skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to run a manufacturing plant that made millions of pounds of the precursor to vinyl chloride every day (EDC, ethylene di-chloride). The EDC was sent in a 3 mile long pipe to another unit which was run by my very best friends that I drank with/barbecued/watched game of thrones/went fishing on the coast with every weekend, and their unit produced the vinyl chloride (VCM, Vinyl Chloride Monomer). I was often inside that unit's control room diagnosing a variety of manufacturing problems.

This is a very, very serious disaster and the panic is well-warranted. These chemicals are awful and can produce even worse chemicals after combusting -- much less of those worse chemicals, but some of them, like small quantities of PCB's, will stick around in the soil forever and potentially make this whole place un-inhabitable. I say "small" quantities of PCB's but if you're combusting a million pounds of Vinyl Chloride Monomer, you will generate a very significant and scary amount of PCB's that don't really ever degrade.

I can't imagine how much PCB might be generated by burning as much VCM as they burned in Ohio. I also can't figure out a better way to clean it up. The rail company should absolutely pay for all the effects of this.

When like a process pump caught on fire (from friction, etc) it would spew PCB's around the concrete pad. Our only viable solution to clean up the PCB's was to spray it with EDC to dissolve it -- PCB's are too sticky and inert to clean up manually. EDC is also a toxic chemical but nothing else worked well to clean up the PCB's. It's illegal to spill too much EDC but we kept it under the "reportable quantity" by only spraying less than a gallon per incident so we didn't have to file an EPA or OSHA report about EDC pollution.

My very last day of work I watched a vinyl chloride railcar explode as I was carrying out my last box of stuff at 8PM. From 2 miles away the explosion hit me in the chest like I was 20 feet from a naval gun. I never wanted to work in a chemical plant again after that.

Pretty much all of the guys that were in the plants for more than 5-10 years have endocrine/HPTA issues.

-------

I also used to work at an acrylates manufacturing unit in a different state. Personally as a nearby resident I'd be more immediately worried about the combustion of all the leaked Butyl Acrylate producing Acrolein than I would be about the potential PCB's.

Acrylates are by far my least favorite bulk chemical. I fucking hate acrylates. Trace amounts of them in the air have a massively terrible affect on my respirator health.
Ocular Surface Erosion After Suspected Exposure to Evaporated Covid-19 Vaccine
And a touch of garlic powder!
One more middle mouse button user here.

It's usually the first thing that stops working on my mice.

Also I love it that ThinkPads still have 3 physical mouse buttons over the touchpad, so I don't have to mess with the gestures or hold down Ctrl to open links in new tabs.
When McKinsey/Bain/BCG goes to a client, the project is usually sold to the CEO or senior exec by a 40-50 year old Director or Senior Partner at the consulting firm. The project kicks off with a "case team leader" who is the only full time person on staff, they are usually like 30, running a group of 22-28 year olds, who are doing the work with the client executives who are usually 2-4 levels down from the CEO. The partners from the consulting firm are not full time on the project and their job is to keep the project on track, present the conclusions to the client at the end, but most importantly to keep the money flowing from the client.
What a completely absurd and nonsense take. Where does this "purpose" get decided? Some secret cabal that controls the education system? Insane.

There are some flaws in our education system that are likely the result of the fact that it is huge, serves an incredibly diverse set of people, and thus is a very complex and difficult to manage system.

There's no secret back room of evil people controlling the populace via an imperfect education system. What a weird take.
Arguably without the OpenGL vs D3D and now Vulkan vs D3D back and forths, along with experimental APIs like MANTLE, we definitely wouldn't have a lot of the robust tech we have access to today.

OpenGL's freeform experimentation and evolution with extensions let people test things out in production environments to figure out what worked, while D3D's stable feature set meant that games and productivity software could - if it made sense for the developer - choose to ship a more limited feature set that worked everywhere, all of the time.

D3D also has consistently offered great debugging tools and a robust reference rasterizer, things you simply can't get in an OpenGL environment. As a game developer it's invaluable to be able to swap over to a Direct3D backend for debugging even if you end up using OpenGL as your default. (These days, Vulkan has first-class debugging support too, which is great.)

Now we have Vulkan as the new home for experimentation and it has great debugging and validation layers, while D3D pushes forward on certain new features and provides a more consistent baseline on Windows desktops. For console games as well, you can use Vulkan on (AFAIK) Nintendo Switch, while using D3D12 on Xbox, so each API is providing value for console game devs as well.
It's helpful for me, I hope it's for you too
These Are the $439,000 Missiles the US Is Using to Shoot Down Mystery UFOs
I still don't really understand why this is important. Presumably kids aren't playing sports every day of the week, so they'll have plenty of time to spend with their parents on the other days. I used to play Tennis from something like 5pm to 7pm a couple of days a week when I was a kid and that didn't seem to cause any problems.
Does it really not have the middle wheel click? This screenshot [0] seems to show it does, perhaps it’s not the default and needs to be configured in the software? (My MX Master 3 certainly has a clickable mouse wheel, and I use it quite often.)

[0]: https://cx-assets.logi.com/CC%20Graphics/OptionsPlusUI/4_Opt...
And how does GNU coreutils being GPL help you if the ls you have didn't come with source? Even if the ls you have is a fork of GNU coreutils's ls there is nothing you can do to get the source. The FSF can't either. But the FSF can stop it from being distributed and collect money from damages.
This always strange to me. Bing search ALREADY couldn't be trusted. What, are people searching something on a search engine and blindly trusting the first result with 100% certainty? Do these people really exist outside of Q-anon cults?
I'm often surprised that so many folks seemed to have "Guidance Counselors" at their schools. I went to a public science and technology magnet school in Kansas during the 90s and I don't think I ever saw a guidance counselor ever.
I am a US citizen, but have two separate businesses that use virtual business addresses provided by two small mailbox businesses in Oregon that have been painless for all addressing/mail needs. The key point is to make sure your businesses registered agents contact info works and that legal correspondence can get to you through them.
The problem is if you start later, you'll end school later which means you'll start activities/dinner/homework later and go to bed later and there wont be much difference.
As the original poster noted, energy is useful. Carbon won’t decline unless electric beats it for baseload, with batteries or somesuch.

Merely being cheaper won’t do it. As long as more expensive sources are useful, and as long as solar is supply constrained, no reason that solar growth would cut into carbon usage.
For 25 years now the standard for 3D graphics has been DirectX. Why would you expect Microsoft, of all companies, to support anything else?
Thanks to Covid, half of kids were below grade level in at least one subject
What's the rationale for some schools having a bus service and others not? In Australia, I'm not aware of any metropolitan state school having a bus service, so it sounds bizarre that buses would dictate starting times.

Some private schools might have small buses. Otherwise, public and private students would use public transport, ride, walk or get dropped off by parents.
It is awe inspiring!

The previous method was a high-power radar transmitter at Arecibo, using the Green Bank Telescope as the receiver. Alas, the Arecibo Observatory is gone... :-(

The VLBA is not only in Hawaii, of course: it's a Very Long-Baseline Array of ten 25-meter dishes. The one furthest to the east is on the eastern tip of the US Virgin Islands, and the westernmost dish is indeed on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

But in between, there are eight other stations arranged throughout the continental United States. The locations were selected for their relative accessibility while remaining far from large population areas of radio interference. And located in a pattern that provides a good mix of baseline lengths and angles on the sky.

If the VLBA is in any one location, it's the Array Operations Center (AOC) on the New Mexico Tech campus in Socorro NM. The VLBA Correlator at the AOC streams the data, matches the frames of the digitized signal to catch the wavefront and that's your phased array mode.

(I worked there for ten years; my first new-programmer-orientation project was adding a hook to the VLBA Correlator runtime to dump some diagnostic data. Haven't been there since 2009, only played at the VLBA for a year or so.)

https://public.nrao.edu/telescopes/vlba/
Thank you; that was an entertaining thread. "GPL is inherently fascist" is a new one.
Yup. Whenever I release my code to the world, I use MIT. I'm not brainwashed, I know what I'm doing. If someone incorporates my code into a proprietary product, that's fine. I hope they're successful! I just want the bragging rights.
> With IPv6 support and adoption a whole network could be set up independent of any other authority besides BGP. Which requires nation-state levels of mobilization just to block an address, with fallout affecting literally thousands of others.

This is not how it works. Taking down a single IPv6 IP address (or whole AS) is a very simple thing and is done daily to combat spam and DDoS attacks, without requiring "nation-state levels of mobilization" (whatever that means). Also there is essentially no "fallout" at all in IPv6, and there isn't any fallout in IPv4, too, since BGP routes can be as specific as a single host
I like how you complain about the lack of sources, which appears to be wrong, then you say

"Companies that created a coffee break during the industrial revolution did see significant productivity and quality improvements."

Without providing any sources.
Ok people you want to know the truth. I know I am going to take flack for this. Truth. The airlines are hiring pilots that are not experienced. 1500 hours is the minimum. When I had 1500 hours. I didn’t know shit. Many of these young pilots don’t have basic flying skills. They will take any short cut to get to the airlines. Of there is a hard way and a easy way. They will take the easy way every time. Especially if there is an APP to go with it. If you ask a new hire. They are GODs gift to the airlines. Management is just filling seats. HR is in charge of hiring pilots. Pilots are now out of the hiring loop. HR is just filling quotas. The airlines are now scrapping the bottom of the barrel. More accidents will come and happen. Many of the newer pilots have no LOVE for aviation. The older pilots did. The newer pilots just money and good days off.
1500 hour pilots don’t know what they don’t know. I hate to say this. Not everyone can or are made to fly an airliner. Just like I can’t don’t Calculus or Trig.
Signed Captain X (Retired)
Third Generation Airline
Scala is also an FP language that places emphasis on types, but it does so in a way very different from F#, which is still based on Hindley–Milner. I think Scala is worth checking out for a different perspective.
Shameless plug: that's why we started FossTeams [1].

As most of us are forced to work with this thing, the least we can do is to find a workaround for the problem somehow...

[1]: https://github.com/fossteams
> Funny, that’s how a lot of us already feel and why we don’t argue online.

Personality flaws like certain kinds of obsessiveness and irrational persistence are internet superpowers, at least in any peer-to-peer forum-like space.

The online world belongs to the guys (or bots) who are willing to sacrifice everything in the name of some dumb internet argument.
What are the new issues?

Is something worse than 60 years ago that can be attributed to porn, if so what?

Without further commentary, the 'porn is ruining the children' was what pro-censorship religious groups argued in the 70s.
It looks good, and is surprisingly readable when shrunk down a bunch. It's a fantastic quick-setup font. I only don't use it as my main font anymore because I have a very personalized Iosevka build. But that takes time and motivation to do (and a mind-blowing amount of RAM).
I was able to get Stable Diffusion and other similar ML systems working in WSL2 on Win11. There might be performance differences between WSL and a native system. I haven't benchmarked AI in different configs, but my main use case is Rust+wgpu and there were noticeable performance differences because the GPU driver exposed by WSL didn't have as many features as the GPU driver used on Windows. I also had problems with other APIs on WSL such as Optix.
You don’t advantage them. A creative track is probably as infuriating to a non-creative person as the current system is to creative ones. Creative tracks should still have outcomes.

It’s like trying to cheat your way into professional sports: if you are not a good fit, it won’t be pretty. And indeed we do have a track for athletes.

To think that all students are identical and they all deserve the same track is myopic. Turns out, we are all different people.
Which is true for sugar. It's good if you get a few grams of sugar while running around the forest all day. It's not good to get half a pound of sugar from big gulp softdrinks while you're sitting in traffic.
To be fair, it’s not their DNS that is unavailable, it’s just their Whois server. Whois, while it can be considered an essential service, is not meant to be critical infrastructure. Whois is only meant to be accessed manually by humans (which is enforced by rate limits), and the format of its output is completely free-form, i.e. not machine parseable in the general case.
This is also from nearly a decade ago..... and shows up at least once a year or so

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31104803

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26909156

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112559

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15658182

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14428792

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14097548

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12842667

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9543534

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8332031
There's always the question over whether a comfortable unnatural life is better than the sort of hunter-gatherer life our brains and bodies spent most of the human generations adapting for.

No matter, without organized mechanized agriculture and the nitrogen fixation process and other technology of the present, most of us would be dead and not able to ponder the question.
In my high school we had a few "competitive" sports teams, which really meant just absolute suffering. Kids would be waking up for 2 hours of swim practice before class, where they would be puking on the edge of the pool, followed by more practice after class, then they had to you know do the whole homework part time job and get into college thing in whatever time is left. Wrestling was just as bad but the kids would starve themselves or wear trashbags under hoodies during the day to make weight on tournaments, along with chewing tobacco to spit more water. At least our football team and basketball teams sucked enough for the players to never take practice or games seriously.
Two things that Rust does better than C++
Do Chatbots Get Us Any Closer to Human-Level Artificial Intelligence?
Yes, I've been using Grammarly for several years now. I still use it in conjunction with ChatGPT. It's efficient in correcting spelling and basic grammar errors. However, more advanced features are only available to premium users. At present, their $12/m fee is a bit steep for me.
The web client has been far more stable and useable than the desktop client. Someone can correct me, but the desktop client doesn’t even seem like it’s fully native even on Windows.
You rephrased the question
Being good at one thing doesn't make you good at everything. See elon musk.

Whilst I love the cynical view, and it somewhat sadly clicks. I agree high school education sits in the grey. From personal experience the most valuable lesson I leaned in high school is when I was doing something I was interested in getting sleep didn't matter. But learning how to grind through work is a really useful like skill. There's no way to teach hard work. You just got to do it.
The ingredients probably are, the quantities possibly not
Ski lift-related fatalities in US are a fraction of fatalities in Europe (2012) [pdf]
No direct mentions of the patents in the article, but indirectly through an older article[0]. The patents in question seem to be [1][2] (both the same?!).

> A method of using voice commands from a mobile device to remotely access and control a computer. The method includes receiving audio data from the mobile device at the computer. The audio data is decoded into a command. A software program that the command was provided for is determined. At least one process is executed at the computer in response to the command. Output data is generated at the computer in response to executing at least one process at the computer. The output data is transmitted to the mobile device.

How can a patent like this pass? This is absolutely ridiculous. Patents relating to CS are utterly broken, people need to demand the government to step in since it is impossible for small players to fight them, hence it stifles innovation.

0. https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/12/mycroft_patent_troll/

1. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9794348

2. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10491679
> Thinking everything is a conspiracy is giving the assholes too much credit.

"maxwellhill"? :) https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/18/business/mcgraw-hill-and-... / https://archive.is/bZKuA
Bigscreen Beyond – The Smallest VR Headset
I know, as I highlighted, it appears to me that all the hurdles for Template Instantiation have been passed, and its about time we start to see actual movement and traction on this.

its been in the pipeline since 2017 with little major movement on it, while a bunch of things developers didn't actually ask for have managed to have more precedence. Whenever I've pressed for reasons for this, it gets hand waved away that they need solutions for SSR and encapsulation. We have both now.

Honestly should have shipped day one with Web Components, would have made it far more compelling. It has always felt like such a big miss to me by the standards bodies that this didn't get attention.
Arcane is IMO one of the finest pieces of animation in the last 20 years.
Isn't it similar to a generic idea like Object Oriented programming? It's a pattern that can work on a server or a client. Unless your server isn't using a DOM of course.
Ok most of these "Paradoxes" are due to interpretation of QM. We don't have to discuss that as several interpretations resolve the so called paradox.

But "Quantum Computing AGI" is a complete non sequitur. It's just not a thing that needs to exist, as I already said quantum computing doesn't bring anything new to that table for current AI technology(Deep Learning).
> Wasn't this the company that announced they were laying people off based on race in the last round of layoffs?

Oh yeah, they were. I forgot about that.

> As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447669/000119312522...

I notice they did not include similar language in this new round of layoffs.
Being fair, none of the studies linked showed that you were "borrowing a bit" that you would have to "pay back later." That does feel like a stretch over the rest of the articles.

It is neat to read on how/why it works. That said, the claim that "it is not the creation of energy" feels like a stretch anyway. Do people really think they get energized in some magical creation way from coffee? Worse, the claim is there that the adenosine "doesn't go away," but there is no cite for that rather key claim. (Did I miss it?)

Edit: For why that last claim needs a cite, it would be like saying ADHD meds for those that take them are "borrowing focus from a later time." Which... feels very contra to how that works.
PRQL: a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34181319

Also: https://github.com/ajnsit/languages-that-compile-to-sql
From the article:

> This is because the caffeine won’t bind forever, and the adenosine that it blocks doesn’t go away. So eventually the caffeine breaks down, lets go of the receptors and all that adenosine that has been waiting and building up latches on and the drowsy feeling comes back – sometimes all at once.

> So, the debt you owe the caffeine always eventually needs to be repaid, and the only real way to repay it is to sleep.

Does drinking water offset the exertion-resultant dehydration that caffeine and other stimulants tend to result in?
> Consider that raping one’s wife was legal until recently

I actually woke up to that one just recently. Turns out in WA lack of verbal consent from your wife could leave one with up to 5 years in prison if your relationship goes haywire and the wife turns vengeful for whatever reasons (which is not uncommon). Getting to know that - have fun having sex if you are even slightly insecure about your relationship.

From reading that law even obtaining a written advance consent from your own wife before each intercourse won't guarantee you won't land in prison because any consent is revocable at any moment by exhibiting vague elusive behavior. And even if there's no evidence apart from the partner's word, just the chance of getting on trial does not sound fun at all.

That's not to mention that any consent is null while under alcohol influence. So better not to have sex when your partner is drunk (regardless if you're drunk too) even if you've been married for many years.
Do you suppose there should be a test to get into the creatives path? Because every kid will want to be there
Thanks for writing. I've not really thought about it before, but you're pretty correct in your analysis. For example, I followed through the links to a flutter demo [1] and you get something that looks like a standard web page but you can't select the text, because it's rendered on a canvas. This is taking away a really important aspect of control that we currently have over our browser experience. I can see this being used to force us to view ads that we can no longer block, prevent us writing extensions that modify the view as we like, etc.

[1] https://flutter-forward-demos.web.app/#/
Rather ambiguous, I agree. Sadly it has resulted in billion-dollar multinational commercial entities getting away with stealing and fencing near endless amounts of otherwise protected data by claiming "fair-use".

Basilisks are not humans, and the law needs to catch up to this fact.
Could have been really crappy weather and a very turbulent flight. I'm not sure I would be able to tell the difference between 2.5g and some of the severe jolts I've been in.