skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
China is the second largest economy in the world, and at current growth rates, will be number one in about five years.

You can't put sanctions on them. The world economy would collapse if countries stopped allowing Chinese goods into their economies. We can't just retool overnight.

The reason they get away with their concentration camps is precisely for this reason. There is very little leverage the rest of us have to stop them.

The best the world can do is slowly twist the screws until they are less powerful. This is already happening. You can see some manufacturing is already moving out of China into other parts of Asia because the US is making small but steady changes on how goods from China can be consumed. This is the only option right now unfortunately.
I get that you Americans want to find someone to blame, but your failure to control this virus in your borders is an American problem.
Thanks for the suggestion. I did try Calligra Plan. I manage a lot of medium-small projects, and to ended up not fitting my workflow very well. That said, I could see how it might be perfect for people who manage and plan bigger projects.
Can you explain a bit more how exactly this string representation works, and how it differs from how strings are represented in Haskell? Also, what are you applying Prolog to these days?
I'd recommend Ross Douthat, currently with the NYT, and Andrew Sullivan, on Substack.
I agree, with one caveat - some old software just makes everything super-tiny.

It's a little like when widescreen monitors came out and people were trying to figure out how to play their 4x3 games.
I respectfully disagree. Resource abundance is a myth. Extraction of resources itself is highly energy expensive and wasteful not to mention that many non renewable resources are what fuels our basic needs.

To give a simple example: the daily bowl of oatmeal. From farms out of the farm gate to processing to point of sale, the entire supply chain runs on fossil fuel. Ag is entirely fueled by fossil fuels. If we magically erase the existence of fossil fuels that is a non renewable resource tomorrow, we will all starve. We might not die at once, but our access to almost everything we need to survive would be blocked.

And that’s just one example of non renewable resource. I also mentioned soil Phosphorus that is limited..and also sand that is non renewable and used extensively for construction. Water and arable land that is needed for everything from timber to food to fiber. Mining etc.

Unless we have a drastic paradigm shift and we tap into some kind of Tesla’esque ‘Free Energy’, we are living off savings instead of capital.
Urban Fantasy
Depends what you're building. Some buildings call for an architect, and with others, an engineer is all the architect you'll need.

If you're a heads down no-nonsense engineer, you're not going to build Fallingwater.
The fact that we haven't found ageless vertebrates means that being immortal is maladaptive for a species. This implies that we are genetically programmed to die.

Immortal species may have appeared, but they probably went extinct, because they had to have few offspring to prevent overpopulation. With fewer offspring, there is less genetic variation, and less ability to adapt to environmental shocks, such as new pathogens.
It’s encouraging that others have been contemplating this idea - I have been too.

For me the key is that content can come every day, but it is delayed based on it’s importance. So instead of Sunday news printing something that happened Saturday, this model prints about the Saturday event two weeks later on a Tuesday when all the facts are known. But it doesn’t have to be every day.

The hard part is that I don’t just want this for myself, I want this for everyone that is currently captured by the toxic 24/7 9/11-style news cycle. The society is in a permanent panic/outrage mode. Breaking that will be tough.
Some theories of consciousness do claim that it is somewhat of an accidental side-show with no affect on anything except the pitiable entities who are just along for the ride.

But I don’t find these convincing, in that it is clear that in the animal kingdom, mammals display very different behaviors from other types of animals and are the only ones to have a neocortex. And among mammals, the species with the largest most developed neocortex also exemplifies and amplified the very behavior that sets mammals apart. That unique behavior is flexibly adaptive social activity.

Your claim is that a p-zombie would act as if it were conscious. But the evidence is the opposite — that all those organisms which display conscious behavior are also conscious, and that no non-conscious organisms display conscious behavior. The only argument for consciousness as theatre is that although conscious behavior always exists with conscious experience, it is an accidentally perfect correlation — a weird but necessary artifact of a brain capable of conscious behavior must always have the byproduct of non-affective conscious experience.

Let’s say that position is true. That conscious experience is just a non-affective but inevitable side-effect of the kind of brain capable of conscious behavior. In that case p-zombies are still impossible, since under this assumption conscious behavior is always accompanied by the illusion of conscious experience.

So in either case my main point still holds: if conscious reasoning is AGI, and conscious reasoning follows from conscious behavior, then the path to AGI is to train for those peculiarly unique conscious behaviors that are most distinguished from non-conscious behaviors. It’s impossible to train directly for qualia, so whether qualia exist as affective components of conscious behavior or not is somewhat irrelevant. Conscious experience will always be a “hard problem”. But what matters is finding the right conscious behavior that enables future growth toward conscious reasoning.

The most uniquely conscious behavior (so unique it is built into us with mammalian milk production) is “parental care”. The simplest concrete behavior that humans share with other animals (such as breathing air), but have also amplified the most (we haven’t amplified breathing at all) is parental care.

If we want to train agents to achieve conscious behavior, I believe this makes parental care the best option. Fortunately, unlike biological evolution which has to contend with a range of variables that may or may not include parental care (plenty of species succeed without it), an artificial training environment can be entirely focused on optimizing for this one variable — success can hinge entirely on parental care.
Hypothetically, a group of people of different races grow up in the same small town in the same economic conditions, go to the same schools etc. Is race still a good indicator of diversity of experiences? Not at all.

Skin color is a poor proxy for diversity of thought or experience. We could instead just treat people as individuals and not draw broad conclusions on skin color.
I think two things contribute:

1. People think the point of education is credentials and free online courses don't typically come with credentials.

2. People routinely use price as a proxy for value. This makes it hard to feel confident that a free course is actually worthwhile.

The nice thing about YC's free education is that neither of these applies.

If you want to start a business, you mostly don't need credentials. (There are exceptions.) You mostly just need to know how to make it happen.

They have a really good reputation. They know what they are talking about.

Bonus points: They do this stuff for free because HN and Startup School are both part of their funnel. If you actually do start a business and hope to grow it big, they would like a piece of the action.

So you know they are giving you good information because they want you to succeed so they can get a cut of some of the businesses that succeed that started out just consuming their free stuff. That's exactly how they make their money and there is a lot of money at stake, so it's worth it to them to give some stuff away for free.
Where China failed was not in allowing the virus to jump to a human, it was in covering it up. I'd like to hope that if the same thing happened in the US, the free press would be screaming about how it started, we'd be taking samples and warning other countries, and we would work with other countries to limit travel of those who may be infected.
Figma has saved us uncountable human-hours in the era of WFH/Covid. Being able to see and work on anybody else’s files, instantly and simultaneously without mucking about with file servers and merging changes from multiple editors is amazing and a massive force multiplier.
RC3 Use More Jitsi
Couldn't the language demand that, as long as a memory chunk is allocated and not freed, there's a path to use this memory chunk? Meaning it's not a memory leak in the sense of 'we are certain (we could prove) that this memory chunk will never be used again', such as the std::mem::forget mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

In practice that would mean that you need to write some formal proof, but that doesn't seem impossible. Just like some formal languages require that you write a termination proof to define a recursive function. Of course I'm not saying this is a practical solution for a language like Rust to demand this kind of proofs for every program, but since programs written in a subset of C have been formally verified, it should be possible (and sometimes desirable) for Rust too.
$85 (~70€) will buy https://www.adafruit.com/product/4345 which is TTN-only.

I have read rumors of alternate firmware to allow that hardware to work outside TTN but haven’t chased it down myself, so mine is running as a TTN node right now.
I was in highschool in the early 90s and wrote a paper in why the "Internet Superhighway" would change society, and got a number of things right (and of course did nothing with them and just watched it happen around me, sigh).

Got a C on the paper, mostly because the instructor found it too unrealistic and so not convincing. I misplaced it at some point, I really wish I still had a copy of it.
Merry Christmas Hacker News
______________ _____________________________________
/ \ \ / \
/ \ \ | Dear Hacker News, |
/ _________ \ | | Marry Christmas & Happy New Year! |
\/ _ \ / | |-------------------------------------|
\ / \ \/_ | | I would like to give a small gift |
| O_O_/ || \_ \ | to anyone who wants a free acc to |
/ __(_ __ || \ / | tvguide website. This is my side |
/\/___\___\_/ \ /_\ | project that I been doing since |
/ __ \/ \ | 2016 and v2.0 is coming in 2021. |
| |\___/ |-------------------------------------|
______|________ | \ | ( See my profile for details. ) |
/ /\ / \ | [ Request before 2021.01.01 ] |
| | \ / \ | < one year free access! > |
\______________\ |___/ \ | Your friend Tux ^_^ |
_|___ |_____\ \ \_____________________________________/
/| __| |_|| o \ \
| | \ |_||____\_____/\
\_|____/ / | \_____/
\__/
https://defungames.com/press/spycursion/
But it's just a rant, what are the real takeaways? She wants:

- A common ethics board

- To protect whistleblowers

And to achieve this, I should be "Annoying as a service"?

I don't feel like I learnt anything.
Yeah I think I’m a bit too laser focused in on SV saas company goings on... which I am taking a long hiatus from soon :)
So the tradition of hijacking web browser history navigation (back and forward), started from Apple?
A minimalist version of that: https://legiblenews.com
16 days to die at Pearl Harbor
Show HN: AutoPause Extension (With Resume and Fast Forward)
Slower news should be a bit more like writing history. You probably already remember the top-level facts for the stuff that made headlines for a few days, but what about specialized fields?

I’d be happy to read a well-written yearly summary of the most important news in neuroscience, for example.
"Sorry the entire world can’t all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I’m standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once."

Ha! Great comment on the never-ending Comic Sans controversy. Over the years I've often been in wars over Comic Sans with friends and colleagues, especially those who consider themselves gatekeepers of typeface respectability. My view is that Comic Sans is a great typeface. That said, the key is to know when and where to use it—and when not to (I don't think there's another typeface where the 'use'/'don't use' rules are so obvious).
My idea is designing templates that's looking good even in black and white. I expected that some people don't want, or don't have the time to customize it. In that case, you can just change the brand color (#353535 in this case) to yours, blue for example, and you're ready. I use CSS variables for these templates, so changing colors will be easy.
Of course, all the queries in the world will be anectotal compared to your experience, but still : from my phone, a couple second ago, ddg censors the query so much that typing "the great" auto completes to "reset". And follows to giving pretty expected results.

I suppose I could come up with a few dozens scenario that would explain no results in your case (as a software engineer, I have heard a rumor that sometimes those " server" thingys have what they call "glitches".)

But I of course completely understand that the hypothesis of DDG specifically censoring the query for you looks more plausible.

You're probably a very important person that needed to be hidden the fact that the WMF had a conference about restarting the economy after the covid - which obviously means that the prince Charles of UK is behind a global conspiracy to manufacture viruses from scratch in order to overthrow capitalism. (I'm just kidding, I know that's not what you believe.)

Sincerely, i hope you have the best possible holiday season, and take care of yourselves.
https://religionnews.com/2017/12/19/the-roots-of-the-christm...
Will you have any options without CSS?
What's next for Redox OS? I couldn't find a roadmap, but maybe you have one?
> With anyone else, it would be weeks of turnaround time.

I've had Dell repair techs out to my house through warranty services for same day repairs. Apple offers no such thing.
I’ve found audio in Linux much easier to work with than MacOS in recent years - the Pulseaudio team has done a great job.
It's way to early to know if these deals will make any lasting difference. The countries in the middle east have been parties to similar pease agreements for decades, but so far they don't seem to last.

If the peace continues to last, sure, we can acknowledge those who were involved. But it's way to early to acknowledge anything yet.
Jordan Peterson?
You are ‘optimistic’. I predict that when automation comes around, there will be a sustained effort to be rid of non productive people.

Depopulation by nature or politics/oligarchs is a guarantee. The only thing we can do is shift away from a money economy.

Finding solutions with redistribution of wealth and money are castles built on sand. You can’t live in them. Automation is coming. AGI ..if it happens in our lifetime..won’t care about us.
Absolutely, that's a great idea. Only release something when all the facts are known! (Although coding that seems pretty difficult, and curating it seems exhausting)

The news cycle is absolutely toxic. People shouldn't have 24/7 access to the news. The pressure to create news immediately, and in turn, to read them it immediately, is harmful for everyone.

Plus, with very few exceptions, it doesn't matter if you hear about it in 2 seconds or 2 weeks.

I hope to hear about what you're building! Sounds great.
Had to log in to read; didn’t read.
Humans are evolved and we will at some point increase our lifespans even more, perhaps to the point of immortality. It may be the case that a conscious mind like a human mind is a hard prerequisite to then leveraging tools to build technology that makes us immortal. In such a case I wouldn't expect regular animals to be capable of achieving this through sheer brute force over billions of years. Might need to flatten all those additional years of evolution into CPU-time and let an AI figure out how to do it for us.
Very light on the details. Is there a prosumer version? Will this increase the quality of my Discord audio?
It bugs me that everytime he goes on a talk show recently, he pegs himself up a horse with "I have stopped doing talk shows and I am doing it for you because ____". He comes across as an arrogant and self-serving. Most of his content is rehashing from other books. A lot of it straight from Feynman interviews on Youtube. Some spiritual stuff repeated verbatim from Jiddu Krishnamurthy.

The interesting thing about Naval is that he has a magnetic effect to new listeners and there is a cult-like following. I used to love his early talks and then the more I got to hear him, the more I realized he is just this narciscist rich guy without a shred of humbleness. He has a great sense of clarity in his thoughts and he speaks well. It's a shame really that his character puts me off more than anything else. I'd rather go read original sources with far more insight.

His repeated claims of "I can get rich even if I start over" - yes, Naval, go for it. Give up the name, money and everything you have and try working 2 jobs as a waiter and a nurse, raising kids and keeping your spouse happy while saving enough to go after your investor instincts. The whole thing comes across as out of touch with reality, compassion and thoughtful consideration; instead relies on his survivorship biases as a guiding beacon of life.
Exactly, try Notepad++ and then get back to us.
They scheduled a conference for a European audience between Christmas and the New Year? Why?!
Security was indeed an issue, but I feel flash’s performance reputation was largely undeserved. Yes, it was cpu-hungry, too intense to run on the mobile hardware of the day, but that’s because it did things html5 couldn’t. You could do smooth animations and complex games in flash easily that were hard to impossible to do with regular web tech (pre-webgl). When flash died, web animation and web gaming mostly died along with it. Some of that is the engine itself, and some is the flash authoring tools, which don’t have an open web equivalent. Maybe that sort of power never belonged in a browser, but I still feel like we lost something that didn’t fully get replaced.
Jellyfish and the secret of immortality

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/can-a-jellyfish-...

[..] We now know, for instance, that the rejuvenation of Turritopsis dohrnii and some other members of the genus is caused by environmental stress or physical assault. We know that, during rejuvenation, it undergoes cellular transdifferentiation, an unusual process by which one type of cell is converted into another — a skin cell into a nerve cell, for instance. (The same process occurs in human stem cells.) [..]
I'm a MacOSX plugin developer, and in touch with others also facing this situation.

I develop on a VERY old machine in order to support backward compatibility way way farther back than Apple will allow: my current plugins will run on PPC machines because those can be used as music DAWs. As such, the machine I'm compiling on is not producing 64-bit AUs that will work, directly, on MI Macs. They work on literally everything up to that point, but Apple finally shanked me, at least w.r.t that compile target. Until then I was able to support PPC to present day with one three-target fat binary :)

Another dev, Sean Costello, told me that older builds of his stuff (pre-2017?) weren't running on M1, but everything built past a certain point (a new version of XCode, that had long abandoned things like PPC and possibly 32-bit support) was automatically working on M1 through the Rosetta layer.

So, depending on the build environment, Apple arranged that the audio plugins don't even have to be updated. Depending on the libraries the plugins rely on (a vulnerability for some of the big names that use bespoke but OLD libraries to do things), some of the plugins might need only a recompile to be native to M1 architecture. And some might be really intractable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_logic

Iron is nuclear ash, and this tech is just about the most reliable implementation of logic we have. It was used in the V2 rocket and US nuclear submarines. It's abandoned tech though and was never pushed beyond 1MHz. If however you have a decade to compute your reactions then that might not matter.

Superconducting magnetic loops also store their flux indefinitely, and in space keeping it cool would be trivial.
> I have to disagree that macOS has a good GUI.

MacOS has a predictable UI. However, Apple products have the LEAST customizable UIs of any system I've used (probably predictable = 1/customizable)
Good question.

There's a big difference between, "These are the observed results" and "These people are inherently X". And especially different than, "Person is Y, therefore they are good/bad at X".

The first statement is open ended, it keeps the door open to systemic factors outside of race that might correlate with race. It also doesn't suggest that everyone of a particular group is better/worse at something.

The second statement says that there's something intrinsic to that everyone of that race. It sets up expectations for a group of people. Maybe you are an Asian who isn't good at math? How does that make you feel? How will you be impacted by other people making assumptions about you?

The third statement is applying stereotypes to individuals, which is just never going to be a good idea.

The differences between the first and second statements are subtle, but important.
Yoy are vastly underestinating the value of getting paperwork sorted for you.

I have moved countries twice and cumulative costs of paperwork and very modest amount of legal advice cost me ~ 20K each time.

The amount of time, stress and opportunity cost (few employers deal with sponsoring foreigners) is cosiderable.

> "Will provide successful applicants with all necessary official documentation, suitable housing, school or daycare for their children, remote working facilities, introductions to tech hubs and networks in and around Helsinki, and help with permanent residency"
140k is a far cry from "viral worldwide" ...
Gaining the power to shut down businesses that are a public health threat? They already had that power and use it. Most people are glad restaurants are held to cleanliness standards and concert venues have capacity limits per fire code.

Requiring people to wear something in public? They already do that too with shirts and pants. And again, I think most people prefer it that way.
Maaaan would it gave made for some weird TV to watch those talks.

I really hope some day, all political negociationswill be filmed, archived, and unclassified a few years after the end of mandates.
> Not really that new of [an] idea...

I think you missed the contribution of the paper by condensing my summary to the closest related concept you are aware of. I too initially thought "well duh, great filter" after reading the headline/article. But then I read the paper to figure out what exactly the novel aspect was supposed to be, and the answer (more accurate spatial/temporal galactic model, exploring influence of different parameters) seems reasonably nontrivial.

Of course our knowledge hasn't made a fundamental step forward (no new data to inform our priors has been obtained), but it does provide a better understanding of our current model(s) and their parameters, as well as where to best look for obtaining more data. That's what scientific progress looks like. (Again, I cannot vouch for the results beyond "assumptions seem generally reasonable to a layman").
It's an interesting point though.. even if linux can bring you the best but requires 'too much' work for the average audio engineer it's gonna flop I assume. You need balance to survive.
Any plans for what to do about GPU drivers?