skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What a fun exploration of an idea! That if we're living in a universe with a creator (simulation or otherwise), even if we're blocked from knowledge of higher purposes, we might be able to pick up some hints from looking at the nature of the universe itself.

And the three items Scott points out are clever: (a) there are secret depths that pay rewards in exchange for structured intelligence, aka math and science, (b) many religious and psychedelic experiences report similar experiences of interconnectedness and higher meaning, (c) the world is set up in such a way that almost everyone experiences certain important things: love, suffering, growth, family, etc.

I'm sure this has been discussed to death in some branch of metaphysics - can anyone share pointers to interesting material? I feel like Bostrom's simulation hypothesis opens up a lot of space here that hasn't been fully explored yet (but I could be wrong).
I see many people conflating contracting with consulting.

Contracting is when you undertake to perform a certain unit of work for either a fixed price or at an hourly/daily rate. Your deliverables are completed tasks - on budget and schedule.

Consulting is when you are a recognised expert in some field, analyze the client's situation/problem, design and document a solution and/or make recommendations. Your deliverables are reports and presentations.

You need to plan for spending 20% to 50% of your time and energy, networking, prospecting, preparing proposals, negotiating and chasing payments. Due to that overhead, you need to charge at least 2x-3x your salary rate. It is prudent to retain an accountant for the financial issues, a lawyer for contractual issues and take out insurances as required in your specific jurisdiction.

If you don't mind all the non-paying activities and the fluctuations in revenue, then consulting can be a lucrative means to a comfortable lifestyle.
They capitulated after being called out on the license/copyright violations.
This article seems like a motivational text for their tool:
https://gtoolkit.com/ .

Has anybody tried it?
Indeed, simply providing clickable links would have been a better response to the original deliberately unclickable links than spawning a giant ridiculous thread to consider the topic of link clickability. This is generally true.
There are only so many words.
I find the critique most apt to the dealer and not the user. The user is just a weak link in the system where as the dealer is where all the misery basically starts.

But yea influencers and the lot I tend to advise to stop using but well they struggle with their habits.
My burgeoning collection of clicky keyboards with surprisingly small numbers of keys would, while not disagreeing with you, like to make itself available as a data point.
How is paying $14.53 at the register "quick and easy" with cash?

Do you just shove a $20 to the cashier and go "keep the change"? Or do you start to dig around for that elusive 5c coin from the bottom of your wallet?

In not-US I can just shove my watch/phone/card at the reader and it's done. Exact change, no fuss.
> added operational cost of running a self driving car - is it worth it to average consumer?

Early high-cost self-driving cars largely won't be owned by individual consumers where the cars spend the majority of their time parked. They will be owned by companies that sell access to them as taxis by the minute/mile and can justify the cost by minimizing downtime.
I don’t think retrofit will work at scale, as maintaining a retrofit for so many models for software as well as hardware will work, building a new model in keeping self driving in mind will be much more cheaper in long run.
Honestly, I think the solution to crypto and other e-payment methods being hard to use is for the next government that wants to adopt crypto to go with a PoS crypto. Then they can purchase a reserve, stake it, and issue a series of notes keyed to some portion of that reserve (in other words, if their reserve was split into a billion notes, they would have a billion unique serial numbers).

Citizens could then just use the notes (with counterfeit measures in place) or bring it to the bank to deposit, and (at their discretion) withdraw on-chain. If the citizens want the staking rewards, they'd have to self-custody on-chain, but the nation could implement a system where users/merchants could scan the notes on receipt (which would validate the authenticity, as well as provide information about circulation which would help with anti-counterfeit measures). Upon scanning, you'd then get a kickback from the staking rewards, proportional to the amount and the date of last scan.

Sounds like a nightmare, but it makes it accessible to homeless people, elderly, etc. and it's honestly more private than existing digital payments; scanning would be at your discretion.
There also seems to be a component to internet culture that transcends generation a bit. Like if you are into gaming and play new releases, you'll be playing along with all age groups that enjoy gaming. There isn't really a clear divide between "Games for young adults" and "Games for old people".

One place I have noticed some divides for myself at least is in memes, because naturally they tend to be in jokes between tighter knit social groups that eventually become popularized. By the time I see a new meme it's already uncool.
Only if Gold Standard means "not quite as bad as the other options," which I'm not sure is a definition that'd stick.
Oddly enough, I just read this book (after checking out the Tin House reprint from the library). It was surprising how many recent films have plots that come straight out of this book. It does seem a decent way for generating plots for those who have difficulty on that front and are writing plot-driven fiction, but for the sort of stuff that I write, where the plot arises more from the characters and the language, it's not all that useful (I picked it up thinking it might help with a story I've been working on that has left me stuck but it wasn't really useful for my own needs). In this instance what helped was to just keep writing and see where the characters led. I think the current draft of the story will probably be twice as long or more than the final story and sometimes that's what it takes.
> This post could have easily been written about alcohol in the prohibition era. We've since learned that criminalizing alcohol makes its impact on society worse rather than better.

It's worth remembering that Prohibition was, in fact, quite successful: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibit...

To quote that article:

> Across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, the number of patients treated in Bellevue Hospital’s alcohol wards dropped from fifteen thousand a year before Prohibition to under six thousand in 1924. Nationally, cirrhosis deaths fell by more than a third between 1916 and 1929. In Detroit, arrests for drunkenness declined 90 percent during Prohibition’s first year. Domestic violence complaints fell by half.

Of course, one can still find Prohibition objectionable, or think that the costs outweighed the benefits. But there is strong evidence that Prohibition succeeded in reducing some of the negative impacts of alcohol use.
Very bad analogy. The Quran has been preserved word for word since its revelation. The Arabs went on to become one of the most advanced societies history has ever seen, read up on the Islamic Golden Age. Many things we take for granted trace their roots directly to that era.

Secondly, you're making a huge fallacy. While many Arabs did not read or write at the time (and this wasn't just specific to the Arabs), they were not ignorant or dumb, which you seem to be implying. We have many surviving poems from the pre-Islamic era. They were very smart people, as we know from history.
> you still have to allocate once per object

Why can’t you bump once to allocate enough space for multiple objects?
It's easily provable that the Quran has been preserved.
cash does not require internet access or electricity.

I don’t see how it can be replaced.
> the governor claimed the authority for such a restriction

It is interesting that both the legislature and the voters seemed largely willing to accept government by executive order (and sometimes bizarre orders as you note) for much of the pandemic.
And certainly people are capable of implementing algo-based clients. Heck, have them scrape your personal web and email and whatever activity, keeping it all local.
I've seen similar abominations written in golang, but they're not public.
I just wanted to thank you for putting all this out there. I don't have a substantive reply, and I didn't want to (keep) delay writing back until I had finished thinking about what you wrote.
Isn't that kind of the point of open source software? I doubt they would use it going forward because of the BS the mastodon developers already tried to pull on a closed alpha site because they disagreed with the users. I get it, there's some people you let the little things slide because you like them and others you act strict as hell because you don't like them. It's odd to use an open source software when you feel the developers are actively trying to catch you slip up to bring you down permanently.
>You aren’t interested in doing that?

Only insofar as it doesn't inconvenience me. I'm not trying to convince you of my pov, it's just my personal opinion.

I think that individual action is no more than privileged westerners play acting, and its all for nothing.

Humans are, on average, vicious parasites. Half the world wants big macs and SUVs, the other half aspires to that.

Riding a bike to your local vegan grocer is a hilarious solution to a catastrophically depressing problem.

We're doomed, enjoy it while you can ;)
Quick "QQ" Question, Pummeler of Productivity, Destroyer of Deep Thought, Harbinger of Headaches. In more crass circles, "Flow Fucker."
golang doesn't have annotations, doesn't have enums, error handling is very error prone. No ability to choose from different GC implementations, nothing remotely close to JFR.
For those in the US worried about cash "disappearing", see this legislation recently introduced in the House [1]. It specifically counters the problems of crypto-currencies (the excess energy requirements, the transaction processing speed, etc) while providing the same guarantees as physical notes and coins and for settlement of public/private debts.

For those outside the US that are nout (hide-)bound by the US's antiquated banking system, cashless/contactless credit and debit processing has dramatically reduced physical cash usage everywhere.

Physical cash (notes/coins) is likely to mostly die out over this century. The issues raised about anonymity and traceability etc are solvable with appropriate legislation, regulation, and design.

First, there was a mandate for Chip+PIN (not signature) from the various payment networks/processors. The EMV standards for this dramatically reduced fraud and the transfer of risk from the merchant to the network reduced costs.

Second, in many countries (I'm in Australia), interchange fees are regulated and capped, while costs for processing card transactions must be separate and advertised to consumers and also limited.

Third, the introduction of contactless EMV, along with high "floor limits" (AUD200 in Australia's case) means that for the majority of transactions, there is no physical interaction required.

Fourth, most countries not only have the two primary payment networks (ie Visa/MC) but also have a third network, usually sponsored by the local monetary authority and/or local banks, for debit transactions tied to bank accounts (EFTPOS network in Australia).

Fifth, in EU, Australia, and other places, there are now "instant payment" networks, with direct settlement between accounts at the monetary authority's accounts. (New Payments Platform/Osko/PayID in Australia) [2]

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/7231...

[2] https://nppa.com.au/
> Modern art streamlined this business

Not a fan of po-mo then, I take it?
The way energy consumption is taxed is in a staffled manner. In the highest staffel the consumer wouldn’t pay any taxes on their top use. The plants thet hit these amounts are for example the reffineries.

It’s not as straight forward as just paying more unfortunately as the rules are so much in favour of big consumers one first needs to change those rules before you have the ground to ask them to pay more.
End of Life Announcement for CA Flowdock
> In other words, 0.1 gets converted from base 10 to base 2.

This isn’t really a (helpful) explanation, but it’s ample setup for: oh I see your problem, you’re converting from base 10 to base 10.
I generally agree that these things can be a sign of someone I would want to work with, but this only works when it's not something that is outwardly valued by employers; something that people just do because they like doing it.

As soon as it is it becomes essential for people to pretend they give a damn about participating in communities, everything goes to hell.
If your young boys are like mine, then they are sad that they might not actually get to drive cars in the future. However, my 5 year old already talks a lot about self driving Teslas (too much YouTube?) so what do I know?
The problem is someone else pulled your weight as well for those two quarters and probably got burned and bitter. As a pure numbers game, its worse for an organisation to have a top performing employee going sour than letting go of an under performing employee.
I smell trolling in his comments, but, in general, it's a very common worldview that is probably caused by excessive Marvel-like products consumption. If you go to a place like r/worldnews, you will see this is a mainstream position there
Kind of jarring to see one of those four things you seem to cherish so casually mentioned beside the others...
There's no way that it's accurate that this datacenter is equivalent to the energy needs of almost a million people. Not even close. A household needs ~2kW of grid capacity on average, and there are at least 400k households in Amsterdam. That's 800MW just for the domestic consumption, which excludes transport.

Consider that the EIA says NL consumed 3.818 quad BTU in 2019 ... this is about 1.1e12 kW-h, or 800x what a 160MW data center would consume. This size of data center, though fairly large, would still be much less than 1% of the energy story of that country.

Generally, data centers use far less energy that people suppose, compared to transport and industry.
> he kid could have been living at home. One spouse in one house, one spouse in the other.

Yes. If the "super-fraud" is that 18 year olds move out to unclaimed apartments or that couples can have a vacation house, I am remarkably okay with that.

> You're proposing an ad hoc centralized mechanism for expropriating and re-assigning a multi-trillion dollar asset class. This has clear and one-way precedence in history.

Except for the ad-hoc nature, the fact that property records and ownership (as well as lists of people's primary residences) are already centralized, that centralization and decentralization of real estate have precedence within the same society at different times, I totally agree. So I guess that's "multi-trillion dollar asset class" I agree with.
Also, cars allow cities to scale further than was possible without them. If cars are banned, inner cities will start hollowing out due to labor / supply shortages, etc.
> it is (socially, in terms of security) a desert hellscape

>Of course, such numbers mostly make sense in the US because it is (socially, in terms of security) a desert hellscape. The lower top salary in the EU comes with the benefit of knowing that if you go blind you won't have to die shitting yourself in some crackhouse.

Can you elaborate?

I assume the canonical source for information about the US is American TV, but I really can't imagine what you watch that makes you think there is no safety net, even for people making $100K.
Start your own business. I always thought I might like to have an ice cream shop.
To save on the credit card fees. Gas stations are one of the few businesses which are allowed to offer cash discounts in their merchant agreements.
You are a direct competitor to Google Maps. So, Google will try to evaporate your business.
We received an email today from Flowdock that their product is end of life, we found this announcement online which was announced on 10th of November 2021.

It blows me away that they would not try and sell a conversion to something else... how does a company just give up on this sort of recurring revenue with no attempt to capture some of it in the process?

Another chat system going down, Slack wins?
Don’t forget the added coalents to the water that are dumped back! I’m still curiou to hear what the composition of these chemicals is but appearantly not s single data center is able to tell oddly enough.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/dutch-town-set-a... for the size of the FB facility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder for the size of the wind farm.
> way longer than that

The main issue with "way longer than that" is that the impedance varies a whole lot with small changes in frequency when the antenna is much longer than the wavelength, and this is inconvenient. (Along with all the pattern oddities you can get).
Humans have no trouble in these conditions (after a brief training period).

What happens the first time a steering wheel free car strands a family in a blizzard due to a few feet of icy pavement, ultimately freezing them to death?
Do you also blame guns when people shoot themselves in the foot when they kept it loaded and the safety off?
I hope there will be a blog post about flyd! I love reading about what fly.io is doing.
In fact I sort of thought they had announced monomorphization, though I wasn’t following really carefully.
Parkour is a way to enter a building but if you expect other people to do it too, you’re off your gourd. If you insist on everyone else doing it, you’re a maniac.

Too many maniacs in this industry.
> There's nothing unique, unconstitutional, or immoral about any of this.

Of course it’s immoral! From the article:

> If the homeowner still cannot pay, the company can foreclose on the property and evict them. After paying the taxes, it gets to keep the remaining equity in the property — which could be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

> That contrasts with what happens when a bank forecloses on a property. In that case, the bank sells the property, deducts from the proceeds what it is owed, then returns any remaining equity to the former owner.

If someone wants to buy the tax liens from a government and charge the 16% interest mentioned in the article, fine. But to grant them some kind of nuclear foreclosure power that lets them take the entire property (rather than simply force a sale and take the owed amount), especially if it happens to be someone’s actual home, is absolutely immoral.
>> As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created

Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ?

A quick search suggests FB consume on average about 1 gigawatt globally. The original article calls it a 200 megawatt DC. That would be 20% of facebooks global energy consumption.

Given FB seem to have 18 existing Data center locations it would imply huge growth or consildation plans for that DC to consume 200 megawatts all the time.

In 2020 the global renewable energy supply capacity was approximately 2500 gigawatts so facebook used less than 0.5% of that capacity.

There are lots of valid reasons to oppose facebook, but it doesnt seem that monopolising the consumption of renewabel energy is a credible one.

https://sustainability.fb.com/report/2020-sustainability-rep...

https://www.irena.org/publications/2020/Mar/Renewable-Capaci...
You can now integrate Google Search on your website
For anyone who wants to give LineageOS a try but can't/won't figure out how to jailbreak your phone to install it, check out https://privatephoneshop.com/

They have a decent selection of relatively modern phones. They will sell you a phone with LineageOS and microG pre-installed ( CalyxOS or GrapheneOS also ). They offer a super smooth buying experience and they are also quick to ship.

I've purchased two phones from them and both have exceeded my expectations. Another reason I like them is because the owners put out a lot of excellent content on keeping good privacy practices and combating invasive advertising.

My only complaint is that I wish they offered more phone models. It's a small thing though. I'm just happy they're available in the USA where it's becoming nearly impossible to purchase a smartphone that doesn't have a carrier-enforced restriction on flashing the bootloader.
>For a single transaction, is it even possible to make a transaction with a credit card when: - The chip/card reader fails? - The network connection is down? - There's a power outage?

In the power outage situation, the merchant won't be able to handle any transactions and they may not be able to legally open their doors even if they could. I don't think I've ever encountered the other two scenarios ever. I would imagine that CC payment systems have resiliency for a network failure and most businesses have at least two card/chip reader terminals for transactions.
Who said anything about a bank branch? I did it on the Central Bank of Ukraine’s website in about 30 seconds. I don’t know how much I can emphasize what a solved problem this is.
A look at the dialog elements super powy
But that's true in general.

What's another way to describe the "best doctor in the country"?

"Marginally better than the next best option".
Maybe show a warning that the install script enables telemetry by default and implement https://consoledonottrack.com/. Users who do not wish to participate in telemetry can set the DO_NOT_TRACK=1 environment variable before running the script.
This is repulsive, especially in a world where we're seeing authoritarians use all sorts of bullshit, made up excuses to arbitrarily punish people.

No - the government does (should) not have the authority in any normal democracy to arbitrarily freeze the finances of those who have not committed any crimes, especially those that have not been proven in court or whereupon there isn't any threat of impending violence.

The situation is obviously politicized, as there are perennially 'protest' activities in every nation which may technically 'criminal'.

The are innumerable protests and related activities in Canada related such things as block Oil pipelines from being built, Aboriginal blockades etc..

In Portland, Oregon, several city blocks were taken over by violent force - with a militia of self-appointed 'soldiers' brandishing weapons, prevent police and emergency services in.

Were their finances blocked? Were the supporting charities blocked? Did those donating to the charities have their assets frozen - no in all cases.

The justice system of most governments have ample power to enforce basic laws, as exemplified by the police response at the border in Alberta and Ontario, and should not be partial to the 'types of protesters' they chose to pursue let alone pursue extra constitutional measures.

That extra judicial measures were taken in Canada is a stain on Democracy and definitely an indication that the government can't be trusted with basic civil liberties specifically with respect to the issue of the transfer of money.

The last thing we need is more oversight over basic finances. If the police, acting independently of any politicians impetus, get a warrant from a judge to intervene in something or the other - they can do that, and it's why those mechanisms exist in the first place.