skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh wow, well I guess that explains the behavioral pattern and similarity.
Reading the article, I don't think they have established that the _mirror_ was Aztec, only that the raw material came from a place then under Aztec control. E.g. it could have been from a chunk of obsidian someone picked up in meso-America, or that was otherwise traded and transported to Europe.
Say “No” to Smoke Detectors
Yes and no. Yes, coal and other fossil fuels would be far more important to phase out in general than nuclear.

But the problem with the German nuclear plants is that they are old, old builds with old tech, and way past their expiration dates, even with the constant upgrades they received over the years. Every inspection in the last decade raised serious "wtf" moments (and inspections are rather lax and even more so before Fukushima). Nuclear can be reasonably safe if you take the time and money to make it so and don't build them in earthquake alley, but these particular ones stopped being safe a decade or more ago.

So you either have to spend serious coin (billions) to modernize the still existing ones, all the while you take them off grid for extended periods of time, or you have to spend serious coin (billions) to build new ones, which will take you like a decade before they go into production anyway. Nuclear is too expensive, frankly. Renewables today are already cheaper, if you also account for all direct, indirect and hidden subsidies each receives.

New or upgraded nuclear is not seen favorable by most (according to polls) Germans, me included. I'd rather see that money go to installing renewables capacity instead, and investing into renewables tech research.

But sure, if we actually had new-ish and safe reactors that could be safely operated for another 10 or 20 or whatever years, I'd personally say: go for it, keep them running for that time instead of coal and gas plants.
One of these things doesn't negate or excuse the other; both can happen at the same time. You're engaging in "whataboutism".
I think technically a URL/URI is only supposed to contain ASCII characters, and certain things that expect URL input will want ASCII only. However, all modern browsers can convert from Unicode to punycode (in the domain name) and percent-encoding (in the path). So I don't really understand why browsers only let you copy the percent-encoded form easily.
I've seen a few movies where they tried to pass off Vancouver as New York. No offense to Vancouver but who do they think they're fooling?
With rising temperature it might be a good idea to put solar on metal trusses over fields and annihilate almost no land. Helps with soil erosion, hail and saves irrigation.
>99% of nursing jobs survived, though
5G Technology Begins to Expand Beyond Smartphones
This was admittedly a while ago (2012 or so) but when I was in grad school, I would often challenge other people in my Distributed Systems lab to compare their Hadoop jobs against just running a batch job on a single system (without the Hadoop overhead etc, just sequential). More often than not, the threshold for "when does this actually make sense" was much larger than they'd expected.

And then [1] came out and disappointed some people. By that time I was mostly out of the lab and just doing minor thesis edits, but when I brought it to our weekly reading group the discussion was... animated.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos...
>>“This surge is nothing like anything we’ve ever seen,” the THA said. “Hospitals are doing everything in their power to figure this out. Staffing is a critical issue and this spike is unsustainable without help. Many hospitals have already idled non-essential services and are offering bonuses and incentive pay just to keep staff.”

THA is Texas Hospital Association. It is kind of absurd reading this because the nation as a whole has been short on nurses for years and its been well forecasted as a problem for some time. Add on top of it a pandemic that is treated as a political problem, at this point a very clear problem with burnout and working conditions, and this little piece of fluff just becomes absurd.
To this day, HAL 9000 "Logic Memory Center" room is one of my favorite scenes from cinema, not only because being one of the more tense parts of the movie but the art direction.

It's amazing how modern and cleans looks even today, and the execution of graphic/industrial design (including typography) it's still one of the best out there.

I mean, I would love a NAS where you eject a caddy with a front glass glowing ID. Would be more expensive, but HDD industry it's full of "pretty hardware" that could be cheaper, but looks cool.
Keep in mind that this article was posted 4 years ago, and if the butthurt author had actually exercised his $4K worth of options, he would be a millionaire now.
Yes, I believe EAC has recently introduced opt-in support for Linux compatible modules.

I don't think I've seen any developer using EAC outright poo-poo the possibility so far, so that's somewhat encouraging...
Wonderful essay.

Tangentially, I found this interesting:

> There were 100 or more people in the audience, which should have been unnerving and intimidating, but I felt fearless and entirely at home. I felt safe on stage and I always have since.

I've played music my whole life, but have always suffered from stage fright. Every trumpet solo assigned to me in band was a panic-inducing punishment. My best friend commented to me after one performance for the whole school: "Hey, this time it wasn't so bad!" (my shaking). Even now, as an adult, I recently dove back into the fray pre-pandemic and played with some people at work in front of co-workers... and after the performance I packed up my instrument and left without looking any of my bandmates in the eye. The shakes grabbed hold about 30 seconds into the performance, and stayed till the end.

All this to say: the concept of feeling "safe" on stage, is just inconceivable to me. The stage is probably where I feel least safe in all the world.

and, these days, going before executive reviews at work is my recurring stage :-(
Employment threatening mandates are fucking stupid policy when it hits already overburdened critical industries.

Then they give us more policy theater like this - it'd be hard to do worse at governing than this current batch of morons. Both teams, BTW - they're all incomprehensibly awful at running things.
Reminds me of when George W Bush changed the dates for Daylight Saving Time to help with high energy prices. Completely worthless but it did make a bunch of work for IT folks.
>99% of nursing jobs survived the mandates, though
Like many energy things, this is a money question, not a technology question. (There are functioning breeder reactors today, but they cost more.)

If it was important enough we could do it. The government could also mandate it, and we could feed them all the existing nuclear waste.
100% this. Coming from someone who made one myself :p if everyone had to do it to cheat, cheating would be OVER at a casual level, and a minor issue at semipros/pros (even irl tourneys can be hacked! see forsaken).
That's a bad "extra".

My advice to junior engineers is "take one step extra".

Write that test that you should have written. Cover that one edge case you know you blew off. Write that cleaner error message that you should have done in the first place. Pick off a single "FIXME" in the code. Write that comment explaining "why" you just wrote the code this way.

The "one step" is the important part. Everybody can take "one step" with just a little effort. But "one step" compounds.

Eventually, that "one step extra" becomes your normal and the next "one step" is a little further. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Suddenly, your "one step" is stacked on "10 steps" that are now habitual. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Suddenly your stackup is now "20 steps". Etc.

And, suddenly, a couple years later, you find that you are much better at what you do than practically everybody around you.
It is. If you want a more accurate analogy, it's like getting into a cab and asking to go to Morton's Meats and the cab driver saying "are you sure? I know this really great place called Shelley's Steaks that's better and cheaper! What do you say?" and then you get to make a call as to whether to trust the cab driver (google) has your best interests at heart or not, and whether to go where you originally wanted or to where you were recommended.

This happens in real life all the time. Cab drivers get kick backs from specific places they have relationships with if they deliver people there, so you have to wonder whether they're actually recommending a better place for you or a better place for them, just like you do with Google.

And yes, I've been referred to a place by a cab driver when asking for a recommendation and found it didn't actually serve my needs at all, and in retrospect it was obvious from the conversation I was steered there without care for what I really wanted.
I agree with this completely.

I've been in situations where proof of what happened was badly needed.
John McDonald did a talk at GDC 2018 about how Valve was starting to integrate deep learning into their server-side cheat detection.

IIRC, some of the process was automated, some was player-reported, and some was done through human review. As a gamer averse to both cheating and spyware, I found this very appealing. I wonder how their systems have evolved since then.

The original youtube clip (v=ObhK8lUfIlc) has been made private, but I think this is a copy of the same video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiP0zKF9bc
The issue with trying to make an argument that religion has no mechanism for change is that religions have and continue to change. So whether the mechanism is a priest, a turtle's dream, or if it's because of evidence is largely irrelevant. Religion does change.
Some politicians are bulletproof to "name and shame", their supporters will even blank out or excuse away that they did something shameful...

Because if those supporters admit (ultimately to themselves) that the people they voted for were cheap scammers, how does that look on their self-belief that they're intelligent people? They'd rather twist reality to not shatter said self-belief.
It's not a leaky abstraction, because it doesn't make any promises about performance. If you still call it a "leaky abstraction" then _every_ abstraction is leaky and we can simply alias "leaky abstraction" to "abstraction" and move on.
Ulam was very famous (at least among nerds) and extremely impactful on the real world, maybe not entirely in a good way (keywords: "Teller Ulam"). The book was very good. I didn't know til just now that there was a movie. I read the book quite a few years ago so when I saw the headline, I tried to remember what unsung scientist(s) Ulam might have written about in it, that would help us remember them. Imagine my surprise on clicking the link, that the unsung scientist was Ulam himself. Ulam was great, but quite well known, even if there aren't any literal songs about him.

Added: I can only think of one really "sung" mathematician: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lf1mB8OZeg
Maybe they can mint 350 million trillion dollar coins and give one to every citizen... then we'd all be trillionaires, and all our problems will go away! /s
Setting all the recent issues aside, I remember a time when I would always check Southwest Airlines for flight options before any other airline and they’d often win my business. For the last ~5 years I don’t even bother. Their prices are at best the same as all the other major airlines (just as likely to be more expensive) and their flight schedules are just okay. I don’t understand how Southwest is maintaining market share (perhaps it’s not).
People underestimate how much work it takes to create a successful language. Creating a language is easy (I have created plenty just for fun). Especially with LLVM available. The hard part (99% of the work) is the rest. Libraries, documentation, standards etc. The language environment/libraries/documentation is much more important for developer productivity than the language itself.
Unfortunately our current political system selects for sociopathy rather than competency.
and we got dr. horrible
From using ZFS since ~2008, I have only ever lost one ZFS pool, and it was due to lack of scrubs (the array was created on a FreeBSD version before ZFS was integral to the installer, and despite upgrades the nightly scripts just never got overwritten, so the array was never scrubbed).

I can't say I've never lost an ext4 partition either, but I've never lost one under normal use without some sort of weird hardware issue causing data corruption.

By definition, without a redundant copy of the data the scrub can't fix anything.

> Creating a pool with no redundancy is not recommended...

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E36219/storage-4.h...
It always seemed risky that it was a singular $22B contract awarded to Microsoft, rather than ~$50m chunks like other governments often do.
downvote-fests

HN doesn’t work like that (technically). Unlike on standard forums, a comment can only get -4 and the next upvote starts at that, preventing the “oblivion” state. If a comment doesn’t take off the gray area, that means it really has zero support.
The union and company are merely denying that they have done anything illegal. Not surprising. Pilots strikes have to be approved by the National Mediation Board. Any job actions including sick outs are very illegal. The last time a major airline had a strike authorized it lasted for 24 minutes before they were ordered back to work by President Clinton.
The media have done an atrocious job covering this story. Gell-Mann amnesia is in full effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Mediation_Board

The first 7 minutes of this video are very relevant to the Southwest situation.

Your Pilot Career and Scope Clauses -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XYpZg0SPCE
And the new languages created by companies will end up having big flaws as well, if they ever become popular enough (because of the increased demands for more kitchen sink features).
Didn't drill into the details here, but I think there's one area where digital advertising is indisputably useful: the cold start. So many start ups have benefitted hugely from buying Facebook/Twitter/Google ads when they hit that point where all their friends, investors and employees are already using the app, and they've maybe to got a handful of organic users, but how do they get from a few dozen to a few thousand users?

This is really the sweet spot for digital advertising. The cost is low, both because you don't need that many new users to make a huge difference, and because the volume is so low that the targeting works really, really well, and conversion rates are really high. For a more established business, sure, you're getting people that would have bought anyway. But in this case, you're getting people that would have bought if they knew you existed, which they don't.
This has some advantages-- it's numerically precise and can be more flexible, but it has some downsides over the suggested approach.

- The quantization of the graphs is a feature to add some tolerance to the tests. I admit this is a mixed blessing.

- This is a lot more opaque to someone looking at a text file of the test output than what is described in the post.
> If you look at the itch.io section there are a lot of games made with this engine. ... The sheer volume of creative content produced is amazing.

Looks like nearly 100. https://itch.io/c/790679/adventuron-games
Heatmaps Are Shit
Visualised aggregations of click activity are a low effort, low signal waste of time and best avoided in favour of actual research
VACnet catches the spinbotters and aimbotters! Actually really good at it too; everyone who did that now just cheats less hard.

The biggest problem was: It didn't auto ban, just sent to overwatch (players watch a past game and vote for cheater or not, fully anonymized). This resulted in a massive clog when some guys I knew generated around 10k free steam accounts (with $3.5 of proxies), began queueing a few dozen at a time, rage cheating. A hell of a lot of games can be botted with free accounts and a beefy (server IIRC) rig; I think he told me he had about 100 accounts running normally in 10 separate Competitive games all against his own bots(rendering at 2x2 resolution so it ran okay, with cheats injected). They all got sent to overwatch but because so many games were being put through overwatch, the queue got overloaded.

This is called Vertigo boosting, because the bots all queued for Vertigo, an unpopular map, to increase odds that only their own bots would be in the game (and, coincidentally, minimize collateral damage to legitimate players). (though it's normally to rank up accounts, not to spam ow queue)

Hi eso :p
I don't know that it's not valuable! It's a good bug, from what I understand of it. The issue here is subtle.

It's not that bugs of all stripes don't have plausible value. It's that there isn't a market for most of them. Bugs are small parts of the enterprises that exploit them. To purchase a bug for significant amounts of money, it has to slot into some kind of business process that will profitably† take advantage of it.

What people are subtextually observing with these $250k vulnerabilities is that there are a bunch of well-scripted playbooks for profiting from RCE vulnerabilities on widely distributed, unevenly patched devices. There may be no meaningful cap to how much a phone RCE is worth, since the IC's alternative to RCEs is human intelligence work that will dwarf any RCE cost just in health and benefits overhead for personnel.

But there just aren't a lot of business processes that profitably exploit stolen contact lists from malicious application installs. You can come up with lots of stories about those processes, but the key thing is that for a bug to be worth a bunch of money, that process already has to exist and be working; the cost of building all the business process stuff around the bug will rival the cost of the bug itself. Bugs have finite lifespans, and "snarf contacts from malicious app" bugs are idiosyncratic, and tend not to be pin compatible with a steady stream of similar bugs that would justify keeping that exploitative process up and running.

This is for what it's worth all my own personal weird theory of the situation, and I don't sell or buy bugs. But I have repeated the theory to many people who do either or both, and nobody has told me I'm totally wrong about it.

† For some possibly non-economic definition of "profitably"
While I'm big on lookup tables for jobs like this, I'd have reached for bitmasks long before that polynomial...
>I expect that it meant a lot to Shatner. That man has spent a significant portion of his life imitating a spacefaring version of humanity.

Also a cool cop, a demented but brilliant republican lawyer, and other things besides. I think he always considered the Star Trek thing a little silly, kind of like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqb4V9GxaBo
Sometimes when shooting on location with permits to close city streets and the like there are heavy costs to running over the schedule. Or in some cases it's not possible at all. They might also be using expensive rental equipment which has to be returned by a certain time. So it can be cheaper to just force everyone to work through lunch and pay the overtime.

(I don't think abusing workers that way is justified just to save a buck and I hope the union members achieve their goals.)
Forget micros, even if nano came after milli, it's still 3 orders of magnitude!
>You could get the same predictive quality with a simple gaussian blur of the "historical accidents" plots (road segmentation included), it seems.

I worked on a project like this for an insurance-oriented hackathon

We created a heatmap from readily available historical data adjusted for traffic density, and played a sound on a mobile device when approaching "hotspots".

For extra "wow" points we actually had someone drive out in my car and tracked them live as they drove around the location of the event, with hotspots showing up at places like where a blind entrance to the parking garage intersected with the road
State of Embedding in Gecko (2016)
Well, I'll take that guy's system over mine for sure.

However....!

For those unfamiliar with the hobby I'd like to mention something, however: you can have an objectively very good system for not too much money.

The research of (among others) Dr. Floyd Toole (formerly of Harman International) makes a very persuasive case that the "best" audio system is simply one that reproduces the input signal accurately, both on- and off-axis. There's no secret sauce, really. It's all in the measurements.

This can be achieved rather affordably. Monitors from JBL (a Harman company) and Kali (former Harman engineers) such as the JBL 305/306/308 and competing models from Kali were built around these principles and accomplish this starting at prices of several hundred $USD.

While formerly "audiophiles" were associated with snake oil and unlimited budgets, there are growing legions of those who subscribe to a more objectivist take on the hobby.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com (I have no affiliation) is one place to find such reviews and discussions.

I'm not an expert but have been in the hobby for a while and would be happy to answer questions if anybody's had interest in the hobby but hasn't known where/how to get started.
Plenty of classrooms they can dump the tech into. For $22B you could strap a grenade on a million high performance drones and let the kids win any war from their classroom.
Airlines, especially post-deregulation, operate on razor thin margins.
They win (won) my business chiefly because of checked bag policy. Even with 2 free checked bags, their prices are competitive. I do hope they recover from this mess.
Faceit is really good for an anticheat. It's just that the skill floor is too high to encapsulate casual users, otherwise it would probably kill matchmaking. Cheats cost $60+ and cheat providers get killed often by detection waves
Things weren't so nice in Windows before Microsoft added VT control sequences to Windows 10. Before then, if you wanted to draw fancy stuff in a console window, you had to call a synchronous out-of-band IPC API to conhost.exe. I don't know how PowerShell did it specifically, but you'd need to make the same sequence of slow IPC calls to draw the progress bar even if you did buffer them.
This, I think, is the pitfall of doing your own thing. When I was younger I did a lot of extra and I suppose it went fine. I did expand our features and I added more functionality and sometimes it ended up being useful. But the truth is that I'm not a strong enough engineer to see what extra I could do that would consistently add value.

I think a lot of people who find success in doing extra are either lucky or at a level above most engineers. I think a lot of the horror stories that you find on dailyWTF and other sites are the result of less skilled (or more isolated) engineers doing extra in a way that makes sense to them. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it - but I wait longer and am more cautious when I do it now. I think it's more helpful overall.
I never knew.
I understand it can be done, but then many Android apps can't be run anymore. It's not a viable alternative for many users.
In this future use case, is coal plant really evil, or acceptable?
I'd like to know as well. and I mean the serious ones, not the sideproject-lets-learn-ast-and-compilers stuff.

my guess of general case is to solve quirks in other languages. but seems to me overcoming quirks is more cost effective than creating entirely new language with new quirks only you know about.