skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is such nonsense. Watching academics flop about trying to craft theories of consciousness or theories of mind is like watching people climbing trees to reach the moon. But we're progressing 20% faster than last year! Or more realistically, maybe the ancients trying to build machines that fly to the moon. We should know by now that we know so little that all these nice little hypotheses are little better than wild-ass-guesses and grantsmanship.

What is Photoshop-ness? How does it differ from Fortnite-ness? Or Excel-ness?

Panpsychist: It's all connected maaaaan. Me: You've told me nothing remotely interesting.

Integrated Information Theorist: The whole is more than the sum of its parts, but we can't actually calculate it. Me: So there's an information processor? Great. Necessary but not sufficient. You've defined away everything interesting. Saying that microcode (or a Turing machine) can implement Photoshop or Fortnite tells me nothing about Photoshop-ness or Fortnite-ness.

...

Ugh. So much nonsense, wrapped in so many formulae and intelligent-sounding arguments. It's not even wrong.
It's not known that the groundwater is contaminated in this case.
I've been able to get AWS support to waive fees for a runaway Lambda that no one spotted for a few weeks - they wanted an explanation of what happened and a mitigation strategy from us and that was it.
It is still unresolved because AWS wants us to pay the bill so they can then issue a credit but the company credit card doesn't have a high enough limit to cover the bill.
9/5 is terrible accuracy.
Yea - but maybe for such an important role for society we can actually put up the cash to make it a worthwhile career choice. I've heard the "we don't want teachers who are only in it for the cash" line enough that I want to puke. If you paid enough to attract the leeches legitimate teachers would get them sacked right quick.
Data reliability is highly dependent on the type of data you're working with, and the procedures, processes, and checks on that.

I've worked with scientific, engineering, survey, business, medical, financial, government, internet ("web traffic" and equivalents), and behavioural data (e.g., measured experiences / behavour, not self-reported). Each has ... its interesting quirks.

Self-reported survey data is notoriously bad, and there's a huge set of tricks and assumptions that are used to scrub that. Those insisting on "uncensored" data would likely scream.

(TL;DR: multiple views on the same underlying phenomenon help a lot --- not necessarily from the same source. Some will lie, but they'll tend to lie differently and in somewhat predictable ways.)

Engineering and science data tend to suffer from pre-measurement assumptions (e.g., what you instrumented for vs. what you got. "Not great. Not terrible" from the series Chernobyl is a brilliant example of this (the instruments simply couldn't read the actual amount of radiation).

In online data, distinguishing "authentic" from all other traffic (users vs. bots) is the challenge. And that involves numerous dark arts.

Financial data tends to have strong incentives to provide something, but also a strong incentive to game the system.

I've seen field data where the interests of the field reporters outweighed the subsequent interest of analysts, resulting in wonderfully-specified databases with very little useful data.

Experiential data are great, but you're limited, again, to what you can quantify and measure (as well has having major privacy and surveillance concerns, often other ethical considerations).

Government data are often quite excellent, at least within competent organisations. For some flavour of just how widely standards can vary, though, look at reports of Covid cases, hospitalisations, recoveries, and deaths from different jurisdictions. Some measures (especially excess deaths) are far more robust, though they also lag considerably from direct experience. (Cost, lag, number of datapoints, sampling concerns, etc., all become considerations.)

It's complicated.
Please some one help [redacted]! I am so far away from him and it break my hear seeing him destroying himself and his business! I love [redacted], it made me a better engineer especially in my Country!

Please Help Him.
It was a 3rd party resource that when updated would call a lambda via a webhook, which would then update the 3rd party resource. So it would create an infinite loop for each resource that was modified.

Dumb mistake...
The consequences of betterC are listed out here. https://dlang.org/spec/betterc.html#consequences

Notice that betterC does not exclude templates or destructors, so you could still use c++-style containers based around RAII, etc.

The argument against it is a smaller ecosystem and you’d end up having to roll your own containers etc.
It’s true that sometimes the toxic dose is tiny, like for example dimethylmercury. I don’t see how that invalidates the principle though.

As a precautionary measure though I do agree with avoiding BPA among other things.
Drop it from 35 to 21, no problem from anyone. Try to split the difference for the nominal value (Dutch/Irish sandwich means even lower effective rates) of what it was for nearly 30 years? Heresy! Won't someone think of the poor corporations struggling to generate billions in shareholder value.
Counterpoint: the question is meaningless.

A "Turing test" is basically a notional thought experiment - useful to reason about, but in actual practice it's nothing more than a person reading some text and making guesses about who wrote it. And the "internal states" we're talking about here - "having internal experience", "understanding a concept" - are vague labels with no concrete definitions.

So in this context, asking whether "Turing tests can determine internal state" boils down to asking whether a person can subjectively determine something subjective.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Assumption.
Mostly tongue-in-cheek. Twitch donations get text read aloud on streams at times: https://www.twitch.tv/a_seagull/clip/BlightedPreciousEchidna...
My family members have been hospitalized for the covid vaccine and some have died while my other family members are left alone outside the hospital desperate to see our relatives who have been imprisoned in the system with no oversight.

Others have been hospitalized for non covid reasons, had their spouse/close relative kicked out of the room, and then gone on to suffer medical abuse and neglect, including being fed food that is not compatible with their medical history for months on end causing endless pain, as well as permanent disfigurement.

So spare me the lectures and the pain Olympics.

And yes some have died of covid, as some every year die of cancer, flu, and other diseases.
Al-Qaeda hit upon a weakness of US response (partially through luck and partially through their own strategizing): the US intelligence community was still thinking about threats in the Cold War model and hijackings were a blind spot. They generally weren't anticipating hijackings to weaponize the plane, and they weren't anticipating an organized multi-hijacking scenario. Partially because both scenarios are militarily ineffective... Intelligence community thinking hadn't come around to the idea of warfare directed at civilian targets purely to demonstrate that the government was an ineffective defender (as opposed to warfare directed at military targets to damage and diminish military capacity).
> C++'s std:: tools are more useful than the bespoke tools in libtransmission's C code. Nearly every time I go in to fix or change something in libtransmission, I find myself missing some C++ tool that I've come to take for granted when working in other code, either to avoid reinventing the wheel (e.g. using std::partial_sort() instead of tr_quickfindFirstK(), or std::vector instead of tr_ptrArray) or the better typechecking (e.g. std::stort() instead of qsort()).

I think it's more to glib development entering an ice age, than a language issue.

Glib had an impressive roadmap list around 8-10 years ago, copying much of STL features, but of course nothing much materialised after GNOME 3 caused an exodus of GTK developers.
C++ is faster than C, and has been for a long time in practice. It also allows you to achieve that performance with many fewer lines of code.

The primary reason people use C today is extreme portability.
> These days I only see videos about cracking the coding interview

Maybe that's because of how many companies have stopped caring if candidates are actually good software developers and just do leetcode tests and call it a day.
Large portions of the western world are experiencing restrictions on basic freedom of movement heretofore unseen in enlightenment societies.

I mean the entire country of Australia is in house arrest basically. Stop pretending nothing's happening.
That really surprised me when I moved up here - suddenly I lost a whole class of jokes about how underpaid teacher are. It shows too, you can look at things like IP creation (comedians, musicians, writers, performers) and even vaccination rates to see the benefits investing in education can get you.
That's from Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter VIII, pg.80.
Nim's a pleasant language to read/write! Out of curiosity, what aspects have you found challenging to learn? One caveat of imitating Python's syntax is that the semantics are not the same as in Python and are closer to Pascal/Ada in many ways.

If you haven't read through the Nim-for-Pythoners [1] it'd be good. I read the "nim manual" [2] constantly and just use ctrl-f. Though Nim Basics by narimiran is a nice tutorial form [3].

There's a few standard links:
1: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-Python-Programm...
2: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html
3: https://narimiran.github.io/nim-basics/
I can't find any source in there suggesting a lack of effectiveness. The underlying source linked by the article mentions a reduction of 80% in symptomatic disease, which is responsible for most transmission. I can't find anything very recent, but here's an analysis that takes Delta into account:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Finding 80+% protection against symptomatic disease and ~40% reduction in onwards transmission, from three different modelling groups.
100% minus .04% does not equal 99.6%, and a link to the source of the data would make your comment more credible.
The problem is knowing when to take action. It could be months after the actual event before you find out about it. And you’re liable for everything in between.

Identity Theft is actually just fraud. And the companies that allowed the fraud should be required to shoulder the burden of addressing that matter with the actual people who committed the fraud. No part of that burden should ever be placed on you, just because someone pretended to be you and commit a fraud.
BlackBerry inbox does that on android. Seriously great
If they decide that, then you don't have an inherent right to work there. You're allowed to quit.

It's similar to how people who are unwilling to dispense reproductive care or contraceptives have many career options available to them - but no inherent right to be pharmacists or doctors.
surveillance capitalism is a political decision, not a random development. let's not normalize mass data collection. because it opens door to totalitarianism.
I agree. Having lived, worked, and paid taxes in Denmark, England, Scotland, the US, and Australia. Most Americans have no clue and keep blindly thinking that the US is “better” than all other countries in every possible way. Completely ignoring all the statistics and real data showing that it simply isn’t true. The willingness to ignore reality is jaw dropping.
> The life someone will have if they are born tall, handsome, and socially skilled

People aren’t born those things, though they may be born with a greater or lesser capacity to become them. They can also be born rich, which can buy one pretty directly and substitute pretty well for the other two, as well as maximizing realization of any natural capacity in any of the three areas.
This is what I also believe. However it is really hard to count reliably. Maybe one day we will know for sure.
Different people may have different definitions of "ready to use". For me, pipewire works mostly great; it fixes more than a few issues I never could solve with pulseaudio. But pipewire-pulse has crashed more than a few times for me (though not since I last upgraded pipewire, so keeping fingers crossed that it's been fixed). I wouldn't recommend it (yet) to someone who isn't prepared to tinker.
For those unfamiliar with NSO and Pegasus, check out this podcast episode:
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/100/
How can you possibly find the group that represents the intersection of both 'covid is no big deal and I'll continue to live my life as normal' and 'you should take the covid vaccine'? This is like trying to find a pro life obstetrician who performs abortion. Other than the mentally ill, no one holds those two beliefs honestly at the same time. If it does exist, it probably doesn't in numbers large enough to matter.

We are approaching the limits of empiricism.
So they’re reducing the expression of ACE2 receptors and that gives the virus less opportunities to enter the cell. If this is true, why was it found that people who use ACE inhibitors (which up-regulate ACE2 receptors) don’t have an increased risk of severe Covid?
Thinking you've found a hidden truth is unreasonably fun. And then you can form a community and have some fun with your fellow nutbars too.

People also want the world to make more sense than it actually does. There being a secret group running things is at least _an_ explanation for the weird shit that happens, even if it doesn't really hold together.

There's a bunch of profit motives and politics involved as well usually.
I don't know what the other trajectory would have been, i.e. had 9/11 been foiled. But I do think it served as the ultimate excuse to curtail rights and freedoms. The long wars it led to both warped our society at home and led to two generations of militarization of kids. For instance, I remember how disgusted and shocked I was at the explosion of military displays at baseball and football games. This was all basically fascism using the attack on our free society to embed xenophobic militarism into every aspect of daily life.

It's speculative, yea. But without 9/11 I don't think we'd have a culture of giant military style pickup trucks rolling coal and waving flags (American or Confederate). I think the militia movement of the 90s would have stayed much more contained and minor without something to justify their claims of conspiracy and NWO takeover. And I think we wouldn't have developed the sense that we were all living in a disaster movie, and become so callous and inured to what we see on the news. I don't think I can or should summarize all this in a post, but maybe the best way to put it would be that it ended the American Century, and bent the arc of our civilization towards decay and self destruction. It exposed a crack in the foundation of the country that has grown, and keeps growing. I suppose that could have happened any number of ways.
I also remember Pidgin fondly.

I have now given up on IM and just email or call people.
Any listicle that omits Kwik Trip from the upper Midwest is opening up with fightin’ words. I tell ya. https://biztimes.com/cult-brands-kwik-trip-midwest-airlines-...
The number of people someone can lead is strictly based on their leadership score. For instance, as a 12th level wizard with a charisma modifier of +3 I can lead 23+1 people.
A couple of points that I see people miss surprisingly often. I will pretend for the purposes of this post that I do not know how mRNA or DNA works and will not argue that until very recently we considered 75% of our DNA structure be junk.

What really surprises me is the fact that a lot of educated people trust 'science' blindly. So on to my first point. The original narrative regarding the current crisis is that we are dealing with an extremely trasmitable and deadly virus. As such we are facing the danger of collapsing the medicare system because intensive care units are simply not enough to handle the volume of cases. A disastrous situation, I agree. Fine! So let's have a vaccine. Let's combat 'future' (ie new) infections (cases) and completely disregard the 'present' situation at hand. Why should we bother with coming up with a treatment (medicine, antibodies or whatever) to keep people from entering intensive care? Our savior is only something that regards new cases alone. Until we come up with such a 'miracle' unfortunately people will die. This concludes the first point, the vaccine mania and the complete disregard for treatment. What sane person would see a 'conspiracy' here?

The second point. "The technology is so advanced that you noobs have no idea". Granted! Let's pretend I'm an ignorant noob. "The new mRNA and cDNA tech is effective and safe". How do you know? Let's entertain this idea for a while. Sure, we've got a tech that can produce a brand new vaccine in a matter of a couple of hours. All it takes is a gene-sequence typed on a keyboard which is then 'printed' in the bio-reactor and voila, the wonder is here! Ready to be injected into the human body, able to affect and modify sensitive cellular mechanics pretty much as you would type some code, compile it and load onto your chip, right? What a wonder! Who needs thorough testing after all? We have ruled over nature! No one will ever get sick by this 'curse' again or any of it's variations. One single recipe to rule over the 7.5Bn person diversity on this planet. Yes, because we have so advanced tech that we are standing at a point where we have a complete understanding to the very finest detail of cellular biology. Only if countries like Israel hadn't proven otherwise...

Trust the 'science', it IS safe. Not only we have a complete understanding to the very finest detail of cellular biology but we also have mastered time-travel. Yes, we have so advanced tech that allows us to time travel to the year 2030 A.D. and behold our wonder did not hurt anyone, ever! Who needs testing? We are so bright! What a time to be alive!

I guess we can now take our righteous seat right next to God! Hell, what am I saying we ARE Gods! Oh, sorry I forgot, we still gotta find that gene-sequence that beats death altogether. But worry not, our saviors are a few clicks away! But I digress... Forgive me.

What sane person would see a conspiracy in all the above? Hell, what 'educated' person with 'critical' thinking would dare to question the 'wonder'? We have so advanced tech, said the 'educated' Gods.

I'm confused, is it science we are talking about here or is it religion???
…which is called Bazel outside of Google.
You Are Not Still Using Virtualenv, Are You?
> Nix is still trying to be a thing that replaces other build tools.

Not true! Nix wraps other build tools, and provides hermetic and reproducible environments to those tools. If the tools exposed a way to get the URL and SHA256 hash of every dependency it downloads from the Internet, then the "infection" doesn't need to happen, as you would simply supply those hashes to Nix, which in turn will happily allow them to be downloaded in the sandbox by the tool. That tools like node2nix exist speaks to the walled garden created by these tools and ecosystems, because they do not (easily) expose dependencies to their environment, and/or they do not (easily) accept dependencies from their environment.

This would absolutely be a problem with Docker as well, if you added the same requirements that Nix enforces in its sandbox, because otherwise you are allowing Docker to fetch dependencies by URL without specifying their contents.
Fermi Estimates
I am making my own content but it’s for my kids. I could not find anything I liked.
> maybe for such an important role for society we can actually put up the cash to make it a worthwhile career choice

The point was what makes it worthwhile isn't cash.
Confusion is likely as far as we're ever going to get with tower 7. Not because there was a grand conspiracy in play, but because we lack information about what happened in tower 7, period. That's generally what people who disbelieve the official consensus misunderstand... Absence of evidence is not evidence of conspiracy.

The Alaska conclusions are correct as per their model. But their model is making assumptions about the spread of the fire and the damage that we lack concrete information to confirm or deny. It's easy to forget that on the day WTC 7 fell, we don't know how much of that building was on fire. A significant percentage of New York first responders had just died... There wasn't enough fire management on scene at WTC 7 to gather reasonable amounts of information, much less fight the fire.

It might have fallen due to thermal expansion of the main structural elements. It might have fallen due to controlled demolition. It might have fallen due to a sudden upsurge of the mole people from Hollow Earth. Too few people had eyes on for us to ever really know.

(Personal opinion: I don't know that we have any good models of what happens to a building close to but under 50 stories when two of the tallest buildings on the planet collapse immediately next to it. What earthquake-magnitude-equivalent force did the foundation of WTC 7 experience, and what effect would that have? The mole people model might be more accurate than I want it to be. ;) ).
If your goal is to erode trust in institutions then pushing any and all conspiracy theories is worth your time. Anywhere you see people trying to undermine the local government you see conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories are great because they're so efficient. Once started they are self reinforcing.
The West is in three ideologial wars with the CCP and Islam (externally), and Marxism (internally), and none are going to voluntarily stop.

Thanks to the Democratic/Marxist White House who plan to allow around 1 million Afghanis into the US, we will also face an internal Islamic war, similar to France, Germany and Sweden. Whether it starts with the immigrants or their children, it will come.

Note that very few of those Afghanis are interpreters, and in fact we don't know who they are. The only thing slowing up their asylum is not paperwork or corona, but measles, which can be fatal to infants.
To learn any new language or framework I just recommend diving in and doing things. Have some goal and mind that you want to create and work at it. Its usually hard to start at first but once you get going its just a little bit of progress at a time.
Except it is. Statistical studies can show all kinds of weird correlations that disappear when larger context is taken into account.

There is no reason to believe there is a large group of people who behaved as if covid were not dangerous and who also felt an urgent need to take the vaccine. The existence of such a group of people is vital to whether or not data can be used to make these claims about the covid vaccine.

Until the existence of that group is shown I don't understand how behavior is controlled for. Everyone claims to be following the rules. case in point, my mother in law is absolutely freaked out about covid. Has the vaccine. Masks. Distances etc. Except she breaks the rules whenever convenient. But in her mind these are necessary. She'll still complain about others who break the rules similarly. Lots of people are this way. You can't trust self reports and you can't follow that many people

Also, and more egregiously, there is a history of fake covid studies destined to make those on the 'side' of the anti vaxxers look bad. So my bayesian a priori estimate of the usefulness of studies on the other 'side' is shifted more to the distrust side.
Ask HN: Favorite Coffee Mug?
My coffee mug broke. I am in the market for a new mug to keep the caffeine flowing while I code.

What is your favorite mug and why?