skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> is 1 really true? we have elections every 2 years for it. how many periods of time have we had no change in control of the senate or the house for 4 2 straight elections? what about fo 4 straight? vs how many times we've had dual term presidents? (serious, don't know the answer to that question, though i could probably look it up)

You can take a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat.... You'll notice that the individual chambers of congress change hands less often than the presidency.

Additionally, Congress has a high incumbency rate. Even in huge swing years like 2018, the makeup of Congress remains largely the same.
One can use the Freetype library to render beautifully sharp text directly to a canvas with gamma-correct subpixel alpha coverage. Why this Rust website uses such blurry fonts, I don't know, it reminds me of playing an OpenGL/DirectX video game where the text is rendered using cached texture-filtered quads: maybe good enough for game UI, but not for intensive reading.
What is 'blind'? Can't google it.
I often wonder how good public transportation would be all over the world if we pooled all the money we collectively spend on cars and roads and put it into public transit. I spend a LOT of money on cars each month between my loan payment, gas, and insurance. Is there a reason we don't just throw that money into public transit instead of trying to phase out gas like this? What am I missing?
You are comparing the power output of a damn that displaced some fish to one that displaced tens of millions?

Doesn’t seem very proportional
REM sleep is when your brain does maintenance and cleaning, particularly with respect to the lymphatic/immune system.
https://www.teamblind.com
I like Monty Python so I watched your Cleese video. It's funny, but of course he lets "moderates" off the hook as if they aren't just as subject to this dynamic as everyone else, when the truth is that they not only are, they have the ace of trump cards—social proof—to mask it with.

To me the interesting thing about that video is that it shows how much self-reflection (or personal work, whatever you want to call it) Cleese had been doing by then. His classic character was the rigid, angry type who was comically un-self-aware, which had roots both in his own character and also in his effort to be conscious of it—it takes consciousness to make oneself hilarious in that way. In this video, the way he describes how to feel good about yourself by projecting badness onto others shows how much deeper he had gone with that.

At the same time, with the blatant loophole for "moderates" in that bit, one can sort of see his limit.
You can get the paper in 30 seconds on sci-hub.
My least popular comments are also comments I have made with hard won experience in my field.

My not-very-humble guess is that it is two fold: One, if you only have a shallow understanding of something, it is easy to dismiss things as wrong if they don't align with your understanding so far. Two, if you do have a deep understanding of a topic but different experiences in the field, you may have really strong opinions in a different direction.

Disappointingly they are also usually the least discussed comments of mine and I rarely figure out why they were downvoted.
Neat story, but god do I often hate the modern internet.

Who the hell thinks that Twitter is the right sort of medium for this type of information sharing? (Give me simple white pages of black barely formatted text and animated gifs any day of the week over this twitter abortion of story telling.)
Speaking about controversies, what are the opinions on Nintendo's "stream ban" happened in Japan? I barely heard anyone talking about it in Western World.

(For the unfamiliar: basically, the streamers have to get permissions from Nintendo to stream their games. Some famous streaming groups failed to do so and they had to delete all their VODs involving Nintendo's games after Nintendo's warning.

[I assume other game publishers technically/legally can do the same, but I don't see them practice this without causing a huge backlash from the community.])
No offense but did you read the rest of the article?

>Both Instagram and TikTok videos were available in the Short Videos row. When clicked, you’re taken to the web version of the social platform — not the native mobile app, even if it’s installed on your device. The end result is that Google users are more likely to remain on Google, as all it takes is a tap on the back arrow to return to the search results after watching the video.

at least they're taking you to the web version of the service they're presenting content from, so it's not like they just serve the content themselves. I don't see a problem with that.
Status quo bias.
my predictions:

1. the vaccine will prove effective against a certain strains of virus but ineffective against other strains, giving a false confidence and later re-emergence of corona.

2. WFH will continue. and companies planning to reopen offices in mid 2021, will postpone till 2022.

3. Trump will refuse to leave White House. grabs popcorn

4. College students graduating in 2021 will face severe competition with 2020 unemployed grads leading to stagnation in salary for entry level jobs. C level positions will have no impact.

5. IT will forget about SolarWinds attack and move on as irresponsibly as before
That's not the idea. There's a shitload of middle ground between breaking everything down into daily tasks and daily meetings; and disappearing for 3 years until you emerge with a completed product.
Book - Delivering Happiness by the late Tony Hsieh

Newsletter - The Service Zealot (https://servicezealot.com), a weekly advice column for service business operators fed up with the status quo.
Older friends lament that you used to be able to have perfectly good conversations arguing about trivial questions of fact. Now there's always some asshole with a smartphone to look up the right answer and ruin the fun.

It helps to look at HN the same way. It's not about the truth, it's about enjoying the conversation.
Same, same, and same. Needed to excuse to join this community, been watching the (excellent) discussion from afar for too long. Cheers to 2021.
I'm loving this trend to do more things with filesystems.

There was https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/ [,] which I'm intending to use in my filesharing sftp server, and now this, which seems like something that exposes functionality from a web browser that I would love.
I think HN is lower quality than Reddit because it's harder to spot who doesn't know what they're talking about. On Reddit the clowns have bad grammar and don't even attempt to substantiate their beliefs. On HN the clowns have flowing prose, a Stanford degree and immaculate clown makeup.
How? The pricing calculator literally says $0.00 fees for me, the only charge is the 1% spread on the exchange rate.
Someone on reddit links https://www.mass.gov/doc/ma-2050-decarbonization-roadmap/dow...

A footnote on page 37 explains that Massachusetts has a law requiring the state to adopt California emissions regulations that are more strict than federal laws.

Probably won't be that big a deal in 15 years, and if it is, seems like registration would be more important than sale. Or imagine the shit show of people putting low impact mileage on out of state vehicles to push them into the 'used' purchase category.

(pdf page 36, document page 37)
I like it, the plan 9/acme approach seems like it could be pretty powerful with browsers
This does seem like a brilliant idea, doesn't it. I'm thinking about how difficult it would be to setup something like 'surf' but using chromium/firefox, and then driving it completely off the CLI. It honestly sounds like my dream browser.
> References in Greek texts from the 4th century BC are IMO suggestive of early voyages to the coast of West Africa, the nearest navigable mangrove forests (unless shipworm managed to somehow get carried across the Sinai isthmus)

Simon Winchester discusses how Cape Bojador [1] was impassible until 1443 (in his book Atlantic [2]) so it is unlikely that early voyages reached any further south along the coast of West Africa. During Roman times there were indeed canals to the Red Sea [3] and a robust international trade system as outlined in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Bojador

[2] http://www.simonwinchester.com/atlantic

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_of_the_Pharaohs

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periplus_of_the_Erythraean_Sea
> I do know that they keep tight control

I was talking about how much control they have over the internet.

The fact of the matter is, that even the most authoritarian countries out there, are simply are unable to have a 100% perfect authoritarian control over their internet, as of today.

Despite the many motivations that current authoritarian countries have for definitely wanting to control their internet, right now, the evidence is showing that they are failing to perfectly control everything over the internet.
You can kinda do that with the vimium plugin. Select a bunch of tabs and press "x", but it doesn't support visual selection of tabs.
Communication, Creation and Consumption
I'm making up for fact that, but for a twist of fate, it could have been me sitting in that wheelchair. It could be me blind, browsing the web with a screen reader and a hope that the websites I visit aren't an incomprehensible mess of divs. Which only happens because somebody was too lazy to spend 5 minutes googling how to style a button with CSS.

I believe its worth burning some of society's resources inefficiently in exchange for evening out the scales of chance a little. Its the same reason I think everyone has a right to free healthcare. (Which is completely non-controversial here in australia.)

Call me names all day if you need to. I stand by my politics.
Every color science and/or accessibility thread trends towards quoting and reinforcing the same gentleman who has blotted out the sun by writing extremely long (and informative!) explanations of color theory on several sites, in service of an extremely flawed conclusion that is fixed by an hour of Mathematica and experience with actual color science.
By the way, maybe this is a slight off-topic (but parallel topic) -- will availability of cheaper Lidars make autofocus an easier / better solved problem some time in the future? Or is this not such a problem to bother with the expense of a Lidar?

If you know exactly the distance to something you want in focus, and it no longer has to be "solved" by phase detection, or edge sharpness? Or is this even already being used with phones having Lidars built in? I guess if your lens isn't perfectly distance calibrated then it fails though.
My understanding is those are the rules for automatic approval of a clearance and if you respond with drug use then you will be initially denied and then they will take a look at your specific circumstance.

Marijuana usage is so pervasive that they basically can't exclude anyone who's ever used it, instead they want to see that it's been at least a year (preferably more) since you've used it and you will probably get approved. "Harder" drugs they are more strict on.

If you just smoked pot in college no worries, you'll be fine.
More serial killers and serial rapists identified and caught via genetic testing.
Yep. Ketamine injections for therapy have been legalized in many states and are available both at doctors offices and as spa-like experiences:
https://www.columbiadoctors.org/specialties/psychiatry-psych...
https://www.fieldtriphealth.com/

But it’s something that should be “targeted” to me during by a doctor during an appointment, not by greedy advertisers who could care less about my health and will do anything for a click.
But will he have the balls to do anything about it? He'll have too many domestic issues in the next 4 years to deal with
I just checked, you're right. I was looking at the Alphabet revenue (parent) and 82% comes from Google Ads. Thanks for the insight.
Can't talk for Pix, but UPI, a similar system implemented by Indian banks, wouldn't accept "private keys" or not having a bank account. No international payments either.

UPI is more like venmo on steroids, but it is no crypto-currency replacement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
> What am I missing?

You could buy cheaper, older cars that you can afford without financing. These have no manufacturing environmental impact, since they are already made. Insurance is cheaper, and you can dispense with full coverage making it cheaper still.
Hey guys, y’all seem to know what y’all are talking about.

Please give me a min of yalls time.

My boss has been talking up Bitcoin SV to me for the past 2 years and he watches hours upon hours of podcast and YouTube videos (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOqZWfHm-gzDyMoDGmPCJbBhg...) that playlist is what he showed me that he watched. Anyways, he sort has convinced me.. I’ve done a little research but I’m not familiar with it as y’all seem to be. Is there any hope in BSV? my avg is 169.xx and I just wonder if this thing he told me about BSV being the only one that can “scale up” or whatever that is.. anyway any comments/tips are appreciated. Happy New Year!
No one puts baby in a corner.
And Putin looked Biden in the eye, smiled, and said "So, we understand each other."
I play and follow Dragalia Lost. Used to play FEH. It's co-produced by a company called Cygames which makes a number of other gachas. Gachas are kind of scummy, but for what it's worth, Nintendo has pulled the reigns on them pretty hard. They've publically stated they don't want kids spending too much money on the games as it hurts their brand. Cygames has stated they have lost potential revenues due to Nintendo's influence. I think this is true as a free to play player who has pretty much everything in the game and zounds of currency (although it's gotten a little bit stingier now).
I work from home everyday so I cannot speak much to the commuting situation. I would expect life to return to normal. A couple major corporations have announced work from home being permanent but I expect a slow migration back to the status que.

For the exact situation on the street, sorry I cannot speak from experience.
If you just want to close all tabs then in Firefox right click a tab and select "Close Other Tabs". Also, you can control-click on tabs to apply commands the the whole set, such as closing them, sending them to your phone, etc.
They haven’t changed Bitcoin a single bit since 2008. Saylor sounds like he got taken by the Bitcoin euphoria.
The real world is usually more dynamic, maleable and workable than the internet has you believe too.

If you believed the internet, you would believe you can only ever use the best parts in the perfect configuration for almost everything. Be it metalwork, mountain biking, computing, drones or any other hobby regularly discussed online.

The reality is you can make do with in so many different ways that if you can't afford the best you can still have oodles of fun on cheaper equipment. Half the fun is learning all this "expertise" the internet has on your own.

Can't afford a Bridgeport mill? Buy something cheaper and work around the edge cases. Can't afford a full suspension bike? Get a hardtail and have tonnes of fun.

Someone is always quick to add in the caveats, but guess what, a new rider doesn't give a shit that he can't send 8ft drops on his hard tail. There are hours of fun on the bike ahead, none of it sending 8ft drops. The new hobby machinist isn't bothered that they can't mill titanium, they are just stoked to be getting started.
All evidence points towards US foreign policy being set by an enigmatic autopilot known to us only as "the civil service."
That's an amazing claim.

Try drawing what would appear to be a perfect square wave in a digital wave. Up, flat, down, flat. Guess what: you've just introduced enormous amounts of aliasing.
My favorite is Tim Romano's alliterative translation: http://www.aimsdata.com/tim/beowulf_trans.htm
Thucydides Trap
My critique is not about greed. My critique is about crypto proponents claiming it does things it doesn’t do.

The GP complains about the overhead and data collection of traditional solutions, implying it’s a bunch of unnecessary cruft. In fact it’s to comply with local laws and protect the consumer and merchant from fraud. GP used Bitcoin to get around this hassle, renouncing any rights in the event of a dispute.

Now, maybe that’s a win, but it’s a much more nuanced and less generalized win than is put forth by crypto proponents.

Notice also the goalpost move of declaring Bitcoin a win over mailing cash. Ok, have you ever done that in your life? I have not been involved in mailed cash transactions aside from receiving $5 from my grandma in the mail 20 years ago.
Could have been worse....
I couldn't agree more. The second approach is definitely more likely to make the deadline. At the same time, it will often result in disgruntled people who just do the minimum possible to ship. The extra meetings and overhead result in less time for actual dev work, and people will be hesitant to make any improvement they deem would be nice to have, no matter how small, because of all the processes it has to go through.
In a similar vein, I'm currently halfway through 'Thinking About Mathematics' by Stewart Shapiro. It's a great introduction to the various philosophies of mathematics: logicism, formalism, intuitionism, structuralism, basically all of the different sorts of philosophical positions prominent people have taken on the nature of mathematics, going back to Plato and Aristotle. It's wonderfully approachable as well, I highly recommend it.
Happy New Year.

(Inter monologue - dang it, why did not I think to exploit the new year for the up votes!)

Listening to 1st Wave on XM. Playing new version of “Everyone Have Fun Tonight” by Wang Chung called “Everyone Stay Safe Tonight”.

I wish everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous 2021.

Thanks to all for providing interesting content in 2020 to help keep us sane.
I'm not sure I understand. If something spreads out from a point, isn't it both "spread out over an area" and "from a single point"?
Funny how optimistic and tech oriented the previous ones are compared to 2021 - mostly politics, inequality and authoritarianism.
Spot on and the money goes from the poor to the rich via the federal government
Hmmm this is interesting. I wonder if people that cannot sleep more than 4-5 hours per night also have very vivid dreams? And therefore the brain cleaning REM cycle is just more intense and prolonged so the mind-body decides it does not need to sleep any longer?
I figure this is a good place for some discussion of the topic of translations. I always read an old translation and reference it with a new translation. People in all eras like to insert their own biases into their translation. This video sums up a good example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KqkyNnm7Bc
I really liked crystal pepsi.. wish it was still around. I was exposed to it in middle school I think... so I didn't have a lot of purchasing power back then. Although I am not a big fan of soda these days.
> I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say.

Alas, not so sure that part is still true.

[looks back at 2020]
Also for us that are still in 2020 to those in 2021...how’s the future?
I actually didn’t play that zelda!
Cannabis industry insights
I don't think the aim is to have 100% control, but just enough. I'll admit I didn't read closely, but I have read a few news articles about some government or another temporarily shutting down internet access during a protest. I'd expect Venezuela could do something similar if they felt like it. They seem perfectly happy letting their citizenry go without basic staples, I'm sure they'd be fine turning off internet for a while.
You only need enough jurisdictions onboard to push manufacturers to only build EVs. Once they’ve made the capital investments, they’re not going back.

What does that look like? Is the idea that Ford is going to make dramatically less money per vehicle if they start building ⅓ the ICE engines that they build right now? Typically they offer multiple engines per vehicle, and have quite a range of engines across their product line, so it seems like maximal volume isn't an issue.
This fear is unfounded, the primary value proposition of .NET (FKA .NET Core) is that it's a high-performance cross-platform runtime that has first-class support for Linux.

It's been designed to be "cloud-ready" from the start where it's adopted a high-performance core with a leaner, modular runtime that supports side-by-side installations since Microsoft wants it to run well in the Cloud of which all cloud providers (inc. Azure) predominantly deploy to Linux VMs, whose trend will continue to dominate.

You can view the supported Linux distributions on their installation page which includes Linux binaries for x64, Arm32 + Arm64 including package managers for its supported Linux distributions (Alpine,CentOS,Debian,Fedora,openSUSE,RHEL,SLES,Ubuntu) [1]. As well as maintaining multiple Docker configurations for popular Distros [2].

With Linux now being a supported platform means if you have run into an issue you can report it where their full-time resources will resolve it. The old days of using .NET to push Windows is gone, the future is the cloud and Azure doesn't care if you run Linux or Windows VMs, it's all the same to them, they're still collecting rent for usage of their servers by the hour.

[1] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/5.0

[2] https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-dotnet-aspnet
It's not balls, it's sobriety. How can we sober up the fox news people?
I had similar thoughts and then quit reading news ever since.

Opinion pieces are even worse they are never fact checked.

its a crazy world that we live in
What were some of the inaccurate things said by the HN/Reddit crowd?
I’ve always suspected dreaming plays a role in fixing short term memories into long term ones.
Szczęśliwego nowego roku, right back at yah. For a year that has been absolutely terrible for both myself and my family HN has been a lovely cerebral distraction.
Perhaps add "why this is bad" explanations as well as "how to fix it / do it better". put those on the page with a hide/unhide button.
ಹೊಸ ವರ್ಷದ ಶುಭಾಶಯಗಳು! (Hosa varshada shubhashayagalu)

Happy new year in Kannada. Thanks to mods for maintaining this site, and to Paul G for creating.
Increased demand for used vehicles increases demand for new vehicles. I think it's not true that there is a bright line where the first buyer of a relatively durable good is the one that creates environmental impact.
> Deepfakes start to surface in the public consciousness in a way they haven't so far. None of this is good.

The scary Deepfakes will be the ones that are 90% benevolent with 10% subtle naughty bits. They'll go undetected by the press. Imagine spreading anti-CCP propaganda in China but not in obvious ways that it can go under the radar of CCP censorship. Complete disarray.
> The total EU budget is about 2% of the total public spending of the member states. That’s a chunk of change at at international level, but is relatively lightweight as a layer of government.

this argument is constantly stated and it's still as bogus as ever

the vast majority cost of implementing powers delegated to the EU is borne by national budgets

once correctly attributed: the "lightweight" label becomes somewhat of a joke
In a real high voice:

Didididit didah didahdahdit didahdahdit dahdidahdah dahdit dit didahdah dadidahdah dit didah didahdit
Who Made the Vaccine Possible? Not WHO
Tech stocks will drop

More no code platforms will emerge and grow

Fiat currencies will have major moves

Bitcoin will rise big and then drop sharply once people realize how useless it is

Inequality will continue to grow. More controls will be put in place to keep disadvantaged in line. Surveillance, social controls, brainwashing

Real estate will have volatility