skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> studies seem to indicate that insects are not capable of feeling pain and suffering

All of the articles (e.g. [0]) I found in a quick search in response to this citation-free assertion suggested that the answer is more nuanced that that. I'd also observe that higher primates (e.g. chimps) that have pain mechanisms that are biologically very similar to ours can have a very different response to us. If you watch film of social interactions of chimps, e.g. [1], it's a fairly routine occurrence for an individual to apparently ignore injuries that would have a human screaming (e.g. a finger partially severed in a fight with a rival), especially if it would affect their hierarchical status to run away. So I wouldn't read too much into observed behaviour as an indicator of what is actually going on, at least for primates.

[0] https://reducing-suffering.org/do-bugs-feel-pain/

[1] https://monkeyworld.org/monkey-life/
> pure-luck impossibility selling a company to Yahoo!

Regardless of how you feel about pg, his selling Viaweb to Yahoo was not pure luck - he had to build Viaweb first.
> you have to have the right information shown in the right ways for people to develop a correlative, intuitive understanding of what they've built

Lots of things have to be right for this to work, unfortunately, and company dashboards I've seen so far tend to be nowhere near it.

For instance, the dashboard refreshed $PERIOD only makes sense if you're showing data that updates $PERIOD, and if you can respond to changes in that data $PERIOD. $PERIOD = "in realtime" or "every minute" or "hourly" or whatever is relevant in a given context.

If you're looking at the dashboard much more frequently than the data changes, you're wasting time. If the data changes much more frequently than you're looking at it, you're likely to miss things, as 'geofft mentions elsewhere in the thread. And if you can't react to the data roughly as fast as it's updating, there's no point in looking at it so often. All those periods - recording, observing and reacting - must be roughly similar for the always-on dashboard to be useful, relative to generating reports every now and then.

Panels full of lights and charts work on fighter jets or on the bridge of the Enterprise, because the pilots/crew are in a tight feedback control loop with their dashboards.

(WRT. reacting in time, there are also error bars to consider. For instance, people on a diet are advised to weigh themselves weekly and not daily, because body mass varies by +/- 2kg during the day, so a naïve person checking weight daily would get fixated on those random oscillations. It's easier to tell regular people to reduce measurement frequency than to explain to them what a low-pass filter is and how is it relevant here. I have a feeling there's plenty of dashboard misuse that amounts to that too.)

--

Speaking of the Enterprise and "getting the feel for the system", there's something that I'd like to try one day: make a monitoring tool that translates various system metrics into background sounds, creating an ambience similar to the one you hear on the Enterprise-D[0][1]. I feel a somewhat unobtrusive mix of background noises would be better to develop "the feel for the system" than a visual dashboard. Real-life examples of this are combustion engine's RPM, or spinning rust hard drives, if anyone still remembers those.

--

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKBvaOLDem0 - the bridge

[1] - In Enterprise's engineering, there's a well-known pulsating sound of the warp core; I can't find a good enough YouTube video (whatever there is, apparently got broken by YT's audio compression). This background pulsing correlated to the speed Enterprise was traveling with.
> "Aerogel from fruit biowaste produces ultracapacitors with high energy density and stability" (2020) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X1...

Years ago, I remember reading about supercapacitor electrodes made from what would be waste hemp bast fiber. They used graphene as a control. And IIRC, the natural branching structure in hemp (the strongest natural fiber) was considered ideal for an electrode.

"Hemp Carbon Makes Supercapacitors Superfast" https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/hemp-carbon-ma...

How do the costs and performance compare? Graphene, hemp, durian, jackfruit

While graphene production costs have fallen due to lots of recent research, IIUC all graphene production is hazardous due to graphene's ability to cross the lungs and the blood-brain barrier?
Seems to be this app

https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/fcvn65/for_fu...

"Please be patient as we prep the code for release. This may take a few days." "Go watch/star this GitHub repo, when we push you'll be notified."
Forgive me if I'm totally off base, but do the paradoxes get resolved if the Many-World hypothesis is a foundation of our universe?
What am I missing here? Is there any reason why another company can't just take over, seeing as they could probably get the equipment at a great discount?
I've been using spaced repeition to review highlights from books. I do it with Readwise (not affiliated, just a very happy customer). A large part of the reason I never stuck to Anki was the friction of creating, syncing, formatting the cards. This tool plugs into your services automatically so takes care of that.

https://readwise.io/

Related:

Quantumn Country: A free introduction to quantum computing and quantum mechanics. Uses spaced repetition baked in directly into the article to aid comprehension and retention.

https://quantum.country/
FWIW there's a Prolog-based graph DB called Terminus: https://medium.com/terminusdb https://github.com/terminusdb

I don't know much about it but they are associated with Seshat Global History Databank http://seshatdatabank.info/ which, if I understand correctly, is something like a serious attempt at "psychohistory" (like in Asimov's Foundation.) https://medium.com/terminusdb/stuffing-the-whole-human-histo...
/r/moderatepolitics is my new /r/politics.
Oh yeah? What is the correct interpretation of

*a.b

Is it

(*a).b

Or

*(a.b)

Your heuristic says it should be the former. Is it? What about this one:

*a->b
Coronavirus Is Spreading in NYC
In what way?

How would you describe it in a way everyone can understand in as few words?
The point is risk mitigation. It seems to me we should expect an increasingly turbulent natural environment that will be driving an increasingly turbulent political environment.

If you don't remember the 2003 blackout, perhaps failure modes aren't forefront in your mind, but they merit consideration. Designing for 2050 while assuming the world looks like 1950 is a bad idea.
Appeal to authority is not the same as appeal to expertise. An expert does have a better shot at knowing. Appeal to authority is saying "climate change doesn't exist, the US president denies it", appeal to expertise is saying "artificial general intelligence is not coming soon, Michael I. Jordan denies it".
What do you mean? As I understand it it depends on the font - you can provide any sort of encoding. So Unicode is there, I don't see how that would be harder than with the latin abc (which is still a hard problem as per the article)
Yes, this is exactly what a dam is (pumping or releasing, or using rain).

Hydo is very cool, and very green.

Some things to remember, however:

- need to drown whole valleys (very high impact on local wildlife)

- energy density is not that good (i don't have the numbers but the volumes of water moved are huge, hence dams)

- very rapid piloting and low maintenance, so nice to absorb spikes
what is the image4io?
> * I would personally advise against taking advice from Reddit beyond simply basic answers about various financial products and maths.*

A lot of people would do well to just get through the 'basic steps' (budget, emergency fund, empoyer-sponsored matching, high interest debt, etc):

* https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics

> ... downvoted to hell.

I think if you're going to go against the conventional wisdom, then you have have some good justification for doing so. People who think they've found a 'clever' new way of doing something often (a) have not considered all the ramifications, and/or (b) got lucky with respect to the particular circumstances of their success (e.g., investing in TSLA instead of SPY).

> I still think having a relationship with a financial advisor you trust is better than taking advice from strangers on the internet.

Depending on the "advisor", the strangers may actually give you more objective advise.
> Getting into an incubator or getting money from investors is zero measure of business success.

"Put your money where your mouth is"

It may not be a measure of business success, but is a validation of an idea, a team, or both. That's a strong validation IMO.
The operator precedence in the article is just an example of a principle that does hold: A series of choices, each individually plausibly the right call, lead to a bizarre situation that doesn't feel right.

However, often (and I submit this very article as exhibit A), the logic is reversed: One observes a bizarre scenario, points at it, and goes: I don't know what or how, but clearly somebody somewhere messed up.

That's not true; sometimes seemingly simple things simply aren't simple, and you need to take into account all users of a feature and not just your more limited view.

Take operator precedence. __operator precedence is an intractable problem__.

Some languages try to make it real simple for you and say that all binary operators are resolved left to right, and have the same precedence level. This makes it easy to explain and makes it much simpler to treat anything as an operator; a feature many languages have. Smalltalk works like this. The smalltalk language spec fits on a business card; obviously, you must use such principles as C's operator precedence table would otherwise occupy most of your card!

But that does mean that `1 + 2 * 3` is 9 and not 7, and that is extremely weird in other contexts.

So, you're in a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation: There is no singular answer: No operator precedence rule is inherently sensible regardless of the context within which you are attempting to figure out how operator precedence works: It is an intractable problem.

One way out is to opt out entirely and make parentheses mandatory. If you then also make it practical and say that the same operator associates left to right regardless of what operator it is, you can still write, say, `1 + 2 + 3 + 4`, but you simply aren't allowed to write `1 + 2 * 3` – you are forced to write `1 + (2 * 3)` or `(1 + 2) * 3`. But now anybody who feels they can copy problems from math domains, or from technical specifications such as a crypto algorithm description now gets tripped up. You may disagree (I certainly do), but a significant chunk of programmers just prefer shorter code. I would certainly prefer my languages to work this way, and have configured my linters like this as well, but it's still not a universally superior solution regardless of point of view.

In other words, had Ritchie chosen to go with this 'when in doubt, do not compile it' strategy, this article could not be written. And we'd still have programmers unhappy with how the operator precedence rules work.
I think the point is tanks in general have little use in the vast majority of modern American battles.
I have a hard time believing this. My six year old has been using that menu just fine for years now, and on my phone (Galaxy S9+) one of those settings is either dark grey with a light gray icon, or bright blue with a white icon. It's hard to imagine being confused by that. Maybe your menu looks significantly different?
Unless they also donated launch costs, and $90 million per year to run it[1], it's no surprise that they're not actually using it. It's small compared to the overall budget, but not free.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy_2018...
The production of armaments is a bit of an economic anomaly, to be honest. All businesses, including arms manufacturers, require a constant flow of business in order to cover their fixed costs and remunerate their investors (debt holders and shareholders). If governments only order weapons when they need them to fight a war, then the arms manufacturers would shut form at the end of a conflict and would take ages to “gear up” again when a new conflict arises, stymying response and lessening the deterrence implicit in having a standing army. Consequentially, it actually makes sense (from a strategic point of view) to keep weapons manufacturers “ticking over” with a constant flow of orders even if that just results in growing stockpiles. One of the reasons that profits are di high for weapons manufacturers is that according to the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) the rush of a government suddenly cutting off orders during peacetime and rendering the company unprofitable and probably bankrupt needs to be offset by high dividends in the here-and-now and with low historic volatility.

Now, I’m not saying I support this, far from it, but that’s (one of) the rationale(s).
Not the parent, but that would be very much a yes from me. Writing something safety-critical in a language like Python or JS would terrify me.
2020 Coolest Swag
https://image4.io/en
D-star hexaquark – a new candidate for dark matter
US does have marginal tax brackets. There is the benefit cliff. But there are also tax credits that phase out progressively with higher incomes. Though I doubt, but don't know, than any of those produce net negatives. They may be closer to net neutral.

The OP was describing the same thing as you. People don't understand marginal tax brackets and do silly things like not want raises for tax reasons.
I had pretty much the same workflow. Then I made Mochi[0] so that I could keep my notes and cards in the same app, and link them together mind-map-style.

[0] https://mochi.cards/
While it is whataboutism, it’s saying (in less words) that instead of painting Tesla in a negative light for $50M, the candle should be shining on the government for the billions wasted in the military every year.

I read it as a dismissal of the article because it seems like it was written just for clicks. An article about the government’s waste doesn’t get as many clicks.
I only know not to write things so complex because either I have made the mistake or some generation of someone I've learned from has made the mistake. It's not a logic problem, where the less complicated, better understood and more general rules of precedence allow writing equations that are terse, objective, and easily parsed by humans: it was born with C's invented, abstraction-breaking rules of precedence. You only learn it with a C-like language. What's a bit to a mathematician?

I'd argue the practices that are most popularly known as 'good practices' are to avoid mistakes that are common.
It seems like this is missing the point of the post:

> What's not happening is the advent of any drug, vaccine, antibody or anything else in time to keep this epidemic from becoming a very big problem. That's because it is already a very big problem

We don't need a treatment in a few months, or even a few weeks. We need a treatment _now_, and we don't have one. Even if remdesivir works, and we can show that _now_, we need to ramp up production and distribution.

Also, it seems like it could be covered in tomorrow's/Friday's post:

> either tomorrow or Friday I hope to do a post on all the things that are going on in the biopharma industry for a possible coronavirus treatment [... ] as anyone who knows anything about drug or vaccine or antibody development knows, we are many months away from the quickest possible proven intervention (more on this in the promised post)
I'm curious how this is the conclusion you made instead of becoming more macro-organized. People are getting more and more stressed (see burn-outs rising), affecting our immune systems. Most of us are still encouraged to go into work when we have a cold. Many could work from home, but are actively or passively stigmatized when attempting to do so. For all its draconian measures, China is showing them to be effective for the time being. In the same way, we could've rid ourselves of many pests, plagues and illnesses ages ago which a simple "get your immune system up bro" couldn't deal with.
Stop trying to deflect blame from Google. They go out of their way to show garbage. They sacrifice their search results as much as they can get away with, in order to show more ads. Reddit does not do this nearly to the degree as Google. It’s not even close. There are ways to filter through the noise, it just doesn’t involve companies with financial conflicts of interest.
I haven't ever been in the position of defunding the US military, so I can't speak to the moral questions they might have faced.

I _have_ investigated child sexual abuse because that's my job which is why I felt it relevant to comment.

I wasn't looking to get into a long-winded argument about the second amendment.
I am not located in the US or Canada and I am pretty sure there are not dozens of organizations that have my photo, not even the state. The material collected from banking machines is tightly regulated and has to be completely deleted after a certain time. It is for immediate cases of theft and the data never sees long term storage. A completely different scenario compared to databases with biometric data.

> I have no reason to not believe it helps in child exploitation cases

The argument is that it isn't enough to justify deployment. Not having kids helps against exploitation cases. I already gave another example. You are free to look after your kids in the most intrusive form if you wish for more security. Give them the largest transmitter you can install on them without hurting their backs. Mass surveillance has significant repercussion for public spaces. We wouldn't even need it with a falling crime rate, but that is another discussion.

In my state surveillance in general is forbidden. There are many good reasons for that. Abuse, the thing you are painting on the wall, being the most prominent one. This is why the laws got put into place.

> some small unit did it

With the controversies around video surveillance and the deployment costs of such software, I believe this to be unlikely. It is also no excuse for that matter.
Thanks! I should have footnoted that too. I get it from the systems thinking world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
I read an interview with an NRO scientist, who described his group as following carefully the progress of the Hubble team who were independently solving many of the same problems their teams had solved earlier. From a national security perspective, they had to sit on their hands and not offer any help, but from an engineering perspective, they valued having another team do it to see if they would validate their design by coming up with similar solutions.
and thank you again when reading stack traces

it's never fun to track down a bug to a line that is doing 8 things.
As he wrote it in the article, OCR is an order of magnitude slower.
Depending on your domain, they can be super useful, if not indispensable, for Named Entity Recognition.
Ultra-High-Energy Density Supercapacitor
If I thought it would help I'd send my fence off to be trained as a Navy physician but it seems to be able to handle the task fine without the additional training.
The sad thing is most companies I've seen don't do either 1 or 2. They do:

3. Your write normal software, i.e. unreliable crap, and you fix only the bugs that block ship. Once you ship, you either:

3a. Don't touch it. Move on to a different project, leaving the software as perpetual crap, or

3b. Cram in more features, only fixing new bugs that prevent shipping those new features. Repeat 3b until nobody can maintain it anymore, then blame some nebulous "technical debt" for why we need a rewrite.
Absolutely is a hot piece. Look how they went out of their way to mention that Musk is a billionaire (is that even true?). Hating on billionaires - so hot right now.
> The laws of physics sure are harsh. Such as there is no safe level of radiation

This is debatable[1]. I'm not saying you're wrong, but this isn't settled science and there are some interesting experiments planned to help us better understand whether or not there is radiation hormesis. Given that we and all of our ancestors have lived with some level of radon exposure, it could be an adaptive trait that has been selected for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
"Emotions _are_ facts."

No, they are not. They are your emotions. Not saying that they are less real or that they should be dismissed, but a threat is a fact, your fear is your emotional reaction to it. There is a difference.

The difference is that you have control over your thoughts, reactions and emotions.
If you do not differentiate between the outside world of facts and the inside world of thoughts and emotions, you mush them together into a mess.

I can learn to master my emotions and for example dissolve my fear. That will not remove the threat. If I learn to assess the threat regardless of my emotional reaction to it, I get a better grasp on the severity of the threat and can react accordingly.

That is not to say that emotions should be ignored. I'd recommend against that. Listen to yourself. If you feel the desire to journal them, by all means, do it. But for journaling _I_ prefer to differentiate and try to keep my emotions out of the narrative. You are free to do otherwise.
... and almost no one will see those extremely authoritative answers because Quora wants me to make an account to read them ...
Not quite pure luck he was in the right place at the right time with the right skills. I would say this is nearly impossible to reproduce today compared to the 90s its not exactly a wide open field, niches are filled rapidly and there is arguably a massive glut of smart people trying to escape desperate poverty. This is why I see Bernie signs on every corner.
Exactly. My oldest son, now 10, has been perfectly able to swim on his own. We live in a former port area with lots of great swimming spots that he visits with his friends. But he's got his swimming diplomas (two of them, which I consider the minimum for this situation).

Sea, though, can be tricky. Half a mile out to sea, currents can be very different. I know that I as a kid once floated on a tiny inflatable boat quite a bit out to sea, and my dad swam after me to drag me back. I thought I could get back on my own, but my dad clearly wasn't entirely convinced.
How about a demo that does not force a login to github. I dont trust you, or your app with my creds. Seems sketchy imho.
Can Cleveland Become the Next Tech Hub?
Login with Google, Chrome only extension... no thanks.
Is that really true when modern American battles seem to always evolve into endless occupations?
> people should focus on improving their immune system

Okay, but for those who cant, underlining conditions etc, what do you suggest ?

This is the world we live in, and that kind of build up you're talking about that would fight off all these strains of virus' would take generations of active measures.

In the meantime, I don't think it's a bad idea to develop vaccines and shots which will aid our immune system.

Our body uses the memory DNA (or memory cells - Not a doctor) after getting chicken-pox so that we (usually) don't get it again. But the COVID strains vary so much it's a little pie-in-the sky right now to imagine naturally fighting all of them.

Our best defense is our ability to maintain good hygiene in this generation. We know all about how these things spread, and that should be the primary focus for the every day to day person.
Took a few years, but glad that Government degree finally came in useful! (=
Was about to write the same :)
I've never tried it on mobile.
Luckily, the M and D commute.

(...Over the reals. Your mileage may vary in less exact types. The Surgeon General recommends avoiding division in production code. Regulations vary by state.)