skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Roth is an incredible diarist of modern dystopia who's always ready with a deft turn of phrase, if you enjoyed this piece at all I would highly recommend checking out his other work. He's a co-owner of Defector (where this was posted), which is essentially the worker-owned co-op spiritual sequel to Deadspin.
> Thanks for your reply.

Likewise. :)

> I've built medical robotics for battlefield surgery that, with a minor twist, became systems for killing.

That's the sort of thing I mean. Something like that would haunt me.

> Accepting that duality is part of a mature stance as a technologist.

Maturity or a Faustian bargain? It may be that one can't prevent the misuse of a technology, but does it follow that you have to be the one to invent it?

> Nobody's asking you to be a futurologist and take responsibility for the sins of all your progeny.

Not to be cheeky but I am. I'll circle back to this in a sec...

> Whether we are optimists or pessimists, guided by hope or fear may be just aspects of personality and not something I'd judge another for.

Same here, well said. Since I'm kinda saying that we can't know the ultimate effects of our inventions, it would be contradictory for me to insist that I could know the ultimate effects of your inventions, for good or ill. FWIW, I hope they are good on the balance.

To some extent I'm a coward, perhaps, for not being more willing to inflict my creativity upon the world. Not a happy thought, but not unfamiliar.

In re: responsibility, you say,

> Nobody's asking you to be a futurologist and take responsibility for the sins of all your progeny.

but then later you say,

> you don't get to abdicate _any_ responsibility, ... You don't get to [be] a creator without ... bearing responsibility.

(I hope my crude edits don't offend you, I tried to preserve your meaning.)

Right or wrong, I (would) feel responsible for the misuse of technology I invented.

It seems to me that you can only be a good steward to the extent that you can foresee and avoid difficulties

> Being a good parent does not presuppose I know every future action of my child, Being a good/moral parent merely requires that I take close interest, and act with proper love/attention to their development.

Becoming a parent is incredible hubris, excused only by the fact that you're the descendant of four billion years of successful parenting.

When you're inventing new technology it's a different story. With a kid it's pretty unlikely you're going to give birth to the next Hitler, eh? (sorry about the Godwin's law tick)
And the irony is really strong here since the term “metaverse” was coined in the context of a dystopian version of VR.
A really good piece of writing with one nice little tidbit, because it feels true:

> you will never see a commercial for anything that is actually and authentically liberating while watching the Super Bowl; that space is just too expensive, and too valuable, for anything but the institutions invested in the opposite of liberation to be able to afford access to it.

It feels true (with pithy, bonus), but now I'm uncertain. What does "authentically liberating" even mean? Which institutions are "authentically liberating"? What do those look like, communes? Collectives? Medical aid NGOs? Maybe more interesting: can liberation be a product?
This would make a cool hl2dm map.
> I wish there had never been all this hype around tech startup culture 10 years ago. That was a disaster. It brought a lot of desperate people

There's a whole sad parallel universe of wannabe entrepreneurs who have zero sense of what might consititute a marketable product and who live off fantasies of validation by VCs. They seem almost exactly the same to me as the poor folks who get suckered into some Evangelical church with the Prosperity Gospel. Down to the regular social events and sermons.

They go for years like this. I'm convinced the whole system feeds off and exacerbates mental illness.
When a single entity is responsible for managing IDs that governments provide it is ripe for abuse still. I'm not saying it couldn't work but these issues would need to be worked out. I'd rather see a decentralized solution that allows users to pick which IDs to accept, etc.
IMO the homeless situation in Paris (largely the result of unchecked immigration) is far more disruptive than any protest.
You might want to try freetaxusa. I tried them last year and really like them.
My childhood heavily featured Dominion Road as my grandparents lived nearby so I had to recheck I opened the right link when I saw that song appear.

Now I'm wondering why 20 years ago I thought the music video for that song featured a cameo of the black panther statue that to me represents that road...

Also lovely words. I can't imagine having five!
That's a bit of a nightmare for communication, though. Subtlety is a thing, both for nuance and clarity.
> Point 1: If you don't want to use alternative stores, then don't use them.

That's my choice, for one. I support there being alternatives, but won't use them. And I am well aware there's ways out of the "jail" (as in "jailbreak") I just choose to stay inside. Same goes for the dark web, rather just stay in the light.
The core features of Modula-2 are largely the same as C + modules, but with more consistent syntax and fewer footguns (like no unsafe implicit pointer conversions), so I don't see how C can objectively possess "great beauty and simplicity" in comparison. Unless you're referring specifically to the syntax?

B was also written as a hack - it was basically a minimal subset of BCPL small enough to fit in the memory of the machines they were working with. B is elegant in a sense that it's a very simple language for a word-oriented architecture - but that's exactly the part that they had to get rid of for C to target byte-oriented ones. Coincidentally, it's also one of the sources of weirdness in C syntax (e.g. implicit int and K&R prototypes are all legacy of B).
I kicked the tyres on caxa recently and liked it, but it has a showstopping bug in Windows in that it unpacks to a temp folder, so when you run the app after a reboot, it's likely corrupted, requiring a temp folder clean and a relaunch. It should be unpacking to non-temp, but as of now there's no workaround that I'm aware of.
I tried it last year and really liked it.
In addition to language, it might be helpful to explore the type of coding you want to do. e.g. Web, Mobile, Cloud, etc. One of the things you can do is peruse some free resources to see what's available and how you like it.

A free resource I like is FreeCodeCamp:

https://www.freecodecamp.org

They have curriculum on Web development with JavaScript and React, which is a popular framework. They also have data science material with Python and related tools.

I'm in the Microsoft space, which has a lot of opportunity and they have free courses on everything you would want to do. You can even open a free Azure account to practice cloud development.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/

They also have material geared toward certification.

Another resource that I find interesting is Google Cloud:

https://developers.google.com/learn

They have various certification programs and I hear they've hired people who have taken and passed their courses.
depends on the bottle
It was a syntactic kludge, perhaps, but it had good reasons - and in terms of expressive power, it's exactly the same as any other Boolean type.
Why India’s Farming System Is Failing [video]
This declaration is rarely wrong.
Monsanto strikes again!
I have had such a dream, at least once. I was writing beautiful code. No, I didn't remember any of the actual code when I woke up.

But I can say that I'm a great programmer - in my dreams.
I am reminded of the short film More: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCeeTfsm8bk
Switched from TurboTax to FreeTaxUSA four years ago. Same product with a cleaner interface and far less expensive. https://www.freetaxusa.com/
This is nonsense. The statement isn't meaningless. It's a tweet, not a formal conjecture.

Sure, no one knows what exactly consciousness is... or what slightly conscious is. The idea of protoconsiousness isn't that much of a stretch. If a biologist had suggested some plants have protoconsiousness, no one would have whined.

So what if someone working on NLP has an opinion about consciousness. Why is their opinion less valid than someone else's. It's not less informed.
The scale of efficiency saving on society due to computer usage is probably 1 million to 1.
I feel really anxious seeing time running out and wanting to find more matches. Fun game, but definitely not something to relax, at least for me ;)
I remember there was a huge issue among the teachers unions that teachers wouldn't be able to deduct up to 500 dollars anymore for classroom expenses (I may have the number wrong).
I was thinking, you teachers should be good at math and realize your deduction being doubled is way nicer than having that classroom supplies deduction. Also, why isn't the school paying for your expenses (but that's a whole separate conversation)
This writing actually resonated with me. I, like the author, stumbled into programming, and I've been enjoying the journey so far. In a way, it feels like reading my future self a couple years from now. I think this article would be best for those who have an intermediate understanding of programming in a single high-level language but want to "look under the hood" so to speak. (I think this just means learning C). So it may not be for you, but it was for me.
Hey, this should be fixed now. Thanks again!
Feedback isnt mentioned. Loops arent mentioned.

I do appreciate that your interpretation is one possible interpretation of the above but it isnt the only one.

You can also interpret it as develop as fast as possible, avoiding any kind of development guardrails, keeping no docs and being ok with 150 page requirements word documents that will become outdated tomorrow.

I wish this were me being disingenuous in interpretation but IME it's not all that uncommon.
I've bought some Meta stocks when it dipped, as I figured they were "too big to fail" and would eventually go up. However, I've been contemplating selling all the stocks I've bought because of this and the previous ad.

If these are kind of the ads that comes out after millions of dollars spent and hours of collective thinking; I don't think whatever they are building now will be appealing to people. As another comment HN have put it: they've lost all touch with reality.
Excellent book. Might be my favorite of his besides Ubik.
>Why are propositions about consciousness different from propositions about faeries?

Ultimately they are not. It's just that the evidence points towards an extremely low chance of fairies being real and extremely high chance of others being conscious in a comparable manner to how you are conscious.
Identity management is a very hard problem a lot of systems identify people by, or anchor trust to an email address, that mostly works, but has some very gnarly edges[0]. I don't think a private company can solve this (the company itself becomes a point of failure, what if they go out of business, or are acquired and change line of business?)

I really wish the USPS would get into managing digital identity, or at the very least, attack the lowest of hanging fruits: assign everyone[1] an email address that won't suddenly be closed for ToS violation on a domain that won't expire in anyone's lifetime. Lost your password/authenticator? Walk into a post office with your government issued identity.

Cleverer people than I am should be able to figure out how to create anonymous identities from your official one and have them linked unidirectionally, i.e. Alice can voluntarily prove she owns/created the Alana identity, but it's otherwise computationally impossible/expensive to do the reverse (unmask Alice from just the Alana pseudo ID)

0. Losing access to a mailbox means losing access to account recovery functionality, and mailbox takeovers result in TFA.

1. This is US-centric, but hopefully an international standard may be set, so that governments or delegated authorities are responsible for basic online identity; just like the way TLD's are managed
This is actually great as an ad for a gamified retirement village. I'd take Geezer Fortnite over bingo and shuffleboard myself, given the choice. That sounds like a Valhalla I could even look forward to visiting, on my way back to dust.

I'm just not ready for Valhalla yet.

So this is Facebook, the empire of targeted advertising, badly missing the target with its own advertising.
Search.

In the past, Google just works. Nowadays, Google must be used with uBlacklist or something like that to yield decent results.
Suggestion, show the matching pair when the timer runs out.
This comment[1] from a previous thread on the "metaverse" has stuck with me: there are real, living people who think that the world of Ready Player One is a valid aspirational goal, and some of those people work on projects like this.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28930355
> The fact that instructions have some 'octal' structure doesn't make the thing an 'octal machine'

Basic concepts like the 8 GPRs are rooted in it's octal decoding roots. MOD/RM is still octal decoded, SIB is still octal decoded, etc. These fields aren't just three bits long, but also aligned to a three bit boundary within the byte being decoded.

> and as importantly, a Datapoint 2200 is not an x86. The x86 is not an octal machine.

The x86 traces its lineage to that and the points still hit. For instance, even when they added more registers in x86_64, it's still a three bit bank with simply a new prefix to select whether it's referring to the top or bottom 8 register bank out of now 16 total registers. There's some awkward places where you can't address different 8 register banks in the way you'd want to from an encoding perspective because of these continued restrictions going back to the Datapoint 2200.

Having written the HDL for a simple x86_64 decoder, it is very much still an octal machine.
Not OP or the author but is "therapy" a worthy enough goal? I sometimes look back at some of my notes and feel a (nice) sense of time having passed by. Reminds me of how much little time we all have :)
Israel performs pre and post conception screenings for TS and a few other genetic diseases that are common within the Jewish population.

Just calling every genetic screening designed to prevent actual suffering eugenics is pretty nonsensical.
Hey, just added a license. It's public domain, but if you do something with this I'd love to hear about it!
> Having psychologically struggled with it and having been on both sides of the issue, I'm still deeply conflicted about it. Same with using "-"s instead of "_"s.

I can't tell, is this sarcasm?
Okay, will the release of C2x be a fork of the C language, since it's going to remove support for K&R function definitions (and not every such function can be rewritten to use the new style)?
"update system packages" while this is better for security, it breaks immutability/reproducibility of the end image.
Yeah, that quoted sentence is pure Orwellian double-speak.
It doesn't have anything to offer. A world where all you can do is look and listen is of very little marginal interest to almost anyone. We all have televisions and stereos. I don't dream of having larger TVs and louder stereos.

It's a lot easier to have a shitty life online in VR than to have a shitty life in real life. In real life you can have a sandwich, and it's a richer, more fulfilling experience than anything VR has to offer.

It's gamers (and buzzword investors) who love VR, and they'll get bored with it. Not every game should be first person; it's kind of a local maxima and a contemporary rut.
Here are the gift cards:

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Good luck
I don’t actually care which country wants to fund anti-facism. If you’re not anti-fascism, you’re the problem.

And before anyone hit’s the “i’m not anti-anti-fascist, i’m anti-antifa” there IS no antifa. You can’t join antifa, you can’t donate to antifa, they don’t give out member cards. It’s just a name people who are anti-fascism apply to themselves.
If you have an adversarial relationship with the business side of your company there's a problem.
Buffer bloat can be a really complex, thorny issue. How do you even solve it, in principle for systems like this? What should happen if a client can't process all messages? Do you drop some? Should the server persist messages on disk? (And how / when?)

I was absolutely gobsmacked reading Kafka's API design, because kafka avoids this problem with a single, simple API choice.

In Kafka, instead of a client subscribing indefinitely, clients can only request ranges of events. Like, a client query will say "Get me the next ~1mb of events from ID 123". The kafka server will send those events (from disk, or streaming) then stop sending them to that client. Once the server has sent the quota 1mb of events, it'll stop and the client is then expected to request the next 1mb of events.

This simple API almost entirely prevents buffer bloat. (Can you see it?). If there's not enough bandwidth for the events to arrive, at most 1mb of events will ever be buffered for that client. Because the client will wait to ask for the next 1mb of events until after the first events have been received, if a client processes events too slowly (or doesn't have the bandwidth to keep up), it'll just gracefully fall further and further behind, without consuming any extra server resources. It'll keep working - just work slowly. And, sure - this is still a problem. But its graceful. And it entirely fits with what people expect to happen when a client doesn't have enough bandwidth or CPU. And its a much smaller problem than if the entire server failed due to a single slow client. Its genius.
> Having the government prevent you from murdering people is not owning you and is not infringing on your rights.

Of course it is! You just don't believe my exercise of those rights is legitimate, but there's no intrinsically different about the act of shooting someone and the act of riding a bike without a helmet, from a Hobbesian point of view. You can argue that the government/society has a more legitimate interest in limiting exercise of one of those rights, and I'd agree. But when we're talking about what rights should be, you can't use a legal definition of rights. That's circular.

> Actually, the government should not be preventing you from murdering others - it is there to mete out justice if you do.

And see, this is I think an interesting argument. But it leads to a really perverse system. You can't engage in any form of harm reduction policy, which means the only lever you have to reduce criminal/harmful activity is to have really cruel punishments for the few directly harmful acts.

Like take speeding or drinking and driving as obvious examples. Under the "only mete justice if you harm others" approach, you can't criminalize drunk driving or speeding, only vehicular manslaughter, so you either live with more death due to dangerous driving, or you have to like make the punishment for drunk/dangerous driving so terrible that it dissuades people from even engaging in the risky behavior. But in practice, avoiding the circumstances that lead to harm is better for everyone (the victim, the potential perpetrator, society at large) than punishing people after the fact, and there are lots of situations where punishments simply don't work.
Can? Yes. Will? No.

It's just two separate jobs, why would anyone sign on to doing two jobs when they can specialize in one or the other, unless they're in a situation like mine, which nearly nobody is.
Stumbled on this: https://www.canlii.org/en/

https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/swy4ge/comment...
Many academics have studied momentum, both cross-sectional momentum and time-series momentum, and many quant firms use it as one of their factors in trading stocks, bonds, and commodities.
I'm pretty sure the USA has been thriving for a while
> People dismiss it often, and it has valid academic criticisms, but most "lay" critiques I've seen seem to dismiss it because it gives things they don't consider to be "conscious like them" consciousness.

If your attempt at a formalism provides useful, actionable implications, and only really disagrees with people's intuitions on cases that are generally believed to be edge cases, or maybe that you also have good reason to believe are edge cases on different ground, then you might have a decent definition.

If your attempt at a formalism provides useful implications, but disagrees with everyone's intuitions on what the words you're using mean, you've probably defined the wrong thing. That's not to say that you aren't defining something sensible (you might still be), but strongly suggests it's not what you want it to be.

Selling IIT as a description of consciousness is roughly the same flavor of hubris as defining berries to include oranges and cucumbers and exclude raspberries and raspberries.
Pretty much same here for a while. The last 5 years I've been able to get away with a LaTeX resume, and give out PDFs.
Just calling every genetic screening designed to prevent actual suffering eugenics is pretty nonsensical.

It's also putting words in my mouth since I said no such thing.
I am reminded of Fully Automated Luxury Gnosticism: https://unherd.com/2021/09/welcome-to-fully-automated-luxury...
A few of them were repeats, as in the same orientation (although the random perturbations were different), others had more than two of the same kind, which might be okay.

That said, that this is a meme some people take seriously (like the idea of wordcels) really makes me irrationally mad.