skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People love to point out utilitarianism is bad by using reductio ad absurdum. However, the point to utilitarianism to me is not to have some kind of mathematical function to calculate utility, and to follow it slavishly. Rather, it is to be pragmatic and to not be anti-utilitarian.

There are many cases where the "ethical" course of action makes many people miserable and where a simple, pragmatic, utilitarian solution would be beneficial. You don't have to go to extreme examples like the trolley problem or shooting down planes with terrorists in them. Just look at organ donations, for example. Here in Germany, it is opt-in. Why can't we just make it opt-out, or like in the US: when you get a drivers license, you have to decide yes or no?

I would consider myself somwhat utilitarian, but I have no problem reconciling most of the mentioned problems with common sense. Sometimes, it is by questioning the set-up:

> b. Framing the innocent
> You’re the sheriff in a town where people are upset about a recent crime. If no one is punished, there will be riots. You can’t find the real criminal. Should you frame an innocent person, causing him to be unjustly punished, thus preventing the greater harm that would be caused by the riots?

The real problem here is that people are going to riot if their sense of justice is not satisfied. You're not just a sheriff but also a philosopher - the solution is to change society!

Most of the problems are variations of the classic "one person suffers greatly so many can have shallow pleasure". I don't know anybody who really proposes integrating over utility without any weight like this. Instead, most people would weight the injustice much greater than the pleasure. I maintain for example, we could radically reduce CO2 emissions and redistribute wealth to reduce poverty if we were willing to accept a couple percent GDP degrowth. That means on average, you might have to wait 2-3 years to get a new phone or a new car, and you might have to take a less than ideal job for a couple of years. But your inconvenience would be more than compensated by the increased utility for all.
Then we probably wouldn't have had Go for the last decade, and we wouldn't have all the real world use cases to guide a correct implementation of generics. "Get it completely right the first time" has never happened in the history of software.
I think the author greatly underestimates how much power bicycle brakes dissipate. I think it’s in the kW range for short time periods.
Sure. It is disconnected from power 99.9% of the time. I only fire it up when required. For convenience I used a dedicated external network print server (you know, the printer is centronics only, and centronics long ago vanished for thevsake of usb on PCs). This print server consumed about 10-20 watt, much more than the printer which was actually one of the first with power saving / standby.

The print server has been replaced by an usb-2-centronics dongle recently to reduce energy consumption further.

An about 25 year old laser printer running almost flawlessly mechanically, with latest MacOS and Windows 10 OS, supporting PCL6 and PS is a thing. He is on the 3rd toner cartridge (at least 5 years old).

Only needed for rare cases of government mandated written docs like passenger locator forms.

Paper transport has been unreliable almost from day 1 based on dried up rolls and paper.
Typescript & webpack support esm input and or output.

Before emiting output, you have to run them in the same package. Themselves they (and the whole ecosystem around) are not ready for that. Of course it’s not an issue if all you do is emitting a frontend, which doesn’t share runtime with package.json directory. But if you’re using webpack for node, for which these authors maintain so many modules, things are fucked up. I advise you to try to webpack a typescripted “type”:”module” project before celebrating.

Existing in two worlds sucks

So does existing in zero worlds. I’m not arguing against ESM. I’m arguing against actions which break half of workflows of those who have no choice and can not control whether ESM to be possible or not, for no good reason. To the point I wish NPM had a username filter so I could skip packages which wouldn’t work for a while no matter what I do or like personally. I don’t mind ESM, but it’s not there yet.
As usual the goal is to pack ever more humans in ever smaller spaces for the sake of economy. I prefer to have a smaller community across a larger space, thank you very much. I have the internet to connect to everyone globally, if that's not enough to be innovative, again, thank you very much.

I love to go to work by bike, for instance. Free sky is an important part of the fun of it. I couldn't imagine just hopping in some huge elevator, enter the subway in the basement just to enter the elevator in an office building.
The court has already decided in history that you're wrong with your assertion and I don't know why do you so heartly want to overturn that by defending corporations against the users who legitimately want to play their games on other systems.
You can learn the art.

You can learn and reflect.

For learning, read. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie, or “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek come to mind. They will grow your communication, vision setting and influencing skills. Skills which are part of the “art” of product management.

And every day provides an opportunity to reflect and learn from the day’s events.
agree, ZKProofs are really interesting and i'm sure they will come to be used across lots of areas of the web and not just blockchain, though their use and development is most active in the blockchain space for how useful they are for privacy+scalability.

Proving knowledge without revealing information allows us to prove computations (validating them is a lot quicker than repeating the computation) and "use things" without sacrificing privacy.
You can combine the two and have private transactions which are then rolled up in a computation, and then post the proof of the computation to mainnet. You get both cheap and private transactions and infra on top of the base chain.

But this goes beyond blockchain: we can hand code to other people to run and then have proof they haven't altered what we agreed upon running, so we can trust the results of someone else running something. That is useful in all sorts of research for replicability in science/engineering.

WIRED Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOGdb1CTu5c

https://developers.aztec.network/

https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks/

https://github.com/matter-labs/awesome-zero-knowledge-proofs
People looking for a decentralized store of value and access to a form of banking and payments would not consider it a waste of resources at all. I think that is a very privileged position. I would recommend reading the work of Alex Gladstein, CSO of the Human Rights Foundation, for stories and data from all over the world from people living under corrupt or authoritarian government who consider this technology a lifeline. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the value Bitcoin can and does provide the world.

If you only squabble is proof of work, there are plenty of resources available detailing why proof of work is important to the fairness, security, and decentralization of the system. Incentives will ensure people working on or promoting any other blockchain will attack proof of work, because they know they can no longer compete with Bitcoin on security in a proof of work system, but that does not make it superior. I will not go into my personal feelings about proof of work vs proof of stake, but there is plenty of writing out there delving into the tradeoffs.

As someone who hangs their clothes on a drying line, and doesn't put Christmas lights up, I think those 2 uses of energy (which surpass the energy used for proof of work) are far more wasteful, but I am happy that the people who do value those activities are allowed to partake in them without demonization.
I'm not sure about that. I've spent 18 years programming in C++, for much of that time in a senior professional capacity and am excited to learn Rust for whatever my next project will be. Most of my colleagues and peers feel the same. I think the person you are characterising is quite rare. I like C++ but don't love all of the baggage and am delighted that things are moving forward.
Study IDs Visual Characteristics That Make People ‘Like’ Images on Instagram
I don't understand. "we are are deeply intertwined, all terrestrials, all earth bound"? What does that have to do with my comment?

What do you disagree with in what I wrote above? That anthropogenic climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels? That it's the fossil fuel industry that is responsible for that? What?
Yeah, thats cool i know very well about MS Office and sth, i think we are all in the same stage of link with Nowadays Microsoft is part of our life. And it's growing and like we also.
I don't understand what you mean by "We've just had a far reaching tsunami from the Hunga Tonga eruption and no one will explain why." Surely the answer is there was a huge eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano that destroyed 1/3 of the island? What more do you want?
> In the context of a generic data stucture, unboxing is not likely to unlock a huge number of optimizations.

Aside from the optimisation of "Not having to allocate and deallocate memory", you can unlock the optimisations of "removing one step of pointer chasing" and "better memory locality" - arguably the top two things one should be thinking about when writing fast code.

If your datastructure has to access the memory, boxed values hurt you in two ways. One is that on each access you have to chase a pointer to who-knows-where. There's also no reason to believe that this value is going to be stored next to other values in the datastructure.

This hurts you in two ways - the obvious one is that extra pointer hop is another chance to miss cache. The less obvious way is that loading one element doesn't do anything to bring nearby elements in from the cache. If your datastructure tends to access nearby items together (say a btree), this is extremely valuable for performance. An even better feature is that if you start loading some sort of metadata nearby elements (again, like a btree might have), the prefetcher might already start loading your data.

You also get inlining benefits in this case - a virtual call out to some comparison function might compile down to a single instruction.

You bring up a good point, that there are cases where boxing matters like having extremely large elements (you still get inlining with generics though). It also matters less for datastructures that don't actually inspect their elements in any way. But in my experience, if you look at something like a map type datastructure, you don't see keys being 1KB objects - they tend towards things like strings, integer IDs, or fairly small structs consisting of the above.

Benchmarking these effects can be a little tricky - small microbenchmarks can reside entirely in L1 or L2 and get extremely unrealistic allocation patterns (only thing allocating == nice, contiguous, allocations), so a realistic benchmark has to apply some degree of cache/allocator pressure that's relevant to your workload.
I don’t think that quite captures everything, though. Because in the same way that attempting to block decoupling is a rhetorical device, decoupling itself (at least in a public debate) is also a rhetorical device.

The decoupler says “put aside your objections to my proposal for a moment so that you can better understand it; then later you can reflect on these objections with a fuller understanding.”

And the person blocking the decoupling says “no, the objections are valid and therefore should be kept firmly in mind whenever you are considering anything to do with the proposal.”

Both approaches are trying to achieve something in terms of discourse. I don’t believe it’s possible to say that one approach is more fair or valid or better in all circumstances.
I think generics on their own are very simple, bordering on second nature. Their interaction with traits (or "interfaces" as some languages call them) can make them complicated. I guess Go needed to find a way to make that interaction work.

By generics "on their own", I mean essentially the Hindley-Milner type system, which supports generics and can do static type inference in linear time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner_type_sy...

Somehow, the "generics wars" in Go made generics into the scapegoat of programming language complexity, when perhaps it was Go's "interfaces" feature all along. Maybe the enemy was here the whole time!
I mean. It's like making an argument against cars, by attacking cars running on petrol and then generalising towards every single car having the same characteristics and environmental disadvantages as petrol cars.

I would have agreed if Bitcoin was THE only cryptocurrency. It is not, and there are many alternatives that are not Proof-of-Work; at least the top 10 cryptocurrencies even.
A PE editor called CFF Explorer and a process viewer
In Japan Panasonic and Bridgestone e-bikes are ubiquitous. Definitely Corolla-like. Those and various folding e-bikes make up practically the entire market. You don’t see many people on high-end e-bikes at all.
> I'm not sure you even clicked the link your point is so orthogonal.

If you're starting off with that attitude, why should I try to engage with your comment?
It's a shame that this generics debate is framed as a "go programmers discover generics".

That has never been the source of contention, and the benefits were noted from the initial discussions of the language before it reached an audience. Like all things it's a trade off. Will you be providing more value with generics, or are other features a higher priority. That's obviously a matter of perspective.

Go has many advantages over other languages, and strict typing, generics and raw speed has never been part of that. If those things are paramount for you, there are better languages suitable.

Go has been fantastic for the problem space I'm targeting. Fast enough, efficient enough, portable enough, simple enough that hiring is easy. This might not be true for what you work on, but I'm not writing a video decoder.
The red numbers did seem like stretching it too far, but I actually think the original construction is quite elegant. Taking the number with more dots doesn’t seem like any more mental overhead than mentally adding the values on two normal dice.
I'm not. It does sound like the kind of thing I would like (I'm a fan of the Dark Sun setting). I normally prefer movies over books, again, because it's less time commitment. But Dune tops Amazon's list week after week, so there has to be a good reason for that.
> I guess is partly because of being alone and lonely. Hard to make friends after college. Seems impossible to make good ones.

This is something you're going to want to solve eventually. You recognise these are what you long for when you engage in behaviour that distracts yourself.
I would strongly recommend doubling down and solving your loneliness and belonging problem (and i realise its not easy. I struggle with it too. But you have to start somewhere and it gets better. Use the internet, use your head, solve it little at a time)

Take care of your needs and the tendency to escape reality will slowly subside and this will likely be the most sustainable solution.

Of course you're also going to want to incorporate the countless suggestions here which give you a more hands on approach to tweaking your OS and your environment to maximise focus.
Aren't you just saying that you cook your steaks the way you like them?
Why isn't etherium deprecated then and everyone moves to polygon? What's the catch?
I've personally adopted JOFU as a way of life.
Indeed “defacto”. Damn auto correct.
Prehistoric eruption has helped recalibrate timeline of human origins in Africa
The volume is artificially doubled since practically every trade is frontrun.
Salary can be a good motivator (for example industrial saturation diving)
There is nothing pragmatic about Go's approach to error handling.

It's the equivalent of putting your head in the sand and pretending nothing else in the world exists.
Nowadays you would probably build some SaaS business around that.

Start with Gmail and slack add-ons and role it from there.

Given the nature of the process, better pick one-time payment and maybe add a corporate plan.
Deepfakes/CGI
If it’s so obvious, could you point me towards an useful query to put into google?

Surely you can come up with at least something to support your claim about what the public is being led to believe?
The best C++ developers are those who violently oppose extending the subset of C++ features used in a project.

"Template specialization and traits? This belongs in library code. The resulting code is actually more bloated than the copy-pasted version. Nope."
>> Go is known to be quite slow

I understood it was comparable to Java or C#, both of which are extremely fast - both in terms of execution speed and more so in terms of developer productivity.

The benchmarks I’ve seen generally back that up

https://plummerssoftwarellc.github.io/PrimeView/report?id=da...

9th overall - faster than c++ for example in Dave Plummers primes benchmark. I quite like that benchmark because it’s really just a bunch of memory operations, a decent view of the compilers ability to generate decent code. Although my concern with this benchmark is that not all languages got the same optimisation effort. Looking at git commits, it seems like rust got almost more optimisation effort than every other language combined.

Also i don’t like the unfiltered view of that benchmark - lisp comes out fastest language of all but that’s because languages like c++ and Rust can only really pre calculate results at compile time (constexpr etc) - whereas that lisp implementation is doing everything before compilation. Unfair because other languages don’t have a programmable precompilation reader phase.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

In the area of java, Swift etc i don’t like these benchmarks at all though. The c# one for example often relies on c libraries or vector intrinsics etc so it’s not really like for like.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...

Between java and c#
This is a great point and definitely something to think about, but I don't think it really captures quite what I intended to say.

It's more like "don't let people get away with appeals to emotion and other fallacies, just because they disguise them as sophisticated arguments - call them out".

This is true in all kinds of debates, but it's particularly important in broad political debates. The appropriate level of charity to give the person you're debating with depends on the context and just how much good faith it's reasonable to assume.

As to 'alterative fora', I don't think that's quite as bad as your comment seems to suggest. An academic paper is an 'alternative forum' to a time-constrained panel discussion on a TV show, but acknowledging that the kinds of arguments that are appropriate in one might not be appropriate in the other, is not "replacing an open society of free expression with a society with a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors".
It depends on the semantics of 'any'. The compiler could look at your code and figure out all types ever used with that 'any' and the optimize each case. The types could be known at compile time in some cases, if the semantics of 'any' allow for such a check and do not simply tell the compiler to not optimize for the types of that 'any'.
> go programmers discover generics

It kind of was though.

It was endless arguments from Go users that generics aren't needed and can be solved through a combination of cut/paste, code generation or simply dismissing its usefulness altogether. And on the other side the rest of us trying to explain the many, many use cases that demand generics.
So how come the energy consumption is still bigger than all but 22 countries on the planet? Saying that other coins don’t have the problem doesn’t make it ok, no?
Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape (2011)
Is there anything in Go that will help prevent those things that definitely can never happen?
For the benefit of the sibling comment that has been removed, let me say that I think there are some public goods which are best provided by the government because of the coordination problem of getting people to voluntarily pool their resources (although crowdfunding solutions do make that option more viable).

In particular, something like a self-hostable secure messenger has important cybersecurity implications, so it makes sense that governments (and supranational bodies) would devote funds towards protecting citizens that way. For other pieces of software there may be less of a justification, but governments do sometimes (economically rationally) invest in supporting industries so that they grow and create jobs.
> I agree, we need a "people's" e-bike. Bare in mind it's not unreasonable to pick up a used human-powered bike for less than $100. It needs to be cheap, safe and serviceable.

Absolutely. For something worth several £1000 it's just not possible to secure outside in a city. Watch this as an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuxHYcP63DE

Until a ebike is cheap enough not to hurt if stolen, I won't be getting one (even if I love the concept).
Unless of course, you cant. For example, if you are tired and you are for entertainment, relax or to make you sleep. Or, if you are overworked from those other things and really really need to chill with a book or tictoc right now.
They lowered reserve requirements to zero at the start of the pandemic. I think most creation is done through open market operations since the housing bubble anyway.
The Story Telling Behind the Number Guessing Game
People used to blame Java for that.
Mozilla has a special agreement with Cloudflare to resolve DNS queries without logging anything, so that's not an argument against Firefox
Framing it as paying a price to be paid might be a bit awkward, but surely the idea that we often make aspirational purchases without thinking through what it will take to actually get any enjoyment out of those items afterwards, resonates with many and has little to do with ultra-utilitarian thinking?
It's also just "not a question", but really a puzzle. And I think that's what's happening in "discourse-decoupling" also. I do think they might well just be the same.

Ie., in ordinary conversation when one says, roughly, "heres some information, what do you think?" one doesnt expect the question itself to be a puzzle -- ie., that the answer is in some formal sense about the information as information.

I think likewise, in ordinary conversation, "shall we just kill all the ants?" means kill all the ants. It is a very unusual (academic) conversation in which the question is read as a sort of "ethical puzzle".

If you just told people in both cases, "this question is a puzzle" -- then I imagine it would trigger the decoupling mechanism more reliably.
Exactly the same can be said about checked exceptions.
If I would not be reading, that time would still pass. I would move closer to death by the exact same amount. Literally regardless of what I would do for 16 hours, my life would move exactly 16 hours closer to death.
Do Vaccine Mandates Work?
When will our tools stop imposing "their" will upon us? I still miss simple T9 correction whenever i want to type a word on Android: it was harder to get it right, but once it was the word didn't change under your feet the second you pressed space to write another word.
OT, but the two tallest structures in the U.S. are in a empty rural area in North Dakota - television antennae.

I believe that federal law now prohibits any other antennaes from overtaking them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_...