skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> During an earnings call last month, BJ's CEO Bob Eddy said the store has kept the low price "just because it's such a meaningful thing to our members." He said the chain makes similar investments in other "key member value items" like paper and water.

Although the article doesn't use the word, this is a subsidy. It's not unlike the subsides that governments give to keep certain prices such as fuel and food low. It's also similar to the currency peg that certain governments set for their own currencies relative to another.

It strikes me that the stores are kind of running a peg on two commodities whose supply they have no control over: chickens and dollars.

If you can't control the supply both sides of the peg, it will eventually fall. Depending on how important that peg is to your image, you might be able to absorb considerable pain along the way.
This is some very fancy printing. How much does one of these cost to make? How much are you going to ask people to pay for them?

The smallest denomination is roughly equivalent to US$30 so I don't think this is a thing that falls into "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it".
Yeah, but when you give me that cash to buy a hot dog from me, how can I verify that I am the actual owner of the received cash?
Mark 3:24: If a kingdom is divided against itself, it cannot stand.

Polarization will kill America.
I think an even more interesting question is to delve into what exactly “net bad” or “net good” even means. Relative to what?

I think we’ve been living in artificial environments for so long we’ve forgotten how much nature simply does not care and is not meant to be any particular way. It just is. Whether we are a part of the environment nature is adapting to is totally irrelevant from the perspective of other creatures, and we are both naive and solipsistic to think our notions of harm and no harm matter on an evolutionary timescale.

Dropping containers into the bottom of the ocean is bad for us. It conflicts with the pristine natural environment we envision and the natural order we have been adapted to and find interesting, beautiful and wish to protect, and it feels like bad stewardship of a garden we wish to cultivate.

That does not matter to nature. Different species within the ocean are in a constant battle for survival to adapt to anything and everything and containers are just another adaptational factor like any other.

I am worried by the number of people that seem to think nature will reciprocate if we are nice to it. We should strive to protect the environment and not change it drastically for our own reasons, not anthropomorphize and treat it like a substitute God that will reward us if we make the proper sacrifices to it.

This is a tangential rant not that related to what you’re saying, and I don’t know why a particular flavor of desire to protect nature as some kind of good in and of itself bothers me so much (which you may not hold in the manner that bothers me), but it does. I say that as someone who is currently bird watching while browsing hn by a marsh and loves evolutionary history and the study/protection of the natural world. I think maybe it’s because it diminishes where all of the stuff around us comes from and how we got here. Biological stuff is really, really, really old and been through environmental changes we can’t even imagine. I feel like a bunch of containers dropped in the ocean is like just another thing in a long, long, loooong history of all kinds of curve balls that contribute to the constant change that is the natural world.
> It's not. It's just regular code - there are no differences.

> All statements in JS can be expressed as expressions directly (ternary/array methods) or indirectly (nested within a function expression), so there's no loss of functionality - it's not even really a subset in that sense.

Do you not see the contradiction?
He did so in correspondence with people in the scientific community. If AGI is both banned AND normatively reviled, then there can be a powerful incentive to defect from a community that would develop AGI.

… or it becomes a tribalistic division and half the community of AI-knowledgeable people become more motivated to develop AGI for queen and country.
The fact that basicmed contained absolutely no affordances for well-managed mental health conditions shows that basicmed was also a serious administrative failure, though.
The ports themselves are mechanically fragile. You're not just breaking an adapter; you're breaking the device itself.

Which why one should also not buy Canon's "cinema" cameras (R5 C) that are similarly crippled with micro-HDMI (but astronomically more expensive).
But you did have light pens, and functions like PEN() and the ON PEN statement to work with them. When PCs came around, those were generally appropriated to work with mice.
This is going a huge tangent, but...

I don't much believe in antivirus, as crooks can often find ways around them.

Traditionally, trust is based on knowing someones name and place of residence so you can call the cops on them and/or take matters in your own hands if they try any funny business. For anonymous people, an established reputation can also work.

In this case the repository is 7 years old. The owner states a full name (that if we are paranoid may or may not be the real one). A person with that name has published a scientific article about compression.
"the day you need to return your video tapes"

That day has long passed.
Caveat emptor:

"Our online courses are inspired by Hillsdale College's core curriculum—which accounts for one-half of our undergraduate education.

They provide a coherent citizen's education in the liberal arts, which pursues high learning, teaches the Christian faith, forms character, and defends freedom."
> I thought if you use compression, you'll always lose at least a small amount of data.

No, the terms "lossless" and "lossy" are attached to different compression methods to indicate whether they do or don't discard data.

Lossless compression methods like PNG, FLAC, ZIP, RAR, etc. will output the exact same input.

Lossy compression methods, which discard some of the input data, include JPEG, MP3, AAC, MPEG-4 video (e.g. AVC, HEVC), and many more.

As PNG is lossless, you can convert your BMPs into PNGs (which will make it far smaller) and back to BMPs, without a single pixel changing in any way. However, note that some PNG "optimizers" may introduce loss with some settings, like reducing the color space, but that's incidental to the format... You can reduce the resolution or color space of a BMP image to reduce its size as well.
You gotta dial in your sleep, exercise and diet first. Consult professionals about sleep, diet and exercise issues to confirm you are in a sustainable and effective routine.

If those three fundamentals don't improve anything, you should then consult a professional to help. If the professionals can't help then you can try out personal suggestions from others (like this thread). This is just the path in order of most-likely to least-likely solutions.

It is possible that you have an inherently bad memory. It seems like long-term memory from your post, but some more clarification would be good.

No sweat. Look into Anki flashcards and do all your note taking for things you want to memorize long term. For all other forms of notes, just have them easily accessible via search or time/date stamps. Gotta craft systems using reliable tools as crutches to improve on any innate abilities. I may not be able to dunk on a ten-feet basketball hoop, but I sure can with a trampoline!

Cheers, and I hope you find a reliable solution soon. You deserve it
I have been checking these EV threads lately because of considering an EV purchase. There seems to be always an EV owner or five on here doing their best “Nick Burns, your company’s computer guy” impression.

It’s frankly a little disturbing.
Yeah that doesn't surprise me, you pretty much have to pay them regularly if using Cloudron, even as an individual, whereas nobody hosting their own Sandstorm server ever had to pay anything. Even when Cloudron was open source, updates weren't automatic unless you subscribed.

I think personal servers is pretty key, so I'm glad there are a few endeavors working on it.
I wonder how much of the new car being cheaper to insure was the liability only portion of the insurance vs the comprehensive. How much of your risk is seen as so much greater by insurance companies as likely to be at fault in causing an accident in a ten year old car vs new.
Ask HN: Do you use Node for production APIs? How is your experience?
Trying to compare options like Node, Ruby/Rails, and Django against something like Java/Spring, Elixir/Phoenix, or Go.

I'm wondering if anyone here is using Node for their production APIs. What is the scaling story like? What about the costs and maintenance involved?

I've got experience with Go and Java, but I've only ever used Node for scripts and super simple internal APIs. I don't have experience with Ruby/Rails nor Django, and used Elixir many years ago and enjoyed it but I'm not sure if I want to invest my time on it.

Interested to hear your thoughts. My biggest pros for Java/Go is that it is tried and tested. I've heard many people use Rails and that it is super fast to build stuff with it. The cons is that it is hard to find people who can use Java/Go well enough, and I've worked on too many projects with spaghetti code and horribly designed architecture. A dynamic language seems easier to refactor or just re-write, compared to these.
I know it's a bit far fetched but I'd go as far as to say that, by Occam's razor, the conscious experience does not exist. A world where the "conscious experience" does not exist would be indistinguishable from our world; ergo, the "conscious experience" does not exist.
After reading all freely accessible pages on your site I still have no idea what this is supposed to do. Getting stated is behind a login which I do not bother to create to get a demo of what this tool can do.

My advice, recreate your entire site to show what the tool does. If it is that ground breaking of a change make sure to load it with examples and provide a free demo account.
It would be interesting to make it an indirect threaded code interpreter targeting wasm. Should end up faster than typical bytecode.
AI Trained on 4Chan Becomes ‘Hate Speech Machine’
Can I ask? How do you mean "get[ting] better"? What is "better" in this case? What's your criterion for "better"?
The concept of a philosophical zombie is outright incoherent under most formulations. The argument runs "What if everything was exactly like a universe where everyone had a mind except that no one had a mind?"

The answer is that one of these things is true:
* P-zombies would write IDENTICAL papers about how they experience qualia but p-zombie land wouldn't
* The mind has some effect on the universe you can detect, so P-zombie universe looks quite different
I don’t take it as an excuse for legalizing drug use.
> were the best thing since sliced bread

sliced bread is disaster
For those who want the "real deal" when it comes to features that old BASICs had, and don't care about the web angle, try this:

https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/
I've had pretty good experiences with Protonmail, though some of my network seemed to melt down that I was questioning their integrity that I felt protecting against them abusing their access would be necessary to ensure I could find stable employment.

(I like the encryption at rest which relies on a key of my choosing, paired with MFA to log in.)

I still maintain I was correct in my choice, and correct that I was retaliated for attempting to "take my business elsewhere".

I had issues porting out a Google Voice number, and had a few other issues that in parallel with my interactions with individual Googlers and ex-Googlers left me feeling pretty unsafe.

I like that Proton encrypts at default, doesn't embed ads (so no excuses wrt to targeted ads, malicious JS, etc), and while Switzerland is not a place you can break the law with impunity, I enjoy knowing my enemies can file an MLAT[1] if they want to invade my privacy moving forward.

(And conversely, if it's not serious enough for them to "come back with a warrant" across internation lines, then they can just learn to not be such nebby little jagoffs[2] after years of legally protected ratfuckery[3][4].

(My email is this handle's name at protonmail dot ch, email me if you want -- I'll either reply, or set up a filter, but I very rarely block absent a lack of storage, so be careful!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_legal_assistance_treaty

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jagoff#Noun

[3] https://www.npr.org/2013/06/13/191226106/fisa-court-appears-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking
How about you try your best to explain all of it? What exactly is that you understand here? What does Optics.rewriteOf do? What's the purpose of Lint.useToMap? How about D.subExpressions ? How does that composition work with the loop function?

Even better. How would you go about finding the source code containing the definition of the function `D.subExpressions` ?
The issue is not that it's easy to work out, the issue is that these manufacturers have decided that fine grained specs aren't important. I actually more or less agree with that, although I wish they'd at least indicate generation.
> And I spent way less time learning Go than learning Haskell.

...And you've got what you paid for.
Plenty of good advices out there. Remember that momentum is key. Someone once said to me, "its easier to get a girlfriend, a job, whatever, when you have one already". So get a job. A whichever job. For momentum sake.
I think it’s less impressive than you think. Most of the ocean is incredibly deep and the bottom isn’t that interesting. You really need to be (relatively) close-ish to shore and (relatively) shallow to see what most people think of as interesting.

In Florida, where I grew up, the state would sink old barges, tires, cement tubes left over from construction projects, etc. to make artificial reefs. Those were pretty cool because they were near shore and attracted the whole food chain from algae and coral all the way up to sharks and other apex predators. Do that in the middle of the ocean and you just add a new pile of junk that maybe a couple tiny shrimp and sightless fish call home.
There's this whole massive project that bombs the Darrien Gap with sterilized screwflies to prevent them from getting into North America[1]. I suspect opening that route to vehicles would probably help get them past the gap and into North America where they'd wreak havoc on livestock.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/north-ame...
> Democracy in the West is more than a mere political configuration, its also the cultural precept (however divergent in interpretation)

This was a hard concept for my Thai wife to grasp at first. I described it this way.

In America, each person represents their own kingdom. The government exists to serve (and be subservient) and protect us to keep the peace. I always try to remind myself that government by the people, for the people means that the balance of power lies solely with the people.
"The AI thinks it's good"

Then why wouldn't it conceal it's good goal from those evil humans who would stop it from achieving it?
I think you've got to be asking

- What benefit does this give to the researchers who are publishing the data?

- Who is paying for storing the data - frequently in the TB?

When the answers are "approximately none", and "the researchers" you're not going to get many takers.

And that's assuming it's easy, it reality it often won't be. If there's a lot of data, it's literally just a pain to upload it (network bandwidth). If there's sensitive data (PII), it's a pain to redact it and make sure you aren't leaking any. Data is frequently in strange formats, and it's a pain to translate it to a standard one. Etc.

---

I've worked with 3 university labs as a contract programmer. In all of them I worked with data with one of the issues mentioned above. Health information in one, TBs of photonics data in another (which was being parsed by extremely janky code too), and 4 16-bit channel images in the last (hundreds of GB of them too). Admittedly for the last it would have been easy to upload it as long as you didn't want people to be able to actually view it (on the other hand I wrote some software to let people false color them live in a browser for the lab, so that the researchers could view them).
Their website doesn't list a date so I have no idea how up to date this is, but the situation doesn't seem all that clear to me: https://jpegxl.io/articles/rans/

If Microsoft's patent goes through and ends up being enforceable then their open-source release doesn't mean squat; their license may say it's royalty free and grants free usage of any patents, but the patents wouldn't be theirs to grant the usage of.

Of course you can ignore this for software distributed in jurisdictions without silly stuff like software patent enforcement, but if you distribute the software to the USA then you might run into trouble.
Not in the slightest. Aviation gasoline is heavily regulated because it has to work flawlessly in every (piston) aircraft engine. 100LL exists because it has an extremely low knock rate; any new regulation needs to maintain that. This is a safety issue, not a political one.
Because cars have been designed to deal with it since the 80s at least. Airplanes not so. Sure, we could begin to manufacture airplanes with more tolerance for different gasolines (and in fact we have; many modern high compression aircraft engines can take unleaded car gas), but it's taken decades to get to even this point.
Haven’t had any terrible experiences with lightning cables. I have several cables that are from 2016/2018 that I use regularly. But then again none of my type c cables go bad either… I think it would have been safer to say “from my experience <xyz>” instead of presenting your opinion as if it were more than just an opinion. I see how friends and family members treat their cables, tugging on the phone to disconnect instead of removing the cable by hand. Or placing the charger in a way that the cable is bent up against a piece of furniture. Regarding the lightning port, it’s actually quite easy to clean, compared to ports like usb-c (I’m guessing you know why that would be). Also using lightning on a Mac doesn’t make sense and that’s probably why they don’t do it.
Maybe the Prosperity License:

https://prosperitylicense.com/versions/3.0.0
I'm fully on board with this.

I've been trying to get people to realize the power of the browser as a ubiquitous runtime for local software (akin to the way that /usr/bin/python and /bin/bash are situated to run scripts loaded from disk). But there's evidence of an obvious mental block when I try engaging with people. It's as if when you speak about the browser, people immediately start slipping and don't stop until they've arrived mentally at a thin client interacting with an application running on a remote server. No. I'm talking about documents that are meant to be saved to your machine and later opened from a file picker (with e.g. Ctrl+O) or double clicked in your file manager. They also happen to be able to be made interactive, and are self-contained, not unlike a partially baked spreadsheet with macros ready and willing to accept your input.

The author is spot-on with the metaphor to woodworking jigs.

If there's some criticism I have, it's here:

> The goal is not to produce a system that runs forever as has historically been the aim of software for the government and, subsequently, large tech behemoths.

The perverse thing is that this method of development is more likely to produce something that can run "forever", accidentally doing a much better job than any SaaS peddler. The biggest threat to this is the shrinking land area, as one tech behemoth uses its leverage (although all browser vendors are complicit) to force more people to conform to its expectations of fitting into the contemporary webdev mold when it comes to what media a commodity browser will accept.

And then, aside from that, I'm struck that the author may be overly focused on collage. I've said it before: self-contained HTML is (in many cases, at least) an acceptable substitute for office file formats. You can even get your traditional office suite to give you HTML instead of its native format, usually. Here's to hoping that this remains viable as the affordances of file:// space are chipped away.
Well you can still do USB2.0 over USB-C for all your low-speed, low-power gadgets.
Yeah, there’s a ton of inertia, with the standard socket so well entrenched. That’s pretty crazy about the proprietary socket. Seems like the big industry players should get a voluntary standards group together and make a big push.
That's not exactly a surprising result. Didn't Microsoft have to shut down their Twitter-trained AI after it started emulating a typical terminally-online neo-Nazi? I might be a CS dropout, but I stuck around long enough for garbage in, garbage out.
I'm not sure you understand what a necessary condition is.
Looking at one everyone say, using backup codes and asking friends to store them (preferably on a USB drive in an encrypted password store) can be a good solution. I don't think most people need to worry about criminals (or the state) tracking down their connections and extort the backup keys from them.

I would never enter my email password into anyone else's computer, though. And this is also true for all of the other important passwords too.
Not a researcher, but I built a data governance system for sharing medical research data. When interviewing people, one thing that surprised me initially (but which makes total sense in retrospect) is that most researchers do not want to share their data. They want to keep it proprietary until they have published as much as possible on it. In many cases, their funders require the data to be shared, so they go through the motions, but if you give them a chance they will almost always try to deny access to anybody else. They're very afraid of someone coming along and publishing on their data before they do.

It's very much not an open source mentality. Everybody wants other scientists to share their data, but nobody wants to share their own.
I work as a bioinformatician (programmer in genomics), a typical paper may involve a dozen sequencing samples (~25G each), and a few thousand lines of scripts to produce CSVs/graphs

When I started my lab head got a request for an old paper (before my time) and I had to hunt down the data, put it on the web, find the code, send an email etc - it was a lot of work, almost as much as just sharing it in the first place.

So now all the code goes up on GitHub, all the sequencing reads to public archives, and we fill the supps full of any intermediate CSVs etc we think people might find useful.

I saw it as "people bothering me so I would do admin" but some lab heads see being requested as "strategic networking and being informed about other research in the field" where they can see what others are doing and gain collaborations / be put onto papers etc

I guess it's just expectations: I've met surgeons who have the expectation that because they kept a piece of tumor from a surgery and gave it to a lab, they will be on any paper that ever uses data from that tissue until the end of time (even on labs on the other side of the world re-using the same data).

When I'm collecting public data, I usually don't bother to ask due to the hassle, and move straight on to the actually public stuff.

My bet is that papers with public code/data are used/cited way more often, but the tradeoff is probably their authors get less total papers over all.

Do you want a larger number of people slightly happy with you or a fewer number of "close friends" in your area who may look kindly on you for grants or paper reviews.