skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reusable rockets weren't practical either. But someone was maverick enough to attempt it anyways. [1]

You provide valuable information but I just hate how you succumb to easy thinking, an appeal to tradition [2]: "well it hadn't been done then so it can't possibly be done now." It's a form of anachronistic gatekeeping. It doesn't belong in the age we currently reside in.

We have totally different computational abilities today, powerful beyond reason. Our hardware is smaller and better performing. We can perform digital simulations billions of times before we even execute one physical experiment.

I've seen the same attitude with age-old mathematics problems and it makes even less sense in that domain. The ability to perform computational experiments that our predecessors couldn't, changes the viability of almost every unsolved problem.

Boston Dynamics would have never created Atlas or Spot if they clung to common tropes about robots. And now, due to battery technology, the once tethered robots are dexterously mobile. [2]

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/10/05/how-much-cheaper-a...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition

[3] https://youtu.be/tF4DML7FIWk
I don't know about the other books off the top of my head, but Count of Monte Cristo and Dumas' other works were published as serials in a newspaper, where I'm pretty sure he was paid per word. Such a system really encourages going into detail with things that are not exactly relevant to the plot :)

(I love all of Dumas' works)
Desktop...
> Which is why I refuse to travel outside of the Schengen area. Even if I'd really like to visit the US one day once corona passes, there is absolutely no way I'll consent to essentially a digital striptease search with orifice controls.

Same here. I am curious about the USA but after reading and hearing a bunch of stories... really, no thanks. I know chances are slim but I still don't want to risk it.

> No wonder, given that...

Yeah. USA has a really strong propaganda system and it's a shame that even on HN, where people should be more critical thinkers, this is not widely recognized.
Become really famous (or infamous) so you don't have to host anything. Others will do it for you. Think about all the people you know who existed 500+ years ago. Did we just happen to find a book/stone where they wrote their story ? It was more about what they did that created history. So, create history and you will be hosted for ever. Think of names like Julius Caeser etc.
You're being unnecessarily negative here. You're claiming that the system is broken wherever it could possibly be broken as evidenced by...your own paranoia.

If you want to suggest an alternative, you have a captive audience including myself. Otherwise you're just fearmongering to fearmonger.
Bogus how? Sources?

> Nowhere in this article can you conclude that APPLE specifically opposes this bill BECAUSE of the climate change clauses in it.

That is a lot of caps.

Apple gives money to group A. Group A opposes a bill that contains environmental provisions. Apple will not refute the actions of group A.

Who cares if group A says their objection is for other reasons. They are still trying to sink a bill with environmental provisions while saying they are in favour of said bills. Apple can't have it both ways.
you don’t have an eureka moment and build a perfectly functional android from scratch. this is a necessary step towards a better-than-human arm
My understanding is that in "queer theory" gender is 100% socially constructed. This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. It is hard to have feminism if you don't have "women". This seems to be at the core of the "terf" conflict.

Ironically in critical race theory race is also socially constructed but racism forces race on people and therefore you must defeat racism before you can get to socially constructed race.

This all quite complex so apologies if I didn't get that quite right.
You can't make this up:

"you can post “Truths” (aka tweets), “Re-Truths” (retweets), and there’s also a “Truth Feed” (Twitter feed).

I mean what kind of people buy this? Just because you say something doesn't mean it is "truth".

When you say something and then add "this is true" that doesn't really add much to your statement -- except it implies you don't usually speak the truth.
Good readings for getting up to speed on methane
Many states already have usury laws which limit interest rates but in practice that doesn't give labor any more power relative to capital. Lowering limits on interest rates would just result in capitalists ceasing lending to risky businesses.

A better solution would be to increase taxes on income from interest and capital, and use that funding for education and social services.
John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset
The Trabant - a classic example of cheap East German engineering. Woefully crash 'un'resistant, and a body made of cotton.

Guy in my state on YouTube has one and takes it to car shows, or used to. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhpIgM6TpwA)
"tac" or "tik"? ? Client for AOL Instant Messenger? I used the console version on a Mac SE 30 running BSD, and shared a serial tty w/ brother at the same time. Had to use a readline wrapper for it, but it worked great!

http://users.tmok.com/~smike/
I see this recurring theme in things I read from places like Jacobin and other socialist leaning places, they seem to completely ignore the middle and upper-middle class.

In every argument, there seems to be only two groups of people. The "slaves" working their 9-5 jobs making minimum wage and barely getting by, and the uber-rich like Bezos, Gates, etc.

What they never say is there are tons of millionaires, they didn't have spectacular jobs, they drive regular cars and live in regular houses. They just saved for years and years and now they have a nest egg that's worth 7 figures.

I get why no one talks about them, when you talk about the "millionaires and billionaires", you immediately think of a Bezos type, vacationing on their yacht. You don't think about the husband and wife that both drive Camry's and live in a nice suburban home with a net worth of close to $5M because they invested and saved their whole life.
Lots of folks are asking questions in that vein:

* https://aeon.co/essays/does-philosophy-still-need-mathematic...

Do imaginary numbers exist? They used to be seen as "as fictitious or useless" until Euler came along:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_number

What about octonions in the present day?

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17575585

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octonion

It's kind of hard to tell what idea will lead where.
That would fit in describing the action, but I'm trying to get at the mindset of these people. The kind of self-righteous, belligerent, insolent, and 'we are completely innocent and have no culpability whatsoever because you made us do this' attitude I'm seeing. I can jot down synonyms for hours but I still don't feel like this truly captures and categorizes what we are seeing here. Maybe I'm asking for too much, but I feel like this can be described with a single word instead of merely trying to describe it at length.
I've spent the majority of my career having plenty of my own ideas, thoughts, and opinions ignored only to see them seriously considered when echoed by taller, fitter, and more attractive male peers.

Software engineers and computer scientists like to think they're above this stuff, but they aren't.
I trust the bank more than I trust my mattress.

All risks are relative.
That sounds pretty painful, I've always felt bad for the people who are forced to use xCode as part of their job. I really hope Apple is forced to make cross-platform tooling, because while it's great for lock-in, it makes it really difficult for outsiders to publish cross-platform apps.
I am hopeful there will be a technological inflection at which adequate nutritious food, clean water, and shelter will be freely self-sustaining for all people. I am not talking about a point at which these things are provided or paid for, but rather a point at which the appropriate technologies are plentiful and self-sustaining, much like plants are today.
This was interesting in light of an interview I was just listening to yesterday, a CBC podcast [1] talking about the benefits of mass timber (glued wood) for large highrise building construction.

There were two guests on, both sounded like environmentalists, with the first one (Michael Green) saying that mass timber was

"currently the best tool we have to address climate impact and in the building materials for a large building"

while the second guest (John Talberth) was arguing:

"The idea that we can cut down our forests and turn them into two by fours and build our way to a stable climate is absurd, and it's just another one of these false narratives of big timber corporations are using to get us to buy more of their product and continue to subsidise their record profits",

and Talberth advocated Bamboo, mentioning it multiple times as an alternative. It kind of went back and forth a bit with Mr Green saying

"Bamboo, for instance, is not structurally a material that can actually satisfy the demand of three billion people that need a new home because it doesn't build large buildings"

and Mr Talberth saying

"Believe it or not, bamboo can actually be put together in the structurally with high structural integrity beams to make taller buildings"

It kind of left me wondering who was right... though Mr Green (an architect) sounded like someone with actual experience making buildings, where as the Mr Talberth (an economist) sounded like he might have been doing a bit of ill-informed wishful thinking about Bamboo.

Seeing the process here gave me a bit more perspective on the discussion. Given the labour involved and the fact that you are working with 20mm x 5mm cross-sections of bamboo, I can see how it would be extremely expensive to build a large building out of bamboo, and the $300 euro price tag on a sheet of plywood at the bottom of the page added more confirmation that it's not going to be a practical replacement for large-scale building.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-oct-20-2...
Don't forget that it might come bundled with other helpful updates with no way to choose which pieces to pull in.

I can't believe people are actually comparing telemetry in Windows to Linux.
"Wall of Sound" was also an extremely awesome record/CD store on Pike St. in Seattle in the early 90s that specialized in experimental, electronic and ambient music (which I always thought was a better target for the term "wall of sound" that Spector's stuff).
funny question: could we mix the nuclear waste with the plastic to make (the plastic) degrade faster?
Data Science Present and Future As the world embraces
1.5 billion
Just wondering, are the reasons you don't like Julia existential (eg, it's a dynamic language without static types), or stuff that we can fix? Also, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the next decade, there start to be good C/C++ libraries written in Julia.
Also NFTs.

Cryptocurrencies claim to empower via decentralisation, but in reality they simply change the power structures from legal-based to capital-based power structures, and removing legal challenges that could be levelled at corporations in favour of "proofs" that have no moral leeway. I believe they are a strongly dystopian concept masquerading as a utopian opportunity.
The thing with Elephant is that many takes are just repetitions of others from the point of view of different characters.
Yikes, I hope you are well paid! (Re: 1 and 3. 2 is table stakes in this day and age. In fact re: 2, would you be willing to share a scenario that calls for sneakernet by courier vs a network storage/transfer?)
While this definitely is an impressive an impressive one, those artificial pneumatic muscles have been around for ages [1] but have not become much smaller. My guess would be that there is some physical limit on how useful they can be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_artificial_muscles
Walmart Has Quietly Begun Hosting Bitcoin ATMs
I have to wonder if this is being passed around Netflix, for example, today, asking who is in charge of fixing it.
Lets say (for example) that was published on a wordpress site, and the admins for whatever reason didn't secure it properly.

The article in question which _today_ looks all legit and points to a nice working script, might tomorrow be pointing to someone else's script that's a lot less legit.

And yes, in this imaginary scenario that wordpress install leads to a host of other problems for the company.

No need to make them your problems too though. ;)
So, if they have access to more information than their competitors such that they can maximise their own chances of winning proifitable auctions, it's problematic as its unfair competition.
Draper has repeatedly said that he doesn’t think Holmes did anything wrong. He thinks that her downfall is because of a “witch hunt,” that she is a “great icon” “bullied into submission” by a corrupt FDA and big healthcare, and has said that he is “thrilled” with what she did at theranos.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine

https://www.wired.com/2011/11/eff-palantir/

If you know something or someone's name, which / who claims to be some sort of advocacy for individuals against the overreach of an industrialized nation's government, and that person / thing is not being COINTELPRO'd, MKULTRA'd, GLADIO'd, PAPERCLIP'd, etc, it's because that person / thing is complicit in some way with the thing they are claiming to be against.
At least 10+, and I think it may have been introduced in 9 if I remember past upgrades correctly. I don't think it's something enabled by default, but it is available to turn on in the default security settings page.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN5GXrvUrVA
There've also been numerous previous discussions of Csikszentmihalyi on HN. Via Algolia search: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Csikszentmihalyi

A more complete obituary was also submitted as his death was announced though marked a dupe on HN.

"Mihály Csíkszentmihályi- Flow Theory Architect, Hungarian-American Psychologist, Dies Aged 88"

https://hungarytoday.hu/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-flow-theory-...

(HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28948395)
I feel like with the uptick in Linux gaming, Valve's investment in Proton, the Steam Deck, EAC/Battleye compatibility with Proton, modern desktops catching up to Windows look and feel, it's closer to being 'the year of the Linux desktop' than ever before.

Sure, 'the year of the Linux desktop' is a loosely defined term that doesn't necessarily have any key metrics that you'd agree with, and it's not like any of the world's governments or corporations are suddenly going to overhaul their entire desktop IT inventory in 12 months, but for the first time ever I have seen people say '2022 is the year of the Linux desktop' and I think that there is actual substance to it rather than just blind naïve optimism.
It is because of our frustration with Windows. There was a time when it was a private system. Sure, the first couple of versions weren't particularly stable or secure, but for some reason you trusted the vendor of your operating system that they won't spy on you.

Unfortunately, things went in the same direction as other greedy companies that pay lip service to valuing their users while exploiting their privacy in all possible ways. Microsoft went a step further, being actively user-hostile, for example changing telemetry settings so that your previous choices wouldn't work and enforcing remote accounts. Name a dark pattern, and Microsoft used it somewhere.

So how couldn't we be frustrated? We receive a box full of adware with little control of how it's updated and what is going to run on it tomorrow. Sure, there are nice things like WSL, but they don't somehow cancel your shady doings. Fortunately the future is more and more web-oriented so it's getting easier to switch from Windows now than it was a decade or two ago.
> I can’t read the article due to the pay wall

WSJ charges two to four times as much as my local paper.
Steven Weinberg walk into an email exchange
Religious authoritarians. Puritans.

Theological adherence is a spiral. They have an absolute doctrine. This is what happens when you shift your moral philosophy to doctrinal adherence. Introspection is not needed when you are a perfect adherent to the one true faith.

It should also be noted that religion is older than language and has a basis in biology. Just because they do not fit the modern legal categorization of religion does not mean that culturally it is not the same.
As somebody from the UK, I find it hard to understand the anti-union sentiment I always see here from people in the US.

What is it about trades unions that's so objectionable?

Is it the legal framework, union culture, being scared it means you'll make marginally less when your potential unicorn IPOs?

And are those objections inherent to unions, or just the way that unions are usually run when you've encountered them in the past?
Very true, important and under-represented view.

And this is not even half of it. It's the dark ages, like cpu computing 50 years ago when computer vendors all had mutually incompatible, uniquely buggy sw stack fiefdoms, and tooling and commodification hadn't yet forced them to cooperate and converge.
I've heard good things about WSL from other developers. My current setup (two OS, two SSD) predates modern WSL though.
Oh good lord.... I'll never see my girlfriend again
That's not how it works: you're [supposedly] not guilty until conviction and so, like all not guilty people, have the same rights. But, on conviction your rights are severely curtailed if the sentence is custodial.

So I guess you could say "It doesn't matter if you are later found guilty [...]" to be consistent with the presumption of innocence.
Seems this case isn't so much about what the police can do in the interrogation room, as what evidence is admissible in court. It's quite easy to enforce the provision that they can't tell juries you refused to hand over a password.

That's a moot point if you do reveal your password, but coercion is a separate issue we could try to address, which would be pointless to address if they could get you convicted simply because you refused.
Congratz timescale on being #1 on the frontpage 3 days in a row !
Even the most secure piece of software - assuming such a thing even exists! - can't do a thing against incompetent users.

Even a perfectly patched Windows instance can't be reasonably protected against an user executing an attachment of an email that then goes ahead and encrypts all files writable by the user. The only option is to ban the user from anything executable and interpreters as Apple does on their iDevices, but we all rightfully and regularly complain about that one.

As for vulnerable software: I agree, some pressure on Microsoft to open-source or at least provably audit their software would be nice - but it's rare to have a definitive attribution on how a piece of malware entered your organization, at least not in places where record-keeping and retention is restricted by laws like the GDPR.
If no one is testing the rights we're supposed to have, then it's unclear that we actually have them. Auditing should seem eminently sensible to all the engineers here.
I'm a non native english speaker trying to read this book, sort of gave it up around (i think) half to read other books in the waiting list. Most of the interludes are not that engaging to me (whale classification chapter comes to mind), which is a pity since I enjoyed the actual narrative.
I think it's important for people to realize that even if your employer treats you well, a union is also still important so that workers can have a seat in the table where decisions are made. Blanket trust in your employer is a bizarre offshoot of corporate kool-aid.

It's all very well to claim that unions are unnecessary for hyper-mobile, extremely well compensated and in high-demand, tech workers (however, that is at present; the future might be different), but the same is not so true for workers who rely on a single physical institution or location for their and their families livelihood. The threat of leaving, or simply moving offshore, enables employers of those workers to squeeze employees into longer hours or into poor working conditions because there is no collective means of pushing back against the employer, and because the employer doesn't have to care about them: they aren't at the decision making table at all.

It's not that Amazon creates nice working conditions now; it's that Amazon can change it arbitrarily without having to care about any of the employees.
> Its a formal logic symbol

I've never seen this notation used in modern mathematical logic papers. I've even had (non-US) logic phds ask me about this notation.

> which was also used by standardized test writers like the SAT. The SAT removed those questions because they were ineffective at assessment, not because the notation was out of favor.

Yeah, standardized tests that have since phased it out were really the only place it was used. Hence anachronistic. If you didn't take the SAT during a certain period of time there's a god chance you didn't see this notation.
You can beat the rap, but not the ride.

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

Edit: Just to be clear, this is an illustrative example. Not a flippant response. Gray should not have died in police custody.
That's why you need a good lawyer, to bring your story to the public, sue the damn police department and get justice!

And then the cop gets 2 weeks of paid suspension, taxpayers pay you 20k in 'damages', and your lawyer costs only 35k.
I agree with the sentiment, but... reasons to use Linux do pile up over time, and Linux desktop is getting a bit better every year too. I don't expect any kind of mainstream adoption, but there's a momentum.
And another one: Structurae[1]

[1]: https://github.com/zandaqo/structurae
This model is incomplete at best. In my view "possums" here are not simply people obsessed with staying on topic, they are people who are deeply invested in the topic. Other terms for possums would include makers, scholars, artists, and founders. So called "otters" are those who have a passing interest in the topic, enough to be entertained by it but who do not participate at a deep level. They are otherwise known as consumers or dilettantes. There is a third group missing, they generally move in after the "otters" have reached a critical mass. To stick with the theme let's call them "orcas". They have no interest in socializing or in the topic, their goal is to monetize the topic and extract wealth from the otters by exploiting the work of the possums.
I never used Magit, I have been using SmartGit for years now and I see the great benefits of git GUIs.

Checking logs, checking and merging changes, searching for files and commits… all this is much easier to do with a GUI. Of course, for complicated stuff one should still know the cli commands, but 99% of the time the GUI is what makes me more efficient and faster.
Just bought a new computer, and I recently got a warning notification from Windows Defender. Clicking through, I discovered that the urgent message was that I should really consider backing up my files on OneDrive.

So I go to ignore the message, but the “dismiss” button was bugged; I couldn’t make the notification go away. After Googling around, I found the fix was to uninstall OneDrive, which had been preloaded, and restart the machine.

This is the type of thing that will get me to switch or simply stop using desktop computers outside of work at all.
I specifically stated "any windows or mac python program".

Indeed, most linux distro packaging teams decided to split tk in a separate package that is not installed by default. Same for pip and setuptools. Of course, this made getting a congruent python experience extra hard, on a platform with already plenty of gotchas for python setup, but hey, they saved a few Mo.