skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The person you're criticizing got a PhD in astrophysics. They definitely would be familiar with all the situations you describe. They've probably also read the wikipedia page for Kuhn's book.

The reality is that Loeb made a claim that is not inconsistent with evidence, but is very fanciful. And the alternative hypotheses are all simpler, and explain the observations well enough that I think either Occam's razor or common sense would say that unless Loeb can somehow conjure up some unquestionable data, it's unlikely his claim will ever be verified or falsified and the mainstream will continue to believe (rightly, I think) that we didn't just see an alien corvette.

Hoofbeats mean horses, not zebras, unless you're on the African savannah, or something like that.
Less astroturfing than being full of children.
I was amazed to read about W.E.B DuBois and his scientific work documenting the effect of systemic racism back in the 1900s in Philadelphia and that it leads to disparate health outcomes. There was a show on PBS that referenced it with respect to covid disparities among minorities showing that Dr. DuBois was way ahead of his time. In fact, we, as a society, still haven't learned anything more than 100 years later!
From the introduction: "The fund is managed by OpenAI, with investment from Microsoft and other OpenAI partners."

It's a separate fund.

> Peter Thiel once made a case that if Google ever paid a dividend it would be an admission that they are no longer a technology company

Well.. duh? They might be a tech company and pay dividends, but they aren't a growth company when that happens. This is sharemarkets 101.
Alternatively: three similar accusations of different events by different people without any other relationship seems like that should be enough to outweigh a nice text message that got sent once, no?

I mean, maybe not. You disagree. But you disagree because you JUDGE the evidence differently, not because of any fundamental truth.

To wit: get off your high horse. You're doing the same thing you called another poster "sexist" for doing.
This is a rather ad hominem attack which does not really refute his point or lead to a good discussion.

If we're going to critique someone it does not do them justice to criticize their scientific pedigree just because some of their ideas are fringe (as you rightly pointed out they have sufficient scientific rigor and have published real work that shows they understand the subject matter at an expert level).

It would be much more fruitful to critique the ideas in question (as was done in response to his papers) which would be the correct way to go about it.
I just feel like Stripe is inherently limited because of who they work with. They're not the top of the totem pole. So it means that they can't screw you over, otherwise some investor is going to wise up, take a small amount of capital and work directly with the processors. I imagine you could bootstrap a Stripe alternative with just under $1,000,000-5,000,000.

I mean what's stopping people from signing up directly with Chase Paymentech or Wells Fargo Merchant Services and just creating their own Stripe? Or if you wanted to, talking directly with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.

There's an absolute floor to these solutions, and it's clearly 2.9% + 25-30c. You cannot grow beyond this. You have to do more.

If you're interested in doing this, I'll help you build the team.
The worst things are the often-non-repeatable or content-sensitive key mappings.

Press up once to edit the last message. Press enter. Press up again nothing happens.

Enter means enter except within a code block when it means shift-enter.

It feels as awful as using Matlab and missing the += from Octave. Like no one tried to use their own product. It makes me sad.
The author has deleted their Twitters and Discord too, and the domain has gone. Seems very scorched earth, I hope they're OK. (Not least because I love to see new publishing platforms and wish them all the best)
Except if you and your friend have the same area of expertise. I'd actually think that's more likely. These fields are super specialized.
What makes you like Pragmata Pro better? Do you think it's almost $250 dollars better than Iosevka?

Great fonts bring me a lot of joy, but Pragmata Pro always felt fairly ridiculously priced to me. I know the author put a lot of time into it, but 99% of the font's features are irrelevant to me (I'll never use Hebrew, for instance, or even the non-mono version of the font).
Linux GUI app support now shipping as part of the Windows Subsystem for Linux
So what is the solution there? Should twitter and facebook have their own internal legal system, decided upon by democratic vote as I was just describing? What would make it inherently less tribal if they did that? Would that stop large groups of people from all deciding to vote as a block and criticize one person all at once? Or is the goal something else? Surely, if this problem were theoretically solvable by a social media site, there should be some different way to operate one?
You have not 'given away' a chunk of your company. What you will have is starting capital and that can be the difference between getting off the ground or not starting at all. Capital is the lifeblood of early stage start-ups, you either need a revenue stream, your own capital or you will need investors. There aren't that many alternatives.

If you are happy with slower growth, then of course you don't need to get outside investment.

See:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/three-roads-to-the-top-of-the-mo...

An oldie, but still quite applicable to the start-up scene today.
> Burden of proof for what?

For me to believe their accusations. It's not just something that exists in the courts, it's a principle that many (most?) people adhere to in their lives. If you have one co-worker who accuses the other of stealing their phone, would you punish the accused without first asking how they know they stole it or looking at camera footage of the time of the alleged theft?

It's not illegal for you to believe unsubstantiated accusations (not just unsubstantiated, but unsubstantiated in the face of exculpatory evidence). It's not illegal for a boss to fire an employee over an unsubstantiated accusation. Legal, but still harmful to society.
Let's be honest, software people are pretty disrespectful about hardware, too.
Both things can be wrong. ProJared didn't victimize Vanessa Guillen so it's a category error to put the military cover up that happened with people lying about ProJared and him showing receipts on how he wasn't victimizing people.
> You’re telling me that P90 is not the weapon to save the galaxy?

Except for that season where the prop shop couldn’t find P90 ammo, so they switched to an AR pistol.
On the one hand, I'm glad that there's more public effort in developing user interfaces beyond what's 'standard,' today. It indicates that "the market" senses the need. I applaud this venture.

On the other hand, they could start by not using such an eye-searing color scheme for their website.
In Waterhouse's book, she isn't simply assuming that "ASD is a single disorder". (Although she does argue that if you study the history of ASD research, a lot of it has been based on that assumption, and that even in recent years people still get funding for research projects which effectively presume that.)

One of her arguments in particular is that the tying of the two symptom domains of social impairments and repetitive behaviours into a single disorder – or group of related disorders, or spectrum – (she doesn't think those three different framings of "ASD" ultimately change the conclusion) lacks good scientific justification. But, that was one of Kanner's most basic assumptions, and if you break that link what you have isn't autism anymore – you've actually got something much closer to her own proposal of "phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment" (or, DSM-5 social pragmatic communication disorder with the repetitive behaviour exclusion removed)
It's all fun and games until you try to expose a networked application from within WSL2. Throw Docker into the mix and you've wasted half a day configuring this nonsense.
They're the opposite of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Has a satellite campus ever worked anywhere?
Leveraging Sequential I/O in S3 to Improve Web Query Performance on DoltHub
Well, here in AU we definitely need better government policies - as our current administration is hellbent on coal and gas, and penalising renewables. As per the story linked in TFA, written by two former AU prime ministers, the reasons for this aren't hard to identify.

Depending on panel capacity and storage size, then yeah, you may find they align - but it's all a tradeoff. My point with those numbers is that for a reasonably small cost (compared to say the capex of a house build, which is the time these things should be installed) you can get very close to self-reliance in terms of electricity, at least at a residential scale, so we're not all held up by grid-scale storage systems. Commercial consumers of electricity tend to have predictable cycles, and therefore their baseload is much easier to manage.
On what money? Good luck as a former dining hall employee (salary < 40 kUSD) against the near-unlimited endowment of Smith College.
That's not a nice thing to say, it doesn't come across like that at all. Just like not every article mentioning Docker is 'a puff piece to sell Docker'. Roll-up vehicles are simply tools available to companies seeking investors.
> Just like any false accusation: it has to go to court

What? This makes no sense. There is no crime being alleged here. No one is trying to send this guy to jail, so what would there be to try in court?

Someone said this guy was creepy. Guy says he isn’t creepy and provides some evidence. Everyone is free to look at the situation and make their own judgement.

The idea that we are only allowed to believe things proven in court is asinine.
Well, that one too. Honestly, one of the consequences of having a team consisting mostly (but not entirely!) of industry vets: we've collectively seen a lot of shit. In fact, a topic I would never want to bring up among Oxide employees: who has had an acquisition in their career gone the worst? There are just too many contenders, which itself is a sad commentary on the industry!
> life could have evolved in interstellar space

This is not a "fringe" idea; it's been a fairly common speculation for decades. What's different about the paper you cite, AFAIK, is the idea that the CMBR during the epoch he describes was the heat source. But there's nothing "fringe" about the CMBR temperature he gives for that epoch; that's standard mainstream cosmology.

> he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas

That's actually what tenure is for--to give people the security to be able to explore all kinds of ideas, many of which appear weak and untestable, and most of which will never pan out, but a few of which will end up creating enormous value. Loeb's ideas may never pan out, but that doesn't make it wrong for him to explore them or publish them or use his tenured position as a secure base from which to do those things.

What I find off-putting about the article is the fact that he appears to think that resistance to unconventional ideas is somehow wrong. It's not. It's a part of the same dynamic of scientific progress as his proposing of unconventional ideas. Even ideas that end up proving correct still get resisted at first, and that's the way it has to be; it's not some defect that we could somehow avoid if we were just smart or open-minded enough. If he wants to play the role of "explorer of unconventional ideas", he should be willing to take what comes with that territory.
Truth is always an absolute defense to libel. If you can back up what you’re saying, libel isn’t a concern.

And if you can't prove what you're saying is true, then why are you saying it?
I've learned a lot about the internet by reading the history of the wild west. The open frontier where the only rule was what you could do with your own hands. Then comes the frontier towns where the ability to enforce law was difficult at best. When justice feels far away, often we rely on mobs to fill that gap.

This used to happen on a community scale...people would get run out of town. More or less, that's still what's happening, except the city limits are more conceptual. This is what it looks like when the justice system doesn't keep up with society.
Interesting.

If someone were to intentionally publish indexes that associate pirate titles with non-pirate SHAs, I imagine they’d be able to cause a lot of trouble for the DMCA takedown industry.
I think this is a really interesting idea. It does seem more effective for validating that reviewers are not torching the work of others — is there a nice way to validate that reviewers are not giving their friends a pass, short of reviewing the manuscript and the review?
The cynicism on this thread is startlingly bad.

OpenAI is one of the top 5 AI research groups in the world. Getting early access to their systems is an amazing opportunity.

Of course they should fund AI startups: $100M isn't much for Microsoft and others to put up as an investment in a Sam Altman-led fund, and innovation is what happens elsewhere.
You could probably improve the article by disclosing this info in the body.
Is the world really that much more complex? Our ancestors ate eggs, raised children, and dealt with the homeless. We can muddle through with suboptimal solutions.
If they wanted people to be able to resell titles while taking a cut, they could easily facilitate that now. Why would Valve turn to NFTs to solve that problem?
Scittle Bookmarklet Creator
I fully support the concerns that the author brings up. It's a big problem and we need to figure out how to address it. At the same time, I can't help but notice that this is coming from the ACM itself. The credibility of ACM has really tanked in my eyes in the last 2 - 3 years. Communications of the ACM magazine is full of articles that belong to the "social engineering magazine" and not to the Computer Science publication. Last time I was renewing my membership, I had to sign some kind of a pledge "not to harass people". Are you kidding me? What are we, 12? Because of that, while it's a very important issue, I am very distracted thinking about ACM itself. I guess this is a lesson that reputation and credibility is important. Once you lose it, everything you say, even if it's truly good, gets colored in a certain way.
Why? This post barely has 30 votes. Did it blow up somewhere else on the web?
Yes that didn't exactly instill confidence
trust emerges in situations with iterated interaction; defecting is most effective in anonymous or discrete situations, since there is less opportunity for punishment.

america has urbanized rapidly in the last half century, at the same time that family formation has broken down and life-long jobs have become a thing of the past. we are atomized and thrust into constant competition. i don't mean to idealize a past that i did not even experience, but there is something to be said for having roots and knowing your neighbors. we arguably have more opportunity at the cost of stable identity -- reputation and trust naturally accrete around the kind of stability we lack.

if you talk to older people, people around my grandparents' age or thereabouts, you will hear that they no longer recognize america, that it is fundamentally different than the culture they grew up in, in terms of values. i find myself thinking about this a lot.
> I've heard nothing but bad things about the LG 5K display…

I've been using one for a year. It would be hard to use anything else.
What screenshots can be proven to be real?
Clever... I might have to steal this one.
> You shouldn't be able to call someone out for being an asshole?

I don't think it's a new concept that 'calling someone out' should have something behind it: evidence, credibility, or at least plausibility. The problem is that regardless of the truth, evidence is not often likely to exist, who is credible on social media has become wildly subjective, and plausibility is easily back-filled with further innuendo.
Or 1% of that cash into improving Steam?
But you can use Python to write Vim and NeoVim plugins already. It's arguably an even better language than Lua.
Clearly. Effective parody exaggerates reality, which she does.

The quote works because it sounds like a large number of similar, genuine ones.
Correct. The only court in the US that could issue a decision binding in both cases would be the Supreme Court, should any appeals make it that far. However, courts can and do look to existing opinions in case law.
Oftentimes the best we can do is make "educated guesses". Most domain experts, myself included, think it less likely that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab. This is not a unanimous position, and most scientists probably don't have a "dogmatic" view of this. Rather, we seek first to find and understand the consensus position, and then to test it.

That you or anyone else might disagree, or might not be able to imagine what type of mental model would lead to such an "educated guess", neither reverses the burden of the proof, nor eliminates the presumption of good faith, nor Occam's razor.

Taking the position that it came from a lab requires more assumptions and more unsubstantiated beliefs than not taking this position. It's just like Russel's teapot.
/e/ ?
How is this a similar situation? No one ever made accusations against Scott Alexander. No one said he did anything wrong.
Not going to defend that phrasing, but I do think that a lay person questioning *scientific consensus is generally of zero usefulness.

Loeb's assertions are generally rejected by the scientific mainstream precisely because they are questioned. If they weren't questioned (if he wasn't a domain expert), they'd be ignored.
Science's tooling is useful. Hypotheses, experiment, falsifiability... all useful.

Science need not be a dogma.

If something came along that was more useful than science's tools, somehow, I'm sure we would adopt those.
You know, ordering quantities of USB/Thunderbolt cables is already a nightmare and now I really have to worry about this crap?

Does anyone have a "meets all the damn specs" USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 cable they recommend?
actually, having gotten a phd and attended many journal clubs, "seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count" is as strong a point as anybody can make.

Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out to find any and all flaws in a paper to demolish it (typically once you have found 2-3 major flaws, it's fine to just assume the paper is wrong, or got the right answer by chance).

I remember the day we had a journal club on Bell's Theorem papers. We went through the EPR paper and the Bell papers. I argued and argued and argued for a deterministic universe and then somebody asked me if I had heard of the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment (I hadn't; it was published in a Phys Rev Lett a year before, which the physics people read but the biologists didn't). Once I finished up reading that I realized that I had to let go every assumption I had about locality and entanglement and relearn how the universe works through the lens of QM. I am heartened to see that people are still trying out ideas like superdeterminism, but I have to admit, all the data supports the basic QM model of the universe.
If I'm reading the arxiv search results right, he put out 54 preprints last year in what looks like to me, a non-astronomer, to be a huge variety of different topics.
> I'm not a huge fan of Lua either mind you

If you liked emacs-lisp, perhaps you should try Fennel. It's a tiny Lisp that compiles to Lua with zero overhead.

It's pretty dope.
Precisely this, he is perfectly within his right to explore these ideas, that can and in fact should be done. His reaction to the reaction of the wider community is rather odd, and has probably caused him more harm than good in the long run.
> under the principle of res judicata rather than stare decisis

Thanks for the clarification.
Stripe WAS "just means payments processing" and changed course to "increase the GDP of the internet". That is exactly the point of the article.
>>> Those who refuse to consider an unconventional idea in science are disturbingly similar to those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope

While that's a headline and not the text of the article (hence possibly added by an editor), it is worth clarifying the history. When Galileo reported his telescopic observations, the Vatican astronomers went so far as to buy a telescope from him, and after some initial difficulty with it, confirmed his observations.

The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened.

As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved.

An odd issue that we face with extraterrestrials, or non-earthly beings in general, is that they can be introduced as an explanation for anything, and have been for 5000+ years. We don't have a good way of scientifically investigating extraterrestrial hypotheses.
r/homelab is pretty decent too
Things are pretty alright over here! Most of the island has recovered since the 2017 hurricane, the remaining damage (at least in the metropolitan area) is road signage and some screwed up power lines here and there.

The virus has been under control as well. We’re slowly going back to normalcy. Case numbers are dropping and so are deaths. The vaccination campaign is working.

TLDR: Things are getting better :)
> demand from the Nederlands is appropriately reduced.

You mean supply is reduced?

> There is no single magical solution to this problem. Everyone needs to do their part.

To reduce demand in your country:

1) Immediately apply significant increase of tax on all products that emit CO2 produced in your country.
2) Place tariffs on all imports from countries who do not apply similar taxes.

...
What am I missing?
You can tell someone what good criteria are for wines, why not forming opinions? They're not obligated to listen to you, but I don't get saying that you can't advise.

Beyond that though, when our opinions have consequences, we have an obligation to form them carefully when they affect others. Not being able to force someone to behave well doesn't mean there aren't reasonable criteria available for them.
I don't think the quantity of laws is really an issue as long as they are being applied fairly and (and this is the vague part) society views them as generally just.
Wait until you have to do tech support for someone who has a USB-C charging cable that doesn't work connecting their hard drive. Singular cable wasn't in the specs.
And I'm fine with that. If this was the comment I replied to, my reply would be "Could you elaborate on what you find reprehensible on the way he acts and posts?" to try to understand better what's the issue here, but that's it. I don't find your comment biaised against right-wingers.
Any tips on finding angel investors in the Midwest? Unless you're manufacturing, agriculture, or research no one wants to invest. My contact info is mike<at>candid.dev.
Anecdotally I experienced chest pain after my Pfizer vaccine. I’m not claiming it’s anything but coincidence, though this does raise my concern slightly.