skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The automatic lead advance works like this: When the lead sleeve is retracted by any amount, it springs back to it's full length and along with that advances the lead by that amount. The way this happens in practice is as you write, the lead wears down till the sleeve rubs against the paper. Usually we write with the pencil at an angle with the paper. This angle causes the lead sleeve to retract when it rubs on the paper and then when you lift the pencil for the next stroke, the lead sleeve will spring back into position advancing the lead with it.

If you're interested in more details and how the mechanism actually works, here is a good link: https://stationery.wiki/Auto-Advance_mechanism
No, like, you could use something like https://www.ego.dev/ and have Vault or something that worked more like an HSM
Mathematics is a useful way to make sense of the world but it's certainly possible that the universe is not itself a mathematical structure which would mean that mathematics is only an approximation (albeit a very good one when it comes to making sense of and predictions about the world). So I disagree with the author's conclusion that the universe must be mathematical and that we could not make rational sense of it if that wasn't the case. The universe is a big place and even the best theory we have of describing its large scale structure (general relativity) is mathematically incomplete (singularities). Similarly the small scale structure is described by another incomplete theory (quantum mechanics) and progress on reconciling the two has been stuck for some time now.

> Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, “Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think,” surprise you? Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts. If you recall that modern science is only about 400 years old, and that there have been from 3 to 5 generations per century, then there have been at most 20 generations since Newton and Galileo. If you pick 4,000 years for the age of science, generally, then you get an upper bound of 200 generations. Considering the effects of evolution we are looking for via selection of small chance variations, it does not seem to me that evolution can explain more than a small part of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. [1]

Hamming elaborates more on what he means by "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in Chapter 23 of "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn" and the entire chapter is worth reading in full because it's full of other useful comments on mathematics and symbolic systems of reasoning.

--

1: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (1980) - Richard Hamming
Oof, only now do I realize I need to record account deletions somewhere independent of my database backups so I don't accidentally restore accounts I shouldn't if something goes horribly wrong. Not sure why I didn't think of this before.
It's very often safer to cross during a red light when you don't have to do so with a bunch of cars. Often the intersection is empty. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Curious how there is no CSAM scare mongering when it's companies that need private storage of information.
I do wonder if this was factored at all into the algorithms. Anger and rage inducing content is great for engagement but it adds a lot of overhead in increased moderation. Does that make it less profitable overall than an algorithm designed to elicit positive emotions? Engagement might be down, but happy users won't continually be at each other's throats leading to less required moderation and constant controversy.
No, it's not. It's people that want to buy, so they can sell it at a premium to Musk later. It's pure speculation.
This is a "Guess what I'm thinking" question.

Non-psychic candidates will struggle with this challenge, so you might find it produces some false negatives.

Since you already seem to know so much about debugging slow performing database queries on your particular RDBMS stack, though... what was your thinking in looking to bring on board someone else who duplicates that exact knowledge?

Oh, and it'll be a missing index. It's always a missing index.
Agreed. Gimme goddamn booleans that work!
Ask HN: Have you gotten a job after attending a coding academy?
How hard was it?

Did you get a competitive salary?

Do you think you are starting your career on a solid footing?
I think we should just jump to the end game and make interviewees do ultra man triathlons while solving differential equations. Then at the finish line, they knife fight each other to find the one we let go to the next stage in the interview. That way we can be sure who has stamina and the best competitive programming problem solving skills.

Something like squid game will truely find the A players. I mean, we wouldn’t want a bad hire after all, and everyone lies on their CV.

(Obviously /s)
from what i understand it's a matter of ideals combined with the technologist's desire to see the machines (all types, including sociopolitical) work correctly.

he wants to see the first amendment function with autistic precision. he wants to remove any messy personalization because it interferes with that purity. he wants fully transparent moderation and proof of fairness. he doesn't like the idea that one organization has such control and he likely wants to turn the company into a dao. he's searching for a problem to apply cryptocurrency technologies to.

what i think he doesn't get are the messy realities of the real world. we're already on the cusp of world war iii, can we chill for just a few minutes?
I agree. Can't dismiss the possibility since anything advertising itself as a service to protect your privacy could make a very nice honeypot for the state, but there's a market for pro-privacy services that private companies are happy to serve and nothing stopping the state from just taking whatever that want from them anyway.
Pretty interesting perspective, I wish it were in a different format so I could read it easier.

I think the biggest problem with globally scaled companies is that HUMANS can’t mentally scale their expectations with the size. Meaning, if you have 10,000 people pissed and tweeting about something, you think “Oh my God this has gone viral, something has to be done!” But 10,000 angry tweets are nothing. 100,000 angry tweets are nothing. But to a single human it’s humongous but compared to the size of Twitters audience, some 300,000,000 people, 100,000 is not material.

Combine that with the majority that probably agree with you being silent, it’s easy to feel like you’re on the wrong side if you disagree. But you might not be.

Someone with guts needs to say, fuck the 100,000 angry tweets, this is the right thing to do. That person is Elon. And I’m not a fanboy at all because I generally hate him. But I admire his actions here. All I know is that he is a “fuck it” kind of guy and that’s what will lead social media out of this mess. People need to stop worrying about tens of thousands of angry tweets and just have the proper internal compass.
I like your dream! An invisible computing system and environment with a range of inputs/interfaces and software to extend the human intellect. You probably mean Dynamicland of Alan Kay and Bret Victor?

https://dynamicland.org

In contrast, "decentraland" seems like a project involving virtual reality and blockchain/web3 stuff.

https://decentraland.org

"The Screenless Office" was new to me, an intriguing concept.

http://screenl.es

It makes me think of screen readers, and how I imagine blind people interact with the computer and navigate the web with auditory feedback instead of visual.

> ..if I could build these things out of commodity parts

It feels like you might get pretty far with commodity hardware, like microcomputers, sensors, electronic parts and so on. The software side sounds like years of work though. I can picture it as a long-term passion project, growing a personal computing ecosystem..

Your description sparked some imagination for my own take on the vision, involving MIDI keyboards and instruments with knobs, dials, touch screen; and a projector that turns a whole wall into a computing interface. Some microphones and cameras as input devices, parsing hand and body gestures..
There are several possible Chinese goals here, none of which require permanently closed borders:

1. Zero Covid until mRNA vaccines become available to them. Given the infectivity of Omicron and the technical hurdles to mRNA vaccines, they seem unlikely to succeed here.

2. Contain the burn to one city/region at a time so that resources from across the country can be moved in, reducing deaths. Again, seems unlikely to be possible given the infectivity of Omicron, but this goal requires quarantined borders to work.

3. Wait until less lethal variants arise, then select only less lethal variants to allow into the country. Given their failure in keeping out Delta and Omicron, this seems impossible, but it would be a good goal. It is complicated by their lack of effective vaccination, which makes comparing variants hard.

4. Continue Zero Covid as theater to avoid undermining the government's legitimacy, perhaps until the population can become quietly infected. This could be combined with ineffective testing, variant selection, and more effective censorship. (And perhaps border closures need only occur until these systems are in place.)

5. Maintain Zero Covid until the next political meeting. Let the floodgates loose after the current government is stable.

6. Find a way to end Zero Covid which can be blamed on political enemies (domestic or foreign).

Honestly, I am skeptical both that the Chinese have a real long term plan, and that their current border restrictions cannot be maintained forever. While it seems impossible to contain a virus with the infectivity of measles, it is travellers who pay for the border quarantines. The state might enjoy maintaining them merely as a way of reducing contact with subversive foreign ideas.
Do you remember Google Plus? Google had excellent financing and an existing team of excellent software developers and couldn't pull of a credible alternative to facebook.

The world is littered with the expensive corpses of failed software.
I suspect that anyone offering such an agreement in a potentially venture funded startup would be so hopelessly naive that it would be a huge red flag for further issues down the track (partnership or co-op model might be a different story, but probably not).
I'm not getting the impression that his actions are the result of a highly polished corporate public personna, I think his actions make way more sense if you imagine that he's just some regular, kinda bright, really eccentric asshole with more money than god.

Like, you can probably imagine at least one person you know acting this way if they discovered a genie.
He doesn't have clear thoughts.

His example: left wing wokes complain racist/sexist speeches exist, center / right / libertarians complain they are censored.

Are you kidding me, how are those two equivalent?

First, center / right / libertarians is a big group, they are not the opposite of the left wing wokes, they are not the one make racist/sexist speeches.

Second, left wing wokes complain the platform does not censor others enough, center / right / libertarians complain the platform censors themselves too much.

How the hell are those two comparable? Just because you mention the left this this, the right that that, does not make the two points comparable.
There is definitely a network effect around scale and populations of users.

Gettr seems to be making positive inroads on the conservative/libertarian population, particularly those for whom twitter is not an option due to previous banning/shadow-banning, and de-boosting.

As I expect there to be consolidation between truth social, gettr, parler, and others, think this will only get stronger.

Part of this is also that younger populations are preferring tiktok to Twitter imo.
I'm inclined to agree. I don't have first hand knowledge, but I certainly find it interesting how differently "vaccine reactions" and "long covid" get treated, when both exist on roughly the same evidence
Oh man I hope this becomes a treatment in the next couple of years. I wonder if it’ll help treat my tinnitus too. I will pay to reduce my tinnitus , and restoring hearing would be an added bonus.

Looking forward to the progress in this.
More likely he'll withdraw offer and sell his stake, causing share price to drop and all shareholders losing real and potential gain.
I don't really buy the monoculture argument, for two reasons.

Firstly, the first nightclub to open in an area with demand for music and alcohol, or cafe with demand for coffee and croissants, is going to very profitable.

Secondly, most businesses rent. They rent from profit-seeking commercial landlords who charge them a market rate. A land value tax is loosely based on the same market rate, just not inclusive of improvements. To argue that commercial tenants will be charged more is to argue that commercial landlords are leaving money on the table, which I don't believe.
#!/bin/sh is also available
I've encountered H1-B fraud once, in an unscrupulous YC startup once, regretfully.

After getting their way to YC, the founders hired two fresh H1s from India, with no internal advertisement [that's not legal]. That resulted in a significant change in negotiating power with early employees. The company went from 33% Indian into 100% Indian in 3 months.

Tried reporting this as an ethics violation to YC, no one cared. Didn't bother to report to INS, that would have caused problems to the hires and they were not the ones responsible for lies and fraud.
yes, there are many factors that can influence a valuation. and in different price ranges, different factors will have different weights. since the price is not $0 today and is relatively close to the potential transaction price, the % likelihood of a transaction has much more influence.
that's a bad analogy.

With vim, emacs, C, shell etc... you can still do everything other programs do, there is just more setup and sharp edges.

With MS Paint, no amount of setup can produce gradients or layers with proper transparency. It is not usability/polish question, this is core deficiency.
An L for Twitter inc, perhaps. OP did not say shareholders would win their lawsuits. Elon obviously has zero interest in a financial return. It's clear he genuinely believes Twitter could be better, especially around free speech.
Key word down payment. You put 200k down on the rental and get 200k in rent. You pay 1.6 million on a 800k loan and own the house at the end. Without appreciation, you are 600k in the hole
> 85K new H1B's a year aren't enough to depress wages when the population of the US is 300M+.

Well, this is obviously false.

Compare these numbers from 2017 ( https://elaineou.com/2017/08/26/the-mystery-of-the-vanishing... )

> According to this Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, 74% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign-born immigrants. A decade ago, 36% of Silicon Valley tech workers were born abroad. In 2000, only 29% were.

> Tech industry employment has increased from about 300,000 jobs in 2007 to 400,000 in 2016, so even though we created 100,000 engineering positions in the last decade, we’ve also displaced 88,000 domestic engineers.

"74% of the employment pool just isn't enough people to make a dent in salaries" is not an argument that can pass the laugh test.
It's not about my own movies that don't get made.

It's about all the other movies that don't get to be financed because of the 19th re-hash of Star Wars (or Marvel movie, or live-action remake of Lion King/Aladdin/Pocahontas/Dumbo/Bambi) that is going to be released and it's "guaranteed" to make another billion dollars in the box office.

It's about having two small kids who get bombarded with products from their franchises on every media outlet.

It's about them using their movies and works to promote whatever ideological propaganda that gets them in favor with government.
it's not that we stopped believing in free speech, it's just that, like many other words and terms, "free speech" has been "Newspeaked", redefined before our very eyes, in our very lifetimes, and all they had to do to accomplish it was put the Internet in everyone's pocket and convince them it will brainwash them into being evil mindless automatons or something, unless The Right People oversee and moderate what can and cannot be discussed online. literally nobody thought this way 15 years ago.
ETFs generally aren’t managed without human involvement, and this poison pill isn’t software either. You’re taking concepts that exist in worlds like Ethereum and applying it to normal finance. That’s not how it works.
One of the key arguments in favor of enforcing private property rights when this idea was taking shape during the Enlightenment is that they are a powerful incentive to develop. So an additional incentive to either generate revenue from the land, or sell to someone who is willing to, is very much in the spirit of modern property rights.
The first rule is fine, but the interpretation given in the screenshot is in my view both unreasonable on its own merits and incorrect on the substance of what the rule actually says
you have to get all of society to agree to your restrictions. By forcing people via mandates you are violating their human rights. Maybe their risk assessment is different? Maybe they value other things than you? Doesn’t matter, the fact they don’t agree with the restrictions should be respected. We have no right to do it.

See also: this article. What is happening in china right now is just slightly more advanced than what many countries and states did for themselves.
I guess if you want something single-file that resembles git (now thinking better, not sure if a requirement at all), you can also try Fossil ( https://www2.fossil-scm.org ).
Legitimate interest (as mentioned in the GDPR) is your friend here.

GDPR enforcement is not black and white and there is no specific rules or timeframes you’re allowed to keep data - instead, if there is a complaint, the regulator will work with you to understand your argument before any penalties are handed out, so you’ll be fine unless you’re obviously acting in bad faith.

So deleting data from the primary data store while keeping backups for a reasonable amount of time (3 months?) is totally fine even though you are technically right in that the data hasn’t yet been fully deleted.
I use kagi as it still uses all of the ddg !bangs, and at some point they will ask me to pay for them (they are in free beta ATM) rather than show me ads which I'm excited for.
Or any opensource project they have contributed to.
"asshole"

What has he done to deserve that label?
You might be imagining the wrong model, its not the people that'll leave if Elon Musk does, but the entire cesspool around repackaging hot takes and reactions to his actions and tweets goes away too. I have a feeling its a lot of content that would dry up.
I agree with this except that

> "cancel culture" is simply culture

There are 2 types of cancel culture: society "cancelling" people when we discover they are extremely toxic and/or sexual predators, and private citizens getting doxxed, slandered, and sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark. The latter is a by-product of social networks, especially Twitter, and it's a real problem with real consequences.

Saying or doing something racist or rude is bad, it should and would probably get you kicked out of a bar or event. But prior to social media, it would not get your entire reputation ruined, and you wouldn't get 50,000 random people to start harassing you. I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment.

But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will also get "cancelled". Then the definition of "borderline" politically-incorrect shifts further left, more and more becomes taboo, and people start to deny facts because they don't agree to societal norms. When reality is taboo, you get real consequences.

We need a grey area, where you can say something which isn't "accepted by society", but it doesn't get you effectively blacklisted everywhere, and it doesn't affect things like job offers. I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off. But with everyone connected and very scrutinizing/critical it's starting to go away.
Interesting, I wasn't aware there was any ambiguity. To be honest I'm not really paying any attention to it though.

What kinds of reasons (valid or invalid) is Russia giving? Are there actually nazis in Ukraine?
No, only the price.
Societally, when some person or org uses a Xeon processor for CSAM distribution, nobody things "man I wish Intel stopped this". However, when it's Apple considering end-to-end encrypted iCloud Photos or iCloud backups, people (read: federal law enforcement) will blame Apple for allowing CSAM to proliferate locked away from law enforcement.

edit: as for why this is bad, federal law enforcement have a lot more pull when seeking change in laws in congress. Maybe Apple would've had to implement a government backdoor into iPhone itself if they didn't pull the CSAM scanning stunt (and I imagine they knew the backlash was inevitable, which allowed them to use that backlash as reason to push back on either scanning or a backdoor).