skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of people still haven't realised that cultural extinction is likely to happen before personal or human extinction does.

Ironically we're a completely natural phenomenon - a species that outcompetes the others, but gets stuck at individual and herd intelligence without evolving collective intelligence.

We're basically a brushfire species - which is probably something that happens fairly regularly on planets.
The article is wonderful and in-depth. The majority of future compiler and optimization work is in the ML realm. So it is important that compiler engineers, how few of them there are, are aware of the issues.
>The people on the "lower rungs of humanity" emit an order of magnitude less carbon than everyone else, and should be the last to cut.

I see this argument frequently and it annoys me.

Poor people emit less carbon because they are poor. Do you want them to stay poor?!? I want a future where everyone can at least live a life as wealthy as mine. But my carbon emissions are much higher than that of the global poor.

If we can provide everyone with at least a quality of life like mine, then we're going to massively increase carbon emissions globally. Sure, better technology will help us here, but it is completely unrealistic to expect this to cancel out the increases of emissions and for this not to increases prices. This would, again, put my kind of life out of reach for many.

Look at China for a realistic example. China has had one of the highest reductions in poverty in history - from 88% in extreme poverty in 1981 to 0.7% by 2015.[0] At the same time China's carbon emissions per capita went from 1.46 tons in 1981 to 7.169 tons in 2015.[1] That's a 391% increase in emissions per capita, but it's worth it, because people are better off as a result.

Climate change is a problem, but it won't ruin tomorrow. It will slowly get worse, but this means that there's time. I believe that technological (engineering) solutions are the only way we can realistically deal with it. Cutting emissions is not going to be enough and it will come with a whole boatload of side effects.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/the-global-decline-of-extreme-pov...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
It should count. But why test for it and why expect proof? If someone is concerned, get vaccinated if you don't have antibodies already. And wear a mask when cases go above N in your area. Problem solved.

What use is there to build systems of control that will turn into more surveillance and eventual enslavement?
It is equivalent to announcing a planned widget tariff on date Y, for widgets delivered on date Y and later. Because if you announce it on date Y, but it doesn't go into effect until formally passed on date X, people will import a whole lot of extra widgets quickly to get around the new tax.
this is actually a really interesting problem i've been pondering quite a bit recently. what would it actually take to get to actually secure computing assuming one was able to start with a clean slate? it seems like getting away from memory unsafe languages is a pre-requisite, but beyond that... how do you build a computer system with thousands of pieces of software authored by different people with thousands of inputs that are controlled by different entities that produces output you can really trust, and verify... like not tamper resistant, but actually tamper proof with verifiable outputs. and well, also not a huge step back in performance and usability.

in reality, maybe something like this that builds on existing primitives to get there may be the only real, feasible thing... but assuming you could start from scratch, what would it look like?
People are not even "selfish". Wanting a nice, stable, predictable environment just like you have had it all your life could be categorized as selfish. And that's fine.

Taking a massive gamble on injecting huge amounts of energy into a system which looks like it will be destabilized is just..... foolish? stupid? I dunno.

According to the Canadaland podcast there is a recent survey taken during the federal election campaign which suggests that 1 in 4 voters still do not accept anthropogenic climate change as real.

I am baffled.

Most of us would benefit from some sort of Green New Deal with a re-organization of the economy. I can completely understand the top 5 or 10 percent balking at any shake up of the system on purely economic advantage grounds, but what about all the other 85%? And even with a shake-up I find it hard to believe that any productive/active members of the 5 to 10 percent would not thrive relatively in any new situation and indeed be better off than in a severely disrupted environment.

Something other than rationality is going on here.
And the line between “acceptable consequences” and “catastrophic consequences” is basically unknowable, so it’s not a bad idea to err on the side of caution.
My apology.
this is an impossible standard to hold. we might as well punish fat people because they have highest costs of everyone to the healthcare system. they have more complications with other diseases (including covid) and take up the most resources. the community is entitled to set rules to minimize those costs right?
As Cubans we need to say Thank you Tim Parsa, Thank you Slyk!! Let's do 2MM in 2022!!
No they didn't, and not they aren't.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hos...

In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.
> I am concerned with the lack of reporting thereof, and additionally the active censorship of those who speak of any issues.

Agreed. And unfortunately the last 18-24 months seem to indicate that things labeled conspiracy theories have a habit of becoming at the very least "plausible" or outright "true" (lab leak theory being perhaps the largest example).
Wozniak finding an excuse to have a private space company is somehow the most...pathetic of all the rich guys compensating with space companies. A cigar may sometimes just be a cigar, but a rocket is never just a rocket with these people.
If a person is infected, it has been evaded. Period.
As a (new) NixOS user too, I'd be interested to hear more about this.

Have you tried setups like "Erase Your Darlings" and "NixOS: tmpfs as root" to explicitly persist and manage state?

https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings

https://elis.nu/blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/
4000 people out of the ~210M people in the US with at least one shot is 0.002%. You have a greater chance of both contracting and dying of COVID. Hell, I think you have a greater chance of drowning in your bathtub.

Ok, though, let's talk about people who already had COVID. Did they actually have COVID, as in, did they test positive, or did they just feel really sick and think they had it? Have they had recent antibody tests? Did those tests show that they have antibody levels that would give them protection (including against delta) comparable to a vaccine? Have they consulted a medical professional about this? If it's "yes" to those questions, great, probably no need to get vaccinated. I have no problem with that. But the "I got sick so I'm immmune" stuff I hear constantly sounds more like a hope than something the people who say it have actually researched and been tested for.
How much is "a bunch" of hospitals? How are you measuring "more strained" "than they ever were?" Because the evidence I found suggests the situation was overblown:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hos...

In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.

And we have staff quitting over the mandates. Which is causing service shortages in NYC now.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-hospital-pause...

An upstate New York hospital system said it will be forced to "pause" maternity services this month because some employees' refusal to get vaccinated against Covid-19 has caused staffing shortages.
This does not follow - your previous statements do not provide any evidence that masking is the choice that minimizes harm, unknown harm definitely does not mean no harm, it may be smaller or larger than the benefit. In order to make any statement whatsoever about whether the benefit outweighs the (unknown) harm, there needs to be at least some attempt to make a reasonable estimation on how large (or small) that harm is.

Ignoring it essentially means making a strong assumption that the harm is absolutely insignificant, but is that really the best informed guess specialists can make?
This is a really important topic if you're doing web services. Especially if you're doing parallel processing services. When I was at Blekko the "interesting" queries were the ones above the 95th percentile because they always indicated "something" that hadn't worked according to plan. Sometimes it was a disk going bad on one of the bucket servers, sometimes it was a network port dropping packets, and sometimes it was a corrupted index file. But it was always something that needed to be looked at and then (usually) fixed.

It also always separated the 'good' Ad networks from the 'bad' ones as the bad ones would take to long to respond.
Global famine won't end civilization directly, but it might spark WW3, and that would do it.
Any large group being mistreated is bad, it doesn’t matter what that group is.
> I feel bad for anyone under 20.

I feel bad for people under 20 due to people pushing this sentiment that they're doomed and they have no future to look forward to. That is currently doing more harm than climate change is. And it does nothing to solve the problem of climate change.
Nonsense.

1. Many diseases have been considered endemic but were eradicated. Don't be a doomer.

2. The whole schtick about anyone who wants to get the vaccine can get it, so it should be a personal choice makes this common but very much mistaken assumption that a vaccinated individual is safe from harm. It just isn't so. Your personal risk is not affected only by your acquired immunity, but the acquired immunity of everyone around you. Vaccines fundamentally require a communal, cooperative endeavor to succeed.
I too find that wildland fires on the West coast being conflated with climate change as bad messaging. You can read about the California valley being filled with smoke consistently during the late summer in "Up and Down California", a series of journals written between 1860-1865[1].

That said, I backpacked in the Sierras this summer and alarmingly saw many old Pine stands recently dead from what I assume is the drought. I also find the perilous state of the arctic ocean ice, the seeming breakdown of typical jetstream patterns(probably linked to the arctic ice) and the sky-high CO2(resulting in ocean acidification as well as warming) all particularly concerning.

[1] http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/up_and_down_california

If you want to read about particularly the smoke, the books are broken up by year and chapters chronologically, his writings during September particularly tend to describe the smoke.
Buffy Season 2 Episode 1
There are more similarity between things like Oppia and interactive fiction, I don't see them at odds. It is is wonderful that Oppia has a musical notation interface.

If you zoom out far enough, everything could be considered a quiz.

This will all be on the test.
The minheap-maxheap approach is better for streaming data, to get the median as data comes in.

I agree that if you have the whole thing, doing heapsort and pulling a[N/2] or a[1 + N/2] is simpler.
The problem with unconstrained government deficit finance is not inflation, it is cronyism and corruption. When 638 individuals decide how $3 trillion gets spent, almost any amount of lobbying expense will yield a positive NPV.
> Being struck by lightning and hail sound plenty adversarial to me.

Not really. lightning and hail behave predictably. Attackers don't. Adversarial hail would be a hailstorm where the hail magically heat-seeked to the engine.

>Meanwhile equifax and co just leave your data unprotected, no adversary required

The parent poster argued for a much stronger statement than this, which includes only negligence.
Also, the ZTE 64 is a 4G LTE device, but even though I bought it from T-Mobile, they are claiming that it will not use LTE on their network. Apparently the frequency bands for their LTE are not compatible with the device. This would not bother me so much if I had not bought the device from them, but I did, and they should support it.
90 CSS3 Buttons with Code
"If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year. Republicans will be hunted."

https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/127830983545328435... https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/127831632504405606...

Maybe pick someone with a slightly better record on predictions.
False equivalence; this is not the flu.
GrapheneOS: The Most Toxic Privacy Community
ICU capacity is generally bottlenecked by staffing and not by beds within suitable facilities. Basically there are required minimum ratios both legally and from a "we have to follow our on policy lest we create slam dunk lawsuits" point of view.

ICU staffing is less elastic than it's ever been because hospitals have cut staffing in response to people postponing elective care (where all the $$ is).

So ICU capacity as a percentage of full is as much a reflection of hospitals being tightwads as it is about Covid.
I am not sure that was ever true. In the Old Testament, there are lots of references to drinking milk.

There is even a saying: Do not boil a baby goat in its mother’s milk. From which rabbis derived various prohibitions on milk consumption together with various meats.

Perhaps you’re going to say the milk was always curdled or formed into cheese? And I would ask, how do we know that they didn’t just drink it?
Point 2 is extremely debatable, especially if you're a reserve currency. The balance of payments also matters.
> Can tribes create embassies?

No. Just as US states can't (tribal “sovereignty” is even farther from that of independent states than that of US states is.)

> Buy land, turn into embassy

Even for entities that can create embassies, that's not how they are created. You can't just acquire fee simple title and then at-will promote it to embassy status.
Wouldn’t that motivate the other countries more to help out so it doesn’t come to Taiwan launching nukes and irradiating the entire region?
Isn't it general practice in Muslim communities that face coverings are only in public, and that the kids' environments, both at family and at schooling (often gender segregated) would be free of face coverings?

The kids obviously grow up fine, but IMHO they do see the faces of their peers and parents pretty much always.
The Most Expensive Internet in America (2012)
Indeed, I do reject scapegoat-driven 'public health'.

The burden of proof is on the health authorities to quantify win/win scenarios. Not fly by the seat of their pants, sometimes based on faulty/incomplete data and guesswork. 'First, do no harm'. If you are unsure, then don't do it.

You want to make an R-based argument? What is the contribution of children in the past 4 weeks? Do you have evidence that children shed more covid compared with vaccinated adults? Do you have evidence that R is a constant, will your calculations hold 6 months from now? Are you accounting for the selection effect of leaky vaccines on virus evolutionary trajectory? What is the cumulative 20 year ADE risk?

For worst case scenario, do you have a 20 year study of leaky mRNA vaccines against infectious disease in some animal population? No, we're experimenting on humans in a world's first. There have been vaccine disasters. Fortunately not in humans. Warning: NSFL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...
My last understanding is that Flakes are slated to go into stable in the next NixOS version 21.11 this fall. Do you know if that's still the case? I'm still just using configuration.nix for everything, haven't migrated to Flakes yet.
> I went to the library and did a small experiment; what could I do if I were to start with nearly nothing? Ignoring my library card sitting in my pocket, I went up to the librarian and asked for access to the public computer. She handed me an access code to use, and I sat at one of the workstations and logged in. Using the default browser, I now had access to free resources like FreeCodeCamp or Open Source Society University to learn anything I needed. I could make an email account for free and use that to make accounts elsewhere. You can't install anything on a public computer, but sites like Replit provide an online IDE to create almost anything. You can make a GitHub account to manage your code, contribute to others, even host projects thanks to GitHub Pages. You can make a free Heroku account and have a backend server to build on. Everything needed for success, although not perfect, was there. Nothing stops you from trying to start a small business, applying for software jobs, or making silly games as long as you're determined to make the most of what you have rather than feeling paralyzed at what you don't.

This seems to be the functional crux of the argument, but it's flawed, for at least a couple reasons.

(1) It presupposes a background in CS and software engineering, as well as knowledge of the ecosystem of tools available online. At some point in your life, you have to have had the time and stability in life to learn all that, and you need time and stability to work towards your goals in the present using those tools.

(2) It's too narrow in scope. This is shown as one example of a general philosophical mindset, but in fact software engineering is uniquely suited to starting out from nothing in this way. You'd be hard-pressed to find analogous examples that require any interaction with the physical environment.

If you're already into software, and you want to learn more about it or build something new, you're right that we have a lot of free resources available online to do so. And I agree that it's good to structure your life, when you can, so that pursuit of wealth isn't important, and you just happen to do so along the way. But I think it's difficult to translate that into a more general point about simply adopting a different outlook on your circumstances to effect meaningful change. There are big swaths of the human experience that that philosophy doesn't speak to.
Given that Donald Trump has shilled unproven cures (Hydroxychloroquine), I think it's perfectly reasonable to only trust the medical professionals.
> People have already largely made up their minds, and nothing is going to change them. This is fully a political-religious divide now, and you can't reason people out of a decision they didn't reason themselves into. The ones who pretend they are on the fence and their minds can be changed by some goal being hit or some facts changing, always seem to move the goal posts instead of actually changing their minds.

Despite the anecdote that the first person I know getting vaccinated experienced a life-threatening case of severe anaphylaxis with the first dose, I thought getting the vaccine made some sense. I caught a bug around March/April of 2020 that had very similar symptoms to COVID, kind of like a sore throat with a flu, but I never got tested to see if it was just a bug or Covid that I got. Actually decided I was going to get the J&J vaccine after weighing pros & cons. I know that I am at a very low risk with no comorbidities, but my logic was that despite my low risk, the main benefit would be that it would minimize symptoms if I actually did catch it.

I started talking with the Dr. in the family to decide where/when. This was when the pause on the J&J came out, and I realized continuing my masking, social distancing, and other isolating activities were the best path. That, by delaying, the science would be better known, more vaccines would be used, and information about which vaccines were safest would come out. I felt that some of the politicization issues around what to do seemed to be frankly strange, if not outright authoritarian propaganda on one side, and wacky hodgepodge on the other.

The more I read on it, the more I became concerned because data on spike protein pathogenicity came out [1]. This called into question the big 3 vaccine approaches long term safety in my mind, because if the vaccines cause your body to produce a huge amount of spike protein, well, that on its own is allegedly toxic.
Additionally, I have been hoping for the Novavax vaccine to come out, which appears to be safer and more efficacious, but that appears to be a long waiting game.

I continue to isolate, wear an N95, and socially distance.

[1] https://www.salk.edu/news-release/the-novel-coronavirus-spik...
I would imagine there's a trial process that would have to go through, just as we had with vaccinations.
Totally makes sense. I think people are reacting to the idea that someone making that much can’t afford a house.
> Let's say, hypothetically, there existed a free shot which would immediately make its recipient a perfectly lean 20 BMI and grants all the benefits of health and exercise without the work

I would be very skeptical and wonder what the downside is
Which we should do! If the medical science can tell us a level of antibodies that confers similar protection to a vaccine, then we should make a "CDC post-infection immunity card", and give it to people who get antibody tests that show sufficient levels.
Everyone is driven by propaganda and social trends, it's naive to believe otherwise. If you can't see the crisis then either you're not looking or you don't understand the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change. The fact that China, India and the rest of the developing world are unlikely to fully adress their contributions to the problem only make the crisis more acute increasing the likelihood for authoritarian regimes to take power and act in whatever way they feel is in their best interest, regardless the consequences.
Look up "blue ocean event". The BOE could lead to the loss of the jet stream in 10-20 years. After that, God only knows what is going to happen. The really big problem is that we won't know where the rain will fall, and so we won't know where to plant, and so we could have global famine. If you think covid was bad, you ain't seen nuthin'. And even that will not necessarily lead directly to the collapse of civilization, but I'm not optimistic about the ability of our political leaders to handle the situation gracefully and without starting WW3.
Government debt does not exist in a vacuum: it comes into existence because the government spent more money than it took in. What did it spend that money on? Ask the lobbyists.
What a disgusting accusation. This isn't "bait," it's a fact. And my reasons aren't "nationalistic" -- it's to be accurate.
>I went to the library and did a small experiment; what could I do if I were to start with nearly nothing? Ignoring my library card sitting in my pocket, I went up to the librarian and asked for access to the public computer.

Were you wearing clothes? What would the librarian's response have been if a naked person walked up and asked to use the computer? Had you showered or bathed recently? What would the librarian's response have been if smelled of body odor? Was your stomach full while you were learning Github and Heroku? How much could you have learned if you were constantly racked by hunger pangs.

Yes, there are ways if you have some money to make it go farther and learn new skills relatively cheaply. However, to say that this is an illustration of wealth irrelevance is really pushing it.