skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Also, there's no character limit here, you can write the entire phrase instead of using obscure acronyms.

FUD is no more an obscure acronym than CDC. FFS this is a programming and tech forum, people throw acronyms around all the time.
Yeah I read that as a 19 year old and spent hours? Days? Making graphics of fractals on my HP-28s (at Oxford studying maths but with no friends). Awesomely inspiring and technical enough to get going even without the internet.
I don't have words for this level of stupidity, but I'm pretty sure Twitter engineering can come up with some for me.
> If we can't have a rational scientific discussion about facts, we're back to the dark ages.

We're rapidly heading that way. Masks are a political discussion now, not a scientific one. Most other aspects of COVID are the same way. You cannot criticize anything non-politically these days. Even saying "this data is entirely inconclusive" or "the first-order effects of doing this are positive but there are negative second-order effects" is a problem.

I don't have a solution, but I feel your pain.
Yes to all of that. A culture of fear and loathing. Charging obscene levels of tuition for it while piling the real work onto adjuncts. Close-mindedness that would make John Calvin blush. The list is extremely long.

There is no chance I would let a university humanities department anywhere near my children at this point.
Wow, what a thoughtful way to respond. That level of character is something you certainly can't get with a degree.
I don't think you realise just how many songs are "out there".

And switching to a given song's frequency wouldn't be the same as being able to listen on-demand: you'd rarely happen to catch it such that you start listening at the beginning.
I also rely on Markdown files and typically write very short content in each file, especially to help with my memory. I tried Google Keep, Evernote and at some point pain-stakingly migrated all the notes I had to Notion, but they are missing "something" I don't know yet so I regressed back to markdown files in a directory.

I created a tool to automatically structure files into a directory tree based on file dates because of this: github.com/zikani03/groupby

It is really great to see more attention given to this space. That and personal relationship management tools (e.g. Monica)
What was that, for those of us out of the loop?
Idk. I've slung about 2M lines of C over the years, and it doesn't take much time to get back into it...
It absolutely is politicized and I find this to minimize his accomplishments.
They're free and worth every penny.
Airflow follows the path of least resistance. Air and the particles in it will go around the edges of the mask where there is zero resistance.
Every genius ahead of his time starts out as a crank.

Also, and far more often, every crank starts out as a crank.
Hey Hackers, this submission is a follow up on my Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668212
I have 2 years worth of experience working on back-end development. Looking to transition to Full-Stack, but am open to any side of the stack. Let's connect!

Location: Toronto, ON

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, AWS ECS, AWS EC2, AWS ECR, AWS S3, Bash, Docker, React.js, Node.js, WebSockets, MongoDB, Git, Django, RESTful APIs, Nginx, Linux, Starlette, Uvicorn, YAML, JSON.

LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3irryvJ
I think that the whole "masks don't protect you they protect others" spiel was designed to save face, because authorities were adamant about masks not working until March. Of course they protect the wearer....otherwise healthcare workers wouldn't use them.
There are two services (one built by me) out there which have this in mind, providing an online space for deep public discussions around a topic.

Taaalk (https://taaalk.co/) is mine. It is currently less focused around debate, and more around exploring topics:

E.g.
OCD: https://taaalk.co/t/exploring-obsessive-compulsive-disorder
Eating disorders: https://taaalk.co/t/discussing-eating-disorders
Bitcoin: https://taaalk.co/t/bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-things
Flag design: https://taaalk.co/t/the-power-and-significance-of-flags
Chess: https://taaalk.co/t/how-to-think-about-chess
Psychedelics & Mental Health: https://taaalk.co/t/falling-inward-discussing-the-role-of-ps...

Etc...

Another alternative that is built by a fellow HNer is
Debubble (https://debubble.me/). It is more focused around debate than Taaalk. There are a fixed number of messages / discussion.
Can you help me understand why you believe that highlighting privilege arising from one's innate characteristics is political?
Thanks for sharing that article - I wrote it months ago, and there's been plenty more papers that have come out since, but there's really not much I'd change in it today. The science has only become more clear.

I think the 538 article really under-states the evidence. I'm quoted in it, but only about my thoughts on the political situation. I actually pointed out to the author that the science is stronger than any other intervention we have.
Unless the 3rd party enabled 2FA
Oops: wrong link. It should have been http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/printer_friendly.cgi?page=/ess... .
Online classes simply don't have the value that in person classes have. Extend that to degrees and that's the stigma you have to deal with when trying to get a job. Telling an employer you got your degree remotely V the in class person, who are you gonna hire?
Pretty neat tool Pabyzu. I like how you layed out the different blocks that show the master info and then a few more details, like RAM used being large and then small total amount of RAM and processes. What are your future plans?
...the CDC was against mask use by the general public at first

And they too admitted to spreading FUD about masks, in the misguided belief that stopping average people from using masks would leave more masks for the health care providers.

That should reinforce the important point that we're dealing with unqualified, clown-show/amateur-hour political appointees in multiple levels of government, making critical decisions, at this point, a point in time, unlike most points, where leadership or it's lack matters.

And I know that FUD is just a long-standing acronym for "fear, uncertainty and doubt" and I too could just write that. But being so long-standing, the term not is only convenient but has come mean a particular kind of fear, uncertainty and doubt, that spread through a particular of public relations system.
Because laws are being made based on weak science.

Like lead paint or Thalidomide masks may only seem to be positive on the surface.

Without proper science it's wrong to make laws about it.
College offers a "poor" return on investment because students focused on passing their exams and their classes, with no thought on application or any plan to retain the knowledge they acquired.

Thus, any skills or knowledge they gained are only temporary, to be forgotten as soon as they graduate.

In this perspective, college can teach as much as they want, but 80% will evaporate.
American businesses have the power to change China’s behavior
Even this is an improvement. After flowing around the edge it is moving at a lower speed and so particles will travel a smaller distance.
I'll have to rate Project Binky: Fitting the running gear from a Celica GT4 into an Austin Mini as one of the most epic youtube series ever. They're definitely quality over quantity as it's a side endeavor from their main business. 32 videos in seven years.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGSOZAHg1yQHU1tc_3Y5M...
In the last 500 years, too, without any doubt. There were 21 million white slaves in Russia, emancipated only in 1861. USA and Brazil had ~4,5+2 million black slaves, combined.
The Sokal Hoax was a loud canary in the coalmine that was ignored:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
How do you sync them to your phone?
Did you add each others' numbers on WhatsApp?

Or if you moved due to work and you got added to a company-wide address book which is also synced to employees' phones and in turn got synced to WhatsApp, Facebook's systems could probably match up names to suggest a connection.

Although, why only these 2 people and not others from the company? Scarily there's probably enough data between you 3 for FB to know that you would be compatible with each other, so maybe Facebook figured the same thing you 3 figured out in real life -- you hung out with each other so I would deduce you found these 2 co-workers interesting. But I doubt anyone got paid to make such sophisticated stuff, there's probably a simpler logic that offers a quantity but not quality of "friends".

I still want to write a short story that starts with a guy saying "OK Google, get me a girlfriend", and an algorithm that slowly pops up suggesting events and locations for him to visit, knowing that a girl that he'd be compatible with will be at the events/locations...
I don't want to be extremely pedantic. But even regular chemical reactions change mass just as nuclear reactions.

It's very small, but it's there. Any change in internal energy will cause a mass change, regardless of the specific fields that are affected.
I map held Caps to Super (so I can switch windows and use other higher-than-application-level shortcuts without leaving the home row in dwm), but yes, definitely don't limit yourself to one use for your keyboard's most convenient key without a use. In X11 it's as easy as

setxkbmap -option caps:super
xcape -e 'Super_L=Escape'

(where setxkbmap is built into X, and xcape is a one-command install away). And IIUC you can do this with ~6 clicks in a third-party GUI like https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/docs/manual/configuratio... in macOS.
Reminds me of how much Sony (along with Braun) shaped Apple’s hardware design language. And that in turn keeps on shaping many others.

And the walkman is arguably one of the classic cases of “build it, and they will come”, where a product was well ahead of what consumers were already calling for. In my mind, that’s the kind of thing actually deserving the visionary label.
The article suggests that many of the current fields of humanities are markers of wealth and status symbols, and that we need to move away from this. That may be true but a bigger problem to me is that the modern humanities have fragmented into many narrowly focused sub fields, which seem to be based on presuppositions about how the world works. These fields seem less like a legitimate area of study and more like pseudoscientific political tools, often working to legitimize perspectives that aren’t grounded in reality, and radicalizing students and our culture as a result. The grievance studies have drastically undermined the legitimacy of the humanities as a whole even though “core humanities” may not deserve the same critique. Unfortunately even though much has been written on this issue (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...), I don’t see it affecting the momentum of these dubious programs at modern universities.
Hey this is awesome!

It reminds me how I built something like this too, along with a little dashboard web server that allows my friends to start the server, read the status and connection address, and display how much it costs to run per hour. My “turns itself off” mechanism was based on skimming the network port for SYNs and FINs, and storing a counter.

Good times :) Minecraft is a great gateway drug to software.
Being anonymous seems to be an exception to this. Social barriers are removed and then its just a question of the energy needed to type somethong out. Of course there are all kinds of tradeoffs, but it's striking how much online communication has been de-anonymized over the last 20 years.
The apple watch is a little closer.
Could someone with GPT-3 beta access try whether it can better solve 3 digit addition when it is allowed/encouraged/forced to make intermediate results explicit? E.g. instead of

21 + 110 = 130

150 + 12 =

condition it on

21 + 110 = 100 + 10 + 20 + 1 = 100 + 30 + 1 = 131

150 + 12 =

or similar. Given that humans make these intermediate steps in their heads GPT may perform better when it is encouraged to do them as well.

This may in fact apply to all sorts of reasoning, but in many cases it may be difficult to make these steps explicit in text form. Humans seem to mainly use some prediction layer or scratchpad which also contains the inner monologue but also motor primitives, smells, images, everything. Humans can decide to think a bit longer before producing an output, which appears to require an RNN.
I fear you are being over cynical. I think most people don't have the time or energy to care about so many different things. The person we imagine in the conversation will care deeply about family, friends. Possibly about their work and maybe one or two "big" issues - but grief there are a lot of issues being top-of-lungs- screamed right now and ten more to come.

Take our persona abi e and put them on a citizens jury and give them two weeks paid time to get involved in an issue (like Irish did on abortion laws) and we will see nuanced balanced decision making (which we may or may not agree with).

And for the very big issues that become part of the "public conversation" this does happen - I am pretty sure that most people in the UK considered the issues around Brexit as deeply as they wanted to - there was time motivation and information available to all.

So for most issues yes they fly past us all, covered in fake news and attention grabbing antics, and sometimes we get angry but most of the time it's just wallpaper.

I don't like the wallpaper and don't think it's conducive to pleasant conversation but I doubt few people are actually fooled.
Those universities need a lot of money: professors don't work for free and buildings don't maintain themselves. You can be sure that you'll be paying for your college education out of your taxes for the rest of your working life.

It would be interesting to analyze what free colleges cost the average taxpayer, and to compare that with what non-free colleges cost in the U.S. Do countries that offer free college education offer the public a way to find out the itemized expenses of publicly funded universities?
The distinction I keep is that trolls do it for fun and grifters do it for money. There is a lot of money in the outrage industry and lots of prospectors looking for gold.
This article made me realize, part of the quality of the conversation on HN comes from the ability to downvote.

I’ve never thought about this before, but one of the effects of Twitter and Facebook only having positive reinforcement is that you don’t get the “disapproving stare.” It’s possible for a person to “like” with some degree of anonymity and no effort, but not possible to do the reverse. Worse, since the Algorithms heavily bias content based on “likes,” there’s no recognition of content that is actually broadly liked versus content that is polar.

Also, for individual posters in places with downvoting, the little dopamine hit you get from upvotes is heavily countered by the bad feeling of downvotes.

I know that in my own participation on HN I will occasionally think of a snarky thing to say, but usually don’t post it because I know it’ll get downvoted, which I don’t like, and that moment of hesitation is usually enough for me to think “yeah that is actually unhelpful and not worth posting.”

This all probably very obvious to most of this crowd, but I honestly haven’t considered it before. How different would the world be if Facebook and Twitter merely had dislike buttons to go along with likes?
But the WHO said masks don't protect you? Who am I to believe, the World Health Organization, or some commenter on the internet? Just trust the health experts dude and stop being such a science denier. /s
I'm pretty sure health care workers wear them primarily to protect others. This is what my health care worker friends have told me (long before covid). Sneezing on someone mid surgery would be pretty bad for the patient, not really for the surgeon.

I think the reason people say it's more for others than yourself is because it's actual pretty rare to catch a disease by breathing it in. Much more often you catch it when it gets on your fingers and then you touch your eyes/nose/mouth. I think that's still at least partially true with covid.
A GIF optimization algorithm for screen recordings
That one guy in Germany has some shame issues.
Osterholm's claims are not supported by the evidence. He claims to respect aerosol scientists, but doesn't have any on his team and none have been involved in his team's work on this issue. He claims that people that are experts in modeling have not modeled correctly, despite having no familiarity with modeling.

On the other hand, our paper includes one of the world's top aerosol scientists, along with top epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and other experts. https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202004.0203/v2

The rubbish spouted by CIDRAP about masks is very obviously flawed, as you can see for example here: https://www.fast.ai/2020/04/20/skeptics-masks/#what-about-th...

Osterholm has never written any paper about community mask wearing. He is not an informed authority on this issue. The efficacy of masks has now been very clearly shown in multiple studies, e.g:

https://gh.bmj.com/content/5/5/e002794

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00818
They didn't even verify their email. I'd be extremely surprised if they turned on two factor authentication.
> The other thing we ask students to do, beyond merely encountering these things is to use them to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them.

Generating propaganda? As that is all they seem to do.
This freaking sucks, I use one "for junk" email address for online shops, etc, but it's also the email I use for Facebook. Facebook opened its "Data Disclosure" section a few months ago, and mine had a list of many companies which uploaded their customer data to Facebook and probably could target me...
THTR-300 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300 . Not alumina pebbles, graphite pebbles with enclosed BISO particles (predecessor to TRISO from the original article). Whole containment is contaminated with graphite dust, very high beta radiation levels. They had problems with broken graphite pebbles all over the reactor because the pebbles were brittle, often got jammed and had to be unjammed by force. They even produced a radiation release to possibly "blow out" graphite dust from the gas pipes that had collected there.
I also find something about the presentation off-putting, and I can't put my finger on what it is. His voice almost sounds angry, or like he is demanding that you recognize his expertise.

Could this just be a regional difference in how people speak, and I (in California) am unused to it?
Guaranteed Payment for Contractors and Freelancers Without the Fees
I just post this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
The mixture seems like the intuitive answer to me. A single tennis ball packs the volume of a tennis ball more efficiently than the equivalent volume of marbles.
If you send good stuff and they unsubscribe it means they don’t care about the topic or are too busy. That’s fine and normal. Churn is normal.
Let the students network and collaborate with each other. Classes and office hours can be done online. Value of universities is primarily in peer interactions.
> A culture of fear and loathing.

Examples?

> Charging obscene levels of tuition for it while piling the real work onto adjuncts.

This is endemic to the US university system, in general.

> Close-mindedness that would make John Calvin blush.

Again, it's all fun and games to riff and instantly disregard a vast number of fields of study, but you're not doing yourself any favors by just throwing out a laundry list. You have an immense distrust towards these departments: air your grievances, I'm sure a lot of us are interested.

> There is no chance I would let a university humanities department anywhere near my children at this point.

Universities tend to admit adults. Also, if your children go into university, are you going to refuse to pay for their general courses? They're going to have to touch a literature or history course eventually. Are you going to forbid them from taking 3 credit hours of Spanish?
Oh man, TIM was such a fantastic game. I have great memories of endless fun in it.
Contrary to popular belief, some quinoas actually have no middle name
Debubble
apart from the benefit of the humanities in an undergraduate education, there are big positive externalities from the scholarly work as well.

for instance, even if most people never read any of the written work of historians, the existence of that community and its scholarly standards helps prevent a lot of bizarre, erroneous historical narratives from gaining traction, and society is much better off for it.
When is a mask not a mask?

The CDC does and does not recommend:

-- A filtered breathing apparatus.

-- or A sterile medical mask.

-- or A disposable paper mask.

-- or A reusable cloth face covering.

Each of those serves a different purpose. Some are meant to protect a healthy wearer from sick people around them. One of the others is for a sick person to avoid spreading their disease to others. Or a combination of protecting both wearer and nearby people, but with different risk factors. Add to it that they have different costs and conditions of use.

But we cover all these use cases under one broad description of "mask". Is there any wonder people are confused?
Taaalk: The Home of Public Conversations
We had to pivot and it sucks
We had to pivot our product at ductllc.com after receiving constant feedback from advisors and our users that we should focus on what was working and get rid of the other features that was more non-sense.

It kind of sucks after putting all that development effort into the other features but I am starting to warm up to the idea.

Wondering if anyone else had to go through the same?
Air France Cuts 7850 Jobs
Reddit has downvotes as well and its conversations are uniformly bad. Slate Star Codex has a creaky old antique of a comment system without voting at all, but its conversations were of the highest quality. So are LWN's. I don't think voting mechanics affect discussion quality as much as you think. What matters a lot more is a sense of mutual respect, shared purpose, and, honestly, a certain level of average intellectual horsepower.
Humanities have been demonstrated to be often incoherent rubbish:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
If you want a good stepping stone between visual programming and Java, check out mods like ComputerCraft [1] or OpenComputers [2]. They add simple computers into the game that can be programmed with Lua. There is also a version of ComputerCraft that has basic visual programming and a simplified Lua interface [3].

[1] https://www.computercraft.info

[2] https://ocdoc.cil.li

[3] http://computercraftedu.com
Proper masks seal tightly to your face, there is no edge to go around.
I'm very happy with Obsidian's pricing. Basically if you're getting paid in relation to some of the notes that you take then you should be using the commercial version. Much better model than the advertising and data-vacuuming models that are the flavor of the day. I'm glad to pay for software that I use, that means the software can be sustainable and continue to exist.