skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently conveys, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. The idea of preference falsification was put forth by the social scientist Timur Kuran in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies as part of his theory of how people's stated preferences are responsive to social influences. It laid the foundation for his theory of why unanticipated revolutions can occur. The concept is related to ideas of social proof as well as choice blindness.

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

More about Kuran:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/11/wh...

Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/4-timur-kuran-economic...
And I guess to expand on my position, I don't think this debate is stupid. The way through, in my mind, as naive as it may seem, is to be basically like substack, and acknowledge that providing a platform is a big responsibility, one they don't take lightly, that the goal is increased trust overall, and that that goal is primarily served by being as content agnostic as possible. Acting in good faith with no expectation that people will return the favor is the way to build trust.
Workers Are Having Their Moment. How Long Can It Last?
That's why manual backing up of your chatlogs is such an amazing (and often cringey) thing. Just don't back them up anywhere online.

I've got conversations from 15+ years ago with girls I liked, friends I loved and everything in between. It's hard to watch, but if I ever feel nostalgic I can bring them up in a flick.

I'm not even 30 yet.
It doesn't seem like this sort of comparison is particularly useful. Never was anyone presented with the decision to pick between those two items for where to spend the next $10 billion.

So $10 billion on Web vs $10 billion split between 5 other missions that didn't happen, for example, might have been the sort of tradeoff that could be analyzed (then or now).

Or $10++++ billion to enforce the provisions of the UN agreement to end the Gulf War vs. the hypothetical concern that Iraq would create more geo-political problems in the future that would ultimately cost more than taking some action now. Also a tradeoff that is hard to evaluate in hindsight, never mind at the time (hard -- but not immune from criticism or evaluation).

I'm not saying that either of the choices, $10 billion on Webb or $10++++ billion on the Iraq war, were the right choices -- just that the comparison isn't particularly useful, IMHO.
Too young to retire but at risk for Covid, older Americans struggle to find work
Can’t be too specific because of Chatham house rules but I heard from three different high ranking US military guys at three different events that there was a non-trivial drive due to Saddam’s failed assassination attempt on Bush Sr in Kuwait
"In addition, Amazon will pay $2.25 million to the Attorney General’s Office, which will be used to support the Attorney General’s antitrust enforcement, which does not receive general fund support."

Not sure if I am more concerned that this puts a heavy incentive for the AG to go out and "get funding" from companies or that they are not funded to do this work.
Why is covid different than riding a motorcycle?

Would you agree with this analogy:

"Going out into crowded public spaces unmasked and unvaccinated ... is not unlike riding a motorcycle without a helmet. And with a busted taillight and bad brakes too, because you're also putting other people at risk."
cynically: computation is easier to mark than reasoning.
And even if we have some breakthroughs for things like aging in general or cancer, attrition via accidents and other forms of physical destruction will always be a factor.
YouTube permanently bans Fox News host Dan Bongino
Horseshoe theory

Far right and far left reach the same behaviors for different reasons
I made a simple Wordle clone in ~70 lines without using Hyperscript.

https://dougmcleod.ca/share/wordle.html
The American government should provide citizens with a basic public web hosting service where constitutional freedoms are respected.
I agree with this, and I do not think it contradicts my original statement. You cannot prevent new variants, but you can reduce the rate of their emergence.

The paper you cite supports this: in a case study of a single immunocompromised patient who---because of that---had a prolonged infection, many replications of the virus were observed. This patient represents a "hot spot" of variant emergence in this furthermore antibody treated patients. From the article "the remaining samples [sic: most] are consistent with arising from a consistent viral population".

What I take from this is: we ought to prevent prolonged infections where it is possible. Again, from the article "The effects of convalescent plasma on virus evolution found here are unlikely to apply in immunocompetent hosts in whom viral diversity is likely to be lower owing to better immune control." And a vaccinated individual will on average have the best immune control.
Student Loan Horror: When You Think You Qualify for Debt Relief, Check Again
That's not what tax farming is.
kickback and relax, emphasis on kickback
It originally used a per-process model primarily because of the age of the codebase. It predates commodity SMP hardware (1986ish onwards, starting with Sequent) and standardized threading APIs (1993):

> DBMS code must run as a separate process from the application programs that access the database in order to provide data protection. The process structure can use one DBMS process per application program (i.e., a process-per-user model [STON81]) or one DBMS process for all application programs (i.e., a server model). The server model has many performance benefits (e.g., sharing of open file descriptors and buffers and optimized task switching and message send- ing overhead) in a large machine environment in which high performance is critical. However, this approach requires that a fairly complete special-purpose operating system be built. In constrast, the process-per-user model is simpler to implement but will not perform as well on most conventional operating systems. We decided after much soul searching to implement POSTGRES using a process-per-user model architecture because of our limited programming resources. POSTGRES is an ambitious undertaking and we believe the additional complexity introduced by the server architecture was not worth the additional risk of not getting the system running. Our current plan then is to implement POSTGRES as a process-per-user model on Unix 4.3 BSD.

(THE DESIGN OF POSTGRES, 1986, https://dsf.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M85-95.pdf )

> In POSTGRES they are run as subprocesses managed by the POSTMASTER. A last aspect of our design concerns the operating system process structure. Currently, POSTGRES runs as one process for each active user. This was done as an expedient to get a system operational as quickly as possible. We plan on converting POSTGRES to use lightweight processes available in the operating systems we are using. These include PRESTO for the Sequent Symmetry and threads in Version 4 of Sun/OS.

(The implementation of POSTGRES, 1990, https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93... )
> So in that sense, the response to COVID is similar - though on an accelerated time scale, because the epidemic is much worse.

Tobacco still causes 480K+ deaths a year in the US so saying covid is worse is a very strong claim.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
Those are the major reported prizes. There are many more high tension, depressed, generally unwell, joints swelling winners with brain fog.

It's gamble, the next booster might be the one that gets you. And you'll need a booster because it only lasts a few months anyhow.
Obligatory: nearby in terms of the universe, not something we're likely to visit

we have localized the source to within our own Galaxy
It's just a payoff.
Runs on betas of macOS Monterey? macOS 12 Monterey went final last Fall, I believe. I think someone copied and pasted the first paragraph and forgot to update it.
Twitter includes malware JS in their pages which often keeps them from loading. Malware-free link: https://birdsite.xanny.family/turingpi/status/14863939450599...
14 years late, 2000% over budget even while getting a free ride from ESA -- and loudly exclaiming this thing has no redundancy whatsoever: anything at all might brick it. It may be a great telescope, but it's a miserable failure as a project.
Looks like someone's on it:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/paypal-stole-use...
> The seemingly obvious thing to do would be to build some temporary capacity specifically for COVID patients.

Many states did exactly that back in march of 2020. Most of these temporary facilities were closed virtually unused.
The reality is, people need to know how to use spreadsheets well and accurately, more than they need to be able to do algebra in their head. Math class should be focused more on how to set up a spreadsheet to solve your problem, something like income tax or household budget or home mortgage that nearly everyone will need to do at some point.

There are still programmers who can program in Assembler. Most programmers do not, even if they had to learn how in college. If most people knew how to use a calculator (their phone) and a spreadsheet (their laptop), they could do all of the math they need to do (except for the few of us who need something more, or who just enjoy it).

The problem is, we evaluate people on how well they know their school math, but we don't evaluate school math by how well it serves most of the people who had to sweat through it. I like math, most people don't, we should focus our education system more on how they can use the tools today to do what will come up often in their life.
I am not sure why we have vaccine mandates that businesses are expected to audit for entry. That to me is absurd. I do not need to provide proof of MMR to enter a McDonalds. I am vaccinated and boosted, but the invasiveness in these requests is a little over the top.
Regarding masks, well businesses do often require shirt and shoes for service. I fail to see where masks differ at all in that regard.
Another day, another answer to "what is Bitcoin good for".
> Yes because only democratic politicians ignore the rules.

> It's hard to break rules that don't exist.

Wait, what's your argument again?
I guess this is one way to get media attention. Probably the increased media coverage from this will help boost sales from other sources to negate loss of Spotify revenue.
We should teach calculus first, because one cannot understand the foundations of stats and probability without calculus.
My question is how does your platform differ from what Substack is already trying to do?
A shirt provides too much friction thus there is a constant feeling of having the earphones pulled down (especially when moving the head)
> by being as content agnostic as possible.

This is not congruent with profit motive, so they will fail. Either as a company or as at this goal. Almost certainly the latter.

Google set out to not be evil and Zuckerberg set out to connect the world. Both, I'm sure, sincere.
Is there any sense in using internet providing sattelites for astronomy? Like if starlink published it's noise data from all sattelites in realtime could it be used as one huge radiotelescope?
Don't forget Wikidpad -- https://github.com/WikidPad/WikidPad
Hard to beat!
With regard to Mars colonization, we can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time. The solution to world hunger isn't actually meaningfully impacted by resources spent on Mars colonization.

Rather, it would seem that solving climate change will give us the tool to deal with space colonization, as space colonization of new homes fundamentally involves managing new ecology and life support systems.
I'm not sure I agree with the premise. Most of the time I see someone not following best practices it's because they're unaware of them and just do the simple/most obvious thing, which just so happens to be bad for not-so-obvious reasons. Or they are aware of the best practice, but decide not to follow it because of reasons x, y, and z. It's very rare, however, that I see someone do the wrong thing because someone told them it was the right thing (at least in the programming field).

Perhaps this is just an artifact of my own personal experience though, all my professional experience has been at dedicated software shops with highly competent engineering teams. I realize that's not the case everywhere.

Does anyone have any specific examples of worst practices explicitly being disseminated under the guise of best practices? Is this something that you tend to see happen only within organizations, or across the internet as a whole?
this article has a clickbait title and religiously abides by it when the discussion is much more nuanced. brainstorming is also not just about idea generation. it is a great way of investing the group in ideas that get picked - so it can be treated as a form of consensus seeking theater. this is why measuring the “performance” of brainstorming is largely a fool’s errand.

why does brainstorming often fail to generate new ideas?
any time there is a sufficiently complex calculus involved in solving a problem, solution generation involves understanding that calculus. a brainstorm session must include people that understand the problem and solution spaces well. otherwise, the brainstorming is often useless.

almost all brainstorming sessions i have seen ignore this concept and result in no useful generation and a lot of wasted time.
The idea of "freedom" and inalienable rights are also utopian fairy tales. There's a reason the guys that wrote the Constitution called it "a more perfect union". We aren't perfect, by we may strive for that ideal.
I was going to write something similar. Actually, I don't care what hardware developers use to develop on, but what they use to experience the product should be at most median of user hardware, and probably lower spec than that (except if they're working on bugs or features for high end devices or specific devices). A low spec laptop (which something with 16GB isn't) and a nice remote build server is a good combination.

When you give developers wonderful devices, it takes a lot of mindfulness to consider the performance on lower class hardware. When you have to make do with $100 laptops or phones, you're more likely to make things work for the low end users.
Substack is trying to generate returns for venture capitalists.

That they agree with one piece of your politics at this particular moment in their company's growth and at this particular point in the evolution of your political beliefs is a massive red herring.

Let me repeat. Substack is trying to generate returns for venture capitalists.
Looks good, here are some test cases off the top of my head.

guess: "SASSY", target: "BRASS", expect either "YYBGB" or "BYYGB". I believe your algorithm would return "YYYGB".

guess: "BRASS", target: "SASSY", expect "BBYGY"

guess: "ASSET", target: "BRASS", expect "YYYBB"

guess: "BRASS", target: "ASSET", expect "BBYYY"
> There are unvaccinated, uninfected people...and then there is everyone else.

This is shifting the goal. The disclaimers I cited come directly from the study and are highly relevant when comparing the effect of natural immunity vs vaccination.

> No. That's not what that study said. First, it followed symptomatic infection, not severe illness.

This doesn’t contradict what I said. The study gives evidence that natural immunity (to symptomatic infection) declines more quickly than vaccine induced immunity.

> Also, methodologically, the study you're citing was bad. It only gave credit for natural immunity to those people with confirmed infections, which was/is an underestimate, and made vaccines look more effective than they are.

One, the same effect would also have been present in the natural immunity group, as people may have been reinfected since their initial confirmed infection.

Two, this is largely irrelevant to the point I was making.

The statistical evidence suggests that even if you have had a previous confirmed infection, you’re still better off getting vaccinated.
Cool story, your co-worker should've let you find it, so close!
Delaying patches slightly doesn't really help revenues unless it's widely publicized, in which case they look bad and possibly get sued and it doesn't even save them any effort. Maybe it's a risk, but I'll definitely take that risk over what we have today.
Feels like an improved gopher and facing similar problems. People try the vehicle, but stay for the content.
Good idea! I'll add an "Explain" link, below the header, kinda like SQL EXPLAIN

Edit: Done!
It's a rounding error compared to those, but it's not to the taxpayer. $10 billion split among roughly 100 million net-tax-paying Americans comes to $100 each. How many taxpayers would rather have an extra $100 than a space telescope?
Right. I was conflating Project Astoria and Drawbridge.
I'm sorry, but the management scenarios seem completely backwards. May be it's my background (service gamedev and web SAAS-like apps), but shipping a feature is only a beginning — you have to test, measure, modify, repeat. If you write bad code, this loop will get long and expensive, your team won't reach your financial targets and the project will be closed. But if you manage to do that quickly and without distracting too much time on bugs — that directly translates to earning more money and being able to grow the team size.
Unfortunately "lather, rinse, repeat" lacks a termination condition.
Diet and exercise. I’ve made efforts my whole life to eat well.

I did not fear Covid for that precise reason (I’m under 40)
Is it a person's right to decide what medicines they take? I'd say yes, definitely.

Note that the mandates in question (those in Quebec) don't force you to get the vaccine.

They just say that if you don't, you no longer have an inalienable "right" to shop at Walmart.
> Only 13% of Americans scored as “proficient,” while over half were “basic” or “below basic.”

A score of below basic (being unable to sum two monetary values) should be viewed as a failure of the education system on the same level as illiteracy.
If that's the case they would have ran into the same issue with any other card processing entity.. A spike in disputes always results in withholdings and restrictions.
I have a pair of Bose QC 35s that I've had for years and whilst I agree connecting to the iPhone is crisp. I have been to hell and back trying to get them to work well with my Macbook. Problems with them not pairing, the audio quality suddenly going terrible or them just dropping out.
I only ever bought one pair of air pods and I ended up giving them away after that update was released where they were supposed to be able to switch seemlessly between devices but the feature was cumbersome. I don't think I managed to find eight distinct issues with during that time, but I can say I've switched to galaxy buds which I much prefer.
I would love to hear more of your thoughts on this.

One thought experiment that has helped me get my mind around the problem is "why is it necessary that parents shield children from some information?"

I think free speech might have a context that is invisible to us. Something like a prior, or trained neural net, in which free speech and no censorship is absolutely the right thing. And then there might be other contexts where it is wrong, and harmful.

In other words, "dangerous ideas" may be the wrong way of thinking about free speech--it might be "dangerous contexts" of our minds--such as childhood. If so, what then?
> I grew up in a very liberal artsy environment and was actually warned against taking advanced math for most of my life.

What possible rationale was there for that?
It doesn't help that the current (US) curriculum, at least in text books in my area, ask deceptively complex questions without explaining what sort of answer they're looking for.

My first grader would have questions like "Sarah has 9 apples and then adds 3 more from another basket. How many apples does Sarah Have? Write the answer in equation format, then Explain why the answer is true"

That last part is a strange question or at least phrasing. A proper answer verges on number theory, while the actual answer they're looking for is a tautological "Because 9 + 3 = 12". These sorts of questions confuse my kids because they realize the "explain" the book wants is just repeating the answer again, which doesn't make sense, so they think that can't be what the question is really asking.
Well nobody can dispute that OpenAI is doing serious work, although whether selling API access to the text output of a neural network is actually using the philanthropic dollars invested to save humanity is another question. Also, the research institute whose most notable output is Harry Potter fanfic did write quite good fanfic!
The M5Stack Core1 was about $10 cheaper but it's now been replaced with the Core2 which has several nice HW upgrades. It's easy to tell the difference because the Core1 has 3 physical buttons below the screen but the Core2 has 3 backlit soft buttons below the screen.

You can buy dev board ESP32 modules for as little as ~$10 but the M5STack comes with with a bunch of additional hardware that basic ESP32 dev boards don't. As you mention, the upside of the M5Stack Core2 system is all the extra hardware already integrated into a very well thought-thru expandable design. The fit and finish of the Core2 case and all the expansion modules I've gotten is also uniformly excellent.
I was at the courthouse a while back for a traffic related matter. When I left, I passed by a woman in her 30's at the courthouse's steps. She's clearly in distraught. She said her husband was in jail and she needed to post bail. She's getting a bail bond and asked how much was the 10% of the bail (10% is the upfront fee bail bond companies charged on the bond). I felt sick in the stomach. Here's a person in her 30's who didn't understand a simple math concept and couldn't compute a percentage of something at the moment she most needed. I looked at the paperwork and it's only couple hundred dollars and let her know.

Don't tell me math is useless and you won't use it in life.
The idea of taking 2/3 cups, spreading it out, and removing 1/4 to get 2/33/4 cups is pretty damn clever and totally street-smart about dividing a hard problem into smaller, more easily manageable problems on the fly.

I'm not sure I could've come up with that method just like that. I would've been conditioned to look out if the fractions reveal an easy answer that I can deduce immediately without calculating anything, and then probably just ended up doing 23 and 3*4, revealing the answer. If it had been something more complex -- such that couldn't have been able to intuit abstractly about it I think I might have eventually come up with some variant of a more visual, hand-measurable method.
Hal9 – Composable web-based machine learning pipelines
> FreeCAD does geometry

FreeCAD can do geometry, but if you can’t reason your way through the constraints you need to set for it to do that then you’ll be flailing around. FreeCAD definitely saves me from doing arithmetic, but not from doing maths.
Looking forward to your posts! Most important thing for me when choosing a Linux distro is which one has the best online content for troubleshooting.

I also came to thank you for sharing a soma fm link on your page. That radio station deserves so much more love.