skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was in the generation industry we called these base and peaking plants. The 5 nuclear plants were base loaded, a portion of the fossil plants were the load following units then there were the required number of spinning reserve plants. These spinning reserve plants, which are running and using fuel but not producing electricity are what utilities would like to replace first.
That’s the thing: they’re all liars. Gell-Mann amnesia demonstrates this conclusively.
It disgusts me how Spiegel uses the royal "We" throughout this memo to distract from the fact that he himself was the (sole?) driving force behind the terrible decisions he now regrets. Own your shit Spiegel, using the royal "we" to deflect blame from your own bad decisions does not show maturity, it shows the opposite.

Miranda Kerr is swiping through her Raya app looking for a dalliance on the side because "for some reason Evan just isn't giving her what she needs anymore" in 3...2...1......
Snapchat is still bleeding money, losing $353 million last quarter.

I literally do not understand what they can be spending that much money on, can anyone clue me in? It can't be on infra and bandwidth.
Well in my ideal word nulls are not part of Integers or Floats or BeanFactory.
I agree with you about polarization being a threat. And I'm guessing you've had more time to think about this than I have.

Hypothetically: what're some solutions that a monied person could implement to stymie the runaway feedback loop? I know it may sound odd but is it possible to use money to stop the purchase of political power for both yourself and everyone else?
It's not so much that neurotransmitter levels are just lower than they should be - reuptake inhibitors fix that problem very quickly....

A more nuanced modern understanding that we have now is that the increased levels of neurotransmitters in the brain signal the neurons to form more synapses, and this increase in grey matter in key brain regions, over months, is what has been repeatedly shown to improve the condition.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4790407/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23988273

Specifically, serotonin-induced synaptic plasticity changes in the anterior cingulate and orbital prefrontal cortex allow the old brain (limbic emotional areas) and new brain (neocortex) to communicate better.
I've never met anyone say that government does everything right. Can you cite me a source of one politician that has ever said that? Reagan famously said:

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

I know it was a joke to make a point but the fact is that I've never heard anyone expound that government does everything right. I've never heard anyone expound that cost never matters. Such a statement would be profoundly dumb and foolish. Yet I've heard prominent politicians expound the equally dumb and foolish belief that lowering taxes is always right and that more government is never the answer.

I suggest to you that you have never actually heard anyone say that government does everything right. I suggest this is a bogeyman whose existence you've been sold on but one which doesn't actually exist. I further suggest you contemplate how it is that you have come to believe such a thing.

Of course I could be wrong. I don't think I am but I recognize that I haven't experienced everything you have and it's possible you've encountered a fanatic who actually said that government is always the answer. You've never heard such a thing from a prominent politician in the U.S. though.
Open Privacy Research Society
No, that's not what cube00 said. The HN guidelines ask you to assume good faith and eschew flamebait, please do so.
We had lots of people under 30 at WDC this weekend - including two high school students and one pre-teen (who is ... really good at handling both the complexity and the stress). Don't age us out yet!
They saved my life after a decade of trying everything else.
That's the point. You're not mean to. It's a meme devoid of any substance with delivered via dog whistle for your side.

If the statement reads as confusing to you, because it lacks any meaningful pointers to identify who it's talking about congratulations on being a rational nuanced thinker..

If it makes perfect sense on the other hand...you've probably been drinking too much "everyone else is wrong but me and people who think like me kool-aid"
I think code comments should play much greater role in code management - i am trying to get this right - https://github.com/mikadosoftware/todoinator/blob/master/tod...

the docstring is my goal ... still waiting for time on the commute to dig in but thoughts welcome
I'm not sure I follow your thinking about kitsch, but's a very contested term.

Master art forgers represent an existential threat to art "connoisseurs", it's like what they do is an exploit aimed precisely at fooling a connoisseur's judgement. For obvious reasons they rarely try to pass off new concepts or compositions, just the superficial styles of painting etc. It's like they have a style-transfer filter but no working model of the source artist's thought processes.

Pastiche (which does often attempt to synthesize whole new works) is usually identifiable and not intended to deceive, but AGI will probably eventually blur that distinction as more and more of the characteristics of an artist's work can be captured in some kind of model.

It's not necessarily true that a derivative work is always worth less than the original, particularly if you include something like appropriation art. Elaine Sturtevant was an interesting example of imitations being taken very seriously:

'In 1964, by memorization only, she began to manually reproduce paintings and objects created by her contemporaries with results that can immediately be identified with an original, at a point that turned the concept of originality on its head. She initially focused on works by such American artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. Warhol gave Sturtevant one of his silkscreens so she could produce her own versions of his Flowers paintings, and when asked about his technique, once said, "I don't know. Ask Elaine."' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_Sturtevant

The work of making a superb pastiche is very highly respected in the art world. See this fictitious 1930s-style animation from a few years ago:

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/shorts/imitation-of-life-sneaks-...

This topic is really fascinating but OTOH the art world is a horrible phenomenon on a social level. It's not a place where deep thinking happens, at least not in public.
The signature is not really helpful. Can you show me how do you implement the actual function?

If you have operators that are typed like + and +. how can you make this work with Num?
this is an amazing resource http://selectstarsql.com/
I'm a horrible designer, but I'm redesigning my website live
Philosophy in my mind and experience really is the art of thinking both critically and constructively about a subject.

Good philosophy opens up more new questions than it answers.

When applied properly to problem-solving or system analysis or conceptual ideation it can be amazingly powerful and provide you with a perspective that is wider than those who don't.

I have studied philosophy since I was very little but I always had one goal and that was to make it applicable to my life not just serve as an intellectual discipline devoid from any reality.
revealing your ability to be explicitly socially deceptive and manipulative can really undermine other peoples' real-life trust in you, especially if they notice you're particularly good at it
I've seen those types of comments everywhere, but only with "junior" devs, or more likely, from people without a CS background. Often these folks haven't had much exposure to clean production code or dug through open source libraries. They're trying to be helpful and document but don't really have the mental models of what needs to be commented or not. This is easy to train away though, through showing examples of what I think needs commenting, or straight up deleting comments during code reviews and by adding Docstrings instead of inline comments.

To be clear, I agree with you about how comments should be used.
I don't look at commit messages either, I look at diffs of file I am working on.
VPN has a vast potential market in China, which has blocked most providers. I've used ExpressVPN for two years, and its connection is not always stable.
I've also used the Lantern proxy with a premium account for a year. Somehow it didn't work most of the time.
Maybe you can use more advanced technology and networking infrastructure to provide better service to such areas.
To be fair chemotherapy does sound barbaric already today, but it's one of the few things we know that kind of works
What's next? Politicians informing people of their stances will now be seen as "influencing the outcome of elections"; an obviously unreasonable partisan tactic. If you tell someone what they should do -- or now even ask them to make their own decisions -- you're an enemy of democracy, I suppose. Funneling millions anonymously into super-PAC campaigns is ok, but telling people to vote... that's too much politics for a company.

Critical thinking also means analyzing your own biases, not just those of others.
15 pages? It's not a leak if it's meant to get out, and 15 pages means it was meant to get out.
The ratio alone isn’t necessarily concerning. You could have a group getting wealthier, say 2nd quintile moving to 4th quintile (not super wealthy) and you’d see the % drop below 100%.
Why don’t you see a doctor, and get prescribed some meds?
This is a really nice article

If you are a tech / software engineering person, and have any sort of inclination towards biology or medicine, there are some amazing opportunities in biotech for smart and energetic people.

Most of the big pharma companies today -- Roche, Merck, Pfizer, Etc -- have been around for over 100 years. They are still by far the dominant groups in pharma. It's like if GE and IBM were still the dominant tech companies, because they bought Google / FB / Apple / Amazon before they got big, then ruined them

Their R&D models have not evolved for decades, and they have basically squeezed all possible juice out of those processes. Their return on R&D investment is approaching 0, and they are buying startups to replenish their dying pipelines

Pharma companies spend over $200B on R&D per year, and in 10-15 years I bet a lot of that R&D will be replaced by startups that are founded today

VCs (who start most biotech companies in house) have developed some pretty effective methods for improving R&D productivity, but the scale is orders of magnitude lower than big pharma. The main constraint is talent

Beyond the high level economic opportunity, there are tons of interesting engineering problems to work on -- although you really need to do the work to understand basic biology. There are tens : hundreds of thousands of smart young biomedical engineers working in academia, but not as many working on solving engineering problems related to translational research (although many are) -- ie developing medicines and bringing them to market. These are brilliant people with biology and engineering chops, learn from them and ask what software / data bottlenecks they are facing

I am a non-scientist but have been working in early stage biotech my whole career. If you want to learn about biology, I'd suggest you 1) read a lot of papers on fields you are interested in, even if you only understand 5% of it, 2) look up every term you don't know, and 3) talk to as many scientists as you can about the papers you read. I find this gives you better yield of useful info per unit time than reading textbooks, of course this will vary based on your learning style. Sort of akin to learning to code by reading a textbook vs just diving into a project -- personal preference to an extent

As a forcing function, try investing in early stage biotech stocks (though invest like you would in bitcoin -- only invest what you can afford to lose and expect a wild ride). Putting your money on the line will incentivize you to learn fast. When I talk to scientists about the non-scientists they know who understand biology well, many work in biotech finance

I'd also really encourage you to find a friend who works in a wet lab, and just follow their work real-time on a particular experiment. Ask them to describe the design in detail and rationale for each choice. Then follow up with them every week to see how the experiment is going, what they did, what went wrong. This is the closest you can get to troubleshooting biology without access to a wet lab, and it is a huge part of what scientists do
It was similar in Romania, but it lasted until 1989. The workweek was 6 days long. My parents dealt with it until the revolution. It’s funny how socialism was worse for the average worker in that way.
Elevated serotonin levels drive synaptic plasticity, stimulating neurons in key brain regions to wire up. It's this increase in grey matter over weeks that is associated with better outcomes, particularly in PTSD.

This has been shown in several studies that use MRI before and after treatment, and explains the lag time.
> Replace the drugs targeting serotonin with drugs that target dopamine and you can expect the same effect.

Anything, drug or non-drug, that has any effect on the senses will have roughly the same effect. E.g. hot therapy, cold therapy, meditation, float therapy, aromatherapy, massage, acupuncture, etc. There's nothing at all special about serotonin, it just happens to sit at the intersection of several different areas of pseudoscience and a lot of marketing dollars. The research that lead to the monoamine hypothesis in the first place was faked.
You claim that being profit driven does make things magically better and provide a single example. Do you really think I can't find a single example of where being profit driven made things worse? You can't think of a single example in all the history of the world in which being profit driven made things worse? I guess you wrote in hyperbole but it seems like you actually believe it and to disprove your belief I merely need to come up with a single example. However, to prove your point you need much more than one example. Indeed, you need to prove it in all examples. Good luck!

Prisoners are generally not treated humanely in the U.S. They tend to be treated better in government run prisons than in for profit prisons. If your point is that since prisoners are not humanely treated in government run prisons then it is OK for them to be treated the way described in the article then I think your position is morally repugnant.
Top Scala Books
I strongly doubt we'll find scientific answers to moral questions anytime soon. The answer to 'what's right' likely doesn't exist in nature outside of human civilisation and social standards, and going from 'this is true' to 'this is right' is not an easy jump to make.

(It's also one that would theoretically obsolete the field of politics if it was ever answered scientifically).
Can Vice be next?
Why not buy another 20amp charge controller, they are like $20?

I ran into similar problems when I was trying to make my own solar AC this summer. I found the best solution for a budget build is to use used panels. Instead of being able to afford 1 I could get 3. Now I have enough power to charge my battery fully and run the AC.
The new drugs coming to fda trials, Psilocybin and MDMA, have a huge non pharmacological component to them. The resulting experience and effect is vastly different when administered in a soft lit cushy room with relaxing settings vs a clinical lab. In that it’s only effective in the right “set and setting”. It almost looks like a strong placebo effect amplifier.

Both compounds work with the serotonin system in the brain. I’m wouldn’t be surprised if SSRIs had a similar caveat, where life circumstances and personal narrative are another factor in the effectiveness of the drugs.

Another lesson from these new drugs is that the results are delivered and pretty durable even long after the drugs leave the patient, which has interesting implications as to how it induces these changes (again not strictly pharmacological).

Which is all to say that science is still learning more, and I hope will bridge the huge gap between pharmacology and psychology.
1. Philosophers derive measures of truth from theories of truth. To accept the measure you have to accept the theory. If you question all the theories you simply arrive at well-trodden metaphysical debates within philosophy.

2. Argument over progress in philosophy is a debate borne of logical positivism, and it valorizes the goal of accumulating one ever-larger shared pool of knowledge as the only one that matters. But why does it matter?

Throughout history philosophers have often been more interested in personal development than grand collaboration. Empiricism just happens to have this property of creating tangible objects that others may study, which makes it apparently dominant in a world dominated by "whiz-bang" science - we're always looking at the next big thing. But merely knowing physical properties of the world does nothing to inform us of how to use them in a productive manner. That's where philosophy will perpetually re-enter as a way to add holistic breadth: the principles are often old, but they need a new adaptation to the circumstances brought about by technical changes.

And that also means that philosophers tend to be unpopular. If their nature is always to question how we're doing things, the natural consequence is that they are outcast for "rocking the boat". This is why it is important to draw some distinction between philosophy, the contemporary academic job title, and philosophy when it is practiced by ordinary people every day. The former is a strange outgrowth of the post-Enlightenment enterprise, the latter is something anyone can claim. Defining oneself as "artist", "maker", "entrepreneur" - these ideas encode philosophical purpose.
Viral infections are thought to contribute to 15-20% of all cancers https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2267909/
Code comments must be a balancing act because they are not free. Documentation for its own sake is not an unalloyed good if the value does not justify the cost. You are fighting entropy here, so maximizing documentation value generated for minimum programmer effort is important.

Code should mostly be self-documenting in terms of the "how", and coding style, idioms, and guidelines should be enforced to ensure that the code actually achieves this goal. Importantly, a lot of implicit intent by the programmer can be made explicit through coding style alone. I prefer this method when possible because inferring programmer intent is one of the single biggest headaches for legacy code, and when intent is made explicit by the code itself you don't have to worry about the documentation diverging from the code nearly as much. I say "mostly self-documenting" because there are occasional cases where the "how" is not obvious even if the code is e.g. a specific result is guaranteed as a side effect of non-local state.

The "why", on the other hand needs significant documentation to exist inline with the code, and you typically need two types of "why"s. First, for some things you need to explain why a specific implementation was chosen versus other possible implementations. Sometimes an implementation is arbitrary -- and I document this too, so people know it can be swapped out with minimal consequence -- but other times it was chosen to effect specific optimizations based on specific assumptions, both of which need to be documented so that a programmer can determine if the assumptions are still true. The other type of "why" is, of course, why does a specific bit of code need to exist at all? I've seen extremely innocuous code that fixed a subtle bug or edge case that would almost certainly be refactored away by a programmer some day if it wasn't explicitly documented that a tiny bit of logic was doing something very important.

From an "80/20 Rule" perspective, I find that code styles the explicitly capture programmer intent, plus some well-written inline "why" documentation does most of the heavy lifting for code maintenance while minimizing the volume of documentation that has to be written and maintained by the programmers separate from code. There should also be some high-level documentation on design assumptions and scope, but programmers are less involved in that on a day to day basis.
> all antidepressants were more effective than placebo

Comparing them to placebo isn't appropriate, you need to compare them with an active placebo and only look at studies that continue longer than two years. Of which there are all of like 2 studies.
Kanye's request was to make slavery more legal, not less legal.

That interpretation makes no sense, why would he want that?
You are making a grave mistake methinks.
Those who sought power by riding the back of the tiger, ended up inside.

What I am saying is I don't trust the Chinese government to respect the human rights of my employees,the human rights of my customers, or my property rights.

The chinese government is a repressive, totalitarian, arbitrary, capricious, cruel regime; fundamentally incompatible with human dignity and freedom. The foundations of the chinese government are mortared with millions of bodies.

you are willing to compromise whatever moral beliefs you have-in exchange for what? for some money? for some prestige?

Is it worth it?
Exactly!

US-style capitalism is at least as bad as the system described in the article. People living to work rather than working to live. :-/
Me too. My first thought was that the title used on HN was some kind of joke, but nope, there really is a staffing initiative called “Amazon Camper Force” at Amazon.
The quote is "I'd have given the middle finger right away"

How does that person know that without having been in that situation? It's so easy to say "I'd never do that" but history is full of examples where most people just fell in line. Just look at around at most big tech companies or banks. There are a lot of people who may not be comfortable with their employer's business practices but in the end they stay because they don't want to lose that nice paycheck. I am not judging these people, they are like most of us. I am judging people who say they are different without back it up.
Not easy to produce things of value when you get thrown out for your opinion from essenyial platforms, like venues, banking services, payment providers, college campus, etc
Is this an alternative to crawling/scraping, or a way to exploit the result of crawling/scraping ?

What they offer is not really clear from the article. It seems that they only provide a raw SQL interface over a database of crawled web pages (to be fair, they added a few HTML-related SQL functions). We don’t know where this database come from, or who is supposed to provide it.

Great to see that SQL is making a come back, though.
As an exercise you could do on a REPL what a macro would do.
Say you have a file containing “(1 + 1)”. Reading this (using slurp and read-str) would yield a list, eval-ing this list would however fail as it’s not valid Clojure.
To make it eval-able you transform the list (all the operations of the language are at your disposal as you’re just handling data) to (+ 1 1). It’s this operating on data between read and eval that macros do.
U.S. government sides with Apple and Amazon, effectively denying Bloombergreport