skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't posted about this app in a while, so I wanted to take this opportunity to share the progress we've made. We've given it a pretty major facelift in the past couple of months, and it's still under active development, so I'm excited to see what's to come!
Ill mention a few I tend to go back for sheer joy. I'm a data scientist, so the ones I really like tend to be statistics focused since (I don't do DL):

- Statistical Models for Earthquake Occurrences and Residual Analysis for Point Processes [1]
Brought to me by [this](https://simplystatistics.org/posts/2017-09-04-deep-dive-ogat...) blogpost a while ago, for me it shows what a really good statistical analysis based on a model developed for the task at hand looks like. Great stuff.

- Conducting highly principled data science: A statistician’s job and joy [2]
Meng is such a good writter. This one really puts into perspective the job of good principles when tackling any kind of task that a data scientist will face. Principles, theoretical principles, are what avoids messing up a task.

1. https://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.1988...
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016771521...
The post tsunami Fukushima disaster usually comes up as an example of nuclear disaster. And it is, but how much of the disaster was nuclear vs bureaucratic? I changed my perspectives on it, a little, after hearing this podcast episode, highly recommend: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/a-tsunami-o...
I have most things that are made nowadays. The arguments for the status quo "you're getting it cheaper, it will actually last quite a bit, it's greener" etc are not really valid.

Even if an item is cheaper as a one off purchase, if I have to buy 3-4-5-10 more of the same, am I not paying now for the same higher quality product, but in the meantime the waste I generated is there, pilling up somewhere "else" where it doesn't bother my Western sensibilities.

The research part doesn't work that well either. I spent days researching a variety of products we have around our house and a bunch of different items a few friends asked me about. It's brutal.

Days of reading reviews, days of looking for the faults, days for trying to find the factory that doesn't abuse people or pay them garbage forcing them into slavery. For nothing. Some products work out, some don't, I pay more than the average guy to get maybe an extra year out of the "thing".

I used to have a Logitech MX518 (the original one that came out in 2006 if I remember correctly) and it still works. One of my parents is using it. It handled over 5000 games of Warcraft 3, over 4000 games of CS 1.6, easily 2500-3000 games of Dota and about 16 years in total of browsing websites and general usage. I replaced the skates once and that was about it. The new M590 I bought to keep quiet around the house had a faulty left switch within months... It also cost about half, but that would mean it should work... 8ish years then.

I had an O'Neill backpack bought in the early 2000s and used it for almost 20 years. It's currently being used by a friend who needed a small and simple backpack. I recommended another backpack to a friend, it fell apart in 10 months after costing 100$+. Twice the price of the O'Neill...

I'm tired. I'm tired of having to spend days to figure out if your product will fail within the year. I'm tired of having gone through about 6 milk hand-held frothers until I found a manual one that is a piece of glass and a handle... I had gone through 2 coffee grinders until I found a manual one made out of glass and metal.

Just...
I would go even wider than that and say that Kubernetes may be an ‘appropriate technology’ for Google but when it is exported to startups it is harmful, like OKRs. IBM had a technology for managing distributed applications for mainframes in the 1990s called “Parallel Sysplex” that was simple in comparison.
At least the disaster is localized to a single terrible place. With coal and gas it undermines the integrity of the planet contributing to climate change.
The issue is the amount of storage required. It depends a lot on the country, but here in Germany I think everybody agrees that we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels. That's a lot of batteries. And currently there's not enough storage for a single hour...

In these dimensions, resource availability becomes a limiting factor. Pumped hydro requires a lot of space and geography that many countries can't provide. It may be an option for Norway or Austria, but not for Germany. And even if Germany would buy the planned world production of lithium batteries for the next 10 years, we still wouldn't have enough. The math just doesn't work out for both. Hydrogen looks more realistic, but is not a mature technology at the required scale.
How many laptops or phones have exploded on planes?
I started working with functional safety only two years ago, and I've been surprised when colleagues expressed that Simulink was actually the go-to solution for functional safety software where they were working before. The logic being that the Simulink toolchain is qualified for functional safety, and if you use it in combination with a qualified C toolchain and RTOS, then you're good to go, certification-wise.
no, it is not.

The alternative is renewable energy.
Suicide is also a factor I believe.

Suicide was the second leading cause of death for people ages 10-14 and 25-34
Gitlab 15.7
You’d think for new hotels there be a robot vacuum in every room these days. Surely there are enough hotel rooms in the world to get industry vacuum bots to cost less then 10k a pop.
Relational Databases in Production
More people died from the Fukushima area evacuations than the meltdown.
Interesting. I used to get zero spam up until 2-3 years ago, lately it's a daily thing and always the same pattern.
Amazon warehouses, mostly. It’s also a worker treatment shortage. They leave for somewhere with equally low wages but less nonsense to put up with.
Oh, a cousin of Azorubin (E122).

Azorubin cleens the spleen!
You are right but this very much reinforces the saying "it's very expensive to be poor". $99 for a coffee grinder is a lot of money for most people. At the US minimum wage it's almost 17 hours of work, after taxes are taken out. So all they can afford is the cheaper version but then they have to consistently purchase a new one so end up paying more over time. Pretty interesting phenomenon.
Micron to cut 10% of workforce as demand for computer chips slumps
This reminds me of a West Wing quote:

> Oh, well then you're just as naive as these guys who think that capital punishment is going to be a deterrent for drug kingpins. As if drug kingpins didn't live their day-to-day lives under the possibility of execution

Where is 50g of fentanyl even being sold? That’s a huge amount. Would this be a deterrent for sellers in China or other countries outside of the US?
Some companies actively block native browser bookmark/profile syncing. Does this get around that?
Average age of a coronavirus death is over 80
Not if you count auxilary costs, it's also intermittent so it really isn't interchangeable with nuclear.
Usually electricity transmission is funded by taxes since that is centralized infrastructure. Production is often a commercial endeavor where energy is trade by the hour, or through longer contracts, on open markets. This depends on the country though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool
finally invest in renewables instead of killing them off
I am not saying that all the people I hired were x10 performers, but they were certainly better than average, imho, with a leaner process. For example I did not hire anyone that lacked basic coding skills. Perhaps I am a great interviewer or, more probably, the fact that the specific profile I was targeting (RoR developers) included a high-pass filter.
> You're downloading both the script and the binary from the host.

Technically, if you don’t read the script, you don’t know the binary is from the same host.

That doesn’t matter, though. The chain of trust is deep, including the tooling that produced the binary, your CPU, the internet, etc.

Downloading the first file basically says “I trust this site to give me this tool and nothing else”. Where it then gets that stuff from shouldn’t matter, even if it is from a shady site. You trusted them not to do that, just as you trusted them not to open up their own site so that hackers can replace files ont it.
Yep.

How many customers of the hospitality industry prioritize either cleaning staff pay, or how perfectly the room was cleaned, when they are looking at their options for a hotel and deciding who'll get their money?

Reasonable Assumption: Hotel management knows the answer, and makes their decisions accordingly.
As of 2005/2006, you'd be right.

Nowadays, the speed of development for statically typed languages is much faster, thanks to improvements in tooling. Going further, if you choose a modern language that supports type inference, static typing becomes a pure win, and in my opinion, there's no longer any good reason to use something like Python on the back end. If I had to pick a language for the situation you're describing, I might pick something like Kotlin.

My background for context: in 2000-2009 or so I wrote a lot of C++ and often wrote Python bindings using Boost::Python because of how much quicker and more convenient Python was for scripting and exploratory work. I also wrote a lot of Java in that era, and Java was indeed incredibly verbose and ugly. Like C++, it imposed heavy costs for the benefits it gave you. After 2010 I worked mostly in Scala, and for a year now I've been working primarily in Python. The simplicity of working in Python still feels liberating, and doing Pandas work in Jupyter is great fun, but in most ways it feels like a relic to me now, because I can write code that looks almost as simple and reads just as easily in Scala as Python. (Sadly, I wouldn't recommend picking Scala for a tech stack in a business, because it's hard to find Scala developers who want to write stupid simple code.)
As they mention in the article though, there are lots of applications that aren't space-limited but are structurally-limited (warehouses) in that they can't support the weight of solar panels without more engineering.

I did think it was strange that they obfuscated the W/m^2 statistic by only presenting W/kg and kg/m^2. I suppose focusing on watts per kilogram better aligns with a breakthrough in installations with poor structural support for heavy panels.
Aircraft carriers will be next when it comes to hot war. Drone swarms and hypersonic missiles just entered the game.
Exactly. What's disappointing is that they quote this hotel owner saying the old "nobody wants to work" trope when it's 100% false. They even bring up a conflicting quote a few paragraphs later, but I really doubt when she said that the person interviewing her said "no, you're wrong, and here's why." And it's not immediately and forcefully disproven in the article. It's not a difference of opinion, it's just wrong. It's disappointing it was even printed, honestly.

But this family will go on continuing to pay poverty-level wages for a brutal and thankless job convinced that other people are just lazy.
Ask HN: What Makes a Good Mentor?
I saw a post about how to find a mentor. I dont think I've ever had a mentor at work. It made me wonder, what qualities make a mentor good? I'm sure I could probably as someone to be my mentor, but how do I identify someone who would be a good mentor vs someone who may be good at their job but not a good mentor?
Textual has a browser-like DOM internally, which means that it has the same kind of structured information that a screen-reader would need. But there isn't a screen-reader API for the terminal to expose that.

On the roadmap is a browser target for Textual (same API, just rendering in the browser). Once that's available Textual can make use of browser technology for accessibility.
Elixir fits in here as well, if the workload is thread-bound and not computation bound.

I think Elixir's syntax and idioms are better than Go's, but that's personal preference.
I have a cousin who... lots of reasons... but life hasn't gone her way.

She had a kid way too early with the wrong guy. She never had much of an education.

Her main job has been working at hotels as a cleaner, and makes something like $8 / hour.

The work was "on demand" -- the hotels wouldn't even give her regular hours. If they didn't have people staying, they wouldn't call her to show up. But, for $8 / hour, they expected her to be on-call -- even though she only got paid if they called.

It was just so cringe-worthy hearing her talk about what was expected of her to make $8 / hour.

She was only allowed like 15 minutes per room. She was never to talk to guests in the halls, unless they spoke to her first. She was told, "Never make eye contact with guests." One supervisor told her, "Better to just shrug and pretend like you don't speak English if a guest talks to you." My cousin has blonde hair and blue eyes.

The cleaners all got cut loose the moment the pandemic hit. No severance pay or Covid bonuses -- pissed me off knowing these companies were claiming pandemic hardships, and getting bailed out, but not passing assistance on to the employees most in need.

My family had to come together to help my cousin during that time -- and that's what family is for, but her employer sure wasn't there for her the way my employer was there for me.

She's never one to complain, or ask for help, but I know from how excited she got when I gave her a handful of $5-50 gift cards that she's never gotten more than $20 as a Christmas bonus.

The highlight of the job for her was when someone would leave a tip, forget something trivial in the room (a phone charging cable or something they wouldn't call lost and found over), or throw something out and she'd get to keep something she found in the trash. But she said they weren't allowed to keep anything from the rooms any more, even if it had been put in the trash. And they were supposed to report if someone left cash in the room, even if it was clearly a $5 tip. Pretty shitty.

Oh, and the kicker... she worked a lot, she was always on call for a few of the different hotels in her area. But if she made "too much" money she would lose her food stamps. There was an "un-sweet" spot, where if she worked too much it would cost her.

Anyway, I don't know what the moral of the story was. It all seemed shitty. Probably best to have robots do more of it.

I spent 7 years in my 20s and early 30s basically living in hotels for work. I have a "lifetime" status with one prominent chain.

I didn't put a lot of thought into the lives of the people who worked these jobs back then. But I probably should have. Anything that seems to good to be true, probably is. Pretty much any time someone walks away feeling, "What good service!" I'm sure there's an army of people being exploited.
A broken fridge ruins lots of food, worth lots of money.

A broken washing machine or dishwasher can flood your house, costing 10s of thousands of dollars.

A broken dryer can burn your house down.

And even if some of those aren’t common failure modes (fridge is common), it is incredibly inconvenient and expensive to be without a major appliance for (insert supply chain guesstimate number of) weeks every year or so.
Ellison And Wang likely to be freed on $250k bail after FTX fraud pleas
Maybe don’t use “we” like that; I certainly enjoy when I can get a sense of a writers vocal pattern, and I am supportive of using text formatting to help with that.
Quite exciting - really hope this can boost the efficiency of conventional solar plants, too.
My advice is to always ignore people like this.
Housekeeping/cleaning is pretty low wage regardless, and the pandemic gave a lot of people an opportunity to get new skills. Not saying they went into tech but almost any industry pays better.

A lot probably also went into industry that pay comparatively the same but offer more flexibility in scheduling.
Export Your MLFlow Data to SQLite
We hired a data engineering consulting company and none of their team of SQL experts had heard of upsert or merge. I find it weird that people don't spend a bit of time searching for a better way of doing stuff before just jumping into a long, hard way of doing things.
Worth noting from a system safety perspective that it's not just about how to prevent the accident, but also how to limit the consequences once it does happen.

From what I remember of the Fukushima accident, one of the quick remedies they could have started with immediately is pump sea water in as a coolant. The management didn't want to do that, because sea water corrodes equipment and makes it more expensive to restore afterwards.

This is a natural thing for management to say -- they're sitting there in Tokyo not fully experiencing the severity of the problem.

The problem is that Japanese culture puts an emphasis on obeying your superiors, so it took a long time until people disregarded those orders and started cooling with sea water anyway. That sort of obedience culture is not really compatible with systems designed to suffer rare but potentially catastrophic failures.
They budget for the whole family, with one “bread winner” remaining.

I’d still expect them to get back to a stable job after their kid grow, but as it was a year or two ago, they just weren’t pulling their weight in the balance.

> ~$2000 a month to live at an absolute minimum. No luxury, no gadgets, just getting by.

Assuming 2000 is what you need as a standard working person, you need less than that in average when you’re in a couple, and the calculus is yet different with kids. When one of the adults stops working, a lot costs shift and it balances out. Gov aids, taxes and other benefits also change depending on your situation.
There are many different levels of hotel rooms. But, as with many things, service worker labor has gotten more expensive relative to other things (Baumol cost disease basically). So it makes sense for hotels and other industries to automate or simply eliminate things like daily room cleanings that most customers don't actually value a lot.
Quality manufacturing in the Good Ole Days is a myth. The Japanese are our lunch in auto in the 70s due to a lack of Quality.

Planned obsolescence is a thing. So is building or making for the short term. There just wasn’t this great era where people made things for the long haul out of pride or something else. People always took the short term view when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.
A couple weeks ago you had people here asking why they were moving forward so slowly.
Yeah, but try getting carbon repaired after a crash. It's not impossible, but it's also not as easy to work with as a material. That said a lot of new high end carbon bikes will come with crash replacement on the frame.
3 books, 0 sales. Sure don't enjoy marketing either, but it seems like I am doing too much of it for this result :(
This sub-thread started on the Vegas massacre, where the shooter used a bump stock. It was legal at the time and pretty damn close to automatic.
I'm sorry, but waveshaping absolutely introduces aliasing - and I was a bit disappointed to not see a section in that in the post.
Sadly cannot view the website on mobile. Adblock detected popup is larger than the screen and cannot be dismissed.
Cars kill people. You're focusing on minor, insignificant details and creating an environment where more people die than otherwise would. How many people die at the hospital waiting for a doctor? You know they have attending physicians and emergency room staff who work there right?

> So doctors won't be allowed to drive to the hospital in emergencies.

You might as well say "so doctors will be stuck in traffic jams on the way to the hospital, these things kill people".
This is assuming that hotels are making enough money to be able to afford to pay more. If margins are thin, they have to increase prices or reduce expenditures in order to get more money. A hotel is not a license to print money; it has to come from somewhere.

This can resolve itself in many ways. The classical outcome is that some hotels go out of business, and the supply of hotel rooms drops to the point where the demand means that a more realistic price level can be reached.

The potentially better outcome is that smaller business that rely on non-wage workers (like family-run businesses) can effectively employ "workers" at a much lower rate in the hopes of outlasting the contraction of the hotel room market.

The worse outcome is that big corporations can allow certain markets to lose money, because they are drawing sufficient income from other markets, and wait out the first culling, which will disproportionately affect local hotels that both rely on wage workers and do not have a capital backstop.

Or, the market can just recover organically due to circumstances completely out of the hotel's control -- the local labor market could contract meaning that workers are willing to take a lower salary, or the tourist market could expand meaning they can book more rooms, or business expenditures for hotel rooms could increase faster than price levels overall.
A related pattern in Java is that if you write

x.equals(“five”)

you can get a null pointer exception if x is null, but

“five”.equals(x)

returns false if x is null which is probably what you want because it is not equal to “five”; it is a good thing though to

import static java.util.Objects.equals

And then write

equals(x,y)

And never get a null pointer exception. Other languages have other problems that make Yoda conditionals more appealing. In PHP the compiler won’t stop you from writing

if(x=y) …

where = is the assignment operator instead of the equality test, but if x is a literal the compiler will balk.
The Billionaire Who Wants to Build the Tesla of Airplanes
Where's the limit? Perhaps we should award copyright over specific notes. After all we've all heard them before.

Music has so many variables that even direct covers often end up conveying something entirely original or unique. The chilling effect of Copyright results in humanity missing out on a huge number of valuable cultural contributions.
Then it sounds like they are set up for a path of future financial prosperity without needing to ape their father’s creative legacy.
Or build it at the top of said mountains?
Find some source code you like and reach out to the authors/get involved in the projects.
I wonder what operating systems the aerospace industry uses, since failures in the operating system could be equally expensive, yet operating system developers generally do not have access to these tools.
In Germany (and I think in the EU) you have a max. weight for cars of about 3.5T (~7716 pounds). You can drive cars that weight more than that but then your speed is limited to (I think 80-100km/h), you have to pay (more) toll and more importantly you have to get a special drivers license in most cases (cost + time).

Camper vans usually get very close to that limit. Even if the van has only 2 sleeping spots. Weight is definitely an issue there and most camper vans sold these days come with a solar installation on the roof.

With 100W of solar you can expect some additional autonomy as a camper. 200W is considered more than average solar for small camper vans in the EU.

A typical 200W solar panel weights in at around 10-13 kg + maybe 1-3 kg for the additional bracket.

11-16kg is something you would think about.

Thats also the reason why flexible panels are already used for some camper vans. They also have the advantage than you can put them on un-even surfaces.

The VW Grand California for example can be ordered with a flexible panel at the front side:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/VW_California#/media/Datei:VW_...