skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m pretty skeptical of feel-good-10-o’clock-news-ready studies like this.

Don’t get me wrong, it could certainly be true but I come in from a place of skepticism.
Write Python 10x faster by editing a spreadsheet
This is a fascinating example of 'if you have a hammer, all you see is nails'. It seems odd that this has been published at all - but then again, it is most likely to be published in journal that is not domain-specific.

The author seems to miss that "economics" is a vast field spanning the whole spectrum from applied economics, over theoretical economics, mathematical finance, financial mathematics, to pure mathematics (with physicists working along the whole spectrum, so this is not a consequence of the author's background per se).

He fails to engage at the right level. From a theoretical mathematician's point of view all models are wrong - they are just deductions from assumptions. From an applied economist's point of view are models are right - they explain some observed phenomena.

Ergodicity is not a niche topic, most intermediate courses on stochastic processes will cover it. Will loosening an assumption about the properties of stochastic processes yield different, potentially better models? Maybe. Will it lead to a revolution in economic theory? Unlikely.

Again, odd that this has been peer-reviewed.

See also the reply here, which is rather damning [1]

And the author's reply to the reply. [2]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01106-x

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01108-9
Yes! This will be interesting to say the least.
It should be noted the high refute energy isn’t due to the error or poor logic of the argument in place. It is due to the trust and faith placed in that argument no matter how faulty or flawed that argument may be to third parties.

It’s also why most people won’t bother to entertain the stupid unless convinced or positively influenced by it. For example many people find the flat earth argument clearly absurd, but they won’t challenge a flat earther on this even with simple obvious data points.
Yea but the target audience for the data is different. For example, I recommended plausible to the head of marketing at my job because she cares about conversion rates, how long people use the site, etc and she gets that from google analytics.

While the sys admins use kibana/grifana to view data the sort of data analytics provides such as where and how people are going, if people are converting, bounce rate aren't important. The raw stats are what are important. I would not recommend plausible to the sysadmins.
No social engineering was needed I suppose. This image: https://truth-sandwich.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/ziobra... done the rounds on social media for a while and someone mustered up the courage to create a Wikipedia article about it. It's basically an Internet meme, not really a law. I use the image sometimes in heated debates where two people throw peer reviewed academic 'links' at each other for hours to prove their point(s).
True. There's a lot of value in data server logs provide for many use cases. But for sites that use Google Analytics right now, in majority of cases they don't want that data and that data makes their dashboard so noisy that is no longer usable for the purposes they use GA for.
You’ll need to spend order of magnitude more energy refuting this page to make a difference here I’m afraid
How to Combat Project Burnout
A ‘low-cost’ plan for California bullet train brings $800M in overruns
> # ... so they should end up with ~1.2e1000 at the end...

Who has ever claimed this? Also, people end up with zero because you are doing integer division in your code (ie the simplified expected return is wrong). Here are my results with 100 bets, and 10000 bet takers. The average return is also on the upward trend, but not really close since CLT doesn't really apply to this distribution:

>>> sum(balances)/1000000
24546192.840913434
>>> print(len([x for x in balances if x<=100]))
5426
>>> print(len([x for x in balances if x>=100]))
5381
>>> print(len([x for x in balances if x>100]))
4574
Nordigen: Free banking data and premium insights
The implementation of the pinned keyword proposed here should fix most if not all @fieldParentPtr() footguns https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/7769
Here's the paper implemented in Sage for anyone interested in running it: https://github.com/lducas/SchnorrGate
Hostage Chess
"'Development is really exciting and should be applauded in these areas, I don’t want to lose the lead but [the technology] will only be fair and just if there is tort law,' he concluded."
> In my experience, the persuasive bullshitters might not even understand that they’re bullshitting. That is, they drink their own kool-aid, and therefore the line between their pseudo-profundity and reality starts to disappear.

This is the essence of Dunning–Kruger, in my experience. Very good point.
The article says that the kid was absent or late for 272 days in 3 years. That's over 50% of school days.

Regardless of whether the school had made the mandated phone call about absence issues to the kid's mother, "the school failed him" would not be the first phrase I would use to describe the situation. It's possible that the school did fail him; maybe he was bullied and going to school was unbearable! But if that was the case, I am surprised that a sympathetic article about the kid and his mother failed to mention it.
Exactly. It'll have to be like a software license key: in theory you can share your key, but the service can just authorize and lock in the first device/entity that presented the license key. This kind of DRM is often annoying for regular customers since you may have to manually contact customer support in order to request a transfer of the license to another device you own, but it does help mitigate non-paid use to an extent.

This could be enforced for real-life events by handing out a wristband with a GUID QR code to the first person to demonstrate they possess the private key that owns a particular ticket token, then never handing anything out for that token again, and also triggering an alert if the same QR code is ever seen on more than one person (to mitigate "pirates" who might offer identical or similar-looking wristband material and "replay attack" with an existing assigned QR code).

There are probably other attacks I'm missing (including obvious existing stuff like people just sneaking in and evading wristband checks), and there are lots of questions about whether an NFT or decentralized blockchain is a smart idea for a given live event, but from a security perspective I think it should probably be feasible if an event organizer does decide they want to do it for whatever reason.

However, there are other analogues that I think are much less feasible or perhaps totally infeasible. There are some NFT... apps? platforms? companies? DAOs? that are providing some service where an NFT grants you access to something like a restricted Discord server. Even aside from how valuable or sensible that may or may not be, there's absolutely nothing stopping a token-holder from just sharing their Discord account email and password with as many people as they want. The platform and the Discord servers would have no idea if anyone's doing this and how many people could be sharing any given account. (Discord employees could potentially detect some cases but I doubt they'd play any part in this.)

For a real-life physical event, someone can't just copy your body and make it a shared proxy for pirating, but any NFT ticket use case short of in-person events is probably often just going to rely solely on the goodwill of people to not abuse/pirate things, and we all know how that goes - especially in anonymous online communities.

The rubber-meets-the-road real-world crossover part is where NFTs and "Web 3.0" in general tends to become really shaky. I'm still mildly optimistic about it in the long-term, but I think a large percentage of existing use cases are going to fizzle as pointless dead ends that are surviving purely based on flavor-of-the-year hype and fad waves. Things are obviously stuck in one such fad right now.
Might I recommend you work on your French?
> But it lacks the awareness of the rest of the java ecosystem that Intellij provides.

Can you give me an example of what you mean?
Well, first, why should (-1) * (-1)= 1? Also, you take for granted that -x = (-1) * x, and why should that be the case?

You had asked when the idea that multiplication is repeated addition breaks down. What does (-1) * (-1) mean if multiplication is repeated addition?

Really all these statements, including x * 0 = 0, are about the relationship between addition and multiplication. 0 is the additive identity, so why should we expect anything special about it when it comes to multiplication? The answer is that addition and multiplication are related by the distributive law:

0 * x + x = 0 * x + 1 * x = (0+1) * x = x

Thus (0 * x) is an identity element for addition, but the additive identity is unique (this can be proved using only the properties of addition) and therefore 0 * x = 0. From here we can show:

(-1)*x + x = (-1)*x + 1* x = (-1 + 1) * x = 0 * x = 0

Thus (-1)*x is an additive inverse of x, and again, we can show that additive inverses are unique and therefore (-1)*x = -x. Now we have everything needed for your proof.

Again, the idea that multiplication is repeated addition plays no role here. What actually matters is the distributive law, the meaning of "0", "1", and of "negative," and that multiplication and addition are closed (i.e. the sum or product of two numbers is a number). Those properties are part of the definition of addition and multiplication (along with the associative and commutative laws, and some form of cancellation for multiplication / multiplicative inverses) and can be taken as axioms.
Independent of this heated discussion, thanks for this good & interesting link.
As for golang, I think the pros outweigh the cons here. Code is read more than it's written. Cleaner code means you can literally identify code structure from afar. Which in turn makes is easier to focus on the part you care about. If you have to pick a length for automatic formatting，the same length makes sense. So is trailing commas.

Even if only half of engineers think this is true, the other half should be pragmatic and let the go formatter do it's thing. The best thing about go is that it has one standard formatting.

As for equal length variable names, the majority of these examples you would use naturally anyway, so I am not sure what are you so upset about (top/not instead of true/false is a bit overkill)
What Uses More Power Than Argentina but Doesn’t Dance the Tango?
"Here at Hackaday we are more concerned with figures than arguments over the future of currency, so the angle we take away from it all lies with those power stats. How much energy does Argentina use, and is the claim about Bitcoin credible?"
> There is no known process in physics that could give meaning to that identity.

I am arguing that we don't know enough about consciousness or about the universe to claim there is no difference between the original and the copy. So saying "there is no known process in physics" doesn't undermine my position.

Here is one possibility, perhaps a bit silly, but if we are in a simulated universe, not that I think this is likely, but if we are then each person could maybe have a unique hash. A copy then would have a different hash to the original.

Like I said I am not saying we are in a simulation. It is just an example scenario where a perfect copy would not be the same as a move.
We haven't set it for our docs on the live demo but we have set it up for /blog this exact use case. On our live demo scroll all the way down to Goal Conversions and click on "Visit /blog*". This gives you a filtered dashboard and on that filtered dashboard if you look at the Top Pages report you will see only the blog posts ranked by popularity and no other content that's outside of the /blog.
I think Zig looks very interesting; I just don't do that sort of programming much so I have a hard time finding an interesting (to me) hobby project to try these languages on. But I see this sort of sentiment with `go` a lot:

> However, I ended up finding these absences liberating — this is where the “fun” comes in.

This just feels like a weird "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" Stockholm syndrome. "I actually LIKE that it doesn't do what I want it to do." Baffles me.
"expected utility needs to be the centrepiece of the theory" Fundamentally expected utility is wrong.

Kellys is fatally flawed as it's merely one of a whole class of functions that be used, where Kellys happens to be on the aggressive side of things.

Ole Peters gives the entire class of the functions that can be used. There is obviously a whole band of less to more aggressive options you can take.
Can you elaborate please ? I am not sure how can a mirror be more expensive than a camera and a screen ?
Texas also has extremely high gun ownership rates, and is one of the few states (maybe the only) that allows the use of deadly force just to protect property.

"There's a good chance you get shot to death" is probably a better deterrent than even a felony, though it's a little morally concerning.
Essentially all economic models of investment have a time dimension. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that it's left out.

Also, the field has gone far beyond von Neumann-Morganstern, so I'm not sure where you're getting that, either. I'm simply making the point that expected utility does not require ergodicity. If you read the proofs, it's clear. If you don't want to read the proofs, the best that I can do is provide indirect historical evidence.
My first computer - I still have it although it needs restoration. We didn't know at the time it was so limited because there was nothing to compare it to.

The author of the programming manual - Steve Vickers - could be thought of both the first and last person to formally teach me computer science, since I eagerly followed the entire manual back in 1981, and then 15 years later I took his notoriously difficult and impenetrable course on Mathematical Structures at university.
First aid for burns. Imagine an ointment tube of this that you could immediately apply to large burns then simply add water and create a sterile coverage for moisture retention under bandages
I did not say everyone of them, I said everyone that I personally came across. I do not swim in antivaxxers. Are we testing our bs powers?
Why does a cool thing seem less cool when/if you realize something else is also cool?
I had an experience with a truck almost hitting me aswell.

It’s strange because it happened in a place where i travel regularly and I was overconfident.

The truck appeared from behind a bush at an angle I didn’t expect.

It honked and I froze, otherwise I’d have stepped infront of it.

Anyways it taught me never to cross a red light, even when I’m 100% sure that it’s safe, because in these cases you need only 1 mistake, and it’s over.
> I'm still not sure what the distinction between lying and bullshitting is.

Logically there isn't one. The difference is in context and motivation.

When I was a kid I had a problem with bullshitting, like when I told my friends that my dad owned a helicopter. I wasn't trying to scam them, I just wanted to be accepted and seem cool. But I got over it as soon as my brain was able to notice what a stupid thing it was to do. "You don't gotta lie to hang out."

FWIW, it seems to em like this study is just showing that stupid people are stupid. It's arrested development to be a bullshitter after, say, 12 or so, surely?
`font-display` for the Masses (2016)
Blockchain like structures use consensus to uniqueness. A protocol that attempts to replicate this meets the loose definition of blockchain.

As the other commenter explained, concensus doesn't require CO2, but most of these have been recent developments.
First computer of the family, received as a kit. My mother, my father and I took turns copying listings from books and magazines. I remember we were very enthusiastic and fascinated by this machine. The first words I achieved to type on it were swear words.

My phalanges still remember it!

Having said that, I had an instinct of repulsion at the sight of the RAM pack on the photo.
‘Blockchain’ is meaningless (2018)
Spacecraft re-entry?
Precisely. Taking the flat earther example, if their able to miss so many obvious data points (some they can observe themselves with their own eyes!) then why would anything you say convince them? Someone who is capable of being talked out of believing bullshit is less likely to have falllen for it in the first place.
Labelling people "anti-vaxxers" because they don't want to become beta testers for a new vaccine technology that's only been tested for a fraction of the time as normal vaccines is some first class bullshitting. Bravo!
It's been commoditized now, yes, and it's less important due to more computing being done on laptops that only periodically plug in.

Back then computer ownership was still proliferating, and computers were more expensive and always plugged in, so there was more preoccupation with protecting against an unknown.

Most people knew someone who'd had lightning strike their TV antenna, so they weren't protecting against a totally phantom risk. Many people also lived in older houses where wiring work wasn't to the standard of a home built in the last couple decades (I still live in such a home.)

I don't remember many people researching surge protector ratings in great detail, though, just being sure not to get a plain power strip. Some did know a lot.
The absence of specific features for solving specific problems makes the language surface very small. Which is liberating in the sense that you don't subconsciously look for the "right language feature" for the current coding problem you're trying to solve.

This sentence from the blog post is key:

"For example, it’s now quite clear to me that Rust is a language which has a dedicated feature for everything."

You always have that nagging doubt in the back of the head that you don't know the language good enough yet. And I never got rid of that feeling in over 20 years of coding C++. Turns out, it's not you, it's the language. Switching to a simpler language like C lets you focus on the problem solving again, not solving language puzzles. Zig is truly a "better C" in that sense, because in a way it is an even simpler language than C (while being much more correct), yet it enables fundamental features that C lacks (like comptime and generics).
Excess demand refers to a situation where a good is underpriced, resulting in a quantity demanded that exceeds the supply. [0]

[0] http://www.personal.psu.edu/dxl31/econ2/pizza_market.png
When I said "every one of _them_" I was referring to every one of them that you have met. Not implying that you meant all of them in existence. I'm surprised by your experience, because growing up in an Evangelical community in the south anti-vaxxers were a dime a dozen, but I've never met anyone whose children were harmed by vaccines.
Redirection Service: Eliminate dead links from your website automatically
I think the point is that he learned (and presumably implemented) the technique in a relationship that failed and yet he recommends it without sharing that context.

“I recommend this construction technique.” “Sounds great. By the way where’d you learn it?” “I learned it building my last house.” “Can I go see it?” “No, it collapsed.”
There is no substance to your reply, so I can't even refute it. It sounds like something copy/pasted from a crypto startup's landing page.
I was really keen on building something like this quite some time ago, but the way I understand the US regulation surrounding money transmission made all of the good and fast ways I could think to do it illegal without full KYC and a money transmitter license which is approximately $1M USD per state in which you wish to operate.

Being a US person, I gave up on the idea, although it still deeply saddens me that there is so much red tape around micropayments that the (fairly technologically simple and readily achievable) systems that we could quickly use are basically illegal in the US.

We have all of the infrastructure to do micropayments; from browser extensions and http status codes to the lightning network. It's just against the law.
Exactly. This makes fake news, propaganda etc a denial of service attack enabled by freedom of speech. The freedom comes at a cost.
I remember them being wildly popular at first, because they were so much cheaper than other 8 bit computers. Then, price wars made computers with more memory and a better keyboard more competitive, and you started seeing much less of the ZX81.
Bullshitting does not require knowledge of the truth. Liars know they are telling a falsehood. Bullshitters don’t care whether something is factual or not, as long as it serves their rhetoric purpose.
@RealAbril, a former Google diversity recruiter, tweeted that Google
“Banned interview questions and feedback, as asked through mock interviews at Howard University by Google Software Engineers. Howard CS students severely struggled with basic coding, algorithms and data structures.”

Is Google wrong about this? Google would not be successful if it were unable to evaluate technical competence.
U.S. law does provide interesting examples of the intersection of positive and negative liberty, I don't personally agree with all of the decisions and some of the examples listed on that page are much, much more nuanced than they appear at face value including subsequent cases that clarified the meaning of those decisions. If we stay on topic with the relation of the two concepts of liberty to the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises LP to no longer publish 6 books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong." and the subsequent decision by Ebay, Amazon, et al. to prevent resale of existing copies of those books then we get a really good example of another topic covered by Isaiah Berlin which is the abuse of positive liberty. Specifically, the demand for freedom from these entities to control the purchasing decisions of their customers with regard to materials that some supposedly rational authority has determined to be detrimental to some group of people (there are echoes of Roth v. United States here). The factors that make this a difficult problem are the near monopoly that Ebay and Amazon enjoy over online sellers and resellers and the fact that they act as intermediaries between those sellers and their customers.

My answer to this situation is similar to that of Justice Holmes, we need a free marketplace of ideas as well as a free marketplace of products. Breaking up monopolies in commerce and discourse goes a long way towards those goals.
Ellx.io seems promising, I'll toy with it a bit, thanks! Unsurmountable objections:

- not language agnostic (JS only, AFAIK).

- lack of native desktop app to keep it fast.

- not spreadsheet view only. I would then hide/collapse syntax highlighted code inside of cells as I wish.
> After all, people have been predicting that web-based tech will be the next big thing on desktop for as long as I’ve been writing this blog — i.e. eons. And yet it never quite happens. Electron apps, for instance, are, like Flutter, popular with web devs but desktop users? Well, they’re less keen.

Lost me here. I don't think most users care whether their apps run Electron or .NET or Python/QT or whatever so long as the app works. Stigma as a dev makes me want to avoid Electron apps but that's because I'm a dev.

If the point is about desktop apps vs. apps that actually run in the browser (e.g. Sketch vs. Figma) then that's a real debate. But that has nothing to do with Electron.
It’s pretty fascinating how in a country “by of, for the people” they’ve chosen to sit on social media, complain about wanting freedom from social ills, but also the freedom to optimize their time to avoid dealing with it.

Y’all want to disrupt something? Extreme ownership models really seem like the last social structure to disrupt.