skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am assuming the article is contrasting the long periods of nomadic lifestyle that ruled over Arabia with the more stationary society suggested by the existence of those mustatils.

As for the heads of the cattle, I can easily imagine the mustatils to be some sort of combination farm-market where you would kill the cattle, burry the head, and give the rest to the consumer who would take it far away to their dwelling or on their journey if they happen to be nomadic; leading to random distribution of the rest of the carcass pieces.
NULL means "I don't have this data". It doesn't guarantee that the data doesn't exist anywhere.

It's semantically ambiguous, yes.

But it's not ambiguous that the database doesn't have the data. It's very clearly NULL.

If "middle name" is NULL, then the database itself can't tell you if a person doesn't have a middle name, or if it's merely not yet been told the middle name. You could differentiate the two by saying empty string for "has no middle name"… except on Oracle VARCHAR2, where NULL is equal to empty string.
That's news to me. How do all those nifty particle accelerators get funded, then?
Building a Cache in Elixir
I love these stories. I got my start around 1998 when the web was coming into full force which was only a decade after this and very different. Things were changing quickly in that era.

The closest I've had to this was working at a company that had been around for close to thirty years and had kept many of the original developers (they'd taken the product from a terminal interface to the web, from cobol to c#) and had many stories like the one in the original post.
I don't think deliberate thoughts are the best tools for all circumstances. That's not my point

Actually getting rid of distinctions requires an overwriting of the non-deliberate thought processes too. You won't "handle" the person shouting at you or the bear attacking you more effectively, you won't handle anything at all. You'll just be the cognitive equivalent of a rock, but in human flesh

You seem to be using "distinctions" as a synonym for deliberate thought (I could be wrong, of course)
You are assuming that Russia has any interest beyond the borders of the USSR, which is quite a strong assumption. By this logic you probably also supported the invasion of Iraq based on the assumption that they were producing nuclear weapons. However, decisions to join a war need to be taken based on logical and provable arguments, not based on irrational fears and assumptions.

> Values. In the end Europeans have some values and most importantly EU is built on some fundamental values. Democracy, human rights and etc

So we should be voting whether we want to support Ukraine, a non-EU entity, in any way - whether through imposing sanctions to Russia (which will later bite us back) or through sending them weapons (which will only escalate the war). It seems like you are arguing for straight out authoritarianism: joining a war against popular support.

> I can't agree that "most people in Eastern Europe have a very hard life already". Define "most" and "very hard life". It just means nothing. The thinking is that being at war is on another level "very hard".

If you spent any time with regular people in the Eastern Europe you would understand. But again, you are arguing that we are or should be in a war and hence this is acceptable. It is not. It is pure gaslighting. At this point it seems like you are pro-war and would say anything to convince people that they should be part of a war. I wonder why.
Well, thing is they might not care. As long as they can leave dealing with insurgency mostly to the new "independent" government and not have to report the losses at home, while still controlling the resources and enjoying the buffer zone they might be ok to returning to the previous lower intensity warfare of the last decade.

Obviously toppling the government proved to be well beyond Russia's means, but I wouldn't be surprised if they might try to take advantage of the post war hardships for a coup. It will be important for the West to help Ukraine with reconstruction to avoid this.
Tom Ford Explores Sale of Fashion House
Hybrid work is doomed
I tend to be sympathetic to your arguments, and I realize what I'm raising is not directly related to your point. But as others pointed out, Yankovic was far from mocking Michael Jackson... and in fact it's well known that Jackson was in on the joke:

“Michael Jackson wasn’t just cool about my parody of ‘Beat It,’” Yankovic told People in 2016. “But he also loved my version of ‘Bad,’ which was ‘Fat.’ He even let me use the actual ‘Bad’ subway set for the ‘Fat’ video. He was very supportive, which was huge with opening the doors with other artists. Because if Michael Jackson signed on, you couldn’t really say no.”

(https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/michael-jackson-acc...)
The Economics of Customer Businesses (2021) [pdf]
This article caught my wandering attention today during an
intermittent fast. Normally I'd take a light exercise day to burn a
bit more, but a minor injury is telling me to take it easy. Reading HN
and tinkering with code isn't enough. Fasting makes me restless. I
almost never get "bored", but this brings it on. I want to break the
link between boredom and waves of hunger. How we manage solitude and
how we manage hunger seem connected.
Depends what you mean by “worked”. It prevented the emergence of priest kings quite well. Not allowing legitimate sons puts a major crimp in anyone’s plans to turn a religious organization’s land into their personal property. See how the Teutonic order turned into Brandenburg upon Protestantisation.
> you should probably pick a language with a future, and that language is probably not Perl.

Perl may not have a future, but being the language in which you can summon Cthulhu with the fewest characters, it has an eternal, undying past.
> I'd like to know the sense of "independently" that the author had in mind here, considering the two are married to one another.

Yes, dear.
Not dog slow compared to the 8-bitters.

There was that time I used my 12 MHz 286 to develop software for a Z-80 based CP/M machine and I could emulate the Z-80 faster than a real Z-80.

Graphics and sound really did suck compared to machines specialized for that. The best you could do for games at the time were tile systems like the Nintendo NES and the TI-99/4A which were not that different from text mode except the ‘font’ was customizable and the tiles were square. The Atari 400/800 normalized changing your video mode on every scan line but the C-64 had the best system balance in terms of quality output on an NTSC television.

The EGA introduced tricks that would let you make the video card copy multiple planes of data at the same time, also you could do some pretty neat tricks with the palette to make layers that blended like sprites. I see Commander Keen as a watershed because it had scrolling as good as Super Mario Brothers and ran on the EGA. Of course they figured out Mode X for the VGA and we got Doom a few years later.
That sounds very normal, at least it’s the same for me.

Sometimes I spent a considerable amount of time brainstorming an idea or concept over and over during alone times, and then at some point it won’t return to my thoughts again, but something new replaces it. Sort of like I am “done” with that thought and my brain wants to move on.

I don’t know why that happens, but I guess I get stimulation simply from that iterative thought process. Thus your garbage collector comparison seems accurate to me.

Secretly though, I do hope to get that business idea at some point via that process. Not sure if that’s ever going to happen, but that’s okay too.
My assumption is that in this context 'independently' means not in their official duties or roles as people affiliated with the university. So the university investigated them for something they did on their own time
I have no axe in this, but what is actually wrong with wood as a fuel? It really is carbon neutral. You could say, solar energy with free storage.

Is it the relative inefficiency and cabron generated throughout supply chain?
It is absolutely essential when traveling to countries whose primary languages you don't understand. Mobile Firefox doesn't support any translation extensions, which means I use Chrome when traveling.
The original flopped at the theaters. It took a long time for the it to be really appreciated.
It would help if you read the parent comment and made a response to its contents. In so far, you've just validated his point - as a member of "the public" not understanding science and using partial truths to reinforce previously held beliefs.

The point I think the parent is trying to make is that the problem is not scientists creating models, the problem is people not understanding the models and using it as an excuse to be vicious; or politicians using an untrue view of models to further their own agendas.
Back in 2001, Gamers Battled Fake News – In ‘Metal Gear Solid 2’
Is it possible to use this without the browser, i.e. as simple plain old command line tool?
> It keeps happening because there are no consequences for it happening

Worse than that - the consequences are positive for Experian: "For now, Rishi has decided to pay Experian $25.99 a month to more closely monitor his account for suspicious activity".
Zero Knowledge and Decentralized Gaming
In Rust, I have occasionally seen things like:

Option<Option<String>>

Here, "None" means "no value specified", and "Some(None)" means "a value is specified, and that value is null." And "Some(Some(my_string))" means the value is "my_string".

There are other ways to represent this in Rust, some of which might be clearer. This representation seems to be used most often if you have a type "MyType", and you want to automatically derive a type "MyTypePatch" using a macro.
The Film Community Has a Math Problem. Not a Film Price or Kodak Problem (2021)
8-Part Film Adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina Is Free Online
The Unicode Consortium itself maintains a list of "confusables" https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/confusables.jsp
> A long list of thinkers, including the likes of Chomsky himself, had to come out and publicly admonish the 'cancellers' (mostly on the far left) for the systematic problem.

Please re-examine what right-wing cancellation means.

School administrators leaving because of right-wing pressure that "diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives" = "CRT" = "toxic propaganda" = ideological poison" is cancelling by the right, yes? https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-dei-crt-schools-p...

] Parents Defending Education has created “indoctrination maps” tracking everything from a district celebrating “Black Lives Matter week” to one that allows students to watch CNN Student News, while the Atlanta-based Education Veritas and Kahaian’s Protect Student Health Georgia provide portals for anonymously reporting educators supposedly sympathetic to CRT, DEI and other so-called controversial learning concepts. ...

] And with that effort came a renewed vilification of CRT, a four-decade-old theory that, contrary to its opponents’ accusations, is rarely if ever taught in K-12 public school systems (it typically is taught in graduate-level college and law school courses). ...

] Using local media coverage and lawsuits, ProPublica has identified at least 14 public school employees across the country, six of them Black, who were chased out in part by anti-CRT efforts in 2021.

Sure sounds like right-wing cancel culture to me.

Odds are, you haven't heard of them.

All the examples you gave were of famous people. But Steven Pinker is not cancelled. Sean Penn is not cancelled. JK Rowling is not cancelled. Not in any meaningful sense.

Operatively speaking, "cancel culture" seem to mean "rich and powerful who don't like to be criticized".

And it's pretty easy to show - define "cancel culture", then see how well it applies to many right-wing actions, like the Southern Baptist Convention's 8 year boycott of Disney, or the broad right-wing opposition to Kaepernick's kneel, which was much less than the recent Supreme Court judgement concerning a "quiet" prayer at the 50-yard line.
That's not a slippery slope. I argued that by your logic testing on desperate 3rd workers is more moral than testing on animals.
Supervised Learning for Coverage-Directed Test Selection
Fishing traps are actually considered cultural and historical items in the region.

I am from Kuwait and this is the first time I read about desert kites. I am now interested to find out if they have history here.

If you are interested, fishing traps are called gargoor (قرقور)[0][1].

[0] https://www.kuwaittimes.com/gargoor-fishing-trap-past/

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324702737_Gargoor_t...
Yeah that's true. All the database can say is "I don't have a value here". Not "there exists no value for this column".

But this doesn't mean that two NULLs are the same. Two people with NULL tax IDs are not the same (one turns out to be unknown but existing, the other is a toddler without a tax ID). Ten people with NULL address don't live in the same house. Half declined to give address, the other half are homeless. Either way we can't send mail to them.

If you use the database to have a UNIQUE constraint of "only one purchase per household" then it makes no sense to allow NULL addresses, but only allow the first NULL address purchaser to buy the thing.

Or "sorry, in this hotel we only allow one guest at a time without a car, and someone else already doesn't have a car".

Does that guest without a car actually have a car? I don't think that's something that the database can solve.

Should databases have two separate values for unknown or no value? That sounds like a world of hurt, with two types of null.
wage theft comes in many forms. Most would use it to describe the deprivation of any pay or benefits as agreed upon or required by law. So not paying benefits required, reclassifying legal status of workers to avoid paying things, not paying overtime correctly, etc.
I stumbled upon this article while searching for something completely unrelated. I highlight some bits that resonated with me.

> I recall very clearly, there was a moment, at a conference to determine the campaign's "farm strategy," when a respected and very conservative Senator arose to say: "Barry, you've got to make it clear that you believe that the American farmer has a right to a decent living."

> Senator Goldwater replied, with the tact for which he is renowned: "But he doesn't have a right to it. Neither do I. We just have a right to try for it." And that was the end of that.

One thing is to have the right to have something, the other to simply have the right to try for it. This relates with the second passage I quote:

> Man can survive in an inclement universe only through the use of his mind. His thumbs, his nails, his muscles and his mysticism will not be enough to keep him alive without it.

It's inescapable. The universe, and everything it, is indifferent to me and what I hope for. I'm not more deserving just because I happen to be here now. But I can try to make the most of it while I can. If anything, I have the right to try to find that. But I most definitely have no right to have that granted to me just because.
I don't think you understood what this does (or then I misunderstood this) but if you do that, then how are you going to get an index violation from having two NULL values in the index? Because that is what this allows: normally indexing NULL values permitted multiple NULL entries, but with this NULL is comparable to other NULLs, therefore you can have only one NULL value in the index.

Previously I had worked this around with functional index on e.g. COALESCE(value_with_null, -1), but not always you have a good sentinel value easily available. A more complicated index (..CASE WHEN..) would solve that, but it's nice to have this directly expressible, seems efficient as well.
Does this paper aim to influence policy?
Yes, by distinctions I mean rational deliberate ones that arise from attachments to ideas that we have about the world. For example the idea that I am me and you are you. We are attached to this idea and act in a non-optimal way due to it. Being before that mind is called "prajna" or wisdom in Buddhism, prajnaparamita being the "perfection of wisdom". I don't mean the distinctions made by our material condition such as hunger or flight and fight, I mean the reactions to those things.

It is the Buddha's parable of the two arrows: the first arrow (pain) is unavoidable, however we also then take on an unecessary second arrow (negative emotional reaction to pain) that is totally avoidable. I'm talking about the second part.

Letting go of our conscious attachment to distinctions and discriminations we can play like children again
The article mentions that Westworld (1973) used computer graphics. I did a short YouTube video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ
You can't be friends with a country which commits joining a military alliance which puts your ports and navy under the control of your enemies.

You seriously expect Russia to have its military and merchant ports in Crimea under NATO control as a sign of "friendship"?

What kind of crack do you have in your pipe?

If you want to be fair then you might as well have Crimea revert to Turkey as it was part of Ottoman Empire in the past, or perhaps the Tatars can have it back if you want.

You prefer to view the world through the reality distortion field of the Western media controlled by the military-pharmaceutical-financial industrial complex. Fine. Have it you way.
Significant new pumped storage capacity requires building large new dams, which is even more unpopular in populated areas than building nuclear.
> No. Track gauge is the nominal width, no? I'm talking about how the width changes in the curves.

I'm not intimately familiar with the English terms, but I think it still all boils down to the track gauge. That Boston article I linked to certainly talks about track gauge and gauge-widening and the like.
>Ironicaly this is never mentioned, they just see this is a "many more men can have a higher iq distrubution wise due to the male gauss tail stretching out further than womens, so this is sexist to say that men are smarter".

Because many advocates of GMVH are only interested in justifying the gender imbalance in leadership positions biologically, dismissing any well known social factors (e.g. competence rating on double blind fake CVs)?

"Feminists say GMVH means men are all smarter" is a gross oversimplification of the situation.

If you have 2.5 hours to spend on a video essay, I'd very much recommend "The Bell Curve"[1], a breakdown of the book of the same name. Not so much for the racism part, but for the background on the construction of IQ.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
Killed the workstations too.

New Mexico Tech had Sun workstations based on SPARC and in 1993 the talk was of Linux because a 386 machine would beat a Sun workstation easily.

Other 32 bit machines like the high-end Amigas and the Atari Falcon 030 could not keep up. Macs were expensive but sold well because of the refined GUI but when Windows 95 came out with an adequate GUI, Apple went into crisis.
>To my astonishment I discovered that I loved to write, even more than I enjoyed writing code.

I wish I was this person. I'm one of those (great majority of) people whose documentation you'd hate.

I deeply hate writing like that because I can never properly explain my tangled thoughts. Even my comments on sites like that are at most few liners. Describing things in code is much easier, since you don't have centuries of context written into words.
I can register certain types of business, but I can’t do anything that actually matters, like entering the country. According to US law I’m not even a proper human, so I could get lawfully executed on the spot, as evidenced by numerous dronings.

To compare, within EU I have all the usual rights, from establishing a company to healthcare.
That sounds plausible. Do we have any stats on this?
The Moral Ambiguity Surrounding Bill Gates and Other Billionaires
Anthropomorphize computer programs and invent a BS way of injecting a real human into a computer and Tron is what you get. It's complete nonsense! However, if you can suspend disbelief, Tron is a seminal film that has echoed through all of cinema for decades and is a helluva lot of fun to boot. It is the 80's in a single film. It oozes style and is a groundbreaking technical tour de force that must not be missed by any serious fan of movies.

The sequel is an epic Daft Punk music video that far surpasses "Interstella 5555" and, for that reason alone, is required viewing unless you absolutely hate Daft Punk. There's a cartoon series, Tron: Uprising, that is excellent even though it was cancelled after one season. (It stars Elijah Wood, in case you needed another reason to check it out...)

Tron may not be the most commercially successful movie franchise of all time, but each instalment of it has been a truly novel treat. It's may be style without much substance, but what style! I eagerly await my next dose!
Democracy depends on curbing mercenary tech giants
Rather than putting the two types of meters in two different tables and doing an error-prone UNION, you would put the distortion measurements in a different table joined to the first, and the meters that don't support it would simply not include entries in that table.
imho the "Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole"[1] first hand account gives a better insight, as clearly the Chicago Maroon piece leaves too many questions.

[1] https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...
Banks and insurance companies have figured out that some things must stay old school because people rely on them too much.

FIDO alliance wants to make everyday things easy, but they don't think through all scenarios that happen when people really start to rely on smartphones and keep everything there and in the cloud tied to their ID's.

Any widely used scheme should have recovery options that are easy to set up and don't need careful planning, because people don't do that.

For example, if you travel abroad alone and lose your iPhone, you lose the SIM (with phone number) you need to recover.
Economics is very unusual in that even doing extremely well in the undergraduate major is not going to prepare you all that well for graduate study. Knowing things like that is part of the hidden curriculum the article is talking about. See also doing undergraduate research assistantships in other disciplines. The author may not have been as clear as they could have been.
> I can’t figure out what the difference would be between this “illusion” and “real” consciousness.

That's the point. We can't.

> If it were an illusion, then we would have to be conscious to experience the illusion.

Or, at least something other than us would need to be conscious in order to experience what it'd be like being us.
In cases where the field is required I would agree. But in the context of an update request, {"foo":null} and {} might both be valid with different semantics. "Update this field to null" vs "don't update this field"
We should really stop the limited liability for shareholders. You own part of company and it does something criminal. You too are going to jail. Would clean up the acts very fast.
I understand, but Uber used these practices everywhere. And, like I mentioned, they used it on their company machines, not the servers where their customer data would probably be stored. So the hypothesis of doing this to protect customers is doubtful at best.
However I say the amount of storage would need to be capable of supply several days in a row (because of no renewable energy ) We have just come out of a rainy period where it rained or overcast every day for a few weeks in SE QLD region I'm skeptical that the amount of storage and transmission capacity has been included to handle such extended periods of no renewable generation.