skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The long-term historical trend was far closer to 50-100m.

There are very few historical large wild mammal populations remotely close to this. And historical, because we've reduced wild terrestrial vertebrate biomass by about 90% over the past 100-1000 years.

There are about a half-million wild zebra, and maybe 12 million white-tail deer. The largest seal populations are estimated at about 8 million -- roughly the number of people in New York City. We're probably outnumbered by brown rates, roughly 11 billion.

Even of domesticated cattle and pigs, totals are on the order of about a billion.

The passenger pidgeon, two centuries ago, numbered 3-5 billion individuals. Today there are none.

For most large terrestrial mammals, populations are in the 5,000 - 50,000 range. That's the population of a small to mid-sized town. For an entire species.

Update: an Imgur photo gallery consisting of images with as many pixels per image as there are individuals in the population:

https://imgur.com/gallery/9v4HV2p
Let's be clear about something, the threats from exposing our information are not hypothetical, the last 10 years of repeated hacks into banks and services that expose people's financial and personal information (CC numbers, SSN numbers, etc) is proof that there are adversarial actors actively trying to get and exploit our information for financial gain. Right now, a database with structured data is useful (and amazing that its not encrypted in a way where it would be useless to steal at rest), but if you were able to get a treasure trove of unstructured messages we may not be far off from being able to extract a ton of information from that too.

And that's just financial stuff. The current generation has repeatedly proven that they want to send revealing photos on these chat platforms. Remember the iCloud leaks of revealing photos? These were done with phishing attacks, but once again proves that there are malicious actors looking to take what most of us would consider to be private personal property. Today it was phishing attacks, but without encryption, tomorrow it might be an actual massive data dump of every photo ever sent on Messenger. Again, we currently have AI models that can do facial recognition and that can do nudity detection (as employed on YouTube, etc.), so access to the data set of photos sent on Messenger could then be analyzed by a computer to extract all nudes of key people (if targeted), or just all nudes (if not targeted). If your response to this is "they shouldn't be using it that way" -- again, consider that you might have second-order exposure to this problem. You may be smart enough to not send compromising information on Messenger, but maybe a close family member isn't and now you can be blackmailed or extorted to prevent revealing something of theirs. Or let's say everyone in your family is smart enough not to use Messenger this way. Your representative or senator's relatives might not though, and now they can be blackmailed too, and there's not much you can do about that since you may not even find out. All these problems similarly exist with respect to corporate privacy as well (trade secrets vs. potentially malicious foreign companies, people trying to get inside information for trading, etc.)

At the end of the day, to me the question of whether the US is trustworthy is besides the point: the lack of encryption exists for anyone trying to get in, and we know there are bad people trying to get in. If you take the lock off the door you might trust your friendly neighborhood policeman but the cat burglar can just as easily turn your doorknob.
Entrepreneurs who sleep more are better at spotting good ideas
Show HN: See Google's Data on Real User Site Performance for Any Site
Amazon’s Prime Video App Disappears from the App Store
Cheaper, but intermittent. Factor in the cost of massive energy storage and the cost is no longer competitive. This is largely academic anyway, the technology to store energy at the capacities necessary to power whole nations on wind and solar hasn't moved off the drawing boards.
I assure you, stock markets stopped being led by human trading long before 2007/2008.
‘We Were Wiped Out’: New Yorkers Preyed on Chicago Cabbies
It's too bad we can't have laws regulating fraudulent behavior like this. This is just one of many ways that companies continually fuck over American consumers and consumers can't do anything about it other than not using services which isn't always an option. Getting ripped off on an ongoing basis is the norm. How do we expect people to plan financially when they are constantly lied to and screwed out of their money with no recourse? Even if there was a class action suit, it would do nothing for consumers. Voting is completely useless as both parties support this predatory anti regulatory capitalism. It's no wonder so many people turn to violence. One had to think that many of those who do so were probably motivated by getting fucked over by companies, especially since the vast majorities of shooters have no mental health problems. What a fucked up society to live in, where one is helpless and often hopeless.
It's a very dishonest way of framing it. The entire article makes it sound like they're talking about actual payment to wealthy fossil fuel companies that could be paid to actual Canadians instead and would make them $1,650 a year better off.
Is it possible for the lens to focus light perfectly, and the brain to process that as blurrier than if the light were focused imperfectly?

I would imagine that, no matter how the brain were processing the image, the image being focused exactly on the retina is an objective truth, and that an exactly-focused image must be clearer to the brain than a blurry image.
Good point if they had a dominant market position. According to https://csimarket.com/stocks/competitionSEG2.php?code=DIS their share is around 10% which I don't thinks qualifies as dominant.
Thx.

At the company we're using EE, and I've heard about the plan locking functionality, but I never dared to use it.

Does it survive DB-restarts? Additionally we have a setup of an active/primary cluster that is replicated to a passive/secondary one in our secondary datacenter (which then becomes leading in case of a disaster in the primary datacenter) => I don't think that a locked plan is replicated to the secondary cluster (which, in a case of a disaster would become a 2nd disaster as many SQL all of a sudden would stop working).

But thanks for the hint :)
In the spirit of writing a simple and condensed answer, and assuming e2e encryption would remain with a government backdoor, there are three main problems (I don’t see any other):

1. Government abuses their power

2. Government gets hacked and hacker abuses their power

3. You have something to hide

Now we can debate on each of these points. Tell me if I’m missing something.
That's true. However, even if they just said IPv6 destinations will be used in the ranking algorithm as a positive indicator of a site that's being actively maintained, that alone would be enough to get some people moving.
Plus, for us Europeans who come to the US, the tax (which is included in Europe). I guess you have in the US an automatism to add some tax to the price but what we see is 10$ and do not take into account the
+ 8.27% tax + 15% tip. (the tax is made up, I never knew what to add)
Why replace a good, short and clear word with a bad and long word that adds no information, but fewer people will understand? [Edit: I think I'm wrong about the adding no information, depending on country there might be other types of eye doctors than ophthalmologists]
How do you know until you try.......???
"More"? I understood CommieBobDole to be saying it was entirely about status signaling:

> the purpose of the hobby has transitioned from primarily "making/using the thing" to "obtaining and displaying ever more extreme versions of the thing to impress other people who know about the thing"

What do you think the difference is between "status signaling" and "impressing other people"?
What are the best alternatives to Virtual Box?
If you look the other way while someone commits a crime, especially when you're a regulatory agency, that makes you a criminal. That makes you complicit, you're helping the criminals get away with it.

To me, you're acting like a jaw-dropping level of corruption is somehow excusable, perhaps because it's "normal"?
I apologize. I hadn't intended an accusation of hypocrisy. I'd tried to phrase around that implication, but I see that I didn't do a very good job of it. I'm going to edit to (hopefully) make that clearer.
This is based on Google's Chrome User Experience database. Some details are available at https://docs.crux.run
You could query this data with BigQuery - but this tool does all the aggregations for you (and has a REST API).
I think that what you are saying here doesn't necessarily serve as a counterpoint to the GP's point. Rather, it's only an additional piece of evidence. Where GP referred to things like a parent being sick serving as a downward pressure in the effort to improve one's circumstances the point is one of externalities which are not typically accounted for.

And in this case, the externality you're bringing up is that oftentimes being raised poor means you're being raised in an anti-intellectual environment. And that externality is something that a lot of poor people have to deal with.

It's another instance in which the game appears to be rigged against those from a poor background.
It does, it just exposes how expensive it is and the sellers don’t like that because it will reduce the number of viewers, and then that starts lowering the value of the ads that are paid for, hence lowering the value of the sports teams themselves.

Bundling sports with other media allowed for price obfuscation.
This is just an advertisement for segment.
I was mostly referring to this thing you wrote earlier: "how can we make sure that we get the convenience part without the pervasive big brother aspect. I'm sure there is a way" - I think that simply cannot exist due to all the practical limitations with rigid systems and costs to issue punishment. And that clusterfuck is mostly the result of the power plays between multiple parties who are trying to hack each other's proposals, trying to win something over others. And that will also exist for as long as we are human. So I'm not really describing any ideal world, it is in fact quite sad. We will probably never have all our data truly in our own hands, even though it might seem easier and more secure. There are practical limitations of being human and there are competing human interests.
Never let a crisis go to waste. Use it as an opportunity to get buy in for time and resources to replace VirtualBox with something more open. If you write code as part of the initiative, and it's not specific to your business, try to contribute it back to the community.
In many cases, "consensus" is just rubbing salt in the wounds of the losers -- not only do they not get their way, they have to pretend that they agree with the outcome that is decided on. As David Mitchell once said in one of his monologues, the idea of consensus robs people of the ability to say "I told you so!" when the bad idea that the majority favored fails, because with consensus you have to share responsibility with those who favored the idea.
At least you can fast forward through them on HBO - at least on the HBO now app.
Back when I used to frequently visit Less Wrong, I made a post about this related to Watson from IBM.

I remember feeling really discouraged by the level of discourse and downvoting in the comments at that time.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kaNErr6mbXvDF9YFf/watts-son
It's a free product that does what you need it to do, and more. Man, some people...
The First Video Game
30 pounds is not really overcharged. This is 34€, I pay 45€ for 1Gbps/300Mbps fiber.

There are cheaper offers, but they will be of that order.
Google shows gmail at the top. Lawsuits!

Disney won't show competitors ads at all. Meh.

These cases aren't identical, but the difference still feels weird.
I think that is a fairly belligerent view on a first-hand observation of a common issue.
Its GPL v3 licensed, any one of those complaining people could fork it and name it what they want it to be called.
Sounds less NBC and more (in fact exactly) like It’s Always Sunny.
Specifically Charlie in the mailroom with Pepe Sylvia, and the pissing thing is just classic Frank.
And you can definitely notice how nice an expensive pair of headphones sound compared to cheap models. If you meant stuff like buying expensive cables for no measurable benefits mechanical keyboard enthusiasts often spend hundreds on keycaps which won't provide any benefit beyond looking good compared to cheaper sets. Mechanical keyboard enthusiasts and audiophiles are very much alike.
not exactly the same but reminds me of a lot of this key and peele sketch (dueling hats)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pKt4gaErvU
Very much signalling, you want something that sets you apart from other users and if that means custom CNC'd cases, with harvested switches that have been lubed using the finest tears mounted on a custom plate. So you have something to ogle and show off to the others. And that's before we get into the scarcity territory that sees secondhand TGR Alices going for over 5K.

It's weird, a good chunk of people buy my Georgis [1] and _don't actually use them_. It's a strange feeling to have something bought only because it's different and to be collected. I think keyboards are to be used, not hoarded personally but in this community it's very common to own at least a dozen boards.

It's very weird.

[1] https://www.gboards.ca/
The estimate is from 2015 - Trudeau got into Power in Nov. 2015...
Such a law would serve no reasonable purpose, though. Criminals can use one-time pads and it's also not hard to make a little encryption program based on existing cryptographic primitives. In fact, drug cartels have specialists for that who could probably even develop and implement their own secure-enough Feistel cipher if they wanted to.

The only purposes such a law seems to serve is to catch clueless idiots who will be caught anyway, and to enable mass-surveillance of law-abiding citizens.
I think a lot of people have mental illness but manage to live thanks to aids, healthcare, affordable housing, and so on. Because these structures are missing in America, these people end up in the street and their mental illness is the focus of the blame.
I guess I took the bait when you "included" dynamic languages, so your little conversation is misleading at best.

On topic:
Oh, these are great and I wish Haskell had more of that.

But these are "dumb" actions, really. How about:

* writing terrible code to get something working, then breaking it down and putting it back up as something production ready

* changing core data structure and updating all the code that uses it

* solving some problems in separate projects and combining them together

* copy-pasting code from another project and adjusting it to a current project

All of the above of course without running the program once in between, without changing the desired program's behavior etc.

And no, I don't think you can't do that in Java, I just think that Haskell is better at it.
More than 5k inmates at this prison die every year
Your cost estimates are contradicted by a variety of sources. Almost everyone puts coal at a cheaper price than gas. That's why emerging economies like India are so heavily dependent on coal.

Furthermore your estimates for nuclear are contradicted by real world performance. How is it that France's electricity is 20-25% cheaper than the EU average despite 70% of it coming from the purportedly more expensive nuclear power?
> Why, on a seller standpoint, would it be a bad thing to know the demand curve ?

Dunno, but it only makes sense to use “understate” if you think it is a bad thing. The comment is about a wording mistake.
I have a fee for the TV box in France (3€ I think)
> Researchers were surprised by the presence of fungi in the typical pancreas and immense increase in their numbers in disease. “The pancreas was considered a sterile organ until a couple years ago”

I'm surprised that after decades of treating pancreatic cancer, nobody noticed this earlier. You'd think they take biopsies and take a look at them.
Tether exceeds Bitcoin in dollar trading volume
Speeding is not inherently unsafe. There are numerous places all over the world and even a few in the US where there are no enforced speed limits. When there isn't one, people tend to drive at a speed they're comfortable driving at. Your judgement on the safety of that speed is irrelevant to knowing how safe it is.
eBay shows the top bid, which apparently is enough to induce a significantly different "sniping" strategy as optimal: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~inet0118/pdf/itterative.pdf
eBay's done some things with "bidding agents" to attempt to ameliorate this but I don't think it worked since eBay is now 80% fixed price: https://tamebay.com/2017/02/are-ebay-auctions-a-thing-of-the...

Amazon has seller-side auctions with its third party system. Presumably this results in a little bit of competition to lower prices, but there aren't really enough third party sellers to make it happen.

Treasury bills are probably the largest auction held regularly and they seem to work well. But consumers all place non-competitive bids while the competitive bidding is left to expert financial firms.

If I had to guess I'd say the real issue is people don't understand economics and would rather buy something at whatever price than spend the effort to identify a good price. Certainly my roommates at college never bothered picking out what was on sale, or even looked at the flyer. And I think the rest of the populace pays more attention to the size of the coupon than the price of the item.
While I applaud your reference to the guidelines, I find it hard to believe that asking people to write instead of clicking was the intent of that request. Nor do I particularly agree with PG on his sentiment about downvoting.

So please feel free to contribute to the conversation! Why do you disagree with my sentiment regarding thee banning of helmets at protests being a de-escalation technique?
Meeting new people boosts your creativity, here is why
I wrote him an email once and his reply was gracious and very helpful.
Google News for top articles on Palantir shows many about some sort of IPO/fundraising round, but also:

https://www.businessinsider.com/activist-group-targets-palan...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelposner/2019/09/12/what-c...

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/9/26/20884182/palantir-ice-p...

https://www.businessinsider.com/mit-stanford-students-palant...

https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2019/09/duke-universit...

That wasn't searching for "Palantir ICE", that was a straight google news for just Palantir, and the first 20-odd hits had 5 specifically about the companies relationship to ICE. No other customer mentioned, it's all IPO and ICE.
Can you tell me more about how it is appalling? I'm trying to learn about UI, and vague descriptions are less helpful than specific ones.
Remember bolt?
This is ultimately a silly and misguided proposal, which focuses on the costs and not benefits. There is nothing special about training an AI; it is simply another thing to spend resources on, no intrinsically worse or better than any other way. A biology experiment has 'carbon footprint'. The ITER has a 'carbon footprint' (and probably one orders of magnitude larger than all AI research this year). HN burns CO2. Everything uses energy or it uses things which require energy, like human labor, and they involve other costs like opportunity cost which are just as real and important. They stand or fall on their net merits, not how much electricity they use.

There is no need to go around criticizing people for 'green AI' by myopically focusing solely on an abstract electrical cost of training. And if there is, then that applies to everything which uses electricity, and is better handled by putting a carbon tax on energy sources, and letting the market find the most unprofitable uses of energy (which will probably not be AI research, I'll tell you that...) and stop it and substitute in more 'green' power sources for everything else.

More importantly, if you are concerned about the costs of training AI, you should be concerned about the total costs as compared to the total benefits, not slicing out a completely arbitrary subset of costs and ranting about how many 'cars' it is equivalent to (which is not even strictly true in the first place considering that many data centers are located near cheap and renewable power like hydropower or nuclear power plants!) and shrugging away the issue that people consider these performance gains important and well-worth paying for. There are costs to a model which is worse than it could be. There are costs to models which run slower at deployment time even if they are faster to train. There are costs to models which cannot be used for transfer learning (as the criticized language models excel at, incidentally). And so on. What matters are the total costs, and corporations and researchers already pay considerable attention to that already. (Not a single one of their metrics - 'carbon emission', 'electricity usage', 'elapsed real time', 'number of parameters', 'FPO' - is an actual total cost!)
On a side note, it's amazing how difficult it is to interface directly with the human brain.

We can place 300 million transistors on a squared millimeter of silicon.

Yet, when interfacing with neurons we can barely achieve dozens of usable contact points over a very large area.
AFAIK, street-facing cameras are illegal in France... (maybe except for the government itself ?)
How much a Model M, or better yet, a Model F, cost in today's dollars?
Well that NIMBY response was the same here.

In London generally on-street parking is already at- or over-capacity, so adding an extra couple of hundred to a thousand people wanting to park their car in the surrounding 3 or 4 streets is not just NIMBY-style petty complaints of "I don't want someone parking outside my house" and so on, but more "there physically isn't enough space for even more people to try and park in the already over-capacity on-street parking - get a reality check, this isn't going to work".

I think there is a difference between those two responses
There are switches that cost several dollars each that feel distinctly different. In general though I agree, with a specific set of switches, there is likely not a quantifiable improvement to be had by spending $800 more.

However, each keyboard case + switch + keycap setup is going to feel and sound slightly different. So it isn't really an objective improvement but they will likely be distinguishable from one another. Some people are into it for the way it sounds.

Its not necessarily that more expensive switches = better experience, its more about getting exactly the type of switch you want. IMO the best switches I've ever used were $30 for a 61 key compact keyboard's worth.
> but I won't mind hearing them out if said opportunity is especially compelling.

ASK them to forward you a full and complete Position Summary including company name, reporting relationships, and compensation structure-- for your review.

If there's a match-up you'll be happy to engage in further dialogue or provide professional referral.
This ended up doing more damage to my career than it did good.
Enthusiast Develops Low-Profile RPi 4 Cooler with Direct-Contact Heatpipes
That’s $30,000 a year. Well less than 1/4 the annual salary of an engineer in any major metro.

Is the reduction in employee satisfaction really worth it?

Reduction of snacks and office perks is a classic canary in the coal mine for those in the know to beware of coming cutbacks and start interviewing elsewhere.

Someone internet famous has written about this. I will try to find the link.