skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think that Mass Effect had pretty good writing in the first game but the later games are pretty bad.

I really enjoyed the first Mass Effect and its three-way balance between storytelling, exploration and combat.

I was really looking forward to playing Mass Effect 2, but its storytelling didn't seem as good as the first game and exploration was almost non-existent. ME2 is more focused on combat, which seems to be what most people want (ME2 gets fantastic reviews), but to me that's the least interesting part of a game.

I never played Mass Effect 3, but I hear it is even more combat-focused.
DOE's inability to develop advanced nuclear
Thanks, I got too excited and didn't read the rest of the comments before asking. I should have realized I was likely beating a dead horse. It does sound like it may be possible to at least port it some day and work is being made in that direction so that's pretty awesome.
Sadly, I can't edit the comment anymore. Here are a few more.

- German Chocolate Cake - Named after the English-American chocolate maker Samuel German.

- Baker's Chocolate (popular American brand of baking chocolate) - Named after Dr. William Baker

- Loop subdivision (CG term) - Named after its inventor Charles Loop.

- French Hill (neighborhood in Jerusalem) - Named after British general John French. (Disputed)

- Mobile Homes (my absolute favorite) - Named after their place of fabrication, Mobile Alabama. Bonus fact (mine): The product's original name (that sadly didn't catch on) was "Sweet Homes" after their inventor James Sweet! And The 1974 Lynyrd Skynyrd hit “Sweet Home Alabama” was a reworking of a 1951 radio jingle advertising “Sweet Homes, Alabama.”
didn't know that was a thing. just converted it to loop. thanks for the tip!
Is chess already solved?
It changes the point profoundly. Why would we expect land to depreciate? Unless the world’s population goes into decline (always a possibility), land will only continue to become more scarce. As other sources of wealth grow (and not just population), land will go up in price, not down.
> there are lots of lemons in the proprietary software market, and no real way to distinguish them.

You can find what people say about a given piece of proprietary software; generally people will have used it and written up their impressions, maybe ran some benchmarks.

Have you honestly never seen a review of a closed source program? Never seen anyone write about their likes or dislikes? Never seen any shareware/try before you buy/free tier software? Never seen anyone use some, decide it was bad, and change to another vendor? Never seen someone try the free version of SQL server or comment about their experiences with IIS or review a new release of Windows? Never seen a computer game review? Or a magazine dedicated to game reviews? Or reviews of Apple app store software?
Conducting employee pulse surveys for remote teams
To be a bit more concrete than the grandparent's name soup, I liked this handbook article about unification in theories: Franz Baader and Jörg Siekmann. Unification Theory. In D.M. Gabbay, C.J. Hogger, and J.A. Robinson, editors, Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, pages 41-125. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1994.

This seems to be a newer version with similar contents but different authors: http://www.cs.bu.edu/~snyder/publications/UnifChapter.pdf

This is specific to unification and not to broader equational reasoning.
> Bloomberg is one of the best software companies in history

If you were a developer working with their API based feeds you wouldn't be saying that
I think people overlook it (I did) because it looks like an ad.
It's not at all clear to me why we should be concerned with the decline of a proposed "west." Many of the traits folks laud the "West" for were in fact the products of a series of influences from many other cultures at the time.

Desirable traits for a society inviting growth, prosperity and egalitarianism can exist in nearly any industrialized society today, and many of them currently fall short of their stated ideals when difficulty is encountered. Further, society as a whole seems to make lots of progress when small and large overturnings (or revolutions?) happen. Poorly formulated ideas are refined or discarded, and values are reaffirmed. Counter-revolutionary elements seek to roll them back, but even in success they're irrevocably changed for the experience and cannot help but define their mission in terms of their challengers.

Let's worry more about creating a sustainable, distributed, and well-understood technology base. Unlike culture, that actually takes time and infrastructure to build.
GPT-3 was trained on half a trillion words (common crawl, webtext, two book corpuses, and wikipedia, IIRC). At about 100 words per minute, that's almost ten thousand years of continuous speech. By my estimate it's probably a few thousand times what people actually hear in a lifetime. We don't experience nearly the volume of language that it did.
Show HN: Go error handling with custom package
For those searching: https://www.patreon.com/cybershadow
The nonsense questions are actually handled quite well, continuing the sense of humor implied. I object to the author's expectation the response should be "I don't know" etc.

Old jokes:

Q: How high is a mouse when it spins? A: The higher, the fewer.

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Two, one to climb the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.

Nonsense prose & poetry is an old literary challenge, notable example being Jabberwocky: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky
Way outside my field, but a platform for global climate management that links current actions to future outcomes and accountability to nations and companies would be very cool, assuming it is taken seriously by parties involved (which is an even harder challenge). This is technically hard, but harder still from a people perspective.
I believe you're trying to apply the US model to the rest of the West. For instance, I'm not sure there is a conflict between ecologically sound and innovation in most other western countries, or the same perception of "communism" as the Bogeyman: for most, it's just a failed experiment/ideology, not an imminent threat to their way of life like how some US discourses view it.
Does your chest hurt when wearing mask in warm weather?
I know it's weird, but I think I've now consistently felt this: when I wear a tight mask continuously for an hour or more with hot weather, I then get 2-3 days where my chest hurts a little like it's inflamed, and I get a nagging feeling in my throat. It's all very mild symptoms, really, but I wonder of I am alone!

Maybe the material of the mask, the humid and warm air stagnating, or something else entirely is causing this.

This happens with KN95 and surgical masks, I haven't tried cloth masks yet.
Agreed. In matrix/synapse, even with e2e enabled the server gets a ton of metadata, including presence info. Also the identity server exposes quite a bit.
In the absence of compulsory production and under the current intellectual property rights scheme, price ceilings cause shortages all other things held equal.
Oh wow. I think I still have my legit retail CD kicking around somewhere. Had no idea it was still maintained. Can I still use that CD? IIRC it had some pretty wild DRM on it for the time and it took forever to crack.
How much of that first vial was paid for by taxpayers?

Does a single drug and associated trials really cost billions to develop? That's a year's worth of pay for 10,000 scientists at 200k/year (I suspect this is a rather high rate for most phd researchers). Most research teams are < 10 people [1]. You could fund 500 large research teams working on different drugs for 2 billion for a year. Let's say just one team, that funds them for 500 years.

Obviously there are other costs (rent, equipment, materials). But where is that money going? It doesn't seem to be going towards doing the science. It's extremely difficult to find breakdowns of R+D costs - seems to be a tightly held secret at big pharma.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4465944/
Thanks. r/savedyouaclick
Ask HN: How to find meaning in your job?
I’m 43 and I’ve been an engineer in this company (Eastern Europe, gambling industry) for 15 years. It’s a Jira sweatshop. I’m not cut out for a manager (social anxiety) so I still code, which I generally like to do, but impossible deadlines, high stress, office politics, and the character of people I work for, made me hate it. I’ve lost all motivation for work. “Welcome to the club”, I know.

I’ve tried disconnecting, but I’m turning into a Zombie. Nothing brings joy. Everything is tainted by the thought that I have to do this for 25 more years at least (that’s how much I have to pay out the mortgage).

I’m mediocre at best so all attempts to find something else failed - either I don’t get an offer or is significantly less than what I get now and couldn’t cover all the expenses. Sole provider, wife, two kids.

The only thing I can think of is to somehow find meaning in the current job. Anyone had the same problem? How did you do it?
Ask HN: What is the best way a Computer Eng grad can get back to programming?
I've graduated a bachelor in computer engineering almost 10 years ago but I went through the "not-tech" aspect of the job, first working as a VC Analyst and for the last 4 years as a Product Manager.

I'm highly technical and I can discuss some architecture with the engineers of my team. I would like to get back to programming, to make some experiments and hacks. But all the resources I find assume that they need to teach me what are for loops or what is an http request.

There are any resources for taking my rust off?
Nimiq Hodlers
Errors package is a drop-in replacement of the built-in Go errors package with no external dependencies. It lets you create errors of 11 different types which should handle most of the use cases. Some of them are a bit too specific for web applications, but useful nonetheless. Following are the primary features of this package:

- Multiple (11) error types

- User friendly message

- File & line number prefixed to errors

- HTTP status code and user friendly message (wrapped messages are concatenated) for all error types

In case of nested errors, the messages (in case of nesting with this package's error) & errors are also looped through. The limited no.of error types are only because I assumed too many options and too much customization might lead to some kind of fatigue. Tried making things a bit easier.
I really like the approach. How much does it cost in dollars or in euros for design service in Africa? I'm currently taking help from Fiverr.
And, since OP asked for recent comments, I'll add this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

It expresses one of the main reasons I stay on this site, combined with our relative willingness to admit error.
> traditional civil liberties (“freedom to” not “freedom from”)

There's no such thing as "freedom from", which is probably one of the main sticking points between these two groups. "Freedom from" is just a nice way to say "loss of agency due to oppressive external control".

I realize this may seem like a pointless semantic quibble, but I think at it's root it points out a philosophical divide, where-in I personally believe one side is divorced from reality.

There are reasonable discussions to be had about where on the sliding scale from totalitarian to libertarian that society should fall for the best results for everyone, but in no case is there ever a situation in which "freedom from" is a real thing. You are trading off "freedom" for "safety".
There is no west decline, it's just individual across the globe reclaimed their rightly productivity. That by itself is a victory of western value: the democracy and freedom of economic power.

Now it's the time for west to advance to the next stage and herald the new chapter of human civilization, instead of wrongly reminiscent of its past glory that was not really meaningful nowadays.
In possibly an unwise move, I'm actually going to respond to the initial point here.

There's a totally valid discipline in taking concepts from different areas and smushing them together to make a new idea. That's what a lot of creativity is, fundamentally. So a bot that's been trained across a wide variety of texts, spitting out an amalgam in response to a prompt that causes a connection to be made, is not only possible, but likely a very good way of generating papers (or at least abstracts) for humans to check. And if the raw output is readable, why not publish it?
They used a rather large camera...

The smallest known camera module is the OmniVision OV6948, has the dimensions: 0.65 x 0.65 x 1.158mm, including 120 degree wide lens.

Sadly it cannot be purchased in single quantities :(

[1] https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/worlds-smallest-came...
I watched the presentation some months ago on YouTube. Really really well done.
Thanks to that video I was able to get some tricky concepts of Erlang that I was previously struggling with.
I like their free Nextcloud feature, but wouldn't upload anything in plaintext. It's now the fashion to encrypt everything before uploading it to cloud services. I use a combination of 7zip, Veracrypt, and if I can mount a cloud drive as a filesystem, then I use Cryptomator. The same goes for their email: PGP with friends who know how to use it too and if I need to contact grandma, then Whatsapp (which you can get on featurephones/dumbphones now)
That people put money into their house every month doesn’t change the fact that a great deal of that money doesn’t contribute to wealth building. Interest on mortgage payments, maintenance and repair, renovations, utility bills; these are all sunk costs associated with home ownership.
This one does not get old.
Most profoundly gifted people don’t want to be “outed” as profoundly gifted because they have been bullied or ostracized for much of their lives because of it. There’s a reason why very high IQ scores don’t correlate to very high success. High IQ is nothing except a certificate you can hang on your wall to brag, hard work is what gets you success.
GPT-3 actually knows: https://imgur.com/a/DHvb8Iu
The Cadaver Synod: The strangest trial in history
This is a dry run.

“The goal of such operations would be to increase the fear and stress levels in big cities with significant minority populations that overwhelmingly vote Democratic to depress turnout”

https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/07/17/the-federal-police-...

https://www.balloon-juice.com/author/adam-silverman/
"Network" is measured by Outlook emails, Yammer posts, and Teams conversations and meetings. I'm willing to wager money most peoples' network metrics increased simply because offline conversations never happened, and they moved to online conversations where necessary.
> you'll have to jump through hoops -the hoops of defining your higher-level notion of equality- in what ever language you choose.

Right. The author is just disappointed that Prolog does have a built-in "equality" that isn't the equality they want. A nice solution in Prolog would be to write a meta-interpreter or to do term rewriting on the input program. This would allow the author to write

clone(usize).

and have it be interpreted as

clone(A) :- type_equal(A, usize).
Trials and triumphs of rural broadband (2017)
Agreed, however calm, reasoned analysis doesn't generate political will. It just becomes fodder for the demagogues to slice and dice in service of their own influence.

We're at a point that our societal and economic structures are not incentivized to solve the hard problems of scaling our civilization. I don't think polarized rhetoric is the way, but neither does anyone have time for the nuanced and deliberate thinking necessary to solve these kinds of complex structural problems.
Could you people please add the post title next to the link? I'm on mobile and it would be much nicer to go through the comments if I don't have to open a bunch of anonymous links just to see what they're about. Great idea for a thread though!
It's important to note that remote work in March/April/May (and perhaps even today) was uniquely coupled with remote life, since most knowledge workers stayed home due to social distancing guidelines. It should not be surprising that the boundaries between work and life blurred when life itself came to a standstill.

I'd be surprised to see if the same tendency to blur life and work, such as by working on evenings and weekends, persists once life returns to its previous form.
What's your favorite weapons and why? I have been fond of the holy have grenade. There hallelujah always made me laugh and the concrete donkey was way too cheap lol
Lots of commas in those sentences.
I think ME2's great reviews were mostly driven by the excellent cast of memorable characters you got to assemble throughout the game. Such an upgrade over the BioWare trademark mild soup of forgettables in ME1, and also the biggest reason ME3 was maligned after relegating most of those beloved characters to a 5-minute scene.
That article felt like it finished just as it was getting started. Where’s the interview with a hide-and-seeker, or an examination of why IKEA won’t let you play in there stores?
I'm afraid this came across as an unfortunate and disingenuous response to someone's comment about privacy. A feeble variation of "I have nothing to hide" I'd say.

For the last part: Standard Notes, Joplin, jrnl, FS Notes (possibly), nvAlt (not actively developed) etc.
Many more than 2% can achieve a 130 IQ score by preparing for the questions and taking sample tests. Many people do that, especially when IQ tests are requirements for entrance exams for private schools. I’ve seen this first hand from the cohort of children at my kids’ schools.
Different regions have had vastly varying levels of liberalism with vastly different levels of wealth. Look at Saudi Arabia. And remember that rich countries 100 years ago were much poorer than poor countries now. There is some correlation for sure, but there is a certain tendency to say that everything is due to the level of wealth, which is empirically false.
The whole thing was generated. Any specific reason you couldn't make sense of it? Any non-sequiturs? Would you prefer more monty python references?
Fish tastes like fish because the taste is a categorizing representation of that sensory input.

What you can do is today is start with a feature map. We can do that with colors https://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/satfaces_map_1024.png (do you perceive this color as red?) and we can do that with smells https://jameskennedymonash.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/table...
That's a fairly limited representation but words are an incredibly low-bandwidth interface not suitable to exporting this kind of information in high fidelity, so we can't. That does not mean it's conceptually impossible. If you wanted to export subjective experience itself then you'd need the previously mentioned debugging interface. Our brains don't have that built-in, but software does. I.e. a program can dump its entire own state and make it available to others.

To me subjective experience seems to be an intermediate representation, deep between inputs and outputs, and due to the various limitations we're bad at communicating it. That doesn't mean there's anything special about it. It is a consequence of compressing inputs into smaller spaces in ways that are useful to that entity.

> This isn't about twisting words, some people genuinely believe that everything is conscious with more complex system being more conscious.

Anything that interacts with the world will have an internal, idiosyncratic representation of that interaction. Even a rock will have momentarily vibrations traveling through it that carry some information about the world.
One of today's NNs will have a feature layers that roughly correspond to concepts that are of human interest. They're often crude approximations, but it's good enough for some use-cases.
Animal brains just have more of that.

So in that sense, sure, it's a continuum. But there's nothing mysterious about it.
> This drawing is from patent 3,855,983, issued to Zopppoth[sic] in 1967 for a miniature surveillance camera.

Trying to look up that patent number[1] finds something completely unrelated: A magnetic sensor device in the ignition system for an internal combustion engine, awarded to Robert J. Valek at Motorola, Inc. Even a search of the inventor's last name[2] finds nothing by the last name of Zoppoth or Zopppoth (with 3 p's as shown in the caption).

I'm guessing that either there was a typo in the article, or that the Xerox patent was never issued and the number was reused by someone else (can that happen?), or that secret U.S. patents have a different numbering system that duplicates real U.S. patent numbers.

[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...

[2] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
You recognize mistakes by memorizing patterns. There is no level in chess where you don’t memorize patterns. Maybe in the lower levels the patterns are simple enough that you don’t consider them patterns, but forks, skewers, etc. are still patterns.
Personally I use Apple Notes or org mode. Whenever I see an alternative, I refuse because it's not like my notes will all magically migrate to Notion/Roam/whatever. No, I'll just append on a name to the list of notetaking apps I use. That's not worth it. Even for some fancy backlinking features that I'll definitely bikeshed to hell.

What it'd take for me to move to a new note taking app (not that I'm holding my breath for a new one) is that it would have to be an information black hole. I wouldn't have to migrate notes because it would automatically suck up everything. Of course that's tricky and potentially privacy invading, so I'm not expecting a solution anytime soon.
Big minus: Only works on Apple platforms :(

I use macOS and iOS all the time but I also use Windows, Android and Linux. So sadly most of Apple's services don't work for me. Even though I know they're really good. I really wish they'd expand their horizons a bit. Microsoft stuff works on pretty much everything so why not theirs?

I had no idea it was that good though, because of the above reason I never really used it.
Spot on!

The decline of West was invented as a tool to mobilize certain groups of Western population, just like any cultural and/or political narrative.

To name one obvious narrow prejudice: The prosperity in China was brought by market economy and Western corporation mechanisms. The rise of China is the rise of West. And often cited as one indication of the decline of the West.
IIRC it is well-known how to synthesize remdesivir, so nobody would actually have to reverse-engineer anything, but this stuff is particularly hard to synthesize on an industrial level, with some steps in the process taking weeks to complete without easy ways to speed it up. Also, each step only has a certain yield which is relatively low, so you need to put in a comparatively huge amount of raw material into the first step in order to get a tiny amount of remdesivir out from the last step, months later.

It seems a little bit like producing Whisky: you can't just decide now to produce a huge batch of 12-year-old Lagavulin and have it ready next month.
Once you give a function a name, it has an operation that's inherent to it.

If you have a function called `Add` that takes 2 parameters and returns the sum of those two numbers. That's the operation. If the web service that you call to perform the sum is down, it cannot return that sum, so that's an failure.

The code that calls this function needs that sum to continue it's operation. If it cannot get that result it cannot produce it's own result and that error needs to be propagated. Maybe the entire program has a purpose that it cannot now be completed and should be aborted.
That's it. That's the tweet.