skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've lived my whole life in two different metropolitan areas: Chicago and Los Angeles. The former has most of its businesses in or near the Loop, the downtown area.¹ The latter has them more scattered like you argue in favor of.

I find with businesses concentrated, it's much easier to make decisions about housing. In Los Angeles, it was difficult to predict where my next job might be. It could be downtown, it could be Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey, the valley, Pasadena, Orange County, etc. I could face a 90 minute drive or a ten minute bike ride to get to work. Even if I didn't change jobs, a company might move from one side of L.A. to the other (and this did happen to both my wife and me while we lived in L.A. although her location change was less dramatic than mine). Dispersed job centers often meant passing up on jobs because the location was inconvenient.

In contrast, in Chicago, the key thing is being able to get to downtown reasonably quickly by public transportation (or, when I was single, I had an apartment that allowed me to easily bike or walk to and from the Loop if I so chose and the weather wasn't awful). One thing I noticed was that in the 90s, many tech companies were located in those outer suburbs and living anywhere but near downtown made commuting challenging. In contrast, since I moved back to Chicago 11 years ago, almost all tech jobs are downtown, which seems a likely consequence of the fact that being close to competitors makes it easier to find employees.

⸻

1. There are, of course, bits of exceptions to his with some scattered business areas in some of the suburbs, most notable Oak Brook, Evanston and Schaumburg being the primary examples in my experience.
Please don't break the site guidelines yourself, even when another commenter is behaving badly or you feel they are. It only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A local 2nd hand Swiss watch dealer/shop runs their online store off a Wordpress set up (no e-commerce/online payments though). Sometimes when I visited to look at their current stock, when clicking into something of interest I would get bombarded with all sorts of random adware crap, new tabs etc. opening with blogspam - typical “Win an iPad” type stuff.

The owner was totally unaware, as this never happens to them - they are logged into the site the whole time, so it deliberately never triggers/fires itself as they make updates, etc.

It was also somewhat random for users of the site, but when users see it, they probably just close it / ignore it.

Nobody told them this happened when browsing their website so they were totally unaware they had been comprised.

Moral of the story, always occasionally browse your own web properties from other devices and incognito windows, etc. to see what other people see.
I think there's more than just ageism involved as to why there aren't more older folks in tech.

I think a major reason is simple demographics. There weren't a lot of folks graduating with CS degrees in the 90's, and quite few before that. There simply weren't a lot of older folks to hire.

That said, I've been fortunate in my career. I currently work for a FAANG/MAANA company. I'm in my mid-40's, and many of my colleagues and report chain are older than myself.

At a former employer I still keep in touch with, the software team has 1 in their 50's, 1 in their 60's, and 1 in their 70's. They all have other engineering or physics degrees.
> Why accuse the FSF of hypocrisy?

If I ship some piece of hardware on a PC with its firmware burned into a ROM and do not provide the source (a binary blob), the FSF will happily say my hardware is RYF-certified.

If I ship the exact same hardware with the exact same firmware as a binary blob but in Flash RAM or loaded at init by a driver they'll accuse me of not "respecting freedom".

Same hardware. Same firmware. Same vendor. The FSF is hypocritical because their RYF certification allows me to get certified so long as I make my hardware impossible to update. I don't have to provide any source or actually respect anyone's freedom to get in their good graces, I just need to burn my binary blob into a ROM.

If I save a dollar per unit by loading the same firmware blob through a driver into the device's RAM, I'm an evil freedom disrespecting jerk.

Besides being hypocritical it also makes for extremely poor security practice and affects longevity and e-waste. If I can't update a device firmware it might have some security flaw that can't be patched and maintain the RYF certification. If I roll an updated firmware and have the driver push it to the device I lose my previous certification unless the new blob is open sourced.

Devices that can't be updated are also more likely to be discarded. An updated OS might be incompatible with my old firmware in ROM so needs to be tossed when upgrading. Same if a security fix can't be pushed out.

So the FSF doesn't seem to actually care about freedoms, just whether a vendor technically meets their requirements. They also engender a poor security posture with their policy. Libre hardware is a worthy goal but the FSF's policies and technicalities around certification don't really lead to that goal.
Are you me? Every sentence is so familiar it hurt to read. I hope you’re still writing code!
A human cell dividing is not reproduction in the evolutionary sense, unless the cell is cancerous. It is reproduction in the same sense that my shoes can reproduce by means of me buying another pair when the first pair wears out.
Putting braces on the same line is the K&R style, which predates Allman style with braces on separate lines.

(The original K&R style had the opening brace on a separate line for functions, but I believe this is due to the original syntax for declaring argument types - if you declare them on separate lines, like variables, a distinct { clearly ends the argument block and starts the function body.)
> "else natural occurrences like mountains would not be possible since they would collapse on themselves"

One way of looking at how mountains can get so high is to think of them as if they already have collapsed on themselves. There's no more collapsing possible, so they can pile up higher. A lot like the Pyramids, they're so big and so old and haven't fallen down because they can't, they're basically a collapsed heap already.

Which is something Isaac Arthur mentions in his YouTube series on space elevators, if you can make the base wider, you can make the top higher, and then you don't need Graphene or Scrith or other future super-strong materials to go high enough (in theory, in practise the base would have to get wider than Earth).
Crop rotation? Of perennials?
AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Apple are all American companies that are innovating in the CPU and GPU market designed in the US. Except maybe Samsung with their Exynos chip, who has better innovation in this sphere?

Might have been a long time the west had real competition, but I personally feel they still have the upper hand in the innovation sector.

Maybe not in the future, who knows.
There are many intentional omissions because people can't afford to study too many years on a curriculum. If you're interested in exploring this issue, perhaps consider what priorities an education ministry would have. For most, knowledge is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.
How did you find them exactly?
I'm sure we can think of a way to contact most of them automatically(or semi-automatically)
I think GP’s point was about revolutionary vs evolutionary tech.
I feel like this discussion can’t be complete without dragon drop: https://mrcoles.com/dragondrop/
Off topic, but I'd like to point out a weird "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon" thing that I'm currently experiencing: "Ghost kitchens". I didn't know they existed a few days ago, saw them referenced a couple times recently and now another one buried deep in this article. Weird!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_kitchen
Slightly different because the Burj is empty by design, while the other examples were empty due to market forces
Why eInk though rather than OLED? Given that keyboards usually come with a backlight these days, why make an effort to be purely reflective?
> I think the ideology of the FSF is a perfectly fine one. It's the hardware vendors that insist on binary blobs that are the problem here.

Their ideology has led them into preferring proprietary firmware that is inaccessible to the user like in the Purism example. I hate that, there is hope that a device that requires binary blobs from the main OS can be reverse engineered and free software developed for it. Making it inaccessible to tinkering is strictly worse for the user in all respects.
I believe that's different. The top 29% of the Burj Khalifa is unusable by design -- its only purpose is to make the building taller.

I believe the OP's point is that when usable space in a building goes unleased, it makes it hard for the investor to turn a profit. Therefore there is no economic incentive to build a taller building.

I find this argument a bit hard to understand for another reason, though. If there is no demand for space, then why does anyone construct new buildings, and why is rent so high in places like NYC? It seems to me like there is actually incredible demand for space in dense cities.
You started off suggesting there may be more serious problems in C which haven't been identified or are not prevalent. In this comparison we have identified car crashes, heart disease and lung cancer as health problems, and they are prevalent.
SaaS vs. On-Prem – Or Why Agile Happened When It Did
It's all relative though. The EV and solar industry certainly lies about the carbon footprint of their tech, exploitation of workers in developing countries, mining pollution, etc.
> Why not synthetic line?

Fire.
The good news is that 16:10 is finding its way back into laptops. The Thinkpad X1 Nano I bought last year is 16:10, as are several other Thinkpad models refreshed recently. Same is true for the XPS 13/15/17 models.

Also, Apple has stuck to 16:10 with MacBook Pro’s this entire time, with exception of the latest 14” and 16” models, which are 16:10 but with extra vertical pixels for the menubar to “live” in.
>Is FB / “MarkZ The Generous” planning to open-source this valuable sounding thing?*

FB usually open sources many projects - but I wouldn't be surprised if this never leaves FB just on practicality. Anytime there's "global data-center scale" state management thingy, it's usually deeply integrated with whatever flavor of Zookeeper/Chubby/Service Discovery/AWS/Global metadata store/GPS Clock/Intern's cron job that makes it a pain to decouple, even worse to actually test against an open source version of these stacks.
What a ridiculous take. Spread businesses out more rather than in one place.

Let me guess, you never go anywhere without your car??
I had a bit of a knee jerk disagree reaction and then thought about it a bit more and found i agreed
Nice idea, but I'm not a fan of the Google-centric webp images. Even though they're supposed to be supported in the browser I'm using, they're not working from this site, and that's not how image formats are supposed to work.
> it seems likely that burning the gas to make electricity and then using that electricity to make hydrogen would be more efficient

I'm not sure why one would think that, the exact opposite is true. Going to electrolysis is only desirable if the energy source is a renewable.

This article has a very good overview of the challenges with moving ammonia production to sustainable energy sources:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808...
Mother sues Meta and Snap over daughter's suicide
TIL that Google popularized the open floor plan.

Is there anything in the tech industry that they haven’t made worse?
Alright, well I don't care about nebulous concepts like "social fabric" and neither do a lot of other people.

Way more people would move to big cities if it was affordable, and these people's wishes should be supported.

Almost by definition, this is true, as if everyone did not want to move to the city, then prices would be lower.

This romanticism for making everyone live in small towns is not something that most people support, given that way more people would leave small towns if they could.
My brother got into something similar a few days ago. I was on the phone with him when he saw 3 cars in the drive-thru line at McDonalds on MLK day. He joined the line but by the time he got to the voice box, he realized it was closed (though the exterior lights made it seem as if it were open). By the time he left and went someplace else, the line had grown to 5 or so. He started laughing on his way back home as he drove back by the same McDonald’s and said there were now 15 cars in the line.
There's likely multiple forces, but at least one must be money. Someone's gotta host the data, right? That falls on either the universities or the publishers.
I was thinking about building a laser system that writes on the cloud deck on a night with stratus clouds and how it could use a subsystem that watches ads-b and makes sure it never lases a plane. (I don’t live too far from an airport.)
Can flat earth explain the phenomenon in a parsimonious way?
> Getting reamed out all the time seems to have had a lasting impact on my ability to take ownership, do the kinds of things you need to do to get ahead, etc.

How so?
You're using a lot of definite articles here: "the problem with Dynamicland", "the beauty of computers".

I think this is a pretty crushingly middle-brow dismissal of what is essentially a hugely ambitious tech demo that could evolve in thousands of ways and lead to all kinds of unforeseeable progress.

I mean how does Dynamicland take away from the Internet? Is the status quo the global maximum? Frankly after 2 years of WFH, I'm far from convinced that staring at screens (whether traditional or in a VR headset) is the pinnacle of collaborative computing.
This discussion all seems to boil down to the semantics of what's "firmware", what's "software" and what's "hardware". Considering how blurred the line really is between the three, the feud seems pedantic at best.

FSF should stick to software only, learn to see shades of grey and label hardware accordingly or reject anything that isn't open until silicon (silicon excluded). Current choice is half-baked.
I have a different Dasung product with fast refresh, and it is fast enough to play videos. However, the power consumption in this mode is substantial - much more than the equivalent-sized LCD would use.
Love the tldr at the start: “ The Go standard runtime allows for asynchronous coding while allowing the developer a simply synchronous interface”
Nah, your memory is bad.
There is that sf story about the names of god too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God
Another issue is that a lot of the mid-rise apartments are built in complexes (at least in the US) that segregate the apartment from the rest of the city. You get density but no community. There’s no sense of place.
I don’t think is really at all clear. Whether it’s word press plugins, or a few thousand JS or Python modules you install with npm/pip, the market has moved into this direction because it is the most efficient. The problem is 100% in testing which is something most places slack of at because people joining, if they do write tests at all, only test their additions to the codebase.

It isn’t just Wordpress, either, I think that testing of large scale interconnected software is not yet a solved problem and whomever can devise a system that eliminates all the vulnerability types we’ve seen exploited over the last few years will become very rich.
Not only are they not all in their 20s, they also sport some ladies. And if I'm not mistaken, they all appear to be my fellow nerds. No tech bros in the bunch. I bet their office gatherings didn't involve shotskis or beer pong!

Praise be to COVID, the returner of offices with doors! I really missed mine. No views of the mountains anymore from my middle of the country office window, but I'll accept it. Also, praise almighty COVID for delivering me from office drinking games.
The main question that requires answering, I think, is why we let Tether and Bitfinex print a bunch of Tether and buy a bunch of Bitcoin during low volume periods. The Bloomberg report et al and the SEC both suggest that this is happening, constituting clear price manipulation.

Is that not by definition fraud? It's like the US federal reserve printing a bunch of stimulus. At least our central banks are nominally appointed by elected officials, on the basis of a social contract.
Redivis: Open Company Handbook
Neat bit of history! I'd have enjoyed seeing one of these for whatever group dmr et al. was in (doesn't seem to be in this one of the "Design Engineering Center 375").

The title got my hopes up that it was all of Bell Labs :(.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/add.15764
The main reason is that binary logic is so much more effective than logic using more than level at the transistor circuit level.

There are alternative number systems that are in use but those are implementations of different kinds of numbers or numbers with different internal structure.

Such as the redundant number system which have parallel addition and multiplication that does not have long serial paths that the normal operations have. This means it does addition in less than log n time.

The ternary numbers are functionally equivalent to binary only differing in representation but not any other aspect so they provide no advantage.
Yeah, it's a damn useful drug, that also has horrible side effects. I've been literally saved by prednisone more than once but I've also suffered from some of those side effects. I even had a doctor who had me on way too much for way too long (he'd already lost his license by the time I found that out) and even after knowing that I had to continue on it a bit longer because you have to be slowly taken off the drug.

The sad truth is that you always have to look out for yourself. You need to take care to read up on your conditions and your prescribed treatments, but don't let that fool you into thinking you've got a medical degree or that doctors are out to get you, or that science isn't trustworthy. Most doctors are doing the best they can to make you feel better using the best understanding of medicine and biology we currently have. You may look at medical history as a series of errors and mistakes, but it really just shows the progress of our understanding.

Things like sinus rinsing have their uses. It may not be the first thing doctors recommend to people, but there are likely several reasons for that beyond people demanding pills. The main reason being a lack of strong evidence that supports it being more effective than current recommendations which may be easier for people to do and/or carry fewer risks. As soon as the data overwhelmingly supports recommending sinus rinsing over current treatments, doctor's recommendations will start to slowly change.

My point is, watch our for yourself and be careful, but don't let bad experiences or bad actors cause you to lose faith in the process itself.
“Australian Science Writing 2021” has a fascinating short story called “Hail Hydrogen: Powering the debate on future fuel” that touches on this exact project, and provides much more nuance and background detail that I found an enjoyable and informing read.

Highly recommend the above if you want what felt like a more neutral take. (In fact the entire book so far has been great)
To be fair, with "War and Peace", this is quite possibly the only way to read it and enjoy the process. ~
It takes two hands to use Fn+Up/Down instead of PageUp/PageDown keys to scroll around. These keys are for some people the most common keys used for fast nevigation in code and documents.

Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V are used far less often, and you can type them with one hand.
Also 5.11 denim pants. I don't know if they're Japanese denim or what, but I've stopped looking for another brand after owning these.
> but comparing it to PL/1?

I think the point was that a language designed when pterodactyls ruled the skies had a better string implementation than C. Regardless, C's not going anywhere. You still need something close to the hardware that has better ergonomics than assembly language to implement that new safe language that mythical safe OS will be written in :-)
I hear you that your intention was not to call names or start a flamewar. Unfortunately, comments that are (a) on divisive topics and (b) don't include much information can turn into flamebait all too easily—in effect if not intent. (I've written about this at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....)

At a minimum, you should be careful to avoid swipey phrases like "wave of wailing" (and arguably also "anti-vaxxer crowd). Such pejorative phrases are sparks that can easily set fire to the fuel.

I hope that helps a bit.
1.0 is so slow that I wonder if they record the narrator, then slow them down by a third. It's much slower than people talk.
What are some examples of unneeded complexity?
People are parroting "the purism example...". Just stop it! Librem-5 is NOT certified!
This is victim blaming.
>because Moderna is german based

Moderna is US based

https://enwikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna

We're you maybe thinking of BioNTech? (Makers of corminanty vaccine aka BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine against Covid)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioNTech
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-...
I don't see it mentioned, but in most of Europe the city center height limit has traditionally been the height of their cathedral/church/etc., Where no building can be taller (closer to God) than them.
I believe under 500 transaction a month its free.
Ok, you go do that then
That's fine, but we need you not to post like that to this site. "Fuck parents like you" is egregiously against the HN guidelines, no matter how legitimate your experience has been. (I have no doubt that it is completely legitimate.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
See https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html for the rationale.

Basically, FSF had to make a compromise here. If you use Flash ROM (or other writable medium), the firmware counts as a nonfree software. However, if you use actual ROM, the firmware might as well have been a circuit baked right in the product, so it counts as hardware; nevertheless, it counts as non-free.

FSF's ultimate goal would of course be to be able to certify that every component (hard or soft) of the system is actually free. However, this isn't very practical, since no consumer-grade computers will be considered free due to proprietary CPUs (e.g. Intel, AMD, ARM), which is why FSF is stuck in a weird situation. (How would you make exceptions for the CPU stock microcode and not the BIOS, for example?)

For that matter, I hope RISC-V helps us go a step forward...
> Unlike in a criminal proceeding, prosecutors do not need to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt to keep property forever.

Wut?! That is robbery!
@stevespang - All your comments seem to be [dead] and I don't see an obvious reason why you would be shadowbanned after looking at the last several. You might want to talk to HN.
I dunno, define "few"? It's easily 20 minutes+ each way to get to a non-tech company building (maybe more if you're embedded in say Crittenden).
I don't see how this could work. Say there's a significant increase in mass at a point in space A. And there's another point B that's where the distance A-B is separating faster than the speed of light. How could any changes in mass at point A alter the spacetime/gravity at point B? Are we presuming a means of propagating changes faster than light via graviton?
You'd run into two problems: The first is that all materials begins to behave like fluids under enough pressure. The second is that your giant heap of material will have its own gravitation pull. By the time you're talking space elevators, you'll run into very unique engineering challenges.