skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Central banks create money, but governments don't spend that money. They spend money from taxes and bond sales.

About $15T USD exist [0]. $5T are held by foreign banks [1], because the USD is the world's reserve currency. All of those countries want the USD to remain stable, so their own economies can work smoothly. The countries cooperate with USA and side with USA in disputes. This benefits USA greatly. If USA went to the gold standard, this benefit would disappear.

Currencies on a gold standard experience inflation and deflation due to changes in the value of gold. The value of gold is primarily driven by demand for jewelry and manufactured products [2]. Demand fluctuates with the business cycle. Gold value is also affected by supply fluctuations. On a gold standard, these would become extra unwanted currency fluctuations.

Only $9T of gold exists above ground in the world. USA has only 3,000 tons of gold, worth 3,000 t * (1,000,000 g / t) * (oz t / 31.1 g) * (USD$1840 / oz t) = $177B. So to get $15T of gold, USA would need to mine or purchase 250,000 t of gold. This is equivalent to 72 years of the world's current gold production. So to make it possible, gold production would need to increase dramatically. And it would take a while. Meanwhile, the US economy keeps growing, increasing the need for currency.

Gold mining produces huge amounts of crushed ore which continually leaches heavy metal pollution into the environment. Gold mining uses cyanide which occasionally leaks and sterilizes a river or lake and kills all the birds and other wildlife nearby. Increasing gold mining would increase suffering around the world.

Another option is to increase the price of gold. This would negatively affect industry, especially electronics manufacturing. It would also cause an enormous wealth transfer to India and other countries that hold a lot of gold jewelry.

On a gold standard, governments have limited ability to solve problems in money supply, and their currency is subject to business cycle fluctuations and interference from cartels. USA will have difficulty getting enough gold to back its currency. Increased mining will poison people in many communities and devastate parts of nature.

[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/Current/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Consumption

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Production

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_prod...
> It's unlikely that there is pent-up demand for 5000 more households in a rural farm area.

Okay, then all the more reason for those farms to sell off some unused acres to alleviate what little pent-up demand there is. And if there are no unused acres, then it's best to work on getting more productivity per acre to make some unused acres.

The agricultural sector is in dire need of a kick in the rear to encourage better land efficiency; LVT is one heck of a kick.

> Farm land just sits there.

Then it ain't a farm, in which case all the more reason to sell off that land and make it available to someone else.

> It doesn't "cost" the local town/county anything.

It imposes an opportunity cost on everyone who would more effectively use that land, including other farmers with better methods (and also, more broadly, anyone else wanting places to live and/or work and/or play).
> I have no time to rewrite numpy or R libraries in CL

It's been done. I have no experience with it but a numpy clone in CL exists.

https://github.com/numcl/numcl
The state government has not provided evidence that outdoor dining is responsible for much of the spread.

At the same time, people have been travelling for Thanksgiving, and people are gathering with friends and relatives inside private homes more frequently than before. That isn't going to stop happening. If restaurants are closed, that might happen even more often, because there is nowhere else to do it!

Law enforcement in parts of the state have already told us that they won't enforce curfews, or won't use curfews as probable cause for stopping people who are out and about. So, stay-at-home orders won't prevent private gatherings and travel from continuing to happen.

The only way to actually stop the spread is to prevent people from having physical contact with people from other households, and we clearly aren't willing to do that. Orders to stop outdoor dining are going to kill businesses and cause people to lose their jobs for minimal public health gain.
What makes me mad is my mom learned about Ibn Shatir in Damascus at school in Karachi but not one word about al Biruni measuring circumference of Earth at Nandana in Punjab or say Bakhshali manuscript.
A lot of it is a panic mode--December is going to be a very cruel month. And if the medical system collapses under strain, a mob will be at public health officials' throats screaming bloody murder. "Why didn't you shut down restaurants when you could?" I don't envy their position.

I worry that this will end up being counterproductive, though. Probably the net number of people meeting other people will go down. However, of those who still meet other people, they will likely meet somewhere indoors (someone's home for dinner), which is much more dangerous than outdoor dining.
I'm interested too; feeling described to a T by your post. I struggled heavily with focus issues as a child / teen but it was never diagnosed far enough to try and medicate me out of it. As an adult with improved awareness of my attention issues, the prospect of pursuing a prescriptive fix that might just make me feel worse is intimidating.
For one sentence summaries of various philosophers’ main points (and how they relate to each other), see Deniz Cem Önduygu’s The History of Philosophy: Summarized and Visualized — https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/
I’d recommend instead reading 10 well-written commentaries on the work. It is a classic, but a bit long in the tooth and long in the text. It had a unique thesis at the time that has been challenged by lots of good folks...to the point that the challenges are more insightful than the original thesis.
Joe Biden Could Help Internet Companies Moderate Harmful Content
I can't comment on the OPs experience but I was on adderall for a few years of my childhood until my parents took me off of it because I was too angry and violent as they said.

I got back on it a few years back after realizing that normal people didn't seem to struggle with problems I just took to be my own lack of willpower.

I occasionally take breaks, sometimes weekends or weeks. I've noticed when I get off of it, it is basically the same as when I had depressive episodes. I start to feel completely lethargic, don't care about anything, I want to sleep and I consume all food within a 10 mile radius. I've notice the same thought patterns coming off of adderall as I do when I am depressed. I don't care about anything, I don't want to exercise because who cares, eat a box of donuts, sure it feels good now, and who cares about later.

When on adderall I can be shorter with people and get angrier quicker; however I am also less likely to act out because I have better control of my angry impulses and am able to recognize it for what it is. I also don't deal well with distraction on adderall because I want to just go go go and focus on one thing. Take that for what it is worth.
Thanks for the feedback...this is great
Not at all. Investors do this all the time to gain an edge over each other. It's ethical because they're actually providing a service by moving the stock price towards a more fair value so subsequent investors don't get ripped off. Some investors will lose money but those are the ones that didn't bother to do useful work investigating the company.
The repo consists on many crates. You can find installation instructions if you click on one of the subcrates (repl, jupyter, context).
Things that are contagious and invisible cause people to act like lunatics. On top of that, the enforcers are hypocritical. What a mess.

See https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1335016414315307009
This is one thing that terrifies me about moving away from my Dr. if I were to move across the country and suddenly couldn't get my medicine I know I would quickly become a wreck for a week or so well I dealt with all of the comedowns.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Accounting/
Link for the original paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00835-2
> But I don’t agree that property rights ought to be snatched from owners.

Nobody's calling for any snatching of property rights. What's being called for is for landowners to internalize the opportunity costs they've externalized on the rest of society (and, indeed, the planet).

> I also don’t think we could keep on increasing the world population when we have clearly crossed carrying capacity.

As much as I agree, unfortunately humans happen to enjoy making more humans (and indeed, arguably have a biological drive to do so), so barring either the ability to move humans off Earth or some Malthusian catastrophe, global population will continue to increase whether we like it or not.

> Half the planet needs to be uninhabitated and rewilded for species and habitat preservation, conservation and restoration.

Which is a lot easier when people are penalized for contributing to suburban and rural sprawl.
Not to mention the region of the world selected has a seventy year history of searching and mostly finding stuff that falls from the sky, it's part of the globes largest (land area wise) long range weapons testing complex dating back to post WWII British testing.

In the event of unexpected beacon failures, etc. there's a pre existing network of interlinked upward facing cameras and tracking software designed to assist finding rockets, meteorites, or plummeting blue whales.
I guess al Biruni was measuring circumference of fake earth in Punjab then?
Fair point. I wonder if my prioritization of the echo-chamber/fake news balkanization problems the web is facing now is purely because it's a more novel threat than authoritarian government overreach?

But it seems like there should be some level of compromise that can address both risks. We restrict other natural freedoms in all sorts of ways in modern society, why not free speech at all? As an example that's repeated so often it's practically a cliche: even with the second amendment in the US, citizens are still restricted from owning nuclear weapons.

A new class of weapon was invented and society decided that no matter what they said in the past, this was too powerful to treat like any other weapon until now. Seems like this new form of hyper-speech could qualify for a similar approach?
For very concise introductions, check out the 1000-word essays on philosophical topics written by philosophy professors. https://1000wordphilosophy.com

For a deeper dive also written by philosophy professors, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is unrivaled. https://plato.stanford.edu

Richard Marshall's 3:16am interviews with philosophers are also great. https://www.3-16am.co.uk
> Defining signed overflow requires sticking more instructions for every integer addition, since the platform is not guaranteed to actually overflow when you want it to so the program will have to detect this and force the overflow to happen. Major slowdowns.

That is most definitely not true. All modern hardware is 2's complement arithmetic, and the corresponding signed integer arithmetic operation will silently overflow without complaint.

> Lots of loop stuff also depends on non-overflowing signed integers. If integers can shrink on addition then you cannot safely do a lot of unrolling or fancier stuff based on affine loop transformations.

Not really. Only certain particular patterns force weirdness on loops were overflow well-defined, and these aren't the most common pattern (a basic for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) loop doesn't need overflow to be undefined to have loop optimizations kick in). Even if you hit a case where it can be annoying (such as the poor man's multidimensional array access, because C lacks such niceties), you can multiversion the loop to fall back to an unoptimized loop in cases where overflow would have kicked in and otherwise use the optimized loop.

Where I've seen the most issues with signed versus unsigned is when LLVM decides to take a loop with a signed 32-bit index, promote the index variable to 64-bit (using zero-extension for all the related values), and then retain a signed 32-bit comparison for the loop bound. The unsigned version of the code had fewer problems. So much for signed overflow being good for optimizations.
Making cigarettes even more conspicuous I think will backfire on teenagers
Well, that was a fairly comprehensive takedown. Kudos to the author for mentioning the things the primary author did well and correctly put the primary responsibility on the senior researchers.

ML privacy isn't at all in my wheelhouse, but I did do computer security research in school. The author makes a good point that researchers need to be ready for their methods to be broken. More importantly though, researchers have an ethical responsibility to publicize when a vulnerability in their work is discovered, so it's not used improperly.

I think this is something that's very clear in the security community, but isn't the norm in the machine learning community. Hopefully privacy researchers in ML take a few notes from their colleagues that have been doing computer security sooner rather than later.

Finally, it's pretty disappointing to see how far Bell Labs has fallen. I won't spoil the article, but the quote from the Bell Labs judge is telling.
Caffeine wears off quickly, and seems to be good for you.

I go off cold turkey once in a while, and the worst I've ever gotten is a week of mild headaches.
No it hasn't.

Ignoring API compatibility and speed etc. (numcl doesn't talk to BLAS/LAPACK IIRC), even the basic datastructure isn't quite there. Numcl uses fixed contiguous lisp arrays as opposed to the strided ones that are standard in Numpy.

P.S- There are atleast 5-6 attempts to build something of the sort starting all the way back from Matlisp, and none of them are feature complete.

The lisp curse is very much true it'd seem.
Even worse, the pages for these projects describe what they are in such high-level vague handwavy verbiage the only way to understand what these things really do is to install them and try them out for a project -- after which time you're down in technical debt land and replacing it with another project to "try out" might cost millions of dollars and probably won't work out.
Ok, but intent isn't enough. You need to post in a way that isn't likely to lead to flamewars, and that responsibility grows as the topic gets more controversial.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
> This is an unhelpful nebulous statement, at its worst a circular definition and victim to the Münchhausen trilemma.

It is most certainly not circular. We are knowing agents first and know things spontaneously. Only on reflection do we begin to ask what knowledge is, what the limits of rational inquiry are, etc. But to be able to reflect on something, there must first be something to reflect on. Thus, we must know something before we can begin to consider epistemological questions or even have those questions in the first place. Methodic doubt always leads to incoherent conclusions because it is ultimately irrational.

> Not at all, I suggest to read Critique of Pure Reason.

I am not surprised by this recommendation given what you said. The Kantian position is extremely problematic and your appeal to it explains your reaction.

> I'll also note that epistemology was well established by Western philosophy long before Descartes.

This was never my claim. I only claimed that epistemology is not an ideal starting point. Obviously, epistemology predates Descartes. Modern philosophy onward (that is to say, beginning with Descartes, traditionally, anyway) shifts its concerns away from metaphysics to epistemology. Thus, epistemology supplants metaphysics as what one might call the primary concern of philosophical inquiry.
Emulating a Computer: The CHIP-8 Interpreter
> (machine learning practitioners are the new SEO consultants?)

If we want to continue the snake oil salesman analogy, SEO consultants were soothsayers, attempting to divine meaning from The Algorithm of Great Google.

Now the apothecaries have begun to legitimize their potion making into tonics, but there is still room for a charlatan or two to push hodgepodge concoctions onto the unsuspecting Product Manager or CTO.
Macs with T2, M1 chips cannot be restored to factory state without Apple
Totally, money and business have taken over IT. Computers are still fun to experiment with however, it is just that people have a choice now of experimenting or playing games, and most people choose games
pg is referring there to October 2006, which is when HN was released (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1), so he must have meant that he'd "finished" it enough to release it. It can't mean "finished" the way you're interpreting it, because he continued working on HN code for years after that. Indeed, he added a major new feature (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304) a few days before he left HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493856).

As someone who's worked on HN code since then, I can tell you there's no such "mindset", nor is it true that "we don't get any iteration on the feature set here" (11 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25197418). It is true, though, that most of the changes are subtle enough not to be so visible, including the ones I'm working on this evening. Most of the effort goes into attempting to improve, or at least preserve, the quality of submissions and comments.
OpenVMS Notes: WASD HTTPd (and the y2k20 dilemma)
I mean, I'm pretty sure the tendency for LSD users to ethically object to war or other offensive violence is exactly why the US decided it should be treated as more dangerous than crystal meth (or perfectly legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco and caffeine) despite there being precisely zero evidence of such danger.
Nice breakdown.

It's a small thing, but I'm really grateful that he very specifically aimed at the senior authors here. While I'm not sure that the first author can be completely absolved of responsibility (due to the simple fact that they are listed as an author), the power dynamics in academia are absurdly skewed and it's nice to see a tacit acknowledgement of that in an otherwise (justifiably) scathing critique.
Absolutely. What makes us well adapted also opens us up to self deception. Heuristic and bias are two sides of the same coin.
I’ve never seen one in open source but I’ve written a couple over the years and seen a few others. It forces you to solve many difficult metaprogramming challenges elegantly so it is a good excuse to achieve some mastery. I’ve burned more hours than I care to admit trying to figure out how to achieve seemingly simple results. Also, until C++17, this was an exercise in masochism due to the limitations of the expressiveness and type inference, which is why so few people tried. Basically, there were a lot of unpleasant rough edges that went away with C++17 because the language wasn’t smart enough previously. C++20 will also be a big step forward for this, whenever the compilers become usable.

One thing to understand is that these libraries are highly opinionated about the abstract architectural model. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to mix components from user space and kernel space designs, for example, though both have advantages separately. It tends to be more along the lines of one abstract architectural model and enormous amounts of elasticity and flexibility within that model based on the data models, workloads, transaction semantics, and hardware you are targeting. You also still have to write a spec that makes sense from a database engineering standpoint.

At least for me, there are still significant parts of a database engine for which I haven’t built a metaprogramming scaffold. That is largely a matter of time and effort. Other parts I haven’t had to write much code for years but still get state-of-the-art implementation to spec.

Ultimately, I’m trying to automate away my job.
My point was that you should just use old-school C++ if you need to use C++. If your desire is to use fancy language features, and that is your primary focus, then you should switch language.

People should just accept that they work with a legacy language and not try to turn C++ into Haskell, Rust or something it isn't. They just turn it into a worse mess than it already is.

Most C++ code that exists and which is useful is written in old school C++ anyway and could be continued to be maintained that way and wrapped for other users.

And really C++ performance is IMHO somewhat overrated. It depends entirely on what you are doing. I think it was the CouchDB creator. He made his first version in C++. He struggled hard. Then he switched to Erlang, despite Erlang running on a VM he got magnitudes higher performance and had to write less than half the code.

You know the ones who squeezed the most performance out of the Playstation 2 did it using LISP and not C++. They used LISP to create a DSL for PS2 assembly code. Thus they could do high level LISP coding as well as low level assembly all in one.

And today you got many scientists needing high performance computing switching to Julia. Fortran will usually outperform C++ on number crunching. And there are quite a number of cases where Julia will outperform Fortran.

Yes in real time systems with tight memory requirements something like Julia is not a good choice. But then again in those cause you may actually want to prefer C or Rust.
I do a form of rucking and highly recommend it. I don’t think traditional rucking gear is optimal though. The backpack format puts more strain on your back and most rucking forums and such I’ve seen recommend only like 30lbs. The most amazing piece of fitness equipment I have is a 36lb belt which puts no weight on your back and doesn’t hold in heat like a vest. I’ve since had to add a 45lb vest to it, but the vest should at least put less torque on your back than a backpack.
Large apartment complexes are typically worth a lot more per land area than luxury developments.
And types and classes are subtly different namespaces BTW. Try specializing a method on KEYWORD. In pure ANSI implementations you can't because KEYWORD is a type but not a class, and method specializers have to be classes.
> Bill Gates is giving away the vast majority of his wealth

That's a tax-avoidance scheme. Here's a recent (and certainly not the first) article laying it out:

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/bill-gates-promised-to-gi...

> You don't know what Elon Musk will do with his wealth

I think we both know that whatever it is, first and foremost it'll be good for Elon Musk.
Blade Runner Game Director Louis Castle
How to generate random points on a sphere
The last thing we need is more censorship... this is not looking good.
I feel like we're going to end up with the opposite question: "What good were these lockdowns when the medical system collapsed anyway?"

The current lockdown strategies, like with many political measures, seem to be more motivated by "we need to look like we're doing something" than "we need to fix the problem".
When I came across this stuff in 2019, the question of whether or not it was real or not really bothered me for about a month. I wondered: if this is real, why seek to discover new science and apply it to human problems if it's already been discovered elsewhere by others? Will they tell us how to unify QM and relativity? Why can't I see them myself?

After looking into this stuff for the past 18 months, I'm now about 85-90% certain that there are aliens we haven't been told about yet.

There is a possibility that this might be wrong. I do not especially care what most people think of me.