skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's the half life of the RTG that is limiting them, right? Because they're way too far to use any kind of solar power.

Ps I always thought that record was a bit funny. I mean it's a good method of initiating communication. Just strapping it to a can of poison is kind of a mixed message. "Hey buddies we're peaceful humans, ps here's a can of instadeath" :) Though I suppose little radioactivity would be left by the time it ever reached an alien civilization.
I suspect patreon's hope is you onboard people with one small monthly payment, then that person will over time add more which lets them then make a useful profit on you.
Domestic is the key here.
oh, that is much better - I survived long enough to notice link to their paper.

Thanks!
I just don't buy that the river metaphor wasn't about Apple. It just doesn't make sense unless he was retiring or leaving design entirely. Otherwise the lack of water is clearly related to Apple.

If it really was solely about himself it's a really poor metaphor. So the river is moving to a new mountain? And the river's lack of water has nothing to do with the current one? Or, the mountain (Apple) has plenty of water but somehow this river (employee) can't receive any of it?

The non-critical-of-Apple reading is convoluted and tortured, imo.
Yes, US stats. My bad for not stating that.
There seems little value in "exposing" crap we would be better off not building in the first place.

The more expressive your language is, the less the runtime and hardware needs to guess about.
While it’s clear the DNC didn’t want Sanders as the candidate, the reality is that he just didn’t have the votes, regardless of how many thumbs were on the scale.

The RNC didn’t want Trump as the candidate either, but guess what? He got the votes.
As somebody who also built a crypto startup that facilitated payments (opentoken.com), crypto does not eliminate fraud. Merchants want fraud protection, they don't know how to handle it and aren't interested in taking on that business. You will end up either handling fraud in the payment layer, or your merchants will find somebody who will.
only as long as you have no interest in interfacing to actual money at either end. Then the bitcoin approach basically sucks.

If crypto was better and cheaper for remittances, then Western Union would already be using it - they've certainly been experimenting with it for most of a decade. Companies can be stick-in-the-muds, but not that much of stick-in-the-muds.
It's a structural problem. If you got a pit bull, raised it without special consideration, and it mauled a child, you could say it was a bad dog, sure, but you raised the chances heavily right in the beginning.

Our FPTP voting system with parties and primaries does the same thing. Each round, usually 40-60% of voters' preference is ignored; with a primary and open election, that's about 40% voting for who they want, 60% holding their nose for the open vote, and only 20% getting who they want. The whole system is stacked heavily against moderate people who compromise; it's a testament to incumbency advantage that any exist at all.
I like that analogy. Because if you bring a well-stocked caravan, tools and spare parts, a radio, and a bit of know-how, you'll probably actually be fine.

Living "out there" for an extended period would be extremely difficult, but given what else sufficiently motivated humans have figured out, I think not the impossibility that many people imagine.
There could be almost any number. We know of at least one (if you count humans as a civilization).
A lot of political polling is poor and conducted in isolation. People consistently support addressing climate change, for example. What will they pay to address climate change? Less than $10/month: https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-.... Most people support Roe. Meanwhile, most people oppose legalized second trimester abortions, which is guaranteed by Roe. With respect to gun—what people support and what they trust democrats enough to work with them on are two different things.

A lot of issue polling is conducted by advocacy organizations and is useless. Pew and Gallup are some of the few organizations doing objective polling.
Maybe it's just a terminological matter. When counting how much money there is, you count the money that the seller now has in their account. You don't also count the amount of the mortgage, which is what I interpreted the statement to mean. Note that the person (or institution) that issued the mortgage now has less money in their account.

Counting the mortgage itself would make sense if the holder of the mortgage regarded it as "just as good as cash", but of course holding a mortgage is not at all equivalent to holding cash. Holding a mortgage is a long-term investment with uncertain return, and limited liquidity, not a money equivalent.
Bucky Fuller calculated that we should all be able to retire after a career of about two years having paid for the rest of our lives, by sometime in the 1970's if we apply our resources and technology efficiently. It was part of his "Design Science Revolution".

The technology has arrived on schedule but the logistics are still messed up.

At least part of the problem is the elites siphoning off capital to Panama or wherever, but the real issue is just getting the basic idea across: you no longer have to "earn" a living. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. We have effectively already won the game of "Life on Earth" but we collectively haven't noticed it yet!

- - - -

Ideally programmers are working to replace themselves, and the set of problems you can solve with a computer expands (to some theoretical limit? E.g. will an AI one day tell you who to marry? Which schools to attend, what career path to pursue?)

Anyway, have you heard of the Futumura Projections? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation ) I think one path forward would be to use a notation for programming that is amenable to partial evaluation.
Rest now sweet explorers. You've given us more knowledge than we asked for and inspired untold numbers. Even in your final dreams you give us beautiful gifts and prove to the universe that we exist.
Agree. You could use the argument that argument against almost any teaching example. Like, when's the last time you ever needed to integrate x from 0 to 1? I've never needed to do that. Or when is the last time you needed to know how long a 1 kg ball will take to fall from 1 m? At least in my opinion, the way the author thinks recursion should be taught seems to needlessly complicate it.
Would that hold up in court? If I sell you a car via a contract that says "if anybody steals the keys they now legally own the car" I suspect that would be difficult to enforce. And the thief would have to reveal themselves to assert their contractual right to own the car, thereby inviting criminal charges.
The difference is that buying crypto is like buying a pet rock or a bottle of air. In fact it's less than that.. It's literally nothing. It's a greater fool market and it's certainly not currency. In addition there's companies (lenders, exchanges, issuers, etc) which build their businessesn on schemes built on schemes that you are supposed to trust which you can't because no one person understands the code or the infrastructure and systems that the code is built in. All in a totally unregulated market that can be shut down in bits and pieces or even all at once by the government. And then you have people touting it as a legitimate asset class deserving investment. And now it's all coming tumbling down.
> His philosophy proven again correct in my view. I found Yellen's comments staggering - having to apologize for not seeing inflation coming - after the US increased money supply 40% from 2020-2022.

Yellen's comments are not contrary to what Friedman says and reasoning only from money supply is wrong headed. It's money supply & velocity and velocity dropped off a cliff in 2020.
The usual things enterprise software companies do: spend on sales, marketing, and R&D on features that would be attractive to new leads.

If they stopped doing those things and just served the existing customers who bring in the $1B revenue today, I’m guessing they could be profitable fairly quickly and start paying dividends (or returning capital through stock buybacks).

But that kind of stable enterprise software company would be mostly attractive as a takeover target for a larger player or private equity; it’s not the story that investors in public markets want to hear. So Elastic’s valuation would be slashed.

This doesn’t make the company a Ponzi though. Seeking growth is a valid strategy and one that’s still sought out by many investors despite the valuation correction from last year.
The opposite has been true in desktops. I have a Ryzen 3900X box and there still isn’t anything from Apple that I would replace it with. Not even to run macOS on it (which I do on the AMD box, using GPU passthrough).

My MacBook Pro 14" is pretty much on-par with my Ryzen 5900X CPU-wise (the M1 Ultra would surpass it by a wide margin). The GPU of the M1 Max is nothing to sneeze at, but I'd love it if they'd bring eGPU support to the M1 line. (And if one can dream, if NVIDIA would also make CUDA available.)
Thank you for your input but I am not commenting on the decision to stop purchasing. I'm responding specifically to the final demand: "Vote at the ballot box and with your dollars." The OP is encouraging us to take action against this behavior specifically via choosing how they allocate their dollars as consumers (and also voting), which is core to the neoliberal mission. They're not just saying it's worthwhile to stop purchasing, they're saying that this is the solution
Any particular reason you're not using the rdiskN (raw) device family, even if you're reading from the disk? I've done plenty of HDD dumps/restores on OS X and macOS over the years, with USB-to-SATA adapters, and so far I haven't caught any problems with neither reliability nor transfer speeds, always maxing out USB2 at roughly 35 MB/sec.
Non phase change systems are inherently more efficient because every heat exchanger (air/air, air/coolant and coolant/water) can be counterflow, allowing substantially greater efficiency.

In phase change systems, the 'hot side' and 'cold side' are all at the same temperature, which means any gradient in whatever you are heating/cooling is lost energy.
Why Netflix Is Still ‘Keeping Things a Little Bit Quiet’ on Its Gaming Front
At work, the new MacBooks with HDMI are trickling in and I've never seen so much excitement around a laptop. People (mostly Product people) just giddy they don't need a dongle to connect to screens.

I didn't realize how much people hate dongles.
“ When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy. Sadly rivers run dry..”

It seems obvious that he is talking about his personal joy running out. Because that’s what he said.
> How does one blow in insulation without removing drywall?

We got blown insulation in the floors (ie between roof and floor), he drilled a 2 inch hole every two feet or so. We added our parquet floor right on top, with just some thin XPS sheets inbetween for noise.

Not sure about drywall, but I'd imagine it's similar. Easiest would be to just put some 6mm plasterboards on top to cover the holes, saves you handling each one individually.
It should be quite possible for one country to have no inflation while other countries do have inflation, if the inflation is caused by monetary policy, not real, global production difficulties.

The exchange rates should just shift continually so that the country that isn't expanding its money supply doesn't experience inflation.
Lets not be disingenuous.

CAPITALISM cuts deep inside creator's profits. Patreon is only one such that relies on the creative works of humans, and gatekeep while charging usurious rates for "access".

Patreon DOES cut deep, for little benefit. But so does every company that hires people. By definition, we do not get the full surplus of our labor. We get scraps, and the "job creators" (read: capitalist scam) get the lion's share of our work.

That's how capitalism works - it's a scheme where only a few at the top get the benefits of the rest of us, all the while they tell us that they deserve our benefits of work.
> I just think the language of motivation and desire makes it harder to see the risks, because it introduces irrelevant questions into the the conversation like "how can machines want something?"

Yet discourse on existential AI risks is predicated on something like a "goal" (e.g. to maximise paperclips). Notions like "goal" also make it harder to see clearly what we are actually discussing.

> the term "intelligence" seems pretty neutral

Hmm, I'm not convinced. It seems like an extremely loaded term to me.
Preach. If the Democratic elites are supposed to be the "adults in the room," then they're the ones responsible for Trump more than anyone else. Nominating Hillary was a bluffing game of Russian roulette that the DNC shouldn't have played when it was obvious most of the country was in the mood for a figurative double homicide.

Though the whole system is definitely not working.
The article discusses how the two mathematicians (Spielman and Teng) came up with Smoothed Analysis for Algorithms (as opposed to Worst case) which gives insight into why Simplex works well.

We introduce the smoothed analysis of algorithms, which is a hybrid of the worst-case and average-case analysis of algorithms. In smoothed analysis, we measure the maximum over inputs of the expected performance of an algorithm under small random perturbations of that input. We measure this performance in terms of both the input size and the magnitude of the perturbations. We show that the simplex algorithm has polynomial smoothed complexity

https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0111050

The two authors won the Godel prize in 2008 for this work.
> cannot be won with the time and resources available to ordinary human teachers

By your description it clearly appears that whoever manages your company[1] is not actually interested in detecting cheating.

What you describe could be easily combated by giving teachers ability to fail blatant cheaters.

[1]At this point it is hard to pretend that it is university
As opposed to the original comment that says they aren’t useful for increasing granularity.
Excellent description. I haven't thought about IRC since I was a kid (and not a software engineer). This brings about beautiful nostalgia and new found sense of elegance.

Fond memories of staying up late into the night.
The reason why this is interesting isn't because humans are smart, but the assumption that human fallibility is both predictable and worth investigating (a supposition I'm inclined to agree with).

Even if humans are easy to fool (though the fact that we're just now achieving this on a generalized scale after at least 80 years of theorizing seems to contradict this), humans being fooled can result in significant enough impacts where we should still investigate the degree to which they can be tricked, and what methods of discerning are available to us.
It's pretty hard to speculate with any certainty, but I suspect companies like Amazon and Google would have had much more difficulty growing if Microsoft had more power to control their access to Windows users. In the same way that Google and Apple made it difficult to block ads on mobile or sideload apps without using the App/Play stores, MSFT would have found a way to get bigger slices of the Amazon retail and Google search pies.
> Are opinion polls actually representative of what public opinion is

Yes.

> and more importantly, how the public will vote?

No. And you touched on the key problem. It's impossible to poll how people will vote because voting differs in key ways:

- tribal (party affiliation) component

- secret

- different wording

- more fear of consequences (meaning that fear of "something going wrong" affects a vote but not a survey)

- lots of other things I haven't personally researched

So the key is for elected officials to figure out how to market a policy/candidate so it connects to the issue polled, and few of them are good at that.
I agree factorial is very clearly defined with self-references but I think that the answers have no clear meaning and that's why its not an optimal way of teaching recursion. Teaching examples that have meaningful answers IMO allow for much better reasoning
If you assume that either everything is supposed to be a public forum or nothing is, then yeah. Otherwise, no.

Both are private property, yes. And you are correct that twitter legally has as much right to do whatever they want with their product and restrict it however they want as United Airlines does. That's not the point being made here at all and has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

The parent comment I originally replied to was saying "how can twitter even he a public square if it is a private company, that's a contradiction". And I was just saying that there is nothing preventing a private company from having a product that behaves like a public square, hence that isn't a contradiction or an oxymoron.
When reading Feynman, don't miss the fact that the original audio recordings are now freely available [1], which, even speaking as someone with a strong preference for reading vs. listening or watching instructive material, shouldn't be missed. Feynman's sheer enthusiasm for the material is hard to get across in print.

In the spirit of SICP, I also like Spivak's less conventional Physics for Mathematicians [2], but, as the title suggests, this assumes more, or at least different, mathematical prerequisites than most introductory mechanics texts. "Strong undergraduate maths background — at least one course each in linear algebra and differential equations, say, or equivalent self-study — with a bit of motivated extracurricular work in differential geometry" sounds about right, but here I'm basically just describing my own background when approaching the book, so YMMV.

[1] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html

[2] https://archive.org/details/physics-for-mathematicians-mecha...
Why would they charge more for the imports because the Fed in another country increased the money supply in that country?
My favorite recursion example is multiplication. Multiplying two numbers is inherently recursive, even though we don't typically think of it that way. (Following is expressed in base 10 for clarity, but in base 2, the multiplications by powers of 10 are of course merely shifts so they don't cost anything.)

68628933
* 26973931

=

(6862 * 3931) * 10000
+ (2697 * 8933) * 10000
+ (6862 * 2697) * 10000 * 10000
+ (8933 * 3931)

And then we notice that (6862 * 3931) can be expressed as

(68 * 31) * 100
+ (39 * 62) * 100
+ (68 * 39) * 100 * 100
+ (62 * 31)

and so on for the 3 remaining products. And then each of these two-digit multiplications can in principle be subdivided into 4 1-digit multiplications.

The reason the algorithm is recursive is that we're really talking about polynomial multiplication, which is convolution. (Other kinds of multiplication (e.g. dot products) are not convolution and this discussion doesn't apply to them.)

The above is interesting and curious, but is it useful? Yes. Karatsuba multiplication [0] exploits this recursion and adds some clever algebra to reduce the total number of multiplication instructions needed and thus speed up bignum multiplication.

For even bigger numbers, the Schönhage–Strassen algorithm [1] goes even further and uses the Fourier transform to convert the overarching convolution operation to element-by-element (dot-product style) multiplication.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karatsuba_algorithm#Recursive_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6nhage%E2%80%93Strasse...
I did read your post, and I include AR and VR in my assessment. Even in a virtual 3D environment, adding a third dimension to a user interface just makes it less convenient.
...of the whole world.
That makes sense. Real life trolly problems do happen in places like an ICU, where people are already in a position where a marginal call can cause a death.
Understanding requirements so well that you give the customer what they actually do want, even though they don't yet know they want it, sounds like really great engineering.
Limited-Edition American Express Card Made from an Actual Delta 747 Airplane
The fact that the recursive method for calculating factorials fails for quite small numbers is a good reason for teaching it.

Also computing the factorial is one of the first examples illustrating that recursion is useless in practice.
> not understanding and following requirements isn't something
engineers should be doing IMO

I disagree, engineers are not robots. Good engineers may second guess
and get technically involved in adjusting badly written instructions
or mangled schematics, and do so all the time. And no, the "process"
for querying and changing requirements is not always practical. Of
course good engineers should document and report all deviations from
the recspec and talk to the quality manager. Spotting that a capacitor
or diode voltage is under-rated and swapping the part number, no
problem. Upgrading a part if it makes no other difference seems okay
too. I've been very grateful to fab or pick and place engineers who
corrected a silly mistake I made instead of just sending me back a
board that obviously wouldn't work. But those kind of people who take
initiatives are rare to find these days,
Youtube is also a genuine platform that gets you an audience and discoverability, gets you ad revenue, and hosts your content (which in the case of streaming video is very much non-trivial technically). Patreon is a donation button with a feed. It's effectively a payment processor and in most of the world the margins in that industry are a fraction of a percent.

This is Youtube vs Patreon (https://www.pymnts.com/subscriptions/2022/vimeo-raises-rates...)

"She says she began making subscriber-only Patreon content in 2020 and hosting it on Vimeo. Then came the notice from Vimeo on March 11 that van Baarle’s bandwidth usage was in the top 1% of Vimeo’s users. So if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site, she’d need to upgrade to a custom plan that could run her as much as $3,500 a year, given a week to make changes or leave the site. The Verge noted that her experience was just one of many — numerous Patreon creators received the notice, which has resulted in “confusion and panic.”
It did cause inflation, but governments don't consider every price when calculating it. For instance the headline CPI rate doesn't include financial assets like equities, cryptocurrencies ... because "consumers" don't buy those, right?
could just as well have been targeting his bank account

It could have but only in a narrow technical sense. They didn't and don't because those types of direct abuses of the consumer-facing financial system are pursued with great vigor and perpetrators punished severely. It's the same reason it made sense to deploy 0 day exploits to thieve WoW gold but not actual money.
End of Bill Gates in the driver's seat, for better or for worse.
The fact that the recursive method for calculating factorials fails for quite small numbers is a good reason for teaching it.

Also it's a good illustration of how useless recursion is in practice.