skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You don’t get to claim human nature when feeding drugs or alcohol to an addict, or when being a bookie for illegal fights, or when pimping.

I think Facebook usage is fundamentally different from drugs/alcohol. A heroin addict can understand heroin is destroying their life, but be physically unable to prevent themselves from shooting up. I am not aware of instances (at any scale, I'm certain examples exist but exceptions don't disprove the rule) where people are aware that Facebook usage is ruining their lives but are incapable of discontinuing their use.

I noticed I wasn't getting anything out of Facebook years ago and decided to stop using it. Similarly, Instagram was fun and engaging until it was not and then I stopped using that too. My experience mirrors that of many people I know. Still more continue to use Facebook and Instagram, and while I personally don't understand how someone could enjoy using either at this point, they are autonomous adults who can choose to use/waste their time with whatever method they prefer. If there emerges a substantive quantity of people who begin to think using Facebook has a negative impact on their lives but who find themselves incapable of putting it down, I think a conversation about the broad approaches society could take to help people detach from these technologies would be appropriate.

>Facebook intends to normalize incredulity at all times, in order to maximize their own profit, and because of the scale of Facebook, it’s causing a net negative in human behavior. Fewer people would be choosing outrage, and less often, if Facebook wasn’t pimping it. Allowing people to form companies with this intention should be illegal, no?

I'm not completely averse to the idea of making something illegal if a majority of people find it to be a net negative. We just have so many aspects of society (broadly in many cases, but I can only speak specifically to American society) where profits supersede general welfare that it comes off insanely hypocritical to point to Facebook specifically while not addressing any of the others.

If you're an advocate of making Facebook illegal because it intends to maximize incredulity/outrage for profit then you would also need to make news programs (both national and local) illegal. You would need to make Twitter illegal. You would need to make YouTube illegal. Most (all?) large scale internet platforms depend on milking outrage for profit. News programs do the same. I'd be interested in having conversations about making all of them illegal. I would not be interested in a conversation about making one of them illegal.

But if we are going to be honest about why Facebook is becoming the public whipping boy, it's because Boomers who voted for Donald Trump used Facebook to talk loudly about why they like Donald Trump.
Your point ironically works directly against you here. Your point is basically "describe an image without using images", it demonstrates how constrained the utility of images is, basically only useful for their own sake.
>For the next decade we'll all be asking ourselves if the whole world's gone mad at least once a week.

Been doing that every hour since march 2020.
If you want to push it a bit further you can mix in our game VRWorkout [1] [2] (the github version is a bit behind the AppLab version).
It's a hand tracking based full body exercise game (crunches, pushups and even burpees included).
I'd be happy if you join us in our weekly multiplayer workouts on Sunday

[1] https://quest.vrworkout.at
[2] https://github.com/mgschwan/VRWorkout
I do a 30-40 minute HIIT or Boxing Routine 2-3 times a week in my quest 2. I keep meaning to get the silicone cover but it hasn't stopped me. The real issue is the foam does get sweaty and if I stop working out then decide I want to play a VR game that is not something you want to put back on after you've taken it off without drying it.
Consider that the compiler cannot optimize A != A into false, or A == A into true, because NaN values can occur at run time.

While you might not explicitly write A == A into your code, it could occur implicitly due to some macro expansion, inline expansion or other code transformation.

I think GCC with -ffast-math gets rid of this NaN rule and does such optimizations anyway. (Your code just has to avoid generating NaNs so that the optimizations are valid.)
I think we’re using different definitions of “old”. My mother’s house is about 250 years old, and that’s not uncommon where she lives. Her house is literally older than this country (I live in the US these days). Her house will probably last at least that again.

My house in the Bay Area is ~65 years old, it’s timber frame & stucco. When a strong wing gusts against it in a storm, you can feel the house slightly shudder. It’s not going to fall down (I’m reasonably certain, at least it hasn’t in the last 15 years and we’ve had a few storms :) and it’s not “made from wooden panels”, but in terms of solidity and construction, it’s not in the same ball-park (to use an Americanism) as my mother’s house.

Oh, and my house cost today would cost about 10x what my mother’s would…

[edit: it’s kind of wild that your username is what I used to sign into Unix systems with when I was in college. Sjg are my initials and they changed our account-names every semester for some reason]
in case others are interested, I was curious about the original and found a good description the mechanism of the original in the patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3710668A/en.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28219948
Yeah i’d give it a shot. I like to push myself to the almost-throwing-up level of intensity so I’m curious if it would get in my way of achieving that.
Yeah, that was too dismissive. I do think there's a problem with juries in that the pool of people is narrowed to those who both want to and are able to serve. Some jobs will pay employees who have jury duty, but many will not. Some people have backup caregivers for their dependents, but many don't. I'm not interested enough to look for statistics on it, but I would be surprised if juries aren't primarily composed of a narrow subset of social classes, like upper middle class professionals, retired people, the childless, and the unemployed, or some similar categories. It should be hard to get out of serving and jurors should be compensated in a way that eliminates the financial burden without becoming an incentive in itself.
But many, many countries are capitalistic, so those roles that are required for capitalism are contributing and/or required for those societies.

If everyone grew their own gardens and was a vegetarian, only consuming what they grew themselves, then the people working in grocery stores wouldn't be essential. But our society doesn't do that, so they are.
Is this because middlemen take too big of a cut?

I work for an agricultural company that does a decent amount of hay sales as a middle man but I'm not too familiar with that part of the business.
This is why you should not ”invest” in projects with anonymous leadership.
Isn't software development a gray zone, yet is male dominated?
I think the reason the Metaverse feels like bullshit to me is because:

—a lot of its marketing, perhaps inadvertently, positions it as a replacement for the web rather than evolution or extension.

—it's pushed by a company that has operates multiple walled gardens.

—as far as I know, there's no real technical details about how the interoperability would work.

I think my and others' reactions would be much different if, for example, a browser vendor had proposed a standard way for linking to AR environments. While a tiny step, it could lead to a gradual but ultimately substantial shift in the web (similar to the way video became ubiquitous over the past decade) and is more in line with the author's vision of media evolution than the Metaverse's marketing seems to suggest it will be. (Edited to add:) I'm not saying this approach is the best way of moving forward or would be a brilliant success or anything; I just mention it to illustrate a more plausible way of developing and integrating VR.

So it's possible the author might be right in the end, but there are a lot of red flags.
It's funny. The reason you hear all those stories about boomers being able to afford a house, college education etc on a basic salary is primarily due to the higher interest rates of the time.

Buying a house when rates were 10% and watching them drop to next to 0 over 30 years must've been fun.

Of course Re: college there are other reasons, like government derisking lending by backing the loans, supporting higher and higher costs.

But it should be no surprise that debt fueled expenses are much much higher now. You can certainly say that carrying costs may be similar due to lower rates, but personally I'd much rather buy an asset at a high rate, and have the option of paying down quickly to become debt free.

Nowadays it's almost nonsensical to pay down your debt from an opportunity cost perspective. But even if carrying cost is low, there's an uncomfortable feeling when you live life by financing everything, and with high level of debt.

The question is, will we ever normalize, or will we follow Europe to negative rates?

The current Fed is too politicized to normalize policy. I think partly due to the greater public scrutiny of their moves. Almost everybody will vote for easy money if you give them the choice. Easy money is always the right choice in the very short term. The longer term distortions are the thing to worry about.

Lowering rates effectively initiates a one time transfer of wealth from the future generations to the present.
Saving a chunk of time and effort. The same benefit you get from unimportant car trips.

Most people go on unimportant car trips just to save a few minutes or for a minor convenience, despite the risk.

It's not a huge benefit each time, but it's also not a huge risk each time. So don't round just one side to zero.

Also who said they aren't using protective gear like insulated tools? That sentence was talking about electricians after all.
It's just a guess, but the sailor who saw the smoke may have instead seen the CO2 from the extinguishers being emptied
This seems huge.

Does anyone know plans around how this will be implemented into Rails?
Do they have a day job? I thought they lived off their Patreon. They definitely changed their first and last name at some point, I remember a Twitter thread mentioning it.
Sure, you can bullshit your way out of a bug. It is called making a "kludge", also known as "technical debt".

It happens all the time... unfortunately.
Perhaps because we don't have the right filters or avatars yet.
I would make those bets because there isnt enough money in stringing the community a long, compared to the $2.7mm already collected
Who goes along with Facebook? Most tech-enthusiasts I know make a point about not using anything Facebook (Whatsapp notwithstanding). It's just that most people don't care that much about tech-related ideologies, the same way most people don't care about animal rights, or the environment. TL;DR: We have to pick our fights.
Here is an alternative I've used for years: https://gonative.io/
Musk says he has a better plan for his money than Democrats
Pardon my language, but I was damn lucky. Not "lucky" meaning that I bought a lottery ticket, speculated on stocks, or any other form of gambling, but that many things outside of my control aligned such that my hard work corresponded to results.

(Also, my apologies for this becoming a longer reply than I had planned. I have a cat sitting on my lap, and cannot move.)

* Stable home life, with active teaching from two educated parents. At no point growing up did I need to expend effort worrying about what I would eat, or where I would sleep. Instead, I could focus on education and hobbies.

* No financial need for a job during secondary education. My family's finances were stable enough that I didn't need to expend effort on a job. Instead, I could focus on advanced courses.

* Didn't need to take on college loans. One of my parents is a professor, and so I had free tuition at their university. As a result, I could focus more on coursework during the school year, and STEM research programs during the summer.

* Receiving a stipend while working on my terminal degree. This is typically only the case in STEM fields. I was lucky that my interest and talents led me to a more in-demand field.

* Reasonable health insurance at all points of my life. From being covered through my parents' insurance (thanks Obama), to being covered through graduate student insurance (thanks to the student union), to being covered through my employers (thanks to being in a field where this is typical). I haven't had any major medical expenses, but I've had the safety net of having reasonable periodic care.

* Interest in an industry that built desirable skills. My PhD ended up requiring me to build custom analysis software to perform large amounts of data analysis, which built skills that have been tremendously useful and in-demand. But I couldn't have predicted either the skills required or their broad applicability when I started on that path. Back in high school, I just knew which subjects I enjoyed more and focused on getting even better at them.

I'm not saying that you and I haven't worked hard. It isn't that we didn't make plans, didn't strive toward those plans. Where I was damn lucky was in circumstances outside my control, allowing that hard work to translate into results.
Grandfather Rule
Exactly. A good business always has to remember who the actual customer is. For kids, in many cases the actual customer is mom & dad, so make sure your product is aimed at them. Same with selling software to a business, the customer is management not the engineers who will actually use it.
I'm really bullish on NFT's (for example I think I'd feel a lot more confident if my ebook or streaming library was a series of NFT's as opposed to some entries in a database owned by Amazon. I'd actually own it and could choose to resell it if I wanted too) but we're really early right now, and I think there's some learning that needs to happen. Once we reach the trough of despair, we're be able to build this stuff out with the high profile failures.
What do you mean? We couldn't know anything immaterial if all we are is material. That's all I'm saying.
J has no operator precedence, and evaluates from right to left. Pretty easy to get used to.
I really wish we would stop giving so much influence to popular opinion on social media. As of late, it is very undiscerning. Voting websites especially are terrible at selecting for true value at scale.
Just checked, looks like Vulcan under DRM on the Pi4 works, and at least some people in the Libretro ecosystem have already messed around with it, so this could benefit Lakka. Awesome. Maybe this'll mean getting to play with some decent CRT shaders on the Pi without an unacceptable performance hit, and/or getting to make better use of Retroarch's advanced input lag reduction features.
Agreed, although impractical due to a shortage of judges. You shouldn't have to rely on making it to an appeals panel to have your fate decided by more than the whims of a single person.
Yes, as I read the article I thought about interoperability between applications as a related problem. There has been lots of effort put into this over the decades with things like OLE and in some sense, object-oriented programming in general. They've achieved some success but it feels like they've always fallen far short of the level of reuse and interoperability envisioned, and for basically the same reasons alluded to in the article - even if you can solve the easier technical problem of defining protocols, there remain the harder technical and design problems of mapping semantics and user interfaces between application environments, and the social problem of divergent interests and priorities between the developers of those environments.
I love how people, usually on the outside, think everything would be simple. The parent comment reminded me of the "I just learned about Bitcoin and I'm here to fix it."
This is akin to the kind of lawsuit where someone breaks into your house, gets hurt and then sues you.
With the original Fisher-Price cash register, the 3 different denominations were of different sizes, so each only fit into its own slot. With their modern remake, the 3 different denominations are all the same size.

That’s the thing about their remakes, all across the board—they look similar to the originals, but lost their a lot of the details and functionality that made them charming. As a Buffalonian I still have a soft spot for Fisher-Price, but these are just disappointing.
Steam Sales Stats from My Game – Yerba Mate Tycoon and Android/iOS Release Stats
I used to work in a PC shop and many of them came back. I had 2 raptors of my own and both of them failed after a few years. I know it's anecdotal but this was a niche item so if you see a lot of returns you know it's bad. This applies to mostly the raptors, we never sold any velociraptors.
Some interesting info on their infrastructure here

https://www.hashicorp.com/case-studies/roblox
As Roger Waters so succinctly wrote (and sang): … this species has used itself to death.
Transposing a Bit Matrix
It's always hard to put a monetary value on these things. With that said, Holocaust survivors were way underpaid.

In order for the policy to be a deterrent for the parents, the children need to endure suffering. I do not think that $450k will undo the damage done to those kids.
I pulled the OEM list from the source of the percentages that I cited. Also, I am not "complaining" about anything; I am simply sharing information. I can see how it could be interpreted this way, so if I could edit the comment, I would probably change it to something like "by the way, LG doesn't sell phones anymore".

Here's something else I said:

> most of the devices on that list are either old or not devices people actually want to use.

Since LG doesn't make phones anymore, all of their phones on the LineageOS list qualify as "old". This is what I was getting at; it doesn't matter much that they used to make some phones with unlockable bootloaders because they will soon be obsolete and the market share percentage will creep further and further down until it joins the "others".
The connection between racehorses and psychopaths in this article seems to be large left ventricles and extreme left-brain lateralization.

I could read this article again but I think I'd just become even more confused if I did.
Seems like the appropriate defense strategy should be to arrange their own cadaver dog analysis which shows completely contradictory evidence to that of the the prosecution dog.
Well, not really. After reading about some cases I've long lost any trust I may have had in the system. It might be ok in general (do not have enough real stats) but when it comes to fucking up particular person's life without any consequences the government / their institutions shine.
This site is not viewable in Europe. But according to other, viewable sites:

1) This is a trial balloon, i.e. the Biden administration is considering this and will see what the reaction is like.

2) It only applies to families separated from their children at the border, so this title (only on HN?) is misleading.

I would be happy to see families subjected to the trauma of that kind of separation compensated -- it's especially traumatic for the kids. I just hope it doesn't create any perverse incentives for people trying to immigrate to the US.

[edit: grammar]
That's pretty horrible. Through circumstances I ended up dropping out of highschool, if not for that I would have loved to go to University but after hearing stories like these I'm wondering if I didn't dodge a bullet. It did cause me to end up in the employment cycle at just the right time to launch a small software development company and that would have never happened if I gone to university instead.
One bit that stands out to me...

A Facebook spokesperson said the company had invested "$13 billion and have 40,000 people working on the safety and security on our platform..."

Hmmm... 40,000 might sound like a lot but 40,000 moderators for 2.5 billion (ie 2,500,000,000) users is only 1 moderator for every 62,500 users, assuming an even distribution. Without a linear distribution that would mean some groups get more moderators per user but also other groups get less.

Either way that seems like a totally inadequate ratio considering how many posts, likes and shares those 2.5+ billion users generate each day.

Anyone have data on the average number of posts (or engagements) a typical FB user generates per day?
> In fact jury selection is notorious for discarding potential jurors with intelligence, critical thinking, legal awareness, or domain expertise. Jurors reflect the part of society least qualified to be making these decisions.

Jurors get dismissed based on whether or not one side feels they decide in their favor or not. That's it.
Yes, it is called C with Experience. Write code like a fantasy scientist: track what you're doing, document what works and what does not, and maintain that reference-sheet across multiple projects. Like a scientist is supposed to work. Your foot guns will vanish.
> without them I presume the guards need to be coded manually elsewhere in the program.

That is my conclusion as well, reading the Oberon manual a SET seems just to be a normal set but for integers only, thus you have to manually check if your integer value is part of the set within the procedure itself, however that check will be a runtime check, not a compile time check if you had a proper enumeration type (I assume). And to my understanding Oberon doesn't have any error handling, so how exactly you would promote a out of range check to an error is unknown to me.

I guess that you would probably want to define constants to fill the set with, thus adding some more noise.

CONST RED = 1;
CONST GREEN = 2;
CONST BLUE = 3;
SET COLORS = (RED, GREEN, BLUE)

So you can use it a procedure call

draw(RED);

Compare to Pascal enumeration

type COLORS = (RED, GREEN, BLUE);

It feels like Wirth was somewhat obsessed with the idea of type extension with Oberon, it should be possible to import any module (program) and extend it without restrictions and enumerations created a problem how you would extend it.

If you have a color module defining the enumeration COLORS together with a bunch of procedures accepting COLORS, then in another custom module you want extend COLORS with the color YELLOW plus some YELLOW specific procedures.

But if you pass an extended enumeration E' to a procedure that accepts the base enumeration E, which should be legal similar how you can pass T' as T, the procedure would receive illegal values, in this case YELLOW. What you need to do instead is create your own CUSTOM_COLORS enumeration, manually include every color from COLORS and add YELLOW, and when calling procedures within the colors module type cast from CUSTOM_COLORS to COLORS enumeration. Perhaps this is the type explosion Wirth was referring to.

Out of range would still be problem if you extend a SET, but you avoid type casts.

This is how I interpret Wirth reluctance to enumerations (and subranges).

https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/Oberon07.Repor...
I used to own an ancient Sun SparcStation with a Barracuda 10k RPM disk, and the noise it made was just ... too much. It sounded like a combination of a fighter jet taking off and a dentist drilling into my skull.

Fortunately, that machine supported diskless operations, which was painfully slow, but ... that machine was painfully slow anyway (by 2005 standards), and it was part of what I liked about it.

Years later, I ran into a CAD workstation with a 10k RPM disk drive, and the noise was just ridiculous. I was so certain it had to be a fan until my coworker replaced the disk drive, I felt rather sheepish afterwards.

I sometimes miss good old HDDs, because you could tell if they were busy just by listening. But considering the godawful noise the really fast HDDs made, SSDs are a blessing.
ugh, now if I could only buy a few haha