skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a bound copy of Volume 16 [1] which as far as I can tell was just assembled from the unsold issue at the end of each year. Unfortunately they require a subscription to view the online archive and it feels very different when you've got an extant physical copy.

IIRC the machine gun story was page 1 and the first letter about aluminum was page 2 or 3 of issue 1. There was also a really interesting exchange between some laymen and a scientist about the nature of meteor but that was half way through the year. Both had some really crazy theories. Most of the interesting stuff like that is hidden throughout.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1867/01-05/
Unfortunately the whole K-12 education system and higher education system has been optimized for wage-earning jobs and not the pursuit of educational goals. This is how it has been for the past many decades. I wish it was otherwise but it's not.

Higher education is a business in itself. And the whole system has optimized for goals that we might not agree with, but this is how it is.
Im amazing that no companies are willing to work together to reject

- * "Diversity" (Discrimination) quotas

- * "Affirmative" action

- * Paid time off (Pregnant/sick/etc)
- * Income Tax

- * GST/VAT

- * Payroll/wage tax

- * Forced super/retirement funds
This is basically just highly polished PR. I'm sure bezos took acting classes and consulted with psychologists for just this purpose.
I think if you can learn one per hour every day you'll be doing pretty well. If you're in school you can easily learn a few every week.

It's also not rote memorization, rote memorization is mapping text->text not text->meaning.
Spam and Phishing in Q1 2020
This thread began with a bold claim about the causes of change in worker power. I challenged the poster to provided evidence commensurate to the claim. I was responding to someone who failed to provide sufficient evidence. You seem to be making an unrelated point. Perhaps start your own top level response?
totally agreed. the disparity is obscene.
yeah, the scheme doesn't somehow prevent you from breaking your API. that's still on us :)
Confirmation bias or actual personal discovery.

I don’t see what is so controversial about this. Lots of people take up exercising as a lifestyle and say they are much better for it. I don’t see what saying ‘yes but there is only one you, maybe you would have felt better without the exercise in this span if time...’ - which means statistics 101 really is not blindly applicable to all venues life. Also why bayesian statistics are sometimes much better in real life situations...
> "Rather than saying 'the government provides subsidies / loans' -- it's preferable to think of this as the population does this, with the government merely administrating."

I think this is true of all public spending in some sense. Governments don't have money. Rather, the population does, and via taxation, the government is able to administer it how it chooses, for better or worse. Hopefully for the better, of course.
Lockdown was the longest period of quiet in recorded human history
It depends on the university; at University of Melbourne they do.
> Why has China progressed more rapidly and pervasively than any other major economy in AI, machine learning, fintech and social media. Because the contents of our minds is now available to the social planner.

Wait until the author hears about the economic policies of Deng Xiaoping, bringing capitalist policies into China in the 1980s which opened it up to the free market. This goes somewhat against the ideas of capitalism and communism co-existing which Marx wanted the former to be replaced with the latter.

> Is Marx about to have the last laugh?

If North Korea is his best example of his ideas truly 'working' or 'existing' then I should expect his true supporters to try out this 'real communism' in action by paying a visit there.
ITER is aiming for net-positive energy in terms of heat coming off the plasma (but the energy will just be dumped); DEMO is aiming to actually generate electrical power.
Slow Train Coming (High-Speed Rail in US)
I'm speaking on my own behalf, and not representing my employer, so I don't want to provide too much information. As I understand it, based on what HR tell me, for the industry we are in we offer at the low to mid end of market rates on salary, and make it up in performance pay (bonus).
Let’s Visit Portopia
We Hindus don't just consider it as breathing, our world view is different. Breathing techniques in India are called Pranayama which means controlling prana.

This is an excerpt from chapter-3 of Raja yoga by Swami Vivekananda.

Pranayama is not as may think, something about breath. Breath indeed has very little to do with it if anything. Breathing is only one of the many exercises through which we get to the real Pranayama. Pranayama means the control of Prana. According to the philosophers of India the whole universe is composed of two materials, one of which they call Akasha, It is the omnipresent, all-penetrating existence. Everything that has form, everything that is the result of combination, is evolved out of this Akasha. It is the Akasha that becomes the air, that becomes the liquids, that becomes the solids; it is the Akasha that becomes the sun, the earth, the moon, the stars, the comets; it is the Akasha that becomes the human body, the animal body, the plants every form that we see, everything that can be sensed, everything that exists. It cannot be perceived; it is so subtle that it is beyond all ordinary perception; it can only be seen when it has become gross, has taken form. At the beginning of creation there is only this Ākāsha. At the end of the cycle the solids, the liquids, and the gases all melt into the Akasha again, and the next creation similarly proceeds out of this Akāsha.

By what power is this Akasha manufactured into this universe? By the power of Prāna. Just as Akasha is the infinite, omnipresent material of this universe, so is this Prāna the infinite, omnipresent manifesting power of this universe. At the beginning and at the end of a cycle everything becomes Akāsha, and all the forces that are in the universe resolve back into the Prāna; in the next cycle, out of this Prāna is evolved everything that we call energy, everything that we call force. It is the Prāna that is manifesting as motion; it is the Prāna that is manifesting as gravitation, as magnetism. It is the Prāna that is manifesting as the actions of the body, as the nerve currents, as thought force. From thought down to the lowest force, everything is but the manifestation of Prāna. The sum total of all forces in the universe, mental or physical, when resolved back to their original state, is called Prana.

"When there was neither aught nor naught when darkness was covering darkness, what existed then? That Akäsha existed without motion." The physical motion of the Präna was stopped, but it existed all the same.

At the end of a cycle the energies now displayed in the universe quiet down and become potential. At the beginning of the next to cycle they start up, strike upon the Akäsha, and out of the Akāsha evolve these various forms, and as the Ākāsha changes, this Prana changes also into all these manifestations of energy. The knowledge and control of this Prāna is really what is meant by Pranayama.
Yeah I think it really reveals a breakdown in our ability to quantitively model the intuitive notion of "causality".

A targeted public health intervention that prevented beheadings just at the time of beheading would clearly break the link in the causal change. This result is insensitive to any imaginable confounders. However, the executioner would find another strategy, say a gunshot or noose, which did not appear anywhere in our dataset.

Really makes you question the validity of observational studies. At least when acts of government are concerned.
That’s how most of life is. Do you get scientific measurements before having friends or having a family? Most of what we do is highly subjective. We are not as rational as we like to think.
What happens when corporations have more practical daily influence over people's lives than the government? This is a problem. Is it our Achilles heel?
That's not entirely true. People opt for these degrees because they believe they need a diploma to succeed. The specifics of the diploma is not as substantial as the diploma itself. They're paying for the paper and not the educational value. If they truly wanted to pursue higher education in liberal arts, then they would continue on the path to academia. But for most, their education stops once they get the piece of paper that is the diploma.
Those QR codes are much safer on paper, secured well, than any digital medium that can be hacked.

The cloud is a dumb place to store secrets, as anyone on the planet can attack your secret storage. Almost any offline medium (including a Post-It stuck to your monitor on your desk!) is inherently safer.
If you only want 1 card, sure. But why not have many? I have one that does 4x on restaurants and groceries, one the same on hotel/airfare, one 3 or 4x on utilities, etc, all of which beat 2.6. Especially since 2 of the mentioned above cash out at 1.25, effectively making them 5%.
Skillful propaganda uses facts to make a conclusion or conjecture that is misleading.

> Sushi is not from Japan

Some people will stop reading and share it on Facebook here

> Sushi reached China, then Japan from its origins along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia, and was later exported to the US and the rest of the world

Actually, it's from China!

Now even more people will stop reading and share it on Facebook

> The dish started out as fermented whole fish preserved with inedible salted rice

Wait, that doesn't sound like sushi to me

> However, the sushi we know today tastes and looks very different to how it did centuries ago. First of all, the rice in the original “sushi” was not intended to be eaten. Mixed with salt, it was used to preserve the fish and then thrown out.

Three paragraphs in and below the fold, the article itself admits that the dish being discussed isn't sushi. We're talking about "sushi" here!

> And sushi’s origins aren’t even Japanese, says Nobu Hong Kong executive sushi chef Kazunari Araki, who has more than 20 years of sushi-making experience.

"origins". Also, it's a Japanese guy saying it. Even Japanese ADMIT sushi is not Japanese!

> The combination of rice and fish, he explains, originated in the third century along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia, where countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia are now situated.

1,700 years ago people preserved fish in rice!

> By the 12th century, this method of fermenting fish had travelled from the Mekong to China, and then on to Japan, where it was called narezushi. However, in the 16th century, in the Edo period, Araki says, vinegar replaced salt in the preservation process, which was a major step forward in the development of sushi. It also gave birth to the name sushi – which translates to “vinegared rice”.

I'm pretty sure this means the dish that we call sushi now is Japanese. Do you think most people will have read this far down into the article?

The rest of the article is about how sushi is actually American. According to this article, sushi is from South East Asia, Chinese, and America! Does that sound like a reasonable conclusion to you?
Do you constantly measure your friendships or family? Most things in life go by instinct or how they make us feel.
Russian Covid-19 vaccine by mid-August
DNP was one of the first anti-obesity medications, and was widely prescribed in the 1930s.

It's use was discontinued, not actually due to overdose and death by heat, but because in some women it had a chance of causing cataracts, and if you're overly susceptible to oxidative stress/damage it can cause peripheral neuropathy.

These effects are generally mitigated through supplementation efforts with anti-oxidants though.
Tim Cook written testimony to House Judiciary Committee [pdf]
Yeah, I'm on Android (pixel 3a) and it's really hard to scroll only one page at a time for me.
People shouldn't need to learn a language and its paradigms to tell a computer what to do.
It's actually undergraduate level of math (typically General relativity is taught in 4th year). It just seems overwhelming because it builds on top of four years of math courses. I'm not an expert, but this paper is interesting because of its leaps in physics rather than special math.
One thing I think its important to remember, and that alot of graduates dont figure out until they leave, is that wether your a person or a country, the harsh reality is that the world really owes you nothing.

If an country or person doesn't produce in demand skills and produce in demand products, then it doesn't have any leverage with which to get the things it demands itself. An example of one such demand might be... a freely accessable largely tax funded teriary education system.

If we can't fund good education, then our living standards fall rapidly. Its the governments job to protect our living standards, and thus they might take interest in pushing people towards in demand skills.

This doesn't have to be as grotesque as you might think. Note that in the past, while University has always been 'open' in the sense that candidates are free to persue any course that they provide, student population was much, much lower. A bigger potion of the countries skills were much more commonly attained by on the job training, and apprenticeships, which are implicitly market driven.
Sometimes I think that Congress had better think ahead to save its own skin, propose amendments to the Constitution about limits on corporations, before they lose all power to them and can no longer escape their grasp.
Placebo can provide actual benefit to an individual. Easing suffering, thus reducing stress levels, which in turn help body to function better.

But you are quite right, individuals with strong confirmation bias and a large social media following are harmfull.

Still, that does not mean individuals should not perform harmless experiments. Individuals should experiment. But they should not claim their findings as universal truths.
I followed much the same path as you. And then I did buy the Micro Four Thirds camera for an overseas holiday.

It was better enough to satisfy my craving for manual settings and RAW output. But it was bulky enough for it to be a decision "to take it" anywhere and expensive enough not to leave in the glovebox/bag/convenient-nearby-place. Ok compromise for travelling for the DLSR types but maybe the fullframe sony rx1 would've been better.

But wife can pick up almost any camera and instantly make a much better picture than me. I suck at composition. Or I am biased towards my wife. Who knows.

Either way, I ditched it all and now just use the smartphone(Open Camera), but try to get better at composition...
Sure, I'll add some more prominently.

https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-8/ has several.

I added one on the home page, too.
There was a time when I would have come close to agreeing with that, the trouble is the ones building the bridge are people, and thats where the humanities comes in, its the study of people, even art history is valuable, and who knows where it will lead, maybe bridge design, someone has to design the pretty bits on bridges and buildings.
Legislators tried to reform campaign finance nearly two decades ago.

SCOTUS stopped them in their tracks.

A constitutional amendment is absurdly politically expensive.
You can break things by editing comments, but those things aren't, usually, part of the public API.

SemVer is a claim about the public API, not the total of behavior you could potentially observe and react to.
My understanding is that Spectre/Meltdown attacks are all the result of either conditional memory operations conditioned upon speculatively read data, or else speculative data operations using addresses calculated from data that was speculatively loaded.

Is that correct? Doesn't moving speculation from hardware control to software control allow you to perform better dataflow analysis than you can reasonably do in hardware, which allows you to perform more provably safe speculations (or less often pay the I/O overhead of converting a speculative conditional load into an unconditional load and a speculative conditional register-to-register move) than you get if the speculation decisions need to be performed in hardware?
iifx

https://www.wired.com/2004/03/douglas-adams-m/
I seem to remember a Cassidy & Greene program that would do all sorts of statistics to your extensions. I mainly used it to do a binary search to figure out which extension is causing the shareware app of the day to crash.
8 light minutes actually.
He's basically saying there's profit-maximizing loopholes all over the place, and it's not his fault they exist...which is true.

The real issue is that politicians are shooting themselves in the foot career-wise if they try to close these loopholes. We need to reduce the incentives politicians get from action or inaction depending on chummy relationships with big business. A good start would be more rules around lobbyist relationships, and figuring out how to close the revolving door where politicians are given lucrative jobs/consultancies/speaking-fees/etc by these businesses after leaving office.
Bartlett: They Earn $200k and Complain They’re Broke
I’m a modular reactor advocate as the most rational approach in fission for the future for the reasons you stated - our collective inability to construct and manage complex monoliths seems to be a problem in physical and software construction regardless of culture or economics as humans. This causes reactionary regulations that bloat costs and thus efficacy. We’d need less stock market and banking market if markets didn’t explode all the time, for example, and lay waste to millions of people’s living, but they don’t take care of themselves exactly without bad externalized costs.
I think about Ulbricht and his life without parole sentence periodically. On one hand, he was almost a pinnacle of libertarian ideology. On the other, he basically ordered what he thought were real hits on people multiple times. It’s hard to feel sorry for him after considering that.
I think you've made my point - BA's in things you may not think of may end up being useful, why exclude them?
Statement by Jeffrey P. Bezos before House of Representatives [pdf]
>nobody actually cares or wants power that is baseload.

That doesn't make sense. At all hours of the day there is some demand on the grid:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

If you only have to store for the fluctuations vs. having to store all night you end up with massively less storage.

Electric cars won't do it either. There are less than 300 million registered vehicles in the US and a car battery holds about 100 kWh. That's 30 billion kWh and overnight demand may be as high as 5 billion kWh/night. You'd need an extremely high compliance rate to pull that off.

But seasonal productivity fluctuations are the bigger issue with solar and wind. You might get way more power in July than you need and way less in January -- wind is also seasonal, but the peak month varies by region. You're not going to store months and months worth of electricity in cars and even grid storage facilities would become cost-prohibitive, and you can't reset a nuclear reactor on a weekly basis, but one or two starts a year might be achievable if you design for it. Currently that's not legal:

http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/09/03/why-dont-we-mothball-nu...
Also known as diaphragmatic breathing: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/9445-diaphrag...

I was taught this as a way to control some very acute anxiety from hypochondria that took over my life for ~6 months before I could get treatment. Apparently it worked, since I haven’t suffered from that type of anxiety since.
There's no rule that says you can't apply for more than one role at a given FAANG. It's not like they blacklist you for not getting hired in one role. They know they have an intentionally high false negative rate, you get to try again.
Yeah. You can;t just say “no one complained so there wasn’t a problem” licensing radio spectrum is a very expensive.
The idea that we were "born this way" has never sat right with me for a number of reasons, so I'm glad to see this article call some attention to it. In particular, the insistence that we were "born this way" and thus our gender or sexual orientation cannot be changed is underlined by the idea that being queer is a negative thing. I see no inherent reason for that to be the case, and would prefer to live in a society that didn't really care what gender people identified as, nor what genders/sexes they're attracted to. What does it matter whether we were "born this way" or not? What's wrong with choosing to be this way?

n.b. as the article noted, we obviously can't change our gender and sexual orientation at will; I want to be clear that that's not what I'm claiming.
Another way to think of this...

Is that a student that picks up poorly demanded skills and can't attain reasonable income, long term won't pay into the tax system that allowed them to do that.

At certain level that would become unsustainable through the generations.
Douglas Adams is one of my favorite writers, and intellectuals, ever.

If you are like me, you absolutely have to watch this hour-long presentation he gave at UC Santa Barbara in 2001 [0], titled "Parrots, the Universe, and Everything". Mind blowing.

His last book, "Last chance to see" [1], which is about endangered species, is heavily related to that talk.

I recently learned that Douglas Adams had a chance to play on stage at Pink Floyd's 28 October 1994 concert at Earls Court in London [2], playing guitar on the songs "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse".

He's even responsible for the 1994 album name "Division Bell" by Pink Floyd. David Gilmour and Douglas Adams were good friends.

Well, what can I say... It sucks that he went away too soon. I'd love to read more of his stuff, and I'd love to know his take on today's world.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc

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

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdOoJmDCV64
You teach 30+ first graders solo? Each kid would get 2 minutes an hour. A close to impossible teaching task. Is that a normal teacher student ratio in your district? Is that normal for public school?
Ex-Honestbee PH boss launches Pickaroo backed by Megaworld
Blockchain-Based BitVPN Reassures Users of Its Data Protection
Probably because you've flooded the market with Indians on visas, who've pushed down wages and working conditions, just like in the US (and now Canada). Smart students don't want to work in an industry where the working environment gets crappier every year if you're not in the 5% working at FAANG.

I had a similar experience when I graduated over a decade ago. My first gig was working for one of the big Indian offshorers - I actually spent a year in India, which was interesting. Regardless, after a few years on similar crappy contracts with over-worked, poorly compensated, indentured servants from India, who were tied to their employer via an H1B visa, I came very close to quitting software for good and going to law school.

Luckily, I found an industry that cannot use visa workers and have been able to make a successful career with working conditions and pay that's fair.

The visa system has turned most software gigs in the US into a very bad deal where ageism, long hours, lower and lower pay, and general working conditions get worse each year. Then they wonder why smart kids in college decide to go into law and finance, instead of STEM.