skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is RSV immunity debt that worries me. I think it's an example of our poor capability for risk analysis. I talk to so many parents here in California that are terrified of covid for their kids. So they still limit activities. But statistically kids have very, very low risk. RSV, and even flu, on the other hand are more dangerous for kids and any immunity debt may make that worse.

It reminds me of how few parents realize the statistical risk of kids in cars versus how rare abduction is (if kid walks alone to school as an alternative to a car, for example). Again it is emotional/anecdotal thinking rather than data.
Every one of these complaints always misses the salient failure of the analogy: do you expect your bridge or your gas line or your house's electrical layout (once it's installed) to be changed every month or quarter to handle new load, produce different results, or even change its feature set? No - these things are planned for and built to do exactly and only the thing they were first designed for. Heck, you can even throw certain software into that mix like medical device firmware. The software industry is doing exactly what people want out of it: becoming highly flexible to individual business and consumer needs in sophisticated customized interactions.

Those of us who write it are trying as hard as we can to impose sensible and reusable structure on things, but the public wants constant innovation. Not the same "heat my house when I plus this in" demand they had 50 years ago that would have given us the stability to focus on standards, safety, and efficiency. We're doing the best we can.
You're an edge case, like the old, the young, the computer-illiterate, the very computer-literate, people who speak English but deal with a lot of things that aren't in English, and so on...
Square lets merchants spam you without opt-in if you get an email receipt
Given that the repo has already been up for 15 months now, the answer is "at least 15 months".
Our team has qualified for the Hack-a-Sat finals three years in a row. I wasn't a part of the first year but was a part of last year and this year. Last year's finals didn't go super well for us, but we're hoping to do better this year.
> You could solve the "system" by regulating that companies are not allowed to sell products at a loss, but that would be unamerican.

To memory, Nintendo is the only console maker that turns a profit on the hardware (which is part of why their hardware specs are always outdated). Sony & Microsoft don't turn a profit until you buy ~3 games.

I think people would be surprised at how often products are sold at a loss.
There's no way they made that threat. California is the 5th largest economy in the world.
Berkeley was paid to port TCP/IP to unix and as far as I know, part of the deal was that the code should be available to quickly port TCP/IP to more systems including non-BSD.

Thus considerable portion of Operating systems at one point or another used BSD4.3-derived network stack to detriment of network API evolution (sometimes updated with later code), some over time developing their own implementation.
The transition from today's world to tropical paradise would include mass extinctions and a lot of human suffering.
I can see how we got here though. There's so little exciting tech out now, compared to so much money and so much talent available.
someone's boss: no, don't worry about error rates. just deliver something by end of day. URGENT!
US Government Amassed More Than a Billion Pounds of Cheese
I am pretty sure this is just not reality. I am reading Vaclav Smil and this is not the picture he paints at all.

From reading Smil though I come away with the idea that informed discussion on this matter is basically impossible because the subject is too complicated. People will just talk their prior beliefs.

It is really a bad situation no matter how you look at it.

The discussion needs to be about gigajoules per hectare but I have never read anyone mention that other than Smil. This of course could be my ignorance.
Tony Soprano: “First thing I did was rip out all that GPS shit”
On the other hand we never had so much knowledge.

Your comment reads as an excuse in why it's okay that we are that slow.
I'm a bit on two feet about this article:

- On one hand, professional liability would indeed be a good thing for overall reliability of our software systems. A "code" for offering software products to citizens would be a good thing. The GDPR is a good step in the right direction for privacy concerns, but there are many other types of concerns that could be covered.

- On the other hand, most of the "real" problems in infrastructure software come from adversarial action. Most software systems run more or less fine by themselves, from a professional liability standpoint. Adversarial action is not usually covered by "professional liability". For example, nobody blames the architects of the Azovstal plant that the steel furnaces couldn't stand up to sustained artillery bombardment.

- Despite all the talk about how critical software systems are these days, 99% of systems out there is the equivalent of a garden shed and nobody would care if it falls over. Certainly the shed in my own garden would not survive a proper hurricane, but that is OK because a. we don't really get hurricanes here and b. the cost to completely rebuild it would be much lower than bringing it up to hurricane standards. Even Maersk, which is surely not a small target, managed to survive a full blown ransomware hit just fine. (By which I mean, they took a fairly large hit financially but nobody died and no ships sank. By and large all vessels even reached their destination on time) Their IT had to work a lot of overtime for sure, but "the system" is not as vulnerable as people like to claim.

So what to do? I would not mind some form of legally mandated checklist to follow that would be mandatory for any company offering services on the internet, but at the same time I don't think it would be very effective in countering the worst threats and I also don't think it would be proportionate for most companies.
It's not so simple. Haber's process increased the population the globe could support by billions. So yes, baby boomers came from post war era, but global availability of food meant that the generations following didn't starve or cap out.
> What method do americans tend to use to check that their politicians are voting in their interest?

Sadly it's usually directly correlated with how much money you give them.
It's nice to see they improved those by adding the plastic guard! I've got a bike with a really scuffed up fork on one side from using the old version without the guard for a few years.
Reminds me of "goto fail" somehow.

Loving how Uninstallation is a top level user flow Oracle advertises. Lowered expectation . I suppose that's what casual users need most often?
Before a bill goes before the full Senate it gets debated/edited in a relevant committee, if the committee votes against the bill it never goes up for the full vote.
I bought a Supernote A5X last year, which is a fantastic e-ink tablet with a stylus. The company behind is very actively developing and enhancing the Supernote's (Android-based) OS and software and people (including myself) love them for it (see /r/supernote). However, I really wish their note file format was also supported by desktop software like Xournal++. Basically, I'm hoping that one day we'll have a standard file format for hand-written notes but of course I'm aware of the usual XKCD…
I think the presentation covers this fairly well.

Give devs interesting work by having them solve interesting problems. If the technology stack is the "interesting problem" then you are wasting this developer excitement on something less valuable than higher-level business problems. Go up the stack, get devs excited to work on those higher-level problems, and spend less of that expensive dev time on high-risk software that has questionable impact on those higher-level problems.
They’re the same thing seen from different perspectives.
This means that a majority of senators voted to oppose the bill, (after it had been approved by the house). Is that correct?

No, the bill did not get to a vote by the full CA senate. Senate committees deal with the bill before that and this one did not get through that hurdle on the way to becoming law.

https://www.senate.ca.gov/committees
Find out how to develop Magento integration easily and fast.
And you're desperately coming up with nonsensical solutions that aren't as practical in any meaningful way.

You honestly think having measuring devices for two entirely different systems or not using US based recipes is trivial compared to asking for the conversion out loud and getting it immediately? Yeesh!

EDIT: even going back to your timer comment (to which you completely ignored the response), your 'trivial' solutions effectively boil down to 'get more kitchen space'. Totally trivial.
With almost 90% of the population in California being over age 10, that would be quite that market to ignore. It's more people than almost all of Scandinavia combined.
How much would this have to be used to offset the (materials/energy/water) cost of manufacturing it though?
You just need to get on with the times. To read somebody now, you must: A) Be sure that whatever they wrote you agree 100% with. B) That person must share your full worldview and must have a pristine moral reputation. Anything else is dangerous, wrong and frankly subversive so I dont mind if you get punished by violating these simple principles.
From what I have gathered the recommendation to choose boring tech usually has this idea factored in already and is more of a conclusion than an aspiration.
If they vote against your interests you don't vote for them again and try to not get them re-elected. However, through writing their own rules, heavy campaigning and the two party system making a vote for your favorite team better than letting the other guy get in this in effect no longer works on either side. It requires a fairly unified effort to get someone out but the majority of voting attention is squarely captured on both sides leading to the same hackery voted in again and again.

It's one of the many reasons why I don't see changes in the American political system happening without real rebellion type actions but the pain isn't felt enough yet to make thinking like that completely palatable.

And not to mention the voting body of the united states is completely polarized and divided.
Right in his critique, but he had nothing worthwhile on how to address it. Hence his resulting attempt of 1. Send bombs to technologists 2. ????? 3. Mass social uprising.

On this particular topic, basic software Freedom would be sufficient. But apparently enough people don't even care to make purchasing decisions based on anti-features. Or at the minimum, say hiring a technician to fix your brand new fridge as described in OP.

So, as seems to be the trend, most people are effectively content letting technology take away their agency. A small number of us can swim in the stream of navigating it so we don't get ruled over by it, but once you're doing all that work just to tread water it becomes awfully tempting to use your understanding to subjugate others.
English Length Units Graph
Already happened with the coffee machine at work.
Anthropomorphising companies is a trap. I mean, it's a trap that SCOTUS fell into, but still. Companies are more like organisms in nature, responding to incentives in a mindless way. Just as it seems foolish to hate a tapeworm for its 'exploitative' life-cycle, it seems foolish to hate this kind of business model, or any other. Are herbavores really the only good animals, and farmers the only good workers? I find that hard to accept. It's almost impossible to judge good or evil, especially in the long run. Consider that mitochondria probably started out as an infection, or a parasite. Your gut flora, too. Not to mention all the weird ways ecosystems interlock, until its no longer clear who's exploiting whom. (That said, I think it's reasonable to want to live in Mayberry, but its highly unfair when the only people who get to live there are the ones who make the rest of the world Hamsterdam.)
Are there common websites where you can see exactly how individual senators vote on specific issues?

From the article, where it is linked "SB 983", clicking that, and clicking the tab that says "Votes" will show who voted yay and nay for this bill[1]. There are many sites, yes, but you can also just get this directly from state legislatures.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xht...
house.gov and senate.gov both have public tallies on bills.

https://clerk.house.gov/Votes
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/votes_new.htm
For those looking for a great alternative to Review Apps - Livecycle is great (https://livecycle.io/).
It offers the automated per-PR ephemeral environment and much more. It also includes a rich layer of built-in collaboration and annotation tools that allow all collaborators to join the PR review and leave their comments visually, on top of the product UI. The comments are maintained in Livecycle and also synced back to Git as review comments so that developers can see the issues faster, understand them better and address them sooner.
There are setup templates that make it easy to simply copy over your docker file and get started within a few minutes. And the team is eager to help if you have any questions or issues.
What exactly is the purpose of a visa that doesn't require employment and doesn't lead to settlement?
> That seems like a perfectly reasonable concern, though.

I agree. But should we hold wind power to the same standards?

Hundreds of thousands of birds are killed by wind power per year, in the US alone:

https://www.birdwatchingdaily.com/news/conservation/new-stud...

Did anyone compare the environmental damage done by Nuclear per GWh to winder per GWh?
> It is a decidedly answered HN question

No, very certainly not: it is not an answered question why *this* specific article has an intellectual interest above a large degree of randomness.
Non-cloud servers. With cloud (virtual servers) you don't have to deal with for examples harddrives, network cards because that is all abstracted away. It's a different set of knowledge required.
Does it mean that whoever selects (controls) the committee pretty much selects the fate of the bill ?
god runs on a freemium service
"The pretence that corporations are necessary for the better government of the trade, is without any foundation. The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman, is not that of his corporation, but that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence. An exclusive corporation necessarily weakens the force of this discipline. A particular set of workmen must then be employed, let them behave well or ill. It is upon this account that, in many large incorporated towns, no tolerable workmen are to be found, even in some of the most necessary trades. If you would have your work tolerably executed, it must be done in the suburbs, where the workmen, having no exclusive privilege, have nothing but their character to depend upon, and you must then smuggle it into the town as well as you can."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
I wrote a Linux CLI tool [0] that parses the man/help pages to extract option details. Works most of the time for me, but there are plenty of corner cases that don't work.

[0] https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help
The Democrat party completely controls the state government.

Thee party controls 31 of the 40 seats in the senate, and 60 of the 80 seats in the lower house.

They have had a majority since 1996.
Interesting, I had no idea COBOL was this valuable.

How does one show proficiency to a prospective employer though? I am going to do some reading on COBOL. Thank you
Lol yes, after years of actual water shortage and housing shortage being "not great, but you know, we manage" this would certainly push the state over the edge into full-on Mad Max thunderdome mood. :D
Nice to see that after being let go from Microsoft, Bob is doing something productive albeit menial.
> The new generation will have their brains wired to ignore ads

...upon which the brain wiring experts get bought and rewire those brains to only see "approved" ads which gives the wheel another push. Around and around it goes, like a circle game.
I loathe MBAs and business schools - I strongly feel like that have seriously ruined much of the last 30 years through wasted talent and short sighted profiteering. That and they are so self assured. Oh add in VC for putting such high pressure and excess returns. The model is broken.

* I know not all MBAs are like this but there's considerable damage *
I think it will be difficult to satisfy global storage demands with lithium batteries. But most countries already have infrastructure to store a couple of weeks to a couple of months worth of methane. Perhaps it makes economic sense to just use that infrastructure and pay the 60% conversion loss. Maybe other battery chemistries will be better options.
Anecdotally, I have two young kids in daycare, and everyone’s been sick more often than not since January. Frequent Covid swabs all come back negative.
Did you know that children in daycare have almost a 100% chance of contracting RSV within the first year of attendance (even pre-pandemic)?
I love working on these. I'm not really into CTFs but I learn quite a bit each time I participate in Hack-a-Sat. The astrodynamics questions in CTF1 were quite hard, such as make a star tracker and find your position.
My team and I had a blast the first year this came out. Definitely recommend participating in this, even if you’re not familiar with more traditional security CTF challenges. These challenges tend to draw from the broad set of engineering skills needed for space-faring technology, not just your traditional vulnerable service or configuration.
I use Xournal++ for explaining concepts online via discord/jitsi using app sharing. Simple and works well.
The link is right in the article: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

It shows the history of the bill including votes. Each state does this differently, as well as the federal government. As for what happened to this bill, it never made it to a full senate vote, it died in a sub-committee, essentially.
Welcoming Rocket.Chat to Matrix
> The only thing that maintains the value of any asset (or currency) is the collective belief in that asset or currency. Put another way: there is an inescapable component of trust in every asset.

This is false in the general case. An asset means a useful or valuable thing, person, or quality. If something is useful to me, such as food, hydration or shelter, trust is irrelevant. In fact, something can have value to me (perhaps even objective value), even if there are no other agents/persons.

Even where there are other agents/humans, no trust in an asset is required in some cases. Suppose we all can independently verify the use and quality of something (we call this measurement). If that thing has some definite utility to us, the value each will assign may differ, but that thing's value is not dependent on the subjective valuation (Say a morsel contains 15 Joules and I can harvest 9 Joules and you 11 Joules, the value we each could assign differs, yours being greater than mine, but is objectively derived, being based not on trust nor subjectivity. Subjective meaning based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions). Granted, we can not preclude the possibility that someone, somewhere providing a subjective value to this thing, merely that somethings have value, potentially to many of us that is objective and intrinsic in and of the thing itself.

Trust in every asset is, indeed, escapable.
Rooftop lawns in cities are to offset the increase in heat generated by having the city there. They are an attempt to return the environment to something closer to natural.

And yes, xeriscaping is striking. Absolutely beautiful to see native plants, well adapted to the climate, thriving and taking center stage.
> Handwashing is water inefficient compared to a lot of dishwashers

My grandmother insisted the right way to hand-wash dishes was to plug the sink and fill it up, scrub with your hands in the water, then drain and rinse everything all at once.

That should be similar efficiency (or greater?) vs a modern dishwasher, but I'm not sure anyone does that anymore. Everyone else I've seen leaves the water running the whole time.
Firefox is here to stay. Or so I hope. It's my daily driver, and I definitely prefer it over Chromium's uncertain future of curbing ad blockers.

I work in web development, and all our products are built with 100% compatibility with Firefox and it being the priority browser. The rest are secondary including Chromium based ones.

If it works on FF, it works elsewhere (except that steaming pile of crap that Safari is)
Who are you talking about thinking that diseases were eradicated by masks?

Public health people talking about low incidence of diseases being due to pandemic isolation and masking almost certainly weren't implying that they were gone, more commenting that they were suppressed by those changes to behavior.

I am kind of fascinated that there is so little call to do things like improve ventilation. There's some, but people haven't seemed to catch on that we could do things to reduce disease that cause ~no individual inconvenience. Or like send people home when they come to work with a cold, change that culture.

For outbreaks, I doubt a few hundred cases of monkeypox (outside of the endemic areas) would have been such major news a couple years ago. It's largely an attention phenomenon. It is certainly something to keep an eye on, but it doesn't appear to be spreading uncontrollably. Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the endemic areas, has more cases this year than the non-endemic areas.
Whatever Happened to “Programmable” Analog? (2019)
I imagine it's very complicated. Sometimes they just need cooperation on other things, then they own stock, their friends own stock, they run in the same social circles, you can bet many are just corrupt and if not their friends are, then there's the actual power the companies have (like the ability to build or layoff in their district, strategically hike prices, minor capital strikes, blackmail (remember who has all the data), all kinds of stuff.) Also, there aren't really any consequences to ignoring you anyway. On average, they'll either get re-elected because nobody notices/understands or they'll just be replaced by a new sock puppet.

This is why you'd want liquid democracy, arbitrary right of recall or something along those lines.
Student Startup ‘Limber’ Makes 3D-Printed Prostheses Affordable and Accessible
UK are to upgrade thousands of schools, hospitals with gigabit broadband