skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"High Achievement" is probably in the eye of the beholder.

I've written a fairly massive infrastructure system that is used throughout the world, and has, undoubtedly, saved lives. It will probably continue to do so, in some form or another, long after I take my dirt nap. It has formed the nucleus of an entire Service structure; not just one application.

Did I do it to be considered a "hero"? Did I do it for financial reward?

The answer to both is "No." I have stepped away from the project, and it has taken on a life of its own.

I developed the system over a period of a couple of years, at first, and refined it for a decade, before finding a team willing to take the reins. That required that I step away from the project, and cede total control: technical, IP, legal, etc., to the new team.

Before long, I'll be nothing more than a footnote in the historical record.

Thousands of people, around the world, use the system, every day. During the COVID impact on the users, it was rapidly adapted to serve a very new environment. It has always been completely localizable, and has a simple, powerful semantic interface that allowed all sorts of cool adapters that I only vaguely predicted, in 2008, when I started it.

I never charged a dime for it. In fact, it cost me thousands to maintain and evangelize it.

I'll probably never get credit for most of the work and planning that I did, and I'm fine with that.

I consider that "high achievement." I did a lot of it, because I needed to keep my tech chops up, and saw a need that could be filled. I enjoyed the process of envisioning the project's lifecycle, planning its genesis, and implementing it. It allowed me to do stuff that my employers would not let me do.

It wasn't because I'm some kind of saint, or martyr. In fact, a lot of folks, during its early years, thought that I was a cantankerous, dictatorial, controlling bastard. I needed to keep the project on task, and in focus. That often meant being a real dick (I'm good at that).

When I finally encountered some tech people that were qualified to handle it, and take it to the next level, it was important for me to turn it over completely, and get the hell out of the way. By that time, I was sick of it. I wanted to learn new tech, and work on different stuff. I basically slowed down the car, pushed it out onto the sidewalk, and went screeching off into the distance.

Most of the work that I've done, in the last four years, has been stuff that I wanted to do, for fun. I had a number of theories about developing high-quality software, I wanted to really get down and dirty with Swift, I wanted to develop applications that made me proud, and I wanted to work my ass off. I like working. You won't find me on a golf course. The coroner is gonna have to rub "YTREWQ" off my cheek, because I'll faceplant on my keyboard, when I pop my clogs.

I'm no saint, but I also consider myself to have a very high degree of Integrity. I have absolutely no desire at all to sacrifice that for money.
Forget orbit, SpaceX has paid for it's ISS contract about 3x in savings over Soyuz. Congress would be dumb to pick a new horse now.
Well, you kind of _can_, to some extent. Here, for instance, you need a vaccine cert to go indoors in pubs and restaurants (unvaccinated people can still eat outside). That said, there obviously won't be the political will for that everywhere; even before this was introduced Ireland only had 5-10% of people saying they wouldn't get vaccinated, so it wasn't a huge deal.
> Obviously it’s Tinder posting the fake profiles because they want men using their software.

I have used Tinder a lot, but not in the US. Where I am it's obvious that 95%+ of profiles are fake. However, I don't believe they are created by Tinder themselves. It's a combination of scams/bots, people looking for followers, prostitutes, fake profiles to try Tinder, and other stuff.

On Tinder's side, a few things happening:

- Tinder actively surfaces old/abandoned profiles to make you waste your swipes and super swipes. It's safe to assume that the vast majority of profiles you swipe on are no longer active or signed up once but never used Tinder.

- Tinder picks a subset of profiles (again, mostly abandoned ones) as "upsells" to make you buy likes. They are even labeled "upsell" in their API and it's the same profiles over and over again when you sign up.

- Most people that you swipe on will never see your profile.

While Tinder themselves does probably not create profiles, they are doing absolutely everything they can to make you spend money and give you the minimum amount of real matches they can get away with. Their goal is to give you the minimum to keep you on the app as long as possible, nothing more.

The system is completely broken and Tinder is extremely malicious. It's almost a scam. Less than ~1% of what you see are actually real people actively looking for matches. I am still using it because even 1% is better than nothing, but I hate the company with a passion.

Also, it has gotten significantly worse in the past ~5 years.
Yep, not uncommon for FBI HRT agents to be embedded with Joint Special Operations command deployments. I imagine other teams are as well.
I learn the hardest things first, not the easiest thing (ie I flip right to the Black-Scholes formula when learning options, gradient descent in neural networks, etc etc).

I find that by going after the hardest things first, you learn the most information in the quickest way as all supporting things must be researched on the way.

If you only go after easy basic things and try to work your way up, the pressure (and rate of growth) will never compare.
Born and raised in Coventry and still have family there.

Coventry has fought (as I see it) 2 major issues which have held it back.

Firstly as the center of the UK car industry and the Detroit of Britain its economic successes and failures have been tied closely to the ups and downs of UK car production. The collapse of that industry from the 1980s through to the early 2000s resulted in huge numbers of unemployed skilled and semi-skilled manufacturing workers. Manufacturing of that type and scale is not something governments can will into existence (and generally the efforts to do so have been at best non-ideal - see Rover's sale to BMW).

The other issue with Coventry is the well-intentioned but disastrous rebuilding of the city center following its flattening in WWII. The city center remains an uninviting concrete jungle with few non-retail businesses and almost no housing. Though the 1980s the inner core became a no-go area after dark and continues to have a bad reputation. Outside of University housing there is little reason for anyone to live anywhere but the suburbs (or in a neighboring town or city).

I would argue that Coventry does have excellent infrastructure and that is no part of why companies haven't wanted to move there. There are multiple trains per hour to London (and Birmingham) and is served by major motorways to London, Birmingham and Oxford (M6/M45/M69). Compared to most UK cities traffic seems manageable.

The expansion of Coventry University and University of Warwick (which despite its name is located in Coventry) may have been the best possible result for the city. How else could the UK government have spent money in the city to attract the size of employers that the city needs?
That's the GE-ification of retail.

Yes, you should allocate a larger share of scarce resources (in this case, floor space) to high-margin product...

... but not at the expense of the central thesis of why customers actually come to your store.

B&N was able to sell high margin gift shop items because traffic was already there as a bookstore... and there as a bookstore because they had reading areas and a coffee shop.
The point of procurement is to procure something.
Blue Origin isn't vaporware. They have engines, they have rocket bodies, they have tooling, etc.

But they are, apparently, firmly in development hell, with no public indication of trying to change that.
> legally-enforceable

That seems to me like the real crux. The acceptance of fiat is enforced, ultimately with physical force; this ensures that it's used.

With crypto, it's a social contract: I accept your bitcoin, because I think others will accept it when I try to spend it myself.
GET %C0%AE%C0%AE/%C0%AE%C0%AE/%C0%AE%C0%AE/etc/passwd
First you steal the ammonium nitrate, but he sure to leave behind enough to blow up all the evidence (except that which may be deduced by dimensional analysis, if you are GI Taylor ;)

Edit: Sorry I simply meant to be imaginative. I didn’t realize there was a conspiracy theory along these lines. I just like the GI Taylor story.
> I trust it because it’s an open source project and I can see what goes in and comes out.

That is just the browser part. The code on their servers that actually processes the data the browser collected is closed-source. In general, browser being open or closed source has no correlation with how privacy respecting it is. Chrom{e|ium} and Edge are another examples.

Pragmatically speaking there is only one thing that guarantees privacy and that is browser being zero-telemetry, regardless of if it is open source or not.
Just asking for a friend: what makes this such a great scientific achievement? of what practical use is it? Can it be used as a means to solve other 'hard' math problems? can it power a hyperdrive? a time machine? practically infinite energy without carbon entanglement?

Please ELI5, even if I AM well in excess of 50.
That’s not what this news story is about, though.
Automated inductive reasoning sounds a lot like artificial intelligence to me...
Well causal inference is considered distinct from statistical inference, and accounts for part of the gap here.
(Not sure I would call that "qualitative" though.)
small satellites, Internet access to remote areas (both military and commercial uses), space tourism, space habitats, competitors to GPS (both military and commercial uses) etc…
Wouldn't utilities just generate less energy, if a significant consumer of energy vanished?
> Would it be better if C, Java and Rust were integrated into a single überlanguage with one central committee to drive further development?

Yes!

They need different runtimes, but there's a lot of infractructure they could have been reusing. It's a shame we have a couple dozen language silos that have to reinvent everything.
Thanks for writing this, it's so dead on. Becoming adept at mastering your time, attention, and effectiveness is worthwhile, but so often we mistake the trees for the forest and get caught up in turning ourselves into little efficiency machines.
A lot of dictionary definitions mention "campaigning for change", which lines up with what I mean. I perceive activism as trying to raise awareness or get attention for an issue. I'd much rather work directly on the issues that an activist would raise awareness for. To use environmental causes as an example: doing activism to raise awareness or support for clean water doesn't interest me, but working with a team that is developing a new water filtering technology does interest me.

There are also the negative connotations of extreme activism, which I find off-putting, like anger, riots, terrorism, etc. I want nothing to do with any of that kind of approach, even if it's supposedly "in support" of a cause I care about. But I don't think all activism is necessarily negative.
I'm an electronics engineer by education. Sadly I've not worked in the domain (lol), but I have years of experience in electrical design and maintenance, digital marketing and sales, electronics repairs and maintenance, and construction.

But I won't complain about cleaning floors, working in a warehouse or as a delivery driver. It's a last resort type of job, but work is work.

My CV must be confusing as hell tbh, I just never understood why I should stay in one place for more than a few years. There's just nothing more to learn. But the real world disagrees.

Then again, one apparently needs years of education to set up a CCTV system or Wifi network in an office building in the real world, and you also have to be a smug asshole about it, an art that I have yet to master.
"SpaceX is a functioning business that actually launches things into space at a lower cost than competitors."

This might actually lead to a greatly increased risk of creating an impenetrable field of space junk if the thousands more satellites that SpaceX launches collide in to one another.

If that happens expect SpaceX supporters to start singing a different tune.
If you're looking for similar hackathons, you may be interested in https://quirkylanguages.com/
The problem is that all automatic elevators are going to be stamped Amazon and there is hardly any room available for someone else. It’s a bigger and bigger monopoly.
I am sure that Amazon is going to automate as much as possible and it will only increase.

Cool story about the elevator. :)
It’s hard to disagree with this, it was bs all the way down. There was also the way a vaccination programme was used as a cover for helping find him, causing problems down the line.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277145-cias-hunt-for-o...
Acknowledging receipt of the King Missile reference!
I alternate between YT and Netflix.

The problem I have with YT is the paralysis of choice in deciding which of a zillion videos to watch. When I have a show to binge, its much easier to just jump into it relax without thinking about what to watch
It's only waste insofar as you don't ascribe value to Bitcoin. It's not fundamentally different from any computing task.
why? we don't understand the architecture, but the brain certainly uses electrical signals in an algorithmic way
Improving visibility with o being annoying
The thing that makes me sad is that IMO the best Star Wars film that came out since the Disney acquisition was Rogue One (even though it trampled all over the expanded universe novel Rebel Dawn, which I loved). Likely Disney views that movie as their second-worst Star Wars outing (after Solo), while I enjoyed it far more than episodes 7, 8, or 9.

On the optimistic side, I absolutely love The Mandalorian (which I didn't expect, and resisted watching until after season 2 was complete), and I'm looking forward to The Book of Boba Fett as well.

But I absolutely agree with you on the failure of "corporate written-by-committee". I think The Mandalorian is so great in no small part because it's run by a small number of people who really love Star Wars and have been fortunate enough to be granted near-complete creative control.
I have no idea what point you’re trying to make.
> Also, you are saying that you value avoiding a lockdown more than letting people on the planet decide what goes into their bodies.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I value avoiding a lockdown more than personally not getting a vaccine. I wish people that think like me could go our own way, and people that think like you could go their own way.

I don't like how every discussion about the vaccine is turning into a "us vs them". You're free to decide whatever you do with the vaccine, I think that's a fundamental right. On the other hand, I'd like the situation to return to normal one day. But not bad enough to force people to vaccinate.
The * refers to the fact that cats are the owners, and dwarves are their pets. A truly accurate understanding of how cats work.
>So nasa wants to go, they're driving the innovation.

You said going to the Moon isn't innovation. You can't have it both ways.
For an example of this, see the Parrot VM from the Raku/Perl 6 development.
I wonder what happens to the Bay Area's beloved moderate climate when the Bay, filled with the very cool water of the Pacific, is gone?
> For example, it's impossible to buy yogurt not in one-time plastic package and we didn't find a "mass market" solution to that problem. Same goes for any other ONE-TIME package

Actually there are completely package-free supermarkets in Europe (and probably the US, too) now, where you bring your own container and pay by weight. It's very niche now but I can imagine it increasing in popularity.
There is a short by Adam Curtis called "Oh Dear". You may have seen it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM

The basic takeaway is that you make it impossible for the average person to keep up the thread of events and they become apathetic to it. I've also watched Adam Curtis's "Hypernormalisation". It is well worth a watch.
QuickJS [0] quotes a 210KiB binary.

[0] https://bellard.org/quickjs/
`curl -s https://www.ioccc.org/2001/cheong.hint | nc termbin.com 9999`

https://termbin.com/5yaq

In short: for a 2n-digit input, returns the integer part of its square root (n-digits)
> In his decision denying Sinclair's motion to dismiss, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff split from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on its controversial server test, also known as the server rule, that says a website can only infringe a copyright by displaying an image if it also stores a copy on its server, finding the rule contradicts the Copyright Act.

> "Proponents of the server rule suggest that a contrary rule would impose far-reaching and ruinous liability, supposedly grinding the internet to a halt," Rakoff said. "These speculations seem farfetched, but are, in any case, just speculations."

Linking and transclusion are core features of hypertext system, so yes, deviating from this 'server rule' could have significant ramifications for how the Web works.

If copyright holders don't want third parties linking to or transcluding (via iframes and embeds) their content, they can host it on their own servers and use access control.
Hard to know where those figures come from, and the article itself says they divide household by capita, which is extremely weird.

If we look at median wealth (don't use average because highly distorted by wealthy tail), the US comes below a lot of other countries:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...

i.e. cherry picking and using invalid metrics can tell whatever story you wish.
Don't know what you're talking about. You can walk down any highway I've ever seen in America and pick up trash for miles and miles.
> I'm saying it would be premature to discount the possibility

So you have no evidence, but demand that your theory be put on equal footing, just because.

If you have evidence for a purposeful detonation, provide it. Otherwise you’re just selling conspiracy theories, something this forum has little patience for.
Maintain a backlog for them, at least an idea backlog
That's the case with tons of compiler optims.
I started work on using this CSV to analyze my purchases (https://observablehq.com/@bradydowling/amazon-purchase-analy...) and found out how much better this data could be if Amazon was even slightly custom centric.

For example, why don’t I see MY product ratings? Analyzing which of my purchases were “good” purchases would help me spend properly in the future. Plenty of other data that Amazon has that they won’t give me in this report.

PS reach out if you’re interested in helping my take this to completion. I was going to make a YouTube video about it as well so I’d love any collaboration
Money is a token than can be readily exchanged for goods and services.

The value of money created by governments is based on the ability of then government to tax the population.

But there are many counties where USD is more useful form of money than the local government backed currency.

Legally enforcable numbers in a bank account means nothing when your account is frozen, the government changes, you have no funds to pursue legal remedies, or be bogged down for years in court. Probably wishing you'd kept it all under the mattress or in Bitcoin at this point
The definition of vapoware is things that are delayed continously after they should have been released.

The BE-4 fits into that.
I find the difficulty of learning Finnish is being consistently exaggerated on the Internet.

Source: Learned it as an adult myself.
SciShow did a great episode on this very issue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvzvM9tf5s0
> You probably can't name many politicians or media personalities in the US that were pro vaccine a year ago

This is not true. politicians expressed hesitation about rushed vaccines not approved or approved under coercion when not supported by studies. They said they would gladly take one when it was authorized based on science, not politics. This is basically what the current president said in debates and he then took it very shortly after that happened, putting his money where his mouth was.

Please edit your comment so that it doesn’t make an unfounded claim.
SpaceX is launching its own internet satellites into low orbit so their satellites will only burn up in a decade without boosting. If your argument is "don't progress or change in any way because something bad might happen" then I suspect you'll find few takers on this site.
This is just a blatant lie. Come on, man!
...except that people are bringing new carbon-emitting power plants online to power their mining rigs.

Really though, this argument is utter nonsense. Solar/wind/etc. power being dumped into Bitcoin mining means carbon-emitting power is being used elsewhere instead of being shut down. Bitcoin is an environmental disaster that consumes massive amounts of energy just to process a tiny number of transactions.
Starlink?

But these companies (well, at least SpaceX) have their focus on making orbit cheap and sustainable, and pushing towards Mars colonization and asteroid mining. Those are engineering and logistics problems more than science problems, but I think they're very important.
What would you have spent that energy on instead?
> If you are going to force vaccinate the entire planet with an experimental vaccine (...)

Which vaccine do you believe is experimental?

If you familiarize yourselft with a vaccine's standard clinical trials and approval process, you'll learn that all major vaccines being rolled out finished all their clinical trials last year.

Recommended reading:

* https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/basics/test-approve.html

* https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

* https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid-19-vaccine-dev...
Multiple providers has been the “name of the game” for a long time now, so it’s not surprising that Blue Origin or ULA got caught off guard. They had to know this Day was coming, but maybe not so quickly.

This should be a wake up call to established space players: the days of cost-plus contracts, multiple bid winners, and endless cost and time overruns - are over. There’s no purpose to those anymore.

For the past fifty years this all made sense: going to space was hard, and the financial risks were astronomical. This decision highlights how much progress we’ve made toward establishing a “space economy”. Space has been de-risked enough that the corporations can take on the (previously fatal) risk of a fixed-price contract. De-risked enough that the government is reasonably certain of achieving a strategic objective with a single provider.

BO, ULA, et. al - the game just changed. Adapt, or die.
> Sure, having the one black or gay character in a tv show is obvious tokenism, particularly when portrayed as shallow stereotype, but it seems to me as if any attempt at representation nowadays is written off as "political" or tokenism, even when it's sincere.

This is the crux of the issue. To me, "attempts at representation" are demeaning by definition. Giving someone a part because of their skin color or sex or sexual orientation is demeaning.

Diversity has to be genuine for it to be good. You have to cast an actor or write a part because you thought the actor was good or the part works, not as part of an "attempt at representation".
Gold-backed currency is fiat, with government setting gold-money exchange rate.

Besides, there were more bank runs back in the gold standard era.
> Congress would be dumb to pick a new horse now.

You're not optimizing for the same outcomes as Congress. NASA is a jobs agency.