skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm trying to find the old story from when NPR got caught re-using VoA propaganda (which was then a violation of federal law), but instead found this, of a similar vintage:

https://fair.org/media-beat-column/npr-floats-an-ombudsman-b...

EDIT: Ah, here is some remnant of the story. NPR was using a VoA reporter to push the State Department line on Haiti:
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Amelia_Shaw

...and here is her LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amelia-shaw-82421a29/
Are you actually kidding me? As you are nearing adulthood as a teenager, you are sometimes able to sneak into adult spaces and experience a bit of adult off-color talk. Not everything is guarded by a fence, but maybe more tech events should be if the alternative is catering to child sensitivities. In any case, these comments would not even be PG-13 in a Disney movie. Also, if the idea is to protect under-18s from any minor adult banter, how come 6th grade has an LGBTQ club?

"was among the worst of my experienced" alone suggests that the author had an incredibly sheltered and privileged life. Expecting every minor offense to be handled by ruining offender's life is not a healthy attitude in life, hope she grew out of that eventually?
Yes I do find those discussions interesting

I was actually scared the first time I went to Switzerland because I was wondering if that was a low key way to off someone
I believe in the movie it is implied that the protein is used on replicants of humans, or of animals which are then consumed by humans. Though it's never really that clear, I suppose.
For a user who is not a software developer, what is the practical difference between GPL and MIT? Is there one?
Memory Management in Resource-Bounded Agents
Meanwhile, in China...

"Cockroach farms multiplying in China" (2013)

https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-c1-china-cockroach-20131...

> Wang Fuming ... is the largest cockroach producer in China (and thus probably in the world), with six farms populated by an estimated 10 million cockroaches. He sells them to producers of Asian medicine and to cosmetic companies that value the insects as a cheap source of protein as well as for the cellulose-like substance on their wings.

> Since Wang got into the business in 2010, the price of dried cockroaches has increased tenfold, from about $2 a pound to as much as $20, as manufacturers of traditional medicine stockpile pulverized cockroach powder.

> "I thought about raising pigs, but with traditional farming, the profit margins are very low," Wang said. "With cockroaches, you can invest 20 yuan and get back 150 yuan," or $3.25 for a return of $11.

> China has about 100 cockroach farms, and new ones are opening almost as fast as the prolific critters breed. But even among Chinese, the industry was little known until August, when a million cockroaches got out of a farm in neighboring Jiangsu province.
Access journalism ??

Oh, you mean Terry Gross' excellent and astonishingly comprehensive interviews with virtually all movers and shakers of the last 3-4 decades?

That's what I like about NPR the most. Prairie home companion, wait-wait don't tell me... BORING. it's time to change the station.
> I try to avoid advertising as much as possible, and it's sad that they are one more place it's invading.

It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid.

Oh, but you will gladly pay for quality, ad-free content, you say?

Unfortunately, based on the numbers I've seen at media companies I've freelanced for, this only works out for a tiny minority of creators. Unless you are the NYT (housing 1000+ journalists) or Ben Thompson (an outlier with a super high income audience), the number of listeners/readers/etc willing to pay is astonishingly low.

When people say they will pay in surveys, most of them are flat out lying. Here's a recent example:

https://tim.blog/2019/07/11/why-im-stopping-the-fan-supporte...

It turns out, a vast majority of people who complain about ads will not put their money where their mouth is.

I say bravo to NPR for looking out for the sustainability of their excellent work. I happily listen to ads to sustain their content. I have full confidence they will continue to report with the same independence they've always had.
Well, that's more dangerous than texting while stopped.
I created an open-source digital marketing strategy for Bubble.io
Not quite.

Enormous : enormousness :: huge : hugeness.

Enormity = Immense scale of evil (e.g., the "enormity of the holocaust")
Good point, thanks for that. Fixing now!
Heh, and keep imagining after you get one. The range is extremely poor, even an inch is tough. It's so limited there's an arrow on the calculator so you now EXACTLY how to align the calculators for a transmission. No way a reflection is going to work.
I mean yes. But no.

A lot of what he says resonates with me. Except the bit about computers needing to be difficult to encourage learning. That's the adversity-builds-character mindset that I disagree with. The computer I learned to hack on was a Macintosh IIsi. It wasn't bare metal like a 8-bit computer that booted into BASIC. Nor finicky with lots of arcane configurations like a Windows 3.1 machine (and I've used both of those as well). It had all the it just works plug-and-play that he laments in Windows 7 but as a curious kid with a hacker mentality it served me just fine. Enough that by the time I graduated from it I was modifying the System with hooks written in 680x0 assembly.

But the author really goes wrong, I believe, in his conclusion that the cause of digital literacy is served by forcing users to be gurus. This is entirely wrong and is the crux of the observation I made above. There is a myth in UX development that programmers are targeting a conceptual user that exists somewhere on a continuous slope between novice and power user. The article ends with suggesting that computers be taught by setting people onto this theoretical path. (And to be honest I think he's mistaken that this isn't what we've already been doing and shown to not be effective.) But what if that path doesn't exist? Then trying to teach anyone that way will be fruitless.

My thought is that there is no gradual progression. Most people are not going to be able to learn computers the way that you and I have. So they need different ways of using computers than what we are used to. And that will mean a lot of disruptive ideas, which we may be suspicious of and call it "dumbing down". But what we should be more skeptical of is our own assumptions.

So if average people want to learn computers differently than nerds do, what we certainly don't want is to cut off the paths of discovery that lead to the next generation of super users, hackers, and developers. Both ways need to be preserved and encouraged to allow average users to get the most benefit of technology, while encouraging the more in-depth learning by those who want to be more deeply involved.
> It’s like, if you believed that useful air travel was fundamentally impossible

Uh, there are birds. Literally everyone thought useful air travel was possible, and not only possible, but so easy that a Darwinian process was able to produce it, not once, but literally thousands of times, in thousands of ways.

----

But looking at the actual "experiment", I don't count that as computation in any meaningful sense, and morally equivalent to the following:

Set up a digital camera and point it at a scene. Take a picture. Now take millions of additional pictures, without moving the camera.

Measure the values at each pixel. See how they correspond to "amplitudes"? That's our computation. <= (This is the part of the article that should raise eyebrows...)

Article (smugly): How about you simulate (render) the scene using an actual computer? Measure the amplitudes of the resulting millions of images. OMG, that took you so long!!! Loser.

Are we being punk'd here?

The digital camera is the quantum computer. The "scene" is the random initial state C. The scene is then translated into a renderable scene for the classical computing version, and rendered with an unbiased physically based renderer, which produces the same result.

I fail to see how any of this is even remotely exciting, much less interesting. A camera is not a computer, no matter how many measurements you make with it, nor how "random" the scene you are taking pictures of is.

And yes, simulating reality takes more cycles than just measuring whatever happened with a camera. Photos are "faster" to get than the equivalently rendered scene—news at 11!

Again: Are we being punk'd here?
That's not a good analogy because murder are both one time actions. Punishing a murderer who saved before doesn't prevent more people from being saved. A more apt example would be granting clemency to a highly talented surgeon specialized in an operation nobody else can do.
Yes I’ve read the original email thread.
The specs you've listed aren't sufficient to describe the differences. Here are some additional numbers to consider:

Mac: 1.4 KW supply, 2933MHz memory (with 12+ core), 24.5 MB cpu cache, 2.6GB/2.7GBbytes/sec SSD R/W (encrypted), Afterburner ProRes and ProRes Raw available, crazy quiet, radical thermal management, ...

Dell: 0.95 KW supply, 2666MHz memory, 8MB cpu cache, 500K/300Kbytes/sec SSD R/W, ...

Apple has designed fully custom I/O controller chips for things like SSD interfaces and the Afterburner MPX modules that have some insane specs. Simple top line specs just don't tell the whole story.

Current Imac Pros are already getting 2.4GB/3GBbytes/sec SSD RW. Even the current macbook pro gets 1.7GB/1.4GByte speeds. Nonetheless, if these high impact details don't matter to you, don't buy it. No big deal. Just don't oversimplify the comparison. Of course, we haven't even mentioned the OS differences...
> In normal companies, people get moved around, demoted or ignored all the time and they don’t always blame it on retaliation for political beliefs or for reporting abuse. They blame it on some asshole manager or decide the company isn’t for them and move on.

Even if what you’re describing is normal corporate behavior, it’s still not great. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to accept the idea of “asshole managers” or toxic corporate cultures, and we should be reporting on this sort of thing more? As a single individual, it’s difficult to change a culture that spans across different companies, and sometimes you’ll need to pick your battles, but I don’t think we should tear down people who are trying to change the status quo for the better. Google employees are in a good position to do this too, since their protests will draw more attention than from someone in a small, unknown company and can shed a light on these practices in other places as well.
And yet in the same state, NSW, they could do nothing when my car was stolen and recorded speeding on the motorway. And took nearly a year to apprehend a suspect in the shooting of a fast food restaurant worker when it was caught on multiple cameras.

I'm not saying that people should be free to use phones but it's increasingly obvious to me that the police's main objective is to keep mostly lawful people in line, pursuing criminal activity is a secondary concern.
You know its time to quit when you:

1) Need the money that comes from a day job.

2) No longer like the work you are doing, and can afford to stop doing it.

3) Can think of something better to do.

For me I was working very hard on something I enjoyed but nobody else cared about. I needed money, so I went and got a day job. If I didn't need money, I would have kept doing my project.
A New Joystick for the Brain-Controlled Vehicles of the Future
>But that doesn’t seem true. There’s no reason to think that person who “won the lottery” would be willing to sell the ticket for the same price they bought it for. Instead they would likely sell it for a similar price to what the scalper wants to charge. At best the scalper can gain some value on the margin by taking on the risk that the ticket won’t sell, but not much value.

As long as the ticket moves to someone with a higher willingness-to-pay, Kaldor-Hicks efficiency is increased.

Since the ticket holder without scalpers isn't the same as the one with scalpers, they have a lower willingness-to-pay than the price the scalper sells at. Therefore, they'd be willing to sell to the actual ticket holder at that price.

The only difference between this scenario and the one with a scalper is some money that the scalper has instead of the original ticket holder, and transfers don't factor into Kaldor-Hicks so this is irrelevant.
The "premium" aggregators I've seen used in some enterprise software campaigns can be extra nasty, I had someone at work forward me a link(over IM) that a competitor sent them targeting our userbase(our company name was in the title of the page, contents of the page was why they were better) since mailing to in email on our domain seemed odd; they sent me a "you visited our site, now call for a demo" email a few minutes later that had my full name, a week later they called my parent's house asking for me (guess it was the only historic phone number associated with my name). Ever since then I have viewed tracking data as unacceptable because the likelihood of misuse is only dependent on how much someone is willing to pay an aggregator to turn a small ID indicator into a person.

Also another court has ruled differently about whether or not an IP address is PII: http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...
Thankfully I don't have to work with Jira anymore. However, when I was working with it the speed was a major problem. Another major problem was clicking something that go into editing mode for a ticket item. Switching between browsers, other windows, etc and the tab that had ticket open I would blindly click into the tab and, bam, I would be editing something on a ticket. One nickpick was how it would hanlde picking names between roman and non-roman characters. We eventually started remembering people's emails instead of the "nicks" or real names that Jira haphazardly used.
I've read almost all comments here and, although I've grown up with lots of technology, this is the kind of stuff that will turn me into my parents/grandparents. It's like when I was teaching them how to operate the VCR years ago.
There's challenging by force (against an organization who has nukes and drones and all that sweet stuff), and challenging by legitimacy.

E.g. imagine Hawaii seceding from the US. Does it take equal military might?
All of the Raptor products use very high quality regulators and power filtering. The only cases of PSU-related damage or malfunction that I am aware of were as a result of a PSU operating way outside of specification (think 12V+ on a 5V rail) or a poorly made PSU exploding and catching on fire, with predictable consequences for the attached devices. Thankfully such incidents are rare, and have never happened with our prebuilt systems that use high quality PSUs.

In general we can diagnose and repair or replace the systems rapidly. This one case was an extreme outlier, and in the future we will just be authorizing RMA and replacement / repair.
Until the latest stink I wasn't even aware that RMS still had a platform. I haven't heard from him in probably 15 years.

That may be a good thing. FSF isn't about Richard Stallman.

And some of the "kids" that ran him out of town know to keep plants at their desks because it turns out he's kind of a creep around young women, and also afraid of plants. None of that information has anything to do with mailing lists. There is always some reason that gets people to deal with a problem and that reason is often objectively kinda shitty. People overlook it because the problem is finally being addressed.

One of the things that's going on in the current political climate is that it's no longer enough to be a great developer but a horrible human being. Development in the 90's was punctuated by some truly titanic man-children that everyone had to 'put up with' because they were just so good at the rest of their job.

Gates seems to have grown up (I'm curious what Ballmer has been up to). Jobs, god bless him, died of his own stubbornness. They keep Ellison out of the spotlight, as they seem to have done with Stallman. Until he retires that leaves Torvalds (who I hope outlasts Ellison).

I am sure there were points in my life where I could be painted with that brush, and I can say with a bit of authority that we don't need that kind of behavior. And if behavior is tolerated at the top then it's effectively tolerated everywhere.
No, that makes sense, thanks for elaborating :)

In theory, you could take the money gained through the computing and devote some of the profits to generating sustainable energy.

Note though, I'm not really convinced that the economics work out here with:

a. how much more efficient data centers are

b. how quickly anything like this would lose value

c. the setup and connection costs
Andreessen Horowitz has a very strong spray and pray feel to it relative to other funds in its class (much like YC). Look at how enormous its portfolio page is: https://a16z.com/portfolio/. I bet this list isn't all inclusive, either.

For comparison: Founders Fund has an IRR of ~55%, at ~$1B AUM scale. It tends to invest in fewer companies -- with much higher bar and conviction -- and its portfolio has a much lower failure rate than competing funds (of course failure rate doesn't matter as much for VC returns, but it's still an interesting fact).

I have no connection to FF whatsoever, but have learned a lot from the way they invest and much prefer their model to the spray and pray style (YC, Ron Conway, A16Z, etc).
>in any case, continuing improvements in voice control will go a long way toward reducing distracted driving via mobile devices.

It'd have to be a lot of continuing improvements because at the moment, voice control is an absolute shitshow and IMO way more distracting than pushing predictable buttons.
Another name for cfs is "systemic exertion intolerance disease". This alternative name never caught up, but it does describe the reality of the ilness quite accurately. Post exertional malaise is literally the defining symptom of cfs, so yes exercise in cfs makes you worse. You can tolerate some mild forms of exercise if you have a mild form of cfs, but that's about it. Also stop spreading lies, Simon Wessely's studies are deeply flawed, to say the least.
With Aussie lifestyle designed around the car, it is definitely a right. Euro lifestyles can support cars as an option.
NPR is corporate propaganda for people who think their above the type of propaganda you see on FOX news.

I use to listen religiously for about 3 years, until the 2016 election. The way they talked about the democratic primary, it was very very obvious they were biased towards favoring Hillary. They were telling outright lies about Bernie and his policies. Haven't listened to them since, but I've seen stories about how much worse they've gotten. I think they're mostly funded by the Koch's.
My First OSS Contribution
I don't understand your point. You throw out a factoid thinking it's relevant, and that it speaks for itself. How is experience related to these two crashes?

Only FAR 121 operations require ATP certification, which has a 1500 hour total time experience attached. And that ATP certification requirement follows the Colgan Air 3407 crash, just ten years ago. And the extra time experience probably wouldn't have made any difference in that crash, because the NTSB dinged the captain more than the first officer, and the inadequacy of training overall. It was the captain flying, he was the one apparently startled by the stall warning, and he was the one who did the exact opposite of what his training should have told him. And he met the newer experience and certification requirements already.
https://www.flyingmag.com/safety/accident-investigations/aft...
Am I the only one who never used a calculator? It felt like learning the formula on paper cemented the knowledge.
Opiates reduce the brain’s ability to form, maintain synapses
At my first good job, it took me a good year to figure out that my boss's policy about telling the truth and about how they don't point fingers was all about doing what it took to get the job done outside the rules....and then if you were honest about what you did nobody really cared as long as your story made sense in some way and effectively nothing bad would happen.
In general, yes. Murder is a very peculiar case that is hardly suitable to be the benchmark for building our intuitions about trading off harm in general: human lives are not fungible, murder is not reversible, the victims do not generally get a meaningful way of influencing how the murder impacts them etc., all properties that do not apply in the case of being put off a pursuit like FOSS. (Even then, we're sometimes okay accepting murder to save more lives: e.g. the Allies' actions in WWII are considered a heroic even with nearly a century of historical distance) Arguably, the progressive argument for {affirmative action, inverted burden of proof in Title IX, ...} also amounts to "accept some harm if the net impact is positive"; few people claim that these policies will not result in some people being rejected from positions they deserve or punished for crimes they did not commit.

Some countries are more explicit about this and actually constitutionally single out matters of life and death as being prohibited from being traded off against each other (e.g. Germany), i.e. the state is not allowed to play in trolley problems. The corollary is that the state, and most everyone, finds it okay to trade off other harms: you can for instance choose to build an airport that will drive down the value of some people's homes and expose them to considerable noise in order to give convenience and good business to a large number of people. I think discouraging some women from participating in FOSS is much closer in quality of harm to "your home is now worth half as much and you have to put up with the noise of planes flying overhead everyday" than "you die a painful and untimely death".
It would be horrifying to have meticulously documented notes on every thing you ever said that may or may not be true, and may or may not have been a joke. If his career had been a comedian and not a FOSS advocate, then would he still be crucified for saying the same things or would he simply be an awful comedian?

I would be dollars to doughnuts that the author of that site and the editors of that "wiki" have made or thought worse things at some point, but because they have not reached a certain level of celebrity, there's no dossier on them. It's truly ridiculous to me the amount of effort spent on trying to claw others down.

I accept that inequality exists and perhaps RMS has some awful opinions, but if that's the case then just ignore him.

If there are people who are choosing to make it incumbent upon themselves to take down these "problematic" individuals, then it must be because they think that all of the systems that have allowed a person to continue to exist despite those opinions must be unreliable in adequately judging them. If that's the case, then wouldn't it be more practical to fix the endemic problem rather than destroy a single person? I'm guessing that the latter is just easier to do and more profitable as well. You gain "credibility" by attacking someone else, so it's difficult to believe that they are doing it for altruistic means.

All in all, I'm pretty sick of this nonsense. A world where everyone is constantly being watched by eachother and reported on is already too authoritarian for me to want to continue living in, not to mention the already authoritarian governments doing the same.