skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you are a materialist, how is this surprising?

It's not. But there are other things, which should be surprising to a materialist: we don't see neuronal firings in visual brain areas. We see some kind of an abstraction over those firings. Do abstractions exist alongside the matter?
> What has Bitcoin created?

The biggest impact on the world from bitcoin's creation was not a democratization of finance, it was a widespread mechanism to facilitate payment of blackmail.
I feel out of the loop for never having read this guy's work before this faux-outrage-turned-scandal, but everything I'm reading of his is great. He's focused, honest, and straightforward, and you can tell her really lets his own voice come out in his writing.

It's funny seeing things I've said for 5-10 years come out as mainstream common knowledge, namely that mainstream journalism is either lazy, extremist, or both. When I first said it I was called reactionary, or paranoid.
I think you make a point which is very true and valid but not relevant to this particular comment thread.

You are talking about multiple different processes/threads heavily and concurrently writing to a database. In that case, you're absolutely right, the point has come to switch to a client/server database like PostgreSQL or MySQL.

But the parent comment was not about that (or at least they didn't explicitly mention concurrency, and their mention of "a default setting that made spill-to-disk very aggressive" rather than locks suggested that concurrency wasn't the problem). They seemed to be talking about a single writer inserting at a high rate, which is something I'd expect to cope with very well with the right tricks (mostly batching multiple inserts in transactions - I acknowledge their comment that the defaults are unfortunate though). Yes even with a single process there are locks, but if a lock is uncontended then it is not normally a problem.
Show HN: Django changelog comparison tool – see what changed between releases
Django release notes are great https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/releases/ but I got frustrated that when upgrading multiple versions it was not easy to get a summary of relevant changes as it's one release per page. If upgrading multiple versions that I have to go across multiple pages.

The changelog comparison tool solves that: choose two versions and see all release notes between the two.

It's also used by Django Doctor codebase audit tool to highlight when a given github project is vulnerable to bugs in the Django version being used.
Following a 'we report, you decide' principle seems like it would invite the least bias.
>It's actually the mods.

Mod means nothing -- I'm a reddit mod. Admin is paid employee of reddit with completely different access level. A planted story by a mod is still within the grounds of "astroturfing" accusing reddit admins is another order of magnitude of corruption higher. Like I said I don't think reddit admins are doing it but the author does seem to imply it.
Really? I feel like having an opinion based on reasoning from first principles should make discussion easier, because you can try and challenge any element in that explicit chain of reasoning. On the other hand, if someone adheres to ideology X because they feel like it's right, I wouldn't know where to start.
Sport is entertainment, and it is emotional, two excellent ways to get someone's attention
I feel like this version of "sysadmin" went out of favor some time ago.

Back in the early '00s I got my start in industry as a sysadmin, working in non-SV startups. Although I had taken courses in C++ and could muddle through it, I seldom did much low level programming - the C/C++ knowledge I did have was helpful to read code, submit the occasional bug report, and understand the rube-goldberg build processes which really seemed to be in style at the time.

Most of the code I wrote was the kind of glue you needed to make sites work and web-ify basic tooling so normal users could access it - and that meant hacking in shell, perl, or python. These things I simply took for granted as part of a sysadmin's job. As the "web" stuff really took off, that eventually landed me doing more with PHP, Django, and Rails.

All of these things matched my conception of what a "sysadmin" would be, but the industry seemed to disagree with me. I worked in other sectors and came to realize there were a lot of "sysadmins" who not only didn't know how to code anything, but also had no interest in learning anything. Eventually I just stopped being a sysadmin and started being a web developer.

Now here we are, with devops and SREs, and I smirk a little. The guy coding up web sites to present internal metrics and writing software to facilitate point-and-click deployments while dropping into Valgrind to help out a lost developer? He's an SRE, I'm sure. But then, so is the guy in the next cube over, who worked the help desk for a couple months and really knows how to click install and reboot.

These labels come and go and they mean different things at different places. Like "agile" or "devops" - once they escape the FAANGs, they start to lose all real meaning.
For reference, Judea Pearl won the ACM Turing award in 2011 "[f]or fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning."[1]

[1] https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/pearl_2658896.cfm
Citybee.lt Database – Leaked, Download
I have sometimes mused about how we have worried about "sky net" since the 90's, but we've already let AI have power to control our lives to some extent.

For instance, there are cases you can point to where some normal person on Twitter with a couple dozen followers posted the wrong thing, it blew up into an international story, and they eventually got fired from their real-world job for it. Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized? In a lot of cases it was the algorithm: for whatever reason that tweet drew engagement, so a massive spotlight was put on this mostly-private individual.

In a real way that's an example of an AI system deciding to take away someone's livelihood.
Maine startup wants to pull carbon from atmosphere by growing, then sinking kelp
Why we are hiring open source devs to contribute to ClickHouse full-time
I don't use Apache Arrow, so I'm in a poor position to compare it with DuckDB.

My use case for DuckDB is effectively querying R dataframes with SQL. DuckDB has the functionality to register virtual tables, with data from existing dataframes.

As I know SQL reasonably well, using DuckDB to query dataframes means I don't need to learn a bunch of new dplyr verbs or data.table constructs.There are some other R packages which also support this use case - sqldf and tidyquery are two I am aware of. Both of these follow a different approach, where they parse the SQL query. Using a DuckDB virtual table lets the database handle all of the SQL.

I've found so far that through using DuckDB, performance is much better than sqldf and tidyquery, nowhere near as quick as data.table and can be quicker than dplyr, depending on query complexity. I haven't really looked at anything approaching big data sizes though.
The important thing for the aggregate economy is that when people want "hard assets", that these assets can tangibly support future consumption, not just something everybody hopes to trade later for consumption but real stuff such as businesses, inventory, production capacity etc. When too many people hoard pure financial promises or crypto tokens and all believe that it's true wealth, bad things happens. People indirectly owe each other all their savings.
I've only just begun to wrap my head around all of this, and I tried playing with some of the DeFi lending platforms built on top of Ethereum.

It has its kinks, but I think on the net it's a remarkably cool thing. I was able to lend $50 (overcollateralized) at 12% APY without any central institution. The only real wrinkle has been the insane transaction fees: it cost me about $80 to execute the "smart contract" for the $50 12% APY loan. That said, this is a flat cost, and I can very much see the value in paying $80 in transaction costs to be able to lend $50,000 or $500,000 at 12% APY. It also very much feels like "mainframe" days of computing where everything was expensive and impractical, but it was just the beginning.

For the time being, I continue to keep my money safely parked in index funds, but one can get a first hand look at the potential for Eth/DeFi by testing small(ish) transactions out.
You make a great and difficult point. I’ll try to answer as best I can at least how I see it.

Big TV’s goal is to broadcast as engaging as possible material to a general audience. This is broad and therefore not very addictive / effective.

Big Tech’s goal is to broadcast as engaging as possible material to an individual. This is specific and therefore very addictive / effective.

Regardless that the goal is the same, one is a heavier hitter, and we should have regulations to protect people against the bigger punches.
You paid a $20 transaction fee for a router?
> Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive.

Also holds for the edit-compile-test cycle, I suppose.
Bitcoin vaults above $50k for first time ever
Yes, that's the theory, although anybody half competent can cherry-pick the interviewees and the quotes to match what they think the story "ought" to be.
For shared use and remote storage, I'd consider using CRDTs like yjs [1] for instance.

Should be pretty easy, local-first, and allow synchronous as well as asynchronous collaboration and syncing. Even p2p over LAN, webrtc or whatever (I'm unsure how to do local peer discovery in a web browser, on the desktop you'd simply use link-local multicast/avahi (DNS-SD)).

[1] https://github.com/yjs/yjs
> The whole unity is "you."

Why don't you aware of each and every neuronal spike, movement of neurotransmitters and so on?
Towards an integration of deep learning and neuroscience (2016)
Yes, I do that now, but there are still issues around that workflow and nothing beats being able to prototype locally. Some issues (not major deal breakers, but still a source of annoyance):

- Much more limited IDE experience if you use any graphical IDE. I prefer Pycharm because it is far superior to pretty much anything else out there when working in Python + Pytorch. You need to use a remote desktop solution like VNC in that situation, which is not remotely close to being on-par with local code prototyping.

Jupyter notebooks I abhor because of how poor they are in relation to any decent IDE. VsCode is the only tool that has a great remote dev workflow but it just isn't near the functionality of Pycharm when you use the latter daily. You also don't directly get the ability to plot and visualize data in something like matplotlib when working remotely which is again an issue. I'll still use it if I have to when VNC isn't snappy enough

- If data security is a concern, everything needs to occur through a VPN which is another intermediate step in your workflow to get started every time you open up your laptop.

- If you have spotty internet access or are traveling, the remote dev workflow suffers immensely.

The other thing I should mention is that outside of the standard data exploration + model training/inference workflow, there are other use-cases where being able to prototype locally is very advantageous. I write a lot of our tooling and internal libraries (for example: a keras-like model training framework in Pytorch) and that involves a lot of pytorch code that references GPUs but testing and prototyping that could easily be done with small models on a laptop. Not being able to do that at all is really annoying and having a native IDE experience when writing a library (especially when you rely on several internally developed libraries) is very critical in my experience.

Again, all of these are not individual deal-breakers, but I feel the pain almost every day.
The fact that you immediately translate the phrase "far right" into "Nazi" is on you, bud. You also have yet to provide a source for any of this.
I would have slept a lot worse if people thought that I held millions in an asset that can be easily stolen by invading my home and putting my family at risk.
I would only be happy if I was very careful with not revealing who I was, ever (hard to do if a exchange gets compromised).

It helps that I have all my necessities well covered.
But you haven't said what is qualitatively different about them. Consider instead a teacup which falls off the table when I bump it while trying to pick up something underneath the table instead. So we have three different "setups" and "triggers:

A. Setup: Pan it precarious position on fridge. Trigger: My footsteps walking into the kitchen vibrating the floor, vibrating the fridge, loosening the pan and causing it to fall.

B. Setup: Teacup in precarious position on the edge of the table. Trigger: Me bumping the table leg, loosening the teacup and causing it to fall.

C. Setup: The entire life history of my spouse (including perhaps things I've said and done). Trigger: Something I said, triggering various thoughts and responses in my spouse's brain, causing them to want to hit me.

We class A and B as the same thing (inanimate objects with no choice). Should we classify C the same way?

Free will to me is a bit like "dark matter" or "dark energy": I don't know exactly what it is, but when I try to "do the math" without it, things don't add up.
For securities fraud. If he was (as it seems there is some evidence to show) selling at the same time he was boosting a stock, he wasn't expressing a sincerely held opinion. He was executing a pump and dump.

I mean, yes, it's possible the guy simply timed this perfectly, promoted a stock based on an understanding that was technically incorrect but genuinely held, and did nothing wrong. But nine times in ten, that's not how it works. The incentives to cheat in this space are, obviously, huge. And that's why we have an SEC with law enforcement powers.

I remain amazed at the amount of credence WSB is giving this fundamentally anonymous yahoo on the internet. You'll at least grant that there are people who want to scam you in the same way that this guy did, right?
In intelligence circles, you evaluate an adversary in terms of capabilities as a rule, then figure out the impact of those capabilities when employed against you.

I find it interesting that so many people in the world have a knee jerk reaction specifically against doing this. Especially when it comes to tactics around manipulation. The fact is, everyone is vulnerable to it. You don't spend all your time worrying about it mind, but it behooves one to evaluate and maintain a sense of perspective. No, Reddit probably isn't always actively engaging in some direct form of manipulation.

Oh wait, yes they are, they advertise, and they moderate.
Both of those are active measures to shape discourse, the difference in whether this is positive or negative tends to come into play based on who the shaping of discourae benefits, and who it maligns, and where you are in respect to that divide. They aren't a hands off neutral platform.

The more interesting article, in my mind, would have been one less focused on particular tech, and moreso the role of manipulation in the modern world.
Absolutely. We've been keeping each other for almost 20 years.
It seems to be true, with virtually nothing in the way of technological and cultural diffusion between the high population density regions of the Old and New World.

Arctic peoples seem to have traded across the Bering Strait, as this article describes, but this was a very small volume of trade, owing to the low population densities on both sides of the Bering Strait and the areas adjacent to them.

The only contact the peoples far from and on the opposite sides of the Bering Strait would have had was indirect, through a trickle of traded items that made it across the strait and passed through numerous hands across vast distances to reach them.
Cheese burgers and video games aren't free dude.

Bad enough they are handing out free drugs. On top of that look at the behavior it produces. Algo amplification of all the content that generates polarization, misinfo, mob justice etc is not possible without a corral of people addicted to and conditioned by the Like/Click/Upvote/View/Follower count.

When their behavior is unproductive. They point at their Like counter as validation. Thats how Trump end ups thinking he is doing something productive.
There's a slick little Haskell library that does something similar called reflex-vty:

https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-vty#reflex-vty

One thing neither of these libraries appear to have done yet that I would really like is create a more compact window rendering. Currently each window gets a 1-character border. What I would like is something that saves space by collapsing adjacent windows' borders into a single character instead of having two redundant borders next to each other. Of course I get why they do it the way they do, but terminals are often more constrained for space and with complex UIs you can lose a fair amount due to these unnecessary borders. That would be the next thing I'd hack on to improve these kinds of libraries. But alas...too many fun projects to hack on and not enough hours in the day.
How to see what blocks has this money been mined from? Are these one Satoshi's money?
I've worked in places where text was the preferred mode of communication, and in places where colleagues thought nothing of smashing that Call (or Video Call) button any time during business hours and sometimes outside of them.

I suppose it would be another topic - how to deal with colleagues who default to calling where an email or IM would be fine.
BTC going up doesn't mean it has fundamental value. It's a speculative asset with more and more people getting on board.

Hedge fund managers are rich. TV personalities are rich. Many PhD students are poor.

This is not people making the right decisions. This is concentration of money because of economy volatility.
It’s anything. Even minor brands.

My brother was gifted some magnets (strong like bull).

He wanted more, so Amazon had them. They’re not that expensive, but they fell apart. My brother contact the business owner and sent some pictures.

They were counterfeit..

They small business owner sent my brother new ones though, which was nice of him.

Order directly when you can.
Facebook moderators 'told not to discuss working conditions'
Foxconn will just build a factory wherever Apple asks them to. Most recently, India. Next option, Vietnam.

It’s not hard to leave China. It’s hard to leave China for the US.
> > The windows EULA (End User License Agreement) clearly states that the agreement can be refused by the end user, and that windows can be returned to the manufacturer. In real life, however, manufacturers typically say that they can't refund the windows license and tell the user to contact microsoft directly.

I did just that, called MS and they had very politely asked me to f*ck off or contact the manufacturer again, the license was issued to the small family company where this was a very unnecessary expense (so there were no consumer protection laws applicable to this). In practice this is all empty promises, now I just furiously refuse to deal with Windows and Microsoft because of their dishonesty.
Readers might be interested in the fan-made remakes, some intended as faithful recreations of the old games running on modern systems (Lemmix), and some geared towards loading custom levels with enhancements like the ability to framestep (forwards--SuperLemmini-- and backwards!--NeoLemmix) of the underground Lemmings scene.
I do not see much of rationalism in this article or in SCC for that matter, at least in the random samples I read.

Personally, I dislike rationalism /utilitarianism and still enjoy reading an occasional SSC article.

And this is the most glaring fault of the NYT. They just assume that Silicon Valley types take everything written on SCC as gospel. Which is understandable, since the totalitarian left enforces all-or-nothing views and the NYT is projecting their own shortcomings on Silicon Valley.

But Silicon Valley just wants to return to the free exchange of ideas of the Usenet age.
File system performance is arguably terrible on Windows, when working with thousands of files.

Stuff like "npm install", large git operations are many times slower than doing the same operation in a linux virtual machine running on that same Windows. Hard to tell if it's Windows itself, or maybe npm/git not using the "proper ways"

Other than that, Windows performance it just fine, and arguably smoother than a Linux desktop (no mouse freezing for example).
Myanmar Shuts Internet Again as Protest Crackdown Continues
Many OEMs did try to ship PCs without Windows and Microsoft abused their monopoly to “encourage” OEMs and retailers back into the fold. This was one of the cases brought up in the Microsoft anti-trust investigations.
I enjoy SSC, thought that unmasking Scott was Not Cool, and agree with many that the NYT article crosses several lines of misrepresentation. But in the "politics are complex" side, I'm curious to hear what others think of this exchange linked in the article: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6rv2ib/did_...

On its surface, this reads that Scott supports D'amore's memo but doesn't want to be associated with it. Is there more context? In general, anybody advising others to hide their beliefs in order to be more persuasive should expect to invite speculation about what their own true intents are.
Data-driven graphics in TikZ/LaTeX
>It annoying to me the extraordinary divisiveness conversations on ketogenic diets generate at this point. But I get we are still in the middle of the learning curve scientifically, and there is a lot of confusion.

One of the big name diet plans blamed Keto for when they lost a huge portion of their revenue. At exactly the same time advertisements everywhere were about 'keto crotch' which is no longer a thing. Clearly were paid for articles to discourage women from going keto.

There's a ton of $ to prevent people from going keto. Why?

Imagine what a grocery store looks like if there were no carbs. A meat department, some drinks? The entire business model collapses. How about fast food? Some fast food joints have been catering to keto folks. The fast food joints that dont and traditionally push nothing but sugar are struggling.

>I no longer practice keto, but a lot of the concepts I learned still stick with me. I practice intermittent fasting many days but not always. If I feel like eating breakfast I do. If I want some bread or pasta I eat it. But I don’t base my diet on it.

How come you quit keto? Were there effects you didnt like or was it just the inconvenience that you basically cant eat anywhere?
Apple Launches Inaugural Entrepreneur Camp for Black Founders and Developers
Show HN: FinHawk, an automated crypto trading assistant