skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are we so sure that plants aren't sentient or can't be sentient? We originally assumed we were the only sentient and self aware animal on the planet. We've gradually realized that we're definitely not, but the assumption that self-awareness and sentience must look similar to what it does in us seems to have stuck.

Think about what's required for pavlov's experiment. They took pea plants and turned on, by turns, a fan and a light from one of two opposite directions. In the control group, there was no correlation between when they turned on the fan and when they turned on the light. In the experimental group, they consistently turned on the fan an hour or two before they turned on the light.

Pea plants will grow towards light pretty actively. In the experimental group, they would consistently grow in the direction of the fan - expecting the light to follow the wind.

Think about what's required for that. You have to be able to sense your environment. You have to have an awareness of light and wind. And you have to be able to associate the presence of wind - something that normally has nothing to do with the presence or absence of light - with the later coming of the light.

That pretty strongly suggests there's some level of sentience at work here.

My point isn't to say "Don't eat plants." It's to question whether eating other sentient beings is really avoidable for us as autotrophs. And if it is unavoidable, where does that leave us ethically?

For me, it leaves me trying to treat everything I eat with care and respect and an awareness that my life comes at the cost of other lives.

And then primarily examining the health and sustainability impacts of my diet, rather than using an incomplete ethics.
Has anyone succeeded in installing Pollen on Windows Subsystem for Linux?
I would argue that there is a need for a proper British PHP compiler.
I have no problem at all using Google Drive and Docs on Firefox, what specific issues have you run into?
In my data structures course, the final exam was about 50 pages of difficult, tricky problems. I completed maybe 8 of them and got a B+. The instructor told us that only one student in his career had completed the entire exam.

As an approach I think this makes a lot of sense. First it gives the very best students an opportunity to really show their stuff. For the others, it gives them the opportunity to pick and choose the problems to show that they've at least mastered some of the material (generally, there is often more presented than can realistically be mastered of the course of a semester (between and within each course)).

(nested parens are (the best))
What are you talking about? Google Docs works perfectly fine in Firefox. What issues exist?
Oh I agree.
Thanks for your input.

Would you go with the 'rich westerners dumping their rubbish on you' narrative? Do you think its a potentially valuable industry that you aren't currently equipped to deal with effectively, or what?

As a westerner I don't really want to be exporting rubbish around the world, but I'm aware that this could be someone's job, and potentially a valuable industry for poorer countries, so I don't want to unilaterally decide to stop it.
Telegram time.
I did get the black coffee can, and it wasn't good. I usually drink coffee black, but that's only when it's freshly made; I tend that I actually tend to prefer the premixed kinds that come with milk in them.

There's just something about being brewed potentially months ago, and then kept at an elevated temperature for many days, all the time in an aluminum can, that doesn't lead to good tastes. It tasted metallic. And interestingly, it was actually hard to hold (and even open) at first, because it was hot, being an uninsulated aluminum can that was in a heater. It wasn't until a few minutes later that I could even hold it firmly in one hand without having to juggle it around a lot.
> Ironically, the same page states “We support the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Edge.”

it shouldn't be that difficult to understand that the latest version of edge means the latest production version, not the brand new complete overhaul of the browser on a different platform that's currently in preview mode.
I wonder if they are using browser detection instead of feature detection.
I don't know when YouTube started feeling so sloppy with it's coding (Gmail has also started feeling this way as it went very JS heavy).
I am sightly biased against most JS in the presentation layer
> Write well-structured, semantic HTML being mindful of a separation of concerns

I keep hearing about this mythical beast, and yet I have never seen one beyond the simplest of text-only blogs.
The largest factor has been identified.

You need permission to build a hospital in most jurisdictions.

BUT WAIT... THERE'S MORE!!

The new hospital must get approval......from the incumbent hospital. Yes, Burger King must seek permission from McD to open across the street.
Not a good analogy. Mechanics diagnose and fix problems. Professors impart knowledge onto others; whether students fully absorb everything is another issue (ignoring the professor's competence).
> My experience was that the trickier part was dealing with new freshman, who didn't always seem as prepared as they should be for college, especially with writing.

I went to a top 40 undergrad. Not stellar but I would have assumed reasonably high.

I was astounded at the poor quality of people’s writing ability. Most people just don’t understand the concept of stating an assertion and defending it with premises.
To some extent I agree, although I feel like grades are often a reflection of papers (busy work that should teach you something) and to some extent what I think of as testing disguised as "trivia".

Good for folks who are good at trivia, not so sure it is the best route.

But yeah I agree grades should reflect how well the student grocks the topic.
Looks like a new browser war is beginning.. I wonder if Brave can work with it
The expression "ivory tower" has an entirely different meaning. Just because the couple of dominant players chose to ignore a standard, particularly in a time and age where they were outright hostile to interoperability initiatives, it doesn't mean the standard was not reasonable.
Can you explain? To me it looks like YouTube intentionally, not accidentally, updated their browser block list to include Microsoft Edge Preview.
I think it's easy to draw a flawed conclusion from research like this. While it can be shown that a majority of psychopathic serial killers have the prefrontal cortex brain anomaly, it's also the case that almost all such criminals are male. Yet we have an abundance of plainly apparent counterexamples to dismiss the idea that being male implies criminality. Interestingly, there are similarities here, as one of the largest brain differences between genders is in the development of the amygdala. The brain anomaly here concerns the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.

> So the first thing I thought was that maybe my hypothesis was wrong, and that these brain areas are not reflective of psychopathy or murderous behavior.

> Eventually, based on further neurological and behavioral research into psychopathy, he decided he was indeed a psychopath—just a relatively good kind ...

It sounds to me as though he simply combined his finding with more research possessing the same systematic error, in order to support his conclusion, in spite of a counterexample. He then bends an established definition to suit his theory.

When sampling the extremes of a population (e.g. the most prolific murderers), combinations of compounding additive factors will naturally be common. To draw a causal link about any of them would be flawed, without a thorough and unbiased analysis of the rest of the population.
Does it support ReStructuredText?
Call it a pet peeve, but if we call it "chaos engineering" it costs a ton and gets people conference talks when a sporadic system integration issue is found. But if you have the same thing happen in a plain old CI half the time it will be ignored or flagged flaky.
What exactly do you mean by "fights tooth and nail"? I had to reinstall my laptop a few months ago, and the experience was "navigate to Firefox download site, download, install, set default browser"... Same as it has ever been.
> old school grading was often somewhat capriciously difficult and arbitrary

Yes! The people complaining about grade inflation want to use grades to compare students across classrooms, yet the level of achievement indicated by a grade is very much specific to a particular class, peer-group, and professor.

Grades should never have been used for cross-classroom comparisons in the first place and if market dynamics have inflated them to the point where it is impossible to continue to abuse them in this manner, I'd call it a good riddance!
The number of people that will say, without irony, that they expect upper level classes to follow a normal distirbution in grades boggles my mind. College by definition involves a great deal of gatekeeping and self selection.

As for the larger trend, I can't help but think it's as much due to better teaching and exponentially more available resources (both for self study ie internet and provided by universities (got to spend that tuition money on something)). From my limited experience (parents went to the same school I did) on a material level classes are objectively harder (more information, deeper coverage, more advanced topics) so sometimes it feels like the "grade inflation panic" is built on a older generation upset that young people might be outpacing them.
Does this not work on mobile? I’m not seeing any of my web services show up on my server when opening this page in iOS Safari.

EDIT: In fact the status of local network scan doesn’t come up at all.
User agent for Edge-Chromium is a bit of a mess. Usually it identifies as "Edg", sometimes as Chrome, and sometimes as Edge (the old one).

Specifically, that old Edge agent comes up for streaming sites because old Edge has different DRM systems and was able to serve 4K streams from Netflix and others, which Chrome did not do. New Edge still has those capabilities, so it doesn't want to be served the Chrome compatible version.

I wonder if YouTube somehow ended triggering legacy Edge user agent on account of being a video site?
The main restriction here is people willing to volunteer. We have tons of specs desperate for more maintenance work. If you'd like to get involved, please do so, and if you can spend significant amount of time on any of them, I imagine their current editors would be happy to add you to the team. (I certainly would, for the specs I edit.) You can get started at https://github.com/search?q=is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+....
> The number one predictor of workplace productivity is IQ, not training/education

You are speaking like this is a fact, when there are solid arguments that the whole IQ->Job performance theory is pure nonsense

See https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
Except neither “cholesterol” nor saturated fats nor salt are “bad” for your health.
I'm not at all surprised that nobody considered the possibility that code might fail if a key starts with zero. It's often hard to identify all the edge cases.

Now that this edge case has been found, of course it should be replaced by deterministic tests that tests the consuming code with different kinds of keys, including one with a leading zero.
>Overall, I think the WHATWG structure, of being open to input from all (instead of pay-to-play),

Thats not entirely fair. The WHATWG is also pay-to-play in a way - the browser makers have disproportionally higher power, even more so than the w3c model where there is at least some form of consensus forming among a group of people with more international representation. Now technically anyone in the world can open a github issue (w3c also does it though now), but thats about what anyone can do to oppose something in the spec that the browser makers have their hearts set on.
In the UK, there is a phone service you can reach by dialing 111. There, a nurse can listen to you describe your issue and advise you if you need to go to hospital, make a next-day appointment with your GP, go to se the local pharmacist, or just get bedrest. My wife and I have used this a couple times and its great. It is something that I’d love to see brought to the US.

One aspect of the service that gives us a lot of piece of mind is that they can confidently and immediately tell you how much the NHS would charge you for their recommended course of action. I do wonder how you would build a similar system that could tell you what your medical insurance would cover and what your copay would be.
LOL this is great.
Show HN: Ship Your Enemies GDPR
I agree. However email metadata isn't secure, so that's a nonstarter. I'm rooting for Matrix but thusfar Riot's UX to get an encrypted conversation going leaves a lot to be desired. No way are the non-technical people I know going to be able to do that. Signal "just works" with secure defaults, so that's the best we've got for now.
I don't think the author is advocating for less education. The thing is that completing a university course awards you with a title which should in theory certify that you have completed some material and you understand it very well.

If that is not the case the world will automatically try to get the next best certification possible. In the world of old just being able to read was seen as a mark of excellence; once that was the norm it became having finished basic schooling. After WW2 having any kind of university degree was synonymous with intelligence, today lots of jobs start requiring a PhD in order to filter out high-level candidates.

This could go on and on forever but the only thing we are achieving is making everybody lose more and more time in school trying to get a piece of paper. This is extremely wasteful and can be simply corrected by making schools actually hard. Then the qualifications will go back to being a premium which most companies will not actually need (rather than bartenders needing a bachelor's degree).

There's also an additional disadvantage of having the bar low: you help discredit actual science by having hordes of barely-passable "experts" which say whatever they want to say. In my parent's time when somebody was a doctor or engineer people would listen very carefully; today nobody even believes global warming or vaccines because so many qualified "scientists" keep barfing random opinions out. This is a serious problem because it undermines the public's trust towards serious issues, and while there's no easy solution raising the bar in universities would certainly help.
I can see that happening as a result of some other requirement, but I can't work out why you'd purposefully structure a team so that only one team member can push to production. To me, the downsides (single point of failure) outweigh the benefits (ease of deployment.) Is there something I'm missing?
> 2017, the median ER wait time for patients before admission as inpatients to California hospitals was 336 minutes — or more than 5½ hours.

We have a similar problem in Quebec (where healthcare is "free"):

> 35 per cent of patients in Quebec — one in three — waited five hours or more for help in an emergency ward [1]

I was personally discouraged to receive public health care on 3 different occasions, after initiating the process myself. Waiting times were always the problem.

[1] https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/quebec-has-worst-eme...
>divine right to make decisions of life and death over lesser lifeforms

Are plants not lesser lifeforms?

I ask this as someone who does not eat factory farmed meat and buys nearly all organic produce, from local farms if possible.

But I just don't find this argument compelling. It's not our "divine right", it's just a survival mechanism for our species. There are other much more compelling arguments for avoiding meat consumption.
Urgent care is closed at 9pm Sunday at least in MTV.
The prime numbers of course would have been just fine and irreducible as ever if Hegel had never existed. He did however manage to influence a lot of other iffy stuff:

> Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that "all the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel."(wikipedia)
I'm surprised Google still uses useragent parsing for browser detection.
That's because word-of-mouth is very capable of transmitting abject nonsense and fantasy. If you're going to be taking some medicine, you should be sure it isn't, and the way to do that is with thorough study & evaluation.
The Bomb Detector That Was a Dud
They likely have a white list of browsers, not a black list, so new browsers may simply not be supported until they update the list.

Edit: And the new Edge version likely identifies itself differently.
He pissed off gamergate.
Quite possibly they have their whitelist of 'tested with' browsers for the new experience, and Edge Preview wasn't one of those, so got shown the 'use a supported browser' modal.
Thanks for the great advice. I never thought about this problem.
What is the goal of these universities and colleges? What are they trying to produce in their graduates? People who are well prepared for careers? Social change?

University of Michigan has a top 20 education program (to pick an example). Their vision is...

> The vision of the U-M School of Education is to be a premier School of Education devoted to developing civically engaged children, youth, and adults for a diverse and inclusive society.

http://www.soe.umich.edu/about/

I recently read an interesting piece on Australia's top journalism program that wasn't all that hard but seemed to have an underlying purpose of social change... https://quillette.com/2019/05/22/when-the-authorities-tell-y...

People tend to chase after their goals. If the goals have changed from what they used to be, shouldn't we expect the output to be changed as well?
Edge Preview runs on Chromium
> these new standards _are_ actually useful

I don't necessarily disagree, but it would help your case if you includes some examples in your comment (if only to build a discussion upon).
It also coincides with the generation just following those hit by the GI bill, where college suddenly became a thing every kid had to attend, and became a required part of getting any white-collar job.

If you didn’t have to go to college to get anything done, things like college desegration would have mattered less (mind, its still important, but college simply wouldn’t have been a significant target for it if it happened in say 1910).

That is, overwhelming demand naturally leads to grade inflation (and cost inflation), as the need to ensure graduation regardless of merit increases (because the university became additionally tasked as a trade school). Combined with ofc the private market’s increased reliance on using the university for training versus doing it themselves, internally.

But I’m making the case that grade inflation doesn’t need to stop, the dependency on higher education does. Grade inflation is a symptom, as is every other non-merit based operation of it.
Most QI professionals do not worry about the philosophical "measurement problem", because it does not matter in their daily work (the math just works). However, it is certainly interesting and it might end up being important for the foundations of quantum mechanics.

By the way, here is something you might want to look up: in the context of Lindbladian (non-unitary) evolution or in the context of weak quantum measurements, the measurement problem is not particularly obvious or disturbing. At the end it is still there, but these toolkits give you a way to reinterpret it as an uninteresting detail of the theory, not as a horrible stain.
Probably the signing requirement for release builds of Firefox.
> You can end up with poorly written code generated by unqualified people that addresses short term business needs.

Given the high standards I've seen Linux maintainers uphold over the years, and experience trying to write kernel code which is good enough for just my installation, I don't really tend to agree that the software is being written by "unqualified people" could push code into the kernel to "[address] short term business needs".

Not really sure what kernel you're looking at, I'm looking at the one where AMD's display configuration codebase, which they had conveniently repurposed from their proprietary cross-platform equivalent, was reviewed thoroughly and needed to be dramatically reworked to meet the standards of the kernel maintainers; business convenience be damned.
It's malicious all on its own. Any entity handling your data poorly and collecting more than strictly necessary poses a risk to you.

Where this gets fuzzy is when you get into the identities of the perpetrator and the victim. Are you a Uighar in China? Well, then China is clearly a pressing threat to you. Are you a Muslim in Burma? Perhaps then China is not very much of a threat. What if you're an American in the US military? What if you're from a hostile country, but traveling to the US? Etc ... People don't always map this risk out in a way that I believe is sensible. Many Americans are worried about using Google, and are much more comfortable with China spying on them than Google. Is this a valid concern? I think it depends on who you are and what you believe about either entity. But, that's sort of the point. The "is X company/country" evil?" discussion can be a bit fruitless, subjective, and politically divisive.

A much more useful conversation for everyone is "Entity X collects the following kinds of data, and shares it with the following parties." In this scenario, a disagreement about who is the real political evil is not necessary. The more this information is made available, the more disparate groups can protect ourselves.
Karabiner Elements is great for doing this kind of remapping on macOS

https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/

The equivalent for Windows would probably be AutoHotkey

https://www.autohotkey.com/
This article completely neglects the influence of lower acceptance rates of upper tier institutions. Between 1960-1970 Harvard and Stanford's acceptance rates were 4-6x larger than they are today. It does not seem reasonable to me to assume that all of the additional applicants nowadays are low-achieving students. Assuming a roughly equal distribution of capability within the applicant pool, it makes total sense that average achievement (and thus, grades) would rise over time.

Yes there may be professors or programs that are artificially awarding higher grades than deserved. But the more likely case is that the admitted pool of students is just a higher caliber with stronger educational background than 50 years ago. If you agree that grades are a metric of academic mastery, then it makes sense average grades are improving, and are not necessarily an indication that somehow school has gotten easier than back in the "good 'ol days".
Canada might hold Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of parliament
One downside of class ranking is that it incentivises destructive behaviour.

Law schools often do this, and I heard many stories of things like (in the days of physical books...) moving the perfect references, a week before the deadline, to an unrelated shelf in order to trip up your classmates.

By contrast the science students tended to collaborate on everything outside of an exam room, and learned a lot from each other this way. Even if their grades were less perfectly reflective of individual understanding.
Even more ironically, sargassum seaweed floats on the ocean, and is higher in vitamin C than citrus fruit.
The demo may not have worked for you, but it does work and works for many other people. Just because your particular browser is secured does not mean the author failed.
ERs typically cannot deny anyone care for financial reasons.