skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
... as is its doppelgänger, the "red pill" or "manosphere" or "alt-right" or whatever it's called this week crowd. Other side, same coin.

The other day I came up with a dorky acronym for social media and what it does: the CRASER. CRASER stands for Craziness Amplification through Stimulation of Engagement with Reactivity.

The idea is that primitive emotions like fear, hate, anger, outrage, etc. are the things that drive engagement. In other words: emotional reactivity. We've programmed computers to moderate our discourse with the goal function of driving engagement, so they selectively amplify signals that push those buttons. The result is a craziness laser that is causing everyone to adopt increasingly extreme, irrational, and provocative belief systems and styles of expression. Like in a laser all the various forms of madness feed on each other and intensify each other.

In the end there will only be Nazis advocating a new holocaust, Neo-Leninists advocating new gulags, and people who just hate everyone equally and want to destroy the world for the lulz.

For what it's worth I remember the early Internet too and in my memory it all really started to go to hell when gasified social media appeared: algorithmic timelines, up/down votes, likes, etc. That's when the CRASER fired up.
Inverters are only used for DC to AC conversion, cogeneration sets are conventional prime mover setups that output 3-phase AC directly. The problem likely has to do with islanded grid stability, without the grid you have to take care of power factor correction and grid voltage regulation yourself, this can get pretty dicey if you don't have direct control or knowledge of the type of loads you'll have.
"If a lion could talk, we would not understand him."

I would differentiate being able to characterize the behavior from being able to 'understand' the behavior. If for the sake of argument, we assume orcas and humpback whales have higher brain functions around the level of humans, I would argue it's still impossible for us to understand the humpbacks motivation because his mind is completely alien to ours.
It blows my mind, too! I nearly blew a fuse. It's shocking to say the least ..

Sorry, couldn't resist.. :-D
> Electrical utilities don't need to be a government-granted monopoly like PG&E, which combines the worst aspects of government-run and private-sector business. Silicon Valley Power proves there are better ways to run electrical utilities.

Is Silicon Valley Power not a government-granted monopoly? How does their business model differ?
'pro-China' was a little confusing on that score, but I did misquote you, so sorry. Cheers.
I wonder if eating gelatin would work similarly; it's basically collagen. https://chriskresser.com/you-need-to-eat-gelatin-here-are-th... -- or conversely I wonder if your supplements would work better for me. (I was starting to suspect arthritis until I added this into my diet.)
It's a law in California. One that I am sure PG&E lobbied for.
My guess? It's actually the consistent use of the cartilage that keeps it healthy. Just like how weight bearing exercises can promote deposition of calcium in bone, I'd imagine there's a similar mechanism for cartilage?

Hip joints (especially in modern era) get far less weight bearing on them - especially as a force / area, since we're sitting all the time.
Jeez... when Apple loses Gruber you know they’ve fucked up. But what can they do? Generations of greedy American CEOs handed over the reins to China and turned them into a superpower. And now we’re all fucked.
That was a really insightful take on evolution, thank you.
L-ascorbic acid is vitamic c and L-Lysine is one of the essential amino acids. This doesn't seem to be particularly groundbreaking supplementation.

You get a whole bunch of L-Lysine every time you eat meat/chicken/fish/milk/legumes. Vitamin C is a common supplement.

Were you 'dosing' at extremely high levels? excess vitamin c is secreted in urine. Your body can't store excess amino acids either - they are converted to ammonia and then into urea/uric acid in the liver.

How high were your 'doses'?
Chrome 77 Breaking Drag and Drop Events
Spent half the morning trying to work out why drag and drop events were not working properly in code that was working fine and deployed for nearly a year. Finally tracked it down to this obscure bug in Chrome 77 which re-orders drag and drop events but only when your page is inside an iframe that is hosted on a different domain. Looking at the report it looks like this has broken a lot of peoples applications and likely a lot more that haven't yet worked out this is the reason. Looks like a fix is coming in 78 fortunately.
Well said, no pain no gain. If your not prepared to walk away from proprietary software and deal with the rough edges then you're a captive audience and the creators of the proprietary software have no incentive to improve.

And let's face it, most of these "rough edges" are just excuse making, the sound exactly like the sort of things people say to avoid losing weight, quitting smoking, etc.
My biggest issue with the x210 is that it's hard to find decent batteries. All the 3rd party batteries I've bought have degraded to <50% of their design capacity within 6 months. I need to buy some decent 18650 cells and replace the low quality ones in the aftermarket batteries.
It really doesn't look like their dividends were atypical before they went to 0 on Dec 2017:

https://ycharts.com/companies/PCG/dividend_yield
https://ycharts.com/companies/SO/dividend_yield
https://ycharts.com/companies/DUK/dividend_yield
There is even a VS Code extension that looked promising, but I was not able to get it to work when I tried:

- extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nergal-p...

- repo: https://github.com/nergal-perm/zettelkasten-vscode

Also I wasn't able to find a license file when I looked now. And unlike stackoverflow there isn't an implied license on GitHub, except to read and fork the repo.
I noticed extra inspiration on bathroom breaks as well, but as a control I tried just getting up and walking outside and back, and that seemed to have the same effect for me.
Marvel shouldn't be in this list.
> yet it doesn't seem that whales set up a persistent and organized resistance effort.

Well sure, if everyone knew about it it wouldn't be that successful now would it? Nothing to see here. No whales. Move along please.
Just throwing this out there... but worry more about the company/team/funding first. Their claims may or may not be true... but you should make sure you're good financially first.
This is cool, thx for sharing.
The Puzzles of Thermopylae
oh sweet! that's great to hear. my pleasure to help.
Tashpolat Tiyip: The Uighur leading geographer who vanished in China
Both of your statements are from before Apple handed control of the data to GCBD, which the article is about. If anything is misleading here, it is your comment.
It is really going too far to say that police would build some kind of non-free government, just because they complain about an app that helps people avoid getting caught for speeding.
The reason you did not hear about it in economics classes is because money being human time is an old and rather out modeded understanding of money.
There are a lot of interesting societal effects caused by the internet and social media, many of them very problematic. But when was this time in the past when people agreed about facts? Is it during the period of time when we lionized science after WWII and before the 80s but during which smoking was still healthy? Or was it when the Church decided what was true? Or was it when Hearst could print what he wanted and make it so? We have been in the Miasma since the dawn of civilization.

Neal Stephenson had a hand in sparking my interest in cuneiform and I've read many tablets myself (mostly Ugaritic and some Akkadian). The same effects are evident all the way to the beginning of recorded history, and likely predate it. The Miasma is the result of any indirect epistemology combined with human proclivities. There is a certain scale and swiftness that is novel, but it's not yet a brand new thing: much as flash crashes on the stock market are a new side-effect of high frequency trading, the crash of 1929 happened just fine without it.

The Miasma is us, not the tech we use to connect us.
Interesting. Didn’t know that history. Kind of wonder what the arguments in favor of privatization were given that doing so doesn’t seem to have resulted in any meaningful upgrades or better outcomes.
Categories: Models of Models
agree. it all looks good on paper until the requirement and design changes, then you are in world of pain.
Your last sentence is correct more or less, but I will say it can be both things at once, Nietzsche was taking a big gulp with that exercise and physics is part of it based on how he thought about it in relation to reality and his timeframe, not abstract unprovable concepts - a philosopher's job isn't to take you in one direction, so that's all that matters, although I will say Nietzsche was so close, but at the same time suffered from his own fatal flaw - dogma. Though he criticized Socrates exploitation of tragedy to convolute philosophy over the years, he seemed to see in his own self as some sort of tragic figure with people using morality as a way to shortcut. His longing for the 'ubermensch' is his own kinda distorted way of longing for a Christ like figure who knows that reason should prevail over morals - he maybe shouldn't have written off psychology and the Bible so hastily.

Where Nietzsche failed to connect the dots as a result of his logical error (righteous dogma/indulging in tragedy as a moral device with his longing for a savior figure) is that he is essentially arguing that the only sin is original sin. Before I get into how his argument fits into that, let me restate his argument in a logical manner so you can tell I understand it somewhat. Morality is a problematic logical argument because it means different things to different people depending on their intrinsic motivations (which are somehwat animalistic, unless one trains one mind to think logically, and even then still one must always learn to recognize the beast) - therefore it is subjective, and non-quantifiable and therefore useless to an intellectual argument - this creates false equivalence, this creates conflicts when people insert morality into their reasoning - it is a logical shortcut.

Back to original sin - "Eating from the tree of KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL" - the Bible is a liar's paradox and if you start to look at it that way it's logical masterpiece and you bet whoever wrote it understood human nature and physics big time. Nietzsche believed whenever you thought you had knowledge of something, you had probably made some logical error in pursuit of a truth you wanted to believe was fixed. He is probably right - God is not divine justice and if it were we've all probably manipulated it to our subjective whims. Jesus isn't magic. But perhaps they are useful analogs : God is Truth, and unknowable - Jesus/Nietzsche/Ubermensch represents logic coupled with mankind's initial logical fallacy (pride of knowledge/divine b.s.) thus becoming a pariah (crucified/madness/misappropriated), just believing they could say something was good or evil without providing rationale as backed by a societal construct that was made to keep some kind of order (such as saying there is no relationship between physics and philosophy and religion and space/time) - but that's neither here nor there for me to speak of, I'd rather someone else pick up the hypothesis, but I may chime in if someone goes too far off course with this.
Silicon Valley Power is a nonprofit operated by the city government. It's a little island in the middle of the sea of the PG&E monopoly. I wouldn't consider it a monopoly in comparison to the massive scale of PG&E, even though it is operated by a city government.

Statewide utilities are bloated and inefficient, and they abuse their monopoly power. PG&E acts like the only choices are to cause fires or turn off power when it gets windy -- it faces no pressure to find a better solution because there is no competition.

Small-to-medium municipal utilities that serve smaller areas can serve their customers much better, as Silicon Valley Power demonstrates -- if people don't like it they can move to a neighboring city. In contrast, PG&E is almost impossible to avoid.

California should give more cities and counties the ability to experiment with this model. Competition between municipal utilities is better than granting a single company a monopoly on a utility millions of people depend on.
Desire to be 'the best'?
Perceived competition?

I'm finding it hard to put this idea into words in relation to a kind of 'civilization-scale', but the analogy is the disappearance of the 'killer instinct' after a certain time dominating some field of competition. Maybe not even that, just the blind spot of being the one sitting on top of the mountain.

Looking at how the winners are doing things in order to best them. Once you are the winner, the whole methodology flips on its head at the point of realization of 'we're now the best'. There's an amount of legacy baggage that comes along with it that's very hard to dispose of.

X got us to the top, so let's keep doing X forever since we've got our whole structure aligned to the methodology behind X. Inevitably, the things that made X the right answer at the time will slowly change, and that change won't be noticed, or accepted, until it's too late, and the entity doing Y ends up besting the entities doing X.

I'd say 70-90 years is starting to look like the 'world superpower' transition period.

Once infrastructure starts failing (bridges, apartment buildings, power grid) in ways that would get politicians fired and the responsible business directors given jail-time a decade or two ago, and yet none of these punishments is even considered likely in the current state of the world, then we're getting to the end-game. It's a failure on so many levels. It's the spiraling failure of 'X'.
It is actually owned outright by the city of Santa Clara. It is not a private company given a monopoly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Power
Just signed up. Can I request to get bumped up in the chain?
The point also ignores the power of network effects -- certain industries are prone to monopoly. It is only natural that government oversight of these natural monopolies follows.
it's beautiful when it all works, it's horrible when requirements changes.
As a designer I often run into creative blocks. Sleeping on them usually brings clarity. I’ve made it a point to never hand over any project until I’ve slept on it and had a chance to look it over the next day. Almost always I’ll find something that needs fixing or that could be done better!
My brother worked on the F-117 and has that mug. Very good thermochromics.
This. Not just the sun, but more annoyingly, opposing headlights in the night. Technologies to avoid blinding opposing drivers are not adequate. We could do with technology to assist those who are on the affected side.
Your question intrigues me. While, I didn't find an answer (I guess I wasn't _that_ intrigued), I did stumble upon this interesting bit of history: http://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-community/about-sv...
I was born and raised in the Bay Area and remember when there was a vote that would have brought SMUD in instead of PG&E. I don’t ever remember PG&E coming out to our property (South Bay), despite having large trees near power lines.

I’ve since left the Bay Area and now have SMUD. They come out every year to check brush and trees. This past summer they cut down a dying tree on the property at no cost. The arborist they sent out was extremely knowledgeable and didn’t mind that I took his time to ask about native replacements, etc.
OT, but I would love a tenkeyless keyboard option for the larger models.
I'll quote the relevant part of the agreement below:

"You understand and agree that Apple and GCBD [emphasis added] will have access to all data that you store on this service."

As a Chinese company, GCBD can and probably does indiscriminately send data to Chinese law enforcement.
Power plants need to be connected to other sources so their AC frequencies can be in phase. If the multiple AC waves were out of phase, you’d cause all sorts of issues. It wouldn’t surprise me if the cogen plant was designed to only work in concert with external power, but not in place of it.

Emergency power would be expected to work independently of mains power.
Oh, get off your high horse. Which devices are you using from a company that isn’t similarly large and doesn’t do the same thing?
> plenty of things that are meant to signal dominance

And that's why I pointed out that it's usually done by meek little fellows in the larger scheme of things. Asserting dominance over others is coupled with being dominated in turn, the dichotomy isn't so much "dominant vs dominated", but rather "dominated and dominating vs. free".

Seeing plenty of that all throughout history is a great reason to call it out for what it is, so we can have something worthwile.
Thanks for that. If there are things we could do differently that you think would be more effective, I'd like to know what they are.
Why Do Older People Play Shorter Games?
You’re ignoring all those times where that didn’t actually happen. It seems quite risky for an organization to rely on the idea “you can just fork and continue the development yourself in case of issues”. That’s not what happens in practice, taking over the development of something like bazel has a non-negligeable cost. Now for sure you can find some (cherry-picked IMHO) success stories but that’s the exception as far as I can tell.
If they aren't paying one of lead developers for this amount of time then management is basically stealing from the people doing the actual work.

In my opinion, technical companies should not have managers or executives (who don't simultaneously hold technical roles). They are just parasites without skills who inappropriately have power over the skilled people under them.

This is just one of many examples of that.
Sure. I accept that there's a hugely elevated risk of fire right now. Maybe turning off the grid was a prudent move. But the reason that fire risk is high right now is that for one reason or another, the grid hasn't been properly maintained, and that's not because we forgot how to build chainsaws.

A society is a complex machine. There are thousands of interacting incentive structures, contractual obligations, and soft expectations that combine to allow us to accomplish more than we can do alone. For a long time, this machine operated smoothly enough to provide the power grid with the maintenance it needed to operate safely in 10MPH winds. The social machine broke down, so the maintenance stopped, and because the maintenance stopped, the grid became unsafe to operate.

Why did the social machine break down? Why did nobody fix it? Why are we having so much trouble operating this machine smoothly when our ancestors were able to keep it going for over a century?
Check candida or fungi infection; it's possible your gut microbiome has some deficiency as well. Also, you might be pre-diabetic.
> they're looking out for their own beet [sic] interest and the best interest of their customers

I'm sure you think you just explained this, but it completely escaped me. How is yanking this app in the best interest of their customers?

Let's break "their customers" into 3 groups:

1. Protestors in HK. It clearly isn't in their best interest . So not those customers, right?

2. Non-protestors in China (including HK). You're argument is that this way they can still enjoy Apple products? Even though those products can no longer be trusted not to betray them to any whim of a hostile government?

3. Customers outside China. The argument here seems to be that Apple makes lots of money in China and that an Apple that makes tons of money in China and outside of China is better for non-Chinese customers than an Apple that makes tons of money outside of China but not inside of China.

This third group and justification is the most interesting to me. I stipulate that I have put words in your mouth. So let me take those words out of your mouth and just say this is the only way I can make sense of what you wrote.

When I follow this train of thought the only way I can see it being true is if Apple's very existence is threatened if some other company were able to fill the void in China, then leverage that to gain so much market power outside of China that they could squash Apple. And even that alone doesn't make things worse for (former) Apple customers. The only way that would be worse is if this hypothetical competitor's products were actually worse than Apple's and only able to dominate the market because of the market power they enjoy due to Apple's absence in the Chinese market.

That is such a stretch that I feel your argument should be dismissed. Can you fill in the holes of my understanding to help me see things your way?

I think this is an extremely important discussion because it seems to be the mindset held by a lot of decision makers. Is the NBA worried that they will stop making many $millions if they don't expand into China? That is, not only will they not double or triple their profits; they will actually stop making money outside of China? Is Disney worried about this? Are Microsoft and Amazon? Is it a fight for survival? Or is it pure naked greed?
I’m aware, that’s why I mentioned it.
Of course, if that was the only example.
Has there been any comparison on if XDP-eBPF packet processing is faster/slower than pure user-space packet processors like Cisco's VPP, especially the ones with support for DPDK and zero-copy? I ask because user space packet processors are extensively used as virtual switches in container deployments. Assuming XDP-eBPF is faster, I wonder if, in combination with namespaces, there could be an efficient "virtual switch" implemented completely in eBPF.
'Blackfish' was an excellent documentary, and I came away from it fully believing that we shouldn't hold orcas in captivity. A chilling (and fascinating) point in the movie is that when one of the orcas nearly kills a trainer, the killer whale doesn't bite or buffet the trainer, but instead holds him underwater to drown him.
My mistake. It was just FBI.
The problem is, the government always steps in and grants a monopoly before a natural monopoly develops by itself, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Maybe a natural monopoly would not have developed statewide. Maybe the government makes a bad situation worse by picking the wrong winner before the market decides. Maybe the government should allow competition if cities and/or private businesses are willing to give it a shot -- it works pretty well where I live.
> when I finally got into bed it still took me something like 2 hours to finally fall asleep because I felt too tired to actually fall asleep

Oh I can absolutely relate to that. On low sleep I found it incredibly natural to fall asleep sitting on a bench with no back rest (without falling over), but purposefully trying to sleep in a bed was always difficult. Up until about 35-40 hours awake I can easily fall asleep in a bed, but it becomes challenging past that point. I'm guessing my brain is pulling some c4 trickery there since that's roughly when my coordination starts to deteriorate.
I don’t know — just imagine how many places the mains power is tied into all of the buildings. Each of those places would also need a mains cutoff, and they would need to all be thrown/active at the same time before the cogen plant could be activated independently. At a place the size of UC Berkeley, that would be a pretty big cost (and logistical nightmare).

If the system wasn’t designed for the switchover from the beginning, I can see how it would be considered impossible/not practical to do. Especially when this type of “blackout” was thought to be rare.

I’m sure the prior assumptions would be reconsidered today.
"I thought it was my cousin."