skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed, ads aren't charity. If companies are spending $1,000 per adult in the United States for advertising (which the are, from the figures I can find), that's because they either:

A. Expect the ads will manipulate spending habits to bring in more than $1,000 of profits per adult on average (with the actual spending needed to reach that profit being far in excess of $1,000, considering profit is only a fraction of revenue).

B. Don't expect the ads to manipulate spending habits, but are stuck in game theory hell where companies waste a vaste amount of resources (10x the budget of NASA) merely to maintain the status quo, because any company that doesn't will fall behind its rivals.

C. Some mixture of A and B.

The cost to the public is mental intrusion (if mental intrusion didn't work, companies wouldn't buy ads), financial (in case A), and also the bad habits that advertising companies and the companies that deliver them push on us so that we can consume more (sedentary culture of watching TV to consume more ads, mindless browsing to consume more ads, encouraging political fights with family to increase engagement and consume more ads).

It's hard to not come to the conclusion that advertising is a huge blight on modern society, and exactly the kind of thing collective action by a society should be fighting against.
> is there a point where we can say that it is in a perfect state

I suspect it's asymptotical. You'll need to determine at which point it's close enough to perfection to stop improving, or just let it rip to infinity (and never benefit from it, probably).
The right place to add it would be here AFAICT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation#Other_measures_of_.... The article on Pearson's shouldn't get sidetracked by discussing other types of variables. (or rather, it already has too many)

But the part that one would add would not necessarily be the definition of the coefficient ξn, but rather the interesting discussion at the beginning about what makes for a good correlation coefficient.
There's a difference between an engineer and a scientist, and you just hit on it.
Where can we buy magnacut knifes? (for cooking if possible)
You seriously underestimate the complexity of genetics and ontogenesis.
> Charlatans don’t make it past engineers.

There is plenty of evidence that this just isn't true.
I only found out because I actually met one in person on a date who insisted you didn't need any IT or coding experience to manage developers
Boy I hate the insurance shakedown. Enterprise did that to me the other day, and they were not friendly when I politely told them no. They wanted to know who my insurance carrier was and what the policy was. I told him it was just fine and if they don’t like it I can go to somebody else. They did end up renting me the car, but I felt like I was being treated like a criminal.

Another time: I was behind a couple at Hertz and the employee at the desk made those people call their insurance company on the spot to verify coverage. Ridiculous.
$129 doesn't seem outrageously expensive?
Naive question: Has anyone tried to whack these questions with the machine learning hammer? I figure if we can do protein folding [0], we should be able to do knives.

[0] https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-...
That's still only, what, twenty or thirty dimensions? I guess it's hard enough to gather data that it's not as simple as feeding it a big black-box optimizer, something like SageMaker or Vizier that's designed to tune ML models with week-long training times and dozens of hyperparameters, but that'd still be quite a bit more powerful than the manual search that the author talks about.
Increasingly, sites will break without their analytics.

Seems bananas to me for your entire functionality be dependent on third parties.
I dunno, this comes off like some sort of hyperbolic fanboyism
Yeah, fair enough. I am interested in cases where we do not know what we are looking for exactly, or rather, we do not know exactly what "perfect" is. When we can define the state we want perfectly, then we have an easy job, but what if we cannot?
That was the retcon.

The real reason that they spoke a pretend version of Mandarin was so that they could say things that would otherwise get stopped by the censors. They used it as their cursing language, among other things.
http://www.wiby.me/ is pretty good too.
A researcher mentions using a compact index based on the Burrows-Wheeler Transform to fit things in less memory compared to using a huge hashtable.

I see open-source implementations of BWT-based indexes (FM-Index/FMtree) out there. Out of curiosity, does anyone know of anything using BWTs for compact indexes in more everyday uses (like full-text search), or alternately reasons it doesn't really work outside the genome-alignment use case? Likely it only 'pays for itself' if you really need the space savings (like, it's what makes an index fit in RAM) or else we'd see it in use more places. It'd still be kinda neat to actually see those tradeoffs.
I definitely think there will be more pressure on the system due to staff absences that isn’t represented in any of those graphs. It would be good to have some visibility of that - actual hospital capacity vs used capacity or something like that.
arguably the only really compelling feature of BeOS (Spotlight)

Be filesystem (BeFS) was terribly compelling, but only after you had lost your first draft of your first book to filesystem corruption.

Or so I'm told.
If there were a vaccine against HIV, and an ongoing pandemic overwhelming hospitals, then yes I guess?
In a recent HN post the creator of Kagi[1] was talking about it. I think it's probably what you're looking for.

[1] https://kagi.com/
Knowing something about your prospects doesn't doom you to negative thoughts. In fact, the way the human mind works is often the obverse.

"Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy."
--Dale Carnegie

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
--Eleanor Roosevelt

"Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering."
--Yoda

"The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."
--Nelson Mandela

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.'
--Marie Curie

"The key to change... is to let go of fear."
--Roseanne Cash

"He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We should all start to live before we get too old. Fear is stupid. So are regrets."
--Marilyn Monroe

"Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones."
--Thich Nhat Hanh
If you expand "vaccine" to "medical interventions", then yes. Bariatric surgeries are quite effective at cutting mortality.

>Long-term studies show the procedures result in significant long-term loss of weight, recovery from diabetes, improvement in cardiovascular risk factors, and a mortality reduction from 40% to 23%.
I don't get it, how do I play this?
Immunosuppressed humans are a minority. And each of them would be less likely to get infected (at all) if the regular people around them took vaccination seriously.

Regarding Omicron, there is some cause for hope: so far it does seem to produce less severe illnesses.
You can follow his own advice and deface any of his pieces you're forced to see until he stops doing it to you, morally. I wouldn't touch the legality of it with a 10 foot pole though.
The town I live in (Santa Barbara), does not allow billboards, and it's amazing. It's easy to forget that billboards exist, but every time I travel I am reminded how nice it is to not see them in daily life.
There's a startup out of U of Toronto working on exactly this:

https://www.thephaseshift.com/
Your project is fascinating, but 8000 queries/hr is just over 2 queries/sec. Even bursting up to 10x that (20 QPS), it doesn’t seem surprising that it can run on consumer hardware? Am I missing something?
I don't really know much about that job market but I would just point out that becoming a deeper expert in something very iOS developer specific might be a strategic mistake compared to learning just enough about the non-native apps people's needs to help them publish their apps on iOS.

With one group you may be a specialist now while with the other they may always have a proof you are not a true scottsmann if staying a scottsmann is their full-time job.
Actually you can. They might be eating a sugary dessert, and then you think "mmm, I'd like one of those".

And the person might not even need to be there physically, they could just be an image.

Do we need to publicly shame and ostracise employees of all advertising and marketing companies?

All ice-cream manufacturers?

What about smoking? Smoking kills 10 million per year, COVID is a pittance by comparison. Should smokers wear a yellow cigarette badge to distinguish them from others?

1 million die from the effects of second hand smoke - which can come off of clothes, even imperceptibly. Best to know about it, and give them a wide berth. Eg, probably a good idea ban them from going into shops at all. And from buying food, starve them out of the habit, eh?

Do remember here, COVID is NOTHING compared to smoking.

That is, by supporting such measures against COVID and not against smoking or any other preventable cause of death, you're effectively a "murderer".

As such, I'll be giving you and folks like you a wide berth myself, though I wouldn't go as far as restricting your ability to feed yourself.

No need to thank me, it's just common human decency.
Congrats on your big life changes.

It's funny, I just wrote up some experiences with the latest Haiku beta and also ended up missing applications despite the snappiness and amazingly trim fit into much less than 1G RAM. I'm sure many more apps will come soon though.

https://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/giving-haiku-os-beta-...
turbolinks takes over anchor navigation and "automagically" makes it use ajax

htmx (and intercooler.js, its predecessor which is 8 years old) is a lower level extension to HTML, allowing for targeting specific regions for replacement, using different events for triggering requests, etc.

htmx is closer to hotwire.dev, which 37signals recently released, but again is lower level and a more straight-ahead extension of HTML
They like to outsource everything. Vendor, vendor, vendor. No rich culture and own fundamental IP generation.
I havent had the need for Google Search as much anymore. I find that the content is lower quality and truly useful information is hard to find.

If I need a product review I use YouTube or Reddit search.

I increasingly use Github search for code.

I use Google Maps for restaurant or store location/hours, then go to the linked website from there.

I use wiki search (Firefox prefix) to find quick information on a topic.

I use imdb search (Firefox prefix) for movies/show information.

And so on.

Ten years ago my internet experience would start from Google Search, now its a lot more diverse.
Py2cr: A Python3 to Crystal Translator
Before English became more common, yes — French was the main “Lingua Franca” in the western world.

There have been attempts to create an alternative language that would not heavily favor or disfavor any speakers of any natural human language, but they haven’t gotten a lot of traction. Look up “Esperanto”.

Prior to French, I think it probably was Latin. But that’s still the western world.

But in the Eastern world? I don’t know what the primary language was before Mandarin, which itself was created only relatively recently because the ruling party didn’t like people using Cantonese and they wanted one unified language that they could force on everyone in the country.
pretty cool that SLC hosted the Winter Olympics while they had the chance
That was fun! I struggled very hard but got it on the fifth try
I didn't realize Tumblr was sold to Automattic for $3 million. Yahoo bought it for $1.1 Billion just a few years prior (which made zero sense at the time).

Yahoo was truly a poorly run business with an incompetent executive team.
There are both debit and credit loans depending on who is loaning who. The two parties are the person recording the transaction and an external third party.\\

A debit to a loan account only reduces it if it is a credit loan. A debit to a debit loan account actually increases it (Think a bank giving further money to their customers).

If you are debiting a loan account it means the external third party is giving cash to the person recording the transaction.

If you issue a refund then you are giving cash to the external third party so its a negative (credit). Then the positive side of the journal is against your income account (reducing your income).

Debits and Credits are not positive and negative, but they are a concept that was invented before negative numbers existed and are perfectly represented by positive and negative numbers.
I would certainly go with a givewell approved charity before donating my money to the government
The problem with this approach is that the group most likely to pay to remove ads is also the same group that is most attractive to advertisers. So your pool of users to whom you serve ads is less attractive overall. That means you need to figure out not just how much you make serving those users ads, but also how much you lose by removing them from the ad viewer pool.
Hello from another greybeard. I've been in the same boat. I'm not a programmer, though. I was a sysadmin and senior tech-support guy (L3, but I can do anything.) I never specialised: I do Windows, Linux, Mac, and in the past, I did UNIX™, VMS, Netware, all sorts of long-dead stuff back to CP/M.

In 2007, I decided to switch from freelance to an office job before I turned 40. It took me about 500 applications to get my first interview, over the phone. I landed the job on that first phone interview. It was good, reasonable contract rates, shift-based but I needed the money.

Snag: I used to be a journalist, and I preferred it. A journo job came up, so I quit. The journo job ended about 4 months later, just as the Credit Crunch hit.

Over the next 5 years, I applied for over three thousand jobs. Not exaggerating. I was British and I also applied for roles in any country where I spoke enough of the language to write the cover letter: France, Spain, Germany, Norway, Sweden.

I averaged one interview a year, I got 2 roles, one of which lasted 10 days and the other 2 months.

Ready to give up, I managed to get a book deal, which paid enough to pay off the urgent bills and cover a one-month intensive training course to be a Teacher of English as a Second or Other Language. I planned to go abroad and travel as a TESOL teacher, as I figured I was too old to work in IT ever again.

Well, I told a friend, and that got me a referral for a technical writer job at a Linux vendor – but in Central/Eastern Europe, the former Communist Bloc. I'd never considered there.

Well, that job didn't last, but I found another quickly and easily – in fact, I was offered 2 roles by 2 different companies.

I have had half a dozen jobs since then, steadily increasing my pay. I moved cities to the capital.

Now, as it happens, I am back to journalism, but what I would say to you is this:

Ageism is very real and it's rife across the English-speaking world and the West in general. Kids (and you know what I mean by that) will deny this, and point out that it's illegal, which it is, but it happens anyway.

There's no escaping it.

But I found that it's not true in the former Communist Bloc. I didn't make as much as I did in Britain, but then, the cost of living is about a quarter of the West, so I lived very comfortably, thank you.

I successfully rebooted my entire career in my late 40s and now in my mid-50s, I own my own place outright, I have a young family with an adorable tiny daughter, a fulfilling job, a savings account and some investments, and I don't owe anything to anyone.

Get out of the collapsing West. Go East. Not necessarily Eastern Europe, but a lot of the developing world is crying out for English-speaking experienced people.

Sure, there are remote jobs, too, but at local pay, which won't go far in the West.

Pre-COVID I flew back to visit my aging relatives 3-4 times a year, which is a lot more often than I could afford to do when I lived in another part of the same country.

Ageism is not a worldwide problem, but you will have to travel far to escape it. But it's totally worth doing, and I'm glad I did. I even changed citizenship to make it simpler.
Fast file system queries that could be stored as shortcuts were nice, still haven't seen that implemented nearly as well elsewhere.

NTFS metadata architecture really inspired by BeFS, or at the least, a fellow traveler.

You can tweak the Windows Explorer (the filesystem UI) to operate on arbitrary metadata. Well, I was able to get an email inbox, where each email message is a text file, just using Explorer the BeOS way, on Windows 2000. It wasn't exactly fast.
That’s exactly it. I usually use these raw_attribute blocks for things like tables, when I want more control than I get when leaving it to Pandoc’s translation from Markdown tables to HTML or LaTeX.
Cardboard, cable, carpet, drywall, twine, plastic packaging and tape, letters, tags on pet toys, pillows, - a good knife made of a modern super steel can be a revelation. Get a good one and keep it handy, and you'll find situations daily where it genuinely makes life easier. For tech people, something like Leatherman skeletool is the ultimate every day carry because of the multi tool, and you can buy custom blades made from powder steel.
Ask HN: What's your net worth/age?
Me, I'm 29 and at about 320k. Fluctuates a lot because a good chunk is in crypto.
I don't know, this doesn't sound like an actionable advice to me. Which is pretty much why I take advertising as a given. And, yes, I don't think one should defend it. I mean, just watch some anti-utopia sci-fi, where everyone has to watch ads about everywhere, then compare it with the direction we are heading to, and reassess your position on "ads being ok".

But I just don't see an alternative, and I don't imagine how one can draw a line between what's good and what isn't. In a sense, there cannot be good ads by definition. In a perfect world, there is no ads, because there is no direct competition — and that's the only way. There is only 1 laundry powder, so you don't have to choose. There may be several laundry powders, each one being the best for a specific type of clothing. And there may be even several laundry powders for each type, one simply being cheaper than the other. But there is always one definitive answer, to which one is the best, so you can make your choice just applying the appropriate filters in your groceries app. Similarly, when you choose a smartphone, you don't really need reminded about samsung being the best everywhere you go: you just go to gsmarena (or such), use some filters and make an informed choice. If an app/consultant/oracle/search engine can truly allow you to choose what's best for you, nobody would think about it as an advertisement, and nobody would need to place it anywhere, because you'll consciously ask it when you need an advice.

Ads are not about that. They are about shouting your product name loud enough to substitute or even obstruct making an informed choice. This is pretty much necessary, when you have 20 laundry powder brands, that make essentially the same product, neither being the best for anyone. And while it could be unnecessary when selling a phone (since all of them are actually different, even if only in how they look), it isn't in the current market, since they need to persuade you that you need a new phone.

So, all ads are bad, but they are unavoidable in a free-market economics, where competition exists. And controlling them doesn't sound ok to me. To be fair, I'm somewhat libertarian-minded in general, so of course it doesn't sound ok to me, but, seriously, where should one draw the line? Is product-placement in movies ok? Is a guy shouting on a street for people come into a restaurant ok? Sure, there is a lot of gradient in-between all this and spoiling the city landscape or even drawing coca cola banners with lasers on the night's sky. But then regulating such things isn't really about regulating ads, since this could be about art projects as well. And, furthermore, one could just call coca-cola banner an art project anyway.

So, I don't see what should I be fighting against, and how should I do that. I appreciate that somebody out there is concerned and stands against evil ad-corporations, but I'm almost holding back to not call it futile.
Alas the information presented is an over simplification of the process.

To actually sequence DNA with this USB thingy you need to prepare a so called sequencing library - and for that you need a fairly well equipped lab - expensive reagents and years of practice and skill ... a mid level biology Ph.D can prepare these ...

in addition the flowcell sold by Oxford Nanopore often malfunctions and the whole run is a bust ... (behaves like this since 2014 ... so no, the technology does not seem to improve a whole lot)
Money and ideology.

Money because restrictions shutdown the cashflows that support the rich in the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed.

Ideology because if we can come together to fix Covid, maybe we can come together to fix climate change and inequality. This is an anathema to those who believe that we should all carry on just as we please, because we can't do anything about these things anyway (and cashflows again).
Seems like there's a lot more Ask threads that bubble to the front page recently than I ever remembered before.
> Well-sandboxed arbitrary byte-code is remote code execution I am OK with!

I used to be OK with that too, until Rowhammer showed that sandboxing is more fragile than one would expect. And then came Spectre...
Risk of myocarditis following sequential COVID-19 vaccinations by age and sex [pdf]
Even the chrome extension for ChromeOS?
For Apple’s iCloud mail it’s even just 20 MB.
Gattaca shows a society in which eugenics, in hopes of creating a shortcut for people who have supposedly the better genes, devolved into a society where someone who did not have genetic augmentation could outcompete a whole bunch of genetically augmented people.

In the movie, either the genetic augmentation didn't work (as well) as expected, or their advantage caused the augmented people to become lazy because they got covered in undeserved status no matter how little or much they worked, as everything depended on which genes they have been "bred" for. Then someone with supposedly bad genes could run circles around them just by working hard.

Maybe some mixture, e.g. in order to protect those kids who fail at the task they have been "bred" for from considering themselves failed humans, gattaca's society adopted this model where they shower all kids in status who have the right genes. Maybe it's not the kids who are being protected but the companies selling the augmentations.
As of the middle of November 2021, about 30% of nurses had not gotten the vaccine, despite its widespread availability.

Does your condemnation extend to them?
obsessively, I just check it dozens of times a day probably

edit: oh, and always always set the topcolor to the same as the background color :)

#f6f6ef