skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if Measles isn't a virus, why can it's spread by halted by vaccination?

I say that viruses are still a theory. To truly scientifically prove it they need to isolate (truly isolate) the virus, and they never did that. Always there was cell materials in the concoction the virologists call an "isolated" virus.

> I mean, the virus can be viewed under a microscope https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC375751/ -

They looked at an concoction with lots of other biological particles: cells, decaying cells, cell parts, etc. There is simply no way to know they EM-photo'ed a virus or one of the other things.

And all the while they have not been able to truly isolate viruses, they were able to isolate all kinds of other small biological particles. Some carrying DNA. They managed to properly sequence that DNA. So far they never manage to truly sequence the DNA of a virus
, but instead virologists do an "in silico" sequencing, which is more guesswork than actual sequencing.
For clarity, most of Oxford University and Oxford the town are strongly anti-Brexit. It's also a very international place.

You might not think this if you heard about all the privately-educated and often wealthy Conservative politicians who came through Oxford University.

So I just wanted to clear up any impression that either Oxford town or Oxford University are like that. They aren't, and most people there are aghast and sad at Brexit.

In contrast, Oxfordshire the region outside Oxford, is more pro-Brexit and much more pro-Conservative than Oxford University and Oxford town. It might have something to do with who owns land.

The same contrast shows up with regard to Green policies, voting Labour, and proportional representation. Oxford town and members of Oxford University (which is a large number) typically vote Green, Lib Dem or Labour, and the Conservatives do poorly. It's politically a progressive place with an international outlook, compared with the surrounding county and the rest of the country.

That hardline Conservatives are not well regarded by Oxford University members is shown by its governing body voting as a protest to refuse Margaret Thatcher an honorary degree when she was prime minister: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/jan/30/thatcher-ho...
I can’t believe this is getting so much “serious” coverage. He seems either gullible (to a computer, no less) or just straight-up mentally ill.

If anything it’s a little sad, and the press shouldn’t be encouraging him?
took them a while to reach common sense...
If packing up and moving out of the Southwest is engineering, then I agree.
Is the method more taxing on the controller? How do such NES events handle controllers? Are modern remakes allowed, do they disassemble and fix them, or is there a fear that eventually all NES controllers will be broken forcing change?
I think this is good advice. Sadly in some places it's hard to have dog. Example, went to an apartment site, ~2000 listings available. Checked "allows dog", dropped to ~280
Anytime you inject biochemically active stuff into billions of people, there will necessarily be some actual bad reactions mixed into a large number of events that would have happened regardless, or that anyway had nothing to do with the stuff injected.

And, some people will get in car accidents on the way home from the clinic, that would not have happened if they didn't go. People who get in line are exposed to random pathogens others in line are distributing, and to any pathogens injected via insect bites in that place.

People who do not get vaccinated are subject to similar risks, but are not counted.

Playing up these numbers does nobody honest any good.
Unboxing a $100 Chromebook
Prosperity of the 80s? You mean the era that signalled the end of the post-war golden age of capitalism and brought about hyper-financialisation (which led us to the 2008 catastrophe from which we still haven't recovered) and the decline of tax progressiveness and public services (which supercharged wealth inequality back to gilded age levels)?

Many of our current problems can be traced back to changes which occurred in the 70s and 80s.

Yes, prosperity on GDP numbers, blessed be Its name. Unfortunately not everything is reduced to making line go up.
The trouble with our current system is that the answer to environmental catastrophe is to make more stuff. And the entities that make the stuff have an incentive to pursue models that see them continue to make that stuff and sell it.

Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure.

We are locked into a forever growth runaway train and our solution to the earth dying is to make more, buy more and then buy even more of the same thing next year.

Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.

Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.
This may be the case as a fully formed and experienced adult, but it's critical at developmental stages
I wholeheartedly agree with the author. Modern tech 'convenience' should be labeled as false advertising and treated as such.

I honestly feel like suing these companies for their blatant dark patterns, false promises, political subterfuge, and consistently poor performance, accuracy and frankly....every metric by which they think to measure is piss poor
Interesting if true. What's a good source for the part about Larry Page's motivations?
I’ve read about lots of different points in the brain that may be the seat of consciousness over the years, but consciousness is probably an emergent, embodied phenomenon so there probably isn’t a lot of point to trying to find it (if it’s even there).

It’s like trying to ask which brick holds up a building. There might be one, but it’s nothing without the rest of building.
Like it was claimed the vaccines were 100% effective, while documents now show they knew already it was not. I certainly do not believe the govt-pharma-media complex on this one. They lied too many times in a row to be take serious when it comes to C19 and measures against it.
You are kind of deciding Amazon's business model for them, or describing what you would like them to be. But your description doesn't fit well with their "Do you have one of these to sell?" links etc. It seems fair to say they send out mixed signals.
I actually rather disliked Thud!; it feels like it's another "what if guns were evil demons that possessed you?" book like Men at Arms (but this time it's the concept of revenge? or something?), with an added layer of "what if racism was bad?", and in the end it felt like he'd forgotten to write any jokes.

To balance out this non-progressive take, Vimes' character arc is "what if a good cop made cops good?", which probably wouldn't work in real life.
Can someone please explain the significance?
Only 2 of the FAANGs are primarily ad based, which is not even a majority of the group. Presumably you know that too. So this comes off as evading the question.

But to give your comment the most charitable interpretation:

Why would they not save up an 8 figure sum after a few years and invest in your company, or start a competitor?
Okay, but is that because brains are just better at optimization of linear algebra? Or is quantum mechanics involved?

I think we can agree rocks aren't conscious. But are dolphins?
Am I alone in liking svn? Like, not necessarily "more" than hg/git but not "less" either.

I get everything Joel says in that first page svn rant, but, part of me was like "well why did you choose to use it that way then?".

Even the whole "hg/git are decentralised, svn is not" mantra bothers me. So friggin create a personal svn repo and merge back when ready already. I've used a decentralised svn workflow more times than I can count now. It's really not that hard.
I think it has a good chance of happening with Mike-cannon Brookes and Andrew Forrest pushing it along. I hope it's better protected than the internet subsea cables, those things get cut about once per year.
You aren't a developing teenager, probably. It's well evidenced as essential for psychosocial development
> “An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie States [sic] among farmers and their wives,” wrote journalist Eugene Smalley in The Atlantic in 1893.

Meta: I find it cool that The Atlantic was around at that time and reporting on current events, and that it's still kicking around:

* https://www.theatlantic.com

Not many places can have "/magazine/archive/18xx/" it its URL.
Either, as long as it is something I can put 100% of my efforts into.
It's one of the most wholesome gaming communities out there, where achievements are celebrated and all ages get to empathize on this pure experience.

It shouldn't replace irl friends, but there are much worse online friends to have than Classic Tetris players.
Moore's law will eventually stop, too. But people have been predicting the end for 50 years and it still looks like it has at least another 10 to go. It seems quite clear that solar costs will continue to drop exponentially until the end of the decade, which is all the author's assumptions need.

Land in a desert can cost as little as a few hundred dollars per acre, so it's far from being a dominant factor. And in other places solar is often a secondary use of the land.
Imagine if software engineering ID allocation failures made frontpage news in the trade press.

"An object reference was discovered to be null today in a web browser window in Frankfurt. Officials said the problem was discovered when some JavaScript application code attempted to read a property from the object reference."
Maybe there’s a $50 start your own business pdf going around that has precise instructions that people just follow.
Why not? It is a hell of a lot cheaper than moving people to the fresh water.
Of course I know the source of the statement. It's not a philosophical statement. Please define think, and am, first. Remember, Descartes spent a lot of time positing that the mind and the brain were distinct, and that the mind was non-corporeal, non-physical, non-matter. Not super-convincing to me (whereas I think what he had to say about the Great Deceiver poses a huge challenge to those who believe that humans can truly state with any certainty that they have free will or even agency)

Put better, I think the statement would be "There appears to be an entity, embedded within my body, which creates a sensation of subjective thought, and I infer from that, without a great deal of additional data, that others have that same kind of subjective thought, and further, that subjective thought likely demonstrates the existence of a brain which has agency and free will, which can be applied to attempt to understand the true nature of the universe in an objective way and to do so is not futile. But I also accept that my experience may be an entirely artificial experience, like a movie projected on a screen, or that my brain might not be capable of comprehending the objective nature of the universe, or that even the concept of 'I' in this entire statement may in fact be objectively meaningless."
> but I'm guessing the rent prices on a space make it untenable.

There's quite a bit of industrial space at... let's call it "not entirely unreasonable" prices in e.g. Oakland or other areas further out. As a result, there's really no shortage of makerspaces in the Bay Area. (https://makernexuswiki.com/wiki/Maker_Spaces_In_San_Francisc...)
Alien comes to Earth.

"Do you think those organic blobs are sentient?"

"Well, look at the structures they managed to build. Very impressive, some of their scale is comparable to the primitive ones we had."

"Sure, but that's not a result of the individual. They're so small. And separated, they don't think like conjugate minds at all. This is a product of thousands of individuals drawing upon their mutual discoveries and thousands of years of discoveries."

"We're larger and more capable, but they're still good enough to be sentient. Of course, we also rely on culture to help us. Even though deriving the laws of physics was quite easy. Also, we've lost most of the record when we were carbon-sulfur-silicon blobs one day as well. We must have had some sentience."

"I think they're just advanced pattern recognizers -- good ones, I'll give you that. We should experiment with thresholds of gate count to be sure when sentience really starts."

"It starts at one gate", replied the other being "and increases monotonically from there, depending on the internal structure of qualia, and structure information flow of the communication networks."

After some deliberation, they decide to alter their trajectory and continue to the next suitable planetary system reached in the next 5000 years. The Galactic Network is notified.
For what it’s worth Russell’s Teapot is an illogical, fallacious analogy, and almost always the reason atheists think they’re smarter than everyone else.
So a month ago, and not a semester. Still too soon to say an 11 day summer camp changed your life.
I remember using an experimental feature of bzr to branch from subversion (that my employer then used), make local commits using bzr and merge back to svn. That was so cool.
It's curious that you didn't actually include the calculation of what the minimum energy requirement; instead, you just assert without evidence that it is "very, very, very high".

In fact this theoretical minimum is not very high; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Environment... explains, it is only 250 kWh/tonne CO₂, or 900 kJ/kg in SI units. To remove the ≈60 Gt/year of anthropogenic CO₂ currently being emitted and get us to carbon-neutral with direct air capture would consequently require a theoretical minimum of 1.7 terawatts, which is only about 10% of current world marketed energy consumption, and presumably about 5% of world marketed energy consumption 10 years from now. Kicking climate change into reverse would require a bit more than that, maybe double. Depending on the sorbent system, this energy can be solar thermal; it does not have to be electrical.

Existing direct air capture systems like Climeworks's do not closely approach the theoretical minimum. Do you know how much energy they require?

Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it cannot get us to net negative CO₂ emissions.
If i was a sentient ERP i too would fire the people yelling fire. Good job Google... play the long game...
States will be trading fresh water for clean energy
This seems strange to me. hey, I'm going to spent 40hrs a week with others, let's make sure I don't give a shit about them.....

Vs, wow, I'm going to hang out with friends 40hrs a week. Sounds fun!

I'd pick the 2nd always. 3 of my best friends in the world are ex-coworkers and 1 more was a friend before but we started a company together at one point so we're we were co-workers. Another close friend I got managed to convince to come to the company I was at. We all had great times together.

It's one of the things that didn't happen at my last job and is certainly not happening at my current job with hybrid mostly WFH. Not making friends which basically makes work a chore instead of a party.
Not quite, though, right? Because the magnitude of those two vectors is different: the magnitude of the latter one is 1.7. I agree with the rest of your statement.
Definitions != mental model

The representation isn’t the model and conflating the two makes it hard to give a meaningful response to your comments.
I was just sharing the story.

Now 2 weeks for a simple change in a if. Some changes can take months and the software is not just a few line of code so if you do the math you may start to have rust on your hardware even before the v1.0 is out.
Also nobody is going to read this type of “doc” but another schema spec coder if that’s the name.
MIT Discovers Semiconductor That Can Perform Far Better Than Silicon
I find it's turning into a continnuum for me,

If I can wait a month, it's cheaper on AliExpress, although their search/discovery is a mess.

If I want it in a week or two, I can usually find it for a few dollars more at eBay claiming 'US seller".

If I want it by the end of the week, I'll try to assemble $25 worth of "shipped by Amazon" items.
Nuclear power plants cannot operate in the Sahara Desert; they need access to cooling water.
Me. I used to attend private meetings with a bunch of scientists and him and spent a fair amount of time talking to him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Foo_Camp). It's pretty hard to get him talking but I was very patient.

Back when I started, Google was fairly small and it was easy to hang out around the founder's area in 43, and occasionally I'd have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and Larry and Sergey (and Rob Pike and a few other brilliant folks) and we'd bullshit and I'd ask a bunch of questions about how search worked in 1999 (which is when I started using it).
I defended my PhD in Computer Science in 2020. My dissertation was on "Rapid & robust modeling on small data regime", hence specifically focused on generalization, network optimization & adversarial robustness. I also worked for a year with Microsoft Research in their ML group :) It was quite a fun ride
Something missing in everywhere but out of town on the plains is horizon to horizon sky. Growing up it was a common daily occurrence now it’s hard to find. I don’t know about claustrophobic but it being missing is weird.
I love your psyche profile on this guy :). Insightful.
When I was a teenager, I had local friends and online friends, and my online friends were very real and I'm very thankful that I had them.

Neither were a replacement for the other.
I still remember the bygone days when we praised the astronauts and the engineers for their bravery and intelligence, and their astonishing feats of human ingenuity that inspired us to dream higher. It seems the zeitgeist of $current_year is instead to praise the financeers for bravely hiring the engineers and bravely skimming the surplus value.
With bulk PV panels by the pallet already at something like $0.42 per STC watt the majority of a residential or small commercial install is already dominated by the cost of labor and other components.

I could theoretically go out and buy a pallet load of twenty, 360W rated, 72 cell panels at something like $160 per piece, costing something like $3,200 + $400 LTL freight. But it's going to cost way more than that to put those 20 on my roof or ground mounts and make them useful.
This is merely the observation that a person and a machine can both perform some of the same actions, and is not much of an observation.

I can crank a shaft just like a motor, and a Victrola can recite poetry. You are not confused by either of those things one would hope.

If I tried to write poetry, it would probably be 90% or more "mechanical" in that I would just throw things together from my inventory of vocabulary and some simple assembly rules that could all be codified in a pretty simple flowchart, and a computer could and would do exactly that same thing.

But it's no more mystical than the first example.

It's exactly the same as the first example. It's just overlapping facilities, that a person is capable, and even often does, perform mechanical operations that don't require or exhibit any consciousness. It doesn't mean the inartistic poet person is not conscious or that the poetry generating toaster is.
Fun Fact: Dickson Despommier is actually a professor of parasitology, speciliazing in the worms you get from eating raw pork.

He and his friend Vincent Raccaniello (rhymes with black and yellow) started a podcast way back in the day (2010?). He's a virologist, so naturally he knew more about covid when it struck than the average bear.

One of my favorite takeaways was when anyone claimed covid was man-made was to ask them "Then why does it have synonymous mutations?" Invariably they didn't know what those were.

Dickson didn't invent VF, he mentored grad students who worked on the idea.

Fun fact #2: Trichonella worms don't die of old age. They don't have any genes for aging. Their life cycle is to live forever in the muscle cell of another animal and very patiently wait for that animal to get eaten.
Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis, for the second time, since a few days ago, about 90% of the way through.
Wrong containers!
You’re going to listen to somebody! When the public institutions become untrustworthy, and this lose their authority, who knows what authority figure you will turn to? It could be anybody. It could be Q.
Trouble is, all PhDs are at least of philosophy, even if they're not in it.
This is legit one of the things I love most about HN, articles might be 80% about tech, but the content in the remaining 20% can be about pretty much anything, and it's always fascinating to get insight into other domains. Never considered that containers were numbered, let alone that a number clash is a significant incident, but thinking about it, yeah it makes sense.
Truly amazing to see this new generation of Tetris play.

On a semi-related note, this article stirred some nostalgia for a related game, "Welltris" (sort of a 3-d version of Tetris) that was popular among the MS-DOS crowd in the late 80s/early 90s.
I’ve found the best option to be a hybrid. 2 days remote, 3 in office.
I guess you might have missed the "are ya winnin son?" meme from a few years ago. Life isn't about the college you get into. Being in the top 20 of tetris players is going to be very rewarding, and they can go to college later if they want
> too reliant on non-revenue based sources (grants/partnerships) to keep the doors open

I looked into joining NYCResistor a while back and the membership fee was quite high (I don't remember it and I don't want to give wrong info). It was the kind of fee that would exclude a lot of people who this kind of space was meant to benefit and undercut the ethos of hacker/makerspaces generally. On the other hand, rent in downtown Brooklyn is really high. It sounds like this space was using grant funding to keep individual fees down and thereby promote accessibility. That's really cool. I am sad to see that they're closing, but this might be better for the community than multiplying membership fee rates or other "revenue" to stay open. It's a hard call and I don't envy them.
As a long time remote worker I can emphasize with some of the points in the article. However, if you think willpower is a limited resource or that keeping a daily schedule requires a lot of mental energy then maybe working remotely or without an imposed schedule and supervision just isn't for you.

Discipline is certainly important but it's important for everything. As more of the people I work with moved to remote work the ones who have struggled tend to be the younger ones without much actual work experience. A lack of discipline combined with unrealistic expectations seems to play a large role in whether someone is dissatisfied with remote work.
I believe all this, and it's terrifying. If AI emerges in the private sector (and therefore under the control of rich people) we might as well give up on the entire human experiment, because the AI will be put toward malevolent ends and we, as a species, shall fail.

The good news is that we probably won't see AGI for at least 50 years. There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.
Cigarettes were often prescribed for depression in the 60's I'm told. Nicotine is an anti depressant.
Most of the trinkets aren't needed fast, so I feel the experience is the same: click the buy button and the submit button.