skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re: If you single-thread the webserver, [network calls] get executed in series

Why is the webserver single-threaded then? And even if it were, why can't network calls be fanned out within it? If they made multi-threaded webservers, would that solve the problem?

Re: Worse, each of those threads take up a few megabytes of RAM that can't be freed until the request completes

Do you mean user page requests, or RAM related to network calls? If the first, that probably will happen no matter what.

I'm trying to sketch little timing diagrams to see where the bottleneck could come from, and cannot see any "general" problem, only problems related to specific architecture choices. But again, I'm not a systems-level software expert. Is there a common concept behind the bottleneck, lots of architecture-specific nuances adding up (OS+WebSrvr+Compiler), or something else?
Another reason is related to the Jevons Paradox

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

Self driving cars and or things like lift and uber externalize the personal hassle due to congestion. Reasonably then congestion will increase.
Someone ought to do a simulation of what this would look like with the full constellation. I love stargazing, I take days long trips to go to dark sites just so I can enjoy the sky. I imagine it would be quite beautiful to see that the implied lattice around the earth as sun glints off the solar panels.

I'm personally so excited to see these, I think it will be a breathtaking, tangible emblem of one of the first planet-scale systems that humans have built.
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We did reset this at the dawn of the Internet. Google's text ads were basically Type 1, and they almost completely replaced the earlier Punch-the-Monkey banner ads we had during the dot-com boom, largely because Google was so much more effective as a discovery platform that sites which advertised on it replaced sites that tried to do their own TV/banner ads.

The problem is that Type 2 ads are more effective than Type 1 ads for mainstream consumers, the ones that think with their emotions rather than carefully weighing competitive alternatives. So even though Google started as a Type 1 only company, the text ads on it have gradually been creeping back to Type 2 manipulation since, and they've expanded into more manipulative ad segments with the DoubleClick and YouTube acquisitions. They also face competition from Facebook (which has been manipulative from the start).

Manipulative ads became the face of the Internet because they work. For them to stop being the face of the Internet, they'd have to stop working. That either requires that 3B people take ownership of their emotions (which seems unlikely, given the general state of emotional education in the world) or that the Internet serve only the few million people in well-off, hyper-rational, educated professions (which also seems unlikely, and not even desirable).
Agreed, it's brilliant and imho the best series in years. The last TV episode that left me as speechless and uneasy as the first episode of Chernobyl (the shift worker looking down into the open reactor from the roof!) was the now legendary Ozymandias episode of Breaking Bad.
Two more media stories from the last 18 hours.

I visited a family member last night who pays for a commercial streaming service. They described an interesting TV program and tried to pull it up, but it had vanished. After using search function, it said "this content has expired".

This morning I woke up and the first thing my mother (who is literally dying of cancer and wanted to listen to a song on the way to hospital where she will receive medical attention for her terminal illness) said to me was that two years of her songs (she is part of an organized choir) have vanished because of iTunes, so she can't access her music in the car.

I for one am never buying another Apple product, use Linux nearly everywhere (despite the hassle) and try to help and educate others where possible. As a society, we have to stop trading long term freedom, stability and efficiency for short term convenience and planned obsolescence / landfill. Contribute to Wikimedia projects, use open source for media creation, and contribute to open culture.
Curtis must have missed the Victorian periodicals that are full of Type 2 ads. See e.g.

http://christinetrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/cigs-10...

http://christinetrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/pills.j...

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/0...

Industrial printed advertising started in the early 19th century with the first stirrings of printed mass media.

But flyers and noticeboards have been around since at least Roman times, and limited-run pamphlet and newspaper/gazette ads were already a thing as far as back as the 16th century.

The propaganda research is more Type 3 - tailored ads designed and monitored for effectiveness. Before Bernays ads were hit and miss, usually made by someone with a brush who could draw and set type.

After Bernays it became a huge industry of influence, and concepts like branding, image, narrative, demographics, and dramatisation began to be used consciously.
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Okay. So say you make an app that helps plumbers do their job well. If every plumber used it, plumber productivity would go up 50%, making life easier for all. It cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it.

There's a big plumber app on the market already, but yours is way better.

How do you get plumbers to hear about your product?

1) The press? Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - no way to scale.

2) Call or knock on doors of every plumber near you? If everyone did this, the spam would be unreal. Also inefficient and not scalable.

3) Referrals? You get some, but most plumbers aren't chomping at the bit to help their competitors. And because you started with so few, referrals are a snails pace and by no means exponential.

4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100 other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts.

See the problem? Without ads, you can't grow many many categories of genuinely valuable products. Even if no one else is advertising, you can't really grow without them.

This is barely a hypothetical by the way. I've worked with a dozen companies with similar situations.
Your post had me thinking the consumer pharmaceutical ads for prescription medicines would fit but then no, they flunk all three of the elements you called out. The marketing just weirds me out -- I'm supposed to select chemotherapeutic agents peddled from a TV ad? One of a dozen patent autoimmune remedies? Prescription medicine ads deserve their own abusive category and are particularly abusive in that their costs are taxpayer-subsidized.
It's not even that.

An average person will have pages of apps installed, but that would actually use only what's on the first page. So they have a choice of bumping something off their precious FP to fit my special app or just keep it where it lands after installation, on the back pages. And if it ends up there, out of rotation, it won't see much voluntary use.
I was surprised to see how much sugar is in bread in the US compared to the bread I buy in Canada (specifically grocery store "bagged bread"). The sweetness makes it taste awful, and hides the taste of the wheat and different grains.
I am amazed how well documented and transparent was the whole process. They new the decision would be difficult to make and there will always be people who wouldn't like the final syntax so they made sure to state their reasoning and trade offs clearly. Fantastic job. Can't wait for August. Thanks!
The IEA is totally not biased against solar. Totally!

https://16iwyl195vvfgoqu3136p2ly-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
Does medium even provide any valuable content? Every time I've been there's it's been nothing but people who are total amateurs talking out of their ass as tho they're experts.
Practically speaking, developing Autonomy requires "not having to deal with other people's shit", which is certainly an aspect of "power". More so if you want to maintain a particular quality of life, and even more so if this quality of life is abnormal.
But this is the whole point - they are unable to think rationally because went invested billions of dollars in trying to find out how to undercut people's rationality. This is the whole idea of advertising and evidently, it works.

You might as well complain that water does not flow upwards.
Invited experts don’t pay any fees: https://www.w3.org/participate/invited-experts/
Certainly. The most accessible source in the popular English press is an article in Business Insider [1] (probably reprinted elsewhere, I didn't check). It accurately refers to claims made in a very well researched book by Leatherbarrow [2]. If you read Russian, I've also seen several interviews with one of the survivors, but couldn't quickly find a link for you. I can look for it later if you're interested.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/chernobyl-volunteers-divers-...

[2] https://leatherbarrowa.exposure.co/chernobyl
An example of

> E.g. x ∈ ℕ ∧ x > 2 ∧ x < 5 ∧ x % 2 = 0 implies x = 4.

in Agda would be this, I think:

_ : ∀ { x : ℕ } → x > 2 → x < 5 → (x % 2) ≡ 0 → x ≡ 4
I understand his concerns, but frankly Medium is a purulent ulcer on the web that needs to be put out of its misery ASAP.
> I don't like use of pesticides and I think there's a reasonable controversy to be had about the dangers of Glyphosate.

There's an important economic perspective to pesticide use: farmers are going to be doing whatever they can to kill enough pests to protect their crops and get a satisfactory yield/ROI.

That means that, the more effective a pesticide is, the less of it they need to use; and the less effective a pesticide is, the more of it they need to use. Since the dangers to humans/other animals come from the amount of pesticide left on something after washing, the seemingly-equivalent "less, more-powerful" pesticide is actually much less dangerous than "more, less-powerful" pesticide, because it's more likely to be completely removed from the end product.

If we ban the most effective pesticides, the alternative is using more of the less-effective pesticides to get an equivalent effect. Which means getting food that likely has more pesticide left over on it.

This also applies to "organic" food: "organic" pesticides are less effective, so they use more of them, so "organic" food ends up having more pesticide left on it than non-"organic" food.

So, if you're not a fan of pesticide in the sense that you're not a fan of eating pesticide, then you should want farmers to be equipped with as powerful a pesticide as possible.
Well money does significantly increase happiness, up to a point. The hard part as an individual is recognizing when you have hit that point. If you can realize it, then as your income grows you can avoid increasing spending which means you can save more and spend less years working. Working just to make and spend more money that doesn't substantially increase happiness.
Natural consequences: What if the child doesn't care about consequence, or what if he/she likes the consequence? In the example of being late for school, the child could consider it as a reward, that he/she doesn't have to go to school anymore.
I wasn't arguing against less deterministic tests. I was just saying "unit test" isn't the name for them. Call them "small tests" or "smoke tests" or make up a new term.
This story just makes me feel sad, and pessimistic for humanity's future. The idea that it was "just okay" for a guy to live in an airport for over 15 years, and lose his freedom of movement and autonomy just because he didn't have papers proving he was born in a particular place... it's just profoundly sad.

It just reminds me of how incredibly petty, violent, and cruel humans are as a whole. We're all people, each deserving life and freedom, and our need to divide ourselves into different, antagonistic tribes is our greatest weakness. And if you can't prove that you're a member of a tribe, you're screwed.
Sugar is a drug, so I guess that addiction can play here.

There's not a lot of regulations for health and safety around most ingredients, so I'd say that also plays:

Fewer risks of decay and such
This is really important work. It's general and operates within a (non-researcher) human attention budget.

Soft Actor Critic (SAC) is a great method on it's own but this human-in-the-loop training for real world problems is a totally viable path for long term training of robots on challenging tasks.

The major roadblock we still face though is having a single model reach competency on multiple tasks without losing competency on earlier ones. I'm willing to train a robot once for each new task, but I'm not willing to constantly retrain it on old ones or wait for it to start from scratch after it's learned a few basic tasks.

We expect skill learning to be compositional and, like learning to ride a bike, easily retained.

This problem (often referred to as life-long learning, or overcoming catastrophic forgetting) is a deep problem in modern ML.
> * Rates of smoking in Belarus are also high.

Russia and Poland have higher rates of smoking. Anyway, it would be mostly about lung cancer which isn't the main component here.

> * The indirect impact of Chernobyl includes a lack of health care facilities in the (rural) regions most impacted.

Lack of healthcare facilities doesn't really impact cancer incidence rate.

>If the stat you're working from was breast cancer mortality, I'd push back harder, but I don't think that's what you're saying.

Breast cancer incidence rate is the main component here. It shows the largest increase in absolute terms. Thyroid cancer shows largest percentage increase, though it is "just" a 1K of cases. Geographically correlates with fallout too.

So far i really fail to see how any argument you've put forward can explain such a significant and regionally (Mogilev and Gomel are large regions, so it is not some local effect) regionally correlated increase in the cancer rate. Especially given that those regions received several Hiroshimas worth of fallout which explains that increase perfectly.

So your explanation need to be at least as good as the Chernobyl fallout provides. Specifically any such explanation has to account for the observed size of the rate increase as well as its geographical distribution, i.e. it should clearly answer - "why Gomel and Mogilev?"
Screwing Up on Purpose: The Beauty of the Deliberate Mistake (2013)
Mathematical Components (The Book)
Do you think amazon has a financial interest in not policing counterfeit products because this strengthens their AmazonBasics brand?
There might not be any evidence. It might simply be the possibility of an update with backdoors/military payloads that gets pushed worldwide moments before a shooting war begins, or as a way to paralyze the world when negotiations become heated.
I installed Linux for my 40 year old mother and she can use it fine.
> So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true.

You are wrong. The paper goes on to say, in the very next sentence, that 3% is "approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed", thus (while smaller), it's the same order of magnitude.

Presumably you do not consider the impact of marriage or unemployment "basically negligible"?

> It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with advertising.

That may be as it may, but that is not what the paper is talking about.
Someone posted this link the other day. https://zeihan.com/my-way-or-the-huawei/.

If enough people have a cold war mentality strategically it makes some sense. Combined with the chance to annoy the Chinese govt in the middle of a trade war, Trump will love it.
People don't die "due to fossil fuel pollution", but rather "air pollution contributes to their mortality" (according to your source).

There's a lot of things that contribute to mortality, sitting in front of a computer screen and writing HN comments being one of them.

Attributing these deaths to pollution is a statistical cherrypick.
I don't doubt that WW-propaganda accelerated it, but manipulative ads were a big thing even in 1898, when William Randolph Hearst started a war to sell more papers.
It was a bit of a pickle to find, but https://devguide.python.org/ has EOL dates under "Status of Python branches"
Sure developing laws that would protect people and not allow monopolies is the job of lawmakers. If they were suggesting laws about users being able to take out their information, crossposting from competing platform, finding out why an add is shown and who have paid for it, all the power to them. But if they are suggesting to ban one particular site it shows their incompetence as lawmakers, and breaks regulations that have been applied on lawmakers themselves by constitution.
OK, I confess that I am a total idiot, but I don't understand what you're saying here at all. It also doesn't seem to be what the article is saying.

> Smaller brands will still be fulfilled by amazon (products stored in amazon's warehouses) but the actual seller will be the product's brand.

As opposed to whose brand? Isn't this how it's worked for years already?

> This makes that brand compete with other sellers selling their products instead of selling wholesale to Amazon and Amazon having to carry the stock.

But you just said that Amazon will still be carrying the stock.

I am so very confused here.
I'd say that's not true any more. We do have a war to fight, the war against destruction of our planet by humanity. (Hoping our politicians would fix it has turned out to be ineffective so far.)

If we could have a war against drugs or terror we can also have a war against climate change, soil degradation, desertification, insect decline and biodiversity loss.
Austerity and climate change put northeastern Nebraska underwater
I wouldn't even consider prison to offer "shelter" since you're locked in there with violent people.
Maby they did sneak in, but fool me once: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html

The last time someone posted pictures claiming they rode their motorcycle through the forbidden zone it caused a stir because that is expressly forbidden because of the risk of picking up contaminated dust. Enclosed tour vehicles only for this reason. Then apparently, in the case of kiddofspeed, we find out she rode her motorcycle to the standard meeting place and took the standard tour. While carrying her helmet along with her for effect.
Actually, the "inventor" of public relations, Edward Bernays, illustrates my point really well. He claimed credit for getting women to smoke with his PR stunts. The data shows that the trend of women smoking started years before he did anything, and the trendline was completely unaffected when he did his stuff. He, at best, got people already smoking to switch to the brand of cigarettes he promoted.
I once read that c compilers were also very expensive before gcc. There's also Gimp to avoid Photoshop. Openoffice/Libreoffice to avoid MS Office. Linux distros to avoid Windows.
There's also seemingly useful articles that end up being content marketing!
Most of the ingredients are for longer shelf life since they are shipped from large factories. You can get bread with fewer ingredients which tend to be from local smaller scale operations. As for sugar it might just be taste preferences in the US. I'm sure the manufacturers do market testing.
The 7.3 million figure is like the “12 years left” figure, that is to say it requires a little work to understand where it came from and what it means.

“Ambient air pollution was responsible for 4.3 million deaths” and “3.8 million
deaths every year as a result of household exposure to smoke from dirty cookstoves and fuels”.

I haven’t dug into the indoor figures but a quick reading suggests that attributing the death toll to fossil fuels in general is misreading the report.

For example, ”91% of those premature deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries” so the bigger problem is how the fuel is used - since richer countries actually use more fuel per capita.

Cooking with coal on an open stove in an unventilated room will slowly kill you from the carbon particulate. Apparently this is a large percentage of the indoor pollution death statistic. The problem here is coal stoves specifically not fossil fuels in general.

The outdoor statistic is a bit more interesting. The Model they use to calculate the number [1] basically takes a curve of PM exposure level across populations around the world, multiplied by an integrated exposure-response (IER) function.

Over the last few years they have lowered the counterfactual concentration (the point below which PM has no efffect) and steepened the IER.

Through this methodology they can arrive at a death rate of nearly 5 million without a single death certificate ever actually stating “air pollution”.

They do this by trying to tease out the damage done by PM by observing places where PM has changed and then looking at how mortality rate due to cancers and such also changed.

It’s an interesting figure, but in a sense misses the forest for the trees.

Particulate matter definitely has adverse heath effects. One study said an average shortening of life expectancy in Europe of 9 months. But the overall “industry” that creates PM (everything from cars kicking up dust on the road to smokestacks) also is responsible for the modern world where ~8 billion people can survive. Is PM shortening lifespans? Or is PM drastically extending lifespans (e.g. preventing mass starvation) while simultaneously also somewhat shortening an idealized life that could have magically gotten everything it needed to survive except without any PM.

If you are going to publish a number of the harm of PM by extrapolating from an IER and PM levels, it would also be useful to consider the net effect, which would be staggeringly positive in terms of lives saved and lengthened not shortened.

[1] - https://www.who.int/airpollution/data/AAP_BoD_methods_March2...
First thank you folks for the suggestions. After using Vim panes for a day, I can say this:

Vim panes vs vim instances in tmux, who wins? It depends on the use case. In case you want to edit files that are completely independent of each other and you prefer not sharing registers between these files, then you are better of using tmux panes; however if the use case involves similar files and involves lot of copy pasting between the 2 buffers, then it is very much recommended that you use Vim panes as the sharing of registers proves its worth in this use case.
I see, then I guess more accurately the page doesnt fall prey to the misconception as much as accidentally perpetuates it. Maybe it would be a good idea to clarify using the tenses of the verbs and the wording that this is about the co considerations for the future pricing of the drug for a decision made before investment, and that the actual price of the drug will be dictated by supply/demand curves? If the model is presented as an investment go/no go calculator rather than price calculator, then that could make a lot of sense, and from that perspective it's a really cool model, I love how comprehensive it is! One nitpick, breakeven price and the word "breakeven" often refers to accounting profit, it might help to clarify that this is the price where you hit NPV>0, and maybe include the details of what the post patent cliff market size assumptions were (although that probably contributes very little given a 20% discount rate). It really is quite thorough!
Sorry for the OT, what is "TFA"?
Advertisers are also the "moral police" and strong arm media companies into compounding the short and long term toxic effects of their original message.