skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You can also use the Git attributes functionality to effectively diff binary files. You do this by telling Git how to convert your binary data to a text format that can be compared via the normal diff.

First, you’ll use this technique to solve one of the most annoying problems known to humanity: version-controlling Microsoft Word documents. Everyone knows that Word is the most horrific editor around, but oddly, everyone still uses it.

...Now Git knows that if it tries to do a diff between two snapshots, and any of the files end in .docx, it should run those files through the “word” filter, which is defined as the docx2txt program. This effectively makes nice text-based versions of your Word files before attempting to diff them.

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attribute...
YouTube denies creators of flourishing through favouritism. I don’t think Rights is the correct way to talk about it. It might even hamstring the dialogue. Discussing opportunity and flourishing is more precise.
2,234 readers admitted to having used psychedelics. Of those, 285 (= 12.8%) stated that they had some hallucinations that persisted afterwards. 219 (9.8%) said they’d had them for a while and then they had gone away. 66 (= 3%) stated that they still had the hallucinations (one limit of the study: I don’t know how long it has been since those people took the psychedelics).

But most of these people reported very mild experiences; on a scale from 1-10, the median severity was 2. The most commonly reported changes were more “visual snow” (ie “static” in the visual field), slight haloes around objects, and visual trails. Many people reported that if they stared at a textured area like a carpet long enough, illusory geometric patterns would start to form. Only a few people noticed anything weirder than this.

So, 3% of a small study have relatively mild visual effects. Oh no!
Just ask. People absolutely love talking about their problems, it'll probably be the most animated thing they have to say about the business they're in.

"Some people profess difficulty at finding applications to write. I have never understood this: talk to people. People have problems — lots of problems, more than you could enumerate in a hundred lifetimes. Talk to a carpenter, ask him what about carpentry sucks. Talk to the receptionist at your dentist’s office — ask her what about her job sucks. Talk to a teacher — ask her what she spends time that she thinks adds the least value to her day."

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busi...
What I like about this so far is you can see that organic moment when the phrase 'United States of America' is born.
>I hear you. I really hate prompts to post to social media myself, but companies do it because it is hard to get people interested in your product.

Gboard came preinstalled on my phone and is not removable. I doubt they need more advertising.
I've been interested in taking a guided "tour" into DMT but uhh, maybe not now.
Sure, but venting and taking collective action in ways that will almost certainly hurt the company's bottom line are kind of different things.
The article alludes to it, but understates how difficult it is to ask questions about things similar to psychosis with no frame of reference.

For instance, it is possible to look at a person, see someone else, and be kind of aware of the discrepancy, but not to experience as a visual disturbance but more of a disturbance in the part of the mind that identifies people. Upstream of the visual input, so to speak. But it's triggered by seeing.

Or one can see something as being in motion, without actually seeing it move. Like, things look normal, but seem to squirm. Again, the mind can separate qualities which are normally inherently connected. Every aspect of physical reality is interpreted by a module that can more or less go haywire separately.

So when someone depicts by illustration what hallucination is like, that is a subset, possibly a small subset of the possibilities, whether drug induced or otherwise.

And there's also the limitations and unpredictability of memory. Who knows whether the memories people have of hallucinations are complete or accurate?
Latent schizophrenics shouldn't take psychoactive drugs of any kind. Schizophrenics (like other people suffering from mental illness) are prone to self-medicate as well though. And the evidence that someone prone to schizophrenia who develops it because of drug use but wouldn't have otherwise developed schizophrenia is scant or non-existent.
If you want to scare yourself off psychedelics for life, /r/hppd has some pretty horrifying posts from people reaching out for help. I am grateful that my own extremely minor experience with similar symptoms taught me to stay clear.
From the article "... To make GitLab better faster, we need more data on how users are using GitLab. SaaS telemetry products, which provide analytics on user behavior inside web-based applications, have come a long way in the past few years. They are an important tool for rapidly improving user experiences because you can understand what users are doing (or not doing) in the app. GitLab has a lot of features, and a lot of users, and it is time that we use telemetry to get the data we need for our product managers to improve the experience."

This doesn't seem like a sufficiently good justification add telemetry features which some users may find objectionable.

Perhaps those resources would be better spent on a feature that let the user who is annoyed by a slow operation to:

- Begin recording user interaction telemetry locally
- Perform the slow or buggy operation
- Stop recording, generating a data bundle file.
- Allow the user to review the data bundle in human-readable format
- Optionally take the data bundle to a less secured system as needed
- Submit the data bundle to GitLab engineering as a well-filed issue

Done that way, I think most users would welcome the interaction with Gitlab. For telemetry, not so much.
I somewhat do agree with the ad engine... but it's a crappy one.

I'm a guy in my 30s. Nothing in my view history ever says, "Hey, this guy is progressive enough to wear makeup." At that, I watch english, polish, and french videos. Ads I get, Spanish. I dont know spanish. I'd accept general language learning ads. But tostitos and I think one was health or house insurance... in spanish. It's like the ad bot is some redneck that thinks there are two languages, American and not-American.

The recommendation bot and ad bot are just terrible. The moment theres a half way decent competitor to youtube, my ass is jumping ship.
>only ever carry one passport when abroad

No that's 100% wrong and provably so (see below). You absolutely have to carry all because there are situations where you'll legally need a mix.

Using my example: South African and EU passport. Suppose I'm flying from SA to Spain.

Airline desk: They want the EU passport. Because they get screwed if they fly someone into the EU that has no right being there.

Outbound immigration desk: Has to be SA passport. It's 100% ILLEGAL for me to present the EU one here - under fine or imprisonment

Inbound in Spain: They'll want to see the EU one because the SA one doesn't have a suitable visa stamp.

My "I presented both" comment is based on an observation that generally playing open cards with officials will result in them selecting the most favourable one. e.g. Iceland won't tell a German "oh we see you also have an afghan passport so you can't enter". Plus I like to play open cards. I have nothing to hide. You want to check both passports...go for it.
> most obviously, the paper from IBM (see also their blog post) saying that they could simulate the Google experiment in 2.5 days, rather than the 10,000 years that Google had estimated.

Not really.... they say -

"We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity. This is in fact a conservative, worst-case estimate, and we expect that with additional refinements the classical cost of the simulation can be further reduced."

> Will we find out next that Google’s benchmark can be classically spoofed in mere milliseconds?

> Well, no one can rule that out, but we do have some reasons to think that it’s unlikely—and crucially, that even if it turned out to be true, one would just have to add 10 or 20 or 30 more qubits to make it no longer true.

Could we explain why Google didn't just add 30 more qubits then? Why did they chose 10,000 years which is not long in Moore's law? Why not 1000 billion years to make sure they wiped the floor?

To me the reason is something would fall apart. They could do what they could do because it was within the bounds of a classical system. If this is not the case then it needs explaining.
The theory of epicycles very accurately explained observed phenomena, and though the conditions for science at that time were very different, its popularity and accuracy very much comparable to those of quantum theory.

In the Hipparchian and Ptolemaic systems of astronomy, the epicycle (from Ancient Greek: ἐπίκυκλος, literally upon the circle, meaning circle moving on another circle[1]) was a geometric model used to explain the variations in speed and direction of the apparent motion of the Moon, Sun, and planets. In particular it explained the apparent retrograde motion of the five planets known at the time. Secondarily, it also explained changes in the apparent distances of the planets from the Earth.

(...)

Epicycles worked very well and were highly accurate, because, as Fourier analysis later showed, any smooth curve can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy with a sufficient number of epicycles. However, they fell out of favour with the discovery that planetary motions were largely elliptical from a heliocentric frame of reference, which led to the discovery that gravity obeying a simple inverse square law could better explain all planetary motions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle

So the epicycles worked very well to explain and predict observations, but for reasons irrelevant to what really caused the motion of the planets. It's still possible that quantum mechanics will fall in the same way.

Note I don't have a horse in this race. I have no opinion on whether quantum mechanics is right or wrong.
A Crisis in Cosmology
> you should have a good reason

And what constitutes a good reason?

The epitome of open source is that you don't need to explain of your fork is really superior, the users will come.
According to the article, it's not just schizophrenics, it's literally everyone who is at risk.

Legalization would be highly irresponsible until we understand why.
It comes to mind for that very reason. The rules for uploading to it are less stringent than other services because it's there to provide a platform for things that don't fit on other video platforms on the web. If you're going to be hosting videos of the horrors of war, it's much more likely to stick on liveleak than any other platform.
There was a ton of wizardry I didn’t know at the time
I’ve done a bit of psilocybin over my life. The only permanent hallucinatory change I’ve experienced is “seeing stars” occasionally (maybe once a year). I distinctly remember the first time it happened while on mushrooms.

I had shorter semi-permanent hallucinations when I was taking them the most. Breathing walls, halos around lights, etc. All of those effects tended to go away once I stopped.

A stranger permanent change has been my unconscious or dream state. I’ve had full blown psychedelic dreams on occasion since taking psilocybin. Those dreams happen maybe once a year.

For context my peak usage was nearly 20 years ago and I used to do quite a bit. Much more than what I’ve heard as ‘common’ nowadays.
Answered in detail 2x in other comments in this thread.

I'd directly link you but can't see a way to do so on hn
> From that same source, roughly 1% of all head injuries admitted into hospitals are from cycling, and 60% are alcohol related. Yet people would find it ridiculous if you suggested they wear a drinking helmet.

That is a hilarious and wonderful comparison. I'm gonna save that one for future discussion of helmets and safety.
I'll admit it is rather weak sauce, but the one time I smoked salvia was enough to put me off psychadelics forever. The entire room that I was in morphed into a Roadrunner and Coyote canyonland for about five minutes, just as Chuck Jones would have it drawn up. No desire to repeat that kind of disassociation from reality.
LibreOffice says they notarized. Does anybody have a clue to what the specific problem is? I'm wondering if it is a bug or edge case that others (such as me) need to worry about for notarizing their distributions.
I’ve always thought of this as more of an anxiety attack and possibly a bit of PTSD from what is often an incredibly powerful and upsetting experience.

I think most people experience minor visual disturbances or have what can be loosely defined as ‘trippy’ experiences from time to time and just ignore them or compensate for them, but imagine having recently had a tremendously upsetting experience that began with similar sensations and how that could tweak someone’s anxiety so that they hyper focus and worry about it to the point that it becomes a serious issue for them.
When my friend was younger and more indulgent with psychedelics, he would sometimes get tracers or flashes of light when tired but they went away eventually. He's open-minded about the human sensory experience so it didn't bother him.
I kind of got this after a heavy meditation session 6 months ago after reading Mindfulness in Plain English and listening to Om (the band.)
Never seriously meditated before but after that I became pretty good at meditation and so depending on my mood and whether I meditated in the morning I slip into a meditative state right away when concentrating and see pretty small perceptual abnormalities.

I was seriously ready to kill myself back then so pretty small tradeoff.
Just thinking aloud. No position, as the article offers very little context and detail.

I'm not particularly sympathetic to the notion that YouTube should be obligated, either legally or ethically, to host content in perpetuity. OTOH, if rapid filtering results in such content being taken down so quickly that even archivists and reporters don't have a reasonable chance at identifying and saving it, then I do see that as a potential ethical (but not legal) dilemma, and an interesting technical challenge.

My initial thought upon reading the title was that this story--such as it is--was more a commentary on the unintended consequences of the censorship of terrorist-related propaganda videos. From that perspective, I don't think the distinction between ML and human filters is that important; the more interesting issue seems to be the scope and creep of censorship and how we can expect tech companies to draw equitable lines within modern political cultures that suffer from hyper-partisan political discourse. It's not hard to imagine a situation where simply permitting any atrocity videos will be seen as partisan--supporting one side or another by promoting particular narratives.
That's at least a bit north of average, IME.

PM friends of mine are in the 150-180 range for base pay. Can't speak to equity comp.
How does 4chan do it? Last I checked they have moderators (well "janitors"). They are volunteers, work for almost no recognition (still Anon), and probably do not have the mental health problems that regular people do.

There is also clearly an ability to follow direction or enforce appropriate (e.g. the janitors of /b/ /pol/ /g/ and /fit/ are clearly all operating on different sets of rules).

I am 100% in agreement that you cannot hire an army of temps off the street and tell them to moderate the internet, but it's clearly not something beyond human capability. You just have to be hiring in the right places.
Becoming a parent in graduate school shaped my approach to work–life balance
No, they won't flip a table. They'll talk to the sales guy, tell him "nope", and will receive instructions how to turn it off.
I take psychedelics once or twice a year, and sometimes I just have these weird moments where, for example, I'll look at a door and go "What the hell is that? We all walk through portals every day!" I think they bring out a sense of wonder in the mundane, which can be amazing but also occasionally disconcerting.
Oh there was a LegalEagle episode on Kim Kardashian studying to pass the bar. He goes over the history and process of taking the bar without going to law school. But the title of the video has her name.

Reality TV recommendations... Jersey shore... celebrity gossip...everywhere...it took 2 weeks to disappear. Strep throat is cured in less time than contracting celeb gossip videos.
Are the common elements in our dreams the result of basic biology? (2015)
I've just launched this. So, Excel finally has vertical sheet tabs as well as multiple-row sheet tabs - features that have been at the top of the requested list for a long, long time. No more endless scrolling backwards and forwards to find a sheet...!

In addition, displayed sheet tabs can be filtered based on color and custom tags - only see the sheets you want to at any one time.

Any questions, comments, ideas, suggestions for product or website?
> if you turn on Do Not Track in your browser, GitLab will not load the JavaScript snippet

This is actually awesome, and a very rare thing as far as I can tell.
First identification of a heavy element born from neutron star collision
NNs are full of magic numbers that were learned from training sets.
This is actually a really important factor that a lot of code just ignores. Floats are decent general purpose numbers for a lot of uses but they come with a whole bunch of caveats where you can lose a lot of precision really fast.
the argument they use is a superweapon and can be applied to any distribution of resources including their preferred one. i guess if the takeaway is people having a moral right to some X% of their pre-tax income is implausible and government having a moral right to some X% of subject's pre-tax income is implausible then that would be coherent. but they don't seem to be biting the second bullet.
How do Democrats win in 2020? These battleground state leaders have some advice
I think most of the reason we have history, is due to physical media, such as print.
newspapers books diaries and scrap books would live for decades and centuries even, so investigators could elucidate the past and bring it to light.

internet media in the current form is subject to great purges of intentional and accidental nature.
no matter the corporate intention, there is a great danger of major events being deleted from social memory, and the engineering attempts currently in play, will easily become best practice in gov parlance.
Viewpoint: Why sustainable finance needs to be defined by evidence not ideology
I know it wasn’t one of your options, but I would say high (just going off what some of my PM friends make so I could be wrong).
Github has tons of tracking.
What do you mean there is no inherent scarcity? There is only a certain amount of capacity in any infrastructure. When you pay for a bit on a network with metered bandwidth, you are paying for the fact that you used up that infrastructure for a short amount of time. It’s exactly the same concept as paying more to deliver a larger package.

On a network with scarce capacity, flat rate billing (vs metering or caps) means that light users are subsidizing heavy users. A real world illustration of this fact is that ISPs actually prefer flat rate because it is easier to market. On networks with lots of capacity they sell “unlimited”, while on tighter networks (like the cellular networks), they almost always use metered billing.

I’m not sure why some people (mostly only on Reddit or HN) are confused about this, but one theory I have is that they don’t understand the oversale of bandwidth. If you want to get a dedicated 1gbps per second of internet bandwidth, that will cost over $2000/month in most areas. So what all ISPs do is to sell that same gigabit to many subscribers. You can get hundreds of subscribers on 1gbps.

But they advertise “up to 1gbps speeds” instead of “1gbps with a 100x oversale ratio” because that would confuse people. So maybe people think that means they are actually supposed to be getting a dedicated 1gbps. If that was the case, then it wouldn’t make sense to bill for data. But most people don’t want to pay $2000/month for their internet.

The real issue that you are complaining about is that ISPs in many areas are monopolies and feel no need to upgrade infrastructure.
It is much easier for the ISP to just inspect the smaller amount of DNS traffic on port 53, than to inspect all traffic including port 443, and scan for HTTPS and SNI. Also, the destination IP does not revel much for CDNs.
Won't being locally built diminish its attractiveness?
For what it's worth, I think PG is completely wrong on this. The site was designed, via progressive lightening, to censor downvoted posts. His statement is essentially permission to censor dissent and doesn't make for a healthy conversation.
What is the base salary?
The point of this change isn't to break ads, the tracking benefits are at best incidental. Ad networks can just opt-out anyway.

The point is to block CSRF attacks on ordinary websites for developers who don't know enough to secure their cookies.

> But it turns out that if you just break the web's ads, users tend to like it, if they even notice in the first place.

Breaking just the web's ads wouldn't have the same impact on security. The reason this change is valuable is because it's not restricted to specific blacklists or domains or applied via an algorithm, it's universal. I really like the tracking protections that Safari/Firefox are adding, but comparing them to this is apples and oranges.

They're policies that are designed for different purposes.
Is there a Patriot Act PR?
Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection is not mandatory. It's just enabled by default now. You can configure it in your Firefox settings or disable for individual sites via the address bar's shield icon.
I'm not sure you can draw that kind of conclusion from a survey administered to a self-selected group of people, and I'm pretty sure that talking about it like that to the group of people who will be filling out the next survey will tend to shape the responses. Interesting topic, though.
It's been used for single-member constituencies at the Federal level in Australia for 100 years, and in the various States for at least 50 years. French Presidential elections have been using run-off elections for even longer, and those are in theory open to the same kinds of tactical voting in the early rounds as IRV.
To me, Valve seems more like a company that zoomed out to look at the bigger picture, and in doing so abandoned what they were.

I don't think that they forgot about the technology side of things - but I do think that in leaving behind so much of what inspired them to expand in the first place, they may have drowned their muse.

At very least, I think they have compromised their ability to dog-food what they're working on.
From direct knowledge of working with a State court system, I can tell you that WordPerfect is still very much alive and well!
Given drew's (SirCmpwn on lobsters) responses to my comment[1] in a thread about pull requests vs email-patch workflows, it makes me think sourcehut won't be supporting PR workflows any time soon.

[1]: https://lobste.rs/s/zxokqi/finding_new_git_host#c_viqwir
Well, Bostrom states that there will be more ideas in the future that may change the simulation theory. It's the latest most plausable theory.