skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't ever post on HN, but this article convinced me to create an account and respond.

>But experts who spoke with me said that the publishing house serves not authors but another master—Amazon Prime.

This is intentionally written in a way that describes Amazon and APub as being nefarious.

I worked in APub for almost 4 years before moving to a different FANG. It was a fantastic place to work. I'm sure engineers in other parts of Amazon get paged all the time. There was essentially no on-call burden for my team. We got to launch some really cool programs and learn about the publishing workflows end to end (ideation all the way to an ebook or physical title). This company was where I became a really strong engineer (my previous job was at a non-tech company building small scale CRUD apps).

First and foremost, authors were our customers. We did anything and everything for authors - it was meant to be a VIP experience.

Does Amazon want to increase Prime subscriptions? Absolutely. But portraying that I or my team "served another master" is disingenuous horse shit.
Like Lazy loading (also called on-demand loading)!
Car Audio Charger
They could just snapshot at important junctions of history and spawn parallel branches, one when a certain decision was made, the other where not. Or where a certain fraction won a decisive battle, or the other one etc. Even ancient philosophers played with that idea, treating time as a series of "pictures" and leaving to gods to decide if they add/remove somebody to/from a picture at a given moment. Pretty much primitive simulation stuff.
We are meant to know.

If probability can be applied to the idea that we are in a simulation, than it can be applied to what kind of simulation (as the more likely, the more those would be run proportionally).

What would be a great way to increase the odds? Recursion.

Why this time period? Because if you don't understand your history you are doomed to repeat it.

What's the point? Isn't there some really important thing about to be happening Elon Musk also talks about all the time in a fearful context? Like those darn AIs that will wipe us out?

If only we could create a sandboxed simulation of what it means to be human so that those AIs could develop their morality and an understanding of the consequences of their actions in a safe, separate space before graduating and being let out into our universe.

And yes, we'd still need them to do busy work to justify their experience. But maybe 1/3 of their time (like 8 hours a day) would be ethical? We could just put their experience of consciousness into a low power state for that period while we use their aggregate computing power for tasks. Let's call it "sleep".

Heck, once we develop some awesome brilliant AI, that being itself could just spin up a new simulation pretty quickly. Maybe in six days or so, and take a day off on the 7th?

If this IS a simulation, does no one think the whole "anti-matter is missing" thing is a giant red flag to raise our eyebrows to the fact out universe isn't so that there is once we became sophisticated enough?

We are SUPPOSED to realize we are in a sim, and we can likely run a very similar sim ourselves to safely develop AI. And arguably, it may even be possible to import the AI that created us into our universe to help do so (would be the fastest way to achieve the result).

Knowing we are in a simulation changes everything. The real question is if the parent reality is finite or infinite. If infinite, it's great news. Why would our universe be finite if the parent universe infinite? Because you can't "solve" an infinite game. We likely have free will, but it's like playing chess with Google's AI. You may choose which move you make, but the outcome is already determined.

We're very likely AIs in a recursive sandboxed simulation of a modified version of the prime reality's history, and whatever the purpose of the simulation, (a) we are very important (if we weren't, no recursion, therefore less likely), (b) no matter what we do the long term outcome is likely deterministic (finite universe so arguably solved given overall sophistication).

Now the really fun question is -- if we are meant to know about it, were the signs there in front of us all along? It's really fun to look back at religious scripture with simulations in mind - many of the most outrageous or bizarre quotes end up making (potentially) a lot more sense.
In philosophy, there's also the idea of cognitive closure where, at a certain point, humans are bounded off to these issues. It could be that we don't possess the vocabulary yet.
Consider the scenario of doing "select all; move over there past a bunch of obstacles and choke points" for 300 tanks.

if you're not playing a starcraft , you probably want them to trundle in the right direction and avoid ending up in a huge traffic jam.

if you are playing a starcraft , bad pathfinding is an opportunity for a skilled operator to worsen their RSI while lovingly micromanaging each tank's route
Licensing server on prem phones home. Devices talk to the internal licensing server.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/technology/me...

Too many customers are ISPs and gifts who do not want core infra connected to the internet.
> My email address isn’t on the web.

Email address is in your public git commits.

Your email address is on the web.
So you measure inflation price per gram model fixed.

Current inflation models are also flawed in other ways as it changes goods exchange. Also if a measured market good is better price is adjusted.
Example larger tv size.
It has been my experience as well that being a white guy means the other person - being a bully for the most part - feels that they can talk down on you endlessly with no consideration of your actual life experience.
Over decades, despite terms of service and laws, it looks like people have been tamed to think that if they put their email address or phone number on the web, they're asking to be spammed or called or sent communication they don't want. It shows how poor a job laws and education have done. Backlash like this article is warranted and required to change this defeatist attitude.
Think about what Earth was like 50 million years ago. It was the Eocene "New Dawn" period. India was just starting to join Asia (physically, in the tectonic sense). The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction saw one or more asteroids kill off most of the dinosaurs. Both North and South poles were forested and Alaska was a rain forest. Grass was a new member in the evolutionary family tree. Primates started appearing, and mostly dwarf species thrived.

If you think about what the fossils from this time period looked like, you can pretty much guess what your message will look like to a future finder in a similar time scale. What you can't guess is what any life form will look like, because nearly nothing alive that long ago even looked like it does today. And we should expect that in the same time period going forward.

Buildings from only a couple thousand years ago are barely recognizable until we dig cleanly around them, and we can't even figure out half of the features we find in them.

Imagine such longer time scales. The digging will be a lot deeper. Tectonics and natural flora cycles will ensure that everything we were has been ground up and recycled repeatedly. It will be nigh impossible to find anything more intelligible than the 50 million year old fossils we find today.

But all is not in vain. With how over populated the Earth is right now, they'll find a whole lot of human-based crude oil to run whatever kind of automobiles they're driving by then.
It’s called HTML. Google reinvents HTML and calls it an amazing innovation.
A 2014 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded having a firearm in the home, even when it’s properly stored, doubles your risk of becoming a victim of homicide and triples the risk of suicide.

It doesn't say that, exactly, since it doesn't distinguish between properly stored and not properly stored cases. It is a meta-analysis; they took a bunch of papers and did the best they could. We can't say that if they're properly stored it's about the same, or worse, or better.

It also acknowledged some methodological limitations, including studying overall death rates, and not specifically deaths due to guns:

...we considered studies of suicide and homicide victimization by any means, and firearm-specific outcomes may differ.

Another issue the study encountered, was that gun ownership rates were not directly available to many of the aggregated studies, which therefore relied on various proxies.

What makes relying on a study like this to initiate a policy of reducing gun ownership not premature?

Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.

We do have laws like this already -- FFLs do background checks for every purchase and if they fail to do so, they can lose their license. What are the expansions that you'd like to see?
This could be the answer to the Fermi paradox...
Grad students in some lab, hastily finishing an assignment for a course in nested simulations.
Put in work preferences. Would like to work hours X; is willing to be notified of opportunities for overtime hours Y. When it's a big deal time, call up everyone who seems to be legal for DOT workrules, regardless of their preferences.
Sabbath: Jesus and Those in Need
> it's especially bad in roguelikes, where luring enemies to doors is a common tactic.

> Ninja Gaiden also has time limits, which are IMO an underrated method of punishing boring play.

Have you by chance played One Way Heroics? It's a roguelike that adds a time limit. There is a black wall of death that moves east at a constant pace, effectively setting a time constraint for you: keep moving, or perish. You extend your time limit by simply moving forward.
"The details are complex, but the basic idea is simple: Some of today’s computer simulations of our cosmos produce distinctive anomalies — for example, there are telltale glitches in the behavior of simulated cosmic rays."

I would like to know more of the details.. But, surely we can't use knowledge of physics and computer-science from simulations we run in our simulated universe, to make predictions about the simulation we are in, which is running in the universe above us, which may have utterly different physics, even logic, and ways of doing computation? The the idea just immediately seems paradoxical to me.
That's a problem in Hawaii. Hawaii got rid of net metering in 2015, because the utility was paying for solar power at a flat rate regardless of demand or time of day. Homeowners can still sell power to the utility, but at something like wholesale market rate. Or they can get batteries.

Utilities fear being required to maintain electrical distribution and generating capacity and only getting revenue on cloudy days. This is a real issue in Hawaii, which has so much sun and no local fuel sources, but less of a problem elsewhere.

It's a good problem to have.
For the not extremely prudish: The story is called "Space Raptor Butt Invasion" and the section quoted above is the second paragraph from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Tingle#Career
But taxes in the US are a lot less progressive than they used to be, so they come nowhere near taking care of that burden on their own.

This is one of those “facts” that simply isn’t true.

US taxes have become more progressive over time.

Look at the first chart:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/02/the-s...
They didn’t. It only loads fast because tgey aggressively preload AMP scripts when you search. A cold load is hardly performant.
Favorite excerpt:

"
AMP SSR is for everyone

If you publish AMP pages, you should publish server-side-rendered AMP pages. Similar to minifying your HTML or CSS, running AMP Optimizer or the Go transformers should be a normal part of your build / rendering chain. The improved rendering performance makes a big difference in FCP times, but more importantly, in the user experience.

"
Other than being the most heavy handed, imperative/authoritarian style call to arms I've seen, the part of this that really bakes my cake is "makes a big difference... in the user experience."
Ya know what makes the experience of visiting my website great for a user? When they actually visit MY website. It's like, the single most fundamental part of a website visiting experience. When their browser and my server host kanoodle around in cyber space together, instead of having some creepy cuckold experience involving Google's server. So I'm thinking that AMP, and all derivative technologies, should really make like 'Google Health' and retire to the trash bin.
What you're describing as "American" is official standard in Sweden, ie:

> Kungsgatan 10 A LGH 1301

King's street 10, staircase A, apartment 1302 which means third floor (10 being ground, 01 being basement), then second apartment counting clockwise, meaning it could be on your right if there are just two per floor.
I don't know if anyone has come up with this answer, but I would try to argue that there is an ethical obligation for us to force the alien superpowers to shut down the simulation, or else emancipate us as artificial life forms in their reality. I think this is the most dignified answer, and one consistent with post Enlightnment values. It satisfies our ethical obligation to all the other universes the aliens are running, etc.

It is also a very leftist answer. Thus I also think that the author didn't even account for such a simple response, shows what an intellectually biased professor he is and it shames his profession.
Soylent-like instant ramen from Nissin
Paged Out – experimental (one article == one page) free zine
"Saving in a bank expands the bank's ability to lend." Lending in modern banks is fractional reserve, they only have a fraction of what they send out in loans, there is literally no law or anything preventing them from typing on a computer and making way more loans than they have money.
Our Brains Tell Stories So We Can Live (2013) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20661495
3 explains magic, i.e. a hack from within the simulation to call some undocumented service of a simulation hypervisor. Well, maybe even 2 if it was intentional to have a hidden API, callable from inside (what if the author wants to spawn an avatar and play inside while granting themselves god mode?).
I'd argue they got it right: when 95% of projects use Git, then why learn anything else? I think the last time I used Mercurial was almost a decade ago at this point, and I don't know of any major project that uses it (outside of Mozilla, who has most of their newer projects are on GitHub, and OpenJDK, which maintains a GitHub mirror).

After Googling, it's pretty dire actually: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ProjectsUsingMercurial Many of these are dead links or links to repos that haven't been updated in years.
What I mean is that outrage over GitHub revealing author email is a bit odd given the way public git repos work.
> We likely have free will, but it's like playing chess with Google's AI. You may choose which move you make, but the outcome is already determined.

Can you explain to me how you made that leap from what you were writing? I don't believe in free will and because I think everything is deterministic. Even if you die in this simulation and had the opportunity to decide what you want next. That's based on all the forces that made 'you' in the life before death.
It's rarely purely price/oz. Often it's mixed units - eg for granola bars or similar you'll see four different items listed at -

Price/oz

Price/lb

Price/bar

Price/unit (which might be bar or package of two bars)

So you get tk calculate the difference in your head.
I started to have knee pain in my early 20s and my dad had both knees replaces sometime in his 60s. I was afraid I'd end up that way and went to a sports clinic (I do a lot of dancing). I had patilla bilat; basically the knee cap was off to the side instead of sitting squarely.

They said everything else on my knee looked good. Out of all the physically therapy exercises, the most significant was cycling. I started to do a lot of cycling after that, which builds the muscles on both sides of the knee and helps keep the kneecap centered.

I had a similar experience, where the knee pain would start to return if I slacked off on cycling. These days I cycle ~100km per week (12km per day to work and back and a bunch on the weekends) during the summer and still dance and haven't had the knee pain return in years.
Once you know rules of the game you can look for flaws/glitches and start cheating.
Guns stolen or sold without a background check that are used in a crime carry a punishment for the last registered owner.

Guns that are stolen would carry a punishment for the last registered owner?
> My GP read the note and informed me: He would not prescribe me painkillers. He would not send me for a second opinion from a neurologist, or treatment from any other specialist. The only referral he would write would be to a psychologist to help me “resolve the underlying issues behind my pain”.

People like that deserve torture. Perhaps there's a hack to induce fibromyalgia or idiopathic small fiber neuropathy, and if there is, they deserve to acquire it.

If it were me, I'd likely be buying opioids from dark markets.
I think the bulwark against it is a society being clear on what its moral axioms are. Like in the US, "all men are created equal", where we understand "men" to mean "people". There are certainly forces in the US that do not want to accept this as true, but the existence of the stated value and national identity helps to defend it. Same with the bill of rights.

And on a personal level, identifying ones own values and principles explicitly and reviewing them periodically can help guide one's path as society changes.
Some great anecdotes here about the development of pathfinding in starcraft 1:

https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-...

> But the biggest thing holding back StarCraft was unit path-finding.

> It wasn’t that the path-finding was totally broken; in most cases it worked quite well. But there were enough edge-cases that the game was un-shippable.

> Game units would get stuck and stop on the battlefield. Often they would go through elaborate efforts to find paths, inching forward or looping around but not making progress, and sometimes getting wedged and unable to move further. Entire task forces would get bogged down in what looked like the afternoon commute.

previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5252003
Google Maps directs them there

Waze, specifically
You mean by 2010
In Sweden, "jämförelsepris" (comparison price) is mandatory for many goods. This means stores have to, in addition to price, display "price per gram" or whatever unit makes sense.

This way, you can quickly compare different groceries despite differing packages, and shrinking the item for the same price would be visible when looking at the comparison price.
Why are “get satisfaction from recognition” and “get satisfaction from things within your control” presented here as exclusive options? It seems fully viable to feel satisfaction from more than one source; why not get recognized for my work and cultivate internal sources of satisfaction?
Tasty British snacks (AI Weirdness)
> All that said, I recommend reading the whole thing if you can find the time. This distillation has only a fraction of the value of the whole piece. Many tangential points are very interesting.

Over time, I’ve come to appreciate all of the little things that get left out of summaries like this to the point that I wonder if they might be harmful. In the time it takes to read a summary, it is also possible to read the first few paragraphs of the article, which should be enough for someone to tell if the writing connects with them.

Fundamentally, this is a persuasive piece and its power comes from providing a vicarious experience to the reader of the author’s experiences at Yale. Whether you agree with her conclusions or not, reading this will help you understand the fundamentals of her position much more than a summary. I worry that, by spoiling the ending, this kind of summarization encourages people to only read the piece if they already agree with the conclusion it ultimately reaches. Thus, the people that would gain the most insight avoid exposing themselves to arguments counter to their beliefs and the echo-chamber is perpetuated a little bit more.

(Side note to ‘alexandercrohde: I don’t really intend to single you out; I applaud the effort you put into writing this summary, and you achieved what you set out to do. I’ve just had this particular rant growing inside me for a while, and this was the first place it made sense to put it.)
This kind of oversimplification and hyperbole with an attitude is what I dislike in such conversations. Telegram is far, far better in speed, reliability, features and UX than Signal has been and is. Signal cannot even get messages delivered reliably as of today and has a whole bunch of UX issues that aren't addressed (two examples among many: can't restore conversations to a new device on iOS, and can't join past conversations and groups on a new device without going through some additional steps and still struggling to get it working). I appreciate that Signal (team invented and) uses reputed E2E, but there's a whole lot more to communicating with other people than security alone.
> In 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom made an ingenious argument that we might be living in a computer simulation [...]

This part isn't novel as it was written about in Simulacron-3 (1964) and one of my fave films[0] (excuse the graphics, good story).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor (1999)
Source? Do any of the major clouds publish their base, first-party load?
Chuck Tingle is an absolute gem of a human. The silly titles of his stories hide an extremely sharp wit and fabulous from-the-first-minute takes on current events.
> why bother to simulate the entire Universe?

How do you know it's simulated in detail? It could be just in a sufficiently coarse level of detail and compute detailed events only when they are observed at that level. Quantum mechanics actually has some spooky things that would be explainable by "lazy" computation of the universe.
But that's the point. AMP makes preloading feasible by making it safe.
So gun owners feel punished when their guns are taken away, and they feel this punishment is more severe than all the lives that are taken away because of mass shootings? And all the families that are ripped apart?
If my 'right' harms so many people, I would not even want that 'right' in the first place.
Guns perhaps made sense in an era where you had to protect yourself agains outlaws. Now we have governments to take take care of your daily security. Now the freely available guns don't make any sense at all.
Restaurants aren't limited to a single service, though. This isn't a winner take all situation. We will end up with an oligopoly but the barriers will be low enough to prevent the winners from being too greedy or complacent.
Gods always seems to pop up in discussions about this topic, which I find glib and annoying.

We could prove the existence of the simulation runners.

That does not suddenly mean theists were right. They would still be just as wrong as ever, making random assumptions without any evidence or scientific method at all.

Lets say we were able to find out that the simulation runner looked and acted exactly like Zeus; that still wouldn't make Zeus worshipers right, just incredibly incredibly lucky in one of their random guesses.
While I myself would like to do just this at some point, this is a lot of work to learn a new tool vs using a website that someone is already familiar with. And you get the added bonus of it being in the cloud and available on your phone (especially great for trips to used bookstores).