skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes and no. This was a big debate during the cold war. If the Russians invaded Europe, would America really nuke Russian and risk total destruction?

Many strategists considered this to be not a credible threat, on its own. This was part of the reason the US deployed so many conventional troops to Europe during the cold war. These troops couldn’t stop the russians, but their presence would force the US to act if the Russians invaded.

Hence, the US might actually irrationally nuke Russia. Hence, Russia would be deterred from invading.

This also partly explains the US presence in Japan and Korea. Apart from power projection, it is a tangible expression of US committment to potentially irrationally deploy nukes to defend those countries. However, recent US actions have greatly called into question the US’s commitment to this strategic nuclear umbrella. Hence those countries may be more interested in a deterrent they control.

Also of note: the US withdrew troops from Taiwan in 1979 when it switched diplomatic recognition to communist China. This switch was done to play China against the USSR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire_force
> improvements in prosperity come quickly [...] has historically almost never been the case

But I don't think the parent was far off with what they said. The advantage of the authoritarian is that there's no red tape for them, whatsoever. This power can be directed for practical reasons like building a gigantic wall around your borders, or selfish reasons like erecting gigantic pyramids to retain your wealth and status in the afterlife.

> It is actually quite anomalous for a non-democracy to see these sorts of quality of life improvements.

This seems like survivorship bias to me. It's easy to point to NK or the Soviet Union or China under Mao as failed authoritarian states. But these were also extremely experimental and it's not hard to imagine that the current incarnation of Chinese authoritarianism is one that has learned from the last one's mistakes. Most of the quality of life improvements that were seen in the west in the 20th century were thanks to technological improvements stemming from the industrial revolution. China is going through an industrial revolution of their own right now. So was it actually because of democracy that the west saw so much improvement last century?

> Honestly, your comment seems remarkably ill-reformed.

Extremely rude.
Sure, if there is one outcome.

In this case, when I do the thought experiment, my mind runs both possibilities and concludes they are both plausible and compelling.

When I do the thought meta-experiment of imagining other people doing the thought experiment, it sees some people imagining one outcome is compelling and likely, and other people imagining the other outcome is compelling and likely.

I'm not sure what useful theoretical point of view you would draw from that, with regard to this particular experiment.
Gofile – a free and anonymous file-sharing site (no limits, no cookies, no ads)
This list of learning resources about CRDTs is open for contributions - feel free to add any good resources you encounter for everyone's benefit!
I find it curious that serialization formats like JSON get hit on for not having a native date/time format. Just use a UNIX timestamp and be done with it.
Your point is not at all clear to me, sorry. I think the differences you're pointing out are small at best, and while they may not have had a vast aristocratic billionaire or centimillionaire class in the past, they definitely do today.
Thanks for standing up for an essential selection in the canon!
I re-read your Big-O comment, and it still does not make sense. The fact, that mapping all n^i to arctan(i) and i^n to arctan(i) + pi is somehow "misleading" is not making it theoretically impossible for RL algorithms from finding an optimal solution in that metric. If for a specific instance you're saying n^1e300 is wrong because it is impractical, and 2^n would be preferred, you simply posed the original task incorrectly by asking for a wrong metric.
The inverse of this can also be true - probably even a vicious cycle.

I used to have a great attitude. I was eager to learn, humble, willing to put in extra work, and wanted the respect and pay that would come with promotions.

Over the past few years I have become jaded by the company passing me over, screwing me over, the double speak, the double standards, and even the outright lies they've told. This has destroyed my old perspective/attitude. I pretty much put in the minimum hours and view everything they say as if it is a lie or a trap. I say pretty much, because I do still have an innate desire to finish things I start and to do a quality job (at any job I've had, and at home). This internal struggle is probably the most painful part of the experience.
I just don't understand why every JavaScript project uses emojis so much
Are you referring to the WIndows 10 image viewer? Yes it is now a "Metro" app I think. The good news is that you can restore the old Windows 7 picture viewer. There are instructions on how to restore this if you Google. Think its a registry change.
Yes, but that may not be as impactful as a tied EC.

In the case of the House, it's rare that all seats are filled anyways, so it can and has functioned with the equivalent of an even split between parties.

And for the most part, a delay on any given piece of legislation probably isn't as big a deal as a massively contested presidential election.
I'd like to believe that Democracy has systematic benefits, but we don't have enough data points to say that for sure.

You can easily argue that the rise of Democracy in the 20th century is simply because the United States won world war 2 and the cold war, and all other countries adopted Democracy just to emulate the US.

If Germany had discovered the atomic bomb before the US (which arguably could have happened if history were just slightly, randomly different), the world could be radically different. We could all be arguing right now that Democracy is just too weak to survive.
> without any deeper understanding

I can't count how often I've seen XML that looked like this:

<container name="containerName">
<attribute name="attrib1" value="value1" />
<attribute name="attrib2" value="value2" />
<attribute name="listAttibute" value="pipe|delimited|values" />
<attribute name="containedAttribute" value="&lt;container name=&quot;otherContainer&quot;..." />
...
</container>

Which was, technically, XML (it even conformed to a schema!)... almost like "malicious compliance".
Show HN: 504 bytes C procedural graphics (IFS Fractal, Linux, fbdev)
> if your customers need to be able to build a shared library on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, and all the BSDs

Are there even any notable commercial projects that use autotools?

Autoconf solves problems that existed in the 90s unix market which are just not very interesting or relevant today. For a few decades now "portable" has meant linux, windows and mac.

A lot of effort is spent on generating shell scripts for the lowest common denominator and this is both useless (nobody cares about 90s unix, everybody can install bash) and insufficient (bourne shell is not native on windows).

Perhaps energy would be better spend on migrating everybody towards newer build systems or just plain makefiles. A lot of projects have migrated already, does anyone have statistics about what percentage of a distro like Debian needs autotools?
It’s not just through the lens of Western demographics that it has to be examined. There’s still a very real possibility of unrest as a result of the gender imbalance created by the One Child policy.
Good point. Assuming a 30 year career, the US population grew from 250MM in 1990 to 330MM today. So it could average as high as 1.3, maybe rounded up to 1.5 considering an increase in average educational achievement.
Hope this gets a response - I don't see a paper.

If there is a paired dataset, I guess this could be "easy". The stylegan "input" is essentially used to control parameters at various stages within the network, so you could adjust them one at a time, or on varying schedules or something, to get the sort of gradual effect.

I know that randomly instantiated neural networks can produce some pretty trippy image transformations as well, so maybe there is a way to bootstrap without paired data.

Lastly, I doubt this is on the right track but it would be cool if you could produce appropriately styled images with a "compression" approach. ie, trying to fit the audio information into some small visually meaningful latent space, and then using that to generate images.

edit: ok just watched the first example, back to square 1 for me. Its literally pulling stuff from paintings.
> What has not really worked too often has been coming up with mathematical models out of thin air, fitting them to all of the current data, extrapolating them to things we haven't been able to observe yet, and then building those things to check if they also worked.

But this is the story of early to mid 20th century physics! General relativity, the initial quantum mechanical theories, Dirac’s equation and anti-particles, neutrinos were all the product of this process of adding mathematical conveniences and extrapolating to things that turned out to be real. You can argue that more recent efforts in this direction have been much less successful than those were, but I think you have to turn a completely blind eye to the history of modern physics to claim that method “has not really worked too often”.
Made me laugh. :-)
Lying and corruption don’t exclude competence. The parent comment meant competent in the sense of whether the state can achieve its goals.

A state may lie about its goals to its public, or enrich its elite, while also being capable of meeting state goals.

US state competence has clearly declined, but it is worth making this distinction. Strictly speaking the two factors you cite aren’t necessarily linked to competence. Every politician must lie, it’s part of the job.
If curious see also

2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21326484

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16371030
The Pentagon's incentivized to exaggerate any threat though, because it justifies more funding to themselves.

I'd say that the real threat, as far as navies go, is what if our carrier-heavy paradigm is obsolete and cheaper missile cruisers are more effective.
I remember reading the classic Hero Compendium, which I found funny back in the day but perhaps a bit out of touch with the times, now.

https://www.masterofmagic.info/Document/hero0030.php
Note that Byju's reported revenue in 2019 was $78M, so we are looking at a multiplier of around 140! Probably nothing shady though, just VCs being VCs, hoping to unload this on the public through an IPO, make their money and get out.
NTP nerds before NTP
Apache Arrow 2.0.0 Release
I'll step on the landmine.

> I think it'd be horsehockey if I were claiming that the Chinese or white people or Americans or whoever is intrinsically more intelligent or "culturally" hard-working or whatever. That's bullshit.

Why would that be horsehockey? Why would you expect people in different countries and cultures to be equally intelligent or hard-working? That would be surprising! So clearly there will be difference of some kind, and it might be small on the average, or it might not be. I'll follow the data where it leads.

I don't accept that the topic is forbidden from rational investigation and discussion. Or that everyone is somehow magically equal and life is fair - that's the real bullshit.
As long as I can buy a watch using beenz.
> "They were stuck in this weird spot where they had to create a build system that took into account of every BOM every crappy cell phone the ODMs could come up with."

Well before Windows Phone existed, they already had to deal with that for Windows CE 1.0 to 6.x and all the PDAs/phones that used them. Android has to deal with the same thing. Nothing was new about that for Windows Phone.

Aside from that, Microsoft had to deal with that already anyway because of Windows CE Embedded / Windows Automotive and all the miscellaneous gadgets people wanted to use it with.
The point still goes to China in terms of whether internal dissent is likely to flare up.
Well no state would actually do that of its own free will because it would disadvantage what parties they actually voted for.

If two states with 10 electoral votes each are both currently winner takes all, but one votes green and one votes purple; and if only the green state changes to proportional allocation, you move from a scenario where both parties got 10 votes each to a scenario where the green state went 6/4 for green and the purple state is still all 10 votes purple, basically kneecapping the green party.
When I was in grad school I was a TA for a biochemistry class and the prof asked me to deliver the lecture on crystallography while he was on vaca. Part of the lecture was about how electron microscopy was easier but pretty inaccurate compared to x-ray crystallography. But the slides were 10 years out of date, the accuracy of EM was still not as good but the gap was much smaller. So I updated them with more recent EM results from the same labs.

When the prof came back he spent the first 5m of the next lecture "correcting" me, explaining that EM sucked, x-ray was the only good technique. I realized that he had basically made up his mind decades earlier and no matter what changed in the technology he wasn't going to change his opinion. Science has its own politics, similar to actual politics in that conclusions drive observations, but instead of being about minimum wage or housing supply it's about arcane scientific techniques.
It helps format the text if your writing a long piece of manual for example.

Sure you can break it up with capital letters, bold but it gets boring and dull. Adding emoji's adds a bit of toybox excitement.

If they are used correctly, it can make a document more appealing. When not then it makes the page look ghastly.
Without any regard for whether it works for all people all of the time.
Write to a database or file?
I will go ahead and assume that they see the Transponder signal and not the actual boats.

If by boats you mean warships, then yes, they may cause a blip in a proper radar.
I highly respect the way you have articulated this. Well done, and I learned a few things about the power of an even keeled approach.
How many TSMC foundries are in Taiwan alone? Sure, they could straight up invade Taiwan, but I'd wager that most of the affluent and the middle class (which would include a lot of TSMC engineers) will have quickly moved shop away from the island by then. So even if China took over the island, the intellect would have escaped.
Going from "a few megabytes I'd rather not include, for a simple use case" to "let's design our own shading language, derail the project for three years, and discover from first principles all the reasons that this is actually a hard problem, while telling everyone else it's actually easy!" is quite the leap. I sympathize with people who believe that page sizes are getting larger and we should do something to prevent it, but the latter is not a worthwhile solution that meets the tradeoffs IMO.
Depends on what you're doing, right?

Dhall is going to be better than writing an inner-language monster of a config language, in YAML, TOML, or JSON. Let someone else do the work, I agree.

But if the goal is to have a human-editable file that loads a few values into a map, and it often is, TOML is pretty nice.

I think we've all been burned by 'configuration languages' which take on the complexity of a full programming language, in a worst-of-both-worlds sort of way. But sometimes you just want to change a font, or specify tabs-or-spaces, or set a non-default remote.
"comment-subject-author":"this is a comment, we dont need out of band communication, thats a bug, not a feature"
YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
> Literally no one contends he defected for the purpose of helping Russia's PR

Right, including me. That just happened to be the result.
Dates Like Jesus Ate? Scientists Revive Ancient Trees from 2k-Year-Old Seeds
The under-specified thing I think is funny because it’s the source of pretty much all the bad XML you see in the wild. For being an entirely tree oriented format it’s tragic flaw is that XML can’t actually represent nested dicts (or arrays for that matter) which turned out to be the data structures people actually wanted to work with.

Oh there are lots of ways to beat XML into looking like it can do it but they’re all bad, break all the actual semantics of XML and turn a nice deserialization story of a tree where each node is a complete thing into mess.

Turns out that very few people actually needed a tree of heterogeneous string k-v pairs.
The Story of the Stone by Hawkes and Minford.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/175344
Cool resources are great, but I think kids just want to have fun, which I as a kid did that by building websites, programming games and fiddling around with electronics. So buy a Lego mindstorms or build a circuit with transistors.
>most people who place high status on them have no real idea why, just that they have such reputations.

I think this is a very good point and it reminds me of discussions during my undergrad days.

>the very comparison of 'truck vs tesla' depends on a global, and contentious, notion of status.

This is the opposite point I was making about the status of each being non-global in nature.

As I've moved around the country, I've come to realize the local effects on university status. Some schools, like those Ivy League institutions are almost universally revered. Others seem to have local reverence that doesn't translate well. I've lived in some areas where the local universities have a supremely high status for reasons that aren't valued elsewhere (athletics comes to mind -- some schools are 'great' because they have a good football team while having an almost non-existent basketball program and vice versa. It's a bit strange to me how this can confer status to students who only interact with the programs as spectators. Academics similarly; having an MIT degree confers status even if it was in liberal arts). Outside of that local bubble, people put almost no stock in said school but within that bubble it carries a lot of status if it's on your resume because of local cultural (i.e. societal) bias. And people seem to make choices more biased by their immediate social group. As you allude to, much of it seems to simply be inertia of what the herd mind reinforces. It's high status simply because everyone has agreed it's high status. But I still contend that requires a reasonably large social component biased by the local bubble.

It will be interesting to see in the coming decades if social media dilutes those local effects.
Have this same problem on Android. Not an MS exclusive. Maybe Apple is better?
Analyze the traffic between your phone and the Internet?
That's not the main point in the series on chemical weapons though. The main point is that modern armies are mobile and well equipped ("the modern system") and that chemical weapons are only well suited to stationary, fixed opponents that are poorly equipped. However, if you are fighting fixed position, poorly equipped opponents there are better and cheaper alternatives that pose less of a risk of self-harm (and war crimes).

In both the posts about elephants and chemical weapons, the theme is the same: they are not useful nor practical given the circumstances so the states make the rational decision not to use them.
While we're here, can we please also get rid of libtool?
Plus they iterate faster than anyone else out there and upgrading is painless (VSCode, not Windows)
> The World Bank's data is a bit spotty, but it looks like China's Gini is roughly similar to the US's at around 40 whereas other economic powers like Japan, Germany, South Korea and France are bunched closer to 30.

This is a common sleight-of-hand - you're giving me income Gini coefficient and describing it as if it is wealth gini coefficient. Check out the wealth gini here [0] to see that Germany and the US are much higher and China is more comparable with France.

> If your theory of is based on China having less wealth inequality than the US, you really should also look at countries with much less wealth inequality than either.

Also to be clear, my "theory" is not based on China having less wealth inequality. My "theory" is that the people making large capital allocation decisions in China are typically smarter.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_eq...
Twitch: asks streamers to delete all content because of unspecific DCMA notice
Are there any transpile to bash languages?

I like the idea of a language that allows for a better experience in writing shell scripts -- and produces shell scripts with fewer bugs on the output side.

But i wonder if a transpile approach wouldn't be better in the long run
Why Emacs is “my favourite Emacs package”
Given the age of the Milky Way, a civilization using even slow sub light travel with generation ships or autonomous probes could have colonized the entire galaxy many times over. Why has no one done that? Hence the paradox.
Matlab Logo: The L-Shaped Membrane [pdf]
Farmers are facing a phosphorus crisis. The solution starts with soil
Yeah, I did that. On December 16 (of some year), I decided that if I waited until next year, I could get the same money and pay a lower incremental tax on it. Except that on December 18, the market decided that it didn't like our stock any more, and I couldn't get the same money next year.

So I say: It's fine to make the most of your income through legal ways. But sometimes doing so can have surprising effects on your actual income, not just on the taxes. So, don't go too far out of the way to avoid the taxes, because it can burn you...
FWIW, I'm forking youtube-dl right now.
I love the direction this wants to go in. So many of these are reasons why we've banned new shell scripts on our projects and instead make python scripts.
That’s interesting. I’m hoping that the people not getting on planes right now will balance out the influx of locals / zoomers.
> 1 See https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md....

> Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown.

How, exactly? This is why I dislike GitHub's "Fork" button, since a takedown of the original takes yours too.
Open Letter: 745 Economists Oppose Trump's Re-Election
-Surely if you are going through the trouble of setting your clock, you might as well do it accurately?

Also, as suggested by others (I should have thought of that!) - ships used chronometers to establish their longitude.

(At 56 degrees north, which Edinburgh lies on, a timing error of a second translates into 18 meters or so - an order or two of magnitude below the accuracy of even the best of celestial navigators - but still, might as well make the starting conditions as good as possible.)
No, I just really love be bopping around California doing ride share now that I am retired from computer programming. Napa Valley wine country is fun. I take breaks and go swimming in the Russian river when I'm not taking people up the river to float down. California meddling politicians and unions want to ruin it for me.
Eh, node_modules hacking is certainly not great by any stretch of the imagination, but once you work with it long enough, there's a bunch of stuff that you just get efficient at. Spamming undos in open files is fairly easy. If the editing ends up being a real fix, then you upstream it and install again. There's also considerations about jump-to-definition and similar tools, etc.

You can't accidentally commit your debugging (unplug edits package.json and there's no replug command) and you don't end up with 3 unplugged folders for the same package (that's a whole can of worms on its own). There's also some yarn 2 specific pitfalls regarding __dirname in local packages, symlinking semantics, etc.

Anyways, getting way too into the weeds here, I better stop now lol :)