skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Astrophysics does have pretty considerable on-going problems as a result of its inability to do real experiments. Even regular physics is heading the same way. Dark matter is basically a giant admission that our models of the universe don't match reality and we have no idea why or how to fix them. String theory does trigger big debates about whether it's actually science or not.

Astrophysics is saved as a science largely by the universe's close relationship with more testable on-earth physics - the motion of planets is Newtonian motion which can be experimented on locally, the physics inside a star is something that can be replicated in a Tokamak, and so on. Sometimes observations are all we have to go on, like with the light bending observation that cemented Einstein as right, but that's rare. Mostly physics yields to experiments. When it doesn't you do see decades without progress.

those models are constantly checked against new findings

I think I'll have to dispute that. My research into epidemiology and its history suggests that this part never seems to happen except by outsiders. Models produce totally failed predictions, in fact often reality falls outside even the uncertainty bounds that are already very generous.

Scientists would at this point stop and say, hmm, there seems to be a problem with germ theory. Our predictions are wrong so we need a refined theory. They'd then design experiments to figure out what that problem is.

Epidemiologists never do this, perhaps because they often don't have a medical background. They can't simply switch contexts and start doing lab experiments. So they simply declare themselves to be highly successful despite all the evidence they weren't, and wait for the next outbreak. Then they jump up and present often the same or very similar models to policymakers as "science", and inform them if they don't immediately implement the epidemiologists recommendations (which are always extreme) millions will die.

COVID is a case in point. Imperial presented a model that was in the words of its author based on "thousands of lines of undocumented C written over 13 years ago to model flu pandemics":

https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1241835454707699713...

It's rather ironic that we've seen endless attacks on people who "claim it's just like the flu" when one of the world's leading epidemiologist literally used a flu model to predict COVID.

But this statement implies epidemiological theories and models didn't really change in 13 years. And when you look at these models in depth, that isn't a surprise. They're astonishingly simple. There hasn't been any breakthrough in germ theory from these people, and their models always predict massive epidemics that don't actually happen. To explain this they'd need to do medicine, or at least honestly admit that current theory is inadequate to explain observed reality. They never do this, which is why in my eyes they aren't scientists.
Attitudes such as this are the problem. Civilization has a cost, that cost is paid with taxes.

Edit: I didn’t pickup in the sarcasm. Mea culpa.
This is embarrassing, try reloading the page. I'm using some website builder, I guess I'll have to move somewhere else. It doesn't normally do this.
I think work like this will really bring a whole new life to a lot of video game music. Today, we see some really great composers making cinematic-level music for video games, which is great. What worlds often miss is ambient sounds, a radio as you're driving or something that reacts to how you act (Actions per minutes go up, maybe the tempo does too?) without having to compose a TON of music.
When I called my ISP to switch over to my own modem they stop charging me the extra $10 a month to rent the modem but said just to keep it. It’s nothing more than a money grab.
There's also orchards, and beekeeping, raising chickens for eggs might qualify.

As well as this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism
"Rule 11: Which database technology to choose:
Choose SQL when you need to do ad hoc queries and/or you need support for ACID and transactions. Otherwise choose no-SQL"

I think it should be the contrary: SQL by default, no-SQL if you have a specific need and know what you are doing.
If you tie your self-respect on how useful are you to the company that pays you, you are fucked. For them you are just a number.
Wow those are really good points I hadn't heard yet about future outlook for colleges.

There's a lot of parents whom children are in high school now that already went through the student loan debt cycle so we should start seeing the effects of that soon.

Perhaps we'll see a rise in trade/vocational school as a result.

I think the stigma of not going to college is changing a lot (for the better) or at least in the programming world it seems that way.
Given a choice of renting a router from Centurylink for $10/month and purchasing it for roughly $100, I purchased it a couple years ago. It already paid off for itself, but an interesting thing happened in December:

I received a phone call from CenturyLink saying that I'm eligible for free upgrade from 100Mbps to 1Gbps. Surprised with their benevolence, I double checked the agent to verify that this is not a scam. They ran some checks and determined that I will need to replace the router with a newer model to handle faster speeds. I said that I purchased the router from CenturyLink, and I'm ok swapping it for a newer model, as long as there are no extra fees, and that I will own (and not rent) the new model. They agreed to this. I got the new modem in mail, swapped it, got the gigabit speed and sent the original one back. Next month I saw a $10 modem rental charge. I called them, they argued, I argued back, they said that they'll need my permission to transcribe the earlier conversation (that's strange, because they always play the message that a conversation will be recorded). A few days later they called back saying that they transcribed the call, found out that they agreed to not renting the modem, apologized and gave me a refund.

I still don't fully understand why they offered me higher speed without paying more. I had no recording of the phone call and they had the upper hand, but they were fair in resolution. Overall, I had a very good run with Centurylink despite hearing only horror stories about American ISPs.

TLDR: Be very explicit on the call when someone offers to upgrade the modem that you own.
> Where are the resources for understanding why useless "proof-of-work" wankery burns electricity and CPU cycles that could be spent folding viral RNA in simulation or doing pattern-recognition DSP on radio-telescope data or something useful?

mises.org is a great place to begin to understand.

Bitcoin is bringing real value into the world by allowing people to save money for a rainy day without making risky investments, and without subjecting the wealth they've earned to the possibility of theft or seizure by the state or anyone else.

As for "crypto," the kind being mentioned in the article here, your guess is as good as mine. These are just scams intended to rake in money from naive investors and speculators, based upon a complete misunderstanding of why Bitcoin was designed the way it is.

As for folding RNA and other useful stuff - that's all nice, but somebody has to pay the costs. That somebody, hopefully, is paying it voluntarily. I might even be happy to volunteer some of my money to causes like that. The "steal hard earned money from people to pay for pet projects" ideology is a non-starter for me though.
It's very obviously not possible to get there by cutting consumption. It has been for a while, but that is all that is allowed into political discourses... probably because the anti-humanity "green" movement is so loud.

It is also very obviously possible to solve the problem.
*STEM PhDs are almost always funded.
Apple's branching scheme for LLVM-project
I have subjective reasons to believe either interest party contacts triple A producers, of AAA games, to sabotage the performance of arbitrary partners. Intel, ie, not to name names, might tell the triple A producer, or GFX producer, or whatever, to compile with a certain compiler, or settings, to promote, or dispromote, certain brands, and configurations.

I am tired but you get the point, some firms sabotage, and pay money, etc, or subsidise hardwares, etc, to get their rotten foot across, it's happening all the time. Can't really deny it. The whole commercial field is a pos when you get down to every bread and crumb.

Anyone who downvotes me should be logged, they're invested in this shitty business. I know you need food for your kids, but, let's acknowledge the truths, my post won't rob you of incomes or anything. Let's paint the kettles black. We all need to eat, but, on which corpses, right. Lagerkommandants fucking assholes. Fucking faggots man
https://autotools.io/index.html
What’s the betting that when Apple move to ARM processors AMD and Intel both start developing their own ARM CPUs. I have a feeling it’s going to be extremely hard for x86 to compete once Apple show the way on this.
33029*, not so much as an email.
Covid-19 was not manmade or genetically modified (Intelligence Community)
"AV" being audio/visual, anti-virus, else?
I would say that PHP is pretty similar to Ruby and Python. It has a messier history and some inconsistent syntax that people like to complain about. On the other hand it has a huge community, a wide selection of web frameworks, a big set of useful built in functions and libraries, an ecosystem of useful services (for example around Symfony and Laravel) and excellent performance for a scripting language. Both the language and the ecosystem is still developing at a good pace.

In addition there are CMS:es like WordPress, Magento and Drupal with huge market shares that can be used for everything from small blogs where you to pick a theme and get a site up in minutes, to large e-commerce sites up to advanced headless backends for large publishing platforms.

It is declining in use, but the way I see it it's only because there are more alternatives nowadays, not because it's not a good option.
Apple and Google will warn you if you’ve been exposed to Covid-19
The news is terrible but Wall Street is having its best month in decades
I have tried(not hard enough) I guess I don't know when it's working. Perhaps too what I said about "being in the moment" just means the details you normally glance over you notice eg. leaves on a plant or something.

Yeah I don't do the stuff anymore because it does not go with my brain(paranoia/feeds into delusion). I also can't logically function(write code). But yeah I'm going to try and do that more often, like stop and look around me, count items or something.
Kubernetes is very different from Borg.
Given the similarity of your description to my own alma mater, I can virtually guarantee that that football program is self-sufficient, and probably raises your university's profile. They couldn't charge that much for tickets otherwise. So I don't really see the harm.
I find it funny that the SSL cert on antirez.com is throwing PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR
Well ... You can. A lot of things will change and there'd be much disruption and churn in academic institutions, but it is possible.
How much different/better/worse is this compared to Kubernetes?
I think the bad results occurred when there were too many variations in shadow and color on the faces.

People with clean lines and smooth gradients on their faces came out better.
At my office, we heavily lean on Postgres' JSONB capabilities, especially for archived data that is occasionally accessed, and also to handle data dumps from other services. The JSONB traversal operators are intuitive and the searching is fast-enough to be useful. Yet another reason that I reach for Postgres first time, every time.
My grandmother used to pay $3.99 (iirc) a month to the ISP for a "protection plan" on the cable wire underneath her house.
Oh it's hot tub time!
Definitely a market for this. There are so many events that like to use music as background noise but due to licensing restrictions in music you have to be careful what you use.
In economics this is what is called rent-seeking behavior, and I think it probably is an exceptionally interesting area of research to study how financialization of industries modifies rent-seeking behavior in those industries. My own hunch is that it probably increases significantly.
> Is that bad?

It depends on your point of view. Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons?

I found my philosophy classes quite enlightening. They were required for my degree in CogSci.

If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes.

Also, there are some majors that lead to professional school. English/Rhetoric are often majors of people going into law school for example.
The future will be AI lawyers battling for rights of AI generated music in the style of deceased artists on behalf of AI media corporations at the expense of robotic listeners.

Before all of this, we'll probably see improvised bands of deceased artists playing together AI generated music in their own style, not to mention long dead actors appearing in new movies etc. AI technology is going to give law firms a lot of work in the future.
Debt is good. It's what enables people who don't have the money up front to start businesses or buy houses. It becomes bad when people are relying on it to finance small purchases or when loans have predatory terms (like credit card payments, payday loans, etc.)
How to Hack a Mac Using a Trojan in Kali Linux
I find this attitude puzzling. If they wanted to start, why not? It seems, according to the comment by the author itself, that they had a lot of fun, and it seemed like an interesting project. So I don't see any reason to back away from it? On the other hand, for the precisely same reason, I see perfectly reasonable that they didn't continue with it. If the fun is gone, why continue?
> It's no different than the mercenary company 'Blackwater' rebranding itself to 'Academi' after it became notorious.

Wow, I'd totally missed that. Going full 180 from the comically evil-sounding Blackwater to the modern and vaguely nerdy Academi, complete with hipster-friendly spelling variant, sounds like something straight out of a comedy sketch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi
Colleges should not even offer loans for non-viable majors.

Picking a major should not be like Indiana Jones picking which grail to drink from.
WebGL 2.0 renderer: clearcoat, sheen, PBR based on metallic/roughness
Won't =/= Can't
i.e. they may been seen as an attractive acquisition
AMD were developing their own ARM CPU for a while. They dropped it to focus on Zen 2, and after looking at the results it's easy to see why.
> Culture fit shouldn't be assessed.

I can't agree with this, you need to work well with the people you see every day.
> And that is where I think we are failing as a society.

For sure!

I would love your inputs on my thoughts on this topic but I'm in a conundrum:

1. If I put a link to my thought, people flag my post as self promotion

2. If I copy paste my thoughts more than once on the same thread, people flag my post as adding noise, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961683

So I guess the only thing I can do now is kindly request you to look at my recent post history on this thread.
Have you looked into protobuf? Seems like it should do the trick
Germany for example offers free education for Americans/foreigners. I remember this was discussed a while back on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9308261
Right, that's why I said search and not a block. Two months ago isn't very long ago and it wasn't very interesting the other two times.
I'll be facetious and say it's now: Their sheep pen on their land across most of the world.

On a more serious note, their land really applies to the rich could tax you. They didn't care about taking care of the land - the only reason why they owned it is to tax it.

Nothing's changed for the better on that front.
Dollar Doubling and Bitcoin Halving: Why the Bitcoin Price Is Going to $100k
Or do active capture after we migrate the electrical grid to renewables.
Good debt is also known as leverage. It’s essential in the real estate business. Incurring a debt for a depreciating asset is dumb (cars, boats,) but for an asset that appreciates, it actually is good.
This. Embedded isn't in love with the latest web framework. Skills live for decades, not for minutes.

Now, even in embedded, not every employer sees the value in 30 years of experience. Those that do, though, understand that such a person is more valuable than someone with 5 years, and will pay accordingly.
>>...barely better than a high-end air/fan cooling setup.

A large air cooler will be as effective, possibly more effective, than an AIO water cooler. What matters is radiator surface air x airflow. AOIs tend to have small surface area radiators and quiet fans because that is their target market. Water cooling does have some advanteages, but for coninuous heavy loads all that really matters is radiator capacity. The large air-cooled radiator is going to have more veins with more surface area covered by a more powerful fan than the typical AOI radiator.
A classic:

Starbucks does not use two-phase commit

https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/ramblings/18_s...
Hmm, not sure on this. If the problem is solving is big enough, I would think people would bite as soon as they're able to validate the software solves their problem. Check out how Jason Cohen founded WP Engine as a counterpoint.

I mean, perhaps ALL of software is so saturated there are no places where this can happen, but I'd rather spend a couple of years discovering that then spend a couple of years learning that one solution I tried to sell isn't valid.
I agree with your gist of "keep learning", but some of what you say about obsolescence of knowledge seems overstated to me.

> The languages you learned? Gone.

I'm not sure if I'll ever get to write Modula-2 again. But every few years, knowing some PostScript can come in handy. FORTH has a tendency to pop up on every resource constrained platform for a while. Tcl has preserved some niches.

And C++ is both old and new technology. Some details have stuck around for 35 years, but if you don't reinvent your style every 10 years or so, you risk becoming obsolete.

> The APIs and weird hardware limitations? Irrelevant.

Hardware limitations tend to come in cycles. Just when resource constraints on macOS seemed irrelevant, along came iOS with its murderous daemons baying for the blood of resource hungry processes. Just when resource constraints in iOS seemed irrelevant, along came watches.

And a Commodore PET with its 7167 bytes of available RAM and fairly accessible hardware ports has some similarity with an Arduino Uno.

So while I think it's unwise to bank on some knowledge never ceasing to be useful, or that no new technology is ever worth learning, knowing old stuff in itself is not a drawback.
Raspberry Pi announces $50 12-megapixel camera with interchangeable lenses
This is the audio equivalent of "name one thing in this photo". Deep in the uncanny valley but fascinating.

We're getting closer. Music is proving to be a tough use case for generative ML.
oh that's interesting and it produces a little story.

I don't know in the back of my mind if I ever really get into that personal assistant thing and want a wrapper/face around it, this would be interesting. Sadly many of the voices are bad... but there are those services you can sample a voice and get a voice to use for TTS, that could be something. Then licensing issues but yeah and latency from API trips
We release our model weights and code here https://github.com/openai/jukebox/, so you can directly build on top of them and don’t have to train from scratch
>Deep fakes and 3D transforms will mean any horny people can see anyone they want to naked.

A VR porn version of deepfakes... this is already close enough to possible that I would be shocked if someone weren't already working on it.
So the solution is don’t have human relationships?

Some this can’t be avoided, some of it can, despite relationships, if people stick to principles and also balance the requirements of all their constituencies.
15m of Googling after seeing the press on this announce - definitely not pretending to be an expert.

But - let's assume that cursory look at primary clients is correct. It appears they're all government agencies. They don't sell much to private business.

The things that make SpaceX and Blue Origin so interesting is that it utterly bucks the government procurement model, making them riskier ventures.

SpaceX and Blue Origin maintain their own product roadmaps, based on their own reading of the marketplace, what technology can do, and their long-term vision.

These other contractors, like Lockheed, General Dynamics, and apparently Dynetics, have an inherently mercenary business model. They only respond to contracts already out on the market - there's little to no incentive for them to blaze a path forward.

They win on graft, running up the bill on cost-plus contracts, and taking advantage of the procurement process that wastes trillions.

The defining question to me - why didn't Boeing or Lockheed build reusable rockets?

Blue Moon started work far before this contract awarded a dime. Same with Starship. These guys have made their money off SLS - a snakepit of corruption and waste.

I'd feel the same way about any company that's primarily a government contractor. There's a big difference in approach between the military-industrial companies, and "New Space" companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX.
Are you sure that these licenses no longer exist? The FCC has a detailed section of their website about them: https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-divis...

I am not sure what relevance they have these days. The FAA seems to handle everything involving aviation radios. I know nothing about shipping. Everything else seems to be computer-based (so you don't operate the radio, you operate a computer that operates the radio in accordance with FCC rules).
$80B into Broadband Expansion
In the best case, yes. In the worst case, users can't connect -- which goes in contrast with the "It Just Works" use case for Zoom.

P2P is great if you're small, but eventually it makes sense to do client-server with servers in the data centers to get that extra 10% of customers. Skype and Spotify are both formerly-P2P applications that went client-server.
>>> I don't know how hard they negotiate (but it's Oracle so probably pretty hard).

Can't be too hard. It's Oracle so they let you in nicely enough, then they screw you later when you're locked in, increasing cost substantially on every renewal, changing terms and billing arbitrary things.

I think Zoom could get away with any terms really (AWS is not hard to beat on bandwidth to begin with). Oracle cloud is desperate for customers, even more than Azure and GCP, but Oracle has the willingness to increase costs tenfold and change terms arbitrarily later unlike competitors, so all things considered don't expect them to have too much regards for the (initial) terms.

On the database they are notorious for trying to charge test databases (normally don't need a full license), any server they can find (up to you to evidence it's not running oracle) or even your entire virtualized datacenter because VMs can migrate so the entire datacenter should be the machine when it comes to billing and they bill by core.
In this case, they will be far more happy with the popularity associated with Zoom using them, much more than whatever money zoom will pay them. This gives their marketing/sales folks far more material than the money from Zoom can buy them.
My only complaint is the use of capitalization as public private. Because I quickly run out of naming variables/instances/structs, and naming is hard!