skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I used to share your belief, but as I got older, I realized... Windows isn't targeted to us, the faux technocratic elite that grew up with computers: it's targeted to the average person, and the average person, largely, is technologically illiterate to some degree.

I mean, the average user has been capable of installing and using alternative browsers for a significant period of time. Most folks exist as some shade of gray between your Grandma with an Ask toolbar and the "HN elites." If anything, I think there is often an underestimation of what regular users understand and are willing to do with their tech (to improve their experience, privacy, etc.) If you need some sort of a sanity check, see how your friends and peers (that don't work in software) configure their systems. See what browsers they use, what adblockers they configure, etc. I predict you'd be surprised.

I rarely meet this "average user" who is often discussed on HN; this person who isn't interested in using non-standard software, who doesn't care at all about their privacy, who will use only the easiest and cheapest solution possible, etc. Dark patterns don't just work on these "average users," they work on plenty who even work in tech. I click "Accept All" on the cookie banner on this one-off website if it's the fastest way to read the contents, I will put off changing default apps if I have to hunt for the correct settings, heck I've been charged for subscriptions an extra month because I put off dealing with the hassle of cancelling the thing.

I think this "average user" is constructed in the collective imagination because it makes implementing user-hostile design choices a little more conscionable if you view your users as tech illiterate morons. Considering the state of the industry, one where dark patterns and user hostility permeate nearly every design choice, it doesn't surprise me that HN, a subset of this industry, holds this dim view of its users.
Every FAANG company compulsively lies to it's customers, and it's a shame because it only encourages up-and-comers to "imitate the best". Making matters worse, American politicians are utterly ill-equipped to handle this kind of deception. Not only do they likely profit off the success of Facebook, there are numerous domestic interests in preserving their control. On top of that, nobody can pull the plug because it's wrapped up with the CIA, FBI, FCC and FTC.
We can currently refine waste down to levels safe enough to keep out of containment facilities, and can dispose of it by landfill in a way that will have zero ecological risk or impact, forever.

So no, not "tomorrow".
And checking to see if your comment stays near the top, how many up votes, reading the replies to see if you're a smart person or not.
> Ideally you'd have a set of properties that the contract must hold, then prove that X satisfies those properties.

The issue is that how do you know you have the correct set of properties that a contract must hold? You might think you have all the properties that you need, but realize later that you missed one that is critical for your desired outcome.
This has nothing to do with doctors... medical workers are a small minority of the people being granted citizenship, a lot of these were street cleaners, caretakers, grocery store employees...

They just took a bunch of essential workers who would have requested citizenship otherwise and lowered the legal stay requirement from 5 to 2 years for them.
The 'general perceiver' is such a model that is somewhat distanced from the modality of its input: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03206
Grey goo is not so much fiction as it is the logic consequence of the kind of machine its creator "designed" (on the sci-fi definition of designing, but with a very strong focus on science).

If we ever build unsupervised self-replicating machines, we will get grey-goo like problems, that is a completely different threat model from any machine we have ever seen. And if the machines are any fast or any far from us, logic dictates that none of the normal safety measures we apply elsewhere will apply.

(So, I guess the lesson is "don't build unsupervised self-replicating machines". Even our body limits unsupervised self-replication by limiting how many generations a cell can create. But it is surely not "people can misuse any tool", "use it wisely" or "control the consequences".)
Something Mysterious Near the Galactic Center Is Flashing Radio Signals
Why out of the largest tech companies, like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (well not large but similar to FB in terms of social network) only one has a reputation for constantly lying and misleading people on purpose in its self-interest? Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?
Lots of treatments are "potentially beneficial", according to various "authorities", such as grapefruit as a cure for cancer. Going outside the scientific consensus is essentially an argument for alternative medicine.
The internet is for sharing. Social media is for driving engagement from users, mining their data, and encouraging unhealthy social comparison (as well as, you know, organizing events and messages and stuff). Nothing wrong with sharing a blog post on an experience you had that you think may be of value to others.
All true, but in both cases I control what I look at. I am the filter. If I waste my time or learn the wrong things, it is on me.
I teach an undergraduate control course that uses Matlab. I'd love to use Julia (I use Julia for all my research) but last time I checked, it was not straight forward to interface to hardware using Julia (our labs use Matlab to control motors). There is a control systems package for Julia but it is no where as complete or polished as the Matlab control systems tookbox (or even the control systems package in octave).
What evidence is this? I’d appreciate a source, given that I’ve never, ever, heard this theory before. Generally, theories about Korean connect it to either Japonic or Altaic, both of which are controversial; meanwhile theories about Dravidian languages generally try to connect it to Elamite or other languages of the area, which is even more controversial. Any close connection between Dravidian and Korean is definitely not suggested by mainstream historical linguistics. (Besides, it contradicts what we know of the history of the region.)
Here’s the only silver lining of this: this company, GTL, will likely only ever use this patent in an on-going forever patent war against their arch-rival Securus, which is equally abhorrent in both their business and patenting practices. So in that way, it’s kind of a wash?
A big problem is the international aspect and the requirement for what effectively are wealth transfers.

Countries often are willing to bribe part of the voters to make some universal policies tolerable, having internal transfer payments for the benefit of the country as a whole.

The world is (IMHO clearly) very, very limited in its willingness to bribe part of foreign voters to make some global policies tolerable, having international transfer payments for the benefit of the world as a whole. There are some examples, but they're very limited in scale compared to intra-country wealth transfers.

It's plausible to convince voters for some reallocation between themselves, even if many specific voters would not individually benefit - but it's a hard sell to convince voters to assign significant resources (as opposed to current international aid/charity) to primarily benefit people in another country, which IMHO seems to be necessary because there's so big country-to-country variation in the actions needed to reduce global warming, the ability to afford these actions, and the severity of local consequences of global warming.
Most of those seem decent [1] but mostly related to reducing taxes on income you put into the government social program instead of letting you invest somewhere else. Not sure employers would see the tax breaks as enough justification if they weren't forced.

[1] - https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/employer-and-individual...
Then either it's much older than you thought when you installed it or you've since forgot it used to be SMS only when it originally released. It wasn't even until late 2015 (i.e. post rename) Signal stopped using SMS for encrypted chats let alone those using it for mixed chat support.
Perhaps for legal reasons it is important to show willingness to negotiate .. but really, a land-grab like this gets "we hope we can be friends" response ?

"The PostgreSQL Core Team and PGCAC still hope for an amicable resolution" ..
DOSbox already flies on a Raspberry Pi. I think this is one of those instances where the technology in question (DOS) is so old that it makes more sense to solve it in software than it does in hardware.
OK but what's the best resource on what has happened / what progress has been made in the last 10-15 years? How are they better and what are the blocking issues?
>That's because the "science" on firefighting has already been settled.

For this specific fire though? /s

COVID isn't the first Virus in the world. There is a good quantity of science on combatting viruses. Sure, we need to figure out where COVID falls in our overall knowledge of viruses but claiming "They had no idea, it was just a knee jerk reaction." is far from the actual situation.
>User generated content, comments, ratings. 3/3 would say so, yes. :-)

That's not great criteria for determining if something's "social media". All those things you listed were part of websites long before social media came along.
Yes, as a business owner, I'm very upset that I have to "follow the law". Things would be so much easier if I didn't.
There's lots of things to do with extra electricity, it's just a question of whether or not it's economical. Here in California, for example, I could imagine the excess being used to opportunistically desalinate water and refill reservoirs. If water and emissions were priced appropriately, it might be worthwhile? It's not exactly a battery, but it's a way to make overbuilding more palatable.

Alternatively if the grid is unreliable, end-use customers will install their own batteries and generating capacity. Voila, problem solved on someone else's dime!
I had the option to have the post re-reviewed, which took two days. I mean it could just be theatre, but I assumed on the second round a human reviewed it.

From the support response:

> The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing by letting us know about it.

Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry around I guess is cool with Facebook's Community Standards.
I've never understood this. I think if you have a relationship with social media that elicits a desire to "quit", it's not because social media is terrible, it's because the relationship is bad.

I wonder as well if there's a difference between people who use it to catch up with their real-life friends vs. people who use it to communicate with online friends. I deleted my Facebook account last year simply because I had never used it; most of my friends on there were people I was acquainted with in real life at some point but I have no desire to talk to them. I never used it so I just deleted my account. However, I use Twitter, and I'd never dream of deleting it; most of my interactions on there are between me and friends I initially met online, and social media is one of the main ways we communicate. These are real friends - I've met several of them in person now - but I'd be losing a huge channel of communication with them if I went dark on social media.

Which, when worded like that, almost sounds like they're trapping me on there, but I also have no desire to quit. I've never felt Twitter negatively impacting my life. I go on it daily, I usually have it open in a tab while doing other things on my computer, but I don't spend hours just scrolling, and I don't follow people who say things that will only make my day worse. I don't see it as wasting my time any more than watching TV or doing crossword puzzles, which are also things I spend a reasonable amount of time doing.

The comparison to cigarettes and alcohol is ridiculous in my opinion. I don't buy the premise that social media, by default and for most people, makes your life worse. Maybe I'm just the exception? I have no idea.
I'd be fine with this if a UAC approval were also needed to make Edge the default browser.
Just taking all social media apps off your phone and having a complex password that makes it difficult to sign into their webapps are a huge step. Not having your social media of choice a finger press away helps a lot. It's easier to get off them if you start with that. I did that years ago and replaced my favorite app with the kindle app. I read a lot more (books) now and I don't get the addicted feeling.
> If your online service allows a parent or carer to monitor their child’s online activity or track their location, provide an obvious sign to the child when they are being monitored.

This is super based I just wish the UK government would be as transparent with their citizens when they monitor us.
OpenGL ES 3.0 is derived from both OpenGL 3.3 and 4.2 while getting rid of some legacy stuff so it's a 'subset', but not really. And considering the range of devices browsers are on, it's not bad. Very few devices other than consoles and gaming rigs actually make use of bleeding edge graphics APIs.
> In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook. Whitelisted accounts shared inflammatory claims that Facebook’s fact checkers deemed false, including that vaccines are deadly, that Hillary Clinton had covered up “pedophile rings,” and that then-President Donald Trump had called all refugees seeking asylum “animals,” according to the documents.

[...]

> While the program included most government officials, it didn’t include all candidates for public office, at times effectively granting incumbents in elections an advantage over challengers. The discrepancy was most prevalent in state and local races, the documents show, and employees worried Facebook could be subject to accusations of favoritism.

[...]

> In practice, most of the content flagged by the XCheck system faced no subsequent review, the documents show.

[...]

> In addition, Facebook has asked fact-checking partners to retroactively change their findings on posts from high-profile accounts, waived standard punishments for propagating what it classifies as misinformation and even altered planned changes to its algorithms to avoid political fallout.

This is a pretty damning indictment of a platform that 52% of American adults use as a news source. [0] Forget the toxic element FB and platforms like it introduce into social relations, the past several years have shown us the extreme power of misinformation and disinformation to polarize the US as a whole.

Something needs to be done here. The lack of oversight is astonishing. Even just the effect they likely have had on elections by selectively including candidates is a huge disruptive effect to the entire fabric of society. Someone needs to be held accountable.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_news_source#...
> They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron.

So basically, a neural network "neuron" is about an order of magnitude less complex than a biological neuron. Furthermore, GPT-3 has at least 3 orders of magnitude fewer nodes than a human brain has neurons, and multiplied by the order of magnitude difference between that leaves 4 orders of magnitude in complexity between best in class neural networks and human brains.

Will bridging this gap reproduce all human complexity, including consciousness? Hard to say. Human neurology has a lot of specialization too, and general systems typically need a lot more resources to emulate specialized systems (think ASICs or GPUs vs CPUs).

So there may be further orders of magnitude needed to close that gap fully, but given how scary competent GPT-3 is, you can see how GPT-N that has 4 orders of magnitude more complexity might be scary competent, bordering on "intelligent".
My education was the inverse of this in many ways. I was home schooled through 6th grade, privately schooled through high school and went to a major public research university for undergrad.

The biggest difference between my story and the OPs is simply the educator's expertise level. Not everyone has a parent who is a PhD in STEM while being extremely well versed in humanities at the same time. I was lucky to have a mom who was a kindergarten teacher.

So my theory is that the mode of education's value is proportional (roughly speaking) to the quality of the educational resources within that institution. For normal folks like my parents, that meant the value was maximized while I was young and declined as my education advanced outside of their expertise. Had I needed to rely on my mom's calculus teaching skills to learn calculus I would have been missing out on those kids' competent calculus teacher mentioned in the article for example.

Additionally, kids learn family culture over the full time they are in your household. Training kids to read and compute is trivial in importance compared to teaching them the value system you believe works well to make you a functioning adult in a complex and ambiguous world. Home schooling and public schooling alike are actually of secondary importance to this primary mission of parenting. Put differently, the OPs kids would have excelled regardless of their educational environment because their family culture inculcated them with high achieving standards. It's clear from the article that their success was never taken for granted or expected. They had to work hard for their admission to college and their family culture inspired them to rise to the occasion.
How much HN is a bubble in itself.

When interviewing developers, I always ask about their experience in handling sites large enough to comprise a farm, not just a single server. In all my years of searching, I've only ever come across one developer with such experience.

But here on HN, it makes it look like the multiple load balanced web and app servers we've got across multiple tiers, not to mention Docker and k8s, are on the small side.

There's definitely a big difference between those conversing here and "the unwashed masses".
As someone in an Apple device dominated family with none of my own, my complaints are simple:

* there's no way to get itemized billing without an Apple device.

* credit card charge descriptions are completely useless

* no "hey your X subscription is about to renew" notifications, 100% a dark pattern

* only one payment method allowed, even in a family account (also, whole family ecosystem is underbaked, but this is true for just about every major company ... a real potential moat)

* just extremely poor support over all, linkrot in their community posts about billing, billing inquiries on a PC go to reportaproblem.apple.com and suppory ticket style interface ..

I could go on, it definitely feels more like malice than incompetence - a form of cheery neglect.
Support Software Developers
PAUSE frames are only for the link in question, you should never look at the source address, only the port that the frames were received on
They need to go after DesignLab as well. They treat their American workers like shit and will give preferential treatment to foreign workers.

It is time for Designlab mentors to unionize.
It might be 'bias', but if it was as easy to do this in other stacks, wouldn't we see hundreds of thousands of cookie-cutter/copy/paste sites in, say, .net? Or rails? Or node? That this is 'easy' with a PHP base speaks to the fact that many other stacks seemingly ignore the needs of many markets.

I seem to recall a perl CMS - was is movable type? - that required mod_perl. This certainly gave it a perf boost against other CMS, but the overhead in setting up and maintaining a mod_perl system, and dealing with making code updates, was huge compared to PHP. I think these qualities continually get overlooked, decades on.
NEAR is WASM based. It's interesting but not nearly as "battle tested" as EVM. ETH2 also can't break any backward compatibility, which makes it easier to just keep going down the EVM route.
If anything, it should have literally the opposite meaning. Part of the idea of what it represents in the Eucharist is that it endures when the world passes away.
Is this a thing where inmates in solitary want to see a specific thing, and we take pics of them and send it to them? Or is this an AI training thing?

Edit: This breaks my heart. I found the hand written notes from inmates. One guy just wants to see his kid he doesnt know, one guy wants an aerial shot of his old neighborhood so he can stroll mentally down his street, and another just wants a photo of, as he put it, "A nice looking young lady wit banging body and some tights, shorts, showing that phat ass but able to see her face and pretty eyes at the same time, she can be black or spanish or white it all cool wit me. "

I don't know how serious these folks are, or if they get the photos, but I feel motivated to at least try and indulge a few of them.
The hard problem is applicable to software, so we do have process.
Service-Learning in a Virtual World
So does Switzerland, but the opinion is already shifting against it.
I was a smoker for many years and the sociability is a huge factor that doesn't get much attention, and is the only thing I miss about it.

The relationships I established with fellow smokers, whether it was at work while stepping out from the office, standing outside a pub, stepping outside on a balcony at a party, etc. were almost always stronger than with my non-smoking friends. You immediately become part of a social circle with people you at least have one thing in common with, and are standing around with a limited number of minutes to chat about almost anything.

I haven't had a cigarette for nearly five years and the thought of lighting one up disgusts me, but I miss the carefree banter during smoke breaks with other smokers.
Interestingly, the first two registry steps are actually the same as the previous windows. Having it behind a hash seems way too user hostile though.
Pointing out legitimate flaws in someone's work is not canceling.
Probably because most people don't care about consciousness and treat people like people if they can relate to them?

You said it yourself -- "we create social contracts based, in part, on empathy". As long as empathy works, we should be treating others nice.

Trying to replace simple and understandable things like "empathy" with vague "consciousness" leads to dangerous roads. One moment you are talking philosophy and next moment you are declaring beings you don't like as "unconscious zombie" and you are enslaving and subjugating them.
Soooo, tell me how the midges are these days? :) I love Scotland though, in all seasons.
No the life changing decision is to move to a new country to become a garbage collector.

If you consider that the person collecting your garbage during a pandemic getting the same rights as you have by being born in the right side of the globe is a dilution of the meaning of citizenship I really don't know how to explain this to you any better.
A Syrian War Criminal and Double Agent Disappeared in Europe