skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an extreme tangent, but something that I was reminded of due to "tubes".

I recently bought my first audio upgrade (Cambridge DAC 100, Little Dot MK III with Voshkod 6ZH1P-EV from the 70's on Beyerdynamic DT 1990 Pro headphones) and honestly, the first time I listened to it I was in tears. Coming from just plugging in some Sennheiser HD1 to my mobo audio out, the difference was staggering. There were sounds in tracks I was quite familiar with that I had never heard before. I bought a Schiit with a closed DT 1770 Pro for my office ... which wasn't nearly as good (and incidentally I think the filter caps might not handle the el cheapo DC-AC converter on the solar panels all that well which gives annoying (as in really audible) cracking and popping sounds even after tube rolling). Now for the downside: "audiophile" is a horrible niche to be in, there is so much cargo-culting and downright hostility that makes it a very "toxic" place to be in (not to mention stupidly expensive if you buy all the ahum "bs" ... a signal processing class would be a better investment...). But, I find the toxicity to be a little bit sad as well. Since it detracts people from a very real life improvement. Audio is one of the primary modalities of our sensory system, and even with mediocre hearing (like a male 30+ will likely have) you can, and do, hear an enjoyable difference for a modest investment. The difference between some second-grade Bluetooth thing and a nice "desktop" set /is/ real. My advice, get a nice open headphone (400-600$ range, I /really/ recommend something with a detachable cable since those fail first), something to replace your on board DAC for 150$, and an headphone amp (I like tubes, but for no other reason than that I like the way they look and "sound"). For something around 750-1000$ your life will be better and it'll last you a heck of a lot longer than any AirPod will (heirloom piece). That is, if you like listening to music, if not, disregard everything. Yes it's an investment, but this is HN, where I feel recommending 1k is not that big of a deal.

Now for the more on topic part: apart from some high voltage DC applications like transceivers or transmitters (like microwaves!) tubes have largely been replaced by solid state. And with good reason, they last much longer, and are less conductive to all sort of ailments ... so apart from /super/ specialized applications they have no place. Apart from maybe providing that nice warm glow on your desk, when you're lonely, at night, and just want to listen to that "one song" while staring out of the window.
Google's Strength Is Harnessing Intentionality, Not Big Data
Heh, thanks for the feedback! What you’re seeing at the end here is the implementation of the parser itself.

You might not be interested in how the parser is implemented; more likely you only care about the design and usage of the proposed data format. Which is fine! But we designed Observable to share one interface for both authors and readers under the view-source philosophy that made the early web so great: all the source is there, accessible, if you do want to dive in and understand it.

But we could do a better job of making the segue from narrative to internal implementation less jarring. I’ve edited this post to make that more explicit with an “appendix” header for the implementation. And we’ve been thinking about ways to formalize this convention, so that the code is still accessible with a click or two if you want it, but doesn’t distract from a normal read.
Is cost the only measure we want to optimize for?
You can use it to find people who work at a company you want to work for, and get a leg up in the hiring process on people who apply directly.
For what it's worth from my not-particularly-scientific tests at work, they both compressed significantly better than gzip, but zstd compressed better and faster than brotli for our typical file sizes (text files around 5-20kb). Mind you, this was all at lower/faster compression levels; by default brotli compresses at the highest/slowest level, so perhaps it's been designed primarily for a different use case.

Unfortunately, we have a strict requirement that the decompression be done in pure Java (and ideally providing an InputStream interface). The official Brotli repo includes a pure Java decompression library that took about three lines of code to drop in next to our gzip support, while zstd had nothing suitable (a JNI wrapper is not an option, and the Java decompressor at [1] does not provide an streaming interface). Writing my own Java decompressor for zstd sounded like a fun project, but that would have been too much like yak shaving; brotli is good enough.

[1] https://github.com/airlift/aircompressor/tree/master/src/mai...
better late than never.

Cheers :)
ELI5: what makes vaping more dangerous or concerning than say coffee or energy drinks?
The experiment reported in the paper isn't hypothetical.

They actually paid people to deactivate their Facebook accounts.
The short answer is that the observable parts of the universe like to spin around in circles and spirals.
it works with a regular VFD as well! see https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1061797427991068672 for a photo and the resulting waveform.
> If it's cosmetic, then I could see the argument.

Then there's another problem: who defines what is considered "cosmetic"? Most insurance companies currently don't cover e.g. facial feminization surgeries for transgender women, even though they're considered medically necessary by WPATH, a document drafted largely by insurance companies [0].

[0]: https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/SOC%20v7/SOC%20V7_..., p. 58
I'm pretty sure he wants to say that you should abstract your database away so that your business code / domain model doesn't depend on it. It becomes a "plugin" to your application and you can easily switch it just by writing another implementation.
One issue with describing figures like 600k is that I think the medical industry has a lot of funny money running around. The doctor somewhat arbitrarily charges 10k to the insurance company, insurance disputes, the doctor hires a lawyer who takes 30% of the negotiated outcome, and negotiation finally ends up at $2k.

The patient sees a $10k bill, pays a $300 deductible, and only $2k ever actually materializes in the exchange between doctor/insurance. And afaict, this is the expected operation.

Of course, when you're uninsured, the numbers stop making any sense, because they fail to go through the convoluted process that reduces it. You just get the $10k bill and thats the end of story. But for the insured, a $10k bill is not $10k exchanged.
I'm not talking about journalists, I'm talking about you Andrew :)

They call themselves "$TSLAQ" and spend all day fantasizing about Tesla going bankrupt.

This is a great example of exactly what I'm talking about.

https://twitter.com/arbissell
Appealed twice and both times they denied it stating I didn't require the surgery despite the fact they pre-approved it and paid for all the in-network costs. I ended up paying it because I had the money and I couldn't handle the stress of a legal battle (which given what I've read is an uphill battle).
We've been seriously discussing solutions.

The real question is at what point do people start actually applying what they learn in these serious discussions in how they live their own lives?

I don't think it ever happens on a large enough scale to matter before it's too late to avert massive loss of life and global conflict.

Things will naturally sort itself out, the population collapses, lots of lives suffer, but life goes on.
NFL Announces Inaugural NFL Big Data Bowl
Learn React from Udemy?
TBC: Neptune was predicted from observed perturbations in the orbit of *Uranus.
> If we're concerned with the environmental impact of K-Cups this isn't really a solution.

I'm simply talking about the convenience factor, personally.

> If you're just talking about coffee for yourself you could just as easily recommend everyone brings their own beans and keep and aeropress at work. Or just make pourover for themselves by keeping some kalitas in the kitchen.

Those options are no where nearly as convenient as K-Cups, or Cold brew. People use K-Cups because of the convenience factor.

When I pour my cold brew, I don't need to do anything at all. No cleanup (not even throwing away anything). Its purely pouring out of a 64oz Mason Jar, which I clean once a week at home (and put more coffee in).

K-Cups are almost as convenient. But in comparison to the Mason-Jar method, you have to wait for the filter (K-Cups pour relatively slowly), you have to wait for the water to return to a ideal temperature (I don't like my coffee to burn me. I prefer to gulp the cold brew ASAP). In any case, K-Cups are very convenient, just not QUITE as convenient as cold brew. There's usually a line in the Keurig machine too at my office, since its a popular device.

Once we're talking about Aeropresses, now you have a cleanup stage. Which means you're touching the icky sponge in the office kitchen. You've also got to measure the proper amount of coffee. That's a LOT of work if you only plan to drink 6oz to 12oz of coffee.

----------

The hack works because:

1. Making 1750 mL of coffee at a time is convenient. Bigger batches means less work in the aggregate.

2. The recipe itself is incredibly easy. Less than 5-minutes prep time on Saturday (120g of Coffee + 1750 mL of Water), less than 10-minutes waiting for the filter. And I can do other things while waiting for the filter to go through, its mostly a passive process.

3. 32oz or 64oz mason jars are surprisingly space-efficient uses of the office fridge. You don't really use much space when you do this.

Based on the discussion, it sounds like there may be ways to optimize the filteration process that I wasn't aware of. I'll play around with the recipe as I go along, but its relatively little work for a whole lot of coffee.

Optimizing for time is the name of the game.
Ah yes, price controls. This has never resulted in problems like shortages before.
That is one of their selling point, isn't it? You got a feed of "Friend activities" on Spotify
The purpose of insurance is to pre-pay for a new roof every fifteen years and a teeth cleaning every six months.
When surrounded by pitch dark the human eye is capable of spotting the light of a candle from tens, possibly hundreds miles away at a clear night, and yet under those conditions it would also be perfectly possible to hide an elephant a few meters away from someone
If people estimate the value of the benefit provided by Facebook to be $1000, under US tax law are they required to declare that as a “gift” and pay taxes on the net $1000 of service they received for $0?
I mean, presumably making it possible for them to be productive citizens would be a pretty good start.
Facebook Didn’t Sell Your Data, It Gave It Away
> It is most certainly not a preference for clarity, though. It is a preference for consistency.

FTR, with "most certainly" you're committing the same fault your accusing the Go team here. You might not think it matters for clarity. I, at least, disagree.

> in our experience most people can't be trusted to not shoot themselves in the foot.

I don't understand the difference between this suggested phrasing and talking about clarity. I'd argue you tend to shoot yourself in the foot if and only if you aren't clear about what you're doing. Clarity and lack of footguns seem directly correlated.
No, not exactly. It's cars that generate the danger. When cyclists are on separated bike paths, the chance of a fatality is almost zero. When cars are in their own separate system (freeways), the chances of a fatality are still fairly high.

This is a relevant distinction, since it informs how you handle reducing the danger (e.g. road diets and traffic calming, at least for urban areas).
For the record, this is exactly how I feel. They did it to themselves. I really believe in free markets, and I really see the downsides of gov't intervention, but my direct experience with this particular market says we'd be better off with the gov't.
"That one entity can unilaterally refuse to do business with abusive vendors. They can negotiate for lower prices. They can notice and investigate discrepancies in pricing between similar cases. They are in a position to judge which types of care are and are not cost effective and can refuse to cover the latter."

Having worked for companies that do government contract work (DoD, in particular), this line of reasoning always makes me laugh.
UK, Germany and even Japan is working overtime to let skilled migration. Meanwhile at Australia their rabid anti immigration policy is taking effect along with their draconian encryption laws. Australia is effectively killing off it's budding tech industry , or whatever is left of it.

US is against immigration too but there is no country as lucrative as US for skilled workers, except for maybe Canada.
Yup, everything is nicer in Javascript if you're working with objects.

There's no type checking or syntactic sugar for dealing with first-class functions, so complex functional programming leads to brutal stack traces and if you ask a debugger what any part of this "pyramid" is, it tells you, "well, it's a function."

If I'm using a parser combinator in Haskell, for instance, I can just say:

liftA2 (+) parseInteger parseInteger

It's pretty clear (if you're familiar with functors) that I'm parsing two integers and adding the result. And it has to typecheck, so 90% of my stupid mistakes are caught by the compiler.

But, also, if I go into ghci, I can see what it is:

:t liftA2
Applicative f => (a -> b -> c) -> f a -> f b -> f c

So I can see the first argument (a -> b -> c) is a function with two arguments, and the second, f a, and third, f b, are boxed in the Applicative, and the result, f c, is boxed in the Applicative. That's how you can understanding that it's combining two parsers using + and then the result is itself a parser.

Javascript, even though it supposedly has all its type information at runtime, really doesn't know any of this because a function is a function and that's all it knows. You could replicate liftA2 in Javascript, but it would be entirely mysterious what's going on.
Seconded. Even if animals do symbolic reasoning, they do it on top of hardware based on continuous physical dynamics, more similar to DNNs... So why not build on that platform?

I don't think biological precedent is the only or even most valuable heuristic for deciding where to research intelligence... But I don't see where there is evidence that symbolic reasoning is either necessary or sufficient for AGI, except people describing how they think their brain works.

Related, there are a lot of statements that symbolic or rule based systems do better / as well as / almost as well as neural methods. Citation please, I'd love a map of which ML problems are still best solved with symbolic systems. (Sincerely - it's not that I expect there aren't any.)
Yeah, but that's the thing: even if you do want to broadcast to your friends that you're listening to BW, that doesn't necessitate access to all your PMs! That just means write-to-wall or -to-updates privileges.
Bernie Sanders, for one, has advocated for the elimination of private health insurance by essentially putting everyone on Medicare.
This is outrageous because the regulation wouldn't even have to be complicated. In the EU there is a directive that you have the rights to know the retail prices of things before you make a purchase and in some countries, retailers have to honor the lowest posted price and we are talking about baguettes!

I don't see why that same thing couldn't apply for healthcare.
1. ERs should publish prices in a public database. If a price is not published for an item/procedure, the customer can pay the lowest price she/he can find for the same procedure from an other provider.
2. The same price must be charged from everyone (regardless of insurance).

Even if only a small fraction of people shop around it might push down the prices. Even if the above is too naive, I am sure someone smarter can come up with a less naive version of it.
That’s not really the problem we face, though. Our problem is you ask how much it costs to give birth at a hospital and then everything goes according to plan and later you get endless bills for much more than they said, often from providers who weren’t even in attendance, for materials that weren’t even used, and so forth.
Costco sells compostable K-cups, $25 for a box of 100. Affordable and environmentally conscious.
Generally if you downloaded it from somewhere/someone you can get a working node from them. Often binaries have a few boostrap hosts hardwired, but then save state once launched. Typically a host tracks several hosts per bucket, and a bucket for each log(n) of the population. So with a million hosts your client will track log(million)*4 or similar. Those are usually written to disk when you close, so you can try those when you launch next.

Clients often broadcast on the local lan to find peers that way.

Also other methods are common, for instance bittorrent clients often use the PEX standard to exchange peers, those peers are often on the same DHT, although I think there might be 2 distinct DHT networks among the popular bittorrent clients.

Worst case you could start randomly walking the IPv4 space, given that there's millions of active clients it wouldn't be long before you found one. Likely only take you a few 1000 random IPs before you found someone on the DHT.
>3) You can be charged just for sitting in a waiting room

I once fainted during a comedy show because the comedian was talking about his wife almost dying in surgery in graphic detail and I got nauseous and fainted. I woke up outside the comedy club up against a wall with an ambulance there. They basically took my blood pressure and gave me a bottle of water then asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I declined. I still received a $3000 emergency services bill later... Apparently they checked my ID/insurance when I passed out and somehow I ended up with a bill even though I declined service.

In contrast, I once hit my head on a train in France and had a huge gash that needed stitches. I took a taxi to an ER, got seen within 20 minutes, left the ER within 90 minutes, then had a $50 Euro bill.

The contrast between "socialized" healthcare in Europe vs privatized healthcare in the US is shocking. We receive far, far, far worse quality and fewer services despite paying a lot more. We're in the worst of all situations.
A way to get around that (which I have heard some countries is currently testing) is to return the tax evenly to the population, so that money flow from those that pollute to those that don't. If the rich continue to afford some amount of pollution then it basically become redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, and the harsher the tax is the more money flows in that direction.
New study finds that marijuana can reprogram sperm genes
>...literally murdering...

Literally one of those words is not being used correctly.
That's fair. I also wouldn't consider it the value of that thing.
> Have a problem with that? Expect a snarky comment about your priorities.

Whereas your comment is completely devoid of snark.
In short firmware as a service means Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is nothing more than a use and delivery of resources and services from the web model. A model where everything directs the “delivery” like “as a Service”, where it does not matter where the resources are located nor who provides them, but rather that they are always available, they are cheap, flexible, scalable, safe… and above all, they give me access to the information I need at any given time and from any device without needing extensive knowledge about computers.
How do you escape spaces in fields that start with spaces?

I think this should be specced out early to avoid falling into the trap good old plain CSV fell into, which now now has multiple ways programs escape commas.
That's a hard row to hoe - a civilisation's foundational superstitions are invisible to most of its members, so a wide-scale questioning of them is unfathomably difficult to prompt. Think Protestant Reformation as the scale of the conceptual and emotional shifts needed.

It's too late now, but it would be lovely to go back in time, say 50 years, and keep plugging away with attempts to undermine the ideologies: there is no such thing as an 'economy', still less 'economic growth' (and as for 'sustainable' growth ...).

We'd probably still lose though. The winners have already bought up half of New Zealand to retire to as things go increasingly awry amongst the general population.
eventually you do get a square wave (similar to a transistor) but with less overdrive, you get a "soft clip" waveform that is rich in second harmonics. these harmonics are an octave above the fundamental, and can also create a psychoacoustic effect where you hear another sound that is an octave below. bass players LOVE using tube amplifiers for this reason--it really fattens up the sound without making it sound crunchy.
"just develop expertise in handling one single government agency, and rake in essentially as much money as you care to have"

I hadn't thought of it this way before, but that's exactly what Raytheon, Northrup Gruman, and Lockheed Martin do. Hmm.
Is it just me that couldn't find the feature in Spotify desk app to actually send a message to a friend from the app?
anti-tampering screws are nothing new

Can't agree with that. Being able to get into anything with a Philips screwdriver and then think through what I found inside was how I developed the hacker mentality way back in the 70s/80s, back when a pocket calculator had lots of discrete components and one chip.

Repairability alone won't solve an environmental crisis, and of course as technology advances integration makes many repairs impossible, so bad luck if your SD card gets damaged. But being able to open things up is still valuable. A year or two back I called out a synthesizer manufacturer who was misrepresenting the technical capabilities of their expensive but software-incomplete product. If I hadn't developed the experience and confidence to find my way around unfamiliar circuit boards and how to read component markings I wouldn't have been able to do that.
Idk if you needed the link to HN in a comment on HN
It doesn't always have to work out, it just has to work out in the aggregate. The bar that the existing private insurance regime has set for discouraging wasteful medical tests isn't exactly high, though.

It's also worth pointing that what you're describing is an illusion of efficiency arising from Medicare implicitly pushing costs off onto non-Medicare patients. That wouldn't be able to happen if there weren't any non-Medicare patients.
I suspect "general purpose artificial intelligence system" means the same architecture applied to 3 games (western Chess, Shogi, Go).
That’s fair, but surely the concept of sharing music with friends isn’t so crazy? Not saying it was necessarily handled well here, but it seems like a feature many would and do want.
Yes, although I'd argue it's less about "rules", per se, and more about just having different infrastructure (protected bike lanes and separated bike paths).
Here's my layman understanding:

- Dopamine for that excited feeling that many people are liking what you had said or posted, i.e. confirmation bias.

- Serotonin for that lovey feeling of seeing something inspiring/cute/your crush.

- Adrenaline for internet arguments, insults, or conflict.
DAU probably means "daily active user" here.
There is so much good that price transparency would do. Most treatments are not emergency and you can absolutely shop around even if it's not cosmetic. Ever hear of medical tourism? It's not a perfectly 'free market', but it could benefit so much from better information.
Vox has released guitar amps with NuTube in them: https://www.voxamps.com/MV50

Ibanez has also released a Tub Screamer that uses them: https://www.ibanez.com/na/products/detail/nts_01.html
"Hey look at all the heroin I can afford now!"