skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's funny. Normally I place a high value on civility and decency in discourse.

But I don't have any problem with this style of communication from Taleb.

I think it's because I've read/heard enough of his material over many years, and I understand the game he's playing.

He's not cruel, and he means no harm to people personally. Indeed he cares a lot about the general wellbeing of society and individuals, about avoidance of violence, poverty, oppression etc.

His whole approach designed to cut through bullshit and seek the truth.

That means being ruthless in breaking down the mechanisms people use to hide bullshit or smuggle it into important discussions - e.g., status/authority signals like titles, honorifics, academic/professional qualifications, academic processes, group memberships like Mensa, corporate/academic jargon, and politeness/courtesy when it's used to subdue people's efforts to seek truth.

His abrasive style is also a test: people who care about truth will not be offended, as they will welcome their ideas being challenged and scrutinised, because they'll win either way; either they'll be proven right, or they'll be shown to be wrong and they'll learn something.

People who have something to hide will respond by getting offended at his tone, rather than simply defending/explaining their ideas on their merits.

Related to that, he's fine with people being rude to him; indeed he prefers it, and he hates it when people try to flatter him or build rapport with him, because he knows that's the first step to being bullshitted.

There have been times when he's been savage about issues I hold dear, and that's been uncomfortable. But it's been a signal that I've needed to keep working to understand those issues more deeply so they'd hold up to any scrutiny.
It was just an broad extension of private health insurance. In fact it was very heavily based on a similar system implemented in Massachsets by, er, Republicans under Mitt Romney. That’s why Obama though he could get it through. The only reason the republicans fought it at the national level was because Obama.

In fact until they turned on it for political strategy reasons it was quite popular with Republican representatives and saw extensive bipartisan review and amendment. The Republican narrative that it was pushed through without them having a say is flat out false.

As a UK conservative I’ve had it up to my teeth with the US Republican Party. It seems like all they’ve got left is reactionaryism and nationalism. They’re now even dismantling trade deals largely built by free trade republicans, and can’t even support their own policies as soon as anyone else supports them too. They’re totally dysfunctional.

I’m a big believer that any political party that has power for too long becomes corrupt. Success attracts mouthpiece politicians that parrrot the party line because it’s successful, without thinking through and living the basic principles. I’ve seen it happen to the Conservative party. I voted con in 1997 but we deserved that defeat. It happened to labour under Blair and Brown. The US republicans have had the same disease since the Bush eras and just can’t shake it. The fact the democrats have occupied the centre right had forced republicanism into a reactionary corner. As a conservative myself it horrible to watch. They’ve become a twisted parody of the party I once loved under Reagan.

Oops. Rant.
In many US states, companies can fire employees without cause. That's very friendly to small businesses.

(I based in South Africa, but traveled the world. So I'm fairly neutral)
An introduction to Systems Thinking
Thoughts on the fare evasion conundrum: why the MTA cares and why we shouldn’t
No one on HN has mentioned my takeaway on the IQ subject that I've held for many years now. Upon learning more information over the years since, it has only solidified my view.

On his analysis, he has a nice argument but he's outright wrong about some of it. They're discovering more everyday about how advanced 'tribal Europe' really was. From the Vikings having more advanced societies than initially thought, back to the Celts when the Romans actually started to fear the Gauls and decided to stop their advances before they became so organized they also had centralized government. The planning ahead required for survival in northern Europe alone greatly increases the chance of evolving a higher minimum IQ vs more congenial conditions where little to no planning is required.

Sometimes truth is inconvenient. I would defend IQ. It's real, and it does matter. What I would say is that in my years, I've learned that it is definitely not the most important attribute. It may not even be the second most important attribute.

A cooperative nature is more important than IQ. What use is a highly intelligent person who won't cooperate with others or interact? Einstein without the willingness to collaborate with society overall is useless. Maybe even a nightmare if he's beyond uncooperative and a malevolent genius. A very uncooperative stupid person could potentially be a big problem too.

If I'm ever picking people to be on my team for a zombie apocalypse, or even just managing a modern society today, I'll take someone with a cooperative nature and little regard for their IQ.

In sum, I would agree with Taleb that IQ can potentially be a swindle, but wouldn't agree with the basis of his argument. IQ is an objective measurement of intelligence, but you don't really need to reach so hard as he did to disqualify the importance of IQ. It's obvious as to why it's secondary to other factors.
Do you really need a better argument than that? Or do you just need to repeat that it's racist until a substantial part of the population both believes that and would also treat challenging that belief as racist?

Consensus is a fundamentally social mechanism, and while scientific consensus ought to be as close to factual as possible, the people forming the consensus are potentially prone to exploitation via outside social forces.
As far as numbering components goes, we typically will number all the components on page 1 in the 100 series, page 2 the 200 series, etc. So the first resistor on page 1 will be R100, the 2nd R101, and so on. And it is good to have the components numbered such that related ones are in the same range.

On a large design, this makes it much easier to find the right section.
What you described is exactly one form of 'business-friendly'. Unfortunately, it is logical. Big business brings big investment and hold a lot of employment under its umbrella. Small businesses might, on aggregated level, provided more jobs or tax revenue, but they don't have a single voice to represent their interests.

So I guess you are right, it is truly 'big-business-friendly', whether that is good or bad, I don't know.
> Taleb is saying that if IQs above 100 have no predictive power, then what’s the point in measuring them?

The whole point of IQ tests is not to identify or rank people who score above 100. The whole point is to identify those who fall well below 100,because that's actually a disability.

Look at it this way: some amusement parks feature amusement rides that are only safe to ride if riders can be kept safe by the safety equipment. One way to ensure safety requirements are met is to admit only people taller than a predefined height. That means that a specific metric (height) is used to pick who is able from those who are not. However, that does not mean taller people are better at riding that specific ride, let alone any attraction.

The IQ concept serves the same purpose. Those with a low IQ simply struggle to perform some tasks, but above a fuzzy threshold IQ is a meaningless metric to evaluate or predict success.
IQ tests attempt to measure g, which is some combination of processing speed, capability for abstract thought and working memory, all of those being highly correlated. The GRE and GMAT are just harder versions of the SAT, IQ tests for people who completed middle school. The LSAT is an IQ test with no math portion

> It is designed to assess reading comprehension as well as logical and verbal reasoning proficiency.

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

The MCAT has one pure IQ test section out of four. However, all of these tests are highly g loaded. People who can do well on one of them can do well on the others with more or less preparation. That’s what g attempts to measure.
How expensive do you think it is to operate a mine flail? Especially factoring in transport to remote areas?
The rest of the western world sees the death penalty as morally wrong and more similar to murder than justice. By their standards you are essentially saying "The government has only murdered a few people recently".
FWIW, this is a project I'm REALLY interested in. If you go open source, I'd totally get involved.

I have a mirror of *booru image galleries (basically, anime/manga images, but REALLY well tagged: upwards of 20+ tags per image) that I've been occationally meaning to see if I can turn into a google-deep-dream-like nightmare to make the worst hentai possible (it started as the idea for a terrible idea hackathon[1]).

I have a fair bit of experience writing web-scrapers [2], but no idea what I'm doing with neural net stuff. I keep meaning to spend time to figure out how to do anything, but other projects (and work) keep me distracted.

Anyways, if you have any use for 5496863 images (probably mostly hentai) with 196852748 tags, hit me up.

Or you could just run the scraper [3] yourself, but I hope you have ~5+ TB of free disk space.

1: http://www.stupidhackathon.com/
2: https://github.com/fake-name
3: https://github.com/fake-name/DanbooruScraper
How do I specify categories? There's a free-form text input field. Am I supposed to put stuff there? What do I put there? What works?

For that matter, I have multiple empty requests bots (apparently). How do you delete them? I could probably edit stowbotlist.json but I can't imagine that's the intended interface.
> Unfortunately, America is no longer the global leader on nuclear energy that it was 50 years ago. To regain this position, it will need to commit new funding, update regulations, and show investors that it’s serious.

> We had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely.

Maybe running pilot projects in U.S. instead of China can solve the first issue he mentions?
Obsessiveness only helps if you're headed in the right direction. That's why YCombinator starts up startups with so little capital - so if they're headed in the wrong direction, they find out fast.
The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
Note that many modern Samsung devices have a blue-light filter available right in the main icon tray (the 11th out of 21 on my Galaxy SO+, for example).
> Sometimes I wonder if I'd be happier as a construction worker but I'm too old for that now and it has very destructive long-term consequences for the human body.

Sometimes we say "Well, I can always do X." But as you observe, we often can't always do X.

Ironic that the conditions of some professions, like construction or truck driving, contribute to limiting the time you can spend in them. Sitting in the driver seat all day long, and eating poorly for convenience, contribute to obesity and diabetes, for example.
I believe being deprived of internet access is considered “cruel and unusual punishment” in the SV area ;)

<insert follow-on joke about Comcast>
> The first step was to forcibly disable 1) the display, 2) the radio, and 3) the flash chip from using the SPI bus by adding three jumper wires to tie their CE pins to VCC.

A couple of things I found helpful.

Use a standard connector for in circuit programming. It just makes developing and debugging so much easier. Being able to easily swap parts of a development setup to see if the problem follows a piece of hardware will save your hair.

For AVR's where the programming interface is shared with the SPI Bus, always put pull ups on the chip selects for SPI's bus parts. As you learned those parts can fight the programmer if you reset the processor while they are holding the bus.

Also for AVR's I've seen mis-programming set the fuses to a clock setting that isn't supported by the hardware. Like programming an very low speed clock or an external clock when there is none. On our test jigs we resorted to injecting a 1MHZ clock on the xtal input pin when programming. Providing for this will be it easy to recover bricked board.

Having a command line interface for running tests is really really helpful. Use one of those USB to serial adaptors by FDDI. I found USB kind of sucks because plugging and unplugging USB ports a lot seems to often confuse OS. I've seen the US just give up on a USB port that it thinks is hosed. Either that or the drive gets messed. And you need to reboot. Using serial solves that problem.

And for small runs of boards try designing a simple loopback teststand. Just loop IO back through the test stand and use the host uP to run the tests.

C#/.net gets a lot of hate, but works really well to drive a single device under test. That allows you to slap together a simple GUI based test that you can offload onto someone else. You don't need anything but the programmer and a USB to serial adapter. You can shell out to run AVRDude.

Consider barcodes and barcode readers to keep track of boards. Failing that invest in QC tags.
Agreed. I think the current interviewing system should be replaced with an IQ test + some more standardized domain specific knowledge tests.

The pseudoscientific programming contest style interviews used by Google and others are highly inconsistent and filled with false negatives + false positives.
> The world has never had as much debt as it has right now

Since Earth doesn't owe money to Mars, it's not at all clear that world-level debt is good or bad.

Every dollar or euro liability for someone is an asset for someone else.

For example, I own US treasury bonds, so for me that's an asset. They pay interest and they're extremely likely to get paid back in full.

For me, debt is good. It allows me to consume less than I produce right now so years later I can consume more than I produce.

Obviously when a family or a company takes on too much debt it can bad for the debtor (interest payments compete with rent and food) and it's bad for the creditor if the debtor can't pay it back.

But at the world level, it's just some of us choosing to consume more than we produce right now, and others of us choosing to consume less than we produce right now.
Part of the reason I like C-style header files for declarations is that I use these as a 'sketch' / 'story map' for the piece of code I'm writing. I tend to spend much more time per line writing my headers than my code, because once I've thought through the public interface and it's close to its final form, the internal code pretty much writes itself.
A couple years back, I wrote a beginner post on learning OpenSCAD. It seemed to have helped people get up and running. https://cubehero.com/2013/11/19/know-only-10-things-to-be-da...

Other than that, you can check out https://www.reddit.com/r/openscad, for what other people are doing with it.
Understanding Zero-Knowledge Proofs
> If you’ve never been exposed to the flu, it’s possible to make a vaccine that teaches your immune system to look for those structures and attack them. But once you’ve had the flu, your body obsesses over the strain that got you sick. That makes it really hard to get your immune system to look for the common structures.

Very interesting, I did not know that.
Highlights from GST 31st Council Meeting – SlickAccount Blog
Agreed completely.

But remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor).

UEFI smells like it was designed by a committee, so the value it adds (if any) seems far outweighed by the added complexity (and corresponding security challenges) it creates... to paraphrase Douglas Adams: (and replacing the word "Universe" with "BIOS":)

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the BIOS is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable... There is another theory which states that this has already happened...” <g>
I'd need a lot more remedial mathematics before I could get any mileage out of those ML/AI book recommendations. I haven't touched mathematics in a strict sense since my senior year of high school Calculus (I majored in the humanities), so I think you're absolutely right. People like me would need to spend a lot more time learning things like discrete math and statistics before moving up to these books.
The core idea of integrating components written in multiple languages got totally lost along the way from COM (a way for components written in different languages to interoperate while avoiding the DLL Hell problem) => ActiveX (a web-friendly marketing name for COM because you couldn't google for "COM") => Java Beans (a marketing name for vaporware to express the idea that Sun had an alternative to ActiveX, which was misleadingly positioned as a replacement for AWT, but when it was finally implemented was only useful for web servers, and certainly wouldn't ever work with anything but 100% Pure Java) => POJO (Plain Old Java Objects, which have nothing to do with user interface widgets or any other language than Java).
Thanks for the offer, but I'm not really interested in open sourcing this. I'm familiar with the danbooru set from Gwern's posts about it but I don't really intend to use it for anything.
Yeah, it's kind of specific to a certain weirdo subgroup (ayo~!!).

I've also chatted with Gwern a bit about the project. We had similar interests.

My scraper wound up being very similar to what he implemented, though it was already up and running when he made his first posts (I started my project about 6 months before Gwern).
I think 50 years would be a reasonable first step. I think something more like 20 or 30 years would be more objectively reasonable (if you believed in the original intent of copyright, and not just for companies to be able to make as much money as possible out of any content), but potentially a bridge too far for the foreseeable future.

The main thing I'd like to see would be to get rid of any silly "life plus x years" terms.
Yeah each free form text entry field becomes both a image category and a new folder that images will get sorted into. If you need to clear out the empty bots you can just delete the contents of stowbotlist.json. There will be a cleaner interface eventually but this tool is very new and still a little rough around the edges, especially in those cases where things go wrong. The demo video on the website shows an example of things you can request and how it would work.
Really looking forward to porting my home automation to flutter!
This article doesn't even seem contrary to scientific consensus as far as what factual information is presented. It's just about how it's packaged in order to form his argument. It's sort of a lawyer-y manipulation of terms with some added hyperbole and even appeals to fashion sense that are misrepresenting what IQ is and what the consensus actually is.
>But at the world level, it's just some of us choosing to consume more than we produce right now, and others of us choosing to consume less than we produce right now.

Isn't it the actual problem though ? When a small portion of people consume a lot less than what they "produce", and another big portion of people borrow from them to consume more than what they produce, isn't it an indicator of rising inequality ? This imbalance can't last forever, and either it provokes a cascade of default and threatens the stability of the economy, or it keeps the big portion of people in an interest rate paying spiral, slowing the growth of the economy. Either way, I don't see it as a good thing at all
I have a lot of 'cool stuff' I would love to elaborate on, personal projects and home lab stuff. Though again, in my experience, companies don't want to hear this. They want to see stupid ass 'bubble sort this, merge sort that, fixx buzz without modulus' crap. I can't do that, I don't -want- to do that. I am not a programmer (despite my handle). I can script, I can automate, but I should NOT need to know every damn CS algorithm under the sun for a fucking NON dev, non programmer, role. I'm tired of this interview process. Tech is the only industry I know of, that has multiple interviews of varying nature, including phone, web camera/ doc collab, on site multiple days, etc etc. I once told a non-tech person the type of gauntlet needed to even get an INTERVIEW let alone a JOB in this realm, and their question was aptly "why the hell would you ever put up with that?". Their job interview was: resume -> onsite with manager, hired.

I loathe this type of interview bullshit culture, and it more than anything else is driving me out of the industry. Sure I'm not Jon Skeet, but I do my job and I do it well. Continuing with these types of interviews and company shit, makes me want to go be an electrician or mechanic or anything the hell else.
A persistent real-time key-value store, with powerful features
Yeah, from the video (videos for text? Really?) you have some categories, but the point is what is the available space of categories?

Do you specify tags you want to filter by? For example, if I wanted to do (random suggestion) SMT IC package identification, how would I do that?

------

From the sound of it, right now, it sounds like you review the requested categories, and manually/semi-manually generate each specific network?

------

I'm basically in a position where it'd be much more valuable to me to have a thing I can point at a directory and have it tell me what it found then something I have to say "sort into these categories".

In general, there's very few cases where I have a dataset where I want to filter by a specific content, and don't already have that metadata. Content discovery would be much more useful.
Txqr: Transfer data via animated QR codes
Hence item b.
Car shows.
You need all three. Picking the wrong thing to work on wastes all of the time that gets spent because of obsession.
I wish I could downvote you. You have completely missed my point. I am absolutely 'real' during an interview, the problem is, the other side of the table doesn't WANT what my 'realness' is. They want cookie cutter CS grads.
Don't programmer do this when they create a prototype and reiterate from there until they have a fully functional product? Unlike painting, programming can refactor parts and rearrange everything. There is no need for an additional sketch if the sketch can become the painting.
Ask HN: Why is YouTube's playlist algorithm so nonsensical?
In the past ±year I've noticed that YouTube's automatic "Up Next" algorithm has become entirely unusable. If I'm watching Video: Part 1, the next video, Part 2, isn't even listed in the playlist. I have to go search for it on the uploader's page.

Why is this? Does breaking a natural playlist flow increase ad revenue?
Pharmaceuticals raise the prices on hundreds of drugs to ring in the new year
How to Create a Custom Widget in Magento 2
Simple things do not need to be documented. And heavy ones are something like trade secrets. There is low probability, that somebody might share their trade secrets with you. There are checklists from fpga vendors for pcb design: https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/user_guides/ug4... Chance, that you will produce the boards for systems with fpga by yourself, is very low.
This scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail came back to my mind:
https://youtu.be/DPXG4pdPj4w?t=18
The good news is that government only needs to keep costs lower than the private system. That doesn't require a good job of controlling costs.