skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The AAVSO and Project Panoptes are two citizen science astronomy projects that are welcoming to all levels of experience. I think like with all hobbies you can spend a lot or a little, although for good astronomy equipment you either have to have machining/engineering skills or deep pockets for the best stuff. You can't really cheat the laws of physics when it comes to lenses, cameras, and mounts. What interests me is the science behind the data processing of photometry. That and the engineering behind building a remote observatory without spending a fortune. You definitely can find things that the pros can't because you will be able to get way more telescope time than a pro does. Things like verifying exoplanet candidates, or observing variable stars and eclipsing binaries and recording the light curves. All stuff that amateurs can contribute to.
Awesome. To keep focus on the main topic, feel free to email me to chat more (FWIW I've done the 50 extension patchwork thing and generally find the extension experience to fractured and suboptimal for me).
You're assuming someone isn't smart or industrious just because they grew up poor.

I think it's a self-serving assumption.
Fun fact: Heroku's app.json actually uses a YAML parser so even though it isn't documented you could use YAML with it. (At least this was the case years ago, it's possible it may have changed)
I make a habit of

1. Forwarding everything to my free tier google apps for business on my domain

2. Annually logging into my throwaways. it seems if i login to them once a year from home, they dont pull this.

3. do NOT attempt to login to my throwaways from a proxies connection (SSH/SOCKS on a VPS or something like that, which i frequently use at work)
> None of this probabilistic reasoning matters in the face of the anthropic principle... In fact, the settings of our universe imply nothing.

What a sad anthropic principle that would be!

In fact, you can use the fact that humans exist to put (loose) constraints on this universe's parameters. For example, clearly the average temperature must be below one billion Kelvin. Making that kind of argument tighter and more precise actually leads to interesting results: bounds on spacetime black hole formation rate, limits on densitiy of dark energy, etc.

The authors in OP's post take an interesting variant of this line of reasoning: If the universe is "really bad" at producing long strings of RNS, then humans must just be a fluke. In that case, maybe most life in the multiverse exists alone in its own observational bubble. They caculate with their model that self-replicating DNS is indeed hard to replicate. This also means that finding aliens would provide strong evidence against their model.

The weakest form of anthropic argument is the tautological aspect you mention, but I wouldn't cut it so short.
Yeah, there was a lot of these discovery services back in the day. It's a shame they eventually all died and/or became astroturfing platforms.
Ask HN: Web or Desktop App for distraction free experience?
I want to create an app that emphasizes a distraction free experience. I'm a web dev so a web app would be easiest for me to build, but browsers are filled with distractions (e.g. other tabs, search bar, plugins). My other option is to create an electron app, which leverages my web skills. A desktop app allows me to control the entire app experience, but would require that I learn electron and how to distribute a desktop app. Anyone have experience in this area or other options that may have worked well for them?
I’ve imported all of Ebert’s reviews (with only the first two paragraphs of the review itself) to letterboxd:

https://letterboxd.com/re2/

https://letterboxd.com/re2/film/mighty-morphin-power-rangers...

Here’s all his 1/2 star reviews:

https://letterboxd.com/re2/tag/-%E2%98%86%E2%98%86%E2%98%86/...

And those didn’t even rate a 1/2 star:

https://letterboxd.com/re2/tag/%F0%9F%91%8E/films/

His great movies:

https://letterboxd.com/re2/tag/great-movie/films/

Was a fun coding exercise a couple Christmases ago. The hard part was cleaning up the data and matching the reviews to the correct movie in tmdb.

I also had to decide how to map his 0-4 star system to letterboxd’s 0.5-5 star system. I ended up mapping his 0 stars to 0.5 stars on letterboxd, and for everything else just add a full star.

I never got access to letterboxd’s API. I just used their CSV import system.
> tempestuous situations

But given this

> The idea of a sexual relationship with her is just gross, though, in the “I’m screwing my sister” sort of way.

There is no temptation
The problem is that you’ve been lied to when they taught you that men and women are identical. They aren’t. So you shouldn’t expect them to react the same way, in general.
We largely had similar experiences, but formed different conclusions.

Like you, with Go I was up and running rather quickly. I didn't have to think very hard. It was easy because I didn't have to pick up new concepts, only new syntax.

With Rust I had to learn some new concepts and internalize them, new concepts I generally find much harder than new syntax, but I believe I became a much better programmer (including when writing Go) as a consequence.

Now the journey is majority complete in both languages, and my conclusion isn't that Rust or Go made a pile of bad design choices, rather that the languages made different trade offs that appeal to different people in different circumstances.

Go pushes a lot of expectations of behavior during runtime onto the author while writing (don't share mutable state between threads without appropriate care, always remember to manually free your (not memory) resources, don't deref a null pointer, don't use a returned value if err != nil, etc).

Rust pushes a lot of expectations of knowledge onto the author while writing just to get the project to compile (ownership, lifetimes, sum types, address all the above mentioned Go expectations).

It's been years since I started using both languages, and I've spent months dealing with bugs in Go. I believe a lot of those bugs could have happened in any language, but also a lot wouldn't have made it past rustc.

Which is the winner for specific type of situation? I don't think we can know for a long time, studying such things is very difficult and takes a lot of time.

In the mean time, we gravitate towards our personal preferences, believing them to be superior for $reasons.
Maybe this person is just one bad head injury from death where otherwise you and I with a similar injury would heal with hospitalization, or maybe just nurse a concussion for a day or two and be fine.
Good time to become a beekeeper! We have one of these and we've harvested over 6kg of honey in the last couple of months https://www.honeyflow.com.au/
What if you couldn't fix it?

It wouldn't be smart to risk $1000 on a broken piece of equipment unless you had a lot more money to spare.
Sounds like there's at least 70% more pollutinators.

I'll show myself out and accept the downvotes.
One thing I've always appreciated about Ebert's reviews is that he [has explicitly stated that he] rates movies from the context of the intended audience[1], rather than from the context of an aloof movie critic.

I like that he takes that approach here as well. This is the first time I read his review and his experience echoed mine, when I saw it as a kid. I remember that the movie sucked and I remember the toy/movie marketing tour that accompanied it.

I miss the guy. He was never an elitist and always willing to surprise you and engage with you on his blog.

[1]: Check out his reviews for Speed 2 and Home Alone 3. He gave both movies, panned critically, three stars. It's hard to argue with the logic he so colorfully furnishes.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/home-alone-3-1997

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/speed-2-cruise-control-19...
Undefeated to the point of boredom. When the clock strikes 2:14 a.m. EDT on August 29, 1997—I'll be ready.
These claims, while they might have some or even a lot of merit are demonstrably false (as they are made seemingly without exception or nuance). There is a very healthy and active black market, for example among plenty of other examples.

It seems rather disingenuous to make such fantastically bold claims as statements of understood fact. I can't imagine what sort of dialog you were hoping to encourage.
You're right that if your search is incomplete the sort of thing you describe can happen. In my industry (academia) search is complete. Everyone looking for a job knows all the job postings.

That said, I think the problem is that overall there aren't enough qualified under-represented minorities to get up to proportional representation. If there were, it would be a very confusing market failure. What's really going on is two things:

1) You can't be both under-privileged and as capable as everyone else on average. Being poor, abused, discriminated against, etc. affects our ability to do things like be really smart and get good at software engineering.

2) For those who are under-represented but not on average under-privileged (e.g. women in mathematics), we are seeing the result of a difference in preferences between men and women. Blue Team elites really don't want to admit that there are systematic differences in who prefers what that correlate with things like gender and race, but it is obviously the case. It's not rampant sexism relative to biology that explains why there are few women in e.g. mathematics, it's because women prefer to do other things on average. And there's nothing wrong with that, and we as a liberal society need to accept it.
Of course, this is absolutely not to claim that women can't be just as good at maths.
Ask HN: How easy is it to get Covid tests in your country?
Australia's governments made a decision to allow Covid to spread without making provision for tests.

It's hard to get a PCR test done, and it's almost impossible to find Rapid Antigen/lateral flow tests. The Australian government and media keep saying that this is a "worldwide problem", but it's hard to know what to believe anymore.

Is there a shortage of rapid tests in your country? How hard is it to get a PCR test?
Code written in C/C++ is running the world. Python/JavaScript/PHP/Java etc. are all thin layers on top of runtimes written in C/C++, running on operating systems written in C/C++, using drivers written in C/C++/Assembler. There is a reason for this. It didn’t happen by accident. C/C++ competed against thousands of alternative languages and won. We are only now starting to see any real competition (Rust maybe?) but there is a looooooong way to go before C/C++ doesn’t run the world.
Me and my wife have been using lunch money for a while and it works well for us.

https://lunchmoney.app/
I mean the future of a lot of countries were decided by rulers pushing their citizens to breed in order to fill out more countries.
To loop back to the original claim I disagree with:

> Go asserts that "error handling" and "main flow" (a.k.a. "happy path") code paths are equivalent, and that you can't ignore the bad stuff as you program against the good stuff. Error handling _cannot be_ an afterthought -- this is the path to fragile, even broken, code.

Go doesn't assert anything about error handling. Go itself is extremely unopinionated about error handling. If you want to do something with the errors it returns you can, but if for some reason you want to "ignore the bad stuff as you program against the good stuff" it won't try to get in your way.

Idiomatic Go never just drops errors on the floor and ignores them, but it does involve a lot of just bubbling errors upwards without spending any time thinking about what happens in the error path. It's very easy to just write `v, error := foo() if error != nil { return error }` without considering if everything's actually in a sensible state if you return here or if bubbling the error up is even the correct thing to do. It _is_ the correct thing to do so often that anyone reading the code is also going to just glance over it.

If a programmer doesn't spend time thinking about error handling, Go does nothing to encourage them to do so. If they do, Go offers very little to help them do so. It certainly compares well in that regard to C and languages where every expression can throw an exception, but that is a very low standard.
You can, and you can also unplug the ethernet cable, but without any user-friendly, ways that are _actually intended_ to do, so it's easy to get wrong.

For example: you enable throttling, upload a picture, that picture gets buffered by a serviceworker, you close the tab, therefore closing the dev tools and disabling the throttling you set up, and the serviceworker uploads whatever you resized to the server anyway.

Or: the application just tries to upload stuff whenever you open the page, turning the throttling solution into a race between you and your browser.

I don't think using dev tools intended to replicate offline-only behaviour are a good way to actually enforce offline-only behaviour.
You might also like promnesia

https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme

And if you're interested we have a small discord server "awesome knowledge management" come join us!

https://discord.gg/XPNeDSQE2j
What about downloaded back up codes ? Phone push approval? U2f key? Authenticator app? Can't imagine complaining about being shut out if you didn't have at least one or all of these set up. Google even nags you about setting these up.
This is a really neat little game--racing to figure out the controls before the AI shoots you is pretty fun. Here's the direct link to the game from the README.md [1]

[1] https://victorribeiro.com/bangBang
Why not just use vnc?
The average person doesn't care because there aren't food shortages yet. The current inflation of food prices is driven by snarls in the supply chain rather than a lack of pollinators.
Exactly the same in my province of Canada.
Nope Pascal was never a real competitor to C. I have programmed serious software using both languages and I would never pick Pascal over C.
Freedom isn't free.

It is almost free to copy free software but the computer to run it on isn't free.

In the past I struggled with ways to price cloud services for 'data rich' applications that involved large databases. You wind up with different components of the cost: so long as the database is loaded into RAM and ready to query you have to pay for a server, maybe a big server. Some users are going to ask simple queries, others will ask complex queries that need more power. You don't want these people stomping on each other.

If you are Salesforce.com you charge a high price that lets you afford gold plated hardware with great performance and reliability. $75 a seat per month is cheap for a product that improves the productivity of a salesperson. Adobe's Creative Cloud is a bargain if you use it every day.

Products with lowball pricing are possible but a struggle to make work.
Well then. I suppose i was overlooking something. Much appreciated.
Black markets can be thought of as truly free markets that are free from antitrust action. These markets, if permitted to exist for an extended period of time, are dominated by cartels. "The Little Guy" doesn't get to be disruptive in black markets, because they are fully captured by cartels that will squash, subsume, or merge with any meaningful competition.
whoa! thanks for the heads up :/
Interesting how the brand of security companies like Google keep telling us is in our best interests always seems to secure their corporate revenue streams first, while the security and freedom of users are an afterthought.
It seems much more likely to me that life started as an 'autocatalytic set' of molescules, each of which contribute to catalysing reproduction of the whole set, rather than a single strand of active RNA that can reproduce itself.

If we look at life now, DNA does not reproduce itself directly, there is an entire ecosystem of chemicals that reproduces itself collectively, using RNA/DNA as a blueprint.

The question then is how a set of molecules encoded itself in RNA, but I see that as much more envisionable (eg some RNA, and a host set of catalysts) than a self-reproducing strand of RNA appearing all at once.
They're providing quality software for free, you not liking the presentation feels like part of the joke. Spongebob needed a Squidward

Seems like they charge for optionally providing hosting though. E.g. Bitwarden
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.118847
I agree with the advice to get your own domain, and then use a service to manage email for it. But don't use GSuite/Google Workspaces/whatever they're calling it now. Your Google account will be somewhat crippled and will be missing a bunch of features, because Google has just decided GSuite accounts should not have those features.

And you can't convert your account to a regular Google account. I really want to untangle all this, but there's no way to (for example) export your Google Photos sharing settings and import them into a new account. I have hundreds of GPhotos albums, with many of them shared with various people, and if I migrate to a new, regular Google account, I'll have to manually set up all those sharing settings again. And this is just one of many difficulties; I'm assuming I'll also lose all my Hangouts/Chat history as well, with no ability to import the old history.

But I'll be doing all this sometime soon, as Google has decided to finally pull the rug out from under those of us who signed up for GSuite when it was free (well, "Google Apps for Your Domain", as it was known back then), and will start charging later this year.

This is all incredibly frustrating, and the level of lock-in is pretty severe after more than a decade of having this account. If I could do it all over again, knowing what I know now, I would have created a Google account without GMail[0], using my email on my custom domain, and hosted my mail somewhere else. Though, admittedly, back when GMail was first a thing, webmail otherwise universally sucked.

[0] https://accounts.google.com/signupwithoutgmail?hl=en
> Utility isn't the same as happiness.

In theory no, but in practice it is the concrete instantiation of utility most commonly proposed. Moreover, I think any definition of utility we invoke will be susceptible to a similar critique.

> another significant problem is in quantifying happiness

I agree with this, and I think the measurement problem is insurmountable. But I still think Williams' criticism is deeper. If we magically solved out the measurement problem (which, again, I think is impossible - the question is ill-posed) I would still be opposed to utilitarianism, because whatever notion of goodness we invoke becomes trivialised when we boil it down to a liquid currency.

> Sometimes I think these kinds of decision scenarios are fundamentally intractable, and don't really speak to reasons for adopting or not adopting any particular ethical paradigm.

I think they can be useful, but analytic philosophers have a bad tendency to lean far too heavily on them. Often results in missing the forest for the trees.
Drug companies offer a lot of free samples. It's the same drugs the psychiatrists were going to prescribe anyway, they're just trying to get them to prefer one brand over the other. Sertraline, for example, is first line treatment for depression, anxiety. Getting free sertraline samples reduces costs for patients and really helps them out. Especially in my country where generic medication is often found to not be of the same quality as those manufactured by big pharmaceutical companies.
Squoosh already had wasm files built, all i had to just import and create a common API.

For now wasm can be compiled from C,C++, Rust and Go, so mostly compiled languages. https://emscripten.org/ can help compile C,C++, Rust and Go has native support to compile. There is also a Typescript like language which compile to wasm(assembly script)

Python or most dynamic languages are too difficult to compile to wasm.
https://archive.is/UxApJ
Intentional connection in the digital office – Seth's Blog
I find it interesting that many people try to invalidate the feeling of being friendzone. I find it as a natural biological reaction to not getting the relationship one wants.

That being said, I think the best way to deal with being friendzoned is to be honest about one's feelings and end the friendship. No use in being around people if it makes one bitter.
> The most mysterious part for me was why one would put JSON inside relational tables?

Cheap and easy way to permit a flexible schema for some part of the data. Performance tests probably showed that for their specific query workload, any slow down from parsing/lack of index was fine.
Germany:

Rapid tests are everywhere (both places you can go and have one done for free, and at-home tests to buy for 2-3€).

Availability of free PCR tests has been an issue, and will very likely be restricted more (before you could get a free PCR if you had a known risk contact or a positive test at home, it sounds like that's only going to be a thing for some groups of people now), which is widely seen as an embarrassing failure of public policy. Private testing places will do paid PCRs, not sure how overbooked or not they are.
"The real magic of connections at the office was that we were having these connections without trying. It’s not that they were better, it’s that they were effortless. But they didn’t work for everyone in the same way. They often reinforced status roles and privilege." - I don't know if I agree with Seth Godin's perspective, but it's interesting to think about. To me, what gets worse is not the "effortless connections," but rather the low latency of communication - both verbal and visual aspects. The technical tax makes video calls (or audio) less exciting and fun. "Can you hear me? Now? You're on mute!" or "Zoom fatigue" are real problems. I wonder how much of our lack of intentional connections is due to technical challenges that will eventually be resolved, and maybe enhanced with VR/AR.
But there are some obvious off-books rules. Like Wordle allows plural but the answer appears to never ever be plural.
I was a huge fan of the power rangers as a kid, but he's not wrong. The only ranger with any personality was the green ranger, and he was essentially just mopy emo. Those giant robots were cool though
It might just pass as Chromium to their browser fingerprinting.
Guardian view on finance failures: manmade errors amplified by machines (2021)
My manual average is 3.28. Smaller sample count than these solvers of course.
2020 was when the “defund the police” movement has started in the US.
U2f key ? Works for me.
Drink your corn syrup, it's full of nanomachines.
> Anecdotally, remember when you would drive any distance on a freeway and your windshield was just COVERED with smashed bugs?

I do, now that you mention it. It's weird how much we don't notice those small changes. I remember I used to see Monarch butterflies all the time, as a child, and I, until this last year, would never see any in the wild.
Yeah except that a lot of - not all - executives maintain something akin to class solidarity with other executives at big companies, especially their big vendors..

Because at some point they might want/need another job, and so often times it's better to help each other out, at the expense of the folks lower down.

Those folks are useless to them, personally, but that VP at Big Vendor probably isn't.
Remember when there were birds? Or.. what were they called.. frogs? oh yeah
That has not been my experience. I was able to recover two google accounts by using a VPN
try:
try:
import orjson as json
except:
try:
import rapidjson as json
except:
try:
import fast_json as json
except:
import json
foo = json.loads(string)
except:
try:
import yaml
except:
# try harder
import os
try:
assert(os.system("pip3 install yaml") == 0)
except:
# try even harder
try:
assert(os.system("sudo apt install python3-pip && pip3 install yaml") == 0)
except:
assert(os.system("sudo yum install python3-pip && pip3 install yaml") == 0)
import yaml
try:
foo = yaml.loads(string)
except:
try:
....