skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>There's no evidence that qualia are anything more than clusters within some vector space which is useful to describe sensory inputs.

I'm sorry, but this just betrays that you have no clue what qualia refers to. It's about the _subjective experience_ of interpreting data. Why don't we have 'smell experience' for visual data and a 'visual experience' for smell data? Why aren't our interpretations of red and blue switched (so that we interpret red visual data as a blue visual experience and blue visual data as a red visual experience)? Hell, why do we need visual experience to act on it at all?

Saying "they arose because they're useful' or trying to reduce it down to cluster analysis does absolutely nothing to explain qualia. There is absolutely no evidence that a NN neuron (or set of them) that can detect a certain trait such as loudness also has subjective experience. Frankly, we essentially know absolutely nothing about subjective experiences except that we ourselves have them.

>I know that philosophers like to believe in some mystical bullshit about a whole different category of things, but if you believe in evolution, things are simple

I genuinely recommend reflecting on this statement. You're essentially saying that you can solve in a single paragraph and using only knowledge that a CS undergrad might have (!) a problem that professional philosophers have grappled with for decades. Do you really think that is more likely than you simply not understanding the problem?
"Knows things" is kind of vague. I'm pretty sure GPT-3 would obliterate all traditional knowledge bases we have. Even bert could achieve state of the art results when the questions are phrased as the cloze task.

If you mean that anything except full general intelligence is unimpressive than that seems like a fairly high standard.
Unfortunately, not all websites used https or enforced it on pages that should have had it. It was very common to see payment forms submitted over http. That is why browsers evolved to the point where Chrome now won’t submit certain types of html form fields over non-https.
Going down the wiki rabbit hole on this led me to the very sad history of Ian Murdock, founder of Debian (Deb was his girlfriend's name at the time). Apparently he hanged himself in 2015 after a somewhat bizarre tweet storm announcing his suicide.
About half of my food forest is dedicated to poplar a very fast growing semi hardwood.

We cut a mother tree down and hundreds of Poplar clones sprouted from its roots.

I selected to keep 30 of them and my idea is to pollard them every few years for a constant supply of semi-hardwood stakes for building fences and staking tomatoes, and more. Videos on my YouTube channel, search "Russell Ballestrini Poplar".

A sharp machete can topple a 2 year old poplar sapling/clone into a stump roots with a single swipe.

Don't worry about it.

These poplars are pioneer species, which harvest carbon from the air and store it into wood!

Use these baby trees as trellis for cucumber, peas, and beans.

Then research the pollarding techniques of yesteryear for yearly maintenance.

Great shade givers as well!
In fact original EverNote implementation (EverNote 2.0) used physical notebook metaphor.

Notes appeared as an "endless tape":

https://www.phonearena.com/news/Two-thirds-of-app-users-in-U...

I think we (initial EverNote dev team [1]) were first who came up with reasonable virtual list implementation for notes.

The metaphor of notes tape (a.k.a. "writing notes down") was quite natural for most of people, that's why EverNote got so many users initially. The key point was to add powerful search tools (including OCR and image recognition) and categorization (tags) on top of that tape.

Just in case: Sciter's SDK contains sample implementation[2] of such virtual tape: https://quark.sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/vtape.pn...

[1] https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...

[2] https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/tree/master/samples/%2...
Fall of the Western Roman Empire
If you know a girl named Mercedes, she might be named after a car company which was named after someone's daughter.

https://www.mercedesbenzchicago.com/what-does-the-mercedes-b...
I for one hope that the Apples imported from New Zealand I buy I will get them cheaper.
Hopefully we will get more products from around the world at affordable prices. EU economy is inefficient and their products are too expensive. For me it is a good riddance.
World Bug Report
Personally I find Apple Notes the most convenient for quick jotting down of ideas etc. It’s not the most advanced in terms of features but it loads instantly, is quick to use and is available on all of my devices. Have tried numerous alternatives but they’ve never stuck e.g. they’re slow to start up or are fussy to use or don’t work well on one platform.

For deeper sketching out of ideas, diagrams etc I really like Concepts on iPad with the Apple Pencil. It has an infinite canvas and is all vector based, which is great for never worrying about whether there’s room to fit your idea on the page or whatever. Previously I used Notability and it was good and a bit more traditionally note based, but I miss the infinite canvas. The text recognition and handwriting features in Apple Notes on iOS 14 are pretty cool though, will be nice to see what third party apps do with them.
Ehahaha, thank you!
It goes both ways. The police unions should be outlawed, and police members should use democracy like everyone else.

If they don't like something about the job conditions, they can vote democratically to change it.

I can't form a tax union and negotiate with the government, why should they be able to?
"I think NIMBYism should be accepted as-is. ... YIMBYs are not going to beat NIMBYs locally."

I fully agree with your realpolitik analysis and conclusions. Your strategy is far more healthy than my own. Thank you.

I was very involved in local politics. Long time member of one of the few remaining orgs regularly doing endorsement interviews. My own large (largest?) precinct is in the most progressive legislative district, in the most progressive congressional district, in a very blue state. For a rough sense, IIRC, our 2016 caucus had ~140 Bernie supporters and ~10 HRC supporters.

That liberal bubble you hear about? I was deep in it. Our executive board regularly has some very divisive arguments. But I now know these were the narcissism of small differences. Collectively, we were very far to the left of our broader community.

I have a rueful laugh whenever told how left-wing my area is. People just don't know. That liberalism hard stops when the topics are housing, homelessness, and adjacent issues. The policy positions blithely voiced by electeds, candidates, other org leaders, activists, neighbors, etc. have made many of us board members blanche.

I've had some very rough conversations with friends, family, and associates about zoning, development, social services. The kinds of convos where I just have to stop for fear of damaging the relationship. It's not a good feeling.

Any way. Thank you for your clear-eyed take. I wish I had your views a decade ago.
MySQL's fork, MariaBD, is also named after one os Widenius' daughters.
Yes, I can see how one worldwide pandemic in 100 years leads to the direct conclusion that worldwide pandemics will happen more and more often.

How often are we talking here?
Over the course of about two years I worked on and off on the Andrew Ng ML course. I loved the site at first but was less enthused about all the incremental changes made to the site over time as they tried to realize a business model. Things like suggesting I pay for the free material in exchange for a useless cert, or verifying my identity via typing analysis so verify I was indeed myself etc
Do you have a source for this claim?
Here are two survey articles with a lot of evidence about all the different outcomes that are strongly correlated with IQ.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2015-strenze.pdf
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2007-strenze.pdf

Specifically, when looking at people with IQ above 110, it seems like the correlations are still there at least for PhD level science. Most fields have average IQs above 130: http://www.religjournal.com/pdf/ijrr10001.pdf

One thing I didn't know initially is that IQ tests are normalized so the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 10. If we assume IQ is normally distributed (not exactly true, but roughly accurate), then IQ of 110 puts you in the top 33% of the population. IQ of 130 puts you in the top 0.3%.
Lol, people say this but I think he was actual opposition to the Tories. KS will not fight anything the Tories want. It will be disastrous for the working people. Shame Labour have reeled back to the depths of hell with New Labour. All I'm suggesting is that the Centrists need to get a grip. Either be with the right wing bring back the Empire type or move left and join to progress society.
The surprising thing is not that he invented the poubelle. It’s that he’s just one elected official in one city who increased its usage. I’m on the other side of the Atlantic, in beautiful Québec, and we also call it une poubelle.

It’s as if computers were called Jobs machines.
P.S. sometimes Orgzly/Drpbox when mobile.

Evernote being my bookmark tool now that Delicio.us has been nerfed. (If it's even still around.)

(Also this P.S. because Materialistic doesn't seem to allow editing.)
And young children (and occasionally their parents jocularly imitating them) talk about "hooving" the carpet, because a "hoover" is obviously a machine for "hooving", right?
As is often the case with Brexit the real explanation for inexplicable actions of the current government is all about internal Tory party management. I read this article a while back which explains it quite well: https://nicktyrone.com/why-i-believe-the-boris-johnson-gover...
A perfect example is amphetamines. Without them, I don't get stuff done, sure I will get the one thing done that I am interested in, but the dishes will sit in the sink for 2 weeks before I can even remotely begin to think about them, and then it is like pulling teeth to get started. The task just seems insurmountable. When I take my medicine, I do them as a way to take a break from thinking. I agree, I think a lot of people self-medicate mental health issues. I know I like opiates, so I always take them as prescribed when they are given to me. Never had an addiction problem with them, but I was on them for a period of time due to a back injury. I think the risk of amphetamine addiction is overblown, but I certainly see how opiates can be addictive and very quickly. They make you pretty much not give a crap about anything.
From the outside it looks as if Brexit is at most slightly unpopular, so it's not unimaginable to believe that in fluctuation we might occasionally find it to be the marginally popular position.
> There's nothing wrong with the word black.

It's negatively connoted in many places. In German for example, fare jumpers are "black riders", people who don't pay TV fees are "black viewers", illicit money is "black money", pessimistic views are "seeing black" etc. etc. ...
Clean Architecture
I've never understood this. If everyone is doing unproductive "busy work" (digging up money) instead of making useful goods and services, then how could the money be worth anything?
Euro elections had Farage beating Lib Dems, 2017 had Tory win too.

Fear of Corbyn was a factor, but so was the “get on with it” sentiment
They make screen films to recreate this friction on the iPad Pro. A lot of my artists friends use them:

https://paperlike.com/
How do you backup Apple Notes? The PDF export loses fidelity. I really like AN for the integrated camera, esp the document scanner. Is there another application that allows for writing as well as annotating media, video, photos and sound?
It might not be exactly what you’re looking for but StackExchange has a software engineering site:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/

There’s also one for code reviews.

There are still forums out there but I don’t know which ones you’d be interested. Most are targeted for a specific project, framework, etc.

One I could suggest that is t really focused on any one thing, but has threads for specific things, is the Cavern of Cobol over at SomethingAwful.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=2...
Moving parliament is a political compromise, not unlike the 1790 compromise in the US
Germany bans single-use plastic straws, food containers
https://www.instructables.com/id/Yellow-Dots-of-Mystery-Is-Y...

"Most color laser printers and color copiers are designed to print invisible tracking codes across every single printed page of their output. These codes reveal which machine produced a document and, in some cases, when the document was printed or copied."

FYI

Edit:

List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...

I'm going to have a close look at my monochrome laser printer output, just in case.
> Other builders have to design a custom bridge for a unique mountain range that must handle stress not normally found in cookie cutter bridge designs.

Aren’t you confusing builders and engineers?
Is it still feasible to still train this model at home?

If not, then how can I fine tune it to fit my own data? Will they provide API for it?
https://www.uaf.edu/anlc/resources/inuit_or_eskimo.php

> Although the name "Eskimo" was commonly used in Alaska to refer to Inuit and Yupik people of the world, this usage is now considered unacceptable by many or even most Alaska Natives, largely since it is a colonial name imposed by non-Indigenous people. Alaska Natives increasingly prefer to be known by the names they use in their own languages, such as Inupiaq or Yupik. "Inuit" is now the current term in Alaska and across the Arctic, and "Eskimo" is fading from use. The Inuit Circumpolar Council prefers the term "Inuit" but some other organizations use "Eskimo".
Leatherman multitools are named after the inventor, Timothy S. Leatherman.
I would even one up there, and say, that standardized tests and a schooling system rewarding those traits, filter out lots of innovators, long before they get near a work bench.
Oh what a shame, the rich person needs to pay a little bit extra so the rest can live like a human. How horrible it is to think someone can earn a livable wage.
Huh

>The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank™, and assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that's not why it's called PageRank. It's actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010715123343/https://www.googl...
C++ Is a Lie
If they weren’t already, they will be now that humans have found them
The referendum certainly gave a voice to a demographic of nationalists, amongst them some quite insidious people, that's absolutely true.

However, it's simply incorrect to characterise the larger Brexit demographic as people who, majority living in the most deprived areas in the UK, voted for anything other than naive or misguided assumptions about the economic impact of EU membership.

It seems to be a fundamental political platform for all parties these days to dehumanise opponents over practicing the slightest bit of empathy.
Who decided to flip the words though
No, but the most common problems become commoditised. 15 years ago I could make money building a restaurant website, now it's just squarespace or Wix. I could build a CMS or set up an ecommerce site. There was enough demand that companies like Shopify grew into existence.

But while the baseline expectation is higher, so is the complexity of new problems. Being a developer is to constantly be learning and adapting, changing direction and always trying new things.
Angus Maddison's estimates of historical GDP are outdated now. I'd look at works like Broadberry's China, Europe and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980-1850 [1].

[1]https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/oxford-economic-and-social-hi...
For me the biggest point of writing is to remember and then safely forget about stuff.
This is true for a certain class of apps. (I really like the website too. Clean and readable.)

Having recently moved back to a Chromebook, I'll add one more to the long list, one that you don't really hear about. Gitlab comes with a very nice Web IDE. Create a new markdown file and start typing away. You get all the beauty of version control without having to use version control. Can even set it to automatically build your own private site. All free of charge. I'd argue this does stand out compared with, say, Evernote or OneNote.
"Note Taking" is the wrong approach, imho. You are responsible for putting things in and keeping it up to date, and of course this is prone to fatigue.

An automatic knowledge base that is created from the signals you already generate anyway would serve you the best, I think. This is what I'm building with https://histre.com/
FWIW, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/04/24/4751295...

> But now there's a new theory. According to the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, linguists believe the word Eskimo actually came from the French word esquimaux, meaning one who nets snowshoes. [. . .] But the correction to the etymological record came too late to rehabilitate the word Eskimo. [. . .] Many Native Alaskans still refer to themselves as Eskimos, in part because the word Inuit isn't part of the Yupik languages of Alaska and Siberia.

So it’s considered non-PC because for a while an incorrect etymology of “meat muncher” was used
Still doesn't seem super different, personally. Women seem to already have cargo options that aren't like you say:
http://becomechic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/20-Ways-To-...
https://www.memorandum.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/i-ivor...

And there's some men's one out there similar:
https://www.hugoboss.com/us/relaxed-fit-cargo-pants-in-itali...
https://www.wearfigs.com/pages/shop-products/mens-axim-cargo...

Although as a programmer, no one would bat an eye if I wore shorts to work, even, so I find the author's claims that cargos can't be worn to an office kind of outdated. Maybe he's a car salesman or something and his boss forces his to wear a suit.
Shall the West Pass Too? Whispers from Fallen Civilisations
This is the first chapter from a book I am writing about the decline of the West, and how to reverse it. This chapter summarises a number of indicators of decline and implications for the future, while also touching on the potential causes by applying the thoughts of Spengler and Toynbee.

Enjoy and feedback welcome!
ZIM desktop wiki (open source). For me, a real replacement for OneNote. Desktop app, no finicky markup skills required. Saves plain text files. Problem solved.
"Reading the OpenAI GPT-3 paper. Impressive performance on many few-shot language tasks. The cost to train this 175 billion parameter language model appears to be staggering: Nearly $12 million dollars in compute based on public cloud GPU/TPU cost models (200x the price of GPT-2)"

https://twitter.com/eturner303/status/1266264358771757057
Usually, that bullshit is tantamount to defrauding the investors by taking salary without creating business value, or screwing over the customers by forcing them to upgrade to a substandard version of the product.

Saying refusing to play along is not “conscientious” is classic corporate double speak.

I’ve definitely similar elsewhere. In fact, the article points out that people that “can’t cut it” at corporate culture often go on to create the best companies.
U.S. Treasury, General Account: Wednesday Level (Wdtgal)
Oh yeah, I'm all over it. I got a PDC years ago and last week I put a deposit down on some Kunekune piglets. FWIW I suspect Nature made us to do Permaculture, et. al. ;-)

(I just laid in seventy seeds in a mini greenhouse to start: melons, the Three Sisters: corn, squash, and beans, some dwarf Tamarillo and ground cherries, etc.)

Sharedearth.com looks awesome (not technically, technically it's crude but functional) and I just signed up and made a profile. Finger's crossed! Thank you!
Reminds me of a guy who hacked into Xerox machine (could have been Canon etc. really, can’t remember anymore) they used to print exam questions in computer sciences faculty (~1995). And who then had a short but lucrative run of selling those questions to other students. He obviously got ratted out rather quickly and got expelled from college.
Z80 Explorer
For me, if I have some more long-running projects or ideas I might return to and e.g. give a presentation about them at some point, I find using https://orgpad.com an alternative. It tries to be a general tool that helps you connect the dots in a graph and that helps structuring information more like your brain does instead of forcing the linear approach of lists or longer texts. It doesn't force a scheme or anything like that on you and it can quite easily be turned into presentations e.g. like this conference talk on Graph isomorphism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu8P7UwHhAA Btw. Orgpad is also a project, that is completely written in Clojure/ ClojureScript. (Full disclosure I have consulted and still consult the developers on orgpad.com infrastructure.)

I the end, if you have the wrong tool or the wrong method for anything you are going to have a bad time even if the tool or method is useful in a different setting. An analogy: You can hardly unscrew something using a hammer unless you want to have more problems then before.
The best thing about Apple notes is that I can dictate while I am hiking. The problem is that it seems to require >2 bars of service, which is a rarity when I actually need it.
I believe it was Thomas J Flip, in 1911.
I highly suggest looking at Elixir. It makes things much better in my opinion.

Some takes from one of the inventors of Erlang on Elixir https://joearms.github.io/published/2013-05-31-a-week-with-e...

tl;dr "It didn't take long, but pretty soon my gut feeling kicked in. This is good shit"
Should the Monster Play Fair?: Reception of AI in Alien: Isolation
>"The investment bankers create a prospectus which describes the "story" of how these companies plan to make money, present financials in a way that is understandable (albeit likely an optimistic way), and then sell the investment as an opportunity."

How different are these prospectus from the reports that the companies already provide to their investors and boards though? I guess I'm asking isn't that "story" already written for them?
Ah sorry I thought it was some technical thing!
It seems like with minor improvements, you could use this to significantly accelerate mundane parts of programming or writing. Human writes bulletpoints, neural net turns it into a program or letter, human corrects. There already was a pretty smart looking AI-based autocomplete shown on HN a couple weeks ago.

This will accelerate development. Is the current version there? Probably not. But GPT-4 might, and would then accelerate the development of future versions.

Even though this is not "magic", it sounds like it will turn into a practically usable and extremely valuable tool soon.
We're talking a while ago, today this would never fly, and they were eventually - predictably - shut down.
Or buying from your neighbor at his store in your village?
Interesting! Can you point to have any sources for that?
> If you have an atomic step that produces multiple targets, it confuses make, and encoding the fact properly in the Makefile is really not straightforward.

Make does have a lot of warts, but this isn’t one of them any more. Grouped targets were added in the most recent release of GNU Make, and they address exactly this problem.

Re: your other points, many of them boil down to “the syntax is weird”. I agree 100%, and also it’s not so tough once you get used to it. I use GNU Make for tons of things, and I like it a lot.