skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't worry, we're heading that way. In 20 years, we'll all be serf-wards of the amazon-google-industrial complex, living of off bezo's benevolence, eating our insects in our shipping container boxes. Nobody has or wants for money- we order allowed goods using cryptographically verified credits distributed by the federal reserve indirectly via stimulus checks to amazon.

The government is indistinguishable from the 10 biggest corporations, as it should be; and all the people need to live and distract themselves to death is provided by heavily automated labour and transport. A few people actually dollarCoins, but you've never seen one. Cash and unregulated cryptocurrencies are illegal, of course, as they aided and abetted terrorists, criminals, pedophiles, the alt-right, and possible alternatives to the powers that be.

Entering your shared containerpartment, you blink away the afterimages from your google glasses as you move to sit down in front of your itechscreen ('smart' was deemed an iq-slur last year, prompting some rebranding.) Your roommate doesn't ask you how the anti-trans-racism protest went; you've never talked to him.

The time between removing your glass and hooking in to the facetube feed is an unpleasant opportunity for your mind to reflect, as you gaze out at the decaying brickwork in the distance before closing the hatch to your cell.

You are free.
Carlsen has done far more to popularize chess than Nakamura. He launched a chess app in 2014. He is the first world champion to regularly play online and accept challenges to blitz games. He has hosted online tournaments with record breaking prizes
Alaska had it's hottest ever recorded summer in 2019 [1] and for quite a few years they've been significantly above average.

It's been said the Arctic is the canary in the coalmine for climate change. Once more of the glaciers and permafrost melt more of suns heat energy will be absorbed rather than reflected, and climate change will accelerate.

[1]
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/high-tem...

https://www.ktva.com/story/40990489/anchorage-officially-saw...

[1] https://phys.org/news/2019-07-alaska-shatters-temperature-la...
For a non-technical text about a basic, broadly-appealing topic, this has disappointingly high level of mentions of something called “FaceTime”.

I have not yet read it all but I already have doubts it's worth reading further after second mention if author just expects all readers to be on Facebook or be familiar with a particular program to connect to others, or with an experience of usage thereof.
Silly me. She was quite young to start with.
The protocol is really simple +5v is 1, 0v is 0. The circuit is just a single conductor and a common ground pin. If you connect a LED between the bus and ground you can visually see packets in form of light pulses.
Square. You won’t find square bits in any supermarket or gas station store. But they’re readily available in hardware stores.

Similarly, the screwdriver bits needed to open a MacBook are readily available from computer repair parts stores.

Seems perfectly analogous to me.
> Most people will just home school their kids.

Wrong and by a huge factor which is why I asked for sources. This source [1] says 3% of children in the US are home schooled. This source [2] says about 3.5%. Even you could give a source that triples those number to 10%, you are are still completely wrong about "most".

> many people on this site went through the US educational system and would cite it as not preparing them for their adult lives

How many? Not only are you speaking for other people, but this is anecdote, not evidence. So far you have a sample size of one: yourself.

> not preparing them for their adult lives

That's partially a failure on the part of parents, not schools. Schools can only do so much. Their job is basic English and math literacy along with some exposure to STEM, perhaps a foreign language and other electives. A high school education will no longer prepare you for adult life, which is why so many countries offer affordable university education. So at the best you might be able to claim that the job of public schools is to prepare you for university. Which loads of public schools in the US are capable of doing. If you work hard in most high schools you can get into a good university.

Are there underperforming schools and especially in some states? For sure. And especially in poor areas. I agree that needs to be fixed. Unfortunately that's not unique to the US.

But if all of US public education is an abject failure like you claim, then you should be able to show how much better either home schooled kids do in life (adjusting for income of parents as causation) or how much better in life kids from other countries do. Lacking either of those, then public schools are doing a pretty good job at least relatively to all available options.

I repeat again: if it were so easy to beat public schools and provide a better service, everyone would already be doing it. It's not that easy. Just as one example, after accounting for the socioeconomic background of students, public school students scored higher than their private school peers on a federal math test [3]. Abject failure?

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/lit_history.asp

[2] https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oii/nonpublic/statist...

[3] http://www.nea.org/home/17824.htm
Hi there! Ankit here, the writer of Being Alone. Thanks so much for sharing this on HN. Appreciate the kind comments and thoughtful reflections here.

Honestly, I didn't anticipate that my writing would find its way to HN—and certainly not the front page—so this is really a pleasant surprise. (By the way, if OP is seeing this, I'd love to know how you found the essay + also thank you directly for thinking to post it here.)

If I can answer any questions about the essay, loneliness and connection more broadly, the practice of being alone, the website, Tea With Strangers (or anything else, really, I'm here for it :).

I'm also reachable at by email (ankit@teawithstrangers.com) and twitter.com/ankitshah. More about me and my background here: https://ankit.fyi/about
yeah and it's fine, honestly I don't care if it takes a bit of a dip, don't want to be a slave of that credit score and I'm not planning to get a mortgage.
What are you specifically referring to?
Unfortunately, the response to that is going to be something to the effect of "Are you calling me stupid?"

Many parents are not going to accept that they had a bad education and could use some catch up. Even fewer are going to accept it if the catch up in question is of elementary school level.
It's so cool that you can get this on internet archive absolutely free, inside the browser, in a JS emulator!

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Castle_of_Dr._Brain_1991
Keep a Brag Document
if ur on a mac shake the cursor really fast and the arrow grows massive. never noticed that before. I was using my curosor to check the blindspot on my eye and was wiggling it in and out at the edge and it freaked me right out. it went in small, disappeared and came out 20x larger. I was like fuck me these eye tricks are mental.
It's not that simple. Hypothetically, I beat my wife. The neighbors call the police. Now I can find out what my wife may have told the police in confidence.
Before I glanced at the authors name, I knew this was Adam Curtis just from the writing style. Instantly reminded me of "Hypernormalisation" (which everyone should watch) and "The Power of Nightmares."
Yes many users have squatted old phone wiring, here in italy in most houses it is embedded in walls, and it is present in most rooms. Being unused and obsolete it can be used for home automation with PJON :)
Really kind of you. Thanks for saying so.

Echoing bobbiechen — it's Squarespace, and this essay was designed as a page, not a blog post, which provided increased flexibility in the design, etc.. It's super robust if you break out of the standard templates.
> As you say, blinking rarely makes its way into conscious thought, despite that the visual input was briefly suspended. (I suppose a similar thing happens with smell. How often do you notice that you don't smell much when you breathe out?) Neither do we notice that our various senses have different latencies, reporting the same event at different times.

Interesting anecdote: I've been through a fair amount of training in perception and conscious proprioception in the military. The end result of all of this training is that I am very often actively paying attention to my body, especially my vision, hearing, and touch. I've noticed that when I blink, I'm consciously aware of what has changed when I finish blinking. I'm aware of how my body moves during this time, if my sense of touch is telling me something is different than before my eyes closed. I can pick things up that I can't see without fumbling for them. It's really interesting how effectively we can mentally model the world around us, incorporate different types of senses to update this global model.

I imagine that professional athletes, race car drivers, Martial artists, etc... develop similar levels of proprioception and modeling.
In emacs, with evil mode, I can do:

<esc>vi`:edit-indirect-region<ret>:html-mode

And edit the string contents as HTML.
Body Cameras Haven't Stopped Police Brutality. Here's Why
I think this is a fair point. ish.

It is true that google/fb don’t sell your data so much as the ad-tracking derived from it. Though they do buy your data from other sources which incentives other firms to collect and sell your data. While you may (rightfully) trust Google’s security practices, I wonder if you would trust the practices of all the other parties who collect or buy your data.

I think it’s also worth looking at the framing of debates on privacy: large firms like google want it to mean that your data is kept as a secret between you and google and you can control who (else) may access it; the other side of the debate want it to mean that you need not live in a world that seems to know so much about things you have done but not made publicly available.

I think I disagree with you somewhat about the distinction between google collecting data and some state like the USA collecting data. The civil service must follow strict rules about such data collection (which private companies need and indeed do not follow), and it is full of scrupulous public servants who want to act responsibly and morally, and who have laws to protect their abilities to do so. The argument that state data collection is worse because of the potential use it would have in enabling tyranny is reasonable. But I think one must concede that firms such as google are able to inflict a lot of tyranny upon people (indeed they currently do this though only to few people and it seems mostly for arbitrary or overlooked reasons).
> "Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as "educational" games."

And that's the problem. Because they are educational. And because they are both educational and fun, people are much more engaged to learn from them than from "real" educational games.

People who play Europe Universalis learn way more about early modern history than they ever learned at school. As Randal Munroe pointed out, you learn way more about orbital mechanics from KSP.

If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn't focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.

Of course there are topics where this is going to be hard. I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar. (Or do I? The best way to learn a language always seems to be to actually use it with a native speaker. Having a friend who speaks the language you're trying to learn would be a great way to do that. There might be something here.)

But something like geology could be part of a simulation where you need to find certain resources, and that's easier once you understand how those resources are formed. And then there needs to be something fun to do with those resources, of course.
Twitter Should Out-Clubhouse the Clubhouse
It's a lot worse than the title claims: almost NO experts ANYWHERE in government are good at their jobs. And it isn't limited to governments of course.

The book "Wrong: Why Experts* Keep Failing Us" by David H. Freedman shows that government, academic and private industry are quite lacking in "expertise". The current pandemic cock-ups with the CDC, "epidemiology experts", reporters, commentators, analysts and political appointees all now make sense.

Freedman doesn't have a solution, instead leaving us with "11 Simple Never-Fail Rules For Not Being Misled by Experts". but the situation laid out does suggest that we (taxpayers) should slash funding for most governmental, academic and private agencies b/c they fail to come through and literally lack expertise.

"No lesson seems to be so deeply inoculated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts."

- Lord Salisbury
Wow, this is a really thoughtfully written page. Thanks for sharing it Pamar. I'll want to take some time to really digest your writing and synthesis of others' perspectives on the topics.
Great write up , I was hoping for more information on how to connect with yourself. Btw your site tea with strangers seems to be down at the moment.
What do you think about this study that compared task completion in java and groovy from which I will paste the conclusion.

> Conclusion
This paper described an experiment comparing static and dy-
namic type systems for programming tasks in an undocu-
mented API. We gave 27 subjects five programming tasks
and found that the type systems had a significant impact on
the development time: for three of five tasks me measured a
positive impact of the static type system, for two tasks we
measured a positive impact of the dynamic type system.
Based on the previous discussion, our overall conclusions
for the use of static/dynamic type systems in undocumented
APIs are the following:
1. There is no simple answer to the static vs. dynamic
typing question: The question of whether or not static
types are helpful for developers cannot be generally an-
swered without taking the programming tasks into ac-
count. In fact, this is completely consistent with the
results of previous experiments, such as Prechelt and
Tichy’s [22], or our own experiments[10, 28].
2. The type system has an influence on the development
time: The choice of the static or dynamic type system had
an influence on the development time for all program-
ming tasks in the experiment. Again, this is consistent
with previous experiments (such as [11, 22, 28]).
3. Dynamic type systems potentially reduce develop-
ment times for easier tasks: Although we are currently
not aware of how to determine exactly what “easy” and
“hard” means, it seems that if a dynamic type systems
has a positive impact, it is for easier tasks (which is
consistent with the experiments described in [10, 28]).
Although there was one counter example in the experi-
ment (task 1), we think that the result for this task is a
consequence of the chosen subjects’ low familiarity with
the dynamic language, Groovy (despite the presence of a
warmup task).
4. Static type systems reduce development times if
(a) the type annotations explicitely document design de-
cisions, or
(b) the number of classes to identify in the programming
tasks is relatively high.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262317340_An_empiri...

Given the challenges to getting a good result identified in the study how do you think it could have been done better today?
But for some kids, the mere act of stopping the game and stepping in as the authority to "teach" is enough to shut them down.

Video games are good at getting through to those who don't respond well to adults stepping in and contextualizing things all the time.
Computers are an evolving symbiotic life form.

It's not hard to guess how this plays out.
The flyleaf (first ed, 3rd printing, 1986) says

This book was set in TeX by Sarah Fliegelmann
at the Weizmann Institute of Science
and printed and bound by MIT Press

That might be another lead.
The lips are blurred with the face, and it would still be useful without sound.
In what ways are computers alive?
Why aren't all former penal colonies full of criminals? Maybe it's because there are a lot of crimes that are situational. For truly violent offenders who refuse to be rehabilitated? Keep them away from everyone else, including other prisoners. For everyone else though? We should be figuring out what they lack and help them find it.

The reason we DON'T do that is because state prisons are glorified slave rackets. The very existence of for-profit prisons is an obscenity that will be seen as being as barbaric as slavery in the long run.
Thank you! Glad you liked it. :)
Of particular worry is accelerated methane release from peat bogs in the thawing permafrost, creating a positive feedback loop (with potentially irreversible consequences) [1] [2].

We’re rapidly running out of runway to mitigate the worst of climate change.

I dread to think how many joules of energy it’s going to take for us to stop emitting carbon, but also sequester that released since the Industrial Age began. I suppose there is some consolation in that enough sunlight hits the Earth in an hour to power humanity for a year, so the clean energy is there for the taking. It’s just going to take decades of sunlight to step back down the carbon curve [3]. Such is the cost of burning ancient sunlight.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback

[3]https://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf
it’s an old adage. when arguing with your wife, would you rather be right, or happy?
It would depend on what services you'd like to run though. A decent chunk of apps may need proot to run in pure termux and others for you to root your device.

Mobile (proper) Linux support for devices is still not thst great even if arm support for most applications is there.
Network protocol stuff, database tools, web clients & servers, games, graphics, AI, cryptography, and various random projects over the past 5-6 years. Some professionally, some for fun.

It's an incredibly adaptable tool. I mean, just take the example of writing type safe Nim code and compiling it to JS for a web client (already handy), then writing a high performance server in the same language, sharing the same types/code, but compiled to C. We can bring together front-end and backend! :)

Another generalist ability is with libraries you can get a high cooperation with Python - you can run Nim from Python and Python from Nim - so you can merge with that ecosystem too and use existing infrastructure as required. And of course an even better situation exists with C and C++.

Personally it's been a great way to diversify my ability to reach different domains with a unified tool.
Touche, but the truth of your point made me sad.
There was at least one masterpiece of educational software in the early 80s: Robot Odyssey. I think it was just too hard and obscure at the time to get much recognition, but I was thrilled to see a write up about its influence in Silicon Valley some years later in the Salon article “The Hardest Computer Game of All Time”

https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/robot-odyssey-the-harde...
The common cold is caused by _many_ coronaviruses and many non-coronaviruses. At least 200 in total, I believe. You’d need to develop (and take) tens if not hundreds of vaccines to do anything useful. There has been some work on rhinovirus vaccines, but it’s pretty natural that COVID (and sars-1 and mers, for that matter) get higher priority.
Ask HN: Will Web Monetization Succeed?
Web monetization looks interesting and promising but will it ever succeed? Lots of vendors, orgs, platforms are starting to support it. It looks like a great alternative and a fresh prespective. Will it grow or just fade off?
Yes, richer countries buy more consumer goods and experiences. You have the relation right but the causality reversed. Large parts of Africa and almost all of Latin America are more highly educated now than 1970s Europe and poorer than it.

Richer countries buy more of everything they want. The most obvious example of economic growth not being associated with education is post Deng Xiaoping China. The huge majority had primary school education at best and the economy just kept growing and growing. On the other side look at any of the Arab petrostates, many university graduates, no real economy except pumping oil.
In my experience talking to academics, the majority population dramatically underestimates just how pervasive racism is in the US today.
I suppose you are also going to tell us that after you’ve fitted all of those perfect functions together into that perfect program, the requirements have never changed.

And I suppose when those requirements never changed you never had to rewrite lots of these perfect functions or resort to “append only” programming in order to make sure regression was impossible instead of making large changes in place.

Forgive me, but it’s clear you have never worked on a program of any consequence, so it’s hard to read your comment and do anything but wish you the best while also completely ignoring its content.
Even if I figured it out, I trust that CIA would suicide me if my ideas ever gained traction. America benefits too much from the world's subjugation. I'll stick to building web apps for SaaS companies.
What is "Web monetization" ?
I’ve had good experiences with swappa, but I don’t think it’s quite as thorough as what you’re looking for.
The full article title doesn't fit HN's 80-char limit, so needs to be shortened. The submitted title was "Data-hungry, invasive app is a voter surveillance tool of extraordinary power", which would normally be fine, but popping Trump off the head of the list was probably too much of a change, so made the title above be a prefix of the original, instead of a suffix.
> Computing saves millions of lives on a regular basis. Can't run modern agriculture or medicine or government without it.

No, we couldn't have. Computing has killed us all.

Good talk I watched the other day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8&feature=youtu.be
:) Happy to know that this exceeded your expectations.

The passage you shared is beautiful, but it's not quite registering how the essay evoked it for you. Can you say more?

Btw - thanks for the flag on the SSL error. Fixed the URL and it should be properly pointing to http://www.teawithstrangers.com now
Radio systems have an antenna that radiate energy into the atmosphere. Other antennas resonate in harmony.

What if you just connect the antenna wires of all the devices together?

That's what a single wire protocol does.
You're right on the money. It's entirely unacceptable considering how heavy-handed the push towards chromebooks were for educational institutions. My 10 year old has been in a public school where they used Chromebooks, and a charter school where they used iPads, and the conversations regarding tech I'd have with her teachers were night and day. Constant issues and support with the chromebooks, and the iPads "just worked."

Apple is not without it's faults, but when UI/UX is concerned, Google, heck all of us, should strive to put forth more effort to try to think things all the way through.
I played civilization a lot back in the day mainly because it was the only game my computer could play. I monitor was so crummy I think it had EGA graphics. because of this now I know what the gardens of Hammurabi and a lot of other of the wonders of the world just by building them and knowing a little bit about what they did for the civilization that actually built them.

factoria is another good one that's really really fun and can also be really really educational if you think about the materials and resources and how you combine them. also if you really want to go crazy with it learning some math will help you fully optimize your factory but it's some pretty complicated math, at least for me.