skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While not the focus of this article, I'm curious how much of a reduction in fertilizer use we'll see in Iowa and the ramifications for water quality. Overapplication and lack of buffers has lead to incredibly high levels of nitrates making it into the rivers. Because of this, Des Moines is starting on a new $30M well because every year the algae and nitrate levels become too high for safe consumption. It's gone to the Iowa Supreme Court, but no remedy has been required of the communities upstream.

The most of the last two summers the local lake has had an advisory to not swim or do water sports because of the algae. Another article interviewed a water quality professor who basically said "There's no other comparable city that has this issue. Not being able to use the river as the full water supply because of nitrate levels is unheard of."

https://www.iowapublicradio.org/ipr-news/2021-04-22/des-moin...
I've been using it for 15 years or so. One of the tricks I use for getting around the problem other commenters here have is that I have bound my keycodes to be qwerty ones and (virtually) moved my key positions. This means if you set the OS to qwerty and type Dvorak the correct letters will be input.

When working in offices I'd have my company supplied keyboard still plugged in as a guest keyboard so others could work with me seamlessly.

This also came about as windows used to have the most ridiculous behaviour of setting the layout per window, so if you changed it when someone else came over you'd end up in typing hell. They thankfully fixed this to be a global setting a few years back.
A blockchain company said that blockchains weren’t evil? You don’t say.

You know there is this company I heard of that has a long history saying some nice things about cigarettes. Maybe I should buy some.
> the people that matter here are the engineers

Where did you get this from? Not like they call the shots. Weird statement.

> In tech areas, academia desperately needs industry to provide the feedback they provide

That's true, I agree. But the tech industry is also very often ruled by the worst of humanity so it's a balance.
Sonoma County farm strikes black truffle gold after 9 years of waiting
ArXiv Hits 2M Submissions
In Putin's mind, USSR and Russia might be one and the same. But I'm not sure Putin's words about the ideals and politics of a historical state which was originally built after a revolution led by a radical Marxist faction, the Bolsheviks, should be taken seriously. After all, the first anthem of the Soviet Union was "The Internationale" up until sometime in the 1940s. I am not completely sure about what was on Lenin's mind though, so I might be wrong - maybe he was secretly nationalist (or a left-wing fascist, if I could use this other loose term).
Oh, these books look interesting!
Thank you for the answer. I will try them someday :)
That's just casual anthropomorphisation. I think most gamers, especially speedrunners realise that games are unintelligent because they encounter and exploit counterintuitive reactions all the time.
It doesn't matter, because you won't be given a choice.

If you need a car, eventually these will be the only options available. Tampering with or removing these misfeatures will eventually be classified as a felony, and suspicion that you may have done so will eventually be used to justify violence against you from the police.
Trigger warning: ugly considerations ahead.

I have not watched the footage of the NZ shooting. I just wanted to speak to some considerations that might drive sudden collapse. Mechanically, there's two things I'd point at:

First, a bullet wound to the heart itself, or close enough (see next point) can effectively be an off switch, in the sense that you're blowing out the hydraulic system feeding blood to the brain. Suddenly loss of flow and pressure means no oxygen getting supplied to the brain; when that happens, willpower and mindset don't mean anything.

Secondly, a rifle round tends to be moving at least twice the speed of a pistol round, bringing with it significantly more kinetic energy and hydrostatic shock, creating a much larger wound channel, more likely blowing out a critical system and/or delivering massive shock to various organs.
Civilians protesting inflation are being shot dead by an authoritarian state, while Russian troops are being deployed to aid said authoritarians. Please don't minimize the gravity of the situation by attempting to connect it to an insulting stereotype that happens to play well with Western audiences.
1. The crypto market is moving to Poof of Stake, rather than Proof of Work. It is already rapidly getting more energy efficient because of this. Most new solutions like Polkadot and Ada are PoS, ETH will be there soon. BTC is energy inefficient because it’s old.

2. Retail payments are an abstraction above currency. When I pay with a Visa card, I may be spending cash, “credit”, crypto, etc… Visa/MC is probably the most pervasive non-Fiat/cash retail payment method in the world and it currently works with crypto thanks to Coinbase and others. Then you have Venmo, PayPal and the many others that work well in retail. There are / will be lots of great retail solutions that are abstracted from the base value store.

3. Crypto is very useful for P2P and B2B payments without approval from gov, banks, etc.

4. I lived in Argentina for a while and it’s true about the taxes and corruption. When I lived there I had to pay rent in cash but often the banks would just close or stop withdrawals. Crypto is better for this application (P2P payment, not super time sensitive).
> Also, single-purpose accounts are not allowed here generally, because they aren't compatible with the value of curiosity that's supposed to animate this place (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29692666
This would have to be a shallow definition of illicit. I think wasting energy, hoarding GPUs, baiting unsophisticated investors could be all be considered illicit activity. By that definition all of cryptocurrency is illicit.
Something like 70% of the population has no savings of any kind.

You know that the arguments about poor grandma with $500 life savings are bullshit, because everyone making them would happily let grandma die for a buck.

The only reason resource extraction types care about inflation is that most use debt to avoid taxation, and increase interest rates hurt their return on assets. Because the perversion of the US Senate has happened, we care more about corn companies, oil drillers, etc than anyone else.
I suspect you just have to pay for it and allow them to read and retain and aggregate your messages and use them for advertising.
Aha, it's Dahak all right.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/42076-dahak
This is huge, thanks for the lead. Others should note it's still experimental and your build command may fail with

> "--squash" is only supported on a Docker daemon with experimental features enabled

Up til now, our biggest improvement was with "FROM SCRATCH".
10 words in 2 seconds isn't really a very impressive way to do 500 words per minute.
I also thought about RSS as a basis for social media (I call it 'Really Social Sites'), but I think trying to make certain stuff private is against the whole idea of pub/sub and therefor RSS. I'm not saying you're wrong though, I just think mixing private and public (that's where the word 'publish' is coming from, right?) makes it more confusing.

I do think there's a gap to fill in RSS based social media, because users of current social media would like to send a private message (or at least not public) from time to time. I basically cover this with a contact form and email, at the moment. Sounds crude and not very techy, but it works like a charm.
...so you're saying NovelAI is better for story generation? Hot damn. I was having a good time with AI Dungeon (to the point where I was considering writing short stories using it as a guide), I might have to give that a try too.

Here's a snippet from my AI dungeon story recently. Mine never seems to get into actual dungeon crawling. The only parts that aren't A.I. generated in this section are the lines that have --me-- before them:

Veronica sits down on a stone bench. She says "Well, I guess we should talk."

Jesus sits down next to her and asks her, "What is the worst thing you've ever done in your life?"

Veronica says "I killed my first husband."

Jesus asks "Why did you do that?"

Veronica says "He was going to take everything from me."

Jesus says "How so?"

Veronica says "He knew where I hid all of my money, and he was going to take it. I would have been broke forever."

Jesus says "That's sad."

--me--: You say "Wait, you killed your first husband? I'm your new husband! Are you going to kill me too?"

Veronica looks away from Jesus. "No. I didn't mean to kill him. He was just... so mean to me. I just wanted to stop him. I didn't..." Veronica finishes by saying "I didn't mean to kill him."

Jesus says "Alright, I forgive you."

--me--: Veronica says "Does that mean I get to go to heaven now?"

Jesus says "I'll let you make that decision as soon as we finish our meal. It will have both heaven and hell as options, and that's all you'll ever get out of me."

Veronica smiles.
playing the devil's advocate, typing speed is important for these reasons:

1. It allows for minimal disruption to thinking process, close to 90% of the time even when coding is not actively typing, but when typing is subconscious and fast it removes the potential of where it interrupts the thinking process.

2. While this has no bearing on individual case (It would be Bayesian, some people consider that to be heretic), but a software engineer who does not type well have a greater chance of having had less practice.
If there's one scenario where I'd dread autocomplete-based/chorded typing is when coding or writing on a terminal. My coding usually comes _after_ some consideration about I want to write, and having to tack an additional "let's proofread what the software thought was close enough" step on top of that would make it seriously annoying. I already have an expansion plugin on my editor that allows me to insert potentially massive amounts of boilerplate for me if I happen to need to, and I already trust it.
I ordered one. This could be a huge benefit for someone like me who writes for a living.
Had no idea about squash. Using cached layers can really save time, especially when you already have OS deps/project deps installed. Thanks!
levels.fyi exclusively covers the top companies.

Median compensation across all companies in an area doesn't match what you see at levels.fyi at all. It's basically the best of the best compensation that you can get, but not everybody gets it.
Just as a comment for anyone new enough to not remember the historical background:

The title is alluding to the famous quote "information wants to be free" by Steward Brand. The full quote famously includes the opposite as well, because information "wants to be expensive because it's so valuable".

Kevin Kelly as an early collaborator of Brand of course knows this intimately.

There is a wonderful and very insightful book on Brand, by the way, called "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner. [1]

[1] https://fredturner.stanford.edu/books/from-counterculture-to...
For programming I only see this if you have a language with a lot of unnecessary overhead (not in the syntax but in what you need to type out) no (good) IDE or only solve mostly memorized leet code problems, or only write pretty brain dead code the 100ed time (in which case you could optimize it away with code-gen).

For other thinks I don't see this, not because I think slower then I type. But to some degree thoughts and typing are out-of-sync and while each though is faster then a typing, for much code you have one thought about how to type it, but also many more about contexts of your solutions and interaction with other code and what you do next etc. you type. And I don't think increasing typing speed would change this much. Except if I increase it to a point where I now need to fully focus on typing, which would be counter productive.

TL;DR: I type and thing, not type then think then type. (Though biologically seen I maybe don't do it actually in parallel but micro-task like how multi-threading on a single core non SMT system works, but it doesn't matter much for the end result.)
In the article, Electrek wrote:

> If the EV tax credit reform ends up passing, it would make the vehicle cheaper than its gasoline-powered version before gas savings. That’s just game over.

That's a suggestion that people will no longer be interested in buying comparable gasoline-powered cars when this Equinox EV were to become available. However, as I showed with my comment above, most of GM's assets must still be focused on building non-EVs, as that's currently 99% of their sales. So if GM is really going to be selling what they announce here, they are in for one hell of an Osborne effect and a huge write-off of their assets. (Not that they have much choice, I guess the competition will eat their lunch otherwise.)
Only if you assume what you are implying: That everyone who donated in fiat disliked the crypto option.
I think things like this are not “everyone must use this new better way of typing,” but more “hey there may be a better way of doing this task.”

I am always surprised, though at this point I shouldn’t be, that there is always pushback against any attempts at improving the status quo when it comes to typing speeds on HN - as though the creator is attacking all of us with lower typing speeds personally…

From another perspective: sure you might speed up only 0.5% of your workday - but how is that a bad thing?

Repetitive stress injuries aside, even if you only spend an hour a week typing (I suspect it’s honestly more) then if you end up increasing your typing speed by double you’re still saving yourself 25 hours a year. Assuming my a career of 35 years that’s 875 hours and you increase your time fighting imposter syndrome by 0.25%.

Scale up as appropriate for how much time you actually spend typing.
> I recently fired up LibreOffice Sheets to see how it compared to Google Sheets. It took four entire seconds to switch to editing mode in a cell. Every time, not just the first. If I were to root cause the issue, I'm sure it wouldn't be Java's fault -- but I bet that the same priorities that led the project to choose Java led them to ignore a four second stall in their most critical user interaction path

That's a slightly confusing comment because while it does integrate it in some components, very little of LibreOffice is written in Java. From what I understand, the core of it is all written in C++ and it's often held up as a canonical example of what happens when a giant C++ codebase gets out of control and doesn't manage complexity well.
You're right, I too was a bit disappointed that the page didn't mention contextual embeddings since that has been the best performing and most robust approach in NLP for nearly four years now.

It's still a clear introduction to word vectors though and it is good to know where we came from.
> (4-5 months after 2nd jab, so pretty much no effect from that) and it's just like a common cold

So you have milder symptoms because you're vaxxed.
Alteryx Announces Acquisition of Trifacta
> Michele Obama classified as a male

Yes, humans don't make embarrassing mistakes all the time. We're only making dignified mistakes.
Absolutely. Without giving proper context, the character giving an answer could be a wacky philosopher, a 5 year old child, a person from the 1800s, a liar, an uninterested passer-by, a trickster mage in a novel. If he didn't build the prompt to make it clear that it's a conversation, the context could even be song lyrics for example.
You see the same with a lot of rich conservatives and Jesus' statements on whether rich people can go to heaven. A lot of mental gymnastics. Rich people want to feel like good people, even if it's nearly impossible to actually square that circle.
The hospital strain point gets made a lot but I have one problem with this. Its been two years: have hospitals or the healthcare industry as a whole made an honest effort at upping the capacity in their facilities?

Why would the healthcare system of the alleged preeminent nation on planet Earth not have capacity for its citizens past a certain threshold?

Many cities have older hospitals that have yet to match the population increase. If so, why is that? And should someone do something about it?

Edited, to add one more question: if they shouldn’t, why not?
I doubt the program "understands" anything.. Its just mapping a input binary string, to an output binary string that minimizes some cost function.
There is an information asymmetry between a prospective employee and employer, which favors the employer. It is sensible to even the playing field a bit by forcing the employer to be the first one to throw out a number to anchor the negotiation.
that's an escalation - I would risk my life to fight against a state that threatens life in prison to control something like crypto
I develop an internal system for a company which sells diapers to big chain supermarkets in europe. It is connected to them through EDI. These are my 2 reasons why EDI is hard and fucked up in my opinion:

1) syntax - we are using XML which has weird element names and values and it's mixed camel case with other styles. It's not nice or possible to read without a manual/reference

2) brokers - you connect to others throught "EDI brokers" (dunno the right name in english). Basically you don't connect with other directly but it always goes through one or more brokers which are part of some EDI union or whatnot. So for example order from chain to a producer goes like this Supermarket -> Broker -> Producer. What this means is that different brokers pass you the orders in different way. So i guess it can vary a lot. Our broker is maybe the largest in the country and yet the only way how to programatically get messages from him is invoking a Java program, which downloads the message from his servers and that is possible to do exactly once. Then it's up to you to distribute it in your company as you wish. God forbid if you corrupt the message or something. This is very bad because you have to do a lot more work than just do a few REST requests to deal with anything. It prolongs basic integration by a lot.
You mobbed a little cobold and killed it and now you feel all big and proud of yourself? Well done >:(
> many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch.

I just use prime and rent movies that aren't free on it. It covers well over 90% of what I want to watch, and I spend well under $50/mo on it. After the $10 subscription, $40/mo for the rentals is like 2-3 seasons of a show, or 10+ movies (in addition to the included stuff). Legal cheap solutions exist, you just have to be willing to rent movies and shows like in the blockbuster days.
> hjkl with Vim using Dvorak was just too hard to get my brain around

Why not just remap? My intuition is that the cascading conflict wouldn't be that hard to resolve (at least compared to learning Dvorak...) but maybe I'm wrong.
Are there any specific advantage that Elixir being on BEAM VM brings to Machine Learning and Data Science? I am assuming BEAM VM's actor model fits well with the GPU / Tensor usage ? ( I have zero knowledge on ML and Data Science )

Personally I think this is a great move from Elixir community and especially coming directly from the creator. Some people may be dismissive ( as with at least half of HN ) But I see this with Ruby where there is a chicken and egg problem. The community stuck with Web or Rails Development only. And no one has incentive to kickstart the languages ecosystem in different directions.

So instead of Elixir being another language for Web / Phoenix, it could now ( or in the future ) be used as ML with some level of official support.
The civil unrest was triggered in part by soaring energy prices, in a country where bitcoin mining consumes 8% of total generation capacity.
Misleading headline. Very misleading.

They took a list of addresses that were known to be associated with illicit activity and calculated what percent of transactions went to those specific addresses:

> Transactions involving illicit addresses represented just 0.15% of cryptocurrency transaction...

Unless you believe they've identified all of the illicit addresses (they haven't) then this report is worthless for anything other than those specific addresses.
Yup. I'm also back to piracy, which is ridicolous really as a grown man. But should I pay for 5 different streaming services, where I basically borrow movies for whatever time they decide? I can't even remember which service has which movie so its very hard to just start watching something.
The problem in this case is the government not the banking technology. Do you really think if there are armed police at your house to intimidate you you are safe because there's a crypto wallet on your phone?
Good to know. `FROM scratch` is such a breath of fresh air for compiled apps. No need for Alpine if I just need to run a binary!
Chainalysis is using the prevailing definition of illicit.
People are getting too hung up on the "500 WPM" part. He's not saying he can type 500 WPM. He's saying that he scored 500 WPM on a specific typing task and he's doing it intentionally. He gets to say he typed 500 WPM and the website that's flagging him as a cheater has to be the one to explain why which just gives him more promotion.

It's not about how fast he's typing. It's about being able to say that his product is significantly faster than everything else.
Is it me, or does this article look suspiciously like an ad?
"This is a very hard conversation to have on HN."

Yes because it implies there is a conspiracy requiring God-like abilities to plan the long term outcomes of a multitude of decisions and actions many of which have conflicting goals.

What is more probable, that the current situation just emerged organically or that some elite group has conspired and executed flawlessly to make the world just like it is ?

There are subcontractors who work for my CM in China and I doubt they are paid much. It wasn't my plan to create wage-slaves and if I paid my CM more they would just likely pocket the difference. I'll admit I contribute to to problems you describe but that's very different than having intent and control.
Actually, that's not a single article, but a whole book (kind of):

1. Word Embeddings (this article)

2. Text Classification

https://lena-voita.github.io/nlp_course/text_classification....

3. Language Modeling

https://lena-voita.github.io/nlp_course/language_modeling.ht...

4. Seq2Seq and Attention

https://lena-voita.github.io/nlp_course/seq2seq_and_attentio...

5. ELMo, GPT, BERT

https://lena-voita.github.io/nlp_course/transfer_learning.ht...

All by Lena Voita, who has a real talent for explaining complex stuff.
No problem.

> Others should note it's still experimental and your build command may fail with

You might try "docker buildx build", to use the BuildKit client -- squash isn't experimental in that one I believe =)

https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/buildx_...
It's OK - tech nonprofits that rely more heavily on individual donations, like the EFF, Internet Archive, or Wikipedia, will still take your dirty crypto.

Less than 2% of Mozilla's revenues are from contributions, so it's cheap for them to symbolically thumb-their-noses at something.
Snap suing to trademark the word ‘spectacles’ for its smart glasses
Luckily odds of actually getting it seem pretty low overall given the CDC increase referencing 3 deaths as an increase. But still, one of those terrifying ways to go.

On a positive note, the act of being alive is also a ticking time bomb that inevitably leads to death as well, so there is that!