skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why poo poo this? This is what really irks me when people laugh this stuff off and spout off something about Fermi's paradox without even understanding it.

Fermi's paradox only asks simply "if statistics say they are everywhere, well then where are they?"

What if the answer is simply: "Zooming all around us and we occasionally see one". Period. The rest is assumption.

Fermi's paradox does NOT presuppose contact. That is likely a false assumption. It does not presuppose consistent detection also.

Why would they make contact anyways? Didn't Hawking point out that contact is a bad idea for lesser advanced cultures throughout history? Wouldn't extreme clandestine scientific activity be the MOST intelligent thing to do, even the most benevolent? Wouldn't extreme evasiveness and covert activity, even active concealment of both your orgin, existence, and intention be the most species-self-preserving if you knew you weren't "alone out there"? If they are sufficiently advanced, what could they possible gain talking to us that cannot simply be deduced from observation alone? When was the last time you parked your Tesla next to an ant hill and demanded to talk to the queen ant? When was the last time you tried to contact an un-contacted tribe deep in the jungle to announce your existence? None of that seems to pan out so we convince ourselves that it cannot be therefore it must not be based on false assumptions. Even if they were sloppy about concealment like we are I don't think we would even be able to pick up a alien TV station if it was emanating from a planet orbiting Alpha Centari. The signal loss is 1/r^2 unless you direct a focused tight beam dedicated to being detected.

And what would you want the governments of the world to tell you if they knew? "Yes, they are here. Yes we know some. Yes they are super advanced. No there is nothing we can do about it sorry they run circles our best stuff. Yeah we also heard a rumor they are taking people in the middle of the night and we don't know why. Sleep tight!" ... Think of the lawsuits!

I would say black project aircraft is the only viable alternative theory, but how is that not EQUALLY interesting also given the capability described? Why poo poo it? That's what I don't understand. I don't buy mass hallucinations of the same thing over and over. Its just too consistent.

"Where's the video"? Go take a video of the full moon with your phone and tell me if its discernible from a can light on a distant black ceiling.

Just my 2 cents. Would love the hear the counter argument.
After the pandemic is more or less over, consumers will return to restaurants for the experience. These ghost kitchens will continue to shovel mediocre garbage at scale for those Friday nights when you just don't feel like cooking, but Sunday brunch on a patio is an experience you cannot get from delivery.

I think there is room for both the physical and digital experience. Any restaurant who hopes to survive will need to make a choice about who they are, though - are you commodity or an experience? I doubt any can do both well.

The sad reality is that most people just don't give a shit - look at how much whitelabel junk is sold on Amazon to people who don't care. Those same people are the perfect demographic for commodity food delivery - they want some abstracted version of what they think Chinese food is for a reasonable price, delivered to their door.

The real scale of the problem will be when DoorDash et. al merge/acquire themselves a monopoly and push orders to their own entities.
I'm very honestly surprised they lasted as long as they did given how empty the stores were. I wanted to shop there but they never had anything.
This is a video explaining the (contained) engine failure, by blancolirio (Juan Brown) a 777-300 pilot. He commented to expect an Emergency Airworthiness Directive, and there was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh4727krwH4
> It was exactly as described, small, shiny, cylindrical, no wings, and fast.

When you say "small", can you give an estimate of it's length and diameter?

Are we talking small-plane-small, or welding-gas-cylinder-small?
The military screws around constantly. That's why Cavalese happened. That's why that Apache crashed showing off in Afghanistan. IR655 got blown up. Like, we have lots of "military screwing around" instances and like zero aliens. It's so hard to believe that it's aliens.

Just doesn't make sense in a Bayesian sense.
They've got patents with issue dates through the mid 2000s.
But they can be added to? Either it's a human document you can amend or it's an immutable religious text.
Once I've added one feed, am I not able to add anymore? Also in the list which has headings, which is epic, there are no links there, so it's hard to open the articles.
> Reframing the question at hand around this metaphor: What would an effective vaccine look like for these thought viruses?

Well, if stopping disinformation is too hard for various reasons, maybe we can
focus on the problem from the other direction: we need to find ways for accurate information to be easier to find and to verify.

If you think of misinformation more like a bacteria, then one of the common causes of bacterial infections is that the regular good bacteria have been wiped out for one reason or another. Antibiotics might help, or they might make the problem worse.

I do think we have some serious institutional problems that are preventing the usual sources of accurate information from operating effectively. News that's become overtly partisan, and an economic model that selects for the most sensational headlines. Scientific research findings that aren't reproducible. Universities becoming increasingly run like profit-focused corporations, and too expensive for many to attend due to lack of public funding. Misinformation is always a problem even in the best of times, but it can also fill the void when there's a lack of accurate information.

I don't know what the solution is. I tend towards more distributed models of information sharing that have fewer institutional gatekeepers declaring who the experts are, but I don't know exactly what that looks like, or how to do that in a way that tends towards more credibility rather than less.
To start, it would be nice if consumers can choose between Android and iPhone and regulate that. Having the systems in place is a precursor to adding a third open alternative with a chance to be successful.

I meant human coordination problem in the sense that Apple is already working at a lower bound of innovation delivery speed. They by definition have the least effort coordination
with everyone working under perfectly aligned goals, under a single Delaware C Corp. Even with Android not being a fully open system, you are already moving away from the lower bound of coordination which is why Android maintains a 2-3 year roadmap gap with iOS. Money doesn't solve this, it takes _time_ to coordinate humans working for differently entities with their own goals/motives. This is coming from someone who worked on Android, at Google and met regularly with hardware vendors, OEMs, app developers, etc.
> Why would I ever think to do that?

...because one has seen UFOs in the past, and wants to capture them?

If I went on a walk through the woods behind my house and saw Bigfoot, I would probably carry a camera next time I went walking behind my house to try and get a picture of bigfoot.
They seem to be given an allotment of several tries that result in blowing up their systems.
Facebook v Australia: Who blinked first?
Probably because "right over the top" can be a 2D descriptor of 3D space. We therefore have no idea how close this object was to the plane. It is entirely possible it was directly above the plane but high enough that it actually wasn't in commercial airspace.
Unloading. (1952?) https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/201...
Lossless-cut is a great little tool for splitting and merging videos too (limited by i-frames), but lightning fast.
If anyone looked for Andromeda and couldn't find it: M31 is Andromeda and it's around 765 kiloparsecs away.
I remember going to Fry's for the first time in the late 90s. Having grown up on the East Coast, I had only heard about this magical place where you could buy pretty much anything computer-related. It was truly an experience, especially when compared with from CompUSA and Best Buy.

When I moved to the Bay Area, I did enjoy going to Fry's and walking around ogling the hardware. Over time, I switched pretty much to buying things online. I guess everyone else did too.
Ask HN: How to deal with false positive fraud detection at Amazon Canada
Hello,

I'm asking advice for what do in this googlesque adventure with Amazon Canada's automatic security and muted support.

A couple of my orders at Amazon Canada were marked as fraud last year 2020 in may but they were really done and paid by myself.

Since that happened, we called Amazon Canada at least 4 times after that to ensure these orders were not fraud and that we had an issue with 2 items, one was broken, the other never arrived.

The orders remained masked, and we got no warranty for the items we had problems with!

Up until today, I sent a request to their client support monthly, and all communication vanishes when the client support transfers my requests to their account or security service. They just ignore us, no more answers suddenly. It's like they will never admit their false positives at fraud detection at any possible price !

Amazon Canada let us down, what can we possibly do ?
It appears that the Pixel Qi company no longer exists unfortunately:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi
Pondered, I have no idea what you're alluding to.
Whenever I see this kind of news pulling the attention of a significant number of smart people I ask what terrible reality we don't want to see or try to escape by injecting us UFO heroin.
I think if you look up the thread at the harassment I've been discussing from the beginning, you'll find that I'm not moving the goalposts.
I had no idea she had such a career..
The only time I've ever been into a Fry's (due to not living near one) was around 2010 in the Sacramento CA area. It was so huge that I genuinely got dizzy and had to work hard to focus to see individual items (It's a thing that happens to me when there is a lot of "input" for lack of a better term). I suspect that the cavernous real estate (and its cost) only hastened their demise.
I assure you it was not snark. Your example is not something I would have thought of and is interesting. Probably because I am 29 and for my entire adult life I have assumed all digital communications I participate in can and will be used against me at a future point (which is why I just use my real name here on HN).

And while that is all horrible, I have played Dungeons and Dragons my entire life without persecution and none of the bands I listen to who are the same age as me have been harassed by the government. Not something I can say about the lates 80s and 90s from my understanding of it. (I am referring to the DnD panic and the legal harassment that destroyed the Dead Kennedys among other bands who the Govt pursued)
This is what worries me about Bitcoin. Right now total exposure to Bitcoin is a tiny fraction of the exposure to derivatives in 2008, but that could change as Bitcoin mania grows. Eventually a sudden drop in the price of Bitcoin could trigger a general economic collapse like in 2008
The answer is not to allow evictions, but to have a moratorium on loan payments.

Why should banks expect payments to continue as if nothing happened when large parts of the economy have been forced to close?
I'm not sure how many people have claimed to see a UFO more than once. Sure, after the first time you might. But you're not thinking about it beforehand.

Also how many thousands of hours of flying and not seeing anything interesting do I have also add another thing I have to focus on when it will likely last only a few seconds and I can never guess when? I don't need another distraction while flying.

Pilots claiming to see these aren't typically trying very hard to convince others that they're real (or at least I've never met any, they're often hesitant to bring it up at all for fear of being labeled crazy). They're just reporting what they saw. So most really don't have much incentive to bother with installing a GoPro on their flights.

Yes, if my goal were to prove the existence of these things what you're saying makes sense. But my goal is to fly the plane to wherever I'm going.
Central Computer is still kicking around -for now.

This is all changing. It's not the same. You used to have a bunch of grey market PC parts distributors all over the east bay (uProcessor, add on Cards, RAM, HDD, etc) that used to sell to beige box PC makers (and individuals) but they went the way of the dodo too (ASI is legit distributor now). Also, remember WeirdStuff? Gone too.

It's a mature industry and the biz has gone largely to Amazon and NewEgg with some at BestBuy (regular people) and to large distributors like Ingram for larger players that can't buy direct from MFG or huge players who build their own.

SARS-CoV2 might have hastened their demise, but it was coming none the less.

PS. The sandwiches + a bag of chips/crisps & drink were not bad at all. Maybe it's nostalgia.
I went there about 2 years ago. It was a graveyard.

I just wanted a USB extension cable, and they only had one, and active extension cable that must have been languishing on the shelf for 10 years.

What I don't understand is how best buy has survived and Frys (I think a much better store) did not survive.
Sadly, Fry’s was going downhill well before COVID.
Cavernous is such an apt description. Fry’s uses giant warehouse sized buildings and even the distance in between racks and aisles is wide.

I also remember the checkout lines having dozens of empty checkout stations that I never saw used. I always assumed they were there for Black Friday or something.
I scroll log files and extracts a lot. Scrolling page by page would be craziness.
By definition "nitpicking" is not desirable. The problem is what is the magnitude of improvement that bridges the gap between a nit and a substantive improvement?

When I started off as a code reviewer, I would frequently comment when "I would have done it differently". Now I make sure I only comment when "I would have done it better" and I always explain why it is better. Writing that explanation forces me to ask myself, "is this better?" and I also really want it to be substantially better.

There are a category of changes I request which I think of as "nits". Usually these are cosmetic changes that I think genuinely improve the code quality. I think they are worth asking why should we have a misspelling in a documentation string when we could not have it? It's just going to annoy everyone who reads that code until some unrelated change decides to fix it. When I have these kinds of comments, I preface them with "nit:".
Every Fry's I have been to in the last decade has felt like the store was already in the process of going out of business. That said, I will miss the place. Sometimes you just need a piece of electronics today and Fry's had a much wider selection than stores like Best Buy.
I have a... heavily modified Browser 2 install on an insanely large (for a PS2) 1TB HDD. Between that and some other tools you can install and run full games onto the console. I even figured out how to make custom Browser icons for them, although in practice selecting one game out of even a decently-sized PS2 collection is ungodly slow. It's still cool as a retro hobby project, if you're willing to jump through the hoops to get a working setup.

AFAIK the official purpose of Browser 2 was to support PSBBN and distributing software through it. They never launched that service outside of Japan. Hell, most of the games that supported the HDD got that functionality stripped out of it in the US. PS2 games could install themselves to the hard drive for faster load times, much like the later install features on Xbox 360 and PS3. However, as far as I am aware this was exclusively for online service games in the US and Europe. On the original Xbox, Microsoft was already trying DLC and digital distribution (no, seriously, it had it, but you needed a special Arcade disc to run games). So I have to wonder how Sony wound up sleeping on something they were already doing for a whole generation.
He once tried to sell investors on using a classical computer to simulate a quantum computer to mine Bitcoin faster [1]. Granted, this was before Ethereum.

> He comments on technical issues and engineering problems, things he knows a thing or two about.

He still doesn't seem to truly understand BFT [2].

[1] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25984251
It sounds like you’re saying “the absence of evidence IS evidence of an advanced alien civilization (because they’d hide)”.

Or do I misinterpret?
RFC1607: A View from the 21st Century
I hope this is fake. Few stores remain with a good selection of maker parts. Though the shelves have been pretty bare for a couple years now.

I have tried to support them recently with a few purchases. With limited stock it has been tricky, though, which I'm sure doesn't help when competing with huge online stores.

For anyone who has never been, most (all?) stores are themed, with huge decorations, statues, and props. Somewhere I read they hired a Disney designer to come up with the themes.
Unfortunately money can't be converted into chip fabs so easily. Building a chip fab requires brains, a functioning corporate culture that rewards and promotes said brains, and large scale cooperation to work towards a common goal as specified by said brains. If Intel was able to build a chip at a price that would yield profitable stream of chips, then they would have no trouble funding said chip fab. There is no shortage of investment dollars here. The US has more than enough investment capacity to do this. But Intel can't execute, and when you can't execute, the amount of money thrown at a project is irrelevant.

What's more, there are very few organizations that have both the human capital and are able to out-execute TSMC when it comes to building chip fabs, and it's almost certain than none of them are in the US, even though we have our own printing press that can generate as many dollars as are needed, yet it still wont be enough paper to deal with the brain-organization gap.

Real things are built with real resources, such as organizational capacity, organizational talent, intelligence, solidarity, focus, tenacity, and long term thinking. You can run the printing presses all day long, and you're not going to get a world-competitive chip fab if you lack these. But if you have them, the funding issues will take care of themselves, as investors will beat down the door to lend you money, which is what happened when Noyce first announced he was starting his own company.
> it’s not like they killed a cop

Correct, it doesn't seem like they did; the NYT story was debunked.

> dragged an enemy flag through the senate

The rebel flag isn't an "enemy flag" any more than the Republic of Texas flag. It's a historical curiosity that has some function as a completely detached cultural signifier.

You are pathologically hyperbolic.
To be real fair most likely even a cruise missile would not look anything like a cruise missile if one zoomed past by when you're busy flying an airplane.

Let's not want to believe [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files:_I_Want_to_Believe
> consumers can choose between Android and iPhone

They already can.

> Android maintains a 2-3 year roadmap gap with iOS.

Understood, however I don’t think this is actually a problem anymore.

It’s ok if there is a lag between the open platform and whatever Apple is able to do at the cutting edge.

This isn’t about eliminating Apple, or removing all incentive for them to produce high end products.

It’s about creating a true open alternative.

We’re at the stage where there is room for low end disruption. The alternative doesn’t have to be as good at everything as the latest iPhone.

It only needs to be ‘good enough’ and it needs to be able to do some things that iPhones cannot do.
Why would someone consider machine learning without a technical background?

It's like saying how did you become a doctor without med school?

What is your motivation ? That's a real question and you should start there. If you find the right motivation, hard things become within reach.
Non-nerds went to Best Buy.
It's called a Capsule Container, and it's a common replacement for an AABB or Sphere bounding container when representing avatars.
I wonder how this affects the American Institute of Mathematics (which was started with John Fry’s money).
My 2016 MBP shows very similar numbers, though my % is even higher (26%):

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 30 Celsius
Available Spare: 88%
Available Spare Threshold: 2%
Percentage Used: 24%
Data Units Read: 356,923,637 [182 TB]
Data Units Written: 354,603,847 [181 TB]
Host Read Commands: 2,817,724,668
Host Write Commands: 2,270,199,931
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 21,443
Power On Hours: 996
Unsafe Shutdowns: 21
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
Is it training, or is it convenience? Personally, I don't like soaking beans 24 hours before cooking. In fact, any additional time is too much for me, as bad as that may be. A article in the NYT called The Tyranny of Convenience really crystalized this for me: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-co...
I managed to get 20/25 correct, and most the wrong ones occurred in the first 10. Once I realized I had to look closer than simple logic errors and slowed way down to read carefully my accuracy increased significantly. Reading the textual parts have the most clues: Comments that didn't match the functionality, variable names that seemed like a soup of related terms, even one typo (separated became separata), debug statements that didn't match the variables they should be outputting. Beyond that the overall cohesiveness was better with real code. When I was a TA in school I used to find that reading through correct code is usually much easier than through incorrect code because you have to start accommodating surreal hypotheticals in your head that might make the code all come together in the end. Disclaimer: I work on NLP projects and I'm quite familiar with the limitations and typical failure modes of transformer models.
Damn, I must say that it's rare that I do find something so compelling yet so radically different to how I usually work[1]. Which is not to say that I think I'm an expert; if anything, it's because I don't know how much I don't know.

I must try this.

[1]: Pretty much the usual gitflow with sequential commits of partial work on a branch—often with commits fixing previous errors in the branch—until I deem it finished.
Same boat. People tell me, “but Trump is worse.” I didn’t realize that was the bar.
"Run all the services that make up the system in an isolated development environment" was maintained in all the test environments. It'd be a moderate disaster to mix live patient/billing data between prod and test and so the test systems linked together with independent test/demo/prod HL7 gateways.
Heck, I would go to Fry’s just to browse and ogle all the equipment I could never afford. I genuinely miss that kind of experience.
Disagree and Commit and Prove Yourself Wrong
I went to a Fry's in San Jose (jungle themed I think) on a Saturday afternoon at 3PM and there were literally 7 cars in the parking lot. I went inside and there were few people and the shelves were loosely stocked with junk from China and random crap like towel warmers.

I hope to read the management post-mortem.
Hey, I have the same issue. I get dizzy inside malls too