skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...

This is a far superior summary of the aforementioned study. It also explains how the computer-simulated experiment was conducted

>All agents began the simulation with the same level of success (10 "units"). Every 6 months, individuals were exposed to a certain number of lucky events (in green) and a certain amount of unlucky events (in red). Whenever a person encountered an unlucky event, their success was reduced in half, and whenever a person encountered a lucky event, their success doubled proportional to their talent (to reflect the real-world interaction between talent and opportunity).

The issue with this study I always had was how contrived an unlucky event (halves success) was. Do these parameters actually map to the real-world? If anyone with actual chops in this field could comment on this, it would certainly be very helpful.
Any plans to make a standalone desktop app?
> And before that, in the pre-alpha days of Rust, arrays were defined with a variadic macro. The /* something */ above was a [T, ..$N], where T is the type, and ..$N defines a range (I believe -- old Rust is weird) up to the number of specified elements.

This is just a misunderstanding. The `..$N` was just the array length syntax. Now the syntax is `[T; N]` with no change in meaning - there was no variadic magic.
Hmm seems we disagree so it is not factually wrong, but a matter of where you draw the line at fallback.

I am not an expert in uefi but my uefi system does not give me the ability to pass command line arguments to the kernel. I actually went to check and took a picture[1].

According to your statement that means you need a working system to repack your kernel if you do not use grub. That kind of proves the opposite of what you write.

With grub you can set kernel arguments in an ephemeral way by just interrupting the boot. In the past, when testing failing kernels it was mighty useful to add a magic argument to the kernel.

[1] https://ibb.co/6vS1VX9
Forgot about the video and didn’t realize it’s the same person. Also reminded me of this 2016 incident that happened in an ING data center https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37337868.amp
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> - Bool - how hard is it to get true and false right?

I think this is actually much more complicated than it seems at first thought. There are a lot of different ways to represent booleans, each with their own advantages, and then the hardware has it's own ideas that might need to be considered. I'm not sure that there's any way to do bool that doesn't lead to pain somewhere.
Web workers are certainly weird... and it's generally best to ignore them :D

But if you don't, then yeah, you sort of run right into the need for an actual lock since you can have shared memory in concurrently executing interpreters. Entire: Web Lock [1] Specifically designed to resolve this issue.

In typical JS programming this is not an issue, but if you are trying to really abuse that javascript VM then this is the way you'd do it.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Locks_A...
They want your phone number. It's a dark pattern to make you communicate your personal information.
> Disease, drought, inter-tribal warfare wiped out the vast majority.

To be clear, disease was by far the biggest factor.

To be even more clear, diseases introduced via Europeans. Wikipedia's list includes "smallpox, bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, the common cold, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, sexually transmitted diseases (with the possible exception of syphilis), typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis (although a form of this infection existed in South America prior to contact),[4] and pertussis" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

European colonization was significantly easier because something like 50-90% of the population was gone, 1) causing Europeans to think the land was 'virgin wilderness', with no strong indigenous land claim 2) making it easier for Europeans to conquer the local population, and 3) leaving improved lands that were easier to settle.

> led to much higher death rates when groups clashed

Do you have any numbers putting those rates into perspective? What I've found says it's a relatively small factor.

> The narrative of European immigrants wiping out the tribal groups is mostly a modern fiction

I have no idea of what are you talking about.

The California genocide isn't a modern fiction. The forced relocations and ethnic cleansings of the "Five Civilized Tribes" isn't a modern fiction. The "Battle" at Wounded Knee was a US fiction about a massacre.

I don't even see how this "whataboutism" is supposed to work. US government policy was directly based on white supremacy. It ended up with horrific consequences. We teach those as bad things. So that makes similar contemporary abuses good? Somehow? How?
Plastic gets a bad wrap. But it's a pretty dang efficient material. It takes so little energy and material to make something very functional and resilient. I know that CO2 analyses of the replacements to plastic bags and straws has not been very kind to them.

I find it commendable to encourage people to consumer less stuff, but the war on plastic straws has been a huge step back - it's done relatively little to actually help, but has imposed huge and everyday annoyances on everyone. These should be the exact opposite goals of environmental reforms when there are much lower hanging fruits available.
> difficult to distinguish causation vs correlation

I mean this is an extremely difficult thing to disentangle in the first place. It is very common for people in one breath to recite that correlation does not equate to causation and then in the next breath propose causation. Cliches are cliches because people keep making the error. People really need to understand that developing causal graphs is really difficult, and that there's almost always more than one causal factor (a big sticking point for politics and the politicization of science, to me, is that people think there are one and only one causal factor).

Developing causal models is fucking hard. But there is work in that area in ML. It just isn't as "sexy" because they aren't as good. The barrier to entry is A LOT higher than other type of learning, so this prevents a lot of people from pursuing this area. But still, it is an necessary condition if we're ever going to develop AGI. It's probably better to judge how close we are to AGI with causal learning than it is for something like Dall-E. But most people aren't aware of this because they aren't in the weeds.

I should also mention that causal learning doesn't necessitate that we can understand the causal relationships within our model, just the data. So our model wouldn't be interpretable although it could interpret the data and form causal DAGs.
Crowdsourced post-mortems on gadgets and products
EU accuses Apple of breaking competition law over contactless payments
Most (all?) recently made graphics cards have shunt resistors specifically for measuring power (current) consumption and it is actually real time consumption. One of the ways that extreme overclockers (think, liquid nitrogen cooling) push cards harder is by 'power modding' them, by switching out the shunt resistors for smaller value resistors to trick the graphics card into thinking it is using less current than it actually is.

It's similar on CPUs, but the monitoring circuitry is internal, I think.
Sure, but it's about as far from user/dev friendly as it gets. I recently had to make a standalone FAQ-style page and got the idea to use XSL to render it from an XML file (since you can teach any semi-literate person how to write XML in like 5 minutes). Firstly, XSL is so much weirder than any templating engine we're used to, that it took me stupidly long to do the most basic things. Then it turns out, browsers don't include default styles in XSL-rendered documents (no headings, no lists, nothing!), so I had to style it completely from scratch.

Everything in the XML "ecosystem" (XSL, XPath, XDT, SOAP) is so unfriendly that I'm no longer surprised everyone is reinventing these concepts in (unfortunately) JSON these days.
Yeah I didn't mean to imply "Why does SGD result in lower training loss than the initial weights" is an open question. But I don't think even lolcatz would call that a sufficient explanation. After all if the only criterion is "improves on initial training loss" you could just try random weights and pick the best one. The non-convexity makes sgd already pretty mysterious, and that is without even getting into the generalization performance, which seems to imply that somehow sgd is implicitly regularizing.
If you don't care about gestures as they've always been fine in my experience. I can't speak for gestures because the only one I use is right click (two finger tap). But for pointing the cursor and pulling the trigger the touchpad/trackpoint works fine I use both constantly since sometimes the trackpoint is easier to reach or the touchpad is easier to reach. I also use both sets of buttons as well as sometimes it's easier to have your left hand at home position and your right hand trackpaddin' but you use your thumb on space to left click.
It's are "optional" in the sense that the spec says it's optional and defines what that means: "A p element's end tag may be omitted if the p element is immediately followed by an address, article, aside, blockquote, details, div, dl, fieldset, figcaption, figure, footer, form, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, header, hgroup, hr, main, menu, nav, ol, p, pre, section, table, or ul element, or if there is no more content in the parent element and the parent element is an HTML element that is not an a, audio, del, ins, map, noscript, or video element, or an autonomous custom element."
Build up and lead a team of good engineers. You can reach 100x
Very cool! Will probably use it soon.
I am sort of baffled by all the ink being spilt about Twitter. I still find it jarring that anyone reports on “tweets,” and that there is even a process to ‘appeal’ a decision made ‘about a tweet.’

Anyway, meta-commentary aside, this blog post is something of a mystery. I don’t know whether the author of the post actually wrote the tweet in question and is somehow trying to get back onto Twitter, or if his account was compromised despite him saying it wasn’t… I just don’t know what to make of all of this. Can anyone clarify? Any insights?
Personally I just drink from the cup. I never use a straw when drinking at home, I don't magically require one when not at home.
> your plastic straw has a big chance of finding its way to the sea

IF you put it in a recycling bin. Here is a quick breakdown:

- Black bin (trash): Goes to a landfill where it is regulated by the EPA and stored in containment and the off-gas is harvested for energy

- Blue bin (recycling): Gets shipped by boat across an ocean to a third world country where it is dumped because that is the most profitable thing to do and it is no longer subject to regulatory oversight that it actually gets recycled
Apple sues Rivos, former engineers over alleged trade secret theft
> Unfortunately, since my account is now blocked I can’t make noise about this on Twitter, which is probably the only place where making such noise would be effective.

This is dangerously true, unfortunately. Were there ever adequate channels of recourse for upstanding citizens which we've let atrophy in the last two decades? Or has Twitter been an unprecedented innovation in elevating plebeian voices? Or are have both tweeted and prior petitions also been impotent?
We don't do that.
Yes, that is a case where it's not legal to omit `</p>` if you don't want the image to be inside the paragraph. Take a look at the spec[1], which outlines exactly when it is valid to omit tags.

The `p` element in particular has pretty scary rules, but it basically boils down to "if it doesn't make sense for this to be inside a paragraph (usually because it's a block element of some kind), it ends the paragraph."

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#optional-...
The incident happened after a technician forgot to copy the new Retail Liquidity Program (RLP) code to one of the eight SMARS computer servers, which was Knight's automated routing system for equity orders. RLP code repurposed a flag that was formerly used to activate an old function known as 'Power Peg'. Power Peg was designed to move stock prices higher and lower in order to verify the behavior of trading algorithms in a controlled environment. Therefore, orders sent with the repurposed flag to the eighth server triggered the defective Power Peg code still present on that server [1]

> Power Peg was designed to move stock prices higher and lower in order to verify the behavior of trading algorithms in a controlled environment.

This is insane. Make one wonder, what is or isn't actually being deployed in prod in 2022.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group#2012_stoc...
>The fire-bombing of Tokyo, Dresden and total destruction of a substantial number of civilian infrastructure in Germany and Japan were considered absolutely necessary to win the war.

I think this only helps my point, because with the benefit of hindsight it is clear that the bombings of London, Dresden, Tokyo, Stalingrad and many other cities were of absolutely minimal value in ending the war except insofar as it damaged military targets in those cities - and in many cases it was outright counterproductive (e.g. London).

Name a single war, or battle in which atrocities against civilians have helped the aggressors, in a situation where the defending side wasn't already militarily defeated (e.g. German or Soviet occupied countries)? It didn't help in Chechnya, Vietnam, or Yugoslavia (either during WWII or in the 90s).

Even the impact of the nuclear bombs is heavily debated. The Imperial Japanese military still wanted to continue the war, and the Emperor was less concerned with the plight of civilians than what was going to happen to himself after the war.

The only universally effective method of winning a war is destroying the enemy's ability to fight. Cruelty towards non-belligerents is not required to do this.
Right at the bottom of the article:

> Locally: You must reduce the amount of plastic shipped overseas by putting it in the regular garbage instead of the recycle bin.

The premise is that recycling creates pollution but landfills do not.
One thing that I found amusing/interesting/horrifying back when I read about this originally is that you can measure the computer reboot time in feet. IIRC, in the problem vehicles, the reboot time was something like 150 feet @ 60mph.
There is a modern fervor over tech minimalism/purism where using even a little bit of Javascript, for example, is just a reminder that perhaps the answer all along was to just to use the trade-offs that work for you.

Note, the people in the article were burned by wiki software that went unmaintained during its rewrite from Python 2.7 to Python 3 (afaict). Now they are editing HTML files on a production server. I'm sure getting let down like they did gave them a specific distaste for certain trade-offs that work for the rest of us, but you can also imagine the babies being thrown out with the bathwater like scaling out an article database without revision history.

That said, it tends to be a good thing when you realize a vastly simple solution works for you.
From the author's account, it's clear to me that he didn't write the tweet.
Thunderbird on Linux, K-9 Mail on Android.

My $WORKPLACE is using Outlook, so I use Thunderbird for Mail there too and always have a browser tab open with the OWA calendar [1]. Not the most elegant solution, but it's working fine for me.

[1] Tried several addons for Thunderbird with Outlook integration, decided I don't like any of them.
Hertz surely is partly responsible for these incidents, but I'd also say that the SWAT team-esque response, with a dozen officers drawing their guns on peaceful people, against those merely suspected of driving a "stolen" rental car, is both excessive and fairly draconian.
Very good points, but I would start with the obvious one - the contrastive objective of CLIP forces the prompt representation to a single embedding vector. So it acts as a bottleneck, limiting the number of object-attribute pairs it can simultaneously encode. And of course the solution is to use an autoregressive setup like Dalle-1, but then they can't have the same diffusion model decoder for image generation.

I bet they consciously prioritised the artistic applications over exact semantics. The CLIP embedding space has nice properties, it's tempting to use it. From my experience semantic similarity based on embedding dot products is much easier to do than exact semantic matching. Three is similar to four and red similar to blue in embedding space.
> I don’t know whether the author of the post actually wrote the tweet in question

It's in the title.

> or if his account was compromised despite him saying it wasn’t…

I'm not sure, it could be, it could be a hack of Twitter as well.

At this point I don't want to rule anything out because the only thing I know for sure is that I did not write that tweet.
I use something like this for my personal website.

I don't know how fast text-based template systems are, but I can do a clean build of my entire website in under half a second. That seems pretty fast to me. I've been adding content to it for over 20 years now... it's not a massive site since it's just me, but it's not exactly small either.

Every page is authored as HTML, with some extra headers at the top. It's parsed as HTML5. The processor will apply templates in a fairly simple way... merge everything in <head>, merge everything in <body>. There's a special tag for templates that means "put the <body> here, instead of merging".

Any given piece of HTML will be parsed / unparsed only twice, because the templates work on DOM manipulation. The second parse / unparse is there because I use an HTML minifier, and the HTML minifier has a bytes in/bytes out interface.

> Another is that you run into "hygenic macro" problems if you want to merge random DOM trees into each other:...

This is a beast of a problem. If I need an ID in a template that may get used in multiple places, then there's some piece of code somewhere generating the ID.

My experience is that it really becomes a problem when you have large, large sites with tons of people working on them, and it's not a problem at all for one person.

> Finally it would be really nice to have a reliable WYSIWYG HTML editor, particularly one that would help you use CSS classes in a disciplined way to customize the system to add whatever markup features you want for your site.

It's called "Dreamweaver". Truly one of the most powerful web authoring tools ever made.
It was not based on her observations, but I don't know how they actually figured out their error. I give them some credit for at least admitting the problem, rather than just letting her flail away at trying to make something out of worthless data. On the other hand, it was a pretty big disappointment for a postdoc, who of course must produce some publishable results within a pretty short time window.
Thank you for sharing your stories. I have (re-)read "Lisping at JPL" [0] dozens of times! What are you up to nowadays?

[0] https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
I think you've overlooked the keyword large in the opening statement
I don't really see how that's not a problem. While not having to specifically await you still need to mark functions as suspend and only call suspending functions from other suspending functions.

I am also not sure how this explicit marking would work with interfaces. Can you create an interface that can be implemented by both suspending and synchronous functions?
Your example is completely irrelevant, nobody asked for a quote here. Jump made an offer and received a counteroffer.

A counteroffer is not a quote.
In his last blog post.

https://fasterthanli.me/articles/lies-we-tell-ourselves-to-k...

"It may well be that Go is not adequate for production services unless your shop is literally made up of Go experts (Tailscale) or you have infinite money to spend on engineering costs (Google)."

You should tell that to the thousand of compagnies running Go just fine in production.
Learn Rust, I write both and I find it and the tooling around it to be an absolute delight. It has a decent amount of traction and jobs too. It being relatively young I think this is the language in that space to watch.
Eventually EU is going to ban data warehousing for any purpose other than storing and giving it back to the user.

And honestly, I think it's necessary.
That’s why I disagree with the article’s conclusion that getting rid of plastic straws is “stupid”. There are alternatives, some better than others at their job of fluid delivery to your face parts, but most doing a better job of not polluting.
If you don't use Two-Factor Authentication, and you have a public profile, the question isn't if your account will be compromised, but when.

Apparently, for Mr. Mattheij, when was today.

The next question is "how do you safely recover your account". Hopefully this is a straightforward process, considering you have access to the email account associated with your Twitter account. Of course, Twitter needs to make sure that the attackers didn't also compromise your email account ...
Signal - The elegance here is the "Privacy-first Design". Every feature and code for Signal messenger is designed on collecting as little (or no) data as possible and it is an essential tool for folks like me who are tired of having tracking and ads nonsense in their most-used apps.
Scientists describe a gravity telescope that could image exoplanets
1. Callback interop

I was expecting something like call/cc, or `suspend(Cancellable)Coroutine` in Kotlin. But judging from the list of preview items[1] it seems the only way is to have the callback write the result to a Future and blocking wait on it.

2.1 Promise.all() can be done with `.map(future => future.get())`
But it is a bit more complicated than that. [2]

2.2 Promise.any()

This is somewhat relevant
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/loom-dev/2020-Februar...

[1] https://download.java.net/java/early_access/loom/docs/api/pr...

[2] https://kotlin.github.io/kotlinx.coroutines/kotlinx-coroutin...
"This function is not equivalent to deferreds.map { it.await() } which fails only when it sequentially gets to wait for the failing deferred, while this awaitAll fails immediately as soon as any of the deferreds fail."
I found two threads in 13 years:

How Fritzing is killing itself - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530891 - Nov 2019 (53 comments)

Fritzing - opensource circuit sketching tool for Arduino - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606567 - May 2009 (12 comments)

Where are the others?
Executives at Square-Enix have been saying for >ten years now that video gaming consoles and AAA games are getting less and less interesting to them, especially in Japan.
It definitely is still a privacy issue. You only need a few data points to fully identify a person.

But no it's not as bad as just selling the raw data.
It’s interesting that the Russians suck so bad at jamming that cell phones still work in underground bunkers. Although maybe they are leaving them up to track movement of personnel