skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty sure that parent poster was pointing out that this was an unamusing and obvious coincidence, and thus not worthy of a post.
> this was pretty assured to happen

That's not what Biden said. Just over a month ago, on July 8th, he actually argued that the Afghan army could win:

Q Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?

THE PRESIDENT: No, it is not.

Q Why?

THE PRESIDENT: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.

...

I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
You can’t find staff.

We are at about 20% below staffing.
I feel terrible for all the Afghans who aren’t religious extremists, who are going to live a life of terror and suffering under the Taliban. Afghan women especially, who are going to go right back to the brutal oppression they faced pre-9/11. However, I don’t really see a good alternative, either.

Having your country constantly occupied by invading forces is a great way to breed religious extremism. The Taliban win because they have a lot of support in Afghanistan, and this isn’t likely to change anytime soon. From what I’ve read, it’s a minority of the population who support them, but the support of around 20-30% of the population, with many, many of those willing to fight and die for the Taliban, is still formidable. I believe the Taliban has more soldiers now than at any other point in their history?

Also, it seems that in a massive number of cases, the Afghan National Army just quickly surrendered without even giving up a fight. They were bigger and better funded, but so many either wanted the Taliban to win, or at least felt that being ruled by the Taliban was acceptable and/or inevitable.

The US had to pull out eventually. When you leave, you no longer control what happens … and in Afghanistan right now, this means the Taliban take over. Really, the US should never have invaded in the first place, so many lives lost so pointlessly.
According to wikipedia they have only 1200 employees.

And 87 interns, that's quite a lot.

Given the level of granularity in that code, I can't imagine what they are all doing.

How do you have 87 people tweak a code-base and then just leave?

There's an incredible amount of sophistication in some of those project, surely they're not all used, but imagine the team you need just to maintain any of that. With only 1200 staffers, how many are in Development?

I think there must be a huge amount of surplus spend here. Basically, they are swimming in cash, hire the best interns, get a few nice things but mostly it's not that important. But if those marginal contributions eventually do provide a tiny bit of value the amount of leverage involved is so huge that it can make them a fortune.
Something Awful is still active, though your mileage may vary as far as "good" goes.
Are you really implying this is because of "woke" culture?
Which parts are inaccessible without paying? Maybe I haven't progressed far enough (haven't finished the Liyue Archon quest) but all the money I spent so far is just for weapons and additional characters. They make it easier to defeat enemies but defeating enemies without those upgrades is still doable.
My first reaction: "holy copyright violation!"

My second reaction: "holy rurol juror! rorul? rurowl?"

This is brilliant and a work of art. They should make the "As seen in" more pronounced (took me a while to find) with an IMDB link and it'd be cool to have preview clips like the autoplaying ones Netflix has but as a montage from the original source so we can see the context (though I realize that may be an unrealistic amount of work).
That's a possible explanation, but the difference of energy to break the bonds is probably small, so a small increase of the frequency of the light in the laser should fix it.

I suspect they are using some usual high power laser that is available on shelf, so it's not easy to choose the frequency arbitrarily. It's very unlikely that the usual on shelf available laser has the right frequency to remove normal Hydrogen but not Deuterium.
That would not have aided in the policy goal of "leaving Afghanistan". This was already such a well known strategy in the 80s that the (absolutely fantastic) British comedy show Yes Minister explained exactly how to do it:

Bernard Woolley : What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?

Sir Humphrey Appleby : Then we follow the four-stage strategy.

Bernard Woolley : What's that?

Sir Richard Wharton : Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.

Sir Richard Wharton : In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.

Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

Sir Richard Wharton : In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.

Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
PDF is an abomination & a relic.
Looking from the other side there are many people here who would argue that NT/2000 was a high point and it has been downhill since.
(Tangential) Got to scratch my head at this "authoritatively voiced" bit of advice in the SO thread:

> Testing the result of a constructor in any language is probably a dodgy practice. It's an object or it's a 'null'.

Ah, if there's an OO language anywhere that can return null from a constructor invocation, I have yet to see it.
I read them. The first paper you referenced do not address any points (it just gives another example, similar to the Norton's Dome), and the second one actually confirms the major point given by Gruff Davies:

> Newton’s laws are deterministic, but they’re not complete.

That second paper identifies Lipschitz condition as missing part, and, by the way, it also states in the abstract:

> I do not seek to conclude that these examples are necessarily strong evidence that classical mechanics is not
deterministic; rather, I want to emphasize the legitimacy of pragmatic considerations in deciding what legitimately counts as a Newtonian system

That is, the original Newton's principle of determinacy ("The initial positions and velocities of all the particles of a mechanical system uniquely determine all of its motion.") might be proven wrong, but that does not make "classical" (non-relativistic) mechanics indeterministic, only incomplete. To quote Gruff Davies again:

> If we think about particles’ states, and consider higher orders like jounce, snap, crackle and pop. (and all the way to infinity), we can see that the choice of path of unstable particles is fully determined by their values, so this isn’t evidence for indeterminism, it is evidence for incompletion.
And my point is that it’s not — the starting pieces may differ, and thus the conclusions, but there’s clearly a qualitative difference between the opinion of an expert, and the opinion of a novice. If only that the expert brings far more knowledge into his opinion than the novice. But also in that his opinion is of better foundation, of more supporting infrastructure, of more stable reasoning, and can in general be both better explained and better defended.

Opinions don’t exist in a void — they’re still the outcome of argument, and can easily be compared by that ruler.

And in this case, it’s trivial to imagine utterly terrible opinionated outcomes — use hyphen to represent addition, having functions like c’s get() (impossible to use correctly, and having defaults that are backwards in the common case.

It’s also trivial to imagine what a poorly reasoned opinion might look like: “ what's what opinions are - they necessarily must be wrong to some people. Otherwise, it'd just be called facts!”
> I'm looking forward to Phoenix 1.6 which ditches Webpack for esbuild. Every step away from the insane churn of the modern frontend world is welcome.

I don't like the churn either, but ditching X for Y only contributes to the churn.
Ignoring all the bad things about Microsoft Word, it really nails revision management for non-tech people. I've worked thru many legal contracts, collaborating with lawyers and other parties. I wish there'd be better alternatives, tho.
Or when Bin Laden was a hero in 1993.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/robert-fisk-os...
There's not really an official definition of FP. There are some proposed ones that involve types and some that don't involve them. Mainly though, this is a thread about the linked article, which is about the tribulations that the author had learning Haskell. Most of those tribulations were with the type system and I think that matches most people's experience. You can't transplant it to Lisp.
Periodic Table from Google Arts Experiments
The US supported regime and even the US military command were literally on the side of child rapists[1]. One can easily find many many other examples with a search, so I won't provide them. Suffice to say the USA was not on the side of the angels here. Furthermore, the rapidity with which the Taliban turned the government forces and took Kabul strongly suggests a Napoleon's return from Elba[2] scenario. The evidence is now overwhelming that the puppet Afghan government and its US supporters were both evil and despised by the common Afghan who jumped at the chance to support the Taliban, actively or by acquiescence.

I'm sure we'll see desperate propaganda attempts in the US news trying to spin it, but it's only going to work on people with absolutely no awareness of history. And as others here have already noted, on top of that it's probably the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American, or possibly any, people ever.

In other news, China already informally recognized the Taliban[3] and the Russian embassy is not being evacuated[4]. We are witnessing the first stages of the collapse of the US led "international order"[5]. Fascinating stuff, although as a US citizen it may not be so great for me personally.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/28/politics/green-beret-afghan-p...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Days#Return_to_France

[3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-prepared-to-recog...

[4] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/15/blinken-says-...

[5] Read: "empire"
> It's incredibly annoying that this kind of thing is rampant...

And that is why it IS rampant. Some people, due to issues that occurred during their youth, have compulsive attention seeking behaviors.
It's about the long tail. If I look at the people that I have subscribed to on YouTube, and then take the mean of their count of subscribers, the mean is probably over a million. When I do the same on TikTok it's about 10k. There were probably the same people posting the same content on YouTube, but because there is no discovery, I never found them, and they never found viewers, so they stopped.

What you are subjected to on each platform is based on the discovery methods of that platform. There are probably very good reasons that American sites tend to have really bad discovery, it means that Ads are more impactful and it gives the creator of the algorithm all the power.

So it's not that bad people don't exist on TikTok, but because their discovery system is so good I end up watching content that I like. Whereas on YouTube, because the discovery system is so poor, I am subjected to watch things that the platform favors. YouTube favors high-energy, face-contorting, lowest common denominator content. Up until now because YouTube has been the only source of internet video, I had to go along with it as it was the best we had. Suddenly I don't.
How low though? Lyra added significant overhead, from what I read. They said it was small but then in practice it was like 100ms or something, which given a typical ok connection is easily 50ms would put it in the perceivable range of delay.
More like a completely disfunctional government made up of a bunch of warlords of dubious background and character. AFAIK the Talibans massacred any possible opposition/contender around the 9/11 events, leaving effectively no cohesive group behind that could replace them.
There are two options that anyone has been able to figure out over the last twenty years: indefinite occupation, and eventual retaking of the country by the Taliban. There may have been some third way, but if so, nobody who had the power to influence the outcome was able to think of it.

It's certainly a bad "look" for Biden, but the real error was going there in the first place. That was when this outcome was decided. Whoever finally pulled the plug was going to have a PR issue on their hands, but this is hardly Biden's defeat.
Why are people even downvoting this comment. Just the other day Biden stated Kabul would not fall.

This is a failure. Don't downvote because of politics.
While I’m also terribly sorry for what happens in Afghanistan and think the discussion on HN will be more thoughtful than in many other places on the internet, I believe these kind of submissions don’t belong here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Everyone knew what would happen.

But if we can't create a stable Afghanistan in 20 years, would we have any success in 40?
It was cover to keep the fight there. 20 years, no terror attacks. Marxist china is now a state sponsor of terror. Global embargo, and they miss out on a lot of new tech. They spread disease, and keep you from the mRNA cancer vaccine.
Well, they're also effectively spending for an extended job interview.
Indeed. We should have been out of there long ago once it became clear that we did not understand the conditions for victory anymore / when we realized that we did not want to allocate the resources required to win. Staying this long was pure sunk cost fallacy combined with weak leadership. Kudos to Biden for having the balls to rip the bandaid off, as painful as it is.
React Renderer for Three.js
> Many consider this game better than Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Is Genshin Impact a pretty and technically impressive BotW-like game? Yes.

But Breath of the Wild is, by many accounts, considered one of the greatest games of all time [0]. I have never heard anyone suggest this of Genshin Impact.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...
Of course, this has been happening slowly over five to six years. I do not deny that. But irrespective of who you support, it is still a tragedy.
Sweet cherry pick. And now, since we created a government that could never be self sufficient, and have been slowly pulling our troop support from it for the last 8 years, all of those little girls will be punished for going to school. And we created that for them. Go USA..
Agreed. Clojure is the most productive language I've ever used.
Thank you for your kind words. Made my day. Typesense is 100% bootstrapped, and a labor of love[0]. We will certainly do our best to keep making it better.

[0]: https://typesense.org/blog/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of...
Totally agree with this sentiment in theory - it's best to keep the environments as similar as possible. But in practice there are requirements that will differ, such as having production be publicly available and staging be protected, mocking of certain third-party services that may not be available in a non-production environment, etc.
But wasn't it some US general's job to train the ANA? If you're training someone to do a difficult dangerous job and the moment you hand things off to the person everything blows up - you probably deserve a lot of the blame.
It's not actually true. There are lots of places where we spend money that are neither opaque nor cheap by default where penny-pinching is a concern. When you're rich to the point that you actually have your day filled (including mornings, evenings, and everything in between) with high-value work, then spending your own time to manage your assets conservatively, directly, no longer makes sense. Even so, you want to hire a fiscally conservative manager. The rich stay rich through great control over both spending and earning.
> at lease that last one is still an advantage over qemu which has... nothing

https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/
Simple Video Chat with WebRTC
This summarizes one possible scenario. https://twitter.com/mycoliza/status/1417539271192309761
Second that. This is THE solution for comparing any two PDFs (image or not). I’ve been using it for years almost on a daily basis. Part of its use is certainly derived from the excellent OCR engine it relies on. Also, this runs fully local, which is critical for legal purposes. (edit for context: I still use v14)
What answer is he supposed to give to that question, even if he is relatively confident of an eventual Taliban victory? I don't mean to ask what the honest answer is. I mean to say, what is the sayable answer?
Europe didn't try to stop the Syrian refugees, it obviously has the political and military capabilities to settle people elsewhere. One million is manageable without Europe collapsing, 30-50 million is a different story.
BTW Europe has already made a deal with Turkey to host millions of refugees there (on Turkish soil) so this is already happening. I think the political will to host more refugees, let alone tens of millions, is about zero in Europe.
What is Webpacker?
Efficiency has never been the problem. Cost has always been the driving factor behind technology adoption, and the highest efficiency solutions are rarely the cheapest.

BEVs are winning at the momemy not because they're efficient, but because the cost/benefit is finally coming out ahead due to advances in battery technology.

But BEVs don't fully cover all use cases. It is telling that the first commercial truck manufacturer to release a full electric truck has also invested billions into hydrogen. BEVs can certainly handle a lot of usecases, but continuous usage at high power levels isn't one of them, even at theoretical energy densities.
In the most extreme scenario, can the US create new agricultural fields in other states, cutting down forests if needed ? The weather will change but surely the US will still have arable land enough to feed its citizens (even if they have to forget some kind of crops (pistachio, etc.) aside) ?
I am 50/50 on if a conscious self-reflection will give you the birds-eye view. For some it might work, for me it doesn't.

Meditation definitely achieves that for me however.
I have also noticed this. Obviously life extension would create a bunch of problems (wealth accumulation, overpopulation) as well as solving others (short term thinking, cost of medical treatment in old age).

But the vast majority of people in my experience instantly reject it citing some possible problem that might arise, and no further discussion can usually be had with them.

I've come to believe that the subject of mortality just triggers a huge irrational reaction in most people. They don't want to think about it at all.
Yeah, and Heroku too. Don't know how they going now, but 5-7 years ago were their popularity was crazy.
This is a well-preparered and well-executed military operation by the Taliban. First, they negotiated a truce in exchange for a deadline on troop removal. Then they prepared a mobile military force, aimed at conquering big cities quickly (not even the Taliban can really control Afghanistan's countryside). They knew that this domino effect would kill the much larger ANA and the current administration. The media did exactly what they were supposed to do, btw. - this was a media campaign as much as a military one.

This gives us some interesting observations:

Someone must have aided the Taliban buildup. Logistics, intel, control and communication for such a wide-spread campaign ain't trivial. Taliban have no industrial base.

US and, to a certain extend, Afghan officials must have known what was coming. They must have seen the buildup, intercepted communication, etc.

The ANA was unable or unwilling to fight. The obvious counter to this offensive would have been to bolster the defense of a couple of important locations, let them be besieged and smash the local Taliban detachment with superior forces. Even four weeks ago such a strategy could have produced a stalemate. The Taliban likely cannot afford a long-lasting campaign. It looks like the ANA was completely corrupt and was out of the fight before it even began.

What really troubles me is that the Afghan people want the Taliban back. No one seems to protest, let alone resist. There are no volunteers rushing to defend Kabul from the conquerors. No women in arms defending their way of life. It makes me think that the Afghan society as a whole demands and deserves the Taliban rule.

Finally, I wonder why neither China or Russia seem very concerned. Yes, of course they will be happy when US helicopters evacuate burning embassies, but both have their own issues with radical islamists. So maybe they think they can use the Taliban to counter the IS?
Since this video is 1h 41m long and many people here on HN probably don’t know much about Genshin I’ll try and provide a brief summary of the game. Genshin is an open world game in the style of Zelda BotW in which you play as an otherworldly traveler who was separated from their twin sibling by an unknown god when they arrived in the world of Teyvat. The sibling you picked then is kept asleep for 500 years until you wake up and begin your journey to find your sibling. This journey takes you across the world of Teyvat as you save people from dragons, Abyss monsters, and other threats. Gameplay wise you play with a team of four characters each with their own elemental skills and abilities. To beat the enemy mobs and bosses you have to combine these different elements to create reactions to amplify your damage. There are also a massive amount of open world puzzles to solve as you explore the world of Teyvat.

The main problem people have with Genshin is that it is a gacha game so you gamble with premium currency to get new units and weapons. Although I do understand why people are extremely against this, in practice it isn’t that big of a problem in Genshin because of the pity system that guarantees that you will get the 5* unit you want after 180 pulls but will normally happen after 150-160 pulls because of the soft pity system that greatly increases your chance of getting a 5* after 74 pulls (the hard guarantee is at 90 pulls). You are also guaranteed a 4* character or weapon after every 10 pulls and these are also very strong compared to the 5* units. You can easily beat the game with only 4* units, and in fact one of the strongest team compositions in the game is made entirely of 4* units. So any claims about the game being P2W aren’t really accurate since there is no PvP content and the PvE content in the game is beatable by 4* units which are obtainable without spending money or a bunch of time grinding.

So overall, I really enjoy Genshin and would recommend other people try it as well. It does have problems but they aren’t as extreme as people make them out to be.
When scams are that endemic, that shows a failure of law enforcement. My PD has hundreds of traffic cops but not even a handful on internet scams and exactly one doing 'to catch a predator' type stings.