skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> no one really knows what mass is. We only know that mass bends space-time curve, hence gravity.

Mass is much better understood by its role in inertia. Basically mass is the amount of energy you need to exchange with a thing to change its current speed. This observation works from Newtonian mechanics to QM and GR as well.

Now, why do things have mass? The famous E=mc² explains this for most things: they have mass because something inside them has potential or kinetic energy. This works all the way down to the atomic level - the mass of a proton for example is almost entirely explained by the potential energy of the quarks being held together in a small volume; the total mass of the quarks themselves is only a small fraction of that. Now, the mass of the elementary particles is somewhat more complicated, but the Standard Model does have explanations for those - symmetry breaking for fermions, and the Higgs mechanism for the massive bosons.

The next mystery is: why is inertial mass equal to gravitational mass? GR has essentially explained this, by showing that acceleration is equivalent to gravitational attraction depending on your frame of reference.

So overall, I'm not sure what Brian Greene means by that - mass is at least as well understood as other basic properties of particles (charge, spin, color charge).

This lecture by Leonard Susskind explains most of these things about mass in a way I found easy to follow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqNg819PiZY
https://danluu.com/atom.xml
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
https://fasterthanli.me/index.xml
https://ahelwer.ca/index.xml
https://www.erlang.org/blog.xml
https://drewdevault.com/blog/index.xml
https://norvig.com/rss-feed.xml
Wrote the latest applied crypto book over two years and a half. I love writing, and I write all the time, but that was extremely tough on me. I would not do it again.

Real-World Cryptography https://www.amazon.com/dp/1617296716/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_1P...
Great point. The crux of the pure physical addiction, separate from the psychological groundwork that leads you to it, is that you just need more and more of that stuff.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.

^ Imagine needing more and more of that stuff to get your usual high. You’re dead.
That's what I thought too. A basement with concret walls/floor/ceiling should have enough rebar to act like a Faraday cage.

It's not a lot of information (say, <1GB), but it's business critical and I'm somewhat distrustful of cloud solutions.
So what? Wikipedia has the important bits in other article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
.eu domains are somewhat common; from a quick grep of my Firefox history:

adamj.eu alsd.eu alternatives.eu belleslettres.eu bergfreunde.eu berthub.eu bitsnbites.eu bizin.eu btcdirect.eu carlschwan.eu ceridap.eu coolblue.eu cpcwiki.eu cubilis.eu datadoghq.eu doshaven.eu epicompany.eu eui.eu eupl.eu euplf.eu eurescrossborder.eu europa.eu forum.eu framelabs.eu gdprhub.eu geizhals.eu gmic.eu hownormalami.eu ibabs.eu inflation.eu itgovernance.eu johnmathews.eu juliareda.eu list.eu maxlath.eu noyb.eu politico.eu postgresql.eu publiccode.eu qonto.eu sagefund.eu secondwheels.eu sifted.eu skikk.eu successfactors.eu surnamemap.eu tjinstoko.eu xahteiwi.eu z80cpu.eu

Some of these are fairly small/obscure; some are fairly significant: europe.eu is the site for a lot of what the EU does; politico.eu is a well known media organisation; coolblue.eu is major Dutch retail business, etc.
I enjoyed reading about the programming and testing of a kickstarter project that used this technique in their fixed-frequency public radio receiver: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/centerlinelabs/kickstar...
Yes, here 2 and 5 years is the norm. There's talk of longer terms becoming more popular but that's probably just talk due to the current climate of rising rates. I've spoken to a few brokers lately and not one even mentioned anything longer than 5.

It feels like there's a few signs now that the so-called "18-year property cycle" is due to be cut short this time around. I've only recently heard the idea so I'm not sure how it's real it is (outside of their circles that have a vested interested in the timeline it predicts). UK lenders seem to be now toughening lending rules rather than relaxing them as they were "supposed" to. Not sure it's a good time to invest or not!
Do you really think that anything Snowden says or does is relevant if detached from the actions that made him who he is and from the fact he could only find shelter in an enemy State?
Yes, I am a researcher and a Ph.D. student in the field of nuclear reactor physics. I regularly operate and do experiments on a research nuclear reactor. My name is in my hn username and I have no problem defending my claims. I also own a popular TikTok account where I do science communication about nuclear reactors. My information about the water discharge comes from reports by IAEA, who is the authority on the matter.
> Considering it avoided both a mass outbreak and lockdowns, I'd say the system has worked out very well

Sorry for the wall of text.

It is time to change - probably overdue. I won't comment on future policy, but this article I think missed a lot of perspective.

I'm in a vulnerable group. I'd rather have been in Taiwan for the pandemic than anywhere else.

The article mentions masks, but it was common for people to wear surgical masks before the pandemic broke out, for example when visiting doctors. It's been that way for the 15 years I lived here. A cultural norm. It isn't seen as oppressive or some kind of anti-freedom measure or most hysterical as a human rights violation.

Until May last year, there was basically total freedom in Taiwan with no (internal) restrictions. We watched with dread at what was happening worldwide.

After May there were some minor Delta variant outbreaks. Then, Taiwan had scarce access to any vaccines. Effectively blocked from buying Biontech as part of China's vaccine diplomacy and suffering the global vaccine shortage at that time for anyone outside of a relatively small but powerful set of countries. I'm not criticising those places, just saying there was limited access in Taiwan as little as a year ago. Relying e.g. on Japan for vaccine donations which we were incredibly grateful for.

Since then they've developed their own highly effective vaccine Medigen and by mixing donations and the vaccines that could be bought, now most of those who want it have been vaccinated.

A year has made all the difference to reduce suffering in Taiwan.

Below 1000 deaths.
No case explosion straining health services.
No severe lockdowns experienced by so many places, although restrictions were put in place.
Yep, which is why he’s definitely in a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation.
I still think the article should have mentioned at least the current predicament he’s in, because to me that’s relevant in shaping his opinions and decisions.
Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense
The GPL is a copyright license. It applies when copyright law would otherwise prevent distributing some program. If I were to violate the GPL, for example by sending someone a compiled version and refusing to provide the source, then there's a clear legal theory by which copyright law could be applied.

That "one added requirement" in the AGPL turns it into a EULA, because it's an attempt to regulate for which purposes a user may run the program. If I were to run a modified AGPL'd SSH server on my own hardware, the question of whether I'm violating the AGPL depends on whether I'm allowing others to access it remotely. If the AGPL can be violated without copyright infringement, it's clearly in a different legal category than the GPL.
From Wikipedia:

> Passive income also know as "Unearned Income" is income that can be earned automatically with minimal labor to earn or maintain. It can be a great way to help one generate extra cash flow, whether he or she is running a side hustle or just trying to get a little extra dough each month.

According to the above definition, the author earns $$$ each year after he had written each book and he doesn't need to do a lot of stuff to earn or maintain (people just buy on Amazon and upvote his books, e.g.). So it is passive income. ("minimal labor to earn" =>>> the author doesn't need to create ads to promote his books etc., he just write them once... and this writting is equivalent to "low labor", see below).

What you want to highlist is rather: SINCE he has worked a lot to earn $10k with 78 books (not only one book - which you wrote in your comment) written over a period of several years, THEN: is it actually worth in terms of $$$?

Given the fact he probably didn't spend lots of $$$ to write and publish his books & ebooks (but he didn't give this piece of information), and given the fact that writting a book is far less stressing than working for someone (in fact, in addition to his job, it made him relaxing), I would say YES. The time he has spent on each book is controlled since in his article, he emphasizes on the fact that he writtes 100+ pages books, not more: so even considering "time is money", the time with no income required to write his books may have been refunded with the sells quite quick.

*Note that: bank investment need lots of money to be done. Writting books, no. Bank investment need a few seconds to be done. Writting books, several months. I think they are equivalent and, thus, are both ways to earn passive incomes.* ("equivalence" from a money point of view and almost from a labor point of view, if we consider that bank investments's initial brought money is only due to labor, not inheritance, etc.)

Moreover, since he already have a fulltime job, I bet he uses his books income to invest as banks investments or, perhaps, on Bitcoin, etc (since his fulltime job decreases the risks for him to have a big debt e.g., in the case of his eventual investments were not worth). Such investments would extend the "worthly"-side of his books activity, alongside with very controlled risks thanks to his fulltime job.

PS: I think 2 or 3 points above have medium probability to be wrong, because the author didn't communicate about them, leading to some speculation/hypothesises by myself. So don't take this comment too serious. However I think it's consistent thoughts.
Why not dropping that to the Sahara or to any remote desert that nobody lives?
I couldn't see whats more in it than a super basic synth with nature samples as a background layer. What am I missing? They have like 5-6 seconds in the video pitching envelope components such as sustain and decay, so it gives me the impression that there isn't much innovation here.
Same here - I do fly 1-3 times a year and I always feel bad about it.

I can't help but think that flying will hopefully become a taboo topic, something that people do occasionally but definitely don't brag about.
Your suggestion amounts to "do nothing" which will achieve even less then voting. Practically speaking, people who do think there is issue and are willing to look for solutions or at least talk about the issue have a chance to improve state of things in the long term.

People who gave up, wont ever improve anything. People who insist that nothing should be done, because none if it is perfect enough are actively working against solution.
Sending a false DMCA takedown notice should prevent you from sending further notices to that platform for a year. (Or forever!)
> Though I don't like the extra step Nim takes of dropping parentheses for 0 argument functions

That isn't true, you need parentheses for procs with no arguments, else it's interpreted as a proc pointer. Try `echo` vs `echo()`.

> I can't think of any good reason why anyone would deliberately have two different functions with the same name in different cases anyway

It's used for declaring variables of an object. `type Foo = object` and `var foo: Foo`.

I like Nim's rules for identifiers, it prevents you for mistakenly declaring two different variables/procedures with similar names.

Other examples where, how you would write something doesn't matter, is Windows filesystems and gmail, reserving every possible derivative with a dot like your.name@gmail.com and y.ourname@gmail.com.

So it's not uncommon or weird. Just programming languages are overly restrictive.
Richmod may be an expert in his field. But even he couldn't point to anything that could actually happen.

His report, and that of his colleagues, is intentionally vague, with no predictions and lot of FUD. Seriously, there is not a single thing they point to and say: "This could happen!"

It's almost as if tritium wasn't that problematic and they were trying to get people who payed them for the study at least something for their troubles.

Tritium has half-life of 12 years, into helium. It isn't something that would persist for generations in considerable levels.
This reminds me of a documentary I recently watched. I don't have the domain knowledge to judge the practicality of its suggestions, but I found it interesting. Perhaps someone else here can offer some insight?

Kiss The Ground (2020)

https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8618654/

Based on the title, I assume this web site is related:

https://kisstheground.com/
The main alarmist assertion has been rebutted by @Botanygeek on twitter. I tend to turn to him whenever a newspaper reports on any environmental story, the same way we have to show scepticism every time a newspaper reports on any "x cures y" story.

Here are his thoughts in The New Scientist:

[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24232291-100-the-idea...
Imagine the U.S. trying to invade Mexico but running out of fuel before Mexico city, this along with the tactical issues they've had clearly indicates there is something deeply rotten in the Russian military.

This isn't propaganda, you can see it in OSINT thats beencollected.
Nice touch having the graphs use the NYRB font. Anyone know what it is?
Yeah, but these same arguments apply in favor to the diode laser treatment the original article talks about. There is biological and chemical reasoning behind it. There are favorable vitro studies. And a couple of the systematic reviews linked in the original article conclude there is weak evidence that it is weakly effective (same with flossing).
I’ve been blogging since 2013, have had a lot of traffic on my blog, yet would make almost no money from ads if I had some (I know from having successfully and not monetized many websites)

Https://cryptologie.net
Cool level of insanity.

I've traveled the world this last year, and have certainly experienced all sorts of stupidity, ridiculous bureaucracy and corruption in this regard. Like OP I discovered that I enjoy going through these Kafkaesque mazes, and found it pretty fun. Literally never knowing if I'm passing a border post or having to turn back (spoiler: I never turned back).

That said, I didn't go to any of the east Asian countries, because it would have been "too much" (as is clear from this post).

In Latin America and Africa, all the "covid policy" was just a clear corruption opportunity being taken advantage of. More things you could "do wrong" is a big boon for every corrupt official. In Africa, border personnel were happy to take a bribe as your "PCR test" (and the one time I actually did a PCR test, they did not accept it, they only wanted the bribe). Police were happy to enforce the mask rules (on white tourists only, in the middle of the night). Businesses were happy to convert to a "PCR testing clinic" by painting the walls white, sticking something in your nose, and giving you a piece of paper for money (even if you wanted a real PCR test, you couldn't know it's real). You see the picture.

Thing is, I've learned that the overt corruption in these "developing" countries is just less sophisticated version of what's going on in the rest of the world. So, the next time you encounter bullshit like this, just try to ask yourself why are they doing this? Who gains from this? Etc. It's a fun game, and sometimes you come to interesting realizations.
if its not US based the DMCA doesn't apply (since its US law) so even if they did, providers in other countries so not need to honour it.
But it is still worse if it is hot and you have to stop at a traffic light.
> I thought the 2nd law of thermodynamics was saying that with incomplete knowledge, the probability distribution of possible states becomes more and more spread out as time goes on. It's almost a limit to how you can make predictions or simulations of physics when the initial state of the system is not fully known. Equivalently, it's a banal statement about chaos in the sense of chaos theory.

I'm not sure I understand what do you mean by "as time goes on". Classical thermodynamical entropy is defined for a system in equilibrium and it doesn't change with time. It changes when you do things to the system.
> while the West sacrificed millions

Australia and NZ are usually considered part of "the west". Culturally and ethnically, this is certainly true. You're frustrated people lump everyone in Asia together, as if its all one country. Please don't make the same mistake with "the west". We aren't one country either.

If you want to criticise the USA's handling of covid, do so. Us westerners aren't a homogeneous block either. I'm proud that Australia's covid response was much closer to that of Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam than it was to the USA and Canada.
You don't need to extract CO2 from the atmosphere using direct air capture (I agree that it's a dead end); you use existing sources of waste to intercept the carbon cycle. Sewerage, for example, contains carbon that was pulled from the atmosphere by a plant, or bacteria in the soil. Ditto for municipal solid waste, especially wood products and paper. If you need additional sources, you can grow fast-growing plants (seaweed is preferable, since it doesn't rely on good land) to pull carbon out.

When you make methanol, processes like gasification and pyrolysis leave you with excess carbon in the form of carbon black, or ash. If you sequester this before it oxidizes, fuel production becomes carbon negative. Methanol is better than ethanol because a) you can't drink it, b) the single carbon molecule means it burns cleaner, c) you get more fuel for the same initial amount of carbon, and d) it doesn't compete with food production for arable land.
https://www.vox.com/2019/11/14/20961972/airbnb-scam-how-to-s...

Or just google it, there are plenty of examples
Please post some sources. I've heard about the severity of this problem multiple times before in the last couple of years so i'm open, but we need at least some data!
The books are about (versioned) technology. They have a lifespan. It's not like books which which are here to stay for decades
Before anyone responds or makes a judgement, they should give a single minute of their lives to reading about tritium, the isotope ONE of the scientist is concerned about. Wikipedia[0] will do the trick if you have no other options.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks
> And reading that book was genuinely exciting, because with TV and offline games being the only alternatives, it was your strongest source of dopamine.

I note with interest the things you left out.

Radio, for one. Clubs and societies for another. (BPOE, Odd Fellows, Elks, Red Men, etc.)

Older houses have big porches in part because sitting on the porch, talking, and chatting with neighbors was part of the social life in the pre-TV era. (Also because there wasn't A/C.)

So was taking a walk around the town square in the evening, including with local musicians playing in the bandstand. Some farmers markets are still like that.

Square dancing was quite popular too.

And church activities, including church dinners, picnics and revivals.

> In the pre-Internet era

This is not something special about the Internet era! Older generation also felt overwhelmed by the information sources available to them.

This feeling of "information overload" is older than I am. The phrase dates from the 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload

At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21118893 I give a couple of older examples, like:

> The problems of adequate storage, preservation and service for the increasing flood of periodical literature coming into their collections are of special urgency for librarians. Many studies have been made, all of which view with deep concern the rapidly increasing rate of growth of American libraries.’ Such growth, if continued even at the present rate, will in a short time result in collections of almost unmanageable proportions, both as to physical size and servicing.

("The Use of High Reduction Microfilm in Libraries", J. Am. Doc. Summer 1950 - https://www.proquest.com/openview/14f723869613e43376c4a7646f... )

Looking now for "flood of publications", I easily found things like

> The last decade has witnessed the publication of an unparalleled number of books dealing with the social, economic, and political institutions of our own and other lands. Amid this flood of publications it is unusual to find one devoted entirely to the Constitution of the United States. - https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/437681 (1922)

> THE flood of publications recommending changes in education during the emergency
appears overwhelming to the personnel of the schools - https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/440941?jou... (1943)

> just turn off the Internet and buy a book, but can you really pretend it doesn't exist? And how long can you stick to it?

I don't say that, because even without the Internet there's still overload.

Accept that you will not read every book in the library. Accept that you cannot know everything. Accept that others may point out something you missed and respond "Thank you!" rather than being embarrassed or ashamed.
>Same with the tax filing stuff.

evidently the poster is in the EU, not sure if you are but different regulatory regimes can of course significantly affect how you have to do things.
so far nobody's been able to make them stop

Someone sure seems to have stopped them occupying Kyiv. Someone appears to have stopped them rolling west across Ukraine as far as the Dnieper.

every single day I read a story about how Russia is just about to lose.

They already did, surely? Russia comes out of this in a worse condition and situation than they went in. Sounds like a loss.
Tritium is highly radioactive (358 TBq/g). Otherwise it wouldn't make phosphors glow in the dark.
Speaking from a European (dutch) perspective

Climate change, PFAS, over-reliance on Russian gas, leaded gasoline, inhumane bureaucracy, discontent with immigrants, lack of technical manual labour, government culture becoming hostile to transparency, nitrogen emmesions exceeding European law.

That is a small list of things that were known to be bad, and warned about for a very long time, but were adressed very late, or not yet.
These are all things that affect me directly. They just act slowly.

How many of the things we are being warned about now will be on a similar list in 20 years?
> The only thing I don't get is how physicists get around the discrete and finite restriction.

Actually, they don't! When you start doing the math about states in a quantum sense (i.e. statistical mechanics), the basic premise is that the available range of states _is_ discrete. Particles are quantized - so they can only possess certain allowable discrete energy levels. The broader laws of thermodynamics fall out of that and appear to be continuous as you scale up to the macro world across a huge number of microstates.
That title is misleading and clickbaity and all the article contains is pure speculation, so definitely not "Breaking news"