skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's great news, but if it's not listed on the download page, people aren't going to know that.

> we don't have the computers necessary to test and distribute on those platforms

Even if hardware wasn't cheap and virtualization hasn't been readily accessible for over a decade, if you're constrained on hardware why are you focusing limited resources on packages for incredibly obscure linux distros? That are more difficult to develop on because a)they're not as high quality or stable and b)there are less support resources and documentation for them?

Re: OS X and Windows, cross-platform support is just going to be all the more painful later.
Well, Facebook is happy to keep cybercrime groups around even after being notified of them: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-... so it isn't that far-fetched.
> I actually do think the platforms do a whole lot for developers; far more than they get credit for, in my opinion.

I think the interesting question is not whether enormous monopolistic trillion-dollar corporations provide value to consumers. They clearly must provide some value or they wouldn't exist at all.

The real question is how much more value would consumers have in an alternate world where these anti-competitive practices were prohibited and these oligopolies were broken up into smaller competing companies?

Without a crystal ball, we can't answer that question with certainty, but we have to make educated guesses in order to have good judgement about the right way to govern the market.
> This is not some conspiracy. It's just a fact of life.

I disagree.

> Examples, image editors need to load new formats.

An image editor doesn't need to load new formats. An image editor just needs a library to convert to a format it can edit easier which almost always ends up being a bitmap of some sort.

That smells like a library. And that smells like not one library for _all_ image formats but instead one library for _each_ image format.

User wants to support the new copyright-compressed-image-video? Add a library. User doesn't want support for old-copyright-expired-and-is-now-public-domain-image-video? Don't update that library.

> Old computers didn't have cameras, now they do, many softwares would suck without support for them.

Nearly all softwares suck with support for them! Different features on the camera, different features in the software. What's needed is for software to just have a library to process an image stream and let the OS handle the camera...

> New input devices come out (mice, touch screens), software needs an update to support them.

What's new about mice that needs a software update? What's new about touch screens that needs a software update? These things haven't fundamentally changed in fifty years.

> Old old computers didn't have networking. Once networking exists plenty of software will be effectively obsolete if not updated to take advantagae

I disagree. Plenty of software shouldn't _need_ networking. That image editor? Yeah no it doesn't need networking. Your OS does though. Your OS should transparently provide any networking that you might need to edit an image on the network. Mount that network drive and your image editor should see it as if it's a local file. No update needed to the app.

> Old software was ASCII only, then the net connected us to the world and not all that old software needs to support full unicode.

Well yes but have you noticed how broken full unicode support often is? ASCII just worked.

> Old software didn't support useful rich copy and paste

And thank God for it. Rich copy and paste is a security nightmare and always ends up pasting junk and trash and vomit into something. I don't want rich copy and paste. How do I turn it off??!?!?!?!

> OSes realized they needed to put the user in control.

Hahahaha yeah... uhhh... no. Modern paid-for OSes (Windows, macOS, Android, et al) often take away more user control than they give. Dumb down the user interface so that they don't have to teach the user how things actually work and don't have to support that weird use case that the one power user used and most people wouldn't even understand. So take it away because it's just not worth the cost involved.
You plug your USB-C cable into your boyfriend?
There's something to that, in that even among successful Mexican immigrants, there seems to be a (relative) lack of leveraging that success into establishing businesses, or other investments that require long-term commitment.

Whether it's because of proximity, that so many come without family and/or plan on eventually returning home, or the related effect of so much of earnings getting sent back to Mexico every month, but there is definitely a cultural difference of some sort at play.
It's definitely not terrible — microUSB was so fragile that people replaced cables a lot more frequently. My point was simply that if you're talking about concrete, the waste is on a completely different timescale — Lightning cables are pretty durable but even a decade is ages in tech while buildings and sidewalks are expected to last an order of magnitude longer without outside damage.
As a web developer with 25 years of experience and (I thought) up to the minute skills ... I have no idea what any of that means but it sounds cool and important and I want to try it.
This might even be a good thing to force hyper urbanisation, can you imaging if the whole country is quickly forced to abandon rural living?
Everything is about money. If you yourself is middle class in a western country. Than you can sell your house buy a smaller one and buy back a few women that are now sold to slavery, or donate money to orgs that fight this, give me good reason why you do not do this?
The Rise of Mixed Precision Arithmetic (2015)
I especially love the drawings and the lettering. Modern graphics produced on computers are great, but as a culture we are losing the ability to produce graphics by hand.

Some time ago I think HN had links to New York Times graphics from the 1940's. Great stuff but I don't have the link.
No, it is useful to have a synchronized clock for some activities.
I'd also be surprised if the nsa and CIA don't do things like public internet web browsing inside disposable thin client/remote desktop virtual machines.
>It works as long as the decisions are wise, but nothing can be done if they are not.

Given how things are going here in the states, I'm not sure this is a problem limited to single party states.
Deep learning meets vector-symbolic AI
I wonder what Tier of captcha's the NSA gets.
The other thing about that statistic is that it is the change of a single near-Earth object hitting earth. And although they propose that equation we are still working on the 140m and above asteroids. There is an estimate based on what we have discovered but as the technology improves to find the harder to detect asteroids we are still finding them at a generally increasing rate each year [0].

[0] https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/site_140.html
This is patently false. Apple cannot "black-bag your entire digital existence".

Just stop using Apple devices. They're not the government.
Or use an adapter
Google is trash, and they don't even care if we know it at this point.
3D Image Slider Using HTML and CSS
When Covid Deaths Are Dismissed or Stigmatized, Grief Is Mixed with Shame, Anger
Okay, that'll be $10,000 per seat, per year, but to get that deal you'll have to reserve the first 100 years.

In advance, thanks for your understanding. We'll start breeding the support staff as soon as your check clears.
> This is the kind of thing that really makes me understand Brexit.

It seems a tad inconsistent to be against restrictions on imports but also for the kind of fallout that resulted from Brexit. That makes your understanding of Brexit seem incomplete.

And if you don't like price increases on Apple products, don't buy them. That's the only language they understand.
Are we thinking about the same thing? Amiga did not have a perfectly future-proof API. Such an invention would be the holy grail of API design.
Oliver Burkeman on the flaw with productivity geek thinking
TeX, certainly. Specialized fields have their own little masterworks (Leland Smith’s SCORE perhaps?) - but these are maybe more analogous to the great works of Victorian engineering like the Brooklyn Bridge or the SS Great Britain than they resemble a symphony or a great painting.
Why? What makes that documentary worth watching over all the news we might have heard already?
The point you’re missing is many of those home were bought as investments. No property tax makes them good stores of wealth, no carrying costs and my god a less risky investment than Chinese company equities.

Problem is that despite the urbanization potential that doesn’t mean the properties are correctly priced or that they’ll continue to go up.

I spent some time in another Asian country that has a per capita GDP 1/10th of the US, yet housing prices are comparable to the mid-west US and most are empty. Most are owned by the ultra rich and used to launder money. And I’m not talking prime location, these are basic apartments on the edge of the city going for $100,000USD or 30-40x average annual salaries. Unless GDP goes 3x no way those prices will hold.

It’s a massive bet on continued income growth and demand for real estate which is not a given, which Japan showed with its massive property bubble.
Perhaps if car accidents can't be stopped we should ban cars?

It is my opinion that the up side contribution to society from facebook outweighs the inevitable downsides.
I'd like to see positive clamping (perhaps by means of a mechanical camming action) rather than relying on the springiness of metal contacts, which inevitably degrades over time due to metal fatigue.
Regardless of whether PHP solved this particular problem, it also caused a lot of its own due to numerous security issues and documentation that encouraged unsafe use of libraries, until recently.
>Even better: clearly the market has proven that it's possible to offer these services with transparent pricing. Why can't hospitals keep pace?

1. You shouldn't be admitted to a hospital for those minor clear-cut procedures.
2. Hospitals receive public funds to offset the costs of some services.
3. Hospitals are required to provide certain services regardless of the customer's ability to pay.

>Lawyers have a predictable billable rate, personal physicians and doctors often don't.

Laywers will tell you their billable rate, and can give you a semi accurate estimate for simple services. For more complex services their estimates have enormous error bars.

>There's no reason why a hospital shouldn't be able to figure out the cost of minor anesthesia before a scheduled minor surgery. That's not a surprising part of the procedure, that should be something that's fully negotiated with insurance and disclosed to the patient beforehand so they can decide.

If you're talking about local anesthesia sure, but in that case you're unlikely to actually need to be admitted to a hospital unless it's an emergent condition. If you're talking about general anesthesia then there's a reason that an anesthesiologist or a CRNA with many years of training is required to be present.

> Yes, absolutely, you can find tons of stories online about people negotiating smaller bills because itemized bills turn out to include services that they never requested (and in some cases services that were never even actually performed).

Yes but do you have actual data that the benefits are worth the cost? Has it actually driven down health prices in the US overall? Was the additional complexity actually worth it?

>It's also absolutely worthwhile because you're seeing creative line items like $500 for aspirin that prove that the costs of the services aren't being based on market rates.

I think you're not understanding the point of this. You're not going to actually save money by declining to take an aspirin. Of course hospital services aren't based on market rates. Hospitals are required by law to offer certain services regardless of the ability of patients to pay, most patients are insulated from the actual costs through insurance, many patients have zero out of pocket costs, complex procedures are impossible to accurately estimate, and the free market has an inherent problem with extremely price inelastic services.

It's not a free market, and unless we are willing to make drastic changes to society, it never will be. Pricing transparency for hospital commodities is such an insignificant part of health care costs that it's a gigantic waste of everyone's time.
Don't ask me, ask the parent comment poster.
> If humanity survives to 2121, there are going to be some amazing games.

This would make a great Ask HN: which computer games of today might be remembered in 100 years? Or: which genres have the best chances for a 100+ year lifespan.

I think I realized just now that we really do live in a time where games as cultural artefacts are stepping into the shoes of books. Wow.

I've never been much of a gamer, but, uh, who knows, maybe my grand-grand-whatever-children of 2100 would also enjoy the first parts of Leisure Suit Larry? [1] It did tackle universal human problems, after all.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry_in_the_Land...
Why would you adjust the price by the GDP? When people ask if a product costs more in a different country they don’t mean relative to the countries industrial output. Median income might be a better ratio for this but GDP makes little sense.
> Agreed. Skimming Humbird's analysis, he mentions concentrations of catabolites as a significant limit on cell density, and points out that their removal is usually the job of the kidneys. To me that immediately raised the question of how to design an artificial kidney-like structure that can also live in solution. Similarly, the cleanroom conditions are very difficult to sustain, but what if we could engineer a replacement for the immune system to police the reactors?

But then you're talking about re-engineering complex animal life, which is nowhere close to happening any time soon. Plus once you add those systems back in, you may loose most of the energy savings that make "lab grown meat" look attractive. This comment when into more detail and did some back of the envelope calculations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28623349.

> Speaking as someone who eats meat regularly, it's mostly a matter of conditioning. I don't think I would have independently invented the idea of killing and consuming an animal if other's hadn't taught it to me.

To be fair, you're a human: you had to learn all your survival skills. You wouldn't have independently invented the idea of eating plants either, let alone picking the ones that would give you a nutritionally complete diet without poisoning you.
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait don't have strong enough governments?
I would not be surprised if Epic launched a phone to compete with Apple.

Epic partners with Tencent in China for games. Tencent sells a "gamer phone", the Black Shark.[1] 90Hz display, liquid cooled.
All Epic needs to do is offer that in the US. With a bit of marketing effort, Epic could make their phone the one the cool middle school kids want. Instead of one of those slow Apple old-people phones.

[1] https://www.gizchina.com/2020/03/03/tencent-black-shark-3-an...
What's the catch? Does the fuel cost $10 a gallon?
> Cyberpunk novels were set in the high tech Chiba City, a district of Tokyo famous for it's gadget shops

Neuromancer is the only novel set in Chiba. Chiba is not famous for any gadget shops, it's an industrial and port town, which is most likely why it's the setting of the opening of Neuromancer - the protagonist is an outsider, down on his luck, living in a pretty shitty place.
I am definitely missing the point of allowing nonfunctional drugs to be sold and advertised as curing anything. What keeps me from selling magic molecule pills and advertising that they are approved for safety and in trials to cure cancer? And even if you disallow advertisements for drugs not yet proven effective, what's to stop my magic molecule pills from going viral and making me a whole lot of money on something I know is extremely unlikely to treat any disease, because I literally put a random inert molecule in there?
1. Toxins over large timescales.(also I’m assuming they aren’t the only thing in the landfill) Most modern plastics won’t leech toxins onto your food in the short time it takes from field to fridge. However microplastics are a concern and they do end up on fruit and vegetables that are in plastic packaging. The amount of course varies.(factors such as type of plastic, temperature, friction, shipping method all impact this) The study of microplastics on human health is quite young but initial results don’t paint a pretty picture.

2. Good point! Errors in foundations or any permeable gaps can still cause leachate to escape. There is also the concern of gases escaping during the lifetime of landfills as well.

You also have an issue of land usage. We have a limited amount of land and that amount is expected to decrease as sea levels rise. I think landfills don’t provide much bang for buck in terms of land value as opposed farms, parks, (I’ve heard of landfills being turned into parks but we still have the concerns of low to moderate containments in the surrounding soil) nuclear/solar/wind farms (although luckily you can still use landfills for these since contact with the public would be minimal), and wildlife habitats. Any ban on plastics, even if it reduces the waste going to landfills by a tiny or fractional amount. Sounds like a win to me
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28626592.
Can New Species Evolve from Cancers? (2019)
>> doing it at point of sale would be far more fuss

One of the reasons why I oppose VAT style taxation

Each citizen should at minimum see on a itemized bill the amount of money the government is collecting from them, IMO each citizen should be forced to write out a check to every government entity that needs to collect money

Automated, and hidden taxes is one of the reason the government can actually steal errrr collect as much money as it does, because if people had to pay their taxes like they do their utility bill there would be continual protests in the streets
And glitter nail polish :)
I've been preaching safety thru adblocking for 15 years. I had locations that went from multiple infections per week to zero over 6 months - after implementing edge blocking (DNS & Squid).
It's a good thing that they discovered the posts. It's a messed up world up here, and we still don't know how many of those slaves will be sold in other platforms that haven't been caught yet.
FYI those are all valid concerns, but even recent Teslas have the age-old 12V lead-acid battery!
Suggestion: take the time to package this up for PyPI as something people can install using "pip install" (or "pipx install").

This is hard the first time you do it, but worth learning because it's a really great way to distribute your Python software.

I'm giving a talk about how to do this at PyGotham next month, but the notes from that talk are already available and may be useful to you: https://github.com/simonw/pygotham-packaging

You may also find this cookiecutter template that I use to build and package Python CLI apps helpful: https://github.com/simonw/click-app
I really love Clojure--it's a joy to use but, you're right.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this project but it seems like abstractions on top of abstractions and has little to do with being a "web language". That was PHP, for better or for worse.
All tamper-evident devices can be defeated by a sophisticated attacker with physical access.

https://www.slideshare.net/MichaudEric/how-to-steal-a-nuclea...
Wikipedia has something on past cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising#History
Schumer and Yellen say agreement reached on paying for economic bill
> Yes, fuel as coolant worked at around mach 3, but at mach 4+ the kerosene itself may not not be energetic enough to both sink heat, and produce more energy than the energy of incoming airflow.

The blackbird did not use kerosene, it used JP7, specially designed for high range of operation as well as being usable for cooling and hydraulics.

> JP-7 is unusual in that it is not a conventional distillate fuel, but is created from special blending stocks in order to have very low (<3%) concentration of highly volatile components like benzene or toluene, and almost no sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen impurities.

JP-7 is famously hard to ignite, the blackbird needed TEB shots to start ignition, and was initially started by driving the engines with a starter cart composed of paired V8s (later replaced with a smaller and simpler compressed-air starter).

The Waverider used the same fuel, and fuel-cooling, and reached Mach 5.1.
I shove my entire home network's DNS thru pihole, cannot imagine life without it.
Your missing the point as well. Different people are on different schedules. My dad used to work third shift - I couldn't call him at 2pm because he would be asleep.

Most people are up at 2pm, but there are enough exceptions that you shouldn't assume it is a safe time to call for non-emergencies.
Most animals are dehuman after all.
Plastic production has pretty high GHG emissions. I think it's higher than glass for comparable bottles, though I'm not sure about that.

But people arguing about landfills are just idiots. Put it in a secure landfill in some geologically stable desert and stop worrying if that's really a problem.
Tools generally don't, I know they have added some antivibration stuff to hammers but an old hammer still works.

As far as socket sets and crow bars go I can't think of a new feature that happened in my life time.

For screw drivers the biggest change is companies keep inventing new heads for security by obscurity reasons, not better performance.
Please report back when you solve it!
The Not-So-Special Relationship
We do. Human consumption of microplastics :)
Yep. Somewhere a long the line running executables arbitrary third parties sent you became common practice instead of something you warn people not to do.
Unpopular opinion but... most of them are more than good enough. .net with C#, java (though I'd probably use kotlin), typescript, and go are the most popular ones and they will all do whatever you need with pretty great performance if written correctly.

I'd do a simple CRUD app in all 4 of them and see which one I liked best from tooling to language design.
I accepted the correction from others here in accordance with a site guideline about this exact scenario:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I was unable to come up with a good faith and plausible interpretation; others found one that I'd missed, and thus I retracted my objection. The author apparently later confirmed their interpretation, but that was not factored into my retraction, and is not relevant to the guideline I'm trying to adhere to.

To your comment about "disingenuous", I've spent most of my life being misunderstood for making perfectly logical statements that other people decided were some sort of slander instead of trying to understand in good faith given the context that I'm a nerd with social disorders. So I'd prefer to avoid being upset with someone else over a misinterpretation when I wish others would be less upset with me about them.
"Which of the following statements did Merkel make to Putin in email or phone conversations last week?"
I did do this with no script and just allow websites I trust but it is a massive chore to keep everything working that I've given up