skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone now has their own personal Skinner box. To me it just seems so dystopian.
Lucky me, the only 2 people I call regularly are a programmer and a gamer :)

If that wasn’t the case, I’d probably buy them a 50ft cable on every holiday until they stop lagging.
Boy band category adder abuser
Wow. I’m supposed to do a PHDs worth of work on a topic? I gave multiple arguments because the OP appeared to not now about the externalities of EV and the renewables in general. Love this site. The site of “science”.
Neat!

Turns out that woodpeckers don’t need extra shock-absorbers. They are small enough that the normal fluid around their brain provides the protection it needs.
What we should be doing as a sort of collective parenting is curating Youtube playlists and categorize them with good, informational, fun and inspiring videos. Then we limit the children's access to that curated material only.
> Does DOS have a per-process per-drive working directory?

In DOS, there is a system-wide current drive, and system-wide per-drive current directory. For a Windows DOS box (and 16-bit Windows apps), "system-wide" is per VM, maintained by the virtual machine manager (VMM in Windows 2.x/3.x/9x/Me, NTVDM for NT and successors)

In 32-bit/64-bit Windows, there is a single directory per-process. CMD.EXE provides an (incomplete) emulation of the old DOS model using environment variables; COMMAND.COM performed no equivalent function, it relied on the DOS kernel to track them on its behalf, essentially the same as any other DOS program did

> I would expect the system for managing per-process and per-terminal CWDs to be completely separate and not interlinked.

It isn't actually "per-terminal"; a Windows console in itself has no concept of current drive or directory, and can simultaneously host multiple processes each with different current directories. Consoles also have nothing to do with this "per-drive current directory" emulation performed by CMD.EXE, which is implemented using per-process environment variables
Involuntary euthanasia
The power requirements for analog processing depend a lot on the required signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and dynamic range, like also for digital processing.

Increasing the SNR for digital processing requires the processing of more bits, which means either the multiplication of digital blocks such as adders, or the increase of the clock frequencies, when the existing digital blocks must process more bits during the same time, in serial manner. Both methods increase the power consumption.

Increasing the SNR for analog processing means the use of more complex circuits, with more devices, and the use of larger devices, e.g. larger transistors, larger capacitors, larger resistors, so that the effect of various noise sources will be relatively smaller (due to averaging). This also increases the power consumption.

The relative power consumptions for analog and digital processing depend a lot on the technologies used, but in general analog processing needs much less power when the requirements for SNR/dynamic range are low, but the power increases rapidly with increased requirements and at some threshold the power needed becomes larger than for implementing the same task by digital processing.

In modern CMOS technologies designed for making digital devices, the analog components have become worse and worse in comparison with old technologies. That has moved the threshold where digital processing becomes preferable lower and lower.

For example, because of this, at every smartphone generation where a new CMOS process is used, an important part of the migration of the previous designs from the old process to the new process is to identify some old analog blocks whose functions could be implemented digitally in the new process, so that those analog blocks could be replaced by digital blocks, because otherwise the new chip could be worse than the old due to worse analog parts, even if the digital parts have been improved.

The parent article makes the point that this trend which was continuous for the last few decades can be reversed now due to the advances in packaging and interconnection technologies, which can make a modern multi-chip device to be similar in price to a monolithic device.

If the restriction of using a single chip is removed, then it is no longer necessary to use the bad analog components provided by the modern CMOS technologies but it is possible to use a separate analog chip, made with an appropriate manufacturing process.

In this case the threshold where digital processing becomes preferable to analog processing can be moved again to higher SNR/dynamic range values, where it was many years ago.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that covid spreads predominantly from the nasal cavity, where vaccines would have little effect.
> We’re in control and it’s as perfect as it gets.

Do you perform bit-perfect tests to be sure? The people who write the software are surely the ones in control.
A guide to front end migrations
This wouldn't work, the moment it loses track of you for only a second it won't know who you are anymore. Even if literally every corner is plastered with camera's, there's like another poster said, bathrooms.. Ergo, every sign will have to have face recognition.
> it’s bizarre to think back to a time that three television networks essentially controlled all news

They didn't. The television networks did control all television news, but newspapers were thriving. Indeed, local newspapers were thriving.
I found this to be much more interesting read than I originally expected from the tone of the title.

Spoiler alert:
Especially interesting is the eventual realisation that they were limited by market growth that wasn’t compatible with VC investment expectations, but that when no longer burdened by that (see robocat’s comment) the company was able to continue growing at a more realistic pace.
I think someone is downvote stalking me, because I write things about their beloved USA they don't like.
But I'll write this: whenever I read about China and censorship I just can't forget how the EU and UK are censoring Russian media.

So when you're in a glasshouse don't throw stones.
Always the hypocritical "look China bad us good". I'm so tired of the propaganda - an EU resident.

Before you start judging a person for being dirty, make sure you're not dirty yourself.
Not everyone uses this personal display facility either.

And I think the mobile device percentage among airport passengers will be extremely high.
I think I'd amend the piece a bit. Personally I think we're playing a high price for mobile phones. Granted, much of the harm is being done by social, but really it's the addictive nature, the "always on-ness" of this that concerns me the most, in all the reading, research and life experience I'm doing.

My son, who is now 17, spends - I would imagine, he doesn't know because he's too frightened to switch on Screen Time - maybe 10-14 hours a day glued to his phone. He's now at an age where I have no agency over him - he's an adult in 6 months and he's got to figure out his own way - but it worries me.

In his specific case I'm actually less worried than with many of his friends. He's bright, and uses the internet to figure out and watch some pretty rad stuff. It isn't all shit, and although a fair proportion of his use is Insta, it's using it as an instant messaging tool rather than a pure "social media" tool. He rarely posts, and I suspect may be different to his (female) friends in that regard.

But here are the two points that are rarely talked about that are actually the most important ones to consider:

First, if anyone was doing anything for 12 hours a day, it's probably an issue. If my kids played football for 12 hours a day, or made Lego, or cooked, I'd be concerned. It's just not healthy to be that ensconced in a thing, let alone when that thing is as hugely, highly addictive as phone use / social media. Even if that thing was the healthiest thing in the world - say someone I knew went out running for 12 hours a day - man, I'd be concerned.

Secondly, it strikes me as "out there in the world" that this is the biggest issue. To me, as a 50 year old man, it's bloody weird anyone spending this much time online, but to be outdoors, or at a bar, or a restaurant with your partner, or looking after your kids, or looking at a sunset, or on the beach - and be constantly in your phone - this is insane.

Living a life, a real life, with real relationships and real sunsets and real beaches - is an enormous privilege. Many of us are wasting it. Life is short. Leave your phone at home, and truly live it.
Debuggers typically bypass normal memory permissions.
How is that "more reasonable" ?
I'll look at it tomorrow
And still say the same about junk food…
I personally think privacy is a fundamental human right that trumps this. But it's an opinion of course.

And private healthcare is also socialised. Just among a smaller group of contributors (those subscribing to the private health insurance) and someone is grabbing profit from it. It's not all that different.
Social media as it is done by Facebook is the major problem.

We need no algorithmic timelines, no manipulation what can be seen by a company. Just what you follow is a scrollable timeline.

Group features that cannot be moderated need to be banned. Forums were good because the mods kept it together.

Same goes for commentaries to posts.
What’s the point of this comment? It’s an opinion piece, so we know it reflects the author’s opinions.

You don’t have to agree with them on abortion, or even privacy. But backbiting on privacy solely because it appears in the context of an abortion argument is bizarre.
I think you're possibly right in that the cons of social media outweigh the pros at this point, but questioning the value of technology is altogether asking the wrong question and claiming "the Amish were right" is utter nonsense. It's like a workman trying to blame his tools for a job badly done. Social media is a use-case. There are plenty of other use-cases. Some of them bring value and some of them don't, but that is not the fault of the smartphone.
I would be curious if those downvoting this could elaborate on their disagreement to help foster conversation
>Unless they can fire before the nukes hit they're not useful.

Au contraire! An important aspect of them as land based is the "nuclear sponge" concept: every single nuke spent on a silo is a nuke not aimed at a population center or vital infrastructure. They're out in the middle of nowhere for a reason (well, multiple reasons, but that's one of them). Even if they're all lost they've constrained the opponent's tactical choices merely by their existence, pushing towards the logic of a counter force strike instead of counter value.

Any nuclear exchange would be very bad, but unlike Europe the US does indeed have a lot of near completely uninhabited non-arable land for strategic depth. Makes sense to use it.
Yes this. Even a first name.

I work in a 200k employee company and I'm the only person there with my first name. Not everyone is named Fred or John :)
h – faster shell navigation of projects
That is how society works. I do not rear chickens. I do not behead the chicken. Sometimes I buy the chicken, forget to eat it, and worms get to it. I look in disgust at my worm-filled trash, but it's some other guy that carries the trash and the worms to an incinerator.

The trash guy goes home, turns on the tv, lies in bed complaining about how there's too many choices on his streaming service but nothing to watch.

But somewhere out there's a guy like me who makes sure that the trash guy gets too many choices instead of going out at night to buy pirated DVDs. That's how we change the world. On Wednesday, we will start event storming sessions on a million dollar project to get the Japanese subs and dubs to say the same thing.

Trash guy wishes he was valued higher for his labor. I wish I could watch trashy shows on weekends instead of looking at procrastination flowcharts. Somewhere out there there's a CEO making a 8 digit salary from controlling people, but he wakes up at 4 AM and considers it a good day if he logs off work at 7 PM.
Using gdb is like when you forget to take the silencer off your gun and claim self defense when the police comes.
If those “most people” really need windows software, they’d be much better off running windows on non-apple hardware directly, imho.
Less understood about west African history is the sheer volume of un-analysed ancient (mostly Islamic) manuscripts. They were deliberately hidden out of fear from the imperials, and even post-imperials until very recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts

Exceptions to the above, are the Tarikh Al Sudan and Tarikh Al Fattesh, they were first translated into the French 100 years ago but only recently into English (in 1999 by Professor John Hunwick). This is how Mansa Musa was introduced into American speaking world

These chronicles are 300 & 400 years old, substatial in size with many references to Mansa Musa as well as other notables and rulers of the Medieval Mali and Songhai Empire (which is basically the Mali Empire Part 3).

These cross reference whatever independant mentioning’s are found in other medieval sources, Spanish, Egyptian, other. Perhaps confirming Mansa Musa was indeed a corporeal entity!
It’s weird that GitHub makes me log in to view gists. I would prefer to view them anonymously.
a good friend of mine who worked at a FAANG expressed similar sentiments. he is the son of a taxi driver and a christian healer and a person of color. his words were "G was a disneyland for rich white kids".
Wooden self-driving RC Car
Begs the question what is the threshold of impact the cerebrospinal fluid around a human brain can absorb? How much protection does it provide?
Ah yes, oops!
You’re right that any technology is just a tool. But I think the real argument is the asymmetry of the power of the tool compared to our ability to rationally use it.

Maybe a bad example is nuclear technology. It can be good or bad, but we recognize that the downside is just too big to allow unfettered access to it.
I'm not really convinced that _anyone_ ever really had an up-front vision for what social media could bring to the table, either good or bad. To me, it always seemed more like a solution in search of a problem, which in turn just ended up creating more problems.
Me too. Hilariously I got the first downvote about 10 seconds after posting it, not enough time for anyone to actually read my thoughts.. :-)
This is far more true of crypto projects.
NixOS maintainer here and this is really annoying me since months. I can't really know what from a 100+ line git log is a breaking change and needs special attention and what is totally uninteresting for consumers of the piece of software.
If you want that kind of info, you just ask the question.

Once you specify who is going to get the money and for what, you're building in a lot of assumptions.
Oh yes, so much that.

On my Windows PC, with the SB ZXR soundcard, for my ATH headphones I want my level no higher than 8-10% ; the lack of steps is a major pain, must be compensated for by in app volume controls.

On my Samsung Android, at least I have their Sound Assistant which makes my Galaxy S21U a lot more useful. There I can greatly increase the number of steps, and the useful range is actually 0-100%. (Also, I can play eg Audible and Spotify at the same time, with individual volume controls).

But it will never come close to the fidelity of my 25 year old Rotel pre amp volume knob. May this system never die, or at least outlive myself.
We just can’t have nice things in space
France has made a deliberate point of not relying on NATO, and instead maintaining its own nuclear arsenal.

If the Cold War had turned hot, the Soviet plan was to drive to the Rhine and then negotiate, on the theory that the US might sacrifice West Germany, but that France would definitely retaliate on its own.
Why do you think mob rule is better?
I think as a red tape solution Google will just collect less data of abortion center etc. They will still suck data whereever they can.
Saving the search history by default is probably a better UX for most users. You get autocompletion, it helps Google deliver better results, helps show more relevant advertisements, etc. Defaults are usually chosen to satisfy the most common use case. The use case described in the article (hiding searches from law enforcement) is relatively rare and shouldn't serve as the basis for a default, in my opinion. For users who value their privacy more, there are alternatives like DuckDuckGo.
Besides being unable to find the names of nearby stores on the map, I haven’t experienced any of that with Google Maps on iOS. I saved an offline map many years ago and the app automatically uses it if I turn on airplane mode or the internet drops when I’m driving. Navigation still works and I can change destinations while offline. Maybe you drew the short stick on an AB test?
Can't read the article; does anyone else get redirected to some "you are visitor N and a winner!" shit? Firefox on iPhone fwiw.
As an unvaccinated suburbanite, my experience has been different. While I stayed home, my very progressive and multiply-vaxxed sister was traveling, visiting our parents during lockdown, going out to restaurants and sporting events. Who exactly was an irresponsible danger to the public health here?
> It’s weird that GitHub makes me log in to view gists.

It doesn't.
English is not my native language but to me a Christian is a _follower_ of Christ. Christ is the leader.

Edit:
> “But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. 9 And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. 10 Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah.
Substack puts paywalls in front of blogs. It works.

Medium failed because their execution was poor.
Not enough for some of the extremes humans manage to put it through. For example, the significant number of traumatic brain injuries in US Football
Nuclear depth bombs are well known technology that was abandoned because they don’t actually work that well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_depth_bomb

They aren’t that much better than depth charges in part because energy is spread in 3D space. 1,000,000 times the energy means ~100x the range, but depth charges are very short range weapons. In WWII with a sub on radar and using 12 depth charges in a grid they only had a 5-10% kill chance. Which is one reason why nuclear depth charges where replaced by target seeking torpedoes.

Carpet bombing the Great Lakes with thousands of nukes could work but that’s a great nuclear sponge. Directing a huge quantity of munitions away from other targets.

PS: 100ft is likely shallow with much of the blast being sent into the air but that’s not very important to your suggestion.
Perhaps even more evil:

kill -SEGV $1
And end gerrymandering at the state level. Picking Michigan as I'm familiar with it, there's a ridiculous bias in the state legislature toward Republicans. Comparing the 2006 and 2010 state senate races is probably the best comparison. In 2006, the popular vote was 55% R and 45% D, with the reverse in 2010. In 2006, a 10% lead toward Republicans gave Republicans a 26 to 12 majority in the state senate. In 2010, a 10% lead toward Democrats gave Republicans a 21 to 17 majority in the state senate. These maps were found by a federal court to be illegally gerrymandered in 2019, but unfortunately, was overruled following similar cases at the Supreme Court[2][3] that year.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Michigan_Senate_election

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Michigan_Senate_election

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benisek_v._Lamone

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause
You have to visit it yourself to resolve it to a long link, then you'll get a long URL that has /@username-of-uploader/videos/[video id]?[huge amount of tracking variables]. For now, you're ok with dropping everything after the ? after you resolve out the vm.tiktok.com link shortener.
Try to fast from devices one day per week.
The ergonomic drawback of concatenative languages is that when you see `a b c d e`, you don’t know whether it means `e(d(c(b(a))))`, or `e(b(a), d(c))`, or `e(a, b, c, d)`, or `b(a), e(c, d)`, etc. The answer depends on the types of a, b, c, d, and e. The syntax `a b c d e` is a linearization of the call tree, whose node structure can be recovered from the types of the symbols (assuming the language is statically typed). As a human reader, it means you have to know the types to understand the structure of the expression. This imposes a cognitive load that other types of languages don’t.

It also removes redundancy that can be helpful to prevent programming errors. While the type checker verifies that the types match a structuring of the expression, that derived structure is not directly visible to the human programmer, and the programmer cannot easily see whether it actually matches the programmer’s understanding.
Why fake grass is far from green in ways you might not guess
is this satire? the page says "sorry the model could not be loaded"
It's more akin to pollution than slaughter. Most of the people selling their privacy are not significantly harmed by it. It's a group downstream that get it worst.
> Weird old guys contacting his son

I'm almost 40 and weird old guys contact me on the internet all the time.
Journalism bears some responsibility (insofar as it’s become addicted to cheap social media traffic and digital ad revenue), but I think the context doesn’t justify disproportionate blame.

In particular: social media companies understood, very early on, that they could use their position to squeeze traditional media by cutting into its advertising. It was a classic industrial takeover, including the incumbent’s mockery of the newcomer until it was too late.

They probably deserve some blame for not seeing how the wind was blowing, and reacting accordingly. But I would place more blame on digital ad markets and all of the perverse incentives associated with them, all of which originate somewhere in the grimy junction between VCs and traditional advertising.
It’s not as simple as that I believe. It’s a combination of user awareness, free market forces, mission and values, shareholder expectations, greed and unit economics (which, the latter, isn’t an issue for fb). Facebook responds to their shareholders, but luckily they don’t have a monopoly anymore (anecdotally from what I can read, besides the small but growing number of adults that are leaving the platform a decent amount of the younger generation isn’t even on it to begin with). I think it’s simply about those handful of metrics and forces that makes them do what they do.
Why u deleted it? Don't fear the wrongdoers...
Also true, but worth noting that this is generally a trivial thing to do for Ruby codebases

I switched from Ruby to java/kotlin and am consistently frustrated how hard to impossible it is to start a jvm app locally. But also realize that doing so is fairly useless since there’s no interactive repl anyway.

It’s just a different way of programming I suppose.
A way to annoy developers. This and cron + sleep + rand could be fun.
> everyone else I know with a lightning-connector iPhone (or iPad) have never encountered. Ever.

How long do you keep your phone on average?

Also, how can you know that nobody around you has ever experienced this problem? I have, but I didn't tell everybody I knew about it.
You would think the Centers for Disease Control might predict this coronavirus like all other coronaviruses would rapidly mutate. This is the worst kind of data driven exercise where field knowledgeable people apparently pretend that the history of their field does not exist. Experts are clearly being siloed and gagged. I'd even bet Fauci is being told what to say, against his own judgement, but his position gags him. Any true scientist would be twisted into knots protecting their statements with caveats, but what does the public hear? Confidence!