skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ...my first experience with programming was to build a game

most of us!

we have made it difficult to show our games and stuff to friends. except for minecraft and game mods. that's why kids gravitate towards those.

as a side note, i was thinking last time that programming is difficult to teach nowadays because when you boot your computer or phone, it doesn't drop you into a shell or command prompt.

so few people nowadays know that you can actually give commands to your computer or phone. so the concepts is not familiar to most!
> I recently wanted to take a hierarchy of items and draw them in a nice tree structure. For example, a Family Tree.

In general, a family tree is a directed acyclic graph. Branches of the tree will always join back together if you follow the history far enough.

The number of ancestors in a generation is 2^N, with N being the number of generations back you're looking. There were only 100 billion people that ever lived, so by the time you get about a thousand years back, it becomes literally impossible for all your ancestors to appear only once.

Of course, that's just an easy upper bound to make the point that becoming a graph is unavoidable. In practice, branches will come together a lot sooner than that.
> It also endangers the basic principle of a rules-based, open world.

You can’t endanger something that doesn’t exist. Sovereign countries exist amongst themselves in the state of nature.
Yeah, it's common.

It's a skill. Babies go through this phase where they're too tired to sleep, and can't sleep because they're tired. You often have to force them to sleep early.

But as the adult, nobody's there to force you to sleep, and you can hit this point where you're tired but don't want to sleep.

One trick is just to wake up extra early. It will feel terrible for one day. You can make do with a midday nap, even 10 minutes works. Your 2 AM bedtime will move back to 11 PM automatically. Every now and then instead of waking at 5, you can 'oversleep' to 7 AM, giving you a good night's rest, and more control over your sleeping time.
Yeah, I know :).

In some ways the explanation of how to simplify your view of it just makes it sound even worse.

A big question is if/when AMD starts adopting AVX-512, will they choose the same subsets that Intel did, or introduce new ones?
So what happens when I fill up an island and I want to capture an idea in the proper place RIGHT NOW? Especially if I've got it surrounded by other islands. Aw shit, I just lost my fragile new idea while getting distracted by landscaping.

Also holy crap the body type in these notes is microscopic.
They sell self-heating canned food. It's not a claim about sapience.
That's a nice way of saying that Elon Musk is full of it with his autopilot...
I recommend "Making a RISC-V Operating System using Rust".

http://osblog.stephenmarz.com/index.html
PigeonBot Robot Flies Like a Bird
I quite like trains. I hope someday the US gets back to having better rail service.

Highway-autonomous vehicles would give you the benefits of rail service plus arbitrary departure times, more direct routes, on-demand route changes, and you're traveling in a vehicle that you can use for first and last mile and intra-city travel.
For one thing it keeps European countries within NATO from invading each other.

NATO isn’t just there to defend against Russia, it is effectively an unbroken continuous occupation of Europe by the US.
Google and Facebook don't sell user data. It's much more profitable to keep it for themselves than to sell it to others.
There is a lot of evidence that technology tends to improve over time.
You can compare these levels of progress, sure but that doesn't mean the comparison is valid. Lots of people dismissed flying cars in the 60s and heck, they were right, the problem is fundamentally different.

The difference because the horse-to-auto transition and the auto-to-self-driving-auto is that autonomous cars solutions are inherently fragile and cars reasonably robust. (Flying cars are inherently fragile too - the problem isn't get a car-like-thing to fly, it's getting it to not hit things).
"What is this protection that the US provides"

The US has bases all over Europe, they spend a fortune on their own defensive tech, capabilities and leadership which Germany et. al. depend on, which acts as a massive deterrent, but also provides security partners with 'almost free R&D'. Also, the US specialises and practices so many things that are just far beyond the reach of pretty much all European forces.

The ability to put bases, air support of all kinds, intelligence, drones, etc. pretty much anywhere is basically beyond most of Europe. When a war broke out on their border (Libya), for better or worse there was an intervention. Obama reluctantly agreed and didn't want to play a lead role, but without US drones, AWACS, and electronic warfare, special forces on the ground, the UK and French fighters wouldn't have been able to do anything at all. This is actually quite a good demonstration of how specific capabilities are huge enablers of others.

Trump's NATO talking point about partners not spending enough is very fair, and most European nations are in violation of the treaty, which is doubly problematic because while NATO is strategically beneficial to the US, it's basically vital to European integrity -> they need it more than the US and spend only 1/2 of what was agreed upon.

If the US simply 'did not exist' - Russian Imperialism would reach just about as far as in the Soviet era. Basically, Poland would be back to being the 'buffer' between Germany and Russia.

Everyone in the 1990's thought all of that would melt with the cold war, unfortunately, neither China nor Russia moved along the expected path, so here we are.

American sanctions of Iran are not remotely big enough to make a dent in currency issues.

I do however think that as finance spreads into different areas, Americans will have more difficulty with said sanctions. Dubai exists as a financial centre basically because it's outside the direct influence or insight of American or European agencies. It's basically an entire micro-economy of dirty money.
Nope, I have free 15GB, 2GB x 2 times Security Checkup Bonus from 2017 & some; & pay $20/year; and have total 100 GB (so paying for 100-15-2-2= 81GB)
The Saudi fund that has invested in them has also invested in uber.
Interesting concept. The brain does store information with visual location so that works in that way.

reminds me a bit of Jurassic Park's OS :)
Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand
What is wrong with the traffic lights in your city would be the much more interesting question here. Everywhere I know, traffic lights work as long as their power supply is intact
I liked this article. I read the book mentioned in the article, “The Sovereign Individual” about 20 years ago and it changed the way I looked at the world.
If we could model a room of our favorite design and store notes in drawers that would be cool.

This is awesome!
Teen killers fist-bumped after ‘unprovoked’ attack with Rambo knife
Talk about clumsy, I seem to remember Russia turning off the gas back in the 90s and everyone was surprised at just how easily nato’s entire infrastructure could be held ransom by the flick of a switch. The issue basically boils down to the survivability of US/NATO operations. And the Germans ambivalence - what with Gerard Schroeder essentially doing a crony deal for nordstream directly underscores that Germans know what we really care about is military survivability. Pretty much every foreign policy decision the US has made since the gas debacle has been to find alternatives to Russian oil. Admitting Georgia to NATO, supporting Ukraine, heck even Iraq and afghanistan have undertones of finding gas alternatives for Germany. The realist in me agrees, it kind of stinks that America seems a bit selfish. But I might remind you that Germany didn’t really like it when the gas did get shut off. I seem to recall their response was, hey America, do something! In the end, Most of what we have done hasn’t worked and then you have Germans themselves supporting nordstream which essentially undermines the entire strategy altogether. I wouldn’t be surprised if the US cedes Germany and leaves in the next decade. Now... what’s going to hurt the dollar more? A few sanctions now or departure from the European continent altogether? Ps also consider the source - the economist - they’ve never met a sanction or a trade barrier they could like so keep that in mind....
Here's something that might surprise you: https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/index.shtml

This provides a 2D and 3D NetLogo installation. The 3D version blows my mind. You can spend days going through the samples. When you look at the code after you watch a simulation, it's a bit of a shock how compact and readable it is. It's definitely a whole lot more than what they taught you and I alike in middle school.

> Lisp should be forbidden to young programmers, precisely so they'll go seek it out.

Unless it comes with a turtle, of course. Then they might
end up writing the next greatest flocking algorithm.
>... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it,

Its not just the manufacturers, who is underwriting all that insurance?

Ford sells approximately 2.3M vehicles per year, imagine if 50% of self-driving...over a 5 year period that 5.5M cars...if each one needs to carry a potential 1M policy thats an incredible amount of liability on someone's balance sheet. (even if you say the policy is only 100K thats still $576B in liability)

Thats only for Ford, add in all vehicles manufacturers and extend that to 10-15 years into the future and thats an incredible amount.

However there is nothing to say that a new laws won't be passed to allow manufacturers to escape liability. Most likely this is what will happen (see vaccine courts, etc)
I’ve seen the shared cars in Paris. They are completely awful.
I understand where you're coming from! It's tough to be connected with a company associated with bad will or unfair cash grabs. I hope PayByPhone isn't in that territory, even if there are historic bad players in its industry. Measuring the thank-you's versus screw-you's I get, I'm happy to be associated with the company.
I think the auto-detivation of morphological rules is still an active research project and not public yet, unfortunately. But it's been a couple years so I may not be up to date.
All I want is to sleep or read on freeways. Solve that first and you’re competing with airlines and unlocking billions or more in value. Prioritize please.
JS is popular because it runs in browsers and therefore has a thriving ecosystem with lots of educational resources, lots of opportunity to show your work to other people, and lots of jobs, not because it's taught in schools.

Examples of educational languages would be Alice and Logo, and they're both pretty bad at actually doing anything.
I can't see L5 happening without, amongst other things, the human ability to reason about things/concepts we've never encountered before (à la consciousness).

Highway driving is the most constrained normal driving problem, and this is solvable in 99% of cases. But there are so many things that can happen in most other driving situations that make me think that model-based approaches (Tesla) are doomed to fail... Go ahead, train a classifier for every situation you can think of - I guarantee you that you've missed many things.

Elon tweeted the other day that FSD is "coming soon". Either I'm totally wrong about this, and of course I hope I am, or Karpathy + the dev team should be tempering his expectations.

That isn't to say that there isn't immense value in L2/L3, there totally is. But I think that solving driving (being able to drive any situation a human can) is pretty much the same thing as solving intelligence generally.
Intracity transportation was also solved in the 1800s.

(compact towns & bicycles)
You are so sure about this. I’m curious where you live where the streets are so well maintained, there’s very little non-car traffic, rarely road construction, no bad weather, no emergency vehicles, no overly narrow two-lane roads, no gravel roads, and electronic maps that are correct 100% of the time.
The United States' main geopolitical imperative is to maintain global hegemony. Part of this is ensuring regional powers are either allied (in the case of NATO countries or Saudi Arabia) or contained (in the case of Russia and Iran).

It is a fundamental rule of Geopolitics that every country assert itself to the best of its abilities with the strengths they have. One of Russia's biggest strengths is natural resources. It is advantageous to them to have Western Europe dependent on its oil and natural gas supplies.

George Friedman explains in this book [1] that Russia may attempt to assert itself to a greater extent in the next few decades, possibly going so far as to annex a Baltic country or two. Today this would be inconceivable, but if Russia has the off switch for Germany's economy, NATO's response is drastically weakened.

Whatever scenario may come to pass, European reliance on Russian natural resources disrupts the US's containment strategy which it needs in order to maintain its dominant position in the region. So yes, it will say something if it feels like that is under threat.

Not saying this is a good or bad thing. Depends on your perspective and what country you live in.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/07...
> Eighty percent of chemical nitrogen fertilizers today are made using the Haber-Borsch process, which involves transforming nitrile gas into ammonia.

Two errors in one sentence. It's the "Haber-Bosch process", and it transforms nitrogen gas into ammonia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
So what pains does this legislation solve?

To me it seemed outrageous that a company I had no dealings with, accumulated data on me without my consent, and above all - their data was breached.

I thought that's what this legislation was trying to address.
> If the taxi is soiled then the next passenger indicates this via the app

So riders blame the mess on the previous passenger. Then the taxi company installs cameras. It’s all gross (and yes, I’m aware many taxis have cameras already).
Of course that’s the reason. Different people use different euphemisms, for the same reason we do now. (“Defend against tyranny.”) But we’re talking about an amendment the founders wrote shortly after they took up arms to overthrow their government. It’s clear what they were talking about: https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/04/second-amendment-hist...

> Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.

That was Noah Webster, dictionary guy. He’s clear that the second amendment embodies a personal right to bear arms (so the citizens aren’t disarmed, like in Europe) so they can overthrow the government.
> I find it very curious that the Spanish Influenza epidemic is almost completely forgotten;

In the US, we are taught about the Spanish Flu in school. The news mentions the Spanish Flu every year during flu season. Every other epidemic movie mentions the Spanish Flu. There are even documentaries about it.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/influenza/

Without a doubt WW1 overshadows the Spanish Flu, but that doesn't mean it is anywhere close to being forgotten.
It will be interesting tko see who registers and who doesn't.
“We’re already doomed” isn’t a good reason to not be concerned about new ways to be doomed.

Yes, we have security. Yes, cars can (probably) already be hacked, perhaps even en-mass rather than in targeted ways.

But: one the big advantages of machine learning in cars is that every car can learn from the experiences of every other car. That makes them monocultures. Monocultures are fragile. You find the weakness of one, you find the weakness of all.

I want the benefits of the former without the risks of the latter. I don’t know if that’s even possible.
For a bunch of "tech visionaries" that Hacker News is supposed to embody, this thread is full of such shortsightedness. I self-drove from Southern California to Phoenix, Arizona, so I guess that's like 1/10th of the way. I couldn't have imagined that ten years ago. Part of the job of being a CEO is to sell the dream, even if it's years or decades away.
Self-driving car networks have the benefit of not being bound by the same finite capacity of a network of humans trying to manage real-world traffic.

Neither would they have to operate at artificially handicapped speeds, as no human operator would really be able to keep up regardless with the 10,000 or 100,000 cars running around.

Part of reacting and mitigating acute issues is being able to reroute traffic early enough, or slow cars down early enough, to minimize disruption (instead of a traffic slinky blocking everyone up).

There's no reason so far here that self-driving vehicles can't improve traffic and overall throughput, and it's a bold claim to declare L5 dead on arrival.
I sort of agree with the twitter poster, but, the iOS Files app seems to be getting better and more robust. My bet is that in a year it will be robust and very safe to use - I hope so because I find myself using my laptops much less and my iPad Pro for more of my writing and work.
Not a single one of the big ones have registered.

Acxiom, Experian, etc.
Don't park selfishly and you don't suffer the consequences. It's that simple. The only issue here is that selfish parkers get their car back at all, they clearly aren't responsible enough to own one.
But how many passengers are on the 747?

The ratio of pilot to total people on the plane is often something like 1/100. In a cars it might average 1/1.2 or something. I think that should be improved.

Also, on a plane, those pilots are never expected to jump in with 2 seconds notice because something isn't working right. I don't think that is realistic....people zone out, but that is expected in "supervised self driving".
The big reasons I want a self driving car is because I want to eliminate the boring drudgery and make the routine parts of driving safer. If I have to drive the last 1% myself, it's not a big deal. I suspect this is how most people feel.

I haven't done the math, but time spent on forest service roads, wedding parking lots, and boarding ferries is quite low overall. And the idea of driving in those instances doesn't bother me. Having the car take care of the other 99.999% of my driving live is what I do care about.

> None of those are edge cases because every time it drives it will encounter some novel edge case that has never happened before and it will have to perform better than a human.

If most of your driving involves drunks directing traffic, forest roads, and dirt-lot weddings then a self-driving car is likely not for you.
Having every parked, idle car driving around aimlessly around looking for fares is going to create incredible traffic congestion.

Studies have shown that the growth in Uber/Lyft has increased traffic congestion. This system autonomously will be even worse.
Scala is an interesting language, but now, it's back to java ugliness as soon as you need to import some existing java classes. That's my issue with all the JVM languages (and .NET is even worse here).
I've read this story a couple times as it's popped up on the internet in different places. I've enjoyed it each time because it promises that lisp is an uber-powerful and easy (?) language.

I'm always curious though: what's the other side of the story? Why is lisp always rejected?

I started programming seriously (for money) in 2009, and when we needed a language we went with python because it had better math/science libraries than Java and much more libraries in general than clojure/lisp/ocaml. I confess I like the functional languages and like using some of their features in python.

Was the no-libraries dealbreaker for the "pure" functional languages also true in 1999, which led google to java? Or maybe there are complex meta-programming bugs you can generate in the functional languages (and elsewhere) that are the dealbreaker? Or what?
So did you stop right after that? It literally goes on to explain how that's due to people buying larger homes.
I like how you said "WEB PKI". This works for the web, but the problem of verifying domain ownership for non-web interner remains. If ever there is a new version of DNS it should assume registrars will provide this CA service for free (or for whatever the domain costs)
What are the incentives, though? There’s not actually that much money to be made here, despite dreams of self driving taxis (something that could never be possible). Maybe in the trucking industry, but the tech doesn’t exist and is nowhere close to being reliable enough consistently enough.
> Even if we ban it here in the US, there's nothing stopping adversarial foreign governments from building the same databases, and probably with a lot more computing power and technical expertise.

You make a good point, a simple ban of this technology isn't good enough. The ban needs to go further, to ban the kinds of things that enable the technology, like massive databases that aggregate people's personal photos or surveillance video.
If self driving cars make driving in any way more attractive than now, they'll increase demand which will increase congestion.
Unpaywalled alternate: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/human-body-tempera...
"Slow" is relative, and quite common in an academic environment. I find that after entering the industry, with people from no/poor academic backgrounds, I feel really fast. If you work somewhere with higher standards, you'll feel slow again.

Learning seems more like a skill/technique than an aptitude. It's not just grades, but learning in a way that it sticks.
Easily scheduled, ubiquitous micro-buses or other vehicle form factors may change the 20th century compulsion of having to have your own private car.
Hmm, you're absolutely right! (And the dictionary I consulted is as wrong as I was.) So why does the post I was replying to not work as is?
Csound
Or they remember all too well. Another way of looking at it is that people who have gotten good at something can look back and see the things that hindered their progress. Like many here, my first exposure to programming languages was BASIC and 6502 assembly language. In retrospect, I can see that they were horrible languages to start with because they taught me some very bad habits that I had to unlearn.

It is possible to teach someone Lisp, or something like it, without teaching them all of it at once... if ever. There are lots of people who use CAD systems like AutoCAD, or Emacs, or the various Lisp based/inspired Expert Systems shells, etc. who wouldn't consider themselves 'Lisp programmers' who learned just what they needed to be productive. If people were exposed to it a bit at a time, rather than the fire hose with minimal direction, I suspect a lot of complaints could be addressed. For example, the reason people think all the parens are bad is because it's become a meme and it's different than what they're used to. If they had started with Lisp and never learned ALGOL-inspired syntax, semicolons would likely look very strange to them.
All those countries actually know what it’s like to live behind the iron curtain and don’t really want to do so again. What should happen is the US should move it’s German bases to a country that actually wants them there like Poland but doing so would probably risk a war. Germany might not like America on their soil but they also have to realize the status quo is certainly better than the alternative. This nordstream project just has German cronyism written all over it and I wouldn’t be surprised if the rest of Europe is worse of because A few kleptocrats had to make a buck. They should be sanctioned quite honestly.