skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do you assume bad faith? Having worked closely with folks from many parts of Europe as an early stage founder, folks from Scandinavia certainly seem to take “naive” or “earnest” efforts of founders more seriously than other parts of Europe (or even Asia for that matter).
Or like a whole degree from bachelor to masters and a 15.000$ car (in Europe)
Apologies, but you just hit on a pet peeve.

If cosmetics didn’t matter, why are they such lucrative items to sell? Cosmetics were once the reward for playing the game, not for spending money. And the look of your in-game avatar matters - has always mattered - to a vast majority of players.

The reward for playing the game now? Getting the opportunity to spend more money.
> Ant minds are not general intelligences

The fact that you don't consider ants as general intelligences means you agree that we aren't making progress towards general intelligences, since ants intelligence is way closer to general intelligence than any computer program we have.

> Their pathfinding and identification and anthill-making and communication are all fixed programs in their genetics, not learnt during life.

They only born with some bases, they intelligently comes up with fine tuned parameters to make them work in practice. Hence they learn. If you don't call this "intelligence" they you can't consider the "AI" we do today "intelligent". I mean, every model a computer executes was invented by a human, the computer only optimized the parameters.

I mean, insects can learn to recognize arbitrary objects without anyone giving them training data or a reward function, they just do it on their own. That is a part of general intelligence. The way we do AI can never achieve that, since it always relies on human intelligence to decide all of those things meaning we just get out some optimized function that can fuzzy match input data.
Obviously you’re going to get downvoted for this. But would you mind saying where the Easter egg is?
> when it reached Italy, it hit that country hard

In general, Italians have issues with high blood pressure. High blood pressure seems to be a factor in the severity of the illness.
A) >>>Specific examples are pennsylvania allowing absentee ballot 3 days after the election even though by law any ballots arriving by mail after election day are void.<<<<

That is incorrect. PA Supreme Court ruled that there is no specific law against that ...Pennsylvania Republicans had sought to block the counting of late-arriving ballots, which the state's Supreme Court had approved last month..... [1]

B) >>>poll watchers who monitor votes being counted were not given meaningful access to monitor even though by law they must be given access.<<<

That is also incorrect. The dispute was about how far away they should be. Both Democratic and Republican observers were at the same distance which was at least 6 feet because of COVID. One of the Judges allowed for the distance to be narrowed for everybody

C) >>>Due to the huge number of absentee ballots election counters did not verify ballot signatures as required.<<<

That is also incorrect. Where state law mandated it, this was done.

D) >>>The reason all these lawsuits failed is because there is no real injunctive relief you can seek. <<<<

This is incorrect. The lawsuits failed because

a) the lawyers actually stated in court that they were not alleging fraud but were 'concerned'

b) the lawyers said in court that there were some irregularities but not enough to change the outcome

1. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/922411176/supreme-court-rules...
>Censorship and sanctions are less preferred because They create even more distrust and encourage conspiracy theories

do they? everything i've seen seems to show that this sort of censorship really does work basically exactly as intended. for example, https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...

letting misinformation spread tends to spread misinformation. shutting misinformation campaigns down disrupts them, and if done broadly enough prevents new ones from gaining traction. yes, it might spawn new conspiracy theories, but if they only reach a few people they cause far less harm than the widespread misinformation that the actions are meant to disrupt.
Setting aside the idea of intentional coverup, China is still the most likely area origin.

Normalized working/eating close to all animals, wet markets, pollution, lack of food care (incl refridgeration), unclean water, and more all make for a hotbed of potential disease.
the docker whale
Odd to see a stress on interest in a problem for its own sake from pg, who has elsewhere written that the startup economy would be crippled by raising taxes on people who had already gotten fabulously rich. If being in it for the money is "the wrong motive" to do a startup, downgrading the potential financial gains from set-for-dynasty to merely set-for-life would seem to be a way of ditching the poseurs...
Perfect example of "whataboutism"
This is awesome! I already see several topics that I am very keen to hear a solid take about what direction the current literature should head in

But more importantly, this is such a humane approach to sharing knowledge because these people are all devoted enough to these subjects to have written dozens of supervised pages that they would stake their own futures on

That is a very worthy criterion to decide who to listen to
Not OP, and I think never using a debugger is silly, but IMO if I need a debugger to figure out a problem then I'm missing either sufficient unit tests or sufficient logging, and spending my time on that rather than in the debugger will aid future devs as well.

I do think the write/debug/edit cycle is a very, very slow way to program, and I have to admit I'm suspicious when somebody tells me they spend 90% their time in the debugger (but a lot of this is dependent on type of work).
Yup, updated it!
The reason you are getting downvotes is because you aren’t seeing the bigger picture. This has nothing to do with Trump, and everything to do with platforms that have a de facto monopoly on certain types of free speech suppressing it in favor of certain groups. It’s all well and good when they are suppressing people that disagree with you, but not so much when the opposite is true.

This is why “platforms” like Twitter need to lose their liability protection when they engage in such behavior. They are no longer playing the role of independent platform in need such protection; they are a publisher that is deciding what can and cannot be viewed. That is perfectly acceptable, as long as they are held accountable for that content. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Nine Out of 10 people in poor countries are set to miss out on Covid-19 vaccine
that’s a non-argument. you can do the same with an EC2 instance. you know exactly what it’s gonna cost. it’s this fancy services with “elastic” pricing models that usually get you
> You'll notice that if you're on a cellular network, even in the U.S., you will have an IPv6 address.

Just a data point.

I'm on a cellular network in the UK for both my phone and my phone network (via 4G router).

My phone get an IPv6 address only, no IPv4.

But my home network gets an IPv4 address only, no IPv6. I can't obtain IPv6 on the home network even though it's the same cellular service (down to the same kind of SIM and same contract) as the phone.
Well, except that it flies in the face of American culture being considered "the coolest" in the world. Heck, the modern meaning even comes from (African) Americans !

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/10/cool-the-etymology-...
> But what would be the point of further discussing it?

If you have a limited number of vaccines, you can vaccinate the propagators first and have 80% of the benefit of full population vaccination for 20% of the cost.
Counter-hypothesis: these games' higher level gameplay loops demand a higher level of consistency; players' mismatched expectations come partially from a place of "if that chance is actually 90%, then what you're asking me to do is impossible".

Let me be more concrete. Take XCOM as the clearest example. On one hand, your troops level up with experience. A veteran soldier is more effective than a new recruit. So you need your them to survive, otherwise you'll be at a significant disadvantage on later missions. On the other, the developers want there to be some difficulty, to create a sense of tension (that you might not succeed) and make strategy matter.

These two goals are diametrically opposed, given the genre. It is difficult-to-impossible to create a scenario where there is both a real risk of losing and where a player can recover from losing a nominally 90% roll. Maybe once per mission. To keep the gameplay balance intact, devs would need to raise the nominal chances to match the actual chances, not the other way around.

The problem is, doing this would make it obvious to the player how much stronger they are than their opponents, in a game where you are supposedly vastly outgunned. So this type of fudging the numbers is more of a psychological trick by the developers, who want to have their cake and eat it, too. It's in the same class as shooters which prevent the AI from shooting you in the back or sniping you from offscreen, or horror games where the monster moves more slowly when you're not looking at them. An illusion to create a certain type of experience.

Note: I don't dispute that people are bad at judging probabilities. But I also ask that you consider that players may use this reasoning (probably subconsciously): "The developer wouldn't set me an impossible goal. If I lose this battle, it will be impossible to reach the goal they have set. Therefore, my chance of winning must be 100%. The game says it is 90%. Therefore, when the game says 90%, it must actually mean 100%. Therefore, when I lose a roll that the game says is 90%, the game is cheating." They don't really mean the game is cheating, they mean the developer is setting them an unfair task, giving them the illusion that there is a chance at victory through smart play, when in fact there is none.

I imagine you could test this hypothesis, or rather, how large of an effect it has, by taking the first 11 letters of the alphabet, randomizing their order, and then assigning them to probabilities 0-100% in steps of 10. Then have people play the game, showing only the letters. Then at the end, ask them to guess what each letter's probability is. This should show how much of the delta is the developer's fault vs player's. I think you'd want to do it with players whose perceptions have not already been poisoned by the lying of previous games, and use a less uniform distribution, so players can't guess the % just by figuring out the relative order.
A particularly lethal form of media hysteria, apparently.
I am disappointed that anyone thinks this is a good idea, regardless of your political view.

The principles behind the United States are that we prefer a mess to tyranny and noise to suppression.

It's not about Trump. It's about whether we trust anyone to make decisions about what is right and not right for someone to say, because whoever has that power will inevitably abuse it.

If you feel fine about this now because you disagree with the person being silenced, then just try to imagine being on the other side of that - calling out what you perceive to be a great injustice only for someone to have the power to take away your voice completely.

This is not a constitutional argument, as Twitter isn't government and not bound by first amendment, it's a principles argument. If you support suppression of speech that's "obviously wrong" to you, you're gonna be in a lot of pain down the road when someone finds YOU obviously wrong.

Having been born and lived in the USSR, this is very real. A lot of folks who were on the "right side of history" in 1917 when it came to suppressing/killing "the obvious enemies of the people", found themselves against the wall in the 20s and 30s. Once you create a system that's more powerful than people, it's just a matter of time before it decides that you're not good enough either.
What do you think is the alternative to social media?
Microsoft: Turning Excel into a Turing-complete programming language
I've also written about this effect, called Lampshading: https://www.swyx.io/lampshading/ asking the "stupid question" is a strength when done in taste.
It's also disappointing though that it brings us no closer to uncovering his identity.
That would still cover the right to publish in US territory.
Good God people, we are above this ridiculousness. Can we please just talk about the philosophy and principles here? If you mention the name of a politician you've already lost.

I tend to be more on the left but I still value free speech and I'm anti-censorship. Can we talk about that?

1. Is what Twitter is doing censorship?

2. If so is it ok?

3. Are we setting dangerous precedents?

4. Should big tech companies be trusted with this power?

These are important questions and this community is well positioned to discuss these.
> Time to leave before he cracks the country in two irrevocably.

hasn't this already happened?

It'll take a long time to recover the damage done to foreign policy. even worse is the division, which was already present thanks to how distant people are if they are a few income brackets apart. he really knew how to worsen all this and make the chaos work for him.

whoever repairs the damage in the coming years has their work cut out. maybe we've learned something as a collective? (I don't think so because while humans are smart humanity is the worst)
You are. Full stop. There are entire industry talks and patents dedicated to manipulating you into purchasing microtransactions.
How is the president actively undermining the core ideals of our country conservative speech? His childish behavior is the problem, the fact that all these tech companies have to step in to prevent him from actively harming the country is a symptom of his own megalomania running unchecked for so long.
> There are ways to educate people [to] identify when they are being lied to on the internet.

Do you have a link about this? Because I would love to know of such a technique. Some of my family doesn't know how to identify conspiracy theories from truths.
You raise some serious points, which I shall try to address; my limited domain expertise notwithstanding.

> if the kids don't get into fights over who gets the reindeer-shaped cookie cutter, and who gets the star?

This, in comparable situations I have witnessed, should not be a problem. The kids should be able to fight quite easily over nuances such as depth of icing, area of icing, colour of icing etc. And in the case of embossed designs, who gets the star motif and who gets the reindeer. Fighting among children is guaranteed to be preserved at current levels under my proposed system; it doesn't upset the status quo.

> Danish Christmas cookies don't have icing. We only get to express ourselves through the shape.

This is perplexing. Perhaps a national education programme might be initiated - using Danish influencers on YouTube, promoting the use of icing and showing how it is made. (You'd start with water icing and move up to royal icing etc.)

Furthermore, one might use this cookie dilemma ("Danish cookies don't have icing") as a metaphor to address other fixed biases in the Danish psyche that might benefit from frank and open discussion.
This is a bit of a cop out answer, but Google probably sorts them based on something derived from PageRank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

In other words: according to some approximation of the authority of the page, given the graph of links to that page, and their estimated authority in the domain of the searched keywords -- it's possible (and likely, I think?) they aren't using stack overflow's vote counts in their sort at all.
Your post implied that you believed HN users above devolving into political bickering. My reply is meant as explanation as to why that belief is unfounded. Should we be better? Yes, but as long as we aren't banning political discussion entirely it's going to happen.
Did I literally post that? You might want to reread my comment.

I can say from experience for every language above, save C++ (with which I have never worked), that they will fail to compile if you change a function signature in a backwards-incompatible way and fail to update all call sites.

The purpose of static typing as a method of program verification is to enforce type constraints at compile-time for all possible executions of that program. A function signature is, you guessed it, a type constraint.
Ask HN: How HN curation works with 1 post per minute?
you can get billing alerts today. it’s not the lack of control mechanisms that prevented this failure. it was the noobism of the user
The end game could be the GOP going full confederate and the Democrats nuking them with the 14th amendment, Section 3. "Sorry guys, this court judgement now says you're banned from holding any public office, federal or state." Simply giving aid or comfort to those engaged in insurrection triggers this section. In this sense, having actual bullets being fired by "rebels" would be the biggest Christmas gift the Democrats could get.
My personal opinion is that every single Presidential election should always be followed up by a well-funded third party integrity analysis and postmortem. I’m not talking about canvassing and re-counts, because those only look at the very last step in the process of tabulation.

We should always be looking into voter rolls of who voted versus things like change-of-address filings and death certificates. We should always be checking the math on percentage of registered voters and looking at outliers. We should always be investigating provisional ballots, for example people who came to vote in person and were told they already voted. And probably many other things along these lines.

I think the other side of this is that the Constitution puts States firmly in control of their own voting process and procedures, which means there are 50 different sets of rules for how these elections can be held, and then in the months and weeks leading up to elections there’s a flurry of lawsuits that try to change all the rules one way or another, sometimes with changes being made up until the final moments of the election. This hugely erodes public trust in the entire process.

Now, I think Twitter has made some objectively very bad calls in the name of censorship the last few months. Freezing the NY Post’s account after the Hunter Biden story in particular. I think the “this tweet is disputed” flags are ultimately another failure on their part. Aside from being objectively the wrong thing to do in some cases, mostly I just doubt that these actions will have remotely the intended effect.
Politics might be the hardest to be earnest in... and yet we must, for the future's sake !
Retrospectively ascribing success to character traits that we favour is subjective to the point of meaninglessness.

Earnestness, like any other trait or 'virtue' is not innate or absolute. Everyone has the capacity to exhibit this trait or be seen to exhibit it, when refracted through the non-objective lens of someone else's bias and perception. For example, a politician for partyX is seen to be an earnest 'straight man' who cares deeply by his supporters, while supporters of partyY view him as a reckless oaf.

To promote the use of personality traits as a predictor of success is naive at best.
Not sure if it’s apocryphal or not, but I remember hearing that that was how Vermeer painted.
It’s ok to challenge and ask for proof. It’s not ok to blatantly ignore this proof once provided without any justification. It’s not ok to “feel” something is’t right because it’s against your bias.
I feel the same. Nice analogy, going to use it.
You’re being downvoted for inconvenient facts
Eh? That would make them keep playing for those few days though, wouldn't it? That's the most important thing with subscription based games like WoW, keep them playing.
Yes, and when we say ‘created’ hacker news, he coded it himself in a dialect of lisp which he also coded just for this purpose.
Interesting variation on "No True Koan (Scotman)".
I think if your perspective has enabled you to know things you wouldn't have otherwise, _most_ of that should just come through from the writing. It should be possible for you to write in a way that's convincing independently of who you are.

A different person might not have been able to produce the same essay, but if the essay is the same, who the author is shouldn't matter too much (for a good essay).
I was thinking “yo mama”
When this started, I did some visualizing of the virus' code: https://github.com/kordless/covid19_viz

That "spike" in the graph comes from sequences in the nucleotides coding the spike on the virus, which is somewhat expected given it's repeated on the surface of the virus membrane.

Apparently most of the spike encoding is from a South Asian fish. Reference in the repo.
His posts aren’t fact based, they’re mostly an expression of his feelings.

A great example are his 5-6 posts talking about how the most important facet of a programming language is its brevity (https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sex...). At no point does he cite any facts backing that up. Even when the brevity chasing language he created failed to gain traction, he didn’t see that as an indication to recheck his assumptions.

In other words, “feelings don’t care about your facts”. But hey, there’s a market for that sort of article. So who are we to judge?
Challenging the validity of an election is not a "coup". We need these challenges to keep our elections secure. I cheered Hillary for telling Biden not to concede under any circumstances.

The left-biased media was worried about election fraud for months before the election (good!) and are now declaring it the "most secure election in American history" in spite of the broad introduction of mail-in voting.

People living in democracies should scrutinize the hell out of their elections.

https://spectator.us/reasons-why-the-2020-presidential-elect...

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/23/5-more-ways-joe-biden-m...
Just another reason not to have kids in today's world.
> Wouldn't people coming to Lisbon just stay somewhere else

No. They just wouldn't come. AirBnb and discounter-airlines has turned the tourism industry upside down.

Now, I do believe, that it's NOT AirBnb "fault" - AirBnb just accelerates the inevitable (like most technologies do) but the impact is still huge.

I have friends who live in Lisbon and Barcelona and from their eyes: tourism, that used to be a profitable "fancy" industry - with middle class people bringing their money to spend it - has turned into something different. These days "tourists" can be a group of 12 football fans, who've spent £18 on a RyanAir ticket and all stay in the same Airbnb room (as a group), getting drunk and vomiting on the streets.

I'm not saying that's definitely a bad thing (everyone deserves the right to experience travel) I'm just saying I can relate to (many) EU cities opposing this, claiming they're not getting any value from these crowds.
Coronavirus is ravaging the world but life looks almost normal in much of Africa
> No, in politics, “technocrat” describes an advocate of rule by an elite of technical experts.

I've never seen that usage - in my experience, a technocrat is always the (supposed) expert, not the advocate for expert rule.

Wikipedia commonly uses "advocate for technocracy" on the relevant biography pages.
https://archive.vn/vXTyN
A $35 RPi-based AirPlay receiver for casting audio to non-WiFi stereo systems
Fall Comdex 1983
In general most people I see aren’t against the legal challenges. They are against the trial in the court of his supporters opinion that he is running. Because arguments that are meritless/fabrications can be brought up with no repercussions. Based on the pitiful weak arguments he made in court it seems like his team wasn’t even trying to win an actual court case, they were playing it up to rally his base.