skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No, cats do not recognize themselves in mirrors. Very few animals do.

That is certainly the conventional belief.

But that conventional belief is founded on a single fundamental test (the mirror-dot test) that may simply be difficult to apply to cats.

Other animals were thought not to be able to recognise themselves until they passed that test.

When they pass the test, we say that animals of that species can recognise themselves in the mirror. It's a single observation.

So the question then becomes: are we so sure about that test?

If you have not watched the video, watch it a few times.

The only other really sensible explanation is that the cat only gets this far:

The mirror cat does everything I do! Every time! I know the thing on the wall has the mirror cat in. I can only see the mirror cat's ears... Ears are interesting. Do my ears look like that? Since the mirror cat matches my every movement, that must be what my ears look like. So if I rub my paws on my ears, and watch the mirror cat copy me, I should be able to confirm that interpretation...

The cat is definitely performing a slow, precise movement in order to watch what happens in the mirror. She sits up to make sure she can see it, before she does it. (She doesn't need to sit up to clean her own ears without looking). It's far too deliberate and studied; we know what cats look like when they are concentrating on movement.

That she comes up short of realising that the mirror cat is herself is definitely plausible. But even then it is demonstrating an enhanced theory of mind, because it involves predicting that the mirror cat's actions will always match her actions, that this can be used to test an idea, and that conclusions can be drawn about what she must look like when doing the same actions.

At some point, we have to accept that the idea that we are wrongly projecting our unique intelligence onto other animals is actually pretty arrogant.
I used Headspace's mindful meditation for a few weeks to attempt to manage some work related stress in an old job. It did help me a little bit initially but it wasn't helping with the root cause of the problem (that the job sucked and I should look for another one).

I know people who have really benefited from mindful meditation as a means to manage stress though so I don't doubt it does help some people. Possibly better for the types of stress and anxiety that builds up over time from a mixture of sources than solely from one obvious cause like in my case.
I'm looking at this as a reference timeline:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/17/timeline-what-led-f...

It looks to me like France/Mali gov relations took a turn after the 2020 coup ?
All in all I can totally imagine Malian population having an anti-French sentiment, while their government is in bed with French entities.
One of the world's richest men using the homeless as a punchline.
Unfortunately they don’t go into any second order effects. In particular I’d be curious about how many hospitalizations it would take to zero out the advantage of reducing ~2% gas usage.

The problem we have right now is: we literally don’t know what the consequences of going cold turkey would be. It’s very likely, that creature comfort would be _completely_ unaffected.
The problem lies within the industry. And it’s unclear how elastic the demand there can even be. E.g. things like ceramic burners, it’s unclear whether you can reactivate them after you let them cool down or whether they’d burst. Same goes for nearly every intermediate stage in chemical processes and storages. It’s unclear if “pausing” production doesn’t also imply “rebuilding”.
And depending on the elasticity of the demand (which will probably be surprisingly high, since these companies are _extremely_ well motivated to find solutions to a problem they hadn’t had before) it’s unclear how much gas we need (both in storage and by implication still buying from Russia).

We now have best-case scenarios talking about ~6% GDP loss max. But that assume practically no second order effects and is based on GDP numbers. Ie i wouldn’t be surprised, if that requires gas to go where there simply is no pipeline.

As I said in the beginning: The problem is we don’t know how things are interconnected. Yes by all means: if you feel comfortable with a lower room temperature then lower your temp. But these 1-2% things… we don’t have 30 of those. And they are extremely costly in terms of political capital
I'm still rocking a x230 with the old Lenovo dock. It's a pleasure to just put it down/ pick up without any attached cables. Though didn't the Lenovo X1 had a nice bottom-attachee dock too?
His famous anti Perl rant circa 2000: (I worked as a Perl dev in 2000)
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/LGeQBt_ClfI/m/Y...
Yea I agree. I wish Republicans would stop creating new ones ya know?

I’m also surprised at how small the defense industry is. What do you think we do to support tech companies? Do you think wars in Africa can be traced back to government support for Netflix and Stripe? Maybe we’re not supporting the defense industry, but actually supporting someone else behind the scenes yea?
Found headspace helpful but only really noticed after a month where I made time for it every morning. In particular I appreciated some of the techniques in different courses - different forms of attention and focus, noting, visualization. My consistency has fallen off and I can see an impact on ability to find and stay in flow; but even without a regular practice I find I’m more aware of when and how I get distracted and don’t fall quite as far away from it.
Would it? Who watches streams on YouTube??
It is weird, because this is really just a static website generator. It's not a zine or magazine creator by any measure.
the convergence of the 2 dots followed by the only one left taking off seems extremely peculiar, though.

That plus the obvious evidence of multiple different explanations promulgated by authorities strongly suggests some sort of coverup
In org-roam v2, file names are definitely not random.

For example, when calling org-roam-node-find to create a new note, say I type "This is My New Note". The file created is named "this_is_my_new_note.org".

Here's an article regarding workflow from the maintainer that I found quite helpful: https://jethrokuan.github.io/org-roam-guide/
After trying Headspace and Calm I settled on the app Waking Up[0] and have been using it for a couple of years now. It's been a huge help. It's a lot more than just a guided meditation app.

While you can get some benefits from simply practicing meditation, it can feel a bit aimless. What I like about Waking Up is the conversations with experienced meditators where they talk about the practice itself. These serve as a guide for my own practice. There's a whole section that consists of conversations on the theory behind meditation. As an HN type I eat these up.

I also don't think you can get the full benefit of a meditation practice without considering the nature of mind and consciousness. The app includes several discussions on this topic as well and it helped to inform my practice substantially.

[0]https://wakingup.com/
Probably saw this guy mentioned on that awfully long Xah Lee wikipost.
> The original point is an interesting example of being correct, but also misleading in that it paints getting the vaccine after natural infection as the best course of action. It has benefits, but probably not as many immune benefits as having a second asymptomatic infection after the original one.

It makes no sense to compare getting the vaccine to getting a second asymptomatic infection. It is impossible to control the level of symptoms you get from a natural infection.
A lot of it is spent on state sponsored terrorism in India and the Kashmir region. Good question indeed as to why we're paying for all this.
Such confidence and such ignorance, a powerful combo. I recommend you go spend some more time around wild animals or you'll continue to have trouble seeing the continuity between us and "the animals". We could be better stewards.
You can tell cats are smarter than humans by the way there are none of them on Facebook.
That's an area where the community has consistently failed. There's clearly desire among companies to rally behind just one distro (in most cases this is Ubuntu, like it or not) and so if the community was thinking ahead, they would be using that as the standard and aiming for compatibility with it. Instead you get a countless number of distros taking pride in how they're not Ubuntu and they carelessly break Ubuntu software for no reason. In some ways Ubuntu is also part of the problem here by taking actions to make it more difficult for the community to engage.
I went on popular podcast to discuss the life altering benefits and cross promoted my unrelated ebook and self help program. Now I make 7 figures working 4 hours a week from Bali. I've never used any of these apps or meditated once, I have severe ADHD, slight brain damage from a scooter accident and short term memory loss from all the weed. Aurora rocks. AMA.
My cats often want to be fed or to go outside.

Wheelchair-height handle-style doorknobs mean my cat goes wherever she wants whenever she wants.

Baby-proof door latches are my friend.
It depends on which keyboard you're using. I'm using the Google keyboard and it's pretty advanced: i typed this comment with it, and only corrected the word "typed" which showed up as "tired"
Not sure which swipe keyboard you are using, but the default iOS implementation is terrible.

Google keyboard is orders if magnitude better (and handles multilingual situations much better as well).
We need better, more intelligent tools to search through the corpus of human knowledge.
I don't think it matters. Deposit insurance is independent from the ability to print dollars. It's an insurance fund that gets contributions from banks.
I found it funny.
There's the government, and there's the people. These are very separate entities. You can't combine them like that.

You're effectively punishing Russian people for something they have no say in. There is no public opinion in this country and the government lacks any meaningful feedback mechanisms.
That wasn't an arbitrary definition invented by GP to make a point. It was copied from Wikipedia.

Major dictionaries agree that censorship is not limited to government censorship. For example Webster defines “to censor” as “to examine in order to suppress (see SUPPRESS sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable”
I saw it as a sign that he's not a fan of WFH/remote arrangements for tech companies, though at its root it's a shitpost.
> The problem is at this point I have been on the team too long to ask any basic questions, one of the senior engineers even pointed out they shouldn't be helping me with certain processes at this point.

The senior dev is toxic.
Any member should feel easy to ask any questions, no matter how experienced they are.
It's almost always better to ask questions immediately.

I've also made mistakes by not asking questions.

I joined a team as a senior dev and worked there for more than ten months.
Sometimes, I felt like I didn't understand very basic contexts in the meetings.
I couldn't ask what they were talking about
because I was afraid of being seen as an incompetent dev.

It turned out that they forgot to invite me to one of the most important Slack channels,
where the product owner, the marketing team, the executives, and devs had discussions
on important business decisions and the direction of the entire dev team.
I was the only member who didn't follow the channel,
so know nothing about the important decisions.

We found out that after ten months, and they apologized for the mistake.
And they even prized me for being productive despite not knowing
the decisions made in the channel.
But I was really ashamed of myself.
I felt like I lacked some basic context a dozen times
but never asked "sorry, what are you talking" even a single time.
Instead, I pretended to understand what they said.

Once I followed the discussions there,
I became more productive due to much fewer communication errors
on the business decisions and direction of the dev team.
Since then, I've tried to ask any questions as soon as possible.
Thanks! It never occurred to me to leverage that, but is closer to what I was looking for.
No, debts are a different type of asset. Eurodollars are currency, i.e. cash and bank deposits.
Minor criticism: I wonder why including a statement like "like a vector field whose elements become aligned" was thought necessary. It does not make much sense technically and it does not even add to the content. If anything it makes me doubt the rest of the essay by suddenly making me aware that Gell-Mann amnesia is a thing. From my point of view it is absolutely net-negative.
I disagree. He's one of the last reasons I have any optimism at all about the future.

How can you watch this drone video of Giga Berlin and not be impressed and inspired?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-4yOx1CnXE

Or inspired by what SpaceX is accomplishing? None of this would exist if he hadn't invested all his Paypal earnings and time over the past 20 years into them. He could have retired and burned it on a yacht instead.
entangled quantum pairs?
Is the situation in the US that insane or is he fighting strawmen strapped to windmills?
I think what he's doing is trying to use the internet like people interact in real life. Online we all have these overly straight forward and sterile personas, for the most part, because people get so weird and autistic about jokes or off-color references, like my last choice of adjective. It's not serious and not reflective of my views, but also has enough of a tinge of truth in it to convey some meaning - like all of the Elon's current slew of shitposts.

And I think the reason "people" get bent out of shape about tweets was answered pretty aptly by this [1] post which is also why I put "people" in quotes. 22% of Americans (2019) use Twitter, with a bias towards youth and liberalism. And of those 22%, 80% of all posts are generated by 10% of them with what is almost certainly a further bias.

So when you think of "people" on Twitter you're talking about a biased to heavily biased sample of 2.2% of America. It's about as representative of America as Atherton is. So the reason people get bent out of shape about posts on Twitter is because Twitter is a little micro-bubble of society where the people engulfed within it likely have a very different perspective of reality than people outside of it.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30838517
Meetings Are a Waste of Time
Nuclear warhead accounting for treaty purposes is not intuitive, they aren't always counting the things you would assume. US warheads are thermonuclear, so they use a tiny plutonium primary stage to trigger the main fusion secondary stage. The "hard part" is the plutonium trigger, and without it a thermonuclear warhead is harmless and inert.

When the US decommissions a warhead for treaty purposes, they remove the plutonium trigger and put it on a shelf somewhere. The trigger assembly doesn't count as a weapon, and therefore it can't be deployed. However, since the plutonium trigger is not actually destroyed, these could be rapidly assembled into a deployable weapon. You would not expect any of these to be participating in a nuclear exchange. The US has relative few operational warheads but it probably maintains an inventory of 10,000+ plutonium triggers.

For treaty purposes, they often count delivery platforms, like missiles and bombers. This makes sense when you consider that it is easy to re-hydrate a warhead on short notice if you have the necessary components in inventory but not so easy to produce an operational delivery system which may have a lead time of years.
The film Network (1976) predicted all of this.

The difference is that instead of a TV network exploiting the crazy for profit, the lunatics are now fully in control.

It's truly something that Elon went from calling a rescue diver a "pedo", spreading dangerous covid misinformation, and generally doing everything a normal person would get banned from twitter for to becoming a board member. But I'm not surprised.
What I find most interesting are those arguing against "cancel culture" and the revival of heretics don't find issue with things like the "critical race theory" boogeyman and the "don't say gay"-style bills preventing teaching of sexuality topics.

It's interesting how consistency of free thought isn't really the important thing here.
A lot of people? Youtube is streaming live sport events, concerts, political rallies, conferences etc. It has a far bigger reach and scope than Twitch.

And not to say the actual videoplayer is also better, live rewind for example which still non-existent on Twitch
Not very aware of history and current events are you?
Hey HN,

I couldn't get an idea out of my mind so I built it -- Waaard is a way to share links and files which requires verification for the openers. It's such a simple idea I thought it would take 1 week and the last 10% took another 4 weeks.

Other platforms (google, dropbox, etc) let you share links, but they often don't verify the person on the other end (outside of making sure they have a google account for example, or are in your org). There's the enterprise dataroom solutions as well but they're all pretty pricey and are more geared for one/short-time use.

It builds on my other project LoginWithHN (https://loginwithhn.com) so it was great to roll that in! That was discussed on HN twice[0][1] so I won't recount it here. With Waaard you can create a note that only HNers (any, or someone in particular) can read. Or if you wanted to make a note that only @paulg on twitter that's possible too.

This was also my first chance to use SvelteKit on something more substantial so I'm happy to be able to get my hands dirty too (pre 1.0, in usual dangerous yak-shavey fashion). Happy to discuss the stack it's built on (sveltekit + typescript + postgres + pulumi + more) , but it gets quite trendy (k8s) towards the bottom so maybe not HN's cup of tea -- I found it to be very productive though!

I've also got a little project that I use to stamp out SaaS ideas called ReadySetSaaS which I'd love to talk about (it's one of the longest yak shaves I've ever done)! ~15k lines of code (including infra-as-code) which helps me handle signup/login, payments, resource provision (if your thing is provisioning resources), provisioning licenses (if your thing is provisioning licenses), authn proxies for your API, emails, and more. If I was a really good yak shaver, I would have built and deployed this to Nimbus[2], but that's not done yet... because I was working on Waaard (bit of a circular problem there!).

I'm working on adding a few things (for example being able to check someone's GitHub Org, Bitbucket as a provider, Heroku, etc.) but for now, it's usable, and I'd love some feedback!

I think the feature I'm most excited about building is paid links (you bring your Stripe/Paypal/Braintree/etc account) -- it could be a little Gumroad (got a book to sell? upload the PDF and you've got an instant page to sell with) and I'm excited about the possibility!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29923736

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30427381

[2]: https://nimbusws.com
I read something recently that suggests that Russia thinks it could not prevent a US counter-strike even with a full Russian first strike, which makes a full first strike by either side pretty unlikely, since the US posture seems to be no first strikes. In which case, the next most likely scenario might be: A destroys a city, B destroys a city in response, and then A tells B: "we are retaliating one more time, how about we stop after this?" And then everybody stops because the alternative is worse.

I wish I could remember where I read it. It still isn't particularly comforting, but maybe better than the all-out-nuclear-war scenario.
It seems like Paul is confusing intolerance of intolerance with heresy in this essay.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Expression of just about anything is met with fairly minimal consequence at least in much of the US, but nonetheless, there's a difference between not accepting something versus being intolerant of it.

E.g not accepting [way of living] in one's own daily life v. not tolerating it in the world around oneself. Are both of these rejections abhorrent? Probably. But the line is crossed when someone transcends a refusal of acceptance in one's personal sphere into a refusal of tolerance of such in the world around them.

(I had a specific thing in the brackets, but pulling a page from Paul's essay, I figured I'd blot it out to make it a neutral point. Fill the blank with [religion] or [suspect classification] or [politics] and it still holds.)
It’s $6/user/month. So yes, you’d be paying that for each.
Not only that, but when I read the headline I got really excited it could help generate Zines.

I'm not saying every project needs to match the name on the tin, but all the zines I've read have wacky page layouts, quirky pictures and articles, and a lot of personality.

This project seems to take content and turn it into really bland flat design with social media style scrolling of thumbnails. Every page has elements perfectly aligned. And, at least in the one example they shared, even the colors are really boring.

https://2d2d.io/

If you want a relevant example, 2600 magazine does a good job of giving each page a unique feel and keeping that hacker spirit alive from it and it's articles.
Where do you see a double standard? Did iso1210 say that the US should keep bombing people?

This is just apologism for Russian atrocities masquerading as pointing out a double standard. As we’ve seen in the West for more than one hundred years now.
I mean, this is the only real response to people posting this sort of nonsense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkCBhKs4faI
"Observation of the latest potentially space-faring budding intelligent species in the universe" might be a thing. Plus, possibly taking away the knives from the children: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-dea...
More than Islam, Islamism (i.e. militants of a political islam, not to be confused with jihadism). I can't think of any muslim country where the islamists are not either one of the major political parties (if not in power), or were a major political force but have been banned, or are a major party to a civil war.

I am sure I am missing some countries and many nuances but from a quick glance at the map and wikipedia:

Morocco: the previous prime minister was from an islamist party (Justice and Development Party)

Algeria: islamists (FIS) outlawed when about to win 1992 elections

Tunisia: islamists are the largest political party (Ennahda)

Libya: islamist a party to the civil war

Egypt: islamists won the elections (Morsi) before a coup

Mali: islamists are party to the current war

Saudi Arabia: political islam in power

Syria: islamists major party to civil war

Jordan: were major political party but have been banned

Iraq: islamists major party to civil war

Turkey: Erdogan is effectively a muslim brother

Iran: political islam in power

Afghanistan: talibans just took power

Pakistan: political islam in power

Indonesia: islamist parties being outlawed

Now there are all sort of other forces at play in political instability: ethnic hatred, various economic interests, etc. But the steady rise of islamism across the muslim world is real, and has probably a much bigger influence on the stability of africa than current or past western meddlings. In many ways it is the communism of the XXI century, i.e. an ideology which has gained widespread support, wants to take power one way or another, is an enemy of modern, secular, freedom loving liberalism, is full of internal divisions but have this common goal of imposing the Sharia as the rule of law. But its influence seems to have been completely ignored by the cookie cutter response that any problem of the world should be attributed to the West, one way or another.