skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2008 was 13 years ago. The past 13 years in the UAE have been nothing like even the past 30 years in the west. The difference between now and 2008 is incomprehensible, it’s simply not the same country.

In the past week I’ve visited a gay bar in a big Dubai hotel, the local synagogue and ate with the local Rabbi at a kosher restaurant in one of the top Dubai hotels (There’s one in the Burj Khalifa(!) and another at the Zabeel Saray) . In 2008 these things could’ve been unimaginable, today it’s normal.

The rulers are well aware that they can’t survive unless they modernize and at the very least catch up with the west.

> Also I have no reason to believe those rape laws are not still enforced the same way.

They literally don’t exist anymore, and hadn’t been enforced for years before they were struck off anyway.
> So what? It's 0% interest. It's incredibly helpful to have easy-access financing to split purchases across a few months.

Unfortunately, this often isn't the case of people who are worse off, not good at managing their finances, and often overwhelmed by bureaucracy.

They fall behind on payments, and then get taken to the cleaners on fees, deferred interest etc., often paying several times the actual price of the product. I've seen this happen (with different but similar services).

Less savvy people being sold stuff they can't afford on credit has been such a problem that some countries have made it illegal to extend credit to someone who can't afford it, which is obviously extremely hard to enforce.

This is hard to grasp for many here, because HN readers tend to be well above average intelligence. Try to think in terms of "imagine how dumb the average person is, and now realize half the people are dumber than that". Now add mental or physical health issues into the game.
For anyone still lusting to start bombing Belarus into compliance, Russia announced that any European Union flight that avoids Belarus airspace is prohibited from entering Russian airspace. Belarus and Russia are connected at the hip. Don't backdoor us into a nuclear holocaust because you think this is Libya or the Balkans. There are very dangerous escalations possible here if we're not careful. Are you really willing to kill thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions over this issue? Belarus might as well be Russia in this situation. Would you advocate for bombing Russia over something similar? If not, learn more about the relationship between Russia and Belarus before pushing us for a course of action that could quickly get out of hand.
> Citizen, using a new livestreaming service it had just launched called OnAir, would catch the suspect live on air, with thousands of people watching.

I'm sorry, is this describing real life or an episode of Black Mirror? It's so blatantly dystopian that I'm at a loss for words.
Where did you get the 2.8 million figure? Wikipedia says "an estimated 303,000 women killed each year in childbirth and pregnancy worldwide", which isn't the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_death
Any stylistic discussions are like that, I agree. The opinions that Go makes are themselves hand-wavy, like any stylistic opinion.

What's important to me is that the decision is already made, and when me and my team are writing code, we don't have to worry about making those decisions over and over again. They're already made for us. IME the costs/benefits of the different styles are not even worth the discussion, just pick something and move on. This is the aesthetic that I like about Go.
Which union would be best if you work on a starship?
The problem isn't the 5 years. It is the fact that Stream will have packages more towards the leading edge and potentially have more bugs. Then, when a bug is found in a package, RHEL gets the patch first, but then the patch needs to be re-worked to get it to apply against the newer version of the package that is in Stream. I don't know if the wall will still exist between CentOS and RHEL teams, where CentOS won't know of a(n) (embargoed) patch that RHEL has prior to public release. If they don't, then potentially something like Rocky will get the patch before Stream (due to the above mentioned re-working of the patch).

Now if that firewall between the two groups gets some holes poked in it, where Stream can start working with the patch sets prior to release on RHEL, then it may not be such an issue.
Climate Change? I deal with it without emotions. Things are what they are, and I want to optimize the outcome for my family. These are my predictions:

- Humanity will probably lose the fight, not because technology isn‘t available, but but because of political/social reasons, eg: prisoners dilemma.

- here in central/northern europe, i am in the privileged position that nothing serious will happen to me.

- food/water might become more scarce until vertical farming can close the gaps. Energy from renewables will be scaled to cover all needs, including stuff like desalination.

- there will be immigration waves from more and more uninhabitable regions. Leading to social unrests over time. Leading to some kind of national border building.

- armed military will starting „preventive deescalation“ against climate refugees. Probably with autonomous weapons to ease the bad feelings about this.

... so I invest in stocks for „clean Energy“, „Robotics & Automatization“, currently evaluating options for tech-agriculture and will finally looking into weapons (border protection) and surveillance (immobilize society).

Anyone else that follows a similar path?
I did a rules engine to the company that I work based in this specification, but using go language. It is a very successful project because our clients can create rules without tech people around in our frontend, it's very easy to translate our rules into json and store it.

I even did a library to implement it in go language: https://github.com/diegoholiveira/jsonlogic
They do mention every now and then how the accessibility features enable quite a lot of people to use their devices like everybody else. But you're right: they should advertise it much more. it is consistent with their user-centric approach to privacy.
Right; you're practicing inductive logic--something computers can't do--at all times, thus essentially predicting possible futures. Until this ability is present in software, there won't be an adequate replacement.
> The argument could be that drivers also only use vision, but other cars do come with radars to supplement driver's vision.

I don’t buy this argument at all, a lot of drivers are absolutely terrible. I think we should be making automated vehicles better than humans.
+1 on Brain Pickings. Recently discovered this and have been using the Surprise Me button to find random goods to read
https://www.brainpickings.org/surprise/
The video says that parts of the golem's armor are in fact megascans, iirc. But yes obviously some parts of it are manually modeled. I don't see why that's a problem - people have been making film quality assets for many years. The only thing that's new is it can run in real time now without a lot of work.
E-ink (especially with additional functional layers which typically overlay the e-ink itself) are pretty dark.

I find ink-on-paper to be difficult to read under direct sunlight as it is too dark. E-ink is virtually perfect contrast under such conditions.

With a "frontlight" layer, my Onyx BOOX is highly readable, though my preference is to have a bright light or reading light reflecting off of it, with the frontlight also enabled. In bright sunlight the additional light isn't necessary. In dim-lighting conditions, the light leakage through the inked-in portions is distracting.

One consequence is that "dark mode" formats are not well suited to e-ink, though they do remain generally readable. The fact that artefacts are more visible against a dark background may contribute to this.

I remember research and/or statements long ago (1980s) that brown ink on a slightly off-white paper has the highest readability, and know of several authors who had their books set like this. In general it's a good option.

For onscreen emissive displays, the variability between displays and ambient lighting conditions generally makes it a poor option, though for desktop use I'll often prefer a slight off-white background and very slightly muted text colour preferable. (Example of my typical CSS preferences: https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB)
I might be misunderstanding, of course, but would you be able to use the JSON protobuf serializers and just define your conditions as Protocol Buffers?

Might be heavyweight.
I remember years ago when i first came to hackernews there was a project very similar to this. An engineer blog proud of the AST they encoded as JSON.

I had only a vague idea of what an AST was, but the highest upvoted comment was clearly saying: This is dumb, we have dedicated formats for turning text into ASTs. ( i.e. a programming language ).

In the past decade+? i have learned what an AST is and have now twice, in a professional setting, prevented an engineer from re-inventing this very concept.

If i had to choose if hackernews is a place where smug snark comments crack down on re-inventing known concepts or a happy place where every idea is a good one i will choose the former.

And once every blue moon we get to laugh and look back at snarky comments such as this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I think we still must be missing something very fundamental with the way we’re doing AI.

When you look at nature and see a tiny bee or fly navigating perfectly around all sorts of obstacles, including the newspaper I’m trying to swat it with, using just that teeny tiny brain running of mili-watts of power with just compound eyes to guide it. And in 3D space not a nice flat surface.

But we still can’t make a car not drive into a massive concrete barrier?

Something is off. But that gives me hope that there’s a discovery waiting to be made that can fix it.
Do you have and references on your last point about algae? I have this (totally unsubstantiated) idea that plundering the oceans of fish along with rising temperatures will result in the oceans sequestering incredible amounts of CO2 via algae blooms. Never found much to read on the topic though - in what ways could this be negative feedback loop?
Autopilot is terrifying. I've been a huge admirer of Tesla for years. I've always wanted a Tesla. I test drove a Model 3 a few weeks ago and had a very negative experience. Auto-pilot/FSD are enabled in different ways (one pull of a stalk vs two). It shows up on the center screen as a small blue dot. There were times I wasn't sure if it was engaged, or if I needed to take control. Since the screen is to the right I had to take my eyes off of the road.

Part of the problem is me not trusting the car, but it's also because the system isn't very intuitive.
A note on blockchain bridges and layer-2 protocols
1947? Probably a lot of radio dramas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_drama#1930–1960s:_Widesp...

My dad, who grew up in the 40s and 50s, has mentioned before that they treated the radio just like the "family TV" of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
That might have been me also.
> I don't know what it is with a certain class of people who need to explain everything in reference to straight men.

> these same people would explain that due to straight men: "Because heterosexual men have penises, representations of penises are celebrated and glorified..."

You are setting up a bit of a weak man fallacy by presenting it this way without evidence, but I imagine there probably is cognitive dissonance around this (and other topics about men).

Partly, I think it's because there are no groups that represent or advocate for men. This hypothetical group, in the current cultural climate, could be hijacked by bad actors or other identity groups, or it could result in an even more monolithic or myopic view of men than exists in pop culture today. Such a group would need to be prepared to deal with these issues without being exclusionary, divisive, or dehumanizing. I think this challenging and would take all the right people to organize such a group.

Identity based groups tend to project a monolithic image of people that is inaccurate. For instance, if you browse the internet long enough you'll probably develop a fairly myopic view that lends towards some -isms that certain groups have, however, if you talk to people in different cultural regions you'll likely discover that what large groups represent is largely in-contest.

Edit: the earlier version of this comment confusingly stated that there's "good reasons" that these groups don't exist.
Fascinating. A passable route was discovered in 1434 by the Portuguese.

> Examining the Pilot Charts for this area, however, it becomes clear that the main concern lies in the changes in winds that occur at about the point at which Cape Bojador is passed in sailing down the coast. It is here that the winds start to blow strongly from the northeast at all seasons. Together with the half-knot set of current down the coast, these conditions would naturally alarm a medieval mariner used to sailing close to the land and having no knowledge of what lay ahead. In the end it was discovered that by sailing well out to sea—far out of sight of land—a more favorable wind could be picked up.
That the bounty sounded like that is enough to make it harmful and despicable. There are enough wingnuts out there who don't think about niceties that you can easily have someone jumping in and starting to assault someone who appears to be the wanted person (but probably isn't).
If I was starting "another CentOS" I would ensure that companies above a certain amount of revenue had to pay (either in licensing fees or in engineer time). Non-corporate and FOSS uses should remain free. The reason I suggest this is differences in user engagement.

It's hard to get community support for projects that are business-focused. A project that is very general-purpose can get quite a few volunteers or donations. But if businesses are the primary users, the project often gets little to no support from those businesses, and very infrequently any contributed code or support. Getting my own company to donate to an OSS project that they heavily depend on is like pulling teeth. Which is ridiculous, because without that project they'd be paying a lot more for proprietary software!
> at our coasts

From my initial comment it is crystal clear I am speaking about The Netherlands.
Is this a recent project? Anything using that ancient theme looks... ancient.
I'd say the purpose is more or less to show respect. By phrasing it as an idea or a suggestion, you give them the chance to (appear to) cooperate willingly.

Both people presumably do know what's really happening, and this is exactly why it's seen as unnecessary (and inconsiderate) to actually say it. There's no reason to call extra attention to something unpleasant.
I rather doubt IBM's lawyers are more friendly about trademark use.
It was the Phoenicians who did this, while Egyptians ordered and paid for it.
A CPU is effectively an interpreter itself, albeit one for machine code; seen this way, Sparkplug is a "transpiler" from Ignition bytecode to CPU bytecode, moving your functions from running in an "emulator" to running "native".
Yes, that has to be part of the picture. Otherwise manufacturing will be a race to the environmental bottom (as it is today).
How is it a loan? Can he recover the principle?
That's a difficult to answer question but you can take - small - comfort in the fact that humans as a species are incredibly adaptable and have managed to eke out a living where many other species failed.

To balance that out: our 'modern' way of living is pretty fragile and unless our numbers go down most likely completely unsustainable over millennia at numbers > a few billion unless we manage to move off-planet.
Yes, and there is a large chasm between discovery and information that is widely known and accepted among the population. For instance, many Europeans went with Ptolemy's less accurate calculation (made hundreds of years after Eratosthenes's) until the 16th century.
There are two aspects of time travel. The fancier one is time travel debugging. To use TTD, you run a program inside another. The outer program is called the monitor, and the monitor can freeze the inner program, and rewind the time back to some point. There is an API to do this, and examples showing how you have your own debugger. When you rewind, you can truncate the history and start fresh from that point onward. This is very useful for testing.

The second aspect of time control, the more simple one, is that you can jump the clock forward, and change the scaling of time at will, so that you can write tests to see if the alarm clock would ring as expected. That feature is as simple the std library functions that control the clock value and scaling. (set_clock_scale(), and set_clock()).

The ability to speed up time by a factor of 10 or 100 is a great time saver for those programs that have key sections, and slowing down time to 1/20th the normal rate (slo-motion) is wonderful for debugging animations. Many languages can set the clock, but not many have time scaling; a nicety.

Beads has a small standard library (compared to OSX or Java), but it has the key features you really need.
Oh no that is bad.
Yes, that one is where the accident occurred in the link I posted
I mean at a minimum their CO2 usage must be astronomical. Likely some of the highest per capita CO2 usage of any human beings ever.

Of course they also use their money to invest in development projects which will I would imagine have significant environmental effects.

In the case of Gates he has been widely criticized by people like Vandana Shiva for his agricultural ambitions pushing chemical intensive agriculture all over the developing world, which Shiva says will have massive negative environmental effects.

Gates also pushes in I believe the WTO for stronger intellectual property restrictions, which has a side effect of more products in the landfill as they are harder to repair.

Bezos has constructed a machine which consumes huge amounts of CO2 (Amazon) in the form of delivery trucks and a flood of cheap flimsy goods which consume energy when constructed and soon end up in landfills.

There’s a lot that billionaires do, by virtue of the power they have in this world, which damages the environment.
No true Scottish engineer would have made that error!
Tesla doesn't have a PR department. It was dissolved last year.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/15/teslas-decision-to-scrap-i...
Sounds a lot like "science progresses one funeral at a time"
AWS uses an in house tcp-like protocol optimized for distributed computing. Said protocol is implemented on a hardware nic. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=916...
From the insurance side: I found the throwaway's reference of MLR very confusing and seems to be misinformed about the ACA market and MLR caps in particular.

Exchange plans are just about the most price sensitive insurance product I can think of; in ACA markets typically the lowest premium plan will capture the overwhelming majority of the signups. Insurance co's are highly incentivized to optimize their MLR to provide the maximum amount of care up to the rebate threshold, while driving costs down as much as possible to ensure you can offer the lowest premium plan on the exchange and be the take-all winner.

Also, so much of prior auth, step therapy, etc are dictated by federal or state regulations and not necessarily what the insurer would like or prefer to do.

There are plenty of pain points in our insurance industry but to carte blanche blame "for profit" companies seems really lazy.
8 Damn Good Creative Hacks
Yup. Rodney Brooks, famed robot scientist and iRobot founder, says not to expect driverless taxis in cities earlier than 2035: https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

I don't think we quite need AGI to make something like a commercial urban taxi service work. For any given place, we can substitute a very large amount of training data. And I think we can get there through an approach like Waymo, where the taxi's number one job is to ask for central human help if it's in the slightest confused or at risk of causing harm. But even that will be a very long slog.

And for the supposed goal of "full self-driving", I agree that is basically AGI, because it requires levels of judgment that even humans struggle with. The other day I came across some Covid-related road changes and I had to reason about human intent as expressed in roads while exchanging human social signals with the people around me.

Brooks suggests we instead may see people trying to simplify the problem by banning humans and/or human drivers from areas where we want automated driving. That's anthema to me, but given the history of building to favor cars vs other modes and given the vast amounts of money behind these efforts, it wouldn't shock me that it turns out that way.
> It's much less likely to have huge broken up chunks and obstructions, and it's less problematic to have to haul yourself up the incline or potentially crash down the decline.

It's also much more dangerous. Making the sidewalks useable for wheelchair users is much better for everyone than forcing them to go on the road.
Cool idea!

I think it would be helpful to include on the website why this is better than something like Amazon Lightsail.

I tried signing up. It asked me to create a new project, so I did. But then I couldn't figure out the next step. There didn't seem to be any option for interacting with the project except "rename" and "delete."

It would be nice to avoid linking to my Google or Facebook account to use it, though it's nice that you don't request any permissions on my account.
Note how we didn't learn anything (precise or not) about the answer to the question from this comment, but we did learn your preferences about communication styles.
I have government contractors specify versions of Red Hat and they will not support other distributions. Of course, these vendors also specify versions of Windows Server that Microsoft recommends you no longer run.
Cool idea. You need a mobile CSS rule. Can’t read a thing.
I probably wouldn't have most of my family if I'd gone to a hospital. My twins would have been a C-section, and then the scar would have led to another C-section and to troubles with the placenta invading the scar. Before long the uterus just plain wouldn't work OK, and would endanger the lives of future babies. Avoiding a C-section is really important for having a large family. My 13th is due in 6 weeks.
I've recently read that the word "pesticide" is a weaponized term, in that you wouldn't label human medicine that way, but for ideological reasons this reframing is done to a plant's medicine.

OTH nobody would use medicine daily and call that a natural state of being (unless you're acutally or chronically sick).

Our food supply depends on these plant-medicines becuase without our cultivated crops aren't strong enough to survive or yield significantly less.
>>What is really the meaningful difference between this and an s-expression language?

>Turing completeness.

S-expressions in and of themselves are obviously not Turing complete. This language could easily have been encoded in S-expressions, just like Lisp can be encoded as JSON. (Like, trivially, as lists with quoted strings instead of atoms, or using whatever object-based syntax.)
Everything about birth is incredible. For example it’s extremely common to defecate while giving birth. Oh no lots of germs and bad for baby right? Actually the exposure helps jumpstart the infants gut biome.

And in the 1930s they were trying to figure out why there’s a type of sugar in breast milk which the infant can’t digest. Why the weird evolutionary waste? It turns out these oligosaccharides are there to feed not the baby but the good bacteria in the gut. The incredible and amazing mother anatomy. Amazing in so many levels.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-018-00007-1
I am in love!