skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In what universe can there exist a society not subject to external forces?
> Their business should be providing value to their users

Yes, their paid users being the advertisers. The end "users" are the product.

> Trump provided a lot of engagement and popularity to the platform

Can you please give a source for your engagement figures?

> banning him was igealogy-driven and was very much against their business interests.

Again, please provide a source for this. Evidence of this could be grounds for a class action suit on the part of share holders.
It seems I was NOT familiar with what a bra is...
The Wolvic XR Browser Vision
> What is the official language of the company?

It's English. I know that this could be enforced by my manager or HR, but would prefer to handle it in a more direct/personal manner.

> You can't manage an IRL team remotely.

We are a "hybrid" team split between multiple US offices with a few fully remote members. So, kind of IRL but also kind of remote.

Honestly though, there are a host of issues I've seen crop up across my org that I suspect are products of a weak engineering culture caused by our partially-distributed setup. I don't think we're ever going to switch to being completely co-located, but I do wonder if I would have a better experience working in either a completely IRL or completely remote team.

> If you lost your job and was replaced with another Chinese person, this would be ideal for them.

Hadn't thought of this. I think they like me? But I guess both can be true.
Python's type annotation system has this feature too:

from typing import NewType

UserId = NewType('UserId', str)

user_id: UserId

user_id = "abc" # Type check error
user_id = UserId("abc") # OK

# At runtime, a NewType is the identity function
s1: str = "abc"
s2: UserId = UserId(s1)
assert s1 is s2

Docs: https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html#newtype

Runtime: https://tio.run/##TU49D4JADN37K544CIkLupk4OBoTXXQ2CKdcDHeXts...

Type checking: https://mypy-play.net/?mypy=latest&python=3.10&flags=show-er...
Coincidentally I watched a discussion yesterday where the assertion was made that complex systems cannot be written from scratch (and hope to work); the ones that work today always started from simpler systems.
> The unit tests is a statement that you will never refactor across this line, and that eliminates a lot of flexibility that I want.

I certainly don't see it as that. I see it as "this is the smallest thing I _can_ test usefully". Mind you, those do tend to correlate, but they're not the same thing.
Seriously, this guy needs to take the Trump flags off the back of his truck before making what might otherwise be legit arguments: plastic is bad, recycling tech at present is poor, maybe even a bust. BUT, so were other technologies at first. It's a problem that needs solving, and at least recycling keeps some awareness of a problem that needs bright people, not another angry conservative blowhard to just say, "ah, fuck it."
Instead of making up hypotheses based on 20th century urban legends, you could have spent thirty seconds reading the abstract which tells you what they actually did:

Methods Using questionnaire data, we classified subjects as predominant solid-fuel users (e.g., coal, wood) or nonsolid-fuel users (e.g., oil, gas, electricity). Unconditional logistic regression was used to estimate the odds ratios (ORs) and to compute 95% confidence intervals (CIs), adjusting for age, sex, education, smoking status, race/ethnicity, and study center.

Results Compared with nonsolid-fuel users, predominant coal users (OR = 1.64; 95% CI, 1.49–1.81), particularly coal users in Asia (OR = 4.93; 95% CI, 3.73–6.52), and predominant wood users in North American and European countries (OR = 1.21; 95% CI, 1.06–1.38) experienced higher risk of lung cancer. The results were similar in never-smoking women and other subgroups.

> You don't really believe that NIH stuff??

I don't disbelieve it. We already know that long-term exposure to other kinds of smoke causes lung cancer and other health problems, what's special about wood smoke?
I’ve been using a writing app lately that uses markdown, and that has an export feature to produce documents that interpret your markup in various ways. It’s rather nice to use but is missing a few things: I wish there was a markdown tag to indicate “title” or “author byline” so that # and ## weren’t inconsistently reserved by certain formatting styles.

Altogether, it is a great system though

Off topic: recommend a nodejs tool (or something client side?) to convert markdown to html to make article writing easier for custom sites?
So what? It is raising some interesting points in a decent way and developing discussion. There are points that make more sense to me than others, and I dont share their conclusions. But I appreciate the discussion it raises.

Americans shouldn't be so fast to discount the idea of each other just because they are from the other end of their political spectrum. US politics would improve if both sides avoided that.
Ask HN: Working in a VR Headset?
I am working full remote right now(programming/gamedev) and I travel several times a year for periods of up to two months. Because of specifics of my job I need to have a powerful workstation(I mostly need a powerful CPU) and I am comfortable with at least two 27" monitors. Traveling with that much stuff is only possible with a car, and even then the whole setup takes too much space.

Laptops are getting there with the compute power, but the 27" monitors aren't getting any smaller. Meta Quest Pro(which seems to be the top of the line now) has been just released and even tho it is somewhat pricey($1500), it still costs as much as three good 27" monitors.

Does anyone have any useful experience to share on working in a VR headset? Is it comfortable for longer periods of time? How is it on the eyes?
Largely off-topic, but I've had so much fun and luck getting old lenses to use with my mirrorless camera[0]. I've been able to get several lenses from random brands for an average price of like $15 apiece. Mirrorless cameras work especially well with those lenses because the adapters can be made very simply and usually had for like $10.

Are they gonna get you the "tack sharp" sports and wildlife photos like a high end lens of today? Hardly. But retro and lofi photography styles are pretty popular right now and are a blast! Why spend $200+ on some wacky retro-inspired lens when you can get a real vintage lens for less than 1/10th of that? Probably built better too[1].

The biggest potential drawback is a lot of these don't even have an option for auto anything (focus, aperture, etc.). Even if you get one that has it, the auto function likely won't work with any digital camera body[2].

Personally, I've actually grown to prefer manual focus in most cases and I shoot in aperture priority 99% of the time anyway. These have become my main lenses for now. Paired with Fuji's film simulations, I get decently close to aspects of the film experience but with modern benefits[3]. I'm not gonna get perfect color representation, but that's honestly what I'm aiming for anyway.

If I really need autofocus[4] or want a shot without my retro "filter", I can always use my phone.

[0]: A used Fujifilm X-T30 mk1

[1]: Even if it's just due to survivorship bias.

[2]: A lot of the old mechanisms for things like autofocus would be like a specifically placed worm gear. These adapters usually don't engage those mechanisms.

[3]: As much as I like the restriction of having limited shots and not knowing what it'll look like til later, it's still a steep cost. On top of that, it's hard to even trust the in-camera light meter as many were designed for mercury batteries. I've been able to use modern hearing aid batteries, but the voltages aren't exact matches, so the readings are slightly off.

[4]: Even though I like manual focus, handing my mostly manual camera to a non-photographer family member always requires a mini photography lesson, for better or worse.
Type correctness can be verified at compile time while Boolean values can’t.
Interesting point about the economics of Energy Vault. I had not actually done the math before. $80 seems low for current prices but it's about the right order of magnitude. OTOH there is at least one project being built to store 100 MWh, and they have a bunch of investors for millions of dollars. That's a bunch of smart people who surely did at least 5 minutes of math to validate the idea, which makes me wonder what they saw that's missing from this analysis. It's possible it's all just a big scam, but strikes me as unlikely.

Also, doesn't thermal storage have the same problem with long-term storage of energy not producing a lot of revenue? Perhaps the capital investment is lower, but the yearly income would be order-of-magnitude the same.

I was pretty much agreeing with you about thermal being the cheap option, but thanks for the breakout.

Do you know of any examples of 10 GWh thermal storage? Just curious, I haven't really poked into that area too much.
Indeed, what could go wrong...

The author wants the scientists to be involved in the coming COP27, as if they were not already. As if no technical anf scientific solutions had been provided to climate change!

Plenty of solutions have been found already. We absolutely know how to resolve this issue on the technical aspects ; this doesn't mean that no research and development is needed: we can and will come up with even better solutions.

But we already have the solutions. No technical challenge here, just a political challenge: decide how to share the costs.

Because we are lazy and don't understand what game theory tells us about the current stand-still. This is a game where each country would benefit the most if it succeeds doing the least - as long as the others do enough.

Hence the need for a political COP27: the only issue is to find a consensus and start acting promptly at the required scale (which is a big one, but much smaller than WWII for example on the economic side).

Geo-engineering is a quest for the silver bullet.

As if technology had ever provided a solution to a political issue... It hasn't. When it looks like it has, it's always because the policies are embbeded into the technogly: cf "code is law" for example.
> The change seems to be that it has now rolled out on all accounts rather than just Red accounts, and now there is drama.

What do you mean by this? There was one high profile incident with the white house, but I am struggling to believe that’s when the controversy started.
Echo chambers amplify invalid assumptions. An example of this IRL is when a founding member of a company hire only people that think exactly like them and so on and so forth. When they have a bad idea, everyone will agree it is a good idea and act on it. Good leaders hire diverse employees and are open to accepting feedback from those that dissent with their views. Some of the best and most successful leaders I have met love it when someone challenges their held views with verifiable data of course.
I've worked on shitty code with shitty tests that ran the core of the business. Even while doing that, it was horrible to work with, held important features back and drove talented people away, leaving everything to stagnate in a "this works enough" state. When the wind changed, it was hard to turn the ship around, important people got nervous, and things got into a bad spiral.

None of this is the failure of code and tests alone; but both can be indicative of the structural health and resilience of the wider situation.
I imagine the bottles are cleaned before refilling.
in japan, plastics like containers are almost always to be sorted out (and cleaned beforehand) and collected on specific days

but more often than not, they just stay there and aren't "collected" until the next raw garbage (food etc) and basically burned with everything else

cans, pet bottles, cardboard, all taken at the day they are supposed to, but plastic isn't most of the time... and its likely the exact same reasons as the article says: its (sadly) a waste
> Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine

> Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Exactly why I like it more than any other social platform. People have to be more accountable and so those posts are much rarer.
> it is definitely better than “opening the gates and letting everyone in”.

Letting users discover when their content is removed is not "letting everyone in".

You can have both moderation and transparency. They're not mutually exclusive, and many people will alter their behavior in a group after being told their content was removed. They're less likely to change when they're not told. For those who persist, consider what Jonathan Rauch says about speaking in a public forum,

> The person you're talking to isn't the person you're directly talking to. You're not going to be able to persuade that hardcore LGBT left-wing activist that your point of view is correct. The person you're talking to is [the one overhearing your conversation]... They're seeing you sound reasonable, and the other person sound dogmatic and censorious... [1]

In other words, don't compromise your values to deal with a minority of very persistent people with whom most people don't find alignment anyway. When you do compromise your values, that person will shift to attack you on the basis of censorship, and you've just given them the very platform they needed to gain followers. At that point you're no longer the open discussion forum to whatever degree you claimed.

So you can't convince everyone of your viewpoint. So what? Leave it at that. Accepting that someone may not agree with you right away, or possibly ever, is the grown up thing to do. After all, in some cases it may be your mind that gets changed. To the extent you don't do this, you are your own worst enemy. And when you can see it through, you will have become your best advocate.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0T9XSG73kY&t=4889s
Does that make the assumption that the nova's energy is distributed evenly? Because I believe there are gamma ray bursts that are quite directional, and can if pointed at us cause harm far further than that. (IANA astronomer...)
There is no love lost between india and china due to events in the recent past.

The Indian people and government are furious with china's flouting of the agreed upon status quo at the border and it comes with all the nationalistic fervour that fury entails. It has also eroded india's trust in china at a diplomatic and military level.

India has been trying to counter and contain china's influence in the region with limited success and all of India's politcal, diplomatic and military institutions see china as our biggest threat.

The nuance in the "bugbear" thing is that this accelerated re-orientation against china is not coming from a place of fear, it's coming from a place of "Come at me bro".

While on paper it might seem like India is militarily outmatched by china the geopolitical and tactical reality is that china is incapable of mounting a meaningfully successful attack against India without itself suffering politically, militarily, economically and diplomatically.
I'll think about colors, thanks.
> Whichaway Camp, one of only two luxury hotels on continent

The fact that there are more than zero is shocking to me! Looks like this one is in the range of $5-$10k per night.
The main benefit of static types is great refactoring tools
I go back and forth on this. If you're there for the Rust, you're probably not there for the politics. If the blog is about Rust, it's counterproductive to make it about Rust+politics, because the set of people interested in that is strictly smaller than the set of people interested in Rust.

On the other hand, I'm a human being. I don't quit being a human being when I think about programming languages. I care about the events in Ukraine and Iran. I care about tyranny - I'm strongly against it. (And, for the record, I'm very much not "woke" or "progressive". Conservatives care about Ukraine too. Conservatives care about what the people of Iran suffer too.)

So I would say that there's a close-to-universal care, just because we're human beings, and they're human beings. But if you're going to bring politics into something unrelated like programming, the issue needs to be about that universal and clear-cut.

But, as others have said, then you get into the problem of selectivity. If I don't say something about everything that rises to that level, then... what? Say nothing about anything? That leaves it as a programming blog, but ignores my humanity. Start saying something about everything? That turns it into a political blog. Be selective? That raises questions about bias. There is no good answer...
I've brought up before that I've given "no hire" recommendations based on a candidate's inability to speak English, and my coworkers seemed shocked.
I think it varies greatly based on your location. Where are you?

My experience in Canada and remote Australia has been excellent. The service is many, many times better than the only alternative.
>turns out it was completely true

Depends on what you mean by “completely true.” For instance, I heard all kinds of wild/absurd accusations like he had child porn all over it. If that were “completely true,” he’d be in cuffs. You need to give more context here.
I’m sorry if you see it as arrogance- we just didn’t have time to polish experience on all browsers- we had to choose our poison.
If that place is the EmailAddress type, then you have built your system wrong.
You check that stuff when the data enters the system.
It's so that when you are 50 function calls deep you don't have to remember if you are handling a verified email or not. This is the same problem I have with "sum types" as implemented in languages that don't have algebraic data types. You either have a massive struct that contains mostly nullable values or something like a tagged union.

>verified and unverified email addresses the same except for some very specific situations.

This is when typeclasses are a useful concept (or interfaces). Instead of designing your function around a concrete type, you can codify that the caller needs to provide any types that satisfy some requirements. For example, if the function only cares that the input can be treated as a string, you can ask for something like `As<String>`. Then, the caller can provide literally anything as long it implements `As<String>`.

> types are just one tool

Indeed, types are just a tool. But it is a much better tool. Its an electronic shaver instead of rusty axe. This is my biggest gripe with "simple and small languages". More often than not, you just end up writing more verbose and complicated code just to compensate.

To illustrate, I wanted to implement `INCR KEY VALUE` from Redis.

```

item, exists := db.keys[key]

if !exists {
return
}

value, ok := item.Value().(string)

if !ok {
return
}

intValue, err := strconv.ParseInt(value, 10, 64)

if err != nil {
return
}

intValue++ // <== this is literally the only meaningful work I am doing

db.keys[key] = intValue;

```
Here's one of my favorite HN submissions, written by a bartender in Antarctica https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5951227
Why am I not surprised.

That's the "you insensitive clod" option.
Related story: Musk got a note attached to his tweet removed. Edit: but now it is back.

"After new Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted a complaint about losing advertisers on the platform Friday, a note offering additional context was added to his tweet, before it later disappeared."

https://www.semafor.com/article/11/04/2022/birdwatch-note-di...
This came up the other day, actually! https://github.com/orgs/mdn/discussions/256#discussioncommen... :)
Well a similar thing happened with roughly the same poll like 10 years ago. Moderation on this site has improved but it’s still grown a lot and there aren’t really consequences for lying here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536734
Sweet fact check!
The UK has free dental for those who qualify [1].

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/dentists/who-is-entitled-to-...
This is brilliant. Just made my day
agree, there really needs to be strong negative incentives to reduce plastic packaging... we consumers don't have a choice of "apples in plastic" vs "apples in cardboard" its just whatever the supermarket buys is what we get
Can you actually buy a profitable bitcoin rig at 20k a coin?
I think ascribing PL popularity to striking the right tradeoff in this respect is leaping a bit far. It's compatibility and familiarity with predecessors, marketing dollars, etc. They tend to have C++ style syntax for example which is a similar path-dependence-formed quirk of history.
The blindingly obvious flaw to this solution is that misinformation is specifically crafted to appeal to particular audiences. People already exercise individual filtering: they don't read (or accept) everything that's put in front of them, but subjectively choose what to actually read and believe. Merely externalizing those internal filters doesn't change the dynamic.
The word awe-inspiring is often used as a hyperbole, but in this case I really think it adequately describes Mlle. Boulanger. If you consider her influence over the 20th century, she surely ranks among the greatest pedagogues in the entire western classical tradition of music.

And of course, there are endless fascinating anecdotes from her pupils and colleagues. There's a video of Elliott Carter talking about how she used to sing and play through a Bach cantata every week with her students[1]. Charles Rosen, who served as a panelist together with her at a piano competition observed:

>Mlle. Boulanger did not, indeed, discuss the contestants, but she had ways of making her opinions known. When she was bored by a performance, she would compose canons. On a large piece of paper she had brought with her, she would rule several five-line staffs, and begin to invent some elaborate counterpoint. The implied comment was far more devastating than any words could have been.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz3PTNOVLuM
Taking fast fashion to a whole new level. Depressing.
Discovered HN looking over a classmate’s shoulder in discrete math class at ~20 or so. Now 33. Quit a bigco tech job, sold a yc startup, married my partner, had a baby. Still here. Lots of appreciation for the orange site and its many serendipities. Still one of the only places on the internet w real discourse between actual biz and technology experts.
The majority of the testing I’ve written have been jest tests and PHPUnit tests, and note PHPUnit is my favourite. It’s easy to built up custom assertions, and all of the in built assertions have the ability to provide an additional failure message during a failure.

Assertions throw an exception and the test runner catches them along with any exceptions thrown by the code in test, marks the test as a failure, and reports the given error message and a full stack trace.
Fortunately, the world is not a movie and there are many ways to contain organisms by making them depend on non-canonical amino acids which do not exist in nature. Making them depend on multiple means that them acquiring the ability to produce them is astronomically low