skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't find it at the moment, but the last time I looked, attempted replications of an early "illegibility improves recall" study failed. (IIRC, that didn't use a custom font, but rather some de-contrasting/visual-noise applied.)

I see no cited papers here, just the claim, in the video, that "over 100 students" were used in testing to pick this font from several candidates.

I'm doubtful of any long-term value here. Even if "desirable difficulty" mechanism is real, I'd expect different readers to need wildly different levels of interference, and for their perceptions to adapt quickly to consistent letterforms. (So, to really get the benefit, you'd have an adjustable and dynamic level of perceptual-interference.)
Not only that but almost once every two week a random poster / trailer for a film is released and it just shoots up to the top of r/all with thousands of upvotes.

Then the movie flops because it had no real interest.

Here is an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/8t40nu/offical_post...

55,000+ upvotes which is higher than anything I can see in r/all at this moment.

Yet the movie has only 23 review on RT, and I can't find a single source of gross box office release.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_man_who_killed_hitler_a...

Maybe its the power of memes, but as someone who just browses the r/all once in a while I find it baffling how many weird movies just happen to prop up alongside international news and cute puppy gifs.
You can quantify mass identically for humans, for other animals, and for inanimate objects. Intelligence-as-measured-by-IQ-tests apparently only works for humans. I would like to see intelligence measurement procedures that work alike for corvids, humans, and digital computing systems. I don't know if they exist. It appears that ordinary IQ tests cannot be applied that way.

My main grievance with IQ as "general" intelligence is its human parochialism. It does not generalize much at all. "The most solid, repeatable, predictive result in all of psychometrics" sounds like very faint praise to someone with a background in the natural sciences.
I wonder how legit it would be for an US company to set up an internal gag order? Running on compromised hardware is practically a nuclear meltdown (pun intended) and publicly admitting to it as well.
This is actively being discussed in the memory and mnemonics community along side spaced repetition.

I'd like to see more research here and see where it can be used and how it can be used.

I've been working on an integrated offline browser for documents and annotation named Polar:

https://getpolarized.io/

which is mostly designed around annotation and spaced repetition.

You can store all your documents and web content in one place and since you're obviously trying to read and retain all that information it might be interesting to enable this as a one-off feature to see if it helps.

Another idea could be to just have them for the flashcards since this is the key information you're trying to retain.
The bounds of the computing power isn't even worth considering because we have no knowledge of the resources, let alone the nature of the reality, in either a parent universe or parent simulation. Sure, fidelity must drop in each nested simulation, but we have no idea if we are 2 levels deep, 1000 levels deep, or in the actual real universe.
It's not "theory", it's publicly known facts that companies participating in mass surveillance denied it, and US official lied under oath to Congress (and weren't punished for it) to conceal it. There's no "theory" here.

> You offer no evidence for this incredible assertion.

The evidence to the above is publicly available and has been discussed to death. If you somehow managed to miss all of it, start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite... and go on the links from there, it will take you some time.

> Some companies have previously collaborated with the government, generally without explicitly lying,

Yes, saying "we do not conduct this particular kind of surveillance ordered by this particular person" while knowing they conduct a slightly different kind of surveillance, ordered by different set of persons - is not explicitly lying. Just like saying "we don't have surveillance technology installed by FBI" if it's installed by NSA instead. There are many ways of lying without "explicitly lying".

> but we cannot jump to the conclusion that all companies would voluntarily lie in a coverup conspiracy

We can not and we do not. We do not know whether any specific company would lie - we just know this option is now very much on the table.

> which, by the way, opens them up to investor lawsuits and risks destroying their branding, for no good reason.

Being on good terms with somebody as powerful as US federal government is a very, very good reason. And I don't see anybody's branding being destroyed so far by the revelation of mass surveillance. We know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemisphere_Project - has AT&T brand been destroyed? Not in the least. And the government granted them immunity from lawsuits related to this.
Yea, and I just noticed it downloading a bunch when visiting the page. So it's probably safe to assume they mean 3rd Party.
Wild guess - the disconnect here is that you're interpreting the maximum power rating of your laptop's power supply as an indication of what it typically draws.

It's more an indication of what your laptop would draw if it were doing GPU-accelerated deep neural net training while recharging a completely drained battery, plus a healthy margin of error just to be on the safe side.
Is there a defining feature of this (or other) cyber bullying laws that make them antithetical to freedom of expression and the tools of oppressive regimes, rather than laws which promote more civil and effective discourse in the public sphere?

I want to say trolling is somewhat like obscenity—in that you know it when you see it—but that is a deeply unsatisfying response when so much discourse online is so polarized.

Because it’s Ok for me to disagree with, even hate and detest, what someone is saying. It’s Ok for me to shocked and angered and deeply offended by a thing you say. It’s not Ok for me to go around clubbing people when they do this.

I think the current laws on libel, defamation, and slander are appropriate and fairly functional. Public figures in particular have a higher burden as well they should.

The new generation of anti-speech laws here and in the UK I find are deeply flawed and dangerous, and appear to me to be tools of oppression rather than the opposite.
Bloomberg: Super Micro boards used by Apple, Amazon contained Chinese spy chips
Thanks, the overall explanation makes sense now.

> The technology 23andMe uses is wrong about 1/10,000 times

Is 23andMe's tech considered state-of-the-art? I'm assuming there are ways to reduce both the false positive and false negative rate and I'm curious how other labs/tech stack up against these rates.
Anyone have a good resource on how variable fonts work? What kind of programmability does it support?
Yeah, so what's the usecase for usage of a TLD if most of your presence is on a more well-known TLD like .edu.XX or .com?
Hacker News is written in Arc, a dialect of Scheme, so kind of Lisp, yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

some calling it simply an extension to Lisp or Scheme and not a programming language in its own right.
If the last name of the congressman who proposed this is Kirsch, then I support this law. I'm sure it's for the betterment of our society.
It would be reasonnable to build the simulated universe as similar as possible to the outer universe.

Even if that was the case we still could not tell the difference between a real universe and a simulated universe. We look at our universe and observe X, then what? Are we in a simulated universe and in the real universe something slightly different X' is true? Or is X simply true in the real universe in which we live? [And in a galaxy far away some aliens are running simulated universes in which something slightly different X' is true and observed by the simulated aliens?]
The only Tesla safety numbers I have seen have come from Tesla. Do you have any independent numbers?
Wi-Fi 6 Is Coming:  Why You Should Care
My favorite "desirable difficulty" from cog psych is to practice recall. I recall a study with 3 groups of students:

1. read essay 4 times

2. read and take notes, study notes

3. read once, then have to write out (a few times) what can be recalled on a blank piece of paper

The groups were from most to least confident in their learning but the actual success on a test for concepts (which requires recall) was opposite.

So, better than using a weird font to push encoding of memory is to plan for and then do recall practice. Like tell other people about what you learned or test yourself on it.

You get good at whatever you practice. If you reread something over and over, you don't get better at recalling the ideas, but you do get better at reading the thing. I bet the first group above would do better than the others at giving a live reading of the essay.
When I was a student, I used multilinguality for a similar purpose.

When I was studying from notes or a book in Spanish (my native language), I would review in English. Actually, my review consisted in presenting the contents to an invisible audience in English (yes, I've never been able to study in libraries or other places where you need to remain silent, most of my time studying consists in standing and talking...)

Conversely, when I studied from material in English, I would review it in Spanish, also by presenting to an invisible audience.

I always found this to be very effective (even before learning about the cognitive science concept you point out). Of course, it's just anecdotal evidence with sample size of 1. But it's a fun way to study anyway, it also lets you practice a foreign language, and you're more likely to not get bored and set "autopilot" on (maybe this was also a big factor why it worked for me...)
Gcam for Poco F1
> Programming with threads is hard - it's hard to synchronize access to data structures without causing deadlocks; it's hard to reason about multiple threads accessing the same data, it's hard to choose the right locking granularity, etc.

It's almost as if we need a language that has a focus on data races, concurrency and fearless threading.
because CPUs are the least efficient computing device, precisely because they are so general.

The future of hardware will be reprogrammable circuits that specialize to repeatable tasks

ICFP 2018 Keynote Address: The Role of Functional Programming and DSLs in Hardware
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqYkcGRr8x0
Congress passes bill that lets U.S. authorities shoot down private drones
The concern was the depression in prices was cratering local high-quality smelting capacity.

However, the DOD issued a memo (penned by Mattis iirc) indicating that there was no supply related concerns. The lack of aluminum used to justify the tariffs was in fact just the result of the LME's anti-market-tampering rules creating an incentive for metals traders to stockpile the material in private stores rather than in LME warehouses.

There was a nice article about this yesterday, but I don't have the link.
According to the author Go make concurrent programming "the best experience, by far, compared to other popular programming languages today."

I beg to differ. I fail to see why I should choose Go over Elixir/Erlang for concurrency. Elixir's cuncurrency mechanisms are at least as good — and I would argue better — than Go's, and Elixir as a language has an expressiveness that Go lacks.
Well, there was the internal data zhe wall Street journal reported on in 2017. And the SpaceX comments made in the follow up. And the funding history is available as well, how reliable crunchbase is for that I don't know.

So there is no complete vacuum. Also, you have advertised costs on SpaceX website. It is at least enough to get a first idea of things. I don't have the numbers in front of me rigjt now, but I am more than happy to share them. Because my whole thought process and thus analysis was wrong it would really help to know that.

EDIT: The rumors I read have been the reason I tried to chase down as much numbers and information I could by myself.
If you don't mind me asking, what track record is that? A quick googling only revealed them giving access to their consumer messaging service.
Mr. Robot to end with season 4
... huh. For the first time, I'm considering the possibility that the Trump administration's tariffs on China might actually result in a positive outcome: forcing US companies to look elsewhere for hardware, possibly creating new supply chains with other (hopefully more trustworthy) partners out of sheer necessity.
I spend far more time reading code and thinking about code than I ever do writing code. Writing code using characters is no more an issue than writing email using characters. Language is a powerful, appropriate technology.

Problems simple enough to be solved by plugging software components together are also simple enough to be solved with a few lines of code, but that's not where the actual work lies. Writing code is effortless compared to the work of thinking out the design of the code that needs to be written, and that work would need to happen regardless of the interface.
Written in Arc running on top of an old version of Racket.
This is just how low trust societies function for hundreds if not thousands of years. This is also why families tend to be much stronger in these places. The American idea of a strong family is different from what I'm describing, since it just centers on immediate family. My definition of strong family bonds, implies both closeness and dependency not just on your immediate family, but even on your distant cousins on both sides. It's close if not the same to how Mediterranean and Hispanic cultures view families. I guess you can call it a clan mentality. I'm now wary of countries where families are really strong ie clans. It's not always the case, but it tends to mean the rule of law is weak and corruption is crazy.

When you can't even trust that food is real, and when you have to bribe even low level provincial government employees (can you imagine needing to bribe DMW workers or even police?) - what else is an average person to do except to treat it as the norm in order to survive? Unless you're an elite, the only other option is to leave, and not everyone has that choice. Very little is considered wrong over there, aside from criticizing the powers that be; as long as it helps your clan. It doesn't help when Western companies and governments look the other way, as we see in past news stories and even the comments here.

I'm not condoning the behavior; just explaining.
The EFF expressed concern over the bill, telling TechCrunch, "If lawmakers want to give the government the power to hack or destroy private drones, then Congress and the public should have the opportunity to debate how best to provide adequate oversight and limit those powers to protect our right to use drones for journalism, activism and recreation."
I think the main argument is that Elixir isn't as mainstream which is a fair point.

That said I agree with everything, Erlang pioneered in this space and has shown to scale very well[1] in a proven way over the last few decades.

[1] https://phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million-webs...
The lottery analogy is compelling as an argument against the parents' specific assignment of probability but I would challenge you on a couple of things:

> The simulation has to be 'good enough' to make a thinking person (win the lottery); my mind has to be only smart enough to think of multiple universes but not perceive the obvious simulation artifacts

Why is it necessarily true that the creator of a simulation would want to indefinitely prevent people in the simulation from recognizing that their universe is simulated?

> Since we even ask ourselves "Are we a limited simulation artifact, or a real thinking person?" the answer is right there in the question.

Let's go along with the notion that the simulation would want to avoid discovery of the simulation. How are you sure that you're really asking the question if you're so convinced of the answer? Is it crazy to imagine that in the hypothetical simulation a person's consciousness would be given degrees of freedom but have imposed constraints?
"Embed .NET directly into an application" is awesome. Asking IT to upgrade the prod server to the latest version of the framework has a lot of latency.
There are people who simply walk away from it all. None of these issues are truly and specifically "to survive", it's all chasing something.
Parent referred to equivalent concentration. The experimental dose was not the the chemical equivalent of 16 packets of Splenda.
The thing being called a national security risk is a lack of domestic production capability. No one is saying Canadian steel is sabotaged or something.
Really? I would prefer to go to a school that spend money on useful stuff.
> All big and security-responsible companies issue their employees special phones and laptops when they go on business trips to countries like China or Russia

From what I understand, Boeing does this when employees visit France.

They have had problems with men in nice suits going through laptops stored hotel safes.
I think most reasonable people wouldn't have trouble defending a position that Elixir isn't a particularly "popular" language - at least compared to Go.
Recently I have become a fan of the Hetzner Cloud:

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=us

I don't know how competitive their prices are, but I like their easy to use interface which is complemented by and also easy to use API.

Adding a 7-day automatic backup history is just a matter of about two clicks, and the additional costs seem reasonable to me.
Stuff like this is already going on:
https://www.ajc.com/news/national/can-police-legally-obtain-...

Of course, people think its great when it was used to solve a murder...
The features we kept under our enterprise license were scaling related features. If you wanted to use Wallaroo on more than 24 CPUs, you needed to pay us money. Upon reflection, that was a mistake. Wallaroo is about making scaling easy. We locked the core value proposition of the product behind a commercial license and tried to build an open source community.

I'm curious about this analysis; was the dual license nature really the problem, or is the "market" not as large as you may have thought, in reality? What is the business model now?

I've really benefited from your technical blog the past few years, I personally am not a wallaroo user though. Good luck!
I am assuming anyone who is going to self-host will be able to use Docker. Perhaps will need to look up some documentation. But maybe I am missing something, why would it not be good way to distribute SaaS app?
That's irrelevant as Life and computation both take resources.

In a more complex universe the bacteria equivalent could be more intelligent than humans. But it does not go the other way simulations of a life form will always be less efficient than the least complex lifeforms in a parent universe.
Sure, but what does that have anything to do with the "average person with average genes who works hard and sacrifices?" Most people aren't engineers and most people can't become engineers, the market can't sustain a 200%+ increase in engineers.

You seem to merely be saying engineering is a good career. Everyone already knows that.

It takes more than hard work to stick out engineering for 20 years, its not a job for everyone, you're going to burn out if you absolutely hate the work. I personally know two mechanical engineers who were both straight A students but hated it once they got to the job. Both didn't even make it to 5 years as engineers.
Alternative: The actual universe has so much computational power that having thinking beings inside a simulation is low cost.

If you are inside the simulation, you don't know the actual universe's rules. Thinking beings being more likely to be in the real universe is just the kind of thing a thinking being inside a simulation with limited computing power would say.

Just half-joking, of course.
Right, I would want to see a study comparing people's ability to remember things written in this and another font before I believe any claims.
Psst… archive.org is your friend.
There's an excellent rant somewhere about the pattern where people at the extreme margins of a trait proudly declare that the trait doesn't really matter for success.

It's the rocket scientist saying he knows lots of people smarter than him, and obviously hard work and precision are what really matter in rocketry - never mind that estimates put the average IQ in the physical sciences around 125. Or the pro basketball player saying that it's not enough to be the biggest, they key is to train hard and work as a team - never mind that the person saying it is the NBA-average height of 6'7". What these people are actually seeing is that once you have lots of a key trait, other traits gain relevance.

Or to take a less quantifiable example, we can look at something like musical skill. 10,000 hours of practice will (in)famously make you an expert, but Ericsson et al actually found that "time to expertise" is fairly constant in some fields, and massively variable in others. (I seem to remember examples varying by a factor of four?) Skill at a musical instrument can be learned by almost anyone, but some people will see vastly better return on their time investment than others. And if we're looking at professionals, then "just practice harder" ceases to be an option.

None of which means most people are excluded from most roles, or that success is tightly correlated with IQ. But there's a distinct pattern of assessing the importance of some trait after applying a hard filter on that trait, and it does everyone a disservice to pretend that's comparable to a population-level result.
Maybe you and me are missing something here. It seems crazy that somebody would go to these lengths without switching suppliers, there must be an underlying reason that is assumed to be understood by the informed reader. (But isn't understood by me and you it seems.)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...

You sure?
Depends on your city, most urban restaurants focus more on "comfort" food than nutrition.
Qualification is no hindrance to being or of the loop though, deliberately or not. It just makes it more embarrassing. Ignorance itself is still easily attainable, just "shoot the messenger" (this will make you seem tough and thorough to your higher ups) a few times when bad internal news escalate to your level and you will remain in blissful ignorance for the rest of your tenure.
> You're starting to realize that not all cultures are that great.

What measures a culture's greatness? How can this value be empirically deduced?
It's having the opposite effect on me. I usually remember images outright(including the shape the letters took, word positions, some smudged portion of the page, other defects, etc.) and read it out mentally in real-time as I need it. This font is completely messing with my mnemonic. I have trouble visualizing anything I write in it.
You're really just reaching the edge of where his analogy breaks down. There are actually advantages to being shorter in basketball, but his analogy did not account for it.
Energy is cheap if you're operating a desktop computer that's plugged into the wall.

If you're operating off of a battery, which accounts for a huge amount of consumer computing (especially if phones count), then it starts to matter a lot. Which is why consumer devices tend to be so heavily optimized for efficiency.

If you're operating a datacenter, it also quickly becomes a big part of your costs. Which hasn't necessarily been an immediately pressing concern for Intel, sure, but that may be why companies like Google have been toying with ditching Intel for ARM.