skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"But there are cases where it isn't good enough, and if you hit those then you need a system that can do preemptive multitasking gracefully ..."

What are some of those use cases where userland threads are no longer good enough? In what areas do they fall short?
"The ethical question I see is whether it's right to unleash this upon the living. Though I suspect it will happen regardless."

Absolutely. Once the cat's out the bag it's difficult to get it back in there.

What also concerns me is - as mentioned in the article - the psychological or emotional impact this could have on people. Not good at all.
OpenTerps API (cannabis related API)
This is a passion project I have started recently; it's still very early in development, but wanted to share. It's built with Go and PostgreSQL - I am also building a CLI for the API utilizing Go, it's been a fun learning experience.

https://open-terps.herokuapp.com/
https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis-docs/CountryFriedCoders/Open...
https://github.com/Banjerr/OpenTerps
https://github.com/Banjerr/OpenTerpsCLI
Lies You've Been Told About Sales
Yes, I did.

While I generally like PG's essays, I wished this one was about half its actual size. As if PG resigned on brevity this time.
It is not without remuneration. We use CAPTCHA to accessing a service. Imagine the "worst case scenario": you don't use Google services but a paid service has Google's CAPTCHA. It may seem like you are paying for training Google's AIs and you get nothing in return... but:

- Bots cause trouble to the service

- The service has to find some mitigation

- Mitigations cost money, and that cost will be passed down to the customer in some way

- Google offers a free solution, maybe not the best, but it will not cost the service anything (or close)

- So you are training Google's AI in exchange for cheaper service

Of course, you may disagree with it, you may think that a paid service shouldn't use Google's CAPTCHA, that you already pay too much, etc... But you are free to go elsewhere, and the rest is just market considerations, not something governments generally mess with, at least not governments that support free markets.

You could do lawsuits based on specific terms and conditions, but I guess large companies, Google first, have lawyers who know they stuff and get the company covered.
Monitoring People with Dementia in Sweden
What if it's a bad measure to begin with, ie. anticorrelated with quality? Does it become (technically) better by being gamed?
Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Switzerland have no minimum wages. They are doing pretty well.
Sure, for example one time I was proficient in DOS low level programming, not a very useful skill now. Also, typically, when a language or technology gets any good, it already becomes obsoleted by something else (examples Delphi Pascal, Perl). What is fashionable is already on its way of being uncool. I guess Java and Python are next (very decent technologies). Though I believe there is a real progress in IT, GPT3 for example. But it happens through obsoleting older technologies. And I can't really say, that I'm better that younger programmers, because one time I knew something unusable today, I think the converse is true. There is no happy ending. I guess escort services are similar to IT (not much premium for older/experienced "workers"). I guess the knowledge that is current in IT year-by-year is called mathematics.
In a word? Abstraction. In two words? Abstraction and apathy.
More likely, only 20 years.
This is not the place to shout your random pet peeves about a vaguely Google-related project.
Government must hold technology companies to account on e-waste
Please provide a citation- apple is doing amazing things with metal - particularly on the M1
Everyone is the hero in their own story.

Don't know where i got it from. I usually use it as a reminder that even evil people like Hitler consider themselves as the good hero. Maybe in difficult circumstances. I don't want to compare PG to Hitler though.
The costly collateral damage from Elon Musk's Starlink satellite fleet
How are those not places you park? They'll even usually leave you a nice parking invoice under your windshield wiper when you do.
That the laptop shuts down when below minimum operating temperature is a Good Thing™. For example, the battery performance changes greatly (reduced capacity and discharge rate), and the battery may even take permanent damage when charged at low temperatures.

Also it is a very bad idea to bring a laptop indoors from the cold and immediately turning it on. Condensing water can cause short circuits (people who wear glasses can probably relate). Always let it warm up to room temperature first.

This is not a MIL-STD 810G rugged outdoor device. If you want that, buy a Thinkpad.
So, I might have a controversial opinion here.

My mother raised me to think for myself, it was a heavy emphasis of my upbringing and important for her.

However I'm now in situations where the world is divided and asking questions (in order to make my own mind up) is considered some kind of admission of guilt for being part of the "other".

For example: Asking someone why they think immigration is good/bad. If it's a belief they hold, I'm interested in knowing the thought process and making my own conclusions based on something I might not have known. But the act of asking the question makes the person, who may not have put too much original thinking in; quite defensive.

There's another drawback here too: which is that you can't experience everything. I can't live with the experiences of an American Black Woman who emigrates to England as a White English Man who lives in Sweden; it's just not possible, thus it requires strenuous effort to empathise.

There will always be a line in which we just have to take things at face value, in computer terms "understanding the contract" between components.

Thinking for yourself is overrated as society is not built for it if you want to fit in.
How different are the heights of cyclists and pedestrians when they're waiting for a crossing light?

I think it's time for a vast menagerie of crossings.

1) The AARdvark crossing. When you hit the button it sings the aardvark song. Also useful on talk like a pirate day.

2) The Abalone crossing. It's under the water and quite endangered.

...
I think you can alleviate a lot of your anxiety (as far as you can without hacking the anxiety itself with, say, cbt) by being in tune with your body and not ignoring potential early symptoms of conditions that leave these lasting effects.

Combine that with only doing "allergy" doses first (think, peanut dust that would trigger your throat to swell, but not close as if you had taken a spoonfull of peanut butter), and you really will be okay.

As a pro tip I tell everyone exploring lsd/shrooms - always have a benzo on handy. If you need to end the trip NOW, it'll almost for sure do the trick. If you may be susecptible to mental trauma, you will be doing no one a favor by "pushing through" it.

Message me if you want :)
In brief terms how would you organise a liberal democracy of > 100M citizens?
Apparently Europeans are bad at this too. Or do you think the French “socialist” party whose members have done things like lead the IMF is really socialist?
https://s.yimg.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-think-for-yourself-...

I wonder who makes these, and how are they made.
Delusion, ignorance, egotism, purism, curiosity? Is this really such a dark, dystopian world for everybody attempting startups out there?? “Hey, teachers, leave those kids alone!” (cit.)
I remember that, it was really annoying.

A prime example of arrogant engineering - they were wrong both about what was going on, and for writing dickish software.

Don't write nagware. Not only are you not as smart as you think you are, software is still very, very stupid and the world is much bigger than you think, even when you think you are taking that in to account.
Clifford Algebra: A Visual Introduction
Ask HN: Anyone else notice black Friday deals are not that good this year?
I have been watching the deals on Amazon and deals from my local big box stores. So far the supposed deal prices are higher on many items than they were in the spring at regular price.

It seems prices are up 10 to 20 % right across the spectrum of product categories. This seems outside normal inflation.

I would like to know if this is just happening in my region(Pacific Northwest) or everywhere.
You navigate through lots of videos of fans performing Bad Guy - but the twist is they're sync'd up so you can move between them and the song continues without interruption but now it's a different person performing the song.
I hear this fairly often, but have never heard an argument against GMO that holds water. Do you have a rational reason for being against them?
> The last vestige of Watson’s musical IBM died in 2001, when the company disbanded its symphony orchestra.

This downsizing of company perks is getting out of hand. Next thing you know they will be removing the caviars from the champagne bar.
Sigh

I should have seen it coming. This or Miles O'Brien himself chiming in and telling us that trace amounts of exotic substances in medieval chain armour would have interfered with the transporter's Heisenberg compensators.
Singapore: Activist Jolovan Wham charged for holding up a smiley face sign
I recommend biking through midtown Manhattan: nothing like playing real life frogger to let go of vague fears!
Maybe Batman, Turkey could help out?
For anyone looking for a sane way to study this stuff, what finally made sense to me was (1) study discrete differential geometry from Keenan Crane's notes: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/DDG/ ; (2) Read these notes on geometric algebra that formally lay down what the hell a GA space is and what operations one can perform on them: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.5935.pdf (Geometric Algebra: Eric Chisolm)
There is a big space of ideas of indeterminate value in between the "good" and "bad" poles.

Was creating Uber a good idea? The company has grown a lot, but AFAIK is still not profitable; the jury is out on this one.

In some cases, the answer is to try.
Access to a parking space with charging, any kind of charging, is the reason I don't own an EV yet. Japan is really lagging behind here: the building I live in was finished in March 2020, it's not even one year old, and there's no way to charge an EV car in the parking spots!
If it bothers you that much why not install an ad blocker? I have AdGuard (free version) on iOS and I didn’t see any of that.
For me it buffers a lot when switching so it doesn't keep the rhythm and the syncing is wasted.

And I have a pretty good internet connection. I never get buffering on youtube.

Anyway, great idea.
I think you are confusing the idea of individual people's incentives with the community as a whole.

Just as in our society individuals may have an incentive to do nefarious deeds like robbery or murder, but society as a whole has an incentive to stop it, so it is with science.

And having checked your link, A) the person's theory was overhyped and B) a meta analysis brought it back to earth. Which is evidence that the process of scientific inquiry works.

That's why we know that climate change exists, despite deniers, and that vaccines don't cause autism, despite anti vaxxers having been inspired by a now retracted paper that said it did.
Can the downvoters comment instead of just downvoting?
I have a bit of a collection of hacker/IT documentaries. In one of them I remember a former IBM employee sang the songs during an interview.

This was for me (as a non-native English speaker) the first time I learned that 'gay' used to mean something completely different.
Depends. Sometimes software is so convoluted that you're sparing yourself and your colleagues a lot of trouble by adding that one liner rather than doing a big refactoring, especially in the absence of tests.
Your example is a big question, and it presupposes that answering the question will yield an optimal solution. If you focus on identifying your starting assumptions then you will be more open to incorporating currently unrelated areas of knowledge or research.
Possibly condensing water caused some transient short circuit. If your laptop survived, you were lucky.
Moderna designed their Covid-19 vaccine in just 2 days
If i remember correctly, it was a reaction to rounds of layoffs-by-spreadsheet.
I used to get that in Sweden when riding a bicycle.

Not to mention that maps at that point (and still) doesn't understand cycling directions. It could often steal focus from google maps. Very annoying and I nearly forgot about it until you mentioned it here.
The value of those shares is partially derived from Bezos having those shares. The purchasers of outstanding shares are predicting Bezos’ interest in furthering Amazon’s business interest will result in some probability of success in gaining market share.

And if you were to increase the supply of Bezos’ shares and sell them all in the open market, then the price would probably drop because the supply of shares for sale is greatly increasing, and because Bezos may not have the same motivations.
Ahh the linksys was a 12v device, the wall wart i had was unregulated and the wires were rubbish.

The little stripboard daughter board in the pics is hosting an LM7805 to power the usb webcam thing because the wrt54g usb port itself was a bit of a hack https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/USB_mod_WRT54
I mean, the other way to look at it is that he's writing about what he knows, or at least about his own experience/perspective?

Better that than trying to write about something he knows nothing about..

p.s. I'm not defending him here, I'm generally not a fan of pg, but I think there's a less narcissistic possibility here. ;)
I really like Der Spiegel but that really meandered through a lot of ailments without a clear message. Moral convusions, racism, opiods, ...
I think it's quite tragic that you got downvoted in a thread about independent thinking. Seriously people, you might disagree with his point, but it's very independent, has a lot of substance compared to all other comments, provides links.

Probably was to independent for some?
"anything successful will target conventional people"

Plenty of successful products are useful for both. E-mail, smartphone, Covid vaccine.

PG's idea that outsourcing more conventional activities such as advertisements and PR may preserve the creative core of the company is interesting at least.
> When I wrote "The Four Quadrants of Conformism" I expected a firestorm of rage from the aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted. They sensed that there was something about the essay that they disliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specific passage to pin it on.

I think this goes both ways: those that found something they liked intensely, but had a hard time finding a specific passage / point to pin it on could also be aggressively conventionally minded.

Both reactions stem from letting your subconscious decide your logical conclusion rather than arrive at that conclusion through skeptical, rigorous observation and analysis.
Modern processors have not just increased in core count, but also in how efficient their pipelining, parallelizing, and instruction reordering is. We used to measure CPUs by cycles/instruction, but modern CPUs have inverted that relationship and now we can execute several instructions per cycle, so each cycle is actually doing more even if we can't squeeze more cycles in per second.
At the same time, when you factor in memory degridation on each recall and ever changing perspective - it'll drive you wild trying to match objective benchmarks with subjective tools.

Marijauna, while often a "light" drug, has quite the ability to pull mental difficulties currently just under the surface in to the top. People often stop dreaming/having REM sleep the same if they smoke before bed, which can't be good long term.

This is yet another reason we should be pushing for full legalization of all substances. Being able to go buy Xmg of pure psilocybin with no contamination and a constant dose is so very imporatant (defunding the cartels is just a fun side benefit to citizens safety.)
I really doubt that had anything to do with arrogance or thinking they were smart. They knew that everyone would just turn that annoying "feature" off, but presumably some lawyer thought it was a good idea to ensure people didn't blame car crashes on Apple, particularly in a court of law.

e.g.

https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-blamed-for-accident-sued-by-...
> This is not a MIL-STD 810G rugged outdoor device. If you want that, buy a Thinkpad.

Or a Panasonic Toughbook. I've always wanted one. Modular, work from -20 to +60, in the rain etc. Expensive as all hell though.
People don't refuse to buy them for doing it, ... in part because there is seldom any disclosure of it.
I'm a lurker, just made an account the other day, but have to say - you do awesome work dang - Thank you!
The only good thing about hcaptcha - what's better than one page of images? - is it doesn't seem to care what you click, but then neither does Google if you're using Chrome.
Survivorship bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
"There may even be a phenomenon like Dunning-Kruger at work..."

His lack of self awareness is incredibly impressive. I'm almost envious.
It's definitely a good thing to remember.

Not to be sociopathic, but try to be the hero of your own story as well. Focusing on the things you do right and not remunerating on your mistakes it's a key part of mental wellness.
Also of note is the microdose amount used in many studies is far below what you would take to "trip".
> HTTPS everywhere

Not anymore, firefox has it by default now, just gotta turn a setting on.

> uMatrix

Sadly this is dead, I guess I'll switch to a fork once I have time to figure out who does what.
Like many of pg's essays there's an unqualified glorification of being independent. For example the suggestion that hiring conformist people is something that just happens. It seems more likely that companies more or less consciously hire such people, because a company where everyone thinks independently would be one where everyone wants to do something different, and nothing would get done, no one could agree on anything.

Bryan Caplan in his book The Case Against Education suggests that employers value college degrees partly as a signal of conformism, and that that's the reason college is so hard to replace.

(His theory is the college signals three things: Intelligence, discipline and conformism. It would be easy to signal first two things in some other way, but the very fact that you think you know better how to signal them proves that you're some kind of smartass who's inevitably going to cause trouble.)
How the Wirecutter Makes Decisions
There are user friendly and secure CAPTCHAs out there if implemented correctly.

A particular gaming forum uses game covers and asks users to select the correct title. This is quick enough to decipher for a human, while any OCR bots would have a difficult time with it. They could build a database of all covers, but it would be difficult to keep it up to date, and site owners could simply add more variation, so I doubt any bot authors bother to do so.
Top 20 Team Building Activities for This Remote Christmas
This is not due to lax parsing though. It is due to the convention of how to process undefined tags and attribute:

User agents must treat elements and attributes that they do not understand as semantically neutral; leaving them in the DOM (for DOM processors), and styling them according to CSS (for CSS processors), but not inferring any meaning from them. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#e...

This is unrelated to parsing - for example a XHTML parser will be strict and draconian in its parsing, but still process undefined tags and attributes as above.
International law is a gentleman’s agreement, not some divine regulatory framework. I assure you that such conventions will go out the window the moment they prove even mildly inconvenient to enforce.
You can see the webinar here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TKJN61aflI

It has much better quality for the graphs, allowing one to read the label values.
Find people you can be honest with and have those conversations. There aren’t many. Then sugarcoat for the narrow minded people. There are many.
Search on "Green Hydrogen" yields an impressive list of articles on this subject. The science and economics do not appear to weigh substantially in favor of hydrogen as fuel. This article, amongst others, argues an interesting opposing view: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoa...
>Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not?

No, because empirical studies demonstrate that u employment doesn't go up when the minimum wage is raised, profits instead get lowered.

There is an enormous lobbying industry dedicated to telling us what is bad for them is bad for us though.
I read the Twitter thread. Was there an article as well?
All the taxis in America aren't Yellow. In fact, I'd hazard to say most of them are Black. Only the ones in NYC are, and maybe in some other major cities.
I Published a Fake Paper in a ‘Peer-Reviewed’ Journal
Bloated code metastasizes bugs in badly architected codebases. If a project like this survives long enough, some developer will suffer the consequences. I had to deal with one of these projects recently and it's making me want to switch jobs.
been looking at `e^e = inf` for a minute now and I just don't get the joke. What am I missing?
I am in Montreal, Everyday I got to school during winters I had to subject my laptop to -20c for 45min before coming back to a warm indoor. It's not like we have any alternatives. It's true for our phones as well.

OP's points still stands. I would add that if your product can't stand this constant hot-cold cycle, don't get in the Canadian market. If you are selling here, we can assume you have accepted the reality of climate and have factored it in your warranty costs.
economically unproductive I think is what they meant, you could say society is a lot when their talents are used for gambling vs something like scientific research
Why would it be illegal? Being able to access a website (be it Twitter, Hacker News, or your hometown newspaper) is a privilege, not a right.
This is a funny line, but the majority is clearly right on most questions, such as the color of the sky, the shape of the earth, etc..
The price premium applies to all champagne though. Even the cheapest ones (eg the one at Aldi) start from $30, while basically indistinguishable if not superior prosecco/cava/sparkling can be had for $10.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law

If you know a thing or two about evolution, it should be obvious how these shortcuts will play out.

And still, you hear about similar metrics being used all the time... All over the place.

I suspect, in most cases, it's actually bad metrics stacked and really the manager trying to putting a metric on their own "contribution". (Parasitic isn't even the word, but rather viral or prionic...)

In the end, truly and reproducibly recognizing individual contribution is probably beyond human comprehension for any non-trivial tasks. Maybe your product actually benefits a lot from that one guy, who is just very good at promoting a good spirit, being fun to work with, rather than being the most proliferative coder. And how do you measure how hard a problem is? Does is matter who perceives it as hard in your team?

I think, it's one of those things, where trying to be clever will most likely make things much worse because the manual labor and personal involvement of the past actually was already best fitted for the task, by utilizing the human brain where it excels. Humans doing human things with humans, without being willfully ignorant about the complexity at hand.