skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Childen watching gore on liveleak, girls looking at anorexia inspiration and boys getting into extremist ideals are not really good for their development, and these resources don't "simply tell" how the world works. In fact, it's the opposite: they construct a desirable narrative that supplants interacting with the real world, they enclose someone instead of opening them up. It's a parent's job to ward off bad influence from their children, whom are not equipped with dealing with such stimuli. Maybe not even the parent is equipped. It's not a matter of hiding and controlling children, it's about not letting other abusive people raise your children instead of you.
Given the same starting state, either you get the same outcome every time, or there's randomness involved, that is the point.

I challenge you to describe a selection process that is not fully deterministic but where the lack of determinism is caused by something other than randomness.

That is what you need to be able to come up with to define free will in a way that isn't smoke and mirrors.

There's no agency. Nothing but automatons.
I read all of the documentation for the service that I operate--per my other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29973282), often times things aren't well-documented and it's crucial to be able to look at the source code to figure out what something does (e.g., how is a configuration parameter used? what are its valid permutations?); however, when the source code is obscured by gratuitous complexity then it imposes a high cost on the user and in the case of DI frameworks, that gratuitous complexity comes with no discernible benefit (a car offers me something of value to justify its learning curve). Personally I'm of the opinion that a person shouldn't have to be a seasoned Java developer to use so many tools that are implemented in Java (or any other language, for that matter).
A go-style coroutine library in C++11 from the Namake Planet
I'd shed a tear for Blizzard, but Blizzard died years ago. First it started dying slowly when they figured out they can print money with world of warcraft, then they ruined that like 3 expansions in.

So no loss for the gamers here, move along...
I can’t imagine a scenario where Sony gets to have COD on their platforms in say… 2-3 years. Bethesda is also now only PC and Xbox. Microsoft is playing hardball because other than the fantastic deal that is Gamepass, they don’t really have a lot of hype building titles (Halo launched to a very mixed reception).

I personally prefer more companies rather than fewer. I also anticipate a large brain drain at Activision studios, like what has already happened at Blizzard. But the Activision brands are established enough (and formulaic enough) that it probably won’t matter either way.
I wonder how this (and drone tech) affects helicopter pilots. I briefly considered enlisting to try and be an army helicopter pilot, but the contract is a 12 year obligation. I just couldn't get over the thought that 5 years from now, AI and drone based countermeasures will be like nothing we've ever seen. I don't trust the army to figure that one out before losing a bunch of people.
Nostalgic seeing the DHTML tag. I remember adding that to my resume back when it was a hot new thing.
This feels like way too cynical of a take. Intelligence in this context means the ability to develop the tools necessary to detect other unusual planets.

Anything at that level of development will of course be aware of the electromagnetic spectrum, just as how we can't see in the infrared and have developed tools to do it for us, or how we've become aware of gravitational waves and are refining our tools for listening to them.

They don't even have to be based on the same chemistry. The only conditions on them would be that they are slightly more advanced than us to be able to do exoplanet atmospheric spectroscopy en masse. Earth would really stand out for being oxygen rich without the temperatures to explain some sort of extreme activity.
aside: what's with the shared URL on this post? dated 1/14 something "_trashed" and redirects to today's release
The series Microsoft recently put out on Youtube about the history of Xbox is surprisingly good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJYsA1jXf60
Sometimes I think that in timezone-distributed corporations it’s a not so subtle way to procrastinate at scale. You start with “Hello” when the other person has 4AM. When they answer with a hello of their own, it’s past working hours for you. Then you follow with “can I ask you a quick question”, and by the time you receive your answer it’s already weekend.

With skill, you can have not one but several concurrent conversations, each just like this one.

All the time you’re working hard and waiting for answers, of course, dreading to think just how difficult would the life be if all this got condensed into 15 minutes as it ought to.
There is no room for free will in physics, period. All processes are completely deterministic. Even quantum processes might appear to be probabilistic if you look at individual particles, but the statistics are nevertheless completely deterministic: if you look at enough particles, a predictable shape will emerge. The future is set in stone and not only is there no way to change it, but the concept of changing the future doesn't even make sense.

Free will is not something that exists in nature, it is something that exists in the psychology of agents with limited information about the world they operate in. Attempting to find a physical basis for free will is like trying to use an optical drive to read data off a pancake.
Ask HN: What are some high signal blogs?
Hello HN.

I am looking to expand my information sphere and would like to hear of any interesting, high-signal blogs you follow.

I can begin by recommending Astral Codex.

Thanks!
The problem is that people aren't interested in saving lives, reducing the number of accidents, or improving safety of accidents.

They're interested in feeling comfortable with automated driving on the street next to them.

Statistical improvements over human averages in deaths, injuries, and frequency of accidents won't sway people generally. People aren't interested in rational reality, they go with their gut and their understanding of narratives.

Tesla needs to release thousands of boring videos demonstrating cars driving well to combat the saturation of error compilations. They need to establish the border between "scary robot driver"and "not perfect, but better than humans, preventing X deaths, Y severe injuries, and Z accidents overall for every million miles driven" and then create a McDonald's style "N lives/limbs/dollars saved by driving assist and FSD."

Advertising gallons of fuel saved per Tesla miles driven and improvement to air quality would help as well.

People keep moving the goalposts because their gut and the information they perceive tells them driving software is dangerous enough that humans are preferable.

They see the media pumped by a system that follows the "if it bleeds, it leads" principle. People will watch criticisms and accident compilations at a ratio of hundreds or even thousands to 1. The only way to combat that narrative is by communicating a better one.

They should provide sufficient information, honestly, so that arguing FSD or driving assist is less safe than humans driving is like arguing that McDonald's doesn't actually sell that many burgers.

Otherwise it's the sensational and negative coverage shaping public perception and discourse.

RTFS, or "Read The Fucking Statistics" should be the final say in these criticisms of ai driving systems. Otherwise actual improvements saving actual lives and limbs will be held back because regulators will pander to the politically safe narrative and obstruct progress in the name of safety, because people are stupid - they'd rather feel comfortable than be safe.

This all, of course, depends on the numbers being in Tesla's favor, but I believe they are: here's the q4 2021 accident report:

>>In the 4th quarter, we recorded one crash for every 4.31 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology (Autosteer and active safety features). For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology (no Autosteer and active safety features), we recorded one crash for every 1.59 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000 miles.

That's better than average human performance. On highways, at speeds greater than 50mph, a reduction if the number of accidents by 8 or of 9 would mean a huge impact. 20k people died in 2021 on the highways - up to 17000 lives might have been saved by autopilot or driving systems. Reducing the number of crashes and accidents by 8 out of 9 is phenomenal.
Microsoft continues brute force drive into gaming industry, with zero creativity but outright buying whole gaming companies, and probably locking out competitor out of IPs
Yeah, as if perpetually rising housing prices, subsidized petrol, shoving the cost of climate change over onto poor countries and responding to migration crises by interning and torturing people is a great vision for the future..

I have never made a single penny of off crypto, but I wholeheartedly appreciate it as a transactional currency in a country with extremely draconian drug laws, the highest overdose numbers and of course the inevitable resulting rise of criminal organizations primarily funded by the governments refusal to take responsibility for the drug trade in their country.

How sheltered do you really have to be to consider bloody fucking cryptocoins a bigger problem than any of this?
Congress Treats Bitcoin Like Stacks of Cash
It's really regional. I get 5 bars pretty much anywhere below 5000ft in the bay area.
I would think women employees would be harassed less under Microsoft
Exactly. Just go around collecting old toilets and make some Duchamp inspired masterpiece then collect your UBI.
Sorry, mine wasn't a plain boomer rant, there are plenty of "real" books I would never let my child read. Most classics are very mature and talk very vividly about violence, death, sex and atrocities. Children should be exposed to nuanced stuff that isn't dumbed down, it's just that these nuanced things should be in the realm of a child, leaving the more mature stuff to older people. A book talking about the friendship between two children in a complex way is cool and good, a book talking about the friendship between two drug addicts might be more suitable to someone who knows a bit more about life.
>This is the kind of stuff that will be in the history books in 2 decades time.

Do you think so? I don't, history is written by the winners, and all western governments play the propaganda game.

Doesn't matter if it's the democrats or republicans, labour or Tories. No politician is going to call this out, the behavioural psychologists are in on it, and so are the media companies.

Unless there is some major disruption in the next 2 decades, think revolution, invasion. You won't see a thing in the history books.

Maybe we need to get ahead of the game. I propose we add a new http error code:
452: this history does not exist
Take a look at most "show hn" posts, exactly the same issue. Looks like there is a group of people here that feel the need to self promote at any possible opportunity, from look at me I wrote this to look at me I also know about this. Quite sad.
Israeli citizens targeted by police using Pegasus spyware, report claims
You have to keep learning - That's right slow down for even a year and you can be left behind in consulting.

That's not what this means.

You're not being brought in for your knowledge of new tech X. You're there because you've demonstrated that you're smart.

They know that they can drop you in sideways to a broken project in an unfamiliar stack, with confidence that you'll be committing code the first day.

That's where the "learning new things" comes is. Fast, and on the fly.
They're lobbying against encryption, but using HTTPS?
A lot more than just inflation changed since the '80s. Off the top of my head: massively larger market, better tooling, better hardware, better distribution networks.

Gaming companies aren't entitled to my money. They're allowed to offer games for the prices they want, and the market is allowed to buy them or not.
For RPGs, that middle-ground seems pretty healthy. No idea about shooters and other action games, as I don’t play those.
The Intel Split
The pandemic’s true death toll: millions more than official counts
There is something that amuses me about 'Call of duty, World of Warcraft, overwatch, Diablo, Candy crush'
Docker lets me focus on cool problems like "which commands can I use to free up space on this cloud-based container-running VM, given that there are 0 bytes free, and many tools will crash if they can't make a tempfile/dir?".

At least, that's been my experience when maintaining a mess of other people's Docker crap.
I will maintain servitude to Apple for the rest of my life because of iMessage: if I leave they can subtly “break” my access to messaging with people I care about (and have done so.)
I think you're taking the example of dogfighting a little too literal when it can be easily applicable in all sorts of different ways.

Let's take your Hypersonic missiles. The largest difficulty with intercepting such weapons is not their speed, they travel slower than traditional ballistic missiles, but their terminal maneuvering which tries to dodge any interceptors. AI powered interceptors could be a game changer in improving the likelihood of those extremely expensive and limited quantity stand off weapons from reaching their intended targets. And having a slight edge in your interceptor AI vs say the terminal guidance AI could produce overwhelming advantages.

> War has changed; making better versions of old weapons is a waste of time.

This has been declared a great many times and yet has been also disproven just as many. Just because a M1A1 Abrams tanks and F-117 Nighthawks Stealth Bombers wouldn't have won the Vietnam War doesn't mean they weren't a significant contributors to winning the Gulf War.

For better or worse airpower will continue to be the deliver method of most warheads onto foreheads. The hypersonic's which you suggest that are making them obsolete are very costly and very limited in total payload capacity compared to the amount which can be delivered by air. There's a reason why Russian and China are not discontinuing investments into new fighter jets and bomber programs just because they have hypersonics.
I was going to post this exact comment. I gave up following the twitter thread because it was so annoying.
Microsoft is spending $70 billion all-cash on this, an extra quarter billion isn't much. I don't expect they'll cut him loose until after all the ink is dry.
Not the guy you are asking, and won't cite due to time constraints, but here is the tldr. In Vietnam, one nation had a dream. It dreamt of MIG-21s falling out of the sky before they even saw the US fighter. That fighter was the F-4 and it did not get a cannon. It did not get a cannon, because its missiles were so advanced that it did not need one - it would spot the MIG-21/19 and shoot it out of the sky before the lighter, more agile plane (with an inferior radar) got close. Except that didn't happen. Some blame lack of approval-to-fire on target that isn't visually identified, but the reality is that the tech wasn't there.

Now it is. Most fighter-to-fighter kills now are radar beyond-visual-range "BVR" kills. Heavier, less maneuverable fighters with more speed, altitude, and radar range can take out lighter ones. The SU-27 can take out the MIG-29. The F-15 can take out the F-16, etc.

Now drones. Drones are mainly a joke when the big boys come to play. The aforementioned SU-27 and F-15 CAN detect and CAN take out most drones. Things like Bayraktars are great against insurgents. Not so much against an advanced military. Note that most drones in service now are used as spotters and ground attack. They are VERY slow, but are high-altitude.

And, no one ruled out EW when it comes to large-scale conflict. Ukraine, 2008 Georgia, Arm/Azer don't count.

edit: For the guy below talking about ICBMs - no one is talking ICBMs. Google AIM-120 AMRAAM and AESA radar. Not trolling, just faster to tell you what to Google than try to summarize.
Alternatively, look for fixed point numbers (though usually that's easy enough to just do manually by switching to a smaller unit, e.g. by using numbers in cents or millivolts or whatever)
Bringing the performance legacy of the Itanic and the ability to grok new markets demonstrated by the (former) radio modem business to Bitcoin. I wish them the best of luck, never have two phenomenon so deserved each other's embrace.

Its like watching the alligators and snapping turtles having a tiff in the swamp: it's gonna be a fun mud wrestle to watch, someone's gonna come out missing some chunks, and the rest of the world benefits no matter which one of them loses. Infact we might just take advantage of the distraction to send some shots their way for the general betterment of society.
Isnt the problem with that approach you have a model of the implementation (and not of the 'interface')? I mean you dont know if you are useing the function as intended and if not used as intended it might (actually will) break in the future.

For auditing you are right, of course.
> have been those countries that have spent very little on weapons, and engaged in few wars (with the US being the exception).

Perhaps, because the US is an exception.
Most insightful comment of the day. :)
I replaced jQuery with vanilla JavaScript a couple of years ago and never looked back. Between the abundance of features in ES6 now and the death of IE, I wouldn't recommend any junior developers utilize libraries like these.
You misunderstand. Do you think I was born understanding how git works? I've messed up at least as much as you, but I spent the time learning how it works rather than going nuclear and deleting the repository. I can't relate to how you think about git because it's been too long for me, that's why I asked if you could explain it from your point of view.
>deliberately turn it down over nothing AFTER the trial phase

Not as an argument against the vaccine, but maybe to help enlighten why many have chosen not to get vaccinated; keep in mind that the FDA approval letter for the Pfizer vaccine indicates that long term testing is not projected to be complete until June 2025. https://www.fda.gov/media/151710/download
Thanks. It does have a direct ‘Share on WhatsApp’ button.
> There is probably a proper command for it

Before you merge, the command is “git merge --abort”. After you merge, the command is “git reflog” to show your history, and then something like “git reset --hard HEAD@{1}” where the number in braces is the reflog entry you want to restore.

Reflog is the ultimate undo tool for work that’s been committed, it’s like having an infinite Ctrl-Z. If you use reflog to restore before your merge, you can even use it again to restore your mess, or to restore a different merge before the one you made a mess of.

The one thing you can’t recover using reflog is an accidentally dropped git stash. This is one reason I try to avoid stashes, and just use lots of one-off branches instead.
> but it seems a poor place to start with any UBI scheme executed in good faith.

This isn't intended to start a UBI scheme, that's an embellishment from the article title. From the article text:

"The scheme [...] is meant to assist those working in the fields of arts [...] who suffered economically as the global Covid-19 crisis surged in-country."

From another source [0], it's also time-limited to 3 years.

I think the less hype reading of the news is that artists are struggling through COVID so the government is offering support to ensure they don't lose a good chunk of the industry.

> one could also argue that the reason a given artist is struggling is because their work is not highly valued in the first place.

Art that's not valuable now could very well be found to be valuable later. Van Gogh died broke and essentially unknown but now he's one of the world's most well-known artists.

[0]: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ireland-basic-income-arts-...
> When I grew up the content of that sort was significantly more limited, i.e. occasional porn GIFs, most fine erotic material, but nothing of the extreme sort you could easily stumble upon by just being online today

You must have lived a sheltered life as a child. As soon an VHS tapes came around in the late 70's and my family got a player, I was exposed to all kinds of crap- rape porn, bestiality, snuff films, white power propaganda, etc. You name it, and we'd trade the tapes as kids. Sure it's a lot more convenient now, but it was all around back then.

I've taken the approach that I'd never be able to stop my curious child from seeing nasty stuff online, no matter how hard I try. The best thing I can do is educate and provide context. I explained pretty early on to my son that he has to be careful what he looks for online, because he'll find it. Now at 15 years old, he tells me, "you wouldn't believe the shit out there, it's disgusting." Exactly.
>blockchain on principle - as opposed to problematic elements within the contemporary blockchain space

The problems are impossible to decouple from "blockchain on principle" because the problems are intrinsic to the data structure itself, not "contemporary" approaches to the data structure implementation.

I am probably aligned with you politically (if not more radical in my libertarian sentiments), and I can sympathize with the stated goals of the crypto space/bitcoin whitepaper. The problem is that the technology and computer science behind it fails completely to deliver on these goals from both an abstract and practical perspective.
I like being a consultant.

Prior to becoming one I discovered that ..
I get bored easily and shitty management makes me change jobs (unless I get fired first for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time).

I work for a consulting company. They pay could be better but at least I get paid for the time that I spend instead of expected to put a "reasonable" amount of time per week no matter what the problem that I need to solve is.

Now I ask for a new assignment after a year or two and avoid having to look for work.

There seems to be a continuous need for people who can write embedded software..
Download is only one way to buy Switch games, and at least I'll still be able to use one console - compared to zero as soon as I stop paying my feudal obligations to Apple.
What Is MQTT? – MQTT Glossary for IoT Enthusiasts
> Jesus was not nearly as radical as some Christians think

The whole thing about forgiveness, non-retaliation, redemption is very distinctive from usual Judaism though. That's one of the core aspects of Christianity.
Right-wing American libertarians in particular have this simplistic view that government control over anything is the root of all evil. Therefore the decentralized aspect of crypto must seem like a wet dream.

I believe the system where a semi-independent central bank has the ability to regulate the currency of the country is a good thing on the whole. It's the best balance of compromises we have seen actualized.

Having a fixed supply of digital coins seems more like a return to the old days where there was a fixed supply of gold and silver coinage. And that era was called the dark ages. A system with fractional reserve credit is much more conducive to economic growth and prosperity.
> If you want things, at least actually figure out what you want because I don't think that is it.

I want competition. I want more choices. Acquisitions are the opposite of that.
> I am horrified by what allowing the kid to roam Internet without filters may lead to now.

I worry too, my nephew is only three and is happily running around playing with dinosaurs.

With social media the way it is, young teens selling themselves on OnlyFans, different types of pornography/hentai imagery traded on Discord. It's all horrifying.