skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't forget livestock - much bigger use than Ag. Pound per pound meat requires a LOT more clean water than crops, even almonds.
Orbits are always periodic functions, so quite amusingly heliocentric and geocentric models are equivalent (because of Fourier transformations).
I understand that, and agree with putting out an editor's note about it. I just think that the second sentence in the example editor's note provided should not be necessary, and the simple explanation of what happened should be sufficient.
That data is great - thank you for posting. It looks like rail-car miles have held somewhat steady, down a little bit, except for 2020, which I assume was COVID related.

I am being a bit facetious with the fiction comment.

However, I do believe there are a lot of problems in the rail industry. With the introduction of "PSR" (precision-scheduled railroading), trains actually have no schedule, and only leave when they're full. This maximizes efficiency.

It's very hard on rail staff, because it means they, too have no schedule. They work a train in one direction, do a staff change, and then go to a hotel while waiting for a return trip. They get as little as 90-120 minutes of notice for the return trip. So it's a lot of time away from home, with very little ability to control one's schedule. I imagine that this source of frustration emerges in a lot of different places, and it's possible that this letter was one of them.
> A local firefighter and I were volunteers for our kids' soccer club. He said that he specifically worked on the other side of town because he didn't want to respond to fires or health emergencies that involved his neighbors.

This is a good point. I think it demonstrates a pretty drastic difference in scope between (ordinary) police and firefighter job requirements: a cop might go their entire career without firing their weapon, while a firefighter's job is almost entirely defined by situations where multiple people might die.

Put another way: I think it's perfectly reasonable for fightfighters to not want to work in the neighborhood they live in, given the severity of the average incident they respond to. I don't think this applies to beat cops, any more than it does to mailmen.

(The other point is also great: there's an argument that cops are more likely to feel territorial or even more violent if they live in the same area as someone they've branded a "troublemaker." I don't have a good answer to this.)
Sounds an awful lot like interviewing for a remote position.
Also annoying when you're doing something else while just listening. Then again there are some videos that are interesting enough for me to watch for a few minutes, but that makes it extra terrible that you can't scrub.

On the flip side I always chuckle when a text-only (with crappy music) ad comes on.
Yes, "Rapid Development" lists a dozen or more approaches, including iterative prototyping and (modified) waterfall, with pros and cons of each one.

My issue with the standard Agile story repeated here is the lack of any mention of pre-Agile approaches other than waterfall.

Take: "Rather than clearing the way for software developers to build, waterfall gummed up the works with binders of paperwork and endless meetings."

Why is there no mention of any other approach? We can easily point to the Macintosh project, which took 5 years (1979 to 1984). Yet, no waterfall there.

Or, take a closer look at: "Peter Varhol, a technology industry consultant, estimates that in the early 1990s, the average application took three years to develop, from idea to finished product." (That's shorter than the Macintosh project.)

What does that mean? Which industry? What kind of applications? Clearly a lot of "log cabin" PC applications are excluded from that list - just think of all the DB2 and VB applications people wrote in that era. And video games.
> Blazor-like

Isn't that just "GWT-like"?
Except nobody is asking how to do anything, so every answer is equally unproductive.
Cyber insurance premiums are skyrocketing YoY due to ransomware attacks based on conversations with clients. Overall, it’s still a challenge to demonstrate the value of defending against them (reducing attack surface, real backups and data recovery plans, phishing exercises to see who is click happy and what their privileges have access to, etc) to folks who don’t understand the risk this poses.

Like driving without insurance, it works until it doesn’t.
Perhaps.

My parallel example would be the Play Framework. Play 1.x was written in Java, but supported both Java and Scala, and was fantastic, easy to use and one of the most productive and performant full-stack framework for web development.

Then, they created Play 2.x, where the core was written in Scala and if I remember correctly even used Scala for its HTML template. Even though it supported Java, and obviously Scala, there was a definite drop in its usage and I believe it majorly impacted its adoption.

Personally I think if they'd stayed with the Play 1.x model, it would have been extremely successful.
As a manager, I've done quote a bit of tech sales. The way I look at it is, you're trying to understand your customer (or prospects) problems and see how your product offerings may help solve their problems. I'd never try to hard-sell a prospect something if it didn't seem like a good fit, even if you do a great job they still won't be happy. That's no good. There are some books you can read if you want to pick up some basic pointers, a lot of it is common sense.

Above all, listen and try to understand what your prospect needs or think that they want.

1. Know your product(s) inside and out.
2. Know your customer/prospect's business inside and out.
3. Imagine what your prospect's objections may be and have answers lined up ahead of time. If you don't know the answer to a question, say so. Let them know you will research it and get back to them.
4. Try to build a rapport.
5. Be prepared for your meeting.
6. Know the audience, is it a tech person or executives?
7. Keep following up, set reminders on your calendar to do so.

And...like others have said, you kind of just need to start doing it.
> Nations should lessen the penalties for white-hat and even grey-hat hackers who report their findings.

Digital Good Samaritan laws.
> Stackage works by publishing a set of blessed package versions for all of the packages vetted by Stackage and these packages are guaranteed to all build together. Periodically, Stackage publishes an updated set of blessed package versions.

All the packages being intercompatible sounds extremely valuable, but how is it actually done? For example, how does stackage allow package A to continue updating despite some never-updating package B requiring an old version of package A? Drop B? Don't let A change? Ignore B's declared dependency constraints? Take over development of B? Require every package to have a contactable maintainer who responds to "you gotta update B" emails or else the package gets dropped within a month?
Blur would be a killer feature in Preview!
Gonna need some citations on that one big hoss. Most of the talk out of California lately is farmers in an arms race to drill the deepest well, because they're planting water-hungry crops like almonds like fiends (good profit margins so fuck the water table).
I'm ok with sponsored segments as the only ads because they are the least offensive ads ATM.

The way to prevent these ads from being blocked is to include them in the video stream itself, possibly by the original author. This has the good side effects of making them easy to skip and, more importantly, unable track users by themselves. The publishing platform can say things like "xx% of users matching rule yyyy fully watched it", but only if watching is non anonymous.
Bitcoin’s Unraveling Tops 50% from Peak with Drop Below $32,000
Same thing here in Arizona. Saudi Arabian hay farms here are massive, and use groundwater aquifers to grow Alfalfa which is exported back to SA to feed cattle.

But yeah, it's the people not turning off the faucet while brushing their teeth that are the problem! Who do they think they are? Don't they know we're in a desert?! /s
http://web.archive.org/web/20220509164023/https://spikeartma...
Hum... Since I've brought a digital caliper that allowed reading sizes with actual 0.01mm precision instead of "guessing it's around X", I've noticed I have no object around that won't compress by something larger than that amount when I apply reasonable amounts of force into the caliper.

I'm also sure it's not calibrated to this level, but that doesn't hurt relative measurements.
yeah, I did a very quick look at some literature, most of it was behind paywalls so my search wasn't comprehensive, but it looked like a large train was more susceptible to derailment but the reduction in the number of trains running actually resulted in a decrease in total derailments.

To me this suggest a much more in-depth analysis is needed.
A list of open Finder windows in the sidebar would indeed be lovely.
The posting on the colleges website paints a much bleaker picture. The ransomware attack certainly didn't help but the school was already near shutting down due to huge drops in enrollment from covid and expenses related to implementing remote learning. It's not like they were just doing fine and didn't think to spend money on IT resulting in an untimely demise they were on the way out and also happened to get hit by ransomware during that. I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't doing particularly well prior to either of those issues even.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple other things they should have been doing to lower operational risk but couldn't realistically do given their situation.
Sound and Complete Flow Typing with Unions, Intersections and Negations (2013)
2018 HN thread on the ongoing "drought" out west: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899

Link is this Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/how-the-we...
I led sales at our company and have sold many (tens of) millions of enterprise software. Not all lessons carry over to every company / product / buyer group but below are my high level thoughts. I am happy to take this offline as well if you have specific questions (I enjoy paying it forward). Note that the below is predicated on the assumption that the product you are selling has product market fit - without that, nothing matters because it isnt a product worth selling.

The Golden Rule (for us): people do business with people they know, they like, and they trust.
- To be known, you need to make an effort to connect and build / maintain a relationship. That doesnt mean you need to be friends but you can't be one and done. Listen to clients and prospects and learn about what they care about and remember it the next time you speak.
- To be liked, be genuine, forthcoming, a good listener, etc
- To be trusted, always operate with integrity and NEVER sell something you don't believe in. I have a rolodex of clients that buy literally every product we launch before we launch it because they blindly trust us. I will do everything in my power to preserve that trust.

If you only read three books on sales, I would recommend the following. The value of #1 is 1000x all others. Read it and put the principles in practice and you will have laid a great foundation for success in life and it automatically puts the Golden Rule in practice.

1- Dale Carnegies How to Win Friends and Influence People
2- Getting to Yes
3- Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion

The above covers disposition. Process and accountability is a HUGE driver of success in sales. At our company, we DEMAND you have strong systems of accountability and follow through. I find the best salespeople are constantly thinking about their funnel. I was in a lecture in college with Larry Silverstein (NYC real estate billionaire) who said success can be quantified pretty easily: make 10x more phones calls and you'll be 10x more successful. You'll hear this as a recurring theme in life, as Wayne Gretzky said "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" and woody allen said "90% of success is showing up". Show up every day and put in an honest days work building and maintaining your funnel, and conduct yourself reasonably and with integrity, and things will close.

There is so much more to this topic and it varies from being average to being good to being a top producer... but I think the above is the pre-req.
You seem to be playing with words. Governments exist among all human societies, not just nation-states.

About this:

"There is no reason why it among all possible forms of organization"

Whatever form of organization you want to invent for a society, that will be a form of government.
It's hard not to get frustrated with a bad experience and it's hard not to take it out on the person who is the business's representative (the service person). I'm not making an excuse, you should be kind to everyone, but it's hard to get punched in the face and turn to the puncher and say "I'm sorry but did you mean to punch me in the face because I don't think I deserved to be punched. Are you having a bad day?" instead of "F you!"

Sure, bad service is not a punch in the face but it is in the same category of receiving something you shouldn't have received and don't deserve.

And, where do you draw the line on what's mean? I can be kind to the service person but then go leave a bad review on the restaurant. Isn't that also being unkind to people? (or maybe it's being kind to others, warning them against bad experiences).

That said, I do see people in the USA (not sure about other countries) that act entitiled. Example, they spill something an instead of cleaning it up they think "not my job. Someone is paid to clean here so no need to clean the mess I made". Even if it's just bussing your own table in a fast food place where it's clearly expected you're supposed to clean up after yourself lots of people will just leave their trash at the table with a "not my problem" attitude.
The same old argument is really all that's in play here. "I want to spend most of my time doing the technical task that I'm skilled at, and not dealing with other people".

Developers add value in so many more ways that heads down concentrating on code. A senior engineer should spend the least amount of time coding compared to everything else they do during the day. If they don't, do you really need a senior engineer? How much of a 4 hour coding session is something you needed specific expertise in and how much is mindlessly typing the syntax with a big of logic peppered in?

If your tasks can all be done truly asynchronously without blocking someone else, they probably aren't very exciting or special. Having worked for many years in both office 9-5s and global async teams, async teams are incredibly frustrating to organize if the work requires any collaboration. In a perfect world sure your 4pm is my 8am and we can work there, but factor in real life, people leaving early, coming in late, and it becomes incredibly annoying to deal with in practice. It takes much more management overhead, and you truly have to ask if the benefit you get from having engineers async is really worth that extra overhead. I would argue in most markets it just isn't. I would take a 20% worse engineering staff all working together than the alternative of a better staff split into different time zones. This is coming from someone who lives in Iceland and has had to work async for the bulk of my projects in the last few years. I found the lack of human contact and collaboration so boring that I took a big paycut to work with people again every day.
Ever tried baking with some of your ingredients 20-30% off? Doesn't work well for lots of recipes. What's even worse is when the error isn't a linear x%, but changes with increasing weight.
it will not make a lick of difference and I like my kids to have someplace to play outside.
Papyrus skit direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
The problem seems to be that Sean Murray suffered from a case of Peter Molyneux syndrome whenever he got interviewed which was a lot - somehow his future ideas suddenly became a reality when he opened his mouth.

Good to see they made it right and are successful.
That's what most people do with their PowerPoint slides and Word documents. I can totally relate with Ryan Gosling in the clip.
It's the default typeface for Office products since the 2007 release. So they just didn't pick anything better
Preview is amazing and I miss it very dearly, now that I'm not running macOS anymore. There's simply nothing like it anywhere else. The amount of things it can do, and what a sleek UI.

I only suffered a bit during the El Capitan-Sierra era, as I think they rewrote the PDF engine and there were some regressions. Anyway, it's the best and I wish something like that existed elsewhere.

On Linux, GNOME's pdf viewer could be close to it, but it is lacking all the annotation features except for highlights. KDE's Okular is a bit better, but it's UI is bad. On Windows, there's just nothing like it. I use Sumatra, but I miss Preview all the time.
Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and second floors of my office.
Or, instead of building a national water grid and thus another piece of incredibly expensive infrastructure that you won't find politicians willing to maintain 30 years from now, you could abandon areas like SoCal that are clearly becoming unsuitable to sustaining life. It's going to happen anyway, why not get a head start?
How to determine which of two sequences of coin flips is real and which is fake?
> Pricing it into the premium is a terrible idea - it would raise premiums for everyone, for very little gain.

Enough to matter? Let's put this in context. A typical CPAP machine will go for years before needing to be replaced, and can be purchased retail for about $800. Compared to routine medical expenses, that's nothing. Heck, the reduction in costs for monitoring compliance would probably lead to -lower- premiums, not higher.
Huge fan of kottke, he should take all the time he needs. I will say there's no way that tree isn't pot-bound though.
The US has somewhat similar problem: flood insurance is heavily subsidized by the federal government so the market doesn't remotely factor in future flooding risks into housing prices.

There have recently been plans to raise prices but since Florida is such an important state to Federal elections there's a massive political hurdle
We can't all love what we do that makes us a living though. The HN audience probably skew very heavily toward loving tech and thus enjoying their work in that industry, but for those without the innate interest it's still better to have a job with good benefits, salary, working conditions etc than one without those things.
This is an interesting answer. There are some actual real-world examples to support it. I think someplace like Cologne Cathedral was planned and the plan executed to completion in ~600 years.

I think it would also be fair to say, that there were other organizing factors in addition to religion, certainly civic, and economic.
Maraka - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1CeEXkNBGs
> nowing that next week will be exactly the same, and the week after and the week after is just kinda bleak.

Sounds like software engineering job. It just happens to pay better
The video game lure is good for some, but for others it's too complicated. But making flash-style animations using Scratch is also attractive (and easier). You can also make algorithmically-generated 3D models for 3D printing using programs like turtleSpaces. And there's also algorithmic music. So games aren't the only option.
as they should? water where water isn't naturally should be very expensive from an environmental footprint. Externalities and all that
Percent of America's baby formula supplies are out of stock
I love the meme scene where Ryan is driving and keeps eye contact with the designer!
As someone with actual ADHD, before I had internet, I could waste hours reading the TV guide or pacing my room bouncing a ping-pong ball.

However, when I actually have something to do, when I'm with friends or on a vacation, I barely remember my smartphone exists. But again, at the end of a 2-week vacation, I catch myself doing the same things routinely and mindlessly, without enjoying them as much.

Basically, when I'm tired or something, my brain goes for a quick dopamine fix which requires the less effort and, very importantly, the less deciding. The "beauty" of social media, is that they free you from the decision. On Wikipedia, you have to decide what to read, but social media give you a nice platter of content: "here's a tip for straining pasta, here's a nine-year-old who died."

If there's a started jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, I'll go for that. A Duolingo lesson pending, a book laying around, sweets in the pantry, a small enough cleaning task...

> but we all need to be more intentional with our time.

Yes. Think how you want your time to be spent. Then make the hard easy, and make the easy hard. Make a "dopamenu" of fun/relaxing/satisfying stuff to do when you need a break.
> Along with actively killing bees[3]

Off by one error.
Btw, here is the litany of broken systems that led to my outburst above.

I'm two months (at least) without data on my phone. I didn't need to use it and I'm a lazy ass so I didn't try to fix it. When I call them, a kind youg man on the other end of the chat says he's reset my service and within a couple of hours I'll definitely have data.

In a couple of hours I have no data, but now I also have no service: "emergency calls only". Result!

Of course I can't log into my account to see what's up, because it's trying to send me a TFA code. It can't send it to my mobile, since it's dead, but it sends it to my landline which is in the UK. I'm in Greece now.

I try to get help by clicking on a link in the page where I fail to login. I'm taken to a page with an "AI assistant" called TOBi. The page has the assistant's icon, smiling at me encouragingly and a wheel that's spinning, spinning, spinning... and spinning.

I think I pass out from all the spinning and all the screaming and pulling at my pigtails. I finally realise I can actuall call a number to ask for help. Fortunately my friend still has service.

I have to blow a few raspberries down the line to convince the (other) chatbot that it can't understand my speech, but I'm finally connected to a human being.

The kind young woman on the other end of the line tells me she has reset my service and I will definitely have my service back in 24 to 48 hours.

Three days later I definitely don't have service. I try to log in to my university email to pick up some work I need to do, but it asks me for a TFA code. That it sends to my mobile.

I call Vodafone for a third time. This time, I'm put through to a technician. He asks me to take my sim out of my phone and read the S/N off it "to make sure it's the right sim".

Hang on. To do what?

I put the sim back in the phone and I have service. Ah. So that's what he wanted me to do. He could have said so.

And I should have thought of it.

So, nothing works. Not even my goddamn brain works anymore. If that was a dumb take, that's because I'm dumb and useless and so is everyone else, it seems. Except for the guy who doesn't know how to tell you "did you try taking it out and putting it back in again?".

Because that's the only thing that works anymore.