skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An acquaintance of mine of German origin had lived most of her life in the US. She spoke fluent and unaccented German but said that when in Germany, she preferred to speak English because she was so out of step culturally that it was easier to be coded as a foreigner than a time traveling native.
As Buffett once said how markets behave like Cinderella at the ball. Everyone tries to stay until right before midnight, except you have no way of knowing when it's midnight.
know something we don't = difference in how you price risk of various outcomes. Not necessarily new information
Yeah, although that's one hell of a caveat that was laid down, "barring some unseen development". Isn't that exactly what we are talking about in how Apple has been able to keep releasing "unseen developments"?
From my perspective, these multiples aren't valuable. Metrics like Price:Sales ratio are,

AMZN's P/S is 4.75, it has climbed sharply, but it has usually hovered between 2 to 3.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/price-...

TSLA's P/S is 25.09. The P/S ration has increased exponentially from a historic low (for the company) of 1.74 to the 25+ territory, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/price-s...
MF DOOM is the name I would give when asked my favorite artist, across medium. His beat tape Special Herb is the name I would give when asked my desert island album. You brought immense joy to me and my friends, thank you.
I haven't tried applying, no. I did some research into it and it seemed dicey. I also have friends with clearance who say it's a complete tossup depending on who you talk to.
Makes sense. You can say "A Software Product" or "A Software Application". You wouldn't say "a hardware either". No?
ilaksh says >"It's just good to know that anything bad they were doing is over now."<

One could make that assumption but since, if something bad once happened then it might also have happened before, after, or now in the same or other context[and almost certainly did, will, or is happening]. If we see a system fail we must become more alert in watching for failure. If we put fail-safes in place we must constantly monitor and verify they are working properly, probably forever. Always verify.

As for mental illness: by now in human history it should be clear that a man may try most anything to improve his lot, even at the expense of others. Neither mental illness nor malevolence is required. It is best to keep an open mind when examining motive.
A lot of folks mentioning Madvillain here but he went by a couple of other monikers too, also producing incredible albums:

King Geedorah - Take me to your leader [2003]
https://open.spotify.com/album/1mrhahrlJu5JfzgeV6Cy8t?si=KqY...

Viktor Vaughn - Vaudeville Villain [also 2003]
https://open.spotify.com/album/7HPjcPD2cr8E5oHvVAmBp7?si=sJM...

If you haven't heard these yet I highly recommend checking them out.

His music was a huge part of my early adult years and this news was a surprising and sad way to end the year :(
Best of HN 2020
Library support?
Not only that, but the entire process is fairly transparent. For instance the code for this website is available here

https://github.com/usds/playbook

Along with full commit history.
In most countries you can't carry a knife on you that's longer than a few centimeters in public. I have no idea what kind of axe legislation exists because I doubt it's ever been a major issue if someone somewhere in the forest swings an axe around, but it actually is perfectly common to regulate tools that are dangerous for other people or endangered animals, plants and so on.
The SNP's majority and the remain vote in Scotland certainly give credence to that idea. Given how close the last referendum was the Brexit issue could easily be enough to tip the scales, granted it's always difficult to predict what other factors might be in play.

I must admit that part of me likes the irony of the UK "forging it's own path" resulting Westminster losing power and it's states gaining independence.

As a side note, I think it's better to refer to the northern Irish as republicans and unionists. The division is due to the partition of Ireland and not religious beliefs. The division lines might be the same but religious labels add irrelevant impactions. You don't have to be Catholic to be in favour of reunionification and vice versa.
> "fix this attitude"

I agree with you, hence my first sentence, "guilty of this more often than I should be". I'm much better about using semantic and accessible markup nowadays but I wanted to give some perspective to others who may not be webdevs and are wondering how and why those damn monkeys can screw things up so badly ;)
Wow, very sad. I remember listening to Accordion[1] for the first time and thinking it sounded like no hiphop I'd heard before (no chorus, really unconventional song structure, dense lyrics, an accordion providing the hook). That was the gateway to the rest of DOOM's discography for me.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpaonSDPw7Y
There's also always a trade off between usability & user friction with high security systems. Although improvements in security software usability have eliminated some of those barriers. And systems security is like physical safes/locks: It should be rated in terms of how much effort it would take to bypass it, and implemented in proportion to the value/risk of exposure of the secure objects/data. Clearly this is an idealized model though: SolarWinds has show that approaches to securing high-value assets are.... lacking.
>I don't know why so many engineers let their foundational skills to be locked behind a proprietary ecosystem like that.

Because no open source toolkit can do what Matlab can do.

The same is true of a lot of high end software: Photoshop, pretty much any serious parametric CAD modeling system (say, SolidWorks), DaVinci Resolve, Ableton Live, etc. When a professional costs $100K+ to employ, paying a few grand to make them vastly more productive is a no brainer. If open source truly offered a replacement, then these costly programs would die. But there just isn't anything close for most work.

Matlab is used for massive amounts of precise numerical engineering design, modeling, and running systems. So while Python is good for some tasks, for the places Matlab shines Python is no where near usable. And before Python catches up in this space, I'd expect Julia to get there faster.
So far as I can see, the general consensus is “if they’re possible they’d form naturally, but they’re probably not possible”.

As for mechanism: quantum fluctuations might make Plank-scale wormholes pop into and out of existence all the time, the inflation period of the early universe might make those tiny ones into big ones, and if a cosmic string got into one that just might keep it from collapsing.
If you are in a room and think everyone else has lost their mind, that means you are in fact the crazy one.

You are so utterly convinced you are right that you refuse to except there are things going on that are bigger than a simple market analysis.

Society is capable of willing into existence that which it believes needs to exist.

Try driving a Tesla once. Then tell me it shouldn't be worth more than all car companies on Earth combined.
It's worthwhile to develop both rhetoric and logic. Such people will not go away because you don't like them, and certainly not if you censor them. How do you think the Protestant reformation happened in the first place?
A number of powerful and mainstream people got caught up in cointelpro including members of congress, the naacp, and the sclc, including most famously mlk
Wormholes in theory are tiny. Tiny as in subatomic scale. Nothing like a gigantic structure like what's described in the article.
What ideological reasons? Are you claiming SV startups use open source alternatives because of "free software" or what?

The only reason most startups use open source ecosystems is economics.
How did the giant squid get so big?
So if my record player plays a record at the wrong RPM it's breaking the artist's IP ?

If I modify my honda civic with a body kit I'm breaking IP?

If I put a sticker over the apple logo on my MBP I'm infringing on their design?

to me the modification of bits in MY Nintendo from MY Cartridge should be none of their business.
> the best excuse for Bitcoin is that it's the only thing that works when a governed society has broken down almost completely

It's no coincidence that the loudest voices supporting Bitcoin are very often stubbornly zealous libertarians.

The total collapse of functioning Government is kind of a libertarian folk dream. They want the proverbial barrel to be empty, and to have basic services paid for through user fees alone.
You're writing to people who have been fed The Guardian propaganda for years. It's now equivalent to Fox News in its levels of absurd toxicity. It used to be pretty damned good, just 10-15 years ago. I think the monetization rush made it go toxic/extremely one-sided.

From the outside it looks like a series of A/B monetization experiments gone horribly wrong. They have essentially gone all in on writing pieces that resonate well with a particular demographic. No other kind of journalism seems to be interesting or relevant.
>that people are willing to pay you for it doesn’t change that.

I dare to insist it most certainly does. Anything is economically wothless unless there are people willing to participate in exchanging it.
When you double spend, someone eventually cashes the money in at a bank, and the bank notices. With their authorization, their wallet decrypts and divulges the person that gave them the double spent currency to the authorities. This continues recursively until the double spender is discovered.

One problem with this scheme is that you could lose your wallet, then be found to be complicit in double spending years later (when you refuse to / can’t divulge the identity of the upstream spender).
What happens when the NSA hacks the mixing services or congress passes a law forcing them to store information for law enforcement? Surely the mixing services know at least for a certain amount of time where the coin is coming from and going to.
For all the hype around Tesla, their revenues for all of 2020 are less than Apple made selling earbuds and watches. These new products launched after Jobs. Add Apple Silicon to the list of things they're doing, I think they're fine on the innovation front.
Brands can turn money into goodwill, given enough money, time, and skill.

I don't think this is some fundamental shift in Microsoft or its values: simply a shift in their market positioning and brand value/identity.

Their products are still proprietary spyware, designed to get as many people locked into the Windows (or now Azure) licensing ecosystem as possible. Even the best parts of VS Code, often cited as one of their best new releases, are either spyware or proprietary. Windows remains a tire fire.

GitHub and NPM are prime examples of this concept that one can turn money into goodwill. I assume money also changed hands for the first-class support that Docker has for windows.
Of course, it absolutely HAS to be a nation-state. There's just no way anybody not being paid millions of dollars could possibly break their ironclad blah blah whatever you get it
No, miners are far more powerful than all the other stakeholders. While acceptance by merchants is a relevant factor, miners also have to facilitate any transaction. Any fork without miners is instantly unable to transact, making the coins useless and therefore worthless.
Brexit is best major event in recent history of Europe.

Not only are almost all Brits now better off, but Brexit shows that Brussels has an extremely weak negotiating position. Why? Because they don't create anything, they plunder, add debt and regulations.

Now we know anyone can leave the EU and be better off.
The economic stimulus has certainly been a success for asset prices, in dollars...
Yardin Shafir's excellent blog post started with a bug found purely through fuzzing by an MS employee security researcher.
What if the cranks gain power because you censor them?
> Inflation doesn't need to be measured in many ways, you can view it directly on the m2 money supply

but this chart doesnt take into account increases in productive capacity. If there exists production capacity to match this growth in money supply, goods will remain relatively priced the same, even if more is printed.
Someone upthread said something similar about apologies also being easier (to deliver) in a second language: I bet that just as a non-native speaker's English cursing feels oddly empty or off to native speakers, apologies come off as insincere. At least that's how I feel about formal apologies in my second language: I can know all the fancy form language, but delivered without the accompanying deeply-socialized guilt/remorse/shame it's just so much hot air.
Did you read the link I posted?

The Melbourne lockdown was as tight as anything in China and yes they did compulsory contact tracing including social media investigations.

We also have a phone app for contact tracing. The biggest issue with that is that it doesn't work, not privacy concerns.

Protests against it were widely covered here in Australia. There was little popular support for them, and the Premier of the state (think US Governer) is seeing his highest polling support ever.

Sure, I agree in the US there are groups that have been much more effective in exploiting fears of government than elsewhere. But the US is a pretty unique situation.
> When a Python thread is holding on to the GIL (running Python bytecode), how many other Python threads can concurrently

You've been tricked by jargon. It's a common misconception. In this context, "concurrency" has a specific meaning that is different from the everyday one you're using in this sentence.

For a good introduction to what the two words mean in a software engineering context, check out this written version of Rob Pike's talk, "Concurrency is not Parallelism."

https://rakhim.org/summary-of-concurrency-is-not-parallellis...

The very tl;dr summary is:

> Concurrency is composition of independently executing things. . . Parallelism is simultaneous execution of multiple things.

When Python's threading model was implemented, parallelism just wasn't much of a concern. CPUs had a single core and could therefore only be working on one thing at a time. (In a macro sense; pipelining and supersclar architectures were still a thing, but not super relevant here.) Multithreading was not a way to do multiple things at once, it was just a way to ensure that some long-running calculation would not cause the program to lock up by, e.g., preventing it form responding to event queues in a timely manner. This was done by, not by running things in parallel, but by switching back and forth among them them very quickly.

Python's GIL was designed for this kind of situation. It's there to ensure that nothing bad happens if one of those context switches happens in the middle of a sensitive operation. Which is, strictly speaking, a concurrency concern and not a parallelism concern.

(It's also possible to have parallel work that is not concurrent, in which case locks are not necessary. But just because it's common for parallelism and concurrency to co-occur does not mean that they are the same thing.)
Very nice article! The technique of using an op amp with capacitor as an integrator is also a key component of analog computers. By hooking up a few integrators, an analog computer can quickly solve differential equations (in the 1960s, much faster than a digital computer could).
In theory you only end up in court if parties don't agree on the intent of the contract, not when they just change their mind about the contract.

If one party no longer likes what they agreed to, yet the contract is clear and unambiguous, then a demand letter and/or a settlement often keeps the issue out of court.
They integrate well with a specific phone type.
Careful with that. I recall vividly toasting 2020 with a hearty "fuck you 2019!", and we can see how that turned out. Do not taunt arbitrary temporal spans.
I think batteries will be annihilated by fuel cells in the near future. So in all likelihood the current business of Tesla will be wiped out. Tesla could only survive if it completely reinvents itself.
The US consumes about 4 PWh/year, so bitcoin isn't comparable with the nation as a whole. However, that is more power consumption than many individual states, so your overall point remains completely valid.
Cymro and proud :-) there's a few of us on here. Shameless plug for toot.wales - I run a bilingual Mastodon instance if you're interested. Iechyd da!
> Hint: if the last character is not alphanumeric, put a # (a blank URL fragment) to work around HN's autodetection of punctuation

I usually use URL encoding (aka percent encoding) [0] in this case but that’s a pretty neat trick and certainly more convenient than for example pasting the URL into https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ and pressing the encode button and copying the encoded URL.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding
It makes it illegal in practice, just not in name.

Are you really free if you have any arbitrarily defined “large” amount of money, only to have it sorted and it become YOUR burden of proof to show the origins of the cash?
If you plop a sphere around one end of the wormhole then shrink it until you can’t shrink it any more, that surface is the throat.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V7e-1bRpweo
What about cash that you can send like an SMS on a network that offsets its CO2?

Celo is proof of stake based and also issues part of its block rewards to Project Wren. It has a native stablecoin and a decentralized phone verification protocol that lets you send money to any phone number.

Check out celo.org and ValoraApp.com
> It's no longer the innovation leader

Who is and how do you define that? I'd say in some very important spaces they're leaders, such as performance per watt in the mobile CPU space.

> by 2040 will be viewed as Xerox came to be

If you mean PARC's transition from an innovator to the one trick pony Xerox of today I'd say the difference is Apple keeps delivering high quality products and services in an expansive set of markets - some in so much demand you can't even buy today if you have the money.

Those products are rarely if ever the first to market, but always highly competent and aspirational to own. Their consistency in achieving this approximately a decade after Job's death should be a good indicator that they have a robust research, design and marketing process that will keep them moving.

I'm sure detractors would put their money on marketing being the primary driver, while happily ignoring Apple's achievements in engineering market-leading SOC's.
Sir, US nationals without ownership of assets like real-estate and stocks got robbed to the tune of at least 20% through this year's inflation and money printing.

What do you mean "if Venezuela wasn't political disaster Bitcoin wouldn't be needed"?
Yet chrome forced updates are the greatest revolution it's modern software solutions.
Love the animations / illustrations in this. Way nicer to look at than LTSpice.
> Their "solution" for my grandma's friend was to tell him not to have a phone for a few weeks.

Isn't the better solution to just not answer any number that is not a contact? Then review the voicemail if necessary. Smartphones at least often have the feature built in to forward all non-contacts to voicemail.
"Anybody who understands English grammar, and has a modicum of integrity."

There we go.
> The biggest problem with the VCO design is that the control voltage that determines the frequency is generated by a complex circuit that is very sensitive to temperature drift and manufacturing tolerances. This means that the generated control voltage might not match up to exactly to what it should be for the desired note and it'll end up sounding out of tune. What's worse is that even if you adjust for this you'll need to re-adjust as the instrument gets warmer!

Instability ironically prized and cherished by synth enthusiasts who will claim it makes old synthesizers sound "better" than modern ones...
What broker are you using? Most won’t allow you to do too much leverage on options.
If I remember correctly all they needed was the last 30 seconds or so of missing data, and they were able to recover it off the drives in the symmetrix lab up in Hopkinton.
> How anyone could be against competition, simply because it's framed in a cheesy phrase, is beyond me.

Because you've entirely misunderstood what EEE means. It absolutely does NOT mean to "do a better job." That phased was coined SPECIFICALLY because it was how Microsoft either absorbed competitors, or put them out of business. They spent decades doing JUST ENOUGH to persuade people to use their stuff, even when it was NOT as good -- given the advantage of their monopoly position and vertical integration -- in order to starve the competition of oxygen.
Twelve years later and I'm still waiting on that severe/total economic collapse wrought of quantitative easing that the libertarian hawks envisaged.
At battery day Elon said if they achieve FSD, their competitors will too in a couple years, and it isn't very valuable as a result. Now they said it all rides on batteries/energy storage and that's really their competitive advantage, a $218 million startup and another small one they bought with stock is now supposed to almost entirely undergird their $668 billion marketcap.
Many thanks to Dang, and all the wonderful commentors who've taught me so much over the past year!

Hears to a good 2021!
MS source code leaks to the public all the time. I think there was one early last year.
In the long term this definition is murkier, see the Dutch Tulip bulb bubble of the 1630s.
So a computer is just an electrical current.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_veh...

Part of the auto market is outside the control of Congress.
Check out Stellar, it’s been created for that, Faster than bitcoin and really lows fees.
May I also recommend burning a copy or two on CD or DVD, as well as keeping a copy on memory card. Even if many computers drop their optical drives, a lot will still be around, DVD players can display picture files, etc.

If they are family pictures, send a copy to all other family members with a file documenting what the picture files are, who sent them, when.

Get a photo printer and print out those valuable enough that you would be willing to put them in a physical album and document them.

Ridiculous overkill? No, not at the cost of storage media. Someone 50 years from now will be very glad you did. Once the pictures are gone, they are gone...
Alien images reflect exaggeration of differences between humans and animals
I don't think Mario's running and jumping frame data is owned by them. I can make a game that meticulously feels like Mario 3 with no legal risk afaiu. Since that's more akin to game rules.
Terence McKenna really was a magician, in the sense that he could speak magic words and manifest his ideas in your head very clearly.

The concept you reference is what he called "The Transcendental Object at the End of Time". See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XMz4hWR5i0
I agree with all your points and my post was meant to convey the same logic. I think you misunderstand me. In particular, I mention deflating press self-esteem specifically to say that is _not_ the point. Chomsky is not interested in “epic smackdowns” like the Ben Shapiros or even Hitchenses of the world.
I worked for a state university for several years, and while there were certainly those there to collect their paycheck, there were also many who - as the parent suggests - had a very earnest desire to do meaningful work.