skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my view, reasoning "this is what we would've done" or placing logical deduction based on -our- understanding of a fantasized encounter is exactly anthropomorphism.

While I'm not a stranger to the notion that eventual intelligent alien beings might in many regards have similar behaviors, wants and needs as humans, I'm personally inclined to think of aliens as much, much higher on the kardashev scale (c.f. ghosts and angels as discussed elsewhere in this thread) than something I personally imagine as a couple of hundred years into-human-future tech.

Autonomous / AI probes is a pretty nice theory and I somewhat adher to it myself as a techie, but it does reek of anthropomorphism IMO.

In either case, all our fantasies are colored by our experiences, I guess what I'm saying is that even though I think anthropomorphizing aliens is bad, I'm just explaining it from my frame of reference, too.
We Are All Buffettologists Now
Lets just do away with paper receipts.
That’s all irrelevant. I was quoting actual tax paid, not marginal rates.

You also forget a major part of tax levied on workers but not on owners - national insurance.
DPaint was a thing, at least in the later years. That program supported zooming in.
If you want it done quickly tell them you're going to prison.
Intelligence Agencies are designed to deceive. That's their primary function. It is completely within the realm of possibility that this is some psyop, ploy for funding, or tool designed to throw off some foreign adversary about our technical capabilities.
Ask HN: How can I focus on knowledge work that I find boring?
I recently started my first job after college, working in finance. A big portion of my job involves being given a research assignment, from which I am expected to distill the essential information, construct models, and deliver a thesis or opinion. Unfortunately I have to be vague due to confidentiality requirements...

I'm really struggling because I find these problems incredibly boring, and I basically cannot make myself sit down and do the work. I try to just stop moving and focus, but I get distracted incredibly easy, always reading the news or browsing HN/Reddit. The longest stretch I've been able to work for in the past couple weeks is a half hour. This is contrast to personal projects - when I find something interesting, I can work for 10 hours straight, totally in the zone.

This is sending me in a bad spiral. I don't get any work done, which makes me unhappy, which makes it harder to get work done, and so it goes. I'm hoping some intelligent people here have some advice or recommendations.

I know that all of the above sounds incredibly entitled - it's a job after all, it's not supposed to be fun. But I'm really, really trying to make myself do this work and I just don't know if I can willpower my way out of this. It's like my brain refuses to work when presented with something I don't find interesting.
Yup. That level is at 50k if you have two kids. Even higher with three kids.
I tried out DuckDB before (previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24531732 ) and thought it looked interesting, but this tutorial has really made me excited about the project.

I've been meaning to figure out Parquet for ages, but now it turns out that "pip install duckdb" gives me everything I need to query Parquet files in addition to the other capabilities DuckDB has!
Its part of some deliberate disinformation campaign. All the videos released thus far have been thoroughly debunked by the likes of thunderf00t. If there are non-debunked videos, I am not aware of them.

Most of the news coverage involves Lt. David Fravor, Bob Lazar or Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell.

Why this stuff is being leaked? I cannot fathom. I assume we are signaling to some foreign entity our ability to track items as small as birds, or angling for more funding.
What new things were learned here?
Why New England is going wild for wet weeds
If people are interested in this topic, I highly recommend that they explore the "Problem of Evil" page (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/) on Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The problem of evil is generally considered the number one argument against the existence of a powerful benevolent God.
What is the goal of this campain to re-introduce aliens into the public discourse? Interestingly, it seems that the "smart" people are now falling for it (washington post, hn, certain subreddits and podcasts...).
Buy-Real-Drivers-License
[edit, naturalauction made a good point] A better way to do this, although obviously impossible to do really rigorously, is to estimate expected value of the equity. Note that EV will not be zero even if lots of possible paths lead to equity = 0.

Compare this and the rest of your comp to other opportunities you have, and factor in how miserable it would make you if it fails (you aren't a rational actor).
https://opencatalystproject.org/
"It’s really striking how many Clubhouse rooms that are on these very tense topics that can go for hours and hours and hours without actually blowing up. Whereas on Twitter, they would have detonated three minutes in."

The difference between Clubhouse and Twitter is Twitter has bots and people who are paid to influence. Bots haven't mastered faking speech well enough to disrupt Clubhouse yet. The influencers will show up eventually, but it seems like Clubhouse has some good moderation features and since it's slow and linear, and only one person can speak at a time, it's more human manageable.

"I can't watch television, news or commentary or anything like that anymore. It's just too much of an alienating and frustrating experience; I'd much rather go listen to three-hour podcasts"

Yes, absolutely. I can't stand TV any more. I now listen to podcasts when I eat dinner instead of T.V. The great part about podcasts is there is so much variety. T.V seems to be locked into a much smaller set of ideas.

"California has had this incredibly absurd period…you could make a Terry Gilliam movie about high speed train construction in California. Like a sequel to Brazil or something, set in the California bureaucracy and political system where you spend billions and billions of dollars and absolutely nothing happens. What would be the most obvious thing in the world is a high speed train between San Francisco and LA. All of these programs exist, they've been authorized, with taxes and all kinds of stuff and like nothing."

The peak of the absurdity is San Francisco. That it took 1 billion dollars to construct 1 mile of subway in San Francisco is pretty funny. San Francisco also spends $300 million a year on 8,035 homeless people. We spend 16% of our GDP on health care, double as a percentage vs any other country and have worse outcomes. There's something going on here that nobody wants to talk about. I think it's related to this:

"I'll confess to being shocked and stunned by how well things worked. I thought last March, when we decided suicidally that we were going to basically shut the economy down. I was like, oh shit, this is really going to be a horrific depression. What's the worst possible depression you can have? It's one where you have simultaneous blows to the supply and demand side and you kill the engine and stall the plane."

It makes you think. How much of the economy is just "bullshit jobs"[1]. How much is just make work, and what we need to do our daily routine and survive just sitting around at home with our laptops is maybe 30% of the actual economy, plus a bunch of stuff made in China? Despite what most doom-mongers claim, there seems to be an ENORMOUS amount of slack in the system, and to actually do something that doesn't take advantage of all that slack, like building new infrastructure, is an enormous ask.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I guess depends on the mental counter response those engineers take. Because you have to think about every possibility, you create a counter temperment that doesn't implode thinking about every possibility.

Some might go the other way, and their anxious personality might help them think about everything, but also make them a stress case.

I think the first type tends to last longer in the industry, at least for my coworkers.
> Part 3:

>Internet amplifies things, but mostly things we focus on. This means an extremely mean comment will tend to be amplified more and get more visibility than a perfectly normal comment.

It's not "the internet". It's social media and news. Which is funded by advertising, so optimises for "engagement" (emotional content). A mean comment in Usenet will die unread. A mean comment on Facebook/Twitter will get algorithmically amplified because it causes others to interact with it.
I remember you would explicitly be presented a screen after you were killed by a player where you could take your funds from the bank to put towards the bounty of the person who killed you.
> Why would the creator of all things have an issue with killing folks via weather, since all humans die?

The argument here is generally that the Bible would be wrong in that case because the Bible claims that God is benevolent.

The point is to show that either one of two things is true:
Either the bible is wrong or God does not exist.
I gave up on "password" field - can't figure out how to make it "unsafe" for the life of me OTL
Is there anything secretive about their developers? I see a lot on LinkedIn for what it's worth.
“Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
I don't want to dismiss your feelings - could you please explain why do you feel like there are some "billionaire overlords" over you? I personally never ever felt anything close to that even though I am coming from a small, formerly communist and poor European country, so I'd like to understand where is that coming from. As I see it, nobody is forcing me to do anything and I am met with great opportunities nearly daily - I can't ask for more.
They absolutely do. That's the main point of them in fact. Revenue for the supermarket. But really it's not a downgrade. Every package is designed to basically be an ad already.
> the difference between "We've put an asteroid into orbit to mine resources" and "We've put an asteroid into a country we dislike" is a remarkably small delta-V

We can already put a few thousand atomic bombs, warheads or EMPs there, with far more predictability, more accuracy, lower probability of early detection and, as a bonus, lower costs. We have had planet destroying weapons for over half a decade now; if a nation really wants to end another nation - or most of humanity altogether, for that matter - it wont need an asteroid.
Non-recyclable plastic should be banned immediately. The fact that we let it persist is ridiculous. I don't care how much costs go up.

We should also limit the types of plastic to a handful, and they should all be recyclable in-country. If we can't recycle it, ban it. Let it get replaced by glass or metal. Again, I don't care how expensive it is. Just like climate change prevention, it's something that needs to happen otherwise we are killing humanity.
Slack is not used by operations as much unfortunately, running in hybrid mode since last August...
There are some pretty clear answers to the publicly traded company question. Financial statements are much more transparent and regulated, HR policies much more formal, equity awards are easier to value and sell, etc.

A lot of responses seem to believe this question is either naive or asked in bad faith. Insofar as YC is a network of founders and mentors with strong opinions on how to successfully start any grow a venture, it would be shocking if there were no generalizations that you could make.
The YC accelerator is really set up to encourage the founders' best qualities and to drive them forward in a supporting environment. The shape and culture of any YC company is almost entirely due to the founders, not YC.
> Rich media like photographs and videos taken on your phone is going to take up a lot of space

Right, but this was a discussion on app sizes. Photos and videos aren't due to the size of the apps, and can easily go on an SD card.

> cached images, music, and other files

Good point about caches. Should be some global policy for that IMHO. One thing is things like map apps downloading regions on demand for offline use, but just plain old caching...

> Games also take up a ton of space.

True, that's an issue even on my desktop computer with a 1TB SSD. Though I don't consider those regular apps. Still, point taken.
The only way to end industries that profit off externalities is by imposing Pigovian Taxes AND redistributing the proceeds back to the people. That last part is important to avoid Yellow Vest protests, while making the industry non-competitive with the alternatives:

Non-Biodegradeable Plastics

Factory Farming

Fossil Fuels

Our cars are all built to be locked into the hydrocarbon monopoly. Why not open up to a free market of energy generation with solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear like all our other appliances?

Carbon Tax and Dividend bipartisan proposal, and Alaska’s Permanent Fund, are the two most “successful” examples so far. We need MORE!
Telegram has absolutely amazing UX on all platforms I've used it on, I hope they can roll out encryption for group chats soon and show somehow that we can trust that encryption.
Goodbye C++, Hello C
I'm not sure if you know, but is there a way to promote earthworms in my soil? It's pretty compacted after the build and apparently they don't like that, so I'm trying to aerate and let my grass grow longer to break up what it can before I trim and let the roots die. For the garden I'm also planning on planting plants with deep roots, like sunflowers, to improve the soil.
I wish that power companies were required to publish outage information, at least down to the neighborhood level.

In my area the chance of an outage can vary considerably between one neighborhood and an adjacent neighborhood. It would be nice when considering buying a house to be able to know if it is one of the lower outage neighborhoods or not.
I remember when <blink></blink> was the most annoying thing about HTML. Ooof.
In addition to the aging population problem mentioned in the article, a huge economic bubble based on domestic real estate investment funded by poorly secured loans has burst, the effects of which are only beginning to be felt. All across the country skyscrapers stand half built, monuments to better days. Simultaneously, Western supply chains are either actively or passively (due to shipping issues associated with COVID) seeking diversification, and Chinese labour is now considered too expensive for a large swathe of manufacturing. Traditional industries such as textiles, shoes and so forth are all moving out to Vietnam/Bangladesh/Myanmar/etc. The accelerating affects of automation further compound this scenario. Further, the local education system and HR market are undeveloped for higher level skills, and core aspects of the domestic business environment create substantial inefficiency (financial regulation and practice, commercial law enforcement, etc.).

That said, I still find China to have many benefits as a business environment, and I will never work for military of any country on principle.
I had the same problem on my iPad. The “Other” category was taking up several GB and the only way to get the space back was to wipe it and restore from backup.

It’s infuriating that Apple allowed it to happen in the first place. It’s yet another slow-motion quality degradation like the battery-induced downclocking a couple years ago.
> VS has no competition

True. Rider comes close, but it's no VS
Unfortunately, many of those materials are then coated with PFAS:

https://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20170201/many-fast-food-cont...

Which have all of the same problems of plastic.
These scientists didn't believe X, and later change their minds to believe Y based on new evidence—they believed X, vocally smeared everyone who dared to believe Y as liars and cranks, and later changed their minds to believe Y based on new evidence.

Updating opinions based on evidence is good. Insulting and slandering people because they have different opinions is bad.
Anything food related should be compostable, including in supermarkets. If it means we can't store food for months, the good. It means we can compost them as fertilizer so the planet is still okay.

Without getting draconian on companies who don't give a shit about anything except for profits, they won't lift a finger to do anything about it.
Trickle down works for immigration. Immigration is not even close to zero sum. For wealth re-distribution within a country it starts of zero sum. And indeed, putting all the wealth concentrated does not help the poor.

Making the wealthy wealthier without taking from the poor will help the poor some. Moreover, it will help the government a lot more.
"Biodegradable plastics" aren't much better than "recyclable plastics," in terms of actual impact.

They live in one of two categories, with almost nothing in the "actually useful" region:

- "Super, super happy to biodegrade." In fact, they're doing it before you even get it! The plastics aren't really ever nice to use, because they're chemically coming apart in the store. They're UV sensitive, time sensitive, oxygen sensitive, and are generally about as useful as a DivX DVD. By the time you use it, they're a weird, slightly greasy, weirdly weak mess. They don't work. But, hey, they're biofriendly! Or, not, depending on what, exactly, they degrade into.

- "Biodegradable." Given certain conditions. 10x solar UV for 100 years. High temperatures, sustained for periods long beyond what any compost pile can do. Requires certain phases of the moon, sustained for a year without interruption. They're "Biodegradable" on paper, but in reality you can't tell the difference between them and something that isn't. In a typical landfill condition, they last roughly forever. Remember, in a landfill, newspaper is not biodegradable. You can layers of a landfill by the newspapers and magazines you dig up, fully readable. It's a totally sealed, anaerobic environment. Very few "bio" things work in that space.

If you require "plastics that are full biodegradable, without nano or toxic byproducts or leftovers," you've effectively banned plastics. Which I'm entirely fine with.
> seems unlikely there is advanced nonhuman intelligence hiding in our solar system

Maybe.

I did some Googling, and apparently the human race has produced between 1 and 2 billion cars in the last 100 years [1]. That's an incredible feat!

Assuming a post-biology intelligence has started space manufacturing, they probably have the capacity to produce an incredible volume of intelligent probes.

Wikipedia claims that the Milky Way galaxy is composed of 100 - 400 billion stars. [2] This figure isn't far out of the ballpark for the number of cars we've made in 100 years.

Creating a single space probe to reach a star is probably within their capability, and I'd wager they can match and exceed our industrial capacity for vehicle production. It's not hard to imagine they could send at least one probe to every star. They have a lot of time to do it, too.

Important factors I'm not accounting for are time of travel and interstellar expansion, but I don't think that changes the fact that an advanced race could manufacture and send a lot of probes in all directions.

Maybe they've already made it here. Maybe before we even arrived.

[1] https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-advice/how-many-cars-are-th...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
If aliens showed up on Earth it would be FAR more likely to be observed and photographed by multiple civilians than the military. Civilian eyeballs outnumber the military by a couple orders of magnitude. You'd probably see it on Instagram first.
But this really just illustrates a lack of knowledge on our part. If we made thyroid screening a regular thing and invested $10B/year into diagnostics, analysis, and study, i guarantee you in 5 years or less we would have the most efficient, effective system for treatment, determining which microcarcinomas are bad, which ones to keep an eye on, etc.

There simply isn't a profit motive right now, and there aren't a ought resources, so unprofitable, minor things like thyroid cancers and other, small, mostly non-fatal things fall by the wayside. If we could massively increase the resources and time spent of solving health issues, we'd have a lot better solutions. There only exist a certain amount of cancer researchers, oncologists, and clinical pharmacologists that can profitably exist. Lots of diseases will never be cured because there are too few people affected by them. Until we decouple medical progress from profit, there's a only a certain amount of progress we can make. Unfortunately, it seems like tying profit to medicine is the most efficient system we have, so it may be centuries till we get there
Fascinating, yes!
Yeah, it’s weird. And it always comes from the same couple of people, with that one obscure hand-wavy blog post.
> Intelligence Agencies are designed to deceive.

No, their primary function is to acquire information useful to decisions makers, including info others want to keep secret. Counterintelligence agencies, which are sometimes conjoined to intelligence agencies and sometimes separate have a primary function of preventing information that decisionmakers want to remain secret from being discovered. Deception is frequently an important technique in both intelligence and counterintelligence, and if understood broadly enough is integral to the purpose of counterintelligence.
^ Can confirm. The tech itself might have had less “complexity”, but devs had to practically (or actually) become engineers of every single piece of the pipeline. The different connectors, the different tubes, how colour works, how the memory functioned (not just how the docs said it functioned), the math that each chip did as the functions were run, everything.

Lack of knowledge of any specific part could mean anything from muddy graphics to a bug in the retail version of the game in a time when there was literally no way to patch a game after release. Those bugs could ruin a company.
Why would aliens only fly drones? Why not land them or do other stuff.
Correctly implementing a spinlock in Modern C++
I think that the sentence is saying that in the period between 2000 and present day more plastic has been produced in the period from 2000 to -inf. A similar statement can be made about most human industrial products - cement production has a curve that appears to have more area post 2000 than pre.
It’s hard to beat Perl when it comes to string matching performance and flexibility.
You can read the report itself here:
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-...
As an active researcher, I'm not surprised at all. It's common enough that people in the same field but a different subfield cannot properly understand a published paper. The same is often true for people working in the same subfield but on different topics. Just read all the horror stories about Reviewer 2.

With some scientific literacy, you may be able to understand the central claims made in a paper. Or you may misunderstand them, because you may not be aware of the specific meanings of some words that are also used in everyday language. You may not be familiar with the context the paper was written in or with the best practices in the field. Hence you may not see the implicit assumptions that were made or know the justifications for certain choices. Because you are not an expert in the topic, you may not see the immediate consequences of the claims and are likely to take them too literally.

It doesn't help that the authors probably didn't understand the results fully either. Most papers are difficult to understand, because they discuss early insights rather than final results. Clarity often comes with a better understanding years after the initial publication.
I feel Dflat would have been a better name.