skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If deleting old tweets seems wise, then surely never tweeting in the first place must be wiser. Delete all you wish, but the number of entities independently archiving the Twitter firehose most be in the hundreds or thousands.

I suspect we're all lucky that for most of human history we didn't keep such meticulous records on every single human's most banal comments and observations. Surely from Aristotle to Abraham Lincoln, a scouring of their lifelong Twitter feed would have revealed every one of them to have produced a despicable melange of racism, spite, narcissism, chauvinism, and Lord knows what other vile comments.

It's rather silly that we're all encouraged to overshare and trumpet inanity into the social ether and at the same time we're going around firing people for regrettable jokes they made 8 years ago.

Ah well, I'll stick to making safe and largely valueless comments on HN...
That's what I was trying to say. So how do people benefit now from preventing likely future disaster?
Is that not more a difference between distributed and decentralized then, such as git is a distributed system even though it needs a central server in most use cases.
Too bad. the environmentalists know better than you and lettuce is killing the planet.

/s
I don't think those problem strangled Usenet to death so much as:

* The emergence of the web as an application platform, which made it easy for anyone to set up a globally available discussion platform without any of the complexities of NNTP

* Binaries, which really did choke Usenet to death, forcing most independent operators to shut down.
> our industry's persistent lack of institutional memory that each generation ends up struggling with these problems de novo, without reference to similar systems that came before

This sounds like what Knuth was trying to solve with Literate Programming.

His wanted to ensure that solutions were as easy to read as they were to write.
In the last game of the series the bots were forced to play an intentionally terrible hero lineup. The humans finally got to win a game but more interesting for me was that the times when the AI did seemingly crazy things were much more common.

I wonder if this is an artifact of the training methodology: maybe if your team is very weak then your choices are also weaker, and reinforcement learning doesn't work as well?
Overall, try to constantly ask yourself a question: does this test verify some business requirement?

a pretty good guide. Analogous to "test the interfaces / contract"
Tesla has lost several billion dollars since its IPO in 2010, and that hasn't seemed to have slowed the stock down at all.
Bananas are picked green and have a long shelf life if stored correctly. They are transported by sea. Lettuce has to be transported by air. Importing lettuce is more harmful.
It used to be that everything was a war, now everything is a crisis.
Nothing about conning or no value in the definition of telemarketing. It's just outbound sales. Some of it is scams, plenty isn't.
The web is and always has been decentralized. But people only want to use centralized services. What does that say? Centralized services have benefits that can make them strictly superior when done ethically. We just need to come up with better ways of funding them that don’t involve building a massive survellaince apparatus.

What’s easier: building a new internet, or forcing companies like Facebook to be honest and transparent?
I was in Cairo in the summer. The city centre was literally burning. Temperatures over 40C. No green spaces. Tight buildings.

Around 2-3PM we arrived to the Historical Islamic City and sitting at the entrance of the mosque I noticed a strong fresh air flow. Despite the boiling temperatures, sitting there was actually enjoyable. And this is despite the massive mosques buildings surrounding us. The interior was also pretty cool.

I think it had to do with these things:

1. The way the massive walls were engineered to allow the creation of strong airflows.

2. The material used to build the walls provides good insulation.

3. The disposition of the walls provides shelter from the sun.

That being said, I have my doubts that the building in the picture will provide the necessary cool.
Makes me wonder why this is even possible...video of Oval Office argument... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ija-VZwcznE
Created by none other than Claude Shannon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
If you want an amusing (and yet depressing) perspective, I recommend Peter Watts' Echopraxia. One of the background themes is how much energy they need to pump sulfates into the stratosphere, in order to prevent catastrophic GCC-driven wildfires. Given the current heatwave around the northern hemisphere, it seems that reality is catching up.
> A guy makes a bad financial call VERY early on in a company’s lifetime because he has different priorities.

It wasn't necessarily even a bad call at the time. Apple was originally founded as a partnership, and Mr. Wayne was worried that he would personally be on the hook for foolish debts incurred by Steve Jobs.
I mean, interacting with the mouse and keyboard isn't the interesting part.

Like, imagine if this was a chess AI, and we were trying to determine who was better at chess, humans or AI. Would you make the AI use robotic hands to move the pieces? No, because thats not the interesting part of chess. The interesting part of chess is the strategy.
It's actually really not. A few thousand years ago, it was a tropical forests and it will be again within a few thousand years.
It's simpler and cheaper to buy and sell tokens than complex paper contracts. It also works better for small amounts of money.
The difference in owning a token of a real estate to owning a dollar is that the token owner is entitled a fraction of the rental income and enhancement of value.
https://www.nasdaq.com/article/how-tokenization-is-putting-r...
In high school, I got a summer job at this local accounting firm. I don't even remember what I was hired for —probably paperwork— but pretty soon I was doing some programming for them. The owner was rich, but cheap, so he asked me to write a simple invoicing tool for their smallest clients. That way, he avoided a costly upgrade for his existing software, at a fraction of the price. I knew I was being underpaid big time, so I would make a mental note of the bugs I'd find, but avoid fixing some of the minor ones. I did not plant deliberate ones. Invariably, when school started, they would call me to go in once or twice a year to fix something. I'd chat with the guys most of the afternoon, change the code over a few minutes, then collect my "tip". I didn't feel too guilty because the owner was paying me a pittance, but acted like he was showering me with millions and treating me very well. I was young, but not naive. I could and would have done a lot more if only he hadn't been so condescending. Plus, some of his business and clients sounded a bit sketchy, although I had no proof.

In another occasion, I cracked the copy protection on one of their applications. They had a full license, but the protection relied on a magic 5¼ floppy disk and their new machine only had a 3½ drive.

I promised myself I'd never work on accounting software again. Later, I ignored the owner's questions about what kind of internet businesses to invest in. He was dangling some of his money in front of me, but I didn't fall for it. Which was a good call, because a few years afterwards, he got in trouble for aiding his sketchy clients I mentioned above.
Sure, at Mastadons scale. But does that scale up?

If HN did implement this then would they have to blacklist bad instances? What is to stop people from spinning up bad instances faster than HN could blacklist? So we'd surely end up with a whitelist which isn't very social.
The web can be fertilizer to stupidity.
This seems as good a place as any to tell HN about my business:

We provide systems to banks to help them include activities which mitigate climate risk into credit agreements, and evidence of compliance into credit scores. It provides a nudge for bank clients to adopt practices which both mitigate climate change and build resilience to climate-related weather shock.

We're a fintech biz built on the fundamental insight that environmental damage, including climate change, is hardwired into the design of the credit system, because issue of credit is blind to resource overuse/abuse, creating a systemic perverse incentive for environmental degradation.

If you're interested in finance, tech and concerned about climate change, I'd love to hear from you in the comments below.

2 further points:

1. HN was the community that gave me the confidence to launch this business.

2. Through our learning experience, we have discovered that banks are already reducing exposure to agricultural lending due to concerns about weather shock. Where farmers can't get access to credit, their production can drop 75%. Although we are only in the foothills of climate change, our financial system will amplify its impact. There may be technological fixes for high value cash crops grown in controlled environments. Not so sure about staples.
Yes, increasingly chaotic weather is expected with GCC. There's more water vapor in the troposphere, and so more energy is available from condensation.
Thanks. I thought it might be something like that.
Right now they don't, but the major governments can set up incentives so that e.g. carbon sequestration would/could become a profitable industry.
Uh, looks like if you combine all European countries on this sketchy chart, as one should considering it's only fair to compare markets of similar amounts of population, their output looks similar to USA's.

This says Western Europe alone is responsible for
22% of pharma revenue, as opposed to 33% from all of the United States: https://www.statista.com/statistics/784420/share-of-worldwid...
Thank God something goes right in this world.
I think it's coming at the problem from the wrong direction to take an existing community like HN and make it federate. It's already too big. ActivityPub services work best with a lot of small actors, not a few big ones.

And for the record, Mastodon's scale is pretty damn big, considerably bigger than HN. There are millions of users.
I've tackled this issue from a bunch of different angles, and have never come to any comfortable conclusion. But one can assume that, there is a semi-random distribution of these traits based on genes and inheritance. So these people are going to keep cropping up, and maybe even more of them. Given that there's no way to stop people with certain personality traits from being born, what to do with them? Unless we're making exceptions, these people also have human rights as well.
Reminds me of British fears of a Nazi chunnel being dug to invade the island. Apparently it could have been used to transport 300,000 men per day.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/britain-feared-nazi-chunn...
You've given me quite a chuckle - I'm glad someone took the time, given how long I put into it :)
It reminds me of the Go AIs going on tilt when they're far behind.

When the win percentage for Go AIs gets to around 5%, every action it can take results in a losing game so it can't make the difference between normal play and super strange moves anymore.

When every choice is really bad, humans tend to still go with their normal strategy and wait for their chance to turn things around, but bots assume the opponent is playing perfectly, so they act like their winrate is going to stay near zero no matter what they do.
Reduce looks really like something that I should check out. Thank you for pointing it out.
Windows 10 Builds 1507, 1511 and 1607 Continue Receiving Updates
X is good enough for Y doesn’t imply that X cannot go beyond Y.
Think about it this way: how you make somebody to do something? There's only two sure ways to achieve it - make them afraid not to do it or make them rewarded for doing it. What would you prefer - people getting executed for going over their carbon quota or somebody making money from carbon sequestration? What you would prefer to happen to you? I think I prefer the money solution over the fear solution.
Randomizers are a really cool and growing community. That Zelda randomizer is probably the most famous one, but programs exist for a significant number of old classics. Not only are they fun to play, but development of them combines both romhacking with modern sensibilities which is really neat.
> One issue mentioned by NYT is using DAFs to "obscure their political activity" since donations don't have to be made public and non-profits don't have to disclose donors.

Ya, that part seems legit. But if that's the lede, why not be more explicit about it?

> Another issue is that the tax savings felt by the donors is tied to the original contribution's valuation and not the valuation at the time the money is used. So in the case of GoPro's Nicholas Woodman, he got a tax break based on $500 mil, but the shares have dropped around 93% so if they're used for charity now it's like he only donated a fraction of that amount.

I'm not sure that's a fair criticism. I think that you should get the tax deduction for the value at the time of donation. Anything else would be pretty crazy.

> NYT also reports that the fees for some of these DAFs can be significant and so a portion of these donations are going to e.g. Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, and similar firms.

Ya, that's sort of a real issue. But it's not at all specific to DAFs as far as I can tell, and it's not an instance of the "tech billionaires" screwing people over. If anything it's a criticism of these wall street banks.
What about https://ironedison.com? I’m interested in nickel iron batteries, sounds like they last longer and can handle more abuse then lead acid and lithium ion... would love to hear if anyone has experience with them
Show HN: ASCII line chart with console, HTML and image outputs, written in PHP
ciao dustin, more than "abstract" I would say "software defined" or "software emulated". Yes, data-links are abstracted and treated by PJON "agnostically". PJON can also use higher level protocols like UDP TCP as "data-links". I think this, although could be considered by many as a layering violation, may be extremely useful for building a decentralized network infrastructure while still having the chance to hop through the internet if required
"The authors don't use TeX" is #1 of Scott Aaronson's Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304
Federated is like email. There's foo.com and a bar.org email servers, users at foo.com can talk with users at bar.org just fine. XMPP works that way.

Distributed means there seriously aren't any servers. Addresses in tox are just public keys, and they're in a global namespace. The network is a distributed hash table formed by peers (the "clients"). There's no central point of failure.
Yes, in the same report, page 27, in 1999, 78% of IPOs were tech companies (that was the peak year for .COM IPOs).
If you track failures and categorizing them as either failures that caught a bug or false positives then you basically have a good measure for test quality.
USB stick turns a Mac into a Windows games machine in seconds
a and b are not the same value, and don't model the same underlying concept.

a: Int would be 0x0000000000000003.

b: Float would be 0x40400000.

While both are specified literally as "3" the compiler de-sugars that into the values above, and further, the type system takes that knowledge into consideration to prevent you from doing things that don't make sense like trying to equate "a" and "b" without explicitly performing a lossy conversion (Binary operator '==' cannot be applied to operands of type 'Float' and 'Int').

I don't believe this to be a name resolution issue, but rather a protocol conformance creates a vtable for the protocol but beyond that dynamic dispatch doesn't exist so it's not possible to resolve the actual method overridden in the subclass.

This isn't a statement on typing (other than your example actually making a solid case for strong typing); rather the boundary between static and dynamic dispatch is not well-constructed in the case of protocol conformances.
Yeah, I've read that too. So maybe the US Southwest will go total desert. And maybe even the Amazon. But the Sahara could become tropical forest again. I don't recall mechanistic details. Something about atmospheric standing waves, I think.
It's not "work" in the sense that you're not hired and told what to do. You fend for yourself, this way or another, fishing today, picking fruit tomorrow, etc.

But it of course is not living without any labor at all, Eden-style.
The fact that investors interpreted the move this way indicates that it's not about hindsight, but a poor forecast.

Investors appear not to have interpreted it that way. That interpretation was disingenuously rendered by this article’s author in support of his premise for it. See [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17693797
Actually I did take a moment and within the first 39 minutes of research I discovered laziness or a lie on Obama’s part and from there I could not help but wonder what other forms of misinformation must exist.
"I don’t think that’s what killed Usenet. What killed it was UI."

Nah. It wasn't the UI. It was developers and corporations chasing the new shiny, which was the web.

Any UI could have been built on top of Usenet, but instead everyone jumped ship and on to the web bandwagon.

Usenet also had a big spam problem, but one which was not insurmountable, as Gmail and other web mail providers have proven. Modern anti-spam solutions could just as easily be applied to Usenet to keep it as spam-free as most web mail is today.

Of course, now there is the lack of historical knowledge, as another poster alluded to elsewhere in the thread, but there's also a contempt for the average user, and a widespread belief that UI's have to be dumbed down for the average user. Web UIs could be just as powerful as Usenet was, but corporations such as Google, Reddit, and Facebook choose to cater to the lowest common denominator rather than to power users.

Also, unlike Usenet, with these corporate walled gardens, alternate UI's for them are rare. At least Reddit has an API, so at least there there's a potential for some powerful alternative UIs built around it, but the ones that I know of are still a pale shadow of Usenet clients from 30 years ago.
pushing the argument to its limit : what happens if we can recover any speech from this or that material (moving leaves, bags, lips movements (AI would be good at that), changes in magnetic fields whatever). should we assume that there is no such thing as a "safe place" anymore ? One could argue there never was (because, for example, police can eavesdrop) but, this article implies it can reach a whole new level... How is that kind of technology controlled by those in powers ? Considering Apple is valued at gazillions of dollars, I guess those technologies will be worth a lot and be available to some others very powerful people... James Bond looks quite outdated to me now :-/
They weren’t branded as such but the store(s) only existing on the deep web plus the incredibly low pricing made it obvious that these couldn’t have been obtained legitimately, if they were really selling anything at all and not just scamming people out of BTC. I highly doubt anyone capable of finding and using these sites could actually be dumb enough to believe it was anything other than stolen electronics (or a scam).
Training is your friend. Learn to be on both sides of the fist and stick and gun - what is and is not possible. For some illustration of outcomes, see youtube for "28 foot rule" or "21 foot rule". Learn to see the setup and the ambush, though there are fewer who teach this. One of the best introductory defense programs I've seen, for when push came to shove, was Bay Area Model Mugging (although for women only). There can be a time to step-up/speak-up and defend yourself and friends, a time to hand over the goods, and a time to run like hell. Training goes a long way to replace panic with healtier options. And call the police right away; it might save the next local victim half an hour later.
Just have separate healthcare systems for each state. There, problem solved.
It's a curious story. That's all it needs to be a good HN submission.
Curious to see if they’ll ever be able to produce a scaffold without a donor lung to strip down
There will always be someone who can find a moral reason that such systems need to exist. Engineers build weapons, after all.
There's a tomscott video on this during the most recent eclipse, how people determined his location. Its got some really interesting tidbits

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGqEBvlmFAQ
frame and position perfect spell casting is like an aimhack in counterstrike

bots are really really good at FPSs with zero ML, just because its easy to point and click at the right position if you're fed its coordinates directly
That's probably part of it, but another explanation would be that the AI wouldn't choose such a lineup on its own, and so it doesn't train on the relevant gameplay.
I'm surprised you didn't also mention geocaching
It's closer to a sibling of mathematics. Albeit independent in a lot of ways. I would say "Computer Science" often ends up referring to many different disciplines:

* The "mathematics" of computation (the British often call computer science informatics, and I think they might be closer). Information theory, computability theory, automata, etc. This would be the theory side of "computer science". But it is more it's own independent sort of mathematics.

* A science about what can be computed effectively, what works best, and other questions using empirical testing. This would be the "applied informatics", or the actual term "computer science". A computer has as much to do with computer science as telescopes do with astronomy, they are a supremely useful tool, and most scientists are probably pretty good at using them.

* Programming, this is the vocational skill, that anyone can learn, that is informed from what we know of the science.

* Software Engineering, this is the primary engineering discipline of the science. In the context of physics this would be like a civil engineer or something, or like a specialized electrical engineer (like compared to physics degree specialized in electromagnetism).

* IT/MIS, this is what most people think when you say computer scientist. But this is more like a specialized technician who maintains computers. And are like 3 degrees removed from the core of the informatics (informatics->science->engineering/programming->maintenance).

So in relation to the larger issue of the thread: In so far as mathematics came from physics (e.g. a tool to study nature, considering most strides in mathematics have come from people who could also loosely be described as physicists (like Newton and Plato, etc.) it's not a major stretch), computer science sort of came from mathematics, transitively it came from physics.
The one example I am willing to share is in high school economics class there was a stock market simulation. The person with the highest portfolio balance at the end of the year received a substantial amount of extra credit.

First of all, this was 1999, and the market (tech-stocks) were in peak ridiculous bubble mode. The hack was that the software used to simulate trades and track portfolios used delayed quotes. So, I simply used real-time quotes looked for gains in a short period and bought held for a bit, then sold. Essentially I had a time machine. I think at the end of year my account had over $500 million in it. The teacher knew I was "cheating" but still gave me the extra credit along with another student who didn't "cheat". An extra perk is the cutest girls in that class constantly asked me how I had so much in my portfolio.
And that the AI was handicapped in the game it lost, as they let the audience draft for the AI team and of course they deliberately picked a bad lineup to see what would happen.