skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> but there is no evidence that these mutations

Parroting NN Taleb: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Haven't we learned from coronavirus that we need to use the precautionary principle in the face of new information that is not fully understood. I don't know where you are from, but I locally heard a string of "there is no evidence of" starting in about January of 2019. There was no evidence that the virus would leave China (it did). No evidence that shutting down travel from infected areas would help (see Vietnam). No evidence of community transmission (it has happened in most of the globe). No evidence that masks help prevent transmission (appears to reduce transmission rates).

I am starting to think as soon as someone asserts "there is no evidence" for something related to the coronavirus, it is a foregone conclusion.

In any case, nobody can assert with absolute certainty that the coronavirus cannot mutate into a more severe or more transmissible virus, especially in the face of a the long human history of being (literally) plagued by mutating viruses.

A critical mutation is a possibility and we should be extremely cautious and vigilant against it. Even if we erroneously overreact 10 times to false mutations, the 11th time might be the one the matters. And the cost of those 11 overreactions will be much less than the cost of letting it go wild.
Apple’s search ads will indeed benefit greatly from this change. When an app developer runs an ad on Facebook, and a user converts and buys the app, attributing that conversion requires “cross app tracking” that will be banned by this update. On the other hand, if the developer runs the ad though App Store search, Apple will be happy to attribute the sale to get paid. One could reasonably guess that the real purpose of this change is to take that market from Facebook.
Yeah being kind is more a weird tug of war. We really need lessons in how to ensure our own well being in a social context.

Now some would summarize it as: be as kind to you as you're to others. I, like your father, has a weird tendency to do everything for free.. but it's unhealthy and I suffer. But I can't really blame others for that.

Being strong and balanced.. a healthy dose of selfishness (kinda like a kid)
RVU based payment should be illegal. Fuck corporate hospital systems
Yes, the policy is essentially dictated by people crying about the government not removing everybody else’s freedom, meanwhile they’re free to self isolate as much as they like.
0.4% is comparable to the wealth tax in Switzerland.

I believe one of the differences is that in California, this would be on top of federal and state capital gains taxes, whereas in Switzerland, there is no tax on investment gains (from stock gaining value - dividends do count as income, and once ETFs with dividend-paying stocks get involved, it gets messy but TLDR you still pay the income tax on dividends).
Well, if the "aim" of the virus (what is ours, btw?) is to replicate as much as possible, the best "strategy" would be to be highly contagious and remain dormant for as long as possible; fatality would be an obstacle rather than advantage. There is just one problem with this approach: as far as we can tell viruses aren't intelligent and they don't think.

On the other hand, if you consider the possibility that viruses might be a tool used by someone else (God, aliens, evil scientists hired by bad governments), fatality becomes an important, if not the defining aspect of the tool.
Strongly agree with this. I’ve been playing on Nvidia GeForce Now (so essentially a high-end PC), and haven’t encountered any major issues. I’d say the game sets a new standard in terms of the level of detail in the environment. The first time you leave your apartment in Night City is simply stunning, probably the only comparison would be the Uncharted series (which was much more linear).

Cyberpunk was perhaps the most hyped game of the last year, so no matter what CD released, I expected a strong and polarizing reaction. I agree with their decision to offer refunds, but I think they don’t need to be as apologetic about what was released. The same issues came up years ago with publishers who targeted the PS4/Xbox One — Cyberpunk just drew a lot more attention this time around.
While I'm dubious about both the legality and wisdom of this proposed tax, I confess I'm having trouble seeing "paying a 0.4% tax on wealth over $30M" as being "slave to a state." Yes, metaphor, but it's a metaphor of "reducing my $50M estate to $49.92M might as well be forced servitude," and, uh, no. C'mon. Put that $50M somewhere that averages even a modest 4% annual return and you could pay the tax, draw out $600K a year (I mean, you can live on that, right? Not a hardship?), and still have another $600K left over.

The people who would actually be subject to kind of tax would not, in an actual monetary sense, be adversely affected by this kind of tax, and we're really falling back on to crying BUT IT'S THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THING. And, fine, but also ironic -- after all, that's also the rationale for imposing the tax.
See “Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo” by Ian Harris.
That’s pretty cool.
I got it as gift and I have installed my vpn and pihole to block ads.
I might look into operating systems course thanks for sharing
On the other hand, even if it’s highly speculative, the cons for most people are “feeling hungry” and “a handful of other benefits that are supported by a growing body of evidence.”

I’m all about rigorously testing the hypothesis over time, but the safety / risks of the intervention has been well studied for a very, very long time.

“Might help and extremely unlikely to hurt” is not a bad basis on which to decide to take up IF.
> It’s actually quite interesting that Apple does not force software updates, or perform them in a hard-to-disable-or-detect manner.

Since at least iOS 14, automatic updates are defaulted to on in the out of box setup flow, and it's up to you to go in and turn them off, several screens later in the settings app once the OOBE is complete. It tells you it's doing this but offers no ability to opt out.

Subsequent updates have restored the autoupdate switch to on, explicitly reverting my choice. It's now part of my iOS point release update checklist to ensure that autoupdates are disabled.

I don't think Gruber is being entirely up-front here. Apple very aggressively wants all iOS devices on the latest supported version.
I oftentimes wonder why people want to defend the NYT and the only conclusion I can come up with is that they mistakenly believe they're part of the elite.
I don't know exactly what combination of factors have led to the decline in reliability of the NY Times, but it's been very noticeable, particularly since Trump was elected.

A year ago, Slate published a transcript of an all-hands meeting, which gives some insight into the thinking of people at the paper.[1] One of the things the executive editor, Dean Baquet, says in the transcript is that the NY Times is going to try to find a racial angle to as much of its coverage as possible. To me, it looks like the NY Times is trying to rebrand itself.

Other people here have mentioned the 1619 Project, which is a good example of how brand has undermined reliability. The project made some sweeping claims about American history that were clearly wrong on a basic factual level. Some of the most famous historians who study the periods in question objected, but were more or less brushed off by the Times. This includes historians whom, not so long ago, the NY Times lavished praise upon in its book reviews. But just a few years later, the NY Times is dismissing them and backing its own shoddy - but heavily advertised (they even made an Academy Awards commercial for it [2]) - historical articles.

1. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/new-york-times-m...

2. https://youtu.be/G1imfEXKaeM
>This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.

Dr. Fauci works for a public health organization and nytimes is a for profit exchange listed company. So this comparison not fair.

The way I remember the mask debate is in March 2020 there was a shortage of PPE and health workers were in great need of masks. To avoid a mad rush of people hoarding masks just like they hoarded toilet paper, the Coronavirus Task Force was emphasising social distancing, hand washing more than wearing masks.

Now, the Caliphate story was outed as a lie by Canadian authorities. The nytimes did not verify their sources, they were caught lying which is why they had to retract their story.

This is a big difference.
Most of the UK is secular. Christmas has cultural significance (and everyone gets time off work), not just religious.
Most likely residents are young, arent they? So if they prioritized people most like getting affected by the disease and only have 5000 shots, I am not suprised that no resident made it to the list.
Linus Torvalds calls this trading new bugs for old bugs. And I agree with the idea in principle: don't replace buggy working code with untested new code. People already know how to deal with the old bug.

And look how it turns out every time that principle is broken, albeit in userland and not the kernel: KDE 4, PulseAudio, Systemd.

I'm fully aware of the differences between a product (airplane) and software, but the 737 Max is born of the same principle being broken. The problem that was being fixed was fuel efficiency. So Boeing replaced the engines and associated structures with more efficient engines, which required different structures to hold them, which required MCAS, and now the whole thing is untested, as compare to the old setup with decades of proven reliability despite 1.6% more fuel consumption.
If such legislation were implemented, it will just incentivize people even more to gift their wealth away before they die. All that's been achieved is simply shifting a boundary condition. My general view is that negative incentive structures are not particularly effective in what they set out to achieve. Better to try and craft positive incentive structures for people to donate money over time before they pass on.

There are essentially 4 ways to spend money:

1) You can spend your own money on yourself.
2) You can spend your own money on someone else.
3) You can spend somebody else’s money on yourself.
4) You can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else.

People are are most careful with (1) and least careful with (4). Taxes fall into bucket 4 and donations/gifts fall into bucket 2. I'd much rather see charitable foundations and organizations self-directing the appropriation of money at the local level rather than state/federal government doing the appropriation.

All this is not to say that inheritance and wealth taxes should not be collected. I think they should and should be done to help fund the essential functions of government, but I think dialing that percentage up to a 100% of someone's wealth when they die would be a mistake.
Oh come on. You can't just hide behind "narrative tension" and problematizing the story when you're putting out false information that should have been fact checked more aggressively.

When it first began to come to light that the subject was likely lying, the creator of the podcast actually said that he was likely telling the truth and it was instead the Canadian police that were incompetent because they couldn't "prove he'd gone to Syria" [0].

They were pretty clear they thought it was a true story. I don't think adding some mild disclaimers once it starts coming to light that the story is not true abdicates them from responsibility for what they put out there.

Even at the time, NYT bureau chiefs (ie. experienced war reporters) were uneasy about the nature of the podcast. Absolutely the Times should be praised for calling out their own errors, but it is definitely embarrassing and (in my opinion) should be career-ending or damaging for the architect of the podcast. She wanted it to be true, so she didn't dig.

[0]: https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1309620500176556032
The story (by a fellow Times writer) you linked is not only fascinating but provides a lot of context for Callimachi's investigation.

I think it does lend some credence to the claims that she was a reporter trying to massage the facts to fit a preconceived narrative.
Google's results were significantly better than other search engines, but only for a while. Soon SEO caught up with it using link farms and other forms of link spam. Then it was basically the same as old engines which were already spammed to death using other methods.

That period of better result quality, combined with other factors you mention, was long enough that most of Google's competition went away. So when the quality went down there was no-one to switch back to.
Do you actually think this was done with malice?

I doubt it. Per Hanlon's razor, we should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by (bureaucratic) stupidity.[a]

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
One wonders if the virus is now "airborne"? Is that something viruses can actually do, ontop of being passed on through water droplets after coughing/sneezing.
Atlas of Migration 2020 [pdf]
I think this falls under the part where I said

> (assuming the terms themselves are legal in the first place, for example they don't break anti-discrimination law)

As you mentioned, GDPR explicitly states that you can't extort personal data from people by withholding service. However in the broader sense a company can refuse service if you don't agree to their terms.
This already happens in some select specialties (such as cardiothoracics) within the UK. In the UK, patients don’t directly pay for their care, but the effect of this case has (anecdotally) been that surgeons are more likely to refuse to operate riskier cases to avoid impacting on their outcomes score.
Good point. We should notice such shifts in language and what they imply.
Well, that and the fact that although Google doesn't sell data to third parties, it has certainly monetized that data and built their business off of it.
One has to wonder to what extent the new strain is really responsible for this, versus being a convenient excuse for the government's failure to manage the normal variant.
Here’s the original announcement https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/kfiaqn/just_wanted_to...
You mean the natural selection of hosts, not viruses. Why should one kind of organism "care" about the natural selection of another?
you can build new housing in california. its just difficult to build affordable housing apartment complexes in the bay area and other affluent zipcodes.

california is huge. if they fixed transport problem(HST failed), we have plenty of space to build homes. its not like we are the australian bush or something..these are perfectly buildable areas..its just not san francisco or the bay area or wherever there is high density and everyone want to flock to the nicest place to live as cheaply as possible.
In most countries, it also puts said loved ones on the wrong side of the law. Better take care of it personally while you are still you.
This. Was an early adopter of GeForce now and now on stadia because of the free controller with a cyberpunk purchase. Can say streaming is the future. Looking forward to Mighty and other cool companies doing something awesome
But if you drive a large fraction of those people out, they don't all go to Austin. Austin therefore winds up with a lower concentration of those people than Silicon Valley had. By doing this, you can kill SV without creating a new one.
As many have pointed out, this is an obviously oversimplified maxim. But I’d like to add two reasons why I think it is a useful heuristic despite that.

1. Great content can’t be commodified, despite the industry’s best efforts.

2. Content lives in extremistan. [1]. Though the average piece of content has little upside, the upside of a great piece of content is nearly limitless.

At the very least, content is a “prince” alongside distribution (network effects).

[1] “Taleb provides another example of Extremistan: book publishing. Suppose one randomly chooses a thousand authors, and adds up the total number of books they have sold. Now, add the bestselling author in the world, J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. Her book sales with vastly exceed the total of the other thousand authors.”

https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html
I think that in the future, categorising people by their made up race will be as absurd as categorising people by their eye colour or hair colour (see how skin colour falls into the same kind of trait?).

Imagine a group of people who discriminate all red headed people. Makes as much sense as discriminating all people of a certain skin colour.

To answer your question: in this hypothetical world where red heads have a hard time: imagine someone being fired for fighting for the rights of redheads while actually looking blonde with a tiny amount of red in their hair colour! That's the situation we seem to be in.
Do we have any reason at all to trust that any of the vaccines currently being rolled out deal with this new strain? There was surely no way to include testing for this in any of the trials. Doesn't this at least raise the spectre that the vaccines will all be for not and we'll still be faced with all the same issues that already exist.
In general, blaming the algorithm is an indirect way of blaming software engineers.

From Facebook to the VW emissions scandal to Stanford’s vaccine allocation, people love narratives that blame engineers. I suspect this trend will only get worse as the general public realizes that engineers are now a highly compensated professional, similar to how lawyers are the butt of so many jokes.
Not a shielded one
How on earth can they control for that in short term studies? Is it even possible to get any statistical significance on that? Smells like bullshit, there is no way there is causation on health from volunteering.

Think about it, if you are volunteering you are likely to not just have good health, but afford good health care, have plenty of free time for various activities, less stress in life, enjoy and seek social activities, outdoor activities, etc. All those things could impact health, but not volunteering itself.
Indeed. And there is also the evidence from Kent (where it seems likely this new strain originated), where case numbers were increasing despite Tier 3 restrictions (all pubs and restaurants closed, etc)
Yes, that is yet another assumption. In general any conversation about such stuff should start out with stating clearly what your assumptions are. Since the GGGP started out with interstellar travel as assumed I felt no need to fix that (and technically, voyager qualifies as an interstellar spacecraft at this point in time, even if it is an unmanned one). But you are 100% right, interstellar travel by intelligent beings should definitely not be assumed until there is proof of it actually happening and/or being done.

Even Musk's 'Starship' is incorrectly named.
I would take a slightly different perspective. I think much of the benefit of volunteering etc. as spoke about in the article is from the feeling of "connectedness". It's not that being generous is in-and-of-itself beneficial, but that it helps connect to other humans. From the article:

"Humans are extremely social, we have better health when we are interconnected, and part of being interconnected is giving"

Being generous and resenting it or moving away from people would probably be antithetical to being connected. Being taken advantage of makes one feel less connected, which might be what you're experiencing.

For a good, short read related to this I'd suggest Sebastian Junger's book Tribe
Every single hacker news thread about the Cyberpunk fiasco has had a ton of top comments about they haven’t had any issues with the game.

Performance/bugs aside, what about the completeness issues? How can the game be acceptable or fun when cars run on tracks and NPC’s don’t have a problem being attacked?

That’s my main concern - I’m sure the performance/bugs will be worked out. But will the game actually be finished?
But why not let users turn off tracking if they choose to?

You never addressed that.
Yes I just watched Boris Johnson's announcement. I know there's a lot of criticism about his leadership, but I'm still glad they are following the science.
"Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed, sandwiched between the Burgess shale and an eon's worth of mud?"

- Dr. Breen, Half Life 2
Perhaps in the future (on the team that added subscriptions at Shopify)
Dangerous Self-Compiling Virus
From the sidebar: "SHOCK CLAIM: Crystal Pyramids ‘found beneath Bermuda Triangle’"

… I'm not sure this site is a reputable source.
Chemicals in Plastic Waste Are Killing Us
do you see how the negative attitude you carry is eating you alive? be more like your dad
> That isn't to say that the Times shouldn't be held to account when errors are found by others. It should

But that's exactly what happened here. It wasn't the NYT who found the errors, unless I misread TFA.

So, in your "not to say"... That's exactly what you seem to be saying.
I am not a native speaker and I don't think I understand the quote. What should "money laundering for bias mean"?
That depends on how much concentration you actually need.

You could kill SV and create five more.
China-based Zoom employee charged for censoring Tiananmen Square events
I think it's important to remember that viral mutations are random. Therefore to a large extent there is no purpose. What there is are traits that make a given mutated version of the virus more likely to spread and thus come to our attention.
I wonder if they'd like the trade-off if it didn't take 21 years to become an American citizen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_sana_in_corpore_sano
How did you get used to the different modifier key layout? I am missing the cmd every time I try to switch to Linux. I have tried rbreaves/kinto, but it was not working well for me, so I decided to keep the native layout.

It took me about 2 weeks to get kind-of used to the different modifier keys, but it did not feel the same.

But the thing that made me switch back is when I was buying a laptop. I was set on not going with Apple anymore after my previous macbook screen died 2.5 years in and they were asking almost 1000€ to fix it.
But I could not find an option that would match the 16" macbook laptop. I was considering the build quality, screen size and its resolution, battery life, usb type-c charger, trackpad experience and the overall software support that I will expect from a daily driver to do my web development work.
I was seriously considering the dell xps 15 9500 that launched this year, but I saw a lot of feedback about generally poor battery life on linux and some cases of trackpad problems.

I was thinking about getting a second, cheaper device like System76 Pangolin and see how it works and use this as a transition to a different platform instead of going all in by immediately switching the daily driver.
Fair enough. We were never very big, but I assumed it was the bare minimum of what was needed in order to pass and the manufacturers wouldn't give out exceptions that easily, if at all.

That's pretty annoying that they secured a pass but then didn't do as they promised (I realize it's not always that easy when it comes to programming, but still). I'm glad CDPR are getting punished for their rash decision in the marketplace and their stock price, at least, even though they're still probably going to end up making a ton of money off the game and their developers are still going to be crunched to death for little reward.

I think it reflects badly on Sony as well, but less so.
Does kindness include lying by omission?