skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think when "science" has been infused with power, so that it is no longer the truth of an idea that gives it legs (the "marketplace of ideas") but an idea's ability to produce power, then "science" will get all sorts of weird results. Power corrupts even "science."

We began infusing science with power in the early 1900s. Over time, the ideas that win are those that are powerful (politically), even if untrue (or only weakly true, relative to what is being claimed).

There's every reason to believe that "climate science"[0] is weakly true, but that its ability to attain scientific consensus is primarily that it is much more powerful than competing theories that explain the same evidence. Climate science gives you control over multi-trillion dollar economies. Other theories do not.[1]

One way to gauge the trustworthiness of "climate science" purely as an idea is to imagine an alternative: suddenly, the Sun starts putting out less energy and the Earth cools. In fact, enough less energy that we are expecting a 1.5 deg Celsius decline in global temperature in ten years.

Ask yourself: what is your confidence level that additional man-made CO2 emissions will be able to counteract this so that the average temperature doesn't actually drop? If I'm honest, it's extremely low. I don't trust "climate scientists" to be able to warm the Earth on demand by injecting more CO2 into the air.

[0] "Climate science" is basically the idea that CO2 (functionally) acts like a thermostat for the Earth's climate at the extremely low concentration levels we see today (due to hypothesized "positive feedback loops" interacting badly with man-made CO2-induced warming). Man is a significant cause of the increased CO2 we see today.

[1] A (powerless) competing theory (because it gives no control over multi-trillion dollar economies) is that the Sun functionally acts like a thermostat for the Earth, that CO2 is incapable of heating the Earth at the extremely low concentration levels we see today—or levels 20x as high we've seen in the past 100,000 years—and that we see more CO2 in the past during warm periods (again: caused by the Sun heating the Earth) because the CO2 capacity of the oceans is lower when the temperature is higher, meaning CO2 is released into the atmosphere as the Earth warms, and moves back into the oceans as it cools. Also, there are no "positive feedback loops" in the Earth that would cause is to uncontrollably heat up due to tiny changes in CO2 levels. The only thing that actually heats or cools the Earth at the level of "climate" is the Sun. Man is a significant cause of the increased CO2 we see today, but that increased CO2 is too insignificant to cause warming by itself. If the Earth is warming (or cooling), it's because of the Sun.
> Although clown distraction was particularly appreciated by parents, it did not significantly reduce pain or anxiety in children as compared with usual distraction.

This conclusion is not surprising, but it was interesting to see a study on this.

Reminds me of Dan Ariely describing his experience in the burn ward, with two painful bandage removal options for nurses to choose from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIRjYBX_9ls
Fire retardants are a net negative for public safety. Consumer protection groups, furniture manufacturers, and fire fighters all banded together to eliminate California's requirements for them. It still took over a decade. During that time, the fire retardant manufacturers were literally the only group that supported using them.
Sounds like coalesce () from SQL.
Yes. In a sense. The sigmoid/neural network was well conceived, the major limiting factor was hardware and training data.

ML isn't really that much further I'd wager. We've just finally gotten the computer yo catch up enough we can spit out a handful of reasonable domain specific function simulators.

We're no closer to a feasible integration thereof to the point of emergent consciousness.
It's all those unnecessary ports I can't stand. I don't need the HDMI, SD card, network, etc. plugs. Just gimme more USB-C Gen2 and maybe some Thunderbolt. I'm fine paying the equivalent of a Caldigit TS4, I just don't need most of those ports.
I read the OP. Okay.

I have a good track record in AI, about the best: I was right and for the right reasons! I got fairly deep into expert systems and said clearly at the time that I thought that they were, in a word, essentially junk. And history has shown that I was correct. In AI, being that correct gives one about the best track record!

Then I did some more: One of the main problems we were trying to solve was monitoring computer server farms and digital communications networks. I worked up a quite general approach, as some math complete with theorems and proofs, starting with some meager assumptions quite reasonable in practice, and totally blew the doors off anything AI was doing. Got to select false alarm rate, in small steps over a wide range. And used Ulam's result 'tightness' to show that the techniques was not trivial. Programmed it. On some real data, it worked fine. Published it. It was successful, on the real problem, better than unaided humans or expert systems could hope to do. And it had some solid math guarantees, from theorems and proofs from meager assumptions. That's also relatively good for AI. But, I didn't claim it was AI and instead just claimed that it was useful, progress on the real problem.

So, I've had, in comparison, two successes! Soooooo, if the author of the OP can give opinions, I should be able to also. So, will do that here and now!

First, I would like to see AI research compare with, say, baby animals, mammals, yes, but also some reptiles and maybe even some insects. I'd like to see our AI systems do as well as the baby animals.

Second, I'd like to have our systems, that do as well as baby animals, learn as well and fast as those animals do as they grow up. A good goal might be a kitten at 3 months.

Third, I'd like to have our systems learn English as fast, easily, and well as a human of 3 years old.

So, in summary, for research in AI, I'd like to see work that has some promise of achieving these three goals.

For now, I'll stop here!
People can always tell when someone is about to say "however".

Might as well fulfill the expectation.
I think it's useful to know and understand things. How a nuclear war would play out might not correspond to what your imagination or popular culture say they will. I started reading that book about 6 months or so ago after coming across it on HN, and I thought it was pretty interesting in an abstract way. Now the idea of nuclear war is closer to the forefront of my attention, but I think it's good to know approximately what to do and why if I find myself as an involuntary participant in a nuclear war.

An important thing to understand is that it's not like everyone within some radius dies and everyone outside it lives. In the event of nuclear war there will be a lot of people in marginal areas that could survive based on luck or doing the right things. Those "duck and cover" films kind of get a bad rap, but I wonder if this is a good moment in time to notify whole populations of how to survive a nuclear strike. Even something like an episode of John Oliver or Steven Colbert's show where they explain how to protect yourself from gamma radiation might save thousands or millions of lives in the (hopefully unlikely) event that things spiral out of hand.

Many people will say they'd rather just die quickly, but for someone to die needlessly when they could have survived and moved to another city is kind of sad. If all of Russia and all of NATO unload all their nukes at each other, then maybe anyone in any affected country who happened to survive will have a very bad time, but you wouldn't know that on the ground. Maybe most of the nukes don't work. Maybe it was a limited exchange, and only a few cities got hit. Maybe they only targeted military targets, and most cities without military bases are fine. No one knows.
> or what the solution should be (e.g. carbon tax).

There's a ton of nuance around what the solution should be. a carbon tax is one, but far from the only one, and it has a lot of downsides. It's difficult to measure and enforce, and creates ripe breeding ground for corruption. It's harmful to the economy, harmful (in some ways) to the development of alternative energies, and it's mainly the developing nations that are the biggest problem, but the carbon tax either doesn't apply to them or it would stifle their development, which is bad for humanitarian reasons (and pretty damn unfair given that the US was allowed to develop restriction free)..

I'm not saying we shouldn't consider a carbon tax, because it might be one of the better options. But there's definitely nuance around it and plenty of important ideas to debate and discuss.
The Physicalization of Metamathematics and Its Implications
This guy: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Josh_Axe
It's true the news media has moved on, but covid doesn't care: cases in Korea (300,000+ per day), New Zealand, Hong Kong have never been higher. And in mainland China too.

Covid is still temporarily or permanently ruining life-years all over the world, but wars of aggression make for much more interesting articles, especially when that's new news while covid is old news.
I'm pretty sure he was talking about the person at the root of this thread, with the name 'matthewdgreen'
Like the article is titled "Ten Database Commandments", but the entire intro is all about the 25th anniversary of Biggie's sorrowful death. Then it gets into the "commandments" which are just the author taking lines out of Biggie's songs and stretching to reinterpret them as database advice (except the 9th one which is "Never talk to the police about your database"?). The advice itself is really weak, like "never run your app on the same server as your DBMS", which is already common knowledge to database admins.

The article ends with the author asking readers to call a tip line if they have info on Biggie's death, as if DB admins on a site called Ottertune would have any real chance of harboring some secret knowledge about a 25-year-old drive-by-shooting that they wouldn't have given to the police already in the last quarter century.

All of this underneath a gigantic illustration of Biggie fist-bumping a cartoon otter.

Is this article meant to be for Biggie fans? Database admins? Is it in memory of Biggie or making fun of him? And what does The Notorious B.I.G. have to do with databases in the first place?

I wouldn't think twice about this if it was on the author's personal homepage, but it's published on the company's website by one of the co-founders as a way to sell OtterTune.
> called a teledoc for like 40$ (copay)

So, more like $7400 annually [0], plus a $40 copay, discounting whatever other health care you needed in the year.

[0] https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2020-section-6-worke...
Poland and the US are both NATO. Somehow sending them from Poland is better? And we’re going to let concerns about how Russia would perceive the transfer dictate what we do?

We’ve already sent a bunch of weapons into Ukraine. These jets are just another entry in that long list.

We need to get this transfer done.
If deep learning isn’t enough, then brains aren’t enough, right?

Edit: No offense to Gary Marcus, first heard of him after reading this article.
None of those sound like use cases for locals. Why not *kwargs for the first example?
my understanding is that tax attorneys are lobbying against such reforms, for obvious reasons
Aside from what other replies said, there's also the statistics, learning and prediction (aka ML?) that's the basis of classic compression algorithms. In fact one of the current leading brain theories is named a lot like terminology from that world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
From cows to giraffes: smart ear tags helping wildlife conservation
Yeah, the attitude it's pushing is that Russia can do whatever they want, but if its neighbors do the same, then that's unacceptable.
it's a scam and has value only to those who have been tricked into believing it has value.

> the most important piece of engineering since the Manhattan Project

that says it all doesn't it? if you think that a Blockchain is as important as the Manhattan project, you have been "converted" and are almost certainly so far away that logic cannot reach you.
Last year Ruby Together, which primarily supported Ruby packages & infrastructure, merged into Ruby Central, which runs the main Ruby & Rails conferences as well as key Ruby infrastructure (Rubygems)

https://rubytogether.org/news/2021-10-21-ruby-together-and-r...

http://rubycentral.org/
I wonder how many DE&I seminars he made his crew sit through.
> No one wanted to give their full name, in the hope that they would be able to return home to Russia at some point.

If they had given their full name, it would be highly unethical to publish it anyway.
Soda is acidic and comes in Aluminum cans. Why don't the cans develop holes?
Projects like Rubocop go a long way to help with this. I try to follow the bbatsov style guide and use rubocop for automatic fixes.
America’s Emerging Energy Crisis
See also the story of the lucky iron fish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_iron_fish
I feel like far too few people know about ReGIS and Sixel.
> Anyone know what a stock split typically means for current shareholder value?

Theoretically nothing. Example, you own 1 HN stock trading at $1000 ( total value of $1000 ). HN has a stock split of 10-1. Now you own 10 HN stock trading at $100 dollars ( total value of $1000 ).

Lets imagine that HN stock is popular and lots of retail investors want to buy HN stock but only 10% of retail investors can afford $1000 for 1 share. But 80% of investors can afford to pay $100 for 1 share. So you can bring in more retail into the mix by splitting the stock. Netflix and Tesla are examples of stocks that did spectacularly well after stock splits. But we are in a stock bubble and most stocks have done well so can't really credit the stock split for the boost in price. No guarantee amazon will do well. Especially if the overall market tanks, amazon will go down with the market.

Berkshire class A is an example of stock that buffet refuses to split and it's trading at $500,000 per share. Fair to say that most retail investors can't afford to buy one share. Buffet did create a class B stock that has split to make it affordable for retail investors.

There is also something called a reverse stock split where many stocks are converted into fewer stocks in order raise stock prices. This is sometimes done to meet with stock exchange listing rules ( minimum share price ).
The minute anybody mixes up one of these in a bottle and throws it, it turns him/her from a civilian caught in a warzone to a combatant.

That suddenly means shooting back with intent to kill is both legal and likely.

It's a pretty big change of status for filling a few bottles...
You haven't actually engaged with any of the points I made. This is not science.
Awesome. Thanks for the resources. Coincidentally, I stumbled on this research today on the effect of exercise + meditation on word recall: https://hpp.tbzmed.ac.ir/PDF/hpp-9-314.pdf
Show me your ML development pipeline and I’ll tell you who you are
Give it a go. Ruby (and Rails) aren't going anywhere. There are far too many companies that are perfectly happy and successful with rails-based apps.

Name a tech unicorn from the last 15 years, they probably have some ruby/rails code that is foundational to the company. Many have adopted microservices and newer languages like Go, but the core Ruby codebases aren't going away any time soon.

Even outside of the rails ecosystem, ruby is a wonderful scripting language for writing small tools with. I prefer it to Python when I need something more powerful than bash/sh.
> A good language is one that doesn't need a community and a beast of an editor just to code something that compiles and runs.

Which languages don't need a community?
"The inside of the can is lined by spray coating an epoxy lacquer or polymer to protect the aluminum from being corroded by acidic contents such as carbonated beverages and imparting a metallic taste to the beverage."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_can
Progrium Technology Thesis 2022
The driver runs in ring 0, and talks over PCI bus to some blackbox that is running random source code your web browser just compiled...
Turing has definitely increased in visibility over the last few decades. Von Neumann was considered the "father of digital computing", because he set down in detail how a general purpose stored-program digital computer ought to work. One was built, and it worked. A few billion Von Neumann architecture machines later...

Turing's automata theory work was obscure and not very usable. Turing's code breaking work was very specialized. The real theoretician of cryptanalysis was Friedman, who gave the field a theoretical basis, along with breaking the Japanese Purple cypher and founding the National Security Agency.

"Colossus", the electronic codebreaking machine at Bletchley, was not a general purpose computer. It was a key-tester, like a Bitcoin miner. Its predecessors, the electromechanical "bombes", were also key-testers.

Almost forgotten today are Eckert and Mauchly. They were the architects of the ENIAC, which was a semi general purpose computer programmed with plugboards and knobs. This was a rush job during WWII, when naval gunnery and navigation tables were needed in a hurry. It did the job it was supposed to do. After the war, they formed Eckert-Mauchley Computer Corporation, and produced the BINAC.[1] This was the minimum viable product for a commercial electronic digital computer. All the essential subsystems were there - CPU, memory, magnetic tape drive, printer. Everything was duplicated for checking purposes. That got them acquired by Remington Rand, and their next machine was the famous UNIVAC I, with more memory, better tape drives, a full set of peripherals, and profitable sales. Eckert had a long career with Remington Rand/UNIVAC/Unisys. Mauchley stayed for a few years and then did another startup. More like a good Silicon Valley career.

[1] http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Eckert_Mau...
This has frustrated me to no end: my iPhone 4s is still in brand new condition and if only Apple would allow me to downgrade to iOS 7 or so, it would be roaring fast, albeit limited in what websites it can handle or what app versions it can run.

But instead it's stuck on the newer iOS 9.x, which turned it into a paperweight.

It's The Peter Principle for tech devices: a competent device will keep getting upgraded until it becomes unusable at its current OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
offtopic question but can this be used to compress base64 images?
To be fair, all the ad revenue for pharma products on American television networks whose parents happen to own a news network also do a great job of building leverage against the pharma companies ever being investigated too deeply.
Ask HN: How much of a SaaS needs to be built before fundraising?
I'm an aspiring founder and developer. I've worked on a few toy projects over the years, but have recently started on something that I believe has real potential.

I know next to nothing about the business side of things. I've been researching and learning, but its left me with questions. One such, at what stage in development should I begin fundraising?

Part of me feels like I should continue working on it during weekends and evenings until complete, and then start worrying about the "business" stuff. All the conventional wisdom however seems to argue against that and encourages swift market entry. How do I enter the market appropriately without funds? And how do I obtain funds without a fleshed out product or prior founding experience?

I have virtually 0 presence on professional social media outlets. No twitter, no IG, inactive linkedin, etc. My only viable options for marketing really is going to be paid ads. I'd also, ideally, like to be in a position to focus on this fulltime rather than worrying about it after my day job.

Now, it'd certainly be possible for me to just launch it one weekend and spend a few hour in the evenings managing things, but it'd seriously hamper growth and adoption.

Suggestion? Advice? Wisdom? I'm open to it all. Thanks in advance.
Phantom limb syndrome is thought to be caused by the brain adapting to changed signals from the limb's nerves. It means years of pain, itching, false sensation. I can't even begin to imagine what it would take to address phantom body syndrome.

(I'm also a total layman here)
The United States does not have chemical and biological weapons labs in Ukraine
Does refrigerating the paper cause the color to reappear?
Blocking the IP at your router won't help if your router's upstream is saturated...
It works great. The reason not to use it is that it will scratch the heck out of certain (resistive or induction) cook tops. Our cooktop has little raised matte nubbies that stick out a bit over the shiny ceramic surface. The nubbies are "pre scratched", and protect the rest of the cooktop. We have no problems with cast iron on it.

Some people use silicon mats to avoid scratches. The protective mat often burns or discolor the cooktop.

If you want to immediately ruin a ceramic cooktop, put a piece of aluminum between a hot pan and the ceramic top. Some sort of ion exchange happens, and the foil embeds itself below the surface, then flakes off. (Also, it smokes a lot,)
Mostly it’d just be about dusting off the cobwebs and using it all again; I still know it all, but my skill will doubtless have atrophied at least a little from six or seven years of disuse. In such a case, having been familiar with Python 2.5–2.7 first probably also works against me, as the distance of time will probably make recollecting the ancient Python 2 way occur more often relative to the Python 3 way than it would have while I was actively using Python 3. As far as actual ecosystem changes are concerned, packaging practices are probably the most significant area where I gather there’s been a fair bit of change happening.
Thanks! Yeah it struggles with periodic functions that are wide. For example it successfully crosses zero with sin(PIxN/5) and delivers reasonable results for sin(PIxN/3). For your specific example you would probably need to provide something like N=1 to N=50.
There's a bad Arnold movie along these lines - The Sixth Day.
I wonder if the display can be messed with by sending a bad payload or a different number like -1.
I remember this being the case too.
Have you considered the environmental impact of using this site? It’s certainly not free.
The classic Nine 1s, One 2 of course!
Brains are

a) far far more recurrent than any practical deep learning system

b) using something other than backprop, and probably that something is much more efficient
Personally, Rust; professionally, mostly web frontend stuff (HTML/CSS/JavaScript, plenty of each) rather than Python web backend stuff.