skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you spend a lot of time alone? In my experience if left to myself I'll just keep working. Having friends/partner who pull you away is nice.

If your answer is yes I'd say find a community join some classes or meetups not related to tech
A ton of modern historical research comes from trawling through very boring old records. Import/export financial records, church tithe ledgers, birth lists, etc.

You might be surprised what a researcher in 2060 will get out of your high school newspaper (especially as the ability to computationally aggregate old digitized primary records continues to advance).
I started sleeping on the floor about six months ago. Carpet, thin duvet folded beneath me. I’ve looked at a dedicated shikibuton-type-setup, but the paradox of choice has stricken pretty hard.

It wasn’t from any sort of plan or goal, I just started doing so after some time spent crashing on my living room floor watching movies with my roommate.

I like that I get up quicker in the morning. And it’s been a more dedicated sleeping setup than a bed has ever been. Surprisingly, I’ve found that almost every time I’ve slept on a normal mattress (few different ones) since, I’ve had some back or neck pain the next day.
It's possible they are more focused on extensions with lots of users. My extensions with tens of thousands of users have been under increased scrutiny in the last year or two, and have had several false positive issues arise, which has been frustrating.
Xoogler.

This is almost impossible by design. As mentioned before, every field on a protobuf is tagged for sensitivity, meaning right down to the bare disks there is privacy controls on data.

Engineers under orders to decrypt & copy data literally could not, without a delegated authority from senior people (some will be GDPR officers too), and there would need to be a staggering level of process failure just to get at the data for a few users.

Ultimately you have to decide if you trust Larry & Sergey, nobody else could make this happen. But insider risk just isn't going to happen from a company that treats user data like military treat classified documents.
It is very much a cultural thing. What makes you think that it isn't?

In some cultures, men (non-romantically) holding hands is perfectly normal. In some cultures, a woman and a man shaking hands would be scandalous. In some cultures, touching somebody else's head would be considered extremely rude. The rules as to what constitutes acceptable behaviour, what constitutes sexual behaviour, etc. are clearly different in different cultures.

"Touch has a high degree of cultural relativity. Thus, the meaning of touch can only be understood in its cultural context (Guindon et al., 2017; Halbrook & Duplechin, 1994; Phelan, 2009)."

"Sexualization Of Touch: Americans, in general, have difficulty conceptualizing physical contact as nothing more than emotional nurturance and tend to avoid touch for fear of being misunderstood (Hunter & Struve, 1998; Zur, 2007a, 2007b)."

https://www.zurinstitute.com/touch-in-therapy/
I agree. It took a while before I was able to leave office behind after a long week. And while I still have.. homework of sorts, I now go out of my way to play with things that are not related to my job at all ( just bought pine time dev kit -- this will be fun ).
you're not wrong, most of the talk about dangers of AI comes from opinionated AI dilettantes like Musk who then throw millions of dollars on pointless "AI safety" initiatives.

I just hope some of that money would trickle down to fundamental research into inner workings of common sense.
The only universal, fixed-size encoding is UTF-32, which, as you can imagine, is very wasteful on space for ASCII text. Like it or not, most of the interesting strings in a given program are probably ASCII.

UTF-16 is not a fixed-size encoding thanks to surrogate pairs. UCS-2 is a fixed-size encoding but can’t represent code points outside the BMP (such as emoji) which makes it unsuitable for many applications.

Besides, most of the time individual code points aren’t what you care about anyway, so the cost of a variable-sized encoding like UTF-8 is only a small part of the overall work you need to support international text.
Nice article. Love your website. Small, no bloat, how the entire internet should be
I’ve always said that an exhaust should only be as loud as the vehicle or motorcycle is fast. I put exhausts on my vehicles and motorcycles that free the flow of air which makes the engine (an air pump) perform better. I never put one on a slow vehicle just to make it louder. Consider this the same as overclocking a cpu. You are burning up more electricity than you “need” to, all for your own personal greed or need for speed? The door swings both ways.
Their point is that ProtonMail specifically does encrypt emails on the server. That's their headlining feature. Only clients are supposed to be able to decrypt them.
We also have excess deaths to measure covid deaths against: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

Some are graphed here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

You can see that some countries that did lock down, e.g. Norway didn’t have significant excess mortality so this can dispel any myths about lockdowns themselves causing excess mortality. I’m sure some people will argue that the excess deaths in their country were caused by the lockdown, but in my experience it’s not worth your time arguing back at this stage.
Silent bed frame. Most of the other parts aren’t as big of a deal. It’s kind of nutty how much difference it makes.

I tried to find out what model we have, but “I found it by searching silent bedframe on Amazon” is the closest answer you’ll get. :)
not the person you are replying to, but for me, it applies the same. I only have uBlock Origin and password manager for extensions, and my phone has very few apps. I don't trust other devs to not succumb to temptation, so I don't use their apps. It would not be difficult for me to give up the smart phone for a feature phone.
I ride such a "bigger more powerful bike with a flat torque curve", and there are two issues:

1. As a sibling said, there's the issue of weight. If you're inexperienced, it WILL bite you in the ass. Especially since the engine being very powerful and having great brakes, when "just starting slowly" it won't feel heavy. Hell, mine gives you the feeling it stands upright on itself. But try braking a bit harder while maneuvering and getting it tilted, and you better expect the 300 kg to want to get down.

2. As per 1, powerful engine + heft + (usually) great suspension give you a bike that feels very, very safe. Plus the torque from way down low never seems to quite "rush" you since you don't have to rev it. So it gives you confidence. Except that even though you don't feel like going fast, you actually are going fast. So you get fairly quickly in deep water, and everything is great while the sea is calm. The sea floor is right there! But you never know. Ride a bit too fast in a turn, and you better hope there aren't any trees around...
The Most Terrible Polar Exploration Ever (2012)
That's what you get for making stupid decisions based on ideology instead of facts.

Protonmail says it very clearly that all mail is encrypted on their servers. If you expect search functionality from them you don't get encryption. You bought into some random surveillance state propaganda.

Google isn't interested in the mail of your random startup, they are happy expanding their cloud footprint. In return you get good search and top notch mail servers.

Make sane decisions instead of ideological ones. Product-wise there is not a thing wrong in the world with GMail.
Actually I have been sleeping on a hard mattresses for years. They are/were barely softer than the floor.

Never had any back pains.

And my father's doctor agrees with your doctor, and I have had this kind of bed since my early childhood.

I have trouble sleeping in soft beds of hotels and other places.
what folks don't seem to grasp is that hardware is (conceptually) software, except it much harder to change...

And it works the other way, too, c.f. Lisp Machine.

And then there were mainframes B6700 had loadable microcode that 'swapped in' different instructions depending on the higher-level language being run: http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/burrough...
Not that far, someone just needs to make a JupyterLab plugin that uses Automerge or a similar OT/CRDT structure for collaborative editing documents in a workspace (perhaps using WebRTC data channels for P2P sync between clients, or stick with the tried and true server model like Google docs). The trouble is turning that into something as polished and secure as Google Docs collaborative editing experience--there's a _lot_ of work to get there with tons of little corner cases, security issues (you're potentially giving strangers over the internet access to remotely run code in your browser--that should raise big alarm bells), etc. to think through. But the basic stuff is all out there for someone motivated to pick up and go wild with.
Microsoft has suspended new Chinese accounts on LinkedIn. I expect that they'll eventually be forced to completely separate the Chinese LinkedIn from the rest of the world. Can't have anyone mentioning Tiananmen Square on June 4.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/11/tech/linkedin-china-microsoft...
One interesting thing that happened in that era was the unlikely friendship that developed between Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini.[1][2]

Doyle was a true believer in spiritualism while Houdini was a debunker of it.

They became friends despite this conflict of views, but later had a falling out over it when Doyle arranged for a seance for Houdini where Houdini's dead mother allegedly appeared.

[1] - https://www.wildabouthoudini.com/2016/04/the-real-story-of-h...

[2] - https://medium.com/picture-palace/harry-houdinis-spiritual-f...
I am thinking of getting a hospital-type bed with support for head elevation. GERD is getting the better of me these days and 2 pillows to prop me up is not doing it.
https://2fa.directory is another one
> how fake American smiles and “how are you?”s are

Yeah, I wouldn't call it fake, just a different vocabulary, so to speak. You just need to mentally translate it into your cultural equivalent (smile = neutral face, “how are you?” = "hello", etc.)
Sometimes I'll think about bugs or try and learn something over the weekend for work. But I only do it for as long as I enjoy it. The second I don't enjoy it I do something else. It's my time, not my employers. I enjoy programming, that's why it's my job. It's only natural that I'll do it in my free time too sometimes.

It's up to you really. If you enjoy doing work related stuff for free then do it, but most people don't enjoy that and I presume you probably don't either. You just like the act of software development. So start some personal projects to scratch that itch when you have it.
I love this quote from here: https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/

"We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments."

That's why not only the very earliest Usenet posts, before Spencer started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in 1979) but even some of the posts in the 1980s are still lost. It's too bad; today, wouldn't more of us rather see what was being said about abortion in 1984 than sift through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have probably been long since retired? "It was perfectly reasonable from the viewpoint of stuff that we might want to use again, but a little sad from today's viewpoint," Spencer admits.

--------

One of the challenges is that, even if storage comes close to free, the management of "everything" isn't. I've been going through this with cleaning up my photo library. It's not that a TB or so of storage matters much one way or the other but getting rid of dupes and near-dupes, adding better metadata, and so forth is a lot of work.
Weighted blankets have been a nice upgrade for me personally, I have a 30lb. It's not too heavy for me, and the standard weight is 20-25.

I can't recommend them to people who sleep in warm ambient temperatures, they generally trap heat.

Does anyone have pillow recommendations for people who sleep on your side?
You’re replies are very frustrating. It’s like you’re completely missing the point of the replies and focusing on very tiny, irrelevant details. Nobody is claiming that you can’t remove deactivated accounts. Only that you charge for them until you go through the rather annoying process of contacting customer support. And then you make some bad excuse that it’s in the name of security because somebody could potentially make and deactivate millions of accounts. Obviously there could be a middle ground of allowing someone to deactivate 5 accounts per month or something.

I suggest you either stop responding, or actually respond to the issues people have, and don’t make excuses that are paper thin.
American here:

I did it last night with a cashier and she laughed and was, I think, amused by the novel response. It seemed to brighten her up a small amount. She then continued to make conversation by saying “Well let’s see if we can’t get you to better than normal.” That was slightly offputting and I wish she didn’t feel the need to take it there. I’m perfectly content with feeling “normal”.

I suppose the way I think of it is like dynamic range of expression. Normal is baseline and perfectly suitable. It’s where I like being. Great or bad are for special cases where I feel extraordinary.
An email/SaaS provider that explicitly markets themselves as "private", complaining that "CAPTCHAs are very hard to build", and will therefore sacrifice user privacy is too rich.

What in tarnation are we paying you for?
hcaptcha is so much harder than recaptcha. You actually have to spend a couple seconds per photo sometimes. Not ideal for users.
"Being an asshole is an essential part of the riding thrill." Fixed that for you.
To achieve this, we'll need buy-in from the experienced.

I'm a contractor who has programmed for just over 30 years (20 professionally) and my current employer doesn't mind what hours I work, as long as I get my work done. They like having me onsite for reassurance, and I appreciate their positive energy since I can be hard on myself and set unrealistic expectations and take it hard when I miss the boat. So a schedule that optimizes bang for the buck and prevents work-halting burnouts could work for us.

But see, the key there is that the people I'm working with are a bit older than me and they get it. They've seen downturns but had the discipline to persevere. There's no gnashing of teeth when I explain the realities of what we're up against. We just buckle down and form a plan and do the work, whatever it takes.

In the past, I've worked for people who never noticed merit or achievement. Find a solution and pull a rabbit out of your hat one day, they want you to come into work early the next and maybe even work on the weekend. I realize now that they had personal problems that were never addressed. Maybe they were workaholics due to troubles in their home lives. Maybe they lived in areas that were too expensive for them or were in debt or just needed the money to live.

What I'm saying is that we imagine our employers to be these impeccable titans of industry, when really they're just people trying to make a way in the world too. Maybe they have someone above pressuring them to have a better month or quarter. Maybe they've never had a raise either, due to structural problems in our economy that have been reaching the boiling point over the last 40 years. They're in the midst of dysfunction just like us but have to reach even further to see a way out of it because their livelihoods depend on things outside their control, like having to rely on the people they employ. The anxiety for them must be crushing sometimes.

If we want to manifest a real change in the world like a 20 hour workweek, I think that we need to step back and see the situation from all sides and recognize that this is a local maximum. We can see how much better things are just across the way, but it feels like an impossible dream. It's a leap of faith.

To make it a reality, we need a plan. We need savings to have leverage. We need access to capital. We need connections. We need examples of where shorter hours lead to higher productivity, morale and sustainability. We need drop-in business tools that find tax advantages when 2 people work for half the hours that 1 would, which already happened in fast food and retail in their race to the bottom.

But we need to do better than them. Identify risk that leads to long hours/low wages and find concrete solutions to that risk. Provide ourselves real vision and leadership to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps. Create a repeatable process that others can copy and build from.
I have this problem too. I’m 2m tall and 118kg. I destroy most sitting or sleeping things eventually. It’s surprisingly reasonable to get custom made mattresses in the uk. Current one is 2.10m long. Perfect
Has anyone tried out the Bryte bed?
If you try it in Private Browsing you might be able to view the article.

Alternate article from a not terribly reputable source: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/nhs-england-weeks...
Rumpl blanket on floor, comforter and fleece as tops. Throw pillow between knees and a second for head, occasionally using a blanket to pad either.

I could probably stand to get another bottom layer.
Maybe the singularity is really really slow, and this is our pace of observation: the inexorable slide into the virtual.
> It occurs to me that a useful browser feature would have automatic "never save cookies ever" and then have a whitelist to add sites that I want to retain cookies on.

That's fairly easy to accomplish. I keep my ~/.mozilla in git and essentially git reset it on startup. Everything I didn't explicitly commit into it - gone!
Do you have any recommendations for where to buy or brand? My biggest fear with these is that the build quality can be all over the place and the last thing I want is to burn down the place!
As far as sheets go, if money is no object, these are absolutely fantastic: https://www.sferra.com/products/sferra-giza-45-sateen-collec.... Warning, a full set will come to about $10,000 (though they do periodic 20% off sales).

I also got a duvet from them so that the duvet cover would match the size of the duvet.

Also, they'll customize the sheets to your mattress if you send them measurements. I haven't found any other way to get a tight-fitting sheet, as it seems that king mattresses and sheets have a wide range of sizes, and the last thing you want is to splurge on amazing sheets that give you a bad night's sleep cause they don't fit properly.
QUESTION:

Are people who have died in car accidents counted as COVID-19 deaths?

ANSWER:

No. There is a two-level system in place to make sure death counts are accurate.

www.wusa9.com/amp/article/news/verify/covid-deaths-car-crash-comorbidities-coronavirus-death-total-counts-john-hopkins-study/65-e3842ed2-f753-4a15-8b97-c2ae75c2b2ce
Cross-Toolkit Software
Setting up dovecot, postfix to receive emails is a fun few hours that have continued to work forever.

Sending mail to gmail requires setting up extra processes that most times won't work anyways. Sending mail from an unknown ip is like sending it from a blacklisted address. To avoid this I use my isp to send the mail.

Setup time including thunderbird settings is under an 2 hours for many.
Huh, is that "Radio War Nerd" aka War Nerd aka Gary Brecher aka John Carroll Dolan? I used to read his stuff all the time in the early aughties. It seemed like he was the one other person in the world who liked explosions and wasn't also taking crazy pills (i.e., literally the rest of the media corps).

Dolan came up with Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames in the eXile ( Moscow in the 1990s! Wow!) then did his own thing. Ames wrote `В Россию с любовью` sometime in the aughts. Taibbi we all know.

They're all still best buddies; who knows what kind of crazy stuff they got up to in 90s Moscow. Funny stuff.
Thanks !
Yeah, if the job can be done by installing one Python package, why use docker :P
Hunter-gatherer societies across the world have, historically, fared poorly when agricultural or pastoral societies have moved into their territory. Complete extermination (i.e. genocide) or complete assimilation is the rule, not the exception. Such genocides happened all over the world but have mostly passed out of living memory with the winners preferring not to be reminded of them. This didn't happen in Canada for several reasons.

Most native tribes, especially in the West, were not crushed militarily, as they were in the U.S.. The crown and most tribes signed treaties. While what was going on South of the border was, no doubt, instructive, it's to both sides' credit that they looked for a peaceful way to coexist. The terms of those treaties remain controversial today but, nonetheless, they put Canada's natives on fundamentally different footing than almost any other overrun hunter-gatherer societies in human history. They had an established, legal right to continue existing.

It's incredibly difficult for us, today, to understand the state of affairs that existed just after these treaties were signed. Native tribes were not peacefully co-existing, stagnant populations that had existed in the same spot for thousands of years. They moved around, bumped into each other, struggled to defend territories, had wars, raided each other. Raiding was so honoured and economically important in some tribe's cultures that even other native tribes did not want to be their neighbours. A big part of why so many tribes were eager to sign treaties with the Crown was that the Crown was promising security. They wouldn't have to continually fight other tribes to keep their sources of food secure. The Crown proved to be a less than completely secure food source themselves at first, but that's another discussion.

When we, today, talk about the desire of leaders such as John A Macdonald to "kill the Indian in the child", we find this atrocious. We respect diversity of religion and culture. However, at the time of John A Macdonald, native culture presented real problems. It was actually progressive for the time to think that natives could be as productive as any other Canadian citizens if they could be educated to adopt European economic pursuits and abandon cultural practices, such as raiding, that were wholly incompatible with the peace and order the Crown promised its citizens, native and European alike. There were those, at the time, who still espoused outright genocide. There remain, even today, places in the world where outright genocide is pursued actively.

The residential schools are a painful part of history that is still, very much, in raw living memory. However, we must look at the big picture too. In almost any other place and time in history, native cultures would already be utterly extirpated. They still exist and thrive in Canada and there is every reason to hope that they will continue to do so. How many other times in history have cultures so alien to each other managed to coexist? There remain many problems to tackle, but hope for the future is well justified based on Canada's past.