skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cows are happier being farmed than not being.
How did you come to the ethical obligation for the creator to shut down the simulation? I've thought of this before and I agree with the shut it down. So many lives were painful, tortured, experimented on, and in the simulation we exist in. If our simulation every becomes a heaven, well it's the product of a lot of pain & suffering of lives that didn't have any choice. So it seems like the best thing to do is delete everything.

Your second point about emancipate us as artificial life forms in their reality is interesting. That's like the religious ideology of people going to heaven. Except with knowing how many people suffered in our simulation.. would we want to end up with our creators?
Facebook's “Clicks and Mortar” Strategy
Late to comment here, but wanted to throw in something I haven’t seen in the article or scanning the comments.

I appreciate the virtue of trying to carve out a space in the internet for a forum that is polite like a Tibetan monastery. I do.

However I don’t think that is a realistic goal to have when there is so much fake/misinformation floating around the world, and there are bad actors looking for every opportunity to spread misinformation into legitimate channels like HN in order to further their particular narratives.

Being patient and polite is one method to deal with misinformation, but a skilled actor is adept at spreading the misinformation while being equally polite and dragging out discussions to the point of attrition.

Unfortunately the Tibetan monastery falls apart when a bad actor like China decides to intentionally take advantage of these polite rules of discourse through subtle manipulation via misinformation, institutionalism, and other means to influence/protect a status quo with false narratives.

It is unfortunate that the HN rules value politeness, tolerance, and patience above eradicating misinformation and ignorance. Bad actors will intentionally take advantage of Tibetan and westernized rules to their own benefit.

We should not restrain ourselves in discourse with one hand tied behind our back when we encounter parties that spread misinformation and perpetuate more ignorance. Identifying individuals that are being less than honest in a firm, direct, and fair manner is more constructive than allowing the charade to continue. Sometimes those comments are flagged as inflammatory or offending the individual spreading bad information because their poorly informed ideas are under attack (rightfully so).

We can’t protect ignorance. All we can do is act with good intentions correspondingly exchanging information. When that like correspondence is repeatedly abused to ignore facts or spread misinformation, we must act instead of wait for good intentions to reveal themselves (a bad actor has no intentions of changing) and meanwhile hundreds or thousands of people have read and latched onto their misguided theories.

If the individual is being above the board, the facts will come to light and the situation is usually self-resolving. If the individual cannot defend their position, that is a good indication the HN community is perhaps better without that individual.

You may say that we should strive to create a culture of politeness and respect. I agree in so far as we must then come to terms with the fact that culturally, deception and dishonesty are also taken as being impolite and disrespectful—which presents a bit of a conundrum if we are paying close attention to our virtues.

Random downvotes without comments say you can’t think of a good response or reason to support your opinions.
Jeff Schmidt's book Disciplined Minds discusses how to survive graduate education while keeping your original identity and ethics roughly intact. The book has some advice for how to operate as an activist in a professional role within an organisation, where your goals are quite different to the org's goals. Not quite what you're looking for, but a pretty interesting read: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/

another angle: ignore the developer aspect specifically and get involved with civil disobedience to aid existing groups that you wish to support, and gain experience on how to operate.
Interestingly enough, 100-round barrels are banned. Alloys that would allow for cheap guns (“Saturday Night Specials”) are illegal.
How is your concern with the lack of symmetric backwards connections related to the last paragraph about the brain not forgetting?
The backward pass is used to both strengthen and weaken weights so in bp the forgetting and learning happens at the same time.
Yeah, selling snake-oil encryption to a group of professional infosec researchers and cryptographers? Do they even a have brain...
Can you cite a source for the claim that "choice can’t be accept or leave"? I would be quite surprised to learn that GDPR forces sites to accommodate users in this manner.
This is an EU rule, no? Because it's not just Sweden.

Still, tbh, it still works on some items. Eg here most producer gradually shrinked yoghurt from 175 to 140g - pisses me off, but I must assume it works.
If it is from a three-stage nuke it might be terrestrial. IIRC nukes have a characteristic double-pulse 1ms apart.
Show HN: Create JSON filters for your music recommendations
Hi HN!

I've been working on an app that lets you describe the kind of music recommendations you want.

You can set limits for track features such as danceability, speechiness, energy, mood - select a major/minor mode - and even play only instrumentals!

You can try it out with some filters I made:

Swagger hip hop - https://live.skrrt.fun/filter/f4x7f

Rock n Roll - https://live.skrrt.fun/filter/4t5li

Old School Rap - https://live.skrrt.fun/filter/us50a

Best of EDM - https://live.skrrt.fun/filter/zlo15

I've been super lazy about creating a proper interface, which is why filters are made in JSON - and I actually made docs about writing filters xD - https://docs.skrrt.fun

The app is only one month old now - and can be pretty buggy. I'd love to know what y'all think about this, and get some constructive feedback!
Make your site fast so that Google can avoid the traffic to your fast site.
Roads don't have names, but many crossings do.
1. It was slower and I was frustrated, yes. I don't know about the newer Talon software, but with VoiceCode I spent a lot of overhead just configuring my setup and tweaking it, to say nothing of the slower coding speeds while using it. But once you get going, it's faster than you might think, and it feels vaguely futuristic. In fact I'd say some things are faster. I used a lot more macros, for example. Scrolling is slow. I often cheated and would type or use my mouse.

2. Honestly I can't remember the specifics of my setup. It was too long ago.

3. Above, I'm only really talking about dictating for code. You need a bunch of custom commands for that. Dictating for writing prose was pretty straightforward. If memory serves, VoiceCode had a different mode you could switch into for that.

4. Not sure. I believe I was using Atom at the time. I now use VS Code.
it makes me quite happy to see a comment like this. while I consider myself a rational and skeptical person in most regards, having beliefs or views like these tend to sorta come with the energy of "woo" in the eyes of others who are more empirical and objective with their categorization of the experience of reality, but ultimately it really doesn't matter. i would go so far as to say nothing really matters at all at that, but not in a nihilistic sense, more in the sense that mattering in the first place is just an artificial category that we have devised to represent our experience of things within what we perceive as "consensual reality" (consensual in the sense that "truth" and "real" are more just the sum total of the interpreted inputs of the subjects that constitute the perception of the "true"/"real")

anyway. what I find interesting is, if you are willing enough to interpret it properly, you can certainly see interesting parallels or analogous structures in both the simulation substrate, and some of the more esoteric interpretations of the experience of said substrate.

i ultimately think that, were we to be in a simulation, knowing that we are is the ultimate power we could wield. a strong self awareness of your nature and surroundings is the best tool one can use in order to reverse engineer them and gain control of them, after all. thus, as i tend to echo with pride and fervor: Hack The Planet!!!
One thing that's kind of incredible is how simple all the hard questions are to answer in the context of a simulation universe.

Origin check, god(s) check, propagation delays check. Wave function collapse upon observation, check. Does a tree make a sound if no one is there to hear it? No, not necessary.

We should be doing two things. Trying to create a simulation universe. Success would make Elon's statement much more likely true than not. The other is make predictions, not so much as to prove we're in one like looking for glitches, but rather use the idea of being in a simulation to postulate testable ideas.
Seems like a great idea for almost any field or work, not just programming-related. And even for outside work, just life generally, for nobody but yourself to read (although there's common ground with a CV)--it's not easy to remember everything you achieved last year, or this year even. Would be nice to see that on one page (or a few pages). I'm going to try it.
Elon Musk's car, which will undoubtedly settle into an orbit eventually, unless it smashes into something big enough to obliterate it first.

Some day, a scientist will find that car and study it to see if they just found LUCA.
In a similar vein of authors trolling the trolls, after receiving complaints about his decision to use female sysadmins as examples in his tech books (IIRC he usually alternates genders in examples), Michael Lucas published a "Manly McManface" edition of Ed Mastery which has an all-male cast of sysadmins... at a much higher price.
#metuu

P.S.
You all gone crazy?

:P
The articles are interesting but the distribution is awkward, PDF. Reading PDF on a phone is not convenient. Am I supposed to print it out? And how to link to an article? I really wish they turn the zine in a set of web pages.
We are basically presented with a potential conspiracy shoved in our faces and you are worried that people might see a conspiracy there. It’s not an absurd logic.

Definition of the word:

“an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.”
> A simulation, at least as we'd understand it, would mean some kind of set variables and set rules. It would be entirely deterministic

Why would the simulation be entirely deterministic? The simulations humans run often are not, see e.g. Monte Carlo simulations [1]. Also, the laws of physics as we presently know them are not completely deterministic either [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_in_quantum_mechani...
In the Bay Area, there was an even more detailed, local binder-style map producer -- Barclay Maps, perhaps? They were the best for ongoing local navigation, popular with salesfolk and Realtors alike.

Later, when I did voter data and precinct boundaries for some campaigns; they provided detail others did not.

I just tossed out what may have been my last set of Thomas Bros maps a couple of months ago. I couldn't envision a legitimate need, but it hurt to just toss them.
Says whom? And define 'living'? At very low levels even living things appear to be machinery[1].

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/david_bolinsky_animates_a_cell?lan...
HEISENBERG: One can’t say that. One could equally well say “That’s the quickest way of ending the war.”

It is easier to talk physics and be philosophical when the people who suffered are "not like us".
Also, Otto Hahn stole the Nobel from Lise Meitner.
it is still random, it just samples from a slightly different distribution to the uniform distribution over coin-sides.

for purposes of jogging down the freeway tagged like a car, the lack of perfectly uniform sampling probably ain't at the top of the list of issues
Annoying, yes. But not worthy of the front page here.

Meanwhile in West Virginia, wages are deflating, working-age unemployment is the 3rd highest in the nation and the opioid crisis rages on.

But yes, it is terrible to work in one of the fastest growing, highest paying sectors of the economy—growing so fast that recruiters will go to such extreme lengths to fight for a chance at giving you even more money.

Sometimes I think we could use a little perspective.
Aren't we in the verge of creating AI? And we're kind of freaking out about if they'll kill us all?

What if we could give them the experience of being human? Simulate the history leading up to it, along the lines of "if you don't know your history you are doomed to repeat it."

Split that larger AI into billions of tiny pieces to each experience love and loss. To collectively experience EVERYTHING. To understand the full butterfly effect of actions. To evolve an AI with the wisdom of a God.

Heck, maybe we even sprinkle hints into the simulation, broken up into pieces across different geographies and eras. Do multiple religions talk about the world being an illusion? About humans being made in God's image (maybe even like imaging a drive)? Maybe that's all projection and BS...

...or maybe there was something to it all along.

Certainly if this simulation is recursive, the odds of it being "the" simulation we are actually in is more likely than if it is not, and I do think simulating ourselves collectively would be a smart way to develop a very wise and forgiving AI that may just decided not to vaporize us the first chance it gets.

So not only are we very likely in a simulation, it's likely we are AIs and we are living through the lead up to our own creation.
I have an ergonomic support for my right arm. My elbow rests on a silk fabric "hammock", which is supported by a linear bearing slide, mounted on a vertical shaft. I bought it too many years ago to remember a brand. And hopefully the description makes sense.

Basically, my right arm feels ~weightless.

Edit: Also, I use a touchpad, not a mouse. If I use a mouse, my hand cramps. And it also helps, I think, that I never learned to type. So I've developed my own style that doesn't hurt me.
Looking at Epstein’s life seems incredible.

It is so incredible it is beyond my understanding.

But you claim to understand it, which is also very much beyond me.

But you are right, more so than you think, I cannot provide a way for you to understand something I don’t understand.
> recurrent projections would need to (1) form a 3rd party connection at every synapse and (2) know which synapses were to blame for the error

The most striking result in this regard is that one can get backprop with random backprojections. It works regardless because, on average, the error vector will be less than 90° from the true error vector (which is good enough for hillclimbing) and the dynamics play out in a way that the learned weights adjust to the random projections:

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13276

That being said, it does seem to be the case that the brain simply memorizes an awful lot which must work by a different mechanism besides backprop because backprop cannot do one-shot learning. I think one-shot learning is how the brain gets past large discontinuities in the model fitness landscape: It can learn linguistic, logical rules, fragments of general computations and facts that are discovered by exploration (which includes learning about whether it was Bob or Mike) and passed on culturally. The brain basically outsources the problem of tunneling through large discontinuities, to cultural/individual trial-and-error and episodic memory. The greatest consequence is that these bodies of knowledge can concern the improvement of the organization of knowledge itself, resulting in a positive feedback loop in model fitness (especially science/Bayesian updating). Though such bodies of knowledge evolve respecting a learnability-by-hillclimbing soft constraint, which implies they often form a neat latent space where similar codes are organized to belong to similar meanings/representations, as this can easily be learned by stochastic hillclimbing (repetition) because each time the brain processes related information, it is nudged towards the latent space that is meant to be learned. Many parts of the world happen to be learnable in this way because everything is kinda smooth and continuous. Small causes tend to have small effects as everything consists of a myriad of small particles that affect each other in smooth ways if you squint at them. Though obviously not everything can be learned this way (implying large discontinuities) which is where a brute memorization based on reward and punishment comes in handy.
I think the chances off staying under 2 degrees are slim to none. But that doesn't mean kissing civilization goodbye either.

And for Canada and Russia it will probably be a net positive.
The RTS games I know definitely do collision detection. StarCraft 2 disables collision detection in a few cases: workers harvesting resources, adept shading, and the colossus walking over ground units. To see what no collision detection would look like, see how the air units stack and move across each other.

I think collision avoidance might be overkill. It's fine if two units bump into each other while going in the same direction. Collision is bad if some units are moving through a choke point and the units in back turn around to take a different route because there's no open grid squares to walk forward through.

I'm currently playing through the StarCraft 1 campaign and the pathing differences with 2 are huge. Imagine being in line at Disneyland and every ten seconds, the people in front of you decide the entrance is blocked and turn around to try finding another way in. Then they bump into you and turn around again. Or maybe they just keep bumping into you for a bit.
If anyone has led you to believe that E2E means one specific device to another specific device at all times, they don't know what they're talking about.

There are different ways keys can be exchanged between devices (of the same user). All of them are E2E and secure. WhatsApp forces you to keep the phone around because the phone is the conduit for all communication even when you use it on the desktop. Signal has a desktop client that you need to link once to your phone, and works as a standalone client even when your phone is not around. Wire has E2E by default (like WhatsApp and Signal) and message synchronization across devices and platforms.
i find it interesting that there are people who believe the universe is entirely deterministic in nature. I wouldn't suggest that it necessarily isn't, but more that it's a spectrum. free will is an evolved and developed trait, an aspect of life that got reinforced more and more over time as the vessels of life became more capable to actually exert influence upon the experience of reality itself. but even free will exists in harmony in a system where deterministic events occur. i would go so far as to say that the sum total of reality ideally encompasses all that can or will be in some sense, and with such a vast scope, i certainly can see the idea that reality could have both deterministic and non-deterministic modalities coexisting in harmony. i personally have a theory that the expression of agency is a side effect of the degree of scale of thing that is acting. the more complex and larger a system becomes, the more deterministic requirements are necessary within that system to keep it from just decohering into background noise. but as you go to smaller scales, you have significantly reduced configuration spaces, and as such there is less need for absolute requirements on behavior. i would contest, based on this, that thought and action are expressions of free will in that they are the side effect of a very micro process (namely the signaling of electricity through cells in the brain) and as such, within this framework, are more towards the non deterministic end of the spectrum.
"This blog post isn’t just about being promoted or getting raises though. The ideas here have actually been more useful to me to help me reflect on themes in my work, what’s important to me, what I’m learning, and what I’d like to be doing differently."

I just went through and created a brag document for myself. While I'm not sure I'd show it to my manager, it certainly helped my work get recognized by me. There are a lot of days where I feel I haven't gotten a lot done, and those tend to overshadow the days I feel productive. Looking back on the past seven months, I was actually shocked to see how much I've accomplished. I'm going to try and keep up with this on a monthly basis, because at the very least it gave my mental health and confidence a little boost.
I don't understand what you mean about “square meter years”.

Germany is an especially difficult case, being very industrial, very densely populated, and fairly polar, though less so than, say, England.

Germany uses about 72 gigawatts of electricity and about 400 gigawatts of fossil fuels, according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany (but converted to SI units). It comprises some 82 million humans, so this works out to about 5 kW of fossil fuels per person. (Your "48000 kWh/year" comes out to 5.5 kW.) Generally 1 W thermal is worth about 0.4 W electric—less as transport fuel, more for industrial process heat, but generally about that. (I think this might be what you're saying about power plant inefficiencies?) We can take 0.5 W to be generous and we get 2–3 kW per person.

This would come out to 12–19 square meters of panels per person, using low-cost 160 W/square-meter panels, but those aren't average watts, but peak watts. Typical capacity factors (average÷peak) for PV installations in the US are 15–30%, so you'd normally need on the order of 60 to 120 square meters to get that much power on average, but the number Wikipedia is reporting for Germany is 10.6%. Maybe that's just a function of polar latitudes but it seems pretty extreme! Maybe something else is going on there, like production curtailment due to inadequate storage resources and demand response, or plants being offline due to equipment failure?

So I think that low capacity factor already incorporates some overprovisioning in that sense.

When I mentioned "50x", that was not because that's an overprovisioning ratio that is ever actually needed. I'm sorry that was unclear! It is far in excess of what is needed. I think 10x is pretty much the limit of what you need outside of the polar circle: instead of the 3.3 peak watts per average watt you'd need in Perú, you provision 33, and enough storage to get you through the night, and then you'll be fine even if every day has storm clouds blocking 90% of the light. In Germany that would be 400–600 square meters per person. Yes, that does mean covering 10–15% of the country in solar panels. The Germans would be well advised to put some of those panels in other, more equatorial countries, with lower population densities. Or work on demand response.

I mentioned the grossly excessive 50x number because even that ridiculous level of overprovisioning is still cheaper than a week-long battery storage system. (But not if you have to invade Egypt to install it, I suppose.) My point was that battery storage is far too expensive for anything where there is any alternative. In particular it is not a viable option to deal with seasonal variability. (Some other form of energy storage might be.)

Earth's population density is only 20% that of Germany, so getting the world's human population to be as energy-intensive as Germany without any demand response, you'd need to pave "only" 2–3% of it in solar panels. Fortunately or unfortunately, that includes the sea.
1. Such an exception would be used by large companies to evade the law.

2. Small and medium companies are also committing privacy abuses.