ewheeler

MIT's D-Lab https://d-lab.mit.edu/research does a lot of similar work on fuels/cooking, evaporative cooling, and design with locally available materials/techniques

I'd suggest commercial aircraft as an even better analogy than cars.

Most of the ongoing costs you mention for cars still apply--but there are also the occasional (possibly dramatic) changes to the interior 'cabin product' like new seats and entertainment systems, new fabrics/branding, new business class seats/pods, changes in seat layouts, etc in order to remain competitive in their market segment. Cars rarely have such significant refreshes, but software products often have analogous design and UX overhauls that are also intended to try to keep the software competitive in its market segment. And again airlines don't need to engage the specific airframe manufacturer like Boeing or Airbus for these, but they do need some semblance of a tech team that have certain domain expertise in aircraft engineering constraints.

Airframes also have major overhauls called MROs (Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) about every 6-10 years, which again does not require the original manufacturer but does require significant engineering expertise. To me this is akin to certain ongoing software maintenance activities like updating a codebase to use newer library versions, major database version updates, API or SDK version compatibility, etc.

Thanks for posting! Wild that that 20 years ago Clay put a name to these niche tools that are now trivial to make with vibes and an API key.

Also fun to see a mention of Dennis Crowley's proto-foursquare group project from grad school

Fun! Very similar to https://www.dragonfjord.com/product/a-puzzle-a-day/

Yes, very dependent on the market. In some East African markets that don't have much history of recycling, Kubik [0] has a neat model of employing folks to recover plastic waste from landfills which are then used to creating building materials

0. https://www.buildkubik.com/

While there are some similarities, yes, our brains definitely don't have anything akin to backpropagation, which is the critical mechanism for how current AI models learn.

Hinton has some research on a forward-forward learning paradigm [1], which might be closer to how our brains learn (but the artificial implementations are not great yet). He also posits that maybe the purpose of humans' dreams are generating negative data for such a contrastive forward-forward learning mechanism.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.13345

Fun fact: Hans Albert Einstein, son of Albert Einstein, helped with the design of the Old River Control Structure.

According to Wunderground's three-part series about the ORCS[1], there is some uncertainty as to whether it will be able to keep the Mississippi River on its current route without failure.

[1] https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Americas-Achilles-Heel-Mis...

Maybe? The Scaling Hypothesis[1] suggests that greater capabilities of intelligence may emerge from scaling up 'scalable architectures' to large sizes. GPT-3 exhibits 'meta-learning' capabilities that GPT-2 did not (like learning how to sum numbers)--probably just because its a 100x larger version of GPT-2.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis

"Malachite Capital Management LLC, a hedge fund specializing in trading volatility, said that it would shut down immediately." according to https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/coronavirus/card/is2y79bNxh...

Correct, here is their Kafka-based stream processing package that presumably ties everything together: https://faust.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Uganda is home to a large regional hub for UN logistics, a state-of-the-art CDC infectious disease laboratory, and similar outposts--presumably due to Uganda's relative stability over the past few decades and strategic proximity to several less-stable neighbors.

For those looking for a modern take on improving on the CSV format, I'd recommend Frictionless Data's Datapackage specification[1] which basically consists of a json file of metadata that accompanies a CSV file that describes column types, versions, sources, and how to validate correctness of the CSV's data. This allows for quite a lot of tooling and workflow improvements to CSV files without mucking with the CSV itself

Another hack to improve CSV workflows is OCHA's HXL[2] that is used by humanitarian organizations. Basically adding a row of hashtags in addition to column names, which is surprisingly useful considering the ease of adding these to a file.

[1] https://frictionlessdata.io/docs/tabular-data-package/ [2] http://hxlstandard.org/

I'd recommend reading more about the 'information fiduciary' approach[1] promoted by Prof Jonathan Zittrain (and others) which I find to be among the most realistic steps in a better direction, as it offers a 'grand bargain' in the spirit of DCMA's 'safe harbor' for companies that choose to commit to putting consumers and their rights above maximizing profit.

[1] https://hbr.org/2018/09/how-to-exercise-the-power-you-didnt-...

Looks like a subset of the open-source https://mermaidjs.github.io/

The 'Retail jobs growth by state' chart in this article (approx 2/3 down the page) is lovely: one square line chart for each US state, positioned roughly according to geography, all equal in size.

I find it very easy to grok compared to choropleth maps and similar charts that attempt to stay true to geography.

Unlike other non-map presentations of US state data, this layout preserves ability to spot regional similarities visually.

Is there a name for this kind of chart layout?

Same with phone numbers. In most parts of the world, local numbers (not fully-qualified with country code), are written/dialed with a leading zero. Excel eats these and/or uses scientific notation!

This is called a 'fiduciary duty' and is common in many professions (law, medicine, finance, real estate, clergy, etc)

Here's a great explanation and strategy for applying to software development: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/infor...

Its not just desire to avoid spending the money to provide chip+pin systems

Most Americans have many credit cards, unlike consumers in Europe, for example, where chip+pin is the norm.

US banks and credit card companies worried that Americans wouldn't be able to remember 6 different PINs for 6 different cards. So, they prefer eating the overhead of fraudulent charges rather than potentially reducing the number of credit cards (and profit) each consumer uses

Technically, The Expanse is financed and produced by Alcon Television Group, which is a division of Alcon Entertainment. Certainly having SyFy on board for US broadcast distribution is a big boon for the series, but I suspect a lot of the series' excellence is due to Alcon and not SyFy

Check out PanicKit: https://guardianproject.info/2016/01/12/panickit-making-your...

I have the Xiaomi Mi4C, which gets an OTA update every week. Most changes are cosmetic, but typically includes substantive android security updates at least monthly.

If you haven't watched Season 19 (which includes the serial saga with P.C. Principal mentioned in the article) I'd highly recommend it. It really embodies South Park's unique ability to be simultaneously mature and immature. And its ability to be hilariously relevant after all these years while delivering thoughtful social commentary.

I watched plenty of South Park when it came out, but hadn't watched it in many many years. I checked out Season 19 after I saw it mentioned as one of the best South Park seasons yet--and I have to agree. Most seasons have a few brilliant episodes and many average ones. Season 19 is great throughout--its foray into serialization means more thorough criticism of big topics and is able to weave several issues together over the course of the season that would seem forced within a single episode.

a recommendation from my friend is http://www.gearbest.com/top-brands/brand/xiaomi.html

i got my Mi4C in April 2016 and it has received several OTA android version update and monthly android security patches. there are certainly many insignificant UI changes, but there have been android updates occasionally in the last four months.

similar to what others have mentioned, the place where i purchased it added google apps in a way that prevented regular updates. once i re-flashed and reinstalled google apps, i've gotten updates every week

yes. my Xiaomi Mi4C gets an update every week. sometimes some minor regressions, but they're always fixed the next week. i certainly prefer that to the typical android software update cycle from most manufacturers/carriers

i'm not convinced that the benefits outweigh the risks. wouldn't browsers have to check for malicious decompression bombs? IIRC -- even without nested zip archives -- a smallish .zip of a few files full of 0s can decompress to many gigs

I wonder what are the differences between the "Sweet* and Sour* Partitions" of PINWALE?

(original HN title was something like: if Snowden's leaks were so damaging, why aren't his NSA supervisors being fired?)

I think we know that they haven't been because if they truly believe (as they are publicly claiming) that the leaks caused "irreversible and significant damage", then they would publicly fire anyone with any potential role in allowing such a leak to happen (read: failing to prevent it from happening). The responsibility in the chain of command goes all the way up, so in an organization like NSA the security failure cannot be blamed only on Snowden.

APScheduler is a nice in-process alternative that doesn't require running another process or using a db for persistence. Quick to start using and no external dependencies. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/APScheduler/

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