skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think about this a lot as well.
To a scientist, funding more science and scientists seems like a no brainer. It's not like everything's worked out, we are inured against all the reasonable existential threats, and we all live to 150 in perfect health. There seems like a clear line between scientific discoveries and almost everything that is good about the world. If everyone in the world took military spending for one year, and made a huge fund to give money to scientists, it at least has a chance to be one of the most beneficial actions in human history. It would also be an eye-watering waste of money, as in literally money disappearing into the void.

This is the thing. Science is a massive waste of money. It is the most important waste of money there is, but it is still a waste of money. If you try to make it less of a waste of money, it stops being worthwhile. To any sort of accountant, it looks like setting money on fire. Academia has shown the ability to proliferate and essentially soak up as much money as they can. Now at the moment, China can see that line between funding and future good. They can tolerate the huge wastage it entails. They are also a functionally permanent regime.

In western countries, my opinion is that science funding will contract over time. I think one of the reasons is that society is ageing. This is partly an economic effect, where the cost of caring for the elderly goes up, the number of people working and paying taxes goes down, and there is less money to fund science. In my country, the biggest government spending ticket is aged care, not including healthcare. But I think the main effect is psychological - more elderly leaders and a more elderly society have a harder time seeing the point of funding science. I'm not saying this is good or bad, only that it is there. In the end, a society decides on the appetite it has for funding science.
It truly baffles me how one could devise an interface so bad as the PrimeVideo UI. I have yet to discover the algorithm behind the near random search results trows up, and autocomplete for 90% of the cases trows up something 'that is not available in your region'. It's 2020. How hard can it be to serve a small catalogue of available titles and allow some decent parameterized querying?
Wish I could read it, but the pdf fonts make it too small to read on my phone.
User stylesheets were removed from Chrome for entirely valid and pragmatic reasons. The feature was poorly implemented and a maintenance burden, and fares much better in an extension (though I gather that the replacement wasn’t quite perfect until two or three years later due to precedence of style application).

I don’t believe Chrome’s user stylesheets even supported anything like Firefox’s @-moz-document for scoping the styles to an origin or similar—it was a completely blunt instrument that had very limited use, even less than Firefox’s userContent.css.

I wouldn’t complain if userContent.css were removed from Firefox for the same reasons (though I would certainly complain if they removed userChrome.css, since no alternative exists in that case). I used to use userContent.css. I’ve used extensions (now Stylus) for the equivalent functionality for years now.

The tweet this article cites about its removal six years ago is terrible: it quotes the most recent comment on that issue as though it were fact stated by the developers, when it is in fact a random person (probably a disgruntled user) jeering; said comment is completely false.
It is 95%, not 100%... and amazingly that looks accurate.

As an example, a 32" CRT with remote control (eg Sony Trinitron) cost about $1500-2000 back in 1997.

Today, you can buy a 32" TV for $85, delivered. And even though this will be "Brand X" and not Sony, it will have better picture quality, more functionality, be more reliable and use less power to boot.
I love Michael Steil. His presentations are incredible.
Long term on prices and yield yes. But since this is a strategic industry China needs to have domestically I could imagine subsidies being viable for a long time. Solar panels had a similar dynamic.
How to make your own music player using HMS Audio Kit: Extensive Tutorial Part 1
There are parts of Shenzhen that look like that.[1] But with better structural soundness. Here's a ground level view.[2] (That's a full sphere video; you can change the view direction, including looking straight up.)

This meets most of the criteria you see the "strong towns" people plugging for. Walkable streets. Convenient retail. Few cars. Very low speeds. Excellent land utilization. No space wasted on parking. Affordable.

Of course, the people who write those articles wouldn't live in a place like that themselves.

[1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/@22.54024647,114.0656082...

[2] https://youtu.be/e-2n_HksLh0?t=220
on "What's the right way to understand and model personality?"

Personality is an outdated concept, personality types triply so. There is no fundamental stability of personality, just behavior context.

Christian Miller - The character gap https://philosophybites.com/2019/02/christian-miller-on-the-... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/24/4818596...

Robert Sapolsky - Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA
Sure, here's a few:

Insolation-driven 100,000-year glacial cycles and hysteresis of ice-sheet volume

"Carbon dioxide is involved, but is not determinative, in the evolution of the 100,000-year glacial cycles."

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12374

Here's a good talk from NASA JPL last year stating we still have a very poor model for changes in cloud cover over time and the dramatic effect clouds have on climate :

https://youtu.be/ra9AFNco3lI

The Holocene Asian monsoon: links to solar changes and North Atlantic climate

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15879216/

Synchronous 500-year oscillations of monsoon climate and human activity in Northeast Asia

"This ~500-year cyclicity in the monsoon and thus environmental change triggered the development of prehistoric cultures in Northeast China. The cyclicity is apparently linked to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, against the background of long-term Holocene climatic evolution."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6739325/

Impacts of the north and tropical Atlantic Ocean on the Antarctic Peninsula and sea ice

"We suggest that the north and tropical Atlantic is important for projections of future climate change in Antarctica, and has the potential to affect the global thermohaline circulation6 and sea-level change3,12."

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12945

Etc, etc...there's probably thousands of studies on the AMO, PDO, NAO, ENSO, etc. On pubmed, Nature, etc. I highly recommend taking a look at some of those.
Women Crowdfunded Radium For Marie Curie
As somebody who has mistaken AAPL Arguments for Touhou Talk in the past I'm glad we can balance each other out :)
To be honest, Microsoft, Apple, Epic and other large tech companies... they seem to all try to lock software down to their platforms, want more control and profit from it. Not sure how I would position myself here.

They could have not released their software on Apple to not be dependent.
Countries sent small armies into battle for good reason - until the industrial revolution sending 1m men into a foreign country would have involved the overwhelming majority of those men starving to death due to lack of supplies.
Competition doesn't work in the presence of network effects.
I was also wondering like how the article says that relocating people near Chernobyl in such great extend isn't the right thing to do (taking the 9 months life expectancy limit in mind) but I am really confused here, because when I see movies or videos showing the Chernobyl accidents they show people feeling the burning sensation, vomiting, getting extremely sick and new babies being born with ill health, which is really scary. So if people don't re locate then they will constantly have this fear, right?
Private Property and Social Hierarchies as Concurrency Control Mechanisms
So is Tensorflow but do you really think volunteers could maintain it?
hmm, Firefox Voice was supposed to eventually use the speech-to-text engine that's now under threat but instead currently uses Google's engine? Can't imagine priorities like this came up in their recent negotiations.
Because security is not the real reason to ban TikTok, the government just wants an excuse to do so.
I agree in general that too many things pop up because people want change without good reason. But Wayland is a highly needed replacement, not just in my opinion, but according to the X.org developers themselves. See e.g. this [1] talk by someone who has worked on both X.org and Wayland.

> Why would users ever not stick with something that is stable and just works?

As a user, I switched to Wayland 1.5 years ago for two reasons. The first is that Wayland has way better performance than X. It solves some long-standing and highly irritating issues with e.g. screen-tearing that I and others have been experiencing with X. The second is security. Wayland is nearly a prerequisite for proper sandboxing of GUI apps, as X apps can all keylog each other, screen-record each other, inject keys into each other, and so on, without much restrictions. Since Wayland is backwards-compatible with X via XWayland, which these days has quite good performance, I haven't yet run into an X-only app that didn't just work.

As for the issues with nVidia, that's mostly due to nVidia implementing their own Wayland backend (EGLStreams) that is different from what every other graphics card driver uses (GBM), resulting in every desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, etc.) having to implement nVidia support separately from generic Wayland support. The single biggest factor holding Wayland back at the moment is nVidia; my experience is that currently Wayland already works way better than X.org if you have an Intel or AMD card, but is highly broken on nVidia.

The second factor holding it back would be that the number of window managers (compositors) for Wayland is lower than for X, currently the main ones are GNOME, KDE, and Sway. But this is changing fast: when I first switched only GNOME worked well; now both KDE and Sway are stable and fully usable on Wayland; and thanks to wlroots, a lot of new window managers for Wayland have popped up [2] and should mature over time.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

[2]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wl...
Baldur’s Gate III Masuk Steam Early Access
I've had Hay-on-Wye on my radar for a while (I'm Dutch, so it is a doable holiday destination by train and bus). The surrounding area looks interesting as well, and the mountains certainly appeal to me. You make it sound worthwhile. How are the prices? London's second-hand bookshops seem to be notoriously overpriced (not surprisingly due to rent and costs).

For now the only things holding me back are the fallout of Brexit and Corona.

My wife and I visited London three years ago and popped into bookshops wherever we could find one (Word on the Water, the London book barge was nice), but the best haul we had was on a day trip to the Isle of Wight where we rode the train to the end of the line and hiked to Ventnor where a festival was going on. In a churchyard an old man had a vintage bus he brought to England from Paris for the sole reason that he fell in love with it (the bus, not Paris), so he bought it when it was too old for its public transport role and restored it. It was filled with second-hand books for the occasion (for a charity I think it was), and we came away with a dozen books and a lovely chat.
Police Want Your Smart Speaker–Here's Why
Hey, I was reading your comments. Had to check out the guy with the huge balls. Kudos to you sir. I sum up George Carlin's life's work and applied it to bullshit detection and get nothing. I wonder if there are better places to hang out.
Among the crazy UX failures, fast forward is so crazy fast that it's completely unusable for me.
I think the only cultural references I see are football-result nostalgia. Quite a few do still crop up though (and even more so, almost every day I get an ad for a Ceefax inspired mug with my team's results on it).
I have an absolute hatred of putting unused code on a production server, especially if it's something that can listen to network traffic. It's such an unnecessary risk. The fact that you don't appear to be able to set PHP up in a way that disables the use of this thing feels horrible. There's no way I'd ever want to run PHP outside of a container that I have control over which few ports are mapped to now.
That's mine, thanks for the mention.
Ah, but Microsoft still takes a cut of that sale, it just happens at a different part of the chain. On top of that, Xbox live takes a 30% cut of all micro transactions, just like Apple.
Not 100% true. There are random and targeted searches of people boarding flights and requests for ID from CBP officers.

The usual reason given is searches for large sums of cash.
> This is a straw man, $500 billion in loans (normally above market value for collateral) means banks could be anywhere from 0-500 billion dollars richer but they are certainly not poorer.

It's not universally a strawman. I've had people propose to me, in all apparent seriousness, that we should just take the QE funding and give it to individuals instead.

> Have you seen the stock market lately? Investors have done well in this new easy money economy and until that money trickles down they certainly have it much easier than they otherwise would.

I've seen this theory, but it fundamentally doesn't make sense. Money is fungible; there's no trickling barrier dividing the money supply into "investment dollars" and "consumption dollars". (It is of course true that monetary policy can affect asset prices in other ways.)

> In the long run this is true. Especially the second statement, it's almost trivial to prove: Imagine an island with 10 dollars in circulation. The amount of goods produced doubles, and everyone is able to trade and consume all the goods. The price of the goods must necessarily be cut in half on average, so that the 10 dollars are able to pay for all the goods.

This isn't so, because you're missing the critically important concept of the velocity of money. If everyone buys and sells things twice as often to match the doubling in total production, prices won't need to be cut. It may help with the intuition here to imagine playing a video of the island at 2x speed; the number of goods they produce in any given time interval will double, yet the total number of dollars in circulation won't change.
That headline is pretty misleading: 1) REI never moved into the planned new HQ, 2) they’re going to use a combination of smaller offices around the greater Seattle area in combination with remote/WFH.

As an aside, it sounds like they’ll be able to sell the new HQ for a profit (Source: local radio...probably KUOW)
Sounds like cloud is getting ever closer to dedicated servers.

One would hope that for the 10x price increase over bare metal, someone would abstract away things like the underlying hardware or OS failing. But apparently, no, you have to pay the premium and do all the work.

The only use-cases that I could imagine for such a tool on EC2 would be if you either don't use containers, or if you oversubscribe your virtual servers by having higher container limits than what the instance can endure.

In the first case, the proper fix is to use containers. Docker can do CPU limiting for you so that one service spiking won't affect its neighbors on the same instance.

In the second case, I'd go bare metal and then hardware is so cheap that there's very little temptation to oversubscribe on RAM or CPU.
I believe that is PureScript.
There's a good iOS app that converts playlists, and will help you resolve situations where an exact match isn't automatically found.

https://songshift.com
> Do the police in your country have guns? (Trick question. The police in every country, even Japan, have guns.)

No, please do your research
It may be a reference to Wayland having better security than X, since any X apps can key log, screen capture, etc. each other while this is limited in Wayland.
Yes, I entirely agree. I often add one with my orders when I can because they are useful and the equivalent clone versions work out very expensive in the UK. They are in short supply because the margin on them must be tiny and it's not worth wasting much manufacturing capacity on them. I wish they would update the specs but I think that's very unlikely to happen as they'll lose the original $5 computer claim. I don't care if it got a little more expensive (again), I like the form-factor.
>I routinely encountered scenarios where accidentally passing values of the wrong type to core standard lib functions produced wildly unexpected behavior that would take hours or even days to debug

Could you provide a concrete example?

Intuitively I do understand ClojureScript is not as seamless as some people say. First of all, Clojure is kind of a database-programming language with fundamental data types built around concurrency, while JavaScript was single-threaded until recently (and web workers used shared-nothing model). Second, Clojure is build around Java specifically, not any other language. Java has some strict type system with immutable complex objects being pretty much native way of doing things, thus Java is great for implementing dynamic types on top of it.

But I feel like not having undeniable proofs of fundamental flaw in ClojureScript. For example, JavaScript fundamentally lacks copy-on-write complex structures. Thus development of copy-on-write libraries is painful e.g. ProseMirror which can become completely broken until page reload which is bad for Single Page Application. However, could it be that ClojureScript... just works?
For sure, but the language barrier and not being on the border will provide some dissonance. It's more a cultural thing for me at this point. Don't feel connected to America after falling in love with international life. Also want to escape the election cycle and local politics that everyone seems to obsess about.
With a bytecode compiler, multiple implementation approaches, and a couple of macrosystems dissected along the line. Though, LiSP is geared a bit more towards Scheme semantics rather than pragmatics. There are some details like closures, and dynamic binding, and call/cc, but you won't find truly gnarly details on garbage collection, value representation, threads, etc. Nevertheless, it's still an amazing book which I would recommend reading!
Indeed it does come up often, but your linked blog post doesn't state a single reason why "forking HTML doesn't make sense". First, nobody is "forking" anything. Second, you assume the role of a "web developer" as a given. If I, as a web "user" (reader) want to read some text (say, about gardening), then I sure want that text to be written by an expert rather than a "web developer". If in doubt, I can live with the presentation being plain; but there's no point in reading stuff about gardening by a dilettante gardener who happens to know HTML, CSS, and JS. As a corollary, "the web" fails to deliver for the domain expert as a simple means for self-publishing; instead a self-referential man-in-the-middle snake oil industry has been build.
Show HN: My notes on Working with Go
I also always wonder how companies can simultaneously offer to sell their highly advanced AI-bla search, yet utterly fail at searching themselves.

I still remember the time when Google tried to license their search servers to enterprises. It appears that market has now been completely eaten by Algolia. And my hunch is that it's because Google's search results are completely irrelevant for professional users. I search for a Windows API function name, and I get pages of SEO spam trying to sell me an unrelated Udemy beginner's course.
I am seeing a new UI for the past few weeks, where the FF is 10s at a time, with frames displayed over the progress bar: much like Netflix. The newer experience is much better.
Covid is a win for nobody, not even the countries who kept it out. It's good that they kept it out, because it saves lives, but the economy takes a hit either way.
>To minimize the overhead of context switches, I split tasks into a tree of checkpoints. Before taking a break I note down the next simplest checkpoint so that when I get back to work there’s little friction to resume.

This reminds me of a trick I deployed while studying for an tedious exam back in the college days, that worked super good at the time but I haven't tried it since.

I used to have the problem to wander off in my thoughts unrelated to the exam(task) at hand. It would often also be interesting thoughts: "well if X is true as this course material claims what about Z? oh that remind me of Y! let me just quickly google/wikipedia...." so letting the thought go was incredibly hard.

The simple solution was to realize as quickly as possible when I fell in to those thought pattern, write down what started the thought, and what associations propagated it. Then write down where it stopped, and the potential rest of the thought chain I could think of. All on one A4 paper that I promised to review at the end of the day after the exam study. The mere promise of reviewing it at the end of the day reduced the procrastination due wandering off from approx 2-4 hours a day to 30min max.

Worked quite fine, and it was easy to see what thought were actually interesting and demanded follow ups, and what was just useless (but enjoyable) thought experiments.

It also helped to have the "Todo today list" A4 paper next to this "chain of thought" paper while writing it down, to get back to the study quicker.
Introducing “version”
Why did Nvidia decide to do that anyway? I understand they have a history of being annoying on Linux, but I'm having trouble seeing what value there is in implementing this with your own backend.
Teletext holidays is still going. It was a place where you could browse for last minute holiday deals as far as I remember.

They have now transitioned to the web.

https://www.teletextholidays.co.uk/
Not immediately, because I would want the Covid-19 situation to improve a bit with hopefully a vaccine before moving into foreign territory.

Thanks for the offer though, would definitely ask in future.
Yes! If you are interested in doing front-end in Rust using Wasm, checkout Yew : https://github.com/yewstack/yew
The data flow is inspired by React, you’ll feel right at home.
Indeed. It’s also better than another UI which requires an esoteric feature of a remote control that I don’t even use and offers no way of switching that stupid choice off, preventing me from ever getting more information about the shows it is presenting beyond the title and banner.

It’s also better than one that always says I’m logged out when I start it, and then magically logs me in a minute or two later... while I’m in the process of trying to log in. (Or any of the several other ones that require me to log in nearly every time.)

Of course calling any of these a “User Interface” is almost laughable. SLOM is a better term. That’s “Small Library Obfuscatory Method” for the uninitiated. Or maybe they’re just trying to save bandwidth by making viewers spend viewing time searching pointlessly through their offerings that are ordered seemingly according to the pattern of pigeon droppings outside their office.
> If you won't use Signal, I'm going to force a downgrade to SMS or email, and then you get even worse security and privacy.

Or we will set up e2e encrypted telegram. Or not talk.

> What if I have a very good memory, and follow conversations by writing up their details

You saying that you remember I said something, even took a screenshot vs you can prove I said something, is a big difference.

If I am doing a snowden, I might go to a sauna. If I am planning to overthrow my boss, I think e2e telegram is okay. Because I can delete the conversation it might even be preferable to signal.

Use cases and threat models...