skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the response man - appreciate it.

To be honest, with regards to the ultimate intention of the New Yorker article, I don’t know. And with regards to your question, I ultimately don’t know what Alexander intended.

I think that the domain of plausible answers to the questions you raise is pretty big and that the article doesn’t really provide enough information to give definitive answers.

We obviously each had different overall impressions of the New Yorker article and it’s authors intent.

With regards to grandiosity, well, the way grandiosity was talked about in the article and the comment was a combination of “beleaguered” and “potent”, I think.

I may have jumped the gun , but to me your comment read as though you felt a particular group that you had some degree of sympathy with was being deliberately targeted by The NY Times. Thus - beleaguered.

At the same time, that particular comment also had a lot of judgements on various things and on various people’s intentions. Judgements which to me traveled a very narrow chain of logic. Lots of either/or black and white, basically. Which I do too at times. But - Thus - potent.

Hope that’s useful information and not crossing a line to say.

Also obviously I don’t believe that The NY Times is specifically targeting anyone or a group in that way. Which isn’t to say they haven’t. And, I could be wrong. My general take is that the motivations of an org like The NY Times are more multifaceted and nuanced than how they’ve mostly been discussed in this comment thread. Same with the New Yorker

Which isn’t to say I haven’t felt a lot of anger towards their reporting at times.

And, I enjoy both those publications FWIW.
I'm not an US citizen, I've never voted in the US, I have no idea how your shit works or not.

But I know how my country's system works, and it's super fucking easy. On election day, I got to my voting place for my voting district. Each district contains a couple of thousand voters. For each election I'm participating in - national, regional, local - I place one piece of paper with the name of the party I'm voting for in an envelope, secretly.

I then go to the election officials, identify myself, and they look me up in their voter roll, which is simply a printout of the couple of thousand voters who should be voting in this place. We all check that I'm in there, and that I'm not already marked as having voted. Then they strikethrough my name in the roll, and put my envelopes in the corresponding urn. I am now certain that my secret vote went into the right urn, and everyone else can be certain that I've only voted once.

Once the voting ends in the evening, election officials in each voting place opens their urns, and opens each envelope, removing the vote inside. Then they simply sort and count the individual pieces of paper that are the votes. You count the total number of votes, you count the total number of voters crossed out in the voter roll, and make sure it all matches up. And this gives you a preliminary vote count for each political party in each district, so you only need to report a couple of numbers to the election authority.

Anyone can watch this process! I can go and watch it. You can come and watch! And it's so simple to count pieces of paper that anyone can do it. And with observers from the various political parties, you can't cheat.

After the preliminary counting, you take all the votes and your voter roll and put it in a sealed box and send it to the regional voting authority where they do a final control count, and archive the votes for history.

As for me and my vote, I can check my district on the website of the election authority: https://data.val.se/val/val2018/slutresultat/R/valdistrikt/0...

I am one of the 1160 voters out of the 1363 eligible, I can see that the party I voted for got at least one vote, so I can be fairly certain that my vote was counted, while what I voted for is still a secret.

Compromising this system is incredibly hard, because it is parallellized and distributed. And the paper trail will always be there. Somewhere in a vault, there are 6,535,271 pieces of paper representing the 2018 vote for the national parliament. You can't accidentally erase that or lose that.
How the hell is slack more complicated than dropbox?? I didn't see Slack Paper, or Slack photos which they then comoletely and annoyingly dropped support for!
Dream killer. Username doesn't check out. =]
Thanks to the culture of fake money, risks are mispriced and money is cheap. How about somebody recognizes that and blames the Fed rather that capitalism?

Also remember that firms can defend themselves from hostile takeovers.
Nothing stops a malicious actor for waiting for no activity on the machine before flicking the camera on, taking a picture, and then turning it off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...

Students were particularly troubled by the momentary flickering of their
webcams' green activation lights, which several students reported would
periodically turn on when the camera was not in use, signaling that the
webcam had been turned on.[9][23][25][48] Student Katerina Perech
recalled: "It was just really creepy."

After the suit was brought, the school district, of which the two high
schools are part, revealed that it had secretly taken more than 66,000
images.

Apple is advocating for a strategy to preserve the privacy of its users that demonstrably does not work.
any idea why they’d shut down? are they not raking in money hand over fist? are they profitable?
Yes, you have it exactly right, including the usage of non-local control flow to interrupt and restart the search. [0] is another implementation in an imperative language.

[0] https://github.com/monte-language/typhon/blob/master/mast/fu...
The unanswered question is: is a jelly donut a sweet dumpling?
barium and teflon additives. suuure, that's TOTALLY what we want to do. It's almost like bad science!
The US motto "Might makes right" is along similar lines - we like to think about "right" and "wrong" when in the end, it's the strongest who get their way.
>If we are to believe Apple cares about its users, then it makes perfect sense why they don't allow slower, less power efficient, less secure and less private web engines available on iOS.

Woah![1]

> "But shouldn't this be up to the user?" some will say ask. Yes, but to a point. There are already so many ways on the web to shoot yourself in the foot.

That sounds exactly like what a dictator would say when asked why the citizens are not allowed to vote.

[1]https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/10/365-days-late...
That allows vote buying/coercion.

You show me your receipt, I verify that you voted the way I wanted, and you get money. Or, if the receipt shows you didn't vote like I told you to, I punch you in the face.
you came here to be wrong?
As alternative, I introduced “failables” into my programming language C3. It has the benefits of Go error handling but none of the downsides. I wrote two blog posts as I developed the idea:

https://dev.to/lerno/a-new-error-handling-paradigm-for-c3-2g...

https://dev.to/lerno/more-on-error-handling-in-c3-3bee

Composing calls is much easier for one, plus there is quite a bit of syntactic sugar to make things even smoother.
How about you just purchase some motherboards and GPUs and start running them in your office (assuming you're not bandwidth limited or looking for millisecond response times).. I'm always tempted to do this when we have fairly constant workload. Wasn't GPU instance pricing quite insane on AWS compared to actual GPU costs?
This would affect soil drainage and ruin valuable land. We would run into food shortages.
On the Mac search for a menu item is almost always available as the very first item in the "Help" menu, and the keyboard shortcut for it is both standard and fairly easily guessable: Command + ? (e.g., Command + Shift + / on a keyboard where "?" is the shifted version of "/").

Not every program implements a Help menu, and not every program that implements a Help menu implements the standard shortcut. But in my experience, a large majority do. (Nearly all native apps do, but even some Electron apps get this right. Visual Code does both, for instance, and Slack at least has the Help menu with the search field in the first place.)
I worked in a research lab several years ago that used Dropbox as their version control system for all the data analysis scripts they wrote. It took a while but by the time I left I had convinced everyone to switch over to git.
I had no idea khinkali were so similar to xiaolongbao!
There are very little real world uses for kana romanized word typed out in English alphabet. Words are either romanized into katakana, or original forms in source languages is inserted similar to how formulas appear in English text.

There are plenty real world examples for “Beef curry” and “ビーフカレー” used in pairs in Japanese, katsu is usually an extra so it’s rarer though.
Crash course: https://youtube.com/user/crashcourse/playlists
This isn't that different than the US. When you "own" land you have freehold ownership - you own it within the framework of the state and it can be taken away (with compensation), taxed, etc. In essence, the state is letting you own it.

It's not allodial title which would be true ownership.
The circuitry can't be that complex. Meaning the likelihood of a bug being pretty low. I mean come on, it's a wire attached to the camera power source with a resistor and a LED.
I think this is great because it invites discussion. As an Italian, I'd like to point out that tortellini can be fried, shallow, in a skillet, and tossed with hearty greens.
TFA says this is optional, but it's a good default. The general case for most loan words is that even native Japanese speakers will find the English spelling much more familiar than romanization. E.g. in any Japanese shop you'll see signs that say "sale" or "bargain", but you'd never see "se-ru" or "bāgen" -- writing that way looks as strange to JP speakers as to anyone else.

"Cutlet" strikes me as an edge case, considering that "katsu" has more or less become a word in its own right. So, perhaps an unfortunate choice of name for this project...
distorts the performance for any student who isn't typical or better than their school.

It distorts the performance of a student who underperforms in coursework relative to their peers but overperforms on exams, at a school where students overperform on coursework and underperform on exams. In other words, it punishes the student who does unusually poor on coursework that is already much easier, on average, than typical coursework from other schools.

How likely are such students to succeed at a competitive university? Not very likely at all, I would think.
The Google drive sync engine is a piece of slow buggy crap. Dropbox is rock solid. No comparison.
I once wondered about subtyping[1] too. Looks like there's a possible solution - MLsub[2][3]. But it will require significant amount of work to modify OCaml inference engine to work that way. For now I just use functors for types with the shared fields. It doesn't add too much lines of code either.

[1] https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/function-argument-polymorphism/3...

[2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sd601/papers/mlsub-preprint.pdf

[3] https://github.com/stedolan/mlsub
Do people binge-watch Late Night or Tonight Show episodes from 15 yrs ago? Or even SNL besides individual sketches?
This is bang-on.

You need to build an ecosystem/experience around the files rather than just straight up only doing storage.
So, creditable also can mean “worthy of belief” which I think is more relevant.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/creditable

But the very fact we are arguing over the meaning of a single word is, I think, kind of a signal of an anti-pattern, so to speak.

It’s like bikeshedding over a single line of code. Sure, in certain cases that single line might be super important (part of an algorithm, performance critical, etc).

Often however there’s a range of acceptable ways to write a single line of code and, if we want to analyze and understand a codebase, it only makes so much sense to spend so much time on that one line.

There’s a lot more code to look at as well and to understand how something works or the intent of the author of the code we should look at individual lines in the context of the whole.

Plus if we’re going to get that specific about individual words, then it’s even more important to be comprehensive and correct and not jump to one of several plausible meanings ;).
Yes, it's invertible, but the thing is that we lie slightly when we write it like that. Instead of normal exponentiation, we chose an operation where Amdahl's Law screws you over. The simplest choice for this lie is that we perform all of the exponentiations modulo a large prime number.

The best known algorithms for performing the inverse of exponentiation modulo a large integer with at least one large prime factor (called a discrete logarithm) have some steps that parallelize well, but the steps that don't parallelize well still take thousands of years. (Remember that a large prime number has a large prime factor: itself.)

More generally, we can talk about the properties required of this operation we lie about. The two properties we need are quasi-commutativity and the inverse operation being insanely slow. Normal commutativity means f(a, b) = f(b, a), quasicommutativity means f( f( x, a ), b ) = f( f( x, b ), a ).

Another common choice for this quasicommutative operation is multiplication of a point in an elliptic curve by a scalar. Again, it's not the normal integer multiplication we're talking about, which can confuse people. It's called multiplication because it's defined in terms of another operation called addition of two points, and it does follow the normal algebraic rules, allowing you to re-use all of the algebra you learned in elementary school, except that you need to remember every time you write the division sign, you need to remember that that step takes thousands of years even on a multi-million-core supercomputer. With points on an elliptic curve, we usually write points with capital letters and scalars with lower-case letters. a * b * P = b * a * P is the quasicommutative operation with a slow inverse that we use for elliptic curve cryptography.

Remember that with normal integer exponentiation, x^a * x^b = x^(a+b), so all of the normal algebraic rules would still apply if we changed our notation to use logarithmic space and wrote x^a as aX and x^b as bX, and this is the notation usually used when talking about algebraic groups other than integers modulo large integers ("multiplicative groups modulo large integers").
Oh, in my example, it's just a coincidence that the number was readable by humans! Other numbers may come out as complete gibberish.

The "mapping" you may be referring to is happening outside and subject to how your brain /your browser interpret it. (How do you know that when I posted the comment, that I didn't supply the raw bits of the number?! ;-))

Anyway, it was just a joke for low level-programmers I guess. Have a good day ;-)
How many people do you think there are that would be willing to pay $3/month but not $10/month?

How many people who currently pay $10/month would drop down to a $3/month plan if given the option?

I'm fairly certain the math on this paints a clear picture: Offering a $3/month plan would cost them more than it makes them.
Computers can’t heal themselves. Our bodies do that on their own without conscious prompting.

Humans evolve the complexity of a computers electron states, not the computers own inherent properties. My use doesn’t force transistors to evolve into better transistors. It has no self regeneration.

You don’t see the issue in principle but here you have an article by an expert pointing them out.

Perhaps be a better listener?

A computer has observable, literal limitations relative to a humans mechanical functionality.

You can’t scrape away literal reality to arrive at some reductionist idea of what a consciousness is.

Our only known good model for a machine that can create our consciousness is us. It took billions of years of the universe churning at random to accidentally generate us. We have no clue how to replicate that scale.

A computer literally lacks a whole lot of literal information that’s embedded in the hardware and software of a person.

Watch this and tell me the last time your computer reconfigured it’s literal shape when you altered its electric field properties: https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg

There’s something to “life” we’ll never be able to jam into silicon.
everything is a simplification. of course it's not spontaneous, but that is literally the word used by physicists to describe the phenomenon.

what does the wave equation of the electron in a hydrogen atom look like during "spontaneous" emission of a photon? i don't think anyone has any idea.

i'm talking about something entirely separate from a linear combination of two energy eigenstates. i'm not saying take

\psi = \sin{\theta} \psi_1 + \cos{\theta} \psi_2

where \psi_1 and \psi_2 are eigenstates of the hydrogen atom hamiltonian and simulate it. i'm saying there is a phenomenon that i'm pretty sure wouldn't be adequately modelled by a smooth function.

edit: add explanation of \psi_1 and \psi_2
From your article:

> Cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value. They are only worth what people are willing to pay for them.

How is this any different from US dollars, gold, or anything besides food, medicine, and shelter?

> Cryptocurrencies facilitate crime

Once again, the same argument could be applied to US dollars
Ask HN: Notion or TiddlyWiki for free a * personal * wiki?
A bit of backgroud, I have been searching for a well suited personal wiki for some time. I am a programmer and I am well versed with linux and open source. Over the course of searching for the perfect software for my purposes, I came across Notion and TiddlyWiki. Notion(www.notion.so/) and TiddlyWiki(https://tiddlywiki.com/) both look super good for a personal knowledge base. Looking at the feature sets, both of them look highly customisable. For my purposes, I have been fascinated by Zettelkasten and hence, I was trying for a software which can be linked to it, to Roam or Obsidian or something else. I plan on keeping a personal wiki and then taking out core ideas from them into my zattlekasten.

Notion being great out of the both wihtout the need to do many things to make it useful. Great sync feature and unlimited storage for a free Personal plan.

TiddlyWiki on the other hand also has great features and amazing customisability. It's open source, so it's more flexbile if one knows how to code. But setting up TiddlyWiki has a learning curve.

So, what's the take of the HN community over Notion or TiddlyWiki, which one do you prefer and why so ? Here I am trying to especially look for a software for keeping a personal wiki.

If you have some other alternative to the following two, please feel free to share.
Check out LibraryBox/PirateBox. While not typically featuring a cellular connection they're at least an independent host for files/wiki/whatever and meant to be self-sufficient.

http://jasongriffey.net/librarybox/
The problem might not be COBOL
It's not irrelevant, it's information that allows any reasonable person to conclude that Apple implemented a solution before and has since decided to exchange that simple and effective failsafe for a marginally thinner product. I can't physically control whether I have a naked camera pointed at me all day but hey, at least my laptop can fit into a manilla envelope, right? Right? Totally worth it.
I have never encountered this! I’m in the USA. Which ISPs?
Yup, such a simple solution, and Lenovo doesn't even make a fuss about privacy, they just "did it".
I mean, just look at the massive variety of human cultures that have existed since the dawn of civilization.
> We do know that embodiment is a sufficient condition for general intelligence: if we assume humans have general intelligence then it is clearly a sufficient condition.

I'm not sure what you mean by "sufficient condition" here. Consider:

"We do know that having a moustache is a sufficient condition for general intelligence: if we assume moustachioed humans have general intelligence then it is clearly a sufficient condition."
Not as small of a minority as you think.
AWS/clouds aren't always the best solution for a problem. Often they're the worst (just like any other tool).

You don't provide a lot of detail but I imagine at this point you need to get "creative" and move at least some aspect of your operation out of AWS. Some variation of:

- Buy some hardware and host it at home/office/etc.

- Buy some hardware and put it in a colocation facility.

- Buy a lot of hardware and put it in a few places.

Etc.

Cash and accounting is another problem. Hardware manufacturers offer financing (leasing). Third party finance companies offer lines of credit, special leasing, etc. Even paying cash outright can (in certain cases) be beneficial from a tax standpoint. If you're in the US there's even the best of both worlds: a Section 179 deduction on a lease!

https://www.section179.org/section_179_leases/

You don't even need to get dirty. Last I checked it was pretty easy to get financing from Dell, pay next to nothing to get started, and have hardware shipped directly to a co-location facility. Remote hands rack and configure it for you. You get a notification with a system to log into just like an AWS instance. All in at a fraction of the cost. The dreaded (actually very rare) hardware failure? That's what the warranty is for. Dell will dispatch people to the facility and replace XYZ as needed. You never need to physically touch anything.

A little more complicated than creating an AWS account with a credit card number? Of course. More management? Slightly. But at the end of the day it's a fraction of the total cost and probably even advantageous from a taxation standpoint.

AWS and public clouds really shine in some use cases and absolutely suck at others (as in suck the cash right out of your pockets).
Hacker news readers are pretty niche as apps go
Maybe they should focus more on functionality people want rather than reducing the size of the devices.

Making something bigger didn't seem to any kind of consideration when going from iPhone 5 to iPhone 6+.
The problem is if someone is able to activate your camera even if the light comes on 100 percent of the time, without a cover they’ll see something and will be able to capture that. Hey this guy hacked in and is seeing naked wife or my taxes on my desk or something else sensitive - the light isn’t really going to stop that. If you really don’t believe me go stay in a hotel next to defcon and use the hotel WiFi naked.
I came to this article expecting a logical proof of why AI was impossible, but instead found the following tautological argument: hard AI, which I define as intelligence with tacit knowledge, which in turn I define as knowledge that cannot be ran in algorithms, is impossible to be ran in algorithms.

Disappointing.

My counterpoint: is there anything that cannot be ran in algorithms? The way I see it the only thing stopping me from simulating every atom in a brain is computational power.
In addition to being able to digitally represent analog signals, there's also such a thing as analog computation, including electronic analog computation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer#Electronic_ana...

So if the brain is an analog computer, then it seems reasonable to believe that we might be able to someday construct an equivalent analog computer (or a digital equivalent thereof).
I think we have to make a variety of assumptions to draw any conclusions about what the author of the New Yorker article intended. There’s too little info in the article to go on.
Only if all donuts are dumplings, since the jelly is added after cooking.
I wouldn't know why, everyone if agreeing on acting against China, since HK