skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unpopular question, how did a plane and jet fuel burn down a steel reinforced building?

I believe in the entire history of buildings built as the world trade centers were, the only ones ever that burned down and collapse are these. The only way as civil engineers have explained it to me, that the buildings structural qualities could have been compromised, are with additional heat sources besides a jet and jet fuel. I’d love a civil engineer in this thread to ELI5 this for me.
I ignore articles on medium.com

Custom-domain medium-hosted sites are a real pain.

Medium blogs must have the worst experience in the web.

I’d need to go out of my way to make a website that bad.

I automatically devalue the authors on that side, obviously unfairly.

Someone on this site coined the phrase “Medium developers”, which sticks in my mind.
This is not the first comment to make such a remark.

History does not editorialize. Especially primary sources: simply portraying them is enough. People will come to their own conclusions. People must think critically, and for themselves.
Censorship being “worse than misinformation” seems like whataboutism, given that FB has serious problems with both.
> Additionally, the fact that members of the Saudi government aided and assisted the hijackers...

Details? My understanding is a huge fraction of the Saudi population have jobs that amount to government sinecures (while immigrants do most of the real work). Are we talking about high-level members with real leadership positions, or some minor member of the royal family working in some ministry doing nothing and going off on his own?
My biggest mistake: years ago I ended pushing personal credentials to GitHub at night and waking up to a several thousand dollar bill in the morning.

Changed credentials and cancelled all the running instances only to find that I’d missed some.

It was resolved by the afternoon.
That's just it. In Finland sauna is something that is an expected utility in a house like a bedroom or toilet. So while there is research in how sleep or toilet behaviour affects health, there is no "bedroom" industry trying to upsell the benefit of having a distinct room for your bed, or a toilet industry convincing you it's a good idea to use the loo.
Fun fact: that watermark is created by explorer.exe, and if you're not running explorer.exe it doesn't show up. I had a box that went through one too many hardware changes and Windows decided that it wasn't on the same machine. I didn't bother contacting support for months because I had set the Windows "shell" to be steam.exe in Big Picture mode, and so I rarely got bothered by it.
The wife got a spin-off series Mrs. Columbo.
> When it was originally on air, it's said that the prime minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, loved it. And it's still absolutely relevant and witty today.

Thatcher loved because it suited her ideology:

> Adam Curtis, in his three-part TV documentary The Trap, criticised the series as "ideological propaganda for a political movement",[16] and claimed that Yes Minister is indicative of a larger movement of criticism of government and bureaucracy, centred upon public choice economics. Jay himself supported this:

>> The fallacy that public choice economics took on was the fallacy that government is working entirely for the benefit of the citizen; and this was reflected by showing that in any [episode] in the programme, in Yes Minister, we showed that almost everything that the government has to decide is a conflict between two lots of private interest – that of the politicians and that of the civil servants trying to advance their own careers and improve their own lives. And that's why public choice economics, which explains why all this was going on, was at the root of almost every episode of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.[17]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister#Politics

> There is a division of opinions by political scientists. Some of them cite the series for their accurate and sophisticated portrayal of the relationships between civil servants and politicians,[40] and are quoted in some textbooks on British politics.[6] However, other political scientists considered it a reflection of the public choice model, which encouraged a "conservative agenda of balanced budgets and reduced government spending".[41] The Washington Post considered its "ideas were at the center of the Thatcher and Ronald Reagan administrations in Britain and the United States, which favored cutting government and shifting its functions to the private sector".[42]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister#Reception
GDPR/CCPA request if this applies to you. Alternatively, redirect the spam to someone high-up whose time is worth a lot of money.
I thought I remembered the plot to the 1996 film “executive decision” as being a debate whether to shoot the passenger jet out of the sky because the plane was going to be used as a missile, but i just read the plot again and they were going to detonate a nerve agent bomb on board the plane while over a us city, so, similar but not quite a prediction of the predicament.
Not many. About a thousand cases this year, compared to about 700 last year. Over 300 million country. Which includes calls like "I took thus medicine and now I feel funny! Also I drunk a bottle of whiskey but that never hurt me before, must be the medicine!". The real overdose cases are in dozens, no more, over all the nation. It's like saying "many people are struck by lightning " or "many people are eaten by the sharks". It happens, but it's not many.
I think it's because the USA was an incredibly safe country, attacked seemingly out of nowhere (as far as the public was concerned, at least) with ramifications that impacted every country in the world.

Covid does about a 9/11 every two days, but covid isn't intentional. Bombs go off and kill innocent people all over the world, but none of them kill this many people in a country perceived safe.

The overreaction that followed the attack on the towers helped shape the mess in the middle east. It impacted public perception on NATO. It started more government conspiracies theories than any other event I can think of.

If you're living somewhere outside the West or the Middle East, then 9/11 probably has very little significance in your daily life. Still, its impact on worldwide politics have shaped the world we live in today.

It's the same reason we still see the Tiananmen Square massacre in the news. 3000 people died, but even though they were people in a remote, (then) poor country that barely anyone outside China had any personal reason to care about, the event changed people's views all around the world.
Why not? Why shouldn't scum be held accountable?
> At least the western societies are producing enough food that there is no reason not to offer some basic nutrition to everyone.

I live in one of the southern US states that tends to be hostile towards people in need. My kids and I had on-and-off hunger 2008-2018.
had my first experience with this a couple months ago at the gate, had no idea it was even a thing. it probably did improve boarding time for the entire plane (A350 transatlantic, 300ish passengers) but after understanding how the tech works I’m more impressed with how quickly the scan is validated against the CBP database - literally a second or so.
Two New and Game Modes for Cod Warzone
I doubt anyone at Facebook is freaking out about Mastodon and setting out to censor all mention of it. It's probably just a keyword or link that tends to co-appear with other, actually rule-breaking content, and some automated system has learned to block it.

Still, it does seem like the sort of thing that could get Facebook in trouble with a regulator if you squint at it.
Last I checked, self-hosted Firefox sync uses Python 2.7, with dead GitHub activity. Not quite the best state for Firefox sync.
One of the biggest mistakes I made is not exploring spot instances and reserved instances earlier.

I cut my bill by 70-80%% after paying full price for years...

If you have an active web server or backend workers with fairly short jobs, spot instances will work for you.
This is semantics. Taking just heart disease as an example, all of the types that you mentioned are heavily influenced by the same types of behaviors. Smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, etc. I addressed this in another comment elsewhere in the thread.
I've previously used Medium to post articles I wrote, and decided to move my blog to Hugo about two years ago, and I definitely love it.
One can dream. That's still free.
I know a lot of devs that don't even type with 5 fingers, you are apparently well trained with your keyboard and you take a X3 hit.
It's not a whataboutism, it's pointing out that with one of the most popular proposed solutions to misinformation, censorship, the cure is worse than the disease.
Communes emerge regularly in history as movements. But very few survive inter-generational transfer —- from California to the Negev. A bunch of kids whose parents all wanted to do something may find they have very little in common. The most successful of them face this head-on with traditions like Rumspringa, but nobody had been able to do it without a religious core. God knows, enough communists have tried.
Oh man this explains so many issues I have had with archive.is, I couldn’t pinpoint the problem. Thanks for sharing this, things finally make sense now.
> Yes Minister and the follow up series Yes Prime Minister are the most rewtchable TV shows I've ever seen.

It had a brilliant and ideologically diverse writing team meaning no side was singled out. The principal actors were comedy geniuses. Plus, the writers eventually revealed they had political insiders feeding them material [1]. Apparently similar things to the Arab embassy security room bar scene actually happened!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister
> we accidentally created an infinite event loop between two Lambdas. Racked up a several-hundred-thousand dollar bill in a couple of hours

May I ask how you dealt with this? Were you able to explain it to Amazon support and get some of these charges forgiven? Also, how would you recommend monitoring for this type of issue with Lambda?

Btw, this reminds me a lot of one of my own early career screw-ups, where I had a batch job uploading images that was set up with unlimited retries. It failed halfway through, and the unlimited retries caused it to upload the same three images 100,000 times each. We emailed Cloudinary, the image CDN we were using, and they graciously forgave the costs we had incurred for my mistake.
>I'd be surprised if a similar event in another country was not covered by world news outlets.

Well, I haven't really heard of the 2nd and 3rd one (though hard to compare) on the list and I doubt they've gotten even 1% of the coverage.
Highly doubt it: vegans won't change their behavior and unrestricted meat eaters won't start eating even more meat. There's hardly anybody in between. Yes, theoretically less people might turn vegan afterwards, but how many vegans have become vegan because of methane?
Privacy isn't even the main reason I use Firefox, if that was all I cared about, I'd use brave or ungoogled chromium with privacy extensions and settings.

I use it because I like it a little bit more than chrome. And because I don't want google to completely control the browser market. But the more firefox becomes like chrome, the less reason I have to continue using it.

And despite what Mozilla thinks and wants, I don't think most Firefox users care that much about privacy. I suspect most Firefox users use it because their tech saavy friend, relative, or IT administrator installed it for them and/or told them to use it. So losing core users also means using many other users in their sphere of influence.
And before Cygwin was relevant, we had X-Win32 and Hummingbird.
During COVID do public saunas require masks? Is that safe given the hot conditions? More generally what do sauna experienced people suggest we look for in selecting a place?
i thought github displayed latex? would be nice if this repo also included the mathematical symbols.

speaking of that, would be nice if github provided rendering of music notation :)
Apple's culture of secrecy used to be to just not talk about what you were working on and don't talk about vapor projects. There was a big thrill to keep things secret for MacWorld, WWDC, whatever. Things changed, social media and various websites created motivation for people to get whatever small satisfaction you get when you leak.

There was a big change after 9/11 of the overall security posture.
Internal security measures kept ramping up year after year as people started leaking. You used to be able to walk pretty much unhindered through all the buildings. Some lab areas would be locked, but things were open in general.

I never understood the leakers. They were usually caught and fired.
Peter Falk really was a fallen angel.
Wings of Desires
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2-26rb7S38
2 it shouldn’t, and doesn’t matter to the end user. If it sucks, it sucks.
I had to stop watching this when it caught up to the part I saw live. I live on the west coast, so I was sleeping when the first plane hit. My mom for some reason was still up from the night before and saw it on the news, so she called me and told me to turn on the TV.

I watched the second plane hit live on CNN. I then spent the rest of the day on my couch watching CNN. My girlfriend was sent home from work around noon and came to join me.

I remember the confusion as to what happened and no one knew if anything else would blow up.

But the other day I remember just as clearly was September 14th, 2001, because I flew on an airplane that day.

The Jewish Holidays were starting on Monday, and my dad and I were flying home together from the Bay Area to LA, and had a flight from Oakland to Burbank. We were told to get there four hours before our flight due to enhanced security, so we did.

The airport was empty. Every airline was offering full refunds to anyone who was scared to fly, and most people took them up on it. My dad and I figured a one hour flight within California probably wasn't going to be a target and decided to risk it.

There were national guardsmen all over the airport open-carrying rifles and handguns. After the metal detectors we had to do a full pat-down and have all of our carry on luggage fully inspected. But since the airport was nearly empty, we were through all of the security in about 10 minutes.

So we walked up to the airline counter to check in for our flight (back when you still had to check in in-person at the counter) and asked them if we could take an earlier flight. There happen to be one leaving in 15 minutes, and the lady thanked us for flying that day and put us on the flight. It was so empty we each had a row to ourselves.

Sept 14th, 2001. The best airport/flying experience I've ever had in my life.
This is a very good point. Excessive highlighting can be distracting by itself. I try to keep it to a minimal - colors that are close enough, as well as using bold so that the flow of reading isn't broken.

Also, avoid RGBi colors. They are horrible, period.
That's what he was doing?!??! (And yes, promotion is a big part of making a product)
Nvidia just requires installing one extra package... It hasn't been an issue for a while now.

The nvidia driver actually works very well... The amdgpu driver wprks well but still has issues with suspend/hibernate. I'd say they are about the same IMO.
I'm fighting Facebook by not participating. I implore the rest of you to do the same. As we leave, the folks remaining will have less reasons to stay. A trickle can turn in to a torrent. Don't worry about an alternative even, we'll find something new when we do, until then, a bit of a detox from the feed will do us good.
I will assert here that Pyramid will teach you more about software engineering than either Flask or Django.
Easy doesn't mean productive. My guess is that you take 2 to 3 times longer to time such sentence.
Design Principles: An Open Source Collection
That's only true if you're selling your platform as an alternative.
I can see the mask bans being useful to prevent crime. It’s hard to bring criminals to justice if their identities are hidden.
For anyone who doesn't consider themselves a conspiracy theorist, but who still wonders how the hell 9/11 could've possibly happened, I'd highly recommend the 2011 podcast episode "Who Is Rich Blee?" [1] and the documentary "9/11: Press for Truth" [2], both by Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy. They're both critical (as in thinking) without being unhinged -- no inside job shit, no controlled demolition stuff, no "plane was fake". Just a close look at the years and months leading up to 9/11, with some terrific interviews with major players (Richard Clarke, Bush's Counter-Terrorism "Czar"; Mark Rossini, the FBI agent assigned to the CIA's Bin Laden Issue Station who was prevented by the CIA from notifying the FBI that 2 of the 9/11 hijackers had multiple entry visas to the US and were planning to travel there).

The documentary's particularly interesting, as it follows the efforts of four New Jersey women who lost their husbands in the World Trade Center as they struggle to figure out what happened that day. I hadn't realized that a "9/11 Commission" hadn't been planned or even wanted by people in Washington, and that the victims' families had to make a stink to get one created.

[1] https://www.doubleasteriskmedia.com/rich-blee-podcast
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KhQXKJCJ5Q

[2] https://youtu.be/9KhQXKJCJ5Q
I don't know about the person you're replying to, but I'm still old school and don't integrate compiling with my editor; maybe some day it will use a language server and get that for free, but for now it's just language specific configuration that does an OK enough job. When I write a string and the rest of the screen is string colored, it quickly notifies me that I messed up something.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't quite clear. I didn't mean to imply that a bare setup leads to better productivity.

The point I was trying to make was that constantly playing around with your tooling (configs, plugins, etc.) leads to very marginal productivity gains at best, especially considering the significant amount of time many developers invest into it. This is based on my observations and thus purely anecdotal.

Pick the proper tools for the job at hand once, learn them. Make minor adjustments if absolutely necessary, but don't get obsessed with tweaking.

The true potentials for gains in productivity lie in many other areas IMO; organizational/social/collaboration matters in your org, actual engineering skills, and so on.
Does this in any fashion help pave the way to a more modern tax filing system whereby the government tells you what you owe without today's current labyrinthine filing process like other countries have had?
If iOS mobile web supported push notifications and permanent app links on the phone, I don't know if we would be asking this question.
VB wasn't really for xBase/FoxPro/Clipper etc users, Access and Visual FoxPro were for those - VB didn't even had database support until later versions and that was some grafted on minimal support.

Delphi was actually meant for the corporate apps you mean, even the name was a hint to it ("to talk to Oracle you go to Delphi" or something like that). It also came with much better database functionality than VB ever had.

Now because VB was wildly popular and easy to use and had Microsoft's name behind it (which was a big plus) it was used for internal corporate apps a lot, but that was a byproduct of VB being used a lot in general - during the turn of the century it was one of the most popular programming languages by far.
I've been thinking along the same lines, it seems like logic + ML would complement each other well. Acquiring trustworthy labeled data is "THE" problem in ML, and figuring out which predicates to string together is "THE" problem in logic programming, seems like a perfect match.

A logic program can produce a practically infinite number of perfectly consistent test cases for the ML model to learn from, and the ML model can predict which problem should be solved. I'd like to see a conversational interface that combines these two systems, ML generates logic statements and observes the results, repeat. That might help to keep it from going off the rails like a long GPT-3 session tends to do.
I'm not sure it's worse than misinformation. In my field, bad data often has a more damaging impact than no data.

But I suppose it will depend on the circumstances, and I'd honestly be interested to hear your thoughts on why censorship is worse.

As for the inevitability of abuse? When it comes to corporate interests, that seems to be nearly axiomatic. The Verge's list of fascinating & horrifying exchange at Apple about app approvals & secret deals makes for a great case-study in this. [0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/22611236/epic-v-apple-emails-projec...
My best boss operated out of complete humility, no agenda, and did everything the could to empower and support his subordinates.

He would sit and listen up to an hour or more just hearing about your life, with maybe only 5 minutes dedicated towards crisp work stuff. Just happy to just listen.

He left before 6 everyday, no matter what, always working 40 hrs a week.

He had a lot of tragedy is his life, and emphasized how work was a secondary concern to family and other kinds of fulfillment.

He never had big ambitions to make a splash. He taught me to be content with the craft, even our decades old code base had its own challenge and fun.

I didn’t care that I worked on not-cutting-edge work. Working in that group was some of the most fun I’d had my whole career.

He taught me that it’s often best to let go, be selfless, and don’t let the larger machinations of power brokers get to you. Really care for the people and relationships around you, and you’ll be rewarded in riches more valuable than money or professional prestige.
I’m on an iPhone 12 mini and half the page is horizontal scrolling and it jitters as I scroll down the page.
This part is interesting...

"We have fewer reviewers available right now because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak..."

That smells fishy. Seems like a job that would be a really good fit for work-from-home. Wouldn't you then have more reviewers available?

Or maybe the exposure to graphic content means they do this in the office?
You haven't seen how the moral imperative to stop the spread of that disease has been exaggerated well beyond practicality, and used to remove citizens' ability to consent to extremely profitable, taxpayer-funded medical experiments?

It's a pretty direct line from what you're saying, (a moral imperative to "be careful") to what governments around the world have been trampling over people rights in order to do, which is lock down society, don't leave your house, take the experimental shot under coercion, etc.

And the argument that destroys that propaganda is that it's prioritized not because it's effective in a utilitarian sense in saving lives, but because it's very effective in giving certain people a lot more power, at a great expense to the freedoms of other people.

Maybe you weren't trying to say that, but that's the reality of public discourse on this topic. The moral imperative your are advocating for has been unilaterally adopted by tyrants.

You should take responsibility for advocating a position that in effect removes people's rights. You won't do that, because you'll run from every confrontation that would show you this truth.
This is why https://play.golang.org/ has a simple layout with no highlight syntax :)

* based on Acme http://acme.cat-v.org/
I'm using it on Mac and have no complaints. Skype was a PITA, though.
JSON Vulnerability in Haskell's Aeson Library
I have also worked on a pre-syntax highlighting code base with strange conventions to make up for it.

I think my favourite was surrounding each mutex lock/unlock operation with lines of %-characters.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
mutex_lock(&mutex);
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Lovely.