skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry you don't actually like defending your claims. That's your problem, not the world's. I'm more than happy to continue the discussion in a public forum where others are welcome to share their ideas as well.

I'd say I'm not really the one rehashing it. In every case where magic/mysticism/religion and evidence-based conclusions have gone head to head, mysticism has lost.

I don't want to believe I'm right. I want to know what is right. If I'm wrong, I want to know. That's the difference. Whether tulpas exist or not has an answer. If they exist, I'd like to know. But I'm not going to accept just a person's claim. Especially of a person I don't really know. You don't seem to care whether or not you're actually wrong. You've declared yourself correct and you allow no doubt.

You also claim not to care what I believe but need me to believe that your tulpa is meaningful. That indicates to me that you do care some of what I believe. I don't want to believe either one of you. I want to know which is the truth. I want to know whether I saw Jesus or had a visual hallucination because I was tripping balls. Which one doesn't matter. What matters is that I find the right answer.

I find it ironic that you are a programmer. And you claim to be "apply[ing your] programmer's mind to it". Because I'm also a programmer and when I apply the same method I use to solve problems at work to other problems, what I come up with is that right or wrong, the correct answers matter. I can't just believe my solutions work. I check them, I verify them. I get others to doublecheck them. Because the answers matter.

And if your mind doesn't require proof, then that's all you really need to say. You aren't coming from a rational place. And in such, you have no real basis to deny anyone's claim about the nature of the mind.

And you've turned this entire thing into an attack on your "lived experience" because you keep saying that makes you right. But you can't prove it. But you can use it as evidence that this person is definitely wrong. Before you've even attempted to investigate his reasoning. You, by your standards, have attacked him. You give yourself a pass. You rationalize your positions and actions, but ascribe the worst to others.

And furthermore, I'm not arguing whether or not you think your experiences are meaningful to you. I flat out don't care. Never indicated I did.

I'm saying, again, whether your claim is true has direct bearing on your initial claims about his work. And I cannot accept your claims at face value. I would need some measure of evidence. If you are right about your tulpa, then you have a point about his work. If you're not, then what you say is meaningless in the discussion. It does nothing either way.

And still, you talk about "transcendent truths", but you've yet to give an example. Like earlier when you said your tulpa told you about multiple universes. But don't expand. You drop these profound-looking phrases, but no one here is an idiot. We're here because we question. You are going to be questioned when you leave a statement half-told.
I have similar misgiving. We came to intelligence in a world with essentially a random sample of all the creatures that came before. The 'ecosystem' has reformed itself countless times through prehistory. Why are the creatures around at this instant particularly important, or interesting?

Especially since we're on the verge of creating whatever creatures we desire. If we can make a pink-spotted unicorn tiger than will fetch your slippers and do your taxes, what matters the Siberian albino tiger?

Let's admit, we've taken over nearly every square mile of our planet, essentially remaking all ecosystems already. Its far to late to capture many details of what came before people started creating deserts and clearcutting forests. What remains is a remnant anyway. If its an 'ecosystem', then apparently ecosystems reform themselves continuously. Since we've taken little or no care of them up to now.
I've noticed that the politicians who discuss regulating social media the most are often times the same politicians who've had their worldview challenged recently.

In the US we have Democrats using Facebook and Twitter as a scapegoat for the rise of Trump. To Democrats, it's not that they're smug and look down on half the country, it isn't that they want to raise taxes to fund programs half the country doesn't want, or that they look down upon gun owners. No, it's the fact that Facebook's algorithms keep people bubbles, and Twitter gave Trump a megaphone that's the problem. To them, if those social media companies were heavily regulated then Trump wouldn't exist.

First it was "fake news"; then it the Russians; then it was the affect social media has on society; then it was Cambridge Analytica; and now we're at Silicon Valley as a whole being a problem, with Google's search algorithms distorting democracy and social media companies not allowing "real news" to flourish over fake news.

At no point do these people take a step back and say,"hey, maybe Trump got elected because people don't like us?"

And I say this as someone who is socially liberal. I see this as clear day and I get annoyed by it; I can only imagine how I'd feel if I were a conservative.

You see a similar process play it in the UK, except with Brexit. At first it was leave voters being too stupid to know what's good for them, then it was the dishonesty of Farage and Johnson (as if politicians lying were a new phenomena), and now they're on to blaming social media and some shady campaign financing from leave groups.

The world order has been challenged in the West and instead of mounting a defense of the establishment, the establishment blames the methods that the dissenters used to organize and punch them in the face. That's what makes the who social media debate frustrating to me. Politicians are obfuscating their true intentions and motives. It's as clear as day.

Social media needs to clean up its mess, but the fact that there's no gatekeepers and everyone can have a voice is a good thing. That ability has allowed people in the middle east to topple dictators and shine a light on human rights abuses. Politicans in the UK and the United States should just learn how to govern better.
The "purpose of life" question is maybe a bit too deep for me, but in general I agree with this kind of questions. It's like I do not have a challenge anymore because, for whatever reason, everything I'm doing seems to turn out well even without me putting much effort into it. I'm just lucky in this regard I think which caused me to lose my self motivation very deeply.

I can also observe this very often in other aspects of life: I find a new technology, buy stuff for it and when the stuff arrives at home to start playing around with it, I do not even open the package because in the end I'm thinking "not worth it to waste time on"... which actually ends up in really wasting time by just sitting on the couch and doing nothing. This exact same feeling I have when I have an idea for a new project but then I don't even start it.

It goes that far that even start to watch a new good movie, which was one of my biggest hobbies once, seems to be a too big barrier for me.

My life goals once were to have a family, a nice house and a healthy life. They are still there too, but somehow the "I need to do new things all the time" added up to the list, and this is contrary to the family and house goal. Maybe this confuses me, driving myself into two different directions at the same time?

The "start somewhere" is probably actually the question. Where?
Nit: Lake Mead is the battery. Hoover's generators are extracting power from that "battery" constantly.

The plan from TFA: Take water that's already passed through the generators at Hoover and, using solar and wind power, pump it back upstream into Mead to be processed again. This gives us the ability to supplement hydro with solar and wind. I guess if this is more efficient than other batteries, it's not a completely crazy idea. It does, however, have potential negative impact on downstream ecosystems.

Also: I assume that we don't extract 100% of the available potential from the dammed water: how much water flows past generators (instead of through them) and how does that change when upstream water supply changes? How much of a decrease in this "loss" can we get from this solar/wind plan?
tl;dr "there's also epigentics"

It has been known for some time already that there's not only genetics (as in DNA), but also epigenetics (i.e. markers that can enable or disable sections of the DNA; they can change over time based on environmental factors). I'm not exactly sure what's the news in this article?
Why do you think we mine things? Do you imagine the 1% have basements full of oil that they swim in and laugh about? We don't stockpile this stuff, we use it. :)

These resources are for people to live their lives in comfort. I know a woman who doesn't turn her heating on in the winter because she can't afford to; there will be a lot more I don't know, and some of them are going to get very sick. Cheaper oil will help these people on the margins. Similar stories can be made for any commodity, these are literal building blocks of modern society.

Sure cheaper commodities aren't an infinite good, but the marginal utility of some creature that is so rare it is almost extinct isn't going to exist for anyone but the keenest nature goer. They are by definition rare. Cheaper commodities will probably be more good to more people than that.
All floating point numbers are rational, but not all rational numbers are floating-point, including very simple ones like 1/3, and ones common in finance like 1/100, which is the point.
Mojave only deprecates OpenGL, but it doesn't remove it as far as I understand. It will continue to ship with the (somewhat outdated) OpenGL version that macOS has provided for several years, no? Did they even try running their own product on the Mojave betas? Seems strange to discontinue a working product just because an API is marked "deprecated"?
Thanks for the comment, appreciate it!
Sorry for the typo, fixed now.
Just a few years ago these guys had the main mediums of information covered, sure there was internet, but up until now it wasn't in palms of everyones hands.

And this new medium tends to be decentrilised, cheap for everyone to access and anyone can be the creator of content.

And on the issue of quality of information, sure it can be shit. Memes, number of character restrictions etc, forum moderators being biased, thumbs ups and downs do seem like we are going back to coloseum times, boos and hoorays, instead of stating our arguments in words. It kind of does seem like we are going backwards.

However big media is full of shit too, is censored in one way or the other, and is highly susceptible to corruption.

Truth (the whole truth and nothing the truth) cannot be presented in 2000-3000 words. Those people at CERN take petabytes of information to be sure what is truth, on the stuff that is real and measurable. And even when they come up with an answer they say "We are 5 000 000 to 1 sure that this particle exists".

And what we are mostly talking here about are abstract philosophical concepts and social sciences like economy, law, ethics, psychology etc. Unmeasurable things (at least pretty far from accurately and completely).

These philosphical, wordsy, matters are thus super easy to manipulate with.

Fake news, flops, deepfakes, resonating echo chambers.....All I see is big media being scared of loosing their power.
I’ve started using Walmart.com for just this reason. I no longer trust Amazon. Trust is a hard thing to acquire once it’s lost. After an Amazon Basics usb cable stopped working after a few weeks I don’t even trust Amazon's own products.
Always remember, some scientists are mad. We've managed to gestate quite a few different animals in the wombs of different species:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecific_pregnancy

Which of course is no panacea, but it's increasingly likely that genetic samples will be used to sustain species.
Bookmarks bar folder on chrome.

Don't see the need for a specialized app, which I would enthusiastically install and then never touch again.
Ask HN: Why is everyone so obsessed with serverless?
In the company I work I see a big trend on trying to move things to AZ Functions or AWS Lambda but I don’t really get why someone would do that. It seems to me like a waste of money.
I could be more easily convinced that loss of endangered species is trivial than that enterprises like mining constitute "human progress."
Also they fail to mention cyclic efficiency and life cycle cost. Hydrolic storage are most efficient with their short comingss being too large and location dependaance.
Serverless Twitter Bot with Google Cloud
> It's new, and you can still save pages

No, I can't. That does not work reliably.

> Browsers will do their best

In other words, they will fail.

> Which one? Is there any cross-platform one with consistent design and UX? I don't think so.

Frankly, even Electron applications are better than making web pages that behave incorrectly.
What exactly is the use for this facial recognition exactly? We all know from experience that British police couldn't catch a cold let alone a criminal, with all those tens of thousands of 240p cameras out of which maybe 20% actually work. What is facial recognition going to solve if they can't even see the face on the camera?
I think I'm a night Owl with DSPS. For the past few weeks I have been trying to shift my schedule to wake at 4:30AM, go running, eat within 6 hours (Time Restricted Eating), and repeat - but my body is rejecting this like an allergy - I just feel awful.

I felt best running in the evening a little before sunset, getting back and eating within 6 hours, and going to bed around 2-3AM.

I had to change my schedule because we have bad Ozone problems in Phoenix AZ, so O3 around sunset was terribad — not worth running (if it was for health, anyhow).

Which book do you recommend? I feel like I'm fighting my body; since I began "waking" at 4AM (I think I'm already kinda awake) I can't sleep for more than 1-2 hours and get tired around 2PM. If I fall asleep at 2PM then I REALLY sleep, for many hours, and wake around 8PM.

Its a total mess.

I'm doing everything I know how: be in the sun early, melatonin, activity early, calories early, TRE, avoid blue light before bed, but my body still seems to reject the early bird protocol.
Another hypothesis I had that all this way down started was the introduction of a smartphone into my life. It was 2012 and it correlates with my continous increase of laziness. I was 19 then. Could just be a coincidence. But maybe not...
I favorite them, and I made an api for HN user favorites. I pull into other software.

It’s free to use also
https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-api
Off topic, but why do people here try to “erase” controversial opinions? It literally happens when people downvote something enough, the comment gets lighter until it’s impossible to read.

If something gets you thinking deeper about an issue, how is that not a positive thing? Are people here worried that if they upvote something they disagree with, someone else might mistakenly believe that it’s their opinion? Is it a way to let someone know that they’re not welcome here? I honestly don’t understand it.
High Sierra 10.13.4 has changed the display API in some pretty fundamental ways. I'm down a screen because our iMacs can only drive 2 external displays now. DisplayLink, Duet and other exotic soft GPUs are broken.

I regret the day I agreed to this damn update.
Absolutely agree.

Now I don’t talk down to non-parents, because they made that choice or had the choice made for them (temporarily or permanently).

It’s crazy stressful but at the same time so joyous.
Extra points for the explanation of point two!

Personally I subscribe to the notion that animal life (just like human life, by the way) has an intrinsic value.
On a related, yet more pragmatic level: even if you don't see the value in the plant/animal itself, you might find value in them in that they make life more pleasant/interesting. Personally at least, I'd much prefer living in grasslands over living on a parking lot, even if they both have fiber to the home...
> From an engineering standpoint, Apples devices became hard to repair because they optimized for weight and size over maintainability. Would Tesla do the same?

> Tesla offers very long warranties (I believe is 4/8 years for vehicle/drivetrain), so making things hard to repair would likely be costing them money.

The Apple analogy is a good one. Tesla makes similar tradeoffs, but instead of optimizing for size and weight, they are optimizing for safety, performance, and ease-of-manufacturing.

Sometimes, there is no conflict. For instance, Tesla's battery is designed to be super low to the ground to lower the center of gravity, reduce rollovers, and improve turning. They managed to achieve this via a bolt-on assembly that is easy to install and and just as easy to replace. Hurrah!

But in other places, the tension is very much felt. Replacing the front radar (even on pre-facelift cars, before it was hidden) requires removing the entire front bumper cover. Replacing a broken paddle gear in a rear door handle often requires removing the door's window.

If modularity were a first-order goal, these procedures would be a lot simpler, and major hardware upgrades (like Autopilot hardware or the 2nd gen MCU) would be reasonably feasible. But to the extent that modularity comes at even the slightest structural cost, or unnecessary weight, or any difficulty in robotic assembly, Tesla has erred away from it.

I assume their calculus is:

* Safety and performance are what they compete on

* Ease of manufacturing is their competitive advantage

* Modularity and cheap repair costs are "nice to have", but less important than the previous two.
The meaning of catastrophe is not "only extinction level counts". That would be meaningless, obviously humanity is still here.

WWII was extinction level for large parts of population - notably civilian populations. Including non Jewish civilians. Not just horrible for people involved, they ceased to exist afterwards. Also, WWI having little impact is quite novel interpretation. Even if we ignore the impact on Russia, it's impact on French and German societies was notable.

Lastly, Pinker is not historian nor has peer reviewed articles/books on topic of history. Where historians reviewed his historical work (even those who share his ideological opinions), they complain about methodology, cherry picking, wrong data and so on. That goes about medieval parts, prehistoric parts and last century parts. That had nothing to do with romantization of history and a lot to do with not so great science driven by authors opinions (whether you agree or disagree with them it is possible to criticize his historical theories and approaches).

Enlightenment is large period spanning many contradictory thinkers. It has to do with both good and bad of that and later period. You can't pick just one and ignore the other.
According to the article the effect seems to plateau or maybe even peak at around 0.3 mg (0.3 mg being mentioned most often). You could try dissolving a pill and measuring it into 1/30ths.
Like DNA coding mistakes
I agree- it rarely seems like the best use of money. At least often.
I have a bookmark folder and within that folder i have multiple folders “philosophy”, “politics”, etc.
Moreover, i have Evernote i created a a note book called “Inbox” where random articles are saved in to read later.
Leaving costs money. Most Americans don’t have the financial cushion to spend time unemployed while looking for work elsewhere. So they stick with what they have even if it’s unsustainable because it’s the only way they can see to keep food on the table in the short term.
How Brazil’s capital is becoming the capital of videogame dev in the country
Pumped-storage hydro[1] is an established concept and is in active use all over the world (Europe, US, Japan, ...).

Austria for example has a lot of hydro (over 70% of total production!) including multiple pumped-storage installations.

There's huge excess capacity at night here thanks to all the hydro, so you might as well use it for something useful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
Again the conflation of two unrelated things, because they share a trivial detail.

Speaking freely in your home, or a public place, or even on a TV station, are so different from spreading fake news via internet bots etc as to be different things. Its about the coefficient of 'being heard' which has an infinite set of values between 0 (aren't heard) and 1 (the whole world sees it in seconds).

The coefficient gets too large, and drastic changes in group behavior can occur. Undesirable changes.

We can study these things with science, and understand where the coefficients should lie, without shouting 'freedom of speech!' into the wind to shut down conversation.
Is it really a problem to be solved? As the article mentions, there's no negative association with the word tsundoku in Japan. It seems like having a reserve of reading material is a good thing; you'll always have something new to read and learn when you * do * have unexpectedly free time. The material will be pre-filtered to subjects you care about and it will be close at hand, minimizing the friction of using those random gaps.

I guess one downside is queue prioritization and management, but maybe the piling gives you an opportunity to test the strength of your interest in a subject relative to other items in your queue.
I use Safari as my daily browser so I end up just using the Reading List feature. It works well, but if you want more options like tagging/categorizing then it's a no go.
Despite that this was submitted four hours earlier than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637437 , that one has more comments, at least at the moment.
I've been building and running OpenGL toy applications[0] on Mojave public betas without issue just to check on that. You just get lots of deprecation warnings at compile time that you can quench by defining GL_SILENCE_DEPRECATION. Excerpt:

./nsopengl_example.h:5:5: warning: 'NSOpenGLContext' is deprecated: first
deprecated in macOS 10.14 - Please use Metal or MetalKit.
[-Wdeprecated-declarations]
NSOpenGLContext* _openGLContext;
^
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX10.14.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Headers/NSOpenGL.h:202:12: note:
'NSOpenGLContext' has been explicitly marked deprecated here
@interface NSOpenGLContext : NSObject <NSLocking>
^
nsopengl_example.m:97:9: warning: 'glVertex3f' is deprecated: first deprecated
in macOS 10.14 - OpenGL API deprecated. (Define GL_SILENCE_DEPRECATION to
silence these warnings) [-Wdeprecated-declarations]
glVertex3f( 0.0, 0.6, 0.0);
^

Nothing is gone yet.

I suspect they'll proceed in a similar way as with OpenSSL, first deprecate, then remove headers, and keep the libs around for quite some time for legacy applications. In Mojave public beta /usr/lib still contains libssl.0.9.7.dylib and libssl.0.9.8.dylib, and it's been quite some time (El Capitan [1]) since you haven't been able to build against them.

The trickier part with OpenGL though is the graphic drivers. I suppose at some point in the future drivers for fresh new GPUs won't include OpenGL support. Maybe they'll include a GL-to-Metal akin to MoltenGL in that case, maybe not, or a third-party will create just that to run legacy applications. Anyway I bet it's a long road ahead and won't happen overnight.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/lloeki/nsopengl_example

[1]: https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build/issues/797
Type annotations in Python's error messages