skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no evidence that there are infinite universes and indeed the belief in such a concept absent any evidence beside "nothing says there can't be" by scientific people is a religious belief on the order of there being a god except with less elf honesty.

We have never detected an alternate universe and we don't even have math that makes it probable. It's just a concept. The same way "there's no reason entropy can't run backwards according to the physics" doesn't stop us not having any evidence for backwards running entropy or negative mass or a million other things that might conceivably exist but have no real evidence but sound cool.
That quotation reminds me of one of my favorite refutations of the idea of directed evolution. A popular misconception is that evolution is directed towards making each species faster, stronger, and more intelligent. That may be true for some high-visibility examples during stable conditions. As soon as a cataclysm hits, it's the low-maintenance generalists who survive to repopulate the world.
Sure, people without Teslas may be confused. No one who actually owns one is confused about Tesla's Autopilot because not only do you have to agree on how to use it before you can enable it, but it constantly nags and reminds you while driving.

And Wikipedia: "Autopilots do not replace human operators. Instead, the autopilot assists the operator's control of the vehicle"
The Power of Systems and Routines
> There’s a lot of volume and time on earth where these random reactions could’ve happened.

Life began basically as soon as the Earth did. So, in terms of biological or geological time, it took almost no time.
https://archive.fo/tVttJ
Yikes, that's more than a bit scary. IMHO Verizon's supercookie and 'Customer Experience Plus' shenanigans deserve massive retribution and restitution such that nobody would dare do that again. If there is one thing that needs to be broken up in big tech its the combo of ISP/carriers and advertising sellers.
The issue is they are operating in the printer ink model where the initial price is discounted based on expected future revenue. That’s a hard nut to crack because any open competition is fighting from a seeming price disadvantage.
I feel like people are treating this differently than I'm saying it. I'm not saying you go in there, and announce your whistle blowing on discrimination. I'm saying pop by someone's office, go "hey I got this document from Bob, I'm not really qualified to judge, is this kosher?"

99% chance they say no, they'll handle it. 1% chance they say yes, it's fine. If you hit that 1%, don't argue it, lawyer up or decide this isn't your hill.

If you really live in an office so punitive that you think HR (not your boss) is going to come down on you for a casual question and accepting their answer, your already so screwed that no amount of playing things close to your chest is going to help you. You need to already be on your way out because your office is so wild you can't predict when the boot is coming. If you are in this office, you probably already know it, because everything is already broken, and aren't posting "Ask HNs" about it.
> Sure, but that proposal along with clear milestones and deliverables should come before the funding.

Probably not the worst idea. The CBO already does a lot of that though.

With the current situation though, we already did the spending. We need to at least reduce the deficit, if not the debt.

> One of the primary things we can do to improve the government is define objectives for new legislation, and make the new laws null and void automatically if they fail to achieve the desired objective.

That's a recipe for either a bunch of way-too-low bars to jump, or a lot of legislation that was on the right track but we just undo it.

With the current situation in the US Senate, more hurdles to passing legislation is _not_ what is needed.
Glamorous? More like glorious!
I won't bite on the feature/bug argument, but it's enough of a foot-gun that I have tracked down no less than 3 real world bugs relating to it in large python code bases. Usually when people use an empty list literal as default and shit gets real when it retains values on the next call.

When performing Python interviews I usually try to have that behavior come up in the coding question - not to quiz for trivia so much as to get a feeling for adding on battle-scar bonus points.

In practice, for any non plain-ol-data defaults I just have it default to None and handle it in logic.

Totally understand why it may be useful for introducing a persistent store to a function, but as a matter of taste I like to do that in an explicit decorator if needed.
Even if gun obsession is a cultural thing, how that translates to gun violence? And to gun recklessness?
What are these shirts? I must know!
There are probably 1000s of logic designers kicking around Silicon Valley, probably not 10s of thousands. These days little semiconductor engineering is happening there, all the new fabs have been built elsewhere for decades now
My city has rental escooters and I find them very convenient. Sometimes I want to go to a restaurant on the other side of the city so I just grab one of the scooters there are usually a few outside my apartment building.

Costs me $4, less than food delivery. And a lot more fun. The best part about them imo is I don’t have to worry about stress. The worst part about using a bike or scooter is worrying that when you return, it won’t be there.
I think "merged reality" will be a lot more fun than what we have today. This will be truly enabled by smart glasses which largely replace the 2d phone screen.

Imagine collaborative art sculptures in the park that you only see of you want to. Cool art without disrupting the physical space. This is just one example. What might science or history class be like? Empathy training?

I think there will be so many new ways of interacting with technology and each other, that the positives will outweigh the negatives.
All our calculations are fucked by having a sample size of one.
The inspecting of stack frames is used by the logging library, and by most unit testing libraries. There are dozens of these small features which are challenging, and if you remove all of the challenging ones, you end up with something where pretty much no existing Python can run.

People have tried, pypy started with that goal before it became clear it wasn't practical.
Their point seems to be that everyone knows their point and no one can say it.
He said they should be able to with access to Paxlovid and Molnupiravir, which aren't yet available in sufficient quantity.

> They claim that hospitals should have accepted prior infection for workers as a valid exemption, and thereby avoided firings and resignations.

This is an argument for a modified hospital worker mandate, not an argument against vaccine mandates.

Additionally, the author confuses himself further by listing a patient unable to get care because his doctor refused to see an unvaccinated patient as a harm from mandates. Removing mandates which aren't yet in place does not change who that doctor would see. On the contrary, a mandate would have solved that issue because it would mean that patient would be vaccinated.
I read quite a bit on cloudy nights.[0]

https://www.cloudynights.com/
The problem about Ubuntu dropping POWER8 support isn't that hardware owners won't find another distro to run.

The problem is that home lab owners who develop on their second-hand POWER8 hardware can no longer have the same software environment as the POWER9 systems running latest Ubuntu that they deploy to. And Ubuntu is very popular in the Cloud.
And here I thought 20 minutes was pretty good.

US healthcare is a mess.
This looks like a marketing stunt and little more. Places where you'd need to use an off-road school bus, the density would probably be too low for a bus to make sense at all.
Hey I did a little write up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30050231
I'm sure it skews that way but I've seen middle or even lower-middle class families invest a ton of resources into sports or dance specifically.

(also, a lot of working class Asian families invest heavily into music)
Building from the Ground Up: Reclaiming the American Housing Boom
Your government has capital controls (mentioned in a different response) to prevent you from purchasing foreign currency.

Which makes buying crypto (or stablecoin) illegal online purchase.

Illegal doesn't always means wrong or immoral, depends on whether the laws are good or not.
I can imagine the free karma upvote threads already.
100% this. I like Python but I'm working on a large inherited code base and type hints on parameters would have made this much easier. Stronger typing would be a good thing imo.
Just in case it's not already on your radar, I've used http://postcodes.io before and found it very good.
As someone who did loads of mountain biking in high school, I like bicycles more than mopeds or scooters. It is hard for me to explain why, but I’d feel more comfortable going off road on a bicycle, it feels cooler, and it’s just what I’m used to.
Industrial Engineering.

It's a fairly math-heavy curriculum (without getting much into the "pure" proof type math courses you mention) that goes into both systems modeling and various logistics and process optimization domains.

And being engineering, it's obviously focused on real world applications. You start with the typical engineering theoretical and/or empirical framework, then you start stating assumptions to simplify/ modify/ apply your formulas to the situation at hand.

And there's methods for evaluation and verification, etc.

Side Note- Most IE curriculums include more hours of computer science/ programming courses than comparable engineering and science degrees, which could be a pro/con depending on the school and your circumstances. Taking classes you already know can lighten your load, or the school might let you skip and sub credits and take a few more advanced/ interesting/ specialized courses.
Curiously, when I look at new companies I always check for manager tenure. My experience is that new managers often don't understand these organizational quirks and have a difficult time navigating the internal politics and processes.
While true, the onus of making tough calls should be on the person with the title.

Less code is a proxy for not really understanding the ground reality. Often staff engineers end up with hand wavy designs with no clue about how it would get executed. They get defensive/frustrated when some senior engineer points out a flaw in their plan.

To be an effective staff, the staff has to be in the trenches, lead by example. Not by writing a few docs and brushing off their hands.
I would like to see a much broader decision, something

* applying to all products, not just ag
* allowing my choice of parts
* allow me or my choice of shop to work on it
* no cryptographic DRM'ed parts
* access to schematics, shop manuals, and admin/interface software
Cheap EMUlator: lightweight multi-architecture assembly playground
I guess "marketplace" requires a trigger warning now. I was inferring a HN feature to simply give your points to someone else.
I’m using Migadu for user and transactional emails currently. The price is amazing, though the setup for mail on macOS is somewhat different than what their FAQ suggests so that’s a small headache to have to deal with. Their approach to pricing is usage based on the number of messages, and NOT the number of domains/email addresses, that’s awesome if you’re into idea validation at minimal cost. Supports SPF, DKIM, DMARC, forwarding, vacation messages. https://www.migadu.com/

*not receiving any compensation from Migadu in any way
Watched his Hackaday talk, mighty impressed. I think this comment section however is pretty sad, it seems that to do something impressive you cannot have supportive parents and money.
Yeah, that is patently untrue.
I'm not sure what your point is. Stars are decent indictor when comparing two projects in the same category.
I’ve managed a career transition to lower pay. A big reason I am able to do it is I don’t own a home, I don’t have kids, and I’m not married. I’m doing what I want though! Which for me is open source robotics.
> But we don't do the same for any other cause of death. For example, we don't track "obesity deaths". Are we downplaying literally every other cause of death in the world?

So? Maybe a deadly pandemic disease is different than obesity and shouldn't be treated exactly the same.
I find there’s another dimension to communication efficiency which is nothing to do with cramming information into bits, but rather is about working with a close-knit group.

What does it mean to be a close-knit group? When you spend a lot of time working, training or living together, you tune into each other’s frequency. You know what they are doing and how they are doing it. You each build a mental model of the others. You can focus contact time on the out-of-model communication that really matters. You can start to make accurate assumptions about what they are thinking. (This is infinite communication efficiency: information transmitted via zero bits!).

It’s like a kind of compression where your experiences together build a pre-shared dictionary - which of course is exactly what a written language is; this is a further optimization through customization.

I’ve seen this kind of “co-experience-bond” communication happen in small teams in the workplace, and I’ve heard third-hand about it emerging in military squads.

And of course my wife and I can communicate across a room with a look and an eyebrow.
No idea if the tools are any good, but I absolutely love your branding. Opinionated, but perfect for the demographic.
This is a thing in Netmaker, another WireGuard server that is being built by a YC startup: https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker
I worked at IBM Watson as one of the early engineers when they first started commercializing the product. It was a fucking joke - Ginni Rometty would go up on stage and said that Watson can help diagnose cancer from CT scans and we would just look at each other and be like "Dude, Watson is just a glorified Lucene index, wtf is she talking about." They started selling Watson as the end-all for everything from cancer diagnosis to customer service chat - they even had a stupid Watson Chef thing at SXSW one year - but none of that used the original Watson codebase - it was all built from the ground up and lots of it was just simple logistic regression
Well the Dutch site takes much longer to load. All these comments are (rightfully) discussing the back end being incredibly over-engineered, but 99% of people do not care about that. They care about how quickly a page loads, which the gov.uk site does much better.

I guess that implies that using Next for a "static site" is not a great idea.
Take a look at what that actually entails. Inexpensive online courses with guaranteed passing exams, many of which have zero to do with actually treating sick people -- Secondhand Smoke. Medical Ethics. Herbal Medicine Review.

Even if a practitioner took it seriously and wanted to get a real education about actual medical issues, they aren't going to find coverage of brand new drugs in an educational setting unless it was arranged by the drug companies themselves.

https://www.netce.com/specials.php?productid=MD22X,MDSUB
> This was a surprising one to me. Simplified Chinese was expectedly more efficient than Traditional Chinese, but both were beaten out by Cantonese (which also uses traditional characters).

My first reaction to this is: "What? Cantonese?" I just knew something is wrong.

So I checked the data and immediately see the issue. `yue_Hant_HK` ("Cantonese"), `zh_Hant_HK` (Chinese, Hong Kong) and `zh_Hant_MO` (Chinese, Macau) all uses the same text, while `zh_Hant` (Traditional Chinese) and `zh_Hant_TW` (Chinese, Taiwan) uses a different text.

As it turns out, there is no Cantonese, just plain written Chinese (書面語, written language as we would call it). Both Hong Kong and Taiwan use the Traditional Chinese script, but the two don't exactly use the same vocabularies due to regional differences. For example, the term "privacy" is "私隱" in Hong Kong, but "隱私" in Taiwan. This is why there exists two versions of Traditional Chinese translations of the same text. Since they are likely done by different people (assuming they are not machine translations) they have different translation styles, which contributes to the difference in length of the two paragraphs.

(Also, Cantonese can be written in Simplified Chinese, but that's all I will say regarding this topic.)
It doesn't take much to disrupt a fax machine.
Watson was sold as being able to spit out answers without you having to think of the question.

Could somebody more familiar with its capability reveal whether that was at all true?
>The story upvoting is sufficient to make sure that interesting stories percolate to the top.

Not any more.

You need to always go to /new where it's almost always better than the main front page these days.

Only a few years ago it was just the opposite.

To get upvotes from a submission, apparently most important by far is the submission time rather than the headline or subject matter.

There is no bonanza of upvotes other than a popular submission.

Ideal submission time is not adequate however, you also would need to have enough good fortune for your submission to attract interest of whatever critical mass is necessary at the time to avoid dropping like a rock.

Each year a greater majority of excellent technical/business submissions drop faster than before, so anything that actually gets enough interest for the front page any more is like winning the lottery.

More dependent on luck than anything else, so some people are going to play as often and game the system as much as they can depending on their determination to "win".
> It would be wonderful if scientific publishing moved to something like that, where the publication would be a subset (ex: Word output) of a process that everyone could inspect and alter.

> Of course, as datasets are becoming the most valuable ingredient in a big soup, I fear this will take a while to happen.

even though it would be wonderful, having worked in this industry i don't see it ever moving to such a system of communication (not on any significant level at least).

publishers are a middleman too deeply entrenched to simply cut out, and anything resembling a threat to their status will get bought out under the guise of 'look we're innovating here' and then die a slow silent death.
Maybe someone wants to fix the title to say NDA instead of DNA? hehe
It would be rad if Molly wrote about privacy cryptocurrencies like Monero and Zcash and how these can enable better protections for at risk folks.

The argument that transparency can lead to coercion can be quite convincing — privacy technologies can give power to victims.
It's a rare breed that runs Windows Firewall (or any firewall) in default deny outbound mode, I can't see more than 0.01% of users (i.e. no more than 1 in 10,000) being protected from this scenario with their current Windows Firewall setup.
I'd say that using Next for a static site is just as over engineered, personally.
Can't speak for everywhere but in Washington state almost anything sold as a scooter or moped in fact requires a full motorcycle endorsement, liability insurance, annual registration, etc. The cutoff for a motorcycle endorsement is a max 49cc motor or 2 brake horsepower, which excludes nearly everything sold as a scooter that I can find.

You are certainly right that in most of the US biking infrastructure is embarrassingly bad, hopefully if pedal-assist ebikes get more popular that will spur more investment in bike paths and separated infrastructure.
Wow, I can't believe how accurate this story is, same thing happened to me I think summer 2016 but I thought it was because our execs were idiots not that IBM would treat every company like that... CTO calling me to his office to talk to IBM on their personal phone, he was the only one who wanted Watson (this was a healthcare company, I was VP of Eng). And yes, they were obsessed with putting their logo everywhere, and as soon as we heard it was so expensive, we had to tell our CTO to chill, we stopped, cause you know you can hire at least 2 devs for that money.
I think you’re very naive as to how revolutionary the discoveries and inventions of Bell Labs truly were. Apple is not doing any fundamental research the way Bell Labs did. Every piece of electronics today uses transistors originally patented by BL. Bell Labs in 80 is like Microsoft 10 years ago. What real inventions had they come up with then? They’ve been a monopoly for 25+ years and what have they produced?

There’s lots of ground breaking work being done at labs today, I just don’t think they’ll be winning Nobels like Bell Labs was. Bell Labs has 9 Nobel prizes. Make a measurable claim on how many google research will get, and I’ll wager against it.
> But then again now we consider physical systems, say a spaceship, which require critical capabilities and operational regimes, and ask if fallback fault management is really a 'bad idea'.

Their very example -- airport notice boards -- is an example of someplace where fallback is needed. The thesis of the piece is that management of fallbacks is complicated and painful and thus increase the scope of failure, as you observed.

In other words: fallback is often but not always required, and if you can plan to avoid it it may be better for you, depending on your application.
> CS is no longer mostly people who care about computer science, in the same way that economics isn't only for people who want the understand economics.

That's the main reason I decided against a CS major even though I love the subject. It's just disheartening listening to discount business majors butcher even simple technical topics. The pure math track actually has more than a few people in the same situation, so I wound up meeting some enthusiasts anyway.
Got any links to such crypto sites where they’re used for auth for comments and social? It’s something I’ve been theorizing for years, would be great to see in the wild.
Relying on code review to catch bugs is just leaving it up to a different programmer. Code review is wonderful, but expecting it to catch every occurrence of even just the categories of bugs easily caught by code review is wildly overoptimistic.

Ignoring the second return value is also the easy case to catch. Ignoring an error-only return from a function doesn't produce a warning, and won't stand out in code review unless you adopt a standard of never writing void functions.
It is miles better than my state's local Covid Dashboard (https://coronavirus.iowa.gov/) that is updated fully once a week on Wednesdays. On Monday and Friday they simply post a screenshot of a pixelated version of a summary page only.
For people who can't rad the article, googling the article should get you around the paywall.

I think what it boils down to at its core is that Europe runs on a tripartism between government, labour and business that's deeply rooted in Catholic social teaching to this day.

There's a genuine consensus when it comes to keeping the social fabric intact and taking care of each other that's just not present in the US. The examples in the article like the public media are just one way how that manifests.
This is an astute observation.
They have other Torsus buses that are basically the same vehicle, I'm sure you can find some.

> How is a small child, someone not particularly agile, or even someone later in life going to board (climbing?) or exit (jump?) this thing? Especially with cargo?

"With assistance and some modest level of risk", I'd imagine.
They are just a contracting company making money off billing the government hourly for their employees time. It’s a horrible business.