really happens in the ‘real world’

- Google roll it out globally to one of their products and we discover that some voices/accents/languages work poorly (or well)

- The same but with slow rollout, feedback, studies, and improvements to try to make sure everyone gets a good result.
I played freespace long after its hayday. The mod loader was lovely and the mod community was still quite active. The most expansive overhaul mod had only one server that had many players. It was a full-on RP server. It wasn't for me, but it was fascinating nonetheless.
Why is this in the interest of users?