skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, after reading those threads, my first impression is this is an ideological disagreement, but not that Harari is actually wrong in his analysis.

Ok, so I'll start with some observations on the comments themselves, and will continue to explain what really needs to be addressed in order for me to understand things better. The comments seem to dislike that this book is about the whole of humanity, written in a short book, so I would expect a simple counter to this, but I see people not having read the book in full:

QUOTE "But again, since I've yet to personally read the book rather than get second-hand info about it"

QUOTE "I've tried to read it twice and not got very far."

QUOTE "I've seen some water cooler chat about the book, but I don't personally know anyone that has read the book - like myself"

Regardless, the first link seems to contain better info on why it's wrong, with specific detailed counters, it's just that those details could still be off, but the premise could still be right... however this "benefit of the doubt", let's call it, is only given to OTHER books just not Sapiens:

QUOTE "This is why a book like 1491 has been so much more warmly received. One can undoubtedly find dozens of factual errors within. But instead of mirroring a popular inquiry born out of popular ignorance ("Why were the Americas so decisively conquered?"), it recognizes that ignorance as a problem to be solved."

First, "warmly received" is useless here, and second we can start to see the root of the disagreement... it has to do with a specific perspective of the world, and anyone going against that perspective is wrong (but of course, the reasons won't be made clear -- instead attacking mistakes, character, and credentials).

The following quote shines a light on this a bit more.

QUOTE "Some would argue that language is purely abstract- that the act of calling something a rock is what creates the rock. As much as the 'rock' exists as a physical object with observable properties, there is no natural boundary between 'rock' and 'pebble' and 'sand.' "

Ah... isn't this interesting? This is all philosophy, and I would even label Sapiens as philosophy to a great extent. These are all theories that can only be reasoned about, and thus we enter Epistemology and Ontology, and we're in a completely different territory than History. We're trying to understand ourselves in History, this is not an event, or a fact.

In conclusion, I would like a hard counter to his simple premise, which is an answer to the question, why are humans so different than the rest of the animal kingdom? (TED talk summarizes it nicely), and also, I would like to point out that the criticisms are not self-aware that they're arguing philosophical matters and instead are pretending they are countering hard historical facts, and dismissing the book on that basis.

TL;DR: why are humans so different than animals, and why is that a historical conversation, when it's really philosophy, and ultimately Harari made it simple, so there should be no need to argue around it if he's wrong in his premise.
> Do we have any idea

IIRC, largely no - it's a very open research question.

> I'd really like to know

I fuzzily recall seeing an applicable NASA space medicine slide deck last year, but I'm not quickly finding it - sorry.

> depend on whether Mars has enough gravity

While it's common to oversimplify and exaggerate minimum-size constraints on rotational gravity, even if greater than Mars gravity is needed almost continuously, it might perhaps turn out easier engineering to maintain that on Mars (with mounted spinning things, or maybe pods in curving tunnels) than in space (spinning habitats). You still have vacuum at hand, but also support and workspace - things are more easily stopped, stood next to, and kicked.
What I'm saying, or more appropriately asking, is whether your impression with the OP's project is inspiring you to change your actions in the future towards being impressed with yourself in similar ways.

> It's not that I worked on the wrong project, it's that most months I worked on no project.

Will you start working on projects in future months?
Good lord man, I thought I'd seen some bad stuff coming out of that guy but that's pretty obsequious
Note that these weren't just hyena, they were cave hyena, which were quite a bit more formidable than what you might be imagining from nature shows:

> The European cave hyena was much larger than its modern African cousin, having been estimated to weigh 102 kg (225 lb)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_hyena

So, sized more like a jaguar than a dog.
>Kidnapping for ransom is basically a dead enterprise in the US because of laws essentially forbidding the paying of ransom.

This is bullshit. US laws do not prohibit ransom payments except to sanctioned and/or designated entities which tend to not operate within the US.
I would demand a refund and make a fuss on social media if he refused. I would post negative reviews either way. People in the medical business that are paid to push products are disgusting.
Seems like it would be better to subsidize a local grocery store in these food deserts regions.
I admire you for calling Musk out on this platform. He's a quandary for sure...I've not worked him out. He's done too many amazing things to be an idiot - but yeah, he's done some super dumb shit too.
Soy is an endocrine disruptor and it's ok to eat in moderation. The same is true of fish with it's dioxin and mercury.

They aren't required to be eliminated, but minimized. I would be much more concerned with the duration of exposure (halflife) when working to reduce exposure given that it's impossible to completely eliminate.
GTM makes it easier if you are using multiple advertisement platforms. If you are using twitter, fb and google ads, then GTM makes it easier.

Google Analytics is different from GTM. And as far as I know, Google Analytics only works with Google, not FB, Twitter etc (which GTM does).
"Cus he's not that bright."

I think you're confusing mental bandwidth with intelligence, likewise you seem to be putting him on a pedestal expecting him to have an amazing network of advisors on every conceivable topic.

No, he's human and his limited attention is split between Tesla, SpaceX, and arguably the other projects he has. Likewise these are complex organizations with a lot of moving parts and it's impossible to not delegate to other competent people, hopefully more competent than not, and then if bad decisions are made by say a Board of Directors and/or CFO then it's perfectly reasonable to reverse course - it's more reasonable than expecting Elon to be an expert of everything, he's not super human.

However I imagine the situation's more complex than meets the eye, some people like you are sticking to cherrypicked facts, others are putting forward conspiracy theories founded on no evidence that this was Elon pumping and dumping purposefully, or that he's just doing it to piss off the SEC because he hates the SEC. Who knows.

Elon in the not so distant past tweeted: "Bitcoin is almost as much bs as fiat money" - so he certainly has enough of an idea to make that statement.
I think this is a key point. I don't personally care much about deliberately dropping IE11 support. But I do want to use fetch() and similar functions without shipping a polyfill. I want to get the code size reduction that comes with just setting ES6 as a compilation target. I don't have to think much about Firefox when doing so, but I do have to think about dropping IE11.
I doubt it’s just one chemical, but various kinds of plastics and adhesives, and possibly some electronic components are all likely contributors. For example, on the 8th gen. iPad, the keyboard connector is surprisingly smelly.

Heat increases the rate of offgassing, so a medium amount of heat in well power managed devices can draw out the time for which there is noticeable offgassing for years. I have found if you can burn-in a computer or TV with heavy load (and consequently heat) for say a month or two, that usually takes care of it. But some mobile devices (especially fanless ones) are “too good” at thermal management, making this difficult. And even for devices with fans, you want to run them in a clean environment so you don’t prematurely fill the fans up with dust or worse.
Anyone seen any confirmation of which cryptocurrency they made payment in?
So now there are two shoeboxes. Hasn’t solved exfiltration. In fact, you’ve just doubled the risk.

There may not be a solution if the problem is untrustworthy people.

The custodians of your ‘independent control’ will eventually get ransomwared themselves.

Then what?

It’s like cash...
If you are a sophisticated criminal, do you waste time burglarizing individuals? Or, do you rob the bank where the individuals keep their money for ‘safekeeping’?

How many people at Amazon have access to the database other companies use to store info?

2?
20?
200?

I don’t know, but I bet it’s a lot. And I doubt they get paid enough to make them immune to a generous offer (or a scary threat) from a bad guy.

Seriously, how many individuals at Amazon have the ability — if they wanted - to irreparable corrupt, encrypt, or destroy data?
Clearly they don't pay attention to what they say.
excalidraw.com

It's pretty great, we're happy plus subscribers.
I think it will be interesting to see what develops as we learn more and more about the mechanisms of our brain and how they intersect with the subjective experience of our mind. I feel reasonably certain we’re going to be able to unlock new capabilities that were previously either undiscovered or not reliably available to humans. Things like the ability for some people to essentially be a human calculator, and others to have photographic memories.

The possible downside however is that we will likely be able to quantify the capabilities of any particular brain based solely on an assessment of its physical attributes. That seems like a dark place.
That's a maybe. Even if he really is guilty he might not have a bad time. The world is not just and there's very little justice in the judicial system.

He called a guy a pedophile with absolutely no evidence and paid no price for that.
you're talking about the same groups of people.

the people that say shit like "unemployment payments encourage laziness" are talking about poor people, minorities and people of color.

The people you're referring to doing crypto trading are typically affluent already, or people in social structures and communities where they have places and people to fall back on.
Sure, if you don't count the Chrysler TEVan, the Ford Ranger EV, the honda ev plus, the Toyota RAV4 EV...

also, if you ask me, a super expensive sports car should still count as a "gimmick". I give Tesla credit for reigniting excitement about EVs, but lets not oversell their achievement.
I Love These Guys
This was extremely poor (I'd say weak) leadership by Colonial Pipeline. While continuing to be down is painful, it puts a spotlight on the issue and forces hands of critical infrastructure to improve security and reach out to security companies for audits and consulting. Also, they could have gotten additional support from the US government and political support by continuing to stay down instead of the back alley payout.

Not to mention, rewarding people for bad behavior is never a good idea. I learned this as a child... "If you give a mouse a cookie, then he'll ask you for a glass of milk."
FWIW - it worked perfectly on Firefox for Linux, but Chrome claimed I had...pretty much everything installed, so it broke horribly.

EDIT: the "special branch" also didn't work
My guess: Offering Bitcoin payments has attracted fewer buyers than it has deterred (because there are all kinds of people who find proof-of-work cryptocurrencies bad, e.g. for environmental reasons or because of the GPU shortages, and some might actually boycott a company over supporting those).
>NASA own evaluation showed that the 300M SpaceX spend on the initial Falcon 9 would have cost 3 billion if done by the government.

interesting, can you cite that?
>he didn't really understand what Bitcoin was

He's not dumb for a scum that scam billions in profit
Yes but BTC is far too valuable. The piñata was only online until it was worth too much. Might work well for other Alts.
How long did you travel? Trains sweet spot is a few dozen to a couple hundred miles. Anything longer really should be fulfilled with high-speed rail, or air.
>If a modern heat recovery turbine is too complex, then so is an electric motor.

A generator is bascially an electric motor running in reverse, at minimum you have a turbine and a generator to make a heat recovery turbine, or you can mechanically couple it with a transmission. That is more complex than just an electric motor, is this not obvious to you?

The SOFC you linked at 75% efficiency uses a turbine with a secondary combustion chamber (post combustor) and along with a generator. Again this is not just a "simple" turbocharger.

https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/3362b2a27c2ec1f3064114...

Does that look like just a simple turbo charger?

You are the one redefining what a heat recovery turbine is, no one calls a turbo charger a heat recovery turbine, and no devices called heat recovery turbines are just a turbo charger at minimum they drive a generator or are mechanically coupled to an engines output.

So you have on one hand a:

battery - motor controller - electric motor

VS

high pressure liquid H2 tanks - fuel cell - recovery turbine with generator - motor controller - electric motor

Hopefully the fuel cell can have enough burst power for acceleration and not also need a buffer battery like current fuel cell EV's, then again you need a battery or regenerative braking, oh well.

Which one is simpler and cheaper to fuel, maintain and operate? Which has more moving parts? Current fuel cells in cars don't even have an energy density advantage, maybe they will and will outpace batteries but they are certainly not simpler than a battery powered EV.

Also stop being an ass, you are the one embarrassing yourself, at least try and keep it civil.
The WeWork CEO (and of Washgtonian Magazine, and many other CEOs) apparently disagree with you.
Blockchain would be a good idea if computers ran without consuming electricity. Could there not be a way for a computer to be designed as a biological plant that integrates perfectly with our environment and would produce no harmful effects.
Audacity: Actions we propose to take on PR #835 #889
There are a number of misstatements here that I just wanted to clarify for anyone else:

The design of this bill isn't such that'd it's leverage any serious weight on Canadian tax payers.

Canada does produce some fantastic television and movies - and those fields already have CanCon related laws, this bill is specifically about extending that to internet borne content.

For the rest of your comment, the food is quite amazing, poutine, tourtiere and mac'n'cheese with ketchup as far as the eye can see, along with a culture that isn't American yet (hence the existence of this law). Also, your tone could use work.
But isn't the Python install getting heavier.

3 packages will be installed:

expat-2.3.0_1
gdbm-1.19_1
python-2.7.18_3

Size required on disk: 18MB

3 packages will be installed:

expat-2.3.0_1
gdbm-1.19_1
python3-3.9.4_1

Size required on disk: 22MB
Nest Wifi. Note that you have to use the Google Home app to configure it.
> If there’s truly nothing of value for four years of school, then I’d argue that university isn’t really worth attending

The value is being able to fulfill a requirement.

> And the required courses of bio, chem, o chem, and physics give all doctors a basic understanding of the scientific method, how biology works (that’s important), and a basic knowledge of skills required for pharmacology.

That's one year worth of coursework out of the mandatory 4 years of undergrad.

> Everything else is optional for Med school, but I can’t see how, everything else equal, someone who cheats their way through these would be more prepared for medical school than someone who actually learned the concepts.

They would have more time to prepare for the MCAT or pad their resume with extra-curricular, making them more competitive. Or have a part time job to pay for the expensive in-person interviews.
Up until very recently it wasn't even possible to host a .NET backend without the rest of the MS stack (Windows Server, IIS), and that by itself made it a non-starter for most startups. It was also closed source and required very expensive licenses (Visual Studio cost thousands of dollars per developer per year).

Things have improved now with dotnet core and everything else, but it takes more than 2-3 years to gain acceptance and widespread use.
Rocket science is easy when you have a very powerful general optimization package available. Classic rocket science is trying to find closed-form minimum-fuel solutions for those problems. See "Hohmann orbit" and related topics. That's hard.

Legged running for robots is a very similar problem. It's under-actuated (more degrees of freedom than actuators) and constraint-limited. I worked out some closed-form solutions for legged running with anti-slip control back in the 1990s, which were later used in robotics work at McGill. Now you can probably just crunch a solution out of an optimizer.

(I used to make the comment about that, "It's rocket science. Which is good, because rocket science is a solved problem.")
They could always just keep the "X" unplugged, it is doubtful hackers from Russia go onsite and sabotage things. Maybe this will make companies realize if they can't secure it at least just disconnect it. Everything doesn't have to be online.
How would a legit company like a grid operator pay a ransom in it if it is banned?
Interesting that it is so widespread- from my perspective it's great that there people now have leverage in negotiating their wage
Is it just me or the angle being played here is a bit weird?

It's not just you - the article is definitely weird and manipulative in its language and argumentation. Kind of mindfuck piece of writing, basically.
Parents with doctor friends are now getting disability diagnostics for their children so they can get extra time during exams.
This sort of thing always runs into 'need the tool to make the tool' loops, where you end up substituting an inferior version long enough to get you to the next level.

Bootstrapping a working metal workshop from first principles would require you to re-run a substantial part of history including the re-invention of lost processes. You'll also likely get killed because quite a few of those processes are anything but safe. Our modern days materials science is very hard-won knowledge, and there aren't a whole lot of shortcuts on that route even if you have the knowledge itself.
Something like B5 isn’t centrally concerned with things like orbital mechanics, they aren’t the focus of its plots and the way ships behave is more a way to contrast the differing levels of tech. Gravity has a plot centered round how things orbit so when the plot cheats on that it’s jarring.

Likewise when B5 had an episode centered round a character who had been Jack the Ripper, but got the area of London where the murderer had been active completely wrong that felt jarring because the nature of that character felt so central to that episode.
Dammit I've been eyeing that one.
It’s good practice for a cash business to make daily runs to deposit daily at the bank. Stupid to leave cash laying in the till overnight.

Which is why thieves rob banks.

But, money is fungible... if it’s stolen, it can be replaced. If the bank can’t replace it without going broke, the FDIC steps in and, essentially, prints more money to make you whole (up to a point.)

But, data is unique and irreplaceable.

If everyone is backing up to a smaller and smaller number of ‘cloud’ companies, it’s just centralizing the problem... putting everyone’s eggs in one basket.
Clarification on Muse Group's involvement and vision for the Audacity project
"Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers. This breaks a lot of people's pattern-matching, in both directions."

--Ben Evans (https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1358760338724974594...)
So perplexing we all can bet the argument is bogus and there's a hidden agenda.

Few ideas:

- using another crypto and discrediting bitcoin to move capital onto others (apparently cardano price didn't crash.. yay for Haskell I guess)

- Tesla having its own token ?

- Simply toying with panic to buy more.

Tesla has solar panel, batteries, and custom ASIC know how or partnership, they could also have their own system in the pipelines now. And with the microgrid rumor (far fetched but I heard the idea propped up by another car brand on radio the other day... Surprising). Maybe an energy currency ?
> If they live in poverty and/or third world countries, are their daily lives impacted by the web?

It won't affect their daily lives directly, but being able to access the knowledge scattered around the web is very important to human development in general.

What I wrote above is a kind of slippery slope argument, but it's a slope that I'm sure we're sliding down very quickly. You can't even read a technical blog these days without loading a whole SPA framework. If we keep going down this path, it will legitimately begin to impact the ability of people with older devices to access any information at all apart from those delivered through a handful of walled garden apps.

> In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content.

Completely agreed!
If and when the shit would hit the fan on a global scale, you will see everything exists- biological weapons, gas weapons, "inhumane" weapons of mass destruction, you name it.

Every major player has these and will show them when there is a global war.

Treaties do shit.

A slightly unrelated example: There are major laws that you can't kill a journalist in your embassy. But did those stop it from happening?
I guess I'm imagining tournament use playing a role, but more generally tying the concept of ownership & legitimacy to the NFT. Ideally it would move the value of the asset into the digital representation instead of the physical, which is what would happen if the physical representation of the asset is easily replicated.

Like sure they could sell the NFT and keep the physical card, but at that point the physical card is now illegitimate. And a lot of the value is in legitimacy, right? If the only value was the physical representation, couldn't a collector could just print a counterfeit?

NFTs work when the important part is the abstract idea of "owning the thing", where the value of the thing is more extrinsic than intrinsic. The specific idea here is making the physical representation is worthless, putting all the value in the digital one. People would start caring a lot about NFTs if it was the "One True Source" of legitimacy.

---

If we wanted to have both representations be equally as valuable, the idea would instead be to have to trade in the card to get the NFT. Trading in the card would involve burning the physical representation and issuing a digital one. If you want the physical rep back, trade the NFT back for a printed card.

If you haven't heard of Unisocks (https://unisocks.exchange/), It's an implementation of this idea.
Even modern hyenas are formidable and I would not want to be surrounded by a pack of them. They regularly duel with lions.