skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Can you figure out by inspecting the chemical formula that H2SO4 will be an acid if you didn't already know that ahead of time?

Strictly speaking, the answer is "no", because it's not the formula that matters but the shape. And something like C₆H₁₂O₆ doesn't tell you how all of the bonds hook up--are we looking at esters, alcohols, ketones, aldehydes, carboxylic acids? There's several distinct molecules that have that formula, and those distinctions matter for chemistry.

But given the actual structure of the compound? Yeah, we can compute a lot of stuff. That list of words that probably meant nothing to you--that's different kinds of functional groups, and functional groups tend to react in very similar ways when given several compounds. And organic compound is basically all about identifying these groups and the ways in which they react.

> Is there a way to figure this out from first principles?

"First principles" in this case would basically be a large dose of molecular orbital theory, derived from quantum mechanics. And yes, we can develop a good deal of explanations by recourse to molecular orbital--for example, why aromatic and antiaromatic compounds exist, despite the fact they superficially look like the same structure.

> Can you look at a reaction and tell whether it will "compile" and what it does, the same way you can look at a program and figure out if it will compile and what it does? If you can't, why not?

Typically, the difficulty is in figuring out how selective reactions are. If you've got a molecule with a couple different C=C bonds in it, and you're doing an addition reaction across those bonds, predicting how many of those bonds, and which ones specifically, change in the reaction is more of a crapshoot. So it's not foolproof, but it is generally reliable enough at this point that organic synthesis has moved from "here's a Nobel Prize for figuring how to synthesize vitamin B12" to "congratulations on being hired; why don't you synthesize this molecule while we ramp you up on the job."
A Docker footgun led to a vandal deleting NewsBlur's MongoDB database
Nothing about this is nice.
Why can you not imagine it? As much as I don't care for 4chan I can see why it attracts some people. It's almost entirely uncensored and everyone is completely anonymous. The only driving factor to contribute is for the sake of enjoyment. I would like to be part of such a board, albeit slightly cleaner...
Frankly, this was provoking, and was not something you could not reasonably notice. If it felt like an innocent joke, that was a signal enough; robots are devoid of sense of humor.

Remember, only the paranoid survive :-\
I think that not all things can be sufficiently explained by stupidity no matter how intenslt people attempt to feign it.
Someone dies swimming and that makes Bitcoin sketch? Can you elaborate?
Just wondering, how about emigrating? or houseboats or more collective living? Are there not cheaper properties in the polders? Why doesn't the government do something to stop the rental empires?
...which is why it's generally desirable for unequal things to never compare equal.

Stability is about preserving the order of items that compare equally. That's a different topic.

I'm talking about it being desirable not to underspecify the comparison function (sorting rules), so that unequal items are never compared as equal.
> One of the disadvantages of crypto, I suppose, is that people could gang up and hard fork against any arbitrary billionaire even if they were alive.

This isn't unique to crypto. People have literally been ganging up against powerful individuals since pre history. Hell, it's common in the animal world. Young male lions often gang up to oust the old alpha and take over his pride.

And beyond that, our current legal system can go after any arbitrary person much more easily than it would be for the entire world to consent to hard forking to target a single individual.
If you have enough cryptocurrency to worry about distributing upon your death, you have enough money to hire an attorney. (PS: they aren't $900/hour.)
Don't forget to mention having and firing a 23mm cannon (Salyut-3)!
blistering take wow

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=muerto%20playa%20hermo...

not like people dont just die at this beach all the time after not heeding warnings. i live like a few hours from here it's really sadly common. especially considering its literally called 'beautiful beach'
I would say we just go back to normal.

With the vaccinations being rolled out, I see no reason to stay in eternal quarantine.

Unless some new vaccine evading hyperdangerous mutant strain emerges, then yes, we have a lasting problem, but I don't see solid data, that this is happening.

Edit: In either case, it is good, that vaccination research and production got a huge boost. But I really want to get rid of the mask as soon as possible.
it effectively reduces the supply by .13%, which is tiny
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

> The 20-year global warming potential of methane is 84. That is, over a 20-year period, it traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide (CO2).

For us, the well-off HN folks, there is no reason to consume meat other than to have a meal that tastes different than another meal we could have instead. We individually could choose to make choices that result in less methane (and CO2 as well) produced, by simply eating more plant-based meals.
You are one power outage away from that email.
> And threats of violence are already against the law

But.... These types of things also cause a chilling effect on other people's speech right?

Do you understand how it is possible to stop large amounts of people from engaging in speech, if non-government actors make threats against their well being?

Do you understand this concept of how censorship can be done by chilling speech through the process of violent threats, even by non-government actors?

> because of the consequences

What if those consequences are violent threats (or even attacks!), by non-government actors, on you and your family?

You really would not call that censorship, if no-one was willing to engage in certain speech, due to these violent threats by non-government actors?
Completely sustainable, because coins are very highly sub-dividable.
Counter question - do you think the team of engineers would scrap their whole, hard-earned design because e.g. they found out that after 20 years it would stain to an ugly yellowish hue in sunlight?
Isometric Sass Library
"content aggregator" or "news aggregator."
I would use Shamir's Secret Sharing and split it up over multiple different physical and/or digital locations.
Na, that's stupid with cash because we can arbitrarily print more of it. Any cash burning event would be of marginal collective contribution.

It actually matters with bitcoin because of the hard supply cap. Every lost coin shrinks the pie.
But you would agree that the sport won't just die if we lose any particular player or coach right?

Likewise research is so competitive/redundant nowadays that there are always multiple labs vying for the same results. If we lose any particular lab we will be set back at best a few months.

(For another example from history, despite the vast contributions by Newton, even if he didn't exist, we would still have discovered calculus at approximately the same time frame)
Strange, on the McAfee thread people where bathing in hate for the guy and I kinda respected his crazy life.

This guy, being my conational that I never heard of, I got into a bit of digging and discovered a really creepy couple of blogs of women with CS PhDs that talk about him like some kind of cult leader and at the same time apparently the man regularly had 4chan level public discourse. What's up with that? Does anyone have info on this? Maybe the blog authors could even clear it up in this thread! But instead the thread gets buried because speaking of the dead (that did not lead a publicly known degenerate lifestyle apparently) is frowned upon.

News of death can be a good trigger to uncover knowledge. Choosing ignorance and shutting down speech because of cultural afterlife superstitions is not productive.
That's completely reasonable since you're not being paid for the time you spend on the bus or in a car each day.
but that is how btc works. All BTC are tied to private keys.
The currency is deflationary but you don't have any fundamental issues until you have issues subdividing the currency, but given that the protocol supports dividing down to 0.00000001 BTC that's not a significant issue (and I'm sure the community would patch that long before it became a problem).
Thats just advertising! I dont work at facebook but i also wasnt born yesterday. Give people a taste so they want to sign up. That doesn't make them evil any more than a movie trailer makes hollywood evil.
Sure.

"Crypto is only used by criminals". Complete non-sense, cash is used far more often for illicit activities. In fact, blockchain forensics is developing so fast that crypto increasingly is very unattractive. Not only may they find you, your coins may become "tainted", and rejected by exchanges.

"Crypto is a scam".
Inaccurate. Out of the 10,000 or so coins, most are scams. Yet there's at least two dozen or so serious long term projects, and these matter, as judged by their market cap.

"It's a pyramid scheme or ponzi fraud".
No, in particular for the serious projects (Bitcoin, Ether), it does not meet this comparison at all. There is no single beneficiary doing a rug pull.

"Crypto boils the oceans".
It doesn't. If you see it as an industry, it's greener than most other industries. And particular as we speak, almost all dirty mining (coal-based) is rapidly moving to renewables as miners are leaving China. And not just that, there's a mining council stimulating in particular stranded energy.

"It's worth zero".
Well, I can't predict market prices, but the point here is that people have no idea about Bitcoin adaption. It grows by millions of users per week, faster than the rise of the internet and Facebook. Also, institutional investors are in, there's ETFs, the first nation accepting it as legal tender, the list goes on. It will face many more obstacles but the point is that this is no longer some weird internet cult, it's mainstream.

"Political rejection"
Here I'm hinting at mostly liberals rejecting crypto based on political motives. Yet they quite literally fail to see the other side of the coin. Where Bitcoin besides being speculative, also has tremendous humanitarian value. It can help the poor unbanked to store/grow value. It can help people in inflationary regimes protect their property. It allows immigrants to cross borders without seizure. It allows immigrant arrivals to send back money to their homeland, without the middle man taking 35%. And perhaps closer to our first world, crypto may be the young's generation only chance to grow some wealth, as they are locked out of everything else.

I know, the above list make me sound like a proponent. I'm not, I'm confused, puzzled. And I embrace that. Because this entire thing is just too complex to slap a single label on.
What if you go on vacation for a week and your email server goes down?
I am not a communist but I think we could use more Communist guest pundits.
You are correct. It’s a rebate game. Net price of insulin has been going down.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZfBANMMU5dQ/XzFtNw93ZCI/AAAAAAAAq...
I like Christopher Hitchen's take on matters like these:

"And one person gets up and says, “you know what, this holocaust, I’m not even sure it happened. In fact, I’m
pretty certain it didn’t. Indeed, I begin to wonder if the only thing is that the Jews brought a little bit of
violence on themselves.”—That person doesn’t just have a right to speak, that person’s right to speak must be
given extra protection. Because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with. Might
contain a grain of historical truth; might, in any case, give people to think why do they know what they
think they already know. How do I know I know this except I’ve always been taught this and never heard any
thing else? It’s always worth establishing first principle….don’t take refuge in the false security of
consensus and the feeling that, whatever you think, you’re bound to be okay because you’re in the safely, moral
majority"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY
Use Shamir’s secret sharing algorithm. If 5 out of 7 trusted people want to decrypt you data there’s probably a good reason.
And to replace that with clean energy is that much harder with energy intensive dispersed communities. Cities are far more energy and resource efficient.

It’s more than cars and energy, its water, sewer, transit, land use, ecological impact, all the things that don’t scale well.

Yes decentralized power can mitigate a lot of that but planning communities to be low energy is a more scalable solution.
>.13%

That actually seems like rather a lot to me in a single blow (if the keys are actually lost forever of course).
Bitcoins can be split down to 8 decimal places.

Given the current loss/mining rate its totally possible for BTC to become difficult to operate, but its also possible for the mining cap to be removed or for coins to be split further.
Diamond hands?
Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.
It does not give "everybody" a little gift, only people who already have money (since their existing money is now worth X% more). People with 0 still have 0, and people in debt have to work even harder to pay it off. Something that disproportionally helps rich people is the opposite of charity.
Same as the rest of the coiner nonsense
> I think that's part of what I'm trying to replace by technical means.

Just use something like Dashlane. People can report you dead, and then you have up until your specified waiting period to mark yourself as not actually dead. If Dashlane goes out of business you'd need a new provider, but as long as you don't die within a month or so of your password manager then you're set. Much better than writing your own.
Unfortunately, checkmarks aren't language agnostic - abstract iconography as a whole is a linguistic phenomenon. I'll just copy paste Wikipedia's notes(edit: HN breaks on the actual symbols so I'll link too):

It is common in Swedish schools for a to indicate that an answer is incorrect,[2][3][4] while "R", from the Swedish rätt, i.e., "correct", is used to indicate that an answer is correct.

In Finnish, stands for väärin, i.e., "wrong", due to its similarity to a slanted v. The opposite, "correct", is marked with {\displaystyle \cdot \!/\!\cdot }\cdot \!/\!\cdot , a slanted vertical line emphasized with two dots.[5]

In Japan[6] and Korea, the O mark is used instead of the check mark, and the X or mark are commonly used for wrong (alongside a triangle △ for entries that are problematic but not wholly incorrect).[citation needed]

In the Netherlands a 'V' is used to show that things are missing while the flourish of approval (or krul) is used for approving a section or sum.

In Brazil, the check character is used to indicate the "yes" concept. For example "yes, it was checked" or "yes, this is the right answer".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_mark
I like the idea in theory, but I fail to see how subscribable lists don’t cause a larger echo chamber than what we have now.

Instead of Reddit’s “news” subs banning the pulse night club shooting, you have “popular tastemakers” driving the list doing the same.

Except probably with less transparency or accountability. When /r/news bans a topic, I know roughly which couple of clowns did it, when I never see something because my list-makers pre-decided I shouldn’t, we’ll, who ever are those people?
Indeed. They have redundancy within a DC, like you would expect from a NAS or SAN.

They don't have the cross-DC redundancy like S3 does. If a DC goes offline, so does your data.

I'm updating my comment.
It's real easy to become a jaded clock puncher when you're a social worker on a six person team that can barely eek out three people's worth of work because three of the people are deadbeats who's only qualifications are an ability to deposit paychecks and knowing someone who was owed a favor by a politician or appointed high level bureaucrat. The one party states have it the worst because the "next guy's cronies" can't clean house without annoying people within their own network because they're all from the same party. That's assuming they're not union positions and they can actually be fired or laid off in a practical manner.

Nobody who has drive and wants to get shit done lasts very long in that environment. There are occasional pockets of "good" but they don't last because when they accomplish too much people move up and out or they get reigned in by the rest of the system.

Source: members of my household work in government providing social services.
What would impress me is someone cashing out a billion dollars from bitcoin.
Reading posts like this make me so grateful for good moderation, and for not being responsible for nurturing and protecting an online community, because it sounds far more difficult than it should be.

As a technologist it seems like we want a high-tech solution (and I'm surprised that AI-driven moderation isn't mentioned more in the discussion; it seems to me you could accomplish a lot with sentiment analysis plus other heuristics like account age and activity). But another thought is to treat trolling itself as a disease to be modeled as a diffusion process, infecting previously good actors and tempting them into trolling behavior themselves. Its remarkable how fragile communities are in the face of even one or two determined malefactors! The OP's sensible approach feels like a kind of vaccination itself, in that it should slow the rate of reinfection such that while it won't eliminate trolling entirely, it will keep the inevitable outbreaks small and localized and not self-sustaining.

But, sheesh, what a PITA. Is anyone working on automating the distracting/annoying/frustrating task of internet forum moderation?
Kellys expat in Amsterdam carries maseca harena, as well as various dried chilies, and imported tortillas: https://www.kellys-expat-shopping.nl/en/world-foods/mexican/
There seem to be many non tech savvy people who were shocked by docos like Social Dilemma and don't understand they are the product. They think they are 'just looking at cats'. Maybe these companies should clearly display on their front page they in personal data collection and targeted advertising business.
Well, I've seen statistics (I don't remember where, sorry), suggesting that deplatforming Daesh worked pretty well.

It is my understanding that what the right wing is going through in 2021 is kinda what Muslims have gone through in 2016, with lots of outrage because some visible targets have been taken down, the malicious actors attempting to fan the outrage and get the entire community to protect the actual evil content, the feeling of being singled out for termination, etc.
I'm sure they were joking, like saying he got Epsteined. People go for the most complicated explanation rather than the simplest.
Somebody went to the trouble of creating a completely new throwaway account just to drop a bunch of insults.

That's not "uncovering knowledge".
Why not?

The currency is digital. If the current smallest unit is worth too much, then we can just increase the decimal places.

Bitcoin is not like gold where its limited supply makes it infeasible as a currency for a large number of people because the size of the coins for everyday purchases would be too small to physically handle (hence the concurrent use of less value dense silver).
One of the arguments I'm surprised I don't hear more often is how much more inclusive remote work is.

People who find driving intensely stressful can be accommodated. People who might not feel comfortable being themselves in physical corporate spaces (e.g. those whose appearance/ethnicity gets remarked on, or people who feel the need to code switch around co-workers) can be accommodated. People who want to maximize time near their loved ones can be accommodated. People on the autism spectrum can be accommodated. Germophobes, agoraphobes, and those who are just socially anxious can be accomodated. People with disabilities can be accommodated.

And if all of these people have proven to do effective work remotely, are we really doing a healthy thing for society in demanding their physical presence?
Borrowing from Wikipedia, I prefer this phrasing:

Misunderstandings and lethargy perhaps produce more wrong in the world than deceit and malice do. At least the latter two are certainly rarer.
> As part of this update, we'll also incorporate the page experience metrics into our ranking criteria for the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile, and remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility.

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for...
What is fundamentally different about the comment section on HN vs. an originator of news, though? We read news stories (or the headline at least), and we jump into the comments section to share our thoughts with each other.

I mean, subjectively I would say that HN is a much better community than most news sites - but I'm clearly biased here and I'm sure there are many people who would disagree with me that the HN comments section holds any value.

How do you feel about a site like Ars Technica, which is an originator of news and also has a very active forum and comments section? I personally disagree with a lot of the comments (and perhaps more importantly, the style of commenting) on that site and regret it almost every time I browse into the comments, but I wouldn't say it is Ars' best interest to shut the comments down. I think they probably get a lot additional ad impressions, premium subscribers, etc. from people who interact with the comments.

And if it's just a difference in the quality of the comments - is the correct course of action for news sites to disable comments, or work to improve them through moderation, UX, etc?

Not trying to be nit-picky here btw, I genuinely did not understand the basis for the parent's comment that "If news sites know what's good for them, they should be disabling the comments section asap".
Unless this alerts people to the risk of losing a private key and they decide owning Bitcoin isn't a great place to store wealth.
DMCA doesn't protect someone who makes money directly from the content. Let the lawyers decide what that means, but I guess it could cover advertising and subscriptions if you prove there's a big chunk of copyrighted content. Hence their pseudo-DMCA appeasement process.

There seems to be a gap though. If I make something independently and am not covered by Content ID and want nothing to do with it, they will need to abide by the DMCA. They have been sued over this and I think it's a fair argument. Setup a system and force me to use it without any contractual agreements, waiving my legal rights? Doesn't really seem proper.
Moderation is also why you won’t see comments which are impolite or heretical but may be obviously true. 4chan is moderated, but the goals are just very different from sites that want to avoid the hassle of vigilante activists by enforcing orthodoxy in content. 4chan also goes to some effort to ensure easy identification of its pseudo-anonymous users. It’s also useful fodder to trick people into rage-donating to the right party. Always ask what the business model is for popular web properties. If you can’t figure it out or nobody else can make money in the same domain, then there is probably a side channel being monetized.
Even with that, who do you trust to actually do any real transfer of your bitcoin in a fully secure way? Certainly not your lawyer, legal offices carry so many security problems. With a total of $1 billion at stake, there are some very real risks of attack.
My 32 Year Old CPU Design Running on an FPGA via Logisim Simulation [Video]