skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think educated people are often dangerously out of touch with how many people don't share their worldview.

What you call above a wacky idea - is actually not that wacky. I may believe dinosaur X existed but not dinosaur Y. That’s perfectly ok. Much of this stuff is not “settled science”. I work in academia, and mostly its a milder version of VC vacuousness. You occasionally throw stuff out & see what sticks. It’s plausible, but not proven one way or other. So you publish something - the goal is mostly signaling and mindshare acquisition. If everyone waited until we knew forsure with 100% consensus, then nothing would get published. That’s why a majority of academic research can’t be replicated, but it is still published and it is still legit.
I use PayPal as a front to my bank account via SEPA Direct Debit, which has an 8-week no questions asked refund policy. If PayPal doesn’t cooperate when I raise the issue I can easily get my money back through my bank. But I still like to dispute just so the business goes on record for fraudulent transaction.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a browser engineered to protect against that? I'm tired of struggling with dark patterns every day, from URL hijacking to modal dialogs with deliberately broken layouts to scrolljacking.
This depends on the renewable.

Hydro, wind and waves are probably at that ideal except to the extent that they are tidal energy.

Solar panels... are literally in the business of making the planetary albedo higher, to the extent that they do so they are introducing thermal energy.

Geothermal is in the business of increasing the rate at which heat escapes from underneath the surface, which increases surface temperature.

Tidal energy is in the business of extracting energy from the kinetic energy of the moon, which probably increases the temperature of earth (but it's hard to say to what degree).

Fusion (if it ever becomes practical, and you count is as renewable) is in the business of releasing potential energy trapped in hydrogen atoms, increasing the temperature. This is particularly problematic because fusion would also enable us to increase our energy usage to the point that direct heating becomes a problem at the same scale as CO2 release currently is.

Fission (if you count it) is like fusion.

Space based solar (if it ever becomes practical), is increasing the area of the sun captured instead of the albedo, and is directly introducing energy.

Etc
It sounds more convincing to what demographic? It may convince people of above average intelligence, but half of all people have below average intelligence. For those people, emotional appeals will probably be more convincing than boring, logical arguments.
Resource wars and food riots are already happening in many parts of the world and no one wants to do anything about it :(
Wait until Musk's neuralink is common.

I talk fast, and type exceptionally fast. I wonder how insanely fast a neuralink would be, without the limits of flesh, rendering concepts to a data stream of some sort.

Then transmitting that to another person. I'm sure there will be a new language, but... imagine conveying 10 minutes of talk in 12 seconds.

How would you ever communicate normally again?
One problem I have with Cambridge is that, IMO, it's a small island in the middle of nowhere, which has to limit its attractiveness at some point.

Sure, there is a fast-ish train link to London but Cambridge itself is quite small and there is close to nothing at all around it.

Edit: Sorry guys! Obviously many people from Cambridge here.
Maunakea Telescope Finds Hints of Life on Venus
Linux phones are never going to be especially obvious or user friendly. To get those types of features you need a boatload of investment that the open source community can't hope to muster in any sort of reasonable timeframe.

For now the choice is privacy vs user friendliness. Currently rooted/de-Googled Android provides one of the best compromises for the average privacy-minded power user, but maybe in a few more years these Linux phones will be mature enough to give Android more of a run for their money.
> Are there no impactful computer science problems left outside of ML?

Well, do Arden Koehler or Howie Lempel have 80,000 hours of CS Research experience? It looks like they have 80K hours of experience thinking about the best way to spend 80K hours. Woops.

On the contrary, the massive influx of applied research driven by deep learning hype means there's probably a lot more high-impact stuff outside of ML than inside of ML. Quantum computing, bullet-proof crypto implementations, safety engineering for robots, and even hardening the electric grid/key compute infra against solar flares all seem much more important. Also much less "sexy".

...and even most of the AI/ML problems are scraped from a few papers from corporate AI labs with the best PR skills, with an eye toward AGI risk. But 1) AGI risk is massively overblown and 2) trying to solve those problems in general has a "silver bullet" vibe. All of the solutions to "AI Safety" questions are going to boil down to "do good software engineering", which is often more about processes and org incentives than technology or science. A really good automated HiL testing setup is going to be a lot more important than "preventing reward hacking". If you don't believe me, go ask anyone who's actually built a robot.

So, I think maybe "AI Safety/Robustness broadly construed" could be one or two entries in a list of important problems in CS. But certainly not half the list as they are here.

TBH, one of the highest impact problems in CS is convincing young PhDs to not waste their time applying deep learning to every god damn thing regardless of whether it's the right tool for the job.
Support Students' UserFreedom
If an underwater Datacenter is established in International waters, do any of the data and privacy laws apply?
There's two different kinds of confidence in science. There's the type that uncritically accepts an article at face value (oranges cause/cure cancer! Time to ban/require orange consumption!), and there's the type that says "the scientific community thinks evolution is true, so even if individual articles can be criticized, on the whole I shouldn't discount it as a theory based on a single critique or mistake." The former is good to undermine; the latter bad. But the boundary between them can be murky.
The math is simple: Replace a senior salary with 2 H1Bs for (hopefully) 1.5x productivity. 2 weeks vacation, no family, and no health issues makes for the ideal servant.
Along those lines, I had a college professor who had just published a paper (now 25 years old?) talking about why "the 20 amino acids." He was equal parts bombastic and brilliant, and for some reason this paper of his stuck with me all these years.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00225...

Now, I'm not an expert or even an advanced layperson in this area, so I won't attempt to speak to the validity of the idea. I merely found the argument interesting at the time.
5th Generation Warfare
> But you need uikit/appkit.

Or one of the various alternatives... Flutter, React Native, Cordova, maybe a few others. There are also game app engines for games and game-like apps).

There are definitely fewer decent alternatives than for the web, but you aren't exactly starved.

Also, the context here is bug fix release cycles... no matter what you choose there will be bugs and release cycles that don't always match what you want for your app.
After reading GP's comment multiple times, I do not see any place where he mentioned turning back climate change. So whether or not your comment is true, it doesn't seem to contradict anything GP said.

If we wanted to accelerate climate change, we could obviously do so (as proven in the last century). Meaning we have an impact on the acceleration of climate change. Meaning we can make decisions to make that acceleration slower, rather than faster.
> is it significant or is it insignificant

Then a study (ideally multiple studies) should be commissioned to find this out. We shouldn't just do it because we can, and because armchair physicists are pretty sure that it's insignificant.

Because, that's what Microsoft (and their partner) did. They did it because they could.

Remember when we, as a global society, believed that CFCs would have an insignificant impact on the environment? I do. Perhaps we should tread a bit more lightly when we're already running into species extinction and global climate change issues.
> Shorting should be banned... as it never does the company any favours.

No, here are my 5 reasons or examples why shorting is good.

_1) Shorts can be beneficial to the company:_

Tesla made a killing from being one of the most shorted stocks. As the stock price rows, it experienced frequent short squeezes as the $TSLAQ short positions holders experienced forced liquidation. Their capital became transferred from the shorts to the longs further boosting the positions of the long investors. $NKLA, $BYND, and $PTON as well.

_2) Shorts Beneficial to long investors:_

Long investors sometimes receive interest payments from short sellers. Heavily shorted stocks become Hard to Borrow (HTB) due to high short interest. HTB stocks cost money to short as represented by an annual interest payment. Robinhood traders with large blocks of HTB stock receive interest payments. IBKR traders using the stock yield enhancement program also receive interest payments. Furthermore, investors of popular Vanguard Index Funds such as VOO and VTI outperform the benchmark by a tiny amount. This is because Vanguard lends out a small portion of the heavily shorted stocks in it's index for interest payments. Then it takes those interest payments and reinvests it back into the ETF further boosting the price.

_3) Shorts allow smart investors to profit regardless of the type of market:_

Hedge funds will short overvalued stocks and long undervalued stocks so that regardless of the market direction, the hedge fund will still make a profit. This stance can reduce portfolio volatility and performance rollercoaster long-only investing can be.

Despite all of these positives for short selling, it would be interesting to see an exchange that bans short selling just for the sake of differentiation. It could never be a popular exchange due to the lack of traded options but the differentiation might be enough to allow it to succeed.
> “Science knows that the disappearance of dinosaurs and the appearance of flowers occurred simultaneously, yet, strangely, it has never drawn much of a connection between the two events. It is up to perfumers to correct the oversight.

> “Vegetarian dinosaurs dined on ferns, floating water plants, and the palmlike cycad. They were not very intelligent, and certainly not very French, having developed a limited, strictly specialized diet. When the great mountain building took place during the Cretaceous Period, seaways drained and swamps dried up. First the aquatic plants, then the ferns and cycads succumbed. Insufficient surface water. Some new plants had been gradually moving in, however. These plants were inconspicuous at first, and neither the dinosaurs nor the swamp plants paid them much attention. Ah, but they had plans for the future. They began to grow their roots longer and longer, sink them deeper and deeper, until they could reach the moisture trapped beneath the surface, and when their stringy little exploratory organs hit the water table-POW!” (Bunny smacked the podium; if V’lu and Priscilla hadn’t been awake before, they were now.)

> “POW! They exploded in a scandalous display of sexual invitation.

> “The old claw-and-fang world of drab, predatory, reptilian repression had never seen anything like this. Lasciviously colored, scandalously scented blossom after blossom flaunted its genitalia openly, enticing with visual and heretofore unknown olfactory charms any who might be inclined to sample its pleasures.

> “With their appalling genius for adaptability, insects responded enthusiastically to the outbreak of sensuality. So did the smaller birds. Dinosaurs, however, were repulsed. Although their reproductive equipment must have been monumental-the penis of a Brontosaurus would have been only a couple of yards shorter than the thirty-foot organ of the great blue whale-it was kept out of sight and infrequently used. The dim-witted, thin-blooded dinosaur was not a hot lover, another way in which it differed from the French.” There was a soft ripple of laughter. Very soft. “It mated once a year, barring headaches. So put off was the prudish dinosaur by the sexy smell of flowering plants that it starved to death and went extinct rather than eat them.”

- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
That line about the fathers routine really got to me. I find it a constant challenge to do the daily routine with my completely healthy children. This father got up at 5am, did the morning routine, then did the evening routine, and it seemed to imply that he would also wake up every two hours during the night to turn Martin. He did this for years despite being told that he was really just waiting for his son to die. The amount of love and compassion this guy showed for his kid is something I strive for every day with my own children, but not sure I always achieve.
> Assuming every watt of energy is actually converted to heat and we moved every data center on earth underwater it'd raise the temperate of the oceans (1.3x 10^21 liters) about 0.01°C.

Also assuming we have coated the oceans with a perfect thermal insulator. Otherwise this heat would also radiate away, a small fraction going to the atmosphere and a lot of it back into space.
> Kardashev type 2+ civilizations

I think you are in fact laundering the very large assumption you're making.
To me the lesson is the same old basic web security practice: don't click links, navigate to pages yourself. When he saw the ad that interested him he should have googled the offer instead of clicking on the ad.
Denial of service is just one of many potential goals.
I have a similar sentiment and anecdote. I'm fully aware that the OP is more about long term projects, but sometimes long term projects can be helped by a modular approach - including starting with a singular high energy event at the beginning to keep you motivated or get validation.

Anecdote: A few months ago I was speaking with a friend and I mentioned the prospect of writing a certain article for publication in a newspaper (at least a local one), but I quickly dismissed the idea. I thought "what are the chances?" I actually looked up the chances of getting published in a top newspaper, and, according to Quora, they were extremely slim.

My friend pushed me to go ahead with it anyway. I spent the next 4 hours producing and editing the first draft. My friend and a random guy sitting next to me at Starbucks helped revise it. I submitted the article to one of the top newspapers in the country/world and got published a couple weeks later.

I literally never wrote a blog or article before that, and two weeks later tens of thousands of people were reading it and it was shared in elite circles. I sent the link to random Starbucks dude to show that his 10 minutes talking to a stranger resulted in more words on a national newspaper. He got a kick out of it.

Though writing is not my profession, I would now feel more confident pursuing a long term writing project like authoring a book in my free time. This goes back to the modularity I mentioned above. This story could easily have been about a small side project that got traction on GitHub.

There is a paucity of action. Just do it. I'm glad my friend told me that.
I wonder if governments around the world are thinking more about manufacturing and distribution since we have promising early results. Bill Gates & his foundation have been talking about how 7 billion doses vaccines will be produced [1] and distributed equitably [2].

[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/What-you-need-to-know-abou...

[2] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/TheOptimist/Articles/coronav...
Coerced consent is not consent.

It is not possible to function fully in most western societies without access to banking services and payment cards. "Consent" to share financial data with credit rating services is consent extracted under duress. Most people have no other choice but to apply for bank accounts and credit accounts unless they are able to live off-grid.

If a robber points a gun at someone and tells them to hand over their wallet, the fact that they had a choice between cooperating and being shot does not mean that cooperation is a consensual act. The existence of an even worse alternative to an unwanted compelled act does not make the compelled act consensual.

It also should not be overlooked that the US financial credit reporting system functions as a Chinese-style Sesame Credit social credit reporting system in practice. Credit reporting agencies harvest non-financial data to evaluate individual behaviors and credit scores are widely used to control access to employment and housing. This amounts to a human rights violation to which no one can meaningfully consent regardless of its formal legality.
I never even applied for credit. I had to get the report to rent an apartment.
I strongly recommend reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn for an excellent treatise on why the answer to "Would Newton be of negative value today?" is almost certainly yes (in the context of scientific progress). It's a dense book but it's a seminal work on the philosophy of science and Kuhn goes to great lengths to dig into how scientific revolutions developed and entered the mainstream.

Long story short, Max Planck was on the money when he said that "“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Oh I see. I was looking at it on mobile yesterday and the dates were 2000, 2010, 2020, etc. Even rotated landscape. On desktop it expands to the full width and I get every year. Something to take note of perhaps.
MDL Zork from 1978 running on PDP-10 emulator
Which of these 2 domain names should I use?
For my new project, a boilerplate for building serverless SaaS applications with React, I'm doubting which domain I should use. I bought both serverless.page and serverlesssaas.com. If you have some time to be a hero please check out the landing page and let me know what you think I should go with.

1: https://serverless.page/
2: https://serverlesssaas.com/
Not reinventing the wheel also helps. Billions are spent every year to design things that have already been designed, but aren't free to use.
> A well-thought design can save us many hours of coding, testing, and troubleshooting.

That is the very definition of a waterfall design model.

I've turned into a fluid-design advocate over the years, where every design principle follows a next question - "okay, this is good but how would I change it?".

So you start with a unique constraint and four months later, you find out that it is not actually unique (like "two patients with the same email, because the 2nd one is a newborn on day of birth").

Or you normalize a data-set only to find out that your 1:N relationship turns into a 2:N relationship from before/after dates (like "UK" goes from "EU" to "UK").

The lost-time work of a design is usually the "okay, we did it in a world where UK was in EU - but we undo it & here's how" notes.

Having a plan to decommission the nuclear plant you're building is super useful and often more relevant than designing it for efficiency alone.
Right, sure, we don't disagree. Strictly speaking, what you've described is trivial:

1. Fork the RISC-V ISA, but brand it as an IR rather than as an ISA intended for hardware implementation

2. Port a C compiler to target your new ISA

3. Port QEMU to execute your new ISA

There you go, you can now compile C to your novel representation, and you can use QEMU to run C programs that have been compiled to it.
Maybe you should have used the old: How do you do, fellow new grads?
Guaranteed basic income emerges as top policy priority for Liberal MPs
Did you mean Irfanview?

Thanks for the tip. Mostly emacsing via X, but good to know.
> The best example I can think of was the lady who got on the flight and when she landed she didn't have a job.

That's Justine Sacco.

> Other examples would be the google memo guy (kind of a reverse order firing iirc)

I (as a firsthand account) argue that Damore had ample opportunity to contextualize his comments, so I'd disagree that this meets your definition, although there's been so much misleading information since that it's an easy mistake to make.

> the maga hat kid

Sure. Although there's an argument that he was able to control the narrative eventually. At this point in time the prevailing narrative is that he was libeled by the media, even though legally speaking, that's probably false.

> lady from brookfield zoo

I honestly can't figure out what you mean. There's a 2019 story about an old lady who crashed her car and may have lost her license? I can't find enough information on this to see why it would be an instance of cancellation.

> manager at Chipotle

Ok, sort of. I mean she was able to recontextualize the situation and was offered her job back the same week.

This is sort of why the sky is falling concerns about cancellation don't resonate with me. The definition you picked is, I'd argue one that frames cancellation as an objectively unfair thing. And one that is concerning even when it ultimately makes the right choice.

But the examples you gave don't really meet that objectively bad definition.
"If anything OP should be grateful that the native app running on what was presumably his personal device didn't do anything worse."

I don't understand why any of these actions would be taken with a mobile phone ...

What I mean is, managing advertising campaigns and budgets and managing assets and spend, etc., is kind of a complicated workflow ... further, it's a fairly critical business process involving a lot of money.

I can see ordering some workroom supplies or paying a hosting bill with my phone ... but creating and managing ad campaigns ? That seems very unwieldy and inefficient. Google adwords, through the web based interface, is very complex and there's a lot of functions there. I can't imagine trying to do this on a phone.

So what am I missing here ?
> There are several points here that probably don't comply with code. The fact that an extension cord has been brought into a permanent circuit is probably one of them.

If you wanted to do this up to code, how would you do it?
You look at this like a bug to be fixed. But it's actually a feature. If you're not a (would be) worker, and most people aren't (let alone the groups our political system empowers) then the harder those workers work and the
less they're paid and the more they're afraid they'll lose their jobs the better!

50 years of rising income taxes, higher student fees, reduced job security, union decline, reduced services for working people etc etc etc are the other side of the coin to rising asset prices and ever higher subsidies for land owners.
Neat! But I wanted one repl for every database :(
is this a dig at python?
Nobody needs more data centers, except for people trying to build their empires.

People need services and data centers are how they get them. If data centers are expensive then I invest in efficiency work because 3 FTEs are cheaper than 2 additional data centers. If the centers are cheaper I will just burn watts to solve my problem, and spend those employees on something else.
Requirement (functional & non-functional) driven development
Definitely dislike seeing the various code violations, but definitely enjoy the get it done attitude and the results!