skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about the opposite?

A tacit understanding that the US pullout we desired so much results in this chaos? That the chaos is unavoidable, that the Taliban were going to take over the country one way or the other when we left.

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Now we can wax poetic about the details: should the troops have stayed put? If so, how many? Clearly, the Taliban were ready to surge (and surge they did: they've overwhelmed the entirety of the Afghan forces in just a week).

That means that boots on the ground fighting would have been left to American forces yet again, a proposition that no one wants either. Its not entirely wrong for us to state: well... at least Americans aren't getting attacked right now.

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And as much as this blogpost wants to discuss "non-serious people", I tune into CSPAN and actually hear the people in power having the difficult discussions. Senators (even Republican ones) aren't blaming Biden for the collapse, they're mostly focused on the timing and the details of the pullout.

Biden was wrong to pull out the troops a few months ago (his pullout was aimed at 9/11/2021). The current situation is: Biden evacuated a bunch of troops, and then suddenly had to send them back into Kabul to secure the airport.

An understandable mistake at a high level (Biden underestimated the speed of the Afghan government's collapse)... but also absolutely fair for Republicans to criticize Biden over. I don't have any answers, but frankly, the political process is __working__. The Republicans are asking the right questions and levying the correct criticisms. Biden is responding in kind with his statements today. Politics continue, the debate continues, but of course no one cares about these details.

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In contrast, this blogpost is about how we're not serious about the issue by mostly posting bad twitter arguments. Aka: the stuff that doesn't matter.

Lets talk about the details. Lets prove that we're serious. 6000ish boots on the ground entering Kabul (as per Biden's plan). Is this too many troops? Too few troops? Will the 9/11/2021 pullout be done in time (less than a month remains).

The Taliban has not yet started their expected bloodbath. Can we trust them to honor their side of the agreement? Will they let us leave in peace? There seems to be no honor or glory in killing a bunch of retreating civilians, but I admit that I'm relatively ignorant of this Taliban (sure, the Taliban from the 90s would have started a bloodbath by now. But that Taliban is mostly dead, we killed most of those former leaders in the nearly 20 year war. I'm sure today's Taliban have different ideas than back then, and it may be important to discuss the differences)

Sure, I know they massacre and genocide people who live there (at least, back in the 90s). But surely its in _THEIR_ best interests to let all of these Afghani civilians (and US forces / NATO forces) leave in peace? The last thing they want is for US forces to "fight seriously" against them right now.
One thing I've picked up on that I especially hate is when a cut scene has you press buttons solely for the sake of interactivity, i.e. they don't utilize game mechanics.

"Press X to..." in a situation that you will never encounter again or press X again in. Like the cut scene isn't teaching you a mechanic, it's just making you pay attention.
Ya tracking its more than just face. Thinking of some wearable RF-ish broadcaster, use it disrupt the comp vision that is a root for biometrics of various types. I know I’m hand waving a lot of stuff technically though.
You’re not wrong about the Taliban, but it is also untenable for American forces to remain in a country after trillions of dollars, two decades, and so many lives were lost when Afghans were never going to fight for themselves. Evacuate everyone who wants out, leave behind those who choose to exist under Taliban rule. Treat it like Cuba but with more support for those who intend to flee (arranged safe passage through diplomatic and military supply chains, for example).
Usually they fill me with dread.
Maybe the ideas you learnt were "settling in" over the past 20 years.
Give Perl6/Raku a shot if you haven't yet.

IMO, it is pretty much the best-of-all-worlds language that is still accessible. (Meaning not exotic like Haskell or Erlang..)

The concurrency is beautifully painless.
> It began with a request for authorization.

Yes, by asking someone who doesn't have permission to give that authorization to do so.
Being a large company, they should at least demonstrate that they took appropriate measures. E.g. show the reports written by the pen-testers they hired.
Louis Rossmann: More NYC businesses refuse to become vaccine police
It's already in, it has to be requested by the user with `-gcflags='-G=3'`. Of course, the feature is in heavy development and not ready for production use, YMMV.
A common money-saving trick is to buy cheap electronics from AliExpress or the likes and upgrade just the right components.

Often, these dirt cheap products are based on pretty decent ICs, but with corners cut on the surrounding circuitry. Sometimes, just changing some components to match the reference circuit can do wonders. Sometimes it is just a matter of replacing a counterfeit cap with a bigger counterfeit cap :)
This will be when I finally use Go for something then.
Intel sells expensive CPUs which are becoming useless thanks to ARM - as much in consumer devices as they are in datacenters, with big players designing their own ARM chips. GPUs are their lifeboat. Three GPU players is better than two, but I don't see much of a reason to be long Intel.
Discusses our part, and points out humanitarian gains during the conflict (girls/women who have been educated and can participate in the Afghan society so long as we were there).

Apart from mentioning the need to understand the history and dynamics of the society and its players, doesn’t pay enough attention to the role played by official Afghanistan. Given the levels of corruption and deceit up and down the chain, so that the size and preparedness of their forces was not only unknown but known to be wildly exaggerated:
* why would we have expected it to be any different leaving today?
* why would we expect anything different from leaving 10 years ago or 20 years from now?
The money and human capital cost (and some environmental cost too, don’t forget) has been large, and I think the payback was going to be never. To those Afghans that gained something during our presence, I express the wish we could have had more and more lasting an effect. I hope my grandchildren, if they ever materialize, will feel similar generosity, they’ll be paying for it.

Don’t forget, we trained the mujahadeen to fight the Soviets, and the Soviets as near neighbors couldn’t win a fight there. The enemy of your enemy might be your friend, but only situationally.
I’ve come to be somewhat known as a “math guy” in creative coding. It’s one of my impostor syndrome items because I’m really not any kind of expert in the field

I feel similarly about statistics. I of course, given my line of work, have a solid foundation there. But my area of expertise is... more complicated to explain or define. When it comes to statistics expertise though, apart from a solid foundation I simply know enough to know what tools to use, and how to research and evaluate such tools. For example, in a recent project I knew that LSTM was an appropriate tool, but I don't know more than a high level abstraction of how it works and the domain of problems it might help solve.

To give a very basic example sort
of like knowing when to use the Pythagorean theorem but not knowing enough to prove it up from axioms.
This is absurd. There is a simple way to eliminate data breaches -- Don't keep data. Humans have been conducting businesses for thousands of years without the need to hoard large quantities of personal data.

If there was sufficient regulatory force to induce companies to make the choice between not hoarding data or not existing then I'm sure that business would carry on as it has for millennia.
“until things get truly terrible. “

That’s the sad part. Big change seems to require a big disruptive event like war or revolution.

But i agree that things seem to get better overall. Unfortunately there are plenty of downs in between and these can last many years.
I've long known that `import antigravity` would open the xkcd comic, but I never knew there was also a geohashing function!

That was a favorite activity of mine in high school. On Friday evening, we'd look at the nearest graticule(s) to our town and pick one for a Saturday day trip. Trucking out to a random point on a map is a great way to explore your metro area and see things you never would otherwise.

Heartily recommend trying it out. Looks like the map (linked from the comic) is no longer working: http://carabiner.peeron.com/xkcd/map/map.html

But, with this function, there may yet be hope!
The whole scheme is such an obvious dark pattern. You have 2 options:

1. About 5 prompts every time a child wants to "buy" something including free stuff.

2. An absolute free for all where a child can have unlimited spend.

Competing app stores would have a MUCH better family sharing setup with proper budgets and controls. Microsoft gets the money end of it right, but sucks at the actual app sharing. Google can't even make their gift cards work properly.

We need app store competition.
Congrats, I think you are working on something very important. Recently I watched the Ds conferences with Steve Jobs to get a new eye on them. At some point he explains that the minute the user get to see the file system, the learning curve goes everest. And so they made splotlight notably.

I think now that was really spot on and that it ultimately goes even further. Look at your desktop computer screen and tell me: how much information is there? A freaking lot. Even a window contains so much information (coords, sizes, 3 buttons, a scroll bar), that's a lot compared to what you find on mobile. The iphone experience is actually pretty different from the desktop experience in that sense, there is an order of magnitude less information on the screen of an iphone.

I'm aging. Now whenever I come in front of a desktop computer screen, my heart starts beating, I'm stressed. Thats just too much for me. Whereas the opposite is true with my smartphone, there is something zen about the experience of it all.
> If you are building a game from scratch why would you limit yourself to a lowest common denominator interface when there's no need?

There is a need: the limits of the human mind. Nobody can model an entire (worthwhile) game in their head, so unless you plan on recursively rewriting the entire program as each new new oversight pops up, you aren't going to get anywhere near optimal anyway.
I think he/she is making the point that our society is not comprehensively discussing topics with all angles covered.

The progressive wing of the party in power—Bernie, AOC, the 'squad', the whole crew that normally tweets 10 times per day and has opinions on everything—goes absolutely mute when confronted by some hard, inconvenient reality outside the US liberal bubble like Cuba or Afghanistan. As the situation in Afghanistan worsened, the charismatic new face of progressive politics was…enthusing about public libraries. Yay!

AOC’s tweet:

Shout out to libraries and library workers. We love and appreciate you that’s all

These same liberals would have been tweeting about ‘leave Afghanistan immediately, we need to spend that money on school lunches’ a year ago, or tweet something about inspiring Afghan women going to school.

They would speak up when speaking up was inconsequential. Well, ok, how about now? We left, and now there is the Taliban.

It’s the same with defunding the police. Even a small pullback of policing increased crime in many US states. Let’s give homeless people tents. Well, ok, now there are entire encampments of homelessness in LA. Let’s let transgender compete in their gender-of-choice sport. Great, now we have men literally beating women unfairly.

Back to the War on Terror, we all know the answer to this problem was time sensitive, we needed to leave Iraq/Afghanistan as soon as we killed Bin Laden.

But now that we stayed 20 years in one of these countries, we have an actual responsibility. You know, like not leaving the child you just gave birth to.

Are we prepared to discuss it like that? That’s way too mature of course.
The archetypal ’talk’ on Data Oriented Design (in the way GP is talking about it) is Mike Acton’s 2014 CPPCon keynote.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
Given Promises and callbacks have always been pervasive in JS—that it’s always been heavily asynchronous—I can’t imagine thinking async/await was a mistake. It’s a drastic ergonomic improvement over both, and it also drastically improves debugging and error stacks.

Adding it to a language where IO is typically blocking with other ergonomic concurrency mechanisms, that I can imagine being somewhat controversial.

It would be good if async weren’t infectious, but as a sibling comment said that was already the case with Promises and callbacks.

It would maybe also be better if concurrency was the default behavior and keeping a reference to a promise was the explicit syntax, but I could see downsides to that. It potentially hides/encourages excessive use of expensive calls. And implicit concurrency is a potential source of many bugs.
I think we need to add a new level 2 assisted driving skills section to driving tests. Level 2 can be safer but it really requires understanding how level 2 works and limitations. For example, when I use level 2 (mine is Honda but applies to other level 2 as well since they mostly share the same vendor), these are the rules I follow:

- Car switching in/out of my lane, I manually take over

- Tight curve in the freeway, manually take over

- Very frequently check the dashboard indicator that shows if the sensors "sees" the car front or not

- Anything unusual like construction, cones, car on shoulder, manually take over

- Anything that looks difficult like weird merging lanes, manually take over

- Any bad weather or condition like sun directly in front, manual drive

- Frequently adjusting max speed setting on ACC. It's safer to not be too much above the prevailing speeds. Otherwise, if ACC suddenly becomes blind, it can accelerate dangerously as it tries to reach max set speed.

- I don't trust lane keep much, it's mostly a backup for my own steering and making my arms less tired turning the wheel

The key thing is to recognize just how dumb this technology is. It's not smart, it's not AI. It's just a bit above the old cruise control. With that mindset it can be used safely.
What capabilities does GM or Ford have that Tesla doesn't? Neither GM nor Ford have rolled out automatic lane changing. Teslas have been doing that since 2019.

The reason GM's Super Cruise got a higher rating by Consumer Reports was because CR didn't even test the capabilities that only Tesla had (such as automatic lane change and taking offramps/onramps). Also, the majority of the evaluation criteria weren't about capabilities. eg: "unresponsive driver", "clear when safe to use", and "keeping the driver engaged".[1]

1. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/cadillac-super-cr...
Important note: it's the preview release. Not everything will be done, there will be gaps. But the first parts of the work have already merged to master, and it's coming.
> This is often seen in the form of very smart people also believing conspiracy theories or throwing their hands up around other massive issues. As an example, the "Rationalist crowd" has de-emphasized work on climate change mitigation in favor of more abstract work on AI safety.

To be clear, the argument (in rationalist circles) is not that climate change is no big deal, it's that there's already a ton of people worrying about it, so it is better to allocate some extra resources to underfunded problems.
Yeah seriously. Someone got triggered by the truth, evidently.
I think we’re in violent agreement :)
I saw that. Thank you for your patience and persistence in responding to so many pointed questions.

For any interested, here is a link to relevant section of the referenced privacy policy: https://plaid.com/legal/#consumers

I am also impressed by the Legal Changelog on the same page that clearly lays out a log of changes made to privacy & other published legal documents.
No. The US is so broke it's buying its own debt by the trillions of dollars via debasing its currency to keep the federal lights on (to keep social security and medicare solvent).

We can't pay our bills properly. When as a nation your central bank has to buy your own debt because nobody else can afford to buy so much garbage paper, you clearly can't afford such irresponsible foreign adventurism.

Enough is enough. Time to go home. Time to reduce military spending immediately. Time to stop playing at nation building. Time to stop pretending we can afford to be a globally deployed military superpower, as though WW3 is going on and we have to be at max defense spending.

The US couldn't afford Afghanistan 15 years ago. It most certainly can't afford it now.
While it does sound like you are burned out, I lived in London for 6 years and hated it - I left as soon as I completed my Ph.D. - it's not a good spot if you are not a city person. My suggestion is to look at remote work, take a pay cut if necessary, and work from where you want to live, at least for a while. Just because you have a Ph.D. this does not mean you have to live in the middle of a large city. Use the money from that job as a vehicle to develop a small, focused piece of software that solves a problem, preferably somewhat related to your Ph.D. work. Get a business person involved in this early to validate the concept, so you sure you are not making something you can't sell, and start selling it. Two outcomes - either you make money (in which case fine) or you don't, and have something to point at showing that you can be self-starting - and then look for a job related to that. Do be rigorous though, and finish what you start (ALWAYS finish what you start). You could begin by doing some focused research to aid in deciding what field you think your academic background confers an advantage in (and is not fintech :))
Seems like this is based on total annihilation, one of the Best RTS games ever made.
The contract was supposed to be Bezos' retirement present and he can't handle ending on a losing note
Try visiting Japan, it's like 1989, everywhere you go.
And the pill would cost a few dollars less than healthcare's lowest bid, not fall all the way to zero, at least until the generics step in.
Regarding Canada, there has been some (slow, small) progress in this area. https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...
Ideally the architect would get together with the developers and they'd all start solutioning...
Go is my favorite language to write code in. I was very skeptical when I first started learning it for a new job with error handling that looked archaic in comparison to exceptions but once I got the hang of it it has quickly become my preferred language of choice for any project.

Once generics are finally added the language should basically be a no-brainer for any serious production code.
Yes, I've been using F12 a lot too, just to dive into random projects. It's amazing how much this little feature means.
(Except the Cone of Silence of course)
If you want to play something similar to Total annihilation with better graphics and balance check https://balancedannihilation.com
ah

penny wise and pound foolish

vs

a penny saved is a penny earned

People have been tackling this issue for a long time.
While old-school and a bit funny, not being on https while sporting downloads of something as significant as an operating system isn't what i would want to do. The internet isn't "fun" anymore and we need all security we can get or someone will exploit you.
Sure, but such models are hackable / breakable, just by breaking the rules or reinventing the game.
The difference is, they have traffic controllers and the train have their own dedicated rails, almost no obstructions and a train into train crash danger situation rarely arises.
The planes have a lot of maneuvering space to all sides.

Car traffic and streets are more dense and often have humans crossing them without regards to laws, bicycles, motorbikes, road construction and bad weather.

Not saying one auto pilot system is better than the other, however, they operate in different environments.
Similar to setting up dotfiles or a library so they can be reused in your next environment.
There is a middle ground between doing it yourself and buying industrialized food. In Italy, people really value food produced locally. There is even a slogan for it "kilometro zero", which means "buy food close to the source".

No wonder food tastes way better in Italy than in the US (in general), for example.
Exact, you can run under the browser. No framework.
3.5 inches on an average of ~1 meter was the measurement, in a study that a single researcher performed using himself as the rider.

This result is both weakly supported and small, and it shouldn't be considered actionable.
Biden is recalibrating on nap time.
I think we need an automated Invoice Filing System for "warranty calls" billed directly to the auto companies.

In addition to the Hilton and Marriott Hotel Chains for their "You recently stayed at the [Hotel]" calls...

I was an elite member at Marriott for years, and I am convinced that my numbers were released in their breaches.
If my tax dollars paying American troops to maintain order prevented a single little girl from being violently raped at the hands of the Taliban—yeah, I'd say let's stay there forever.

I mean seriously, this argument holds no weight whatsoever. No one ever intended to stay there forever. But maybe "stay there long enough to help the government be resistant to religious zealots willing to die to subdue non-believers"? That seems like a pretty damn low-bar.
Actually that's not what he did. He blamed the Afghan government and army for literally dissolving in 1 week to 10 days. Within 10 days they gave up like 17 of the largest cities, eventually Kabul, a city of 4.5 million people literally in a couple of hours.

It was absurd. Who would've predicted that? And what would Trump have done differently, since I'm sure that's your guy. He wanted to pull out by May.

Obviously from your vacation comment (he was at Camp David which is like 30 mins by heli from the White House)... you're just being partisan and a troll.
I fully agree with you. I'm absolute skeptic about anything Facebook and Twitter and other multi-billion dollar tech companies support. Especially because, the whole project of a decentralized social network, if this succeeded, and really became mainstream, these same companies would loose A LOT of power.

It would be easier to compete with them, they would lose their role as being the gate keeper of acceptable debate on a huge part of the internet, so there's a huge down scepticism from my part, thinking "they will find some way to taint and contaminate this whole project... somehow". Twitter would never actually embrace this idea, certainly voluntarily.
Fake person
One thing I never understood is why _downsampling_ is the most efficient way to compress the data about chroma into fewer bits while maximizing perceptual accuracy. It really seems like for any given target bitrate for the chroma data, there should always be a more efficient compression scheme available than simply throwing out 3/4 of the pixels and running compression algorithms on the rest. Surely modern compression can do better with a continuous low pass filter or a adaptive compression scheme that focuses data on interesting edges or something?
Maybe someone here can better explain the intuition for this. I'm similarly curious for resolution in general (i.e. why does 480p upsampled ever look better than 1080p at the same bitrate) but chroma seems like a good place to start.
AdCenter Network closes shop after ‘piracy scam’ investigation