skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a bit like with a formula one car. If you go through the curve with 100 mph, you will die, because you really need to go through the curve at 200 mph for aerodynamics to give you enough downward force to keep you on the track...

We are in a very similar situation here. We need to aggressively speed up and focus our engineering efforts to understand nature and to potentially "suck the gases out of the atmosphere" (one solution, we put it there, we should be able to get it back out, if that was really the reason anyway).

Never in mankind's history have the odds been so in our favor. Our technology improves at unprecedented speeds and its only going to go faster. It has to go faster, that is. Otherwise we actually might be wiped out.

I never understood why people think its a good idea to dial back progress & technology to where we were a few hundred years ago... The earth will die anyway in a few billion years. There is only one way forward: Out into space. At the current rate we will be able to do just that, within the allotted time. Even if we can't save earth in the end (who knows), we will still have enough time to leave the sinking ship. But we also have a pretty good shot at to repair the damage we have done.

But the answer for both trajectories is the same: Technology, more technology and faster, faster. If that means more pollution, that's okay. As long as we advance faster than we destroy (which we are doing already), we are golden! Stopping or going slower is what will kill us.

So people, stop whining about pollution and global warming. There is no way to stop that other than technology. Developing countries are not going to stop polluting. Most notably seen with the Amazon. We have no true control over what other countries do. But we can repair the damage they do, via technology deployed on our home soil. That is precisely what we must do & develop. Waiting for global consensus and contracts is waiting for death... Hell, they can't even agree on some minimal pollution numbers between the G7 countries. How the hell are you going to get all 200 nations into one basket. It's ludicrous.

On that note, keep in mind that countries like the USA are the world's number one polluter. Developing countries do some serious shit, but on a smaller scale.
Nope,that's just the source. I can imagine overloading the battery farm or downstream distribution lines.
Yep, modern optical computer nice have sensors north of 10000 dpi, so ostensibly a hacked up mouse/scanner could read all the data with plenty of room for error.

A colleague was doing this in a decade ago, I wonder if he ever got it working.
From the developers standpoint its not something that matters until the 1 to 3 to many year contract expires. THen it times to find another govt. gig working with other nice/older/secure family focused peers.

For those under 40 everyone makes it harder on themselves then it ever needs to be. Not saying people over 40 aren't backstabbers, but its way less and going to work is more enjoyable then you worrying always about looking better then the next, you not believing in yourself and or dealing with those that fall under those categories and are a horror to work with and for.
I'm not saying one should listen to vinyl exclusively, I agree that's ridiculous. But it is important to maintain and curate a physical collection of music -- wthether it's vinyl, CDs, FLAC, or MP3, and that is something that streaming makes impossible.
I think there is a 4th position not in discourse:

4. Im so old i will die before it kills me,
and im rich/influential enough to buy a comfortable situation for myself until that day.

or alternatively, "Its Not My Problem."
Serious question: I always see 'humans will survive' in these kinds of posts. Why? We know most of the past species are extinct, we are in the middle of a mass extinction event, the climate crisis hasn't even fully begun, and there are other serious problems coming.

So I don't want to be negative, but I do want to stay realistic. Does someone know why humans will survive, and on which time scale this prediction is valid .
Yes, this exactly. I'm an assistant professor who's fine with my salary and position, but I can see firsthand how difficult it is to recruit and retain excellent colleagues.
Has it though? The wiki article (and my experience) implies that it's been getting worse, not better.
Any effort you put into solving it can do one of two things: prove you are human, or help label data. It can't do both.

The only way to have it do both is to make you put twice the effort into it. If you are thinking one comes as a byproduct of the other, though, you haven't really thought it through.
I have dismantled the players. Truly a marvel of electromechanical design. So many hand soldered and assembled parts. It is incredible they made it work mass produced. Too bad it was 20 years too late.
a) Yes, e.g. in Sweden. The same social democratic party that is currently ruling Sweden was deeply into eugenics before WW2.

b) I think this guy's motivation comes from a completely different perspective though. He's teaching at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_School_of_Economics - I can't really imagine anyone with social democratic tendencies wanting to work there. Given the current debate climate in Sweden my thinking is that he simply expected to be celebrated for having a radical solution to the climate change issue.

Or he just wanted to market himself. Or he is a cannibal.

Or a combination of the above things.

It will be interesting to see what the Stockholm School of Economics end up saying about him after the dust has settled.
There seem to be a bunch of self-centered pessimists replying to you so I'll try to give a real response.

If you don't already work in an industry that is doing research towards or creating a product that makes a difference, change careers. The solution to this, both on an individual and collective level, is not to give up and hide in a hole hoping you die quietly in your sleep. The solution is to fucking solve the problem.

We need smart people in engineering, nuclear science, agriculture, bioscience, and politics. People that give a damn and aren't satisfied to sit on their asses and wistfully dream of eco-primitivist utopias. Put your resources into skilling up and move to a center where shit is getting done. Talk to people that are working on the problem and find a job that is actively moving the needle.

If we can't fix it then at least you'll die trying rather than cowering.
I've sometimes thought about setting up my Shuttle Pro jog wheel to act like an iPod wheel...
But why would the university bother?

The students are paying to go to <top name school>, not (very often) because they want to be taught by <top name professor>. From the university's perspective, there's little financial incentive to retain that top talent. Making it worse, the professor isn't being stolen by a competitor (another university) where students might spend their money instead.

In short, if you're asking for the free market to solve this problem, it has- from the professors' perspective.

Edit: put another way, these professors can earn the private industry far more money than they can the university. Often a lot more. Salary competition between such pairs of actors will always result in the same thing.
What if we stop pretending there is a climate apocalypse
Choosing the right language also helps reduce errors. There are languages with no nulls and no runtime errors.
I’m curious. Are you using Android? I was able to get it done in a few seconds on iOS/Safari.
Precisely the direction of my questioning. It seems absurd to me that people today think its more important to get humans on Mars and drastically modify its environment than it is to clean and maintain our own.

If we are to believe that Mars once had water and might have been more hospitable to life, then we also must see the irony in trying to groom it so we can leave a future Earth as it starts to look more and more like Mars, instead of getting our act together here and now, and not letting Earth become another Mars.
Typical right wing Hindutva tropes where the people in power- upper caste Hindus are painted as victims. Sati, child marriage and caste discrimination is now illegal. Get over it.
The trouble is that the market rate for professors in other subjects is not as high, and they get mad if the differential is too great.
It adds an interesting dimension to Steven Pinker’s thoughts about common vs shared knowledge.
Chat app is only worth that with a huge network of users, which is the real value.

Anyone can make a chat app. Making a chat app with 100M+ users takes years of effort and luck.
Not to mention that putting stuff into space is great boost for human culture and morale. Totally worth it.
I want a sign that keeps flashing "YOU ARE TOO CLOSE" when someone comes closer than N meters, where N is roughly my speed in km/h divided by 10. My number one annoyance on roads in Poland is that a lot of drivers don't give a damn about safe distance. It's not fun when you're driving 90 km/h with a small kid in the back and have another car stuck 2 meters behind you.
Please don't break the site guidelines by replying to an egregious comment, a.k.a. feeding trolls. It just makes the thread even worse. Ditto for going into personal attack.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Being a TVC (contractor) this option is close to impossible, as I would need to go through a typical 5+ rounds of interview process - the same as for outsiders. This is a different discussion, however, and this process is completely broken, unfair, discouraging and illogical even for Google. My main point in answering the question was around restrictions to, mainly, house-brewed tech stack and overall attitude of other developers I had a chance to work with.
People use them less frequently, so they don’t type the credentials as often?
What is blind allocation and why is it bad?
If we can't keep biosphere 1.0 viable, we have bugger all chance of creating a viable and sustainable extra planetary one. Besides how many launches will be needed to get 7bn to biosphere 2.0? Whatever the answer it's cheaper and easier to address AGW right here, right now. Or does your backup plan only involve sending a tiny few off planet?...
BP is currently distributing a thumbs up display along these lines in New Zealand [0]. I've yet to see one in the wild.

[0] https://www.bp.com/en_nz/new-zealand/home/products-and-servi...
A lot of these things came about because they allowed people to bypass harder aspects of programming for the web. This was great for ease of entry but introduced tons of problems.
Code search is a game changer.
It is, we don't live in a system that would allow us to prevent things getting worse.
I live in a redwood forest and it is noticeably quieter of insect and bird sounds compared to nearby down out of the forest a bit, but not as silent as in an old growth grove.

The redwood canopy blocks out a lot of light, the thicker it is, the harder for any plants to grow down below. The redwood leaves acidify the soil over time as they fall, there is a limited range of plants that can handle it. And then the trees themselves are highly insect resistant, there are no insects living in bark for example.

So basically: bottom of the food chain for birds isn't there, especially not down on the floor in old growth with so much light blocked out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Afikv6k1-c
Global 2000 Report to the [US] President (1977)
Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar, even if others have made unfair accusations. Such discussions are equal parts predictable and nasty, we've had them many times before, and we don't need to have them again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Why should we believe Benford?

You could start with because the claim Minsky went along with it was never offered by the accuser in the first place!

There is something to debate about how far you should believe accusations without investigation or evidence ... but this isn't that, this is jumping to hysterical ends without even an accusation being made, assuming the worst about someone whom-- as far as I know-- no one had even the slightest concern about, even in the face of contradicting evidence. It's an area that deserves more investigation and inquiry, but as far as I can tell-- that's it.

I don't know how to see that as anything but a straight up witchhunt where no one targeted could ever be found innocent.

My above comment is now, I think, my highest upvoted HN comment ever, even though it is a striking contrast to most of the posts in this thread. I suspect a lot of people are afraid of challenging the witchhunt.
Do you have an information that sex that these girls had with Epstein or with his friends or with his clients - was not consensual?

The stories that these girls told suggest that they were free to leave.
Better to do nothing than incur the banal nitpicking of software engineer armchair arborists.
We don't understand enough to ensure anything we've done wouldn't cause unintended negative side effects but as it stands we're headed for utter destruction so doing something might be better than nothing.
Flaming like this will get you banned on HN regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
I tried out of curiosity, and it doesn't even load on one of my machines (in two different browsers). And no, I am not inclined to debug their product for free.
Please don't use HN for racial or national or religious or ethnic or any other kind of flamebait. This is all off topic for HN, and we ban accounts that post like this repeatedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think this is not new in CS-ish university departments. With the start of dotcoms, it seemed a lot of professors and departments wanted their students to do startups, and the professor/dept. would get a cut of it.

This affected time spent on students, affected what some wanted students to work on (use the uni as a startup incubator, rather than research), and affected how some selected students.

I also recall professors who were almost no-shows, spending most of their time on their students' startups, didn't actually teach their one class for the term, and even their PhD students complained about having trouble getting meetings.

I don't know that some CS departments ever recovered from that, and it seems some are permanently in pursuit of commercial spinoff riches mode.
On Apple's Response to Google's Project Zero
No. I wrote about this awhile back (https://reindeereffect.github.io/2018/06/24/regex/#the-limit...). From that post:

[M]atching parentheses requires our recognition device to remember how many unmatched open parentheses there are. Since the only way for a DFA to remember anything is to be in one of a set of states corresponding to it, and since the unmatched open parentheses could easily outnumber the available states, we can see that the fundamental limitation of a DFA is that it can store only a finite amount of information (remember the ‘F’ in DFA?). This limitation applies to any string matching task that involves recursive structures or algebraic relationships between substrings. It is why “HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide.”
The world is a much more fucked-up place than any of us can imagine. I believe Xeni Jardin, completely.
1) Is it illegal to receive donations from pimps?

2) Is "forced suicide" a fair punishment for pimps?
I bought a turntable from the 80s several months ago and I love it :-) I never had a turntable before so it's actually a "new" technology to me, but I find the physicality of the whole thing wonderful - choosing a record and setting up the turntable is like a ritual, you just enjoy the moment.
Yes, I meant gas. And using renewables for farming is only a partial solution. Farming can be extremely energy intensive or less so depending on the methods used.

Animal farming is more than order of magnitude worse.

A lot of industrial farming developed that way due to access to cheap energy - but this is not sustainable.
I'm assuming there is no usable fertilizer in Mars "soil" right now, and certainly a lack of the symbiotic bacteria and other critters we need to grow things that have adapted and evolved for Earthly living conditions. We'll need to bring pretty much everything from scratch.
For one, HackerNews is a tech discussion board - so many of the contributors are probably more intimately familiar with issues in the technology world than in the civil rights world especially in countries outside of 1st world software/tech producing countries.

I don't see anything wrong with going after Google, as they have time and time again lied to customers and taken advantage of customers with help from our legal system.

Both are bad, but one is easier for technophiles to discuss and brainstorm than the other I would guess.
What about <a>this <!-- </a> --> </a> <!-- </a> -->?
I don’t like being used, I’m already doing you a service by jumping through these hoops. Being asked to train your neural network or provide other computing resources is a perfect way for loosing me as a customer.
micro-management dictated by the company with their policies and promoting to management those who lack basic management skills. Isolation is based on the culture of competitiveness, self-centered goals, ignorance and, again, lack of necessary management skills in understanding by removing blockers, offering help... etc
> Maybe you can detect tags with regex, but maybe you shouldn't...

So what do you think would be a more appropriate choice for writing a tokenizer?
Randomness is an empirical observation. Identically prepared quantum states, when measured, produce different experimental results, distributed probabilistically.

MWI's solution to this is to say the experiments are wrong, and the results are actually the same. It rejects empiricism to simplify the theory. But that's not good science.

> Neither of these universe are any more real or extant than the other (they have the same magnitude)

What is meant by "magnitude?" It can't be the measure of the wavefunction because those can easily be different, e.g. if the particle's decay probability is not 50%. This is the Born rule problem again.
On Joi and MIT
Unlikely. e.g. see the comments here on HN.
Why would users care? They will waste the same amount of electricity. In fact, I would argue it's better than solving a pointless equation.
Ah, you’re right. He’s an expert in marketing and gauging reactions.

It’s much harder to see what his motives are then.
One solution, which I admit is out there, is what if we actively cook the earth?

While yes, it would be an engineering challenge, I think it is quite reasonable to create an “adjustable solar shade”. Basically build up enough reflectors at the Lagrange point to selectively “cool” parts of earth. Yes, it would be a massive undertaking, but could potentially be done mostly autonomously.

If our timeline is 30 years, this may be more achievable than alternatives.

Elevator pitch: use materials from asteroids to build huge reflectors in space. Side benefit is it would enable large scale mining of the sky.
Learn as much as you can and practice being resourceful, information is power, medicine, chemistry and biology in particular are extremely important. If we have to endure catastrophic collapse being able to construct things like makeshift air cooling, air and water filtering systems from raw and waste materials will be paramount.
It's not even the newest iPhones: my iPhone SE beat an Intel Celeron N3060 @ 1.60 GHz almost every time.
It's far from accurate, but an easy way to think about it is:

200 000 000 users * $1.
Should you keep your pride as a development lead?
Wow, is it enough to read the title?
I could see a use a screen saying, I'm travelling as fast as the guy after me, so back off. It's so annoying to be after those drivers that can't seem to understand it's not your fault that you're driving so slow.
It's also probably a good idea to learn how to resolve conflicts violently and accept the consequences of that.
How long do the pessimistic projections say we have until 5 degrees?
What terms would you prefer to use to describe different clusters of phenotypes? Or do you deny the existence of different clusters of phenotypes in humans?

It doesn't have to be "race", since that's a really loaded word. "Ancestry" and "heritage" seem to be more popular modern equivalents. But do we really use either of those differently than people 100 years ago would have used "race", or are we just powering down the euphemism treadmill?

I really think the main problem in this comment chain is that we're using different definitions and talking past each other.
Seeing 'Yahoo! Mail' at number 3 on that list is interesting, didn't realise many people still used it
I actually think a lot of Universities in America are hiring bottom-of-the-barrel programers for their tenured positions as a result of the income difference from University to Industry.

I went to a top-10 CS school as well, and saw it happen several times. Professor that is actually really talented, educated and capable of articulating advanced CS concepts ends up leaving to be a sr. engineer at G, FB, MS, etc. due to differences in pay.

We lost our best math prof, and our best CS prof in my 4 years because of this. They both got replaced with imports from other countries that couldn't teach as well due to language barrier but probably where happily willing to accept the visa sponsorship and shot at USA life (which I understand).
According to the linked Reddit post, Brave has 2M "recent" downloads, whereas Firefox has 500k. But FF has 100M+ installs whereas Brave is in the 10M+ bucket. Of course, none of this counts the system default browser, which it's unlikely Brave will ever supplant.

Still, having 1/2 as many recent downloads as LINE is impressive.
> That is not the question. Has your boss at your tech job ever invited an important guest to your workplace, who brought associates whom you reasonably thought might be there against their will?

No, and neither did Epstein. They had no reasonable basis to assume these women were there against their will.

> No, the discussion is about whether Ito should have known at the time to not work with Epstein. tptacek is also arguing that he should have left once Epstein’s involvement with Media Lab was first discovered, since he had to know the depth of the story.

I think you just reiterated my point. Yes, the question is whether, at the time Ito should have known not to work with Epstein. Whether the publicly available information at the time was sufficient to justify his exile from MIT.
Recap: An attacker exploited a vulnerability on their firewall that allowed unauthenticated users to reboot. Exploit was public, firewall was unpatched. Unlikely that the attack was targeted, making "cyber-attack" somewhat of a stretch in my book.
"Nothing here indicates a discharge rate."

In battery terminology, and this paper, charge/discharge rate is referred to as "C". Charging or discharging at 1C means a battery would be fully charged/discharged in 1 hour. A 100 Wh cell discharging at 1C would produce 100 W. Likewise, at 3C it would take 20 minutes and produce 300 W. At C/3, it would take 3 hours.
Your conception of vinyl buyers is very negative. I think there's another category of people that buy vinyl. If you really love an album and want to support the artist you can purchase the vinyl version of the album. Apart from supporting the artist you often get additional treats like a nice booklet with the lyrics or additional art/imagery.

I really think there's extra value in buying vinyl apart from it being hip.