skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up?

Bit of both.

Certainly people who tripped into a niche back in the 1980s/1990s are getting old.

However, modern customer support has gotten stupidly expensive and annoying as hell. I blame the fact that modern users are significantly less sophisticated and significantly more demanding.
These aren’t available to undergraduates. Such programs can really screw people over financially, but more often it’s a question of lost earnings and interest on initial loans rather than graduate tuition on it’s own.
We have hundreds of years of experience with viral genetic vectors. There's a whole subfield of rheumatology dealing with autoimmune conditions triggered by viruses.

The mRNA vaccines are just a single protein not the whole virus and it never gets assembled so its using considerably less cellular machinery than a real virus would.

We've literally studied this shit for hundreds of years, and we're using less moving parts that would happen with a real infectious virus.

Cold fact: this is not unknown territory at all.
Vulgarity was is descended from the inappropriate use of existing sacred words. It evolved into a comparative tone device. But it was always a cheap trick (just like the magic words it corrupted).

...

That report doesn't say what you want it to.

"Honesty" is not necessarily reality. Someone who is moved to high expressiveness is plausibly sincere, but they are not necessarily rational, reasonable, or correct.

Appealing to emotion works but it is still a cheap trick. If that's what we do here nowadays, well OK, but it's a loss.
The finance business area at the last large company I worked for was borderline ridiculous. The division I was employed at ran a billion in revenue through Excel sheets scattered across network drives. FSS had a nightmare of a week at the end of every quarter. I was given a promotion and a shift from engineering to business analysis with the goal of creating a model to predict workforce requirements for ongoing business and new contracts. After a few months of learning the ropes and the history of similar attempts, it became clear that the company already held a license for software suitable (perfect) for this goal and the finance area was already slowly working towards ditching the excel mess in favor of the sane solution.

By "slowly" I mean that they had been inching towards using the right tool for years, finding any and every excuse to abandon course. The corporate app dev unit explained to me that they were wary of working with the finance area of my division as finance had repeatedly gone 90% of the way to an improved tool only to bail out at the last minute, wasting time and money and leaving corp app managers the task of explaining why things fell through to their bosses.

The best (worst) excuse given by finance during my attempt to sort things out was after we were acquired by an even larger contractor. "We're not sure if <company> uses <software>, so we're going to need to put a complete halt on the shift." They weren't sure? It took me less than a minute to go to the acquiring corp's job req page and see that they were hiring admins/devs for the software in question. Ridiculous. Finance leadership could have made a single call to ask a single question, but rather than stepping out of the comfort zone they decided to scuttle a project which was all but guaranteed to improve their lives and the organization as a whole.

I'm close to 50/50 on whether the finance unit was doing something dishonest and wished to retain the control provided by using an opaque/incomprehensible system or if they were merely too afraid of any sort of change by virtue of their bean counting nature. Either way, they're probably still actively harming the company.
This change occurred in 2010:

> Prior to 2010, Federal loans included 1) direct loans originated and funded directly by the United States Department of Education and 2) loans originated and funded by private investors and guaranteed by the federal government. Guaranteed loans were eliminated in 2010 through the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act and replaced with direct loans because of a belief that guaranteed loans benefited private student loan companies at taxpayers expense, but did not reduce costs for students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_St...

> Most student loans — about 92%, according to a June 2020 report by MeasureOne, an academic data firm — are owned by the U.S. Department of Education.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/stude...

The MeasureOne link: https://www.measureone.com/resources
If you define pi based on physical circles, then it isn't even the "same pi" as the mathematical one in this universe. In fact, it changes locally from point to point. That's literally what General Relativity says: spacetime is curved!
I went into music because I liked it. Pursued it all the way to the PhD level and got more into the tech side as I developed my career and skills. Shortly moving into a job once I get my doctorate conferred where I'll be working with machine listening stuff in a research capacity. I knew the risks and at every stage my supervisors gave me the realities of what I was doing. I was tactical while pursuing my "passion" although that term is pretty dead to me now. You simply make sure your I come is as much aligned with the not bulkshit parts of life. Ultimately everyone wants freedom till other people create a debt bubble ... Oh wait
That might be true of liberal arts, but I don't know about film school. USC's was the first American film school and opened in the 1920s. NYU, Columbia, and Cal Arts followed in the 60s. Everything else came later than that. These aren't prestigious past times for the nobility. They're relatively new things. Film degrees don't have much prestige associated with them any way. Schools can certainly try to argue they make a difference, but the vast majority of successful filmmakers don't have film degrees. It's not like you go apply to direct a film and the studio gives a crap about your education. It's completely driven by portfolio and nepotism, and the only possible advantage a school can offer is helping you make that first film to build the portfolio, but if they don't even do that like this guy said, and you have to self-fund your film on top of paying for tuition, well, it's hard to see what value they can even claim to offer.

I don't want to dismiss this guy's tweet thread or anything. He definitely seems to be saying Columbia tried to market the program as giving you a better chance, but students have to know becoming any kind of artist at all, filmmaker included, is purely a lottery. There's at most a few hundred people in the world at a time making any real money doing it. Schools can't just pretend that isn't the case.

For what it's worth, I think it's a disastrous career choice either way, unless you're relying on nepotism and your parents were famous actors or directors. I had a girlfriend 20 years ago going through Rutgers' MFA program, and she realized some of her dream for a little while, being a working producer for a cartoon studio and even moving to LA for a few years, but burned out eventually from every place she ever worked going out of business and moved back to Jersey and opened a bakery. My best friend from college actually did not study film, but did succeed in becoming a Hollywood writer and even won an Emmy a few years ago. It didn't make any difference. He's even poorer and in more debt than my ex who owns a bakery now. Even "success" in the art world doesn't mean you won't be begging for table scraps for the rest of your life. Hundreds of people work on any given project, but even if a project is wildly successful, wins a ton of awards, and makes a billion dollars, maybe five actors, the director, and possibly the head writer if that isn't also the director, actually see any of that money. The rest goes to the studio.
The best way to save AWS costs is to optimize your code. Seen it over and over again at many portfolio companies.
I don't use Arch, but I've been impressed with Pacman and the AUR. It's got everything.
What you say here exactly illustrates why if one does not immediately grasp the intent of someone's words, they should not take immediate offense, but rather "dig deeper". Don't understand why someone said something they said the way they said it? Ask them. Easiest way to clarify things is to request more information to work with. :)
Most of these horror stories you hear about students being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt come from people who have graduate degrees in, for example, film from Columbia University.
The one with the 100 radio buttons at least allows precise control, something that most volume controls out there lack.
It took me more than a few seconds to even find the control. I guess that's why it's so bad!
> Sometimes, I feel like Apache foundation is like Thanos

Soon: https://thanos.io/
I just ran into one of these. I just got a Garmin Fenix Pro 6 watch, and it has a Spotify client on it. Just create a playlist on your phone or computer, then download and play it from your watch with Bluetooth. Sweet! Unfortunately it autoplays, seems to set the volume way too high by default, and while the volume control is a regular slider, it takes a minimum of four button presses across three different buttons around the perimeter of the watch to reduce it. So think "Crap that's loud-press up, press down, press enter, press down..." and all the while your eardrums are being blasted out. And god help you if you deviate from the sequence and have to back out to try again.
I briefly used it on Android. The scrolling momentum was all wonky, totally different from the rest of the system, and using it was unbearably unpleasant for me. I resorted to digging into developer menus and manually tweaking parameters, trying to get it to feel remotely good, and eventually I gave up.

I don't understand why they would make it so, but that's the sole reason I stopped using it, despite being otherwise willing to go out of my way to support them
Conway's Law Revisited: If finance dictates your organizational structure, then finance is developing your software.
Assuming the political impetus is there to stop issuing them. I'm sure there's the will to forgive those loans, though, which will probably just end up being a blank check from the feds to universities.
Less than 40% use extensions. Of the most popular - uBO is less than 5%, so most people likely aren’t blocking it unless it’s the default.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior
Imagine this: In England, the Queen decides to dissolve the parliament - which she has the absolute right to do. Boris says "No, I'm the boss now". The USA sends in some aid for the Queen and helps get Boris out of there, so the Queen can re-set up a new government.

Did the Queen/US commit a coup d'etat? Or did Boris commit the coup and try to become a dictator by not stepping down when legally required to?

That is exactly what happened in Iran, if you replace "Queen" with "Shah" and "Boris" with "Mossadegh".
But wait! there's more (Google Meet and Microsoft Teams): https://neil.computer/notes/oh-sorry-i-was-on-mute/
Do you also deliver Xanax with these doses of reality ?
Yes, it is - latency-sensitive but infrequent events are an extremely common use case.
> Does the project or business that we are working on really matter?

Probably not in the grand scheme of things.

But it's fun to push yourself to your limits with other smart people.
Yeah, my wife and I talk about reaching a sort of semi-retirement state where we can just make some small amount of money and not stress out about money anymore. That will keep us busy but we can take breaks any time we want to.
Italy to ban mammoth cruiseships in Venice
Global warming is a real thing but there are no plausible scenarios where it will affect quality of life of current 20 year olds in US in a meaningful way in their lifetime. If Miami get flooded they can just move a bit inland. With that debt they won’t own waterfront property anyway.

And to your question - much better to crush dreams earlier like they do it in Europe.
There's a sad small group of people who just want any excuse to be instantly offended at anyone and everyone about any little thing, and they're always makin' up weird stuff like this (or buyin' into some other small sad person's made up thing). I've come to realize the only options are to ignore them or call them out on it, depending on the given situation.
Most popular ideas about what Japan is like by people who have never been there are probably wrong, but also Japan is massively from the US in all sorts of interesting ways that are worth talking about.
Yeah talk about misfortune. I once read an account of a Ragusan merchant ship that was pressed into the Armada. Imagine being a run-of-the-mill Ragusan sailor one day, then, several hellish months later, trying desperately to navigate the Irish coast on a leaky galley just to survive and get home.
I'd encourage you to read more objective sources about the history of modern Iran rather than ones which chalk it up to "America/CIA bad". Religious fanatics were already taking over the country in the 1920s, long before America had any interest in the region.
I'd take that over being in a prison cell.
> Before the industrial era, the average person in England owned 36 objects.

Life at the advent of the industrial revolution sucked. The Victorian age was also one of high inequality. I'm not sure what that's supposed to inspire.

> inherently unsustainable

What part? You're not addressing that. I did, however: increase in population increases demand for things.

Environmental destruction is scaling with population, not consumer voraciousness.

> “Buy less sh*t” should be the first and most powerful front in our fight against climate change, but it isn’t because we are selfish and gluttonous beasts.

Look at the stuff you have lying around in your domicile. That's somewhere near the average of what people in the West own.

Digital consumption has increased on average, people aren't tripping over things in their ever-shrinking domiciles with ever-shrinking purchasing power owing to stagnant wages.

Not only are you overestimating consumption of "shit", you're failing to make a meaningful connection between consumer habits and lack of sustainability. It's a question of scale.
I think another things is, these MFA programs aren't about scholarship or research. They're essentially exorbitantly expensive trade schools. Even weirder: in the past the idea of going to some ultra expensive trade school to learn how to make films would've been considered bizarre. Hollywood operated with an apprenticeship model (with, obviously a shitload of luck) that was kind of similar to the way a plumber-student would need to apprentice.

Even journalism schools when they first started, weren't bathing in the cache of a MFA program, they were trade schools for making reporters. They taught you bare bones shit about writing a column to set lines, and had you interning at newspapers and shadowing reporters right away. MFA programs and the rise of "creative non-fiction" are now making journalists think they're artists.

I don't have a problem with MFA programs existing (I mean, some CS programs are awful and churn out students who can barely code), but I think some applicants need to take a hard look at whether they even serve a purpose for their future employment beyond the letters "MFA" after your name; and, whether Columbia is actually the best MFA program to go to.
Updated list of Google Colab notebooks
Hi Folks,

Sharing an updated list of a Google Colab notebooks with some really cool projects that you can start experimenting with today like a Mario RL agent.

https://www.qblocks.cloud/creators/computer-vision-google-colab-notebooks

Also, we have a 100% cashback offer for first time users on Q Blocks platform for the month of July.
You can sign up here to avail your free computing credits: https://www.qblocks.cloud/

PS: Q Blocks is a decentralized computing platform designed to help ML and Data science teams get 10x more affordable cloud computing for training ML models.

Regards
Q Blocks
Vij
If you're worried as the original poster was about the impact of inevitable global decarbonization on national economies, I have bad news for you about Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, and Qatar.
Honestly this is so stupid brilliant I love it (stupid as in I can’t believe I hadn’t considered this). Honestly it really is about storing, sending, and checking messages so SMTP makes so much sense!

I’ve been building for the web for 15 years and it shows how far I can hyper focus on certain communications implementations that I’m not looking at pre-existing options that really meet a large number of use cases. I suppose it also means making sure your data consumers are comfortable working with the protocol but it’s a really top notch idea.
You're discounting the impact of aggressive marketing for these programs in the 2020s vs. virtually zero back in the 1990s.
Yes, it was extremely difficult to adjust accurately.
> I saw some sensible commentary that basically.. these types of degree programs have always existed for the bored children of the rich. It just seems some didn't get the memo and took on huge debts to join them. This could be said of a lot of elite, expensive, liberal art degree programs

There's a pretty good book that explores that phenomenon and what happens when people don't "get the memo": Paying For The Party: How College Maintains Inequality, by Elizabeth A. Armstrong (https://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequa...).
Sorry you had abusive parents
Imagine that organometallic chemistry had developed quicker, and decent Ziegler-Natta catalysts had been discovered in 1935 instead of 1955. Would the Japanese have gone to war over the caoutchouc plantations in Southeast Asia instead of relying on synthetic rubber?
"Zero Hedge (or ZeroHedge)[b] is a far-right[12] libertarian[17] financial blog,[13][14] presenting staff-written articles and aggregating news and opinions from external sources."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge
Probably not? When I use my headphones with my laptop, 10% system volume and 100% app volume is about comparable to 80% volume (ish) on my iPhone 6S.

Evidently there isn't much standardization between devices. Personally I don't find it that annoying - devices remember what volume I last set them to.
Trees did not evolve solely for the purposes of carbon sequestration. Similarly, it would be silly to say that mammals are nature's best solution at sequestering oxygen.
The most recent episode[1] of the Huberman Lab Podcast[0] talked about this briefly, in the context of alertness and focus:

...I haven't figured out yet how to develop a workstation where the computer is above me. I think the only way to really do that is actually to tilt one's body back, but actually that's not a good idea either. They have done studies recording from areas of the brain associated with alertness. Areas like locus coeruleus in the so-called reticular activating system. What they found is that depending on how reclined you are or upright you are, you will decrease with reclining and increase with sitting forward your levels of alertness. So body posture and whether or not your upright or reclining will impact your levels of alertness in the predictable ways. And where you position your eyes, whet her or not your eyes are upright, so to speak, looking up or directly forward or looking down, will dic tate whether or not you are feeling more alert or more sleepy, respectively. So try and arrange a work station or a position of your body in your chair or your standing desk, whatever it is, that allows you to work with a heightened state of alertness.

(text pulled from Youtube captions)

[0] https://hubermanlab.com/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXvDEmo6uS4&t=2250
Teams, Google Meet, Webex, Zoom -- on Chromium, they all hijack and increase your microphone volume without you knowing. It's infuriating. Just thinking about it pisses me off. You have to have the volume control open and have a live tug-of-war with the app while you're talking.

Firefox, either intentionally or unintentionally, does not let Meet do this. I say Meet, because none of the others work on Firefox anyway.

But the recent Meet update is broken on Firefox, so yeah, there goes that.
Totally agree.

To a degree, many of these 'prestige' degrees amount to a kind of version of "become the next president of the USA and if you don't, you can become a volunteer part-time mayor of a small town"

If they sold it like this, people would see the odds in this lie. Very few people in the US will become president of the USA. And while filmmakers are somewhat more abundant, it cannot accommodate as many as there are enthusiastic pupils, so they end up doing other things like massage therapist when thigs don't work out but they now have a mountain of debt.

There are many more degrees like that. Ironically, when there is some slack in demand for something like EEs, suddenly people abandon that track en-masse. But these liberal arts degrees don't seem to suffer the same attrition they actually deserve.
I’m on shaky ground correcting French, but I think that should be “c’est lui.” Moi, toi, lui,…
Well, here is what I'm curious about. Which of these conditions is valid justification for violating house arrest and fleeing a jurisdiction that you are being prosecuted in?

-- You believe the charges or prosecution is being unfairly conducted

-- You believe you are innocent

-- You believe public opinion is on your side

-- You have a more favorable jurisdiction you can flee to

Is it up to you to decide that you're in the right, and if you have resources, should escape the legal system?

I'm sure many people feel these points when they're being prosecuted. Are they to decide? Or is it just that he's rich and had the means to act on these opinions?
I think it's more likely that they aren't really comprehending the numbers. They look at the generations of film students before them who went to film school at a much cheaper price. In that case, those that didn't make a career out of it weren't trapped by the decision to go in the first place.
The solution I’d prefer is to remove federal student aid eligibility from all study programs that don’t result in sufficiently increased earnings for their graduates.

There’s lots of arguments to be made about how having lots of history/English/whatever graduates benefits society in some intangible way, and they might have a lot of merit to them. But that’s not the purpose of federal student aid. The purpose is to improve social mobility. It’s not difficult at all to measure which programs achieve that goal, which don’t, and which are in fact harmful to social mobility.
I find that believable, but we're talking about carbon, not oxygen.

Forests do sequester carbon for a period, although most of it is released again in fires and decomposition (chemically just a slow fire.)

But the point is that a forest locks up a lot of carbon compared to cleared grazing or cropland.
OVH has US and Canadian data centres, and free bandwidth and DDoS protection. Ive been using them for about 5 years and they are very reliable.
Sounds great, anything I can do to help you get to work on soil? Consider checking out AirMiners, may have some resources to help you in your quests.