skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> However, as Paul discovered when he stopped pricing exclusively in Euros (€) and started pricing North American customers in USD ($), even this very simple change can be incredibly profitable.
What I see here is mostly fear to failure. Fear about "not keeping the high standard level that should define myself". Fear about being perceived as a mediocre scientist saying incorrect things.

This is wrong. Let me tell you a thing. Nobody will cares. Not-one-single people will care about your mind image.

1-Feeling depressed or having doubts in some point of the process of writing your thesis is more common than you think

2-Run, reset and try in a different field will not be easier, it will be more difficult. It always is.

3-Closures provide a lot of peace of mind. Finish your thesis and then move your mind to greener pastures. A not perfect thesis about a poor known theme, is better than none.

So, just keep working and do your best effort. Most people never receive a Nobel in any case and what people could think about you, is not so relevant as you think. In the end, you will be the expert in quantum computing, not them.

Remember also that any error slipped in your these can be fixed later. Science is not written in stone. We fall and we learn. Scientists are expected to commit honest mistakes.
He can't know, but I'm the original commenter and it was the same article. Apparently it wasn't all ink jet printers, but just the top 4 of the list. Still not great for a list that claims to be explicitly about laser printers.
Information wants to be free, as they say
I'm a bit surprised by all those dismissive comments here. Isn't it useful that _some_ people sit down, think hard about what are the worst things that could happen to us as a species, and consider preventive measures? In every company you have people do this for the business. Every military considers threat scenarios. Heck, the all-beloved Elon Musk wants to bring us to Mars of all places to have a backup home, just in case. But Bostrom is talked down for having a "shtick"? It's his job.
That’s what https://www.runningtide.com/ is trying to do
Thou shalt receive https://web.archive.org/web/20220523140308/https://www.econo...

but alas hardly worth the read :-|
The guy also blamed the Anders Breivik atack on Muslims when it first happened, then tried to stealth edit when news about the attacker came out to make it seem like he wasn't saying it was Muslims, then got called out for the stealth edit and said he had actually wrote that it was an edit but the computer screwed everything up[1]. I was always kind of surprised that this was treated as no big deal.

Also worth noting the unsettling fact that it seems almost all mention of this has disappeared from the internet (at least, the easily accessible internet). I was only able to find his refutation of the criticism below (which shares the basic facts of the above, but leaves out other criticisms like edits of the original piece that still weren't treated as such). Sometimes it seems like people have a better time finding bad things a random person said on Twitter a decade ago than acts of malfeasance from a major publication a decade ago.

[Edit: Finally found an old blog post laying out the issue well by digging around Twitter and find a tweet from some years ago. Couldn't find it at all through Google, even when limiting the results to the week it happened and looking through every single result Google gave . Check it the blog post here[2].]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110809051022mp_/http://www.the...

[2] https://flapola.blogspot.com/2011/07/no-shame-at-atlantic.ht...
Not sure why you're getting downvoted - this entire operation should cause a major rethink of military operations based on new technology.

The proximal goal of any weapons system or operation is to deliver live ordinance to the target, preferably at minimal risk to those doing the delivering.

From WWI to WWII, the progress seemed to be to deliver larger volumes of ordinance, with some increases in accuracy. Since then, it's been longer range and higher accuracy, to the point now that we often need only a pair of 'smart bombs' or JDAMs to take out a target that used to take multiple full bomber loads. With highly accurate targeting, we can even deliver non-explosive ordinance just to minimize collateral damage. Of course Javelins, Switchblades,etc. make it close to 1-shot-one-kill on tanks and other heavily armored vehicles that used to be tough to kill.

Following the trend further, drones and AI recognition technology seem likely to make this even more effective. I'm sure everyone has seen the Slaughterbots video [1], but much loser in technology is killing swarms of small bots specifically targeting enemy equipment, and the loitering switchblade is already here - just add some recognition, maybe it recognizes, operator confirms, and the drone tracks it for the optimal strike moment. Add the swarm then seeks and destroys other examples of the same vehicle.... Small self-contained flying ordinance delivery drones being disgorged from larger carrier drones or aircraft - already in design & testing stages. This IS all going to change and fast, and the smart militaries are taking a LOT of notes on this battle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots
If there is "excess" energy given away for free, mining cryptos, by definition, would not be profitable.

Instead, solar and wind generators can simply decrease production (in milliseconds) when not needed.
I suspect that every low-tech peasant farmer, regularly using some crude wheeled thing to haul [goods|crops|whatever] over [uneven ground|rutted paths|hills] might quickly feel inspired to minimize the dead weight of his crude wheeled thing. Regardless of what draft animal[s] he might or might not have available.
Exactly. Drones only look powerful because they're a recent innovation (in terms of military procurement timelines).

They're being shot down with air defense missiles designed for helicopters, because that's the cheapest option we currently have.

Once RFPs, responses, and projects work their way to completion, everyone will have anti-drone air defense missiles that, while still expensive, will be better cost:capability calibrated.

The real difference that drone warfare seems to make is in persistence of ISR, which is why so much funding seems to be going into stealthy HALE platforms with stealthy networking and sensors (point to point and LPIR).

The correct lesson to take away from Ukraine seems to be that future battlefields will have key assets (tanks, ships, supply stores, HQs, etc) under threat to a greater depth behind front lines. And not because of a capability change (i.e. a drone can get there with a weapon), but because of a visibility change (a drone can loiter and identify the asset).

Creating a smoking hole in the ground at an arbitrary location is a capability most advanced militaries have had since the 1990s.

What's changed is the ability to find something valuable to place that hole on, at all times, anywhere, at a cost you can organically equip smaller units with.
But said person was teaching at an entry level position.

Regardless, 300K is not a salary one should expect in pretty much any public function. By comparison, the PM of my country makes 150K.
Reposting a dead comment because it's good, see below.

Alot of these people are homeless because they're mentally ill. So this is essentially criminalizing being mentally ill.

This third world country setup already happening in L.A. and in the Bay. Massive homeless encampments a few blocks from 7 figure houses.

Also, America has made it next to impossible to escape homelessness once one has become homeless.

A shower, some medicine, some job interview clothes could go a long way to help some of these people, but that's next to impossible for someone under a bridge. Mental health could go a long way as well. Instead we just push them out sight.

Meanwhile we just gave how many billions to Ukraine?

It really baffles me why there's so little political will to help our own people in this country.

Homeless people, College students, older people, the sick, the poor, etc.

"""This is essentially a problem to be pushed onto accomodating states since there is no political will (no one wants the optics of being the bad guy putting people in mental institutions) to solve this at the national level.
This is how it ends: The US becomes more like Brazil/India and more gated palaces next to miles of slums."""
> "Aiming to produce PDF files that would be accepted at conferences (which seems to be easy-going if you sprinkle some fancy quantum vocabulary over something and hand it in to a non-quantum conference). I felt less and less comfortable in a setting that apparently expected me to pick some low-hanging – let’s call it fruits – and call it a day. After all, science is all about the pursuit of knowledge, even though the incentives of research funding might not be entirely aligned with that"

This is broadly similar to my experience. The priority of most academics is not to produce deep, novel, and creative work. It is to churn out sausages in the shapes favoured by journals, at a factory production rate. That's what they have to do for their career. After a while, though, they start to be unable to tell the difference between the two.
Fair. The concern, however, is when the state forces everyone to reason one particular way. The other concern is that arguing from a who has 'all the data' position is seriously fraught ... but the state and its mandates get underwritten when enough people embrace this fraught & simplistic mentality.
Certainly the entire thing is a rant, but my point is not to criticize the naïveté, it’s to sympathize with it.

Unfortunately, you win the election, you run the social network, your revolution is successful, and you come face to face with the actual challenges your predecessors faced. This is the source of our continued frustration with elections doing nothing.

Without a theoretical leap in solving problems at scale, there is little to be done, and the variances between solutions are just fiddling with coefficients.

It’s easy to think that some shadowy league of dentists is preventing a cavity cure from reaching the market, or that the forces of for-profit healthcare are arrayed together in an alleyway. We love to think that a very large series of people have just not had the balls to stand up to our favorite caricature of an enemy, but the truth is usually nuanced, complex, and slow.

The asterisk at the end of simple solutions is usually “provided everyone agrees with me or bends to my will”

We’d likely both chew our own leg off to escape the meeting to eliminate this billing line item, both blaming it on some complexity upstream we can’t agree on.
Google is very much build on the idea of using machines and algorithms to solve problems instead of throwing people at them.
> The browser window prefers to be set to a specific size

Any idea how this works? Can you still set your browser window to any size you want in your window manager, does it misreport it? Could that not cause rendering issues too?
If you or your PI have a grant the proposal and the VC funding should be taken care of and linked
FWIW, I’m surrounded by PhDs who love research, loved their time doing PhDs, and some of whom loved working at Microsoft Research. I work in computer graphics.

One good thing about a PhD is you get several years to explore a topic of interest to you in great depth. (As long has you have a decently good advisor.) Another good thing about a research PhD is that in addition to getting experience publishing papers, you go through the process of writing a book sized thesis, which is valuable experience in a lot of ways - skills transfer to publishing and reporting in any field.

On an intellectually superficial but economically important level, another good thing about a PhD is that people who have advanced degrees earn on average 50% more than (1.5x) people without advanced degrees. This is in the US at least, according to data published by the US Fed.
khinzals are supposed to be carrier killers.
> Integration tests take far more time to maintain.

So? You're going to have them anyway or else you can't deploy.

> Major functionality changes can affect all of your tests. With unit tests they may invalidate a few, but that’s okay because they were cheap to begin with.
I wonder whether introducing slight per-pixel-per-draw noise into the values could be used here, to mask this sort of detail? Or would you be able to average it out somehow
Stuff like this is why I hope Firefox remains viable as a browser long term. Chrome is now what? 80% of the browser market share and they have no incentive to protect user privacy.

I'm really worried that we're going to head down the road of chrome becoming the only browser anyone tests their site against and we're going to go back to the bad old days of IE 6 compatible sites that are completely broken in other browsers.
Exactly. Giving the OP the benefit of the doubt -- that he is completely correct in his assessment of the group -- he is certainly doing himself no favors publicly throwing them under the bus. I imagine other prospective advisors, in any field, might be reluctant to take him on if this is a pontential outcome.
But if he's an elderly sailor, that means he learned decades ago how to navigate without electronics. People have navigated for thousands of years without electronics, even without light houses. For many it's a point of pride and a pleasure that they do things like this "the old fashioned way."
I think there is also a danger in saying "that man has a thick brogue, and therefore I suspect that they will engage in genocide like Angus McMillan." It's better to look at the patterns of behavior that lead to people (and groups) engaging in terrible behavior. Despite the panic I see on HN, I see are relatively few examples of people springing from "liberal speech policing [like e.g., what we see today on Reddit and Twitter]" to authoritarian rule, without lots of important intervening steps. Yet there are lots of real authoritarian governments in the world today whose path can be studied, in case you want to look for more real-world evidence of how the process typically happens.
Google has excellent AI and these is no application of it to their search to remove spam. Google needs competition or it'll never be fixed. Search is important
This doesn't make sense for careers that require the additional training before you can be useful in your field.
If I write code that can be exploited with a buffer overflow and you exploit it, who is the law going to punish more harshly?
Downvotes indicate a lack of appreciation for your sarcasm. No tone of voice available when writing.
I think the author was in a tough position to try and pursue this in the first place because, as they admit, they didn't have a direct background in the topic. That makes it difficult at the onset to look for programs and advisors with the the right type of experience to align with your desired research topic when you yourself do not have enough experience to make a fully informed judgement on how well their work in the field relates to what you want to explore.
What does this part mean?

> stuff for building large extensions
>Russia said they're shooting down drones with laser weapons

I tend not to believe this. In part because Russia is very comfortable with shameless lying, and in part because it's really hard to deliver enough energy with a laser to a moving target. That said, non-moving (hovering) drones would be very reasonable targets as you can illuminate for as long as it takes for an important part to melt.

BTW my favorite anti-drone tech are trained hunting hawks. Hawks are a weapon for a more...civilized time.
Isn't making people angry illegal yet?
>you have the "batshit insane" side which claimed that masks literally deprived you of oxygen, and then the "somewhat reasonable" side would over-correct and downplay any negative sides to having to wear a mask

this seems to be a false dichotomy. you can certainly fit all of the opinions into a binary if you'd like, but nowhere near enough people believed what you are calling "batshit insane" to constitute one side.

more reasonably, you could talk about how one side advised not wearing masks at all, proclaiming they were totally useless, and the other "over-corrected" by mandating wearing cloth masks, which we knew all along were practically useless.
The title is good advice... for people willing to have the microphone near them. In a quiet room, with a person or two who keep the mic at arm's length or more, Yeti is a decent choice. Results won't be great, but will be OK. Quiet rooms are rare, but people unwilling to get the microphone close are pretty common.
My experience with post docs in a science lab was that science was surprisingly tribal, and not in a completely bad way. Certain programs and labs trusted people and papers from other labs they knew. They tended to accept PhD students who were recommended by particular professors. And this clustering seemed to exist along some theoretical or subject matter divides. The benefit is that there is some consistency and some short hand or "lab lore" in common.

This article seems to be about a PhD candidate at a program that didn't really have people experienced in the field. If you want to get a science PhD, look at the papers by the tenured people in that program and see where they went to school. Look at who cites their papers. The schools that read their papers may be the ones that you can apply to later.
This is a chicken and egg situation.

Football has more money spent on it because it became so popular that people started spending more money on it. I can't say for sure WHY it became so popular, but people in my area know college football history back 100+ years so well that it's a common topic of conversation.

Usually the 2 big state schools would play a football game at the state fair every year and it became a major social event. The games themselves were almost secondary to the social event.
A very nice approach for read heavy structures is the Left-Right algorithm.

http://concurrencyfreaks.blogspot.com/2013/12/left-right-cla...

It does cost an extra instance, but it generalizes to any data structure and gives you wait-free reads.
I was thinking more about graduating high school. At least in my country that is something you'd put on your resume.

A FAANG probably wouldn't care either way, but a Fortune 500 might, and numerous other places of employment might also pick the person that graduated "on time" if most other things are equal between two candidates.

_If_ they knew the reason it might matter less, but not all employers will take the time to figure out what the reason was, and not all reasons are necessarily something you'd want to share and offer up freely because it might be very personal. They'd have to trust the reason given as well. A person that graduated on time presents no such hassle, or unknowns.

I'm not saying it is correct to do this, it's just what I _imagine_ is likely to happen given how people tend to sometimes judge people on other inconsequential stuff.
unfortunately feeling like shit can make it very difficult to think through these things. Pretty great idea.
The guitar teacher said some students are "about a year behind where they would normally be after four years of studying". That seems a lot less extreme than "never be even moderately proficient at music".
> If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.

It's a blog post, he definitely can say what he thinks, orthogonal to unprofessionality.

It's up to the reader to understand that's his view of reality and without any hard proof we should take his view as a data point, and potentially an erroneous one. Nothing more.

Last we need is people writing accusatory white papers to explain themselves over an opinion they had on a personal blog post.
PhDs really require hard justification to continue. Especially in STEM where you can do as much research via a corporate job.

Happily left with an ABD to join Microsoft in 1995.
Doesn't this only apply when all the threads are doing the same thing but on different data?
> when the soil is clay is very problematic

There's quite a few countries that converted marshes in actual land.
Net or tape? In a war? Why not suicide your drone into the target drone? If you want something reusable or longer range, a shotgun-like apparatus.

Gliders will be easier to spot because they won't be able to actively navigate through trees for cover the way the way a more nimble, powered drone could.
That does not matter though. As long as US avoids to adopt the English rule for attorney's fees, everyone will lose to patent trolls.
Masters degrees are the way to learn something that exists in depth though. This is different to a PhD.
A donut C is a donut with one big bite taken out of it, all the way through to the hole.
6. Killing someone by clicking a button and watching the explosion on a TV is much easier than pulling a trigger in the real-world
As an Australian stay at home dad who knows many others, I've never heard of or had anything close to these experiences hapoen. And I'm not aware of Australia having a paticularly closed minded reputation?

You maybe should question that anecdote.
You got it. I don’t know how things worked in the old days before people started to think that becoming Einstein or Witten was a plausible career path, and academia oriented itself to deal with the demand. But. To imagine that culture-fit might allocate resources better than test-driven meritocracy! quantamagazine needs to start featuring more representative career paths like OP’s.
"clef" is a good example, thanks! There certainly seem a lot fewer than in English though.
What I've imagined for the past decade or so, are spotter drones that are about the same size as the drones they are design to shoot down. These spotter drones could be built much like WW1/WW2 aircraft, just much smaller, with top speeds between 50-200knots for the smaller versions.

As a weapon, they could carry weapons similar to submachineguns, shotguns or light marchine guns, depending on the size of the target. Add an AI of about the same level of sophistication as the "autopilots" in cars, and they should be able to identify and shoot down hostile drones relatively cost efficiently. Produced at scale, the smallest versions (designed to shoot down comercially available drones, for instance), would not have to cost all that much more than the drones they are designed to shoot down, if produced at scale.

I'm imagining at least 3-4 size categories, lets say.
1) Tiny, able to shoot down most quad copters. Top speed of 50-100knots. Price needs to be low enough to allow tens of thousands to be produced. Could potentially also double as anti-infantry weapons by strafing.
2) Small. Able to shoot down switchblade-sized drones. Top speed of maybe 200 knots. Can be produced in numbers of thousands.
3) Medium. Sutable to hunt small UAV's, such as Buyraktar. Top speed of several hundered knots, maybe just below Mach 1. Somewhat more expensive than the Buyraktar, but can also carry some of the same ordanance, like a tiny fighter-bomber.
4) Full-sized, possibly supersonic. Basically the same as the Loyal Wingman concept. Designed to counter other full-sized drones as well as manned aircraft.

Basically, the removal of a pilot, allows aircraft to span a wide range of sizes, and I would expect all sizes to be produced, as it is uneconomical to hunt quadcopters with full sized aircraft, while it is impossible to hunt supersonic aircraft with switchblade type aircraft.

In a way, this would be analogous to naval vessels, with different sizes serving different roles, from corvettes, MTB's and attacks subs, through frigates and cruisers, to WW2 style batlleships or carriers.

Now, for the AI researchers out there, imagine the careers that can be built around providing AI's for these vehicles. To see your own AI locked in a WW2 style dogfight with a similar drone from another country, in a real-time feed.....