skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> charming mistakes

One character being played by three different actors (either that, or three characters being so similar I confused them as the same character despite being three different actors) is hardly charming IMO.

Longer form stories, such as Game of Thrones (where Azor Ahai, and other such plotlines are literally killed off) are probably more entertaining. It sucks to see a fan theory turn out to not matter at all, but not everything ends up being relevant to the conclusion.

I don't think a 2 or 3 hour movie has any room to dwell on unimportant details. Anime and miniseries do have that time. We can watch Goku mess around with Princess Snake or Krillen get his Namekian power up (which doesn't matter for any fight, but is good development for the character in isolation).

That's probably the charm of Cowboy Bebop. There's so much detail and none of it really matters. The interesting story happened like 10 years ago (in universe time). That's be my pick for a show / story with very little Chekhov gun going on.

-----

Chekhov gun is probably contrasted with Red Herring, which is explicitly a detail that not only doesn't matter, but purely exists to mislead the audience. Any Chekhov gun heavy plot needs red herrings to balance things out, otherwise it's too predictable.
I noticed a lot of people noting that they enjoy use some hybrid of JSON w/ their SQL. I do the same thing and I think this is an incredibly productive way to manage fast-changing things.

One trick I learned along the way is to apply gzip to your JSON columns. For us, we got over 70% reduction in column size and query performance actually increased. I presume because it is faster to read fewer IO blocks than more, esp when doing table scans (which you shouldnt but they happen).

The only caveat with this is if you want to query against something in the JSON, but I think this is where the balancing act comes into play regarding what is in (compressed) JSON and what is in a column.
Samsung uses the same company to make its phones, Foxconn, that Apple does to assemble its phones. Whatever the case is about child labor, my point is expecting a single company to be able to sidestep the enormous labor arbitrage from manufacturing in China/SE Asia is naive. Surely there are many qualified people who work to determine what price premium the public is willing to pay versus going to a competitor.
Really? Because it seems to me that they suspected the opposite - that animals are intelligent - and they designed an experiment to attempt to prove it.
Not the OP, but in my experience, when you are doing math, physics or CS and don't use LaTeX, you'll be looked at sideways. There is virtually no alternative when it comes to typesetting advanced maths.
Thanks for the link to the paper. 8th century BCE is earlier than long before the earliest meaningful contact between China and Central Asia previously known to me, in the form of the Silk Road. And that's two millennia before the Mongols started having written history!
To make the analogy work, all food would be grown organic, but only companies can buy it untampered with. Before selling to consumers producers would infuse the produce with trace amounts of neurotoxin.
The top comment on this HN submission at the moment has this misunderstanding.
Actual paper as a web page: https://www.hegnes.tech/2021/09/01/location-tracking-of-wifi...

Wow, lots of maps in there. He also recorded WiFi SSIDs and mapped which one were still on WEP, or even unencrypted (although my guess is these are public ones like in a coffee shop)
I Make (This Much) $ Sharing Dev Content [and Here's How]
This is not quite accurate. Toyota began stockpiling materials a while back after having its supply chain disrupted. Having extra inventory, no matter how well-implemented, is actually an anti-pattern in lean manufacturing -- the good folks at Toyota are simply wise enough to know when they they should embrace lean vs. when they should back off it a bit.
I honestly think they could. Less Andrew Ng, more B. F. Skinner.
A user can have more or less control over their device. There are many shades of gray between "I fully control my device" and "I don't control my device." When a change to the device software, like the introduction of on-device scanning, reduces the level of agency the user has over their data on their device, it's an adverse change that the user is justified to protest.
> But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."

We are discussing high school education admissions right now. The kids being evaluated are 13. What is schooling for? Do admissions exist to make sure that some unqualified kid never gets access to a strong education? That conservative approach can make sense for life-or-death interactions like surgery, but nobody dies if a "less qualified" kid is sent to TJ (actually, since suicide rates have increased as the school has gotten more competitive, it might actually save lives).

GPA measures several things at the same time. It most explicitly measures what you have done. But in admissions we want some measure of future potential. This is not aligned perfectly with what somebody has done in the past. Were we to change grading to a continuous evaluation of future potential then I'd be much more accepting of a stricter hierarchy in admissions, but I am extremely skeptical that such a metric would be achievable without introducing tremendous biases.

My GPA in middle school was about a 4.0. But when I review my life, the reason it was so high included many many things that were unrelated to my future potential as a student.

We can also take a step back and consider why we even have limited-access accelerated education in the first place. GMU is just down the street. Even discussing the idea of opening up accelerated education to anybody who wants it is also considered being "an enemy of excellence" by opponents.

Finally, your note about surgeons and nurses is interesting, given the history. Prior to understanding of germ theory, it would have been preferable to be operated on by a nurse. Obviously, this is an extreme example but it clearly demonstrates how widespread understanding of "merit" can actually be totally broken.
Yes, LaTeX is what’s most widely used in physics.
> authors have to pay to publish, and then pay again to read

That makes me sick. I'm sorry that you had to suffer this indignity.
I think this is open to interpretation. I'm from India but actually count 3 per finger (i.e. the 3 spaces on your finger between the lines), counting up to a max of 12 per hand.
I stand corrected, they do have e2ee but not in Photos/iCloud at this point. Then I suppose the only reason for them to have gone for all this complexity is to invalidate an excuse law enforcement could use to access user data left and right. (LE: Show us all the photos so we know who’s bad! A: We have a reliable system that auto-reports, see paper, therefore this is unjustified and we’ll sue.)
Make a Joule Thief (2002)
Or just like, design some controls that work for its anatomy and give it a treat when you get to your destination. Then it can get out and you can play fetch.
This is amazing.

If only the rest of the Internet had this level of content.
What other assumption can you start with?

Assuming the natural world is dumb is simple, consistent, and easy to explain.

If you start with the assumption the natural world is “smart”, what does that even mean? Does it mean that we should assume dog can do calculus, but choose not to? Or that dogs are capable of complex communication, but also choose not to?

Saying the natural world is “smart” is a pretty meaningless statement. How smart is “smart”, everyone will have a different opinion, so you can’t use it as the basis for discovery or discussion.

However everyone understands what the natural world being dumb means. From there you can start the journey of proving step-by-step where the smarts are.
Can you feel the propaganda yet?
One thing that is very hard if not impossible for the human mind is to 'unsee' stuff. Once you have learned a certain method or theory it becomes almost impossible to think creatively about a problem and attack it from different angles, because you already know what works.

Repeated exposure also reduces skepticism. The writing world has already long known this, you can not proofread your own work. You will read 50 times over a silly mistake without ever noticing it. Software engineering is understanding this more and more through code review as well, but academia is slow on the uptake. Groups or individuals will spend months on their work without anyone else to check on it.

The young are not yet cursed with knowledge. They can look at things with a fresh look. They can poke holes in stuff others are 'reading over', and find completely new approaches.
I can recommend https://nononsensebooks.com/qft/ (as well as the rest of this excellent series of books).
Increased risk of traffic accidents in subjects with latent toxoplasmosis (2002)
Another solution is the spray them with isopropyl alcohol. I do this with sandals if they ever start to smell. Works great. Smells for a bit while it evaporates but then it is fine.

Boric acid still makes nervous but it is completely safe?
I just removed the bluetooth module from my car.
On paper, yes, but it'll just get passed on to the renter.
Personally, as a Goodreads user I don't care about the review ratings.

I'm there for:
a) making a list of things I want to read
b) finding more books by authors (including upcoming) to add to that list
c) release dates for books on that list (and sorting that list by date)
d) seeing what other people are reading

All of those tasks were time consuming before Goodreads and I'm extremely happy that some let's-refactor-our-website-for-whatever-reason push hasn't broken my use case.

1 and 5 star ratings for unreleased books are dumb but humans are really bad at 5 star rating systems anyway.

I find there's far more value in the number of ratings, but in the end books are often about personal taste.
That is like the most clueless comment on that topic ever. You are either trolling or working for one of the publishers ;-)

a) Of course people who need to read the paper professionally will just pirate it (if they don't have access through their institution). After all, citing a paper doesn't imply that you "own" it.

b) None of the authors saw any of your 250 euros.
The primary problem begging to be solved is instantaneous transfer of funds at near zero cost.

It's insane that a computerized transaction currently consumes 2-3% of amount. This is an unnecessary drag on the entire world economy.

Not only is Bitcoin no help, it actually makes the problem worse.

The perfect solution to this could be a virtual dollar --- which I suspect is where the Fed is headed.

A real working solution would obsolete existing crypto overnight for just about everything except maybe money laundering.
Or you could just do what these scientists did, and test whether or not dogs were capable of recognising intent in scenarios that don’t involve harming them.

Not sure why you would need to harm to test if they could understand intent.
So many other factors contributing to this future too.

I.e. Manual labor continuously gets automated, so less low education positions available each year.

Upcoming climate crises that's going to displace a lot of people that won't have jobs anymore.

Air quality continuously worsening. We're globally at 415 CO2 now, up from below 300 before industrialization. With each sizeable increase people will statistically perform worse on intellectual tasks. If current trends continue we'll be at 500 before 2100.

Continuously improving neural networks/"ai" will make fully automated armed defenses on private properties viable, so this is likely the first time in history in which people in power won't be dependent on their guards, making worker uprisings basically impossible

I am glad as well that Im always well into my 30th and make an effort to enjoy each day without thinking too much about the future. It's looking grim, so all the more reason to enjoy the present
Do dogs do intentional things with their feet other than walking/running? Perhaps they projected this onto you.
Although I'm more skeptical than the OP, you have to realize: the idea that the majority of society currently accepts is that privacy is less important than protecting children. Are those in opposition to the scanning of personal data willing to argue against the idea that the proliferation of CSAM directly leads to child abuse? Unless there is hard evidence that refutes such a claim, nothing about Apple's policy is going to change. And not only Apple's policy, but the policies of all other tech companies and the governments of dozens of countries throughout the world that compel the creation of those policies and the related laws.

Personally, I believe that those policies have good intentions, and that ending them will cause great harm to children on a significant scale.
In the culture's that I'm familiar (western anglophone) it's entirely unacceptable to use the word "him" for a putative technical cofounder that does not exist.

I've flagged this thread to give the moderators an opportunity to consider this data point; HN is a great community but I think that it is numerically male-dominated. That of course needn't necessarily translate into cultural problems but I am disappointed by the behavior of thread participants here.
Can't say I agree on the notion that dynamic languages doesn't gain anything with strict typing.

I have written a lot of PHP over the years and PHP has gradually introduced type hints for function parameters and return values. For me this has reduced the number of type errors I have to almost zero and with that data errors.

The thing is with type errors in dynamic languages is that it usually hides an error branch. Example, we open a file handle with fopen(), it can return a handle or false on fail.

If that would fail (false) with old style PHP you could continue pass that false file handle to other file functions like fread(), fwrite() etc without knowing they all failed. So in this case there would be no data at all either to be transformed, mangled or inserted, it wouldn't exist at all because it couldn't be written, that is also a form of data pollution (fopen() can swapped with sqlite equivalent for the same argument)

How about types and preventing data pollution? Take dates as a good example. In old MySQL you could insert zero dates (0000-00-00) or invalid dates (2004-04-31), with better sql modes you can prevent that for happening, a type enforcement.

Having non existing dates in your database will give trouble in the future, how should you handle them for calculating something like time periods for subscriptions? Do you really take into account when writing your SQL query that some dates are not valid dates at all?

Having inherited lots of old PHP project I can't say enjoy the non-strict typing in both code and database, database columns are usually filled with all sorts of garbage, like 0,1, -1, 2, true, false, null, "NULL", "Yes", "No" or even localized strings "Ja", "Nej". This will always lead to more complicated SQL queries or code logic down the line.

The article argues that you can easily spot data pollution in a column, that assumes that the developer actually looks at it, but if everything "works" why should they?

I want to do the opposite and create my own types, assume that we accept user input and to make sure that the user input doesn't contain garbage I can create my own types, like MultiByteText255, AsciiText64, HtmlFragment etc and that should be enforced both in code and storage. These types can both enforce the contents of it and also make sure to properly store and output it. And if I want I can inherit to specialized types like UserName extends MultiByteText255. Everyone using functions that takes a UserName type is forced to adhere to it.
I don't get how people can keep saying this. Is it that people are told banks lend out money from depositors in school?

Anyway, if you sign a contract that says you shall pay me every month for 30 years OR ELSE I get to sell your house (and whatever else you own, seize your income etc) then the document with your signature IS the value created and I can sell that document for what it is worth.

So the bank creates money not entirely out of thin air but against this contract.

This is a fantastic deal for them as there is almost no risk.

The seemingly few percent interest per year over 30 years quickly ads up to 2 or 3 times the initial sum.

I suppose this would be a reasonable amount roughly around the point where 3 out of 4 houses and the ground under them would just vanish in thin air with their owner stopping all payments after about 5 years on average.

The reality was that some people still had to pay rent for their flooded home.

So we are all suckers for putting up with the scheme, welcome to the club.
I had no idea, how stupid.

This makes me want to get a pair now.
Spending money on the Internet without asking permission from governments and corporations. Like cash.

Or, in crypto lingo, having a permissionless payment system.

Any other payment system is "permissioned". You need permission from some or many entities to make a bank account, a paypal account, or anything else.

You don't need permission to use cash. If you have a dollar bill in hand, you can go anywhere and spend it. You don't need an account at any financial corporation, you can just spend it.

And crypto can be like that. (currently most, but not all cryptocurrencies have exorbitant fees, so they are an imperfect solution for this problem, but they are indeed a solution)
So you love your pets and treat them kindly and with affection, yet you are assuming that your pets behaviour when you do accidentally hurt them is due to an unproven ability to discern that it was an accident rather than simply learned behaviour that you are not a threat and, rather, a boon?

Assumption is not science.
"In under 1.5 of them, humans went from first heavier than air flight to walking on the moon. In around another 1 of them, we flew a helicopter on Mars"

Yeah, one of those is much less inpressive than the other. We landed a probe on mars before we landed people on the moon

In the first period Engineers and Industrialists were in charge of companies, and then we succumbed to financialisation and bean counters, and progress has stalled.
How does this work please
I'm slightly annoyed with all the UK examples. This is about the Netherlands.

The Dutch housing bubble consists of 4 factors:

- interest rate on mortgages has been tax deductible

- new developments are limited due to environmental considerations

- it's the safest "on the books" wealth storage in all of Europe (it has been a good investment since the 16th century)

- the Netherlands outclasses it's direct neighbours in quality of life and urbanisation. It's #1 best location in the world to raise children. This leads to many many people wanting to move to the Netherlands. They are not coming for the jobs or our great personalities (sarcasm) they come for the nice living conditions, the great bicycle and public transit infrastructure. The great roads. The good education. The livability of our towns and cities. And we can't really scale it up further. It's all of the country already. You can be in the middle of nowhere in Frisia and jump on a lightrail or see a proper safe bike detour due to some new construction. From small suburbia to big inner cities. We really need Germany, Belgium and Denmark to step their game up. Release some of the pressure. (PS. Denmark is actually stepping up and will get there soon)
The Gameplay Mechanics of The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild
> To accomplish this, the world state needed to be stored in a central database and served to Minecraft servers as they popped in and out of existence

Could you elaborate on this point? To me "need" seems to strong; it could also be addressed via replication or a distributed model.

Centralized is absolutely the most straight-forward (and may be the most suitable) but I'd love to see some reasoning as to why it's the only appropriate approach.
Borax doesn’t do that. It actually affects the nervous system of insects, see here: https://homeguides.sfgate.com/insects-borax-chase-away-kill-...

I think you are thinking of silicon dioxide which does get into the chitin of insects: http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/degen.html
Speaking of that movie, I can recommend anyone who is familiar with The Room, but who hasn’t seen The Room, to watch the movie The Disaster Artist (2017) instead. I’ve only watched the latter and not The Room itself but watching the latter instead was a nice experience.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3521126/

The Disaster Artist is based on the book "The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made" by Greg Sestero, and it’s got James Franco portraying Tommy.
When many of the quality-focused companies in Japan took off they focused on gaining market share primarily through gaining repeat customers. A lot of their sales machinery was constructed around the idea of building a personal relationship with the customer to predict their needs as they arise.

This was in part because the domestic Japanese market was so small. Of course, it needs support from quality development and manufacturing. But it's also efficienct because it's much cheaper to sell something to someone who trusts you than to get it out by cold calling.
Related submissions, although none have any comments:

Joule Thief (June 17, 2021)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_thief
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27540614

How to steal every last bit of juice from a battery (April 28, 2015)
http://aeguana.com/blog/the-joule-thief/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9451484

Joule thief – A minimal boost converter (January 25, 2015)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_thief
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8941971
I've wondered lately, since the government backstops both banks and mortgages, shouldn't it just cut out the middleman? It could either give cheaper mortgages or use the difference as tax revenue.
Experimental science is all based around ruling out the null hypothesis. For that it needs to be falsifiable.

The hypothesis 'the dog can differentiate between A and B' is very hard to falsify. Because the dog could differentiate, but choose to not act. You would need a fairly complete understanding of the dogs mental workings, and scanners to study them.

On the other hand, 'the dog can't differentiate between A and B' is much easier to falsify. If you repeat an experiment a sufficient amount of times and the dog consistently has different behavior between A and B, you can rule this null hypothesis out.

That is the real reason we always 'assume the worst'. Because 'assume the worst' is the easiest to scientifically rule out.

EDIT: I would suggest this video by Veritasium, which also touches on this, at a very fundamental level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKA4w2O61Xo.
I don’t think that the assumption is that the natural world is dumb. The scientific discovery process aims to highlight new insights to help us make a better and useful description of the world. Implying that the starting point is "dumb" is incorrect. The starting point is a blank page, that will be filled by the research, whatever they find out.
Isn't this pretty much the definition of survivorship bias? (Not discarding the information in the post)
Python actually has generics, though.
I'd be more concerned about lounging around a coffee shop with spandex revealing all I've been given.
I have friends who used MS Word to write their thesis in CS undergrad.

Surprisingly it is possible to write math in a LaTeX-like fashion and they show up quite well. I have had more trouble aligning things with Word than with LaTeX so I kinda looked at them sideways.
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