skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if I have a credible belief that I can save some number of future humans, what is the acceptable moral number of current humans to place at risk and/or kill?

> Imho, that's a grave, serious decision, but not one to which the morally absolute is "zero, always."

I think that what we've learned throughout human history is that no one should be trusted and given the power to make such decisions. It has invariably led to disasters. The very idea that someone can decide to put someone else's life in danger for potential future advances gives too many perverse incentives - chief of which, rationalization that "more people will be saved" even as the experiment crashes and burns.
That could be a serious issue if you're just relying on your nodes having beefy hardware.

It's a lesser issue if you can support a large number validating nodes using cheap hardware, they are frequently and randomly assigned to verify different portions of the history, and they always act as secure light clients of the other portions.

In fact, it might even compare favorably to the handful of major mining operations that mostly run Bitcoin, on expensive ASICs.
Failing on the last 2% (or whatever small number we want to set) isn't a shortcoming of deep learning: it's a shortcoming of all prior knowledge systems. Humans included.

And the barrier to surpassing that problem has been hardware (now approaching solving) and calendar- & person-time.

The problem with 1970s AI (ingnoring hardware) isn't that we couldn't build useful AI, but that we couldn't afford to build useful AI in most domains.

Calendar time costs money. People time costs money.

Deep learning and derivates finally provide a solution where we can substitute machine time and data volume for calendar and people time. As a result, we can afford to do things in domains we couldn't before.
Last week google did something like that to me. It said "device not recognized" and "suspected activity detected" and won't let me in even after I reset my password. That was my reality check. Fortuanately, I was able to login via my old smartphone. I did a google takeout and downloaded all my data. Then I got a domain name and protonmail account and changed email on all of my accounts to my own domain. Now I have some peace of mind that nothing would be lost even if my gmail account is to be gone tomorrow.
I think Bjarne Stroustrup put it best.

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

The C++ Programming Language

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/226225-there-are-only-two-k...
They are not that air-tight... see this cat on one of the pictures (https://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001g7xxp). He was a part of a cat unit used to test submarines for air-tightness. Soviets would lock such unit up on a submarine for a week... if cats are dead, submarine is air-tight. One of the picture survived! Though I heard that cat survivability was close to 100%. Only reported cat fatalities were due to bad food.
When I submitted this, I didn't think of it from a "political" perspective. To me, this issue transcends politics and reveals a part of human nature that is beyond the definition of politics. I thought it would prompt an exploratory discussion of the matter and of human nature.

Unfortunately, many events which in reality exist with or without politics (like race-based hatred) are tagged with the political label. This also makes these events harder to discuss in an objective manner because an element of partisan thinking enters the fray: "does my party support this or not?" vs "do I believe this is right or not".

EDIT: There have been many front page posts about the genocide of Uighur Muslims in China. Is that considered political as well?
Many service providers will block access from known VPN endpoints. Try changing your endpoint and see if that helps. Otherwise, pick a different VPN.
But in this video, as soon as the FSD got engaged the car started driving towards the train... It doesn't look like the car had much understanding of what was going on.
Indeed. Be honest with me until I'm on my deathbed -- at that point, please follow Fitzgerald; there's little point in changing a dying person's mind and I'll probably be in plenty of anguish already. But once I'm dead? Whatever, I'm dead. Don't delude yourself for my sake!

And, does anybody remember when bin Laden died? Was it inappropriate to speak ill of him on that day? Nope, that was roundly celebrated with back-slapping and champagne on the very day it happened, by democrats and republicans alike
Mediavine alternatives for blogs with non-US majority traffic
>Ok, tell me how do you plan on restoring the dying nuclear industry?

That is a different discussion. France built France built over 50 reactors in about 15 years, so obviously a rapid buildup could be done if that ends up being the best option, but that is worthy of its own discussion.

My point was that there are advocates who only talk about the cost of nuclear power compared to say the low cost of solar electricity from solar cells in Arizona at noon. If we are going to only rely on wind/solar there are a lot of unknowns about how long term grid storage could work or the costs of over building of wind/solar that might have to be done, etc etc. Yea that all might just work out, but if it doesn't is it better to suffer an existential threat from climate change or use nuclear power? If people are opposed to nuclear power no matter the consequences, then they should just say that.

I think Bill Gates has the right approach here - he is investing in grid storage technologies AND investing in advanced nuclear plant designs.
I'm not from the US, and as an outsider it appears that the US political system is largely dysfunctional at the federal level. I'm afraid solving a problem of that scale is outside the scope of a discussion like this!

However, some parts of the world are more enlightened when it comes to consumer rights. For example, the EU has at least attempted to make constructive regulatory interventions in the interests of consumers as technologies have evolved, even if their success has been mixed. Here in the UK, aside from EU rules we're inheriting after Brexit, we too have some solid basic consumer rights laws of our own. The EU+UK market is already larger than the US one, so that's a pretty big incentive for Tesla not to try those sorts of games around these parts. And if we get reasonable treatment, maybe that's enough for customers in places like the US to demand the same standards.
PHP doesn’t need GC, unless you have some long running process which is generally quite rare.
Yeah, screw you left handed freaks! /s
You asked "Isn't it well-known that PhD makes only sense for people who want career in research?" and I answered with a counterexample. There are many places where a PhD makes sense for a career in industry.

And if you think an oversaturated job market pushing people into doing PhD's they don't need for the actual job isn't a problem for "the PhD system" then I call you short sighted.
One suggestion: for your primary email address, use an alias (college alumni account, personal dns, etc.) that forwards to your provider of choice (gmail, outlook, whoever) so that when this kind of thing happens you can just update your forwarding address with your provider and instantly restore access to your other accounts.

Doesn’t help with your old email, though...
Show HN: Divar-starter-kit – React.js SSR-ready boilerplate using Razzle
The way I heard it, Cern could be considered to be indirectly financed by the war machine as it was essentially provided as a playground for Europe’s atomic scientists to stop any one nation running away with the ball.
But they don’t get killed for it!

If they miss too much high school they can be arrested for truancy, they can be verbally and physically assaulted by parents or peers, find themselves completely ostracized from society and unable to find professional work that suits their skill level, etc. They face significant discrimination, harassment, and exclusion. If that doesn't kill them, they might just do the job themselves.
You're thinking of the US Springfield 1903. It used a Mauser style bolt-action that was protected by a patent. Mausesr sued and won. The US gov had to pay license fees for it. I think actual payment was delayed until after the war was over.
Hmm. I’m not getting the switch each color once part. Why is that?
Nice, I currently use knex.js with Objection which provides the active record like API on top. You still have to write the migrations in knex but to be honest I prefer it that way because it gives you more control so if you ever do need to drop down to lower levels you know the exact structure.
> I never understood how "But Can I buy Starbucks with Bitcoin" became a meme

That's disingenuous. It became a "meme" because for many years, bitcoin evangelists touted bitcoin as a currency replacement. You can buy pizza with bitcoins! Remember? It has and still is being sold as a virtual currency - after all you can't have cryptocurrency without currency.

> I don't expect to be able to buy Starbucks with Apple stock.

But you can actually buy goods with bitcoins...

You fall into the same trap as all evangelists, self-contradiction. I like bitcoins, I like cryptocurrencies, think the future is bright for blockchain tech. I just don't like bullshit.
My main concerns with the imbalance are undersampling of the negative class data distribution relative to the positive class, and overestimating performance on the test splits. I can buy that you may want to train on a balanced dataset, but the testing condition should reflect the true case distribution as closely as possible.

I agree that you would not want to use only the class priors for prediction. However, I do not think it is clear that you would want to throw that information out. Also not sure that I agree with the statement that neural network has “no memory” of the prior class distribution. That is a strong claim to make about something as opaque as a neural net model.
Delphi never had proper support for Metro, initially they faked it with VCL styles.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9653260/resources-for-na...

Also how come Embarcadero supports Windows features before Microsoft does?

I am a big Object Pascal/C++ Buider fan, but also acknowledge the reality of their actual support.
I’m not a PHP programmer but I used to be. It’s hard to overstate the simplicity of the deployment model. Your competitors will spend tens of thousands of person-hours chasing their tails around Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Ansible/Puppet/Chef, etc. while you spend 15 seconds FTPing your source code around. LAMP stack achieved the “serverless” dream before many of today’s engineers were even born.
Most innovative companies in the world, by number of patent grants claimed
I stop using Ezoic on my blog for monetization
Or how long until death is a result of some remote tweaking..
Its similar in Kerala as well.
2005 means PHP 5/5.1. It may suck in retrospect, but it was fine at the time, and there were a lot fewer choices. There are excellent reasons why it powered (and continues to) large swaths of the web.

I think a lot of the misunderstanding around PHP's past stems from its accessibility. But real software developers had no problems creating real software with it even then, and since then the ecosystem has become startlingly better.

> …you might end up convincing me (and others) to give it a try in 2020.

It's been in the TIBOE top 10 since it's debut in 2001. If you haven't tried it by now, it seems unlikely you ever will (and that's absolutely fine).
You don't choose your kid's school schedule, and many people don't choose their work schedule either.
The car didn't replace walking, it replaced carriages, which were easily as heavy and could probably go much faster than the first cars. Sure, the horses would generally try to avoid obstacles, but horses pulling a heavy carriage at speed are not infinitely maneuverable. So, I doubt that cars would have ever seemed like a huge risk initially simply because it wasn't significantly different from what came immediately before it.
Ultrapure copper for an ultrasensitive dark matter detector
outlook.com isn't paid?
You just reiterated it. Your view is that PHP is only used by non-educated simpletons and who are only capable of solving the most mundane of business problems. This sort of elitist attitude is really frustrating on a forum that's supposed to embody the "hacker" spirit, that is, building things and getting shit done without worrying about whether or not someone is going to come along and criticize the correctness of their code while blissfully ignoring their innovative idea, or the fact that it works, and the impact on the world. It's pure gatekeeping garbage.

This of course is coming, like usual, from someone who spent a significant portion of their life in academia and then moved to R&D and still has yet to make a dent in the world, or likely their student loans.
Time for a DMCA take down?
I'm using my own hacked-together very basic system in Python right now, and am pretty happy with it. No doubt I might find myself wanting more features soon, but here's hoping I can stick with it, it's the first moderately interesting side project I've worked on.
Yes. Lots and lots. The easiest ones to identify is food preference. The upper castes ask you if you are a vegetarian. (Because they consider vegetarian = pure. Meat eaters are impure.)

Also caste determines my job, education, wealth, where I live, where I pray, who I marry and many more.

There are ways to find it from the ornaments and things, clothes you wear. It would be simply called 'tradition'. Caste segregation is the way of life here in India and there are so many different and easy ways to figure out another Indian's caste.
I started programming with PHP back in 2001, I think. I moved to C# when dotnet was released shortly after, but still have a personal website that's built with PHP, and a couple of years back I updated it (from something like PHP 4/5, I forget) to the latest version PHP. I was pleasantly surprised - it wouldn't be my first choice by a long shot, but I can see why others would choose it today. And there's always been a good community around it too.

I also started with JavaScript a long time back, maybe something like 1998-1999. I've always found it a most loathsome language, and the anaemic standard library a huge barrier. It's not entirely the language's fault, of course - being the language of the web was always going to mean glacial progress. Recently I worked on a vanilla ES6 project (since browser support is finally there), and at long last I wouldn't quite describe it as "loathsome" anymore! Still, it's a far cry from the nicities of Typescript, and the tiny standard library remains an issue.

Having seen both PHP and JavaScript evolve over around 2 decades, I'd probably argue that PHP has evolved more as a language than JavaScript has.
Perhaps a less conservative bridge development culture would have resulted in more innovative bridges that could have avoided those incidents?
This sounds too good to be true. I want to see a double-blind test done ASAP.

I'm rather skeptical, but the potential upsides are so huge that it's worth rapid additional investigation.
Yes let's compare that to:

1. All of the mainstream media except for Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity

2. All of academia (higher and lower education)

3. All of Hollywood

4. Essentially all of entertainment in general (music, late night television, Netflix)

5. All of the federal government bureaucracy

6. All major social media platforms

7. Almost all major corporations

8. Almost all of the international community

So essentially every single institution except for those you listed.
I am fully aware of it, but the damage has been done and very few will give it a second look, which is quite a produvity loss, but so is the circle of "innovation".
True chaotic neutral.
Most of the Indian population lives in small towns and villages where everyone knows one another. People would notice if you suddenly start claiming to be from a different community.

The classification of higher and lower caste itself is an oversimplification.

Wearing the thread implies that you are from a Brahmin community. Brahmin is just one of the many communities that exist in India based on geography, language (including numerous dialects), wealth and religion (including different sects). Each of these communities think they are better than some subset of indian ethnicities.

Some groups (Dalits being one of the prominent examples) are unfortunately at the receiving end of biases from almost everyone else.
Because when I visit it all I see is the following:

451: Unavailable due to legal reasons

We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time.
Get yourself a lifetime domain name. And connect that to a email service. And do regular backups of your mails in a structured way.

Email hoster misbehaving. Just switch mail provider, keep mail adres, restore mail. And live a happy life?
I mean, COBOL is in the same boat -- there's too much code written in it to outright kill it. They still update the language standard today (2014).

The main migration argument I see is usually along the lines of "50% of all COBOL progammers today will be DEAD by 2025!"

Rather than about technical/financial merit (anyone willing to migrate on those grounds, and believed it was even possible for their infra, will have already done so)
JavaScript even in 1996 was much saner language than PHP. Surely there were bad parts, but in JS you could just ignore them. In PHP on the other hand one had to build on top of bad parts since there was no good alternatives.
Facebook didn’t make its money because of innovative PHP uses. And it based on this (somewhat old) discussion the quality of code at Facebook is universally terrible:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3r90iy/faceboo...

Which I am not blaming PHP for specifically, but rather that “you say PHP sucks but Facebook made a lot of money” is not an argument and is particularly dumb for Facebook specifically.

And the personal attacks are really not ok.
I think we don't learn and codify standards from our mistakes in software engineering in the same way we have learnt in civil, mechanical or electrical engineering. I guess it could be because we think the consequences in software mistakes are not as serious/permanent as they are in those other engineering fields.

Also the speed of innovation/change has been super fast compared to those other fields. But I doubt if we can keep up this pace of innovation for much longer without the software engineering process becoming the bottleneck.

I came across a startup of 50 people in which there were 4-5 different application stacks for server-side micro services – each team had decided to go their own way and there were no standard end to end observability and release management tooling and they were struggling to debug a latency issue – which itself was happening because they didn't have proper parallelization of RPCs and didn't have proper timeouts, isolation etc. This problem of not following well-understood design patterns, or keep stumbling into known anti-patterns (and worse yet failing to recognize them as such even after repeated punishing failures/outages) – I've seen various versions of this at different sized companies (from multi-million to multi-billion $$ ones).

And in each case, all decision makers didn't know/have standardized terminology to talk about things, what should have been easy conversations were seemingly unnecessarily hard about what's good design pattern vs anti-patterns etc. I can't help but think that this is uniquely a software engineering discipline problem.
Though the bakelite phone is apparently the same all around the world
That would take France accepting being on a different timezone than Germany, and shifting their habits to have one hour more of darkness in the evening. I don't see it happening.
Precomp: Further compress files that are already compressed
> There's a saying in mathematics that when any field matures it turns into algebra. Life crossed a threshold from chemistry to biology on Earth, and developed exponentially from there. Order in mathematics crosses a similar threshold, as it becomes sufficiently structured to support algebraic reasoning. The subjective experience is like ice melting into a churning liquid, or a land-locked creature learning to fly. Once one has this experience, one cannot imagine thinking any other way.

Hi, this seems wrong to me.

First, as far as I can tell, such a saying does not exist. I've never heard it, despite having a fair amount of experience with mathematics (though not as much as you), and I can't find it through Googling.

Second, and more substantively, it is not the case that mathematical fields inevitably turn into algebra. One only has to look at PDE, probability, and analytic number theory to see this is the case (to give just a few examples). All are highly mature fields and essentially non-algebraic. This is not to say that ideas from algebra are not occasionally useful, just that it should be obvious to anyone who opens an introductory graduate text in PDE that the subject has not "turn[ed] into algebra."

> The killer app for Haskell is parallelism. To this day it has the best implementation of parallelism; one can achieve a 7x speedup on 8 cores by adding a handful of lines to a program. This ease is a consequence of the functional model, and of considerable effort by Haskell's developers.

I don't think this statement is entirely wrong, but I don't think it's entirely right either. There are plenty of languages where one can get parallelism with just a few extra lines of code; Julia comes to mind immediately. Easy parallelism is hardly a Haskell-specific, or even FP-specific, feature. I would of course agree that designing things without mutable state makes writing parallel code easier, but this can be done in many high-level languages these days.

But that is a nitpick. A more substantive objection is that the sole purpose of parallelism is performance, and idiomatic Haskell is generally speaking slower, sometimes a lot slower, than the same algorithm written in C++ or similar languages. (The adjective idiomatic is important here – I'm aware that one can with enough contortions write C-like code in Haskell, but this response undercuts of the point of highlighting Haskell-specific features like immutability, laziness, etc.) In particular, a few years ago it seemed like the people implementing parallel Haskell features didn't understand or care about fundamental things like cache locality. Maybe this has changed?

There is also an amusing story about the "ease" of writing parallel quicksort in Haskell [1].

> The real point of lazy evaluation is that it best supports this algebraic reasoning, as carbon best supports life.

It's worth noting that Simon Peyton Jones is on record as saying that any "Haskell 2" should not be lazy [2].

[1] https://sudonull.com/post/75314-Parallel-quick-sort-on-Haske...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1924061
Do you mean the a mount of traffic that the VPN sends to MS would look like an attack?

I think it is just more likely MS doesn't know who you are yet. For example, if you're talking about how you get more captcha to fill out, I think this is because your IP address doesn't have the history to build reputation as you with MS.