skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If Amtrak went that direction and made its transportation close to free, I wonder if we'd see more people try it out

My understanding is that in north America the big problem with passenger rail is less cost and more the fact that there's a bias towards freight in track right of ways. Even if you're willing and happy to pay a lot to travel by train, scheduling is still likely to be screwed up somewhere by a big ass freight train in the way and there's nothing you can do about it.

Edit to add after a double check: I guess in the US it's technically the law that passengers be given priority but it's poorly (or just not) enforced[1].

[1] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
I bumped into Ben Lamm by coincidence at a business dinner (he was having dinner at the next table at a really small place and instead him and his party just joined us as a big group) and he was talking about Collossal. The weird thing is he wants bring back multiple extinct species and to recoup the investment by essentially running zoo exhibits. So you would pay to go see the wooly mammoth or whatever. I love that this exists and would love them to succeed but the plan seems pretty out there.
This was a really enjoyable read. Thank you for sharing it.
Endemic seasonal influenza didn't just recently acquire the ability to jump to humans. Even considering the 2009 H1N1 pandemic the H1 protein is descended from the human strain which circulated in 1918-1957 and there was still enough immunity in the human race in 2009 to make that virus not that novel. This monkeypox virus is brand new to the human immune system.
If more Scottish grads help develop the Scottish economy then it could pay for itself, at least partially.
Ask HN: High quality digital art printing?
I need to print digital art (.jpeg) but most of the websites seem to be ads or spam blog posts. Does HN know some good addresses?
“All this info should be freely available” and “all this info increases crag crowding” are both common complaints about Mountain Project, but they’re mutually exclusive. A person who is angry about crowding is not likely to support Open Beta either.

I will say that the idea that route info should be freely available is not rooted in history of the climbing community. For many decades the primary way to get info (aside from asking around) was to buy guidebooks that other climbers researched and published. Making money off route info has a long tradition.

And the core tradition of climbing competence is to just show up and climb what you see. This is why flash and onsight climbs are highly regarded even on sport routes with permanent draws. Free access to route beta is not essential for climbing.

I certainly don’t object to Open Beta but I think some of the complaints about MP are a bit overwrought.
IBM’s stock price is roughly flat over the past 5 years. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IBM/

The S and P is up 50%. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EGSPC/

Go back 10 years and IBM is down roughly a third while the S and P has almost tripled. This is while IBM has been doing massive buybacks to raise the price.

Is that farcical?

What’s interesting is a Mongo employee looking at IBM as a role model. This confirms the “get in and then and then squeeze your customers” strategy.

Just be careful. As an employee, the endgame isn’t pretty when the company realizes that young auditors are cheaper than old salespeople and engineers.
Not everything on the internet or web is really intended for public consumption, even if it is left open to it. The standard for a personal tool is far different than one intended as a tool for general use.
I think we should try to do more with automation to produce food more cheaply. I’d rather have a zillion little robots clipping weeds than spraying roundup on GMO roundup resistant crops to achieve the same effect. A farmer’s job should be to press one button in the spring.
> Off the top of my head, the only forceful worldwide organization we have is the UN Security Council, which is finely calibrated.

It is utterly and completely locked up and has been for years because the worst threats to international security (Russia and China) have been blocking anything against them or their interests.
Except he was right on many occassions and even vindicated on his predictions (see: German energy crisis).

Just strange to see people disagree with a sound idea simply because of the person pitching it. And the slight about insecurity is odd coming from someone on SSRI's.
It's been a while since I've studied thermodynamics, but as far as I understand it that sounds like a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Scottish universities are cheaper than the rest of the UK. Tuition fees for the lowest ranking uni in England (London Metropolitan University) is £9,250 per year (~$11,000).
Linus Tech Tips: Apple Self-Repair Tools Pros & Cons
I'm assuming you are referring to the WEF "Young Global Leaders".

If you look at the members and alumni for that [1], you'll find many politicians who oppose things like this. A relevant example would be Andrew Scheer, the former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, who opposes even the carbon tax. [2]

The thing probably serves a function similar to "honorary" doctorates: it pads the resumes and boosts the egos of politicians, and extends the network of influential people who are friendly towards WEF.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Global_Leaders#Members...

[2]: https://globalnews.ca/news/6265202/scheer-vows-to-never-supp...
The military made a robot that can eat organisms for fuel
It's funny that in the earliest days of COVID, when there was the most uncertainty, if you wore a mask or distanced as a precaution you were called an exaggerating racist. (You obviously just hate Chinese and see them as diseased)

Only when it became predictable and appeared flu-like, posing no major threat to many demographics, did it become supremely virtuous to wear masks and distance.
The text is still up but the images are gone.
Why is it bad that Amazon seeks to cycle out the lowest performers? Is that not what any high performing organization does?

I’m not aware of any very high performing organization that doesn’t have some form of cycling out low performers. And places that don’t do this, or promote based on silly metrics like years of service, consistently are places plagued with poor standards and performance overall.

High performing individuals also loathe the underperformers and want them gone. They drag down standards, create more work for others, impact morale. I’ve seen too many orgs that don’t chase out poorly performing people. What happens? The good performers flee.
"they'll be able to pick up your language no problem."

That still takes time. If someone is already experienced in an (complex) ecosystem, he or she will be way more effective in it, than someone who has just general skills. I guess I am a very good problem solver. But if I suddenly would have to do a C++ project with all its footguns, I am not aware of (last time I coded in C++ was in university)? I would suck in it for quite a while. This would not be effective at all, unless I would want to change my skillset to the C++ ecosystem.
The next level for the WHO is pandemic, right?
Prove it that it will work in a very humid environment or this product just make dry air from already dry air.
Locality-sensitive hashing[0] is similar to bloom filters. It's a hashing function that hashes values into buckets. One interesting application is neutral networks with sparse inputs.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing
It isn't just anti-cheat, it's support for peripherals and games as well. I recently got into DCS (sometimes kinda works on Linux via WINE), for which I purchased nearly $1000 worth of high-end peripherals which technically work on Linux, kinda, if you give up half of their feature sets because the software that gives you access to those features doesn't work on Linux. VR is also a shitshow on Linux.
The Greenland Inuit used iron from the Cape York meteorite to make spear heads.

Some believe that the chunk of iron that Achilles offered as a prize in the Iliad was of meteoric origin.
Why the Japanese Calendar Is Full of Unofficial Food Holidays
"It's affecting us now and we're talking more about it, that's just racist!" I don't know why everything these days has to call to arms over how woke we all are.
What always did, going through awesomewm, stumpwm and xmonad to now sway, was to used whatever of those services were available from the OS. Some I had to launch by hand, but that was a one time change always (some of them across WMs). Nowadays it is even easier, since most of what I needed to launch manually are now user-level service from systemd.

In the end, I am running most of the normal services a GNOME desktop would be running, but without using the GNOME shell, and that has worked very well.
Wow

In my culture, each spouse has their own custody and assets, it's never the "household"'s assets

Western legal frameworks sounds harmful on the long run
Your immune system already fights cancer. Strawberries don't need to prevent their blood from freezing in the arctic.
I've always thought that was the most plausible of the dystopias, and it's the most terrifying, because there's literally no way of avoiding becoming a target of the state (or whoever it might be assuming state-like functions).
I didn’t say that fine-tuned language models have enlightened opinions about living things, just that they produce comments indistinguishable to me from the GP :)
> huge risk to rely on any other country though, friends today may become enemies tomorrow.

Real life isn't some RTS game. If a flip like that happens, it won't happen very quickly.

Also autarky isn't even possible for most countries, and is probably a weakness for most of those that could pull it off.

> Have we already forgotten that US dropped atomic weapons on Japan yet are now fast allies...

That's an example of an enemy becoming an ally, so not exactly relevant.

> or that US supported the Islamic fundamentalism in Afganistan before now becoming enemies. US + Saddam bosom buddies in the Iran vs Iraq war.

Those are allies of geopolitical necessity, not "ideologically-aligned natural allies." For the latter, I'm thinking of things like NATO (maybe sans a couple of members) and "the Anglosphere."
Are you for real ?
I am rusty on my thermodynamics, but could this cycle be reversed for heat-pumps?

In the summer dehumidify air for more efficient cooling.

In the winter humidify the air for more efficient heating?

This would be a win-win-win because where I live summers a hot and humid, and winters are dry, and my heat-pump dries the air even more.
As a Spaniard, I think that's highly suspicious of being one of those internal internal consumption narratives of how bad everything is.

Do you have any proof of that scheme you're mentioning? I say this because, believe it or not, one of the things that Spain does right is building infrastructure on a budget. There has been corruption cases and places when it has been horrid, but in general is well managed.

You'd be surprised how bad it is in many other countries deemed better by your average spaniard. In terms of cost overruns, time, and all kinds of nasty shit.
Web3 domains, lollerplex.

It took 25 years to start seeing some adoption in the ipv4 to ipv6 transition, and we’re nowhere close to finalising said transition…

if you think dns is going away because of the blockchain then i can start laughing way sooner.
You just need to put it inside a for loop to run continuously. Or put them on wheels to get prompted by the environment[1]. Or give them a game to play[2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.07207

[2] https://www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent
The 'normal' system being complex is a bit exaggerated here - if you have to travel one-off via local multi-mode transportation you'd usually just get a regional Deutsche Bahn day ticket which will generally by accepted by local transport companies as well, and I believe various variants of these would also exist for longer-timespan tickets.

Still, that would not be as handy as the mostly unified billing system using NFC cards we have in the Netherlands since the late 2000s, where if you do not have any entitlement valid on a particular mode of transportation, it uses a charge card balance as such.

While this isn't as innovative nowadays as it used to be, it's still notable as it works in the entire country, which, while small, is still not a city-state.
> 100% agree. A popular "bring your own engine" editor would be awesome and would make a lot of sense (just not a lot of 'business sense').

This makes no sense at all to me. Part of what makes different game engines interesting is that they have different ways of modeling the world. How can you make an editor that's agnostic to the model? What's it even editing?

Unless your notion of 'game engine' is restricted to a subset that happen to use a very specific model. Like for example...2D tile-based platformers with finite maps.
Yes, that's my point. \sloppybottom can look fine but it violates the requirement of real register-true typesetting where each typeblock has the same size on every page and the lines on a double page match exactly. Some publishers have this requirement and it's hard to work around it. This could in principle be improved by some subtle tradeoffs between line breaks in previous paragraphs, paragraph breaks, and page breaks. It's a kind of global optimization that is not possible in TeX due to principal limitations of the engine. See Section 4 of [1].

[1] https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb11-3/tb29mitt.pdf
Sadly, this is seldom the case for heat in Ottawa. Often it can be 32C, 35C, with 80%, even much higher humidity.

Seeing as it was -30C a mere 6 months ago, and many Canucks think 15C with sun is a nice temp, comfort comes at close to 20C.

Which of course, with the sun pounding on the house, means you need the return air to be 10C or some such.
I’ve also programmatically programmed generation of word documents using CPAN modules in a past life. I’m sure there’s better packages these days.
This was my first thought as well, from the name I thought it's for optimizing your nutritional intake in a food shortage.
So are Midwestern school kids just really undisciplined and badly behaved?
I don't think this entire discussion has proven informative or useful here on HN, ergo my request to Dang. I'm not singling you out, I'm saying that the entire set of posts on this topic is a waste of our time and the topic should be shut down.

You're taking this discussion personally. Don't!

I don't intend to "cancel" anyone and think the whole idea is a breach of rationality, ethics and etiquette. Just some good manners is necessary. Even a heated discussion with overreach is good. Discussion w/o emotional motivation/expression is rarely productive.

And remember, in any discussion, it is clear that you should not care (beyond etiquette and the law) what anyone else thinks of you. Otherwise you will censor your own true thoughts and others will fail to get your message. Then we all lose. That is part of free speech (an old idea, but a good one, perhaps not commonly in
use currently).
Sure, then let's compare NYC to London:

The train in NYC runs 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The London Tube stops at midnight.

The train in NYC is much much cheaper, it's $2.75 to go anywhere on its almost 400km of track. London's Tube has zone-based pricing.

The NYC subway cars are all air-conditioned.

The NYC subway cars are far roomier than the Tube.

NYCs subway is "cut and cover" and so the stations aren't nearly as deep and quicker to get in and out of.
Are you predicting starvation in Canada?

If not, then it seems like lower demand for artificial fertilizers in Canada would increase the supply of the stuff to other nations, thus reducing prices and increasing caloric intake.
I've noticed this with youtube. Even though I'm on desktop with an adblocker they repeatedly autoplay the same video with a creator embedded crypto promotion at the beginning (especially when it would be plausible to infer I'm asleep from user interaction and clock/watch time). Must be getting a cut (plus scamming the ad buyer).
You should copy and paste this "Why?" explanation onto the front page of the site to instantly multiply the number of signups.
Not very reliable. There are many reports of problems in the public forum: https://forum.getpublii.com
I don't have a Twitter account and I never will at this rate, since all I ever hear about Twitter is what a shithole it is. Twitter isn't showing me ads and I'm not posting things that could draw more users to Twitter to see more ads. That seems like a real cost to me
Takes more time to get the right amount of extraction
Another solution might be to allow opiate addicts to have access to safer versions (e.g., pharma grade and/or grow their own poppies).

My brother died of a heroin overdose many years ago -- it was illegal then (of course) and the country spent billions on "drug enforcement" but it didn't stop the black market from providing him a dangerous drug with no way of knowing purity.

Drug addiction is a health issue and by criminalizing it we don't make it go away, we just make it more expensive and more destructive to society.
I got it from Benjamin Bayart. Last time I checked he was president of https://www.ffdn.org/en
If he really was an engineer working on this, you'd hope he'd be pretty expert, but you'd at least expect him to understand what was going on in the model. His outburst showed that he really did not.
Do you live in europe? I do and it being europe does not mean I haven’t seen homeless in public transport.
I think you are over estimating how smart someone has to be to pull something like that off and under estimating how gullible majority of population is. WEF has been working on this behind the scenes for decades and only now we start to see the effects when all the Young Leaders become Prime Ministers and furnish their cabinets with their fellow WEF members set with the common mission, and now the "once in a lifetime opportunity to change the world" has appeared. Probably the fact that Klaus Schwab is old and wants to see the Grand Finale (or Great Reset if you will) before he goes also plays a part.

Other factor is that they themselves may not be competent, but they have money that can buy competent people to get their closer to their goals, however, stupid and destructive these may be.
I prefer companies which are open about the technologies and languages I'm experienced with. That's a huge green flag, that they consider their software engineers as smart people solving hard problems while continuously learning new skills. It also means they listen to their senior technical staff, which consider that learning new bits of stacks is hardly the most complicated thing they expect you to do.

As opposed to companies which consider them as glorified factory workers, who are insufferably hard to manage and monitor.

I'm currently working with RoR, which I'd never used before, and what matters is that I know algorithms, SQL beyond ORM, how to write code which won't be a nightmare to maintain in a couple of years, etc. All those skills are the same in Rails, in Django, in C++.
this is a chicken-and-egg problem.

our railways prioritize freight because that's the customer that actually uses the system. as long as passengers are rare, there's no reason to prioritize them. if passenger trains were actually a critical part of the transportation network, i'm sure we'd stop letting freight pre-empt them.
That's awesome, small world indeed. Make Salt Lake looks great.

Yeah I share that conviction. This space is less about creating value and capturing a part of it than creating community (though done well the value created by a thriving community _is_ substantial). And for reasons I've only partially grokked, many people are willing to contribute to a community backed by a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) corporation but not a regular corporation.
Why 998?
It’s not free it’s tax payer funded. If Americans hate the idea of paying for someone else’s healthcare they’re not going to like paying for their travel either
> this theory would mean that a state legislature could simply overturn federal election results it did not like based on its perception, no matter how unfounded, that the rules were violated.

The question is, if a state legislature did this to deny Biden the win in 2024, would Democrat voters attempt to take over the state capitol?

I can imagine a lot of Democrats feeling that there's no point playing by the rules if a state legislature is just going to throw their votes away, especially if the January 6 commission didn't lead to the DoJ indicting Trump.

The natural response would be for the state to bring in the state defense force (for example [0]) to respond to any insurrection, and this could also encourage other unofficial militias and lone wolves to unleash violence on protesters[1].

There would then be a lot of pressure on Biden to send the US military in to protect the protesters and re-establish law and order, potentially with the hope that the state legislature would restore the state election result that he needed to stay in power.

De-escalating such a divisive and dangerous situation could be almost impossible, though, and the problem could spiral out of control with other states declaring martial law and demanding a new election. That could be enough of a constitutional crisis and casus belli to trigger a full blown civil war.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_State_Defense_Force

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-ramming_attack#Protest...
Presumably an available nullptr typed literal will allow linters and other static analysis tools to be more aggressive?
but what can be done now practically? with covid it was easy to come up with measurements - but monkeypox? I am already using condoms at the local swinger club
Not really. There was some idiocy like what you describe, in particular the “hug a Chinese person” campaign by the Democrats comes to mind.

But mask wearing became popular well before we knew COVID was “flu-like”.
> I really long for a future where content is published in a freely available database. Free to read from and free to write to. Where a post is a content addressable piece of data signed by the author. And comment too. And where a like is a cryptographically signed message, "I like this /joe". And where the order of your "feed" is not adjusted by outside forces.

Spammers and griefers historically conquer that kind of environment. Usenet fulfilled virtually all of your freeness criteria and now it's a cesspool of spam and worse. Everyone worth talking to has left. Moderation is necessary for quality discussion, or selective membership, or more likely both.

You can make a Merkle tree of signed comments but the problem was never the integrity of the messages (I don't recall anyone messing with the contents of existing Usenet messages) or relationships between them (the worst practical problem was bottom-quoting).

The order of a "feed" is adjusted by the rate at which spam is generated; spam will always be the first result in the feed because that is spammers' objective and they have automated resources to achieve it.
It’s extremely rude, and a great way to convince people who make useful free stuff that the world is composed of assholes and that it’s not worth it.
Anecdotally, drink driving is more common in California than in Ireland, maybe because I grew up with ads like these on TV:

https://youtu.be/xtJqw--DGl8

And a cursory search says:

> threat-based road safety communications that target affective (fear) and cognitive (perceived efficacy) mechanisms can positively affect driving behaviours

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12889-016-3227-2