skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don’t need to decode video signals as RGB values to be meaningful.

The value is simply the abundance of data and the patterns that show up within it because most images are close to the ones before them. Suppose you sent every book ever written in English as ASCII data and someone tried to decode it as an audio signal. There is nothing in the data that’s going to show someone is on the right track or not. However with uncompressed video you can find patterns and the closer you get the more obvious it becomes.
Seems pretty cool but what the heck is the syntax?

"User shall send login message to server"

seems almost exactly like

"Server shall send req_resolution to ctrl_entity"

yet the former throws an unhelpful error. Your parser might want to just internally slap a `_` between unexpected tokens and try reparsing. Humans tend to use spaces between things.
I know nothing about Elastic specifically, but...

"Ponzi scheme" has a specific meaning. Many cryptocurrency projects appear to fairly closely fit this meaning, while "for-profit business that's making year after year of losses and being propped up by VC funding" does not.

Not everything that's a very bad investment—or even outright fraud—is a Ponzi scheme.
> What’s stopping elites and elected officials from accessing the public opinion polling that social scientists use to understand what the public wants?

> Renshon: Absolutely nothing is stopping elites from using the same public opinion data ... it’s also not unusual for politicians to discount or dismiss public opinion polls when they don’t like the results

I am curious if we are reasoning from stable ground here. Are opinion polls actually representative of what public opinion is - and more importantly, how the public will vote?

It seems that on a lot of hot button issues - for instance, guns - opinion polls show considerable support for restrictions that simply do not manifest when there are actual referenda on the issue. Polling on guns tends to skew substantially to the left of the actual referenda.
Exactly. I'm not a big fan of Apple, but in the same way they defined the user experience for desktops via the Mac, they defined the user experience for mobile computing with the iPhone. So much so that most people don't even remember that there were plenty of smartphones previous to the iPhone.
Generally people use "nice" to refer to low-crime, little blight (abandoned, falling apart homes, junk cars), and well upkept infrastructure and scenery.

Ten years ago, many parts of many coastal cities would qualify. Being in the Bay Area, I know San Jose, Union City, Newark, Fremont, Dublin, Livermore, and Walnut Creek homes were all affordable on working class Bay Area wages. Those days are gone. I'm bitter about most of my friends being unable to afford a middle class life here. However, they're mostly the same people that complain about any new construction and homes, so it's a bit self-inflicted.
Assuming travelling faster than light remains impossible. Theres the advantage that there are significantly less stars in the range of 0 to 100 lightyears than there are stars between 100 and 200 lightyears away. This means even if theres an alien civilisation, All the advanced ones must be far away and therefore our technosignature will never be exposed for XXXX years.

Our biggest signature/threat is that alien civilisations are receiving signals from our planet as it was thousands or millions of years ago and have send out a capable ship. But we still have the advantage of time. even travelling at near light speed, we might notice their technological attainment far before their ship can arrive. And thanks to einstein, the time dilation they experience at light speed means they dont have time to develop further during their travel. so an alien ship arriving is not game over as we have the space-time advantage. Therefore, military forces a few hundred years from now could be interested in defensive technosignature detection.
I have no idea.

You can definitely do it for cheaper. There are $1000-$3000 single-head units available online for self-install, and you could hire an HVAC person to come out and do the high pressure line part of it (or all of it) for a similar range. It just gets expensive with the name-brand ones. For some reason that $2k-6k turns into 10k-20k when you switch to a name brand (e.g. mitsubishi). They're only available through specific installers, and using a non-authorized installer means your warranty is void.
Yes; many EVs already use heat pumps, so if this has a higher coefficient of power (and is not much heavier), and it can be scaled down to automobiles, then it will be a win.

(None of those details can be inferred from the press release.)
Plenty of housing like it was built in the west, with the same tech. Not to mention all the cheap workers' housing of the industrial revolution most of which didn't last 150 years, never mind 500.
The cliffhanger is to get you to buy the book. That “article” is just an ad.
Good Book
To my mind, the most interesting question is the other way around. We have an abundance of data about the public, we have relatively little data about how the elites operate. As I've gone up in my career, and begun to reach elite levels, I've been fascinated to learn about some of the upper levels of the economy, some of the odd rituals that it has.

I have taken an almost sociological interest in some of the minor social codes of elite life, such as who is allowed to use curse words, and what they are actually communicating when they allow themselves to use curse words. But also the opposite: who never uses curse words, and why?

But my point is, if I want to learn how coal miners in West Virginia use curse words, I can easily learn about that. I own several good books about working class life in Appalachia, I've read half of them. But good books about the use of curse words among the elites? That is much more rare, and the situation tends to evolve at a faster rate.

Also, I'll point out, this form of journalism is fairly common. Over the last year I've seen several good essays that suggested various elite groups were misunderstanding the mood of the public. What is somewhat more rare is to read a book about how the public misreads the elites. Into this category I would, arguably, suggest that Democracy For Realists is the best:

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Realists-Elections-Responsi...

I read this at the end of last year, and posted a few excerpts here:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...

The public also seems to misunderstand how much any political system, but especially democratic systems, depend on certain elites, and in particular political parties, to allow the system to continue to function. Consider the Panama Exception:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/the-panama-exception

Occasionally someone is born into wealth and they turn out to be a great novelist, so they can write a novel that gives us some sense of growing up in the upper class. Interesting stuff. But in general, if I want to learn how poverty persists in Appalachia, I have many more books to read than books that teach me how the upper class transmits its status to its children. Some of the details of that operation are hidden, and difficult to learn about, save when we make friends with people who had that upbringing, and even then, we are only seeing a narrow slice of the overall process.

And obviously, the life of the wealthy frequently shows up on television and movies, but not in a realistic way. Such shows amount to a kind of obfuscation of elite reality.
Yeah, I've always thought he would sell out on functionality to get some meaningless design feature included for the aesthetic.
Straw man argument.

The worst of YouTube is way worse than alcohol advertising.

I’d prefer more fine, or even coarse grained control over content available to my accounts.

There will always be a way to bypass it, but there is some right gnarly stuff on there.
I do not agree. I prefer it to not have any such CSS, and then I can specify what CSS I want, myself, if any; and otherwise have the client software make it suitable itself, for the width of its display, user's specified font sizes, colours (which may be different if a print out is made on paper, or if using a monochrome display), etc. (I find the default styles are mostly suitable.)
We should let the silly individualists persist in their delusions in one lone location, right? Or, not even allow the one?

If not, why not?
To me personally, I don't really use it except for novelty.

When I buy stuff in-person, I use cash because no one needs to know who I am, what I buy, and where I shop; and that extends to everyone those stores and credit card companies share their data with.

I use my credit card for online purchases, but I like the idea that even if the store knows where I live to ship me stuff, they can't see who else I shop with, or how much money I have.
BTC is about to hit new levels of support ;)
Writing utensils definitely influence scripts. One tidbit I like is the evolution of the Burmese script.

The Burmese script was originally square format but became round and cursive due to the popular use of palm leaves (and others) as a medium: straight lines would rip the leaves, so softer round strokes were preferred [1].

The round cursive style is in stark contrast to modern Devanagari (India) where the strong overhanging line is a core feature [2] despite both scripts descend one way or another from the Brahmi script [3].

As for the OP, ballpoints have come a long way such that one could easily find a ballpoint that is sensitive enough for a Palmerian style (but perhaps not Spencerian as that genuinely requires varying line thickness).

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmic_scripts
It is such a weird question. People fall for AI-generated language because the goal of the people who made the generator was to create language like a human would.

Do people wonder why scissors cut paper? Because that is what they were made for!

If the AI wouldn't fool the humans the researchers would be honing it more. Same way if we couldn't make paper cutting scissors there would be people trying to make one.

Am I missing the point here?
I'm slightly surprised that no company like CocaCola has made cost-free subsidised eye glasses with their logo watermarked in the lens so you see it everywhere you look. They can't all be waiting for AR/VR to take off before racing each other for that, surely?
It is their machine, So they should have the rights to admit whoever they want. but usually just with an email and a please is enough, the only downside to the tildeverse is if you're not woke they kick you out.
If you live long enough, you may eventually live past the point where science makes it possible to live forever. For most of us, this is impossible because we lost the birth date lottery.
44 trackers and ads blocked by Brave.
I’m not a medical expert, but antibodies and auto-antibodies are not the same thing.
>>If we actually enforced these laws, maybe we would have electric cars even earlier, and indeed, there maybe wouldn't be Tesla.

This is just utopianism.

>>Laws don't work this way

I wasn't saying they do. I was explaining the consequences of those "better laws" existing. In truth, the laws being sought by the OP would further undermine the very foundations of a liberal society, with contract liberty, to replace it with social control by an officialdom made up of unionized government bureaucrats with next to zero accountability, micromanaging the actions of others based on an elitist "government knows best" philosophy.
We could also maybe stop killing things for fun.
In my particular case, it is not a case of not being able to see the values, but being able to press the buttons without using a pointing device.

In accessibility, the scenarios you can think of are only the tip of the iceberg which represents all the possible scenarios.
I don't think we're going to get there following the GPT path. I'm aware this is a bit of a contrarian take -- and that I have some degree of bias, since I've made literally tens and tens of dollars selling my own fiction -- but even the best generated text that I've seen suggests a few things:

- it can be very good at mimicking narrative styles

- it is good at close range context, what might be (uncharitably) described as "autocomplete on steroids"

- it doesn't understand overall structure

That last one is the contrarian bit, but I think it's absolutely true. Context gives some structure to generated text, but the longer the generated text runs the closer it gets to falling apart. Nothing we have now is remotely good enough to pull off things like "here is something planted in chapter two that will be referenced in chapters eight and fifteen and finally pay off in the climax in chapter twenty-five".

And I don't think this is just a matter of iterating on the current models; at some point this requires an understanding and application of story construction rules, of act structure, of character, that seems fundamentally incompatible with the way neural network-based machine learning currently works. If you feed a bunch of screenplays into an ML model, it can generate text in that style, but it's not going to write what we would consider a good screenplay. If you feed a screenwriting textbooks into that same model, it won't help, because it doesn't have the ability to interpret those as structural guidelines for writing entirely unrelated texts.
You pool the transactions over a longer period. The donor initially gets charged $10, but if they cancel early they will get refunded. Then after a few months they get charged another $10 and so on.

It has drawbacks, like if the person doesn’t have $10 or they complain that they’re being charged. But a) is unlikely since most people who are that poor aren’t donating money, and b) is hopefully unlikely if you make it very clear how the payment system works and that they can get refunded if they cancel early.
Bitcoin's value is derived from loads of people having excess money that they could use to speculate. It has no intrinsic utility. When the choice is to buy food and fuel or a token that only gets more valuable if you can find someone with even more money to burn, people start to get a lot more practical as the money gets tighter.
In a way some of the FANGs are doing just that. Hire best talent, and get them all under one roof, and hope they would come out with breakthrough products.
Game engines have a lot of nice tech and maybe one will get popular for apps one day. The major issue I see is that they're simply tuned for a different UX. They're usually very power hungry (both amps and CPU cycles) and designed to push as many pixels as possible.

It's the exact opposite of the modern view layouts that try to cache view images to reduce the draw work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31792202
No, just unnecessary commuting.
Patreon charges a 5%-12% platform fee on top of any payment processing fee. They’re not footing the bill of 25c or whatever flat fee per transaction, as you seem to imply. They’re not spreading costs.

Whether you’re donating $1000 or $1, Patreon is getting their 8% (or 5%, or 12%).
That bit about the firing of the designer who used the river metaphor in that email is such a good lesson for anyone:

Never ever ever ever announce moves like this if there is still money on the table that can still be taken away from you.

No matter how awesome your company is, how great the team, product or how wonderful the atmosphere is. This guy thought he wrote a heartfelt goodbye to his beloved team and was instead brutally punished for it.

That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive.
Bolt: Faster matrix and vector operations that run on compressed data
Man this was almost substance free, found it unreadable, what exactly are they doing? What is an example experiment and what does it show? The paper this Q and A is about is mostly surface level it seems.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-polisc...
We don't currently have the means to live forever, but if you manage to live long enough, you might survive until we do.
This is your friendly physics reminder that perpetual motion machines have nothing to do with this. It's hard to turn the whole planet into paperclips because paperclips are mostly made of iron, while the planet contains many other elements. Of course, with a high enough level of technology, it might be possible to fuse together the non-iron elements, so that you would end up with just a bunch of iron nuclei. This would even be energetically favourable, since iron is so stable. Then you just have to solve the issue that the paperclips in the center of the planet would be under huge pressure and would be crushed.
True; but this one manages to avoid using an explicit stack.
I already can't wait to die, and I've got plenty of time ahead. I mean, yeah, if you fit in/like the current systems, you might think living forever is cool.

But what would you think during the next world war, for example? Or if there's some massive climate refugee crisis (more akin to a war, actually), are you on the side getting shot, doing the shooting, welcoming strangers (and being ostracized by "your own"), hating newcomers or ignoring everything? What do you think about yourself then? Death ain't all bad in dire circumstances.
It’s probably not a culture fit if someone happily worked on products whose only purpose and outcome was to rip off users. Six months is enough time to figure that out and find other employment.
You just have to live long enough for some new technology to appear to give you the extra years you need to wait for the next new technology.

Even if at no point actual immortality is developed, you can go like this forever, finite life extension by finite life extension.
Thank you for this. I feel the same way. I hate the performative theater of office life. Pretending to care, pretending that our work matters at all. But the pay is great, and I can’t afford to live without it, so… that’s how it goes.
We fall for it because although language is a powerful tool, it's incredibly bad at conveying nuance, context, and describing phenomenons present in nature. Poetry comes close, but still doesn't hit the spot, and leaves out so much detail, no matter how well written or verbose in its descriptions. Our own mind has to fill in the blanks of a well written description. Language also can't express the ineffable or the divine. It can hint at it, but it won't transmit the phenomenon correctly into another mind.
You have discovered another road to feudalism.

When people cast wishes I’d like them to imagine they are holding a monkey’s paw whilst doing so.
> One common theme I've heard on both sides is that where you wind up matters a lot. The people and org structure around you can have a large impact.

This would seem to indicate a complete absolution of leadership and responsibility from senior management for how their company is run.

Delegating so much cultural autonomy downwards might mean they can avoid the hard work of building a cohesive org, but the costs are that everyone now knows that if you apply to work there, you're playing a lottery. Worse, if you lose that lottery, then the company won't have your back.

At more well-functioning companies, if you get hired into a team and it's not working out, they'll try and work out where you might be happier (and useful!) and consciously try and help you move teams. But that requires a perspective that doesn't treat staff engineers as a commodity.
I have some comments on how (not) to teach it.

First of all, do not tell students to "start with the base case". The base case will be trivial and gives very little insight into how to solve the recursion problem. All the time they spend thinking about that is time spent not confronting the actual problem.

Beyond that, I think the way to teach recursion is to say "You cannot write the code until you can write a sentence in words describing the recursive solution. Your sentence must make reference to calling the procedure on a smaller sub-problem. Don't bother describing the base case in the sentence; it's boring - just fill it out when you write the code.".

So something like "The number of ways the robot can get to the last square is equal to the number of ways it can do it assuming it starts by going right plus the number of ways it can do it assuming it starts by going down".
People playing chess on roller coasters
If technological progress continues exponentially (including increases in human or machine intelligence to make them possible) then our understanding of biology and life-extension will continue to increase, and many such life prolonging-treatments will be made available to the public.

If one life extension makes you live 5 years longer, and during that time an new one comes out that lengthens your life by a few more years, you can see how one might keep "catching" these just in time and thus gradually transition from mortal to immortal.
I agree. Jon Ive was a genius with design when he had to work under constrained scenarios. But the moment he had unconstrained power, form was able to win over functionality.
>>You're talking about Musk becoming open about his backing for an authoritarian, cult-of-personality party?

Musk doesn't have any good alternatives, unfortunately. He's supposed to back the Democratic Party, that relies on a long-tradition of union-backed left-wing violence to intimidate the opposition? [1] The party that fanned the flames of 500+ riots in the summer of 2020, leading to dozens being killed and billions of dollars worth of people's livelihoods going up in flames?

The party that is aggressively moving toward authoritarianism, and trying to silence/cancel any one who speaks out about it, like Glenn Greenwald? [2]

The party of lawyers [3], who early on pushed aggressively for CCP-style lockdowns and vaccine mandates [4]?

The party fully backed by elite anti-Free-Speech movements? [5]

Even when the GOP were under Trump, the Democrats weren't clearly the more moral choice.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[2] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1450487818766143492

[3] https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/industries

[4] https://twitter.com/NYSBA/status/1326149426063224832

[5] https://youtu.be/54zIUalrCyA
> stakes are lower the lower the amount. Who cares?

OP mentioned customer service. Pretty much any American can create 50+ hours of customer support and legal work for no reason at all in payments. Even an irate, clueless customer will waste an hour of your support staffs’ time.
Cheapest thing to do is remove all exterior drywall, spray foam everything and call it a day.
You are right to be skeptical, but in this case the lie is not in the performance but that it is a breakthrough.

The announcement is basically: A US company (Lenox) has a prototype heat pump that matches performance of Mitsubishi and LG heat pumps.

The DOE is running a competition to get US companies to improve performance of their heat pumps.
I think possibly the greatest advantage Elixir has is offering the power of the Erlang/OTP system without weird quirks like Erlang’s string handling. I never have to think about it in Elixir, binary UTF-8 strings are the default and there’s plenty of functions in the standard library for dealing with grapheme clusters and the like.
Why houses in Bermuda have white stepped roofs (2016)
It says "double" the efficiency, so I assume they mean 2x the COP of the previous model at 5F, and 1.7-1.8x the old COP at -5 and -10F.

A COP of 2 @ 5F isn't a "breakthrough" vs. the first commercially available model I could find numbers for, and a COP of 1.5 at -10F seems implausible:

https://www.nordicghp.com/2017/01/heat-pump-effective-temper...

Honestly though, this press release is so poorly written, I wouldn't trust the numbers match up to anything.