skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You appear to be upset. I'm sorry that what I wrote made you think that I'm immoral and that I'm a piece of shit. This exchange exemplifies what started all these threads. That is, that it's better off for people to quit social media. Had we discussed this in person I'm certain you'd not think I'm a piece of shit.

What's missing in internet discussions like this is the assumption we make about people when we first meet them in person. Namely, that the other person isn't bad even if they have a different opinion. It's too easy in faceless discussions like this to paint an incorrect picture about the other person.

I wish you well.
Are you saying that a brain cell is immortal through one’s life?
I think for the same reason as the recipe, this one line calling of a Windows API wouldn't be covered by copyright. As I understand it, once the code is entirely functional and is unable to express any creativity you could argue it isn't covered by copyright as it exists as a fact.

I'm sure if you dig around enough you'll find really simple recipes that claim to be covered by copyright.
In Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk [1], the US Supreme Court held that time spent by warehouse workers waiting to undergo and undergoing security screenings is not compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act, as amended by the Portal-to-Portal Act.

[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/integrity-staffi...
> Oh, there is this new computer & internet thing but that's it.

This sentence is doing an unbelievable amount of work. I don't think you realize how strange it is that we have instant-speed trans-Atlantic communication that can transmit massive amounts of data. Computers are practically foreign objects to plenty of people born in the 60s, who grew up as they were invented. You don't think someone from 1920, with no prior exposure to them, would think that a smartphone is just a standard part of everyday life?

Not to mention all the other massive changes to society that you ignored. Commercial flights started in the 1920s and are now commonplace in everyday life. Digital audio; televisions; massive changes to cars; ATMs and credit cards. Can you imagine someone from the 1920s trying to operate a Dyson AirBlade?

This is before accounting for the crazy rate of cultural change that would shock someone from 100 years ago. Half the words used in daily conversation wouldn't even make sense to someone from 1920.
He means that management or organization wouldn't be willing to risk the death of an individual, not that the individual wouldn't accept the risk.
twitter is mostly anonymous users shitposting and dunking on each other.

facebook is all your friends' racist friends yelling at you, interspersed with bizarre ads for products you'll never buy and sponsored links to phony news sites. it's a completely different dynamic and it's much more insidious.
It is in addition to social security in Canada. We call that OAS. Social security (OAS) gets clawed back if ur over like $70k/year in retirement or so. CPP does not, IIRC.
I mean, the same can be said about gambling.
arent boeing and spacex preparing capsules for the moon? would you be OK with applying 1969 safety tests standards on them?
Most of what has happened since has been merely incremental improvements upon what came before. That true age of innovation – I’ll call it the Golden Quarter – ran from approximately 1945 to 1971. Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time.

Ok, Boomer.

I jest!

But yeah this is a US centric, physically biased view of the world that ignores major changes in technology and society.

Firstly, I'd note that of the key innovations he cites (The Pill, Electronics, Computers and the birth of the internet, Nuclear power, Television, Antibiotics, Space travel, Civil rights) all except the pill are clear refinements of development that was occurring prior to 1945 and most prior to WW2.

Sure, our phones are great, but that’s not the same as being able to fly across the Atlantic in eight hours or eliminating smallpox.

It's not a competition, but I think there are pretty compelling arguments that incredibly cheap, highly reliable instant communication devices available everywhere (with the exception of North Korea) are more important than being able to fly across the Atlantic.

And most recent advances in longevity have come about by the simple expedient of getting people to give up smoking, eat better, and take drugs to control blood pressure.

There is some truth in this, but what an advance it is! In the US, life expectency at birth in 1971 was 71, in 2019 it was 78. But this undersells the advance, since most of the world has improved even more. For example, China went from 60 to 76!
Is this true? What are the extents of this? There are many movies that have tons of imagery created by algorithms that are surely covered by copyright. Is it enough for the algorithm itself to express creative expression? How about the inputs? Is any creative expression enough?
> why are US technology companies still so valuable?

Marketing plays a big role.
Not a whole lot of evidence in this essay. Sure its possible risk aversion is holding us back, but then again maybe it isn't. I may not have a better theory, but i am not particularly convinced either.

Most importantly, if risk acceptance is the magic sauce, why do all these advances just start in 1945. Its not like people were super risk averse in the early 1900s or the 1800s. Then again i suspect there is some selection bias here to make all the data points fit in this time period. Its not like feminism started from nothing in 1945, first wave feminism goes before that.
i'm waiting for my facebook account to be deleted in a week and the only anxiety i have now...is waiting for it to be gone. it's toxic. i'm much more at peace letting facebook go.
I had to write and sign a letter to a Vodafone group company testifying that I would always wear my seatbelt when driving to their offices.

Even though that is the law of the land.
Ancient China also had this kind of tradition.
Born in 1981, computers and the internet seem mundane to me.

But I thoroughly agree that they are the two (one?) biggest revolution in history.
They stole IP from western companies so they could reach the bleeding edge and then spent billions on R&D research to get ahead. Without the decades of IP theft, the R&D achievements never happen. No western company should trust their 5G equipment.
That is what I said. I didn't understand what a dataframe was. Note that I didn't really blame the data structure. I said it was an irritating factor. Someone else might not have been as irritated. But if R was closer to what I already knew, learning would have been easier. For me.
I read the article.

Superficially, it might seem informative.

But if you look into the various industries, not so much.

In aviation, engines have become 1% more efficient per year, which means 3 related things:

1) they burn half as much fuel as ~72 years ago

2) the range is double, so that 737's can fly globe-spanning international routes now (this is game-changing)

3) engines are "powerful enough" for the first time - for any mission, there is an off-the-shelf engine. Until recently the v1 was always underpowered.

Computers might be banal outside of IT, but I remember when floating point was optional and compilers were a crap shoot. :) Also, Moore's Law kept pace in the time window the author wrote about.

We do need to put the pollution genie back in the bottle though. I remember when the Great Lakes and Niagara River were flammable, with green froth oozing from the banks.

There is little awareness of reuse in the West, which is hugely better than recycling.

Not well-known, while the US recycles 99% of cars, but most municipalities just landfill those blue bins since private garbage contractors can't make money off them.
I deleted my Facebook account and feel the same as the study: I wish I had done it years earlier.
How risk friendly was NASA back in the day? I know there were deaths associated with the program, but every move was public, and every failure was a national failure and cold war propaganda defeat. I gotta imagine in that sort of climate nasa must have been very concerned about safety
OpenJDK project considering move to Git and GitHub
It certainly wasn't modern enough to institutionally facilitate releasing open source software though, si it's great that they made progress on that front.
> Something that the rise of ubiquitous tech should have solved.

What makes you say that?

To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever carried out a rigorous analysis on the stability (in the dynamical systems meaning of the word) of our societies; whether they trend to dystopia or utopia.

But it isn't very difficult to argue that the US, at least, is currently trending dystopic. Look no further than citizens united.
If rightwing governments ever became the good guys I guarantee you'd hear about it.
The geology and geophysics of Kuiper Belt object (486958) Arrokoth
What about making it so that the amount of latency added is dynamic? It could be set up so that frequency of visitation leads to greater and greater latency. Something like exponential growth of 1.5x every time the site is visited with an exponential decay function applied since the last time visited. This would encourage slowing down, and would most heavily penalize the most heavily used sites which seems coherent with the goal.
What year was that?

Huawei bought Toga in 2016.

https://venturebeat.com/2016/12/07/huawei-reportedly-acquire...
Absolutely.

His argument also ignores all the battles for civil rights progress before 1945 (eg, Gandhi's Salt March was in 1930, the Suffragette's between 1900 and 1928. Pretty sure there was some war in the the US that did something about slavery a while before 1945 too).

Edit: err.. heavy downvotes? Isn't this obviously correct? What am I missing here?
Arent those incremental updates? They do not create new affordances for us. Longer flights are more economical but that doesnt enable much that wasnt enabled by a layover cross-world flight. One could say that the pace of progress has become so slow in so many things that we 've forgotten what it is like to have a breakthrough.
Very useful! thanks for this
The Apollo missions saw no loss of life in outside of training. Given the number of flights I would guess that it's single digit levels of risk. It's interestingly losses in space went up as time went on.
Does the person he's replying to?
Ask HN: What instances of Wikis have worked well? What have failed?
Shuttle engineers felt that the risk of an accident was about 1%.

Managers couldn't accept more than 0.01%

It turned out to be ... 1%.

Talk about a disconnect in risk assessment!
"The problems of these, among other things:

- mixing up burnout risk with burnout

- mixing up burnout with physical or mental fatigue

- not serving any purpose (i.e. not providing good directions)"

Also I'd argue and add to the list: - not accounting for (undiagnosed) comorbid/latent mental health disorders that affect mood, personality, happiness, well-being in social environments that can cloud your judgement and how you perceive your job w.r.t. the signals that generally predict burnout (e.g. clinical depression, panic attack/anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, etc)
New Record Label Is Using an Algorithm to Find Its Artists
Arc Challenge: Create an AI that can solve reasoning tasks it hasn't seen before
Based on "On the Measure of Intelligence" https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547
Most people treated as criminals are poor because of the shape of wealth distribution, plus the fact that wealth is associated with the ability to have your behavior not treated as criminal when the same behavior from a poorer person would be treated as criminal.
Up here in East Lansing Wayfair is adding 500 jobs this fall. I have to wonder if they're moving jobs away from high cost East coast cities to the Midwest.

https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2019/11/26/wa...

But with a starting wage 50-70% over Michigan's minimum wage for a GED is pretty good.
I can't upvote this comment enough. The "Golden Quarter" wasn't.
Businesses have this weird desire to make money. Stupid I know.
Because the only reason to send a human to the moon is publicity, and having said human die defeats the whole point. If there were an actual reason to send people to space, we'd be just fine with deaths. People die in construction, engineering, research, war, and even recreation all the time.
From Non-Recursive to Recursive Language 70K Years Ago – How?
"Language evolution to revolution: the leap from rich-vocabulary non-recursive communication system to recursive language 70,000 years ago was associated with acquisition of a novel component of imagination, called Prefrontal Synthesis, enabled by a mutation that slowed down the prefrontal cortex maturation simultaneously in two or more children – the Romulus and Remus hypothesis"

by Andrey Vyshedskiy

https://riojournal.com/article/38546/

Article includes explanations of

a) how ~18% of the population can envision neither complex structures/actions nor the sentences that describe them,

b) why those same persons have few if any religious/spiritual beliefs, manifest a deficit in imagination and have IQ levels of ~86,

c) How the structure of language and thought would differ between cultures whose members have and do not have Prefrontal Synthesis,

d) possible genesis of Prefrontal Synthesis.
The way that the writer defined of progress is part of the problem.

If you go into a virgin forest and cut down all of the big trees... that's the easy stuff. It's kind of absurd, then, to ask why the world isn't producing as much wood any more.

The CPUs of the 1950s, which used thousands of vacuum tubes and took up whole floors of buildings, once seemed like a breakthrough. Today we only have these little phone things. Only incremental progress, right?
Maintaining compatibility and not breaking stuff generally adds a severe multiplication factor to the development time compared to a greenfield project.
I'm not sure whether it's still the case with lit-html, but back when Polymer was a thing, you'd better make sure all Web Components on your page were compatible with the same version, and also didn't build on top of incompatible versions of the same shared component. This really made it a pain in the behind to integrate many different components built by many different teams into the same application, especially if there also was a library of shared components used by all teams.

Anyone from ING present who can share whether this is still the case?
It's news at the very least. It's in the name.
Toga started 2008.
Was owned 100% by Huawei - in a chain of holdings.
The came out of the closet in 2016 once established.
Are you saying Toga Networks was always Huawei and they hid that fact, or that 7 years after they were founded Huawei just bought them? (like it says on the front page of their website [1])

[1] - http://toganetworks.com/
when you target crowd from 2 specific companies and offer 2x market value salaries it is more aggressive than just "employment".
It's embarrassing to be wrong, thanks for the correction. I knew that witnessing a confession was admissible evidence but not that it was an exception to hearsay.
What happens when different modules register custom elements with the same name?
Six New Google R&D Projects in India (Asia AI News)
I moved to a rural area in Europe with poor internet. Those GIFs take their time to load!
exactly that.
was told so during interviews back in 2011.
I thought about that too, but looking through the README, there are some considerable complications (and funny bugs). The author has tested this on a lot of Windows versions!

I feel like this was a toy/thought experiment that turned into learning a lot about Windows, EFI, bootstraping, etc.
Web development Bootcamp on udemy by Angela Yu. Only like $10-15 if they are having a sale but it gets a basic understanding of dev in you head.
Doesn't America have a history of adoption of adult men in gay couples? That allowed them to secure the legal rights of family members before gay marriage was legal. I remember some stories of it being a problem when gay marriage became legal, and they faced legal difficulties if they wanted to marry their adopted father or son.
Absolute nonsense. Here are some minor things that have been invented since 1971.

* Cell phones

* GPS

* Sequencing the human genome (and many others)

* Personal computers

* Drones

* Lithium-ion batteries

* The world-wide web

* Quantum computing

* Video games

* Bitcoin/blockchain

* Cheap wind and solar energy

* Hybrid cars

* The ISS (International Space Station)

* Genetically engineered crops

* SMS + instant messaging

* HDTV

* Hubble space telescope

* On-demand TV/streaming

* Self-driving cars

* Video calling

* Digital cameras

* Voice-controlled computers

* Touchscreens

* Digital music

* Social media

* Kepler space telescope, discovering 2662 exoplanets

* LED lighting + indoor farming

* Gene editing (Crispr)

* Atomic-force microscopy

* Magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI)

* Reusable rockets

* 3D printers

* MOOCs/online education

* Ebooks

* Online marketplaces

* Ridesharing

* Micromobility (e-scooters)

* Biodegradable plastics

* Automated translators

* Optical character recognition

* Asymmetric key cryptography

* RFID

* Electronic payments

* Online dating

* High-temperature superconductors

* Soft lithography

* Machine learning + deep learning

* Cloud computing

* Immunotherapy for cancer treatment

* Stealth technology (F-117, B2 etc.)

* Mars rovers: Spirit, Opportunity + Curiosity

* Voyagers I & II probes

* Cassini-Huygens probe to Saturn + moons
500 Chrome extensions secretly uploaded private data from millions of users
Amusingly enough I've had that method fail while ordering an iMac a few years ago.

I requested delivery-with-signature on a $4k iMac and it got delivered to another house three blocks away. They didn't ask for the signature (though they were supposed to); they just left a $4k computer on the curb. It was marked as delivered. I'm lucky to have an honest neighbor who brought it to my doorstep (no thanks to Apple and their logistics partners).
Yea some of them are. Obviously not every cell in the brain, but some types are not replaced.
Why can’t they just keep proper inventory and reduce their lost inventory liability with basic tracking and analytics? If high value goods go missing during a particular shift at a particular store THEN you increase security at that one store or ideally track which employee took the goods and make an example of them by taking them to civil court since the average Apple product is much more then petty theft...
>why do all these advances just start in 1945

and they actually didn't start in 1945. We entered WWII with propellers, exited with jets, entered with visual/optical targeting, exited with radar and targeting computer, entered with Enigma style and other mechanical primitive calculation devices, exited with the first real computers, entered with an idea of possibility of nuclear energy, exited with A-bomb, etc. V-2 ballistic missile became the foundation of Space Age in US and USSR. Mass production of antibiotics, and really mass production of anything, Liberty ships for example. We exited WWII with tremendously scaled up R&D and mass production capabilities which were put in significant part to peaceful use after the war. And of course GI bill in the US. And the formation of 2 super-empires - Eastern Bloc and NATO/Bretton Woods. As far as i see at least the technology and economy of the Golden Quarter is firmly rooted in WWII.
But what of the things listed really was a breakthough?

If we look at flights, he lists "8 hour Transatlantic flights" as being more important than the cell phone(!!).

Is it 8 hours that was the breakthough? What about 9 hours? 10?

It seems to me that if there was any real breakthough in that domain (and with travel generally) it's the change from "multi-day travel" to "waste one day in travel" to "I can go for a meeting during the day and be back in the evening".

While Concorde technically moved transatlantic travel into the "there and back in a day" bucket, practically it didn't - the timing of the flights meant you had to stay overnight anyway.

In that case, there probably aren't any more breakthroughs possible - except cheap, reliable, high quality video calling (which he totally ignores).
Not sure it's on the GP to provide a source but here's one:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/life-span-of-human...
Everything you didn’t know about the Handshake naming system (2018)
You could make that same argument about pretty much everything that happened in the "golden quarter".
We will definitely add a disclaimer like this in the future! Thanks for the feedback. We really wanted to highlight these security tools that have added so much value to us in the past as practitioners.
While many of the oldest businesses in Japan are hotels, some of the oldest in Europe are breweries [1], e.g. Weihenstephan (1040) and Franziskaner (1397) which both make excellent hefeweizens.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2013/02...

"New neurons are made in just two parts of the brain—the hippocampus, involved in memory and navigation, and the olfactory bulb, involved in smell (and even then only until 18 months of age). Aside from that, your neurons are as old as you are and will last you for the rest of your life. They don’t divide, and there’s no turnover."
I think it's more helpful to think of it as there are physical limits, so we approach an asymptote.

Sure, if we had cheap fusion or room-temperature superconductors, that might be game-changing.

Barring those, I'll take 1%/year improvement for 100 years or more.

For example, you're not going to see supersonic flight again due to the parasitic drag (physics) requiring so much fuel.

You could make ICE engines twice as efficient by cutting the car weight in half.

Municipalities had this great program before - swap your old fridge or water heater for a free, more efficient one.

Maybe have Amazon ship your items to a community mailbox without the brown box?

Those are doable things that pay benefits immediately.
Another cause could be increased capital investment in existing systems due to larger populations. The author brings up a good point that a lot of common products and experiences haven't changed much in the last 50 years. But think about what would be involved in changing the fundamental nature of something like air conditioning or plane travel. Billions upon billions of dollars are invested in building and maintaining the current systems. Financial and physical infrastructure that didn't exist after war world 2, and didn't have to be replaced with something new.

This doesn't explain why we haven't sent a person to mars or had meaningful civil rights reforms. But technological progress is often limited by the switching costs from one paradigm to another. And those costs tend to compound over time